Amnon

I cannot recite the street names of Tel Aviv by heart because I have not lived there. And when Amnon stuck his head out the window to ask me to run to the makolet for a lemon, it was not the street sign that I was looking at, but Amnon. The absence of window screens in the city allowed me to take him in all at once, unobscured, with nothing between us but the urgency of completing a salad. The cucumbers and tomatoes were already chopped and waiting in the bowl.

I did not know where the makolet was, but I followed my instincts and got lost after a single turn. The roads were potholed and sandy, congested with cars and pedestrians all moving in different directions but at the same frenetic pace. At Rothschild Boulevard I slowed down to consider a canopy of trees and two old women sitting on a bench. I wanted them to be speaking Yiddish and they were, so I put the trees aside and considered them instead, getting close enough to smell their face powder and peek into a canvas bag sitting by their feet. More tomatoes and cucumbers.

It was late when I found my way back to Amnon’s. In the courtyard of his apartment building stood a small grove of lemon trees, all bearing fruit.

Amnon regarded the lemon in my hand before he regarded me, particularly the white flower and stem attached to it from pulling too hard. “You didn’t find the makolet?” he asked, glancing at the same window from which he had called down his request, an hour before.

“I took the scenic route,” I explained. I did not explain more but instead reached out for Amnon, to see if we could still manage to complete each other after all this time apart. “It was a long trip getting here.” I meant crossing the ocean as well as having to wrest myself from that bench on Rothschild Boulevard. It is always hard to see Yiddish die, even in the first Hebrew city of Tel Aviv.

Amnon accepted my embrace for exactly three seconds. “I’ll get a proper lemon,” he said, placing my offering on the table and preparing to run away. “The ones in front” —he shook his head as if I should have known better. “No good.”

I should have known him better, Amnon; for three months we had tilled the same land together, fed the same cows, sewed the same red identification threads onto our work shirts. But without a kibbutz to keep us in concert, one of us was always straying from the other, if not for minutes, then for years. This was the fate we shared, and I had exactly forty-eight hours to fashion a new one.

“Hurry back,” I said.

While he took the stairs down two at a time, I tried to bridge the distance between us by setting the table, and when that was done, by standing...