Free The Seven Good Years by Etgar Keret Page B

consistent with the spirit of religious fundamentalist terrorists.
    I know it isn’t really politically correct. But how else to explain a game in which you are prepared to sacrifice your life just so you can destroy the houses of unarmed enemies and vaporize their wives and children inside, causing their deaths? And that’s before you get into the business of the pigs: a filthy animal that, in fanatic Muslim rhetoric, is often used to symbolize heretical races whose fate is death. After all, cows and sheep could just as easily have stolen our eggs, but the game planners still deliberately chose fat, dollar-green capitalist pigs.
    By the way, I’m not saying that this is necessarily bad. I guess launching square-headed birds into stone walls is as close as I’ll ever get to a suicide mission in this incarnation. So, this might be a fun, controlled way of learning that not only birds or terrorists get angry, but so do I, and all I need is the right and relatively harmless context in which to recognize that anger and let it run wild for a while.
    A few days after that odd conversation with my mother, she and my father appeared at our door holding a rectangular gift wrapped in flowered paper. Lev opened it excitedly and found a board game inside, on which pictures of dollar bills were prominently featured.
    â€œYou said you were bored by Go Fish,” my mother said, “so we decided to buy you Monopoly.”
    â€œWhat do you have to do in this game?” Lev asked suspiciously.
    â€œMake money,” my father said. “Lots of money! You take all your parents’ money till you’re filthy rich and they’re left with nothing.”
    â€œGreat!” Lev said happily. “How do you play?”
    And from that day on, the green pigs have been living in peace and quiet. True, we haven’t been to their neighborhoods on Mom’s iPhone, but I’m sure that if we dropped in for a quick visit, we’d find them squealing contentedly after closing off a balcony or digging a burrow for their little ones. My wife and I, on the other hand, find our situation deteriorating. Every evening, after Lev goes to sleep, we sit in the kitchen and calculate our new debts to our greedy little scion, who holds more than ninety percent of the Monopoly real estate, including cross-ownership of construction and infrastructure companies. After we finish calculating our multidigit debts, we go to bed. I close my eyes, trying not to think about the chubby, coldhearted issue of our loins who, in the near future, is going to strip my wife and me of the torn carton we’re presently living in on the game board, till blessed sleep finally arrives, and with it, dreams. Once again I’m a bird, flying across the blue skies, cutting through the clouds in a breathtaking blissful arc, only to crush my square head in a delirium of vengeance on the heads of green, mustached, egg-eating pigs. Ho-la!

Year Five

Imaginary Homeland
    W hen I was a kid, I used to try to imagine Poland. My mother, who grew up in Warsaw, told me quite a few stories about the city, about Jerusalem Boulevard (Aleje Jerozolimskie), where she was born and played as a little girl, and about the ghetto where she spent her childhood years trying to survive and where she lost her entire family. Apart from one blurred photograph in my older brother’s history book that showed a tall, mustached man and a horse-drawn carriage in the background, I had no reality-based images of that distant country, but my need to imagine the place where my mother grew up and where my grandparents and uncle are buried was strong enough to keep me trying to create it in my mind. I pictured streets like the ones I saw in illustrations in Dickens novels. In my mind, the churches my mother told me about were right out of a musty old copy of
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
. I could imagine her walking down those cobblestone streets, careful not to bump into tall,