The Girl on the Fridge: Stories (7 page)

Suddenly, an alternative presented itself. An alternative that had always existed in theory but, for her at least, had always been out of reach. She remembered very well how, only six months ago, she had looked down from her balcony. And the thing that had stiffened her neck mumbled to her through her throat, “I don’t understand how people do that to themselves.” She just didn’t understand. But now she does. Not that she has to do it, but the alternative exists. Like a driver’s license, like a visa to the United States. Something she can take advantage of, or not.

There was a time when she wouldn’t do that for guys—
suck them off
,
go down on them
,
give head
,
blow them
—it’s interesting how all those names they invented for it sound so disgusting. Maybe it was the names that repulsed her. But not anymore. Not that she thought it was so great. But she could do it when she thought she should. Another alternative.

Then they’re in bed and she has that aftertaste in her mouth. Kind of salty-sticky. Something between pretzels and fish. He pulls her on top of him like he always does. Kisses her on the mouth. So he can taste it too. As if to prove that it isn’t disgusting.

“What are you thinking about?” he asks.

She smiles, thinking about the alternative. “Nothing,” she tells him, “nothing.”

She wonders if there really is nothing afterward, or if there is something. Her intuition tells her there’s nothing. Because if it’s pretty much nothing now, when everything’s moving, then it would probably be the same afterward. But not necessarily. There is no “necessarily.” We have free choice. Nothing or not nothing. The alternatives are all in our hands.

They say she’s gifted, but what do I know. I roam around her soul, and it’s like a deserted apartment. Like a house where the parents have shoved all the furniture into a corner because their son is having a party. Gifted at painting, they say, and writing, too. Creative, but quiet and slightly odd. And I say—she’s anybody’s guess. Nothing here is clear. Because of her, I feel guilty.

I’ve always asked myself what girls think when they’re doing it. Not suicide, the sex thing. It bothers me. I always used to think that they thought it was supposed to bum them out, to humiliate them. I hoped that, if I could get inside her head, everything would be different, I’d get some kind of insight. Different, my ass. This isn’t why I became a writer.

She looks up from the balcony. The sky. Iron bars and the sky. Her thoughts—not sharp at all. The whole thing’s kitsch. In the end, she’ll die, even though they say she’s gifted. She’ll go down on me and she’ll die. She’ll die and she’ll go down on me. In the name of free choice. In the name of the Movement for the Advancement of Women and Gravitation. And I can tie it all together neatly so the climax shows off my narrative skills. Or not.

What do you do the day the woman of your life dies? I went to Jerusalem and back. There were terrible traffic jams; some film festival was opening. Just getting from downtown to the highway took more than an hour. The guy I was driving with was a young lawyer and an expert in one of those martial arts or something. “Thank you all,” he mumbled to himself the whole way out of town. “Thank you to all the people who chose me, and especially to my mother. Without her…without her…” He always got stuck like that at “without her,” all three hundred times.

Once we’d gotten out of town, and traffic started to flow, he stopped saying thank you and just kept staring at me. “Are you okay?” he asked every few seconds. “Are you okay?” And I said yes. “Are you sure?” he persisted. “Are you sure?” And I said yes again. I was a little hurt that he’d thanked everyone but me.

“So how about telling me something,” he said. “Not any of that bullshit you make up, something that really happened to you.” So I told him about the extermination.

My landlord threw in the extermination free of charge. He’d handwritten it in at the bottom of the lease without my even asking for it. A week later, a guy with a plastic jerrican and a Dr. Roach shirt woke me up. He did the whole house in forty minutes and told me to air out the place when I came back that evening and not to wash the floors for a week. As if I would’ve washed them if he hadn’t told me not to.

When I came home after work, there was no floor. Everything was covered with a carpet of legs turned to the ceiling. Three layers of corpses. One or two hundred per tile. Some were the size of kittens. One, its belly covered with white spots, was the size of a television. They weren’t moving. I asked one of the neighbors for a spade and loaded them into jumbo-size garbage bags. When I’d filled something like fifteen of them, the room began to spin. My head hurt. I went to open all the windows, corpses crumbling under my feet. In the kitchen, I found one swinging from the light fixture. The bug must have realized it was going to die from the poison and decided to hang itself. I loosened the rope, and the body fell on me. I almost collapsed; it weighed about seventy kilos. It was wearing a black jacket, no pockets, and it didn’t have any papers or a watch or anything, not even wings. It reminded me of someone I knew in the army. I felt really sorry for it.

I took the others downstairs in the bags, but I dug that one a grave. I found an empty watermelon crate near the Dumpster and put it on the grave instead of a headstone. A week later, the exterminator guy came to spray the place again, but I whacked him on the head with a kitchen chair and he was out of there in a flash. He didn’t even stop to ask why.

When I’d finished telling the story, we were both quiet. Then I asked him if it was true that a lawyer can’t inform on his clients, and he said yes. I offered him a cigarette, but he didn’t want one. I turned on the news, but the announcers were on strike.

“Tell me,” he finally asked, “if it wasn’t for the festival, how come you wanted to go to Jerusalem?”

“No reason,” I said. “A woman I knew died.”

“Knew her for no reason, or died for no reason?” he persisted. Then came the Shalom intersection, and instead of taking a right, he spun the wheel left, straight into the median.

I arrived a week later, the way I always do. I never come on the actual date. I did go to the funeral and to the first memorial, but with all those people staring, the firm handclasps, the mother smiling at me teary-eyed and asking me when I was finishing my degree—I said fuck it. The date itself doesn’t mean much to me anyway, though it’s an easy one to remember: December 12, the twelfth day of the twelfth month.

Ronen’s sister is a doctor at Beilinson Hospital, and she was on duty the moment your heart stopped. I heard Ronen tell Yizhar that you died at the stroke of noon. Like, on the dot.

Ronen got all worked up about it: “On the twelfth of the twelfth at twelve. Do you realize what the odds are?” he whispered so loud that everyone could hear. “It’s like an omen from Heaven.”

“Incredible,” Yizhar muttered. “If he’d stuck around another twelve minutes and twelve seconds, I bet they’d have issued a stamp in his honor or something.”

It really is easy to remember—the date, I mean—and the street sign we stole together on Yom Kippur. And that retarded boomerang they brought you from Australia, the one we used to throw in the park when we were kids and it never came back. Every year I come and stand beside the grave and think back, remembering something else each time, remembering very clearly. We’d each had five beers, and then you did another three shots of vodka. I was feeling pretty okay that night. Tipsy, but okay. You? You were shitfaced. We left the pub for your place, a few hundred meters away. We were wearing those gray raincoats we’d bought together at the pedestrian mall. You were pretty wobbly, and you knocked into a phone pole with your shoulder. You took a step back and stared—bemused is how you looked. I shut my eyes, and the blackness of my lowered eyelashes swirled together with the dark vapors of the alcohol. I tried to picture you far away from me, in a different country, say, and the thought scared me so much that my eyes snapped open, just in time for me to see you take another unsteady step and tip over backward. I caught you just before you hit the ground, and you smiled at me with your head tilted back, like a kid who’s discovered a new game.

“We won,” you told me, as I helped you up. I had no idea what you were talking about. Then we took a few more steps and you did it again, deliberately this time. You just let your body drop forward, and I grabbed you by the coat collar, a tenth of a second before your face hit the sidewalk.

“Two–zip,” you said and leaned against me. “We’re good. The sidewalks haven’t got a chance.”

We kept walking toward your house, and every few steps you let yourself drop to the sidewalk, and every time I’d catch you—by the belt, by the waist, by the hair. Never letting you touch the ground. “Six–zip,” you said, and then “Nine–zip.” The game kicked ass, and so did we. We were unbeatable.

“Let’s hold them at zero,” I whispered in your ear, and that’s just what we did. By the time we reached your house, we’d scored an amazing twenty-one to nothing. We entered the building, leaving the humiliated sidewalks behind us. Your roommate was there in your apartment, sitting up and watching TV.

“We fucked them up,” you said as we walked in, and he rubbed his eyes behind his glasses and said we looked like shit. I was about to wash my face, but before I even made it to the sink I threw up in the bathtub. I heard you screaming in the hallway that you weren’t about to piss in that configuration. I came out of the bathroom and saw you staggering, with your pants down to your knees.

“I’m not going to piss with you holding me up,” you told your roommate. “You I don’t trust. Only him. I want him to hold me,” you said, pointing at me. “Only him.”

“It’s nothing personal,” I said and smiled at the roommate. “It’s just that we have lots of practice.” I helped you up by the waist.

“You’re fucking insane.” The roommate shook his head and went back to his show. You finished pissing. I threw up another time. On the way to your bed, you fell once more, and I caught you, just barely, and both of us fell to the floor. “I knew you’d catch me,” you said and laughed.

“Look,” you said and tried to get up again. “I’ve lost my fear of falling. My fear of falling’s gone.”

There are these two kids here at your grave, aiming their tennis ball at the tombstones. I think I’ve figured out the rules: if the one they hit is an officer’s, they get a point. If it’s a cadet’s, it’s a point for the cemetery. They hit your tombstone, and the ball rebounded right into my hand. I caught it. One of the kids walked toward me apprehensively.

“Are you the guard?” I shook my head. “So, can we get our ball back?” He took another step in my direction.

I handed him the ball. He moved up closer to the tombstone, squinting at it.

“SFC,” he called out to his friend, who was standing a ways away.

“What’s SFC?” the faraway one asked. The one with the ball shrugged.

“Excuse me,” he asked. “Is SFC an officer or just a normal soldier?” “An officer, of course,” I said. “It stands for Super First Commander.”

“Yes!” he shouted and hurled the ball high in the air. “Eight–seven!” His friend came running and yelled, “We beat the gravestones! We beat the gravestones!” and the two of them started jumping and yelling like they’d just taken the world championship, or better.

The sub told them to line up in pairs. Slimy Shlomo Is a Homo was the odd man out. “I’ll be your partner,” the sub said and gave him her hand.

Then they went for a walk in the park, and Slimy Shlomo Is a Homo looked at the boats in the artificial lake, and at a gigantic sculpture of an orange, and then a bird pooped on his hat.

“Shit sticks to shit,” Yuval shouted at them from behind, and the other kids laughed.

“Ignore them,” the sub said and rinsed his hat off under a faucet. Next came the ice-cream man, and everyone bought ice cream. Slimy Shlomo Is a Homo ate his Popsicle, and when he finished, he pushed the stick between the tiles in the pavement and pretended it was a rocket. The other kids were fooling around on the grass, and only Slimy Shlomo Is a Homo and the sub, who was smoking a cigarette and looking pretty tired, stayed on the pavement.

“Why do all the kids hate me?” Slimy Shlomo Is a Homo asked her.

“How should I know?” The sub shrugged her drooping shoulders. “I’m just a sub.”

Hans and I had nothing in common except brain cancer. He was a shriveled-up old guy who spoke broken Hebrew, and I’m a fat, overgrown sabra still on this side of forty. Even so, and although we were roommates less than a month, we felt like old friends. “Is because you and me, we both terminal sick,” Hans explained. I loved his fractured Hebrew, especially when he called me “terminal sick,” like I’m waiting at some busy airport about to take off for an exciting, different place.

We used to play chess. Hans was once on the Mainz University team and even won the university championship in 1935. “But now, because cancer in my head, I how you say,
idiotish
?” Me? I was an idiot even before the cancer. Sometimes Hans would forget to move when it was his turn, and he’d just sit there staring into space until I nudged him. “Pardon,” he’d apologize and make his move quickly. I also had blackouts when we were playing, sometimes I’d even forget how to move the pieces, mainly the knight, and Hans would remind me with his usual patience.

Dr. Arad says that forgetting is perfectly natural in advanced stages of brain cancer, which must’ve been meant to reassure me.

Everyone always says that the
yekkim
, the German Jews, are as dry as dust, but with Hans at least, that wasn’t true. The guy was a straight-out poet. Like the time he told me about Bergen-Belsen, “I remember the day they take Anna and little Karl. I just not know what will happen next minute. I look at my watch and I know: five minutes more the tram come, forty minutes more I hug Anna, make little Karl to laugh, everything be in order. All of sudden, I am on bed, alone, not know anything what will happen. I want killing myself, only so I be sure of something.”

Hans froze and stared at the wall across from him, and for a minute I thought it was another attack, he forgot what he was talking about. “Then I see him on wall,” he went on, “
mein Schatten
, how you say, aah…shadow. I look at him and I know, my shadow he always with me. I know always what he is going to do, and him even the Germans they cannot take.” Hans raised his hand and stared at its giant shadow on the wall making the exact same gesture. He looked at me and smiled.
“Zauber,”
he whispered.

Hans was in worse shape than me, and when his urine bag had to be emptied, I did it. “Pardon,” he’d always say, apologizing as if it was his fault he was sick. The truth is that Asher, the orderly, was supposed to empty urine bags, but that bastard liked to drop in only once a day, to change the soaked sheets. I always cursed under my breath when that shit finally showed up in the ward, and it was Hans who defended him. “Not to be angry, Zvi, he is
jünger Mensch
, he has much life yet and we are at end.”

Once, Hans asked me what the name Zvi meant. I didn’t know how to explain it. Finally, I showed him a picture of the deer in the Israeli Postal Authority logo printed on the envelope of a letter I’d gotten. “Ah,
Hirsch
, beautiful animal, but not many now, almost extinct.” I told him that people with brain cancer who play chess are probably almost extinct too, and he looked at the drawing of the deer again, a gentle smile flitting across his face.

Funny, the whole time we were together I was aware that death could come and take me at any time. But I never thought that the same death could visit Hans, too. It never entered what was left of my mind that a man who talks so funny could die. When it happened, I was really calm. I didn’t cry, didn’t yell, nothing. Asher came in. “What’s the name of the old guy who died?” he asked. “Dr. Arad needs it for the death certificate and the nurses lost the papers again. Wasn’t it Hindisheim, Hindishtreim, something like that?” Remembering what Hans said about his shadow, I looked at the wall and raised my right hand high, like Hans. That sneaky little shadow rebelled and decided to put his hands around the shadow of someone else’s neck. I couldn’t even trust my shadow now. Asher grunted and screamed. I heard other people’s voices. I kept looking at the mutinous shadow. I want killing myself. Then my lips chose to utter a word I didn’t know the meaning of.
“Zauber,”
I heard myself whisper.