A child is born and his father keeps him on guard.
They live together in their home in the Golan, entertaining each other, growing up side by side.
The child does not know the outside, only the house.
His father does not allow him to go out.
He thinks he's protecting him.
Father and child live together, until the child leaves his father and runs away.
This plot line drives Omri Horesh's second book of prose, "Child," but the child's existence exists not in the reality familiar to us, but in the intermediate space between writing and reality.
The author gives birth to his son in writing.
He writes it and therefore maintains it.
"Every time I look up from the page there is a little more of you. A perfect sketch of a child."
The child exists in what is called a liminal space, a location of a threshold - between flesh and blood life and absolute imagination.
"You came secretly, sneaked up on me one Tuesday in mid-June, and suddenly you were, as if you always lived there as a pattern in my head, I always looked but did not see, until in one moment you were incarnated," Horesh writes.
The most common image for describing the process of publishing a book is the image of birth.
The book grows in the writer's belly, it is built in his mind and goes through a lengthy process until he comes out bound in a beautiful cover, arranged after first and second glosses.
But in this work the moment of procreation is not the moment when the book leaves the printing house, but the moment when the character sprouts in the author's head.
This is the real birth, a sudden appearance of something out of nothing, where the work takes place.
The novel is written as a letter, a confession that the father confesses to his child, who ran away from him on his 18th birthday and takes place without him for the first time.
The father reveals to him their relationship over the years, the interdependence, the initial manifestations of life and the child's growing thoughts about the world outside.
"I created a protected garden for us from the outside," the book describes.
"In the paradise of your creation I did not want external harassment. I did not tolerate the advice or opinions of the people of the plateau, the valley and the plain, of anyone. You were me and I was you. That was enough for us."
The child suffers from overeating, the father changes diapers, they play with toys, everything father and son do together.
At the age of three the son begins to ask questions about his existence and origin, about the mother who is not, and the father tries his best to regulate the situation.
In these moments, the child emerges with the understanding that will eventually lead him to flee.
The book is read as part of what might be called "epidemic literature."
The writer sits in his house, isolated and enclosed, and the writing is the fulcrum in front of what is happening outside.
"The whole world has stopped, my treasure," the narrator testifies to what is happening around.
"Grounded planes, desolate squares in city centers, ants taking over grain fields, tigers roaming free on the inanimate roads. A mysterious disease is attacking us all and not noticing. I know you in these moments."
The issue of vaccines also comes into play when the father is debating whether and how to vaccinate his closed son at home.
A father-son relationship is conveyed in the book through the tension between the tumultuous inner world and the threatening and alienated pressure, at a distance between the imaginary and the real dimension.
A grove plays well between these poles but leaves the reader wondering what their nature is, where they really exist.
In the last pages of the book, Horesh elegantly hints at the process of the child's birth, how it happened and how long the birth lasted - "and maybe all these years were just a minute of contemplation, a handful of words, a spark of writing, a daydream, like in movies with a fold of time."
A whole world delivered in a flash of passing thought.
As the first swallow in the new original literature series of Nine Souls Publishing, "Child" presents experimental and intriguing literature to see which books the series will produce later.
Omri Horesh / Child, Nine Souls, 88 pages
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