Another Bus To Heaven

Another Bus to Heaven

This is a great time of year, either usually or maybe it’s just this year, a few days of autumn like Navy years in Rhode Island, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania. All that’s missing is red, yellow and orange leaves. And clouds threatening snow. 

Our first snow in Rhode Island (1957) was December, but in Ann Arbor (1962) it was October -- white ground, black trees, gray sky from mid October to mid May and that’s no joke. Snow, I can love it or list it, if you’ve shoveled one driveway you’ve shoveled them all. But Kristen hasn’t seen snow and she’s turning 21 in two months. I told her to choose Michigan for college, or Maine, but her heart was set on Emory, a junior and still no snow in Atlanta.

One of those kooks who has several books going at once, current favorite is Ebert’s Life Itself: A Memoir but also going is a book about Jesus that’s by the bed upstairs, and here by the lift-chair we bought for mama that’s mine now, one of my several books by Etgar Keret. The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God & Other Stories: Warped & Wonderful Short Stories. Israeli, Keret lives in Tel Aviv. His stories are translated, which could make mastering Hebrew more enticing than just being able to read Haggai. 

“Katzenstein” starts out with the narrator in Hell, immersed in a cauldron of boiling water, can’t stop screaming, the pain is so bad. Why is he in Hell? Suicide. Life was a downer of constantly being compared to Katzenstein who was always just a little better. In high school he didn’t quite get into honors class and his mother cried her eyes out because Miriam Katzenstein’s son got in, his grades were a little better. Once after they’d made love his wife complains that he never gets a promotion at work, but look at Katzenstein. All his life it’s Katzenstein, Katzenstein, Katzenstein, Katzenstein. On the plane back home from Basel he realizes Katzenstein is sitting in front of him, suffers the five hour flight still and lifelong behind Katzenstein. During the flight he orders an orange juice and drinking it notices Katzenstein sipping a Jack Daniels. As the flight nears end and passengers are told to fasten seat belts, our narrator, insane from Katzenstein, leaps up, pulls the lever, door swings open, is sucked out, falls to his death, is hustled immediately to Hell. 

Fifteen minutes later the plane crashed on landing. A bus passes Hell on its way to Heaven, Katzenstein and the other passengers wave at him.

Keret’s irony is not as dark as Flannery “The Enduring Chill” nor pious as Lewis The Great Divorce.  

TW+

Bus: pinched online, tks.