And so on. But there’s no escaping in that direction. Why not? This our readers understand quite well on their own.
[174]
After he’d written like that, Joyce wrote no more. When they asked him why, he answered roughly as follows: I’ll write only if I find very simple words, very very simple words.
We know some simple words. For example: “There once was a rabbit / who had the bad habit / of twitching the end of his nose. / His sisters and brothers / and various others / said, ‘Look at the way he goes!’”
Not a superfluous word. And one can see it all. The rabbit. The field he’s looking for food in. His sensitive nose. And it gets better:
“But one little bunny / said ‘Isn’t it funny’ / and practiced it down in the dell. / Said the others ‘If he can, / I’m certain that we can,’ / and they all did it rather well! // Now all the world over, / where rabbits eat clover / And dig and scratch with their toes, / Each little rabbit / has got the bad habit / of twitching the end of his nose!”
If only we could write like that.
Or the way that Louis Armstrong sang. Come to think of it, he too twitched his nose.
[175]
At some point along the way (maybe when we were infants even) something got scrambled and we started putting words on top of each other (and not side by side).
At school for sure. Louis Armstrong couldn’t read music. Why did they send us there? After all, we could already talk.
On the board the teacher wrote “Shalom, first grade,” but we cried. A woman came and said my name is Tzipporah and we wanted our mother. Why did they make us sit in chairs and tell us that we couldn’t move?
When we gave things names we did so as though in a dream. But then they forced us to give the names letters, and that was too much. They placed bright lights directly before us, as though the sun weren’t enough. Why did they make us sit in those chairs?
Then came the sin of addition. How much is such and such plus such and such? Before that we were never wrong. Only afterward did we start to make mistakes.
[176]
The first-grade chairs became computer chairs. Now we’re sitting in front of large screens, our face is pale and our spine is bent, and we send each other odd signs.
Sometimes the computers crash and entire love stories vanish. Addresses can’t be recovered and the faces aren’t yet known.
Stricken with sorrow, people head into the streets, carrying clumps of metal in their hands, but the technicians aren’t able to get the names and phone numbers out of them, and since the people have lost the power of speech, they withdraw into themselves, like that gray worm that shrivels up when you touch it.
Today the storks are coming to mothers giving birth. Each beak bears a small computer, and the whole world has been destroyed by a blackout.
[177]
Yesterday Mr. Yellinek asked Mr. Nahmias (the Liverpool fan) to lower his mailbox.
First, Mr. Nahmias removed the box from the wall. He leaned it against the stairwell wall and went to get a drill.
When he returned he asked Mr. Yellinek: Where do you want it? Mr. Yellinek made an arc-like motion with his hand (as though he were opening an imaginary mailbox) and said: Here.
Mr. Nahmias drilled a hole where Mr. Yellinek had indicated and, with light taps from his hammer, he inserted a plastic dowel into the hole. With the help of a screwdriver, into the dowel he turned a large screw, on which he hung the mailbox.
Mr. Yellinek said Thank you very much and (because his head reached only to the chest of Mr. Nahmias) held out his hand toward Mr. Nahmias’s private parts. Mr. Nahmias shook the hand and said: It’s nothing. Then he gathered up the drill and the hammer and the screwdriver and the toolbox and went back to his apartment. Mr. Yellinek, on the other hand, stood there in front of his mailbox for a good long while.
[178]
In a previous life Mr. Yellinek was, no doubt, a pony and the mailbox a bale of hay or a water trough.
We’d like to come back as a bakery. As all that’s in it. As ovens. Fire. Loaves. So that our soul would become the soul of a bakery.
But our karma will undoubtedly take us in another direction. Most likely we’ll become a vole. Or, what’s it called? A broker (that is, on the stock market). Or a tragic historical figure.
Sometimes (mostly in dreams) we see something from our past lives. We were a pumpkin salesman at a market in Europe during the time of the Black Death or a Roman senator during the war with Carthage.
Once we had a nightmare. That we’d been reincarnated as ourselves and everything was happening for a second time. Step by step and word by word exactly as it had happened in our life, including our shoe size (9 1/2).
That’s why we like the way Jews bury their dead. The shrouds through which one can see the outline of the body. The sound of the corpse hitting the bottom of the hole. The prayer El Malei Rahamim—God, full of mercy. That absolute end and return to dust.
[179]
And that’s why happiness ascends from, of all places, cemeteries. No order is finer than that of those rows upon rows. And especially the great quiet, sometimes with just the sound of a hoe against the soil or the call of a crow.
Life itself should be lived like that. As in a silent film in which one sees only a single hut with a rooster strutting every so often from the left side of the screen toward the right, and a little while later coming back across it.
Once every thousand years or so a word will be heard. Like the sound of very distant thunder. A word like zoo or zero or zillion. Words, that is, which start with the final letter.
In this world there won’t be any information at all. That is, it won’t be possible to store anything. Memory will be something else entirely. More like a pane of transparent glass. And matter? Whatever you’d like it to be. But endless. One thing within another.
On second thought, even that word is superfluous. Perhaps the sound is sufficient. Something like the “A” that a tuning fork makes when the string instruments are being tuned. But only the “A.” Without the program or the concert that follows.
[180]
We’ve come to death and even to life that resembles death and the book’s still going on.
Maybe because we like to drink a certain kind of sherry. Not the kind they import to Israel, but another one. If we could remember what it was called, we’d ask our wine store to bring us a case of it.
We don’t want to say banal things about people we love, etcetera. We just want to say something about the wondrous nature of the heart. The muscle itself. That it’s stretched and contracted some seventy times a minute sixty minutes each hour and twenty-four hours a day three hundred and sixty-five days a year for maybe eighty years, and only the wizards of arithmetic can figure out how many beats that makes.
And, because we’re grateful to this muscle, wherever it comes from and wherever it’s going, it’s forbidden for us to die before our time and we need to observe all the commandments in the proper manner, such as, for instance, the one concerning the sherry.
And if we remember the name of that wine we’ll insist that the publisher order maybe eighty cases and distribute the bottles to bookstores, so that the readers can taste it.
[181]
We’d like to share all sorts of things with our readers. Not just wine.
For example, in Japanese, the syllable ka is like a question mark. You say something like “We’re going to Tokyo tomorrow.” But if you add a ka to the end of the sentence, the meaning changes to “Are we going to Tokyo tomorrow?”
The reader can read books
that way. That is, as though there were a ka at the end of every sentence. The book would then be a long series of questions (among others about the sun and the moon and the stars) and we could call it The Book of Great Doubt. We could even call it The Book of Tremendous Doubt if we added the ka to the end of every word. But there’s no need to go that far.
In fact, faith is preferable to doubt. It’s better to read the book as though there were an exclamation mark at the end of every sentence. Or better still, as though each sentence were followed by those three letters that religious Jews are always adding to everything—bet, samekh, dalet (which stand for “with the help of God”)—and then we could call it The Book of Great Faith.
Imagine putting bet, samekh, dalet before every sentence and ka at its end. Then what?
[182]
These things are linked to Mr. Yellinek. We didn’t count him as one of our neighbors and then (when Mr. Nahmias fixed his mailbox for him) we spoke of him as though he were one.
The reader might ask himself: Is Mr. Yellinek a neighbor or not? Or worse, he could ask himself if Mr. Yellinek even exists.
But this is a question that shouldn’t be asked. Everyone exists. Especially Mrs. Shtiasny and her Italian husband. If you start casting doubt on this or that character you’ll need, at the end of the day, to doubt the existence of all the characters—even the author himself (that is, Yoel Hoffmann), and worse still, yourself.
And so, Mr. Yellinek exists exactly as Mrs. Shtiasny exists and as her Italian husband exists. You can see him here and there (mostly in Tel Aviv) standing in front of mailboxes.
Generally speaking. The word exists is an ugly word. At most it might suit a kind of screw but not all of creation. And if our readers insist on using it, they should at least write it with a ks instead of an x.
[183]
January two thousand and nine. During the war we inhale the air that we exhale and not new air. Our dark father, who stands behind our biographical father, gives birth to us.
In this way too mankind goes astray. It gathers up information all the time like a mad quartermaster, but during a war even the mad go mad.
When we were soldiers we never managed to get things straight and polish what was supposed to be polished. Our steel helmet rocked from side to side, our backpack slipped off of our shoulders, our canteen got dirty, and the rifle was never properly calibrated. Our dark father accompanied us wherever we went and our mother was far away or dead.
There was always someone very short (shorter even than Mr. Yellinek) who made everyone laugh. Mostly his name was Yirmiyahu but everyone called him Yirmi and every once in a while Yahu. What was so funny about him? For instance, he stuffed his ammunition pouch not with extra rounds but with cans of sardines and slabs of cheese. He was the one who’d light the fire and then piss on the coals before we left. Everyone had a girlfriend (or everyone said they did) and he was the only one who didn’t. But he had some thingamajig that he loved. A pocketknife or a large marble or a pen on which a naked woman rose and fell.
[184]
The German word for war is krieg, and it’s a word that suits a kind of cracker (or rusk) and not the shedding of blood. Francesca, my stepmother, sometimes said krieg but, because of her build, it sounded different.
Generally, a word depends on who says it. Think, for example, of the philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz and Mary, the Holy Virgin. We’re having a hard time thinking of a word that both might have uttered, but it’s clear that if they said that word, in each case we’d imagine something completely different.
Once we knew a woman who wanted a child very badly but miscarried every one she conceived. She sat in cafés and so on, like everyone, but every time—roughly once a year—when they asked her (and also when they didn’t), she’d say: The baby died.
Correct. The baby would have died in any case. He’d have died in a war or of old age. And so it’s possible to say such a thing about every baby. But that he died before she managed to see him. And that he died before he managed to see her. And that afterward she sat in cafés and had to say those words. All these things are harder even than war to bear.
[185]
We should seat Mr. Yellinek (and Yirmiyahu from the army) on the backs of wild geese, so they can fly far above the earth like Nils Holgersson.
We’ll have to say goodbye to them as they’re going beyond the borders of the book. Wild geese don’t comply with literary convention. But they’ll hover in other worlds and from a great height see the well-tended fields and the places where people live. They won’t be able to see people from that height, and so the journey will involve a certain amount of loneliness. But imagine that the heavens are one huge mailbox and letters arrive for Mr. Yellinek from distances that he can’t fathom.
We could end the book like that, but most of our characters are too heavy to put on the backs of wild geese. We ourselves (which is to say, I) would like to leave the book that way. And, if possible, the world—period. But some inexplicable stubbornness is compelling us to get at least to chapter 200 and, if possible (though this in fact is beyond our control), to our eightieth year.
[186]
We know some professors who are the exact opposite of wild geese.
First of all, they’re always quarreling and therefore they can’t take off and fly in those beautiful formations. Second, their colors. They’re never white. Usually they’re one shade or another of green or yellow. Third, their necks are short.
And there’s another difference. Wild geese leave no traces. If you say that they’re here, they’re there. If you say that they’re there, you’ve lost them. Professors, on the other hand, never move from their positions. Moreover, they draw everything to where they are. Soup. Various items. Gravitational fields, etcetera. Many are like a German housewife who’s always pickling cucumbers.
Though now we’ll risk being sued for libel, we’ll mention in particular Professor Har-Shoshanim (formerly Rosenberg). You’ll always find him opening doors or shutting them. He wears brown leather shoes and you’ll never catch him with both of his feet in the air. When he speaks what he says is all too clear and others, therefore (others, that is, in his proximity), need to take Prozac. Above all, he’s an associate professor and in the end will become (unlike the wild geese) a full professor.
[187]
Once Professor Har-Shoshanim proposed during a faculty meeting that two departments be merged and two others be split. His hands made a motion indicating a merger (when he spoke of merging) and another one suggesting a split (when he spoke of splitting).
It’s very hard to remember the reasoning that he laid out for the council. But we remember the gold frames of his glasses glinting in the neon light. Maybe his rivals were thinking (as in the stories by Karl May about the Indians and the eclipse) that the glinting indicated hidden powers. In any event, his proposal for the merger (and for the split) were approved by a large majority.
In the parking lot, next to his Mazda Lentis, Professor Har-Shoshanim took off his glasses and wiped the lenses. He stood there, alone, his head rising like a disk over the cars of the senior faculty.
There are moments in human history that have to be given a name. That moment will most likely be called “the moment when Har-Shoshanim took off his glasses” or “the moment when Har-Shoshanim looked toward the university but didn’t see it.”
[188]
Imagine the loneliness of writers surrounded by the characters from all their books and unable to get away from them and go back to their families.
There’s no consolation to be had from Har-Shoshanim. We
tried going to his home and couldn’t. We tried to meet him in the cafeteria. Again, no luck.
With Mr. Yellinek we manage to get along, somehow. We can pay him our dues for the housing board (thirty shekels) and offer him a cup of tea. But then he goes silent. We need someone we can talk to, but can’t find anyone like that in the entire book (apart from the dead, of course).
The girls we had crushes on are already old (in the book as well) and if we had a friend or two we wouldn’t want to see them if they were older than seventy or so. What would we talk about. Arthritis?
Maybe it’s our problem. We’re anti-social, and so at best we live in peace with an imaginary notion of women.
[189]
But it isn’t right to trouble our readers with these sorts of things. If we’re not mistaken, we also promised (in the opening chapter) a love story.
If we’re afraid of close quarters we can find it (love, that is) in large train stations. Sit on a bench in the main concourse and think of the high ceiling as the dome of heaven and the people coming and going as creatures of God. Regina and Moshe and Shalom (with the suitcases). And Odelia. And Haim. And Mr. Schwartz, whose hair has gone white. And the entire Na’im family (with the elderly aunt). And Abramov. Who isn’t there?
You can go up to them as though you were the Pope in the great square and open your arms wide as though you were a fisher of men. And whoever comes into them comes into them. And deserves love.
And don’t be put off by the fear in people’s faces. And don’t worry about the policeman who might take you away. You can embrace him as well. And, above all, don’t lose that love when you’re with the psychiatrist they’ll quickly call in. It isn’t his fault. Just tell him: You too are worthy. You too.
[190]
Moods Page 9
