The Seven Good Years (6 page)

A
few weeks before our son, Lev, was born, almost four years ago, two weighty philosophical issues came to the fore.

The first, will he look like his mom or his dad, was resolved quickly and unequivocally at his birth: he was beautiful. Or, as my dear wife so aptly puts it, “The only thing he inherited from you is the hair on his back.”

And the second issue, what will he be when he grows up, was of concern for the first three years of his life. His bad temper qualified him to be a taxi driver; his phenomenal ability to make excuses indicated that he might do well in the legal profession; and his consistent mastery over others showed his potential to be a high-ranking member of one totalitarian government or another. But during the past few months the fog surrounding our son's plump and rosy future has begun to lift. He'll probably be a milkman, because if not, his rare ability to wake up every morning at five-thirty and insist on waking us, too, would go completely to waste.

One Wednesday, two weeks ago, our routine of being awakened at five-thirty a.m. was preempted by the doorbell. Dressed in my pajama bottoms, I opened the door and saw Uzi standing there, white as a sheet. Out on the balcony, he smoked nervously and told me that he'd had dinner with S., a crazy kid who'd gone to elementary school with us and had become, of course, a crazy high-ranking military officer. Around dessert, after Uzi finished bragging about a dubious real estate deal he'd just closed, S. told him about a secret dossier that had reached his desk. It dealt with the psychological makeup of the Iranian president. According to the dossier, which had originated in foreign-intelligence agencies, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is one of the few living leaders in the world whose real views, aired only behind closed doors, are even more fanatical than the ones aired in public.

“It's almost always the opposite,” S. had explained. “World leaders are barking dogs who don't bite. But with him, it seems, his desire to wipe Israel off the face of the earth is really a lot stronger than he actually says. And as you know, he says it quite a bit.”

“Do you get it?” Uzi asked, covered in sweat. “That crazy Iranian is prepared to destroy Israel even if it means the total annihilation of Iran, because from a pan-Islamic perspective, he sees that as a victory. And in a few months, that guy is going to have a nuclear bomb. A nuclear bomb! Do you understand what a disaster it'll be for me if he drops it on Tel Aviv? I rent out fourteen apartments here. Did you ever hear of a radioactive mutation that pays its rent on time?”

“Get a hold of yourself, Uzi,” I said. “You're not the only one who'll suffer if we get bombed. I mean, we have a kid here and—”

“A kid doesn't pay rent,” Uzi yelled. “A kid doesn't sign a lease with you that he'll break without a second thought the minute he grows a third eye.”

“Uncle Uzi,” I heard Lev's sleepy voice behind me, “can I have a third eye, too?” At that point in the conversation, I also lit a cigarette.

The next day, when my wife asked me to call in a plumber to check a wet spot on the bedroom ceiling, I told her about my conversation with Uzi. “If S. is right,” I said, “it would be a waste of our time and money. Why fix anything if the whole city is going to be wiped out in two months?” I suggested that maybe we should give it half a year, and if we're still here in one piece in March, we'll repair the ceiling then. My wife didn't say anything, but from her look I could tell that she hadn't realized the seriousness of the current geopolitical situation.

“So if I understand you correctly, you probably want to postpone the work on the garden, too?” she asked. I nodded. Why waste the citrus tree saplings and the violets we'd plant? According to the Internet, they're particularly sensitive to radiation.

Aided by Uzi's intelligence, I managed to save us from quite a few chores. The only home-repair job I agreed to take part in was roach extermination, because even radioactive fallout won't stop those pests. Gradually, my wife also began to realize the advantages of our shabby existence. After she found a not exactly reliable news site warning that Iran might already have nuclear weapons, she decided it was time to stop washing dishes. “There's nothing more frustrating than getting nuked while you're putting the soap in the dishwasher,” she explained. “From now on, we only wash the dishes on an immediate-need basis.”

This “If I'm going up in flames anyway, then I won't go as a sucker” philosophy extended well beyond the dishwasher edict. We quickly stopped unnecessary floor mopping and garbage removal. At my wife's cunning suggestion, we went straight to the bank to apply for a huge loan, figuring that if we take out the money fast enough, we can screw the system. “Let them come looking for us to pay it back when this country turns into a giant hole in the ground.” We laughed as we sat in our filthy living room, watching our enormous new plasma TV. It would be nice if only once in our short lives we could really put one over on the bank.

And then one night I had a nightmare in which Ahmadinejad came over to me on the street, hugged me, kissed me on both cheeks, and said in fluent Yiddish,
“Ich hub dir lieb”
—My brother, I love you. I woke my wife. Her face was covered in plaster. The problem of the wet spot on the ceiling over our bed was getting worse. “What's wrong?” she asked, frightened. “Is it the Iranians?”

I nodded, but quickly reassured her that it was only in a dream.

“That they annihilated us?” she asked, stroking my cheek. “I have one of those every night.”

“Even worse,” I said. “I dreamed we were making peace with them.”

That hit her really hard. “Maybe S. was wrong,” she whispered in terror. “Maybe the Iranians won't attack. And we'll be stuck with this filthy, run-down apartment, with the debts and your students, whose papers you promised to give back by January and haven't even started to mark. And with those nudnik relatives of yours in Eilat we promised to visit for Pesach because we were sure that by then—”

“It was just a dream,” I said, trying to cheer her up. “He's a lunatic, you can see it in his eyes.” But that was too little, too late. I hugged her as hard as I could, letting her tears flow onto my neck, and whispered, “Don't worry, honey. We're both survivors. We've already survived quite a bit together—illnesses, wars, terrorist attacks, and, if peace is what fate has in store, we'll survive it, too.” Finally my wife fell asleep again, but I couldn't. So I got up and swept the living room. First thing tomorrow morning, I'm calling a plumber.

T
he minute we got into the taxi, I had a bad feeling. And it wasn't because the driver impatiently asked me to buckle the kid's safety belt in the backseat after I'd already done so, or because he muttered something that sounded like a curse when I said we wanted to go to Ramat Gan. I take a lot of taxis, so I'm used to the bad tempers, the impatience, the armpit sweat stains. But there was something about the way that driver spoke, something half violent and half on the verge of tears that made me uncomfortable. Lev was almost four then, and we were on our way to Grandma's. Unlike me, he couldn't have cared less about the driver and focused mainly on the tall, ugly buildings that kept smiling at him along the way. He sang “Yellow Submarine” quietly to himself with words he made up that sounded almost like English, and waved his short legs in the air to the rhythm. At one point, his right sandal hit the taxi's plastic ashtray, knocking it onto the floor. Except for a chewing gum wrapper, it was empty, so no trash was spilled. I had already bent to pick it up when the driver suddenly braked, turned around, and with his face really close to my three-year-old son's, began screaming. “You stupid kid. You broke my car, you idiot!”

“Hey, are you crazy or something?” I shouted at the driver. “Yelling at a three-year-old because of a piece of plastic? Turn around and start driving or, I swear, next week you'll be shaving corpses in the Abu Kabir morgue, because you won't be driving any public vehicle, you hear me?” When I saw that he was about to say something, I added, “Shut your mouth now and drive.”

The driver gave me a look that was full of hatred. The possibility of his smashing in my face and losing his job was in the air. He considered it for a long moment, took a deep breath, turned around, shifted into first gear, and drove.

On the taxi's radio, Bobby McFerrin was singing “Don't Worry, Be Happy,” but I felt very far from happy. I looked at Lev. He wasn't crying, and even though we were stuck in a very slow-moving traffic jam, it wouldn't take long to reach my parents' house. I tried to find another ray of light in that unpleasant ride, but couldn't. I smiled at Lev and tousled his hair. He looked at me hard, but didn't smile back. “Daddy,” he asked, “what did the man say?”

“The man said,” I answered quickly, as if it were nothing, “that when you're riding in a car, you have to watch how you move your legs so you don't break anything.”

Lev nodded, looked out the window, and a second later asked again, “And what did you say to the man?”

“Me?” I said to Lev, trying to gain a little time. “I told the man that he was absolutely right, but that he should say whatever he has to say quietly and politely, and not yell.”

“But you yelled at him,” Lev said, confused.

“I know,” I said, “and that wasn't right. And you know what? I'm going to apologize now.”

I leaned forward so that my mouth almost touched the thick, hairy neck of the driver and said loudly, almost declaiming, “Mr. Driver, I'm sorry I yelled at you, it wasn't right.” When I finished, I looked at Lev and smiled again, or at least I tried. I looked out the window—we were just easing our way out of the traffic jam on Jabotinsky Street; the hard part was behind us.

“But Daddy,” Lev said, putting his tiny hand on my knee, “now the man has to tell me he's sorry, too.” I looked at the sweaty driver in front of us. It was clear to me that he was hearing our whole conversation. It was even clearer that asking him to apologize to a three-year-old was not a really good idea. The rope between us was stretched to the breaking point as it was. “Sweetie,” I said, bending down to Lev, “you're a smart little boy and you already know lots of things about the world, but not everything. And one of the things you still don't know is that saying you're sorry might be the hardest thing of all. And that doing something so hard while you're driving could be very, very dangerous. Because while you're trying to say you're sorry, you can have an accident. But you know what? I don't think we have to ask the driver to say he's sorry because, just by looking at him, I can tell that he's sorry.”

We'd already driven into Bialik Street—now there was only the right turn onto Nordau and then a left to Be'er Lane. In another minute, we'd be there. “Daddy,” Lev said as he narrowed his eyes, “I can't tell that he's sorry.” At that moment, in the middle of the incline on Nordau, the driver slammed on the brakes again and pulled up the hand brake. He turned around and moved his face close to my son's. He didn't say anything, just looked Lev in the eye, and a very long second later, whispered, “Believe me, kid, I'm sorry.”

N
ineteen years ago, in a small wedding hall in Bnei Brak, my older sister died, and she now lives in the most Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem. I recently spent a weekend at her house. It was my first Shabbat there. I often go to visit her in the middle of the week, but that month, with all the work I had and my trips abroad, it was either Saturday or nothing. “Take care of yourself,” my wife said as I was leaving. “You're not in such great shape now, you know. Make sure they don't talk you into turning religious or something.” I told her she had nothing to worry about. Me, when it comes to religion, I have no God. When I'm cool, I don't need anyone, and when I'm feeling shitty and this big empty hole opens up inside me, I just know there's never been a god that could fill it and there never will be. So even if a hundred rabbis pray for my lost soul, it won't do them any good. I have no God, but my sister does, and I love her, so I try to show him some respect.

The period when my sister was discovering religion was just about the most depressing time in the history of Israeli pop. The Lebanon War had just ended, and nobody was in the mood for upbeat tunes. But then again, all those ballads to handsome young soldiers who'd died in their prime were getting on our nerves, too. People wanted sad songs, but not the kind that carried on about some crummy unheroic war that everyone was trying to forget. Which is how a new genre came into being all of a sudden: the dirge for a friend who's gone religious. Those songs always described a close buddy or a beautiful, sexy girl who'd been the singer's reason for living, when out of the blue something terrible had happened and they'd turned Orthodox. The buddy was growing a beard and praying a lot; the beautiful girl was covered from head to toe and wouldn't do it with the morose singer anymore. Young people would listen to those songs and nod grimly. The Lebanon War had taken so many of their buddies that the last thing anyone wanted was to see the others just disappear forever into some yeshiva in the armpit of Jerusalem.

It wasn't only the music world that was discovering born-again Jews. They were hot stuff all over the media. Every talk show had a regular seat for a newly religious ex-celeb who made a point of telling everyone how he didn't miss his wanton ways in the least, or the former friend of a well-known born-again who'd reveal how much the friend had changed since turning religious and how you couldn't even talk to him anymore. Me, too. From the moment my sister crossed the lines in the direction of Divine Providence, I became a kind of local celebrity. Neighbors who'd never given me the time of day would stop, just to offer me a firm handshake and pay their condolences. Hipster twelfth-graders, all dressed in black, would give me a friendly high five just before getting into the cab that would take them to some dance club in Tel Aviv. And then they'd roll down the window and shout to me how broken up they were about my sister. If the rabbis had taken someone ugly, they could've handled it; but grabbing someone with her looks—what a waste!

Meanwhile, my lamented sister was studying at some women's seminary in Jerusalem. She'd come visit us almost every week, and she seemed happy. If there was a week when she couldn't come, we'd go visit her. I was fifteen at the time, and I missed her terribly. When she'd been in the army, before going religious, serving as an artillery instructor in the south, I didn't see much of her, either, but somehow I missed her less back then.

Whenever we met, I'd study her closely, trying to figure out how she'd changed. Had they replaced the look in her eyes, her smile? We'd talk the way we always did. She still told me funny stories she'd made up specially for me, and helped me with my math homework. But my cousin Gili, who belonged to the youth section of the Movement Against Religious Coercion and knew a lot about rabbis and stuff, told me it was just a matter of time. They hadn't finished brainwashing her yet, but as soon as they did, she'd begin talking Yiddish, and they'd shave her head and she'd marry some sweaty, flabby, repulsive guy who'd forbid her to see me anymore. It could take another year or two, but I might as well brace myself, because once she was married, she might continue breathing, but from our point of view, it would be just as if she'd died.

Nineteen years ago, in a small wedding hall in Bnei Brak, my older sister died, and she now lives in the most Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem. She has a husband, a yeshiva student, just like Gili promised. He isn't sweaty or flabby or repulsive, and he actually seems pleased whenever my brother or I come to visit. Gili also promised me at the time, about twenty years ago, that my sister would have hordes of children and that every time I'd hear them speaking Yiddish like they were living in some godforsaken shtetl in eastern Europe, I'd feel like crying. On that subject, too, he was only half right, because she really does have lots of children, one cuter than another, but when they speak Yiddish it just makes me smile.

As I walked into my sister's house, less than an hour before Shabbat, the children greeted me in unison with their “What's my name?”—a tradition that began after I once got them mixed up. Considering that my sister has eleven, and that each of them has a double-barreled name, the way the Hasidim usually do, my mistake was certainly forgivable. The fact that all the boys are dressed the same way and decked out with identical sets of payos provides some pretty strong mitigating arguments. But all of them, from Shlomo-Nachman on down, still want to make sure that their peculiar uncle is focused enough, and gives the right present to the right nephew.

Once I'd passed the roll-call test with flying colors, I was treated to a strictly kosher glass of cola as my sister, who hadn't seen me in a long time, took her place on the other side of the living room and said she wanted to know what I'd been up to. She loves it when I tell her that I'm doing well and I'm happy, but since the world I live in is to her one of frivolities, she isn't really interested in the details. The fact that my sister will never read a single story of mine upsets me, I admit, but the fact that I don't observe the Sabbath or keep kosher upsets her even more.

I once wrote a children's book and dedicated it to my nephews. In the contract, the publishing house agreed that the illustrator would prepare one special copy in which all the men would have yarmulkes and payos, and the women's skirts and sleeves would be long enough to be considered modest. But in the end, even that version was rejected by my sister's rabbi, the one she consults on matters of religious convention. The children's story described a father who runs off with the circus. The rabbi must have considered this too reckless, and I had to take the “kosher” version of the book—the one the illustrator had worked on so skillfully for many hours—back to Tel Aviv.

Until about a decade ago, when I finally got married, the toughest part of our relationship was that my future wife couldn't come with me when I went to visit my sister. To be completely honest, I ought to mention that in the nine years we've been living together, we've gotten married dozens of times in all sorts of ceremonies that we made up ourselves: with a kiss on the nose at a fish restaurant in Jaffa, exchanging hugs in a dilapidated hotel in Warsaw, skinny-dipping on the beach in Haifa, or even sharing a Kinder egg on a train from Amsterdam to Berlin. Except that none of these ceremonies is recognized, unfortunately, by the rabbis or by the state. So that when I would go to visit my sister and her family, my girlfriend always had to wait for me at a nearby café or park. At first I was embarrassed to ask her to do that, but she understood the situation and accepted it. As for me, well, I accepted it as well—what choice did I have?—but I can't really say I understand.

Nineteen years ago, in a small wedding hall in Bnei Brak, my older sister died, and she now lives in the most Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem. Back then there was a girl that I loved to death but who didn't love me. I remember how two weeks after the wedding I went to visit my sister in Jerusalem. I wanted her to pray for that girl and me to be together. That's how desperate I was. My sister was quiet for a minute and then explained that she couldn't do it. Because if she prayed and then that girl and I got together and our togetherness turned out to be hell, she'd feel terrible. “I'll pray for you to meet someone you'll be happy with instead,” she said, and gave me a smile that tried to be comforting. “I'll pray for you every day. I promise.” I could see she wanted to give me a hug and was sorry she wasn't allowed to, or maybe I was just imagining it. Ten years later I met my wife, and being with her really did make me happy. Who said that prayers aren't answered?