Life on Sandpaper

by Yoram Kaniuk

  Lee and I met in Rome. The ship was due to sail in three days’ time. We walked the streets. Rome is the city of the world. We couldn’t stand one another all that much, but not being able to stand one another only helped our marriage because we expected nothing from each other and dependency seemed better than freedom and love anyway, and so we got closer again in Rome. There was magic in our time there, maybe because we were on foreign soil. The people were poor but friendly, they wanted to steal and screw, but were pretty agreeable about it. Lee and I laughed, even though we hadn’t laughed together for a long time. There was pleasure in our relationship again and so she demanded that she travel with me by train to Naples, accompany me to the ship, and from there go back to Rome and fly to Israel. We made love on the train. Me and my wife—love on a train. We watched the passing scenery through the window. The Italians couldn’t have cared less and they drank wine and laughed. We reached Naples.

  I looked for Angelina, the hooker I’d fed at Santa Lucia. There was the same Vesuvius. We ran into the happy couple who’d met onboard ship. They wanted to get married right away and were looking for a rabbi. I introduced them to Lee and we looked for the hooker and a rabbi. I found the hooker. She’d aged, she saw me, recognized me, got scared, started to run. From a faded hotel nearby came some rabbi who was shocked at hearing Hebrew. Angelina didn’t want me to see her in the doorway of some cheap hotel. I yelled to her to come back but the crowd swallowed her up and we went back to the port. The rabbi ran after us asking if we understood him. I said sure and he asked if I wanted to put on phylacteries. I saw he was terribly excited so I told my wife to kick him where his pants were bulging. For some reason she started thinking about the story about me and her lovely sister-in-law and so she kicked me instead. I was writhing with pain and she told the rabbi, That’s because he messed around with my sister-in-law. He put phylacteries on his head and arm and at the sight of the box on his forehead Lee asked him if he could get the BBC as well. The woman asked the rabbi to marry them. He took us to a small synagogue and didn’t ask about papers. Lee and I were the witnesses and they were married in accordance with the Law of Moses and Israel and went back to America on the first ship. My paintings were already aboard the Negba. Lee stood on the gangway to say good-bye and suddenly fell in love with me after three years of living together. I’m going with you, she said. We arranged it with the company; the Shoham shipping company was associated with El Al and they changed her ticket. She sailed with me.

  On the deck like a shadow walked an elderly and slightly hunch-backed man who nodded his head and seemed to be talking to himself. Lee followed him and studied his steps, as she always measured people’s steps, and said she thought he wanted to die. I didn’t argue with her but the man saw us, came over, and we started talking; he took a shine to us, and he knew about my exhibition, and we went to lunch together and one might say we became friends. His name was Chaim Karniel, big wide light-brown eyes, thick brows above them, two half crowns, and this whole bent man seemed to sit inside those soft, well-proportioned eyes, his whole tiny body seemed a timid extrusion from the concavities of his eye sockets, which were, apparently, or so Lee said, the breadth of his heart. His English was excellent and in the evening we sat on deck, in deck-chairs. It was hot and he said he’d come from France in 1934 and joined Kibbutz Avivim. He was educated and so they made him into a high-school teacher. At night he cleaned the dining room, on Saturdays he worked in the fields. I said to Lee, when he got up for a moment to look at the water, If it wasn’t for his huge clear eyes, you could easily say he was ugly.

  He had married an unhappy woman and had had a son. In 1945 a young Austrian girl who’d been brought to Israel by the Youth Aliya rescue organization met a group of kids from the kibbutz and came with them. She fell, so he said, into my lovable eyes and didn’t see my ugliness. I left my wife and son for her, she told me that she knew I understood her sorrow and we got married. When he wanted to touch her he used to knock on the glass of her body to get in, he said. And then some party leader came to lecture, talked a lot of nonsense, seemed authoritative and impressive and saw the girl, whose name was Lili, and became obsessed with her, begged her to spend a week with him, begged in front of everyone, including her husband, and she went to Beersheba with him and he became less and less interested in politics and they settled there and he opened a big store and prospered. Years later Chaim’s son from his first marriage had fallen in love with and wanted to marry the daughter of Lili and the man from Beersheba. After the wedding, where Chaim had needed to support his son and smile at his ex-wives, he shut himself up in his house. Lili got sick then and her second husband threw her out and she came to Chaim’s home to die. At that time in the kibbutz he began writing poetry and went into the Jerusalem hills to look for a cave to sit in. On the way he stopped at phone booth, he called his son, told him he’d had it with everything, that he was going to go hide in a cave and that no one should come looking for him. The police traced the call. They searched and searched and didn’t find him. In her will Lili had asked to be buried next to Chaim and he told us that night on deck that Lili was waiting for him in the ground and he didn’t even know if he still loved her. Lee sat with him on the last night onboard ship and, after we’d passed Cyprus, she said, his head dropped. His eyes remained filled with wonder, as though the death that had settled on him there was simply a curiosity, and he smiled at it. Lee shouted to one of the sailors to call a doctor, the doctor came, Chaim looked at the doctor and said, Next to Lili, what a beautiful death this is, and Lee saw how he closed his eyes, opened them again, and then his head dropped again and what remained of him, she said, were the eyes.

  When Lee saw Mount Carmel she asked what it was and I said it’s Mount Carmel and she didn’t believe it was a mountain. Then we went to my parents’ home, lots of people came to welcome us. Ze’ev Shiffman took me out to the balcony. We sat down. He wanted to tell me a secret. He said he’d heard himself on a tape recorder his daughter had brought from America and didn’t recognize his own voice. When I realized that this was the secret I consoled him, and afterward there were the exhibitions in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and the guys from the Havurat Ha’esh palmach unit came and invited Lee and I along on their annual trip to Masada. It was July and hot. We went in jeeps. There were a lot of us who gathered at the foot of the mountain and Gandhi, the army officer who organized the whole thing, sat his son on his shoulders and made sure that the kid had a nail in his shoe because it was important for a Jewish soldier to suffer. We went up the Snake Trail to Masada. The view even impressed Lee. I took her to the cliff edge and we looked out; Hebron’s lights were glimmering, the moon was full. Magic, said Lee.

  When you see Paradise, I told her, like this one, with shimmering lights, always make sure that you’re not standing on the edge of an abyss.

  Afterward we went down. It was nighttime. They lit a bonfire and five hundred people sang around it. They fired guns into the air. They yelled. Because that’s the price Jews pay for a state. Being right means shouting with all your might. Back then the Israeli style was ho-ho-ho and ya-ha-ha, and Avshalom the Yemenite dancer came, they said he was the greatest, and he asked Lee to dance and for years people talked about that dance, which was accompanied by nothing more than shouted singing and drumming and which went on for hours, until they both dropped.

  Then we toured around Israel, Lee didn’t believe that the narrow stream flowing through the scorched land, between the granite hills and the heat, was the same Jordan River that the black singers sang about in Harlem’s churches as if it was the Mississippi. We sat in Café Kassit. Everybody looked busy, hunched over their glasses, they were experimenting with Nescafé, which had only reached Israel a few months earlier and was known as Nes, the Hebrew word for “miracle,” because it was a miracle to put a spoonful into a cup and pour hot water onto it and get a cup of coffee. The more meticulous among us conducted a variety of experiments, putting a spoonful of sugar into the
cup, for instance, pouring a little milk onto it, stirring it for a while and then, when they at last poured in the water, they got coffee with foam. You could go into Kassit and see an entire nation sitting with strained faces, focusing with maximal concentration upon their cups, earnestly mixing sugar, coffee, and milk. I met up with childhood friends, comrades in arms, my parents were happy, Lee played the loving wife who would soon provide them with grandchildren, and we flew off on an El Al DC-6. The plane bounced, there were what they called air pockets that made it feel like you were about to drop down onto the mountains below, but no, we ate sausages, reached Rome many hours later where the plane landed and refueled and from there we flew to London. We stopped over there for two days.

  I had a friend in London I hadn’t seen for five years and whose name I’ve forgotten and who was engaged in planning the global Trotskyite revolution. We walked in the city and met an angry and horribly rude policeman. The sun was shining and we went into a restaurant and the food was excellent. Lee said that in twenty minutes flat all the English stereotypes had been refuted: a rude British policeman, a lovely and sunny summer’s day, and good food. We flew back to New York via Scotland, Iceland, Greenland, and northern Canada. Together for about thirty-five hours. When we arrived Marilyn Gennaro came over and asked us to hide her from Wally. He came looking for her right away, he didn’t like people running away from him, even people whose faces were already all black and blue. They’d had a daughter by then. We tried to persuade Marilyn to stay, but she claimed that she couldn’t leave him, she loved him and had to go back to him. Mira appeared from somewhere or other. She didn’t say from where and didn’t talk much. She wanted to go to sleep and so slept for twenty hours and then said that Boris was sick.

  A few days later I went to Boris’s house and Mira said that last night she’d been asleep and when she woke up she’d seen her mother standing over Boris’s bed, watching him dying, weeping her heart out. She wept until she died. We found her mother’s will. She’d written it in Russian. Zhenya asked us to remember that she and Boris had also lived another life, when there were no people around, that they had been in love like the children they once were in Odessa, and she left money so that her body could be kept in cold storage until Boris died and then, only then, she requested, should their funerals be held—together. Mira decided to adhere to the terms of her will and Zhenya was put into the refrigerator of the Chabad burial society, who for a great deal of money had agreed to turn a blind eye to this unusual practice, but two days later, Boris couldn’t wait and died too. Mira got into her dead father’s bed, hugged him and slept with him all night long until they came to take him away. Avi Shoes, who we hadn’t seen for a long time, came with Rita Hauser, the daughter of the man he claimed he’d killed. She looked confused, clung to Avi Shoes, and Mira fixed him with a look that, despite the pain, was basically a look of amusement. He came over to her with Rita on his arm and said, Mira, I’m sorry about Mother and Father. She replied, They’re not your mother and father. He shook her hand and Mira looked at me and tried to laugh, but it seemed that for the first time in her life she was truly sad. She stood there powerless, weak, and didn’t manage to act unruffled and sarcastic, and then she suddenly fell onto Avi Shoes’s neck, hugging Rita as well, and burst into tears, and that was the first time we’d seen her crying. She said that to everybody’s surprise Boris had asked for a proper Jewish funeral in his will, not the modern nonsense. Even so, she said he’d look up from his grave and criticize how they were carrying it all out, and he’d correct the cantor’s singing. I found the old Hebrew bookseller who looked yellow now from some sort of illness, and he gathered a few Orthodox Jews together and we brought a rabbi from the Chabad Hasidim who had kept vigil over Zhenya’s body and we stood by the two graves. Mira was silent. I said Kaddish for Boris, because there was nobody else. After I’d blessed the Almighty for being so good as to take Boris and Zhenya from us, the rabbi prayed some more and then they began filling in the graves. It was hot. New York knows how to be hot. The sky seemed like it had sunk into a viscous grief. The air was still and in it we could see flecks of dampness; like passive-aggressive rain, Gandy said. And then a black automobile drew up and out of it got Professor Oppenheimer from the Manhattan Project accompanied by some people who looked like scientists, one of whom said his name was Teller and he was an admirer of Boris’s, and they asked to stand by his grave. Oppenheimer asked to say a few words. Mira thanked him. He smiled at her with a good and heartwarming smile and said, You’ve grown up since we last met, and Mira said, Yes, but I’m no wiser. He spoke of Boris’s work and of what a great contribution he had made, but didn’t go into detail. To Boris he said, About that matter, you know which one, you were right, but we can’t go public about it yet.

  Boris and Sonia were put into their graves, in their coffins, she first and he after. Mira said that they were lying side by side for the first time in years, and when we got back from the funeral we found his laboratory burned down. Somebody had torched the laboratory and his files, all the protocols and the scientific notes. At the funeral I’d recognized Yuri, Mira’s ex-husband. He was still wearing the garb of celibacy and was staring at Mira. She looked at him but didn’t see him. He prayed. I went over to him to offer a word of consolation. He sounded confused and contradicted himself and said that one day he’d remarry Mira, even in heaven, when his holy vows and hers were no longer binding. I told him that she’d left holy orders a long time ago and he said that you can’t leave holy orders.

  Afterward Lee began rehearsing in the studio we had on Fifty-second Street and I painted in the next room and in the evenings I walked around with Gandy. I was still trying every possible way of finding Pat; there were rumors, but they all proved unfounded. Adele Schwartz disappeared and Mira left her parents’ home a few days later and did not return.

  I went out with Tony Scott the clarinetist and at night we met Bird on Delancey Street. It was the last year of Bird’s life. He would die at thirty-four; like Jesus, Gandy would say. Something inside Bird had broken. He had stopped using heroin because he could no longer afford the expense, his daughter, Pree, had died, and Bird knew he was going to die because of his kicking the habit so late, because his body could no longer function without heroin. The man had invented a musical language. He never used curse words; you’d never hear a “fuck” from Bird, and he had an old-fashioned gentlemanly respect for women. He chewed aspirin and drank sweet and disgusting Manischewitz wine, which calmed him. Chan, his wife, was the daughter of a Runyonesque character in the sense that Damon Runyon had actually written about him in his stories. Her mother had been a Ziegfeld girl. Chan had a lovely smile that seemed to challenge the world.

  I was in the lives of all these people by mistake. A time of anarchy in America. I was passing through, younger than all of them. Once I was walking down Bleecker Street and saw Bird. He was stamping his feet hard on the sidewalk. I went over. He said I shouldn’t be his shadow and I should get going. I said that I wasn’t a shadow but if he wanted me to go, I’d go. Don’t be stupid, he said, and we walked together. He spoke about Chan, Pree’s funeral, how they’d played jazz, and he talked about his music, about the young Chet Baker. That wild young guy’s got the music, he said. We passed Louis’ Bar, the San Remo, the Calypso, we walked farther, far into America, and stopped. He said he wanted a cup of coffee and I saw we were outside a Chock Full o’Nuts. When we went in he said that the place with the small shining white squares probably looked like the men’s room in a millionaires’ railroad station that you’d go into and because it’s so squeaky clean you never want to leave. That happened to me once in Paris. What really made him mad was the sign at the entrance—same it was in each of the chain’s hundreds of stores—“No Tipping.” He said it was crime not to leave a tip. He was dumb-struck. You could tell Bird was angry by his clenched fists and his head tipped to the right, like Gary Cooper when he had no place to run in High Noon, which Bird said was the best Western e
ver made. And he knew all about Westerns. Bird looked around and said, Man, this is the whitest institution in town. The waitresses were all free when we got there. There were sitting in a row on a long bench and smiling into the restaurant. They were hired because of the whiteness of their teeth and lovely legs and were ordered to smile even if there were no customers. They were sitting cross-legged with the gleaming whiteness of their teeth shown in smiles of polite malice that Bird envied; they were like porcelain statues, their hair identical, dirty blonde, with gray or blue eyes and that simultaneous smile plastered over their faces. The fact that the place looked like a synthetic temple also captivated Bird, who’d found himself raised to this moment from one of his lowest—when his body was crying out for what he couldn’t give it.

  A waitress got up smiling and asked Bird how he was today. Good, he replied. She asked me and I said a little less good today than yesterday. She seemed taken aback and stopped, she wanted to say something but whatever it was didn’t reach her lips, and Bird asked for a cup of coffee and the waitress, still baffled by my reply, served Bird his coffee with chilly ceremony and I ordered pea soup and a roll. She said, The roll comes with a hot dog, soup comes with a cracker. I asked, Can I have the soup with the roll from a hot dog? She looked confused, her jaw dropped, the smile vanished for a moment and she said she was sorry but she’d already told me, the roll comes with the hot dog. Bird looked like a pensive old man and he smiled at me as if to say, They’re your people, not mine, and I said, So what about soup and crackers and a hot dog without a hot dog, I’ll pay for the hot dog I don’t eat? Now there was murmuring all around. The waitresses’ smiles turned mean. She brought me what I’d asked for and looked frightened. I put the hot dog to one side and ate my soup with a roll. I asked for coffee and she asked, With cream? No, I said, with milk, and a glass of milk! What milk? she said. Coffee with milk and a glass of milk, I said. She served me contemptuously and Bird told her that he thought not leaving a tip sounded anti-American. She smiled and said, Thank you, but we’re not allowed to give an opinion.