Reading for My Life

by John Leonard

  If you can’t bring yourself to listen to these dispossessed, then at least listen to Molly Ivins, who told me you’re such a listener. In Molly’s opinion “there’s not a thing wrong with the ideals and mechanisms outlined and the liberties set forth in the Constitution of the United States. The only problem is the founders left a lot of people out of the Constitution. They left out poor people and black people and female people. It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.”

  Include us; exalt us—your office an agency of levitation.

  Meeting David Grossman

  EARLY ON IN The Book of Intimate Grammar—before he has fallen in love with Yaeli in her black leotard, before he is betrayed by his best friend Gideon, before his father, with a hammer, attacks the face of modern art, before his country goes off to the Six-Day War—in a schoolroom in West Jerusalem during English class, young Aron Kleinfeld discovers “the present continuous”: “I em go-eeng, I em sleep-eeng. You don’t have that eeng tense in Hebrew.”

  “I em jum-peeng….” Jumping far, far out in space, halfway to infinity, and soon he was utterly absorbed and utterly alone; jum-peeng; it was like being in a glass bubble, and someone watching from the outside might think Aron ees only jum-peeng, but inside the bubble, there was so much happening, every second lasted an hour, and the secrets of time were revealed to him and the others who experienced time the way he did, under a magnifying glass.

  The “present continuous” is Aron’s stream of childhood consciousness. By a process he calls “Aroning,” he will henceforth “dive in” as often as possible, to float, to swim, to drown in this “intimate grammar” of pumpkin seeds and elevator shoes and Mozart, where he’s a magician like Houdini, a spy in Egyptian intelligence, or the first Israeli bullfighter; where every surface of the Holy City throbs with subcutaneous meanings, coded messages, invisible writing, Kabbalistic signs; where red shirts on a laundry line semaphore of friends in need, and scribbles on a sidewalk signal airplanes overhead; where food is a sacramental menu of values and emotions (“the sugars of friendship and the starches of perseverance and the carbohydrates of loyalty”); where time is so relative that minutes on a clock have not only different speeds, but animistic phases (between a slow horse and a vanishing atom, phases of fox, of mouse, mosquito, and germ); and where words, pronounced “with deep devotion,” have lazy halos and can be plucked like strings:

  There is a little light in everything, even the steel wool of scrubbing panels has a mysterious spark, even the dark grapes have a dusky gleam, or a thick drop of blood on the tip of your finger… and certain words, if you know how to pronounce them in a special way, not from the outside but as though you were calling their names, right away they turn to you, they show you their pink penetralia, they purr to you and they’re yours, they’ll do anything you want; take “bell,” for instance, he rolls it over his tongue as though tasting it for the first time ever, “bellll,” or “honeysuckle,” or “lion” or “legend” or “coal” or “melody” or “gleam” or “velvet,” melting on his tongue, sloughing off their earthly disguises, till suddenly there is red heat, a cinder of memory spreading its glow as it slowly disappears into his mouth, for Lo, this hath touched thy lips, and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin is expiated.

  Like David in Call It Sleep, Aron has visions. Like Alex in Portnoy’s Complaint, he spends too much time in the bathroom. Like Oskar in The Tin Drum, he refuses to grow up. At first he can’t; later he won’t. (Such a shrimp, his Uncle Loniu worries at the bar mitzvah: “Is this why we came to Israel with the sun and the vitamins and the oranges?”) But who needs it? Pimples on the face, hair in the armpit, cracking of the voice, pornographic playing cards, patriotic sloganeering, Picasso’s Guernica? Better to go “Aroning.” With his imaginary dog, his broken guitar, his “jinxed shoes,” and the blood covenant he strikes with Gideon in the cave where they bury the basalt stone, he will revel “in the possibilities that glittered between the wires, flitting in and out, to and fro; and in the process something would melt, and unfold to him in all its glory, yes, oh, yes, that’s what he wanted, free passage through the fortified wall.”

  You think immediately of Momik in See Under: Love. Aron is his secret brother. As Momik was a child of survivors in Tel Aviv in the 1950s, so is Aron a child of survivors in Jerusalem in the 1960s. As Momik, in order to assuage a Nazi Beast he believed to be waiting in his cellar to devour Jews, would sneak down at night to feed yogurt, cucumbers, and chicken drumsticks to hedgehogs, lizards, turtles, and a raven, so Aron, in the Kleinfeld bomb shelter, seeks to raise a vegetarian cat, no meat and no bones. Nor is this cat Aron’s only experiment. He tinkers as well with his tear ducts and laugh glands. He collects and smokes the butts of cigarettes to cause and assess a sneeze. He steals a giant magnet from the science lab at school and sleeps with it under his pillow. He establishes, in the bush, his own hospital for wounded words.

  But Momik grew up to be a writer, looking for Bruno Schulz. Whereas Aron, who might have been, if not Babel’s Di Grasso, at least a Gimpel out of I. B. Singer, won’t grow up at all. He is exactly the same height and weight, after his bar mitzvah, as he had been at age ten and a half. Once upon a time he had a knack, but “the wunderkind has lost his wunder.” Pouring the kiddush wine on Friday nights, his hand trembles; the wine spills. He is afraid of the electric eye at the supermarket that opens the glass door. He is “misclassified with a hasty glance” by movie ushers, substitute teachers, the new nurse, little old ladies, and “the crow that raids the trash bins who isn’t quite sure whether Aron has reached the age where they stop throwing stones.” It’s as if he had been pickled and jarred, as his mother, with the banana hairdo, pickles and jars everything in the vegetable kingdom: peppers, olives, sauerkraut, carrots. While his father, a paper-pushing clerk who used to work in a bakery, moons over the neurasthenic Miss Edna Bloom next door “shivering like a delicate salamander.” And his grandmother, crazy Lilly, who used to dance in a Polish nightclub, whose high heels Aron hides in the cellar, wants to give him a fire engine for his bar mitzvah. And his older sister, overweight Yochi, deserts him for the army. And his best friend, the green-eyed, “pure and noble” Gideon, will no longer play their games. And the love of his young life, the exquisite Yaeli, in whose likeness he has fashioned a sweet challah, prefers the company of Gideon, with his geopolitical expansiveness and Boy Scout warrior strut. (Poor Tonio Kroger, alone with his difficult art!) There is a buzzing, a “chirring,” in his ears:

  You don’t stand a chance…. There’s nothing in the world that isn’t me. I’m the things of the world and the people who use them. I’m steel and rubber and wood and flesh. I’m cranks and valves and gears and pistons. I’m the blade that cuts. I’m the screws you have to remember which way to turn on the first try. I’m the knots in your shoelaces and the cord for the blinds…. I am the scourge of the broken plate and the light bulb exploding in your hand and the glass that shatters when you clink l’chaim.

  Well, puberty. God help us. And there are certainly enough of them to go around, gods that is, in Jerusalem. And absolutes. And so many fortified walls between Aron and free passage: the Bet ha-Kerem housing project, the hospital where they send crazy Lilly, the school where time is relative, the cave of the childhood covenant, the abandoned refrigerator in the junkyard. And if not God, then Freud: Enraged by his mother, Aron strikes at her hands, which hold bottles full of milk. Massaged with too much enthusiasm by his sister Yochi, he is frantic, thrilled, almost abused. Grappling with Gideon, he is so much the lover scorned he might have been reading Leslie Fiedler. And when his father undertakes to knock down a wall in Edna Bloom’s apartment, with its rug-checkered floors, its ivory figurines, its black leviathan of a piano, its volumes of Indian art, its reproductions of Degas, van Gogh, Picasso, and Magritte, those snow-filled globes of swans, clowns, dancers, and children trapped under glass—a
fter first fiddling with her fig tree (come on, Grossman!)—and ends by reducing the whole flat to dust and rubble in an orgy of furious destruction, we have passed with Aron through and beyond a Viennese underground of eros and thanatos into the medieval realm of the Sefiroth and Zohar, of transcendental sexuality. No wonder that Aron, walking, eating, sleeping, Aroning, dreams of a “misty courier” crossing a white plain, a scaffolding of bones, a red-black sea of clotting blood, and a fissured egg of yellow coral covered with a frosty film: “Aron to Aron, where are you now, over…”

  Not quite so suddenly, sex disgusts him, and food, too (custard, falafel, and salami; Creambo and Yemenite skhug); the “code of mass” and “the canon of the flesh.” How would you feel if what you really wanted for your bar mitzvah was a new Yamaha guitar, and what your father gave you instead was “very special”: the army shaving kit with the razor, the foaming block, and the little tray he used during the Sinai campaign? To accompany, perhaps, the key ring in the shape of a Mirage jet given out in honor of Independence Day by the Delek gas company. Because war fever is heating up all over Israel, except in Aron’s head. Even words have lost their savor: longing, wandering, heron, diamond, autumn, lonely—“all culled from the Hit Parade on the radio, an excellent source of words; in the middle there was news, Nasser Kasser Basser Yasser, and later that afternoon he would be releasing ‘lamb’ and ‘twilight’ and ‘midnight’ and ‘kiss me by the sea.’” Comes the dark, however, and no place for Aron in Nighttown in Jerusalem:

  Noisy shouts and patriotic songs blared over the loudspeakers, and the smell of burning in the air after the fireworks, how the night suddenly burst into color, with a pang of longing he thought of Yaeli, and people kept bumping into him, saying, Hey, kid, watch where you’re going; he was out of step, out of sync, he always ruined everything, someone hit a sour note on the accordion: “Sing, oh water/Flow to the Negev.” “Flow,” that’s nice, and there are public showers there but what about the flow of blood, and carefully he extricated the word “flow” from the general clamor, stripping it gently and whispering it backward thrice with great intensity; “Wolf wolf wolf,” his mouth clamped shut so none of the outward pollution would infiltrate, the tumult and the smoke and the crowds, till the dusty, sweaty sheath of “flow” dropped away like a cast-off skin, with its shrill notes and dissonances and random undertones; he hid it inside him, in the intimate new center, quickly checking over the other words he had smuggled in over the past few days: “supple,” “lonely,” “gazelle,” “profoundest secrets,” “sacrifice,” “tears,” words that had welled out of an endless stream, and now “flow”; for seven days he would refrain from saying it aloud, till it was purified, till it was his, his alone.

  But Aron hasn’t seven days, not even Six. He must engineer his exodus, his shaman Houdini disappearing act and Great Escape, from a maze of meanings and a wheel of signs. He is acquiring too much density even as he cracks. With Roman coins and onion skins in his pockets, and nylon bags on his fingers, and magnets under his pillow, Aron—who wants only to tell stories, interpret dreams, fend off famines, lead children in song with his golden flute, and “trap the lustrous auras of this world in glassy marbles”; for whom language is contaminated and food constipating and flesh corrosive; who declines to grow up even as Israel in the Six-Day War is about to burst its borders, to break down Edna’s walls; terrified of the sexuality and aggression of adulthood, the lust for power and appetite for territory of modern statecraft, the destructive dissonance of modern art, the raging hormones of gluttonous history itself—Aron falls inward, on a spiral track through voltages of feeling and magnetic fields of words, down to an abandoned refrigerator in a West Jerusalem junkyard, to await deliverance by magic, like an angel in a cyclotron.

  So: Did Aron perish in that locked box in 1967, or somehow, with a broken guitar instead of a tin drum, prestidigitate himself?

  This is the wrong question to ask David Grossman, on the outdoor terrace of the King David Hotel on a summer Sunday afternoon of ice cream and sparrows. He has dodged it too often in the three years since The Book of Intimate Grammar was originally published in Israel, where high-school students already read it before sitting down to final exams; where A. B. Yehoshua teaches a seminar on Aron at his impasse. Grossman still thinks about Aron; he may not be done with him any more than he is done with Momik. But Aron is an imaginary character. A residue, a caution, and a confabulation, he belongs now to the readers of his grammar, who’ll have to make up their own minds. Anyway, if Aron weren’t alive, his book could never have been written. And if he has survived, it is at a price. To be normal, after having been Aron, is to be coarsened. To fit in is to be diminished.

  Besides, while Grossman was waiting for the poet and perfectionist Betsy Rosenberg to finish her loving translation of Intimate Grammar into English, he wrote and published two more books—Sleeping on a Wire, a series of interviews with troubled Israeli Arab citizens, and The Zig-Zag Boy, a novella for children on Israel’s adult best-seller list. Red-haired, horn-rimmed, affable and evasive, he would have us believe that Aron’s problems are existential, not political. I’m not buying it. I’ve been Aroning myself, in the past continuous. Grossman was thirteen years old himself during the Six-Day War, living like Aron in Bet ha-Kerem. “I was terrified,” he says, “when they told us on the radio, on the Hebrew-speaking station in Cairo, that they would throw us into the sea. I was a child in Jerusalem. I didn’t know how to swim very well. I took it in a concrete way, this threat. I am sure that I’m not going to live until the next Rosh Hashanah.”

  At age thirteen, he had already been a child actor on Israeli radio for four years, after winning a Sholem Aleichem contest, standing on a special “Grossman box” to reach the microphone and to speak in tongues. Following army service just in time for the Yom Kippur War, he returned to radio to become the anchor of a popular newsmagazine program, from which he was dismissed, to which he was restored, in a pattern of troublemaking that continues unto this summer Sunday. Imagine devoting your first novel to Israel’s morally corrupting occupation of the West Bank. And daring in your second to write about the Holocaust when your parents weren’t even survivors. Jewish Defense League hoodlets disrupted his American tour for The Yellow Wind. In the middle of the Gulf War, when the PLO made common cause with the Beast of Baghdad, as Scuds came down on Tel Aviv, still, on television, he insisted that peace was possible “only if we listen to the Palestinian suffering and misery…. We were shaped by the same wound for almost a century.”

  But Grossman today would really rather talk about his son, who’ll be waiting for him after soccer. And the Slavic planes of my wife’s face, from the Pale of Settlement. And the redheaded Syrian soldiers he met during the Lebanon mess, an odd camaraderie of carrottops.

  It occurs to me that the last time I was in Israel, for the Jerusalem Book Fair in 1983, in the middle of that very same Lebanon mess, Grossman’s novel The Smile of the Lamb hadn’t yet been published, although it was about to be. Missing the story, as usual. Inquiring, instead, at the Sling-Shot Bar of this very same King David, where Edmund Wilson and Saul Bellow both got haircuts, where V. S. Naipaul had gloomed in the lobby, where Menachem Begin once planted a bomb, exactly how one went about meeting the famous mayor. Being told: Just stand still; he’ll find you. And of course he did, minutes later, Teddy Kollek with a tree in one hand, a caduceus in the other, and a minivan outside to make sure we didn’t miss an important goat. “Balzac would have taken to the mayor,” wrote Bellow in 1976. “Kollek is to Jerusalem what old Goriot was to daughters, what Cousin Pons was to art objects.” They’ve dis-elected Teddy now; installed in his stead a bloodthirsty clown, Ehud Olmert, who will defend against a visit by Arafat with a wall of West Bank settlers. I did see Citizen Kollek the other day at breakfast. And guess who walked right by his table without noticing? Alan Dershowitz himself, in town for a presidential forum on Israel-Diaspora relations, and probably billing O. J. Simpson.

 
My best moment in 1983 may have been seeing the Western Wall with Swifty Lazar at midnight. Or, barefoot at Haram esh-Sharif, my first two mosques. Or Masada, like the Alamo. My worst moment… maybe not at Fink’s, a bar for journalists and Eurotrash, where I declined the offer of a hitch by jeep to the Lebanon front. Maybe at the party in Amos Elon’s flat, full of Peace Now people, all of whom were bad-mouthing Jacobo Timerman. You recall Timerman. For being the sort of Jewish troublemaker who published in his Buenos Aires newspaper the names of the “disappeared,” he was kidnapped by the sort of people who believe in a Zionist plot to gobble up Patagonia; and spent the next thirty months “talking to Susan,” a machine that applies electrodes to one’s genitals; and was then sent off by bloody parcel post to Israel, where he wrote Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, in which he just happened to mention the acquiescence in his abuse by Argentina’s silent Jewish community. Well, this ingrate had chosen in 1983, in the pages of The New Yorker and in a book called The Longest War, to criticize Israel’s invasion of Lebanon—for which, by Peace Now people in Amos Elon’s flat, he was now reviled. How dare he, having arrived so recently, having skipped not only the Holocaust but 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973… “I see,” I said. “He was tortured in the wrong language.”

  Jacobo Timerman went back to Argentina. “He should have stayed,” says David Grossman, who hasn’t even left Jerusalem, though A. B. Yehoshua has gone to Haifa for quiet time and peace of mind, and Amos Oz, after the reviews of Fima, is hiding out in the desert, and as we sit with our fingers crossed—Peace Now!—I’m semi-ashamed of myself. How is anyone here to know, and why should anybody care, that I was once upon a time a dilettante (or delicatessen) Zionist, a secular-humanist sabra-in-my-head, before Edward Said and Lebanon and the intifada?