Cut Throat Dog

by Joshua Sobol

  I’ve got a lot to say to you.

  Go ahead, says Hanina.

  Over fish and wine? suggests Yadanuga.

  Why not.

  50

  You always scared me, Shakespeare. And not only me. Jonas too. Jonas had a huge, open heart. Nothing scared him. Except for things that he couldn’t feel. And he once said to me: Yadanuga, can you imagine a song without words, without a tune, without a beat? Or a melody without sounds? Or a painting without color or line? That’s Shakespeare for me. A language without writing, a shape that changes when you look at it. Matter that evaporates the minute you try to take hold of it. If I had to define him in one word, I would say that he’s not. And if in four words, I’d say that I don’t feel him. I don’t feel what’s cooking inside him, and what he’s going to do in another second. For me our friend Shakespeare is a labyrinth that changes the minute you enter it, and if you don’t get out at once, you’ll never escape. That’s what Jonas said to me.

  And the Alsatian. He had a cool head. A mind as sharp as a razor. If anything scared him he would analyze it in his Talmudic brain. Arrive at the heart of the danger. At the brain behind the machine. And he would take that apart too. Indicate with the precision of a laser beam the point that had to be hit in order to neutralize the system. What can I say, the soul of a demolition man. And you succeeded in scaring even him. You know how he defined you? A differential equation with infinite unknowns.

  They never told you. And now they can’t tell you. But you scared them. Yes, yes. After all the years we worked together, after everything we went through, I can tell you one thing. I don’t know you any better today than I knew you the first time we met. Yes, yes. Maybe even the opposite. You can laugh, but the more time passes, the less I know you. Not that you’ve changed. The truth is that you don’t change. Not at all. At the base is the same thing that scared me so much the first time I met you. And with the years it scares me more. Yes, yes.

  What is it exactly? There’s no word for it. I can try to describe it for you. Here you are sitting in front of me. Listening to me with interest. Or as if you’re interested. Even that I can’t say for certain. You hear what I’m saying to you. And what do you do? How do you react? You go on crushing the pincers of that lobster. Extracting its flesh. Sucking its marrow. Calmly. With concentration. As if cleaning out the shell of that fucking lobster is the most important thing at this moment. No less important than the things I’m saying to you. Yes, yes. As if I was talking to you about the taste of the new Beaujolais. I tell you that the best friends you ever had were afraid of you—and you go on polishing off the lobster.

  Friends? Maybe the word friends isn’t relevant. Were we your friends? Is there anyone in the world who’s your friend? It takes some nerve on my part to say this to you. If I’m sitting here now and talking to you, and my body isn’t decomposing in some dark alcove at the end of a maze of tunnels in an abandoned copper mine in the Austrian alps, it’s thanks only to you. Yes, yes. Thanks to your quiet madness. So what gives me the right to even ask you if you’re my friend?

  Let me tell you something.

  Jonas was sentimental. We both know that. When he drank he became even more sentimental. Once we were sitting and drinking. We sat and drank the whole night long. He was quite drunk. He had a fit of sentimentality. He said to me: Yadanuga. Yadanuga, he said to me. You should know, Yadanuga, you’re still alive thanks to Shakespeare. That’s what he said to me. Jonas was a real mensch. Straight as a ruler.

  If it had been up to me and the Alsatian alone, he said—and he was crying when he said it, but he said it, yes, yes—if it had been up to me and the Alsatian alone you would have given up the ghost long ago in the belly of that accursed mountain in the Tyrolean alps. No one would have dreamt of giving them what they demanded in exchange for letting you go. And you would have remained there, Yadanuga. There was no proof that they were holding you inside that mine. Apart from the things you succeeded in dropping on the way.

  I asked the Alsatian. He said it was true. I doubted the whole thing, he said to me. I went along with it against my better judgment, he said to me. Against what my brain told me. Yes, yes. You should know, Yadanuga, that I went along with it only because I gave in to Shakespeare and his madness, he said to me. He told me that when you got the maps from the German engineer, and when he saw how many tunnels and subterranean halls there were, he said that there was no point in even thinking about going into the mine. There was no chance of coming out of there alive. According to the German, some of the tunnels and halls and pits didn’t even appear on the maps. For three hundred years nobody had set foot in there. Since the eighteenth century. Your decision to enter the mine seemed suicidal to the Alsatian. If you want to understand Shakespeare, he said to me, you have to take into account that all his life is a rush towards death. He confessed to me. And you know how hard it was for the Alsatian to confess. But he confessed to me that he said to Jonas: Say goodbye to Shakespeare before he enters the belly of the mountain. You won’t see him again. Yes, yes.

  When I sat there in the absolute darkness, in the absolute silence that reigned there, broken only when the guards changed shifts—the only thing that kept me alive was the gut feeling that you were on your way to me, and that as long as you were alive you wouldn’t give up. But what that feeling was based on I can’t tell you. Because if you allow me to tell you the truth, Shakespeare, however painful it may be—I never felt you. I could understand the Alsatian, even if it was difficult. He would explain himself with his complicated Talmudic logic, and in the end you could understand him. With Jonas it was easier, because I could feel him. I always knew where his heart was. I always had a sense of what he would do and what he wouldn’t do. I could feel where his boundaries were. And therefore I knew that neither the Alsatian nor Jonas would suddenly appear before me in the belly of the mountain. But with you I haven’t got any gut feeling. I feel you like an empty space. And that’s scary. Awfully scary. You know what? When you left me to take care of Jonas when he lay dying, and threw off your coat and set off in pursuit of the surgeon, and I suddenly realized that you were pursuing him empty-handed—I was sure I would never see you alive again. Only a lunatic like you would be capable of throwing off everything to be lighter for the chase! I imagined that you did it without thinking, but without feeling too, without an sense of the situation. Otherwise, I can’t understand how anyone sets out empty-handed in pursuit of a crack shot, who’s presumably carrying another revolver in addition to the one that flew out of his hand when my dagger missed his heart and hit his hand. I thought I’d never see you again, until you loomed up out of the dark and said: I nearly killed him, but at the last minute the sonofabitch disappeared into the darkness.

  Do you remember the words Jonas said to you before you entered the mine? You don’t remember? I’m not surprised. Your memory too is a riddle to me. You remember the most insignificant details of the most trivial things in the world. But what your friend says to you when he shakes your hand and parts from you, and what you say to him in reply—that you forget. Yes, yes. So let me remind you.

  When Jonas told me what he said to you, and what you replied, cold shivers ran down my spine. I see that terrible moment when he told me. As if it’s happening now. You shout at me: Look after Jonas! And before I can understand what’s happening, you’re already running into the distance and leaving me alone with Jonas dying in my arms next to the Sheikh’s tomb in that oasis—

  Sheikh Muamar, says Shakespeare.

  And suddenly he opens his eyes and asks: Where’s Shakespeare?

  Chasing Tino, I say.

  Good, he says, He’ll finish off the bastard who killed me.

  Yes, I say, he’ll finish him off.

  When he comes back, tell him that I understood what he said then to the Alsatian.

  What did he say to him? I ask, and Jonas whispers:

  We have eyes, but we have no tongue.

  When did he say that? I try to
keep him awake.

  Before he entered the tunnel, he whispers with the last of his strength.

  What tunnel? I ask him, even though I know what he’s talking about.

  The tunnel in the copper mine.

  Do you remember what else happened there? I ask him and hold his head, trying to keep the conversation going, not to let him sink.

  Yes, I remember, he whispers. The Alsatian told me to say goodbye to him because I would never see him again.

  And how did you say goodbye to him? I go on drawing out the conversation.

  I went up to him, shook his hand, and said to him: Thanks, Bill, it’s been beautiful.

  And what did he answer? I ask him.

  Let’s synchronize our watches. I have one-zero-six. That’s what the sonofabitch answered me.

  Do you remember what happened afterwards? I go on drawing the conversation out.

  Afterwards the Alsatian checked the infrared binoculars and flashlight, and said to him: Keep your eyes open. That’s all you have. The radio won’t work inside the mountain. And Shakespeare replied: We have eyes, but we have no tongue. I never understood what he meant, Jonas whispers with his eyes closed, and now I understand.

  What did he mean? I ask him.

  And I’ll never forget that moment to the day I die. Jonas opened his big childlike eyes to the clean desert sky and said in a clear voice:

  We have eyes to see the beauty, but not the tongue to describe it. Tell him thanks for everything, and that it was beautiful.

  It was beautiful—those were his last words.

  There was beauty in him, that guy. Beauty you and I don’t have, Bill. We’re corrupt. I’m telling you what your friend’s last words were, and you go on cracking that lobster and cleaning out its shell. Go ahead. Bon appetit.

  Thanks.

  You’re welcome. The Alsatian himself told me that he gave in to you and agreed to let you go into the mine, just because Jonas said that even if there was no proof that I was imprisoned inside the mountain, if in the end it turned out that you were right, he would never forgive himself to his dying day.

  And when you showed up with me in the end—he thought he was hallucinating. But you didn’t surprise me. All the time in there I relied only on you. I had the feeling that if the signs I left outside reached you, you would come in and get me out of there. Not because you love me. Or because I’m your friend. In your deepest place, you’re indifferent. Indifferent to your friends, indifferent to the world. I don’t know if you’re indifferent to yourself as well or not. I’m not asking you. I don’t expect any answers from you. According to what I see at the moment, you’re not exactly indifferent to the fish you’re about to eat. Otherwise you wouldn’t be examining its flesh so attentively. You wouldn’t be squeezing the lemon over it so precisely, you wouldn’t be sprinkling the crushed garlic over it with such concentration.

  But to me you’re indifferent. Yes. Today I received the final proof. You simply threw me to the dogs. You abandoned me completely to Mona. And Mona, forgive me for saying so, is all teeth and claws. You know exactly what score she has to settle with me. Still from the days of the unit. I’m going to say things now that will hurt you. But I have to say them. Mona loved me. You know it. And I was indifferent to her. That was the situation. Mona lives by her instincts. She doesn’t act from her head or from her heart. She acts from her guts. We both know that. She waited years to do what she did to me. To hit me in a painful, sensitive place. The weakness of an aging man versus the strength of a young man.

  That’s what the struggle is about. You think I really care so much that this pair of yuppies are prostituting our profession? As if anyone could prostitute it any further. There’s no taboo that hasn’t been broken long ago. They’ve already used real pictures of executions. And what is this unrestrained use of children, if not contempt for childhood. You look at the children made use of by advertising. You see the old expressions on the faces of the little smartypants parroting the words the cynical copywriters put in their mouths, and you want to vomit. And both of us have already used children more than once. And when we demeaned children in our advertising, I loathed myself. But I did it. And I loathe the pornographic use that Golanchick and Moranchick are making of children and old people in their advertising of this fucking pill. But this isn’t what makes me so mad. I’m not a pious virgin. I’m an old whore. Like you. What makes me mad—or rather, who makes me mad is you. You saw what was happening. You saw Mona’s game. You saw how she built the conflict between me and those two little pishers. With a Mona Lisa smile she did everything to bring me to the moment when she could get rid of me with a kick in the balls. Tell me that I’m no longer relevant. That I need to admit it, step aside. The next stage will come when she tells me that an advertising agency isn’t a geriatric institution. Yes, yes. That’s what she’ll say.

  You’re the only person who could have delivered her a knockout. Told her: Madam, Mackie’s a friend of mine, and you’re not going to walk all over him. Nobody touches my friend. You could have done it easily, without risking a fingernail. All you had to do was open your mouth and say: We’re going with Mackie’s idea. End of story. But this time, the minute I needed you, you weren’t there.

  What happened to you since you went into the mountain and risked your life to rescue me? Now I’m asking for help, and you’re abandoning me and you don’t care. What kind of a person have you become? What kind of a person are you, Bill?

  51

  Listen, Yadanuga, Shakespeare raises his eyes from the fish and sees the evening descending on the sea and the blood rapidly draining from the slaughtered clouds, leaving piles of gray rags in the celestial rubbish dump. Against this background, on the other side of their table, strewn with plundered mezze saucers, and pieces of pita bread, and broken lobster shells, and the decapitated heads of little red mullets, and chips bloody with crushed tomatoes, the face of the bearded man opposite him appears to him like the landscape of a disaster zone, and he feels a powerful urge to put out his hand and stroke this sad face with love and great pity, and to kiss the puzzled eyes staring at him as if at some undecipherable riddle, and he hears Shakespeare speak from his mouth.

  You ask me a little question: what kind of a person am I. We’ve been friends ever since I remember myself, but we’ve never talked the way you talked to me now. I never asked you who you really are, and you’ve never asked me what kind of a person I am.

  If it bothers you—Yadanuga begins to say, but Shakespeare cuts him short:

  No, no, on the contrary. After all these years, and after everything we’ve done together, it’s time we sat together like this, quietly, over a bottle of whiskey, and talked about ourselves, even if it isn’t easy for us. And perhaps precisely because it’s so hard for us. To tell the truth, I don’t even know how to begin to answer you. And from where. From what. So forgive me if things come out in a muddle. In bits and pieces. When I try to think about myself, I can only think in fragments, splinters, broken bits and pieces. I can only give you fragments. Take them however you can, and put them in any order you like.

  I won’t put your words in order, Shakespeare, says Yadanuga. There comes a moment when a man is a broken vessel, and any well-constructed story is a complete lie. Give me fragments of truth and don’t sell me a well-told lie with a beginning, a middle and an end.

  Excellent, says Shakespeare. That will make it a lot easier for me, because I haven’t been a good story for a long time. And the more time passes, the more of a story full of contradictions and dead zones I become. There’s a dark side of the moon too, where I’ve never been, and I can’t tell you what happens there and what comes from there. The lit side of a man is the side that other men see. Your lit side is the side that I see now.

  I’m with you on this motorbike, says Yadanuga. Step on the gas and don’t stop.

  Okay, says Shakespeare. So what kind of a person am I. Let’s see. Maybe I’m a person with an artificial aspiration to the meaningl
ess. Now that I hear these words coming out of my mouth, I ask myself where they came from. But let’s put that question aside. Let’s tackle the statement itself, as if it contains some truth. The very fact that it came out of my mouth shows that something in there, on the upper cortex of the right lobe of the brain, arranged those words one after the other: a person with an artificial aspiration to the meaningless. How do I know that it comes from the upper cortex of the right lobe of the brain? Because I can feel that this spot is now activated. I can feel the heat and weight of some mass there. But let’s get back to the statement itself. Let’s see what words it draws behind it. And I’m giving you notice that from now on I take no responsibility for the words that come out of my mouth. I’m a person with an artificial aspiration to the meaningless, because it has more life than a life that aspires to the meaningful. What do you say to that?

  That’s what I always liked about you, admits Yadanuga. That you were an invention.

  All four of us were an invention, corrects Shakespeare. We operated in the wild territory of pure, immoral, asocial, unnatural, inhuman action: we executed. We didn’t murder. Murder is a natural, human act. Every murder has a motive. Committing a murder is surrendering to nature. Execution is something else entirely. It’s an artificial act, without any motive on the part of the executor. Remember how we operated when we operated well: we executed people without instinct or urge. Our act was a simple, pure, vulgar act, calculated as a game. And this I received and learned from you, Yadanuga.