Drunken Angel (9781936740062)

by Kaufman, Alan

“You’re nice.”

  “Maybe. I’m sure only that I don’t belong anywhere. And, I sense, neither do you. In fact, I’m sure of it.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Alan.”

  “I’m Helka.”

  I didn’t offer the usual pleasantry. We sat silent for a time, gazed at the fire-silhouetted partyers clapping and swaying, singing and dancing—normal ones with a sense of place, who felt they belonged wherever Fate put them.

  Then I stood up, offered her my hand, pulled her to her feet, and went off with her to find a spot in the desert where we could merge, disappear from ourselves, our estrangement from everything, at least for a while.

  16

  SOON, THE KIBBUTZ WAS BUZZING ABOUT OUR affair. Everyone knew everything about each other. Privacy did not exist. The kibbutz men grinned suggestively and clapped my shoulder and said: “Hey, Alan. How’s Helka?”

  “Up yours,” I’d say with a smile.

  They’d laugh: “You’re a good boy, Alan! A man who gets to the point!” A very high compliment in Israel.

  She asked to read my published short stories, poems. Their content mattered less to her than the fact of their appearing in print, and she regarded me with unconcealed awe, submerged in her own world of delusions. “You’re the first writer I’ve ever met.”

  “And the last, I hope.” Adding: “For your sake.”

  She hesitated, unsure of how to respond. I didn’t really know myself exactly what I meant. Was always blurting out dramatic-sounding, bitter, often cryptic or contradictory pronouncements from off the top of my head, trying to seem profound or bizarre but also hoping to accidentally hit on something that might ring true, about myself, about anything whatsoever. I was woven into a fabric of lies and illusions so long-standing that I couldn’t tell where I began and the fabrications left off. In effect, I had become a living, walking, talking lie—my very existence an ambulatory falsehood.

  When alone, I could detect nothing within myself that I could quantify as depth or substance. In private soundings of my innermost self I heard only echoes of ricocheting emptiness, a hollow nightmare of synaptic distress signals. Or else felt flat-out void, seemed to have the emotional and intellectual texture of a protozoan or a basic protein.

  For this reason I read voraciously. Books filled my vacant psychic well with content: social codes, subtleties, perspectives. I had an aptitude for absorbing and regurgitating quantities of commentary, ideas, tastes, preferences, attitudes, drawn from whatever book I happened to be immersed in at the time. I would be Faulknerian one week, Hemingwayesque the next, and Hamsun-like the week after. Even my ways of speaking changed to reflect these shifts in reading.

  I read not for amusement or even knowledge but to draw from language regiments of details with which to reconstruct myself from day to day. Should days go by when I read nothing, there was no me, no one home. Sat and said nothing, numb, for all intents and purposes dead. But the glue that held me together, cemented the details, was booze. And that was blessedly plentiful on kibbutz, easily obtained. The commissary sold brandy, vodka, beer, wine, as much as I needed.

  I needed a lot. Chose vodka for its low-cost lethal efficiency. A fifth, diluted and imbibed by the glass at regular intervals, could get me through a couple of days. Vodka was the blackness that filled the vast interregnums between my dead star constellations. Without it, there was no one home. Nothing more terrifying than to find yourself alone at home with no one home.

  In this regard, Helka, who was also a hodgepodge of self-invention—an emptiness with eyes assembled from mostly cliché sources—was like a figure from a familiar novel whose plot I knew by heart. She didn’t have a reflex that I could not anticipate. I saw clearly what she chose to believe about me and could easily fill in the blanks with dialogue, attitudes, airs that perfectly fit the roles she had assigned me. I was the tragic gifted American writer experiencing foreign cultures for the first time—an important step in my personal and artistic development. She, the fascinating lover whom I met en route to fame and someday would write about, the beautiful and moody enchantress who taught me the true meaning of love in a foreign land rocked by war, a mirror in which I could now see myself as I never had before. I could practically write the jacket copy for this turgid and tiredly cliché narrative.

  There was more. She was scheduled to return to Finland in three months. She could return home alone, back to her lonely twenty-nine-year old life as an anonymous secretary, or remain with me in Israel. Or, possibly, return in triumph to her hometown, Helsinki, with a handsome young American writer husband in tow. Who knew where it could lead? Finding Helsinki too much the backwater, we might decamp for New York. The way lay open to a big adventurous life, with moppet-haired little Jewish-Finnish tykes running about underfoot as she knitted scarves and mufflers for the clan and I hammered out my novelistic masterworks.

  I lay on a cot in my cottage, whiling away yet another afternoon sipping vodka with a novel by August Strindberg spread on my chest. Outside the door, some faded tough stalks of grass poked through the dusty ground. The sound of work boots on gravel crunched past. The air smelled of cowshit. I sipped more vodka. Helka’s dream was a pretty picture. But she didn’t understand me. Pounding out whole books—that wasn’t about to happen anytime soon. The way ahead would be longer and harder for me than for most. I was earmarked for cosmic martyrdom. Could not even count on a James Dean–like early victory and quick, legendary death. My bones moved slowly. My brain stuck on rutting. My writing, I knew, was immature. I was incapable of sustained effort. I sipped the vodka, let it dribble down my chin as a sign of my ingrained rugged bachelor independence. Wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, a free adventurer. Noted with satisfaction the vodka that had soaked, staining, into my T-shirt. Mingled with my unwashed skin, it made me reek like a Bowery hobo. Family with her? Fat chance.

  Helka might have proved a perfect wife for a career, if only there were something to sacrifice oneself for. But there was nothing. An infrequent story or poem or article I cranked out on a whiskey high, because at dusk the light in my room turned a certain shade of blue or a line in a poem sent shivers down my back, caused me to pick up the pen in response. But there was no programmatic pursuit of my art, no particular theme I wished to express. Virtually everything I wrote was in some way Jewish or Holocaust-related, but there was no coherence in my approach. I still believed in the lie of inspiration—that one must be struck by holy fire. Keeping fixed hours, a set routine, something I’d read about in numerous interviews with famous authors, was, to me, repellent. That worked for them. I was different. God’s messenger, a hidden genius, I’d show them.

  The idea of pursuing a single task over an extended time filled me with gloom. In fact, I was loath to finish anything whatsoever. Stories or poems or jobs or relationships—the moment I could foresee the outcome, I lost interest. In this respect, I told myself, I was a true avant-gardist. It never occurred to me that my distaste for endings concealed a phobic fear of loss and death. So that even as I did all in my power to traduce love the moment I had it, the prospect of losing the woman inspired nightmare feelings of fatal abandonment. Endings equaled the grave. I did not want lines of existence to travel from point A to point B: preferred that they remain indeterminately fixed in limbo.

  17

  FOR THE NEXT FEW WEEKS HELKA AND I MADE love with unhappy urgency anywhere we could grab some solitude. Sex became our creative act, our cultural statement.

  Once, after a tough day hauling fish in nets across the kibbutz fishponds, naked and knee-deep in mud, I found Helka stretched out lounging in a nearly invisible bikini beside the swimming pool. Stood over her, reached down, pulled her to her feet and marched her off to a spot behind the volunteer quarters. Was so excited that my hands shook as I positioned her to take my thrusts, the crushed swimsuit so flimsy that I pushed it aside and entered her with a groan of shuddering pleasure. “I love you,” I whispered into her soft, curving ear. Sh
e held me so tight. “I love you too, Alan!” she gasped.

  We made love at night out near the orange groves and behind the cowshed. We made love too in a piano practice room, after which she took me home and fed me sandwiches of fresh-baked challah bread and canned smoked reindeer meat sent to her in a parcel by her parents.

  We drank a lot. Even she, a heavy boozer, remarked on my intake, though now I drank less than usual, substituting sex for drink. She was my new drug, my martini on legs. All day I worked in the fishponds and in the afternoons banged Helka. The more we balled, the more I wanted. Once was not enough. Twice, three times a day, until I was not only spent but drunk on our bodies’ chemicals. My eyes wore a fixed, listless look. Helka began to bore me. Or rather, I became sick of the roles I played around her—my affected personae of jaw-clenched existential torment, all-knowing silences. Didn’t want to analyze Camus, Beckett, Hamsun, Strindberg—authors she had not only read in depth but had dreamed of someday discussing with an erudite lover, and here I was. But after a few weeks of nonstop lust, all literary pretense fell away. My tongue did not want to discourse on A Doll’s House; craved, instead, to tease her clit.

  No fool, Helka took note. In her residential cottage, on her cot, we were half clothed, wound tight around each other, my aroused member prodding and probing. Her hand reached up and gently stroked my cheek as she pulled away.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  She gazed up into my face, studied my eyes, smiled warmly, and said with undisguised sadness: “You make it very hard to get to know you. What are you afraid of?”

  Felt a mild sense of panic. For the first time imagining that in my eyes she could sight tight ovals of depthless fear. And again had the experience that I’d had with every woman I’d known. As if the whole were fast-forwarded through a life of scenes, I could see clear through, right to the end: the two of us aging, white-haired, kinder, the lines around our mouths softening into the inevitable physical surrender to death.

  But I didn’t want to grow kinder. Wanted to become more savage, pitiless, steely. Could see it all, every Kodak color page of the photo album of our wedded lives—the friends and holidays, special family dos, retirement trips abroad, honorific ceremonies for work well done. All of it sickeningly predictable. My heart fiercely protested, didn’t want to know the end; begged to be shown album pages of an indecipherable sort, a book not of standard watershed moments but of inscrutable mysteries.

  I could not bring myself ever to say to any woman that this is what I saw—an inexhaustible round of dinners and nature walks, doctor’s visits and grocery runs. The classic smiling snapshots of heads touching before the Eiffel Tower, waves from a gondola, creeping up with Nikons on silverback gorillas, the whole boring khaki shorts-clad suburban bullshit that passes for meaningful experience sickened me. Smiling heads posed in bouquets of joy were a happiness that vanished one moment after the shutter clicks, as they all returned to their socially programmed preset flight patterns to the family-package funeral plot.

  What else a life could be I didn’t know: another reason for my sunken-hearted certainty that no woman would be mad enough to risk the ride. And yet I’d hope, though I bitterly knew love that is an adventure was not possible at a certain point, once the routines set in. At best, all I could do was get aboard the Van Gogh boat, sail away alone. But the loneliness was killing. And my response was to drink heavily.

  At the heart of me there lay the soul-crushing example of my parents. Recalled how as a boy of eleven I sat on the edge of my bed, fist clenched, cheeks and arms covered in welts, eyes burning with tears and swearing to God that so long as I lived I would never marry.

  Soon after our little chat, I went to a Purim bash with Helka. On Purim, the Jewish answer to Halloween, one is mandated, by holy writ, to get riotously drunk. I did. Don’t recall much except that I found myself behind a shed, atop Helka, her naked ass in dung-smelling mud and me blindly grunting away. “Alan,” she kept saying. “Alan. Please. Alan.” If she wanted me to stop, I couldn’t tell. But it felt like rape in the dark. I finished off a bottle of vodka and left her there, passed out, undressed, and stumbled off. Don’t recall the rest of the night.

  The next day, her eyes accused. I loathed to be near her and, equally, despised myself. I withdrew. Some kind of mechanism asserted itself: an old familiar one. The more you loved me, the less I cared. The closer you came, the farther I ran. And why was she calling my name that Purim night, again and again, in such a tone of quiet urgency?

  Even the other kibbutzniks noticed her blues. Remarked the cruelty of my smile when responding to their queries. What’s up with you and Helka? She looks so sad. Did you two fight?

  I studiously avoided her. She sent notes; I tore them up. In the communal dining room, I sat apart, and after a meal, hurried out. If she knocked on my cottage door, I didn’t answer. If I saw her approach, I turned down another path. I avoided the pool where she often hung out.

  She sent two Swedish girls as emissaries to plead with me on her behalf. I told them that I no longer loved her and that they should tell her so.

  “You should tell her yourself, coward!” one of them spit.

  Knowing that she was right, I didn’t reply. Instead, accepted a friend’s invite to stay in Jerusalem. There was an Israeli girl he wanted me to meet. She was, he said, his wife’s best friend, filthy rich, single, artistic and beautiful. If I had any sense, my friend advised, I would marry her. After all, he said, I was a pauper. A girl like that could really set me on my feet.

  18

  HOW UTTERLY SOULLESS I HAD BECOME. WITH shame I remember how arrogantly, heartlessly, I exited the kibbutz to bus down to Jerusalem, dressed in freshly laundered and pressed clothes, as Helka stood watching mournfully, her sleepless face haggard. Made my way out through the main gate, past the armed sentry, my heart stiffened against her. Weak, with no core values and with a foolproof escape hatch—alcohol—I was willing to betray the possibility of real love with her in exchange for a free ride on another woman’s back.

  On the bus to Jerusalem, I hummed tunes to myself as the landscape whizzed by. Smoked cigarettes and dozed or dug into my bag of kibbutz bakery cookies and chewed contentedly. Helka really loved me—in my book, a fatal error. My conscience, I told myself, could turn itself off at the first hint of real intimacy. She had come too close, wanted to ensnare me in her agenda. I wasn’t having any of it, had other, bigger fish to fry. Heroics to perform. Books to write. Fame to gain. Also needed a place to crash where I wouldn’t have to break my back in return for board. A place to unwind, write, produce masterpieces. Drink and not work. Justify shiftlessness and manipulation of women in the name of art.

  The Israeli woman, Tsofnat, lived part of the time with her mother, Elia, and four very feral mutt dogs, in an old, sprawling, elegantly decrepit flat in Jerusalem’s Katamon quarter, which had been a front line in the horrific battles for the city during the ’67 war.

  Tsofnat, not nearly as beautiful as my friend had claimed, was pretty in a peculiar, jaundiced sort of way. Had haunted eyes underscored with dark bags that showed bad nerves, and her body was slender but flaccid, her breasts droopy. Not only did she have a faint smudge of hair above her upper lip—for me, a deal breaker—but her legs were defiantly unshaven.

  And yet, there was something morbidly appealing about her. A kind of nervous, aristocratic twinkling. A fallen naïveté reminiscent of Hollywood Southern belles, late-stage Scarlett O’Hara or Blanche Dubois hiding from the lightbulb’s glare.

  In an instant her look would change from darkly introspective, morosely inscrutable, to a very pretty, even charming kind of histrionic liveliness, replete with cheek-fracturing dimples, and her eyes grew big and bright with awe-filled gaiety.

  She was very flattering, made you feel like a knight in shining armor, and it occurred to me that since she was purportedly rich, here was someone that I could manipulate at will. The idea of such dominance aroused me.

  For
my visit she wore a white chiffon party dress with a ridiculous red corsage: an outfit that confirmed for me her full-blown outright eccentricity, an immaturity bordering on psychosis.

  Strangely, this awareness of her probable madness gave me further hope. I realized that only someone crazy could endure life with me. Also, she was rich. This would liberate me from the necessity to support myself, or her. My unwillingness to deal with money matters did not concern me overly. I was, I felt, engaged in a lifetime experiment to see the extent to which I could manage to evade money matters altogether.

  All I required was cigarettes, whiskey, paper, pen, and boots. Foodwise, could live on whatever crap happened to be around, didn’t really mind. Now and then, for lack of bucks, had even spooned dog food into my cakehole. As to clothes, skid-row thrift shops served me fine.

  My reasoning went that given that she had dogs already, what mattered one more head to board, another mouth to feed? I thought myself no better than a feral hound, an opportunistic dog. To live comfortably I required little more than was needed to keep, say, a Great Dane. Surely one more mutt would not be too much.

  Also, I liked her mother, Elia, who, it was evident, had once been, unlike her daughter, a very real beauty. She was fat but still hot: a former kibbutz potter of repute, with ceramic sculptures in such prestigious places as the Hebrew U and Hadassah Hospital.

  Elia had jet-black hair, fierce, barbaric turquoise-blue eyes, perfect features, and a vivacious, keen intelligence that enfolded you in camaraderie and enthusiastic curiosity. She had big breasts that you wanted to rub your face in. Had she not allowed her once no doubt spectacular figure to go so completely and horribly to pot—with a huge belly and a behind that might need a wheelbarrow to transport around—I would have made my play for her instead, blown off the acrid daughter.

  Elia and I were instant soul mates, two against the world. Tsofnat, who had that eerie, almost telepathic, insight typical of borderline schizos, grasped her exclusion. I had nothing to say to her. It was Elia I wanted to hang with.