by Amos Oz
And now you will ask why I had to bother. Surely I could simply have said to myself: Look here, Manfred, if your crazy Count has really got a fancy to hang a gold ring in a pig’s nose, just pocket your commission quietly and let him jump off the roof. At this point Tender Feelings enter the picture. Zakheim Iscariot may not turn his nose up at the thirty pieces of silver (or more), but he has no desire for some reason to hand his lord over to be crucified. Nor does good Manfred wish to be a party to the exploitation of orphans. We were friends, you and I. Or so I thought. When you were seven or eight, a strange, gloomy child who made statues for rhesus monkeys and tried to bite himself in the mirror, the undersigned had already placed his sharp wits at the service of your father’s visions. Together the two of us built an empire out of nothing. It all began in the roaring thirties. The day will come, my learned client, when I shall finally sit down and write my sensational memoirs, and you will discover how I wallowed for your father’s sake in the filth of degenerate Arab effendis, in foul British beer, in the Bolshevik phrases of nasal officials of the Jewish Agency—and all so as cunningly to add acre to acre, stone to stone, pound to pound, everything that you received from me on a silver tray, gift-wrapped and tied up with a blue ribbon. Take it or leave it, chum; I couldn’t stand the thought that you would waste it all on fixing a golden mezuzah on every Arab ruin in the territories, on tying tefillin on every Godforsaken Arab hill, on all that idolatry. On the contrary, before my mind’s eye there opened up the attractive prospect of using Sommo to renew our days as of old, to purchase at rock-bottom prices parcels of land in places where no white man had yet set foot, to hitch our wagon to this messiah’s donkey and do for you in the present twice as much as I did for your father in his day. That is the case for the defense, Alex. There are only one or two odd points left.
By efforts verging on martyrdom I set Sommo on the (relatively) straight and narrow path. I turned the black Pygmalion into a Zionist real-estate dealer, and attached Zohar to him in the role of safety pin. I hoped that in the course of time you too would calm down, sober up a little, and authorize me to mount in your name the new wagon I had built. I was confident that when the sound and the fury were over you might at last begin to behave like a true Gudonski. I was planning that your money plus my brains plus Sommo’s armor-piercing cousinhood plus Zohar’s dynamism would make all our fortunes and we would live happily ever after. In a nutshell, to quote the diminutive Moses, all in all I was trying to bring forth sweetness from the strong. And that’s all there is to it, mate. That was the only reason I associated myself with the Sommo-Paris axis, and plugged into the Toulouse deal. That was the reason I begged you to agree to exchange your ruin in Zikhron, which doesn’t bring you in a penny and only gobbles up property tax, for a foothold in Bethlehem, where the future lies. Take note, Alex: our Bolsheviks are on their last legs. The day is not far off when this country will be in the hands of Sommo & Zohar and their ilk. And then land in the West Bank and the Sinai will be released for urban development; and every clod of earth will be worth its weight in gold. Believe me, sweetheart, for a lot less than this your father would have sent me a little Mercedes and a case of champagne for my birthday.
And what did you do, darling? Instead of inscribing Manfred in the Golden Book, instead of offering thanks thrice a day to your father for bequeathing you not only his throne but also his own private Bismarck, instead of the Mercedes and the champagne, you fired me again. And you cursed and swore at me in your cables like a drunken mujik. And what’s more, you heaped your new lunacy on me: buying Boaz from them. As it says in Shakespeare: “My kingdom for a horse” (but not for an ass, Alex!). And this after all you forced me to do in your divorce suits? Why Boaz all of a sudden? What for? What’s the big deal?
For so it seemed good to you. “Le Roy le veult,” and that’s that. The Frenchified Russian aristocracy from North Binyamina Region smashes crystal goblets, and we the servants have to pick up the pieces submissively and scrub the stains off the carpet.
When I carried out my humanitarian duty of delaying the execution a little in case you reconsidered your mad orders, you fired me again and hired Roberto in my place. Just as you threw your father in the bin, just as you threw Ilana and Boaz on the scrap heap, just as now you have decided to throw yourself in hell: like throwing away a pair of old socks. After thirty-eight years of service! Me, who built the whole Duchy of Gudonski out of nothing! You’ve heard of how the Eskimos throw their old people out in the snow? Well, even they don’t spit in their faces as well. Roberto! That will writer! That maître d’!
And then, lo and behold, dear Uncle Manfred, that great-souled avatar of King Lear and Pere Goriot, determined, despite the blow, to remain at his post. To turn a blind eye to his dishonorable discharge. “Here I stand, and can do no other.” In the military court of appeals we once had a case of a soldier who had refused to operate a mortar on the grounds that he had personally signed for the shells.
And in the meantime you bought Boaz, shook off Roberto, and turned to me again pleading that we start afresh. You know, my genius, there’s method in this madness. First you trample (Ilana, Boaz, me, even Sommo), then you apologize, you grovel, you shower with money and excuses, you mollify and attempt to purchase retroactive absolution. And even to beg for mercy. What is this: folk Christianity? “They that shoot in tears shall bandage in joy”? “As you have murdered, so shall you bind up”?
And at once you imposed a new task upon me: to lay my hands on the monumental child on your behalf and at your expense, and to assist him to set up a sort of hippie colony on your father’s abandoned land. (By the way, that Gulliver is evidently fashioned of passably good materials, albeit totally demented, even by the standards of the Gudonski family.) Manfred, your unconditional lover, once more gritted his teeth but discharged your lunatic instructions. Like a cobra dancing to a fakir’s pipe. He betook himself to Zikhron. He pleaded. He paid. He lubricated. He pacified the local police. Evidently I still have some sort of little gland that goes on secreting a kind of affection toward you and constant anxiety about your health. If you will permit me, I shall remind you that even the great Shakespeare himself did not let Hamlet, in the mass-stabbing scene, casually run through his faithful Horatio. In my humble opinion, it is not I who owe you an explanation, but your lordship who owes me at the least a formal apology (if not a case of champagne). And by the way, you also owe me money: I invest some two hundred fifty dollars per month in your Goliath as per your orders. But you deigned to forget (since when do you have a head for trifles?) that you have no ready cash here. On the other hand you now have, thanks to me, a great pile in your William Tell account, following the Magdiel-Toulouse deal. It’s not very nice to descend from the sublimity of moral stocktaking to the banality of the financial vale of tears, but I would still ask you not to forget. And don’t wave your famous will at me again with the sweet item for my grandchildren: old Manfred may be a bit doddery, but he is still far from being senile. Nor has he volunteered in the meantime for the Salvation Army.
Or perhaps he has joined up after all, without noticing it? Unknowingly joined the motley ranks of holders of the Legion of Honor for rescuing Alexander the Wretched? Otherwise how to explain his peculiar devotion to you and all your successive whims?
Go fuck yourself, Alex. Go and get married to Sommo, adopt your ex-wife as your mother, her hoodlum as a rhesus monkey, and Roberto as your adjutant. Get lost. That’s what I should have said to you once and for all. Go and donate your trousers to the Union of Reformed Nymphomaniacs for Judaea and Samaria, and get the hell off my poor back.
The sad thing is that sentimentality is constantly getting the better of my pure reason. Antediluvian memories tie me to you like a pair of handcuffs. You are stuck in my soul like a rusty nail without a head. And apparently I am stuck in you too, somewhere among the cogwheels you are equipped with instead of a soul. I wish you’d explain to me one day over a glass of whisky how your black magic works on
us. How do you manage to manipulate us all, over and over again, including foolish Uncle Manfred? In 1943, when I was still a little second lieutenant in the British Army, I was called out in the middle of the night once to Montgomery’s field HQ in the Cyrenaica desert, to translate some German document for him. Why is it that in your presence I always feel as I did then, with him? What is there about you that makes me jump to attention? Time and time again I click my heels (symbolically) and whisper submissively “Yessir” to all your whims and insults. What is the spell that binds us all to you, even from beyond the Atlantic?
Perhaps it is the mysterious combination of ruthlessness and helplessness.
I can see before my eyes your supine form reclining on the leather sofa at the Nicholsons’ house in London the night of our last meeting (even though you are back in America now, if not in Ceylon or Timbuktu). Your patrician features fixed in a brazen effort to conceal your pains from me. Your fingers curled around a teacup as though at any moment you might hurl its contents in my face or smash it over my head. Your voice was clear and cold, and your words like lead soldiers. Every now and again you closed your eyes slowly, as though you were a medieval castle raising its drawbridge and dropping the portcullis. While I was waiting for you to deign to take notice of me again, I looked at your back, stretched stiffly on the sofa, at your blank, pale face, at the expression of bitter disgust etched permanently around your lips, and just for a moment, as though peering through the firing slit of a tank, I could discern the child I remember from forty years ago: a large, pampered child, a decadent boy emperor who might at any instant signal to his servants with a lazy nod of the chin to chop my head off. Just like that. As a little nocturnal diversion. Because I had stopped interesting him.
That is how you looked to me at that moment in London. And I experienced a mixture of submissiveness and a vague paternal compassion. Physical awe combined with a sudden urge to rest my fingers on your brow. As when you were a child.
Your gladiator’s body, which had become so skinny and bony, your expression of a tortured prince, the power of your grey eyes, the radiance of your tormented spirit, the icy shield of your iron will. Perhaps it was this: your fragile savagery. Your defenseless tyranny. The childish wolfishness which gave you the air of a wrist watch that had lost its glass. That is how you mesmerize us all. Arousing even in a man like me an almost womanly feeling toward you.
Even if you explode I shall not restrain myself this time from writing that at that meeting of ours in London you stirred a sort of sympathy in me. As though I were a peeling old eucalyptus that had all of a sudden surprised itself by producing figs. I was sorry for you. For what you have done with your life and for the way you are now planning your death. Surely you developed the disease like a deadly, sophisticated missile that you targeted on yourself (I have an inner certainty that you can command the choice, whether to stifle the illness or submit to it entirely). Now you will chuckle dryly to yourself, twisting half your mouth, and maybe make a note that Manfred the villain is dancing unctuous attendance on you once more. But Manfred is worried for you. For that strange child of solitude who, forty years ago, used to call him Uncle Malfrend and climb up on his lap and feel in his pockets and sometimes find a chocolate or a piece of chewing gum. Once we were friends. And now I too am a monster. Albeit only a carnival monster. When I get up every morning and shave I see in front of me in the mirror a bald, ugly, wrinkled satyr, dragging his ugliness from day to day so as to bestow his money when the time comes on his precious grandchildren. What is precious to you, Alex? What makes you get up every morning? What looks back at you out of the mirror?
We were friends once. It was you who taught Uncle Malfrend how to ride a donkey (a spectacle that ought to have been immortalized by Chagall!), and I taught you to cast on the wall a whole theater of animals created from the shadows of our fingers. During my frequent visits to your home I sometimes used to read you a story when you were in bed. And we used to play a card game I can still remember: it was called “Black Bear.” The object of the game was to arrange everybody in pairs, the male dancer with the ballerina, the tailor with the seamstress, the farmer with the farmer’s wife; only the black bear had no partner. The player who was left with the bear was the loser. Every time, without exception, I was the loser. More than once I was obliged to resort to complicated maneuvers to insure that you won without discovering my renunciation, because otherwise you would have been seized by a fit of terrifying rage—if you had lost or, even worse, if you had suspected that victory had been given to you as a gift. You would have started to smash, throw, and tear, accused me of cheating, bitten the back of your hand till the blood came, or gone into a dark depression and crept away like an ichneumon to hide in the darkness of the narrow space under the staircase.
On the other hand, every time I lost a game you would go overboard—according to some strange code of justice—to compensate me. You would rush to the cellar to fetch me a cold beer. Or make me a present of a marble or a basket of white snails that you had industriously collected in the yard. You would climb on my lap and slip one of your father’s cigars into my jacket pocket. And once, in the winter, you slipped into the closet and scraped the mud off my galoshes. Another time, when your father was roaring at me at the top of his voice and cursing me in Russian, you caused a short circuit with a broken iron so as to plunge the house in darkness in the middle of his thunder and lightning.
And then in forty-one I volunteered for the British Army. For five years I wandered from Palestine to Cairo, Cyrenaica, and Italy, from Italy to Germany and Austria, from Austria to the Hague and from the Hague to Birmingham. All through those years you remembered me, Alex. Every two or three weeks the gold soldier Malfrend would receive a package from you. From you, not your father. Candy, woolen socks, Hebrew newspapers and magazines, letters containing sketches of imaginary weapons. In return I sent you postcards from all the places I visited. I collected stamps and banknotes and sent them to you. When I came back, in forty-six, you vacated your room for me. Until your father rented me my first apartment in Jerusalem. And I still have standing on my bedside table a photograph from April of forty-seven: good-looking, sad, and a little violent, you are standing like a dreamy wrestler holding one of the poles of the canopy at my wedding. Seven years later, when Rosalind was killed, you and your father invited little Dorit to spend the whole summer at Zikhron. You built her a hut of branches, with a rope ladder, in one of the pine trees and captured her heart forever. When you went to the university in Jerusalem, I gave you the key to my apartment. When you were injured in the back in the raid north of the Sea of Galilee, you stayed with us again for a fortnight. It was I who prepared you for your examinations in German and Latin. Then came your meteoric wedding, and soon afterward your father began dispersing his fortune to all sorts of charitable funds and handing out checks to confidence men who assured him that they were representing the ten lost tribes of Israel. Until he sent his Circassians on a night raid on the neighboring kibbutz, and then the two of us got together and decided to plan a coup. We have not forgotten, you or I, the eleven lawsuits I conducted on your behalf before we managed to extricate the property and put the Tsar away. Nor will you ever be able to forget everything I did for you during your divorce suits. I have set down these brief notes to tell you that Uncle Malfrend has been carrying you on his back ever since your childhood, while you were establishing your world-wide reputation and your book was being translated into nine languages. You for your part paid for Dorit and Zohar’s honeymoon in Japan and even opened a generous savings account on the birth of each of my grandchildren. Was this merely a calculated, coldblooded investment? I’d be grateful if you’d enlighten me. And if you would confirm in writing, at least between curses and insults, that what I have written here really happened. Otherwise I shall be compelled to infer that one of us is already decrepit and sees things. Are we friends, Alex? Answer me yes or no. Just to set the record straight. And the main thing: se
nd me a sign and I’ll invest the proceeds of Magdiel in purchasing the meadows of Bethlehem. Take care of your health and let me know how I can help.
Uncle Malfrend
Keeper of the Signet
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PERSONAL ZAKHEIM JERUSALEM ISRAEL
DEDUCT WHAT YOU ARE OWED FOR PAYMENTS TO BOAZ FROM MY ACCOUNT TAKE ANOTHER TWO THOUSAND AS A TIP AND STOP WAGGING YOUR TAIL ALEX
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GIDEON SUMMER PROGRAM PRINCETON NJ
I AM A MONUMENTAL FOOL AND YOU ARE A LOST CAUSE IVE TAKEN FIVE THOUSAND AM SENDING DETAILED ACCOUNT ROBERTO REFUSES ABSOLUTELY TO RESUME MANAGEMENT OF YOUR AFFAIRS REQUEST URGENT INSTRUCTIONS ABOUT TRANSFER OF YOUR PAPERS MAYBE YOUD BEST HAVE YOURSELF INSTITUTIONALIZED VOLUNTARILY BEFORE THEY PUT A STRAIT JACKET ON YOU MANFRED
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PERSONAL ZAKHEIM JERUSALEM ISRAEL
YOUR RESIGNATION NOT ACCEPTED YOU ARE AUTHORIZED TO CONTINUE MANAGING THE PROPERTY ON CONDITION YOU KEEP YOUR MEDDLESOME NOSE AND PAWS TO YOURSELF IM LEAVING YOUR GRANDCHILDREN IN MY WILL THE DEVIL KNOWS WHY ALEX
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GIDEON SUMMER PROGRAM PRINCETON NJ
MY RESIGNATION STANDS IM THROUGH WITH YOU REPEAT REQUEST INSTRUCTIONS RE TRANSFER OF PAPERS MANFRED ZAKHEIM
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PERSONAL ZAKHEIM JERUSALEM ISRAEL
MANFRED CALM DOWN AM GOING INTO MOUNT SINAI HOSPITAL NEW YORK FOR A WEEK FOR RADIOTHERAPY MY ESTATE TO BE SHARED AMONG MY SON HER DAUGHTER AND YOUR GRANDCHILDREN DONT LEAVE ME NOW THINKING OF COMING BACK TO ISRAEL PERHAPS AFTER TREATMENT CAN YOU ARRANGE ME A QUIET PRIVATE CLINIC WITH FACILITIES FOR CHEMOTHERAPY YOU HAVE A FREE HAND IN MANAGING MY PROPERTY ON CONDITION YOU STAY WITH ME DONT BE CRUEL ALEX
