Tel Aviv Noir

by Etgar Keret

  For a moment our eyes met. He nodded once. He was just an outline by then. Don’t come back, he said. I heard the gunshot, but when I opened my eyes it was just some Filipino construction workers having an impromptu picnic by the Yarkon, next to an Arab family who were setting up a barbecue, while two young women jogged past and someone with more enthusiasm than sense was trying to row a boat on the river.

  The river smelled. And I walked home.

  Tel Aviv

  It’s getting better now. The news helps—Channel 2, Reshet Bet on the radio once an hour, CNN, the newspapers. Rockets over Gaza, an exploding bus in Tel Aviv, the deaths and mutilations anchor me, a rope to pull me back into the right place and time. The sight of a concrete apartment building blown open with mortar, a child’s plastic doll on the ground, its blue eyes staring into the camera. A mass funeral, a coffin draped with a flag, men waving guns in the air, and I realize with a start that I can’t even tell who they are, Muslim or Jew.

  The news helps, and I immerse myself in the secondhand bookshops, the moldy, lurid paperbacks from the 1960s, with unlikely author names such as Mike Longshott and Kim Rockman and the pictures of scantily clad women, two-foot-tall Korean secret agents, monsters, ghosts, Nazis, and cowboys; and I avoid that damned Hebrew detective, David Tidhar.

  * * *

  I hope to never see another bloody zeppelin.

  This story was originally written in English.

  SLOW COOKING

  BY DEAKLA KEYDAR

  Levinsky Park

  I’m the only one who asks for a Thursday-night shift.

  Stella and Diana have barely worked here for two years, so no one asks them what shifts they want. But I’m a veteran, and I still ask specifically for that shift.

  Thursday night is the hardest shift. It’s bearable until seven or eight in the evening. Probably because customers are still busy with showers and dinners. But I guess after their kids go to bed they realize the supermarket is about to close for the Sabbath, and then our phone lines nearly overload. Thursday-night customers are the most nervous and suspicious. Any delay, any substitute product we suggest, any special offer we’re obligated to tell them about before completing the order, makes them lash out at us. But we put our emotions aside. That’s the first rule of working at Plenty Market. Over the years I’ve found it easier than I’d expected.

  On Thursday night we split the workload. Except for at ten o’clock, when I usually do pickup while Stella and Diana answer the phones. That way we get more done and increase our chances of getting a promotion. After Stella once walked around for over forty minutes looking for untoasted cashew nuts, and another time when Diana almost got fired because she couldn’t find nonkosher matzo meal, and dared argue with the customer, claiming it didn’t exist—we decided I would do pickup. No customer can confuse me.

  And I like working these hours. Diana plays classical music on the main checkout speakers, and it’s dark outside but bright and colorful inside. I push the cart with one hand, hold the list of orders in the other, and imagine all the Friday-night dinners our customers are planning. Not that there are many surprises. Other than that guy from Jabotinsky Street, who orders thirteen cans of tuna and four family-packs of toilet paper every week, or that woman from Ben Yehuda Street with her seven family-size bags of jelly beans (one bag per day, her husband doesn’t know, she once told Stella), most families make a standard order: salmon or frozen tilapia or Nile perch, ground beef, rice, pasta, vegetables. Very similar to my sister Shoshi’s Friday-night menu.

  I also load a shopping cart for myself on Thursday night: five tomatoes, five cucumbers, cheese, bread, lemon wafers to have with my coffee. That’s all I get, even though I have an employee discount. That’s all I need until Saturday, and on Sunday morning I’m back here anyway. Thursday is the only night shift I do since the conversation I had with Mati six months ago.

  Mati had just come home from work and I immediately noticed the lunch I packed him had not been eaten. He said he didn’t have an appetite, which isn’t like him because he always eats, even when he’s sick, especially meatballs with rice and peas in red sauce, which I had made that day.

  I watched him all evening, hoping it wasn’t serious. Even when the kids showered and played, and when one of them ended up in tears, as usual, and they didn’t speak all through dinner, even then I noticed him looking at the omelet like there was something wrong with it. I gave him a glass of water and two painkillers. Was he trying to act like a hero? I told him to rest, but instead he read the kids a story, helped them brush their teeth, and didn’t sit still all evening.

  Later, when we got into bed, I picked up my book and waited for him to reach for his. But instead he leaned back and sighed. I moved closer to him and pressed my lips against his forehead like I do when I check if the children have a fever. He fidgeted.

  “Do you feel all right?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, and sighed again. “I don’t feel good.”

  “What hurts?”

  He was silent for a moment, then said, “I think I need a change.”

  My knees began trembling under the covers. “What kind of change?”

  “I don’t think I can live here anymore. I need a break.”

  “Did you tuck the children in?” I asked. “They throw off their blankets at night.”

  He stared at me for a moment. “No,” he said, and started getting up, but I beat him to it and he remained perched on the edge of the bed. I arrived at the children’s room breathless, as if I’d just run a mile. I turned the light on. They were sleeping deeply. The eldest with her arms spread to her sides, legs stretched out, the youngest squeezed tight like a beetle.

  I felt my pulse in my ears. Every day, ten people make the same assumption he just did: that I’m their problem. If a product is out of stock, if the delivery person can’t find their home, if the frozen corn thaws by the time they get it—it’s my fault. My job is to cordially fix the problem, or, as our manager puts it, “to remove the human factor from the equation,” and compensate them accordingly. I squeezed my knees tight and returned to the bedroom, running my hand against the wall. He was sitting up in bed, looking at me.

  “You need a change,” I said, “but I’m not the problem.”

  I leaned against the door and glanced at the frame hanging over our bed, with the printed photo of Mati and me in Palma de Mallorca from ten years earlier. We had saved for that vacation since we met and hadn’t gone on another one since. The photo was almost completely faded now.

  “So what are you saying?” he asked.

  I took a deep breath. “You sit in your lottery booth all day, not moving. Your world is narrow. All you see every day is people losing money. What do you expect? You think you can do this for another twenty years? You said it yourself: the best moment of your day is when you prank call me—and now I’m what you need to change?”

  My knees were still trembling. I realized I never ended up tucking in the children, and I left the light on.

  “Did you always think that?” he asked.

  “Yes.” That was a lie. His work was steady, with good benefits and all the retirement and insurance funds. It was our future.

  “So what do you suggest, that I quit?” he asked. “Who’s going to hire me? At my age? I have no education, no connections. All I know how to do is sit in a booth.”

  “Find another job and then quit, that’s how it works.” I glared at him. “You don’t just break up a family like that, Mati.”

  * * *

  A few days later we heard honking outside the house. The kids and I went out to the balcony. A giant red truck was parked at our curb and behind the wheel was none other than Mati, glowing with joy, though he’d found the most dangerous job there is—delivering chemicals, driving at night on the most treacherous roads in Israel. It paid even less than his lottery job and it offered no special benefits, but I didn’t say a word. I remembered that Mati was born with an excellent sense of direct
ion. He could always explain to me, slowly and quietly, where to turn and when, and what I should be seeing on my left and right. And the kids were excited.

  He drove at night and slept during the day. When I left for work he was just getting back, and when I came home he left again. He complained about the noise the kids made when he tried to sleep during the day, though sometimes he’d wake up upset from the sound of me yelling at them to be quiet. He announced that he was going to sleep at his mother’s place from then on, and one day the kids told me he’d rented a one-bedroom apartment right around the corner.

  I asked him over for a talk. What a waste, to rent a second apartment, and so close too. Like throwing away money—rent, food. He said it was only temporary, that his mother was getting on his nerves, that he needed his own “quiet corner” but wanted to stay close to the kids. He’d get a couple of beds, and then they could come spend the night at his place when he wasn’t working, and I’d have some peace and quiet too.

  But who wanted peace and quiet from the kids? On the contrary, I wanted them around me all the time, making noise. I played Monopoly and trivia with them, helped them with homework, walked to the park, went to get falafel, played music in the living room, and danced. I even liked dozing off with them in our bed, in front of the television, one of them on either side of me, and then waking up with them in the morning, warm and sleepy. My sister Shoshi kept saying, “This must be hard on you,” but I said it wasn’t. I had less cleaning and cooking to do. If I had any complaints, they were directed only at myself.

  Then things started to change. It was as if the kids suddenly lost their patience with me. If I hogged too much of the blanket at night, if the pita I made them for school fell apart, if I didn’t sign a letter from their teacher that they never even showed me, they got pissed off. And they were hungry all the time. They roamed the kitchen, opening and closing fridge and cabinet doors. I cooked and cooked and nothing satiated them. They banged their fists on the table like prisoners. Sometimes I couldn’t help myself and banged their plates down on the table in response, sending the food everywhere.

  When I went to work with defeat on my face, Stella and Diana suggested I try to imagine they were customers. Put your emotions aside, tell them it’s temporary. The kids would ask me about twenty times a day when Daddy was coming home, as if that same question didn’t drive me mad as well. And I just kept saying it was temporary.

  One day Mati called to tell me he got a couple of mattresses and wanted the kids to stay with him from Thursday night to Saturday, his days off work. I wasn’t going to have any of that. What was he thinking, leaving me without the kids all weekend?

  “This is their home,” I told him. “You want to see them on Saturday? Come home.”

  I didn’t give up. I took them to dinner at Shoshi’s on Friday night. In the kitchen, she scolded me that the kids were telling everyone I wouldn’t let them see their dad. What kind of primitive behavior was this, she wanted to know, fighting him at their expense? I was going to end up with no husband and no kids.

  That’s how I ended up giving away my kids for the weekends.

  Thursday night to Saturday night. No kids.

  Since last March. It’s been over six months.

  I immediately asked the manager for the Thursday-night shift.

  And on my very first shift, I noticed Dr. Alex Michael.

  It’s not that this customer, from 31 Bloch Street, was anything special. But he was a pleasant surprise after so many irate, impatient, and rude customers who made me regret not heeding Stella and Diana’s warnings about this particular shift. He said “please” and “thank you.” I took down his order with special care, and asked, “Would you like anything else?”

  He said, “Yes, to tell you that you’re very nice.”

  I thanked him and we said goodbye. Mati didn’t think I was nice. The kids didn’t think I was nice. Even Shoshi didn’t think I was nice, trying to avoid going to her place for Friday-night dinner. Without the kids, there was no point in going, but she kept twisting my arm. “It’s important that you get out of the house,” she said.

  I thought maybe this was Dr. Alex Michael’s first time ordering groceries and that’s why he was so kind, but I checked the records and found that he was a veteran customer at Plenty Market, and that he called every Thursday at ten o’clock and almost always ordered the same thing: pitas, vegetables, fruit, yogurt, chocolate milk, frozen food, meat, chicken breast, pasta, cornflakes, cleaning supplies, low-cal bread, sugarless cookies. A normal family. Two or three children, an overweight wife, a husband who does the grocery shopping. Mati used to shop for us as well, using my employee discount.

  I kept signing up for the Thursday-night shift and waiting for ten o’clock. Even when he sounded tired, Dr. Alex Michael never made me feel like he held me responsible for the shortage of organic trash bags, or for the kilo of rotting apples he got the week before. He never asked suspiciously about the price of an alternate product I offered him, as if I had anything to gain from selling him something more expensive. On the contrary, he said he trusted me completely, and that I should make the substitution without even asking.

  But two months ago, in August, something changed. Dr. Alex Michael’s large family order grew smaller: three apples, two pears, dental floss, cleaning supplies. I thought maybe they were going on vacation. People have many reasons for changing a standing order. We can’t ask the customers personal questions, of course. But by the fourth week I got the picture. No cornflakes, no star-shaped frozen schnitzel, no Splenda.

  It was the order of a family man who found himself spending a large chunk of his time alone.

  I was surprised by the tear that left my eye as I typed in Dr. Alex Michael’s order. Five cucumbers, butter, half a loaf of bread, half a carton of eggs, frozen chicken nuggets. He asked if I had gotten a cold in honor of winter and told me to take care of myself and drink hot tea with lemon. I couldn’t help myself and asked if he was a general practitioner. He said he was an orthopedic doctor, a hand specialist. We ended the conversation.

  Stella was eating canned mackerel with a plastic fork and handed me a tissue. She looked at me as if she had a right to everything I was feeling.

  I waved my hand at her. That mackerel she was eating was much pricier than the five shekels worth of merchandise we were allowed to eat per shift. It could put our jobs at risk. The contracting company would have no problem replacing us with cheaper, younger hires who didn’t steal mackerel. I know. Lots of employees have come and gone in the time we’ve been here. Diana, Stella, and I were the only ones who survived.

  She said its sell-by date had passed, and that she took it from the returns cart.

  I apologized.

  She came closer, enveloping me with her large body, and said I had to try it because it tasted like her home. Stella’s home was in Romania. She used to be a math teacher there. Diana came from some Ukrainian village. She used to be a pianist. I’m the only one who was born in Israel, and I’m the only one who didn’t use to be something else.

  * * *

  This past Thursday night I came to my shift all dressed and made up. Stella and Diana thought I had a date after work, but actually, my date had ended two hours earlier.

  Mati called at four. He finished work early and asked if he could pick up the kids within the hour. I said fine, as long as they had a chance to finish eating before he came. He agreed. Without thinking too much, I took some minced meat and chicken breast out of the freezer and placed them on the counter to thaw. Then I showered, put on makeup, and started cooking. I chopped, I stirred, working quickly, like I was a participant in some sort of contest, though my food tastes best when it’s slow-cooked. Within thirty minutes, I had a pot of rice and a beef stew on the stove. I fried twenty schnitzels, charred some eggplant to make a salad, chopped vegetables, and even unfroze bread in the microwave—something I never do. The kitchen was filled with nice smells. It had been forever since I last cooked a rea
l meal. The kids usually had lunch at school, and I spent weekends alone. There was no point in cooking for just myself. I called the children over to taste the food, and they said it was delicious, which boosted my confidence. It quickly started to look like I was cooking for the entire neighborhood.

  At five o’clock Mati honked outside.

  I signaled to him from the balcony to come up, but the kids had already run out and climbed into the vehicle, bouncing on the seats. I saw him tell them to wave at me, and they did, looking like they couldn’t wait to get out of there. He glanced at me from his high seat, waiting for me to wave back and let them go, so I did.

  When I returned inside I saw they forgot their schoolbags. I could have called Mati, but I didn’t. Let him deal with it in the morning.

  I examined the pots. I still had two hours before my shift. What was I going to do with so much food over the weekend, all by myself? I felt like dumping it all, but I couldn’t throw away food when there are children starving in Africa.

  It’s not like I was unkind to the customers during the evening shift, but it took me almost ten minutes to find the family-size pack of lavender-scented laundry softener, and I quoted the wrong sale price for tofu. Diana and Stella rolled their eyes at each other as they took delivery orders. Then Stella pretended to fall asleep, and Diana pretended to throw up. They made each other laugh, but I only followed the large clock in the main register: 9:50, 9:55, 9:58, 9:59.

  “Plenty Market phone orders, good evening.”

  “Hi,” he said. “Good evening.”

  “How can I help you?” I asked, as if I didn’t recognize his voice. Stella and Diana were watching me, their hands on their hips, as if they’d caught me. Then I realized I was smiling.

  “This is Dr. Alex Michael. How are you?” he said, and then added, “From Bloch Street.”