Then Olga goes back to change. She puts on black jeans, ballet shoes, her tortoiseshell Ray-Bans, and leaves for work. She goes by the office to kiss Elias but doesn’t say a word about her date with Kirzenbaum, just that she ran into Manu at the Japanika with someone named Juliette, “super pretty.” Elias shudders. If only Manu could stop seeing his ex, dammit! But what does he see in her? You’d think he was doing it on purpose. Suddenly he asks himself, What if Manu was pretending to be crazy about Romy just to hide that he loves Juliette? A terrible theory for Elias, because that would be the end of their friendship. But it’s not impossible. After all, that girl never knew her father and the age difference between her and Manu isn’t a real obstacle. On the contrary, even. They could easily end up stirring up a Freudian stew between them.
But if Olga starts seeing her, too, that would be the last straw! As if he didn’t have enough to bug him without adding a possible friendship between Olga and his ex… since they have different schedules, with Elias ending his day when Olga’s starting hers, they agree to meet at his place on Levinsky Street around 10:00 p.m. That leaves a little time for Olga to prepare the rest of her plan. At seven, she’s back home, and at seven thirty on the dot she hears the doorbell ring. But she doesn’t answer right away. She waits until Kirzenbaum rings twice and lets a few more seconds go by before going to open the door for him. A humanitarian or not, a great moral conscience or not, he looks like a big pervert.
“Oh, it’s you!” she says, feigning surprise.
“May I point out that we had an appointment,” he replies, already vindictive but giving her a funny look, for she’s totally changed style since this morning, wearing only a little mauve satin dressing gown that goes down no farther than her butt, and black high-heeled mules she bought half an hour ago at Derech Yafo in a store that sells accessories for Ukrainian whores. It gets Kirzenbaum right away, but it also intimidates him. He sits down at the edge of the couch—prudently, you might say—while she drops down next to him with her legs crossed high and her thighs mostly bare.
“Did you bring the money?”
“Yes, yes, of course,” he answers, tapping the pocket of his dull yellow-gray-brown jacket. He takes out the wad of bills and puts it in the little space still free between her and him in the hollow of the seat. Olga takes the money and slowly counts it while he eyes her body, visibly naked under the peignoir. Sensing he’s devouring her with his eyes and he’s not attentively following the count, she intentionally makes a mistake.
“I’m only finding fifteen thousand.”
“Oh, hey! No!” he protests. “Count it again, the twenty thousand are there.”
Olga gets a kick out of recounting out loud and laying the bills on his thigh one by one, right next to his fly. By the time she reaches the seventh bill Kirzenbaum has lost count. He is well aware that he’s wrong to let himself get excited by this so-called Frenchwoman, but while he’s a man who can fight against the Occupation, there’s nothing he can do about his erections. He’d give his right arm to screw Olga. She’s putting him in a state of rut he has never known. He’s breathing hard without realizing it as he tries to quell the insurrection between his thighs.
“You’re not feeling well?” she asks naively.
“Yes, yes, why do you ask?”
“You’re puffing like a steam engine!”
“I’m fine.”
She picks up the money slowly and gets up to get the photo. “You’re really sexy!” he calls to her, with his tongue hanging out, and Olga turns around and looks him up and down for a moment, just a moment, for him to feel even more miserly, more milquetoast, more of a wet blanket than he is.
“Do you want something to drink?” she asks him then, coming back with what he’s paid for.
“Oh yes, if you have something cold.”
“A Nespresso?”
“Ah, well no, I wanted something cold, not hot… uh… and then coffee at night…”
“Yes, that’s not good, and anyway I’ve got to go now, motek.”
“So when do we see each other again?” he says as he gets up with his arms stretched out to try to grab her.
“Next week, if you have time for me,” Olga simpers, avoiding his embrace.
“Before. Before that! I’ve got to see you before, OK? I’ve got to!” he shouts, at the end of his tether. “That is, if you can.”
“Come on, don’t act like a child!”
Once she’s succeeded in getting him out of there, she can sink down on the sofa and breathe at last. A weight has fallen from her shoulders. She acted without thinking, but it’s not so easy to morph into a femme fatale when you’re a solid Savoyard woman from Chambéry who likes simple things like fondue and mountain streams. It’s still less easy because she’s managed her affair in secret, without saying a word to Elias. Just to save him. She is quite simply mad about her guy—she hadn’t foreseen that either. Her great love, you know, the man of her life. While she landed in Tel Aviv for an unpaid internship, with no other goal than to enrich the little professional experience she had, she now sees herself with a ring on her finger. What’s more, Marcel made her a salaried employee. It commits you, all that. The upward spiral of life. It’s fascinating. Everything takes off all of a sudden, and there’s no going back.
A merry-go-round of texts follows, each more lovestruck than the last. Kirzenbaum wants to see her again right away, in an hour, in a half hour, in a minute. She fingers the bills he left, reflecting on the best way to give them to the family of the two Bedouins. That’s the next stage of her plan. But above all, to discredit Kirzenbaum by getting him to publish those photos. So she goes to the trouble of answering his messages with phony romantic platitudes like “Give me another week to be all yours,” but she can’t wait for the whole thing to be over with.
The other question is to find someone to join her when she goes to the encampment near Mitzpe Ramon to hand over the twenty-five thousand shekels. She doesn’t feel up to going there alone. It can’t be Elias, of course. Why not with Manu? He probably wouldn’t refuse, but he’s too close to Elias. And he doesn’t speak Hebrew that well. Go there with her new girlfriend, Juliette—that would be perfect! Two girls are always better than a fake couple for this kind of trip. And then it would create a superstrong connection between them.
“Why d’you want her number?” asks Manu warily.
“No reason, I think she’s cool.”
“I’ll ask her first, OK?”
But Olga goes straight to Juliette at the gallery on Abarbanel Street, claiming she wants to buy a painting she saw on Facebook, and in the same breath proposes they go on a little expedition. Olga gifts Juliette a bottle of Miss Dior her mother brought back from the Duty Free at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle the last time she came to visit her. Naturally, Juliette wonders what Olga’s getting at and if buying the painting isn’t just a pretext for God-knows-what scheme. Either Olga doesn’t know she’s Elias’s ex, or this girl is the kind who likes to pal around with the exes. These things exist. But Juliette has to know and know fast, for this ambiguity is very disturbing. Hurtful, almost. If Olga knows what happened between her and Elias, and she’s acting as if nothing happened, that would be pure sadism.
However, Juliette accepts the bottle of Miss Dior and even gives Olga a kiss to thank her.
“What’re you doing this Shabbat, Ju?” Olga asks her, already at the nickname stage.
“Nothing special, probably sleep late and then the beach.”
“Do you feel like going to Mitzpe Ramon with me?”
“To do what?”