Eshkol Nevo - Homesick

If you still don’t get it, Nina left yesterday. Her money ran out. I poured everything out of my wallet on to our bed, made two piles of all the dollars and travellers’ cheques and said: tuyo (yours, in Spanish. We’d started stammering in that language, which we both hardly knew, but at least we both hardly knew it). No, she said and put it all back into one pile. Why not? I yelled in Hebrew, and she just shrugged her shoulders and kept on saying no, no, no possible. I got down on my knees. I put my palms together and begged. I pretended to be insulted. Crazy. Nothing helped. That stupid Czech pride of hers wouldn’t let her take money from me. For them, she told me with her hands, a girl who takes money from a man is a whore. What whore, who’s a whore, I said, getting upset and pounding on my chest. Don’t you see that I totally love you? And if I understood the Czech she spoke, she said, I love you too, and gave me a long hug. She hugged me and stroked me the whole night, even in her sleep. But in the morning, when I asked her if she’d changed her mind, that ‘no possible’ was even firmer than before, as if in the meanwhile she’d danced a tango with the possibility and rejected it once and for all.

So last night, I walked her to the bus stop. What else could I do? Aside from us, there were mainly peasants and chickens waiting for the bus. They travel to the big city at night, spread their mats on the ground and sleep in the main square to grab a space for market day. There was an unbearable smell of chickens in the air and grey feathers were scattered on the filthy ground. I crowed a little for Nina in a final effort to get her to change her mind, but she didn’t even laugh. At eleven on the dot — all the buses on this trip were always very late, and hers had to come on time? — she climbed up to the roof to check that they were tying her backpack down tightly, then came down to me for a last hug. She handed me the Dvorak disc, the one she played for me on our first date, and said, tuyo . I refused to take it. Are you joking? I know how much you love it, I said, but she kept her lips clenched till I gave in. I didn’t have anything to give her, except for a long letter in Hebrew — I hoped she’d find someone in the Jewish quarter of Prague who could translate it for her — and a kiss.

At eleven-fifteen, she wasn’t waving to me from the window any more. I trudged back to the hostel. I was wiped out, as if I’d just finished the Eilat triathlon, and when I got back to the room, I fell on the bed and stared at the broken ceiling fan and had depressing thoughts, such as: love is like a cinema. The lobby is fancy, decorated with select posters from the film. But you leave the place through a twisting, urine-soaked corridor with dented walls and there’s always some idiot usher who opens the door a few minutes before the end and you always try to ignore the invading light.

Enough of these thoughts, I told myself off before I fell asleep. The day after tomorrow’s a new day.

But I didn’t have strength for anything today either. There’s a hot-water waterfall an hour-and-a-half walk from the village. I didn’t go. Your letter is probably waiting for me at the embassy, an hour away by bus. I didn’t go. And now I don’t know what’s happening with you and Noa. And I have no idea whether you made those crazies normal or they made you crazy. Even though I’m really curious about it. Really. But try to understand, bro. I could barely drag myself out to eat lunch. And even then, I didn’t touch the meat and I only ate the guacamole. Would you believe that I ignored a steak that was sitting on my plate? Even worse. A French babe who was sitting at the table next to the wall kept showing me her dimples through the whole meal and I didn’t go over to her. I didn’t even smile back at her. I got up and started back to the hostel. All the people in the street looked like hostile, dangerous liars, so I walked faster and when I got to the room I lay down on the bed, even though I’d only got out of it an hour before, and suddenly started thinking about my family. It’s been months since I invested even a minute in missing them, and all of a sudden I pictured all of them sitting down to eat supper without me, and I wanted to be there. To eat aubergine salad and potato salad with mayonnaise. To have those stupid fights with my mother. To laugh at my father’s unfunny jokes. To take the dishes off the table after the meal and load the dishwasher.

And later, at night, I heard some music coming from the party in the bar downstairs. It was a song we used to like to dance to, ‘Come on Eileen’ by Dexy’s Midnight Runners. My knee started bouncing to the rhythm, but that was all. I didn’t feel like going down to dance. Why meet other people? So I could say goodbye to them two days later?

How does that Caveret song go: ‘It might be over’? It might be. Or I might get up tomorrow morning and the sun will rise in my chest again.

Whatever happens, I’ll fill you in so you know when to book a court for us. I can’t wait to beat the pants off you.

Modi.

*

When I woke up on Saturday, I saw from the rectangles of light on the wall of my room that the sun was out. The sun! I opened the blinds and all the broken glass in the empty lot sparkled at me. The wind coming into the room was cold but nice. ‘Great weather for football,’ like they say on that radio programme, Soccer and Songs . And for taking a drive. Before Gidi died, we used to take a lot of car trips, mostly with the Lundys, to the Carmel, the Galilee, to all kinds of creeks whose names I don’t remember. We get up early. Dad sits in the living room with the map on his lap and plans our route, Mum makes sandwiches in the kitchen and I fill empty Coke bottles with water and then help her wrap the sandwiches in foil. And always, a few minutes before we have to leave, the Lundys call to say they’ll be a bit late and Dad sighs and says, as if we didn’t know. And Mum says, I don’t understand. Why can’t we just plan to leave a little later? But when we meet them at the Sha’ar HaGai petrol station, no one mentions that they were late. They all hug and kiss each other. My father and Ami, who was under his command in the army, and my mother and Nitza. Then Dad switches to Nitza and Mum to Ami. Only Shira Lundy and I stand far away from each other. For the first few seconds, we don’t have the courage to talk. She plays with her curls and I look at my shoes and neither one of us is brave enough to say hello. Then my mother says — she always says the exact same thing — Yotam, you know Shira, don’t you? And Nitza laughs and says, Nechama, why are you embarrassing the children? Then my father says, let’s go girls, we have no time for this. We have a long drive ahead of us today. We all get into our cars, fill the tanks and start driving. Every few minutes, Dad asks, do you see them? Do you see them? And Mum says, yes, they’re right behind us, and goes back to humming along with the song that’s on the radio. Sometimes Dad hums with her and they sing together, he with a deep voice that tries to sound like the singer and she with a mother’s voice. He puts his hand on her thigh and strokes it and in the back seat, I try to find the best position for my legs and look out the window at the signs on the road that are full of the names of places I’ve never been to, like Elyakhin and Eliashiv, which always come one right after the other. Or Caesaria and Binyamina, which Dad always says are worth stopping at when we have a chance. But that chance never comes, and when the scenery changes and hills start popping up, Mum asks me what kind of sandwich I want, and I say, what kind do you have? She looks at me and says, cheese, pastrami with hummus and pastrami without hummus. I pick one and peel away the foil, thinking that soon we’ll get to the place where we start walking, and then I’ll see Shira Lundy again. That gives me a kind of scary but nice feeling in my stomach that makes me lose my appetite a little. But I eat anyway, so Mum won’t say that she doesn’t understand why she bothers to make sandwiches if I’m not going to eat.