Several more days like this pass, with more and less interesting events. Aaron moves between a couple of apartments, sleeps a couple of nights at Ya’akov’s when he can’t find a vacant place. Just when he starts to feel that he’s overstaying his welcome, his father texts him that one of his renters, who is going to spend the month in an army base, has agreed to sublet the apartment. Not entirely for free—his father first gave up the rent for the month, not knowing that he’ll ask her to use the place later. 

Aaron arrives at the flat, throws his bags by the entrance, wipes the sweat off his forehead and surveys his bounty. The living room is small but well organized, tidier than Aaron would have kept for himself, with only one item breaking the aesthetic—an improvised Israeli flag, with a thin bamboo stick for a pole. He never met the people who live there, but it’s enough for him to feel some kinship to them. 

On the first evening, he hears his neighbor and her two children on the nearby flat, through the living room wall. At first it’s just a young boy, about four years old, calling his mother again and again. After a couple of minutes of repeated calling, Aaron hears her steps, and then her voice as she asks what’s going on. 

A third character appears then, an older boy, eight or ten years old. “It’s all fine,” he answers, and even through the wall you can hear the mischievous smile in his voice. 

“What are you doing to him?” The mother raises her voice. “You’re hurting him!”

“I’m not hurting him, I’m just hugging him.”

“But he doesn’t want to!”

“I know, that’s why it’s fun.”

“It’s not fun, it’s violence!”

“It’s fun and it’s violence,” The little wiseguy answers. 

Aaron opens his phone and writes down what he’s just heard, and when the words are put down they seem so blunt, so on the nose. And it’s too similar to what he’s heard already, with that little girl. He’s disappointed from reality’s writing, but he puts it in the memoir anyway. 

A reminder comes up on his phone, interrupting him—turns out it’s been a month and a week since he was supposed to start living in Florentin, and he made a memo to talk to the owner and get back the rent he’s been promised. He opens the correspondence between them, and reading it again realizes he didn’t understand correctly—the owner in fact wrote that he’ll give Aaron the money back only if Aaron finds someone to live there instead of him, a fate Aaron wouldn’t wish on his worst enemy. Don’t go back in the text looking for it, it’s written wrong. That’s how memories are. 

The fish, the good Jew Aaron met in Florentin, finally sends his poetry, and Aaron reads, not knowing what to expect. He doesn’t really enjoy it, but he has to admit the rhymes are impressively creative, like “commander” and “blow up a mosque”, or “terrorist running away” and “shot the fiend” (the last one really impresses Aaron, over the image being drawn of the narrator shooting another human being in the back, which isn’t very common in poetry). They discuss it carefully over texts, and the fish explains to Aaron that he has no desire to hurt anybody, he just really really wants to protect his land. I swear to God.

Aaron stays in that apartment for a couple of days. Sometimes he manages to sleep more than five hours a night. In the days he deliberates whether to fly to Thailand, or maybe move to Germany and start his life there, or maybe stay a couple of months in Israel with his friends. The flight to Thailand is more expensive now because the plane not only doesn’t stop in Muslim Dubai, it goes around the entirety of Saudi Arabia, which it didn’t have to before. Berlin is frozen now, and you can’t make friends when nobody wants to leave the house, and in Israel, well, you know. 

His friends vote for and against each of the possibilities, and he understands what he wants to do by the expression that comes on his own face when he hears their suggestions. 

His father, in a rare moment of quiet, pats him on the back. “It’s a rare opportunity,” he says. “You don’t have a home you need to figure out what to do with, no workplace you need to negotiate a vacation with, no girlfriend to compromise with. No one’s waiting for you.” Aaron doesn’t enjoy hearing it, but he agrees. 

On Sunday he buys a ticket to a flight that embarks on Thursday, and invites the friends over to say goodbye on wednesday. They arrive, Eliezer, Shammai, Yael, two friends who weren’t mentioned because they were in Holland, and another one Aaron just didn’t get a chance to meet, Yona. 

They talk of everyday things, but Aaorn connects everything they say to how it might help them move abroad, escape. Yona’s cat died from circumstances unrelated to the war, at the age of twenty three, and Yona talks of the grief offhandedly. (One less obstacle stopping him from leaving, Aaron notes.) The couple that was in Holland say a little about the possibility that one of them will study for a doctorate there, and a lot about the first time they consumed edibles, giggling when they arrive at the part where the doctorate candidate imagined the room they were in with such detail he didn’t believe his beloved when she told him his eyes were closed. (If he’ll get accepted to the doctorate, and she’ll get permission from her job to work remotely, they could do that every weekend.) Shammai updates them on the latest advances in AI research, as if he would tell of the demons he and his sorcerer colleagues were summoning in the dungeons of their dark tower, but not without humor. (The road is paved for Shammai to immigrate anywhere, but that’s not new.) Yael claims that Christopher Nolan is not a good director, and under siege from everyone present defends her post with her life. Aaron finally admits that she has a point, and he’s never really cared for any of Nolan’s protagonists. Then again, do you know how hard it is to write a likable protagonist? (It’s not easy to get into Hollywood as a screenwriter, but Aaron believes Yael is capable of it.)

Eventually it gets late, and even though Aaron won’t see these friends for a long time, he lets them know that he’s tired, that he wants to go to sleep early in order to organize everything for the flight tomorrow. He walks them down the stairs, hugs them outside, and climbs back up. When he opens the door to his apartment, he smells the strong dank smell of weed. On his couch, using a small teacup as an ashtray, sits a doppelganger of his, tanned and with a slightly longer beard. 

“Oh, hello,” Aaron greets him. 

“Sup.”

“Who are you?”

The doppelganger rolls his eyes. “You.”

“Like, me from the future?”

“Think less Rick and Morty, and more Dostoyevsky’s The Double.”

“Haven’t read that one yet. Are you a version of me that did?”

“I saw the Jesse Eisenberg film. The point is I’m a literary tool. You’re going to write what’s happening now, in the future.”

“So it is time travel?”

“Halas¹.”

“Either way, you can’t smoke here,” Aaron says. “You’ll stink their place up.”

“It’s fine,” the double answer. “This part is entirely fictional.”

Aaron thinks about it for a moment, shrugs. “So it’s fine, I guess. So, why are you here?”

“He thought-”

“Who thought?”

“You from the future, writing this. He thought it would be more interesting to sum it all up as a dialogue instead of a monologue.”

“Very Platonic. Should I bring the olive oil and Togas?”

“Never discourage a man who’s making progress,” the double quotes.

“Fair enough,” Aaron concedes, sits down and puts his shoes on the table, if this is all being imagined by me, anyway. “So, is this piece fiction or non-fiction?”

“It’s mostly real, but any attempt to describe reality will be faulty. There were also decisions that he took consciously—to write that you arrived one day before the war started even though you arrived on the second of October, to pretend you didn’t spend even a single night in the gross apartment even though you slept the first night there, popping a clonazepam and pretending you were in a zombie apocalypse, fortunate to find a place to stay. He decided to add this entirely fictional part to sum it all up, but also to warn the reader not to believe him too much.”

Aaron nods. “Where is he now?”

“Bangkok. It was a good decision to go. A good place to fall apart in, just like Shimshon said. He wanted me to tell you it’s exactly like you imagined, but more. Check out this metaphor: in the house of the Israeli he’s staying with, there’s a huge dog that’s supposed to deter burglars, but she’s so aggressive she makes the life inside of the house insufferable. Strong, isn’t it?”

“Strong indeed. And he doesn’t want to write that?”

“Enough is enough,” the double says, and takes a long toke, exhaling slowly. “It needs to be done at some point. You can’t go on and on, on the faces that tourists make when you tell them you’re from Israel, and how the most leftie Israelis find themselves isolated from their international online communities, and so on. Maybe we’ll write more at some point. For now, for this piece, he wants it to be clear what he’s trying to say, to anyone reading it.”

“I thought… That I’m writing this just for her.”

“It started out that way, but obviously you want other people to read it too. Maybe somebody could make something out of it. And he’s afraid that it will kill some friendships, in Israel and out of it, so at least he wants the friendships to be killed over his true opinion.” 

Aaron thinks about that for a moment. “You know, that’s still weird to me. People become friends because they trust each other that their intentions are good. And then this kind of topic arrives, and every one of the friends makes their best effort to arrive at the right decision, and if their logical processes end up leading them to different conclusions, they stop trusting each other.”

“It’s the other way around. The trust comes from the shared opinions, and when the opinions stop being shared, the trust declines.”

“So what is he going to do,” Aaron asks, “Plead with them to trust him?”

“No point. If somebody doesn’t trust that your intentions are good, it won’t change anything if you told them. Whoever believes in you, believes in you already.”

Aaron has to admit he’s a little disappointed in all of this. There he is talking directly to the Metatron, and still everything is laden with misunderstanding, faulty communication. “So there’s no point in this introduction. What’s the point of this whole thing?”

“What do you think? You’re the protagonist of this story.”

Aaron looks at the ceiling for a long moment. Like all Jews, he knows that there’s a power to the words we say and the order we say them in, that they shape reality in a true, meaningful sense. “I think… that the world is in a war between love and hate. Don’t roll your eyes, listen to me for a second. When people love, they want there to be more love. When people hate, they inspire more hatred. And what happened on October Seventh, was a win for hatred. What do you think, that Hamas thought it would drive us back to europe? They wanted to fill Israel with so much pain, so much hate, that everything that would remain here is war. And they were somewhat successful. They managed a psychological impact that every US-school-shooter can only dream of. I don’t know the names of the terrorists, but the name Hamas I will never forget. And it’s not just that they hurt the mental health of every person in israel—they made us more like them.”

“So you’re saying that Israel is free from blame for the horror happening here?”

“I’m not a judge, I’m a scientist. I’m trying to understand the process. Israel bombed Gaza harder than it ever did. Killed more people in a very short span of time. On our side, a line has been crossed, and will be easier to cross next time. And on theirs… How many gazans blame Hamas, and how many Israel? How many orphaned children will just grow with the desire to kill someone? That’s the process, the spreading of hate, like a virus. I’m making a prediction: the next generation of Hamas is going to have the highest percentage of recruits from the population since the organization was founded. And Israelis are going to have an easier time reading about death, hearing about death, seeing death.”

Like a gentle, precise teacher, the double looks for the right question to spur Aaron forward. “So that’s it? It’s all processes, with no emotion?”

“Don’t be a shit. I’m terrified. I’ve never been so afraid in my whole life. If I’d let myself see the videos of people being taken or murdered, if I’d allowed myself to feel, I think I too would have felt that thirst for revenge, that simple human need to kill whoever hurt my clan. It’s an emotional reaction, and it won’t disappear just by being recognized. But it can be categorized. It can be understood. And it can be predicted. We did exactly what Hamas wanted us to.”

The double is silent, letting the words settle into the space. In the heat of discussion, he forgot to smoke. The joint lies on the brim of the cup, extinguished. Without the inhale and exhale of living lungs, the fire dies.

“What?” says Aaron to his likeness’s image. “You disagree?”

“You’re going to have a couple of months to think about this, since you arrive at that conclusion. And you’re probably right about the mechanism, hate igniting more hate and all that. But to think that’s what Hamas wanted, it’s a little naive.”

“What do you think? That they actually expected it to start a war that will drag the entire middle east into it?”

“I think you’re so deep into your perspective that you think everyone is as pragmatic as you are. But open up Wikipedia for a second, my brother, and see that we’re talking about a religious organization that’s been founded as an antithesis to the secular Fatah. They’ve engaged in a religious war, out of the true belief that God will support and repay them, in this world or the next. You’re trying so hard to fit Shpinoza and Lao Tze and Jesus into a single religious conception that you can live with, that you don’t understand people live in a completely different world. A world where God is real, and gives you permission to kill and die in His name. People here talk a lot about an Arabic worldview versus the European one. ‘You’re eating sushi in a place where people wipe humus’. But that’s not it. It’s a religious perception against a liberal one. A holy war versus just living your life the best you can.”

“Okay, so what do we do?” Aaron takes the joint off the cup, draws his own lighter, lights up, takes a very deep draw. It’s comforting, even before the neurochemical effect starts. It’s comforting to know that relief is on the way. 

The double laughs and leans back. “Do you think I have any idea? He did what you promised in the introduction—describe what you saw, this process. People convince each other it’s okay to kill people on the other side of the fence, and it’s the belief that’s the enemy, not the people.”

“You know you’re not going to convince anyone of that.”

“Maybe not.” The double leans forward suddenly, his face stern. “So how about this: Bibi and Hamas are on the same team. They gain out of each other’s growth, and they’re against us. The Israeli citizens and the Gazans are also on the same team, and not only because they’re trying to survive the manipulation of these parasites.” For legal reasons I’d like to say I’m not condoning any violent action, but the state of Israel does have a penalty for treason written into its legal codex, and when people commit a crime they should be punished for it. “If there won’t be a resolution between the people and their rulers, there won’t be any solution.”

“Really, my brother? Marxist analysis? Are you going to tell the Israelis that the people that cheered…” Aaron’s eyes glaze over for a moment. No one but his clone would even notice the micro-stutter as he suppresses the images of the body of a young woman tossed around in a forest of hands, over a sea of cheering mouths. “Murder, are their allies?”

It breaks the double’s heart to see him like this, and he does the only thing he can do to relieve him, which is to take the discussion forward. “Some cheered, some knew that it was a horror, some for years have been arriving at quiet protests and getting their face broken by tear gas grandes shot right into the crowd. It’s like saying that IDF soldiers are murderers. True, sometimes a soldier puts a bullet in the head of someone innocent that doesn’t even resist, but still the majority is very committed to be as ethical as they can. And each one of our friends that got drafted as a combatant, returned more left leaning then before.” And with post traumatic stress syndrome. One insists it’s not a problem that he sleeps one hour a night, another, a hulking mass of bulging muscle, politely asks that we order hamburgers instead of barbecue them ourselves, because the smell of charred meat brings back the memories. A third one gave up on his life entirely. Didn’t kill himself, just didn’t leave his room for a decade.

Aaron is getting pissed. “How can I know that? How can I know what these people believe?”

“Oh I don’t know, maybe try to actually talk to them. How come you don’t talk to anyone Arabic in this entire story?”

“Because I don’t have any Arabic friends. What am I supposed to do? To call up Ahmed from school? ‘Ahalan brother of mine, how are you? Sorry we didn’t talk for five years. I wanted to ask how you feel being a minority in a country that’s becoming more and more racist towards you?’”

“He would have answered, though. What a sweetheart.”

“A really sweet guy, but I wouldn’t be comfortable with that.”

“So how do you expect to understand what’s going where you live?”

“I guess I don’t. I guess all I can do is describe what it’s like being a secular Israeli Jew, and watching the country lose its mind. Besides, I don’t live here anymore. I left.”

“And what if everyone leaves? And no one stays here to fight?” It’s not clear to Aaron whether the double is disappointed with him, or communicating his own fears.

Aaron pulls at his beard. “If I’d known how, I’d fight. But before you pull out the war drums, don’t forget why we left over a year ago: the people who think that God is real and promised them the land are on both sides of the fence, and on both sides they’re making much more babies than the people who believe in human rights. In Israel, the percentage of people that think women should not be allowed to sing in public, that deliberately send their children to schools that don’t teach math or english, rises every year. I knew that it’s going to be way harder abroad than in Israel, but I also knew that in a couple of decades there won’t be an Israel anymore. With this unending war, nobody has time to fight for the termination of allowances². As things are looking now, in fifteen years there won’t be women singing on TV, no pride parades, which means there won’t be pride parades in the middle east at all. I don’t see any solution to that, and if you have one, you’re welcome to share it with the rest of the class.”

“No,” the double says quietly. “I don’t.”

For a long moment they’re both silent. Aaron takes a long draw, coughs. The effect arrives. He feels reality, already a pretty loose thing, loosen its grip on him a little more. “Say, is he happy there?”

“In Thailand? It’s hard to say. Sometimes. He’s very lonely, but he can sleep. Not every night, but sometimes he sleeps nine hours in a row.”

“Binging on the legal weed?”

“Without weed. In a foreign place, without knowing the language or customs, surrounded by great poverty, in a house with a huge dog that hates him, and still he sleeps better.”

“And you?”

“What about me?” He laughs, as if the question is no question at all. “I’m a literary device. I’m here to deliver a message.”

“So I’m asking you to deliver a message,” Aaron says. “From me to him.”

“What?”

“Ask him not to disappear there. Not to end up like Moti Banana in Zurich.”

Do you remember that quote? Did you even see that movie, Operation Grandma? Even if you didn’t, it means exactly what you think it means.

The double, for the first time, is pissed off, and Aaron is awed by the way anger makes his face ugly. “And if he disappears, so what? How many friends do we have that fell off the track, that stopped believing anything good will come out of their lives, and stopped trying? One disappeared in Belgium and nobody knows what he’s on about, another still here but refused to spend a single night without drugs, another unemployed and playing computer games sixteen hours a day, and confesses: ‘I don’t do it because it’s fun, I do it to stop existing.’ You blame that on a personal problem, on willpower, but Israel is a world where war goes in through your eyes and ears, through your nose and mouth. It’s pumped in the drinking water and breathing air. Are you surprised people run away? There are places where it isn’t like that. And I’m not talking about one place, Canada, most of Europe, make Israel feel like a madhouse. Why not disappear somewhere? I’m a version of you that dealt with that fear.”

“Really?” Aaron laughs. “The version of me that went to the other side of the world, that’s the version that’s going to talk about overcoming fear?”

“I’m the version of you that doesn’t need to prove anything. That doesn’t feel shame for wanting a better life.”

Now Aaron leans forward, responding with an attack of his own. “Tell me, does this seem alright, to you? People ran for their lives and that’s what he’s writing about? A vacation in Thailand?”

“That’s the beauty of it,” the double smiles, as if he intended everything. “That we describe the least-horrible perspective, the person war affected the least, and still it’s ruining his life. War is a many-headed monster that eats the lives of human beings and shits out misery. It’s a poison that reaches everywhere. A virus that kills people that weren’t even infected by it. We have to understand what it looks like from all sides, what it does to people.”

“And if we see it from all sides and still don’t solve it?”

“Are you listening to me, you dumb stoner? Do you think you’re even close to solving anything?” The double says and waves Aaron to pass the joint. 

“So… what’s the point of all this?”

“When a bunch of Brits in a Bangkok drag-show ask if I’m on the side of Israel or Palestine, I could give them this to read, and maybe they’ll understand they’re breaking into two parts a puzzle that has at least six different pieces. When a US American asks me why I’m not in Israel, fighting, (something an Israeli never would) I could send this, explaining that people don’t have to live like this. Do you remember what Vancouver was like?”

“I remember…” Aaron, despite himself, smiles. “After about a month, a great peace fell upon me. A tension that I didn’t know I was holding was suddenly released. In Israel you feel like you have to fight, otherwise they’ll take what’s yours. And out there… you don’t feel like the world is trying to defeat you. You don’t feel like dying every time you need to handle anything bureaucratic. And the people, instead of cutting in line, just wait. Israelis in Canada always joke that Canadians love to wait. It’s not true, nobody likes waiting in line. They just don’t curse and bitch all the time, they don’t shout “why isn’t there another cash register?”. In Canada, you just wait. You pass by. It’s another part of your day. It’s not a struggle against anyone else.” 

“It doesn’t sound like you miss Canada. It sounds like you just don’t wanna be here anymore.”

“That’s true.”

“So what are you back here for? If you want to move, move. What do you need to justify it all for?”

“Because I’m Israeli. That’s what I discovered in Canada. No matter how much my English improves, how much I stick to etiquette, I’m still an Israeli. Worse, I’m a Jew. I didn’t know that before Canada. I thought I was an Atheist.”

“And what did you figure out?” The double asks, but from his smile it’s clear he already knows. 

“That I think like a Jew, joke like a Jew, live like a Jew. That I don’t really feel like I’m having a conversation if I’m not arguing with someone. That I love this culture. That I love the Israelis.”

“So…”

“But Israel is dying. And Judaism… it’s going back to what it used to be. My judaism is the diaspora kind, the wiseguy-judaism where if you ask your rabbi if God exists and he or she answers with something adorable like ‘many different wise rabbis tried to answer this question and the only thing that everyone agree upon is that it doesn’t matter, you should still come to the synagogue.’ Judaism here is returning to the one of old, conquering under a divine justification. 

“So we’re going to be refugees, like grandma?” The double says, forgetting his role of guide. His eyes open a little wider as he stares into the distance. “Speaking in a strange accent. Not fully understanding the culture, missing a place that doesn’t exist anymore?”

Aaron puts the joint down, grabs the double’s hand with two of his own. The double is surprised by this sudden proximity. Aaron looks him in the eyes. “I’m sorry,” Aaron says. “For all of the times I called you a coward. It’s okay to be afraid. Nothing wrong with it. To stop trying, to hide, make excuses, lie, these are things that are worthy of contempt. We need to keep trying to engender love and understanding in this world, I don’t care how cringe that sounds. That is the whole Torah, the rest is commentary.”

The double didn’t expect to be so close, so soon. His voice cracks. “And what if we fail? What if no one gets it?”

Aaron slaps his double twice, not hard, like grandma used to do before saying something she really wanted him to listen to. “Then I’ll be there with you, and we’ll cry together. If there’s anything we learned this year…”

NEXT: Conclusions

1. Arabic – Enough ↩︎
2. This refers to two different government sponsored allowances. One giving Yeshiva students an allowance to study the Torah, even grown men. The other gives a monthly amount of money for every child born. The majority of income tax in Israel is paid by employees in tech companies, which are mostly secular. ↩︎