Life on Sandpaper

by Yoram Kaniuk

  Every now and then I would check the emergency room at five different hospitals; somebody had told me that Pat had hired a private detective and that in order to pay him she’d gone back to the world’s oldest profession. Years later she called. She asked me to come to the cemetery in Yonkers. I went. She was standing erect but sorrowful over a small headstone and said that her girl was buried there. She asked me to go to bed with her. It was already evening. There weren’t many visitors. I couldn’t refuse. And I didn’t really want to refuse. She said she felt like a skeleton making love to a human being. We hardly spoke. She didn’t tell me much. I went with her to her small room in the Chelsea Hotel and stayed with her all night. In the morning she stood there, dressed like a Park Avenue lady, magnificent and angry with me for having stayed. She said she’d put the doll that used to live with us in the Division Street apartment in the grave. So her darling girl could have both a mommy and a daddy. She still had the same disconsolate majesty. She tried to be the Southern lady her parents had wanted. But when she cried it seemed like she was shedding old tears. She asked where was the God of the Jews who allowed such a thing. Freddie the drummer who lived on Charles Street with his wife or girlfriend who turned tricks on the side, said that she saw her now and then and she always seemed angry.

  Freddie’s wife worked at the Wellington Hotel and bought him a new cashmere sweater every week. She liked the white stuff. Freddie was the first around to own a television set and his wife or girlfriend was a hooker and could see through walls. Freddie went to the bathroom to try and hide, but she saw everything. The white stuff was on the table. They sat across from each other with the stuff between them. He took a razor blade, arranged the stuff into a neat square, both of them were like hawks, ready to kill each other any minute, verifying that the square was precise, nudging it a bit to the right or a bit to the left until it was perfect. Sarah Vaughan on the phonograph. There they sit, their eyes glued to the white square like a couple of hungry tigers. He carefully positions the razor above it, slices down toward the center, tries to cut a precise diagonal, the phonograph stops playing, only the endless scratching of the needle in a dead groove, Freddie tries but she yells, Don’t cheat, and he says, I didn’t. She looks like a wild animal. She grabs his hand and then he slaps her and she slaps him. He’s yelling and together they bring the blade slowly down to the powder and as his hand tries to make its final approach she screeches, No! A bit to the right! And then together and in absolute silence—I’m sitting in the corner afraid to breathe—they cut the white square into two equal parts. They take turns going to the bathroom. Tie a rag around their arms. Take a syringe of warm water and shoot up. A few minutes later they calm down and embrace. He makes me laugh with his impersonations of his imaginary friend, the English Lord Henry S. Tiepelhonf, who I would have seen had I stopped in London with my ship, and then she tells me about a john who wanted a kiss for two hundred dollars and she said her kisses were only for Freddie, and when he tried to force her she threw him naked into the hallway. Freddie says no, the john actually threw him out. Love becomes tangible in the room. He goes over to his drums and takes out his sticks. Charlie Grant comes along and joins in with his clarinet. Jerry Tallmer comes looking for me. Freddie’s wife has got to get back to work and Freddie gets into bed with her. Afterward she gets up and he goes to the bathroom, she looks at the wall and says, What beautiful piss he’s got. And somebody, maybe Jerry, says, That game of theirs with the diagonal is fucking scary.

  I said my good-byes to the neighbors at Pat’s building and moved to a new room opposite a small Russian restaurant. The restaurant was called Alex’s Borscht Bowl and was owned by Alex and his wife Sonia. My landlady decided to smile at me because Gandy had told her that my father was some big shot at the UN and he could send her lots of diplomats with money dripping out of their pockets. A paper-thin woman passed by and laughed. She said I was Swiss. She asked for my father’s address. She said you could see I didn’t have a mother. She sang “My bonnie lies over the ocean, my bonnie lies over the sea,” and the landlady kicked her out. She said she’d never eat at Alex the Communist’s. Sonia, his tiny, charming wife, didn’t like the pimps who’d come into the restaurant after they stood outside shouting to their girls on the roof of the neighboring women’s prison, but Alex exclaimed with ideological, proletariat fervor that they were just girls who’d had bad luck and been corrupted by the capitalist system. Those poor girls and their pimps, he said, were innocent victims of imperialism, which was presently fighting against the world of tomorrow in Korea. In a socialist state there would be no whores. Sonia said there were death camps. Alex shouted, Stop killing Arabs in Wadi Hanin. Sonia said, I’m here, Alex, I’m with you. Alex was a dwarf and so was Sonia. She was about four foot six and he about four eight. Even though they were in their early sixties they looked like kids. She’d wind her braid around her head and look like Natasha from War and Peace, and when I said so Alex said that love is not, as they say in Russia, only a matter of chemistry between two people, and blushed. He flew the Red Flag behind the counter from time to time and hung a portrait of Lenin up and fought with his wife for most of the day. Luckily for us, Sonia—the most ardent Zionist I’ve ever met—won on certain points. When she’d see his Red Flag going up she’d conspire to get Alex outside for a moment and swap it for a Jewish National Fund donation box or an Israeli flag. Alex liked me despite my being a Zionist colonialist from Palestine. He was one of the bravest revolutionaries in the Village, which as we know was hardly empty of competition in this regard. He knew Plekhanov’s The Role of the Individual in History, most of Lenin’s writings, and Das Kapital by heart, and would recite Yesenin and Aleksandr Blok—The Twelve in particular—and Pablo Neruda too. Sonia, whose beauty was faded like an old photograph of herself as a girl, challenged him at every opportunity, but they still served the best beef stroganoff in town. That’s what Gandy and I used to eat there with Freddie who Alex always hoped would come along with us because he was a Jew whose wife had been exploited by imperialism and instead of jailing that scumbag Truman they’d put her inside for two weeks. Freddie would stand outside Alex’s restaurant and shout to his wife on the fenced-off roof of the prison and cry since he didn’t have any new sweaters and then he’d eat something with us. Sometimes in the evening other communists would drop by. Sonia would sing “Carry a Flag to Zion” and “Hatikvah” and “Be Strong, All Our Brothers” and other Zionist songs to spite them. They would drink vodka and sing working-class songs that I knew in their Hebrew versions. Between rounds of cooking Alex sat and thought up strategic plans that he called “subterfuges” to overthrow American capitalism, and Sonia would counter by declaiming the number of kibbutzim in the Negev Desert and singing Hebrew pioneering songs that got on his nerves. One day, Gandy, Freddie, and I were sitting there and Sonia lost her temper and tore up a photograph of Stalin and replaced it with one of the Labor Zionist leader A. D. Gordon. Alex was shaking with anger. But the ideological struggle that had persisted between them for forty years had taken its toll and finally exhausted them. They started yelling but fell asleep in the middle. When they dropped off, usually in the middle of fighting but also occasionally while cooking, they would sink onto the green couch under the photograph of Plekhanov, who, to Alex’s sneering delight, Sonia didn’t know was one of the revolution’s greatest thinkers. On the couch they would embrace. She would curl up to him and with a sweet smile on their faces they’d fall asleep. As they were childless, due to what Sonia called the ideological struggle that had consumed them, they became their own children. They were fully aware of each other’s weaknesses and laid semantic ambushes for one another. And practical ones too: the Daily Worker was replaced by Ha-Doar. Their prolonged battle was bitter indeed, since it’s no easy thing to foment an international communist revolution from a small restaurant that only has ten tables on the ground floor of an old building facing the old Jewish-Portuguese cemetery, next door to the building where I lived then
, just as it’s no easy thing to conquer Umm Joni, irrigate the Negev, and strike back at communism from the other side of the same restaurant. Sonia had wonderful eyes, soft and kind, and Alex wasn’t exactly Gary Cooper, but he beamed a stubborn authority and he really and truly burned with ardent conviction. Sonia said that Alex was far more of a Talmudist than a communist and at night when they were tired and before they fell asleep embracing on the couch, her head in his lap, he’d sing Hasidic songs in a voice full of yearning purity. At night, in the silence of the night, on the couch at the entrance to the restaurant that was all they had, America was no longer a branch of Chase Manhattan and Israel wasn’t the world’s enemy and what saved Zionism was Sonia’s borscht which she only ever made on the condition that Alex left the kitchen because otherwise he’d steal her recipe.

  I don’t know where the urge came from, but that one time at Alex and Sonia’s, maybe because of Pat, I went to the cemetery. Not the Jewish cemetery, one farther away. There was a young woman standing there by a gravestone. She stared at the stone and wiped her eyes. I came closer and said something and she said, Ah, my husband. When? I asked. Four years ago, she said, he died in an accident. He was devoted. He didn’t love me but he was devoted. I come here to look for his love and forgive him. We went to her house. She lived on West Sixtieth Street in a brownstone that was all hers. Not far from there was an Automat I liked better than all the restaurants in New York because it was clean and had the best coffee in town and the food was simple and delicious. She sat with me. I don’t remember her name. I told her about Alex and Sonia and their fifty-year long love and their ideological battles. She didn’t know what Zionism was so I didn’t explain it to her. She came from Albany, New York, and was a woman of means and didn’t have to work, she said. It was nice, I said, to go out just like that once in a while and pick flowers at a cemetery. She looked at me and smiled. I remember a lovely smile. She said, Over a year ago a guy tried to hit on me by the grave, maybe it’s an epidemic, but he disgusted me and you don’t. Late in the morning I went down to a diner on Broadway with a huge appetite aroused by my marathon with the nice woman, and I had fried eggs with a double serving of hash browns and two Thomas’ English muffins, one spread with tangy cheddar cheese and the other with marmalade. I drank two cups of coffee and went back to the Village and my room.

  My landlady was standing in the doorway of the building wearing my mother’s face and said sourly what she perhaps thought I didn’t know myself, that she hadn’t seen me in the house that night, and I told her that I’d been busy with a meeting at the UN with my father and the Secretary of State and she started trembling and her snorts of approval sprang directly from her thirst for my father’s supposed gold, I hopped up the stairs and went into my room and fell asleep. Gandy came and woke me up. We argued over the concept of a painting not based on nature, as distorted as it might be in the final product, and had a lively discussion about Picasso’s Night Fishing at Antibes, perhaps the only work I liked by that artist who started the revolution I detested so much, and which hung in the Museum of Modern Art. Gandy brought a Rex Stout detective thriller and a printed copy of a poem he said he’d heard last night after I’d disappeared, probably with a Belgian countess, a poem that e. e. cummings had recited at Sherry Abel’s. Afterward I painted him. He took a canvas, hung it from a nail on the wall, and did one of his crucifixion paintings. On the radio Mahalia Jackson was singing gospel. I said she sang from where sighs come from. Gandy said I had to hear Sister Rosetta Tharpe. We went to Madison Square Garden. It was packed. Tens of thousands of black people. In the middle there was a small stage. On the stage stood a short fat singer with a few musicians behind her. She stood there facing that vast audience and got married right there to a little man who didn’t dare utter a sound and the preacher blessed them and the audience clapped and she sang in a tremendous voice, without a microphone, to an audience of thirty thousand men and women, she sang like a thunder rolling through a valley. She sang, “It’s so high, you can’t get over it, It’s so low, you can’t get under it, It’s so wide, you can’t get around it, You must come in by the door,” and the whole audience rose to its feet and clapping with the rhythm sang along with her and shouted and cried and conquered that song, they sang and swayed for a long time, in unison, thirty thousand people moving as one and singing. She descended to near silence and they went down to total silence, then she climbed up to part the sea and they parted the sea, and Gandy sang with them and I looked on enviously and said, If that doesn’t open the gates of Heaven, then what will? And Gandy replied, No, it doesn’t open anything. But suddenly on the way home on the subway he spoke emotionally of his childhood, his parents on the Lower East Side who lived not far from the building where I used to live with Pat. He’d never spoken about it before. Now he told me about the neighbors, the neighborhood gangsters who spoke Yiddish and how he didn’t have enough money to study and how there was hardly enough to eat. We went outside, started walking, people loved to see how he walked. Like a dancing wolf, not a monkey. Slightly awkward and heavy and his gait was light, his legs supporting a good weight. Maybe a tired horse—precise, melodic, slow—but proud of his poverty.

  In the lighted window of Alex’s Borscht Bowl we could see Sonia and Alex asleep on the couch and in the fluorescent light they looked like a sculpture. I ran upstairs, brought down a sketchbook, and from the opposite side of the street did ten drawings of them in each other’s arms on the couch, enfolded like a mother and her embryo, and then the landlady called me to the phone and an Israeli man with a 1920s accent said that he’d heard about me from Ya’akov Har-Perachim who I’d once met and asked if I could do a few illustrations for a poem by an important poet named Abraham Menachem Abramovitz. I didn’t know the poet and asked what the poem was about. He said about life, love, death, envy, fear in the camps, the Nazis, you get it, right? I did a few illustrations and he came to collect them and said that it was just what he wanted and left me fifty dollars. I went to the Cedar Tavern, pushed my way through a sea of people, and drank Old Crow bourbon. Poets read from their work, drunk. Dylan Thomas, who used to spend a lot of time at the White Horse on Hudson, would come down to the Cedar Tavern and drink huge quantities and declaim and go down on all fours and piss on the floor and beg everyone’s forgiveness and they all told him that they forgave him and he thanked them and read his poems again, he took to writing them on pad, and then the place burned down.

  Maybe it burned down because Lyndon LaRouche was standing there. Laroche is a historical figure bordering on the pathological. He had many admirers. And followers. His Progressive Labor Party was then in style. The angst-ridden psychologist Reich was God and masses of people in the Village sat in “orgone boxes,” because God was an orgasm and the boxes they sat in helped them achieve better ones, as did giving lots of blowjobs. Adele Schwartz, Gandy’s close friend who modeled for Hans Hoffman and who herself painted and looked like a gypsy, came over and I was happy to see her. She sat at the Cedar Tavern every night. Her face was slightly coarse but her body was well sculpted. She grew up in a Jewish orphanage and in her childhood had wanted to be called Barak Ben-Avinoam. She was completely devoted to Reich. It was then that LaRouche left his followers and went looking for new ones and went to war against Reich who was already dead. Then he fought to get back his followers and declared that there was an international conspiracy that included the Queen of England, the President of the United States, and the Pope, all of whom were running the world’s biggest drug operation—production, distribution, and sales. Hundreds of billions of dollars went into these three pockets while a few measly millions were spent on sporadic attempts at law-enforcement. Here and there some unfortunate drug dealer would be jailed and never know that the hand that had thrown him into prison was the same one that gave him his livelihood. LaRouche founded a whole new movement of paranoiacs and decided to run for President. Later he was convicted of tax fraud and spent a few years in prison. LaRouche might have b
een crazy but he was intelligent, but the people who believed in him are long gone. One night he told me that he wanted me to deliver this message to Ben-Gurion: It is possible to understand pessimism and defeat using a particular balance of sweat and depression. He talked about pride and depression and Hitler and Jesus and God and the Pope and went on with a story about a girl who tried to drive him crazy, he said that Ben-Gurion would understand that—the girl used to wait for him wearing a pink 1930s slip, making rowing gestures with her hands. Her lips were parted and painted bright red, they looked like the mouth of a fish suffocating out of water and flapping as it neared death. Movements that were perhaps supposed to be somehow linked to sex because she thought they were reminiscent of how Rita Hayworth moved, Rita Hayworth who she thought she resembled. They had secretly implanted a network of cables in his brain. Love is something that happens everywhere. It needs to be honed. It sometimes enters evil minds. What do you do? You point a broom to heaven and then make it into a sundial and then the broom becomes just a stick. Then he calmed down and said that at Roosevelt High there was an argument between the kids as to what their parents had accomplished. One said, My father designed the Washington Bridge; another said, My father built the Empire State Building, and then a Jewish boy, who didn’t have such an illustrious father, asked, Have you ever heard of the Dead Sea, and they all said, Yes! and then he said, Well, my father killed it! And then the Cedar Tavern burned down but was quickly rebuilt because hundreds of artists, writers, and poets were waiting for what they called their house of prayer to be returned to them. Dylan Thomas sat outside drunk writing a poem and I stopped there and he said, Are you really from Israel? I said, Yes. He said, two screwed-up peoples, the Irish and the Jews. Genius. Pathetic. Magnificent. The filthiest of the lot, they rise the highest and fall the lowest.