When Tsofnat took me to see her penthouse in a building that she owned nearby, I couldn’t wait to return to Elia’s place, where the three of us sat all day in her lavish garden, eating grapes plucked from the overhead vines, as Elia regaled me with tales of her heroics as a fighter in the famed coed brigade known as “the Palmach.”
She had fired weapons in battle, seen comrades fall, thrown Molotovs and hand grenades, gone on hair-raising raids. Here was a woman I could relate to. She had known heroes, she said, such as I could not even imagine, fearless kibbutzniks, moshavniks, Jewish farmer-soldiers who went about in shorts and sandals with a revolver and a knife on their belts and performed secret military feats of derring-do, ones that you’d never find in any history book.
Israel, she said, voice dropping, kept secret its most important resource. Israel’s most important weapon was not those hidden-away atomic bombs—there “just in case”—but the people. Israelis were Israel’s truest secret weapon. And the men—she fluttered her heavily mascaraed eyes and nibbled hungrily on a cookie—such men were both fatally irresistible and hopelessly unreliable.
“You men are butterflies,” she said. “You live only for today. No yesterday. No tomorrow. A woman with her body, her need to breed and raise children, cannot afford to be so. But you men?” She shrugged and smiled. “You are a little like the men I knew. Though your life in America has made you soft, you have about you the splendid élan that they had in the early days, during the War of Independence. I’m sure that in the right circumstances you would make a brave soldier. I can already tell that you are a real heart-breaker with the ladies. Undependable. Irresistible. Come here.”
I moved my chair closer. Elia kissed me on the cheek. Then reached up with her long, warm fingers and wiped the lipstick off. Tsofnat absorbed all this in silence, shifting uncomfortably in her chair. Now Elia took my hand, examined it. “You have calluses. They make you work on your kibbutz, huh? Good for them! They are making you tough, hard, an Israeli! What do you do there?”
“I work in the fishponds.”
“The fishponds!” She and Tsofnat exchanged quick looks, clearly impressed.
“You know,” said Elia, “they only take the elite to work in the fishponds. The commando types. They must have a very high regard for you.”
Later, Tsofnat took me to the summit of Mount Zion. As the sun descended I saw the entire ancient city of white stone turn a fiery gold. There and then I resolved, at all costs, to live in the seat of the ancient Jewish kingdoms and of the Bible, where David, the poet-ruler and outlaw, had bedded Beersheva, wrote his melancholic psalms, and wise Solomon composed his immortal proverbs as he bed-hopped among his thousand wives.
19
IN THE MANNER OF SUCH THINGS IN ISRAEL, AFTER hosting me over several weekend visits, Elia and Tsofnat decided, without any open discussion but by a kind of perfume-scented osmotic interchange of nods, sighing winks, moistening thighs, and trembling breasts, that I would leave the kibbutz, apply to study at the Hebrew University, and move in with them.
There was little ceremony about it, and I had the least say of all, one way or another. Besides, it perfectly suited me. Owned nothing but the clothes on my back, some notebooks and books, and the typewriter, my trusted old Smith Corona. Hadn’t a cent to my name.
The prospect of living rent free in Jerusalem, the city of God, thrilled me. Of course, it was understood, if unstated, that their sole reason for housing me was as a marital prospect for Tsofnat, who had no suitors for miles in any direction and was drifting into misanthropy of a very real and chilling sort. Her suffering was there in her eyes, unmistakable: a dark stare of nightmarish childhood mental injury incurred by an upbringing on a borderland kibbutz where, every night, for fear of marauding robber bands and terrorists, the children were rousted from sleep and hurried, under fire, into dark, fetid bunkers to await the outcome of the night’s battle, never knowing whether the figure appearing at the door to retrieve them would be a kibbutznik or a pistol-wielding killer poised for rape.
These experiences had calcified into dank mental crawlspaces into which she retreated and where no one could reach her. In all likelihood, she would go mad. Were she to, I couldn’t possibly lose. I understood my advantage as perfectly as any gold-digging gigolo: Elia, a divorced woman without any illusions about the prospects for her increasingly strange old maid daughter; Tsofnat, a daughter living under the perpetual unspoken critique of her still beautiful, talented, and charismatically fiery mother; and me, an American Jewish boy, twenty-six years old, broke, needing to make his way in a new country. I would, could, provide endless amusement, not to speak of social, emotional, esthetic, and sexual relief—both directly and vicariously—to two brutally lonely single women trapped with each other.
Everything was understood, but unstated. The ostensible purpose of my “ingathering” into their home was patriotic. I was an immigrant Jew whose assimilation into the Jewish state they would jointly underwrite. I was a project. Obviously, I was too promising a prospect to have to endure the indignities and soul-bruisings of immigration in a war-embattled land.
My sacrifice for the homeland entailed eating vineyard grapes while seated at the feet of Mother Elia, learning the insider’s history of Israel, while her mad daughter raced about the building she owned engaging in interminable, outraged lawsuits over plumbing fixture repairs, damaged walls, leaking roofs. At night, as Elia and I continued our conversational walk through history, Tsofnat, dressed in a horrific gray maid’s dress with white trim, her hair stacked atop her head in a gruesome pyramid, cooked the standard household fare of turkey meatballs, falafel, salad, coffee, chocolate cookies, all topped off with filterless Selon cigarettes and Rishon LeZion brandy. At this juncture, they had no idea whatsoever about me and booze.
It didn’t take them long to discover.
Elia was first to note how I seemed to down glassful after glassful of the brandy until none was left, whereupon I started on the wine. But she simply chalked it up to my bohemian temperament. The word drunkard was not yet assignable to me in their love-blinded eyes.
After a week on the sofa, I made my move. Crept into Tsofnat’s bedroom. It was dark, but she was up. Lying there in a white nightgown, very still.
She said in a frank voice: “You have come for something?”
“Yes,” I said, leaning over to plant a kiss. She jerked her face away, my kiss landing on her frizzy hair, which felt like steel wool.
“Not so fast,” she said. “My mother will hear.”
“She won’t care. She likes me.”
“You are so sure of yourself?”
“Yes,” I said. And made to kiss her again. Again she jerked away. A part of me watched myself act like a cad yet felt helpless to stop.
“Look,” I said. “You know why I’m here. Why play games? We’re adults.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean”—I lied—“that I want you. I want to make love to you. I think you’re beautiful.”
“More beautiful than your Finnish whore?”
I paused to absorb this. “I knew that I should not have told Elia about that.”
“Helky. Is that her name?”
“What does it matter?”
“A little slut with long legs and tits that lift like this?” With both hands, she clutched her sagging breasts and shoved them up so hard they almost bounced off her chin, which had begun to show signs of doubling.
I winced. “Tsofnat,” I pleaded. “What’s the point?”
Inside, I was panicking. Had ditched kibbutz and Helka for a free ride on this cash cow, and now she was refusing to give milk.
“She was ugly!” I blurted out. “Hideous, in fact!”
Tsofnat stopped, looked at me. “Liar,” she said hopefully.
“I’m telling you, she was—I don’t know just how you’ll take this, because you have four of them yourself, but she was a dog. A complete dog.” My hand made descriptive motions
before my face. “Her eyes were small, her nose out to here, she had lips like a mule, the only thing pretty on her was her...”
I paused here. I knew that my lie would better persuade by avoiding undue exaggeration, that everything ugly has something beautiful about it, but whatever I chose to exalt mustn’t be something that would throw Tsofnat into a permanent tailspin of self-loathing, some body part which she despised in herself, but rather should be a part of her physiognomy of which she could be proud, a competition category in which she felt unthreatened.
“Her neck,” I said. “She had a long, slender neck, like yours.”
Neck, after all, was not so important. Face, breasts, ass were the real minefields.
I took Tsofnat’s hand in mine. “And she had pretty tapering fingers like yours.”
“Oh,” said Tsofnat, withdrawing her hand a little but not completely.
“And her waist. She had a little wasp waist like you.” Letting her hand go, I clasped my hands around her waist, drew her close. “I admit. That little waist of hers turned me on a lot. Those little hands. But she didn’t have those eyes of yours to look into when—”
“Humping?” She pulled back, tried to get free.
“Talking,” I said.
“Yes, sure,” she spit with fascinated skepticism. “I bet you talked much with this Finn.”
“Her English was very good.”
“Better than mine?” Tsofnat snapped.
“No.”
“I see. What else did this Finn not have?”
“Your amazing hair,” I said, knowing it to be a stretch—she was fully aware of its tumbleweed coarseness. But there is that part of us that yet wants to believe against all evidence to the contrary that the painful fact is untrue, that even our own perception of reality lies—that what is ugly is in fact beautiful.
On the other hand, I knew that if she bought the lie about her hair, then I had her in my pocket.
One month later, in a private ceremony attended by a few friends and relations from her side, we were married.
20
IT AMAZES ME TO REALIZE THE EXTENT TO WHICH we alcoholics stake our illusory hopes on the flimsiest, most ill-conceived evidence, all the better to later tear them down so that, bottle in hand, we can wallow amid the rubble in an orgy of drunken bitterness, survey the carnage with a certain longing, confirmed in our suspicion that life is a cheat; that all along we were right to suspect existence itself of shortchanging deceptions.
But though all along we intuit, sense, know, that only ruin can ensue from a foolish strategy, yet we elect to proceed, wed someone sure to harm us, in order to be harmed—feel the disillusionment that has only one possible, immediate, and quite lethal antidote: booze.
Clearly, Tsofnat was a severe manic-depressive. In marrying her, I knew what I would get, and got it. The raging shut-in with haunted eyes and bride-of-Frankenstein hair stormed through my days and nights, locking herself behind closed doors, weeping, screaming, threatening suicide, just as my mother had. And in my darkly mounting sense of justification—given Tsofnat’s abominable public displays—I could grab, in turn, for whatever little pleasures and leisure and momentary stays from life were obtainable, and with a sense that these were my due, these I deserved: look at the psychotic woman I’m married to. The Shrew Queen of Hell.
Under the pitying witness of Elia, with considerable heartbreak and disillusionment I watched Tsofnat’s performances. My own theatrics were, I thought, Emmy-level—so much so that I even believed them myself. At such times, I wept like a man lost. Elia, unable to bear this spectacle of a good-looking young new husband heartbroken by an insane wife, poured me tall tumblers of brandy and once even broke out a fifth of some very old British Mandate–era scotch and said: “Here, poor boy. I was saving this for a special occasion. But with a wife like that, you deserve it.” I made quick business of the bottle. And then of the brandy too.
Under their name I ran up a tab with a local grocer for cigarettes and booze. By now I had little left of common decency and knew it, but I couldn’t bear to dwell on that for very long. To kill the pain, I drank increasing amounts of liquor in the space that Elia had cleared for me out back in her old pottery studio, an amazing giant wooden shed of cobwebs, flowers, potter’s wheels, unfinished semiabstract ceramic figures writhing from the workbenches and shadows. I loved it in there. Set up shop quite nicely. Want only to write, I told myself. Just leave me in here alone long enough, keep the cigarettes and booze coming, and one day I’ll emerge with a masterpiece in hand.
But there was the painful shame of my treatment of these two women. It choked the language in me, blocked my ability to write. Often I woke from a blackout slumped over my typewriter. I read ferociously for escape from my despair: Dostoyevsky and Coetzee, Babel and Hemingway, Conrad and Borges. Occasionally, encouraged by booze, I sipped brandy, dragged deep on Time cigarettes, and sketched down the scenes humming through my head, a disjointed narrative of fragmentary nightmarish recollections that yet might have built to something, though probably not much. Inevitably, Tsofnat would crash into my redoubt and stand there, horn-rimmed, horrified, to remind me of my crimes against her: “Look at you! Happy as a cat! You’ve got it all! Lucky boy! Lucky American boy! Stupid Israeli women pay the rent, make the food, eh? Keep you in liquor and tobacco, huh? Give you where to write. Nice deal you got here! No job. All the time you please. At least if you were writing something worthwhile—that made money—but what do you got here, eh?”
Pinched between thumb and forefinger she held up a nearly blank page containing a single typed sentence with several cross-outs running through the words. “Today’s output?” she smirked. “Or maybe this week’s?”
“I need time. I’m just getting my sea legs.”
“Sea legs! What sea legs? What sea? A sailor works! You are a lazy, lying thief! You think we are all stupid little chess pieces you can move around your board while you drink and smoke away the days, don’t you!”
Yes, I did.
“Please,” I said. “I’m just sitting here confused and scared because the woman I’m married to seems to be having a nonstop nervous breakdown.” Made myself look as pathetic as I could. Which worked on Elia, never on Tsofnat. By now, she saw right through me; knew she had landed a drunken predator who right before your eyes, in the midst of your life, drained your resources and vanished. Now I was here, then not, liquor-transported to a realm of groundless hope and tireless fantasy where she held no citizenship, was stamped an “undesirable,” ridiculed as a nag, a slag, a drudge, and unceremoniously expelled.
Day followed night. The explosive pressure built. Anyone could have seen what lay ahead. But Elia and Tsofnat were clueless. I had chosen my prey well. They were vulnerable, naïve, too inexperienced to guess what lay in store.
One day, Tsofnat locked herself in her bedroom, raged loudly about my refusal to work. As Elia stirred a cauldron of soup and peered down at me with heavily mascaraed mournful eyes, concerned (perhaps intuiting some shift in my normally pleasant mien), I pocketed my nearly full pack of Selon cigarettes, picked up the bottle of Rishon LeZion, stood, and said: “What Tsofnat doesn’t seem to understand is that there are no barriers, no fences, no walls.”
I moved a step and waved a hand before my face to show its unchecked passage. “She can fill the air with her voice, her threats, her craziness, but none of that impedes my body’s travel through space. I am free. Doesn’t she know? I am always at point A. Wherever I decide is point B, I just get up and go to it. Nothing’s in my way.” I walked to the door. “I’m no mathematician, but this much I know: from point A to point B is a straight line, with nothing in between.” I looked at her astonished face and repeated: “Nothing, Elia. Nothing.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m out. Gone. Right now. I’ll be filing for divorce.”
She looked at me, incredulous. “Pish posh. Sit down. Don’t get all worked up. She’s just in a mood. She has her mon
thlies. You know how sensitive she is.”
“I like you very much, Elia. You are the kind of person I hoped to find when I came to Israel. But she is insane. You recognize that, don’t you?”
Elia’s face hardened. “She’s not well. But you knew that too, didn’t you, when you married her. But you went ahead anyway. Let’s not play games with each other.”
“No games. Yes, I knew. I knew what I was getting into. And I also know what I’m getting out of.”
“So, she’s right. You only married her for the free rent and board.”
Her words stung. The ugly truth hung there between us, and at that moment I could have cried for what I had done to this woman, who had been so kind to me, to her daughter, who had trusted me enough to wed. I was a complete scoundrel, unrecognizable to myself. As I stood in the doorway, about to leave, my eyes sought for hers, to say: Please forgive me. I don’t know what I’m doing on this earth. But instead I shut the door quietly behind me. Hurried away into the unknown, chased by the thought of Tsofnat in her white nightie, banshee-barefoot behind me, howling.
But no one followed.
21
THE BATTERY OF GOVERNMENT BENEFITS DESIGNED to encourage immigration included payment for food and board and free university education. I rented a small cottage in a quarter known as Nachlaot—a quaint working-class slum populated by artists and laborers—and applied for and got into the masters program in English literature at Hebrew University.
Studied Melville, Herzl, Freud, Sylvia Plath, Marx, and Edmund Wilson. The days passed in boozy boredom. In a class on Charles Dickens it struck me that to be the son of a Holocaust survivor, resident in Jerusalem, first in my family to breathe free air in a Jewish state in two thousand years, and pissing away my days analyzing semiotics of late Victorian British novels was an absurdly wasted opportunity.
Drunken Angel (9781936740062) Page 6
