by Yoram Kaniuk
I’d hear later that Charles had married a Danish girl and opened a bar in Copenhagen called Thirteen Boilermakers. I met him by chance in the Queen’s Bar in the King Frederik Hotel in Copenhagen and he was glad to see me, and the first thing he asked was, Do you remember that sonofabitch?
We sat down, the waitress brought a Polish vodka for me and bourbon for him, and Tuborg beers—we were in their motherland—and draft too, and Charles downed the draft beer, talking about the great hero of our time, the hero of his life with his thirteen boilermakers and he drank another and I sat there silently, enthralled, and Charles lauded that black king and went on drinking and talking about his wife, a beautiful Dane, he said his children were like half-and-half cream. Big Charles had become an important man in Copenhagen. But he hadn’t forgotten that guy. All around there were blonde Danish girls, it was snowing outside and dark in the middle of the day. We were both in a strange city. People were licking the sidewalk to clean their tongues. Everything was aesthetic and sad. A country that was a kiss without lips, and when he talked about his hero his eyes lit up. I suddenly noticed something and then I said to him—though in mid-sentence knew I shouldn’t have said it, but I’d already started—You’ve just drunk thirteen boilermakers, Charles. He looked at me maliciously for a long moment. He got up. He called the waitress over and asked how much he’d drunk. Tell him. His face was burning with rage. The waitress wasn’t surprised at any of this, because the last time anybody was surprised in Denmark was in the sixteenth century when the Swedes had staged a sneak attack from the sea. Big Charles looked miserable. Defeated. He had lost the hero of his life. He ordered another, drank it, got up, gave me an angry, pained look and said, You people like to kill heroes, Jesus, the Son of God, you didn’t want Him so you killed Him. What exactly did you want? He waved and left. I could see tears in his eyes. From the doorway he said, Don’t try coming to see me again, don’t even run into me by accident. After that I never saw Big Charles again.
But in the meantime I was still working the bar and Charles was with me, and I was writing my book and found Ziva Shapiro and gave it to her for translation and with Miranda we met Norman Mailer who I’d once known, an angry and funny man, who when he’d asked me to read him a chapter of The Naked and the Dead in Hebrew—I’d asked for it to be sent from Israel, and the book arrived, and I read for him—he wept and said, A book about those things you read in the language of prayers? At the time he had a tall black poodle bitch that had had two black pups whose tails he refused to dock on principle. The bitch pup was big. He asked if we wanted it but only on condition that we wouldn’t dock its tail. I think it was then that his wars with the world and his wife Adele began, his wife who he stabbed but she hadn’t died, and I loved the dog at first sight. She didn’t behave like a poodle, she didn’t know she was a poodle. She was independent, determined, stubborn but soft as butter when she was treated with love. And she was loved and she loved back. I walked her in the park at the end of Eighty-seventh Street by the river and let her run free. She took her place in our life. She sometimes slept with us. She’d express herself forcefully and gently and was a member of the family. One night heavy snow began to fall. It fell quickly and in thirty minutes the streets were covered. The restaurant was full. People were afraid to go out into the freezing cold. We all had a drink together, the beautiful waitresses and Big Charles and me and one of the owners, the wannabe author. Snowdrifts began forming. All the regulars lived in the neighborhood. There was a moment when driving was still possible and they ran to catch buses and jump into their cars and left. The wannabe author lived opposite and asked us to close up and make sure everything was locked. Suddenly there were only six of us left, three waitresses and three drinkers. Big Charles managed to catch the last subway. To get home I had to cross to the West Side through the Park. Forget it. No vehicles could get through. Madison Avenue looked like a vast cemetery of snowed-in cars and buses. A horse-drawn carriage appeared from the Plaza Hotel. Kitschy. The horse walked slowly and a cloud of heat emanated from it and the driver offered to take us home for a decent price. It was a big day for carriages; they covered the entire city to remind its denizens of the difference between a horse and a car. We got in and drove off. The snow was so deep that the horses struggled, but they managed to get through. It was cold but it was nice to drive through a city whose modes of transportation had all died and in a horse-drawn carriage with its tinkling bells. Cars were stuck and locked. Here and there we saw someone trying to drive and getting stuck deeper in the incessant snow. Buses stood silent and the driver brought me home and Delilah the dog who’d been named by Norman Mailer—he asked us to keep the name, not just the tail—barked joyfully when she smelled me from the street. She had become part of our life. In a dream she’d lie at my side and I’d kiss her eyes, which studied me intently. I talked to her. She loved us and would smile showing her back gums. She was absolutely loyal and on numerous occasions she slept between Miranda and me and I remembered how Oved used to kiss cows, there was warmth and sweetness in her but also a capricious stubbornness and she loved a challenge.
The winter passed and I went over the translation I’d paid for and today I haven’t the faintest idea where I got the money from. Sam P. Shaw, a friend of Miranda’s parents, gave us his summer home in Fairfield, Connecticut for a month. He lent us a car. The house was an eighteenth-century wooden building. In the middle of the house was a stove that heated all three stories. The floorboards weren’t fixed with nails but wooden beams. Although the house had electricity and a modern kitchen, it remained more or less as it had always been. It stood in four hundred acres of woodland, streams, a small lake, no houses could be seen from the windows, the remoteness of Maine and Vermont, but there in Connecticut. Horses grazing. Deer skipping past the windows. I’d go into the village that was fifteen minutes away and buy groceries. Delilah loved the place and romped on the soft lawn. Miranda’s parents and some relatives and friends came and we sat on the vast lawn like in a British movie eating and drinking and lolling in hammocks strung between trees. At night you could hear the frightening silence of the bears that weren’t there. An Israeli friend came to visit me from Yale in New Haven and asked if we had a gun. It was wonderful in the vastness of nature and the damp scent of morning dew and the neighing of the horses, and after ten days I went back to New York to look for a publisher for my book. I asked who the biggest publisher around was and was told Doubleday. I went to the bar and heard from Big Charles that my stand-in was useless and they were looking forward to my return and it was nice to hear that they were waiting for me and all the drinkers were saying that if I didn’t come back soon they’d move out. I asked the wannabe author where Doubleday was and he told me and I went along. I carried the translated manuscript in a small bag. In the lobby there was a secretary at a desk with some phones. I told her I’d come to see the editor-in-chief. Mr. Seldes? she asked. Yes, I replied. She asked if I had an appointment and I said no but that he would be glad to see me. On her face I saw the expression shared by every unsympathetic secretary one meets in this life and I saw too that she felt entirely in control and she said that Mr. Seldes didn’t receive callers just like that, I had to make an appointment through an agent or find a way of arranging it through his personal secretary and she had to tell me that as far as she knew he would only be free for a meeting—if he would be free at all—after the Frankfurt Book Fair at the end of October. I looked at her and smiled. What are you smiling at? she asked. I told her to pick up the phone right away and tell Mr. Seldes that Yoram Kaniuk from Israel had to see him right away about a certain bit of dirty business and to tell him that I wouldn’t wait long. She asked what it was all about and I told her it was better she didn’t know but Mr. Seldes certainly would and he’d be angry if she didn’t inform him right away. Now she seemed helpless. Americans aren’t very good at improvising. And something in my appearance scared her. I put on the look of a desperate man à la James Cagney and Humphrey
Bogart movies: shifted my hat slightly forward, leaned over, and could almost feel the gun I didn’t have. Since I’d anticipated something like this happening, I’d brought along the document I’d been given on my discharge from the army that said in Hebrew that in 1948 I’d served in the Fourth Battalion of the Palmach and on the reverse side I’d stuck a stamp in English I’d found at the consulate at an Independence Day party I’d stopped by for a few moments and during which I’d wandered around the building because I was so bored and wound up finding a bunch of stamps that said “Consular Service.” The secretary deliberated and apparently decided that you don’t question your superiors and led me to the elevator and said she’d call Mr. Seldes and that I should go up to the fourteenth floor. When the elevator doors opened again I saw lots of people working at typewriters and talking loudly into phones and at the end of the room, which was partitioned into working areas, was an elderly secretary who looked quite suspicious of me. She was sitting by a door bearing the legend, Seldes, with no Christian name. She started interrogating me and I glared at her and raised my voice.
Silence fell in the huge room; the assistant editors, the editors, the secretaries and the stenographers were all looking at me and I said, Let me see Mr. Seldes because he’ll be very angry if he doesn’t see me immediately. The old woman reconsidered and showed me in to see Mr. Seldes, who was sitting at the far end of his office, the walls covered with photographs, books in glass-fronted bookcases, framed book covers everywhere, photographs of authors on one high wall, and he glanced at me questioningly and asked, What exactly do you want and who are you exactly? I heard more curiosity than anger in his voice. I realized I’d hooked him in the sense of gaining his confidence in the way you sometimes trust people precisely because you have no reason to trust them, so I moved closer, introduced myself, I said I was an Israeli living in New York and I’d written a book and wanted Doubleday to publish it. He looked at me for a long time and asked, What about the dirty secrets and all that stuff you said downstairs, what was that? He was angry but also somehow intrigued by my chutzpah. For a moment he saw himself in a book that someone had brought him to read. He asked, Are you sure this isn’t about information that might benefit our house? It seemed he was awaiting some kind of revelation. Then he thought a while and smiled and said, Do you mean to tell me that you’ve come to see me just because you’ve written a book? Do you know how many people write books? More people than there are authors, let me tell you. Don’t you know that first you go to an agent and the agent tries to get your manuscript in to me, and then there are quite a few editors under me who read a book before it reaches my desk? I said I’d swum here from Tel Aviv. But what’s this “dirty business,” he asked, what’s this certificate of yours? How did you manage to sucker everybody here? Then he got up and shook my hand, asked me to sit down, he seemed amazed at the sheer magnitude of my chutzpah and offered me a cigar that I declined. I explained that I had painted and I had a friend, Gandy Brodie, who’d taught me that there are no closed doors in New York; that anybody can get inside anywhere if he’s daring enough in taking advantage of people’s blindness. I haven’t deceived anybody, I said. The certificate I showed you states that I served in the Palmach. I come here, write, pay a lot of money I don’t have for a translation, I have no contacts, no agent, so how could I get to see you? If I’m the new Faulkner, who’d know about it? And Seldes, who was staring at me with growing amazement, got up and came over to me, he was shorter than me, dragged me to the middle of the room, shook my hand and said, Is that how you won the war? We sat there for two hours. Every few minutes his secretary called to say that so-and-so wanted to speak to him, and he told her to hold his calls and asked me about Israel, the Bible, the rebirth of the Hebrew language, about Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, Gandy Brodie whose colored scarf and wolfish dancing in the basement I described as picturesquely as I could, we talked about literature, art, our mothers; he said that the secret of the Jewish mother was that she understood that in life love is a fleeting thing, that’s why she doesn’t base her relationship with her children on love but on guilt, because guilt lasts forever. He told me about his father, Gilbert Seldes, a playwright, author, and critic who had written a book on the so-called “low” arts, like musicals, folk tales, pop, jazz, and had defended them as legitimate arts; Seldes talked about his family, said how much he wanted to visit Israel, and we concluded our meeting with me leaving him the manuscript and my number and he said, I’ll tell you what everybody says, don’t call us, we’ll call you! But in your case, because of the guilt I’ll feel and because you’re such a cheeky bastard, I promise I’ll call.
I went back to Fairfield, the scenery dropped on me as though it wanted to squash me. The rivers. The fields. The morning mist. The clouds that touched the treetops. The avenues of trees. The horses quietly grazing, far from the real world, and I told Miranda’s family, who had come to visit for the weekend, about my meeting and they looked at me as if I’d just landed from the moon. One of the relatives hung Japanese lanterns on the trees. A grill was brought out and Miranda’s father cooked hot dogs. People sang. We were drunk, but not Miranda. She sat in a chair and somebody gave her a screwdriver, which is vodka and orange juice. She emptied the glass, then looked straight ahead and fell flat on her face unconscious and slept for ten hours. Bobby, Miranda’s father and I began telling stories about our military pasts and I wanted to beat him by sounding as though I’d had the harder time, even though he’d been under fire, in a sea of fire, in fact, for two years in the Far East, so I talked about our training and suddenly invented a story about how we had to do one-handed pushups. Show me, he said. It seemed that my entire reputation was on the line. I looked at him and smiled. I lay down on the ground. Face downward. And I raised myself on one hand, and despite my fears—if for no other reason than that two thousand years of Judaism were at stake, or that’s what I thought, like an idiot, as if Miranda would be less mine if I didn’t succeed—I succeeded. I tried it again a few months later and failed. They all sang and danced around a bonfire like Boy Scouts, like I’d done in my youth, and then we returned to the city and our apartment.