The street was deathly silent.
The cold Jerusalem air made us shiver. We each hugged ourselves. And said we’d talk tomorrow.
*
I search the photograph, trying to find something in it that gives an inkling about the day it was taken. The night before, we went to the Knesset to see Rabin’s coffin, but the queue was enormous and we didn’t get in. We tried to join the kids sitting in circles below the Rose Garden, singing sad songs, but we felt a little strange. ‘Fledgling Fly Away’ didn’t exactly apply to us and there was a kind of innocence in the air that neither of us could connect to no matter how much we wanted to. I took a few pictures of the area, especially the stands that had been set up on the side of the road, selling corn on the cob from steaming pots, and we drove home slowly, cautiously. Everyone drove like that, with exaggerated politeness, the first few days after it happened, as if they were trying to rectify some deeper wrong by driving carefully.
It was sunny when we woke up the next day, and I said to Amir, let’s go to the Sataf Springs, it’s practically next door. We’re always so busy studying that we don’t go out, and when will we have another day when we’re both free, and Amir said, OK, let’s do it. He put his psych books (I have no idea when he took them out) back on the shelf and dressed in his chill-out clothes — an NBA t-shirt with long sleeves and loose trousers that ‘let his balls hang free’. I put on jeans and a hat, made us cheese sandwiches and took a picnic blanket out of the cupboard.
I look at the picture again. I took it from above, from the stone rim of the small pool. Amir was just getting out of the water, leaning on his arms to lift himself up. That’s when I clicked the shutter. His tennis muscles — he hasn’t played since Modi went away, but he still has the muscles — were almost bursting out of his arms (an impressive sight, even though I’m not crazy about bodybuilders), the two mounds of his chest were glistening, I really felt like resting my head on it, and for some reason, his uncombed hair had fallen over to the right. He had some white hair even then, but you can’t see it here because it’s wet. Two large drops are dripping down his forehead. There’s another on his eyelash, and he looks surprised, a tiny bit mocking, Noa, Noa, taking pictures again? The light is marvellous, the soft light of early November, the sun is dancing on the water, illuminating his face just right.
And also the face of the Arab boy sitting in his underpants on the far edge of the pool dangling his legs in the water.
Maybe this is where the inkling I am looking for is hidden, in that boy’s face. Even though he’s only background, seemingly random, he’s looking at the camera with a pretty serious and angry expression on his face. His eyebrows are contracted, his lips are pressed together in the kind of expression older boys usually have, and if you look carefully, you can see that his right foot is half-way out of the water, getting ready for a kick that would only collide with air, but is aimed — or at least looks like it is — at the camera. Maybe what happened in the square a couple of days before had put up the wall of fear again and that boy, even if he doesn’t understand the whole meaning, senses it somehow. Maybe his parents, or his grandparents, lived in the Arab village of Sataf, whose inhabitants were uprooted in ’48, and during this nostalgic trip to the springs they decided to tell the boy who it was that kicked them out of here.
Hey, come on. Enough. It’s obvious that you’ve been spending too much time in Bezalel, Noa. Are you starting to be a phoney intellectual too? Just a few minutes ago, that boy asked for a sip of your Coke, and when you handed it to him, he said thanks a lot and gave you a nice big smile. What’s the connection between the assassination and the Arabs? It’d be better to admit that there are no inklings in the picture. Or maybe there are and you’ll be able to see them in retrospect. That happens sometimes too: you look at a picture you’ve seen a thousand times before, and suddenly a new detail jumps out at you. That’s how my best project last year was born. I was looking at pictures of my family, and all of a sudden, I noticed a puddle of water on the edge of one of them. That picture had been taken in the summer — you couldn’t mistake the burning light of an Israeli summer — but the puddle was as large as a winter puddle. In the middle of August, I started looking for puddles in Tel Aviv and the surrounding towns. In car parks. In industrial areas. In the back yards of grocery shops. It was amazing how many I found. I took pictures of them with almost romantic lighting, as if I were photographing a Norwegian fiord, and I chose an angle that made the puddle look bigger than it was. I called the project ‘Summer Puddles’, and the lecturer stopped the lesson in the middle, told everyone to stay in their seats and ran to get the head of the department, because ‘this is something he has to see’.
On the way back from Sataf, Amir and I argued. A lively debate whose words got all tangled up and somehow turned into a bitter argument. It all started when I said I was sick and tired of living here, in this puddle that drowns its inhabitants, that it looked to me as if things would get very bad now and that I’d started thinking about doing a Master’s in art abroad in New York, say. Amir said that the States wasn’t such a bargain, he’d already lived in Detroit with his parents and they put too much ice in their Coke, and when you go to play basketball at the YMCA, there are ten people standing there and each one takes a shot into a separate basket, and besides, he’s sick of moving; but I insisted, reminding him of Modi’s letter from South America, the one he’d read to me the day before, and I said don’t you feel like getting away for a little while, to sit and look at old Indian ladies all day? He snorted disdainfully and said in an all-knowing tone, bullshit, you take yourself with you everywhere you go, and he turned up the radio to signal that he wanted to end the discussion, and, slightly annoyed, I said, hey, aren’t you tired of those sad songs, for example? He said, no! and turned the volume up even higher and locked himself up inside himself like a steel car lock, I could actually hear the click, but I didn’t know what to say to soften him up, because I didn’t really understand what had hardened him like that. The minute we got home, he escaped into his fat books, and even though I followed him and said, when we finally have a free day after so long, it’s a shame we have to waste it fighting, even then he wouldn’t make up, didn’t even turn his head towards me. So I went into the living room and looked at the picture I hate, the one with the sad man, and prayed that Amir would argue with me, that he’d get up and shout, because I can’t stand it when someone’s cold to me like that, and I turned on the TV and turned it off. All of a sudden, our whole apartment seemed too small, too cramped, and my mouth filled with the taste of defeat and I felt that it wouldn’t work, that the whole idea of living together would end in tears and I’d screw up my final project on the way. I went outside for some air, to calm down, but it was so cold that I ran back in, and inside, no one was waiting for me, except for the man in the picture who, just like before, kept looking outside through the window.
*
In eight years we never had a fight, Moshe and me. Not since we met. Maybe we would’ve kept going and broken the Guinness world record if the car with the megaphone hadn’t come down the street inviting the people who lived in the neighbourhood to a rally with the great rabbi, with a performance by the singer Bennie Elbaz, in the square in front of Doga’s shop.