The Drive

by Yair Assulin

  I didn’t call her, because when I took my phone out of my pocket and looked at it, I no longer wanted to call. I even felt a slight disgust, the way I felt once when I sat in a cafe next to Ayala and her profile suddenly looked ugly. I put the phone back in my pocket. Dad phoned a minute later and I told him I was still waiting and it would take a while longer. He said he was outside. I stared into space and for a long moment I didn’t think about anything, and every time I let a thought steal into my head, I was immediately overcome with fear and a strong desire to die. A group of noisy soldiers walking by reminded me again of that horrible base and everything that was bad about it, as if I hadn’t been thinking of it the whole time.

  Those moments outside the mental health building passed inexorably, and I knew I had to decide. I felt as if my choice was between death and . . . I didn’t honestly know what the other option was. I couldn’t go back to that base, and I couldn’t, in my mind, go AWOL or defect, because I knew that then I would live in constant fear that they’d come and find me and put me in prison, and the thing I wanted least of all was to keep running away. I wanted a clear decision: life or death. I wanted them to tell me if they were sending me to die or not. Then I realized that in fact they had told me; they’d already abandoned me.

  I kept mulling over these ideas, and I even thought about convenient ways of dying, like taking pills or jumping off a tower, options that didn’t involve too much pain, until suddenly, and I write “suddenly” because no matter how much I try to reconstruct the moment and understand how it happened, I cannot, it was as though the lust to live—such a big phrase for such a miserable, banal thing—took over, and I stood up and walked into the building. There was nothing heroic or brave about that walk. It was heavy, and my eyes— or so I felt—were half-shut.

  VIII.

  I remember walking up the stairs. I remember the floor tiles I stepped on one after the other on the way to the office. I was empty. I knew this was my last chance. I thought about Samson again, and his face in the cartoon when he asks God to give him strength just one last time. I saw how he stretched his arms out to the sides and strained his face and brought the palace columns down on himself and everyone around him.

  When I finished recalling the movie scene, at the moment the palace columns shattered, I found myself standing outside the plain wooden door with Michal the MHO’s name on it. I knocked twice, softly, and I remember her voice responding with a tired “Yes.” I opened the door and went in. I stood facing her. “Yes?” she repeated, looking up from a paper.

  I told her I’d been there a little over an hour ago, maybe an hour and a half, with David.

  “Yes, yes, I remember,” she said quickly before I could finish. “What’s wrong?”

  “Can I sit down?” I asked. I could feel my legs about to buckle.

  “Actually,” she said, “I have a meeting in fifteen minutes, so just for a few moments, okay?”

  I nodded. I explained that I’d come back because I just couldn’t leave knowing that I had to go back to that base tomorrow. I told her again about the feelings I had and about how I wanted to serve in the army and I wasn’t trying to get out of it or make my life easy, and that I’d really tried to get along on that base, “God, how I tried,” but I felt that I could not go back there. It was as simple as that: I could not go back.

  “David already told you that we have no way to help you with that,” she said, repeating the same empty words about how they weren’t the adjutancy, and they couldn’t force my unit to transfer me, and they could only make a recommendation.

  “But I can’t go back there,” I suddenly shouted, to make her stop talking. “I really can’t go back there. I’m not lying. I’m really not lying.” I put my head down on the desk. “I can’t go back there,” I kept saying through my tears, “I can’t.”

  “Maybe you can’t serve in the army,” she said, trying that trick again, talking quietly, almost maternally.

  I felt I no longer had anything to lose, so I answered softly, “I can serve in the army. I just can’t serve there. What’s so hard to get about that? What’s so complicated? Why make things complicated all the time? I just can’t go back there. I just can’t.”

  And like that, with my head on the desk, sobbing, I sat there and murmured to myself over and over again that I couldn’t go back to the base. Michal said nothing and I felt her looking at me and evaluating how genuine my behavior was. I silently recited the Psalms verses I’d learned by heart and felt that I might vomit on the floor at any minute. “A song of ascents,” I mouthed, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the mountains: From whence shall my help come? My help cometh from the Lord, who made heaven and earth. He will not suffer thy foot to be moved. He that keepeth thee will not slumber. Behold, he that keepeth Israel doth neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord is thy keeper; the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand. The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord shall keep thee from all evil; He shall keep thy soul. The Lord shall guard thy going out and thy coming in, from this time forth and forever.” Then I recited more verses: “Lord, who shall sojourn in Thy tabernacle?” and “Keep me, O God; for I have taken refuge in Thee,” and I rolled the words around in my mind and maybe on my lips, over and over again, until suddenly Michal sighed. There was something sad about her sigh, about the way she let the air out of her mouth and the sound she made. I felt her gazing at me more tenderly than she had before, and I looked up at her face.

  “You won’t have to go back there,” she said suddenly. I don’t remember exactly how it happened, and I can’t put my finger on looks or tones of voice or expressions, but looking back, it seems to me as though a holy spirit entered the room and enveloped me and Michal and the whole moment. She said she would talk to my base and inform them that I wasn’t going back, and that meanwhile I’d be at home and she’d give me as much sick leave as it took until they realized I couldn’t be there and transferred me back to the induction center, where they’d post me somewhere new, close to home, and she hoped it would be a place where I could serve without having all these bad feelings. Then she said that as long as she was giving me sick leave, I had to come see her once a week, and that each time I came she would give me a form with sick leave for the following week, because she couldn’t give me more than a week’s worth at once. Then she asked if I had the phone number of the adjutancy on my base so that she could talk to whoever was in charge there, and I gave her the biggest grin I was capable of, which was a pretty pathetic one, and said I had the number because we’d used it a lot recently—me and Dad and of course Mom, who’d called more than anyone involved in this story. I read her the number from my phone and she said I should go wash my face, and meanwhile she’d talk to them, and that while she did that she would print out my sick leave for the coming week.

  IX.

  I remember standing in the little bathroom of the mental health clinic, splashing my face with more and more water. I remember looking into my eyes, which were red from lack of sleep and from all the pain I had endured. I hadn’t looked at my eyes for a long time, I realized, and I remembered that once I used to look at my eyes a lot to see if they really had any green inside the brown, as girls had told me. For the first time in ages, I dared to look for that green again.

  I did everything like a machine. With ridiculous caution, as if I was afraid to do something reckless that would change the reality that had suddenly been created after I’d all but given up. As if I were afraid that I’d fallen asleep on the desk while I was crying and at any moment I’d wake up and realize that everything that was said in that room was a lie, a fantasy. I’d had similar fantasies before, dreams in which everything somehow got resolved, in which I no longer felt the terrible pain that was eating away at my stomach and giving me no peace. Now someone had finally understood that I was really in a bad state and that I wasn’t lying. I remembered a daydream I’d had while I was waiting on the bench outside the camp commander’s office. I remember
ed the sharp pain that pierced my stomach when I roused and saw his office and saw myself in my dirty uniform, waiting for him.

  X.

  When I went back to Michal’s office, she was waiting for me with a cup of coffee. The sick leave form was in the printer tray. “I talked to them,” she said, in a tone that was part reassuring, part proud. “I told them that as long as they don’t get you out of there to the Chief Adjutancy, you won’t be going back to the base, and that I’m responsible for it.” She reached out to the printer and gave me the form, and reminded me that I had to come see her once a week, “So we can talk and so I can give you sick leave for the next week.”

  “I remember,” I said. Then I said, “Thank you very much,” and I left the room and the building. Outside, the same sun was still hanging, perhaps even stronger. I stood looking at that base, at the bench I’d sat on half an hour earlier thinking about the best way to commit suicide, at the white buildings, at the black asphalt paths. I didn’t have any feelings of happiness or victory or revenge. Whom could I feel victorious over? All I felt, for the first time in a long time, was tranquility. Calmness. Calmness from the simple knowledge that I would not have to go back to the base, and from the even simpler fact that for the coming week I would be at home. I could visit Ayala, and I would finally be able to sit and read a book without struggling to suppress thoughts about the army while I read. I felt that after a long time I could breathe like a human being—just breathe. Then I thought about Dror and I called to tell him that I’d be on leave all week, and I asked if he wanted to take a trip. “Maybe to the Kinneret,” I said, “like we did the week before I enlisted.” He asked why I was on leave, and I said they’d found some breathing difficulties related to the asthma, and that there was a good chance I’d be at home a lot in the near future.

  Then I called Ayala. I told her about the leave and the asthma, and I asked if she wanted to meet me during the week. I didn’t want to tell her about the MHO. I was no longer sure we were going to be together forever, and I was afraid that if we broke up she would tell other people about it. I suppose our relationship was already dead, and the final separation, which came a few months later, was only a memorial service for the corpse we were already carrying around.

  Then I walked out and got into Dad’s car. On the way out, I glanced at a group of soldiers standing by the snack bar licking ice cream. “How was it?” Dad asked, turning to look at me. I told him everything that had happened, and how in the end, thank God, it had all worked out, and that Michal had promised me I wouldn’t go back to that base anymore. “What do you mean, you won’t go back there anymore?” he asked, and I told him about the whole thing with the sick leave until they transferred me to the Chief Adjutancy. Then he asked what they’d written on the evaluation and I handed him the form. He read it closely, then looked at me. “You really are a bit of a narcissist,” he said. He laughed, and I realized I hadn’t seen him laugh for a long time.

  “Do you think it’s problematic, the mental health ranking?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know. It could be . . . ” He paused for a moment. “Either way, you can be sure that if any problems come up, we’ll be with you, and we’ll try to help you as much as we can.”

  He started the car and turned his head back to reverse out of the parking spot. The Leonard Cohen CD started playing from the beginning, and the cup of coffee Dad had drunk on the way sat empty in the cup holder. The sun shone powerfully and lit up the street. The silent houses were the same ones that had stood there when we’d arrived that morning, and when I’d lingered by the gate before deciding to go back in.

  YAIR ASSULIN, born in 1986, studied philosophy and history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The Drive is the first of two novels he has written and for which he won Israel’s Ministry of Culture Prize and the Sapir Prize for debut fiction. He has been awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize for authors, writes a weekly column in the newspaper Haaretz and has been a visiting lecturer in Jewish studies at Yale.

  JESSICA COHEN shared the 2017 Man Booker International Prize with author David Grossman for her translation of A Horse Walks into a Bar. She has translated works by Amos Oz, Etgar Keret, Dorit Rabinyan, Ronit Matalon and Nir Baram.

  AND THE BRIDE CLOSED THE DOOR

  BY RONIT MATALON

  A young bride shuts herself up in a bedroom on her wedding day, refusing to get married. In this moving and humorous look at contemporary Israel and the chaotic ups and downs of love everywhere, her family gathers outside the locked door, not knowing what to do. The only communication they receive from behind the door are scribbled notes, one of them a cryptic poem about a prodigal daughter returning home. The harder they try to reach the defiant woman, the more the despairing groom is convinced that her refusal should be respected. But what, exactly, ought to be respected? Is this merely a case of cold feet?

  http://newvesselpress.com/books/and-the-bride-closed-the-door/

  SOME DAY

  BY SHEMI ZARHIN

  On the shores of Israel’s Sea of Galilee lies the city of Tiberias, a place bursting with sexuality and longing for love. The air is saturated with smells of cooking and passion. Some Day is a gripping family saga, a sensual and emotional feast that plays out over decades. This is an enchanting tale about tragic fates that disrupt families and break our hearts. Zarhin’s hypnotic writing renders a painfully delicious vision of individual lives behind Israel’s larger national story.

  http://newvesselpress.com/books/some-day/

  ALEXANDRIAN SUMMER

  BY YITZHAK GORMEZANO GOREN

  This is the story of two Jewish families living their frenzied last days in the doomed cosmopolitan social whirl of Alexandria just before fleeing Egypt for Israel in 1951. The conventions of the Egyptian upper-middle class are laid bare in this dazzling novel, which exposes sexual hypocrisies and portrays a vanished polyglot world of horse racing, seaside promenades and nightclubs.

  http://newvesselpress.com/books/alexandrian-summer/

  ANIMAL INTERNET

  BY ALEXANDER PSCHERA

  Some 50,000 creatures around the globe— including whales, leopards, flamingoes, bats and snails—are being equipped with digital tracking devices. The data gathered and studied by major scientific institutes about their behavior will warn us about tsunamis, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, but also radically transform our relationship to the natural world. Contrary to pessimistic fears, author Alexander Pschera sees the Internet as creating a historic opportunity for a new dialogue between man and nature.

  http://newvesselpress.com/books/animal-internet/

  EXPOSED

  BY JEAN-PHILIPPE BLONDEL

  A dangerous intimacy emerges between a French teacher and a former student who has achieved art world celebrity. The painting of a portrait upturns both their lives. Jean-Philippe Blondel, author of the bestselling novel The 6:41 to Paris, evokes an intimacy of dangerous intensity in a stunning tale about aging, regret and moving ahead into the future.

  http://newvesselpress.com/books/exposed/

  THE 6:41 TO PARIS

  BY JEAN-PHILIPPE BLONDEL

  Cécile, a stylish 47-year-old, has spent the weekend visiting her parents outside Paris. By Monday morning, she’s exhausted. These trips back home are stressful and she settles into a train compartment with an empty seat beside her. But it’s soon occupied by a man she recognizes as Philippe Leduc, with whom she had a passionate affair that ended in her brutal humiliation 30 years ago. In the fraught hour and a half that ensues, Cécile and Philippe hurtle towards the French capital in a psychological thriller about the pain and promise of past romance.

  http://newvesselpress.com/books/the-641-to-paris/

  OBLIVION

  BY SERGEI LEBEDEV

  In one of the first 21st century Russian novels to probe the legacy of the Soviet prison camp system, a young man travels to the vast wastelands of the Far North to uncover the truth about a shadowy neighbor who saved his life, and whom
he knows only as Grandfather II. Emerging from today’s Russia, where the ills of the past are being forcefully erased from public memory, this masterful novel represents an epic literary attempt to rescue history from the brink of oblivion.

  http://newvesselpress.com/books/oblivion/

  THE YEAR OF THE COMET

  BY SERGEI LEBEDEV

  A story of a Russian boyhood and coming of age as the Soviet Union is on the brink of collapse. Lebedev depicts a vast empire coming apart at the seams, transforming a very public moment into something tender and personal, and writes with stunning beauty and shattering insight about childhood and the growing consciousness of a boy in the world.

  http://newvesselpress.com/books/year-of-the-comet/

  WHAT’S LEFT OF THE NIGHT

  BY ERSI SOTIROPOULOS

  Constantine Cavafy arrives in Paris in 1897 on a trip that will deeply shape his future and push him toward his poetic inclination. With this lyrical novel, tinged with an hallucinatory eroticism that unfolds over three unforgettable days, celebrated Greek author Ersi Sotiropoulos depicts Cavafy in the midst of a journey of self-discovery across a continent on the brink of massive change. A stunning portrait of a budding author—before he became C.P. Cavafy, one of the 20th century’s greatest poets—that illuminates the complex relationship of art, life, and the erotic desires that trigger creativity.

  http://newvesselpress.com/books/whats-left-night/

  THE EYE

  BY PHILIPPE COSTAMAGNA

  It’s a rare and secret profession, comprising a few dozen people around the world equipped with a mysterious mixture of knowledge and innate sensibility. Summoned to Swiss bank vaults, Fifth Avenue apartments, and Tokyo storerooms, they are entrusted by collectors, dealers, and museums to decide if a coveted picture is real or fake and to determine if it was painted by Leonardo da Vinci or Raphael. The Eye lifts the veil on the rarified world of connoisseurs devoted to the authentication and discovery of Old Master artworks.