Марко Коскас - Goodbye Paris, Shalom Tel Aviv

“I so like what you do,” she says to Juliette with a big smile, on the off chance she’s right. Juliette looks at her wide eyed in bewilderment.

As for Elias, he feels like smashing the bottle of Merlot. He only holds himself back by staring at the heater glowing over their table. Is she ever going to let go of him? Or go to the devil? Or just go fuck herself? He had his reasons for not going back to see her Friday night, and those reasons were way more pressing than the pain he caused her. Should he have given up the love of his life for an affair of no importance? And besides, taking his apartment on Levinsky Street—what was that plan, if not harassment? Always that same gluey way of glomming on to him and following him like his shadow!

After two or three minutes of inner boiling, he suddenly gets up and goes off without even saying goodbye.

“I’ll send you Azencot’s number,” Diabolo calls out to him.

Once he’s gone, the table lightens up. Juliette asks Manu if he went to get the bike at Romy’s.

“What bike?” Diabolo says, laughing up his sleeve.

“Uh… Romy’s son’s bike,” Manu confesses, shamefaced.

“She gave you his bike?” Diabolo asks mockingly.

“By the way, you two don’t know each other yet,” says Manu, introducing Juliette to him to change the conversation.

“Thanks to you, Juliette, IBN got a hundred thousand visitors the same day,” Diabolo tells her.

“Well, I’m happy for you,” Juliette answers pleasantly. “But I wish the terrorist had picked someone else.”

“So, Manu, to return to the subject, she gave you the bike?” Diabolo asks, poker faced.

“Not at all, why would she give it to me?”

“You bought if from her for how much?”

“Two thousand. Well, twenty-five hundred.”

“Not thirty-five hundred?” Juliette says, putting her foot in it.

“Ha ha ha!” Diabolo guffaws. “Thirty-five hundred bucks for that old piece of crap. Man, she’s greedy, that Romy!”

“Hey, here are your five hundred bucks,” Manu answers in an irritated voice, giving Juliette five one-hundred-shekel bills.

As she goes back to Levinsky Street, Juliette wonders how much time went by between the moment she got to Florentin 10 and the moment Elias left. A quarter of an hour? An hour? It was such an intense moment she really thought she’d faint. But she lost the notion of time, since Elias didn’t remain more than three minutes in her presence. She just remembers that she didn’t understand whatever Yoni’s fiancée, Maia, was telling her, and her heart was drumming in her chest so loudly she had the impression everyone could hear it. Now she feels rather proud of facing that situation and not retreating. Would she be able to do it again? Now she has no more energy, as if she lost all her strength in that face-to-face with Elias. She’d just like to go to sleep. But her mother is waiting for her at the door.

“Oh, Mom, forgive me, I’m totally zapped.”

“That’s nice.”

“No, it’s because you know, because of… I was kept back at the gallery by, um, you know, well, the inventory.”

“Don’t worry, darling, I just got here.”

Juliette opens the door, and her mother discovers the little studio she now lives in on Levinsky Street in Tel Aviv.

“Well, it’s very cute!”

“You think so?”

“Except you had a better apartment in Jeru.”

“I’ve got a little balcony, you see it? Jean-Pierre!” Juliette cries, and the kitty pops out of who knows where. She takes him in her arms and presents him to Sandrine, who can’t get over it.

“So Jean-Pierre is a cat?”

“It can’t be a man, since no man wants me.”

“What are you talking about, darling?”

“I’m dead, Mom, d’you mind if I go to bed?”

“Without eating dinner?”

“I don’t feel like it.”

“Go to bed, dear. I’ll read.”

Sandrine settles into the window seat, while Juliette goes to bed fully dressed without taking off her makeup or brushing her teeth. Her mother spares her a comment and dives into the memoirs of Father de Foucauld, a priest, but also a womanizer, at least before he went into the Church, a little like Victor. But there’s no use, Juliette is turning this way and that, unable to sleep. She finally turns on her bed lamp.

“You’re not sleeping?”

“Well, no, I’m too tired,” she answers as she gets up. She goes and takes off her makeup and brushes her teeth. Then she gets undressed and puts on pajamas.

“What’re you reading, Mom?” she asks distractedly as she goes back to bed.

“The memoirs of Father de Foucauld.”

“Another priest!” Juliette sighs.

“It’s very interesting, you know.”

“OK, good night, Mom.”

“Good night, darling.”

Juliette puts out the light and turns toward the wall, while Sandrine points her pen lamp on the book and starts reading again. But she senses Juliette isn’t really sleeping, and that prevents her from concentrating. Why isn’t she sleeping, her darling daughter? What is bothering her so much? Sometimes she would so like to be a little mouse. See everything that’s happening in her life and understand what’s making her suffer so much. Not a minute goes by that she doesn’t think of Juliette. If only she could take the weight of that absurd filiation off her shoulders! Because at bottom, she knows very well what’s making her daughter suffer so much. A priest’s daughter, God forgive me. And yet Moshe, her ex-husband, hadn’t treated any of the three kids differently! He gave as much to Juliette as to Mathilde and Assaf. Not an iota of preference. What a great man! Yet there was no lack of gossip throughout her pregnancy. Well-meaning souls told tales, even writing poison pen letters. Good old Moshe, he would throw all those papers into the wastebasket! And never the slightest allusion to a poison pen letter. Not like Victor. Maybe he was a great man, too, but not always charitable! When Juliette was five, Sandrine wanted the priest at least to see the adorable child he had given her. But he turned away. Another time, they met by chance on a bus in Jerusalem, and he slunk off.

To be the daughter of a man who does not wish to be your father, who does not even want to know what you look like, what a nasty gift of life! Oh, how she would like to have the courage to tell her the truth. Who knows if it would help her? Such a beautiful girl, who only falls for selfish men exactly like Victor. It really makes you think, doesn’t it? Is it fate? But every time she’s going to do it, Sandrine shrinks back. At the last minute, she tells herself, What’s the good? She just doesn’t have the courage to confess the truth to Juliette. Yet the ideal opportunity has come, and she owes it to herself to take advantage of it: Victor Boussagol passed away three days ago at the age of eighty-one. Isn’t it time to own up? To break that long silence? It’s the very reason Sandrine came to Tel Aviv. Announce to Juliette that her dad is dead. Well, no way—she can’t manage to do it. Petrified in her guilt. Dead or alive, Victor still decides what she has a right to say and what she must keep silent.

Too bad she doesn’t know that ever since Juliette was a little girl, she’d heard that truth a thousand times. At school or in Sandrine’s family, there was no dearth of allusions to it. She knew who Victor Boussagol was and what he looked like. Sandrine is torturing herself for nothing. Or she’s torturing herself too late.

Elias answers the police summons without a lawyer to try to play down the situation, and he goes there by bus. Two hours on the road separate Tel Aviv from Netivot, that little town in the Negev a little over three miles from Gaza, and even if it isn’t at the end of the world, when you want to go there, it takes all day. Despite the quantities of missiles it received from Hamas, Netivot has remained a place both calm and strange, where you sometimes meet transsexuals who’ve had very successful surgery. There Elias knows a certain Levana, a good-looking blonde with the voice of an ogre, very nice and ultrafeminine, who doesn’t always make you pay for a blow job. A real subject for an Israeli film, that Levana: born in a man’s body, but also into an ultraorthodox family who called it the work of the devil when she decided to change sex. Levana became a woman nonetheless. Her seven brothers accepted it, since she supports them financially while they twiddle their thumbs pretending to study the Torah.