The Unsatisfied
Published in Issue #10 Translated from Hebrew by Dalya Bilu(Excerpt from a Novel)
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In certain couples who bitterly persevere in their lives together, consoling themselves with the thought that happy marriages are rarer than snow in Egypt, the arrangement between me and the Irishman gives rise to envy: we see neither too much nor too little of each other and thus avoid being defeated by daily life on the one hand or by longing on the other.
The Irishman is a theater director who lives in London and works in Europe, while I live and work in Tel Aviv. Due to the peripatetic nature of his profession, we usually meet – six to seven times a year, two to three weeks a time – in the city where he is putting on a play at the time: Graz, Basle, Zurich, Weimar, Frankfurt, Stockholm, Utrecht, Brussels, Antwerp, a partial list. It goes without saying that maintaining the relationship extracts a good deal of cash; evidently the laws of the market apply here too – whatever is common is cheap and whatever is rare is expensive.
After the play opens we stay in the town, depending on the town, or take a vacation in one of the surrounding villages, doing in abbreviated form what others do at length, and even if the reality is more faded than its image, as is its wont, we are still talking here about a high tide, stable and crisis-less, that has forded nearly fifteen long years packed with phone calls and emails.
But despite the relaxed and good-humored nature of our relationship,...
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