Angling for Love

Matkot—an Israeli beach game (known as Kadima in the U.S.), played with a short-handled racquet (matka) and a squash ball. Using a paddle, two or more players hit the ball back and forth as many times as possible without dropping it. Considered Israel’s national sport, it has no boundaries and no rules; the only goal is to keep the ball in the air.

Jacky gets there first, before the rest of the matkot players. He combs the beach in front of the five-star Tel Aviv hotels before the chair attendants come to work. He finds one or two, sometimes even three abandoned white plastic chairs, and drags each through the sand. His thin body, bent and stooped by his seventy-eight years, moves slowly. He knows no one will thank him but he doesn’t mind. He likes to think he’s doing something useful. He lines up the chairs at the meeting point, sits down, and takes out the sandwich of leftover grilled eggplant and tahini that he packed before leaving home in Pardes Katz to catch the number eighty-two bus for the thirty-minute ride to the beach. Today, he has a change of clothes in his backpack for the excursion with Dalia. Not that it matters. It’s not like she’s interested in him or anything.

As he eats his breakfast and waits for Dalia and the others, he gazes out at the sea, which is like liquid mercury so early in the day. These are the moments when he feels rich, when he doesn’t think about the wife who left him, the daughter who won’t talk to him, and his Russian almost-girlfriend, Valeriya, who agrees to go dancing with him, and lets him pay for her groceries but won’t sleep with him. His beach chums call him a frier—a sucker—at least he shouldn’t buy her groceries, they tell him. He knows they’re right. But he also knows what it’s like not to have money. So he gives her a fifty-shekel bill and asks her to buy him a container of milk that costs six shekels, knowing she’ll keep the change. He likes how rich it makes him feel, that he can let her cheat him, even if it means he is a frier. Can you be a frier if you know you’re a frier? Why is everyone so worried about being a frier?  Besides, they don’t call him a frier when he brings them the chairs.

He always gives up his seat for the ladies, even though most of them don’t give him the time of day. Over the years, he has asked every woman, as soon as she starts to play matkot with the group, to go dancing with him. Even if she’s a lousy player, even if she isn’t pretty. None have agreed.

He loves to dance, especially salsa. Dance is a prelude to love. And he would love to have love. All his life, the more he wanted it, the less he got, especially from his ex-wife, Annika, a Dutch volunteer at a kibbutz whom he...