The Seven Good Years (8 page)

T
he media-blitzed revolution in Libya isn't the only one going on in the region; another revolution, quiet but no less significant, is taking place. After more than forty years of being oppressed by substandard nutrition and deprived of physical activity, my body has taken to the streets. One after another, in remarkable synchronization, my muscles have begun to cramp. It started with my neck, moved down to my shoulders, and at some point even reached my feet. My wife came home one day to find me lying on my back like a dead cockroach. It took her twenty minutes to understand that something was wrong with me, and when she did, the first thing she said was, “You had it coming.” The second thing she said had to do with a bet she'd made with my cousin from Ramat Gan that I would die of a heart attack before I reached fifty. According to my wife, the only reason he agreed to risk money on my longevity was his strong feelings for me; she had common sense and modern medicine on her side. “Anyone treating a pet the way you treat your body would have been sued by PETA a long time ago,” my wife pointed out as she tried to help me sit up. “Why can't you be like me—watch what you eat, do yoga?”

The truth is, I did try yoga a few years ago. At the end of my first beginners' class, the pale, skinny teacher came over to me and in a soft but firm voice explained that I wasn't ready yet to work with the beginners and should first join a “special” group. The special group turned out to be a bunch of women in advanced stages of pregnancy. It was actually quite nice—the first time in a long while that I was the one with the smallest belly in the room. The women working out were very slow, and they would pant and sweat even when they were asked to perform simple, basic actions, just like me. I was sure that I had finally found my place in the cruel world of physical activity. But the group steadily grew smaller: as on a reality show, each week another woman was eliminated, and in trembling voices her excited friends would say that she had given birth.

About three months after I joined the class, all the members had given birth except me, and the teacher with the soft but firm voice told me before turning out the lights in the studio for the last time that she'd bought a one-way ticket to India and didn't know whether she'd come back. Meanwhile, she recommended that I take on something “a little less challenging than yoga.” Since she didn't offer any details, I infused her enigmatic remark with the familiar aroma of basil and went back to eating whole trays of pizza.

So, when the recent wave of cramped muscles weakened a little, I decided to be proactive and wrote down a list of potential physical activities, then crossed out all those I knew my body would not withstand. Running and working out in a gym were the first to go, joined by aerobics and spinning (given a choice between listening to Britney Spears and having a blocked aorta, I'd pick the latter), and kickboxing and Krav Maga (in the neighborhood of my youth, I'd been hit so many times for free that I couldn't imagine paying for the privilege). The only line that remained on the page after the series of crossings-out was fast walking. I quickly crossed out the word
fast
and added a question mark after
walking
.

Reading the page, my wife didn't seem excited about the walking-with-a-question-mark option. “There are a million other things that even someone as lazy and atrophied as you can do,” she claimed.

“Name one,” I said.

“Pilates,” she said, munching on a wheat sprout or whatever that smelly thing in her hand was. A bit of quick research on Pilates turned up a few of its more attractive aspects: Even though it was officially defined as “physical activity,” there was no danger you'd break a sweat while doing it, as most of the activity takes place while you're lying on your back. Also, the man who invented Pilates used the technique during World War I to rehabilitate wounded soldiers. Which meant that even if I didn't find a group of pregnant women to join, there was still a chance I might meet the criteria for being accepted into a class.

At my first lesson, I learned a few more facts about this wonderful sport. In Pilates, you work on mainly internal muscles, which means that anyone watching you has no way of knowing whether you're really exercising your deep pelvic muscle, contracting your striated muscles, or just dozing on the mattress. Here in Israel, the classes are particularly small and made up mainly of injured ballet dancers. Which means that the studio abounds with such high levels of refinement, injuries, and empathy that there is no better place in the galaxy to complain about a pulled muscle and get a compassionate massage. I don't know when you last had five lame ballet dancers help you relax your hamstring, but if it's too long ago, I recommend heading straight for the nearest Pilates studio and trying it.

It's been only two weeks since I started doing Pilates. I still can't open pickle jars with my striated muscles and when I raise my hand to scratch my head the pain in my shoulder remains unbearable, but I do have my own locker, sweatpants with a gold stripe down each leg just like David Beckham, and a soft new mattress that I can lie down on twice a week for a whole hour and think about whatever I want as I stare at shapely, stoic-faced ballerinas perched on giant, brightly colored rubber balls.

A
while ago, I took part in a group reading at an artists' colony in New Hampshire. Each of the three participants got to read for fifteen minutes. The other two were just starting out as writers and still hadn't published anything, so in a gesture of either generosity or condescension, I offered to read last. The first writer, a guy from Brooklyn, was pretty talented. He read something about his grandfather, who had died, strong stuff. The second writer, a woman from Los Angeles, began to read and sent my brain spinning. Sitting on my uncomfortable wooden chair in the overheated library auditorium of the artists' colony, I listened to my fears, my desires, the violence that smolders in me like an eternal flame but conceals itself so well that only it and I know it exists. In twenty minutes it was over. She left the podium for me, and as I walked limply past her, she gave me a pitying glance, the kind a proud lion in the jungle gives to a circus lion.

I don't remember exactly what I read that evening, only that throughout the reading, her story was reverberating through my mind. In that story, a father is speaking to his children, who are spending their summer vacation torturing animals. He tells them that there is a line that separates killing bugs from killing frogs, and that no matter how hard it is, that line must never be crossed.

Such is the way of the world. The writer didn't create it, but he's here to say what needs to be said. There is a line that separates killing bugs from killing frogs, and even if the writer has crossed it during his life, he still has to point it out. The writer is neither saint nor tzaddik nor prophet standing at the gate; he's just another sinner who has a somewhat sharper awareness and uses slightly more precise language to describe the inconceivable reality of our world. He doesn't invent a single feeling or thought—all of them existed long before him. He's not the least bit better than his readers—sometimes he's a lot worse—and so it should be. If the writer were an angel, the abyss that separates him from us would be so great that his writing couldn't get close enough to touch us. But because he's here, at our side, buried up to his neck in mud and filth, he's the one who, more than anyone else, can share with us everything that's going on in his mind, in the lit-up areas and especially in the dark recesses. He won't take us to the promised land, he won't bring peace to the world or heal the sick. But if he does his work right, a few more virtual frogs will get to live. The bugs, I'm sorry to say, will have to manage on their own.

From the day I began writing, I knew that truth. I knew it firmly and clearly. But at that reading, when I came face-to-face with a real lion in the MacDowell Colony in the heart of New Hampshire and felt that fear for a second, I realized that even the sharpest knowledge we all possess can become blunted. Someone who creates without support or reinforcement, who can write only after working hours, surrounded by people who aren't even sure he has talent, will always remember that truth. The world around him just won't let him forget it. The only kind of writer who can forget is a successful one, the kind who doesn't write against the stream of his life, but with it, and every insight that flows from his pen not only enhances the text and makes him happy but also delights his agents and his publisher. Damn it, I forgot it. That is, I remembered that there's a line between one thing and another; it's just that lately it has somehow turned into a line between success and failure, acceptance and rejection, appreciation and scorn.

That night, after the reading, I went back to my room and straight to bed. Through the windows I could see huge pine trees and a clear night sky, and could hear frogs croaking in the woods. That was the first time since I'd come there that the frogs felt safe enough to croak. I closed my eyes and waited for sleep, for silence. But the croaking didn't stop. At two in the morning, I got out of bed, went to the computer, and started to write.

I
wrote my first story twenty-six years ago in one of the most heavily guarded army bases in Israel. I was nineteen then, a terrible, depressed soldier who was counting the days to the end of his compulsory service. I wrote the story during an especially long shift in an isolated, windowless computer room deep in the bowels of the earth. I stood in the middle of that neon-lit freezing room and stared at the page of print. I couldn't explain to myself why I wrote it or exactly what purpose it was supposed to serve. The fact that I had typed all those made-up sentences was exciting, but also frightening. I felt as if I had to find someone to read the story right away, and even if he didn't like or understand it, he could calm me down and tell me that writing it was perfectly all right, and not just another step on my road to insanity.

The first potential reader didn't arrive until fourteen hours later. He was a pockmarked sergeant who was supposed to relieve me and take the next shift. In a voice trying to sound calm, I told him that I'd written a short story and wanted him to read it. He took off his sunglasses and said indifferently, “Fuck off.”

I went a few floors up to ground level. The recently risen sun blinded me. It was six-thirty in the morning, and I desperately needed a reader. As I usually do when I have a problem, I headed for my big brother's house.

I buzzed the intercom at the entrance to the building and my brother's sleepy voice answered. “I wrote a story,” I said. “I want you to read it. Can I come up?” There was a short silence, and then my brother said in an apologetic tone, “Not a good idea. You woke up my girlfriend, and she's pissed.” After another moment of silence, he added, “Wait there for me. I'll get dressed and come down with the dog.”

A few minutes later, he appeared with his small, washed-out-looking dog. It was happy to go out for a walk so early. My brother took the printed page from my hand and started to read as he walked. But the dog wanted to stay and do its business in a dirt patch by a tree near the building entrance. It tried to dig its little paws in the ground and resist, but my brother was too immersed in reading to notice, and a minute later, I found myself trying to catch up to him as he quickly walked down the street, dragging along the poor dog behind him.

Luckily for the dog, the story was very short, and when my brother stopped two blocks later, it could finally regain its balance and, going back to its original plan, do its business.

“This story is awesome,” my brother said. “Mind-blowing. Do you have another copy?” I said I did. He gave me a big-brother-proud-of-his-little-brother smile, then bent down and used the printed page to scoop up the dog's shit and drop it in the trash can.

That was the moment I realized that I wanted to be a writer.

Unintentionally, my brother had told me something: The story I had written wasn't the creased, shit-smeared paper now sitting in the bottom of the trash can on the street. That page was just a pipeline through which I could transmit my feelings from my mind to his. I don't know how a wizard feels the first time he manages to cast a spell, but it's probably something similar to what I felt at that moment; I had discovered magic that I needed to help me survive the two long years until my discharge.

I
t was less than a week after 9/11, and Kennedy Airport looked like the set for a grade-B action movie: jumpy security guards in uniform patrolled the terminal, clutching rifles and shouting nervously at the thousands of passengers gathering in huge lines. I was supposed to fly to Amsterdam that day to participate in a groovy, cool arts festival of the surrealistic kind that only a mellow Dutch hippie who spent the '60s tripping out could hallucinate.

After months as an artist in residence in the States, I was happy to get away. Amsterdam wasn't Israel, but it was still close enough for the love of my life to agree to fly there to be with me for a few days. And knowing that after the festival I'd be going back to America for two more tough months as a swarthy foreigner with an accent and a passport from the Middle East, I was in almost desperate need of that break.

Electronic tickets were less common back then, and the friendly organizer had written to tell me that my ticket would be waiting at the KLM counter at the airport. The unpleasant woman at the counter insisted that there was no ticket waiting for me there. That shook me up a little. I called the festival organizer in Holland, who answered in a cheerful, but sleepy voice. After telling me how good it was to hear from me, he remembered that he'd forgotten to send the ticket. “What a bummer,” he said. “My short-term memory isn't what it used to be.” He suggested that I buy a ticket at the airport and when I landed, he'd reimburse me. When I told him that the ticket would probably be expensive, he said, “Man, don't even think about it. Buy the lousy ticket even if it costs a million. You have a cool event scheduled for tomorrow and we need you here.”

The sour-faced lady demanded $2,400 for a middle seat in economy class, but I didn't even try to argue. A cool event and my beloved wife, who was my beloved girlfriend back then, were waiting for me in Amsterdam. I knew that I had to get on that plane. The flight was completely full, and the passengers looked a little nervous and tense. I knew this wasn't going to be an easy flight, but it became harder when I discovered that sitting in my seat, between a nun and a bespectacled Chinese man, was a bearded guy with tattooed arms, wearing sunglasses and looking like ZZ Top's fat, evil brother.

“Excuse me,” I said to the beard somewhat timidly, “but you're sitting in my seat.”

“It's my seat,” the beard said. “Scram.”

“But my boarding pass says that this is my seat,” I persisted. “Look.”

“I don't wanna look,” the beard said, ignoring my outstretched hand. “I told you, this is my seat. So scram.”

At this point, I decided to call the flight attendant. She managed to get a little more cooperation out of the beard, and it turned out that, because of a computer error, we'd each gotten a boarding pass with the same seat number on it. In an authoritative voice, she said that since the flight was completely full, one of us would have to get off the plane.

“I say we should toss a coin,” I told the beard. The truth is that I was desperate to stay on the plane, but that seemed like the only fair way to solve that exasperating problem. “No coins,” the beard said, “I'm sitting in the seat. You're not. Get off the plane.”

It was then that I felt one of the already overloaded circuits in my brain finally blow. “I am not getting off the plane,” I told the flight attendant, who'd just come back to tell us that we were holding up a planeload of passengers. “I am asking you to get off now,” she said in a cold voice, “or I'll be forced to call security.”

“Call security,” I said in a tearful voice, “call security to drag me off. It'll just add a few more zeroes to the amount I'll be suing your airlines for. I paid good money for a ticket. I received a boarding pass. I boarded the plane, and this is exactly where the story ends. If there aren't enough seats on the plane, you can get off yourself. I'll serve the food to the passengers.”

The flight attendant didn't call security. Instead, the white-haired, blue-eyed pilot appeared, placed a soothing hand on my shoulder and asked me politely to get off the plane. “I am not getting off,” I told him, “and if you try to take me off by force, I'll sue all of you. All of you, do you hear me? This is America, you know. People have been awarded millions for a lot less than this.” And at that moment, which was supposed to be especially threatening, I began to cry.

“Why do you have to fly to Amsterdam?” he asked. “Is someone in your family ill?” I shook my head.

“So what is it, a girl?”

I nodded. “But it's not about her,” I said. “It's just that I can't be here anymore.” The pilot was silent for a moment, then asked, “Have you ever flown in a jump seat?” I managed to control my tears enough to say no.

“I'm warning you in advance,” he said with a smile, “it's very uncomfortable. But it'll get you out of here, and you'll have a good story to tell.” And he was right.