[31]
What slayed us was high heels. The vertical line of the leg and also at times (when the shoes were mules) the heel.
We saw legs like those at the end of Allenby Street next to the Opera House. On one side of the street was an iron railing and on the other were gambling joints of various sorts. Other writers would certainly describe the whores quite well, and also the gulls.
Whoever went there went there. Some would lean against the railing and look toward the sea, and sometimes they saw (as one sees a shooting star) a gull die and fall into the water.
[32]
We hear a name like Mittelpunkt, which means a point in the middle.
Since space is infinite there is no point in the middle of the world, and therefore these people (called Mittelpunkt) are themselves that point in the middle. If we extend lines in every direction from where they are, these lines would be equal in length.
My Aunt Edith was afraid that the ground would smother her. But several saints (so we heard) lay down in coffins while they were still alive. They pointed their bodies in the right direction but their spirits floated and they thought (in the dark of the coffin) things like, Where’s that brown shawl?
[33]
We’d like to use the phrase hard times. To say, for instance, because of the hard times I slept fitfully and my mind wandered. A wandering mind is a marvelous sight.
During the summer you can see people sitting at cafés. Their upper bodies are properly cast (like busts of composers we put on pianos). But beneath the tables you see their toes, and some are afflicted with mycosis.
From Aunt Edith we ask forgiveness for our not having read the letters she left behind.
[34]
Old telephones are preserved in memories. The voice that emerged from the receiver frightened us. We couldn’t understand where the face had gone.
Now in phones you can see faces that are far away. But the sadness is greater by a factor of seven precisely because you see them.
If we could bring Aunt Edith back, we would. Even to the time when she had to sit in a wheelchair. She’d be amazed by the sight of the Azrieli skyscraper in Tel Aviv.
[35]
We can talk about a certain man’s life and the people who were bound to him because people were bound to us as well.
There was a radio repairman who was bound to us during the days when radios were made of lamps. And Uncle Zoltan, who heard the symphony’s concerts (on the radio), and Mr. Yaar, who sold shoes, and so on and so on.
That is to say, we thought they were bound to us, and they thought we were bound to them. The whole thing’s very complicated, as a post office clerk, Rahamim Kadosh (whom we’ve written of elsewhere), once said: It’s been ages since I’ve seen you, and you haven’t seen me either.
[36]
Uncle Zoltan also conducted the concert he heard on the radio because he knew how to read what people call scores. Generally speaking. He was extremely learned, and knew the grammatical structures of some thirty languages.
And even though he was a doctor at the Labor Union Clinic on Zamenhoff Street, and saw a great many people there, when people came to his home (largely to visit Aunt Edith) he’d lock himself in the bathroom and not come out until they were gone.
He was bound to Aunt Edith and she was bound to him, out of loneliness. Each would walk from here to there all alone and come back to an empty home. But because each was bound to the other they were able to ring the doorbell.
And someone opens the door for us too, and for this we thank God (and He, when you give it some thought, is always alone).
[37]
My other uncle, my father Andreas’s brother—his name was Laudislaus—was also a doctor. He knew how to wiggle his ears, like an elephant, though his diagnoses were often wrong.
We too inherited this gift from our forebears, and there’s a good chance that we are the only author who can wiggle his ears like that. We can also bend our thumb all the way back to our wrist.
We’ve already written in another book about the donkey that Uncle Laudislaus received from the clinic (because there weren’t any roads in Ramat Gan at the time). Since then we’ve seen donkeys and she-asses in all sorts of places, and we can say that there are no lovelier eyelashes than those of a donkey (or a she-ass).
[38]
Yesterday the tax authorities put a block on our salary. Not because of any debt, but because of a dispute over when our return needed to be filed.
We called wherever we called and sent faxes to various places, but without a doubt, because of it all, something slipped our minds. If we had a union or league (as of nations), thirty or forty readers would have waved cardboard signs before a government building.
We’ve heard there are writers who can’t, as we say, “finish the month” and pay their bills. We too have trouble when it comes to finishing the month. We also have trouble starting it, as feelings are always troubling our heart. The feeling of things past. Of sights. And things we’ve lost. Of night.
We send up a prayer that we won’t be so needy.
[39]
The air over Nahariya is full of crows. These small black people know a thing or two that people below do not. We hear them as one hears a large synagogue.
Sometimes a crow comes down between the tables at a café and sees the urologist from the Clinic, or a woman named Aviva.
But at dusk, all fly up from the tops of the eucalyptus trees, like a man who can’t remember if he’s taken off his socks, drunk at the sight of the weakening sun.
[40]
Because of this dispute with the authorities we’ve sought out, in Nahariya, a man who is also an accountant. His name is Tugenhauft, which means (we think) “given to sorrow.” We can already see the sorrow in the stairwell.
Ernst Tugenhauft has us sit in a chair and we open books before him. In the meantime, the sun has already set and the crows (so we hear) have returned to the trees. And we (which is to say Ernst Tugenhauft and I) are crows on a lower plane. Within the large room our bodies are gradually darkening and our mouths grow long.
[41]
In the end, the authorities responded to Ernst Tugenhauft and the deadline for the return was extended, but now our blood pressure isn’t right and we need to lower the upper number.
But the blood is pressing as it always has against the tubes beneath the flesh. It’s figuring out how to break through to the blood that’s beyond us, and sometimes it breaks though the tubes and strikes against the skull.
People don’t know that once there was a man named Buxtehude. His name comes to mind because of the mystery words embody. One could say “the blood of Ernst Tugenhauft,” but it isn’t possible to say (which is to say, one can say but not think) the words “the blood of Buxtehude.”
[42]
It’s been ages since we’ve spoken of beautiful things.
We remember how beautiful the widow was, although by most people’s standards her face was ugly. We weren’t, however, bound to her at all because she remained within herself, as she was, only up to the borders where the air begins.
If we were Catholic, we’d go to the priest and confess before him that we haven’t received with true submission the divine design and we’ve sought for ourselves empty space.
[43]
We remember how beautiful Uncle Zoltan was. And how beautiful our stepmother Francesca was (her maiden name was Manheim). They too were precisely what they were, but then, when we were children, we only wanted solid forms.
We might sketch out episodes but we can’t. We’ve forgotten adjectives and adverbs a
nd we remember (like the mentally disabled) just first names.
It’s only right that we should read the phone book as we read Scripture.
[44]
A certain sheikh from a Sufi sect saw that the time to pray had come. He started to rise from his pallet and was just about to go to the mosque. But since a cat was sleeping on the sleeve of his cloak, he cut off the sleeve and went to pray with his one arm covered and the other exposed.
The cat is already dead, and the sheikh too has passed away, but year after year tens of thousands of pilgrims prostrate themselves before this sleeve. Some crawl on their bellies (like the Christians who come to Fatima, in Portugal, to the grave of the child-shepherds who saw the Holy Virgin in the sky) from the edge of town and across the spice market up to the mosque where the sleeve is preserved.
Hence the injunction, Be a sleeve to the world. If the woman beside you is sleeping and her head is on your arm and you need to get up and go to the bathroom you very carefully have to place her head on the pillow beside you (how tempting it is to say you have to cut off your arm) just so you won’t wake her.
[45]
Penina Tuchner we loved like the Twin Towers, especially when they were burning. If her bra were preserved in a museum, we’d go there and break the display-case glass.
How she’d say “Shalom,” with that first syllable precisely placed between s and sh. Generally. She pronounced words like a swan sailing along on the Thames, next to the hotels. You could see her throat through her neck.
We remember that she lived at 15 Tribes of Israel Street, on the third floor. On the first (we remember) there lived people whose names were Kalantar and people whose names were Yesharim. On the second floor were people whose names were Laufer, and on the third (facing Tuchner) lived a man named Fabricant.
[46]
Mrs. Tuchner (Penina’s mother) used to put soup pots on the windowsill. We remember that a large pot came between us and our view of the apartment across the way.
When we ate (Mr. Tuchner would eat with us too), Mrs. Tuchner would walk from the table to the kitchen and back. Mr. Tuchner’s eyeglasses would fog up with vapors and he would remove them every so often and wipe the lenses with the tablecloth.
We thought to ourselves then that they (which is to say, Mr. and Mrs. Tuchner) brought a baby girl into the world and waited until she grew up and now we take off all of her clothes.
[47]
We’ve heard that physicists are searching for a tiny particle that they can’t find and therefore they’ve built an enormous tunnel in Switzerland.
We too from time to time lose a breadcrumb, but usually we find it under the table. My stepmother Francesca lost an imitation pearl once and after a while she found it between the sheets.
Happy are people who lack only a tiny particle. Sometimes we lose what seems like half the world or even two thirds of it, and the part that’s left is a blackish-yellow like the streets of Europe in the nineteenth century, when they’d light the lamps with gas.
[48]
At times like these only a dog can diagnose the problem. He places his head on our knees and sends us healing powers. And this (that is, the dog’s soul) is one of the great mysteries about which one can’t write in books.
We remember all the dogs that were bound to us. Their souls are now in heaven. Their paws are preserved in the great Pantheon of the World Spirit.
And this is the schedule of buses departing from Nahariya to Ma’alot: 5:15, 6:30, 6:45, 7:00, 7:20, 7:45, 8:30, 11:30, 13:30, 16:00, 18:25, 19:30, and the last one is at 20:35.
[49]
And now it’s only fitting that we should talk about the shopkeeper and the dog.
Every day Mr. Hirsch would slice up a large chunk of cheese. His hand went up and down as he sliced, and therefore we couldn’t see if the number on his arm and the number on the arm of his wife were in sequence.
Mr. Hirsch also taught us to distinguish between white bread and dark bread. They don’t bake loaves like that any longer. But then they’d cut three small grooves into the outer crust of the white bread.
The dog would always lie by the door to the grocery store and growl. Perhaps he saw in his mind’s eye a pot roast (or something called ratatouille) and was angry that he couldn’t smell what was cooking.
[50]
Next to the grocery store was a shop that belonged to a tailor named Leopold. And after that was a store called My Book, where they sold books and stationery supplies.
The movements in the grocery store were, on the whole, vertical (which is to say they went from top to bottom). At the tailor’s the movement was lateral (which is to say, horizontal—on account of the line drawn in the air by the needle and thread). And at My Book the movement was crosshatched. On the pavement in front of the stores the children played with small glass marbles.
Once the tailor whose name was Leopold left the store and chased all the children away. But the children came back and some of them even pressed their noses against the window of the shop in order to see the tailor’s dummy.
[51]
At the bookstore called My Book (we gave the name a penultimate stress) there was, on the shelf, a book called How to Win Friends and Influence People, and there was also the Bible in the multivolume Cassuto edition. Except that we didn’t see the Book of Ezekiel.
We might tell how the clerks came and went and how we fell in love with several, but in fact only Mr. Twersky manned the store, and he would simply say, “What else” (with the words spaced out in rhythmic fashion).
At that time we’d think about Indulgences. That is, the writs of forgiveness that priests sold for money to sinners. Even though we hadn’t committed any great sin (we’d stolen a cream puff from the kiosk and whatnot), we sought for ourselves a writ of forgiveness for all the sins we knew we’d commit in the future.
There’s no need to point out (as we’ve already said in an earlier book) that the sun came and the sun went during those days as well.
[52]
Years before that Micah Raukher pushed us into a bougainvillea.
At the time, we hadn’t yet heard of the man who was crucified at Golgotha, but without a doubt the number of thorns that pierced our flesh was greater by far than the number of nails that the Romans drove into him.
The kindergarten teacher took out the thorns with the help of a pair of tweezers, and we shed a tear like that boy in the picture that hung on the wall in every pediatric clinic in the country.
Micah Raukher stood in the corner and some thirty or forty years later died in a traffic accident. We were carried (which is to say, I was carried) by my grandfather, Isaac Emerich, in his heart, all the way to his house on Arlosoroff Street, next to the Monkey Park.
If the grandfather of the Crucified One (and not his Father in heaven) had taken him down from the cross, everything would have been different.
[53]
We’ve always wanted to know a man named Osip. We wanted to say Good morning, Osip—or Osip, what’s up.
The name is suddenly cut off, but even afterward it sails on like a huge boat toward a place that had been prearranged.
It’s unfortunate when a woman is named Griselda. On the whole, women should walk around without names.
We see them here and we see them there carrying a tragic basket or trying on a dress, and we can’t forget for a moment how they’re split within and become someone else.
In their childhood, which resembles a hoopoe bird (in gym shorts), and in their dotage as well (in shoes fitted to their feet in special stores), they are extremely beautiful.
[54]
This book is a book of moods. We could call it The Book of Moods.
Now we’re filled with love, and now it’s hatred. Sometimes we hate things we’ve loved or love things we’ve hated, and there is no end to it.
Once we hated spiders, and today we love them. Especially those with thin legs and round bodies. Because we don’t drive them away (as others do), they spin webs in all sorts of places and come and go across the floor and along the walls, and sometimes they hang all night long over the bed, a pinky’s length from our heads.
And when we sit at the table, intending to write, along comes a spider across the paper and it stands there over the words.
[55]
It’s possible to leave the earth and watch it grow smaller and smaller. Till now we’ve seen this only in a dream.
Maybe the dead see such a sight. Or saints. In the commentary by Onkelos to the biblical passage about Abishag the Shunammite, it says that she lay beside the old king and sank into her thoughts. First (so it says) she drew the bedding out of herself. Then the king. Then the palace, and finally she hovered in a kind of spiritual space (as Onkelos puts it) in which there remained not a trace of anything material.
Most likely the elderly king looked at her and thought that his time too had come to pass away from this world and on to others, but memories seized him like crabs taking hold of a dead fish.
[56]
Now we’re thinking about the woman psychoanalyst.
From the diploma on the wall we learned that she had made her way to people in the know in Switzerland. In our mind’s eye we saw how she traveled there with her two breasts hidden within her suit jacket like stowaways.
Moods Page 2
