And thus, one day at dusk, while the Fair continued to seethe with its usual commotion, the bulldozers dug foundations in a new suburb under one of the Pythia’s bastions. Her stock of the thousand faces suddenly ran out, and at the very same moment, at the back of the fairgrounds, a pack of dogs succeeded in breaking through the walls of the old green hut.
For a moment the dogs recoiled from the dazzling light bursting through the planks, but they immediately recovered and ran howling after the fleeing figure. It was on top of the hill when the first, the boldest of the dogs, stuck his claws into her dress and dug them into her flesh. The smell of her loins sweating from flight momentarily dizzied the dogs. They stood on their hind legs and unthinkingly swallowed the chicken’s heads flung into their jaws. Whining furiously, one dog then attacked his fellow, and they savaged each other with stiff tails.
The dogs spun around with rage when the heavy shadow of a big, dark-eyed bird circled above them. Then in one magnificent leap, they flew off in her wake with outstretched necks and wings and mauled her with their beaks. In the descending evening, the big dark bird came streaming down and flooded the earth with a black, bubbling river. Shrieking, the hawks then assailed one another, casting red, fast-moving shadows.They landed quickly in an avalanche of earth that covered the river with rocks. Bright flames rose from the rubble and illuminated for a moment the sunset sky. But the evening breezes quickly scattered the flame’s tongue and only pink smoke remained to cover the cheeks of the clouds.
When the dogs dispersed at last with their tails between their legs, licking their snouts, the contents of the Pythia’s purse were left strewn over the rubbish of the streets. Around the broken comb and wilting rose the pearls from her necklace lay scattered. One of the pearls gleamed for a moment in the last of the dying light, and reflected, as in an inverted mirror, the jubilation of the City of Joy and its Immortal Pleasure Pavilions.
THE DANCE OF THE THINKER
It began in the days of the great disasters, when hopeless-ness and despondency covered the land like manure and brought forth blossoms of despair. There was nothing then to strengthen the spirit of man. Only he, the thinker, rose up like a lion to compose his dissertation on the subject of despair. He discovered double meanings and hidden meanings in destruction, and his thoughts reached extraordinary heights of subtlety. From early in the morning he scratched his letters in tortuous lines, and when evening fell he swept up the pieces of paper and stuck them, one on top of the other, onto a tall spike.
The cries of lamentation of the afflicted beat against his chamber door. But under his pen they were transformed into profound words. At first they were the voices of strangers, and later the cries of his father and mother, his wife and his children—which in the end died down. One by one.
Then, when silence fell outside, his thoughts sailed onto new seas. Heroically he crossed the waters, borne forth on the sharpness of his sentences. Like delicate bridges they led him with admirable precision along the razor edge between abyss and extinction. And thus he, who had never learned to steer a boat, succeeded in pulling the ropes of the eternally billowing sail, balancing his body in a marvelous rhythm on the planks, as in a dance.
When after a while he raised his head, he no longer saw the shores from which he had sailed. The waves had carried him to other seas, opposite other shores, where people lived who did not know that the planks of his raft were the beams of ruined houses, and the cloth of his sail—the torn clothes of the dead.
When currents swept him toward one of those shores, the natives of the place would blow festive trumpets, hang lanterns of colored paper on the streets descending to the sea, and come out in their multitudes. For his part, he exerted himself to entertain the distant crowds. For after all it was for their sakes that he continued to polish the dance of his thoughts. From time to time he would improve it by adding an unexpected leap or a special glide. And when they, too, seemed insufficient to him, he would go so far in his innovations as to courageously tear a plank or two from the waves, or, in a burst of emotion, wave the rags of his sail.
And thus, between one movement and the next, tottering backward and forward, his meditations sang, “I am sadness, I am joy, I am perfect despair! Even if the sea dries up, even if the land is laid waste, I shall go on dancing, I shall go on gliding on high. I am the irrefutable argument!”
With increasing daring he would rise and bend, retreat and approach. With pure spirit his body ruled the waves. It seemed to him that he could hear the cries of admiration from the shores, “See what a man of spirit! He has striven with matter and prevailed! Man has never achieved such transcendence! A spiritual man! A hero of the spirit!”
But when the wind scattered the rags of his sail, and the last of the planks gave way to the churning waves, the portly body of the thinker fell into the water. He beat the waves with practiced gestures of despair. And thus, quivering with panic, he was swept back to shore.
A group of boys playing on the sand mistook him for a heavy sea beast with a man’s head. Full of naughty tricks they prodded him with sticks and pushed him back into the waves. They did not stop until he almost drowned. When he escaped them at last, he kept on flapping his arms but did not succeed in taking off, and his legs, no longer used to walking, gave way beneath his weight. With teetering steps he approached the esplanade from which he could hear the sound of trumpets and cheering crowds.They must have congregated there to honor the dance—he hurried. But pushing his way under the colorful paper lanterns, he heard the weeping and lamentation of the stricken natives who had gathered there to accompany their dead. On the edges of the crowd drunks capered sardonically, throwing their hands backward and forward, aping the agony of the dying.
That night he dragged himself to an abandoned barn. And there, on the straw which shook with the thrashing of his limbs, he gnawed the bread thrown to him as a reward for his prancing.
When he woke up in the morning, his body was empty of motion. Hands outspread and body clumsy, he tried to renew the movement of his thoughts—one step here, one step there. But the foreign barn floor lacked the power of the planks of his own ruined town and the dance did not return to his feet. When he tried to leap, all they produced was a foolish kind of skip. A clownish, drunken caper.
RITES OF SPRING
The origins of this story stem from something I heard in my infancy, in those years which lie sunken beneath the roots of events, and which, when looked at in the burning light of reason, leave nothing but fine ash behind them. The incidents were related by two unfamiliar guests who turned up to share our family meal, and who, as well as I can remember, never visited our home again. Although the events were related on different occasions, and each guest was only vaguely aware of the other’s existence, their tales were woven for some reason into a single shadow in my imagination. Perhaps because of this shadow, and it might well also be because of the dryness of my childhood landscapes—for years this was the only way I imagined the sight of a forest.
I shall not attempt a detailed reconstruction of the pictures their words first painted. I shall only try, as far as possible, to present the tangled voices of the two speakers without being able to guarantee that they have not been confused, here and there, in my memory.
At that time the newspapers were full of warnings to foresters: the hot weather was endangering the ancient forests. Although the summer fires in the mountains had become routine in the island, this time the weather forecast warned of an exceptionally heavy heat wave, so that the villagers were not surprised when they saw flames on the horizon. And in the village, which was no more than a few houses scattered along the sides of the mountain path, the event stopped being the topic of the day the next morning when the wife of the village elder discovered her neighbors’ grandson in her garden picking plums. Her shrieks about handing him over to the local police dispersed the remnants of the impression left by the fire of the evening before.
Some time had passed since the intens
ification of the old tickling inside Berenov’s, the third floor neighbor’s skin, but he was too busy to pay any attention to it. It was almost certainly only a transient annoyance which would soon pass. Nevertheless, when he noticed the first signs under his skin, he made certain attempts to change his habits. He began to eat more as if to nourish himself and the stirring inside him, but he still maintained the weekly routine which had not been disturbed for years. In the morning he would make himself coffee in the kitchen, at ten he would buy a round cinnamon cake from the cafeteria worker pushing her trolley through the offices, and at midday he would lunch in the staff cafeteria. On the Sabbath he would get up half an hour later, spread the halva he had purchased for this purpose on a slice of hallah bread, and wait for the kettle to boil in order to make a fresh brew of tea. Then he would sink back into the armchair made of green plastic strips, and read the weekend paper, or take down a book from his modest library—a classic novel, or a work about social and economic affairs.
At the beginning of the stirring, he also extended a special invitation to his nephew and his wife to have tea with him. He set the glasses out on the table the day before, and bought cookies by the kilo in the grocery store. His nephew came alone because his son had the measles, and his wife stayed at home to look after him. He drank his tea without touching the cookies, and after a short time he said he was sorry but he had to run. When Berenov washed the glasses at the sink, one of the saucers slipped out of his hands and broke.The next day he invited a clerk from his department, as well as the woman from the second floor—the one whose balcony was full of cactuses—so that he would not be left with the cookies if something untoward happened again, such as the clerk being obliged to leave early.
A month later, he received a return invitation from the clerk. He spent a long time getting dressed in front of his mirror, putting on a tie despite the discomfort, as well as the medal he had been awarded for his industriousness. At the clerk’s house he was seated in the place of honor at the head of the table covered with yellow oilcloth, and served his tea before anyone else. But as he had feared, the tie prevented him from enjoying it. Moreover, as he was attempting to take his turn in contributing to the conversation by mentioning one of the names that kept on cropping up—each time in a different order—the tickling inside increased to such an extent that he almost burst out laughing.
But, in spite of these modest changes in his routine, who knows if he would have paid attention to the stirring under his skin without what happened one day on his way home from work.
That same evening the forest in the valley close to the village burned down. The first columns of smoke rose from the middle of the forest, and by the time the villagers arrived the whole heart of the valley was full of tall, dense flames. The ancient forest stretched from the outskirts of the village to beyond the mountain ridge. The tall tree trunks were sunk in heaps of needles, and when walking on them one slipped, shoes sunk into the rot. Darkness developed at the moment of entrance, and it made it seem as if one were carving a way through a wall of trees. Even the cries of a straying wild boar were returned from directions so unexpected that the boar itself took fright and lay down in surrender on the blanket of pine needles. Beams of light danced on the heaps of needles, and through the bird calls, insects’ buzzing, and creaking tree trunks, the gurgling of the little stream could be heard. It gushed down in the brightness through the trees into rock-rimmed pools, where the vapors rose dizzily into the forest’s chiaroscuro.
The forest and the stream were the villagers’ pride. On holidays they would go out to the needle-covered clearings next to the stream, bury their bottles of wine and water-melons in its water, and at midday, after a freezing dip, they would take out their packages of bread and cheese and remove the chilled delicacies from their hiding places.
Life in the hilly villages of the island proceeded according to laws of its own, unintelligible to the waves of tourists from the mainland. Even when the time came for the young men to leave the courtyards with the drying sunflower seeds and lizards to hire themselves out in the cities of the mainland, they were not assimilated among the city dwellers. With their stern, heavy tread, they stood out on the boulevards, as if they had never stopped climbing the mountain paths. When they returned to the island, the empty rooms of the old people awaited them. Soon the memories of the mainland faded from their minds and were completely covered by the whispering of the forests and the sharp mountain air.
That evening the fire did not succeed in taking hold of the ancient trees and felling them at once. First it climbed along the bark to the branches, and only when the trunk was left bald and blazing did the tree move from its place and fall. The piles of needles were covered with flames as if with tender plants, and quickly collapsed.
From their elders the villagers knew there was nothing to be done when an ancient forest caught fire. They watched from a distance as the local firefighters dutifully passed water in a chain to the edges of the fire, but their full pails were not even enough to quench the smoldering embers.
On the initiative of the school teacher and his pupils, the villagers dug a ditch between the forest and the village. Over the shadowy row of workers evening fell, red and solemn. Sparks flew and heated the night sky. When they had finished, the diggers gathered with their tools at the top of the village and gazed at the burning valley which looked like a red city spreading over the mountain range: The last battles were still being waged between fire and stream, with the flames flaring up wildly over the stream’s bed and dropping down again in roaring billows of black smoke.
The fire stopped at the edge of the forest even before reaching the ditch, as if it knew its appointed limits in advance and had no intention of overstepping them. Only the next afternoon did the black cloud slide over the valley to the sea, covering the window sills with a fine film of soot. The blue shutters of the houses stayed shut and a new, direct light whipped the courtyards.
That night’s news broadcasts on the island began with the forest fire. The broadcaster announced that the experts forecast an ongoing wave of fires, and called on the population and the fire fighters not to give way to despair. At the end of the broadcast, he quoted the official version which blamed the outbreak of the fire on neglected embers of shepherds’ fires.
Inside their houses, behind their closed shutters, the villagers dismissed the voice coming from the radio with a shrug of their shoulders.They gathered around the elders in silence and listened intently to their words.
When Berenov left the office he felt a burning in his throat, and recalled that he had already felt a burning that morning in exactly the same place. When he crossed the square he decided to go into the pharmacy. And when he took the medicine from the beefy pharmacist, with her too stiffly starched white gown, he felt an urgent need to relieve himself of the softness between his legs. He asked if he could go to the lavatory. The pharmacist looked him suspiciously up and down and said curtly that the place was not tidy. Berenov acquiesced in advance to the poor conditions, supposed that she was over-scrupulous, or that there was no toilet paper there. He took the key and trailed behind her to the door leading to the courtyard. There the pharmacist pointed to a structure stationed behind bunches of flowers for sale in olive tins.
Berenov groped for the lock with the key and went inside. He closed the window which was open to the courtyard and the flowers, holding his breath. In the narrow space he struggled with his briefcase, his hat, and his clothes. He placed the key, which was attached to a little loop of rope, on the concrete window sill. He squatted down and did his business with a feeling of relief, pulled the curving wire chain of the water tank, and a dirty stream burst into the hollow between the footholds. He took his briefcase, hanging miraculously on the door handle, and his hat suspended on the knob of the bolt, and turned to take the key. But as if under a spell cast by the pharmacist, the key slipped and fell. Berenov searched around his feet, but the key had fallen into the murky pool. Hoping t
o find it close to the rim, he groped with two fingers, but the key was not to be found. In dread of facing the pharmacist’s look, he pushed his whole hand in and swept it to and fro. A dense, slippery lump pushed into his fingers. In the nausea which seized him he began to shiver, and he shook his fingers. He quickly slid his hand in deeper, close to the drain. His shirt got wet. He finally snatched the key, but there was a bit of paper sticking to the little loop of the rope. With his dry hand he kept hold of his hat and briefcase. He stepped out and locked the door with the wet key.
In the yard the flowers stood red and yellow in the tins. On the other side the pharmacy door was pockmarked and full of locks. He felt dizzy.
Berenov pushed the iron door open. In the back room big bottles stood in straw baskets, and two pharmacists bent over a table. In the corner he discovered a basin. He washed his hands with plenty of soap, and he also washed his shirt cuff.Then he washed the key and the little loop of rope and he trembled. He was afraid that the pharmacist would see that the key was wet, and he put it down without a word on the shelf under the cabinets holding the medicine. Drops formed around the key. The pharmacist took it and gave him a sharp look. He bowed his head in thanks, and went out.
In the square he was dazed by the noise and the light. The smell of grilled meat wafted from the steak shops, and people licked ice cream cones. With his dry hand he held his briefcase and hat, and he spread the fingers open on the other one. The skin of his arm under the wet cuff stung. Berenov almost stumbled.
The next day he did not go to work, nor did he go down to the grocery store to phone and let them know. For a long time he shuffled back and forth from the rusty basin in the bathroom to the kitchen sink, and he no longer knew if the slipperiness on his fingers was a coating of excrement or soap slime. Afterward he sat down in the armchair whose plastic strips were hollowed out in the shape of his back, and waited tensely for some time, until with a feeling of relief he noticed a sharp pinching in his chest.
Hold on to the Sun Page 13
