Around eight, she has the feeling he’s not going to come, and at nine she admits it’s all over. And of course, he’s impossible to contact. At ten she goes out and starts wandering around the Tayelet. On Friday nights, there isn’t a soul in the streets before eleven. People have dinner with their families and go out afterward. Juliette walks by only Arabs from Yafo drumming on their cars to bug everybody and because it’s the only time of the week when they can think the seaside belongs to them. She dreams of a gigantic, implacable tsunami—a tsunami that would carry her off. Let’s get it over with! Her phone chimes, but it’s never Elias, just the ritual shabbat shalom from her pals in Jeru. Not even sorry. Bastard. Son of a bitch. What cruelty! She got ready for him, with an off-the-shoulder satin top and her hair styled so he would want to be with her, and instead of that he stands her up. He can go fuck himself!
She walks up toward Rothschild because among the rare bars open on Friday night, there’s the Cofix on Lilienblum Street. When people are broke and want to get smashed cheap, that’s where they go. Everything’s five shekels. Whiskey, Coke, vodka, or beer, same price. It’s full of Russians, already drunk and haggard, blue eyes with red whites, three hairs on their chins, black fingernails, still knocking it back again and again just to roll under the table grunting, and young Frenchmen without a cent, bombed for only thirty shekels. Elias might be hanging out there. But she narrowly misses him. She bumps into Yoni, her Jeru pal who eats pork with a yarmulke on his head. He informs her that Elias just left not five minutes earlier. Actually, Olga told him on the phone, “I have to talk to you, it’s urgent.” That’s why he left. But Yoni doesn’t know that. He just saw Elias jump up and disappear as if he’d been sucked out of Cofix.
Juliette goes off again, leaving behind her a wake of bitter tears and crumbs of her broken heart. At the corner of Herzl, she bumps into Manu, who resigned himself to walking over to Romy’s to pick up the bike even though it’s close to midnight, and on a Friday night there are no buses and very few taxis. At any rate, he’d needed to go by the ATM of the Bank Leumi at the corner of Yehuda Halevi Street and then maybe try to get a sherut on the corner of Allenby and Rothschild—he could ask the shared taxi to take him to Dizengoff—but in short, he didn’t get there either, and what’s more he could only take out two thousand shekels. Despite the advance he’d already given her, it’s not enough. So he’s afraid of Romy’s reaction.
“You wouldn’t have a thousand shekels to lend me till Sunday?” he asks Juliette feverishly. “Well, twelve hundred.”
“Not on me, no,” Juliette answers in a trembling voice and immediately snuggles into Manu’s arms. “He betrayed me again, that bastard!” she sobs. “I can’t take it anymore, Manu! I can’t take it!”
Always present at the most heartbreaking times of her melodrama, Manu seems to have become Juliette’s official guardian angel, her prophet Elijah. The fact that she had sucked him once changed nothing in their relationship. He will never be her lover. Her protector, yes: the most solid, safest shoulder in all Tel Aviv. That’s it. Manu hugs her affectionately, but even without thinking about sex, he gets a hard-on. It probably comes from his old job, an unconscious conditioned reflex, for he’s still extremely anxious about Romy. On tenterhooks, in fact. Not at all in the mood for sex. He is so afraid she’ll press charges!
“How much a week can you take out?” he asks Juliette, for this time his own anxiety prevails over her situation.
“Can you imagine? This morning he came to my place by mistake and just screwed me! That bastard! I’d die for him! Just to screw me!”
“Yeah, I know,” Manu says. “He came by my place afterward. We got into a real fight, if you want to know.”
Together, they go to the ATM of the Bank Leumi, and Juliette withdraws five hundred shekels for him. That’s all her weekly limit will allow. Not one cent more. At least that will make two thousand eight hundred in all, and when you take into account the advance he paid, not that far from the full amount.
“You won’t be mad if I cut out now?”
“But why’re you leaving? Stay with me, Manu. Please,” Juliette begs.
“Well then, walk with me. I’m going to try and grab a sherut for Dizengoff.”
She takes his arm, and they walk up the central thoroughfare together to Japanika Sushi at the intersection of Rothschild and Allenby, like a couple out together on Shabbat eve after the family dinner, melting into the crowd already gathering there.
“You might’ve told me Jean-Pierre was his cat,” Juliette remarks as they cross.
“I got a call from Amos Kirzenbaum, you know, darling.”
“Who’s he?” Elias asks.
“The blogger on Tag Shalom,” Olga answers.
“What about?”
“The terrorist attack on you.”
Olga is on duty this Friday night at H24, and it makes a funny impression on Elias to see her in private conversation in the deserted newsroom. They look like two survivors of a shipwreck, for when this open-space office isn’t buzzing like a hive, it makes you think of an ocean liner that’s been hastily evacuated, with its computers off, its chairs empty, and its whitish lights. But did Olga call him just about this, or because she’s starting to miss him? They’ve hardly started talking, and already there are stealthy glances and restrained gestures between them.
“You sure his name is Amos Kirzenbaum?” Elias asks.
“Well, yeah, why?”
“Because Amos Kirzenbaum is the name of the main character of my novel, and he’s also a member of a pro-Palestinian NGO.”
“That gives me the shivers,” she whispers, rubbing her arm vigorously.
“What did he want from you?” Elias asks, in a low, worried voice.
“Nothing from me. You’re the one he wanted to talk to,” she answers, crossing her legs just under his nose. “That is, he was trying to reach you, and they passed him to me.”
“Did you give him my number?”
“No, I thought I’d better ask you first,” Olga says, leaning toward him.
“And so?”
She puts her two hands on his thigh, as if they could take liberties with each other again, and looking him in the eye, she says: “Eli darling… tell me what happened with the two Bedouins. I’m on your side, you know. I love you. Trust me.”
Naturally, he can’t believe his ears, so much has he dreamed of this moment and so much did he not believe it would happen. Besides, what should he answer? The question about the Bedouins or that “I love you” dropped from the sky? All in the same sentence! And with that languorous look like on the first day. As if she’d never given him that cruel moment when she got back from Gérardmer, as if the return of affections promised by all the witch doctors in the world existed in reality.