[136]
We were six or seven then, and now can confess that we’d go to my Aunt Edith’s apartment (five buildings away) only to hear Dr. Kalish say und auch (as well).
He’d say, for instance, “Where is the skillet und auch,” or “What time is it und auch,” or “The Germans are retreating und auch,” or “Emma”—this was Frau Dr. Kalish’s name—“come here please und auch,” and so on.
For days (no, weeks and months) we’d think about what this und auch meant. That is, we realized that Dr. Kalish saw much more than other people did, but we didn’t know what he saw.
Once we plucked up our courage and we too said und auch (something along the lines of “What does it say in this book und auch”), but Dr. Kalish just looked at us, surprised.
Today we think it should be mandatory, by law, for all people to use this expression at the end of every sentence. So as not to get too smug.
[137]
There’s someone else we wanted to talk about but we’ve forgotten his name and how he looks.
We remember only the other things. That he was a body’s length from the earth’s surface. That he came near and grew distant. That night came over him and the day made him bright, and things of this sort.
We can’t recall anyone more precisely. Therefore we miss him, and because we can’t remember his name, our longing is greater than we can say.
This person is with us wherever we go, and without him we’d die of a broken heart. And if this seems overly clever to someone, then maybe he should look at himself.
This man is also the hero of this book that we’re writing (and of all the books that we’ve written to date). If we could bring him to mind, we wouldn’t need to write.
[138]
We’ve already discussed Japan in this book. Here we simply want to mention the two distinguished prostitutes from Kyoto.
The first bowed deeply and said: We welcome you under our meager roof. We’re honored that you’ve chosen this lowly establishment. With the greatest possible humility we would like to begin by playing the samisen for you, and to the sound of its music a maiko (young geisha), who goes by the name of Rose’s Scent, will dance before you an ancient dance of desire. Ten thousand yen.
The second bowed more deeply still and said: Of late the autumn wind has blown, and the maple leaves are turning red. Within our humble rooms you can meet Cherry Blossom, who is, it’s true, thirty-six, but full of tricks, or Drawn Sword, who can bend herself, for your distinguished pleasure, in all four directions. Twenty thousand yen. And Lotus Flower, about whom you’ve no doubt heard, is thirty.
[139]
Cherry Blossom took off her obi but didn’t remove her kimono. She bowed deeply and said: Mr. Gaijin (Mister Foreign Man). Does Japan please you? Have you seen the rock garden at Ryoanji? Or the great statue of the Buddha at Nara? Does Mr. Gaijin know that it’s possible to crawl through his nostrils?
Yes. Cherry Blossom lives in Kyoto. Cherry Blossom’s mother was also a geisha. Cherry Blossom’s younger sister is a maiko at the House of the Full Moon, in the Gion Quarter.
Has Mr. Gaijin left a wife behind in his country? Is her hair blonde? Cherry Blossom is no longer young, but is her figure not that of a young woman?
Then Cherry Blossom took up the koto and plucked on its strings the ancient song,
A moon in the pond—
But the waters do not break,
And the moon stays dry.
[140]
Sometimes the waters of the pond are stirred and the moon disappears. Then we go out to the street at four thirty in the morning and see the silhouette of the newspaper deliveryman and hear the paper hitting the pavement. The air is very cold at this hour and even one’s memories freeze. Women we’ve known are suspended in inner space like icicles.
At five thirty the municipality turns off the streetlights and at six the sun, the Sonne (that son of a bitch), does what it does behind the post office. In the street, the garbage truck moves along then stops. We greet Beber, the garbageman, and at that very moment the sun comes up, glorious and dripping with sex, over the roof of the post office, and so we stand there, two men and one large woman, till the driver of the garbage truck yells out, Nu, Beber, let’s go already.
[141]
We owe nothing to no one. Certainly not a story. If we’d like we could write a single word 7,837 times. A word is as cheap as a stick. Or we could compose our sentences along the lines of Japanese syntax (that is, from the end to the beginning). Or insist that the publisher burn the bottom edge of the book so that the reader’s hand will be blackened by the charcoaled page.
Whoever doesn’t get it can go to hell. Let all those intellectuals with their pursed lips go to hell and take their stash of Paxil with them. The women too. Things would be better between us without all that wisdom of I’m looking for myself, and so forth.
We suggest that you put your hand behind the bookshelves and knock the books over onto the floor. You can see how they open in the air like a fan.
And you’re entitled to smash all the light bulbs. Why not. You’ll see the children glow with joy. You’ll tell them that now it’s time for the other lights.
[142]
There’s a certain amount of noise in Mrs. Rauschenberg’s name. But she was without a doubt the quietest woman we’ve ever known.
Like Sisera’s mother, she sat all day by the window and looked out toward the villages of Hiriyya and Sakiyya (which were there before the ’48 war).
No one knew what Mrs. Rauschenberg was thinking. If this were a story we’d write that she’d lost such and such at Auschwitz. But in fact it wasn’t possible to know if she’d ever had anything to lose.
That’s all. If we had any other information (we could, for instance, write that we remember the scent of Yardley soap that wafted up from her, or the fine netting that covered the hair on her head), we wouldn’t hide this from our readers.
[143]
We think that Mrs. Rauschenberg was silent till the day she died, and Miss Rigby (from the Beatles’ song) also didn’t speak very often.
Because what, at this point, is there to say? At most one has to tell the grocer what one wants, or else one gets a mango instead of tomatoes.
We were at the university and saw that people go into rooms at regular intervals and one person then speaks before them for a very long time. We remember things of that sort from our childhood, when we heard the croaking of frogs or when the cicadas (in Japan, for example) sent up their sound day and night, during the summer.
But the frogs and cicadas say just one thing, which is most likely very important. Something about the water in the swamp, or the warm air, or the desperate need to mate.
And that’s how it should be in the university. A person should enter and say to everyone (even for an hour and a half or more) things like “I’m Mattityahu. My mother’s name is Rivkah. My father is Eliezar. Yes, please . . .” And so on.
[144]
Because once we traveled by bus from Tiberias to Tel Aviv and beside us sat a woman who had a large basket of eggs on her lap.
We didn’t speak at all, but by the time we reached the town of Tabor a great closeness had developed between us and at Hadera we could no longer (which is to say, I could no longer) think of ourselves as alone in the world.
The hardest moment came at the Central Bus Station when the woman got off the bus and went somewhere else. Then we thought (as our heart emptied), What’s Iphigenia in Aulis to us? Or macroeconomics? Or sociology? Or the conjugation of verbs? Or theories concerning metallic strength and tensility? Or
generally, what’s what they call perspective or point of view to us? We wanted to lie down under the great wheels of the bus and die. And we swear before man and eternity (and that includes all the psychologists and their ilk) that we’ve never been more sane than we were at that moment, when that woman with the eggs left us behind.
[145]
Each time we think that we’ve come to the end of the book we’re reminded of something else to say. We remember how our children were very young and how, as we held their hands and hurried from place to place, they flew in the wind like kites.
We also recall how we were offended in all sorts of places. Especially in Switzerland. Everything there (including the landscape) was so utterly orderly, and as a result we were hurt to the core (or maybe that should be to the cores).
The visible police directed things outside, and the hidden police held sway within. The moment we crossed the border, we were sent (one can’t say we were thrown, since no one throws things there) into an internal prison, one of those places where everyone sits in a cell made of iron and sees his neighbors through bars on the side and his guards through bars in front of him.
We also recall Lake Biwa, which resembles a huge violin, and when it’s still one can see the cities on the opposite shore doubled there, above and in the water.
[146]
And we remember also the thousands of candles that the Japanese float on the surface of the lake. These are the souls of family ancestors and maybe my great-grandfather Ausiás Goldschlag was among them as well.
We’re imagining him hovering over the face of the waters, his great beard singed by the flame of the candle and the Japanese all around him staring in wonder but bowing politely.
One should perhaps explain these memories (a brain and so on) but we’re sparing our readers explanations of that sort. For they too (the readers) deserve a little rest. So they can spread the fields of their recollection far from the skull and toward the cities and the villages of Europe, toward Baghdad and Kurdistan and Morocco and Algeria, enormous regions—larger than the box of the brain by a factor of more than a million.
In the end, the paper boats sink in the water and the candles descend to the bottom of the lake. The celebrants shake the dust from their kimonos and go home. And this too we won’t let anyone explain.
[147]
Once, in Mea She’arim, we ran into a demonstration against the practice of carrying out autopsies. Garbage bins were burning in all four corners of Sabbath Square. People shouting verses from the Psalms were shoving us up the slope on Strauss Street. The smoke from the burning plastic brought tears to our eyes and for a moment we imagined that we were weeping for the dead whose dignity had been violated.
In fact, we thought (like a wandering violinist who stumbles onto a string orchestra)—Why do we need to cut into the flesh of someone after they die? Finally, after a life of sorrow and trouble a man lies in absolute peace on his back. If one really wants to know what the cause of death is one could write on the relevant documents “Birth,” and if one really wants to know what the cause of birth is, one could write there “Death.” And even if we cut into the dead man’s tissue we’ll find more tissue beneath it and beneath that still more, whereas the secret is much more likely to be found in the open mouth of the dead man, out of which his spirit passed, or in the open mouth of the world, proof of which lies in the sun and stars.
[148]
We’re asking ourselves if, before the creation of the world, it was determined that the great novels (War and Peace or Crime and Punishment) would be written.
It’s clear that God didn’t conceive of them. He’s very sparing with words, and when he does speak the results are seismic (see for instance Genesis 1), but it may well be that these works were, as they say, within him, like civilization as a whole.
Sometimes writers say that they’re only vessels in the hands of God. Some French writers have even tried what’s called automatic writing. That is, they themselves didn’t interfere in what was written on the paper. One of them would write the word shutters maybe seventy times. Most likely at that very moment God felt a terrible sense of constriction.
My grandfather, Isaac Emerich, would sigh every so often and say, Ach, mein lieber gott (Oh, Good Lord), but if we ask ourselves if his complaint was predetermined as well, we’ll never find our way out of this maze, not even if we address the question to the Department of Philosophy, in writing.
[149]
Tonight is New Year’s Eve. Tomorrow’s January 1, 2009. We greet our readers (also those who don’t read our books) and wish them this: that in the coming year they should read only good books. Michael Rips’s The Face of a Naked Lady, for instance.
There’s no point in talking about wretched humanity that’s sending artillery shells in every direction tonight. God have mercy on everyone.
[150]
Now it’s below zero. Think about these words below zero. Less than nothing.
When we were in Japan we read in books by religious sages that it’s possible to get below zero and then to walk around above zero as though one were still beneath it. Something like abstracting the form from things and nevertheless leaving them as they are.
Once we knew a woman by the name of Rivkah who always said “It’s nothing,” and nevertheless bought herself blouses and dresses and the like.
As far as we’re concerned, we prefer the rabbis
a) because of their beards
b) because of their Yiddish
c) because they know that everything’s nothing but don’t say so, so as not to spread sorrow through the world.
[151]
Outside, everything’s frozen. We bring the dogs into the house. The cats go into the empty doghouses and warm themselves against each other’s bodies. But what do the wild boars in the brush do? The jackals? The birds?
Language too gets twisted. Entire words freeze in the mouth, and we need to stand beside the stove to thaw them out.
Which reminds us of the story that Wilhelm Busch wrote about Peter, who wouldn’t heed the warnings he’d received and went out to play one winter’s day and didn’t return. His father and mother sat at home and wept, but a hunter found him in the woods and brought him back, frozen as a block of ice, and his father and mother were very happy and led him toward the stove and watched with joy as he thawed out, but, alas, in the end, all that remained of him was a puddle of water and his broken-hearted parents gathered the water up into a jar and put it on the shelf between a jar labeled CUCUMBERS and another labeled SALT and wrote on it PETER.
[152]
We forgot to wish the psychologists a Happy New Year. No doubt the cold makes it harder for them to look into souls.
If only the New Year would bring about a condition in which their souls would melt (as one melts lead) into the great form of the soul of the world, and there’d no longer be any separation between their eyes (behind glasses) and the eyes of the people they’re looking into. And that the rule against hugging others might be dropped, and, above all, that someone would hug them.
Because there is no loneliness greater than that of the psychologist. His thought is always doubled, as he’s forced to consider thought upon thought, and sometimes thought upon thought upon thought.
And apropos thought upon thought: It goes without saying that we also greet the philosophers. But for them we need—above all—to pray that they get some sleep.
We (which is to say I) especially want to wish a Happy New Year to the women, because they so often go unloved. And of all of mankind’s crimes, this is the greatest.
[153
]
The reader should always see the paper that’s behind the words. Not what was there before the words were written, but what resurfaces after they’re read.
Don’t believe the physicists who talk about specific density. Things that you see, even if they seem heavy, are all the stuff of dreams. And don’t believe that either. The dream itself is a dream.
But wait. When you see large things like a hippopotamus or a Sumo wrestler you’re tempted to credit them with an exaggerated degree of actuality. My stepmother Francesca, for instance, was very hard to doubt. But once we knew a very fragile woman, who appeared and then vanished like a hologram. It was very easy to doubt her, but the longing for her was painful.
[154]
Because of this longing, which is in fact hard to bear, novels of some three hundred and even six hundred pages are written and countless numbers of people who fill them come and go, like a medicine cabinet full of Tylenol.
You need to put things beside one another, a novel like this one and a crow. Or, if you’d rather, a turtle.
Once a crow came in through the front door and stood on the kitchen table. At first it pecked at breadcrumbs and then it froze there and stared at us.
That’s why we’re writing what we write. If only we knew what he saw when he stared we would tell the reader (instead of this book). But because we don’t, we keep on writing.
[155]
Now we’re reminded that a son was born to Uncle Shamu and his Muslim wife, and he was called Moshe. Maybe because both the Jews and the Muslims believe in the biblical Moses and maybe because his grandfather, which is to say, Uncle Shamu’s father, was called Sandor Moshe Farkash.
Uncle Shamu and his Muslim wife are already dead and their son Moshe left for America and opened a refrigerator business there. We visited him when we were in New York. He lives in Queens, and his wife, who came from Croatia, made us latkes. As we said goodbye, Moshe hugged us and gave us a fountain pen. One of those pens that his father, Uncle Shamu, had left behind.
Moods Page 7
