[117]
At night we hear the jackals and the moon is twice as large. Wild boars come up to the fence and dogs bark. We see the silhouette of the mountain over the house. The mountain itself is black.
This is the Philharmonic of the Galilee’s Hills. Immigrants from Morocco and Russia, the Druze and the Christians and the Muslims, all have subscriptions to this orchestra.
Citizens of Tel Aviv sit, shut in a hall, in rows, their backs straight, and listen to their own concert. All is finely crafted. Movement by movement. The musicians come in at just the right time. The conductor waves his hands like one of those miserable souls afflicted with an obsession for order and cleanliness. The Galileans, on the other hand, lie down, each in his bed, on the enormous stage of a much greater concert.
At midnight the last of the jackals falls silent. The wild boars return to the thickets, and the dogs go into their doghouses. Each one dreams. The jackal dreams. The boar dreams. The dogs dream, and the human beings dream as well. If the children’s books are to be believed, so do the moon and the mountain.
[118]
Around three o’clock in the morning all sorts of things come to mind. That we said something stupid. That we were spoken to coarsely. That people we’ve loved have died and people we love are far away. That we’re old now. That everything’s gradually slipping away.
In the night air we see loose women. Killing fields. Natural disasters. Jackals are howling outside again, and the dog is barking. Things that were—won’t return.
There’s shouting everywhere. Houses on fire. Thoughts are burning. There’s an air of depression, like a cold front, moving in from the west. We’re walking barefoot along bookshelves that serve no purpose, turned in as they are on themselves, and ponderous, like geological formations in a canyon’s walls. Whence cometh my help, we think. And take a Valium.
[119]
Someone said, “Get hold of yourself.” We’ve always wanted to get hold of ourselves, but to do this we’d need to extend our arms considerably, and how could we stand on the ground if we were in fact to get hold of ourselves (feet and all).
Imagine that we could cradle ourselves like that and move from place to place like large babies carrying themselves. We’d calm ourselves down like mothers do when they rock their babies in the air and sing them lullabies.
People would come with claims only against themselves and with the soles of their feet laid bare. Maybe they’d even be carrying themselves (getting hold of themselves) while they’re naked. So nothing would be concealed from them, and they’d see themselves completely, as a mother sees her baby while she’s changing a diaper.
True. We’d no longer be counted among the bipeds. Our legs might atrophy. Crows would undoubtedly gaze at us in amazement. Maybe we’d be defined in dictionaries as a kind of clumsy bird (lacking wings and feathers) that hovers heavily as it carries itself over the face of the earth. But we wouldn’t be wanting.
[120]
The sun sets in any event, even if you try hypnosis to get it to stop in the sky.
You can sit in Nahariya by the sea and see for yourself. Like we did once, when we met with the editor in chief at Café Kapulski.
The editor in chief didn’t know, of course, that we were trying to do this, and so we could focus on the hypnosis only when he turned to eat his tuna sandwich or took documents out of his briefcase. Maybe that’s why it wouldn’t work. That is, because we weren’t able to look at the sun the entire time as it was setting.
We’ve not yet revealed to a soul that we have hidden powers. We can, for example, break a thought in two and join an entirely new thought to one of the broken halves. Or we can move our hand.
You can go to Café Kapulski in Nahariya and try these things. You might have some luck, even with the sun.
[121]
Among our powers is the power to draw women toward us.
We’ve been endowed with this only to a moderate extent. At times a woman would walk toward us as though against her will, but usually this was a woman we weren’t interested in, like women whose names were Kinneret Lipshitz or Zahara. We were drawn to darker women, but more often than not they would march on, in a straight line (without, that is, veering off in our direction).
Nevertheless we lift up a prayer of thanksgiving for every woman who showed us kindness. One shouldn’t take these things lightly. That, and the green carpet that covers the hills during the rainy season. Or the migration of storks. Or the laundry lines with their white sheets on the rooftops. Or the train’s whistle or the boat’s horn as it comes into port. Or the perfume wafting in the theater lobby. All are blessings from God that exert an influence over us. And, especially, the gentle swish of dresses as women take them off.
[122]
We saw a beautiful woman during the Days of Awe. She glanced from behind the screen of the women’s section like a half moon revealed through a cloud.
With the blowing of the shofar our hearts were split in two and we fell in love with her. The prayer books and holy ark swirled in the space of the synagogue, like in a painting by Chagall. Every so often the screen was shifted and her face would appear then vanish. Lines from hymns were scattered, like Lego pieces, in the air.
Finally we couldn’t stand the screen any longer and went up to the edge of the women’s section and stared toward the swarm of kerchiefs that moved like a field of wheat in the wind. We didn’t see her, and nonetheless union with her was brought about, facing away, so that the world would go on. Otherwise, it would have returned to the darkness that preceded the chaos and void, and the voice.
In a certain sense one might say that at that moment we created the doors and frames through which people pass, and the vast range of possibilities within the kaleidoscope we call life.
[123]
Yesterday we came home and wanted to die. But then we remembered the laundry marks that are put on clothes (the letter nun for Nahman and for Shalom Nehemkin also a nun, though a shin would have been more appropriate) and our spirits revived.
There’s great vitality in laundry marks and in people who put them on each article of clothing. And later, at a large laundry, clothes are sorted by these marks and returned, clean and pressed, to their owners.
These are the things that require our attention in a novel. So that the clothes of the main character won’t get mixed up with those of the minor ones. Especially in a serious novel. Imagine what would happen if, in the middle of the action (when critical things were taking place), the main character was running around with a shirt three sizes too small for him. No one would take the book seriously.
Or picture a novel in which a man walks around in a woman’s clothes and a woman is wearing the clothes of a man. On second thought, such a thing is entirely plausible (and even called for) in a novel where all the main characters are transvestites. But these sorts of novels are quite rare, and as a rule it’s wise not to mix up the clothes.
[124]
Today is Christmas. We’re thinking about virgin births. Unlike that Portuguese writer, Saramago, we believe in the sanctity of that moment. There wasn’t an infant in the world, and suddenly there was.
And we too are the product of a virgin birth. We were born twice. First when a woman of flesh and blood delivered us in the ordinary manner. Later, like everyone, we were wiped off the face of the earth with the people who were sent to the ovens. And if we’re alive, we are—like some sad kind of miracle—among the babies now in the ground, or far above in the place where the smoke from the chimneys ascended. Beyond history.
[125]
The count
ing did in fact begin, as the Christians have it, with the birth of the infant Jesus. But it concluded with the birth of Adolf. We were given just 1,889 years of life.
Now we’re in the age of ash. Beyond time. As though in a game that has come to an end. There’s no more movement on the field. Just kicks toward the goal. Everything only seems to be. A thin wash of color covers it all, and beneath that—blackness.
Only giraffes remain. Mountains. Wisps of clouds. Celestial bodies. Woods. Bodies of water and shells of men. Europe, apparently. Hallucinations. A real sun rises over nothing.
[126]
We know that we need to say something amusing now. Some sort of joke. Or an anecdote. Something about a great love.
How, in spite of everything, the world renews itself. Phone books, for instance. Countless men and women brought together, and one could call them all.
We remember how, when we were little, maybe in sixth grade, we’d flip through the phone book and look for funny names. We found the name Dr. Ochs and called the number and when a man answered Yes (with a German accent) we said: Moooo . . .
Which is how every ox finds its mate. And the male chiropractor a female chiropractor. A male accountant a woman who also manages accounts.
We remember how, in those days, we’d visit each other on Raleigh bikes (with a bell) and ride together to the river. Girls with names like Tzila would shake their heads and their braids would fly in the air. The soles of the teachers’ feet would sweat, because they were wearing leather shoes even during the summer (they’d come from the Holocaust), and if there were empty places they’d be filled up at once with oranges and tangerines.
[127]
Everyone came for a brief while and went with joy to his death.
And how did they die? One way or another. Shamaya Davidson, for instance, who was an English teacher, tried to hurdle a low barrier. Just two rows of cinder blocks. He completed the first part of the jump, which is to say, up to the point where the body begins to return to the ground. But instead of landing, he kept on rising through the air.
There was also a Hebrew teacher. He was walking down the hall and suddenly died of happiness. We’ve heard that in the old farming cooperatives people would slip between two heavy books, as though they were flowers, and press themselves dry. In Tel Aviv, people would lie (when they felt the moment was nigh) down beneath a café table, and the waiter would put a piece of cream cake on their belly.
And there were people like my grandfather, Isaac Emerich, who took off their clothes and got into bed, and thus, quietly, slept while they were dying.
[128]
We’re extremely proud of the previous chapter. It’s a shame we can’t show it to our dead relatives.
Then again, we could go to a specialist who calls the dead back to this world and speaks with them. We knew a man like that once, but he died, and now we need someone to bring him back as well. Maybe we should look in the yellow pages, under the listing “Spiritual Practice.”
Imagine that we’re trying to bring Aunt Edith back, and by mistake we summon Attila the Hun. Or Ben Gurion. What would we say? Sorry to disturb you? Better to let them be and wait until we ourselves go to them.
On the other hand, it’s possible that we’re already dead and that the world we see around us is in fact the world to come, and the government bureaus and the government itself are a kind of photographic negative of the previous world, but we just don’t know it.
Once we knew a woman who was always saying, “Oy, I’m dying.” Maybe she knew more than it seemed.
[129]
This might be the last book that we’ll write. I wonder how it will end. What its final words will be. Joyce, for example, finished his final book with the word the.
We’ve always thought it extremely strange that movies (and books) end with the word End. Moreover, sometimes the definite article’s added.
Maybe we’ll end with another word altogether. We’ll do what we did when we were little. We’ll shut our eyes and open the dictionary (or some other book) and put our finger on one of the pages and the word that our finger lands on will be the last one.
Imagine if the word turns out to be prow. Or Binyamina. Or epaulettes. Or hydraulic. Or gurgle (which is probably onomatopoeic). Or drowse. Or you.
[130]
We could, toward the end of the book, tell about a murder, and then when the woman asks, Who killed him, the detective will answer, You.
Or we could make it a love story, and the woman will ask, And who is that woman you always dream of, and the man will answer, You.
And what then? What happens in books after they end? Then, and only then, does the true story begin. Again there’s no end. No division between different things. All the colors come at once. Forms are found within each other, even if that involves a contradiction (a square circle, for instance, etcetera). Scents mix. There’s a spectrum of sounds that Maria Callas never even dreamt of. The size of the pages (after the last one) is infinite. They’re white like the Siberian tundra in winter. Whoever reads those pages reads himself to death.
[131]
Saroyan understood these things. He’d always fall toward those other pages and return (out of compassion) to the book itself. He knew the old women who sifted lentils, and the Mexican workers’ dogs.
There was never a more religious man, and therefore he drank and gambled and went to whorehouses (in books and beyond them), and every word he wrote was charged, like high tension power lines, with thousands of volts.
And he was a great thief. If we’re missing a key we can be sure it’s in the celestial pocket of his suit. He’d lift the mustache right off our face, and even slip our wife away.
In fact we’ve forgotten our name and think we’re called Saroyan. When someone says Yoel Hoffmann, we think he’s speaking to another person.
No wonder it’s so hard to separate Siamese twins. Because they have just a single heart, one of them usually dies.
[132]
Today the muses, damn them, went elsewhere. They come and go as they like, and we’re in their hands like a weather vane in the wind.
We haven’t seen them with our actual eyes, but it’s said that there are seven. And in fact, when they all come at once, the noise is unbearable. One says Write this, and another Write that, and they fight with each other and sometimes coax us into writing drivel, or worse, what’s true.
Mostly they sing like a choir of angels or those women in Hawaii who hang leis from their necks and sway their hips. But when an evil spirit gets into them, each one goes into a corner of the room and screams. And then you sink into the lowest of spirits and begin to write—like some kind of clerk—all sorts of facts. And she left. And the phone rang. And the train arrived at the station. And the street was wet with rain. And they drew pistols, etcetera etcetera.
These are the muses of sanity, destroyers of art—who tempt writers and poets to enter into a marriage with them, then send them to take out the garbage, or fix the faucet.
[133]
Dzhokhar Akhmadov, a poet from Chechnya, said to us once: You see eagles whose wingspan covers Grozny and all the surrounding plains. My elderly mother looks out through the window, but the glass is broken. Nights crawl like a hungry hyena. You’ve come from a far-off place and so my soul grows faint. Have you ever seen a Muslim cloud? Or a cloud that’s Greek Orthodox?
People died of tuberculosis. Some in stairwells, with fire from the bombs lighting up their faces. I didn’t know you before today, but I’ve long known you would come, and now we can go to a single grave. You see these hands? Think of an
infant and think of a mortar.
[134]
As though in a slaughterhouse, we need to strip off all of our skin—down to the very last piece. We’re the butcher and also the beast. And if the blood doesn’t flow toward the drainage channels, there is no literature and there is no poetry.
Once we sat in a Tel Aviv café (we realize there’s more to Tel Aviv than cafés, but when we go there we’ve nowhere to sleep), and we saw through the glass a woman pushing a carriage and in the carriage there was a baby. Where is that woman now? And the baby?
Poetry’s found in the melting tar of summer rooftops, in which you can see the imprint of the soles of shoes.
We remember that Uncle Shamu once held a fountain pen up to the sun and with his other hand pointed to the nib and said: See, it’s gold.
[135]
Since we’ve thought of Uncle Shamu we’ve also thought of Dr. Kalish, who’d say the words “as well” (und auch) for no reason at all.
Dr. Kalish was a doctor of the humanities. He’d studied ancient history, or something like it, at the University of Leipzig and came to Palestine with Dr. Zoltan Forschner (who was a medical doctor), my Aunt Edith’s husband.
Why are we mentioning all these things? Because when the Italians bombed Tel Aviv (during the second world war) Dr. Kalish’s house was cut in two and Dr. Kalish and his wife (Frau Dr. Kalish) were exposed to the world as they were sitting at the kitchen table and eating an omelet.
During that same bombardment many people died, but Dr. Kalish and his wife were brought down on a ladder from the third floor, and from there they took a taxi to my Aunt Edith and her husband Zoltan, and they stayed with them (in their other room) for something like half a year.
Moods Page 6
