Private Novelist

by Nell Zink

  I realize now that I forgot to explain what I meant by Yigal’s lofty feeling of superiority vis-à-vis the sexuality of American men.

  Israeli men maintain:

  1. That American men are obsessed with large breasts.

  The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence—it really is, because you can’t help trampling the grass on the side where you are, but anyhow, perhaps those American men would enjoy visiting Tel Aviv. I attribute the absurdly large breasts of some American lingerie models to internal competition in the industry, the same force that supposedly led a Nevada strip club in the 1960s to advertise a “topless nursing mother of six” who was a dachshund. The glamor of dominatrices arises in a similar way—submissive men are not actually very picky, but with so many doms jockeying for the submissive dollar, a competitive subculture arises on its own. The top echelon comes to function as a cartel, bringing some assurance of decent pay and safe working conditions to its members. Like the possession of a dentist’s chair or a cattle prod, absurd breasts function for the model, in marketing terms, as a “point of difference.”

  2. That American men are obsessed with blow jobs.

  This is quite true. I blame it on estrogenic drinking water and the “growth hormone” in American beef. Together, these have reduced the median American penis by 35 percent over the last fifty years (I base my estimate on anecdotal evidence and on drawings and tables found in a strangely comprehensive hygiene manual of the 1920s, property of the University of Pennsylvania), while the American woman has become a giantess. If you can’t see the connection, just forget I said anything at all.

  3. That American pornography is perversely clinical.

  I have seen two American porno films, which is two too many. As everyone admits, they are all the same: the beige bedspread, the stock footage, Ron Jeremy. Only once did I catch a glimpse of foreign smut. A French movie featured a character addicted to pornography, and in the video he was watching, two very attractive young people went to a beach, parked their motorcycle, and began to make out. It was actually sort of romantic—compared with American porn, it was Pride and Prejudice—so I think I know what the Israelis mean.

  There is no Israeli pornography. Zohar showed me the explicit passage in A Baby Comes into the World that got him through adolescence:

  And here’s how the thing happens: Father and Mother lie down together, close to each other, and the penis enters into the vagina. The spermatozoa in the semen come out of the penis and swim. . . .

  Yigal, Mary, and Rakeffet went for a walk on the beach. They sat down to watch the sun touch the horizon and seem to melt and flatten to it, making a hot-pink Krembo shape. Then they bought ice cream. Rakeffet dropped her ice cream and ran very fast on the sand with her arms out, saying, “I’m a bird!”

  “You are not a bird,” Mary contradicted.

  Then she and Yigal looked at each other and kissed tenderly, for they noticed that the novel had ended. The time for reviews had come.

  SAILING ONE MORE TIME TOWARD THE SUNSET, AGAIN

  by Elad Manor

  Under the pen name “Nell Zink,” critically acclaimed author Avner Shats has rewritten his commercial failure Sailing Toward the Sunset as an easy-to-read, palatable, and naive spy thriller, set in a small glass booth above the falls of the Rhine. The Swiss setting hints at involvement in the struggle to recover lost Jewish assets, and before the novel ends we see that the hero has definitely come into some money somehow. But Sailing Toward the Sunset is not merely a legal procedural on the intricacies of Swiss banking law—it incorporates elements of romance, horror, and a revealing look backward at the historic moment of Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War. The technical details regarding the use of dolphins in contemporary submarine warfare are fascinating. On the negative side, Shats underestimates the importance of science fiction in English literature (I, for one, would never have learned English without it), but, all in all, Sailing Toward the Sunset is the perfect Israeli thriller.

  NEW FOR AGES 13–41: NELL ZINK GOES SAILING

  by A. Oz

  Readers of Swallows and Amazons and The Wind in the Willows will recall the pleasure of “messing about in boats.” I am pleased to say that at last Israel can boast an author willing to gratify our long-suppressed national desire to float, both physically and mentally. Too many writers have succumbed to the large bribes offered by manufacturers of military hardware, and have applied their energies to international spy thrillers designed to promote a sense of urgent paranoia and a renewal of Cold War–style tensions. Zink bucks this trend, turning inward in ever-smaller circles until at last her plot assumes the form of a very small and unidentifiable animal which appears to be sleeping soundly.

  MEMORIES OF A POND

  (unsigned)

  Nell Zink’s first novel, Sailing Toward the Sunset, takes us on a nostalgic journey to the rural Virginia of her early youth, where she was in possession of a small green wooden boat, somewhat like a punt. Although it leaked and had to be bailed constantly with a margarine tub, she was able to spend hours floating in it on a large eighteenth-century millpond hidden in the woods behind her house. This experience functions more as a scar or a burden than anything else, and there is no better argument for the common practice of raising children without privacy.

  EUROPEAN STORY FOR AVNER SHATS

  AUGUST 25–SEPTEMBER 22, 2005

  THIS STORY WILL BE COMPOSED IN bad English, the up-and-coming lingua franca of the European Union and, with any luck, the world. Bad English incongruously pairs transparent simplicity with high-flown academic jargon. Willful misapprehension of everyday words and ignorance of cliché make bad English a forceful vehicle for literary expression. Precursors and predecessors to this work include the classic novelette Heart of Darkness. A self-respecting native English speaker would shudder at his own bathos as he penned the phrase “heart of darkness” and laugh at anyone who suggested he make his villain’s last words “the horror”—after all, who can actually say it? Available options include Brooklynese (“the hara”), “the whore” (what always happens when I try to say it), and a solemn precision not really suggestive of a dying man who’s not playing a vampire. Other masterworks of bad English include the romantic era. So as you can see, you don’t have to be a European like Joseph Conrad to write in bad English. I am still, as I write, arguably American, but I feel that seven years’ absence, along with a lot of practice talking pidgin to foreigners, have qualified me to write as poorly as he did.

  Every sentence in bad English is short, short, short. Individual phrases may be dauntingly terse, even inherently paradoxical, but constructions are stripped down to the point of blank tautology. Argumentation has no place in what is essentially a prose style originated by American high school teachers. Where someone hoping to bring an effective argument might expect to be permitted to save his conclusion for the end where it might seem more convincing, Americans know that conclusions belong up front as “topic sentences” and even en détail as “abstracts.” By the way, anyone who thought that last sentence was a long one is already so inured to patois that he wouldn’t know high culture if it bit him on the butt—which in its turn might indeed constitute a topic sentence for this story, which is about high culture.

  “Oh no,” you are surely sighing, “this is going to be a story in a kitsch language about kitsch and I refuse to read it.” Well, guess what—you have no choice! How many centuries has it been since Western culture peaked? Two, maybe three? Do you really expect anyone, not just me, but anyone to write a story in 2005 that will tell you something you didn’t know about the human condition? Maybe I will, but only by a sin of omission on your part; I could rehash everything from Pushkin to Platonov, and who would notice? Nobody. I don’t mean that you don’t have a choice but to read this story, just that any story you pick up is going to be kitsch by the time it hits your consciousness, if not before, so you might as well get used to it.

  Yesterday a German student t
old me all about how much William Blake loved Jesus. The German student in this story is a bit more sophisticated than that. For one, he’s been studying art history intensively for almost nine years, and for two, he’s one of the best postdocs at his university and was given a scholarship to spend three months in an exclusive villa on the outskirts of Florence while working on a project that could give his career a major jump-start. His name is David (pronounced Dah-veed).

  David lived in a villa that the artist Max Klinger had willed to Kaiser Wilhelm. An immense mansion in toasted marshmallow color with green shutters, it was shaded by a high and crumbling garden wall bordering the old road to Siena. The garden’s many blue and pink mirror balls reflected tall cypresses and occasionally late roses, which were still, in November, blooming. David’s room was on the fifth or sixth floor (the stairs were very confusing), high up in a corner, not quite under the roof, in a bare but largish stone cell that must have been built to house a whole bunch of maids. His room had two windows.

  Across the hall was an aging Israeli writer who seemed generally disappointed by life and was writing some sad book about something, possibly a socialist embittered by the failure of communism (David wasn’t sure at all, but he happened to have seen big reference books about Russian history in the room). Next door was an extremely good-looking girl. She looked very young. She told the Israeli writer she was nineteen and from the Crimea and a lesbian, and he told David. David believed it, because she would go to the shower wearing only a smallish towel. To get to the shower, you had to go down the hall, down a spiral stairway to a larger hall, through a public area to a really big staircase in an atrium, and down another spiral stairway to the shower, which was on a landing. Looking down from the gallery in the atrium, you could see the real inhabitants of the villa come and go—the artists. The writers and scholars in the little stone cells were some kind of afterthought. The other people living on the hall were a German novelist in his sixties and an English art historian. David studiously avoided the art historian. In a place as picked over as Florence, it would be some kind of miracle if you met someone in the same field who didn’t feel he was competing with you directly. In this case, the competition was right out in the open. David got as far as the word “Giotto” before the Englishman rolled his eyes back in his head and moaned. He avoided the German novelist because he was German, and who goes to Florence to meet other Germans? Besides, the novelist was famous, and he didn’t want anyone to think he was sucking up. He was more or less terrified of the beautiful girl, so his main conversational partner, when rain led him to settle in early for the night upstairs, was the Israeli.

  “What does she make?” David asked.

  “That is not entirely clear,” said the Israeli. “I like to think she’s a poet, probably because she has no books at all, and she doesn’t paint or do anything else downstairs. I talked to Siegfried about her.” That was his name for the regal (as in flowers and string quartets going into rooms where David and the Israeli weren’t welcome, discreet laughter as they walked away, condescension whenever they spoke) German in a green suit who ran the place. “He said she’s here as a favor to an old friend who knew her mother, something like that.”

  David laughed.

  “Okay, I know what you’re thinking. The old friend is Siegfried’s wilting, forgotten dick.” David laughed again. “But I swear I believe her. She is a lesbian. Otherwise the Earth is a cruel planet devoid of hope, and I’m not ready to accept that yet.”

  “For me, it’s better when she is not a lesbian,” said David.

  “Then you are a great optimist,” replied the Israeli. “To me, she is the world’s most desperate heterosexual slut, who became a lesbian overnight to avoid sleeping with me.” David laughed. “That is, just in time to avoid rejecting me on some concrete personal basis of which there is all too abundant proof. An unregenerate nymphomaniac, until she met me and I healed her. Now she thinks only of spiritual values and the delicate love of a like-minded girl who is probably even more beautiful. I am quite sure she is a poet, now that she dreams of this girl, even if she was not a poet before, but a nymphomaniac slut. I am her savior.”

  “I will ask to read her poetry,” said David. “This we call a win-win situation. If she is a lesbian, she will like it. If she is not a lesbian, she will like it. Every poet likes it.”

  “But it’s in Russian. I see her taking notes in the garden.”

  David sighed.

  David was both an art historian and a chemist. Right off, you can see he’s from the wrong side of the tracks. An influential art historian from an established family of professors can see an ear tacked up on a wall a mile off and immediately say, “Rembrandt,” but David would most likely take a week to think it over before he says, “I like the ear, but it’s recent. Still, it’s a great ear, one of Rembrandt’s best ear designs ever, honestly, even if it was painted by a restorer in 1951.” It’s an unwelcome new discipline. It used to be you could say, “Painting X was ineptly restored.” People like David force you to admit that it was obliterated. David wanted to be the type who gets to proclaim works authentic on aesthetic grounds alone, but that kind of deep sensibility can only be inherited. Or at least, art history departments work as though it can only be inherited, which boils down to the same thing. So he took up chemistry.

  His project in Florence was, generally speaking, a deep, dark secret. There was no media presence. A bulldozer ripping out an old rail line had hit rocks that turned out to be the tops of the walls of something Etruscan. They put up a high fence and called in an American team (except for the ultra-specialist David), which was slowly digging and making drawings. He had a lab in two containers on the site and it was all terribly exciting. When people at the villa asked what he was doing, he said, “Affreschi di Giotto.” It had to be kept quiet because, no matter what they found, the high-speed magnetic-levitation rail line was going right through the middle of it come hell or high water.

  It wasn’t all Etruscan. It was a very solid structure and had seen a lot of use. There was something for everyone, from Byzantine graffiti to broken glass. It was tucked into a ravine next to the river not far from town. There was some discussion as to whether it might have been buried deliberately and not merely covered by erosion, and many were intrigued by the evidence that a tunnel had been dug to it from the river at some point before the 1920s. (That was the date of the newest condoms.) (Explanation: rats.) In slow increments, David was working his way through samples and scrapings. A picture was emerging of an ancient and unglamorous granary, or possibly a temple of Artemis in a sacred grove, or perhaps just one of those places you drop off an infant you’d rather not see again. Or at least there were plenty of small bits of human bone in the dirt covering the floor, all pretty much ground to dust by archaic mass tourism of some kind, or maybe pigs or cattle. The place had once been surrounded by trees. All were cut down on the same day in 755 B.C. Around the same time, someone had hammered quite a few pegs into the interior walls—all at the same height, but at irregular intervals, as if to hang crepe paper for a party while drunk. David kept his distance from archaeologists. His specialty was analyzing lint.

  There were five artists living downstairs in palatial apartments, according to the German novelist:

  1.A Macedonian guy who pretended to be Iranian. He sketched male nudes, beautifully, from memory.

  2.A German of the Leipzig school, painter of schematic architectural exteriors.

  3.Another German from Leipzig, a copyist of advertising circulars.

  4.A Swiss sculptor in cheese.

  5.An elderly Dutchwoman whose turbid landscapes recalled prowling archangels in the angry coalescing of their impasto skies.

  “Sculptor in cheese?” said the Israeli.

  “In Switzerland are many, many cows,” the German novelist replied. “The government gives a subvention for every way to use more milk.” They were walking together across an open plaza downtown on their way to an art performan
ce. One of the more significant central churches, with a small pietà by Bernini and an irreplaceable inlaid agate floor, had been half filled with scaffolding and a collapsible aboveground swimming pool into which a world-famous video artist was about to jump naked. Since the local cardinal was to give a benediction first, in Italian, and they had tickets from Siegfried for a VIP area up front, they were walking very slowly.

  “Why cheese?” mused the Israeli. “I suspect this artist. Where cheese is made, there are two smell possibilities. One is fungus, the other is a penetrating smell of vomit, a smell that flings a person to the floor in involuntary contractions.”

  “It is not only cheese,” the German added. “At times, there are other products of Swiss and French agriculture in his work.” He stumbled against a low step leading to the portico of the church. “Owa, the leg. I am telling you, Eyal, I have a problem with my knee.” He sat down on the steps.

  Eyal, the Israeli, paused in front of him with his hands in his pockets, looking up at the heavy bronze door of the church, which was slowly closing, pulled by invisible hands from inside. A group of young students of both sexes raced past them and through the door at the last second.

  The German, Ingo, stretched out his leg and groaned. “Go in, go without me.”

  “No, why? It’s a nice night, here outside. Perhaps it’s better here than there.” They could hear the hugely amplified droning of the cardinal. “You have a bad knee?”