Kin. Dror Burstein

names too, and some of the people who rose to the highest positions in the Dan Company called themselves “Daniel Dan” or “Dan Daniel.” Right, the director of Dan was Dan Daniel and the head of the conductors’ department was Danny Ben-Daniel, cried the driver, holding up the mike of his two-way radio. And my father, continued the passenger, who was only a simple driver on bus no. 5, called himself “Yaakov Dan,” though everybody else called him “Kuba Dan” when they weren’t just calling him plain “Dan.” And he was proud of it at first, that he had the strength of character to make the change, and I would stand behind him, all my childhood I remember being in the bus behind the plastic barrier, and I would whisper to him softly, “Daddy . . . daddy . . . ” but he didn’t hear me, or else he just didn’t answer me because talking to the driver was forbidden. He was afraid there might be an undercover inspector on the old people’s seat at the front of the bus, maybe disguised as an old lady, and the minute he opened his mouth and said something to me the old lady would jump on him and give him a fine. But he would wink at me in the big scratched mirror.

      And there was silence in the taxi sailing onto Rothschild Boulevard, and a soldier got off at the Dizengoff Center, and the driver rattled his collection of five-shekel coins. And the driver said, “What a life,” and fell silent, and remembered the half-blind cat crossing the street and its closed eye, and he thought of Moshe Dayan, who he had once seen, when he was a young soldier, and he wanted to shout at him, Dayan, Dayan, what did you do. He pulled to a stop with the ruins of the Habima Theatre behind him. In the end I would pull the cord and the “stop requested” sign would light up and I would get off at home. He wouldn’t say good-bye to me, he was too afraid of the undercover inspectors who got on the buses disguised as blind men in order to catch the drivers out, they just waited for the driver to make one little mistake and immediately got up and took him off the bus or put a reprimand in his file. And once he spat out of the driver’s window, the case they made against him, Dreyfus, the disgrace . . . And what now? the friend whose name was Shosh interrupted her, and the daughter of the Dan driver said, “Now? Now he’s dead.”

      The taxi arrived at the corner of Balfour, and Shosh said good-bye to her friend and got off, carrying a big X-ray photo in a big envelope, and the friend turned to Yoel, who didn’t look at her, and said, “She’s very sick. Not yet forty,” and fell silent. Yoel wanted to ask her how the story about her father ended, if there was any more to it, but the woman turned away to look out of the window. Yoel turned to look at the pregnant woman in the seat behind the driver, who all this time had gone on talking to the driver and arguing with him about whether talking to the driver while he was driving was permitted or forbidden. Neither of them tired of this conversation, which seemed to have begun very long ago and might go on forever. He fixed his eyes on the woman’s swollen belly. The taxi stopped in a traffic jam on the corner of Sheinkin Street. The bureaucrat’s cell phone rang and he got out to answer it, apologizing for the disturbance. A colorful procession crossed Rothschild Boulevard from east to west. Yoel closed the window near him against the whistles and the drums. “Close your window,” he wanted to say to the pregnant woman, “so the baby won’t be startled by the noise,” but he was too shy to start a conversation. The taxi was buzzing with talk. Yoel took out his MP3 player, which was a little dirty with sea sand and now contained only a few Bach organ pieces and Schubert Lieder, aside from the camera function that took up most of the memory card, and plugged in the earphones. He closed his eyes and leaned his head on the windowpane. He managed to hear the driver say, “I’m switching off the engine until they go past. It’s the exodus from Egypt, except on Purim.” But there was still time. A burglar alarm ripped through the air but could not penetrate the skin of his dream. People shouted outside, he didn’t hear. He was tired, it was the middle of the day. Well, to be precise, he did hear the sound, to be precise, sure. He wanted to sleep, even though it was only noon. He dreamed that he was riding in a taxi and dreaming that he wanted to sleep, and what Amikam, his old father, said to him when he was small, Yoel too said in his sleep: How good it is to sleep when you’re tired. A little bird flew through the taxi, entering through an open window, leaving through an open window. And other dream fragments came up and thrust themselves upon him but as usual he forgot almost everything. If he had remembered his dream he would have seen a transparent train ascending to the top of a tower, drawn by a whistling, straining iron locomotive, but when you looked at its wheels, you saw that there was nothing there, that it wasn’t transparent but absent. And he woke up in an empty taxi.

      Someone had forgotten a cell phone on one of the seats. The phone drilled into the cushion and its light blinked.

      The taxi stood in the parking space of the new central bus station. At first the driver was nowhere to be seen, and then Yoel caught sight of him through his dazzled, freshly awakened eyes, sitting outside on a bench next to a few other drivers and drinking a hot drink from a plastic cup. Yoel’s neck hurt. Vapors rose and misted the faces of the drivers and their heavy-framed spectacles. Yoel’s sleep had crushed him, his neck was stiff, his MP3 player was silent and its earphones were plugged into his ears like white corks. Did you hear anything at all? Dream fragments flitted past his eyes. A window. A cloud. A whistle. A watch. He looked, without raising his leaning head, at the silent, empty taxi, at the seats on which thousands of passengers had imprinted their shapes and smells. And how sunk into themselves these seats were, he now saw for the first time, how much weight had compressed them. Compressed and deepened. He rubbed the upholstery. Like a herd of donkeys whose backs were worn and hollowed, he thought. And the taxi, like a beast of burden, drove north-south and didn’t complain. Again you fell asleep, again you arrived at the central bus station, again you have to begin to go back.

      Yoel got up with difficulty and climbed out of the taxi. Then he heard the driver calling him, from a distance. “Did you have a good sleep? I didn’t want to wake you. You slept like a baby.” And he turned to his taxi-driver friends and said to them, lowering his voice, explaining, “He fell asleep . . . ” And then, after Yoel walked away and could no longer hear him, the driver added, “Him, he likes to sleep in taxis.” And after a few seconds he commented gruffly to the tips of his shoes: “Him, not a week goes by that he doesn’t fall asleep in my taxi.” The other drivers looked at Yoel stretching himself opposite the central bus station as though it were a real spectacle.

      To begin to go back again. No, he didn’t have the courage to go up. But the next day he would go there again.

      But the next day he would be there again, in the taxi. And he would travel all the way, alone in the taxi, thinking, why not go up today. For five shekels I could get a private taxi. But in the middle of Levinsky Street he would say to the driver, “I’m getting out here. Have a good week,” and the driver, who would perhaps be the same one as yesterday, or perhaps not, would say to him, “What do you care, ride a little further, it’s the same money, get off at the last stop like a human being. Who gets off in the middle of the road?” And Yoel would admit, “There’s something in what you say,” even though he already had one foot outside the taxi. And the trees all along Levinsky would be low and leafy and their fruit thick-skinned, and a great shadow would pass along them and through them and over the bridge, all the way to Sheinkin until it disappeared. “Are you headed back north?” Yoel would ask, and the driver would say, “Where north, I do the route, drive round in circles,” and Yoel would say, “In that case, I’ll go back with you.”

       THE CITY

      After many years to come, and even more hours and minutes, the city will be a smooth surface of ice. On top of the bowling alleys, on top of the basketball stadium and all its victories and defeats, on top of the highest mall in the Middle East, on top of the sea. The ice will cover everything. And nobody skates on it, and nobody throws a snowball at the snowmen. And nobody crosses the Bosporus on foot anymore, and nobody falls asleep wrapped in thick furs anymore in a sleigh on the way from Sicily to Italy. There’s nothing except for the wind and the silence. A bird frozen in mid-flight that crashed onto the plain and shattered. And wind and silence and frost. And schools of fish frozen underfoot, feet that aren’t there, that don’t walk anymore. That are frozen down below. Sitting on chairs. Frozen, stopped. And they don’t swim, don’t spawn, in the cold.