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

down, again, so I headed for the Hadera Observatory with a photographer I’d never met. This photographer told me he’d been pissed off at the paper for the past month or so. He had in his possession the picture of a soldier who’d been murdered in the territories—a blood-and-gore shot of the guy’s head skewered on a spike—and the editor was too pussy to print it. He’d said it was cheap.
    “I wonder what he’d say about David fucking Lynch,” said the photographer, taking it out on the stick shift of the rental. “Or Peckinpah—I guess he’s ‘cheap’ too. The picture I shot of that Almakayess guy doesn’t belong in a paper. It belongs in a fucking museum.”
    I tried to guess what my mother would be setting up for my birthday. The present would probably be a mini–cassette recorder. That was the thing I needed most, anyway. And for the occasion she’d bake me a carrot cake because it’s my favorite. We’d sit around and chat, my brother would drive in especially from Raanana. My dad would tell me how proud he was of me, and he’d show me a scrapbook with all the stories I’ve written pasted on the black pages. I don’t know why, but it made me think of my tenth birthday, how the whole class came, and my parents hired a magician.
    The photographer and I reached the observatory. It was freezing, and I was supposed to be talking with all the meteor buffs who were hanging around there, getting copy. The people I met told me these weren’t just meteors that move past us every one hundred years, but a group of meteors that passes by planet Earth once in seven centuries. My tape recorder wasn’t working, so I had to take everything down in longhand.
    “This is fucked up,” the photographer griped. “People on the West Bank are slaughtering each other, and here I am shooting a bunch of shortsighted dorks in parkas jerking off on a telescope. Those moon rocks better come out good.” Besides the cake, my mother would make the spaghetti I love, and carrot soup. And whenever she headed back toward the kitchen with that tired walk, I’d want to die.
    The meteors came, the way they do every seven hundred years, and the photographer said it looked like shit and would look even shittier in the paper. If they were going to take so long coming around, he said, the least they could do was make it worth our while. And I kept thinking that if there was no magician, those meteors should come to our house instead. And burn everything down. My mother, my brother, the worms in her guts, me, with my fifteen hundred words for pages 16–17. That would make everyone happy. Even my ex-girlfriend would sleep easier at night. Like that birthday with the magician, when the coins kept spilling out of my brother’s ears and mine. When my mother floated on air like a ballerina on the moon, when my father just smiled and said nothing.

Through Walls
    She had this vague look in her eyes, half disappointed, half what’s-the-difference. Like someone who realized he bought skim milk by mistake and doesn’t have the energy to take it back. “It’s really nice,” she said, putting the cactus in a corner of the room. Then she said, “Look, Yoav, I don’t know what you have in mind, it’s just important to me that you know I’m living here with someone.”
    Once, I thought it was extremely important for my girlfriend to be pretty. It was essential that she be smart and we had to be in love and all that, but I really, really wanted her to be pretty, too. I was reading a lot of comic books in those days. My hero was The Vision. He could fly, he could walk through walls. He could kill you with a look. The Vision wasn’t a person, he was an android. You couldn’t tell from looking at him, he had a girlfriend and everything. He was special. He didn’t look like anyone I’d ever met. He had a red face with a jewel in the middle of his forehead and a green suit. The Vision always wore green no matter what.
    Sometimes I’d bump