Марко Коскас - Goodbye Paris, Shalom Tel Aviv

“Did you bring the money?”

“Yes, yes, of course,” he answers, tapping the pocket of his dull yellow-gray-brown jacket. He takes out the wad of bills and puts it in the little space still free between her and him in the hollow of the seat. Olga takes the money and slowly counts it while he eyes her body, visibly naked under the peignoir. Sensing he’s devouring her with his eyes and he’s not attentively following the count, she intentionally makes a mistake.

“I’m only finding fifteen thousand.”

“Oh, hey! No!” he protests. “Count it again, the twenty thousand are there.”

Olga gets a kick out of recounting out loud and laying the bills on his thigh one by one, right next to his fly. By the time she reaches the seventh bill Kirzenbaum has lost count. He is well aware that he’s wrong to let himself get excited by this so-called Frenchwoman, but while he’s a man who can fight against the Occupation, there’s nothing he can do about his erections. He’d give his right arm to screw Olga. She’s putting him in a state of rut he has never known. He’s breathing hard without realizing it as he tries to quell the insurrection between his thighs.

“You’re not feeling well?” she asks naively.

“Yes, yes, why do you ask?”

“You’re puffing like a steam engine!”

“I’m fine.”

She picks up the money slowly and gets up to get the photo. “You’re really sexy!” he calls to her, with his tongue hanging out, and Olga turns around and looks him up and down for a moment, just a moment, for him to feel even more miserly, more milquetoast, more of a wet blanket than he is.

“Do you want something to drink?” she asks him then, coming back with what he’s paid for.

“Oh yes, if you have something cold.”

“A Nespresso?”

“Ah, well no, I wanted something cold, not hot… uh… and then coffee at night…”

“Yes, that’s not good, and anyway I’ve got to go now, motek .”

“So when do we see each other again?” he says as he gets up with his arms stretched out to try to grab her.

“Next week, if you have time for me,” Olga simpers, avoiding his embrace.

“Before. Before that! I’ve got to see you before, OK? I’ve got to!” he shouts, at the end of his tether. “That is, if you can.”

“Come on, don’t act like a child!”

Once she’s succeeded in getting him out of there, she can sink down on the sofa and breathe at last. A weight has fallen from her shoulders. She acted without thinking, but it’s not so easy to morph into a femme fatale when you’re a solid Savoyard woman from Chambéry who likes simple things like fondue and mountain streams. It’s still less easy because she’s managed her affair in secret, without saying a word to Elias. Just to save him. She is quite simply mad about her guy—she hadn’t foreseen that either. Her great love, you know, the man of her life. While she landed in Tel Aviv for an unpaid internship, with no other goal than to enrich the little professional experience she had, she now sees herself with a ring on her finger. What’s more, Marcel made her a salaried employee. It commits you, all that. The upward spiral of life. It’s fascinating. Everything takes off all of a sudden, and there’s no going back.

A merry-go-round of texts follows, each more lovestruck than the last. Kirzenbaum wants to see her again right away, in an hour, in a half hour, in a minute. She fingers the bills he left, reflecting on the best way to give them to the family of the two Bedouins. That’s the next stage of her plan. But above all, to discredit Kirzenbaum by getting him to publish those photos. So she goes to the trouble of answering his messages with phony romantic platitudes like “Give me another week to be all yours,” but she can’t wait for the whole thing to be over with.

The other question is to find someone to join her when she goes to the encampment near Mitzpe Ramon to hand over the twenty-five thousand shekels. She doesn’t feel up to going there alone. It can’t be Elias, of course. Why not with Manu? He probably wouldn’t refuse, but he’s too close to Elias. And he doesn’t speak Hebrew that well. Go there with her new girlfriend, Juliette—that would be perfect! Two girls are always better than a fake couple for this kind of trip. And then it would create a superstrong connection between them.

“Why d’you want her number?” asks Manu warily.

“No reason, I think she’s cool.”

“I’ll ask her first, OK?”

But Olga goes straight to Juliette at the gallery on Abarbanel Street, claiming she wants to buy a painting she saw on Facebook, and in the same breath proposes they go on a little expedition. Olga gifts Juliette a bottle of Miss Dior her mother brought back from the Duty Free at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle the last time she came to visit her. Naturally, Juliette wonders what Olga’s getting at and if buying the painting isn’t just a pretext for God-knows-what scheme. Either Olga doesn’t know she’s Elias’s ex, or this girl is the kind who likes to pal around with the exes. These things exist. But Juliette has to know and know fast, for this ambiguity is very disturbing. Hurtful, almost. If Olga knows what happened between her and Elias, and she’s acting as if nothing happened, that would be pure sadism.

However, Juliette accepts the bottle of Miss Dior and even gives Olga a kiss to thank her.

“What’re you doing this Shabbat, Ju?” Olga asks her, already at the nickname stage.

“Nothing special, probably sleep late and then the beach.”

“Do you feel like going to Mitzpe Ramon with me?”

“To do what?”

“I don’t know the Negev…” Olga suggests.

“Got a car?”

“I’ll rent one.”

“Well, why not?” says Juliette, a bit evasively.

“No, don’t worry. I’ll pay for everything.”

How can she refuse? Olga has such a tender way of pushing to get what she wants! All she has to do is like the person to deploy all her charm, and she’s liked Juliette from the start without even knowing why. Her delicacy, perhaps? Or the beauty mark on her right leg? Her beauty, so fresh? Could she be a lesbian, by any chance? Juliette wonders, without really believing it. Elias would never be infatuated with a lesbian. Or a bisexual. He only likes real females, she thinks. Strange, all that. But OK, she would have to talk to her, if they really become friends.

Time may do its work, but Juliette has not healed yet. Luckily, the gallery pretty much occupies her, at least when she is there. But the rest of the time her thoughts are entirely devoted to Elias, and the desire to knife him is rising inside her like a black tide. There are days when her suffering becomes so intense that, yes, she envisages it, she fantasizes, she sees herself surprising him at dusk on Levinsky Street like in a crime novel, stabbing him twenty times in the back. Then it goes away or dissolves into the activities of daily life. In two months, she has transfigured the Moins de Mille gallery. It used to be just a messy, glorified storage place, but it has turned into a showcase where all the bohemians in Tel Aviv come streaming through from morning to night. The young painters of the city all seek out Juliette now. Her calendar is chock-full of appointments. In a few weeks, she’s become someone who’s important here, both for artists and collectors, and her boss gave her a raise of a thousand shekels a month. Gallery owners on Ben Yehuda Street also call her with job offers, but for the moment she feels good in Florentin and doesn’t feel like settling in the north of the city—too bourgeois. The provincial woman she was when she arrived, unhappy and upset, has become one of Tel Aviv’s most sought-after figures in the art world to the point where she must often juggle multiple invitations for the same evening. That helps her forget Elias, too, except that they still live across from each other, a nagging reminder of her unhappy love affair.