Apparently everyone occasionally needs to have a loaded gun pointed at them.
A fiercely passionate desire to live surged inside me like a geyser and broke through the dysthymia’s layer of ice, to be or not to be? To be! To be! To be! the reply rose from deep inside me.
Go ahead, shoot me, I said to Camilla. Just do me one favor, afterward, when Axel wakes up, ask him what else happened in Colombia, something he didn’t tell you about.
Something else? she said, looking at me in confusion. The barrel of her gun dropped slightly. Just a hair or two.
I took advantage of that to slap it out of her hand to the other side of the room and ran out of there while I still could. The elevator didn’t come, hotel elevators never come when you need them, so I ran down the stairs from the thirteenth floor to the lobby, pushed aside the guard who tried to stop me, and kept running through Sacher Park to the Valley of the Cross. I ran among the olive trees from which Christ’s cross was made, I fell on stones and was scratched by branches, but I didn’t stop until I reached the entrance to the monastery and the church inside it. I broke through the confessional door and dropped into a sitting position. While I waited for a priest to come, I caught my breath and licked the blood pooling from a deep cut that ran the length of my arm.
—
After Camilla petitioned for divorce, Axel Wolff tried to kill himself. Without success. The bullet that was supposed to kill him grazed his left earlobe. When he was in the hospital, fans all over the world held their breath. From my TV chair, I watched the reports from the front of the Stockholm hospital enviously—there, in minus twenty degrees, a huge crowd of people had gathered to light candles. Only two days later, he was released with a small bandage on his ear, which provoked a wave of rumors that the entire story was about a petition for divorce and a suit for royalties and the attempted suicide was only a public relations ploy designed to increase interest in his/her new book.
While I was watching TV, my phone rang.
I asked Noam, who was closer, to answer it for me.
Daddy, she said, handing me the phone, someone from the Stockholm police wants to talk to you. Where is the most special place you’ve ever met readers?
The meeting was supposed to take place in a small hall in the basement of a culture, leisure, and sports complex in the town of Re’ut. The organizer had arranged forty or fifty white plastic chairs in straight rows, and left several more stacks on both sides of the hall because “You can never know, some people don’t sign up in advance.”
There were light refreshments laid out on a white plastic table outside the hall. A store-bought cake. Pretzels. Tea. Coffee. And many dozens of paper cups.
Three people came. A man and two women, one of whom reminded me a bit of Hagai Carmeli. I mean, if Hagai Carmeli had surgically altered his sex, he would have looked like her.
It turned out that a musical reality show finale was being broadcast at the same time, and since one of the contestants was a resident of the town, everyone was glued to their TV screens, texting votes for him.
What a waste of chairs, said the woman who looked like Hagai Carmeli as she pointed to them, we could have had the meeting in the Jacuzzi.
Jacuzzi! What a fantastic idea! The other woman laughed in delight.
The truth is that I just happen to have my bathing suit with me, the man said.
I have no objections, the organizer said, her expression serious.
The four of them turned to me. In anticipation.
I went with the flow.
And it’s not that I’m much of a goer with the flow. Dikla always says I’m so sure about what I want and don’t want that there’s not much room left for maneuvering in life with me. But that evening in Re’ut, I didn’t have the strength to protest.
(Years ago, on the very day I left the apartment on Hess Street, where I lived with Tali, I had an interview with the army liaison officer. I arrived unshaven, I remember, and distracted, and he said there weren’t enough people with my training in the Gaza Division. Instead of protesting and saying, “Gaza? You’ve got to be kidding!” or “I’m heartbroken. Gaza? You’ve got to be kidding!” I nodded apathetically and found myself under torrents of mortar shells in the winters that followed.)
My three readers and I stepped into the Jacuzzi beside the pool.
I was in my underwear, they in their bathing suits.
The man reached behind him, pressed the button, and everything between us began to bubble.
—
“There’s a catch inherent in a meeting with readers,” I always begin my lectures, “and right at the outset, I want to put it on the table. After all, the most important meeting has already taken place. And if it hasn’t, it will—and I hope it turns out to be an intimate, unique meeting with the book itself—”
But that introduction didn’t seem appropriate to the situation. Even on the literal level. At most meetings, when I say that I want to put the catch “on the table,” there is an actual table in front of me. With a vase of flowers on it. But here, only currents and bubbles, bubbles and currents, and, occasionally, a foot touching another foot under the water. By accident.
The man leaned forward slightly and shook some water out of his ear. The two women cut off their mumbled conversation. And the three
