In the morning the radio announced the happy news. It was an unusual morning, different, contrary to the sequence of fifty-four mornings, a new record in which the news was bad or mostly bad.
The excitement was great.
When the sound of the news was finally heard, the announcer excitedly said he was proud to be the one to read such an important release.
Today at noon, he said, but with more words, candies will be distributed to all residents of Israel to improve the public's mood, which, according to surveys of the governmental survey company together with the Institute for Moods of Binyamina and several state companies, declined considerably in recent months as compared to the level from last November--at which time a low of all time had been recorded.
I turned up the radio to see if it could be that that radio announcer already had a candy crackling in his mouth. For, in the very quiet moments, when radio announcers do what radio announcers usually do, you could hear a sound, the tiniest tick and yet very distinct, which reminded one of the sucking of candy.
If true, it would be really unfair if radio announcers received before all other citizens, what everybody is supposed to receive simultaneously and equally, I allowed myself to mutter loudly. My wife who for a few months was dragging a dominant gestational tummy, agreed and said she was not surprised if someone on TV did research and found out that those guys on the radio are taking over this country all for themselves. "In the end," she concluded, "It is always a war between the people on the radio and those on TV."
She must have good senses, my wife, because already that evening they put on television a lead with that exact story but it would only happen after dark, and in the meantime there was still the excitement of the promised candy that overwhelmed all of us and was constantly growing.
The excitement grew in me and of course it grew in my wife, and it grew down in her bulging impregnated stomach and in all our neighbors, all of whom we hate, except for the dying neighbour because how can you hate a neighbor who’s only got two or three months to live? He is, after all, a neighbor.
I told Adva that I'm leaving to go to work at the advertising agency. It's stupid to tell your wife "I'm leaving to go to work at the advertising agency." She already knows that I work there, right? She's known that since my first day, two years and four months ago. I explained away my foolish comment by telling myself that I said it only because of the pregnancy and the bulging stomach and in the uncertainty of what might happen between us, because recently there had been problems, and the only thing that seemed guaranteed to me was my work at the advertising agency.
"I'll be at the advertising agency in an hour," I said to her, already by the door.
She said my tie does not suit an advertising agency, that I should get rid of it.
"Really?" I tugged at the neck of my tie with my fingers.
Fifteen minutes later, inside the car, just before merging onto the Ayalon Highway North from the Halakha Bridge, I threw my tie out the window. I didn't care for wearing it all day long nor all of the next. The tie flew through the air and landed on the head of a cyclist riding on the new path for cyclists, and he got mad because he had distinctly decided to take the new path because is only for cyclists and not, for example, for Riksha drivers or Alte Sachen transporters or delivery trucks for ice or for flying neckties. He stopped abruptly and banged on the tin hood of my car righteously, shouting, "Now are you happy? Now are you happy? You almost knocked me off the path! Does that make you happy?"
How do you tell a cyclist who is travelling on the new path, designated only for bicycles, that the relationship between you and your wife has gone aground? That you took different routes and now you're growing further and further apart from each other, AND that her belly continues to swell daily, in spite of it all.
