by Frank Wynne
Seven days after my uncle’s death, the unit in which he’d been stationed deserted in its entirety and went over to the Partisans. To that point M. had been their only casualty. At war’s end three more lay dead. But they were no longer the enemy.
Grandpa and Grandma lived together for a full thirty years after the death of their son, never speaking of him. They held their silence in front of others and probably held it between themselves. Don’t expect me to be so banal as to say I know Grandma blamed herself for her son’s death. She never once set foot in a church again, she forgot Christmas and Easter, and only once a year did Grandpa put on his best suit and head to Sarajevo Cathedral for midnight mass. He didn’t have much of an ear, but he liked singing the songs heralding the birth of the eternal child.
Grandma didn’t decide that God doesn’t exist, more that he just had nothing to do with her. She stopped believing in him even if he did exist. Grandpa died in 1972, and Grandma began her dying in the early spring of 1986. She had throat cancer and it got harder and harder for her to breathe. Sometimes she’d call me by M.’s name. They were little slips and I didn’t call her on them. Or maybe they weren’t little slips at all. By that time I was her only surviving son.
At the beginning of June, an ambulance came and took her to the hospital to die. They cut her throat open, but she still couldn’t breathe. She fixed her gaze straight ahead and set her hands together. I smiled like it was all no big thing and that she’d be better tomorrow. But I knew exactly what was going down. Death came slyly and unfairly. It grabbed my grandma by the throat and shook everything left out of her. What was left was the memory of her son. She died during the night of the fifth of June.
Like all old folk, she’d talked about her funeral while still in good health. Under no circumstances whatsoever did she want her photograph to appear in her obituary, over her dead body. But she didn’t mention anything about a priest. No one had asked of course. That would have been stupid.
Over her dead body, we got a priest and paid for a memorial service. I can’t explain why to you. Maybe so that God, if he exists, smartens up his act. That’s how a friend of Grandma’s put it.
I never even visited her grave come All Saints’ Day. I can’t tell you why. I just didn’t ever feel like it. I was sorry she’d died, particularly in such a terrible way; I guess I thought visiting the grave would be to honor such a death. A few days before this most recent war, my friend Ahmed’s father died. On my way back from the janazah, instead of heading for the exit gate I decided to take a walk over to the Catholic plots. On the tombstone under which my grandpa and grandma were buried, a huge black dog lay sprawled out in the sun. I sat down beside him, and he lifted his head lazily, looking at me with half-closed eyes. I’d long since stopped caring that no one had believed my first insight and first memory, the one of a dog barking in the hall of the maternity ward the moment before I let out my first scream. You’re the angel, aren’t you? He wagged his tail on the marble a couple of times and sunk back into sleep. My hand followed him.
THE NIMROD FLIPOUT
Etgar Keret
Translated from the Hebrew by Miriam Shlesinger and Sondra Silverston
Etgar Keret (1967–). Born in Tel Aviv, Etgar Keret is the author of six bestselling story collections. His writing has been published in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and Zoetrope. Jellyfish, his first film as a director along with his wife, Shira Geffen, won the Caméra d’Or prize for best first feature at Cannes in 2007. In 2010 he was named a Chevalier of France’s Order of Arts and Letters. Keret’s father was arrested for peeing on a wall when drunk. It was the wall of the French Embassy, and the arresting police assumed it was an obscure act of political protest. His brother heads up the movement for the legalization of marijuana in Israel.
MIRON FREAKS OUT
When it comes to Miron’s problem, there are, as they say, several schools of thought. The doctors think it’s some trauma he suffered when he was in the army that resurfaced all of a sudden in his brain, like a turd that comes floating back at you in the toilet long after you’ve flushed. His parents are convinced it’s all because of the mushrooms he ate in the East, which turned his brain to quiche. The guy who found him there and brought him back to Israel says it’s because of this Dutch girl he met in Dharamsala, who broke his heart. And Miron himself says it’s God who’s messing with his mind. Tapping into his brain like a bat, telling it one thing, then the opposite, anything, just to pick a fight. According to Miron, after He created the world, God pretty much rested on His laurels for a couple of million years. Until Miron came along all of a sudden, and started asking questions, and God broke out in a sweat. Because God could tell straight off that unlike the rest of humanity, Miron was nobody’s chump. As soon as you gave him the smallest opening, he’d slam right through it, and God—as everyone knows—is really big on dishing it out, but not on taking it, and the last thing He feels like putting up with is a rebuttal, especially from a guy like Miron, and from the minute He realized what was going on, He just kept driving Miron around the bend, hassling him whenever He could, with everything from bad dreams to girls who wouldn’t put out. Anything to make him fall apart.
The doctors asked Uzi and me to help them a little with Miron’s case history, because the three of us have known each other all our lives. They asked us all kinds of questions about the army, about what had happened with Nimrod. But most of it we couldn’t remember, and even the little bit that we did remember we didn’t tell them because the truth was that they didn’t exactly look like nice guys, and Miron had told us a couple of things that bordered on something you’d see on 60 Minutes. After that, during visiting hours, Miron begged us to bring him some hummus from the hunchback, because more than anything else, it was the food here that was doing him in. “It’s been three weeks since I got here,” he figured, “and if you add that to the four months in the East, that’s almost six months without hummus. I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy, I really wouldn’t.” So we went to get him some. The hunchback said he didn’t do takeout. “Only sit-down,” he snarled, half-menacing, half-indifferent, the way he does. “I’m not running a snack bar here.” So we ordered a plate of hummus, and stuck it in the pita ourselves. When we got back, Miron’s mother was there. She said hi to Uzi, but not to me. She hasn’t spoken to me for years, on account of me influencing her son to experiment with drugs. We didn’t give him the hummus while she was still there, because we were afraid she’d tell the doctors. So we waited for her to leave. Meanwhile, the ful was getting cold, but that didn’t matter to Miron, who wolfed it down. Three days later they discharged him. The doctors said his reaction to the medications was remarkable. Miron still insists it was on account of the hummus.
UZI LOSES IT
In June, Miron and I went down to Sinai. Uzi was supposed to come too, but he stood us up at the last second for an appointment with some dot-com German from Düsseldorf who could put up millions for a project with Uzi’s company. It was supposed to be a kind of celebration, in honor of the fact that Miron wasn’t considered crazy anymore, and Uzi felt kind of embarrassed about his childish attraction to money, so he promised that as soon as his appointment was over he’d join us there. “I’ll bet you anything he doesn’t show,” Miron said. “A double bet: First off, he won’t show, and second, give him three more months and he’ll marry the Turnip.” I didn’t want to bet Miron about either, because what he said sounded depressing but basically true. Turnip was our code name for Uzi’s obnoxious girlfriend who was also deep into all those virtual hi-tech deals that Uzi loved to manage. I remember him asking us once why we called her Turnip, and Miron told him something about how it was because turnips are underrated: some people don’t realize how good they can be. Uzi didn’t really buy it, but he never asked about it again.
If life is one big party, Sinai is definitely the chill-out room. And even Miron and I, who hardly did anything in regular life anyway, could appr
eciate the ultimate nothingness of the place. Everywhere you looked on our beach, you saw dozens of spaced-out hippie chicks, and Miron kept hitting on them, going on about all the time he’d spent in the East. It even worked, sometimes. Me, I didn’t have the energy, or the coordination either. So I just smoked lots of weed, stared at the sea, and kept debating whether to order a pineapple pancake for lunch or take my chances with the fish. I also kept an eye on Miron from a distance, checking to see if he’d really straightened out. He still came up with some pretty weird stuff, like for instance when he insisted on taking a shit right near our hut because he was too lazy to walk all the way to the restaurant. But the truth is that he used to do stuff like that before he went crazy too.
“I have a good feeling about that short one with the navel stud,’’ he told me at night after we came back from the restaurant on the beach. “You have to admit, she’s cute, isn’t she?” The two of us were sitting around, out of it, just staring out at the sea. “Listen,” I told him, “about that whole thing when they put you away, I know Uzi and me acted like it was no big thing, but you scared the shit out of us.” Miron just shrugged. “It was pretty freaky, like suddenly I started hearing voices—talking, singing. Like some broken radio that you can’t figure out how to turn off. It drives you up the wall. You can’t think straight even for a second. I’m telling you, I felt as if someone was trying to flip me out. And then it just stopped.” Miron took one more drag on the cigarette, and put it out in the sand. “And I’ll tell you something else,” he said. “I know this sounds wacked, but I think it was Nimrod.”
The next day, contrary to all our predictions, Uzi arrived. Too bad I didn’t take Miron up on his bet. As soon as Uzi put his bag down in the hut he dragged us straight to the restaurant, chewed some squid, and told us all about how the German guy had turned out to be even more of a pushover than he’d expected, and how happy he was to be with us, with his best friends, in Sinai, his favorite place in the whole world. After that, he went charging up and down the beach, calling “Yo Bro” at anything that moved, and hugging every Bedouin or Egyptian who wasn’t fast enough to get away. When he got tired of that too, Uzi made us play backgammon with him, and after he beat both of us, he clobbered one of the Bedouins too, and then he made the Bedouin traipse up and down the beach behind his bald opponent yelling, “Watch out, girls, Abu-Gara’s big.” Miron tried to chill him out with a joint, but that only made Uzi crazier. He started coming on strong to a forty-year-old American tourist, gave up in no time, ate three pancakes, told Miron and me that he couldn’t get over the peace and quiet of the place, ordered kebab, and suggested that maybe the three of us and his new Bedouin friend, who turned out to be a taxi driver, could go down to play the casino at Taba. Miron was dead set against it, because he figured he was just about to get lucky with navel stud, but Uzi was so worked up that he didn’t stand a chance. “No shit,” Miron said as soon as we got into the taxi. “The guy’s completely lost it.”
Abu-Gara and the Bedouin made a killing at Taba, swooping down on one table after the next, leaving nothing behind them but shattered croupiers and scorched earth. Between killings, Uzi wolfed down enormous slabs of apple pie and chocolate mousse cake. Miron and me just sat there, watching patiently, waiting for him to wear himself out. But the thing was, he just kept getting stronger and stronger. Once Uzi and the Bedouin had finished humiliating the casino and divvying up their winnings, we took the taxi to the border station. Miron and me reminded Uzi that we were supposed to be heading back, but he said it was out of the question. As far as he was concerned, the day was still young, and there was no reason not to cash in at a couple of clubs in Eilat before heading back. He made sure to give the Bedouin his business card, and they kissed about eighty times. Miron made one more try to persuade the Bedouin to take us back to the beach, leaving Uzi to continue his escapades on his own, but the Bedouin told us off and insisted that for us to leave a wonderful friend like Abu-Gara right in the middle of a celebration would be a disgrace, and he’d have loved to come with us himself except he wasn’t allowed to cross the border. After that he kissed us too, got into the taxi, and disappeared. When Uzi got tired of the Spiral, we went to the Yacht Pub and then to some hotel called the Blue Something, and only then, after Miron and I had refused two different times to let him get some call girls sent up to our room, Uzi turned over on his stomach and started to snore.
Ever since that time in Sinai, Uzi’s company’s been on a roll. After the German pushover, Uzi found two other suckers, one an American and the other from India, and it looked like he was about to knock the whole world on its ass. Miron said it only went to show how crazy all those businesspeople were. Because the fact was that ever since Uzi’d gone off the deep end, he’d been getting bigger and bigger. Sometimes we’d still try to drag him with us to the beach or the pool hall, but even when he did come, he was so busy the whole time telling everyone how much he was enjoying it and what a great time we were having together, and checking the voice mail on his cell phone, that after an hour with him you’d simply lose the desire to live. “Don’t worry. He’ll outgrow it,” I’d try to tell Miron, as Uzi got caught up in another transatlantic call just when it was his turn to shoot. “Sure,” Miron would say in the tone of an ex-wacko who’s got it all figured out, “and if it’s doing the rounds, you’re next.”
NEXT IN LINE TO LOSE HIS SHIT
The next morning, I woke up in an utter panic. I had no idea what was causing it. I lay there, pressing my back to the mattress, trying not to move till I could figure out what had me so scared. But the more time went by, the less I could figure out what brought it on, and the more scared I got. I lie there in bed frozen, and keep telling myself, in the second person, as calmly as I can, “Take it easy, man, take it easy. This isn’t really happening, it’s all in your head.” But the thought that this thing, whatever it is, is inside my head makes it a thousand times more horrifying. I decide to tell myself who I am, to say my name a few times in a row. That’s bound to help me get a grip on myself. Except that all of a sudden even my name is gone. At least that gets me out of bed. I crawl around the house, searching for bills, mail, anything with my name written on it. I open the front door and look at the other side of it, where there’s an orange sticker with the inscription: “Have a hell of a life!” In the hallway there’s the loud laughter of kids and the sound of footsteps approaching. I close the door and lean against it. Stay cool. In a minute I’ll remember, or not—maybe I never had a name. Whatever happens, that isn’t why I’m sweating so hard that my pulse is about to blow my brains out, that’s not it, it’s something else. “Take it easy,” I whisper to myself again. “Take it easy, whatever your name is. This can’t go on much longer, it’ll be over soon.”
As soon as it eased up, I phoned Uzi and Miron, and arranged to meet them both at the beach. It was just a few hundred yards from my place, and I had no problem remembering how to get there, except that all the streets suddenly looked different, and I had to keep stopping to check the signs to make sure they were really the right ones. Not just the streets, everything looked different, even the sky was kind of squashed, and low.
“I told you your turn would come,” Miron says, and sucks at the red tip of his Wave-on-a-Stick Popsicle. “First I lost it, then Uzi.” “I didn’t lose it,” Uzi protested. “I was just a little high, that’s all.” “Whatever,” Miron went on. “It’s your turn now.” “Ron isn’t losing it either,” Uzi said, beginning to get worked up. “Why do you keep putting those ideas in his head?” “Ron?” I ask. “Is that my name?” “Know what?” Uzi concedes. “Maybe he has lost it a little. Can I get a bite?” Miron hands him the Popsicle, knowing perfectly well he’ll never see it again. “Tell me,” he asks. “When it started, didn’t you feel there was someone in your head?” “I don’t know.” I hesitated. “Maybe I did.” “I’m telling you,” Miron whispered, as if it was a secret. “I could feel him. He was saying things that only he could know. I�
�m sure it was Nimrod.”
NIMROD’S FLIPOUT
Until he turned twelve, Nimrod was a shitty person. The kind of whiner that, if he wasn’t your best friend, you’d have kicked his ass a long time ago. And then one day, just before his bar mitzvah, they put insoles in his shoes, and suddenly the guy was a whole new human being. Yes, Miron, Uzi, and I had been friends with Nimrod even before that, but now, when he became nice too, it actually started to be fun to be around him.
Later, in high school, Uzi and me were in the honors program and Miron and Nimrod went to vocational school and mostly the beach. Then came the army. Miron was drafted six months before us, and by the time our turn came he’d sucked up to enough people to make sure we’d all be in the same unit with a cushy office job. Nimrod used to call it the padded pad.
Most of the time, we didn’t do anything except sit around in the canteen, threatening to file complaints against our commanders, and go home every day at five. Other than that, Uzi would surf at the Sheraton, I was forever jerking off, Miron took courses at the Open University, and Nimrod had a girlfriend. Nimrod’s girlfriend was as good as they get, and because all of us except him were virgins, that made her even better. I remember I once asked Miron what he would do—hypothetically, I mean—if she came to his house, say, and asked him to fuck her. And Miron said he didn’t know, but whatever he did, he’d regret it the rest of his life. Which is a nice answer but knowing him, he’d be sure to take the fucking option first and the regretting option second.