in tears. She had long brown hair, crooked teeth, and wore a man’s shirt, and all of this somehow only strengthened her vitality and beauty. You will think I go on too much about the beauty of your young girlfriends, but I have a point, which is that in all of your suffering up until then you had not been blind to beauty, one might even say you found a certain shelter in it. But no longer; now you turned away this beautiful girl who cared for you. You wouldn’t even speak to your mother. If I am honest, I have to admit that a little part of me was glad to see her receive the same treatment as I. That she should feel what all my life I felt from you. That she should have to exist a little on my side of the fence, and see what it felt like to throw oneself against that impenetrable barrier. And as if she sensed my satisfaction, whatever gentleness had come to visit us after we found out you were alive, whatever benefit of the doubt we silently agreed to give each other, dried up. Our discussions about you—in low voices in the kitchen, or at night in bed—became tense. Your mother wanted to call the father in Haifa, to shout at him, to defend you. But I wouldn’t let her. I grabbed her hand and pried the phone loose. It’s enough, Eve, I said. His son is dead. His parents were murdered and now he has lost his only son. And you expect him to be fair? To be reasonable? Her eyes turned hard. You have more sympathy for him than you have for your own son, she spat, and walked away.
We failed each other then, she and I. Failed to support each other as we should have. Instead we each retreated alone into our own anguish, the special, unique hell of watching your child suffer and being helpless to do anything for him. Maybe she was right, in a way. Not about my lack of sympathy—you were my child, for God’s sake, you are still my child even now. But right, perhaps, about a lack of generosity in the way I viewed your reaction to the tragedy that had befallen you. You ceased to live. Your mother believed that something had been confiscated from you. But to me it seemed you forfeited it. As if all your life you had been waiting for life to betray you, to prove what you had always suspected of it—how little it held for you except disappointment and pain. And now you had an irreproachable reason to turn away from it, to break from it at last, just as you had broken with Shlomo, with so many friends and girlfriends, and long ago with me.
Terrible things befall people, but not all are destroyed. Why is it that the same thing that destroys one does not destroy another? There is the question of will—some inalienable right, the right of interpretation, remains. Another person might have said: I am not the enemy. Your son died at their hands, not mine. I’m a soldier who fought for my country, no more and no less. Another might have closed the door to the agonies of self-doubt. But you left it open. And I admit that I couldn’t understand this. When you didn’t get better after two or three months, the pain of watching you suffer turned to frustration. How can you help someone who won’t help himself? After a certain point, one can’t help but see it as self-pity. You resigned from all ambition. Sometimes, passing the closed door of your room, I would pause in the hall. What about the shark, my son? What about Beringer and his mop and the ceaseless drip from the leak in the tank? What about the doctor, and Noa, and little Benny? What will become of them without you? But instead, when I found you hunched over a plate of food you refused to eat, I demanded, Who are you punishing? Do you really think life will be hurt if you deny it?
Wherever you went the hurt rattled in you, the old injuries mixed up with the new. In all of this I became deeply implicated. From every angle I was given only your back. My resentment grew, for both you and your mother who had formed an exclusive camp together from which I, the brute, was excluded—to punish me