by Joshua Sobol
Sorry, Captain Antoniu, no more voyages tonight.
9
Captain Antoniu, he hears them calling his name, Captain Antoniu dos Shaninas do los Rugashivas.
He disliked not only his legs, but also his arms and all the other parts of his body, and he couldn’t stand his name either. He gave expression to these feelings in a poem. No, not a poem, an epoch making poetic novel in verse, composed of a cycle of seventy-eight, no, a hundred and seventy-eight, poems, like ‘Eugene Onegin’, whose opening poem began with the words:
Hanina did not choose his name.
This poem-novel, which heralded a new era in poetry, a return to classical meter and rhyme, was immediately translated into seventeen, no, twenty-seven languages, and rose to the top of the best-seller lists in eight, no, eighteen, countries.
In the opening poem, stunning in its simplicity, the mysterious poet, dos Shaninas, succinctly sums up his attitude towards himself in the following words:
Shaninas did not choose his ma,
Shaninas did not choose his pa,
And on the night it came to pass,
Nobody thought of Shaninas.
There is no need to quote the poem in its entirety here. As soon as it was published, shortly after the death of the poet, its lines became a byword for the new poetry, and the public is already well acquainted with them.
Indeed, it was only after his departure that the full extent of his astonishing creation would be revealed. A box full of papers closely covered with his cramped writing would be found under his bed, in the modest room in which he lived his secret life, in the heart of the teeming city which paid no mind to the intellectual giant passing like a shadow through its streets, always wearing the same hat. No, not a hat, a beret. No, not a beret, a peaked cap. A dark brown leather cap. Almost black with use.
On the fiftieth anniversary of his death, when the bronze statue of the poet, in which he was seen sitting at a table in the little cafe where he was a habitue, was unveiled, the television would interview women with necks generously wrinkled by the pleasures of life, and they would declaim his poems to the camera in voices full of emotion, and confess with damp eyes and no inhibitions: ‘His lines turned us on, his words wet our panties’, and one grandmother in a wheelchair would gush in the ears of her blushing granddaughter: ‘His poems simply stripped you bare. When I read his poem ‘Take your baby my love/ Take my prick in your hands’ for the first time I couldn’t breathe, I panted so hard my mother came running in a panic to see what had happened.
Yes, Monsieur Rejvani, you should have been a poet. How did you allow them to tempt you into imprisoning the joy of your youth in liquidation operations, and burying the rest of your life in advertising? First you murdered for them, and now you’re selling them vegetables, chickens, fruit, banks, computers and quack medicines. Take all those lost years and throw them into the trash. In your soul you remained a poet, of that there is no doubt. You introduced direct speech into poetry. The simple description of what people see when they close their eyes and live moments of happiness. When a loving hand touches them in the exact places they want to be touched. Write the poems that nobody will write in your place.
The fact that one day Hanin stopped writing poetry led to much speculation in those distant days and gave birth to rumors that Haninai had not really written those wonderful poems, published in the collection ‘Shock poems’, himself, but that he had come into possession of a notebook belonging to an anonymous comrade in arms, a solitary youth who had fallen in battle. Straight off the boat, or the plane, the anonymous poet Yohanan had landed in the slaughter fields of the most terrible war of all the wars in the war-sick East. He had time to meet a nurse with a braid. He had time to fall in love with her, to spend the night talking to her, but when he set off in the morning he remembered that he had forgotten to ask her name. On his way to his last battle he told his story to Honen Avihai, and made him swear that if he fell in battle, Heynan would give the notebook he carried on his body to the girl with the braid who had never left his side.
But the shady Hananya had published the poems he found in Yohanan the anonymous warrior’s notebook under his own name, shamelessly, and after he published the last of the poems in the notebook the wellspring of his poetry had dried up forever. But this rumor gave birth to a further rumor, according to which H. N. Hanialik himself had invented the rumor about the solitary fallen soldier’s notebook, and also taken care to spread it.
One literary researcher, in his attempts to arrive at the truth among the rumors, discovered to his astonishment that Honen, with his reputation as a social butterfly, with all the girls hanging round his neck, didn’t actually have one close friend, and everything those considered close to him knew about him came from rumors, and none of them could point to the source of those rumors. Yes, he didn’t have a single friend.
10
.… Apart from Yadanuga—a corruption of ‘Yad-anuga’ or ‘Tender Hand’—who now emerges from the jaws of the elevator which previously swallowed Mona. First his solid head appears, crowned with a mane of silver curls, beneath which his eyes, full of childish wonder, twinkle mischievously, then his broad shoulders push their way out, and finally this overgrown infant emerges in all his ungainly height. Yadanuga pierces him with a sharp look—one of those precise looks which always ended in a body lying at the side of the road, or sitting at the wheel of a car with a hole between the eyes—and asks in an amused tone of voice:
What’s the matter with you, Shakespeare? Everyone’s waiting for you.
For Yadanuga he’s Shakespeare, just as for him Yad-anuga is Yadanuga, and not Yudaleh Nugilevski, who to his widowed mother is still her good little boy Yudinka, who leaves a soccer game in the middle if she calls him, and comes running to ask her what she wants him to do. And in high school he was the tough daring athlete Roofy, who even then excelled at walking on the parapets of high roofs and acrobatic riding on the Matchless Motorcycle his uncle Yehiel Nugilevsky-Nagil brought back from the army. And in the assassination squad, where they served together, he was discovered to possess a delicate hand, capable of skewering a lizard on the branch of a jacaranda tree with a commando knife at a distance of eight meters, and therefore he was Yadanuga in the team of the ‘Cunning Cooks’, of which only the two of them had survived, and Hanina uses this ineffable name only when no strange ear is in the vicinity, and Yehuda Nugilevski too calls him Shakespeare only under the same conditions. In the presence of the other employees of the advertising agency Yadanuga becomes Mackie, and Shakespeare becomes Hanina.
Yadanuga, says Shakespeare, and then he says again: Yadanuga …
And since at least three seconds, if not four, of silence pass between ‘Yadanuga’ and ‘Yadanuga’, the latter responds with a short ‘What’, leaving all options open, and Shakespeare repeats once more:
Yadanuga.… I didn’t sleep all night. And he immediately corrects himself: Maybe I slept for two hours.
What’s up? asks Yadanuga, who reads his friend like an old book full of pencil lines. Don’t tell me you’re still stuck with Adonis’s ghost.
It’s much more complicated than you think, says Shakespeare.
I thought you came back because you’d recovered from that illusion at last.
It’s not an illusion, says Shakespeare.
Listen, says Yadanuga, after you called from New York and told me you were on his tracks, I spoke to Tzibeleh. He got into the archives and went over the report by the Belgian pathologist, who by the way died a couple of years ago—
I know the de Odecker document off by heart, says Shakespeare, and it’s no longer relevant.
The de Odecker document isn’t relevant?!
Look, says Shakespeare, even if this guy isn’t Adonis, although I think he is, I’ve gotten somebody else involved, someone who has nothing to do with the affair, and this person’s life will be in danger as long as Tony is free.
Tony? says Yadanuga in surprise. But he wasn’t cal
led Tony. He was called Tino.
Yes, confirms Shakespeare, his official name was Tino the Syrian.
He wasn’t actually a Syrian, Yadanuga tries to clarify something forgotten to himself. He was some kind of English-Spaniard or German-Italian wasn’t he?
He was a Belorussian of English-German descent, Shakespeare corrects him.
Right, right! Yadanuga’s memory grows clearer, like a distant dream whose details suddenly, at the magic touch of a word, or a sound, or a picture, begin to emerge from the mists. His name wasn’t Tino at all!
No, that was his alias in their network, Shakespeare fills in another detail.
Right, his name was Anatol! Yadanuga eagerly adds another details to the mosaic emerging from under the sands of oblivion.
Anatol? Shakespeare introduces a doubt into Yadanuga’s heart, without offering an alternative.
Just a minute, just a minute, not Anatol, Yadanuga corrects himself, Anthony.… Anton!
Do you remember his face? asks Shakespeare. Could you draw his face for me without the beard?
How can I draw his face for you without the beard? protests Yadanuga. All they gave us then was a blurred photograph … you could hardly see anything. That’s why we came too close to him. Because we weren’t sure if it was him.… And Jonas paid for it with his life.
What exactly do you remember?
In the photo he had a black beard that covered half his face. That’s all I remember.
In the period when we were looking for him, you made all kinds of sketches of his face, says Shakespeare.
Yes I did, says Yadanuga, but years have passed since then.
Can you find those sketches?
How can I? I don’t even remember what I drew them on.
You had a little Kohinoor notebook, with an orange cover.
You know how many of those notebooks I’ve been through since then?
Perhaps you could try to reconstruct his face from memory, take off the beard and add twenty years?
Shakespeare, Yadanuga laughs despairingly, I can make you twenty sketches, what good will it do?
I don’t know, admits Shakespeare. On every trip it seems to me at least five times that I’ve seen him. In the end it’s just some guy. But this time I have a feeling—
You don’t want a repeat performance of the story with that poor waiter from Islay, warns Yadanuga.
That’s the problem, says Shakespeare. That’s why I’m asking you what you remember. Your visual memory is the only thing I have to rely on.
What do I remember.… Yadanuga tries to fish up details. I remember something with brown and white.
What brown and white?
Is there such a thing as a brown-white wine?
A brown-white wine?! It sounds like that bastard wine whose taste changes from bottle to bottle.
Right! It was called ‘Vino bastardo’ I think, the wine he liked, a sweet Spanish wine, don’t you remember they gave it to us to taste, so we would be able to identify it?
Wait a minute, wait a minute, Shakespeare remembers, bastardo … that rings a bell.
And he liked white carnations with red stripes.
That’s it, says Shakespeare. He was wearing a white shirt with red stripes, or maybe the opposite: a red shirt with white stripes.
A lot of people wear shirts like that, Yadanuga tries to dampen down Shakespeare’s excitement, without success.
No, no! Shakespeare protests, the shirt had a white collar, and he was wearing a brown tie.
All that means is that he’s got terrible taste, Yadanuga demurs, but it doesn’t prove that he’s our man.
He’s our man, pronounces Shakespeare.
Where did you meet him? Asks Yadanuga.
In Manhattan, in an Irish pub. He was sitting there drinking muscatel, into which he poured creme-de-cassis from a flask he took out of the inside pocket of his jacket.
How did we come up with the name ‘Tino the Syrian’? Yadanuga wonders.
Don’t you remember? When they gave us his profile, they said that he had a lyric tenor, and he liked chansons from the thirties; and because he was called Anton, and he was one quarter Russian, we called him ‘Tino Rossi’, and later on, when we found out that he trained in Syria, and for a while he acted as a bodyguard to that old Nazi who lives in Damascus—we turned ‘Tino Rossi’ into ‘Tino the Syrian’.
Even if it is him, he’s no longer the same person. He must be forty-five today … Yadanuga reflects on all the years that have passed together with the secret gloria mundi of their stormy youth in the quartet of the ‘Cunning Cooks’.
Listen, Yadanuga, confesses Shakespeare. Weird things are happening to me. I need a break.
And Yadanuga, aware of every nuance in his friend’s voice, lays a beefy hand on Shakespeare’s shoulder and says:
Shakespeare, we’ll make a decision, and after that take a break, go where you want.
Where I must, corrects Shakespeare, if I take responsibility for my actions.
You take responsibility, if I know you, says Yadanuga, but now we have to come to a decision, and you, as the boss and the CEO of the firm—
I can’t sit there, Yadanuga. I can’t!
Those two yuppie pipsqueaks raise my revulsion level too, confesses Yadanuga, but we haven’t got a choice. Mona’s tending in their direction. You have to throw all your weight into the ring. Come on, let’s go down.
That’s not the point, Yadanuga. The revulsion level doesn’t bother me.
What is it then, Shakespeare? Talk, because you’re beginning to worry me.
Something’s happening to me, Yadanuga, and I don’t know how to tell you. I don’t even know where to begin.
Yadanuga doesn’t say a word. He takes a flat bottle of Knob Creek out of the pocket of his leather jacket, takes a sip of the whiskey, and hands the bottle to Shakespeare.
What’s this, says Shakespeare in surprise, you’ve changed to Kentucky straight bourbon?
Lately, says Yadanuga, I prefer whiskey without memories.
Shakespeare takes a sip of Yadanuga’s whiskey without memories, and in his head the expanses of Mid-west cornfields open up, with the country roads, and the isolated farms scattered between them, and on one of them, in the shade of the giant elm trees, in the place where he had parted from her for the last time, Bridget sits on an old wicker chair breast-feeding the small, pink Hugh. Before he drives out to the road, he waves to her from the car window and calls: Wait for me here, under the elm, and a the same moment the sentence rings in his head in French, in the voice of the Alsatian, the voice in which he would say softly to every corpse they parted from: Attendez moi sous l’orme, and he knew that he would never see her again, or the little son, who would grow up without a father. That’s the biggest favor you can do him, Shakespeare eased what remained of his conscience, and stepped on the gas, and drove away.
11
Yadanuga looks at him, draws on his whiskey bottle, and says to himself that he knows him like he knows himself. In other words, hardly at all. He is shrouded in absolute darkness, and out of the darkness pictures emerge like cars from the road tunnels in the North of Italy. One minute they’re racing along the road twisting between mountains stunning in their savage beauty, and the next they’re swallowed up again in the maw of the next tunnel. Sometimes he tries to attach names to these pictures. The names are very strange, and more than shedding light on the content of the pictures, they actually increase their obscurity.
One of these pictures now pops out of the dense darkness in Yadanuga’s head, labeled ‘Binbad the Bailor’, and he laughs.
Shakespeare looks surprised, and Yadanuga apologizes, explaining that all of a sudden, because of the way ‘Tino Rossi’ had turned into Tino the Syrian’, the words ‘Tinbad the Tailor’ had suddenly popped into his head. Shakespeare, Shakespeare, you and your crazy codes! To this day the French police are still puzzling over ‘Zinbad the Zailor’. How did you come up with it?
Shakespeare doe
sn’t answer. Shakespeare isn’t here any more. Shakespeare is already there. In the dark night, on the road climbing to the isolated villa near Nice, which said backwards is ‘Sin’, which gave birth to ‘Sinbad the Sailor’, and Stephen Dedalus, or perhaps Mr Bloom, gave birth to ‘Binbad’. And the pictures flicker and chase each other in the darkness. Four men in overalls get out of the French Electrical Corporation minivan and enter a dark isolated villa on a hilltop. Between the pines the lights of Nice, capital of the Azure Coast, twinkle in the distance, and Yadanuga sings softly ‘Tomorrow my friends we shall sing as we go into battle’. The Alsatian silences him: If you have to sing, sing ‘Frere Jacques’. The armed goon stationed at the entrance to the villa shines a strong flashlight on their faces and overalls. What’s the trouble, the Alsatian inquires, and the goon explains that the electricity suddenly shorted, but all the fuses are okay. Where’s the fuse box here, asks the Alsatian, and the goon says, come with me. He turns into the entrance. Jonas raises his hand as if to scratch his head, and a terrible blow aimed at the back of the goon’s neck leaves the latter sprawled lifeless on the stairs. In the dim drawing room eight men are seated at a round table in candlelight. They raise their heads and look at the four technicians. Good evening, the Alsatian greets them, you’ll have your light back on in a minute. And indeed, light bursts in brief flashes from the toolboxes in the hands of the electricians accompanied by a dry hiccuping sound. Chairs turn over. The technicians hurry to the fallen men and take care of each of them personally. A flash and a hiccup for every head. The eyes of Shakespeare’s personal patient suddenly snap open. Shakespeare looks straight into the whites of his eyes and whispers: This is for Munich. And adds another flash and another hiccup, right into the aiming eye, which sprays onto the overalls emblazoned with the initials of the French electric corporation: EDF, ‘Électricité de France’.
