Why had I really come to Tel Aviv? In a story, a person always needs a reason for the things she does. Even where there appears to be no motivation, later on it is always revealed by the subtle architecture of plot and resonance that there was one. Narrative cannot sustain formlessness any more than light can sustain darkness—it is the antithesis of formlessness, and so it can never truly communicate it. Chaos is the one truth that narrative must always betray, for in the creation of its delicate structures that reveal many truths about life, the portion of truth that has to do with incoherence and disorder must be obscured. More and more, it had felt to me that in the things I wrote, the degree of artifice was greater than the degree of truth, that the cost of administering a form to what was essentially formless was akin to the cost of breaking the spirit of an animal that is too dangerous to otherwise live with. One could observe the truth of the animal at closer range, without the risk of violence, but it was a truth whose spirit had been altered. The more I wrote, the more suspect the good sense and studied beauty achieved by the mechanisms of narrative seemed to me. I didn’t want to give them up—didn’t want to live without their consolation. I wanted to employ them in a form that could contain the formless, so that it might be held close, as meaning is held close, and grappled with. It should have felt impossible, but instead it felt merely elusive, so I couldn’t give up the aspiration. The Hilton had seemed to promise itself as such a form—the house of the mind that conjures the world—but in the end I failed to fill it with any meaning.
Lost in these thoughts, the burble of Meir’s Spanish passing over me in rising and falling syllables, I hardly noticed as we drove up the driveway of the actual Hilton. Only when we pulled up under the concrete canopy that overhangs the entrance to the lobby, and my eyes fell on the giant revolving door encased in a steel cylinder with the words HILTON TEL AVIV above it, was I suddenly hit with the strangeness of arriving there. I’d been inhabiting the hotel psychically for so many months that now its real, physical manifestation was jarring; and yet, at the same time, the place was—and could only be—profoundly familiar. Freud called this confluence of sensations the unheimlich, a word that captures the creeping horror at the heart of the feeling far better than the English uncanny. I’d read his paper on the subject in college but only vaguely remembered it, and when I got to my room, I was too exhausted to do anything but take a nap. On top of which, now that I was finally there at the hotel, it struck me—the carpeted hallways, sterile furniture, and plastic card keys—as all so mundane that I couldn’t help feeling foolish about the absurdity of my last few months’ obsession.
All the same, the following morning, after calling home and speaking to my children, I tracked down Freud’s paper, which now struck me as critical reading for my Hilton novel, without which I couldn’t possibly begin. Laid out across the hotel bed, I began to read about the etymology of the German word, which derives from Heim, “home,” so that heimlich means “familiar, native, or belonging to the home.” Freud wrote his essay in response to the work of Ernst Jentsch, who’d described the unheimlich as the opposite of heimlich: as the result of an encounter with the new and unfamiliar, which causes a feeling of uncertainty, of not knowing “where one is.” But while heimlich may mean “familiar” and “homelike,” its secondary meaning, Freud points out, encompasses both “concealed” and “kept from sight,” as well as “to discover or disclose what is secret,” and even “withdrawn from conscious” (Grimm’s dictionary), so that as heimlich progresses through its shades of meaning, it eventually coincides with its opposite, unheimlich, which the German writer Schelling defined as “the name for everything that ought to have remained . . . hidden and secret, and has become visible.”
Of the circumstances likely to cause an uncanny feeling, the first Freud mentions is the idea of the double. Like a slap to the forehead, I recalled what had happened half a year earlier, when I’d arrived home and felt certain that I was already there, an experience that had begun the chain of thoughts that brought me here, to the Hilton. Other examples Freud gives are an involuntary return to the same situation, and the repetition of something random that creates a sense of the fateful or inescapable. What all of these share is the centrality of recurrence, and, arriving at the heart of his study, Freud finally proposes the unheimlich as a special class of anxiety that arises from something repressed that recurs. In the annals of etymology, where heimlich and unheimlich reveal themselves as one and the same, we find the secret to this very particular kind of anxiety, Freud tells us, which arises from the encounter not after all with something new and foreign but rather with something familiar and old from which the mind has been estranged by the process of repression. Something that ought to have been kept concealed, but that has nevertheless come to light.
I shut my laptop and went out onto the balcony. But a sudden wave of nausea hit me as I glanced down at the stone walkway twelve floors below, and remembered the man who may have snapped his spine or smashed his skull there. The day before, on my way out for an evening walk in the thin rain, I’d spotted the hotel’s general manager in the lobby and had almost chased him down to question him about the incident. But he’d stopped to shake the hand of a guest, and I saw how he radiated a smooth confidence that came, so it seemed to me, of knowing his guests’ minds even better than they knew themselves, of understanding their desires and even their weaknesses, while at the same time pretending not to know, for the secret to his job must lie in making the guest feel that it is he who was in control, he who asks and receives, he whose commands send everyone scurrying. Watching the general manager in action, glowing with hidden intelligence, light glinting off the gold pin on his lapel that signaled some obscure order of excellence, I lost all hope of getting anything out of him. If one of his guests had fallen or jumped to his death, surely this general manager would have done everything in his power to keep the news under wraps in order not to unsettle the other guests, just as now he had done everything possible to enable them to ignore the fact that the occasional missile might be lobbed over from Gaza: after all, in a matter of seconds it would be converted from real into unreal overhead, with nothing but a sonic boom as evidence.
Now the sun had come out again, the world sharpened again by its intelligence. There was no sign of any disturbance. Light sparkled on the blue-green surface of the water. How many times had I looked out at this view? Many more times than I could remember, that much was certain. If Freud were right about the uncanny stemming from something repressed that comes to light, what could be more unheimlich than returning to a place that one realizes one may never have left?
Heim—home. Yes, the place one has always been, however hidden from one’s awareness, could only be called that, couldn’t it? And yet, in another way, doesn’t home only become home if one goes away from it, since it’s only with distance, only in the return, that we are able to recognize it as the place that shelters our true self?
Or maybe I was turning to the wrong language for the answer. In Hebrew, the world is olam, and now I remembered that my father had once told me that the word comes from the root alam, which means “to hide,” or “to conceal.” In Freud’s examination of where heimlich and unheimlich dissolve into one another and illuminate an anxiety (something that ought to have been kept concealed, but that has nevertheless come to light), he nearly touched the wisdom of his Jewish ancestors. But in the end, stuck with German and the anxieties of the modern mind, he fell short of their radicalism. For the ancient Jews, the world was always both hidden and revealed.