Zion's Fiction

by Zion's Fiction- A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature (retail) (epub)

  Ido dearest at twenty-four,

  Write about yourself, write about the world. Write poems or just notes, the important thing is that you write. Say what you have to say, but never be quiet. Scream and shout, but never remain taciturn.

  Love you, Osher

  What a lovely word, taciturn. I’ve never heard Osher use it, perhaps because it’s a word you only write, not speak. Anyway, I was through being taciturn. I added the copybook to my pocket, which was becoming heavy and bulging. A moment before I got out I remembered one more thing and took a Pilot ballpoint pen. Junk wipes you out. I’ve become forgetful recently.

  Before leaving I lingered a bit in the living room. Something funny was going on there. The atmosphere was heavy, unpleasant. The gun’s grip was sticking out of my pocket, and people turned to look at me. I felt like a black-hatted cowboy entering the town’s saloon in a second-rate western.

  All the way to the beach my hand lay on the plastic grip of my lovely Jericho. Its weight pulled down the right-hand side of my jacket.

  The beach was quiet. Despite it being a pleasant evening, there was no one at the seaside. Not that I wanted anyone to be there. Suicide, after all, is something you do by yourself. I walked north. The Bugrachov Beach breakwater seemed to me fit for my task.

  Funny word, suicide. I said to myself, out loud, several times, just to get used to it: “Ido committed suicide”; “Ido’s dead, he committed suicide”; “Ido Menashe committed suicide”; “Ido shot himself in the head”; “He committed suicide last night.” Then I said, “I committed suicide,” and this brought up a terrible laughter, to have such an expression in Hebrew. Must be the least-used phrase in the whole language. So I kept laughing out loud, saying again and again, “I committed suicide, I committed suicide, I committed suicide.” An old man who passed by me, wearing a baseball cap, trainers, and training suit, gave me a funny look and started walking faster.

  Enough with the laughs. Must find a logical place to do it.

  I walked to the end of the breakwater. Couldn’t be seen from the beach, darkness surrounded me, swallowed me whole. Recoil’s Ozz had explained to me that the length of the barrel determines noise dispersal. The shorter the barrel, he’d said, the sound of the shot disperses more, can’t be heard from a distance. A handgun’s report—I hadn’t realized until then that a report is also the sound a gun makes—is carried just a few dozens of meters, and the waves will cover it anyway. Nobody on the beach was going to hear my shot.

  I stepped carefully over those large rocks. The last thing I wanted was to fall over and break my neck. Got to the end of the breakwater, sat down on a rock. Took the gun out of my jacket pocket and the ammo box from my trousers pocket. Loaded ten rounds into the magazine, even though I needed only one. Sniffed the oil-and-metal aroma I liked so much. Looked at the magazine. The lead of the dum-dum core looked back at me through the closed copper rosebud, as if it were waiting only for me.

  I cocked the gun. This was quite difficult, because it was a double-action mechanism: cocking and releasing the safety with just one pull of the hammer. Took aim at a rock and fired one shot. Lime dust rose up and rocky shrapnel flew all over the place. The noise was staggering. My ears started buzzing. Under the circumstances, it had seemed idiotic to put in earplugs. Good God, you should have seen what it’s done to the rock. Blasted the shit out of it.

  Okay, now I know the gun works properly, and I can move on to the next stage. I took out my pack of cigarettes and lit one, covering the lighter with one hand against the wind, the way I’d learned in the army. And so I sat there on the rock, smoking my cigarette in long, deep pulls. Wind hit my face, chilling it. I’ve never enjoyed a cigarette more than I did this final one.

  I threw the stub of my final cigarette into the dark, roiling water. Didn’t even hear it going tsssss. Put the Jericho’s muzzle in my mouth and felt the barrel, still warm after the previous shot, pressing against the back of my mouth. It tasted of smoke and gunpowder.

  I closed my eyes, because this is what you do when you commit suicide. It’s instinctive, like closing your eyes when you kiss.

  “I wouldn’t do it if I werrrre you,” said a voice behind me, emerging between cleft lips. Tony was sitting there on a rock, cross-legged, smiling an asinine smile. “Look at the macro, dude,” he said. “Keep your head down till the wave passes over. This is just a rough patch. Good times will come; it would be a pity to end up like this.” Tony got up, put a hoof against the gun and removed it gently from my mouth.

  “Go away, Tony,” I said. “You’re just like them.” I put the muzzle back in my mouth, closed my eyes and put my index finger on the trigger.

  Tony reached out with a hoof and removed the gun again. “There are still those who care about you, Ido,” he said. “You won’t have it this easy; I’m not giving up on you.”

  With my right hand, I shoved the gun into my mouth. With my left hand I gave Tony the finger. I started increasing the finger’s pressure against the trigger, gradually. “A gentle squeeze of the trigger,” as I’d been taught in firearms lessons in boot camp.

  Tony lifted again his hoof towards me, trying to remove the gun. He was quite serious about it, but I had no intention of allowing him to spoil it for me.

  Suddenly we were both rolling on the ground, fighting for the gun. Tony was sitting on my chest, and he was not some skinny donkey. It was all I could do just to breathe. “You shall live, Ido; I will not let you ruin everything,” he said, and I heard in his voice an insistent decisiveness I’ve never heard before. “I love you,” he said, grabbing the barrel forcibly with his strong teeth and pulling. My finger was still caught in the trigger guard.

  The gun fired, like it had a will of its own. Tony’s head exploded, bursting like a ripe watermelon. Headless, Tony stumbled two more steps to the right, then fell rolling into the sea. My eyes were burning because of the gunpowder, and a thin buzz filled my aching ears. All over my clothes there was a spattering of blood, brains, and bone fragments. The ugly slush pooled up in various depressions on my body and flowed inside my shirt in warm, sticky rivulets. Some of it got in my mouth, and I have to tell you that donkey juice is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever tasted. And it had to be Tony juice, the only ass ever who really cared about me. I threw away the gun with all my strength. It hit the water far away, making a little splash, and sank deep. The headless corpse floated in the water, and black currents swept it rapidly into the sea.

  Up in the sky a point of light appeared, growing larger. The UFO came in fast, stopped, and hovered above the body. A hatch opened in its belly, a yellow ray of light emerged, and Tony’s corpse was pulled up slowly, majestically, into the flying bubble. The corpse was sucked inside, the hatch closed fast, and the bubble went blip, blip, whoosh!—and flew away. Quiet reigned. Only the crash of the waves could be heard. The wind carried towards me a smell of burned out brakes.

  “Do you want to acquire merit, sir?”

  I turned around quickly. The religious fanatic, the one who’d disappeared at Yarkon Park, was standing behind me holding a prayer shawl in one hand and a prayer book in the other. “Will you say Kaddish for him?”

  “But he was just a donkey,” I said.

  “Let me tell you,” said the fanatic, “that some Jews have the heart of a donkey, and some donkeys have a Jewish heart. He has no speaking relatives—so perhaps you, as his friend, could…. It’s a great mitzvah, you know….”

  I couldn’t take any more of this. I lied without hesitation: “I’m a Druze,” I told him. “We can’t say Kaddish.”

  I turned my back on him, stripped down to my underwear, threw the rest of my clothes into the sea, and jumped in myself. I scraped my body fiercely and felt the blood and brain fragments wash away in the cold water.

  A thunder blasted, and lightning lit up the sea. Heavy rain started falling, and in a minute I could hardly see the figure standing on the breakwater, in black jacket and hat, shaking all over and chanting aloud, in
an Ashkenazi accent, “Isgodol veiskodosh shmei rabo….”

  I swam away, leaving the breakwater behind me. For the first time in weeks I felt a twinge of sadness in my heart. He really cared about me. The jackass.

  I came back home. Mor was standing on a chair in the hallway, removing a white sheet from the wall. Beside her there was a heap of folded up sheets, and the yellow-grey flaky walls of our beloved apartment were revealed in all their glory.

  “Mor,” I asked, “what are you doing?”

  “I figured, if it’s all over, and there’s no more use for these sheets, I may as well take them back home.”

  “What do you mean, it’s all over?”

  “Why, haven’t you heard? Alllll over,” she said, pulling it out like she was giving birth to it. “He’s a nobody, there’s nothing to him, as everybody knows now.”

  I thought she sounded a bit angry, but surely I was wrong, because Mor is one of those people who never get angry.

  Mother came out of the kitchen. “I’m leaving, Ido’leh,” she said in a squeaky voice. “I left some good stuff in the fridge for you to eat. How could you get along without my schnitzels?” She gave me a sticky kiss, leaving a wet smudge of lipstick on my cheek, and went out.

  Azulay came in from the balcony, carrying under each arm a pot of geraniums, which for some reason spread orchid smell all over the place. He made his way to the door, grunting in my direction, “See ya, Ido.” He turned his back and kept going, heavy and awkward, never waiting for an answer.

  The place looked empty as it had not been for a month now, since Max’s accident. They put the TV set back in place, but without the couch it didn’t look the same.

  I went into his room. Max was lying on his bed in a torn training suit and a T-shirt, his arms and legs spread out, listening to trance music through earphones, but so loud that I could hear it as well as he did.

  “Max,” I said. He didn’t react. “Max!” I shouted again. Max saw me. He got his earphones off at once and tried to escape. Stepping on the strings of his open shoes, stumbling and falling spread-eagle on the floor.

  “Don’t beat me up, Ido. I never fucked Osher. I swear on the Bible.”

  “I know you didn’t. I knew all along. I thought maybe we could go back to the way things used to be before.”

  “Why are you wet, and where are all your clothes?”

  “What’s going on? Why did everybody leave?”

  “Because of the mess you made,” said Max. He sounded indifferent. “They asked some tough questions, and I no longer had any answers for them. So I told them it’s all over and they may go away. There was some crying and some shouting. A few of them read me the riot act. But generally speaking, I think they’ll get over it. Let it go, I’ve had enough bullshit for one day. I really have no energy to talk about it anymore. Say, is it at all possible that you’ve got some stuff for me to smoke?”

  Max was right. It would be stupid to fight when you could smoke some good junk instead. I went into my room to get the stuff, because all I had in my pocket got lost when I tossed my clothes into the sea.

  I was thinking about a small gob of quality Moroccan hash stuck underneath the bottom drawer of my cabinet for six months now, waiting for a special occasion.

  In my room I found Osher sitting on my bed.

  “Osher, you’re here too?” I asked.

  “I’m back, Ido,” Osher said.

  “But I thought you were done. You told me you’re not my girlfriend anymore.”

  “That’s true, I was done, but I’ve come back now.”

  “You’re not mad because of the scene I made about you and Max?”

  “Oy, Ido,” Osher said in a voice I hadn’t heard for a month now. “When are you going to get it? You’ve always been too heavy.” Osher placed her hands on both sides of my head, covering my ears and temples. It was a very pleasant feeling. “Let this head of yours rest. You keep it running all the time. This is not healthy, Ido, and it does nobody any good. You and your thoughts, alone against the whole wide world. Somebody is bound to get hurt eventually.”

  “But Osher,” I felt I had to protest, “I thought such things, when they happen in our lives, are supposed to make us grow, make us more ready for life or something. Has nothing happened to us during this last month? Haven’t we grown, haven’t we learned something, isn’t there some lesson we’re missing? Doesn’t this story have any moral?”

  “Don’t you want to be back with me?” Osher asked, hurt. She leaned her head against my chest. She was five foot three, so she barely reached my lowest ribs, because we were both standing up. Her ribs were trembling with the beginning of a cry, and when I put my fingers over her eyes, they were salty. Then we just stood there hugging.

  I still wanted to tell her lots of things. I didn’t feel this was over and done with, but it was no use anymore. For myself, I really thought I’ve grown, I’ve been through something, this month has had some value. But there was no one I could tell it to. So I hugged Osher again, buried my head in the cavity between her shoulder and neck, smelled the nice scent of her deodorant, and thought that while I was right, there were more important things in life than being right.

  “Sure I want to be back with you, Osher. I’m happy you’ve come back,” I said. For a moment I became sad and wanted to cry.

  We hugged each other like this, not speaking, for several minutes. My sadness passed away. I felt everything became as per usual, the way it used to be.

  Osher put her hand on my hip. “What happened to your clothes? Where’s your gun?” She asked.

  “I threw them all into the sea. What do I need a gun for now?”

  “Great,” Osher said. “Just wear something, or you’ll end up getting pneumonia.”

  “Alte zachen! Alte zachen! Old stuff! Fridges, cabinets, washers…. Alte zachen!” Ahmed was shouting in the street below. He’d found a new donkey, a small brown one with a patient look in its eyes; a donkey that never spoke, just pulled the loaded cart wherever Ahmed told him to. They got along famously, and Ahmed was very happy. “At long last, a donkey with no bilosophy,” he’d told me.

  It’s Azulay I’m going to miss the most. A real gentleman. It was quite nice of him to come with his truck and return my late grandmother’s ugly orange wedding couch right to our living room. Despite all its cigarette holes and the stains of coffee and cum on its pillows, for me this couch meant home—and that’s irreplaceable.

  Good days are back, in a big way.

  We were slumped, the three of us, on the couch in front of the TV. Max was wearing worn jeans that were a bit too short on him, felt slippers with a hole through which his big toe could be seen, and his favorite New York Knicks T-shirt.

  “What’s with the pizza?” he asked. I told him I’d ordered it twenty minutes ago, a gigantic tuna crème fraîche, which we all liked, with some extras. I’d also ordered a couple of large bottles of Coke, so we won’t go thirsty. I told him that if the delivery guy won’t make it within the next ten minutes we’d get the sodas for free, in line with Domino’s hot pizza policy.

  My mouth was actually watering, thinking of the delivery guy ringing our doorbell, of the moment I’d open the pizza’s carton and a wonderful wave of smell, melted cheese commingled with the scents of tuna, onion, and pepperoni, would hit my nose. My stomach rumbled in anticipation of the pizza it was going to host soon. I had a feeling this was going to be a perfect night.

  Channel Two had commercials and promos. In a few minutes the Haifa derby was going to start. The picture moved to Kiryat Eliezer. An excited Zuhir Ba’aloul said there already were ten thousand fans in the stands, chanting and shouting. Behind him there was a roiling sea of green scarves and shirts. Smoke grenades were thrown, enveloping the stadium in pinkish fog. Rolls of toilet paper and calculator paper flew onto the pitch. The mayhem was just beginning.

  The doorbell rang. I got up to open the door. There was the delivery guy, handing me two family-size pizzas. In the nick of
time. “Why two?” I asked him. He told me they now had a bargain to celebrate Domino Pizza’s thirty years in Israel. Every third customer ordering a pizza gets another, identical one, for free.

  The delivery guy was looking over my shoulder, into the apartment. He asked, “Don’t you have an ashram or something here?” I told him there used to be one, but not any longer. The delivery guy asked if it wasn’t by any chance the ashram of Tony, the donkey from Florentine. I said yes, but Tony won’t be back. The delivery guy told me that with the sodas it comes up to fifty-seven shekels, sixty agoroth. I yelled out to Max that I’ve got no money for the pizzas, and he yelled back that I can take it from the Grace and Charity Box in the kitchen, he thought there was a lot of bread in there. I paid the delivery guy and added a generous tip.

  I went back, sat on the orange couch, and moved closer to Osher. I lay my hand across her shoulders. Her feline body clung tight to me, and I felt her sweet ass pressing against mine. She stretched out, gently nibbled my earlobe, and whispered that she was glad we’re back together and we’ll never split up again.

  “Pity about Hapo’el. Maccabi will tear them to pieces,” said Max.

  “Rubbish, Maxi,” said I. “Giovanni Roso and Ben-Shimon are on a roll; they’re going to teach the Maccabi defense some good lessons. Wanna bet?”

  “Quiet, shuddup, it’s starting,” said Max, as the ref blew his whistle for the opening kick. I slid my hand under Osher’s sweater, letting it cover her warm, firm breast. Moved my finger in circles around her nipple, feeling how it got hard and erect. Osher purred pleasantly and snuggled against me. A soft, long-fingered hand crept from below into my shirt, moving up slowly. “Just you wait for what I’m going to do with you after the match,” she whispered in my ear before nibbling it again, not so gently this time.