Suddenly, a Knock on the Door: Stories by Etgar Keret, Nathan Englander, Miriam Shlesinger, Sondra Silverston

my chance and I blew it, but you—aren’t you going to learn from my mistake, Motti? Sign on the dotted line and get it over with. Who knows what could land on your head five minutes from now.” And this Motti or Yigal or Mickey sitting across from him would stare for a minute and then take the pen he held out with his good arm and sign. Every single one of them. No ifs, ands, or buts. And Oshri would wink goodbye, because when your right arm is paralyzed there’s no shaking hands, and on his way out he’d be sure to add something about how they’d made the right move. And so, without much effort, Oshri Sivan’s battered bank account quickly began to recover, and within three months he and his wife had bought a new apartment with a much smaller mortgage than the one they’d had before. And with all the physiotherapy he got at the clinic, even his arm started to get better, though when clients held out their hand to him, he’d still pretend he couldn’t move it at all.
     
     
    “There’s blue and yellow and white and a soft sweet taste in my mouth. There’s something hovering high above me. Something good, and I’m heading toward it. Heading toward it.”
     
    At night he went on dreaming about it—not about the accident. About the coma. It was strange, but even though a long time had passed since then, he could still remember, down to the last detail, everything he’d felt during those six weeks. He remembered the colors and the taste and the fresh air cooling his face. He remembered the absence of memory, the sense of existing without a name and without a history, in the present. Six whole weeks of present. During which the only thing he felt within him that wasn’t the present was this little hint of a future, in the form of an unaccountable optimism attached to a strange sense of beingness. He didn’t know what his own name was during those six weeks, or that he was married, or that he had a little girl. He didn’t know he’d had an accident or that he was in the hospital now, fighting for his life. He didn’t know anything except that he was alive. And this fact alone filled him with enormous happiness. All in all, the experience of thinking and feeling within that nothingness was more intense than anything that had ever happened to him before, as if all the background noises had disappeared and the only sound left was true and pure and beautiful to the point of tears. He didn’t discuss it with his wife or with anyone else. You’re not supposed to get that much joy out of being close to death. You’re not supposed to get a thrill from your coma while your wife and daughter are crying their hearts out at your bedside. So when they asked whether he remembered anything about it, he said he didn’t, he didn’t remember a thing. When he woke up, his wife asked if, when he’d been in the coma, he’d been able to hear her and Meital, their daughter, talking to him, and he told her that even if he couldn’t remember hearing them he was sure it had helped him. It had given him strength, on the unconscious level, and a desire to live. That was what he told her, but it wasn’t true, because when he was in the coma he really did hear voices on the outside sometimes. Strange, sharp, yet at the same time unclear, like sounds you hear when you’re underwater. And he didn’t like it at all. Those voices sounded menacing to him, they hinted at something beyond the pleasant, colorful now in which he was living.
     
     
    “May you never know sorrow again.”
     
    Oshri couldn’t make it during the shiva week to pay a condolence call on the family of the guy who’d fallen on his head. He couldn’t make it to the unveiling of the headstone either. But when the first anniversary rolled around, he did go, with flowers and everything. At the cemetery there were only the guy’s parents and his sister and some fat high school friend. They didn’t know who he was. The mother thought he was her son’s boss,