Private Novelist Read Free

boat—just nipped it, denting one gunwale by about an inch, but that was enough to crack the glass. “Meep!” cried Sissy the friendly dolphin, watching in horror as Red Sea water, oozing with phosphorescence, stained all our sneakers and began to creep up our socks. The rest of the passengers were spellbound, following the missile’s slow ascent and descent as it arced upward, eclipsing the morning sun, on a course that I calculated would take it approximately to my apartment on Basel Street in Tel Aviv, give or take fifty feet. The skipper turned the boat around and made slowly for Eilat while I handed out life jackets. Clad in the typical plastic sandals and bikini of the native Israeli, he was not nearly as uncomfortable as the rest of us, and thought to entertain us, as Israelis often will, by turning up the radio really, really loud.
    â€œTraffic on Ibn Gabirol has been diverted to the Namir Road due to a suspicious object,” the announcer eventually said. I resolved to return to Tel Aviv as quickly as possible, and when we reached shore I took my pay from the cash register and ran down the street to catch the bus. Only ten hourslater, I was home. The sight that greeted me there was not for the faint of heart. Where my coffee table had been, only splinters remained, and Zohar’s latest manuscript, which had taken hours to print on the cheap new color printer I blamed him for buying, lay smoldering on the floor. The missile was gone—no doubt Shin Bet had seen to that. What would the claims adjuster say?
    I called Zohar in Bhutan. A faint rustling sound, as of geese’s wings, accompanied the signal as our conversation raced around and around Earth from satellite to satellite. As is well known, Israelis boast one of Earth’s higher rates of penetration for cellular and satellite phone service, second only to Finns, and Zohar was no exception. Seeking a little peace and quiet to perfect his academic discipline, he had hit on the idea of spending the summer in a frigid mountaineering hut on an isolated pass not far from the dangerous border with Sikkim. The dead trees, some dead already for hundreds of years, were festooned with prayer flags, which looked to the untrained eye a bit like the banners around a used-car lot, only paler. The cold, dry air instantly embalmed anything Zohar tried to discard, and he could not dig the frozen, rocky ground, so he relied on the sparse vegetation, which resembled a sort of razor-wire heather whose tiny flowers were the ivory gray of moths’ wings, to cover the little piles of garbage that had sprung up around his hut. He seemed relieved to be summoned home.
    Far off, near the Rheinfall, where colored panes of glass in a small booth double for the colored searchlights of Niagara, a pool of sticky liquid oozed and oozed, and in the booth an Israeli spy and a girl from the Shetland Islands lay curled up together, sleeping quietly. It was around four A.M. , and they had hitchhiked that day from Feldkirch. Her name was Mary,and whether she knew that he was an Israeli spy, I don’t know. She was ordinary looking, and he was ennobled only by his possession of certain distinctive eyeglasses, which Zohar calls “vain Ashkenazi glasses,” oval with wire rims. Mary had noticed that he could read without them—perhaps that was her first clue that he was a spy. They had met the day before at a roulette table. She was drinking, and losing heavily . . . he took her elbow and offered to buy her another drink. Into it he slipped a tablet of vitamins B1 through B12. She saw him do it and asked why.
    â€œI don’t know,” he said somewhat bashfully. “I was brought up to think men should be mysterious and aggressive both at the same time, which is a bit of a contradiction, since mystery involves a holding back, a withdrawal, so I had this idea of giving women vitamins without their consent and then maybe giving them a hard time if they