Suddenly, a Knock on the Door: Stories (15 page)

Read Suddenly, a Knock on the Door: Stories Online

Authors: Etgar Keret,Nathan Englander,Miriam Shlesinger,Sondra Silverston

BOOK: Suddenly, a Knock on the Door: Stories
9.6Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
That was a scary moment, Eyebrows thinks.
I wonder what he said to her on the phone, Band-Aid thinks.
Even when she’s weak, Mustache thinks, even when she’s on the verge of collapse, she’s all woman. Deep in his pants, he feels the beginning of an erection and hopes no one else notices.
The intercom buzzes. It’s the catering guy again; he’s waiting for an answer about parking in the building parking lot. Traffic’s crazy now and finding a spot on the street for a large truck is just impossible. Band-Aid, who answered the buzz, repeats the question out loud.
Mustache gives him a tell-him-it’s-okay nod. But the semiconscious Pnina mumbles that he shouldn’t use the tenants’ parking. There’s a neighbor on the seventeenth floor who causes problems. Just last week, an acquaintance who stopped by to see her for an hour, even less, got towed.
Eyebrows volunteers to go downstairs and tell the caterers they can’t park in the building lot. From there, he thinks, the way home will be shorter.
Mustache says he should stay, Pnina isn’t doing well and it would be better to have a doctor around. “I’m a doctor of dentistry,” Eyebrows says.
“You’re a doctor of dentistry, I know,” Mustache counters.
Pnina says that they have to go to Avner’s office right now. It’s not like him to call and then hang up like that. Anyway, something’s been wrong with him lately. He’s always taking pills. He told Pnina they were for headaches, but Pnina knows headache pills, and what Avner’s taking isn’t Tylenol or Advil, it’s this black, elliptical pill that isn’t like any other pill she’s ever seen before. And at night he has nightmares, she knows, because she heard him yelling in his sleep.
“Talk to Cohavi,” he yelled, “talk to Cohavi.” When she asked him about it, he said everything was fine and he doesn’t know any Cohavi.
But she knows that he does. Igal Cohavi. His phone number is in Avner’s BlackBerry. And of all the numbers listed there, his was the only one she didn’t call. She thought he might put a damper on the atmosphere.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Pnina says. “I’m scared.”
Mustache nods and says that all four of them should go to Avner’s office to see if he’s okay.
Eyebrows says that they’re all getting a little carried away here and the first thing Pnina should do is call him again. Their phone conversation got cut off; things like that happen all the time. Something might be wrong with Avner, but something might be wrong with the phone company too, and they should check it out before they schlep all the way to Herzliya.
With shaking hands, Pnina punches in Avner’s office number. She puts the phone on speaker. Band-Aid thinks that’s strange. What if Avner picks up and tells her something intimate or insulting; that could be awkward.
But there’s no answer on the other end. Eyebrows says she should try Avner’s cell, so Pnina tries. A recorded announcement tells her she’s reached Avner Katzman and anyone who needs him urgently should call his secretary or text him because he doesn’t listen to messages.
Mustache doesn’t know Avner, but just from his diction he can tell he wouldn’t like him. There’s something haughty about his voice, the voice of someone who thinks everything is coming to him, a kind of noblesse oblige without the oblige.
A lot of the clientele at Mustache’s Ra’anana branch were like that, the kind of people who were offended every time the bank charged them a fee. The way they saw it, just agreeing to open an account in Mustache’s branch was already a huge gift they’d given to the bank, and how rude, not to mention ungrateful, of the bank to still charge them for a new checkbook or expect them to pay interest on overdrawn funds after they’d made such a lovely gesture.
Eyebrows asks Pnina to text Avner, but Mustache interrupts him, saying they have no more time to waste and they should all drive to his office now. Band-Aid agrees quickly; this whole business seems like an adventure to him.
The truth is that he’s not worried about Avner killing himself, because his life insurance policy doesn’t cover suicide, but now, even if Band-Aid doesn’t get home till four in the morning, he can tell his wife it had to do with work.
They all decide to ride in Mustache’s car, a new Honda Civic. In the elevator, Eyebrows still tries to convince them to split up—he and Band-Aid would take his car—but Mustache firmly vetoes the idea.
Band-Aid and Eyebrows sit in the back with their safety belts buckled like two kids on a Saturday family trip. The only thing missing is for Eyebrows to complain to Mustache, “Daddy, Band-Aid’s teasing me,” or to ask him to stop at a gas station because he has to pee-pee.
Eyebrows, he’s capable of stuff like that, a real baby. If there was a war on now, Mustache thinks, and lots of people say there is, Eyebrows is the last person he’d want watching his back. Avner is a pain in the ass, that much is clear already, but still, your patient disappears, his wife is an emotional wreck, and all you can think about is bruschetta and getting home early?
Eyebrows is texting in the back, probably to his wife, probably something sarcastic. Band-Aid is trying to sneak a look at the message, but the angle is wrong. A minute later, when Eyebrows receives an answer, he can read it, and it says, “I’m waiting for you in bed wearing only socks.”
That makes Band-Aid jealous. He has never gotten a sexy text message. The last time his wife wanted to say anything sexy to him was before texting was invented, and he doesn’t let all those women he fucks on the side text him or leave voice mail. He once read in a newspaper that even if you erase messages, the cell phone company still has copies and they can blackmail you or just screw up your life.
There’s heavy traffic all the way to Herzliya. Everyone who works in Tel Aviv is on his way home now. Traffic in the other direction is actually light.
Eyebrows can picture Avner driving home now after a completely ordinary day’s work. In that phone conversation, he’d probably wanted to tell Pnina that he loved her, that he’s sorry he’s been a little stressed-out these last few days, and also for lying about the black pills. They’re for hemorrhoids, and he was too embarrassed to tell her, so he tried to sell her a story about headaches.
And when he gets home he’ll see some pissed-off people in a caterer’s truck fighting over a parking spot with one of the neighbors and he’ll think some Buddhist thought like how many of our fights in life are about trivialities, then he’ll skip over to the elevator, and when he reaches his floor and opens the door, he’ll find a completely empty apartment and a half-empty bottle of cognac.
Pnina won’t be there and that’ll really hurt. After all, today’s his birthday. He doesn’t need gifts or parties from her, they’re past the age for that kind of crap, but is it too much to ask your life partner to be with you, just be with you on your lousy birthday? And, Eyebrows thinks, at the very same time, Pnina is in a traffic jam on the way to Herzliya. What a joke.
But Avner isn’t driving to his apartment in Ramat Aviv now. And he isn’t in his office in Herzliya either.
When the four of them finally get there, there’s no one in the office, but the security guard at the entrance says he saw Avner leave less than an hour ago. He says Avner had a gun. He knows that because Avner asked him to help cock it. Not that Avner didn’t know how to do that, he did, but something was stuck and he wanted the security guard to help him get it unstuck.
Except that the security guard wasn’t exactly the right person for the job; he was just an old Kazakh who had grown vegetables in some remote village his whole life, not Rambo. When he came to Israel he asked to work as a farmer, but the people in the agency said no, only Thais and Arabs work in farming today, and what he can do from now till he dies is retire or be a security guard.
He tells Mustache that when he couldn’t help with the gun, Avner got angry at him and even started cursing.
“It’s not nice,” the security guard says. “It’s not nice to curse a man my age. And for what? I did something wrong?”
Mustache nods. He knows that if he wants to, he can calm down the security guard too, but he doesn’t have the energy anymore. And that talk about the gun bothers him. All the way here he was thinking Pnina might be exaggerating with all that worrying of hers, but now he sees she’s really right.
“If he asked me about agriculture, I could help him with everything,” the guard says to Band-Aid. “I like to help. But about guns, I don’t know. So that is a reason to curse?”
On the way back to the car, Pnina is crying. Eyebrows says that this whole business is out of their hands now, they have to call the police.
Band-Aid butts in, claiming that the police won’t do a thing. If you don’t have connections, it takes at least a day before they start moving their asses. Not that Band-Aid has a better plan than going to the police, but Eyebrows has been getting on his nerves for a while now and the last thing he wants is to agree with him about anything.
Mustache strokes Pnina’s hair. He doesn’t have a plan either; he can’t think at all while she’s crying. Her tears flood his brain, drowning all thoughts before they can be completed. And the fact that Band-Aid and Eyebrows are arguing next to him—that doesn’t exactly help his concentration either.
“You two take a taxi. You can’t help here anymore,” he tells them.
“What about you and Pnina?” Band-Aid asks. He really doesn’t want to go, or pay for a cab, or drive all the way to Ramat Aviv with Eyebrows.
Mustache shrugs. He has no answer for that.
“He’s right,” Eyebrows says, knowing that this is his chance to take off, and besides, Mustache is really right, the fact that there are four of them doesn’t help anything. Mustache can drive to the police station with Pnina alone, he doesn’t need them to come along and hold his hand.
Band-Aid isn’t happy with the whole idea; now that there’s a gun and some action, going home would be a real bummer. If he stays he can change something, maybe save that Avner; and even if he doesn’t and he just finds his body with Mustache and Pnina, that would be an experience he’d probably remember for the rest of his life. Maybe not the greatest experience, but still, an experience.
He hasn’t had too many of those these last few years. There was the blast wave of that missile landing near their vacation
tzimmer
in the north, shattering the window, and a basketball game he went to once with a friend and the TV cameras caught him yawning. Maybe also when his son was born. Even though he wasn’t really there for it. His wife made him leave the delivery room a few minutes before because she was angry at him for answering a call from someone at work.
In short, Band-Aid isn’t hot on leaving, but he knows that if Mustache and Eyebrows are against him, he can’t insist on staying without seeming like an asshole. The only way to save the situation now is to come up with an idea. A killer idea that’ll lead to a plan and put him right in the center of things as the originator, someone useful, someone worth having around.
“We have to talk to Igal Cohavi,” he says, partly to Mustache, partly to Pnina, who’s done crying now and is just panting. “Pnina said she has his number from Avner’s BlackBerry. And if he had a dream about him that made him yell, Avner must really have him on his mind. Who knows, that whole story with the gun makes it look like he’s going to commit suicide, but what if he’s planning to kill that Cohavi instead? We should call and warn him, find out.”
As soon as Band-Aid says
commit suicide
, Pnina starts crying again, and when he says
kill
, she faints dead away.
Luckily, Mustache manages to catch her a second before her face hits the sidewalk.
Band-Aid runs over to Mustache to help, but the look on Mustache’s face makes it clear that that’s not a good idea.
Eyebrows says it’s nothing, just the pressure. Someone should get her a glass of water, sit her down on a bench, and she’ll be on her feet in no time.
“Get out of here, both of you,” Mustache yells, “get out of here now!”
Later, in the taxi, Band-Aid will tell Eyebrows that Mustache went too far; who is he to open a mouth like that to them? These days, if an officer talks to his soldiers like that, he gets a formal complaint lodged against him, so who the hell is Mustache to yell that way at two people he barely knows and who are only trying to help?
That’s what he’ll say later, in the taxi. But now, outside the office building in Herzliya Pituach, Band-Aid doesn’t say anything, and he and Eyebrows walk away, leaving Mustache and Pnina alone.
Mustache carries her to the car and puts her in the passenger seat gently, as if she were a fragile object. Pnina comes to even before they reach the car and mumbles something, her eyes half-closed, but only after he puts her down does he start to listen.
“I’m thirsty,” she says.
“I know,” Mustache says. “I don’t have any water in the car, I’m sorry. We can drive somewhere to buy a bottle. On the way here, really close by, I saw a branch of Aroma.”
“You think he’s dead already?” she asks.
“Who?” Mustache asks.
He knows who she means but pretends not to—that’s a trick meant to make her fear seem unfounded. She looks at him but doesn’t say “Avner” like he thought she would. All she does is look at him.

Other books

Seriously... I'm Kidding by Ellen DeGeneres
Chill by Stephanie Rowe
The Lifeguard by Deborah Blumenthal
Not Planning on You by Sydney Landon
The Red Umbrella by Christina Gonzalez
The Roots of the Olive Tree by Courtney Miller Santo
Cover Her Face by P. D. James