by Zion's Fiction- A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature (retail) (epub)
There was nothing left to say. So I took off.
It was only when I got back home that I discovered the horror.
The apartment’s yellow, peeled up walls were covered with lengths of white, clean cloth. The rickety orange couch, the one I brought in from Grandma’s old home, was gone. And something very strange happened to the floor: you could see the tiles’ original color. This was quite bizarre. Something about the apartment’s air was fundamentally different. The stench and general ickiness so typical of bachelors’ shared rental places in central Tel Aviv were completely replaced by something else.
Max was in charge of Operation Cleanup, waving his arms in broad, slow gestures as he spoke and sounding quite serious. Seeing him like that, I could no longer be mad at him for the missing couch. I was just sorry for him, terribly. Poor Max. He just didn’t have it coming to him. He used to be one of the good ones.
From the kitchen smells of home cooking wafted in, such as never before filled the air of this place. A pair of chubby twins, with long, blond, curly hair, were standing there, stirring two gigantic pots on the gas stove. They said hello, it was their pleasure to meet me, they’ve heard a lot of stories about me from Max. It was all I could do to avoid their attempts to hug me. They did try. Orit and Hagit, they introduced themselves with dimple-deepening smiles. Hagit offered me a chair, and Orit pushed a wooden plate in front of me loaded with rice and vegetables. She actually wanted me to eat it. When I saw those pieces of celery in the rice, I politely declined.
What the fuck, I thought. Lucky for them I don’t have the energy right now to deal with this entire mess; otherwise I would have kicked the lot of them, just like that, out of my apartment. I turned aside to hide in my room. I got in—and immediately got out again, slamming the door. This can’t be. Sheer horror.
I stepped back into the room. The first thing that hit me was the odor of orchids. The floor, believe it or not, was just like in the commercials, smelling of orchids. The windows were wide open, and fresh, pure air came in—who knows how long it’s been since such a thing had happened. The floor was sparkling clean. All those pizza crusts, empty Coke bottles, and unidentified food leftovers that used to carpet it, all gone.
A week before, I’d stopped washing my clothes. When I got tired of any of them, I would throw the dirty ones on the floor and choose some other dirty clothes instead. The clothes that used to be on the floor were no longer there. I opened my closet and found them, washed and ironed, neatly folded up, lying in heaps, arranged by type and color. Even the condom I’d thrown under the bed, the last time I was with Osher, had disappeared. Motherfuckers. It had some sentimental value for me.
I didn’t have to look far for the culprits responsible for my disaster: Azulay and Mor were on their knees, rubber gloves covering their hands, carefully and thoroughly cleaning the panels with toothbrushes that they dipped every once in a while in a bucket full of soapsuds.
Mor, still on her knees, straightened up. “Hi there,” she said, taking off a glove and gracefully wiping sweat off her brow. “Sorry to have invaded your room like that, without permission,” she went on, “but Max said it will be an excellent exercise for us in personal development and ego attenuation. And when Max says something, you know….” She shrugged, smiling. Azulay, ignoring me completely, kept scrubbing energetically. His trousers were pulled down, revealing the crack of his red, sweaty arse.
“Get—out!” I said quietly, emphatically stretching out these words, because this had for some reason a calming effect on me. “Get—out—now!” I told them. Azulay quickly wiped off leftover water, and Mor removed the remainder with a damp rag. They got out in haste, and I realized my hands were trembling. I felt I had to leave this room, this apartment, at once, get some fresh air.
At first, nobody took their little cult seriously. After all, in Tel Aviv that autumn you could just throw a casual stone and hit two gurus and a prophet. Nobody took anybody seriously in Tel Aviv that autumn.
It turned out, however, that there was life outside Tel Aviv, too. I went out of the apartment, and my long legs took me north—deep in thought, barely noticing time. Reaching the entrance of Yarkon Park, I saw a lot of people there, a lot even for a Friday afternoon. Oh well, I said, it must be Town Hall having another one of their silly festivals: “Food in the City,” “Jazz in the Park,” or something else to offer an excuse for clean, happy, well-off young people to go out with their fashionable, high-bosomed girlfriends.
But it turned out to be something completely different. Neither “Food in the City” nor “Jazz in the Park.” It was the landing of a UFO from outer space. I managed to see it after pushing through a multitude of people, knocking down a trembling old lady and landing, unintentionally, a terrible elbow blow on a patrol cop who blocked my view. It was a kind of silvery bubble standing on thin legs and spoiling City Hall’s lawn.
The patrol cop’s name was Nissim. He wasn’t mad about the elbow blow. He just put a hand to his eye, where the flesh around it was swelling up quickly and getting an alarming blue color. “A historical event,” he said to me. “A historical event, I’m telling you”—and I realized, by the very fact that he didn’t drag me to his precinct to beat the shit out of me, that he must be right.
Around the UFO there were some SWAT types with their Kevlar vests and short-stocked rifles, the ones with the telescope sights; there’s no knowing how they thought they could use those against a silver-colored bubble. Apart from them were parked three Merkava Mark III tanks and one Chabad Mitzvah tank, illegally parked, and blatantly so, beyond the police cordon. Only God knows how those crazy religious fanatics managed to work the system and get this close to the UFO.
Everybody around was really devastated by the fact that the bubble showed no sign of life. Especially the reporters. There were about one hundred TV crews over there who, having nothing better to do, kept interviewing each other and pushing everywhere with their minicams, their gigantic microphones, and their lights, knocking down trembling grandmas and unintentionally elbowing patrol cops.
“What is it? Why don’t they say something? If they came from that far away, they must know real important stuff,” said Nissim, rubbing his shoulder that got bruised by a cameraman wearing a Sky News badge who’d crashed into him with his camera while trying to move over from nowhere to nowhere and then added insult to injury with a thick Brit accent: “You bloody idiot, don’t you have eyes?”
“Why is he talking to me like this, what did I ever do to him?” said Nissim to me, and I realized I chanced upon the geekiest cop in the Yarkon District and told him he should arrest that impudent cameraman. I kept trying to get Nissim mad at the Sky cameraman, in vain. He seemed far more interested in the aliens than in the cameraman, who stood near us, sunburned, shooting his reporter, who was chattering in English, accented so heavily I couldn’t understand one word of it.
Everybody around us in the crowd started talking excitedly and pointing their fingers: a small hatch opened up in the silvery bubble, and the cameramen became ecstatic. Something that looked like an old gramophone loudspeaker came out very slowly. Everybody was completely silent until it was completely out, except for those ecstatic cameramen who were climbing on top of each other, trying to get a better angle. “Pheeew,” said Nissim, “it’s going to speak. Must have something important to say.”
But the speaker remained silent.
Then it said, “Shalom.”
The Chabad fanatics went crazy. They grabbed each other’s shoulders, formed a circle, and started singing, “Hevenu shalom aleichem.” Very quickly they switched to sing “Messiah—Messiah—Messiah,” until the crowd broke through the cordon and forcibly shut them up, because people wanted to hear what the UFO had to say.
And the UFO did have something to say: “Bring Maxim Kornfein of 28 Ahad HaAm Street. We have an important message for him.”
Two white cars with blue lights on top went out, their sirens blaring. And I thought that with all t
hose drugs screwing with my brain, I didn’t hear very well what they were saying. What did they need Max for?
The squad cars were back in fifteen minutes; they must have been driving like crazy. The back car’s window was open, and I could see the head of Tony, Ahmed the alte zachen’s donkey, looking out. He saw me in the crowd and winked at me.
Max came out of the car. He looked very impressive, so tall and wearing a white robe. He got on Tony’s back, and then he looked even more tall and impressive. They moved together, trotting in a noble sort of way toward the silvery bubble. When they were real close, the bubble started vibrating and twisting, like the surface of a pool when you throw in a stone. Then the bubble puckered out a pair of lips and—schluk—swallowed up both Tony and Max. The Sky News cameraman swooned ecstatic.
And then nothing happened. For the longest time, maybe twenty minutes. The Chabad fanatics put on their phylacteries and started shaking and quaking. Nissim gave me a friendly elbow in the ribs and smirked: “Look, they’re trying to listen in on the ship’s communications network.” I lit up a joint and offered Nissim a drag. Nissim looked fearfully left and right and then took it. He handed me back the joint and said, “just that you know, I’m not really a patrol cop. I’m with the patrol’s computer unit, but I came here anyway, because this is a historical moment.”
Finally, the ship’s surface started twisting a little, made waves, and the lips puckered up again and spat out Max, still on Tony’s back. The lips pulled back again. The waves grew stronger, the UFO bubble went blip, blip, blip—zabababam! and disappeared abruptly, leaving no trace except for a sharp smell of burning brakes, four little circles of yellow dead grass, and one of the Chabad fanatics, who disappeared leaving no trace.
The media waxed hysterical. The Sky News cameraman used the opportunity to crash again into Nissim, even though he wasn’t in his way at all. I couldn’t take it any longer and pushed him back. The cameraman fell down on the grass, but immediately got up and raised his minicam, taking no notice of me. That should teach him for interfering with a policeman in the fulfillment of his duty.
I took Nissim by the hand, and we ran forward with all those reporters and cameramen. When the police tried to stop me, I pointed at the heavily breathing Nissim and said, “I’m with him!” and they let me go through.
Max was sitting on Tony’s back, absorbed in deep meditation. The reporters made a siege circle around them and kept asking a thousand questions: “How does the UFO look inside? Who were the creatures flying it?” and the question that was repeated the most, “What was the message?”
To the reporters’ utter amazement, it was Tony the donkey who opened his mouth and answered all their question like a veteran spokesperson, in near perfect Hebrew and then almost fluent English. Sometimes it was a bit hard to understand him, because of the structure of his mouth, ’cause every word came out as kind of a braying “brrr….”
Eventually the reporters realized that while a talking donkey was indeed a hell of an attraction and a hot news item, he wasn’t going to betray (bray?) any real information about the UFO’s cosmic message. So they returned to questioning Max, who wouldn’t give them the time of day. When he got fed up with all this aggravation, he opened his eyes and stretched his neck. Silence fell among the ranked reporters.
Quoth Max, “It was a personal message for me. Can’t tell you what they said.” Before the stunned reporters could make a protest, he gave Tony a kind of giddyup with his knees. Tony made a sprint, jumped mightily above the alarmed reporters, who immediately ducked for cover, and started galloping west. He and Tony rode into the sunset, which indeed had amazing pink and orange hues to it. I thought, now they’re going to take them a bit more seriously.
When I came back home, I lay on my bed staring at the ceiling, with the light on, for I don’t know how long, until I got tired of it. Then I called Mr. Eliahu. Mr. Eliahu was my landlord, and a highly valuable archaeological relic he was, too. It’s a wonder the Antiquities Authority hadn’t laid their hands on him a long time ago. He dates back to the time they still thought they could set up a proper European nation here, where people will be nice and decent with each other. This is why he was called “Mr. Eliahu.” His first name was Naphtali, but no one, not even his wife, I think, called him that. When I’d told him I was from Ra’anana he got terribly excited and said that that was where he’d met his wife, working at the Ra’anana orange groves in June of ’47. They were building a homeland, but the entire experiment blew up in their faces once the Levantine Indians took over, he said. Now, I decided, Mr. Eliahu is going to get a living demonstration of Levantine Indiancy, courtesy of the Bezeq Phone Co.
Mr. Eliahu’s Hebrew was old-fashioned. He was capable of saying things like “You shall pay me right on the dot for being exceeding kind to you, Mr. Menashe.” I told him, “Naphtali sweetheart, I got fired from my job, my overdraft passed the five thousand shekels mark already last week, I don’t have a penny in my pocket, and I’m rotting away at home all day not even looking for a new job. So you can forget about your money. I don’t intend to pay you any. You won’t see a penny coming from me to you. You’ve made enough money at the expense of losers like myself. What are you going to do with so much money? You’re already rotten inside and half dead. Forget about it, Naphtali sweetheart. You won’t see a penny from me.”
Mr. Eliahu was not fazed one bit. Apparently I was not the first Indian to hit him. He said dryly, “I understand you, Master Menashe. I understand you much better than you realize. Just be advised that breach of contract is a serious matter—you are in way over your head in this.”
“Naphtali sweetheart,” I rudely interrupted him, “you can take your contract, roll it tight and good, and shove it deep inside your asshole!”
I hung up on him. Now it looked like I was on the right track, having greatly enhanced my prospects of becoming homeless. I’ve always wondered whether City Hall’s wooden benches were good to sleep on.
Wandering footloose in the city did nothing to improve the way I felt. I couldn’t stop looking at the benches, asking myself which one was going to be my home. Rows of benches kept passing in front of my eyes whenever I closed them—and this was getting too hard to bear. I felt I had to relax, clear my head somehow.
That’s why I gladly accepted Ahmed the alte zachen’s invitation. He was sitting in the Yemenite’s kiosk in Cordovero Street, near the Lehi Museum, looking bored.
“Backgammon?” he asked. “Come on, set it up,” I said to him, “but only if you feel like losing.” Ahmed smiled under his moustache, took out a packet of Time, offered me one, and lit another for himself. To Yossi he said, “Two black coffees, my man, and make it strong.”
“You talk too much, you,” said Ahmed, opening up the board and laying it on the brown Formica table. He arranged the pieces in a dizzying speed, rolled a die to see who goes first, and got a six. Ahmed stared at me with his one good eye, the other one roaming uselessly in space. “Play for money?” he asked.
“No thanks, I’m broke,” I said and rolled my die. Got a one. “Never mind,” said Ahmed, “coffee’s on me.” “You start,” I said to Ahmed. We played silently, not talking at all, rapidly moving those worn-out pieces. The only sound was the rattle of rolling dice, until the end of the first game, which I lost to Ahmed by a gammon.
“You talk too much, you,” said Ahmed again, never raising his eyes from the board. “All day long, your head’s just running around thinking about girls, about life, you never notice what’s going on ’round you. You’re all like that. All day long, your head’s into bilosophy and girls, not looking where you’re going.” Ahmed stressed the b in bilosophy to show his disdain. When he spoke Hebrew he hardly had any accent, usually, and he could pronounce his ps without any difficulty, unlike so many Arabs. I had a feeling that since the accident Ahmed was rather bitter with us Jews.
As well he should be. A week before, he got a new donkey, but they didn’t quite get along. The donkey
couldn’t understand what Ahmed wanted it to do. Wouldn’t move an inch, and when Ahmed told it what he thought about it, the donkey broke two of his ribs with a massive two-hoofed back swing. Ahmed returned the donkey to the person he bought it from, and since then he’s been sitting all day at the Yemenite’s, inviting passers-by to backgammon and coffee, trying not to breathe too deeply. It’s not like he’s out of pocket. Tony puts money in his bank account twice a week. But this is not what you’d call living. Ahmed is a man of principles and dignity. He shouldn’t be living on handouts from his previous donkey, like a beggar.
Ahmed offered me another cigarette, took a long and noisy draft from his cup of coffee, and said to me, “Believe me, Ido. You have nothing to worry about, you. In the end, everything will be back the way it used to be. I’ve got eyes, I see people, and I’ve been around some. Last year it was Kabbalah, two years ago it was Hare Krishna, five years ago, Emin. Soon this too will get out of their system, the way all the others did.”
“Inshallah,” I closed our conversation. Wind started blowing, sweeping with it droplets of rain from the sea. We picked up the table, moved it inside the kiosk, and kept on playing, fast and silent. Eventually I beat Ahmed twelve to two, got up, and shook his hand. Ahmed ordered some more coffee. I went back to the apartment.
In the stairwell I found myself face-to-face with Mr. Eliahu, accompanied by an execution office cop. I was going up, he was going down. “You are extremely lucky, Master Menashe, because Mister Azulay is a real mensch, and thanks to him you may keep staying here rather than live on a bench in the street.”
“He paid you?” I asked. All of a sudden, my face became red and hot.
“He most definitely has,” said Mr. Eliahu. “Paid everything, with arrears interest and also for the next six months—adding a handsome compensation for all your smart-ass shenanigans. A right upstanding gentleman, Mr. Azulay is. I just cannot figure out what he sees in you.”