“So what do you think?” Effie was saying.
“About what?”
“You’ll talk to him?”
“Who? Your Mossad friend?”
“I told you, he has something he wants to discuss.”
“With me?” I laughed. “You’re not serious.”
“I couldn’t be more serious,” he said gravely.
“What does he want?”
“He won’t tell me. Only wants to talk to you.”
It occurred to me that Effie might be starting to lose his grip—he was already seventy-nine; the mind doesn’t last forever. But, no, probably he was just exaggerating in his usual fashion. When the time came, I would find out that it wasn’t actually his friend who was a former Mossad agent, but a friend of his friend. Or that his friend only delivered the mail in the Mossad offices, or performed at their holiday parties.
“All right, so give him my number.”
“He wants to know if you have plans to come to Israel anytime soon.”
But I had no such plans, I told Effie, and as I said it I realized that I lacked plans in general, and had not managed to make them for some time. When I brought the calendar up onto my computer screen, it was largely empty except for the children’s activities. To plan things, one must be able to imagine oneself into a future that is an extension of the present, and it seemed to me that I had ceased to imagine that, whether out of inability or lack of desire, I couldn’t say. But of course Effie couldn’t know as much. He knew only that I still traveled to Israel often—my brother now lived in Tel Aviv with his family, and my sister also had an apartment there where she spent part of the year. Along with them, I had many close friends in Tel Aviv, and my children had already spent enough time there that they, too, had incorporated the place into the landscape of their childhoods.
“I might come soon,” I said, without attaching much meaning to the words. Effie said he would talk to Friedman and get back to me, and I did not attach much meaning to his words, either.
A moment of silence passed between us, and there was a sudden brightening outside, as if the light had been rinsed clear. Then Effie reminded me to tell my father to call him.
A month later I said good-bye to my husband and children and flew from New York to Tel Aviv. The idea to go had come to me in the middle of the night during one of the long passages outside of time, in which I found myself wide awake even as I became increasingly exhausted. Or rather, I’d dragged a suitcase out of the downstairs closet at three in the morning and filled it with an assortment of clothes, without having spoken to my husband about the idea of going, and without having called the airlines about a flight. Then I finally fell asleep and forgot about the suitcase entirely, so that when I awoke its squat, hopeful presence by the door came as a surprise not only to my husband but to me as well. In this way, I seemed to have gotten around the impossibility of planning. I was already going, as it were, having skipped the planning stage altogether, which would have required a sense of conviction and powers of projection currently unavailable to me.
When my sons asked the reason for my trip, I said that I needed to conduct research for my book. What is it about? the younger one asked. He was constantly writing stories, as many as three a day, and would not have been troubled by such a question concerning his own writing. For a long time he’d spelled the words as he thought they might be spelled, without any spaces between them, which, like the Torah’s unbroken string of letters, opened his writing to infinite interpretations. He had only begun to ask us how things were spelled once he’d started to use the electric typewriter he was given for his birthday, as if it were the machine that had demanded it of him—the machine, with its air of professionalism and the reproach of its giant space bar, that required that what was written on it be understood. But my son himself remained ambivalent about the matter. When he wrote by hand, he returned to his old habits.
I told him that the book had to do with the Hilton in Tel Aviv, and asked if he remembered the hotel, where we had sometimes stayed with my parents. He shook his head. Unlike my older son, whose memory was like a steel trap, the younger one seemed to recall little of his experience. I chose to think of this not as a native lack, but rather the result of being too absorbed in the invention of other worlds to pay very much attention to what happened in the one world he had so little say in. My older son wanted to know why I needed to research a hotel I had been to so many times, and the younger one wanted to know the meaning of “research.” Naturally they are both artists, my children. After all, the world population of artists has exploded, almost no one is not an artist now; in turning our attention inward, so have we turned all of our hope inward, believing that meaning can be found or made there. Having cut ourselves off from all that is unknowable and that might truly fill us with awe, we can only find wonderment in our own powers of creativity. My children’s progressive, highly creative private school was primarily engaged with teaching every child enrolled there to believe that he or she was, and could only be, an artist. One day, speaking about my father on the walk to school, my younger son suddenly stopped short and looked up at me in wonder. “Isn’t it amazing?” he asked. “Just think of it. Grandpa is a doctor. A doctor!”
After they went to sleep, I called the Hilton to see whether a room was available. If I was going to write a novel about the Hilton, or modeled on the Hilton, or even razing the Hilton to the ground, then it made sense, I reasoned, that the obvious place to finally begin writing was at the actual Hilton itself.
The El Al flight was oversold as usual, ensuring that even before takeoff the atmosphere was tense and hostile; the mixing of the orthodox and the secular in such cramped quarters only aggravated things, as did the mounting tension of the situation. In recent weeks, the shooting of a young Palestinian by the IDF had been followed by brutal killings of both Israeli and Palestinian youth, lengthening the long chain of savage revenge. Houses were demolished in the West Bank, and rockets were fired from Gaza, a few reaching as far as the sky above Tel Aviv, where they were exploded by Israel’s interceptor missiles. I heard no one around me speak of this; it was an all too familiar script. But less than an hour into the flight, the edginess erupted in an argument between a woman in a drab headscarf and a college student who had reclined her seat. “Get out of my lap!” the Orthodox woman shrieked, pounding the back of the girl’s chair with both fists. An American passenger in his forties put his hand on the woman’s arm in an effort to calm her, but this new affront—an Orthodox woman may not be touched by any man other than her husband—nearly sent her into an apoplectic fit. In the end, only the purser, trained to deal with sociological friction just as he is trained to deal with a loss of cabin pressure or a hijacking, was able to calm the woman by finding someone willing to switch seats with her. While all of this was happening, an elderly couple seated across the aisle from me went steadily at each other’s throats, as they must have been doing for the last half century (“Why the hell would I know? Leave me alone. Don’t talk to me,” the man spat, but the wife, immune to his insults, went on talking to him all the same). Some of us are touched too much, and some too little: it is the balance that seems impossible to get right, and the lack of which unravels most relationships in the end. In front of the married couple, a woman balanced a wig on her fist, calmly brushing out the coppery tresses while gazing transfixed at the small screen on the seatback in front of her where Russell Crowe was traipsing around in his metal gladiator skirt. When she’d finished with the hair, the woman retrieved a Styrofoam head mold from under her feet, popped the sheitel onto it, and, with a carelessness that belied all the brushing, tossed the whole thing into the overhead compartment next to the bulging carry-on of the loquacious wife, which had been squeezed into its tight spot only thanks to the strength of three teenage boys from Birthright.
Twelve hours later, Meir, the taxi driver who’d been retrieving my family from Ben Gurion Airport for thirty years, met me outside of the baggage cl
aim. After I spent a summer during college living with a family in Barcelona, Meir had gotten into the habit of addressing me in Spanish, since he had spoken Ladino to his parents growing up, and his Spanish was better than both his English and my Hebrew. Over the years I had forgotten what little Spanish I’d once had, so that where once I understood him somewhat, now I understood him hardly at all. As soon as we pulled away from the curb, he began to speak excitedly and at great length about the missiles and the success of the Iron Dome, and I pretended to understand what he was saying because it was far too late to explain that I didn’t.
It was winter in Tel Aviv, and as such the city didn’t make sense, being based around the sun and the sea, a Mediterranean city up at all hours that got more frenetic the later it became. Dirty leaves and pages of old newspapers blew down the streets, and sometimes people plucked them out of the air and put them over their heads to protect themselves from the occasional rain. The apartments were all cold because they had stone floors, and during the hot months, which felt interminable, it seemed absurd to imagine it could ever be cold again, so no one bothered to install central heating. I opened the window of Meir’s taxi, and in the sea air mixed with the rain I could almost smell the metallic scent of electric heaters, their brilliant orange coils aglow in people’s apartments like artificial hearts, forever threatening to explode or, at the very least, to short-circuit the city.
As we made our way through the streets, I saw again the familiar set of everything Israeli—jaws, postures, buildings, trees—as if the strange conditions of enduring in that small corner of the Levant produced a uniform shape; the hard, determined form of that which lives and grows in opposition.
Why had I really come to Tel Aviv? In a story, a person always needs a reason for the things she does. Even where there appears to be no motivation, later on it is always revealed by the subtle architecture of plot and resonance that there was one. Narrative cannot sustain formlessness any more than light can sustain darkness—it is the antithesis of formlessness, and so it can never truly communicate it. Chaos is the one truth that narrative must always betray, for in the creation of its delicate structures that reveal many truths about life, the portion of truth that has to do with incoherence and disorder must be obscured. More and more, it had felt to me that in the things I wrote, the degree of artifice was greater than the degree of truth, that the cost of administering a form to what was essentially formless was akin to the cost of breaking the spirit of an animal that is too dangerous to otherwise live with. One could observe the truth of the animal at closer range, without the risk of violence, but it was a truth whose spirit had been altered. The more I wrote, the more suspect the good sense and studied beauty achieved by the mechanisms of narrative seemed to me. I didn’t want to give them up—didn’t want to live without their consolation. I wanted to employ them in a form that could contain the formless, so that it might be held close, as meaning is held close, and grappled with. It should have felt impossible, but instead it felt merely elusive, so I couldn’t give up the aspiration. The Hilton had seemed to promise itself as such a form—the house of the mind that conjures the world—but in the end I failed to fill it with any meaning.
Lost in these thoughts, the burble of Meir’s Spanish passing over me in rising and falling syllables, I hardly noticed as we drove up the driveway of the actual Hilton. Only when we pulled up under the concrete canopy that overhangs the entrance to the lobby, and my eyes fell on the giant revolving door encased in a steel cylinder with the words HILTON TEL AVIV above it, was I suddenly hit with the strangeness of arriving there. I’d been inhabiting the hotel psychically for so many months that now its real, physical manifestation was jarring; and yet, at the same time, the place was—and could only be—profoundly familiar. Freud called this confluence of sensations the unheimlich, a word that captures the creeping horror at the heart of the feeling far better than the English uncanny. I’d read his paper on the subject in college but only vaguely remembered it, and when I got to my room, I was too exhausted to do anything but take a nap. On top of which, now that I was finally there at the hotel, it struck me—the carpeted hallways, sterile furniture, and plastic card keys—as all so mundane that I couldn’t help feeling foolish about the absurdity of my last few months’ obsession.
All the same, the following morning, after calling home and speaking to my children, I tracked down Freud’s paper, which now struck me as critical reading for my Hilton novel, without which I couldn’t possibly begin. Laid out across the hotel bed, I began to read about the etymology of the German word, which derives from Heim, “home,” so that heimlich means “familiar, native, or belonging to the home.” Freud wrote his essay in response to the work of Ernst Jentsch, who’d described the unheimlich as the opposite of heimlich: as the result of an encounter with the new and unfamiliar, which causes a feeling of uncertainty, of not knowing “where one is.” But while heimlich may mean “familiar” and “homelike,” its secondary meaning, Freud points out, encompasses both “concealed” and “kept from sight,” as well as “to discover or disclose what is secret,” and even “withdrawn from conscious” (Grimm’s dictionary), so that as heimlich progresses through its shades of meaning, it eventually coincides with its opposite, unheimlich, which the German writer Schelling defined as “the name for everything that ought to have remained . . . hidden and secret, and has become visible.”
Of the circumstances likely to cause an uncanny feeling, the first Freud mentions is the idea of the double. Like a slap to the forehead, I recalled what had happened half a year earlier, when I’d arrived home and felt certain that I was already there, an experience that had begun the chain of thoughts that brought me here, to the Hilton. Other examples Freud gives are an involuntary return to the same situation, and the repetition of something random that creates a sense of the fateful or inescapable. What all of these share is the centrality of recurrence, and, arriving at the heart of his study, Freud finally proposes the unheimlich as a special class of anxiety that arises from something repressed that recurs. In the annals of etymology, where heimlich and unheimlich reveal themselves as one and the same, we find the secret to this very particular kind of anxiety, Freud tells us, which arises from the encounter not after all with something new and foreign but rather with something familiar and old from which the mind has been estranged by the process of repression. Something that ought to have been kept concealed, but that has nevertheless come to light.
I shut my laptop and went out onto the balcony. But a sudden wave of nausea hit me as I glanced down at the stone walkway twelve floors below, and remembered the man who may have snapped his spine or smashed his skull there. The day before, on my way out for an evening walk in the thin rain, I’d spotted the hotel’s general manager in the lobby and had almost chased him down to question him about the incident. But he’d stopped to shake the hand of a guest, and I saw how he radiated a smooth confidence that came, so it seemed to me, of knowing his guests’ minds even better than they knew themselves, of understanding their desires and even their weaknesses, while at the same time pretending not to know, for the secret to his job must lie in making the guest feel that it is he who was in control, he who asks and receives, he whose commands send everyone scurrying. Watching the general manager in action, glowing with hidden intelligence, light glinting off the gold pin on his lapel that signaled some obscure order of excellence, I lost all hope of getting anything out of him. If one of his guests had fallen or jumped to his death, surely this general manager would have done everything in his power to keep the news under wraps in order not to unsettle the other guests, just as now he had done everything possible to enable them to ignore the fact that the occasional missile might be lobbed over from Gaza: after all, in a matter of seconds it would be converted from real into unreal overhead, with nothing but a sonic boom as evidence.
Now the sun had come out again, the world sharpened again by its intelligence. There was no sign of any disturbance. Light sp
arkled on the blue-green surface of the water. How many times had I looked out at this view? Many more times than I could remember, that much was certain. If Freud were right about the uncanny stemming from something repressed that comes to light, what could be more unheimlich than returning to a place that one realizes one may never have left?
Heim—home. Yes, the place one has always been, however hidden from one’s awareness, could only be called that, couldn’t it? And yet, in another way, doesn’t home only become home if one goes away from it, since it’s only with distance, only in the return, that we are able to recognize it as the place that shelters our true self?
Or maybe I was turning to the wrong language for the answer. In Hebrew, the world is olam, and now I remembered that my father had once told me that the word comes from the root alam, which means “to hide,” or “to conceal.” In Freud’s examination of where heimlich and unheimlich dissolve into one another and illuminate an anxiety (something that ought to have been kept concealed, but that has nevertheless come to light), he nearly touched the wisdom of his Jewish ancestors. But in the end, stuck with German and the anxieties of the modern mind, he fell short of their radicalism. For the ancient Jews, the world was always both hidden and revealed.
When I finally met Eliezer Friedman two days later, I was more than half an hour late. A plan had been made to meet for breakfast at Fortuna del Mare, a few minutes’ walk from the Hilton. But having finally fallen asleep at three in the morning, I slept through the alarm I’d set and only woke up when Friedman rang the room. It was the first time we’d spoken—all the arrangements had been made through Effie—and yet his accent, Israeli but inflected with a childhood German, was deeply familiar to me from my grandmother and her friends, the women she took me to visit as a child whose apartment doors opened in Tel Aviv but whose hallways led to lost corners of Nuremberg and Berlin.