We need to check in Genesis to see on what day God created the grasses (just now it seems too hard to remember) and offer up a prayer of thanksgiving.
[99]
There are people in whose bodies cannabis can always be found, and they don’t need to mix it with tobacco and light a cigarette, like that same distant relative (who was born in 1921) we used to call Uncle Shamu.
First, he jumped off an illegal immigrants’ boat into the sea, near the coast of Caesarea, wearing a wide-brimmed hat.
Second, he immediately befriended (after two or three days) an Arab widow he’d met in Jaffa and went to live in her home. That widow in time became the only person who could speak high Hungarian in the entire Muslim world.
Third, he sold fountain pens, the nibs of which were made of gold. He found himself a small store on the border between Tel Aviv and Jaffa and over it hung the sign SHAMU PENS.
Fourth, he went into a mosque wrapped in a tallis.
But most of all, when he walked (from Tel Aviv to Jaffa and back) his shoes moved along at the height of the upper windows and the wide-brimmed hat on his head passed over the rooftops.
[100]
Generally speaking. What floats floats. There’s nothing one can do about it. The news is divided into grammatical components. Syllables here, and consonants there. Sometimes you hear, as though it were Czech, a word with seventeen consonants.
Every woman opens her arms. White sheets flutter in the breeze. Suddenly Doctor Semmelweis arrives (he discovered the cause of childbed fever). You drink espresso and think about a cabbage salad. The Hebrew cantillation signs are homosexual. You go to the Home Center and ask for earphones and they give you birds. It seems to you that water is flowing under the streets. You see the rays of the sun one by one, as though in a child’s drawing. No one is more lovable than the plumber. Yoel Hoffmann is the name of a powder. You hear the muezzin everywhere.
Evening is morning, although it’s evening and the morning is morning, and nonetheless we don’t get confused.
[101]
We haven’t yet spoken of the great theories of mankind. Sometimes the spirit spins around itself like a whirlpool at sea, and the soul sinks.
Some people bow before nothing. Or plead to what’s beyond the world to come and save them.
Whoever goes to hell goes to hell. Who’s saved is saved. What do we know? Maybe far beyond the world, in a place unreached by the oldest starlight, a teddy bear sits and no one knows. Or a narcissus. Who doesn’t get drunk on their scent?
We can now reveal to the readers of this book a deep secret, but they’re not allowed to reveal it to readers of other books.
Feet follow one another. Hands cut through the air. The mouth opens and closes. The inner organs expand and contract, according to their nature. What’s outside is standing or walking.
Prayers can be heard everywhere, whether a person says them aloud or not. Frogs need only themselves. The marsh reeds know the right direction.
And because these things are set forth here, it’s a wonder this book is sold for so little.
[102]
Here we would like to introduce a new character. The landlord at 7 Nahalat Shivah Street, in Tel Aviv.
His name was given to him a day or two after he was born. They made meatballs and invited guests. The crystal dishes came out of the sideboard.
When he got bigger he rode on the tram, and at the Gymnasia he wore a hat with a visor. Now he’s already old, and whenever he goes down a staircase he groans.
This is the man. His neighbor in the building next door (number 9) suits this chapter better. Readers can see (if they hide in the courtyard) how she goes down the stairs with the garbage. When she returns to her apartment she places different pots on the stove.
These two, granted, are minor characters, but they’re major minor characters.
[103]
The words falsification of corporate documents frighten us. Maybe we’re also committing such a crime. On the other hand, books like these can hardly be thought of as corporate documents, and we do our best not to lie. Witness the previous chapter.
Other writers lie all the time. They play around with names and change dates and whatnot. We, however, lied only with regard to the girls we had a crush on in fifth grade and sixth grade, because they’re married now (though some are widows) and we’ve already seen how one of their husbands looked at us.
Writers should be brought to trial not over things like that but for inflicting boredom. There should be a clause about that in the criminal code. We, too, are sometimes guilty of this.
Imagine for a moment that we’re found guilty of inflicting boredom on our readers and we’re thrown into prison and sit there among the crime families. On second thought, that’s better than sitting in Tel Aviv at fancy stores like the Bookworm.
[104]
Here we can relate the sly doings of Mrs. Shtiasny and her Italian husband and Mrs. Minoff and my stepmother Francesca, and how they traveled to the Rukenshtein Pension in the hills of Safed.
In those days no one traveled by taxi more than a few streets, and this only when something dire was involved. Nonetheless, they went by taxi, something that gave rise to considerable grumbling in the Austrian old age home. (They were accused of being haughty, wasting money, and the like.)
As a kind of punishment from on high (this is how the others saw it), Mrs. Shtiasny’s Italian husband almost fell out of the taxi when he tried to slam the door while it was moving. To this day, some of the Arab elders of Acre remember the wondrous sight of a taxi passing through the Old City and the back door suddenly opening and a tall Jew being shot from it like a shell being fired from the barrel of a cannon and two women holding his legs and pulling him back inside.
At the Miron Junction Mrs. Minoff tried to slam the broken door and the whole thing happened again. That is, the door opened wide because of the wind and Mrs. Minoff tumbled out and was pulled back in by Mrs. Shtiasny and her Italian husband.
At the pension itself Mrs. Shtiasny’s Italian husband suffered a bout of sleepwalking and wandering into Mrs. Minoff’s room. But this we’ve already alluded to elsewhere.
[105]
From this incident with the taxi the readers can learn of the difference between fabrication (which we call fiction) and life.
In literature (which is to say, fabrication), the incident of the open taxi door would have occurred just once, as the author wanted only to refresh the readers’ faith in the realism of the narrative. But in life? Life is full of great wonders, and things like this happen two or three times, much to the consternation and dismay of writers of a realist bent.
And another thing. A realist wouldn’t have brought in my stepmother Francesca, since she wasn’t really involved in these events. But in life? In life she sat beside the driver (whose name was Abramov) the entire trip, and the front doors of the taxi were fine. Details like these aren’t mentioned in stories.
[106]
And another thing. We’ve heard about scholars of literature, but we haven’t heard of scholars of life. Which is to say, people study one thing or another (like tissue or behavior). But life?
Scholars of literature, for instance, walk around within life. Maybe one needs to examine life from the perspective of those scholars. Once we knew a scholar who took medicine for various illnesses. We need to get to the root of all illnesses in order to understand life, and not to examine them one by one. Maybe there’s a crack within them opening between the living soul and the crust that surrounds it.
Sometimes scholars of literature convene committees and ther
e you can see flashes (like the flickering of the Northern Lights) of very sad things. A tie. Lipstick. Or the papers of the committee’s agenda left behind in the hall after everyone has left.
[107]
To this day we don’t understand why over the butcher shop in a Welsh village it says FAMILY BUTCHER. Maybe it refers to an ordinary store (that sells meat to housewives). In any event, we read the sign as though it was run by someone who slaughters families.
And apropos butchers. In Arab Nazareth we saw a sign in the window of a butcher shop on which it said WE SPEAK NORWEGIAN.
Signs like these lift our spirits. Like the names of banks in Portugal and Spain: BANCO ESPIRITO SANTO (which is to say, Bank of the Holy Spirit) or even the sign YOSEF AZRIEL ATTORNEY AT LAW AND NOTARY PUBLIC. Once we saw, in Herzliya, beside the highway a big sign that said FUNN & CO.—REAL ESTATE BROKERS.
Generally speaking. The government should put signs on everything. They should put the sign HOUSE on every house and TREE on every tree and so on. This way we’d be better oriented. Maybe it should send a plane up into the sky to write out, in white smoke, the word WORLD.
[108]
We’d like to recommend Undencil. This is an excellent antifungal cream (for irritated skin). You can apply it between your toes or in the genital area and the itching vanishes instantly.
If readers have any advice to offer us about how to treat bladder irritation, we’d be grateful to them for that. They can write to us c/o the publisher or the township of Ma’alot, and the letters will be forwarded. We can also advise the readers how to lower their blood pressure by means of (the human) spirit (not the one that hovers over the face of the earth).
Generally speaking. Authors should display greater generosity toward their readers. But real generosity. Not like in certain places, where computers are stuffed with the dates of birthdays and spit out greetings on the right day.
We’d like to embrace all our readers. Men, women, the elderly, and children.
[109]
For what is man if not Uncle Shamu. Don’t we all, in one way or another, wear a wide-brimmed hat and jump into the sea?
We should call all things by their first names. All dogs. All frogs. All trees. Once upon a time we took pity on a gourd that the gardener wanted to uproot, and so we called it Simcha.
How can it be that we walk around under the sky and nonetheless have an unconscious? Don’t believe these lies. The world is large and wide and has no measure. And all is revealed.
[110]
One is greatly tempted to end the book with these words, but we need to be wary of too much truth.
We don’t want to write (like the mystics) things that give off a whiff of sanctimony. We’re trying to write a kind of train schedule.
Or an owner’s manual. The sort of thing they distribute with appliances (like cell phones or pressure cookers), with instructions about how to operate them. Or something like the Kama Sutra.
True, all is revealed. But how is it revealed? It’s revealed in the form of a certain woman, or another woman, and in all sorts of colors and all kinds of clothes and types of closets, and the whole thing is endless.
Once, at a country inn, in Ireland, we were waiting for breakfast to be brought out and no one came. After an hour or so we went to the kitchen and found the owner fast asleep on a chair with a bottle of whiskey before him on the table.
[111]
Elsewhere, on the east coast of England (in the town of Great Yarmouth), the owner of the bed and breakfast was overly attentive. She called her vacuum cleaner by its first name (“Henry”) and put out seven kinds of cereal for breakfast.
We also remember the Hyatt Hotel in the Philippine city of Bangui. We were tended to there by women with names like Charity, Faith, and Honesty.
As for the rats at Hotel Long Spring, in Mekong (Taiwan), we’ve already written about them in another book (it’s hard to believe that, in the entire history of world literature, the same rats have been mentioned in two different books).
This is the great diversity one finds in the world of hotels. Like a paint company’s catalogue of colors.
[112]
We can’t quite remember if we’ve already spoken about how Mr. Cohen from the Austrian old age home would raise a toast to the Emperor, Franz Josef.
Mr. Cohen was already a hundred, give or take, and was still sending letters of encouragement to the Emperor’s son (or grandson). Every year on the Emperor’s birthday he’d buy a bottle of champagne and go to my father’s room and there they’d drink to him (that is, to the Emperor) or, more accurately, to his memory. My father wasn’t a royalist, but he did like his liquor.
We, on the other hand, are of the opinion, like Mr. Cohen, that the monarchy should be restored. Not only in Austria. Everywhere.
And that the words of the prayer Avinu Malkeinu (Our Father Our King) should be offered up in both directions. And though the prayer is cast in the masculine form, we’d rather see women reign in both places (in heaven, that is, and on earth).
[113]
My father Andreas liked to play tricks on people. Mostly on his sister, my Aunt Edith.
Every year, on April 1, he’d come up with another prank. Once he started muttering strange syllables and wrote a note to my aunt saying that he had vowed from that day on to speak only Mandarin. Another time he borrowed a tallis and prayer book from the gardener at the old age home, and when my Aunt Edith came to his room he wrapped himself in the tallis and called out in a loud voice and mimicked the chanting of the cantor and the prayers. My Aunt Edith was as innocent as a flock of lambs and it never occurred to her that her brother was playing a trick on her.
Sometimes we too (which is to say, I) thought that he’d lost his mind, like the time that he tossed a thin book into the air, as though he were throwing a boomerang, and shouted “Balthazar.” We had no idea who Balthazar was but since my father repeated this act some twenty times or more we remember the name to this day.
When he was serious, he was too serious. But that’s already another story.
[114]
We’re asking ourselves what the point of this book is or of books in general.
We’ve never seen books classified by genre. That is, we’ve seen them classified, but not correctly. What’s the point of classifying books as fiction or contemplative literature, for instance, when fiction is part and parcel of contemplation and contemplation is entirely a matter of fiction?
Or take, for instance, science books. These aren’t stories? Accurate ones. But stories nonetheless. Or the distinction between biographies and novels. Is there a biography that isn’t a novel? Or a novel that isn’t the story of a life?
If books are going to be classified by genre, it should be done in an entirely different manner. First, one has to distinguish between happy books and sad books. Not books that make one happy or make one sad. Happy books, plain and simple. A book that can laugh or smile or cry. The book itself. The reader can behave however he likes.
Critics, for example, cry at the sight of happy books and are happy in the face of books that cry. The marble-like faces of academicians are summoned before books of every sort. No wonder most of them (that is, most of the books) get offended.
Apart from the classification by feelings, it’s also possible to classify books by subject matter. The principal group here would be books about pelicans. Or a large group of books about shoreline rock formations. Here too there are secondary classifications (such as pelicans according to their coloration or shore formations according to their shape, and so f
orth). But better to classify them (that is, the books) by their feelings.
[115]
At first glance this book would seem to be a hybrid. That is, a book that sometimes laughs and sometimes cries. But in fact (as the logicians say), it’s laughing and crying at once, and to the same degree.
The protagonist of this book is the human being. God is a minor character. And so it (that is, the book) is a total failure, since it never really gets to the heart of one or the other. If it were printed on thinner paper we’d suggest the reader use it for rolling cigarettes. The smoke would write the book in the air as it really is.
My father (Avraham Andreas) knew how to blow smoke rings. Much to our amazement he could smoke an entire cigarette without it falling apart. That is, the whole thing would turn into one long tube of ash, and he wouldn’t have to tap it—not even once—on the ashtray.
[116]
When we took him (that is, my father) by taxi for an x-ray, a pickup truck drove in front of us and a large Doberman sat in the back of the vehicle.
Throughout the trip the dog was looking at my father and my father looked at the dog until we got to the hospital. There they told us that a large spot had been found on my father’s abdomen (he was already 86), but, out of courtesy, they didn’t mention the word cancer.
On the way back to the old age home the same pickup truck was driving ahead of us (we recognized the license plate number) but the dog was no longer there. When we got to his room, my father put one string quintet or another on the record player, poured himself a glass of cognac, and said: You don’t need to tell me. I know. It’s over.
Moods Page 5
