The sultry Red Sea resort of Eilat, right on the Sinai border with Egypt, may be less than an hour by plane from the bustling metropolis of Tel Aviv, Jackie reflected in her travel-journalist inner voice as she sat at a bench in the garden of Suzanna restaurant sipping – slurping, really – the house cocktail of mint and arak. But it’s also thirty years away. In Eilat, greed is good and flashy is fashionable. In Tel Aviv, stealth wealth is the insider’s choice.
To be honest, Jackie knew what a brash, money-mad place Tel Aviv was, too. But there was no denying the cultural dynamism of the place – more museums and art galleries per head than anywhere else on earth. Sitting in the upmarket bohemian district of Neve Tsedek, with its maze of winding lanes and multitudes of studios and galleries, the difference between this city and the fleshpots of Eilat couldn’t have been more different. There was a tractor pushing sand in a side-street off Shabazi, and she smiled as she remembered one of her favourite stories about Israel; that Jews were so mad for culture that even when Tel Aviv was a village of hopeful settlers rather than a city of movers and shakers in the early years of the twentieth century, it was a village with two theatres, an opera house and a huge library. They were still covering up the sand dunes, and they had a museum. No matter how much money washed in, that sense of being built on culture – not religion like Jerusalem, or relaxation like Eilat – would always remain.
Having said that, there were only so many ways you could feed your brain before you felt the need to fizz it up a bit, Jackie thought as she looked at her watch for the third time in five minutes. Where was Dov? There; walking down Shabazi from the seafront, checking out every man, woman and dog moving towards him in the way she had come to know and love for the lack of furtiveness, the fierceness of freedom in his frank appreciation of everything life had to throw at him, especially if it had breasts. It was interest as much lechery, and this gave it an aspect which meant that the English word ‘perving’ seem totally beside the point. It was like saying that a dog perved over a lamp-post. If he could, Dov would have sniffed every person he met. But he’d only be interested in urinating over a chosen few.
She made a meal of him with her eyes – his height, his big shoulders, his olive skin and glossy black hair - before shutting off her lust and adopting the amused, slightly contemptuous expression which her husband, like so many Israeli men, preferred to see on the face of the woman they loved. He saw her and mockingly saluted her before dodging through the traffic, licking his lips, to where she sat.