by Amos Talshir
But Charlie gave up on words and merely hugged Simon’s shoulders tight and listened as he translated the announcer’s words. The announcer explained that Rose had been caught since she had broken the law by leaving her seat in the stand. In order to positively identify her as the woman who had streaked, she had been stripped in front of all the stadium’s inhabitants. In her investigation, it was revealed that she belonged to a resistance movement that had plotted to harm the previous regime, and until she turned in her fellow resistance members, she would continue to freeze to death up there. The announcer invited anyone who wanted to express their loyalty to the revolution to turn in the resistance members, and thus also save the freezing Rose in the suspended cage.
The audience liked Rose, hovering naked in the black sky, who was the last pleasant memory shared by the stadium’s residents. The vision of her naked run brought all of them back to those days of the end of the soccer game between Athletic and Sportive, when the greatest disaster of their lives had been their team losing, and the great happiness of the visitors had been their team’s victory. The distant days of a love of sports, of disappointment and bliss due to the score of a soccer game. Wonderful days, in which tens of thousands of fans sang cheers to their team, each and every one of them belonging to the mighty group of tens of thousands of unknown fellow members. A unified sense of deep identification with one clear goal—winning a soccer game.
Simon felt bad. He tried to come to his senses and disengage from the escape, which had been so near. They had actually been on their way to the burrow that would lead them to the bats’ exit into the sea, and suddenly, it had all shattered. He tried to gather his thoughts and figure out whether they had done the right thing when they had called off their escape once the helicopter arrived with Rose’s cage. He couldn’t clearly reconstruct the moment of decision. Rose, trapped in the cage, had erased his mind.
“I’m confused,” Simon told Charlie, who hugged his shoulders and led him to their seats. “That’s what’s happening to me, that’s how I feel. I knew people feel that way. That’s what I feel when I want her—confused. Her pain is in my body, her humiliation in the cage, the help, the rescue, my helplessness. Dad, that’s what I feel. I can’t run away and abandon her. Dad, does that mean I love her?”
Charlie and Simon returned to their seats, like the tens of thousands of fans who turned to gaze at the cage hovering in the freezing night air. Charlie didn’t know what to tell Simon and hated himself. It wasn’t enough to know how to repair engines by diving into deep waters; it wasn’t enough to swim many miles into the heart of the sea. You had to know how to talk. To your son, to your wife. You had to talk. Charlie stayed silent and Simon cried.
Supreme order returned to the tens of thousands of seats. The wretched Rose’s frozen body in the cage suspended from the arm of the crane interrupted the dance party in which Veronica had starred. The massive dance of the thousands of celebrants who had followed her was all she had ever dreamed of. Her wanted pregnancy was much more than she had ever wished for herself. Veronica expected Charlie and Simon to save Rose but knew they were in a state of mortal despair due to the failure of their escape plan. She tried to fall asleep in her seat beside Charlie but knew she would not manage to do so. She forced herself to believe that if she fell asleep, the night would pass for Rose as well, and perhaps tomorrow, Simon and Charlie would awaken from their despair and do something for Rose. Simon fell asleep and Charlie sat in his chair, gazing furiously at Rose’s cage.
Veronica did not dare speak to him when suddenly, he put his hand on her shoulder and clenched his fingers around her tightly, squeezing her flesh in a way that sent waves of heat through her body. Veronica wanted to talk to Charlie about the great happiness that had flooded her body when she led the masses in their dance on the pitch. She wanted to console him for the lost chance, the failed escape, but more than anything, she wanted to ask him to help Rose. The cold wind froze her nose; she rubbed it against Charlie’s prickly cheek and realized he was asleep. The only person she had in the world and in the stadium had fallen asleep by her side. She had so wanted to have someone who would sleep with her at night and wake up with her in the morning. She would have told her mother she had found herself a man who would sleep beside her all night. Whose arm was wrapped around her shoulder, who had no one else to whom he had to hurry back and return before she noticed he had disappeared for the night. It was true that she thought of Clara, his ex, but she loved her, since she was the mother of Simon, that charming boy. Only she, Veronica, was Charlie’s one and only, and even carried his fetus in her body. Perhaps she would still have the chance to tell all this to her mother, who had stayed home without knowing that she, Veronica, had traveled to the soccer game with Clebber. Perhaps the anxiety was killing her as she wondered where her daughter had disappeared to, not knowing that she was sleeping for whole nights now beside her man.
Charlie shifted his posture in his seat and his hand dropped between her thighs. She clasped his hand between her thighs and a pleasant sensation filled her body, through her belly and into her heart. She had everything she wanted. She didn’t have to wait for someone to appreciate her for what she had achieved or tell her what she should do. She could do it all on her own. To dance and lead others in dancing and get pregnant by the man she wanted. She loved life and was no longer worried about food and her body’s health. She was as good as anyone else. Even better than all the others whose bodies had betrayed them in the stadium. She was exercising and happy and beloved and did not have to explain anything to anyone. She had everything she wanted, even a baby of her own. She didn’t have to expect anything from anyone anymore.
Suddenly, she was struck by a thought that made a shiver run through her. She wouldn’t expect Charlie to save Rose. She could do just as much for Rose as Charlie could. Just as much as anyone else. She could and should do what she was thinking about for Rose, if only she made an effort to think and came up with an idea of her own on how to save Rose. She might use Simon’s help in explaining to her, merely explaining, what could be done for Rose. She didn’t have to expect someone to do it for her, or even tell her that she needed to do this or that. If she knew how to live well in the stadium, she would also know how to save Rose. If she could get herself pregnant, and her man slept by her side all night, she could achieve anything. Veronica decided she could save Rose and fell asleep with a smile on her face and Charlie’s hand limp between her thighs.
35.
The first morning light woke Simon. He quickly checked whether the cage was still suspended over the pitch. Indeed, the cage was still swaying in the chilly morning breeze on the claw arm of the crane, which had replaced the helicopter. Simon spotted Charlie standing and waving to him from the bottom of the stand. Veronica could be seen completing her umpteenth lap around the stadium at a determined run, slowing her steps when she passed below the cage suspended in the air. Charlie stood looking at the cage, trying to identify signs that Rose had survived the freezing night.
Veronica had never considered herself particularly smart, and there was no shortage of people to confirm her opinion. Especially her mother, who always said that a woman who made her living at a dance studio, even if it was therapeutic dance, would always be considered frivolous and silly. Dancing was dancing, she said, even if it was therapeutic. There were also the men who came and went, treating her as if she didn’t understand a thing. In fact, they paid no attention to her at all, only to her pretty body. Right, my very pretty body, Veronica was happy to remind herself once more as she ran. Every time she was caught asking herself or the man who was with her if he was only attracted to her body, she regretted it. She realized how stupid the person required to answer considered her to be. No, I’m interested in your mind and in your emotions… Well, then, why couldn’t she hold herself back from asking? Anyone who saw nothing but her body was not worth her efforts. And yet she asked, and then regretted it.
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nbsp; However, over the years, she had managed to find out that she could think and focus, and tell herself confidently that she knew what the right thing to do was. She managed to do so only while she was running, and not when she was lying in bed in her apartment, trying to speak clearly to herself about her relationship with men. She never managed to decide for herself to break up with someone who only found the time to see her in the early evening hours, before he returned to his wife after “an exhausting meeting outside the office.” He would break up with her after he could no longer withstand his wife’s pressure. The very act of lounging around in her bed, which had hosted all those losers, made her think of herself as stupid. She never managed to focus and decide what the smart thing to do was when she was in her studio, either. All her students would merely ogle her attractive body, compliment her constantly on the way she looked that morning and yesterday and tomorrow, and how she always looked as if she had just stepped out of a beauty parlor, which made her feel like an idiot. At the very least, she wanted to feel that someone, it didn’t matter who, fat or short or old or stupid, treated her seriously. He didn’t even have to say that she was smart, but that she was a serious person…
Only when she was running, in the park near her apartment or on the beach, did she manage to focus and think of productive things. And today, as she passed for the tenth and last time under Rose’s cage, a smart thought flashed through her mind, one that she had reached by herself, on her own, about how to save Rose.
Simon wanted to break the silence between him and Charlie, which had been going on since the failure of their escape last night. He wanted to discharge the disappointment and gather his fortitude once more. He wanted to know what his father was thinking, to have him talk about the decision, about the sacrifice of the escape in order to save Rose. He couldn’t shake off the feeling that Charlie was not truly sorry about their failure. During the hours that had passed since their escape plan failed, it occurred to him that his father had been too hasty in agreeing to call off their escape, to give up the opportunity. It was true that he, Simon, hadn’t been determined to carry on with the plan either, but there was more to it than that. A long time before the escape, he had suspected that his father was not really eager to get away, and it made him angry, because it seemed to him as if Charlie had simply started to get used to the convenient life in the stadium, and perhaps didn’t truly care what was going on with Mom and Emily. He then thought that Dad was probably having fun in Veronica’s company, and he no longer had any reason to think of a life of freedom outside the stadium.
Simon hadn’t given up on the decision to reunite with Mom and Emily. Freedom didn’t interest him; he had never really spoken or thought in terms of freedom and human rights. He wanted to go back to his mother and missed his little sister, who loved him more than anyone else in the world. He continued to indulge in fantasies of escape, concocting a new, detailed plan.
Charlie stood under the cage, suspended about sixty-five feet over his head, hoping to spot a small movement or any other sign indicating that Rose was still alive. He was willing to do anything to save this brave girl whom his son loved, who was his first love. Even if she didn’t hold on for a long time, it would have significance and an impact on the rest of his son’s life. His instincts, honed across from the open sea, made it clear to Charlie that it would not be good for Simon to remember his first love in the form of a dead woman. Such thoughts always confused him. After all, he couldn’t manage to explain to himself how he had in fact found himself married to a woman he didn’t know. Perhaps his loneliness across from the sea made him connect too quickly to the first woman who accepted him. Tanned, orphaned and isolated.
He considered the story of his marriage to Clara to be the great failure of his life. The years that had gone by had not managed to dull the feeling that he had not done enough to adapt himself to his wife, who was so different from him. From the first day he had seen her dragging her bike through the warm sand of the beach, he had wanted her because she was completely different from him, so unsuitable for him. Obviously, she hadn’t thought he resembled her, either. After all, she had looked at him as if he was a magician when he’d returned the bicycle chain to its place on the chain wheel. He’d then suggested that she accompany him to his boat engine repair shop to apply a bit of engine grease to the chain, which was creaking after being dipped in the fine grains of sand. She had seen that he was merely an engine mechanic and not a sophisticate of any kind, and that he was not the type of guy she had already met in her travels through the world. And yet they were attracted to each other and shared a big love. Everything could have continued being beautiful, swept with sand and sun and sea. But they had begun to spend too much time in hospitals and needed mental energies that left them drained, until Simon got better, and by then it was different. His natural environment, the sand, the sea, the sun, the endlessness, was no longer there. Among the doctors, the white corridors, the decisions, the deliberations, the harsh treatments, he was no longer what and who she expected him to be.
Charlie felt that he could, and wanted to, do something that would ensure Simon’s success with Rose, if she was still alive. If he managed to help her, he thought, he would fulfill all of Simon’s expectations, which would accompany him throughout his life. Charlie had been in that position with Clara. At the time, it had not occurred to him that he needed help. That if he could have talked to his mother, he would have had a better grasp on what was about to happen between them. Even a brief conversation with his father. No—Mom was better. But both of them were already gone. And if they were still around, maybe he wouldn’t have allowed them to interfere. Not even to speak. He had thought he knew everything and was stronger than anything. Even the mighty sea.
Rose had been suspended there all night, naked and frozen. The Others would not release her until she turned in her fellow resistance members, or until another solution was found. Charlie thought that perhaps the third wish still at his disposal was the solution to save Rose, but immediately veered away from this thought, angry at himself. He had promised himself to save the third wish for the right moment, the greatest moment of all, the impossible moment. That was what he had sworn to himself after he had sacrificed the second wish out of the three his father had bequeathed him. It was after Simon had recovered almost completely and Emily was three. Silent Clara had sat with Charlie on the terrace of the house on the bluff and told him she had run out of strength. Charlie didn’t really understand what she was saying, because Clara was still talking in her northern language and had never bothered to learn his Mediterranean language. He felt she was saying something major and difficult. He asked her what she meant, and she said that Simon’s illness had exhausted all her strength. Strength for what, he asked. And she said, strength to go on.
Charlie would have given anything not to be there by her side at that moment. He was dying to be at the heart of the sea, swimming by himself at night, ten miles from the shore, surrounded by black, salty water that his arms were cutting through. Distancing himself from all that was familiar and safe on shore in order not to know and hear that Clara wanted to break up with him. He would have given up the second wish in order for her to see him once more as the savior who had fixed her bike on the beach. He would give anything so that she would pounce on him again like she had years ago in the wet, warm sand at the water’s edge, uttering words of love and desire that he didn’t understand. However, he didn’t make the wish.
Charlie continued pacing on the pitch, occasionally glancing at the cage as it swayed in the air, consoled by the warm rays of sun on that day, which were surely helping Rose survive up there, in the cage.
Years had gone by before he understood why he hadn’t made the wish that would have left Clara with him. Until he realized she could leave him. Until he sobered up from the stupidity that had made him believe that everything could go on the way it was. Until he realized she was no longer with him and the ha
tred seared him and tore at his heart. Even ten miles of swimming at night in the frozen sea hadn’t banished the image of Clara with someone else. The flames of jealousy turned her into a hated demon, humiliating him, attracting and repelling him simultaneously, threatening the house his wretched father and mother had left him. She became the enemy taking his children away from him. He understood he wasn’t willing to sacrifice a wish for the woman he wanted so much, but also hated. After she’d left him, he had been stricken with a terrible fear. Not only had his wife left him, but he was also going to lose his children, Simon and Emily. He had then sacrificed the second wish to salvage his relationship with the children.
And now only the third wish was left. Would he dedicate it to ensuring the success of his and Simon’s escape from the stadium, or to the welfare of Clara and Emily, suffering somewhere out there? Or perhaps to save Rose, dying up there in the cage? Once again, stupidity was telling him that they would manage to escape on their own steam, thanks to their swimming skills, thanks to Simon’s talent, thanks to their determination. They would manage to get to Clara and Emily and rescue them as well. Therefore, he would save his one remaining wish for the future, even though he had no idea how he would rescue Simon’s Rose. How he would rescue his son’s love. Perhaps he should still sacrifice the remaining wish for the sake of his son’s first love. Why? Because there would not be another first love for Simon. Life did not give you a second chance at first love.
