I began to tell them about the gray whale who’d lost his way and ended up off the shore of Tel Aviv, but only a sentence in, they began to make little noises of distress, and I realized that it had been a mistake. Ho-ho! I exclaimed, not yet sure quite how I would rescue them from this little snafu, this puddle of sadness that God forbid they should drown in because they’d never been given the chance to learn to swim. We had made such a huge production out of their happiness, my husband and I, had gone to such lengths to fortify their lives against sadness, that they had learned to fear it the way their grandparents had feared the Nazis, and not having enough food to eat. Despite the par-for-the-Jewish-course nightmares I had a few times a year about trying to hide my children under the floorboards or carry them in my arms on a death march, far more often I found myself contemplating how much personal growth they could achieve in a few weeks of running for their lives through a Polish forest.
But wasn’t it possible, I hurriedly pointed out to them now, that the scientists had gotten it all wrong? That instead of a mistake, maybe the whale had come here willingly, isolating himself at great cost and risking his life to cling to what was most original in him? That the whale was on a great adventure?
Saved again, my sons soon became restless. At last, my husband reappeared on the screen. Twice his pixelated face froze in expressions that had no viable translation. But even whole, there was something unusual about his appearance. In the last months he too had begun to appear different. When you look at something for long enough, there is a point at which familiarity passes into strangeness. Maybe it was just the result of my tiredness, of the brain economizing its work by turning off the flood of associations and stored perspectives it uses every second to fill in the blanks and make sense of what the eyes transmit. Or maybe it was the early onset of the Alzheimer’s I was sure would be my fate, as it had been my grandmother’s. Whatever the case, more and more I found myself looking at my husband with the same inquisitiveness with which I looked at other passengers on the train, but even more so, and with added surprise, since for nearly a decade his face had been to me the epitome of the familiar, until one day it crossed out of that realm and into the unheimlich.
He’d been following the news and wanted to know what it was like in Tel Aviv, and which direction things seemed to be going. It was calm now, I said. Maybe there would be no Israeli airstrike, though as I said the words, I didn’t really believe them. Didn’t I want to come home? he asked. Wasn’t I afraid? Not for myself, I told him, and repeated what I had heard others say: that one was more likely to be hit by a car than a rocket.
Then he asked how things were going with me, and what I had been up to since I’d been away. This simple question, so rarely asked, now struck me as vast. I could no more answer it than I could tell him what I had been up to, and how things had gone for me, during the decade we’d been married. All that time we had been exchanging words, but at some point the words seem to have been stripped of their power and purpose, and now, like a ship without sails, they no longer seemed to take us anywhere: the words exchanged did not bring us closer, neither to each other nor to any understanding. The words we wanted to use, we weren’t allowed to use—the rigidity that comes of fear prevented them—and the words we could use were, to me, irrelevant. Still, I tried: I told him about the clearing weather, the swim I’d taken in the Hilton pool, and seeing Ohad, Hana, and our friend Matti. I told him about the atmosphere in the shelter, and the loud booms that sometimes shook the walls. But I didn’t tell him about Eliezer Friedman.
One corner of my sister’s apartment was open to the dark, leathery foliage of a tree under whose leaves the air was kept dim and humid, spider-filled, and in this small outdoor room she had placed a once-expensive leather chair that had lived for a quarter century in our grandparents’ apartment. When it rained in the winter, the metal shutter could be closed, but otherwise the chair, which my grandparents had been religious in their care of, rarely sitting in and protecting from the Middle Eastern sun with a sheet, was left open to the elements. This rebellious or just free-spirited act of my sister’s was thrilling to me. I sat in the chair often to defuse the urge to cover it.
Opening to the first page of Kafka’s Parables and Paradoxes, I began to read:
Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have. When the sage says: “Go over,” he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labor were worth it; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something too that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least.
I felt a little upswell of frustration. When I thought about Kafka at a distance from his books, I almost always forgot this feeling. I would think of the iconic scenes of his life, which I’d read about enough times that I recalled them in my mind like the scenes of a film: the physical exercise before the open window, the feverish midnight writing at his desk, the painful days passed on the white, disinfected sheets of one sanatorium after another. But frustration was more than a subject for Kafka, it was a whole dimension of existence, and the moment one begins to read him, one is delivered there again. There is never any resolution to the first aggravating, then enervating scenarios that arise in his writing; there is only the great, unending occupation of them, the nearly tantric endurance of frustration that achieves nothing except to prime the soul for absurdity. Even the sages are wrung for it: they tell us to go someplace, but we have no way of moving toward this place, and moreover they know no more about it than we do—there is no proof that it even exists. No matter that the sages are only ever finite and yet endeavor to direct us to the infinite. In Kafka’s calculation, which cannot exactly be refuted, they’re useless. They draw our attention to the fabulous beyond, but cannot bring us there.