Eshkol Nevo - World Cup Wishes

Churchill wasn’t afraid of girls. He wasn’t afraid of life at all and approached it with a bare chest, sweeping hand movements and untied shoelaces, and although I knew in my heart that I would never be completely like him, I believed, or wanted to believe, that gradually, just from the many hours we spent together, some of his lust for life would rub off on me and also, I would stop treating girls as if they were marble goddesses. I too would step away from the wall and join the party.

*

After what happened with Ya’ara, I felt that again, as if ten years hadn’t passed, I was stuck to the wall and had withdrawn into my comfortable old gloominess.

It’s embarrassing to admit, but I even went to the phone a few times to call Churchill. And once I actually started dialling his number. I knew that he was the only one who could understand, without my having to explain, why I could no longer look at those ads featuring beautiful women wearing glasses, why every time the word ‘revelation’ appeared in an article I was translating, I pushed the bundle of papers aside, and why, after Ya’ara, every girl I went out with felt like a compromise.

But I also knew there was a chance she’d be the one to answer the phone in his flat.

So I didn’t call.

And one day, driving to give a translation to a client, I saw them. It was on Nahalat Benyamin Street, near the fabric shops, and they were in the car in front of mine waiting for the lights to change. At first, I wasn’t sure it was them, so I took my foot off the brake and let the car slide forward, like a piece of cloth slipping off a chair, till it almost touched theirs, and I still wasn’t one hundred per cent sure — after all, I hadn’t seen either of them for months. But then, with that gesture of hers, she took off her glasses, and he leaned over and they kissed. And kissed. The lights turned green and they were still kissing. I could have honked my horn, I should have honked my horn, but I stayed still and saw how she ran her fingers through his hair and how his hand held the back of her neck and how her eyes closed and how his eyes closed and how her shoulder gleamed and how the ends of her caramel-coloured hair rested in the hollow between her gleaming shoulder and her throat and how his finger played with the ends of that hair. The green light had already turned into a flashing yellow light, and I still didn’t honk. And he kept kissing her, and her head tilted slowly back, and I could picture her small breasts in the V of her shirt, and then they weren’t kissing any more, they were just wrapped in a tight, hot embrace that continued until the yellow had turned to red. Her body was enveloped in his arms and his head rested on her breast, and her shoulder was gleaming again and he raised his head slightly and kissed her naked skin, bit it gently, and she stroked his head as if urging him on, to bite her harder, deeper, and he raised his head for a moment and saw that the lights had turned green again –

And they laughed. I could almost hear their laughter bursting out of the windows. They were laughing about their recklessness, or perhaps because Churchill had impressed her with his famous imitation of the airborne traffic reporter, and through the propeller noise he made with his lips, he told his listeners about a couple kissing in their car and blocking traffic on Nahalat Benyamin Street.

Or perhaps he was telling her about the wish I’d written on my piece of paper. And that was what amused them so much, a second before they started driving.

I waited a little longer, ignoring the loud honking behind me, so I could make sure they were moving away. As far as possible. Only then did I start driving. My heart frozen. Frozen stiff.

*

I stayed away from my friends for almost six months.

I resisted all Amichai’s pleading and temptations (the championship league game! on a 40-inch screen!! Ilana the Weeper’s tear-flavoured burekas !!!).

I held out even when he switched to threats (if you don’t come here, we’ll come to you. If you don’t open the door, we’ll break it down —).

But when he called to tell me that Ofir had had a breakdown at work, all my determination buckled like a pile of pears in the supermarket, and I left straight for the hospital.

What caused Wittgenstein, who asserted that words have value only if they represent reality, suddenly to say years later: I made a mistake, concrete reality is not at all relevant, the meaning of words derives entirely from the ‘game of a specific language’ in which they take part, and therefore, contrary to my earlier claim, it is not important to ask to what extent words fit the world, but: what do people do with words?

Was it, as is customarily believed, a slow, gradual metamorphosis that led to this sharp shift in Wittgenstein’s thought? Or was there a particular moment in which he clutched his forehead and said: Grösser Gutt! ? Did this change of mind occur while he was building his sister’s house in Vienna, or did it happen during one of the lessons he gave as a not-very-popular school teacher in an Austrian village? Or perhaps the insight came to him while he was watching one of the ballgames he so loved to use as metaphors in elucidating his ideas? I picture him sitting in the Centre Court at Wimbledon in 1934, watching that year’s championship game between Fred Perry and Jack Crawford. The spectators’ heads move from side to side, following the white ball from side to side, from side to side. When suddenly one head stops moving: Wittgenstein realises that he has made a mistake.

And I am curious to know: was the word ‘mistake’ projected onto the screen of his mind before he broke into a sweat of panic, or did he first break into a sweat of panic and only then did the word ‘mistake’ appear?

And how much courage does it take for a person to deny his own ideas? (Especially those that have become public. And have admirers. And earned Wittgenstein the respect of scholarly philosophers all across the continent.)

How much courage, or despair, or honesty with oneself that is brutal to the point of despair, does it take for a person to toss away all of that? And start from the beginning?

IN THE FIRST picture on the right on my living room wall, Ofir and I are standing back to back, holding petrol hoses as if they were rifles. As if, in another minute, we’d take ten paces, turn around suddenly and start to duel. We’re both wearing petrol company uniforms and, in my case at least, it looks like a costume. The Carmel Mountains are in the background, but that’s not unusual: almost anywhere you take a picture in Haifa, the Carmel or the sea will be in the background.

A week after being discharged from the army, I started working with Ofir at his father’s petrol station. Ofir said it was considered ‘essential work’, and if we stuck with it for six months, we’d get a grant from the army. Besides — he tossed another reason at me — loads of women in red cars came to the station, and sometimes, if they liked the way you looked in your attendant’s uniform, they asked you to check other things besides oil and water. That’s how his father met his second wife. And the third. And, in fact, that’s how he met Ofir’s mother — when she came in to put air in her tyres.

After two weeks, we were fired in disgrace. Ofir’s father said we worked too slowly and talked too much. And work like that was for real men, not for the kind raised by their mother.

To tell the truth, I was relieved. The petrol fumes didn’t do my asthma any good. And the only woman with a red car who came into the station during those two weeks got pissed off with me for not cleaning her windscreen.