Private Novelist

by Nell Zink

  EVERYTHING IS THE SAME SIZE,

  BUT SOME THINGS ARE FARTHER AWAY IN THE FIFTH DIMENSION.

  I remember standing on a college playing field and deducing that the world itself, which appears very large, must on this theory be very close to me in the fifth dimension—and it was. My explanation of the phenomenon “horizon” was truly refined, but I’ve forgotten it now.

  Now it is noon, and Zohar has spent the morning catching up on his reading of this, his second exposure to Sailing Toward the Sunset. His criticisms are invaluable:

  “Is Yigal very fat?”

  “No, why do you ask?”

  “Because he can eat half a gallon of chocolate ice cream in a sitting.”

  I take a didactic tone. “Zohar, skinny people can eat lots of ice cream if they want. They just don’t eat much else that day. It’s not like the way you used to eat an ice cream, then lunch, then an ice cream, then another ice cream, then dinner, then ice cream . . .” He grows bored and leaves the room, returning in a moment to ask:

  “What is your relation to Yigal?”

  “I’m his upstairs neighbor.”

  “You didn’t have an affair? Did he go to Switzerland before or after I went to Bhutan?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then how do you know what his penis looks like?”

  The fictional Zohar was too busy to remember that he had left his wife to the tender mercies of an introverted, easily embarrassed professional assassin. Crouched in an ice cave only two hundred yards from their position, he waited for the Bhutanese border police to break camp. Days were wasting, and he knew the llama-trekkers would pass nearby only once. The guards were drunk day and night on hot yak’s-milk liquor mixed with honey wine, but they slept standing up, leaning on their rifles. All around, the snow was stained with the blood of the lemmings and chinchillas which were their only food. Zohar’s patience was wearing thin. Squatting in a tiny room made entirely of ice, too low for him to stand up and too narrow to lie down, he had whiled away five long days and nights pondering the intricacies of the Great Fugue, when suddenly he heard a whistling ping. A bullet had struck near the entrance of his hiding place, releasing a shower of ice crystals which stuck to his face, melted, and became uncomfortably wet. Zohar’s tolerance was at an end, and he stepped from the cave, raised the GPS in the air, and yelled, “Mossad!” The border guards drew close in curiosity, their rifles raised. “Mossad!” Zohar repeated firmly. “Israel! Mossad!” Comprehension dawned, and the terrified Bhutanese dropped their guns and ran at top speed down the mountain. Correctly, Zohar had guessed that word of the Israeli secret service’s recent descent into incompetence and chaos would not have reached the isolated puppet regimes of the Himalayas, but as he crossed the mountain pass he cried bitterly in shame at having drawn the guards’ attention to his déclassé Middle Eastern origins. His only comfort was that he would—probably—never see them again. Looking to the sky, he sought in its vast reaches oblivion from the horror of what he had been driven to by excruciating necessity. Then, lowering his eyes to the sunny plain, he saw the line of llamas, their gay Peruvian halter-tassels whipping in the cold breeze. Zohar jogged down the rocky incline, dialing as he went. They turned their heads, smelling salt (his boots were still covered with salt) on the wind, and you can imagine the looks on the faces of the American advertising executives and lawyers, led by a temp administrative assistant in marketing, as Zohar’s solitary figure advanced upon them from a near-vertical wall of ice, talking on the phone.

  “That’s great!” I told him. “Don’t let them get away!”

  He folded up the phone and introduced himself, and within moments he was allowed to join them. After weeks of walking across a frozen wasteland, Zohar was again walking across a frozen wasteland, but this time with big, hairy, decorated animals to keep him company. He called me again in a panic when he found out that the llama trek cost $250 per day, since his travel per diem is only $100. I reminded him how cheap the rest of his trip had been.

  Yigal and Mary took their time exploring New York. Yigal had an especial interest in the G, L, and 7 trains and related maps in the public library. Mary was eager to spend hours looking carefully at Max Ernst’s Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale, the quillwork on Native American slippers, and the Paracas Textile. They met every night in Chinatown for dinner. One day they went together to the Cloisters, and another day they walked over the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. Finally, one morning, Yigal said it was time to catch Metro North to Rye.

  They arrived at Rye Playland in separate cabs. Yigal walked slowly from arcade to arcade toward the Derby Racers, waiting until he saw Mary at a distance. Well rehearsed and armed with a pistol, she was to provide cover, but instead she was crying inconsolably not far from a Whack-A-Mole. Yigal ran up and put his arms around her. “My sweet,” he said, kissing her face over and over, “what’s wrong?”

  “It’s a polar bear game,” she sobbed.

  He looked up and read the label twice to be sure. “No, sweetheart, these aren’t seals. They’re moles. Look at their noses.” He turned her again toward the sick, corrupt, and reprehensible game of murder and violence. “They have pointy little noses and big pink paws.”

  A child approached, seized the rubber mallet, and put a token in the slot. The moles descended, then emerged briefly and unpredictably, like seals at their breathing holes, but still they could not evade the quick, violent swats of the angry child, whose concentration created an atmosphere of frightening stillness in the midst of the pounding and beeping of the game. Yigal led Mary away. “They’re moles,” he said again.

  There was no one in line for the Derby Racers. Yigal and Mary looked on in awe as the empty ride slowed heavily and majestically, like a planet dying on its axis, then presented their tickets and chose horses. As the building gathered speed, both were conscious of steadily increasing ecstasy, of great power, of the strength of art unfettered by commerce, of freedom from the limitations of the body, of the flimsy nature of the ephemeral structure around them, whose readiness for collapse seemed only to increase its splendor, and of its awesome beauty. There were no mirrors, no painted figures—just the race of the horses, their mouths foaming, and wooden railings, and at the center a small man who, Yigal could see, was biting his nails while chewing gum. This, Yigal knew, was the man Rafi wanted.

  Mary stayed on her horse for the next round while Yigal made his move.

  “Lamerchakim mafligot hasfinot,” he whispered.

  “Rafi can suck my dick,” the man replied. He shook the hair out of his eyes. “I told that motherfucker several times there’s nothing left. What does he want, a DNA sample from every man on earth?” He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and began digging around in a desk while Yigal fingered the hypodermic in his pocket. “Hang on, let me show you . . .” He took a medallion and a black-and-white photograph from the drawer. “Take a look. This came off the last guy with any connection to the case, and this is a picture of what he looks like dead.”

  Yigal looked down with interest. “Wow, you’re right. This guy is so clearly dead. I never saw anything so sloppy in my life. What’s this thing again?” He looked more closely at the medallion.

  “From the British Museum. Believed lost with the Dakar, now commonly known to be in a desk in Rye Playland.”

  “Can I have it?”

  “Sure. Forwarding address?”

  “No, thanks. Wow,” Yigal said. “This is cool.” He stepped back onto the revolving platform and found Mary. “Look, Mary, this is something really old.”

  Mary studied it. “It’s strange. I know it’s supposed to be a wheel, but from certain angles it looks sort of like a skull—what are you going to do with it?”

  “It was stolen from the British Museum.”

  “Look at the other side—it’s a seal and a woman’s breasts. You should send it back to the British Museum and get them to say what it is.”

  “I have a better i
dea. Put it in your back pocket and pretend it’s not there.”

  “Okay.” She waited a moment, concentrating. “It’s gone! Do you want to ride again?”

  Actually, it wasn’t gone at all. Mary had liked it and wanted to keep it. She thought Yigal was silly to throw it away.

  CHAPTER 11

  YIGAL’S REASONS FOR HIS ACTION were as follows: The Dakar, purchased in 1968 in England by the Israeli navy, vanished without a trace on its maiden voyage. Mr. Pickwick seemed to be connected with both the Dolphin Star Temple in Mount Rainier, Maryland, and his apartment on Basel Street. An ancient relic of the House of David bore the image of a silkie.

  This structure seemed to Yigal like a house of cards. If one element was removed or changed, the whole thing would fall, and then instead of having to understand the power relations of the disparate elements, he could extract the card he wanted and be done with it. The hypothesis Yigal wanted to test by depositing the medallion in the silkie ATM could be summarized in one word: monotheism. Are the House of David and cash advances to silkies handled by the same guy? A positive answer, Yigal thought, would be a real convenience.

  Just a week before, Yigal, a logical positivist, would not have regarded the question as meaningful. Now, like Hamlet, he was somewhat more open-minded. Unfortunately, it did not occur to him that the medallion might be a mass-produced popular item worn by silkies as a brief fad in the 1890s, with no connection to the House of David at all, unless you include its role as evidence that the last remaining heir, instead of marrying a Jewish woman, had married someone about as unlike a Jewish woman as a person can get, namely a silkie; and that this closely guarded fact, which effectively put an end to all hope of a Messiah, came out only at the woman’s death, when the medallion was found on a fish-gut string around her neck. Her five grotesquely deformed children had died in infancy, but their graves, under a row of lilac trees in the Jewish cemetery in Fishguard, were empty. Had the bodies been removed for religious reasons and reburied in unmarked graves outside the walls? How did an Israeli sailor come into possession of the medallion, and who ordered his murder?

  I’m not saying that’s what happened, but it didn’t occur to Yigal, which shows that the luxury of married life was beginning to soften his intellect. Yigal was conscious that he might be missing something very important and obvious, but he couldn’t imagine what.

  I was having a busy week. Activity at the port was increasing, mostly because of a phenomenon I could easily explain, but didn’t care to: a constant traffic of dolphins over, around, and under Mr. Pickwick. This had brought out, in addition to the religious and disco elements, every young mother in Tel Aviv. An intimidating riot of strollers blocked access to the seawall, on which toddlers were perched, their mothers holding their waists and telling them, “Look! Look! Dolphins!” The dolphins leaped obligingly from wave to wave. Spinner dolphins, common dolphins, spotted dolphins, bottlenose, a pair of young minke whales—everyone was there, and the crowd was getting thicker and thicker.

  It reminded me of the practice Pierre Louÿs, in his turn-of-the-century soft-core freak-book Aphrodite, attributed to the ancient Greeks: Women, wearing whatever flattered them most, which in the case of hot post-adolescents meant nothing at all, would loiter near a certain Athenian wall on which men were in the habit of writing their own names, the names of women, and a price per woman. When a woman saw her name connected with a man and a price she could accept, she would stand under it for a while, waiting for him.

  I always wondered what Aphrodite was doing in the Modern Library, usually a squeaky-clean repository of family classics. The heroine of Aphrodite was the most beautiful of the professional courtesans (strange how inoffensive that word sounds) and a nymphomaniac bisexual. Her beauty is darker, more full, more exotic than that of the Greeks—accordingly, it comes out after a bit that she is a “Hebrew.” She mesmerizes men with her native love poetry, “My tummy is a baby goat,” “My head is terrible like an army with banners,” etc., which according to Louÿs leaves Greek erotic poetry in the dust. In the end she dies painfully, imprisoned for impersonating the goddess, but not before a sadistic Greek takes her portrait in marble in the throes of a love I will not discuss or describe. The book was a gift to me. I read it and forgot about it until, years later, I found it and threw it in the trash.

  Many people think it is wrong to throw books in the trash. They think because they happen to love some books, they should love all the others too. Their relation to books, regardless of their content, is one of respectful stewardship buoyed by paranoia, and they would see my disposal of Aphrodite as a criminal combination of censorship and infanticide. These are the people who give all their worst books, which they would not read again, to charity. This is surely why much of my most disturbing childhood reading was done at Girl Scout camp, where I read The View from Pompey’s Head, a long novel about the one-drop rule (the protagonist discovers that he is black), two years in a row and memorized a manual for seducing teenage boys—I remember how it said I should sit: left elbow on back of chair, right hand on left knee, left leg crossed over right leg to produce illusion of maximum thigh-plumpness.

  It is a common practice in America today to write outraged, grief-stricken articles about library administration, on the lines of “Crouching by the back door like a demonic hungry hell-toad was an immense garbage dumpster filled with—can you imagine the horror—books!” They do not stop to imagine the tears of boredom in the dusty eyes of the bibliographers who are charged with determining, before each book is discarded, that it has never been read, has never been cited, was obsolete at publication, and will cost eighty dollars to deacidify.

  How do people come to love books for their own sake?

  My theory is that the process begins in early childhood. A child who is reading a book quickly becomes conscious that he has never been quieter, and has never appeared more intelligent. He need only look up for a moment to see that his parents are swimming in effulgent self-satisfaction and pride. Long before he can read himself, he finds that allowing himself to be read to makes his parents more docile, gentle, and patient. “Junior loves books more than anything,” they proudly say as he chews on a corner of Pat the Bunny following a performance. Mentally, they see him surrounded by books—a lawyer, a professor. . . . In his teens he discovers that reading has the power to liberate him from other chores. “I can’t do that now,” he calls out from under a blanket, “I’ve got ten more pages.” The parents see a lawyer, a professor. . . . They forget that he is reading one of the later, less coherent sequels to Tarzan of the Apes. Jane has been kidnapped again—will Tarzan arrive in time to save her from being used sexually? Who is most effective in a fair fight—apes, Bantu, or little tiny white people ten inches tall?

  I read only the first twenty volumes. I kept them in a special pink box with a handle, like a lunch box. Every afternoon I practiced in the woods around our house. My goal, to climb from one tree to another without touching the ground, was quite limited and specific, but I never attained it. It was a mature white pine and hardwood forest where most trees had their first branches about thirty feet up.

  Around this time, I was known to perform strange feats of strength in the president’s physical fitness thing (I can’t remember what it was called), some Nixonian program to toughen up the youth of America. Asked to hang by their hands with their chins over a bar, other little girls would drop after five seconds, but I stayed for a minute, until I was asked to let go by the teacher. I did something like seventy-five sit-ups, with my legs straight on the floor. My weak event was the six-hundred-yard walk/run, perhaps because Edgar Rice Burroughs had emphasized brute strength over aerobic fitness.

  Mr. Pickwick remained motionless in the water. The authorities still denied its existence. It was almost forgotten in the general joy over the “gamboling” and “playing” of the toothed whales in all their variety, their constant comings and goings, their eager departures for assignations, and their hurried
returns.

  Last night (I assume the reader has no difficulty detecting shifts from fiction to nonfiction, but in case there is some confusion, an explanatory note: everything I write about Avner Shats and Sailing Toward the Sunset is 100 percent true) I went with Zohar to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art to hear a performance of avant-garde classical music. It turned out to cost sixty shekels, so during the first half I took a walk to Dizengoff Square to see the revolving multicolored fountain shoot flames while loudspeakers blared Swan Lake. Suspended on an aerial plaza over Dizengoff Street, the fountain, which bears an inscription to something like world peace, may be the least tasteful object in the world. I looked up at it, laughing and smiling, for several minutes and then returned to the concert hall, where the intermission was just starting. Zohar introduced me to a number of composers, novelists, poets, visual artists, and men who said they were all of the above or some lesser combination. I told each of the men that I was writing an English version of Sailing Toward the Sunset by Avner Shats, based not on the Hebrew original but on rumors and hearsay. Despite the supposed artistic sophistication of each of them, all became confused. None had heard of Shats’ book. I am pleased to think that in the carapace of their dependence on mass media I was able to pry open a crack through which each was afforded a glimpse of Shats’ work, despite the fact that it still has not been reviewed except by the radio personality who consigned it to the abyss.

  CHAPTER 12

  BEFORE I WROTE ABOUT ÖDÖN VON Horváth’s novel Youth Without God, I thought I should check that it’s available in English. I know it’s available in French, because the only mention I’ve ever seen of it was as Jeunesse sans dieu. Von Horváth, an Austrian, was known for broadly cynical and harsh socialist satires like the play Faith, Hope, and Charity and the novel The Eternal Philistine, literary equivalents of the caricatures of George Grosz.