Lies, First Person by Gail Hareven

Author:Gail Hareven [Hareven, Gail; Bilu, Dalya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781940953076
Publisher: Open Letter

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Nimrod left first for Atlanta, where he was to remain until the end of the academic year. Oded and I took off a few hours after him into weather that grew stormier the farther east we flew.

“So what do you say about our sons?” My husband tried to distract me from the rocking of the plane, but there was no need to do so. Every jolt interrupted a thought, and I was glad of the jolting and interruptions, as if this was exactly what my body needed in order to purge itself.

“So what do you say?” Something thudded. The beverage cart. It was jolted from its place and crashed into the back of the plane, and the riders on the Ferris Wheel let out a groan in chorus. A flight attendant grabbed hold of the cart and hurried to sit down and fasten her safety belt, and someone behind us threw up.

“What do I say? I say that we’re blessed,” I gasped out loud.

At the beginning of my relationship with Oded, when I was very much in love, I would sometimes imagine myself bumping into him in places where there was no chance at all of coming across him: what would happen if he suddenly walked into the auditorium of the arts faculty? Would he see me sitting there? Would I signal him in the middle of the class?

Say he had been invited to the party too, and at this very moment he was standing in the kitchen with the people who weren’t dancing, drinking beer.

Say he had been relieved from reserve duty early, say the whole company had been relieved, and on their way home his mates decided to stop at precisely this bit of the beach, and now he was sitting with them in the shade of that hut. All kinds of nonsense along those lines. That’s what people do when they’re in love, and it’s not completely illogical: coincidences sometimes happen, and why shouldn’t they happen to me?

Five weeks after he took me to Mount Scopus, Oded and I were already living together, so that this kind of suspense didn’t last long, and turned into a sweet, vague background to our days in the Garden of Eden.

At the Seattle airport I went back to seeing someone who wasn’t there, just around the corner, and there, opposite the entrance doors, in a kind of sick reversal, I began to see the Not-man.

I hugged Yachin, who drove to the airport twice that day, first for Nimrod, and now for us. I looked at my husband and my son clumsily embracing in the embarrassment of an emotional farewell, and as I looked at them, one hand on the handle of my suitcase, it occurred to me that perhaps First Person was there.

He lived in America. He was invited to lecture all over the country. There were a number of universities in Seattle, maybe one of them had invited him to give a talk, or maybe he was there

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