The Scandinavian thriller writer Axel Wolff did not stop drinking during our meal together in Jerusalem. His face flushed, his eyes grew red, and when dessert arrived, he began to cry, really sob. Between one sob and the next, he managed to say that he was going through a crisis. With his wife. Since what-happened-in-Colombia-and-didn’t-stay-in-Colombia, she didn’t want to read his manuscripts. And he was totally dependent on her opinion. Between the lines, I understood that she was also the one who rescued him from writer’s block with the help of brilliant plot ideas that only someone free to advise from the sidelines can come up with.
I poured him a glass of water.
He drank, and then suddenly began to speak to me in Swedish.
I should have known that was not a good sign, but I kept nodding as if I understood and tried to follow the music of the words in an effort to get a sense of the content.
It continued for several minutes: He spoke to me in Swedish and beat his chest in self-righteousness, or anger, and I did a free translation in my mind.
Then he collapsed.
I hadn’t seen anyone’s body go so quickly from upright to prone since Haim Huri fell onto the grass in the middle of the Memorial Day ceremony our senior year in high school.
I hurried over to him and tried to pick him up from the floor, but he was too heavy. A real Viking. Waiters rushed over to help me, and together we managed to carry him to the couch in the restaurant foyer. Someone unbuttoned the top button of his shirt, someone else lifted his legs. In response, his eyes still closed, he mumbled the same sentence in Swedish over and over again, “Yag dödade honom, yag dödade honom, yag dödade honom…” I asked the waiters to call an ambulance, but before it arrived, he had already opened his eyes, buttoned his shirt so that it was still about to burst open on his huge chest, and began speaking English again. He insisted that there was no need to take him to the hospital. That’s how he is, he explained. Sometimes his body has to shut down totally before it can restart. And look, he can stand up, even walk a straight line. Okay, not ruler-straight but quite straight, he said. And he has a colleague from Israel with him who will make sure he gets to his hotel and into bed. That’s all he needs now, a good bed with clean white sheets, and tomorrow morning, a short espresso. Two at the most. And he’s all set. Really. Believe him.
In the taxi, he stretched his legs comfortably and fell asleep, so I couldn’t ask him what the hell Yag dödade honom meant.
I called Dikla to tell her I’d be home late.
She didn’t answer. My wife has been screening my calls for the last few weeks. My wife. Screening my calls. And she no longer dresses in front of me. Or tells me anything about what’s going on at work. Only by accident did I find out that she’d been promoted. So gifted. My wife. So distant.
I supported Axel all the way from the lobby to his room, until he fell onto the bed, fully dressed. There were three bottles of liquor from the minibar on the bedside table. All empty. Right after I made sure that his snores were just snores and not death rattles, I went over to his laptop, which was open on the desk, and typed Yag dödade honom into Google Translate.
No results.
Then it occurred to me to write yag with a j instead of a y.
The translation appeared immediately: I killed him.
A moment later, there was a knock on the door. Not on the front door. On the other, hardly ever used door that connects a hotel room to the adjacent one. How long did it take you to write your last book?
Actual writing time—three months.
Total time—three years.
In the middle, many other things stole my attention: Yanai’s entrance into first grade, trips to Sde Boker with night-vision equipment to make sure Shira was all right, Sirkin’s run for party head that required a new catchphrase almost every day, long testimony I was forced to give in the police investigation in Sweden, and of course, the search for Hagai Carmeli in the Rosh Pina area.
It began with Ari, who said that someone who visited him in the hospital said he saw Hagai wandering around Rosh Pina. Ari couldn’t remember who the person was and apologized: It’s those painkillers. They space me out.
Could you have dreamed it? I asked.
Anything’s possible, Ari said, and scratched his bald head. A bit embarrassed.
Still, because there was a small chance, because I have a deep respect for dreams, and because the air in my house smelled of separation anyway—the invitations to the bat mitzvah had already been sent—I enlarged a photo of Hagai Carmeli from our high-school yearbook (“Our Hagai / he’s a real blast / took his driving test seven times / and still hasn’t passed”), raced along the winding road between Acre and Safed, rented a cheap room in Rosh Pina, and began my search. I started in the town itself. I asked people, showed them the picture. On the trees in the area of the Ja’uni café I hung a few photos of him, along with detachable tabs showing my phone number. I went down to the mall, the gas station, the minimarket next to the gas station. No one recognized Hagai, but I had a gut feeling. If I were playing the hot/cold game, I just knew the other players would be saying, “Getting hotter…getting hotter.”
On the second day, I drove up to the hills above Rosh Pina with a tent, a sleeping bag, and a one-piece snowsuit that Ari once
