THAT GIRL EMERGED

That girl emerged from her lover's soul – not from any rib or bone. And from her heart comes honey. Amazing! How could honey come from stone?

Todoros Abulafia (1247-after1300) trans. Peter Cole

heads. He would have picked them up on the Causses one day, in the warm wind, with the gorse popping, the thyme sweating oil and the lichen-covered boulders soaking up the sun. “What kind of flowers are they?” “I don’t know, Eleanor”. His answer had an exasperated ring. The soft atoms floundered back and came up against her hard voice. Told you so. She accepted her humiliation: there was too much hanging in the air this evening to go filling it with irrelevant questions. But it still rankled. It was the way he said her name. As if he was a teacher, and she was a pupil. That wasn’t how it was. He might be twice as old, but she was, at least, twice as arrogant. Although that just made him laugh. Not once had she managed to disconcert him, even when her rudeness to him had gone far beyond what might be acceptable as a joke. A white stone rose out of the darkness. He turned off the tarmac onto a dirt track between rows of vines. She sat up straighter and looked around. She had no idea where he was taking her. He switched off the headlights, then the engine and they coasted for a few hundred metres before coming to a halt in front of a straggling line of trees growing along the bank of an irrigation ditch. He opened the door and got out while she was still sitting there blankly, wondering what was going on. Trees. Of course. On va voir s’il y a des cerises. Cherries. Not in a bowl on the table at home under an electric light bulb. But here, stolen from the trees in the night air. He disappeared into the darkness, oblivious to her. It didn’t seem like he was being romantic. And yet, all the ingredients were there. All she had to do was mix them together. Vineyards. June. Cherries. The full moon, which she had just

THAT DAY WHILE I HAD HIM

That day while I had him on my knees he saw himself there in my eyes and tried to trick me. He kissed them ever so lightly – kissing himself, not me...

Yehuda Halevi (c.1075-1141) trans. Peter Cole

34 | The Liberal | Autumn 2007

noticed, hanging around overhead, ready to come in on cue when the rhyme was needed. No. There was something too self-consciously perfect about it. Too French. Or, at any rate, too like the France which had been so resolutely colonised by the English middle classes that they had made it seem cosy and predictable, like everything they touched. She tried to picture what the other linguists in her year would be doing now. The most romantic of them in Eastern Europe, somewhere bleak and improbable, thawing out; or in a mountain-locked war zone, in the Andes: wherever they were most likely to be kidnapped and held hostage. Because romance had everything to do with danger and nothing to do with safety. But the vineyards, the moon, just happened to be there. They had nothing to do with whatever it was between her and him. Or with France. She had taken a wrong turning and ended up stranded out here, in his dimension, where time was measured in Parsecs and space was infinite and black. Hers was earth time: new and greedy. His was aeonial and biding. There was a lightness at the back of her head, coming from his open door. He had opened the hatch and she was feeling a new pull, the elation and terror of endless space. She got out of the car and walked across the cratered dirt and stones, hearing her feet crunch in the silence. The cicadas counted as silence, they made silvery white noise, cold and dry and bright. It went well with the stars. A short moon shadow ran eagerly ahead of her. The cherry trees were on the other side of the ditch. As she jumped over, she slipped. She righted herself and looked up to see if he had noticed. He was standing a little way off, pressed against one of the trees, pulling back dark leaves to expose swelling bunches. He looked at her as if she was just another tree in the darkness. She wondered if he was picking cherries for her too, his hands were full of fruit. But he moved further off, and squatted to eat privately, possessively, like an animal, half-turned away from her. She collected a few bunches for herself, the flesh cool in her warm palms. They were on the edge, deep red and some had split. They had to be eaten, by her or the birds. There were so many, their ripeness pulling down the stems. Her mind lifted with wonder, to think of cherries growing on this barren moonlit planet. Picking her way carefully over the stones, she went and squatted opposite him to share what she had decided ought to be a romantic moment after all. Because of the moon. And because nothing, not even gravity, was holding her back. Lifting her face, she held out her hands to him, dark and red with fruit and shadow. He looked up without smiling and one by one, spat his cherry stones straight at her. He bit into each cherry, swallowed the soft, red, yielding flesh, sucked the useless hard stone, and spat it out at her with force.

Olivia McCannon is currently completing a new translation of Balzac’s ‘Old Goriot’ for Penguin Classics.
NE W S HORT F I CTI ON

The Girl on the Refrigerator

byEtgar Keret

Alone HEtold her that he once had a girlfriend who liked to be alone. And that was very sad, because they were a couple, and couple, by definition, means together. But mostly she preferred to be alone. So once he asked her, “Why? Is it something in me?”. And she said, “No, it has nothing to do with you, it’s something in me, from my childhood”. He didn’t really get it, the childhood thing, so to understand it a tiny bit better, he tried to find something similar in his own childhood, but he couldn’t find anything. The more he thought about it, the more his childhood seemed like a hole in someone else’s tooth - unhealthy, but not too annoying, at least not to him. And that girl, who liked to be alone, kept hiding from him, and all because of her childhood. It really pissed him off. Finally, he told her, “Either you explain it to me, or we stop being a couple”. She said okay, and they stopped being a couple.

Ogette Is Sympathetic “That’s very sad”, Ogette said. “Sad and at the same time, moving”. “Thanks”, Nahum said and took a sip of his juice. Ogette saw that he was crying a little and she didn’t want to upset him, but in the end, she couldn’t resist, and she asked, “So to this day you don’t know

what it was in her childhood that made her leave you?”. “She didn’t leave me”, Nahum corrected her, “We broke up.” “Whatever you say”, Ogette said. “It’s not ‘whatever I say’”, Nahum insisted, “It’s my life. For me, at least, those details are important”. “And to this day, you don’t know what event in her childhood started all this?”, Ogette continued. “It wasn’t an event that started all this”, Nahum corrected her again, “It was you”. And after a short silence, he added, “Yes, something to do with the refrigerator”.

CHIASMUS FOR A DOE

In my lap – a doe, and in her lap – a harp; she plays it with her fingers, and kills me with her heart.

Sa’adia Ibn Danaan (mid-fifteenth century–1505) trans. Peter Cole

Not Nahum’s When Nahum’s girlfriend was little, her parents had no patience for her because she was little and full of energy, and they were already old and worn-out. Nahum’s girlfriend tried to play with them, talk to them, but that only

annoyed them more. They didn’t have the strength. They didn’t even have enough strength to tell her to shut her mouth. So instead, they used to hoist her up, sit her on the refrigerator and go to work. Or wherever they had to go. The refrigerator was very high, and Nahum’s girlfriend couldn’t get down. And so it happened that she spent most of her childhood on top of the refrigerator. It was a very happy childhood. While other people had the crap beaten out of them by their big brothers, Nahum’s girlfriend sat on the edge of the refrigerator, sang to herself and drew little pictures in the layer of dust that had collected there. The view from up there was very beautiful, and her bottom was nice and warm. Now that she was older, she missed that time, that alone time, very much. Nahum understood how sad it made her, and once he even tried to fuck her on top of the refrigerator, but that didn’t work. “That’s an awfully beautiful story”, Ogette whispered, brushing Nahum’s hand with hers. “Yes”, Nahum mumbled, pulling his arm back. “An awfully beautiful story, but not mine”.

Etgar Keret’s latest collection of stories, Missing Kissinger, is published by Chatto. His film ‘Jellyfish’ won the Camééra d'Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Chatto & Windus

‘Etgar Keret’s short stories are fierce, funny, full of energy and insight, and at the same time they are often deep, tragic and very moving.’ Amos Oz

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