*
He’s remembering Gidi now. I know what colour his eyes are when that happens. I don’t know whether to comfort him, to coax out the memory or change the subject. So I keep quiet. At times like this, I think that our relationship is a little risky. After all, I’ll leave the Castel in the end. And then what? Isn’t it enough that Gidi disappeared on him, do I have to disappear on him too? Enough, I flog myself and cross another traffic light, you can’t let fear of separation determine everything.
Park here, on the pavement, Yotam suggests.
Isn’t it a little too far? I wonder.
Everything closer is taken, he says with the confidence of someone who’s been here a lot.
Once, I remember, I took a girl to the beach at night and at a certain point she stopped and kissed me and pulled me under some thatched shelter. Something about her movements, something about how confidently she spread the blanket under us told me that she was recreating what had happened before, right there, with someone else.
This way is shorter, Yotam says, pulling me along a side path, and I obey. We are carried along towards the stadium on a huge wave of fans. We’re surrounded by big flags around us, hats and scarves. All of them yellow and black. But still, I start to feel the thrill of the excitement I used to feel when I was surrounded by Hapoel red flags, hats and scarves.
Wanna buy sunflower seeds? I suggest. But he feels more like an ice lolly. A yellow one, right? What else. I buy him a lemon ice lolly and a raspberry one for myself so I can have at least one red thing after I left all the others at home.
Someone practises playing his zambura, and the crowd shoving its way to the ticket booth answers with a weak ‘olé’. We already have tickets. I bought them on Thursday so we wouldn’t have to queue and get pushed and shoved. But there’s a huge crowd trying to push through the gate too, so I put Yotam in front of me and wrap my arms around him to protect him. How thin he is, I think. How fragile and full of bones. We move ahead slowly. Brakes. A step. Brakes. The policemen are stressed out after all the recent terrorist attacks and spend hours checking everyone who goes in. Yallah, odrob, come on, move it, the game’s starting soon, complains a father whose son is perched on his shoulders. What do you want from them, they’re only doing their job, a pair of identical twins standing behind him have a go at him. I wonder what Yotam and I look like to them, the thought flashes through my mind. Father and son? Brothers?
The guy taking tickets takes my two and tears them. The way they tear football tickets reminds me of the way a son whose father has died tears his shirt to symbolise a heart broken in anguish, and I shove the tickets right down into my pocket.
We go inside.
The fans’ songs resound strongly now, shaking the concrete walls and the heart. Confetti rain is falling on us from nowhere, washing away all thoughts. There’s no club. No Noa. No itch. Football is such pure fun.
Yotam breaks free of my grasp and runs up the steps. I skip after him and roar silently: Go reds go! Go reds go!
*
That’s the really cool thing — when you go up the steps and all of a sudden you see the whole field and the fans sitting in the stands on the other side and the players warming up. Like in Eilat, when you go into the water with your snorkel and — boom! you see all the fish and coral all at once.
There are no Hapoel fans here at all, Amir said, standing next to me. I put a finger on my lips to remind him he’s at Teddy. Right, he said, slapping himself on the forehead. Then he whispered in my ear, you have to teach me a few of your songs fast so they don’t figure out what I am. There’s the song, ‘O-hana’, I started to explain to him, and while I was talking, he led us to two empty seats in the middle of the stands. A tall guy was sitting in front of us and Amir asked him to change seats with his friend because ‘the kid’, which was me, couldn’t see. Moshe Sinai walked past under the VIP stand on his way to the HaPoel bench and all the fans got up and sang rude songs at him. Amir smiled at me, but I could see that he was a little pissed off about it. Then the fans unfurled a huge flag from the bottom of the stands to the top, each one grabbing the edge and passing it to the person behind him. It was dark under the flag, and hot and smelly. Amir bent over and whispered in my ear, I don’t believe that I’m under a Beitar flag. Next time, we go to Bloomfield. Fine, I said, happy that there was a ‘next time’ in our plans.
Then the game started and everyone yelled at everyone else: sit down! sit down! But no one wanted to be the sucker who’d sit down first, so they all stayed standing. During the first half, there were mainly fouls. The referee kept whistling and taking out yellow cards. No one kicked in the direction of the goals except for one corner that Pishont kicked which almost hit the net by mistake. The fans, who had sung a lot of songs before the game, gradually got quiet, sat down and started cracking sunflower seeds. They didn’t get up again until half-time, when Moshe Sinai walked past under the stands on his way to the locker room and they threw plastic bottles at him and swore at him. There’ll be goals in the second half, Amir promised. Ours, I said, and remembered a Yehuda Barkan candid camera programme I had seen that week.
I didn’t tell Amir about it so he wouldn’t get scared. On the programme, they put a Maccabee Haifa fan into the Beitar stands wearing a yellow shirt over a green Maccabee Haifa shirt. After a few minutes, he took off the yellow shirt and started cheering for Maccabee Haifa in the middle of the Beitar stands, wearing green. Wow, did he get smacked around. They took him to the hospital and he had to have about ten stitches.
Just don’t let Hapoel score, I prayed silently. I wouldn’t want Amir to have to get stitches.
But as soon as the second half started, that’s exactly what happened.
Shmulik Levy lost a ball on the side closest to us and Alon Ofir ran down the line almost to the corner and then kicked. Kornfein ran out to stop the ball, but Nissim Avitan jumped higher than him and butted the ball into the net.
Suddenly, the whole stadium was quiet. Complete silence. Like right after Adina, our form teacher, shouts that if we don’t quieten down, she’ll give us a test.
I looked at Amir. I hoped he wouldn’t say anything. I prayed he wouldn’t do anything. But he did. He opened his mouth and yelled.
*
Why?! Why?! Why?!
That’s what I yelled. I was bursting with happiness about Hapoel’s fantastic goal and I couldn’t keep it inside, so instead of yelling ‘Yes!’ I found myself yelling ‘Why?! Why?! Why?!’ Three earsplitting shouts that thundered through the stunned stands. Yotam looked at me worriedly. A few heads turned towards me in puzzlement. How, I kept yelling, how did you let them score a goal like that?! Because we have lousy defence, someone sitting two rows below us answered. Because the coach is shit, someone sitting above us said. A bunch of fans got up and started singing to the coach: resign, resign, resign. The Beitar players looked embarrassed. The Hapoel players went right into a bunker defence. A little one-nil. That’s all we need. That’s our speciality. For years. Towards the end of the game, Beitar did have a few chances. Abucsis kicked two balls that whistled over the goal, and Yotam grabbed his head in frustration. I patted him on the shoulder with a winner’s generosity. Wait, he said, it’s not over yet. But a second after he said that, the referee whistled the end of the game and the Hapoel players hugged Moshe Sinai and ran quickly to the locker rooms so the flying plastic bottles wouldn’t land on their heads. Fans hung on the fences and swore at them, and when they’d all left the field and there was no one left to insult, the stadium started to empty out. Yotam and I waited in our seats till the last fan had gone. We sat there staring at the sunflower seed shells, the ice lolly wrappers and the special editions of the fans’ newspaper published in honour of the game that were now being trampled on by the crowd.