Eshkol Nevo - World Cup Wishes

My restraint, in any case, was deeply cracked the minute I met Ya’ara. During the months we were together, my horse burst out of the stall with me on its back, my legs dangling on either side of the saddle. I raced with her to the school she’d gone to and she showed me the small yard — she remembered it as being larger — where the girls in her class decided to ostracise to her; I raced with her to plays she went to see mainly so she could be disappointed and explain to me later, her cheeks red with passion, how she would have done it differently, more intensely; I raced with her to a party in Jerusalem that went on all night, and when she danced, her hair whipped my face, and it hurt and felt good, felt good and hurt; I raced with her to my parents’ house in Haifa and watched her win them over in five minutes; I raced with her to wherever she took me, throwing off my calculated caution, and that way, feeling light, I could keep going to distant regions in my soul and hers. Every night, in bed, she told me things: how the affront she’d felt when her girlfriends decided to ostracise her in her first year in high school still stung, making her keep a safe distance from women, and how that guitarist threatened to hurt himself if she left him, and three weeks later, he left her, and for the first time in my life, I didn’t make do with listening and told her that before her, there’d been nothing, and I’d already reconciled myself to a life without love, except the love I had with imaginary women I created for myself every night, and then during the day, I scoured the streets, the shops, the campus lawns for girls who looked like them. With the appropriate self-mockery, I told her about my collection of imaginary women, trying to create the impression that they were all in the past, while at the same time, the suspicion was growing in me that she herself was imaginary, and when we’d finished racing around together, there would be a very non-imaginary fall. I even felt a slight yearning for that fall. For those first seconds after you fall, when everything is suddenly silent. And when it finally came –

I didn’t bang my head against the wall. I didn’t empty a bottle of sleeping pills. I didn’t stroll around on the window ledge. I took on more and more translation work so I wouldn’t have time to think, and I told Amichai not to ask me over to watch the football for a while because I wouldn’t. But that’s not fair, he protested, it’s not fair that Churchill did what he did and you’re the one who’s out in the cold. I’m not out in the cold, I choose not to be with all of you, I said, almost yelling at him, as if raising my voice would make my decision logical, and when Ilana the Weeper called on the pretext of needing help with translating some article, confessing a second later that she actually wanted to tell me that they all missed me a lot, and she didn’t understand why I was denying myself their support when I needed it most — I told her that I just couldn’t. And she said I could see just her, if I wanted, and her voice was gentle and empathetic, very different from the sharp voice she used with Amichai when we were around, but I still said, thanks, Ilana, really, thank you, but no.

*

To tell the truth, it wasn’t easy. Without my Haifa friends, Tel Aviv went back to being the ugly, inhospitable city it had been when I moved there, half-heartedly, after the army, only because of the impulsive promise I made to Churchill on the last Independence Day before we were drafted.

We were sitting in the playing field stands and Churchill announced that this time we were going to Tel Aviv, and Ofir said he’d read in the papers that there was a party in Malkei Israel Square, and Amichai said it was probably expensive because everything in Tel Aviv is expensive, and Ofir said, you dimwit, it’s in Malkei Israel Square, how can they take money in an open place, and Amichai said, you’re the dimwit, what’s the problem with fencing it off, and Churchill said, enough, if it costs money, we’ll pay, it’s our last Independence Day before the army, and when he finished the sentence, they all looked at me because I was the only one who had not only a driving licence, but also his parents’ car, and I said yes, but on one condition, that we leave early because I don’t like driving when I’m tired, and Churchill patted me on the shoulder and said, whatever you say, Freed, but when I came to pick him up, he was far from being ready, and Ofir, who was always next on the route to be picked up, had fallen asleep watching a Fellini film and we had to pull him off the couch by his curly hair and make him two cups of instant coffee, and Amichai decided he’d stay at home to help his brother study for an exam and wouldn’t change his mind until Churchill explained that not going out on Independence Day is like thumbing your nose at your country, but even after he gave in, we had to wait for him to have a shower and find an outfit he thought would cover the blotch on the bottom of his neck that had first appeared after his father was killed by a road bomb in Lebanon. From some angles, that blotch looked like a map of Israel, which turned Amichai, against his will, into an attraction in civics class and left him with a permanent complex about his appearance. That night, he tried three different shirts and three pairs of matching trousers till he found a combination he was happy with, and that’s why we didn’t start driving south until one in the morning. Churchill said we had nothing to worry about, things in Tel Aviv started late anyway, and when we reached the Glilot junction and got stuck in a horrible traffic jam, he said, everyone’s probably going to that party in the Square, I think it’s going to be the party of our lives, but the traffic didn’t move, and the radio said there’d been an accident on Namir Road and ‘traffic in the area was heavy’, and Ofir said, isn’t this Namir Road? And Amichai said, what are you talking about, this is Haifa Road and Ofir said, you cretin, Namir Road and Haifa Road are the same thing, and Amichai said, you’re the cretin, why would they give the same road two different names? And Churchill leaned over to me and whispered under their voices, take a right here, and when I did, he signalled me to park on the pavement and said, yallah , let’s walk, how far can it be, got out of the car, slammed the door hard and started walking towards the distant lights of the big, unfamiliar city, and we all hurried after him without knowing exactly where we were going.

We walked through a neighbourhood of tall buildings with marble lobbies and underground parking, and through neighbourhoods of low buildings without marble lobbies or underground parking, and we barely saw another human being the whole way, just a few scared girls wearing miniskirts who Churchill called babes, it’s unbelievable how many babes there are in this city, and Ofir said, like someone in the know, you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet, Bro, when we get to the Square you’ll have to put on your shades so your eyes don’t get burned, but when we reached the Square, sweaty and wrinkled after an hour and a half of walking, it was totally empty, there was no one there except a lone demonstrator holding a ‘Stop the Occupation’ sign. That was before the army, and we didn’t even know what or where the occupation was, so we just asked the demonstrator if there’d been a party there, and he said no, there hadn’t been any party because you need a reason to party. No party? How can that be? Ofir asked us, ignoring the demonstrator, I swear that I read in the papers that … Maybe you read it in ‘Teen Dreams’, Amichai jeered, and Ofir defended himself, no, I swear, it was in the weekend Yediot Aharonot , in the Seven Days section, and Amichai said, only you, Ofir, only you, Seven Days has interviews with retired generals and football players, parties are listed in the Seven Nights section, and I looked at my watch, thought about the long drive home waiting for me and said, it’s four in the morning already, maybe we should start back? But Churchill shot a withering look at me and said, are you crazy? Go back? It’s Independence Day! We have to find a party! We have to!