The Seven Good Years (3 page)

T
he Swiss guy with the funny hat sitting next to me on the balcony of the Indus restaurant is sweating like crazy. I can't blame him. I'm sweating quite a bit too, and I'm supposed to be used to temperatures like this. But Bali isn't Tel Aviv. The air here is so damp that you can actually drink it with a straw. The Swiss guy tells me that he's between jobs now, which gives him time to travel. Not too long ago, he managed a resort hotel in New Caledonia, but he was fired. It's a long story, he says, but he'll be glad to tell it to me. The Turkish writer he's been trying to hit on all night told him she was going to the bathroom about an hour ago and still hasn't come back. He's already had so much to drink, he says, that if he tries to get up he'll probably roll down the stairs, so he's better-off sitting where he is, ordering another frozen vodka, and telling me his story.

He thought the idea of managing a resort in New Caledonia sounded cool. It wasn't till he got there that he realized what a hole-in-the-wall the place was. The air conditioners in the rooms didn't work, and there were insurgents in the nearby mountains who tended not to bother anyone, but for some inexplicable reason—probably boredom—liked to scare hotel guests who went out walking. The cleaning women categorically refused to go anywhere near the hotel's industrial washing machine, which they claimed was haunted, and they insisted on washing the sheets in the river instead. In short, the resort looked nothing like its brochure.

He'd been on the job for a month when a rich American couple arrived. From the minute they entered the small lobby, he had a feeling they were going to be trouble. They had that look of typical unsatisfied customers, the kind who come to the reception desk to complain about the temperature of the water in the pool. The Swiss guy sat behind the reception desk, poured himself a glass of whiskey, and waited for the couple's irate call. It came in less than fifteen minutes. “There's a lizard in the bathroom,” shouted the hoarse voice on the other end of the line. “There are a lot of lizards on the island, sir,” the Swiss guy said politely. “That's part of the charm of the place.”

“The charm of the place?” the American yelled. “The charm of the place? My wife and I are not charmed. I want someone up here to get that lizard out of our room, do you hear me?”

“Sir,” the Swiss guy said, “removing that particular lizard won't help. The area is full of lizards. There's a good chance that, by tomorrow morning, you'll find another few like it in your room, maybe even in your bed. But it's not that bad because—”

The Swiss guy didn't get to finish his sentence. The American had already slammed down the receiver. Here it comes, the Swiss guy thought as he gulped down the remains of his whiskey. In another minute they'd be at the reception desk yelling at him. With his luck, they probably knew some higher-up in the resort chain, and he'd be screwed.

He rose tiredly from behind the reception desk, having decided to take action: He'd get a bottle of champagne and bring it to them himself. He'd suck up to them the way they'd taught him in hotel management school and get himself out of this mess. It's no fun, but it's the right thing to do. Halfway to their room, he saw the Americans' car speeding toward him. It zipped past him, almost running him over, and continued in the direction of the main road. He tried to wave good-bye but the car didn't slow down.

He went to their room. They left the door open. Their bags were gone. He opened the door to the bathroom and saw the lizard. The lizard saw him, too. They looked at each other in silence for a few seconds. It was about five feet long and had claws. He'd seen one like it once, in some nature film, chewing on a live goat; he didn't remember exactly what the film had to say about them, only that they were very scary, unpleasant things. Now he understood why the Americans had taken off like that.

“And that's the end of the story,” the Swiss guy said. It turns out that those Americans really did write a letter, and a week later, he was fired. He's been traveling around ever since. In November, he'll be going back to Switzerland to see if he can make it in his brother's business.

When I ask him if he thinks there's a moral to his story, he says he's sure there must be, but doesn't know exactly what it is. “Maybe,” he says after a short pause, “it's that this world is full of lizards, and even though there's nothing we can do about it, it is always helpful to find out how big they are.”

The Swiss guy asks me where I'm from. Israel, I tell him, and I had a hell of a time getting to this writers' festival. My parents didn't want me to come. They were afraid I'd be kidnapped here, or killed. After all, Indonesia is a Muslim country, and very anti-Israel, even anti-Semitic, some say. I tried to calm them down by sending them a link to a Wikipedia page that said Bali has a vast Hindu majority. It didn't help. Dad insisted that you don't need a majority vote to put a bullet in my head. Once Israeli flags were burned in front of the Israeli embassy in Jakarta, but since diplomatic relations were broken off, those flags had to be burned in front of the American embassy. A living, breathing Israeli could really make their day.

Getting a visa was a hassle, too—I had to wait five days in Bangkok, and I would've had to go back to Israel if the festival director hadn't managed to get to a senior official in the Indonesian Foreign Ministry through his Facebook page and become his Facebook friend. I tell the Swiss guy that in a little while, I'll be reading at the opening event in the Bali palace in front of the governor of the island and representatives of the royal family, and if he's able to stand on his feet by then, he's invited. The Swiss guy really likes the idea. I have to help him stand up, but after the first step, he manages to walk by himself.

There are more than five hundred people at the event. The governor and representatives of the royal family are sitting in the first row. They look at me while I read. I can't really decipher their expressions, but they look very focused. I'm the first Israeli writer ever to come to Bali. I may even be the first Israeli, maybe even the first Jew, some members of the audience have ever seen. What do they see when they look at me? Probably a lizard, and from the smiles slowly spreading across their faces, this lizard is a lot smaller and more sociable than they expected.

T
here's nothing like a few days in eastern Europe to bring out the Jew in you. In Israel, you can walk around all day under the blazing sun in a sleeveless T-shirt and feel just like a goy: a little trance, a little opera, a good book by Bulgakov, a glass of Irish whiskey. But the minute they stamp your passport at the airport in Poland, you start to feel different. You might still be able to taste the flavor of your Tel Aviv life and God hasn't yet revealed himself to you in the broken fluorescent light flashing above you in the arrivals terminal, but with every whiff of pork, you feel increasingly like some kind of converso. You're surrounded, suddenly, by Diaspora.

From the day you were born in Israel, you've been taught that what happened in Europe over the past few centuries was nothing but a series of persecutions and pogroms, and despite the dictates of common sense, the lessons of that education continue to fester somewhere in your gut. It's an unpleasant feeling, somehow always affirmed by reality. Nothing grandiose happens—a Cossack doesn't rape your mother or your sister. It can be a seemingly innocent comment on the street, graffiti of a Star of David and some unclear slogan on a crumbling wall, the way the light reflects off the cross of the church opposite your hotel window, or a conversation between a couple of German tourists resonating against the background of the misty Polish countryside.

Then the questions begin: Is this truth or phobia? Are those semi-anti-Semitic events insinuating themselves into your mind because you anticipate them? My wife, for example, insists that I have superhuman power when it comes to detecting swastikas. It doesn't matter where we are—Melbourne, Berlin, or Zagreb—I can locate a swastika quicker than a Google map.

On my first trip to Germany as a writer, exactly fifteen years ago, my local publisher had invited me to an excellent Bavarian restaurant (I admit that sounds like an oxymoron), and just as our main course arrived, a tall, strapping German about sixty years old walked in and began to speak in a loud voice. His face was red and he looked drunk. From the jumble of German words he tossed into the air, I recognized only the two he kept repeating:
“Juden raus!”
I went over to the guy and said in English in a tone that tried to sound calm: “I'm a Jew. You want to take me out of here? Come on, do it, take me out.” The German, who didn't understand a word of English, kept shouting in German, and in no time at all, we were in a shoving match. My publisher tried to intervene and asked me to go back and sit down. “You don't understand,” he tried to say. But I persisted. I understood very well. As second generation—the child of Holocaust survivors—I felt that I understood what was going on there better than any of the restaurant's calm patrons. At some point, the waiters pulled us apart, and the angry drunk was thrown out. I went back to the table. My food was cold, but I wasn't hungry anymore, anyway. While we were waiting for the check, my publisher explained in a deep, quiet voice that the furious drunk had been complaining that one of the diners' cars was blocking his vehicle. The words that had sounded to me like
Juden raus
were actually
jeden raus
, which translates roughly to “each out.” When the check came, I insisted on paying. Reparations to a different Germany, if you will. What can I do? Even today, every other word of the German language puts me on the defensive.

But as they say, “Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you.” During the twenty years I've been traveling the world, I've collected a number of genuine anti-Semitic experiences that can't be explained away by a mistake in understanding.

There was, for instance, a Hungarian guy who met me in a local bar after a literary event in Budapest and insisted on showing me the giant German eagle tattooed on his back. He said that his grandfather killed three hundred Jews in the Holocaust, and he himself hoped to boast someday about a similar number.

In a small, peaceful East German town, a tipsy actor who had read some of my stories on stage two hours earlier explained to me that anti-Semitism is a terrible thing, but you can't deny that the intolerable behavior of the Jews throughout history helped fan the flames.

A clerk in a French hotel told me and the Arab Israeli writer Sayed Kashua that if it were up to him, his hotel wouldn't accept Jews. I spent the rest of the evening listening to Sayed's grumbling that on top of forty-two years of the Zionist occupation, he also has to bear the insult of being taken for a Jew.

And only a week ago, at a literary festival in Poland, someone in the audience asked me if I was ashamed to be a Jew. I gave him a logical, well-reasoned answer that wasn't the slightest bit emotional. The audience, which had listened attentively, applauded. But later, in my hotel room, I had a hard time falling asleep.

There's nothing like a couple of good November khamsins to put the Jew in you back in its place. The direct Middle Eastern sunlight burns all traces of the Diaspora right out of you. My best friend, Uzi, and I are sitting on Gordon Beach in Tel Aviv. Sitting next to him are Krista and Renate. “Don't tell me,” Uzi says, trying to cover up his ballooning horniness with some unsuccessful telepathy. “You're both from Sweden.”

“No,” Renate says, laughing, “we're from Düsseldorf. Germany. You know Germany?”

“Sure,” Uzi says, nodding enthusiastically, “Kraftwerk, Modern Talking, Nietzsche, BMW, Bayern München . . .” He forages around in his brain for a few more German associations, to no avail. “Hey, bro,” he says to me, “why did we send you to college for all those years? How about contributing a little something to the conversation.”

I
t all began with a dream. A lot of troubles in my life begin with a dream. And in this dream I was at a train station in a strange city, behind a hot dog stand. A horde of passengers were huddling around it. They were all jumpy, impatient. They were dying for a hot dog, they were afraid of missing the train. They were barking orders at me in a strange language that sounded like a scary blend of German and Japanese. I answered them in the same strange, nerve-wracking language. They tried to make me go faster, and I did my best to keep up. My shirt was so splattered with mustard and relish and sauerkraut that the few places where you could still see the white looked like spots. I tried to concentrate on the buns but couldn't help noticing the angry mob. They looked at me with the ravenous eyes of predators. The orders in the incomprehensible language seemed more and more menacing. My hands started to shake. Beads of salty sweat dripped from my forehead onto the thick hot dogs. And then I woke up.

The first time I had that dream was five years ago. In the middle of the night, when I got out of bed, covered in perspiration, I made do with a glass of iced tea and watched an episode of
The Wire
. It's not that I'd never had a bad dream before, but when I saw this one start to make itself at home in my unconscious, I knew I had a problem, one that even the winning combination of iced tea and Officer Jimmy McNulty couldn't solve.

Uzi, a well-known dream and hot dog buff, worked out its meaning in no time. “You're second generation,” he said. “Your parents were forced to leave their country, their home, their natural social environment overnight. That unsettling experience filtered down from your parents' unsettled consciousness to yours, which was unsettled to begin with. On top of which, there's the unstable reality of our lives in the Middle East and your being a new father. Stir it all up and what do you get? A dream that includes all of those fears: of being uprooted, of arriving in a strange, alien place, of being forced to work at something unfamiliar or unsuitable. You've got it all.”

“That makes sense,” I told Uzi. “But what do I do to make sure that nightmare doesn't come back—see a psychologist?”

“That won't do you any good,” he said. “What's the therapist going to tell you? That your parents weren't actually persecuted by Nazis, that there's no chance of Israel being destroyed, leaving you a refugee? That even with your lousy coordination you can do a good job selling hot dogs? What you need isn't a bunch of lies from a PhD in clinical psych. You need a real solution: a nest egg in a foreign bank account. Everybody's doing it. I just read in the paper that foreign accounts, foreign passports, and four-wheel drives are the three official trends this summer.”

“And that will work?” I asked.

“Like a charm,” Uzi promised. “It'll help the dream and the reality. It's not going to keep you from becoming a refugee or anything, but at least you'll be a refugee with a bundle. The kind who even if he winds up with a hot dog stand at a train station in Japa-Germany has enough cash to hire another refugee with even lousier luck to stand there and stuff the sauerkraut.”

Taking advantage of refugees wasn't an idea that appealed to me at first, but after a few more nocturnal visits to the hot dog stand, I decided to go for it. On the Internet, I managed to find a nice website of an Australian bank, with a promotional video that showed not only breathtaking landscapes but a smiling teller, who looked like Julia Roberts's even nicer sister and urged me to deposit my money with them.

Uzi nixed the idea straightaway. “Ten years from now Australia won't even be there. If the hole in the ozone layer doesn't get to them, the Chinese takeover will. It's a sure thing. My cousin works in the Mossad, Pacific Division. Go for Europe. Any place except Russia and Switzerland.”

“What's the problem there?”

“The Russian economy is unstable,” Uzi explained, taking a big bite of falafel. “And the Swiss . . . I dunno. I don't like them. They're kind of cold, if you know what I mean.”

Eventually I found a nice bank in the Channel Islands. Truth is, before I started looking for a bank I didn't even know there were islands in the Channel. And it may well be that even in the worst-case scenario of a world war, the bad guys who'll conquer the world won't realize there are islands there, either, and that even under global occupation, my bank will stay free. The guy at the bank who agreed to take my money was named Jeffrey but insisted that I call him Jeff. A year later he was replaced by someone named John or Joe, and then there was a very nice new guy named Jack. All of them were pleasant and polite, and when they talked about my stocks and bonds and their secure future they made sure to use the present perfect tense correctly, something that Uzi and I never managed to do. Which only reassured me more.

All around me, squabbles in the Middle East were growing more aggressive. Hezbollah's Grad missiles were hitting Haifa, and Hamas rockets were thrashing buildings in Ashdod. But despite the deafening explosions, I slept like a baby. And it wasn't that I didn't have any dreams, but what I dreamed about was the pastoral setting of a bank, surrounded by water, and Jeffrey or John or Jack taking me there in a gondola. The view from the gondola was dazzling, and flying fish swam along with us, singing to me in a human voice that sounded a bit like Celine Dion's about the splendor and beauty of my investment portfolio, which was growing by the minute. According to Uzi's Excel charts, it had grown to the point where I could open at least two hot dog stands or, if I preferred, one roofed kiosk.

And then came October 2008, and the fish in my dream stopped singing. After the market crashed, I called Jason, who had replaced the last J on the list, and asked him if he thought I ought to sell. He said I'd do better to wait. I don't remember just how he said it, except that he, too, like all the J's before him, made very correct use of the present perfect. Two weeks later, my money was worth another thirty percent less. In my dreams, the bank still looked the same, but the gondola had begun capsizing and the flying fish, which didn't look the least bit friendly anymore, started talking to me in the same familiar Japo-German dialect. Even if I'd wanted to, I couldn't have bribed them with a good hot dog. Uzi's Excel charts left no doubt that I could barely afford a warm coat and a pair of shoes. I kept phoning the bank. In our first few conversations, Jason sounded optimistic. Then he began getting defensive and, at a certain point, simply indifferent. When I asked him if he was looking at my investments and trying to do something to salvage what was left of them, he explained the bank's policy: proactive management began with portfolios of one million dollars and up. I knew then we'd never again take a gondola trip together.

“Look at the bright side,” Uzi said, and pointed at the picture of a friendly-looking man in the newspaper's financial supplement. “At least you didn't invest your money with Madoff.” As for Uzi, he made it through the crisis unscathed; he gambled all his money on wheat crops in India or weapons in Angola or vaccines in China. Before that conversation, I'd never heard of Madoff, but now I know all about Bernie. In retrospect, apart from the bit about the rip-off, we have a lot in common: two restless Jews who love to make up stories and have been sailing along for years in a gondola with a hole in the bottom. Did he, too, once, years ago, dream he was selling hot dogs at the train station? Maybe he also had some true friend, like Uzi, who never stopped giving bum advice?

The guy on the news just announced a state of alert in the middle of the country and that there are roadblocks on some of the highways. There are rumors about a soldier being abducted. On my way home I buy a pack of diapers for Lev and stop at the video store to pick up a few episodes of
The Wire
and a bottle of iced tea. Just to be on the safe side.