were sixteen. Both of them. And their parents, all four of them, like a clenched fist with only a stump left of its thumb, aged overnight. One said, “No, no.” One said, “What’s this? What’s this?” The third said, “Out of the question. Not as long as I have any say in the matter.” And the fourth spat on the floor and then bit his finger. They didn’t want to hear anything. Or see anything either. So the two of them ran away to Jaffa a few weeks before the date. The journey north on the bus in her ninth month, alone, she would never forget. How she threw up next to the Ramon Crater out in the desert and all the passengers in the bus stared at her. How the driver got out and stood behind her with a glass bottle of water in his hand and asked, “Should I pour a little water on your head?” and turned to look back at his passengers with a long look. Now he really saw them. Window after window he surveyed them. Window after window. Window after window they looked back at him. Closed faces. Squashed against the windowpanes. Glinting glass. All the seats were taken except for one.
They looked again at the crumpled note, from which the sound of waves rose as from a shell. Tomorrow they were going to meet the father.
In two hundred and fifty million years’ time the continents will be all rolled up and compressed into one mass with a kind of big salty lake in the middle, a big drop left over from the oceans of yore. And it will be very hot with hot winds blowing, and in the streets of the city that the ice will have already wiped off the face of the earth millions of years ago there will be only red sand, blazing heat, desert. And there won’t be a single creature, not even spiders or germs, left in the city, the city will be empty. And all the street signs will be lying in the streets, and all the lamps will be extinguished, far below, upside down, under a layer of rocks and soil and ice and who knows what else for kilometers. Names ground into dust. Pages in the sand. A heavy red silence on the face of the earth. A few minutes pass. A decade passes. Twenty years pass. And nothing moves. Everything has stopped. Come back after a hundred years and nothing’s changed. And already you almost despair. But, like a shattered vase, with a little work, the work of millions of years that is, perhaps they’ll slowly be stuck together again, the pieces, like a giant jigsaw puzzle, and after maybe thirty, sixty, ninety million years, look, a squat tree, or a pale green bush, or a tiny creature swimming in some warm water. Bubbles, bubbles in the slime. Such great labor, a tree has already started to grow in a forsaken corner of the single continent, and again an asteroid strikes and annihilates the miniscule fish and the tree, or ice covers the sea again and all the creatures die, and again a time of quiescence, thirty years, thirty million, there’s no clock to count it. And again a tiny fish, this time a little bigger, and with fins. And again moss on a rock. And again sweet water flows in the streams and pours into the sea. And who is this, walking there in the distance, look, it’s a child, he has already entered the picture, sitting on the riverbank and doing a sum. 1 + 1 =
Enough. Get up, Yoel. Get up. The parents are waiting.
At the central bus station, [ ] would wait next to the buses. Sometimes for hours. Everyone passes here, he thought, so he will pass here too. “He.” Nobody looked back at him.
If he could see him, only for a minute, and even from a distance, it would give him a little peace. And so in the beginning he would go and look for him. Just stand there at school fences. Is that him? Is that him? For years.
And he would sit and play at the bus station, and sometimes in the streets next to it, and sometimes people wanted to throw him a coin, but he never put out a box, and his case was closed, so nobody threw a coin, or else they put it down on the ground. One day, [ ] thought with the sound of the music in his ears, he would bend down to me with a shekel in his fingers. Everybody passes here. Yes. One day he would turn up too. He had to. The name they gave him was Emile. In 1970. But who knows what his name is now.
Get up, Yoel, get up. And running.
Almost running, he’s got a cut from shaving, he crosses the street, leaving the shade of the trees in the avenue, opposite the birdsong, the chiming of the wind chimes on the open porches, making a beeline for the fixed route share-taxi, the kids push ahead of him in the queue, he doesn’t say anything, he’ll wait for an empty van. One is sure to come. No, not empty, but with room for just one more. An old man gets out, Yoel gets in. Like someone penetrating a dank jungle, forging on with head lowered through the sounds echoing in the interior, yes, route 5, he sits down in the old man’s place as the taxi takes off with screeching tires, orangutans shriek from the branches, a tiger slinks through dense foliage, roars, an iceberg creeps slowly from the north, a sun sits on the snowy horizon. He sits down and passes a gleaming coin to the passenger in front of him, who bends his hand backward, here, give it here.
So you tell me, Professor, the driver said to him as if continuing a lengthy conversation, is it permitted or forbidden for the driver and the passengers to have a conversation? And one of them, a pregnant woman with a bag on her knees from one of the bridal boutiques in Dizengoff Street, jumps in: In the buses they used to have stickers, it used to say, “Passengers may not stand next to the driver or talk to him while the vehicle is in motion,” but I don’t see any sticker there behind you, and the driver said, never mind the sticker, forget about the sticker, I’m talking to you about a principle here, is it permitted to talk to the driver or forbidden to talk to the driver? If I have an accident, said the driver, yes? if I have an accident, and we’re all God forbid killed here to death, will they come and say afterwards it’s because he didn’t have a sticker with “It’s forbidden to talk to the driver” on it? I don’t understand you, Sharon, I really don’t! Let me concentrate on driving, let me concentrate on the road! Let me go with the traffic flow, I’m taking a turn here now! And the woman said, pardon me, if it doesn’t say that it’s forbidden to talk to the driver I’ll talk to the driver, and if you don’t like it you don’t have to answer. I take taxis specifically to talk to the driver, if I didn’t want to talk to the driver I’d get onto a long bus and sit on a back seat, and the driver laughed and suddenly braked to let a cat blind in one eye cross the street.
One of the passengers, sitting behind Yoel, who had a blue inflatable felt cushion tucked under his backside and whose whole appearance shouted “senior bureaucrat” said, in your case there should be a sticker saying the opposite, “It’s forbidden for the driver to talk to the passengers,” and the driver said, and maybe there should be a sticker that says, “It’s forbidden for the driver to read stickers”? All the passengers laughed, and Yoel laughed too, and said to the driver, can I talk to you for a minute? And the driver said, feel free, there’s freedom of speech here, and the pregnant passenger said, so why have you been drumming it into my head for an hour that talking to the driver is forbidden, now you’re telling him that it’s permitted to talk to the driver, and she smiled at Yoel, and the driver said, sure it’s permitted to talk to the driver, it depends which driver, I meant another driver. The bureaucrat shifted his position on his blue cushion and said, I’ve never in my life talked to the driver or stood next to the driver, I always bring a cushion and sit at the back, and Yoel turned round and asked, the cushion, is it for piles? And the bureaucrat said, not at all, the cushion is for added height, and Yoel saw that the top of his head was already pressed right up against the roof of the taxi. Hilik, you need a cushion for your head as well, how many times have I told you? Padding top and bottom, why discriminate, the driver roared with laughter as he let off an old woman, interrupting her “thank you” with a “good day,” his eyes on the green light. “Hurry up, get in, there’s a Jumbo behind us,” he said to a couple of young women laden with packages, “but please don’t talk to the driver or stand next to him!” And one of the new passengers
