Something about her recalls Glenn Gould. That chilly thing that makes us think of the hospital morgue in Cincinnati.
Picture an Orthodox Jew who has been exiled to the Canary Islands. He can’t find a prayer shawl or phylacteries. There isn’t any kosher food. He’s looking for a synagogue. He wants to pray and chant his hymns, to whisper anguished petitions, but the people around him are selling watches.
[57]
A cow can hear the voice of the calf that’s hers, even when hundreds of calves are mooing. She responds to his moo and he responds to hers.
Sometimes the movement of the heavenly bodies in their circuits is disturbed, and, for instance, the moon disappears, and then the cows lift their eyes to the sky and moo.
A question of considerable import is: Do weeds and trees experience longing? Once we saw an insurance agent weeping. He said something about a policy and suddenly burst into tears, and out of embarrassment we asked him only if he’d like some coffee.
He drank his coffee and wiped away the tears (people kept handkerchiefs in jacket pockets then) and stuffed the hanky into a pocket in his pants.
[58]
We also remember how the chorus teacher wept. He wept because the children threw chalk at one another and sent paper airplanes through the air and didn’t listen when he shouted “Quiet!”
When a person who doesn’t speak Hebrew hears the word bakhah (wept) he can’t guess what it means. He might think that bakhah is a kind of tree used to build boats or a cookie (which is to say, a small flat cake).
Especially strange is that system of inflections by which we conjugate words like bakhiti (I wept), bakhita (you wept), bakhah (he wept), bakhinu (we wept), etcetera.
[59]
After her husband the Italian died, Mrs. Shtiasny lost her mind. She called Aunt Edith and my stepmother Francesca names like krumme Ziege (crooked goat) and ein weiblicher Schnurrbart (woman’s mustache).
Once she woke Mr. Cohen, who was already a hundred and one, at midnight and asked him if it was A.M. now.
Within that madness she also understood things. She pointed to the corner of the room and said, “I’m not there,” or she took the pictures off the wall in the hall while saying things like, “This is not a sun,” or “These aren’t horses.”
[60]
In the end, Mrs. Shtiasny stopped speaking and only every once in a while would say, “Die Unterwelt” (that is, the Underworld).
(It’s hard to say that Charles Darwin explained the world. The changing seasons. Day and night. The light that falls on an eel. The ends of words. A corridor.)
On a clear winter’s day Mrs. Shtiasny sat in the yard. All the others went to eat and came back to their rooms for a nap. At three o’clock the hair on her head was lit by sunlight (the upper world) and burned with the colors of fire until dusk fell.
[61]
It’s hard to believe that all this is taking place within a book. The people must be very small. Or maybe the power of imagination is employing signs (from among some twenty-plus) and turning them, by means of a kind of sorcery, into all these different things?
We’ve heard that people masturbate in front of the word ishah (woman). It’s hard to see how the letters arouse them. Maybe the last one.
In the twelfth century a Chinese court calligrapher hanged himself from the palace rafters because he couldn’t draw the character for man without thinking about what makes one.
It’s highly probable that Jewish scribes copying sacred Jewish texts descend into the darkest of moods whenever they scribble a letter in error while writing a writ of divorce.
Once upon a time we knew a man whose name was Horovitz, and he’d always say, “Just one v.”
[62]
When one goes astray, one really goes there. That is, one goes there as one goes home, and finds that being there has a shape and borders, and that people want to know what it’s like between them. Being astray isn’t easy, as the air is thin and the sky very high and the ground beneath one comes and goes.
Children also find their way there, but usually start crying until someone retrieves them. The elderly, on the other hand, don’t look back. They don’t remember other states. Some have even forgotten their names. But in the end they manage to find the toy elephant or the wooden train that once upon a time they’d misplaced.
[63]
Sometimes we start weeping for no reason at all, or for one we can barely recall.
Ezra Danischevsky’s mother we saw just a single time. We were having soup she’d made and went out (Ezra and I) to play in the yard. Nonetheless, when we heard (thirty years later) that she’d died, tears welled up in us, even though we remembered only the paff paff sound that her slippers made.
Once we rushed a sick dog to the veterinarian’s apartment. His name was Dr. Gottlieb and his apartment was on Clement Street. Because the door to his building was locked, we became extremely agitated and went around to the back of the building, where we saw a light and shouted the name of the street loudly.
[64]
We’d go down into the world of the dead if only we could meet William Saroyan. He would understand such things.
In a certain respect we too are like Armenians exiled to California. Things like the names of department stores make us wonder.
And also the news. Or the anchor’s words: “First, the headlines.” What seems right are the icebergs in the Arctic Circle or silent films, even when they’re filled with war scenes.
Not that we don’t fight for human rights, like Shulamit Aloni in the Knesset or that Communist woman whose name now escapes us.
We do. And we don’t forget for a single second the five fingers on our hand. There could, after all, be six or seven.
[65]
And we don’t forget our shoes. Or the buttons on our sleeves. Or to breathe. This book treats all these things at all times, like a giant pair of bellows.
No one on the Left ever mentions Erzurum. Bless its residents. And the Yemenite villages (here and in Yemen). And the shopkeepers whom no one remembers, we remember.
And also Mr. Yaar, who sold shoes and because of some flaw deep in his throat made a tinny sound when he spoke. And the less-than-scrupulous taxi drivers. We haven’t heard anyone mentioning them.
[66]
And the moon. On the Right they take it for granted, and on the Left they take it apart.
No one takes into account that it has no light of its own, and like the proletariat, depends on the graces of a larger light, one that’s usually hidden.
And we always vote. Even when the polling station stinks of plucked chickens and seven or ten morose-looking poll workers are sitting at a long table.
We don’t understand why all this is here (and isn’t not here—which is to say, doesn’t exist). None of the parties admit it. Let alone the particulars, like bobby pins and a thousand bras.
[67]
We salute the readers who’ve come this far. In the meantime they and we (which is to say I) are walking on the earth’s surface like circus bears balancing on a ball. Thousands of policemen walk like this (that is, like circus bears) and don’t slip.
When we were little we thought about people in Australia and how their heads were upside down and yet they didn’t fall.
The earth in fact comes from a dream (we think, like Aborigines) and returns to a dream. And if we sing (that is, speak) correctly, we return it to where it had been before the creation of the cosmos. Including flies, excrement, etcetera.
[68]
Once a poet came to visit and my first wife (here it’s hard to speak in th
e plural) cooked a goose in his honor. We saw the poet’s fingernails and his teeth and remembered the painting by Hieronymus Bosch of a fish eating a fish that was eating a fish.
Sometimes (in India or Africa) a leopard attacks a poet and this is part of the natural order, since all things in the end are swallowed by larger things, though we don’t know who it is that swallows the world as a whole.
And so, one way or another, poems are written, and we too will now write a love poem to all the women reading this book:
A book you touch
Begins
Reading itself
[69]
Apropos love. In Ramat Gan (during the time of Mayor Krinitzi) a man named Kadoshkin walked from one end of Rav Kook Street, then the longest street in the country, to the other and back.
Kadoshkin held a cane in one hand and in the other he held a bottle. We don’t know if the bottle was full or empty but if it was full it held water or vodka, because it was always transparent.
He’d stop before a display window, holding the bottle against his body (come to think of it, it held vodka) and call to the object behind the glass (he’d say “kettle,” “shirt,” “chair,” etcetera).
During the winter the cane would become an umbrella, but the bottle remained a bottle. We believe that this man kept things in their proper place. And if he hadn’t called them by name, they couldn’t have maintained their form so precisely. And where would the Land of Israel be then?
[70]
We’re wondering if the word zarzif (drizzle) is onomatopoeic. That is, a word that makes the sound the thing makes. Bakbook (bottle), they say, does that.
Or pkak (cork). But not lavlav (pancreas). No one has yet heard the sound that organ makes. But parpar (butterfly)—yes. People with a heightened sense of hearing can hear this sound when butterflies flutter around them.
Mrs. Minoff, whom we’ve already mentioned (in chapter 13) spoke in onomatopoeia. She’d say, for instance, This gluk gluk or chin chin, and sometimes only Francesca my stepmother or Mrs. Shtiasny could follow her.
There were rumors that she’d slept with Mrs. Shtiasny’s Italian husband. But maybe she only slept next to him, and in any event this has nothing to do with onomatopoeia.
[71]
We’re trying to be humble, and modest. Even humor seems like a sin today. And we should, so to speak, erase ourselves so as to see only another. His birth. His childhood. His life.
We realize that these words don’t amount to what’s usually called belles lettres. If there were a bank where one could exchange literary currency for the currency of life we’d go there and ask for the latter, even if it cost us greatly.
And we’d go to the florist and buy a large bouquet of wildflowers for the woman who loves us (and pay for these with that currency) or stand in the kitchen where she usually stands and make lunch.
[72]
In December we’re exiled to chillier regions and see death in action.
There my father (Andreas Avraham) hides from Francesca, my stepmother, records he bought because the money he receives (in transparent bills) isn’t enough for her.
The music he listens to consists of a single sound, like the straight line on the monitor when the heart stops beating. The scent of eternity is like that of goulash. Everything’s frozen over. Jokes one tells are revealed in full like that famous rainbow arched through a cloud. Each season extends to infinity. You stand there, and the streets run on beneath you. Women lie down forever. A faint soft sound like the fur of a foal (of a donkey) wafts through the air, and the colors are all pastel.
[73]
But sometimes the dead remain on the surface of the earth, like those we saw in Dublin, in the basement of St. Michan’s Church.
There was a crusader there who died over six hundred years ago. He was large, and they sawed off his feet so he would fit into the coffin. And there was a thief who’d had his hands hacked off because he’d used them to steal, and his feet chopped off because he’d fled. And a nun who died at a ripe old age and whose tiny fingernails were preserved, as though she were still alive. And two brothers who rebelled against the British and were hanged, and their bodies, miraculously, didn’t decompose at all until live Irishmen came and laid flowers at their heads and something wafting up from them (the flowers) made the men decompose.
Generally speaking. The world is full of miracles. How fingernails grow and hair gets long and we clip them both. How doors are slammed. And how the River Liffey, which cuts Dublin in two, runs on and on.
[74]
At times we’re reminded of the future. How we’ll sit by a window and see a mountain’s silhouette. And we’ll turn our head toward the room and see the silhouette of a man. We remember the scent of the morning papers during the twenties (of the twenty-first century).
We know this scrambling of time will cost us. We’ll sink into a dark mood and, maybe, during the middle of the month see the moon when it’s full. That great big pill of Prozac.
We’ve already talked of the woman psychoanalyst, but we haven’t yet told our readers that once we saw a male analyst as well. Mostly we remember two things. The waiting room and that he was mortal.
If we could make a request of the readers we’d ask that they send us (c/o this book’s publisher) all the words of the song that begins: “Five years passed for Mikha’el / While he danced away / He had no work he had to do / And he was free to play . . .”
[75]
That song broke our hearts and later so did Eleanor Rigby.
Here are some other things that break the heart: An old door. A glass left out in the yard. A woman’s foot squeezed into shoes, so her toes become twisted. A grocer whose store no one goes into. Above all, a husband and wife who don’t talk to each other. One-eyed cats. Junkyards. The stairwells of old buildings. A small boy on his way to school. Old women sitting all day by the window. Display windows with only a single item or two, coated with dust. A shopping list. Forty-watt bulbs. Signs with an ampersand (such as ZILBERSTEIN & CHAMNITZER), and when a person we love disappears (at a train station, for instance) into the distance.
[76]
Mrs. Shtiasny’s Italian husband kept a bottle of brandy in the pantry and drank from it every so often.
One day during the fifties he opened the pantry door and a large package of noodles fell out and the noodles scattered across the floor.
This event resembled (in miniature) that meteor crashing into Siberia. We saw how thousands of trees were leveled at once in precisely the same formation as the noodles.
So it is that similar patterns run through the world. The lines in a leaf and the veins in the leg of a diabetic. The concave places in a woman’s body and the valleys of regions like Provence. Heavenly bodies and uncut diamonds scattered about on a large table at the polishing workshop, and so on.
Mrs. Shtiasny got down on her knees and gathered up all the noodles, one by one. And because times were hard, she washed them under tap water and turned them into a soup.
[77]
And there was another thing. That a man knocked on the door and asked for a glass of water. He was carrying a large bundle of rugs on his shoulder and when he’d had enough to drink he spread one out on the hallway floor and said: “This is authentic, from Paras” (he stressed the first syllable, as Persian does).
The rug was the color of a pomegranate and held within it the forms of small birds and all sorts of flowers, and among them, equidistant from one another, were people.
He put down the glass on the edge of the rug and the small people near the glass got up from the rug a
nd took a drink from the water left in the glass, then returned to their places among the birds and the flowers.
Many of the things recollected in this book are fiction. But the memory of this event, which we call (amongst ourselves) “the great thirst in the hall,” is real.
[78]
Yesterday we read in the paper that a man broke a glass at his own wedding (in remembrance of the Temple’s destruction) and shards of glass went into the sole of his foot and he was taken directly from the chuppah to the hospital, and there they removed the glass from his flesh and bandaged his foot and as soon as he left he hired a lawyer and sued the owners of the banquet hall.
Imagine for a moment the crucified one coming down from the cross and hiring a lawyer. He’d have thrown history off its course, and who knows what disasters might have ensued.
Better for a person to accept his fate and head off on his honeymoon while his foot is bleeding and only there, as the sheets turn red, let out a groan.
Sometimes things are sevenfold worse, as when a man manages to break the glass and his feet are fine but his wife then scowls for forty years.
[79]
Certain people are named Jorge and it’s quite likely that they are scattered, not by chance but along the lines of geometric patterns (at the apex of a triangle or at a rectangle’s corners), all across Israel.
And in fact it makes little difference if one Jorge takes the place of another. If he sometimes finds there an extra child or a refrigerator of a different color, he quickly gets used to it and to the woman who, in any event, everyone calls “Jorge’s wife.”
Moods Page 3
