Eshkol Nevo - World Cup Wishes

As I walked happily, I thought about Major Kierkegaard, the melancholy Danish philosopher, and the night of his metamorphosis: on 19 April 1848, he spent a long, dramatic night falling in love with God again. The next morning, he wrote with intense emotion in his diary: ‘My whole being is changed. My reserve and self-isolation is broken — I must speak … Dear God, shed your grace on me!’

But what happened after that morning? Did the joy of inner clarity suffusing Kierkegaard last for more than a few hours? Did he formulate a coherent doctrine? Was he able to leave behind the melancholy nature he’d had since childhood? Reading his writings provides several answers to those questions, some of them contradictory.

Apparently, I summed up for myself, it will take a few days before I know what this euphoria means.

And so it was. A few days later, Ya’ara called and told me she was pregnant.

ILANA MUST STILL have been in the recovery room because she isn’t in the picture. Amichai is in the middle of the frame with two identical plastic cradles, the hospital kind, in front him. He looks tired. Wrinkled. But a kind of new glow illuminates his face. We’re all smiling at the camera, smiles both happy and awkward. We’re twenty-five, if I’m not mistaken, still children ourselves, and overnight our friend has become a father, of twins no less. We can’t even begin to take that in. You can see it in the picture. It’s not just the bewildered smiles, it’s also the way we’re standing. Ofir’s hands are shoved in the pockets of his jeans, Churchill’s hands are folded on his chest as if they’re protecting him from something, and my hands are on Amichai’s shoulders, but it looks like he’s the one who’s supporting me. ‘You’re our advance party,’ Churchill had written to him in all our names on the card attached to the bouquet of flowers. ‘You can check it out, this business of kids, and if it seems good, we’ll join you.’ Later, going down in the lift, Ofir said it was because Amichai’s father had died when he was little and he never had a normal family — that’s why he’s started his own family so young. And Churchill said, bullshit, he did it just to make Ilana happy, that’s all. And I thought to myself that Amichai actually looked quite happy there, beside the cradles, and in some cultures a twenty-five-year-old man can already be the father of four children, and perhaps it was Amichai who was acting naturally for his age and we were the ones dragging our feet for no reason and squandering our days with meaningless love affairs.

*

It’s not yours, Ya’ara hastened to reassure me.

How do you know … I mean … how can you be sure? (If it turns out to be mine, the thought flitted through my mind, then one of my three World Cup wishes — a child with Ya’ara — would be coming true.)

I calculated the days, Ya’ara said. It comes out exactly on the last time I slept with Yoav, three weeks ago.

OK … if that’s the case … then congratulations, I said. I didn’t know what else to say.

Yes, Ya’ara said.

We were silent. I tried to picture her compact body pregnant. I couldn’t.

OK, let me talk to your idiot friend, she finally said. I called him and he took the cordless phone to the bathroom, and they spoke for three and a half hours — at some point, I couldn’t hold it in any longer and went down to pee in the cats’ yard — and in the morning, he collected his things, hugged me, told me I was a prince and went back to their flat.

*

Amichai and Ofir couldn’t understand Ya’ara. How could she give him chance after chance after chance when it was clear he would never change? That question was directed at me, as if I were an expert on Ya’ara. We were sitting in the square in front of the Cinematheque, group after group of children passing us on their way to the nearby school, and I sniffed and said that all sorts of things hold couples together. And sometimes it’s that ability they have to hurt each other where they’re most vulnerable. And even that analysis, I added, should be taken with a grain of salt, because we have no idea what happens between them when they get home and remove their masks, because we’re never there. Ofir said that in principle, I might be right, there were hidden energies flowing between him and Maria too, but when it came to Churchill, he thought that in another few weeks, or a few months at the most, we’d be hearing about another infidelity of his.

Churchill, on the other hand, claimed that knowing he was going to be a father calmed him down and put into perspective what was important and what wasn’t. Personally, I thought he was spouting the clichés that football players speak in one-on-one interviews, and what had really put things in perspective for him was the blow he had taken when they’d removed him from the case. I thought that we’d called him Churchill so much and treated him like Churchill for so long that he’d forgotten he was originally Yoav. It had always been convenient for him to have friends a bit less successful, a bit less brilliant than he. And I also thought that, with our co operation, he had nurtured the messianic belief that he was not an ordinary person. Not just another guy from Haifa. Not just another guy from Tel Aviv. Not just one of the six Alimi siblings. I thought that his success as a lawyer fed that belief until it grew to monstrous, voracious proportions that swallowed up his good qualities, one by one.

*

A day after he officially resigned from the prosecutor’s office, Churchill received a call from Amichai, who offered him the job of running the legal arm of Our Right.

He choked up in response. But … how … I was a shit … When you formed the organisation … I didn’t even come to … I didn’t come to your meetings … So why, all of a sudden … How …

Listen, Amichai interrupted him. I’m not happy with the guy who’s doing the job now and I think you can do it better. All the rest is irrelevant.

But I didn’t even apologise … I didn’t have the chance to say I’m sor …

Your retroactive apology is accepted, Amichai said. You start work Sunday morning, eight-thirty. And now I’m sending a volunteer to you with all the material you need to read. You should go over it.

Thank you … thank you so … much, Churchill stammered.

*

Do you believe it? Amichai said with a chuckle when he spoke to me on the phone half an hour later, Churchill stammered!

Churchill stammered, and finished work every day at six, and got home at six-thirty without stopping on the way at Sharona’s, or Keren’s or Hagit’s. And he spent quiet evenings in front of the TV with Ya’ara, and catered to her every whim and put his hand on her stomach to feel if the baby was kicking yet, and complained that she never asked him to bring her ice cream or gherkins the way women do in films.

And she threw the application to the University of London she’d downloaded from the Internet into the bin and gave up once and for all her dream of studying theatre, because at the moment ‘it’s not practical anyway’ and ‘the working hours at her father’s office were very convenient’, and altogether, ‘theatre is not exactly a profession that goes with motherhood, and there’s no ignoring that’. Considering how easily she slipped into the role of the perfect mother, I thought scornfully, the world of the theatre has truly lost a great creator. I know what you’re thinking, Yuval, she said on the phone, and before I could deny it, she begged me, please don’t say it. I’m in the middle of trying to convince myself now, so don’t hassle me with the truth, OK?

The further her pregnancy progressed, the less I spoke to Ya’ara and Churchill. They seemed to have withdrawn into their own private cocoon, where there was no room for old friends. 1