at the table and refuse to eat, and in death we are eternally hungry.
How can I explain it? The way you frightened me a little. How you seemed just the tiniest bit closer than the rest of us to the essence of things. I would walk into a room and find you staring at something in the corner. What’s so fascinating? I wanted to know. But your concentration would be broken, and you would turn to me, a wrinkle in your brow, a faint look of surprise at being disturbed. After you left the room I would go to see for myself. A spiderweb? An ant? A disgusting hairball coughed up by Yoella? But there was never anything there. What’s wrong with him? I asked your mother. He has no friends? By that time Uri had already befriended the whole neighborhood. There was an endless stream of kids coming in and out of the house for him. The only time Uri spent in the corner was when he was wrapping his arms around himself and wriggling as if he were French-kissing. He would run his hands up and down his back, squeeze his own ass, and give a little yelp, screwing his head back and forth in an imitation that made everyone roll on the floor. But amid the laughter you were nowhere to be found. Later, pruning the tomato plants, I came across a patch of the garden where you had mysteriously assembled little piles of dirt in rows, alternated with squares or circles etched into the ground with a stick. What the hell is this? I asked your mother. She cocked her head to study it. It’s a city, she announced without a shade of doubt in her voice. Here is the gate, she pointed, and the fortifications, and this here is a cistern. Then she walked away, leaving me defeated again. Where I saw little pathetic piles of dirt she saw a whole city. From the beginning you had given her the keys to yourself. But not to me. Never to me, my son. I spotted you crouching near the hose. Come here, I shouted. You lumbered toward me on your short legs, your face crazily stained from a Popsicle. What is the meaning of this? I demanded, gesturing with the clippers. You looked down and sniffed. Then you squatted and carried out some lightning renovations—hurriedly sweeping, patting, refashioning a lump. You stood to examine it again from above, cocking your head at the same angle your mother had. So that was the secret, I thought. You have to turn your head at a special angle to make sense of it! No sooner had I absorbed this clue than you lifted your foot and, with a few quick stomps, leveled the entire thing and retreated into the house.
Which came first? Was it I who backed away, or you? A strange child with secret knowledge that I came to resent, who grew to be a young man whose world was barred to me. Do you want to know the truth, Dov? When you came to me to tell me about the book you planned to write I was taken aback. I couldn’t understand what made you decide to come to me of all people—me, with whom you shared so little of yourself, whom you only spoke to as a last resort, when it was absolutely necessary. I was too slow to respond as I might have liked. I couldn’t change so fast. I assumed the old position. A certain tone of voice, a roughness that had always been my defense against all I couldn’t grasp in you. To reject you before you could reject me. Afterwards, I regretted it. The moment after you walked out of the room I realized that I’d lost my chance. I understood that you had offered me a reprieve, and I’d squandered it. And I knew it would not come again.
A shark that is a repository for human sadness. Who takes all that the dreamers cannot bear, who bears the violence of their accumulated feeling. How often I thought about that beast and the chance I lost with you. At times I felt I was on the verge of understanding everything the great fish stood for. One day I went into your room looking for a screwdriver you’d borrowed, and on your desk I found the opening pages. My first feeling was of relief that I had not, after all, dissuaded you. No