Brown Scarf Blues

by Mois Benarroch

  Brown Scarf Blues

  Mois Benarroch

  Translated by Steven Capsuto

  “Brown Scarf Blues”

  Written By Mois Benarroch

  Copyright © 2015 Mois Benarroch

  All rights reserved

  Distributed by Babelcube, Inc.

  www.babelcube.com

  Translated by Steven Capsuto

  Cover Design © 2015 Lyah Benarroch

  “Babelcube Books” and “Babelcube” are trademarks of Babelcube Inc.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Brown Scarf Blues

  2008

  2002

  1988

  1966

  1976

  1997

  1982

  1999

  1981

  1975

  1983

  Fragments of a fragmented childhood

  Your Review and Word-of-Mouth Recommendations Will Make a Difference

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  1.

  I found a scarf in Seville and lost it in Madrid. A pale, pale brown Pierre Cardin scarf. I lost it in Madrid, perhaps at the Café Gijón. Usually what I lose at the Café Gijón is cell phones, at least three times I’ve left my phone at the Café Gijón, but this time it was a scarf I'd found in Seville. I last saw it at the Café Gijón, though I could have lost it at El Corte Inglés department store in Nuevos Ministerios when I changed into the long underpants I bought for twenty-eight euros because my legs were freezing. I never felt colder in Madrid than the day I lost the brown scarf. I found it in a restaurant in the Jewish Quarter of Seville, when I was there with a group of Spanish Moroccans and I was the last to leave. After lunch I went to have an Italian coffee at the counter and on my way out the only things on the rack were my jacket and the scarf, which might have belonged to someone else who was still in the restaurant. But I half-remembered it belonging to one of the thirty Jews in my group, so I took the scarf and went around to each participant, announcing that I’d found a scarf and was looking for its owner. But no one owned up to owning the scarf. Returning to the restaurant was out of the question and I was starting to enjoy its warmth and delicate texture, I had already put it around my neck and there it stayed for two weeks till I lost it in Madrid. Maybe at the Café Gijón, maybe at El Corte Inglés, maybe on the Paseo de la Castellana, or on a street called Calle Orense, between the Café Gijón and the Calle Orense.

  A scarf always brings back memories. The first memory is a mother wearing it warmly around her neck on a cool day, others include the sore-throat scarves of adolescence, innumerable, filled with antibiotics and occurring almost monthly. Or lovers’ scarves, red, always red, sometimes over her black sweater, so much beauty, seldom on her naked body. And it occurs to me that I don’t recall ever buying a scarf. I always find them in odd places or they’re gifts filled with caresses from women I love, or sometimes from a friend. Sometimes, it’s “You like that scarf? Well, keep it.” Scarves nearly always have that bisexual quality, they are not insistently gendered, which almost everything is now, and contrary to belief that is not always how things were, the lines drawn between man and woman were not so clear, for instance not long ago male actors did not object to playing female roles, and vice versa, men wore high heels, and the difference between a skirt and pantaloons was not always so distinct. From such sexual freedom we are creating a different religion of gender and the sexes.

  What was I doing in Seville? Or rather, what was I doing secondarily, besides finding that brown scarf? I was going to the Three Cultures Foundation. Thirty of us were going there to find out what became of the Jews of northern Morocco over the past two centuries, why it happened and where they dispersed to. Just like my scarf, which came to me by chance and which I then lost by chance so it could end up on the neck of someone else. A scarf is also a risk and a menace, a weapon for strangulation if someone decides to kill us. A scarf is ready-made for strangulation, even if you put it on the normal way with one end of the scarf on your back and the other on your torso, or if you knot it like a kind of necktie, or even with it unknotted with both ends straight down on your chest and belly, it can always be a menace. Actually, though, I can’t think of any film where someone gets strangled with a scarf. The object’s hot connotation would deter such a common use.

  It had been a hard year, and I was looking for something, or someone, in that chilly Spanish November. The year started with the unexpected death of my best friend Alan, who’d decided to have weight-loss surgery, and continued in autumn, during the holiday of Sukkot, with my sister’s death. In between those two events I sold the house I’d owned for twenty-seven years, sold the dream of living in an old house with high ceilings, which cost a bundle to maintain, and I moved to a middle-class home. Dreams die suddenly. Dreams die in droves. A scarf was what I needed.

  I feel desolate right now, in the scarfless present. But I’m back from Madrid and away from the cold, that slicing cold that gave me backaches after half an hour of walking through the streets that I always enjoyed in that city. It’s the same sadness I felt before finding the scarf, the scarf that eased the unbearable pain. While wearing it, I could wonder who it belonged to before it reached my neck. It seemed fairly new, so it probably had an owner, maybe it was a gift, as my other scarves had been, maybe two owners. A man or a woman? It could have been anyone’s, a civil servant’s or a mobster’s. Even a brand-name scarf is affordable, and civil servants or unemployed people can buy one without having to tighten their belt. Maybe it was a prostitute’s scarf, the one she wore the day she met her true love so she could go on to an ordinary, normal post-adolescent life, and maybe her boyfriend knows nothing of her work, she tells him she works in an office in the suburbs, so there’s no fear he’ll drop in unannounced. Just another office worker, or she says she answers phones. Maybe the scarf belonged to a big businessman with a nice Saab or a Mercedes, maybe his wife or lover or daughter or granddaughter gave it to him, a scarf can come from anyone. Maybe a man or woman who was cold and starting to get a sore throat bought it at El Corte Inglés.

  They’re dying, lots of people I know. I notice that I get news of more and more deaths of people born from 1955 to 1960, friends from years ago, I find out about one when I run into his wife who I hadn’t seen in years, she says it the way you’d tell an anecdote, I don’t recall or never knew if they stayed married or if they divorced before he died. He died suddenly, of a heart attack on a business trip, after a day of skiing. He was one of my best friends twenty years ago until one day he said I was a horrible person and he never wanted to see me again. I don’t quite get why some people have to end things so badly or justify why they don’t want to see you anymore. I think it’s normal that some friendships, even intense ones, just need to end, to make room for new ones. Ours was intense for five or six years, and I convinced him to take a year off from work to write the book he’d dreamed of. He did, he wrote two of them, and then apparently (we were not talking by the time they came out) he realized writing was a long road to poverty, and he preferred to live rich and die young in a foreign country. I say he preferred that because we decide our own lives and deaths. Another who died a year ago, a composer, born in 1957, was also a close friend of mine in those university days. I learned of his death on the flap of a book he wrote, in those terribly final parentheses (1957–2009), the second number is always a harsh, unchangeable ending. In the book, I learned he had become a rabbi, and the text combined Kabbalah with music. It’s not like I knew such a huge number of people that so many should die in one year. Might we all be doomed and predestined to die young? We’re a generation that saw great changes, those born from 1955 to 1960,
the first to get massive amounts of antibiotics and vaccines, and the first fed on industrialized food, we’re the second generation after the big war, which created an earlier generation that keeps proving itself the most selfish of all, a postwar generation that gave themselves pensions without wanting kids, that has thought only of their material well-being as if the world around them didn’t exist, and who haven’t thought for a second about the generations that will still have to live on this planet. And it’s a generation that lives and lives and doesn’t want to stop living and keeps on living and getting tons of money, draining the national health system dry. Maybe they even deserve it, after that war, but then again maybe that’s what’s killing us: if postwar generation 1 won’t die and make room for others, then it’s postwar generation 2 who must die, a generation stressed about their future buying power and stressed about their chances of a peaceful old age. So who left whom without a scarf? Now generation 3 has been born into a different reality and they think only of their most immediate future, while we are still thinking about what world we’ll leave our descendants, and it isn’t great, it is not great. In Greece and the U.S., clouds have started overshadowing two very different economies, but what they have in common is that these two generations cannot continue at the rate they’re going. You can’t retire at sixty and then live another thirty years unless you have at least five children, somewhere it must explode. It is exploding.

  2.

  The restaurant is called Papagaio. It was raining. Hard. Very hard. Alan was bundled up in an orange scarf. He liked extravagant colors. Alan seemed nervous, which was appropriate since he only had three weeks to live. Somehow I knew, the way people know in advance that something bad is coming, we know. We don’t know how we know, but we know. But I tried to reassure him, tried to be optimistic, though I did not support his having the operation. Maybe I should have tried to dissuade him, the way I did two years earlier. But Alan had gained another twenty pounds in less than a year, and by then I think he weighed over three hundred pounds. He would go into the hospital that evening and the operation would be the next day. It was past three, and we’d been discussing where to eat. We considered going to Hummus, or the Hummuseria in the Tapiot district, or to Pinati, which was nearby on Yad Harutzim Street. But it seemed too cheap for such an occasion. He said, “Wherever you like,” and I said the same, we were in his car, a company car from the place where he had worked for five years. A metallic-gray Hyundai i30. It was raining and Alan was taking some bags of groceries to his daughter’s place. We arrived. Abu Tor. The daughter’s other half came down and they exchanged some words that I don’t recall and he took the bags up. Then we swung back towards the restaurant. We parked about a hundred yards away but Alan had trouble breathing and it was raining. Hard. Very hard. It was cold. It was February, his final February. In the end he was the one who chose Papagaio. He had never been there, even though he liked meat restaurants. Papagaio is a Brazilian barbecue place with an all-you-can-eat meat platter. I recommend the entrecôte. It was late by Israeli standards, but the restaurant was not empty. Lunch was still underway at four tables. The restaurant is spacious, but a bit austere. Dark wooden tables, somewhere between gray and black. Meats emerged from the back of the room and made their way to customers. I suggested the all-you-can-eat deal but Alan wasn’t hungry, and I wasn’t very hungry either, though I occasionally enjoy a dose of animal protein in my nearly vegetarian diet. I didn’t touch meat for years, but eventually I realized it contains the proteins my body recognizes best. After a childhood with two plates of animal protein a day, noon and night. The body remembers. Alan was born in Israel but spent his childhood in South Africa, his father was a good rich racist who hated blacks and left him nothing when he died of a heart attack at sixty-six. When his father died, I made Alan go to his funeral to say Kaddish. I took him to the airport and put him on the plane. Almost by force. His parents divorced when he was ten, and two years later he returned to Israel with his mother. In South Africa he ate a lot of meat because his father, too, was a real barbecue lover. Less so here. Gastric bypass surgery, that’s what they call it. Sounds simple. Widely recommended. Still, Alan was coughing a lot that day, more than he’d already been coughing in the previous months, and that’s why he even quit smoking those little cigars we used to smoke together. I asked if the doctors knew about that, and he said yes, and that the doctors presumably knew what they were doing. I asked for the umpteenth time whether he had heart problems and he said no, though a few days later I learned he did, from something his wife said, she was still his wife then. Now she’s his widow.

  His daughter’s coming over this afternoon. He died a month ago. She was in preschool with my son. They’re both twenty-four now, the age I was when I got married, now they wait longer. Statistically. I met Alan through his daughter, about twenty years ago. Just after he separated from his wife. He came to my house with his daughter, and his daughter went into the bedroom to play with my son. He sat in the living room and said nothing. For months all we would say was, “Hey, how’s it going?” and “What are you up to?” He had stopped painting. He had painted and studied painting and even taught classes, he had several exhibitions. In Israel and abroad, in Ireland I think, and one in New York or London. I’m not sure. He never talked about his successes much back then. Maybe you could find his name mentioned as a rising young painter of his era. People were forgetting him, he was forgetting himself.

  The painters in my books are all based on him. For years, I told him he should go back to painting, that one could make a living at it. But he didn’t believe me. One August on Rakevet Street, where he rented a small apartment surrounded by trees, he painted five or six of his last pieces. That was 1993. After that all he created were covers for my books. Sometimes he talked about painting after he retired. That won’t happen now. It won’t.

  It’s over.

  Alan’s life is over. He always drew little imaginary animals for the children, generally called chirpaletas, or sometimes they were also chirpalezas or chirpetas. My kids grew up with a bunch of chirpaletas and he always smiled when he drew for children.

  No, I didn’t try to dissuade him. I should have. At least I should have tried. But Alan felt awful and was always very tired, so when he came to visit a few months ago and said he had made up his mind and had no other choice, I said nothing.

  “It’s just that if I don’t do it now I could be dead in four or five years.”

  His words. Five years. Five years sounds like a lot of years, Alan. It sounds infinite. Five years.

  Now I read, “Ten percent chance of complications, one to two percent chance of death.” Thank you modern medicine. Thank you.

  No, I never meant to write this book. Maybe that’s why it’s urgent. It calls to me. The book calls to me.

  Atalia, one of Alan’s close friends, told me just before the funeral that the only thing she thought when she heard the news was the word MERDE. Multilingual as I am, I think that is the right word, the perfect word. Merde means shit but it’s more than that, it’s, well, Merde. A cry against injustice, against the world, against death. It means to hell with something. Death, merde. Śmierć, merde! He once told me that Atalia was his soulmate and that if he were younger he’d have married her, he is (was?) about fifteen years older than her.

  The book calls to me. “Mourn. Now. Mourn now. More now!” The book is calling to me.

  “Maybe you could write about that,” a friend said. “Maybe something will come to you.” As if the act of writing earned the writer a consolation prize. It doesn’t. Writing is not a consolation, or a form of psychotherapy. People get that wrong. Writing is the creation of words. Sometimes to fill the void. Sometimes to fill the void that the dead leave. Alan dead. I’m getting used to the idea slowly. If it’s possible to get used to the idea of death. We live in life, and the people we know, we know them when they’re alive, so we don’t know death and cannot conceive death and death does not exist. Something is over,
I won’t drink coffee with Alan ever again every Friday with a thin cigar and he won’t describe some new woman he met, starting with her boobs, always with her boobs, especially her boobs, sometimes with a word or two about her ass, and always getting the gender of “boobs” wrong in Hebrew, since in Hebrew boobs are masculine, like in French, les seins, but he was always saying, in the feminine, that she had shadayim yafot, and sometimes I would correct him and say shadayim yafim. The way I often correct my wife. Though sometimes I get it wrong myself. Boobs should be feminine in all languages. That won’t happen anymore. But if I remember those get-togethers now it’s like they’re happening at this moment while I’m writing or when I remember them. They’re happening in remembered reality, remembered, not imagined. And even if it were imagined what difference can there be between that memory and the memory of a live person. None.

  This culture does not know how to die. We know nothing about what death is. We don’t know how to talk with the dead. We don’t know how to communicate with them as hundreds of cultures do.

  But I spoke with Alan after his death. Well, not spoke, connected with him for a few days. It started before the funeral.

  Now, two weeks and two days later I’m making a CD of music we used to listen to together, music he liked, or some songs he never had the chance to hear, songs I meant to play for him when he came over or on one of our road trips to Tel Aviv.

  The first is Bob Dylan’s “I’m Not There,” one of Dylan’s old Basement Tapes with The Band. I rediscovered those songs recently and made a CD for his car. Though “I’m Not There” isn’t on the double LP from the seventies, it was recently in the film of that title and I put it on the CD that I made for him. “I’m not there, I’m gone.”

  The latest to arrive, too late for Alan, was the most recent Bob Dylan album, Together through Life, which I planned to give him before the operation. He’d asked for it as a birthday gift but I gave him a different album, Luka Bloom’s Amsterdam, since the Dylan seemed expensive and I told him I’d find it for him another time. Another time came but the album arrived two days after our lunch together. So I thought I would give it to him after the operation, once he recovered. But when his wife said he wasn’t doing well and there had been a complication and they were going to operate a second time, I knew. I knew he wasn’t coming out of this, he wasn’t. And I even thought he would have preferred not to come out of it half alive, disabled, without his already failing kidneys, in a wheelchair, mostly I feared he’d end up in a coma for many years, that would be the worst for Alan. I think he feared that, too, I think that in a way he decided to give the hell up when he saw what awaited him.