“I don’t know the Negev…” Olga suggests.
“Got a car?”
“I’ll rent one.”
“Well, why not?” says Juliette, a bit evasively.
“No, don’t worry. I’ll pay for everything.”
How can she refuse? Olga has such a tender way of pushing to get what she wants! All she has to do is like the person to deploy all her charm, and she’s liked Juliette from the start without even knowing why. Her delicacy, perhaps? Or the beauty mark on her right leg? Her beauty, so fresh? Could she be a lesbian, by any chance? Juliette wonders, without really believing it. Elias would never be infatuated with a lesbian. Or a bisexual. He only likes real females, she thinks. Strange, all that. But OK, she would have to talk to her, if they really become friends.
Time may do its work, but Juliette has not healed yet. Luckily, the gallery pretty much occupies her, at least when she is there. But the rest of the time her thoughts are entirely devoted to Elias, and the desire to knife him is rising inside her like a black tide. There are days when her suffering becomes so intense that, yes, she envisages it, she fantasizes, she sees herself surprising him at dusk on Levinsky Street like in a crime novel, stabbing him twenty times in the back. Then it goes away or dissolves into the activities of daily life. In two months, she has transfigured the Moins de Mille gallery. It used to be just a messy, glorified storage place, but it has turned into a showcase where all the bohemians in Tel Aviv come streaming through from morning to night. The young painters of the city all seek out Juliette now. Her calendar is chock-full of appointments. In a few weeks, she’s become someone who’s important here, both for artists and collectors, and her boss gave her a raise of a thousand shekels a month. Gallery owners on Ben Yehuda Street also call her with job offers, but for the moment she feels good in Florentin and doesn’t feel like settling in the north of the city—too bourgeois. The provincial woman she was when she arrived, unhappy and upset, has become one of Tel Aviv’s most sought-after figures in the art world to the point where she must often juggle multiple invitations for the same evening. That helps her forget Elias, too, except that they still live across from each other, a nagging reminder of her unhappy love affair.
In short, she agrees to accompany Olga to the Negev, but before Olga goes away, she does ask the question.
“Olga, do you know who I am, at least?”
“Of course, come on!”
“You sure?”
“Don’t tell me you and Manu are dating.”
“No, no, Manu’s crazy about a certain Romy.”
“The one with the bike, huh?”
“Right,” Juliette answers, giggling. And in a rather cowardly way, she laughs with Olga at Manu’s sentimental misfortunes instead of telling her she’s Elias’s ex. For now that she thinks of it, hiding the truth from Olga is the best way of getting close to Elias again. With her mind working at top speed, she sees all the advantages she could get from this friendship. How could Elias still reject her if she became Olga’s closest friend?
And then when she’s put things in order in her mind, she doesn’t consider herself Elias’s ex anymore, but his tikkun, an old hard-to-translate Hebrew word that roughly means the price to pay to expiate a misdeed. What misdeed? Aside from being born of an unknown father. As if that were her fault!
CHAPTER 21
When Olga announces that she’s spending an all-girls Shabbat in the Negev with her new friend Juliette and that she’ll take advantage of the excursion to give the money back to the Bedouins, Elias grows very somber. Tel Aviv is so small! To make friends with her like that, and tell her about the Bedouin business, to boot!
At the same time, he can’t tell her now, and only now, that he had a long relationship with Juliette. Too late, mate! Olga wouldn’t understand why he hid something so important from her. In fact, why did he keep that relationship under wraps? After all, they’ve been dating for several months. That’s a real relationship, not a passing roll in the hay. So why does he cultivate that fanatical taste for secrecy, which always gets him into inextricable situations? It makes him so damned annoyed at himself. He’s pissed at himself for being so weird. But Elias isn’t just weird. Not only. He’s also a good guy, a super friend, a generous guy, romantic and cultivated. A lot of people like him the way he is. And he’s better than anyone at being liked when he wants to be liked. Only, that’s how it is, he has trouble inside him, a really dark twist, like a malaise from the depths of time.
Poor Elias, caught in another spiral.
“I’ve had it with your business with Juliette! Had it up to here, I tell you!”
“What business?” says Manu, when they meet at Flo 10.
“You’re in love with her!”
“Bullshit!” Manu retorts. “I’m not going to turn my back when I see her, OK? She never did anything to hurt me.”
“But spending Shabbat in the Negev with Olga! Do you have any idea what that means for me?”
“No, I don’t,” Manu admits.
“It means your fucking Juliette is going to screw up my thing with Olga!” Elias shouts. “If you didn’t see her so much, she wouldn’t even know Olga!” Elias continues to shout.
“It’s your lies that’ll screw up things with Olga,” Manu calmly answers, getting up to leave.
“Stay, please, Manu.”
“You’re always saying we’re a small world here,” Manu continues as he sits down. “If I didn’t introduce Olga to her, someone else would have. So either you accept she’s in our world, or go screw yourself somewhere else!”
“You’re talking to me like that, Manu? That’s what it’s like being your best friend?” Elias begins to sob. “But for godsake, why the hell can’t you understand me? Why d’you keep sending me back to my neurosis?”
“It reminds me of Thelma and Louise. You see it?” Juliette says.
“No, but I know it’s with Geena Davis, and I love her,” Olga replies as they’re driving in the Negev with their hair flying in the wind.
The beginning of spring is an ideal season for a road trip through this mineral desert. The temperature’s mild, the sun’s caressing them, and the atmosphere is exuberant. The slightest pebble has glimmers of silver, and the air is so pure you could almost hear it tinkle. Olga has done well, renting an Audi convertible for a song, thanks to loyalty points accumulated at car2go on her father’s credit card; and then there’s her playlist. To learn Hebrew, Olga listens to Israeli artists, especially Mosh Ben-Ari, first of all because she doesn’t have the time to go to Hebrew immersion during the week, and then because when she constantly listens to the same song she manages to detach each word in the sentence and find its meaning with her Hebrew-French app. Now, Juliette translates “Ve’Er Shelo,” and it’s a pleasure for Olga to finally understand what still escaped her in her favorite song. So she’s full of gratitude for Juliette.
“You know what, Ju? Well, I can feel we’re going to be friends for life!” she says, turning contentedly toward Juliette, who gives her an affectionate smile, while in her head, she remains on guard.
“Hope so,” she answers nonetheless.
“You must meet Elias! You’ll love him,” Olga adds naively, and all Juliette can do is bite her tongue, but Olga doesn’t notice and keeps describing Elias as only a woman in love can describe the man she loves.
Irritated, Juliette finally interrupts her right in the middle of a sentence. “Do we have enough gas?”
“Don’t worry, there’s a gas station two miles down the road.”
“You know Mitzpe Ramon is over twenty-six hundred feet high, and it’s over a crater one thousand six hundred and forty feet deep?” Juliette continues like a Blue Guide to stop her going on about Elias.