At 5:35 on a Friday morning, I open my eyes. I don’t have to be up yet, but I feel what I call the “awakening of the brain”: that immediate alertness that resigns you to the fact that you won’t be going back to sleep. For a few minutes, I lie there listening to Avner’s breathing, soundlessly inhaling and then that almost inaudible honk as he exhaled. To think I had once found that endearing. I gently pull off the thin blanket we share – although it’s June, the nights still get chilly – and pad to the toilet, where I sit and close my eyes. I will go to work, get a cake for Shabbat, and meet the girls for coffee.
Working on a Friday was not my choice. I hate reaching the bank, watching the neighboring café coming to life, with the fat weekend editions read by thin weekend ladies. I hate having trouble finding a parking place because most Tel Avivis are enjoying their breakfasts and have yet to move their cars. I hate watching my customers, all in a hurry to complete their Friday errands so they can get to their lazy brunch meetings on time. And if I wasn't the assistant manager, I wouldn’t be working either. My boss, that schmock – he doesn’t work Fridays.
I get up and go to the kitchen, nearly tripping over Avner’s damned gym bag on the way. He has the self-discipline to work out three times a week, but can’t bring himself to put his stuff away. I pass the boys’ rooms, peeking through Yoni’s open door, tiptoeing past Omer’s sealed fortress. I have to wake them both before I leave but it’s still early. I make the Elite instant coffee which only I will drink – Avner calls it rat poison – and step out onto the tiny balcony. Only a minute away from the bustle of Yehuda Maccabi Street in the old north of Tel Aviv, our street is surprisingly peaceful, and at this early hour, it is already completely light, but silent, taking its time coming to life. I look at the buildings across the street. The birds perch anonymously on the humming air conditioners. Cats still pick leisurely through the big green trash cans. It seems that every morning there are more of them, as if they multiply in the nights, screeching among the trees and the cars, and the municipality does nothing.
These moments alone are precious to me. When I was working at the Holon branch, I would have 37 minutes of pure solitude, to enjoy singing in the car, pretending to be someone else.
But five years ago, I had been relocated to the Bavli branch, and those commutes had been taken away. Work was five minutes away from home and I could walk if I wanted. And when you hear your own footsteps, it’s difficult to pretend you're someone else. I hadn’t wanted to switch branches. I had applied for the position of branch manager at Holon, and got relocated instead. Riki, this is a great opportunity for you. You can be closer to your kids and work shorter hours – at the same job with the same pay. We’re being more than generous here. As if I need to be closer to my children. Yoni is twelve years old and has a schedule which is busier than mine, and Omer is seventeen and barely acknowledges my existence.
I am startled by a sound from inside. It’s almost six thirty and I go inside to get dressed. In our bedroom, I can hear the toilet still gurgling, but Avner was already fast asleep again. Lucky bastard. I sleep lightly, and once sleep has gone, it’s gone for good. I step into our walk-in closet and get dressed, pulling on the nylons: torture at this time of year, but since I hate the beach and any form of tanning activity, a necessity for my pale legs.
Criminals don’t wear light colors. On TV they’re always in jeans and dark faded sweatshirts. I bought the cream suit – the saleslady had called it eggshell – they have so many names for such a parve color – because it shows off my legs, which are still great. I hadn’t intended on wearing it that morning, but my navy skirt was still in the wash, and I would be meeting the girls later – I had no choice. Funny, actually, that I ended up wearing that, when you think of the weather that day – the sky itself was as white and glaring as the suit, almost crackling with heat and dryness.
Inside the bathroom, I take my time with a high-SPF moisturizer and foundation. The sun can be brutal, and I take pride in how well my skin has aged. My mother used to say that the most tell tale part is the neck, and so I take special care to cover it with sunscreen and moisturizer in circular motions every single morning. Apart from some traitor crow’s feet, no one would guess I am closer to fifty than forty. You’re still young, they had said. You can apply for manager the next time around. There will be other jobs, more promotions. That had been the last time I was overlooked for branch manager, this time at my current branch. They had promoted that ben zona Ohayon. That smug manyak whom I had taught everything he knew, introduced him to our key customers-
I realize I am stabbing angrily at my face with the makeup sponge and take a deep breath. This is not who I am.
I tie a mauve scarf around my neck. Squinting to make my image blur, it almost looks like a dead body with a severed neck. A slash of color always adds a nice touch to neutral tones. Satisfied, I step back. My hair falls gently on my shoulders, a light brown wave which is the most appealing haircut I’ve had in months – must praise Avram for his work this time. My makeup hardly shows. My legs look great in the short beige skirt. The only problem with this suit is that the sandals that go with it are rather uncomfortable – a rash purchase made while Avner waited impatiently outside the shop. Life is full of compromise, I mutter, pulling them on. No one can say I’ve lost my sense of style.
I have no appetite, but I need a full stomach for my iron supplements, so I make a sandwich: salted 5% ricotta cheese on whole wheat bread, a sliced cucumber, and some olives. Chewing disinterestedly, I bring in the weekend paper and try to read, but can’t concentrate. Bits and pieces of what I see slip into my mind: an interesting interview with a young new authoress who has written about murdering her illicit lover; the dollar is down again; the Chief Justice has decided not to indict the Prime Minister, the education system strike is in its 51st day, and still, the government does nothing. You can get away with anything in this country. And people do nothing: nothing.
I walk over to Omer’s room and by force of habit raise my fist to knock, but then remember that he is asleep and won’t hear me anyway. God only knew what time he had gone to sleep. This strike was driving them all crazy. He and his friends, and more than one hundred thousand other high school students, had not gone to school for almost two months. The teachers were protesting their conditions, and as much as I sympathized with their cause, it was starting to cost me, in takeout meals and movies, and time on that internet game he played. Today, however, he had asked me to wake him for a weekend trip with his friends.
The room is like a black cave, except for the bouncing screen saver on his computer. It is close, almost stifling, and smells like socks. Omer had insisted on dark shades for the windows. He cannot sleep in the light, like some sort of vampire. For a young man, his room is rather neat, and I am surprised to realize that this makes me proud. I look over at him. “Omer, sweetie,” I say softly.
“I’m awake.” I still can’t get used to that baritone, though god knows I’ve had a good four years of it already.
“All right. Wake Yoni in fifteen minutes please.”
“Would you knock the next time.”
Teenagers.
I should get going. The bank opens at 8:30 and I like to have an hour to myself at my desk. In the elevator, I recheck my hair, patting it down. I force a smile at my reflection in the mirror: I always feel like there is a hidden camera watching me.
I could have walked to the bank, but as I have my heels on and don’t want to work up a sweat, I look around, trying to remember where I had parked my Fiat. Parking was hell on these little streets, and it seemed that the city was marking off more and more parking spaces as illegal every day, in order to make more money off the fines. I locate my car across the street, almost unrecognizable. It’s covered with splattered fruit that would be a pain to take off. The bats would come at night, darting among the trees, and shake off the fruit which falls on the cars and leaves a sticky residue that was impossible to clean. I had called the municipality three times this year already, but they said that there was nothing they could do. And Avner, Avner does nothing, because he can park his precious Ford in our building’s lot. It’s the company’s, I need to take good care of it, he whines.
I step into my Fiat and grimace as I hear the creak of the door. I had asked him to fix it several times, but he conveniently forgets. Avner and his company car, his cell phone, his executive lunches, his MBA buddies. The MBA I had put him through. I had missed the bank’s executive training when I was on maternity leave with Yoni. You can come in and take the course now, and extend your leave later, they had offered. We’re being more than generous here. How could you explain to them that this was not an option with a husband who was completing his MBA in the evenings? I had declined, counting on the fact that the training took place twice a year, confident I would simply jump on the next train. After that, they began closing the course, offering it to branch managers only. Good thing at least Avner has his MBA, I think bitterly. You really need a high class education when you’re a supervisor for a construction company, watching concrete being mixed.
Yehuda Hamaccabi is already busy at 7:15, and traffic is slow. I look wistfully at the people sitting leisurely at the cafes – mostly the elderly, who are early risers. A group of middle aged men sit in a circle around a table, bobbing their heads and puffing cigars. I wish I could spend the morning alone with the weekend papers in a café.
I hear a savage honking from behind me and realize that the cars have moved. But my eyes are stuck on the men at the café and for a moment I cannot put my foot on the pedal to go. An impatient Audi overtakes me, its bald driver looking at me and mouthing metumtemet! making the universal sign of the “dumbass” – finger tapping on temple. Men. Constantly hurrying. As if those three seconds would change something. He disappears and I am instantly sorry I didn’t give him the finger, or speed up and overtake him. I’m too nice.
“You’re too nice,” my former boss Levi had said when retiring from his position as branch manager. I cannot forget that day: he had avoided me all day, after announcing Ohayon’s promotion to the staff. I had been sure it was mine. After waiting and pestering all day, I finally got five minutes with him, and he had been organizing his things and was getting ready to leave for the day. Pulling on his jacket, he had said: “they need a sales shark. You are a whiz at customer service but you’re not pushing the pension and investment consults. You sympathize with the customers and don’t give them the hard sell – you treat them like they’re your children. They get to you. Ohayon- he’s tough. A moneymaker. He works long hours and doesn’t take any boohooing.”
“I’m sorry,” Levi had added. “But hey, look at the bright side. No assistant branch manager makes the salary you do, especially not a working mother assistant manager. They’re being more than generous.”
More than generous indeed. Damn them. I had gone over to Ohayon’s desk, congratulated him, the words spit painfully out of my mouth as if my teeth were crumbling on each syllable. He stood up, taller than I, and thanked me in an official tone which puzzled me. This was, after all, the guy I had trained to handle investment portfolios for business clients. In the two years we had worked together, we had gone past such formalities. We had compared stories of our children and had lunch together on several occasions.
I should have seen it coming, with that sudden curtness. “I’m going to want to sit down with you and talk about the business department,” he said stiffly, as if the entire staff were watching, although it was past six and we were the only ones left. “Next week.”
That’s how it had started. Our daily briefing sessions in the kitchenette, where we would trade information as colleagues, were replaced by weekly updates, where I would be summoned into his office to report on my clients. His office: more like a foyer after he expanded it at my expense. Where my own little office had been, was now a fake leather couch and chrome coffee table with a tiny Zen rock garden upon it. I had been sent back out alongside the tellers, to a cubicle. “An assistant manager should not be behind closed doors. The customers should always have access to you.” Access to me, and yet when I do all I can to help them out, to make them stay at our bank, you veto me, overturn my decisions, make me feel like an idiot.
Our bank is located in a small building in Shikhun Bavli, a nice residential neighborhood on the banks of the Yarkon river, popular with newlyweds and young families because of the Yarkon Park. Because it is a neighborhood bank, I am familiar with most of my customers, and as I step out of the car and rifle through my bag for my key, I nod my head at Mr. Gotgold, who is walking his dog. I know them all: the elderly widows trying to make sense of what was left to them along with their pensions, the younger couples wanting their own homes. These were my favorites. The young couples who would come in, asking for advice, asking for a mortgage. I could help them. Here my experience meant something. These young couples with the hope, and the plans for the future. “But we need three bedrooms,” they would say, their eyes full of giggling toddlers and building blocks. I would search those eyes: one pair would be full of determination and choice, the other dull with dead ambition. When two people in a relationship make a decision, only one of them is actually choosing: the other has, by virtue of choosing the first, relinquished any further ability to decide.
Couples like Eitan Greenberg and his girlfriend Gali – no, Galia. They had applied for a mortgage in order to buy the apartment they were currently renting – no point in throwing that money away, when I could be buying the place, the young man had smiled. I had agreed – the boy was in hi-tech, after all, and produced a decent salary – and tried to get them a sub-prime interest rate. This was within my authority, something I could do for someone. At least so I had thought.
Ohayon had then passed by my desk and I had asked him to sign off on the approval. This was a matter of procedure, and as far as I knew, the terms were nothing he hadn’t approved before. But he had shot me down: new policy, I sent the emails out last week. See what happened in the States. No sub-primes without collateral, and even if there were, you’re not married – you don’t qualify. We can give you a regular mortgage with a fixed interest – we’re being more than generous already. Sorry guys, he had shrugged to the young couple, Riki doesn’t read her email often enough.
I sit at my cubicle now, pulling their paperwork out of my tray. I have to close their file. It had been sitting on my desk for over a week now, but I hadn’t had the heart to make it official, to enter our denial into the records. Damn this country. Damn the interest rates. “Isn’t there anything you can do?” he had asked, that Eitan. A young boy like that, doing so well, all he wants to do is buy his own apartment, but can’t, unless he’s married. The anonymous overpowering government making the most private of civilian choices for us. What happens when Omer wants his own place?
My computer finishes its creaking morning workout and the picture of my sons – taken at a family outing to Nachal Zavitan three years ago – smiles cheerfully at me. This had been the last time I managed to snap a photo of both my boys together. They grow up so quickly.
I double-click on the bank’s intranet and point the arrow at my inbox. Riki doesn’t read her email often enough. Two daily exchange rate updates, a response from customer service regarding a request I had made on behalf of a client, something that looked like one of those silly forwarded jokes from my father – I had to get him to stop sending those – and a quarterly report from HR. I open the latter. “Congratulations to David Ohayon for making Q2’s Best Branch Manager!” It reads in boldface. I scan it quickly. “David Ohayon, manager of Bavli branch, has an excellent record of customer service, sales, and retention. In Q2. the Bavli branch has been the most profitable neighborhood branch with an 18% increase in sales and 25.5% customer retention.”
My head began spinning. This was too much. That prick. Could no one see him for what he was? There was a difference between encouraging sales and actually rewarding this kind of behavior. I thought of Eitan and Galia. I thought of Mr. Gotgold and his monthly pension – his measly 2000 shekels for which we insisted on making him see an impatient investment consultant who screwed him out of most of it. I thought of the stiff tones, the embarrassment in front of the customers, the denied mortgages.
I couldn’t help what happened next. I had not chosen to be there on a Friday, to be an assistant manager entering the data for a decision I didn’t make. I had not chosen to work at a bank which valued numbers over people; I had not chosen to stay home all those nights while my husband made new playmates on the executive field. I had not chosen to wake my son up early, only to miss seeing him for the rest of the weekend. I had not chosen to live in a country that did nothing to get its teenagers back into school, did nothing to get its cats off the streets and its newlyweds into homes.
I had to do something; something that would stop that endless train of useless days in which I smiled and nodded and punched in my numbers and swiped my card. I look around to make sure no one else is there – it’s only 7:45 – and click “log out”. I get up to make some coffee, my mind reeling with possibility.
I’m being more than generous here, I think, as I punch in Ohayon’s system ID and password. The bank’s red and grey logo flashes, rotating lazily as the system loads. More than generous. The main menu appears and I choose “private banking”. I thumb through Eitan’s papers on my desk, and type in his account number. I select “pending requests” and their mortgage application pops up. On the next menu I click “approval”, and, while the forms are printed, get up to open a new file. I pull a purple cardboard file out of the cabinet – I prefer these over the plain manila ones – and arrange the papers inside. I click “sub-prime interest,” choose “Yes” on “link to index?” and highlight “USD”. I turn around and open the drawer behind me, pulling out an application form for mortgage insurance. I will throw the monthly premium in, free of charge. I staple a pension consultation brochure to the outer cardboard, stamping “first meeting free” forcefully with the ink stamp from my tray. More than generous.
The printer is whirring, busily cranking out the forms, and I gather them automatically, stacking them in order, going over them to check that I hadn’t missed any. I work fast, almost laughing out loud, as I skim through them and mark “x’s” where the applicants need to sign.
I look at the clock on the wall above me. Eight o’clock. It’s not too early.
“Eitan, it’s Riki, assistant manager at Bavli branch. Would you like to come in and sign some forms? There’s something I can do after all.”
Sunday, July 8, 2007
Thursday, January 4, 2007
How I began writing
How I began writing
The phone calls came in on one Friday morning in June, as I was indulging in my weekly ritual of coffee and pastry and reading the weekend papers. There were only two; both from friends who had seen the papers and automatically picked up their phones. My Nokia was buried under two inches of print, so between the rumbling of buses on Yehuda Maccabi St. and the patrons of the cafe, I nearly missed the announcement of my own death.
“Hello?”
“You’re alive!”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“There’s an announcement of your death in the weekend papers.”
“Really? What did I die of?”
“They don’t say. Page 24 in the back. In the classified section. Your funeral is today at noon.”
“Very funny. Some poor woman with the same name has died. A sad coincidence. What's even sadder is that you’re reading death announcements.”
“Shortage of reading material on the toilet, you know.”
“You’re sick.”
“Better sick than dead."
“Ha ha. Talk to you later. Wash your hands.”
“Bye.”
The announcements appear daily in the Israeli papers, somewhere between the classified and business sections, as if death was a used car to be negotiated and bartered off. I wondered what my namesake had died of.
I rifled through the stack of papers. The classifieds weren’t there. I glanced around at the other Friday morning readers. A fifty-ish man with shiny hair slicked back and a ridiculous Bluetooth headphone flashing in his ear was reading the classifieds.
My phone rang again.
“Hey.”
“You’re up.”
“I’m having my Friday morning coffee and papers.”
“So you’ve seen it.”
“My death? Yes.”
“Oh come on, don’t exaggerate. It’s not that bad.”
“I’m not. I was joking. It’s just someone with the same name as me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The death announcement? Someone with my name has died.”
“Oh.”
“Why? What were you talking about?”
“It’s Sarah.”
“Sarah? My Sarah?”
Silence. Uncomfortable cough.
“You know what I mean. Fine. Not my Sarah. What about her?”
“She’s written a book. There’s a double spread interview with her. Maariv Culture section.”
“Fuck. Me.”
“That’s not all. It gets worse.”
“How much worse?”
“The book she’s written? It’s about an illicit relationship between a lecturer and an unnamed student at Tel Aviv University.”
“Holy shit.”
“Are you OK?”
“Holy shit.”
“Yael? You OK?”
“I need to read that interview.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to-“
“Don’t be silly. I’d have seen it eventually. Is the book in stores already?”
“No. Next week.”
“I have to read that interview.”
“Well, at least the picture sucks. She looks like a total cow.””There’s a PICTURE?”
“Get the paper. Call me later.”
There was a puddle of bitter espresso at the bottom of my cup. I downed it, trying to make it wash over my entire mouth, but not enough was left. My tongue felt like it had been wrapped in a towel. The arts section I was holding was from the wrong newspaper. Sarah had written a book. About us. My Sarah. Well, never technically, but still My Sarah, with a capital My. We, who had read Vita and Virginia and fantasized of how our own correspondence would one day be published. She, the world-renowned lecturer, would jet-set all over the world, giving talks about her latest book of essays on ethics (ha!), and I, the bestselling (but highbrow) fiction novelist would join her whenever our book tours crossed paths. She, who had, in a lazy game of thought-badminton, lobbed over the thought that our sexual attraction was derived from intellectual competitiveness, and I had swatted it away, secretly flattered, saying how could I compare with your brilliance. I had sat through her lectures, trying not to burn her down with my gaze. I'd graduated from University; she'd graduated from me. A book. She’d written a goddamn BOOK.
I stared down at the table. Some little pink sweetener packets had been shaken loose from their container and I absently pushed them back in. I’d managed to go without thinking about her for a very long time. She'd gone back to Oxford, and it had been over a year since we’d exchanged even the most perfunctory of emails after a scathing online dispute about the Second Lebanon War. It had been longer than that since any sign of affection peppered our correspondence, and yet longer - over two years - since that summer. But the signs and symptoms were still there, rising fresh and welted like a new tattoo. The malady had returned; I could already feel the signs of my five-year flu. My eyes started watering and my head throbbed. The people in the café continued their idle chit chat, and I resented them for their oblivion to the fact that I was dying right next to them. Sarah had written a fucking book.
A group of old men was sitting next to a pile of papers. They probably had the culture section. I approached the ringleader.
“Excuse me.”
“…I used to buy a case of wine from him every week, but the bastard stopped selling my brand. Thought he could make more off the Australian.”
“EXCUSE ME.”
“Avram, the pretty young lady is talking to you, forget about your wines.”
“Ahh… but ladies are like wine. You let them wait, and breathe, and they mature well,” he smiled, his yellow dentures glistening with spittle.
God’s self-proclaimed gift to wine and ladies was basking in his five minutes. Sadly, he was practically sitting on the pile of papers I wanted. I tried the good natured potbelly on his left.
“Sir? Have you finished with the papers?”
“Avram, give her the papers.”
“By all means, by all means,” Avram stood and allowed me access to the pile on his chair.
I almost fell over three chairs in the two meters separating me from my table, while flipping through the paper to find the interview with Sarah. I was too hungry to see her face.
It was unsettling to stare too long. The living drama of her face, etched so vividly in my mind for so long, was now a faded two-dimensional print, plastered over hundreds of thousands of newspapers, some of which would inevitably be tossed aside, used as absorbent beds for cat litter, or worse. She was looking directly at the camera, one side of those incredible lips slightly drawn up as if contentedly amused, but I instantly recognized the expression as ironic and pained, as if saying: “this is the price I must pay for fame.” I knew for a fact how camera-shy she was, and how much of an effort it had probably been to stare straight into the lens. Her eyes were not the flash of color I remembered. Damned Photoshop. Her nose still sported the same silly ring, her unoriginal attempt at non-conformity. There was something foreign about her hair, though. Perhaps it missed my fingers running through it. I wondered if the back of her neck had ever felt warm since. It was perfect, and seemed as if she was looking directly at me.
The title of the article was horrendous: “Teacher’s Petting”. I smirked. She would hate it. She had teased me endlessly for selling myself short when I used to voice my fantasies about appearing on the cover of the paper’s weekend supplement. And now she was doing it herself. What the hell was she doing writing fiction anyway? That was mine. I had dibs on the failed writer department. And now, she’d beat me to the punch, apparently using me to do it! Then a horrifying thought crossed my mind. Was this book even about me?
I can’t tell you what it said, word for word. Most of it was her background, which I already knew firsthand. I skimmed through it. The facts seemed to align with our story: like my friend had said, the book was about a university lecturer having an affair with a student. It was set at Tel Aviv University in recent years, and from what I could tell, ended tragically. But when asked the inevitable, Sarah replied: “every work of fiction has a trace of the autobiographic. But this is still a work of fiction.” And later: “No. I’ve never had an affair with a student.”
Well, at least that part was right. I had indeed no longer been a student when our… our thing began.
The book was coming out next week. Sunday. The article read: “Sarah Schiff, here in Tel Aviv on a sabbatical, is already working on her next book, tentatively titled: ‘The Ethics of Abuse”. Here in Tel Aviv. On a sabbatical.
I had been sitting at this café on Friday mornings for months. It was my neighborhood café, the waitresses knew me, they knew my laptop with the yellow Tweetie Skinit label, and would always help me get a table next to a power outlet. I knew the menu by heart. This was my home court, the most familiar of places. Now it had all gone to shit, and the bustling café seemed full of malignant strangers, all of whom would read the paper and stare accusingly at me. I wanted to die.
Suddenly remembering, my head jerked up. I noticed that slick-hair had gone, leaving his papers. I grabbed the financial section, thumbing through to the classifieds, the want ads, the used cars, the death announcements. There it was.
Our beloved
Yael Nussbaum
Has passed away
Funeral today at noon, Kiryat Shaul Cemetery
Shiva at home of the deceased, 38 Bloch St. Tel Aviv
Wow. I had always dreamed of seeing my name in print.
I looked at my watch. Eleven twenty. If I hurried, I could make it to this funeral on time.
When I reached the cemetery, I realized that I had no way of knowing which procession was “mine”. There were three large groups of people, none of whom I recognized. One of the groups looked ready to move, and I followed the two gravediggers as they wheeled a body wrapped in a white shroud on a stretcher out of the funeral hall. The mass walked slowly forward, until it stopped and spilled out into a crude circle around a freshly dug pile of earth near a hole. The hole was square and neat, but looked hardly deep enough to be a proper grave. People pulled out their cell phones to make sure they were silenced. Distracted, I pulled out my own, but was not quick enough to block the cheerful yodel announcing an incoming text message. This drew several looks and I quickly stepped aside. “1 new message” it said. The text message was from a number I didn’t recognize and read: “Heads up, on the right. By the giant chess piece.” My head shot up, and my eyes scanned the area. The rabbi had started his drone of prayer, and I tried to listen in to the names, to catch a clue. Then I saw it. The tip of a horse’s mane set in stone. Craning my neck, I could make out the entire horse’s head. Some chess champ must be buried there. Standing on tiptoe, I could see someone standing in a shadow by the large horse. A sound rose from my chest into my throat and remained there, like the stone of a cherry mistakenly swallowed: it was Sarah.
My entire range of opportunities flashed before my eyes: I could run. Towards her or from her. Soft Cell looped crazily through my head: Once I ran to you, now I run from you… I could hug her or kick her. I could pretend not to know her. I could feign amnesia. I could lie. Worse, I could tell the truth. I had imagined our next encounter so many times it had grown as ragged at the edges as a favorite terrycloth robe. I could not move. She took one hesitant step in my direction, and her face was no longer in the shadows. Her hair was indeed styled differently, but other than that it was all the same: those grey serious slacks, their crease so severely cut, were the straightest thing about her. Her black top, set off by her pale white face, punctuated by that mouth. I stood petrified.
She took a step towards me, and a year of determination succumbed to five of desire.
I was furious. Now I had to talk to her. Now I had to walk over there. Had to seem strong. Thank god for the two coffees, I thought miserably, as fatigue washed over me, deadening my legs. I pulled away from the group of mourners around the grave, my legs heavy. It felt like walking in water. I was walking towards her.
She leant irreverently against a grave. She looked slimmer, but I couldn’t trust my eyes until I touched her and saw for myself. I lifted my chin slightly.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
I’m not going to take off my sunglasses. If she sees my eyes, I’m finished.
“I see you’re not dead, then,” she says.
“That depends on how you define dead.” Great start.
“Well, I’m glad you’re not dead,” she says, smiling.
“Why?”
“It would have been too weird. When I saw the announcement I felt a terrible sense of the uncanny. Killing you off and then seeing you were really dead. It would have been too symmetrical.”
“What?” My vocabulary, it seems, is limited to “wh” questions.
“My book. It came out this week. In the ending, you died. How awful it would be to discover you were really dead.”
“Oh, that.”
“So you’ve heard about it.”
“I saw something in the paper. Congratulations.”
“You don’t mind, do you? Me using our story as an example?”
“An example?” Our story? Our STORY?
“Bad choice of words. Not example. But me writing about what happened?”
“Well, that depends on what you wrote, I guess.”
“I'm sorry I had to kill you.”
“How did I die?”
“You’ll have to read the book.”
She's flirting with me, and my throat tightens. I want to rush over to her and throw her on a grave, to lie on top of her and inhale her. I bet she smells terrific. I dare not draw close enough to confirm.
“I always thought I’d be the fiction writer,” I venture.
“I think it’s safe to say that this is my only foray into fiction. I prefer essays. I’m more comfortable with them.”
“So why did you write this?”
“With art, you can’t be comfortable all of the time.”
I want to strangle her. What the hell does she know about art? She is the critic. I know about art. I know about suffering. I have seventeen aborted beginnings on my laptop at home, all of them first parts of the novel I would write about us. I am the victim here. She bailed. Went AWOL when it mattered most, and now she’s returned to give her account of something, that in her mind, never even happened.
“So was it easy to kill me?”
She shrugs. “It was a fictional device. I needed closure in my plot.”
I snort. “I bet it would have been easier if I had really died.”
She looks at me curiously. “Why?”
“Well, nothing would have been your fault, and you could have been the remorseful lover-”
“Lover?”
I think of red- hot embers on a grill, a hissing sound, the scorching of flesh. Then I look at her.
“Yael, what happened between us was a meeting of the minds on the most cosmic of levels. We were never lovers... we were souls converging on a plane, in an unfortunate point in time – that plane being English Literature. It could have happened anywhere, at a supermarket, if we shopped the same brands, at a rock concert, if your taste in music was decent” – here she actually had the nerve to wink at me – “you get my point. Thinking about something doesn’t make it happen. I was your teacher. I couldn’t have acted upon anything, even if I had wanted to. I was flattered by your letters - your… attempts. No one had ever paid me such attention before. But I’ve told you – we were never…” her voice falters. “We could never be…”
“And yet here you are. At the supposed funeral of the main character of your first book of fiction.”
“Of course I am! Don’t you think I care? You were thought inspiring. I was uplifted. You made this all possible. Your – your attentions got me thinking. About Platonic love,
about Eros and Agape and the difference between them. The modes of loving. The distance between thought and emotion-"
“I can’t believe you’re going into all that academic horseshit. Or maybe I can. You always escaped into the big words when you couldn’t deal with life. You would disappear for days and then excuse yourself by telling me we’d had conversations in your mind. You would pretend to listen to what I said and then ignore most of it. I was forgiving and patient, and you took advantage of that, never honest enough to admit you just got a kick out of my devotion. Well, you just stick to your academia. Read your Henry James. Read your Simone Weil and your Levinas, your Buber and Lacan. Read and read and read your books, because you suck at reading people. You are forever on the brink, testing those waters, running back and forth with your thermometers and instruments, theorizing and speculating and experimenting, but your feet remain dry, don’t they? Just like you ran from me, when it all got too real.” I pause for breath, and then mutter, “Did you write about that in your book?”
“I only told it like it is.”
“That wasn’t at all the way it was, and you know it.”
She looked at me then, managing to hold my gaze. Her mouth was wounding me, those incredible lips falling on my bare back like a whip, leaving their welts. Her harsh words were quickly piling up between us, a fortress I would once again have to plunder in my attempt at conquest. The sickness had returned: I knew I would be replaying those words time and again in my mind, trying to forget. But her eyes were full of other words: words of regret and sadness. When they finally came out, they were barely more than a whisper.
“Then write it differently.”
The phone calls came in on one Friday morning in June, as I was indulging in my weekly ritual of coffee and pastry and reading the weekend papers. There were only two; both from friends who had seen the papers and automatically picked up their phones. My Nokia was buried under two inches of print, so between the rumbling of buses on Yehuda Maccabi St. and the patrons of the cafe, I nearly missed the announcement of my own death.
“Hello?”
“You’re alive!”
“Why wouldn’t I be?”
“There’s an announcement of your death in the weekend papers.”
“Really? What did I die of?”
“They don’t say. Page 24 in the back. In the classified section. Your funeral is today at noon.”
“Very funny. Some poor woman with the same name has died. A sad coincidence. What's even sadder is that you’re reading death announcements.”
“Shortage of reading material on the toilet, you know.”
“You’re sick.”
“Better sick than dead."
“Ha ha. Talk to you later. Wash your hands.”
“Bye.”
The announcements appear daily in the Israeli papers, somewhere between the classified and business sections, as if death was a used car to be negotiated and bartered off. I wondered what my namesake had died of.
I rifled through the stack of papers. The classifieds weren’t there. I glanced around at the other Friday morning readers. A fifty-ish man with shiny hair slicked back and a ridiculous Bluetooth headphone flashing in his ear was reading the classifieds.
My phone rang again.
“Hey.”
“You’re up.”
“I’m having my Friday morning coffee and papers.”
“So you’ve seen it.”
“My death? Yes.”
“Oh come on, don’t exaggerate. It’s not that bad.”
“I’m not. I was joking. It’s just someone with the same name as me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The death announcement? Someone with my name has died.”
“Oh.”
“Why? What were you talking about?”
“It’s Sarah.”
“Sarah? My Sarah?”
Silence. Uncomfortable cough.
“You know what I mean. Fine. Not my Sarah. What about her?”
“She’s written a book. There’s a double spread interview with her. Maariv Culture section.”
“Fuck. Me.”
“That’s not all. It gets worse.”
“How much worse?”
“The book she’s written? It’s about an illicit relationship between a lecturer and an unnamed student at Tel Aviv University.”
“Holy shit.”
“Are you OK?”
“Holy shit.”
“Yael? You OK?”
“I need to read that interview.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to-“
“Don’t be silly. I’d have seen it eventually. Is the book in stores already?”
“No. Next week.”
“I have to read that interview.”
“Well, at least the picture sucks. She looks like a total cow.””There’s a PICTURE?”
“Get the paper. Call me later.”
There was a puddle of bitter espresso at the bottom of my cup. I downed it, trying to make it wash over my entire mouth, but not enough was left. My tongue felt like it had been wrapped in a towel. The arts section I was holding was from the wrong newspaper. Sarah had written a book. About us. My Sarah. Well, never technically, but still My Sarah, with a capital My. We, who had read Vita and Virginia and fantasized of how our own correspondence would one day be published. She, the world-renowned lecturer, would jet-set all over the world, giving talks about her latest book of essays on ethics (ha!), and I, the bestselling (but highbrow) fiction novelist would join her whenever our book tours crossed paths. She, who had, in a lazy game of thought-badminton, lobbed over the thought that our sexual attraction was derived from intellectual competitiveness, and I had swatted it away, secretly flattered, saying how could I compare with your brilliance. I had sat through her lectures, trying not to burn her down with my gaze. I'd graduated from University; she'd graduated from me. A book. She’d written a goddamn BOOK.
I stared down at the table. Some little pink sweetener packets had been shaken loose from their container and I absently pushed them back in. I’d managed to go without thinking about her for a very long time. She'd gone back to Oxford, and it had been over a year since we’d exchanged even the most perfunctory of emails after a scathing online dispute about the Second Lebanon War. It had been longer than that since any sign of affection peppered our correspondence, and yet longer - over two years - since that summer. But the signs and symptoms were still there, rising fresh and welted like a new tattoo. The malady had returned; I could already feel the signs of my five-year flu. My eyes started watering and my head throbbed. The people in the café continued their idle chit chat, and I resented them for their oblivion to the fact that I was dying right next to them. Sarah had written a fucking book.
A group of old men was sitting next to a pile of papers. They probably had the culture section. I approached the ringleader.
“Excuse me.”
“…I used to buy a case of wine from him every week, but the bastard stopped selling my brand. Thought he could make more off the Australian.”
“EXCUSE ME.”
“Avram, the pretty young lady is talking to you, forget about your wines.”
“Ahh… but ladies are like wine. You let them wait, and breathe, and they mature well,” he smiled, his yellow dentures glistening with spittle.
God’s self-proclaimed gift to wine and ladies was basking in his five minutes. Sadly, he was practically sitting on the pile of papers I wanted. I tried the good natured potbelly on his left.
“Sir? Have you finished with the papers?”
“Avram, give her the papers.”
“By all means, by all means,” Avram stood and allowed me access to the pile on his chair.
I almost fell over three chairs in the two meters separating me from my table, while flipping through the paper to find the interview with Sarah. I was too hungry to see her face.
It was unsettling to stare too long. The living drama of her face, etched so vividly in my mind for so long, was now a faded two-dimensional print, plastered over hundreds of thousands of newspapers, some of which would inevitably be tossed aside, used as absorbent beds for cat litter, or worse. She was looking directly at the camera, one side of those incredible lips slightly drawn up as if contentedly amused, but I instantly recognized the expression as ironic and pained, as if saying: “this is the price I must pay for fame.” I knew for a fact how camera-shy she was, and how much of an effort it had probably been to stare straight into the lens. Her eyes were not the flash of color I remembered. Damned Photoshop. Her nose still sported the same silly ring, her unoriginal attempt at non-conformity. There was something foreign about her hair, though. Perhaps it missed my fingers running through it. I wondered if the back of her neck had ever felt warm since. It was perfect, and seemed as if she was looking directly at me.
The title of the article was horrendous: “Teacher’s Petting”. I smirked. She would hate it. She had teased me endlessly for selling myself short when I used to voice my fantasies about appearing on the cover of the paper’s weekend supplement. And now she was doing it herself. What the hell was she doing writing fiction anyway? That was mine. I had dibs on the failed writer department. And now, she’d beat me to the punch, apparently using me to do it! Then a horrifying thought crossed my mind. Was this book even about me?
I can’t tell you what it said, word for word. Most of it was her background, which I already knew firsthand. I skimmed through it. The facts seemed to align with our story: like my friend had said, the book was about a university lecturer having an affair with a student. It was set at Tel Aviv University in recent years, and from what I could tell, ended tragically. But when asked the inevitable, Sarah replied: “every work of fiction has a trace of the autobiographic. But this is still a work of fiction.” And later: “No. I’ve never had an affair with a student.”
Well, at least that part was right. I had indeed no longer been a student when our… our thing began.
The book was coming out next week. Sunday. The article read: “Sarah Schiff, here in Tel Aviv on a sabbatical, is already working on her next book, tentatively titled: ‘The Ethics of Abuse”. Here in Tel Aviv. On a sabbatical.
I had been sitting at this café on Friday mornings for months. It was my neighborhood café, the waitresses knew me, they knew my laptop with the yellow Tweetie Skinit label, and would always help me get a table next to a power outlet. I knew the menu by heart. This was my home court, the most familiar of places. Now it had all gone to shit, and the bustling café seemed full of malignant strangers, all of whom would read the paper and stare accusingly at me. I wanted to die.
Suddenly remembering, my head jerked up. I noticed that slick-hair had gone, leaving his papers. I grabbed the financial section, thumbing through to the classifieds, the want ads, the used cars, the death announcements. There it was.
Our beloved
Yael Nussbaum
Has passed away
Funeral today at noon, Kiryat Shaul Cemetery
Shiva at home of the deceased, 38 Bloch St. Tel Aviv
Wow. I had always dreamed of seeing my name in print.
I looked at my watch. Eleven twenty. If I hurried, I could make it to this funeral on time.
When I reached the cemetery, I realized that I had no way of knowing which procession was “mine”. There were three large groups of people, none of whom I recognized. One of the groups looked ready to move, and I followed the two gravediggers as they wheeled a body wrapped in a white shroud on a stretcher out of the funeral hall. The mass walked slowly forward, until it stopped and spilled out into a crude circle around a freshly dug pile of earth near a hole. The hole was square and neat, but looked hardly deep enough to be a proper grave. People pulled out their cell phones to make sure they were silenced. Distracted, I pulled out my own, but was not quick enough to block the cheerful yodel announcing an incoming text message. This drew several looks and I quickly stepped aside. “1 new message” it said. The text message was from a number I didn’t recognize and read: “Heads up, on the right. By the giant chess piece.” My head shot up, and my eyes scanned the area. The rabbi had started his drone of prayer, and I tried to listen in to the names, to catch a clue. Then I saw it. The tip of a horse’s mane set in stone. Craning my neck, I could make out the entire horse’s head. Some chess champ must be buried there. Standing on tiptoe, I could see someone standing in a shadow by the large horse. A sound rose from my chest into my throat and remained there, like the stone of a cherry mistakenly swallowed: it was Sarah.
My entire range of opportunities flashed before my eyes: I could run. Towards her or from her. Soft Cell looped crazily through my head: Once I ran to you, now I run from you… I could hug her or kick her. I could pretend not to know her. I could feign amnesia. I could lie. Worse, I could tell the truth. I had imagined our next encounter so many times it had grown as ragged at the edges as a favorite terrycloth robe. I could not move. She took one hesitant step in my direction, and her face was no longer in the shadows. Her hair was indeed styled differently, but other than that it was all the same: those grey serious slacks, their crease so severely cut, were the straightest thing about her. Her black top, set off by her pale white face, punctuated by that mouth. I stood petrified.
She took a step towards me, and a year of determination succumbed to five of desire.
I was furious. Now I had to talk to her. Now I had to walk over there. Had to seem strong. Thank god for the two coffees, I thought miserably, as fatigue washed over me, deadening my legs. I pulled away from the group of mourners around the grave, my legs heavy. It felt like walking in water. I was walking towards her.
She leant irreverently against a grave. She looked slimmer, but I couldn’t trust my eyes until I touched her and saw for myself. I lifted my chin slightly.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
I’m not going to take off my sunglasses. If she sees my eyes, I’m finished.
“I see you’re not dead, then,” she says.
“That depends on how you define dead.” Great start.
“Well, I’m glad you’re not dead,” she says, smiling.
“Why?”
“It would have been too weird. When I saw the announcement I felt a terrible sense of the uncanny. Killing you off and then seeing you were really dead. It would have been too symmetrical.”
“What?” My vocabulary, it seems, is limited to “wh” questions.
“My book. It came out this week. In the ending, you died. How awful it would be to discover you were really dead.”
“Oh, that.”
“So you’ve heard about it.”
“I saw something in the paper. Congratulations.”
“You don’t mind, do you? Me using our story as an example?”
“An example?” Our story? Our STORY?
“Bad choice of words. Not example. But me writing about what happened?”
“Well, that depends on what you wrote, I guess.”
“I'm sorry I had to kill you.”
“How did I die?”
“You’ll have to read the book.”
She's flirting with me, and my throat tightens. I want to rush over to her and throw her on a grave, to lie on top of her and inhale her. I bet she smells terrific. I dare not draw close enough to confirm.
“I always thought I’d be the fiction writer,” I venture.
“I think it’s safe to say that this is my only foray into fiction. I prefer essays. I’m more comfortable with them.”
“So why did you write this?”
“With art, you can’t be comfortable all of the time.”
I want to strangle her. What the hell does she know about art? She is the critic. I know about art. I know about suffering. I have seventeen aborted beginnings on my laptop at home, all of them first parts of the novel I would write about us. I am the victim here. She bailed. Went AWOL when it mattered most, and now she’s returned to give her account of something, that in her mind, never even happened.
“So was it easy to kill me?”
She shrugs. “It was a fictional device. I needed closure in my plot.”
I snort. “I bet it would have been easier if I had really died.”
She looks at me curiously. “Why?”
“Well, nothing would have been your fault, and you could have been the remorseful lover-”
“Lover?”
I think of red- hot embers on a grill, a hissing sound, the scorching of flesh. Then I look at her.
“Yael, what happened between us was a meeting of the minds on the most cosmic of levels. We were never lovers... we were souls converging on a plane, in an unfortunate point in time – that plane being English Literature. It could have happened anywhere, at a supermarket, if we shopped the same brands, at a rock concert, if your taste in music was decent” – here she actually had the nerve to wink at me – “you get my point. Thinking about something doesn’t make it happen. I was your teacher. I couldn’t have acted upon anything, even if I had wanted to. I was flattered by your letters - your… attempts. No one had ever paid me such attention before. But I’ve told you – we were never…” her voice falters. “We could never be…”
“And yet here you are. At the supposed funeral of the main character of your first book of fiction.”
“Of course I am! Don’t you think I care? You were thought inspiring. I was uplifted. You made this all possible. Your – your attentions got me thinking. About Platonic love,
about Eros and Agape and the difference between them. The modes of loving. The distance between thought and emotion-"
“I can’t believe you’re going into all that academic horseshit. Or maybe I can. You always escaped into the big words when you couldn’t deal with life. You would disappear for days and then excuse yourself by telling me we’d had conversations in your mind. You would pretend to listen to what I said and then ignore most of it. I was forgiving and patient, and you took advantage of that, never honest enough to admit you just got a kick out of my devotion. Well, you just stick to your academia. Read your Henry James. Read your Simone Weil and your Levinas, your Buber and Lacan. Read and read and read your books, because you suck at reading people. You are forever on the brink, testing those waters, running back and forth with your thermometers and instruments, theorizing and speculating and experimenting, but your feet remain dry, don’t they? Just like you ran from me, when it all got too real.” I pause for breath, and then mutter, “Did you write about that in your book?”
“I only told it like it is.”
“That wasn’t at all the way it was, and you know it.”
She looked at me then, managing to hold my gaze. Her mouth was wounding me, those incredible lips falling on my bare back like a whip, leaving their welts. Her harsh words were quickly piling up between us, a fortress I would once again have to plunder in my attempt at conquest. The sickness had returned: I knew I would be replaying those words time and again in my mind, trying to forget. But her eyes were full of other words: words of regret and sadness. When they finally came out, they were barely more than a whisper.
“Then write it differently.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)