Kick and Run: Memoir With Soccer Ball by Jonathan Wilson

Author:Jonathan Wilson [Wilson, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sports, Sports & Recreation, Soccer, Personal Memoirs, Non-Fiction, Biography & Autobiography, Football
ISBN: 9781448213788
Google: KeR6AAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1448213789
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2013-10-22T04:00:00+00:00

SECOND HALF

Chapter 12

Eleni married John a few months after returning to England and I was happy for her. At first though I was lonely, drinking too much and writing a series of dismal poems. I sat at my desk and watched the blue jays swoop in and out of the trees outside my window. I had no family in Israel and the woman I had lived with since I was twenty-one was no longer around. “When we leave each other,” the Danish poet Henrik Nordbrandt writes “we also leave all the places we have been together” and that is how I felt: our workman’s house in Wivenhoe; a hotel in Heraklion, Crete where we spent a week on vacation and were greeted every morning by the din of pneumatic drills breaking concrete beneath our window; a cottage in Skibereen, Cork with pink fuchsia in its front garden and steaming cow pats in the sloping field at the back; a house on an estate near the lock in the Oxfordshire village of Iffley, married accommodation for graduate students of the university which we had lied to secure only to discover that, like us, all the tenants were single.

In the year that followed Eleni’s departure I had quite a few very nice girlfriends, although I was never quite sure if they were more attracted to me or to my apartment. Talia was the slightly out-of-control daughter of an American rabbi (she smoked a lot of dope); Ada was a teacher in an experimental school; Orna and Liat were students at the art school; Edna had grown up on a kibbutz; Tami was a dancer who also happened to double as my cleaning lady; Ruth was a journalist from San Francisco; and Robyn was someone else’s girlfriend, passing through.

In my memory of that time and the years that followed between Anwar Sadat’s breakthrough visit to the Knesset (the Israeli house of representatives) in 1977 and the violence that erupted on Israel’s northern border in July 1981, Jerusalem exists in some eternal naïve summer unsullied by politics. There, in that place, inhabited by someone in his mid-to-late twenties, not altogether a fool and not altogether wise, and with love, sex, poetry, and soccer on his mind, conflict is buried under bushes overgrown with wild honeysuckle and jasmine bursting like tiny stars at dusk. I barely sensed the seething disquiet of the Palestinians in East Jerusalem.

I met Sherry, my wife-to-be, at a wild party in the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, an area which, in the late 1970s, was very briefly home to a bohemian world of writers, painters (like Sherry), and photographers. I thought she was seventeen, but as it turned out I was a decade short, which was good news for me, as I was captivated from the start. We went up to the roof of the party house that offered a spectacular view of the Dome of the Rock, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and the Western Wall. In moonlight that bathed everything

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