The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God & Other Stories
Read The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God & Other Stories Online
Authors: Etgar Keret
Praise for
The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God
“Wonderfully surreal, laugh-out-loud-funny stories . . . all of them witty gems from a singular storyteller.”
âElle
“The extraordinary collection . . . the kind of writing that could hook a lot of readers, including some who rarely open a book.”
âThe Boston Globe
“Wildly inventive. If you have a desire to indulge your taste for dark humor, you can't beat this book.”
âBaltimore Sun
“Mr. Keret's always on the side of the naïve against, well, everything else . . . A powerful statement.”
â
The Wall Street Journal
“Slacker midrash . . . Keret serves us plenty of good laughs.”
â
The New York Times
“One couldn't have hoped for a finer way to herald this major new voice in world literature.”
â
San Francisco Chronicle
“Brief and powerful linguistic downpours . . . This is wonderful political satire . . . hilarious.”
âJohn Green,
Booklist
“These wry writings wring the truth out of the fabric of everyday life.”
â
Boston Herald
“Keret's prose comes straight out of the gate, a marvel of verbal economy that never loses its heart.”
â
Flaunt
magazine
PRAISE FOR ETGAR KERET
“Etgar Keret is a genius. . . .”
â
The New York Times
“A brilliant writer . . . completely unlike any writer I know. The voice of the next generation.”
âSalman Rushdie
“One of my favorite Israeli writers.”
âJohn Green
“When I first read Etgar's stories, I wondered what was wrong with himâhad his mother smoked crack while pregnant? was he dropped on his head as an infant?âuntil I met him, and grew to know him, and realized his problem was much worse than I had ever imagined: he is a terribly caring human being in a terribly uncaring universe. Basically, he's fucked.”
âShalom Auslander
“Etgar Keret's stories are funny, with tons of feeling, driving toward destinations you never see coming. They're written in the most unpretentious, chatty voice possible, but they're also weirdly poetic. They stick in your gut. You think about them for days.”
âIra Glass, host and producer of
This American Life
“Exhilarating . . . For Keret, the creative impulse resides not in a conscious devotion to the classic armature of fiction (character, plot, theme, etc.) but in an allegiance to the anarchic instigations of the subconscious. His best stories display a kind of irrepressible dream logic.”
âSteve Almond,
The
New York Times
“Etgar Keret possesses an imagination not easily slotted into conventional literary categories. His very short stories might be described as Kafkaesque parables, magic-realist knock-knock jokes or sad kernels of cracked cosmic wisdom.”
âA. O. Scott,
The New York Times
“[Keret's writing] testifies to the power of the surreal, the concise and the fantastic . . . [O]blique, breezy, seriocomic fantasies that defy encapsulation, categorization, and even summary.”
â
The Washington Post
“It's astonishing what he can do in just two pages: go from funny to bizarre to touching to satiric to meta to surprising and surreal. . . . [A] master storyteller, creating deep, tragic, funny, painful tales with scarcely more words than you've read in this review.”
âCarolyn Kellogg,
Los Angeles Times
Also by Etgar Keret
The Seven Good Years
Suddenly, a Knock on the Door
The Girl on the Fridge
Missing Kissinger
The Nimrod Flip-Out
R
IVERHEAD
B
OOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
Copyright © 1992, 1994, 1998, 2002 by Etgar Keret
Translation copyright © 2004 by The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
ISBN 978-0-698-16571-7
Published by arrangement with the author and The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature
“Katzenstein,” “The Mysterious Disappearance of Alon Shemesh,” “The Son of the Head of the Mossad,” “Plague of the Firstborn,” “Siren” and “Pipes” were first published in Hebrew in
Pipelines
, Am Oved, 1992.
“Hole in the Wall,” “Breaking the Pig,” “Cocked and Locked,” “The Flying Santinis,” “Korbi's Girl,” “Shoes,” “Missing Kissinger” and
“
Good Intentions” were first published in Hebrew in
Missing Kissinger
, Zmora Bitan, 1994.
“The Story About a Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God,” “A Souvenir of Hell,” “Uterus” and “Kneller's Happy Campers” were first published in Hebrew in
Kneller's Happy Campers
, Keter and Zmora Bitan, 1998.
“Goodman,” “Rabin's Dead,” “One Last Story and That's It” and “Jetlag” were first published in Hebrew in
Anihu
, Zmora Bitan, 2002.
All stories in this volume were translated by Miriam Shlesinger except for “Breaking the Pig,” “The Flying Santinis,” “Korbi's Girl,” “Missing Kissinger,” translated by Dalya Bilu; “Shoes,” translated by Margaret Weinberger-Rotman; “Siren,” translated by Anthony Berris; “Jetlag,” translated by Dan Ofri.
Originally published in 2004 by Toby Press.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
THE STORY ABOUT A BUS DRIVER WHO WANTED TO BE GOD
THE MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCE OF ALON SHEMESH
T
his is the story about a bus driver who would never open the door of the bus for people who were late. Not for anyone. Not for repressed high school kids who'd run alongside the bus and stare at it longingly, and certainly not for high-strung people in windbreakers who'd bang on the door as if
they
were actually on time and it was the driver who was out of line, and not even for little old ladies with brown paper bags full of groceries who struggled to flag him down with trembling hands. And it wasn't because he was mean that he didn't open the door, because this driver didn't have a mean bone in his body; it was a matter of ideology. The driver's ideology said that if, say, the delay that was caused by opening the door for someone
who came late was just under thirty seconds, and if not opening the door meant that this person would wind up losing fifteen minutes of his life, it would still be more fair to society, because the thirty seconds would be lost by every single passenger on the bus. And if there were, say, sixty people on the bus who hadn't done anything wrong, and had all arrived at the bus stop on time, then together they'd be losing half an hour, which is double fifteen minutes. This was the only reason why he'd never open the door. He knew that the passengers hadn't the slightest idea what his reason was, and that the people running after the bus and signaling him to stop had no idea either. He also knew that most of them thought he was just an SOB, and that personally it would have been much, much easier for him to let them on and receive their smiles and thanks.
Except that when it came to choosing between smiles and thanks on the one hand, and the good of society on the other, this driver knew what it had to be.
The person who should have suffered the most from the driver's ideology was named Eddie, but unlike the other people in this story, he wouldn't even try to run for the bus, that's how lazy and wasted he was. Now, Eddie was Assistant Cook at a restaurant called The Steakaway, which was the best pun that the stupid owner of the place could come up with. The food there was nothing to write home about, but Eddie himself was a really nice guyâso nice that sometimes, when something he made didn't come out too great, he'd serve it to the table himself and apologize. It was during one of these apologies that he met
Happiness, or at least a shot at Happiness, in the form of a girl who was so sweet that she tried to finish the entire portion of roast beef that he brought her, just so he wouldn't feel bad. And this girl didn't want to tell him her name or give him her phone number, but she was sweet enough to agree to meet him the next day at five at a spot they decided on togetherâat the Dolphinarium, to be exact.
Now, Eddie had this conditionâone that had already caused him to miss out on all sorts of things in life. It wasn't one of those conditions where your adenoids get all swollen or anything like that, but still, it had already caused him a lot of damage. This sickness always made him oversleep by ten minutes, and no alarm clock did any good. That was why he was invariably late for work at The Steakawayâthat, and our bus driver, the one who always chose the good of society over positive reinforcements on the individual level. Except that this time, since Happiness was at stake, Eddie decided to beat the condition, and instead of taking an afternoon nap, he stayed awake and watched television. Just to be on the safe side, he even lined up not one, but three alarm clocks, and ordered a wake-up call to boot. But this sickness was incurable, and Eddie fell asleep like a baby, watching the Kiddie Channel. He woke up in a sweat to the screeching of a trillion million alarm clocksâten minutes too late, rushed out of the house without stopping to change, and ran toward the bus stop. He barely remembered how to run anymore, and his feet fumbled a bit every time they left the sidewalk. The last time he ran was before he discovered that he could cut gym class,
which was about in the sixth grade, except that unlike in those gym classes, this time he ran like crazy, because now he had something to lose, and all the pains in his chest and his Lucky Strike wheezing weren't going to get in the way of his Pursuit of Happiness. Nothing was going to get in his way except our bus driver, who had just closed the door, and was beginning to pull away. The driver saw Eddie in the rear-view mirror, but as we've already explained, he had an ideologyâa well-reasoned ideology that, more than anything, relied on a love of justice and on simple arithmetic. Except that Eddie didn't care about the driver's arithmetic. For the first time in his life, he really wanted to get somewhere on time. And that's why he went right on chasing the bus, even though he didn't have a chance. Suddenly, Eddie's luck turned, but only halfway: one hundred yards past the bus stop there was a traffic light. And, just a second before the bus reached it, the traffic light turned red. Eddie managed to catch up with the bus and to drag himself all the way to the driver's door. He didn't even bang on the glass, he was so weak. He just looked at the driver with moist eyes, and fell to his knees, panting and wheezing. And this reminded the driver of somethingâsomething from out of the past, from a time even before he wanted to become a bus driver, when he still wanted to become God. It was kind of a sad memory because the driver didn't become God in the end, but it was a happy one too, because he became a bus driver, which was his second choice. And suddenly the driver remembered how he'd once promised himself that if he became God in the
end, he'd be merciful and kind, and would listen to all His creatures. So when he saw Eddie from way up in his driver's seat, kneeling on the asphalt, he simply couldn't go through with it, and in spite of all his ideology and his simple arithmetic, he opened the door, and Eddie got onâand didn't even say thank you, he was so out of breath.
The best thing would be to stop reading here, because even though Eddie did get to the Dolphinarium on time, Happiness couldn't come, because Happiness already had a boyfriend. It's just that she was so sweet that she couldn't bring herself to tell Eddie, so she preferred to stand him up. Eddie waited for her, on the bench they'd agreed on, for almost two hours. While he sat there he kept thinking all sorts of depressing thoughts about life, and while he was at it he watched the sunset, which was a pretty good one, and thought about how charley-horsed he was going to be later on. On his way back, when he was really desperate to get home, he saw his bus in the distance, pulling in at the bus stop and letting off passengers, and he knew that even if he'd had the strength to run, he'd never catch up with it anyway. So he just kept on walking slowly, feeling about a million tired muscles with every step, and when he finally reached the bus stop, he saw that the bus was still there, waiting for him. And even though the passengers were shouting and grumbling to get a move on, the driver waited for Eddie, and he didn't touch the accelerator till Eddie was seated. And when they started moving, he looked in the rear-view mirror and gave Eddie a sad wink, which somehow made the whole thing almost
bearable.