by Nell Zink
Adolescente fui en días idénticos a nubes,
Cosa grácil, visible por penumbra y reflejo,
Y extraño es, si ese recuerdo busco,
Que tanto, tanto duela sobre el cuerpo de hoy. . . .
Roughly, “I was adolescent in a haze of delicate confusion, but the remembrance brings only pain to the body I have now.”
Soon after, Yigal and Mary began having their big fights about prenatal care. I would hear the door rattling and there would be Meyer, dusty from the stairs, pushing to be let in. From below I could hear Yigal shouting about folic acid and ultrasounds.
Meyer nestled into my arms and looked up gratefully. His new eyes were neatly picked out in blue-and-white embroidery floss, and he had a tiny red line for a mouth. All his ruptures were neatly darned, and he wore a different outfit every day. He lived in the box, which he had rigged up with a washcloth for a door, and spent most of his time listening intently to talk radio call-in shows.
I was beginning to show the strain of separation from Zohar. When he called I found his excuses increasingly thin. Our conversations—at least on my side—became sarcastic. “The Cubs in the World Series? When hell freezes over! Can’t you do any better than that? How about some lost Schubert songs discovered extant as microscopic fragments in recycled newsprint papering the ladies’ room of a bell tower in St. Petersburg?”
“Actually, Nell, you’re not far from the truth—”
I screamed. I heard Meyer’s characteristic thud as he hit the floor downstairs and ran to safety on the balcony. Sometimes I wondered if instead of giving him eyes, we should have sewn his ears shut.
“I’ve been invited to examine a piano that has not been touched since it was played by Chopin. It’s been enshrined, more or less, in the drawing room of a mansion in Bydgoszcz. The youngest daughter in each generation is entrusted with ensuring that—”
“That’s it, Zohar. Make up your mind. It’s him or me.”
There was a long silence. “I’ve been writing some prose-poetry,” he said. “About my students. There’s a recurring image that haunts me—mechanical cockroaches.” He blew his nose.
I was moved by pity and asked, “Did you know Elad Manor is seeing that little nympho you were so crazy about?”
“Elad Manor? He couldn’t fuck his way out of a paper bag!” I sensed Zohar’s machismo emerging again from the cocoon where it had briefly sheltered, unable to thrive in the touchy-feely, romantic atmosphere of an American sports team. “Elad Manor hasn’t done anything worth mentioning since Sailing Toward the Sunset, and that was, what, let me see, almost six weeks ago. Elad Manor is washed up. By next week nobody will remember the name of Elad Manor, except maybe that ungrateful minx—she’ll remember him every time she takes her penicillin—did you see him?”
“Yigal saw him read at Beit Haomanim.”
He gagged. “If I were Avner Shats, I would put out a contract on Elad Manor.”
“Zohar, think what you’re saying! Avner knew the risk going in. He knew if he let Elad lay claim to his poetry, Elad would probably end up with ten or twelve beautiful teenaged lovers—he told me so himself. Avner knows the seductive power of words, unlike some other people I could name who write obsessively about mechanical cockroaches. Anyway, you should hear what Elad is writing now. I hate it when people write about war. It’s such a cheap effect. Of course, everybody worships him. Amos Oz is saying he’s going to shoot himself on television so Elad can be the new prophet of Eretz Israel, or something like that.”
“I must come home,” Zohar said. “My country needs me. Expect me soon. Give my love to the eerie little bear.”
“Meyer,” I said. “Good-bye, my love! Until tomorrow!”
CHAPTER 22
SUMMER TIDES HAVE STRIPPED MUCH of the sand from the beach below the Roman city of Apollonia, and Zohar and I often walk there now to seek pretty shells and Phoenician mosaic tiles. On Saturday as I skirted the waterline, a narrow black form caught my eye, a digital watch which proved to be exactly identical to Zohar’s, but one hour faster. Crusted with salt and worn smooth by the action of the waves, it had apparently functioned in the Mediterranean for three months, since the end of daylight saving time.
As Sailing Toward the Sunset flirts ever more promiscuously with satire, I often think of Ödön von Horváth’s beautiful novel Youth Without God, and its injunction to abandon ridicule in favor of sincere praise of that which is highest. Why then should I hesitate to reveal the brand name of the heroic wristwatch? If it did not in fact survive three months in the bitter waters of the ancient and historic cesspool, it can only have come to us via the Suez Canal. Perhaps a fish coughed it up on the beach, like Jonah; perhaps it fell from an Indian freighter; very possibly, waterspouts were involved. Whatever its origin, I stand in awe of the Casio F91W, our gift from the sea.
As William Blake once wrote,
Mock on, mock on, [Avner], [Nell];
Mock on, mock on; ’tis all in vain!
You throw the [watch into the sea],
And the wind blows it back again.
And every [watch] becomes a gem
Reflected in the beams divine;
Blown back they blind the mocking eye,
But still in Israel’s paths they shine.
Mary pulled her beret down over her ears and shivered. We were sitting outside in the shade at the café downstairs. I hadn’t seen her in several days. Her nose was red from crying.
“What’s wrong with Yigal? Is he crazy?” she moaned. “He wants me to stay here and never leave, and he wants to raise his child himself, and he wants me to get all these tests to make sure it’s okay—it’s a seal pup, all right? How okay is that?”
“Maybe it’s you he’s worried about.”
“Then he should let me go! It’s not me, it’s his pup. Ever since I’ve been pregnant he’s so possessive. Except when he ran off, did I mention that?”
“You did.”
“He ignores me now. He spends all his time model railroading with Meyer. He never touches me except to do this weird listening, palpating routine like he thinks he’s some sort of obstetrician.”
“Listen, Mary,” I said. “You have to put yourself in his position. He just lost his job, he’s in love with a seal, and he’s living with an ersatz Winnie-the-Pooh he raped and abandoned. He doesn’t feel he has any control over his environment, so he’s trying to control what he can, like your diet and the model railroad. Don’t you think it makes him feel good, when the little train goes around and around, and he can make it go faster and slower?”
“I guess,” she sniffled. “The train is great. Meyer loves it too. You know, Meyer’s an odd character.”
“Yes?” I encouraged her. I wanted to know what she found so unusual about Meyer.
“What I mean is, he’s completely independent, yet there’s nothing he can do for himself. If he wants to see a book, you have to open it for him and turn the pages. But if you didn’t open it, he’d be fine. He has his house, and his radio. Except that he’s so cute, and tragic, and Yigal feels really guilty, so he just sits there all the time, watching him, waiting to see if he wants something, trying out different things to see if he likes them . . .”
Just then, two floors up, Meyer sat on the carpet studying an aerial view of the Temple Mount. He indicated to Yigal that he needed a better map. Yigal opened a file cabinet and found a tourist guide to the Old City of Jerusalem. “Something more detailed?” he asked. “Are you looking for something for driving, or as a pedestrian?” Yigal turned the pages one by one until they arrived at the City of David, at which point Meyer nodded and looked fixedly at the model railroad. “You want to go to Jerusalem on the train? It’s too late to go today. Is tomorrow all right?” Meyer nodded again. As Yigal lifted the phone to call for the train schedule, he added, “Are you sure it wouldn’t be okay to drive?”
Then he saw, stuck to the bulletin board with a pin, the Order of Har-Zion. With a flash of insight, his brief ps
ychogenic fugue ended as it had begun.
He turned and stared at Meyer. “Mind if I look in your house? Yes? Well, I’m looking anyway.” Yigal lay down and lifted the washcloth. He felt around inside until his hand encountered something heavy and rectangular. “Meyer, what the hell is this? Is this, or is this not, the box of Kalashnikov cartridges I thought I had lost?” Meyer looked at the floor. “Meyer, you have been a very bad bear, and you are not going to Jerusalem tomorrow.” Yigal kept feeling around inside Meyer’s house until he found a shiv, several lengths of wire, a perfume bottle, a disposable camera, and almost three thousand shekels in cash. He opened the bottle carefully over the sink. It contained ether. “Bad, bad bear,” Yigal repeated, placing Meyer unceremoniously in a briefcase and locking it shut.
We saw him come out the front door. “Yigal, over here!” Mary waved cheerfully. “Where are you headed?”
“I wasn’t sure,” he said, sitting down. “We have some serious Meyer trouble.” He told the story and concluded, patting the briefcase, “He’s in here.”
Mary was outraged. “How could you do such a thing?!” She snatched the briefcase from Yigal. “What’s the combination? Meyer, Meyer, everything’s going to be fine!”
“No,” Yigal told Mary.
I held her arm to keep her from running. “Wait,” I said. “What if it’s like this: What if this isn’t Meyer at all? What if Meyer doesn’t get any benefit from being animated this way? You say all he does is sit and listen to talk radio, right? Well, what if what he’d really rather do is live on a shelf and be played with every so often? What I’m saying is, maybe this has nothing to do with Meyer.”
She sat down. “Ask Meyer.”
Yigal opened the briefcase and put Meyer on the table, after taking away the letter opener he’d concealed in his tiny underpants. Meyer looked around nervously, then sat down by the sugar. “You ask him, Mary,” Yigal said.
Mary picked him up and he snuggled almost violently against her, trying to lose himself between her breasts. “Poor little Meyer,” she said. “Is this really hard for you?” Meyer nodded. “Would you rather rest?” He nodded again and actually made a sort of tiny whimpering sound, God knows how, but we kept our distance.
“Is it Yigal?” He shook his head. “Is it Moshe?” He nodded. She loosened a thread at his neck and found the edge of the parchment. “Tell me if this doesn’t feel good,” she said, drawing it slowly from between two lumpy wads of cotton batting. Meyer kept nodding and nodding, and then, suddenly, was inert.
We were all silent for a long time. Mary held the name in her hand, reading it over and over, and then said, “That was the saddest thing I ever saw.” She gave Meyer to Yigal, who hugged him, sobbing. The waitress finally noticed him. “Double espresso,” Yigal said through his tears.
“Another large cappuccino,” I added. “Can I see that?” Mary handed me the all-powerful name of Moshe Dayan. “Now what do we do with it? Eating it or rolling a joint with it are definitely out.”
“Do you think it could be improved?” Mary said. “Like, if we tucked it into a good book?”
“What languages do you think it can read?” I asked Yigal. “I like Mary’s idea a lot. I want to start it on some Robert Walser right away.”
“I think this is a case for a demonologist,” Yigal said, “but after what I’ve heard about their general level of expertise, my proposal is as follows.” He stirred his coffee. “First, we need to see what the smallest effective dose is. How big a piece of this name is needed to animate objects? In fact, I don’t think we should be touching it without gloves. It could be influencing our thoughts. There’s some basic information we need before we can formulate an effective disposal plan. Actually, thinking about it, I’d rather just assume that even the smallest particles could be dangerous, which inclines me to favor sealing it in a concrete block and—Nell, didn’t you say your brother has a job dropping things into deep trenches in the Gulf of Mexico?”
“He sure does,” I said proudly.
“Well, that’s my plan,” Yigal concluded. “Concrete block, ocean trench.”
“Except what if the concrete block rises out of the ocean, flies through the sky, and lands smack-dab on the Dome of the Rock?” Mary asked.
“Oh.” We were silent again.
“And at first everybody thinks it’s a bomb, and then a meteor, but then they crack it open—”
“We get the picture,” I said. “This is a tough one.”
“We could bury it in a mine. Except then it might animate the whole earth.” Yigal was pensive. “We don’t know where it would stop.”
“Maybe all the oil from Saudi Arabia would flow to Tel Aviv and start gushing out of the storm sewers,” Mary suggested. “And it would rain once a week, all summer long. And then giant volcanoes—”
I suddenly thought of a different tactic and interrupted. “It needs to go somewhere where there are safeguards already in place. A political group, say, that’s already frustrated and under surveillance. Make sure it gets into people we know are inept, instead of some heavy object that could prove dangerous.”
They both looked at me and smiled. “Nell’s right,” Yigal said. “That’s genius. And I have a brilliant idea to go along with it.”
“I don’t want to know,” I said.
“Is it that soccer team you hate?” Mary asked.
“I don’t want to say,” Yigal said. “Hey, where’s the parchment?”
We looked all around. “I guess it blew away,” Mary said. Yigal jumped up and ran down the street while I scoured the sidewalk. The name of Moshe Dayan was nowhere to be found.
Mary shrugged. “So what? It’s best of all this way. What can a name do to hurt anybody?”
CHAPTER 23
ALREADY I SUFFER FROM NOSTALGIA and vain regrets, a personal Anxiety of Influence: How can I maintain cohesiveness and unity without falling into pointless rehashing of subjects and characters already flogged to death? I prefer not to think about chapters earlier than yesterday’s, yet I cannot help recalling vaguely an early lament on the attitudes of certain academics toward the ancient Greeks. How I long to rectify my failure to mention the pre-Socratics!
The pre-Socratic philosophers were favorites of Heidegger’s and of all those who believe that when the world was new and fresh, ultimate truth lay floundering on the dock, and all you needed was a bucket. Sophisticated language, you see, tends to obscure our view of things-in-themselves, creating lifetimes of thankless labor for the philosophers of today. Luckily some languages are less obscurantist than others. Pre-Socratic Greek, the theory goes, was chock-full of stunningly accurate common nouns. Only German (Heidegger wrote) can hope to rival its ontological precision.
I took a semester-long course in Greek philosophy and a year’s seminar on Heidegger. Our education in pre-Socratic philosophy consisted of the following statement:
EVERYTHING IS MADE OF WATER.
The professor, a big fan of both Heidegger and the pre-Socratics, said this proved that the pre-Socratics were way beyond Einstein. I tried to rediscover the mysterious statement in a book on the pre-Socratics belonging to Zohar’s sister and lifted from her by Zohar without permission many years ago, but I failed. Although the book was published in 1981, the primary texts are rendered in a vaguely Mishnaic turn-of-the-century Hebrew that mystifies even Zohar. However, I did find a poem by Empedocles in which the words “Zohar” and “Meyer” both appear.
Of Heidegger I learned, not from the hagiographic class discussions but from reading Being and Time in German, that he was an idiot. His etymological curios, so bewitching in translation, flaunt in their transparently moronic original an air of validity on the order of: [Insert here impromptu Heidegger imitation of choice, e.g., “Seattle, we see, is a fine place to sit,” or “The word ‘boring’ suggests a drill-like, twisting action; you will recall from our discussion of ‘screwing’ . . .” or “Poodles come from puddles”].
I was a little sorry, when Zohar ret
urned home late one night, having attended a department meeting on his way from the airport, that he had missed Meyer’s period of activity. Even Meyer’s house was already gone from the garbage pile—
American readers may not realize that when I refer to a “garbage pile,” I am speaking of a literal pile of literal garbage sitting in a shallow pit created by its usual means of removal (a municipal combination dump truck and backhoe). Why these piles are allowed to exist, on conspicuous street corners and in the entrances to public parks, it is not in the purview of this work to say. Leaving its pile, garbage makes a short trip to one of the picturesque “Garbage Mountains” that dot the Israeli skyline. These are conveniently located next to major intersections so that no tourist can miss seeing at least two or three.
—and Meyer sat dimwittedly on a shelf, doing service as a bookend. Zohar threw down his briefcase and embraced me passionately.
“My dear Zohar, you are so cute,” I said.
“Give me a minute. I have to print.” He ran to the computer and inserted a diskette. “My Chicago epic will revolutionize Israeli poetry and chart its development for the next hundred years. Of course, I can’t say it’s about Chicago, and I’ll have to put a naked woman on the cover. I’m thinking of calling it South Lebanon Nocturnes. What do you think?”
“That’s the name of Elad’s new book.”
Zohar fixed me with an angry eye. “Curse him! That scoundrel will pay for this.” From his T-shirt pocket he pulled a half-moon-shaped knife. “Do you know what this is?”
“Darling,” I said, “would you like a chocolate sandwich instead?”
“You don’t know? Here’s a hint: It’s Mongolian—but were you referring to a frozen pita carefully defrosted in a warm toaster oven, split, halved, and stuffed with a generous portion of the ersatz chocolate crème made famous by the native industry of Be’er Sheva in the hallowed year of 1961?” Zohar pulled up a chair and sat down at the kitchen table. “Already I feel my bloodlust melting away. I pardon you, Elad Manor. You will live to write again; your egregious poetry will spatter its blots of shame, which cry out to heaven, upon the Hebrew language without my interference.” He bit the sandwich and turned to me. “Elad Manor,” he added, “owes you his life.”