The Girl on the Fridge: Stories
Read The Girl on the Fridge: Stories Online
Authors: Etgar Keret
“I read [
The Nimrod Flipout
] in bed beside my boyfriend who was reading a much less interesting book and I kept shouting ‘Wow’ and ‘No way’ and ‘Oh my god’ and my boyfriend would say, ‘What? what?’ and I’d shake my head and say, ‘You wouldn’t get it. You just have to read it.’ After I finished the book I immediately became more deadpan, more ridiculous and more in touch with my own mortality. My boyfriend was impressed with the new me and I told him, ‘It’s that book,
The Nimrod Flipout
—it’s opened up a whole new world for me.’ Now he’s reading it, just so we can stay on the same plane of reality together.”
—Miranda July,
Salon
“Etgar Keret’s short stories are fierce, funny, full of energy and insight, and at the same time often deep, tragic, and very moving.”
—Amos Oz, author of
A Tale of Love and Darkness
“Keret is a cynic who can’t manage to shake off his hopefulness—the most reliable kind of narrator there is…To call Keret apolitical would be to miss a seminal moment in the history of Jewish literature. Indeed, it would be like pigeonholing Isaac Bashevis Singer—at whose knee Keret seems to have learned the art of magic realism, only to use it with more discipline than his master.”
—Alana Newhouse,
The Washington Post Book World
“If there were a fiction genre combining wit, wild imagination, penetrating insights, fantasy (sexual and otherwise) and the paranormal, Keret would dominate it like Stephen King dominates horror…Keret’s a strange genius.”
—Kevin Walker,
The Tampa Tribune
“A fresh breath of honest weirdness that doesn’t forget the heart of its characters when dishing out the creepy…Keret’s fiction is thinly packed and calmly paced, gobsmacking the reader when she least expects it. He uses one word when five will do.”
—Chris Barsanti,
City Pages
(Minneapolis/St. Paul)
“Keret’s stories are strangely compelling—or compelling in their strangeness. The Israeli author blends Kafka’s eeriness, fairy-tale wonder, and the absurdity of everyday life.”
—Anat Rosenberg,
Entertainment Weekly
“These stories exude a force and zing that some readers will find life-changing.”
—Jesse Berrett,
San Francisco Chronicle
“Mr. Keret has cousins at an international level—like Haruki Murakami, his young male characters favor hardboiled speech and make no apologies for their juvenile habits, and they seem unfazed by the mild magical realism that pervades their lives. Yet Mr. Keret distinguishes himself with a kind of overarching sorrow…His imagination cuts through to the reader, making an incisive gesture, hard to interpret but easy to feel.”
—Benjamin Lytal,
The New York Sun
“Effectively communicates the violence and complexity of contemporary Israel with humor and a touch of the absurd…Keret’s vision is both universal and utterly bizarre.”
—Kimberly Chisholm,
The Believer
“Although [
The Nimrod Flipout
] has been translated from Hebrew to English, you don’t lose his raunchy sexual humor or beautifully delicate descriptions…You’ll wish the addictive collection…was twice as long.”
—Cheryl Brody,
Jane
ETGAR KERET
Moshe Shai
Born in Tel Aviv in 1967, Etgar Keret is the author of five bestselling collections. In America his stories have been featured on
This American Life
and
Selected Shorts
. As screenwriter-directors, he and his wife, Shira Geffen, shared the Caméra d’Or for best debut feature (
Jellyfish
) at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival.
When you have an asthma attack, you can’t breathe. When you can’t breathe, you can hardly talk. To make a sentence all you get is the air in your lungs. Which isn’t much. Three to six words, if that. You learn the value of words. You rummage through the jumble in your head. Choose the crucial ones—those cost you too. Let healthy people toss out whatever comes to mind, the way you throw out the garbage. When an asthmatic says “I love you,” and when an asthmatic says “I love you madly,” there’s a difference. The difference of a word. A word’s a lot. It could be
stop
, or
inhaler
. It could even be
ambulance
.
She said, “Don’t touch it,” and I asked, “What is it?”
“It’s glue,” she said. “Special glue. Superglue.”
And I asked: “What did you buy that for?”
“Because I need it,” she said. “I’ve got lots of things to glue together.”
“There’s nothing that needs gluing together,” I snapped. “I can’t understand why you buy all this crap.”
“The same reason I married you,” she shot back, “to kill time.”
I didn’t feel like getting into a fight, so I kept quiet, and so did she. “Is it any good, this glue?” I asked. She showed me the picture on the box, with this guy hanging upside down from the ceiling after someone had smeared some glue on the soles of his shoes.
“No glue can make a person stick like that,” I said. “They took the picture upside down. He’s standing on the floor. They just stuck a light fixture in the floor to make it look like a ceiling. You can tell right away by the way the window looks. They put the clasp on the blinds backwards. Take a look.” I pointed at the window in the picture. She didn’t look. “It’s eight already,” I said, “I’ve got to run.” I picked up my briefcase and kissed her on the cheek. “I’ll be back late. I’m—”
“I know,” she snapped. “You’re swamped.”
I called Mindy from the office. “I can’t make it today,” I said. “I’ve got to be home early.”
“How come? Is anything the matter?”
“No. I mean, yeah. I think she suspects something.” There was a long silence. I could hear Mindy breathing on the other end.
“I don’t see why you stay with her,” she whispered in the end. “The two of you never do anything. You don’t even bother fighting anymore. I can’t figure out why you go on like this. I just don’t get what’s holding you together. I don’t get it,” she said again. “I simply don’t get it…” and she started crying.
“Don’t cry, Mindy,” I told her. “Listen,” I lied. “Somebody just came in. I’ve got to go. I’ll come over tomorrow, promise. We’ll talk then.”
I got home early. I called out hello when I walked in the door, but there was no reply. I went from room to room. She wasn’t in any of them. On the kitchen table I found the tube of glue, completely empty. I tried to pull one of the chairs out, to sit down. It didn’t budge. I tried again. Stuck. She’d glued it to the floor. The fridge wouldn’t open. She’d glued it shut. I couldn’t see why she’d pull a stunt like this. She’d always seemed reasonably sane. This just wasn’t like her. I went into the living room to get the phone. I thought she might have gone to her mother’s. I couldn’t lift the receiver. She’d glued that down too. Furious, I kicked at the telephone table and almost broke my toe. The table didn’t budge.
That’s when I heard her laughing. It was coming from up above me. I looked, and there she was, hanging upside down, her bare feet clinging to the high living room ceiling. I looked at her, stunned. “What the fuck. Have you lost your mind?” She didn’t answer, just smiled. Her smile seemed so natural, the way she was hanging, as if just her lips were subject to gravity. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll get you down,” and I pulled some books off the shelf. I stacked up a few volumes of the encyclopedia and got on top of the pile. “This may hurt a little,” I said, trying to keep my balance. She went on smiling. I pulled as hard as I could, but nothing happened. Carefully, I climbed down. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll go to the neighbors to phone for help.”
“Fine,” she said and laughed. “I’m not going anywhere.” By then I was laughing too. She was so pretty, and so incongruous, hanging upside down from the ceiling that way. With her long hair dangling downward, and her breasts molded like two perfect teardrops under her white T-shirt. So pretty. I climbed back up onto the pile of books and kissed her. I felt her tongue on mine. The books slipped out from under my feet as I hung there in midair, not touching a thing, dangling from just her lips.
“Go on, Henri, go talk to them. You’re a
gendarme
, they’ll listen to you.”
I put down my empty coffee cup and moved my feet around under the table, trying to find my slippers. “How many times do I have to explain it to you, Grandma? I’m not a
gend
—a policeman. I’m a soldier, a
soldat
. I don’t have anything to do with them, so why should they listen to what I have to say?”
“Because you’re tall as a building and you wear a
gendarme
’s uniform—”
“
Soldat
, Grandma.”
“So you’re a
soldat
, what’s the difference? You go to them with your
pistolet
and tell them that if they climb our loquat tree one more time, you’ll throw them in the
calabouse
and shoot them, or something, just so they stop coming into our yard…”
Grandma’s faded eyes were moist now, and bloodshot. She really hated those kids. The old lady wasn’t all there, but out of respect I said okay. That evening, I heard them in the tree. I put on a pair of shorts and a sleeveless undershirt and told Grandma I was going out to talk to them.
“No,” she said, blocking my way to the door, holding my ironed dress uniform. “You’re not going out to them like that. Put on your uniform.”
“Leave it alone, Grandma,” I said, trying to get past her. She leaned against the door stubbornly, handing me my uniform.
“Your uniform,” she said firmly.
I walked down the front steps, with her hopping down behind me. I felt mortified dressed up like a model soldier. She even made me wear the unit insignia. “Henri, you forgot this,” she whispered in her raspy voice and held out the Uzi, loaded and cocked. If my commander had seen me then with my weapon in my hand, I’d have gotten two weeks inside.
I snatched the gun out of her hand, took out the magazine, and gently uncocked it. A bullet fell out of the muzzle onto the grass. “Why’d you bring me the gun, are you crazy? They’re only kids.”
I gave her the gun, but she slapped it right back into my hand. “That’s not kids, that’s animals,” she said resolutely.
“Okay, Grandma, I’ll take the rifle.” I gave in with a hopeless sigh and kissed her cheek. “Now go inside.”
“Oh,
mon petit gendarme
,” Grandma said, clapping her hands happily. Filled with satisfaction at her small victory, she skipped up the steps.
“Soldat,”
I cried after her. “For fuck’s sake, I’m not a fucking policeman.” And I walked down the rest of the steps.
The kids in the loquat tree kept on making noise and breaking branches. I was planning to take off my shirt, wrap the rifle in it, and hide it in a bush so I’d look more or less normal when I went over to them, but the sight of Grandma’s face peering out from behind a curtain stopped me. I walked over to a kid who was climbing the tree, grabbed him by the shirt, and pushed him onto the ground.
“Yallah,”
I yelled, “everyone out of the tree. This is private property.”
There was a second of silence, then an answer came from one of the high branches. “Oh, I’m so scared. A soldier. You want to kill us, Mr. Soldier?” A rotten loquat hit me in the head.
The kid I’d pushed onto the ground got up and looked at me with contempt. “Paper pusher,” he said. “My brother’s in a combat patrol unit, working his ass off, and you’re not ashamed to walk around with the insignia of that unit of pussies from Tel Aviv?” He brought up a gob of phlegm and spat on my shirt. I whacked him on the head hard enough to knock him down.
How the hell did the little schmuck know about insignias?
“Did you see that son of a bitch hit Meron?” someone yelled up in the tree.
“Hey, homo, what are you doing walking around in uniform on a Friday night?” another one shouted. “Can’t you afford Levi’s?”
“If he’s so hot for the army, let’s give him an intifada so he doesn’t get bored,” the first one shouted, and the one in the tree started throwing loquats. I tried to climb up to him, but it was next to impossible, what with the rifle and all.
Suddenly, a brick landed on my shoulder, and it turned out that there was another kid in the bushes. “PLO,” he yelled and gave me the finger. Those kids were really fucked up. Before I could chase him, the kid who’d spat on me got up, his whole face covered with mud, kicked me in the balls, and started to run away. I saw red and caught up with him in about three steps. I pulled him by the shirt from behind and he fell. I started to beat on him. The one who threw the brick jumped onto my back, and two others came down from the tree to help him. They stuck to me like leeches. One of them bit me on the neck. I tried to shake them off and we all fell in the mud. I was punching them left and right. But those midget bastards had balls. They wouldn’t give up no matter how much I hit them. I was holding one with each hand and was choking the third one with my legs when suddenly that Meron, who seemed to be their leader, smashed me in the head with a rock. The world spun, and I felt blood dripping onto my forehead. I heard a round of gunfire and noticed that I hadn’t had the rifle for a while. It must have fallen when we were rolling around in the mud.
“Leave my grandson alone,
sales bêtes.
” I heard my grandmother’s voice. “Or else I’ll finish you all off like carp in the bathtub.”
I didn’t know if it was real or I was dreaming. “Watch out, the old lady’s crazy.” I heard Meron’s voice and felt all the hands letting go of me.
“And now get out of here,
tout de suite
,” I heard my grandmother order them and then the sound of feet sloshing through mud.
“Look at how they dirtied your
gendarme
clothes,” she said, and I could feel her hand on my shoulder. “And they split your head open,” she continued her lament. “Never mind, I’ll bandage you up and wash the clothes so they look like new. And God, he’ll take care of those little devils. Come home, Henri, it’s getting cold.” I stood up, and the world kept spinning and spinning.
“Tell me, Grandma,” I asked, “where’d you learn to load a gun and shoot like that?”
“From a Jacques Norris movie. It was on TV, before that cable bastard turned off the movies,” she recalled angrily, “and ran away with my money. Tomorrow you’ll wear your
gendarme
uniform and go pay him a visit too.”
“Grandma!” I blurted out furiously, my forehead burning like hell.
“Sorry, Henri.
Soldat
,” Grandma apologized and skipped up the steps.