Eshkol Nevo - World Cup Wishes

Yes, I think it’s a shame too, she agreed.

How much longer will that trial of his go on? I asked. Isn’t it supposed to be over already?

Are you joking? she said. Only on TV do trials start and end in the same episode. It’s not like that in real life. Even so, she added, I don’t think it’s right that he’s not helping you. I told him I don’t buy all that crap about ‘a well-run country’.

And what did he say?

I’m not sure he was even listening. He’s so preoccupied with that trial. He works every day till midnight, and there are nights when he sleeps in his office so he doesn’t have to waste time going back and forth.

So how do you manage to fall asleep? I asked. I remembered that she hated sleeping alone. A week after we started dating, she was already sleeping at my place regularly because there were ‘noises’ in her apartment.

I don’t, she said. I get up ten times a night to check whether there’s a burglar. I keep a canister of pepper spray under my pillow, but that just stresses me out even more. Sometimes I fall asleep for half an hour or an hour. And then I have nightmares that …

Someone is chasing you down the street with a huge kitchen knife and your shoes aren’t right for running. You try to take them off while you run, but you can’t, so you try to turn yourself into a rabbit so you can move faster, but you can’t, and then, when he catches up to you …

I wake up. I can’t believe you remember that.

(I haven’t forgotten anything, I thought. Not your nightmares and not that, under your expensive skirts, you wear plain knickers you buy in the open-air market, and not how horny you are the day before your period, and not that you turn off the alarm clock three times before you get up, and not that you think that your bum is a bit too big, but there’s no way you’ll diet because you don’t have the self-control it takes, and not that you’re jealous of your older brother who, for some reason, you think is cleverer than you, and not that you feel a bit agitated when you don’t manage to come, and not the way your eyebrows contract when you’re listening hard, and not the special way you say the word l-o-o-ve, and not that the only time a producer, your brother’s friend, made you a concrete offer to be the director’s assistant on a play, you declined, saying that the play didn’t interest you, and not that, hidden under your self-confidence is a lack of self-confidence, and hidden under that lack of self-confidence is a hard core of conceit. I haven’t forgotten anything, Ya’ara, as hard as I’ve tried.)

It’s hard to forget, I said, when someone wakes you up in the middle of the night twice a week to tell you the same story every time.

Incredible. I’ve been stuck with that dream since I was twelve. So many things have happened to me since then, and only that stays constant.

Like a loyal friend.

Exactly. You know, you’re one of the only people in the world who knows that I’m afraid to sleep alone.

Why, are you ashamed of it?

Yes. Anyway, people don’t believe me. It doesn’t fit with the image I project. Admit that you were surprised the first time I told you about it.

Yes, but there’s something so appealing about that contradiction … between the way you are during the day … and at night … All the contradictions about you are appealing …

It’s nice of you to think that.

Nice is a word you can use on your sister.

I don’t have a sister.

Shame. She could come to sleep with you.

Bastard.

*

The last, arrogant words of that dialogue were never spoken. I have a tendency to make myself sound overly clever when I recreate conversations with Ya’ara. But in fact, we all rewrite our lives when we tell them to ourselves, don’t we? Besides, those lines that I made up aren’t very far from the truth. Ya’ara and I really did talk a lot during that period. Amichai and Ofir appointed me liaison with her. I protested mildly, but they insisted, claiming that she had a weakness for me. Perhaps guilty feelings. In any case, it was worth exploiting for the good of the organisation.

There was always a legitimate excuse for her night-time phone calls: an update on the changed time of an appointment. Inside information on a donor that we should keep in mind when preparing the presentation for him (this guy’s a right-winger, that one’s a left-winger. This one has a weakness for the Russian immigration, and that one is interested in the Ethiopians. This one has a heavy Texas accent that’s very hard to understand, and that one, who insists on meeting in Jerusalem, is used to having people agree with everything he says and show enthusiasm for every idea he has, so it isn’t enough to say ‘of course’ after his every remark, say ‘absolutely!’).

Great, that’s important to know, good work, I would say to Ya’ara, and write down all those tips in the organisation notebook — and then we’d slip into talking about other things.

Like in the past, I’d tell her about interesting articles I was translating (for example, an article claiming that four times more women suffer from depression than men because they have a different brain structure from men). And, like she used to, she would offer subversive interpretations of the research data (different brain structures? Bullshit. Men just aren’t willing to admit that they’re depressed. Not to themselves and definitely not to the researchers).

Like in the past, she would tell me about especially grotesque moments that occurred during business meetings she attended as her father’s constantly reprimanded assistant. (‘And then the marketing vice-president, who’d said five minutes before that he strongly objected to that strategy, began to explain why it was inevitable’, or ‘You wouldn’t believe it, we’ve been sitting for three days with the management consultant to create a vision for our company. What’s the deal? Everyone knows that the only vision is for my father to make more money.’)

As in the past, I believed her with all my heart when she said that working for her father was only temporary, till she gathered the courage and ninety-one thousand dollars and did what she truly wanted to do: go to London.

Unlike in the past, I didn’t stop the conversation every five minutes to tell her how much I loved her. And how magical she was. The fact that everything was taking place on the phone, and the fact that she was married to my friend, enabled me to keep a proper distance between us, the kind that would let me tease her. Mock her. Even be slightly disappointed by her.

I hated those conversations with her. And so looked forward to them.

And I took out her sock over and over again from where it was hidden in the closet.

*

The first presentation of the Our Right non-profit organisation was in the Hilton Hotel. A small surprise was waiting for us at the entrance. The security guard who checked our briefcases was none other than Yoram Mendelsohn, the school genius. In the ninth grade, they promoted him to the tenth. And in the middle of junior year, he disappeared and they said that he had moved to Jerusalem with his family and joined a secret national programme to train the country’s future scientists. We all knew that one day, he’d win a Nobel –

And now he was standing in front of us at the entrance to the Hilton with a wispy moustache, asking if we had any weapons.

Mendelsohn! Yoram Mendelsohn!!! we said happily, but he kept his expression blank and scanned us with his wand.

What are you doing here, Mendelsohn? Ofir asked.

Working, he answered curtly.

But … aren’t you supposed to be at … the Weizmann Institute or something like that?

I quit. They wouldn’t let me keep working on my research.