Talia Lavin
The Dream (Israel)
I can barely admit I have this dream, it flutters around my head like a bad hairdo, but sometimes I still dream about him. My first boyfriend -- the
skinny one with black hair and latent stubble even on shaven days, whose eyebrows grew together to a shameless V in the center of his
forehead. He'd come home from college for the weekend to his family's big, new house, and we'd sit on the bare pine floors, socked, playing
board games on those interminable Sabbath afternoons. More rarely we'd kiss in his white-walled room behind the paper shades, the red
and green of brick and oak peeping through the corners. The sounds of his family echoed in the massive house, reminding us constantly of
our sins. But the dream takes place long after he dropped out of engineering school and moved to Jerusalem; it takes place even after the
second boyfriend, the one with big, tremulous lips and a grey Toyota Avalon; it takes place far from the orange circle of streetlight on New
Bridge Road where the groundhogs come to die, and where we'd park sometimes until four in the morning; far from the laundry detergent
smell that clung to both of them when I pressed my nose into their shirts, the clean, full, wholesome smell of love...
The dream takes place in a strange Israel, scrubbed of its Semitic grime, the Arabic and Hebrew patter faded into a dull audio treacle.
I walk through the squares, not naked, not clothed, through the narrow streets leading to the Wailing Wall and the excavation sites with their
half-eroded pillars -- pillars without roofs, lifting into the perfect sky like bodiless legs. I begin to descend toward the Wall, joy flooding my
body with each downward step. Behind me, the African man in yellow robes and turban I saw on these steps when I was seven looks out
with a brown gaze towards the stone bones of ancient towns hidden behind fences. I float through the metal detectors, past the bent women
lifting their keys from the bins. After I pass through, I see him, the first boyfriend, dressed in the Sabbath suit I saw him in last before he left.
He comes to walk beside me, clutches me, and as I feel again the minute weight of his thin hot arm I am drawn back to the place where
everything that happens has real consequence.
We walk through the Wall's courtyard together. The flat stones hum and warm beneath my feet. I know that I'm sleeping -- even in the dream
my limbs are heavy -- but the light on me is shining harshly, and my legs are round and brown, and the color of his eyes is the same as
on the rainy day of my first terrible and disappointing kiss and subsequent blazing discoveries.
The me that's hovering just under my shut eyelids knows he left me long ago, knows, even, that he's gotten married in the interim, but
the brown me in the dream knows nothing at all. She can see his white throat, octagonal glasses, thin fingers -- he's narrow all through -- and
can feel his wiry arm around her. The warm Jerusalem wind carries the breath of her love in it. She knows him; and his smell; and the other
him; and his same smell; and the trembling wet texture of lip on lip. She knows her love will never wane. It is big in their interlocked hands. It
is buried in the white ground of dream-Israel, where it will always exist.
©2007 by Talia Lavin
