The Girl on the Fridge: Stories by Etgar Keret Read Free Book Online Page A

was lousy, and that if the cooks thought they were getting furlough, they could just forget it, because this was the army and not some fucking summer camp. I stuffed in a folded Kleenex and tried lying on my back without breathing, to keep it from leaking. But my whole body hurt, and the blood was gushing out of me, sounding like a broken sewage pipe. It leaked over my hips, and my legs, and splashed over my stomach. And the tissue turned into a wad that stuck to my hair and my skin.
    That night I dreamed that I was a forty-year-old woman and that I was disgusted with myself, with my life. With not having a driver’s license, with not knowing English, with never having been abroad. The blood that had dripped all over me was beginning to harden, and it felt like a kind of curse. Like my period would never end.
    That night I dreamed that I was a forty-year-old woman and that I fell asleep and dreamed I was a twenty-seven-year-old man who gets his wife pregnant, and then finishes medical school and forces her and the baby to join him when he goes to do his residency abroad. They suffer terribly. They don’t know a word of English. They don’t have any friends, and it’s cold outside, and snowing. And then, one Sunday, I take them on a picnic and spread out the blanket on the lawn, and they put out the food they’ve brought. And after we finish eating, I take out a hunting rifle and I shoot them like dogs. The policemen come to my house. The finest detectives in the Bloomington police force try to make me confess. They put me in this room, they yell at me, they won’t let me smoke, they won’t let me go to the bathroom, but I don’t crack. And my husband beside me in bed keeps yelling, “I don’t give a goddamn how you did it before. Around here I’m the commander now!”

A No-Magician Birthday
    In November ’93, Dov Genichovsky announced the new municipal tax collection ordinance on national radio. My mother, who even at fifty-three was still a raving beauty, had begun to drag her feet across the floor. Her smile stayed the same, she felt the same when you hugged her, she still had plenty of strength in her arms, but now when she walked she shuffled her feet. If you looked hard at the X-rays, you could spot black worms drilling into her kidneys. My birthday was coming up. The date’s very easy to remember: December 21, 12/21. I knew she’d be planning something special, like every other year.
    The winter of ’93 was probably the coldest winter of my life. I was living on my own, sleeping in sweats and socks, and every night, I’d make sure to tuck the top deep into my pants so if I turned in my sleep, my back wouldn’t be exposed. The Channel Two project had just fallen through, the paper wouldn’t give me a raise, and my ex-girlfriend was going around town telling everyone I was gay and impotent. I’d wake up in the middle of the night with my armpits reeking of decay. I’d call her, and as a precaution I’d put my hand over the receiver even when I was dialing—and when she’d answer I’d hang up. I was convinced I was getting back at her, big time.
    We put off my birthday by a day, because on the evening of the twentieth the paper sent me to an observatory to bring back a thousand words about a meteor belt that traveled past us only every hundred years. I asked if I could write about the settler from Hebron who’d been hit in the head and turned into a vegetable, but they told me it wasn’t my beat. My beat was human interest. Every week I had to come up with a human interest feature for pages 16–17 of the supplement, so that anyone who’d made it through the security-crime-finance-politics stories would get a bonus: a world convention of veterinarians, skateboard championship of the universe, something upbeat. I kept pushing for the settler who’d gotten whacked on the head with a brick. I identified with him. His project had fallen through, too. His prospects had dimmed. But my editor turned me