I’ve heard stranger things, the young doctor said. Medicine has made great advances, but between us, as far as the mind-body relationship is concerned, we’re still groping in the dark.
—
I asked R whether it would be okay if, in the future, I put her story into one of my books. She thought for a moment and then said: Let me sleep on it.
Only on the way home did I realize that I didn’t have her e-mail address or phone number.
I could have made a greater effort to get hold of them. I didn’t.
By any criteria, it would be obscene to use R’s personal story here word for word, without checking that it’s okay with her.
And someday, the karma police will probably punish me for it. Are the characters in your books based directly on real people, from life?
Not usually. Writing about real people is limiting. What I know about them distracts me from imagining what I don’t know about them. And adding stories about people who are close to me to my books is morally complicated. They can be offended. Or—if they happened to have studied law—they could sue the pants off me.
My characters are made like salad. I chop an ingredient from each real person and mix all the ingredients into a new person: one woman’s hair flows onto another woman’s shoulders, which are joined to the body of a singer who didn’t pass the audition for The Voice—and that body ends in the small feet of one of Ari’s girlfriends.
Except in one instance.
Of a major character, in fact.
Gili Arazi was part of our crew in high school. But he was closer to Hagai Carmeli. Gili and I were never really close. There was a period when we trained together before the army. We ran along the seashore to the hill and back, but that didn’t make us friends either.
I pictured him constantly while writing my last novel. The physical description of the character was almost identical to his. The family background too. And other things, small, specific, and not necessarily flattering, which I won’t mention here. I’ve already ruined his life once.
In any case, I saw him last week.
He’d gone off to San Francisco to do a postdoc, and I assumed that, like most people who go to San Francisco on the bay from Haifa on the bay, he wouldn’t feel far away. And he wouldn’t come back.
But there he was, walking toward me on the street, and I couldn’t turn back because he was already waving, and when he reached me, he greeted me happily with a hug, exactly the way I had described the character in my book hugging his friends. A limp hug, the bare outline of a hug.
So tell me, he says, still holding my shoulders lightly, you became a writer?
Yes, I avert my eyes suspiciously.
Honestly? I didn’t see that coming, he says. I mean, I thought you’d be a psychologist.
Me too.
But it’s great. I’m proud of you.
Thanks.
Don’t be offended, but I still haven’t had a chance to read your books. It’s not you, academe has dried up my brain. I haven’t read a book for ten years already.
No rush—I breathe in relief and try not to let him see how relieved I am—really, there’s no rush.
Maybe we can get together, he says, the whole gang, I’m in the country until the weekend. My brother is getting married.
Sure, I say, we really should.
Tell me, he asks, have you heard anything from Hagai Carmeli?
No. Have you?
I thought I saw him at a conference in Singapore. In the end, it was some other redheaded guy.
No kidding.
So, see you, eh? Give me a call?
—
Wait just a minute. There was, in fact, another instance apart from Gili Arazi: the girl from the train.
Okay, it’s no wonder I didn’t think of her from the first minute. Our memory tends to edit out humiliating scenes.
—
Gili Arazi, that is, the character in my book based on him, was desperately in love with a female character whose motivations I understood, but I couldn’t imagine what the hell she looked like.
I searched for her in cafés, in workshops, in meetings with readers but couldn’t find her. I tried to keep writing the book with no picture of her in my mind—to no avail. My male protagonist was obsessed with a woman, and I still didn’t understand what there was about her to justify it.
So I went to Berlin to visit a couple of friends who had been living there for years on a grant from the Heinrich Böll Foundation. The three of us tried to drown my writer’s block with beer, zigzagging along the city sidewalks, trying not to step on the black tiles on which the names of Jews had been written in gold letters.
A few days later, we boarded a train heading for another city to visit another couple of friends from Israel who lived on the guilt feelings of the Germans. We were three people sitting in a space designed for four, and I placed my bag on the empty seat next to me. The train was already leaving the station, but the last passengers looking for seats were still moving through the packed cars.
Even before I really saw her, I felt the gust of energy that arrived with her.
I took my bag off the seat, and she sat down.
I looked at her and knew immediately: She is the one I have been looking for this entire year. The blond bangs, the glasses, the stiff pants with the pockets on the sides, and the soft, thin blouse above them.
I’ve never been good at beginnings. There’s an abyss there that I usually
