by Eshkol Nevo
But before I could say anything, she spoke: You’re pretty photogenic, eh?
Coming from her mouth, it sounded like an insult. But I didn’t have time to waste on that. I was in the middle of a mission: to find out the small, specific things she does that so enthrall Gili Arazi.
I asked about her books. And while she answered, I observed her hand movements, which told a different story, and sometimes actually undermined her words; I observed her bangs, which moved slightly when she spoke; I observed the rare moments when something embarrassed her. She seemed anxious to project the image of a strong, liberated woman whom nothing could embarrass, and that was why, when she suddenly bit the nail of her pinkie finger, there was something moving about it.
When we got off the train at the station—how lovely it was, the way she hopped off the step onto the platform—I felt that I needed a bit more time with her. A bit more information.
So I suggested that we meet for a drink after her lecture. You must know all about it, I said, the better the lecture is, the lonelier you feel after it.
I don’t remember what we talked about in the bar. I mean, there was a text, but I remember the subtext better. And I remember that I said to myself while we were sitting there, No no no, absolutely not, she’s definitely not your type, Dikla is your type and you don’t want to risk what you have with her—
But when she pushed her blond bangs aside, leaned over, and whispered in my ear, My hotel…it’s right around the corner—
She was definitely Gili Arazi’s type. And there are things you can know about a character only if you sleep with her. So I went to the hotel with her. Which was much more luxurious than the dumps they put me up in. I followed her into her room, her suite. Before I could do anything, she pushed me up against the wall.
She grabbed my arms with both hands. And held them over my head in an iron grip. Her pelvis trapped mine so that I couldn’t move, and her mouth headed toward my neck.
I fought to free myself. But she was stronger than me. I must have cried out, which only caused her teeth to dig deeper into my neck. Then the pain lessened. My resistance weakened, my neck abandoned itself to her mouth, and she sucked my blood and everything that flows in it. I actually felt how she sucked out entire memories: the bag of apricot pits I’d collected in fourth grade that left me deep in debt at the end of recess when I lost the game; the kid from camp we ostracized because he didn’t play soccer well enough; the squad exercise during the officer training course when an accidentally discharged bullet scratched Gal Miller’s left ear; Tali Leshem standing very close to me on the Stella Maris promenade and I didn’t have the courage to kiss her; Dikla and I throwing eggs at each other in a no-holds-barred fight in the apartment on Raban Street, and then making passionate love on the floor, mixing yolks with whites; Dikla saying hurtful things to me during an argument in the apartment on Yaldei Teheran Street, and then waiting hours for her to apologize, which she didn’t, because she doesn’t believe in apologizing—
After the German writer removed her teeth from my neck and released my hands, I thought it would be natural for us to continue to the large bed in the middle of the room.
But she thought differently. She called reception. To order me a taxi.
* * *
—
Sitting in the backseat, I closed my eyes and felt empty. Not empty. Hollow.
The driver drove with the window open, and the freezing wind blew into the taxi, but I didn’t have the strength even to ask him to close it. I didn’t have the strength even to open my mouth.
That bitch had sucked the life-force right out of me. All of it.
And didn’t deign look in my direction when I left the room.
* * *
—
Six months later, she sent me her book. In German. The gold letters on the cover were embossed, as befits a book meant to be a best seller, and in the neat handwriting of a perfect little girl, she had written me a dedication on the first page:
To the suntanned writer from Israel
Thank you for helping my investigation.
There are a lot of extramarital affairs in your last books. Do you think all married people are ultimately destined to have affairs?
I think that all married people are ultimately destined to imagine an affair.
How much of you is in your characters?
They are melded into me and I into them. So much so that sometimes it’s hard, in all that amalgam, to see who is who. In this interview as well, it’s time to admit:
Some of the things I supposedly revealed really happened to me.
Some I am terrified will happen to me.
Some I desperately hope will happen to me.
And some happened to Ari, or to Axel Wolff, the Scandinavian writer.
If you google him, you’ll get a series of pictures of him in almost chronological order. In the first few shots, from the beginning of his career, he’s an arrogant Viking giant, his blond hair pulled back, holding various award statuettes, a different statuette on a different stage each time. In pictures taken the last few months, he’s slightly stooped, his hair is thinner, his eyes haunted. Under the pictures you’ll find a link to the huge scandal connected to his name—several days after returning from the Jerusalem International Book Fair, he found three documents from his wife on the kitchen table: a farewell letter filled with Swedish curses, a statement of claim for divorce, and one for ten million kronor owed her for being the actual writer of all the best sellers in the Scar series. She and her husband had made a quiet agreement, according to which she would write the books, and he, with his blond hair, towering height, and blue eyes, would be their PR image. It worked beautifully, sales doubled every quarter, until what happened in Colombia happened. And she decided to put an end to the sham.
* * *
—
That affair didn’t surprise me at all.
Right after I heard the knocking at the door that separated Axel Wolff’s hotel room in Jerusalem from the adjacent room, I heard a thick female voice. Open the door, please, it asked. The tone was proper. Matter-of-fact. Like the tone of voice of the woman on Waze. I didn’t sense that I was in any danger, and even after I opened the door, no alarm bells rang for me. The owner of that proper voice was properly attired, and her hair was pulled into a proper bun on the top of her head. She introduced herself as Camilla, the writer’s wife, thanked me for taking care of him, and said she wanted to check that Axel hadn’t spoken too much nonsense that evening. Because he sometimes did that when he drank.
Truthfully, I confessed, there was one sentence he kept repeating the entire time.
Jag dödade honom, Camilla asked.
How did you know?
I am his wife, after all.
Do you have any idea why he claimed that he murdered someone?
If I tell you, I’ll have to kill you.
I was sure she said that with a smile. Her lips spread and curved upward until the left corner of her mouth almost merged with the small scar on her left cheek. It was clear that smiling did not come naturally to her, and her effort to seem as breezy and affable as a TV personality made it even sadder. And therefore, intriguing.
That’s why I said, I’ll risk it.
She and Axel met at a party, she told me. And immediately fell wildly in love. They left their spouses and children to be together. Three months of wild passion, just the two of them, cut off from the world like prisoners. And then came his confession: “One night, a few years ago, I killed a young man who abused my daughter. I strangled him with a rope and tossed his body into a river. Everyone thought he had committed suicide by jumping off a bridge. I made sure they would think that. I left clues. I forged his suicide note. I planned it in advance, down to the smallest detail. The police never suspected. No one knew. Not my daughter. Not my ex-wife. But with you, I want to be comp
letely honest from the beginning. To build our relationship on a foundation of trust. Do you think you can live with a murderer? Because if not, better to say it now.”
What could she do? Her heart was already his. But that secret he told her—
Secrets in general—they metastasize all through your body.
In the end, she had no choice but to write it. Of course, she didn’t write it. We, the storytellers, she said, giving me a piercing look, never tell the real secret, the dark one. That remains ours alone. Sometimes we don’t even fully admit its existence, as we transform it, remove evidence, and turn it into art.
When she completed the manuscript, she told me, she gave it to Axel to read and said, You’re its first and last reader. She had intended to turn the secret he told her into a story only to free herself of it. She had no intention, desire, or ability to deal with readers and criticism.
But Axel, realizing immediately that what she’d written had the potential to be a series, manipulated her emotionally, after manipulating her sexually, into the binding arrangement that was the basis for their joint success: She would write books, he would be “the writer.”
* * *
—
She straightened the blanket around Axel’s body, which was sprawled on the bed, and looked up at me.
And that’s how it’s been ever since, she said. Five years. Ten books in the Scar series. Thirty million copies sold throughout the world.
What a story, I said.
And now that I’ve told it, I have to kill you, she said.
I laughed.
She took out a gun she’d hidden in the hem of her corduroy pants.
I’ve been looking for someone like you for a long time, she said with a sigh. A random stranger to whom I could momentarily, but only momentarily, entrust the real, dark secret that could not be written. But I warned you in advance: There are too many considerations involved here. We can’t allow ourselves to let you leave this room and spread rumors that would damage the Axel Wolff brand. Sorry.
From the moment she cocked the pistol until I opened my mouth to speak, I managed to think the following thoughts: What do I care if I die, my life lately has been on the brink anyway, and the effort to not fall into the abyss is so exhausting, but what will happen to my children, who will help them through the next stages of their lives, who will be there when they fall into their own abysses, and what will happen to Ari, what if there is the smallest chance that, at the last second, a new drug is developed for his disease, and what about the slim chance that Dikla will start loving me again?
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 e
ar. The two women cut off their mumbled conversation. And the three of them turned their wet eyes to me.
It was clear that they were expecting something to begin.
I reached behind me and took one of my books out of my bag. Perhaps I would read them a passage? My fingers were wet, making it difficult for me to turn pages, and I couldn’t find the bathtub scene in my last book. Too bad, I thought, because it would have been a perfect fit for this meeting. I put the book back in the bag. Then I closed my eyes, spread my arms to the side, leaned my head on the rim of the Jacuzzi, and slid down a bit so my lower spine would be directly in front of the jet.
I remained like that for a few seconds, inhaled the chlorine smell, and then opened my eyes and began to tell them. The truth.
I said, Sunday is my younger daughter’s bat mitzvah.
I said, Apparently right after it, my wife is going to tell me that she wants us to separate.
I said, Not a difference of opinion, a crisis.
I said, I still love her.
I said, I’ve loved her from the age of twenty-three.
I said, She has the most wonderful smell, I don’t think there’s another woman in the world who smells so good.
I said, Her collarbones.
I said, I don’t know how I can live without her.
I said, I felt that she was moving away from me and tried the wrong way to bring her back.
I said, Our eldest daughter went off to boarding school, and that…shifted the balance at home.
I said, I probably won’t understand the real reason for years.
I said, In any case, it’s not something that couples therapy can solve.
I said, Maybe there was a moment when our marriage could have been saved, but I let it pass.
I double-clicked on the moment: A Friday morning, several months ago. The children were already at school. She woke up first and began working on her computer. But I could see without looking—after all, we’d been together for twenty years—that she was only answering e-mails. I could have said: Let’s eat breakfast together. I’ll make you an omelet with mushrooms and onions, cherry tomatoes on the side, and after we eat, we’ll start to unravel the tangle, thread by thread. But instead, I went to my computer. She made herself toast and coffee. And didn’t ask if she should make some for me. Once, we solved problems like that with sex. Once, I used to kiss her neck and all was forgotten in our passion. Maybe on that morning, I should have simply gone to her and kissed her neck.
