the back part of the car off the wheels. The front seat was one long bench, and I sat close to Yoav as he drove. The car slid onto the motorway, and we talked about places we both wanted to go (I to Japan, he to see the Northern Lights), about Hungarian versus Finnish, genius at midnight, the relief of failure, Joseph Brodsky, cemeteries (my favorite was San Michele, his Weissensee), the house of Yehuda Amichai in Yemin Moshe. Yoav told me about how when he was a child his mother used to point out Amichai on the bus or walking down the street carrying his plastic baskets full of food from the shuk. Look at him, she used to say, a man like any other, coming home laden with groceries. And yet, in his soul all the dreams, the sadness and joy, love and regret, all the bitter loss of the people he passes on the street fight for a place in his words. And then we were there, together, in the Jerusalem of his childhood. He told me about the house on Ha’Oren Street, which smelled of musty paper, damp cisterns, and spice, and how his mother had fallen in love with it the first time she visited Ein Kerem years before, and how the first thing his father did when he began to make money was pay a visit to the owner of the house to ask his price. One day he asked his wife if she wanted to go for a walk, and slowly, taking a meandering route, they arrived at the house on Ha’Oren Street as if by accident, and he took the key out of his pocket and opened the gate, and she, bewildered, hung back, the way one always hangs back, a little frightened, when a dream suddenly transforms into reality.
Looking back, I don’t think that I was ever happier during my time in England than on that drive, nestled against Yoav, who talked as he drove. Though soon enough we reached Folkestone, drove the car onto the train, and left England behind. The radio didn’t work in the tunnel and the car didn’t have a CD player or tape deck, but we kissed in the silence under the Channel until we surfaced again in Calais. We drove past signs for the battlefields of Ypres and Passendale, but headed east toward Ghent. Outside of Brussels it became foggy, and as we sped along a canal the crows scattered and then disappeared altogether as the dilapidated outskirts of the city reared up. We got lost in a maze of one-way streets and roundabouts and avenues without signs, or confusing signs, and had to stop to ask an African taxi driver for directions. He laughed at us as we drove away, as if he knew something about where we were headed that we didn’t. We drove south through the expensive streets of Uccle, and soon we were on tree-lined roads in the countryside again, those wonderful tree-lined roads planted with a ruler and a whip that you can only find in a place as anal about beauty as Europe. As we drove we talked about the future as we rarely did, though not directly since it was impossible to talk to Yoav directly about anything to do with our relationship, whereas indirectly he could talk about the most raw and intimate things, the most dangerous things, the most painful and inconsolable but also the most hopeful. As for what, exactly, was said about the future, all I can say is that, speaking as indirectly as we were, transferred between us was only a feeling, or a shift in feeling, something like the sense of solid ground underfoot after walking for days or even months on spongy bog, a shift that I would be hard pressed, both then and now, but especially now, all these years later, to put into words.
It was late in the afternoon by the time we drove up to a pair of rusted wrought-iron gates. Yoav rolled down the window and pressed the buzzer. A minute or more passed before anyone answered, and just when he was about to buzz again the gates came to life and began to swing slowly open. We drove up the drive, gravel crunching under the Citroën’s wheels. Who lives here? I asked, trying to sound unimpressed by the stone castle with slate turrets coming into view behind the huge ancient oaks, because the last thing I