Life on Sandpaper

by Yoram Kaniuk

  We parted without kissing, I went to the hospital, I saw Avi Shoes, the Hauser woman was sitting there and she looked at me and cried. She said, I’ll wait for him, the idiot never knew how much I’ve loved him all these years. I went home. I had a daughter at home. But Delilah didn’t like Aya. She was jealous and didn’t want the baby in the house. We tried. We even went to a canine psychologist. Meanwhile, Aya was at risk. With great sorrow we put an ad in the Village Voice, a woman came along and I told her that the dog was wonderful but she was jealous of my daughter and I had to get rid of her; I didn’t want any money, just a promise, because this dog was the sister of the son of Norman Mailer’s dog—I just had one demand, that her tail must not be docked. The woman smiled, stroked Delilah and took her. Delilah cried on the way out and I looked at her lovingly but we had no choice, she had bitten Aya, had jumped into her crib and tried to stop her nursing.

  One evening my friend Arthur who I hadn’t seen for a long time came over with a beautiful young girl and asked us to go with them to a very special place. He said he had left and been left by several wives. I asked Big Charles to say I was taking the evening off and that Patricia should stand in for me and we drove north by the park near the Hudson above 230th Street, an area I’d never been to on my own, I’d just passed through in the car on my way somewhere else. He took us to a restaurant near Henry Hudson Parkway and there was a beautiful garden that went down to the river. After he parked the car we approached a white building with green windows and he said we had to do what we were told. We went into a waiting room that was locked from the inside and a tall young woman was sitting there wearing a purple dress, and Arthur said something to her, she checked in a big book on the table in front of her and said, Welcome. There’s no talking in the restaurant. Quiet is the key word. If you can’t manage it, come out and talk to me. There is only one option for each course on the menu. To call the waiter, press the red button on the silent bell in the middle of the table. Have an enjoyable evening. She pressed a button, a door opened, for a moment we were between two doors, and when the outer door closed the inner one opened and a young waiter in white indicated with a crooked finger that we should follow him. He sat us at a round table by one of the windows, smiled, and left. We sat down. There was deep silence in the restaurant. Music could be clearly heard from very far away. Almost all the tables were occupied. Nobody spoke. We were served wine and a pitcher of cold water and we looked at one another in a kind of amazement and the waiter came over carrying a small green blackboard on which he wrote with chalk: Welcome. Make your silence the most intricate conversation possible. Say in silence what you do not want to say. The first course is cream of lobster soup. The entrée is roast veal with pumpkin and cucumber purée and pommes de terres de la maison. Green salad with capers and Gorgonzola gratin. Courgettes stuffed with dates cooked in wine and if you have any problems with this please write them on the board and I’ll do what I can. He watched us and waited for a response but took care to appear that he wasn’t. We wrote that everything looked fine and we thanked him. The thank you was an addendum by Miranda. The meal was served and each course was better than the last. Through the window we could see the entire length of the Washington Bridge, and the quiet was a friendly quiet, not a burden. Something in the room’s precisely gauged acoustics gave the space the impression of being a vacuum. One didn’t so much feel the quiet, more the absence of noise. I heard clothing rustling against chairs, the sounds of people breathing, chewing, there was a tranquility to it all, Miranda smiled and looked so beautiful, our daughter was like a wondrous toy, and Arthur smiled, he wanted to say good-bye to us without saying a word. We could feel things, the walls moving in the wind that was blowing, the chalk scratching on the small blackboards held by the waiters. In the middle of our table was a small plastic square with a red hat on top, and when I pressed it the waiter came, leaned over, and I wrote that I’d like another roll. We sat there for about two hours. The quiet wasn’t oppressive. It was easy to learn how to speak without making noise. Every now and again the light changed and we didn’t exactly understand where it was coming from and I thought of Vermeer and his illusive light and Hopper’s gentle toying with light and we parted in silence, it was hard to talk even after we left, it was the first time I’d experienced love entirely through looks and gestures. Arthur said afterward that it was sexy, refined, and exciting. Maybe Arthur had a reason for taking me there. Perhaps he wanted to show me a form of subtle, conditional freedom that was nonviolent and strong at the same time.

  A few days later I met Al Brown to say good-bye. He had been one of the first people I’d known in New York. He sat in the restaurant with me, I worked and he sat facing me, all the waitresses working that night and those who weren’t came to say good-bye. Al said, If you come back sometime, for a visit or for good, which is what I expect you to do because you belong in this city, but if you go and come back after some time, you’ll be a map of the city that once was. I’ll be seeing the city changing every day and lose the profound sense of what it was, but you’ve been family here and you’ll carry away a city that won’t exist in your head!

  We packed everything, said good-bye to all kinds of people and family, Aya was a year and two months old and we boarded the SS Zion and I discovered that the chief engineer was Bambi who’d worked with me years ago on board the Pan York. I looked at New York as it moved away. The sea remained. There was a storm that lasted five days. I was occasionally seasick and Aya’s right thumb was crushed by the heavy cabin door. A doctor treated her but forbade her to walk lest she fall. Miranda and sometimes me, but mainly Miranda, carried her for five days as the ship rocked. Miranda carried her and walked the decks for at least four and a half days, hundreds of times a day, and the passengers looked on in disbelief. We reached Madeira, the sea was calm, there were flowers there and we disembarked and walked. We stopped in Gibraltar, there were apes there, we sailed on and reached Haifa after two weeks at sea. My parents came and we went to their house in Tel Aviv. They rented an apartment for us in Kiryat Sefer Street. In the evening a friend who had visited us in New York took us to Café California on Frishman Street. There were all kinds of artists and poets there, it was noisy, there was cigarette smoke, shouting, a huge table to the right, and there were people there who remembered and shouted Shalom, and a man I didn’t know got up, smiled at me and said he was Yossl Bergner, I knew the name, he was a good painter and he asked if I was Yoram Kaniuk and I said yes and he said in Yiddish-accented English: I’ve read your book. In English. A very bad book. I looked at him for a long moment and understood that I’d come home.

  HEBREW LITERATURE SERIES

  The Hebrew Literature Series at Dalkey Archive Press makes available major works of Hebrew-language literature in English translation. Featuring exceptional authors at the forefront of Hebrew letters, the series aims to introduce the rich intellectual and aesthetic diversity of contemporary Hebrew writing and culture to English-language readers.

  This series is published in collaboration with the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature, at www.ithl.org.il. Thanks are also due to the Office of Cultural Affairs at the Consulate General of Israel, NY, for their support.

  YORAM KANIUK was born in Tel Aviv in 1930. A novelist, painter, and journalist, Kaniuk has published more than thirty books of fiction and cultural commentary, including the novel The Last Jew, which appeared in English translation in 2006. A feature film based on his novel Adam Resurrected was released in 2009 to great critical acclaim.

  ANTHONY BERRIS was born in the United Kingdom and has lived in Israel for most of his life, working as a teacher and freelance translator.

 

 

 
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