After the war begins, it will be hard to recall the days that came before it. Hard to remember that Aaron feels great joy and relief the moment he buys the flight ticket away from Vancouver. Five days in Berlin to survey it as the next possible destination for immigration, and then a couple of months in Israel, to recharge. Vancouver is one of the most beautiful cities he’s ever been to, with its sunny beaches and snowy mountain tops, but he felt disconnected from people there in a way he found hard to explain. After an adjustment period people started laughing at his jokes, but he didn’t laugh at theirs, and he didn’t feel close to anyone. Especially not his partner. The months he spent with her there were the last of a ten-year relationship, and everyone involved knew it.

After he arrives in Berlin, he goes to the apartment of the childhood friend who convinced him to visit there. Joseph. You remember him, don’t you? A gentle guy, more pretty than handsome, with shining green eyes and gray hair that takes nothing away from his charm. 

In their boyhood, the three-year gap between them felt much more significant. Joseph took Aaron to explore a neglected meadow behind his parents’ house, and Aaron looked up to him as someone who knew the mysterious wilderness. Now Joseph is doing a master’s in Jewish Studies, and is married to a German woman, a blonde who’s a head taller than him. He is tied with all his being to the child they made together, a pale and blue-eyed toddler who requests from his father in soft Hebrew and demands from his mother in a German so harsh that Aaron’s Polish-Jew instincts urge him to hide in the attic. 

When he arrives at the small-yet-elegant apartment, the sun is setting through the large window, coloring in egg-yolk the dozens of potted plants, wooden floors; all these get a sigh out of Aaron that he didn’t know he was holding in. Joseph plays Alma Zohar on the speakers, heats up some pasta and Oxenschwantz (ox tail) leftovers for dinner, and rolls a huge joint with the explicit intent of sharing it. 

Aaron feels like he is at the end of a great calamity, at the beginning of a great adventure. He eats his dinner even though his biological clock thinks it’s two in the morning, and doesn’t refuse the joint, either. At some point his mouth opens and doesn’t close again as he tells Joseph how, in the last few months, he fought a war he knew he couldn’t win, but also couldn’t admit defeat, surrender, or retreat. He tells Joseph about the suffering it caused both parties involved, a suffering that could have been avoided if only he’d found a solution besides bloody warfare. 

“Well,” Joseph concludes when Aaron’s done. “You are a warrior.”

Aaron doesn’t know if that’s true – he didn’t even complete his army service – but doesn’t argue. Joseph looks at the clock, apologizes, and takes his child to the bedroom, accompanied by protests made in authoritative German. For long minutes Joseph stays in the room with his son, singing in a tender voice Aaron never suspected he was capable of. Israeli classics like the ballad of Yoel Moishe Solomon—songs that Aaron has missed. 

The peace is disturbed when Aaron’s phone bips, having recognized that both (Aaron and the phone) are in Berlin again, and decides to show him pictures of him and his lover from their last visit there. One of the pictures in particular pinches at his heart: the two of them by a mural on the broken Berlin Wall that shows the German head of state kissing the mouth of the Soviet president. In the photo he and his lover also kiss, imitating them. God, the Russian caption under the mural reads, help me survive this deadly love. The words have a different meaning now. 

Joseph returns from the bedroom, and the child yells after him in German, presumably demanding that he return. Joseph takes a seat on the sofa, puts his head on one hand and activates a timer on his phone with the other. 

“It pains you, you know?” he says, and for a moment Aaron thinks that he’s talking about him. “You put him to sleep and he screams like he’s dying, and you feel like it’s been twenty minutes. You look at the clock and it hasn’t even been three. I don’t like it, but that’s what the sleep trainer said has to be done.”

After what feels like long minutes the child stops demanding in German and starts begging in Hebrew. “One more song, Father. Father, just one more. Father!”

Aaron sits there, listening to the simple, almost primitive scream: that awful fear, the plea not to be left alone in this darkness, the horrible knowing that no one is coming to save him from it. It resonates. 

Joseph and him watch the first twenty minutes of an idiotic Chinese action movie and then go to sleep, Joseph in his own apartment, and Aaron a couple of stories below, in a room that he rented. 

Five days pass in a similar manner. Aaron gets up very early in the morning, writes, gets a message from Joseph after he takes the baby to kindergarten to come and do yoga, does yoga, eats breakfast, argues about philosophy until one of them feels bad that Joseph is supposed to be working, and then heads out to the city to see galleries and museums. At around four he gets another message from Joseph that he’s picked up the child from kindergarten and they go together to the Spielplatz (playground), then eat dinner with all sorts of guests that speak articulate English with a graceful German accent, after which Aaron returns to his room, listens to Alma Zohar’s “Blue Eyed” and whimpers like a kicked dog. This was the year, he tells anyone who’s close enough to listen, that he learned how to cry. 

Reading this now, you must think that’s not so special anymore. A lot of people learned how to cry, last year. 

The last day arrives, as last days eventually do. Even without knowing what’s about to happen, he has a feeling it is a grave mistake to leave Berlin. He can see his life there, proceeding just like this. An easy job at a school in the morning, a master’s in English literature in the afternoon, beer and hotdogs in the evening. He and Joseph feel like very close friends and the toddler already accepts him as an uncle. German women are taller and less hostile than Israeli ones. He could heal here. More than that, he could make a home. Just a couple of months in Israel, he promises to himself, to recharge, and he’ll be back to conquer Berlin as soon as winter ends.

It’s raining when he leaves, before the sun rises. It was raining when he left Vancouver too, after a couple of sunny, pleasant weeks. It’s like the sky tries waiting for him to leave before letting itself fall apart, and doesn’t quite succeed.

He carries a little bag on his chest, a large one on his back, and two suitcases that weigh exactly twenty-three kilograms, one in each hand. To every airport security person who looks through his bags he explains, with a degree of oversharing, that all of his worldly possessions are in these bags. The Canadian security people smiled politely, acknowledging something had been shared even if they didn’t want it. The Germans let their closed expressions say that it is none of their business, and even if it were, they would not care. 

The flight from Germany to Israel is laughably short compared to the marathon ones from western Canada, and Aaron barely has time to watch two movies by the time it lands. He waits to pick up his bags from the conveyor belt among densely packed Israelis and is amazed by the feeling that everybody is fighting for their place. So different from the feeling in Canada, where people go out of their way to make sure they aren’t accidently cutting you in line.

By the time his suitcases arrive he is already exhausted, dying to get to the apartment he rented in advance in lively Florentin. After he passes through customs in the lane for people that have nothing to declare, a man in a black t-shirt and jeans approaches him. A tattoo of chainmail wraps one of his arms, a Roman legion helmet the other. 

“Hello, Sir, I am detaining you for a random inspection. I’m only going to delay you for several minutes.”

“Hello, Sir. Can I see some identification?”

“Sure,” he says, and flashes a green ID card. That’s all that Aaron glimpses, but it doesn’t really matter. No one can stand here and ask people to open their suitcases without Security’s knowledge and consent.

“Thank you. May I ask why you are in plainclothes?”

“Because I’m a detective. Don’t worry, it really will only take a couple of minutes.”

“No worries, I set time in advance to be randomly selected.”

“I don’t have any prior knowledge of you, if that’s what you’re saying. My job is to stand here and pick people out of the crowd.”

“I’ve got no complaints, friend. I understand the logic in choosing a bearded man traveling alone. Where should I put my bags?”

“Well, I can already see you have common sense. Here on the table please. Two suitcases; it must have been a long trip.”

“All of my worldly possessions,” Aaron says for the first time in Hebrew, “are in these four bags.”

“Walla¹?” the detective says, with honest sympathy. “That’s rough.”

The most noticeable trait of this detective, Aaron notes, is that he really is uncomfortable with his role. He knows that he is invading Aaron’s privacy by using the power given to him by the state; knows that Aaron doesn’t want to go to prison, which is what would happen if he refused the search. But he has the decency to feel bad about it, to try and make time pass a little more pleasantly. 

“I’ll look at the books, with your permission, to make sure nothing’s hidden in them. I’ll just pick one at random.” He raises a book with a lavender cover and a drawing of a cherry blossom in black ink. Zhuangzi – The True Book of The Southern Bloom.

“Ah,” Aaron says. “You’ve chosen well.”

“Walla? What is it about?”

“How to become free.”

“So like, self-help?”

“Not exactly: it’s Chinese philosophy.” Aaron feels a measure of humiliation flattening this great book into a category. Zhuagnzi writes that words are like a net, used to catch ideas. Once you’ve caught the ideas, you have no more need for words. Find me a man who doesn’t need words, to have a word with.

The detective shrugs, and continues searching, lifting a couple of shin guards. “Do you do Muay Thai?”

“Karate, Kyokoshinkai.”

“Nice. I’ll try not to piss you off. Do you train?”

“I used to, in Vancouver. At Tatsuji Nakamura’s.”

“Oh, went on vacation and now you’re coming back?”

“I tried to leave, actually. I’m coming back to gain momentum to leave again.”

The detective looks up. “I’m against people leaving, just so you know, but if you do I wish you all the success in the world,” he says, and performs that last gesture of sharing in the burden – closing the suitcase’s zipper. It is a true gesture, one he probably performs more than a hundred times a day, though no law forces him to. Aaron knows thanking him would cheapen this true sharing, so he says he hopes they will see each other only on good occasions, and proceeds to the train station. 

He takes the train to the HaHagana² Station, and experiences the greatest feeling of crowdedness he has in months. He doesn’t understand how people think it’s ok to yell when they stand so close to each other. A cab driver waiting outside the bus station sees him looking around and starts asking “Where do you do need to go?”, again and again. Aaron pretends to know and starts walking the wrong way through the cacophonous crowd. The streets scare him. Significantly fewer homeless people than in Vancouver, but unlike the peaceful homeless of Canada, Israeli homeless have hostility in them, and hunger.

He waits by the bus stop, but for some reason the bus’s live location doesn’t update. A young, tanned man with a synthetic soccer shirt and fashionable haircut approaches him. “Which line gets to Rabin Square?” he asks, no introduction, no nothing. 

“You have 40,” Aaron replies, “but it doesn’t go through here. You need to go to the next stop down the street.”

The man looks away, points. “There?”

“Yes.”

The young man doesn’t look back. Once he understands where his destination is, the interaction is over, as far as he’s concerned. 

Aaron knows he shouldn’t engage in conflict, that he won’t succeed in teaching the youth of this country manners, but he can’t hold himself back. “You’re welcome,” he says.

Now the guy does turn back. “What?”

“You’re welcome,” Aaron repeats. 

The man looks at him for a moment, as if deliberating whether there’s even a point saying anything more, and walks away.

The bus finally arrives. Aaron gets on it, disappointed to find that no one makes room for him and his four bags. He spends the ride standing and trying to stop the suitcases from running wild. He gets off, follows the instructions on his phone, and arrives at the single grossest apartment he’s ever been to. Even worse than the one in Be’er Sheva, where he spent six hundred shekels a month because he couldn’t believe he’d complete the first year of studies, and prepared himself to keep paying for it after he got back to Tel Aviv. Here there are holes in the walls, windows that won’t close, a seat that isn’t connected to the toilet in any way, a bathtub in shades of brown. A dead fridge blocks the front door from the outside. 

He sees now how soft he’s gotten in exile, how much higher his standard of living has become. But he’s also learned to move in exile, shaken off some paralysis that accompanied him all of his life, and now he can act. First he calls two friends, Menashe and Shimshon, to come drink and loiter in Florentin and stop him from sinking into a bad mood. Then he texts people who might be able to give him a place to stay. One of them, Shammai, says that he is currently at an artificial intelligence convention in Paris, and his apartment is free for the next couple of days, if he’d like it. Aaron thanks him dearly and texts the landlord to notify him, in a way that is neither insulting nor demanding, that he is going to live somewhere else. He asks the landlord for a partial refund for the rent that was paid, even though the lease doesn’t obligate him to do so.

“I won’t refund a part of the rent,” the landlord responds. “I’d rather refund all of it.”

Aaron is so stunned by the generosity he doesn’t know what to say. “No place like Israel, believe you me,” he mumbles to himself.

NEXT: Soldiers

1. Arabic. Used in spoken Hebrew similarly to “For real?” in English ↩︎
2. Hebrew, literally meaning “The defense,” the name of a pre-independence Jewish freedom fighting organization. ↩︎