Aaron remembers Uncle Yoni fondly. In third grade, Aaron was clever enough to realize that he could learn more than what was given to him in school, but not smart enough to prove it to anyone, to actually get into some program for gifted kids. School was a prison of horrible boredom, and he didn’t know what crime he’d committed to be sentenced to twelve years there. 

And then came Uncle (technically his aunt’s divorced husband, but no one cared about that) Yoni. Aaron doesn’t really remember the events that came before, only that for that year, every Tuesday he would go to Yoni’s and they’d play thinking games. Sometimes three dimensional puzzles, like two rings that needed to be separated or a pyramid made of irregular pieces he had to take apart and put back together; sometimes scientific questions like, “What’s smell, anyway?”, and an experiment that Aaron remembers clearly, where Yoni lit incense in one room and they walked around the apartment and estimated how the intensity of the smell correlated to distance. Aaron’s decision to spend an afternoon with his nephews, once every week or two, and play chess or write code, or discuss Emanual Kant, was very much influenced by Uncle Yoni. 

Later, when Aaron was in middle school, Yoni worked as a teacher at the same school, teaching the lowest graded division of math students. Aaron would occasionally be approached by some thug, and instead of initiating conflict, the thug would instead start singing Uncle Yoni’s praises, saying how much he’d helped and believed in him, and that it was only because of Yoni that he could learn math at all. 

In the years since, Yoni moved from Tel Aviv to Miztzpe Ramon, where he teaches kids, and Aaron feels guilty for the long years he didn’t see him. Not since he moved to Canada, but not in the years before, either. So when Aaron’s parents tell him they’re going to visit Yoni and his partner, Aaron decides to join them. 

When Yoni opens the apartment door he’s limping on stiff legs, bent forward, and there’s an old orthopedic belt wrapped around his lower back. His movements remind Aaron of a turtle walking on two legs, but when he sees Aaron, all of that stiffness and fatigue fall away. “Aaron, what a surprise!” He’s bald and very tanned, with thick fingers that each end in broken nails. He wears a faded shirt and pants and old sandals. 

Aaron extends his hand to Uncle Yoni, steeling himself. Yoni has always had a strong grip, and for some reason he used to enjoy surprising Aaron with it, squeezing the bones of the palm together. I don’t know if you know what that feels like, but it’s very unpleasant, and Aaron always found it uncivilized, though he let it slide. But when Aaron shakes his hand now Yoni returns a feeble squeeze. Something that was there before, something Aaron could count on, is fading away. 

Yoni’s partner brings them food and leads them to a table on the balcony. Aaron’s mom and Yoni argue about politics, and both say smart and interesting things but don’t listen to each other enough, too focused on the details on which they disagree to synthesize new ideas. Nobody comes out happy, but they do agree on one thing—it’s a true godsend that Biden brought his aircraft carriers to Israel’s shore, even if the constant hum of drones is insufferable. Also, the food is very good. 

At the end of the visit, Uncle Yoni walks Aaron to the car. They say goodbye, but after Aaron turns away, Yoni calls to him again, as if suddenly remembering he’s there. “Aaron, if you wanna come to Mitzpe, you’re always invited. If you love it, if you’ve got the talent for it, come and teach. You could replace me, and everyone would benefit. Whenever you want to, come.”

Aaron drives away, smiling.

He’s going to see Noah, a friend he made in kindergarten and was shoulder to shoulder with all the way through highschool. When Aaron arrives, Noah’s father and mother are there, not so much hovering over his baby, Michal, as just sitting with her. Hadar, Noah’s wife, and his mom, who’s also named Hadar, sit at each side of the baby on a mat on the floor. Noah and his father sit on the sofa, drinking black coffee, enjoying the child’s simple being there like old hunters enjoying a fire on a cold night. 

When Aaron sees Noah’s father, two decades older than he last saw him, he finds out that he still holds a grudge for a rude utterance the father made when Aaron was eleven, one year after his brother died. He recalls the shock of it, the inability to deal with the stinging insult or the confusion that a grownup had done the wounding, not another child. 

When Aaron looks at that bent back, the watery, vulnerable eyes, he knows he can take his revenge now. He has improved at the subtle art of placing words one after the other since they last met. He knows that he can hurt the man, perhaps even in a way other people won’t be able to perceive.

He takes a deep breath. It’s not that taking revenge is forbidden. He just doesn’t want it as much as he wants to forgive. He turns to Noah’s father and shares with him a memory that’s related to both of them, as he always does when he tries to engender closeness. “Do you know that I learned the word ‘shitty’ from you? Noah and I were playing with animal-shaped toys, and Noah said, this is a little rhino, a little shitty rhino. Then I went to my dad and asked him what shitty meant and he got angry. Noah must have learned that from you, right?”

Noah’s father raises both eyebrows. Seems he doesn’t know what to say. 

“When was that?” Hadar (Noah’s mother) asks. Changing the subject, maybe? “In Haya’s Kindergarten?”

Noah shakes his head. “Haya’s Kindergarten was before I knew Aaron. This had to be Tova’s Kindergarten. We were five.”

Aaron calculates. “Twenty-nine years ago.”

Noah laughs, but there’s a bitterness in the sound. “God guard us, that’s a really long time.”

The father comes to the rescue. “Twenty-nine years ago sounds like a lot, and it’s unpleasant to hear. Better to say ‘some time ago.’ And why does it matter exactly how long ago it was, anyway?” He finally manages to address Aaron. “It’s funny that you remember that. The rhino. Such a small thing; it’s interesting how our core structures remain relevant.”

The conversation sails on in that direction—how in some period of our lives our memories are stronger, and the changes that happen to us have more of an impact. Noah tells them about an ex-religious guy who worked with him at a software company. “He’s a chess genius—I mean crazy good. Do you know how much 2200 elo is?”

Aaron nods. “It means he wasn’t far from being Israel’s champion.”

“Yeah! And maybe he would have gone even further, but instead he got into the tech world, and now he’s also an alcoholic, so that doesn’t help. Anyway, he was one out of sixteen kids. Do you understand what kind of crazy poverty that is? It’s not just eating a slice of bread with some mayonnaise for dinner, and it’s not just that the older kids raise the younger ones: everyone knows the orthodox do that. Once you have fifteen siblings, that means you don’t get to sleep on a bed every night. They used to make bets for their bed-nights, trading them for favors. Aaron, do you want some coffee? I’m making more anyway.”

Aaron looks at his watch, sees that it’s already past one o’clock, but decides to sin a little. “Make me half a cup?”

“Sababa, but I saw the hesitation there. Are you limiting yourself? This is my vice, I drink so many of these.”

“What, like four cups a day?” 

“Eleven, twelve easy. Talk about nurture.”

Noah’s father shrugs and sips from the black tar in his cup. “I drink coffee at midnight too; it doesn’t hurt my sleep, and I like it.”

Aaron looks at this old man with the white beard and the mustache stained a dirty orange right in the middle, where cigarette smoke has corroded everything it touched. His teeth, when he smiles, are the same rotten color. 

Aaron remembers that Noah told him, a few years back, how hard it was to stop smoking tobacco. It bothered him in every waking moment, and in his dreams he’d be standing on the porch and lighting one up. Sweet dreams that he always woke up from right before the cigarette touched his lips. 

The grandparents leave, and Hadar (Noah’s wife), goes to put the baby down for a nap. Noah and Aaron move to the balcony, in the shade, and pretend that the heat (of the end of October, goddammit) isn’t intolerable. 

“Listen,” Noah says, “there were a lot of things I had to change after I left home. Like, I became much less homophobic. I made an effort to improve. I realized it was a problem when a friend came out of the closet. I was already pretty alright by then, yeah? I’d accepted that people can do whatever they want and it’s none of my business, but he still came to me last of all his friends. It was sad to realize he was really afraid of my reaction.”

“Who, Telem?”

“Yeah. I know he’s not exactly gay: he was a crossdresser, and then he said he was gay and then said he was never gay… There’s some sort of story there. Obviously it was more than just sex.”

The trait in Noah that has always surprised Aaron is that simple closeness. The fact that he calls his mom every morning (something unimaginable to Aaron), yet still can reject their opinions completely. 

He’s the same with his friends, particularly about addictions. While each and every one of their shared friends smokes weed, Noah doesn’t. He stopped when he got a job as a contractor for the military¹, but never went back to it because he noticed he started being able to do more things—lift weights seriously, but also learn programming languages he ended up teaching in college. He even wrote a couple of courses by himself. He did more, because it stopped being so easy to do nothing.

“In this country you feel like you always need to do something,” Noah says. “I don’t know if weed is anti-anxiety or if it just makes you stop feeling like you should be getting more done. It’s anti-motivation, that’s how it allows you to actually relax. But if you smoke every day you don’t move forward, you don’t think about new things, you don’t change. I have some friends in problematic places. People in their thirties acting like they’re in their twenties, and it’s not pretty; it’s not fun to see.” 

Aaron wonders if he knows how much he sounds like his father. A needlessly large motorcycle accelerates in one of the nearby streets, and for a split second it sounds just like a rocket alarm. Both of them rise in their chairs a little, and take a moment to sink back into them. “I don’t understand how anyone could knowingly choose to be such a piece of shit.”

“No need to understand,” Noah says. “They need to be fucking drowned. Should we go back in? The heat’s killing me out here.”

Next: Refugees

1.  Most military-related companies in Israel demand workers take a polygraph test regarding the use of marijuana and other drugs. I’ve never heard of a single case of a civilian-facing company doing the same. 
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