Rhyming Life and Death

by Amos Oz

  When he was sixteen or seventeen, the age that the young poet Yuval Dotan is now, the Author used to sit alone at night in an abandoned storeroom where he poured out fragments of muddled stories onto paper. He wrote more or less the same way as he dreamed or masturbated: a mixture of compulsion, enthusiasm, despair, disgust and wretchedness. And in those days he also had an insatiable curiosity to try to understand why people hurt each other, and themselves, without meaning to at all.

  Nowadays he is still curious to understand, but over the years he has gradually acquired a physical dread of bodily contact with strangers: even a slight accidental contact terrifies him. Even the touch of a stranger’s hand on his shoulder. Even the need to inhale air that may have been in other people’s lungs. And yet he continues to watch them and write about them so as to touch them without touching, and so that they touch him without really touching him.

  One could put it like this: he writes about them as if he were a photographer from the days of sepia photographs, taking a group portrait. He runs around among the sitters, chatting to them all, making friends, joking, instructing them to settle down and take their places, arranging them in a semicircle, with the men standing at the back, the shorter ones with the women and children sitting in front, closing up the gaps, moving heads closer together, walking among them two or three times, straightening a collar here, a sleeve there, or a hair ribbon, then retreating behind the camera perched on its tripod, burying his head in the black cloth, closing one eye, counting aloud one-two-three, finally pressing the trigger and turning them all into ghosts. (Only Miriam Nehorait’s grey cat refused to be still, maybe he sniffed the presence of Joselito, so he has been immortalised in a corner of the picture with three or four tails. Lisaveta Kunitsin blinked and looks as though she is winking. The bald pate of Mr Leon, the gangster’s henchman, reflects an unhealthy glow. The young poet Yuval Dahan/Dotan forgot to smile, but Charlie is grinning broadly, Rochele Reznik is looking down at the tips of her shoes, while Lucy, runner-up in the Queen of the Waves contest, has a slight, not unattractive squint in her left eye.)

  *

  But why write about things that exist even without you? Why describe in words things that are not words?

  Moreover, what purpose, if any, is served by your stories? Whom do they benefit? Who, if you will excuse the question, needs your shabby fantasies about all kinds of worn-out sex scenes with frustrated waitresses, lonely readers who live with cats, or runners-up in Eilat Queen of the Waves contests from years ago? Maybe you wouldn’t mind explaining to us, please, briefly and in your own words, what the Author is trying to tell us here?

  He is covered in shame and confusion because he observes them all from a distance, from the wings, as if they all exist only for him to make use of in his books. And with the shame comes a profound sadness that he is always an outsider, unable to touch or to be touched, with his head perpetually buried under the photographer’s old black cloth.

  You cannot write without looking behind you; like Lot’s wife. And in doing so you turn yourself and them into blocks of salt.

  To write about things that exist, to try to capture a colour or smell or sound in words, is a little like playing Schubert when Schubert is sitting in the hall, and perhaps sniggering in the darkness.

  It’s green and peaceful here, a crow

  stands on a pillar, all alone,

  a pair of cypress trees together

  and another on its own.

  *

  You need to make a correction. Your description of Mrs Miriam Nehorait was not entirely accurate: swollen legs with purple varicose veins and a wizened face wrapped in cultural sweetness. Later, when she came up to you, you noticed her delicate mouth, her well-shaped fingers, her pleasant brown eyes, like those of an enthusiastic child, with long, gently upturned lashes. Twice every day she feeds eight alley-cats, one of which is missing an ear. Yechiel Nehorai, her husband, was run over nine years ago when he was a Zionist emissary in Montevideo. Her two married sons are both gynaecologists in New York. (One of them is married to the daughter of the peeping neighbour, the optician Lisaveta Kunitsin.)

  For some time now a hesitant, ill-defined relationship has been developing between Miriam Nehorait, a mature woman who has lived on her own for years in a two-roomed flat with a little entrance hall, and her widowed neighbour, Yerucham Shdemati, the bubbly cultural administrator, with his noisy gaiety and his body odour, the man whose face looks like an old loaf of bread that has stood for too long in the basket and has started to shrivel and crack. Once, in the sixties, he was put thirteenth on the Labour Union Zionist Workers’ Party list, and he was nearly elected to the Knesset. He was one of the last remaining campaigners for the creation of a general commune of all the workers in the Land of Israel, Jews and Arabs, men and women, who would all work to the best of their ability and put their monthly earnings into the communal chest, from which each worker would be paid a standard basic wage, with supplements according to the number of children, the state of health and the educational and cultural needs of each working family, according to the condition and the real needs of each. He believes that people are by nature generous and that it is only social pressures that drive us all into the arms of selfishness, greed and exploitation. This evening, before you both went up onto the dais, he asked you to remind him later to tell you something about Rabbi Alter Druyanov’s Book of Jokes and Witticisms. You forgot to remind him, and now it’s too late. So now you will never know the key difference between a joke and a witticism. You are unlikely to meet Yerucham Shdemati again.

  You ought to pause here for a moment, to take the time to give this character some habits that will fix him in your readers’ memory, two or three significant eccentricities. For example, his habit of lustily licking the gummed strip on the back of an envelope with the whole width of his tongue, as though it were some kind of sweet. Yerucham Shdemati also licks stamps with a great abundance of saliva, with sensual greed, after which he likes to stick them on the envelope with a mighty thump of the fist, which makes Miriam Nehorait, who is fascinated by his ‘latent Tartar side’, jump out of her skin.

  He always answers the telephone at the first ring, with a broad, expansive gesture as though he were throwing a stone, and shouts into the receiver: Yes, Shdemati here, who is calling please? Bartok? No, I don’t know any Bartok, Arnold or not Arnold, no, my dear comrade, absolutely not, on no account, I’m sorry but I am not authorised to divulge the Author’s telephone number, I have not received the necessary permission, very sorry, comrade, why, if you don’t mind my asking, don’t you try to get it from the Writers’ Union, for example? Huh?

  Yerucham Shdemati almost always has bruises on his elbows or his forehead or his shoulder or his knee – a result of his fixed habit of ignoring inanimate objects and trying to walk straight through them as though they were made of air. Or maybe it is the opposite, and the inanimate objects bear a grudge and conspire against him. At any moment a chair back may butt him, the corner of the bathroom cabinet collide with his forehead, or a slice of bread spread with honey lies in wait for him on the bench just where he is about to sit down, the cat’s tail plants itself right underneath the sole of his shoe and a glass of boiling hot tea hankers after his trousers. He also still composes furious letters to the editor of the evening paper denouncing some injustice or pitilessly exposing the ugliness, the arrogance, the ignominy and the lies that have infected politics in particular and society in general in this country of ours.

  In the morning he stands for a long time, sweaty and solidly built in his pyjama trousers and a yellowing singlet, at the basin in his bathroom, never closing the door as he performs his thorough, noisy ablutions, and with legs outspread he leans over the basin, washing and scrubbing his face, the back of his neck, his broad shoulders, his chest covered in white curls, snorting and gargling under the running tap, shaking his wet head from side to side like a dog that has been in water, squeezing each nostril in turn and emptying their
contents into the basin, clearing his throat and hawking so noisily that Miriam Nehorait, who is on the other side of the wall in her own kitchen, is alarmed. Then he stands there for another three minutes towelling himself dry energetically, as though he were scrubbing a frying pan.

  If, however, somebody praises an omelette he has made, a picture on his wall, the achievements of the early pioneers, the dock strike in Haifa, or the beauty of the sunset outside his window, his eyes moisten in gratitude. Underneath his inflamed discourse on every subject under the sun, from the decline in the status of workers to the general infantilisation of culture in Israel and worldwide, there is a constantly gushing geyser of jollity, a Gulf Stream of cheery warmth and kind-heartedness. Even when he tries to raise his voice threateningly and burst into a wounded roar, his face still beams optimistically with a tireless enthusiasm.

  Yerucham Shdemati always greets his brother’s granddaughter with a fixed riddle or joke: Tell me, my little krasavitsa, what is it that goes around with its baby in its pocket? Is it a kangaroo? Or is it a can’tgaroo? Or maybe it’s a shan’tgaroo? Which is it? Hee-hee! (He completely overlooks the fact that his great-niece is no longer a small child, in fact she’s fourteen and a half.) So as to maintain this outward appearance of being jolly, dynamic and positive (in the trade-unionist sense of the term), Yerucham Shdemati hides both from his great-niece and from Miriam Nehorait the fact that he is suffering from a blood disease from which, according to his brother the doctor, his chances of recovery are remote.

  *

  By now it is three o’clock in the morning. And there may be another correction to make, the Author says to himself as he crosses an empty street on the red light, peering to left and right and seeing that there is no one around and that the single street lamp is flickering as though wondering if there is any point. I could, for example (let’s say, at nine o’clock tomorrow morning) bring Charlie – Charlie who was once the reserve goalkeeper of Bnei-Yehuda football team, he was the boyfriend of Lucy, the runner-up in the Queen of the Waves contest, then he was the boyfriend of Ricky, the waitress, then he was Lucy’s boyfriend again, and he spent a delicious week with each of them at his uncle’s hotel in Eilat, and now he has a family and a factory in Holon manufacturing solar water heaters that he even exports to Cyprus – at nine o’clock tomorrow morning I could bring him to Ichilov Hospital for a surprise visit to Ovadya Hazzam.

  But why should he come alone? He’ll be scared to come on his own. The phrase ‘terminally ill’ terrifies him. Better for him to come with his wife. No, not his wife: let him come with Lucy, his friend from the good old days, the one he used to call affectionately Gogog.

  Not with Lucy. With Ricky. This morning you can see through her summer blouse that she isn’t wearing a bra, and you can see two dark puppy dogs that nuzzle her blouse with every step. Charlie used to call her Gogog, too.

  In fact, why doesn’t Charlie come with both of them?

  Ovadya Hazzam opens his eyes suddenly and tries to wave his hand. He is too weak, and the skeletal hand falls back on the sheet, and he murmurs, Why have you come, honestly, you didn’t have to. Then he murmurs something else but so faintly that Charlie and the girls can’t understand. The patient in the next bed has to translate for them: He wants you to bring some chairs from over there by the window. He just wants you to sit down.

  Charlie is suddenly smitten with fear mixed with pity and a slight disgust and shame for the disgust, and he tries to talk cheerfully, too loudly, as though the man who is dying of cancer is also suffering from partial deafness. Well, it’s like this. He’s come with the two girls to get Ovadya out of here. Yallah, Charlie shouts kind-heartedly, come on, you old poseur, you’ve been cooped up here long enough, come out for a bit, we’ll show you off out there like a young lion, we’ll have the party to end all parties. Here, lean on these two cuties I’ve brought you, and off we go. What were you thinking, that we’d just come to visit? Nah, we didn’t come to visit, we came to get you outta here. The girls will dress you and you’ll soon be out, and meantime you can decide which one of the two you prefer, compliments of Charlie, or maybe you’d like to have the two of them? For you – the two of them, on the house.

  Again the invalid murmurs a few hoarse words, and Charlie says, What, what, can’t hear, speak clearly, and again the patient in the next bed translates: He’s saying Charlie’s Angels. He’s talking about your girls. He means, like in the TV series Charlie’s Angels. He means it as a joke.

  While he is chatting to Ovadya Hazzam and the patient in the next bed, Charlie suddenly grasps that Ovadya Hazzam is really going to die. Before he came he was told that his condition was pretty serious, but he thought that ‘serious’ meant something like a smashed knee or six broken ribs. Now he suddenly realises that for the first time in his life he is touching a dying man, and the discovery fills him with panic and also with a wild joy that thank God the man who’s dying is somebody else and not himself, that he’s strong and healthy and will walk out of here in a minute whereas Ovadya isn’t going anywhere. Ever.

  Charlie feels so ashamed of this feeling that he raises his voice even more and jokes so much that the dying man makes a gesture and mutters something that Charlie can’t hear and even the patient in the next bed has trouble hearing, and Ovadya Hazzam has to repeat it over and over again before the neighbour manages to translate: Orangeade. He said orangeade. He’s thirsty, he wants a bottle of orangeade.

  Orangeade, Charlie wonders, where on earth can we find orangeade? They stopped making it a hundred years ago. Well, twenty at least. Lucy? Ricky? Orangeade? When was the last time you saw such a thing?

  The patient next door insists vindictively: That’s what he’s asking for. That’s the only thing he wants. Nothing else will do. What are you going to do for him?

  Charlie scratches the back of his neck and continues the movement by patting Ricky on the head.

  Yallah, my lovelies, can’t you see our friend here is feeling low? So why don’t you cheer him up a bit. The two of you, together: start stroking his head and his body. Take away the pains. Haven’t you got eyes in your heads? Can’t you see our friend is in pain? So show him everything you’ve learned from me. Go to it. Give him a good time. Gogog and Gogog. The two of you.

  While he is talking, Charlie himself bends down, overcoming his fear and disgust, and begins to stroke the patient’s sweaty head, his cheeks, his pale forehead, weeping as he does so, and begging the patient who has also started crying: That’s enough, man, don’t cry, you’ll be fine, you’ll see you’ll be as right as rain, trust me, trust your old brother to get you out of here, go on, girls, you stroke him too, as if you mean it, stroke him with love and stop whining.

  And so on, until the patient in the next bed, who also has tears in his eyes, rings for the nurse and gestures that enough is enough, the patient is getting overexcited, she should gently but firmly usher his visitors out.

  *

  What about Rochele Reznik? You promised her you’d ring her over the next few days, you’d definitely ring her, soon, absolutely, but you didn’t get her number. Because you didn’t ask her for it. You forgot to ask. Standing alone in her frugal, simply furnished room, with its clean smell, its light-coloured curtains, wearing a chaste nightdress, by the light of a lamp with a macramé shade, carefully folding her clean underwear, having thrown her dirty nightdress and underwear in the laundry basket, she feels sad as she looks at her flat body in the mirror on the inside of her wardrobe door: If only I had my mother’s breasts, or my sister’s, my whole life would be different. Why didn’t I let him come up? After all, he begged me, in his polite, fatherly way, to ask him in. I could have said, Come in. I could have made him some tea or hierba mate or even a snack. I could have told him, seeing that he liked the way I read, that I can also sing. I could even have sung to him. Or put on some music, while we drank tea or Argentinian hierba mate. And then the two of us might suddenly—

  There can’t be a girl in the world
who says no to him, but I’m so spoilt—

  And now I’ll never never—

  Now he probably thinks I’m weird. Unwomanly.

  Just look, Joselito, look what a fool I am. I’m the biggest fool there’s ever been. (She says these last words aloud, grinning but close to tears.)

  In her buttoned-up nightdress, the plain cotton nightdress of a boarding-school girl in the old days, she now sits, thin and stiffly upright, on the edge of her bed, under a Peace Now poster, with the cat curled up on her lap, quietly writing the names of towns and countries on her collection of matchboxes from dozens of well-known hotels where she has never stayed, San Moritz, St Tropez, San Marino, Monterrey, San Remo, Lugano.

  *

  But what was the Author trying to say?

  Rochele Reznik is still sitting on her bed, her hair unplaited, with her legs folded underneath her, white knickers visible under her nightdress, but there is no one to see, the curtains are not at the cleaner’s, they are tightly drawn against the neighbours. She knows that the Author was definitely talking to her between the lines this evening, that there were more words underneath the words he spoke, and she didn’t understand a thing. She will sit here like this for another hour or an hour and a half, not trying to get to sleep but trying to understand what he was saying. What was behind his story about the pharmacist who revealed the secrets of the poisons to him when he was a child? Or about Trotsky’s beautiful secret daughter? Or the mother who wanted her son to meet a real live author? Or the uncle who hit a member of the Knesset? Her glance pauses suddenly on the door handle, which for an instant looks as though it is silently moving, as though a hand is tentatively testing to see if she has forgotten to lock up. Is it the staircase rapist?