The Falafel King Is Dead

by Sara Shilo

  She tells me everything. Kobi’s the only ear she’s got. Every time I get the name of someone new. I don’t need a girl who sleeps around. She likes to pretend she’s my wife, but if I didn’t come home one day then she’d be off with someone else. Everything she does is an act. But she gets nothing out of me. She doesn’t even know where I live. Once she asked me what my dad did for a living. I told her he owned a restaurant, just to see how it felt. I’ve heard that’s what people say in Rishon. She hasn’t a clue he’s dead. Sometimes she asks when I’m going to bring the deposit, says the main office is putting pressure on her. I say, ‘My dad’s swamped with work. In another month, two months at the most, when he has time, he’ll settle up. Don’t worry about it.’ I’m not worried, after all. She told me the Model Apartment would be the last one sold because they need it until the end.

  I don’t look at her for long. I go into the room to wake her, and she gets up, pecks me on the cheek. We go into the kitchen and she says, ‘Do you want a coffee? How was work?’ I always bring her something for the house, either flowers or fruit. Happily, she takes out the plastic ones from the bowl or the vase, puts in the ones I brought her. Before we leave, I go into the bathroom, check my face carefully. I don’t lie to myself – the mirror still doesn’t show me the face I swore I would have. When we leave the apartment together, she lets me lock the door. Just holding the keys in my hand drives me mad. One day, as I was wandering, I bought the nicest keyring in the city. It’s made out of plastic, although it looks like glass, with real dried flowers inside. It took me hours to find the right one. Yafit says, ‘Yalla, Kobi, it’s late. Don’t forget I have to be back at four.’ I know I have to leave the keys in her hands, and I can’t. It gets harder every time. The keyring has become like holding a child’s hand, then having to let it go. Yafit knows how hard it is for me and tries to help. The last time she said, ‘Kobi, you have to talk to the neighbours about making a mess in the entrance hall, and you should go to the next tenants’ committee meeting. I never want to see Markovitz on the third floor after what happened on Saturday.’ I said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll talk to them.’ Then I put the keys in her hand and she left.

  I always stand there for about fifteen minutes after she’s gone. I can’t move. I’m dying to ask what the tenants’ committee is, what their meetings are like and what they talk about. It’s not as if it’s a factory. It’s only a building. What is there to talk about at building meetings? But I don’t ask. In Rishon I don’t ask questions. I just take it all in and find out afterwards. I don’t let anyone get a sense of where I’m from. I dress like someone from Rishon. You’d think I was one of them.

  I’ve already learned everything I need. Just from hanging around, from talking with Yafit. I know how to show people around the Model Apartment, too. One day an older couple came to view it while she was resting. She often goes out to late-night parties and comes into work tired. I send her to the bedroom, so she can lie down, and I watch the place for her. When the couple arrived, I knocked softly on her door, so she could get herself together, and I began to walk around with them myself. When she came out she went mad. But there’s no question I can’t answer. I know everything she knows, even how sometimes to focus on the wife and sometimes on the husband.

  Yafit said to me, ‘If one of them wants it and the other doesn’t, I don’t make the gulf between them any bigger. I take a thread and I start to repair it. I help them find common ground, what they both want. Did you know how to darn clothes? You go from one side of the hole to the other. You have to have a lot of patience, stitching in the strong cloth that won’t fall apart, and you go from side to side and up and down, until the hole has gone.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘My mum does it that way, too.’

  She said, ‘Mum-mum, Mum-mum. You’re a baby, Kobi. Don’t tell me you sit at home with her every night.’

  I took that on the chin. I see how she keeps her cool every time people leave without wanting to buy, pretending she doesn’t care. She says to me, like she’s talking about somebody she’s never met, ‘Let them go. Who needs them? After you’ve seen a hundred people view the apartment, you know who’s serious and who isn’t. I’m on to them straight away. What’s the point of arguing with the ones who are looking for everything that’s wrong with the apartment? Let them go and do up their old house. Good for them. Compared to the price of a new apartment, doing up a house is chicken feed.’

  I like it most when she says to me, ‘You’re the only person I didn’t have to show the apartment. You told me you wanted to buy without ever putting a foot in the place. You’re quite a guy. But I don’t understand: can you see through walls or something? How did you fall in love with the apartment? Through the door? Through the windows?’

  When Mordi and I went to Rishon the second time, and I wanted to go to the Model Apartment, Mordi was sure it was because of the girl. I thought he wouldn’t notice while the people on the mini-bus were getting off, so I asked him to take me to the new housing estate. He stopped at the side of the road for a heart to heart.

  ‘If it’s because of the girl there, what’s her name, Yafit? If it’s for that Yafit, I’m not taking you. You’re my friend, and I won’t let you get into my kind of nonsense. Don’t forget I was just a boy. I was playing with Fannie. I didn’t think I was playing with my life. What can you do? It was my fault and I paid for it. I’ll be paying for the rest of my life. I’m not saying … Fannie’s a good woman … It’s just my life, a life you wouldn’t think twice about. It’s the life of someone who walks into a nice shop – the one over there, see?’ He reversed a few metres and stopped in front of the shop. ‘I went in there, a fifteen-year-old boy with some money, a gift you might get once in your life. I picked up the first thing that caught my eye. I wasn’t thinking, didn’t even look around properly. The thing slipped out of my hand. What could I do? I had to pay up and go home with what I broke. Don’t look at me like that. People think I’m a joker, always laughing. They have no idea that Mordi is burning up inside every day, that he’s dying for a chance to go back to the shop just once more.’

  What could I tell him? What was there to tell him? If I said it wasn’t to see Yafit, then I’d have to say it was to see the Model Apartment. But I’m not saying a word about the apartment. Only Jamil knows about it.

  Mordi’s problem is that he doesn’t like silence, so he just carried on talking. ‘You’re not a kid, Kobi. Also, in your situation, you can’t mess around. If you’ve any sense, you’ll get a foreign wife. Look at Eliko. What a life he’s got, eh? What girl would say no to him? There’s not a girl in the town who wouldn’t have married him like a shot if he so much as looked at her, but did he take the easy option? No! He took his time, got out of the army, went to Tel Aviv for a year, where he realised he was a no one – couldn’t get a classy girlfriend – and went to Norway instead. When you get off the plane there you don’t get, “You look Moroccan to me”, “Where in Israel are you from?” or “Who’s your dad?” There, you are what you are. You’re taken at face value – judged on your body and your strength and your looks. It’s an international language. If you work as a fisherman like Eliko, you’ll make a packet in half a year. You learn the language, wander around, get a pretty girlfriend, but not too pretty, with money, but not too much money, so she won’t think it all comes from her.’

  He started the bus again. I thought he’d finished so I switched on the radio. He reached out and switched it off, interrupting a jingle mid-tune: ‘Nothing beats the heat like ice-cold Crystal.’

  ‘He’s got brains,’ he continued. ‘He picked a wife like he was picking a flower, then put her in a vase of water. To her he’s everything: father, mother, brother, friend. And most important, she knows his mother is queen bee. What more could he want? He spoils her rotten, too. She’s his princess. So everyone knows their place.’ I’m sitting in the car, thinking about how I can get to the apartment. I don’t know how I’m going to get away. ‘And best o
f all, his mother and his wife can’t talk to each other. They don’t speak each other’s language. They need him to translate the tiniest thing. Eliko’s a genius, I tell you, a genius. He’s got a girl who speaks Norwegian and a little English, and a mother who speaks Moroccan, French and Hebrew. Five languages between them and they can’t talk to each other. Eliko’s their only bridge. And he knows how to use it to get some peace and quiet.’

  I said nothing, but still he carried on talking. When we were in the same class at school, he wouldn’t say a word. I tried to remember how he was then, but it’s as if he’s not the same person. Now he can hardly keep his mouth shut. He’s always laughing, smoking, eating, spitting, talking, singing, drinking, telling jokes, whistling. He even opens letters with his teeth. I think it’s a habit from driving the bus. All day every day his hands are on the steering wheel, his eyes on the road, his feet on the accelerator, brake and clutch. He’s like a paraplegic; the only thing he can move is his mouth.

  As we drove back to town, I wondered if he’d put a foreign girl in the Model Apartment for me. As I dozed off, I heard Mordi’s words in my sleep: ‘When you’re abroad, you’ve got to make her understand that your mum and the twins are part of the package. She’s got no choice in that.’ I pictured the Model Apartment, the living room there, the big brown corduroy sofa, the shiny table and its fruit bowl decorated with camels in the desert, the large sandy-coloured ashtray. I saw in my mind’s eye the black vase with flowers on the little side table, the rug with its pattern of circles, the floor-to-ceiling curtains the colour of milky coffee, the giant flower pot with its plant the size of a tree. I moved on to the television cabinet, looked at the pictures on the wall behind the sofa. One picture is of a river with flowers floating on it. Sometimes they look like flowers, sometimes like little green boats, carrying girls in white and yellow dresses. It’s pretty either way. I don’t have to decide. Every time I go, I sit in a chair and look at it for about half an hour. It’s a picture that is always moving but it calms me, too. When I’ve finished looking at it, I close my eyes and when I open them again, the picture is all around me.

  I thought about the picture as I listened to Mordi: ‘Once I went to Eliko’s and the wife was sitting in the living room, like a china doll, feeding the baby with a bottle. His mother was bringing her tea and cookies, and Eliko was just sitting quietly, happy with his lot.’

  I transferred the foreign wife onto the sofa in the Model Apartment. She was drinking coffee, watching television, her hair the same shiny dark-blonde as the ashtray. Her clothes were patterned with circles, like the rug, but smaller. She breathed quietly and I breathed in time with her, until I fell asleep, floating on water like the flowers in the picture. I opened my eyes just as we were coming back into town. It was evening.

  5

  I walk home from the factory, thinking about Rishon and the apartment all the way. When I get to the centre of town, it’s dead, like the industrial estate. No one’s there. It’s two-thirty, so everyone’s probably having lunch. I’m thirsty and dying to get home. I glance towards the street that leads to the clinic and I see Mum. It’s definitely her, even though she has her back to me. The headscarf, the dress, the shoes. It’s her. I can’t believe it, though. It’s as if another woman has dressed in her clothes. Where is she going in the middle of an alert? Everything’s closed. I can’t whistle to my mother in the street. What goes on at home is our business, but even if there’s no one in the street, someone might be looking out of a window. I want to shout to her, but I don’t know what to shout. I haven’t called her ‘Mum’ since I turned into the twins’ dad. What would Oshri and Chaim think if I called her ‘Mum’, too? I’m trapped: I can’t call her Mum and I can’t call her Simona. If I call her Simona, people will think I’m not respecting my mother. What should I say? Simi, like Dad used to?

  At first, I used to think about it at school, that I’d call her Simi in front of Oshri and Chaim when she got home. What would she do? So every day I’d wait for her to come home, and I would try to say Simi but I couldn’t. It stuck in my throat and I couldn’t get it out. It’s like lighting a fire on the Sabbath. You think about it a hundred times, but you can’t go through with it. Even if you don’t wear a yarmulke, or if you go the beach instead of the synagogue on Saturday, your hand refuses to strike the match.

  She doesn’t have the same problem. She always calls me ‘Kobi’. But when she’s talking to Oshri and Chaim she says, ‘Tell Dad’ or ‘Go to Dad’ or ‘Be quiet when Dad’s asleep’. I look at her walking down the street, and I know I just need her name to leave my mouth once, and then it will be easy. I just can’t do it in the street. Lately, I’ve been thinking that I could start doing it in Rishon. No one knows us there. As soon we arrive in Rishon, I’ll let the house keys fall into her hand and I’ll say, ‘Congratulations, Simi, enjoy yourself.’ What will happen? Will Dad pop out of the ground and give me a slap? What could possibly happen? She’ll be so happy about the new house that she won’t realise what I’ve said.

  She walks to the end of the street. I don’t stop her. She’s carrying the bar mitzvah handbag, which she hasn’t used since Dad died. The shoulder strap is made of two white cords, attached to the bag with big gold rings. The gold clasp shines in the sunlight. She never goes out with that handbag. She goes to work with a plastic bag, and in the market she throws her purse into a basket. Why is she carrying it now? I watch her cross the street, then she disappears from view. I don’t know where she’s going. Where could she be going? Sylvie’s house is nearby – maybe she’s visiting her. I can’t think why, though. She never visits people.

  I turn around and head for home. I’m hungry. I walk up the stairs and go into the apartment. Oshri and Chaim and Etti are in their rooms having afternoon naps. I go into the kitchen, heat up the couscous, spoon it onto a plate with a big piece of pumpkin. I take a mouthful, but I can’t swallow. All I can see is her walking down the street, the handbag swinging from side to side and hitting her in the back. I can’t eat. I need the bathroom. I’ve got to stop this. I take off my jacket and shoes, go into the bathroom, and put the mop handle against the door so no one can open it from outside while I’m having a shower. I take off all my clothes, put them on the sink, draw the shower curtain, turn on the water and sit on the floor. The floor is cold and the water is boiling as it pummels my head. I lower my head, so the water hits me on the back instead. That feels good. I don’t touch myself. I can’t touch myself and think about Mum in the street at the same time. I look down. I feel like a wild animal in danger. I can’t help it. I’m in trouble. I close my eyes and focus on the foreign wife. I manage to bring her into the shower, but she’s like air. There’s nothing underneath her clothes. I try to think about Yafit then, but that doesn’t work, either. She screws up her face, tells me I’m mad, laughs at me. She’d never set foot in a house like this. Instead I picture her on the sofa at the Model Apartment, then on the bed in the bedroom, her back to me. She doesn’t take off her clothes, but throws her high heels on the floor, and rubs her bare legs together. I hold myself, moving slowly up and down, up and down, slowly, slowly. My hand is slow but my blood is rushing now and I’m breathing fast and I don’t want it ever to stop and it’s driving me crazy and I want it to stop and my hand’s still moving slow and my legs and my arms and my head are like a spring and my lips are dry and my heart is beating till I have to do it fast now and I do it fast and hard and faster and faster and I give a small shout as it shoots out of me.

  I sit there, not moving, until the hot water is finished and the cold water starts to fall. I lift my hand and turn off the shower. I get up, mop the water that has crept as far as the door, dry myself, quickly dress, and walk out. I don’t look in the mirror. I’m cold. The shirt I put on the sink has a circle of wet from the dripping tap, and the bottoms of my trousers are wet from the water on the floor. I go to the bedroom, change my clothes, then get into bed in the middle of the day, covering myself from head to toe.


  Please let her not come now. That would be all I need. What a shitty day. I don’t understand what the army gains from the alert. What difference does it make to them to ruin the day for thousands of people, turning everything upside-down and sending everyone home. An empty day to wander the streets or wait until the sky falls in. It’d be better not to tell us anything. If we’re alive, then we’re alive, and if we’re dead, then we’ll have died living a normal day. At work, at school, doing whatever we normally do. I’m angry with the army. The bed’s too hot. It smells clean. I check the sheet. Did she change it again? I don’t know what’s got into her. A week ago, she started changing it every day. How does she have the strength to take it off the bed, wash it and put a new one on every day?

  I close my eyes, remember how we were when Oshri and Chaim were babies. For a year and a half, in this bed, we fenced them in. Two baby lambs between us, she’d say. We were neither properly asleep nor properly awake. Once I thought she was looking at me, so I said something and she replied in her sleep. Another time she was feeding both of them at the same time, and I thought she’d fallen asleep, when suddenly she started talking: ‘In Morocco, my Aunt Tamu had a snake in the house. When she breastfed the baby on one side, the snake would feed from the other side.’ I don’t know if I believed those stories about the female snake, a pet in her aunt’s house where Mum grew up. The snake lived in a basket and ate sehina with them on the Sabbath. And the house was made of mud and straw. ‘One day,’ she told me, ‘we came home and we couldn’t get in because the snake had wrapped itself around the doorknob. We found out afterwards that there was a viper inside. She’d saved us.’ She had a thousand stories about snakes in Morocco, a place where there was a market of snakes. But she’d only ever tell the stories in bed. I don’t know why. Maybe she was dreaming about the snakes.