The entrance to Petah Tikva is busy in the afternoon, cars and buses rushing on the Jabotinsky axis.
The hustle and bustle does not manage to isolate me to myself.
I let Wise lead, and he instructs me to turn left and right and announces that I have reached my destination.
I see the sign on the right and continue to the paid parking lot.
Michal texted that she was on her way, that she would arrive in twenty minutes, that she brought chocolate and water, but they might not let us in.
I pass the entrance of the place.
Eight steps on each side lead to it, and further a rock of large, hewn stones stops the ground.
I choose a shady stone that is close to the sidewalk and sit down to wait for the tank.
Maybe when she arrives I will be able to push away the thoughts that collide with each other.
Down the asphalt a car is parked, and a woman wearing a simple t-shirt dress is standing by the window on the far side from the driver.
I hear her say: So you're not going in, are you?
you are not entering
She stands still, but as if walking in it.
A uniform slow march, lacking variety.
Leg up, leg down and back.
Her yellow dress moved with her step.
Her body is thick and her feet are slippers, and it seems that she is the mother I saw one day rushing to the grocery store, when she hurriedly went out to buy something that was missing.
The car windows are dark.
She circles the vehicle, and the driver takes out a transparent bag with a box inside.
I can only see his palm and forearm, and there is in a box in a lunch bag, something that looks like rice and meatballs in a dark red sauce.
I look at this woman and think that if we let her out, she would be better off than Shiri.
I've always been bothered by the question of whether people who lose their minds know.
Terrified by the possibility that my essence could change at some unexpected moment, like a possession taking over, being in the twilight zone, sinking into a completely different world, laughing, crying, shouting suddenly or undressing in the middle of the street like Shiri did.
Ignorance is as scary as death.
Death of the soul, of the part that is only ours, that is so familiar to us, that can suddenly become someone else inside us, that we don't know, someone we met in the blurred areas of the mix.
And we don't know.
And how will I know?
A week ago Shiri called from a landline number.
She said: That's it, I was hospitalized.
Good thing I'm here, she said.
I will be taken care of.
I was glad she felt that way.
After the conversation with her I looked for my notebook of quotes that I have kept since I was sixteen.
I wanted to correct my memory of one of the quotes in it.
The notebook was on a shelf, pressed between books, wrapped in blue paper, and inside was my handwriting from that time, pointed like arrows.
I remember how I designed this script, I practiced on it.
I remember how I felt at the time and I know that what was stirring in me was not so.
In the third quote in the notebook is written the motto of the book "Let me in" written by Ella Barkat.
A few years ago I looked for the book in second-hand stores and couldn't find it.
There was little written about him on the Internet.
And on those Barkat it was written that she wanted to be hospitalized.
I forgot the contents of the book, but not the amazement at the intensity of the exposure and the anguish that accompanied me after reading it.
And questions like what our soul is and how it becomes sick, and the urgency I had to know.
In my notebook it says:
"Escape from the truth is fear, escape to the truth is madness. The fear of madness is the worst of all."
I memorized this motto for years, ran it over in my head, argued with it.
My argument was mainly with the second part of the first sentence.
I didn't agree with him, because I always looked up to people who hold the truth.
I thought the truth gave them strength.
That they know, like you want a mother to know, to find an answer to any question.
That they don't just think there is one way, they really believe it.
I envied them.
I wanted to have truth and a way and a mother who knows, and I felt weak and confused around them.
I was near them, but far away.
And there was also another time, when I thought I had found a solution and the phrase "escape to the truth is madness" can be read differently, because maybe the word madness in it simply means: great, wonderful.
Michal texts that she's parked.
She arrives and I tell her that this is my first time in such a place.
So it's good that we came together, it's not pleasant to be here alone, she says.
She offers me water.
I drink from her bottle, and feel how her words provide me with protection.
Drinking from mouth to mouth is something I learned to get used to on the basketball court.
The place where the three of us met.
Now the fear strengthens in me a feeling of disgust, or maybe it's just a fear of putting someone else's something in an intimate place like my mouth, after all we're not in the field.
Michal was a lawyer until a few years ago and decided to convert to teaching.
She completed studies and experience and just started her first year.
Taught math in an elementary school.
She told me that the children were disturbing her in class and that she did not know how to control them.
When this happens she just sits and waits for the lesson to end.
We climb the stairs and Michal tells me that a few years ago her sister-in-law fell ill with manic depression and was hospitalized.
She wanted you to come visit her, but Michal was busy and her sister-in-law committed suicide before she could.
Mental illnesses condemn the patient to terrible loneliness, she says, and I think what comes first, the loneliness or the illness.
At the entrance there is a security guard who checks bags and further on there is an intelligence desk.
The walls are painted orange, and then you come to a corridor with large windows on both sides that overlook manicured gardens.
At the end of the corridor the color of the walls changes to light blue, the ceiling is lower and there are no windows.
On the right side there is a door with a small window and above it a small sign that says department closed.
It's here, Michal says.
I am silent.
Trying to listen to my thoughts and feel the heartbeat.
A bell with a dark blue button is installed on the side of the door.
Michal rings.
Another security guard opens for us.
We enter a room with a counter, and in front of it is a door with a small glass window protected by an iron mesh.
Faces peep at us as if to see who has arrived, and disappear.
The security guard asks who we came to visit and writes on the page.
He shows us cells to leave our belongings in.
Nothing is allowed in, he says, and puts a yellow bracelet on our wrist, and without smiling he adds: if you want to stay, take off the bracelet.
Then he opens the door in front of his counter.
We are entering.
He closes after us.
I hear the clicks of the door lock.
People walk the corridors back and forth.
They are dressed in light blue robes that blend in with the color of the linoleum.
They drag their feet, and those who stand stomp in place.
I whisper to Michal: Why are they stepping on the spot?
And she says it's a side effect of the medication.
The lighting is weak.
Some people mutter, some sit on benches against the walls and stare.
They do not see each other and there is a feeling that they are one.
They walk without any direction at an almost uniform pace and suddenly one of them comes from the end of the corridor, moves forward quickly, speaks, speaks loudly, waves his hands, passes us and continues.
The fear is present now.
How many of the people around me know they are lost?
How many will get to know themselves again?
What does it resemble?
Maybe for the feeling we have when we are sick with a physical illness that erases the memory of the healthy feeling.
Maybe dream.
Or maybe for the time when I break down.
We advance a little and then Shiri appears in front of us.
She is happy.
In the last few days we corresponded through Facebook.
She wrote that she eats a lot, and I see that she is really fat.
She would always come to training late, always a bit sloppy, with long nails that could injure while playing.
I avoided keeping her.
She asks if we brought her cigarettes.
Michal says she brought her chocolate but they didn't let her in.
Shiri says that it's okay, that soon her mother will come and get her.
Maybe mom is allowed, I think.
A fat man with big, wide eyes walks by us and Shiri says to him: Bring a cigarette.
He doesn't answer her.
Shiri speaks to the people and to us at the same time.
I have friends here, let me introduce them to you, she says, introducing us as her friends to everyone who passes by.
She wants us to see the art room, she wants us to see her bed, her closet, and she keeps repeating that there is no time, that lunch is just around the corner and that during lunch we will have to go.
She leads us to the place of her bed.
On the way there is a smoking room whose windows are transparent.
It is dark and smoky.
People go in and out of it and the smell of smoke wafts through the corridors.
The smoking room does not have a door.
There are no doors to the rooms, and Shiri says that they have nothing to do most of the day and that they have to take good care of their belongings because everything is stolen here all the time, shoes, socks, cigarettes, even toothbrushes.
This is my bed and this is my wall, she says.
On the wall in front of her is another bed and someone is lying in it, half of her face facing the wall and her gaze downcast.
Shiri also introduces us to her face, but the girl does not turn her head towards us.
We go out to a yard with benches and paths.
Shiri leads us to the art room which has computers and papers and paints.
The man with the big eyes is there.
Shiri tells him again: Bring a cigarette.
He gets up and leaves.
There are computers around and Shiri says she can come here whenever she wants.
She tells us that she doesn't know when exactly it happened.
She only remembers being in the apartment that a friend left for her, and the moment after she was with her mother in the emergency room in Ichilov.
From there they were sent here.
She repeats that there is lunch now and that we should go.
After a few days she writes to me on messenger.
She writes that she is not manic, that she had psychosis.
Michal suggests that we go visit her again.
I write songs.
She does not want to.
She does not allow anyone to come except her family.
She is fed up.
If it hadn't been forced maybe it would have been different, she writes to me.
A few months later she goes out, calls me and suggests that the three of us meet.
I don't know if I want to see her again.
The thought of running away brings me back to Ella Barkat.
Perhaps the movement of running away from the truth and towards it exists in the soul of every person.
Perhaps Freudian psychology is right in asserting that there is an authority in the psyche that is considered normal that often strives to trap us to what we are, and the sick is a loss, destabilization, collapse or relinquishment of this being, and in our dreams this authority gives way and another part of the psyche takes the baton into its hands, chooses which area to wake up .
as in sick.
Maybe we just operate automatically.
are kept
When I think of Shiri and Michal, I can imagine the dirt under Shiri's fingernails, feel Michal's sweat touching me when we fight for a ball.
I go to practice with another team.
Going to the bus stop in the same city, at the same time, in the same body, a bag slung over me with the towel and shoes in it, and in me anticipation of the game and a sense of satisfaction.
I never met them again.
Not a close friend brought me to visit Shiri in the closed department.
Maybe it was hunger to be close to something extreme.
Take off the yellow bracelet.
Play with the options.
To be close to my fears that are named in memory.
***
spring evening
The window is open and the noise of children playing comes from the garden.
I finished copying something into the blue notebook.
Leftover lunch on the table, rice and meatballs.
I'm waiting for it to be time to go to practice, listening to Marianne Faithful sing "As Tears Go By".
Hearing my mother.
Just me and her at home.
Why do you listen to such sad songs, she asks.
Celine Essig has so far published three books: "Reverse Scream", "Parts of Machines" and "Days for Erasure". Winner of the Minister of Culture Award and the Prime Minister's Award, and her books were nominated for the Sapir Award in the long list. Until about six years ago, she was engaged in mechanical engineering, and today she is the editor of source literature at "Yediot Seferim".
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