The Marsh Angel by Hagai Dagan (ebooks online reader .TXT) 📗

told me you liked the academic atmosphere in the department.

Before I discharged, I told the department head who replaced Moti that I was planning to study the humanities, and he asked me if I wanted to be poor.

Okay, so maybe you won’t strike oil, but a university job is a decent gig— good salary, not too many hours, longs vacations. The only catch is having to teach… My last boyfriend before I met my husband was a lecturer in History. He complained about it all the time. You have to keep the students interested, to be an entertainer; he said it was exhausting. He also hated the fact that in order to get promoted you had to constantly ask for recommendations, kiss up to people, be nice… Are you cut out for that?

Tamir looked at her incredulously. He hadn’t considered any of that until that moment.

But if you really care about it, it’s worth it, I think…

Tamir tossed back his shot, and suddenly recalled his father, who had to cut his studies short when he was thirteen years old. The Germans had entered Kaunas, and the world turned upside down. Once, during one of their regular Saturday afternoon vodka-drinking sessions, his father told him that he should go to university, study, become educated. He uttered the word educated slowly, as if trying to suspend it on his tongue for as long as he could.

What did you even write about?

Karl Jaspers. A German philosopher.

Oh. Why him?

Something there… appealed to me.

What was it?

The fall.

What does that mean.

He spoke about life as a series of falls, falls into a void, and the significance of these falls.

Sounds depressing as hell.

Yes… Well, yes and no, because he also spoke about how we are shaped by these states of crisis.

And what, you just described his philosophy?

No, the point is to say something about it.

She smiled. So, what did you say?

The noise inside the Siegel increased. The music became clouded and dense. Tamir sipped his beer and looked at the bartender’s tattoo. He saw a bird. For some reason, it seemed to him like one of its wings was broken, but he assumed that was just the dim light of the pub refracting over the bartender’s body.

I said that the thing with him was his strive for clarity. That one can strive for clarity— aspire to it.

That’s it? Neta wondered.

Yeah.

How many pages did you write?

Almost three hundred.

Almost three hundred pages about how it’s possible to strive for clarity?

Yeah.

And they’re going to award you a doctorate for that?

So it seems.

Academia is strange, isn’t it?

Yeah.

Okay, well, here’s to your budding academic career. Are you sure you want to do it in Israel?

No, but…

What’s keeping you here, anyway?

She had a point— what was keeping him there? He sat in silence.

She cast a prolonged gaze at him. Eventually, she glanced at her watch and said it was getting late. They looked into each other’s eyes. Everything was clear, there was no need for interpretation. That vitality, that joyful connection which vibrated between then, vibrated no more. It had been a singular moment, existing in the space between the reception room and the intelligence analysis office in Efroni; between the mountains of the Western Galilee and the mountains of Lebanon; between the upbeat chirpiness of Neta the intelligence analyst in her parka and slippers, and the desperate longings of that Tamir, who now seemed immeasurably far, lost in the annals of time. None of that fire had rekindled.

20.The Purple Line— The internationally-recognized border separating Israel and Lebanon. At that time, South Lebanon was under partial Israeli control and was referred to as the ‘security strip’. Subsequently, a distinction was made between the security strip, which acted as de facto border between Israel and Lebanon, and the purple line, which separated Israel and the security strip.

6. SHIKMA STREAM

a. Carpenter’s Glue

Shikma Stream is called Wadi al-Hasi in Arabic. The stream originates in South Mount Hebron, flowing from east to west through the northern Negev Desert, before emptying into the Mediterranean Sea, south of Ashkelon. The stream is seasonal, but even on the occasions when water does run through it, it gets sucked up by Mekorot water company near the mouth of the river. The eponymous Shikma Stream College was established near the stream’s arid channel. Tamir Binder felt that was cruel irony.

He arrived at the college in the early 2000s as an adjunct professor in philosophy. The students he met knew too little about everything, their inclination to learn was scant, and their interest in the material meager. From the off, he found himself struggling to retain whatever semblance of attention they were able to muster. He exuded philosophical authority, sagacity, and flare, but at the same time, he knew that it was easy to shine against a dull backdrop. His students were not trained in analytic reasoning, nor in systematic thinking; they were obtuse and awkward. Any articulate utterance sufficed to impress them, or, alternatively, to threaten and confuse them. He could tell them anything. They lacked any tools to challenge him or criticize the premises of his arguments. When he was a student, students would regularly challenge their professors, raising counter arguments, bringing up other schools of thought. That age had passed. Students now were mesmerized by any cheap trick or intellectual sleight of hand. He found the whole thing exasperating.

During evenings, he would sit in his apartment and try to ignore the fact this was what his life had become. He eventually left his apartment in Simon Thassi Street, drifting through several other apartments in Tel-Aviv, living in Johanan HaSandlar Street, Sirkin Street, Alharizi Street. The apartments were very different from one another, and yet very similar. They all bore a mark of certain forlornness, transitoriness, a sense of anguish and instability. It’s as if this whole city is a mirage, he thought, some cheap conjuring trick, a ruse, plaster and carpenter’s glue. The whole thing is going to come crashing down someday, he thought, that much is