Now I have three kids. A house. A family.
And I think: If all this falls apart now, who gives a damn about writing?
—
We had a kind of ritual, Dikla and I. After the last kid fell asleep, we sat out on the balcony. Without phones. And drank red wine. One glass each. She finished hers quickly. I finished mine slowly. And as we drank, we talked about everything unrelated to the kids: A song she heard on the radio and liked. Insults one or the other of us had suffered. Places we wanted to visit. Clothes suitable for the change of seasons. Moral issues. The texts changed with the years, but not the rhythm: A sort of jazz. Unpredictable. Filled with leaps from subject to subject. We had rhythm, Dikla and I.
Now I’m waiting for her on the balcony. She’s avoiding me.
Awake? (I text her. Even though we’re both at home.)
Yes.
The men in my family die young.
Not funny.
Will you be joining me tonight?
No.
Because of Colombia? Because I told you that…
It’s not because of Colombia.
So what’s actually happened?
This isn’t the life I wanted to live.
Want to come out to the balcony and talk about it?
No.
—
Then yesterday, suddenly—we had sex. After weeks without any.
In the middle of the night, as if in our sleep, her body began to caress mine.
Her hands undressed me.
Her hot mouth.
Her tongue.
But after she came, she didn’t put her head on my chest.
She went to take a shower, came back, and burrowed under the quilt, even though it was summer, and turned her back to me.
I stayed awake for a long time, and when I finally fell asleep in the early hours of the morning, I had a lightning-quick dream of only one scene (or I remember only one scene): I’m climbing the stairs of Atarim Square in Tel Aviv, but instead of going up, I’m going down.
I think about the strange similarity between the beginning and the end of love. From the moment Ari introduced us, in the club on Kibbutz Cabri, I felt as if everything that would happen between Dikla and me from then on was inevitable, because the attraction drawing us together was stronger than both of us. And in fact, now too, I feel the same thing: That no matter what we do, this new force pulling us apart is stronger than both of us. And it’s only a matter of time until—
—
We haven’t been arguing at all these last few weeks, maybe because at the heart of every argument is the hope that something will change.
Yesterday, we walked quickly past each other in the house, and my shoulder bumped into hers as if we were strangers in the street.
She suddenly looks older to me.
And I must look old to her.
As if each of us had held on to our youth for the other, and all at once, it dropped away.
What crap. “Held on to our youth.” “All at once, it dropped away.” I escape to pretty sentences because I don’t have the courage to tell the truth.
The truth is much more concrete.
Cell phone. Suddenly you need to punch in a code to get into her text messages.
Subscription for two to the Cinematheque. Not renewed.
Melatonin pills. Originally purchased to overcome jet lag when I came back from Colombia. Now I keep them beside my bed. To overcome insomnia.
The 2014 Docaviv Film Festival. Another way to overcome insomnia. My favorite summary: The graffiti on the Berlin Wall, specifically the picture of East German leader Erich Honecker kissing Brezhnev, has become a symbol of the protest against the Communist regime. But who painted it? The film documents the search for the artist and the story behind the kiss. The results of the search are not only surprising but also scandalous, and raise the question: Who determines the significance of a work of art, the one who created it or the ones exposed to it?
Axel Wolff’s book. Another book by Axel Wolff. The fourth one she’s read over the last few months. Spread open on her nightstand. From the back cover, Axel looks at me euphorically, as if he’s the new man in her life.
The living-room air conditioner. Needs to be fixed. A pretty expensive repair. Maybe we should wait until the situation becomes clear (we both think but don’t say, and no one calls the repairman).
A stapler without staples. (We are like…)
Our wedding album. Lying uselessly on a shelf in the living room, until the day Noam is asked to bring a family picture to school for her bat mitzvah project. She browses quietly through the album until she finally chooses a photo that was taken before the guests arrived (or after most of them had gone?). In the picture, Dikla and I are sitting at a table of friends. In one corner, you can see a piece of Hagai Carmeli’s rusty mop of hair. But we have our backs to him, leaning completely into each other, deep in conversation, and you can see how very close we are. Noam shows us the picture, first Dikla, then me. And I suddenly suspect there is no class project and that the clever girl simply wants to remind us of us.
Tax invoices/receipts. Every month Dikla gives them to me to send to the tax consultant. I usually forward them automatically. This month, for the first time, I go over them carefully, searching for evidence of a secret affair. I find a receipt for a mediation course, and another receipt for a course in business English. She’s been taking courses ever since I’ve known her. Always challenging herself. I find a receipt for three Watsu treatments. That’s the only way she manages to let go of her ambition for a short while. I find a receipt for acupuncture, and for the monthly sum she contributes to ERAN, the emotional first aid NGO, because once, during a long stint of guard duty in the Arava desert when she was in the army, she almost went
