Megaphone. White. Signed by all the workers in the NGO Dikla ran. A memento of the period of demonstrations. She led the march, used the megaphone to call out slogans we’d made up the night before in the kitchen. She explained the message she wanted to get across and I tightened and rhymed. She trusted me. I was proud of her. And even if I didn’t have the passion she had, I joined the demonstration the next day and, as we walked through the throngs, I thought to myself: This woman in the front, the tall one with the megaphone? I sleep with her.
Sticker. From her campaign to be elected leader of the apolitical-but-clearly-political movement she helped run. “Definitely Dikla” was written on the sticker pasted on the computer that was once hers and had been passed on to Noam. She lost by five votes. It turned out that behind her back, a deal had been made for the sole purpose of preventing her election. The movement’s old guard was uneasy about her controversial and uncompromising views. Her extreme independence. And made sure she wouldn’t be elected. She was even more disappointed by the betrayal by people she thought were her friends than by the failure. Then Noam was born, and she was offered a job she couldn’t refuse in the private sector.
She won’t admit it, but the thought of what-might-have-been-if haunts her to this day.
Picture of Barack Obama. Taken during his 2008 campaign. Pinned onto the corkboard above her desk. On the night of the US elections she watched CNN until the morning and cried during his victory speech in Chicago. I don’t know why, she said, he’s not going to be my president, and after everything I went through, I should be immune to politicians. But he has something…I don’t know. When he speaks, you feel the person he is…behind the words. Besides, don’t be insulted, but he’s the best-looking man I’ve ever seen.
The brown dress. She hasn’t worn it for years. But sometimes, when she’s not home, I open her closet, riffle through her dresses until I reach it, touch the fabric, and remember.
Hangers. There were always a few empty ones in her closet that I could steal. There haven’t been any recently because she’s been buying a lot of new clothes. The style is more restrained. Tailored pants and button-down shirts. And yet, it’s impossible not to notice that, these days, she opens one more button.
Thermometer. Once we both got sick at the same time. We only had Shira then. My mother came and took her, and we remained alone in the house. Surrounded by tissues. Coughing. Burning with fever. Making tea with lemon for each other. Telling each other our strange dreams. Laughing. Coughing some more. Happy.
Dream notebook. She’s crazy about the poet Agi Mishol. I buy her every new Agi Mishol book. I browse through it while I’m still in the bookstore until I find a poem that I can use as a dedication, and only then do I ask for it to be wrapped as a gift. A few years ago, I bought her Agi Mishol’s Dream Notebook, and since then, influenced by the book, she began to write down her dreams in a notebook she keeps on her nightstand. I’m not allowed to look at it. She said that explicitly: My dreams are none of your business. I respected her wishes. I never looked inside the notebook. Until yesterday.
I read quickly, afraid I’d be caught, although she wasn’t home and wasn’t expected back until the afternoon. This is what was written there (more or less—I read it once and immediately closed it with the intention of never opening it again, so I remember the plot more than the wording):
I’m in a hotel, not in Israel. There’s a knock on the door and a man’s voice says, “Yes, we can.” I open the door even though I’m wearing only a bra and underpants. Barack Obama enters the room dressed in a writer’s jacket, places his book on the table, and leaves before I can say anything. I’m hungry. I didn’t know I was hungry before Obama and the book arrived, but now I’m really starving. I open the book and see that there’s a huge butterfly between the pages. There’s something written on its enormous wings that I can’t read. The butterfly spreads its wings and tries to get out of the room, but keeps banging against the window. I open the window and, both sad and relieved, I see my dinner fly away from me.
Speakers. Huge, in the living room. That she bought. On Saturdays she plays CDs and dances with the kids. For the last few weeks, she’s been raising the volume as high as it will go.
Letter on the kitchen table. She would leave it for me. And go. If we didn’t have kids. (Parents simply can’t get up and leave. That theatrical, unambiguous movement is not something they can usually do. So they are doomed to a slow death.)
This is what she would write in the letter she would leave on the table before she went, if we didn’t have kids.
I’ve changed my mind about what I told you on one of our first dates—that I want to marry a writer. Turns out that it’s not such a great thing after all. When
