The Seven Good Years Read Online Free PDF

job selling hot dogs? What you need isn’t a bunch of lies from a PhD in clinical psych. You need a real solution: a nest egg in a foreign bank account. Everybody’s doing it. I just read in the paper that foreign accounts, foreign passports, and four-wheel drives are the three official trends this summer.”
    â€œAnd that will work?” I asked.
    â€œLike a charm,” Uzi promised. “It’ll help the dream and the reality. It’s not going to keep you from becoming a refugee or anything, but at least you’ll be a refugee with a bundle. The kind who even if he winds up with a hot dog stand at a train station in Japa-Germany has enough cash to hire another refugee with even lousier luck to stand there and stuff the sauerkraut.”
    Taking advantage of refugees wasn’t an idea that appealed to me at first, but after a few more nocturnal visits to the hot dog stand, I decided to go for it. On the Internet, I managed to find a nice website of an Australian bank, with a promotional video that showed not only breathtaking landscapes but a smiling teller, who looked like Julia Roberts’s even nicer sister and urged me to deposit my money with them.
    Uzi nixed the idea straightaway. “Ten years from now Australia won’t even be there. If the hole in the ozone layer doesn’t get to them, the Chinese takeover will. It’s a sure thing. My cousin works in the Mossad, Pacific Division. Go for Europe. Any place except Russia and Switzerland.”
    â€œWhat’s the problem there?”
    â€œThe Russian economy is unstable,” Uzi explained, taking a big bite of falafel. “And the Swiss . . . I dunno. I don’t like them. They’re kind of cold, if you know what I mean.”
    Eventually I found a nice bank in the Channel Islands. Truth is, before I started looking for a bank I didn’t even know there were islands in the Channel. And it may well be that even in the worst-case scenario of a world war, the bad guys who’ll conquer the world won’t realize there are islands there, either, and that even under global occupation, my bank will stay free. The guy at the bank who agreed to take my money was named Jeffrey but insisted that I call him Jeff. A year later he was replaced by someone named John or Joe, and then there was a very nice new guy named Jack. All of them were pleasant and polite, and when they talked about my stocks and bonds and their secure future they made sure to use the present perfect tense correctly, something that Uzi and I never managed to do. Which only reassured me more.
    All around me, squabbles in the Middle East were growing more aggressive. Hezbollah’s Grad missiles were hitting Haifa, and Hamas rockets were thrashing buildings in Ashdod. But despite the deafening explosions, I slept like a baby. And it wasn’t that I didn’t have any dreams, but what I dreamed about was the pastoral setting of a bank, surrounded by water, and Jeffrey or John or Jack taking me there in a gondola. The view from the gondola was dazzling, and flying fish swam along with us, singing to me in a human voice that sounded a bit like Celine Dion’s about the splendor and beauty of my investment portfolio, which was growing by the minute. According to Uzi’s Excel charts, it had grown to the point where I could open at least two hot dog stands or, if I preferred, one roofed kiosk.
    And then came October 2008, and the fish in my dream stopped singing. After the market crashed, I called Jason, who had replaced the last J on the list, and asked him if he thought I ought to sell. He said I’d do better to wait. I don’t remember just how he said it, except that he, too, like all the J’s before him, made very correct use of the present perfect. Two weeks later, my money was worth another thirty percent less. In my dreams, the bank still looked the same, but the gondola had begun capsizing and the flying fish, which