Suddenly, a Knock on the Door: Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

fictitious, it was no fun being married to a shmuck.
    The next day, Assi came home from the base, planted a wet kiss on her forehead, and said, “I saved you a hundred shekels.” Orit wiped the saliva off her forehead and Assi explained: “That moron will marry you for free.” Orit said that seemed a little suspicious and they had to be careful, because maybe that Simyon didn’t really understand what the word fictitious meant. “Oh, he understands all right,” Assi said, and started foraging around in the refrigerator. “He may be a complete idiot, but he’s cagey like you wouldn’t believe.” “So why did he agree to do it for free?” Orit asked. “How do I know?” Assi said, laughing and taking a bite of an unwashed cucumber. “Maybe he figured out that it was as close to being married as he’d ever get in this life.”
    The captain drove the Renault and the religious soldier sat in the back. They were quiet almost all the way, and that left Orit a lot of time to think about the fact that she was going to see a dead person for the first time in her life, and that she always found herself bastards for boyfriends and that even though she knew it from the first minute, she still always stayed with them for a year or two. She thought about the abortion and about her mother, who believed in reincarnation and insisted afterward that the baby’s soul was reincarnated in her scrawny cat. “Listen to the way he’s crying,” she told Orit. “Listen to his voice, it’s like a baby’s. You’ve had him for four years already and he never cried like that.” Orit knew that her mother was talking crap and that the cat was just sniffing food or some female cat out the window. Except that his yowling really did sound a little like a baby crying and he went at it all night. Her only piece of luck was that she and Assi weren’t together anymore, because if she’d told him something like that, he would have burst out laughing. She tried to think about Simyon’s soul too, and where it had been reincarnated, but she reminded herself that she didn’t believe in any of that. Then she asked herself why she’d agreed to go to the morgue with the officers, and why she hadn’t mentioned that the marriage was fictitious. There was something weird about going to a morgue and identifying a husband. Scary, but exciting too. It was a little like being in a movie—having the experience without paying the price. Assi would probably say that it was a terrific opportunity to get a lifetime widow’s pension from the army without even lifting a finger, and no one in the army could do anything against a marriage contract from the Rabbinate. “It’ll be fine,” said the captain, who must have noticed the thought lines in Orit’s forehead. “We’ll be with you the whole time.”
    Assi came to the Rabbinate as Simyon’s witness, and throughout the ceremony he made faces, trying to get Orit to laugh. Simyon himself looked a lot better than the stories about him made out. Not a world-class hunk, but not as ugly as Assi’d described him. And he wasn’t such an idiot either. He was very strange, but not stupid, and after the Rabbinate, Assi took them out for falafel. That whole day, Simyon and Orit didn’t exchange a word except for hello and the words they had to speak at the ceremony, and later at the falafel stand, they tried hard not to look at each other. That made Assi laugh. “Look at how pretty your wife is,” he said, putting his hand on Simyon’s shoulder. Simyon kept his eyes fixed on the dripping pita bread he was holding. “What are we going to do with you, Simyon?” Assi said, still needling him. “You know that now you have to kiss her. Otherwise, according to Jewish law, the marriage isn’t valid.” To this day, she doesn’t really know whether Simyon believed him. Assi told her later that of course he hadn’t, and that he was just taking advantage of the situation, but Orit wasn’t so sure. In any