“Yes.”
“I must have been nervous about his visit. I could still taste the last time he’d been here three years ago, a year and a half after he first left us. He came and moved in with me for a whole month then, a sick, confused, guilt-ridden man tom between two worlds ... the haunted murder victim returning to the scene of the crime ... drawn back to all his and her things, to his own bed and home, but scared stiff by the lurid memory. He would get me out of bed in the middle of the night to sob all over me. He couldn’t be left alone for a minute—I began to worry that he would never go back to America.... And so this time I was afraid of a repeat performance, even though his most recent letters had had a different tone. He had found a woman there, a job, something to do with his life. He was always a terrible square, and yet apparently he had managed to work on himself a bit.... Yet who would have thought that he would traipse back and forth in a trance for a whole week between Haifa and Jerusalem without stopping off even once in his beloved Tel Aviv...? Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you. You were hoping that he would deluge me with pressures and shower new conflicts on our reunion. Didn’t I warn you in our first meeting that I won’t play the neurotic sufferer for you? I told you the whole story of my parents right away so as to clear the table of it ... to make you realize that I had nothing to hide and that you needn’t waste your time digging up ancient history. I didn’t come to you with any problems. I came to understand.”
“To understand what?”
“The subtle power that I have over people. I want to see myself more clearly in order to be stronger and put my deviancy to work for me. You can’t make me feel bad about myself ... the normality that you’re preaching isn’t for me...”
“You think that I’m preaching normality?”
“All the time. Covertly, of course. You’ve been smart enough to avoid a frontal attack. Which doesn’t mean you won’t launch one yet ... because you still don’t know the worst of it ... sex for sale, the atrocious nexus of pleasure and money ... only by then you won’t be able to mount your self-righteous high horse and denounce me in the name of your social norms, because I’ll already be waving goodbye to you from the other side of the door...”
“Is it important to you that I should have social norms?”
“You do have them. That’s a fact.”
“You say that it’s a fact because you need it to be one.”
“I don’t need it to be one. You do. You sit here surrounded by all your books, in one of which there’s bound to be some passage that fits my case exactly...”
“Which is?”
“Defining it is your job. Why make life easy for you?”
“You keep talking about categories, theories, test tubes that I want to cork you up in. You’ve drawn yourself a bull’s-eye and you keep throwing darts at it. But perhaps it’s convenient for you to think that everyone else is square, norm-bound, hyperrational and conformist so that you can enjoy your sense of difference from them, your eternal revolt against them. If I didn’t represent normality you wouldn’t feel comfortable with me.”
“You’ve never made love to a man ... and something tells me that you’d never be able to...”
“Do you think that I’d have to be able to ... in order to ...”
“But I’ve had women now and then. There are women I can make it with ... there’s a way of doing it ... maybe I’ll let you in on it one day ... that is, if I’m in the mood. Excuse me, though, for having interrupted you...”
“I hear about all kinds of strange experiences in this room, but I don’t have to undergo them myself in order to comprehend their significance.”
“In order to grasp them intellectually on a very superficial level. I’m talking about in depth.”
“No, not just intellectually. Although that too, of course ... I was wondering a while ago why you pictured me eating cauliflower ... where you got the idea from...”
“There’s no cauliflower cooking in your kitchen?”
“No. There never has been.”
“I’m sorry if I offended you ... I smelled something on the stairs ... I’m sorry...”
“That isn’t the point. What I’m asking is, why did you pick on cauliflower of all things? What does it symbolize for you? Perhaps it has something to do with the way it looks, its round, white lobed form that resembles a brain. Why cauliflower? I wonder: is it in order to portray me as an utter rationalist, a dyed-in-the-wool intellectual ... a man who eats brain all the time ... brain nourished on brain ... a person who is all cerebral technique? You’re constantly sending me some message ... it’s very clear ... you keep staking out the boundaries of our relationship. You don’t trust me emotionally—and you don’t believe that I can understand you psychologically. You deny my emotional capacities. To this day you’ve never given me a real feeling of yours ... I mean something really intimate ... despite all your pretending to be candid...”
“I simply haven’t wanted to embarrass you.”
“What makes you think you would embarrass me?”
“Whenever I touch on such things I can feel you wince.”
“That’s pure projection on your part.”
“I’ve wanted to spare you the gory details of my escapades ... you’re still so young...”
“You needn’t spare me. I never asked you to. I’m here to help you ... you’re even paying me for this. I don’t think you understand my role here. I really am here to help you. Have some faith in me. Make use of me. If you sought out a young therapist, that too is significant. One always repeats some family pattern with a father or a brother or a sister. You chose me to stand for someone whom you needed to confront. Perhaps your younger brother, who according to you is a cerebral square just like me. But so far you’ve merely been skirmishing with me and avoiding working on yourself. You have great verbal power, a large vocabulary, a highly manipulative command of language ... an ability instantly to translate every experience onto an abstract, conceptual plane ... while evading the issue itself, of course...”
“I don’t follow you...”
“You follow me perfectly well. You keep telling me that you’re only here conditionally ... that maybe you’ll pay me and maybe you won’t ... that each visit here may be your last. You deliberately come late ... you even picked an odd hour like this because of its provisional feeling, as though it were a form of weekend entertainment. And you keep insisting that nothing bothers you, that you’re only coming to see how I define what you already know. But we can’t work this way. I’ve let three months of it go by as an opening. It’s even predictable in a case like yours. But we can’t go on going nowhere ... your time is too valuable ... and so is mine ...”
“Hey, you’re attacking me ... for the first time ... I feel almost stunned ...”
“Don’t you think that it’s about time?”
“I didn’t know you had it in you. You’re not as quiet and innocent as I had thought, then ... I rather like that. You know, what you just said about my brother ... it was an interesting hunch ... how old actually are you?”
“Why does it matter to you?”
“Oh no, don’t throw the question back at me. Now it’s you who are evading. Drop your anonymity for once and tell me how old you are.”
“Twenty-seven ... but why?”
“And you really hope to identify with me?”
“Only in order to understand.”
“What an odd profession you’ve chosen! But all right, I’ll tell you a dream. You asked me a few weeks ago if I ever had any ... well, now I’ve dreamt one for you, you can’t say I’m not trying. In fact, that was the real reason for my impatience to see you today ... the reason I came on time ... because I’ve brought you a fresh dream. I already lost most of it during the day, but something is still left ... so let’s see what you can do with its dehydrated remains. As far as I can see it’s completely meaningless, but that’s your problem. You see, I must have known that your attack was coming, because I armed myself wit
h a dream.... You know, I think we’re beginning to form a real tie. Now I’ll put you to work, let’s see you show your stuff...”
“I can only work together with you.”
“Together with me, of course. I’ve already learned the rules of the game.... On the whole, you know, last night was rather strange. My father arrived in the late afternoon and insisted on taking me out to eat even though I had cooked a meal for him. He was obsessed with some little restaurant that served a special borscht he had dreamt of all the time in America.... Okay, so we went there and the place was closed because of the holiday. But he insisted on finding the owners, and they were so overjoyed to see him that they opened the restaurant especially for him ... only there wasn’t any borscht left. So they sent out for a whole pitcher of it, and for sour cream too, and he sat there putting away the thick red stuff of his dreams, smacking his lips and grunting with pleasure and joking and chattering away. He didn’t say much about his meeting with mother, except that he hoped it would all be over with on Sunday and that he was ready to give her the whole apartment ... after which he began feeling so sick from all the borscht he had eaten that we went home. He washed up, sat down to look at all the letters and journals that had come for him while he’d been away, and then turned on the TV to watch an interview with some new politician he had never heard of before. Halfway through it he began to doze off, so we never did say anything important. I too went to sleep early ... and then at two a.m. this old fairy knocked on the door, a big-time banker from an old Jerusalem family ... an odd, sentimental character who’s fallen wildly in love with me ...”
“Calderon?”
“The very same. Which means that I’ve already mentioned him to you and that you haven’t missed a trick. Exactly. Refa’el Calderon. I showed him who he really was and since then his life has been one big mess. It has no structure anymore and his family is falling apart. He runs after me like a dog, does all kinds of things for me, won’t leave me alone. A case for you. At the stroke of five he’ll be waiting for me below with his chauffered car. A real case for you ... now there’s suffering ... mark my word, he’ll come to see you yet. In fact, he’s already jealous of you. The man’s in a tailspin.... But to get to the point, he knocked on the door and woke me at two a.m. And I’m such a kind heart that I can’t drive types like him away, so I had to get up and listen to his pre-dawn confession. I too, you see, have my patients ... in the long, wee hours of the morning I treat them free of charge ... all kinds of oddballs ... first they wear me down psychologically, and then they get me into bed and hump away ... What?”
“Nothing.”
“I thought you said something.”
“No.”
“I don’t know if it’s worth starting on that dream now ... we haven’t much time left ... all right, I’d better tell it, just so you don’t say I’m evading again. I went back to sleep and Calderon stayed in the kitchen with my father, who had woken up too. In the end his wife even called ... it was either then, or before that, that I had the dream. I’ve forgotten a lot of the details, but what I remember ... what’s left for you ... is more or less this. There was a small hotel, a building not far from a lake surrounded by distant mountains ... it may even not have been in Israel. I don’t remember much about it, but I do remember that there were stairs ... in fact, two sets of them. The ones I climbed were straight and light-colored, but nearby, as though they had been built by mistake, were the original stairs of the building, which weren’t in use anymore. They were made of rough old stone carpeted with an old, reddish rug that was worn at the edges ... very windy stairs that led to some rented rooms, most of them already moved out of. In them I could see unmade beds and personal possessions that had been left behind—shawls, pins, dirty absorbent cotton, colorful robes ... On the first floor, which I was trying to climb past, I saw sitting by the window—God knows how he had gotten there—my English teacher from the night school I attended twelve years ago. We called him Mr. Foxy, but that wasn’t his real name—he had some German-sounding last name like Neustadt or Freustadt ... a gloomy old bachelor, a gray, impeccable German Jew who had failed in business and taken up teaching English at night. He always wore a winter suit. He was tall and bald, wore glasses, was round-shouldered, had this yellow skin ... apart from his fingers, which were green from nicotine ... and talked only English with us because that gave him the upper hand.... Now he was sitting in this hotel in an open white shirt, waiting for someone in a room like a dining room that had tables all around. I didn’t know if he remembered me, but I went over to him. He spoke to me in English, but it was an English that I understood, so that I had no trouble following him ... the words passed into me as easily as though they were Hebrew. Without turning to look at me he explained that he was waiting for his hunting. I remember him using that word, and I knew at once what it meant, even how to spell it. Hunting. I think he must have been referring to some meat dish, but he called it his hunting in English, as though he were a country squire, or pretending to be one.... Are you listening?”
“Yes.”
“It seemed absurd that this colorless man should be sitting there and telling me about his hunting that he expected to be brought from the forest, fresh from the kill, because in the room itself there was no sign of anything like a kitchen. But he kept staring out the window. And there, low down, I saw a thicket of bushes with a hose sticking out of it from which some water was running. Something moved there. It took a step in the bright evening light, and then the water dwindled to a trickle and stopped, as though someone had turned off the faucet or bent the hose...”
“Yes?”
“That’s it.”
“That’s it? Did you wake up at that point, or did you go on dreaming?”
“No, I woke up. The telephone rang, and I heard Calderon begging for dear life.”
“Did you awake with a feeling of anxiety?”
“Don’t you ever give up? No ... there was no anxiety ... the phone simply woke me. But had I gone on dreaming, I’m sure I would have climbed down to see what the hose was attached to and who had shut it off.”
“And that English teacher ... what did you say his name was?”
“The students called him Mr. Foxy. He was like a long, gray fox.”
“Do you have any associations with him? Have you seen him lately?”
“No. He doesn’t mean a thing to me. I didn’t even know he still existed in my mind. I haven’t seen him for years ... haven’t thought of him ... why should he suddenly have turned up like that?”
“Were you a good student in English?”
“No. A very bad one. Totally resistant to learning. I don’t think I ever took the final exam...’’
“Were there other courses that you didn’t finish?”
“No. I think it was the only one. Once I lost interest in getting my diploma I didn’t bother with it anymore.”
“When did you start night school?”
“After my junior year in high school.”
“Before that you studied in the same school where your father taught?”
“Yes.”
“Was he ever your teacher?”
“No. He only taught the seniors.”
“Was that why you left?”
“I don’t get you.”
“So that you wouldn’t have to be a student of his.”
“Oh. Maybe ... it’s possible ... that’s not how I thought of it then ... but I wouldn’t rule it out. There were several reasons, but that may have been one of them ... only how does that help us with the dream?”
“This English teacher ... you say that he was a peripheral figure for you ... are you sure you haven’t run into him lately?”
“Absolutely.”
“But in dreams such peripheral, meaningless figures are stand-ins for others. They conceal other, more meaningful figures.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“This Mr. Foxy ... he’s more or less your father’s age ... and like hi
m, a teacher ... did you ever have a run-in with him?”
“Never.”
“But you failed his course. If nothing else, he stands for the one exam you never took, because of which you failed to get your diploma.”
“That’s of no importance to me.”
“But it’s inconceivable that it didn’t bother you at some point ...”
“No. I don’t buy that. But go on.”
“The teacher spoke English, but you understood it as though it were Hebrew. Now your father is in America, with a new, English identity. Behind it, though, his old Hebrew self is still there.”
“Go on. I’m listening. I don’t say you’re right and I don’t say you’re wrong.”
“The teacher in the dream had changed. He always used to wear a heavy winter suit—and here he suddenly was in a summery white shirt. He was different, no longer the same ... like your father, about the change in whom you keep talking ... about how young and artsy-looking he’s become. You said that the teacher was pretending to be a squire—the same gray personage who used to smoke the cheapest cigarettes...”
“The cheapest cigarettes? Hold on there. Who told you that?”
“His nicotine-stained fingers ...”
“Are you an amateur detective?”
“I was just listening to you ... to the details that you yourself were giving me. I’m trying to base myself on them. In the dream the teacher is waiting for some kind of meat dish, for his hunting ... while last night your father went hunting for some red borscht. The link is so obvious: red ... blood ... Something about your father’s appetite evidently upset you. You disguised him as another teacher who meant nothing to you, you put glasses on him and made him bald ... why was all this camouflage necessary? Perhaps because of what you’ve been thinking about him ... because the dream expresses some extreme wish. You need to conceal it in order to protect yourself, while at the same time giving it vent. What it is, though, remains to be discovered.”
A Late Divorce Page 26