Rhyming Life and Death

by Amos Oz

  Every human is God’s creature

  And God’s spark is in him seen;

  Each of us a microcosm,

  Every heart contains its dream.

  (This poem was played and sung to a melancholy Russian-style tune; a whole generation, the Author among them, sang it, in voices quivering with sadness and longing, around campfires and on kibbutz lawns. But now both the words and the tune have been forgotten. Just like the naive poet himself.)

  When the jesting spirit descended upon him, Beit-Halachmi was capable of rhyming like this: ‘Only a horse / never questions his course’, or ‘As babbling brooks flow to a pool / so are the words of a prattling fool’.

  When the Author was fifteen or so, a girl in his class at school (who was attractive rather than pretty) gave him a book called Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse, and she wrote on the flyleaf these lines by Tsefania Beit-Halachmi:

  The wind blows where it listeth,

  And as it blows it sings:

  Perchance this time the soaring wind

  Will lift you on its wings.

  *

  Once Bar-Orian has concluded his discourse it is Rochele Reznik’s turn to read out four short extracts from the Author’s new book. She is pretty and shy, pretty yet not attractive, a slim, demure woman of thirty-five or so, with a single, dark old-fashioned plait falling over her shoulder and hiding her left breast.

  She is wearing a cream cotton dress, sleeveless but buttoned up to the neck, printed with a pattern of blue or purple cyclamen. With her dress, her plait and her demure bearing she looks to the Author like a pioneer girl left over from a previous generation. Or does she come from a religious background?

  Rochele Reznik is standing facing the audience, her back slightly bent over the page, her forehead leaning towards the microphone, her slim forearms supporting your book as though it were a tray laden with glasses, and she reads as though there were nothing in your book except love and tenderness. Even the vitriolic dialogue that you wrote as though you were scattering shards of glass she reads with gentleness and feeling.

  Why have you come here this evening, the Author asks himself, what can you get out of it? You ought to be at home right now, sitting at your desk, or lying on your back on the rug, making out shapes on the ceiling. What obscure demon drives you to come out again and again to these gatherings? Instead of being here, you could be sitting quietly at home, listening to Cantata BWV 106, the ‘Actus tragicus’. You could have been an engineer designing railways for difficult mountain terrains, as you dreamed of doing when you were little. (When his father was serving as secretary at the embassy in Bogotá, the Author, then aged twelve, went on a trip in a mountainous region where the ramshackle train wound its way among dizzying drops, a journey that still haunts his dreams.)

  And in fact why do you write? And who for? What is your message, if any? What role do your books play and what good do they do anybody? What answers have you got to the important questions, or at least to some of them?

  Compassion and grace, that is what Rochele Reznik finds in the pages you have written, and she is a pleasant and almost pretty girl, only not really attractive.

  *

  To one side, in one of the back rows, sits a boy – no, it’s a man: gaunt, slightly shrivelled, he looks like a monkey that has lost most of its fur and just has some tufts left on its sunken cheeks, a shabby man in his sixties, with a thinning crest of hair like an anaemic cockscomb. He could be, let’s say, a low-ranking activist who has been thrown out of the section office because he was caught passing confidential papers to an agent from another party, since when he has eked out a living by giving private maths lessons.

  Arnold Bartok would be a good name for him. A month ago he was sacked from his part-time job sorting parcels in a private courier company. His shirt collar is discoloured by sweat and grime, his trousers hang loose from his hips, he hardly ever bothers to wash his shirts or his underwear, and his sandals are worn out. Arnold Bartok spends his evenings composing memos addressed to ministers, journalists and members of the Knesset, writes letters to the editors of various newspapers, pens urgent messages to the State Comptroller or the President, and he suffers terribly from piles. Specially in the early hours.

  He lives with his mother, Ophelia, whose legs are paralysed. The two of them sleep under the same sheet on a worn-out mattress in their room, which is no more than a windowless cubicle that was once his father’s little laundry. Since his father died the iron shutters of the laundry have been permanently closed and secured with a padlock, and the only entrance is at the rear, from the yard, through a warped plywood door. The toilets are in a corrugated-iron lean-to at the other end of the yard, but they are out of reach for the disabled widow, who is dependent on an enamel chamber pot that Arnold Bartok has to put under her every hour or two and then go out and empty in the cracked toilet bowl in the lean-to, and wash under the tap between the dustbins. Black spots have appeared where the enamel of the chamber pot is worn or chipped, so that even after being washed and scrubbed and disinfected with bleach the pot always looks dirty.

  For years now his mother has refused to address him by his proper name, Arnold, but maliciously insists on calling him Araleh or Arke, and when he remonstrates, Stop it, Mama, that’s enough, you know very well that my name is Arnold, his paralysed mother, coquettish as a spoilt little girl, cries exultantly from behind her glasses: What, again? What happened now? What’s the matter with you, Araleh? Why you so angry with me? You want maybe to beat me a little? Like what your sainted father, God rest his soul, used to do? Is that what you want, Araleh? You want to beat me, huh?

  Is Arnold Bartok the wretch who has just chuckled or sniggered again, for the third or fourth time? Is it deliberate mockery, the Author asks himself, or jealousy? Or disgust? Or anger? Or perhaps this is the abstract, depersonalised sound of suffering itself?

  The Author tries to imagine Arnold Bartok, in nothing but his sweaty underwear, at a quarter to three at night in the damp, mouldy laundry, pulling the smelly chamber pot out from underneath his mother’s body, then panting with the effort as he turns her on her front to wipe her clean and fit her with a dry pad.

  *

  And so, when he is finally invited to speak, the Author appears at his best, and replies to the audience’s questions patiently, modestly and seriously. Occasionally he uses simple analogies or examples from everyday life. He takes his time as he expounds the difference between explaining and telling a story. He cites in passing Cervantes, Gogol, Balzac, and even Chekhov and Kafka. He tells a few anecdotes that reduce the audience to laughter. He launches a few sly digs at the literary critic, while he praises his presentation and thanks him for the profundity of his observations. As he speaks, he is amazed at everything: that he agreed to take part in this event, that he has not prepared for it properly, amazed at the words that are coming out of his mouth, even though as he pronounces them it is totally clear to him that he does not agree with what he is saying, and worse than that, the truth is he does not have the faintest shadow of an answer to the real, central questions, and he has no intrinsic interest in the things that his mouth is pouring forth, independently of him.

  Nor does he have any idea as yet why Arnold Bartok bothered to come. Was it really just so as to sit at the back of the hall, stretch out his lizard’s neck towards you and mock you with stifled sniggers? Isn’t he quite right though to scoff? the Author says to himself, as, with his warm, gushing words, he continues to captivate his audience, especially the women.

  *

  He pauses for a moment and runs his fingers through his hair, remembering the waitress, Ricky, and her first love, Charlie, the reserve goalkeeper of Bnei-Yehuda football team who used to part her lips slowly with the tip of his nose, melting her until she almost fainted, and whispered Gogog to her, and even bought her, in Eilat, a dress with sparkling silvery sequins, an evening dress like a singer’s from a hotel on the Riviera, before dumping her and taking up ag
ain with a girl called Lucy who was runner-up in the Queen of the Waves contest: men can’t help themselves, that’s just the way they are made, but women, in Ricky’s view, are actually not much better, definitely not, women often have this thing where they act like lying cats that need to be petted, so the truth is that in any relationship there’s not much to choose between the man and the woman, they’re both pretty worthless. It’s like this: if there’s no electricity there, how on earth can they start to make a relationship? But if there is electricity then they end up getting burnt. And that’s the reason why, Ricky thinks, one way or another love affairs always end in despair. But maybe with a bit of luck I’ll manage to meet up with that Lucy? We’ll have plenty to talk about, replay some juicy episodes, have a laugh together over things that were so painful all those years ago. I ought to try to find out where she’s ended up, that Lucy, after being runner-up in the Queen of the Waves competition. Assuming she’s still alive. And assuming she’s living on her own, too. Like me. And assuming she doesn’t mind meeting up with me.

  *

  With an expression that combines loneliness, cultural sensitivity and sadness, the Author piles lie upon lie. To the questions from the audience, Why do you write etc.? he gives answers he’s already used more than once before, some of them clever, some witty or evasive. Tricks he learned from his father, the minor diplomat. By way of conclusion, he amusingly throws the ball back to the cultural administrator, Yerucham Shdemati, and repays him in his own coin with some lines from Rhyming Life and Death:

  Many a wise man lacks for sense,

  Many a fool has a heart of gold,

  Happiness often ends in tears,

  But what’s inside can never be told.

  Then he is surrounded by his readers. Nonchalantly he signs copies of his latest book, accepts praise with an air of pensive modesty, occasionally smiling a smile that looks like a stifled yawn, while attempting to assuage the ire of Dr Pessach Yikhat, the broad-jawed, cantankerous educator with bushy grey eyebrows and hair sprouting out of his ears and nostrils, assuring him that contemporary literature does not all negate the State: condemning the injustices of the occupation, satirising corruption and widespread brutishness, exposing decadence and stupidity, these things do not amount to negating the State, often, in fact, they come from a broken heart. Even if the enemies of Israel sometimes exploit things that are written here for their own ends, that definitely doesn’t indicate, and after all the biblical prophets too, etc., and also earlier modern writers like Bialik or Brenner, Uri Tsvi Greenberg or S. Yizhar, etc., etc.

  The Author generously allows the boy with the pebble lenses, Yuval Dahan or Dotan, to send him some of his poems. Send them, yes do, but please be patient and don’t expect a reply in a day or two, you must understand that loads of people send me their stuff and ask my opinion of it, but sadly my time, etc., etc.

  Then with a wink he shakes hands firmly with Yakir Bar-Orian Zhitomirski, the expert on literature, he thanks Yerucham Shdemati, the cultural administrator, who thanks him in turn for agreeing to come and speak, No thanks, there’s really no need to call a taxi, I’m staying nearby tonight, I’d rather walk back, it’ll refresh me, maybe a sea breeze has started to blow and it may get cooler soon?

  *

  Outside on the stairs the Author lights a cigarette and devotes his attention to Rochele Reznik. He thanks her warmly, and praises the sensitivity of her reading and her pleasant voice. She, for her part, gives an embarrassed smile, as if instead of being complimented she has been unfairly reprimanded, and in a choked voice she thanks him for his kind words: it is not she who deserves the praise, but the book she has read from.

  When the Author stands aside to let her pass she murmurs repeatedly, It’s nothing, thank you, really, it’s nothing. Then, as though she has offended him, she says sadly, No thank you, I don’t smoke, I’m sorry, thank you anyway, no really. And she holds the book she has read from in front of her like a breastplate, wrapped in brown paper kept in place by two rubber bands.

  You know, the Author says, the truth is that I would have been very happy if instead of all the talking this evening they had just let you read, I mean if the whole evening had just been a reading, instead of all the nitpicking, the exposition and analysis, and even my own wisecracks at the end. You really read my words from the inside, as though you were inside the book and not just holding it open in front of you. When you read, the book itself begins to speak.

  Don’t mention it, Rochele Reznik mumbles, it’s nothing, thank you, really, it’s nothing. Then it suddenly dawns on her that that was not the right way to reply, and she apologises in a voice close to tears.

  At this moment the light on the staircase goes out, and the Author tries to hold her arm to steady her, while feeling with his other hand for the light button, but in the darkness his fingers alight for a moment on the warmth of her breast, before encountering the banister. Meanwhile someone on another floor has turned the light on. The Author apologises and Rochele Reznik, somewhat surprised, replies in a tremulous voice, Don’t mention it, it’s nothing, thank you, really, thank you very much. I’m sorry if I’m a bit emotional. The Author continues: Besides which, your voice really sounds to me so much like the inner voice of the character as I heard it while I was writing.

  Rochele Reznik receives this in silence, her lips trembling. Eventually she says, with downcast eyes, that she has to admit she was very nervous before this evening, she was frankly terrified, after all, reading extracts from an author’s work in his presence is a bit like playing Schubert when Schubert is sitting in the hall.

  *

  The Author offers to walk Rochele Reznik home: he feels like taking a stroll anyway, and breathing the night air, and they could chat on the way or maybe sit down somewhere and have a hot or cold drink. Or even something stronger?

  Now she is thrown completely off balance, she blushes from her ears to her neck, as if her dress has suddenly come unzipped, she apologises, confused, unfortunately there’s really nowhere to walk her, because she happens to live right here, opposite the community centre, just up there, under the roof, that window on the left, the one with no light on, she’s really terribly sorry, no, she’s not sorry, but . . . well. It just so happens this is where I live. Upstairs.

  If there’s no light on, the Author smiles, that must be a sign that there’s nobody waiting for you so you can still come for a walk?

  No, Joselito is waiting for me, I think he must be looking at the clock every few minutes by now, if I’m only a little bit late he always gets angry with me and gives me a guilt trip, where have you been, what did you do, how could you, you should be ashamed of yourself.

  Joselito?

  A cat. A devil in cat’s clothing.

  But the Author does not give up. Why don’t we go for a walk anyway before you climb up to that roof of yours? Then I’ll have a word with this Joselito. I’ll give you a note for him. Or should I grease his little paw with a bribe for you? Just let me take you to a special place that’s less than five minutes from here? It’s very near, at the end of the street and then to the left, come with me and let me show you something and tell you a little story (holding her elbow lightly now, almost absent-mindedly). Here, look, right here, on the spot where they’ve put up this boutique, many years ago stood the Pogrebinsky Brothers’ pharmacy, where once, when I was six years old, my Uncle Osya, my mother’s brother, left me behind, he simply forgot me, and it was more than an hour later that he came back, shouting at Madame Pogrebinskaya, the pharmacist, What sort of irresponsible behaviour is that, roaring at me, Ti paskudniak, little devil, don’t you dare disappear like that again, waving his fist at me and threatening to hit me. But before Uncle Osya came back, when I was alone with the pharmacist and the intoxicating smells, she had taken me into a dark little back room and explained to me in a whisper about all sorts of drugs and poisons and how they all work. Ever since then I have had a weakness for poisons and I’m fascinated by cellars, s
torerooms and all sorts of secret cubbyholes. (While he is talking, the Author releases her elbow but drapes his arm over her shoulder. She trembles, doesn’t know what she should do or say, and decides to do nothing.)

  Tell me, am I boring you?

  No, of course you’re not boring me, what a thought! Rochele Reznik exclaims in alarm. For me this is an experience, it’s as though you’re giving me a preview of your next story, one you haven’t written yet. Or even one that you’ve started and haven’t finished. Of course, you don’t have to tell me. I’m sorry I asked, you should never ask a writer questions like that. (He removes his arm, but first squeezes her shoulder and presses her to him.)

  Very carefully, as though walking barefoot in the dark, Rochele Reznik continues, Take me, for instance, I don’t believe in coincidences any more. There have been moments lately when I’ve had a sudden feeling that everything that happens – literally everything, without exception . . . but I’m not sure I can explain. Don’t you ever think that nothing, I mean nothing, happens by chance?

  A budding shoot, a falling leaf,

  A baby born, an old man dead,

  Say not it’s chance – a vain belief,

  But put it down to fate instead.

  The Author cites these forgotten lines by Tsefania Beit-Halachmi that have suddenly popped up in his memory. Rochele Reznik says: I actually met him several times, at various family celebrations. He had a pink, round face, like a blancmange, with very red lips, always smiling, like a cherry in the middle of the blancmange, and soft fingers that smelled of perfume and were always pinching children’s cheeks in a limp, unpleasant way.

  Who?

  Beit-Halachmi. The poet. His real name wasn’t Tsefania, it wasn’t Beit-Halachmi either. It was something totally different, something like Avraham Schuldenfrei. Bumek. We just called him Uncle Bumek. Once my mother replaced the actress who always read for him, because she had sinusitis, so my mother read at an evening in honour of Uncle Bumek in Kiryat Chayim. And even that night, although I wasn’t a little girl any more, I was already in the army by then, he pinched my cheeks limply every five minutes, and once he pinched me somewhere else too. He was vaguely related to us – I’m not sure exactly how. He wasn’t a real uncle, maybe he was an uncle of one of my parents’ in-laws. Or their great-uncle, perhaps. At family gatherings when I was little they used to say to me, look over there, you see that man shaking hands and smiling left and right, the one who looks like an overgrown podgy baby, that’s our Uncle Bumek, who’s also the famous poet Tsefania Beit-Halachmi.