Марко Коскас - Goodbye Paris, Shalom Tel Aviv

He finally decides on a finely chiseled gold bracelet because the symbolism of the ring does seem a bit too strong for such a recent relationship. But for the cash payment, after locking the entrance to the shop, the saleslady asks him to follow her into the back office. Once they’re alone, Elias slowly takes the money out of his pocket, looking the jeweler in the eyes for a long time. She has a little embarrassed smile, and Elias puts the stack of bills on the table with great precaution. While she’s recounting, he comes up to her and flattens himself against her hips. She doesn’t move. Then he puts his hand under her skirt, and she sighs softly while he strokes her thighs. She keeps counting the bills for a few moments, but she finally gives out a heavy groan when he stuffs two fingers into her. “Come back and see me often,” she murmurs to him in Hebrew before he leaves the shop.

When he reaches H24’s parking lot, he rips out a random valve in the engine to make the four-wheel drive unusable. That way, he’ll go back to the Gaza border with another vehicle, in case the Bedouins want to find him and take their revenge. Then he brings back his supposedly malfunctioning camera to the equipment office. Next he goes to see Marcel, who immediately tells him about Juliette’s visit.

“I hope you didn’t give her my address!”

“Hey, I’m not crazy,” Marcel answers soberly. “Any news from Olga?”

“Why would I have news of Olga?”

“Everybody knows you’re together.”

Elias takes it in stride, waits a moment, and then starts up again as if nothing had happened.

“I also need another car, Marcel. Mine broke down.”

“The car, too?”

“Afraid so. Sand’s not great for the motor.”

“Did you go to the garage?”

“Yeah, but there’s nothing available.”

So Elias hangs around the newsroom, waiting to get a new vehicle. He sits down at Olga’s desk for a moment, thinking of the first magical moments of their meeting, when she couldn’t concentrate on her screen anymore and she only had eyes for him. That was hardly two weeks ago.

He calls Manu to pay him back, and they set up a meeting at the Café Français on Rothschild Boulevard. It used to be the library of the French Institute. But there were a lot fewer people there. Now it’s always full. It is the place to be in Tel Aviv, the spot where all the bourgeois bohemians want to be seen.

“You know Juliette’s in Tel Aviv?”

“Uh… well, sort of, but no, not really, why?” Manu stammers.

“It worries me, she’s following me. Dunno who told her I was working at H24. Seems she came by this morning. Crazy, right?”

“Yes, it’s strange,” Manu says, embarrassed and looking away.

“Hey, here’s your five hundred bucks,” Elias says, handing over some bills. “If you see her, not a word about me, OK?”

“Of course!”

Manu returns to Florentin determined to press Juliette to find her own place. She’s already started working three mornings a week at the Moins de Mille gallery, and that gives her a little income but not enough to pay rent. The cheapest studio apartment in Florentin is four thousand shekels a month. A little less than a thousand euros since the sharp drop in the European currency, and that makes it still more for her. In the slum just next to the brand-new Beans, you can find something less expensive, but they’re sad dwellings with no AC and sometimes no window. Since you live outside a lot in Tel Aviv, it’s less serious than in a colder country, but it’s still hard to live in them.

Now Manu is even more eager for her to move, because it really weighs on him to lie to Elias, but on the other hand he’s also starting to like her presence in his apartment. She’s so sweet and gentle. A little melancholy but very sweet, and truly friendly. In fact, she arrived at the best possible moment in Manu’s life: after his horrible night with Romy. Without Juliette he would have had to treat his eye alone, for example, and that would have been really depressing. And then she’s beginning to look him in both eyes, or rather in one eye, outside of the moments when she’s changing his dressing, and something very tender is connecting them. Having breakfast together on the balcony is a great pleasure, he must admit: a moment for lovers, if truth be told. But he’s thirty years older than she is with no advantages and no prospects, so let’s not get carried away here.

The most touching thing is her unbelievable attachment to Jean-Pierre, the cat. He has become her cat, and Manu promised she can take him with her when she has her own apartment. Sometimes he longs to tell her it’s Elias’s cat, if only to see her reaction. It might be funny. She’d be capable of seeing a sign of fate in that, she’s so fragile. Well, no. Might as well let her love the animal without bothering her.

In Florentin, Jean-Pierre is the favorite cat, because the cats run wild in the neighborhood, like in the rest of Tel Aviv. Devoted neighbors feed them, but they adore dogs. You have to see the girls in Florentin pick up their dogs’ turds with an abnegation they’d probably never have for a guy. So those animals think they can do anything at all. The dogs yap at each other from one sidewalk to another and spread out like doormats at the entrance to restaurants. It’s all about them. On Florentin Street, there are two shops devoted to their needs: air-conditioned kennels, plastic bones, dog food with added vitamins, toothpicks for poodles. At least cats get along fine on their own, without bugging anybody. Moreover, the difference in condition between cats and dogs in Tel Aviv makes you think of an animal representation of the gap between Sephardim and Ashkenazim in Israel, although with the arrival of the French, Sephardim are now becoming the privileged part of society. They invest, they speculate, they set up bakeries, call centers, hip restaurants, and a bunch of things Israelis love, like that Café Français on Rothschild Boulevard. At some future time, Tel Aviv will be a French city.

“I didn’t think I’d miss you so little, only, there you are…” Olga begins, without opening the purple velvet case Elias set before her. “I don’t want to lie to you, Elias. I’m not really in love with you.”

“I think I’m gonna die,” Elias mumbles, with his head down.

“Don’t say that, I mean, we didn’t… look, we barely had two weeks together. It’s not exactly… let’s stay friends. We work at the same place, after all.”

“I’m gonna die,” he repeats stubbornly, pushing the case containing the bracelet toward her. That doesn’t persuade her to open it any more than when he put it in front of her.

She’s so embarrassed by their conflicting emotions! And although she doesn’t want to let herself be moved by pity, Elias’s incredible distress does catch her unprepared. Never would she have thought he’d be so upset. She was even sure he’d already be with another girl when she got back from Gérardmer. Maybe she’s had the wrong idea about him? Maybe he’s not a cynical seducer but an ultrasensitive guy? Fragile, even? With men, she never knows what is pure show and what’s truly driving them. But she knows when someone makes her vibrate and when those vibrations fade away. And that’s how it is with Elias.

So she gets up delicately, as if to disappear without making a sound, almost sliding, but she sees Elias crying his eyes out and that holds her back for a few moments. Just a few moments. She quickly caresses his hair, and then she clears out.

The sky fell on his head, poor Elias. And not just the sky. The planets and the stars, too, especially his lucky star with girls since it’s the first time one has ever left him.