Work Text:
The first time Axel comes back to Israel after it all, he rents a car and drives all the way to Pia and Eyal's house. It makes him feel like he knows the country better, proud of standing his ground, he can manage, he needs nobody taking care of him. He drives with a book on the passenger seat that he's not even bothered to wrap, even if it's a gift.
It's not that kind of gift.
It's been months and they don't comment how, to Axel, Eyal seems to have grown lighter, happier around the eyes, and , to Eyal, Axel finally looks like a grown-up and not the man-boy that last set foot on this earth. Pia looks exactly the same, Axel thinks, but that's usually the way with siblings.
While she sets the table Axel pushes the book into Eyal's hands.
Eyal opens it by the marked page, starts reading but Axel stops him.
Axel says:
`Take silence and try to be silent.
Take the words and try to speak:
beyond language, language is a wound
from which the world flows and flows.
Language says: is, is not, is,
is not. Language says: I.
Language says: come on, let's speak you,
let's handle you; come on, say
you've said – ´
`You don't speak Hebrew that well,´ Eyal says, looking in wonder at Axel and at the book.
`I've memorized it before coming,´ Axel replies with a mischievous smile. `Impressed?´
`Very much.´
After the dinner, just before coffee -strong, foreign- they lean on the veranda and look out at the shape of the earth, the darkened valley; in moonlight the scattered trees look dark green like olives. Axel notes, with an acute pain to his side, that he had forgotten how the air tastes out here, heavy with dust and memory. He promises not to take so long until his next visit. It has to do with Eyal, too, of course, and how the features of his face had began to erase for Axel, and time is a fucking thief. He had began to forgot how Eyal looks, like this country, tough and vulnerable, inscrutable but to the hands, like an ancient language with no Rosetta stone.
`Having been born here you can't possibly know, how beautiful this country is,´ Axel says, looking out at the line of horizon.
Eyal smiles, replies in the same tone of voice.
`Having been born somewhere else you can't possibly know, how ugly this country is.´
He says it without venom or regret. There's fondness in the accusation. There's the sudden mix of everything they are. German, Israeli. Straight, gay. It stops having any meaning to this landscape. Under this sky they are just Axel and Eyal.
*poem by Amir Or.