by Nell Zink
At the edge of the village was a tall forest bordered by a deep meadow. He took a few steps into the wet grass, then looked down with a sinking feeling. How come I always forget? he thought. Every time I’m in Northern Europe it’s the same damn thing. He slid forward, grimacing. The meadow was knee-deep in slugs, each under its own blade of grass, oozing a slime that wouldn’t wash off—water would just spread it around—his boots would dry silver white. He had never seen the banana slug of the Pacific Northwest, but he knew a slug so conspicuous and easy to avoid could not possibly be more revolting than the endless millions, living and dead, under and around his feet in this one idyllic Swabian pasture. He had heard that New Zealand harbors a snail so large it fills the evolutionary niche normally occupied by . . . he tried to remember—he recalled vaguely that the New Zealand grasshopper is so big that it functions as a mouse, but couldn’t remember what the snail does. In any case, it’s a foot long, and he had no plans to visit New Zealand.
The desert is so clean and pure, he thought. I should take the M16 and drive down the Egyptian border to where the mountains look like bare, golden, freshly swept stairs. As a rotting log broke open under his foot, revealing a wet safety-orange slime mold, he thought of the dry, delicate geckos that used to run across his kitchen ceiling, and of miniature blue-black birds flashing like obsidian against the dusty green of feral geraniums in the backyard. Then he remembered that if he went home, he would have to report in. What will I tell Rafi? Rafi, it’s like this: I’ve narrowed down the search to two families—two clans, that is—two countries: Laos and Iceland. I’m certain the heir will be found in one of those two places, in a remote cliffside cave where I can say I did it, collect the bounty and get the hell off this ridiculous project which is destroying my career and all my relationships. I just know if I weren’t always traveling, Nofar would go out with me. I feel like a sailor. It’s no wonder she won’t give me the time of day . . .
Yigal found a logging road and stopped to scrape his soles on the gravel. He realized that the slugs must once have had a predator, now extinct. He imagined the unicorns using their horns to lift the meadow thatch and reveal the slugs below, then eagerly munching them with their strong teeth and coarse tongues. What horror the virgins must have felt when the unicorns laid their slimy chins and stiff beards in their laps, how they screamed for the huntsman to come quickly, then the purely decorative nature of the roast unicorn centerpiece, its inedible meat slippery as okra. In his mind’s eye, he saw the male unicorns’ vicious battles for possession of the richest meadows and creek bottoms, where long brown slugs grew thick and fast as mushrooms.
He closed his eyes and pretended he was somewhere near Be’er Sheva in a field of crispy weeds and Roman coins, then sat down in the road to check his e-mail. There was a long message from his old friend Osnat. Secretly he hated her a little. When a girl like that hangs around a man like me, he knew well, saying she thinks I’m sweet, it means she doesn’t actually think of me as male. If she respected me a little, it would cross her mind that her behavior ought to be driving me insane. Doesn’t it occur to her that calling a man at six in the morning to cry about some fucked-up love affair is a tease? Why does she dress like that?
Osnat wrote, Thanks for putting me in touch with Coppola’s people. I’m helping them scout locations. Call me when you get into town. Yigal, I hope you’re taking care of yourself—please play safe. . . .
This motherly tone, Yigal thought, makes me sick. He wrote: What Coppola’s people? I forget things, you know. I may be coming home soon. Amsterdam always makes me miss the sunshine. I don’t think I’ve been outdoors in a week. I’ll call you.
It’s true what she said about scouting locations—Osnat was taking Mary to every café in town. I went with them to Café Tamar. They sat talking for two hours while four young men, all with open notebooks, eavesdropped. I sat down with one and he froze like a rabbit.
“Are you a poet?” I asked.
“I’m a rapper, an MC,” he said in a wee, soft voice. “I can work better in a place like this. It helps me to let the rhymes flow.” He crossed his legs, above the knee. “That girl, she’s poetry in motion.”
“You’re an idiot,” I said, standing up. I tried the next one.
“What are you writing, poetry?” I asked.
“Not yet. It’s sort of a manifesto. I think the poetry of today is corrupt, bankrupt, meaningless—there’s nothing of significance left for it. We need a hard, merciless, thrusting poetry that won’t take no for an answer.” He fidgeted nervously with an empty sugar packet. I tried the next one.
“Is that poetry?” I asked.
“It’s a letter,” the man said. “My girlfriend won’t marry me. I really love her, but she thinks because I’m already married, it’s not worth it for her. Well, I’m a man who can think for himself, and in this case I think I have rights. Let me show you.” He began to dig around in his book bag, and I moved on to the fourth and last.
“Are you writing poetry?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “Here’s my latest poem. ‘Dogs are Shakespearean, children are strangers—’”
“That’s Delmore Schwartz.”
“You know it?” He looked disappointed. “Okay, how about this. ‘The heavy bear accompanies me, honey covers his face, awkwardly staggering around—’”
“Are all your poems translations of Delmore Schwartz?”
“No, right now, looking at your friend, I have an idea for a poem based on Ginsberg’s ‘Song.’” He began scribbling in the notebook. “The weight of the world is love,” I saw over his shoulder.
I went back to Osnat and Mary. Osnat was trying to talk Mary into being tested for HIV.
Thousands of miles off, the only Israeli in Eastern Bhutan was toiling uphill on foot, humming tunelessly and thinking about Piano Sonatas nos. 21, 23, and 26. At my suggestion he was carrying a plastic bag filled with water from the radiator—otherwise he would have died. I’d located a llama-trekking party from Portland, Oregon, just 250 miles away over the Nepalese border, and with the GPS ripped out of the Rover after the axle broke, he was making good time. Only once did he admit weakness. “I’m getting a hole in my sneaker,” he said ruefully, and my heart went out to my brave darling.
CHAPTER 6
DANIEL DERONDA IS A SORT OF young, beautiful Jewish Mr. Pickwick. Critics actually say, “This novel is unrealistic because no one is as adorable as Daniel Deronda.” Obviously, these critics are boys. I have a friend who’s every bit as nice as Daniel. Plus, he’s never been married, has a master’s degree, a good job, and wants kids. He lives in Washington, D.C., and you can reach him at [address redacted, even though it’s all still true].
Daniel lived with his mother, a narcissistic and sexy actress, until he was two years old. She was a Sephardic aristocrat, something that turns up again and again in English literature. The most fabulous and intellectual Jews in European myth are the ones who escaped from Spain, late and in small numbers, bringing with them the mysterious spiritual culture of the ancient world—orange blossoms, fiery chariots, numerology, the Alhambra, etc. The paler native Jews, shrill and irritating, insist on trying to pass for white, and constant vigilance is required to keep them out of our swimming pools. Daniel attended Eton, then went off to college, but it wasn’t until he was twenty-two that it occurred to him that there was something just a little tiny bit unusual about his penis. His strange penis then leads him on a voyage of discovery that ends in cabalistic studies, intimate involvement with a beautiful Jewish singer, estrangement from his adoptive family, and ultimately the realization that he was born a Jew.
Actually, of course, George Eliot doesn’t mention Daniel’s penis. I think of it only because I am not Jewish, and if I were to have a son, he would not be Jewish, so I see no particular reason for circumcision unless he asks for it by name, but Zohar thinks an uncircumcised Israeli child would be beaten to death in the first year of kindergarten. There is nothing I can say to refute
him—I don’t really know how much time and energy boys devote to examining each other in the bathroom and punishing deviants—except to present to him the shining example of Daniel, whose unusual penis, far from handicapping him socially, helped make him the most popular boy in the world and the third most charming character in English literature.
At the end of Daniel Deronda, the newly married Daniel heads “East” on a journey expected to take several years, and drops out of the purview of George Eliot. However, we find him again at the First Zionist Congress, giving the keynote address to the Spirituality Special Interest Group and meekly consenting to model for a bust of Aaron. Later that night, he stands with his back to the buffet, scanning the crowd for his wife so he can tell her he’s stepping outside for a cigar.
At last he sees her—Herzl’s wife has her cornered, trying to talk her out of ten acres near Jaffa that Herzl wants for an experimental vineyard. “I’m keeping it in olives and lemons,” he hears his wife say. “The Lord will save the Jewish people by bringing them to a land where a kosher diet can be fresh, nutritious, and high in fiber. Does Daniel look to you like I feed him nothing but cream sauce, port wine, and strawberry jam?”
“He doesn’t look a day over thirty-five,” Mrs. Herzl is forced to admit. “Maybe Theodor should talk to you, he has some digestive problems . . .”
Daniel blushes.
“Seals don’t get HIV,” Mary said to me as we rode home on the bus.
“Are you a seal? Be serious.”
“I’m not exactly not a seal,” she said. “I mean, ask me to hold my breath sometime. I’m not like most things, which are what they seem to be, and if you put them under a microscope, you see the same thing, only smaller. I’m different. I think it’s like in Platonism where you have substances and accidents, and my substance is to be a seal. I think. My parents were seals. If I look like myself, it’s by accident. When I’m a seal, I’m a hundred percent seal, but when I’m human it’s not quite a hundred percent.” I begged her to explain and she started over. “Silkies are ancient and immortal, right? But seals and people aren’t. And in a sense neither are silkies. You can’t be a seal forever, or a person forever. You’d get bored. I’m only like four years old, as a person I mean, I think.”
“How can you be ancient and immortal and four years old?”
“I don’t know, people pay attention to stuff like that, seals don’t. Nobody cares. I mean, some seals get older, and some don’t. And some become silkies, and some don’t. I think I seem pretty young. I mean, like the way I can’t defer gratification, and this confused way I talk and stuff. I know I look like twenty-five, but I wasn’t a little tiny seal when I first came out—I was pretty big—”
“When was that?”
“It was in 1990. I had this crush on this totally cute guy who was a ski bum in Taos, so I came out, but it didn’t work out, so I went back in for a while, but now here I am again.”
“You lived in Taos?”
She shook her head. “No, no, no—Santa Fe. I think if we’d lived in Taos, it might have worked out. For him, anyway.” She looked sadly out the window at Rabin Square hung with flags, and began to cry. “Where’s Yigal?” she sniffled.
I had to admit, I had no idea.
The next day Osnat called to tell us he was in Amsterdam, whoring around on drugs. She and Mary went out to Café Siach to cry together.
Mary came back angry. “How can she say she loves Yigal, and then say he’s going to get hepatitis and herpes? It’s like she wants him to be punished. I told that bitch Mr. Francis Ford Coppola isn’t going to be needing her services, we’re filming in Salt Lake City.”
“Look what I got,” I said. I sat her down in front of the computer. I had thought to ask for his e-mail address from Osnat, and I already had an answer.
Dear Nell, don’t mention things like Trident missiles in unencrypted messages. This part is for Mary. My dear Mary, I am still wandering around Switzerland, but you are in my apartment in Tel Aviv. Why? Yigal.
Mary wrote him some sort of reply.
I also had a disquieting message from Shats in response to chapter five. There was a low humming sound outside just now, he wrote, like some huge engine in the distance, and what sounded like occasional underground explosions far away. I went to the window and there’s this blazing sunset, the sky was very gray and the sea dark blue gray, and on the horizon bright orange strips of light. A satil—a navy missile boat—was sailing southward along the shore, then changed course and started sailing toward the sunset. It doesn’t make sense—the distance’s too long—but it seems the sounds came from the boat.
Could it be, I wondered, that the stress of reading Sailing Toward the Sunset has unhinged Shats’ mind as the labor of writing it seems to be unhinging mine? My friend Mary (no relation to the Mary in this novel) remarked that I seem frazzled, and whenever I leave the house I find the outside world fantastically large and three-dimensional compared with the tiny world of the computer screen. And, Shats says, his English is good, but not entirely second nature; I think he put it, To see Hebrew is to read it, but English still requires concentration. In short, it may be that he spends more time reading each chapter than I spend writing it. It is possible.
I fear I may lose artistic momentum, and even as I do, Zohar’s joyful faith in me as an artist for art’s sake reaches new heights daily. “You are working! You are obsessed!” he cries, taking the opportunity to, for example, eat all the blueberry jam, knowing I may not think of going anywhere near the kitchen for hours.
I asked him why the outside world seems so lovely now, as though I were naked at midnight on a golf course having eaten a big handful of psilocybin mushrooms, and he said, “The outside world is more beautiful than any art.” He ducked into the Justy (I had come outside to see him to the car) and arranged himself for a trip to the Helicon editorial board meeting. “But your art is very cute. You are cute!” He revved it to 4,500 rpm and sped away.
In one sense I am delighted by Zohar’s transformation. For years he had seen me only as art’s detractor—the sourpuss sure to say, “Are you sure writing a poem requires staying drunk for a week with ninety-nine channels of cable?” Now I have taken the role of art’s disoriented, preoccupied hermit, and he—my gentle patron.
Meanwhile, down in the Gulf of Aqaba, Nachum’s new glass-bottomed boat skimmed across the small, frothy waves, followed by Sissy and friends, out to approximately the point from which the Trident missile had emerged on its mission of dangerous vandalism. He was busy preparing a bucket of dead fish when he heard one of the tourists say, “Will you look at that!”
Below them was only darkness. But it was a solid sort of darkness, punctuated with rivets, a huge hulk, immense and black—the submarine, still there. “I’ll be damned,” Nachum said.
“Get the dolphins to go down and tell us what it is!” someone suggested. Everyone agreed that would be the best thing.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Nachum said, turning toward Eilat. He called me twenty minutes later and made me promise to stay out of my apartment whenever I could.
“Just let me know when it leaves, so I can relax,” I said. I told him to tie a float to it, one of those little fishing buoys with a flag. Nachum protested, but that’s what he did. The next day he called to say it had moved about a hundred yards closer to Eilat. The next day, it was gone.
CHAPTER 7
IT WASN’T MARY WHO BROUGHT Yigal back to Tel Aviv—it was a syndicated newspaper story he found in a bus shelter in Konstanz.
A SPECTER IS HAUNTING ISRAEL: THE SPECTER OF “MR. PICKWICK”
Inhabitants of Tel Aviv are reporting sightings of a mysterious submarine—the first UFO (Unidentified Floating Object) of its kind. A British “house” DJ active in the port of Tel Aviv has dubbed the object “Mr. Pickwick,” calling it “rotund” and “jovial,” and the name seems to have found resonance in the popular mind.
All official sources are denying reports of the vessel, whi
ch witnesses say is approximately 100 meters long and 20 meters in diameter. “A whale,” scoffs a bored clerk at the Ministry of the Interior. “Crude oil,” says an idle receptionist at a customs office. “A mass hallucination,” adds the press secretary to the minister of culture.
Ordinary Israelis are not so sure. “A Trident missile submarine, without a doubt,” says Amit, 22, a lifeguard on Tel Aviv’s Hilton Beach, relatively near where most of the sightings have taken place at Tel Aviv’s defunct shipping port. “Definitely one of the black submarines,” agrees Maya, 24, barista at Sheinkin Street’s Café Kazeh, echoing the American penchant for sighting “black helicopters” connected with U.S. government covert operations.
No one yet claims to have circled or touched the craft. Fishermen in the port of Jaffa say it is unobtrusive. None we spoke to had bothered going anywhere near it. A few mentioned a proposal to string an underwater cable across the Yarqon River, to keep the submarine from blocking boat access should it choose to enter the shallow estuary.
“From what I’ve heard, it wouldn’t even fit,” one fisherman said, shrugging. “So let them try it.”
A widely held opinion holds the submarine to be somehow connected with the coming of the Messiah, and the port is now home to a religious revival. Buses arrive hourly from all over Israel, and banners proclaim, “Welcome, Mr. Pickwick, Our Messiah and King.”
Sociologists are speaking of a “cargo cult,” formed in response to reductions in U.S. military aid. . . .
“It’s funny,” Zohar said, “but not as funny as the Mishna.” He was referring, of course, to the section on a man’s duties to his dead brother’s wives when there are two of them, both orphans, and one is deaf and the other “small” (a midget? underage?).