Limassol (10 page)

I went on like that for a long time, without stopping, running off at the mouth, at times I forgot the therapist was there. He was silent and wrote. It was nice to sit in his room and get out words from the heart.

When I fell silent, he asked only one question: “Do you want to continue doing what you do?”

So the cat was out of the bag. I thought he wanted to hear me, to treat me, but all at once, he moved over to their side. Everything I said would go to them, there would be no immunity here.

“They want me to stop?” I asked.

“What do you want?” he asked. All his questions were open—not like with us, we demanded places, dates, names.

“I want them not to kill us,” I said.

“And you, do you want to live?”

I didn't hold back. I described my recurring dream—Temple Mount, the turquoise faucets, my slaughter—and he smiled for the first time, couldn't repress the smile, as if he had come upon the elephant man of psychology. “That's where the binding of Isaac was, right there,” he whispered in amazement, and leaned back satisfied as if he had just finished screwing.

Doctor Freud didn't ask a thing about my wife, the child, my parents, Rehovoth. I would have gone into all that if he had asked, I wanted to talk with somebody. He didn't ask.

I asked when to come back. He said it wasn't urgent, but he recommended resting a little more. I was sorry about what I had said, that I was furious, that I didn't behave with restraint. Who was he anyway? A stranger who works for them. You can never be sorry for silence, only for chatter.

 

I drove to Ikhilov Hospital in the midst of the evening rush hour, past the towers on the banks of the Ayalon Freeway, between the street lights, and I thought how all that electricity damaged us, and we're in a bad way if we send the people who are obliged to be harsher than others to psychiatrists.

I caught the doctor as he was leaving, on the way to his private clinic. He had enough time to tell me they had brought Hani out of the coma; all the tests were done; he had a metastasized tumor that would kill him soon, but he might have a few weeks left to live. From a medical perspective, he could soon be discharged from the hospital, if there was someplace he could rest. “Don't send him back to Gaza,” he requested. “There they won't give him medicines and he'll die in awful pain. You can go see him now,” he chuckled. “Just leave the pliers outside.”

“No,” I said. “I don't want to disturb him now. And I'd drop the jokes.”

“A spy without humor,” he blurted out. “Too bad.” Before he took off elegantly for his lucrative evening occupations, he stopped and looked back. “His girlfriend was here again. A very impressive woman. They're close. Maybe he can stay with her a few days.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Thanks for everything, doctor.” My plans were spread out for the whole world to see. Everything happened at its own pace, as if an internal motor was guiding things, without any outside interference, and instead of moving the plot along, I became its instrument.

Daphna announced on the phone that she would take Hani to her place; she arranged for a bed and medical supplies. Everything's going well, I said to myself, with no effort on my part.

“Tomorrow I'm coming to you for a lesson,” I said smugly. “The
etrog
man is progressing well.”

There was a brief silence, and then she said: “I don't think tomorrow will be convenient. Tomorrow I'll be busy with Hani.”

“Then I'll come the day after tomorrow, in the morning,” I said. I stood at the entrance to the hospital, the halt and the lame passing by me.

“I'll call you,” she said coldly. “I don't think it'll work this week.”

“We've got an agreement, Daphna,” I said quietly.

“We had an agreement about Yotam,” she said firmly. “And I don't see that you're keeping to it. He's still stuck there in Caesarea, and they still want to kill him, the thugs come to me every day. That's not what we agreed. I thought you had more power.”

“I told you I'd take care of that, but the two things have nothing to do with one another.”

“There aren't two things,” she burst out. The sidewalk on King David Boulevard was covered with red flowers falling from the trees. “There's only one thing. One whole. One deal. Go to Yotam now, then talk with me. I'm not willing to talk about any lessons before you take care of Yotam.” And she pressed the mute button, instead of slamming down the receiver with all her might.

The child was sleeping at my mother-in-law's that night, because Sigi had meetings and preparations for the trip. I meant to go to her, read the child a story and put him to bed. I told her I couldn't come, something had come up. Anyway, I felt we had already separated, and it tore me up inside.

“We shouldn't walk around outside? Somebody's going to blow himself up?” asked my good mother-in-law anxiously.

“Maybe somebody is going to blow himself up,” I said. “But I don't know much about it.” I calmed her. She was still fond of me, or perhaps she hadn't really had any expectations from the start.

 

The sea at Caesarea was very quiet this time, and the area of the A-frame was silent. Hungry mosquitoes stung me on every exposed strip of skin, on my arms, my neck, my forehead. I had no strength to climb to the window above his bed, so I shouted to him from outside to open up. After a few minutes of shouting, the door opened. I went in, there was a murky light. I didn't see anybody. I climbed the stairs to the second floor and saw that his filthy bed was empty. I turned around and saw his mouth gaping open to the depths of the maw; he was waving a big knife. I was so scared I wanted to kill him.

“I could have slaughtered you like a pig, look how scared you are.” He was shaking with laughter, his hair was scattered on his face—his arm moved up and down, cutting the air.

My gun was in my hand, aimed at him. The last time I took it out of its holster was four years ago, at a meeting with a source who looked as if he had flipped. “I'll shoot, Yotam, put that down,” I said quietly, and opened the safety catch. “Let's spare your mother one grief at least.” He lost his confidence, the ecstatic laughter stopped, the hand came down very slowly, and he landed on the bed weakly, like a man who lost a battle and signals his surrender with an obsequious gesture. I put the safety catch on and thrust the short barrel into his cheek until it hurt and then I put it back in the holster.

“I'm here only because of your mother,” I said. “The next time I'll shoot you without thinking twice. Now let's search this place. I'm going to throw out all the drugs.” He whined like a child, pleaded with me not to touch anything, but I had already started going through the drawers, looking under the mattress and behind the books. I signaled to him not to move. I removed at least three small plastic bags full of powder and pills from behind the books. Then I went to the tiny bathroom where I confiscated the boxes of Ritalin and the antipsychotic medicines—here and there I scanned the consumer pamphlet out of curiosity—and then went down to the first floor and made a few finds there, too.

“Now, come with me,” I said, and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck. He was wearing only his underwear; I told him to put something on, and went out to the sea with him, hand in hand. There were a few cars there leaving the beach at the end of a long day, the children must have been put in the back seat, dead tired, and the parents looked at us like we were a homosexual couple gone nuts, I and my druggy toy boy. Everything was out in the open.

I performed a premature version of the New Year's rite of Tashlikh, throwing out sins, at the shore. He wailed when he saw his treasure thrown into the sea. I shook out the bags carefully so nothing would remain, and then I sat down next to him on the sand. The lights on the chimneys of the electric company glowed above us with the stars.

“I'll kill you when you're not looking,” he muttered with his head between his knees. “Everybody can be surprised. Even you. From behind.”

“You won't succeed,” I said. “You're a junkie and your senses are fucked up. Your reaction times are shot. Your nervous system is gone.”

He lay back, his hair was filled with sand. Small waves broke loudly on the shore. Far from us, stood the silhouette of a solitary little tent with a small bonfire burning next to it.

“You really want to get clean?” I asked.

“No,” answered Yotam, his enormous face toward the sky. “There's nothing bad about drugs. The problem is money. People are just brainwashed. There are millionaires who snort cocaine all their life. Without stuff they wouldn't get anywhere. Reality is too hard to face without help. The problem is money, capitalism, they don't want little people to use it. Who will be their slaves if everybody's high?”

“You don't really believe that crap,” I said. “Look at you, twenty-three years old, you're barely alive.”

“They're chasing me,” he said. “They won't let me breathe.” He asked for a cigarette.

“I don't have a cigarette. I'm here only because of your mother. Fuck up your life by yourself, you're not my son.” I thought how Haim would have acted in my place, about his
kippa
and his eastern amiability and the Jerusalem-style wisdom of life and all that, how he would have taken care of him.

“With a father like you . . . ” The crooked laugh started climbing onto his face again. “Tell me, did you screw her yet, or does she pay you with money? She doesn't have any money, I don't think she can . . . Did you read her books? Did you see what great sex parts there are? When I was twelve, I found them in a closet. I love to read books. I was a wunderkind, in kindergarten I could already read, did she tell you? You know how it is for a kid to masturbate to passages his own mother wrote? Don't think I read the books from start to finish, between us, they're pretty shitty, but the parts of screwing, there I found . . . ”

I stood up to leave him. Behind us were the lights of the concrete bloc called Israel, next to us was the big power station, only in front, in the sea, were darkness and quiet.

“And your father?” I called to him from the distance.

“Ha, the genius,” he laughed. He stood up and started running wild like a marionette out of control, throwing his limbs to the sides. “Fellini, Bergman, Karl Marx, Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, all in one . . . I'm out of control, so forgive me, you threw away what I had left in life. Mother sent you to kill me. In the end, he went back to Jerusalem, the saint, sat in a wheelchair with a stroke, even his Russian woman left him. Those Hassids kept him imprisoned, he couldn't even toss God to hell anymore, poor rag. How arrogant he was, he was the only one who knew everything. He always said everyone envied him, everyone was obsessed with him. What great films he made, two and a half people saw them in the Paris Cinema and even they wanted their money back. Avital Ignats, what a splendid name. But by the time I was six months old, he wasn't there anymore. He wanted me to come to him a few years ago. Where's my son? I miss him. What did I find there? A broken vessel. He thought he was the patriarch Isaac, he put his hand on my head. I expected him to ask for forgiveness. Where were you all the time, Father? Where were you? He didn't understand what I said to him. I tried to talk about Nietzsche. I read the books he had left, I tried to impress him. But he sat and drooled. The man was totally wiped out. I ran away from there . . . ” Yotam dropped onto the sand and started shaking.

For a moment, I touched his shirt, which was wet with sweat and spray from the waves. His eyes were shut. Everything was dripping down from him, soon he would melt into the sand like a jellyfish.

“What happened with that Nukhi Azariya?” I asked. “How did you get mixed up with him?”

“Who are you anyway?” he whispered under the noise of the waves. “Why should I tell you?”

He's tied up tighter than the people in our cellars, I thought. They've at least got something in their head that sustains them: hope, children, desire for revenge. With him there's nothing, he's got handcuffs on his brain that press inside and distort everything, from the moment he was born . . .

“Let's say,” he began hesitantly, then coughed. I helped him take off the wet shirt. “Let's say there's somebody who lived in New York and dreamed of doing something there. Making powerful movies, like Scorsese,
Taxi Driver
. His mother paid for him to study in the best film school, he doesn't know where she dug up the money for that. But he doesn't have money for other things—for instance the stuff he takes and without which he can't concentrate; he never was any good at school. He lives in a hole, a single room he shares with rats. Then some Israeli comes to him in some café where he sits, talks with him . . . You don't get me, right?”

“No, anyway you can't hear anything in this wind.”

“And that Israeli . . . ” Yotam coughed. “He invites him to eat in a fancy place, brings along some girls, one who looks just like Jennifer Lopez. And this is a fellow who, if he had stayed in Israel would never have had anything to with a man like that. The two of them would have gotten to the grave without sitting down and drinking coffee with one another. But in New York it's different, and before you part, he tells you he's got an empty apartment. In Trump Tower, on the river. He gives you the key, and one of the Mexican women goes there with you in a cab at his expense. You start feeling like a human being, at long last, you've got experiences you can put into a film, and you're in America, America! tasting the good life of America. And it's an amazing apartment with a view of the whole city, and the doorman knows you're coming and greets you, everything's arranged, your head is spinning, and he makes sure to put in your pocket the sweetest stuff you ever tasted, something that just came from Pedro's field in Colombia . . . ”