by Yoram Kaniuk
Avi asked Hauser whether by any chance he remembered walking down Fifty-fifth Street and his shoelaces coming undone so that he had to put his foot up on a hydrant to tie them. The man said it happened frequently. No, he didn’t recall that particular occasion, but it was certainly probable that he’d passed by there. Despite his protestations Avi bought the contents of the gallery. He also put two hundred and fifty thousand dollars into Hauser’s bank account, a sum identical to the one he’d made from the laces during the initial period of production. Hauser pleaded and grumbled that it wasn’t right, that he hadn’t worked for the money, but Avi explained that he had more millions than he could count, and that Hauser deserved it. Avi said it was humility and humility is a kind of conceit. Hauser yielded. He got confused. He invested in new paintings. Avi continued to buy paintings from the gallery through acquaintances and people who worked in his companies. Hauser began to look haggard. He begged Avi to stop. He bought watch after watch and pen after pen with the money, even when his purchases drove the market up, but he still couldn’t spend all that Avi gave him. And then, one day, in his Packard with Gandy and me, as his chauffeur was taking us to his office in Manhattan, Avi read a small item in the Post. It said that an antique collector and art gallery owner had been found dead in his apartment on West Ninety-second Street. It said that he was found holding a pistol in his mouth. It went on to say that the police had found a sheet of paper with no addressee, on which was written, “Much is little. Victory is catastrophe.” Avi Shoes sat and wept. I’d never seen him cry before.
We went to Hauser’s home. Relatives told us that Hauser had died a wealthy man. Avi Shoes told me that now he realized that Hauser had died because he could no longer look forward to his new acquisitions with the same desperate desire he’d had when he was poor. Because of him, because of Avi, Avi said, there was no more tension, no mystery, no triumph in his victories, in his perseverance. I killed him. Once he had all that money he could go right to Christie’s or Sotheby’s and buy every fountain pen or watch he wanted, never getting excited, never having to beat out the cunning stratagems of his competitors, and so, said Avi Shoes, he had to get out of the game. Avi never got over it. He tried to atone for Hauser’s death. He found Hauser’s daughter Rita and tried to help her as much as he could. She hated him. But that story doesn’t belong here.
Since Mira’s return from the convent her mother had become a wispy shadow of herself and looked like a moth stuck to a lamp. Or, Avi Shoes said she was a fly who’d managed to escape the flypaper. Boris looked old now. He said that the difference between Russia and America was that in Russia life is a drama. Tears. The more horrible the ending, the better. America on the other hand is a fairy tale, a musical, a Western with a happy ending and good guys and bad guys and bad guys who turn out to be good guys and good guys who turn out to be bad. Life here is a musical. I had a show, Lee danced the part of one of the three girls in the Nutcracker and her friend Marilyn started visiting us again, bringing along her domesticated gypsy beauty and a childhood friend of Brando’s, Wally Cox. Bird played at Minton’s for a few enchanted nights and one night he took Gandy and me to a Chinese restaurant around West Fiftieth Street to hear Lennie Tristano. The second floor was almost empty. I drew this handsome blind man. A beautiful young woman was sitting there who didn’t take her eyes off Tristano’s hands. Tristano caressed the keys with a kind of tenderness but from a secret place hidden inside this tenderness he would sometimes strike the keys with a sudden smack though his fingers were the most delicate things in the world, said Gandy. Once I even kissed his fingers after I’d finished drawing some of them and the woman looked at me enviously. Bird liked him and said he was an Italian bastard and a wonderful musician. That he was white but of Benny Goodman’s magnitude and he had black rhythm in his hands. Somebody once called blood “dried-up water,” maybe it was Borges who I’d then begun reading, and here the blood in the music was like that. Sometimes Bird would pull out his alto sax and join Tristano, but only as an accompanist, because he didn’t want to steal a single note, a single second, from that man. They threaded a crumbled tune stuck with thumbtacks of brilliant lightning and at the same time going crazy with notes sneaking one into the other. The woman cried. Lenny asked that Gandy and me bring some paintings. He fingered them and described what was in them. I asked him to describe my face. He moved his hand over my face gently, his fingers touching it like a pianist playing Chopin, turning it into the mirror of a blind man, and it was nice. The young woman’s name was Jane. Maybe it wasn’t Jane, maybe I don’t really remember, but when Tristano stroked Bird’s huge head his description was perfect and beautiful: the high forehead, the sensual lips, the sad mischievous eyes, the rounded cheeks, who can remember words so mysterious and so extraordinary, something about a fluttering of forms that cannot see but can feel, something that moves, waves, a sense of something that touches it with wings, a song that remains a song but returns by a roundabout route to be the words that that the song really wanted to sing and the caress calling forth delicate, quivering, invisible forms…Go figure today what it all meant and how that brotherhood between Lennie and Bird and Gandy and Jane was formed. At the end of his time there, after the restaurant had lost a ton of money, we took Lennie to Minton’s. Jane came too. Lester Young, who knew about love, brought them together officially. They were married in the Chinese restaurant by a justice of the peace we brought and afterward they went to a Catholic church and a black priest conducted the ceremony even though Jane was a Methodist but the priest was kind enough not to mention this. When Lennie played after the ceremony you felt he was taking pity on the music, perhaps he wanted it to burn up with his own happiness. He enthused and played and said, I’m playing windmills, playing the leaves of trees in the park. His pale pink fingers whispered the music. Bird wailed. Mingus wept. Bird said, Lenny’s taking pity on his music. Billie Holiday, who called Bird the Black Angel, said later that Tristano was out of the ordinary, abnormal even, and that’s why he would eventually just fade away. Like when I heard Bird I thought it was the voice of God, like the Brahms sextet or the coda of Beethoven’s Ninth. As always Lenny was wearing a fashionable black suit and a wide kitschy purple tie, and he asked what was the difference between pink and red and what are eyes when you don’t have eyes to see them. Bird, who was trying to quit heroin and had the shakes and drank a whole bottle of sweet Manischewitz wine and chewed through the contents of an entire big bottle of aspirin, just sat staring. Next day, Jane told us later, Lenny had said to her, Let’s travel the two hundred and fifty miles to Virginia by taxi. It cost him hundreds of dollars. There he met Jane’s father, who was terrified by this apparition, got blessed by an old drunk, and when he got back, he played the same melodies but something was lost. He knew, he said, that such happiness tends to make bad music and Bird said, Tell that to all the other fools in this fucked-up town. Let them be happy that they’re stupid and that life’s good to them and they’ve got all the money in the world. Twenty people attended Rockefeller’s funeral, the man was a giant, he had more money than God, but everybody hated him, couldn’t he have bought two hundred people?
We went to a gig with Bird. They didn’t want to let him play, because of the drugs, but somehow he managed it. On the way we stopped at some hole-in-the-wall town in Pennsylvania near New Hope where he and his wife Chan lived in a little house surrounded by green lawns. New Hope was one of the few places where a mixed-race couple could live undisturbed. But nobody loved America like Charlie Parker. Europe admired him and America beat him to the ground, but he went hurtling on anyway, he was in love. He collected guns and loved Westerns. He made a religion of fried chicken. A fat black man asked Bird for his autograph. He told him he was the greatest. He said that Dizzy Gillespie had said that Bird plays the way the music should sound. He said that his music came out of God’s ass. Bird laughed and the guy sang, “Hey Bop a Rebop, Mama’s in the kitchen, Daddy’s in the jail, Sister’s on the corner singing ‘p
ussy for sale,’ Hey Bop a Rebop.” More kids came along and sang too. I forget who turned that great work into a beautiful piece of jazz. A few weeks later I went to Minton’s Playhouse with Gandy. A black kid was tap-dancing by the subway. A limousine drew up and Fred Astaire got out. He danced a few steps with the kid and gave him some money and yelled, You’re great, kid! We clapped. And Slavenska from Lee’s ballet company said that when a great Russian dancer had come to America and was asked how it felt to be the greatest dancer in world, he replied, The second greatest! The first is Fred Astaire.
Wally Cox stopped making the beautiful jewelry he put together so skillfully and began appearing at the Village Vanguard, this time without the help of applause from Gandy and me. He was ugly but funny. An evil little man with a talent for hurting people. We’d laugh till we cried at the parties he came to and it was suggested that with his cynical, sharp, witty, and rather British sense of humor—and maybe because of his screechy voice and ludicrous appearance—he’d do well on the club circuit. In the end he had his own television show. He claimed he’d fallen in love with Marilyn Gennaro even though he’d been dating five strippers and had beaten them all up. I tried to avert a disaster but was told not to interfere.
Ilka and Aviva came back from a tour of American cities and started working for Leo Fuld who’d opened an Israeli nightclub called Sabrah. I was asked to paint camels and Bedouins on the walls. Leo Fuld would sing, “To see the Yam, Lir’ot Ha’am, Ha’shemesh all day long.” He’d trill the words with his hair dyed orange, wearing plastic teeth, make-up, singing in Yiddish-English-Hebrew. The murals I did were usually left in darkness and nobody saw them and Avi Shoes brought Mira who said that the paintings looked good in the dark. Lee came with me once or twice and that was more than enough of the world she thought I came from. Two Israelis from Haifa danced the Israeli “national” dances: the Zionist Fisherman and the Arab Hunter.
Steve Allen, who was dragged to Sabrah and laughed, decided to do a show for Israel’s Independence Day. I was asked to bring a big painting to the studio that I’d done of Shabtai Zvi riding a horse. I was to show the picture to the camera and say a few words about Israeli art. The big day arrived. I found a huge disorderly stage. Dozens of people were running back and forth and back and not-forth and writing things on little blackboards and shouting and there were masses of cameras and microphones and huge piles of cables. Allen was sitting wearing a djellaba and a kaffiyeh with a red akal on his head, which is, of course, Israel’s national costume. An old man wearing a yarmulke set up a falafel stand and next to him men and women in various costumes wandered about, some in djellabas and others in regular clothes. It was hot. Allen drank whiskey and played the piano. Off to the side I saw a strange camel that had been brought from the Bronx Zoo, and at its side a short Pakistani; the camel spat and looked angry, Allen was already drunk, and five young men were running around him holding big boards and chalk and writing gags that might suit the moment. It was a kind of electrical musical hell, an orchestra playing tunes like “Hava Nagila” and “Mein Yiddishe Mama.” The hunter and fisherman from Sabrah hunted and fished. Israel Fuchs, wearing a tar-bush but without a djellaba, was sitting by a bonfire protected by terracotta-colored stones and making coffee in a jug and pouring it into little finjans and then he spoke about the fighting spirit when we fought all the Arab nations. I wandered around, getting under everybody’s feet. Steve got drunker and drunker and told jokes he read off the boards and also made up a few of his own and played something that wasn’t Israeli but dragged in some Yemenite singer called Zemira I’d never heard of and who was introduced as Israel’s national singer and she just sang away. The camel didn’t like the sound. It groaned and Steve told a joke about a Jew, an American, and a Frenchman, and then they signaled that it was my turn. I was positioned in front of a camera, and back then the cameras were huge, the one in front of me started rolling, they shouted at me to talk, I showed Shabtai Zvi on his horse and began talking about the first Israeli exhibition at the Tower of David in Jerusalem, when the camel suddenly jumped forward, detaching himself from the Pakistani who was holding on to it for dear life and it galloped toward me hawking horribly, the Pakistani hanging on behind, and it tore cables as it ran, hating my painting and hating me, the painting had been sold and I was scared it would be damaged and I didn’t have the money to give back to the buyer, and so instead of talking about the historic exhibition at the Tower of David I started running holding the big painting, Steve Allen loved it and told the cameramen to follow me, the camel attacked, the Pakistani smacked his head on some cables, I retreated, trying to think up escape strategies, somebody ran after me with a microphone and another said, Go on about the exhibition at Solomon’s Tower, I said David’s, but the camel abhorred the Tower of David and the Pakistani was wheezing like his camel, words, words, Steve Allen was laughing and his writers who were already as drunk as lords were laughing too and running after me and the camel with the Pakistani who hit a wall and the camel was trying to attack again and again and the Pakistani was trying to it and more electric cables were torn, Steve was lying on the floor half dead from laughing and was scalded by some Arab coffee, the camel trampled on all the falafel and the guy cooking it ran, the camel licking him all over, the writers wrote a gag about a licking camel and I panicked, the camel was strong and butting the painting and belching, we were all running, somebody threw water on the bonfire, and the fisherman and hunter lost their costumes because the camel didn’t want them to feel ignored and they were running naked looking for their clothes, Zemira seized the moment to sing another song, her Hebrew sounded like Arabic, and Steve, who’d lost his kaffiyeh, went over to the piano and took out a clarinet and played a little more and the writers were writing words for the song he was improvising, and then he sang a song they’d written on the board for him about a camel and an artist and I don’t remember what else. I ran for it. Happy Independence Day Eve. I ran down Seventh Avenue, people saw me and yelled, it was one in the morning. They shouted, A madman with a fucking horse, because the camel had managed to break free and run after me. The passersby fled. I was trying to get to the subway entrance and the camel knocked down two people who he thought looked like me, and I with the horse and Shabtai Zvi shouted, Watch out! The Pakistani ran after the camel and I managed to get into the subway. I waited for a train. I got in and almost passed out. Next day I got a call from Steve Allen’s office and they begged my pardon, but they couldn’t stop laughing. How the camel fought the horse. What did it have against you, maybe the camel was the brother of the horse’s real father who wasn’t a real camel, and then a guy named Bill Dana came on the line and said he was one of the writers I’d seen on the stage and he invited me for a drink the following evening.
We met. A sad Jew. He could easily have played an Italian gangster. Or maybe it was the other way round. He spoke ten dialects. Hated himself with gusto. A strange guy. I liked him. Later he did a funny bit about a character named José Jiménez and it made him a star. A year or maybe more after the Independence Day with the horse and camel, he suddenly called and asked how I was. I told him. He invited me to his office to see how they got the Tonight with Steve Allen show ready. It was broadcast nightly from eleven-thirty to one and was the mother of all the late shows. I went to the office. A cold winter’s day. The coldest day of the year. The room was overheated. In the middle of the room stood a table holding a bottle of Four Roses bourbon and around it sat the five saddest people I’d ever met, their faces long and longer, looking as though they’d just come out of a pogrom, and one of them was Bill. They whispered among themselves. They drank. And one said sad-faced, What about Jew 4 with Scotsman 7 and a Puerto Rican on a plane? The second said, That’s fine, we just have to add German 6, and a young woman was sitting writing down everything they said, and Bill said, Indian 4 with Jew 25, a Pole not a Russian, plus Scotsman 8, plus a wheeze, and then maybe Brooklyn 6. During a break, during which they finished off the bottle, Bill expl
ained that he’d been writing gags for five years, first for Jack Benny and now with his friends for Steve Allen. Good money. There were thirty or forty basic gags. Or maybe it was a different number. They were so clever that all they needed was the tiniest hint and they could tell you the rest of the joke. I didn’t believe them, I tried them, I told them about how Ben-Gurion asked his old Minister of Religious Affairs, Rabbi Toledano, who had recently gotten married to a young girl, to get to the cabinet meeting early in the morning. Rabbi Toledano said to Ben-Gurion, If I can’t come, I’ll be there—if I can, I won’t. They finished the joke when I was still in the middle. Then they gave me four other possible endings. They didn’t laugh once during the four hours I spent with them, then Bill opened the door to the hall to let in some oxygen, or so he said.