Read Online The Seven Good Years by Etgar Keret - Free Book Online Page B

songs always described a close buddy or a beautiful, sexy girl who’d been the singer’s reason for living, when out of the blue something terrible had happened and they’d turned Orthodox. The buddy was growing a beard and praying a lot; the beautiful girl was covered from head to toe and wouldn’t do it with the morose singer anymore. Young people would listen to those songs and nod grimly. The Lebanon War had taken so many of their buddies that the last thing anyone wanted was to see the others just disappear forever into some yeshiva in the armpit of Jerusalem.
    It wasn’t only the music world that was discovering born-again Jews. They were hot stuff all over the media. Every talk show had a regular seat for a newly religious ex-celeb who made a point of telling everyone how he didn’t miss his wanton ways in the least, or the former friend of a well-known born-again who’d reveal how much the friend had changed since turning religious and how you couldn’t even talk to him anymore. Me, too. From the moment my sister crossed the lines in the direction of Divine Providence, I became a kind of local celebrity. Neighbors who’d never given me the time of day would stop, just to offer me a firm handshake and pay their condolences. Hipster twelfth-graders, all dressed in black, would give me a friendly high five just before getting into the cab that would take them to some dance club in Tel Aviv. And then they’d roll down the window and shout to me how broken up they were about my sister. If the rabbis had taken someone ugly, they could’ve handled it; but grabbing someone with her looks—what a waste!
    Meanwhile, my lamented sister was studying at some women’s seminary in Jerusalem. She’d come visit us almost every week, and she seemed happy. If there was a week when she couldn’t come, we’d go visit her. I was fifteen at the time, and I missed her terribly. When she’d been in the army, before going religious, serving as an artillery instructor in the south, I didn’t see much of her, either, but somehow I missed her less back then.
    Whenever we met, I’d study her closely, trying to figure out how she’d changed. Had they replaced the look in her eyes, her smile? We’d talk the way we always did. She still told me funny stories she’d made up specially for me, and helped me with my math homework. But my cousin Gili, who belonged to the youth section of the Movement Against Religious Coercion and knew a lot about rabbis and stuff, told me it was just a matter of time. They hadn’t finished brainwashing her yet, but as soon as they did, she’d begin talking Yiddish, and they’d shave her head and she’d marry some sweaty, flabby, repulsive guy who’d forbid her to see me anymore. It could take another year or two, but I might as well brace myself, because once she was married, she might continue breathing, but from our point of view, it would be just as if she’d died.
    Nineteen years ago, in a small wedding hall in Bnei Brak, my older sister died, and she now lives in the most Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem. She has a husband, a yeshiva student, just like Gili promised. He isn’t sweaty or flabby or repulsive, and he actually seems pleased whenever my brother or I come to visit. Gili also promised me at the time, about twenty years ago, that my sister would have hordes of children and that every time I’d hear them speaking Yiddish like they were living in some godforsaken shtetl in eastern Europe, I’d feel like crying. On that subject, too, he was only half right, because she really does have lots of children, one cuter than another, but when they speak Yiddish it just makes me smile.
    As I walked into my sister’s house, less than an hour before Shabbat, the children greeted me in unison with their “What’s my name?”—a tradition that began after I once got them mixed up.