The Seven Good Years (12 page)

I
t was the night I was supposed to fly from Israel to Los Angeles to kick off my book-promotion tour, and I didn't want to go.

My father had died only four weeks earlier, and this trip meant that I would miss the unveiling of his headstone. But my mother insisted. “Your father would want you to do it.” And that was a very persuasive argument. My dad really would have wanted me to take that trip. When he first took sick, I had canceled all my travel plans, and even though he realized how important it was to both of us to be together during those difficult days, the cancellations still bothered him.

Now I was thinking about him and the book tour while I was giving Lev his bath. On the one hand, I thought, the last thing I wanted now was to get on a plane. On the other, maybe it would be good for me to be busy, to think about other things for a while. Lev sensed that my mind was somewhere else, and when I took him out of the tub and started toweling him off, he saw it as a golden opportunity for a little last-minute roughhouse before his dad went away. He yelled, “Surprise attack!” and gave my stomach a friendly head butt. My stomach actually took it well, but Lev slipped on the wet floor and began to fall backward, his head threatening to land on the rim of our old bathtub. Moving instinctively, I managed to place my hand on the rim of the tub in time to cushion the blow.

Lev came out of that violent adventure unscathed, and so did I, except for a small cut on the back of my left hand. Since our ancient bathtub had some brown rust spots on the rim, I had to go to a nearby clinic for a tetanus shot. I managed to get it done quickly so I could make it back home for Lev's bedtime. Lev, already lying in bed in his pajamas, was upset. “They gave you an injection?” he asked. I nodded.

“And it hurt?”

“A little,” I said.

“It's not fair,” Lev shouted. “It's just not fair! I was the one carrying on. I should've gotten the scratch and the injection, not you. Why did you even put your hand there?”

I told Lev that I did it to protect him. “I know that,” he said, “but why, why did you want to protect me?”

“Because I love you,” I said, “because you're my son. Because a father always has to protect his son.”

“But why?” Lev persisted. “Why does a father have to protect his son?”

I thought for a moment before answering. “Look,” I said as I stroked his cheek, “the world we live in can sometimes be very tough. And it's only fair that everyone who's born into it should have at least one person who'll be there to protect him.”

“What about you?” Lev asked. “Who'll protect you now that Grandpa's dead?” I didn't cry in front of Lev. But later that night, on the plane to Los Angeles, I did. The guy at the airline counter at Ben Gurion Airport had suggested that I take my small suitcase onto the plane, but I didn't feel like schlepping it with me, so I checked it. After we landed and I waited in vain at the luggage carousel, I realized that I should have listened to him. There wasn't much in the suitcase: underwear, socks, a few ironed, neatly folded shirts for my readings, and a pair of my father's shoes. The truth is that my original plan was to bring a picture of him with me on the tour, but somehow, for no logical reason, a minute before I went downstairs to the cab, I shoved a pair of shoes that he'd left at my place a few months earlier into the suitcase instead. Now those shoes were probably circling around on some carousel in a different airport.

It took the airlines a week to return my suitcase, a week during which I'd participated in many events, given lots of interviews, and slept very little. My jet lag provided a great excuse, even though I must admit that even in Israel, before I left, I hadn't been sleeping very well. I decided to celebrate the emotional reunion between me and my luggage in New York with a long, hot shower. I opened my suitcase and the first thing I saw were my father's shoes, lying on a pile of ironed shirts. I took them out and put them on the desk. I picked out an undershirt and a pair of briefs and went into the bathroom. I came out ten minutes later to a flood: The entire floor of my room was covered with water.

A rare problem with the pipes, the mustached hotel maintenance guy would tell me later in a heavy Polish accent. Everything that was in my suitcase, which I'd left on the floor, was soaking wet. It was a good thing I'd tossed my jeans on the bed and hung my underwear on the towel rack.

The car that was coming to take me to the event was due in a few minutes, just enough time to dry a pair of socks with the hairdryer and discover how useless that was because my shoes were sitting on the bottom of the murky pool my room had become. The driver called me on my cell phone. He'd just arrived and had no good place to wait, so he wanted to know how long it would take me to come down. I glanced at my father's shoes resting on the desk, dry; they looked very comfortable. I put them on and tied the laces. They fit perfectly.

T
he waitress in the Warsaw café asks if I'm a tourist. “The truth is,” I tell her, pointing to the nearby intersection, “my home is right there.” It's surprising how little time it's taken me to call the forty-seven-inch-wide space in a foreign country whose language I don't speak “home.” But that long, narrow space where I spent the night really does feel like home.

Only three years ago, the idea sounded more like a silly prank. I got a call on my cell phone from a blocked number. On the other end of the line, a man speaking English with a thick Polish accent introduced himself as Jakub Szczesny, and said that he was a Polish architect.

“One day,” he said, “I was walking on Chłodna Street and saw a narrow gap between two buildings. And that gap told me that I had to build you a house there.”

“Great,” I said, trying to sound serious, “it's always a good idea to do what the gap tells you.”

Two weeks after that weird conversation, which I filed away in my memory under “Unclear Practical Jokes,” I received another call from Szczesny. This time, it turned out, he was calling from Tel Aviv. He'd come here so that we could meet face-to-face because he thought, correctly, that I hadn't taken him seriously enough during our last conversation. When we met in a café on Ben Yehuda Street, he gave me more details about his idea of building a house for me that would have the proportions of my stories: as minimalist and small as possible. When Szczesny saw the unused space between the two buildings on Chłodna Street, he decided that he had to build a home for me there. When we met, he showed me the building plans: a narrow, three-story house.

After our meeting, I took the computer-simulated picture of the house in Warsaw to my parents' house. My mother was born in Warsaw in 1934. When the war broke out, she and her family ended up in the ghetto. As a child, she had to find ways to support her parents and baby brother. Children could escape from the ghetto more easily and then smuggle food back in. During the war, she lost her mother and little brother. Then she lost her father, too, and was left completely alone in the world.

She once told me, many years ago, that after her mother had died, she told her father that she didn't want to fight anymore, that she didn't care if she died, too. Her father told her that she must not die, that she had to survive. “The Nazis,” he said, “want to erase our family name from the land, and you're the only one who can keep it alive. It is your mission to get through the war and make sure that our name survives. So that everyone who walks down the streets of Warsaw knows it.” Not long after that, he died in the Polish uprising. When the war ended, my mother was sent to an orphanage in Poland, then to one in France, and from there to Israel. By surviving, she fulfilled her father's request.

She kept the family and their name alive.

When my books began to appear in translation, the two countries in which, somewhat surprisingly, I became more successful as a writer were Poland and Germany. Later, conforming perfectly to my mother's biography, they were joined by France. My mother never went back to Poland, but my success in her native land was very important to her, even more important than my success in Israel. I remember that, after reading my first collection in Polish translation, she said to me, “You're not an Israeli writer at all. You're a Polish writer in exile.”

My mother looked at the picture for less than a fraction of a second. To my surprise, she recognized the street immediately: the narrow home would be built, totally by chance, on the spot where a bridge had linked the small ghetto to the larger one. When my mother smuggled in food for her parents, she had to get past a barricade there, manned by Nazi soldiers. She knew that if she was caught carrying a loaf of bread, they'd kill her on the spot.

And now I'm here, at the same intersection, and that narrow house is no longer a simulation. Near the bell there's a sign that says, in big, brash letters,
DOM KERETE
(
THE KERET HOUSE
). And I feel that my mother and I have now fulfilled my grandfather's wish, and our name is alive again in the city where almost no trace of my family is left.

When I come back from the café, waiting for me at the entrance is a neighbor, a woman even older than my mother, holding a jar. She lives across the street, heard about the narrow house, and wanted to welcome the new Israeli neighbor with some jam she made herself. I thank her and explain that my stay in the house will be limited and symbolic. She nods but isn't really listening to me. The guy I asked on the street to translate her Polish into English stops translating my words, and says in an apologetic tone that he thinks she doesn't really hear too well. I thank the woman again and turn to go into the house. She grabs my hand and launches into a long monologue. The guy translating into English can hardly keep up with her. “She says,” the guy tells me, “that when she was a girl, she had two classmates who lived not far from here. Both girls were Jewish, and when the Germans invaded the city, they had to move to the ghetto. Before they left, her mother made them two jam sandwiches and asked her to give them to her girlfriends. They took the sandwiches and thanked her, and she never saw them again.”

The old woman nods, as if confirming everything he's saying in English, and when he finishes, she adds another few sentences, which he translates. “She says that the jam she gave you is exactly the same kind her mother put in the girls' sandwiches. But times have changed, and she hopes they'll never force you to leave here.” The old woman keeps nodding, and her eyes fill with tears. The hug I give her scares her at first, but then makes her happy.

That night I sit in the kitchen of my narrow house drinking a cup of tea and eating a slice of bread and jam that is sweet with generosity and sour with memories. I'm still eating when my cell phone vibrates on the table. I look at the display—it's my mother. “Where are you?” she asks in that worried tone she used to have when I was a kid and was late getting home from a friend's house.

“I'm here, Mom,” I reply in a choked voice, “in our home in Warsaw.”

M
y wife says that I'm too nice, while I claim that she's just a very, very bad person. Around the time we started living together, we had a serious fight about it. It started when I came upstairs with a cabdriver who'd taken me home from the university. He had to pee. She awoke to the sound of his flushing the toilet, and she walked into our living room not fully dressed. The skinny cabdriver came out of the bathroom and gave her a polite “Good morning” while zipping up. She responded with a quick “Oh my God” and ran back into the bedroom.

The argument started after Skinny left. She said it was crazy to bring a cabbie you barely know into the house to use the bathroom. I said it was mean not to. After all, the entire field of taxi transportation is based on consideration of the passengers' feelings. Those cabbies drive around the streets all day without toilets on board, so where did she expect them to relieve themselves, in the trunk? As long as we focused on her claim that I was crazy, the discussion was quite civilized. But the minute I brought up the opposing hypothesis—that maybe most of humanity invites cabdrivers to use their bathroom, and only the selfish people among us, like her, for example, think it's weird—the decibel level began to rise.

It ended with our making a list of six mutual friends whom we would ask the same question: Have you ever invited a cabdriver up to your apartment to use your bathroom? If the majority said yes, I could keep inviting cabbies into our home. If the majority said no, I'd stop. And in case of a tie, I could keep on inviting them up, but I'd have to apologize to my wife for saying she's a bad person and give her a foot massage every day for a week.

We asked our six friends. They were all on her side. But what do you do if you're in a cab with a driver who really, really needs to go to the bathroom? I asked each of them. You just look the other way? You pay him and say, “Keep the change, man, and keep driving till you find yourself sitting in the middle of a little puddle”? Only then did I realize that I was endowed with the unique and absolutely insignificant power to sense when people need to go to the bathroom. It turned out that to me things like that were as transparent as those glass doors at the bank my wife keeps crashing into, while the rest of the human race is totally insensitive to the status of other people's bladders.

This happened eleven years ago, but last Friday, driving to Amnon's wedding at Kibbutz Shefayim, I remembered it. Amnon and I worked out at the same gym for almost two weeks before I quit. The only reason I know his name is Amnon is that the first time I met him, the gym owner said to him, “Hey, Amnon, how about trying a little deodorant?” And after a second's pause, he added, “Tell me, Etgar, that smell, isn't it criminal?” I told the gym owner that I didn't smell anything, and ever since, Amnon and I have been sort of friends. The truth is that when he gave me an invitation the last time I bumped into him in the neighborhood café, I was a little surprised. But it's like a subpoena—the minute the envelope touches your hand, you know you have to show up. That's the thing about wedding invitations—the less you know the person inviting you, the more obligated you feel to go. If you don't show up at your brother's wedding and say, “I couldn't come because the kid had chest pains and I took him to the ER,” he'll believe you because he knows there's nothing you want more than to be there with him on his big day, but if it's an Amnon you hardly know, he'll realize right away that it's an excuse.

“I'm not going to the wedding of some smelly guy from your gym,” my wife said, her tone determined.

“OK,” I said, “I'll go alone. But next time we argue and I tell you that—”

“Don't say I'm a bad person again,” she warned me. “I hate it when you do that.” So, I don't say it, but I think it, all the way to the wedding at Kibbutz Shefayim. I won't be able to stay for very long. The invitation said the chuppah would be at twelve, and at one p.m. there's going to be a screening of my former student's film at the Cinematheque in Tel Aviv.

With the usually light Friday noon traffic, Shefayim to Tel Aviv takes half an hour, tops, so I'm sure I'll be covered. Except that it's already twelve-thirty, and the chuppah is showing no signs of starting. The student who directed the film has called three times to ask when I'll be there. More accurately, he called twice, and his older brother, whom I don't even know, called the third time to thank me for agreeing to come. “He didn't invite any of his other teachers to this screening,” he told me, “just family, friends, and you.” I decide to cut out. After all, Amnon saw me here, and I've already given a check.

As I get into the cab, I text my student that I might be a few minutes late. He texts me back that it's OK. They have some technical problems, and the screening will be delayed at least an hour. I ask the cabdriver to make a U-turn and go back to the wedding hall. The chuppah has just ended. I go over to Amnon and his bride and congratulate them. He hugs me, looking really happy. I know it wasn't nice of my wife to say he's “smelly”; he's a great person with feelings and all that, but the truth is that he does have a strong body odor.

Later, during the screening, I get a text message from my wife. “Where are you? The Druckers are waiting. Shabbat starts soon and they have to make it back to Jerusalem.” The Druckers are friends who have become religious. Years ago, we used to smoke together. Today we mostly talk about kids. They have so many. And all of them, thank God, are healthy and sweet. I sidle toward the exit. My student saw me come in. That's enough. In an hour, I'll text him that it was great, and that I had to take off right after the screening. Sitting near the exit door is his brother. He looks at me as I leave. His eyes are wet with tears. He isn't crying because of me; he's crying because of the film. With all that pressure, I hardly noticed that they were screening one. If he's crying, it must be really good.

On the cab ride home, the driver talks constantly about the riots in Syria. He admits that he doesn't know who's against whom there, but he's excited about all the action. He talks and talks and talks, but the only thing I'm really listening to is his body. The guy's dying to pee. When we get to my house, the meter shows thirty-eight shekels. I give him a fifty-shekel note and tell him to keep the change. From the car window, I can see my wife on the balcony, laughing with Dror and Rakefet Drucker. She's not really a bad person.