by Yoram Kaniuk
After she’d finished reading the woman put the book down in a corner of the stage and music came on and she began stripping and the audience roared, and she smiled a sweet smile and she had a terrific body and Lee said, Look at her movements, she’s a black-magic ballerina, look at that showmanship. She’s in control of her body, the audience, she’s precise down to the last detail, she does nothing that’s not planned but still leaves room for improvisation, half the dancers in the world would love to know how to work with their bodies the way she does. She knows exactly when ninety percent of the men are going to start with the heavy breathing and she doesn’t rush things, she wants to draw it all out and for it to be an experience, not just voyeurism, she’s really great. Watching her is how America’s greatest comedians learned how to make people laugh, and Lee clapped and I almost loved her. And then the woman stopped for a moment and called out, Chan? God! Where did you spring from? Come here, give me a kiss. Amazed, they all looked at Canasta who sat there pale and still. And the woman went on stripping and staring right at him all the time. When she’d finished and was standing there almost nude except for a small triangle between her legs, she stopped all her stage business and said, Sitting here is one of the greatest artists in the world. He can tell the future. A man from another planet. Come up here, Chan, for me, I’m begging you. The audience sat in quiet shock. Lee was excited. Chan came to his senses and went up onstage. The woman kissed him and he kissed her and she asked him to do something with the whole audience. He looked embarrassed, I’d never seen him embarrassed, he asked everybody to think of a word and jot it down on a cigarette pack or a bit of paper, and when they’d done it he said to them, You over there, you wrote “Bastard,” and you wrote “Dream,” and you in the gray hat, you wrote, “Fraud,” and that’s very nice of you, you in the brown derby, you wrote “Looker.” There was commotion in the audience and the woman hugged Chan and he got down off the stage and we left and he said, You see? If I was a mathematician and knew complex equations by heart and invented a new way of solving a three-hundred-year-old problem I’d be lauded and be made a professor at Columbia, but who am I? A freak who excites fools, like someone with six fingers, or a midget or a fat gaudy stripper. Lee was more excited than I’d seen her for years and that night she danced in our apartment. Chan stayed a while, applauded her, said, When you dance nobody thinks it’s a miracle and your dancing is much more of a miracle than what I do. He went on a tour of nine cities and came back and claimed there was still no explanation for the positive defect in his brain. His paintings weren’t any good yet, but he persevered for years, always alone and always feeling rejected, contemptuous of his own great talents, making money and hating himself. He had a boyhood friend, an Israeli writer who came to New York and lived for a while with a bellicose woman photographer he had a thing for. He was a good-looking man and he moved in with the woman before they’d even managed to talk to each other. She didn’t know Hebrew and he only spoke beginner’s English. They’d have fights in languages they didn’t know. One day Chan told me I should help them because people said I’d saved Frank Sinatra from hitting rock bottom with my applause and so maybe I could help this nice couple. I knew the guy. He had a good imagination and was boundlessly optimistic. Before he even wrote one page of a new book he’d already sold it like it was a bestseller and had won the Nobel Prize and been translated into twenty-eight languages.
I went to the photographer’s apartment on Fifty-sixth Street a few times, not far from the Plaza. She worked for Look and was nice to look at and pretty wild. And so it happened that, on a few occasions, when they got mad at each other, they’d call me, and I’d go, they’d hold back until I sat down and once I was down they’d start. They were livid. Clenched fists. She was on one side of the room and he on the other. And she said, Tell him he’s a bastard and a motherfucker and a fatherfucker too and he doesn’t know how to write. So I translated. He said, Tell her she’s a cow and ugly when she’s naked and that she sucks cucumbers. I translated. Now and again I got stuck, motherfucker and fatherfucker sound natural in English, but not in Hebrew. And kus emek doesn’t sound right in English. They waited patiently while I translated and when he said “daughter of a whore” in Hebrew it was hard for me to find a good substitute so I said “sonofabitch” but they were patient and always waited for me to come with a solution and then they continued. When I was a kid the subtitles always used to run at the side of the screen on a separate strip. The projectionist would get tired and fall asleep every so often, so the translation was never in the right place. Then projectionist would wake up and roll the translation fast. During particularly sad scenes the parts of the audience that didn’t know English or French or Russian would burst out laughing because a joke had arrived late. After about an hour of sweating like a horse with the writer and photographer they’d make up and slip into an animal-like trance and growl at each other and wait for me to leave and I’d run for it. I told Lee about it and she said, That’s how it is with us too, only we both understand English.
Back then, and even beforehand, and actually years later too, there was a woman who had grown old and lost everything and was always smiling, a wonderful woman and not beautiful at all, yet despite that she was lovely and somehow got power from her ugliness. When she told me that ugliness is a disease, I told her that she was creating a new beauty with what she called ugliness, feeding on itself. Power is weakness you know how to use. The intelligence of this woman, Sherry Abel, oozed from every hair of her head. Her husband Lionel was a professor at Columbia who wrote metaphysical plays that nobody would stage and he even wrote books on what he called “metatheater,” as in “metaphysical,” and his friend e. e. cummings liked to go to Sherry’s place on Saturday evenings and read his poetry and they let me come along. Sherry introduced me to her daughter Mary who was fourteen. Black eyes, slim figure, she seemed frightened of life, there was an innocence in her, but she was cynical beyond her years when it came to marriage. Her father and mother were among the Village’s first bohemians and separated when Mary was a little girl. Lionel had a “life partner” and Sherry had a boyfriend. She lived with the boyfriend who was always lying in bed in the next room and thinking secret thoughts, while Lionel lived with a woman nobody had ever seen. But Lionel and Sherry were still very close. He would come to her apartment every day and they’d argue for hours, and Mary was spellbound taking in all the witticisms and verbal projectiles and she knew what coitus interruptus was when she was six. She also knew that Spinoza had been ostracized out of vindictiveness but she didn’t understand her parents’ love because they didn’t know how to put it into simple language and used metaphors and Virgilian and Dantean aphorisms and they absolutely forbade her to have any ideas about love in language they called billingsgate. Mary was their guinea pig, and out of their metaphysical hostility and love for one other, they’d managed to turn her into a terribly frightened little girl. Each of them wanted her to be his or her special something in the world. Sherry was a warm woman, though sharp-tongued, quick to laugh, she’d worked as a deputy editor on Commentary from the day it was founded; but Mary wanted her father, who was busy solving metaphysical problems and writing literary reviews for the New York Times.
Sherry told me that she wanted Mary to study painting with me because she’d liked a painting I’d given to her. Later, years later, whenever I visited Sherry and we talked about Mary, she’d bring a sealed green bottle out in which she kept Mary’s ashes. She’d put it down between us and we’d talk about Mary. But when we met, Mary was alive. I was twenty-four and she was fourteen. She would come into the apartment as though hovering; she had no scent. How profound and serene was her sadness.
One day Freddie came to our ground-floor apartment and asked me to lock him in the bedroom for a few days so he could kick his habit and demanded that no matter how he might yell I shouldn’t answer and he even told me to throw away the key. The room had a small window that overlooked a neglected garden. He
really did yell; for three days and nights he screamed and banged his head against the door. I didn’t want to throw away the key but then his hooker girlfriend came along, weeping, and took the key from me by force and threw it down the drain. Freddie beat his head against the wall and begged and yelled and his woman said, Don’t pay any attention, he’s got to get clean, otherwise he’ll die, I got clean too, I don’t have the strength to go on turning tricks for him. Mary came on Tuesday as usual for her lesson and heard the yelling. She went into the garden, stood like a scarecrow, and recited a poem. Birds perched on her. Freddie went silent. Mary came back and sat down and painted while I supervised and made comments, and then she flew away. A day went by with no shouts. I started worrying and called a locksmith who smashed open the lock. Freddy wasn’t there. In the yard I found the jacket Mary had been wearing when she stood outside. Freddie had gone back home. I don’t know how she made an opening for him to crawl out. He said he didn’t know who Mary was. But when we painted in the small cemetery in the neighborhood and Mary saw the stone angels on the headstones she said she wanted to fly like them or anyway be a stone angel with wings who can’t take off. She painted angels. She loved me and used to hug me and cry.
I got Chan Canasta to entertain her. She sat unmoving and used to repeat every word he said. Chan told me later that he was concerned about her. He said she was alive but didn’t understand where or why she was living and that scared him. I talked to Mary and she tried to explain to me how she saw life through what she called cobwebs. She said, I understand characters in books, I understand characters in plays, I understand them because they’re not real, but people, who are even less substantial than fictional characters, I can’t manage to understand them or touch them. I only know how to touch you. Two days later Sherry called to tell me that I had to sleep with Mary because she needed to know real physical love before some bastard took advantage of her. I refused. Her father came over and brought me several learned treatises on adults who had made love to young girls and how it had helped both the girls and the adults. I told him that he could go to bed with her himself because maybe that’s what she really wanted. I went on teaching her. She was a rara avis in my life and she knew it. Once I had a dream. There was an angel in it. It was nice. Lee wasn’t home. I woke up and saw Mary standing over me, watching. I asked her, How long have you been there, and she said, An hour. You were sleeping and you looked so tranquil and sweet. Freddie came over to drum for Mary and she danced with me, trembling and frightened. Some time passed and she went to Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. I visited her because she wrote me that she was sad and that Lionel was writing to her about Proust and her mother was busy with a book on Franz Rosenzweig. It was a small sweet town with sweet scenery with sweet houses and lots of sweet young girls. In the evening they rang sweet bells, lots of little bells, and the melody sounded like the voices of angels. Mary said I was her older brother and that I’d come from Paris. There was something nice and sterile about the town. All the girls there looked alike. It was depressing there but revelatory. Thirty young girls would come down to breakfast in identical pink or blue bathrobes and Mary said she was only here so as not to be there and all her life she was where she was not.
Then I didn’t see her for a few years. Sherry used to report back to me, and Mary wrote me lovely letters. Lee was jealous of her but there was really nothing to be jealous about. Later Lionel would come over and say awful things about Mary’s lovers, whose numbers were growing, and then Sherry told me that Mary had met a young doctor, married him, and moved to Chicago. One day Sherry and Lionel were called to Chicago urgently. According to the report they’d been given, Mary had fallen from the roof of her building and been killed. The police and Sherry and Lionel suspected that her husband had killed her, but despite numerous inquiries there was insufficient evidence. The husband denied it. He hinted that she had been suicidal. There was no great love between them, said Sherry; he had killed her because she wanted to fly and he wanted her in a cage; Mary’s monument was a graveyard angel. In the bottle that stood between Sherry and me were her ashes. A Jewish princess in a bottle. I said to Sherry, Mary could only have cheated on her husband with God, that’s what that bastard was afraid of.
I’d look at Mary’s paintings and try to understand who she really was, and then, I remember it was a rainy day and the room was hot and I was doing a drawing based on an Etruscan burial site I was interested in at the time, thinking that the Etruscans must have been even greater than the Greeks or Romans. Mary looked at the painting and did something in watercolors that looked like a huge wadi and she wrote next to the wadi: Betrayal! I tried to understand. I thought and thought. I suddenly missed home. I recalled a line from the Book of Job: My brethren have dealt deceitfully as a brook.
Then I got a call telling me that I had been invited to come and exhibit my works at the Bezalel Museum in Jerusalem and the Tel Aviv Museum too. I collected paintings from various people who’d bought them from me and added in a few new ones. My parents were excited about my coming home. I was surprised when Lee asked to join me. She was acting and dancing in some show and could only take three weeks off though I had to travel by sea along with the paintings. We arranged to meet in Rome and she said she’d fly there. The paintings were loaded together with me aboard the SS Saturnia, an aging luxury liner. My cabin was comfortable. As happens on sea voyages, I got pretty friendly with some of the passengers, as friendly as you can imagine, friends for life with people who swear that they’ll see each other again and of course never do. Lots of affairs started up. We’d all dress up in each other’s honor. There was an Israeli woman on her way home from New York where she’d been looking for her son who’d disappeared after her husband had died. On board she discovered a man who’d courted her late mother when the Israeli woman was young. In her youth she’d liked him, unlike her mother who’d gotten rid of him quick, and she’d been jealous then of her mother because this man had been in love with her, but now, after so many years, on deck, in the torrential rain, she met him again, and a new love story was born, and they were even talking about marriage. And during a storm a woman whose name I’ve forgotten was standing on the bow, standing and shouting that the captain didn’t know the way. She’d already sailed this route a few times. She was the one who said, with the utmost seriousness, that there is no nothing, because there is something.
A week later we reached Barcelona. It was 1955. Spain was all policemen and fear. The passengers disembarked to see Columbus’s ship, the Santa Maria, here where he was called Colón. It was a Sunday and quiet, the church bells were ringing and the entire city went to the corrida. We sat in the huge arena, there were matadors or toreadors, the shouts of the spectators and the handkerchiefs thrown by women. After the first matador had slaughtered his bull, and after all the other noble participants, in contrast with the corrida in Mexico, had stuck the poor bull with their lances and tormented it to the roar of the spectators, I fled and walked down the broad La Rambla. The street was almost empty except for the policemen in their peacock-like hats. I was walking in the direction of the ship, looked down a side street, saw a fountain, walked toward it, saw that it was beautiful. Then, from an upstairs floor I heard the strains of Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia,” and I stopped to listen. It was nice and it was strange in the middle of a city of toreadors, Franco, dueling, swords in the cellars, castanets, so many citizens screaming to see bulls slaughtered, to suddenly hear the rhythm of jazz. To hear the right intervals. The right rhythm. Professional. A young man peered down from a balcony and was joined by another, and they stared at me. One of them called out in Spanish and I gestured that I didn’t speak Spanish. He called to me in English and asked if I understood English and jazz and I shouted yes and yes and they came down, dressed in black, and took me upstairs. A big apartment. Photographs of New York on every possible surface, and photographs of Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Bird, Louis Armstrong, Hawkins, and musical instrum
ents everywhere, then they gave me coffee and beer and went on playing and I listened. I don’t know if it was jazz, because there was something missing, something you only get in America, the echo of whips lashing slaves, of joyous southern funerals, of brothels, which were the only places where blacks and whites came together—but the desire and the passion and the etiquette were there. They spoke New York-accented English between themselves and used jazz lingo: Groove. Pad. Hey man. They called Lester Young “Prez.” They asked who I was and I told them. They asked what I knew about jazz and I told them. They began touching me. They wanted to know which hand had shaken Bird’s hand and they kissed it. They danced around me. They knew the names of New York streets. They knew what the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel looked like and where to get a shoeshine on Lennox Avenue and Eighth Street outside the second building from the corner by the empty church, in Harlem, and the tobacco store on Madison between Fifty-fifth and Fifty-sixth Streets, and they knew what the buildings looked like, where and what Saks Fifth Avenue was, what the Apollo Theater looked like, what was happening at the Fremont, what Katherine Dunham and her parties were like and her dance company on the roof by Shubert Alley. They knew how long it takes to walk from Charles Street to the Cedar Bar. Where Circle in the Square was. But they were naïve. They had all submitted visa applications for the United States. They had to wait. How long? One would wait fourteen years. The other only ten. There were some who would have to wait twenty years. No problem. The main thing was to get there. We’ve got patience, they said. They’d wait. Maybe something would happen to Franco. There’s a future. Then they got a little timid because they weren’t sure if I would inform on them. They said, frightened, There’s nobody like Franco, and I said, It’s okay, guys, and left for the ship. I met my friends from the ship still all excited by the slaughter of the bulls and the ship got underway for Naples; a sea of silk; from Naples I was supposed to board the Negba for Haifa, after a quick side-trip to Rome.