Eshkol Nevo - Homesick

Wait, hold on a sec before you run to the phone to tell my parents that their son has finally lost it, to organise a special rescue mission, the elite corps, the air force, an article in the weekend news magazine.

Hold your horses, like they say in English.

I can see you sitting in your small home (you didn’t describe it, but I have a feeling it’s small), that picture of the sad man with the radio hanging over your head (unless Noa managed to convince you to part with it, but I don’t think so), stockinged feet on the table, steaming tea in your hand (it should be cold now in the hills of Jerusalem, right?), rereading the first lines of this letter and thinking: what happened to the friend I know? Where’s the football nut? First he lays on me a theory about modes of consciousness that he’s developing and now he thinks all of a sudden that there is a God.

Wait. I didn’t say there’s a God.

I said that yesterday, after three days of a long winding trek, I woke up with the sunrise. I went out of the shack (not exactly a shack, more like a tin hut) and suddenly saw that I was on the roof of the world (we’d arrived there the day before, in the dark, those lazy Australians stopped every two metres). I went and sat on a large flat rock overlooking the valley. It was freezing, so I shoved my hands under my knees. The mountains below were still covered with soft morning clouds. Some of the higher summits peeked out. The sun hadn’t shown its face yet, but its rays bathed everything in a transparent, almost white light. And there was no soundtrack at all. Can you imagine it? No honking horns. No buses. No humming air conditioners. Not even birds chirping. Total silence. I don’t know if you can understand, but there was something about it that made me feel reverent. All of a sudden, I felt that all my little problems, the annoying way I missed Adi, it was all so small. There’s a kind of grand order of things, maybe a divine order (OK, maybe not), and I’m a dot in it, a tiny sliver of a dot, a zero, zilch. I’m about as important to the world as a fly in the Sinai.

I don’t know, there was something comforting in that thought.

Then the others woke up and came to sit with me on the rock, and the magic faded a little. I wanted to share it with them, but just the thought of having to find words in English to describe what I felt made me lose the urge. So I promised myself I’d write to you when we got to the town at the foot of the mountain, and I smiled hello at Diana from Sydney, who, first thing in the morning, wearing a faded tracksuit and with her hair still messy, looked like a princess (See? You have nothing to worry about. Some things about me will never change).

So here I am. We took a good hotel, pampering ourselves after the trek, so there’s even a desk I can put my writing pad on. Every once in a while, the voices of vendors in the nearby Indian market drift through the window. By the way, that market is really something. I walked around it today with Diana and thought about your Noa — I mean, ninety-nine per cent of the time I was thinking about how to seduce Diana (today she wore trousers that zipped over her ass, can you see it?) but every once in a while, a thought about Noa crept in — how she would love it here. Every few steps, a picture for National Geographic . Today, for example, it started raining while we were wandering outside (cats and dogs, as if the guy in charge of rain on a Hollywood film set got confused about quantity). All the vendors in the open market grabbed their merchandise and ran to the roofed section (roofed with sheets of torn plastic, just so you don’t make the mistake of thinking they ran into a shopping centre), and only one old lady whose legs were probably too heavy to run stayed where she was, closed her eyes and let the rain soak her through and through. Picture it: one old Indian lady alone with vegetables spread on the mat in front of her in the middle of a large sandy area that was turning into mud. Her face was carved with lines like the sole of a shoe. Her hair was blacker than black. And the clouds overhead. And the old bus that opens into a stall in the back. Nice, right? So what are you waiting for? Grab your backpacks and come.

You wrote that sometimes you feel like there’s no air in your apartment. That your souls bang into each other like the bumper cars at a fair. So come on, what are you waiting for? Come here. You’ll have all the air you need, believe me. And there are no cars here at all. Yes, I know you’re both bourgeois now. I read it in your letter. Apartment, work. Nappies before you know it. But maybe you could drop by for a few hours?

I promise not to go on and on about God.

Meanwhile, write to me at the Israeli Embassy in Lima.

(Your last letter was nice, but too short. Sometimes, you can wait two days for a train here. Try harder, man. Tell me a little about what’s happening there. Peace, no peace. The score in the Hapoel/Maccabee game. What happened to Licorice, that group of David’s. We’re pretty cut off here.)

Yours,

Modi

*

On 4 November, that 4 November, I went to David’s place to console him after his girlfriend dumped him. On the way, a little before the turn at Motza, they announced on the radio that Rabin had been shot. By the time I arrived, he was already dead. The spokesman’s announcement and all that. We sat silently in front of the TV in David’s living room. He looked terrible. Thin, his hair a mess, his eyes dead. We hadn’t seen each other since I moved to the Castel. He was up to his ears in rehearsals with his band, Licorice. I was busy adjusting to the fact that I was a couple. We’d spoken on the phone and set up dates to meet, but one of us always cancelled at the last minute. I didn’t know how to make him feel better. He really loved her, that Michal, from the bottom of his mixed-up soul. And I didn’t know if it was right to talk about it now that the Prime Minister had been killed. We didn’t say anything for another couple of minutes, just stared at the pictures coming from the square in Tel Aviv, and then the phone rang. Maybe that’s her? his eyes lit up: maybe she changed her mind. He grabbed the receiver. It was Noa, who wanted me to come home right away. She’s scared. She’s sad. She feels all alone. And the way she said ‘home’, the gentleness — I’d never heard that word said with such gentleness. I got up from the sofa with an apologetic look on my face. David said, it’s OK, man, it’s perfectly OK, and he walked me down the steps to the car.

The street was deathly silent.

The cold Jerusalem air made us shiver. We each hugged ourselves. And said we’d talk tomorrow.

*

I search the photograph, trying to find something in it that gives an inkling about the day it was taken. The night before, we went to the Knesset to see Rabin’s coffin, but the queue was enormous and we didn’t get in. We tried to join the kids sitting in circles below the Rose Garden, singing sad songs, but we felt a little strange. ‘Fledgling Fly Away’ didn’t exactly apply to us and there was a kind of innocence in the air that neither of us could connect to no matter how much we wanted to. I took a few pictures of the area, especially the stands that had been set up on the side of the road, selling corn on the cob from steaming pots, and we drove home slowly, cautiously. Everyone drove like that, with exaggerated politeness, the first few days after it happened, as if they were trying to rectify some deeper wrong by driving carefully.

It was sunny when we woke up the next day, and I said to Amir, let’s go to the Sataf Springs, it’s practically next door. We’re always so busy studying that we don’t go out, and when will we have another day when we’re both free, and Amir said, OK, let’s do it. He put his psych books (I have no idea when he took them out) back on the shelf and dressed in his chill-out clothes — an NBA t-shirt with long sleeves and loose trousers that ‘let his balls hang free’. I put on jeans and a hat, made us cheese sandwiches and took a picnic blanket out of the cupboard.