The Nimrod Flipout: Stories (5 page)

To Danny, with Love

Listen, a true story. About three months ago a woman about thirty-two years old met her death in a suicide bomb attack near a bus stop. She wasn’t the only one who met her death, lots of others did too. But this story is about her.

People who are killed in terrorist attacks are taken to the Forensic Institute in Abu Kabir for an autopsy. Many people in important positions in Israeli society have wondered about this procedure, and even the people who work at Abu Kabir don’t always understand it exactly. The cause of death in those attacks is known, after all, and a body isn’t some surprise egg that you open without knowing what you’re going to find inside—a sailboat maybe, or a race car, or a toy koala. I mean, whenever they operate they always find the same things—little pieces of metal, nails, or other kinds of shrapnel. Very few surprises, in other words. But in this case, of the thirty-two-year-old woman, they did find something else. Inside her body, besides all those pieces of metal that had torn into her flesh, this woman had dozens of tumors, really big ones. There were tumors in her stomach, in her liver, and in her intestines, but especially in her head. When the pathologist peeked into her skull, the first thing he said was “Oh my God” because it was simply frightening. He saw dozens of tumors that had inched their way into her brain like a swarm of cruel ants that just wanted to devour more and more.

And this is where the scientific observation comes in: if this woman hadn’t died in a terrorist attack, she would have collapsed within a week and would have died from her tumors within a month, two months tops. It’s hard to see how a young woman like that could have suffered from such an advanced cancer without its being diagnosed at all. Maybe she was one of those people who don’t like medical examinations or maybe she figured the pain and the dizziness she’d been suffering from were something routine that would just go away. In any case, when her husband arrived to identify her at the morgue, the pathologist had a hard time deciding whether to tell him about it or not. On the one hand, it was a revelation that could have offered some comfort—there’s no point in tormenting yourself with thoughts like “if only she hadn’t gone to work that day” or “if only I’d driven her” when you know that your wife was about to die no matter what. On the other hand, this news could make the grief even more distressing and turn her arbitrary and horrible death into something much more horrible: a death experienced twice over in a sense, making it inevitable, as if someone up there wanted to make absolutely sure, and no what-ifs could have saved her, not even hypothetically. Then again, the pathologist thought, what difference did it really make? The woman was dead, her husband was a widower, her children were orphans—that’s what mattered, that’s what was sad, and all the rest was neither here nor there.

The husband asked to identify his wife by her foot. Most people identify their loved ones by their faces. But he asked to identify her by her foot, because he thought that if he saw her dead face, the sight would haunt him his whole life, or rather, what remained of it. He had loved her and he knew her so well that he could identify her by each and every part of her body, and somehow her foot seemed the most remote, neutral, far-removed. He looked at the foot for another few seconds, even after he’d identified the barely visible wavy contours of her toenails, the slightly crooked, chubby big toe, the perfect arching of her sole. Maybe it was a bad idea, he thought to himself as he continued to look at the little foot (size 5), maybe it was a bad idea to choose the foot. A dead person’s face looks like a sleeping person’s, but with a dead person’s foot there was no mistaking the death under every toenail. “That’s her,” he told the pathologist after a while, and left the room.

Among the people at the woman’s funeral was the pathologist. He wasn’t the only one. There was the mayor of Jerusalem, and the minister of internal security. Both of them made personal promises to the husband, repeating his name and the deceased woman’s name many times as they spoke, to avenge her brutal death. They gave a dramatic and vivid description of how they would hunt down those responsible for dispatching the murderer (there was no way of taking revenge on the suicide bomber himself). The husband looked rather uneasy with the promises they made. It seemed that he wasn’t all that interested, and the only reason he was trying to hide it was to avoid hurting the feelings of the impassioned public figures who were naïve enough to believe that their vehement speeches could offer him some solace.

The funeral was the second time the pathologist had considered the idea of telling the husband that his wife had been on the verge of death in any case, to offset some of the uneasiness and vengefulness in the air, but this time too he kept it to himself. On his way home he tried to think philosophically about everything that had happened. What is cancer, he thought to himself, if not an attack of terror from above? What is it that God is doing if not terrorizing us in protest against…something. Something so lofty and transcendental that it lies beyond our grasp? Like his work at the institute, this thought too was surgically precise, but it didn’t really make any difference.

The night after the funeral, the husband had a sad dream in which the dead foot was rubbing against his face, a dream that caused him to wake up in a state of fright and agitation. He tiptoed into the kitchen, so as not to wake the children, and made himself a cup of tea without turning on the light. Even after he’d finished drinking the steaming tea, he went on sitting in the dark kitchen. He tried to think of something he’d like to do, something that would make him happy, anything. Even something he couldn’t really allow himself because of the kids or because he couldn’t afford to, but nothing like that came to mind. He felt as though he was stuffed full of some dense and sour material that was blocking his chest, and it wasn’t grief. It was something much more serious than grief. After all those years, life now seemed like no more than a trap, a maze—not even a maze, just a room that was all walls, with no door. There must be something, he persisted, something I want, even if I can’t make it happen. Anything.

Some people commit suicide after someone close to them goes, others turn to religion, and there are some who sit in the kitchen all night and don’t even wait for the sun to rise. The light from outside was beginning to creep into the apartment and pretty soon the little ones would be waking up. He tried to recall once more the feel of the foot in the dream and, the way it always happens with dreams, all he could do was reconstruct it but not really experience it. “If only she hadn’t gone to work that day,” he thought, forcing himself to get up. “If only I’d driven her. She’d still be alive now, sitting here in the kitchen with me.”

So let’s say I’m dead now, or I open a self-service laundromat, the first one in Israel. I rent a small place, a little rundown, on the south side, and paint everything blue. At first, there are only four machines and a special dispenser that sells tokens. Then I put in a TV and even a pinball machine. Or else I’m on my bathroom floor with a bullet in my head. My father finds me. At first, he doesn’t notice the blood. He thinks I’m dozing or playing one of my stupid games. It’s only when he touches the back of my neck and feels something hot and sticky oozing from his fingers toward his arm that he realizes something’s wrong. People who come to do their washing in a self-service laundromat are lonely people. You don’t have to be a genius to figure that out. And me, I’m really no genius, and I did. That’s why I always try to create an atmosphere in the laundromat that will make people feel less lonely. Lots of TVs. Dispensers that say thank you in a human voice for buying the tokens, pictures of mass rallies on the walls. The tables for folding laundry are set up so that lots of people have to use them at the same time. Not because I’m stingy; it’s on purpose. Lots of couples met at my place because of those tables. People who used to be lonely and now they have someone, maybe more than one, who lies next to them at night, shoves them in their sleep. The first thing my father does is wash his hands. Only then does he call for an ambulance. That hand washing is going to cost him dearly. He won’t forgive himself till his dying day. He’ll even be ashamed to tell people. How his son is lying there next to him, dying, and him, instead of feeling grief or compassion or fear, something, all he can feel is revulsion. That laundromat will turn into a chain. A chain that’ll be big, especially in Tel Aviv, but it’ll do well in the suburbs too. The logic behind its success will be simple—wherever there are lonely people and dirty laundry, they’ll always come to me. After my mother dies, even my father will come into one of those branches to do his laundry. He’ll never meet a woman or make a friend there, but the chance that he might will drive him there every single time, will give him a tiny sliver of hope.

When Ronel woke up that magical Tuesday morning and found his beloved terrier, Darko, between his legs licking his morning erection, a single razor-sharp thought passed through his dull and relatively unoccupied brain: “Is this sexual?” In other words, was Darko licking his balls the same way he licked Schneider’s balls—Schneider being the miniature schnauzer Darko tried to have sexual intercourse with every time they bumped into each other in Meir Park—or was Darko licking his master’s penis for the same reason he licked the dewdrops off a fragrant leaf in that park? It was a troubling question, though not as troubling as the question of whether Neeva, his wide-hipped wife, suspected him of sleeping with his business partner, Renana, which would explain why she was so nasty to her on the phone, or was that sheer dislike? “Oh, Darko, Darko,” Ronel muttered to himself with a mixture of self-pity and affection, “you’re the only one who really loves me.” Darko, who might not have recognized a human male sex organ as such, recognized his name every time, and he responded with a bark of joy. Clearly, it was better to be a dog coping with dog-dilemmas, like the what-tree-should-I-pee-on-this-morning one, than to be Ronel grappling with such tedious moral quandaries as whether fucking Renana as she bent over his wife’s vanity table was less repellent than fucking her right in their queen-size bed. A question that had many implications, by the way. Because if it didn’t matter, they’d be a lot more comfortable doing it on the bed, and that would be that. Or, for example, whether fantasizing about his naked wife while penetrating Renana offset the infidelity somewhat, or whether it was just another perversion? “Daddy’s not a pervert, Darko honey,” Ronel said as he stretched and got out of bed. “Daddy’s a complex person.” “What?” Neeva asked, peering into the bedroom. “Did you say something?” “I told Darko I’d be home late because I have a meeting with the Germans tonight,” Ronel said, making the most of the rare eye contact with his wife. “Oh, really?” Neeva sneered. “And what did Darko have to say about that?” “Nothing,” Ronel said, putting on a pair of gray underpants. “Darko accepts me.” “Darko also accepts Purina Dog Chow,” Neeva snapped. “His standards aren’t exactly high.”

One obvious advantage of having an affair with a colleague was that all those romantic candlelight dinners were tax deductible. It wasn’t the only bonus, of course, but it was undoubtedly the one Ronel enjoyed most, because he never felt more relaxed and at peace than when he was stapling receipts to pieces of paper embellished with details and dates in his own handwriting. And when the invoice wasn’t just his ticket to a tax deduction but an emotionally charged object in its own right, one that allowed him to reminisce about a night of successful lovemaking, the pleasure it gave was doubled. “I need a receipt for my taxes,” he said to the waiter, stressing the word “taxes,” as if there were more than one kind of receipt in this little world of ours. The waiter nodded at Ronel as if to say he knew the score. Ronel didn’t like him. Maybe because of the niggling way he corrected their pronunciation when they ordered, maybe because he’d insisted on hiding his left arm behind his back throughout the meal, which made Ronel nervous. Or maybe it was just because he was a waiter who earned his living from tips, a form of payment that irritated Ronel because it had no place in the cozy womb of deductible expenses.

“What’s with you tonight?” Renana asked after they’d decided to abandon a failed attempt at wild sex in favor of watching the E Channel together and eating watermelon. “I’m stressed,” Ronel said, “stressed and a little weak, physically.” “You were stressed last time too. And on Thursday, we didn’t even try. Tell me…” She stopped speaking in order to swallow an especially large piece of watermelon, and as he waited out the lengthy process of her swallowing, Ronel knew he was in for a hassle. And in fact, a belch later, Renana picked up right where she’d left off. “…do you still fuck your wife or can’t you do it with her either?” “What do you mean, ‘either’?” Ronel said. Now he was annoyed. “What, to be more precise, do you mean ‘can’t do it with her either’? Is there something we don’t do?” “Fuck,” Renana said, licking her stubby fingers. “We don’t fuck. Not that it’s a big deal or anything. It’s just that, when you’re ‘a fuck on the side’ and the whole sex thing drops out of the equation, then you’re nothing but ‘on the side,’ if you know what I mean. I’m not saying it’s a deal breaker or anything, it’s just, you know, a little weird. Because with your wife, even if you don’t fuck, you can visit her parents or fight about who loads the dishwasher, all the normal couple things. But when it happens with a lover, it sort of pulls the rug out.” “Who said we don’t fuck?” “Your prick,” Renana said without a hint of provocation in her voice. “That’s why I asked about your wife, you know, to see if it’s because I don’t turn you on anymore. Or if it’s something more…” “More what?” Ronel insisted as the pause lengthened. “Give me a sec,” Renana mumbled, “I’m looking for a gentler word than ‘impotent.’” “You’re making a big deal over nothing,” Ronel said, getting angry. “Just because once or twice I was a little bit tired and stressed out over work, it doesn’t mean I’m impotent. I had a hard-on just this morning. Not an ordinary hard-on, either. It was phenomenal.” Ronel, remembering Darko, felt his organ stiffen a little and, for no reason, was flooded with guilt. “Terrific,” Renana said. “That’s good news. And who got to share this phenomenal hard-on of yours, Neeva?” “No,” Ronel said, momentarily confused. “I shared it with myself.” “How nice for you.” Renana smiled her famous carrion-eating smile, which he’d previously come across only at work, and went back to licking the watermelon juice off the palm of her hand.

Even so, the night might have ended with a fuck. Not a passionate fuck, but an angry one, with Ronel trying to work up some desire and have an erection, if only to make Renana eat her words. Maybe. Who knows. But Ronel’s cell phone vibrated in his shirt pocket right where his heart should have been and brought that utterly pathetic evening to a new low. “Sorry to disturb you in the middle of your meeting with the Germans.” He heard Neeva’s hate-filled voice stretching out the word “Germans” as if she were referring to Hitler himself. “Don’t be silly, sweetheart, you’re not disturbing me at all. We just finished,” Ronel said, sucking up to Neeva the way he always did around clients. To sound more credible, he even tossed a few words in English at Renana: “It’s my wife. She says hello.” Renana promptly gave a loud belch in reply. “Mr. Mattenklott says hello, too,” Ronel said, afraid Neeva might have heard the repulsive belch, and added quickly, “I think he’s had one too many. I’ll just drop him and Ingo at the hotel and come home.” “Ronel,” Neeva rebuked him on the other end of the line, “I didn’t call to find out when you’re coming home. I called to tell you something.” “I know, I know. I’m sorry,” Ronel apologized automatically as he tried to grab the remote from Renana, who was raising the volume. “It’s your dog,” Neeva added after a short silence. “He ran away.”

When a dog takes a thin little saw and saws through the bars on the bathroom window, then shimmies down some tied-together sheets, you can say, “The dog ran away.” But when you’re walking down the street with him and he’s not on a leash, and an hour later you realize he’s nowhere to be seen, then someone has clearly fucked up. Trying to lay the blame on Darko wasn’t fair. “He was probably sniffing some curb or monument and when he looked up, he realized you weren’t there,” he said to Neeva in an accusing tone as they walked down King George Street trying to reconstruct the route of that disastrous evening stroll. “How many times have I told you not to let him out of your sight?” “Tell me,” Neeva said as she stopped walking and stood in the middle of the street like a wife about to make a scene. “What exactly are you trying to say? That I’m not a good enough au pair for your smelly dog? That I don’t walk him according to the rules of the International Dog-Walkers’ Association? If you were home instead of fucking around with your
Germans
, you could’ve taken him out yourself and none of this would’ve happened.” Ronel could have complained about how he worked his ass off till all hours just to put food on the table, but he decided, for tactical reasons, to hold his peace. One of the first things he’d learned in the business world was never to reach a point of no return. You always left open as many options as possible. This often meant not saying or doing the thing you wanted to say or do. Now, for example, he felt very much like kicking Neeva in the shin as hard as he could. Not only because she’d let Darko run away, but also because she didn’t call him by his name and insisted on referring to him as “smelly,” and mainly because she refused to take responsibility for her actions and behaved as if this terrible tragedy were God’s way of punishing Ronel and not the mistake of a self-centered and totally irresponsible wife. He didn’t kick her in the shin as hard as he could because that, as mentioned, would have been a point of no return. Instead, with that same composure and self-control so often displayed by murderers when cleaning up the scene of the crime and getting rid of their victims’ bodies, Ronel suggested that she go home and wait there in case someone called with information about Darko. “Who’s going to call?” Neeva laughed. “Your stupid dog from a pay phone? Or his kidnappers asking for ransom? Even if someone does find him, they won’t know our number.” “I still think it would be better if we split up,” Ronel insisted, and seriously considered abandoning the insight that had served him so well for so many years and kicking Neeva very hard after all. When she persisted in asking why, he shook his head wildly and said, “No reason.”

Ronel leaned against a yellow mailbox and read over the list he’d just made on the back of the receipt from the restaurant he and Renana had eaten in that night. The list was headed “Places Darko Likes (?)” He didn’t know why he’d tacked on that question mark and parentheses. Maybe because he felt that if the list didn’t include an element of uncertainty, it would be like claiming he knew all there was to know about Darko, whereas Ronel himself had readily admitted countless times, to himself and to others, that he didn’t always understand Darko. Why sometimes he barked and other times chose not to. Why he started digging holes so furiously, then left the excavation as suddenly as he’d started it, for no obvious reason. Did he think of Ronel as his master? His father? His friend? Maybe even as his lover? At any rate, it was definitely no more than a list to help Ronel search, and that’s why it needed a question mark of uncertainty. The first place on the list was Meir Park, where he and Darko went every morning. That was where Darko met the dogs who were his friends and enemies, not to mention his bosom buddy, the stumpy Schneider. At that late hour, there were no dogs or people in Meir Park. Only a drunk, homeless Russian dozing on a bench. Ronel presumed he was Russian not just because of the somewhat stereotypical bottle of vodka cradled in his arms, but because he kept laughing and speaking Russian in his sleep. Ronel stopped for a minute and said to himself that despite the troubles that kept plaguing him and sometimes made him feel like a latter-day Job, or at least a Job lite, he should be grateful for what he had and thank whoever it is nonreligious people thank about such things for not putting him in that Russian guy’s torn old newspaper-stuffed shoes. The Russian’s laughter grew deeper and louder, demolishing Ronel’s ideas about his own relative happiness. “Who says?” Ronel asked, suddenly filled with a great truth diluted by a substantial amount of self-pity. “Who says my fate is better than his? Here I am in the same park where he’s drunk and happy. And I’m neither drunk nor happy. All I have in the world is a dog who left me, a wife I don’t really love, and a business…” It was actually the thought of his business that cheered him up a little. This was, after all, a period of some growth, which hardly held out a promise of boundless joy but, for now, was still preferable to newspaper in his shoes.

Near the park exit, Ronel noticed a rapid dog-like movement in the bushes. But after observing it briefly, he saw that the object of his shattered hope was the short, bearded shadow of Schneider. Ronel, who frequented the park only during the day, was surprised to see Schneider there so late at night. His first thought was that some sixth sense had told Schneider that Darko was lost and he’d left his house to join the search, but a familiar whistle punctured that heroic interpretation of events. And right after the whistle came Alma, Schneider’s beautiful, limping mistress. Alma, who was about twenty-five, was one of the most beautiful women Ronel knew, and definitely the lamest. She’d been injured in an unusually stupid car accident, and had used the money she received in settlement to buy a fully renovated penthouse on Michal Street. Alma’s extreme encounter with a bad driver and an excellent lawyer (she’d even told Ronel his name once, but since there were no injury suits on his horizon, he quickly forgot it) had undoubtedly shifted the course of her life. People always say they would pass up any amount of money to get their health back, but was that really true? Alma, as far as he could tell from a leash away, always smiled a genuine-looking smile, which Ronel had tried to imitate for business purposes. He had even practiced a few times in front of the mirror before he gave up and opted for one that came more naturally. Hers was a permanent smile that rested on her face, a default smile, not fixed or phony, but always in reaction to whatever was happening around it—broadening, narrowing, turning surprised or cynical when called for, but always there and always relaxed. It was the relaxation of that smile that made Ronel try to mimic it, recognizing its superiority as a negotiating tool over any other expression. Would she have smiled that way if she were poor and had a platinum-free leg? Or would the smile have been different, less serene? More frightened by an uncertain economic future, by the threat of old age looming over her perfect beauty?

“I didn’t know you and Darko came here at night,” Alma said, hopping into the shaft of light at the entrance to the park. “We don’t,” Ronel groaned desperately. “Darko ran away,” he said, but quickly corrected himself. “I mean he got lost.” Schneider was looking all around Ronel with the annoying friskiness of a stupid and not particularly sensitive schnauzer. “He doesn’t understand,” Alma apologized. “He smells Darko on your clothes and thinks he’s here.” “I know, I know,” Ronel said, nodding, and for no reason, burst into tears. “But he’s not. He’s not here. He could be dead by now. Run over. Or maybe some kids are torturing him in a backyard, putting out cigarettes on him, or maybe the city dogcatchers got him…” Alma put a comforting hand on his arm, and even though her hand was damp with sweat, there was something pleasant about that dampness, something gentle and alive. “Dogcatchers don’t work at night, and Darko’s a smart dog. There’s no way he was run over. If it were Schneider…” she said, giving her lively schnauzer the kind of sad, loving look beautiful girls always save for their ugly girlfriends, “then we’d have to worry. But Darko knows how to take care of himself. I can just see him whining outside the entrance to your building. Or on your doormat right now, chewing on a stolen bone.”