by Etgar Keret
“Hey, you’re the writer.”
“Writers have the worst time with names.”
“Dorit,” said Asaf.
“Wonderful,” said Tycher.
“That’s Tycher’s mother’s name.”
“So you get a list of videos,” Gideon Tzuk continued. “Dorit Sucks Niggas, Huge Cock Coming Up Dorit’s Butt, Dorit’s Dream Gang Bang, Dorit in Asian Lesbian Action, and it adds something. The name adds something.” He winked at Tycher.
“Do the girls actually look like the picture you upload?”
“Not often,” said Gideon Tzuk. “But sometimes, let’s say 30 percent of the time, it’s kind of horrible how similar they look. An infinite museum, updated daily, documenting all of your exes fucking. All of the time.”
“Has anyone tried uploading pictures of things other than people?” Tycher asked. “Like a picture of a volcano or of space, to see what it finds?”
The writer and Asaf didn’t seem to hear him. Gideon Tzuk stared at the door by the end of the bar until one of the kitchen workers appeared there. He ordered three shots of arak. While they were being served, the writer got up and walked behind the bar, by the cash register, and found a bottle of Tabasco. He grabbed it, smiled at the worker, and returned to his seat. He uncapped the bottle with his teeth and spat the cap onto the bar, then raised it at Asaf and Tycher, inviting them to participate in a ceremony whose existence they were not aware of. They raised their glasses and lowered their heads. The writer poured two drops into each of the shot glasses. He raised his own glass again. They mimicked him as he tapped his glass on the bar twice. He then clinked his with theirs and said, “L’chaim. To life and not to death.”
They repeated after him: “To life and not to death.” And they all drank.
“Then one day,” Gideon Tzuk wiped fat drops of arak from his beard and went on talking, as if he had never stopped but rather jumped over a hurdle, “I received an e-mail with a video of myself jerking off. It was right after I visited Fucking Familiar, I should mention. And the e-mail came with a threat, blackmailing me. All I was asked to do was to keep jerking off every day, or else the video would be shared over the Internet.” He turned to Asaf. “And I did it every day. And every day I got a video of myself doing it the day before. And so I came to meet your friend.” He pointed at Tycher. “But I didn’t tell him it started at Fucking Familiar. That was too much. Because he would’ve asked whose picture I uploaded.”
“I wouldn’t have asked.”
“I wouldn’t have told you,” said Gideon Tzuk. “And I’m not going to tell you now.”
“It’s none of our business,” said Asaf.
“Damn straight,” agreed the writer. “So then I went to see another investigator, but he didn’t find anything either. In the end, you know who explained it to me? Meir Shalev.”
“Oh my God,” said Tycher.
“It happened to Meir Shalev too?” Asaf asked.
“No,” said Gideon Tzuk. “Meir Shalev is a good friend of mine. We are both half from Emek Yizrael and half from Jerusalem.”
“Okay,” said Asaf.
“A year ago I told him this story. He says, Look, this isn’t the first time I’ve heard this. He wouldn’t tell me who he heard it from, but I gave him permission to tell whoever it was that it happened to me too, and to ask him to contact me. The guy called the same day. A very well-known writer whose name I won’t repeat. It turns out there was a support group. I didn’t know about it, because I’m not really part of the inner circle. There were two musicians, two illustrators, and an actor, but mostly writers. Thirty writers, all caught up in this thing. They were investigating it together, so they had a lot more information than I did. For example: Derek Hammon never did anything illegal. Turns out we gave our consent to be filmed. It was in the user agreement you sign on the website’s homepage. We clicked Okay.”
A cigarette butt breathed on the floor and Tycher tried to put it out with the sole of his shoe.
“The worst part is the fear. What if one day I couldn’t do it, and he went public? It cripples you. What if you have reserve duty in the military, for example? Or if you’re somewhere with no Internet access? Or you’re sick? There’s no vacation from it. It’s like this, every day.”
“If you know who it is, why don’t you just kill him?” Asaf asked.
“We ended up talking to the police.” Gideon Tzuk sipped his beer. “He was arrested a few months ago. We waited to speak to them for so long because we were really afraid it would leak. You know how it is. Police. But it didn’t. They handled everything masterfully. But until that happened I spent five years in hell.”
“You should write about it,” Asaf said.
“No way. I don’t want to think about it ever again. I can’t even jerk off anymore. Just out of fear. I can’t visit Google without duct-taping my webcam and the laptop mic. Not to mention being able to look other Israeli writers in the eye.”
When they finished their drinks, the three headed down toward the Kerem HaTeimanim neighborhood to eat hummus at the Syrian’s place. Asaf walked with his hands in his pockets, looking nervous, and finally said, “Aren’t writers supposed to be able to jerk off using just their imagination?”
Tycher cringed.
“Like, I always thought writers didn’t even look at porn. Because they have enough imagination.”
“You’ve always thought that?” Tycher muttered.
Gideon Tzuk seemed irritated. After another minute of walking in silence he said, “Watching porn is like trying to peek beneath the hood of a car. At the engine of everything. I’m not saying sex is everything. But I am saying you can understand everything through sex. That sex is an action so close to the source, to the pure idea of interaction between two human beings, that it becomes the ultimate metaphor. Watching porn is like peering through a microscope at the movement of primary matter. Of atoms. The atoms of the relationship between giver and receiver. You’re watching people—who are themselves the products of other people’s orgasms—entering other people, and allowing other people to enter them.” He closed his eyes for a moment. “Even between us, although we’re all men, and we’re all straight, and none of us really wants to fuck the others up the ass, we can still examine our relationship in pornographic terms: who wants to give what to whom, and who wants to receive what from whom.”
Asaf took a deep breath and exhaled loudly. The moment they reached the hummus place, he realized he’d left his iPhone at the Minzar and went back to get it. Tycher and Gideon Tzuk sat at a corner table and lit cigarettes before ordering their food. The writer chatted with one of the owners, and when the man left he began crushing hot peppers and onions onto a paper towel. Watching him, that old sensation came over Tycher again. As if they were somehow related.
“I lied,” said Gideon Tzuk. He lifted the paper towel and scattered the onion and pepper crumbs over the hummus that had just arrived.
“About what?”
“It never stopped. He was arrested, but before he was put in prison he made a deal with all the writers and artists he was blackmailing.”
“What kind of deal?”
“We got an e-mail from him in which he clarified that even though the police claimed all evidence had been erased, the videos still existed on some server, probably in Slovenia. Which only supports my theory that Derek Hammon is nothing. A puppet. He said we were free of our previous engagement—being recorded jerking off every day—but we were now bound by a new arrangement. According to this new arrangement, in order to keep him from publishing the videos, we had to write a book for him.” Gideon Tzuk raised his eyes from the plate of hummus. “A children’s book. It would be a children’s book with all our names on it. Cowritten, allegedly, by thirty writers. It would guarantee monstrous PR, because nothing like this has ever been done before. Thirty famous writers collaborating on one children’s book. Not a collection of stories but a single plotline. Sixty pages. It’s never been done in Israel, or anyw
here, for that matter. And for good reason—because it’s a shitty idea! But it’s exactly the kind of shitty idea people would buy. And just to be on the safe side, all proceeds would go to a charity.”
“What is this thing?” asked Tycher. He felt the sinus in his forehead pulsing.
“It’s a story about a boy who speaks with the sea. He gave us some guidelines. The rough plot. A boy whose father was a sailor and died at sea before he was born, and ever since, the sea talks to him. He left basic instructions for graphic design. Lots of gold and pale blues, and other details. Everything with a round shape has to resemble an eye. He knew exactly what he wanted. The whole thing looks pretty professional. Pretty good, even. A pretty good children’s book. Something no one would suspect the thirty of us didn’t actually write. Because we did write most of it, following his guidelines, but also because there’s some truth to it. Something I really could see myself writing, if I gave a fuck about children’s literature.”
“You said we did write. Like you already wrote it.”
“It’s coming out in May. All the money from it goes to autistic children. He let us pick the cause. But there’s something else, you know? There’s something wrong about this book. The words he insisted we put there—”
“Like what words?”
“Mirror, sweetness, sea, moon, wolf, abyss, brain, heart, dimension, spherical time, web, net, infinity, waves, construction, face, pipes, woods, vision.”
Tycher swallowed.
“And there were other instructions. The hero had to be named Moshe. He’s a boy, but in the illustrations we were told to make sure he looked a little like a girl, or wore girly clothes. He requested a scene in which someone climbs up a ladder and then goes down. A scene containing digging and unearthing glowing objects.”
“Do you think it’s some kind of hypnosis?” Tycher asked.
“Codes,” said Gideon Tzuk. “We brainwash kids, but we have no idea what we’re putting in their minds.”
Tycher ignored a text from Asaf saying, You’ll never believe who I just ran into.
They ate quietly for a few moments. Then, in a hushed voice, the writer continued: “It’s not like I don’t have a theory. I think there may be an event. An event in the future. An event we can’t understand because we have no way of knowing it’s about to happen. But there are people who are on a higher evolutionary plane—it happens with every species, some individuals just progress faster than others—and so they know this event is coming. They smell it, or I don’t know what. And these people want the rest of the human race to be ready when this event finally happens. Because you need to be prepared in order to understand it. Get someone from the twelfth century to watch an episode of Big Brother and they won’t be able to grasp it as anything even approximating concrete reality. So, because of the accelerating progression of human evolution, we won’t even be able to understand the reality of our grandchildren. Maybe even the one our children are experiencing now. Because it’s faster now. We don’t need a thousand years to pass to be unable to make sense of reality. We need, like, fifty. And soon it’ll be more like ten. And then it’ll take a year before you shift into a completely different reality, and then a day, and then a second. It’s going to happen any moment now. And some people are already in the next reality, and they understand better than we do what this event is going to be, and what the next generation is going to look like. And they are insanely calculating. Much more than you and I. They are on such a different level that things that appear good to them seem evil to us. They’ve used Derek Hammon as their puppet. And then they took thirty writers, emptied them of every last drop of sexual drive through overexposure, and made them sit down and write this thing for kids. So all the kids who read it will grow into specific people. Specific people who will then give birth to kids of their own, raising them in a way that will deepen their understanding of the ideas in this book—ideas I myself don’t understand—and so on, until these ideas fully mature in a specific generation, and the event will finally happen.
“We—you and I—we don’t need to be prepared for the event.” Gideon Tzuk pointed at Tycher’s chest with his pita. “Because by the time it comes, we’ll already be dead. But our kids will have to be a quarter of this creature, this creature that can understand the event when it occurs, and their children will have to be half this creature, and their children’s children will be the creature itself.”
“Are there entire scenes in the book that he wrote himself?”
“No. But there was one sentence he asked—they asked—that a minor character repeat at three different occasions in the story. It was the easiest thing to put in, actually, because it fit the subject. The sentence was: Here it comes from the sea.”
“Here it comes from the sea,” echoed Tycher.
“They wanted this character to say, Here it comes from the sea. Do you understand it?”
“Sort of,” said Tycher. He was shivering.
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-two.”
“You’re thirty-two and you sort of understand it. I’m over sixty years old and I understand it even less. Even less than you. You see this thing here. You were born later and so you understand it more. And your children will understand it more than you do. Do you have any children?”
“A girl,” said Tycher. “She’s six.”
“And her children will understand it even more,” said Gideon Tzuk, running a hand through his black hair. “And her children’s children will understand nothing but it.”
SAÏD THE GOOD
BY ANTONIO UNGAR
Ajami, Jaffa
Saïd Katani is dead. They put two bullets in his back and another in his head, about five years ago now.
The first time I saw him was in his grandfather’s garden in the Ajami neighborhood of Jaffa; he was seven years old. It was May, his father and some other men were smoking from a narghile pipe in the shade of an apple tree, the breeze from the sea was playing through the leaves. I was inside with the veiled women, watching them through a window, and Saïd was playing with two friends. He seemed intense and was very handsome, dressed with dark blue trousers and a white sweatshirt.
I never sat with the men. I’m a foreigner, I speak little Arabic, and though everyone except Saïd’s father had always been polite, they never knew what to do with me, an Argentine writer who seemed to them like any other Israeli. I remember that his father stopped talking in the middle of a sentence, approached the boy while he was playing, and showed him how to use a slingshot—how to stretch out his arms, how to close one eye, how to aim. He remained with his son until my wife and I stepped outside.
His father was always a nasty piece of work. That’s what my father-in-law said when I asked him about that thin, pale man with a blank stare and huge hands, who drove around the neighborhood in his brand-new BMW, always wearing shirts with horizontal stripes and white tennis shoes. I saw him on foot only on Fridays, after praying at the mosque, and then only for a few blocks before he disappeared down Ajami’s narrow streets, followed by two teenagers who never spoke with anybody.
Saïd’s father had always been intelligent and bad. They called him Il Ta’lab, the Fox. At school, he bullied his classmates and stole their money. At fourteen, he joined the emerging hashish Mafia, in spite of his father’s threats. At seventeen, he left home and went to live with a little Russian capo, who adopted him as his own son and taught him everything he knew. At twenty-five, after having already killed three men, he decided to start his own business.
The area south of Jaffa, just before Bat Yam, is little more than sand dunes with a few rundown quarters for laborers, abandoned buildings, and empty lots full of garbage. Within a few years, the Fox had established a prosperous business there distributing cocaine to small-time dealers. He managed to stop killing people, instead hiring underage boys who he called his soldiers to do it for him. At twenty-eight, rich and handsome, he asked for the hand of my wife’s aunt, who was then one o
f the most coveted single women in Jaffa.
Saïd’s mother was gorgeous and shy. She married the Fox one week after finishing high school at a wedding with five hundred guests. The couple had three girls in addition to Saïd. Two of the girls got married before finishing high school, while the third graduated and became a teacher. None of them married members of the Mafia. The Fox laundered his money by buying legitimate businesses, the first of which was a store that sold kitchen equipment, which his wife ran when the children were small.
Saïd grew up between his public school, where he bullied the other children just as his father had before him, and the store, where he spent his afternoons running errands. His father beat his mother and kept another woman in Haifa, the port where he received shipments of the highest-quality cocaine from Colombia via Spain or Greece, and the best Moroccan and Egyptian hashish, always paying off, with ever-increasing sums, the port employees and the customs agents.
When Saïd’s mother asked for a divorce, the Fox agreed on the condition that he would be the one to raise his son. His mother could not refuse, as she did not have enough money to even send him to school. When he was fifteen, the boy stopped playing with BB guns and received his first real one, a 9mm. After it was presented to him, there was an informal ceremony that included kisses on both his cheeks from all the members of the gang, and the privilege of sitting with the narghile smokers in the semidarkness of a café in Ajami.
As a teenager, he had only two friends. One was Arab, a classmate until he was thirteen, and the other was Boris, a Ukrainian who passed as a Jew but was just Ukrainian. His Arab friend, a member of a gang of thieves, was skinny and had sweet eyes, but soon was murdered, stabbed for revenge in an honor killing. Later the Ukrainian became his brother: he lied for him, saved his life during a chase, and proposed that they finally strike out on their own in order to maximize profits.