The Tunnel Read online

  Zvi Luria has begun to lose his memory. At the beginning he only makes small mistakes, forgetting first names and taking home the wrong child from his grandson’s kindergarten, but he knows that things will only get worse.

  He’s 73 and a retired road engineer. His neurologist hints at the path his illness might take and suggests ways of combatting it, with the help of his wife Dina.

  Dina, a respected paediatrician, is keen for him to return to meaningful activity, and suggests he volunteers to work with his old colleagues at the Israel Roads Authority. This is how Luria finds himself at the Ramon Crater in the Negev desert planning a secret road for the army with the son of his former colleague. But there’s a mystery about a certain hill on the route of this road. Who are the people living there and why are they trapped? And should the hill be flattened and the family evicted, or should a tunnel beneath it be built?

  With humour and great tenderness, A.B. Yehoshua depicts the love between Luria and his wife as they confront the challenges of his illness. Just when Luria’s sense of identity becomes more compromised, then does he find himself on this extraordinary adventure involving people even more vulnerable than himself, enabling a rich meditation on the entwined identities of Israeli Jews and Palestinians and on the nature of memory itself.

  Yehoshua weaves a masterful story about a long and loving marriage, interlaced with biting social commentary and caustic humour.

  The Extra

  “Yehoshua’s masterful portrayal of a female musician at a pivotal moment in her life is deep, unpredictable, and, in the end, surprisingly suspenseful.”

  Kirkus

  “His gift is to present life just as it is lived, without showing off, without forcing conclusions, without literary self-consciousness.”

  The Jewish Chronicle

  The Retrospective

  “Yehoshua achieves an autumnal tone as he ruminates on memory’s slippery hold on life and on art.”

  The New Yorker

  “A compelling meditation on art, memory, love, guilt. A hugely pleasurable read, it shows that in his seventies, A.B. Yehoshua is still producing some of his best work.”

  The Independent

  Friendly Fire

  “… these lives haunted by loss are powerfully evoked. The questions Yehoshua raises are deeply moral.”

  The Jewish Chronicle

  “Part of Yehoshua’s genius lies in his ability to weave broader and narrower swatches of a seemingly straightforward story into an almost seamless tapestry filled with weighty symbolism, yet enriched with personal pursuits and colorful threads of sexual tension.”

  Haaretz

  A Woman in Jerusalem

  “There are human riches here. The manager moves from a man who has given up on love to one who opens himself to it. And there are strange and powerful scenes – of the morgue, of the coffin, of the Soviet base where the manager passes through the purging of body and soul.”

  Carole Angier, The Independent

  “Mr Yehoshua’s A Woman in Jerusalem is a sad, warm, funny book about Israel and being Jewish, and one that has deep lessons to impart – for other people as well as his own.”

  The Economist

  “This novel has about it the force and deceptive simplicity of a masterpiece …”

  Claire Messud, The New York Times

  The Liberated Bride

  “Yehoshua seeks to present two worlds, those of Israel’s Jewish majority and its Arab minority. He has done it rather as Tolstoy wrote of war and peace: two novels, in a sense, yet intimately joined. Paradoxically – and paradox … is the book’s engendering force – the war is mainly reflected in the zestfully intricate quarrels in the Jewish part of the novel. The peace largely flowers when Rivlin finds himself breaking through the looking glass into the Arab story.”

  Richard Eder, The New York Times

  “The Liberated Bride seethes with emotions, dreams, ideas, humor, pathos, all against a backdrop of violence, conflict, and terror.”

  The Sun (New York)

  “The boundaries that are broken down in The Liberated Bride include those within the self and others; mystical boundaries between self and God; political and cultural boundaries and finally, the stylistic boundaries of the novel itself, which Yehoshua is constantly stretching in different directions.”

  International Jerusalem Post

  A Journey to the End of the Millennium

  “Yehoshua is so graceful and eloquent that his work’s timeliness also succeeds, paradoxically, in making it timeless.”

  The New York Times

  “This is a generous, sensuous narrative, in which women adroitly manoeuvre within their inherited role, and theories of irrevocable Arab-Jewish hatred are obliquely refuted.”

  Peter Vansittart, The Spectator

  “A.B. Yehoshua is an old-fashioned master, without stylistic pyrotechnics or needless experimentation. His chief asset is his belief in a powerful story deftly delivered.”

  Times Literary Supplement

  “Wherever this innovative, erudite, suggestive, mysterious writer – a true master of contemporary fiction – points us, there can be no doubt, it is essential that we go.”

  The Washington Post

  “One of Yehoshua’s most fully realized works: a masterpiece.”

  Kirkus

  “Above all, Yehoshua is a master storyteller, who coaxes his readers far into an alien landscape, allowing him to question familiar orthodoxies – that moral codes are universal, that jealousy governs every personal relationship, and that religious boundaries are set in stone.”

  The Jewish Chronicle

  Open Heart

  “… the work of a superb novelist: haunting and annoying by turns, with considerable emotional payoff at the close.”

  Kirkus

  Mr Mani

  “Mr Mani is conceived on an epic scale as a hymn to the continuity of Jewish life. This formulation sounds pat and sentimental, but Yehoshua’s achievement is the opposite: it always suggests even more complex worlds beyond the vignettes of which the novel is composed.”

  Stephen Brook, New Statesman and Society

  “Suffused with sensuous receptiveness to Jerusalem – its coppery light, its pungent smells, its babble of tongues, its vistas crumbling with history – Yehoshua’s minutely researched novel ramifies out from the city to record the rich and wretched elements that have gone into the founding and continuation of the nation whose centre it has once again become.”

  Peter Kemp, The Sunday Times

  “A.B. Yehoshua has created a historical and psychological universe – nearly biblical in the range and penetration of its enchanting ‘begats’ – with an amazingly real Jerusalem at its centre. It is as if the blood-pulse of this ingeniously inventive novel had somehow fused with the hurtling vision of the generations of Genesis. With Mr Mani, Yehoshua once again confirms his sovereign artistry; and Hillel Halkin’s translation has a brilliant and spooky life of its own.”

  Cynthia Ozick

  “In Yehoshua’s rich, grave fictions, private and public lives cannot be separated; the tale of a flawed individual or disintegrating relationship is simultaneously an emblem for a country in crisis. Literature is history, an event a symbol, writing a way of exploring the world. Yehoshua is a marvellous story teller but also a profoundly political writer, always arguing for uncertain humanism rather than zealous nationalism in a country where everyone lives on the front line.”

  Nicci Gerrard, The Observer

  Five Seasons

  “… [a] gentle comedy of manners about a widower in want of a wife.”

  Clive Sinclair, The Sunday Times

  “… a meditation on the cycles of change and renewal, and a portrait of a middle-aged man, glimpsed at a transition p
oint in his life.”

  Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

  “Molkho’s adventures are quietly hilarious in the way Kafka is hilarious.”

  The New York Times Book Review

  “The novel succeeds in charting the ways in which grief and passions cannot be cheated …”

  Financial Times

  “A wonderfully engaging, exquisitely controlled, luminous work.”

  The Washington Post Book World

  “one of Israel’s world-class writers”

  Saul Bellow

  A Late Divorce

  “In his fiction, Mr Yehoshua is subtle, indirect and sometimes visionary, even phantasmagoric.”

  Harold Bloom, The New York Times

  “… thank goodness for a novel that is ambitious and humane and that is about things that really matter.”

  New Statesman

  “Anyone who has had experience of the sad and subtle ways in which human beings torment one another under licence of family ties will appreciate the merits of A.B. Yehoshua’s A Late Divorce.”

  London Review of Books

  “… there is something Chekhovian about Yehoshua’s affectionate impartiality toward his characters, who like Chekhov’s, combine hopeless, maddening egotism with noble impulses and redeeming outbursts of affection.”

  Gabriele Annan, The New York Review of Books

  “He is a master storyteller whose tales reveal the inner life of a vital, conflicted nation.”

  The Wall Street Journal

  The Lover

  “Mr Yehoshua’s inventiveness and hallucinatory intensity should be vividly evident. He is a writer who exhibits the rigorous fidelity to his own perceptions that produces real originality.”

  Robert Alter, The New York Times

  “We see an Arab and an Israeli locked into a debate of proximity, alikeness, mental hatred, that Yehoshua’s superb ability to render both presences relieves of all sentimentality. What I value most in The Lover is a gift for equidistance – between characters, even between the feelings on both sides.”

  Alfred Kazin, The New York Review of Books

  “Delicate shifting tensions between political surface and elemental depths … elusive, haunting.”

  The New York Times Book Review

  “It is a disturbing, brilliantly assured novel, and almost thirty years after its appearance it retains a startling originality.”

  Natasha Lehrer, TLS

  “In this profound study of personal and political trauma, Yehoshua … evokes Israel’s hallucinatory reality.”

  The Daily Telegraph

  The Continuing Silence of a Poet

  “The originality of these stories, their characters, and the emotions they express so precisely and movingly have remained so clearly in my mind that I feel justified in taking risks. I was as moved and impressed by them as when I read Mann’s Death in Venice and some of Chekhov.”

  Susan Hill, New Statesman

  “… for Yehoshua has found a way of writing inside that no-man’s land where the perception of objective reality and private dream or hallucination jostle for position. Reading his stories you realise that this shifting between real and unreal is not peculiar to his characters. It is actually what goes on in our heads most of the time. I don’t know any writer who has transcribed this phenomenon so economically.”

  Victoria Glendinning, The Sunday Times

  “It seems typical of this highly talented Israeli writer that we are left with more questions than answers after reading what he has to tell us and that the most urgent and disturbing questions are always more suggested by his work than stated in it.”

  Robert Nye, The Guardian

  “Yehoshua … is very much the enfant terrible whose stories evoke the dreadful silence of a people who live on the edge of destruction.”

  Bryan Cheyette, TLS

  The Tunnel

  A.B. Yehoshua

  Translated from the Hebrew by Stuart Schoffman

  For my Ika (1940–2016)

  Eternal Beloved

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  The Tunnel

  About the Author

  Also by A.B. Yehoshua

  Copyright

  at the neurologist

  “So, let’s summarize,” says the neurologist.

  “Yes, summarize,” echo the two, quietly.

  “The complaints aren’t imaginary. There is atrophy in the frontal lobe that indicates mild degeneration.”

  “Where exactly?”

  “Here, in the cerebral cortex.”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t see anything.”

  His wife leans towards the scan.

  “Yes, there’s a dark spot here,” she acknowledges, “but tiny.”

  “Yes, tiny,” confirms the neurologist, “but it could grow larger.”

  “Could,” asks the husband, voice trembling, “or likely will?”

  “Could, and likely will.”

  “How fast?”

  “There are no firm rules for pathological development, certainly not in this part of the brain. The pace also depends on you.”

  “On me? How?”

  “On your attitude. In other words, how you fight back.”

  “Fight against my brain? How?”

  “The spirit versus the brain.”

  “I always thought they were one and the same.”

  “Not at all, not at all,” declares the neurologist. “How old are you, sir?”

  “Seventy-three.”

  “Not yet,” his wife corrects him, “he’s always pushing it … closer to the end …”

  “That’s not good,” mutters the neurologist.

  Only now does the patient notice that tucked among the doctor’s curls is a small knitted kippah, which he apparently removed when Luria lay on the examination table, lest it fall on his face.

  “So take, for example, the names that escape you.”

  “Mostly first names,” the patient is quick to specify, “last names come easier, but first names fade away when I reach out for them.”

  “So here’s something worth fighting for. Don’t settle for last names, don’t give up on first names.”

  “I’m not giving up, but when I try hard to remember them, she always jumps in and beats me to it.”

  “That’s not good,” the neurologist scolds his wife, “you’re not helping.”

  “True,” she says, accepting blame, “but sometimes it takes him so long to remember a first name that he forgets why he wanted to know.”

  “Still, you have to let him fight for his memory on his own, that’s the only way you can help him.”

  “You’re right, Doctor, I promise.”

  “Tell me, are you still working?”

  “Not anymore,” says the patient. “I retired five years ago.”

  “Retired from what, may I ask?”

  “The Israel Roads Authority.”

  “What is that exactly?”

  “It used to be called the Public Works Department of the Ministry of Transportation. I worked there for forty years, planning roads and motorways.”

  “Roads and motorways.” The neurologist finds this vaguely amusing. “Where? In the North or the South?”

  As he considers the proper answer, his wife intervenes:

  “In the North. Sitting before you, Doctor, is the engineer who planned the two tunnels in the Trans-Israel Highway, Route 6.”

  Why the tunnels? wonders the husband, these are not his most important achievements. But the neurologist is intrigued. And why not? He’s in no hurry. It’s his last patient of the day, the receptionist has collected the doctor’s fee and gone home, and his apartment is located above the clinic.

  “I haven’t noticed tunnels on Route 6.”

  “Because they’re not so long, maybe a couple of hundred metres each.”

  “Still, I should pay attention, not daydream on the road,” the doctor reprimands himself.
“You never know, other road engineers might come to see me.”

  “They’ll only come if they can’t hide their dementia under the overpass,” says the patient, attempting a joke.

  The neurologist objects: “Please, why dementia? We’re not there yet. Don’t rush to claim something you don’t understand, and don’t arouse unnecessary fears, and above all, don’t get addicted to passivity and fatalism. Retirement is not the end of the road, and so you need to find work in your field, even part-time, private work.”

  “There is no private work, Doctor. Private individuals don’t build motorways or plan roads. Motorways are a public affair, and there are others out there now, younger people.”

  “So how do you spend your time?”

  “Officially I sit at home. But I also take walks, everywhere. And we go out a lot, theatre, music, opera, sometimes lectures. And of course, helping my children, mostly with the grandchildren, I fetch them, pick them up, bring them back. And I also do some housework, errands, shopping at the supermarket, the market, and sometimes—”

  “He loves going to the market,” says his wife, eager to end the recitation.

  “The market?” The neurologist is taken aback.

  “Why not?”

  “By all means, if you know your way around, it’s fine.”

  “Because I cook.”

  “Aha, you also cook!”

  “Actually I mostly chop, mix, reheat leftovers. I’m in charge of making lunch before she gets back from her clinic.”

  “Clinic?”

  “I’m a paediatrician,” his wife says softly.

  “Great,” says the doctor, relieved. “In that case, I have a partner.”