Prickface

Fighting words | Fiction | Fresh Soup

As an author, I know it's easier to write about something that's already happened than about something that's happening now. But even so, since the war began almost two years ago, I've been insisting - mostly for my own sake - on trying to write the present. This is my best effort so far.

Illustration by Etgar Keret

On Friday evenings, after the news headlines, Eliran and I like to listen to our neighbors fight. They live a couple of blocks away, and every week, always at the same time, they have a row. We came across them by chance, after we walked to the convenience store one Friday evening for some rolling papers. On the way home, we heard her yelling just as we passed their building. At first it was standard curses – “fuckup,” “parasite,” “prickface” – but after a couple of minutes things got pretty extreme. She told him he had the worst body odor in the world and that his mouth reeked like a mass grave of rabid dogs. He called her a cunt and said their wedding anniversary was the saddest day of the year, even sadder than Holocaust Day, because at least the Holocaust was over. It was bonkers. Like listening to the trashiest reality show ever made. Eliran and I sat down on a sidewalk bench opposite their building and literally bit our sleeves to stop from laughing out loud. After a few minutes, Eliran said, “Come on, Sarah, I’m freezing, let’s go home,” but I insisted we sit there for a while and roll ourselves a spliff for the road. I thought it would be a bummer to miss out on the first exciting thing to happen in this snore of a neighborhood. So Eliran rolled a joint, and we sat on the bench smoking while the couple went at it.

It was funny right from the start, but after we’d had a few puffs it got absolutely hysterical, and I laughed so hard I almost wet my panties. And then someone rolled up the motorized blind on the second floor and a thin redhead, about my age, wearing a ripped Mini Mouse sweatshirt, walked out onto the balcony with a lit cigarette. She looked furious, but also on the verge of tears, and every time she took a drag on the cigarette, her hand shook. Even before the blind was all the way up, she caught sight of us on the bench, and I was so embarrassed that all I could think of was to start kissing Eliran so that it would look like we’d just sat down there to fool around, not to eavesdrop. Eliran got really into it and we started making out right there on the bench. It was fun to sit outside at night, just a few minutes from home, and touch each other. I was high as a kite, and for a minute I forgot about the redhead with the shaking cigarette and her prickface husband, and all I knew was Eliran’s lips and tongue. When I looked back up at the balcony, she was gone.

Since then, every Friday night, we’d walk over to the bench, smoke a joint, and listen to Red and Prickface fighting. We never did figure out why they clashed every week at the exact same time. Eliran said it might be because of the evening news: maybe it always started with a political argument. Or they might have just had too much wine with their Shabbat dinner and it went to their head.

We only saw Prickface once, when he came out onto the balcony and said to Red, “Yeah, keep on smoking. It’s good for the cancer.” He was kind of stubby and wired, and it didn’t seem like a stretch to call him a prickface, and every time Eliran and I laughed together on that bench, deep down inside I thanked god things weren’t like that between us.

When the war broke out and Eliran was called up for reserve duty, I hardly talked to him for a whole month, and that was the first time I realized how many hours a day we spent together, up in each other’s business. It’d been that way since high school. Now that I was alone, I started vegging out in front of the TV for hours. But instead of watching mini-series, I turned on whatever current affairs or live talk shows I could find, just to have other people’s voices in the apartment. I really missed Eliran, and I was scared, even though when we talked, he kept insisting there was nothing to worry about.

The first time he came home on leave, he looked weird. Kind of amped up. He only wanted to fuck all the time and talk about children, and on Friday evening, after the headlines, he got up and put his shoes on and kind of jerked his head at me. “Come on,” he said, “get some clothes on, otherwise we’ll miss the fight.” It took me a minute to remember. Those ugly fights between Red and Prickface, and the two of us on the bench—it all seemed like a million years ago.

We didn’t say anything the whole way there. Eliran walked fast, like he was on a mission, and when we got to the bench he rolled us a joint. The lights were on in Red and Prickface’s apartment but they weren’t fighting. The only thing we could hear was the TV announcer reading the list of soldiers who’d died that day. It was strange, sitting on our bench, stoned, listening to the names of people who didn’t exist anymore.

Then Eliran said, “Staff Sergeant Micha Davidi. I know him. He’s from the recon platoon.” The motorized blind opened and Red came out to smoke. The second I heard that blind rolling up, I instinctively started fondling and kissing Eliran, but he didn’t kiss back. “What’s the matter with you?” he snapped. When I looked up at the balcony, I could have sworn I saw Red smiling.

On the way home, Eliran said, “That guy who died, Davidi, I couldn’t stand him. In the army, when someone you hate dies, it’s a double whammy: you’re sad that he died and you feel guilty for not being sad enough. He was an antisocial prick, that asshole. He and his wife just had a baby girl. Poor guy.” Then he shrugged his shoulders and said, “Well, that’s over. No point going back there. They’re not going to fight anymore.”

Translated by Jessica Cohen