by Nell Zink
“No.”
“And the beauty part is, no one but the target has any idea what’s going on, and the whole system is passive. What did you say?”
“You’re talking a lot. Are you lonely?”
“Not at the moment.”
“I have some questions about Rafi,” Yigal said. His boss happened to be Zohar’s uncle. In compliance with Zohar’s request, I am putting him in Avner’s book, even though John le Carré already put him in another book. “I’m concerned that he may be disappointed by what I’m planning for tomorrow.”
“Do you want a tarot reading?” Yigal shook his head. “Do you want my advice? Asking Zohar won’t get you anywhere. The whole family just thinks Rafi is cute.”
“Sure.”
“Okay, here’s the scenario: Rafi Eitan vs. the name of Moshe Dayan. Who wins?”
“I see your point. Thanks, Nell, you’ve been a big help, as always.” He gave me a kiss on the cheek and took his coffee with him downstairs.
In the morning I went along to the port. We were in a festive mood. Mary seemed especially full of life, fidgeting in the backseat of the taxi. Yigal looked nervous. After a long and difficult discussion, he had agreed to hold the video camera while Mary did all the work. She wanted to get a nice film of what went on above the water, in case she missed something.
The seawall was nearly empty. Only a few tired ravers were left, drooling and hiccuping on the concrete, while a cadre of religious men said their prayers. With the sun behind us, we could see the submarine’s outline clearly. Yigal and Mary crossed the seawall. He squatted with the camera, out of sight, while Mary took off her jeans. I stayed behind, in my arms what could turn out to be our mission’s most important element: a forlorn, threadbare, one-eyed teddy bear known as “Meyer.” It belonged to Yigal and might once have been intended to represent Winnie-the-Pooh.
“Rolling,” Yigal said, and she leaped into the waves. Barely a minute later she was back, carrying a tiny strip of parchment. “Here,” she said, still climbing up the rocks, and gave it to Yigal. He read it (“Moshe Dayan” was all it said), rolled it up, and punched it with his thumb through a hole in the neck-seam of the neglected toy. The effect was dramatic. The bear, Meyer, whom we were later to come to know so well, immediately turned his head, gave Yigal a despairing look, raised his arms, brought his blunt paws together like pincers, and ripped off his one remaining eye.
“Did you film that?” I asked.
Yigal was looking at the wall of a building. He seemed distracted. Quickly he shouldered the camera and aimed at the bubbling sea. Mr. Pickwick broke the surface in a slick of brown ooze. A layer of slime, crowded with bubbles, began to form on the dancing blue waves as the spiral casing of the sub unwound slowly, like one of those long, twisted bagels flipping itself in boiling water. The dowels popped out one by one and floated on the surface. Something like an airplane cockpit rose and then fell, dragged down by the massive osmium skeleton of the Leviathan, which came to rest on the shallow bottom, still oozing brown bubbles. A religious guy tapped on my shoulder.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“I don’t know, it’s doing something.”
He looked over the wall. “Hi,” he said to Mary and Yigal. “Were you swimming?” he said, noticing Mary’s wet hair. “Don’t swim around here, it’s not safe. Look at that—the sewer pipe’s leaking again.”
“Nasty!” Yigal said. “Let’s get you into a shower.” We thanked him and moved away. I asked Yigal if he wanted to hold Meyer. “No, no . . .” he said slowly. “I—there’s something—I have a feeling he doesn’t like me.”
“Who doesn’t like you?”
Yigal took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes as we crawled into the taxi. “I don’t deserve to live,” he said, looking far away out the window.
“What’s wrong?” Mary asked. “Why aren’t you happy? What’s going on? Is there something between you and Meyer?” I pulled on her sleeve and indicated the taxi driver. “Do you speak English? No? Okay. Tell me, Yigal, I can’t take this. I thought we’d have fun.”
Yigal’s voice became low and husky as he struggled to speak. “It’s Meyer—I think I had sex with him, just once, and then I put him at the bottom of the laundry hamper for . . .” He paused and seemed to be counting. “For thirty-one years. I punished him—I didn’t remember it until he looked at me—” Yigal opened his fist and there was the little black button, Meyer’s eye. “My mother made his eyes, and his nose, and he used to have this little red shirt that said ‘Meyer.’”
“Poor Meyer!” Mary cried, taking him in her arms. He inclined his head against her, and she felt the gentle pressure of his stubby arms. “Poor little Meyer,” she repeated, before introducing herself at length.
“I thought there was some sentimental reason I was saving him,” Yigal said to me. “I just always thought there was something like that, like I wanted to show him to my kids, I don’t know. I idealized our whole relationship. It had nothing to do with reality.” He looked at Meyer. “Is he—is he suffering? Should we take the parchment out and put it somewhere else?”
“Yigal, how could you say that?!” Mary cried. “Meyer is going to be fine!”
“Mary’s right,” I opined. “This is the best possible thing for him. Now he can take an active role in his life. He’ll be able to grow and change and recover. He’s a very lucky bear.” Mary and I huddled together, stroking Meyer’s somewhat truncated head and his tattered ears, from which all the plush had worn off.
Yigal retied his shoelaces for no reason and frowned. “I also remember this book I once saw that attracted me very much, and it makes me feel more than ever like shooting myself.”
“What book?”
“It was in a bookstore, I only saw the cover. About these little yellow aliens with one eye—”
“Runts of 61 Cygni C,” Mary said. “I know that book. I talk about it all the time. I relate it to the way men are fascinated by silkies.”
“Maybe,” I whispered, “we shouldn’t talk about this in front of Meyer.”
Meanwhile, Zohar sat quietly facing the chimpanzees in the Lincoln Park Zoo. Near him on the bench were a small electronic keyboard and a cassette recorder. A small child approached and asked what he was doing.
“Musicological research—this is my control group. Have you ever tried to find graduate student volunteers who can demonstrate an authentic lack of musical education?”
“No,” the child said.
“Have you taken music lessons?”
“No.”
“Can you spare twenty minutes?”
The child shook his head. “No, my dad just went to the bathroom. He said we have to go and ride the train.”
Zohar was lucky he had not gone to the zoo with anyone from Chicago. A Chicago native will always point up to a certain tall building from whose roof, one hot Fourth of July, a man fell and was bisected, leaving a vertical smear hundreds of feet long, in front of a crowd approaching one million. Zohar was not fated to hear this grotesque story: His Lincoln Park Zoo trauma was to be of a different order. Packing up, he walked toward the koala house. How he loved the gentle, peaceful koalas. There, a small crowd was admiring a new arrival. “What’s he doing?” Zohar asked the zookeeper. “Is that baby koala doing what I think he’s doing?”
“Yes, that’s why the pouch faces toward the rear. There are also a few burrowing marsupials with pouches opening at the bottom, but that’s just to keep the dirt—”
Zohar ran, covering his ears.
Due to my literary digressions—
I should point out, in case the reader has not already noticed, that economy and brevity are not what I value most in literature. I suspect many readers of having been suckered by the high school standard, usually introduced in a reading of “The Tell-Tale Heart” or “Hills Like White Elephants,” that there is no idea worth expressing that is not worth expressing in 250 words.
Due to my digressions, Shats has ex
pressed some concern that I appear to have read “everything.” I share his concern to some degree and refer the reader to a loose legal-pad page floating in a notebook entitled “Ulan Bator and the New Schemata” dating from around 1987. The page originated as a note from a friend:
Hello—Nell—
came by to
drag a captive
off for breakfast
but there were
no prisoners to
be had
Mary
Three notes in my handwriting surround this amiable missive.
Sideways:
Gide’s acte gratuit < = > surrealist activity?
“where abstract potentiality achieves pseudo-realization.”
Right side up:
(24) “Thus Cesare Pavese notes . . . a sharp
oscillation between ‘superficial verisme’ and
‘abstract Expressionist schematism’”
like in Robbe-Grillet/Joyce static and sensational
vs. dynamic & developmental (Lotte in Weimar)
Upside down:
In Hegel—inner & outer world form
“objective dialectical unity”
With a different pen, obviously at some later date, I have written:
Lukács notes, I think?
—Realism in Our Time, “Franz Kafka or Thomas Mann?”
In other words, not only was I reading Lukács for fun, but I was capable of remembering, even after several days, that I had done so. I was passionately attached to Adorno and other thinkers who reasoned carefully and wrote clearly, especially if they managed to mention Kafka, which all the good ones do sooner or later, and the bad ones too. The citation tends to support my claim, which I make at least once every five years whenever I feel I am in the presence of somebody who might give a flying fuck or have any clue what I am talking about, that between 1987 and 1989 I read nothing but Kafka, Kafka-related primary material, Kafka’s favorite authors (e.g., Robert Walser), and Kafka scholarship. I fantasized about entering a Kafka trivia contest and coming away with the top prize for naming his Hebrew teacher. My to-do lists of this period bring me nothing but joy. For example:
Read more Hamsun
Janz, FN
Pay income taxes!
I take FN to mean Friedrich Nietzsche. Hamsun was another favorite author of Kafka’s, frequently recommended to his younger sisters. A Scandinavian, he wrote eloquently about things like shooting dogs in the head from close range. Similar lists still play a role in my life. For example, this spring I read Spengler. I expect to go cheerfully to my grave never having met another human being who has read a word of Spengler. The prospect does not frighten me.
Tucked into the same notebook is an unmailed letter to my mother about a class I had attended (December 1, 1987), taught by my friend Alberto Bades Fernandez Arago.
Went to Albert’s contemporary lit class yesterday—it was lots of fun, the students were very sluggish, so sluggish that when some of them said very funny things, I was the only one giggling. Reading “The Heavy Bear Who Goes with Me,” Delmore Schwartz about the body in general, & A. asks, “So what IS the heavy bear?” Student has a quick answer of which he is obviously sure: “The penis.” A: “So how do you explain ‘breathing at my side’? How do you explain ‘kicks the football’?” Most males in the class seemed sure, at any rate, that it was a poem by and for males, which is like saying that Bambi is a book by and for deer. The penis proponent stuck to his guns for a while, while A. gently urged a more “consistently consistent” interpretation—then a sixteenish blondette in a ponytail says, “It’s the conscience.” She immediately had a legion of supporters, eager to believe that the conscience is the seat of aggression and lust. The moral I drew from most of this is that these are people raised on ambiguous (a.k.a. meaningless) contemporary poetry who thus have no respect for straightforward language . . . or any poem that isn’t a Rorschach blot/riddle.
As well as a postcard from her (November 4):
For two days now I’ve dashed out when the mail arrived, all set to settle down and enjoy the letter you said you were going to write on Sunday. Have I been put out of mind again? What a blow! If you don’t plan to write, say so. Love, I think, Mom.
The notebook contains a single poem.
Your face is like a coin to me
Your feet are like the snow’s
Your ears descend like maple seeds
More slowly past your nose
Than diatoms that ornament
The ocean’s turgid coils;
Come, delegate yourself to glide
To me on subtle hydrofoils! . . .
I remember how I came to write, under duress, this flagrantly criminal work, reminiscent of the poems composed by robots in the works of Stanisław Lem. I enrolled in a poetry workshop (I have mentioned it before), and at the very first meeting the professor asked each student to write a word on the chalkboard. Then he asked us all to go home and write poems that employed every word on the list.
I can’t remember which word was mine, but I remember the white-faced, red-haired boy who wrote “turgid.”
To return from these digressions to the topic of digression: Educated people are taught to value prose for its economy and poetry for its opacity, and in this their taste differs so completely from mine that, in fact, I may well have read, in the reading public’s eyes, instead of “everything,” virtually “nothing.” For example, despite my having read the complete works of De Quincey and every word ever published by George Eliot except her translation of Das Leben Jesu, I cannot recall ever having seen or touched a book by Raymond Carver. In my mind, he appears as a sodden, terse combination of John Cheever and Charles Bukowski, lifting sketchy tales of cancer and divorce from country and western songs. Where did this impression come from? Who can say? But he is truly famous and popular.
When Mary and Yigal got home they put Meyer to bed and went out to talk on the balcony.
CHAPTER 21
“YIGAL, HE CAN’T LIVE HERE.”
“Why not?”
“Can you imagine what it must be like for him? You saw how he responds to you.”
“So where will he live?”
“I was thinking of getting him his own place. There are lots of little apartments around here—”
“You’re forgetting one thing. He’s supposed to protect me from Rafi.”
“He will, Yigal, he will,” Mary said. She ran her hand along the balcony railing and looked sorrowfully down at the street. “But give him time.”
“What if I don’t have any time? What about tonight, and tomorrow, and the next six months?”
“I don’t know.”
Yigal went inside to see if Meyer was awake. “Meyer?” he called. The bear ducked his head and inched under the pillow, trying to hide. “Meyer, I’m so sorry. I am so deeply sorry. I never suspected how you felt. I forgot what I’d done, and the whole thing is one of the most disgraceful episodes of my life.” Meyer succeeded in pulling down the near edge of the pillow. Only the tip of one leg poked out. “Mary?”
“What?”
“Can you tell what he’s feeling?”
“If you leave the room, maybe.” Mary lifted the pillow and peeked underneath. Meyer was quivering and shaking his head. “Leave the room, Yigal.”
About half an hour later Mary and Meyer appeared at my door. They stayed overnight, and in the morning, while Yigal went to see Rafi after receiving an urgent summons, we went shopping. We covered a big cardboard box inside and out with flowered contact paper and put it under a table in a corner of the living room. Inside we placed a sofa cushion, a small rug, a doll’s rocking chair, and a selection of houseplants. “Meyer?” we called out. “We made you your own private place, where no one else is allowed to go.”
Meyer approached, feeling his way along the floor. “What is he looking for?” Mary asked.
“You know what—it could be his eye. I think it’s in Yigal’s pocket.” Meyer cocked his head at me
and began to shiver, rolling over into a fetal position. Mary scooped him up and took him to bed just as Yigal sat opposite Rafi, fingering Meyer’s eye.
“Rye Playland was no help at all,” Yigal said. “I’m still considering a trip to Iceland.”
“What’s in your pocket? Souvenir?”
Yigal gave him the button. “Look familiar?”
“It reminds me of—you know, it’s a little strange who it reminds me of.”
“Actually, it’s not strange at all.” He took the button back and held it in his hand. “By the way, the target doesn’t exist.”
“That’s fine, because the committee met last night and we voted to offer you a pension. I wanted to keep you on, but there was a consensus to—to let you go . . .”
Yigal eased the pistol out of his waistband and laid it on the desk. “Any more formalities?”
Rafi started to pick up the gun, then seemed to change his mind. He wiped his hands on his lapels and smiled. “Yigal, you really have done excellent work, and I’m going to ask the committee to double your pension. I’m also nominating you for the Har-Zion Award, and I’m going to name a suite of offices after you, in Dimona. Privately, I’d like to offer you an opportunity to purchase shares in the expansion of the Eilat dolphin reef.”
Yigal took the gun back and smiled. “Thank you. My retirement comes as a pleasant surprise. As you know, my wife is pregnant, and I look forward to spending quality time with our child.” Rafi was laughing as Yigal closed the door.
Yigal had seriously misinterpreted one of his remarks. The button reminded Rafi of certain pajamas worn by a certain somebody’s mother on certain occasions between 1952 and 1956, and not, as Yigal had assumed, of Moshe Dayan. Moshe Dayan’s pajamas, Rafi recalled, had large, flat buttons of light blue Bakelite. Then he sighed and returned to work. The Kibbutz Negba pajama parties were legendary, but belonged to a time and a mood that would never return again. He thought of the lines of Luis Cernuda:
