Tel Aviv Noir

by Etgar Keret

  3.

  A bridge stretches over Heinrich Heine Street, a river of light, haste, and steel. A bridge that connects Jaffa to Tel Kabir, overtaking a row of olive trees veiled by smog and carbonated garbage. I stop at what might be the right moment, halfway across the bridge. My left calf itches. I alleviate the itch with my right foot. Light movement, a whisper through the denim. What pleasure. The air grows colder. I breathe. I’m on the bridge, wielded tighter than a knife.

  4.

  Was it foreseeable, the sudden change in weather, I asked the librarian. She looked at me, not understanding. A young, round woman. She smiled when I walked in. The library was deserted, save for two Ethiopian boys who were engrossed in computer screens. The librarian’s eyelids were anointed with soft baby-blue eye shadow. A modest shade, if you ignore the fact that wearing makeup is, in itself, flashy. She observed me with confusion. Lightning bolts whipped the sky outside, their glow lingering for a moment in the air.

  Had they mentioned a storm, I repeated the question. She said nothing. I stood by her table. I handed her the two Za’afrani volumes, which had been tucked away on the library’s single poetry shelf. Oh, she said, we only got these two days ago. And you hurried up and hid them, I said. She answered drily, As you can see we don’t have much space. I perused the new-additions shelf. Shiny covers, Vaseline-bright images. How, I asked, how did you get them. A contribution, she said. Yes, I said, but from whom. She didn’t answer. There was a hint of ridicule in her voice when she asked for my library card. That’s it, she said, we’re about to close.

  The building was newly renovated. Pretty columns and steps, a mass of marble, so different from the surrounding housing projects. I waited in the shadows cast by the architecture. She locked the door tiredly and turned to leave, wobbling a little, and yet erect. I blurted a weak greeting and went after her. She was taken aback. You scared me, she said. I didn’t believe her. Her expression was tough, her eyes narrowed. A wind blew. The temperature dropped. There were already signs of rain, and the scent of expectation. What do you want, she asked. I didn’t know what to say. I left.

  5.

  I checked the year of publication of the volumes I had borrowed. Signs of the storm lessened around my Jaffa apartment. The volumes were old but unused, like food rotting in its package, or formaldehyde virginity. I caressed the cover. I opened the book at the desired pages, but the paragraphs in the photocopy I had didn’t match those in the books. I compared the text, sentence by sentence. Words had been changed, phrases, syntax. The courage that my earlier thought had planted in me was gone. The thought itself was trampled by the stampede of others. The same edition, the same details. Only one edition had ever been published. A distant cousin of Za’afrani’s had put it together. The family objected after his body was found in the bathroom, his wrists slit, submerged in wine-colored water. I imagined the corpse, its head tilting forward, aspiring to the depths.

  A snappy reporter located the cousin in the period when people were excited about Za’afrani’s writing. The cousin remembered him as a boy. Back in those wonderful days, they had been true friends. He always managed to notice things she couldn’t, hints and traces, aromas and sounds. Once, he found a bracelet she lost. It was springtime, an abundance of daisies. He closed his eyes and asked her to put her hand on his shoulder and walk him through the field. Her body, he told her, knows without words. He stopped without warning and pointed at the ground. She bent down and felt among the stalks, beneath the yellow burning of bloom, and pulled out the bracelet. She kissed his cheek and he was startled. Don’t do that, he said. How old were they. Maybe eight. The country was young. Lots of open spaces. They grew apart. He ran away at a young age, she heard, and then came back, and ran away again. They said something was wrong with him. He lived alone, she remembered, but where, she didn’t know. Now she’s tired. Maybe the reporter would be willing to continue tomorrow.

  I was plagued with weakness. I returned to the lines of Za’afrani that I knew well, almost by heart, to the screech that rose from them. Where is a writer when he writes, what kind of middle ground. I went outside and wandered up Yehuda HaYamit Street. Buildings threatened by the sword of refurbishing. My downstairs neighbor once shared a secret with me on the stairwell. All the young people from Tel Aviv are moving here now, she said, and prices are rising. Where will we go? It’s not like we can move to the Jewish neighborhoods. All the dreams buried here, slumbering, growing moldy, natives and immigrants. Jaffa is developing into a jumble of gazes, a tangle of forces pushing away reality. I bent down to pick up a coin whose twinkle caught my eye. I looked up and the city was different. A change whose quality I couldn’t judge. I was poked by the cold finger of the strange. Yehuda HaYamit Street sloped down toward the crumbling port, and I sloped down with it. I went to look at the sea in winter. Big deal, the sea in winter.

  6.

  The daytime librarian’s motions were lumbering. Her heavy Russian accent toughened the syllables in her mouth. Who, she asked. Yes, yes, she’s here in the evening, and I’m here in the morning. That’s how she prefers it. Eventually she gave me the name of the evening librarian. A narrow, snaky name. Come back in an hour, she said. The library was empty. In an hour, bands of schoolchildren would flow in to do their homework. I was disgusted by the expected whispers, by the evil in their speech. I asked if she knew who contributed the Binyamin Za’afrani books to the library. Who cares, she said. All sorts of people give us all sorts of books.

  The poinciana trees in the shopping center were still rain-bathed, the floor tiles mossy. Clusters of older men, elderly even, sat around stone tables, playing backgammon, checkers, cards. Loud voices and jokes in Bukhori. I looked at them. The living, what do they need. My father’s kingdom is at the top of the mountains—on one side snowy prairies, on the other a cruel desert. His envoys walking the blade of the mountain range.

  I examined groceries at the local supermarket, the superficial glow illuminating candy wrappers. I coveted the shapes the light scratched into their metallic sheen. On the other side of the row, a conversation took place. I couldn’t see the speakers. A woman was explaining to a boy that his services would no longer be required. She emphasized each word. He answered hesitantly, in a thick, slow voice. I went outside. The daughter of the greengrocer was standing behind the counter in his shop. Her nails were tattooed with patterns and rhinestones. I stared at them until she raised her eyes to me. Yes, she said, how can I help you? I asked if I could buy an apple.

  7.

  She doesn’t recognize me, the round evening librarian. A sort of halo of gloom surrounds her. She becomes hopefully alert, hearing her name escape my lips. She stands up to honor the sound. She stands up in my honor from her seat next to one of the children whose homework is occupying her time. The child has nut-shaped eyes, curious eyes. I was wrong about the shade of her eye shadow. It isn’t baby blue, it’s soft green, perhaps a shade of leek. What, she says. I wanted to ask, I say, about the Binyamin Za’afrani books. Yes, she says. Let me check the computer. She dawdles, truly dawdles. Where is last night’s posture, the naked confidence of her walk. They’re out, she says. I know, I borrowed them last night. Okay, so why are you bothering me, she asks. I say, How did you get them, they went out of print over twenty years ago. I see we just received them, she says. Oh yeah, I completely forgot. She tells a dull tale of the local greengrocer who won the lottery and bought a deserted building he wanted to renovate and turn into a synagogue. He found a box of books in that building, she says. I ask to see the other books from that box. She pulls out a list. I peruse it. An incredible lack of taste.

  8.

  I almost got run over on the way back to Jaffa. I was too nervous to climb up to the bridge. Instead I used the same trick I employed on the way there: I waited for a lull in traffic and jumped onto Heinrich Heine Street. A fast moped almost peeled the skin off my face. The door of the grocery store by my building was locked, a calm, blue metal board. When I walked into th
e building, my neighbor appeared before me, flushed. How terrible, she said. What, I asked. What happened to the grocery store owner, she said with a hint of pleasure. He was violently murdered last night in his apartment by the flea market. It took the police quite some time to identify the body. Her teeth appeared in all their might as she spoke, grinding against the world. There was an animal quality about her I’d never seen before, a horsey merriment. The police have started investigating, she continued before her mouth locked. The determined motion, the bulging muscles of her jaw, explained her off-key singing. She liked talking to me. She’d been waiting for the opportunity for a while now, she said.

  I expected to see her standing outside my apartment when the doorbell rang late at night, but beyond the fish-eye peephole I saw the librarian. I thought about how her name matched her curvy shape. Her eyes were puffy. I didn’t ask what she wanted, but let her enter silently. I don’t remember when I bought the tea bags which were reeking in the kitchen. I quickly offered her coffee, before she could come to her senses, but she remained stunned, on the verge of tears.

  I’m not staying, she said in a low, anxious voice. I barely got away. I said nothing. I need those books, she said, I made a horrible, horrible mistake. What, I said, what are you talking about? We just spoke about them this afternoon, and you seemed totally indifferent. She said, You wouldn’t understand. Give them back to me, we shouldn’t have . . . She was silent.

  No, I said, no way, I still need to look at them. Please, she whispered. In spite of her general murky appearance, there was still some majesty about her, perhaps dignity, a steel thread, anyway. I’m sorry, but I need them for research, they’re different from the ones . . . Exactly, she said. They shouldn’t have come to us, they shouldn’t have been released. I don’t understand, I said. I told you, she said, there’s no point in trying to explain it.

  She stood bewildered at the doorway. Won’t you sit down, I said. My break will soon be over, they’ll notice I’m . . . Give them to me. I lowered my head. I’ll bring them back tomorrow, I said, when the library opens. She seemed prepared to keep arguing, but then she retreated. She said, Use the bridge. You’ll know which way to come.

  9.

  Is this what she meant, I wonder. The heat returned to the city—a furious, bitter radiation. But on the bridge—a chill, shuddering skin. Halfway across, that same itch of the left calf widens its scope. A bother with pleasure in its side. Below me is a flood, moving vehicles forget their previous being. The moving and the still have different essences, but we transfer from one to the next our entire lives. Or strive to. How do we do it.

  I’m almost sure Binyamin Za’afrani’s new paragraphs were speaking about this. The lines of the poems captured something too, as it changed. Not the calculations and metaphysics at their core, not an urge toward destruction and a fear of it, but evasiveness. Throughout the night I scanned both volumes, testing their spines to make sure they weren’t broken.

  She didn’t explain it. She waited in the shadow of the columns and jumped at me from the stairs. I handed over the books unwillingly. Go away, she said. Out, out with you, dybbuk. Then she escaped, fast despite her rotundity. I chased after her, calling her name, narrow and snaky in the cold air. But she was swallowed in a charmless cluster of pink buildings, dolled-up projects whose contents I could guess.

  10.

  I wandered the shopping center. The men playing games. The women dragging shopping carts. Pigeons came and kissed the faces of puddles and hummed over the poinciana trees. A layer of disgust hovered over all things, as an envelope of impurity around flesh. The players looked at me with hollow, threatening eyes as I paused to watch their game. This time they didn’t joke, as if the game demanded a dangerous accuracy, being on guard. No, mechanization. Mechanized things are impure in their own way. I stood there for a few minutes, pondering. Everything random, whimsical, and arbitrary about nature was revealed to me against the orderly walk of the women with their carts, the careful steps of those leaving the post office, the arm movements of customers at the spice shop. I could locate the beat, the rhythm, the beating of the big heart. I listened, dum, dum, dum.

  I was violently shaken from my listening by the weight of a gaze. The greengrocer stood outside his shop and stared at me. There was burning rage in his eyes, black rage. I looked away, but I could still see it. A boy was standing behind him, dressed in a modern yeshiva student’s outfit—a tailored suit, a white, pressed shirt. A young tenderness about him. The tightness of his eyes cleaving the shadow that enveloped him. The being of the entire place pooled inside his eyes.

  11.

  My building was blocked, cordoned off with police tape. The street and the facades of buildings were washed with the blue fire of sirens. Animals, said my downstairs neighbor, animals, not humans. Each time a blade of light dashed across her face, her skull stared at me from beneath the cover of skin, muscle, fat. At the edge of my father’s kingdom, birds used to be girls who had sinned, and they sat on branches and chirped their pleas for grace, thousands of tongues whispering through the air at all times.

  The neighbor across the hallway from me was murdered. Her body was covered in small cuts, as if she’d been in a glass room whose walls exploded. Somebody broke into her apartment last night. I didn’t hear a thing, said my downstairs neighbor. Did you? Indeed, silence had filled the previous night. Her off-key singing subsided. I pitied her teeth, bitten by time. How are we going to live here now? she said. We’re not like you, we have nowhere else to go.

  12.

  Of course, I’m awoken at night by the smell of blood. I moan somewhere in my dream, ordering my feet to move. What do we do in dreams, other than fight the paralysis that takes over our muscles. Then I choke, blood, blood, I wake up breathless. The walls pulse beneath my hands as I search through the darkness, which is broken only by the flashes of sirens outside. I can’t find the light switch. My eyes quickly adjust and I no longer require the clarity of electricity. Beneath my hands the walls are meaty, warm. I listen to the soft flow inside of them.

  The police officers questioned the neighbors and myself and left in their cruisers. The cruisers are patrolling almost silently around Shivtey Israel Street, only the friction of tires and the scorching of rubber sounding here and there.

  I make a cup of coffee and sit at my desk. Something almost becomes clear in the depths of Za’afrani’s writing, especially with regard to one short essay dealing with what he described as two levels of existence, the Beast and the Ghost. I had assumed these were developments of images from the Book of Daniel and the Book of Genesis. Maybe even something to do with Christianity’s Judgment Day. But now, it seems to be something entirely different which trembles at the edge of my consciousness. What is it. A minute later I’m staring awkwardly at the computer screen. I compare scans of the book from the Tel Kabir library with the photocopies from the university library. They are the same. Same sentences, same lines. I try to memorize what I can recall, affix it in my memory. But the thought is slippery, yearning to evaporate. If I understand this new version clearly, Za’afrani was not concerned with a fracture in reality. He wrote of slow transformations into a foreign future. I once was a child, and I once knew happiness in a garden, and I once got lost in sweet oblivion, in grumbling oblivion. Just like all the other children. The signs of the past are no longer visible in me.

  13.

  I easily located the deserted building the greengrocer had purchased with his lottery winnings. I ascended Ben Zvi Road, flanked the neighborhood. To my left was the Tel Kabir Forensic Institute, sheltered by ficus trees, or some other kind of vulgar tree—who could even identify that heavy dullness of growth. Tel Aviv is hot. Man is destined to sweat in it, always, even after only a twenty-minute walk. A two-story building, its plaster exfoliating to reveal perforated bricks. A film of blindness like moss on the windowpanes. I walked inside. What did I expect to find. There was dirty graffiti, shit and tampons, syringes and condoms, a moist smel
l of dust, and stairwells on the verge of collapse.

  14.

  The greengrocer’s daughter smiled and said, You’ve come for another apple. She waved her nails which were adorned with a tangle of patterns, secret codes, fake gems. Isn’t it hard, I asked. She skillfully packed up a customer’s shopping. Isn’t what hard? she asked. With the nails, don’t they break? She laughed. Why aren’t you at school? I asked. What are you, the Board of Education or something? she replied. No, I said, I just think it’s a shame you have to work like this. She said nothing. I mean, your brother could help out too. Her fingers, which were running across the keys of the cash register, stopped. I didn’t know how to read her look. It closed off to me at once. She wore an ankle-length skirt in spite of the heat. The sleeves of her shirt covered her arms all the way to her wrist. Inside the shop an old man sorted ripe tomatoes, separating, choosing. Outside was the tumult of all the places that Tel Aviv had put out of its mind, that base urgency of life, that multiplicity of meagerness.