by Yoram Kaniuk
Yekutiel Ohev-Zion took me to lunch at the drugstore and everyone treated him with due respect and he said they behaved nicely to him because everybody here loved his wife and also because they all owed him money and the sheriff wouldn’t let them hurt him because he paid him off. Here’s Mr. Kut, they said. He didn’t try the bacon and eggs and forgave me for eating it. He asked if I knew Yudelevitz from Gedera and I said I didn’t and we talked for hours about Hebrew poetry and he hugged me and wouldn’t stop kissing me on the cheeks and said, My son’s with a goya, the children are goyim, I’m a miserable old man, how lucky you are to have a Jewish wife. I said it was pure chance and he said, in matters like that God works for us.
We were on our way the next morning. The ballet went to Los Angeles and I got bored and couldn’t resist asking Yekutiel to put in a good word for me with one of the ranchers because I wanted to see where the cowboys came from. Lee was happy about this because she’d had enough of seeing me sidle into our room covered in marks left by her colleagues. Danilova kissed me on the cheeks and said, See what happens when you leave St. Petersburg? A tall ruddy rancher took me to his ranch in his jeep. We drove along dirt roads between cliffs and blue and brown mountains for about five or six hours until we reached an isolated ranch surrounded by hundreds of acres of pasture and cows. I went to the foreman and as he gave me a tour I thought, I could put the entire State of Israel somewhere here in the middle of the ranch. In the evening I sat with the cow-pokes in a lean-to. It was cold. They lit a fire and I recalled my days in the Palmach. One of them played a banjo and they sang “Blue Moon” and “Cindy,” they told stories, an Indian sang a Sioux tribal song, I asked the rancher if I could bunk with them and he said okay, I’m too tired for a city boy in any case, I don’t give a rat’s ass about pansy Yankees from the East Coast. I didn’t want to correct him. It was late. We drank Kentucky sour mash bourbon and my head was spinning and I sang them songs from Israel and they liked them and said, They sure speak funny in New York, and they fell asleep, some standing up, and I went outside.
I missed Lee and remembered how we hitchhiked from New York to Provincetown in the summer and sat facing the great ocean. The lights of the fishing boats glimmered from far away. There were a lot of artists in Provincetown in the summer and we swam naked on the beach of the Portuguese town that looked like an Italian town and there on the beach I had the longest conversation on painting I’d ever had. I sat with Willem de Kooning who had a summer home there and told him what I thought about abstract art being only decoration and that painters no longer knew how to draw and he got angry, left, and came back about ten minutes later with a black suitcase and he opened it and showed me some beautiful realist drawings he’d done in Holland and New York and I told him, You’re wasting your time on splatter painting, give us something about man, about our world, paint from your consciousness and from life, you do fine wallpaper but that’s not enough, we argued, and I think that’s perhaps why, later, when he did the most beautiful paintings of his life—a series of works on Marilyn Monroe in which he brought the human image back to his turbulent canvases—he invited me personally to come to his new opening and smiled and said, Thank you for Provincetown. I remembered how after de Kooning had left a drunken fisherman came up to me in the bar and talked about painting and about living surrounded by fish and artists. He liked fish better. He talked about the silence at sea at night when the fish glint in the moonlight, about the loneliness of the sea. The yearning, he said. Try to paint that. Melville wrote it, but only one artist, Ryder, really painted the sea. He began to ramble and I was tired and I went to the room where Lee was sleeping and fell asleep.
Outside on the ranch in the mountains it was cold. A bright moon and clear black sky filled with bright stars like you see in the desert. It was a dry cold. The mountain peaks seemed serrated in the light of the full moon. I stepped out and walked and reached a sparkling stream hidden in the sparse undergrowth. I crossed it and stood on the bank and a kind of sorrow about everything filled me. Who, what am I? Where am I going? Why me? Am I just another poor guy who lost his way leaving Rishon LeZion and ended up in a small town like Laramie? How far had I traveled, and what for? I was young and overtaken by a terrible sense of having missed out on something, it seemed that all was lost. The silence was deep, the landscape was infinite, glorious like a cold rocky desert, all chiseled and carved rock. Then in the light of the moon I saw the body of a young girl in the stream. I moved closer in disbelief and from the water, in the freezing cold, she came out. She picked up a towel and dried herself and looked at me and smiled. She put a coat over the towel and sat down and said, “Come here, stranger,” and I did. She said she was a mermaid. I said, There’s no sea here. She said, I’m Sandra, your host Cooper’s daughter. I saw you at supper and you looked like a kohen in a cemetery. I asked, How does a pretty girl like you in the midst of all this Christian splendor know that word, and she said, There’s a sweet Jew in town, Kut, and he had a wife called Matilda, a wonderful woman, and I’d sit with her and she taught me all kinds of things, a warmhearted woman, their son went away, there was a daughter who died, her husband’s brother didn’t want anything to do with them and I was like their adopted daughter. They’re Jewish. I told her I’d met Yekutiel and that I came from his country and she said, Come closer, I’m cold. I came closer. She was shivering. I asked if it was just from the cold. She said, No, I’m sad. I’m seventeen and there’s nothing here for me except a father who hits me and a drunk mother and the cowboys who look at me all the time and undress me with their eyes, so hug me. Don’t make love to me, I don’t love you and I’m too young to start with that, but you’re nice and sad too. I hugged her and she still shivered. She was thin and in that landscape somehow mythical and her skin was wet and firm. Her blonde hair reminded me of Pat. She pressed herself to me, it wasn’t easy to keep from doing more than hug her, I stroked her hair and she laughed like a little girl and said she was happy and that she knew a lot of sentences she’d learned from Matilda, like, Im ein ani li, mi li? If I am not for myself, who will be for me? She said it in Hebrew. I could have loved her. I walked back alone and lay down to sleep. Next morning I drove around the ranch again, I took a walk. The rancher took me to a small saloon in the middle of the endless fields. We drank beer and ate steaks and came back.
I looked around for her but didn’t see her. Then she appeared and asked her father to introduce us, he did, and she said, A nice boy, who was Yoram? He was a king who did evil in the eyes of the Lord, I said, and she replied, That’s good, and she left as if the previous evening had never happened. I sat with the cowboys who were hosting some friends from another ranch. There was an Irishman who took out a guitar and sang cowboy songs for hours and concluded with “Danny Boy” and other Irish songs and in the morning the rancher took me to the bus station. It took us four hours. From the jeep I saw her passing like a shadow and blowing me a kiss. I had to ride to some town or other and from there I traveled by train for two days and nights through those vast expanses to Los Angeles. Lee was waiting for me with the company after ten days of performances in Hollywood. She tried teaching me manners and what love is and said I didn’t understand anything about it and that she wouldn’t let me run away from her and then she continued the tour with the company and we arranged to meet in Dallas in about two weeks’ time.
I stayed with Oved and his brother who’d fought in the war with me. Oved, of whom much will be told later, didn’t know me then and we got acquainted. He was tall, skinny, pained, quiet, and very introverted. Always seemed to be deep in contemplation. Strong features with no beauty but a kind of unfinished grace, as if his mother had given birth to him an hour too soon. Friends came over in the evening. Fat Paul, the Brothers Karamazov, Handsome David, and in the dovecote in the yard slept Valerie, who was as slim as a feather. Paul was a potential millionaire and although he hadn’t yet made his first million he knew he had to work on the second. He lived in an old woman’s house and
when the first of the month came along and rent was due, she’d doll herself up for him, he’d go to bed with her that night and so buy himself some time to make yet another of his many attempts to get rich quickly, one of which, the most amazing, will be described later. The Brothers Karamazov came from someplace in Israel whose name changed with each story they volunteered, though they’d only say something once every two days. They managed the window cleaning business where everybody worked. I joined them. At the time new neighborhoods were being built in the San Fernando Valley and their job was to clean the windows after the paint job was completed because paint was always left on the glass by the window frame. For this they used a single-edged razor blade and worked by contract, being paid per window. Oved invented an efficient way of working quickly and the gang managed to earn quite a lot of money from this exhausting work in the terrible heat of the valley. The older Karamazov brother had visited Vienna as a Jewish Agency emissary. It seemed he’d fallen in love with a Viennese woman who was perhaps a princess and perhaps not, but whoever she was, she’d left him. In Los Angeles, whenever we saw girls, he’d give them a long look, shake his head and say, She’s not Viennese. His brother was convinced that the older Karamazov knew all the Viennese women in the world, because he knew who wasn’t Viennese.
Handsome David was tall and apparently good-looking and had been in the same class as me for a year when he was a kid but had been held back in the same class for three years. He later worked on an Israeli ship and ran away to Los Angeles. He was scared of cops and guards and even of the poor old guys in livery who stood at the doors of department stores. In New York he used to walk using a system that Oved invented for him according to the theory that the girls on Fifty-seventh Street walked the north sidewalk on even days and the opposite sidewalk on uneven days. The idea was to make a pass at every girl, and according to the Oved’s statistics, your chances of spending a night with one of them were about 20:1. David said it worked, he would hit on twenty and always end up with one. In Los Angeles he got a job as a parking valet in front of a hotel that looked like an ancient Egyptian garden called the Garden of Allah, and the younger Karamazov brother gave him a copy of the book named after himself and his brother, or so they liked to think. Handsome David stuck a scrap of paper in the middle of the book and when he’d see a young woman approaching in her car, he would pretend to be engrossed in the page he was reading, and the girl would wait and get curious, because in those days parking valets didn’t read heavy books or books in general, and then as if emerging from the fog of the book, he’d discover her, look confused, still immersed in his book, read another line, and she’d ask, What are you reading, and he’d say, The Brothers Karamazov, a book most of them had never heard of, and Oved told him he could say Jaguar or Picasso and they wouldn’t know the difference. If one of the starlets showed interest he’d explain that he was working on his PhD at UCLA and this brought him quite an impressive crop of pretty faces. In the evenings he’d come over to my place and misspell names of writers, artists, musicians, learn them by heart to then be able to tell a girl, You remind me of Natasha from War and Peace. Once he made a mistake and told a beautiful young thing that she reminded him of a Picasso and she slapped him, and that evening we taught him what he shouldn’t say, but David, who hadn’t completed primary school and moved directly to work on his PhD, got many pretty girls into his bed this way and enjoyed telling us about his performances and we nodded and taught him even more names he should say or not say. His affairs only lasted one or two nights, but he claimed it was worth it.
In the evenings we’d sit and talk about the millions Paul was going to make; I told them about my trip. Valerie came down from her dovecote and put the kettle on for tea and you could see she loved Oved who’d spent his childhood playing and fighting with the Arab children from the neighboring village Qatra. His father’s hands were so hard and clumsy that he once killed a donkey with a single blow. His father liked to sleep next to an old fan because he needed the noise to fall asleep. And he liked milking cows. He loved cows more than anything else. Nobody expected much of Oved because he looked distant and drowsy. In 1947, when he was seventeen, he joined the Haganah and from some beach or other swam out to an illegal immigrant ship and was captured by the British and managed to escape. He knew every rock in the desert and had the instincts of a nomad. But he was captured again and sent to an internment camp in Cyprus where the watch he’d been given for his bar mitzvah was stolen and then he was released and came back. Later he served in Moshe Dayan’s battalion in Lod and Ramle. He raced ahead in a jeep firing in all directions and the locals fled. When he got back there were bullet holes in his shirt. The Arabs made me some buttons, he said. A Bedouin from Juaresh named Abu Shalouf was married to two wives. He had two camels, two donkeys, and his dog sat on his dead daughter’s grave until it died too. Abu Shalouf worked for Oved’s father. In the father’s opinion Abu Shalouf was a willing slave. Couldn’t live unless he worked for him. Oved’s father tried to throw him out, he cursed him, he hated seeing his poor callused hands exposed in those terrible dry winds, but Abu Shalouf refused to leave. It went on this way until 1948. But even after he was expelled from the village and the village no longer existed he came back to work. He particularly loved plowing. One day a Bedouin tracker who loved Abu Shalouf’s daughter came to ask Oved’s father to talk with Abu Shalouf on his behalf. Oved’s father spoke to Abu Shalouf and tried to mediate between them, but Abu Shalouf explained that there were two reasons why he wouldn’t give his daughter to the tracker: I come from a simple family, I plow and ride camels and this guy who’s in love with my daughter rides a horse and is a spy. In their clan, said Abu Shalouf, my daughter will be a slave. The second reason is that I’m giving my daughter to a man from Ramle who wants her for his son because my daughter is the most beautiful and so in return I’ll get two of his daughters from him, one for my son and the other, who’s fourteen years old, for myself. Since telling that story Oved got the nickname Abu Shalouf, after the Bedouin. Oved had an Uncle Simcha who lived in Tel Aviv and was a prophet. He prophesied that Europe, except for England, would be destroyed. He said that Ben-Gurion would establish a state for the Jews. That one day all the evil goyim would be killed. People would gather round him on Rothschild Boulevard and listen to his prophecies, which even when they made little sense were always interesting. Oved loved him. They met sporadically, and in 1956, when Oved had already been in the States for years, the uncle died, but for Oved he still lived on and soon Oved started prophesying on behalf of his dead uncle.
I worked with them for a week cleaning windows, but a few days later I had to go to Dallas to meet Lee. Oved decided to drive me. For two days we drove through a desert that was darker than the Negev and lacked the unassuming splendor of the Ramon Craters. We stopped at a ramshackle cabin shaded by a Royal Poinciana. An old, disheveled man was sitting on the scorched ground with his back to the wall. Behind a water pump in the nettle-filled yard we saw a huge pile of new Cadillacs shining in many colors. There was no road leading there, only a dirt trail. I don’t know how Oved/Abu Shalouf found the place because I was asleep when he made a detour and entered this barren landscape. The old man got up and asked if we’d like a drink. Very much, I said. He went to the well and with a rope and bucket brought us water and glasses and poured from the bucket and we drank. Not far away we saw a field of oil pumps that looked like huge grasshoppers as they rose and fell. The man begged our pardon because he needed a moment of silence. He went into the cabin and came back with an old abacus like the ones we used in primary school. He slid the beads around, scribbled with an indelible pencil on a scrap of paper and said, An hour and ten minutes. Five thousand dollars per pump times twenty. Another five Cadillacs. We looked at him in amazement despite the heat and he explained that he’d lived there all his life as had his father and grandfather before him and they’d go from ranch to ranch, and here the ranches are two days’ walk from one another, and pick the l
eft-over cotton. He said his wife had run off. He didn’t remember her name or whether they’d had any children. He lived there on his own although up until a few years earlier his brother had lived there too but he’d been shot dead by a crazy sheriff. One day some men came along with instruments and discovered oil on his spread. They came and drilled. He said that each time the grasshopper fell it was fifty cents and the same when it came up, and so a hundred pumps times twenty-five cents a minute was worth something. Every time he needed to he’d call the field foreman who’d call the showroom in Houston. They’d bring him another Cadillac on a truck that always managed to get stuck on the way and he’d put the Cadillac in the yard. He didn’t know how to drive. He didn’t know why you needed to drive. He didn’t want to go anywhere. He didn’t want electricity or piped water. There was no real road around there for the Cadillacs to drive on, but this, he said, was how all his ancestors had lived and the colorful Cadillacs were his pride and joy. He didn’t know why but it had happened and he didn’t want to fight his wealth. He liked us because we came from a distant place that he’d heard of in the prayers recited when his daughter or son had died. He talked right through the night. In the end he told us to dump our old car, the old purple Buick, and told us to get the field foreman who also turned up in a Cadillac and asked him to fix us up with licenses and from there we drove a brand new Cadillac to meet Lee. The foreman had managed to do about a hundred miles in the car before we arrived. We reached a new road that looked good on the map. Abu Shalouf said, Trust me, I’ve driven along here a lot, and after about half an hour we realized we were alone on the road. No cars. No trees. He’d never been there in his life. Nobody ever drove on this road. No milestones. No road signs. A wide road, four lanes in each direction. Smooth. Burning hot in the desert sun. Not a diner. Not a gas station. No people. Not even half a person. Abu Shalouf was unruffled because he was convinced he’d been on this road before, but I started worrying that it was a new road and I told him that I thought we were in trouble. Oved/Abu Shalouf wasn’t a big talker. In a five-hour drive he hadn’t said more than twenty words. Fortunately the Cadillac had a big fuel tank and after about eight hours, almost on empty and us hungry and thirsty, we came to a small town with a diner and a gas station and two old black men who stared at us like we’d landed from Mars. There was a small motel ten minutes away and we went to sleep. We tried to find out about that road but nobody would say more than, Yep, it’s a road, or Right, not many people use it, or, In the meantime, it’s what we’ve got. The motel was empty. The room looked as if it had never been slept in. There was still a small silk price tag still attached to the sheet. From the window I could see the empty gas station. A lit up Pepsi-Cola advertisement and another one for Pepto-Bismol seemed forsaken in the desert view. A hot dry wind was blowing. There was no air conditioning. In the morning we ate at the diner. We were the only people there. A lively young woman made us breakfast and greeted us warmly and poured coffee and more coffee, and said that my pipe gave me an air of sophistication. I asked who passed through there and she said, Never mind that, the Bible is old but it will always be with us. We left and the landscape began showing signs of life. Huge ranches running for hundreds of miles, here and there a tractor, jeeps, and then a green wasteland and thousands of cows. Oved stopped the car in the shade of a bus stop which said: To the attention of our passengers—Bus No. 76 will arrive on Thursday at 11:00 A.M. It was Tuesday.