Tel Aviv Noir

by Etgar Keret

  And then there’s the Croatian NGO guy with the ironic mustache, who’s always telling the story about the one time he found a latex glove placed neatly on a chair in his living room.

  There are many stories like these—about furniture moving around, whole sets of teaspoons disappearing, clocks being turned, dead fish floating in aquariums. Stuff like that. Nothing violent, nothing harmful—except to the fish. These stories serve as warnings only, they are but a mere feeling attaching itself to the back of your neck and shoulders, sticky and thick. These are stories with one simple message: You are not alone.

  They also serve for humor, these stories. Blaming Shin Bet is the standing joke among the expats. Every time something disappears, you can bet someone will make a joke of it. Your keys are not where you left them? Shin Bet must have taken them. Your e-mail never reached its destination? Shin Bet hacked your account. Those single socks that never return from the washing machine? Shin Bet has a storage room full of socks lifted from diplomats, lobbyists, and international aid workers. On casual Fridays the Shin Bet people wear the mismatched socks themselves, for fun.

  This morning it is my husband’s ID card that has gone missing again. He is late for work and from the street we can hear the driver of his armored Mercedes honking, eager to move away from the activists who have occupied most of Rothschild Boulevard for the last fortnight. My husband is hurrying about the apartment, throwing stuff around, searching for his ID.

  —How is it even fucking possible? he cries.

  In the kitchen I am stabbing the bloated yellow of a fried egg with a knife. The texture never seizes to fascinate me: the thin protective membrane of the yellow, how easily it’s perforated, the way it bleeds itself empty in one simple, relieved sigh.

  There’s a roar coming from the street. The unrest is in its twentieth day and getting violent. At seven in the morning we received the first message from the corporation’s expat notification service: Demonstrations and clashes expected throughout the day in central Tel Aviv. All personnel advised to avoid the area until further notice.

  Our apartment building overlooks the section of Rothschild Boulevard where the bats live, and now the activists too. I found them creepy at first, the bats, but they are so light, so swift, so immaculate, like melancholic, nocturnal cousins of the hummingbird, and I do not mind them anymore. I wonder what it would feel like to hold them, the leathery texture of their wings.

  —I cannot believe this.

  My husband is back in the kitchen, going through a pile of Haaretz on the counter. It’s a paradox that a man so sure of himself is always losing his ID.

  —Must be Shin Bet, he says, grinning at me, ha-ha—stressful morning but he made a joke!—before finally locating his ID card hiding behind the toaster. With his stuff going missing, we both know it’s not Shin Bet. It’s just him, his absentmindedness, his elsewhereness. He gathers his documents, stuffs them into a laptop bag.

  —I won’t have time for breakfast. Sorry, fucking Middle East, all these ID requirements, he says, kissing my forehead. Hey, try to get out today, eh? See some people?

  —The corporation says avoid the area.

  —Hon, the corporation always says avoid the area. It’s their default advice for anything; social unrest, bomb threats, any clustering of living organisms. I’ll tell them to take us off that stupid mailing list. Go to the beach. No one’s rioting on the beach.

  I am the expat spouse. Each morning he kisses my forehead and heads out to work the politics of the Middle East. Each morning I drink freshly squeezed orange juice, I water the plants, I walk barefoot on cold limestone floors. I should go to the beach, where no one is rioting.

  There are more tents on Rothschild every day, popping up between the trees, colorful and childlike, as if the activists pulled them off their parents’ yards, the tents they were playing hide-and-seek in yesterday. They have their own soup stations, laundry service, portable toilets. There are banners and flags, and cardboard boxes are being used for everything: for shelter, for sitting on, for writing your message on.

  The message is in Hebrew, so I can’t read it. But the sound arising from their camp is the same as in any other demonstration I have witnessed in the countries I have lived in throughout my husband’s career. It’s the sound of homeless desires.

  Stone-throwing reported by demonstrators in Old Jaffa. All personnel advised to avoid the area until further notice.

  I lock the heavy front doors behind him as he leaves. Two doors, double locks on both of them. I slip the keys with the Home Security keychain back into my pocket, and I am enveloped by the kind of echoing quiet that is only found in too-large, underfurnished apartments.

  All expat homes are like this one: tastefully decorated by a team of professionals, yet bland and too large. Every weekend we attend dinners in apartments like these, with northern European diplomats, journalists, associates of the corporation, and other internationals with job titles consisting of acronyms.

  When the corporation’s local administrator guided us around the apartment she excused its massiveness.

  —If you want quality in this country, you have to go for one of these new, oversized apartments, she said.

  This is how you speak to northern Europeans: as if our wealth is unfortunate, but necessary. The administrator handed us keychains with alarm buttons, explained the different functions. Activate, deactivate. Press House and the star at the same time and the alarm will sound throughout the building; the security company will be notified.

  This is the panic button. House and star.

  I eat two eggs, some hummus. Turn the pages in Haaretz, do some yoga. There is a certain discomfort, boxy and sharp, in my chest. I sit on the floor and take in the room, absorbing all the details. I need to know exactly where everything is placed in case something changes, in case he leaves a sign. There have been no signs for twenty days and I know something is wrong. Nothing has been moved, rearranged, or gone missing. Everything is exactly where it should be and it leaves me restless.

  Clashes reported in several locations between Old Jaffa and Florentin. All personnel advised to avoid the area and to use alternative routes.

  Outside on the boulevard there is a deep howl, coming up from below, carrying aimless despair toward a clear, expansive sky. There is something embarrassing about listening in to someone else’s social protest, like getting stuck at the table during someone else’s family argument. All you can do is study the napkin, pretend to be deaf, mute, or stupid. I should be used to this, moving between countries in various degrees of distress. There is always someone’s uprising, someone’s riot or spring—and our double locks, panic alarms, automatic shutters.

  We do not worry, we do not join in on the despair. We safeguard, we trust: systems, information, money. We are the kind of people they send in helicopters for.

  These riots rage through Tel Aviv every summer, like a public outbreak of seasonal affective disorder. It goes back to 2011. A couple of months each year living in tents and people are able to shake away the unrest and slide back into complacency.

  —Poor kids, my husband likes to say about the activists. A region of biblical fuck-ups, and they think they can fix it with crayons.

  I tell him it feels real to them, probably.

  And this year it is going to be different.

  Clashes erupted between demonstrators, police, and IDF in the Florentin neighborhood and moving north along Nahalat Binyamin toward Rothschild Boulevard. All personnel advised to avoid gatherings, minimize their exposure, and limit their movement to the essential. More updates will be sent as received.

  Things started to happen in the apartment after we had been stationed here for a couple of months. It was to be expected, perhaps, with all the stories, and the general rule for this type of living in any country: always assume that your home is wiretapped, that there might be cameras, people reading your mail, checking your laundry.

  But what was happening in our Tel Aviv apartme
nt was not quite like in the stories. These subtle hellos were not frosty, were not warnings, were not aimed at my husband or the corporation.

  These messages were for me.

  In the beginning it was only small things. A pearl necklace disappearing from the bathroom and reappearing on the bed. A tiny origami bird on a shelf. A vase of flowers. Objects changing places, disappearing, reappearing—things only I would notice, being the one at home. Sometimes there would not even be any visible signs, just a certain feeling upon returning to the apartment, something in the air suggesting that someone had been there.

  And so I would walk through the rooms, tracing my fingers along the windowsills and baseboards, looking for uneven spots, cracks, marks. It seemed like the appropriate response of a person who believes she is being watched, however ineffectual it might be; it would of course be impossible to find whatever sophisticated equipment is being used these days.

  Not wanting to seem paranoid, I refrained from mentioning any of this to my husband.

  When I came home one afternoon, I found one of my dresses draped across the bed. It was the yellow dress, a pretty one, old. I glanced around, did not know what to think. I left the room, walked around the apartment restlessly, returned to the bedroom. Eventually I pulled off my top and shorts, hesitating a moment before slipping on the dress, the stiff, synthetic fabric cooling my skin. I had not worn it in years. I had been a very different person in this dress. And here she was. Once more I peered around the room, as if trying to meet someone’s gaze. I sat down on the bed with a strange feeling of having finished an assignment, of awaiting further instructions. In the empty apartment even my own breath seemed to vaguely echo around the walls.

  Something happens to your movements, your physiology, your entire composure the moment you realize you are being watched. The way you tuck your hair behind your ear, the way you fill a glass of water, the way you get undressed. An element of something performative. Even if you cannot see the person watching you, you can’t help but feel their gaze.

  And I did not know what I should do, how I should feel. I knew how I did feel: watched. In this apartment, I thought, nothing I did would go unnoticed, would be bereft of meaning. From somewhere within these walls, a stranger was getting to know me.

  A stranger, but a gentle one, someone thoughtful. He would put out books for me to read, on subjects relating to something I had been searching for online, a conversation I’d had on the phone. He placed a blank postcard with a picture from my hometown on the refrigerator door. For all the places we have traveled, it is a town my husband has never seen.

  Once he added a song to a playlist on my computer. I listened to it while running along the promenade, north to south then back along the strip between the deep blue sea and the tall white city. You know the feeling of listening to a song someone chose for you? It is a simple one, a simple feeling, sparkling and crackling.

  There is a blast from the street, a heavy blast that makes the windows shudder; then the crowd breaks into a panic, all the car alarms in Tel Aviv go off. Dogs howl, glass shatters. Finally the riots are translated to a language everyone can understand.

  Violent clashes throughout the central Tel Aviv area. Stone-throwing, gunfire, and teargas reported. All personnel advised to avoid gatherings, to minimize their exposure, and to stay indoors. More updates will be sent as received.

  I saw him only once. It was just before the riots started. I came home in the early afternoon and there was a man standing in the hallway by the living room. I froze, keys in hand. He was taller than I had expected, dressed as an unconvincing construction worker, in large, ill-fitting overalls, his face a pale shade of sleeplessness. His eyes a peculiar green, the irises patterned with swirls, as if there were tiny storms in there.

  My fingers wrapped themselves around the Home Security keychain. House and star, house and star. But then he was just standing there, clutching the door frame, holding onto it as if it could save his life. And he stared right at me as if I could too.

  —I am sorry, he said softly in broken English.

  He was so tall he had to tilt his head beneath the low door frame, making the room look small and silly around him. As if inside a doll’s house. As if he had been misplaced and this universe did not suit him.

  I stood before him, scriptless, knowing it was already over. He made no mistakes; I had not happened upon him by accident—he was merely saying goodbye.

  —It is you, I said.

  He observed me solemnly. I am no one, he said.

  —Please do not forget.

  His eyes rested on me for a moment. Then he let go of the dollhouse door frame, turned, and left. Later I would be baffled by the very fact that it had happened, that the whole occurrence had not shifted quietly into fiction. Later I would wonder why he had come to see me like that, only to realize he had not: he had come so that I could see him.

  * * *

  There is another blast, closer now and heavier, the windows won’t hold much longer. I open the door to the balcony. A thick cloud of smoke chases another cloud of frightened bats out of the treetops. They never come out during the day, and now they are terrified, out of control, cutting through the sky like wild scissors, blackening the colorful tents, rising out of the heavy smoke billowing from a car on fire in the street. The flames are hurling themselves at the trees, at the sky, at crowds of people with their cell phone cameras lifted as if in an ancient ritual.

  A bottle comes flying through the smoke and fire, scattering on the asphalt in a glassy splash of emerald. I step back into the apartment, pulse racing, and locate the button to close the shutters. The metal clicks slowly into place. In the dark of the glass behind the shutters I meet my own reflection.

  * * *

  There are stories. Everyone in the expat community knows them. Stories about furniture moving around, whole sets of teaspoons disappearing, clocks being turned, dead fish floating in aquariums. Shin Bet, we say, nodding at each other during dinner parties. These stories make for good jokes, jokes that are funny because they could be true. One day it could be you coming home to your empty apartment, finding it not quite empty. And if one day you realized that someone could see you, really see you, what would you do?

  The second before the shutters fully close, a compact black object swirls into the room, slashing the dimness with its tiny frantic body, slamming itself against a wall. The creature slides down in a heap on the floor. I bend down over it and touch its dark fractured wings.

  They are not leathery at all, but more like skin, like us.

  And as the first stone hits the shutters, I’m weighing the bat in my hand, observing its small death. I tell myself I’m a patient one. I am waiting for a storm that belongs to me.

  This story was originally written in English.

  MY FATHER’S KINGDOM

  BY SHIMON ADAF

  Tel Kabir

  1.

  For many days now, I’ve been submerged in the work of esoteric poet Binyamin Za’afrani. The streets of Jaffa are compressed by the month of November. I can see the ugly sycamores wheezing beyond my window, quick exhalations erased by a sudden gust of air coming from the west. How is the passion for another’s writing born. A little over three years ago, Za’afrani’s name was uttered by every pair of lips in Tel Aviv, thanks to the last poem he ever wrote, “5767,” in which he predicted the city’s destruction on Rosh Hashanah of the Jewish year 5767. I read quotes from it in the newspaper, and then the entire work was uploaded to the web. I asked my doctoral advisor to change my dissertation subject. The office door was ajar behind me. I felt eyes watching us, spying from beyond the crack.

  He was amused. For two years I’d suffered through articles written by him and others of his generation, on the oeuvre of one of Israel’s most prominent poets: manly rhymes, rhythmic stanzas, the air of revival humming in his throat, between his teeth, mimicking the epic sound of storms and crises, the wild turmoil of the heart. Za’afrani’s lines were, by
comparison, dejected. Perhaps because he chose to describe the downfall of the city through fragments of the tales of residents who were already suffocating under the weight of the everyday. A woman discussing her son’s hasty divorce with his brother. A girl doodling her name in the sand, having just learned how to spell it. A beggar finally locating the soup kitchen he’d crossed the city to find. And all the while, horror appears on the sidelines, chiseled onto the windows of sturdy buildings constructed for the welfare of the wealthy. Perhaps that detail caught the public’s miserly attention—Za’afrani’s ability to capture, even in the 1970s, Tel Aviv’s race toward the future. An optimistic city: funds poured into the improvement of infrastructure; apartments purchased for a fortune; babies born into the world—but no one can guarantee they will still have a city another decade from now. Years have collapsed onto that exhausted, hysterical optimism since Za’afrani’s vision was published. “5767” is the most direct of his pieces. The other poems and essays are vaguer. There is knowledge buried in them whose origin I cannot trace back to any known eschatology. Beyond them is an outside presence, threatening to permeate. Each piece is a tiny seismograph. But where would I find my earthquake, that pleasurable vibration I’ve been awaiting within the coarseness of sounds. My advisor laughed. I decided to get a new advisor. The Ben Gurion University in Be’er Sheva was happy to accept me. It’s a fan of the marginal.

  2.

  I stared at the poems, perplexed, reading the same stanza over and over again, descending the short stairwell and walking into the nearby grocery store. I survived on overpriced rice, tomatoes, and canned goods. They weren’t cheap either. Each time he overcharged me, the clerk’s face drew into a smile. He often joked around with his friends as he operated the cash register, and their laughter grew louder as I carefully counted out the change. One evening a thought struck me. A meaning I’d never noticed before floated over the final chapters of the Za’afrani book I was reading. And as if to enrage me, just as I decided to shake off the limpness of heat waves, I spilled my coffee on the next page. The two volumes gathering the entirety of Za’afrani’s writing are held by the Rosenbaum Collection at the university library and cannot be signed out. I rose to my feet, holding the navel of the thought tightly, lest it go the way of other thoughts and crash under the weight of overzealousness. Thirty minutes until the library closed. Darkness descended outside like a bird, carrying news of my father’s kingdom. I would never make it on time from Jaffa to Ramat Aviv during rush hour, even if I took a taxi. On a whim, I ran Za’afrani’s name through the library computer catalog online. I stared at the results of the query. The off-key singing of the neighbor in the apartment across from mine joined the singing of her favorite pop artists. Not only were the volumes stored at the public library in the Tel Kabir neighborhood, a twenty minute walk away, but they were available for borrowing.