Rhyming Life and Death

by Amos Oz

  For an instant she freezes in terror. But then a warm glow drives away the fear and she almost darts to the locked door, to peer through the peephole and open up to him even before he can knock, Come in, I was waiting for you.

  But no, she won’t do it. She has already experienced enough disappointments and rebuffs, she has too many old scars. So sits on her bed, staring as if fascinated by the door handle, long after the desperate Author has run headlong down the stairs and bumped his shoulder on the broken door of the meter cupboard.

  Until eventually she collapses on her back, exhausted.

  The cat comes and lies on her stomach, purring and rubbing the sides of its face against her fingers. They both have their eyes open, watching a moth fluttering around the Peace Now poster with the slogan ‘Our sons’ lives matter more than the patriarchs’ graves!’.

  She draws the sheet over herself and goes on trying to understand, while Joselito continues to watch the moth. The air conditioning hums and blows warm, damp air at her, and she has difficulty sleeping. Occasionally she dozes off briefly, but it is more like fainting than sleeping. During one of these spells she fancies for a moment that she has understood, it was really very simple, but then she wakes, sits up in bed, swats at a mosquito, and once again doesn’t know what was expected of her this evening. Why did he ask her to go for that walk after the literary event? What was the meaning of his arm on her shoulder, and then – his arm round her waist? And all those stories of his, and the furtive cuddles in that dark backyard? Was she just imagining, a couple of hours ago, that a timid hand tried her door handle, and then that he changed his mind and ran downstairs, before she even had time to make up her mind whether or not to open the door?

  Was it him or wasn’t it? And why?

  No answers come, but she feels sadder and sadder, because only a few moments ago, when she was dozing, she understood it all, completely, and now she is awake she has forgotten what it was she understood.

  The night drags on and on, as if time is standing still. Joselito is restless: he treads softly all over her body, suddenly nipping her big toe, lies in ambush, his body flattened like a stretched spring, his rippling fur heralding an imminent leap – and then he leaps, scratches the sheet, leaps again, and is suddenly clinging to the curtain with his claws as though he means to rip it to shreds and thus dispose once and for all of her lie to the Author.

  *

  So the poet Tsefania Beit-Halachmi, Uncle Bumek, was wrong when he wrote in his book Rhyming Life and Death that ‘You’ll always find them side by side: never a groom without a bride’. And Rabbi Alter Druyanov was also mistaken in including in his Book of Jokes and Witticisms the story about the shlemiel of a circumciser who was late for the circumcision. If you think about it, being late is never funny. It is always irreparable. Actually the angry teacher or deputy head of department Dr Pessach Yikhat was quite right when he stood up at the end of the evening and declared furiously that one of the roles of literature is to distil from misery and suffering at least a drop of comfort or human kindness. How to put it: to lick our wounds, if not to dress them. At the very least literature should not preen itself on mocking us and picking at our wounds, as modern writers in our days do ad nauseam. All they can write is satire, irony, parody (including self-parody), vicious sarcasm, all steeped in malice. In Dr Pessach Yikhat’s view they should have this fact pointed out to them and they should be reminded of their responsibilities.

  Rochele showers in lukewarm water and changes her nightdress. Like the other one, it has two buttons, and she does them both up.

  An apple falls from the tree.

  The tree stands over the apple.

  The tree turns yellow. The apple is squashed.

  The tree drops yellow leaves.

  The leaves cover the wrinkled apple

  And a cold wind ruffles them.

  The autumn is over and winter is here.

  The tree is consumed, the apple rots.

  Soon it will come. It will hardly hurt.

  *

  Ten past midnight. The gangster’s henchman Mr Leon and his assistant Shlomo Hougi are sitting under the air con, in front of the TV, in the Hougis’ newly done-up living room. Second floor back, two small flats knocked together to make one big one in a housing development in Yad Eliyahu. Sitting at a table covered with a flowery oilcloth, they are nibbling peanuts, mixed nuts, salted almonds and sunflower seeds and watching a thriller. (Their wives have been relegated to the kitchen or the other room because this film is not for the faint-hearted.)

  Mr Leon, thickset, bald, his eyes a dirty grey, his nose ridiculously small, like a button lost in the middle of the moon, is remonstrating with his host during a commercial break. Believe me, Hougi, you better take back what you said, look, there’s a hundred shekels on the table here says it’s not the black guy did it, the dentist killed the three of them, did them in one at a time with that what’s-its-name of his, the thing he puts you to sleep with before he pulls your teeth out, that’s what he killed ’em with. You’ll see for yourself in a minute how wrong you are, you an’ your black guy, you’re making a big mistake, an’ it’s gonna cost you a straight hundred, and just be glad we didn’t make it five hundred.

  Shlomo Hougi hesitates uncomfortably. Well, I’m not saying, maybe it really is the dentist who did them in, not the black, I might have misjudged him, we’ll find out soon enough. What I was saying before, it was just my personal opinion of the matter. Nothing more.

  A few moments later he adds in a contrite tone: Look, in Judaism it says somewhere, I think it’s in Tractate Ta’anit, it says ‘God has many killers’. I heard Rabbi Janah commenting on this, he said maybe it’s true that God respected Abel and his offering, but he really preferred Cain. The proof is that Abel died young, before he had time to marry even, so it’s a plain fact that the whole human race, including us, I mean the Jewish people, is descended from Cain not from Abel. No offence meant to anyone personally, of course.

  Mr Leon munches a few cashews while he thinks this over, and then he asks: So what? What are you getting at?

  And Shlomo Hougi replies sadly: Who? Me? What do I know? There must be loads more about this in Judaism, but personally I’m just on the bottom rung, as they say. I don’t know much. Nothing at all, really. Tell me, don’t you think it a pity he preferred Cain? Don’t you think it would have been better for us if he’d preferred Abel? But he must have had a reason. There’s nothing in the whole world that doesn’t have a reason. Nothing at all. Even this moth. Even a hair in your soup. Everything there is, without exception, doesn’t just testify to itself, it testifies to something else as well. Something big and terrible. In Judaism this is known as ‘mysteries’. Nobody understands them, except the great saints, in the high places among the holy and pure.

  Mr Leon chortles, It’s true you’re a little cracked, Hougi. More than a little, in fact. Those God-merchants of yours have really messed up your head. What you’re saying, it doesn’t make much sense. It’s not that new either. But since you’ve fallen into their clutches nothing you say makes any damn sense. Maybe you can explain to me the connection between Cain and Abel and a moth. Or between a hair in the soup and the great saints. You’d be better off shutting your face. That’s enough now. Let’s watch. The commercials have finished.

  Shlomo Hougi thinks this over, and finally, with a guilty, chastened air, he admits almost in a whisper: The truth is, I don’t understand either. In fact, I understand less and less. Maybe you’re right, the best thing for me to do is to shut up.

  *

  Yuval Dahan goes out on the balcony and without turning on the light sprawls in his mother’s hammock, ignoring the bats that nest in the ficus tree and the shrill note of the mosquitoes, mentally composing a letter to the Author after the literary evening at the Shunia Shor and the Seven Victims of the Quarry Attack Cultural Centre. In his letter the youth will express disgust at the sterile show of erudition displayed by the literary critic in his talk
, attempt to express in a few sentences the various emotions he has felt on reading the Author’s books, and explain why he senses that the Author is more likely than anyone else in the world to understand his poems, a few of which he makes so bold as to enclose in case the Author can find half an hour to look at them and perhaps even write him a few lines.

  For a few minutes he indulges in a fantasy about the Author. After all, the Author probably has sufferings of his own, not as ignoble as mine but just as painful. You can read it between the lines in all his books. Maybe, like me, he has trouble sleeping at night. Perhaps at this very minute he is roaming the streets, all alone, unable to sleep, not wanting to sleep, wandering aimlessly from street to street, struggling like me with the black hole in his chest, and asking himself if there is any point and if there isn’t then why on earth?

  Soon his wanderings may chance to bring him here, to Reines Street, or rather not chance, because nothing happens by chance. And I’ll go out to post this letter, and at the corner of Gordon Street we’ll meet, and we’ll both be very surprised at this nocturnal meeting, and he may invite me to keep him company so we can chat on the way, and so we’ll talk as we walk, maybe down to the seafront and then left towards Jaffa, and he won’t be in a hurry to take his leave, we’ll both of us forget what time it is, because he’ll discover something in me that reminds him of himself when he was young, and so we’ll go on walking through the empty streets towards the Florentin Quarter or maybe to the area around Bialik Street, and we’ll go on talking till morning about his books and also a bit about my poems, and also about life and death and all sorts of secret things that I could only talk about to him, not to anyone else, and about suffering in general, because I will be able to explain to him, because he’ll be able to understand, he’ll understand me at once, even before I’ve finished explaining he’ll have understood everything, and maybe from tonight on there’ll be some kind of personal bond between the two of us, we might become like two friends, or like a teacher and a pupil, and so from tonight on everything in my life might be a bit different because of this meeting that’s going to happen soon by chance down there, by the postbox.

  *

  Two or three weeks later the Author will reply briefly to Yuval Dahan or Dotan’s letter.

  I read your poems with interest and found them serious, original, linguistically fresh, but first of all you must learn to curb your excess of emotion and write with more distance. As if you the person writing the poems and you the suffering young man are two different people, and as though the former observes the latter coolly, distantly, even with a measure of amusement. Maybe you should try writing as though the two of you were separated by a hundred years, that is as though there were a gap of a century between the young man in the poem and the poet, between the pain he feels and the time you are writing.

  PS You are not quite right in your harsh criticism of the lecturer, Bar-Orian. True, he is apparently not a very nice man, and I was sorry to learn that at the end of the evening he dismissed you rather rudely, but it is not correct to say of him that ‘he is a stranger to life’: for some years he has been living alone in a ground-floor flat in Adam Ha-Cohen Street, he has been widowed twice, he teaches in the Kibbutz College, you probably didn’t know that his only daughter Aya walked out on him when she was only sixteen and a half, changed her name to Jocelyn, hung around in New York for two years, posed nude for magazines, then got religion and married a settler from Elon Moreh, and now, for the past two to three weeks, Mr Bar-Orian has been torturing himself to decide whether to keep to his boycott or whether to close his eyes to his conscience and his principles and agree, just this once, and certainly not to create a precedent, to cross the Green Line into the Occupied Territories to visit his settler daughter and hold his baby settler grandson in his arms for the first time.

  *

  Or take Ovadya Hazzam, for example, Hazzam from Isratex, the man who won the lottery, got divorced, had a wild time, lent money left and right to all comers, cruised around town in a blue Buick, contributed to collections for new Torah scrolls, financed a pirate religious radio station out of his own pocket, spent money like water on good causes and also on divorcees from Russia, bought land in the Territories, rushed into politics, moved house six times in two years, married his elder son to Lucy, runner-up in the Queen of the Waves contest, Yitzhak Shamir and Shimon Peres both attended the glittering wedding, the hundreds of guests kissed him and he, in a blue silk suit with a triangle of white handkerchief in his breast pocket, kissed and hugged every one of them, men and women, members of the Knesset, land dealers, artists, journalists, he hugged and kissed the lot of them, with tears of emotion, joked and laughed, made them all taste – just taste – another piece of cake, have another drink, and now he is lying on a sweaty bed in the damp darkness of the hospital ward, between two other dying men, his bedclothes soaked in urine, with bits of dried blood clinging to his nostrils and the corners of his mouth, with a painful wheezing sound he breathes through an oxygen mask that covers his nose and mouth, and as his chest rises and falls he half remembers in his morphine-induced haze lots of hands stroking his head, shoulders and chest, a woman or women weeping, and closing his eyes he can suddenly see the Sources of the Jordan: a sunbathed landscape with choirs of birds and a shady eucalyptus grove between two streams. The trees are massive, and almost belong to the realm of the inanimate. The place is far away and peaceful. Apart from the twittering of the birds and the occasional sound of the breeze high up in the trees, the silence is intense. An unseen bee is buzzing in the heart of the sunlight. And two birds reply. Some time ago there was heavy rain all over Galilee with thunder and high winds. Now all is calm. The air is brilliant, polished, and all the view as far as the mountain slopes is bathed in limpid light. There are ripples on the surface of the two streams. Every now and again a curl of foam dances on the water, or a shoal of fish stirs under the surface like a silent caress. The slowly falling leaves rustle constantly in the twilight under the oxygen mask, and there is an occasional grunting sound or a stifled guttural scraping like a car slithering on thick gravel, that now pierces the sleep of Ricky the waitress and causes her to utter a couple of frightened sobs and chase away with a sleepy hand some evil shadow that bends over her and presses down on her sheet in the dark. Crafty, patient and kindly, Berl Katznelson, still looking down from his picture at the cultural centre, knew how to pull off a discreet coup by rather devious means: this is a bad business, all of it here, ridiculous and terrible.

  *

  It is still warm and humid inside, and thick darkness outside. The Author lights a last cigarette and soon he will lie down to sleep. Sounds of four o’clock in the morning come to him through the window: the swish of a sprinkler on the lawn, broken cries of alarm from a parked car that can no longer bear its loneliness, the low weeping of a man in the next-door flat, on the other side of the wall, the shriek of a nightbird nearby that can perhaps already see what is hidden from you and me. Tell me, have you ever heard the name of Tsefania Beit-Halachmi? Rhyming Life and Death? No? He was a minor poet whose verses were once quite well known here but over the years they have been forgotten. The poet who was wrong about that groom and bride, side by side. And now, the nightbird has stopped its shrieking, and in the evening paper that was waiting for me by my bed I read that in the early hours of yesterday morning, in Raanana, at the age of ninety-seven, the poet died in his sleep of heart failure. Once in a while it is worth turning on the light to clarify what is going on. Tomorrow will be warm and humid, too. And, in fact, tomorrow is today.

  The Characters

  The Author

  Ricky: A waitress. Once she was in love with Charlie, the reserve goalkeeper of Bnei-Yehuda football team, who affectionately referred to her as Gogog.

  Charlie: the reserve goalkeeper of Bnei-Yehuda football team. Had a good time in Eilat with both Ricky and Lucy. Now owns a factory that manufactures solar water heaters in Holon and even exports them to Cyprus.


  Lucy: runner-up in the Queen of the Waves contest. She also had a good time in Eilat with Charlie. In the end she had a glittering wedding to the son of Ovadya Hazzam from Isratex.

  Mr Leon: gangster’s henchman. Thickset and bossy.

  Shlomo Hougi: Mr Leon’s assistant. Understands less and less.

  Ovadya Hazzam: used to work for Isratex. Had a blue Buick. Used to drive around with various close friends, immigrants from Russia. Now he is in hospital with cancer, and no one comes to empty his catheter bag.

  Ovadya Hazzam’s son: married Lucy, runner-up in the Queen of the Waves contest. Yitzhak Shamir and Shimon Peres came to the wedding.

  Shunia Shor and the Seven Victims of the Quarry Attack: Shunia Shor was a mechanic, ideologue and composer of folk songs. Was killed in 1937, with seven other workers at the Tel Hazon quarry, by Arab youths who had decided to drive the Jews out of the country. The community centre where the Author meets his readers was named after Shunia Shor and the seven victims of the quarry attack.

  Yerucham Shdemati: cultural administrator. Runs the Shunia Shor and the Seven Victims of the Quarry Attack Cultural Centre. Likes to lick the gummed side of postage stamps with the whole of his tongue. Not a well man.

  Rabbi Alter Druyanov: author of The Book of Jokes and Witticisms.

  Rochele Reznik: professional reader, who reads aloud the words of famous writers. Collects matchboxes from famous hotels round the world.

  Yakir Bar-Orian (Zhitomirski): literary critic. Widower. His only daughter is married to a famous settler in Elon Moreh settlement.