The Seven Good Years (10 page)

H
ere's an interesting fact about my screwed-up personality that I've learned over the years: When it comes to taking on a commitment, there's an inverse correlation between the proximity of the request in terms of time and my willingness to commit to it. So, for example, I might politely refuse my wife's modest request to make her a cup of tea today, but I will generously agree to go grocery shopping tomorrow. I have no problem saying that I will volunteer, in a month's time, to help some distant relative move to a new apartment; and if we're talking about six months from now, I'd even offer to wrestle a polar bear naked. The only significant problem with this character trait is that time keeps moving forward and in the end, when you find yourself shaking with cold on some frozen Arctic tundra facing a white-furred bear with bared teeth, you can't help asking yourself if it might not have been better to just say no half a year earlier.

On my last trip to Zagreb, Croatia, to participate in a writers' festival, I didn't find myself wrestling with any polar bears, but I got close enough. On the way to the hotel, while I was going over the schedule of events with Roman, the organizer of the festival, he nonchalantly tossed the following comment my way: “And I hope you didn't forget that you agreed to take part in a cultural project of ours and spend tonight in a local museum.” In fact, I'd completely forgotten, or more precisely, I'd totally repressed the recollection. But later, at the hotel, I saw that I'd received an e-mail seven months earlier asking if, during the festival, I'd be willing to spend a night in the Zagreb Museum of Contemporary Art and then write about the experience. My reply consisted of two words: Why not?

But now, sitting in my pleasant, comfortable hotel room, picturing myself in a locked, dark museum, sprawled on a rusty, bumpy metal sculpture called something like
Yugoslavia, a Country Divided
, and covered by a tattered curtain I'd pulled off the entrance to the coatroom, the opposite question came to mind: Why yes?

•   •   •

After the literary event, I'm sitting with the other participants around a wooden table in a local bar. It's almost midnight when Carla, Roman's assistant, says that it's time to say good night to everyone. I need to go to the museum. The writers, some slightly drunk, get up and bid me a rather dramatic farewell. The brawny Basque poet hugs me tightly and says, “Hope to see you tomorrow”; a German translator wipes away a tear after shaking my hand, or maybe she was readjusting a contact lens.

The night guard at the museum doesn't know a word of English, let alone Hebrew. He leads me through a series of dark halls to a side elevator that takes us up one floor to a beautiful, spacious room with a neatly made bed in the middle. He makes a gesture that I take to mean I should feel free to wander around the museum. I thank him with a nod.

As soon as the guard leaves, I get into bed and try to go to sleep. I still haven't recovered from the early-morning flight, and the beers after the event haven't done much to keep me alert. My eyes begin to close, but another part of my brain refuses to submit. How many times in my life will I have the opportunity to wander around an empty museum? It would be a waste not to take a short stroll. I get up, put on my shoes, and take the elevator downstairs. The museum isn't huge, but in the near darkness, it's hard to find my way around. I walk past paintings and sculptures and try to remember them so that I can use them as landmarks to find my way to the elevator that will take me back to my comfortable bed. In a few minutes, the fear and tiredness fade a little, and I'm able to see the exhibited work not only as landmarks but also as pieces of art. I find myself walking circles through the halls. I always return to the same place. I sit down on the floor in front of a huge photograph of a gorgeous girl whose eyes seem to bore right into me. The text scrawled across the photo quotes graffiti sprayed on by an unknown Dutch soldier who was part of the UN Protection Force sent to Bosnia in 1994:

No Teeth . . . ?
A Mustache . . . ? Smel Like Shit . . . ?
Bosnian Girl!

The powerful work reminds me of something I heard that afternoon in Zagreb in a side-street café. A waiter there told me that during the war, people who came in had a hard time choosing the right word when they wanted to order coffee. The word
coffee
, he explained, is different in Croatian, Bosnian, and Serbian, and every innocent word choice was fraught with threatening political connotations. “To avoid trouble,” he'd said, “people started ordering espresso, which is a neutral Italian word, and overnight, we stopped serving coffee here and served only espresso.”

As I sit in front of the painting and think about words, about xenophobia and hatred in the place I come from and the place I'm in now, I notice the sun is beginning to rise. The night is over, and I never got to enjoy the luxury of the soft bed the guard had made up for me.

I get up from where I've been sitting in a corner of the room and say good-bye to the beautiful girl in the picture. In daylight, she's even more beautiful. It's already eight a.m.; I start walking toward the exit as the first visitors, city guides in hand, make their way in.

M
y son, Lev, complains that he has never seen me cry. He's seen his mother cry several times, especially when she reads him a story with a sad ending. He once saw his grandmother cry, on his third birthday, when he told her that his wish was that grandfather would get well. He even saw his kindergarten teacher cry when she received a phone call telling her that her grandfather had died. I was the only one he's never seen cry. And that whole business makes me uncomfortable.

There are many things parents are supposed to know how to do which I'm not very good at. Lev's kindergarten is full of fathers quick to pull their toolboxes out of their car trunks every time something breaks, and fix swings and water pipes without even working up a sweat. My son's father is the only one who never pulls a toolbox out of his car trunk, because he doesn't own a toolbox or a car. And even if he did, he wouldn't know how to fix anything. You'd expect a father like that—non-technical, an artist—to at least know how to cry.

“I'm not mad at you for not crying,” Lev says, putting his little hand on my arm, as if he feels my discomfort, “I'm just trying to understand why. Why Mom cries and you don't.”

I tell Lev that when I was his age, everything made me cry: movies, stories, even life. Every street beggar, run-over cat, and worn-out slipper made me burst into tears. The people around me thought that was a problem, and for my birthday they brought me a children's book meant to teach kids how not to cry. The book's protagonist cried a lot, till he met an imaginary friend who suggested that every time he felt the tears welling up, he should use them as fuel for something else: singing a song, kicking a ball, doing a little dance. I read that book maybe fifty times, and I practiced doing what it said over and over, till I was finally so good at not crying that it happened by itself. And now I'm so used to it, I don't know how to stop.

“So, when you were a kid,” Lev asks, “every time you wanted to cry, you sang instead?”

“No,” I admit reluctantly, “I don't know how to sing. So most of the time when I felt the tears coming, I hit someone instead.”

“That's weird,” Lev says in a contemplative voice, “I usually hit someone when I'm happy.”

This feels like the right moment to go to the fridge and get us both some cheese sticks. We sit in the living room, nibbling quietly. Father and son. Two males. If you were to knock on the door and ask nicely, we'd offer you a cheese stick, but if you did something else instead, something that made us sad or happy, there's a good chance that you'd get roughed up a little.

T
hirty years I'm a cabbie,” the small guy sitting behind the wheel tells me, “thirty years and not one accident.” It's been almost an hour since I got into his taxi in Beersheba and he hasn't stopped talking for a second. Under different circumstances I would tell him to shut up, but I don't have the energy for that today. Under different circumstances I wouldn't shell out 350 shekels to take a taxi to Tel Aviv. I would take the train. But today I feel that I have to get home as early as I can. Like a melting Popsicle that has to get back to the freezer, like a cell phone that urgently needs to be charged.

I spent last night at Ichilov Hospital with my wife. She had a miscarriage and was bleeding heavily. We thought it would be okay, till she passed out. It wasn't until we got to the emergency room that they told us that her life was in danger and gave her a blood transfusion, which was a perfect ending to a week in which my dad's doctors told me and my parents that the cancer at the base of his tongue was back.

The taxi driver repeats for the hundredth time that in thirty years he hasn't had a single accident and that, all of a sudden, five days ago, his car “kissed” the bumper of the car in front of him traveling at thirty miles per hour. When they stopped and checked, he saw that, except for a scratch on the left side of the bumper, the other car hadn't really been damaged at all. He offered the other driver two hundred shekels on the spot, but the driver insisted that they exchange insurance information. The next day, the driver, a Russian, asked him to come to a garage, and he and the owner—probably a friend of his—showed him a huge dent all the way on the other side of the car and said the damage was two thousand shekels. The cabdriver refused to pay, and now the other guy's insurance company was suing him.

“Don't worry, it'll be okay,” I tell him, in the hope that my words will make him stop talking for a minute.

“How will it be okay?” he complains. “They're going to screw me. Those bastards are going to squeeze the money out of me. You see how unfair it is? Five days I haven't slept. Do you get what I'm saying?”

“Stop thinking about it,” I suggest. “Try thinking about other things in your life. Happy things.”

“I can't”—the cabdriver groans and grimaces—“I just can't.”

“Then stop talking to me about it,” I say. “Keep on thinking and suffering but just don't tell me about it anymore, OK?”

“It's not the money,” the taxi driver continues, “believe me. It's the injustice that gets me.”

“Shut up,” I say, finally losing it, “just shut up for a minute.”

“What are you yelling for?” the cabdriver asks, insulted. “I'm an old man. It's not nice.”

“I'm yelling because my father is going to die if they don't cut his tongue out of his mouth,” I continue to yell, “I'm yelling because my wife is in the hospital after a miscarriage.” The driver is silent for the first time since I got into his taxi, and now I'm suddenly the one who can't stop the stream of words.

“Let's make a deal,” I say. “Get me to an ATM and I'll take out two thousand shekels and give it to you. In exchange, it'll be your father who has to have his tongue removed and your wife who's lying in a hospital bed getting a blood transfusion after a miscarriage.” The driver is still silent. And now, so am I. I feel a little uncomfortable for having shouted at him but not uncomfortable enough to apologize. To avoid his eyes, I look out the window. The road sign we pass says “Rosh Ha'ayin,” and I realize that we missed the exit to Tel Aviv. I tell him that politely, or I shout it angrily, I don't recall anymore. He tells me not to worry. He doesn't really know the way, but in a minute, he'll find out.

A few seconds later he parks in the right lane of the highway, hoping to persuade another driver to stop. He starts to get out of the taxi to ask for directions to Tel Aviv. “You'll kill us both,” I tell him. “You can't stop here.”

“Thirty years I'm a cabbie,” he tosses back at me as he gets out of the taxi, “thirty years and not one accident.” Alone in the cab, I can feel the tears rising. I don't want to cry. I don't want to feel sorry for myself. I want to be positive, like my dad. My wife is fine now and we already have a wonderful son. My dad survived the Holocaust and has reached the age of eighty-three. That's not just a half-full glass; it's an overflowing one. I don't want to cry. Not in this taxi. The tears are welling up and will soon begin to flow. Suddenly I hear a crashing boom and the sound of windows breaking. The world around me shatters. A silver car veers across the next lane, completely smashed. The taxi moves, too. But not on the ground. It floats above it toward the concrete wall on the side of the road. After it hits, there's another bang. Another car must have hit the taxi.

In the ambulance, the paramedic wearing a yarmulke tells me I was very lucky. An accident like that with no deaths is a miracle. “The minute you're discharged from the hospital,” he says, “you should run to the nearest synagogue and give thanks for still being alive.” My cell phone rings. It's my dad. He's only calling to ask how my day at the university was and whether the little one is asleep yet. I tell him that the little one is sleeping and my day at the university was great. And that Shira, my wife, is fine too. She just stepped into the shower. “What's that noise?” he asks.

“An ambulance siren,” I tell him. “One just passed by in the street.”

Once, five years ago, when I was in Sicily with my wife and baby son, I called my dad to ask how he was. He said everything was fine. In the background, a voice on a loudspeaker was calling Dr. Shalman to the operating room. “Where are you?” I asked.

“In the supermarket,” my dad said without a moment's hesitation. “They're announcing on the loudspeaker that someone lost her purse.”

He sounded so convincing when he said that. So confident and happy.

“Why are you crying?” my dad asks now, from the other end of the line. “It's nothing,” I say as the ambulance stops next to the emergency ward and the paramedic slams the ambulance doors open. “Really, it's nothing.”