Eshkol Nevo - World Cup Wishes

The story behind that picture is the story of our friendship. The four of us. It’s not clear exactly how it began. It’s not clear what keeps it strong to this day. And it’s not clear whether it will continue to exist now that our lives have changed. I think friendship is a strange thing altogether. I’ve been translating English academic articles in the social sciences into Hebrew for five years now, and still haven’t come across an article that studies the subject in depth. Yes, everything today has to be statistical and empirical, and it really is difficult to quantify and calculate distance and closeness and loyalty and betrayal and love and longing. And perhaps it’s not necessary .

*

I was fairly satisfied with what I’d written. Mainly with the last paragraph. I decided I’d go to the second meeting of the workshop to hand in the exercise and hear what the tutor had to say.

He returned the exercise a week later. He’d written on it in his long, narrow handwriting:

The description of the picture itself is rich and detailed, but the paragraph that comes later, the one that’s supposed to tell ‘the story behind the picture’, explains and analyses and does everything but tell the story .

I think that this exercise could be the opening into a larger story about the characters that appear in it, but you still need to find the narrative path along which you wish to lead yourself and your reader .

*

What does he want from me?

That was my first response when I read his comment.

Idiot, I thought a few hours later. How can he say that the last paragraph isn’t good?

The next morning, I reread what I’d handed in. Perhaps, I thought. Perhaps there is something in what he says.

A week later, while shaving, I suddenly had the general idea for a plot that would grow out of the earlier World Cup wishes and end with the approaching World Cup.

With racing, burning fingers, I began to write the book.

*

The flow that swept me along as I wrote the first pages bore no resemblance at all to what I felt when translating, and, in fact, it bore no resemblance to any other state of consciousness I’d known in the past (except perhaps for my especially successful masturbation fantasies — the ones I invested so much in that my fingers could actually feel the nipples of the girl I was fantasising about).

But after the first explosion of enthusiasm, I realised that writing is not a leisurely sail down a river –

I discovered, for example, that apparently unimportant physical handicaps also handicapped me in writing. Since I was colour blind, for example, there were too few colours in my descriptions, as if I were afraid to mistakenly call red green and green red.

But on the other hand –

A few of my shitty traits actually worked to my benefit in writing: the obsessive memory that would not let me forget Ya’ara, even for a minute, over the last four years helped me when I had to recreate a situation. I remember everything that was said. Everything that was worn. Every song on the radio playing in the background. And if there is something I happen not to remember, I invent it. And how wonderful it is to invent. As a translator, you’re bound to the original text by chains of fidelity, but here — here you can be unfaithful. Replace an uncle with a father. One friend with another. Invent entire conversations you’ve never heard. Lie. Take revenge on people through your words. But you can atone as well.

I also discovered that never losing sight of the great goal of finishing the book is both a blessing and a curse. It makes me sit down in front of the computer every morning, but there are days when nothing gets written and I have no choice but to go outside, sidestep the renovation pits and walk all the way to the northern wall of Yarkon Park where the paved path ends. And lie down there. And simply stare at the shifting clouds.

Though it’s so easy to get confused between days like that and days when you’re just being lazy. The dishes were always clean during the ten months I was writing. The laundry was very nicely folded. And my translating business revived. Every now and then, I tried to escape into reading other people’s books, but I soon discovered what a problem that could be. This, for example, is what I wrote after I finished reading Lips — a collection of erotic stories by foreign women writers. I couldn’t fall asleep all night, and in the morning, the following scene wrote itself:

Ilana runs her fingers over Maria’s lips, flutters over her upper lip and continues the imaginary line that stretches from the corner of her mouth to her cheek, to the large artery in her neck, to her collarbone. Slowly, like a fine brush, her finger moves under her shirt, raising it slightly, and climbs up to her shoulder .

Ilana presses her ear against Maria’s breasts. Maria’s heart has a three-beat rhythm: oh-my-love, oh-my love. Or perhaps: Oh-my-God. Oh-my-God .

For a moment, Ilana imagines them dancing a tango to that rhythm .

The word ‘tango’ also flickers in Maria for a moment. It’s not clear where it’s coming from .

Ilana presses her lips to the coffee stain, two fingers from Maria’s navel .

Maria asks soundlessly: how many sugars?

They transform. On the first transformation, they’re scorpions. Then tortoises. Then it’s their souls that are transformed. Maria feels no guilt .

Neither does Ilana. At least not while they’re doing it .

Pain has collected in Ilana’s back. Spots of pain. Maria presses gently on them and feels how each spot tells a story .

Ilana’s thighs are poignant. A bit scratched, a bit wounded. Maria kisses them, then kisses them again, slightly higher up .

How strange. Maria kisses her thighs but she feels the pleasure on the back of her neck .

And suddenly she’s embarrassed by her nakedness and wants to cover up with something .

There is no blanket, so Maria climbs on top of her and covers her with her large, blazing body .

Where, in all that, was the point of no return? The point when it was still possible to stop .

Before. Long before all that. The moment, three weeks earlier, when Maria suggested that, if Ilana had back pain, she would treat her. The moment her touch was soft. The moment they went to the sea together and their hands touched accidentally, under the water. The moment Maria pulled her onto the dance floor, at the wedding. The moment she told her, with simple frankness, about her winter depression. The moment she expressed an interest in her articles. The moment she came into their apartment for the first time, with Ofir. The moment Ilana met Amichai .

Their first time in the living room. On the sofa. Later, in the bedroom. On the carpet. And after that, in the kitchen, when Maria sat on a chair and Ilana sat on her, her hands wrapped around her neck, her stomach pressed up against her, her glance direct, evasive, frightened, bold .

Ilana moves on Maria’s muscular leg, back and forth, back and forth, until …

Maria looks at her, how beautiful she is when she’s enjoying herself. Her lips .

Lana, Lana, Lana, she says her name silently .

Writing those lines was a joy, I won’t deny it.

But more than that: suddenly, as I was writing, I began to feel that the encounter was actually taking place, and when I finished writing, I was absolutely positive that it had happened and that Ilana had taken the secret with her to the grave.

In any case, I couldn’t go on writing like that. It was too horny and too necrophiliac, and, even worse, the tips of my fingers itched with a sense of falseness.