Once in a Lifetime

The final countdown | Non-Fiction | Fresh Soup

Image by hidesy (edited)

Once, many years ago, I was invited to give a talk in a village in the Galilee. The event organizer had a limited budget, and so he asked if instead of paying for a car service, he could come and pick me up in his silver Mitsubishi. I hesitantly agreed. He sounded soft-spoken on the phone, but you never know. What if he turned out to be a nudnik who would talk at me the whole way there about some historical novel that takes place at the foot of Mount Lebanon and I’d have nowhere to run and would be forced to listen to the endless landscape descriptions he’d memorized and keep nodding like a dashboard bobblehead? But then he said, “I don’t talk much. I hope that’s all right. If you don’t like silence, we’ll put some music on.”

I waited on the corner of my block, as we’d arranged, but there was no sign of the silent Galilean. This was a long time ago, I didn’t have a cell phone yet, and all I could do was lean against the fence of the building on the corner and wait.

About fifteen minutes later, just as I was about to go home, a car with its high beams on stopped a few yards away. I hurried over and got in, and while I was fastening my seatbelt, I heard the driver say, in a deep, quiet voice that sounded nothing like the Galilean’s: “I’m going to start counting. Slowly. And if you’re still in this car when I get to three, you’re getting your face smashed in. Is that clear?” “Oh no,” I apologized, “I think I made a mistake. It’s just that someone—” “One,” said the driver, pulling the handbrake up. He really did count slowly, and by the time he got to “two” I’d unbuckled my seatbelt and opened the door. He said “three,” since he was already committed, but I’d already slammed the door shut and was standing on the sidewalk.

I hardly remember anything about the silent Galilean, who arrived a few seconds later and apologized for being late. It has been thirty years, after all, and I don’t remember the drive or the event either. But that moment, sitting in the passenger seat of the wrong car, is something I’ll never forget. A singular moment in life with no dilemmas and no remorse. Everything simple, everything clear, it’s all up to you, just do it. One. Two. Three.

Translated by Jessica Cohen