She wouldn’t really do that, I tried to calm myself down, she’s not the type, but then I remembered small moments from our life together, when something suddenly exploded inside her, without warning, and I watched in amazement as my noble wife slapped someone who had blocked her car on Ibn Gevirol Street; stood up in the middle of a premiere at the Jerusalem Film Festival and shouted at Lars von Trier that he’s mentally disturbed; stopped the car in the middle of Geha Highway and got out because I had the nerve to say something critical about her sister; drove off the road into an olive grove in Crete, stopped the car, and put her hand between my legs.
On the sixth night without Dikla, I could already imagine what kind of man she was dallying with in the ashram. A widower. That was obvious. Her eyes always cloud over when she talks about widowers. The wife of that widower died from an illness less than a year ago and he’s alone with their two sons now. That short stay in the ashram is the first time he has allowed himself to leave them. He brought a guitar. So he could play around the campfire at night. With that guitar, the sharwal, and the rasta braids, he looks a little like Lenny Kravitz, if you think about it. Lenny Kravitz with a sorrowful look in his eyes. A combination that Dikla would find hard to resist for long. While I was making sandwiches, they were most likely talking together in the ashram. She and her sorrowful widower Lenny. While I was helping Noam with her homework, she was most likely inviting him to continue the conversation in her mud hut. Or he was inviting her to continue the foot massage in his mud hut. Or they were splashing around together in a small pool. Half naked. Or not just half. She tried not to look but still saw that every man has his good points, and he tried to look, discovering the secret known only to me, that Dikla is even more beautiful without clothes than she is with, and then, after he leaned toward her and she leaned toward him and they reached the point of no return, she decided not to return. And when she does return a few months or years later, he is with her, holding her hand, and when I try to object, he shakes his rasta braids from side to side as if I’m disappointing him personally, places his free hand on my shoulder, and says, That’s how it is, bro. I’m sorry your situation has let you down.
How did the idea for your last book come into being?
The messenger from the Transportation Ministry said sign here, here, and here. After I signed, he informed me that I had accumulated too many points for traffic violations and therefore, in accordance with the law, my driver’s license was being revoked as of that moment. The next day I went to the vehicle registry office. I tried to argue. To plead. To finagle my way out of it.
No license. For three months.
The first few days, I stayed home, mortified. Who would drive the kids to school? To their after-school classes? What was I supposed to do? So, having no choice, I went back to using public transportation, and after a week of riding trains and buses, I realized that a miracle had happened to me. Nothing less. Israelis in the public space, how can I put it delicately, are not exactly Brits in the public space. They don’t read books or evening newspapers. They talk on their cells. Loudly. And I sit there, eavesdropping. From moment to moment, conversation to conversation, I understand that I have stumbled upon a gold mine.
During my three license-less months, I heard: Men being dumped live. Inheritance conflicts dripping with bad blood. Financial manipulations that, if exposed, would send those involved to prison. Military secrets—when the operation would begin, what the targets were, and which troops would take part.
And just when I thought that I’d heard everything, there came the crowning glory.
She boarded the train at Binyamina. And about a minute later, she began to speak. She sat down behind me and I deliberately didn’t turn my head so she wouldn’t suspect I was eavesdropping. Her voice was gentle and ingenuous.
From what she said, I understood that she was speaking to her sister.
I also deduced the following details:
She was supposed to get married in two days.
She was canceling the wedding.
The groom didn’t know.
The only one she’d told was her sister (and everyone sitting in the train car).
Then came the really fascinating part, the part that granted the conversation an indisputable place in the pantheon. From Hadera northward, they spoke only about the dress. She was very concerned about it and wanted her sister’s advice. What the hell do you do with a wedding dress? Sell it? Rent it? Keep it and remake it into an evening dress?
She got off at Acre. I couldn’t quite catch a glimpse of her, and maybe that was a good thing, it left room for the imagination. That, after all, is the important thing about the moment a book is born: It needs to have something unknown. A gap you will want to bridge with your writing. And of course, it should relate to some pain you have suffered. So that you are linked to the moment by an invisible tunnel, like the ones you dig in wet sand on the seashore until your hands finally come together—
—
When I woke up on the morning of our civil wedding in Lefkara, Cyprus, Dikla wasn’t
