They have to go outside and walk away from the gallery to be alone, with no witness, with a bit of vocabulary now and not just the little sounds and reflexive cries that leak out of their throats.
“It’s just unbelievable… they released you!” Juliette says, beaming. “I’m so, so glad! Come on, we’ll go to the French Bakery.”
“No, no, let’s go to the Landwer Café,” Olga suggests, taking her hand. “I love their Limonana.”
“I really thought you wouldn’t come back, I swear! I was sick over it.”
“I don’t even have your number!”
“And I don’t have yours!” Juliette answers in a burst of laughter.
They sit down hand in hand, like two little Tel Aviv lesbians, on the glider of the Landwer Café, at the foot of the Beans and Abarbanel Street. It’s the seat reserved for lovers, that glider. And they order a café Affour for Juliette and a Limonana for Olga.
“I don’t smell too bad?”
“It’s sort of OK,” Juliette confesses, giggling.
“Isn’t that just meshugga, they prevent you from washing when you’re held for questioning?” Olga says, hugging her and squeezing her hard against her body.
“OK, but tell me, how’d you get out?” Juliette whispers into her ear.
She doesn’t have time to answer the question, Jérémie’s calling her back.
“Chhhkh,” she sighs. “Can’t get rid of this guy.”
“Who is it?”
“The lawyer, Jérémie.”
“It may be important,” Juliette says.
“I’ll call you back,” Olga says, cutting him off. “Well, I lucked out,” she continues, putting her smartphone away. “Madame Benshimoun was marrying off her daughter, so she didn’t have time to do the job.”
“Huh? What is this business?” Juliette guffaws. “Who’s Madame Benshimoun?”
“The translator. They asked her to translate my WhatsApp, but she didn’t turn in her work in time.”
“Oh, brilliant! She saved your life. You should send her a little present.”
“But I don’t know her. It’s the cops who told me.”
They hug again, hold hands, smile at each other, kiss without embarrassment or afterthoughts, but both of them can feel they’re only avoiding and postponing the subject that’s brought them so close but could make them angry too. Loving the same man is a very bad idea, whatever Jules and Jim might say. Elias is an explosive subject. They hardly touched on it before they were separated by the Mitzpe Ramon cops, but they’ll certainly have to talk about it and really talk about it this time. All the time she was in detention, Olga never stopped thinking about it: Why did Elias never tell her about Juliette?
At this moment, neither of them knows why he’s in prison, and Juliette doesn’t even know he’s there. So she doesn’t understand why Olga ran to see her first. Normally when you love a man the way she loves Elias, he’s the one you run to first. But Juliette doesn’t dare ask the question, of course.
“OK, to the shower!” she says like a Scout troop leader as she gets up.
“No, wait a little! This sun is too nice,” Olga answers. “In a month it’ll be frying us like potatoes, let’s take advantage of it!”
They leave the Landwer to walk to Olga’s in Yafo and get there in less than ten minutes. Where can Elias be? Juliette still wonders. Would he be waiting for them there? And she prepares herself for this improbable encounter. He’ll be flabbergasted when he sees her, of course. So all through the walk, she tries to master her anger at him. On the other hand, it’s a pleasure not to have to hide anymore, not to have to see him on the q.t. when Olga disappears for a day or so. On the way, Jérémie calls again, but Olga still doesn’t pick up.
“He’s really bugging me now!”
“It’s the lawyer again?” Juliette worries.
“Yeah, and he doesn’t even want me to pay him, don’t you think that’s fishy?”
“He’s in love.”
“You got it, girl!”
But Elias is not at Olga’s, and this absence is starting to make Juliette anxious. What if he comes back all of a sudden and finds her there? She makes a few phone calls to make herself look busy. She calls artists who asked her for an appointment—that disguises her edginess—and then the gallery, to notify them she’ll be back in only in the early afternoon, and her boss is concerned she dropped a client in the middle of a sale just to follow her girlfriend. “Don’t worry, he’ll be back,” she answers, without justifying herself any more than that. She hangs up savoring the new status she’s gained at work. She does what she wants, she comes and goes, she gets there at no particular time and leaves when she feels like it. A real diva. As long as she stays, her boss must tell himself, to accept behavior like that. But at every step on the landing of the stairs, she shudders.
Olga comes out of the shower fifteen minutes later, after using all the hot water in the tank.
“They didn’t want to tell me if they’d released you or not, can you imagine?” she says, knotting a towel around her hair. “I could see you weren’t in the other cells as I went by, and that was a relief, but at the same time I was so mad at myself for getting you into this shit, oh my God!”
Olga goes into her room, pulls clean clothes out of the closet, and spreads them out on her bed, smiling.
What a joy to be able to pick what you’re going to put on, just think of it! Yes, that makes her smile: this kind of thing is so trivial in ordinary life but so extraordinary after captivity. She drops her bath towel without hiding from Juliette and puts on panties, a black miniskirt, and a T-shirt, while Juliette senses the moment is approaching when she’ll have to tell her about the evening that followed her return to Tel Aviv. How can she avoid it? But she’s such a bad liar!
“I hope we’ll be able to make that trip together again,” she says to change the subject.
“Oh yes,” Olga answers, “the desert is so beautiful.”
“You know, still further south, there are landscapes that look like the surface of the moon.”
“You’re not hungry?” Olga asks.
They go down to eat a salad in the pedestrian shopping street below the building, and of course Olga finally asks her what she did when she got back to Tel Aviv the previous Saturday night.
“You must’ve called Manu when you got back, right?”
“Not right away, no,” Juliette answers, somewhat taken aback. “I was exhausted, I just wanted to sleep.”
“Poor Jul! It must have been awful to go back in that bus,” Olga says sympathetically.
“Especially after what happened to us.”
“And the next day, you did call him, finally?”
“Umm, well, no,” Juliette admits, embarrassed. “No, no, the next day not at all, I waited for him to… well, I mean, here’s what happened: I bumped into him as I was going to work, that’s what… and he already knew, can you believe it?”
Olga takes her hand again and squeezes it hard in hers, without trying to find out if she called Elias or not that night. Or the next day. At one time or another, in any case. Decidedly, the topic is too hot to touch. She can see it by Juliette’s embarrassment as soon as they get near the theme, so she creates a diversion by bringing up her return to work.
“I’ll go there tomorrow,” Olga says. “You can’t just go straight from jail to job. You think I’ll be able to get back into it easily, Jul? I’m so afraid they’ll look at me like I have the plague.”