Eshkol Nevo - World Cup Wishes

Ofir, in any case, didn’t change his mind.

Contrary to our predictions, he was still talking about Maria in our next conversation, and in the one after that, and when we demanded it, he put her on the phone and her voice sounded pure and happy, just as we could have expected from his descriptions, but we explained to him that a charming voice isn’t enough and he should bring her here so we could give our final approval. He laughed and said that he wanted to, he wanted to very much, but it was a problem because of the girl, and he was thinking now that he’d go back to Copenhagen with them. And try living with them there.

What? Churchill blurted out. You’re sure that’s a good idea? Two months ago, you didn’t even know each other.

And I asked: tell me, ‘Ofi’, when we wrote down our World Cup wishes, didn’t you have a dream about writing a book of short stories? What language will you publish it in there? Ancient Danish?

That’s just the problem with the Western way of life, Ofir explained in a calm voice. We set goals for ourselves and then we become slaves to those goals. And we try so hard to achieve them that we don’t notice that, in the meantime, they’ve changed.

Nice, Ya’ara said.

The Indians, he went on, have an expression they use all the time: sab kuch milega , which means ‘everything is possible’. At first, it drove me crazy. Then I realised that that’s life here. You get up in the morning and there’s a terrible monsoon, and all of a sudden the monsoon stops and in seconds, the sky is blue without a single cloud. You get on a bus in the yellowest desert ever, and six hours later, you’re in the greenest valley ever. Not to mention that the bus never leaves on time. And when you ask someone at the station when it’s supposed to come, he’ll answer, ‘After some time’, and he isn’t lying. Because the whole thing about time works completely differently here.

Differently? How?

Isn’t it true that in Israel it’s really hard to catch flies? So here, the flies move so slowly that there’s no problem catching them. And if there’s a small accident here between two cars, or between a car and a rickshaw, no one gets road rage. They just keep driving. And there are always these weird meetings that you feel a second before they happen. Let’s say, yesterday morning I suddenly remembered the secretary who was with my father the day he had the attack, and I thought, I wonder what’s happening with her, and half an hour later, her daughter shows up in the guest house where I’m staying. And when stuff like that happens, you realise that instead of trying to force yourself on reality, it’s better to accept what life dishes out and be open to its natural flow. Because, anyway … sab kuch milega .

Nice, Ya’ara said again.

What’s so nice?! Churchill said, getting angry. Leaving your friends like this is nice? A year ago you said we were like family to you, and now you tell us in that flow of yours that you’re leaving Israel?

I’m not leaving Israel. But I have to admit that I don’t really miss Israel. Or Israelis.

And I have to remind you that we’re Israelis, Churchill said.

Well, I miss you.

So what’s your problem? I don’t understand.

Forget it, it’s complicated. It’s not for the phone.

But the phone is all we have right now.

It’s just … I’ve had a lot of time this year … a lot of time to think. And I’ve come to the conclusion that nothing happens by chance. You know why I had that breakdown that day in the office? Because I looked down into the abyss.

What abyss?

Every creative person walks on a very narrow bridge over a river of fear — fear that one day, it won’t come any more.

What won’t come?

The ideas, the inventions — one day, all your creative juices will dry up. And the only thing left will be a cold stone that has no copper or gold under it. And the thing of it is that you can’t let yourself think about that day. You can’t look into the abyss.

So why did you?

Because … Wow, just thinking about it depresses me. I can’t believe I’m standing here across from the Himalayas talking about this –

Come on, spit it out.

That day in the office, I was supposed to fire one of my team — an unattractive woman — because one of our big clients told the boss that he didn’t like having to look at her every time he came to the office. And a minute after she walked out of my office in tears, I was arguing with the production manager and yelling at him like an animal to lower his price, or else I’d make it my personal mission to see that he never worked in the business again. And then I was supposed to go into a meeting and come up with a brilliant idea for a campaign for our biggest client. And all of a sudden, I couldn’t. I was terrified that this was it. It was all over. My well was dry. So I locked myself in the toilet to think quietly, to concentrate, perhaps an idea might still come to me, but I heard my heart pounding in my temples and I heard my heart pounding in my temples and my forehead and I heard my heart pounding in my temples and my forehead and my eyes and my neck and I heard them paging me, again and again and again, till at some point … at some point, I stopped hearing.

You never told us that.

I didn’t tell you because I … I didn’t understand the big picture.

And what … what’s the big picture?

I fell apart because I’d reached the end of my tether. And I reached the end of my tether because they sucked everything out of me. And they sucked everything out of me because I was part of an aggressive system that uses words only to sell. And that system … it doesn’t work alone, you see? It’s part of a whole society … that’s pure aggression. It starts from the occupation, from the fact that we rule another people, and it goes on to … the smallest things, like how we drive. Or how we queue.

And there are no things like that in Copenhagen? Or other annoying things?

Pata-nahi .

Pata-what?

Pata-nahi . Maybe yes and maybe no. How can I know what’s in Copenhagen if I’ve never been there?

*

I’m telling you guys, it’s that Maria, Churchill said after we’d hung up. ‘Aggressive system’? ‘It all starts with the occupation’? Since when does ‘Ofi’ talk like that? She’s brainwashed him. She’s probably one of those bleeding-heart Europeans who switched from being anti-Semitic to being anti-Israel.

But what he said is pretty accurate, Ya’ara said. Quietly.

Of course it is, Churchill said angrily. But the solution is not to run away. It’s to stay here with his friends and fight. To be involved. To influence, to do things that have meaning.

That’s your solution, Ya’ara continued to put herself in danger of getting a pillow in her face. You can’t impose your solution on other people.

We fell silent. The commentator on the field was interviewing a Maccabi player who was trying to find a reason why the team lost. Ilana’s fingers were still typing her doctoral dissertation in the den. One of the twins began crying in his sleep. Amichai got up to settle him and I thought, there’s always been something about Ofir that projected: I’m here temporarily, I’m a freelancer. And there was that propensity of his for small, totally unnecessary exaggerations. Like when he told us that the salary he was getting at the ad agency was net, when it was actually gross. And when he didn’t feel like going out, he’d say he had a high fever and ask us to come over to his. And once, we saw a really gorgeous girl walk across the square in front of the cinema, and he claimed he’d gone out with her, and later, Amichai met her when he went to sell her father a subscription to Telemed and it turned out that she’d never heard of Ofir. And after years of more and more of that needless, ridiculous shtick, I felt I couldn’t completely trust him (or, as Churchill put it once: there are people you trust enough to shoot odds and evens with over the phone. Ofir Zlotochinski wasn’t one of them).