asked. Yes, she said. A hundred? I asked. She didn’t answer, but her eyes turned cold and hard. A thousand? She walked away.
NO, IT ISN’T my fault that you didn’t become the writer you wanted to be. You wanted to write about a shark that takes the brunt of human emotions. Suffering, I said to you. What? you said, a quiver in your lips. Listen to me, Dov, you have to take control of it. You have to grab it by the horns and wrestle it down. You have to suffocate it or it will suffocate you. You looked at me as if I had never understood anything in my life. But it was you who didn’t understand. You stood in your army uniform, your kit bag slung over your shoulder. In a uniform a man can go about detached from himself, can lose himself in the flank of a great beast of which he has never seen the head. But not you, my boy. In plainclothes you suffered, and in a uniform it was no different. You’d come home on leave for the first time in three months. Do you remember this? You were still in love with Dafna. It was her you’d come home for. Maybe in the beginning she had been drawn to your suffering, but even I could see it was already beginning to bore her. She came over and the two of you closed yourselves in your room, but not as you used to close yourselves in, epically, against the world; now she came out after only an hour wearing your army-issued T-shirt to explore the refrigerator or turn on the radio. Make yourself at home, I said as she picked through the bowls of chicken salad and cold pasta. I sat across from her and watched her eat. Such a small girl and such a large appetite. She was sure of her beauty; it was evident in her smallest gestures. She flung her arms and legs around with unstudied carelessness, but they always landed with grace. There was an inner logic that organized her thoroughly. Tell me something, I said. She looked at me, still chewing. A musky odor clung to her. What? she said. I sat there, hair growing out of my ears. Never mind, I said, and let the giant shark swim off away from me. She finished eating in silence and got up to clean her plate. At the door she paused. The answer to your question is no, she said. What question? I said. The one you didn’t ask, she said. Oh? Which one is that? About Dov, she said. I waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. There was much in that instant I failed to grasp. I heard the front door close behind her.
All throughout your service, before what happened to you, you used to send packages home addressed to yourself. Your mother passed on your instructions that these packages were not to be touched except to be placed in a drawer of your desk. You lavished no end of tape on them, so that you would know if anyone tampered with them. Well, guess what? I did. I opened them up and read the contents, and then I closed them back up exactly as you had, with more tape, and if you ever asked I would have told you it was the army censors who were to blame. But you never asked. As far as I could tell, you never again looked at what you had written. Sometimes I even convinced myself that you knew I broke open the packages and read what you wrote; that you meant for me to read it. And so, at my leisure, when your mother was out and the house was empty, I steamed open the envelopes and read about the shark, and the interconnected nightmares of many. About the janitor who cleaned the tank every night, wiping the glass and checking the tubes and the pump that sent fresh water in—who would pause in his work to check on the feverish, shivering bodies asleep in their beds, who would lean on his mop and stare into the eyes of the tormented white beast covered in electrodes, attached to tubes, who every day grew sicker and sicker from absorbing the pain of so many.
The girl, Dafna, left you of course. Not immediately, but in time. You discovered that she had been with another man. Could you blame her? Maybe