Life on Sandpaper

by Yoram Kaniuk

  We read almost exclusively the socialist newspaper PM and I was completely shocked as the results began trickling in declaring Eisenhower the winner. In the Village nobody even remembered that he was running for president. Nobody knew what he’d been doing. But there was a whole scorpion’s nest of trouble hiding behind that forgettable exterior. Romain Gary said he was the greatest president in the history of golf. Meanwhile, as he beamed his sweet smile, the best of America’s minds were dismissed from their posts and either sank into depression or evaporated or committed suicide or were arrested or went into exile. In The Emperor Jones Eugene O’Neill writes: “Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is the glue.” Ike was a meager sort of grace. He couldn’t talk and listen at the same time. Lee had voted for Wallace and all of a sudden said, We’ve lost America! She brought home a day-old chick that Yuri Milstein (who had two wives, one of whom—or so he said—had been killed, and he didn’t know which) had given her as a gift. It ran around the apartment and Lee came home tired from a show and asked me to cook because she’d been working and I’d been playing with the chick all day. I took some frozen chicken from the freezer and she shouted, Not in front of the children! She was accepted into the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, which had then been reestablished, and she asked me to come with her so we’d have a belated honeymoon. We went by bus to numerous cities in the Midwest. Arrival, check-in, rest, practice, performance, and sleep. On the bus the boys knitted and hugged each other and the girls sat on their own, bored. At night, after the performance, black, curtained Cadillacs would be waiting and the boys were swallowed up in them and driven to hotels or the homes of wealthy ranchers. The girls would come back from the performance and sit alone in the lobby and I was the only man there. And I took advantage of it. There was sadness there. The prima ballerina was Alexandra Danilova who was then in her fifties. Her glory days—when gentlemen had stood in their stirrups in her honor in St. Petersburg, Paris, and New York—were long behind her, though she was still a brilliant professional. She sat stitching and repairing her ballet slippers and told stories about Russia and her lovers and husbands, including Balanchine: she was the first of his six or seven lovers even though she refused to officially marry him. When we’d reach a city everybody would go to the hotel for a rest while she went to the theater and walked the stage, slowly pacing its length and breadth and measuring it with her bare feet to feel its bumps and obstacles. In Red Rocks Park, Colorado they were booked to dance in the outdoor amphitheater, where there were strong winds, and I went along with her on her inspection. She walked across the stage and then collected some pebbles from the river that wound around the amphitheater and sewed them into her tutu. She never stopped practicing and although her body was no longer as supple as it had been her arm movements were the works of a master. She prayed with her hands. Her back was lithe and her gestures dignified and she said that was how you worship the God of the Arts. She thought that sleep was something that great artists cannot allow themselves to enjoy. She said that the Crusaders used to say that a ruin is half a fortress. I am half the fortress I once was and so I have to work all the more. Through the wild monotonous vistas of Utah, Iowa, Nebraska, harsh and frightening landscapes, sometimes cruel and desolate, she’d hold a sewing needle up to their light to stitch her delicate ballet slippers. Somebody joked rather sadly that Danilova surely hadn’t danced before the aristocracy of St. Petersburg so that in her old age she could amuse the hick ranchers of Wyoming, but she treated each and every member of her audience as if he were a St. Petersburg nobleman, regardless. She said that ballet was a miracle. Was sculpture in space. Nijinsky was asked how he jumped so high and he replied, I jump, wait a while, then land. Ballet is a form of wisdom descended from royal whimsy—a magnificent rabbit pulled from a nonexistent hat. Danilova liked me, but she turned a cynical eye on my habit, in stolen moments, of consoling the poor dancers who had nobody waiting for them but me, and how Lee would pretend she didn’t see.

  We reached a small town called Laramie in Wyoming. There was one long street, awkward buildings that looked like the movie set of a town without a town behind them, a church, a huge bar with a dance floor, a few stores, a barbershop, another church, a movie theater, and the silence of an afternoon dying in the heat. We went to the hotel wondering where the audience would come from, although beyond the main street you could see some buildings and a few houses of green wood in the distance. I walked along the street and saw a car speeding by. The street was empty. A cop hiding behind a gate popped out and stopped the driver. The car had Michigan plates. The driver tried to get away but the cop had him dead to rights and took him into the barbershop. I followed them. There was a man in the barber chair having his face lathered. He took out a small card, showing the driver that he was not only the sheriff but also the judge. The driver tried to explain that he’d misread his speedometer but the cop gave him a dig in the ribs and he doubled over, the barber laughed and sprayed him with lather. The judge asked, Guilty or not guilty? The driver saw the cop balling his fists and said, Guilty. The judge said, Ten dollars and costs, right now. The driver asked what costs and the judge said, My shave, a dollar fifty. The guy tried haggling, the cop glared at him and snapped his fingers, the guy paid up and drove off. The judge said, Whiskey on me and he and the cop went to a bar where I saw that they let them drink on the house because no one would take money from a sheriff and a judge and a giant cop, even with two of them being the same man. I moved on. In the shaded, somewhat dark entry-way to a hardware store I saw a lantern hanging and a man hidden at the rear of the store. I went inside. There were tractors there. Sprinklers. All sorts of tools. Pruning shears. Shovels. Wire. Electric tools. From a distance the man seemed to be bent over like a monk at prayer. As I drew closer he smiled at me but didn’t say anything and I saw he was reading the complete works of H. N. Bialik, in Hebrew, a thick book. I stared and since I was so surprised, all I could think of saying was that Bialik was my godfather. The man recited “The Pool.” I asked who he was and he said, Yekutiel Ohev-Zion, a miserable wretch from Rishon LeZion. Then he said he was pleased to meet me and that he hadn’t seen another Jew for maybe five years and his wife had died and his son had gone to New York and there was a brother in Tel Aviv who was possibly dead, he doesn’t write, he said, because he wouldn’t talk to anyone who left Israel for America. I want to go back, but I’ve been here fifty years already and it’s not easy. He told me he’d been looking for someone from the Galilee who’d killed a friend of his by mistake and he’d had enough of searching for him, traveling from city to city, and there was the wife of some rabbi who’d made his way west and died here and he’d married her. She was a good wife, a pure soul, and that’s that.

  We sat reading Bialik and he said that this was a town of hoodlums. He spoke old Hebrew like my primary school teachers, pompous phraseology mixed with outdated slang, Hebrew intertwined with Arabic and Yiddish and it was getting late, so I said good-bye, went back to the hotel, and fell asleep. Lee hugged me suddenly and said she missed her mother and then she left with the other dancers for the theater and a strong wind was blowing and I walked the streets. Darkness fell and hundreds of people appeared on horseback and driving jeeps. They were wearing cowboy outfits. Most of them were short, no Gary Coopers, mostly Indian, they yelled, drank in the bar, came out and shot their guns into the air, and I followed them. There was a movie theater there. We stood in line and they gave us green eyeglasses for the 3-D screen. The lights went down. A bell rang. Through the green glasses we wore the screen seemed unreal and on it were the same cowboys who were now sitting around me but their faces were slightly different and the town was different and they galloped into town and went into the movie theater and were given green glasses and fired into the ceiling and yelled, and suddenly the Indians around me started shooting at the ceiling. The movie became part of the audience, I didn’t know who was who and I became someone sitting watching himself but “himself” wasn’t ther
e. The only thing missing from the movie was me.

  The barber who was both sheriff and judge arrived and laughed. Reality split open. The contortions of life now became a movie, reality returned as pitiful as always through the glasses now worn by hundreds of people, their lenses cracked, some lights came up, the ceiling was covered with a layer of cork to stop the bullets, the party was over, they returned the glasses and went to the bar. Girls were waiting for them. They drank and at the end of the night they sped off in their jeeps and on their horses back to the ranches in the mountains or beyond them. There was nothing but wilderness there. In the morning the town seemed dead again and a garbage truck cleaning the streets passed by. The graveyard-shift cops split the money they’d collected, beat up a few holdout girls until they handed over their share, and vanished. The giant dayshift cop also appeared and I went back to sleep because there was another show that night.