Eshkol Nevo - World Cup Wishes

A week later, he’d be waiting for her in front of the car with a bouquet of flowers. Or a box of chocolates. And apologise from the bottom of his heart for having shouted. And they would suddenly melt. Suddenly surrender. As if a cord of control had snapped. And by the end of the lesson, he was already allowing himself to run his fingers through her hair, or rest his hand on her thigh. And all that time, the boy watched them from the back seat, two conflicting voices inside him: one admired his father, wanted to be as handsome as his father, beloved like his father, and the other wanted to shout that something here wasn’t right. But he didn’t know exactly what that something was.

As the boy grew older, the second voice overcame the first, until one day, when a young woman with a very short skirt and blonde-streaked hair planted an unashamed kiss on his father’s cheek before she got out of the car, he could no longer control himself and said: Dad, that woman has lice.

Lice? his father said, and turned to him, amused. Yes, she has lice in her hair! the boy insisted. Besides, our mother is much prettier. Our mother? His father’s expression suddenly grew serious, as if only at that moment did he realise what might be going through the mind of the boy who was always sitting in the back seat. Our mother is a wonderful person, Yoavi, Michel Alimi said. I adore our mother. And all these … all these women you see here in the car, they’re only good for one thing.

One thing? What thing? the seven-year-old boy asked.

Never mind, the father said and moved into the driver’s seat. Then he looked at his son several times in the mirror, started the car and said loudly, remember what I’m telling you, boy, none of those women can hold a candle to your mother, do you hear? Not one!

*

Churchill’s mother was also a well-known figure in Haifa. Dina Hayut-Alimi, head of the neighbourhood association. And the parents’ association. The woman who inserted a firm hyphen in her surname long before that became fashionable among Tel Aviv-Jaffa women. The woman who raised six sons in the lowest neighbourhood in Haifa and taught them that lying is wrong and that you have to do what you think is right, not what people say, and most importantly — you mustn’t be afraid of anyone. Don’t be afraid to be smart. Don’t be afraid to be first. Don’t be afraid to succeed. Because if a person wants to succeed — he will. It doesn’t matter where his grandfather came to Israel from. And it doesn’t matter what neighbourhood he grew up in.

She didn’t succeed to the same degree with all of her six children. Her rigid distinctions between good and bad actually caused some of them to grow up wild. But Churchill was his mother’s pride from the moment he was born. You are God’s gift to me, she would tell him in a whisper so that his siblings couldn’t hear, and she paid for special courses they didn’t get, bought him a bicycle two years before his bar mitzvah because ‘I know I can trust him’, and appointed him to arbitrate in arguments between the other children because it was clear that they would all accept his decisions.

When Churchill reached the age of twelve, his mother decided that he would attend the best school in the city, no matter what the courts said (determination of status in Haifa was ridiculously topographic: the higher you lived on the mountain, the higher your status was). According to municipal policy, it was impossible for children from the low neighbourhood in which Churchill lived to go to school on the Carmel, but Dina Hayut-Alimi checked it out and found that there was a quota of ten children that the good school had to accept from other neighbourhoods in the city, and she made sure that Churchill took the entrance examinations. And prepared him for them from morning till night, for three months.

Only two children passed the entrance exams to the school on the mountain: Churchill, and Shahar Cohen.

Several days after he received the letter that began, ‘We are pleased to inform you’, Churchill saw Shahar Cohen at Stella Maris, the place on the mountain slope from which, without paying, you could watch the matches being played in the Kiryat Eliezer stadium. I heard that we’re going to go to the same school together, he said with a broad, proud smile.

Instead of answering, Shahar Cohen grabbed him by the shirt and slammed him up against the trunk of a pine tree.

Don’t you talk to me, you bastard. If you don’t tell your loser father to take his filthy hands off my mother, I’ll kill you, I swear to God. I’ll kill you on the first day of school, you hear me?

After the ‘lice incident’, Churchill’s father no longer took his son along on his driving lessons, so Churchill had no idea that something was going on between his father and Shahar Cohen’s mother. But he knew that Shahar Cohen’s mother had given birth to him when she was sixteen, which made her the youngest mother in the neighbourhood. And he knew that Shahar Cohen’s father was an officer in the army stationed on a base near Beersheba who came home only once every two weeks. And that a month before, he had been promoted to major and was given an army car, so he was able to leave the family car at home. For the use of his wife. Who didn’t have a licence.

All those facts ran quickly through his mind when Shahar Cohen had him pressed up against the tree trunk, but none of them turned into speech. His hands spoke instead, trying to break him free of Shahar Cohen’s grip, but Shahar Cohen, though shorter than he was, had the advantage of rage and didn’t let him go. Locked in a clench, kicking each other, butting each other, they fell onto the ground.

The other children gathered in a circle around them, but none of them dared intervene.

Unlike the regular brawls, which were an inseparable part of their childhood (like the tune of the ice cream van in summer and the flooding sewers in winter), there was something different in this fight. It was hard to explain, but at certain moments, the spectators thought that Churchill and Shahar Cohen were actually hugging. At certain moments, they seemed to be consoling each other. But on the other hand, they kept trying to hurt each other, and after a few minutes of hard punching, their faces and hands and chests and thighs were covered in hot, sticky blood.

*

Churchill didn’t go home that day, not even after nightfall. He waited for his father’s car to turn into their street, then he stood in front of it in the middle of the road. His father stopped the car with a squeal of brakes and jumped out in a fright. They had a brief conversation, very brief, in the light of a flickering streetlamp. Michel Alimi combed his beautiful hair back for several seconds, tossing sideways glances, and spoke in a very quiet voice. Look, he said. I want you to understand, he said. I’m only a man, and …

So what if you’re a man? Churchill interrupted him, silenced him, and quashed the rest of the arguments his father tried to make with exactly the same focused silence that, years later, he would use to quash the arguments made by opposing counsel.

The next day, Shahar Cohen’s pretty mother moved to a different driving instructor. And so it happened that on the first day in his new school, Churchill was not murdered. On the contrary, he flourished.

Already on that first day, he managed to persuade Shoshana Roth, the scary maths teacher, to give less homework by showing her a detailed table of the homework given that day in all their subjects, plus a statistical calculation of the impossible amount of time, on the average, it would take each student to do justice to all of it. And at break, he went out to the football field and authoritatively settled the argument two teams were having about whether there had been a foul, and at the end of the day, he went up to Rona Raviv, the snob, whom no one had dared to approach since primary school, and simply spoke to her, without lowering his gaze, and even managed to make her laugh twice. And within a few weeks, had already formed a small group of admirers-friends around him who emulated the way he walked, dressed, laughed, smoked, and hung on his every word.