Tami Arad: I feel guilty for being alive

For part 1 of the interview, click here

She arrives to our second meeting with a bunch of papers.

"Here," she says, "It's your story about me. I wrote it for you."

You're that scared?

"Yes."

Why?

"I keep feeling guilty."

What for?

"For being alive even though he's not here."

Shadow of a myth

The story she wrote is not really a story, so much as a statement of defense: "My decision to fall off the public radar was not a conscious one. As far as I was concerned I was fighting for my sanity, because emotionally, I felt like I couldn’t take it anymore.

"I took Yuval and we went to the US for a year. It was horrible. The loneliness was even greater; but I needed that timeout to realize you cannot escape yourself. So we came back. To our family and our friends, who have been and still are my supporting circle. The media respected my choice. I think that when you send a clear message it comes across. With the exception of a handful of cases, they didn’t bother me and I appreciate that very much. Over the years I came to realize that it was the only way I could keep sane."

Not that she – or anyone else for that matter – knows what "sane" is under such circumstances. Everything in her life has to do with Ron. In a country long lost in its own sense of righteousness, who is to say where the lines are drawn? Is she allowed to laugh in public? To write a controversial article? To have a baby? To fall in love with the only man not daunted by life in the shadow of a myth?

How does he live with it?

"He doesn’t live with it. He lives with me."

And with IT.

"That's the last I'll say on the matter."

Looking back, do you think you made the right decision?

"After we got the letters from Ron last summer, I was even more convinced of what I had. He wrote that the love we shared gave him the strength to go on. That was my answer. He trusted me to raise Yuval properly. I did my best. I've made my share of mistakes. Who hasn’t?"

And now what? Will this be the moment when the horsemen of media apocalypse charge on their motorcycles, digital cameras in hand and brazenness as their armor? Or is there another option, one which suggests we still have a shared sense of decency left, and that after 22 years, we can let Tami Arad stop being TAMI ARAD for just a few moments?

The fact that she looks practically the same doesn’t help. Arad is one of those women barely touched by the hands of time and anyone who lived here during the 1980s would instantly recognize her.

They got married when she was 21.

"I was the one to propose," she boasts. "My parents were just divorced and my brother just got married, so I proposed to Ron."

What did he say?

"He laughed and said 'Isn't the man supposed to propose?' so I said, 'Fine, you propose.'"

Did he?

"We were married from the first day we met, when I was in the 12th grade. Besides, everyone in the squadron got married when they were young."

Karnit Goldwasser did things differently.

"Define 'differently.'"

She was able to make the world understand that she was a keg of gunpowder and that we better do something before she explodes.

"True."

You didn’t.

"We're not cut from the same cloth."

Meaning?

"Karnit learned a lot from our case. She pulled all the resources to end her nightmare as soon as possible. She succeeded where I failed, if you like. Udi came back. Ron didn’t."

Her message, basically, was "I don’t want to be Tami Arad."

"Yes."

Does that bother you?

"I'm fine with it."

She also didn’t want to be left an aguna (the Jewish definition for a woman unable to obtain a divorce).

"I guess. That fact stopped bothering me the day I realized that the only solution for my legal status was declaring Ron dead. No thank you. Don’t use my status to declare him dead as long as you don’t know for sure. And believe me – they don’t know. Of course, it's easier to say that if we haven’t heard from him in 20 years than he must be dead. Case closed. We – and I speak for Ron's family as well – think he deserves a little more than 'Sorry, we don’t know where you disappeared to.'"

'Life doesn’t freeze'

Last June she reappeared for just a second, writing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert a letter which was attached to Noam and Aviva Shalit's, the parents of kidnapped IDF soldier Gilad Shalit, High Court petition against the 2008 ceasefire agreement with Hamas.

That letter, she said "was the closest I ever came to actually saying he was dead, or at least, I guess it came out that way."

But you didn’t.

"Life didn’t freeze. They go on and Ron didn’t come back. That's a fact."

Do you know anything about the conditions he was held under?

"They called him 'the object.' This guy, who was king of the world, and they're calling him an object."

They become objects. Gilad Shalit too.

"I think about Gilad often. Noam and Aviva too. I told them that. As far as I am concerned, when Gilad comes back it would be beyond joy. I can't say it would be a comfort – there is no comfort and no forgiveness for what happened with Ron – but by having Gilad back I will have a sliver of the overwhelming joy that should have come rushing over with Ron's return. Gilad is alive and Gilad should come home. Anyone who has any doubts about any prisoner exchange deal should try substituting Gilad's name with that of their child. That will solve any dilemmas.

A photo of Ron Arad in captivity

"After I read those few last letters, I realized they could only have been written by someone who's alive, whose life was taken away. The longing made it harder for Ron. I assume it's the same for Gilad. Secluded captivity like Ron's, like Gilad's, it's a path, like the tunnel people who have near-death experiences and have come back to life describe. The difference is that one is fully conscious in captivity and it is a very dark place. I don’t understand how we got to the point where Gilad has been held captive for over two years.

"This is a mind game. There are regional politics intertwined, naturally, since the Iranians have their hand in it. A lot of what was done for Ron was done too late. If we want to keep Gilad from drowning in an ocean of interests, we need someone with a creative mind heading the case."

There is no one like that.

"I was disappointed with Moshe Yaalon. In the few meetings I had with him when he was IDF chief of staff, I got the impression that this was a very moral person. It was hard to hear him talk about how sometimes we have to sacrifice soldiers. We sacrifice solders in every war – it is inevitable… (but) if someone survives that inferno and the State gives up on them 'because some interests are more important than one soldier's life' – than as I see it, we've lost one of our basic moral values."

Proportionate response

If the jet had not been shot down, where would you be today?

"In Rehovot."

Rehovot of all places?

"Ron wanted to work for the Weizmann Institute of Science. He was studying chemical engineering at the Technion in Haifa and he wanted to get his Masters' in genetic engineering."

And you?

"I wanted to have five children."

And what would you be doing?

"I don’t know. Maybe I would have become a teacher… I really don’t know. It's such a hypothetical question. You have no idea just how hypothetical."

I don’t buy that.

"Why?"

There it too much of a gap between you – the person you have become – and that description.

"I don’t know. I was so young; I really don’t know what, who I was."

Well, you didn’t become a teacher.

"Yes, but before… Ron was the bright one."

And you?

"I was with him."

And that was enough for you?

"I was just happy he wanted to be with me."

As horrible a gamble as it is, life is made up of the permanent tension between characteristics and circumstances. It is safe to assume, especially with everything that has ensued, that Arad was just not meant to be a teacher in Rehovot.

The 1980s ended with her going through the one photo album she had over and over again; she started writing a diary and scrapped it; she underwent therapy; read Catch 22 – which Ron left by the bed – over and over again; and she raised Yuval – or was it Yuval who was raising her?

The 1990s saw her become a different person. She kept fighting her losing battle, but she was invited to the Defense Ministry's building in Tel Aviv less often; meeting with the respective IDF chiefs - a distant, slightly embarrassed Dan Shomron, Ehud Barak with his never-ending Zen mantras, the ever-good listener Amnon Lipkin-Shahak; Shaul Mofaz, with his constant all-night pharmacist look and the somber Yaalon – each making promises they could not hope to keep.

The meetings led nowhere and she eventually found herself losing – to herself. She no longer had the ability, the strength to keep up the near-grieving widow routine. So she left the television studios to the tragedies de jour and slowly got on with the business of living, studying criminology and working with distressed soldiers before shifting gears, hosting a weekly radio show on a local station, writing a newspaper column.

It is almost ridiculous, but Tami Arad, our national absentee, has been corresponding with us constantly for all these years.

"In all my years of writing, I've almost never received any reactions involving Ron. Everyone thinks it's a different Tami Arad," she says, amused. Maybe it is because she sounds different. Different from what – I do not know – but different from what we might expect a Tami Arad column to read like.

The writing experience gave way to a three-year writing frenzy which culminated in her first novel. She struggled with the familiar pitfalls. Ernest Hemingway, her favorite author, said that writing was like architecture. Gabriel Garcia Marquez equated it with carpentry. Reality, she found, was harder than wood and tougher than interior design. Let's face it, said author William Styron, writing is hell.

This is not a biography, she stresses. The novel centers on a man – a neurosurgeon as cold and clinical as his profession – who wakes one morning to find his much-younger wife has a brain tumor. The novel is skillfully written and well researched. Her "visit" to the cardiothoracic wing is meticulously described and the history of the characters' love affair is presented to the readers frame by x-rayed frame; until we do what doctors are forbidden to do – we grow emotionally attached to the patients. But somehow, Arad's biography still hovers in the background.

"How did you come to that," she asks, curious.

You write about the fact that when something awful happens to a person, it also happens to their spouse.

"So?"

Isn't that what you have been feeling all along?

"No… absolutely not. I never saw myself as the heroine of Ron's story. I never felt that way, no matter how sorry I felt for myself. Maybe it would have been different had he been killed, but because he went through all of those horrible things there, I could always keep myself in check."

Was there ever a moment when you wanted to write your own story?

"(Writing) opened up wounds which bled even without me touching them. I realized that writing about myself wasn’t the way to go, so I reverted to fiction. I use my characters to live in a movie whose script I wrote. Now, I can see psychologists nodding their heads and saying this is my way of compensating for my lack of control over real life. Maybe it is. I don't know."

Yes you do.

"I am who I am. This is my name, for better or for worse, but my aspirations go beyond the role life has in store for me. Maybe 'aspirations' is too big a word; 'needs' is better. I'm not sure."

The book is dedicated "To my Ron," followed by a few lines form the Moody Blues' 1967 song Nights in White Satin: "Nights in white satin, Never reaching the end, Letters I've written, Never meaning to send…"

Why did you choose that song?

"It was his favorite."

That's all?

"The night he vanished, everyone was looking for his brother, Chen, who was in a movie. After he came out and they told him, he got in the car and turned on the radio. The anchor said that an Air Force jet was shot down. And then they played that song. Of all things – that song."