Oliver Benjamin
offer the question “what if?” He was the best Devil’s advocate I had
ever seen. He regularly chose the other side of the coin just to give it
thickness. And now, that marvelous coin had been spent. But on
what? For what reason? I fell into a dark hole, feigned illness so I
wouldn’t have to work. I could not kill any more chickens. Not now,
not ever.
That week, the clerk from the market came over to my room and
told me how bad he felt that he had yelled at Yippee, because he
really had no idea he was actually suffering from insulin shock. He
said that he had had no intention of telling Anat about the incident
anyway because, he said, he was afraid of getting in trouble for
picking on a handicapped person. I told the clerk not to worry, that
Yippee hadn’t been mad at him at all, which seemed to ease his
conscience considerably. “If he turns up again,” said the clerk, “I’ll
give him all the candy he can eat.” I told him that that was very
thoughtful of him and walked him to the door.
The next time I went to the market, I took both one chocolate toffee
and one peppermint taffy from the large bin of candy in the middle
of the store, and sat down on a bench outside. Opening my journal, I
began to write about what had happened to Yippee, but was struck by
what I had written in the previous entry.
The last time I had written in my journal, on our boat from
Rhodes to Israel I had offered him some chocolate, but he shook his
head no. “I don’t like sweet things. Everybody likes sweet things,” he
said, “I prefer sour. Much more interesting.”
I sat on the bench and stared blankly into space. That twisted
bastard didn’t want candy after all. He only craved cataclysm.
CHAPTER 7
Things more or less got back to normal, and Yippee’s death began to
become part of the folklore of the kibbutz. I was having a hard time
getting over the tragedy, but Greta and I had developed a friendly
sexual relationship that offered me some joy. As much as I liked
Greta, I was incapable of becoming emotionally attached to her,
partly because of what had happened with Charly and partly because
I needed to float weightless above the earth for a while. She did quite
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