Chapter 6
It happened the year after we met. We went out clubbing, as we did most weekends.
We drank a lot, and at some stage Halimi disappeared into the dark recesses of the club.
I danced for hours with Libby and a bunch of other people who came and went.
At some point I went to the bathroom, and it was there that I heard groans coming from one of the stalls.
I smiled—remembering that first night with Halimi—and suddenly realized that I recognized his voice.
I froze up, even though I knew that I had been waiting for this moment. I leaned against one of the walls, waiting for them to leave the stall, part of my brain curious to see how he would handle this.
The girl came out first. It was smooth black bob, thick eyeliner, flaming-red lipstick, the one who’d pestered us that first night.
I was overcome with revulsion, if only because of the tacky coincidence.
The girl went over to the sink; her eyes were bleary, and her makeup smudged.
She tugged at her miniskirt and tried to adjust her shirt.
She didn’t notice me, just washed her face, threw a glance in the direction of the stall, and turned to leave.
“Are you coming?” she asked briskly.
“No.” Halimi’s voice was low and gravelly. “Give me a minute.”
The girl shrugged her shoulders. “As long as your lady friend doesn’t catch you, right?” she asked in the same nonchalant tone. There was no response from the stall, and she left.
I heard a rustling from the stall, the click of a lighter, and a faint crackle of friction between flame and cigarette.
I heard Halimi inhaling and exhaling. I was dying to smoke a cigarette, too, but he had the pack.
The voyeur inside me knew I would never give up the dramatic moment in which Halimi exited the stall and saw me.
I could already imagine telling the whole sorry tale to my sister, Dina (“I caught him fucking some girl in the bathroom of the club! Just like in the movies!”)
While waiting, my resolve weakened. I began to cry.
The cold and rational voice inside my head said, Honestly—what’s the big deal?
It’s not like you didn’t expect it. But my mind kept digging in—like a tongue probing a cavity—with a clear memory of that morning when he said he’d impregnate me, and I spread my legs wide and lifted my hips even higher and whispered, “Go for it.”
I heard a movement and straightened up a little, and Halimi exited the stall.
He headed straight for the sink to wash his face and didn’t notice me right away.
But when he raised his head, he saw me out of the corner of his eye and turned to face me.
Horror was etched all over his face. “Oh no,” he said.
“Oh no, indeed,” I said.
He collapsed onto the filthy floor, his back to the wall, and his eyes welled up with tears. It terrified, even disgusted me a bit. “I’m so drunk. Dumb. And drunk. Dumb,” he said, his usual diction dropped. “Will you come home with me just one more time?”
I decided it would be better to spend the night at home and then play it by ear. We said nothing to each other the entire cab ride back. When we entered the apartment, Halimi got down on his knees and clung to my thighs.
“Give me a break, stop it,” I said.
“I’ll kill myself if you leave me,” he begged.
“Don’t kill yourself, you piece of shit,” I spat back.
Halimi went off to throw up in the bathroom, and I changed my clothes.
I sat on the bed for a few minutes, staring into space.
I heard him brushing his teeth. I threw on a pair of old sweatpants and went back into the living room.
Halimi had fallen asleep on the couch, his mouth slightly open.
I sat down in the easy chair, lit a cigarette, and numbly checked my social media feeds.
Halimi gave a small snore. I jumped out of the easy chair, alarmed by my revulsion toward him.
I took a deep breath, and the moment I began texting Libby, he opened his eyes.
It never took him more than a moment to wake up. “Do you hate me?” he asked.
“Not entirely,” I answered, for some reason attempting restraint. Halimi sat up, fixed his eyes on me, and rubbed his nose with a shaking hand.
I wanted to get something straight here.
“See,” I began, “I don’t really care that much if you stick your dick in some other woman’s cunt …”
“Diti, come on,” Halimi protested, and a half-laugh, half-cry escaped my throat.
“Ah, is that too graphic for your delicate soul all of a sudden?”
“You’re right,” Halimi said submissively. “I’ll shut up.”
“I don’t care that much,” I repeated, emphasizing the word that.
“But why did you have to do it there? In the bathroom of the club, where we …” I got angry and dropped it.
“Never mind, that’s not the point. It’s just that I always thought if you ever had a fling with anyone else, you’d warn me first. You’d make sure I was ready for it, I don’t know, that I didn’t need you right then—”
“You’re right, you’re right,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m a total ass.”
“It’s just that, I don’t know…,” I continued. “I thought we were in this together. That you wouldn’t pull something like this on me.”
“Darling,” he said, his eyes imploring.
“Stop looking at me like a sad puppy, Halimi, honestly,” I flared up again. “It makes me feel like a librarian annoyed at a student for not returning a book on time.”
“I’m an ass,” he repeated.
He climbed into bed while I brushed my teeth. When I got into bed, he asked if it would be okay to hug me. Disconcerted, I agreed. He repeatedly told me he was a scumbag, a lowlife undeserving of love, that the girl had started making out with him and he had just gotten carried away.
When he said it would never happen again, I pulled away from him. “It’ll happen again, I have no doubt about that,” I said. There was silence, and Halimi tried to say something but failed. Finally, he spluttered, “So, that’s it, you’re breaking up with me? Is that it?”
His voice was matter-of-fact, even cold. In the darkness of the bedroom, I heard the ticking of the clock on the wall and Halimi’s breaths.
“I’ll tell you the truth, Limi,” I said after a while. “You know I fell in love with you completely, even though I didn’t mean to. I never believed we’d stay together for more than a month. And I don’t know if it can work, considering the kinds of things you do.”
“Considering,” Halimi said quietly and clung to me again.
“I’m willing to undergo chemical castration if you’ll stay with me,” he added, wrapping his long arms tighter around me.
“But only after you give me a baby. Even if you leave me after.” I laughed, and the fact that he could still make me laugh, even now, suddenly made it all look idiotic and insignificant.
While I thought about it some more, I realized he’d fallen asleep.
I woke him up in the middle of the night and said, “What about an open relationship?”
“Give me a break,” Halimi mumbled, his arms still around me.
“So, he doesn’t want to know?” my sister said, thoughtfully chewing on a carrot stick she’d cut for Max. Max and his sister, Eva, came in and out of the frame behind Dina as we chatted on Zoom.
“It’s not a good sign … If he doesn’t want to know, it means he doesn’t really want to deal with it.”
Throughout her adolescence, Dina shocked our parents with outrageous behavior.
She became a heroin addict and went to rehab on a farm in Spain.
After that, she floated through different countries.
Twice she joined mystical-spiritual cults and stormed out of both.
In recent years, she’d settled down in Berlin with Georg, an installation artist who initially came off as a psychopath but was actually a very gentle soul.
We maintained a strong bond throughout the years.
I was quite close to my parents, too, but it wasn’t the same.
Natasha and Sergei Rozhevsky were frozen in the time before they moved from Russia to Israel.
Old black-and-white photos revealed a wild youth, all-night parties, fancy costumes, guitars.
Stories of underground manuscripts and clandestine recordings of Western music circulated among the few friends who also immigrated to Israel.
But in Israel, they became moralistic and neurotic, and when they finally settled in, my sister and I had already left home.
It was only on weekend visits later, when I was a student, that I began talking to my mom about her youth and her life.
They would come once a month for lunch at a Tel Aviv restaurant, and sometimes Halimi and I would sleep over at their small apartment in Jerusalem.
Halimi loved Jerusalem and its wind-blown hills, the stones that turned pink at sunset, the introspective denizens.
He particularly loved Natasha and Sergei’s warm little den, its walls lined floor to ceiling with books, my dad’s old record collection, and the tea and candies served every couple of hours.
My parents adored Halimi—he flirted shamelessly with my mom and made her laugh like a teenager.
He argued with my dad over politics. They agreed on nothing, but both of them enjoyed the clashes.
I spoke to Dina almost every day—by phone or Messenger, and sometimes we spoke on Zoom.
I visited her frequently in Berlin, and whenever it seemed like things were getting out of hand in Israel, I toyed with the idea of moving there.
By the time Halimi and I started living together, Dina was already a mom.
Dina and Georg—who met at a crazy party one night at Berghain—decided on an open relationship with clear boundaries from the start: one-night stands only, no affairs, complete transparency with each other, and the right to veto.
It worked—they stuck to the rules, their love for each other blossomed, and Dina gathered material for a book on how to sustain consensual non-monogamy.