Eshkol Nevo - World Cup Wishes

Actually, we didn’t talk about Ya’ara at all the week he stayed with me. Instead, as if seven years hadn’t passed, we reverted to that lazy flow of conversation we’d had towards the end of the long trip we’d made together. After you travel around with someone for months on end, all the regular, strained channels of conversation get used up, and that’s when conversations take on a certain naturalness. You speak sparingly. You can be comfortably silent. And occasionally, as if offhandedly, a conversation develops that has something new in it. That’s how it was during that week he found refuge in my flat. We played a lot of chess (I always won) and looked at the photo albums from that trip we took together. I had the opportunity to recall some of his unbearable habits, like always leaving the shampoo bottle uncapped, or putting his cup on the table without a saucer even though he knew I hated it, or simply not knowing how to wash dishes and always leaving pieces of food stuck to the plates. On the other hand, I also had the opportunity to recall his natural generosity (the day after he came to my place, he did a huge supermarket shop, and every evening, he cooked us ‘a meal fit for a pig’), and I was able to enjoy that appealing, sincere curiosity of his again. He was interested in hearing about the articles I was translating, so I told him that now I was doing one by an Oxford professor who had studied the platforms of the large political parties that had participated in the last elections in Western Europe and compared them to the policies of the governments actually formed after the elections. He came up with a fascinating finding: in a large number of cases, the winning party ultimately implemented, item after item, the ideology of the losing party. That sounded unlikely to Churchill, so I read him several surprising examples the professor had brought from Italy and Germany, and then we tried to decide whether that model applied here in Israel as well. We came to the conclusion that on the one hand, it did, because it was Menachem Begin who made peace with Egypt, but on the other, if it were true, that meant that Arik Sharon, winner of the last election, would implement the Labour Party platform, which advocated withdrawing from Gaza, and that was totally out of the question. Later, he quite enthusiastically helped me translate an article discussing the legal aspects of Shakespeare’s works in general, and of Hamlet in particular. While he was surfing the Internet to check a concept he wasn’t sure of and I went to brew us some herbal tea — because that was all he wanted to drink that week — I thought that, actually, apart from him, I had no other friend with whom I could have a meaningful dialogue about Shakespeare, and that it was refreshing not to be alone in making all the small, annoying choices a translator has to make.

*

We hardly left the house that week. Anyway, I was the sort of person who’d rather read the Israeli Time Out than actually go to any of the places or events it lists, and Churchill was simply afraid to go out.

He told me that the media had been pursuing him since the affair exploded into the headlines, and he was especially irritated by the correspondent on the leading TV channel. I tell her that I don’t want to be interviewed any more, and she keeps calling me seven times a day, he complained, and asked me to look through the peephole before I opened the door to anyone, because ‘that leech could come here too’.

What does she look like? I asked, and he sat me down in front of the news broadcast so that her image would be burned in my mind.

The news was bad. Murders followed by injuries followed by accidents followed by drug raids followed by beatings followed by stabbings followed by murders. I noticed something strange: the words coming out of the newsreader’s mouth were dynamic, full of momentum, words like ‘breakthrough’, ‘escalation’, ‘dramatic developments’, but the reality being described by those words moved in closed circles. Stuck. And I also noticed that the journalists treated their interviewees with obvious resentment and disapproval. As if the violence dripping from every item they read with closed, official expressions on their faces had seeped into their bloodstream. They rudely interrupted the people sitting across from them and drummed their fingers on the desk and made a show of swallowing their saliva, and throughout the broadcast, I felt that, in another minute, they would no longer be able to keep up that damned pose required of all TV presenters, and all the anger and frustration that had been building up quietly inside them would erupt from their bodies like lava and demolish the studio.

The legal correspondent appeared at the end of the broadcast. Light brown hair, rapid speech. Glasses. She looked a bit like Ya’ara. That Michaela, she actually looks like a nice person, I said to Churchill. Watch out for her, that niceness of hers is a trap, Churchill warned, then reminded me: don’t open the door to anyone, OK?

*

For the first few days, I did what he said. I didn’t open the door before looking through the peephole.

The first person to knock on the door was Menashe from the second floor, who asked for my dues for the house committee.

Then there was a surprise visit from a Federal Express messenger holding a large package sent by Mr Shahar Cohen, Lubliana. We opened it cautiously and found a large cardboard box inside filled with five orange tubes. There was no logo or name on the tubes, and instead of instructions for use or information for the consumer, Churchill found a personal letter from Shahar in the box.

Hi Baba

How are you

I heard you’ve been having a pretty hard time lately and even though I know you never forgave me for what happened in the neighbourhood and also the last time we saw each other at Amichai’s shiva you hardly spoke to me I’ll always remember that demonstration you organised for me at school so I tried to think of a way I could help the guy who helped me and the first idea that popped into my mind was to send you that salve for heartache we’ve been working on for two years in our lab here and still haven’t put on the market only for technical reasons that have to do with licences and documents and that’s why there’s no leaflet with consumer information but that’s nothing because there’s not much you have to know about that salve except that it’s natural and made of essence of the dulcinea plant which is a sort of lotus that grows in Bled Lake in Slovenia and as far as instructions for use are concerned that’s not complicated either you just have to spread the salve twice a day on the left side of your chest where you heart is and in two or three days you’ll feel significantly less sadness and I know this not from experiments with mice but from my own personal experience because I’ve had my disappointments too but this is not about me it’s about you and I really hope this will help you and in any case I want you to know that I think only good things about you and know that you’ll come out of this a winner with or without salve

Regards to all the guys

Shahar

PS Sorry there’s no punctuation in this letter it’s just that I hardly ever write in Hebrew any more and forget where the marks are on the keyboard

A few hours after the orange salve arrived, Amichai and Ofir arrived. They dropped by for just a few minutes ‘to see if Churchill’s alive’, and stayed to watch the Israeli team’s last-chance game.

That was actually the first time all four of us had met to watch football since Ilana died and, for the first few minutes, there was a sense of cautiousness in the air. How are you, what’s happening, everything’s fine. As if we were four strangers or four people who had to carry out a mission together in order to pass a screening test and get hired for a top job, and not four best friends. I thought that part of the awkwardness came from the fact that, for the last year, Amichai had been a well-known, even admired, public figure and here he was, the man on TV, the man in the newspapers, sitting with us in the living room and we weren’t sure how to treat him. Like one of the guys or one of the gods?