World Cup Wishes

10

CHURCHILL IS THE focus. Even though he’s standing on the side holding a relatively small placard, it’s clear that he’s the focus of the picture. It’s hard to explain. It’s something in his posture. And something in the way the heads of the others at the demonstration lean towards him for guidance or approval. Written in large letters on the placard he’s holding are the words ‘WE ARE ALL SHAHAR COHEN’, my placard says ‘NO SHAHAR COHEN — NO CLASSES’, and the placard Amichai’s holding says, ‘SHAHAR STAYS OR WE GO’. Ofir thought up those slogans, of course. And Amichai’s little sister printed them in her beautiful, round handwriting.

Two days earlier, Shahar Cohen had been expelled from school. There’d been a scuffle during break. Scuffle is too nice a word. It was a fist fight, and Shahar Cohen was involved. He’d also been involved in a copying incident during the Bible final exam. And in a graffiti incident in Arabic. And in the inflated-sex-doll-in-the-headmistress’s-office incident. He hadn’t initiated any of those pranks, but he had the rare talent of joining them at the worst possible moment, when the real initiators could put the blame on ‘the one who came with the integration’ and vanish from the scene. Sometimes it seemed as if Shahar Cohen derived a strange pleasure from always being blamed. As if, instead of fighting the prejudice against ‘the one who came with the integration’, he’d decided to submit to it. To validate it.

Churchill couldn’t stand Shahar Cohen. There was some hidden grudge from the time they were kids growing up in the same neighbourhood. But more than he couldn’t stand Shahar Cohen, he couldn’t abide injustice. And the more he heard about that punching incident during break, the more he suspected that the school governors had taken the easy way out. It turned out that the fight had been started by the son of the president of the school alumni association. And it turned out that he had provoked Shahar Cohen, verbally and physically, for quite a while before Shahar finally punched him. It turned out that he had called Shahar Cohen’s mother a whore, and Shahar a petty criminal. It turned out that his friends had bet secretly that he couldn’t get the petty criminal hiding inside Shahar to come out.

Each one bet fifty shekels.

Those bastards are afraid that his father will cancel his donation for the computer lab, Churchill explained, so they’re putting it all on Shahar. Blaming Shahar is the easiest thing to do, because who’ll defend him?

We’ll defend him! Churchill answered his own question, and dragged all of us to a non-violent demonstration at the school gate.

After standing there for an hour, screaming what was written on the placards to the tunes of football songs till we were hoarse, we moved on to the next stage of Churchill’s plan of action and tied ourselves to the gate with iron chains. I don’t have any pictures of that stage (there was no one to take them, we were all shackled), but the photo in the newspaper clipping I kept shows Churchill stretched out against the gate, and in the corner, there’s a white arm that looks like Amichai’s.

It didn’t take long for the governors to back down. The article in the local newspaper clearly supported our position and printed additional testimonies by students who had been involved in the scuffle. The alumni association held an emergency meeting and decided to set up a committee to study the incident so that such episodes could be avoided in the future, a committee that has not convened to this day. Shahar Cohen was readmitted to school on probation, and thanked Churchill emotionally for all he’d done for him.

It wasn’t for you, it was for the principle of the thing, Churchill said, and added, as cold as iron: don’t think I’ve forgotten what happened, Shahar. Don’t think we’re going to be friends now.

*

None of us knew exactly what had happened. Every time we tried to ask Shahar about it, he cracked a joke. And every time we tried to ask Churchill, he said nothing.

Only years later, on the way back from Mitzpe Ramon, did Churchill tell me. In a quiet voice. Without looking at me even once during the entire drive.

*

Churchill’s father was the handsomest man in Haifa. Even in his forties, Michel Alimi had a full head of carefully combed hair. And greying temples. Impressive. He had very tanned, muscular arms, especially the part you lean on the car window. And he had the smile of a man who knows that his smile is alluring.

He was a driving instructor, and his speciality was married women. From the Carmel. In the mid-eighties, the ‘second-family-car’ rage spread through the wealthiest section of the city, and dozens of women who didn’t have a licence or whose licence had expired, flocked to take lessons with the best instructor in town.

Welcome to my kingdom, he would say at the first lesson and open the door gallantly. Waiting for them inside was a beautifully upholstered seat, air conditioning, and the light scent of aftershave, and in the glove compartment, a box of sweets awaited them: mint and caramel and lemon and the kind that, when you took a small bite, filled your mouth with a warm flow of chocolate.

Sometimes, a boy was also waiting for them in the back seat. The boy’s face was broad and light-skinned, totally unlike the long, dark-skinned face of his father. This is Yoav, my son, Michel would explain to his new students, and they would smile at the boy through the mirror or turn around and shake his hand or turn around and stroke his cheek. Or ignore him completely.

With time, the boy learned that it was actually those women who ignored him — the ones who got into the car determined to show that they had come only to learn how to drive and not for anything else — who were the first to be caught in his father’s net.

It always began with compliments. ‘That colour suits you.’ ‘Your new hairstyle is very flattering.’ ‘Could you please not wear that perfume any more when you come for a lesson? It makes me lose my concentration.’ Then came the touching. Brief, supposedly accidental touches on the elbow or palm. Then more lingering touches: ‘May I? Let’s do it together. Hand on the gearstick, foot on the clutch, and now change gear, gently, not with force, pretend you’re holding something that’s pleasant to the touch, OK?’

Later, just when the atmosphere in the car was beginning to warm up, came the planned outburst of anger: ‘Not like that! What are you doing?! You want to kill us all?!’ He would raise his voice and stop the car with a squeal as he slammed on the instructor’s brake pedal. ‘I’m explaining it to you but you’re not listening. I’m sorry, but if you keep this up, you’ll never pass the test,’ he’d say, putting his tanned hand on his chest, and the woman would leap out of the car at the end of the lesson, upset, sometimes in tears.

A week later, he’d be waiting for her in front of the car with a bouquet of flowers. Or a box of chocolates. And apologise from the bottom of his heart for having shouted. And they would suddenly melt. Suddenly surrender. As if a cord of control had snapped. And by the end of the lesson, he was already allowing himself to run his fingers through her hair, or rest his hand on her thigh. And all that time, the boy watched them from the back seat, two conflicting voices inside him: one admired his father, wanted to be as handsome as his father, beloved like his father, and the other wanted to shout that something here wasn’t right. But he didn’t know exactly what that something was.

As the boy grew older, the second voice overcame the first, until one day, when a young woman with a very short skirt and blonde-streaked hair planted an unashamed kiss on his father’s cheek before she got out of the car, he could no longer control himself and said: Dad, that woman has lice.

Lice? his father said, and turned to him, amused. Yes, she has lice in her hair! the boy insisted. Besides, our mother is much prettier. Our mother? His father’s expression suddenly grew serious, as if only at that moment did he realise what might be going through the mind of the boy who was always sitting in the back seat. Our mother is a wonderful person, Yoavi, Michel Alimi said. I adore our mother. And all these … all these women you see here in the car, they’re only good for one thing.

One thing? What thing? the seven-year-old boy asked.

Never mind, the father said and moved into the driver’s seat. Then he looked at his son several times in the mirror, started the car and said loudly, remember what I’m telling you, boy, none of those women can hold a candle to your mother, do you hear? Not one!

*

Churchill’s mother was also a well-known figure in Haifa. Dina Hayut-Alimi, head of the neighbourhood association. And the parents’ association. The woman who inserted a firm hyphen in her surname long before that became fashionable among Tel Aviv-Jaffa women. The woman who raised six sons in the lowest neighbourhood in Haifa and taught them that lying is wrong and that you have to do what you think is right, not what people say, and most importantly — you mustn’t be afraid of anyone. Don’t be afraid to be smart. Don’t be afraid to be first. Don’t be afraid to succeed. Because if a person wants to succeed — he will. It doesn’t matter where his grandfather came to Israel from. And it doesn’t matter what neighbourhood he grew up in.

She didn’t succeed to the same degree with all of her six children. Her rigid distinctions between good and bad actually caused some of them to grow up wild. But Churchill was his mother’s pride from the moment he was born. You are God’s gift to me, she would tell him in a whisper so that his siblings couldn’t hear, and she paid for special courses they didn’t get, bought him a bicycle two years before his bar mitzvah because ‘I know I can trust him’, and appointed him to arbitrate in arguments between the other children because it was clear that they would all accept his decisions.

When Churchill reached the age of twelve, his mother decided that he would attend the best school in the city, no matter what the courts said (determination of status in Haifa was ridiculously topographic: the higher you lived on the mountain, the higher your status was). According to municipal policy, it was impossible for children from the low neighbourhood in which Churchill lived to go to school on the Carmel, but Dina Hayut-Alimi checked it out and found that there was a quota of ten children that the good school had to accept from other neighbourhoods in the city, and she made sure that Churchill took the entrance examinations. And prepared him for them from morning till night, for three months.

Only two children passed the entrance exams to the school on the mountain: Churchill, and Shahar Cohen.

Several days after he received the letter that began, ‘We are pleased to inform you’, Churchill saw Shahar Cohen at Stella Maris, the place on the mountain slope from which, without paying, you could watch the matches being played in the Kiryat Eliezer stadium. I heard that we’re going to go to the same school together, he said with a broad, proud smile.

Instead of answering, Shahar Cohen grabbed him by the shirt and slammed him up against the trunk of a pine tree.

Don’t you talk to me, you bastard. If you don’t tell your loser father to take his filthy hands off my mother, I’ll kill you, I swear to God. I’ll kill you on the first day of school, you hear me?

After the ‘lice incident’, Churchill’s father no longer took his son along on his driving lessons, so Churchill had no idea that something was going on between his father and Shahar Cohen’s mother. But he knew that Shahar Cohen’s mother had given birth to him when she was sixteen, which made her the youngest mother in the neighbourhood. And he knew that Shahar Cohen’s father was an officer in the army stationed on a base near Beersheba who came home only once every two weeks. And that a month before, he had been promoted to major and was given an army car, so he was able to leave the family car at home. For the use of his wife. Who didn’t have a licence.

All those facts ran quickly through his mind when Shahar Cohen had him pressed up against the tree trunk, but none of them turned into speech. His hands spoke instead, trying to break him free of Shahar Cohen’s grip, but Shahar Cohen, though shorter than he was, had the advantage of rage and didn’t let him go. Locked in a clench, kicking each other, butting each other, they fell onto the ground.

The other children gathered in a circle around them, but none of them dared intervene.

Unlike the regular brawls, which were an inseparable part of their childhood (like the tune of the ice cream van in summer and the flooding sewers in winter), there was something different in this fight. It was hard to explain, but at certain moments, the spectators thought that Churchill and Shahar Cohen were actually hugging. At certain moments, they seemed to be consoling each other. But on the other hand, they kept trying to hurt each other, and after a few minutes of hard punching, their faces and hands and chests and thighs were covered in hot, sticky blood.

*

Churchill didn’t go home that day, not even after nightfall. He waited for his father’s car to turn into their street, then he stood in front of it in the middle of the road. His father stopped the car with a squeal of brakes and jumped out in a fright. They had a brief conversation, very brief, in the light of a flickering streetlamp. Michel Alimi combed his beautiful hair back for several seconds, tossing sideways glances, and spoke in a very quiet voice. Look, he said. I want you to understand, he said. I’m only a man, and …

So what if you’re a man? Churchill interrupted him, silenced him, and quashed the rest of the arguments his father tried to make with exactly the same focused silence that, years later, he would use to quash the arguments made by opposing counsel.

The next day, Shahar Cohen’s pretty mother moved to a different driving instructor. And so it happened that on the first day in his new school, Churchill was not murdered. On the contrary, he flourished.

Already on that first day, he managed to persuade Shoshana Roth, the scary maths teacher, to give less homework by showing her a detailed table of the homework given that day in all their subjects, plus a statistical calculation of the impossible amount of time, on the average, it would take each student to do justice to all of it. And at break, he went out to the football field and authoritatively settled the argument two teams were having about whether there had been a foul, and at the end of the day, he went up to Rona Raviv, the snob, whom no one had dared to approach since primary school, and simply spoke to her, without lowering his gaze, and even managed to make her laugh twice. And within a few weeks, had already formed a small group of admirers-friends around him who emulated the way he walked, dressed, laughed, smoked, and hung on his every word.

Shahar Cohen never belonged to that group of admirers, even though he always hovered around near them. The secret rancour between him and Churchill continued to simmer all those years without any of their friends knowing why. And it wasn’t till that night, on our way home from our unsuccessful search for the vet, Ricardo Luis, in Mitzpe Ramon, with Ofir and Amichai asleep on the back seat and Radio Amman the only station we could get on the radio, that Churchill looked out into the vast darkness on our right and told me everything, and in the end, said, I want you to know, Freed, that no one in the world knows about this but you, and I kept quiet and felt lucky and important and special.

*

Fourteen years later, I got a first-hand report of the ‘embarrassing personal circumstances’ from the source.

Churchill knocked on my door a few nights after the story broke on TV.

He was dressed strangely. The bottom half — black trousers and polished shoes — was lawyerly. But above it was an old Maccabi Haifa T-shirt with Eyal Berkovic’s number on it. A small Israeli paunch protruded from the T-shirt. I wondered whether he’d got fatter recently or I only just noticed it now.

Can I come in? he asked. Sorry about the late …

No worries, I said, inviting him in.

I made him a cup of strong instant coffee, carefully stirring in one and a half teaspoons of sugar the way he liked, and brought it to him in the living room.

Thanks, Baba, he said, and left the cup on the table.

That was a hell of trip, he said, pointing to the framed picture of our trip to the Sinai that was hanging on the wall.

I haven’t seen that picture for years, he added when I kept silent.

You haven’t been here in years, I said dryly.

Yes, he said, and looked down at his shoes. He usually sat with his legs spread wide, as if he were having sex with the air, but now his knees were pressed together.

I know, he said, that for the last two years, you and I haven’t … I mean … we’ve grown distant … after what happened … rightly so, of course … He stopped and looked at me.

I nodded like a judge, giving him permission to continue along the same lines. For the time being.

But as far as I’m concerned … you’ve always remained my friend … and now, I’m in trouble … and I have no one to talk to, no one to ask for advice … Ya’ara, she won’t any more … and Amichai, he has enough on his mind … and Ofir … he called and starting telling me how every mistake is a lesson, and maybe he’s right, but those clichés of his drive me mad … and my parents … my father doesn’t understand these kinds of things, and my mother … I’m ashamed to talk to her about it … you know, she started law school this year? She said that seeing me succeed gave her courage, you see? So how can I tell her what happened, disappoint her this way …? But still, I need to talk to someone … someone who thinks clearly … because I can’t do it alone any more …

Your coffee’s getting cold, I interrupted him. I still didn’t know what I wanted more: to help him or to throw him out.

Anyway, he said after a few quiet sips, you’re the only one who can understand me in this thing. Because you’re the only one who knows who Keren is.

Keren?

Keren from Cusco. You remember when you were sick and I took care of you? And that’s exactly when I met a girl who … The one with the secret?

Yes. The one I asked to wait till you recovered, but she left, saying that ‘whatever is supposed to happen …’

Happens. And if you’re supposed to meet — you’ll meet. I remember. But how is she connected to the ‘embarrassing personal circumstances’?

She is the ‘embarrassing personal circumstance’, Churchill said. And began to tell me.

Churchill had a special tone to his voice when he talked about his conquests. When he talked about women he’d been able to seduce, his voice would become slightly deeper, rougher, a bit like the voice-over in a Hollywood trailer, and his gestures were sweeping, illustrative, and he always went into the most intimate detail. Where he touched her. And how, at first, she wouldn’t. Then suddenly she would. Wow, would she ever, she was dripping from every opening. And the sounds she made, oh God! And the smell of her breath. And the taste of her lips. And her lips down there. When we were teenagers, there was something very provocative about it, and I usually had a hard-on when he spoke that way, but later, when we were older, we grew tired of it and just found it embarrassing. And gross. But I still had a hard-on sometimes when he spoke that way.

Now, in any case, his tone was different. Hesitant. Hurt. And occasionally, he stopped and rubbed his head where his hairline was receding (I wondered whether it had receded a great deal more recently, or was I simply noticing it only now. And then a thought flitted through my mind: if he already looks so much older, do I as well?).

She came up to me after a court session, he explained. And, idiot that I am, I didn’t ask myself what she was doing there. I was just glad to see her.

You recognised her?

Immediately. She looked exactly like she had then. Actually, not exactly like she had then, better. More womanly. She was wearing a long, wine-red dress slit up the side. In retrospect, I know that everything was planned, but at the time, I didn’t suspect a thing. She said she’d just happened to be nearby and had come inside, and that sounded reasonable to me. She said I looked good in a lawyer’s robe and then, when we were sitting and talking outside in the museum plaza, she said that a day didn’t pass when she didn’t think about me.

Since Cusco?

Yes. So I immediately said that I … I hadn’t stopped thinking about her either since then.

I didn’t know that.

I never told anyone. I thought it was pathetic to keep thinking about her all those years. Who was she anyway? Just a girl I spent two days with and …

Kept thinking about. What’s pathetic about that?

I don’t know. I thought that if I talked about it, if I said it out loud, it would just grow larger in my mind.

Or if you told anyone, I thought, your image would be tarnished.

Shall I tell you something else that no one else knows? Churchill went on. A few days before I got married, I went to Ashdod. I remembered Keren telling me she had family in Ashdod. So I went down there and drove in circles around the city. Looking for her. I drove slowly. For hours. Ashdod has grown into a large city over the last few years. It’s divided into quarters. So I drove from one quarter to the other. I told myself that if I saw her, it would be a sign.

A sign of what?

I don’t know. But it had become really urgent that I find her. Talk to her. Before I got married.

And you didn’t find her.

No. Then she suddenly shows up with that slit up her dress, still radiating the sense that she has a secret she’s keeping to herself, and she tells me that not a day has passed that she hasn’t regretted not waiting with us in Cusco, because there was a special magic between us. A one-time thing. And no matter how hard she tried to recreate that magic with other men, it was never the same.

Wow.

It was nothing, just clichés. But I didn’t get it then. And she kept touching me as she spoke, light, fluttery touches. First, only on the back of my hand. Then on my knee. And in the end, there was one especially long one here, on the inside of my thigh.

So you slept with her.

More or less … Churchill said and stood up. Usually, at this point in his stories, came the detailed descriptions. But now he stood up, sighed an old man’s sigh, went over to the window, pushed the curtain aside and stared down at the street.

Unbelievable, he said.

I thought he was talking about himself, about what happened, repenting. But then he said again, unbelievable. Come and see what’s going on here.

I went over to the window. It was one in the morning, and on my little street, some ten young women wearing traditional yellow dresses were dancing their way among the cars. The procession was led by an older woman with long black hair who was banging on a large drum in an ever faster rhythm. In the centre of the group, dressed in white, were a woman and a man, a bride and groom, who looked amused and excited by the commotion. Every few steps, the young women stopped their dance for a moment to throw confetti on the couple, then went back to their dancing and singing.

It’s a hinna, Churchill explained.

In the middle of the night? I asked.

That’s what’s so great about this city, he said. Anything can happen. And what’s even greater is that no one makes a big deal about it.

True. In Haifa, the neighbours would already be calling the police.

A parking warden turned into the street just as the hinna party reached the junction. In seconds, she was swallowed up in the sea of yellow dresses — female arms touched her, stroked her, pulled her into joining the dance. She resisted at first, tried to break out of the circle that formed around her, but then, suddenly, as if something inside her had surrendered, she abandoned herself to it — she let down her hair, unbuttoned the top button on her blouse and danced in front of the groom.

Look at that, what a scene, Churchill said.

The warden finally broke away from the group and went back to putting parking tickets on windscreens, but Churchill continued to hold the curtain away from the window.

Remember that trip on Independence Day? Remember that I made you swear to come here with me after the army?

Of course.

Do you think it would have been different if we’d stayed in Haifa?

What would have been different?

Everything … us. Do you think this city changed us?

Of course. I don’t even remember how to drive a manual car up a hill any more.

And … apart from that?

I don’t know. I’m not sure. Because meanwhile, time has passed, so how can you separate what …

Look, look at that woman with the drum. She must be the bride’s mother. Shame Ofir can’t see this now, it might make him feel like coming back to live here.

That’s hard to believe, I said. I think he’s already gone past the point of no return.

The joint of no return, Churchill said, repeating one of Ofir’s quips from his copywriting days.

The colourful procession disappeared around the corner, but Churchill lingered at the window for another long moment, as if saddened that he would have to continue his story now. As if he would rather join that group of dancers, bang the drum loudly and forget everything.

Tell me, he suddenly asked, at my wedding, did I look as happy as those two on the street?

I didn’t know what to say. At his wedding, my eyes were mostly on the bride.

No, he went on without waiting for an answer, even at my wedding, I was thinking about Keren. Thoughts of her went through my mind at least twice during the ceremony. That’s why I drank so much, to stop those thoughts. And thoughts about our World Cup wishes — you remember those wishes we wrote? She was one of the two wishes I didn’t read aloud. ‘I want to meet Keren purely by chance after thoughts of her are gone from me’, that’s what I wrote.

‘I once loved a little girl in the Galilee,’ I said, reciting the next line of Meir Ariel’s song.

Churchill flashed me a warm look, the kind we used to exchange once, before the rift. A look that says, ‘How great it is that there’s someone in the world who understands my most personal associations.’

And you know what the best bit is? he went on, slightly heartened, she’d really been living in the Galilee all those years, in some small village above Carmiel.

Alone?

Sometimes alone, sometimes not. At least that’s what she told me. Now I don’t know any more what is the truth and what isn’t. She said she wasn’t ready to give up her freedom for any price, and in the same breath asked me to come and see her there. I told her I’d drop by sometime, and then she crossed one slit-exposed leg over the other and said, I meant now.

So you slept with her, I said impatiently.

Yes, but only to exorcise the dybbuk. I told myself, I’m cheating on Ya’ara, but it’s actually for her own good.

Her own good? I shouted. I was beginning to feel that Churchill was misleading me again with his brilliant arguments.

I know it sounds bad, he said, but that’s what I thought. That if I sleep with her, I’ll find out the secret she’s always been hinting at. And if I find out the secret, it won’t drive me mad any more.

So, did you find it out? I asked, trying not to sound disparaging.

Yes, Churchill said sadly. After a few minutes of kissing in her house, she suddenly stops me and says: there’s something I have to tell you. And you have to realise that at that point, I’m already on fire, burned at the edges, like those birthday cards I used to make for you guys once. But she moves my hand away and tells me that she thinks I should know that she wasn’t in the court by accident.

So what was she doing there?

She’s the defendant’s daughter.

Wow.

The oldest daughter, from his first marriage. She’s not really in contact with him. Just the opposite, she’s angry with him. Even changed her name so it won’t be the same as his. In fact, she’s not sure whether she came to court to support him or to gloat.

Wait a minute, is that legal?

What?

For the prosecutor to get chummy with the defendant’s daughter?

It’s problematic ethically, but if he doesn’t know she’s the defendant’s daughter, it’s hard to fault him.

So that’s why she …

Told me, right. So that later, when they hear the tape, it’ll be clear that I knew.

The tape?

The tape, a hidden camera. They were very methodical.

But what … why did they invest so much effort? If it’s not you, another prosecutor will be appointed, no?

They think that, from the beginning, I personally pushed that case. That I’m obsessed with getting a conviction, for personal advancement. They always claimed that.

And you didn’t … at any point … with Keren … you never suspected?

Churchill sniggered sadly. Suspected? To suspect, you have to think. And at that point, I wasn’t thinking at all. Ten years! Ten years, since Cusco, I’d been thinking about her, and there she was, right beside me. With that slit. Do you see? It was like trying to stop breathing.

Churchill stood up again and went to the window. His eyes sought some other dramatic event in the street, an event that would save him from having to finish the story.

The next day, he said, turning back to me, I went into the district attorney’s office to confess. It turned out that she already knew. They’d sent her the tape during the night. Actually, she was fine. She said she appreciated that I’d come to her of my own volition. Said the fact that the family had made such a great effort to get me off the case proves how frightened they were of me. But she had no choice but to remove me from the case. She suggested we do it as quickly as possible, before it got out to the media, because it would be better if it came from her and not as a result of public pressure. She put a hand on my shoulder and said that I was still young, and it was important that I learn from that mistake … and that was that. Two hours later, they sent someone to take the cartons.

What cartons?

The boxes we keep all the legal material in. I’d been working on that case for a full year. I dreamed about it at night. And within two hours, poof, it was all over. The next morning, when I looked at the docket …

What docket?

You know, the screen that shows all our scheduled court appearances — when I opened it, I saw that they’d already replaced my name with that of one of the senior attorneys. Do you understand? he asked, his eyes pleading for a good word, a sympathetic look. I remembered something I’d seen carved into one of the walls in the court on the day I’d gone to see his appearance. ‘My hope is in thy ordinances’, it said in large letters. And now Churchill’s hope was in mine. And I–I just looked at the living room wall.

I would have been proud to say that, at that moment, I was not gloating, as might have been expected, but that wouldn’t be quite true. I was gloating. But I also felt pity. And anger. And surprise. And the faint, pleasant sense of superiority you feel when someone asks for your advice.

So what exactly are you undecided about? I finally asked.

Undecided?

You said you came to ask my advice, didn’t you?

Ah … yes. It’s just … she … the district attorney … she left it up to me to decide whether to leave the prosecutor’s office or stay. On the one hand, she might be expecting me to leave. On the other, I don’t really have anywhere to go. But on the third hand, people look at me with pity … pity and gloating. And it’s driving me mad. Yesterday the gang I usually have lunch with didn’t call me when they went out to eat. And today, I thought that even the car park attendant had heard about my disgrace. It took him half an hour to raise the barrier. Maybe I’m imagining things. Maybe I’ve become paranoid. What do you think? What do you think I should do?

I reminded Churchill of his 51:49 theory, which states that with every 50:50 indecision you consult a friend about, in your mind you tend to favour one side slightly, and when you ask him the question, you do it in a way that guarantees he’ll back the side you’re favouring anyway.

Just ask yourself which is the 51 side, I said.

Great idea, Churchill said. And after a brief silence, added unsmilingly, I have a new theory: every smart-arse theory you develop comes back at you like a boomerang.

More coffee? I offered after a few seconds. It was embarrassing to sit there feeling sorry for him.

Maybe tea, he said (‘Tea is the hot babes’ drink’, he always said, making fun of Ofir).

Tell me, I shouted from the kitchen, what’s the story with the Maccabi Haifa shirt?

Ya’ara threw me out of the house, he shouted back.

What?! I said, hurrying back into the living room. I wondered if he could hear the small rise of happiness in my voice.

She changed the lock and left me outside on the doormat with a bag of underpants and socks. And this Eyal Berkovic shirt.

She always did have a sense of humour.

So she did, Churchill said, lightly scratching the space between the wide shirt sleeve and his arm.

The truth is, he said, his eyes suddenly clouding, that’s what hurts me the most. OK, I lost the case, but if I lose her … that’s not … that’s too much. She … she wouldn’t let this one pass … Do you undertand?

I was silent. I wasn’t sure I wanted to understand.

She’s the first woman who wouldn’t let me wriggle out of it, Churchill went on. She always used to say to me: you’re a coward. You don’t know what love is because you’re a coward. But you can forget that. I won’t let you be a coward with me.

Churchill stopped for a moment, and I pictured Ya’ara saying those words to him. Taking off her glasses. Pronouncing the word l-o-o-ve the way only she can. Brushing his hand with hers just as she spoke the words ‘you can forget that’.

You know, he continued, no one has ever said things like that to me before. No one ever understood that I give only twenty per cent of what I’m capable of giving. But she does. And she said that to me so many times that I was starting to feel it seeping into me. That I had a chance to get over myself. But now … it’s over. I ruined everything.

What’s he expecting, I thought angrily, that I’ll console him for losing Ya’ara? There’s a limit, surely?

Churchill must also have remembered whom he was talking to, and didn’t pursue the subject any further.

We were silent together for a while. I went into the kitchen and came back with a cup of boiling hot tea.

He drank it slowly, all of it.

So where have you been sleeping? I asked.

Yesterday, I wandered around the street all night … and today … I don’t know, he answered, his eyes lingering on the sofa.

You’re welcome to stay, I said. And immediately regretted it. How much pleasure it would have given me to refuse to take the hint, to let him suffer.

Thanks, Baba, he said.

I spread a sheet on the sofa for him. I fluffed a pillow. I brought him a blanket, even though it wasn’t cold, because I remembered that when I stayed at his place during my first few months in the city, he always gave me a blanket and said, ‘It’ll give you a feeling of home.’ I turned on the TV to the sports channel and told him how to use the remote to change channels and turn off the TV.

England against Greece? Why are they playing against each other? he asked, pointing to the screen.

World Cup qualifiers, I explained.

Already?

Of course, what’s with you? The World Cup is in ten months.

Where?

Japan and Korea. They’re hosting it together.

Seriously! I’m so out of touch with everything. Wait a minute, what about us? What about Israel?

The deciding game is against Austria next week. If we win, we go to the knockout stage.

And if we make it through the knockout stage?

We’re in the World Cup.

*

Towards morning, I got up to pee, and on the way back to bed, I glanced into the living room. Churchill was sitting on the couch with his eyes closed, asleep. He had a finger jammed into his right ear and he was jiggling it rapidly up and down and deeper as he slept. I knew about that ritual from our trip, from the less pleasant parts of it. The weeks we didn’t meet any new people who could confirm his greatness. But on the trip, it only lasted for a few seconds, the time needed to clean your ear, but this time, Churchill kept shoving his finger in deeper and deeper, as if he were in a trance, as if he wanted to clean out not only his ear, but also his soul. I thought that in another minute, he’d tear his eardrum, but in any case, it was obvious that he was hurting himself a lot. I remembered from our trip that just calling his name loudly would cause him to open his eyes and stop, but I wasn’t sure it was right to invade that private ritual of his now. Perhaps it made him feel better? Perhaps he wanted to hurt himself?¹

I stood there until he finished torturing his other ear as well, made sure he went back to sleep and returned to my room.

On the days that followed, Churchill did not move from the sofa. He watched a great deal of football and said that there was no case waiting for him at the prosecutor’s office anyway, and that watching football was the only thing he was capable of doing now (I once caught him watching reruns of the same edition of Sports News over and over again).

He occasionally called me over to watch a particularly horrendous referee’s mistake (Churchill awaited those mistakes eagerly and enjoyed them no less, perhaps even more, than the goals). Sometimes he tried to get Ya’ara on the phone, without success. She didn’t answer her home phone or her mobile when he called, and every time he called her at work, the secretary said she was in a meeting, and with every such failure, his cheeks contorted with pain that started in his ears. But he didn’t talk about it.

Actually, we didn’t talk about Ya’ara at all the week he stayed with me. Instead, as if seven years hadn’t passed, we reverted to that lazy flow of conversation we’d had towards the end of the long trip we’d made together. After you travel around with someone for months on end, all the regular, strained channels of conversation get used up, and that’s when conversations take on a certain naturalness. You speak sparingly. You can be comfortably silent. And occasionally, as if offhandedly, a conversation develops that has something new in it. That’s how it was during that week he found refuge in my flat. We played a lot of chess (I always won) and looked at the photo albums from that trip we took together. I had the opportunity to recall some of his unbearable habits, like always leaving the shampoo bottle uncapped, or putting his cup on the table without a saucer even though he knew I hated it, or simply not knowing how to wash dishes and always leaving pieces of food stuck to the plates. On the other hand, I also had the opportunity to recall his natural generosity (the day after he came to my place, he did a huge supermarket shop, and every evening, he cooked us ‘a meal fit for a pig’), and I was able to enjoy that appealing, sincere curiosity of his again. He was interested in hearing about the articles I was translating, so I told him that now I was doing one by an Oxford professor who had studied the platforms of the large political parties that had participated in the last elections in Western Europe and compared them to the policies of the governments actually formed after the elections. He came up with a fascinating finding: in a large number of cases, the winning party ultimately implemented, item after item, the ideology of the losing party. That sounded unlikely to Churchill, so I read him several surprising examples the professor had brought from Italy and Germany, and then we tried to decide whether that model applied here in Israel as well. We came to the conclusion that on the one hand, it did, because it was Menachem Begin who made peace with Egypt, but on the other, if it were true, that meant that Arik Sharon, winner of the last election, would implement the Labour Party platform, which advocated withdrawing from Gaza, and that was totally out of the question. Later, he quite enthusiastically helped me translate an article discussing the legal aspects of Shakespeare’s works in general, and of Hamlet in particular. While he was surfing the Internet to check a concept he wasn’t sure of and I went to brew us some herbal tea — because that was all he wanted to drink that week — I thought that, actually, apart from him, I had no other friend with whom I could have a meaningful dialogue about Shakespeare, and that it was refreshing not to be alone in making all the small, annoying choices a translator has to make.

*

We hardly left the house that week. Anyway, I was the sort of person who’d rather read the Israeli Time Out than actually go to any of the places or events it lists, and Churchill was simply afraid to go out.

He told me that the media had been pursuing him since the affair exploded into the headlines, and he was especially irritated by the correspondent on the leading TV channel. I tell her that I don’t want to be interviewed any more, and she keeps calling me seven times a day, he complained, and asked me to look through the peephole before I opened the door to anyone, because ‘that leech could come here too’.

What does she look like? I asked, and he sat me down in front of the news broadcast so that her image would be burned in my mind.

The news was bad. Murders followed by injuries followed by accidents followed by drug raids followed by beatings followed by stabbings followed by murders. I noticed something strange: the words coming out of the newsreader’s mouth were dynamic, full of momentum, words like ‘breakthrough’, ‘escalation’, ‘dramatic developments’, but the reality being described by those words moved in closed circles. Stuck. And I also noticed that the journalists treated their interviewees with obvious resentment and disapproval. As if the violence dripping from every item they read with closed, official expressions on their faces had seeped into their bloodstream. They rudely interrupted the people sitting across from them and drummed their fingers on the desk and made a show of swallowing their saliva, and throughout the broadcast, I felt that, in another minute, they would no longer be able to keep up that damned pose required of all TV presenters, and all the anger and frustration that had been building up quietly inside them would erupt from their bodies like lava and demolish the studio.

The legal correspondent appeared at the end of the broadcast. Light brown hair, rapid speech. Glasses. She looked a bit like Ya’ara. That Michaela, she actually looks like a nice person, I said to Churchill. Watch out for her, that niceness of hers is a trap, Churchill warned, then reminded me: don’t open the door to anyone, OK?

*

For the first few days, I did what he said. I didn’t open the door before looking through the peephole.

The first person to knock on the door was Menashe from the second floor, who asked for my dues for the house committee.

Then there was a surprise visit from a Federal Express messenger holding a large package sent by Mr Shahar Cohen, Lubliana. We opened it cautiously and found a large cardboard box inside filled with five orange tubes. There was no logo or name on the tubes, and instead of instructions for use or information for the consumer, Churchill found a personal letter from Shahar in the box.

Hi Baba

How are you

I heard you’ve been having a pretty hard time lately and even though I know you never forgave me for what happened in the neighbourhood and also the last time we saw each other at Amichai’s shiva you hardly spoke to me I’ll always remember that demonstration you organised for me at school so I tried to think of a way I could help the guy who helped me and the first idea that popped into my mind was to send you that salve for heartache we’ve been working on for two years in our lab here and still haven’t put on the market only for technical reasons that have to do with licences and documents and that’s why there’s no leaflet with consumer information but that’s nothing because there’s not much you have to know about that salve except that it’s natural and made of essence of the dulcinea plant which is a sort of lotus that grows in Bled Lake in Slovenia and as far as instructions for use are concerned that’s not complicated either you just have to spread the salve twice a day on the left side of your chest where you heart is and in two or three days you’ll feel significantly less sadness and I know this not from experiments with mice but from my own personal experience because I’ve had my disappointments too but this is not about me it’s about you and I really hope this will help you and in any case I want you to know that I think only good things about you and know that you’ll come out of this a winner with or without salve

Regards to all the guys

Shahar

PS Sorry there’s no punctuation in this letter it’s just that I hardly ever write in Hebrew any more and forget where the marks are on the keyboard

A few hours after the orange salve arrived, Amichai and Ofir arrived. They dropped by for just a few minutes ‘to see if Churchill’s alive’, and stayed to watch the Israeli team’s last-chance game.

That was actually the first time all four of us had met to watch football since Ilana died and, for the first few minutes, there was a sense of cautiousness in the air. How are you, what’s happening, everything’s fine. As if we were four strangers or four people who had to carry out a mission together in order to pass a screening test and get hired for a top job, and not four best friends. I thought that part of the awkwardness came from the fact that, for the last year, Amichai had been a well-known, even admired, public figure and here he was, the man on TV, the man in the newspapers, sitting with us in the living room and we weren’t sure how to treat him. Like one of the guys or one of the gods?

But then Churchill told everyone about the special package he’d received from Shahar Cohen, and they encouraged him to try that dulcinea because what did he have to lose? So he squeezed some salve into his hand and spread it carefully on the left side of his chest just as Shahar had explained, and in less than a minute, the whole area began to itch terribly.

What a bastard that Shahar is, he said, scratching his chest with his nails.

Not a bastard. A genius! Ofir said with a laugh, it’ll itch you so much now that you won’t be able to think about anything else.

What are you so happy about, ya sharwal?! Churchill screamed, threw the tube of salve at him and ran to the shower to cool the burning.

He came back, still scratching, and Ofir rolled a thick joint for all of us and explained that he was happy because they’re pregnant, that is, his Maria’s pregnant. And in honour of the event, he went to Jaffa, like he used to, to bring us all premium weed, something especially strong recently brought in from Lebanon. We all stood up and hugged him warmly, one after the other, and said mazel tov, Daddy, mazel tov. Then we passed the joint around slowly and Churchill laughed and said, if only the police would come in now and catch us red-handed, that would solve my dilemma about whether to stay in the prosecutor’s office or not, and Amichai paled slightly and said, I don’t know if the police is such a good idea, my adversaries in the health system would have a ball with that, not to mention the media, and that lit a fire under Ofir, who said, yes, I can just see the headlines: ‘Our Right to Smoke? Founder of the Our Right NPO to Advance Human Rights in the Health System suspected of using drugs’.

‘Tanuri defends himself: “There’s smoke without fire”’, Churchill suggested a subhead.

‘Tanuri defends himself: “I thought it was the JOINT organisation”’.

‘Tanuri defends himself: “My actions have been taken out of context”’.

‘Tanuri defends himself: “I was just trying to support the Arabs of Jaffa”’.

‘Tanuri defends himself: “It wasn’t me. It was Shahar Cohen”’.

We continued writing virtual headlines about Amichai’s brush with the law. The less funny they were, the more we laughed at them. I could feel the awkwardness fading, and we were connected once again by the fine strings of unforced closeness. And the Israeli team wasn’t doing too badly either. The blue-and-whites were awarded a penalty kick and, amazingly enough, scored a goal to make it one-nil against Austria. Now they need to play an eleven-man defence till the end, Amichai said, and Churchill objected, are you kidding, now’s the time to attack. And Ofir suggested, they should play defensively, then counter-attack!

As the game drew closer to the end, they stopped arguing about tactics and switched to planning our trip to the World Cup. Ilana’s brother is working in Japan now, and we can probably crash at his place. Maria has a friend who has a flatmate who is the secretary of some FIFA big shot, Ofir said. Maybe she can pull a few strings and get tickets for us. Four tickets for the semis, the final, and all of Brazil’s games, Churchill fantasised out loud.

Only I was quiet. My pessimism would not allow me to get carried away with them, much as I wanted to. And at the last minute, I was proven right (when a pessimist is right, he feels no joy. Just a tiny, bitter drop on the tongue. That’s all).

Austria was awarded a free kick from outside the penalty box. The wall (of course) wasn’t positioned right. The Israeli goalkeeper (of course) didn’t see the ball in time. And the ball (of course) landed in the net.

How predictable, Churchill said.

It was in the air, Ofir said.

Maybe we can still score another goal, Amichai dared to hope.

But the referee blew his whistle to end the game and the analysts were already demanding the coach’s resignation more emphatically every moment, and fragments of shattered dreams drifted in the air of my living room. Ofir quickly rolled another thick joint, because now that we were finally all together, it would be a shame to sink into gloom, but instead of making us happy the second joint had the opposite effect on us, and so intensified our disappointment at the team’s failure that from drag to drag the disappointment grew into a deep, overall depression about our individual lives, how they were turning out, how different they were from what we had expected. Suddenly, everything seemed so pointless, almost hopeless, and at the same time, we all felt stomach-turning, heart-pounding anxiety and a desire to open the window and jump out and crash onto the sidewalk because even if it hurt, it would be better than what –

That stuff … Amichai mumbled, his pupils dilated, a bit strong, isn’t it?

I’m sorry, Ofir said. I went to Jaffa, to my old dealer. But it turns out that he’s back on the straight and narrow and counsels street gangs now. So they sent me to someone else, and that someone else told me this was good stuff … What do I know? I used to understand this kind of thing once. I’m sorry, I’m really sorry, guys. I just wanted to make us all feel good.

Don’t worry, I told him.

But then, without any warning, he began to cry.

You couldn’t have known, Amichai said, trying to calm him down, but he sobbed, you have no idea, you have no idea. And was silent. Then took another drag of the joint and said, you have no idea how worried I am about Maria. She spends all her time wandering around the territories, at those checkpoints. I try to explain to her that it’s not right. That she’s pregnant now. But she doesn’t listen. She keeps going there … I don’t know … Sometimes I think she doesn’t even want this pregnancy. That if it was up to her, she’d rather join Ilana in heaven.

Amichai’s face suddenly darkened when he heard Ilana’s name. I’m not enjoying this, he said, and took a drag on the joint. I haven’t enjoyed anything since Ilana … Once, everything used to give me pleasure. Every little thing. Having a shower. Dipping artichoke leaves in mayonnaise. Driving fast with the windows open. And today — I’ve become like my mother after my father was killed. I live to survive. To exist. Even that NPO — I don’t enjoy it at all. And if I feel a moment of satisfaction, I immediately begin to feel guilty for being happy when Ilana’s dead. And then … and then I’m not happy any more.

I listened to Amichai and Ofir and couldn’t understand them at all. Just the opposite. They pissed me off. What were they complaining about? At least they had love. At least something important had happened in their lives. And me? The most important thing that had happened to me was Ya’ara. And Churchill had taken even that. And now he was asking me for refuge. And I was giving it to him.

We continued passing around the joint. It was clear now that it was poison, but we couldn’t stop. Some senior official in the Football Association who was being interviewed explained that the fact that the team didn’t make it to the World Cup couldn’t be considered a failure, and even if it could, he wasn’t responsible for it.

What a loser, Ofir hissed.

What a shit, Amichai spat out the words.

What a pathetic bunch we are, I thought and looked at the three people sitting in my living room. Suddenly I felt contempt for them. That Ofir, whose spirituality stops at the green line. He always talks about giving to the ‘other’, but when his wife goes to stand at the checkpoints, he makes her life a misery. And Amichai too, pretending not to enjoy the NPO. Of course he enjoys it. The NPO and the attention. He’s like a note that’s been folded for a long time and is spread open now for all to see. But he won’t admit it. Not him. Because then he’d have to admit that it all began with Ilana’s death. With the fact that he no longer had to expend all his energy on making her happy. And Churchill, why’s he vomiting now? Why on the carpet? What is he, a little boy? Why do I always have to clean up his vomit? Fuck that. He can clean it up himself.

In the end, Ofir cleaned up Churchill’s vomit. And carried him like a wounded soldier to the shower. And washed his face with cold water. And put him on the bed to recover. My bed.

It’s all my fault, Ofir apologised later on his way to the door, and I said, forget it, it’s Shahar Cohen’s fault. But Ofir insisted and said that he’d go to Jaffa the next day and find out what exactly they’d sold him there. I’ll let you know if it was something dangerous, he promised, and I thought, nice of him to take responsibility like that, and perhaps I’d been wrong to put him down, and Amichai also said he might drop round the next day to see how Churchill was and to bring him some clothes, because they’re more or less the same size –

So the next evening, when Churchill was in the shower and there was a gentle knocking at the door, I was sure it was them. And I forgot Churchill’s request to look through the peephole to see who was on the other side of the door before I opened it.

Ya’ara was standing in front of me. Ya’ara the First. The Ya’ara of my dreams.

He’s in the shower, I said. You want to wait for him?

I didn’t come to see him, she said and gave me an intense look over her glasses. Only then did I notice that she was wearing her blue cloche skirt, the one she knew I liked. The one I’d pictured her wearing dozens of times in the last three years when she came here just to tell me she’d chosen the wrong friend. And to ask if she could still change her mind.

I felt that thing begin to swell in my chest.

Wait a sec, I said with a dry throat, left Churchill a note saying that I’d gone out to play chess in the club, put on my coat and went out to her in the hallway.

Where should we go? she asked.

To Hagilboa Street, I said with uncharacteristic assurance.

Halfway down from the second floor to the first, the staircase light went out. I felt around in the dark to find the wall and press on it, when suddenly she was enveloped in my arms. And suddenly I felt her stomach pressing against mine. And suddenly I smelled her scent in my breath. And suddenly she buried her small, cold mouth in my neck and said: I made a mistake. I chose the wrong friend. Can I still change my mind?

¹ I think that, in this description, Mr Freed is trying, with his customary nobility, to preserve my honour. I am sorry to say that the actual scene he saw that night was not one of mysterious ear-probing, but of simple, unrestrained weeping. I must emphasise that, as an adult, I have cried only twice: the first time was that night at Mr Freed’s home when I first truly understood that I was about to lose the only woman, apart from my mother, who truly loved me. The second time was approximately a month ago, when Mr Freed’s father called and told me what had happened.

To the best of my knowledge, Mr Freed borrowed the image of feverish ear-probing from a boy he tutored as part of the Student Association project to help underprivileged children when he was at university. Though Mr Freed remained in close contact with that boy for years after the official project ended, he gets no mention at all in the book.

But that boy is not the only one given no mention: many other details of Mr Freed’s life are kept hidden from the reader — such as, for example, his daily telephone calls with his mother, the regular allowance he received from his father on the first of every month, and the fact that he wrote particularly acerbic talk-backs to Internet sites that posted remarks by army officers, and signed them ‘Major Kierkegaard’.

As editor of this book, I should, as a rule, respect this choice to conceal material, even if it is occasionally beyond my understanding (why did Mr Freed decide to conceal his regular chess partner? After all, that emaciated old man’s suicide by hanging was certainly one of the main reasons Mr Freed ended up in the situation he did later!). (Y.A.)