Candies by Tsvi Yulis
In the morning the radio announced the happy news. It was an unusual morning, different, contrary to the sequence of fifty-four mornings, a new record in which the news was bad or mostly bad.
The excitement was great.
When the sound of the news was finally heard, the announcer excitedly said he was proud to be the one to read such an important release.
Today at noon, he said, but with more words, candies will be distributed to all residents of Israel to improve the public's mood, which, according to surveys of the governmental survey company together with the Institute for Moods of Binyamina and several state companies, declined considerably in recent months as compared to the level from last November--at which time a low of all time had been recorded.
I turned up the radio to see if it could be that that radio announcer already had a candy crackling in his mouth. For, in the very quiet moments, when radio announcers do what radio announcers usually do, you could hear a sound, the tiniest tick and yet very distinct, which reminded one of the sucking of candy.
If true, it would be really unfair if radio announcers received before all other citizens, what everybody is supposed to receive simultaneously and equally, I allowed myself to mutter loudly. My wife who for a few months was dragging a dominant gestational tummy, agreed and said she was not surprised if someone on TV did research and found out that those guys on the radio are taking over this country all for themselves. "In the end," she concluded, "It is always a war between the people on the radio and those on TV." .
She must have good senses, my wife, because already that evening they put on television a lead with that exact story but it would only happen after dark, and in the meantime there was still the excitement of the promised candy that overwhelmed all of us and was constantly growing.
The excitement grew in me and of course it grew in my wife, and it grew down in her bulging impregnated stomach and in all our neighbors, all of whom we hate, except for the dying neighbour because how can you hate a neighbor who’s only got two or three months to live? He is, after all, a neighbor.
I told Adva that I'm leaving to go to work at the advertising agency. It's stupid to tell your wife "I'm leaving to go to work at the advertising agency." She already knows that I work there, right? She's known that since my first day, two years and four months ago. I explained away my foolish comment by telling myself that I said it only because of the pregnancy and the bulging stomach and in the uncertainty of what might happen between us, because recently there had been problems, and the only thing that seemed guaranteed to me was my work at the advertising agency.
"I'll be at the advertising agency in an hour," I said to her, already by the door.
She said my tie does not suit an advertising agency, that I should get rid of it.
"Really?" I tugged at the neck of my tie with my fingers.
Fifteen minutes later, inside the car, just before merging onto the Ayalon Highway North from the Halakha Bridge, I threw my tie out the window. I didn't care for wearing it all day long nor all of the next. The tie flew through the air and landed on the head of a cyclist riding on the new path for cyclists, and he got mad because he had distinctly decided to take the new path because is only for cyclists and not, for example, for Riksha drivers or Alte Sachen transporters or delivery trucks for ice or for flying neckties. He stopped abruptly and banged on the tin hood of my car righteously, shouting, "Now are you happy? Now are you happy? You almost knocked me off the path! Does that make you happy?"
How do you tell a cyclist who is travelling on the new path, designated only for bicycles, that the relationship between you and your wife has gone aground? That you took different routes and now you're growing further and further apart from each other, AND that her belly continues to swell daily, in spite of it all.
To be honest, I was very frightened of the cyclist. I pretended to cry so that he wouldn't open the door of the car and rip me out and kick me onto the road like I deserved because I'm an Israeli maniac who hurls things out of the car at 80 kamash. I also felt guilty, as a Jew, though not much. As a last reasort , I planned to howl that my wife was pregnant and that we’re not going through the best of times and he’d better understand me. Tension makes me more me than I am when I'm not nervous.
The whole speech was canned and ready deep down in my throat--short sentences, jerky, dressed up nicely with broken and flat notes. But that rider didn’t care about me or my speech and he disappeared on his bike down the Ayalon North.
Five minutes later I saw them. Hundreds of flight attendants dressed in uniforms of the IAA ports and of the Navy and WIZO, and young shop assistants of Fox and even Ethiopian cashiers of the AMPM supermarket chain. All came. They were all there to hand out candy. It must be an enormous logistical effort, I thought, and I tried to meld into the daily early morning traffic jam .
I turned on the radio and listened to the station that was the best among all radio stations because it didn’t just inform you of traffic jams in general, but also gave the essence of each, and to that added a play-by-play of major driver fights and when they happened, including an indepth commentary from the studio.
The announcer, who was named Alma and who broadcasted every day between eight and ten, said that at that very moment the distribution of candy was taking place all over the country. It was wonderful, like being inside her head, because what she said was what I was seeing with my own eyes--unlike normallyl, when she would say that traffic was flowing on the Ayalon North and clearly the only thing that's really flowing is Alma herself, or rather her imagination, 'cause all I see around me are people stuck in their cars and talking incessantly on their cell phones. No! This time they were really there, all the stewardesses Alma blared over the airwaves from her padded studio in central Tel Aviv. And they really gave out candies, one candy per driver, and agreed to let drivers choose their own color and flavor too, though one could not exchange their candy if it had already been put into ones' mouth.
The speedometer was pointing to eleven kilometers an hour, which was good because recent surveys had shown that that was just the average traffic speed expected when taking into account the quantity of cars added to the roads this past year. I felt sorry for the drivers who had a manual, and had to do all that foot work. To remind myself of how lucky I was, I tuned the radio to a music channel, and tapped along freely on the floorboard with my left foot.
Soon I will get my candy from my country. My little country that cares about me. I finally arrived at the colorfully decorated counter, Flags of the Ministry of Health and Ministry of Transport and Ministry of Defense flapped at its sides.
"What does this have to do with the Ministry of Defence?" I tried to make my voice sound exactly like the tone of a thirty-eight year old man who works in an advertising agency and has a pregnant woman who doesn’t smile at him when he comes home after a day's work, unless he comes home with a story about the divorce of Hochebergers or Yochelmans--something which flicks on the happy thoughts program inside her head.
"The whole thing belongs to the Ministry of Defense," said the steward who was probably a secret service man and knew exactly what he was talking about. He handed me the tray on which lay the candies alongside and a few pieces of cake that looked like an army standard. When the flight attendant saw me struggling he said, "My mother baked the one that makes you choke. Have a good day. May we have many more days like this."
I nodded. I wanted to tell him I need a lot more days like this one, because a single day probably wouldn't be enough. The steward looked busy serving the other drivers and picking up a hot brunette in a blue Ford Focus. I decided to keep my mouth shut. I took one piece of choke cake and an orange candy in blue cellophane. I showed the steward that I took a bite of the cake and waved goodbye.
Adva was waiting for me at home, on the other end of the morning as she calls it, which is the evening. I once argued with her that there's no sense in claiming the night is the other side of the morning. However, she insisted they're one in the same, just as if you drill a hole in Ramat Gan, and never stop drilling, then you come out at the other end, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, between Chile and New Zealand. I tried to argue with her about that too, because I couldn’t find an economical reason for drilling such a hole in Ramat Gan After all, it’s just Ramat Gan, but she remained unmoved.
Once we spent an hour arguing about Tsvi Bar, the mayor of Ramat Gan--if he’s really such a good mayor or not. In the end we concluded that in any case we live in Tel Aviv, and we have our own mayor, so who cares. It happened back then when we were still arguing full evenings and sometimes through the night instead of sleeping, in the name of love.
She sat at the table and said she had been to the doctor and he discovered that the baby does not want to come out. Not in a month and not at all. She said she thought about it all the way through the traffic jam on Ayalon South, and that perhaps it is because he understands what's going on. The child. Maybe we do not, as parents, deserve him.
I sat down beside her and asked her if she was sure that was what the doctor said. She was very sure and then added that I must be disappointed now, of her, of her belly, of the situation, because it's not what we imagined that would happen, for example four years ago, or six years, when we hung the laundry together and counted who dropped fewer clothespins on the tin roof of the neighbor who in the meantime was dying.
"No," I said. No way I'd be disappointed. I am not disappointed. I was not and I will not be. That whole ‘to be or not to be’ thing... disappointed, I mean... no, there is nothing disappointing here... "
I wanted to tell her about the wonderful day that I had on the streets and about the candies and how all the people behaved nicely to each other, not honking or cursing, just driving in peace. Such a perfect day. But she was no longer in the mood for it and of course neither was I.
We lay down in bed and fell asleep. I remember dreaming I was driving along in my car when suddenly people started throwing candies at me on the 431 Highway or was it the number 20? In dreams it's hard to know because the signs are not very clear and full of spelling mistakes. Someone shouted, "Congratulations, Uri!" and when I looked back I saw my father's face. Congratulations, he said and reached out with a long hand. You have a newborn. It’s a boy, at last. I shook his long hand but then I discovered it was a doll's hand. Detached. Not a father's hand. It saddened me because I wanted to shake my dad’s hand attached to his body.
In the middle of the night I woke up. A car sped past the house and honked like crazy. Someone must have gotten upset about something that happened on the road. Perhaps the car was still part of the dream? I searched in darkness with my father's hand for the handle of my night table drawer and opened it. I stuck my whole hand in and felt around the bottom. There it was. Round and still wrapped in cellophane, rustling under my fingers. I tried to picture the blue translucent color of the wrapper.
In the morning when my wife gets up, I'll give her this candy, I promised myself.
I put my head on the pillow and I counted the minutes passing slowly, quietly, like cars on a jammed road, in a hot day. I was not sure what kind of effect this piece of fudge will have, if any at all, but for the first time in many days I felt determined.
The excitement was great.
When the sound of the news was finally heard, the announcer excitedly said he was proud to be the one to read such an important release.
Today at noon, he said, but with more words, candies will be distributed to all residents of Israel to improve the public's mood, which, according to surveys of the governmental survey company together with the Institute for Moods of Binyamina and several state companies, declined considerably in recent months as compared to the level from last November--at which time a low of all time had been recorded.
I turned up the radio to see if it could be that that radio announcer already had a candy crackling in his mouth. For, in the very quiet moments, when radio announcers do what radio announcers usually do, you could hear a sound, the tiniest tick and yet very distinct, which reminded one of the sucking of candy.
If true, it would be really unfair if radio announcers received before all other citizens, what everybody is supposed to receive simultaneously and equally, I allowed myself to mutter loudly. My wife who for a few months was dragging a dominant gestational tummy, agreed and said she was not surprised if someone on TV did research and found out that those guys on the radio are taking over this country all for themselves. "In the end," she concluded, "It is always a war between the people on the radio and those on TV." .
She must have good senses, my wife, because already that evening they put on television a lead with that exact story but it would only happen after dark, and in the meantime there was still the excitement of the promised candy that overwhelmed all of us and was constantly growing.
The excitement grew in me and of course it grew in my wife, and it grew down in her bulging impregnated stomach and in all our neighbors, all of whom we hate, except for the dying neighbour because how can you hate a neighbor who’s only got two or three months to live? He is, after all, a neighbor.
I told Adva that I'm leaving to go to work at the advertising agency. It's stupid to tell your wife "I'm leaving to go to work at the advertising agency." She already knows that I work there, right? She's known that since my first day, two years and four months ago. I explained away my foolish comment by telling myself that I said it only because of the pregnancy and the bulging stomach and in the uncertainty of what might happen between us, because recently there had been problems, and the only thing that seemed guaranteed to me was my work at the advertising agency.
"I'll be at the advertising agency in an hour," I said to her, already by the door.
She said my tie does not suit an advertising agency, that I should get rid of it.
"Really?" I tugged at the neck of my tie with my fingers.
Fifteen minutes later, inside the car, just before merging onto the Ayalon Highway North from the Halakha Bridge, I threw my tie out the window. I didn't care for wearing it all day long nor all of the next. The tie flew through the air and landed on the head of a cyclist riding on the new path for cyclists, and he got mad because he had distinctly decided to take the new path because is only for cyclists and not, for example, for Riksha drivers or Alte Sachen transporters or delivery trucks for ice or for flying neckties. He stopped abruptly and banged on the tin hood of my car righteously, shouting, "Now are you happy? Now are you happy? You almost knocked me off the path! Does that make you happy?"
How do you tell a cyclist who is travelling on the new path, designated only for bicycles, that the relationship between you and your wife has gone aground? That you took different routes and now you're growing further and further apart from each other, AND that her belly continues to swell daily, in spite of it all.
To be honest, I was very frightened of the cyclist. I pretended to cry so that he wouldn't open the door of the car and rip me out and kick me onto the road like I deserved because I'm an Israeli maniac who hurls things out of the car at 80 kamash. I also felt guilty, as a Jew, though not much. As a last reasort , I planned to howl that my wife was pregnant and that we’re not going through the best of times and he’d better understand me. Tension makes me more me than I am when I'm not nervous.
The whole speech was canned and ready deep down in my throat--short sentences, jerky, dressed up nicely with broken and flat notes. But that rider didn’t care about me or my speech and he disappeared on his bike down the Ayalon North.
Five minutes later I saw them. Hundreds of flight attendants dressed in uniforms of the IAA ports and of the Navy and WIZO, and young shop assistants of Fox and even Ethiopian cashiers of the AMPM supermarket chain. All came. They were all there to hand out candy. It must be an enormous logistical effort, I thought, and I tried to meld into the daily early morning traffic jam .
I turned on the radio and listened to the station that was the best among all radio stations because it didn’t just inform you of traffic jams in general, but also gave the essence of each, and to that added a play-by-play of major driver fights and when they happened, including an indepth commentary from the studio.
The announcer, who was named Alma and who broadcasted every day between eight and ten, said that at that very moment the distribution of candy was taking place all over the country. It was wonderful, like being inside her head, because what she said was what I was seeing with my own eyes--unlike normallyl, when she would say that traffic was flowing on the Ayalon North and clearly the only thing that's really flowing is Alma herself, or rather her imagination, 'cause all I see around me are people stuck in their cars and talking incessantly on their cell phones. No! This time they were really there, all the stewardesses Alma blared over the airwaves from her padded studio in central Tel Aviv. And they really gave out candies, one candy per driver, and agreed to let drivers choose their own color and flavor too, though one could not exchange their candy if it had already been put into ones' mouth.
The speedometer was pointing to eleven kilometers an hour, which was good because recent surveys had shown that that was just the average traffic speed expected when taking into account the quantity of cars added to the roads this past year. I felt sorry for the drivers who had a manual, and had to do all that foot work. To remind myself of how lucky I was, I tuned the radio to a music channel, and tapped along freely on the floorboard with my left foot.
Soon I will get my candy from my country. My little country that cares about me. I finally arrived at the colorfully decorated counter, Flags of the Ministry of Health and Ministry of Transport and Ministry of Defense flapped at its sides.
"What does this have to do with the Ministry of Defence?" I tried to make my voice sound exactly like the tone of a thirty-eight year old man who works in an advertising agency and has a pregnant woman who doesn’t smile at him when he comes home after a day's work, unless he comes home with a story about the divorce of Hochebergers or Yochelmans--something which flicks on the happy thoughts program inside her head.
"The whole thing belongs to the Ministry of Defense," said the steward who was probably a secret service man and knew exactly what he was talking about. He handed me the tray on which lay the candies alongside and a few pieces of cake that looked like an army standard. When the flight attendant saw me struggling he said, "My mother baked the one that makes you choke. Have a good day. May we have many more days like this."
I nodded. I wanted to tell him I need a lot more days like this one, because a single day probably wouldn't be enough. The steward looked busy serving the other drivers and picking up a hot brunette in a blue Ford Focus. I decided to keep my mouth shut. I took one piece of choke cake and an orange candy in blue cellophane. I showed the steward that I took a bite of the cake and waved goodbye.
Adva was waiting for me at home, on the other end of the morning as she calls it, which is the evening. I once argued with her that there's no sense in claiming the night is the other side of the morning. However, she insisted they're one in the same, just as if you drill a hole in Ramat Gan, and never stop drilling, then you come out at the other end, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, between Chile and New Zealand. I tried to argue with her about that too, because I couldn’t find an economical reason for drilling such a hole in Ramat Gan After all, it’s just Ramat Gan, but she remained unmoved.
Once we spent an hour arguing about Tsvi Bar, the mayor of Ramat Gan--if he’s really such a good mayor or not. In the end we concluded that in any case we live in Tel Aviv, and we have our own mayor, so who cares. It happened back then when we were still arguing full evenings and sometimes through the night instead of sleeping, in the name of love.
She sat at the table and said she had been to the doctor and he discovered that the baby does not want to come out. Not in a month and not at all. She said she thought about it all the way through the traffic jam on Ayalon South, and that perhaps it is because he understands what's going on. The child. Maybe we do not, as parents, deserve him.
I sat down beside her and asked her if she was sure that was what the doctor said. She was very sure and then added that I must be disappointed now, of her, of her belly, of the situation, because it's not what we imagined that would happen, for example four years ago, or six years, when we hung the laundry together and counted who dropped fewer clothespins on the tin roof of the neighbor who in the meantime was dying.
"No," I said. No way I'd be disappointed. I am not disappointed. I was not and I will not be. That whole ‘to be or not to be’ thing... disappointed, I mean... no, there is nothing disappointing here... "
I wanted to tell her about the wonderful day that I had on the streets and about the candies and how all the people behaved nicely to each other, not honking or cursing, just driving in peace. Such a perfect day. But she was no longer in the mood for it and of course neither was I.
We lay down in bed and fell asleep. I remember dreaming I was driving along in my car when suddenly people started throwing candies at me on the 431 Highway or was it the number 20? In dreams it's hard to know because the signs are not very clear and full of spelling mistakes. Someone shouted, "Congratulations, Uri!" and when I looked back I saw my father's face. Congratulations, he said and reached out with a long hand. You have a newborn. It’s a boy, at last. I shook his long hand but then I discovered it was a doll's hand. Detached. Not a father's hand. It saddened me because I wanted to shake my dad’s hand attached to his body.
In the middle of the night I woke up. A car sped past the house and honked like crazy. Someone must have gotten upset about something that happened on the road. Perhaps the car was still part of the dream? I searched in darkness with my father's hand for the handle of my night table drawer and opened it. I stuck my whole hand in and felt around the bottom. There it was. Round and still wrapped in cellophane, rustling under my fingers. I tried to picture the blue translucent color of the wrapper.
In the morning when my wife gets up, I'll give her this candy, I promised myself.
I put my head on the pillow and I counted the minutes passing slowly, quietly, like cars on a jammed road, in a hot day. I was not sure what kind of effect this piece of fudge will have, if any at all, but for the first time in many days I felt determined.
