an eyebrow. We used to venture out sometimes, but now hardly at all. A kind of inertia has taken hold. We have the garden, and Yoav goes outside a little, but it’s been months since he last left the house.
She came to the point of her letter: It can’t go on like this or we really will stop living. One of us will do something terrible. It’s as if my father is luring us closer to him every day. It gets harder to resist. For a long time now I’ve been working up the courage to leave. But if I go, I can’t ever come back, and I can’t tell Yoav where I am. Otherwise we’ll get sucked back in, and I don’t think I’ll be able to escape again. So he doesn’t know anything about it. If you haven’t figured it out already, Izzy, I’m writing to ask you to come here. To him. I don’t know the first thing about your life now, but I know how much you loved him then. What you two meant to each other. You’re still alive in him, and there isn’t much else that is. I was always jealous of what you let him feel. That he had found someone who made him feel what I’d never been allowed to.
At the end of the letter, she wrote that she couldn’t leave unless she knew for sure that I would come to him. She didn’t want to think about what would happen to him alone. She said nothing about where she planned to go. Only that she would call me for my answer in two weeks.
Her letter awakened a tidal wave of feeling—sadness, anguish, joy, and also anger that Leah would think I would drop everything for Yoav after all these years, that she would put me in such a position. It also made me afraid. I knew that to find and to feel Yoav again would be terribly painful, because of what had become of him, and because of what I knew he could ignite in me, a vitality that was excruciating because like a flare it lit up the emptiness inside me and exposed what I always secretly knew about myself: how much time I’d spent being only partly alive, and how easily I’d accepted a lesser life. I had a job like anyone, even if I disliked it, I even had a boyfriend, a gentle, kind person who loved me and evoked in me a kind of tender ambivalence. And yet the moment I finished the letter, I knew that I would go to Yoav. In light of him, everything—the inky shadows, the dirty dishes, the tarred roofs outside the window—took on a different look, became more acute, altered by a rush of feeling. He awakened a hunger in me—not just for him, but also for the magnitude of life, for the extremes of all it has been given to us to feel. A hunger and also courage. Later, looking back at how easily I’d closed the door on one life and slipped away to another, to him, it seemed that all those years I’d just been waiting for that letter, and that everything I’d built up around me had been made of cardboard, so that when it finally arrived I could fold it up and throw it away.
Waiting for Leah’s call, I couldn’t think of anything else. I barely slept at night, and couldn’t pay attention at work, forgetting things I was supposed to do, losing papers, getting in trouble with my boss who always took his anger out on me anyway, when he wasn’t staring at my legs or breasts. When the day finally arrived that Leah was supposed to phone, I called in sick to work. I didn’t even take a shower, afraid that I would miss her call. Morning turned into afternoon turned into evening turned into night, and still it didn’t ring. I thought she had changed her mind and vanished again. Or that she couldn’t find my number, even though it was listed. But then, at quarter to nine (the very early hours of the morning in Jerusalem), the phone rang. Izzy? she said, and her voice was exactly the same as it has always been, pale, if you can describe a voice like that, and quavering a little as if she were holding her breath. It’s me, I said. He’s sleeping upstairs, Leah said. He doesn’t fall asleep until two or three in