Eshkol Nevo - World Cup Wishes

Hey, is everything OK with you? he asked on the way.

What … Yes … Why do you ask? I stammered.

Your body … he said, putting his hand on my back, between my shoulders.

What about my body? I asked, shaking him off.

Nothing, it’s just that you seem … But if you say everything’s OK, then …

Everything’s fine, I said, putting an end to the conversation.

But nothing was fine. After the Havatzelet junction, at the spot where you first see the glittering lights of the metropolis, I pretended to be relieved. Look, I thought, trying to convince myself, you’re going back to the city. Its pulsing life will recharge you.

But near Herzliya, the morose thoughts took over again. All your friends have finished the plaster stage with a sense of purpose, and you’re the only one still wallowing around in doubt. An exciting new time in their lives is about to begin, and your train is still stuck in the station. Soon they’ll be talking about nappies and nurseries, and what will you be talking about? A scientific article on parenthood that you translated?

And anyway, it’s over. You have to admit the truth: the group’s golden age has ended. For fourteen years, that quartet was the whole, entire world. Earth, fire, water and wind (and if you add Shahar Cohen, then we had ether too, the fifth, elusive, divine element that Aristotle talks about). But that’s over. Friends come and go, and women remain. Anyway, Ya’ara might be right and the world has changed and there’s no longer room for groups of Haifa guys like us. Perhaps everyone has become impatient and inattentive and horribly self-interested, and even the Chameleons announced this week that they’re splitting up, and from now on, each member of the band ‘will focus on personal projects he is interested in promoting’, and exactly the same thing is happening to us, and if it hasn’t happened yet, it will soon: each of them will be in his home with his love and his children and the personal-project-he-is-interested-in-promoting, and I’ll be in my flat, without love, without children, without a project, and I’ll end up as a kind of eternal Uncle Yuval you invite to parties out of politeness.

My flat looked small and ugly when I walked into it that night. All the little defects glared out at me: the old Formica cabinets in the kitchen. The yellow stain in the toilet. The too-small windows. The broken shutters. Those lying photos of my friends hanging all over the walls. The photo from the Chameleons performance. The photo from Amichai’s birthday. The photo from the Sinai. All lies. Because in reality, that Chameleons performance was terrible. They sang their old songs indifferently, and their new stuff was completely mind-numbing. And on Amichai’s birthday, he and Ofir had a long argument about some stupid thing, and the whole atmosphere was ruined. And that trip to the Sinai? On the trip to the Sinai, you could sense that we were on the beginning of a downward path. I can’t remember a single genuine conversation we had on that trip. Everything was already coated with a thin layer of estrangement. And that’s been the direction ever since.

The photos drove me to the bedroom. Suddenly, it also looked small. Suffocating. Reeking of loneliness. I went over to the wardrobe and pushed aside two piles of folded shirts to reach it. I held it in my hands. A plain red sock with a yellow stripe around the top. There was nothing special about that sock except for the fact that it had been Ya’ara’s, but that alone had been enough for me the last few years. Every time I felt that my life was empty and everything that happened to me was merely a hollow echo, I would go to the wardrobe, find it and once again be filled with hope that one day Ya’ara would come back to me and put on that sock, in this room, for me, the hope, no matter how unfounded, that had managed to keep me from falling into the black pit of total despair, for if there was even the smallest chance she might come back, then there was a reason to shave, a reason to go to sleep, a reason to get up in the morning, a reason to translate another article. And another article. And another article.

I touched the fine, feminine cloth. Crushed it between my fingers.

And felt nothing.

*

One night, on our big trip, Churchill and I got lost on a small Indian island in the middle of Lake Titicaca. We wanted to see the sunset from the highest hill on the island and ignored the rather basic principle that with the sunset comes darkness. On that island, whose name I’ve forgotten, there was no electricity and we didn’t have a torch, and in the dark, our hosts’ house looked like all the others. Blinded and a bit worried, we walked down the hill and began searching for the house in the darkness. We stumbled on hidden furrows, fell into covered pits. By mistake, we reached the lake shore. And went back. We knocked on doors, but no one answered. Slowly, we began to fear that we were imagining everything — that island, the group of travellers we’d come there with, our hosts — and perhaps we were really on a fake tourist island whose inhabitants left it every night.

And then — as we were about to give up hope and Churchill said in alarm, the dark is touching me, I swear, Bro, the dark is touching me right this minute — a clear, continuous sound split the darkness. The sound of a saxophone.

Our hosts didn’t have a saxophone, so we actually had no reason to walk in the direction the music was coming from, but that’s exactly what we did, because in the total darkness of that night, we had no other point of reference, and because everyone, of course, needs a saxophone to walk towards. Even if the playing is shaky. Even if it’s occasionally off-key. A person walks towards the saxophone because he knows that otherwise he might surrender to the darkness.

(The saxophone player turned out to be a hugely tall Indian who was playing for three drunk friends from a student’s music book written in Spanish. And at the end of the concert, he led us easily to our hosts’ house.)

*

Ya’ara had been my saxophone over the years that had passed since the last World Cup. I had walked in her direction again and again, every time it grew dark. The hope that she would come back to me played inside all the time. Quietly, but constantly.

Now the playing was silenced.

And I was left in darkness.

*

It’s hard to describe what happened to me over the next few weeks.

It was as if there was less of me every day.

It was as if the shutters covering the windows of the chambers of my heart had broken. And couldn’t be opened.

It was as if I was burning up from the inside. But with a very cold flame, like the kind fireworks make.

It was more like smog than fog.

It was as if my bed were sleeping in me and not I in the bed.

It was like lead weights. Iron chains. A kibbutz at twelve noon. The dead letter office. Plastic flowers.

OK, enough of those similes — they’re just another way of evading the truth. Of posturing. Faking. How comfortable to translate everything into lively, picturesque images when, in fact, it was as if only the image remained and the actual thing being described was gone.

I slept a great deal during those weeks. And when I wasn’t sleeping, I wanted to sleep.

I couldn’t translate anything. Simple sentences suddenly seemed impossible to decipher. Clients called to ask what was happening. I told them there’d be a slight delay. Very slight.

I said to myself that I’d been waiting for a fall like this for years, for years I’d been fighting gravity, and perhaps once I should simply let myself fall.

Clients called again a week later and asked what was happening.

I apologised. The translation wasn’t ready yet.

Clients left.