The Girl on the Fridge: Stories (12 page)

Right to his face she said it, on the synagogue steps. The moment they’d walked out, even before he’d had a chance to put the yarmulke back in his pocket. She made him let go of her hand and told him he was an animal, he’d better not talk that way to her ever again, dragging her out of there like she was some kind of property. And she said it out loud, too. People could hear. People he worked with, even the rabbi, but that didn’t stop her from raising her voice. He should’ve slapped her right then and there, should’ve shoved her right down the stairs. But like an idiot, he waited till they got home. And then, when he beat her, she seemed so taken aback. Like a dog that you hit for shitting on the carpet when so much time has passed the shit’s already dry. He kept at it, smacking her across the face, and she shouted, “Menachem, Menachem!” as if the person beating her was some stranger and she was crying out for him to come and save her. “Menachem, Menachem!” She cringed in the corner. “Menachem, Menachem.” And he gave her a kick in the ribs.

When he laid off and lit a cigarette, he noticed the spot of blood on his synagogue shoes, and he looked at her again and saw a red crescent on the dress he’d bought her for the holidays. The crescent kept growing fuller. She must have been bleeding from the nose. He pulled up a dining room chair and sat down with his back to her, facing the electric clock. Behind him he could hear her crying. He could hear the moans as she kept trying to get back on her feet, the thumps as she fell back into her corner. The hands of the electric clock were moving at an alarming speed, and he loosened his belt and tilted his body forward.

“I’m sorry,” he heard her whimper from the corner. “I’m sorry, Menachem. I didn’t mean it, really, forgive me.” And he forgave her and so did God, and the timing was truly perfect, with only thirty seconds to go.

The most patient man in the world was sitting on a bench next to Dizengoff Center. No one was sitting on the bench beside him, not even pigeons. The perverts in the public toilets were making such loud, weird noises that you couldn’t ignore them. The most patient man in the world was holding a newspaper in his hand, pretending to read.

He wasn’t really reading, he was waiting for something. No one knew what.

A German tabloid offered ten thousand euros to anyone who found out what the man was waiting for, but no one did. In the exclusive interview he agreed to give to a CNN correspondent, the most patient man in the world said he was waiting for lots of things, but that wasn’t the place to list them. “So where
is
the place?” the persistent journalist asked, but the most patient man in the world didn’t answer, he just waited quietly for the next question. He waited and waited and waited, until finally they cut back to the studio.

People from all over the world made pilgrimages to ask what his secret was. Hyperactive brokers, hysterical students, artists desperate for their promised fifteen minutes of fame. The most patient man in the world didn’t know exactly what he was supposed to tell them. “Shave,” he always ended up saying, “shave with hot water. It’s very soothing.” And all the men would rush right off to their bathrooms and nick their faces in a thousand places. Women said he was a chauvinist. They said his macho answer automatically denied every woman her right to attain a state of calm. Women also found him very ugly. Laurie Anderson actually wrote a song about him. “A Very Patient, Ugly Chauvinist” was the name of the song. “His biological clock is taking its time” was the chorus.

The most patient man in the world fell asleep on the bench with his eyes half closed. In his dreams, meteors crashed into the ground with the faint sound of buses hitting their brakes, hideous volcanoes erupted with the sound of perverts flushing toilets, and the girl he’d loved for many years told her husband she was leaving him with the cooing of birds. Four meters away, two pigeons were trying to peck out each other’s eyes for no reason. They weren’t even fighting over food. “Shave,” the man said in his sleep. “Shave with hot water. It’s very soothing.”

Weismann had a rasping, dry cough, the hack of a tubercular, and the whole way there he kept coughing, and spitting into some tissues.

“It’s the cigarettes,” he apologized. “They’re killing me.” When we got to the Erez roadblock, we parked at the gas station. There was a taxi waiting for us there with local plates. “Did you remember to bring the forms?” Weismann asked and spat a yellow gob on the sidewalk.

I nodded.

“How about the powers of attorney?”

I said yes, those too.

We didn’t have to tell the driver what to do. He knew to take us straight to Fadid’s office. It was already late May, but the streets were flooded. Must have been some problem with the sewers.

“Shitty road,” the driver complained. “Every three week, tires finish.” I figured he was getting ready to hike the fare.

We walked into Fadid’s office, and he shook our hands. “Let me introduce you,” Weismann said. “This is Niv, an associate in our firm. He’s here to learn.”

“Keep your eyes open, Niv,” Fadid said in perfect Hebrew. “Keep your eyes peeled and look around. You’ll learn plenty.” Fadid led us into his office. “You sit here,” he told Weismann, pointing to the leather chair behind the desk. “And this”—he pointed to a small wooden stool in the corner—“this is for the interpreter. I’ll be back at two. Make yourselves at home.”

I sat down on the leather couch and laid out the forms in five separate piles on the low table beside me. Meanwhile, the interpreter showed up. “There are five cases,” he said. His name was Mas’oud or something like Mas’oud. “Two eye, two leg, one ball.” From the way Weismann had described it, it wouldn’t take more than twenty minutes each to take the depositions, which meant in an hour and a half we’d be heading back.

Weismann asked the usual questions through the interpreter, lighting each cigarette with the last. I had them sign the medical secrecy waivers and powers of attorney, and explained to each of them through the interpreter that if they won we’d take a cut from fifteen to twenty percent, depending. One of them, a half-blind woman, signed with her thumb, like in the movies. The guy who got it in the balls asked in Hebrew, when I’d finished explaining, if the Security Service guy who kicked his balls in would wind up in jail if we won. “I know his name. I say it in court,” he said. “Steve,
in’al abu
, that was his name.”

The interpreter told him off in Arabic for talking Hebrew. “If you want to talk with them yourself,” he said, “you don’t need me. I can wait outside.”

I know a little Arabic. Took it in high school.

An hour and ten minutes later we were back in the taxi already, and on our way to the Erez roadblock. Fadid had invited us for lunch, but Weismann said we were in a hurry. Weismann didn’t stop coughing and spitting into his tissues the whole way back.

“It’s no good, mister,” the driver told him. “You need doctor. My sister husband he doctor. Live near here.”

“No thanks, I’m okay. I’m used to it.” Weismann tried to smile at him. “It’s all on account of the cigarettes. They’re doing me in.”

We hardly spoke the whole way home. I was thinking about my five o’clock basketball practice. “In three of the cases, we stand a chance,” Weismann said. “The one with the balls, forget it. Three years he spent in jail after the interrogation, not once did he say he’d been injured. How can you prove they did it to him three and a half years ago?”

“But you’re taking him on all the same?”

“Yeah,” Weismann mumbled. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t take him on. I just said we don’t stand a chance.” He kept fiddling with the radio dial, trying to pick up something, but all he got was static. After that he tried humming something, but a few seconds later he got bored, lit up, and started coughing again. Then he asked me once more if I’d remembered to have them sign everything.

I said I had.

“You know what.” He turned to me suddenly. “I should have been born black. Every time I come out of there I tell myself: ‘Weismann, you should have been born black.’ Not here. Someplace far away. Like New Orleans.” He opened the car window and flicked out the cigarette. “Billy, that’s what my name should have been. Billy White. That’s a good name for a singer.” He cleared his throat as though he were about to start singing, but the moment he inhaled, he started up coughing and wheezing.

“See this?” he said when he was finished and held the used tissue, the one he’d coughed into, up close to my face. “Now here’s a little something that I made up all by myself. It’s the real thing, isn’t it? Billy White and the Dismals, that’s what they’d call us. We’d do nothing but blues.”

In the summer of ’76, they remodeled our house and added another bathroom. That was my mother’s private bathroom, with green tiles, white curtains, and a kind of small drawing board she could put on her knees to do crossword puzzles on. The door of this new bathroom had no lock because it was my mother’s and no one else was allowed to go in anyway. We were very happy that summer. My sister, who was best friends with Rina Mor, that year’s Miss Universe, married a nice South African dentist who’d immigrated to Israel, and they moved to Raanana. My older brother finished the army and got a job as a security guard for El Al. My father made a pile on oil-drilling stocks and became a partner in an amusement park. And I made them all bring me presents.

“Different people—different dreams,” that’s what was written on the American catalog I picked my surprises from. It had everything from a gun that shot potatoes to life-size Spider-Man dolls. And every time my brother flew to America, he let me pick one thing from the catalog. The kids in the neighborhood looked up to me because of my new toys, and they listened to me about everything. On Friday afternoons, my whole class used to go to the park to play baseball with the bat and glove my brother brought me. And I was the biggest champion, because Jeremy, my sister’s husband, taught me to throw curveballs that no one could lay a bat on.

Terrible things could happen around me, but they never even touched me. In the Baltic Sea, three sailors ate their captain; the mother of a kid in my school had a boob cut off; Dalit’s brother was killed in a training accident in the army. Anat Moser, the prettiest girl in class, said yes, she’d be my girlfriend, and she didn’t even talk it over with the other girls. My brother said he was just waiting for my birthday to take me on a trip to America as a gift. Meanwhile, on Saturdays, he’d drive me and Anat to the amusement park in his Swedish car and I’d tell the park operators that I was Schwartz’s son and they’d let us go on all the rides for free.

On holidays, we’d go to visit Grandpa Reuven in Zichron, and when he shook my hand, he’d squeeze it so hard I cried. Then he’d yell at me that I was spoiled and needed to learn to shake hands like a man. He’d always tell my mother she was bringing me up all wrong, that she wasn’t preparing me for life. Mom would always apologize and say that actually, she
was
preparing me, it was just that life today wasn’t anything like life used to be. That today, you didn’t have to know how to make Molotov cocktails from alcohol and nails or how to kill for bread. It was enough to learn how to enjoy life. But Grandpa wouldn’t let it go. He’d pinch my ear and whisper that if you want to know how to enjoy life, you also have to know what sadness is. Otherwise, it isn’t worth a damn. I tried, but life was so beautiful then, that summer of ’76, that no matter how hard I worked at it, I couldn’t be sad about anything.

“Asthma,” “Atonement,” “Cheerful Colors,” “Cramps,” “Crazy Glue,” “Gaza Blues,” “Goody Bags,” “Gulliver in Icelandic,” “Happy Birthday to You,” “Hat Trick,” “Journey,” “Monkey Say, Monkey Do,” “Moral Something,” “My Best Friend,” “The Night the Buses Died,” “A No-Magician Birthday,” “Nothing,” “Painting,” “Quanta,” “Raising the Bar,” “The Real Winner of the Preliminary Games,” “Sidewalks,” “Slimy Shlomo Is a Homo,” “So Good,” “Vacuum Seal,” and “World Champion” were translated by Miriam Shlesinger.

“Alternative,” “The Backgammon Monster,” “Boomerang,” “An Exclusive,” “Freeze!,” “The Girl on the Fridge,” “Knockoff Venus,” “Loquat,” “Myth Milk,” “No Politics,” “Not Human Beings,” “One Hundred Percent,” “On the Nutritional Value of Dreams,” “Patience,” “The Summer of ’76,” “Terminal,” “Through Walls,” “Vladimir Hussein,” “Without Her,” and “Yordan” were translated by Sondra Silverston.