Eshkol Nevo - World Cup Wishes

Probably not. Concealed under his agreeable exterior was the stubborn determination that enabled him to listen to Telemed customers for hours, to put together jigsaw puzzles with thousands of pieces on his balcony and run ten kilometres every day. In all kinds of weather. I think it was that determination, more than anything else, that caused him to speak again after Didier Deschamps hoisted the Cup and the crowd waved.

What I was thinking, he said, is that each of us should write down on a piece of paper where he dreams of being in another four years. Personally, professionally. In every sense. And at the next World Cup, we’ll open the papers and see what happened in the meantime.

What a great idea! Ilana the Weeper yelled from the den.

We all turned to look. For all the years we’d known her, we’d never heard her get excited about anything. Her droopy face always had the same gloomy expression (even at their wedding. That’s why there’s a lot of Amichai on the video tape doing his standard dance move — tapping lightly on his stomach — and very little of her), and most of the times we were all at Amichai’s she would drift away after a few minutes and bury herself in a book. It was almost always a book on her field of research in psychology, something about the connection between depression and anxiety. We were already used to her non-present presence in the living room and her coolness towards Amichai, and suddenly — such enthusiasm?

She came hesitantly out of the den and walked over to us. I was just reading an article here, she said, by an American psychologist who claims that correctly defining an objective is half of achieving it. The next World Cup is in four years, right? That means you’ll all be thirty-two. Those are exactly the … plaster years.

Plaster years?

It’s a concept he uses, this psychologist. It means the years when personality hardens and takes shape, like plaster.

She waited a few seconds, expecting to observe the effect of her words, and then, disappointed, turned around and went back to the den.

Amichai gave us a look.

We couldn’t let him down. Not when she’d finally got excited about something. When he’d finally broken through in his efforts to make her happy.

OK, bring paper, I said.

But let’s be organised, Churchill said. Everyone writes three things. Three short sentences. Otherwise, there’ll be no end to it.

Amichai passed out thick psychology books so we’d have something to rest the paper on. And pens.

*

I had no problem with the first wish. It had formed itself in my mind the minute Amichai tossed out the idea.

1. At the next World Cup, I still want to be with Ya’ara , I wrote.

Then I got stuck. I tried to think of other things I wanted to wish for myself. I tried to expand the scope of my desires, but my thoughts kept going back to her, to her silky, caramel-coloured hair, her soft, slender shoulders, those green eyes of hers encircled by glasses, the moment she takes them off and I know we’re about to …

*

We’d met two months earlier in the cafeteria in the Naftali building on campus. At the beginning of the break, she came in with two guys, carrying a large tray with a small bottle of grapefruit juice on it. She walked with her back straight, a brisk walk that made her caramel-coloured ponytail bounce, as if she were in a hurry to go somewhere else, and they lurched heavily along behind her to the table. She had trouble opening the bottle of juice, but didn’t ask for help. They were talking about a play they’d seen the night before. That is, she was talking, very quickly, and they were looking at her. She said that they could’ve done a lot more with that play if the director had only had a little inspiration. For instance the scenery, she said and sipped her juice, why do the stage sets in this country always look the same? Can’t they think of something a little more original than a table, coat hooks and an armchair from the flea market? She kept talking — about the music and how the director could have got more from the actors if he’d done his job out of a real love for the profession. She stretched out the ‘o’ in ‘love’, pronouncing the word with all her heart, and as she said it, placed her open hand on her shirt. That is so-o-o true, the guy sitting across from her said without taking his eyes off her shirt. You’re absolutely right, Ya’ara, the other one said. Then both guys got up and went to their class, leaving her sitting alone at the table, and suddenly, for a fraction of a second, she looked small and lost. She took some papers out of her bag, pushed her glasses more firmly onto her nose with her little finger, crossed her legs and became engrossed in reading. Every time she turned a page, she touched a finger lightly to her tongue, and I watched her, thinking how incredible it was that such a gesture, a librarian’s gesture, could be sexy on the right girl. And I also thought that it would be interesting to know what that serious face looked like when she burst out laughing. And if she had dimples. And I thought that I’d never know, because I’d never have the guts to talk to her.

Hey, she said, looking up from her reading, do you have any idea what the English word ‘revelation’ means?

Every impairment has its moment of glory. That’s how it was with my colour blindness. Apart from the embarrassment it caused me all my life (children, do you see the bright-coloured anemones? Who said ‘no’?!), it saved me at the right moment from the corps assignment officer’s plan to make me a lookout.

And that’s how it was that instant, when Ya’ara asked me a question. Years of a spartan Anglo-Saxon education, a ridiculous quantity of tea with milk, chronic emotional constipation and a basic sense of alienation instilled in me because my parents never stopped feeling like outsiders here, in the Levant, and kept speaking Anglicised Hebrew to each other for thirty years after arriving in Haifa from Brighton –

All this, for one moment, worked to my benefit.

I explained to her authoritatively in Hebrew that revelation meant exposure or disclosure, and when I saw that she was satisfied with my answer and was about to go back to her reading, I quickly added that it could also mean ‘epiphany’. Depending on the context.

She read me the whole sentence. Then another sentence she had trouble with. So I gave her my phone number, in case she needed more help, and amazingly enough, she called that same night and we talked about other things, too, and the conversation flowed like wine, and then we went out, and kissed, and made love, and she put her head on my stomach when we were lying on the grass near the Music Academy and tapped on my thigh to a piano melody that was coming from one of the rehearsal rooms, and bought me a turquoise shirt because ‘enough of all that black’, and I kept looking for the catch the whole time, how could it be that a girl who disproves Churchill’s three-quarters theory — ‘There are no girls who are pretty and smart and horny and also available. One of these elements is always missing’ — how could it be that a girl like that would pick me, of all people? True, a few months before she met me, she split up with a guitarist who had made her miserable with five years of cheating on her and then begging her to take him back, but there were enough guys wandering around campus who were taller than me and would have been happy to be a corrective experience for her. And anyway, that whole story with the cheating guitarist didn’t make sense. Who would want to cheat on someone like her? Who would ever want anything but more and more of her?

*

Amichai pushed me to finish. Everyone but me had already given back the pens.

I looked at the first sentence I’d written and added impulsively: