Tel Aviv Noir

by Etgar Keret

  Margalit shook her head and raised her hands despairingly. She got up to leave. She turned her cart upright and began to gather her belongings. How did everything become so tainted?

  Yoel pushed her onto the bed. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  Margalit sat there, paralyzed. It can’t be. Everything was so right just moments ago. Why does the goddamn truth always show its face in the worst possible moment? She could have left here with money, and she would have improved her method in the next apartment, taking only some of the money, maybe some jewelry. Yoel would never have known, and she would have grown used to him, made him whistle more and more. Ari would have been saved.

  “I want you inside me,” Yoel said, doing a bad impression of her. He unzipped his pants and crawled over to her on the bed. “I want you inside me. Go on, say it.”

  “Yoel, please, don’t do this.”

  He slapped her, hard. “Don’t do what? No one’s ever been in these apartments with me before, you know that? It was a secret. A professional risk. I brought you into this palace, I was generous, I invited you to share my treasure.”

  She tried to get away, but he was stronger than her.

  He ripped off her pants and underwear. “And what do you give me in return?”

  She whimpered. “Yoel, don’t.”

  “Say it already!” he screamed, and slapped her again. “I want you.” Now he was trying to enter her. “Inside me.”

  “Stop it!” she yelled.

  But Yoel wouldn’t listen. He put a sweaty palm over her mouth and kept going.

  She was gripped with horror. What would she do with all the anger he was going to release inside of her? She moved her hand around and found the bottle of Campari by the bed. She grabbed it and slammed it into Yoel’s head. It made a terrible crashing sound.

  And then another.

  The bottle didn’t break, but Yoel collapsed. She pulled herself from beneath him and he slipped to the floor. She got dressed and stared at him from above. His eyes were slightly open, his lips slightly parted. Nothing special. She leaned down and zipped his pants. Yoel didn’t move. Then she smoothed the bedspread. She went over to the shopping cart and pulled out the towel she’d shoved in there only moments earlier. She wiped the blood from the floor. Not a lot of blood, but enough to get noticed. She smoothed her clothes and hair and sipped the pink remains from the bottom of the glass. She put the towel and the empty glass in her cart, grabbed the briefcase, and left.

  ALLERGIES

  BY ETGAR KERET

  Florentin

  The dog was actually my idea. We were on our way back from the gynecologist’s office. Rakefet was crying, and the cab driver, who was, for once, nice, dropped us off on the corner of Arlozorov Street, because Ibn Gabirol Street was closed for a demonstration. We started walking home. The street was crowded and humid and people around us shouted into loudspeakers. A giant scarecrow with the treasury minister’s face was planted on a traffic island. People were stacking bills around it. Right when we walked past, someone set fire to the bills and the scarecrow began burning.

  “I don’t want us to adopt,” Rakefet said. “It’s hard enough to raise a child of your own. I don’t want someone else’s.” She paused. Around us people were screaming, but she only looked at me, waiting for my answer.

  I didn’t know what to tell her. I didn’t really have a say in the matter, and even if I had, this wouldn’t have been the time to give it. I could see how upset she was. “Why don’t we go buy a dog tomorrow?” I finally said, just to say something.

  The scarecrow was glowing bright red now. I could hear a police or television chopper circling above us.

  “We won’t buy,” Rakefet shouted over the noise. “We’ll get a dog. There are plenty of stray dogs who need a home.”

  And that’s how we got Seffi.

  We picked Seffi up at the Tel Aviv SPCA. He wasn’t a puppy, but hadn’t finished growing yet. The caretaker said he’d been abused and that nobody wanted him. I tried to find out why, because he was actually a handsome dog, looked like a purebred, but Rakefet didn’t really care. When we came up to him he flinched like we were going to hurt him. He trembled and howled the whole way home.

  But Seffi quickly got used to us. He loved us, and he cried whenever one of us left the apartment. If both of us left at the same time he barked like mad and scratched the door. The first time it happened we decided to wait downstairs until he stopped, but he never did. After a few attempts we just never left him alone. Rakefet mainly worked from home anyway, so it wasn’t too complicated.

  As much as Seffi liked us, he hated everybody else, especially children. After he bit the neighbor’s daughter, we always had him wear a leash and a muzzle. The neighbor made a big scene, wrote letters to city hall, and called our landlord, who didn’t even know we had gotten a dog. We received a letter from his lawyer, demanding we move out of the apartment immediately.

  It was hard to find another place in our neighborhood, especially one that accepted dogs. So we moved a little south. We found a place on Yona HaNavi Street. A very large but very dark apartment. Seffi liked it. He couldn’t stand the light, and now he had a bigger space to run around in. It was funny. Rakefet and I sat on the sofa and talked or watched television and he ran around us in circles for hours, never getting tired. “If he were a kid we’d have given him Ritalin ages ago,” I once said. I was only joking, but Rakefet answered seriously, saying that we wouldn’t have, because Ritalin wasn’t invented for kids, but for lazy parents who couldn’t handle their children’s energy.

  In the meantime, Seffi developed a strange allergy. He got a scary red rash all over his body. The vet said he was probably allergic to dog food and suggested we give him fresh meat instead. I asked if the rash could have something to do with the missile attack on Tel Aviv, because although Seffi had no reaction to the actual explosions, he was very nervous when the siren sounded, and the rash only broke out after that first alarm. But the vet insisted that the siren had nothing to do with it, and asked again that we give him fresh meat, but only beef, since chicken would be bad for him.

  Seffi liked the beef and the rash disappeared. But he soon began reacting violently toward anyone who came to the apartment. After he bit the supermarket delivery guy we decided not to have people over anymore. We were very lucky with the delivery guy. Seffi tore his bicep. The guy didn’t want to go to the hospital because he was an illegal Eritrean refugee. Rakefet cleaned and dressed his wound and I gave him a thousand shekels in 200-shekel notes and apologized. He tried to smile, said in a heavy accent that he’d be fine, and limped out the door.

  Three months later the rash came back. The vet said Seffi’s body had grown used to the new food and that we had to make a change again. We tried feeding him pork, but he couldn’t digest it. The vet recommended camel meat and gave us the number of a bedouin who sold it. The bedouin was suspicious, because he didn’t have ministry of health permits to sell the meat. He’d make appointments with me on different intersections, always a couple of hours’ drive south. I paid him cash and he’d fill my icebox with meat. Seffi loved it. When I cooked the meat he stood in the kitchen and barked pleadingly at the pot. His barks sounded almost human, like a mother trying to convince her little boy to get off the tree he was climbing. It cracked us up.

  One day when I took Seffi out for a walk, he attacked the old Russian man from the second floor. He didn’t bite him, because he had his muzzle on, but he did jump up on him and pushed him down on his back. The old man received a serious blow to the head and had to be taken to the hospital. He was unconscious when the ambulance arrived. Rakefet told the paramedic he’d stumbled. We became really depressed, knowing that when he regained consciousness we’d have to move again. Actually, I was depressed. Rakefet was mainly worried that Seffi would be taken away from us and put down. I tried telling her maybe that was the right thing to do. He was a good dog, but a dangerous one. When I said it Rakefet started crying and turned
cold. She wouldn’t let me touch her. Then she said I was only saying that because I wanted to get rid of the dog, because he was giving us a hard time with his special food, and not being able to have people over or leave him home alone, and that she was disappointed, because she thought I was stronger, less selfish than that.

  She wouldn’t sleep with me for weeks afterward, speaking to me only when she had to. I tried telling her that it had nothing to do with selfishness. I’d happily endure all the difficulties if I thought the situation could be solved, but Seffi was just too strong and scared, and no matter how closely we watched him, he’d continue hurting people. Rakefet asked if I’d have our child put down too. And when I said that Seffi wasn’t a child, he was a dog, and that she had to accept that, it just ended in another fight. She cried in the bedroom. Seffi went over and started howling too, and I could do nothing but apologize. Not that it helped.

  A month later, the Russian man’s son came over and started asking questions. His father had died in the hospital. Not from the blow to the head, but from an infection he caught there. The guy wanted details on what happened, because he was suing social security. He said there were deep animal scratches on his body, but the emergency services’ report said his father had just stumbled. He wanted to know if there was anything we hadn’t told the paramedics.

  We didn’t let him in the apartment, but as we spoke in the stairwell Seffi began barking and the guy asked questions about the dog and wanted to see him. We told him he couldn’t come in, that the dog was new, we only got him ten days ago, long after his father had the fall. He insisted on seeing him anyway, and when we refused again he threatened to come back with the police.

  That very night we packed up our things and went to stay with Rakefet’s parents for a few days. I met some realtors and found an apartment in the Florentin neighborhood. It was small and noisy, but the landlord didn’t mind the dog. Rakefet and I went back to sleeping together. She was still a bit cold, but the drama with the Russian’s son brought us closer together again. She also saw that I was standing up for Seffi, and that softened her.

  Then Seffi’s rash returned again.

  Our old vet was no longer available. It turned out he was a high-up in the military and had been killed on reserve duty, carrying out a retaliation attack in Syria. Rakefet refused to try to find a new vet, scared he would tell us to put Seffi down. We didn’t want to keep giving him camel meat. We tried fish and meat substitutes instead, but he wouldn’t touch anything, and after he didn’t eat for two days Rakefet said we had to find a different kind of meat, before he starved to death.

  She crushed some sleeping pills her mother had given her a long time ago, when we flew to New York for our honeymoon, and put them in a bowl of milk. From our balcony we saw some cats in the yard approach the bowl and sniff the milk. None of them touched it, except for one thin, red-haired cat. Rakefet told me to go downstairs and follow it, but the cat wasn’t going anywhere. It lay down by the bowl. It didn’t even move when I approached it. It looked at me with almost human eyes, giving me a sad but accepting expression, like he knew just what was going to happen and simply had to accept it, because the world was shit. When it fell asleep I picked it up, but couldn’t take it upstairs. I felt it breathing in my arms, and I couldn’t do it. I sat on the steps, crying. A few minutes later I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was Rakefet. I never even heard her coming down the stairs. “Leave it,” she told me. “Leave the cat here and come upstairs. We’ll find another way.”

  We decided to try pigeons. On Washington Avenue, right by our house, there were a ton of fat pigeons that the old neighborhood residents liked to feed. We searched the Internet for ways to hunt them. There were plenty of methods, but they all seemed pretty complicated. Finally, I bought a professional marble-shooting slingshot at a military equipment store in the Central Bus Station. After a few days of studying and practicing, I was quite the marksman. When Seffi ate one pigeon and seemed to respond well, Rakefet and I drank two bottles of wine and fucked all night long. Happy fucking. We felt very, very good, and we felt that we’d earned all that goodness, fair and square.

  Rakefet suggested I hunt the pigeons at dawn, when the streets were empty, to avoid any eyewitnesses. Ever since then, twice a week I set the alarm for four thirty a.m., head out while the whole street is still asleep, scatter bread crumbs, and hide in the bushes. I’m addicted to these hours, to the gentle cold air of the morning—not freezing cold, but cold enough to wake you up. I lie in the bushes, listening to music on my earphones. It’s my quality time. All alone, just me, my thoughts, my music, and occasionally a pigeon in my sights. First I only hunted two or three at a time, but now I’m starting to get more. It’s fun, coming home to my wife with my game, like some sort of caveman. It’s really improving our relationship, or at least helping us fix whatever broke back then, when Seffi jumped on the old man.

  When we Googled hunting methods, Rakefet found a great French pigeon recipe: pigeons in wine, stuffed with rice. It’s the most delicious thing in the world, and Seffi loves it when we eat the same food as him. Sometimes, just for kicks, I sit next to him on the kitchen floor and we both howl at Rakefet as she cooks our pigeons.

  “Get up,” she always says, laughing. “Get up, or I’ll think I married a dog.”

  But I tilt my head back, close my eyes, and keep howling, and I only stop when Seffi comes closer and lovingly licks my face.

  CENTER

  BY ASSAF GAVRON

  Dizengoff Center

  We sat inside the villa, sipping black coffee and staring out the window: it never stopped raining. The sky was low, the garden wet and green. Piles of floor tiles, sacks of cement, and tubs of paint crowded beneath a plastic sheet that blew in the wind by the pool. I was about to ask Srulik if he thought we could head home after we finished our coffee—we weren’t going to get any work done in this rain—when an unfamiliar ringtone sounded. It wasn’t my phone or Srulik’s, and it wasn’t the villa’s landline either. I shot Srulik a quick look and saw deep grooves between his large eyebrows. “It’s the other phone,” he said. “Get it from the jacket by the door.”

  The other phone? What phone? I wondered, putting down the small glass and walking toward the coat rack by the front door. I found the phone ringing in the coat pocket and hurried back, handing it to the boss.

  “Hello?” The wrinkles grew deeper. “Yes,” he said into the phone. “Yes, this is actually a good time. I just had a cancellation because of the rain. Hold on, I’m writing it down.” He covered the mouthpiece and whispered to me, “Write.” He removed his hand and said, “Yes, go on.” On the edge of an old Haaretz I wrote in pencil: Dizengoff Center. Apartment tower. 11th floor. Monbaz. “We’ll be there in fifteen minutes, man.” He hung up, turned to me, and said, “Let’s go, doctor, we have a job.”

  We were silent the first few minutes of the drive from the northern Tzahala neighborhood to Dizengoff. The rain on the roof of the car and the monotonous dance of the windshield wipers silenced a conversation the radio announcer was having with a meteorologist. Finally, stopped at a red light, without even the moving landscape to break the silence, I asked Srulik, “What’s the story with that other phone?”

  His fingers drummed on the steering wheel through his woolen gloves. He whistled and looked at me sideways. Then he faced forward again and said, “It used to be Cindy’s phone. When we broke up and she went back to Canada, I was left with it.”

  Strange, I thought. Why walk around with an ex-wife’s phone? But before I even had a chance to ask, Srulik said, “I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, why would the person calling on that phone talk to me about a job and not ask to speak with Cindy?”

  “Um . . .”

  “I know, I know that’s what you were thinking. Come on, I’m always two steps ahead. So it’s like this: One day I got a call from the yellow pages, on my normal phone, not this one. They offered to print an ad for the renovation business. They gave me a go
od rate, explained the target audience, ana aref, that kind of stuff. Then they said, two for one. Meaning, I can print a second ad and only pay for one . . . I still know what you must be thinking.”

  I wasn’t thinking anything.

  “You’re thinking, what would I need two ads for? The renovation ad will go on the renovation page—what’s the other one for? And then the lady on the phone asks me, Don’t you have anything else to advertise? I thought about it. I had another line, another phone, why not advertise something else? So I thought, there’s this dream I’ve had for years, of opening an investigation firm. Why not? What’s the worst thing that could happen? I have a phone. I have an ad in the yellow pages. I have a brain that thinks two steps ahead. Someone calls, I’ll try to help them. Seemed interesting, a bit of a change of pace.”

  I stared at him blankly. I didn’t know what to say. A detective? Srulik? He’s not even that good of a handyman.

  “Don’t look at me that way,” Srulik said. “Renovations and investigations are very similar. What do we do? We take things apart and then we put them back together, layer after layer. Revealing and covering up. Investigating is exactly the same thing.”

  I said nothing. At that point we entered Ibn Gabirol Street and were about to turn right on Nordau and then left on Dizengoff. The rain seemed softer in central Tel Aviv than in the northern neighborhoods, but it didn’t stop. The radio announcer read out an unending list of traffic jams all over the country. “Two questions you’re asking yourself. One, if I have a private investigator’s diploma. And two, what I wrote in my ad. So, one, no, I don’t have a diploma. And, two: Private investigator with diplomas and recommendations. One hundred percent service. One hundred percent reliability. One hundred percent responsibility. Seventeen years of experience. That’s what the lady recommended I write. And she said, Don’t call it AAA Private Investigations or anything like that. People know you only do that to be the first on the list. So I called it Srulik Lasry, Special Investigation Services.”