Life on Sandpaper

by Yoram Kaniuk

  She looked at it and wept and I knew that after my painting of Bird it was the best painting I’d ever done, and she hugged me. More people came, dancers kissed me, stage hands and actors asked for my telephone number, we drank champagne and some people got angry that I’d made a spectacle of her and in the end she also paid me a lot of money and we parted ways. I don’t remember the painting apart from its discrete moments, not its entirety, not the finished product. She sent me a bunch of flowers, and that was that.

  Oved called to tell me that he and Hanoch were coming from Los Angeles and asked where they could stay. I went up to see my sweet landlord who said he was angry at America for buying another country in South America just for its bananas and I asked whether there were any apartments for rent. He said that just this week two apartments had become available, one with one-and-a-half rooms and the other with two, and he asked who the tenants were, because he didn’t want any reactionaries and on the other hand he didn’t want any rich people even if they were left-wingers, but was looking for people he called “decent.” If they had been beaten down by society, all the better. I didn’t tell him about Hanoch’s right-wing views but exaggerated his and Oved’s poverty. They came and I told them there were apartments available and they asked how much and I said that the landlord was ideal and Millard Thomas lived upstairs and this was Carole, and Oved said that he had spent two and a half years in Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala and soon he’d tell me things that would absolutely floor me but first he wanted to rest. There had been problems with the authorities. The FBI had intervened. He needed American papers. He had plans. He’d been in prison. He was interrogated. He’d discovered an unknown Mayan city. Hanoch had separated from his wife and wanted a bit of New York. We’ll manage. And they moved into my building. We threw a party at my place and sang Israeli songs and Ilka and Aviva came too and Ilka sang the plaintive strains of Bialik’s “Shelter Me Under Your Wing” in his amazing bass voice and we drove to Harlem. Ilka took us to meet Paul Robeson. They both filled the basement of Robeson’s house with their basses, and he even sang “Ol’ Man River” for us.

  Meanwhile, Carole’s presence had become awkward. She barely walked around, occasionally jumped for no reason, bought candy, and didn’t think about anything. A wild girl, said Hanoch who wanted to make a play for the plain one on the second floor who lived with the girl with the breasts who tap-danced and whom I had a thing for. Hanoch always maintained that no woman would love him for his looks because he was ugly, but he was smart and knew how to talk, and he always looked for girls who would be grateful for his company. The girl was indeed taken by him and started talking like him but there was nowhere to do stuff because Hanoch’s apartment was unfurnished and too small and the plain one’s apartment was shared and Carole lived in my place, so I brought Carole over to Oved, who was shy, quiet, and looked absolutely dreamy. I told him that she was a gift from me. He took her into his apartment and they stayed together for ten years. The next year, they got married—he got a green card and then citizenship. Now I could go up and occupy the one with the breasts—Carole still visited my place once in a while—but eventually I went back to being alone. Oved lived with Carole, Hanoch with the woman who became his wife for thirty years. They were both fatalists. Relationships didn’t matter. They were simply inevitable.

  In Guatemala, he said, Oved had discovered the world’s biggest trove of Mayan art and soon, he promised, it would be the news of the century. At an altitude of two thousand feet above sea level, in vast caves leading into a subterranean labyrinth whose area was two square miles, he had found, he claimed, huge caves that had remained from some geological upheaval from thousands of years ago. In the caves were ancient urns painted in a huge variety of colors and also wood and clay statues and idols: There are, he told me, thousands of amazing sculptures in glass and greenish jade and there are big bas-reliefs on the limestone walls. And manuscripts too. That’s where the Mayans—who were well-known as a people who had foretold their own extinction—had hidden their treasures, close to the God of their Hell, and it was Oved who had discovered this treasure trove and he explained that in the famous pyramid at Tikal only three painted urns had been found and to this day no original Mayan manuscripts had been found anywhere. In Dresden, Germany there was a traditional Mayan document describing the destruction of humankind by flood, but this was apparently a later copy of an unpreserved manuscript. Now Oved had discovered manuscripts inside his caves. He claimed he’d found scores of pages on Mayan culture written in hieroglyphs that foretold that life on our planet was nothing but a series of recurring destructions that were always followed by new rebirths. A perpetual and cyclic apocalypse in which human beings disappear in a catastrophe and later return in another form. In the Sun God’s pyramid the number of stairs is the number of days of the year less one. How this all started was that Oved had acquired a number of limestone blocks carved with figures and gods that the local archeologists had insisted that they were fakes. Oved knew that they weren’t, however. Guatemala had suffered an earthquake and following the disaster the U.S. Air Force had undertaken to map the earthquake area geologically and their work had shown that there were vast hall-like caverns deep in the earth. It came to Oved that somewhere there in these underground caves might be where his “fake” relics have come from.

  Some guy named Jackie Vasquez kept coming up in conversation as an expert on all things Mayan. Oved went back to the Guatemalan government, whose experts had made fun of him and his theory earlier, but when he got back to the city there was a new regime in place and it was chaos everywhere. Marxist terrorists had risen up from nowhere and toppled the government in Nicaragua and then, said Oved, according to reliable witnesses, had attacked both Guatemala and San Salvador. Now, however, the people in power listened. They realized there was something in what Oved was saying. As a token of their thanks they granted him permission to look for the legendary Jackie Vasquez and make contact with him to find the entrance to the caves. Vasquez, who had fathered a hundred children over his lifetime, had never left the region. He knew the jungle like the back of his hand. When somebody needed a hundred parrots or two hundred monkeys or jaguars they’d send a messenger to him and he’d supply the goods. When Oved got permission he established an initial contact that became a friendship that lasted until the day Jackie died. Oved wanted knowledge, though Jackie was afraid to give it. But Oved’s stubbornness paid off. Oved sold arms to both sides in the civil war, sold Israeli weapons to both the rebels and the government; he hired a helicopter and went into the jungle and found an Indian family and confirmed that they weren’t fabricating the relics that had made their way back to civilization but simply digging valuable statues out of the ground. Jackie Vasquez was the first foreigner to obtain the secret of the Mayan manuscripts. He found twenty square miles of interconnected subterranean caves. The government gave him a license to purchase three of the rare manuscripts, the deciphering of which might perhaps provide an answer to various questions about the Mayans that had been awaiting a rational solution for hundreds of years. Still missing, however, was governmental consent to bring American scientists into the caves. Without their seal of approval there would still be accusations of counterfeiting. All the things Oved had and Jackie found were located in a place that nobody, including the governments of the region, knew about. The Mayan Indians, he said, had had slanted eyes and their babies had the gray-blue Mongolian mark above the cleft of their buttocks that disappeared between the third and sixth year of their life, and go figure how they came by their mathematical knowledge and how they built their amazing pyramids and how they dragged those huge stones and how they lifted them. It’s also interesting that they date the creation of the world 645 years after when the Bible dates it. And Oved slept with women there who thought it was against God’s law for a man to live alone. He met ministers and generals. He met presidents. He mediated. Some of his friends are in jail or dead now. Oved had a basic innocence about him. H
is life was strange, cursed. The Mayans were a surrogate family for him; the jungle was a sort of homeland to him, though now he couldn’t go back because he’d mistakenly sold a few phony urns to some Israelis. And he sold Israeli Arava airplanes to Honduras but to this day nobody knows what Oved really did in the jungles for forty years. In the 1977 earthquake in Guatemala the Dutchman’s hotel was destroyed but Oved got out alive. He was to live there with Carole for five years and she’d convert and they’d live in the jungle and then they separated. Carole would live in the jungle for years afterward. She’d write. Even years later Oved was sure that the manuscripts he’d found or been given or bought or forged or were forged for him were the discovery of the century. In 1976, a year before the hotel was destroyed, a tall soft-spoken American guy was waiting for him there. He asked Oved if by any chance he knew what the week’s Torah portion was. He said he’d converted to Judaism and married Carole who told him that Oved was her first husband and now he’d forgotten he was ever a goy. He said that he and Carole had built a synagogue in the jungle. Oved went with him and saw a building made of dried goat dung. He found Jewish scriptures. The husband who’d converted studied the Talmud. They had two children. The rabbi of Guatemala City taught the husband his Kabbala. He opened a school in the jungle and Oved went out into the jungle with him and they reached some godforsaken hole in the wilderness. Just tracks and dirt roads. From a distance in the middle of the jungle he saw a woman riding a bicycle and recognized Carole. Kisses, and they went inside. A tin roof. No running water. A big bottle of mineral water and a broken gas cooker. Not clean. They put him in a dilapidated room on the second floor, the toilet was in the yard. On the first floor was the master bedroom where there were religious books and a menorah and Carole would touch it wearing a yarmulke on her head. She had the Tablets of the Covenant carved by Indians and the Ten Commandments burned into them by Indians with the sun through a magnifying glass. Her husband wrote and taught English in a galvanized iron schoolhouse. Oved sold arms to Biafra, made friends with some African rebels, and reached Cameroon, and there were jungles there too.

  My brief affair with the sweetie with the huge breasts was over. Hanoch was living with his angel. Oved and Carole had shut themselves away. We were all waiting for something to happen. Avi Shoes came along and we sat in the Blue Angel. Irwin Corey was funny and my sweet Anita Ellis sang. And her brother Larry Kert came. He said that Lee had changed and of course she hadn’t married Robbins; she had become tough, irascible, ambitious; she wasn’t nice like she once was. We were joined at our table by a girl with a nice face, not particularly beautiful with its sharp angles, and her eyes were green and she was in a Broadway show, A small role, she said, and that’s not really right because there aren’t any small roles but only small actors, I’m a good actress and it’s a small role and nobody recognizes me. She said her boyfriend had left her. She’d come to have a laugh with Irwin Corey who could make a bronze sculpture laugh, and we drank, Larry went off with a guy older than him and I saw them kissing by the restroom door and Sharon, that was the girl’s name, took me to an apartment on the top floor of an old building at One University Place. She shouted that she loved me and I thought God knows what. I called Carole to ask how the brothers Oved and Hanoch were getting on and to tell her I’d be along later and Sharon and I were together all night and for a whole day we only got out of bed to bring in food and take a shower. She talked about mysticism and I suddenly thought I loved her too and went home and worked on two paintings Carole had discovered behind the closet and which had been slightly damaged because I’d wanted to sell them and I called Sharon to ask when I should come back and her voice was icy and she said, Don’t come back. What happened? I asked. Nothing, she said. I’m busy. I tried to talk sense into her. She said her boyfriend had come home and they’d made up, and like an idiot I said, But last night you said you loved me and she said that things said at night aren’t always valid in daytime. I begged her again and she said, All men are children who don’t like being left. Thank you, Frau Freud, I replied. She said, You’ve got a lot to learn. What happened yesterday is yesterday. Today is today. I said I was coming over to get my watch, I’d left it there by mistake. She let me in and was cold to me. Her father came with two glass tubes filled with quarters and kissed her and left and didn’t even look at me and she explained that it was her daily allowance. The two tubes were glass containers from the Churchill cigars he smoked. She said, Look, my father comes from Jews. My mother was a beautiful Irishwoman. Not a nobody like him. I told him that the Jews of Palestine should be thrown into the sea and he told me that the Jews had learned to swim in Auschwitz. My awful father worked as a foreman in an oil company in New Mexico and one day even though he’d never even finished third grade he invented a special cap for oil barrels, registered a patent, and every oil barrel in the world is closed and opened with my father’s cap and ever since he sits smoking Churchills and counting his dough. He doesn’t want to give me any real money. Just quarters in the tubes. And then she looked at me with a kind of contemptuous compassion and said she had no feelings for me. She said that when her father was young he’d wandered all over America and worked. So what if I said I loved you, does that bind me to you now? We had a good night and day and that’s it. What do you know about women at all? I said, but your body danced for me, and she said it danced for everybody. What didn’t I say, what didn’t I try, I actually had tears in my eyes. She enjoyed seeing me humiliated and said, You’re leaving now. My boyfriend will be back any minute. I went downstairs and stood for a whole hour outside the building and saw people going inside, I went to the public phone outside the Arts Club on University Place and called her and she cursed at me and slammed the phone down.