Flocks of cranes continued to migrate south, even at night. But a bit more quietly.
Finding Hagai Carmeli is not the most important thing, I thought. The most important thing is to keep searching. In your opinion, will people continue to read books in the future?
People will continue to need stories.
And storytellers like me will continue to need people.
It’s possible that books in the form we’re familiar with now will disappear from the world. But who knows? Maybe the new form will be cooler?
Soundtracks, for example. It drives me crazy that I can’t add soundtracks to my texts.
This interview, let’s say? I’d begin with a bold beat. In a loop. To be slowly joined and enriched by sadder instruments. In the paragraph about Ehud Banai, I would simply put the sound of him playing in the background. Because no matter how I describe Ehud Banai’s strumming, it will never be like hearing Ehud Banai’s strumming.
The same thing with dancing.
I can write many pages describing the way Dikla dances. I can look for totally original phrases and juggle super-ingenious images. But if there were a way now, this minute, to add a short clip, thirty seconds, no more, of her dancing, eyes closed, to the sounds of “Come on Eileen” at the Kibbutz Cabri club in 1995, everyone would understand immediately why I began dancing beside her in the hope she would open her eyes at the end of the song. And if there were a technology that enabled readers to smell while reading, they would be able to sniff the nape of her neck when I press up against her from the back at night as she sleeps. I can write that it’s similar to the smell of challah being baked for the Sabbath. But it wouldn’t be like actually sniffing the nape of her neck.
Readers say, “I really got into the book.” But what if it were possible, virtually, to enter into the reality of a book? To be a fly on the wall, a dog lying on the floor, a smoke detector in the light fixture—
In the bedroom that Dikla and I share. The night I came home from Colombia, let’s say. Oh, then the reader could see whether my lower lip really trembled slightly, signaling a lie, when I told her what happened in Colombia. Whether the look in her eyes showed that she believed me. Whether she threw me out of the house or we stayed in the same house and the same bed, awake all night, without touching each other. Without exchanging a word. Do you write in the morning or at night?
I try—but don’t always succeed—to write in the morning.
At night, I’m with Yanai and Noam. And once a week, I get into the car, supposedly to drive to a lecture, but actually to drive to Sde Boker to observe Shira.
I take along Ari’s military snowsuit and the night-vision equipment he forgot to return when he was in basic training. He’s the only person who knows that I drive to Sde Boker to spy on my daughter. He thinks I’m totally screwed up, and that instead of hiding in the bushes, I should just knock on her door and tell her I want to speak to her. I tell him that he doesn’t understand anything because he’s not a dad, and that children sometimes need to distance themselves from their parents so they can find themselves. Especially if they had a strong, maybe too strong, connection to him. To them, I mean. He doesn’t comment on my Freudian slip. But he rolls his Indian eyes at me. I have to respect her boundaries, I try to convince him, and he says, Great, bro, so why do you always drive down there? Ah, no, I explain, that’s because I miss her.
—
I have a permanent observation point. That I can’t reveal here.
A bit after seven in the evening, the kids leave the dining hall and head for the living quarters. Then I have a little more than a minute to watch her through Ari’s binoculars, and guess how she is from the way she walks, from the movement of her hands as she speaks—strong, like her mother’s—from the responses of the people walking beside her.
In a bit more than a minute of walking, she smiles more than she did during her entire last year at home. Her clothes are much lighter, airier. She has switched from painfully tight jeans to sharwals. From leather jackets to T-shirts with sayings printed on them. All in all, she looks good. I mean, she seems happy. I’d like to think that it’s the desert that’s making her bloom. But it’s probably the distance from us.
—
Yesterday, I became anxious when she didn’t come out of the dining hall. Her girlfriends did. Her boyfriend, Nadav, did. But she didn’t.
I watched Nadav through the binoculars to see if he was using her absence as an excuse to flirt with other girls.
The kids walked off to their rooms, and ten minutes later, all the lights in the dining hall were turned off. What happened to my little girl? Why didn’t she go to eat? Where is she? In her room? And maybe not? Maybe she’s already left the school and I’m the only idiot who doesn’t know it? Bottom line, if she asked Dikla not to tell me about Nadav, how can I be sure that there aren’t other things she asked Dikla to hide?
I couldn’t call Dikla. Because then I’d have to explain what I was doing there in the dark.
I couldn’t knock on the door of her room. Because I wasn’t wanted.
I couldn’t question her friends either. Obviously, they would tell her immediately that her father was wandering around, bothering them with questions. And that would be the end of me.
A cold wind penetrated my snowsuit and I decided to risk walking in the direction of her room. Maybe I’ll be lucky and
