After several days of having some family time in the north, I returned to Tel Aviv. Not that I have any special feelings toward that city. I lived there about a year before I decided that I prefer a metropolitan that speaks English.
I started wandering pointlessly, crossing several streets, and then I suddenly saw someone I knew. I immediately recognized him because he was drinking ice coffee and his mask was just below his chin. We had grown up together in the same town until he decided to leave.
He is many years my senior. He is a poet, a journalist and a curator, or at least he was all this. He changed. His hair is long and white. When we met last, over beer 14 years ago, before I left Israel, he had short brown hair. He was working as a bar critique and invited me to accompany him to one of the bars.
When he immigrated to Tel Aviv he changed his last name to that of a well-known Israeli poet, at least known to those who know Israeli poetry. "Israeli poetry is all about restrained bereavement, but also about love. Because you have to f-ck before you die," he said. We sat at the bar he just went on and on, talking bout politics and poetry, two things I knew little about.
The poetry was reserved to memorial days in school. The words, like headstones, represented something that no longer exists. And politics? Well, it is a fata morgana, appeared for a fleeting second and then disappeared in one hot November night.
"Metaphorical love affairs," he stressed. "TO f**k a Palestinian is the exact same thing as fucking someone at a bathroom stall in a bar." That is how he talked at the time, and wrote critiques.
A whole host of characters, anecdotes, political musing and literary references. I read his pieces and even made a cameo appearance in one of them as the "emigrant" in which he recounted how our conversation unfolded that night. We had not met since.
I took off my mask. We shook hands virtually and he asked me what I was doing these days. I told him I moved to the US and that I write on politics and literature. "I have still not the slightest clue in poetry," I smiled. "What about you," I continued. "It is unclear," he replied. "Yes, the coronavirus destroyed everything," I said. "Yes, the coronavirus," he said and smiled to his girlfriend with that same smile that I recalled from that bar. From the look on his face, I understood that he didn't mean the pandemic, but perhaps he didn't want to tell me what he had endured over those many years.
We parted ways, and I continued to wander around the streets. It was as if there was nothing really concrete that had emerged from that meeting. It was as if it was some song that I have never fully understood before I emigrated, moved forward, toward the future. An immigrant is not supposed to go back to where he has come from. There is a danger that if he returns, he will discover that his old place was just a fata morgana, an echo from the past that had a fleeting moment in the future and then disappeared in the burning sun.
