I remember her asking, What happened?
And I remember that I bit my lips. Ashamed to tell her.
—
I would Undo the way I acted with Dan. Or maybe, in fact, I would Cut and Paste. A Cut and Paste that would bring us together years later in a situation where he’s the strong one—let’s say, a couples’ therapist Dikla’s friends recommended to her. His hair would still be combed to the side, but his pants would no longer be too short. We go to him to find out if we can still be saved, and when we walk into his office, I see how, for a fraction of a second, before the professional curtain drops over his eyes, they light up with the same flash of admiration that lights up the eyes of men who see Dikla for the first time. That combination of her impressive height, her long, straight brown hair, and her look of boldness. Of seriousness.
In any case, Dan grants me only a quick glance, a seemingly I-don’t-recognize-you look.
But later on, he unreservedly supports every claim Dikla makes against me, while he reacts to my claims with the thinnest of smiles and a meaningful raise of the eyebrow. Do you plan your books?
Do we plan our dreams? Do you have a recurring dream?
I have a recurring nightmare.
Someone hacks my hard drive and steals the terrible first versions of my books. And all the speeches I wrote for Yoram Sirkin.
Then he calls me from a cellar that looks like the ones in Tarantino movies and demands that I pay a ransom.
He has the voice of a pimple-faced teenager, but I agree.
Then he doubles the amount.
And I agree to that too.
But he doesn’t show up at the meeting place he set, on a street lined with garages.
Like an idiot, I wait there with an envelope filled with dollars, and it becomes obvious to me that, in the meantime, he has sent all the files to the entire list of NATO nations, and I have been publicly exposed in all my nakedness. Is there such a thing as “writer’s envy”? And if there is, does it motivate you to work harder at your craft?
I do not envy writers. I envy Boaz Barzilai. He’s the partner of one of Dikla’s friends. And whenever he comes to our place, or we go to theirs, there’s a moment when he and Dikla gravitate toward each other to talk. The companies they work for are more or less in the same field, data security, so the conversation always begins there, but the conversation is not the issue—I sit far enough away so it doesn’t look like I’m eavesdropping but close enough to eavesdrop—the issue is her face as she speaks to him. I deliberately don’t say her eyes, it isn’t only her eyes, it’s a performance in which her entire face, the eyebrows and lips and cheeks, is set in a small smile. Then her lips and eyes grow brighter again, and a finger always joins in, pushing away strands of hair that really don’t need to be pushed away, and again the lips and the neck, that is, the place where the bottom of her neck meets her cleavage, where she places her long fingers, and then the show once again rises to her lips and cheeks, that are set in an even more generous smile, and the entire performance, in all its elements, is so familiar to me because once, not long ago, it was enacted for me. Will you encourage your children to follow in your footsteps and become writers?
No, but if one of them does become a writer, it will probably be Yanai. The kid was born a fiction creator. When he was a baby and claimed that monsters came into his room at night, we figured it was his age and took turns sleeping on a mattress beside his bed to “protect him” from them. And at age five, when he told his day-care teacher that he had a twin brother his parents hid in the safe room, we laughed about it with her and said, Well, okay, it’ll pass as he gets older.
It didn’t pass. The older he became, the more stories he invented, and the more convinced he was that they were true when he told them to us or to people who happened to be visiting us: Superman stopped by his kindergarten and took a few kids for a short glide above the clouds. Ronaldo stepped out of the TV and played soccer with him, and he, my son, won. Today God made it snow only on his day-care center, and all the kids built a snowman. Why didn’t your teacher take a picture and send it to the parents? Because snowmen don’t like to have their picture taken. And he isn’t the little brother of the family. Of course not. Apart from his twin in the safe room, he has an annoying little sister named Tali (why Tali, of all names?). And he wouldn’t go to the first grade next year, he’d go straight into the second grade. Because he’s so good at arithmetic.
Dikla thinks all those lies are cute.
I’m beginning to be a little disturbed by the sheer quantity of them. And am waiting to see whether there will be fewer of them when he starts school.
In any case, we definitely should take into account that he, our youngest child, will write a story about what has been happening in our house lately.
His opening sentence will be: At some point in his life, almost every kid is afraid he was adopted. Through my whole childhood, I was afraid that my parents would split up. And one autumn, after my sister left for boarding school, I was sure they would.
The hero of the story will be: Smarter than his age. Yet also very naïve.
The style: Poignant detective story. Yanush Korchuk meets Axel Wolff.
That is to say, the very naïve kid who is
