Марко Коскас - Goodbye Paris, Shalom Tel Aviv

“Can I sleep at your place tonight?” Elias asks.

“Of course, but why?” Diabolo says.

“Because if I’m at your place, I won’t give in to the temptation to go down to hers.”

“Can I sleep at your place tonight?” Juliette asks Manu.

“Of course, but why?”

“I don’t want to give in to Elias as long as he hasn’t clarified the situation,” she answers. “If I stay in my place, he’ll show up, and I’ll give in again.”

Diabolo improvises a dinner for four on the terrace. Just with Elias, Dina, and Jonathan Simsen, his faithful assistant, but the phone doesn’t stop ringing, and other friends begin to arrive in Kerem. Friends may be too strong a word. Spongers would be more accurate, and parasites probably too strong, but let’s not quibble. In Tel Aviv, the golden rule is the more the merrier. You can’t stay in a small group even at the most serious moments. Moreover, since Diabolo insists on always hosting like a lord and hiding any trace of the bad patch he’s going through, Jonathan Simsen digs into the reserves of sorbets and dried fruits, scrapes the bottom of the drawers for snacks-chips-apéri-cubes, defrosts reserves of patisseries and petit fours, orders pizzas and sushi on credit, brings up the last bottles of champagne, and refills the cigar box with Cohibas as fast as it empties, like the tub of the Danaïdes. So now they are fifteen of them, somebody puts on music through the Bose, and the calm little dinner among friends turns into a party on the roof—a typical Tel Aviv party.

Romy Schneider has recovered from her back operation and drops by to say hello too. So Diabolo feels obliged to alert Manu but doesn’t tell him Elias is there too. It’s so obvious! When Diabo’s there, so is Elias, and when Elias is there, so is Manu, you can bet on it.

Only, since Manu still has the old notion that Elias and Diabo just don’t see each other anymore—or exceptionally, like the night before—he takes Juliette with him, and that’s how she and Elias meet face to face despite their respective plans for avoiding each other. All that for this . Elias immediately stalks out of the party in a rage without even saying goodbye. Seeing them together drives him crazy. Furious. Why does Manu refuse to understand? Will he have to stop seeing him to put an end to it? His best friend, God dammit, wasting his time with Juliette without even a hope of getting laid. Is he off his rocker?

She, on the other hand, is apparently undisturbed, but this new about-turn hits her right in the face. Elias cutting out as soon as he sees her, while the night before he came inside her, in her bed, in her arms—it’s too much of an outrage, and she’s submerged once more by the urge to stab him. She needs to lean on Manu to calm down a little. If only he were thirty years younger! And if only she could be, not thirty years older, nor less for that matter, but if only she were a little more adventurous. She’d forget their age difference and let herself go, just on her feeling for him. But the model of her sister, Mathilde, as a materfamilias is always pressuring her, while she struggles not to faithfully reproduce the countermodel of her mother, the great puerile lover. Create a family, stop hanging around Florentin, say goodbye to her youth—that’s what Juliette wants with all her strength, but at the same time she loves this life with all her heart. Beaches and white wine, bohemia and night.

Romy is also getting impatient seeing that Manu isn’t leaving Juliette’s side for a moment during the party, for she’d like to talk to him about something important. But Manu would rather avoid her, as he has a pretty good idea of what kind of important thing she has in mind. He doesn’t know exactly how much she wants, but he knows what she wants. And he is so sick of forking out cash! Didn’t he pay enough for his madness on one evening? Between the electric bike, her back operation, and a few other trifles, she’s wrung him out! For the first time in his life, he’s overdrawn. He also lost his left eye, which still sees only shadows. What else can she want from him?

So he accompanies Juliette everywhere, even to the bathroom. They’re so intimate now. But Romy finally corners him.

“I’m renting my pad on Airbnb next week,” she says. “It would be convenient to come live with you. Do you have somewhere you can go?”

“Well, no,” says Manu immediately. “Where do you expect me to go?”

“Figure it out yourself!” she says, definitively odious.

“You figure it out!”

“You’ll be sorry for that!”

Manu shrugs and walks away. He’s had it up to here with her blackmail. Let her press charges if she wants. And let her go to hell in any case. Luckily, Juliette finds a compromise, suggesting Romy move in with her rather than Manu, and it ends that way: Romy will live at Juliette’s place on Levinsky Street while Juliette goes to live with Manu on Abarbanel Street like before, but without hiding this time. Whatever Elias might say, it’s just too bad.

“We can’t live according to his whims,” she says to Manu.

This deal suits him fine. He loves Juliette tenderly, and her presence in the house delights him, even if he’s resigned to never being her lover. Unless… who knows if one day she won’t realize that she loves him too.

That night, Elias wanders aimlessly between Cofix and Allenby, tortured by the only question that has any importance: Should he turn himself in to free Olga?

If the judge doesn’t release her at the next hearing, he’ll have no other option than to admit everything, make a confession, and take sole responsibility for his acts. He keeps thinking about how to get ready for that grim outcome, and it’s hard. He’d never imagined that his aliyah would result in a criminal record, but anything can happen in Israel. He swindled two poor guys and sent them to jail; it can’t stay like that. He’s a lover, and they’re criminals, OK. But still. It seems their police records are already pretty long, also OK. All the same, he’s the one who swindled them, and they’re the victims. They might have slit his throat, but he was lucky and got away. He must give something back for that luck, not be just lucky but lucky and just. Since Olga’s attempt to put a little justice back into this business failed, that must not have been the right solution.

Another question: How can he admit his offence without involving Diabolo? Jérémie Azencot advised him to be patient and wait until Olga’s next hearing before deciding what he’d tell the cops, but that wait is getting too long. Too stressful, as well.

His phone rings as he’s walking into a very noisy bar on Nahalat Binyamin Street with its back to the Shuk market. A call from France. Olga’s father is worried; he hasn’t heard from her for three days, and “that never happens.” Elias tells him Olga lost her phone when she was on assignment in the Territories, but she’ll get a chip in a couple of days, and she’ll call back then.

“But where is she now, right now, at this moment?”

“She’s asleep,” Elias answers without losing his cool. “She’s working early, that’s why she goes to bed early. She has to be up at five…”

“Wake her up, please.”

“No, I can’t do that, first of all I’m outside, and…”

“What’re you doing outside at this time of night?”

“Nothing,” Elias answers, taken aback, before adding, “I’m going back home… I promise, I’ll leave a note for her to call you on my phone when she gets up.”

Olga’s father finally hangs up, not at all convinced, and Elias can see him landing in Tel Aviv at the end of the week to find that his daughter is in police custody. A nightmare. He’d rather be six feet under than live through something like that.