“You’re not gonna tell me what montage is!”
“It’s not the movies, it’s TV,” editor-in-chief Marcel fires back, “and you better get used to it!”
Olga followed this from afar, biting her lip. Even though she’s ten years younger than he is, she knows the codes of a TV channel better than he does. Rule number one: Never confront someone directly. Everything behind the back. All base deeds on the q.t.; Elias is the opposite. He enjoys this kind of conflict. He gets off on it.
So he asks either to go back to the newsroom or to cover Judea and Samaria, and Marcel proposes a correspondent in… Jenin, on the West Bank. You take your life in your hands. With his Sephardic face, Elias wouldn’t have time to put a foot on the ground before he’d be lynched. Even with an Arab cameraman, it’d be scary as hell. So he remains sagely at the Gaza border, taking notes.
In the futuristic novel he dreams of writing, the main character will be Amos Kirzenbaum, an Israeli-like des Esseintes in Huysmans’s Against the Grain, a rich aesthete who’ll be the last Jew in Tel Aviv after the disappearance of the Jewish state. A uchronia, a waking nightmare.
Every other day he comes back to Tel Aviv and spends the night with Olga. But they sleep at her place because Olga still can’t stand the little cat he adopted.
“Just the time he needs to recover, and I’ll find him a host family,” Elias promises. He goes to see Manu to ask him to adopt Jean-Pierre, and Manu starts to panic because he opened the door without thinking about his new roommate, Juliette. Too late, Elias is there with Jean-Pierre in his jacket. Now, Juliette happens to be out, and it’s even worse than if she were there, because she may return at any moment. Manu thinks of texting her, telling her not to come back for a little while, but he tells himself she’d sense that Elias was there and she’d zip right back.
In short, it’s at that unusual moment of panic that Manu agrees to adopt Jean-Pierre, the cat—Manu, who never could stand cats. Juliette’s the opposite. She loves them and immediately gets a crush on the kitty. If only she knew it was Elias’s cat. Manu told her he found it in the street. She takes care of it lovingly, and it’s quite touching to see her give it so much love. In fact, Manu thinks she’s right to want kids, she’d make a wonderful mom—an excellent nurse, too, as she takes such good care of his wounded eye. Eye lotion twice a day, pomade, and a new dressing. She does this gently, delicately, very tenderly. She is really made to love. And to give. Manu imagines that if she began to hate someone with the same devotion, she could become a criminal. With devoted people, it can easily swing. They need the absolute, those people. They don’t know how to hold off, to play for time. And put things in perspective. Devoted people are potential criminals, that’s all there is to it.
But there is a certain embarrassment between them: she never looks Manu in the eye. She always turns her head. Yes, looking a man straight in the eye. Well, it’s troubling. It’s too intimate. She only really looks Manu in the eye when she takes care of him, when he’s in such a state of dependence that there could be no sexual connection between them. It’s only in porn that the nurse finds the patient exciting, and God knows how many movies Manu made with Taba Cash disguised as a nymphomaniac nurse! But there’s nothing exciting about a sick guy. Nor woman, in fact. It arouses compassion, not passion. And yet, no one can deny that there’s something favorable to sex in the caregiver/cared-for relationship.
Besides, between Manu and Juliette, that’s not the only connection that might arouse the desire for sex. When he glimpses her coming out of the bathroom naked, he thinks of it. And she does, too, very furtively, since she’s sleeping in his bed. She’s even the one who thinks of it most often, although she immediately rejects the thought as indecent. She can’t wait to find her own place. Every day, she goes to visit apartments, but it’s always too expensive or too small or too ugly. And then she doesn’t feel able to live alone, for the moment…
“I’m leaving to cover a story for a week,” Olga announces.
“Where?” Elias asks.
“In Gérardmer, in the Vosges. There’s a film festival.”
“But that’s absurd! Why not me? I got into FEMIS, for godsake. I know something about movies.”
“Well, yeah, I know. You want me to turn it down?”
“No, no, but still…”
It’s the first time she sees him frustrated, and that’s a strong contrast with the magnetism he usually has. All of a sudden, his lips are pinched and the whites of his eyes turn whiter than white. The cinema is such a source of frustration! Even if Elias gave up FEMIS, he still hopes to succeed in making a film someday; everything brings him back to the sacrifice he made when he came to Israel and reconnects him to his initial anger at the whole world. Olga’s the opposite. As she never encountered the slightest vexation in her young life, she has no way of taking the measure of the extent of his inner anger, which is deep, and old. Ancestral, even. After a few hours it goes away, of course. But Olga found the change spectacular, and she’s leaving the next day for Gérardmer with that strange impression in her mind.
Alone with his camera at the Gaza border, Elias smokes cigarette after cigarette, waiting for something to happen. He needs money to give Olga a splendid gift, impress her, and materialize that love in a symbolic object. A ring—that would be ideal. But where can he find the bread? He already owes Diabolo five thousand shekels and five hundred to Manu.
He leaves his post and goes driving through the Negev at random, filming the rocky landscape of that mineral desert. All that beauty inspires the filmmaker and writer that lie dormant within him. He imagines a Western with Patrick Bruel running a falafel stand in this setting—that would be a ball—and Lee Van Cleef as a sinister visitor who doesn’t take his eyes off him. Except Lee Van Cleef is dead, and there’s no great actor with an unsettling face anymore. Then Elias starts making financial calculations, and the yetzer hara, as they say in Hebrew, slips into his imagination—the inclination for evil, you might say. Dirty tricks go through his mind and stick there. The station’s four-wheel drive must still be worth a hundred thousand shekels. It’s a rather old-model Subaru. Why not try to sell it and claim it was stolen?
He knows there’s a gang of slightly criminal Bedouins near Mitzpe Ramon. They live on a rock from which there’s an amazing view over the valley. He spends the night there out in the open, sending texts full of love to his beauty. Toward dawn, two Bedouins draw near. Elias starts the negotiations in Hebrew, and the deal is concluded over a cup of scalding tea under the tent: fifty thousand shekels in two installments, twenty-five thou’ up front and the rest a month later—with the papers for the vehicle.
Now the equation is simple: Either he claims he was attacked by these Bedouins and they stole his car in exchange for his life. Then there’d necessarily be a police investigation. It would be his word against theirs. Or… or nothing. The unknown in this equation is when the truth will come out.
He goes back to Tel Aviv by bus, with twenty-five thousand shekels in his pocket. On the way, he finally gets a text from Olga: Real happy to be back to snow and France. Kisses. Not the great declaration he was waiting for, and this bugs him. Does she miss him so little? And then Marcel calls him to commission a story on the new rocket that fell on a vacant lot near Sha’ar HaNegev, but he doesn’t answer. Marcel repeats his request by text this time, and Elias texts back that his camera is broken. Come back and get good equipment, Marcel answers obligingly. Before going back to H24, Elias makes a detour by Kerem HaTeimanim to explain his situation.