I think back on the first list that I wrote here in the Coronavirus Diaries.
I was so innocent back then. I was convinced, in mid-March, that the project will continue for four or five weeks and then we would return to our normal lives, which now seem so distant. But I now understand that this acute stage is over; we are now at the chronic stage. We will just have to live with the virus somehow. I already see how my despair fits in a more comfortable position.
What's particularly difficult is the fact that I am locked inside Israel. If we do not consider the domestic flight my friend arranged for me when I was 17, it is safe to say that I was 32 when I first flew overseas.
I have been invited to various writing programs abroad ever since. The meetings are now carried out by email correspondence with my friends around the globe.
Hau in Singapore wants to know more about the radical change that has transformed Israeli society since May, from a country that is among the safe "Green" countries to one of the most "Red" countries.
Tatiana has been taking pictures styling a face mask and posing like a supermodel, sending me a makeshift picture book. Only with the Chinese, I have yet to talk. This has nothing to do with the coronavirus; it just an old grudge from some writing program in Iowa.
The government's bipolar conduct may raise some eyebrows, trigger ridicule and bewilderment among people globally, but my reaction is horror. It's amazing how little is necessary to unmask the facade of government solidarity, showing the atrophied and complicated situation in our regime, the foot-dragging and shirking of responsibility, and the inability to appoint someone who could manage the situation in a cold and calculated way rather through some populist policies.
The government's next step is to use profanity against the people, and that has trickled to the street. "Israelis are a bunch of scammers; it is all because of us," I hear a man preaching to his friend at a coffee shop near my home.
Such statements cause my blood to boil and I approach them and recite from my black book all the tricks and fraud methods of our apathetic elected officials: ministers who took part in super spreader events without a mask with great banter; the Health Ministry that sends people into isolation without any accountability and destroys their livelihood along the way, as well as the esoteric term called "privacy;" the jaw-dropping ineffectiveness and the rejection of offers to help just because of ego. And of course, the waiver from isolation for the rich. The two men turn silent and I look at the other customers. Whoever dares to demean the people has been warned. They better not try me.
My outrage is not just affected by the first coronavirus year. This is also my first year of divorce. I got my divorce only two months before the virus emerged and I am getting used to how society treats a divorcee and has been learning that one can write an entire novel, a thick one, with the gems of this term. For example, there are some people for whom the word "divorcee" threatens them much more than the agile and lethal virus.
The writer's workshop is not filling up. People are worried about congregating and they are sick and tired of Zoom. The fear of the unknown has led me to do something that I have not done in many years: send my CV. I call that Corona Vitae.
I have been sending it all over to various offices, including some that I never knew could exist in our world. Because of the plethora of such places, I do not get a response. Sometimes someone blurts out in a passive voice: "So many books! Why is that useful?"
These responses take me back to my novel, which has been spending time with me for two years since its conception on a flight to Spain.
We have a complicated relationship. He makes my life miserable, he sneaks up on me and turns off the light at the end of the tunnel just when I reach it. The concentration is difficult in these times of divorce and corona. But now, perhaps as a gesture of solidarity, he flashes with great fondness on my computer screen and asks me to come closer.
I put down all my worries and daily anguishes, and allow myself to snuggle with the words and characters as I go on a deep dive – even if it is just for an hour – to this unuseful world.
