one else was home, but I closed the door anyway and sat down to read about the terrible animal with the bared teeth suspended in a tank that glowed in an otherwise dark room. Electrodes and wires attached to its greenish body. Machines that hummed at all hours of the day and night. Somewhere also the persistent sound of a pump that kept the shark alive. The beast twitched and rolled, and expressions—is it possible for a shark to have expressions? I asked myself—passed over its face at a rapid speed, while in small, windowless rooms the patients continued to sleep and dream.
I don’t need to tell you that I’ve never been much of a reader. It was always your mother who loved books. It takes me a long time, I have to make my way slowly. Sometimes the words are a puzzle to me and I have to read them two or three times until I can crack their meaning. In law school it always took me longer to study than the others. My mind was sharp, my tongue sharper, I could debate with the best of them, but I had to work harder with my books. When you learned to read so easily, almost on your own, I was amazed. It seemed impossible that a child like you could have come from me. It was yet another effortless understanding you shared with your mother that I stood outside of and would not be let into. And yet without your knowledge or consent, I read your book. Read it as I had never read a book before, and have never since. For the first time, I’d been given a way into you. And I was in awe, Dovik. I was frightened and overwhelmed by what I found there. When you enlisted and left for basic training, I was distraught to think that my secret reading would come to an end, that the doors onto your world would be closed to me again. And then, lo and behold, you began to send back the packages every couple of weeks, wrapped in brown tape, and decorated with the words PRIVATE!!! DO NOT OPEN!, with express instructions for your mother to place them in your desk drawer. I was happy. I convinced myself that you knew, that you had known all along, and that your extravagant charade of secrecy was simply a way to save me—to save us both—from embarrassment.
In the beginning I used to read the pages in your room. Always when your mother was out doing the shopping, volunteering at WIZO, or visiting Irit. With time I became bolder, sitting in the kitchen or making myself comfortable in a lawn chair under the acacia tree. Once she arrived home earlier than expected and caught me off guard. Not wanting to arouse her suspicions, I carried on reading, pretending it was a brief for one of my cases. A landlord who wants to evict, I muttered, glancing up at her over my glasses. But she only nodded and gave me that semi-smile she always offered up when consumed by other thoughts—of Irit, perhaps, and her pathological needs and her noisy emergencies to which your mother always arrived like an ambulence. As easy as that, I thought, but not wanting to test my luck I snuck back to your room and put the pages away in your desk.
I didn’t always understand what you wrote. I admit that in the beginning I was frustrated by your refusal to state things plainly. What does it eat, this shark? Where is this place, this institution, this hospital, for lack of a better word, with the enormous tank? Why do these people sleep so much? They don’t need to eat either? No one eats in this book? It was all I could do to keep myself from making a note in the margin. Many times you lost me. Just as I was finding my way around Beringer the janitor’s room with only the tiny window way up high (and why was it always raining outside?) and his shoes lined up like soldiers under his little hard bed, just as I was getting the feel of the place, to smell the odor that a man gives off when he sleeps alone in a small room, suddenly you threw me out and started to drag me through the forest where Hannah used to go to hide from everyone when she was a girl. But I did my best