So, maybe Madmoni’s workers take them? They get here at six every morning.
Great, Noa, blame the Arabs. It really figures they’d steal Haaretz.
Why not? Doesn’t it have a property section?
*
That’s the house, I’m sure. Or maybe not? For two weeks, ever since we started building the extension here for Madmoni, I’ve been looking at the house across the street, looking at it a lot. First thing in the morning, I look, and during the breaks, and at the end of the day too, when we’re sitting on the pavement waiting for Rami the contractor to pick us up and take us back to the village. The bottom part of the house is new. Ya’ani, I mean renovated. Clean stones with thin lines between them. A family with two children lives there — the husband drives for Egged, I can tell from the bus — and there’s a young couple living in a little apartment at the back, but all I can see of it is the roof and some aerials.
If there was only that part, at the bottom, I wouldn’t think anything.
But upstairs on the second floor where the old man and the old woman come out sometimes, upstairs it’s built in the old way, stone on top of stone, the way they used to build in the village. And one stone, in the corner, sticks out like it did in that building, I remember. And another stone, on the left of the door, is as black as the black stone we had, though I remember it being on the right side. And the window has a little arch, just like my parents’ window did.
*
My family moved to a lot of different apartments, at least ten before I went into the army. From Jerusalem to Haifa. From Haifa to Jerusalem. From Jerusalem to Detroit. And within each city, too. But no matter how many times we moved, the worst pain I ever felt was the move we made when I was in Year 10. It was during the football World Cup, so I remember the year: ’86. Mexico, ’86. Belgium against the Soviet Union. Spain against Denmark. Lots of goals. Live broadcasts in the middle of the night. The time people are sleeping, but I can’t fall asleep. From eleven o’clock, I’m tossing and turning in bed trying to decide whether I should finally rebel against this moving from place to place that my father forces on us every few years, whether the time has finally come to stand up and say: enough, I’m staying here. In Jerusalem. With my friends. You can all go back to Haifa. Over and over again, I picture in my mind what’s going to happen in the next few weeks. How at the going-away party, the girls will kiss my cheek and all the kids will take my new phone number and promise to stay in touch, how two or three at the most will call during the summer vacation, and we’ll see each other maybe once, in Jerusalem, of course, because it’s hard to get from there to Haifa, and how, even if we see each other more than once, even if the incredible happens and they do come to Haifa, when school starts we’ll drift apart, the letters will get shorter, the silences on the phone will get longer, and the names of all kinds of people I don’t know will start coming up in their stories.
Unless — the possibility runs through my mind again — I rent myself a room. Yes. In some old lady’s house. There are ads like that in the local papers sometimes. But where will I get the money to rent a room? And where will I do my laundry? And how often can I eat scrambled eggs, which is the only thing I know how to make?
Every night, as the time for the game comes closer, I get up and take my blanket into the living room to watch the game on TV, without sound, so I won’t wake everybody up. When there’s a goal, I choke back my shouts, and when the broadcast, including the round-up and analysis, is over, I put on my coat and go out into the Jerusalem night, still wound up with the mute suspense of the football game, and walk down to the shopping centre, to the lit-up but closed SuperPharm, where I look at the packages of nappies and toilet paper, read over and over again the posters showing all their special sales until I’m sick of it, and sit down on one of the chairs outside the neighbourhood café, which are tied together with an iron chain. I’m freezing from the cold and think that maybe I should tie myself down with a chain too, like they do in demonstrations, so I won’t have to move. I look at the few passing cars and make up stories about them: that’s a Mossad agent coming back from a spying mission in enemy territory, that’s a prostitute coming off her shift … and only when the first strips of light appear and light up the park, and the rubbish trucks are creaking at the end of the street do I get up from the chair, run all the way home and lie down in bed, pretending to be a good boy. After a little while, I get up and go into the kitchen, drink my morning chocolate milk with Mum as if nothing has happened, and go to school and talk back to all my teachers because I’m too tired to behave myself and because they can’t do anything to me anyway. I’m moving to Haifa.
*
There was a strong wind when I took the picture, you can tell from Amir’s crest of hair, which has an impressive presence even on normal days, but here it’s actually threatening to move out of the frame, and from the bushes behind him that are bent strangely towards the right. But what’s really interesting about the composition is not the wind but the discrepancy between the figure and the background, between the central event and what’s happening behind it. The figure, of course, is Amir, who’s holding an oval wooden sign in one hand that says NOA AND AMIR’S HOUSE — you can read it if you strain — against the door. In the other hand, he’s holding a big hammer that Moshe the landlord lent him. In a minute, he’ll pull some nails out of his pocket and try to hang the sign on the door. At first, the nails will bend on him, but after a few tries, he’ll manage to do it. Meanwhile, he’s smiling a big smile that’s a combination of real happiness — it was, after all, an occasion — and a spark of scorn directed at me as if he’s asking: why this posing, Noa, why does everything have to be photographed? Behind him, behind the dramatic event, you can see the neglected empty lot between our house and the house where the bereaved family lives. A crooked iron post, bushes, a small pile of rubbish topped with a huge plastic jerry can, a few boards the contractor forgot to take, small rocks, large rocks, and one mangy cat looking at the camera with glittering eyes. I’d be happy to say that I noticed all those details while I was taking the picture, that I closed the shutter so that everything would be in focus, but the truth is, I didn’t. Some of the things in the field are blurred, and the ones that aren’t, are dim. I forgot again what Ishai Levy, who teaches us the history of photography, told us in our first year: no frame has only one story; always look for other stories around the edges.
After we finished nailing the sign on the door and checked that it was straight, we went inside, pulled down the blinds and celebrated the event in bed. We celebrated everything between the sheets, or between the blankets, actually, because it had already started to get pretty cold. We celebrated moving the queen-size mattress into the bedroom. Buying the radiator. Even our first big purchase in the supermarket at the shopping centre (he spread honey on my nipples and then licked it off. Slowly.).
Amir always wants us to stay in bed, hugging each other for ever, but after a few minutes I always want to, have to, escape to the shower.
*
And what was strange was that even when I was standing on my own two feet, even when I had no one else to blame, I kept on moving compulsively. I’ve lived in seven different apartments since the army, seven times boxes, nails, butterflies. If you look at each move separately, you might say I was cursed. The landlord decided to sell the apartment on Hashmoniam Street. Maya decided to fall in love with her lecturer’s assistant. My room-mate in Ramat Gan had a nervous breakdown. But the bittersweet truth is — and it took me a while to admit it — that there’s something addictive about frequent changes, the anticipation, the adrenalin that surges with every new leaf you’re about to turn over. I think — we learned this in our first year — that just as people get addicted to the runners’ high after jogging, people can get addicted to movers’ high or changers’ high (the Americans will be sure to find a technical name for it).