Honey in the Carcase

by Josip Novakovich

  He took photographs of Fritz and Bobo and captured the images of the two souls cuddling. Igor sent the pictures to his wife in Belgrade. He wrote a letter, and among other sentences, he wrote these:

  “During multiple rocket-launcher fires, the two shell-shocked trembling creatures forgot to hate each other. Who knows how many nights they spent together, embracing. Who knows how they survived. I imagine the cat hunted and fed the dog pigeons, mice, little rabbits. And when the cat couldn’t catch anything, perhaps Fritz did. Or maybe they ate horse carcasses, or even human corpses. I don’t want to imagine that. I am sure they didn’t—they hunted. I see Bobo hunt in the yard in the morning. But the strange thing is, they don’t let me approach them. They don’t let me into the house, either. Anyhow, all I want to say is: if Fritz and Bobo get along, why couldn’t we?”

  That was a rhetorical question. Igor didn’t expect an answer, but three weeks later—not much longer than it took the letter to reach Belgrade—Dara arrived on a seemingly empty train. People didn’t dare to travel at night in the trains, and if they did, they lay on their seats and on the floors for fear of snipers.

  Once she closed the squeaking yard-gate of her old home, Dara hugged her husband. Fritz and Bobo came out of the house and growled at them.

  A VARIATION ON A THEME OF BOCCACCIO

  DURING THE TIMES of Jacob the Patriarch, love was made passionately and blindly so that Jacob and, undoubtedly, many other men could not make out a difference between two radically different-looking women in their beds. During the Renaissance, wives couldn’t tell the difference between husbands and other men, a failing which gave rise to sensual jubilations.

  Nowadays, in our passionless age of electricity and information, people notice every little difference, detail by detail, eliminating all the hope of passing for someone else in bed.

  I cursed the age I lived in when I met a bewitching woman, wife of an Episcopal minister, at an anti-nuclear rally in the city of C. When a crew of cripples from the suburbs of Nagasaki rolled in electric wheelchairs across the podium, she searched through her snakeskin purse for a handkerchief or paper tissue. I handed her my handkerchief, a hand-woven memento from Athens, which I carried around for cultural value, and only in extreme emergencies did I blow my nose in it. She wiped her large tears, sun in her eyes and on her golden necklace, and the refracting and glittering radiance of her tears and blue eyes knocked a modern darkness out of my soul.

  “Thou hast ravished my heart with one of thine eyes, with one chain of thy neck,” I said to her, and her teeth shone. I wrote letters to her—her name was M (more I should not reveal)—in a combination of Gothic and Japanese calligraphy, in King James English, jealously hating the minister. I became poetic, lyrical, subtle, crass; my whole character bloomed with many contradictories of passion and imagination. But for one hundred pages of my imageries, which wept in ink from swan feathers in my fingers over waxed paper resembling papyri, she replied cursorily in a laser-printed PC Line font. “I appreciate your letters though they shock me. I’ve never received such lyrical gibberish in my whole life. Please, don’t ever write to me like that again. You may write to me if you wish, if you have something to say, especially on the non-radioactive fusion research you do.”

  I no longer sprinkled verses from ancient texts onto my page, such as, “Thy teeth are as a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which come up from washing, whereof every one bear twins.” I wrote about the absolute power of the forces of attraction among nuclear particles, thinking she needed a cover lest her husband should perchance read something incriminating. After I explained to her the turmoil my bottle-fusion experiment was undergoing at the hands of envious colleagues with billion-dollar reactors, she yielded to my invitation to take a boat ride on a lake, but did not respond to my attempt to kiss her—or rather, she did, recoiling from me so abruptly that the boat tilted and she fell overboard. I pulled her out by her narrow wrist. Through her silk, I saw the outline of Aphrodite, her nipples scolded with the cold, erect. The minute blond hairs on her breasts stood up, alarmed. But from the Neoclassical body a modern and gruff voice shouted, “I don’t wish to see you ever again! You are so single-minded!”

  And true enough, I was single-minded, able to think of nothing but her form. My yearning took various shapes, but alas, none that would please her, because they all were the variations of me and not of my brother.

  I’ve delayed to mention—I was so loath to interrupt the illusion of another beginning that writing about the beginning gave me—that M slept with her husband rarely, and with my brother often. My brother, an endowed chair in chemistry at our pompous university, had been with me at that no-nuke rally, and instead of writing letters on papyri, he had called her up on a cordless phone from his Turbo Saab.

  Delicate M’s sleep was fragile, and so at home she slept in a bedroom of her own on the second floor, in the western suburbs of the city of C, among pines, oaks, crew-cut golf courses of subtle green shades, dark ponds with pink water lilies. Tiger-striped black and orange bees rubbed their legs in gentle dust in red flowers, completing the colors of the German flag. In a nearby botanical garden, trees swooned promiscuously in balmy winds, casting their aromatic pollens. Near her window bowed an all-knowing oak. Its branches richly bifurcated and trifurcated so that my brother easily climbed into her room, to come home with floridly lurid details. “Oh, Joachim, her lips are so smooth and moist, you can see lust rippling in microwaves over them before I bite her ear and pass my incisor through her pierced earlobe. And her nether lips…”

  For jealousy I heard buzzing in my ears, and in darkness saw frozen winter moss on the northern side of a beech in the forest of my distant childhood. And the Bible echoed, “Jealousy is cruel as the grave; the coals thereof are coals of fire which hath a most vehement flame.”

  If only I looked like my brother! We did look alike, but never had anybody mistaken me for him. I thought him uglier, though his head was full of hair and mine wasn’t. I photographed him and took the photos to a wig designer. No sooner had I got the dreadfully expensive wig than my brother cut his hair.

  I wasn’t about to give up. Our hairs were approximately of the same length and color, but mine was curly, his flat. My hairline had retreated far from the slopes of my forehead; his hadn’t budged.

  I got a hair transplant. I gained what I wished to gain anyhow. If Steve had been balding and I’d had a full head of hair, I would have had to pluck my hair, just for the slim hope of tricking M. Yet I would have done it.

  In a black ghetto parlor, a barber ironed and straightened my hair. Now I could hope to deceive M, the way Jacob had deceived Isaac, passing for his brother Esau.

  But that was only a beginning. My nose was straight, thin, long, classically so. Art curators used to compliment me on it. My brother’s broken nose looked like the Black Monday graph, horizontal with a sudden long drop. I went to a scar-faced plastic surgeon who had lifted many a famous cheek. I showed him Steve’s nose. “Sir Doctor, I’d like to have one just like that.”

  “Are you demented?” He touched my nose, gazed obliviously, and said, “You must be putting me on, you know my weakness!”

  “I wish I were.” I was dejected, for I was fond of my nose.

  “Young man, you’ve no idea how much I love money, yet still, I beg you not to do it. Walk as an example of what a nose should look like.”

  “Please, hurry up with the job!”

  “How about changing something else? I could make your eyes slanted, heighten your cheekbones…” He clearly assumed that I wanted to change my appearance because I must have done some terrible crime, which was not true, not at that time anyhow.

  He cut out a piece of my nose, smashed and twisted the rest, and despite all the painkillers, it was a crucifixion. But with each bang on the nose, I was closer to my beloved’s breath, which would balm me like a dewy wind from the cedars of Lebanon.

  After my physical recovery—I did find out how much the doctor
loved money, I couldn’t hope to recover financially yet—in the mirror my brother gazed at me from around the swollen nose. I kept the nose pinched in bandages and wore a baseball cap. Steve thought I had been through a bad neighborhood.

  Steven was a bit heftier than I. So I gorged on meat like a Tatar, slept like a lion, melted Turkish delights on my tongue like a sultan. In three weeks, Steve and I looked like twins.

  My changed looks could get me as far as her bed. But in our merciless age, you have to talk before caressing, and only when it seems you have nothing more to say, you make love. My voice would hinder me.

  I modulated my voice, but, to get his lisp, I needed to eliminate a premolar. My dentist made me sign that I wouldn’t sue him, and he doubled the regular extraction fee, for the legal risk. It’s one thing to have a sick tooth pulled, there is even pleasure in the painful departure of pain—but to have sturdy roots torn from the nerves and the blood vessels! The dentist grinned with gusto as my tooth and my jaw crackled, and he chatted with his mini-skirted assistant about the computer-balanced Pirellis on his Jaguar. When my gum ceased to bleed, while the insides of my jaw still itched, I copied Steve’s lisp perfectly.

  In the meanwhile, I had neglected my nuclear fusion. Most traditional nuclear physicists, in fear of losing multimillion-dollar support from the military, railed against the Salt Lake City physicists, who overshadowed me, but some railed against me most acrimoniously, claiming that I was faking my data. I had recorded even more energy release than the Lake researchers. Ever since M had ravished me with her eyes, I didn’t care to defend myself, though I believed I had found the key that would redeem not only me and the Lake physicists but all of modern humanity—we’d have more cheap and safe energy than we could put to use. But then, is there such a thing as safe energy?

  My love wasn’t safe energy. For love is strong as death.

  The hair, nose, and the lisp would carry me into her embrace. And then? I remembered that unlike me, Steve was circumcised. Where was I to get a circumcision? I had already spent too much money. If only I were a Jew! Well, why not become one?

  I went to a synagogue. My conscience pricked me for abusing the sacred for the secular, but then, is love secular?

  The rabbi questioned me, and I gave my apology. “I don’t believe in Christ. Yet I still have a burning religious want, a faith in one G-d, whose guidance I long for.”

  He lamented that most modern Jews, converts included, took religion as a cultural mainstay rather than a communion with G-d. “Incidentally, if you aren’t, are you willing to be circumcised?”

  “Oh, yes, longing to be!” He flipped his sharp eyebrow skeptically and curled his soft side lock contemplatively. “Is it expensive?” I asked.

  “It’s free, but at your age, it can be tremendously painful. Why don’t you think about it, lest you enter the covenant rashly.”

  To convince him and myself—each step on my thorny path to her ruffled lips absorbed me completely—I studied Hebrew while gorging on cheap steroid beef. Three weeks afterward, I reappeared at the synagogue, reciting to the rabbi the first chapter of Genesis in strong consonants. The contemplative rabbi’s eyes lit up with Mediterranean alertness. He recommended me to the regional board, whose rabbinical members asked more about my learning Hebrew than about my plagiarized theology.

  What torture! The skin capable of creating pleasure turned out more capable of inflicting pain. It stayed sore for two weeks, and I still shivered at the thought of unsheathing.

  I could now groan at M’s nostrils and lick the hairs in her nose. But, though I could speak like Steve—I copied his syntax and vocabulary—I didn’t know whether I could groan Steve-like.

  On the Fourth of July, certain that the patriotic zeal had carried everybody out to stare at the pinks, reds, and crackling yellows in the burnt sky, I hid a microphone among the rugged leaves of the old oak. I stretched the dark brown wires through the bark grooves to the cubic hedges at the lily pond, where I hid among creaking toads. Love shuns no debasements, yet I loathed my eavesdropping as my brother gripped M’s sternocleidomastoid muscle in his teeth.

  The evening before his next scheduled visit, about which he routinely bragged, I said to him, “Brother, let’s celebrate!”

  “Celebrate what?”

  “I’ve converted to Judaism.”

  “Are you nuts? What for? Jews will always consider you second rate, respecting you less than before, and Gentiles will think you third rate. Shifting identities, you’ll lose your character, nobody will respect you!”

  “But I am sincere. I enjoy the Old Testament. Physics gains strength from mystical Judaism, and I’ve always wanted to be a Wandering Jew.”

  Steve jeered. He smoked a brown Cuban cigar, sticking out the very tip of his tongue through his lips when the strong leaves smarted its lick-sores. I brought out several bottles of Rothschild wine from the end of the Great War, whereupon my brother changed his mind about my conversion.

  I sipped. He gulped, quickly replenishing his glass. He rubbed the glass edge, making the high sound ring from the vibration. When his droopy-eyed head dropped onto his forearm, I dragged him to his bed and roped him.

  In the morning, he shrieked. I told him that upon drinking wine with him, M had tied him. Inscrutable are the ways of love. “Damn your jokes. Tonight I have to visit her! Untie me!” “The undulating lips will always ripple for you.” I took off my nose cover and my baseball cap. His face darkened into the color of the wine he’d so amply drunk.

  My heart beat in luscious fright while I climbed the tree and dug my nails into the bark like a cat. In the window, veiled behind a silky curtain, she whispered, and I heard, “Come, I have decked my bed with coverings of tapestry, with carved works, with fine linens from Egypt. I have perfumed my bed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon. Come, let us take our fill of love until the morning.” I hastened as a bird to its snare, as a hawk to its dove.

  Upon leaping over the ledge, I flung myself into her embrace, kissed her ear with tenderest violence that flowed through my lip toward her lips; my jaws quivered with their power.

  “You taste different tonight, but…mmm! What have you eaten?”

  “Turkish delight. I love you now more than ever!” I lisped in the voice of my brother. Yet I couldn’t stop my tongue from shaping, in Hebrew, “Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins, which feed among the lilies. Until the day break, and the shadows flee away…” I quit, afrighted—this was out of Steve’s line—yet she heard nothing but my throaty lust. I savored her flesh, cool petals from the lily pond, through the silk that enshrouded her in a pink cloud in the pale moon’s silent rays. I freed myself from my rude linen and entwined my flesh with the ghost of my fantasy, her flesh. I strove into the confluence of all my yearning, into the emptiness inside the crystalline form of blood—she was a blood crystal.

  “Wow, I want you like the first night, Steve!”

  It reassured and yet disturbed me that she sighed my brother’s name.

  We were drowning in the tormenting thrill, in the waves of seething lust. I sought fullness by emptying my bones in the focus of her misty beauty, to capture her elusive haze into a definite form of my will transcending itself. She sought to catalyze her dream, her haze, by my clear will, luring my will to leap out of itself, so she would seal it in her fullness of being. A flash of ecstasy—the sheets of lightning trembling out there on the horizon and inside, in my teeth, my nose, my hair, my gone foreskin. I felt like a scorpion, dying upon emitting the sting. What post-orgasmic repose! M’s fingernails slid over my navel. Now that I had gone through the death cycle, the touch perturbed me. I wished no resurrection yet. I wished nothing to be added or taken away, and nothing to stir.

  She whispered, “Steve, Steve, oh, Steve!” At that, my lacerated ego awoke, like an owl with the sinking of the sun. “Oh, Steve.” Out of her tongue the serpent from the garden of Eden hissed through my ear, scratching the skin on my Adam’s apple. My hairs stood up
in proud, cold rebellion on my prickly skin.

  “I am Joachim. I have only playacted Steve. But I am…”

  “Stop, Steve!”

  “Joachim. I have changed my nose, hair, teeth.”

  “You aren’t…”

  “I learned how to imitate. So much for the inimitable love! Steve. No. Spurned Joachim. Haha.” She paled away. I reveled.

  “Mean bastard!” she said.

  “Your misplaced love has twisted me into a bastard brother. Yet you have just loved me.”

  “No, I love Steven.”

  “You loved all the little changes in style, in passion—all quintessentially mine. I don’t care what you say. I tasted your truth!”

  She sobbed. I took no pity on her. With the nonchalance of the one who has transcended a case of love, I crawled down the tree, naked, my nails in the bark, my skin tearing against thorny protrusions. With moonlight upon my skin, tranquil, I walked with my blessing to my foolish brother Esau.

  I untied him. He flew in the chains of love to the tired oak, like a hungry monkey to a coconut tree. Although I was not curious—I merely strutted in the pine-needled breeze—I heard their voices: sharp, rising, ever sharper, in a quarrel. Soon another voice joined, M’s husband. Furniture crashed. He must have woken at my unabashed ecstasy, and he waited, used to humiliation, until he could take it no more. When Steven returned, his left knuckles bled; he had struck out the minister’s two front teeth in exchange for the minister’s smashing his crooked nose—now it was straight! —and plucking out his hair.

  With the sounds of Carmina Burana on my stereo, I looked at Steven, who looked like I used to. He’d even lost his taste for fine wines. I laughed, and my cheer grew better and better with the tart oaky taste of the old red wine on my tongue, although the oak did taste rotten.

  AN OLD DEBT

  BORIS WALKED UP to Stephan, a Gypsy in his late thirties, at an outdoor café in the park of Nizograd, Yugoslavia, and said, “You remember, you owe me money.”