These are the turns life takes, and it takes us here and there, sometimes in Adidas sneakers and sometimes in Crocs and the like.
These changes are easier by night, when outlines blur, and nearly every man is willing to take in nearly every woman and vice versa.
[80]
And there are those who believe that movements like these (that is, who goes to whom, etc.) are scribbled in the stars, but we lift our eyes and see something else spelled out there.
First, what’s written is written on infinite paper. Second, it’s silent (that is, it can’t be pronounced). And third, it’s very very old.
But beneath that writing that no one can read we receive the great effulgence that’s possible to see in tall towers of canned food.
At night, when the supermarket closes, the cashiers go out into the street and return to their room-and-a-half beneath what’s written in the heavens—and no doubt it’s written that death will surely come, and so we shouldn’t worry so much. After all, we too are made of stardust, and there is no difference between the stuff of the stars and us.
[81]
Day after day Uncle Ladislaus lay in bed and wiggled his ears. And though he owned a donkey, he didn’t make house calls. The donkey, which he tied to a pomegranate tree, brayed out of boredom and Aunt Matusya brought it leftover compote.
In those days you could see in the sky (there were no factories or street lights) a million stars. Below, between Herzl and Yahalom Streets, you sometimes saw the mayor, fat Krinitzi.
Our lives (which is to say, my life) was contained within a much smaller body, and all we wanted in this world was that this girl or that one would agree to be our girlfriend.
[82]
At this time most of the boys were named Tuvya. Girls were called Kinneret. The air was full of the scent of cypress trees (and countless lewd images). Teachers were usually called Yehudit.
But all this we’ve already said elsewhere. What good do those memories do? They’re made of the stuff of dreams, and the stuff of dreams (as it says in the Talmud, Gittin 52) makes nothing happen.
We’ll go with everyone to the mall and pass by the stores like herds of buffalo on the savanna. Then we’ll sit in front of large plasma screen TVs.
After all, Uncle Ladislaus and Mrs. Shtiasny and her Italian husband and my stepmother Francesca are already dead. Others now are living.
And what’s left of that world? Nothing. Only eternal truths, such as that two plus two equals four or that the sum of a triangle’s angles is always one hundred and eighty.
[83]
Maybe we’ll write (in a leaner style) a contemporary story. For instance:
At six o’clock, Zivit opened her eyes and yawned. She already heard the noise of the first bus from the street. I need to move to a new place, she thought to herself. Two cups stood on the table with coffee grounds in them. Only when her eyes fell on the cups did she remember Ohad. She turned her head toward the pillow beside her and saw his hairy back. She recognized the curl she’d made on his back before they fell asleep. Is this the man, she wondered, I’m destined to grow old with? Various thoughts passed through her mind. What about his son, she thought. Will Ohad want him to live with us? He’s always saying that his ex is destroying the kid, and he almost went to a lawyer about it. And if it weren’t for the social worker’s report about the mother, the child would already be living with them. Am I cut out, she asked herself, to act as a mother to someone else’s child? I doubt I can be a good mother to a child of my own.
She picked up her panties and bra from the rug and threw them into the hamper. Then she stood for a long while in front of the closet and finally chose a thong and a lace bra that was nearly see-through. She walked around in the room like that, wearing only her panties and bra, hoping that Ohad would open his eyes and see her, but he was fast asleep. No wonder, she thought, after last night’s wild sex.
[84]
Some of our readers are no doubt saying to themselves: At last, a real story. I wonder what will happen next.
We don’t know if we can say what will happen next. For that we’d need real inspiration, and inspiration, as we know, comes from somewhere else, like prophecy.
Where will Zivit go once she’s fully dressed? Will she wake Ohad up before she leaves the apartment? And will Ohad go home, change his clothes, shower, and go from there to work? Will he call his ex and ask how the child is? Or maybe he’ll call another woman? And so on and on with questions like these.
Once we met a woman named Rina Bartoldi. We remember that she said, “That hasn’t yet been determined” (something to do with the age of the universe, 14.5 billion years or less). One could still see signs of beauty in her face, as in certain neighborhoods in south Tel Aviv.
We remember her even though some thirty years have passed because her age and the age of the universe were linked to one another, and because of the great distance between the two (that is, the two ages) and also because she stood in the world and spoke of its start and used the ugly word determined. All that and the fact that she looked like a pelican.
If this book didn’t already have a name we’d call it The Long Loneliness of Rina Bartoldi.
[85]
Meanwhile (that is, between the first part of the previous section and the second) we also saw a doctor who specialized in hypertension.
The doctor himself was a little pale and his head tilted to the side. Generally speaking. There are many people whose head tilts to the side. Apparently it’s hard to hold the head straight, and most of the time we’re preoccupied with getting it right.
The doctor wasn’t especially concerned about our blood pressure. We were there for all of seven minutes and still, as soon as we left we felt a kind of longing. We drove home through Kiryat Motzkin and Acre and Nahariya, and all the while the sun was on our left.
The moon hadn’t yet risen, or maybe it was very pale and therefore we didn’t see it. But we saw other things (the sea, for instance, and the Nahariya train station) and all this we thought we should share with our readers.
[86]
And also our dreams. That we’re flying above a lake or buying a kerosene stove with a chimney pipe for two hundred and twenty shekels.
We can also share with our readers that gray, amorphous primal sadness, which has no clear-cut place and no particular reason for being, apart from the awful apathy of things (like walls or entire cities or voices on the radio) that take up their places, by themselves, while nothing of them comes to us.
Once we saw the philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz in Jerusalem, next to the old Bezalel Art Academy. He was walking alone and carrying a jar in his hand.
[87]
We can do something godlike and create a person. Let’s call him Sha’ul Sachs. We’ll give him a defect. One arm is too long, or his chin is.
We’ll lead him from place to place. He’ll have a sun of his own and a moon. Others will call him Sha’ul, and some will call him Mr. Sachs.
He’ll gradually grow older (or grow gradually older—we’re entitled to choose between the two) and in the end he’ll die and we can buy a rectangle in the newspaper—Ma’ariv or Ha’aretz—and write inside it: Sha’ul Sachs is no more.
The sun and the moon we’ll leave in place. That way we can see the actual sun and the fictive one side by side, and the two moons.
Once, in Rome, next to the main train station, we went into a church and confessed before a priest.
This is what we said to him: Father, we’ve been carrying around heavy feelings of guilt. Heavy feelings of regret. Heavy feelings of
hope. And, nonetheless, great love.
The priest said: Don’t look in books. Sometimes they say one thing and God has decreed something else. We’ve heard that the red wine in Palestine is excellent.
[88]
In Alexandroupoli we met a Greek priest. He was sitting on a stool in front of a blacksmith’s shop, holding a skewer in his hand and biting into the flesh of a grilled chicken.
We not live here, he said. On high mountain. Come each shix mont or sho, ate . . . dreenk . . . woamen . . . haahaa.
He said something in Greek to the blacksmith and the blacksmith made a circle with his finger and thumb and stuck a finger of his other hand into the circle, maybe because he thought we hadn’t understood the word woamen.
Beyond the shop there was a boulevard lined with palm trees and the Greek sun hovered on the horizon.
Then we went to the train station and there we were told that the train to Bulgaria would leave the following day at shix. The shky went red and the shun shet.
[89]
We’ve written elsewhere of our trip on the train to Bulgaria and how in the train there were only us and an old Bulgarian woman who drank wine and ate sugar and then what happened at the border crossing. Now we remember how we went to the city of Gabrovo because we’d heard it had a museum of humor.
It was a very hot day and maybe because of that no one in Gabrovo smiled when we asked where the museum was. In the museum (possibly in the entire city) there was what they call a blackout, and therefore the long neon lights weren’t lit and the big ceiling fans were still. In most of the rooms there weren’t any windows, and so we walked around in the dark, sweating profusely, and barely able to see the outlines (which is to say, the wooden frames) of the drawings. Moreover, in each room of the museum there stood a scowling Bulgarian woman in a guard’s uniform.
We walked out into the light of day and saw, at the entrance to the museum, a gypsy making an old bear dance. We thought about all the memories that the bear must have held in its soul, and we were filled with awe.
[90]
Nothing comes to an end. There are extremely subtle things like a changing wind or passing thought and they are endless. Or things that are extremely thick like a cough or a clothes closet, and they too have no end. Or very slow things and very fast things that are fast and slow at once (like the memory of trains or mounds of coal) and therefore do not come to an end.
We saw physics textbooks and noticed how much sadness was trapped between the crumpled covers. We saw forks whose tines were taller than the spires of Notre Dame.
We saw things that were very large, like the space through which starlight passes, and we saw wonders such as a tree or a weather vane or a convoy of ants and Russian men and Belgian men (and women of course), and all of these things are endless.
[91]
Apropos Belgium. There was a thick-skinned woman selling latkes in the market in Antwerp. We asked for one and she held the latke in her hand and didn’t stretch her hand out toward us. We stood there like that for a while, as though in a film that had gotten stuck, until we realized that first we had to offer up the coin and only then would we receive the latke.
No doubt there were at the time latke thieves in Antwerp, and the woman was wary. And in fact the temptation to steal latkes in the Antwerp market is great. Likewise the temptation to stick one’s foot out (while someone’s walking blithely along) is great, in the market at Antwerp, or elsewhere.
Or to slap someone without any reason. But no more than that. Knives are foreign to our nature. Also pistols and rifles.
But we’re happy if soup gets spilled on someone, especially if it has chicken legs in it. Generally speaking. We’re happy at the sight of others’ misfortune.
[92]
A journalist by the name of Kashkhanski wrote what he wrote about another book of ours in which we spoke candidly of our lives.
He had a certain compassion about him, something one often finds in this country’s builders. Most likely he had a hard time holding back tears, and would look as though through a fog at the white buildings of Tel Aviv.
The soft-mindedness of these people breaks our heart. Their feet are firmly planted in the wailing of Yosef Haim Brenner, but their spirits are free and they see what corresponds and doesn’t, beginning with the sefirah Ayin (Nothing) and ending at the sefirah Malkhut (Kingdom)—which is to say, here. Where it says on the door, KASHKHANSKI.
Sometimes we miss those people, as the thrush longs for the dove. If we could meet them in the cafés of Tel Aviv, we would.
At night we toss from side to side and sometimes we dream that we’re standing in a huge synagogue but instead of reading the prayer book everyone is reading the evening paper.
[93]
Our Great Pyrenees never has anything critical to say about us. He gets straight to the heart of things. If there’s sorrow he sees sorrow. If it’s joy—he sees the joy. Lesser dogs run away from him, and he doesn’t even glance in their direction. The garbage-bin cats look on at him tranquilly and don’t so much as budge from their places, not even if his fur almost grazes them as he passes.
His heart beats like the bell of a great temple, and in his eyes you can see the residue of the earliest stages of the universe (before the great break of creation).
And there is also a person like that. At a bakery. In the Arab village of Tarshiha. These are the ideas that Plato talked about. Dog. Man.
[94]
However you put it, the shards of things too are whole in their way. Once we met a book reviewer who wrote a sad poem.
No doubt she longed for a world without books or a world in which books contained just a single word, repeated endlessly.
It was clear that her room (most likely in a rented apartment) held a dirty glass shelf with four or five jars of face cream. And cassettes by that singer, what’s her name? Mercedes Sosa.
And that same dress for whenever she went out, since the other dresses were cruel to her figure. And the books. Something about revolutions. And psychology. And Saramago’s most recent novel.
We don’t know if she shaved her legs, but if she did we’d suggest that she find an editor in chief, at a publishing house, who would stroke them.
[95]
This is also the answer to the Zen riddle about the sound of the one hand, and also the answer to the torments that Freud says a person endures. That is, that someone should touch someone, and so forth.
We think that our readers should use this book to look for another person. For instance, he should make it fall to the floor in a bar or a pub and then pick it up and ask a woman: Is this yours? Or put two glasses of red wine on it (we’ll make sure it’s big enough) or stick a knife into it and say, If the knife reaches the word love, you’ll leave with me (we’ll be sure to scatter the word throughout the book) or, If your back hurts you should put something hard under your head (and therefore we’ll put out a hardback special edition).
Once (we remember) we used to pile books on a chair in order to reach high places.
[96]
We know a man who took one of the poet Shneor Zalman’s books with him to his grave (which is to say, we knew him).
Our readers may not know this, but Shneor Zalman fought against Shmuel Yosef Agnon so that he, and not Agnon, might win the Swedish prize. Each of them (Shneor Zalman and Agnon) had supporters, who sought to undermine one another and wrote letters and summoned ambassadors and convened mutually hostile committees.
Now both of these writers (and most of their readers) are dead and other writers (and readers) have taken their places, but we haven’t h
eard of anyone (apart from that one man) taking a book with him to his grave.
At the cemetery we saw blank tombstones and we understood that most of these people were waiting for their spouses. But if you’re going to take a book with you when you go, you should take Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends . . .
[97]
We don’t know why happiness is so sad. Maybe because we see pieces of things, like a hand or a mezuzah, and want the whole thing.
My stepmother Francesca was already 83 and her eyes had gone dim. She could barely make out—and only then with great difficulty and with special lenses—very large shapes, and nonetheless she played bridge. She’d bring the cards very close to the lenses. At the same time she’d be speaking to Mrs. Shtiasny and Mrs. Minoff with great excitement about one thing or another.
What she didn’t see she would feel, and what she couldn’t feel she’d imagine, and she never said (or thought) that something was missing. If she’d gone up to the Himalayas the Rishis would have borne her aloft on their palms and burned incense at her feet.
What annoyed us was her habit of speaking only of practical matters. But this is one of our faults.
[98]
There are people who return the Divine Presence to Tel Aviv when they smoke cannabis. A great cloud wafts up over this city of sin, and all in a flash is forgiven.
People who are usually quite sharp (journalists, etcetera) find it a challenge to distinguish between a knife and fork, but a benevolent spirit enters their bones, and over the course of an hour or two they forget (which is so unlike them) all the appropriate ways of behaving.
We knew a man whose two names (first and last) were modern. Something like Yaron Yar-Ad, or Ran Ziv-Or (during the days of those kibbutz sandals that cost four hundred shekels). He was highly conscious politically, and therefore occasionally ate sashimi from the lunchtime menu. Now (under his cloud of hashish), he even loves settlers.
Moods Page 4
