Марко Коскас - Goodbye Paris, Shalom Tel Aviv

What’s this pretty chick playing at, calling herself a Tag Shalom sympathizer but probably a Ukrainian whore? Kirzenbaum wonders. Certainly a Ukrainian whore despite her French accent. It’s not even a scoop, this photo, nor an affair making the headlines, just a piece of evidence to illustrate a pseudoinvestigative story like the ones he regularly writes against the Israeli army.

“I can’t even give you ten percent of that,” he confesses.

“Too bad,” Olga answers, taking back the photo. She slips it into her purse and gets up. But Kirzenbaum grabs her by the wrist and forces her to sit down.

“Wait a second, please. You didn’t even tell me who’s who in this photo. Well, yes, I recognize the reporter from H24, but the other fat guy, there? Can I take a look at his face?”

She puts it in front of his nose for a few seconds before putting it back in her purse and getting up again to leave.

“Wait, wait, what’s his name, his accomplice?”

“Gérard Valensi, or Diabolo, if you’d rather.”

“And what’s your connection to Elias Benzaquen?”

“I’m his ex. I’m the one who took the picture. The bastard threw me over, and I want to make him pay.”

“The moron! Pearls before swine! A gorgeous girl like you… alone now, huh? Because I can… would you like to go to the movies tonight, the Cinematheque is having a retrospective of… um… the other idiot who became a rabbi, I have tickets…”

“Fifty thousand shekels or nothing,” Olga interrupts him, putting her smartphone to her ear to pretend she has someone at the other end of the line.

“If you’re really a Tag Shalom sympathizer, you should give it to me for free.”

“I’m a whore, you dope!” replies Olga, putting the phone back in her purse. “Don’t you get it?”

“Give it to me!”

“Let go of me!” she shouts, loud enough to alert the passersby.

Kirzenbaum immediately takes two steps back, raising his arms like in a Western, but he keeps walking behind her with his hands up, afraid of being accused of harassment. They walk up Rothschild Boulevard like that, among the joggers and roller skaters on the central pathway, up to the first stand where Olga stops to drink a Limonana. Still with his hands up, Kirzenbaum asks the bartender for a strong espresso, “with the sugar already stirred in, please.” The bartender gives him a funny look, with a half smile on his lips as if he thought it was a sketch on Candid Camera .

“OK, put your hands down,” Olga finally says to him in English, and Kirzenbaum lowers his hands.

“You gotta realize we’re not rolling in dough at Tag Shalom ,” he whimpers. “We don’t have money. Not a cent! It’s pure poverty, I’m telling you.”

“What about the subsidies from the European Union?”

“Excuse me?”

“A hundred thousand euros a year, that’s not nothing.”

“But that hardly covers expenses! We’ve got observers everywhere, you don’t realize what that costs, the volunteers’ little cameras! Not to mention thefts from volunteers… they may be volunteers, but they steal us blind anyway. Well, the Occupation is terrible, I swear, but…”

“OK, so let’s say thirty thousand shekels.”

“Ten thousand, no more,” he says.

“Twenty thousand, my last offer, take it or leave it,” Olga concludes. “My place at seven thirty for the exchange. Twenty thou’ in cash, got it?”

She walks back up Rothschild Boulevard alone, quite pleased with herself for hooking Kirzenbaum. Now he has to bite on the hook and post the photomontage she made. You can see an obese man next to Elias, leaning on a four-wheel drive Subaru, the same model Elias sold the Bedouins but red instead of white. Naturally, the fat man is not Diabolo. Olga found his picture in Google images. With his bleach-blond hair and rosy complexion, he looks more like an Austrian tourist in some Asiatic sex paradise than a plump, dark Sephardi like Diabolo. Olga replaced the landscape of sand and sea with a stony landscape like the Negev’s, and her montage really creates the illusion. Let’s hope Kirzenbaum, blinded by his desire to get Elias, lets himself get trapped.

Olga also senses the blogger is one of those men who’d eat out of her hand, and so smarmy, such a whiner, that he makes her feel like indulging in little sadistic pleasures. This business is getting exciting! What’s more, Elias knows nothing about it. She did the whole thing secretly, alone with Photoshop.

As she crosses Allenby Street, she sees Manu at the counter of Japanika Sushi with a blonde girl she doesn’t know, and she comes over to give him a little pat on the back. A bit surprised, even embarrassed, Manu introduces her to Juliette, and the two girls kiss each other as if it were perfectly normal. Besides, Olga still doesn’t know who Juliette is. Elias has never mentioned her. Juliette, on the other hand… of course she knows her rival, and of course she’d recognize her anywhere. Her nonchalance, above all. That fascinates her. She would so like to be like Olga. Not give a damn about anything, at least on the face of it. As for Olga, while she doesn’t envy anything about Juliette, she would like to get to know her, have a friendship, giggle together, build castles in the air, talk about boys, and shake her like a plum tree at the same time—in short, be her new girlfriend. Truly love at first sight.

“What do you do in Tel Aviv?”

“I sell paintings.”

“You have a gallery?”

“It’s not mine,” Juliette says. “But yeah, I’m the one who does everything.”

“Where?”

“Abarbanel Street. It’s called—”

“Oh yeah, Moins de Mille, I know it. I love it. I’ll drop by to see you, all right?”

“Umm, yes… when?”

“Anytime. Just like that!”

“OK, fine, yes,” Juliette says, vaguely worried, but relieved, too, to discover Olga’s a real person and so approachable, not just a silhouette.

Then Olga goes back to change. She puts on black jeans, ballet shoes, her tortoiseshell Ray-Bans, and leaves for work. She goes by the office to kiss Elias but doesn’t say a word about her date with Kirzenbaum, just that she ran into Manu at the Japanika with someone named Juliette, “super pretty.” Elias shudders. If only Manu could stop seeing his ex, dammit! But what does he see in her? You’d think he was doing it on purpose. Suddenly he asks himself, What if Manu was pretending to be crazy about Romy just to hide that he loves Juliette? A terrible theory for Elias, because that would be the end of their friendship. But it’s not impossible. After all, that girl never knew her father and the age difference between her and Manu isn’t a real obstacle. On the contrary, even. They could easily end up stirring up a Freudian stew between them.

But if Olga starts seeing her, too, that would be the last straw! As if he didn’t have enough to bug him without adding a possible friendship between Olga and his ex… since they have different schedules, with Elias ending his day when Olga’s starting hers, they agree to meet at his place on Levinsky Street around 10:00 p.m. That leaves a little time for Olga to prepare the rest of her plan. At seven, she’s back home, and at seven thirty on the dot she hears the doorbell ring. But she doesn’t answer right away. She waits until Kirzenbaum rings twice and lets a few more seconds go by before going to open the door for him. A humanitarian or not, a great moral conscience or not, he looks like a big pervert.

“Oh, it’s you!” she says, feigning surprise.

“May I point out that we had an appointment,” he replies, already vindictive but giving her a funny look, for she’s totally changed style since this morning, wearing only a little mauve satin dressing gown that goes down no farther than her butt, and black high-heeled mules she bought half an hour ago at Derech Yafo in a store that sells accessories for Ukrainian whores. It gets Kirzenbaum right away, but it also intimidates him. He sits down at the edge of the couch—prudently, you might say—while she drops down next to him with her legs crossed high and her thighs mostly bare.