The Girl on the Fridge: Stories (8 page)

“You’re sure this isn’t the way?” Daniel asked haltingly. “I see some lights in the distance.” The scout kept walking in silence, and Daniel, as if having no choice, trudged behind him. This stillness droning on around them was unnerving, oppressive. He would have given a lot for the scout to say something. But the scout marched on wordlessly, and Daniel found himself impelled to speak. “My parents wanted me to study law or accounting, you know. My grades were pretty good. I got into this prelaw program, no problem,” Daniel said, trying to make eye contact with the scout, whose gaze, however, remained fixed on the ground. Warily he examined every track as if it led to a snare.

“But I asked myself, Why should I be buried under a pile of books, in the fluorescent basement of some library,” Daniel went on, although by then he knew he wasn’t about to get an answer. “I’m still young. The world’s my oyster, and it’s full of things nobody’s ever seen. Places just waiting for me to show up. Like here, for instance.” Daniel held out his arms, as if trying to embrace the strange landscape around him.

“Not quite here yet. Pretty soon.” They were the first words the scout had spoken.

“Sorry,” Daniel said, more softly. “I got carried away.”

On they walked. To Daniel, the silence was heavier than the rucksack on his back. He paused to wipe the sweat from his forehead and found himself speaking again, this time in a whisper. “Two months after I got out of the army I went to Thailand, to look for all those hidden places, you know.” He stopped and sighed. The scout didn’t even turn around. “Everywhere I went I found trekkers, like me, each convinced he was on his way to discovering a new continent.” He shook his head as if in disbelief. “Every hostel, every waterfall, every palm tree was teeming with tourists: Swedes, Germans, Israelis. Especially Israelis. All looking for virgin territory, and making do in the end with a game of cards and a few rounds of gin and orange juice. The Far East, it’s one big campground.”

The scout paused, raised his hand to his neck, and froze. At first, Daniel thought the scout was mulling over what he’d just said. But once the scout had studied the stars, he resumed walking, leading Daniel across the smooth, open sands. “Then I went to South America,” Daniel continued. “There I thought I stood a chance of finding the place. Some new place to call my own. But there, too, everywhere I went there were people smoking Camels, always slapping you on the back, asking you where in Israel you’re from, what unit you served in. I couldn’t take it anymore. I grabbed my rucksack and headed into the jungle, just like that. No compass, no map, no guide. I let myself get lost. For days I just wandered. I didn’t give a single thought to food, mosquitoes, snakes, anything. I was alone. And then I reached a clearing in the forest. In the center there was this enormous tree, standing all on its own. I decided that this clearing would be my home. That would be where I’d live. Just me and the tree. ‘I’m Robinson Crusoe,’ I told the tree. ‘Who are you?’ It didn’t answer.” Daniel chuckled. “Just like you. Maybe it preferred life on its own, without me. I circled it a few times, touched its trunk, its branches. Next to the base of the trunk I discovered an almost invisible scar. I bent down to check it out. Imagine my shock. Someone had carved something with a penknife. The bark had grown back and tried to conceal it, but I could make out all of the words:
NIR DEKEL, AUGUST
5,
PARATROOPERS KICK ASS
. I hoisted up my rucksack and started walking, looking around me at the jungle. The tree limbs seemed to be slapping me on the back, the crocodiles winked and wanted to know where I’d done my ser-vice, the scorpions were about to pour me a screwdriver. The entire jungle suddenly looked like one big practical joke Nir Dekel had set up for me. I knew I’d wind up in the city eventually. The world had become so small you couldn’t get lost. Not if you were an amateur. I actually burst into tears.”

Daniel took a long breath, letting the sea air into his lungs. “And that’s pretty much it. I came back home, retook the boards, and registered for class.” He glanced at his watch. “I had four days to go when they told me about you, how you get people lost, how you’re a pro—”

“We’re here,” the scout announced and came to a halt.

Daniel looked around him, confused. “Here? But you can see the lights from here. You can hear the people. Look, there’s the power station,” he said, pointing at the lit-up chimney.

“It may seem close, but nobody has ever come here,” the scout declared firmly, crouching to take a close look at the tar-soaked earth. “And nobody ever will.”

“So close to Tel Aviv and yet nobody will ever come here? How is that possible?”

“Fucked if I know.” The scout shrugged and gave Daniel a wink. “Maybe they’re all in Thailand.”

“And what about me? I’m bound to find the way back to Tel Aviv from here.”

“You could try.” The scout smiled, then he straightened up, turned his back to Daniel, and moved off. His light steps left no tracks in the sand. The next thing Daniel knew, he was gone.

And she loved a man who was made of nothing. A few hours without him and right away she’d be missing him with her whole body, sitting in her office surrounded by polyethylene and concrete and thinking of him. And every time she’d boil water for coffee in her ground-floor office, she’d let the steam cover her face, imagining it was him stroking her cheeks, her eyelids, and she’d wait for the day to be over, so she could go to her apartment building, climb the flight of stairs, turn the key in the door, and find him waiting for her, naked and still between the sheets of her empty bed.

Nothing in the world would have made her happier than to make love with him all night long, tasting his non-lips once again, feeling the uncontrollable quiver run through him, the emptiness spread through her body. He wasn’t her first. There’d been many before him, sweating and moaning in her bed, squeezing her till it hurt, their fleshy tongues in her mouth, in her throat, almost choking her. Different men, made of different ingredients: of flesh and blood, of fears, of their fathers’ credit cards, of treachery, of longing for someone else…But that was then. Now she had him. Sometimes, after they made love, they’d go for a walk in the night-soaked streets. Holding each other, sharing a single poncho, oblivious to the winds and the rain, as if inured to their touch. He took no notice of what people were saying around them, and she pretended not to hear either. None of the gossip or the nastiness could touch their world.

She knew her parents weren’t happy about her beloved, even though they hid it. She once even overheard her father whisper to her mother, “Better than an Arab—or a junkie.” Of course they’d have been happier if she were going out with a gifted doctor instead, or a young lawyer. Parents like to take pride in their daughter, and that’s hard to do with a man who’s made of nothing. Even when the man made her happy, filling her life with meaning, more than any man made of something could.

They could spend hours together, wrapped in each other’s arms, never saying a word, lying there naked with no change in their love or their position. And when the clock began urging her out of bed, she’d skip her morning coffee, skip washing her face or brushing her hair, for just a few more minutes of being together, with him. And all the way down the stairs, to the bus stop, to where she worked, she’d wait for the minute she’d turn the key in the door, and there he’d be. She hadn’t the slightest doubt or apprehension. She knew that this love would never betray her. What could possibly let her down when she opened the door? An empty apartment? A numbing silence? An absence between the sheets of the rumpled bed?

They shot him like a dog, and me they slapped. That’s how it always is—they shoot the men like dogs, and the women get slapped. “I don’t have the heart to kill you even though you deserve it,” said their leader, who, oddly enough, was the shortest one. “We won’t even rape you,” he added, and from the look in his eyes, I could tell that he considered himself a prince, but instead of thanking him for his courtesy, I started to cry. It’s tough being a woman, what with all those slaps and all the men you lose. When you’re a man, they take you out of bed in the middle of the night once, drag you into the street, and bam, it’s over. But when you’re a woman, it never ends. “It’s natural to cry,” he said, stroking my head, “it’s the shock.” And then he said again, “We won’t even rape you. Even though you deserve it.” Then they went away. It wasn’t because they were afraid, men aren’t afraid of anything. Maybe I wasn’t grateful enough. I took the shovel out of the tool chest and dug a hole where the ground was soft. It took me three hours, and I got calluses on my hands. It’s hard to dig a hole big enough for a person, especially a huge one like my man. I lugged his body to the hole, but I didn’t have the strength left to cover him with sand, so I covered him with our flowered quilt and put the espresso machine we got from the kids for our last anniversary on top so the quilt wouldn’t blow away. It’s an old trick; my mother did the same when my father died. Then I went into the kitchen and took a carton of myth milk out of the refrigerator, drank two glasses, and gave a little hiccup, a woman’s hiccup. When he hiccuped, the whole house used to shake. “Don’t be a pig,” I’d tell him, and he’d laugh. I went to bed, but it was hard to fall asleep without a man, even harder without the quilt on such a cold night. When I finally did, I dreamed they dragged us out of the house in the middle of the night and shot me like a dog, and for once, he was the one who got stuck with the slap and the “we won’t rape you” and the grave and the myth milk, and it got me so excited that I woke up all wet, the way only a woman can.

I was waiting on the bench at the bus stop the night they died. Checking the punch marks in my bus pass, trying to figure out what they reminded me of. One of the holes looked like a rabbit. That one was my favorite. The others, no matter how long I stared at them, just kept looking like holes.

“An hour we’ve been waiting,” an old man grumbled, half asleep. “Longer. The bus company, those two-faced fucks, when it comes to sponging off the government, they show up in no time, but when you’re waiting for them to come—you could die first.” Having said his piece, the old man adjusted his beret and went back to sleep. I smiled at his shut eyes and went back to staring at the holes, waiting patiently for something to change.

A sweaty young man flew past. Hardly breaking stride, he turned to us and gave a hoarse, breathless shout: “No point waiting. The buses are dead. All dead.” He dashed off and had run quite a ways before he clutched his side with his left hand and turned to look back at us, as if remembering something important he’d forgotten to say. The tears on his cheeks glistened like beads of sweat. “All of them—all dead,” he wailed, then turned back and he was gone.

The old man awoke with a start. “What does he want, the
meshugener
?”

“Nothing,” I mumbled. I picked my backpack up off the ground and headed down the street.

“Hey there, young man, where are you going?” I heard the old man shouting behind me.

By the old chocolate factory there was a couple waiting, playing one of those finger games whose rules I’ve never figured out. “Hey,” the guy called out to me. The pad of the girl’s thumb was touching his outstretched palm. “Any idea what’s up with the buses?”

I shrugged.

“Maybe there’s a strike,” I heard him tell her. “You’d better stay over, it’s already pretty late.”

The strap of my backpack was cutting into my back, and I straightened it out. All the way down the main drag the bus stops stood deserted. Everyone seemed to have given up and gone home. There hadn’t been any outcry over the fact that the buses never came. I continued south.

On Ben-Gurion Avenue I saw my first corpse. It was lying on its back, badly bent out of shape. A thick smear of black brake oil covered the fragmented windshield. I knelt down and wiped at the oil with my shirtsleeve. It was a number 42. I’d never actually taken that one. I think it runs from Petah Tikva, or somewhere around there. A bus, gutted and prone in the middle of Ben-Gurion Avenue. I didn’t quite know how to account for the sadness I felt.

At the central bus station there were hundreds scattered all over the place, rivulets of fuel oozing out of their disemboweled shells, their shattered innards strewn on the black and silent asphalt. Dozens of people were sitting around, downcast, just waiting to hear the purr of a motor, their tearful eyes scouring the landscape in search of a spinning wheel. Someone in a bus inspector’s hat was walking through the crowd, trying to offer some hope: “It’s probably just here. There’ve got a whole fleet in Haifa. They’ll be here any minute. Everything’s going to be fine.” But everybody—including him—knew that none had been spared.

People were saying that the
malabi
vendor had set fire to his cart, that the cassettes at the music stands had cracked in agony, that soldiers who’d been waiting at the station with bloodshot eyes weren’t smiling as they walked back home. Even they were sad. I found an abandoned bus stop bench, lay down, and closed my eyes. The punch marks in my ticket still looked like ordinary holes.

The guy on TV said the military court gave the death sentence to the Arab who’d killed the girl soldier, and lots of people came on TV to talk about it, and because of that the news went on till ten-thirty and they didn’t show
Moonlighting
. It made Dad so angry he lit his pipe in the house and it stank. He’s not supposed to do that because it stunts my growth. He yelled at Mom that because of her and the other lunatics who voted Likud the country was becoming just like Iran. And Dad said we were going to pay for it, and that it was eroding our moral something—I don’t remember the word—whatever that means, and that the U.S. wouldn’t put up with it either.

The next day, they talked to us about it at school, and Tziyyon Shemesh said that if you hang a guy he pops a boner, like in porn, so Tzilla, our homeroom teacher, kicked him out. Then she said different people feel different ways about the death penalty, and no matter what arguments you make for it or against it, people would have to decide in their heart. And Tzachi the retard, who was left back two times, started laughing and said the Arabs would have to decide in their heart after it stopped beating, so Tzilla kicked him out too. And she said she wouldn’t listen to any more nonsense and she was just going to teach us our regular subjects, and she got back at us with a ton of homework.

After school, the big kids had a fight about how if you hang somebody and he dies, it’s because he chokes or the rope breaks his neck. Then they started betting cartons of chocolate milk and caught a cat and they hanged it from the basketball hoop, and the cat was screaming, and in the end its neck really did break. But Mickie’s a cheap-ass, and he wouldn’t pay for the chocolate milk, and he said it was because Gabi had jerked on the cat and that he wanted a do-over with a new cat that nobody touched. But everyone knew it was because he was a cheap-ass, so he had to pay. Then Nissim and Ziv said they should beat up Tziyyon Shemesh because he was a liar because the cat didn’t get a boner. And Michal—she’s the prettiest girl in the school, probably—came by and she said we were all disgusting and like animals, and I barfed but not because of her.