The Nimrod Flipout: Stories (13 page)

Ten Times More

Once or twice a day, Himme would snoop on his ex-wife, peeking into her new apartment from up in one of the trees across the street. Most of the time, she wasn’t doing anything special. Just the kind of stuff he knew about from when they were married: TV, lots of books, watching a movie with Yael. After her shower, she’d stare at her figure in the mirror, pinching herself all over, and making cute faces. The truth was that it was very easy to like her during this ceremony, and Himme wondered if this was something new or maybe she’d always done it but he just hadn’t noticed, because he’d only started snooping on her after they broke up. Maybe, he thought, there are lots of things about her that I don’t know, and if I’d known about those things when we were still married, I’d have loved her ten times more. And me too, maybe there are a million cute things like that about me, and if she’d known about them, she’d never have wanted to leave me. Who knows—maybe lots of nice things had passed between them, coming out in the dark, like the roaches, and just because they’d gone unnoticed, it didn’t mean they hadn’t been there, nevertheless.

Sales Tax

“Think about it,” Himme’s dad said once. “I’ve never been to India, and you’ve always wanted to go. Your mother said she’d be glad to have a break from me for a few weeks too. What do you say?” And when he saw Himme hesitate, he continued: “Look, me, my life is over. All I have left now is the sales tax. No real commitments, no real worries, just a couple of short espressos, some quality time with my darling son, and maybe, if we can fit it in, an elephant trek. And you too, son, what have you got to do around here anyway? How much longer can you keep peeping at your ex-wife in the shower? Sooner or later they’ll arrest you, or else you’ll fall out of the tree. Wouldn’t it be better to spend some time with your dad—to visit one of the Seven Wonders of the World with your dad?”

India

The revolving restaurant on the rooftop of their Delhi hotel had one song, Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” on a continuous loop. Over and over again, at every meal, “My Way,” three meals a day. For Himme, the cumulative effect of the cumulative listening to the cumulative song was cumulatively distressing. Himme’s dad took it in his stride, and even kept whistling along with Sinatra over and over, but Himme refused to resign himself to this fate, and on their third day he demanded an explanation. He took it up with the manager: “Why the same song?” The smiling manager wobbled his head slowly in the Indian manner: “This is like asking why the same restaurant turns around and around. The restaurant is turning around and around because this is the best restaurant in Delhi. Same with the song. ‘My Way’ is the best song, and in the best restaurant in Delhi we are playing only the best.” “Yes, but there are other songs. Also good songs,” Himme attempted.

“‘My Way’ is the best song,” the manager said, repeating his mantra with smiling resolve. “No second best for my guests.”

Ramat Gan

The world outside the revolving restaurant seemed even stranger, and Himme found himself sticking to the hotel room, while his father made valiant sorties into the outside world and came back armed with new experiences and leprosy-stricken friends, who were glad to join him in the elevator to the fourteenth floor in order to meet his very talented, albeit somewhat depressive, son.

When he felt he’d exhausted Delhi, Himme’s dad dragged his plaintive son northward, to breathtakingly beautiful villages, where even Himme began to enjoy himself. The beauty and the generosity and openness of the Indians along with Himme’s dad’s Old Guard stories all came together in his mind, in an overwhelming but incredibly moving jumble. And so, riding an elephant at sunset, he heard the sad life story of the meticulously well-mannered boxer who’d come to Ramat Gan all the way from Freiburg, Germany, and established the Atom Bar from scratch, learning how, with a single terrible left hook and half a heart he’d knocked down both Sinkevitch brothers, even though deep down inside him he believed that knocking down clients would be bad luck, and indeed three years later the bar was burned to the ground by a tattooed Maori gentile after a local hooker insulted him.

As it turned out, the Indians loved Himme’s dad’s stories too. They listened very closely, and usually laughed in the right places, which sometimes helped Himme forget that they hadn’t understood a word. A closer study revealed that rather than listening, they were actually concentrating on his dad’s glorious bare potbelly, and the way it shimmied whenever he described something particularly funny or moving. On the underside of his dad’s belly there was a scar from when he’d had his appendix out, and one of the Indians told Himme in broken English that every time the scar turned red, they knew the story had taken a very dangerous turn. Himme’s dad took his swelling audience in stride, and kept on reminiscing out loud, even as he swallowed the saliva that filled his mouth while he carried on about Shiyya Barbalat, the legendary wandering junkman from Hamavdil Street, who’d snuck around town with his horse and carriage one night, and beheaded all the “No Horses Allowed” signs, then scattered their ravaged carcasses in the backyard of the municipal department of motor vehicles. It was an interesting question what the Indians would think if they could actually understand. They would probably imagine this Ramat Gan as an exotic place. And even to Himme, who’d grown up on Hashalom Road, not quite a mile from where all the stories took place, his dad’s Ramat Gan sounded like something far away—not just in space and in time, but also in a million other dimensions that he couldn’t even name.

Like Himself

Himme’s dad’s death came out of nowhere. Suddenly his dad was feeling “under the weather,” suddenly a dizziness, suddenly a fever, suddenly they needed a doctor but there wasn’t a doctor to be found. Drink a lot, stay in the room, and rest. Himme’s dad kept smiling the whole time. The fever, he’d tell Himme, felt sort of good. “It’s like after a bottle of rye,” he’d say, laughing, “only without the upset stomach.” When he and Himme were alone, it seemed like nothing, but judging by the concern of the Indian who was renting them the room, it was obviously serious. Himme’s dad was calm, and he wasn’t just pretending to be calm, but that didn’t really say anything about the situation. It wasn’t about dying, after all, just about getting a sales-tax rebate. His real life had been over for a while anyway. All the rest was an add-on, a kind of quality adventure with his darling son on the wide tax bracket of time.

After he died, Himme buried him in the backyard of the house where they were staying. The Indian landlord tried to persuade him it would be better to have the body cremated, but when he saw that Himme was adamant, he got some spades and dug along beside him. By the time they’d finished covering the grave, it was evening, and Himme was busy taking care of a blister that had developed on the thumb of his digging hand, and wondering what to inscribe on the tombstone. It was strange how his dad had been so good at eulogies, and here Himme couldn’t come up with a single sentence. The only thing that occurred to him in connection with his dad was that he was utterly like himself. Lots of thoughts got mixed up together in his head, that it had been a mistake to bury his father there, and that he should have taken the body back home, and that he ought to call right away, call his mother, whom he was missing a lot, and maybe his ex-wife too, who had loved Himme’s dad very much, that maybe this sad situation would cause her to come back to him, at least for a short while, out of pity. Other thoughts had to do with Barbalat, with Velvaleh, with the Atom Bar, with that whole world that Himme had never known, a world with which Himme’s dad had been at one. And thoughts about passports and rupees presented themselves too, and thoughts about what on earth would happen next and another tiny glimpse—of how life had protected him until now, like a Fabergé egg in a padded box, and of how in his entire thirty-two years the world had hardly confronted him with anyone who’d died (two people): his dad, and the girl-soldier with the broken heart who’d fallen to the ground beside him at staff headquarters. He sat and waited for all those thoughts to pass, but when he realized they were just going on and on, he got up, stuck a piece of wood in the mound, took a black felt-tip pen, and printed
THE OLD GUARD
in large bold letters.

Fortuna

Even after Himme’s dad died, Himme kept on roaming around India with no particular goal in mind. Some of the time he felt bored or shitty, for no reason. Lots of times he felt happiness, for no especially good reason either. In one small town, not far from Aurangabad, he met an Indian girl who looked exactly like his neighbor’s daughter, Fortuna. She was playing hopscotch with another little girl, slightly older, and just like Fortuna Roman, the Indian Fortuna remained serious all during the game, and even when she won, her eyes stayed sad. After the game he followed her home, and saw that the Indian Fortuna also lived in an apartment, half a floor up on the left. Because he’d kept his distance as he followed her, he couldn’t see who opened the door when she rang the bell. The voice of whoever opened it spoke Hindi, but it sounded surprisingly like Nissim Roman. Which meant that the apartment opposite theirs might just belong to the Indian Himme. And Himme was terribly eager to knock on his door, but he didn’t have the nerve.

He sat on the stairs and tried to imagine what life must be like for the Indian Himme behind that door. And wondered how much like him he really was. Whether he was divorced, whether his father was alive, whether his father had stories about Aurangabad of earlier days too, and whether his wife’s Indian girlfriend also had the smell of an easy lay. Three hours later, the door opened and out came a grim young Indian with a handlebar mustache. He looked at Himme and Himme looked at him and neither one lowered his gaze. After a few seconds, Himme was feeling so uneasy that he got up and left. Deep in his heart, he hoped that the sad Indian was nothing like him at all.

No Attachment

The whole time Himme was wandering aimlessly, he didn’t once phone his mother back home, and it made him feel guilty and mean. He didn’t phone his ex-wife either, or anyone else for that matter. All in all, he didn’t do much talking to people in India, and he spent most of his time on his own. Until he reached the guest house in Puna, where a group of three Israeli sannyasis started talking to him in Hebrew about Existence, against his will. The most talkative of the lot was called Bashir. Sometimes the other sannyasis called him Moshe, but he’d correct them. Bashir told Himme that you could tell at a glance he was far from his center, and that this was very sad, because Bashir had also been far from his center once, and he’d studied at the College of Business Administration, and only now, in retrospect, when he’d found half the light, did he understand how terribly he’d been suffering. Himme tried to pretend in English that he didn’t understand what Bashir was saying and that he was really a tourist from Italy, but his accent was a giveaway. “Man,” Bashir said, placing his hand on Himme’s shoulder, “you’ve got to be more trusting. You need to get in touch with yourself. Don’t you realize what’s happening to you? You’re in a very bad head.” And Himme, who really was not in touch with what was happening to him, and with what it meant to be in a very bad head, moved even further away from his center and tried to sock Bashir in the jaw, but he missed, and slipped, and banged his head against the edge of the table, just at the very moment when the three sannyasis spotted two German girls and rushed over to offer them a tantric relationship with no attachment, which would help them connect to their true selves.

Flip

The truth is that Moshe, or Bashir, or whatever his name was, had a point, and Himme really was in a terrible head. He was angry, and he was bored, and he was homesick, and he was so much of all of those that he thought he was going to explode. He felt like a victim, he felt guilty, he felt upstanding, he felt that he had no name, and even more than he was feeling, he was thinking.

A typical thought by way of example: at night, when we say we’re going to sleep, and we get into bed and shut our eyes, we’re not really asleep. We’re just pretending. We shut our eyes and breathe rhythmically, pretending to be asleep, until the deceit grows slowly real. And maybe that’s how it is with death. Himme’s dad hadn’t died right away either. And the whole time when his eyes were shut and he wasn’t moving, you could still feel his pulse. Maybe Himme’s dad had been dying just like someone going to sleep—pretending, until it became real. And if so, then it was altogether possible that if only Himme had interrupted him in the process, jumped on his bed like a little kid, opened one of his eyes to make sure, shouted “Dad!” and tickled him—the whole deceit would simply have fallen apart.

Gracia

Himme returned to his room, his forehead bleeding. He didn’t have a first-aid kit, and he didn’t really feel like looking for the owner of the guest house and asking whether he had one. Near the door to his room, he bumped into a tourist who struck him as oddly familiar. She told him in broken English that she was French, and that she’d be glad to lend him a bandage. He told her he was Italian, and even added “Gracia” at the end. But both of them knew for sure that they were Israelis who were tired of meeting other Israelis in the East. So she helped him with the bandage, in English, and he smiled at her, and tried to remember where he knew her from. In the end, without either of them really planning it, they went to bed. And afterward, when they’d already told each other their real names, he figured it out. “Sivan Atlas?” he said, with a lopsided smile. “I think I met your sister, but only once and just for a second, may she rest in peace.”

At night Sivan cried, and at least from the outside it seemed to be helping her feel better, and so did Himme. He let go of his tears the way a hot-air balloon jettisons another extra-heavy bag of sand, and as they lay there in each other’s arms, he felt as though if only he’d let go of her, he’d start floating up toward the ceiling. The next morning, Sivan continued to Dharamsala according to plan, and Himme, who didn’t have one, remained.