World Cup Wishes

1

IT WAS AMICHAI’S idea. He always had ideas like that, even though the official ideas man in the group was Ofir, but Ofir wasted all his creativity in ad agencies writing copy for biscuits and banks, so he took advantage of the gang’s get-togethers to be boring and was quiet a lot and talked only a little, using simple Haifa words, and sometimes, when he drank a bit too much, he’d hug us all and say: how lucky we are to have each other, you have no idea how lucky. Amichai, on the other hand, sold Telemed subscriptions to people with heart disease, and even though he sometimes managed to pick up a great story from the sales conversations he had, usually with Holocaust survivors, you couldn’t say that he got much satisfaction or excitement from the job. Every few months, he’d announce that he was leaving Telemed and taking a course in Shiatsu, but something always came up that made him put it off. Once they offered him a bonus. Once they offered him a car. And then there was his marriage to Ilana the Weeper. And then the twins. So all the joy of life bubbling inside him that he couldn’t express in his meetings in the old people’s homes or in bed with Ilana came gushing out with us, his three best friends, in the form of all sorts of brilliant ideas, like taking a trip to Lake Kinneret to celebrate the tenth anniversary of our outing to the Luna Gal Water Park there, or signing up for a karaoke competition and really working on an a cappella rendition of a Beatles song. Why the Beatles? Churchill asked, and you could guess from his tone how that new idea would end up. Why not? There are four of them and four of us, Amichai said, trying to be persuasive, but from his tone you could tell he realised that this idea, like all the others before it, didn’t stand a chance. Without Churchill’s backing, it was hard for us to get anything off the ground. And when Churchill squashed someone, he did it so offhandedly and so precisely that it made you feel sorry for the defence lawyers who had to go up against him in court. It was Churchill who founded our gang in high school. He didn’t really found it, it’s more accurate to say that we flocked around him, like lost sheep. Every feature of his broad face, each untied lace of his trainers, even the way he walked — it all projected the sense that he knew what was good. That he had some kind of internal compass that guided him. All of us, of course, faked self-confidence in those years, but Churchill really had it. The girls twisted a curl around their fingers when he walked past, even though he wasn’t good-looking in the movie-star sense, and we picked him with a communistic majority of votes to be captain of the class football team, even though there were better players than he. It was there, on the team, that he got his nickname. Before the semi-finals against a class of seniors, he got us together and gave a rousing pep talk saying that all we had to offer against the seniors was blood, sweat and tears. We were almost in tears when he finished, and then on the field, we just gave it our all, including a constant fight for the ball and painful slides on the asphalt, which didn’t keep us from losing three-nil because of three bad mistakes Churchill himself made: once he passed the ball to the opponent’s striker, once he lost a fateful ball in midfield, and to top it all off, he scored a breathtaking own goal when he tried to clear a corner and, instead, sent the ball straight into the goal where I was standing.

No one was angry with him after the game. How could you be angry with someone who, a second after the final whistle, gets everyone together in the centre of the field and, with lowered lashes, takes all the blame on himself? How can you be angry with someone who, to make up for it, takes the whole team to a Maccabi Haifa match when everyone knows he’s taking the money out of his own pocket because his parents don’t have any? How can you be angry with someone who puts his heart and soul into writing birthday greetings, who listens so well, who travels all the way to the Negev to visit you in basic training, who lets you stay in his apartment for three months till you get settled in Tel Aviv and insists that you sleep in his bed while he sleeps on the sofa?

Even after what happened with Ya’ara, I couldn’t be angry with him. Everyone was sure I’d be furious. That I’d explode with rage. Amichai called me the minute he heard — Churchill really fucked up, but I have an idea: let’s all go to a paintball game and the three of us can shoot him with paint pellets. We’ll really let him have it! I talked to him and he says OK. Are you up for it?

Ofir walked out of a campaign meeting for three-layered toilet paper just to say: Bro, I’m with you. You have every reason. But I’m begging you, don’t do anything you’ll regret. You have no idea how lucky we are to have each other, you have no idea.

The truth is, they didn’t need to beg. I couldn’t work up the anger anyway. One night I even went to his place hoping that the drama of doing that would light a fire under me, and on the way I kept saying out loud to myself, bastard, what a bastard, but when I got to his building, I didn’t feel like going up any more. Perhaps if I’d seen a faint silhouette moving in his flat, that would have clenched my fist, but I just sat in the car and sprayed water on the windscreen and turned on the wipers, sprayed and wiped, till finally, when the first long ray of light touched the solar water tanks on the roof, I left. I couldn’t picture myself hitting him. Even though he had it coming. Even though, when we wrote wishes during the last World Cup, all three of mine had to do with Ya’ara.

*

It was Amichai’s idea, those wishes.

After Emmanuel Petit scored the third goal and it was already clear that France would take the Cup, and there was a faint sense of disappointment in the air because we were all rooting for Brazil; after we’d finished off the tear-flavoured burekas Ilana had baked and the last nut had been cracked and only one piece of the watermelon and feta cheese was left, the piece no one felt comfortable taking — after all that, Ofir said, you know, something just hit me. This is the fifth World Cup we’ve watched together. And Churchill said, how do you get to five? Four, max.

And we started going over them.

Mexico ’86 we saw in Ofir’s father’s house in Tivon. And when poor, naïve Denmark lost five-one to Spain, Ofir cried his heart out and his father said that’s what happens when a boy is raised by his mother. The ’90 World Cup final we each saw in a different city in the territories, but there was one day when we all went home and met at Amichai’s place to watch the semi-final. No one remembers who played because his little sister was walking around the house in a red baby-doll nightie and we were soldiers and couldn’t keep our eyes on the screen. In ’94, we were students. Tel Avivians. Churchill was the first to move there, and we all trailed after him to the big city because we wanted to stay together and because Churchill said that it was the only place where we could be what we wanted to be.

But we actually saw the ’94 games in Rambam hospital in Haifa, Ofir remembered. Ri-i-ght, I said.

In the middle of supper at my parents’ place, I had the worst wheezing asthma attack of my life. There were moments in the panicky ride to the hospital when I was seriously considering dying. After they stabilised me with injections and pills and an oxygen mask, the doctors said I had to stay in the hospital for the next few days. For observation.

The final was the next day. Italy against Brazil. Without telling me, Churchill got the guys together and put them all into his beaten-up Beetle, and on the way, they stopped at the Pancake House in Kfar Vitkin to buy me peach-flavoured iced tea, because that’s my particular passion, and a couple of bottles of vodka because, in those days, we pretended to be into vodka, and ten minutes before the match started, they burst loudly into my hospital room (they bribed the guard with a bottle of Keglevich when he tried to stop them because visiting hours were over). I almost had another attack when I saw them. But then I calmed down and breathed deeply, from the diaphragm, and together we watched the tiny TV hanging above my bed and saw Brazil take the cup after 120 minutes. Plus penalty kicks.

And … so we came to ’98, Churchill summed up. Four World Cups altogether.

It’s a lucky thing we didn’t bet, Ofir said.

It’s a lucky thing there’s a World Cup, I said. That way, time doesn’t turn into one big, solid block, and we can stop every four years and see what’s changed.

Awesome, Churchill said. He was always the first one to understand when I came up with a remark like that. Sometimes the only one.

You know what’s lucky? It’s lucky that we have each other, Ofir said. You have n-o-o i-ide-ea how lucky we are, we all completed the familiar remark.

Bro, I don’t understand how you manage with all those ad men, you’re such a pussy, Churchill said, and Ofir laughed, OK, that’s what happens when you grow up with your mother, and Amichai said, I have an idea.

Wait, let’s just watch them hoist the cup, Churchill said, hoping that by the time they were finished hoisting the cup, he’d forget his idea.

But Amichai didn’t forget.

Did he know that the idea he was about to suggest would turn out to be a true prophecy that would disappoint us time after time over the next four years and, amazingly enough, would preserve its prophetic power?

Probably not. Concealed under his agreeable exterior was the stubborn determination that enabled him to listen to Telemed customers for hours, to put together jigsaw puzzles with thousands of pieces on his balcony and run ten kilometres every day. In all kinds of weather. I think it was that determination, more than anything else, that caused him to speak again after Didier Deschamps hoisted the Cup and the crowd waved.

What I was thinking, he said, is that each of us should write down on a piece of paper where he dreams of being in another four years. Personally, professionally. In every sense. And at the next World Cup, we’ll open the papers and see what happened in the meantime.

What a great idea! Ilana the Weeper yelled from the den.

We all turned to look. For all the years we’d known her, we’d never heard her get excited about anything. Her droopy face always had the same gloomy expression (even at their wedding. That’s why there’s a lot of Amichai on the video tape doing his standard dance move — tapping lightly on his stomach — and very little of her), and most of the times we were all at Amichai’s she would drift away after a few minutes and bury herself in a book. It was almost always a book on her field of research in psychology, something about the connection between depression and anxiety. We were already used to her non-present presence in the living room and her coolness towards Amichai, and suddenly — such enthusiasm?

She came hesitantly out of the den and walked over to us. I was just reading an article here, she said, by an American psychologist who claims that correctly defining an objective is half of achieving it. The next World Cup is in four years, right? That means you’ll all be thirty-two. Those are exactly the … plaster years.

Plaster years?

It’s a concept he uses, this psychologist. It means the years when personality hardens and takes shape, like plaster.

She waited a few seconds, expecting to observe the effect of her words, and then, disappointed, turned around and went back to the den.

Amichai gave us a look.

We couldn’t let him down. Not when she’d finally got excited about something. When he’d finally broken through in his efforts to make her happy.

OK, bring paper, I said.

But let’s be organised, Churchill said. Everyone writes three things. Three short sentences. Otherwise, there’ll be no end to it.

Amichai passed out thick psychology books so we’d have something to rest the paper on. And pens.

*

I had no problem with the first wish. It had formed itself in my mind the minute Amichai tossed out the idea.

1. At the next World Cup, I still want to be with Ya’ara, I wrote.

Then I got stuck. I tried to think of other things I wanted to wish for myself. I tried to expand the scope of my desires, but my thoughts kept going back to her, to her silky, caramel-coloured hair, her soft, slender shoulders, those green eyes of hers encircled by glasses, the moment she takes them off and I know we’re about to …

*

We’d met two months earlier in the cafeteria in the Naftali building on campus. At the beginning of the break, she came in with two guys, carrying a large tray with a small bottle of grapefruit juice on it. She walked with her back straight, a brisk walk that made her caramel-coloured ponytail bounce, as if she were in a hurry to go somewhere else, and they lurched heavily along behind her to the table. She had trouble opening the bottle of juice, but didn’t ask for help. They were talking about a play they’d seen the night before. That is, she was talking, very quickly, and they were looking at her. She said that they could’ve done a lot more with that play if the director had only had a little inspiration. For instance the scenery, she said and sipped her juice, why do the stage sets in this country always look the same? Can’t they think of something a little more original than a table, coat hooks and an armchair from the flea market? She kept talking — about the music and how the director could have got more from the actors if he’d done his job out of a real love for the profession. She stretched out the ‘o’ in ‘love’, pronouncing the word with all her heart, and as she said it, placed her open hand on her shirt. That is so-o-o true, the guy sitting across from her said without taking his eyes off her shirt. You’re absolutely right, Ya’ara, the other one said. Then both guys got up and went to their class, leaving her sitting alone at the table, and suddenly, for a fraction of a second, she looked small and lost. She took some papers out of her bag, pushed her glasses more firmly onto her nose with her little finger, crossed her legs and became engrossed in reading. Every time she turned a page, she touched a finger lightly to her tongue, and I watched her, thinking how incredible it was that such a gesture, a librarian’s gesture, could be sexy on the right girl. And I also thought that it would be interesting to know what that serious face looked like when she burst out laughing. And if she had dimples. And I thought that I’d never know, because I’d never have the guts to talk to her.

Hey, she said, looking up from her reading, do you have any idea what the English word ‘revelation’ means?

Every impairment has its moment of glory. That’s how it was with my colour blindness. Apart from the embarrassment it caused me all my life (children, do you see the bright-coloured anemones? Who said ‘no’?!), it saved me at the right moment from the corps assignment officer’s plan to make me a lookout.

And that’s how it was that instant, when Ya’ara asked me a question. Years of a spartan Anglo-Saxon education, a ridiculous quantity of tea with milk, chronic emotional constipation and a basic sense of alienation instilled in me because my parents never stopped feeling like outsiders here, in the Levant, and kept speaking Anglicised Hebrew to each other for thirty years after arriving in Haifa from Brighton –

All this, for one moment, worked to my benefit.

I explained to her authoritatively in Hebrew that revelation meant exposure or disclosure, and when I saw that she was satisfied with my answer and was about to go back to her reading, I quickly added that it could also mean ‘epiphany’. Depending on the context.

She read me the whole sentence. Then another sentence she had trouble with. So I gave her my phone number, in case she needed more help, and amazingly enough, she called that same night and we talked about other things, too, and the conversation flowed like wine, and then we went out, and kissed, and made love, and she put her head on my stomach when we were lying on the grass near the Music Academy and tapped on my thigh to a piano melody that was coming from one of the rehearsal rooms, and bought me a turquoise shirt because ‘enough of all that black’, and I kept looking for the catch the whole time, how could it be that a girl who disproves Churchill’s three-quarters theory — ‘There are no girls who are pretty and smart and horny and also available. One of these elements is always missing’ — how could it be that a girl like that would pick me, of all people? True, a few months before she met me, she split up with a guitarist who had made her miserable with five years of cheating on her and then begging her to take him back, but there were enough guys wandering around campus who were taller than me and would have been happy to be a corrective experience for her. And anyway, that whole story with the cheating guitarist didn’t make sense. Who would want to cheat on someone like her? Who would ever want anything but more and more of her?

*

Amichai pushed me to finish. Everyone but me had already given back the pens.

I looked at the first sentence I’d written and added impulsively:

2. At the next World Cup, I want to be married to Ya’ara.

3. At the next World Cup, I want to have a child with Ya’ara. Preferably a girl.

Now you give me the slips of paper, Amichai said. And I keep them closed in a box till the next World Cup.

Why you? Ofir objected.

Because I’m the most stable guy here.

What does that mean? Ofir said, getting angry.

He’s right, Churchill said, trying to soften it. He has a wife, a flat, twins. We’ll probably go through ten flats before the next World Cup, and slips of paper like these are just the kind of thing that gets lost in packing.

OK, Ofir said. But let’s read them out loud first.

Are you kidding?! Amichai shouted. That kills the whole surprise.

Fuck the surprise, Ofir said angrily. I want to know what you all wrote. Otherwise, I won’t give you mine.

Delayed gratification isn’t exactly your thing, is it? Amichai said sarcastically, then added casually, well, this is what happens when a kid is raised by his mother.

You know the story about the man who delayed gratification? Ofir shot back. There’s this guy who delays gratification. Delays, delays, delays — then he dies.

I have an idea, Churchill interrupted before Ofir and Amichai got carried away into one of their verbal clashes — sudden, meaningless rows that brought out a nastiness it was hard to believe they were capable of. How about if everyone reads only one of the three things he wrote? Churchill said. That way we can keep the element of surprise and we’ll still have the teasing. That is what you advertising people call it, yeah?

Teaser, Ofir corrected, and a shadow crossed his eyes, the way it did every time someone mentioned his work.

OK, I’ll go first, Amichai said, unfolding his slip of paper.

By the next World Cup, I’ll have opened an alternative therapy clinic.

A-a-men, Churchill prayed, putting into words what all of us felt. If it came true, we hoped, perhaps Amichai would stop talking about it so much.

Ofir unfolded his slip of paper.

By the next World Cup, I will have kissed the advertising world goodbye and published a book of short stories.

Short stories? I said, surprised. Didn’t you say you’d make a movie about us?

Yes, Ofir said, but the whole movie was based on the idea that one of us … dies in the army. And you promised that if no one did, then …

If it’s still an option, I’m ready to die any time, I offered (and as I did, a too-pleasant shiver ran through me, as it always did when I thought about the possibility).

Don’t worry, Ofir said. It’s not necessary. Lately, I’m more into the short story thing. My head is full of ideas, but when I get home from the office at eleven at night, I don’t even have the energy to turn on the computer.

So yallah, I urged him, get a move on. You have time till the next World Cup. In any case, you already have an English translator.

Thanks, man, he said and patted me on the shoulder, his eyes glistening. You have no idea how lucky …

Churchill quickly unfolded his slip of paper before Ofir could start weeping.

By the next World Cup, he said in a very serious tone, I plan to have slept with at least 208 girls.

Exactly 208? Amichai said with a laugh. Why not 222? Or a round 300?

Do the numbers, Churchill explained. Four years, 52 weeks a year. One girl a week — a total of 208. Just kidding. Do you really think I’d waste a wish on something that’s going to happen anyway?

So what, then, you were just playing us? Amichai asked, his voice dropping. For a person doomed to one Ilana the Weeper, the thought of a wish that included 208 different women must have lit up his imagination.

Obviously, Churchill said with a laugh and read from his list:

By the next World Cup, I want to have an important case. In an important area. I want to be involved in something that will lead to social change.

Ofir and Amichai nodded in admiration and I thought to myself that it was a bit embarrassing to read one of my wishes out loud after what Churchill had just read.

OK, your turn now, Amichai said to me. I looked at the slip of paper and took comfort in the fact that at least I didn’t have to read all three.

At the next World Cup, I still want to be with Ya’ara, I read in a fading voice.

And, as expected, everyone attacked me.

Yallah, yallah, this Ya’ara doesn’t even exist, Ofir said.

Till we see her, that wish isn’t valid, Churchill added a legal opinion.

I think she’s probably ugly, I think he’s keeping her under wraps because she’s ugly, Ofir said and looked at me to see if I was annoyed.

Cross-eyed blind, Amichai said.

With an arse the size of a helicopter pad.

Tits down to her knees.

Football-player shoulders.

She’s probably a man who’s had a sex change. Before that, they called her Ya’ar.

Oka-a-a-y, I said, I give up. You’re all invited over to mine on Tuesday to meet her.

But on that Monday, I put off the meeting for a week with the excuse that I was ill, and then I cancelled the postponed meeting too, saying that we had to be at her parents’ house in Rehovot for dinner, and finally, the one who put an end to all those postponements was Ya’ara herself, who told me, one-third as a joke and two-thirds seriously, I’m starting to think you’re ashamed of me. Don’t be silly, I said. Then why don’t you introduce me to your friends? she asked. No reason, I replied, it just hasn’t happened yet. And she said, I’m dying to meet them. You talk about them so much. And I said, I never noticed. You mention them in practically every sentence, she said. And your living room is full of pictures of them. Out-of-focus pictures, but still. And every five minutes, one of them calls you, and then you get into long, deep conversations with them. Not the kind of practical conversations men have, but real conversations. It just seems to me that you all have a very strong connection, don’t you think?

I don’t know, I said. Sometimes I think we do. That it’s for our whole lives. Like a year ago, we went back to our school for the Memorial Day ceremony and I noticed that all the other groups of friends from our year had broken up, and we were the only ones standing there together, close, during the siren. And the truth is that I have no idea why. Whether it’s inertia or whether even now, after eight years in Tel Aviv, we still only feel like we belong when we’re together. But there are other times when I don’t understand what we’re doing together, like there’s no reason for it. But maybe that’s how it is, and that endless dance of getting close and growing apart is just the basic movement among friends. What do you think?

A fa-a-a-scinating analysis, Ya’ara said, but don’t change the subject. Next Tuesday we’re cooking them dinner, she said firmly, and took off her glasses. And I said OK because it’s hard to say no to green eyes and because I couldn’t find a good reason to object, except for the vague feeling I had that it would end in tears, a feeling I attributed to my chronic pessimism.

But the dinner was actually a great success. They devoured the stuffed vegetables we made, and Ya’ara easily found a common language with each of the guys. She laughed with Ofir about the whole world of advertising (it turns out that she once worked as an assistant producer on a laundry detergent ad). She argued with Churchill about the leniency the prosecutor’s office showed towards public figures. She told Amichai about the acupuncture treatment that cured her — to the amazement of her conventional doctors — of mononucleosis. And she kept touching me the whole time, rubbed the back of my neck, put her hand on mine, her head on my shoulder, and twice she even kissed me lightly on the neck, as if she suddenly sensed what I had been trying to hide from her through all the months we’d been together: that I was afraid of losing her. That I’d never had anything like us before.

So? I asked when they’d gone. We could still hear their footsteps on the landing.

They’re terrific, your friends, Ya’ara said and hugged me.

Explain, I said, and went to wash the dishes. Two or three stuffed vegetable corpses were still stuck to the plates.

That Ofir is so sensitive, I heard her voice behind me. How many years has he been in advertising? Six? It’s not easy to stay who you are in that cynical world. And Amichai, that guy has so much patience. I think he really could be a great alternative therapist. And all of them, she said and hugged me from behind, seem to love you very much. So we all have at least one thing in common.

And Churchill? I asked, and I could feel her loosen her grip, then drop her hands.

Seems like a smart guy, she said in a hesitant voice.

But …? I turned around to face her. My hands were still wet with dishwater.

No buts, she said, moving away a little.

It had the sound of a but, I insisted.

Forget it, it’s not fair to judge after one meeting.

I knew she was right. And that it was much easier to label a person than to stay open to the possibility that there’s more than one side to him. But I couldn’t help it.

Come on, say it, I pressed. I’ve known him for so many years that I can’t tell any more what kind of first impression he makes.

The truth is that there’s something conceited about him. As if he’s looking down at the three of you. From the VIP box. I don’t like that. And I don’t like the way he talks about women either. Did you notice that whenever he talked about male politicians, he called them ‘Minister’ or ‘Mayor’, and when he talked about women politicians, it was ‘the airhead ‘ and ‘the bottle blonde’?

Could be, I said coldly. And even though I’d asked for it, I felt the anger rise up in me at how insufferably easy it was for her to criticise my friend. You should know that he’s an amazing person, I shot the words at her. When he graduated from law school, he had offers from private firms that would have paid him a lot of money, but he went to the prosecutor’s office because he thought it was more important, and a few weeks ago, at the World Cup final, we each wrote down on a slip of paper where we dream of being at the next World Cup, in four years. We all wrote totally egotistical things, and he was the only one who wanted to do something significant that would affect Israeli society, so maybe … maybe you should wait a little before you decide what he’s like.

What did you write? Ya’ara asked. Her eyes were seductive above her glasses. This was the first time since we got together that I’d let myself be angry with her, and strangely enough, she seemed to like it.

It’s a secret, I said, trying to keep a certain meanness in my tone. If you want to know, you’ll have to stay with me till the next World Cup. That’s when we read the slips of paper.

No problem, Ya’ara said, pressing up against me and putting her hands into the back pockets of my jeans — you can’t scare a romantic girl with love.

Two weeks later, she was with him.

There are a few contradictory versions of how that happened.

Churchill claims that she bumped into him on the street, during his lunch break, and told him she thought they’d had a communications failure during dinner, and if he was up for it, she’d like to buy him a cup of coffee so they could start again. He agreed, because he felt it was import ant to her. So they sat in a café and talked and didn’t notice the time passing. And in the end, when they stood up to go, she said that there were a lot of things they’d talked about that were left open and perhaps they should meet again the next day to close them.

Ya’ara claims that he was the one who called her, three days after the dinner, and said that ever since he met her, he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her and couldn’t fall asleep at night. She told him she didn’t know what to say, and he said he wanted to see her. She said, what are you talking about, they couldn’t do something like that behind my back. But he pleaded with her and said that a lot of criminals, rapists and murderers, were walking out of court free men because he hadn’t been able to function since he met her. She laughed and agreed to see him, just for a few minutes, just for coffee, just because of the rapists. After coffee, when they got up to go, he said that there were a lot of things they’d talked about that were still left open, and perhaps they should meet again the next day to close them.

I imagine that she was probably telling the truth.

I’d like to believe that he was telling the truth.

Either way, the outcome was the same: they continued to see each other secretly for a week, and in the end, she came to my flat and said she was confused. And needed time to think. And she kept her graceful neck bent the whole time she was speaking. And touched me a lot. But she didn’t take off her glasses even once.

He called that evening and was, as usual, clear and focused. Told me what happened. Said he was sorry. Said he knew that his apologies weren’t worth a damn. Said he’d understand if I wanted to stay away from him for a while. And that he hoped it wouldn’t be for long, because I’m his best friend. And that just made what he did even more despicable (he used the word despicable — that’s how clear and articulate he was).

I slammed the phone down on him, of course. But even that didn’t manage to make me shake with rage. Even that couldn’t change the fact that what I was feeling was mainly relief.

My life had been sailing smoothly along (some might say it was scraping the bottom of an empty pool) before Ya’ara shook it up. I was making a living from the translations I was doing for liberal arts students. The money paid for my everyday expenses, nothing else, but it had never been my ambition to save, not to mention get rich. To tell the truth, I had no ambitions at all. At twenty-eight, I had no idea what I wanted to be at thirty. Even the smallest olive tree seedling knows what it’s meant to be and grows naturally, without hesitation, into an olive tree. But I had no idea in which direction to grow. And in the meantime, moving at the pace of a traffic jam on the Ayalon Freeway, I wrote my philosophy dissertation entitled ‘Metamorphoses: Great Minds who Changed their Minds’, and every summer I bought all the university catalogues so I could pick up a new, more practical field of study from them.

In a moment of weakness, I went to one of those institutes that give advice about choosing a profession. The counsellor, with baby cheeks and lots of good will, looked at my tests and said that, based on the results, all possibilities were open, I could choose anything I wanted. I said that was just the problem. That I don’t want. Then she said: that’s why I’m here, to help you clarify what you want. And I said, you don’t understand, I don’t want anything. I’m devoid of motivation. I’m a horse standing in his stall who would rather watch the other horses compete than gallop himself.

She survived in my presence for another two meetings, then recommended warmly that I try therapy. I gave her a small nod, but I didn’t go to a therapist. What for? After all, going into therapy — or Alcoholics Anonymous or a self-awareness workshop in the desert — means you first have to believe that people are capable of change. Besides, I already knew what the therapist would say: the restraint that characterises my family relationships has become transformed in me into an overall indifference. The fact that I wasn’t hugged enough when I was a child restrained my desire to act. (Funny, the tutor in the creative writing workshop I’m doing now talks about restraint as ‘one of the greatest powers a writer has’. He says the hotter the content of a story, the colder the narrator should be. But, he claims, you also have to be careful not to fall in love with restraint. And you have to know when to put cracks in it.)

My restraint, in any case, was deeply cracked the minute I met Ya’ara. During the months we were together, my horse burst out of the stall with me on its back, my legs dangling on either side of the saddle. I raced with her to the school she’d gone to and she showed me the small yard — she remembered it as being larger — where the girls in her class decided to ostracise to her; I raced with her to plays she went to see mainly so she could be disappointed and explain to me later, her cheeks red with passion, how she would have done it differently, more intensely; I raced with her to a party in Jerusalem that went on all night, and when she danced, her hair whipped my face, and it hurt and felt good, felt good and hurt; I raced with her to my parents’ house in Haifa and watched her win them over in five minutes; I raced with her to wherever she took me, throwing off my calculated caution, and that way, feeling light, I could keep going to distant regions in my soul and hers. Every night, in bed, she told me things: how the affront she’d felt when her girlfriends decided to ostracise her in her first year in high school still stung, making her keep a safe distance from women, and how that guitarist threatened to hurt himself if she left him, and three weeks later, he left her, and for the first time in my life, I didn’t make do with listening and told her that before her, there’d been nothing, and I’d already reconciled myself to a life without love, except the love I had with imaginary women I created for myself every night, and then during the day, I scoured the streets, the shops, the campus lawns for girls who looked like them. With the appropriate self-mockery, I told her about my collection of imaginary women, trying to create the impression that they were all in the past, while at the same time, the suspicion was growing in me that she herself was imaginary, and when we’d finished racing around together, there would be a very non-imaginary fall. I even felt a slight yearning for that fall. For those first seconds after you fall, when everything is suddenly silent. And when it finally came –

I didn’t bang my head against the wall. I didn’t empty a bottle of sleeping pills. I didn’t stroll around on the window ledge. I took on more and more translation work so I wouldn’t have time to think, and I told Amichai not to ask me over to watch the football for a while because I wouldn’t. But that’s not fair, he protested, it’s not fair that Churchill did what he did and you’re the one who’s out in the cold. I’m not out in the cold, I choose not to be with all of you, I said, almost yelling at him, as if raising my voice would make my decision logical, and when Ilana the Weeper called on the pretext of needing help with translating some article, confessing a second later that she actually wanted to tell me that they all missed me a lot, and she didn’t understand why I was denying myself their support when I needed it most — I told her that I just couldn’t. And she said I could see just her, if I wanted, and her voice was gentle and empathetic, very different from the sharp voice she used with Amichai when we were around, but I still said, thanks, Ilana, really, thank you, but no.

*

To tell the truth, it wasn’t easy. Without my Haifa friends, Tel Aviv went back to being the ugly, inhospitable city it had been when I moved there, half-heartedly, after the army, only because of the impulsive promise I made to Churchill on the last Independence Day before we were drafted.

We were sitting in the playing field stands and Churchill announced that this time we were going to Tel Aviv, and Ofir said he’d read in the papers that there was a party in Malkei Israel Square, and Amichai said it was probably expensive because everything in Tel Aviv is expensive, and Ofir said, you dimwit, it’s in Malkei Israel Square, how can they take money in an open place, and Amichai said, you’re the dimwit, what’s the problem with fencing it off, and Churchill said, enough, if it costs money, we’ll pay, it’s our last Independence Day before the army, and when he finished the sentence, they all looked at me because I was the only one who had not only a driving licence, but also his parents’ car, and I said yes, but on one condition, that we leave early because I don’t like driving when I’m tired, and Churchill patted me on the shoulder and said, whatever you say, Freed, but when I came to pick him up, he was far from being ready, and Ofir, who was always next on the route to be picked up, had fallen asleep watching a Fellini film and we had to pull him off the couch by his curly hair and make him two cups of instant coffee, and Amichai decided he’d stay at home to help his brother study for an exam and wouldn’t change his mind until Churchill explained that not going out on Independence Day is like thumbing your nose at your country, but even after he gave in, we had to wait for him to have a shower and find an outfit he thought would cover the blotch on the bottom of his neck that had first appeared after his father was killed by a road bomb in Lebanon. From some angles, that blotch looked like a map of Israel, which turned Amichai, against his will, into an attraction in civics class and left him with a permanent complex about his appearance. That night, he tried three different shirts and three pairs of matching trousers till he found a combination he was happy with, and that’s why we didn’t start driving south until one in the morning. Churchill said we had nothing to worry about, things in Tel Aviv started late anyway, and when we reached the Glilot junction and got stuck in a horrible traffic jam, he said, everyone’s probably going to that party in the Square, I think it’s going to be the party of our lives, but the traffic didn’t move, and the radio said there’d been an accident on Namir Road and ‘traffic in the area was heavy’, and Ofir said, isn’t this Namir Road? And Amichai said, what are you talking about, this is Haifa Road and Ofir said, you cretin, Namir Road and Haifa Road are the same thing, and Amichai said, you’re the cretin, why would they give the same road two different names? And Churchill leaned over to me and whispered under their voices, take a right here, and when I did, he signalled me to park on the pavement and said, yallah, let’s walk, how far can it be, got out of the car, slammed the door hard and started walking towards the distant lights of the big, unfamiliar city, and we all hurried after him without knowing exactly where we were going.

We walked through a neighbourhood of tall buildings with marble lobbies and underground parking, and through neighbourhoods of low buildings without marble lobbies or underground parking, and we barely saw another human being the whole way, just a few scared girls wearing miniskirts who Churchill called babes, it’s unbelievable how many babes there are in this city, and Ofir said, like someone in the know, you ain’t seen nuthin’ yet, Bro, when we get to the Square you’ll have to put on your shades so your eyes don’t get burned, but when we reached the Square, sweaty and wrinkled after an hour and a half of walking, it was totally empty, there was no one there except a lone demonstrator holding a ‘Stop the Occupation’ sign. That was before the army, and we didn’t even know what or where the occupation was, so we just asked the demonstrator if there’d been a party there, and he said no, there hadn’t been any party because you need a reason to party. No party? How can that be? Ofir asked us, ignoring the demonstrator, I swear that I read in the papers that … Maybe you read it in ‘Teen Dreams’, Amichai jeered, and Ofir defended himself, no, I swear, it was in the weekend Yediot Aharonot, in the Seven Days section, and Amichai said, only you, Ofir, only you, Seven Days has interviews with retired generals and football players, parties are listed in the Seven Nights section, and I looked at my watch, thought about the long drive home waiting for me and said, it’s four in the morning already, maybe we should start back? But Churchill shot a withering look at me and said, are you crazy? Go back? It’s Independence Day! We have to find a party! We have to!

Ah … guys … I’m dying of thirst … Amichai started mumbling, then added, I have an idea! Can’t we stop somewhere and buy something to drink? But Churchill said no and started walking again, and we followed him because we always followed him, not only because we were in awe of him, but also because of his enormous lust for life that had something contagious and beautiful and joy-inspiring about it, and really, after a short walk on Frishman Street — which Amichai insisted was named after the Hapoel Tel Aviv basketball player, Amos Frishman, and Ofir said that didn’t make sense, because Amos Frishman was alive and they don’t name streets after living people — we heard dance music coming from a flat and Churchill said, come on, we’re going up there, and Amichai said, what do you mean? We don’t know anyone there, that’s just the point, Churchill explained, we don’t know anyone in this city, so we can be whoever we feel like being, and Ofir said that if they ask, we’ll say we’re friends of Daniel, because Daniel is both a guy’s name and a girl’s name, and it’s an international name too, and I looked at my watch again and remembered the straight, monotonous section of the road after Hadera where you could easily fall asleep while driving, and I thought there was something embarrassing, not to mention humiliating, about crashing a party, but still, I trailed up the steps behind them to the third floor, holding my nose so the stench of urine coming from the walls and the steps and the windows wouldn’t make me vomit, and I thought, I wonder what a party in this city is like, it’s probably different, the people here must dance differently, but after Churchill pressed the buzzer and we heard a mechanical bird cheep and the front door opened, it turned out that there was no big party going on behind it, there was just one girl with wild hair and a wild neckline who gave us a look that was both dead and hungry for love, a look I know very well today, after ten years in this city, but then, it still amazed me with the inner contradiction it reflected.

Did you want something? she asked, pulling back her hair into a wobbly ponytail. Her tone was surprisingly matter-of-fact, as if she were used to people ringing her bell at four-thirty in the morning. As if she were a waitress in a café and we were her customers. We’re friends of Daniel … Ofir began, but Churchill interrupted him and said, the truth is that we heard music on the street and just … thought there was a party going on here. A party? the girl said, giving Churchill a head-to-toe look that lingered a bit on his broad chest. There actually is a party going on here, she went on, but it’s a … private party. Very private, Churchill said and smiled at her, pointing to the empty space behind her. Yes, she smiled back at him, very private is a good way to put it. And … is there any way we can join this ‘very private’ party? Churchill asked as he leaned against her doorframe. She let down her hair, then pulled it back into a ponytail again and said, I don’t know. I don’t really know any of you. Ah, that’s not a problem, Churchill said. I’m Yoav. And these are my friends from the pilots training course, Ofir, Amichai and Yuval. Pilots training course? the girl said, surprised but not very enthusiastic, as if she’d already heard every possible lie. Yes, Churchill said, we have a forty-eight-hour pass, and we’ve been looking all night for a place to dance, but without any luck. Till we came here. To you.

I have no idea how you did it, Yoav, but you’ve managed to get my sympathy, the girl said and moved back a little so we could walk in. As I passed her, my elbow rubbed lightly against her waist and I got a whiff of her perfume, which was very different from the ones used by the Haifa girls we went out with, and I had the urge to turn around and bury my head between her breasts for a few seconds and inhale that bitter smell, but two songs later, she was pulling Churchill into the bedroom, and the three of us were left behind, in the living room. We kept on trying to convince ourselves we were dancing, facing each other, but then we realised how ridiculous that was, so we turned the music down and sat on the black leather sofa in the middle of the living room, and Amichai shot a quick glance at the bedroom door and said, that’s something else, isn’t it? And Ofir said, right out of the movies, and I said, maybe you really should put it in your film, Ofir, because years ago, before he wrote down his World Cup wish to write a book, Ofir had said that after the army, he wanted to make a film about the four of us, something like Late Summer Blues, which had been such a big hit, and every once in a while he’d bring a video camera when we went to the beach and tape us playing volleyball, or puffing out our chests on the waves, and he’d say he was ‘gathering material’, and we were all sure that he really would make a film in the end because he was obviously bursting with talent and there wasn’t a single Purim play at school or in the Scouts he didn’t write, and in our junior year, he won second place in the national screenplay writing contest, when the first place winner was a kid from the Talma Yellin performing arts high school, whose surname was suspiciously the same as one of the judges’.

It’s not a bad idea to put a scene like this into the film, Freed, he said, patting me on the shoulder. Not bad at all. Even though … none of this will be worth a damn if one of us doesn’t die in the army. Someone has to die in the army, he sighed, otherwise I don’t have a film. But why? Amichai said angrily, perhaps because his father really did die in the army, and Ofir again raised his argument that every successful movie or book in Israel since the state came into being has a dead soldier in it, and the part about the dead soldier is always the most moving part of the movie or book. Zvilich in Late Summer Blues? Ori in He Walked in the Fields? Yehoram Gaon in Operation Thunderbolt? Ofir raised a finger for each example, then kept piling on details of cases that clearly proved his argument, till Amichai fell asleep, and he wasn’t satisfied till I promised him that if none of us died spontaneously in the army, I was ready to take on the job. His head dropped onto the wide shoulders of his eternal adversary and I was left alone in that girl’s living room. I didn’t know her name, but I could already tell you what kind of sounds she made when she had an orgasm. Or faked it.

I got up and walked around her flat, which didn’t look like any I’d ever seen, and not like any I’d ever dreamed of either. It had huge paintings on the walls, all in intensely bright colours. Not posters of paintings you buy for fifty shekels, but original works. I had the feeling she painted them herself, even though I had no evidence of that. There were some very ugly papier mâché sculptures on her bookshelves and I guessed she made them, too. I didn’t see one familiar book, except for The Little Prince, and that made me feel like a philistine. There were lots of art books and poetry books, and very few novels. I took a small book from the poetry section. It was titled Poems of Love and Sex by David Avidan, and I remembered our literature teacher mentioning his name once or twice, but we never studied any of his poems. I read the first one standing up, and then I couldn’t sit down. ‘A woman so beautiful and a man so ugly/And she’s married to him. A crime’ — were the first lines to hit me. ‘Two Sex Toys’ was the name of the poem on the next page. I didn’t know if I liked these poems, but I couldn’t stop rolling the new phrases around on my tongue: ‘Lolita Splendita’, ‘A reliable little sex animal’, ‘A strong moment of weakness’, ‘We rose, ready to go’. I even copied a few of them down on a piece of paper I found in the kitchen so I could show them to Churchill later, on the drive home, and hear what he thought of them.

He thought it was ‘a scandal that they don’t teach that’ and ‘literature teachers would rather teach dead poets because they have lesson plans on them all prepared’. And he also said that it would be just like Atalya — that, it turns out, was the name of the girl from Tel Aviv — to have a book like that in her house. Why? I asked, because I knew from the tone of his voice that he wanted me to ask, and he opened the car window, leaned his elbow out with that post-coital euphoria and said that Atalya had been having an affair with a married man for a few years, and a couple of hours before we arrived, he told her he couldn’t sneak out to see her that night even though he’d promised he would, and she was so upset that she had to dance out all her anger, otherwise she would have exploded, or even worse, jumped out of the window, and that’s when we knocked on the door looking so pure and innocent in our jeans and T-shirts that she just had to touch the smooth innocence she was losing as her affair with this man was becoming tangled in a web of lies, but she couldn’t end it, she couldn’t leave him because if she did, she’d be alone, completely alone.

Churchill went on describing in minute detail everything they said and everything that happened in the bedroom, and I didn’t stop him because it excited me and helped me get through the section of the road after Hadera without falling asleep, and when we started up Freud Road and the sun was painting the Carmel Mountains in sleepy gold, he said, look, Freed, there’s nobody on the road but us, this city is dead. Dead. We have to get out of here the minute after we’re discharged. If we stay, in a few years, we’ll get homogenia.

Homogenia?

We’ll be like everyone else, Churchill said. We’ll go to work, come home from work. Grow a pot belly and a mortgage. We can’t let that happen. We can’t!

OK, Churchill, I said. O-o-OK. But that wasn’t enough for him, and after we dropped off Ofir and Amichai, he made me swear that after the army, I’d move to Tel Aviv with him because without me, ‘I’ll never have the guts to do it’.

I was surprised that the great Churchill needed me so much and I felt a little weird swearing to do something that would happen in another four years. Not only that, but just two hours earlier, I’d promised Ofir to die in the army for his movie, but Churchill said he’d get out of the car if I didn’t promise, and I was tired, very tired from that whole Independence Day, so I swore to him, and with us, subjects of the British Empire, teatime is teatime and giving your word obligates you, so three months after we got out of the army, I went to his apartment to go through the ‘Flatmates Wanted’ listings he’d taken from the Student Union for me, and in the years that have gone by since then, I’ve never felt at home in a single one of the six Tel Aviv flats I lived in, but on the other hand, with time, I stopped feeling like a temporary visitor and even started to have an affection for certain places where the four of us spent a lot of time together — like the far bank of the Yarkon, or the boisterous square in front of the Cinematheque, or the American Colony on the way to Jaffa — but even those modest affections faded, faded very much, when that business with Ya’ara happened.

Without my Haifa friends, the streets of the big city seemed like dead-ends to me again. The shoreline looked like a hotel lobby again. And the people walking on the promenade looked hopelessly different from me again. Their joy of life seemed superficial to me. Materialistic. Pathetic. I ridiculed them and envied them at the same time. I felt purer than they were. Deeper. And at the same time, I felt that they had a kind of wonderful lightness I would never have, only because in my heart, I was still a Haifa boy.

I was anxious to know whether any of my Haifa friends missed me at the annual spring barbecue. Or at the screening of Late Summer Blues every Memorial Day. I found out how boring and sad it was to watch football alone, especially Israeli football. I found out how hard it was to make new friends at our age. I tried to get chummy with a few of my clients, and I even went out with some of them to an Irish pub near the beach. But it didn’t work. Too many things had to be explained because they didn’t understand immediately what I meant. It all smacked of benefits to be gained. And overcrowded schedules (apparently it’s no accident that most friendships are born in high school or on trips. You need a generous stretch of time to get close).

Mostly, all those Irish outings made me miss my old friends.

And Churchill more than any of them.

After getting our BAs, we’d taken off, just the two of us, on a long trip to South America. Ofir had just started working in an ad agency and was afraid they’d fire him if he took a too-long holiday, and Ilana the Weeper was already pregnant with the twins, so Amichai dropped out too, and it was just the two of us, Churchill and me. Me and Churchill. Nights. Days. In piss-smelling rooms. In Indian markets bustling with colour. In central bus stations that had no information desks. In long waits that went on for hours. In long rides that went on for days.

On a trip like that, you’re exposed to the true nature of the person you’re travelling with, and he’s exposed to yours. At home, you can somehow hide it, smooth it out, play nice. But on a trip like that, everything comes out. Floats to the top. And is laid open.

I never imagined, for example, how much Churchill was addicted to attention. I always thought there was something about him that projected: I have my own way and I make it on my own. It wasn’t till that trip that I realised, for the first time, that it all depended on feedback. If we didn’t meet any new people for a few days, he withered. His shoulders drooped. Even his speech became hesitant.

He never imagined what a neatness freak I was. I tried desperately to turn every miserable little room we rented into a home. And when he threw his clothes on the floor, I told him to pick them up as if I were his mother, and that provoked him so much that at some point in the trip, we decided that, for the good of our friendship, we should sleep in separate rooms even though it cost more. And it also drove him crazy that I couldn’t communicate until I had my morning tea-with-milk. And his constant complaints against the locals drove me up the wall. Look at all the natural resources they have, he’d say, pointing out of the bus window at cascading waterfalls, it’s incredible that they don’t do a thing with them. Let me enjoy the scenery, I’d think, and move slightly away from him, but he wouldn’t let it go: of course they’re poor, they’re lazy, like they can’t help themselves. They have no desire to change their situation.

For the first few weeks, I argued with him (perhaps it’s a different way of life? Perhaps they choose to be like that?) and then I just kept quiet. I listened to him complain (look at this terrible road. Why is it such a big deal to get it fixed? This is not a way of life, it’s just plain laziness) and prayed he’d shut up. Or bother someone else on the bus.

But despite everything, we didn’t separate for more than a day on that whole trip. And despite everything, we were closer when we came home. Perhaps because, as Aristotle claims, ‘Men cannot know each other until they have eaten salt together’, and perhaps because the trip gave each of us at least one chance to learn that he really could depend on the other.

When Churchill came back, he told everyone how I saved his life when he drank the San Pedro. I thought he was exaggerating a little, all I did was go to see how he was eight hours after he’d left the ranch with a bag full of green cactus juice the Indians used when they wanted to talk to the gods. Any friend would’ve done that. Before he left our shack, he said he was going to drink that juice, but I had nothing to worry about because there was no way it would have any effect on him. I believed him. After all, he was Churchill. And when I went out to look for him, I was sure I’d find him swimming naked with two Israeli girls in one of the natural water pools scattered around the ranch.

He really was naked when I found him. But alone. Covered in his own vomit and in the throes of a very serious attack of paranoia. It seemed that the gods had spoken to him and told him to undress. It seemed that he thought the hill we were standing on was full of tigers that had horses’ heads. It seemed that he thought everything he said was coming out enormously loud and could be heard all around the globe. And he was afraid his parents would hear it back home. In fact, his parents had come to visit him here, now, after he vomited. And he finally told his father what he thought of him and his women. But now he was scared. No, not of his father. Of the Indians’ gods. They were angry with him and he couldn’t understand why. And he was thirsty, as thirsty as if he’d walked through the desert for forty years, but he couldn’t put a drop of water in his mouth, so maybe I could drink for him, instead of him, he meant.

I opened my bottle of water and shoved it in his mouth. Then I helped him get dressed and dragged him back towards the ranch. I kept a close watch on him, waiting for the effects of the drug to start fading, meanwhile making sure that he drank and ate enough. At night, after I thought he’d recovered, he suddenly had a horrible attack of anxiety that if he fell asleep, he wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between reality and dreams when he woke up. I promised him I’d be his sign of reality, that every time he wasn’t sure, he could call me. He called me a dozen times that night. And every time, I got up, went over to his bed and stroked his head till he fell asleep.

I want you to know, amigo, that I’ll remember you my whole life, he told me two days later, inside a van that was taking us back to the city. We were leaning on our rucksacks and a pleasant sun was dancing on our naked chests.

It’s nothing, I said.

It definitely isn’t nothing, he insisted. If you hadn’t come looking for me, I would’ve dehydrated. At best. At worst, bandidos would have passed through, shaved off my pauchos and for dessert, shot me through the heart, I mean corazonos.

Don’t exaggerate, I said.

I’m not, he insisted.

Anyway, I owed you for Cusco, I said.

OK, now that really was nothing, he said.

*

It wasn’t nothing. I didn’t think so and neither did the local doctor (who was also the local pharmacist and also the local travel agent and also the only person in town who spoke English). He examined me in a storeroom full of empty cardboard boxes, behind the pharmacy, after my temperature went up to 39.4 centigrade, and I had chills all through my body. You have ‘gringo fever’, he said, and explained that it was a fever that mostly tourists got. There is no medicine for it, and it could last from a week to a month. The only treatment is rest, lying in bed and waiting patiently for it to pass. And you, Big Guy, he said to Churchill, stay close to your friend. Make sure he drinks and check his temperature every few hours to see that it doesn’t go past forty. If that happens, let me know right away because that means the disease has entered its second stage.

Churchill followed the doctor’s orders meticulously.

At the end of the first week, he met a girl in Posada named Keren, who’d been at university with him. She’d had a boyfriend then, but not now. They started having breakfast together and went out at night after I was asleep.

Churchill spoke passionately to her. To be accurate, I’d never heard him talk to a girl like that. That Keren has something, he said. She has a secret.

A few days later, she suddenly vanished from his stories. I asked about her, and he said she’d gone. Continuing her trip. So why didn’t you go with her? I asked.

I asked her to wait a little, till you got well, and then we’d go. She said that ‘Whatever is supposed to happen will happen’, and that ‘If we’re meant to meet, we’ll meet’.

Too bad you didn’t go with her, I said. She had a secret.

That’s crap, Churchill said angrily, she pretended she had a secret to drive me crazy.

I didn’t say anything. The way Churchill spat out that ‘crap’ was proof that giving up Keren wasn’t easy for him at all.

My thermometer beeped and he took it out of my mouth. We’re getting better, he said. Thirty-eight point six. And after a short break, he added, as if to himself: girls come and go. Friends stay.

*

I reminded him of that remark when he called to confess about Ya’ara.

He was silent. Didn’t deny that he’d said it. Didn’t claim that I was quoting him out of context.

I kept on reminding him of that remark even in the internal dialogues I had with him later on. What happened? I’d ask him. What changed in the three years that passed since then? Did your priorities change or did you just turn into a shitty person?

He never answered me. That’s how it is with internal dialogues, you can sling as much mud as you want and there’s no one to answer back. And so, in my mind, I wished he would lose all his cases from now on, not just lose, but lose for the most humiliating reasons. Because he didn’t prepare witnesses properly. Because he misplaced the plastic bag with one of the main pieces of evidence inside. Or because the defence attorney surprised him with a legal precedent that every lowly clerk should know, and he’d have to explain that to the district attorney. And lower his eyes as he spoke.

I wished him all that — and I missed him. His inner fire that had something inspiring about it. The way he focused totally on every conversation with a friend, no matter how busy he was. Or troubled. Or tired. That quick, smiling glance he’d give me when I spoke a private thought out loud, signalling to me that he knew exactly what I was talking about: that he’d seen the movie, read the book or, like me, he’d picked up on the absurdity of a situation everyone mistakenly thought was serious.

It had been with that kind of look that our friendship came into being. It was the week of our junior year when we went out for pre-army training. All the junior classes were moved to an army camp in the south, and for five days, we played soldier. They dressed us in uniforms. Split us up into companies. Ran us ragged. Hassled our arses. And we gave ourselves up to the new order. That is, most of us did. Only a few stood at the window wondering why the hell we had to cross that bridge before we got to it. That is, if we were doomed to be shackled, we’d be shackled. But why start it in high school?

Hey, you think they’ll let us out for the weekend? I asked during one of the short canteen breaks they gave us, and no one thought it was funny. Except Churchill. I think it’s a definite — perhaps! he said, imitating the decisive voice of our buzz-cut unit commander, smiled at me with his eyes and when the break was over, asked me, only me, if I’d like to skip the next parade with him. When that made me hesitate (it’s one thing to laugh at the accepted routine, and another to deviate from it), he said he’d checked it out and they had no legal authority over us. In fact, he promised, they can’t do a thing to us if we don’t show up for parade. Not a thing.

I was persuaded and stayed in the canteen with him. And it had the taste of rebellion. We ate chocolate bars and talked about how Rona Raviv looked good even in uniform, and how the movie Dune wasn’t nearly as good as the book, and why it was better to learn how to drive on a manual than on an automatic. Churchill held forth and I mostly listened, but he was curious about the few things I did say, and that encouraged me to talk more than I usually did. I found myself telling him that I played chess once a week in an old men’s club. And he didn’t make fun of that, instead he asked me to play against him on Saturday. If they let us out for the weekend, I reminded him. And he laughed again. I thought it was generous of him to laugh at the same not-very-funny joke twice. After our game on Saturday, he talked me into going out to the Little Haifa pub because an aircraft carrier from the Sixth Fleet was anchored in the port then, and there would probably be a lot of American sailors in white there, getting drunk and singing with wet throats, ‘Bye bye Miss American pie’. That is a sight you really have to see, he said. After that Saturday, we became friends. I’d had friends before him, but they were all my type: short, gloomy, the ones stuck to the walls at parties, and during breaks at school they read science-fiction magazines. They were the ones who knew the Maccabi Haifa line-up by heart, including subs, but never went to matches, who made fun of everything in beautifully constructed sentences, but started stammering the minute a girl said something to them.

Churchill wasn’t afraid of girls. He wasn’t afraid of life at all and approached it with a bare chest, sweeping hand movements and untied shoelaces, and although I knew in my heart that I would never be completely like him, I believed, or wanted to believe, that gradually, just from the many hours we spent together, some of his lust for life would rub off on me and also, I would stop treating girls as if they were marble goddesses. I too would step away from the wall and join the party.

*

After what happened with Ya’ara, I felt that again, as if ten years hadn’t passed, I was stuck to the wall and had withdrawn into my comfortable old gloominess.

It’s embarrassing to admit, but I even went to the phone a few times to call Churchill. And once I actually started dialling his number. I knew that he was the only one who could understand, without my having to explain, why I could no longer look at those ads featuring beautiful women wearing glasses, why every time the word ‘revelation’ appeared in an article I was translating, I pushed the bundle of papers aside, and why, after Ya’ara, every girl I went out with felt like a compromise.

But I also knew there was a chance she’d be the one to answer the phone in his flat.

So I didn’t call.

And one day, driving to give a translation to a client, I saw them. It was on Nahalat Benyamin Street, near the fabric shops, and they were in the car in front of mine waiting for the lights to change. At first, I wasn’t sure it was them, so I took my foot off the brake and let the car slide forward, like a piece of cloth slipping off a chair, till it almost touched theirs, and I still wasn’t one hundred per cent sure — after all, I hadn’t seen either of them for months. But then, with that gesture of hers, she took off her glasses, and he leaned over and they kissed. And kissed. The lights turned green and they were still kissing. I could have honked my horn, I should have honked my horn, but I stayed still and saw how she ran her fingers through his hair and how his hand held the back of her neck and how her eyes closed and how his eyes closed and how her shoulder gleamed and how the ends of her caramel-coloured hair rested in the hollow between her gleaming shoulder and her throat and how his finger played with the ends of that hair. The green light had already turned into a flashing yellow light, and I still didn’t honk. And he kept kissing her, and her head tilted slowly back, and I could picture her small breasts in the V of her shirt, and then they weren’t kissing any more, they were just wrapped in a tight, hot embrace that continued until the yellow had turned to red. Her body was enveloped in his arms and his head rested on her breast, and her shoulder was gleaming again and he raised his head slightly and kissed her naked skin, bit it gently, and she stroked his head as if urging him on, to bite her harder, deeper, and he raised his head for a moment and saw that the lights had turned green again –

And they laughed. I could almost hear their laughter bursting out of the windows. They were laughing about their recklessness, or perhaps because Churchill had impressed her with his famous imitation of the airborne traffic reporter, and through the propeller noise he made with his lips, he told his listeners about a couple kissing in their car and blocking traffic on Nahalat Benyamin Street.

Or perhaps he was telling her about the wish I’d written on my piece of paper. And that was what amused them so much, a second before they started driving.

I waited a little longer, ignoring the loud honking behind me, so I could make sure they were moving away. As far as possible. Only then did I start driving. My heart frozen. Frozen stiff.

*

I stayed away from my friends for almost six months.

I resisted all Amichai’s pleading and temptations (the championship league game! on a 40-inch screen!! Ilana the Weeper’s tear-flavoured burekas!!!).

I held out even when he switched to threats (if you don’t come here, we’ll come to you. If you don’t open the door, we’ll break it down —).

But when he called to tell me that Ofir had had a breakdown at work, all my determination buckled like a pile of pears in the supermarket, and I left straight for the hospital.