He actually had a relationship once with someone who’d committed suicide. Not emotional, physical. It happened in the army. He was serving in general-staff headquarters at the time, and he’d been brought up on charges of being seen with his boots unpolished. And just when he was walking past the tall staff headquarters building, someone dropped to the ground next to him, splattered. A girl-soldier, they said, with a broken heart, a corporal, Liat Something. Later he remembered hearing a kind of scream above him as she was falling. But he hadn’t looked up. The sound didn’t even register.

He reached the hearing all covered in her blood. They let him off. Liat Atlas. That was her name. They even called on him later, to testify at the military police investigation. It couldn’t go on this way, that much he knew. Maybe he needed therapy.

Autor: Etgar Keret