How can you live and write in a place that summons up no memories? That you don’t care about? That doesn’t infuriate you so much sometimes that you want to bang your head against the wall and your fingers on the keyboard? What is Israel for you?
They had no furniture, only mattresses. The real estate agent whispered, the mortgage. The woman was pleasant. There were only mattresses, there was no furniture. The children looked hungry. What a view, the agent said. That was five years ago. We were looking for an apartment between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, preferably with a balcony. I didn’t say a word the entire time we were there. The agent whispered, the mortgage ate up all their money. The woman tried very hard to look pleasant. The view was spectacular. What is your earliest memory?
It was the Yom Kippur War.
Of course, I didn’t know it was the Yom Kippur War.
I was two and a half years old.
I know, people don’t usually have memories from that age.
But I remember a house full of women. My mother’s friends, apparently. Who came to help. And I was the center of attention, sitting in the living room, playing building blocks with them. Then there’s a cut, and one of them carries me to Mom’s room, where my mom picks up a simple recorder and plays something for me, until she suddenly starts to cry and one of the women carries me back to the living room. Again the building blocks. And that’s it. That’s where my memory ends. Anything I add would be a lie, or worse, an interpretation. How do you feel about the fact that one of your books is required reading in high schools?
We’ll arrange a taxi for you, the literature coordinator said.
Great.
Write down the driver’s number, she said. His name is Mordecai. Call him tomorrow morning and tell him where to pick you up.
I wrote the number on a piece of paper and called it the next day.
A masculine voice answered. Hello. In a heavy Arabic accent. Must be a wrong number, I thought. I hung up and punched in the number again. The same voice again. This time, I tried anyway: Hello, can I speak to Mordecai?
A too-long silence, followed by: This is Mordecai speaking.
Hello, I said hesitantly. You’re supposed to pick me up at noon today and take me to Jerusalem. Should I explain how to get to my place?
Yes, yes, the voice said. Too quickly. As if he sensed my hesitation and wanted to convince me that he really was Mordecai.
Are you writing this down? I asked. And he repeated: Yes, yes.
I gave him a full explanation, and he said he’d be there, I had nothing to worry about.
His Hebrew was okay, but the accent—totally Arabic. And that was a period of frequent terrorist attacks.
We ended the call, and I began to get ready to leave. I chose the books I wanted to read from and marked the passages with my usual bookmarks—business cards from Zarathustra, the intellectual café Hagai Carmeli had once tried to open in Jerusalem. And closed a month later. As I was inserting the bookmarks, a farfetched yet believable scenario began to take shape in my mind, explaining the conversation with “Mordecai”: The number they gave me was wrong. I mistakenly reached a high-ranking member of Hamas who, after a few seconds of hesitation, realized that a golden opportunity had come his way and decided to play the game: pretend to be Mordecai, pick me up, kidnap me, and take me over the Green Line.
Though my suspicions seemed a little over the top, I still decided to be on the safe side and called the literature coordinator to make sure she had really given me the right number. There was no answer.
Having no choice, I put my nice shirt into the dryer to iron itself and got ready for Mordecai’s arrival. I’ll decide after I see what he looks like, I thought, calming myself. If he looks like a terrorist, I won’t get into the taxi. And that’s it.
But his appearance only confused me more.
When I walked out of the building, he was sitting on the hood of the car, smoking a cigarette. He didn’t have a fanatic-Muslim beard, but he looked totally like an Arab. Mordecai my foot. But his handshake was gentle, and his eyes weren’t hostile.
Ready to go? he asked.
Ready to go, I said, and got into the backseat.
We drove around the traffic circles on our way out of the city in silence. I waited for someone to call him on the two-way radio, so I could hear the name Mordecai spoken by someone else. But his radio was silent. No voice came out of it. No one asked who was available on Herzl Street. Maybe Mordecai doesn’t work with a taxi station, I thought. But if that’s true, why does he need a two-way radio? And why doesn’t he talk to me? Since when are taxi drivers not talkative?
I began to think what would happen to the stories I still hadn’t published. Would anyone bother to publish them after my death? Because that’s when they might actually have commercial potential. People value artists more after they die. They hold tribute performances for them. They bring singers. Maybe even Ehud Banai would agree to sing at mine. But wait a minute, who would choose which of my stories to include in the anthology and which to leave out? And what about all the embarrassing stories, the ones buried deep in my computer hard drive with clever code names, the ones that, if published, might hurt my loved ones, or at the very least, shock them? Do their feelings still have to be taken into account even after I’m murdered
