by Eshkol Nevo
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 no one will see me, I thought. Maybe I’ll be lucky and her curtain will be open. That way, I can look inside and at least see if she’s there. If she’s alive.
I sprinted from building to building, from bush to bush, and trying to show myself as little as possible, I crossed an area filled with junk and picnic tables. Finally, I reached my destination. I circled the building and the yard it shared with other buildings to get to the window, but when I did, the curtain was closed. I couldn’t see what was happening inside from any angle.
Then she came out. When I heard the door open, I moved cautiously toward the path in the front yard. She was holding her cell phone close to her ear, but when she saw me, she said, Just a minute, I’ll get right back to you, then opened her eyes wide and asked: Dad, what are you doing here?
Instead of replying, I knelt down and said: I’m sorry, Shira, please forgive me. She looked around and then said, Dad, get up, don’t embarrass me. I asked if I could come in. She nodded slowly and we went into her room and talked. Finally, we talked.
* * *
—
All that happened in my imagination. In reality, I retreated through the shadows to my car and drove home with a heavy heart. When I walked in, Dikla was on the phone. From her tone, I could tell it was Shira on the other end, and from the content, I understood that she wasn’t feeling too well. She had a cold. Nothing serious. Nadav was taking good care of her.
Do you ever feel like changing or correcting your books after they’ve been published?
Usually, after a book comes out, I regret not having deleted more. Sometimes, when I read from my books to an audience, I edit them: take out a word here, a paragraph there.
But there’s one story I would cut completely. All of it. The one that Shira came across on the Internet.
It takes place in Haifa, in the eighties, and the protagonist is a sixteen-year-old girl who is in love with a boy a year ahead of her in school. That boy is tall and handsome and popular and doesn’t notice her at all. So, under the influence of the romantic movies she watches with her mother on pirated cable channels, she decides to do something about it. Her mother tries to dissuade her, tells her that men don’t like that kind of woman, but one night, she stands under the boy’s window with a guitar and serenades him with the cover of the Smiths’ song “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me,” over and over again. Neighbors open their shutters and shout at her, Enough! But she keeps singing. People walking their dogs so they can do their business stop near her. And she keeps singing. A dog pees on her, and she keeps singing. Until a kid who lives in the building begins to feel sorry for her and wakes up the father of the boy she’s in love with, who goes out onto the balcony and tells her that the boy isn’t in, he’s at his girlfriend’s place. So shut it down and go home, he says. She doesn’t go home. She continues to sit in the street and play until the kid who shouted to the boy’s father calls her mother. When she arrives, wearing an Adidas tracksuit and an old-man’s undershirt, she doesn’t reprimand her, doesn’t say “I told you so.” She just sits down next to her until the sun rises over Haifa Bay and t
he stench from the oil refineries fills their nostrils, as the kid from the building looks longingly at the girl.
* * *
—
If Shira agreed to talk to me, this is what I would tell her:
I’m sorry I hurt you. I’m sorry I published that story. But I just want you to know—
That girl standing under the window is me.
You and I are alike. More alike than you think.
That’s why you saw yourself in the story, and it infuriated you.
And that’s apparently why you have to distance yourself from me now.
And that’s okay. I mean, it hurts, but it’s okay—
What kind of father are you?
So what brings you to me?
Our son, Yanai.
Tell me a little about him. How old is he?
Seven.
Second grade?
First. We kept him in kindergarten another year. He was born in December. We thought he wasn’t mature enough yet.
I understand.
We were wrong, of course. I am a parent, therefore I err. But that’s not why we’re here.
So why are you here today?
The boy—how can I put it nicely—is a liar.
I understand.
No, you don’t. You can’t believe a word he says.
Children sometimes tend to blur the boundaries between truth and imagination. You must certainly be aware of that.
No blurring and no boundaries. The kid’s a liar. You want an example?
You can give an example, but I’m asking myself—
I ask him whether he did his homework, okay? So he says yes, and it turns out that he didn’t. I ask him whether he saw the TV remote, and he says no, but it turns out that he hid it in the crack between the couch cushions.
I understand. Is it possible that what you call “lies” are, in fact, means—age-appropriate means, by the way—of bypassing or denying the difficulties life poses for him?
Terrific interpretation. Really, hats off to you. And how does that explain the fact that in the shoe store, he insists that he wears size thirty-seven, when he barely fills a size thirty-five? That he tells his teacher he was born in America and came to Israel when he was two years old? That he tells the kids in the playground his name is Nimrod? That his surname is Ben-Yochna? We don’t know anyone whose surname is Ben-Yochna. The kid just can’t stop lying. He was always like that, but this last year, it’s gotten completely out of control.
And is that so…bad?
Excuse me?
I’m asking myself why you, both of you, experience as a tragedy the fact that your son isn’t always faithful to the truth?
What do you mean? What if his sister learns from him? What if we all start lying? What would life in our home be like? There’s a kind of contract between people in the world that they will try—they don’t always succeed, but they try—to tell the truth. Our ability to trust each other is built on that foundation. If you pull that card out, the entire tower falls.
I understand. If that’s the situation, I have to ask you if the tendency to lie…has appeared in the family before.
What? No. Of course not.
Why are you smiling, Dikla?
Because it’s amusing how a person who likes to think he’s self-aware can be so totally clueless about himself.
Meaning?
My husband is a writer. So when it comes to everything related to habitual lying—
Hold on, Diki, that’s not fair—
You’re addicted. You think of your life as a story. You think of me as a story. A character in a story. Once, your words had value. Today, they have as much value as Yoram Sirkin’s words.
That’s enough.
But it’s true.
Your truth…
The objecti—
I’m stopping you for a moment. Even though I am getting the impression that there is definitely room here…for couples therapy. But this is neither the time nor the place. And also…the price is different. Therefore, I suggest that we go back to focusing on Yanai. I’d like to know, Dikla, if Yanai already reads books on his own.
The child is a bookworm. Since he learned to read, he finishes two or three books a day. And add to that the stories his father tells him.
How many stories a day do you tell Yanai?
Let’s see. There’s the waking-up story. Otherwise he can’t wake up. There’s the daily toothbrush story. I mean, the toothbrush is a kind of creature that talks to Yanai. Then, in the car on the way to school, instead of playing a boring CD of children’s songs, I tell him another story. But a short one. And another very short one on the way home from school. Then, in the early evening, there’s a hammock story.
Hammock story?
We both lie in a hammock and look at the clouds. He tells me what shapes he sees, and together we make up a story based on them. Then supper, a bath, and a bedtime story.
And that’s it?
The truth is that there’s also “Where Is Mr. Marshmallow.”
Mr. Marshmallow?
It’s not really a story, more like a musical detective rhyme. Right before he falls asleep. We’re walking down the street. The light is yellow. There’s no time to think. Where oh where is Mr. Marshmallow?
I understand.
In the end, the kid in the story—excuse me, the musical—always finds Mr. Marshmallow, and then I pretend to eat him. Yanai, I mean. And he giggles hysterically. He’s crazy about it.
So altogether—correct me if I’m wrong—you tell him seven stories a day.
The hammock song is only in the summer.
That’s all he does with him, do you see?
That’s not true, Dikla. And it’s not fair. We also go to the supermarket together on Fridays.
When you tell him a story about the little pepper that lives inside the big pepper.
If I don’t, he gets bored and drives me nuts. It doesn’t count.
I ask myself—
Tell me, why do psychologists always “ask themselves”? After all, you ask us, not yourself. Why skirt around it? And what is that saxophone in the background? Your neighbors? Aren’t they going a little over the top with the volume?
I wonder…Look, on the one hand, the picture you describe is heartwarming. It seems that you and Yanai have a lively and…creative bond. On the other hand, you can’t dismiss out of hand the possibility that there is a line that joins the abnormal number of stories the child is exposed to and his tendency to offer his own subjective interpretations of the variegated aspects of reality.
Can you repeat that in people speak?
She’s just telling you what I tell you all the time. That seven stories a day—
Six, in winter. One is only a rhymed musical detective story, so—
Five and a rhymed musical detective story—is too many. Yanai can’t tell the difference between truth and fiction anymore.
Am I to blame for that too, Dikla?
It’s not a question of blame.
Yes it is.
It’s—
I’m stopping you. Look, I still need to meet with Yanai in order to verify my gut feeling, but it may very well be that what you call lies are, for him, only small stories. He takes pleasure in inventing those stories and in the fact that they allow him to effectuate an independent inner world—
You know, it sounds kind of cute when you say it. “Small stories.” “An independent inner world.” But it’s not. It’s not cute. It’s worrying. The boy is already seven years old.
What exactly is worrying you? In developmental terms, it’s still age-appropriate.
What do you mean, what’s worrying me?
Look here. I realize that you’re both in distress, and I’m not taking that lightly. I merely want us to be preci
se about the essence of that distress. What exactly is it that worries you?
We’re not preparing him for the world. In the end, his lying will get him in trouble. Children will see that he’s lying. Teachers will stop thinking it’s charming. I want to spare him the humiliation.
And how…do you see it, Dikla?
I don’t know. I think about it a lot. If we’re seriously considering Yoram Sirkin as a candidate for prime minister—that says it all. Maybe there is no more reality. Just Photoshop. And maybe, in an upside-down kind of way, we’re preparing our son extremely well for the true reality of life. Because apparently only liars can survive in a fake world and in a country where you can’t believe what anyone says about anything. But then again, speaking as a mother, daily life becomes very difficult when you can’t trust your own child. When you need to be suspicious of everything he says.
I can imagine.
I don’t know how to react, whether to pretend I’m not paying attention, or…I see how the flicker of suspicion in my eyes hurts him, and that…makes me sad. A few weeks ago—you went to lecture in Eilat—he didn’t say anything all weekend, and only when I pleaded with him to tell me why he wasn’t speaking to me, did he say…in a small voice…that he was afraid…that if he opened his mouth…lies would come out.
You didn’t tell me that, Dikla.
What do you want, you weren’t home.
Why didn’t you tell me that?
I would like to suggest something. Let’s conduct an experiment that may or may not succeed. But let’s try, in the coming weeks, to reduce the number of stories you tell Yanai from seven to…let’s say three. And report to me whether it has an effect. Again, this is an experiment. I’m not promising that it will succeed. Certainly not right away. But…do you think you can manage it?
I don’t know…
I understand.
I’m not really sure you do.
