by Joshua Sobol
You learned that from me? protests Yadanuga. I learned it from you!
No, no, Yadanuga. Of the two of us, you were always the natural player, and I was the one who had to acquire every new ability with tremendous effort. By learning. By practicing. Through exhaustive training. When we were kids, you were the gifted athlete. The champion sprinter, high and long jumper. Not to mention ball games. You grasped every new game on the spot. And I trailed behind you clumsily and awkwardly. Everything you did easily, gracefully, thanks to the perfectly proportioned, athletic body you received from nature—I had to torture myself to acquire.
But why did you do it? wonders Yadanuga. You had other gifts. You had imagination and inventiveness that none of the rest of us had. To this day I don’t understand where you got the name Yadanuga for me from.
From the same place that you got Shakespeare for me.
Good, that was completely natural, says Yadanuga. You always saw things that nobody else saw. You had amazing powers of observation, and that was a gift from nature.
Yes, that’s true, says Shakespeare. I wasn’t born for action. I was born to be an observer, and if I’d accepted myself as I was—that’s what I would have been all my life. But the minute I realized that that was what nature intended for me, I rebelled. Ever since then what people call ‘nature’ doesn’t interest me. Only the artificial attracts me. I never wanted to be only an onlooker and observer of the world. Today I know that from my early childhood nothing fascinated me like the magic of action. The magic of the body. And that’s exactly what I tried to do all my life. To turn disadvantage into perfection.
Look how strange it is, says Yadanuga, when we were young, I was sure you would be a poet. In the end you became the most physical of all of us.
And perhaps the activity of the poet, in its origins, isn’t linguistic but physical, Shakespeare muses aloud.
You know what, says Yadanuga, when I think about babies, I understand what you’re talking about.
I was actually thinking about play-actors, says Shakespeare.
You’re not only talking about the theater, clarifies Yadanuga.
Certainly not, says Shakespeare. I’m talking about every act of play. A man who plays is a poet of the body. Poetry interests me only when it leaves a space that demands to be filled by play-acting. By the presence of the body. By a physical act. That’s what’s so fascinating about sound and movement, that it’s impossible to separate them from a body acting here and now. On the other hand, written words can be separated from physical existence, and that’s the danger of words.
Because that’s what makes it possible to construct with the help of words a story that’s all a lie? Yadanuga reads Shakespeare’s next thought.
Yes, says Shakespeare, Thomas Mann thought that music was dangerous, because it is liable to arouse men to irrational action, but the truth is that there is no power on earth that motivates men to acts of violence more than a false story well told.
Are you thinking of the story of the exodus from Egypt and the giving of the Torah and the promise of the land and the conquest and settlement? asks Yadanuga.
And the story of impregnation by the Holy Ghost and the birth of a man who’s the son of God, and his crucifixion, offers Shakespeare, and Yadanuga continues the same train of thought with quotations from the Koran, which both of them learnt by heart in Arabic, in an Iraqi accent, with the help of Jonas:
And the story about ‘the hereafter, to which the righteous believers are to aspire to pass speedily, and only the sinners will never aspire to death, for fear of the punishment awaiting them for their sins, for Allah knows the sinners, and therefore you will find them more eager for life than any other man, and even more than the idolaters, and every one of them hopes to live for a thousand years!’
‘And after you have become believers’, laughs Shakespeare, ‘many of the people of the Book, out of envy, wish to return you from your belief to unbelief.…’
‘Because they have recognized your truth’! Yadanuga adds quotation to quotation, and Shakespeare concludes:
‘Do not call those killed for the sake of Allah dead, for they are alive! And you Jews, who were given the Book, believe in the revelation that has been sent down to us now, which confirms what was previously in your hands, before we smash your faces to a pulp’!
Ah, Jonas, Jonas, sighs Yadanuga, where are you now?
Nowhere, says Shakespeare. If the dead were anywhere, they wouldn’t be dead.
I see him, says Yadanuga, his gaze lost in the dark of the cyberspace of his brain. I see Jonas with his enormous nose, and his hard, heavy hand that could break five tiles at once.
We see the dead like we see stars that haven’t existed for millions of light years. The light they radiated before they were extinguished goes on reaching us as if they still existed, even though they died long ago, says Shakespeare. And those who remembered their dead, and saw them in their imagination, invented the beautiful story of the world to come, where they go on existing.
Interesting that every new false story rests on a false story that preceded it, like a man without a leg on a man without an arm, and the two of them lean on a deaf man, and woe to whoever makes fun of the pretension of these cripples to represent the true, the just, the good and the beautiful, muses Yadanuga, and concludes: there really is nothing more dangerous and violent and murderous than a false story well told.
Which is why I say that the act of a true poet is not in words, but in what is left unsaid. Which has to be filled by a physical presence and by action.
All this is well and good, Yadanuga rouses himself from the philosophical discussion into which the two of them have unintentionally been drawn, but I asked you who you are, and once again you succeeded in slipping away and disappearing among all these words.
That’s what I am, says Shakespeare.
What exactly? demands Yadanuga.
An escape from direct confrontation with any form of violence, laughs Shakespeare, an escape that I’ve elevated to an art.
The question I asked you, ‘Who are you?’ is a form of violence? wonders Yadanuga.
You remember the test we took before we were accepted into the unit? Shakespeare replies with a question.
We took all kinds of tests, says Yadanuga. Which one precisely do you mean?
The decisive test, says Shakespeare.
Heart-lungs stress test?
Yes, says Shakespeare, and he elaborates: accelerated heartbeat in a situation of excitement, of fear, of exertion, and mainly—the combination of all three factors in a situation of extreme stress.
What about it? asks Yadanuga.
Do you remember your results?
No, says Yadanuga, how could I remember?
Your heart beat rose from forty five at rest to sixty-three in excitement-fear-exertion.
How can you remember details like that? demands Yadanuga in astonishment.
Because at that stage, after hard, back-breaking exercise and training, I succeeded in attaining only fifty beats at rest and sixty seven under stress. You know what my heart beat is now, sitting and talking to you?
No, says Yadanuga, what is it?
Thirty two beats a minute, says Shakespeare, and he adds: When we fought on the beach, after running, I reached forty.
You still train, Yadanuga half asks half states.
Yes, admits Shakespeare. I want to achieve total control over my heartbeat, up to complete cessation.
You’re insane, states Yadanuga. Dangerously insane. Our war is over, and you haven’t accepted it. You continue developing yourself as a lethal weapon.
Not at all, protests Shakespeare. It has nothing to do with weapons. There are fakirs in India who can stop their heats beating for fifteen seconds and even twenty, and they’re not in the least warlike.
So why do you do it? inquires Yadanuga. Are your sins so terrible that you want to live a thousand years, like Mohammed says in the Sura of the Cow?
No, says S
hakespeare. My sins don’t bother me. Like all the tellers of perfect tall tales, Mohammed was very well acquainted with human nature. He knew that it was nature that made men fear death, and nature that made him submissive and in need of love, protection and security. This fear is what makes people crowd together and create societies. Have you ever asked yourself what society is based on?
Common interests? guesses Yadanuga.
No, my friend, says Shakespeare. Society is based on imitation. Human socialization is a process which is entirely based on the act of imitation. That’s why the lives of people who live in societies is an imitation of life. And that’s why they love stories which are an imitation of an imitation of life so much. The natural fear of death drives people to run away from life to the imitation of life. Because only he who lives can die—anyone who isn’t alive can’t die. And therefore, anyone who devotes his whole life to the imitation of life, and avoids living life as it is in the original before any imitation, is ostensibly protected from death.
What exactly do you call the imitation of life? Yadanuga demands a clarification, and Shakespeare clarifies:
All socialized human behavior. Everything that you do in the framework of a community, tribe, nation, religion, army, state, system.
Tell me one thing, if any, that you did outside those frameworks, demands Yadanuga.
I want to escape from any imitation that precedes the original, declares Shakespeare, and immediately regrets the declaration, and adds: I aspire to the performance of an act that is pure action, an act that can’t be made into a story.
What I’m hearing from you now contradicts everything I knew about you, states Yadanuga.
What you’re hearing from me now contradicts everything I myself knew about me before I opened my mouth to answer your question about who I am, admits Shakespeare, and the truth is that I’m not committed to everything I just said. If we go on talking I may say things that will contradict what I said up to now, and in another minute or two I may do things that will have no connection to what I am about to say.
In other words: what was is nothing, and what will be is also nothing, Yadanuga begins to develop an idea, and Shakespeare hastens to complete it:
And this union of the nothing that was and the nothing that will be permits you to do anything at all in the present.
That can lead to crime or madness, warns Yadanuga.
Precisely the opposite, says Shakespeare. Crime is always an imitation. There is no original crime. After the first murder, every murder is only an imitation of it and of all the others that will come after it. Every rape is an imitation of all the rapes that preceded it, and every theft is an imitation of the thefts that came before it. The very urge to commit a crime comes from the aspiration to imitate a previous personal example. Take the suicide bombers. Every suicide imitates the ones who preceded him in every particular. He wears the same clothes, binds his head in exactly the same green band, and parrots the words and sentences that scores of suicides have already recited before him. The suicide bomber is entirely an imitation of an imitation, and he himself serves as a role-model for children and youths who aspire to imitate his act. Crime is perhaps the most striking example of an act which is all imitation without anything original about it, and therefore it’s no wonder that this act is so connected to the Sura of the Cow: If you are righteous, you must aspire to pass quickly to the next world. Because of its imitative nature, crime has a past and a future. On no account can it be born of the union of the nothing with the nothing. Only the unique union of the nothing with the nothing can give birth to an act that will not be an imitation or a duplication of any other act, and therefore it will also be an act with no meaning, an act that is all invention, all imagination, all body.
And it’s an act like this that you’re going to perform now? Yadanuga presses him.
Perhaps, says Shakespeare. The truth is that I don’t know yet what I’m going to do now. I could get up this minute and travel to a place where I’ve never been, and which is nothing to me. Like for instance Oregon, or New Mexico, and meet someone there who may be Adonis and may not be Adonis, and clarify something with him quietly, or get into a confrontation with him because of a girl he calls Winnie, and who calls herself Melissa, or Timberlake, and some judge once called her Pipa, and I don’t owe her anything, and I don’t feel anything for her, and I don’t have any urge or need to do anything for her, and at the same time I might kill or be killed for her.
You know what, Shakespeare, confesses Yadanuga, sometimes it seems to me that you make things up and exaggerate wildly, or else you’re simply a compulsive liar.
You know what, Yadanuga, declares Shakespeare, if I lie I only do it in order to assert one indisputable truth, which is that it’s impossible to determine what the truth is.
You want me to believe you that your story with this Melissa isn’t a love story, but a story about nothing, but I’m telling you that it’s a love story.
What’s a love story? asks Shakespeare.
52
It’s a story about what happens between two people who love each other, says Timberlake as she leans forward over the table, on the terrace of a seafood restaurant on the banks of the Indian River. In the river dolphins frolic, leaping in silver sinusoidal arcs against the background of the sunset and the evening enveloping the coconut palms on the east coast of the Buena Vista Park, and her tongue, which has licked so much, very delicately licks the salt from the corners of his eyes, and her tearful eyes laugh at him:
So they call you Shakespeare, your executioner friends?
Yes, he laughs, and sometimes even Bill.
Tell me the truth, Bill, she says and wraps his hand in her fingers, why do you do it? I don’t understand anything anymore. You rescue me from Tony’s claws. You risk your life for me. Because he won’t accept it, he’ll try to murder you to get me back in his control. And now you give me a Christmas holiday like nothing I’ve ever had in my fucking life before. You take me to Palm Beach to spend New Year’s Eve at Breakers Hotel, and you do the most wonderful thing for me, which I can’t even believe is happening: you don’t try to fuck me. I lie in bed next to you at night and I feel your big warm body responding when I touch you.
If you didn’t let me touch you, I would understand that I was involved with someone so in love with himself that he can’t stand anybody else touching him. I already had a hunk like that once. He was a model for underpants and swim-wear, and he was also one of a group of men who did a striptease act for audiences of hysterical women. He paid me good money. He would take off his clothes and walk round the room naked, like you, but unlike you, he would open all the closet doors with mirrors, and set them at an angle that allowed him to see himself in all of them at once, and he would contemplate his perfect body, and make me look at him too and tell him how gorgeous he was and how I was dying to fuck him. It was all an act of course, because all that magnificent body with its flat stomach and its big prick gave rise in me to nothing but boredom. He would stand in front of the mirror and talk about himself, look what beautiful hands I have, and I would have to repeat after him like a parrot: What beautiful hands you have. Look what an adorable bum I have. Your bum is really adorable. And so it would go on, sometimes for half an hour, and we would go into minute details, about his neck and his lips and his nipples and his prick, I repeated whatever he said like a broken record, until he came just from talking about how gorgeous he was. And when he came he would stand in front of the mirror with his hands spread out at his sides, without touching himself, like Jesus Christ, and he only needed me as a witness. And sometimes, when I tried to touch him, just out of curiosity, he would lose his temper and yell at me not to dare to come near him. I’ve already seen more than a few ugly things in my short life, but believe me that I’ve never seen anything so pathetic as that underwear model with his love for his perfect body.
Why am I telling you this? Because you let me touch you, and I can feel that it gives you pleasur
e. You can’t hide it from me. I can see what happens to your body. And you can feel too that at these moments I’m ready to fuck you, sometimes it even seems to me for a moment that I almost want to do it with you. We could have done it easily. But you don’t do it with me. Maybe you’re waiting for me to do it to you? For me to rape you? I could have done it a few times already. Everything was ready. All I had to do was sit on top of you and slide you into me. But I don’t want to do anything to you that you don’t want, just as you apparently don’t want to do anything to me that I don’t want, and it’s the first time in my fucked up life that somebody considers my wishes. Every time I stroked you and got it up, I said to myself: In a second he’ll grab hold of you and open your legs and fuck you, but you’re made of stuff I’ve never come across before.
Okay, I’m not pretty, I know. But you’re not exactly gorgeous either. You say so yourself. But sometimes it seems to me that from the two not beautiful people we are, something far more beautiful could emerge than what comes out of all kinds of beautiful people. And perhaps what’s happening between us is precisely that beautiful thing?
You simply give me rest. The most wonderful rest I’ve ever had in my life. But why do you do all this for me? I don’t dare to think that you love me. I lie next to you naked. I stroke you. And I feel good. I feel so good. You’ve taught me something. For the first time in my life I’m restraining myself. And it’s so good. It’s so wonderful to feel it and not to do anything with it. Just to lie there, body touching body, and not to do anything. How long can we go on like this, before we do it? All you have to do is take me in your strong hands and lift me up, and my legs will open of their own accord, and you’ll only have to lower me gently and put me on top of you. Why don’t you do it to me? How do you succeed in restraining yourself? Is it a sign that you don’t love me? Or perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps I don’t know what love is at all. There is such a thing as love, isn’t there?