Eshkol Nevo - World Cup Wishes

*

Somehow, sex written in Hebrew always leaves the characters unsatisfied. As if something about our Jewishness will not allow us to let them enjoy it fully, or perhaps writers are afraid their descriptions will turn out pornographic, so they take it to the opposite extreme. And I might have done that too if it hadn’t been a lie.

It’s hard for me to go into detail. I’m not Churchill.

So I’ll make do with saying that the body is a wonderful thing. And in one night, two bodies can express such a wide range of feelings: regret, apology, despair, hope, hurt, pride, loneliness, abysmal loneliness, deep understanding, gratitude, and simple, pure joy. And revenge. And love.

Perhaps I’ll quote Ya’ara, who said later that now she knows for sure that I am the best she ever had. And if only all men were so intent on giving pleasure to the women with them.

And perhaps, having no choice, I’ll add that words can deceive, thoughts can drive you insane, but the body — the body knows. The morning after that night, we both knew there would never be another one like it. That I could never hurt her as she needed to be hurt without faking it, and even though she might want to believe that she could, the truth was that she couldn’t live more than a few hours with the unconditional love that I have to give. Because after a few hours, she begins to feel slightly annoyed. And tries to hide it. But with my sharp senses, I pick up that evasive look. And the shoulder growing colder. And that makes me insecure, makes me afraid that in another minute, I’ll lose her. And then I become even more unconditional. Love even more. I’m not like that with any other woman. Only with her. And she simply cannot accept it. Not from me. Not for very long. And I can’t live with insecurity for very long. That is our vicious circle. The circle that will always remain closed no matter how we spin it, trapping us inside until we have to break out of it. And escape.

*

The next morning, we devoured a huge meal, in silence.

I put on one of Churchill’s shirts (at the time, in my flat, he was probably wearing one of mine) and Ya’ara didn’t put on anything.

I forgot how you eat cornflakes, she said.

How?

Funny. Every spoonful you put in your mouth has barely one cornflake in it.

And I forgot how you eat cornflakes, I said.

How?

Funny. Every time you raise the spoon to your mouth, your right breast moves a little.

She raised the spoon to her mouth to check it out, and laughed. You’re right, she said.

After a brief silence, she said, I think we could really be a great couple.

I agree.

We could have such a great relationship. A healthy one.

With a lot of intimacy, but space for each of us to grow individually.

And good sex.

Great sex, I said. And reached out under the table and began sliding my hand between her legs.

She abruptly squeezed her knees together hard on my hand.

Ow! Ouch!! You broke my fingers!!! I pulled my hand away and waved it in the air as if it had been burned.

Let me see, she said, leaning across the table and taking my hand between hers. She kissed my knuckles, one by one. January, March, May, July.

Actually, why not? she asked. The eyes she fixed on me were innocent, but at the edge of her voice was a note of seriousness, as if she herself knew the answer but wanted my words to express her feelings.

Why not what? I asked, feigning innocence.

Come on, she said, dropping my hand impatiently.

Because if we were together, I said with a sigh, we’d have to be happy.

Happy? she said, backing away from the table dramatically. My God! Anything but that!

You see, I said.

And we both smiled a smile whose happiness stopped at our cheeks. And a drop of sadness dripped from it into the small delta between the two neck arteries.

I love you, she said, don’t you know that? She moved her chair closer to the table. And again took my hand with a kind of solemnity.

Yes, I said.

How?

Your body told me, I admitted.

And last night … Yuval … I’ll never forget it … It was … very special for me … I want you to know that, OK?

We kept eating our cornflakes, each in our own way, and then she spread some white cheese on black bread for me, and I told her that she was losing out if she didn’t taste the avocado salad I’d made.

You’re going back to your flat now? she asked.

Yes, I said. I have a translation to finish by tomorrow.

What’s the article about? Ya’ara folded one naked leg over the other. I suddenly noticed that her legs were short.

The title is ‘Back to the Future’, I said. Actually, it’s an abstract of a speech given a few years ago by the chairman of the Canadian Psychologists Association, Jeremiah Miller, at their annual conference. His thesis is that there’s an underlying struggle in modern psychology between the American school, which has an eye to the future, and the European school, which is focused on the past in a big way. When an American psychologist looks at a person, the first question he asks is: where does this person want to go? When the European psychologist looks at a person, his first question is: where has this person come from?

But they’re interconnected, aren’t they?

That’s exactly what Miller says. That you have to find the synthesis. More accurately, that the Canadians have to find it.

Why the Canadians?

He claims that the United States is a relatively young country with a short past, and there are large parts of its history — for example, what happened to the Indians — that it’s not interested in looking at. But he believes that the Europeans, on the other hand, cling to their glorious past and the days when they were the cultural centre of the Western world, and that’s why they find it difficult to look ahead. It turns out then, that only Canadians, in whom both cultures are combined, are free enough to offer a true synthesis.

A bit pretentious, don’t you think?

It sounds OK in English, somehow.

I don’t know, Ya’ara said and put her finger in her mouth to lick off the remains of avocado salad.

What don’t you know?

I’m with the Europeans. You can’t escape the past. Look at that idiot friend of yours. He acts just like his father. Last year, he and Michel even started looking alike. The same receding hairline. The same swaying walk he swore he’d never adopt. He talked so much about being different from his father and, in the end, he’s just following in his footsteps.

Determinism is the last refuge of …

The scoundrel. Ya’ara completed Churchill’s famous remark. And Australia was settled by prisoners expelled from England, I know. And yet …

She was silent. And so was I. I crumbled black bread. I crumbled the crumbs of black bread.

How is he, she said. There was no question mark at the end of her sentence, as if she wanted it to sound as casual as possible.

Shattered, I said, telling the truth.

Good, she said, her tone indifferent. But you could tell from her eyes that she cared.

Then I offered to wash the dishes, and she said, just leave them. So I dressed in my original clothes and put on my shoes the way I had taken them off, without untying the laces and, meanwhile, she went to the bedroom and came back with a plastic bag full of shirts for him and said, how long can he wear that stupid Berkovic shirt?

I thanked her in his name and took the bag. We hugged for a long time, a concluding hug, and I felt something different begin to swell in my chest, and I kissed her on the cheek and left. I walked lightly, almost floated down the street, feeling at least five centimetres taller, feeling that everything around me was tiny in comparison, that my life was going to be different from now on in a way I still couldn’t grasp. I didn’t know whether I felt that way because it was over, I was finally free of the hope that had taken over my life since the last World Cup, the hope that one day, against all odds, the three Ya’ara-wishes I’d written down would come true, or that I felt that way because my body was simply happy about the night it had enjoyed with her body. Happiness that, by its very nature, would be brief.