Eshkol Nevo - World Cup Wishes

Why not? There are four of them and four of us, Amichai said, trying to be persuasive, but from his tone you could tell he realised that this idea, like all the others before it, didn’t stand a chance. Without Churchill’s backing, it was hard for us to get anything off the ground. And when Churchill squashed someone, he did it so offhandedly and so precisely that it made you feel sorry for the defence lawyers who had to go up against him in court. It was Churchill who founded our gang in high school. He didn’t really found it, it’s more accurate to say that we flocked around him, like lost sheep. Every feature of his broad face, each untied lace of his trainers, even the way he walked — it all projected the sense that he knew what was good. That he had some kind of internal compass that guided him. All of us, of course, faked self-confidence in those years, but Churchill really had it. The girls twisted a curl around their fingers when he walked past, even though he wasn’t good-looking in the movie-star sense, and we picked him with a communistic majority of votes to be captain of the class football team, even though there were better players than he. It was there, on the team, that he got his nickname. Before the semi-finals against a class of seniors, he got us together and gave a rousing pep talk saying that all we had to offer against the seniors was blood, sweat and tears. We were almost in tears when he finished, and then on the field, we just gave it our all, including a constant fight for the ball and painful slides on the asphalt, which didn’t keep us from losing three-nil because of three bad mistakes Churchill himself made: once he passed the ball to the opponent’s striker, once he lost a fateful ball in midfield, and to top it all off, he scored a breathtaking own goal when he tried to clear a corner and, instead, sent the ball straight into the goal where I was standing.

No one was angry with him after the game. How could you be angry with someone who, a second after the final whistle, gets everyone together in the centre of the field and, with lowered lashes, takes all the blame on himself? How can you be angry with someone who, to make up for it, takes the whole team to a Maccabi Haifa match when everyone knows he’s taking the money out of his own pocket because his parents don’t have any? How can you be angry with someone who puts his heart and soul into writing birthday greetings, who listens so well, who travels all the way to the Negev to visit you in basic training, who lets you stay in his apartment for three months till you get settled in Tel Aviv and insists that you sleep in his bed while he sleeps on the sofa?

Even after what happened with Ya’ara, I couldn’t be angry with him. Everyone was sure I’d be furious. That I’d explode with rage. Amichai called me the minute he heard — Churchill really fucked up, but I have an idea: let’s all go to a paintball game and the three of us can shoot him with paint pellets. We’ll really let him have it! I talked to him and he says OK. Are you up for it?

Ofir walked out of a campaign meeting for three-layered toilet paper just to say: Bro, I’m with you. You have every reason. But I’m begging you, don’t do anything you’ll regret. You have no idea how lucky we are to have each other, you have no idea.

The truth is, they didn’t need to beg. I couldn’t work up the anger anyway. One night I even went to his place hoping that the drama of doing that would light a fire under me, and on the way I kept saying out loud to myself, bastard, what a bastard, but when I got to his building, I didn’t feel like going up any more. Perhaps if I’d seen a faint silhouette moving in his flat, that would have clenched my fist, but I just sat in the car and sprayed water on the windscreen and turned on the wipers, sprayed and wiped, till finally, when the first long ray of light touched the solar water tanks on the roof, I left. I couldn’t picture myself hitting him. Even though he had it coming. Even though, when we wrote wishes during the last World Cup, all three of mine had to do with Ya’ara.

*

It was Amichai’s idea, those wishes.

After Emmanuel Petit scored the third goal and it was already clear that France would take the Cup, and there was a faint sense of disappointment in the air because we were all rooting for Brazil; after we’d finished off the tear-flavoured burekas Ilana had baked and the last nut had been cracked and only one piece of the watermelon and feta cheese was left, the piece no one felt comfortable taking — after all that, Ofir said, you know, something just hit me. This is the fifth World Cup we’ve watched together. And Churchill said, how do you get to five? Four, max.

And we started going over them.

Mexico ’86 we saw in Ofir’s father’s house in Tivon. And when poor, naïve Denmark lost five-one to Spain, Ofir cried his heart out and his father said that’s what happens when a boy is raised by his mother. The ’90 World Cup final we each saw in a different city in the territories, but there was one day when we all went home and met at Amichai’s place to watch the semi-final. No one remembers who played because his little sister was walking around the house in a red baby-doll nightie and we were soldiers and couldn’t keep our eyes on the screen. In ’94, we were students. Tel Avivians. Churchill was the first to move there, and we all trailed after him to the big city because we wanted to stay together and because Churchill said that it was the only place where we could be what we wanted to be.

But we actually saw the ’94 games in Rambam hospital in Haifa, Ofir remembered. Ri-i-ght, I said.

In the middle of supper at my parents’ place, I had the worst wheezing asthma attack of my life. There were moments in the panicky ride to the hospital when I was seriously considering dying. After they stabilised me with injections and pills and an oxygen mask, the doctors said I had to stay in the hospital for the next few days. For observation.

The final was the next day. Italy against Brazil. Without telling me, Churchill got the guys together and put them all into his beaten-up Beetle, and on the way, they stopped at the Pancake House in Kfar Vitkin to buy me peach-flavoured iced tea, because that’s my particular passion, and a couple of bottles of vodka because, in those days, we pretended to be into vodka, and ten minutes before the match started, they burst loudly into my hospital room (they bribed the guard with a bottle of Keglevich when he tried to stop them because visiting hours were over). I almost had another attack when I saw them. But then I calmed down and breathed deeply, from the diaphragm, and together we watched the tiny TV hanging above my bed and saw Brazil take the cup after 120 minutes. Plus penalty kicks.

And … so we came to ’98, Churchill summed up. Four World Cups altogether.

It’s a lucky thing we didn’t bet, Ofir said.

It’s a lucky thing there’s a World Cup, I said. That way, time doesn’t turn into one big, solid block, and we can stop every four years and see what’s changed.

Awesome, Churchill said. He was always the first one to understand when I came up with a remark like that. Sometimes the only one.

You know what’s lucky? It’s lucky that we have each other, Ofir said. You have n-o-o i-ide-ea how lucky we are, we all completed the familiar remark.

Bro, I don’t understand how you manage with all those ad men, you’re such a pussy, Churchill said, and Ofir laughed, OK, that’s what happens when you grow up with your mother, and Amichai said, I have an idea.

Wait, let’s just watch them hoist the cup, Churchill said, hoping that by the time they were finished hoisting the cup, he’d forget his idea.

But Amichai didn’t forget.

Did he know that the idea he was about to suggest would turn out to be a true prophecy that would disappoint us time after time over the next four years and, amazingly enough, would preserve its prophetic power?

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