Uterus: A Selection from Etgar Keret’s The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God & Other Stories (2015)

“On my fifth birthday, they discovered that my mother had cancer, and the doctors said she had to have her uterus removed. It was a sad day. We all got into Dad’s Subaru and went to the hospital and waited till the doctor came out of the operating room with tears in his eyes. “Never ever have I seen such a beautiful uterus,” he said, as he removed his surgical mask. “I feel like a murderer.” My mother really did have a beautiful uterus. So beautiful that the hospital donated it to the museum. And on Saturday we went there specially, and my uncle took a picture of us next to it. My dad was no longer in the country by then. He divorced Mom the day after the operation. “A woman without a uterus is no woman. And a man who stays with a woman who’s no woman is no man himself,” he told my older brother and me a second before he got onto the plane to Alaska. “When you grow up, you’ll understand.”

The room where they had my mom’s uterus on display was all dark. The only light came from the uterus itself, which shone with a kind of gentle glow, like the inside of a plane on a night flight. In pictures, it didn’t look like anything much, because of the flash, but when I saw it up close, I could understand perfectly well why it had the doctor in tears. “You came out of there,” my uncle said and pointed. “You were like princes living in there, believe me. What a mother you had, what a mother.”

Eventually my mother died. Eventually all mothers die. And my dad became a famous arctic explorer and whaler. The girls I dated always used to take it the wrong way when I’d peek at their uterus. They thought it was some kind of gynecological hang-up, which is a definite turnoff. But one of them, with a really nice bod, agreed to marry me. I used to spank our kids a lot, right from infancy, because their crying got on my nerves. And the truth is they learned their lesson fast, and stopped crying for good by the time they were nine months, if not earlier. In the beginning I’d take them to the museum on their birthdays, to show them their grandmother’s uterus, but they didn’t really get into it, and my wife would be pissed off, so little by little I started taking them to Walt Disney movies instead.

One day my car was towed, and the police lot was in the same neighborhood, so I dropped in at the museum while I was there. The uterus wasn’t in its usual place. They’d moved it to a room on the side, full of old pictures, and when I took a closer look, I saw it was all covered with tiny green dots. I asked the guard why nobody was keeping it clean, but he just shrugged. I begged the guy in charge of the exhibition to let me clean it off myself if they were short-staffed, but the guy in charge was very nasty. He said I wasn’t allowed to touch the exhibits because I wasn’t a member of the staff. My wife said the museum was one hundred percent right, and that as far as she was concerned, displaying a uterus in a public institution is sick, especially when the place is full of children. But not me. I couldn’t think of anything else. Deep in my heart I knew that if I didn’t break into the museum and steal it out of there and take care of it, I’d stop being what I am. Just like my dad that night, on the steps of the plane, I knew exactly what I had to do. Two days later, I took a van from work, and arrived at the museum just before it closed. The rooms were empty, but even if I had met someone, it wouldn’t have worried me. I was armed this time, and besides, I had a really good plan. My only problem was that the uterus itself had disappeared. The guy in charge of the exhibition was kind of surprised to see me, but when I shoved the butt of my new Jericho deep in his throat he was very quick to cough up the information. The uterus had been sold the day before to a Jewish philanthropist, who had stipulated that it should be sent to one of the community centers in Alaska. On the way there, it had been hijacked by a few people from the local chapter of the Ecological Front. The Front issued a press release announcing that a uterus doesn’t belong in captivity, which was why they’d decided to set it free in natural surroundings. According to Reuters, this Ecological Front was radical and dangerous. Its whole operation was run from a pirate ship commanded by a retired whaler. I thanked the guy in charge and put away my gun. The whole way home, all the lights were red. I just kept swerving from lane to lane without bothering to look in the mirror, struggling to get rid of the lump that stuck in my throat. I tried to imagine my mother’s uterus in the middle of a green, dew-covered field, floating in an ocean full of dolphins and tuna.”—Etgar Keret, The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God & Other Stories (2015)