by Etgar Keret
I signaled to everyone that I’d be right back, and walked in after them. I was greeted by the smell of grease and bits of metal and old mufflers, cartons full of spare parts. She stood there, her arms folded, her head wobbling in tiny motions, trapped between the Gideonof brothers. Izzy Schuster turned around in a ragged office chair to face me. Next to his desk, a model was hugging some sort of machine in a calendar. Both of them were lit by a fluorescent lamp that buzzed in the kitchen.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“You’ve known the answer to that since yesterday.”
“First of all, let her go,” I said.
“You’ve known since yesterday, but you’ve been doing the exact opposite.”
“Let her go,” I repeated.
“And then what?”
“You tell me. Or maybe you’ll kill me, like you did Mota.”
“As I said, it was only meant to be a warning for him to stop working with you.” Izzy folded his arms across his chest and Big Gideonof lowered his eyes. “Mota fought like a man and things got out of control. Believe me, it’s eating me up.”
“I’ll believe you if you let her go right now.”
“And then what?”
“We’ll talk this through, we’ll work it out.”
“Ah, we’ll talk. That’s the most you’re willing to do to get her out of here?”
“Don’t test me, Izzy. I’ll call Farkash right now.”
“Don’t make me laugh. The Gideonofs will kill both of you before you even finish dialing.”
“There are 150 witnesses outside. You may be a maniac, but you’re no idiot.”
“Now you’re testing me.”
“What do you want, a chunk of the profits? Copyrights? No problem. Whatever you want, that’s fine.”
“Just cut it out, Ronny,” said Izzy, as if he was only being kind. “Bygones.”
I looked into his eyes, and then into hers. I knew it was all lost. They knew it too. Perhaps, I thought, it had all been lost from the day it started.
“Nothing’s good enough for you,” I blurted angrily at him. “Nothing but winning, being a boss.”
“This is supposed to be light entertainment,” he said. “You’re taking this too hard, you’re being dramatic.”
“Capo di tutti capi, that’s what you are,” I said.
“Fine,” replied Izzy. “Go outside and tell them to get back on the buses. I’ll take it from here.”
* * *
Worried and defeated, I walked down HaAliya Street. A police car, shining with rain that had poured elsewhere, pulled over, and Farkash smiled at me through the open window.
“You need a ride to your moped?”
I leaned down to her. “I was just on my way to your office.”
“I was just on my way home,” she said.
“You know, I’ve never been to your place.”
“That’s your loss.”
“What does that mean?” I asked hopefully.
DEATH IN PAJAMAS
BY ALEX EPSTEIN
Masarik Square
Death wore a leather jacket over blue pajamas. He opened the door and came in. Without a word, he sat at the counter facing King George Street.
It was 7:24 in the morning. I’d just opened up shop and made myself an espresso. To really wake up, you have to blow on a mirror. That’s exactly what I was about to do when Death came in.
I pulled my mirror from my purse, kissed it for good luck, and turned to Death. “Is it true what they say? That you sleep in fresh graves? That your favorite season is spring? That you have a twin you’ve never met and who when you finally meet you’ll spit in his face and hug him, not necessarily in that order?”
Death didn’t answer.
An elegant woman in terrible high heels then entered, greeting me. A draft snuck in behind her. The tall woman asked about the coffee blends we used, and when I answered her—Magic Noir—she said, “Large latte, extra foam.” She asked if I could hold onto her lilacs. I shrugged politely.
As I foamed the milk, the radio announced a missile attack near Hadera.
“So,” I tried again, “is it true what they say? That you don’t like Venice? Because in your dreams it’s always crowded there? That you were seen wiping sweat from your brow on the Bridge of San Luis Rey in Peru? Playing chess at the Samarkand train station? Smoking a cigarette during the Battle of Stalingrad? That your epitaph is going to be . . .” I paused for dramatic effect, cleared my throat, thought for a moment, and said, “Here lies Death . . . killed in action? Is it true?”
Death didn’t even turn to face me.
A third customer, a stocky man with a goatee, came in and sat to the right of Death. He removed his glasses and blew on them. Death volunteered to wipe them off with his blue pajama sleeve, peeking from beneath his leather jacket.
It was 7:27.
The third customer put his glasses back on, picked up a copy of Haaretz newspaper, flipped through it, found what he was looking for, and began mumbling: “It’s very interesting what they say. Very interesting. Listen: Color only rarely appears in dreams. That’s a pretty surprising absence, considering how extreme the rest of a dream’s attributes are.”
“Those who sow a storm,” I said, serving him a glass of orange juice, “will reap a typhoon.”
Death couldn’t resist the urge to look my way. In his eyes I saw the glint of melancholy surprise. The radio said there was a shooting near Elkana.
The third customer downed his orange juice in one gulp. “In one of my dreams,” he continued, leafing through the open newspaper, “I met a strange fellow with a pipe. He asked me for the quickest route to a legendary volcano that spews . . . breast milk. I pointed him in the right direction, east, secretly hoping that the volcano would drown him in tar-tasting lava. Very good, this juice.”
He paid and left.
Another moment and I’d have solved one of the greatest secrets of creation: who has more of a soul, the coffeemaker or the juicer? But then Death pulled a pack of Lucky Strikes from his pocket and began coughing, drawing my attention. I was growing sick of him.
“Tell me,” I said, “do you mind if I read your palm?” I grabbed his hand before he could respond. “Open your fingers. Yes, that’s it. Hmm . . .”
He didn’t say a word. He coughed one last time but obeyed. His hand was simple, quite smooth. Few remarkable lines, definitely not an old man’s hand.
“Look,” I said, “your destiny line is broken. That usually signifies insecurity. In your case . . .”
Death neither confirmed nor denied my claim.
Twenty minutes later, the coffee shop was swarming with wounded people, medics, police officers, sappers, and a sweet old lady who wanted to know if we served chocolate milk. Beautiful smoke wafted all around.
It was 7:45. The radio announced a double car bomb attack in Jerusalem. I drank red grapefruit juice and played checkers with Death, quickly licking my lips. He was as silent as a fish and didn’t even laugh when I told him the only joke I remembered about him. (In the joke, he, Death, stands at the foot of a married couple’s bed. He tells the husband: “I’ve come for your soul,” and the husband wakes up his wife: “My soul, get up, someone’s here for you.”)
Another customer emerged from the bathroom, her broken high heels in her hand. A flame burst out of the room behind her. Death blew in that direction, extinguishing the fire with ease.
She whispered, “I’m all right, nothing happened to me in there.”
“To me neither,” I said. I captured Death’s last checker piece. Before I folded the board, I remembered to place a lilac in its center.
Death scratched his head. The headline in the paper the juice-drinking customer left on the counter said, Explosive Car in the Heart of Tel Aviv.
Many more interesting things happened in the coffee shop before and after everything blew up outside along King George Street: A girl whose doll had a missing right arm came in and asked for carrot juice
. A giant man wept because his cell phone stopped working. A beautiful naked woman riding a snow-white horse appeared from a cloud of smoke and cried, “Follow me!” and someone whose T-shirt said Shady Shade was about to step outside, but I grabbed her shoulders at the last moment and told her to sit down, that she was way ahead of schedule.
It was 7:50. I whispered, “One, two, three,” leaped over the counter and onto Death, and before he could even blink I held up his arm and sniffed his armpit. Neutral scent. He tried mumbling something but his lips failed him. Instead, he whimpered and then went silent.
“I don’t like you very much, friend,” I finally told Death. “I think I’d like you to leave.”
Death seemed deeply insulted. He examined the passersby on King George Street and then turned to me.
A beggar with a Juventus scarf walked in and asked if I wanted to buy a music box that played three tunes. I said yes. Death and I sat together, fascinated by the sweet sounds that emerged from the box and rose to the ceiling like rings of smoke pulled by spiderwebs.
To really wake up, you have to blow on a mirror.
I went to the bathroom, and when I came back I smiled at Death and said, “You’re an introvert, huh? Look, I’m sorry for what I said earlier. I didn’t mean to insult you. You know, I have my own problems. Is it true what they say? That you’re an orphan?”
The radio announced eight dead soldiers stationed along the Egyptian border, a Palestinian woman who had a miscarriage and lost her twins because she was delayed at a checkpoint that was bombed last night, and a neighborhood in Beirut that disappeared from an atlas in a university library, or something like that.
“You’re confusing me, Death.” I laughed.
I think I saw a little smile form on his lips.
And many other interesting things happened at the coffee shop before everything exploded outside: A couple came in, embracing each other, and mumbled, “You’d think we were in a hurry. One croissant!” and I answered, “You’d think I was a waitress. You want butter on that?” and the second hand on the clock began moving counterclockwise, and a truck driver parked by the window facing King George argued with a police officer who wrote him a ticket and then they came in together and ordered a croissant. The radio announcer lamented, “Moon beating on my chest, half is bright, dark is the rest. From myself I try to run. Happy tune? A bitter one.” A chair by the counter walked outside all by itself and fell apart in front of our stunned eyes. Et cetera.
Death said nothing. He was silent from the moment he entered, he was silent as people came in and went back out, he was silent as he observed them, some with compassion and others with despair, he was silent as the bomb began to tick, he was silent that first moment, when the windows shattered into large and small shards, like blood drops and hearts and fists. He was silent as he opened his arms so that nothing happened to me, and only after the first ambulance siren sounded (to really wake up, you have to blow on a mirror, a window, on a hospital monitor where the jumpy horizontal line will stretch from left to right for one last instant and then disappear), only then did he take my hand in his.
He put my hand on his chest. My heart skipped a beat. I closed my eyes, paralyzed. I tried not to breathe.
And then, finally, Death whispered: “If you don’t mind, I’d like a glass of mineral water. I don’t like tap.”
THE EXPENDABLES
BY GAI AD
Ben Zion Boulevard
Margalit Bloch was a successful woman.
She was fifty-one years old, good-looking, smart, and intriguing. She lived in a rent-controlled apartment on Borochov Street in central Tel Aviv, which meant that everything was walking distance, and she knew the city like the back of her hand—art exhibitions, the theater, a farmers’ market here, a flea market there, designer sales, shoes, bags, the works. She had a job in television as a props person, but quit two years ago when Channel 1 implemented its reform plan and offered terrific severance to longtime employees. Her retirement might have seemed like a greater success had her husband, Nathan, not discovered the cancer within him exactly two months later. But that is what happened, and instead of going on a long trip abroad to meet up with their only son, Ari, who’d been traveling the world for a year, they were sucked into the tedious yearlong labor of dying.
After her retirement and her husband’s death, Margalit felt hollow as a flute. She knew she needed a new source of income. Nathan was an artist. He taught art, painted custom portraits, but ultimately left her nothing but an ugly plastic storage container filled with all his equipment and the pieces he could never sell. He’d tried, had held a couple of exhibitions, but they were always of the community center genre and were met with reservations. Not to mention that the paintings were what one of her friends in the know termed “too simple,” lacking the necessary depth.
They never managed to buy an apartment either, and her current rent-controlled place used to be her parents’. Nathan and Margalit had moved in after her father died. A year later, Margalit’s mother died as well, and the apartment was effectively forfeited to them.
She blamed their borderline finances on Nathan. He was afraid. She was more daring, but for some reason rarely recognized opportunities in time. By the time she did, and tried to convince Nathan to take a chance, they had already become less attractive. Like that apartment on Shalom Aleichem Street, the closest they ever came to buying property. It belonged to two people who’d inherited it from their grandmother. One of them was in the process of building his own home and was in dire need of money. Margalit heard about them from a friend who lived in the building, and spotted the opportunity, but Nathan hesitated. The grandson changed his mind at the last minute and his sister moved in with the daughter of one of Margalit’s friends.
At least she had the rent-controlled apartment. At least, she knew, she would always have a place to live.
Yoel Guttman, an acquaintance of Nathan’s, entered her life during the week of the shivah. She knew him vaguely, knew of him. Now he came to console her, having seen the obituary in the newspaper. He told her he and Nathan had taken sketching lessons together. He had realized he was not talented enough and decided to go to law school instead. He’d tried to convince Nathan to study law as well because of his excellent attention to detail. Was he implying that’s what Nathan should have done? Studied a real profession rather than some nonsense? Margalit was on edge. She said that they made do with what they had, and something about her expression, the way she pursed her lips in defense of her husband, impressed Yoel immensely. He thought about her for some days afterward and then came back for another visit. This time, he suggested she open a small secondhand shop. He was the legal counsel for the administrator general and had access to apartments whose owners had passed away. She could get her hands on possessions left by people without families whose apartments had to be cleared out, he said, and her background in prop work would help her choose well.
The idea appealed to her. This was the kind of initiative she’d never taken, the unfulfilled potential that was hidden within her all these years. It flattered her that Yoel recognized this side of her.
For Yoel, this was an excellent way to get closer to her. He’d lived alone all these years, single. Maybe his moment had finally come.
The first time Margalit came to one of these apartments, she wore a blue tracksuit, had her hair pulled back in a ponytail, and looked to Yoel like a curious schoolgirl. She began sorting through things without any unnecessary niceties. She was surprised with herself, she told him. She had always been clean and organized, and now here she was, burrowing into other people’s smells, pulling out anything she liked with a kind of passion. He took with him any money and Jewish artifacts, and explained that they were to be donated to different institutions around the country. She brought a shopping cart to the next apartments she visited, into which she packed the anonymous lives of strangers.
Yoel did some rummaging as well, but his style was more focused. He on
ly looked for documents that had to do with the apartment and the bank accounts of its owners.
“What happens to all these assets?” Margalit asked him.
He smiled knowingly. “That’s where I come in.”
There was something twisted about that answer, but Margalit smiled back. Though not a fan of guns, she was happy to be beside an accomplished hunter.
“These people have completed their roles in life,” he told her. “And so far, no next of kin has come forward.” He explained that he would sell these apartments on behalf of the state, and once in a while he’d sell an apartment to himself, on “special terms.”
Yoel Guttman had accumulated quite a few walls in his capacity as caretaker for the expendables.
Three months and four apartments later, she found a tiny, inexpensive shop on Dizengoff Street. Ari, her son, who’d returned to Israel right before Nathan died, helped her renovate the store, and rather quickly, maybe because of the high quality of the items, or perhaps because of her good taste—like the small armchair which gave each customer the sense of being the center of Margalit’s life—the shop gained some regular customers, and drew quite a few enthusiastic tourists, and things were looking up. On the wall hung one of Nathan’s paintings, removed from the ugly balcony in their apartment, and she promised herself that each time she sold one of his works she’d hang another one in its place. She didn’t think Nathan’s paintings were appropriate for an exhibition, not because they were too simple, but because they weakened each other when shown together. This worked better. She sold two right away. Then the paintings stopped selling.
Yoel’s interest in Margalit had so far been satisfied by spending time with her, sniffing her hair as she walked past him, and rubbing against her here and there. He scouted as many apartments as he could, had never worked as hard as during those months, and Margalit accepted all of his invitations.