by Eshkol Nevo
Our indoor soccer game is top priority, Ravit explained.
I placed my books on the floor. Arranged them in front of me in chronological order of publication, from right to left, then reconsidered, moved them aside, took another swig of wine, and began to tell them about the book I wrote that was never published. The one I had never told anyone about.
I worked on that book for more than a year, I told them. I had already reached page two hundred on the computer, which is about three hundred pages in a book.
The book was called Accounts, and it was based on the powerful sexual tension between a man and a woman. They live in the same apartment and are very attracted to each other, but for various reasons, they’re forbidden from acting on the attraction. In my original plan, they’re supposed to overcome the prohibition on the last few pages of the book. But after a year’s work, I couldn’t take the sexual tension between the characters anymore. They wanted each other so much, and I had more and more difficulty stopping them, so I decided to do something about it: to write the final scene before the actual end, to free myself and my characters from all that frustration and then put the scene aside until it was time to insert it. And that’s what I did: I wrote fifteen pages of wild sexual abandon, a long, detailed, erotic scene, and really, I had a truly pleasurable week at work, except that the moment I finished, something super-problematic happened: I lost interest in the book. Totally. I tried to force myself to fight it, to shake it off, to keep writing. But the efforts exhausted me so profoundly that once or twice I even nodded off while writing and my face actually fell onto the keyboard. Finally, a month later, I had to concede that the book would not be finished. More than a year of work down the drain.
Did you at least save it? Ravit asked, shaking her feathers.
The truth is that I deleted it. If I had already decided to shelve it, then why not go all the way.
But what was the bug? the first guy wanted to know.
The bug?
What was the real glitch in the book?
Yes, the second guy joined in, like…the way you tell it, it sounds like if you hadn’t written that sex scene in advance, everything would have been fantastic. But that’s crap, bro. It’s like when we tell people the reason the company folded is that the Canadians beat us to it.
And that’s not true?
Of course not, our user interface was complicated and clumsy, and theirs was more user-friendly. That’s why they were able to attract paying customers. And we weren’t. That’s the real story. That’s why eighty people went home.
You should always ask yourself—the first guy clarified—what’s concealed behind the official explanation. I mean, why did you really shelve that book? Otherwise, how will you learn for the next time?
Every crisis is an opportunity, Ravit said. Then she pulled a feather out of her crown and stuck it between her teeth as if it were a knife.
When one door closes, another door opens, the first guy said.
Soccer time! the second guy said.
They stood up and stacked their chairs on the side. I did too.
The first guy put a miniature soccer ball the size of a tennis ball on the floor and signaled the second guy to stand at the other end of the corridor. The game was about to begin, and it seemed as if they were no longer interested in secrets from the writer’s desk.
Ravit walked me to the elevator along the yellow brick road and said, Thanks, the guys received a lot of added value. I haven’t read your books, but now I will totally consider reading them.
The elevator began its slow descent to the lobby. On the twentieth floor, it suddenly stopped.
And a huge crab entered. If a regular seashore crab is a ten-point font, then this one was a seventy-two-point font.
Its red claws spread along the length of the elevator walls and I had a feeling that it was looking at me through its antennae. I glanced in the mirror to keep from creating eye contact between us, God forbid. And for the first time, I began to suspect that I wasn’t real.
The elevator stopped at the eighteenth floor (only later did I figure out what the numbers meant), the crab went on its way in its crablike sideways walk, and Yoram Sirkin, along with a few suits, took its place in the elevator. They spoke English to each other, and one of them, who looked like Ari before his illness and was holding a small hypodermic needle in his hand, kept repeating in the same tone in which Ari after his illness asked me to help him end his suffering: Start-up nation. Start-up nation. Start-up nation.
He said “start-up nation” eight times until the elevator reached the twelfth floor. Each time he said it, he sounded more desperate. And the eighth time it really sounded like a cry of anguish.
They got out at the twelfth floor (the bat mitzvah floor), and Dikla entered, wearing her brown dress.
She came over and gave me a long kiss on the mouth, the way she used to. Then she opened the zipper of my pants and reached inside, but before we could do anything, the elevator stopped. And she exited without a word. No one entered in her place.
The elevator shook wildly, as if it couldn’t recover from her departure. And then it continued to descend. To plummet.
For a long time.
Too long.
When I finally reached the lobby, the doors opened directly into a white abyss. Standing on the bottom, waving at me, was Mayan from Death Road.
Do you believe in God?
No, but I tend to believe in karma, that if you do something bad, it has repercussions, and if you do something good, it comes back to you. It’s never one-to-one, of course. Fate is more circuitous. And most of its boomerangs are invisible. Take, for example, a story. Not mine, but one written by R (a pseudo-letter), who came up to me after a readers’ meeting in Kfar Saba and said: You said you were a story hunter, right? So I have a story for you. Want to listen to it? She was wearing a sweater that was several sizes too large for her, thick glasses, and black New Balance running shoes. Her tone was matter-of-fact. Almost businesslike. And she looked a bit tired. Nothing in her appearance even hinted at scandal. Nonetheless, I liked that she said “listen” instead of “hear,” so I asked her to sit on the bench outside the library.
* * *
—
It turned out that R had once had an affair.
And not just a run-of-the-mill affair. A sadomasochistic affair.
Twice a week she used to meet with a square-chinned guy on the bottom floor of the Beit Silver parking garage near the Ramat Gan Diamond Exchange, and there they would hurt each other until they swooned in pleasure or one of them would say the word “suburbia.” That was their code word. To signal the other that the pain had passed the point where it was arousing, and to calm things down, they said “suburbia.”
At first, R thought she was succeeding in living her dangerous life on the bottom floor of the parking garage and her normal life on the third floor of the building in suburban Kfar Saba without either of them affecting the other.
In addition, she sometimes felt that one complemented the other. That one enabled the other to exist.
But then R’s husband began to have pain.
He couldn’t pinpoint its specific location. Sometimes he thought it was in his stomach. Sometimes his back. Sometimes it climbed to his throat.
In any case, it was very strong. So much so that he couldn’t fall asleep at night. He tried painkillers—starting with over-the-counter medications and moving to prescription drugs—but nothing helped.
She had no choice but to take him for tests. Which showed nothing. There was no finding that could explain the pain. No unusual blood test results. No growth. No damage to any of his internal organs.
Each doctor sent him to another doctor, and at first, each new one was loudly skeptical of the professionalism and judgment of the previous one, but ultimately was forced to admit that he too had no idea what the source
of the problem was.
And then—the tough square-chinned guy went abroad. To a work conference. During the two weeks they didn’t meet, her husband’s condition showed a marked improvement.
R didn’t notice the connection right away.
It took another few visits to the Beit Silver parking garage, after Square Chin returned from abroad, and another few visits to the emergency room, when her husband’s pain grew worse again—for her to understand: It was her. She was hurting her husband.
Something in his subconscious felt it. The poisonous substance of her infidelity was seeping into him.
From the moment she realized it, she had no doubt about what she had to do.
She made a date to see Square Chin outside of their regular meeting times in the parking garage, told him what she had discovered, and said that was it, it was over.
He grabbed her ass, slammed her against his car, and said, Nothing is over.
She pushed his hand away and said, I’m serious, it’s over.
He grabbed her by the back of the neck, yanked her head closer, tore at her hair painfully, and said, Don’t play games with me.
She tried to push him away, and said, I’m not playing.
He pressed his pelvis against hers, locked her arms behind her back with his huge hand, and began to grind against her.
She said, Suburbia.
And he kept going.
She said, Suburbia!
And he kept going.
So she kicked him in the testicles.
He shuddered for a moment, recovered immediately, and punched her a few times. Real punches. The bones in the back of his hand crashed into the bones of her nose. And then into her stomach.
She fell onto the filthy ground next to her car, and he, as if waking from a daydream, bent over her quickly. I’m sorry, sweetie, he said.
I said suburbia.
I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it. I got carried away.
Take me to the emergency room, she said, clutching her stomach. No, don’t take me to the emergency room. Just go.
Your nose is bleeding. I can’t leave you like this.
Please…go.
Go?
Yes, I’m begging you. I’ll manage. Go. Enough. It’s over.
R called her husband, told him that a car had hit her in the parking garage and taken off, and asked him to pick her up. He came with his soft, vulnerable chin and, horrified, hurried her off to the emergency room. He sat beside her for hours, the way only someone who loves can. He held her hand and didn’t let go. He brought her decaf with soy milk and a not-too-warm chocolate croissant from the shopping center. He walked alongside her bed when they moved her from one department to another. He brought her another blanket from a different department when she was cold. He slept all night on two chairs joined together at her bedside, and talked with the doctors in the morning, his voice trembling and his eyes wide with worry.
One of the doctors, young and not yet burned out, recognized him from his own visit to the same department several weeks earlier, and asked how he was. It’s strange, he replied, since my wife has been hospitalized, I have no pain at all. Nothing. As if someone cut-and-pasted: pulled it all out of me and shifted it to her. Did you ever hear of anything like that?
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 can’t jump over.
But in this case—I had a goal.
So I asked. And she named the same city we were going to.
And I asked again. She replied that she had a readers’ meeting at the Literaturhaus to discuss her book.
What a coincidence, I’m a writer too.
I don’t believe you.
I only lie in books, I said.
I don’t believe you, she repeated. You’re too suntanned to be a writer.
So I suggested that we google each other.
While she was googling me, I googled her.
It turned out that she writes about vampires, and that her bloody books are huge best sellers in Germany and outside it. On one site, there was a picture of her lying on a piano, wearing a slit-to-the-thigh wine-colored dress, her expression simultaneously defiant and shy.
She looked up from her phone, examined me skeptically, then looked down at her phone again, then looked up again—
It’s all fiction, I wanted to tell her. Don’t believe a single word written there—
