by Asaf Schurr
43
Their lives (when Motti feels better) will be like reality TV or like the life of a religious person: an eye on them at all times (it will be her, looking at him at all times), and thus they’ll strive at all times to be worthy, to live for real. They won’t waste time on nonsense like me (“the narrator”) and Motti do here. We are indeed in the same exact situation. We could have done something good with our lives. We could have been helpful to someone. We could have loved, been loved, really helped, like he and Laika could as well. Save a life. Many lives. Save as many lives as possible. Walk around in the streets saving kittens. Volunteering at animal shelters. This would certainly raise one’s spirits. And in order to make Ariella happy he’ll take care of his body. He’ll go, let’s say, to a gym. And she’ll laugh at him, look, look how you’ve puffed up, what a man I have, what a man, she’ll laugh, but she’ll actually love those new muscles, they will touch her deep down inside, on an evolutionary level, she’ll be drawn to him, she’ll want to touch him all the time, to feel those new muscles, well-defined no less. At the shelter he’ll toss around bags of food. Lift up enormous dogs onto the operating table. Build walls, straighten fences. He’ll gently pet puppies with his massive hands, so they’ll get used to being touched by humans. And when someone shows up there to abandon, for example, a grown dog who’s been with this someone for years (no lack of excuses, never a lack, and I’ve already heard about one, ten years old, whose owner abandoned her because she was no longer able to reproduce, he was used to selling her offspring for money; and I’ve already heard the one that goes our children are no longer attached to him, he’s already grown, we were thinking about getting a new puppy instead; about how it’s getting cold at night now, inconvenient to have to take him out on a walk; and then how, after three years together, three or four or even eight, we just had to take the dog back, they say, no longer a good fit, but look how cute he is, someone will definitely take him, give us a call, tell us how he’s doing, give us an update, after all we love him a lot, bye bye…and it could very well be that you too are one of those people who throw your dogs away willy-nilly, and don’t see what the problem is at all: toss them out of the car, let’s say, on the way to the airport to head out of town—stop on the way to Ben Gurion Airport, open the car door, and shove the dog out, good-bye; and, look, if that’s the case, a miserable and gruesome death is far too lenient of a punishment for you, and unnecessary, actually, because if you have children, and of course you do, when they get older they’ll abandon you to rot in some stinking old-folks home, to rot in your filthy diapers: they’ll come to visit once a week or every other week for a half hour, reluctantly, and will talk about nonsense with a forced smile, and this will be a quite fitting end, good luck to you and I hope you burn), when this man shows up there to abandon his dog, Motti will spit in his face. Will stand opposite him, with his new muscles, and will spit. Will say to him, listen, the usual practice here is to request a small donation from people bringing dogs to the shelter, but I’ll gladly donate even a thousand shekels in your name if in exchange you’ll just allow me to give you something you need. And when the man says, yes, yes (here it comes), Motti will spit in his face. Then he’ll turn his big body around, his shirt too small to contain this firm abundance, and he’ll walk away laughing, even run off mischievously, giggling hee hee.
Only he won’t really have the courage or lack of manners to do this. Not his fault. And I don’t have the courage to cause him to do this. To intentionally take an action from which, by definition, there is no return. A thing that would actually exist in the world, that would leave evidence behind in the form of the spit dripping down the man’s face, lips, the curve of his chin.
I, by contrast, if I could do it, wouldn’t bother to spit. I would loosen the man’s jaw. With one punch. And so too for the man who abused my Cookie, even though that’s not what they called her, my dog, back then—who knows if she had a name at all. Nevertheless, they kicked her. Every time she stood up, they kicked her, and when we first met she would lie down helplessly and break out shrieking if someone so much as put a hand on her, just put it out to pet her. One devastating punch for the man who, we’re guessing, stepped on her snout, since her jaw never healed properly. Who did this, who? What’s more, I know her now, and can see in my mind’s eye how she got up after the first kick, maybe even the second, still wanting to be petted. Yearning for a touch and fearing it too, like she does now, and as she would after the kick, lying on her back and howling with longing, with fear, hoping to be petted this time, not the other thing. No, not one punch. Many more than one. To cause pain as he caused pain, including a foot to the jaw. Even though, of course, he didn’t do it out of absolute evil, there is no absolute evil, he kicked, of course, out of misery. But that doesn’t absolve him. And the punch, well, but no, this too is a lie. I wouldn’t do a thing. Afterward I would regret it, regret not doing it, that much is clear, but I wouldn’t do a thing. I’m just trying to push this novel, this narrator’s voice, past its limits. So it will explode, so it will burst. One can drown in this expanse of possibilities, die from too much revulsion and joy, die from this desire to abstain, from the desire for nothing to happen, for everything to remain open. I’ve already said this, I know, said it one too many times. But Sarah’s dead and this didn’t really accomplish a thing. Her life reached its limit—only Motti, even in his prison cell, is still drenched in possibilities like rain. And the more I limit him—if he’s sent to solitary confinement, even—his freedom to avoid choosing only grows stronger. The freedom, that is, to narrate, to fabricate, to take pleasure in the things that could be.
It certainly would have been better if these issues hadn’t come up in this monologue of mine. If they had come up in a dialogue between two characters, with complicated psychological motivations. But they’re true either way.
Whereas Sarah died, as mentioned, and this had almost no influence. Everything is so clean here, clean and well ordered, and there’s no way out. Where’s the bathroom in the prison, where does Motti shower, what kind of smell lingers there, and who are the other inmates, do they use deodorant and where do they brush their teeth, and where is the world, where is it with all its beloved, insufferable disparities. Where is it imprisoned for us, it is we who imprison it, closing ourselves up in our perfect rooms, in the knowing, barren cell of our story, of our perfect fantasy about ourselves, about our beloveds who we meet with less and less, having complete conversations in our heads, but with our bodies, no, nothing doing. There’s nothing in here, is there, from out in the world, nothing makes it inside, not the smell, the temperature, the soil, the plastic, the air, the worms, the ads, the demonstrations and counterdemonstrations, the full plates, the sinks of dirty dishes afterward, the rain, the humidity, the actual memory of things that actually were—if there’s any such thing, I mean distinct somehow from the memory of things that never were. So I now want to condemn it, this novel. Condemn it entirely, breach its clean borders, the imperative of its borders. I don’t want to go on playing the voice of wisdom, as it were, being the one who knows. So perhaps it would be better to try again, no? It would be better to start over. This time on a smaller scale. To start with a shriek interrupted and with the noise of the metal grating in the fallen cage, with blood and shreds of fur, with Edna who hurries to throw up in the bathroom: because something happened here, there’s no denying it. Something that’s impossible to undo, impossible to pretend that it never was, even though that’s exactly what Edna (like me) tries to do.
And she reprimands Laika. Bad dog! she tells her. What did you do? What did you do, bad dog? And points at the shreds, at the mangled fur. Only Laika just looks at the pointing finger. She doesn’t understand. And why would she understand. And even after Edna’s already cleaned everything, even then she doesn’t look at Laika, doesn’t pet her, though she knows intellectually that there was no malicious intent here, no guilt, it was just an act and that’s all, she doesn’t succeed
in bringing herself to look at that fucking dog. She hurries to the store before the children come home and buys a new hamster. No one will notice that anything is different, other than that the cage has been placed on the table, up high and far from Laika. Yuck, murderer.
Is this the moral? Edna doesn’t ask this herself, but we definitely do. Is this the moral? Is there no encounter that doesn’t end with teeth? With tearing?
44
Well, something happened. Something happened that’s impossible to ignore. There was the gathering up and there was the rinsing in water, there were the bleach and the rag that was also thrown into the garbage, to cover up the remains, and even before all this there had been the hamster’s rapid heartbeats, his instantaneous, absolute terror, the pain when those teeth were sunk into him, his cry, the additional pain when what was torn was torn, his last heartbeat, the absence of pain, the darkness if there was darkness. And already a new hamster in the cage, far above on the table, no one will know that anything happened here, Edna won’t say a thing, why upset the children—but all these things were, definitely were, but where are they now, what are the ramifications for the plot, this is not known.
And if I had the talent for it, I wouldn’t make a story out of all this, but a dollhouse instead. Look: this is Sarah’s empty room, who dressed warm, ate something small, drank a cup of coffee with Sweet’N Low, then left the house and that’s all. And here, in a different room, a metal doll in the shape of Edna lies in bed, and she dreams a bad dream. It doesn’t seep into Menachem’s sleep, who lies beside her, since dreams don’t seep anywhere. She dreams, for example, about her son who has yet to be born, he stands in the middle of a field of smoke, behind him are trampling war machines and chunks of earth rise up in the air because of the bombing, and Edna looks at him with an indescribable sadness as he calls to her as if nothing happened even though his shirt is soaked in blood and tissue, completely torn up in the places where once he had arms and now there are only shreds of flesh that he raises as he calls to her laughingly, “Look, Ma! No hands!” This a very common dream in this country.
In another room, out of scraps of dark paper: sky-darkening trees, a ground carpeted in needles hiding sharp rocks, perhaps later a moon lacking color rising above, and amid all this the river from Guard B’s stories flows along in fog, and in the background his friend Tom stands, whose parents had a store in State Square, he was probably the first child in Israel with this name. And he had a brother named Lace and another brother named Crane and a sister, Thrion they called her, and all of them very much loved exciting adventure stories.
Another room will be the prison cell. And another one, on the other side of a thin partition, made perhaps out of popsicle sticks, will be the empty abode of Motti in his home. High, high above, far off in the sky, a plane will pass by. There will be another room there, another whole wing, a giant library containing Motti’s marvelous future. In the meantime, he isn’t too involved with the world, tries hard to avoid it, but in the future he’ll get involved—now he isn’t a father, but he’ll even be a father then. Establish rules, attend to things. And not arbitrarily. Not the way we punish a kid and say to him, and so to ourselves as well, this is a learning experience, when actually we mean: this is what our own father did to us, in his day—and we still don’t really get the point.
A doghouse will be there too, in this dollhouse. It too is empty, since Laika was never forced to live in a doghouse. Her whole life she will sleep next to beds and even on them, and people will pet her at night.
But it’s also possible to make a different shape in space, in place of this story. To make out of papier-mâché or even clockwork various tracks that people could hurry down, like those cardboard decoys dogs chase at the races, but, in this case, each one magnetized to the others (I mean, the rushing cardboard people). And in fact it’s lucky that the speed of the cardboard people is greater than the force of attraction, so that each one still stays on its track. Otherwise, they would crash into each other with all the terrible force of their acceleration, and nothing would remain of them.
45
Motti saw, on his small stool, really saw, with his own eyes, how he and the chubby Ariella (because of her pregnancy) would stroll and hold hands in the street, and then, even better than this, don’t hold hands directly, but rather each one of them holds a hand of the small girl who walks between them, and every three steps they lift her in the air, hup, hup, and by now she’s choking from all the excitement of this familiar occurrence, every three steps—look, two more, one more, and now—being lifted up into the air and then returning to the ground and so on again and again. Galit, they’ll call her. The girl. The three of them will walk in the street and Ariella with her tummy. A lollipop, too, he would put there, in this picture, if it weren’t for the fact that Galit’s two hands are busy with their hands, so they can lift her. Maybe the lollipop will be in her mouth, if so. The three of them will go to a puppet show, let’s say. And he and Ariella will be just amazed at her trust, amazed at Galit’s uncompromising acceptance of everything that happens on the tiny stage. It will astound them how the children sit there truly hypnotized, they don’t pick up on a single one of the production’s contradictions, giving themselves like this to the pleasure, none of them being the least bit restless, whereas he, Motti, it seems to him that he always was a problematic boy, even as a boy he was a problem, never once really enjoyed himself, always stealing a glance to the side to see how people expected him to have fun, and then tried to look as though he was, but no, not now, there’s no place here for this self-pity, for this futile, idiotic longing. This isn’t his second chance. This is her first chance, what’s her name, Galit. And how much fun she’s having! On the stage is a mouse, a mouse puppet, with a knight’s sword and a crown. And the children, as one person, laugh in the right places, hold their breath in the right places, breathe again right after. And then the three of them will leave, at the end of the performance. After they applaud until their fingers almost hurt, such a wonderful play it was, they’ll come again to see it next chance they get, and at home they’ll cut up a cardboard box, make a window in it, and Ariella will sew small curtains, and in the evening, instead of television, they’ll put on small performances for each other. The heart breaks, it does.
On his little stool he sees all this. All these worlds open up to him. And then the voice of Guard B invades. His nasal, annoying voice. “And then we set sail!” he says. “Would you believe it? Me and Jimbo sail down the Yarkon River inside a small boat. The immigration police on his trail—but we’re in the boat. Like it’s the Mississippi, I swear.”
“Uh huh,” says Motti politely but grudgingly. Galit dissolves, as does Ariella.
“And we’re there,” continues the guard. “Rowing like crazy in that little boat, I swear, I think about it now and see us like in a movie, makes me laugh, you know. But then, how scared we were then, you can’t imagine.”
(No, wait. Here it is nonetheless, a tail to grab hold of: the mouse’s tail, the mouse, the mouse puppet, puppet theater, they’ll all sit in the living room and laugh, they’ll make popcorn even, in a big pot with a glass lid, and watch it pop. And on Fridays they’ll go out to eat in a restaurant, this will be their weekly treat, and Ariella, she’ll order…)
“And all around—fog! Fog like you’ve never seen before! And I’m carried away on this raft in one direction, and Jimbo in the boat, who knows where he is. And I called out to Jimbo. But quietly, so the police won’t hear. And he, like an idiot, he screams back to me…”
(…and ice cream for dessert. And when she grows up a bit, Galit, he’ll be one of those fathers who embarrass their children at restaurants. Joking with the waitress, and when she asks how this or that dish tasted, he’ll tell her honestly. And Galit, she’ll say, ugh, Dad! Can’t go out with you anywhere! And that’s just the beginning. At class parties he’ll volunteer to supervise, he’ll sit in the kitchen with one of the other fathers, and from time to tim
e stick his head through the door, are you behaving nicely, children? And Galit will no longer say ugh, Dad! nothing, just her face will say, c’mon, you’re embarrassing me, go, go away already! And he’ll return to the kitchen, and the two of them sitting there will say, how they’ve grown! How they’ve grown! I remember like it was yesterday…)
“And in the end I get there, totally wet, feeling like I swam from here to Nahariya, who knows how long it took, maybe ten minutes, but then it felt like a week to me. Climb onto the boat and what do I find? Jimbo sitting there asleep, got tired of looking for me, poor guy, definitely thought I drowned and was done for. And me, after I wring out my wet shirt, I say to him, Jimbo, Jimbo, what, you fell asleep? And he wakes up, did he ever wake up, jumps, almost cap-sized the boat on us, and he hugs me, says to me…”
(And so too at the end of high school. He’ll sit there, in the crowd, with a camera—and rejoice. When she graduates college he’ll no longer embarrass her. She’ll understand him, understand the not-at-all-simple position of fathers in this world. And how he’ll cry when she gets married! He and Ariella will each help hold the chuppah.)
“No, seriously, I’m telling you. For sure you dreamed it. Fog on the Yarkon? Whoever heard of such a thing. Thanks for worrying about me in your dream too, I joke. And he nods like this, thinking. We sit like that in silence for a minute or two and then suddenly his eyes stop on my shoes. Wait, he says to me. If I only dreamed it, where did your wet shoes come from? I thought I was going to piss from laughing, but he didn’t laugh. Just said to me, you wouldn’t do a thing like that…”
(They’ll be the best grandfather and grandmother in the world, that’s clear. There will be a cupboard full of sweets at home, and the grandchildren will be allowed to stay up until late, to jump rope in the living room, to eat in front of the television, to play with the computer until two in the morning even.)