Life on Sandpaper

by Yoram Kaniuk

  Oved got out of the car and through a hole in the fence that he widened with professional ease went over to one of the fat cows and from my place at the wheel I could see he was crying. That was the first time I’d seen him cry. Later, when I told the story, I was told that nobody had ever seen him cry, not when his parents had died, not when his friends had died; he cried and hugged a black cow with white spots. At first she mooed but then warmed to him. Oved whispered in her ear and she laid her huge head gently on his chest. He bent down and she got down on her knees. Oved kneeled at her side and as he stroked her whispered words of love that I could barely hear and later he said that in Gedera they used to speak love to their cows in Arabic so it was a waste of time explaining it to me. In the car Abu Shalouf said, That’s how we did things in Gedera.

  We reached Dallas and found the theater. Lee wasn’t happy to see me but two of her friends were. Afterward, we hugged. That night she was angry at me. I went again to see the show, a ballet version of A Streetcar Named Desire, choreographed by Valerie Bettis. It was very successful and the tour even got to Japan. Oved went back to Los Angeles and Lee and I traveled to New York by train and went into the restaurant car to eat. A young man was playing a banjo. Lee began swaying, people moved their plates and glasses, she went into a trance, the passengers didn’t complain, their food got cold, the banjo player jumped on the table and danced with her as he played and I don’t know or remember how, the others got into it and danced, a small black man wearing a railroad uniform came along and began tap-dancing and Lee accompanied him with movements that grew more and more expansive, the locomotive’s horn blew and broken plates lay scattered on the floor. All this apparently came to an end because a day later we reached New York and all that remained was a memory Lee wouldn’t share or speak of with me. At night she dreamed that I was strangling her because I was jealous of her success. I told her that the Talmud says that a dream is a sealed letter. She incorporated this into her secret beliefs and with a few of her friends corresponded in dreams and choreographed a new dance to Gerry Mulligan’s version of “Makin’ Whoopee.” It was a hot and humid summer in New York. Lee was working in a show whose name I’ve forgotten and she and the other dancers used to sunbathe naked on the roof because on Sundays the offices in the Empire State Building opposite us were closed. They’d sunbathe naked so they wouldn’t have swimsuit marks in the show.

  Bob Fosse called one day and asked Lee to dance in a new show and also to be Carol Haney’s understudy. The show, he said, was called The Pajama Game. Of course she wanted to. I was angry. She was working on the dance to “Makin’ Whoopee” and I thought it was more important for her to dance the things she really loved, as she’d done at rehearsals, rather than get into a musical again and earn good money but what about the soul? Lee, who was the provider for my soul, thought a great deal about her own. Already as a girl she’d known that it was important to love your soul, but she had grown up poor and liked her soul to have a body around it. Our argument went on for a few days. I went to watch her rehearsing at the Henry Street Playhouse with Gerry Mulligan and she danced both seriously and with humor and she was wonderful. In the end I persuaded the poor girl not to go. Fosse asked if there was someone else as perky as she was and as good a dancer and Lee recommended Shirley MacLaine who he of course knew and who’d sunbathe with Lee on the roof. Lee did her concert, got a good review in the Times and another in Dance Magazine. The second performance was empty. Shirley MacLaine danced in the show and Carol Haney got sick, Shirley MacLaine replaced her in the unforgettable “Steam Heat” number. Hal Wallis just happened to be in the audience and five minutes after the show Shirley MacLaine became a star. Lee never forgave me. I told her she was right but it didn’t help. Mira, Lee’s childhood friend, would visit us every Sunday and we’d argue. Mira’s face was a blend of Hedy Lamarr and a Jewish-Slavic princess: the corners of her mouth seemed to hold lots of little secrets. Lee came from a Jewish-Russian-Communist home. Mira and Lee used to shoplift together from record shops and department stores. On one occasion Lee was caught and a complaint was lodged with the producers of The King and I and they gave her a talk as she sat embarrassed in the corner, but all in all they thought it was cute. They spoke harshly but smiled at the same time. She recalled the smiles only years later because her childish hunger for love by then had extinguished her embarrassment at being reprimanded. After she begged and pleaded and promised not to steal any more she continued dancing and getting bigger roles but of course couldn’t help herself and went back to stealing. She usually stole only what she didn’t need. For instance, she took the same record she didn’t like five times and each time it was immediately chucked in the garbage.

  Mira was only twenty-two, more a woman than a girl. She had a mind like a razor. Got her BA at sixteen. I was scared of her. She was studying at Columbia and working on her doctorate. She had a violinist boyfriend called Yuri. He begged her to love him and she smiled and told him that she’d marry him and then perhaps she’d love him eventually. He asked when and she said in two days. Yuri, who was a talented violinist, everyone said he had a future, loved her even before he was born and out of sheer joy started scratching his hand open so it would be worthy of Mira’s ring. They got married and moved into an apartment and Yuri later swore that he’d never had the guts make love to Mira on their wedding night because Boris, her father, had accompanied her to their apartment and joined them and sat playing the piano. After two days she got up while Yuri was sleeping, took her things and left. When he woke up he was already separated. Her father, Boris, was happy. When he saw his daughter coming back home with her suitcases he burst into a hearty Russian song. Her lovely gentle mother sat reserved as always, wearing a hat for all the trips she never took and holding a travel guide with maps and tips she’d never follow. Seeing Mira return, Boris hugged his wife, something he’d long since given up doing, and was thrilled since Mira had left “that idiot,” whom he’d actually loved like a son for years. Boris was a chemist who came to the United States in 1942 and was taken immediately to Los Alamos to help build the A-bomb. When I met him we became friends because he was looking for worthy foes and to him I was the Zionist enemy, deforming Jewish history. He quoted Rothschild who’d said that a Jewish state would become a ghetto with the same prejudices as any other; petty, intolerant, narrow-minded, orthodox, expelling the goyim and Christians. He felt he could argue with me and at the time he had a chemical company where he conducted secret experiments. He spoke good English but with a Russian accent and had a small beard like Lenin and he used to sit facing Mira and his wife Zhenya and recite passages from Russian literature. He particularly liked Gogol and Chekhov. Boris had been gifted with a macabre sense of humor, thick wild hair under a beret, a deep bass voice, and he would eagerly deride the absurd idea of a Jewish state, a Chelm, a country of fools, beating the Iraqis. He knew entire books by heart and their English translations too. He also put up with me because unlike the other men around I wasn’t chasing Mira and never had sex with her. Mira was looking for love but was incapable of being loved or loving and used her power to hate herself all the better, and more than that, to hate men. Defeated young men with their tongues lolling out like dogs in the heat hung around the building trying to get into their huge apartment on Riverside Drive and West Eighty-eighth Street and Boris would drive them away. Lee had recently choreographed Once Upon a Mattress. But Mira was a refugee. Sinister. She was a promise of what would never be. For no one. Everybody wanted to break her. Even being rejected by her was a great honor. All her life she searched for absolute ignorance. Boris had known Stalin. They’d been friends. They’d played chess in the Kremlin and come up with tactics. They would glare at one another and so decide who would lose that day and they would talk about death. They both loved power, the power that was always there in their hands, they’d play with a model railroad that Stalin had gotten from a western communist who’d brought it as a gift for one of the heads of the KGB; later
both their heads had rolled. Stalin and Boris would humiliate each other. The Jews of Moscow knew that Stalin had a pet Jew but they didn’t know who. When the mood took him Boris would harangue me about my supposedly enlightened ideas, which he detested. The people’s love of tyranny, he said, is the great existential secret. The expulsion from the Garden of Eden was the price we paid to know what is permissible and what is forbidden—that is, to be slaves. Human beings prefer to have someone else think for them, and if this someone is a tyrant, they’re afraid—but the more they’re afraid the more they love him because to live is boring, and it is dangerous and frightening without somebody out there thinking for you. Christianity and the monarchies understood this, they’re both based on tyranny and so both have survived and both are eternal. Tyranny is eternal. Both Christianity and all totalitarianism are splendid performances. And in fact even the Christian and the communist rituals are similar. In all of these systems, the Supreme Being resides in a palace. The most wonderful sentence in Russian literature is what Ivan writes in The Brothers Karamazov, when Jesus comes to Seville. The Great Inquisitor has him arrested. At night the Inquisitor comes to his cell. He is tall, old, withered, but there is still a light in his eyes. He sits before Jesus and explains that he, Jesus, had founded the Church based on anarchy and justice and compassion while we, knowing the nature of Man, founded the Church on pomp, mystery, authority. In other words, on vanities, on fetters. Ritual is welcome brainwashing. In June 1941 the Germans attacked, but Stalin didn’t believe they would because in August 1939 he’d signed a pact with Germany and he admired Hitler. He was convinced that a bastard like Hitler wouldn’t violate an agreement with him. Stalin, said Boris, admired the SA commander Ernst Röhm who Hitler had hanged from a hook, because he knew to take care of his enemies. Stalin loved his wife Nadezhda and killed her. Afterward, he said, something was extinguished inside him forever. She was his last connection with the world. Twenty-five million Russians died in the war, half of whom he killed himself. In his view, prisoners of war were traitors, and this included his son Yakov, and so he killed them. Boris drank some tea and wiped his face with a towel and smiled. Eh? Eh? I looked at him. Mira loved telling about how Boris had had lunch with President Truman, and told him that Stalin was a historic hero. Eternal. McCarthy, who devoured communists and anyone who even smelled like a communist, liked hearing Boris out because listening to him he understood what an important role evil must play when it serves a nation that doesn’t know what’s in its own best interests. Boris despised democracy. Why should fools decide who goes to war and who runs a country? There was something noxious and ugly in millions of ignoramuses electing a fool—anyone who can hypnotize them and convince them that he’s just their size—to be their king. A king makes his people, not vice versa. Boris was offended on Stalin’s behalf when he learned how eager the dictator’s subjects had been not to die for their leader during the invasion.

  I remember one of Boris’s speeches in particular: The truth is an accepted lie. Somebody once said that the Devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make human beings more evil than they are. Faith has to feed on the blood of innocents because they are the fiction from which a leader is created. I never thought Stalin legitimate. I didn’t believe in communism—but neither did Stalin. How can a thinking man believe in such foolishness, that people are born equal and that everyone will get what he deserves? When Mira and Lee were zealous members of the Young Communists in New York, Boris laughed at them—while Mira was admired because she’d once sat on Stalin’s knee.

  I thought that Boris hoped that Mira and Stalin would both get married. After Stalin died Boris was convinced he was still alive and hiding in South America. A man who’d been at the Kremlin but managed to escape the purges said that Boris and Stalin used to sing sentimental songs together but eyed each other with suspicion. They realized that each of them could happily murder the other. But they loved playing their games and enjoying such sweet anxiety. Boris said, Stalin had a murderous naïveté. But he loved those he was forced to kill.

  After the Germans invaded, Stalin put Boris in charge of getting the trains out of the Germans’ path as they raced toward Moscow. The very fact of treason, said Boris, is the sign of something deep—just as Mira betrayed me by being her mother’s daughter too, because she wanted to and she should have been born from me alone. Boris saw how the Ukrainians were overjoyed when the Germans arrived. At night he saw the German officers embracing and a terrible desire for new betrayal awakened in him. He already considered himself a traitor to the Russian people because of his friendship with the tyrant, but by then he didn’t care. Stalin was lost. Trapped by people Boris thought were fools. Stalin was diligently retreating from the Germans he so despised, didn’t listen to his officers’ advice, killed the generals who wanted to save Russia, and Boris watched them all get shot in the back. When he was in Kiev sometime later he met an American agent sent by Allen Dulles, who was pulling the strings from Switzerland. Boris was a specialist in something or other I know nothing about, and Dulles wanted it. Boris took his wife and Mira, but not before writing a letter to Stalin. The family went by train to Eastern Siberia and from there, via a rather strenuous route—as Greek refugees to Iran and then through Egypt—reached the United States. On his arrival he fell in love with America’s shallow happiness. The twenty-eight flavors of Howard Johnson’s ice cream. Coca-Cola, the Automat, cafeterias, all that space spread out with no purpose, without culture, beyond the big city, and Allen Dulles came on a private jet and took him to Los Alamos for the Manhattan Project, despite everything they knew about him. For two years the family lived in a small house in Los Alamos. He loved the town in the desert. It reminded him of Stalin’s anger and the barrenness he so yearned for. He was angry when the bomb was used against the Japanese and not the Nazis. After Los Alamos he moved to New York and set up a laboratory. He chased around after Mira who’d become increasingly lost.

  His overwhelming love for Mira. His rage at his wife who had dared bear her. He was dangerous when it came to Mira. Mira buried herself in study but didn’t find what she was looking for in Judaism. She claimed that Judaism was colorless, it lacked ritual and God had no splendid palace—He was wretched, pathetic, He was theology without a hierarchy, without metaphysics. She drifted from theory to theory, from belief to belief, she studied Zen Buddhism which was only starting to be popular in America then, she studied astrology, attended consciousness-raising workshops, went to all kinds of psychiatrists, talked with priests of every stripe, studied Christianity for one semester, worked for a time preparing gravestones in a cemetery, read whatever she found and wasn’t excited by Lutheran or Calvinist Christianity but was attracted by Catholicism, was drawn by its absoluteness.

  She became even more beautiful. He face grew pale. She studied theology for a year and a half, started going to church, was baptized, delved deeper into religion. She learned about medieval monasteries and cloisters. She read St. Jerome and Aquinas and St. Augustine whom she especially liked and was dismayed by his tortured soul, the fact he wasn’t born to religion, and then one evening she came over to see us and as usual we argued. This was an upsetting evening because I tried to convince her of the error of her ways and she only felt sorry for me. She emanated a sort of a Christian concept of sin and compassion, and then, after a stupid and futile argument about faith, which probably can neither be substantiated nor refuted, she left for a convent in Ohio. She wrote every now and then. Boris was happy. He said she wouldn’t marry a strict and obstinate Jewish God, but His Son instead, so she’d sin in her mind only with Him. Mira studied for about two years and became a nun.

  We didn’t attend the ceremony. She came to see us in her nun’s habit. She said she’d cried for us, for our errant souls. She went to Spain, to Vejer de la Frontera in the Cádiz province. I still have her address: Frontera Rauch, Queipodel Lahauo #3, Vejer de la Frontera, Cádiz, Spain, and sometimes she’d even reply when we wrote to her. She was in the c
onvent for about two and a half years. It was an ancient and remote place for old nuns. The mother superior was senile. Supplies would arrive from Cádiz every now and again, and the high mountains enclosed the convent and in winter the winds blew with what seemed like hate, Mira told us later. The nuns stayed inside. Mira arrived there in May, when the Holy Cross of Cádiz was carried in the Corpus Christi procession by forty men before a huge statue of the infant Jesus. She walked through the town that seemed to be shrouded in a veil of ancient terror, preserved in the very stones. She traveled a road between magnificent crags that touched the sky and reached the white-painted town of Vejer de la Frontera that looked over the valley from the heights of a rocky cliff. The houses of the town crowded together, she walked along a path between stones and wild vegetation and reached the convent. It was surrounded by thousands of acres of dried vines, neglected groves, a huge rotting winery and abandoned farmland, fruit orchards and withered apples. The nuns were completely apathetic, prayed and giggled and at night she heard them groaning and mumbling. They no longer had any contact with the outside world.