Alte Sachen by André Klein

Author:André Klein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: israel, palestine, jerusalem, arab, palestinian, israeli, tel aviv, yiddish, scrap dealer, alte sachen
Publisher: André Klein

It was an unusually cold night. The windows weren’t open but the walls were chilling to the touch. Only last week he’d picked up an old spiral heater (“good as new”) but the electricity costs were enormous.

His wife was lying next to him like a log. Once in a while she made little grunting noises in her sleep while he stared into darkness, eyes wide awake.

The clock on his bedside table was ticking, beating time to his thoughts.

It must have been somewhere after midnight that he started going through the plan in his head: suicide at six, funeral at 12, clear-out at three in the afternoon.

Suicide, funeral, clear-out. It sounded so simple, the perfect plan.

Why was he to interfere? It was none of his business. If he wanted to die like that it was his own will. And shouldn’t one respect the last wish of the dying? But what if the last wish of the dying was death itself? Did that still count?

His thoughts began to confuse him again. Ahmed had never been much of a thinker. He liked to get things done, not think about them. His wife sometimes joked that these were his scrap-dealing genes. That he could have gone to school if he wanted. That he could still go.

The clock was ticking.

His wife groaned softly as he slid off the bed and closed the bedroom door behind him.

Ten minutes later he was sitting in his truck. It was around five in the morning. Turning the ignition key and letting the Volkswagen roll noiselessly onto the street he noticed the light of dawn in the East.

When he stepped on the gas he checked the clock on his dashboard. The green letters glowed faintly: 5:23.

There weren’t many cars on the street. Through the windows of apartment blocks he could see people brushing their teeth and sitting at breakfast tables in their pyjamas. Children were getting ready for school. Parents started their daily commute to the city.

The suburbs were laid out like a grid. He knew these streets and corners in his sleep. They were printed on the insides of his eyelids, mapped out on the walls of his skull. The old man’s apartment was not far away. He stepped on the gas and let the Volkswagen fly through the dawn.

Only a few streets away, a moving truck was blocking the road. Ahmed honked. Two people on the loading ramp were handling an old grandfather clock, their faces puffed with strain. Ahmed honked again.

The clock slid out of their grip and crashed onto the truck’s floor. There was a sound of broken glass, the shards raining onto the pavement and glittering in his headlights.

A woman came running out of the front-door of an apartment block, screaming something.

The moving men shrugged. There was some more screaming and gesticulating. Then one of the men pointed to Ahmed’s Volkswagen. He honked again. It was 5:29, according to the dashboard clock.

The woman signaled to him to step out of his car. Hesitatingly he killed the motor and walked up to the apartment block.

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