Drunken Angel (9781936740062)

by Kaufman, Alan

  The week when Yehuda Amichai, the country’s greatest poet, won the coveted Israel Prize, he was scheduled to be interviewed on our stage by a prominent literary critic named Alex Zahavi.

  Backstage in a dressing room, Amichai, a mistress cradled on his lap and surrounded by a retinue of mildly amused rough-looking literary cohorts, sat smoking, drinking, and in no great hurry to face his audience.

  When finally he emerged, the crowd had been waiting for an hour. Amichai, bored, sank into his chair and sat there looking like an insolent truant forced to remain after school.

  Zahavi asked him how he felt to have just received Israel’s most prestigious accolade. Amichai shrugged. Lit up a cigarette, blew smoke into Zahavi’s face. Whereupon Zahavi clutched his chest, tore at his shirt, struggling to breathe, and slid from his seat onto the stage, where he lay gasping for air. He seemed to be having a heart attack.

  Amichai, the closest to him, looked away, bored.

  Zahavi’s wife leaped up in her seat and began to scream: “Yehuda, help him! It’s Alex’s heart!” but for whatever reason Amichai did nothing, seized by a spell of Amichaian torpor, an existential sluggishness. Or maybe he had caught a good verse line in his head and didn’t want to lose it. With the aid of an assistant, I got a nitroglycerine tablet under Zahavi’s tongue and kept him comfortable until the ambulance arrived. Amichai, with bigger fish to fry, left.

  Weeks later, in a Jerusalem bar, at a table with Ivan Schwebel, the painter, and the poets Natan Zach and Dennis Silk, we waited for Amichai to show, but he called the bar, said he couldn’t make it. Schwebel, American born, was Amichai’s favorite painter; one of his works adorns the cover of Amichai’s selected poems. Schwebel boasted to Zach that I was a Bronx football player from the toughest high school in New York and could do more push-ups than anyone present. To prove it, Schwebel and some others hit the ground for fifty, their limit, and dared me to exceed it.

  With lifted eyebrows, Zach, a portly man with a Faustian goatee, looked at me as if to say: So?

  I jumped down, did sixty. Eyelids lowered, Zach nodded and smiled. To celebrate my victory we got good and smashed.

  At Anna and Itamar’s I held court, so to speak, said little, the mysterious, unapproachable, behind-the-scenes kingpin. But inside, I wallowed in a warm self-pity bath. Had an awful crush on Anna, could barely stand to look at Edna anymore. Though I planned, designed, and directed every aspect of every program singlehandedly, didn’t really feel a part of it. There was me over here, the creative power and financial source, and them, the artists, over there, poor, disheveled, but in love, proud, working together. They were all so grateful. But what about me, I wondered bitterly.

  As our gatherings grew to include more of Jerusalem’s bohemian set, I sank deeper into a despair that I could not share with anyone, a surfacing undercurrent of frustration over the undeniable fact that I had fallen completely and hopelessly in love with Anna.

  26

  I LOVED HER SO MUCH THAT I DARED NOT EVEN sit close to her in the same room. Wherever she happened to be always found me at the farthest point opposite. Our group often went out dancing and drinking to little late-night gangster cafés along Agrippa Street, where everyone sat around in the yellowish electric light, smoking endless cigarettes, leaning against each other, drunk, looping limp arms around each other to stumble-dance, but Anna and I sat apart, exchanging terse pleasantries with others too drunk to stand, and always ignoring each other from opposite ends of the table.

  I never for a moment fooled myself into believing that she loved me or harbored any reciprocal feeling except as colleague and familiar.

  She seemed to be closest to Edna. They were together constantly, a commiserating female triumvirate of Anna, Edna, Debbie, always off somewhere, to the Turkish baths to steam up and put henna in each other’s hair, or to lunch in workers’ cafés and after, shop for clothes and personal care items in the cheap stalls of the Yehuda market. They were the kind of trio who turned heads, and when I saw them together, laughing with arms locked like mischievous sisters as they hoofed down the street, I felt even more hopelessly in love with her.

  In the planning sessions for the museum shows, over which I presided with a firm but encouraging hand, I was all business—the entrepreneurial visionary who had roughed out each show’s basic design, the go-to decision maker who marshaled resources from thin air, the miracle worker who made it possible for the creators to create.

  At these meetings Anna was a consummate professional who stayed on point with her assignments and addressed only matters of concept, or if the conversation went deeper it was to better understand what I was attempting to stage in a particular show.

  Dancers, singers, poets, authors, filmmakers, actors whirled around me, cyclonic. A wave of my hand could conjure a postmodern opera. The show mounted from astonishment to astonishment as I introduced innovations like computerized audiovisual stage sets and tightened presentations so they increasingly resembled actual holograms of a literary arts publication. At the program’s height—and at the lowest depths of my inexpressible longing for Anna—audience and cast members alike had the eerie experience of watching the pages of an immense journal turn with each new presentation, and feeling that they were turning with it.

  At show’s end, a glut of Jerusalem hoi polloi and culturati poured from the theater and stood around to talk excitedly in the corridors, balustrades, lobby, and out in front of the giant institution. But if their eyes sought for me, I was nowhere around. Skulked alone in some backstage area, disconnecting cables and tossing soda cups into trash bins—anything to avoid the unbearable sight of her. For on such nights she wore her finest clothes, looked stunning. At the sight of her my throat would catch, I couldn’t speak. This had happened to me after more than one program, to my mortification.

  I would find a way to angle in slowly on the group, but really, on her. Knew they were out there waiting for me to go party, celebrate. I would come around from a dark side door exiting onto the surrounding park, and for a time stand at a remove, in the shadows of trees, looking, smiling, tearful, shaking my head in wonder, hurting inside, and so dazzled—how could anyone be so beautiful? Then I thought, maybe some astronomer who has loved a certain planet or star since earliest memory feels that mingled pain and pleasure to see it through a telescope, and knows the same anguished wonder. Whereupon, drawing a deep breath, I’d come upon them, unsmiling, my usual no-nonsense self, and say something inane, like “Well. That was all right, huh?” and get hugged and backslapped and hand-pumped, and they probably would have carried me on their shoulders too were it not so plainly evident that I disliked any sort of appreciative horseplay.

  We’d go out, to the music places, where liquor flowed. The hugging couples drifted over the dance floor or flailed around and spun and screeched with hilarity as the pounding music accelerated our pulses, and we drank, endlessly, while inside my head I watched, in a bubble, my anguish-frozen insides, unutterably alone, hopelessly solitary, like some freak fallen from space, green fluids dripping from eyes and noxious mouth agape, forming words in a language no one spoke.

  Sat smoking cigarettes, polished off bottles of Rishon LeZion brandy. Sometimes wandered off unnoticed, or with some mumbled promise to return, and did not, slept it off in the streets.

  Come morning, I’d stumble to my feet, let myself into the flat, knowing that Edna, drunk, had spent the night at Anna and Itamar’s. In a strange sense, I had become the hub of everyone’s world, yet was nowhere to be found, and could not locate myself anywhere in it. And so had it been for most of my life, which seemed to have been lived in my absence.

  27

  THEN, THE WAR.

  In response to ceaseless incoming rocket attacks from terrorist bases in Lebanon, the Israeli Air Force bombed Beirut. Then ground troops excursioned inland toward the Litani River, where, it was reported, they would establish a defense perimeter to hold as a preventive buffer against further cross-border shellings and
raids.

  Instead, under the direction of Defense Minister Arik Sharon, the army kept going into all-out full-scale surprise war.

  But while the army went north, my unit went south, into the Gaza Strip, to conduct operations against groups infiltrating from Gaza and Egypt.

  It was later called “the Secret War,” small units holding down vast spans of territory, performing tasks that required ten times our numbers and that we were, by and large, completely unsuited for. And so while the big war raged northward our dirty little mission went unnoted in the south.

  I know soldiers who during several tours in Lebanon were not fired upon once, but every night; on the border of Egypt, we were shot at by tired, disgruntled Egyptian soldiers, or else Muslim fanatics, or even Bedouin tribesmen. If patrolling in the West Bank, we were fired upon. This was supposed to be a “quiet” service, a “good” time. Our good time consisted of night operations in rank-smelling close-quarter market places where every door or alley concealed a possible assailant. Our “good” time involved leveling the homes of terrorists who had blown up Israeli buses or stalking wanted gunmen through labyrinthine housing complexes or making sudden, lightning raids on communities where we overturned the contents of bedrooms and living rooms, searching for Molotovs, and which, afterward, made us feel inhuman, dirty, morally bankrupt, despite whatever we might unearth.

  We were not trained for such tasks. My reserve unit consisted of armored infantry attached to a tank battalion: of urban counterinsurgency we knew nothing whatsoever. Trained for the battlefield, we found ourselves conducting operations among populations seething with hatred, and we felt that hatred deep down in our very bellies, where it sickened us and sometimes made us want to get good and drunk.

  I recall one operation where I and two others drove alone on patrol in a jeep to a far-distant Arab village on the frontier of the West Bank, at the very edge of Jordan, through a menacing marketplace crowd in an area where several terrorist cells were known to be operating.

  We had orders to make our presence felt, show ourselves publicly, with weapons held at the ready as we parted the crowd like surf, yet not to fire unless first fired upon. I remember the fear in my comrades’ faces, the hypertense alertness as we scanned every eye, every wall crack, every changing rivulet of space appearing and disappearing between the amassed bodies of the marketgoers, knowing that in that shimmering interstice a handgun might appear, or a Kalashnikov, or a grenade. It felt unreal.

  Experiencing a form of terror so brand-new changed the quality of fear, for me, into something like a hallucinogen. Moving through so much barely suppressed fury, hate condensed into a sea of staring, was akin to a religious experience. Felt myself transported out of my skin into a realm far beyond the reach of human enmity. There were constant house-to-house searches. Manhunts for infiltrators. But the worst of it was up in the West Bank, in Hebron, to which my unit was sent because, with the war in Lebanon going full-tilt, elements of the routed PLO had infiltrated the West Bank and were launching new operations there.

  Locals were going at it nose to nose with the settlers, with the Israeli Army caught in the middle. It was here that we picked up two prisoners, infiltrators, whom we were told to escort to prison headquarters in the back of a truck. The men lay on the floor blindfolded, and as I looked at them I sensed the terror that they must have felt. Though they were potential killers sent on a mission of mass murder into an Israeli civilian population center, the sight of their captivity sickened me, made me want to puke.

  I knew that were I in their place I could expect no mercy from their side. But it didn’t help. They were killers, fanatics, prepared to slaughter us all. And yet, I could not bear to see them in restraints. There is a kind of blindfolding and binding—Edna’s kind—that is erotic; another kind, this sort, that felt dehumanizing. Was there a link? We handed them over to their jailers and as I watched them led away, stumbling and falling, something inside of me fissured, a hairline crack.

  From then on, I saw many blindfolded and wrist-bound men stumble down corridors into interrogation rooms, and each time, the crack widened. Realized that our foes had found the perfect way to destroy us: by placing us in the hopeless, impossible position of choosing between survival and moral disintegration, depriving us of any choice that would preserve both our bodies and souls. It would have to be one or the other, and of course I, like my fellow Israelis, chose life—what else could one do? But from that day on I lost the power of sleep.

  Lay insomniac in my sleeping bag, fixated on one thing: Anna. Thought of her pale white feet with pink-nailed toes, the gummy-bear rubber sandals she bought in the Yehuda market, the dirty beige high heels she wore with a short black skirt, her slender legs, warm thighs, coltish knees.

  I thought of her shoulders, how they tapered seamlessly into her arms, her arms into her electrifying hands, whose fingers, like spiders, seemed so effortlessly to spin solid matter into art. Thought of how she drew all the time, book in her lap, reddish-gold hair falling over her pale, aristocratic face, eyes full of longing. How she concealed disappointments. I had seen that there.

  Stopped removing my uniform, slept alongside my weapon and ammo vest, head pillowed on my helmet, and when a mission needed someone, was the first up and on the armored car or jeep, face wrapped in a black kaffiyeh and goggles, gunstock wedged into my thigh, at the ready, a round chambered and didn’t care who knew it—performing my tasks robotically.

  Plunged down any hole ordered into, any darkness, berserking through hideouts, searching for weapon caches, gasoline bombs, rags, detonators, explosives, flags, propaganda tapes, uniforms, grenades, photographs, flyers, suspects—a writer without a book to my name, married to a woman for her money, dope, and apartment, in love with someone else’s spouse, lonely, disgusted, badly needing a double.

  Slowly, in the recesses of my ignored consciousness, my entombed emotions, a plan took shape, ill conceived, which acquired the momentum of a visionary religious conversion, until I felt almost as if I had been called upon by some god to execute it.

  28

  I HAD DECIDED THAT I MUST TELL ANNA THAT I loved her. If there was a God, or orbiting mother-ship aliens, ruling the earth, something greater-seeming than my little fears had commanded that on my next return home I must attempt, no matter how hopelessly, to persuade Anna to engage with me in adultery.

  I would tell her how I felt, the whole painful truth, knowing that to do so would bring an end to everything that was my world. I didn’t care. Craved Armageddon, despised myself, my lies: how the world paraded its wants and hopes but my shameful truths hid away in shadows.

  For the first time in my life I was going to be nakedly honest about my feelings. Anna, I would say, I know that we are both married, but I love you and want to possess you, sexually, socially, intellectually, and in every way that one can possess another. Possess you and declare my feelings to the world.

  Once I chose this course, it was as though I had been transported to another realm, a different dimension, where I saw life through eyes made fresh with regained innocence.

  What was I doing in the Gaza Strip, a hellish place of incurable Jew-haters, religious and nationalist fanatics with guns? Far from home—Anna was home. Lay on the ground near a fire in an oil drum, the dark, muttering silhouettes of other troops milling around. In uniform, ammo vest, hugging my weapon, helmet beside me, body stinking, filthy, face smudged with black camouflage stick, sweating, flies buzzing my face, tightroping on my earlobes, nibbling on bits of food and my peeling flesh. Dung beetles and scorpions scuttling over my abraded, scabby, black-knuckled hands, I had visions of walking with Anna through a town in Spain, wearing rope sandals, squirting endless wine down each other’s throat from bloated goatskins, staining her blouse, soaking through to the shape and hue of her satin breasts, how clearly they stood out, high and pert—and she and I dancing wistful drunken steps for smiling peasants in Basque berets, arms around each other’s waist, shameless, wistful, inte
llectual, soulful, like Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, two hoboes slumming in exile, gypsy moth bohemians far removed from internecine combat, hopeless battles, raging wars.

  Soft music sadnesses and warm nights of gentle candlelit poverty, poetic simplicity would be ours, Anna. We’d have new friends, expatriates exiled from other exiles to pure white sand beaches, removed from clamorous ambitions, gossipy cultural scenes, the grubby lower depths of those struggling in the arts.

  No more struggle. Love, sun, sex, writing, drawing, painting, food, wine, sleep, good conversation, chalk-white walls and doors painted red and blue, guitars strumming over little fishing harbors, the night tides twinkling with reflected stars. She yearned for it too. Could tell. Even as I knew that I was deluded.

  When my leave came up I hitched a ride in the back of a police dog truck, curled up in the canine-reeking cage, still wearing fireproof mud-caked combat overalls, half dead, sleepless, after days and nights of continuous operations, yet feeling more alive than I ever had. About to eject my false life, live a brand-new one of uncompromising personal truth, I drifted happily in and out of sleep, head rolling, dreaming of white flares pulsing through a pitch-black sky, camouflaged faces peering out over landscapes filled with wild field rats driven from their holes by the thunder of artillery duels, in the clap and flash of which I saw a terrorist I’d bound and blindfolded led away to interrogation, and I went outside, upset, to smoke—and woke, sweating, with a start, head bouncing on the jeep floor, tufts of dog hair stuck in my lips.