A motorcycle shot past and the driver shouted something to Friedman, who shouted back in return. Whether I’d witnessed a brief skirmish or a greeting of acquaintances, I couldn’t say.
“I don’t need to tell you that this is a difficult country,” he said, leading us toward Hayarkon Street. “There’s no end to our problems, and every day we have new ones. They multiply. We deal with them poorly or not at all. Slowly they’re burying us.”
Friedman stopped and looked back at the sea, perhaps for some sign of the missiles. More had been exploded yesterday, preceded by the deafening whine of the sirens. The first time it happened, I’d left my café table and gone down into the basement shelter. The seven or eight people gathered in the concrete room had about them the air of people waiting in line at the grocery store, except that when the boom sounded, there was a smattering of low “wows,” as if someone in the line had tried to purchase something extraordinary. The second time the siren sounded, I was with my friend, Hana, who merely stopped what she was saying and tilted her face toward the sky. Almost everyone around us had remained in place, too, either because they believed in the impenetrable dome above or because acknowledging the danger would also require acknowledging many other things that would make their lives less possible.
I scanned the sky for a sign, too, but there was none, only the white furrows of the sea whipped by the wind. When Friedman turned back, the lenses of his glasses had darkened in the sunlight, and I could no longer see his eyes.
“For twenty-five years, I taught literature at the university. But no one has time for literature anymore,” he said. “Anyway, in Israel, writers were always luftmenschen—impractical and useless, at least according to the founding ideals, which, however far we’ve strayed from them, still reverberate. In the shtetl, they knew the value of a Bashevis Singer. However hard times were, they made sure he had paper and ink. But here, he was diagnosed as part of the disease. They confiscated his pen and sent him to pull radishes up in the fields. And if he should somehow manage to write a few pages in his off hours and publish them, they made sure he would be punished by taxing him at the highest possible rate, a practice that continues to this day. The idea that we would support the production of literature through programs and grants, as they do in Europe and America, would be unthinkable here.”
“Nearly every young Israeli artist I know is looking for a way to leave,” I said. “But for writers there’s no way out of the language you’re born into. It’s an impossible situation. But then, Israel seems to specialize in those.”
“Fortunately, we don’t have a monopoly,” Friedman said, guiding me up the steps of the small park next to the Hilton. “Anyway, not all of us agree,” he said.
“None of you agree. But I don’t know which disagreement you’re referring to now.”
Friedman looked at me sharply, and I thought I saw a flash of skepticism in his face, though it was hard to say, being unable to see his eyes. I’d meant to make a joke, but instead I must have struck him as an amateur. Before I could arm myself against it, the desire to please or perhaps just not to disappoint rushed in, and I cast around for something to say that would convince him that his instincts about me had been right; that he’d had good reason to single me out and invest hope in me.
“We were speaking about writing,” Friedman said before I had a chance to redeem myself. “Some of us here never forgot its value. That the reason we continue to live on this contested scrap of land today is because of the story we began to write about ourselves in this place nearly three millennia ago. In the ninth century BC, Israel was nothing—a backwater nation, compared to the neighboring empires of Egypt or Mesopotamia. And that’s what we would have remained, forgotten with the Philistines and the Sea Peoples, except that we began to write. The earliest Hebrew writing we’ve found dates to the tenth century BC, the time of King David. Just simple inscriptions on buildings mostly. Record keeping, nothing more. But within a few hundred years something extraordinary happened. From the eighth century, suddenly there is evidence of writing all over the Northern Kingdom of Israel—advanced, complex texts. The Jews had begun composing the stories that would be collected in the Torah. We like to think of ourselves as the inventors of monotheism, which spread like wildfire and influenced thousands of years of history. But we didn’t invent the idea of a single God; we only wrote a story of our struggle to remain true to Him and in doing so we invented ourselves. We gave ourselves a past and inscribed ourselves into the future.”
As we crossed a pedestrian overpass, the wind picked up, sending sand flying through the air. I knew I was meant to be impressed by his speech, but I couldn’t help feeling he’d given it a hundred times before in the university lecture hall. And I was getting tired of beating around the bush. I still had no idea who Friedman really was or what he wanted of me, if he wanted anything at all.
The bridge led us into the dank, shadowy area beneath a concrete overhang, part of the complex of buildings around Atarim Square, whose threatening Brutalism made even the Hilton look inviting. What had once been a semi-covered arcade of shops had long ago been abandoned, leaving the building to erode more fully toward the hell its architect had once only toyed with; the whole place was haunted by a sense of the post-apocalyptic. The stench of urine was overwhelming, and the stained concrete blocks rose around us like a prison worse than any Piranesi ever imagined. The question I’d been unable to ask since I sat down at the restaurant rose up again, and I knew that if I didn’t say it now, before we exited into the sunlight, I would lose my courage.
“Effie told me you used to work for the Mossad.”
“Did he?” Friedman said. The tapping of his cane echoed in the cavernous space, along with the click of the dog’s nails behind us. But Friedman’s level voice gave away nothing, and I felt a flush of heat rise up my neck, part embarrassment and part annoyance.
“I was under the impression—”
But what could I say? That I’d been led to believe, had let myself believe, that I’d been selected for something special by him, Eliezer Friedman, a retired professor of literature with time on his hands? In a moment he would ask me if I would agree to come speak to his wife’s book club.
“The Hilton is in the other direction. I should be heading back.”
“I’m taking you someplace I think you’ll find interesting.”
“Where?”
“You’ll see.”
We walked along the tree-lined footpath that runs down the median of Ben Gurion Street. To those that passed we must have looked like nothing so much as a grandfather and granddaughter out for a stroll together. As if to play up his role, Friedman offered to buy me a fresh juice.