House on Endless Waters
Published in Issue #22 Translated from Hebrew by Anthony Berris and Linda Yehiel(Excerpt from a Novel)
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One after another the people are swallowed up into the plane to Amsterdam, one after another after another. Yoel, too, is approaching the aircraft’s door but the flow of passengers is suddenly halted by somebody, a woman in an orange windbreaker who has planted herself in the doorway of the Boeing 737 and refuses to step inside. Yoel’s thoughts are already with the new novel he has decided to write, and he thinks about this woman and asks himself which of his new characters would be capable of admitting to the primal, naked fear that besets every mortal on entering the flying trap called an airplane. Who would volunteer to disrupt with her body the “everything’s okay” façade, and violate the sacred order to which people clutch so they won’t have to admit that everything is truly chaotic?
From his place in the line Yoel can see only the woman’s back. Even through the orange plastic of her windbreaker he can see how tense her muscles are, and over the shoulders of the people in front of him he discerns the beads of perspiration breaking out on the back of her neck and around her ears. The line starts burbling irritably, people peek anxiously at their boarding passes for flight such-and such, clutching the rectangular pieces of paper as if they were an assurance that the plane would eventually take off. Then from out of nowhere appears a man in a resplendent uniform, with gray hair and an...
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