The Seven Good Years (2 page)

I
really admire considerate telemarketers who listen and try to sense your mood without immediately forcing a dialogue on you when they call. That's why, when Devora from YES, the satellite TV company, calls and asks if it's a good time for me to talk, the first thing I do is thank her for her thoughtfulness. Then I tell her politely that no, it isn't.

“The thing is, just a minute ago I fell into a hole and injured my forehead and foot, so this really isn't the ideal time,” I explain.

“I understand,” Devora says. “So when do you think it'll be a good time to talk? An hour?”

“I'm not sure,” I say. “My ankle must have broken when I fell, and the hole is pretty deep. I don't think I'll be able to climb out without help. So it pretty much depends on how quickly the rescue team gets here and whether they have to put my foot in a cast or not.”

“So, maybe I should call tomorrow?” she suggests, unruffled.

“Yes,” I groan. “Tomorrow sounds great.”

“What's all that business with the hole?” my wife, next to me in a taxi, rebukes after hearing my evasive tactics. This is the first time we have gone out and left our son, Lev, with my mother, so she is a little edgy. “Why can't you just say, ‘Thanks, but I'm not interested in buying, renting, or borrowing whatever it is you're selling, so please don't call me again, not in this life, and if possible, not in the next one, either.' Then pause briefly and say, ‘Have a nice day.' And hang up, like everyone else.”

I don't think everyone else is as firm and nasty to Devora and her ilk as my wife is, but I must admit she has a point. In the Middle East, people feel their mortality more than anywhere else on the planet, which causes most of the population to develop aggressive tendencies toward strangers who try to waste the little time they have left on earth. And though I guard my time just as jealously, I have a real problem saying no to strangers on the phone. I have no trouble shaking off vendors in the outdoor market or saying no to a friend who offers me something on the phone. But the unholy combination of a phone request plus a stranger paralyzes me, and in less than a second, I'm imagining the scarred face of the person on the other end who has led a life of suffering and humiliation. I picture him standing on the window ledge of his forty-second-floor office talking to me on a cordless phone in a calm voice, but he's already made up his mind: “One more asshole hangs up on me and I jump!” And when it comes down to deciding between a person's life and getting hooked up to the “Balloon Sculpture: Endless Fun for the Whole Family” channel for only 9.99 shekels a month, I choose life, or at least I did until my wife and financial adviser politely asked me to stop.

That's when I began to develop the “poor Grandma strategy,” which invokes a woman for whom I've arranged dozens of virtual burials in order to get out of futile conversations. But since I'd already dug myself a hole and fallen into it for Devora of the satellite TV concern, I could actually let Grandma Shoshana rest in peace this time.

“Good morning, Mr. Keret,” Devora says the next day. “I hope this is a better time for you.”

“The truth is, there were a few complications with my foot,” I mumble. “I don't know how, but gangrene developed. And you've caught me right before the amputation.”

“It'll just take a minute,” she gamely tries.

“I'm sorry,” I insist. “They already gave me a sedative and the doctor is signaling for me to close my cell phone. He says it isn't sterilized.”

“So I'll try tomorrow, then,” Devora says. “Good luck with the amputation.”

Most telemarketers give up after one call. Phone pollsters and Internet-surfing-package sellers may call back for another round. But Devora from the satellite TV company is different.

“Hello, Mr. Keret,” she says when I answer the next call, unprepared. “How are you?” Before I can reply, she goes on: “Since your new medical condition will probably keep you at home, I thought I'd offer you our Extreme Sports package. Four channels that include various extreme sports from all around the world, from the dwarf-hurling world championship games to the Australian glass-eating matches.”

“Do you want Etgar?” I whisper.

“Yes,” Devora says.

“He died,” I say, and pause before continuing to whisper. “Such a tragedy. An intern finished him off on the operating table. We're thinking about suing.”

“So who am I talking to?” Devora asks.

“Michael, his younger brother,” I improvise. “But I can't talk now, I'm at the funeral.”

“I'm sorry for your loss,” Devora says in a shaky voice. “I didn't get to speak with him a lot, but he sounded like a lovely person.”

“Thank you,” I keep whispering. “I have to hang up. I have to say Kaddish now.”

“Of course,” Devora says. “I'll call later. I have a consolation deal that's just perfect for you.”

Y
esterday I called the cell phone company people to yell at them. The day before, my best friend, Uzi, told me he'd called and yelled at them a little, threatened to switch to another provider. And they immediately lowered their price by fifty shekels a month. “Can you believe it?” my friend said excitedly. “One angry five-minute call and you save six hundred shekels a year.”

The customer-service representative was named Tali. She listened silently to all my complaints and threats, and when I finished, she said in a low, deep voice: “Tell me, sir, aren't you ashamed of yourself? We're at war. People are getting killed. Missiles are falling on Haifa and Tiberias, and all you can think about is your fifty shekels?”

There was something to that, something that made me slightly uncomfortable. I apologized immediately, and the noble Tali quickly forgave me. After all, war is not exactly the right time to bear a grudge against one of your own.

That afternoon I decided to test the effectiveness of the Tali argument on a stubborn taxi driver who refused to take me and my baby son in his cab because I didn't have a car seat with me.

“Tell me, aren't you ashamed of yourself?” I said, trying to quote Tali as precisely as I could. “We're at war. People are getting killed. Missiles are falling on Tiberias, and all you can think about is a damn car seat?”

The argument worked here like magic, and the embarrassed driver quickly apologized and told me to hop in. When we got on the highway, he said partly to me, partly to himself, “It's a real war, eh?” And after taking a long breath, he added nostalgically, “Just like in the old days.”

Now that “just like in the old days” keeps echoing in my mind, and I suddenly see this whole conflict with Lebanon in a completely different light. Thinking back, trying to re-create my conversations with worried friends about this war with Lebanon, about the Iranian missiles, the Syrian machinations, and the assumption that Hezbollah's leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, has the ability to strike any place in the country, even Tel Aviv, I realize that there was a small gleam in almost everyone's eyes, a kind of unconscious breath of relief.

And no, it's not that we Israelis long for war or death or grief, but we do long for those “old days” the taxi driver talked about. We long for a real war to take the place of all those exhausting years of intifada, when there was no black or white, only gray; when we were confronted not by armed forces, but only resolute young people wearing explosive belts; years when the aura of bravery ceased to exist, replaced by long lines of people waiting at our checkpoints, women about to give birth and elderly people struggling to endure the stifling heat.

Suddenly, the first salvo of missiles returned us to that familiar feeling of a war fought against a ruthless enemy who attacks our borders, a truly vicious enemy, not one fighting for its freedom and self-determination, not the kind that makes us stammer and throws us into confusion. Once again we're confident about the rightness of our cause, and we return with lightning speed to the bosom of the patriotism we had almost abandoned. Once again, we're a small country surrounded by enemies, fighting for our lives, not a strong, occupying country forced to fight daily against a civilian population.

So is it any wonder that we're all secretly just a tiny bit relieved? Give us Iran, give us a pinch of Syria, give us a handful of Sheikh Nasrallah, and we'll devour them whole. After all, we're no better than anyone else at resolving moral ambiguities. But we always did know how to win a war.

W
hen I was a kid, I always thought that Hebrew Book Week was a legitimate holiday, something that fit comfortably amid Independence Day, Passover, and Hanukkah. On this occasion, we didn't sit around campfires, spin dreidels, or hit each other on the head with plastic hammers, and, unlike other holidays, it doesn't commemorate a historical victory or heroic defeat, which made me like it even more.

At the beginning of every June, my sister, brother, and I would walk with our parents to the central square in Ramat Gan, where dozens of tables had been set up and covered in books. Each of us would choose five. Sometimes the author of one of those books would be at the table and would write a dedication in it. My sister really liked that. Personally, I found it a little annoying. Even if someone writes a book, it doesn't give him the right to scribble in my own private copy—especially if his handwriting is ugly, like a pharmacist's, and he insists on using hard words you have to look up in the dictionary, only to discover that all he really meant was “enjoy.”

Years have passed, and even though I'm not a kid anymore, I still get just as excited during Book Week. But now the experience is a little different and a lot more stressful.

Before I started publishing books, I inscribed dedications only in those I bought to give as gifts to people I knew. Then one day I suddenly found myself signing books for people who'd bought them themselves, people I'd never met before. What can you write in the book of a total stranger who may be anything from a serial killer to a Righteous Gentile? “In friendship” borders on falsehood; “With admiration” doesn't hold water; “Best wishes” sounds too avuncular; and “Hope you enjoy my book!” oozes smarm from the first H to the final exclamation point. So, exactly eighteen years ago, on the last night of my first Book Week, I created my own genre: fictitious book dedications. If the books themselves are pure fiction, why should the dedications be true?

“To Danny, who saved my life on the Litani. If you hadn't tied that tourniquet, there'd be no me and no book.”

“To Mickey. Your mother called. I hung up on her. Don't you dare show your face around here anymore.”

“To Sinai. I'll be home late tonight, but I left some cholent in the fridge.”

“To Feige. Where's that tenner I lent you? You said two days and it's a month already. I'm still waiting.”

“To Tziki. I admit that I acted like a shit. But if your sister can forgive me, so can you.”

“To Avram. I don't care what the lab tests show. For me, you'll always be my dad.”

“Bosmat, even though you're with another guy now, we both know you'll come back to me in the end.”

In retrospect, and after the slap in the face I got for that last one, I suppose I shouldn't have written what I did for the tall guy with the Marine buzz cut who was buying a book for his girlfriend, though I still think he could have made a civil remark instead of getting physical.

In any case, I learned my lesson, however painfully, and since then, during every Book Week, no matter how much my hand itches to write in the books bought by some Dudi or Shlomi that the next time he sees anything from me on paper it'll be a lawyer's letter, I take a deep breath and scribble “Best wishes” instead. Boring, maybe, but much easier on the face.

So, if that tall guy and Bosmat are reading this, I want them to know that I am truly repentant and would like to offer my belated apologies. And if by chance you're reading this, Feige, I'm still waiting for the tenner.

A
few months ago, I opened my rusty mailbox to find a blue-and-white envelope containing a gold plastic card embossed with my last name, and, above it, in flowery letters,
Frequent Flyer Club Gold
. I showed the card to my wife in a pathetic gesture, hoping that this sign of appreciation from an objective, outside party would soften her harsh opinion of me, but it didn't really work.

“I advise you not to show this card to anyone,” she said.

“Why not?” I argued. “This card makes me a member of an exclusive club.”

“Yes,” my wife said, smiling that jackal smile of hers. “The exclusive club of people who have no life.”

So, OK. In the discreet, intimate confines of this book, I am willing to make a partial admission that I don't have a life, at least not in the traditional, everyday sense of the word. And I admit that more than once in the past year I have had to read the stub of my plane ticket, which was nestled peacefully among the pages of my stamp-tattooed passport, to find out what country I was in. And I also admit that during those trips, which often followed a fifteen-hour flight, I found myself reading to a very small group of people who, after listening patiently to me for an hour, could offer only a consoling pat on the back and the hopeful observation that in Hebrew those stories of mine probably make sense. But I love it. I love reading to people: when they enjoy it, I enjoy it with them, and when they suffer, I figure it's probably coming to them.

The truth, now that I've launched into an inexplicable outburst of sincerity, is that I'm willing to confess I also love the flights themselves. Not the security checks before them or the sour-faced airline employees at the check-in counter who explain that the last empty seat left on the plane is between two flatulent Japanese sumo wrestlers. And I'm not really crazy about the endless waiting for luggage after landing, or the jet lag that digs a transatlantic tunnel through my skull with a particularly dull teaspoon. It's the middle I love, that part when you're closed up in a tin box that's floating between heaven and earth. A tin box that is totally cut off from the world, and inside it there's no real time or real weather, just a juicy slice of limbo that lasts from takeoff till landing.

And strangely enough, for me, those flights don't just mean eating the heated-up TV dinner that the sardonic copywriter for the airlines decided to call a “High Altitude Delight.” They're a kind of meditative disengagement from the world. Flights are expansive moments when the phone doesn't ring and the Internet doesn't work. The maxim that flying time is wasted time liberates me from my anxieties and guilt feelings, and it strips me of all ambitions, leaving room for a different sort of existence. A happy, idiotic existence, the kind that doesn't try to make the most of time but is satisfied with merely finding the most enjoyable way to spend it.

The “I” who exists between takeoff and landing is a completely different person. The in-flight “I” is addicted to tomato juice, a drink I wouldn't think of touching when my feet are on the ground. In the air, that “I” avidly watches mind-numbing Hollywood comedies on a screen the size of a hemorrhoid and delves into the pages of the product catalog kept in the pocket of the seat in front of me as if it were an updated, upgraded version of the Old Testament.

I don't know if you've ever heard of the wallet made of rust-resistant steel fibers, material developed by NASA that guarantees that the bills inside will remain fresh long after our planet has been destroyed. Or the cat toilet that sucks out the smells and is camouflaged within a plant, providing your cat with full privacy while it's doing its thing, and preventing unpleasantness for household members and guests. Or the microprocessor-controlled antiseptic device that inserts antimicrobial silver ions into tissue with a budding infection in order to avert the disaster of an open sore. I've not only heard of all of these inventions but can also quote from memory the exact descriptions of each of those products, including the various colors they come in, as if they were verses from Ecclesiastes. After all, they didn't send me that Gold Card for nothing.

I'm writing this during a flight from Tel Aviv to Frankfurt on my way to Bangkok, and I'm doing it with very uncharacteristic speed so that, in another few lines, when it's finished, I can get comfortable in my seat again and browse through the in-flight magazine a little longer for an update on how many new destinations Lufthansa will be flying to soon. Then maybe I can catch the last fifteen minutes of
The Blind Side
, or go for some mingling on the line to the bathroom at the back of the plane. I have another hour and fourteen minutes till we land, and I want to make the most of them.