When I resigned from the fund in January of ’96, I had the feeling again that I needed to clean myself and my life out a little. This was how I thought of it then, in terms of cleanliness, even though I had no idea of what this cleanliness I was seeking might be. Mainly, I remember, I wanted to talk less. Before this there were days when I had seven meetings in my planner, days when I met dozens of people, and the outside world had begun to make me ill. More and more I felt sickened by so many contacts and so much talk, sick of myself and my talking, and tainted, until I sometimes felt as if a moldy lump was sitting in my throat and incorporating more and more particles of pollution with every additional sentence I uttered.
In the months before I left, Nira Woolf took up most of my leisure hours, but the plot of The Stabbing unfolded reluctantly, as if I was serving one more tour of duty in the reserves. In a fit of spite I destroyed one of her monstrous cats, and laid its carcass at the entrance to her apartment. In another fit of spite I decided to leave her at the end waiting for the results of an AIDS test, without telling her that she hadn’t been infected. If I said before that the world doesn’t need my feelings, The Stabbing is one of my proofs, because when the book came out none of the readers noticed the change.
For the second time the movie rights to Compulsory Service were acquired by the same producer, and this time too I assumed that nothing would come of it, but in the meantime a handsome sum was about to be transferred to my bank account. The manuscript of The Stabbing was handed to the editor. For almost seventeen years I had been putting money into a pension fund. I have an apartment that I can’t be thrown out of, my needs are modest, and I could afford to stop working. Hagar, who was planning to go to America and had already applied for a grant which she would no doubt get, expressed reservations: “But what will you do all day?” And I reassured her by saying that now I would have time to research and write in the mornings, which was what I had wanted for a long time — to write in the mornings. Perhaps I would register for a course at the university, I would find a new field of interest, and who knows, maybe I would come to bother her with a prolonged visit to New York, because I had never been there.
When Hagar, not reassured, finally left, I flew for the third time to Moscow, and when I returned I spent two or three months cleaning out and reorganizing the apartment. It was only in the middle of this fit of activity that I realized what I was doing, that I was returning the house to how it had been in 1972. My daughter’s room, Alek’s room, was turned into my study, and according to the logic imposed by the room itself, my new desk with the computer now stood in the place where his desk had once stood. Hagar’s things were boxed and stored in the space under the roof. The picture of the greenish woman was brought down and hung in the newly painted bedroom, and Klimt’s watery dead women were taken to Yoash to be reframed and returned to the kitchen. I brought them back on the day that bus number eighteen blew up, the day that bus number eighteen blew up for the second time, and the explosion shook the windows of the house, but I walked down Agrippas Street to Yoash to fetch the picture and continued about my business. I realized what I was doing, but its purpose escaped me, and as I packed and unpacked, moved furniture, took pictures down and hung them up, I enjoyed waiting for the understanding to come. Waiting for something that I felt would come later.
At the age of forty-two and a bit I started life as a semi-retiree. Reading in the morning paper about how we were settling accounts in Lebanon. Reading books in the morning. Going nowhere in particular without a shopping bag or a purse. I didn’t disappear from the world or shut myself up in my lair: from time to time I took freelance jobs, which I still do, and wrote applications for support from various funds on behalf of various organizations. I sat on the board of a public committee, and I do a little volunteer work for two non-profit justice-seeking organizations. Family and friends come to visit and I visit them, Talush comes to lie in my bed and get some rest from her twins. On Friday afternoons people often drop by, their children run up and down the stairs, shaking the rail and threatening to fall with it.
My financial situation is stable and my health is excellent. At least four times a week I go out to run, and with time my route has grown longer, so that it reaches the Israel Museum, passes the Knesset, and returns via the Supreme Court. It was on such a night run with my walkman that I heard the news of Rabin’s assassination — Hagar was there in the square, I had let myself off going to the demonstration — and when I got home and switched on the television, under the rush of adrenaline surging through me and the flood of phone calls to me and to her, I was still waiting to hear from him.
After the murder, when everyone jumped up to make declarations and beat their chests and point their fingers, and at the fund, too, when people asked themselves where we had gone wrong and what more we could have done, all I wanted to do was retire. Young people, my daughter among them, lit candles in the square and fell on each others’ necks in an orgy of shocked and weepy self-indulgence; at the fund people talked a lot of nonsense then about “the youth,” they seemed to believe that singing sentimental songs, waving candles, and holding “dialogues” would really bring about a new reality here, and I no longer knew what was true and what was false, everything seemed false to me — or at moments that were far worse, like a kind of banal and uninteresting truth. I would switch on the television then and without turning down the volume I would stop hearing the words. Faces on the screen were distorted as if by crooked mirrors, until for seconds at a time I was overcome by panic at not being able to recognize them. I thought that if I screamed the picture would come right and I would see human faces again, and human beings would start talking a human language that I could hear again — why were they talking to me like this? — but in the end the picture straightened out without my screaming, or I switched it off, and only the lump in my throat remained.
I retired from my job, and at the age of forty-two, for the first time in my adult life, I had all the time I wanted in which to think. But grace did not visit my thoughts. Grace did not come from my thoughts.
ONE NIGHT
One night this week I woke up when I heard him calling me from outside my dream. I had fallen asleep late, at about four in the morning, and apparently soon after falling asleep I dreamt that some woman was chasing me, I was being chased by a woman, and I was hurrying down a winding street behind the Natural History Museum. In the dream I didn’t see my pursuer, I didn’t know where she would appear from, but I knew that she was chasing me or lying in wait for me, and so I was walking quickly. I walked quickly, but the street kept growing longer and longer, as if it would never end, even though it was still the very same street behind the Natural History Museum, which I knew well and which you could walk down in a minute. In the way you know things in a dream, I knew what she wanted, too. When she caught up with me, the woman would bend down and with two movements she would cut my ankles.
At some stage of my lengthening flight from her I heard him call my name, not in the dream but from outside it, from the room, as if he wanted to tell me something or ask me something, some everyday thing, and that was why he was standing in the doorway and calling me, and when I opened my eyes to answer, I could on no account convince myself that his voice, too, was part of the dream. If his voice belonged to the dream then I was no longer able to distinguish between dream and reality. I couldn’t fall asleep again and so I got up and got dressed and went outside to walk around the streets in the direction of the open market.