Eshkol Nevo - World Cup Wishes

This is exactly where we at Telemed come into the picture, I say, taking advantage of the opportunity to channel the conversation in the direction I want, and I spread booklets and documents in front of him and explain why a gold subscription would be better than a regular one. And as he’s being convinced and has started signing, there’s a knock at the door and Shulamit, the young woman, walks in.

This is the boy from Telemed I told you about, he introduces us and I shake her hand politely. A grandmother at least seventy years old, not one whose beauty you could say is still visible on her face, but she seems like a bit of a devil. You should have seen how he looked at her when she came in. How he trembled when he took her hand as she sat down. I swear. I was afraid he’d have an attack on me right then and there. But she laced her fingers with his and gave him this quiet kind of look and said to me, ‘We have undergone a rejuvenation.’

Nice language, I said admiringly.

Yes, Amichai said. The funny thing is that it’s catching. Even now, telling you the story, their language is suddenly coming out of my mouth.

A nice story, I admitted.

But did you get the moral? Amichai asked.

What, that if I wait till I’m ninety, I might be rejuvenated?

No, that now you’re alone and we’re all couples. But we still have our whole lives to be friends. And everything’s fluid. Everything can change.

*

I have no idea why he said that. It was much more like Ofir to philosophise like that. Perhaps, as a practised salesman, he was trying to soften my objection with a remark I would like.

I’m not a big believer in mysticism either (though I’m ready to accept the fact that, sometimes, a hidden oracle inside you knows what’s going to happen before you do).

Anyway, I didn’t go to the farewell party for Ilana’s nose.

Three weeks before, I had met a girl named Hani.

I translated an article into English for her, ‘The Collapse of the Soviet Union: Revolution or Evolution?’ and something about her hesitant manner attracted me. Most of my clients were totally uninhibited about their requests and saw nothing wrong with paying me to do something for them that, in principle, they were supposed to do themselves. Hani, on the other hand, stammered and blushed with shame when we met for the first time to set up the schedule. I would have done it myself, she told me, really, but my English … Where I grew up, they don’t study English at all, and I’m trying to catch up now … Trying very hard … Do you understand?

After all the sophisticated girls I’d gone out with since Ya’ara, her naivety was refreshing. I was also curious to find out how her hair, which was always tied back in a severe ponytail, looked when it was loose. So when I brought her the translated text, I asked if she wanted to go out, and she did.

On the actual date, it turned out that ‘the place where they don’t teach English’ was the ultra-Orthodox community of Bnei Brak, and she had given up religion a year earlier. I mean, it was a gradual process that began when she was a teenager. She had looked at her mother, how her mother lived, and knew that she wanted more. She didn’t even put it into words for herself at first. Then it was only a vague feeling of hunger, hunger she couldn’t satisfy. And she had no one to share that feeling with because where she grew up, you don’t wash your dirty linen in public.

So, very slowly, she began to lead a double life. On the surface, she kept going to the religious girls’ school, but secretly read books like Spinoza and Other Heretics , or, at the other extreme, Lady Chatterley’s Lover .

Actually, she said, I’d already stopped being religious in my heart when I was eighteen. But it took another three years before I ate pizza.

Pizza?

Not kosher, I mean. It was in Givatayim. And I ate it so quickly that I burned my tongue on the bubbling cheese, and I was sure that was a punishment from God. So I put things off for another few months. Then I bought culottes, which is a kind of interim stage between a skirt and trousers. And I wore them, but only at university, of course. And a year ago, I bought my first pair of jeans, and the sky didn’t fall in on me. And with the doing of the deeds, one grows to love them. Until I finally left home.

It takes a lot of courage to do what you did, I said (and thought: with my restraint, I probably would have stayed in Bnei Brak).

In the end, it wasn’t courage any more, she said, I had no choice.

Maybe that’s how it is in life, I said. You have to suffer, to hit bottom, before you can change.

I don’t know, she said. That’s a very pessimistic thing to say. Are you always so pessimistic?

*

To my great surprise, and in total contrast to the shyness she projected in her every movement, we ended the night in bed together. You have to understand, she said as she let down her ponytail and her honey hair cascaded to her shoulders, I’m five years behind the rest of the class. I still have a lot of catching up to do.

I wasn’t her first. But I was the first to give her pleasure. At least, that’s what she told me. And anyway, there was something infectious about her beginner’s enthusiasm. Everything we did was new for her, a first: oral sex. The Ein Kerem Inn. The lone bench on the cliff overlooking the sea at Beit Yanai. All those ‘magical’ places were magical for her, without the quotation marks. She had never seen a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Show . Didn’t know that the singers Ehud Banai and Meir Banai weren’t the same person. And she wanted to go dancing at the Coliseum on New Year’s Eve. I explained to her that the Coliseum had been closed for a long time, and she said she knew, but for years, she’d read about that party in the Coliseum in the newspapers her mother didn’t allow her read, and a fantasy gradually took shape in her mind of a New Year’s Eve party where she’d dance till she dropped to the music of the DJ Ilan Ben-Shahar (he and no other) and bid her final farewell to the religious world.

Ah … Look … We can find out if Ilan Ben-Shahar is appearing at a different club on New Year’s Eve, I suggested. But, uncharacteristically, she shook her head and said, we could, but it wouldn’t be the same.

So on the eve of the millennium, we put on party clothes and took our battery-operated Discman and two speakers, along with a collection of hits of the ’80s chosen by Ilan Ben-Shahar, and went to where the Coliseum used to be. We walked up the steps to Atarim Square, which was as dirty and deserted as usual, but Hani didn’t care about that, she had a fantasy in her mind and she was determined to live it down to the smallest detail.

At eleven-twenty, we went through a broken window into the dark space of the dead club.

At eleven-twenty-five, we connected the Discman to the speakers and she flung her hair from side to side to the music of Duran Duran’s ‘Girls on Film’.

At eleven-fifty-five, we switched to the radio to hear the countdown to the new millennium.

At exactly midnight, we had a long, long, long kiss, surrounded by electric wires, broken windows, pieces of plaster, torn posters of Grace Jones, and beer bottles that didn’t even smell of beer any more.

And at twelve-thirty — as we started walking away from the Square — her mother called.

It was a ritual. Every night, her mother called to swear at her, and this time, as if her maternal antennae had sensed from a distance how much her daughter was enjoying herself, her tone was louder than ever: you’re a whore, Chana, you know that? No? Really? So tell me, what’s the difference between you and a whore?

But Mum … Hani protested feebly.

No, really, Chana. Explain it to me. You have relations with a man, you sleep with him in his house. You know what? You’re worse than a whore because a whore at least gets money for what she does. With you, it’s free.