Eshkol Nevo - World Cup Wishes

Are you coming? he asked. And his tone was ingratiating and arrogant at the same time.

No, we’re not going in the same direction, I said. And continued on towards Jaffa.

*

After a few weeks of touch meditation, the name Maria started popping up in Ofir’s conversations with us.

They met in one of the workshops, he told us. He was treating her and she started to cry in the middle. That scared him and he apologised. Thought he’d hurt her. She said, of course not, those were tears of joy. He was surprised: how can you cry with joy? She was surprised that he was surprised. What? He’d never felt so happy that he couldn’t stand it any more? No, he admitted. So let’s swap places, she said. He spread his long legs on the mattress and she started treating him. After a few of her touches, he felt his spirit soar. As if something that had been dammed up inside him for too long was finally breaking free. The problem was that it wasn’t only his spirit that was soaring. And he was wearing a sharwal . A thin one. So he asked her to stop. And she was hurt. Wasn’t she good enough? No, it’s not that, he said, and explained to her quietly, in a whisper, what had happened. She looked in the direction of his groin and burst out laughing, and at that moment, because of her wild, free, unapologetic laughter, he fell in love with her.

It’s incredible, he tried to explain to us. There’s something … clean about her. Maybe because she’s from Denmark. Maybe because it’s her. I don’t know. But she has this ability to be happy that I’ve never seen in any Israeli girl. And she’s an amazing mother too. You should see her with her daughter.

Her daughter?!

Seven years old. A little genius. She calls me Ofi.

Ofi?

You know, a kind of pet name.

Ah, a pet name. What’s her daughter doing there?

They’re travelling together. Like two girlfriends. The father left when Maria was pregnant, and it’s been just the two of them ever since.

Touching.

Very. OK, ya’allah , I have to hang up now. I promised the girl I’d buy her some burfi .

Burfi?

It’s a kind of cake, made of biscuits and caramel and banana.

Yuck.

Why yuck? How do you know it’s yuck?

*

OK, so it’s a classic case of holiday romance, Churchill said after we’d hung up.

I have to agree with my learned colleague, Amichai said. Knowing ‘Ofi’ the way I do, at some point, he’ll see what kind of burfi he’s got himself into.

You got that right, Churchill said with a snigger. In our next conversation, he’ll be with someone else.

That poor little girl, I said. Never mind Maria, but that little girl …

And I think you’re wrong, all of you, Ya’ara said. You always make the same mistake.

Please, dear, tell us how we’ve erred, Churchill said and put his hands together in a gesture of fake pleading.

Your problem is that you all refuse to recognise the possibility that Ofir might have really changed and that something good is happening to him on this trip. You’re so fixed in your ideas of him that it’s funny. You know what you remind me of? A bunch of old labour party guys who meet in a café in Ahuzat Hacarmel in Haifa on Fridays, talk down to the Russian waiter and act as if they’re still running the city.

There’s no such place as Ahuzat Hacarmel, there’s Ahuza or Central Carmel, Churchill corrected.

O-o-kay, Ya’ara said, and threw a pillow at him. Which hit me.

*

The first time Ya’ara joined our conference calls with Ofir was by accident.

Usually, whenever Churchill watched basketball with us, she would go to see her only girlfriend and he would pick her up at the end of the evening. But once, her girlfriend went out, she just forgot that Ya’ara was supposed to come, and Ya’ara called up from downstairs to say she’d been walking around the streets for two and a half hours already and asked Churchill to ask me if she could come upstairs to pee. I said OK, for humanitarian reasons. And when she came in, I acted as if I wasn’t the one who’d vetoed her for the last year. I went over to her, kissed her on both cheeks, asked her to join us in the living room and pretended that her presence filled me happiness. Not pain.

Wait a minute. Why am I lying?

My creative writing tutor says that honesty is one of the most important things for a writer. Especially if the text is written in the first person. ‘Take a light and illuminate the inside, the dark places. Expose the ugly things. The un-presentable ones. There’s nothing more off-putting than an “I” who tries to put a nice face on things,’ he warned us. And here I am, doing exactly that. Acting like a true product of the Anglo-Saxon home I grew up in, hiding the pathetic, embarrassing truth: I didn’t have to pretend I was glad to see Ya’ara. Because, really, I was happy to see her, to kiss her on the cheek, to smell her hair, to hear her unwavering opinions on every issue, to listen to her shoot clever ripostes in all directions, machine-gunning words in that rapid-fire, confident speech of hers, and to know that all those niceties concealed a huge vulnerability, and that when she comes, sob-like sounds emerge from deep in her throat, as if her orgasm makes her sad, and afterwards, something completely unravels inside her and she loves to curl up next to you like a little girl, fold her legs against your stomach, rest her head on your chest –

To know all that and to speak to her quietly, while the others are focused on the game, to ask her how she is, to hear again that she ‘just needs to get ninety-one thousand dollars together’ and then she’ll ‘finally go to London to study theatre direction’. To wonder again why ninety-one thousand and not ninety. And why she has to be in London. Not to say anything to her about that, of course. And not to say that I noticed the new burn on her thumb and I know that means she’s gone back to holding lit matches a second too long. But to say that I was sure she’d be a great director. To see her raise suspicious eyes above her glasses: you do? Really? You really think so?! To say yes, I think so. To tell her how my delightful father is, to lie about how I am, to see her forehead listening, to see her soft, left earlobe shining through her hair, to feel something, to feel something real after all the dull dates I’ve had since she left –

But that isn’t the whole truth either. I still have to do some peeling. With a knife. And talk about the humiliation. And the pleasure in humiliation. About the moments that followed it, when Ya’ara’s presence at our get-togethers became permanent. And Churchill, assuming that it didn’t bother me any more, allowed himself to touch her. And my eyes would follow his hand as it stroked her knee. Or her thigh. And I’d be filled with a sweet, fucked-up feeling.

You know you don’t have to take it, Ilana once said to me quietly, at the door, and touched my arm suddenly. I was surprised at her concern and played dumb, take what? And she said, I’m sure that if you ask Churchill, he’ll control himself. And I bit my lip and kept quiet because how could I explain to her that it was like watching a sick, exploitive reality show on TV, and even though you know that it’s sick and exploitive, you can’t help watching.

And I can still keep peeling.

Digging to get to the core.

And in the core, I nurtured a shameful hope. That the whole Ya’ara and Churchill thing was temporary. That the small cracks I saw at those evenings — like her tendency to bicker with him about everything, or his tendency to blatantly check out every woman who appeared on the screen — would widen, they had to widen, into the Afro-Syrian fault, and one day she’d knock on my door, wearing the blue skirt she knows I like, or her light-coloured jeans (I had a few scenarios like that in my head and I’d reconstruct them and fix them up and add details), and I’d open the door and she’d bury her small, cold nose in my neck and say: I made a mistake. I picked the wrong friend. Can I still change my mind?