by Amos Talshir
Simon’s smile was so welcoming, yet so shy and tentative, that it could easily be perceived as a child’s attempt to ingratiate himself with everyone. The sculpted line of his hawkish nose emphasized the smile’s soft expression, and his eyes, deeply set in his rectangular forehead, seemed to hide behind dark eyelashes that made it hard to discern whether they were brown or green. It was easy to notice his red ears, lying close to his shaved scalp, seemingly indicating a carelessness regarding his physical appearance. Only when the observer noticed how identical his smile was to that of his father, standing next to him, did the connection between that special smile and their features as a whole become clear. The build of their lips, the stance of their jaw, the radiant whiteness of their teeth, the square chin and the muscular neck, rising from an agile body, left no room for error: that winning smile was not an indication of weakness.
They rose from their seats, ignoring the darkness imposed on them once the illumination in the stadium went out, buoyed upon the waves of joy of their team’s fans, who surrounded them in the stand dedicated to fans of the visiting team. The beaming boy received smiles and hugs from dozens of people he did not know. All of them shared the joy of victory. It was impossible not to embrace the boy and rejoice along with him. Charlie was gratified, not just because their team had won, but also due to the progress in his son’s behavior.
“Come on, let’s head out,” he told Simon. “We still have a long way to the airport.”
“And then the flight home,” the boy supplied.
They allowed themselves to be swept up by the stream of fans who had begun to make their way down the stairs. The air was stagnant, and an initial sense of oppression began to set in. Indeed, the breeze to which they had grown accustomed at the end of every game in the stadium was nowhere in evidence. The massive crowd comprised of thousands of visiting fans who had flown in from the coalition of states along the coast of the Mediterranean Sea was thrilled following their team’s victory over a superior one. Their clothes were disheveled. The limp scarves they wore, bearing the team’s logo, resembled war banners, yearning for a breeze to come fan them.
Suddenly, an announcer’s voice thundered from the stadium’s massive loudspeakers, emitting a long, complicated sentence in the local language, the language of Los Españoles Estados Unidos, the Union of Spanish Countries.
It never occurred to those Spaniards that some people didn’t understand their language, the father thought. The boy smiled at his father as if realizing he possessed another minor advantage at the moment. Simon spoke this language, which he had acquired after nonstop viewing of sports broadcasts online and listening to the sharp banter of the sports commentators.
“They’re asking us to stay in our seats and let the local fans leave first,” he translated the announcement for his father, a reserved smile reemerging on his lips.
Fans of the visiting team around them were exhibiting signs of nervousness. They could not understand the earsplitting announcement. They noticed that the tall, smiley boy had understood it, but they could not hear the explanation he gave his father. They asked the boy to repeat the explanation. Simon looked down, as if having a hard time dealing with his sudden elevated status. Charlie willingly turned to the people around him and explained the announcer’s demand, proudly stroking the boy’s spiky shaved scalp. The boy smiled at his father. Charlie was happy. The boy, wearing a team jersey, hugged the scarf with the team’s logo to him and thrust it in his mouth, biting it and suppressing the joy of victory inside his lanky body. Charlie signaled to his son that they should sit down until the locals left the stadium. Their communication was perfect. A hint of a subtle glance, a hand gesture and a shrug were sufficient in order to allow the two to synchronize their route, the rhythm of their movement and their action plan, after years of coordination whose meaning was clear to both of them without ever having discussed it. The father and his son conducted themselves like two dolphins crossing the oceans.
It was now clear that it would take some time for ninety thousand people to exit through the stadium gates, arrive at their cars in the parking lots scattered around, or catch the subways that transported the team’s fans after every game. And yet, Charlie thought, they would have a significantly shorter wait than the one they would have experienced in Mediterranean Mara Land, the Mediterranean State, from which he and his son, along with all other visiting fans, had arrived. This was better, he told himself, than getting caught up in some random fight that might break out between fans due to the local team’s loss.
The local fans had rioted before. Charlie thought back to violent incidents that had taken place in this stadium. A certain degree of nervousness filtered into his thoughts. Simon sat down next to him, still radiant with the joy of victory. Charlie was glad to see his son curiously observing tens of thousands of people streaming by in their uniformly green outfits as they headed for the exits.
Out of all the boy’s numerous areas of interest, soccer was the one that thrilled him most. Ever since Simon was five years old, still in kindergarten, he had always exhibited a certain degree of variance. Charlie could understand and accept it. But the boy’s mother, as well as the kindergarten teachers, the doctors and even the child psychologist, could not really explain why the boy was like that.
“Like how?” the father asked the kindergarten teacher. “Quiet?”
“Not involved in the children’s games,” the teacher replied.
“Okay,” the father tried. “He doesn’t like those kinds of games. There’ll be other games.”
“Children play,” the kindergarten teachers said.
“Besides, when they hit him in kindergarten, he doesn’t defend himself,” his wife said.
“Maybe that’s why he doesn’t play with them?” Charlie tried to explain.
“You really don’t want to understand that we have a problem with the boy, do you?” said Clara, his wife.
Perhaps he didn’t want to understand. The boy was allowed to be a little different, considering what he’d gone through when he was born, he thought. Charlie had taken him into his care and discovered that the boy loved sports. Simon enjoyed watching sports events, watching athletes, sports broadcasts, sports journals, sports spectators, traffic jams near sports arenas, the bus in which the players arrived at the games. He gobbled down every bit of data and information published on any type of sport: athletes, teams, records, contracts, finances, leasing, franchises, player transfers, coach transfers, club budgets and broadcast rights. He never exhibited his extensive knowledge; he merely accumulated it, studying and replying if asked directly.
“How many fans do they have here?” Charlie asked as they watched the human swarm leaving the stands.
“Ninety-one thousand subscribers. They’re all here today,” the boy replied. “Nine thousand visitors.”
“Will it take long?”
“An average of twenty-seven minutes,” Simon said, smiling.
The two of them watched the immense crowd leaving the stadium in disappointment, exchanging hugs. The sense of victory was bubbling in their veins, and they ignored the angry cries of the visiting team’s fans over the ongoing delay at the exits. Charlie savored the big grin on his son’s face and was happy to sit and observe it until it was time for them to leave. As always, he promised himself that he would simply enjoy the boy’s happiness, rather than tormenting himself with questions that should be of concern to every father. What was actually going on with the boy? Why was he so quiet, so quick to step back, never asserting himself? At birthday parties in nursery school, Simon was the last child who managed to get a piece of cake from the tray placed in the middle of the room. Sometimes he didn’t even get his slice. Perhaps there had been a miscalculation, or another boy took two pieces. Simon would return to his chair, flashing his winning smile.
His wife, Clara, claimed Charlie was willfully closing his eyes and consoling himsel
f with the love of sports he shared with the boy, ignoring the child’s need for special care. The truth was, he knew some sort of treatment was necessary but could not decide how to define the problem. Okay, so he was a bit quieter than other children. Let’s say he’s patient, he suggested to his wife. We have a patient child. Would it be better if he was agitated, screaming and demanding? He was intelligent, without a doubt; everyone agreed on this point. In any case, it would be fine, Charlie told himself, putting an end to the internal debate for the millionth time. No one knows him like I do, he thought to himself. Ever since the boy was six, Charlie had taken time off from his boat engine repair shop and spent an increasing amount of time with his son at sports events, soccer and basketball games, and Formula car races.
Simon touched his father’s chin, directing him toward a grouping of exits. Charlie grasped Simon’s directive immediately but did not understand his intention. For a moment, a small irritation ignited within him over the fact that his son did not make his intention clear quickly, decisively and determinedly. But within seconds, he realized what Simon had already seen, although the stadium lights had been turned off. Not only had the swarms of local fans not disappeared into the exit tunnels, but they were now making their way back to the stands, their gestures appearing startling and disturbing: they were throwing their hands in the air, sprinting for a bit, and behaving erratically. The unexpected commotion near the exits attracted the attention of all the visiting fans waiting impatiently for their turn to leave the stadium. An immense current of fans emerged from the tunnels back toward the stand area. Those returning seemed panicked. The visitors were still in their seats, observing the behavior of the local fans returning to the stadium.
Charlie asked his son what was going on without expecting an answer. The visiting fans surrounding them had already begun to grumble and even curse in their own language, unfamiliar to the locals. No one had imagined a situation where the fans returned to the stands, not only because this delayed the visitors’ departure, but because the phenomenon of a massive return of spectators to a stadium at the end of a game was an inconceivable sight. It was a logical reversal, an impossible image, upsetting all expectations. Charlie thought that once again, it was one of those moments where he didn’t understand what was going on, and there were many such moments. This thought briefly distracted him from the topsy-turvy development of fans returning to the stadium.
He noticed a woman who had remained in her seat. Charlie knew himself in that regard, the excessive attention he directed toward women, even dedicated to women, to be more precise.
Even as a boy, peacocking along the beach at the foot of the bluff where his parents’ house was located, he felt as if he were supervising the presence of the women who arrived at the breathtaking bit of coast that was his childhood playground, He would classify them with indicators that were clear to him, while never having to question or confirm his conclusions with anyone else. Mostly because he had no one with whom to discuss it. He had grown up as a lonely boy on the beach, the only child of a fisherman father and a mother concerned mostly with the father’s return from nights of fishing on the stormy sea. On his own, he would process his observations about the women visiting the exotic beach of his youth and usually would not reach particularly interesting conclusions. He was satisfied with the data popping up in front of his eyes and, as with any other topic in his life, did not concern himself with analysis and drawing inferences for the future.
Charlie had developed this insight about himself—his inability to draw simple conclusions—which was, in itself, too troubling and too deep for him, thanks to or because of his son. Simon radiated a frenetic air that certainly applied in regard to his father, one of accumulating data and analyzing it while simultaneously generating an action plan. Charlie had learned that this was how his son operated and was willing to admit he found it quite exhausting.
4.
The woman who had remained sitting in her chair drew his attention not only because she exhibited no interest in the strange occurrence of the spectators returning to the stadium, but also because her relationship with the man by her side was unclear, or rather unjustified, as Charlie thought of it. They were not talking, and it didn’t appear as if a love of soccer was the reason for her presence in the stadium. That, and one more thing: she was a woman with a very unique appearance, very athletic.
“Someone’s closed the stadium’s exit gates,” Simon said.
“What’s that?” Charlie asked. The boy did not reply, as he knew the father had heard him but was already distracted by the shoving of the fans who had begun to move down the stand in agitation. The boy grabbed the father’s sleeve, trying to stop him. Charlie paused and looked at his son, who was feeling somewhat ashamed of having stopped his father while the crowd continued to surge forward.
“How do you know someone closed them? Maybe they never opened them,” the father said.
“No, Dad. They opened and then closed them,” the boy replied.
“No way.”
“It’s a fact. More people left than the ones coming back,” he replied with a smile.
“How do you know?” the father asked, instantly regretting it, like the thousands of past times he had asked his son that unnecessary question, how do you know? And Simon’s answer was always conclusive.
“I counted,” the boy replied.
The throng of locals began to climb back into their seats in the stands. The sprouting of panic was obvious to Charlie and Simon even from the distance of the far end of the stadium, where they were located. People began to stumble on the stairs, delaying those going up. The loudspeakers broadcast impassioned, self-important instructions in the local language, which did not arrive in the familiar, professional voice of the mythological announcer of the local team, Sportive. This was a voice resembling that of an excited soap-opera actor.
“Que tengan un hermoso día,” have a beautiful day, he said in Spanish, in an ingratiating tone with no punctuation, too emotional considering the contents.
“What’s he saying?” the father asked the son, appalled to hear himself shouting against the background of the silence that had descended on the stadium. The tens of thousands of fans stilled following the announcement, as if they needed a lengthy interval in order to take it in, understand it, or react, if a reaction was necessary.
“He said the exit gates were closed, and everyone should return to their seats,” the boy said.
A sudden sensation of anxiety assaulted Charlie. He had time to answer several fans around him who also demanded a translation of the announcer’s notice before returning to his seat, hugging his son’s shoulders. Charlie realized that, this time as well, his sense of disaster was justified. He had developed this sense as a child, waiting for his father’s fishing boat to return from the sea.
It was now almost eleven p.m. The air was much colder. It had been quite a while since that wondrous act of streaking. Charlie wondered if the charter planes for the visiting fans would wait for them or take off for Mediterranean Mara Land without them. If they ended up taking off at all; maybe they had closed the airport gates as well, he thought, recalling the announcer’s fawning voice. Well, the bad thoughts could wait, he decided.
In the meantime, the fans around him were stamping their feet and rubbing their shoulders, trying to warm up somewhat. The cold had become a more urgent problem. He looked at his son, his head rising above those of the fans who had remained standing. Simon wouldn’t be cold, of that he was sure. His son always carried too much with him. He might have been the only boy in the world whose mother never had to tell him to take a sweater. Consistently, and for a reason they’d never bothered to look into, yet one more thing they’d neglected, their son would take supplies for every possible purpose with him. Warmer clothes in his backpack, along with a smartphone with an internet communication modem and other essential types of equipment.
From his backpack, the boy produced leather gloves and a cashmere scarf that would not irritate the eczema he had suffered from ever since he was a baby. He bundled inside them and offered his father his bank-robber cap. Charlie declined it with a hand gesture, thanking his son. Simon pulled the warm cap over his shaved head and smiled at his father. His face, shining with a very distinct whiteness from within the scarf, along with the cap, made him look like a handsome baby, causing the memory of past suffering to climb up the father’s throat. The memory of Simon’s very white face, and his hazel eyes, always smiling, as were his lips, tinted a heightened shade of red due to the sensitivity to cold characteristic of eczema sufferers. Every time he remembered his helpless infant son in the incubator in the maternity ward, he could never quell the emotion. And the smile, the marvelous smile on his jaundiced face when he was a day old, broke down Charlie’s last line of defense against memories of the past.
“He’s smiling,” the kind nurses in the pediatric intensive care unit had said.
“That’s impossible,” said the dedicated head of the unit. “The smile reflex appears much later; let me check. Only when they’re a month old.”
“He’s smiling,” the nurses insisted, and throughout the months of his stay in intensive care, they called him Smiley. After a while, the nickname began to appear on official hospital forms. Smiley’s blood tests are here; Smiley has a CT appointment that needs to be moved up; we need to order another test on Smiley’s vertebrae.
“He’s smiling,” the head nurse called out, smiling back at the beaming baby. “Don’t worry,” she told his parents repeatedly as they took shifts sitting by his crib at night. “Those who smile get better.”
“Are you sure about that?” the mother asked.
“No, it’s a belief,” the nurse said, thumping her fist against the left side of her chest. “He’s smiling so nicely, he’s just got to get better,” she declared, running to the doctors’ lounge to conceal her tears.
