“Ow! Oh, oh!” Manu groans. “Oh, God! I never hurt so much in my life… ohhh… I’m gonna die.”
“Forgive me. I didn’t know what else to do,” Juliette stammers out.
“I’m gonna go to the hospital, ow, oh, oh.”
Then Juliette sets the glass of water down on the low table and slides her hand slowly up his thigh to the fly and methodically unbuttons it. “Let me do this,” she whispers, slipping her hand delicately inside his pants. Little by little Manu relaxes, the pain goes away through her magical caress, and Juliette diligently sucks him to calm it completely. Then she gets up.
“There, Manu, I hope we’re even now.”
“I’m so sorry, Juliette, I swear I wasn’t faking and then—”
“And then nothing,” she cuts him off. “I’m going to pack my things, and you’re going to forget what happened. OK?”
“Do take a pair of sheets,” Manu says, with some embarrassment, as he closes his pants.
“Thanks. It’s still OK for me to take Jean-Pierre with me, right?”
“Of course, of course, he’s your cat now.”
“Where’s Jean-Pierre?” asks Elias as he comes into Manu’s apartment the next day, wearing a cap and fatigues a little too big for him. But above all, his eyes are red, continually red. All he does since Olga left is cry. So Marcel granted him a few days off, and he wanders from café to café like a lost soul. He hasn’t returned to Levinsky Street to sleep, and he hasn’t swallowed anything, either, aside from wine and coffee. He’s visibly melting away, but he feels better on an empty stomach. He fasted so much, before.
“Jean-Pierre?” Manu says, caught off guard. “I dunno, he must be out roaming around.”
“Where the hell can he roam? You live on the fifth floor.”
“Maybe at the neighbors’? He must’ve gone by the balcony.”
“Can you check, please? I’d like to get him back. At least he won’t drop me.”
Manu does a quick round trip to the neighbors’ and comes back relieved. “Nobody home.”
CHAPTER 12
The next day, Elias gets back on the road to Gaza in another four-wheel drive, this one painted with the station’s colors—a brand-new Toyota, equipped with a fridge and a Nespresso machine. Marvelously kitted out for a road trip. On the way, he gets a call from Juliette, who wants to tell him she took his apartment on Levinsky Street, but he doesn’t answer, and she hangs up without leaving a message. That gets him into a very odd state—let’s say a certain sexual excitement—which doesn’t go very well with his suffering, because normally one drives out the other. Now, one may have driven out the other, but the other returns through the back door. It’s not that they’re in a tie inside his heart, far from it, but he wouldn’t mind going to bed with Juliette again because that affair has left him with the taste of something unfinished.
Maybe he’ll go see her when he gets back from Gaza. Hey, besides, where could she be living in Tel Aviv? It’s the first time he asks himself the question. Then Olga takes over his thoughts again, and once more, he starts crying.
He goes to the Golani unit at the Nahal Oz kibbutz to report his return and then goes to park the car at the foot of the artificial dune they built facing Gaza. After four days of storms, the sun has returned, but those torrential rains have transformed the landscape. The stony countryside has given way to an incongruous green and the dune is now a grassy hill, already dotted with poppies.
A message from Marcel arrives right away, asking for a story on the collapse of Hamas’s tunnels in Gaza, precisely because of the bad weather. Elias calls his contact in the Shin Bet, who confirms the info. He climbs to the top of the dune with his camera and takes a few wide shots of the fence. An interview on FaceTime with the Golani Brigade unit’s commander and archival footage of the tunnels, and he’ll have enough to produce a story in a couple of minutes.
That distracts him from his torment somewhat, but he constantly wipes his eyes as he works, because his tears flow even without him noticing it. After a few shoulder shots, he sits down in the back of the four-wheel drive for the FaceTime interview, and the picture of the Golani unit’s commander appears on the screen.
“Hello, Illan. Sorry to bother you, but could you give me a few words about the collapse of the tunnels?” Elias asks in Hebrew.
“You crying, or what?” Illan says.
“No, just conjunctivitis.”
“According to our info,” the officer says, “there were a lot of cave-ins, yes, and…”
At that moment, the side door of the car swings open, and Elias feels himself being snatched up and pulled outside and thrown to the ground. Dammit, the two Bedouins—they found him! Must be the “Arab telephone”—the grapevine. Luckily, his iPhone 7 films the scene live, and the Golani commander thinks it’s a terrorist attack. He orders a jeep patrolling the sector to rush to the artificial dune. In the meantime the Bedouins work Elias over good. He manages to get away, but they catch him a hundred yards farther on and force him back to the foot of the four-wheel drive. They search him and confiscate the keys to the vehicle. One of the two then takes out a knife at the same time the army jeep surges up, saving Elias’s throat from being slit. The two guys run away, but the jeep drives off after them while Elias gets up with difficulty, bruised and swollen like at the end of a ten-round fight.
Yes, he’s had better moments in his life. It’s as if fate’s been hounding him the past few days.
He lies down with his arms stretched out on the dune and breathes in deeply to get his breath back. What luck! Incredible, even. If he’d called the Golani commander a minute later, just a minute later, he’d have been slaughtered like an animal.
The jeep comes back again with the two captured Bedouins and makes a quick stop in front of the four-wheel drive. “Hey, these must be the keys to the car. Can you come make a deposition at the end of the day?” the soldier says to him, and Elias nods as he recovers his keys.
But he feels sick over the idea of having been that lucky, and because those two guys are now in deep shit. He walks back and forth around the car, wondering if it’s a good idea to call Illan, tell him the truth, and get them released. A strong feeling of guilt is beginning to rise in him. After all, he swindled those two guys, and now they’re going to spend God knows how much time in the slammer. Caught red handed in an attempted assassination, you can get ten years, life for terrorism. Especially right in the middle of the knife intifada! He can’t stand it. On the other hand, they would have cut his throat if the jeep hadn’t gotten there on time. They wouldn’t have hesitated a second.
He calls Manu to ask for advice, while Marcel is sending him text after text to send in his story on the collapse of the tunnels as soon as possible: I programmed it for The Big Night with Danielle Godmiche, so move it!
“On the spot like that, I don’t know what to tell you,” Manu confesses. “It’s a bad business, seems to me. But the main thing is you’re still alive.”
“It’s getting seriously complicated now,” Diabolo mumbles. “If only you could cancel your subscription to idiocy, Elias! But for the moment, don’t budge! They tried to assassinate you with a knife, and that’s it. It’s a fucking terrorist attack, that’s all.”
“I don’t want you to talk about it on IBN, Diabolo. Not a word!”
“What do you think I am, a fink?”
The pain of the breakup plus solitude plus moral distress! He’s inside a cocktail of existential dramas with no exit, and his reporting on the collapse of the tunnels shows it. Elias is thinking only of Olga, and he keeps making slips of the tongue while recording the commentary: “Islamist olganization” for Hamas. He sends the story out at 6:00 p.m. and, in return, receives a new broadside of compliments from the ed-in-chief: “This is useless! It’s pathetic! You can flush it down the toilet! I have to redo your shitty commentary!” But it hardly affects him. In any case, a lot less than the dilemma that’s tormenting him. At the end of the day he drops by the Golani unit to make his deposition before going to eat in Netivot.