In Tel Aviv, at the last store that sells vintage fountain pens (on Allenby Street), they replaced the rubber ink sac, straightened the gold nib just a little, and sold us a new inkwell. Sometimes we dip the nib into the well, fill the pen with ink, then squirt the ink back out.
[156]
On this night (2009, between the third and fourth of January) the cannons are roaring and therefore the muses have to be silenced. In any case, they’re infernal females who trouble the sleep of man.
All we can think of is the song we heard a long time ago, when we were little. Maybe Francesca, my stepmother, sang it. O dear Augustin, Augustin, Augustin, O Augustin, my dear, all is lost.
Uncle Max, my stepmother Francesca’s father’s brother, was taken by the Gestapo to a concentration camp. He clutched his World War I medals to his chest and hobbled along on his wooden leg (the leg of flesh he’d given as a gift to Germany) out to the street.
His leg most likely went up in smoke at Auschwitz. But if we had it today we’d set it afire now in order to warm up the people of Gaza, who are freezing.
[157]
Now that we’ve remembered the song about Augustin, we also remember the tongue twisters my stepmother Francesca taught us.
Try saying the following: “Der Potsdamer Postkutscher putzt den Potsdamer Postkutschekasten” (that is, approximately, the Potsdam post coach’s coachman cleans the postbox of the post coach of Potsdam).
Or: “Herr von Hagen darf ich fra-gen, wie viel Kra-gen, Sie getra-gen, als Sie la-gen krank am Ma-gen in der Hauptstadt Kopenha-gen” (more roughly still, Dare I ask, Mr. von Hagen, / how tight was the collar you wore when you gagged on / the apple core, which left you sore, / in the capital’s hospital, in Copenhagen).
Or (in Berlin German): “Ick sitze da und esse Klops, / uff eenmal kloppt’s / ick denk nanu! Nanu denk ick / Ick jehe raus und kieke, / und wer steht draußen? Icke!” (which says, more or less, I’m sitting and eating my supper, / and then there’s a knock at the door—/ Who is it, I wonder, who is it for? / So I go out to see—/ and . . . who’s standing there? / Me!).
[158]
And in fact, wherever you look you’ll see yourself. And others too are only images on the screen that’s you.
As a woman once said to us: What am I to you? When you look at me you see only yourself. And I’m here. Here. Here. That’s what she said, and she pounded her fist against her heart.
Her name, that woman’s, was Francine, and in the end she left us. She went back to her home in Quebec and became an English teacher. Now she’s standing there and explaining the difference between the first person and the third person. If we’d known that difference then, we wouldn’t have lost her.
[159]
Francine spoke Canadian French, which is like Yiddish in relation to German.
She bathed with two bars of soap and explained that each bar suited a different part of the body. Fine down sprouted along her legs and when the sun came up across them, it seemed as though the down was cast in gold.
We could write countless stories. “Francine on the Beach” (how the big toe of her right foot was cut by a piece of glass and she cried, “Zut alors”) or “Francine on Shenkin Street” (how she tried on a pair of boots and removed them with a kick and one boot landed on the top shelf) or “Francine at the Café” (how she spilled her beer onto the pavement stone just to watch it fizz).
We don’t know which sun comes up over Quebec and which moon lights up its night. Most likely a different sun and a different moon. But if it’s the same sun that rises here and the same moon that lights our night I would write on them with two long brushes (a brush for day and a brush for night) “O Francine.”
[160]
The reader can no doubt guess what sort of music we’re trying to compose. Mostly blues. That sentimental melancholy suits us as a suit fits a tailor’s dummy. If someone tells us to look at something rationally, in a major key—as, for instance, Telemann did—we get angry.
Take the shelves in the supermarket. They’re trying to tempt us to process the arrangement of boxes and packages systematically. But we see cornflakes and think of snowflakes falling on the Siberian tundra, or we see soup mix and think of stardust.
Whoever understands these things can join the secret order whose members send one another signs by moving their pinkies ever so slightly. Look carefully. You’ll find them, even at gatherings of the bar association.
Once we saw a man like that at the train station in Budapest and we fell all over him.
[161]
We’ve forgotten to tell our readers about our neighbors. Mr. Nahmias occasionally makes a swerving kicking motion. He’s a fan of the Liverpool soccer team. The neighbor on the other side, Mr. Sapoznikov, goes up and down the stairs while reading Globes, the financial paper. Our Hello-how-are-you relations are much better with Mrs. Nahmias than they are with Mrs. Sapoznikov.
One floor down there’s an architect whose name is Pnei-Gal, but we don’t see him very often, because (so we’ve heard) he’s an ecological architect. Which is to say, he designs houses that work in harmony with the earth and so on.
Pnei-Gal, the architect, is a very thin man with narrow shoulders, but we usually see only his back. Mr. Sapoznikov, on the other hand, who owns an excavation equipment company, usually comes at us head on, that is, from the front.
Of all the women in our entry we’re partial to Mrs. Nahmias. Mrs. Sapoznikov looks too much like her husband, and the architect, Pnei-Gal, lives alone, or with another man.
We think this chapter’s all confused, maybe because we don’t really have a clear sense of our neighbors.
[162]
We won’t talk about our immediate family in this book. We’ve already done that in another book, and there too we’ve concealed certain things. But between us, which is to say, ourselves and ourselves, we know that every word in it is dedicated to Nurit in lieu of a thousand bouquets of flowers.
What can be revealed is the view through the window. The mountain. What’s in front of it and behind it and to its sides (and also above it) is always in motion. It alone stands there, as they say, immobile and silent.
And it has no name. And one can see it only as it is. And it can’t be explained or criticized or made fun of.
We ask God’s forgiveness for the fact that we’ve sometimes (in distress) prayed to it. But we worship the mountain.
[163]
At the foot of the mountain there’s a creek that dries up in summer and if you follow the water-worn pebbles and stones you’ll get (after three miles) to a pool containing translucent fish.
We remember the legend about the city beneath Lake Baikal in Siberia. We saw how, during the winter, when the lake is frozen, people lie on its surface and look into it and sometimes they go back to their villages along the shore with a mysterious expression on their faces.
Some of them never leave their wooden homes. They sit all winter long and look out at other lakes, the ones at the bottom of their souls. In any event, anyone who sees the sunken city (outside or within) knows something that the others don’t.
Imagine that they saw the sunken city and the world around it. And that they’d seen another lake. And people are also looking into that lake and seeing beneath it a sunken city wherein people are lying on the frozen surface of a lake and so on and on into infinity.
Once we knew a Russian man who, every morning (before the sun came up), would walk a white dog. We said good morning to him and he always answered (with a Russian accent) “wolking.”
[164]
We dream that a man (apparently us)
buys a musical instrument, probably a mandolin or a Japanese koto for seventy-one thousand and several hundred (we don’t know what currency) though the instrument isn’t worth more than three hundred.
Leaping with joy, the two salesmen escape with the money to a place (apparently Rosh Pina) that’s full of people and where it’s hard to find a room for the night. In the end we pay four hundred (in that same currency) for a small, filthy room and then we wake up.
Generally speaking. Our behavior in dreams is irresponsible. The men expected no more than a few hundred. But we made some calculations on the tablecloth and proposed that astronomical sum ourselves.
At least we didn’t commit any crimes in this dream. Sometimes we murder. But usually we fly high in the air and dream that others don’t know how to fly, apart from one person who lives in Mevasseret Tziyon.
When we were little we understood one day (as we woke) that in fact (which is to say, in the waking world) we can’t fly, and our hearts broke.
[165]
Now our readers no doubt understand why we can’t continue the story we started (about Zivit and Ohad and so on). The gravitational field of that story is too strong. Even more so than the gravitational fields of physical bodies.
The readers can invite Zivit and Ohad (together or separately) for a cup of coffee. Then can ask them how they are and Zivit or Ohad (or both at once) will tell them.
Once we took a trip to London and saw, on Oxford Street, a character from one of the stories we’d written. We don’t particularly like that story and have almost completely forgotten what it says there. But we remember that this character (we called him Gurnischt) married a British woman and settled in London.
This movement between two worlds is imaginary. After all, someone is writing us as well. Someone is reading us. And someone is having critical thoughts. And someone is filing us away.
[166]
It’s the dentists who teach us which world is more real.
When we were little they sent us to Dr. Buchstabe, who lived (oddly) on Child’s Boulevard, behind the Ordeo Cinema in Ramat Gan. Dr. Buchstabe operated the drill by pressing a pedal with his right foot, just as they operated sewing machines at the time.
Dr. Buchstabe had a peculiar sense of humor. Before starting the drill (there were, we recall, also leather straps involved in the mechanism), he’d ask: Do you think it will hurt? The terrible pain caused by that mechanical drill taught us about history (the Inquisition, etcetera) better than any teacher ever did.
In Dr. Buchstabe’s waiting room there were pictures of famous dentists, but then again maybe they were just his ancestors, and the pungent smell that hung in the air would have driven away any and all thoughts of madeleines from Proust.
When they told us that Dr. Buchstabe had died we remembered the story about the man who heard that Edison (who invented the light bulb) had died and thought that from that day on darkness would reign in the world.
But after Dr. Buchstabe’s death, dentists continued to drill in our mouths. And now their drills ran on electricity.
[167]
How sad the days of childhood are. Everyone else is bigger and ugly and they’re always talking about the upper level of things. The bus is coming. It’s six o’clock. The curtain is dirty, etcetera.
They go up and down stairs. And enter and exit through doors, wearing all the while a practical expression, of the sort one sees on a taxi dispatcher.
None of them ever say, We’re going from here to there on the face of a planet, and the planet itself is spinning in a great darkness that has no end.
What could we do? The other children were bigger than we were as well, every time, apart from one girl, whom we suspected (mistakenly) might also have known about the planet and the darkness.
[168]
Today (January 8, 2009) the enemy attacked the Zilberman Residential Hotel in Nahariya (which is also called the Golden Age Home).
In the confusion, Rivkah Leibowitz (age eighty-six) pushed her wheelchair to the street and turned toward Ga’aton Boulevard. She crossed the road to the south side and rolled her chair into the Penguin Café.
There she ordered a deluxe breakfast (though she’d already had her hard-boiled egg and cream of wheat at the Zilberman) and took a women’s magazine from the newspaper stand.
First she read a long article about women who fake orgasm. Then a feature about the singer Sarit Hadad, and finally letters from readers (I’m thirty-six, my husband is a good man and a devoted father to our two children but).
When she was done with her breakfast (only half of the tuna spread was left on her tray) she wheeled herself west, toward the shore, and there she sat, beneath the crows, looking out at the great body of water.
[169]
In the end the sun set and another calibration began (maybe the ninth of the month). Other things happened in other places. We could write that men were killed there and there people died, and there they were born—but these things are understood.
All this trouble of writing a book and printing a book and selling a book and reading a book and translating a book is a waste of time unless, in the end, it brings people joy.
And so, the past has already been. The future isn’t yet with us, and the present is only a future becoming a past. Joy? In what? Maybe in that the past has already been and the future is yet to come and the present can be either. Which is to say, that everything’s nothing.
There is no greater delight than that, since, if we look around us, the nothing is packed to the rafters.
[170]
As for war. They should call up reserves of literary critics. They’d vanquish the enemy with their weighty pronouncements. Afterward, the critics could enlist the lethal forces of verbal contortion and extensive annotation to verify that the enemy in fact had been crushed. Imagine the shock of (for instance) religious fanatics in the face of that technology.
There’s also a chance that, confronted with their sudden and frightening appearance on the battlefield, the enemy would simply experience a conversion and throw itself at their feet.
Which reminds us of Mrs. Unger, whom we once knew, when we lived in Haifa.
Usually Mrs. Unger was a very soft woman. She baked pecan cookies and poppy-seed cookies and read romance novels in Hebrew and in Hungarian.
But sometimes, maybe once every two months, she’d wave her right hand in the air (without moving the rest of her body) and slap her husband.
No wonder Mr. Unger always moved in such wide circles around his wife.
[171]
We miss poetry. Yesterday we read a poem in Ha’aretz about a swan that falls into the water and we too are trying to bring down a swan. But the swans get away and the sea is full of battleships.
Maybe one should begin artificially, without inspiration, and then inspiration will follow. Since now it’s night and everyone’s sleeping we could start with “The city breathes in chloroform.” Except that we’ve heard that chloroform hasn’t been used for ages in operating rooms, and we don’t know what sort of anesthesia they use today.
Maybe one needs to think about a single detail and not an entire city. Pertaining to Mr. Yellinek, for instance. On the face of it, there’s nothing poetic about Mr. Yellinek. But in fact, when he opens his mailbox day after day it’s impossible to look directly at him, just as one can’t stare at the sun (Mr. Yellinek is five feet three inches tall and barely reaches the mailbox) without going blind.
[172]
And there’s nothing more poetic than notes from the housing committee (each person owes such and such).
Or
an antenna. But then you’re tempted to put birds on it and that ruins the poem. Generally. Whatever seems like a poem isn’t a poem and what doesn’t seem like a poem is.
Tiberias, for example, is full of poems. Also Afula. And Birmingham. Especially the hotel where we got a room for twenty pounds a night but had to climb over the beds to get to the shower.
We’ve already talked about phone books. Under “H” we find our name among others, and look at it (that is, at the name) and at the number beside it and don’t understand.
All these things (that is, not putting birds on the antenna and not understanding our name) are necessary conditions for poetry. But not sufficient. Something else is needed. Perhaps a great sadness or maybe great joy. Or quiet.
[173]
Maybe this quiet we long for is a sign that the book is nearing its end. We’re not sure.
Maybe from here on in we need to do what Joyce did in his final book and write in a kind of parallel language.
Something like O my mother in Hinfich feel phaned a slanguage a slanguage and more. Piraeus isn’t far. And the stubbledom oh the stubbledom. My mother whom our mother recovers the sea covers the great sees and more across unto pain extends to the end to the end. And if and mother and father and rivers and rivers oh no once again and again, oh since she has a very great ball and a dress made of others and a wonder and brother and canals of algae and cruel stubbling like a knife that our father that very same knife and a glinting or glash. O my mother the willow the bowl.
Moods Page 8
