living! and then the laughter dropped from my lips. Who do you think you are? I asked. The hero of your own existence? You shrank into yourself. You pulled your head in like a little turtle. Tell me, I said, I’d really like to know. What is it like to be you?
TWO NIGHTS before your mother died I sat down to write her a letter. Me, who hates writing letters, who would rather pick up the phone to say my piece. A letter lacks volume, and I am a man who relies on volume to make myself understood. But, OK, there was no line that would reach your mother, or maybe there was still a line but no telephone on the other end. Or just an endless ringing and no one picking up, Jesus Christ, my boy, enough with the fucking metaphors. So I sat down in the hospital cafeteria to write her a letter, because there were things I still wanted to tell her. I’m not a man who has romantic ideas about the extension of the spirit, when the body fails it’s over, finished, curtains, kaput. But I made up my mind all the same to bury the letter with her. I borrowed a pen from the over-weight nurse and sat under the posters of Machu Picchu, the Great Wall of China, and the ruins of Ephesus as if I were there to send your mother to a faraway place rather than no place. A gurney rattled by carrying the almost-dead, bald and shrunken, a little bag of bones that opened an eye in which all the sentience had been concentrated, and fixed me in its gaze as it rolled past. I turned back to the paper in front of me. Dear Eve. But after that, nothing. Suddenly it became impossible to write another word. I don’t know which was worse, the plea of that pathetic little eye or the rebuke of the blank page. To think that you once wanted to make a life of words! Thank God I saved you from that. You might be a big macher now, but it’s me you have to thank.
Dear Eve, then nothing. The words dried up like leaves and blew away. All that time I’d sat by her side as she lay unconscious it had been so clear in my head, the many things I still needed to tell her. I’d held forth, I’d carried on, all in my head. But now every word I dredged up seemed lifeless and false. Just when I was ready to give up and crumple the page into a ball I remembered what Segal once told me. You remember Avner Segal, my old friend, translated into many obscure languages but never English so he always stayed poor? A few years ago we met for lunch in Rehavia. It had surprised me how old he’d gotten in the few years since I’d seen him. No doubt he thought the same of me. Once we worked side by side among the chickens, full of ideals of solidarity. The kibbutz elders had decided the best way to make use of our youthful talent was to send us to inoculate a flock of birds, then to clear up their shit in the hay. Now we sat together, the retired prosecutor and the aging writer, hair growing out of our ears. His body was bent. He confided that despite the fact that his last book had won a prize (I never heard of it), he was having a terrible time. He couldn’t get a paragraph out without condemning it to the trash. So what do you do? I asked. You want to know? he said. I’m asking, I told him. All right, he said, between you and me, I’ll tell you. He leaned across the table and whispered two words: Mrs. Kleindorf. What? I said. Just what I said, Mrs. Kleindorf. I’m not following you, I told him. I pretend I’m writing to Mrs. Kleindorf, he said. My seventh grade teacher. No one else is going to see it, I tell myself, only her. It doesn’t matter that she’s been dead already twenty-five years. I think of her kind eyes and the little red smiley faces she used to draw on my papers, and I begin to relax. And then, he said, I can write a little.
I turned back to the paper in front of me. Dear—I wrote, but stopped again there, because I couldn’t remember the name