These days, only Yanai still asks me to make up a story. After his bath, I wrap him in two towels and carry him to his bed. We call it “Yanai in a pita.”
Carefully, I carve out a path for us through the Lego pieces scattered on the floor of his room, put him on the bed wrapped in the towels, and take his superhero pajamas out of the closet.
He asks to stay wrapped in the towels for a little while longer. I say okay. And rub his body through the towels to warm him up. Then I peel them off him, slowly, and help him into his pajamas. When he lies down, I cover him with his blanket and take a quick sniff of the wonderful smell of his scalp. Then I sit on the large quilt on the side of his bed.
He already knows that the story is about to begin and looks at me.
His eyes are identical to his mother’s, brown and large, with beautiful long lashes.
But the way he looks at me—is so different. Free of disappointment. Free of anger. Shining with pure love.
I begin telling the story. He looks at me, eager to devour every word, and his face reacts with great emotion to every turn of the plot.
Those are the best moments of my day. No dysthymia. No dying Ari. No evasive looks from Dikla. Just Yanai and me and the stories about the intrepid boy, Eelai (he needs the name change in order to believe it can all happen: a bird that carries a child in its beak when the child is unable to get down from the tree he’s climbed; a boy who’s bitten by the mix-up mosquito at night and, in the morning, instead of going to kindergarten, goes to his mother’s office, and his mother, who was bitten by the same mosquito, goes to his kindergarten).
When I leave the room, Dikla goes in.
Well, actually, she waits a few seconds so we won’t accidently brush against each other in the hallway and then goes in to lie down next to him. Her hair spreads out on the blanket. Her long legs hang slightly off the edge of the bed. She kisses him. Hugs him. Often falls asleep beside him.
If she does fall asleep there, I go inside again and look at the two of them wound around each other. So alike that it’s funny. Yanai also has long legs. And a defiant, rebellious curl to his upper lip. His hair is very dark and his skin very light. Like hers.
I think Yanai is too young to understand that we have been taking comfort in him recently, each in our own way. Or maybe I’m wrong.
Yesterday, on the way to school, he told me that his classmate, Guy, is really living it up because he has two homes, his dad’s and his mom’s. And each has a whole drawer full of candy just for him.
It’s because his parents split up, Noam explained to him in her big-sister voice, what’s so great about that?
It is too great! Yanai insisted. In his little-brother-has-an-opinion-too voice.
I didn’t say a word.
I dropped Noam off at her school, and continued to his. “Kiss and go” or “walk and hug”? I let him choose, as I did every morning. Walk and hug, he said. I was glad. That meant we’d have more time together.
I parked far away. We got out of the car and walked hand in hand. When we reached the gate, I hugged him. Too hard. You’re crushing me, he said. I let go. I watched him as he went on his way, and didn’t walk to the car until he disappeared. On the way, I called Oranit from the after-school program and told her he wouldn’t be staying that day.
I waited for him at the gate at 12:45. He was surprised. What are you doing here?
(What could I say? “Your mom is growing more distant from me and if it keeps on this way, you and I might end up seeing each other only twice a week, which would destroy me, so while I still have a say in this, I want to be with you and Noam as much as possible”?)
I thought we’d go out and have a fun day, I said. What do you say? There are quite a few mentions of photographs in your books. Are you a photography buff?
I can’t stand photography. I don’t want to take pictures. Don’t want to have my picture taken. I’m like the witches in the Bolivian Witches’ Market—when someone takes my picture, I feel as if they’re stealing part of my soul.
Even more—that desire to document, to freeze a moment, is alien to me. And goes against the Taoist approach on which I have been trying to base my life since I read The Book of Tao when I was twenty-three, in South America: everything passes, everything is in motion, life is a powerful stream you should give yourself over to instead of trying to stop it. Or in the words of Lao Tzu: “Where Taoism acts, people say—it happened of itself.”
I try to adopt that approach in my writing as well, by the way. I was supposed to be writing a novel this year. Instead, I’m writing answers to this interview, which is based on “a selection of our surfers’ questions” that the editor of an Internet site passed on to me. I was supposed to prepare standard answers to those questions, but I decided to answer truthfully. It was supposed to be only an interview, nothing else, but slowly—it seems I can’t do it any other way—I’ve
been turning it into a story. I was supposed to leave Dikla and the kids and the dysthymia out of it. And all of them are in it. Occasionally, in the middle of the night, I drive to see Ari, in
