Life on Sandpaper

by Yoram Kaniuk

  After some time Mira decided to save the convent. She found old accounts ledgers and began taking care of the property. The mother superior fell ill and no one was chosen to replace her. Mira did everything the old woman wanted and the nuns came back to life slowly, and young nuns were sent by the local bishop after Mira went to see him and begged for them. She began tending the vineyards, renovating the winery, she brought in a local winemaker who still remembered how his forefathers used to make the region’s famous wine. She brought in workers, paid them well, sold fruit at good prices, cultivated the fields, the orange groves, reached a new productivity record after bringing in a noted expert from France, and the convent began to show a profit. Word spread. Bishops came and were amazed by the newly invigorated convent and said, There’s a living, breathing Church here despite it all. Mira painted and renovated the convent, went down into the cellars and found important manuscripts there, some of which were in Hebrew, she found Shabbat candles, an old Chanukah menorah, she discovered that it was customary for the nuns to fast on Yom Kippur and the ninth of the Hebrew month of Av which was adapted to the Gregorian calendar in an old book she found where the Gregorian months were listed in accordance with the Hebrew dates up to the year 2050. She sold part of the non-Hebrew manuscripts in Milan for huge sums. She became famous, wrote us that her life was wonderful and that she felt like she was founding a new nation, and said that she now knew how they used to sing in the Temple because here, she said, they had preserved those ancient psalms. The archbishop came to bless the place. More nuns arrived. Her ex-husband Yuri converted to Christianity. He studied and became a monk. He spent some time at a monastery in California, gave up his music, and two years later settled in Spain at a neighboring monastery. She had no contact with him but he was seen walking around the convent. He wrote to her, but Mira never told us what. She received a singular invitation from the Holy See. She went to Rome. She was granted an audience with the Pope—for a simple nun it was almost unheard of. The Pope knew about her past, her father, Stalin, and wanted to hear more. She told him. He permitted her to kiss his hand. He said she’d brought the roses back to the cheeks of the Church in southern Spain. Mira requested that her marriage be annulled. It’s very rare that His Holiness intervenes in the annulment of a marriage because there is no divorce in the Catholic Church and the Pope is God’s representative on earth, but he granted the annulment anyway. She went back to the convent and introduced more and more innovations, the region flourished, the villagers became prosperous, she adjudicated local disputes, fasted a great deal, sang Hebrew songs in secret, and one day took the Hebrew books and sold them to a Jewish dealer in Genoa. Mira, who in her youth had studied the piano, composed an oratorio in the Gothic style using the text of her father’s letters and after it was sung at the Easter festival she traveled to neighboring Gibraltar and crossed to Algiers. She bought two cans of hashish and boarded a ship. She wrote to us asking that we meet her at the port and marked the number of the pier.

  She arrived wearing her nun’s habit and looked so beautiful, with her pale face and the habit and coif. She was carrying packages and the cans, which emitted a smell that even the seagulls could probably have identified. But the Irish and Italian New Yorker cops crossed themselves, their sense of smell having abandoned them. She looked completely pure in her habit, likewise crossing herself, and she even held a short prayer for the cops while the hashish sent out its aroma and Lee and I shook with terror. We took a taxi to Eighth Street. Mira hadn’t explained a thing but went into a small club and came out half an hour later with thirty thousand dollars and we went to our apartment and she took off her habit. She asked Lee to steal a purple or brown dress and shoes for her from Macy’s, which Lee did, and then, after she got dressed, Mira went to see her father and we went with her and she told her story and everybody, except Boris, was overjoyed. He hissed some words in Russian that sounded angry. And from then on she went to bed with anything that moved.

  At that time I was in an exhibition. I was showing the paintings I’d done of Sonia and Alex. Somebody said derisively that if only they could, my paintings would sing as well. One critic, who at the time was fighting with somebody, I can’t recall whom, wrote something about me, and one day I saw Alex and Sonia in front of my paintings. They had their arms around one another. They looked like a glass sculpture. Transparent. I told them that with them I could fulfill my greatest dream and make sculptures of water. Alex said something about humanity. Sonia spoke about Jewish values. I had a sudden attack of conscience. I called the Union Theological Seminary and introduced myself. At first they refused to give in but eventually I persuaded them to give me Mary Frances Hagen’s phone number.

  I wrapped David Dancing Before the Master in cloth. I took the painting in a taxi to her home. I rang the bell. An old woman opened the door and I found I’d got the wrong address. The woman was slightly drunk so although she wanted to be angry with me she smiled and from there I went to another address I found in the book, also under the name Mary Frances Hagen. I reached a big, fancy house. The doorman, wearing a brown uniform with golden buttons, asked who I was and I said I was a messenger from the Sidney Janis Gallery. He called her, I heard her say she was in the middle of a call to Chicago and he should send the man up. I gathered that she hadn’t really paid attention, which helped me get into the old elevator, and a young man took me up to the seventeenth floor and I rang her bell. I waited a while and she opened the door. She was wearing a kimono and her hair was tousled and she was barefoot and arrogant but she recognized me. She didn’t seem surprised. I went inside, she led me into a big room devoid of paintings or furniture except for modern couches, standing lamps, and a single abstract sculpture. She asked, To what do I owe this honor? There was bitter mockery in her voice. I said, I owe you this, and offered her the painting. She peeled off the cloth, looked at it for a long time, I could see tears rising in her eyes but of course she wouldn’t allow me to see her crying on my behalf, and she said, How sweet, how much is it? I said, Nothing, it’s a gift. I’ve never put it up for sale because between David dancing before the Lord and a dancer whose name I forgot, I always figured it belongs to you and that you should have it. She asked if I wanted coffee and I said I very much wanted coffee because I’d walked a long way because earlier I’d gone to a different Mary Frances Hagen’s. She looked at me with a smile that still carried a certain bitterness, brought in a tray with two cups, poured the coffee and milk, I took a spoonful of sugar and she said, In your prison they count the number of spoons of sugar you take, and I replied that she might have noticed that I’d never taken it upon myself to go out and photograph American military installations in the Arizona desert. She smiled and propped up the painting in front of her and in all the years I’ve seen people looking at paintings, I’ve never seen anyone looking at one with such force and for such a long time and without saying a word, stunned by some ancient emotion. I knew it wasn’t because of the painting, there were many far more beautiful, it was just a hint of something I’d wanted to reach in those days, I’d wanted to touch a primeval Hebrewness in modern terms, without losing sight of the human aspect and without sidestepping the need to say something personal and without breaking up the canvas with stupid blotches. Then I saw that she was actually crying and she got up, went to the window, looked out, and said, I once asked you why you didn’t love me. You had to. You could have saved me. I’m here. Who I belong to now isn’t important. You can see I’m not poor. The Israeli policewomen no longer shout “Stop it,” or “Spy,” or “Slut” at me; the Security Service no longer shines lights in my eyes. I’m my own. I’ve got nothing in my heart. I exist, not live. You’re a Jew and these days I don’t like any of you. This is the most beautiful painting I’ve ever seen and it’s not even such a good or important painting. It’s me and he’s dancing before the Master, and don’t call me, I’ve got a man, he lives with me, he’s not like you and he’s got a heart. If another war breaks out I’ll be on Hit
ler’s side because he knew Jews from the inside. You could have loved me. I would have become a devout Jew for you even if I hadn’t loved you, now go. Thanks for the painting. On the way out the doorman looked at me with a smile, I asked him why he was smiling and he said, In ten years only one man has come to see her, and I pressed a dollar bill into his hand like a big shot. He thanked me, poor guy, and I left.

  About a year after she got back to New York, Mira met Avi Shoes and nobody really knows what happened between them, except that she cheated on him and as usual was pretty wild, but she was never cruel just for the sake of being cruel. She had an enormous desire to put an end to everything. Religions had destroyed her mind, said Avi Shoes. Her Catholicism and a convent without God, all from the need to create another Boris out of Jesus. Mira begged me to go with her to Niagara Falls. No way, I told her, take Wally Cox away from Marilyn, or take Gandy, or take Avi Shoes, but she said she only felt free with me because I wouldn’t want anything of her and we both knew, she said, how I really felt about love. Lee had gone on tour with a new off-Broadway show and she finally persuaded me to go along with Mira. I had a second exhibition. A museum bought a painting. I invented a method of mixing metallic paints with gouache and oil and then with a concoction made from egg yolks and linseed oil that I found in my school textbook on Caravaggio’s color techniques that I then completely revolutionized. I wrote down my dreams and Lee got on my nerves with phone calls that filled me with revulsion at my own ostentatious pangs of guilt and back then I was missing her all the time.

  Mira and I went by train. We hardly spoke on the ride up. When we got there we checked into the Falls Inn. It was a clear winter’s day, the snow glistened on the roofs and fences, the falls were domesticated in the old windows, hung with red drapes. There was an electric fireplace decorated with golden fringes and cherubs, slightly faded, a small fir tree was lit up with tiny lights, with old paper flowers stuck to it. At the hotel entrance stood a toy general with medals and epaulettes with fringes, and over the threshold was the legend: Be Thou My Spouse. Mira and I took separate rooms and when we went first upstairs and stopped at my door, she announced, Remember, here you don’t know me and I don’t know you. You just look. After a rest and a shower she began wandering around the streets and stores like a spoiled cat. She wanted me to follow her and she kept turning her head to make sure I was there. She went into a flower shop. I stayed outside, watching. There were lots of young people there. I saw she’d singled out a young man and gone up to him. He looked like Mr. Clean. Gray-blue eyes, light brown hair. He wanted a bunch of flowers. I couldn’t hear the conversation but I saw that he was looking alternately at the flowers and Mira and seemed embarrassed, confused, and angry. He put a flower into a vase and took it out again. Then he went out and stood as if waiting. She played with the bunch of flowers he had touched earlier, and looked at him with innocent curiosity. The man holding the flowers turned around, fixed her with an angry glare; I could see it clearly through the shop window. He looked insecure, and when he turned to go, as if remembering for whom he was buying those flowers, Mira came out of the store alongside him, and he realized he still hadn’t shaken her. Now I could hear them. He told her about his wife, he said she was waiting for him, it would be their second night together.

  At dinner in the hotel restaurant Mira sat alone sipping a martini. She fished out the olive and chewed it sensually, and there facing me sat the young man with a young woman and his eyes followed Mira’s every movement. She ordered something to eat, wine, by this time he wasn’t paying the least attention to his wife. Afterward I didn’t see anything. Later, in the lobby, I heard her say to the young man, Listen, my husband died, I’m Jewish and I need a man to make up the minyan. He didn’t understand and said, What? What? And she said, He died. The man was trembling. What do you mean Jewish? She said, He died, dead Jews need a minyan, a quorum of ten men. Late that night he came to her. An hour later he crawled back to his own room and a few minutes after that crawled back to Mira wretched and humiliated and miserable, dragging the flowers he had bought for his wife. His wife came out into the hall in her nightgown and couldn’t find him. He went back to her and in a loud voice begged her to forgive him. She cried. Mira came out of her room and handed her the flowers. In a tinny voice Mira said, Take them. Later I told Boris what had happened and he said, There’s no place like America, she’ll be the first Jewish woman president yet. I told him that first off she was a Catholic, second, there’ll never be a woman president, and third, she wasn’t born in America. He said she was no longer a Catholic and if Ike could be president, so could Mira. We moved to Gramercy Park, on Sixteenth Street, an old place with mahogany-paneled walls, next door to a locked apartment on whose door I remember a plaque that read: Sherlock Holmes lived here during his visit to America (but that can’t be right, can it?). Right next to the building was Union Square and there was a May First demonstration. Lee joined the demonstration and sang the Internationale while brawny Irish cops stood around laughing. She went away for a few days. I came home from a night of drinking at the San Remo Bar near the Calypso on MacDougal Street, and found an old man standing naked under the staircase that was now our kitchen, making soaping movements with his hands. I didn’t understand. He reeked of cheap whiskey. He suddenly realized what was happening and got dressed awkwardly and explained that he had once lived here and came out of habit to take a shower and hadn’t noticed that there was no water because the landlord was always shutting it off anyhow. I fed him.

  Sondra Lee was playing in a musical called Walk Tall, I think, that Lee had done with Larry Kert. She lived on Fifty-first Street and Eighth Avenue, and told me that she had gone into the kitchen once and turned on the gas oven. It was funny, she said in tears, I put my head in the oven, took my head out for a moment to check that the windows were closed, and I saw light coming through the window and shining on the box of Quaker Oats cookies on the shelf over the oven. It seemed a shame not to eat the cookies, so I missed the chance of dying with dignity. Sondra, who was Brando’s lover at the time, wanted to take me to meet a guy who collected folk songs. A studio on Fifty-eighth Street. I went. A man with a beard and a tortured face and thousands of tapes. I could get ten dollars a song. He recorded and I sang songs I’d known from my childhood. I sang Israeli-Russian songs that I translated into back into Russian, which I didn’t understand, but knew how to fake. I remembered a Turkish song from my days at sea and I invented a few more. I invented songs in Arabic. In Greek. I went home with two hundred dollars. The poor guy tried to find me again afterward but Brando told him I’d gone to sell peacocks in Alaska.

  I met a girl and we went to her apartment and she had a parrot that mimicked me but I just couldn’t do it so I told her I was gay because I didn’t want to offend the beautiful bird that laughed in my voice as I ran out of the apartment.

  Sondra Lee again decided to commit suicide. She told me that this time she got everything ready, didn’t look at the shelf so she wouldn’t see her cookies, opened the window to jump, put one leg outside, but the air was freezing, a strong wind was blowing down Fifty-first Street from the river, and so she just couldn’t jump. I told her that anyone who couldn’t commit suicide with a razor blade would never get anywhere. I went back home and Boris called to say that the universe is fluid. That the universe no longer actually exists. It’s all in our mind. We are part of a consciousness called the universe. Time is over, we’re simply a shadow, a ray wandering between lost galaxies. Mira’s no longer a Bride of God, I told him, what do you want from me? And he said, I miss Stalin but the bastard went and died on me.

  A Russian woman from a radical right-wing California paper wanted to interview Mira on her experiences in the convent. She researched the story of Mira and the convent and told her that Boris had a brother. You had an uncle. He died in the gulag. Boris knew he’d be taken away. And Mira told her, My father certainly knew why his brother was being sent off to die. Mira remembered how they’d been ta
ught sublimation in the Young Communist League; they were revolutionary cadres who would put an end to the decadent capitalist regime of the United States of America.

  I got a call from the New York Times radio station after a favorable article appeared about a painting of mine that had been bought by a museum. A man with a German accent asked me to take part in his weekly program called, “How Others See Us.” My gallery owner, Mr. Feigel, thought it might help. I went to the station with Gandy and he found some friends there, and he went off to get drunk in the room of a fat woman he’d known since his childhood on the Lower East Side and told her that I was a nephew of the Czar’s cousin. The man who interviewed me was serious, pleasant-looking, and ascetic. He asked how an Israeli sees America and I told him that I really only knew the Village and Harlem. We chatted after the interview and he said it had been interesting. He added that he’d like to invite me to dinner. Despite the sale of my painting to the museum I was not in good nutritional condition and couldn’t refuse. I went to his apartment on Park Avenue. An upper floor, I don’t remember how high. The doorman called up. The elevator had an operator. It was a lovely apartment. A small framed Piero della Francesca fresco that had been brought to the apartment from Italy using a technique I’d learned about when studying art and the transport of frescoes at the Beaux Arts in Paris. There was a Rembrandt hung there too, one of his self-portraits, a few Noldes, a rare Chardin, and more.