Brown Scarf Blues by Mois Benarroch

already studying engineering, I didn’t have much time for him, for the new him, he had become an Israeli, he was very reserved and said very little, he looked bad, worse than in ’75 and it seemed like maybe he was a virgin, and I honestly didn’t have the energy to spend time with him. I had moved on.

1983
    H e had a literary group, him and two friends, who all complained constantly about being ignored, they considered themselves the cream of Israeli literature and who knows, maybe they were, a group of exceptionally gifted poets, writers, novelists, but they were against everyone and everything, they were against European literature and at the time they thought that after many changes, people needed to write a new Hebrew literature, like the Midrash or Talmud or the Biblical prophesies, I was friends with the redhead and even slept with him occasionally though I wasn’t his girlfriend, we were also neighbors and sometimes got together for tea. Later I moved to Galilee.
    That year they had a party to mark the magazine’s fourth issue, they wouldn’t publish my poems but they invited me to the party. One thing they didn’t lack was chutzpah. The party was in one of the halls at Binyané Hauma, where the Sabra worked weekends, in fact he became the master of tens of thousands of square feet and that was his empire. He did as he pleased there, and as far as I know he never got in trouble because no one found out what went on there on the weekends, or if he did I never heard about it. They generally gathered there along with three other poets in the group who took turns attending, and they would argue about poetry, but that Friday they decided to use the space to celebrate the publication of issue 4 of the magazine. To everybody’s great surprise, I think everyone who got the more or less secret invitations—so no one would find out—showed up, as did their friends. I guess there were thirty or even forty of us. First there were readings of poems and prose from the magazine, during which you could see looks of pain, especially on the face of the Sabra, who, though the poorest of the three, had put the most money into the magazine, and he began attacking all the critics who said nothing of their efforts, and then all his friends from college who ignored us, and his professors, he was very disappointed. Meanwhile everyone started drinking, I think they’d brought vodka, the cheapest drink in those days.
    Suddenly the complaints became shouting and even weeping, two poets sobbing and the others soothing them, like in a nursery school, it seems someone criticized the pagination, and the Sabra’s and the redhead’s fraying nerves snapped and they burst into shouts and tears. Both were exhausted from the effort of publishing the magazine, besides three books written by the three editors, who were founding a publishing house called Marot, like the magazine, and the magazine’s writers were referred to as “The Men of Marot,” Marot means mirrors in Hebrew but also visions, men of mirrors and men of visions, both at once. The idea came from Borges, but even Borges never knew that Hebrew had one word for mirror and vision.
    Everyone was drinking and wandering through the offices and hallways and even onto a half-balcony on the roof of the back entrance. With no railings. The Sabra started running towards the one-story drop saying he would kill himself, and someone went and calmed him down, explaining that the most he would do is break a hand and a leg, and that even if he landed on his head, a nine-foot leap wouldn’t kill him. That’s when I felt a hand reach in from the hallway, touch me from behind and grab my right breast, it startled me, and I turned around, I couldn’t believe it, it was him, Charly, well, he called himself Charles but we all called him Charly or, to piss him off, The Moroccan or El Marrocano, and there I was with my face practically touching his, with this child ten years younger than me