Endgame in Kiryat-Gat
by John Auerbach
Home > No. 11 > Texts

I rise early in the morning and know that a day starting like this must be disastrous. The forebodings are the sharp brightness outside the window and the wild whistling of a high wind.

Exasperated in my impotence to do anything about it, I hang my shirt on the bathroom window. I shave. I regret I have no thick black curtains to blind the windows completely. Brightness keeps pouring in, through the sides. I turn on every electric light in the flat and finish shaving. The skin on my face is dry and taut. The roots of the headache to come are already firmly established in my skull.

The wind whines outside. I know the khamsin will assault me the moment I open the door: the sun bright red and burning fiercely, and the space between the pale sky and the scorched earth charged with an electric load of one thousand million volts.

Ready to go, with my hand on the doorknob, I still hesitate. If I stayed here, behind closed doors and windows, I could perhaps pretend to ignore the presence of the Outside. I could even delay the coming of that inevitable headache by a few hours. Sometimes you become timid in your ambition: you cannot avert the catastrophe, your dream is to postpone it—even for a limited time.

But no trick can save me from the electric tension, the raw terminals of the nerves would be equally exposed to it, here, and outside. Knowing this, I open the door in desperation and go out: I have to drive to Kiryat Gat; don't tell me about people being able to escape their destiny, and destination.

Kiryat Gat is a development town in the south of Israel. A few years ago nothing was here: they erected the drab apartment houses in the middle of nowhere, connected them to the electrical net and supplied some water; they paved roads and brought the people in to live. From that moment on, the town lived spontaneously and defiantly, like a cactus plant in the desert.

The apartment houses looked already like slums, with bedding and laundry hanging on the balconies and from the windows. Empty dust bins with crumpled lids stood at the entrances: among them, dirty kids were chasing alley-cats. With the exception of these, the broad streets were almost deserted.

The man I was looking for was not there: his door was locked, and a sheet of paper was pinned on it. "Will be home at noon," I read. In strange stupor, I repeated the sentence aloud twice, and slowly descended down the staircase. The plaster was peeling off. On the last landing I stopped and read, written in white chalk by a child's hand: "Menachem is an ass" and "Lea is a whore." Outside, the sun hit me like a sledgehammer. I found myself in the central square of the town. It was huge and empty.

A strange idea entered my head: I thought there must be a hundred identical central squares throughout the world, in North Africa, in Asia, perhaps in Central America as well. Even here, in Israel, I knew at least two more like this one, paved with slabs of concrete, swollen under the weight of noon heat, and breathing out sick, stale warmth toward evening.

Yes, they were identical. If you put them all together like fitting pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, they'd look, for anybody placed in the middle of one of them, like a sequence of endless reflections in a mirror, symmetrical, and with a real Kafkaesque horror to them. And you could easily get trapped in this world of mirrors, which were extending the horror into infinity, and then you could lose your identity, lose yourself, as your reflection in them became smaller and smaller, until it made you into a mere black spot in a white square, whose walls were mirrors.

I panicked, and ran toward the walls, sweat pouring from my body, my heart beating wildly. The square was flanked on each side with rows of shops and restaurants. This was also the Commercial Center.

And once in shadow, but still stealing glances over my shoulder at the square, where shimmering heat was dancing over its rectangular stones, I started walking slowly, looking at the shops, oriental restaurants, bars, and ice-cream joints. Calming down, I stopped and tried to register what I saw in one shop window. Cheap tin toys made in Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, and Western Germany were there. Cars, police cars, fire brigade cars, tanks, moon vehicles. On the left, under the portraits of Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir, Bar-Lev, and Shazar, were Japanese transistor radios of all size and shape. A bit lower, cameras, and shoes, and enormous amounts of plastic goods, buckets, baskets, pots, key-holders, ball pens, never-wilting plastic flowers, films for cameras, 8 mm pornographic movie pictures, souvenirs from Venice, and from Paris—porcelain gondolas and tin Eiffel Towers, shining miniskirts in imitation leather, and red and black brassieres. A mad god emptied his cornucopia in a gesture of derision in this shop window. I could hear him roaring in mocking laughter. I rubbed my eyes, and discovered in the middle of this unbelievable heap of junk the crowning feature, the king of it all: a solitary big TV set of local production, half buried under a wave of women's tights and stockings.

Obviously, you could buy anything in this shop, a real department store on twelve square yards. Obviously, too, these were the goods the inhabitants of this town needed. And again, squinting at the whiteness of the square on my right, I realized that here was all that the people in all other towns like this needed—all over the world. Next door was a photographer's shop, with many enlarged pictures of smiling brides and bridegrooms, in identical poses, deep-frozen for posterity. One couple did not smile. She was staring sullenly at the camera eye, he, with large black moustache, scowled. I frowned.

Absentmindedly, I fanned myself with a copy of Play and Players I had in my hand, which was wet with my perspiration. I was almost desperate. What shall I do squeezed between these shops and the white square? Should I sit in one of the outdoor cafés, read my magazine, drink a coffee, and kill time till noon?

But the place was so timeless, that just the idea of killing time here appeared funny to me. Really, Kiryat Gat did not belong anywhere in time.

I passed my hand over my wet neck, and noticed that I should have a haircut. It was only a fleeting thought, but perhaps the sign "Barber" just behind the haberdashery and the photographer's shop had caught my eye. I advanced a few steps. In the window were two dusty pictures of women's heads with fancy coiffures, French inscriptions. Flanking the women were two gentlemen with very long and bushy sideburns, their hair glistening with pomade. On a glass shelf were small jars of face cream and a carton box of condoms: the Pill had not arrived yet.

This is an excerpt. To read the rest, please continue your travels in the Republic by purchasing No. 11, December 2001.

John Auerbach's bio is forthcoming.