#4: Your Man by Etgar Keret
Released: 2004
"When Abigail told me she wanted us to break up, I was in shock. The cab had just pulled up at her place, and she got out on the sidewalk side, and said she didn't want me to come up, and that she didn't really want to talk about it either, and that most of all she never wanted to hear from me again, not even a Happy New Year or a birthday card. And then she slammed the cab door so hard that the driver cursed her through the window."
So begins Etgar Keret's Your Man, a story which, quite frankly, gives me the chills every time I read it. Keret is an Israeli author of novellas, graphic novels and screenplays, but his real talent is for super-short, powerful stories.
The Story
Trying to explain an Etgar Keret story is a bit like trying to catch jelly with oily hands, but I'll try.
An unnamed narrator is dumped by his girlfriend Abigail in the back of a cab. While deciding on where to head next, he hears an address that is strangely familiar. He tells the driver to head there.
He arrives and the house is empty. He breaks in and heads inside.
He turns on the living room light to find it empty apart from a wall that is covered with photographs. He immediately recognises the faces; they are all his ex-girlfriends, starting from high school up to last love Abigail smiling.
It suddenly all falls into the place for the narrator - all those break-ups, girls leaving him out of the blue- it was this man's fault, not his own.
He waits for the man to come home, but when he does, the man is "short, like a kid, with big eyes and no lashes," holding a coloured schoolbag and glad to see him. The narrator is overcome with rage, in disbelief at the man's seeming indifference to his pain. And it's then that he acts, unaware of just how much damage will be done both now and into the future.
Why it Sticks
Most of Keret's stories stick in one way or another; in different tales, they feature women who turn into fat male slobs (Fatso), angels that don't live up to their name (Hole in the Wall from The Bus Driver who wanted to be God), and a strange netherworld populated entirely by people who have committed suicide (novella Kneller's Happy Campers.) Your Man is different in that it isn't riddled with the bullet wounds and lost youth of many of the stories in The Nimrod Flipout. His claustrophobic fear is in this case replaced by something far more sinister: the tragic trajectory of one unable to trust in a giving world, to believe that love is in abundance, for him as much as anyone else.
