THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL
Yehoshua's novel came home from the library on a whim of mine. It stayed on for several days to entertain, inform and move me immensely.
“Of Yehoshua I might just say one thing that the nation has said. The Nobel prize has been given for less,” begins Paul Holdengräber of the New York Public Library during his 2011 interview of a multi-faceted Jewish writer. In June 2022, that prolific author, A. B. Yehoshua, passed away in a Tel Aviv hospital at the age of 85, leaving behind thirteen novels, three short-story collections, four plays, and four books of essays.
The Tunnel begins exactly the way a dreaded conversation might at the doctor’s office. It’s real. It’s funny and snarky, too, the way even one of the saddest days of our lives leaves space for something memorable and special. The opening chapter was so touching that it was impossible to not blaze through several more chapters right during my work hours.
“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 toward 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?”
Zvi Luria is the patient in question and his wife is a respected pediatrician. Luria is a man in his seventies in the city of Tel Aviv, and he has retired from his job building tunnels for the Public Works department in Israel.
Luria’s family is worried about his decline and hence they encourage him to work part-time as an assistant to an engineer conducting a covert “military” operation in the northern Negev Desert. What begins as a job to stanch the decline of his mental faculties begins to be a test of his humanity. A Palestinian family is living under the protection of an archaeological preservationist right on that proposed route and Zvi Luria must seek to understand story of this family before he learns why he must not flatten the hill on which this family lives without an identify card.
During my journey through this novel, I began recognizing places that I’d visited in Israel in October 2022. As Luria begins to work with Asael Maimoni, we drive alongside them through Israel’s grim desert landscape in the south, the Negev desert. We arrive at Ramon Crater where a road must be built and as we watch the interaction between the assistant and the boss, it’s not clear who the manager and the underling are exactly.
Luria’s long-term memory is not just intact; his passion for and his expertise in his profession are as fresh now as they were before and we see how this project of building the road could not have been more suited for a man who has been told that his brain has embarked on a slow decline.
The Tunnel took me back to my car ride to the Dead Sea on the Israeli side and our long drive to Masada. There is an immense nothingness as we navigate the satiny roads through the Negev, yet it’s astonishing how Israel has made the desert bloom. We passed miles of date palm orchards that rose out of the blue. I’ve read several stories that describe the innovation in farming in the barren lands of Israel.
In a typical fashion of this book, the grimness of the real situation in Luria’s life is always pitted against the sharp humor of the man and that of his wife Dina, and the vexations of their quotidian life. Writing about The Tunnel certainly got me thinking about the light, literally, at the end of the tunnel, of the genius and the creativity in the guise of a retired engineer who is celebrated at his work—and always thinking about it. There’s a moment on the drive to the Ramon Crater when Luria tells Maimoni to, please, not pass the humongous truck ahead of them even as Maimoni gears up to pass the massive vehicle.
No, please don’t overtake this monster, Luria begs him. Don’t pass, because when I study a winding road like this behind an enormous truck, I can better understand the methods of excavation and the quality of the asphalt. I worked in the North, haven’t been in a wilderness like this for ages, so let me slowly feel the temperament of this road, where soon we’ll need to find the right place for the new turnonff.
Passages like this made me fall in love with this book many times over. I recognize this endearing quality of madness when I see our musician friend Mark at a guitar store. I see the same spit and glee when my husband is surrounded by the guys who build systems and databases. It’s beautiful to see it even though I may feel zero excitement in the endeavor myself. What I recognize, however, is the zeal and spirit that drives us human beings to accomplish impossible feats. We can see in the novel that Luria hasn’t retired at all.
There’s a spectacular moment in the narrative when Luria descends from the car and disappears into the desert, making his young boss sweat. He’s off trying to understand where the new road must be laid. When Maimoni locates him, the older man, the one who’s suffering from an early onset of dementia, says how the place the young man chose was utterly wrong for safety reasons. He explains to Maimoni that most accidents happen at intersections and exits. The communications blackout in that area means that people will not get help in case of an accident. But that is not all, Luria explains, to his dumbfounded assistant.
The turnoff you chose is too close to the last curve of Independence Road. It’s where cars pick up speed that a turnoff sign could go unnoticed. Don’t forget, there are no traffic cops here, very few cars, fast drivers. And the ones coming from the South won’t be able to see from afar the traffic coming in from your road. Their field of vision is limited. And those who exit from your road onto Route Forty, whether they go south or north, will have the same problem. That way, Asael, you are unintentionally courting disaster, not least because it’s an army road, and army drivers are inexperienced, or wild and crazy. Listen to me—move your turnoff three hundred meters farther south, and everyone will will have a good field of vision.
Luria’s condition causes undue anxiety to his wife and his family while, to the reader, it continues to be just a mere blip in his otherwise sprightly, incandescent personality. He constantly surprises us all with his acute vision in his area of expertise as well as his uncanny insights into the people around him.
Yet, every moment that alerts us to his strengths also devolves into a dead end that highlights his challenges. The day he is sent back to Tel Aviv on a minibus, Maimoni forgets that Luria may not even remember his own address.
Yet again, we witness a moment of tragicomedy when both the patient old driver and an impatient old passenger try to figure out where Luria’s home may be located. He asks Luria to tell him the name of a main street he might remember from the neighborhood. Luria blurts out the name of the street Israel’s first prime minister Ben Gurion lived on but is sure that’s not really where he himself lived. The driver then wonders if he lived near another leader’s home. Sokolow maybe?
“Thank you, it’s not Sokolow, why do you keep insisting on Zionist leaders?”
The driver laughs. “Because I learned about them recently for my bagrut test.”
“Matriculation exam at your age? Only now? Why’d you wait so long?”
“Because I was wild in high school and ignored my studies, but I’m tired of being just a driver.”
“In any case, don’t stop now, go down Ibn Gabirol, because I’m sure that’s the right way, but without Zionist leaders, please. I remember now that my street is named for a great rabbi.”
“A rabbi?”
“Yes, a rabbi, a great rabbi, why not?”
“Your address is suddenly a rabbi? Here, pick one. Look at the map. I think that around the medical center on Basel Street are a bunch of names that sound rabbinical. Alkalay, the Holy Shelah, Emden, Eibelschutz, Ovadia of Bartenura, they’re all rabbis, no?”
“Emden, that’s the one,” rejoices Luria. “Rabbi Yaakov Emden, Emden number five. That’s the house. That’s the address.”
The Tunnel is about the dark place that Luria descends into when he’s left alone and gets lost upon forgetting an important detail about his life. The exasperation of infirmity and old age haunt the pages. Yet there is no despair. As the story progresses, we do see Luria sink deeper into an abyss of his own making, while his family madly tries to reach him on two cell phones. The Tunnel also bores into a general human affliction; the author suggests that people almost always develop a tunnel vision around a patient with a mental setback, seeing only the dimness growing inside the person while discounting the rest of what he stands for.
I was also heartened to learn, thanks to this book, that when Palestinians need to be transported to hospitals in Israel for urgent and complex medical care, they often get help from Israeli volunteers through the charity Road to Recovery. In a review for The Tablet, Professor Sonya Michel drills down into the significance of several facts and allusions in The Tunnel . It enriched my own understanding of a novel that would make such a timely pick for a book club, given the ongoing armed conflict between Israel and Hamas-led Palestinian militant groups.
Great choice of book Kalpana. Incredible summary of life with dementia.
A scary and hopeful look ahead. I’ll uncover my eyes now.