Life on Sandpaper

by Yoram Kaniuk

  Pat had a handsome Chinese friend, a former dancer named Chao Li. Every two weeks she’d dress up in cheap evening clothes and go to see him. She never explained, but as she left she’d embrace me, frightened. She once said it was better I didn’t ask so I wouldn’t know. She’d come back with a flippant but irate smile and call me Mr. Yoiram and shut herself up in her room. And after a while she’d snuggle against me and talk about her childhood, and I’d pamper her even though jealousy was gnawing away at me. She wanted me to touch the baby she said was dead in her heart and disgusted her. One evening Chao Li called. She begged him to change his mind, but he demanded that she come. I took her to him. He came down, sized me up mockingly and said, Wait here till I’m done. She threw me an unhappy glance, forced on a smile, and went up with him. There was a broken bench outside the building and I sat down and waited for her. I smoked. Next day I felt I was suffocating. I thought I’d swallowed a bone. I called AT&T and asked them to add my name to Pat’s account as a joint subscriber. Pat went to sleep after she got back from Chao Li’s. She said it was the last time and I listened to her voice but thought I was already dead. She went shopping and I called Information for my number and address. The operator gave me my address and number and so I knew I still existed. Pat left again and I was panicking. The house shook terribly and I switched on the radio, some woman on the phone was asking the show’s host what she should feed to her sick goldfish and then two old ladies came on who’d been living together for fifty-five years in a house they had to vacate now and they had no place to go and who would take pity on them, and the host suddenly became animated and described these old ladies he’d never met in his life as frail, forlorn, and they cried, they really cried over the radio. I thought, there’s somebody worse off than me. One night we came home from a movie about the South. I lectured on and on about the Scottsboro Boys and their dubious trials and recited the words of my instructors from the youth movement in Tel Aviv. Class. Capitalism. Workers. Racism. I said that perhaps justice was a cruel word. Listen, Pat said, there’s no absolute injustice either, you’re a sweet idiot. But like everything else about her, offense took its time, and eventually her anger rose and became tangible and I’d never seen such rage in her before. She talked incessantly in her honeycomb voice and was appeased only when I kissed her left big toe that she still thought was not as beautiful as mine. I thought we’d settled the argument but next morning she was waiting for me in her red coat. She stood there firm and furious and said, You’re coming with me. Where to, I asked. Come, she replied. I can’t remember whether we took a bus or train. She was silent for hours and I was stifled and stiff as usual, and outside the scenery changed, getting more and more untamed. We reached Birmingham, Alabama, in the afternoon. We went into a diner and had something to eat. Some tough-looking guys, gray eyes, blond hair, were sitting there, bored and staring at us. One got up and moved over to Pat and fixed her with an evil glare. I got up to defend her, although judging by his appearance I knew that my combat experience establishing a Jewish state in a hostile region wouldn’t do me any good this time. Pat whispered, Don’t worry, honey. She turned to the guy and in her most cloying Southern accent told him, Fuck off! He came closer. She then delivered a sharp and wonderfully professional kick to his crotch, his friend came up and she whispered something, I didn’t hear what, and he took to his heels as the first guy somehow managed to get up and do likewise. Yoiram, she said to me, here you can forget about your “Palmach.” We went to the cemetery. We walked along a shady avenue of bougainvilleas leading to a small wooden church. Thick fragrances filled the air and I saw pink and red flowers and lilies and magnolias. Pat stopped by a grave against which leaned a skillfully decorated cardboard sign. I moved to stand in front of it and read: Our Loveliest Girl, Pat. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, April 12th, 1928. Died February 5th, 1949. May God Bless Her Soul. I heard a sound behind me. I went back to Pat and she was staring transfixed at the approaching crowd. Alone. I no longer existed. A line of people was approaching. Pat said, There’s Grandma, the one in the wheelchair. That’s Mom and that’s my Dad. There’s my brother and my sister Virginia. That’s my nanny who looked after me. The congregation stopped at the improvised grave and Pat’s father spoke of his daughter, how lovely and delicate she looked at her debutante ball when she wore the white gown that had been made for her. Nobody saw her standing there. They looked but didn’t see. Pat started crying and said, Grandma, Dad, Mom, Nanny, Virginia, John, Melinda…But nobody responded. As if she was talking to a wall with eyes, she said, I love you. Hug me. Touch me. Mom, Dad. And then in a faint voice, Have mercy on me. They didn’t bat an eyelid. Turned to the headstone and talked about her some more and praised her and even laid down a wreath. Her nanny wept and her mother also cried and said it was a shame she’d died so young. They stood in silence for a while. Pat didn’t say another word. A few minutes passed and the sun began to set and the headstone turned red and they began to leave. Pat said to their backs as they left, Forgive me. Where is your Christian forgiveness? They didn’t look at her. After they disappeared down the path between the splendid gravestones, an old colored man appeared, glanced smilingly but not without sympathy at Pat, didn’t say a word, it seemed that he wanted to speak but stopped himself and he took the sign and vanished. We walked along the flower-lined path between the gravestones and Pat said, Yoiram, never, you hear me, never ever come here from Israel to teach me about the South! She was silent on the way back. A few hours later she said, They’re good people, Yoiram. They don’t know any better. They love me and they live in a world you don’t know and can’t understand. We returned and I painted Pat nude in the red coat. I painted her as a modern Astarte, with a primeval expression. I worked for a few days, Pat walked around naked despite the cold. She said she should have stood naked in the cemetery too. The doctor came to examine her and told her that the day after tomorrow she’d be going to a hotel on Broadway for the final weeks of her pregnancy. I took her. We went up to the room. A guy calling himself a lawyer came in. He didn’t say whose lawyer he was and he informed me that I could visit her a few more times but only between four and five in the afternoon and added that there was no point in arguing. Pat was now huge. Her face was gray. She asked me to make love to her one more time and it was difficult with the huge mountain she’d become but still it was good. She bad-mouthed men, they got out of it all so easily, with syphilis at the worst. We hardly spoke. She listened to the radio and looked out of the window. When her labor pains began I took her to the hospital in Harlem. A nurse was waiting for us. A young doctor arrived and asked me to leave. I called Ilka from a public phone and he came right away. A few hours later Pat gave birth. We didn’t see the baby but Pat said she’d had a girl and would have her circumcised. I went home. Ilka called to say that something had happened and that I should come over immediately. I got to the hospital and Ilka said that some stupid nurse had allowed Pat to breastfeed the baby and now she’d changed her mind and wanted us to help her escape from the hospital. I scoured all the department’s exits and hallways and Ilka found out from a doctor wearing a Star of David around his neck how things worked there and then he ordered a taxi to come to the back while Pat waited in bed dressed and holding the baby. We quietly climbed down the fire escape and reached the taxi. The driver got out to open the door just as five cars screeched to a halt. They surrounded us. A few unpleasant-looking guys jumped out and it was like an old movie, but it hurt for real. They beat the hell out of us. Ilka lay there in the parking lot with his wooden leg. Pat lay on the concrete. I was battered and flung into the bushes while the baby was swallowed up into a car where a woman was sitting with a scarf tied around her head. The cars took off and Pat never saw that baby again. We brought her back to the apartment. She was weak and threw up. Ilka called the doctor who ordered her to rest and prescribed some medicine. I went out to buy it. At the drugstore they didn’t want to take my money. The Hebrew bookseller stood there pale and wanted to talk to
me, but was unable to. The woman in black from the paper came and helped us take care of Pat. She tried calling the number of the contact man that she’d been given at the hotel but was told that the number had been changed. Pat lay in bed for five days and wept. The floor at the bedside turned into a lake. You’re from the desert, she said, so take the tears and water it. Ilka sang “How Lovely are the Nights in Canaan” that my mother had loved to sing to me, and Pat stopped talking. When she started again, she said viciously that she hated me and refused to eat. She said we could have saved her. That I’d done it on purpose because I was jealous of the man she’d made love to. I didn’t respond and we forced her to drink. She was weak and unsteady when she got up to go to the bathroom. Ilka left with Aviva and she said quietly, You could have saved me but you didn’t. I woke up in the morning and she wasn’t there. I looked for her but she hadn’t left a trace. I called Chao Li whose number was scratched in the plaster over the gas stove and he sounded friendly and said he was sorry for me but it really was of no interest to him. I waited about a week and didn’t hear from her. I went to the Waldorf Cafeteria on Fourteenth Street where the Yiddish and Hebrew writers sat at separate tables and asked one of the few customers of the Hebrew bookstore downstairs if he’d seen anything and he said he hadn’t and he was sorry since the whole neighborhood had heard, and in Odessa even the worst gangsters wouldn’t have been so hardhearted. Then he said there’d been another tragedy, their old waitress of the past twenty years had died and the writers needed a new intermediary. They were there every afternoon.

  I saw that the tables were quite close to one another. The men were wearing berets or bohemian hats, colored neckties and cashmere scarves around their necks, and corduroy pants, except for one who was wearing flannel. Their expressions bore a sadness that they made into poetic sadness. Even the way they stirred sugar into their tea was poetic. Burning eyes, some kind of piety and purity. They drank their tea and every other minute a heartrending oy vey would ring out. They chain-smoked and the debates at the two tables, each of which refused to acknowledge the other’s existence, concerned the life and death of words. A faulty line in a Hebrew poem would give rise to a bellow of pain or apprehension from the Hebraists and mocking snorts from the Yiddishists. They were noisy and the new waitress, who didn’t know them, was unable to fill the shoes of the old one who’d died. They despised the new goya because she didn’t know who liked milk in his tea, who took sugar, who drank coffee or seltzer, and how to translate their pain and mediate between the two tables because she knew neither Hebrew nor Yiddish. One of them told me that O. Henry had called New York Baghdad-on-the-Subway, for us it’s Warsaw-on-tea-and-Zucker. They used teaspoons, forks, and teapots in their arguments about the Korean War. They moved tanks and bombed armies using empty tumblers. The war on their tables was far more logical than the one they read about in the Forward or from those turn-coats at the New York Times. They thought up plans replete with cunning tactics to outflank the enemy and designed surprise rear attacks. There were no missiles back then but they had missiles as well as airplanes that flew at the speed of light and rays that could penetrate tanks. But their primary obsessive occupation was still poetry and literature. Undying loyalty to their two languages. Slaves to poetry. It was a bitter battle. They worshipped literature like the loyal entourage of a cunning and unfaithful mistress. The number of their readers dwindled daily. Sometimes a few of their surviving admirers would come by, trembling with excitement as they peeked at the writers through the cafeteria window. Shy and burning with desire they’d beckon me with crooked fingers to come outside and I’d go out and they’d ask me whether Chaim B. had recovered and if H. had finished writing his long poem. They’d send messages of love and encouragement via me and the poets and writers, as if by chance, would glance out and wave limp hands as if they’d spent all their lives onstage at Radio City Music Hall in front of applauding thousands. They, of course, wrote for posterity but they paid me twenty dollars a day to act as mediator. They sat each at their respective table—it had been that way for decades. Eternal hatred permeated with mutual longing. The Yiddish table would call me and somebody there, Bashevis Singer perhaps, would say in a voice heard not only at the adjacent table but in the Bronx as well, that I should be so kind as to tell, but gently, the poet G., who’d written a not-too-bad poem in Lodz forty-five years ago, that his new poem in Ha-Doar or alternately in Der Yidisher Kemfer was so lightweight that the cupboard in which he’d put it had flown away, and he didn’t know why the cupboard was flying away until he remembered that it held the poems of this esteemed and honorable poet. I said that Frischmann had written the same thing about I. L. Peretz and he said that he got it from the same source in Warsaw. Through me they passed brief, violent, passionate messages and they usually wouldn’t refer to one another by name but would say, That fellow over there sitting to the right of A. with the black cap, or that sickly man with the purple beret who keeps looking for maidelach through the window. They spoke loudly because they didn’t altogether trust me despite the twenty dollars a day and the two free cups of coffee, and when a Hebrew poet would shout to me and I would shout it on to his actual addressee that in his long poem there were davka—a word they loved to use and which does not exist in English, and they’d sigh excitedly as if by using it they were taking their revenge on that bitch of a language—that in his long poem there were davka—impossible to translate into English!—two good lines, even though they’d been written fifty years ago by Nachman Bulkovitz, there would be loud laughter from one table and bitter loathing grumbles from the other. But I loved seeing these poets and writers meet at funerals. They’d embrace and cry and shed tears on each other’s shoulders. Funerals were cease-fires between Hebrew and Yiddish. Their wives, who’d been friends back in Warsaw or Odessa, would kiss. They’d tell stories about the childhood of the deceased whom they all knew well and their love for one another knew no bounds. But once they got back to their tables hostility reigned supreme. There they were the Yiddish bastards on one side of the ring and the saviors of Hebrew from its defilers in Eretz Yisroel at the other.