Private Novelist

by Nell Zink

  Youth Without God (1937), his second-to-last work, is written in rhythmic one-sentence paragraphs, like a poem, although it is mostly about intrigue among little boys. The book concerns a teacher’s conversion to resistance, prompted at first by an aesthetic concern: the coldness of his students. They test themselves dispassionately, seeking new experience for its own sake, and they dismiss and satirize everything they see. He knows that everything he does (camping trips, the books he reads with them, the essays he assigns) is intended to harden them for war, and he does his best to help them prepare. But he winces a little, involuntarily, drawing the attention of “the Club,” four boys who meet secretly to discuss banned books. Club members must swear never to express contempt in any form. After the teacher loses his job, his home, and his reputation, he begins to wish openly that he could find God. Finally an elderly baker tells him: “God is in our house. He lives with us because we never fight.” God, the teacher realizes, is a real experience, but a delicate one, which even the mildest dishonesty or ridicule will scare away.

  Von Horváth died in Paris in 1938. He was walking to his hotel from an appointment about the film rights to Youth Without God when a tree branch fell on his head.

  Anyhow, I thought the fastest way to the English version of Youth Without God might be Amazon, for which I hear nothing but praise. When I entered the Amazon site (for the first time) and searched for the exact title, I received the following truly ingratiating response, worthy of the younger von Horváth:

  CLOSE MATCHES FOR THIS SEARCH:

  A Night Without Armor: Poems by Jewel Kilcher (hardcover)

  Siblings Without Rivalry: How to Help Your Children Live Together so You Can Live Too by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish (paperback)

  Don’t Go to the Cosmetics Counter Without Me: An Eye-Opening Guide to Brand-Name Cosmetics by Paula Begoun with Bryan Barron (paperback)

  Ancient Secret of the Fountain of Youth, Vol. 1 by Peter Kelder; foreword by Bernie S. Siegel (hardcover)

  How to Survive Without a Salary: Learning How to Live the Conserver Lifestyle by Charles Long (paperback)

  Without Remorse by Tom Clancy (mass market paperback)

  I’m not making that up—it said “close matches.” Would it really be so bad if somebody burned every copy in existence of each of the books above? Don’t they all sound like they started life as articles in Woman’s Day? I’m not trying to promote wasteful bonfires in public squares—the whole process could easily be accomplished without publicity, as was the suppression of Youth Without God. I favor the use of books to generate electric power. Tel Aviv (this may come as a surprise to my American readers) is bitterly cold in the winter—that is, it rains every third day while the temperature hovers around 60, and no one has central heat. The net effect is like that of the boarding school in Jane Eyre. Without Remorse could be used to provide two minutes’ complimentary energy to every Israeli, which he could use to fill a hot water bottle and tuck it under his shirt.

  Mary naturally assumed that Tel Aviv would always be toasty warm. The heat of the summer, which reminded her of a potter’s kiln, seemed unlikely to give way any time in the foreseeable future, and no one had told her about the winter, which, after all, is quickly over.

  Her sealskin lay in a furrier’s storage locker, like so many other sealskins before, but she had not forgotten it. She had a habit of putting it on now and then, unlike other silkies who would abandon theirs for good, letting themselves blend gradually with the mass of humanity. She liked keeping her options open, and never burning bridges.

  She was desperately curious to know the origins of the strange medallion. The next morning she went to the Jewish Museum, approached a curator, said, “Umm,” turned, and left the building. In the afternoon she walked slowly between long, dark display cases in the Met, hoping to see something similar. In the evening she sat in bed, absentmindedly switching channels, and the next day she went to the New York Public Library, where Yigal was spending all his time. She didn’t see him (he was down in the maps division, and she was in general reference) and she strode up to someone and said, “Hi! I’m trying to figure out what this is.” The librarian, who felt rather irritated after spending twenty minutes with a man in search of the very best pancake recipe, was pleased to speak with someone like Mary, who kept her distance and didn’t smell funny. He led her to the huge black catalog books in deep recesses along the walls and asked, “Do you have some clue what you’re looking for?”

  “What do you think?” Mary said, handing him the medallion. “I heard it might be connected with the House of David, the Jewish kings, but to me it looks like a seal with breasts.”

  “Are there silkies in Wales? David is the patron saint of Wales.”

  “Silkies are Irish,” she said. “But I guess they could get around, if they wanted. How did a Jewish king get to be patron saint of Wales?”

  The librarian shook his head, reminding her that one question was enough, and started her ordering books on ancient coins. Two hours later, she had:

  1.A depiction of a leopard that made it look like a seal

  2.Ditto, depiction of a lion

  3.Ditto, a camel

  4.Ditto, a wildcat

  5.Etc.

  Wouldn’t everything be simple, she wondered, if all of them were really intended as seals in the first place? The wheel was a symbol of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, but the breasts could signify the Roman virgin martyr Agatha. . . . She considered her options and ordered a book on Egypt. That night at seven she’d made up her mind: The medallion was fourth century Egyptian. It depicted, in a sad and clumsy way, Saint Catherine and a sphinx. In other words, it was extremely boring and disappointing.

  Mary felt she should get rid of it before Yigal noticed she still had it. It was probably worth something to someone, and it seemed a shame to throw it in the trash, but she couldn’t sell it, and besides, Yigal might expect her to be able to get it back on a moment’s notice. So she did the only thing she could: She stopped by a post office, and she mailed it to me.

  Her letter was open and candid.

  This is something I want you to keep for me. I think it’s Saint Catherine and a sphinx, but apparently Yigal thinks it has something to do with the heir to the Israeli throne. He gave it to me to send away, so now I’m sending it away.

  New York is great. Yigal spends a lot of time reading about the subway. We go to museums. We had sushi—yum!

  I can’t wait to meet Zohar! I hope he gets back soon!

  Zohar was sleeping peacefully under thick felt blankets at his last stop before Kathmandu. After a bath and a shave, he’d turned into the most popular member of the tour group. All of them—yuppies desperate for just a whiff of the old odor of culture and sophistication they remembered from college, driven to acquiring it in the crushingly efficient way natural to people with twelve days’ annual leave—were in awe of Zohar. Here was a man who existed to analyze the piano works of Beethoven, whatever the price—a man who would endure any hardship, who never took a day off, who would never be finished, always driven, always unsatisfied, always moving on, a solitary cowboy on the high plains of the Beaux-Arts, who had arrived at insights too deep to be shared with dilettantes like them, which didn’t keep them from hanging around to buy him drinks every night, just so they could hear him say things like “I hate all classical music.” He was having a great time, except in the mornings. There is no Turkish coffee in Nepal. To the Americans he only said mournfully, “That’s not coffee.” Each of them, especially the single women, privately resolved to visit Israel in the near future.

  CHAPTER 13

  YIGAL’S AGNOSTICISM BEGAN WITH A gift from his parents on his eighth birthday: The Wind in the Willows. God makes way for “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn,” and as far as Yigal could tell, it was a big improvement.

  He bought a copy for Mary at Scribner’s across the street from the library. I admit it’s a Rizzoli now, but for the purposes of this novel, it’s still Scr
ibner’s. The book delighted her. “This is just like the ocean! Who is this guy?”

  You can tell a lot about the author of Wind in the Willows by reading it, but Yigal hadn’t given it much thought, so he said, “I don’t know. The author.”

  “He must have lived in the ocean for a while. These characters are so much like people I used to know down there. This frog is just like a sea tiger.”

  “Sea tiger?” Yigal was imagining something large and furry with stripes, since a seal in Hebrew is a “sea dog.”

  “It’s a sort of squishy green thing about a foot long, with spots. What I mean is, sea tigers are always trying to take advantage of people. Actually they eat them, but you know what I mean. They sting, but they’re easy to avoid.”

  “Do they talk?”

  “No, no. They have personalities, but they don’t talk. Even rocks have personalities. They just sit there, and that’s doing something. It’s not at all like a bird that flies around, or seals playing.”

  “Who in the ocean do I remind you of?”

  “You’re like an albatross. You keep moving all the time, and you sleep on the sea.” Yigal frowned. “I mean, you don’t seem to like your apartment very much. You’re always traveling.”

  “Trident missiles fall on my apartment.” He took the book from her and leafed through it. “Do you want to go to England?”

  “No, I want to go to Tel Aviv, where it’s nice and hot.”

  Yigal closed the book and said, “I don’t.”

  “But that’s where you’re from. It’s your home.”

  “And? Doesn’t it seem like I’d want to get away? What bird spends its life sitting on the nest where it hatched? You left the ocean.”

  “Only for a while. I’ll go back, there’s nothing more relaxing. Besides, I might have to. I think I’m pregnant.”

  Yigal jumped up, then sat down again. He was swaying a little, as though she had hit him on the head with a board. “What? Already? How did you manage that? Are you sure?” He dropped the book, and his face contorted in anguish. Then he remembered that he might have had something to do with it, and he knelt to stroke her tenderly. “Dear Mary, this is sudden, but I’m so happy and proud—”

  “Why?” Mary asked. “It’s just a pain in the neck. I’ve never been pregnant when I was human, but it’s got to suck. I mean, walking around, carrying all that weight all by yourself. But I love you, so I won’t go back to Shetland until the very end. Then I’ll be gone for maybe eight months till I can get it weaned and swimming.”

  “There’s something I don’t understand,” Yigal said. “You mean our child is a seal?”

  Mary laughed, then looked very solemn as she said, “Yes, I imagine it will be a seal. They’re always seals.”

  “Couldn’t it be a silkie like you? It could be a seal and still look and act completely human.” Yigal was starting to seem really upset, like maybe he was wishing he’d listened to all the things his mother had told him about really getting to know a girl for at least two years, and meeting all of her family. For the first time since the army, he wanted to talk to his mother, but he realized there was nothing he could say. She had always told him what would happen if he married a girl who wasn’t Jewish—the shouting, the recriminations, eventually one day she’d call him “Dirty Jew!” and pack up and go back to her parents—or something like that. Also, he recalled, this non-Jewish girl would be too skinny and give no milk. His mother always gave him advice of questionable usefulness, but he imagined it must have been really great stuff to know in Russia in 1942.

  “Nobody’s born a silkie. Being a silkie is a—a sexual preference. If you develop a taste for human guys, well, then it can happen.”

  Yigal was actually crying.

  Mary tried to cheer him up. “It might only take three or four years. Seal pups grow fast. I’ll take her to a harbor with cafés, where she’s sure to see lots of cute waiters and stevedores . . .”

  “So in four years,” Yigal sobbed, “I might get to see my fifteen-year-old daughter—what if it’s a boy?”

  “There are no boy silkies,” Mary said. “At least not to speak of.”

  “So he’ll be a seal. Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “You’re kidding, right? How can you be mad at me? I told you everything!”

  “Like hell you did!” Yigal grabbed a towel off the rack and stuffed it in his backpack. He was muttering obscenities to himself in Arabic. Mary turned on the TV. After he left, she curled up in a little ball and cried herself to sleep.

  Zohar was talking to journalists in the bar of the Hilton in Kathmandu. “It was nothing,” he said. “Don’t forget, for the first two thousand miles I had a car.”

  They all sat scribbling in their notebooks. One asked, “What did you eat?”

  “I depended on an Israeli invention, the world’s most compact and nourishing food, nutritionally complete and aesthetically satisfying, color coded for mnemonic purposes—pink for breakfast, green for lunch, yellow for dinner—so that even in the utmost extremity of deprivation, the Israeli is able to eat regular meals. I am referring, of course, to the world-famous ‘Kokos,’ pioneered by our industry, if I am not mistaken, in the desert town of Be’er Sheva in 1961.”

  “Can you show us what you mean?”

  Zohar pulled a pink Kokos from his pocket.

  “Breakfast,” a journalist said, nodding.

  “Yes, it was just about breakfast time when I saw the llama caravan pause at a glacial stream eight thousand feet below me on the icy steppe.”

  “Ooh,” the journalists said in unison. Zohar took out an Israeli Swiss army knife, made in China, with the awl and can opener broken off, and cut the Kokos into six pieces.

  “Astounding,” a journalist said, chewing thoughtfully. “Do you like pancakes?”

  “Yes,” Zohar replied.

  “That’s great, great,” said the journalist. “Our readers really go for a guy who likes pancakes.”

  “Although I am known chiefly for my prose-poetry, my first loves have always been those of the common people, such as your readers: pancakes, olive oil, Peter Handke, Krembo, Raymond Carver, Tetris—are you getting this down?”

  “You’re going a little fast. Who’s Krembo?”

  Zohar realized he was losing their attention and said, “It’s a sort of pancake.”

  “Great, great,” the journalists responded. “Another bourbon? How’d you get out of Bhutan? Mr. Eitan? Where’d he go?” Suddenly, Zohar was nowhere to be found. Even the last slice of Kokos had vanished. Zohar was seated comfortably in a taxicab, on his way to the airport for a flight to Bangkok.

  Then I had a sudden insight: What if Shats’ Sailing Toward the Sunset employs less complex, easier Hebrew in the middles and ends of chapters than at their beginnings? Most authors start writing in a high, dense literary style and slack off gradually—why not Shats?

  I opened his book at random and was instantly rewarded with a perfectly comprehensible passage about some guy named Taylor, who is hitting on some girl. “You could take off your clothes and sit on my lap,” he suggests to her, in his mind, before beginning to speak. The Hebrew is alarmingly straightforward, and I can put no other interpretation on it.

  The guy named Taylor was standing behind Mary in line at a liquor store on Madison Avenue the next morning around eleven. He was an up-and-coming toothpaste executive in a blue suit and a yellow tie. She turned around and looked hard at what he was buying. “Why so much rum?” she finally asked.

  “It’s this stupid office party we have every year for the interns—the Equinox Luau.”

  “Wow, that’s dumb.” She looked down at the bottle of champagne in her hand. “I don’t know why I’m buying this. I’m pregnant.” She set it on a corner of the counter and put the twenty-dollar bill back in her pocket.

  Taylor, who had been in the middle of thinking, “You could take off your clothes and sit on my lap—” but had suddenly stopped, said, “They have milk to
o, in the back.” Mary fetched a carton of milk and stood in line behind him. “Go ahead, I’m not in a hurry. I have the whole afternoon off to get ready for this stupid party.”

  “What else do you have to do?”

  “This is it.”

  “Want some help? My husband just abandoned me in a cheap hotel and I’m feeling sort of lonely. I couldn’t get a flight back to Israel before the day after tomorrow.”

  “Do you know where he went?”

  She shook her head. “England, maybe? Or he might be riding back and forth on the L train, or the 7, or maybe the G.” She set down the milk and wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “It’s so sad.”

  Taylor paid for her milk, picked up his case of rum and stepped outside to hail a cab. “Listen,” he said, “I’ve got to go, but I wish you the best of luck. My advice is, you go back to the hotel and wait for him. I’m sure he’ll turn up. Taxi!” He turned toward the street.

  “My husband leaves me alone and pregnant in a strange city, and you think you can make it all right by spotting me $1.49?”

  He was embarrassed, and lowered his voice. “That’s not exactly what I was thinking. But now that you point it out, I guess that’s what I did. Would you rather pay me for the milk?”

  Mary opened the milk and poured it into the gutter. White and slightly viscous, it gathered particles of soot and gravel and a green note of antifreeze as it flowed to a crack in the cement and out of sight.

  Taylor watched it in silence. He was not actually an insensitive guy. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Do you have money for food and the hotel until your flight?”

  “I have plenty of money. I was just lonely . . .”