Elvis
By Lavie Tidhar.
Elvis didn’t die. Everyone knows that. But I know where he went, after.
Elvis left the United States. Elvis became a volunteer, and went to Israel, and worked on a kibbutz.
The kibbutz was called Ramat Ha’shofet.
Ramat Ha’shofet is not an attractive kibbutz. It has cattle, fields, a factory. Its communal dining-room is one of the largest in the country. Movies are screened there once a week, on a Friday. Chairs are reserved by placing a salt-shaker or a napkin-holder onto them.
The food is bland.
When Elvis came there he lived with the other volunteers, most of whom were younger than him. He had lost weight by that point. He began going to the kibbutz swimming-pool and doing laps between two and four, when normally only one or two elderly ladies swim, slowly and leisurely, like placid, stupefied ducks. At work, Elvis drove a tractor, and as he drove through the fields he sang “Hound Dog”, “Viva Las Vegas”, “Long Legged Girl”. He had a friend on the kibbutz, Hagai Shalev, who was a boy at the time Elvis came. He followed Elvis around. He was convinced Elvis was Elvis.
‘My name’s Aaron,’ Elvis would say to him, almost every day. ‘Aaron. I’m Jewish. Elvis wasn’t Jewish.’
But Hagai knew he was the King.
On Saturdays Elvis went to the kibbutz pub with the other volunteers. No one uses money on a kibbutz. Everyone had an account. Elvis drank moderately. He liked to sit with a glass of beer and listen to the music. He didn’t think much of Shlomo Artzi’s singing, and he avoided the kibbutz music teacher, Tesler, who always gave him funny looks, as if he were someone he knew but couldn’t quite remember where from.
He liked Carly Simon.
If someone happened to buy him a beer he always said, ‘Thank you. Thank you very much.’ He was always very polite, and the kibbutz elders all liked him. Hagai’s grandfather, who smoked for seventy years and only died at the age of ninety-three, always said, ‘He is a nice Jewish boy, that Aaron. You should be more like him, Hagai.’
He seemed to be happy. It was a pretty place to live, and it was quiet.
Hagai told me of the last time he saw him. Elvis was hitchhiking on the road outside the kibbutz. He had a guitar strapped to his back, which Hagai had never seen before, and he wore dark sunglasses, and his workman’s blue overalls, and he was smiling. When he saw Hagai he waved, but at that moment a car stopped and picked him up, and he drove away.
Hagai never saw him again after that. Perhaps he went to another kibbutz.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lavie Tidhar is the author of HebrewPunk (2007), An Occupation of Angels (2005), Cloud Permutations (2009) and Gorel & The Pot-Bellied God (2010). He wrote the short novel The Tel Aviv Dossier (2009) with Nir Yaniv and edited anthologies A Dick & Jane Primer for Adults (2008) and The Apex Book of World SF (2009). He’s lived on three continents and one island-nation and currently lives in South East Asia.
First published in 3:AM Magazine: Wednesday, April 29th, 2009.
