World Cup Wishes

12

ILANA MUST STILL have been in the recovery room because she isn’t in the picture. Amichai is in the middle of the frame with two identical plastic cradles, the hospital kind, in front him. He looks tired. Wrinkled. But a kind of new glow illuminates his face. We’re all smiling at the camera, smiles both happy and awkward. We’re twenty-five, if I’m not mistaken, still children ourselves, and overnight our friend has become a father, of twins no less. We can’t even begin to take that in. You can see it in the picture. It’s not just the bewildered smiles, it’s also the way we’re standing. Ofir’s hands are shoved in the pockets of his jeans, Churchill’s hands are folded on his chest as if they’re protecting him from something, and my hands are on Amichai’s shoulders, but it looks like he’s the one who’s supporting me. ‘You’re our advance party,’ Churchill had written to him in all our names on the card attached to the bouquet of flowers. ‘You can check it out, this business of kids, and if it seems good, we’ll join you.’ Later, going down in the lift, Ofir said it was because Amichai’s father had died when he was little and he never had a normal family — that’s why he’s started his own family so young. And Churchill said, bullshit, he did it just to make Ilana happy, that’s all. And I thought to myself that Amichai actually looked quite happy there, beside the cradles, and in some cultures a twenty-five-year-old man can already be the father of four children, and perhaps it was Amichai who was acting naturally for his age and we were the ones dragging our feet for no reason and squandering our days with meaningless love affairs.

*

It’s not yours, Ya’ara hastened to reassure me.

How do you know … I mean … how can you be sure? (If it turns out to be mine, the thought flitted through my mind, then one of my three World Cup wishes — a child with Ya’ara — would be coming true.)

I calculated the days, Ya’ara said. It comes out exactly on the last time I slept with Yoav, three weeks ago.

OK … if that’s the case … then congratulations, I said. I didn’t know what else to say.

Yes, Ya’ara said.

We were silent. I tried to picture her compact body pregnant. I couldn’t.

OK, let me talk to your idiot friend, she finally said. I called him and he took the cordless phone to the bathroom, and they spoke for three and a half hours — at some point, I couldn’t hold it in any longer and went down to pee in the cats’ yard — and in the morning, he collected his things, hugged me, told me I was a prince and went back to their flat.

*

Amichai and Ofir couldn’t understand Ya’ara. How could she give him chance after chance after chance when it was clear he would never change? That question was directed at me, as if I were an expert on Ya’ara. We were sitting in the square in front of the Cinematheque, group after group of children passing us on their way to the nearby school, and I sniffed and said that all sorts of things hold couples together. And sometimes it’s that ability they have to hurt each other where they’re most vulnerable. And even that analysis, I added, should be taken with a grain of salt, because we have no idea what happens between them when they get home and remove their masks, because we’re never there. Ofir said that in principle, I might be right, there were hidden energies flowing between him and Maria too, but when it came to Churchill, he thought that in another few weeks, or a few months at the most, we’d be hearing about another infidelity of his.

Churchill, on the other hand, claimed that knowing he was going to be a father calmed him down and put into perspective what was important and what wasn’t. Personally, I thought he was spouting the clichés that football players speak in one-on-one interviews, and what had really put things in perspective for him was the blow he had taken when they’d removed him from the case. I thought that we’d called him Churchill so much and treated him like Churchill for so long that he’d forgotten he was originally Yoav. It had always been convenient for him to have friends a bit less successful, a bit less brilliant than he. And I also thought that, with our co operation, he had nurtured the messianic belief that he was not an ordinary person. Not just another guy from Haifa. Not just another guy from Tel Aviv. Not just one of the six Alimi siblings. I thought that his success as a lawyer fed that belief until it grew to monstrous, voracious proportions that swallowed up his good qualities, one by one.

*

A day after he officially resigned from the prosecutor’s office, Churchill received a call from Amichai, who offered him the job of running the legal arm of Our Right.

He choked up in response. But … how … I was a shit … When you formed the organisation … I didn’t even come to … I didn’t come to your meetings … So why, all of a sudden … How …

Listen, Amichai interrupted him. I’m not happy with the guy who’s doing the job now and I think you can do it better. All the rest is irrelevant.

But I didn’t even apologise … I didn’t have the chance to say I’m sor …

Your retroactive apology is accepted, Amichai said. You start work Sunday morning, eight-thirty. And now I’m sending a volunteer to you with all the material you need to read. You should go over it.

Thank you … thank you so … much, Churchill stammered.

*

Do you believe it? Amichai said with a chuckle when he spoke to me on the phone half an hour later, Churchill stammered!

Churchill stammered, and finished work every day at six, and got home at six-thirty without stopping on the way at Sharona’s, or Keren’s or Hagit’s. And he spent quiet evenings in front of the TV with Ya’ara, and catered to her every whim and put his hand on her stomach to feel if the baby was kicking yet, and complained that she never asked him to bring her ice cream or gherkins the way women do in films.

And she threw the application to the University of London she’d downloaded from the Internet into the bin and gave up once and for all her dream of studying theatre, because at the moment ‘it’s not practical anyway’ and ‘the working hours at her father’s office were very convenient’, and altogether, ‘theatre is not exactly a profession that goes with motherhood, and there’s no ignoring that’. Considering how easily she slipped into the role of the perfect mother, I thought scornfully, the world of the theatre has truly lost a great creator. I know what you’re thinking, Yuval, she said on the phone, and before I could deny it, she begged me, please don’t say it. I’m in the middle of trying to convince myself now, so don’t hassle me with the truth, OK?

The further her pregnancy progressed, the less I spoke to Ya’ara and Churchill. They seemed to have withdrawn into their own private cocoon, where there was no room for old friends.¹

And Amichai also withdrew further and further into himself. Maria’s daughter had surprised the twins with the announcement that from now on she wanted Noam, only Noam, to be her friend, and so, in a single moment, she split the threesome apart. In response, Nimrod shattered all the pictures in the house (except for the one of his mother) and hurled a mini-disc player, including speakers, out of his bedroom window into the street. Professionals explained to Amichai that actually, through his anger at Maria’s daughter, Nimrod was allowing himself to experience his mother’s death for the first time. Amichai thought they were wrong, that they did not fully appreciate the autonomous power of children’s love (he’d once had an Irit whom he loved in the second grade. For months, he’d planned to ask her to be his girlfriend when they were at the end-of-year party, but she never showed up). Anyway, he delegated most of his authority to the managing director he’d appointed to work under him, cut his media appearances to a minimum, and tried to spend ‘quantity time’, as he put it, with his Nimrod.

He called his friends less often, and if I called him, he would usually promise to get back to me after the children were asleep. But he didn’t.

Of all of them, Ofir and Maria were the only ones who tried to show an interest in what I was doing (or, more accurately, in what I wasn’t doing), and once they even formally invited me to a family dinner.

My inner oracle prophesied doom. It claimed that this was not a good time for family dinners. But, as mentioned, I was educated to believe that, when invited, the polite thing is to accept, so I pulled myself together and drove to Michmoret.

On the way, I listened to naive Hebrew songs on the radio. A pleasant breeze came through the open window, and drivers passing me on the road looked to me like people, not just drivers. I said to myself that it was very kind of Ofir and Maria to invite me over. And that, all in all, I should be happy for both of them, now that they were pregnant.

But from the minute I walked into their wooden house, I couldn’t stop feeling envy. Bitter, bubbling, maddening envy.

I envied their small, modest house. And the fact that they were a five-minute walk from the sea. And the breeze that carried a salty smell into the living room and gently rocked the hammock. I envied the fact that they’d had the courage to leave the city. And the courage to do what they love. I envied Ofir for having Maria who, even after three years of being together, still occasionally stroked the back of his neck for no special reason. I envied Maria for having her daughter, even though they actually argued throughout the entire meal.

First, the girl didn’t want to sit with us. And then she didn’t want to eat with a knife and fork. And then, while we were still eating, she insisted on sliding down the banister of the narrow staircase that wound down from the gallery to the living room. Get off there, you’re doing something dangerous for no good reason, Maria said. Look who’s talking, was the girl’s cheeky reply. What is that supposed to mean?! Maria said, tensing up. Ask Ofi what it means, the girl hissed at her, and stayed on the banister. Maria looked over at Ofir. My trips to the checkpoints are my private business, she said, trying to contain her disappointment, I don’t understand why you had to talk to her about it. Because I don’t think it’s your private business, Ofir replied, without raising his voice even slightly.

And she answered him. And spoke about Lana, saying that this was her way of missing her.

And he didn’t answer her. And tried to touch her hand. But she moved it away, though not roughly.

They both got up to take the girl off the banister and bring her back to the table. And all that time, despite the angry, tense words of all three, you could sense how close they were. Intertwined. I’ve never had anything like that, I thought, and continued to eat my rice-and-lentils à la Copenhagen, and tell them about the articles I was translating, and about the latest, condensed news of Amichai and Churchill, but inside, the envy was blazing. Scorching. I envied the fruit salad that was served for dessert (a single guy would never make fruit salad for himself). I envied the fact that they didn’t have cable (that’s the way to live!). I envied the silence that filled the room after we stood up from the table and reclined on the cushions in the living room (a comfortable silence, as if they hadn’t had a bitter argument a moment earlier). And I even envied the fact that they talked about the problems they were having with the clinic.

They said that since the second Intifada had begun, people were hesitant about spending money on luxuries, and alternative therapy — there was no denying it — was still considered a luxury in Israel.

And I thought, how much they care about that clinic of theirs. How much it means to them. And how I had nothing like that in my life. Nothing that really means anything to me.

Ofir said that, the way it looked now, if the number of clients continued to dwindle, he’d have to go back to working in advertising at least for a short time, because there were bills to pay. But that didn’t scare him because a lot of water had flowed in the Ganges since his breakdown, and this time he’d be coming from a totally different place.

And Maria took his hand in hers and added, this time, you won’t be alone with it. This time you’ll have me.

I looked at them and thought, it’s love, stupid. It’s her love that changed him. Not those spiritual clichés, not the flapping sharwal and not the swaying hammock. It’s her. Maria. She calmed him down. Family-ised him. Hugged him so hard that he had no choice but to stop moving in her embrace. Caressed him so much that lately he even stops shrinking in alarm when a hand accidentally nears his face.

How about sleeping over tonight, Maria suggested and rubbed Ofir’s stomach, as if he were the pregnant one.

Yes, Uncle Yuval! Yes! her daughter said happily. And we’ll play Trivial Pursuit!!! (The girl was a world-champion player. Most grown-ups didn’t dare to play with her because they were afraid they’d lose, but I had collected enough marginal information through my translations to give her a fight.)

I’d love to stay, sweetie, but I’m going out tonight, I lied.

A new girl? Ofir asked casually.

Yes, I lied again.

That’s great, Maria said, happy for me. I think you deserve it. You deserve love. She said it warmly, and her eyes looked at me with warmth, but it made me cold. There was nothing patronising about the way she spoke, but I felt as if she were patronising me. That they both were being slightly, almost imperceptibly condescending. The natural way they rested in each other’s arms. The murmuring of the sea coming through the window. The gentle, caressing breeze. The thick, intoxicating smell of incense that blended with the light scent wafting from the shelf of Himalaya brand shampoos and creams. Damn it, two years had passed since they’d come back from India, how did they still have so much left? And why did they keep it in the living room and not in the bathroom? What was it, furniture?

I couldn’t stand it any more. I felt an intense need to see the city again. To hear the honking horns again. And the bulldozers. And the groaning buses. To sweat in the humid air. To stop at the shop for an ice lolly. To see people walking their dogs as if they were their spouses. Stroking them. Talking to them. To see people walk slowly, earnestly out of a cinema. To feel the tumult of the city overwhelm me, slowly silencing the tumult inside me.

Thanks for the invitation, the meal was great, I said, and stood up to leave. Maria and the girl gave me long hugs, and Ofir insisted on walking me to the car.

Hey, is everything OK with you? he asked on the way.

What … Yes … Why do you ask? I stammered.

Your body … he said, putting his hand on my back, between my shoulders.

What about my body? I asked, shaking him off.

Nothing, it’s just that you seem … But if you say everything’s OK, then …

Everything’s fine, I said, putting an end to the conversation.

But nothing was fine. After the Havatzelet junction, at the spot where you first see the glittering lights of the metropolis, I pretended to be relieved. Look, I thought, trying to convince myself, you’re going back to the city. Its pulsing life will recharge you.

But near Herzliya, the morose thoughts took over again. All your friends have finished the plaster stage with a sense of purpose, and you’re the only one still wallowing around in doubt. An exciting new time in their lives is about to begin, and your train is still stuck in the station. Soon they’ll be talking about nappies and nurseries, and what will you be talking about? A scientific article on parenthood that you translated?

And anyway, it’s over. You have to admit the truth: the group’s golden age has ended. For fourteen years, that quartet was the whole, entire world. Earth, fire, water and wind (and if you add Shahar Cohen, then we had ether too, the fifth, elusive, divine element that Aristotle talks about). But that’s over. Friends come and go, and women remain. Anyway, Ya’ara might be right and the world has changed and there’s no longer room for groups of Haifa guys like us. Perhaps everyone has become impatient and inattentive and horribly self-interested, and even the Chameleons announced this week that they’re splitting up, and from now on, each member of the band ‘will focus on personal projects he is interested in promoting’, and exactly the same thing is happening to us, and if it hasn’t happened yet, it will soon: each of them will be in his home with his love and his children and the personal-project-he-is-interested-in-promoting, and I’ll be in my flat, without love, without children, without a project, and I’ll end up as a kind of eternal Uncle Yuval you invite to parties out of politeness.

My flat looked small and ugly when I walked into it that night. All the little defects glared out at me: the old Formica cabinets in the kitchen. The yellow stain in the toilet. The too-small windows. The broken shutters. Those lying photos of my friends hanging all over the walls. The photo from the Chameleons performance. The photo from Amichai’s birthday. The photo from the Sinai. All lies. Because in reality, that Chameleons performance was terrible. They sang their old songs indifferently, and their new stuff was completely mind-numbing. And on Amichai’s birthday, he and Ofir had a long argument about some stupid thing, and the whole atmosphere was ruined. And that trip to the Sinai? On the trip to the Sinai, you could sense that we were on the beginning of a downward path. I can’t remember a single genuine conversation we had on that trip. Everything was already coated with a thin layer of estrangement. And that’s been the direction ever since.

The photos drove me to the bedroom. Suddenly, it also looked small. Suffocating. Reeking of loneliness. I went over to the wardrobe and pushed aside two piles of folded shirts to reach it. I held it in my hands. A plain red sock with a yellow stripe around the top. There was nothing special about that sock except for the fact that it had been Ya’ara’s, but that alone had been enough for me the last few years. Every time I felt that my life was empty and everything that happened to me was merely a hollow echo, I would go to the wardrobe, find it and once again be filled with hope that one day Ya’ara would come back to me and put on that sock, in this room, for me, the hope, no matter how unfounded, that had managed to keep me from falling into the black pit of total despair, for if there was even the smallest chance she might come back, then there was a reason to shave, a reason to go to sleep, a reason to get up in the morning, a reason to translate another article. And another article. And another article.

I touched the fine, feminine cloth. Crushed it between my fingers.

And felt nothing.

*

One night, on our big trip, Churchill and I got lost on a small Indian island in the middle of Lake Titicaca. We wanted to see the sunset from the highest hill on the island and ignored the rather basic principle that with the sunset comes darkness. On that island, whose name I’ve forgotten, there was no electricity and we didn’t have a torch, and in the dark, our hosts’ house looked like all the others. Blinded and a bit worried, we walked down the hill and began searching for the house in the darkness. We stumbled on hidden furrows, fell into covered pits. By mistake, we reached the lake shore. And went back. We knocked on doors, but no one answered. Slowly, we began to fear that we were imagining everything — that island, the group of travellers we’d come there with, our hosts — and perhaps we were really on a fake tourist island whose inhabitants left it every night.

And then — as we were about to give up hope and Churchill said in alarm, the dark is touching me, I swear, Bro, the dark is touching me right this minute — a clear, continuous sound split the darkness. The sound of a saxophone.

Our hosts didn’t have a saxophone, so we actually had no reason to walk in the direction the music was coming from, but that’s exactly what we did, because in the total darkness of that night, we had no other point of reference, and because everyone, of course, needs a saxophone to walk towards. Even if the playing is shaky. Even if it’s occasionally off-key. A person walks towards the saxophone because he knows that otherwise he might surrender to the darkness.

(The saxophone player turned out to be a hugely tall Indian who was playing for three drunk friends from a student’s music book written in Spanish. And at the end of the concert, he led us easily to our hosts’ house.)

*

Ya’ara had been my saxophone over the years that had passed since the last World Cup. I had walked in her direction again and again, every time it grew dark. The hope that she would come back to me played inside all the time. Quietly, but constantly.

Now the playing was silenced.

And I was left in darkness.

*

It’s hard to describe what happened to me over the next few weeks.

It was as if there was less of me every day.

It was as if the shutters covering the windows of the chambers of my heart had broken. And couldn’t be opened.

It was as if I was burning up from the inside. But with a very cold flame, like the kind fireworks make.

It was more like smog than fog.

It was as if my bed were sleeping in me and not I in the bed.

It was like lead weights. Iron chains. A kibbutz at twelve noon. The dead letter office. Plastic flowers.

OK, enough of those similes — they’re just another way of evading the truth. Of posturing. Faking. How comfortable to translate everything into lively, picturesque images when, in fact, it was as if only the image remained and the actual thing being described was gone.

I slept a great deal during those weeks. And when I wasn’t sleeping, I wanted to sleep.

I couldn’t translate anything. Simple sentences suddenly seemed impossible to decipher. Clients called to ask what was happening. I told them there’d be a slight delay. Very slight.

I said to myself that I’d been waiting for a fall like this for years, for years I’d been fighting gravity, and perhaps once I should simply let myself fall.

Clients called again a week later and asked what was happening.

I apologised. The translation wasn’t ready yet.

Clients left.

Gila from the bank called, said we had to meet. I thought it might be amusing to call her and talk to her about real things, about the huge hole that had opened in my body, for example, or about futility. The futility of everything.

That was my last amusing thought.

Then I completely lost my sense of humour. I lost the crucial ability to look at my life objectively and laugh at it.

I was obsessed with the thought that everything happening to me now was delayed punishment for the sins I had committed in Nablus during the 1990 World Cup. A direct result of the old Arab woman’s curse. Proof that you can never truly rub out the stains of the past, only blur them, and that sins are like a virus, waiting for the moment you’re weak to attack and demand its pound of flesh.

I knew that it was all a bit weird, but I couldn’t get those thoughts out of my mind. So I disconnected the phone and stopped shaving and spent hours staring at direct broadcasts of the Australian Open golf tournament. I set up a mini-golf course in my living room. Instead of a golf ball — a ping-pong ball. Instead of a club — a squeegee mop. Instead of a hole — a soup bowl. My sense of taste became blunted. Spaghetti had the same taste as rice. Oranges had the same taste as apples. And it took five teaspoons of sugar to sweeten my coffee.

I think I started to worry the minute I noticed that my sense of taste was impaired. The minute that the line between body and soul is crossed like that, I thought, I won’t be able to stop it any more.

I told myself that I had to do something before my other senses began to betray me as well.

I called a psychologist that one of my clients had recommended, but as soon as I heard her voice, I hung up.

I knew exactly what would happen: whatever I said, she’d connect it to my relationship with my parents. And even if I protested, even if I claimed that she was forcing me to fit into her theories, she would hint that my protest was not actually directed against her, but against my parents. And besides, I still didn’t have an answer to the question of whether people, myself included, are capable of changing. And if they are, how? And before you pay 350 shekels an hour, you should have answers to those questions, right?

So I called Hani. We hadn’t spoken for more than a year, but it suddenly seemed to be the only thing left to do. I called the number I had, and a recorded message gave me her new number. And when I called the new number, a recorded message referred me to a third number. From one announcement to the next, my desire for her intensified. I remembered her honey hair. And the sneezing that shook her body right after she had an orgasm. And the time she danced in front of me, so happy, in the Coliseum. The only reason it didn’t work out between us was the shadow that Ya’ara cast over everything. And now that I’d finally thrown that red sock with the yellow stripe into the rubbish bin, who knows, perhaps we had a chance.

How are you? her voice asked, and I thought that it was a good sign that she still recognised my number on her display.

I, … ah … so-so. And you?

Thank God, she said. My son was born last month.

Wow … a son? A boy? Congratulations.

Yes, it is a great joy to us. My parents are thrilled too. It’s their first grandchild.

Your parents? Don’t tell me you went back to Bnei Brak?

Of course I did. You can’t live without family. Without roots. And this is where my family is. You know, I’m glad you called. I’ve … wanted to call you for a long time to thank you.

Thank me? For what?

It’s just that … you were so awful to me … and after you there was someone else who treated me the same way, and … What happened to me with both of you made me think that maybe all that secularism I wanted so much … When I got close to it … it was empty. Sad.

Sad?

It’s sad to always wonder if people are telling you the truth. Sad to have a relationship when the possibility of breaking up is hovering over it from the minute it begins. How can you devote yourself to someone that way? With Jacob …

Jacob?

My husband. From the first time we met, I knew he was serious about me. And if he was, then I could love him without being afraid. And I want you to know that he’s from Boston. He has an open mind. He isn’t frightened by questions the way my parents are. And he doesn’t think that a woman is a defective creature. You see, I did manage to take something from the two years I spent in the secular world. But it’s hard to live without God. Without a way of life. Do you understand?

It’s like living without a saxophone.

What?

Never mind. Go on.

Look, sooner or later I would have discovered all of this, but I think that you … brought me closer to redemption, as we say in our world. So thank you and … come and visit sometime. Really.

It sounds like you’re all very busy.

In the middle of the week, yes. But at the weekends, you’re more than welcome. Spend the Sabbath with us. Sing the Sabbath songs with us. Eat well. Rest. And maybe, with the doing of the deeds, you will grow to love them.

What do you mean? You want to make me re …

No … Of course not … Don’t be alarmed. I only meant that you’d have the chance to cleanse your soul. It sounds to me like you need it.

Yes, I thought, I need it. But not with the help of faith. Jewish culture might be in my blood, and the Bible might underlie every word I say in Hebrew, but faith, unfortunately, is not an option. God cannot save me when I’m at my lowest. Like Soren Kierkegaard, I’d like to wake up one morning and discover that during the night I had been filled with boundless, unconditional love for God. And perhaps I really could be filled with such love for God if I had grown up in the right home. But my parents planted in me a deep, secular suspicion of all things religious. And even if that suspicion was unjustified, I was no longer able to uproot it from inside me.

I’ll come over sometime, I said.

Wonderful, Hani said. There was no emotion in that ‘wonderful’ of hers. There had been no emotion in her voice during our entire conversation. Listen, she said, ending the conversation, I have to feed Benjamin now, so …

Bye, I said in an effort to save my self-respect and have the last word.

*

That’s just like you, I said to myself after hanging up the phone: have a whole relationship with a girl without including her in it, nurture the thought that one day, when you want her, she’ll want you back. And never bother to find out what reality has to say about it. You got what’s coming to you, I said, flogging myself. But not even the lashes of the whip managed to hurt me. Make me feel something. The darkness engulfed me in the days that followed. Every small action — going to the toilet, pouring a glass of water, turning off the TV — seemed like a huge boulder I had to roll up a mountain. Even though I was tempted, I didn’t call my friends because I had the feeling that I had to climb out of that hole myself. Bullshit. That’s my pride speaking in retrospect. I didn’t call my friends because I didn’t want them to see me like that. No, even that’s cover for the truth. I didn’t call my friends because, in a way that’s hard to explain, I’m a solitary person. A solitary person who has a lot of friends. A solitary person who learned how to function in the world as if he were sociable, but when he’s in pain, always withdraws to his original position. And perhaps that’s also a lie. In any case, I knew that I had to do something to get myself out of the mess I was in, but I was too tired to do it, or to think of anything. Actually, that isn’t accurate either. I’m putting a nice face on things again. Two extreme solutions did occur to me at the time, and I rejected them both out of hand. The first idea was to take mood-altering drugs. Clients had told me that there are great new drugs now that have no side effects, that that’s what helped them finish their degree. But, considering my tendency to become addicted, I was afraid that the minute I started taking them, I wouldn’t be able to stop. The second idea that occurred to me, and not for the first time, was to change my sexual orientation — to admit that the whole business with girls was too much for me and I always ended up lonely, so I would try homosexual relation ships. After all, I’ve always got along with men. So perhaps that’s a sign?

There was only one small problem with that idea: I’d never been attracted to men (except for one erection I had during a ping-pong game with Shahar Cohen, a single, random erection, that I am willing to admit only in parenthesis).

No, I thought, pulling myself together, you need a saxophone. Something you can move towards. But what, damn it?! What?

*

I tried to go back to that bloody, unfinished thesis of mine. Perhaps there, I’d find a melody of meaning. The last philosopher I’d begun writing about, and stopped in the middle, was Martin Heidegger. In 1927, Heidegger published part one of his book, Being and Time, but the second part of that book never appeared, and Heidegger’s students claim that it was because of die Kehre, the change that occurred in his thinking. Beginning in the 1930s, he stopped analysing structures of acting, the structure of anxiety, perhaps under the influence of thinkers from the Far East he had been exposed to, and began to speak of contemplation, inner observation and openness to experience. Philosophy, he claimed, must return to the openness that characterised the pre-Socratic philosophers and wean itself of the desire to impose itself on things by force.

That was all well and good, but during the years he spoke about openness to experiences and how much he missed the simplicity of country life, Heidegger joined the Nazi Party. When he was the Nazi rector of the University of Freiburg, all democratic policies in the University were cancelled, three public book burnings were held and his former teacher, Edmund Husserl, was denied access to the library only because he was a Jew. In hearings held after the war, Heidegger denounced his actions during the Nazi period, but the French occupation government did not allow him to take a teaching position, claiming that his influence on students might be destructive.

*

I went over the dates again, perhaps I’d been mistaken. Perhaps not. All of Heidegger’s texts that spoke about openness to experience and deplored ‘efficiency for the sake of efficiency’, which characterises modern society, actually were written when he was a Nazi (he remained a member of that too-efficient movement to the last day of the Second World War).

Tell me please, Mr Heidegger — I’d ask him if I could — exactly what experiences were you referring to when you wrote about experiences we should be open to? Kristallnacht?

Again, like the last time I tried to touch Heidegger, I had an overwhelming sense that I had to stop working on my thesis. If I couldn’t understand the metamorphosis of one philosopher, how could I put together a thesis that would include the metamorphoses of all of them? Even worse: perhaps Heidegger’s case proved that all my attempts to connect philosophers’ lives with their views were fundamentally mistaken, and I had to separate their private lives and their philosophical thought into two parallel lines that never meet? Or, in other words, to throw that fucking thesis into the rubbish bin. And that whole academic language too. There’s something depressing about it. Watery. Yes, the idea suddenly overcame me with devastating force, that thesis is killing me, everything is the fault of that thesis! All that research on people who changed keeps me from moving forward. Keeps me from breaking out of the corral, keeps me from finding a normal profession. Or love.

Out of despair, I deleted the file with my entire thesis from my computer.

Then I inserted the back-up disc and deleted it from there too.

I thought I’d feel enormously liberated. That the second I pressed the delete key, a wave of hope for a new beginning would wash over me.

For the first few seconds, I felt nothing. And right after that, I had a horrible anxiety attack.

(I should have known that would happen. That’s how it always is with me: only when I just lose something, do I start to really miss it.)

What have I done?! What have I done?! I shouted and turned the place upside down trying to find another disc on which I once saved part of the text. Or maybe not. I wasn’t sure. In the end, I found a dusty disc, but I didn’t have the courage to insert it into the computer and find out that it didn’t have the file with my thesis.

So I ran away. I went into the city to look for a saxophone, anything not to wither away at home, not to go crazy, but every place I went to was being frantically, feverishly renovated. The nearby avenue had been turned inside out. All the hidden ugliness, usually covered over with concrete and cement, was now exposed. I tried to make my way among the heavy sacks of sand, piles of bricks and the iron rods that were sticking up from the ground. Time sweated over me, the noise of drills deafened my thoughts, and I accidentally kicked a bucket of whitewash. A second later, I almost fell into one of the open pits that workers’ heads were popping out of. Hey, zombie, watch where you’re going, they shouted. I’ve hated the word zombie ever since the commander of Training Base One used it during the hearing to kick me out. But I didn’t answer them. I avoided another pit and with a great deal of difficulty reached the corner shop. I bought iced coffee and sat down on a bench to drink it, but it tasted like orange juice. A couple walked past me with their arms around each other, and the girl suddenly gave me a searching, sideways glance. It’s unbelievable, I thought. Even the couples in this city are always on the prowl. How can you find love that way? I went back to the shop and bought a tuna sandwich which, based on the picture on the menu, should have been tasty. But it had no taste at all. The deterioration of my sense of taste was freaking me out. There was something too symbolic about it. Someone stopped next to me with a squeal of brakes and asked: are you coming out of this parking space? And I thought he asked: are you going out of your mind? Someone with a drill stood next to me and started drilling, sending up a huge amount of dust. Huge amounts of dust were rising from everywhere I went that day in Tel Aviv. The dust entered my lungs with every step I took until I began to feel an attack coming on. The symptoms were familiar to me: a tingling in my nostrils, a growing itch between my chin and my throat.

I skulked back home and didn’t have the guts to go out again over the next few weeks.

Mornings were the hardest. I lay in bed like a corpse, limp but not relaxed. Dulled but not hurting. My thoughts kept unravelling at the edges and I couldn’t complete any of them. I was extinguished like a memorial candle whose wax is dripping, and yet everything was infused with the aura of a stage play. There was someone inside me watching the melodrama of it all from the wings.

Little things drove me crazy. Things were in the wrong places at home. One morning I moved a salt shaker five times, and in the end returned it to its original place in the kitchen. And another morning I took apart the shelf where the loudspeakers were and put it up near the door. Over and over again, I listened to a Chameleons CD that had come out two years ago (we didn’t know then that it would be their last). A shitty album, I’d said to Churchill when I finished listening to it the first time, and buried it under a pile, determined never to listen to it again. And here I was now, unable to listen to anything but muted, morose drums and faint, whining guitars. Introverted music alien to itself, weary, monotonous melodies that never took off, even at the chorus, and the lyrics that I hadn’t understood then, two years ago, now felt as if I’d written them myself –

Sleep without a sheet

Alone in my bed.

They’re renovating the street

But I’ll be gone

Before it’s done

Or:

The countdown’s over

And nothing took place

After zero comes the silence

After zero comes the silence

Of empty space

*

The Chameleons’ tired melodies rocked me slowly, defeating me into a too-early, sweaty noontime nap that I woke from in a panic, my heart pounding rapidly as I tried to grab onto the tail of the nightmare that had attacked me while I slept. Once it was a car I was driving that suddenly had no brake pedal, only the accelerator, and once it was Ilana, who wanted, demanded, that I kiss her cracked, dead lips. Once it was the handcuffed boy from Nablus limping towards me, a club in his hand, and once it was Shahar Cohen who was shooting ping-pong balls at me through a gun, and when I couldn’t catch them, he said contemptuously, ‘How do you expect to save money like that, man?’

After years, the recurrent nightmare of my childhood returned: I’m a little boy sitting on the beach in Haifa with my mother and father, building sandcastles, when suddenly a huge wave the height of a four-story building comes rushing towards us. We get up and start running away from it, but the wave pursues us up Mount Carmel, engulfing buildings and cars and other people on the way, but not us, because we manage to race all the way to the Muchraka which, for some reason, was called Masada, and we stood there and watched the huge wave finally retreat into the sea like all the other waves.

The water-pursuing-me feeling was so palpable that every time I woke up from that dream, I needed a few seconds of open eyes to be convinced that it wasn’t really happening. Every morning I would promise myself not to fall asleep in the afternoon so that I wouldn’t have one of those nightmares, but every day I’d give in to the temptation to lie down on the sofa ‘just for a minute’ to listen to ‘only three songs’ from the Chameleons’ CD.

A light breeze would come through the window in the afternoon, and that would get me off the sofa and energise me a bit. But that renewed energy had something even more frightening in it: the whole time I was comatose, I wasn’t a danger to myself, but the minute I began to move around the room, there was always the chance that my legs would take me to the window. To the window ledge.

I had gone through a dark period like that when I came back from the long trip with Churchill. I couldn’t fall asleep at night then either and used to snatch a few hours of nightmare-ridden afternoon sleep. Then too, things seemed to be in the wrong place and I thought that the parts of my body weren’t working properly. But that had been a shorter period — about a week — and at no time did it go as far as the window ledge.

I was young then. After the trip. And still had hope that things would change. That I would change.

Eight years had passed, and there I was, an old man of thirty-one. I’d completed the plaster years Ilana had spoken about and the plaster hadn’t set and I hadn’t found a cause, and even my friends, who had once been the reason and the result and the ground and gravity — even they were already moving away from me, each towards his own star. I assumed they still loved me, cared about me, but their feelings seemed faint, like an alarm clock ringing in another house. And my parents — I’d spent ten years trying to get away from them, and I’d done it so well that now they were too far away to help me, and even if I tried, what could possibly happen? My father would tell me, again, how good I used to be in maths, and wonder, again, why, for heaven’s sake, I hadn’t continued in that direction, and my mother — she’s a wonderful person, but ever since she left the printing house and signed up for an Arabic course because ‘that is the space we live in’, and for a singles group because ‘why did she have to miss out on meeting interesting people just because she was married’, and for a course for tour guides because ‘someone has to show the world the beauties of Haifa’ — ever since this late blooming had begun, her optimism, which had been quiet and pleasant, had turned into something quite stormy, and a few days ago, she left me a message that she’s at a Ministry of Tourism course at Kibbutz Shefayim, and if I want, I can pop by in the evening, but I didn’t call her back because I could picture us sitting together in the kibbutz dining hall that had been transformed into a restaurant, she with that happy moon face of hers and me with my limp paleness, and I try to explain to her what I’m going through, and she nods politely, supposedly listening, but at the first opportunity, she changes the subject and tells me that it’s not at all certain that Harry is Charles’s son, and that the hottest conspiracy theory in London now is that Diana wasn’t killed in the accident, but was murdered by assassins from British intelligence.

*

And anyway, if I were living in the time of the Second Aliyah, or during the War of Attrition, when Late Summer Blues takes place, then I could join something that was nourished by a great, important cause, or alternatively, I could be like Aara’le from the movie and write slogans against the great cause. But now? There was no one and nothing to live for (and that’s a lie too. I don’t have Aara’le’s daring, and even if I lived in an important period of time, I would probably find reasons to question its values, to observe the action from the sidelines and then complain that I had no purpose in life).

*

One of the times that I was a step away from giving up — I picked up a pen and wrote a list of the small things, not the big ones, that are still worth living for.

It took a long time, and while I was doing it, doubt was gnawing away at me — why bother with a list? Words and more words –

But in the end, the pen started moving:

Apricots — during the very short season (about two days) when they’re not too hard and not too soft.

The CD of collected Chameleon songs that would come out after they split (specifically, the moment I open the wrapper at home, and take out the booklet with the lyrics and read them).

A visit to Sydney, Australia (I had never been, but people who had said it was fantastic).

The first days of summer at university (a female hand tucking a short skirt behind her knees).

To live outside the city and see if it helps my asthma.

The fact that I still haven’t had the chance to do it with two sisters at the same time (or to do it in a respectable public place like, let’s say, the Israel Museum).

The fact that perhaps once, when we’re very old, there will be peace.

Ah, yes. Also the fact that the next World Cup is really close.

A small smile unwound in me when I added the World Cup to the list. Somehow, of all the things I’d written, that was the one to slip between my dry ribs and strum on the string. Suddenly I thought it really would be a shame to leave before the World Cup, to miss the great little dances the African players do after scoring a goal, not to see the bloody Germans go home in defeat after the semi-final, and not to hear the English fans chanting for their team, and the batucada in the Brazilian stands, and the analysts’ stupid predictions, and the reports on the suspension of the civil war in Togo, or Ethiopia, or anywhere else but the Middle East, for the month of the matches. And the yellow cards, the red cards and the close-ups of the players’ faces when they get a red one, and the black-and-white archive clips of England’s crossbar goal in the ’66 World Cup, and Spiegler’s goal in ’70, and the hypnotic white ball moving from foot to foot to foot, and the fans doing the Mexican wave in the stadium stands, and our improvised wave in Amichai’s living room, and the slight nausea you feel after you’ve watched three terrible football matches in one day, and the elation pulsing inside you after you’ve seen a truly great match, the kind that will go down in your own private history, and the joy of knowing that for a month, you can devote most of your time to something that has no other purpose than to give you pleasure, and that wonderful internal contradiction in football between the enormous effort of the coaches to prepare the game and the natural randomness that suddenly bursts from the players’ feet despite themselves, happily sabotaging all the predictions, and that moment when the hypnotic white ball lands in the bottom of the net and the scoring player breaks into a run, shaking off everyone who dashes over to hug him, and he has no idea where he’s racing off to, what his final destination is, but he is simply so damn happy that he has to do something with his body, has to take off his shirt, skip past the billboards, climb onto the fence, hug the coach, get down on his knees in thanks –

*

True, I admitted to myself, everything is very bland now. And far from being happy. But perhaps I could drag myself through another few months, till the World Cup, and climb onto the window ledge only after the final match?

The question of how many months there were till the World Cup — exactly how many months would I have to carry on — suddenly bothered me a great deal.

For the first time in an age, I reconnected the phone and called Amichai.

Tell me, Bro, I asked in a rusty voice, when does the World Cup start?

Wait just a minute, he protested. What’s happening with you? I left you loads of messages. There’s going to be an absolutely final performance of the Chameleons and we thought we’d all go together. Where did you disappear to?

I’ll tell you in a minute, I lied. Just tell me first when the World Cup is. It’s important.

It usually starts in June and ends in July, doesn’t it?

Another nine months, I calculated quickly. That’s a lot, but not eternity. Perhaps it was still worth waiting.

You know, Amichai said, I still have the World Cup wishes we wrote.

What wishes?

The ones we wrote at the last World Cup, don’t you remember? We each wrote on a slip of paper where we thought we’d be in another four years. Where we wanted to be.

And you kept them?

Yes, they’re here. In a shoebox. I haven’t touched them since then, but a while ago, I was taking some of Ilana’s things out of the back of the wardrobe and saw that they were still there. Four nicely folded slips of paper. We’ll unfold them during the final, right?

Sure, sure we’ll unfold them. That should be really amazing.

Wow, so many things have happened since then, Amichai said, it’s hard to believe that less than four years have passed.

I didn’t say anything. Lots of things really had happened to him and the others, I thought, but to me?

It’s a good thing we have the World Cup, I finally said. That way, time doesn’t turn into a big lump and you can stop every four years and see what’s changed.

You said the same thing then.

What?

That remark about time … that it’s a big lump.

I said something like that?

Who else but you can philosophise that way?

*

As I recreate that fateful phone conversation with Amichai, it seems to me that the light bulb didn’t flash right away. It took another few minutes for the current to reach the wires.

Meanwhile, Amichai talked about other things. And at some point, between his story about what Nimrod had done on a family trip to the Judean Desert — he’d climbed onto his lap and asked him, Daddy, where’s your smile? — and the report on two female interns in the legal branch of the NPO who had complained to him the day before that Churchill was always hitting on them — it lit up.

Like a spectacle. Suddenly I saw it before my eyes: the Bahai Gardens.

I cut the conversation short despite Amichai’s protests (but you haven’t told me anything about yourself yet! You always do that! It’s not right!), and after I’d put the phone down, I picked up a sheet of paper and wrote down our names.

Next to each friend’s name, I wrote the wish he’d read out at the World Cup four years ago.

And I began to draw lines.

Churchill was ousted from the case before he’d been able to fulfil his wish ‘to be involved in something that would bring about true social change’, but on the other hand, he’d been granted my wish: to be with Ya’ara.

Amichai hadn’t fulfilled his wish to open a clinic for alternative treatment, but he’d founded the Our Right NPO, thus fulfilling Churchill’s wish to be involved in something that would bring about true social change.

Ofir didn’t publish a book of short stories, neither in Hebrew nor in ancient Danish, but the natural knowledge, stronger than any piece of paper, the same knowledge that makes an olive tree seedling turn in an olive tree and not anything else, led him to fulfil Amichai’s wish and open a clinic for alternative treatment.

I stopped for a moment and looked at the page.

Only one line remained to be drawn. Only one line separated the four of us from an amazing, almost Bahai-like symmetry in which none of us had fulfilled our own wish from the last World Cup, but each had fulfilled one wish to the right of his own, his friend’s wish. For that last line to be drawn and the symmetry to be perfect, I had to fulfil Ofir’s wish: to write a book.

I imagined the end of the 2002 World Cup, and Amichai taking the papers out of the shoebox, and each one of us taking his. Then Amichai unfolds his and reads his wishes and laughs in embarrassment. And after him, Churchill, who stammers a bit when he reads the wish about Keren. Right after that, to blunt the effect of his words, he urges Ofir, come on, Bro, your turn. And Ofir hands Maria their baby boy (girl?) so his hands will be free, unfolds it and reads, and the first glint of suspicion, of understanding, shines in Churchill’s eyes, but it isn’t until I read my three Ya’ara wishes that he begins to notice the shifts I see in front of me now, and for a few seconds, you can see the lines I’ve just drawn on the page being drawn in his mind’s eye, until the full beauty of the entire Bahai garden fills his head, and he taps me on the shoulder and says, man, if you went and wrote a book, we’d have one hell of a situation here. And while he explains to Ofir and Amichai what he means, and what a waste it is that I’m the only who hasn’t fulfilled my part in the symmetry, I bend over my briefcase in slow motion, and take out the book I’ve written secretly over the last nine months.

*

Desire flared in me at that moment: to create the focal point, the one without which there is no symmetry, to do my part, to complete the picture, to add the missing instrument so that our quartet could play the harmonic music that the guide in the Bahai garden had spoken of. Everything depends on me, I thought with awakening enthusiasm. If I don’t do anything, it will all be pointless, like a messy room in a hostel, but if I dare to write the book that Ofir dreamed of, that would be so symmetrical, so beautiful, like an elegant philosophic proof, like an exact translation of a sentence from English into Hebrew. Like a neat room. The kind I love.

For a few moments, I felt that finally, I had a purpose. Finally something inside me really wanted.

(And perhaps to tell it in a different, more genuine way: for several moments, I saw an opportunity to grab onto something before I was shot down once and for all. Before I gave up. I wasn’t sure it would really help. I wasn’t sure I hadn’t already reached the point of no return. But for several moments, I thought that perhaps —)

*

But at the very end of those lovely moments stood my father, holding a bucket of cold water. Freezing water.

Write a book? Are you serious? He tilted the bucket over my head. Who are you to write a book?

¹ While in all other places in the book, Mr Freed’s descriptions, even if they are inaccurate, are based on a kernel of truth, here, in this short paragraph, he so distorts reality that even I, as editor and friend, find it difficult to accept. It was not we who withdrew into our own private cocoon during that period, but he himself. My spouse and I invited him to our home many times and he never bothered to respond to our invitations. I have no idea why Mr Freed chose to paint a picture in which his friends abandoned him. Perhaps in order to justify his own escape into writing a book and making us its protagonists without informing any of us. Perhaps for the pleasure latent in self-pity of this kind. And perhaps every narrator is always limited to his own point of view. After all, if each of us, his friends, had been asked to tell the story of the last four years, four different stories would certainly have emerged, and rightly so. Be that as it may, in this case, the bare facts do not fit with Mr Freed’s claims. Not for a moment did my spouse and I stop taking an interest in what he was doing, in his mood and the condition of his asthma. Not for a moment did we stop being grateful to him for the large gifts he gave to us both, for the refuge and consolation and true friendship. Yet despite all of the above, Mr Freed did indeed feel that we had abandoned him, and I can only apologise to him for that (and owing to his present condition, he is unable to accept or reject my verbal apology, so I am offering it here, in writing). (Y.A.)