Free The Nimrod Flipout: Stories by Etgar Keret Page B

smart dog. There’s no way he was run over. If it were Schneider…” she said, giving her lively schnauzer the kind of sad, loving look beautiful girls always save for their ugly girlfriends, “then we’d have to worry. But Darko knows how to take care of himself. I can just see him whining outside the entrance to your building. Or on your doormat right now, chewing on a stolen bone.”
    Even though he could have called Neeva to ask whether Darko had come back, Ronel decided to go home. It was close by, and besides, now that Alma had managed to convince him that Darko might be there, he didn’t want Neeva to be the one to tell him the good news. “She and I,” he thought, “should have separated a long time ago.” Once, he remembered, he’d looked at Neeva when she was sleeping and imagined a horrible scenario in which she died in a terrorist attack. He’d be sorry for cheating on her and he’d cry live on the six o’clock news out of guilt cunningly disguised as pure grief. That thought, he now remembered, had been sad and terrible, but, to his surprise, it also made him feel a kind of relief. As if her being wiped out of his life might open up a space for something else, something with color and smell and life. But before he could feel guilty again about this sensation of relief, Renana made her entrance into the scenario and now that Neeva was no longer in the picture, she moved right in with him, at first to give him comfort and support. Then she stayed for no reason at all. Ronel remembered how he’d gone on and on in his imagination, till he reached the point when Renana said to him, “It’s me or Darko.” He chose Darko and remained alone in his apartment. Without a woman. Without love, except for Darko’s, whose existence only intensified the terrible loneliness he called his life. “Terrorism is awful,” Ronel had thought that night. “It destroys life in an instant,” and he gave Neeva’s sleeping forehead a gentle kiss.
    Ronel walked past Darko almost without noticing him. He was too busy trying to find a lighted window in his third-floor apartment. Darko was busy too, his filmy glance admiringly following the quick hands of the owner of Tarboosh Shwarma as they cut thin slices of meat from the revolving spit. But when the two friends finally spotted each other, their reunion was replete with lavish face-licking and emotion. “That’s some dog,” the shwarma guy said as he knelt in front of Darko, placing a piece of paper with a few greasy slices of meat on the sidewalk like a high priest making a sacrifice to his god. “I want you to know that a lot of dogs come here, and I don’t give them anything. But this one…” he said, pointing at Darko. “Tell me, does he happen to be Turkish?” “What do you mean, Turkish?” Ronel asked, offended. “Oh nothing,” the shwarma guy apologized. “I’m from Izmir, so I thought…When I was a kid, I had a dog just like him, a puppy. But he used to pee in the house, which drove my mother crazy, so she threw him out, like he did it on purpose. But you, you’re a good man. He ran away from you and you’re not even mad. Believe me, that’s how it should be. I don’t understand all those tough guys who clobber their dogs with the leash if they stop for a minute to watch the shwarma turn. What are they, Nazis?” “He didn’t run away,” Ronel corrected him as he pressed his tired forehead against Darko’s sturdy back. “He got lost.”
    That night, Ronel decided to write a book. Something between an educational fable and a philosophical treatise. The story would be about a king beloved by all his subjects who loses something he cherishes, not money, maybe a child or something, or a nightingale, if nobody’s used that yet. Around page one hundred, the book would turn into something less symbolic and more modern that dealt with man’s alienation in contemporary society and offered a little consolation. On about page one hundred sixty or