Eshkol Nevo - World Cup Wishes

A few months later, in Haifa, when all of Ilana’s university colleagues would talk about how serious and earnest she was, and her students would talk about how she was always ready to help, even after her office hours, and her mother would say, even as a child, she was responsible, sometimes I thought she was a little too responsible –

All I would think about was that moment, at the wedding, when I opened my eyes and saw Ilana the Weeper in front of me, jumping around with charmingly clumsy movements, a smile on her freckled face, her shoulder straps fallen onto her arms, and her always perfectly straight bob swinging wildly.

If we accept the hypothesis that one of the characteristics of the world of concrete experience is its endless changeability (outside my window, the leaves are moving. The sun, which was in the middle of the sky at noon, is now nearing the horizon. A cool wind blows suddenly through the window) and if we accept — and we have no choice but to accept — the fact that our minds never rest for a moment, it too is a constant dance (as I write the Introduction to my thesis, a thought about my favourite football team’s upcoming match flashes through my mind), then one way to understand the nature of existence and the universe would be to try to identify the pattern of the variability, to formulate a kind of ‘movement report’ of life and consciousness. Therefore –

This paper will not deal with the well-known coherent theories of several philosophers, but will focus particularly on their moments of confusion, of intellectual and emotional embarrassment. Not only because there is something human and touching about them, but also to explore the possibility that there — in the faltering, in the regret after the fact, in the lack of knowledge that led to a change — the key to understanding the true nature of thought may lie.

(And again, forgive me, a thought about my favourite team’s game sneaks into my mind, this time as a metaphor: anyone who wants to understand the magic of football will not succeed by simply asking about the team’s line-up. Or the results. Because the true nature is found, not in the results, but in the moments between the goals. In the movement of the ball from foot to foot to head. And especially in those moments when suddenly, for no apparent reason, the game shifts direction.)

THERE ARE ALMOST no pictures of Ilana the Weeper in the album. She had some sort of complex about not being photogenic.

Still –

Sometimes I look at a picture and know, I just know, that she took it.

There’s the series she took of us watching the match Israel lost to Cyprus in the ’98 World Cup qualifiers. It’s a series of three photographs: in the first, we’re tense and expectant, in the second we’re leaping up after an atrocious miss, and in the third, we’re gutted after the Israeli team’s deciding match ended in another loss. What’s nice about that third picture is that she managed to capture perfectly, intimately, the terrible emptiness that drags a fan’s body down when his team loses. Ofir is sprawled on the couch, wiped out. Hugging a cushion. Churchill is massaging his temples. Amichai is listening to the post-game commentary, trying to find consolation. I’m smiling a bitter little smile.

And based on the number of times Amichai appears in them, it was Ilana the Weeper who took the pictures at Churchill’s swearing-in ceremony in Jerusalem after he passed his bar exams. Here’s Amichai when Churchill’s name is called. Here’s Amichai handing Churchill his robe. Here’s Amichai with the sunset in the background. And the Valley of the Cross in the background. And in every picture, he’s photographed at angles that don’t show the blotch on his neck. And in every picture, he looks a bit better than he does in real life.

Couples are misleading. You think you know a couple well, but you have no idea what goes on between them after the guests leave. Ilana the Weeper never showed her love for Amichai when we were around. I remember the first time we met her. It was after we’d been hearing about her for a few weeks. He said he’d met the love of his life. A fantastic girl. Gorgeous. Brilliant. Exciting. Someone he’d marry tomorrow if she said yes. We were twenty-one, and weddings were something theoretical that happened to older brothers and sisters and cousins. But even so, we couldn’t remain indifferent in the face of all that excitement. I remember that I even had a haircut before we went to meet her. Churchill wore his date shirt. And Ofir came on time (till he met Maria and became ‘Ofi’, he always arrived everywhere late).

I’d like you to meet my future wife, Amichai proudly introduced the skinny girl who came into the room, and we shook her hand, one after the other. Her handshake was limp, evasive. And she had a glum look, as if we’d already managed to disappoint her somehow. Her face wasn’t ugly, but it was very pale and very freckled and surrounded by thin, stiff-looking hair. Her posture was stooped and mousey, and she was wearing beige, high-waisted, old-lady trousers.

Well, she probably has a great personality, we thought. But she answered all our interested questions with a vague mumble. And she didn’t ask us anything or laugh at our jokes. She wasn’t properly impressed by Ofir’s cleverness and Churchill’s pronouncements. And she went to the bathroom in the middle of the evening. And didn’t come back for a long time. A very long time.

Isn’t she incredible? Amichai asked us after she’d gone (all of a sudden, she had to go home urgently).

Churchill didn’t say anything. Even a white lie is a lie, he always says. I looked at Ofir. He opened his mouth to speak, and I was afraid he wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation to blurt out one of his smart-arse remarks, something along the lines of, ‘incredibly terrible’.

So I spoke first: yes, Bro, I said. She’s something, that Ilana of yours. Everything you said about her is true. She’s really a special girl.

We have to give her time, I thought to myself. After all, a group like ours could be threatening, with our inside jokes and mutual associations and hidden currents of understanding.

But till Maria showed up, Ilana was always reserved around us. For years, she would leave us in the living room to go into her study or take care of the twins or talk to her students on the phone, and she only came back to put her home-baked burekas on the table or to take pictures of us, with a kind of remoteness, as if we were subjects in one of her research studies.

Amichai, for his part, never stopped admiring her. Out loud, so she could hear, he would boast to us about her academic successes: they offered Ilana a three-year research grant! Her students gave her the best feedback of any teacher in the history of the department!! They want to give her a full teaching position!!!

Every once in a while he would go to the study to see if he could do something ‘to make her happy’. And if she happened to pass through the living room, he would be very attentive to her, touch her, caress her, compliment her.

She never touched him in our presence.

But when I see a good picture of him in the album, I know she took it.

*

It all began with routine plastic surgery.

I don’t understand why you need it, Amichai said. I think your nose is great. Kind of a Latin nose … sensual.

You must really love me if you think my nose is sensual, Ilana the Weeper said. My nose is ugly, but that isn’t it.

So what is it? Amichai asked. He really and truly didn’t understand.