by Joshua Sobol
Seven thousand, Yadanuga calculates. You could have taken a suite overlooking the park, and still had enough left over for analysis.
When we parted, she didn’t want to take the money.
You’re kidding me.
She didn’t want it! In the end she agreed to take something as a Christmas present.
And you didn’t touch her all week?
I touched her, and she touched me. But nothing else, says Shakespeare. Nothing. We just rested.
Yadanuga holds out his hand and Hanina passes him the bottle. Yadanuga swallows, corks the bottle and lays a tender hand on his friend’s shoulder:
What are you still doing here, Bill, he says. You’re not really here at all. Get on a plane and go to her.
Yes, Hanina agrees sadly, I guess that’s what I’ll have to do.
And now let’s go down to the meeting, Yadanuga concludes, and put all your weight in the right place.
They turn round and step into the elevator, leaving the night and the cold, hard, pure moon behind them.
12
Smoke. Bluish-gray smoke stings his eyes. And the sweetish smell of grass. He passes his hand to and fro like a fan in front of his eyes, to get rid of the cloud suspended between the Himalayas, and out of the mist three burning dots smolder in front of his watering eyes, perhaps the cigarettes giving rise to all this smoke, or perhaps the eyes of Shiva, the Indian god with the third eye, which can see within, but when it looks out has the power to burn and destroy everything in its path. This third eye pierces the smoke like some kind of ancient laser beam. Smoldering like a red diamond in the head of an upright lingam, or in simple English, an erect penis. Hanina strains his eyes and manages to see through the smoke that this lingam is actually their energetic young graphic artist, Golan, whose two wives, Sati and Shakti, are supporting him on his left and right, each with a cigarette flickering in her mouth. Hanina rubs his eyes and waves away the smoke, and it turns out that Sati is Moran, the ideas woman, who brought Golan to your advertising agency, and Shakti is your wife Mona, Hanina, Tyrell Shlush the scriptwriter reminds him, beginning at this moment to develop a subplot, because from the way they are sitting on the right and the left of Shiva-Golan, the upright lingam—it is quite clear that they will be impregnated by him, and perhaps they have been already, and the only question is which of them will give birth to Skanda, the six-headed monster, and which of them will give birth to the elephant-headed Ganesha, but a second look leaves no doubt that Mona-Shakti will give birth to Skanda, and the young Moran-Sati will give birth to the elephant man, or the man-elephant, and what does it matter anyway who gives birth to what, it is perfectly clear that from this three-sided fuck only monsters will be born.
Why are you stuck in the door? He hears the voice of Shakti-Mona.
This place smells like Shiva’s temple in Bangalore, says Shakespeare, to himself or to Yadanuga, who responds, ‘I thought it reminded me of something bad …’
13
And suddenly they’re there, racing along the thickly overgrown red dirt path, their straining lungs breathing the sickeningly sour-sweet smells of rotting tamarind and passion-fruits, as they drag the Alsatian with them, grunting and foaming bloodily at the mouth. And like a pesky fly buzzing round their heads, they are accompanied by the fateful moment when the guy with the beard realized that the four men following him are not innocent Shiva devotees, coming to beseech the god of the many faces, but members of a death squad who have been hot on his heels all the way from Frankfurt to Bangalore, and who are now closing in on him—and in the fraction of a second, before they can grab him, the knife glitters in his hand and is buried in the Alsatian’s stomach. In the twinkling of an eye Jonas’s iron hand comes down on the back of the murderer’s neck, and the sound of a dry cracking of bones is heard, and the bearded man with the round face and the swollen lips falls broken-necked on the white marble steps, limp as an empty sack.
But what has been done cannot be undone. The Alsatian spits though his teeth: The dog stabbed me in the liver, and immediately loses consciousness, and someone has to take command in his place. The few tourists on the steps at this early morning hour take in the scene and run for their lives, but one skinny Japanese man turns his Handycam towards them and films them, and Yadanuga pats his cheek, snatches the video camera from his hands, removes the mini videotape with a skilled, tender hand, returns the empty camera to him, and suggests in basic English that he go and piss somewhere else. The terrified tourist doesn’t need to be told twice and he runs down the steps as fast as his legs can carry him. In a matter of minutes they will be surrounded by police. The way to the car is blocked, says Jonas, and at that moment Shakespeare takes command and orders: ‘To the river’. They reach the jetty. Hundreds of boats lie on their sides in the sand along the bank. They turn one of them over and push it into the water, lay the Alsatian in the bottom, and the boat slides into the water amid the tangled vegetation. The slow tide takes them out. They ply the oars, now they are far from the shore. And Jonas, who all this time is trying to give the Alsatian mouth-to-mouth, says fuck it, we’ve lost him. The Alsatian’s face turns a poisonous green, the color of tattoo ink. His lips are turning purple. His eyes open and for a split second his pupils reflect the green tropical sky, and then they suddenly go dull and they no longer reflect anything. They look at each other. They each wait for somebody else to say it, but all of them, with their throats choked up, maintain the right to silence.
And that’s the moment, says Shakespeare, that you stand up in the middle of the boat and produce a bitch of a monologue, God only knows where from:
What a genius you were. What a noble mind was destroyed here. Always, when we stood at a loss confronting the impossible, you would analyze the situation with your Cartesian French mind, going straight to the heart of the matter with the elegance of a knight, cutting to the chase with a stroke of a Samurai’s sword and the sharp intelligence of a Yeshiva scholar from Alsace. And now you lie here, at the bottom of a fishing boat, on a foreign river in a foreign land, a marvelous miracle of a man, and it’s all over for you, over and done, and we have nowhere to take you, friend. Forgive us, Danny, we’re giving you up to the river.
As one man they lift Daniel Altwasser, who for the first time Shakespeare has dared to call by his name, and lay him very gently in the water, over the side of the boat. The tide takes the body, rocks and spins it for a moment, until it slowly sinks into the brown water. But the Alsatian never disappeared. At this very moment he’s here with us, muses Yadanuga, and he senses the reluctance of Shakespeare, who is standing in front of him rooted to the spot, to enter the conference room, which is full of smoke and steeped in the fragrance of marijuana, like the Temple of Shiva in Bangalore. But here the sweetish scent is coming from the joints which Moran is rolling with her long fingers. And he says to himself exactly the same words he said then, as they stood in the boat and looked at the body as the muddy water spread over its monk’s habit and stained it brown, like coffee seeping into a white sugar cube: We talk wildly. We come up with all kinds of random sentences. Belonging to a world that doesn’t yet know why things happen. Surrounded by senseless killing and meaningless death. And what do we understand? Nothing.
14
Shakespeare Shakespeare, thinks Yadanuga, where did you find those words at that moment on that muddy river, words which described what our lives were with such precision. And in his head, from darkness to darkness, a selection of action scenes rush past, as if they had been cut out of many movies and stuck together into one sequence. A mustachioed man, wearing a well-tailored ultramarine suit, gets into a maroon Renault 16 next to a public park, slams the door, starts the engine, and breaks into body parts flying between fragments of metal inside a ball of fire that scorches the foliage of a chestnut tree, bright with the fresh new green of the end of spring, and then a coded knock in Morse, dash-dash-dot-dot at the hotel door, and a fat naked man, his paunch spilling over the top of his green boxer s
horts, opens the door in the middle of the night and gets a bullet between the eyes from a silencer that coughs into his face at point blank range, and he falls backward on the carpet, and the crown of his limp penis peeps in one-eyed astonishment from the opening of his shorts, and a man’s voice on the telephone says ‘Pronto’ in Italian with a heavy gutteral accent, and a finger presses eight-one-zero, and from the other end of the line an explosion is heard and after it the long shrill whistle of a disconnected line, and four men in the overalls of the French electric corporation skip like goats and spray eight men sitting round a table with miniaturized machine guns, and chairs turn over, and a fisherman’s cabin goes up in flames, and a boat blows up at sea, and people with arms and legs outspread fly like black cardboard cutouts against a background of glaring gold, and the voice of the Alsatian sings a line from a song by Yves Montand with cheerful irony ‘Et tout cela pour rien’—and all this for nothing.
God, how much we killed and were killed. So many lives were lost in order not to reach the place we’ve reached, and here we are at exactly the place where we didn’t want to be. And the lives that were lost are lost. We have to talk about it one day, Shakespeare. We have to sit over a bottle of Lagavulin one night and talk about it. Not Lagavulin. Its presence is too powerful, and it will take us straight to Islay, to that poor waiter, Bousidi, whose only crime was that he looked like the identical twin of the real Bousidi, and this resemblance cost him his life. So not Laphroaig and not Lagavulin and not Talisker. We’ll sit over a more neutral brand of whiskey. Calm. Without memories. Not from the Western Isles, whose soil is soaked in peat, but from the Highlands, from the heights of North Scotland. Balvenie, or Oban, or Glengoyne. Or perhaps from the lowlands, velvety triple distilled Auchentoshan. We’ll sit, you and I, and try to understand what it was, this Marathon, in which the streets are suddenly filled with crowds of runners, seventy thousand runners stampeding like herds, flooding and packing the squares and avenues to suffocation, spilling into the streets and alleys, a human tsunami flooding a city, the earth trembles from the thudding of the soles on the roads and the pavements, a hundred and forty thousand feet pounding the asphalt, and the shop windows and the facades of the buildings echo, and the air trembles with the sobbing of the desperate breathing of the lungs inhaling and exhaling two hundred and eighty thousand liters of air a second, and suddenly the last runners go past, and the race is over, the streets are empty, and a profound silence descends on the still city, and you stand there wondering: What was it, all that? Where did they come from? Where were they running to? What did they want? Where did they suddenly disappear to? What the hell was it, this crazy story that was our lives—
Where are we?
15
Shakespeare’s voice interrupts the torrent of images flooding the cellars of Yadanuga’s consciousness, and Mona repeats the sentence, and directs it to a precise address:
Moran, so where exactly are we?
Well, says Moran, and turns to Hanina, before you went up to the roof—
He knows what happened before he went up to the roof, Mona interrupts her and says in the commanding tone of a skipper: Tell him what happened when he wasn’t here.
Moran takes a breath. Her nostrils flare and quiver. A beautiful mare about to break into a gallop, he says to himself, trying to banish Melissa, who wears reading glasses on her slits of eyes, which look as if they have just been bathed in tears, and who is reading to someone over the phone passages from a book with a yellow cover, which shows the photograph of a man with a bald head and a lifeless face in a tuxedo, embracing a naked young Thai girl.
He asks himself why she needs this book for the pervert on the other end of the line, since there is nothing new about the description she is reading him. He has no doubt of her ability to successfully improvise a text of the same kind, full of names for the male and female sexual organs and tediously banal descriptions of what happens to them in the act of sexual intercourse. Apparently she prefers to read these things from a text written by someone else, a translation of some French novel, since this frees her from the need to search for words or to involve herself in the dreary transaction taking the place of real intimacy. He looks at her through the open bathroom door and sees her contemptuously deceiving her customer, who is fully aware of the deceit, but at this moment, in some kennel of loneliness, in one of the tens of thousands of cells of human habitation in this city glittering in a festival of light in the window, he is sitting on the lavatory, or leaning over the sink, and masturbating, with his face contorted in an expression of bestial stupidity. Apparently she gathers from the sounds on the other end of the line that the guy is about to come, for instead of continuing with her reading, she starts to puff and pant, with an expression of utter boredom and indifference on her face, and if she feels anything at all, it’s presumably an itch under her right elbow, for while her right hand holds the telephone, the fingers of her left hand move to scratch a spot just under the elbow on her right arm, and after they’ve finished scratching there they climb up her forearm and scratch there too, and when she’s done scratching she inserts her skinny pinkie into her left ear and probes inside it, and he watches her from his bubble bath, and steamy vapors cover the big window and turn Manhattan from 12th Street North into a shimmering Milky Way in the darkness, and her pants and moans over the phone grow faster and more frequent the deeper her matchstick pinkie digs into her ear, and now her mouth gapes open in a jaw-splitting yawn, of which she takes advantage to let out a deep groan, as if she has discovered within her a vast reservoir of hidden air, and she cries, now, baby, stick it into me, all of it, oh yes, she roars, go on, shout, she whispers, and afterwards she puts the phone down and opens her mouth in a yawn even bigger than the one before, and she gets up, and stretches in front of the steamy window, and swings her long arms round behind her, making her shoulder joints crack loudly, and then she senses his presence close to her, and she turns round and sees him standing opposite her, wrapping a white towel round his waist, and she asks him in a businesslike tone if he wants to fuck now, or a little later.
Not now, he says, infected by her yawn.
I hope that conversation didn’t bother you, she yawns a third time.
A job’s a job, he says. We all have to earn a living.
And suddenly the phone rings. She looks at the display and says:
It’s him.
Hanina takes in the number, engraves it in his memory, picks up the phone and says:
I’m waiting for you, maniac.
There is silence on the other end of the line, and Hanina returns the receiver to its cradle.
What did he say? she asks.
Nothing, he says.
He wanted to check if you were still here, she says.
So now he knows.
I’m living on borrowed time, she says. One day that lunatic will kill me.
He won’t touch you, he says.
I can’t take him hitting me anymore. He keeps accusing me of being lazy. However hard I work, it’s not enough for him.
I can testify that you work even when you’re resting, he laughs, and adds: Or maybe the opposite.
In the end I’ll kill myself, she says, and that scares me.
When a person really wants to kill himself, he tells her, he should kill whoever put him in that situation.
This time they won’t let me off so easily, she says, I’m not a minor any more. Besides, Tony’s not Patrice. He’s a professional killer. He’ll kill me ten times before I can give him a scratch.
If you permit me, I’ll help you, he hears Shakespeare sharpening a quill.
You help me just by being here, she says. These days between Christmas and New Year’s Eve are the worst for me. Because anyone who’s lonely all year is doubly lonely then, and the demand for whores goes through the roof.
Shakespeare is a little taken aback by her casual use of the vulgar word ‘whore’, which comes to English from the German ‘Hure’, which is close
to the Arabic word ‘huriyeh’, which reminds him of the Hebrew word ‘hor’, or hole, and the noble one ‘horin’, freedom, which reminds him of the Indo-European root ‘karo’, from which are derived the Italian ‘caro’, the French ‘cher’, the Hebrew ‘yakar’, and the English ‘cherish’, ‘caress’ and ‘charity’, but also the ancient German ‘Horaz’, which is close to the Israeli ‘harman’, or lecher, which is reminiscent of the Sanskrit ‘kama’ which means love or desire, giving rise to the famous ‘Kama Sutra’, that Hindu codex of love and marriage, and who knows how far the bard of Stratford’s musings would have taken him if the huriyeh of Manhattan hadn’t interrupted him in mid-flight:
Tony has one client, a deaf-mute, a kind of kinsman of his, who’s into orgies. This maniac’s ordered three whores for New Year’s Eve. And who’s supposed to provide them for him? You guessed right: me. Believe me, it isn’t easy to find a girl who’s free on New Year’s Eve. So where am I going to get the other two? And if I don’t do what Tony tells me—he beats me up. That’s his language with women. The last time I failed to come up with three whores for the deaf-mute’s harem, to make him feel at home, Tony gave me a black eye. I holed up in a motel, I didn’t want to see anybody. My problem is that when he hits me I hit the bottle. So I was sitting at the bar when this guy came up and bought me a drink. He was nice to me so I went up to his room with him. At first he was nice, but suddenly I realized even though I was pretty drunk by then, that he was trying to pimp me to three Hispanic butchers who worked at a slaughterhouse near the motel, and I saw that if I said no it would be bad. So I said I was going to my room for a minute to take a pill, and I went out to the road and got away from there as fast as I could. I haven’t got the strength for that kind of stuff anymore. I’ve had about as much as I can stand. I’m teetering on the edge here. Do you understand? She’s pleading for her life, and the slits of her eyes are suddenly flooded with tears.