Марко Коскас - Goodbye Paris, Shalom Tel Aviv

“Please!” Juliette interrupts him, sobbing again. “It’ll be a secret.”

“Yeah, but just think of it… if Elias realizes you’re living with me…”

“I’m just in no condition to remain alone. Try to understand me.”

A beep from Manu’s phone. Alert. A rocket was fired from Gaza. Hey, it’s been a long time! After a year’s pause, they’re at it again. Since 2014, the alert hadn’t sounded on the iPhone.

“Where’d it fall?” asks Juliette distractedly.

“Eshkol Regional Council, as usual,” Manu answers, with a shrug.

“No kidding.” Juliette smiles.

The alert works, too, to clear away her despondency. When there’s something in the world greater than you are, war or faceless hatred, like Hamas’s random bombardments of the southern towns, you forget yourself more easily. Still, for the knife intifada, we can’t figure out what to do about it, and we can’t find a solution.

At any rate, installing Juliette in his place and being Elias’s best friend… he’d rather not think of the can of worms that’s going to be, even if Juliette’s stay will be as short as possible. For he’ll have to lie. Lie about his eye, too, not only to Elias and Diabolo but also to other people, even to the waitresses at Flo 10—girls just out of the army, gorgeous and full of punch, who always want to know everything about his life. They ask all kinds of questions, so after a while they know everything except that he made porn movies for thirty full years. He would just give them one film like that, and it really cracked them up. Or else it didn’t interest them at all. With them, the bullshit about the cork worked; Elias and Diabolo will ask more precise questions.

What’s more, it’s actually attempted rape, and on a member of the group, to boot. He could always say he just tried to grab her, but if she presses charges he’d be in the slammer, and fast. They don’t kid around in the Promised Land. A young guy got ten years the week before, just for forcing a girl to kiss him. Even Katsav is rotting in prison in Ramla in a VIP cell for sexually assaulting his secretary, and he’s the former president of the State of Israel. Israel is ultrademocratic, with a judicial system that has its hand on the trigger, with no pity for the powerful. That’s the way it is. Manu had already been blind in one eye for a time when he was young, after an attack of uveitis. He tells himself he’ll just pretend it’s a new inflammation like that. It’ll prevent questions…

As she arrives at his place, Juliette is struck by the beauty of the panorama, with the Yafo Mosque and the American church on the south side of the bank like two rival watchtowers over the Mediterranean. A new building went up these last few months on the north side, as if on purpose to block part of the sea view, but there’s enough left for Manu to feel happy: every day he thanks the good Lord for giving him a landscape like this. Some mornings he does forget to express his gratitude, and then he feels guilty. He’s afraid the good Lord will put him on His shit list.

While Juliette goes onto the balcony, Manu makes room for her things in the wardrobe. And gives her his room so she can be fully at ease. She protests a little for form’s sake, but not exactly for form, either, because she has a half-hidden feeling of embarrassment at the idea that one night Manu could slip into bed with her. Whereas in other ways she trusts him completely. She has the tender feelings for him of an orphan for a father figure. But she also knows he has something hanging between his legs like all men, it was even his breadwinner for thirty years, and from one moment to another you never can tell with those things.

Manu is thinking of Romy. Why did he do that? What a dumbass thing to do! Could he even make up for such an act?

“She’ll press charges!”

“Gimme a break!”

“I’m telling you!”

“Shit, they’ll put me in the slammer!”

“Nah, I calmed her down with three thousand shekels. But they’re costing me, your stupid escapades! You’re lucky as hell she always thinks the wolf’s at the door.”

“You sure she won’t press charges anyway?” Manu says.

“If you can spare two seconds, you might think of saying thanks!” Diabolo retorts, vaguely annoyed at Manu’s ingratitude, before he hangs up.

“I’ve got to prepare,” Elias announces suddenly.

“So?” Sandy asks.

“I need to concentrate.”

“So?”

“So I have to be alone.”

Sandy looks at him disgustedly. “After having a great time in my ass, is that it?”

He goes right under the shower in his tiny room, a space of a square yard with no wall, painted with orange-colored lime. Since he’s been there, he’s never even invested in a shower curtain, and Sandy gets splashed all over. She finally admits she’s now one person too many there and takes off, insulting him as she leaves.

Try as he might to act cynical, Elias is disturbed by the pain he caused Juliette. He always gets into the same destructive spiral with women: he needs to hurt one to love another, to drive away the other to come back to the one before, as if there is a connection between all those women, and the wrong he did to the first is repaired by the good he did the next one, and so on. In fact, he’s the connection—him and his anger.

As he gets dressed, he tells himself he’ll call Juliette and apologize, but not right away. He doesn’t want to owe her anything: let her expect nothing from him, even if he has a great feeling of tenderness for her. Not love, just tenderness. He calls Manu to tell him what happened when Juliette showed up at his place, but Manu, embarrassed by Juliette’s hidden presence in his place, changes the subject to the state of his eye.

“How’d you do that?” Elias asks.

“Well… I was gonna string you along, but since Diabolo knows about it already, I might as well tell you the truth.”

“Don’t worry, we’re just a little group,” Elias says after hearing the story. “A microcosm, in fact! If Romy accepted the bread, she’s not going to turn you in.”

“You think so?”

“Sure… take it easy.”

“What’re you doing now?”

“Got a job interview at H24. I can come by later, if you want.”

“Oh no! No!” he cries without thinking. “Let’s meet, I dunno… let’s meet at the Espresso Bar.”

“OK, around six.”

“What’s FEMIS?” Marcel, the editor-in-chief and recruiter for Channel H24, asks, and Elias can’t help pitying him instead of answering. Someone who doesn’t even know the most elite film school in France.

“Anyway,” Marcel follows up right away, “even if you passed the entrance exam, you didn’t go there, right?”

“Right. I made my aliyah instead.”

“And you know how to use a camera?”

“Of course.”

Like all newsrooms, H24’s is full of gorgeous girls, busy but smiling, and Elias tells himself he’s fallen into the richest mine of women in all Israel. He spots four at first glance, particularly a certain Danielle Godmiche, a sublime Sephardi with a ponytail and a checked shirt, delicate as an artist’s sketch. But the one he keeps coming back to is a blonde liana of twenty-four or twenty-five in white sneakers and a black lace miniskirt.

“So you’re an engineer, and you want to be a reporter, a journalist?” the recruiter goes on.

“Well, yeah,” Elias answers. “Miller was an office worker, and he became a writer at forty-two, you know.”

“Miller? I thought he was a TV host.”

“That one was a psychoanalyst first.”

“An office worker or a psychoanalyst?” Marcel asks, confused.

The blonde gives him a sympathetic smile. Elias draws closer to her, leaving the ongoing conversation completely. But while he slips gently closer to her, Marcel keeps questioning him. A seduction maneuver, involuntary but totally successful, because the recruiter follows Elias like a shadow, standing just behind him, taking notes.