It was unclear who the “we” in question was, since the restaurant was empty but for an old dog with a dusty coat of curly hair, lying on its side in the sunlight. Regardless, the compliment touched a nerve in me, as it has been touching a nerve in Jewish progeny for millennia. On the one hand, I was flattered. I wanted to please. From the time I was a child, I’d understood the necessity of being good and doing whatever possible to make my parents proud. I don’t know that I ever fully explored what was behind the necessity, beyond that it plugged a hole through which darkness could otherwise spill, a darkness that always threatened to pull my parents under. But even as I brought home accolades by the armful and stuffed my parents with pride, I resented the burden and the contortions it required, and knew all too well how it hemmed me in. The very first Jewish child was bound and nearly sacrificed for something more important than him, and ever since Abraham came down from Mount Moriah, a terrible father but a good Jew, the question of how to go on binding has hung in the air. If a loophole was found out of Abraham’s violence, it was this: Let the ropes be invisible, let there be no proof that they exist, except that the more the child grows, the more painful they get, until one day he looks down and sees that it’s his own hand doing the tightening. In other words, teach Jewish children to bind themselves. And for what? Not for beauty, like the Chinese, and not even for God, or the dream of a miracle. We bind and are bound because the binding binds us to those who were bound before us, and those bound before them, and those before them, in a chain of ropes and knots that goes back three thousand years, which is how long we’ve been dreaming of cutting ourselves loose, of falling out of this world, and into another where we aren’t stunted and deformed to fit the past, but left to grow wild, toward the future.
But now there was more. The need to make one’s parents proud is deforming enough; the pressure to make one’s whole people proud is something else again. Writing had begun so differently for me. At the age of fourteen or fifteen, I’d grasped it as a way to organize myself—not just to explore and discover, but to consciously grow myself. But if it had been a serious occupation, it had also been playful and full of pleasure. And yet as time passed, and bit by bit what had been only an obscure, idiosyncratic process became a profession, my relationship to it had changed. It was no longer enough for it to be the answer to an inner need; it also had to be many other things, to rise to other occasions. And as it rose, what had begun as an act of freedom had become another form of binding.
I wanted to write what I wanted to write, however much it offended, bored, challenged, or disappointed people, and disliked the part of myself that wished to please. I’d tried to rid myself of it, and on a certain level had succeeded: my previous novel had bored, challenged, and disappointed an impressive number of readers. But because the book, like the ones before it, was still undeniably Jewish, filled with Jewish characters and the echoes of two thousand years of Jewish history, I’d avoided sloughing off the pride of my landsmen. If anything, I’d managed to increase it, as part of me must have secretly hoped to do. In Sweden or Japan they didn’t care much about what I wrote, but in Israel I was stopped in the street. On my last trip, an elderly woman in a sun hat secured with a strap under her chubby chin had cornered me at the supermarket. Gripping my wrist between her meaty fingers, she’d backed me into the dairy section to tell me that reading my books was, for her, as good as spitting on Hitler’s grave (never mind that he doesn’t have one), and that she would read every page I wrote until she herself was in the ground. Pinned against the kosher yogurt display, I smiled politely and thanked her, and only after she held up my wrist in the air like a heavyweight champion’s and shouted out my name to the disinterested checkout girl did she finally leave off, though not before flashing the faded green numbers tattooed on her forearm like the badge of an undercover police.
A few months before that, my brother had gotten married at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. The toasts had gone on for a long time, and when they were finally finished I’d made a beeline for the ladies’ room. I’d made it halfway across the lobby when a woman in a headscarf had pushed a stroller into my path. I tried to move around her, but she wouldn’t let me pass, and, looking me in the eyes, she’d spoken my name. Frazzled and confused, I was also on the verge of wetting myself. But I wasn’t getting away so easily. With a flick of the wrist, she tore back the hood of the stroller to reveal a tiny red-faced infant. In a hoarse voice, she whispered the name of a girl in one of my books. The baby swiveled its tiny head, and when its myopic gray eyes passed over me, both seeing and not seeing, her hands jerked out in front of her like a monkey trying and failing to grasp the branch, and she let out an earsplitting scream. I looked up at the mother’s swollen face and saw tears welling in her own eyes. “Because of you,” she whispered.
But worst of all was the previous year, when I had come to attend the International Writers Festival in Jerusalem, been taken on a special tour of Yad Vashem, and afterward was separated out from the other (non-Jewish) festival writers and escorted to the museum’s back offices. There, under a brooding oil painting of Wallenberg dark enough to look like it had been rescued from a house on fire, I was presented with photocopied papers concerning my murdered great-grandparents, along with a bag from the museum gift shop. “Go on, open it,” the director encouraged, pushing the bag into my hands. “Oh, I’ll open it later,” I suggested. “Open it now,” she commanded through a smile of gritted teeth. Three or four of the staff hovered around me, watching feverishly. I opened the bag and peered in, then closed it again, but the director grabbed it away, dug into it, and lifted out a blank notebook commemorating the sixty-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. Could the message have been any clearer if the endpapers had been printed with piles of dead children’s shoes? Back at home in New York, I tossed the notebook in the trash, but an hour later, overcome with guilt, plucked it out again. Sitting down at my desk, I desperately tried to write something on the first page to strip it of its power, but after sweating it out for a quarter of an hour, all I’d managed was to scribble down a list of things to do—(1) Call plumber, (2) Gyn apt, (3) Fluoride-free toothpaste. Then I’d shut the cover and buried it at the back of a drawer.
“So? You’re writing a new novel?” Friedman asked me now.
I felt a trickle of sweat roll down my chest despite the cool air.
“Trying,” I said, though I had not been trying, had in fact avoided trying these last three days, as no sooner had I checked in than I understood that beginning a novel about the Hilton while actually at the Hilton would be even more impossible than beginning a novel about the Hilton while at home in Brooklyn.
“And what is the subject?”
“I haven’t gotten that far,” I said, shifting my eyes to the hotel looming on the cliff above the beach.
“Why? What’s wrong?”
When I didn’t reply, Friedman gently folded the napkin on his lap and returned it in a neat rectangle to the table. “You must be wondering why I asked to meet you.”
“Beginning to, yes.”
“Let’s walk.”
I glanced at the cane by his arm.
“Don’t let it fool you.” Friedman unhooked the stick and deftly hoisted himself to his feet. The old dog lying prostrate on the floor jerked up her head and, when she saw that Friedman really meant to go, pushed herself back on her haunches, splaying her front paws to leverage her weight against the floor, and creakily rose from the thighs. Then she cast off her inertia with a spasmodic shake, sending thousands of motes of dust exploding into the light.
We made our way past a small shop with sun-faded surfboards in the window and up to that promenade that runs along the sea. The dog followed discreetly after us, occasionally sniffing halfheartedly at a boulder or pole.
“What kind of dog is she?”
“Shepherd,” Friedman replied.
But the dog bore no resemblance whatsoever to a shepherd, German or otherwise. If anything she was more sheep, only one lifted from pasture and put away in storage for a very long time, where its woolly and colorless coat had begun to disintegrate.