World Cup Wishes

Editor’s Epilogue

On the way back from the shop which had printed the final version of the manuscript — which included the last scene and was apparently meant to be handed over for final copy-editing the next day — my beloved friend Yuval Freed drove into the car stopped in front of him at the traffic lights on the corner of Einstein and Brodetzki Streets. He didn’t hit it hard: the damage to both cars was minor and included a broken headlight and slightly bent bumper. Nothing more.

What happened after that is shrouded in fog. To this day, there has been no clarification of the precise order of events that had such tragic results.

It appears that Mr Kfir Kliger, the driver of the car that was hit, got out of his vehicle and walked over to Mr Yuval Freed, opened the car door and pulled him out by the collar. They apparently had a short argument, accompanied by mutual shoving.

Witnesses for the prosecution reported that Mr Kliger was the attacker, and that Mr Freed was focused on trying to ward off the attack on him. Witnesses for the defence, on the other hand, claim that Mr Freed was equally responsible for the argument and the shoving.

From my years’ long acquaintance with Mr Freed, with his characteristic restraint and mild manner, I tend to accept the first version, despite the fact that it cannot be denied that in this book Mr Freed himself claims that there was a little hooligan inside him, and ‘perhaps in all men’.

Be that as it may, after several minutes of mutual provocation, Mr Kliger went and got an army club from his car and hit Mr Freed in the stomach with it several times. Then in the head.

Mr Freed fell unconscious onto the blazing tarmac and was taken to Ichilov Hospital by Mr Kliger himself.

A routine report from a volunteer worker for the Our Right NPO, who was in the hospital at the time, reached Mr Amichai Tanuri’s beeper, and so, within half an hour, all of us — Amichai, Ofir, Maria, Ya’ara and myself — were standing in the corridor outside the intensive care unit.

The treatment Mr Freed received was irreproachable. As was the manner in which the team treated us during the long hours of waiting. Cynics would undoubtedly claim that Mr Tanuri’s presence is what caused the hospital staff to treat us with so much care and sensitivity. However, in this case, I am unable to agree with them. As far as I could tell, the attending physician, Dr Eitan, is not the sort of person who needs special reasons to show sensitivity to his patients. He is a young man — almost our age — whose professional honesty and ability to infuse his surroundings with his humanistic spirit are remarkable and inspire me with hope that — perhaps — we have been blessed with a new generation of doctors.

After an eighteen-hour struggle, Dr Eitan came out of the operating room and told us and Mr Freed’s parents that his life was no longer in danger, but there was no way of knowing when he would regain consciousness. The strong blow had caused a serious brain haemorrhage, he explained, and in such cases it can be difficult to predict when consciousness will return. It can take a week, it can take two years, and perhaps — and we must be prepared for this — it might never return at all.

The fact that your friend is relatively young works in his favour, he said, put a warm hand on my shoulder and promised to personally monitor the course of treatment. Be with him, he said. I have no scientific proof, but I believe it’s important.

We set up a schedule for shifts so that at any given moment, at least one of us would be sitting beside Yuval and talking to him.

*

Two weeks later, the indictment in the case of the State v. Kfir Kliger was issued. After reading the results of the psychiatric examination, Judge Yeshayhu Navi was forced to rule that Mr Kliger was not mentally competent to stand trial and should be sent forthwith to an appropriate institution. It turns out that Kliger was known to the mental health authorities as a victim of severe post-traumatic stress syndrome. He had served as a military policeman for two years during the first Intifada, and towards the end of his stint, as a result of an event that occurred during a search of the maternity hospital in Nablus carried out by his unit, had suffered shell shock. He was discharged due to the poor state of his mental health and began intensive treatment that combined psychiatric drugs and sessions with a psychologist. Documents submitted to the judge indicated that on the day of the event, Mr Kliger had slipped out of the closed ward of the psychiatric hospital, where he had been committed by his family out of fear that he might harm himself. When he came out of the hospital, a fellow soldier from his unit gave him his private vehicle, in which he had forgotten, purely by accident, his army club. Apparently, Mr Kliger’s friend gave him the car so he could meet with a girl he’d been hiding his condition from. The date with the girl had been set for one-thirty in the afternoon, and at one twenty-five, as he was waiting at the traffic signal, Mr Freed’s vehicle hit him from behind.

*

At the conclusion of the hearing, the judge read the following words:

‘Legally speaking, the evidence before me leaves me no choice but to rule that the suspect cannot stand trial. Nevertheless, it should be stressed that this ruling in no way makes light of the specific act committed by the suspect, or of violence in general. A slow, subliminal change has taken place in our country over the last several years, and Mr Kliger’s outburst is merely the tip of the iceberg informing us that the iceberg does in fact exist, or is the indication of a generation that has gone to the …’

While the judge’s mouth was producing the bland legal jargon, my thoughts wandered to Yuval, who was lying in the hospital now, and this entire trial was of no use to him at all. I thought about his great desire to achieve the ‘Bahai symmetry’, and about the fact that ultimately there had been a point to what his creative writing tutor had said in the workshop, and perhaps the wish to achieve the symmetry and harmony of the Bahai Gardens here, in this place, is a bit like the Israeli team’s wish to be in the World Cup: unfortunately, it always remains only a wish.

‘It is not merely disturbed people who display this sort of contempt for others, but sin is crouching at the door …’ the judge continued to intone his admonishments from the bench, and I remembered the absolutely final performance of the Chameleons. After the group had given their always-sure-to-please encores, the audience demanded one final song. The musicians had a short argument (short and loud, in the best tradition of the band), and then we heard the first notes of ‘Prophet’. Few people apart from Ofir recognised the poem, written by Yehuda Amichai, that was the last track on the group’s CD of songs by poets.

I am the prophet of what was, I read the past

On the palm of the woman I love

I am the forecaster of winter rains that have fallen

I am the expert on the snows of yesteryear

I dredge up from the deep things that have been

I prophesise about yesterday and the day before

I am the prophet of what was

The prophet of what was

They sang the last line several more times, weaker each time, further away from the microphone each time, then walked off the stage. The audience was dumbstruck for a few seconds, then responded with quiet, scattered applause. What a weird song to end their last performance with, Amichai said when we’d gone out of the club into the night air. You don’t understand anything, man! Ofir said, it was brilliant! ‘The Prophet of What Was’ is exactly … it. Exactly … them … Exactly their story!

*

I hope that when he opens his eyes, Yuval won’t be angry about that Yehuda Amichai poem I felt should be quoted here, or about the other changes I made.

These last several weeks, from the moment I received the manuscript, I have worked day and night to complete the editing and proofreading so that the book would be ready for Yuval’s target date: the World Cup final.

As I mentioned, reading the text was not at all easy for me. In many cases, I had to put the pages aside and let my overflowing emotion subside, and I had to stop myself from making too many changes (after some changes, does the text lose its original essence? I don’t know. And that’s why I was especially careful).

In his real, non-literary life, Yuval Freed was even more withdrawn and silent than he portrays himself in the book. Most of the remarks he attributes to himself in the book never came out of his mouth. Usually, it was only his pensive eyes that spoke. And sometimes, his actions: like that night he helped me survive after I drank the San Pedro. Or the way he helped Amichai set up the NPO. And we got used to his quiet restraint, just as we got used to Ofir’s exaggerations and Amichai’s puzzles. That restraint was convenient for us. It was convenient that the group consisting of earth, wind and fire also included an element that burbles around the rocks like water, one that doesn’t initiate any bizarre schemes and doesn’t change its character every other day and doesn’t demand absolute justice from everyone, but merely stays silent and smiles that wise smile of his (that smile, Ya’ara once told me, was what made girls fall in love with him).

I think that through all the years of our friendship, I never heard Yuval say more than three sentences at one time, and perhaps that’s why this book, which is all one long monologue of his, surprised me so much. And embarrassed me. And infuriated me.

And made me feel close to him. Closer than ever.

Come back, I ask him when it’s my shift (I speak to him out loud and I don’t care if the other patients in the room hear). Come back, you’re the best friend I’ve ever had. You taught me what being a friend means. And without you, I’m afraid I might forget. You know me from before I changed for the worse. And every time I’m with you, I feel I’ve become a slightly better person. You see through all my masks and hear in my words exactly what I manage, through them, to hide from the rest of the world. Come back, it’s so sad here without you. Ya’ara is very sad too. I want you to know that. She’s suffering from prenatal depression because of what happened to you. She loves you, do you even know that? And the fact that she loves you is a big problem now. Because she’s so sad that she’s almost stopped eating. And she needs to eat a lot, for our little girl. So come back, Bro. You have to come back. You’re the glue. You were always the glue. There’s one place in the book where you wonder what happened during those six months you boycotted us. What happened is that we hardly ever saw each other. And when we did, it was empty. Cold. And that’s the truth: without you, we’re a random collection of people. With you, we’re friends. Without you, the big city is all the bad things Ofir says about it. With you, it’s home.

So come on, Baba, wake up. That’s the only wish I have now.

If you wake up, we’ll read our World Cup wishes.

If you wake up, this book won’t be a requiem. Not for you and not for our friendship.

If you wake up, I promise not to shield myself with protective armour or poke fun at you with ‘glittering legal arguments’. Look, I promised myself to write this epilogue with restrained formality, as befits a copy-editor and attorney. But I simply can’t any more.

*

These last few nights, we’ve all stood around your bed in the rehabilitation hospital to watch the deciding rounds of the World Cup.

The timid girl from your workshop has joined us, and she sits on the side, silently, occasionally getting up to feed the two birds sitting on the ledge of the window near your bed.

They’ve been here since the first day they brought you. Sometimes they spread their wings and fly off to another place, but they always come back. Ofir claims that Ilana’s soul has been reincarnated in one of them and Yoram Mendelsohn’s in the other. Because they want to be at your side too.

Amichai says that Ofir is full of crap (so what else is new?).

Shahar Cohen is here from Slovenia, with his partner. He’s selling properties in Eastern Europe to Israelis now, and between goals and misses, he tries to convince us to buy flats in Budapest and Prague because ‘what happened to Yuval shows that our country is sick, and any reasonable person has to prepare an escape hatch for himself now, and if you all make the move together, it’ll be easier for you’.

He’s been trying to sell you a place too, by the way. And every few hours, he lowers the price in the hope that that’s what’ll wake you up.

Amichai claims that it would be most fitting for you to wake up when Brazil scores a goal, and insists that we practise shouting our ‘Ye-e-e-s!’ together.

I’m counting on the book. This book.

In another week, the day before the final, I’ll drive to the Efroni printing house to pick up the first copy and drive right back here with it. I’ll stand close to your bed, lean over you, and say into your ear, that’s it, Bro, the four World Cup wishes have come true.

Then I’ll open the copy and hold it in front of your nose. The thick, sweet smell, the smell of a new book, will open your nostrils, your eyes. Then your memory.

Who won the Cup? will probably be your first question, after you get your bearings.

The final is tomorrow, will be my answer. It’s wide open.