I was the one who opened the door for the pizza-delivery guy. I’m the one who forgot to close it behind him when I went to get my wallet, which enabled Luna to slip through the opening onto the dangerous streets. Dikla was still at work, the kids were in their rooms. There were no witnesses. After the vet, after the injection, after Noam went to sleep, when Dikla asked me, But how did it happen? How did she get out?—I rearranged the details of the story to show myself in a more positive light. The delivery guy came in, I told her, and before I could close the door, she…just…squeezed behind it and ran away.
Dikla didn’t ask anything else. Didn’t speak. All she did was give me a look that said: We both know that Luna couldn’t move fast enough to do something like that. And it also said: I know you’re lying to me. And I’m embarrassed for you. But we won’t get into that now. Who do you draw inspiration from?
On my way back from Kiryat Shmona, Robbie Williams is singing that he wants to feel real love. The taxi driver’s phone rings and he apologizes. It’s his daughter, he has to answer it.
Robbie Williams continues singing, at a lower volume, that he wants to feel real love and the driver’s daughter says, I don’t feel well.
You don’t have to go to school, he calms her down.
And she says, I’ll go anyway, Daddy.
Whatever you decide, my love, he says. And I think: Maybe if I had said to Shira, “Whatever you decide, my love,” more often, she wouldn’t have left us.
It starts to rain. Drops splat diagonally across the windshield of the taxi. There’s a new hotel at the Koach intersection, and next to it is a grounded hot air balloon. And Robbie Williams sings that he wants to feel real love. Wants to feel the home he lives in. Do your children read your books?
For years, I had this scene in my head of Shira on her post-army trip to South America. She’s finished reading all the books she took from home, and after two weeks of not speaking Hebrew—because, if I know her, she deliberately planned her trip to avoid the Hummus Trail—she boards a bus. I always imagine her walking down the aisle, her matchstick legs stuck in stiff hiker’s boots, looking for an empty seat. She has put her large backpack on the roof of the bus, so she only has a small purple (her favorite color) bag on her shoulder. And a guitar, of course, on her back. On purpose, she lets her curls—still light brown? maybe already dark brown?—fall onto her face, the way she always does when she’s embarrassed, and apologizes in beginners’ Spanish when the neck of the guitar bangs into the shoulder of one of the passengers. She sits down, her head tilted back, her eyes closed. Small white earbuds are stuck in her ears. What is she listening to? Salsa. At the beginning of the trip, she hated it, then she became addicted. Her right knee rises and falls to the beat of the music, that knee has had a beat of its own since she was a child, and when the never-ending song finally ends, her knee stops moving, and in the ensuing silence, she suddenly hears Hebrew. She opens her eyes. A group of Israelis is sitting in the last row of seats. Though she’s a bit put off by their loudness, she has no choice but to go over to them because she needs a book desperately. After a brief discussion, one of them says that he has a book he’s willing to exchange. He takes it out of his bag and she sees that it’s one of her father’s books. Even as a child, she was embarrassed when people made the connection. And as she grew older and more rebellious, the embarrassment actually caused her to cringe. She doesn’t say anything about it to them and thinks to herself that the last thing she wants to read is one of her father’s books, but the alternative is to remain bookless. And who knows when she’ll have another opportunity. So she takes the book, gives the guy one of hers, and goes back to her seat. She doesn’t like to read when she’s in a moving vehicle, it makes her nauseous—she’s been that way since she was a child—so it isn’t until that night, in the hostel, wearing a now faded sweat suit I bought her years ago, that she opens the book. I’ve always hoped it would be my first book she starts reading in the hostel. It’s my most innocent book. In my mind’s eye, I see her finishing the first page, touching her tongue with her finger—something her mother does—and turning the page. And another one. She keeps reading page after page, feeling slightly disconcerted. Or she puts the book down, uninterested. I created several detailed options in my mind for this scene. But sometimes, reality beats out imagination. And Shira, being Shira, had plans of her own. I myself have tried my hand at writing, and the hardest thing for me is developing a plot. Do you have a tip for me?
Tell your kid bedtime stories, or borrow someone else’s kid and tell him. I’ve been doing it for more than a decade. And if my plot-developing skills have improved slightly, it’s thanks to my kids. It has always been true that if the story I make up doesn’t interest them enough, they stop listening. Their eyes wander. Their bodies move restlessly. And sometimes, they tell me to my face: Dad, it’s boring. Or even more embarrassing: Forget it, Dad, read us something from Dr. Seuss. So I had no choice, and very slowly, from failure to failure, I learned how
