Amos Oz

The Same Sea

A Note on Pronunciation

One point that was impossible to convey in the translation: the name "Albert"

is pronounced as in French (with a silent t) by everyone except Bettine, who

pronounces it as it is written, with the stress on the second syllable.

Nicholas de Lange

A cat

Not far from the sea, Mr. Albert Danon

lives in Amirim Street, alone. He is fond

of olives and feta; a mild accountant, he lost

his wife not long ago. Nadia Danon died one morning

of ovarian cancer, leaving some clothes,

a dressing table, some finely embroidered

place mats. Their only son, Enrico David,

has gone off mountaineering in Tibet.

Here in Bat Yam the summer morning is hot and clammy

but on those mountains night is falling. Mist

is swirling low in the ravines. A needle-sharp wind

howls as though alive, and the fading light

looks more and more like a nasty dream.

At this point the path forks:

one way is steep, the other gently sloping.

Not a trace on the map of the fork in the path.

And as the evening darkens and the wind lashes him

with sharp hailstones, Rico has to guess

whether to take the shorter or the easier way down.

Either way, Mr. Danon will get up now

and switch off his computer. He will go

and stand by the window. Outside in the yard

on the wall is a cat It has spotted a lizard. It will not let go.

A bird

Nadia Danon. Not long before she died a bird

on a branch woke her.

At four in the morning, before it was light, narimi

narimi said the bird.

What will I be when I'm dead? A sound or a scent

or neither. I've started a mat.

I may still finish it. Dr. Pinto

is optimistic: the situation is stable. The left one

is a little less good. The right one is fine. The X-rays are clear. See

for yourself: no secondaries here.

At four in the morning, before it is light, Nadia Danon

begins to remember. Ewes' milk cheese. A glass of wine.

A bunch of grapes. A scent of slow evening on the Cretan hills,

the taste of cold water, the whispering of pines, the shadow

of the mountains spreading over the plain, narimi

narimi the bird sang there. I'll sit here and sew.

I'll be finished by morning.

Details

Rico David was always reading. He thought the world

was in a bad way. The shelves are covered with piles of his books,

pamphlets, papers, publications, on all sorts

of wrongs: black studies, women's studies,

lesbians and gays, child abuse, drugs, race,

rain forests, the hole in the ozone layer, not to mention injustice

in the Middle East. Always reading. He read everything. He went

to a left-wing rally with his girlfriend Dita Inbar.

Left without saying a word. Forgot to call. Came home late. Played his guitar.

Your mother begs you, his father pleaded. She's not feeling too—

and you're making it worse. Rico said, OK, give me a break.

But how can anyone be so insensitive? Forgetting to switch off.

Forgetting to close. Forgetting to get back before three in the morning.

Dita said: Mr. Danon, try to see it his way.

It's painful for him too. Now you're making him feel guilty;

after all, it's not his fault she's dead. He has a right

to a life of his own. What did you expect him to do? Sit holding her hand?

Life goes on. One way or another everyone gets left

alone. I'm not much for this trip to Tibet

either, but still, he's entitled to try to find himself. Especially after

losing his mother. He'll be back, Mr. Danon, but don't hang around

waiting for him. Do some work, get some exercise, whatever. I'll drop by

sometime.

And since then he goes out to the garden at times. Prunes the roses.

Ties up the sweet peas. Inhales the smell of the sea from afar,

salt, seaweed, the warm dampness. He might

call her tomorrow. But Rico forgot to leave her number

and there are dozens of Inbars in the phone book.

Later, in Tibet

One summer morning, when he was young, he and his mother took the bus

from Bat Yam to Jaffa, to see his Aunt Clara,

The night before he refused to sleep: he was afraid the alarm clock

would stop in the night, and he wouldn't wake. And what if

it rains, or if we are late.

Between Bat Yam and Jaffa a donkey cart

had overturned. Smashed watermelons on the asphalt,

a blood bath. Then the fat driver took offense

and shouted at another fat man, with greased hair. An old lady

yawned at his mother. Her mouth was a grave, empty and deep.

On a bench at a stop sat a man in a tie and white shirt, wearing

his jacket over his knees. He wouldn't board the bus.

Waved it on. Maybe he was waiting

for another bus. Then they saw a squashed cat. His mother

pressed his head to her tummy: don't look, you'll cry out again

in your sleep. Then a girl with her head shaved: lice? Her crossed leg

almost revealed a glimpse. And an unfinished building and dunes of sand.

An Arab coffee house. Wicker stools. Smoke,

acrid and thick. Two men bending forward, heads almost touching.

A ruin. A church. A fig tree. A bell,

A tower, A tiled roof. Wrought-iron grilles. A lemon tree.

The smell of fried fish. And between two walls

a sail and a sea rocking.

Then an orchard, a convent, palm trees,

date palms perhaps, and shattered buildings; if you continue

along this road you eventually reach

south Tel Aviv. Then the Yarkon.

Then citrus groves. Villages. And beyond

the mountains. And after that it is already

night. The uplands of Galilee. Syria. Russia.

Or Lapland. The tundra. Snowy steppes.

Later, in Tibet, more asleep than awake,

he remembers his mother. If we don't wake up

we've had it. We'll be late. In the snow in the tent in the sleeping-bag

he stretches to press his head to her tummy.

Calculations

In Amirim Street Mr. Danon is still awake.

It's two in the morning. On the screen before him

the figures don't add up. Some company

or other. A mistake

or a fraud? He checks. Can't spot anything. On an embroidered mat

the tin clock ticks. He puts on his coat and goes out. Its six now

in Tibet. A smell of rain but no rain in the street in Bat Yam.

Which is empty. Silent. Blocks of flats. A mistake

or a fraud. Tomorrow we'll see.

A mosquito

Dita slept with a good friend

of Rico's, Giggy Ben-Gal. He got on her nerves

when he called screwing intercourse. He disgusted her

by asking her afterwards how good it had been

for her on a scale of zero to a hundred. He had an opinion

about everything. He started yammering on about the female orgasm

being less physical, more emotional. Then he discovered

a fat mosquito on her shoulder. He squashed it, brushed it off, rustled

die local paper and fell asleep

on his back. Arms spread out in a cross.

Leaving no room for her. His cock shrivelled too

and went to sleep with a mosquito on if blood vengeance.

She took a shower. Combed her hair. Put on a black T-shirt that Rico

had left in one of her drawers. Less. Or more. Emotional. Physical.

Sexy. Bullshit. Sensual. Sexual.

Opinions night and day. That's wrong. That's right. What's squashed

can't be unsquashed. I should go and see how the old man's doing.

It's hard

With the first rays of dawn he opens his eyes. The mountain range looks like

a woman, powerful, serene, asleep on her side after a night of love.

A gentle breeze, satisfying itself, stirs the flap of his tent.

Swelling, billowing, like a warm belly. Rising and falling.

With the tip of his tongue he touches the dip in the middle of his left hand,

at the innermost point of his palm. It feels

like the touch of a nipple, soft and hard.

Alone

An arrow poised on a taut bow: he remembers the line

of the slope of her thigh. He guesses her hips' movement towards him.

He gathers himself. Crawls out of his sleeping-bag. Fills

his lungs with snowy air. A pale, opaline

mist is rolling slowly upwards: a filmy nightdress on the curve

of the mountain.

A suggestion

In Bostros Street in Jaffa there lives a Greek man who reads fortunes in cards.

A sort of clairvoyant. They say he even calls up the dead. Not

with glasses and Ouija boards

but visibly. Only for a moment, though, and in a dim light,

and you can't talk and you can't touch. Then death takes over again.

Bettine Carmel, a chartered accountant, told Albert. She is a deputy inspector

on the Property Tax Board. When she has a moment he is invited to her flat

for herbal tea and a chat, about the children, life,

things in general. He has been widowed since the early summer,

she has been a widow for twenty years now. She is sixty

and so is he. Since his wife died he has not looked

at another woman. But each time they talk

it brings them both a feeling of peace. Albert, she says, why don't you go

and see him some time. It really helped me. It's probably an illusion, but

just for a moment Avram came back. Its four hundred shekels and no

guarantee. If nothing happens, the money's gone. People pay even more

for experiences that touch them much less. No illusions

is a current catchphrase which in my view is just a cliché:

even if you live to be a hundred, you never stop searching

for those long dead.

Nadia looks

A framed photograph stands on the sideboard: her chestnut hair

pinned up. Her eyes are a little too round, which is possibly why

her face expresses surprise or doubt, as though asking: What, really?

It's not in the picture, but Albert remembers what pinning

her hair up did to her. It let you observe, if you wished,

the soft, fine, fragrant down on the nape of her neck.

In the photograph hanging in their bedroom Nadia looks

different. More worldly. Fine earrings, a hint of a shy smile

which both promises and asks for

more time: not now. Later, whatever you want.

Rico looks

Kind-heartedness, bitterness, stamina, scorn — these are what Mr. Danon sees

on the face of his son in the photo. Like a double exposure: the clear, open brow and eyes are at odds with the wry,

almost cynical line of the lips. In the picture the uniform broadens the span

of his shoulders, transforming the boy into a tough man. For several years

its been almost impossible to talk to him. What's new? Nothing special.

How are you? Not too bad. Have you eaten? Have you

had a drink? Would you like

a piece of chicken? Give me a break, Dad. I'm all right.

And what do you think about the peace talks? He mumbles some wisecrack,

already halfway out the door. Bye. And don't work too hard.

But still there is a kind of affection, not in the words, not in the photo,

but in between or beside. His hand on my arm: its touch

is calm, intimate yet not really. And now in Tibet

it is almost twenty to three. Instead of investigating further

what's missing from the picture I'll make some toast, drink some tea,

and then get down to work. There's something wrong with this photo.

On the other side

A postcard arrived, with a green stamp: Hi Dad, its nice here, high and bright,

the snow reminds me of Bulgaria in the bedtime stories Mom used to tell

about villages with wells and forests with goblins (though here there are

almost no trees; only shrubs grow at this altitude, and even they appear to do

so out of sheer stubbornness). I'm fine here, got my sweater and everything,

and some Dutch guys are with me — they're really safety-conscious. And by

the way, the thin air somehow

totally changes every sound. Even the most terrifying shout

doesn't break the silence but instead, how can I put this, joins it. Now

don't you sit up working too late. PS On the other side

you can see a picture of a ruined village. A thousand years or so ago

there was a civilisation here that was lost without trace. Nobody knows

what happened.

All of a sudden

Early next evening Dita turned up. Light-footed, out of breath, unannounced

she rang his doorbell, waited. No use, he's not in, just my luck.

When she had given up and was on her way downstairs she met him coming up,

carrying a string bag full of shopping. She grabbed one handle

and so, embarrassed, hands touching, they stood on the stairs. At first

he was a little startled when she tried to take the bag away from him:

for a moment he didn't recognize her, with her

short hair, and her cheeky skirt that almost wasn't there. The reason

I came is that I got a postcard this morning.

He sat her down in the living room. He told her at once

that he too had had a postcard from Tibet. She showed him.

He showed her. They compared. Then she followed him into the kitchen.

Helped him unload the shopping, and put it away. Mr. Danon

put the kettle on. While they waited they sat facing one another

at the kitchen table. One knee over the other, in her orange skirt,

she seemed almost naked. But she's so young. Still a child. Quickly he

averted his gaze. He had trouble asking her whether she and Rico were still

or no longer. He chose his words carefully, tactfully evasive. Dita laughed: I'm

not his, I never was, and he isn't mine, and anyway, you see,

those are just labels. Everyone for themselves. I'm allergic

to anything permanent or fixed. It's better to just let everything flow. Trouble is,

that's a kind of fixed notion too. As soon as you define, it's a mess. Look,

the kettle's boiling. Don't get up, Albert, let me see to it. Coffee or tea?

She stood up, sat down, and saw he was blushing. She found it sweet. She

crossed her legs again, straightened her skirt, more or less. By the way, I need

your advice as a tax consultant. It's like this: I've written a screenplay,

it's going into production, and I've some papers to sign. Don't be mad at me

for taking the opportunity to ask you, just like that. You mustn't feel

obliged. On the contrary, I'll be delighted:

he started to give her a detailed explanation, not as to a client,

more to a daughter. As he clarified things from various angles, his docile body

began suddenly to strain at the bit.

Olives

Sometimes the taste of these strong olives cured slowly in oil,

with cloves of garlic, bay leaves and chillies and lemon and salt,

conjures a whiff of a bygone age: rocky crannies,

goats, shade and the sound of pipes,

the tune of the breath of primeval times. The chill of a cave, a hidden cottage

in a vineyard, a lodge in a garden, a slice of barley bread and well water.

You are from there. You have lost your way.

Here is exile. Your death will come, and lay a knowing hand on your shoulder.

Come, its time to go home.

Sea

There is a village in a valley. Twenty flat-roofed huts. Mountain light,

sharp and intense. In a bend in the stream the six climbers, mostly Dutchmen,

are sprawled on a groundsheet, playing cards. Paul cheats a little, and Rico,

who is out, retires, swaddled in anorak and scarf, slowly inhaling

the crisp mountain air. He lifts up his eyes: sharp sickle peaks.

A couple of cirrus clouds. A redundant midday moon.

And if you lose your footing, the chasm has a womblike smell.

His knee aches and the sea is calling.

Fingers

Stavros Evangelides, an eighty-year-old Greek wearing a crumpled brown suit

with a stain above the left: knee, has a bald brown head patterned with wrinkles,

moles and grey bristles, and a prominent nose, but perfect, young teeth,

and large, joyful eyes: guileless eyes, which seem to see only good. His room

is shabby. The curtains are faded. There's a crooked wooden shutter

secured on the inside with a bar. And a thick blend

of sepia smells heavily overlaid with incense. The walls are covered

with icons, and an oil lamp illuminates a Crucifixion with a very young

Christ, as though the painter has brought Golgotha forward,

so that the miracle of the loaves and the fishes, and the raising of Lazarus

must have occurred after the Resurrection. Mr. Evangelides is

a slow man. He seats his visitor, goes out and comes back twice,

the second time bringing a glass of water

lukewarm. First he collects his fee, in cash, counting the money methodically,

and enquires politely who it was in fact

who recommended the gentleman to him. His Hebrew is simple but correct,

with a slight Arab accent. Are his perfect teeth his own?

Impossible to tell for the moment. Then he asks a few general questions

about life, health and so on. He takes an interest

in Albert's family and country of origin. He maintains that the Balkans belong

both to the west and to the east. He writes all the answers down in detail

in a notebook. He wants to know about those who have gone before,

who and how and when. And who is the deceased who has brought you here

this evening, sir? Then he ponders. Digests. Studies his fingers

for a while, as though mentally checking to make sure they are all present

and correct. He explains modestly that he cannot guarantee

results. A man and a woman, you must surely know, sir,

are a mysterious union: one day they are close, the next

they turn their backs. I must ask you to breathe normally, sir.

Palms up. Clear your mind. That's right. Now we can begin.

The visitor closes his eyes to remember. Narimi narimi the bird said to her.

Then he reopens them. The room is empty.

The light is grey-brown. For a moment he fancies he can make out

an embroidered pattern in the folds of the curtains.

Some time later Mr. Evangelides came back into the room. Tactfully

he refrained from asking how it went. He brought

another glass of water, this time cool and fresh. A pleasant, soothing light

shone from his smiling eyes between the brown wrinkles, the smile

of a bright child displaying milk-white teeth. Treading softly

he saw his visitor to the door. The following day over herbal tea at the office

Bettine said to him, Albert, don't take it to heart, one way or another

almost everybody ends up disappointed. That's the way it is.

He was in no hurry to reply. For some time he studied

his fingers. After I left, he said, just like that in the middle of the street

I saw someone who looked a bit like her. From behind.

You can hear

Bettine sits alone at home after midnight in an armchair reading a novel

about loneliness and wrongdoing. Someone, a secondary character, dies

because of a misdiagnosis. She lays the book

face down in her lap, and thinks about Albert: Why

did I send him to the Greek? I caused him unnecessary pain. And yet

we have nothing to lose, after all. He is living all by himself now,

and I am on my own too. You can hear the sea out there.

A shadow

Vague rumors abound, and half-testimonies too, concerning a gigantic,

almost human creature, that roams alone in the Tibetan mountains.

Single and free. Footprints have been photographed in the snow

once or twice in inaccessible places where even the most intrepid

mountaineer would hardly dare venture. Almost certainly

it is nothing but a local legend. Like the Loch Ness monster

or the ancient Cyclops. His mother, who sat embroidering

almost to the hour of her death, his sad, withdrawn father

who sits night after night at his computer looking for loopholes

in the tax laws, everyone in fact, is condemned to wait

for their own death locked in a separate cage. You too, with your travelling,

your obsession to go further and further away and hoard more

and more experiences, are carting your own cage around with you

to the outer edge of the zoo. Everyone has their own captivity. The bars

separate everyone from everyone else. If that solitary snowman really exists,

without sex or partner, without birth or progeny or death,

roaming these mountains for a thousand years,

light and naked, how it must laugh as it moves among the cages.

Through us both

Before excuse me is this seat taken,

before the color of your eyes, before can I get you a drink,

before I'm Rico I'm Dita, before the fleeting touch

of a hand on a shoulder, it passed through us both

like a door opening a crack in your sleep.

Albert in the night

On the roof her shadow, a slow shadow,

a shadow that is gradually leaving me.

Indoors it is bad. Outside

it is dark. The bedroom at night

feels lower.

Butterflies to a tortoise

At sixteen and a half, in a country town, she was married to a well-off relative.

A widower aged thirty. It was the custom

to marry daughters within the family. Her father

was a gold and silver smith. One of the brothers was sent to Sofia,

to study to be a pharmacist and bring back a diploma. Nadia herself

learned from her mother how to cook and embroider,

make sweetmeats and write neatly. The widowed bridegroom, a draper,

came to visit on Sabbaths and holidays. If asked, he sang wonderfully

in a rich, resonant tenor voice. He was a tall, elegant, well-mannered man,

who always knew what to say

and what to pass over in silence. Nadia's heart

was not in the marriage, because her best friend whispered to her

what love was really like: it must not be stirred until it pleases.

But her parents, patiently, understanding, brought her to another point

of view. Surely to do her duty was also in her own best interest. And they set

a date, not too soon; they wanted to give her enough time

to become accustomed gradually to the widower, who never failed

to bring her a present Sabbath by Sabbath

she learned to like the sound of his voice. Which was pleasant.

After the wedding her husband turned out to be a considerate man

who inclined to a measure of regularity in intimate matters. Every evening,

scrubbed, scented and cheerful, he would come and sit on the edge

of the bed. He started with a gentle word of affection, turned out the light

to spare her blushes, drew aside the sheet, caressed her sparingly,

and eventually rested his hand on her breast. She was always

on her back, her nightdress rolled up, he was always on top of her,

while outside the door the pendulum wall-clock with gilt fittings

slowly beat time. He rammed. He groaned. Had she wished, every night

she could have counted about twenty moderate thrusts, the final one

reinforced with a tenor note. Then he wrapped himself up and slept.

In the thick darkness she lay empty and bewildered

for another hour at least. Sometimes solacing her body herself. In a whisper

she told her closest friend, who would say, When there is love

it feels different, but how can you explain butterflies to a tortoise.

Several times she woke at five, put on a housecoat and went up on the roof

to fetch in the washing. She could see empty rooftops, a patch of forest,

a deserted plain. Then her father and her husband, setting off together

to early-morning prayers. Day after day she shopped and cleaned

and cooked. On Sabbath eves guests came, imbibed and dined

and nibbled and argued. On her back in bed when it was all over

she sometimes had thoughts about a baby.

The story goes like this

After about three years it became clear that she could not give him children either. The widower, sadly, divorced her and married her cousin instead. Because of the shame and grief she was suffering her parents gave her permission to join her brother and sister-in-law who had settled in Israel, and live there under their supervision. Her brother rented a room for her on the roof of a building in Bat Yam and arranged for her to work in a sewing shop. The money she had received from the divorce he deposited in a savings account for her. And so, at the age of twenty, she was a single girl again. She enjoyed being on her own for much of the time. Her brother and his wife kept an eye on her, but in fact it was unnecessary. Sometimes she baby-sat for them in the evening and sometimes she went out with somebody or other to a cafe or the cinema, without getting involved. She was not attracted by the thought of being put on her back again with her nightdress rolled up; and she could easily keep her own body quiet At work she was considered a serious, responsible worker and in general a lovely girl. One night she happened to go to the cinema with a quiet, sensible young man, an accountant who was distantly related to her sister-in-law. When he escorted her home he apologized for not flirting with her; it wasn't because he didn't find her attractive, heaven forbid, but, on the contrary, because he didn't know how to go about it In the past some girls had made fun of him for this, he explained, and he even laughed at himself a little, but it was the plain truth. When he said this, she suddenly felt a sort of pleasant inner roughness at the nape of her neck in the roots of her hair that radiated warmth towards her shoulders and armpits, which is why she suggested, Lets meet again on Tuesday at eight o'clock. Almost joyfully Albert said: I'd like that.

The miracle of the loaves and the fishes

There was also sex for money. It happened in a low-roofed

backpackers' hostel in Kathmandu. She had a dark voice like a muffled bell,

not unlike a fado-singer's bitter wistfulness. She was a tall,

well-rounded woman from Portugal who had been thrown out of a convent

on account of temptation (which she had both committed and succumbed to).

The Saviour had forgiven her. Her trespasses were themselves

her penance and her penitence. Now she took in wayfarers for a modest

charge. Her name was Maria. She spoke some English. She was not young,

her makeup was thick, but her knees were shapely and her breasts

unrestrained. In the tender furrow that crossed the neckline of her dress

a pendant hung, two fine silver lines running down till they met at a cross

that appeared and disappeared and reappeared

at the opening of her dress whenever she moved or laughed or bent over.

The L-shaped room contained only some mattresses, a low cupboard,

a washbasin, an earthenware jug, some tin mugs. The four Dutchmen,

Thomas, Johan, Wim and Paul, drank a strange, sluggish beer

brewed locally from a mountain shrub known as monkey marrow. Rico

sipped it curiously, it was tepid, thick and rather bitter.

For a modest fee she would grant them "grace and favor" in her room. One

at a time, twenty minutes each. Or else all five of them at once,

at a discount. She had a weakness for really young, woman-hungry men

coming down off the mountains: they always gave her such a soft,

maternal feeling. For all she cared they could see her at work. Let them

watch, it would be more exciting. For them and for her. She guessed

at the pent-up rivers of desire accumulated by mountain climbers

up there, in the empty snowfields and stark valleys. There were five of them

and she was a woman, and their desperation

made her feel compassionate too. Now you, come close and just touch me

here, then back off. Now you. Now wait Watch.

She took off her dress slowly, swaying her hips, her eyes lowered, as though

to some sacred chant inaudible to them. The little green cross

hanging on her chest quivered on its silver thread, caressed by her breasts.

Paul snickered. At once she covered up with both hands: no.

This would not do. She insisted: no laughing. Anyone who had come here

to mock could have his money back and go elsewhere. Here

everything was decent and unsullied; there was room for aching bodies

but not for filthy minds. This evening she had a yen for a wedding night:

she would bestow her favors on every groom, then lull them to sleep

on her belly, a she-wolf with her cubs. Just as the Christ

gave His body and His blood—

so she went on, until Thomas and Johan, on either side, sealed her lips.

Rico was last, feeling for her warm soft conch and missing. Her hands

slid down and guided him. He lingered inside for an eternity,

holding back, not thrusting, mastering the surge lest it end

like a fleeting dream. Wherefore the woman Maria was filled with tenderness

as waters cover the sea. As though seized with labor pains,

she clenched him lightly, with descending and ascending contractions:

suckling him and being suckled to the very last.

Back in Bat Yam his father upbraids him

Rebellious son. Stubborn son. I am asleep

but my heart is awake. My heart is awake

and makes lament,

the smell of my son is like the smell of a harlot.

There is no peace for my bones

on account of your wanderings.

How long?

But his mother defends him

His mother says:

My view is different

Wandering is fitting

for those who have lost their way.

Kiss the feet my son

of the woman Maria

whose womb, for an instant,

returned you to mine.

Bettine breaks

— But what more is going to happen between you and me, Albert? Here

we are again on your balcony in the evening. Under the neon light It's not

you and another woman, it's not me and another man,

and it's not two other people either.

Herbal tea. Watermelon. Cheese. It's very nice of you

to buy me a present A silk square. Can you really see me wearing

a thing like this? Round my neck? On my head? I've bought you a present too,

it's a scarf Look: it's pure, soft Welsh wool. Good for the winter. Blue.

Checks. You sit facing me with your legs crossed, talking good sense

about Rabin and Peres. But you never mention her. Heaven forbid. So no one

gets upset.

But who will get upset if you do speak for once, Albert?

Are you worried you'll upset me? Or her? Or yourself? After all, we are

what we are, we're not partners and we're not family. We're not playing

the male-female game. You're sixty and I'm sixty. We're not a couple,

we're just two people. Acquaintances? Friends? Colleagues even? In a way?

An alliance for a rainy day? Twilight affection? Our legs crossed. Mine crossed

over mine, yours crossed over yours. You facing me and me facing you.

I read once that a man and a woman cant be just friends:

either they are lovers, or there is nothing between them. The fact is

I am just as bad as you. I don't say a word about Avram. I'm scared

that if I do talk about him you'll be so embarrassed

you'll run away again.

What is left? Herbal tea. Watermelon. Cheese. Investments.

Indexation. Savings accounts. Funds. Legs crossed, you

and I. Your leg over yours, mine over mine. Careful

with words in case we touch. I'm relaxed

and you are calm. The neon light casts a brightness

on all this. Below the veranda the gravel is dusty.

Forgive me Albert, don't be upset, I suddenly feel

like breaking a glass. There, that's done. I'm

sorry. You will forgive me. I'll sweep it up.

You needn't bother.

In the Temple of the Echo

A letter from Rico to Dita Inbar. Dear Dita, Kathmandu here, and this

is the scene. Going from one temple to another. Mainly out in the country.

I sometimes remember that thing we have, where I'm a nun

and you're a monk. If you can't remember, try. Though there's something

in Tel Aviv that rubs out memories. It's not the heat or the humidity.

Something else. Something more fundamental. Tel Aviv is a place

that rubs things out Writing, rubbing out, while all the time we're breathing

chalk dust Don't wait for me. Have some fun. Find yourself someone

who understands you, someone who's tough on the outside and soft

on the inside, sly in back and refined in front,

who advances on the left while forging ahead on the right, and go

if you can for a building contractor who'll let me live

in the gamekeepers cottage. Don't get mad I'm only trying to say

that here in Tibet you really do remember things. Yesterday, for instance,

in the Temple of the Echo (so called because of an acoustic distortion

that turns a word into a wail, a shout into a laugh), I said your name twice

and you answered me from an underground cistern. Not you actually,

but a voice that was partly yours and partly my mother's. Don't worry.

I'm not mixing you up. She is herself and you are yourself. Take care

of yourself and don't go jumping into any empty swimming pools.

PS If you get a chance, look in on my dad and see how he's getting on.

I don't suppose he's complaining and I'm not either. The light here

is quite pleasant on the eyes, when it doesn't dazzle you.

Blessed

The light is sweet on the eyes. The darkness sees into the heart. The rope

follows the pail. The pitcher was broken at the fountain. The humble settler

who has never settled himself in the seat of the scornful will die in August

of cancer of the pancreas. The policeman who cried wolf will die

in September of heart failure. His eyes were sweet and the light is sweet

but his eyes are no more and the light is still here. The seat of the scornful

has been closed down, and in its place they've opened a shopping mall.

The scornful have passed away. Diabetes. Kidney disease. Blessed

is the fountain. Blessed is the pail. Blessed are the poor in spirit for

they shall inherit the wolf.

Missing Rico

At 7 p.m. in Café Limor with one Dubi Dombrov, a divorced lad

in his forties. He has a habit of panting like a thirsty dog, fast and hard,

through his mouth. His ginger hair is thinning but his bushy sideburns go

exactly halfway down his cheeks. Like a pair of brackets, she thinks, eyeing

his legs as he comes in and sits down, not facing her but by her side,

his thigh almost touching hers. The purpose of the meeting is to talk about

the film. This Dombrov is the number one man in a production company

that does some work with Channel 2, or hopefully soon will. He definitely

doesn't rule out the idea of doing something different, for a change.

Something experimental, like the screenplay Dita has written

and shown him. The only condition is that Dita should find

shall we say four thousand, give or take, and of course Dita herself must take

the part of Nirit. The fact is that while he was reading the script this Nirit

teased the pants off him. In bed at night it's her, only her, that he undresses.

Wet dreams, that's what you've given me, you or Nirit. Cross your heart:

is Nirit you?

And let's be quite clear that I'm serious and I and you and I and I.

He leers lecherously at her breasts — into her mouth he forces

a spoonful of ice-cream and pushes her hand between his legs, so she can

feel for herself what a hard-on she's given him. As big as a donkeys.

Dita pulls her hand away and leaves.

Back in her bedroom alone she unzips her skirt, in front of the mirror

she strips. She looks at her body: its wild, it's new, it turns men on

and it turns her on too. This body wants sex and it wants it

now, this body wants Rico, it does, but how: Rico's not here.

She's got the itch, her body's in charge and she can't resist. Naked

she throws herself down on her bed, into her pillow she buries

her head then rolls herself over as quick as she can and hugs that pillow

as though its her man. She wants to stop but her body says no, it's started

now and it's got to go. She ruffles and tickles his body fur so he'll have

gooseflesh just like her. She buries her face between his thighs and her tongue

plies wildly as her body sighs and she drips with juices like rare perfume

as her body is pierced by a tender tune. Their hands intertwine and she stifles

a groan. He is inside her but she's alone. When it's done, she plants six

little kisses in the soft of her arm for the man she misses, and then as she falls

asleep on her bed she counts to herself inside her head how much cash she has

stashed away and how can she raise the 4k to make a movie out of the script

that she wrote about the love of Nirit. Cross your heart: is Nirit you?

That's a question Dita's not got an answer to.

No butterflies and no tortoise

The forecast, that had promised a chance of snow on high ground,

had not kept its promise. But Nadia, who had promised nothing, appeared

at his door one Saturday morning, in a light-colored frock

with a red scarf round her neck, somewhere between a girl and a woman. Did I

surprise you? Are you free? (Am I free? Oh, painfully free. His heart dissolved

in bashful glee. Nadia. Has come. To visit. Me.)

Albert was renting a room from a childless couple in old Bat Yam. They were

away for the weekend. The flat was all his. He sat Nadia down on his bed

and went to the kitchen to slice some black bread, and came back bearing

a tray with a choice of feta or honey. He paced round the room,

then returned to the kitchen, and chopped some tomatoes to make

a salad so fine and well-seasoned, as though this would convince her

that he was right. He would not let her lift a finger to help him. He made

an omelette. Put the kettle on. Like a man in his element This surprised her,

because previously whenever they went out together to a café or the cinema

Albert had seemed so hesitant and unassertive. And now it emerged

that at home he did precisely what he wanted, and what he wanted was to do

everything himself. She touched his hand with her fingertip:

thank you. Its nice here.

Coffee. Biscuits. But how do you start on love on a rainy Saturday morning

like this, in a shabby room in old Bat Yam in the mid-Sixties?

(In the headlines in the paper on the kitchen table Nasser threatened

and Eshkol warned of the risk of escalation.) The light flickered. The room

was small. Nadia sat Albert faced her. Neither of them knew how to begin.

The would-be lover was a shy young man, who had only ever dreamed

of sleeping with a woman. He dreaded yet wanted it; he wanted it

but was deterred by a faint fear of bodily embarrassments.

His would-be partner, a reserved divorcee, lived in a room on a roof,

sewed for a living, her past was somewhat conventional. She

was no hind and he was no young hart. How and with what

do you begin to love? Nadia sat. Albert stood.

Outside it was raining again, the rain getting heavier, teeming down on rows

of dull grey shutters along the empty wet street; hammering on overturned

dustbins, polishing the panes in the tight-shut windows, pouring down

on rooftops, on forests of antennae trembling in the freezing wind that beat on zinc tubs hanging on grilles of kitchen balconies. And the gutters

grunted and choked like an old man sleeping fitfully. How do you start

love now? Nadia stood. Albert sat.

Through the wall from the next-door flat came the Saturday morning

program on the radio. A musical quiz. Nadia is here but where am I?

He tried to tell her some news from the office, not to break the thread

of the conversation. But the thread was no thread. She was waiting

and he was waiting for whatever would come at the end of the thread.

What would come? And who would make it come? She was embarrassed.

So was he. He kept on and on trying to explain something in economics.

Instead of words like credit side, debit side, Nadia heard, My sister,

my bride. And when he spoke of bulls and bears she translated, You have

doves' eyes. While he was talking she reached for a cushion, and Albert

trembled because on the way the warmth of her breast touched his back.

It's up to me to overcome his fear. What would a really experienced woman

do now in my place? She cut in: apparently, all of a sudden, she had a speck of dust in her eye. Or a fly. He bent over to get a good look. Now his face was close to her brow, she could clasp his temples with her hands, and at last lower his lips for a pleasing, teasing first kiss.

Two weeks later, in her room on the roof between two rainshowers, he asked

for her hand. He did not say, Be my wife, but instead: If you'll marry me

then I'll marry you. Because it was Nadia's second marriage they had a small,

intimate party, at her brother and sister-in-law's home, with a handful

of relatives and a few friends, and the elderly couple in whose flat

Albert lodged. After the ceremony and the party they took a taxi

to the Sharon Hotel. Albert undid the straining hooks one by one

down the back of her wedding dress. Then the bride turned out the light

and they both undressed modestly, in total darkness, on opposite sides

of the bed. They groped their way toward each other. She sensed

she would have to teach him: after all I presumably know

better than he does. It turned out however that shy Albert could teach her

something she neither knew nor imagined: the broad, flowing surge of joy

of one who was shy as long as the light was on but in the pitch dark

was insatiable. In the dark he entered into his own element.

No butterflies now and no tortoise at all, but like a hart panting for water

or a swallow for its nest. His chest to her back, and belly to belly, horse

and his rider and into every breach.

And what is hiding behind the story?

The fictional Narrator puts the cap back on his pen and pushes away the writing pad. He is tired. And his back aches. He asks himself how on earth he came to write such a story. Bulgarian, Bat Yam, written in verse and even, here and there, in rhyme. Now that his children have grown up and he has known the joy of grandchildren, and he has produced several books and traveled and lectured and been photographed, why should he suddenly return to versification? As in the bad old days of his youth when he used to run away at night to be all alone in the reading room on the edge of the kibbutz where he would cover page after page with jackals' howls. An acne-scarred, yellow-haired, angular boy forever swallowing insults, with his high-falutin talk arousing some ridicule and some pity, hanging around the girls' quarters, hoping that Gila or Tsila might want him to read them a poem he had just written. Naively imagining that a woman is acquired by a sermon or a verse. And indeed he sometimes managed to stir something inside those girls that later, in the night, accompanied them when they went to the woods to give and receive love, not with him but with burly haymakers who reaped with joy what he had sown with his words almost in tears. He is almost sixty, this Narrator, and he might sum it up roughly as follows: there is love and there is love. In the end everyone is left alone: those hairy haymakers, and Tsila, and Gila, and Bettine, and Albert, and even the Narrator in question. And he who is climbing mountains in Tibet and she who embroidered in the quiet of her bedroom. We go and we come, we see and we want until it is time to shut up and leave. And then silence. Born in Jerusalem lives in Arad looked around him and wanted this and that. Since he was a child he has heard, impatiently, time and again from Auntie Sonya, a woman who suffers, that we should be happy with what we have. We should always count our blessings. Now he finds himself at last quite close to this way of thinking. Whatever is here, the moon and the breeze, the glass of wine, the pen, words, a fan, the desk lamp, Schubert in the background, and the desk itself: a carpenter who died nine years ago worked hard to make you this desk so that you would remember that you didn't start from nothing. From starlight down to olives, or soap, from a thread to a shoelace, from a sheet to the autumn. It wouldn't be a bad thing to leave behind in return a few lines worthy of the name. All this is diminishing. Disintegrating. Fading. What has been is being gradually wrapped in pallor. Nadia and Rico, Dita, Albert, Stavros Evangelides the Greek who brought up the dead and then died himself. The Tibetan mountains will last for a while, as will the nights, and the sea. All the rivers flow into the sea, and the sea is silence silence silence. It's ten o'clock. Dogs are barking. Take up your pen and return to Bat Yam.

Refuge

Dita is at the door. On her slender back a mountain of a backpack

with another bundle tied to it, clutching some plastic bags

and a handbag: she is seeking refuge, for a couple of days,

a week at most, if it's not an imposition. She's ended up with no flat

and no money, all her savings and everything gone; she found

some kind of producer, got taken for a ride. But why are you standing

in the doorway? You'll fall over. Come inside. Then you can

tell me all about it. We'll have a think. We'll get you out of this mess.

She gulped down a soft drink. Undressed. Took a shower. For a moment she embarrassed him when she emerged wrapped in a towel from mid-breast

to thigh. She stood in front of him

in the kitchen and told him in detail how she had got stung.

And her parents were abroad and their flat was let, she had simply nowhere

to turn. It was no good his staring down at the floor:

the sight of her naked feet

sets his heart at odds with his body.

Rico's room is yours from now on. It's empty

anyway. Here is the bedding. That's the air-conditioning. His wardrobe isn't

too tidy, but there's some room. I'll bring you a cold drink in a minute.

Lie down. Get some rest. We'll talk later. If you need me for anything

just say Albert and I'll be right there. Don't be shy. Or simply come

to my office. It's through there. I'll just be sitting finishing off some accounts.

You're no trouble at all. On the contrary: for some time now—

He stopped himself. Under the towel her hips made a whispering sound

and he was blushing as though he had been caught red-handed.

In the light-groping darkness

A widowed father with an honest name

lies wide awake in the night consumed with shame:

a sleeping woman the cause of his pain.

She's there alone — his eyes are open wide—

next door she's lying naked, on her side.

So young. A child. My daughter, my bride!

He switches on the bedside light and blinks

at his son and wife on the sideboard. He thinks

for a while. Then pads to the kitchen and drinks.

He sits down at his desk and begins to dream

heavy thoughts: his shadow stares back from the screen.

What a difficult summer, he types, this has been.

From the garden outside where nothing has stirred

in the light-groping darkness, a single bird:

narimi narimi. Yes, I heard.

Restless he stands: how he longs to spread

a blanket on her, and stroke her head.

He stifles these feelings, and goes back to bed.

He turns and tosses. Of sleep there's no sign.

He turns on the light and checks the time:

it's five o'clock here — so in Tibet it's nine.

In lieu of prayer

Its nine in the morning now in Bhutan. Without the Dutchmen. On a bench

in a wood the youth sits wrapped in a blanket, absorbing

the mountain shadows among the mountains. A tranquil silence

envelops the view. How empty and strange the light here flows, light

longing for shade. Light shading itself. Wind in the grass. A deserted valley.

True peace shall surely come.

The woman Maria

remembers him: the last of the boys.

His brow. His eyes. The groan as he came.

The touch of his arm and the spring of his seed. When the others had left

he came back and kissed the soles of her feet.

A feather

After four troubled nights he went back to Bostros Street for a second visit

to the old Greek who called forth the dead. True, on his previous visit

all that his money had bought him was two glasses of water, one lukewarm

and the other cool and fresh. And a picture of a crucified Christ-child

looking as though the Crucifixion and the Resurrection had preceded

the raising of Lazarus and the other miracles. As he left he had seen a woman

going down the street who had looked a little like her from behind. This time

he would not give up. He would follow her to the ends of

Mr. Stavros Evangelides, the eighty-year-old sorcerer, his bald head patterned

with brown stains, moles and sparse grey bristles, his Phoenician nose,

big and protruding, but his teeth were young, and his joyful, guileless

eyes, which seem to see only good, looked down at the visitor

from a sepia photograph in a tortoiseshell frame. In his place was a skinny

crow-like old woman with cracked leathery skin and an evil mouth. She

motioned him to sit, claimed her fee, counted the cash, went out, returned,

and handed him a glass containing a viscous liquid with a yellow taste.

While he drank she bent over him. Sweet and terrible the smell of her flesh

hit him, a smell of decay. She waited. Motionless. Her dress was embroidered.

Once or twice her beak opened wide, parched with thirst, closed then opened

a crack. Narimi, she cried harshly and flew away. In his bosom

one black feather remained.

Nirit's love

Dubi Dombrov Productions Ltd. woke up at ten o'clock, sweaty and

thick-headed. He went for a piss, his eyelids still gummed together, then

turned on the tap and washed in cold water. He thought about shaving.

Couldn't be bothered. Put on a rancid shirt from yesterday, and clumsily

groped his way to the kitchen to make some coffee. When he went

to the rack for a clean cup a spider ran away. Why? What's the matter?

What have I done? I'd never harm you, so why are you running away from me?

Barefoot, tired, he sat down to wait for the water to boil and remembered

Nirit's Love, that script by Dita Inbar. And the money. True, it wasn't exactly

honest what I did, but she had only herself to blame, and why did she have to

show me, right to my face, that she found me disgusting, like some lower kind

of scum? Surely even a repulsive man has a right to be attracted to

a woman, has a right to finer feelings which a woman can choose to

ignore, but why must she rub salt in the wound? Why did she have to

show me how disgusted she was? And just when I was thinking that she

was different from all the rest, that she had a higher tolerance.

My fatal mistake was that like an idiot apparently I identified her

with her screenplay, where this Nirit takes pity on a real dog of a man. As for

the money, no one has ever given anything back to me. Everyone has always

taken from me. All I've ever had back has been insults.

A Psalm of David

In a hanged mans house one must not mention that the rope follows

the pail. It is not in vain that a woman is bewitched by a nocturnal shade,

and gives her body to a wandering minstrel in Adullam, or here on the plains

of Bhutan. At your age David of the beautiful eyes did not play the harp,

only with his reed pipe did he make the hinds to dance. And this was the

instrument that drew Michal and Ahinoam and the woman of Carmel to him

like a rope. Such a plain, homely instrument, but maidens were beguiled by

its strange, mournful sound, the ruddy-faced rascal who leaped and danced

and grazed his flocks among the lilies, chasing the wind and deflowering

women whose storm-racked flesh bristled under his hand that was soaked in

the fat of the mighty and their blood, skilled with the sling. So he roamed,

slew, loved, smote his tens of thousands, and so he became king. After many

years, on that great oak tree, the rope followed the pail.

Then came mourning. The house of a hanged man. Then came the harp

of the psalms. Finally came the dagger. How the day has faded. Passed.

Now all is dust.

David according to Dita

How the day has faded. When were we talking about King David,

how did we get to talking about him? Do you remember, Dita? One Friday

night at Giggy Ben-Gal's in Melchett Street. You dragged me out of the party

onto the balcony and at the window opposite a beefy man wearing nothing

but an undershirt and his loneliness was polishing his glasses

against the light, he put them on, saw us watching and shut

his shutters. And then because of him you told me what it is

about a man that attracts you: the Charles Aznavour type, or Yevgeny

Yevtushenko. From them you went on to King David. It attracts

you when there is a needy side, a rascally side and a side

that plays the fool. And you also showed me from the balcony that night

what a ragged sexy city this Tel Aviv is.

You don't see a sunset or a star, you see how the plaster

peels from an excess of adrenaline smells of sweat and diesel fuel a tired

city that doesn't want to sleep at the end of the day it wants to go out wants it

to happen wants it to end and then wants more. But David, you said,

reigned for thirty years in Jerusalem the ultra-Orthodox City of David

which he could not stand and which could not stand him

with his leaping and dancing and his one-night stands.

It would have been more fitting for him to reign in Tel Aviv,

to roam the city like a General (Retd.) who is both a grieving parent

and a well-known philanderer, a loaded high-liver and a king

who composes music and writes poetry and sometimes gives a recital,

"The Sweet Psalmist," in a trendy venue then goes

off to the pub to drink with young fans and groupies.

She comes to him hut he is busy

She has made him some tea and brought him some crackers and olives

and goat cheese on a tray and now here she is barefoot in the doorway

of his room, feeling partly like a daughter and partly like a waitress,

waiting for him to turn his tired head. But he has not noticed. He

is hunched over a document, absorbed in checking the details

of the rotten agreement she has so incautiously signed. She has been

taken for a ride. She had such high hopes. He finds that all she gets

in return for the money is not a commitment but, at best, only

a conditional intent. It is a contemptible contract, yet so full of holes

that even without lawyers there is a fair chance of rescuing her

and putting pressure on him to pay back the money.

Barefoot with her tray she waits for him to notice her. If she calls him

he will start and his voice will tremble. Yesterday evening she said Albert

and he jumped, almost shuddered. What will happen if she touches

his hand, not like a woman but like a child asking

When are you going to stop being busy?

He glances at his watch: ten to five. Ten to nine out in Nepal. He'll

pay it back, and how: we'll scare him. At the meeting

tomorrow we'll point out, here and here, how we'll nail him if he tries

to get clever. On the other hand, if he admits his errors and makes amends,

our side may consider taking no further action on this occasion.

While he is still making notes, the tray arrives with the touch of her hand,

not like a daughter but like a bold schoolgirl, deliberately

teasing a middle-aged teacher who is shy but endearing.

He isn't lost and even if he is

Crystalline silence, transparent and blue.

The wind has died. Over deserted plains

a veil of glassy frost descends.

Cold and empty. Vast. Just over the horizon

according to the map there is a little village.

There is no sign of the village. Perhaps he is lost.

He will press on a little further. If he is lost

never mind: he will give up and go back

silently. The way he came.

The road is level. The frost is fine and bright

Beside the sea his father is waiting

and beyond, in the depths, his mother.

Desire

His father is waiting and so is his mother and Dita is with them

in a strange shack and the woman Maria and the mountain shadows

and the roar of the sea and David and Michal and Jonathan too,

and there is no limit to their passionate longing many waters cannot quench

and mighty rivers cannot drown. See, he is returning to them filled.

Like a miser who has sniffed a rumor of gold

But what is the Narrator trying to say? Is he resentful? Is his blood pounding

or his heart aching or his flesh bristling on the threshold? Here he has made

a list of words: in the word woods there is a vague dread. In the word hills is

a world of lust. If you say shack, or meadow, or wayfarer, rain, compassion,

at once he lights up like a miser who has sniffed a rumor of gold. Or if,

for instance, the evening paper prints the phrase "new horizons," at once

I am on my way to bathe twice in the same river.

Shame

A miser who has sniffed a rumor of gold should wrap himself in dark robes.

Mr. Danon is working as usual compiling balance sheets on his computer

screen. Next screen previous screen. Checking every entry. His heart is not

in it. In vain he clears his mind, he has no refuge from her smell. Her smell

on her towel her smell on her sheets whom did she call whom did she talk to.

Her smell in the kitchen where has she gone where has she gone when

will she be back in the hall her smell in the living room her smell who

has she gone out with what is there between them. Her smell in the bathroom

where has she gone and what if she is taken for a ride again. The smell

of her shampoo. Her smell in the laundry basket. Where has she gone. When

will she be back. She'll be back late. In the Himalayas it's already tomorrow.

Where can I hide from her smell.

He lies in the dark with his life in his hands. Her breasts are so soft, her juice

running over the down of her thighs but he is alone. With half of his pleasure

still warm in his hand he shuffles to the washbasin, shattered. A man

of his age. His son's girlfriend. He should wrap himself in dark robes

but where can he take his disgrace. Tomorrow night he should get out of here

and seek sleep in some hotel. Perhaps Bettine would take him in?

He resembles

It would be interesting to know what she is thinking about now, what is the source of that secret smile, like a drowsy, satisfied cat She is remembering a morning of love in a hotel in Eilat in the springtime. She didn't feel like a swim and she didn't feel like getting up. They stayed in bed with the air-conditioning on, sated with night games, she in half a bikini and he stark naked, their skin still pink and hot from the beach yesterday. Breakfast in bed and a game of rummy, laughing at nothing at all, looking for a rhyme for stowaway. Throwaway. Go away. I stow away, you stowed away, he has stown away. Then, with pencil and paper, listing palindromes. Collapsing with laughter at this too. Noon. Boob. Poop. Toot (As in, toot if you've pooped.) Whoever found a new word could demand a forfeit In the course of this game Dita discovered something she had never noticed before, that Rico could write with either hand. I've never seen anything like that before; let's see now if you can write with your toes. He tried and scribbled and made her laugh. He explained that he was not born ambidextrous, he was actually born left-handed, but his parents made him write with his right hand and even punished him if he didn't Especially his mother, because where she came from left-handedness was considered a handicap, a sign of poor upbringing, the mark of a bad family background. They forced me to be right-handed, and the result is that now I can write with either.

She took them both and placed them here and here, let's see which of them is more left-handed. They ended up playing at deflowering the virgin and seducing the monk, until they fell asleep. Later they showered and went down, famished, to look for a fish restaurant. In the evening they went for a swim. Now, remembering, she wanted him. She went to a film with Giggy Ben-Gal and they ate in a pub, and then went back to his place. When she got back it was nearly one o'clock, but she found the old man waiting up for her. Was he worried? Was he jealous? He made her a snack which she didn't eat because she wasn't hungry. But she sat in the kitchen with him for half an hour and he told her something about how drab life was in those days and even a little, in passing, about Rico's mother. Finally, filled with nocturnal courage, he revealed to her that he had a girlfriend, not exactly a girlfriend, a lady friend, who worked in the Property Tax Board, not a lady friend either really but an undefined sort of relationship. Dita was curious to know whether he had touched his "undefined relationship" yet, but she didn't feel she could ask. Interesting, why did he tell me? It came out as though he was writing a word, rubbing it out, and writing another one on top of it, and that reminded her of his son. And his way of putting his hand between his collar and his neck sometimes for no reason at all, or explaining things as though he were threading beads. Is he left-handed too, but still in the closet? Such a sensitive man. So sweet. I wonder when he ever sleeps.

The Narrator copies from the dictionary of idioms

One who has come through fire and water, his early promise

has come to nothing. It has not come easily to him. He has come to blows.

He has not come up in the world nor has he come into money.

He has come to grief, has come down to his last crust Now

he has come to judgment, and at last he

has come to terms.

A postcard from Thimphu

Dear Dad and Dita. We were cut off yesterday while we were talking. I didn't

manage to tell you how pleased I am the two of you are together at home.

It's good that you're not alone either of you. It's a good solution for you both.

You look after her and you look after him, etc. Cooking and eating

and washing up and taking turns emptying the rubbish. I like this

father-daughter couple thing, this two-track relationship, as if you've gained

a daughter Dad and Mother and I have gained a double. Dad, I expect

you're the one who puts both your laundry in the machine, not sorting it

into his and hers but only into cotton and synthetics. And Dita, I imagine

you're the one who does the shopping for both of you and Dad you make

one of your salads, no mortal hand can chop vegetables finer than you. So

you've ended up with no money and no flat Dita, well Dad, you'll sort

that out for her. And as Mother used to say, every cloud has a silver lining,

and in this case the lining is also fun. Dita I can almost see you sleeping in

my bed, where Dad you come in every night as usual to cover her up, but

Dita you push and kick the covers off again. An anarchist in your sleep.

The opposite of Mother, who even on summer nights wrapped herself up

like a mummy. She wore a blue nightie trimmed with lace. You ought to

ask him if you can wear it one night. You won't refuse her, will you?

It's on the top shelf of the wardrobe, on the left. The little that Mother needs

now she can find with me: she, who could never stand long journeys, who

could never sleep in a strange bed, comes all the way here sometimes,

and naturally I don't tell her to go away.

A pig in a poke

A repulsive fellow with sweaty armpits, he is forty minutes late, he apologizes, Bat Yam is like Bombay to him, his brains dehydrated before he found it, and on top of everything else he's parked illegally. He is oozing good will and wants to settle the whole business in good faith, and even, lets say, make a fresh start. When all is said and done, its nothing more than a little misunderstanding: he will only use her money if and when there is a production, otherwise he'll return every last shekel (after deduction of expenses, etc.). What a pity she's not in: he was hoping to explain to her personally that bygones are bygones, his intentions were definitely honorable. Mr. Danon spoke sternly: the contract was crooked, and not entirely aboveboard from the tax point of view either. As he spoke the producer sat before him, worn-out, sweat-soaked and unkempt, a shamefaced, heavily panting dog, in his forties, his thinning red hair offset by Hapsburg sideburns going down to the angle of his jaw, a woebegone creature whom no woman except his mother had ever touched without an ulterior motive. Mr. Danon fetched a bottle of mineral water and poured a glass and then refilled it While the producer was drinking as though he was dying of thirst Mr. Danon pondered the expression benefit in kind, which contains a hint of corruption but also a touch of desperation. Likewise the word crafty.

Mr. Danon spoke in a tone of polite reprimand, like a pedantic father. The producer listened with his head to one side and his mouth wide open, as though his sense of hearing were located in his throat rather than his ears. At least three times he insisted that he was really an honest man and that Dombrov was a respectable company and that he was sorry to have given the impression. There and then he signed an agreement to return the money in full in two equal installments. Let's say there's a distinct possibility that the film will materialize; she's truly gifted and she's come up with a peach of a script, though not exactly what the market goes for these days. After signing he stayed on for half an hour or so and polished off another bottle of mineral water, talking about the state of the media, which is being ruined by commercialization, which in fact, lets be clear, is destroying everything here. Mr. Danon fetched another bottle, because Dombrov — call me Dubi — displayed a bottomless thirst He insisted on being pleasant and inspiring confidence, prepared to debase himself so long as he made a good impression. He began to expand on an idea he had conceived about the eternal conflict between genuine art and popular taste. So he gained some more time in the company of his paternal host, who appeared to be sensible, attentive, just the way he himself would be happy to appear on the stage of life but had never managed to. And besides, on another matter, tax, for some years now I've had an accountant, Mr. So-and-So, from whom I have never had an ounce of human warmth. Is it out of the question, lets say, for me to put myself in your hands? Be looked after by you personally? That is to say as a client who needs an occasional guiding hand? Actually "guiding hand" might seem to be a religious expression, whereas I am, lets be clear, an ardent secularist, even though there are moments — but that's nothing at all to do with what we were talking about I'm sorry, I've wandered off the point again. I need a guiding hand. Actually I've been like that ever since my wife left me for a well-known singer. And by the way my parents, both of them, were killed in the El Al disaster when I was a child. So that now, let's say at the present juncture in my life, I'm coming to terms the hard way with the fact that I'll probably never be the Israeli Steven Spielberg. A pig in a poke is an expression that generally denotes an unconsidered purchase, but in my case it describes my actual condition, both commercially and personally, or, let's say, existentially. But how did we get on to that? After all, we were only talking about the occasional tax advice and making up my annual accounts.

Mr. Danon apologized, he couldn't take on, overwhelmed with work, etc., but finally, on the doorstep, to their mutual surprise, he suddenly heard himself utter the words Call me, we'll talk about it.

She goes out and he stays in

At six she woke from a heavy siesta. She took a shower

and washed her hair. Stopped in the doorway of his room,

wearing only a wet shirt that did not quite cover her underwear.

I slept like a log and I must rush to work (receptionist

in a hotel). Be a dear and lend me two hundred shekels

just till the end of the week, will you. There's some rice and chicken

in the fridge and tonight after the news there's a program

about Tibet. Will you watch and tell me about it tomorrow?

She combed her hair, dressed and stopped in his doorway again,

I'm off now, bye, and don't you dare wait up for me,

just you go to bed, don't worry, I promise not to take any sweets

from strangers. She blew him a kiss and left him

changing a light bulb in the hall, in deepening gloom.

And when the shadows overwhelmed him

And if she stays out all night what will he do all night, and if she gets back

at midnight and goes straight to bed what will he do while she sleeps?

Tomorrow he'll tell her that her money is safe, that from now on

she is free and he is of no further use. Around nine there was a power outage,

and like a solitary mountaineer on whom night falls in a deserted place

he groped and found a flashlight and shifted the blocks of shadow around.

When the shadows overwhelmed him he gave up and went

to Bettine's, which was also in darkness with only an emergency light

glowing palely by her bed. And as the lights did not come back on

and the emergency light was fading he found himself telling her how

a bedraggled bird had nested uninvited in his flat, and how today he

himself had made sure — why on earth had he done it — that she too

would soon fly away. Reading between the lines, Bettine picked up

his secret and found it partly ridiculous and partly moving and painful. She

took his hand in hers, and they listened to the tossing and turning

of the sea in the depths of the dark, and then came a reaching out, a shy

embrace with no clothing removed, partly for loneliness of the flesh

and partly for grace and favor. Bettine knew from her flesh that he

was imagining another in her but she forgave him: had it not been

for the other, this would never have happened.

A shadow harem

Wisely, firmly, yet gently, he had rescued and retrieved

her lost cash. And what was the outcome? Simply

that in another day or two she would pluck her underwear

off the washing line, blow him a kiss, and vanish. The wrong

had been righted, but an invisible hand, not his own,

certainly not his right hand, possibly his left, had mockingly

frustrated him. Fear not. It was not in vain. With her going, the shade

of the dead one will surely return to be with you.

And hers too. The shades of two women. And Bettine as well.

A shadow harem under the shade of your roof.

Rico considers bis father's defeat

Dad's sitting reading a paper. Dad's watching the news headlines.

His face is pained, like a disappointed teacher: reprimanding, chiding

the state of the world whose antics really go

too far. The time has come to take steps. He has

made up his mind to respond severely.

My father's severity is ineffectual. A poor mans severity. Weary fading

powerless. Instead there is a touch of sadness about him, an air of

resignation. He is not a young man. He's just a humble citizen.

What difference can he make

with his puny cane. And sometimes my father quotes the verse:

As the sparks fly upward, man is born unto labor. But what is he trying

to say to me? That I should fly upward? Or get a job? Not to fight

lost battles? My father's severity. His defeated shoulders.

Because of them I left. To them I shall return.

Rico reconsiders a text he has heard from his father

And there's another great text in Job that he quotes to me

so that I'll remember that properly and possessions are

not the most important thing: Naked came I forth from my mother's womb

and naked shall I return thither. So what is the point of the race to amass

and hoard so-called belongings. My father is blind

to the hidden secret of this verse: her womb

is waiting for me. I came forth. I shall return. The cross on the way

is less important.

The cross on the way

He circles aimlessly around. And returns. Between one sleep and the next

he barely wakes. He travels from village to remote village. A day here a day

there. He meets Israelis, what's new back home, and falls asleep. He meets

women, exchanges a first signal and gives up. Like a tortoise.

On his travels he has crossed three or four maps. So what if he crosses

yet another, more valleys. Another climb. This view has run out.

His money too, almost. With a little luck he'll make it to Bangkok,

where the money his father sent is waiting. And then Sri Lanka. Or Rangoon.

In the autumn he'll go home. Or not. By a feeble light in a hostel, lying

neither sleeping nor waking, like an invalid waiting for it to become clear

one way or the other, seeing on the sooty ceiling stains of mountains

suspended between one shadow and the next. Not to climb but to find

a way in, or a way through, an opening, or a narrow crack, through which

Seabed bird

Shortly before my death a bird on a branch enticed me.

Narimi its feathery down touched me wrapped all of me

in a marine afterbirth.

Night after night, my widower weeps on his pillow, where has she gone

whom my soul loves. My orphan child is wandering far, conjuring omens.

Child bride you are their wife, you have my nightdress,

you have their love. My flesh is wasted. Set me as a seal.

He hesitates, nods and lays out

He returns from Bettine's when the power is restored and sits for a while

on the veranda alone. It is still August but the night is almost chilly, the cool

of the sea is an advance payment on the autumn. Around one o'clock,

five already in Bhutan, he drinks some chilled fruit juice

and goes to bed. Who knows who she is out on the town with

at this moment, she must be shivering in her light clothes. He gets up

and spreads a blanket on her bed and then hesitates,

nods and lays out on her pillow a blue nightdress,

because she is bound in her sleep to kick off the blanket.

Outsiders

Now for a riddle: what if anything does the shabby film producer Dubi

Dombrov have in common with the fictional Narrator who is about to

bring him back to Albert for a second visit? Besides the fact that both of them

require the services of a tax adviser, we may note some other parallels. He and I

as children were both outsiders. And we were both orphaned

at a fairly tender age and in need of a guiding hand, which is, as

Dubi observed, both an unquenchable personal need and, shall we say, a

religious quest Both of us would like to create at least one work

that will turn out properly. And we are both on our way. True, he is a

clumsy, sloppy man, a thing of shreds and patches, which ostensibly

contrasts with the Narrator, who is well known to be a punctilious person

who always puts each thing away in its proper place. But that is only

on the outside. Inside him too there is an almighty mess.

And we are both always thirsty. Incidentally, a pig in a poke is an expression

that generally describes an incautious purchase but in our case connotes

not so much the impetuosity of the purchaser as the condition of the pig.

Sometimes we encounter a spider or a cockroach in the kitchen, which

we would never dream of hurting, but when the creature runs away from us

we take offence. And in general we are easily hurt:

we are constantly offended but contain ourselves, and continue to invite

further offence. With women he has a harder time of it the Narrator

is apparently helped by a certain glow, at least on the surface. Like

the producer, he feels not entirely worthy, like a con man obtaining favors

by deception: be my mother, my sister, etc. Not to mention the feet that both

characters are a bit like David, who always longed to adopt a gentle brother

and a tough-warm father, a grim father whose manner toward his son implies

a suppressed rebuke. And yet, adopting a father, as can be seen

in the case of David, generally ends up in a battle in which the father's role

is to fall, thus restoring to us the liberties of orphanhood. And,

it may be added, both the unsuccessful producer and this Narrator

know the summer will soon be over.

Synopsis

To sum up the story so far, this is actually a tale about five or six characters,

most of whom are alive most of the time, who often offer each other

a hot or cold drink, generally a cold one, because it is summer. Sometimes

they bring each other a tray with some cheese and olives, some wine, slices

of watermelon, occasionally they even make each other a light meal. Or else

you could see it as a number of intersecting triangles. Rico his father and

his mother. Dita and her two lovers (Giggy Ben-Gal doesn't count). Albert

between Bettine Carmel and his child bride who slips from room to room

wearing no more than the shirt on her back. And Bettine herself, between

Avram and Albert, her choice for a rainy day. While Dubi is stuck

between his desire for Nirit and the rebuke of her warm-hearted

representative on earth, to the love of women preferring the reproach

of the sensible father. Rico, between his father and his cross, mistakenly

searching in the mountains for his sea-tossed mother, in love with Dita

though not loving her enough. Dita who is still waiting. And all of them are

among shadows. Even the Narrator himself is somewhere between

the mystical and the mischievous. This fabric resembles

the pattern in the curtain at the Greek necromancer's, who died and

left in his place a crow-woman. She has no living soul and her fabric gives

a foretaste of the worm. And so a certain shadow falls over this story too.

The peace process

Hadhramaut. On his map such a principality appears in southern

Arabia, east of Bab el-Mandeb. Maybe the peace process

will open it up to us. But what is there there) Shifting sands,

wilderness, the haunt of foxes. But what is there here, in this abandoned

temple? A solitary Buddhist monk, a skeletal figure, through a hatch

wordlessly handing you a bowl of cold rice

and disappearing. He will not open the gate: you are not worthy yet.

In other words, the peace process is slow and painful. You will have

to make one or two further concessions. Only what is truly

a matter of life and death should not be negotiable.

In the middle of the hottest day in August

At Giggy Ben-Gal's, in Melchett Street She is sleeping with him again

because she feels sorry for herself While he saws away, she is thinking of

dear, good Albert, who worked so hard to find her

a one-room flat in Mazeh Street, the unfashionable side. On the

one hand it's good news, but on the other she really doesn't want

to move out. She enjoys living with him, he makes such a fuss of her

and his devotion is touching, not to mention his hungry look. All

the sweeter for being forbidden. This Giggy is a big brute. He fucks

as though he's hammering in nails or scoring points. One way

or another, in the end everyone is alone. In this heat

the best thing to be is a Buddhist nun in Tibet.

The riddle of the good carpenter who had a deep bass voice

In fact they were distantly related, both born in Sarajevo, Albert Danon from Bat Yam and my carpenter Elimelech who made this desk for me and died nine years ago. The great love of his life, apart from his wife and daughters, was opera: he had a stereo at home, another in his workshop, and a third in the car, hundreds of records and cassettes, dozens of performances. You could tell from two streets away if the workshop was open, not from the buzzing of the electric saw or the smell of sawdust and wood glue, but from the music: La Traviata, Don Giovanni, Rigoletto, the man was a total addict. We called him Shalyapin, because while he was planing away he would be roaring and booming, shamelessly out of tune, plunging so low as to put the deepest bass to shame. His voice was like the voice of the dead: a profundo de profundis. And yet this thunderous bass sound burst forth from a chest of modest dimensions, in fact Elimelech the carpenter was actually a slightly built man; his face was wrinkled with irony, one eyebrow was raised, and his glance contradicted itself: partly asking forgiveness and partly impish or sarcastic, as if tb say, Who or what am I, but then you too, sir, excuse me for mentioning it, began as a drop of moisture and will end up as a broken vessel. The desk he made me, on which I am writing these words, turned out heavy. Massive. With no frills. A desk with the legs of a rhinoceros and sides like the shoulders of a market porter. A bass table. A proletarian object, thickset as a wrestler. Unlike Elimelech the carpenter, a man who loved to joke and tease but at the same time was being secretly, relentlessly eaten away by a ruthless canker, until one day he upped and hanged himself. He left no note, and no one could explain it. Least of all his wife and daughters. When I went to the hanged man's house to offer my condolences, I had the impression that grief had been displaced by surprise: as if all those years it had never occurred to them that here in their home an alien being was living among them in disguise, a maharajah masquerading as a woodworker, and one day he had been summoned home, and at once, without a word, had shed his familiar disguise and set off for the place where he belonged. The last man, literally the last man in the world, to go and hang himself. For the life of us we wouldn't have dreamed that he had it in him. And there was no reason either: all things considered, life treated him very well, he had a family, friends, made a decent living, and he was the kind of man who was, as they say, content with what he had and always made the most of things. For instance, he loved eating, he loved to sit in his armchair every evening and fall asleep with the paper, and he especially loved those operas of his; he used to listen to them and sing along from morning to night and, well, we did think it was a bit much at times but we kept our mouths shut, why shouldn't he have a bit of pleasure? There are some husbands, after all, who squander half their pay on the lottery and suchlike, or who are crazy about football, and with him it was his operas. You must agree, sir, that it's a refined hobby. And also, he loved to make people laugh, he was a champion joker, he was the king of practical jokes, you may not believe this but just the morning of the day it happened, barely three hours before, he was making omelettes for the girls and he pretended to swallow the hot oil straight from the frying pan. What a fright we had before we started to laugh. What else can I say to you, sir, people are a riddle, even the ones you think you know best. You sleep in the same bed together for thirty-five years, you know every hair on their head, their illnesses, their secrets, their problems, their most personal things, and then suddenly it turns out that It's as if there was two Elimelechs, one for foreign affairs and one for internal affairs. It was nice of you to come. Thank you. We'll do our best. The girls are just wonderful, look how they take after him. They take everything as it comes. When you next see Albert say a big thank you to him for taking the trouble to come to the funeral. He's not a youngster any more, and it's a long way from Bat Yam, after all.

Duet

Behind the first stream another rivulet is hiding.

The first one flows so loudly

that you can hardly hear the murmur

of the second, hidden one. Rico is sitting on a rock. Perhaps

you can only hear it in the dark? He is willing to wait.

The well-fed dog and the hungry dog

If you are Giggy Ben-Gal, a man who helps himself with both hands because

you only live once, for whom toys and pleasures and fun wink

from every branch as though it's Christmas all year round, earning your living

as a security adviser while maintaining dovish views, attending

the occasional rally and signing every petition, with a flat and car provided

by your parents who aren't short of a penny or two, and on the sweeter

side of life you have Ruthy Levin and Dita and another one, a married

woman, your friends wife is your friend and anyway he has no idea (she's older

than you and full of surprises in bed), but at heart you're not selfish,

quite generous in fact, you enjoy fixing things for others, helping a friend

through a difficult patch, taking the weight off his shoulders, its not

surprising that one fine evening you'll collar this Dombrov for a man-to-man

chat, to sort out what's really going on with this filmscript

that seems to have got stuck: after all, we're talking about relatively small

sums of money, and anyway you know a source you can tap.

And so you will sit facing one another in Cafe Limor, you cheery and brisk

while he looks bitter, careworn, not completely on the ball, for instance

when you say "grant" and he, instead of taking notes, starts describing Nirit.

Or if you imply that there's this fund you know of he just stares abstractedly

into his beer then leans forward and downs it in one. For a moment you feel

disappointed, even hurt, is he really so ungrateful or has he just got

a screw loose? Suddenly you realize that the problem isn't the script, it's Dita.

The kids jealous. He sits there wriggling on his chair, full of wretchedness

and shame, and at the same time he's drawn toward you, he doesn't dare

but he'd love to touch your hand that touches Dita and probably does things

to her, any way and any time it likes, that he can only dream of. He would

sell you a year of his fucked-up life here and now, just like that, for a hint

of a chance to taste just once a tiny crumb from your nightly feasts with her.

Sweeter even than her body for you now is his embittered envy, that

stimulates your complacency gland, and also makes you feel pity and an urge

to share your bread with the hungry, to grant him an evening with her,

a secret gift or a donation of surplus goods. There's also a surprising

pang of jealousy at the poor sod, with that desperate thirst of his

that someone like you has never known and never will. Right now

you're feeling thirsty too, so you order two more big frothy beers.

Stabat Mater

But why do you keep worrying? Calm down. See for yourself

how well I'm looking after myself,

I'm eating, sleeping, wrapping up warm in my sleeping-bag,

protecting myself from the freezing

breath of the winds, I even drink fresh mountain goats' milk

for breakfast I won't get lost.

It's no good. She's all around me. She's worried. She's found

a hole in the elbow of my sweater, the soles of my boots

are worn too thin, and what's that cut on my cheek? She lays

a cold hand on my forehead

and another on her own, compares, naturally I'm warmer.

She doesn't trust me.

And why did you forget to send your father a postcard every week?

It's not so easy for him there,

looking after your girlfriend, well not exactly looking after her,

she's not exactly the one who's being looked after. In your place

I'd go back. You've checked out all these mountains one by one,

and it's nearly autumn,

it's time to go home. The mountains will always be here,

but your life wont Instead of wandering around you could

be an architect for instance: what with your fathers way with a balance sheet,

my gift for embroidery, your grandfather who was a silversmith, and Uncle

Michael, the pharmacist, put it all together and you'll be a master architect

Take a rest, Mother, I say to her. Sit down for a bit You're tired.

You've worried enough. Go back to sleep

curled up like a fetus in the hammock of the deep.

Master architect, doctor, they're

marketable professions. But every market closes in the end,

and everything perishes,

dust to dust. Suppose your son puts Number One first,

so the whole of Bat Yam is full of his glory and all the substance

of his house, a name and legacy, a Mercedes and precious unguents,

surely with the passing of the years all will be covered in dust.

The name will fade, the unguents will dry up and only a powdery crust

will remain and it too in the end will fly

to the four winds. A forgotten, invisible, imperceptible powder, Mother,

the dust of forsaken

collapsed buildings, shifting sands swept by the wind,

ashes returning to ashes,

from a handful of cosmic dust our planet was formed,

and to a black hole it shall return.

A doctor an architect in a dream house with fancy carpets

in the best part of Bat Yam. Powder.

Rest in your peace, Mother, after the mountains I shall come

and you and I shall hide

beyond reach of the cloud that existed before anything was made

and that when all has passed away shall be alone.

Comfort

Shortly before sunset Albert walks round to Bettine's to seek her advice

on a particular case involving double taxation. Bettine is pleased to see him

but hasn't got time to talk, she has her grandchildren with her, she is three,

he is one-and-a-bit, she is drawing a palace and he has crawled into

a cardboard box hideaway. Bettine offers some homemade lemonade

to Albert, who, carried away, is already down on all fours giving a recital

of animal and bird noises but the lion strikes the wrong note,

the tot in the box is scared, tears, and a bottle for comfort. Albert too seems

chastened and in need of comfort, so the little girl offers him a present,

the palace, on condition he don't cough scare no more. Later, in the empty

alley on his way back to Amirim Street a bird on a branch calls to him.

With no living soul to hear he replies and this time he hits the right note.

Subversion

Bettine likes to sit indoors in the evening

in her pleasant room that faces the sea, half-submerged in potted plants,

wearing a summer kimono, her still-shapely legs

propped up on a footstool.

She is deep in a novel about a divorce and an error.

The suffering of the fictional characters fills her

with a feeling of calm. As though their burden has fallen

from her own shoulders.

Yes, she too is getting older, but without feeling

humiliated by it. A senior civil servant of sixty,

with her bobbed hair and those earrings, she feels

younger than her age.

The sea that is close to her home seeps through her windows

and inside her body too there is a murmur

seductively, secretly pleading with her, like a little child

lightly pulling at her sleeve.

What is this body after? One more game?

Another outing? Let me rest. Its late.

But it pleads persistently,

not knowing when to give up.

She glances at her watch: what now? Go out? To Albert?

Who was here not two hours ago? It's late. It's absurd.

And that girl is still there, and there is, after all, something

cheap about her.

Exile and kingdom

Something cheap and something soft and something hard and remote,

Dita Inbar in her orange uniform, with a name-badge on the lapel,

works three nights a week as a receptionist at an expensive seaside hotel,

tourists, investors, philanderers, foreign airline pilots in uniform

and teams of tired stewardesses. Forms. Credit cards.

At four in the morning she has some free moments for a casual chat

with the Narrator, who is staying here after a lecture at the expense

of the sponsoring organization (it is not easy for him to drive all the way back

to Arad so late at night on his own). But he can't sleep. In a fit

of hotel depression he goes downstairs and paces the lobby, where

he finds you at the desk, looking official, tired but pretty.

Good evening. Evening? Its nearly morning. What's it like

here? Do you take in stray birds? What do you mean birds—

corpses more like. Have you ever seen a face reflected in a spoon? That's

what the whole human race looks like after midnight. Aren't you

the author? A friend of mine reads your books.

The only one I've read is To Know A Woman. But what a woman is

the hero hardly knows. Maybe you don't either. Men

are mostly wrong, whether they're authors or not. Tell you the truth,

I write too. Not books, screenplays, just for my own amusement so far.

Shall I send you one? Would you read it? You must be drowning

in manuscripts. How about yourself? Got another

book on the way? Don't suppose you'll tell me what it's about?

If it weren't for the years and my fame and a fear of being made a fool of

I'd stand here, a desk's width away from your body, and tell you

about Nirit, narimi, Bhutan, and the cross on the way. Nearly.

But not quite. While you smile at me all of a sudden

both phones call you at once. I too

fake a smile, return a vague wave of the hand, and walk away

to stand at the big window overlooking the sea. It has been written

that exile is a kingdom and it's been written that it is a fleeting

shadow. A filthy old dog is this September dawn, dusty, yawning

on the seashore, limping among the dustbins.

An ugly bloated baby

After his mother became ill Rico stayed out quite a lot. It was useless his father pleading with him. That winter he came home at two o'clock almost every night. Only rarely did he sit by the invalids bedside. The selfish love of an only child. Sometimes when he was little he used to imagine that his father had gone away, that he had been sent to Brazil, or moved in with another woman, and the two of them were left on their own in a pleasantly enclosed life, consoling each other. At least he wanted all the traffic between his parents to flow through his own junction and not through a tunnel behind his back. Her illness seemed to him as though she had suddenly had a baby daughter, a demanding pampered creature, a little like him, it was true, but a spoilt child. He imagined that if he went away his mother would have to choose between the two of them, and he was sure she would never give him up. How astonished he was when she eventually chose the ugly bloated baby and left him alone with his father.

Soon

At the beginning of this autumn, like every year, I planted some

chrysanthemums next to the bench in the garden. And like every year

I had my hair cut at Chez Gilbert for Hanukkah and then I went shopping to

fill the gaps and replace some worn-out items on my shelf of flannel nighties,

and got home in time to light the first candle with Albert, because Dita

had rung to say sorry but she and Rico couldn't make it. It seems likely I

won't live to see the end of this winter. Dr. Pinto is optimistic, the situation

seems stable, if anything the left one is a little less good, but the right one

is clear and there are no secondaries. They even see some improvement there.

So the story moves on with intervals that are getting longer every time,

because I tire easily. Meanwhile I continue embroidering a place mat

that I'd like to finish. I rest every ten minutes, my fingers are turning white

and my eyes see things that aren't there. Sometimes I'm so terrified of it

like a pack of wolves and sometimes I just wonder how exactly it will come.

Is it like falling asleep? Like being burnt? Sometimes I regret we didn't take a

second trip last summer to Crete, where night fell so slowly and the salt smell

mingled with the tang of the pines and we drank wine with ewes' milk cheese

while the shadow of the mountains spread right across the plain but the

mountains themselves were still illuminated in the distance by a light that

promised that peace would come and the water in the stream was icy

even though it was August. Sometimes there's a pain and I lie down at once,

take a pill, I don't even wait the ten minutes I promised Dr. Pinto. He surely

won't be angry. And I sometimes feel something I can't remember the

word for, tmno, is it "dark"? My Hebrew is abandoning me, and making room

for more and more Bulgarian. Which is coming back to me now. Rico will

come back too, even though its past two o'clock, and Albert is waiting on

the veranda, fuming, now he has come back inside and is holding my feet.

He is holding me firmly and warmly and it really is soothing even though

I was calm already. Maybe this death is a Japanese? A sort of samurai.

Mannered. Hiding behind a childish ritual mask, a smooth shiny mask.

The unwrinkled cheeks are not even snowy-white but china-white, the cheeks

look powdered and the brow seems polished. The mouth turns downward

at the corners and there are long narrow empty cracks for eyes. Its really

a baby. If so it is rather terrifying, precisely because this china-white mask is

so smooth and expressionless. If it is a woman, it's strange that she hasn't

noticed there's a fried fish in the frying pan in the kitchen, cold and hard

from this morning. If it really is a baby, there's a diaper here; they put it

between my head and the pillow to soak up the perspiration. And if behind

the china mask there is a wrestler, a sumo wrestler, a Japanese weight-lifter,

what he will find at his feet is a body wrapped in a sheet Albert turned up

the heater for me and now it's too hot, I'm soaking, and he's gone outside

again, waiting on the veranda to tell Rico off the moment he gets back.

Should I take a nap? Not yet. It's a pity to miss details

and soon the bird.

Rico shouts

But dont you let it Mother bite and scratch

youre so submissive and obedient dont you let

so cold and evil crouching over you undoing and ripping

your pale skin your breasts

youre blind youre not in Crete youre not

among the streams and mountains dont you let

it Mother dont be gentle with it it will tear

your flesh and chew you to the bone

ripping and sucking the marrow of your spine so shout

so cold and evil crouching over you tearing and preying

forcibly planting in your womb a monster a bloated baby

shout out dont let it Mother bite kick and scratch

gouge its eyeballs out so obedient cotton wool

bite and scratch dont lie down so submissively dont let it

feast on your flesh relishing you all bit by bit

yes rip it gouge it yes tear its eyes out so shout

its crouching to dismember you liver pancreas and kidney

seeping into your spleen tearing you creeping from ovary

to gut sucking and chewing at your diaphragm

planting venomous fangs into lung and palate fight it

my chewed mother get it by the throat dont let it

Mother slain lamb shout.

A hand

It's a little less hot today which is why I asked him to come and sit with me on the veranda from where we can see the garden and breathe the nearby sea. This summer is already trailing signs of tiredness but it is still cruel and changeable, a capricious old tyrant. I put two liter bottles of mineral water on the table, remembering from last time how insatiably thirsty he is. The tax file he brought with him seems, at first glance, not entirely above board, it is sloppy and may have cut a few corners. Dombrov is a small company producing mainly advertisements and short public information films, the risk of fires in summer, the importance of wearing a seat belt. I'll go over it for him. Put it straight. It's a matter of two or three hours' work. And in the meantime the sea breeze comes and goes. On the garden seat below us a black cat lay dozing. Once again he talked about chance and guiding hands, like the first morning. It was not chance, in his view, that brought Dita and him together. Would it seem absurd if he confided in me that her script exactly describes his life and even his most intimate fantasy? A quiet house in a village, adjacent to a cemetery, with a tiled roof and thirty or forty fruit trees, a dovecote and a beehive, all surrounded with a stone wall and shaded by tall cypresses, and a young woman, Nirit, who because of a moment of compassion or some other fleeting emotion comes to stay for a few days, despite the fact that women usually find him repulsive. That is her script in a nutshell and it exactly represents the fantasy that has haunted him for many years, and that he has never told to another man or woman. It's a fact. Is it really possible, Mr. Danon, that it's just coincidence? How on earth did she manage to write a stranger's innermost dream? And another mysterious thing, how do you explain that she brought this script to me of all people? Half the inhabitants of Tel Aviv are producers. Or think they are. Do you really believe, Mr. Danon, that it's all just coincidence?

To this, naturally, I neither had nor could have an answer one way or the other — who can say — however I was surprised that this time, unlike his previous visit, he did not touch the glass of water I had poured him, which fountained bubbles excitedly till it grew tired, and subsided. As though in the meantime he had undergone a thorough detox. Instead, while he was expounding his views on probability, he attacked the fruit I had put in front of him, pears, grapes, apples, and devoured it without noticing what he was doing, munching, dripping, unaware that he was staining his clothes, what is just chance, Mr. Danon, and what is the result of the guiding hand of fate? I was astonished that he attributed some kind of decisive authority to me of all people. If we had lived lets say a couple of hundred years ago you might have imagined that he had come to me to ask for her hand in marriage and meanwhile here he was beating about the bush.

It's not easy to know, I said, whether there is such a thing as a guiding hand, and it's even harder to explain towards what and to what purpose this hand, if it exists, is or is not guiding what appears to us as chance. I sometimes wonder myself. To be sure what I said did not contain any answer, but somehow he seemed satisfied, even happy: on hearing the words "I sometimes wonder myself" his greedy mole's face suddenly lit up, and for an instant through this expression I caught a glimpse of a sad, unloved child, whose father has suddenly given him an unexplained pat on the back, that he has interpreted as a caress. Before I had any notion where or why, my hand reached out, touched him lightly on the shoulder as I saw him to the door, and "Don't worry," I said, but why did I say it, "we'll check through your tax papers and maybe straighten them out a bit, get in touch next week and don't even mention money."

Chandartal

It drips. It stops. It trickles.

The water tastes like wine.

A sluggish little fountain

in the courtyard of the shrine.

We've reached Ladakh, the "country

of the children of the moon,"

along the River Chandar,

and a lake named Chandartal.

The village is called Tiksa,

Tiksa Gumpa is the shrine,

the woman's name, Maria: you're

the one that she recalls.

The one who kissed her feet.

Yes, I mean you: come here.

Did you know there is a custom

in the region of Ladakh

to give one bride in marriage

to two or three young men,

to two or three young brothers.

It's you that she recalls.

The fountain flows and falters,

it stops and starts again

in the courtyard of the shrine.

The stone here is not chiselled,

but plastered white and red.

The shrine is Tiksa Gumpa,

the woman Maria. Come

to me. Fear not. I'm talking

to you. Tonight my lips

you shall open. Tonight

I'll be with you. Tiksa Gumpa

is the shrine and the lake is

Chandartal.

What never was and has gone

Maria too is lost, she roams from shrine to shrine,

sleeps, rises, packs her bag, sometimes in the company

of wayfaring men. Her beauty is wearing thin. Her face

is wrinkled by wind, sun and frost. The promised land

has gone or was it just a mirage? Whatever she has given

has been taken, and whatever is left will perish.

Promised lands are a lie. There is

no wondrous snowman in the mountain ravines. Only

in the sea there awaits her what never was

and has gone. Tonight the boy is with her.

Tomorrow alone. Chandartal.

Get out

Voices he hears, Tatars. What Tatars. Which Tatars.

Tatars in his head. Come back tomorrow, preferably

in a different frame of mind. Come back without the voices.

Without the Tatars. Without the torture. He is dead,

Elimelech the carpenter. On the windowsill a candle burns,

for the end of Sabbath or for remembrance. Who is crying

shouting Tatars to distinguish between weekday and

disaster? Elimelech the carpenter is dead hanged in the shed in the yard

looking like a practical joke, it was Rajeb who found him. Nine years on

and tomorrow his daughter is to be wed, I am invited to the wedding

and preferably in a different frame of mind. She is marrying

a land dealer around Nablus and they are settling

in Elon Moreh. Where are these omens coming from?

Tatars. Candle in the window. Elimelech the carpenter taught Rajeb

to sing duets with him, basso profundo and tenor, both

out of tune. Four armed settlers will support the posts

of her bridal canopy and you will stand with Albert

who is coming from Bat Yam. Palely the carpenter's daughter

smiles. The bridal veil is very fine. A bunch of roses

and a well-fed bridegroom. Sabbath end? Remembrance? And the rabbi

leaps and dances Tatars. Get out. What Tatars. Where

are the omens coming from and who is calling me where?

The carpenter hanged himself and Rajeb returned to Hebron.

He has not been seen since. Some say he ran away to Sudan

others that he was caught or killed constructing an explosive device,

and others are Tatars. Thick darkness and a candle outside the hired hall.

A car park. Silence. Dogs barking in the distance at a moon

that does not answer. Get out. Cut your roots and go.

Only the lonely

Evening and she has not come. Next door a child is crying, tiredly,

monotonously, knowing that nothing will help. In the one-room flat

I have rented for her in Mazeh Street there is no phone yet And even

if there were I wouldn't. This evening she won't come. On my own eating

black bread, cheese and olives. It's a long evening. Everyone is on his own

this evening and I too am on my own. I am wondering whether the money I

sent has reached you. Anxious about avalanches, landslides on those slopes.

Or awake, reading by candlelight in the cold in an abandoned temple. The

evening is still. The child who was crying before is quiet now. Here at my

kitchen window the sea is talking about autumn already. Another glass of tea

and I'll sit down to check a balance sheet that doesn't balance. Many send in

their accounts. Only the lonely know how to be accurate.

Rico feels

Yes the night is really cold and the snow reminds him of his father.

It creeps like a tiny furry creature

slinking across the valley.

Quiet and even, it gropes at the roof and the walls.

In the dark the sleepwrapped snow on tiptoe,

silent and anxious, spreads a blanket over him.

And the same evening Dita too

In a foam-filled bath

she pities their loneliness:

one wanted me to mother him

the other looks to me as a daughter.

To be a woman to both of them

is something I can only do in the bath.

A wish stirs

Evening. Rain falls on the empty desert hills. Chalk and flint and the smell

of dust being wetted after an arid summer. A wish stirs: to be

what I would have been had I not known what is known. To be before

knowledge. Like the hills. Like a rock on the surface of the moon.

Simply there, motionless, and trusting

in the length of its shelf life.

I think

Night. In the garden ploughs a breeze. A cat,

I think a cat, pads among bushes, a shadow

flitting among the shadows. It sniffs or guesses

something hidden from me. What is not mine to sense

is taking shape there now without me. Cypresses

tremble slightly, black, in a motion of mourning,

I think beside the wall. Something there is touching

some other thing. Something is expiring. Ostensibly

all this is taking shape right before my eyes

as I watch the garden from this window. So I think.

In fact all this has always happened and always will

but only ever behind my back.

A web

Waking tired at twenty to five. Lights. A pee. A wash. Then standing

with a coffee at the window. Chilly mist still in the bushes. The garden

light continues signalling to itself. The lawn is still damp.

Empty. Chairs, with legs in the air, upside down on the garden table.

There is a milky light

toward dawn, lest we forget that we are in

the Milky Way, a remote galaxy flickering until it fades out.

Until it fades out five-o'clock-in-the-morning things are happening. A

startled bird calls out in surprise, as though this were the very first morning.

Or the very last. Between two branches of a ficus an early spider is at work.

From the humors of its body it spins a tight net in which it hunts

twenty or thirty dewdrops that do not sit idle either but catch splinters

of light and multiply each one sevenfold. Every captive splinter, for its part,

translates itself to lightning. Until the paper arrives I'll sit down and write too.

Rico thinks about the mysterious snowman

Man that is born of woman bears his parents on his shoulders. No, not on

his shoulders. Within him. All his life he is bound to bear them,

together with all their host, their parents, their parents' parents,

a Russian doll heavy with child back to the first generation:

wherever he walks he bears his forebears, when he lies down he bears

his forebears and when he rises up he bears them, or if he wanders far or

stays in his place. Night after night he shares his cot with his father

and his couch with his mother until his day comes.

But that snowman is not born of woman. Weightless and naked

it roams alone on the barren mountains. Neither born nor begetting

neither loving nor thirsty for love. It has never mourned

nor lost a living soul. Ageless it floats over the snows,

fatherless, motherless, homeless, timeless and deathless. Alone.

One by one

He rolls down the woman Maria's stockings, one by one, his eyes

digging into her flesh. These are the eyes of the flesh. The eyes

of his spirit are closed. Were they not closed he would see Maria not

in her ripe sensuality but as she will look in old age, shrivelled like a

dried fig. If he opened the eyes of his spirit the desires of the flesh

would subside. His lust would turn to dust.

Or it could be put like this: climbing a tortuous track in the mountains,

between two chasms. His glance is alert and sharp but the eyes of his spirit

are shut If he opens them just for an instant, he will feel dizzy and fall.

All this is ancient knowledge: the eyes of the flesh covet, the eye of the spirit

goes dark, he who is here is you without you, he who is not

here is not here, but if so why love a woman? Why walk across chasms?

Your son longs

Your son longs for the extinction of sleep. And at once

he sleeps. The wind outside the hut

howls. A fox slinks by in the wood

and there is a night bird hidden in the leaves

seeing what is coming but choosing to pass over

in silence. In seventeen hundred and six

a wandering merchant from Russia who was on his way to China

breathed his last in this hut. He died

alone in his sleep and was buried in the wood

where he sank into the depth of oblivion.

A wandering merchant from Russia who was on his way to China

to take furs and precious stones from Nizhni to Nanking, and from Nanking

brought back jewelery and silk. He was fond of drinking and eating at

wayside inns, strange travellers' tales at night in front of a blazing fire,

and servant girls' favors on a straw palliasse by the light of a clay lamp.

He took pleasure in shrewd selling and in haggling for a bargain, fine

patient dealing, resembling courtship, or loveplay in which

he who lasts longest wins, and the swift have no advantage: he who desires

must feign indifference and cloak his eagerness with uncertainty. In the spring

he set his steps eastward and returned homeward in the fall, crossing

rivers and forests, steppes and mountain passes, and every year

the hoard of coins buried in his courtyard grew and grew.

One evening, in this hut, he ate his fill till midnight, paid

a girl to wait on his couch and warm his bedding,

and, when she had left, he settled comfortably on his back

to count and calculate how much he had gained this year,

how much the next would bring, and how much more

he would accumulate in the course of the decade. Until his eyelids

dropped and he slept and at daybreak the servant girl

shook his shoulders to no avail, so she raised her voice and cried,

frightening all the village. All this happened long ago

and has long since been forgotten. Soon you too.

It's not a matter of jealousy

Good evening, this is Bettine speaking, I'm a friend of Albert Danon. We met a couple of times while you were staying with him but we didn't talk much: we didn't get the chance, or perhaps we felt awkward. I hesitated for a long time before calling you. I hope I'm not disturbing you. And you're perfectly entitled to say, Look, it's none of your business. Or even to hang up. I'll understand. The thing is this: you moved into his flat as his son's girlfriend, or ex-girlfriend, I'm not asking and you don't have to answer. Either way, he took you in and got you out of trouble and apparently he even ended up finding you or helping you to find a place of your own. I don't know the details and I don't want to. He is a generous and efficient man in his quiet way. But you, whether deliberately or not, are doing something bad to him. I use the present tense because even now that you've moved to wherever you've moved to, he's still unsettled because of you or else not because of you but, let's say, in your wake. Wait. Don't interrupt me. This conversation is not exactly easy for me as it is. I'm very concerned that you don't misunderstand me. I don't want to be judgmental and I'm certainly not trying to tell you off but merely to advise you, not even advise you really but simply to ask you to give it some thought. You're a good-looking young woman and you belong to a generation where certain things have become quite simple, perhaps too simple. I'm not passing judgment, I'm merely voicing an impression that may be groundless. I'm older than you, possibly older than your mother, so it's not a matter of jealousy or competition. Surely you too — but no, I don't want to get into that, and please consider what I have just said unsaid, because even a denial of jealousy is liable to arouse suspicion. Let me try putting it this way: He is grieving for his wife, and on top of that, as you know, he is upset that his son has gone away. Even though he's by no means a weak man, you will surely agree with me that it is not necessary to add to his pain. When you were staying in his flat he was almost looking for somewhere to run away to, whereas now that you've left it's all he can do to stop himself from going to look for you, because you promised to visit him and you forgot No, don't apologize, you're busy, of course I understand, a girl your age and so on. I'm sorry. Just give me another minute or two and I'll stop. What I wanted to say, or rather ask, is that you shouldn't leave him hanging in mid-air. He doesn't sleep at night and he looks as though he may be getting ill. You have caused a misunderstanding, and you are the only person who can clear it up. Apart from which, you may not have thought about what will happen when Rico comes back. What sort of relationship will you have with the two of them, and what sort of relationship will they have with each other? Forgive me for raising these questions, I have been a civil servant for thirty-eight years, and I may have picked up a rather bureaucratic tone. I'm not asking you to break off relations or disappear but rather — how should I put it — to observe some boundaries. Perhaps I have not succeeded in explaining myself. I feel the need to say to you, Look, Dita, you arouse something in him that makes him very sad, depressed, you may not even have noticed, but if you want to put it right you'll have to draw some lines. No. That wasn't quite what I wanted to say to you, and it may have sounded petty. It's hard for me to find the words. One weekend, many years ago, my husband Avram and I took Albert and Nadia for a day trip to Upper Galilee. At dusk we saw, all four of us, a furry creature scurry down a slope and vanish among some trees. We tried to keep it in sight but it had vanished. The sun went down and for a long time afterwards it seemed as though the whole world was shimmering and would go on shimmering for ever. Albert said it was definitely a stray dog, and Nadia said it was a wolf. It was a pointless argument, because look what has happened since: Avram died long ago, and now Nadia has died, and the wolf or dog is dead too. Only Albert and I are still alive. By my reckoning you may not even have been born the evening that I've remembered all these years, with no pain now but with a clarity that gets sharper and sharper with the passage of time. A wolf or a stray dog? The wood was in darkness and there were Albert and I confronting Avram and Nadia in an argument that had no ending and could not have any, the creature had vanished into the dark and around us everything was empty and silent and shimmering. You must understand, I've told you this story not to make you feel uncomfortable but only to make a request, or rather to convey to you what I am asking myself and that is why I am asking you too. You don't have to answer. Naturally, all this will remain just between you and me. Or rather, between you and yourself.

It's only because of me that it came back to her

She says she's not jealous. Like hell she's not. Not angry.

Like hell she's not. She's right as rain but in fact

when all's said and done, she only wants him for herself. She wants me

to get out of his sight this minute, draw a line as she puts it,

or else she'll gouge my eyes out. It's my fault

he doesn't sleep. So what if he doesn't sleep. Being awake is being alive.

If I weren't around, by now he'd probably be dozing

for hours on end in an armchair or sitting on his veranda staring ahead

for a month, a winter, a year, gradually the sea would come up

to his head. Hers too. Instead of bugging me

she should actually say thank you nicely:

it's only because of me that it came back to her, that stray dog in Galilee

or that shimmering wolf, or whatever it was.

It's only because of me that what was almost blacked out is shimmering again

for her as well as for him. I'm quite fond of him. But not of her.

Not at all.

Every morning he goes to meet

As for the Narrator, on these late September days he gets up each morning

before five and writes for an hour or so until the paper arrives. Then

he goes outside to check if there is anything new in the desert. To date

there is nothing. The mountains to the east are stamped out

against the sky. Every slope in its proper place. Like yesterday. And

the day before. That lizard, a pocket dinosaur, has not improved

his position. The Narrator is interested in registering all this, in trying

to clarify and record here what has been and what is. Things must be

called by their proper names or by another name that sheds a fresh light

or casts, here and there, some shadow. Fifty years have passed:

in Jerusalem, on Zechariah Street, in a two-room flat, a private

school belonging to Mrs. Yonina. My teacher was Mrs. Zelda, Zelda

who some years later wrote the poems in The Spectacular Difference and The

Invisible Carmel. Once, on a winter day, she chose to say

to me softly: If you stop talking sometimes

maybe things will sometimes be able to talk to you. Years later

I found it promised in one of her poems that trees and stones

will respond Amen. A spectacular difference she promised,

between stones and trees, to anyone who is prepared to listen.

What I wanted and what I knew

I can still remember her room.

Zephaniah Street. A back entrance.

A frenetic boy, seven and a quarter.

A word-child. A suitor.

My room does not ask, she wrote,

for sunrise or sunset. Enough

that the sun brings its tray of gold

and the moon its tray of silver. I remember.

Grapes and an apple she gave me

in the summer holidays of '46.

I sprawled on the rush matting,

a fib-child. And in love.

From paper I used to cut her

flowers and blossoms. A skirt

she had, a brown one, like herself,

a bell and a smell of jasmine.

A soft-spoken woman. I touched

the hem of her dress. By chance.

What I wanted I didn't know

and what I knew still hurts.

De profundis

What I knew still hurts. Nadia Danon, for instance: like my teacher Zelda

she too died of cancer. Despite the bird before dawn, despite embroidering

until two days before she died, despite Dr. Pinto mercifully drugging her,

a false hope deluded her. Struck roots inside her. Refused to let go.

The twilight of her suffering showed her a samurai in a china mask, who was

her first husband: a tall, stern, elegant man, who always knew what was right,

he would turn out the light, curl up, press her breast, burrow and fiddle

in her flesh, hurting her to the bone but in the end he always let go. Soon

he had had enough of her and she was saved. Not long now.

Giggy responds

But what if anything would Giggy Ben-Gal say about all this? This story

is getting on his nerves, because the night is still young and there are

some juicy scenes still to come, women going down, shares going up

tonight he has plenty of tricks to turn. Tel Aviv is a big pond,

where he plays step by step, one move at a time.

Joking aside though, the bastard who laughs last laughs longest. In

less than a year he'll be number two in the firm,

and then he'll really hit the town, the sky is the limit

and the limit is just the first step.* Those bad scenes, like sickness

suffering and death, are strictly for the losers who are stuck on

the south side of town. Lonely people

deserve to live alone, and the needy deserve to be poor. Life

may or may not be a picnic but, on the other hand, even your Mr. Perfect

is really just another show-off. Everyone pisses and fucks so why should they

all pretend otherwise, that frustrated Narrator and the other old moralizers.

Dies irae

A short time before or after sunset this Narrator goes outside to check

what is going on and if there is any news in the desert. The wind

is always leaving: it always blows from there to there,

through here but never from here. A dust devil rises, dissolves and

re-forms on another hill. And disappears again. One move

at a time, he laughs last, the gospel according to Giggy Ben-Gal. Suffering

sickness and death come and go. Unlike this desert. Unlike the stars

in the sky. They are fixed. But this too is only apparent. Better a living dog,

and the poor mans wisdom is poor, a barren heath in the desert which the

wind stirs up then abandons. Always abandons. It comes from there and

drifts to there, it whirls around and returns into stillness. It is not the dead

who will see it, and sweet is the light to the eyes.

My hand on the latch of the window

Dear parents, dear Fania and Arie, it's night now and I'm in my room

in Arad, alone with my tea and these pages. The requiem is by Fauré. A fan

is whirring, blowing, turning away, coming back. The desert

is empty and near. At the windows the darkness is warm. And you

are both resting in peace. Are you sleeping? Or quarrelling still? At least

you can't fight over me: I'm tidy, hard-working, successful. Bringing you

more and more pride and joy, a regular sorcerer's apprentice. I'm tired

but I never give up. You both wanted me to grow up to be one thing

or another. Dad one thing and Mother another.

Now the difference is gradually shrinking. What difference does it make

what I am. I shall be here for a little while longer, and then I shall rest.

It's late. This street is empty and the garden is whispering to itself

in Russian, so I won't understand. It's mistaken: at this hour secrets

are less secret and almost all things are revealed. For years and years

Dad you stockpiled footnotes while you, Mother, stood at the window,

clutching your usual lemon tea, with your back to the room. Tormenting

yourself and longing like Elimelech the carpenter to return to some orchard

you'd dreamed up. Which never existed. Whispering to each other

in Russian which sounds soft and deadly. Dad you stand up,

stooped. Mother you are sitting, erect and beautiful. Dad you appear to

insist, refusing to open the window. But you Mother won't give in.

In the deep darkness you weep in vain in a whisper,

in whispers Dad you try to explain. My hand on the latch of the window, I

must now choose. If I am to forgive, then this is the moment.

And you

Piercing, despairing, in Yiddish, the sound in the distance of a woman

whose child in front of her eyes and she screams.

Then a wailing in Arabic, of a woman

whose home. Or whose child. Her voice is penetrating, terrifying. And you

sharpen a pencil or repair a torn dust jacket. At least

you could shudder.

The hart

As the hart pants after the water brooks, so does my soul. And a pair

of dark cypresses sway to and fro in wordless devotion. As the waters

cover the sea, the proud waters have gone over it: they passed over

and are gone and are no more. Return unto your rest my soul. Where

is your rest? Where will you return to, for what will you pant like a hart?

The kettle whistles. Time for coffee. If the light that is in you be darkness,

how great is that darkness. A fly is trapped between

the window pane and the screen. The house is empty.

A rug. A curled cat. When shall I come, when shall I appear?

The light is darkness. There was a hart at the water and it has gone.

At the end of the jetty

And on the first rainy day, with a grey peaked cap, a raincoat and an umbrella, and a brown bundle firmly secured with string, Albert Danon caught two buses to go from Amirim Street to Mazeh Street to see how his sons girlfriend was doing. Under his sleeve, under his watch strap, he carefully tucked the two punched tickets. He looked like a retired schoolmaster. Waiting for the red light to change to green even though the street was empty. Crossing Rothschild Boulevard, picking up a sodden newspaper from a bench and dropping it into a litter bin. Tel Aviv in the first rain looks like a heap of jetsam. The streets are deserted: anyone who has anywhere to go has gone. In Mazeh Street there's an impression of fallen leaves: fallen plaster, fallen papers mixed with some brown leaves and soggy rubbish. Everything is soaked but not washed clean. On the rooftops antennae, solar water heaters and clouds. The birds are there but their singing is flattened. And in the unlit entrance is a row of mailboxes, Cherniak, Shikorsky, Benbassat and a private neurological clinic. On the left-hand door on the ground floor, a note: "The podiatrist is out of the country." On the door opposite was written Inbar. No Dita: just Inbar. Like a man. A stranger. Forsaken like a winter sea, this stairwell. Albert Danon, a thin, elderly man, stands staring at the end of the jetty as though waiting for the black water to give up a life raft. He presses a bell. Which does not work. A polite interval. He presses again. Hesitates. Taps softly on the door. Waits again. Maybe she is getting dressed? Or she's asleep? Or she's not alone? He puts his bundle down on the floor and rests his umbrella. He waits. And in the meantime he wipes his feet in front of her door so as not to bring any water or dead leaves inside. He waits. Inside the bundle there is a flannel nightdress of Nadia's and an old two-bar electric heater. Albert blows into his hands, sniffs his breath, suddenly fearing it may smell bad. Then he knocks on the door again. And waits.

Passing through

Sit down Albert Take off your coat.

Let's draw the curtain. Light the light.

I was asleep. What never mind,

don't worry. It was time I woke.

I'll put some water on for coffee

and throw a bedspread over the mess.

I'll make us both some cheese on toast.

Thanks for the heater. And the nightie.

Your wife's. And what a pretty blue.

It may suit me some years from now.

Just wait there while I have a shower.

Or come with me. Take off your shoes.

And take that off, while I undress.

Now come with me. No, don't be shy.

There is a custom in Ladakh,

perhaps an ancient marriage law:

they marry three or four brothers

together to a single bride.

Three brothers. And a single bride.

Stop shivering, and touch me here.

Touch, it's not me, it's only cloth.

Its only cotton: touch me here.

Think that its happening in a dream

high in the hills of Chandartal.

My fingers are like alleyways,

my palm's a square. You cross it, then

you stop. My arm is like a curving road,

my shoulder is a river bed and then

the neck's a bridge. Then you can choose

to go this way, or that To wait. To wait.

In a dream in a cloud in passion

and wonder. Just listen to the thunder.

Then he walks around for a while and returns to Rothschild Boulevard

When he left, the rain had stopped. The boulevard was a girl

stripped naked and beaten up by a gang, and left lying there on her back

ripped and drenched. Now she hears trees,

promising her a kind of second silence, which belongs

at the end of shame and degradation, a still, small silence,

a kind of birth: I shall no longer raise my eyes to the hills

but lie quietly now in a puddle

of muddy still waters. Here is the breeze. Here are rumors

of birds' wings, stitching the damp air, unstitching,

restitching, unstitching again. Everything now is grey

and tender. Rest. In peace. Smelling sweetly

of good rain and earth. Everything is past.

Squirrel

Eyes. Eyes. Eyes in the water eyes in the branches eyes in the curtains eyes in the jug and eyes in the pillow. Nadia remembers Nadia as a little girl in an organdie frock or a pleated skirt, with ribbons in her plaits, Sabbath eve silver candlesticks warm hallah raisin wine blessings and table songs sit up straight please and stop squinting. She remembers gleaming white lace-trimmed napkins, porcelain bowls the color of the sea, a woven wall rug, little baskets, sauce boats, the smell of basil, lavender and ginger, and candied fruit Eyes, eyes, and Nadia remembers squirrels in the branches of the deserted garden milky-white mist in the hills snow blossoming on a darkening meadow the poignant tolling of a bell at dusk, dark woods that whispered rumors when the wind blew, the howl of a wolf on a winters night beyond the garden fence, the dovecote and the cockerel and the billy goat that frightened her in the dusk when she was sent out to fetch wood from the shed in the yard. Eyes in the water eyes in the night eyes eyes in my back, in my breasts, Nadia remembers old secrets, aged ten and a half in the morning, her father stripped to the waist up a ladder retiling the roof, and herself handing him up tiles one by one, inhaling the scent of his sweat and the sight of his nipples concealed in the steelwork of his chest bringing a secret trickle to her own ungrown nipples, she remembers the sudden flutter in her tummy and how the sun shone on his bare stooping back, as her father laid tile after tile and his muscles eyes eyes seemed to burrow between his shoulderblades. And once she watched her brother Michael hiding crouched in the back of the woodshed milking the dogs erection a blood-red butchers-shop udder protruding horribly from the covering fur and the two of them, Michael and the dog, thirstily panting and lolling and then soft thunder rolled in her tummy and turning she ran from die woodshed and that same night the first blood appeared on her nightdress with her terrified tears and the pain as though a maggot had wriggled inside her. In a whisper her mother taught her how to and how not to and when, and how women hide their impurity from menfolk's eyes and how to smother the smell, and she also said that this was the curse of Eve: every woman is punished and sullied with blood, recompense for the serpent and apple, in sorrow shalt thou bring forth thy children and there is no way back and only in pregnancy and in old age do we get some relief Eyes in the back eyes on the roof eyes on disgrace eyes on the festivals, Nadia remembers her handkerchiefs lace-edged brassieres satin ribbons suspender belts translucent silk embroidered blouses corsets and headscarves, schemes and intrigues of virtuous women a cesspit concealed under layers of velvet, muffled laughter and sneers of old women leering aunts winking caressing deriding and gradually covering her with a silky cobweb of the spidery order of women, catching and trussing her in a network of transparent threads, initiating her by degrees into the mysteries of the sect, labyrinthine lies filigrees of guile a subversive sisterhood in the face of the male sex intrigues of ancient stratagems delicate perfumes, jewellery, cosmetics, eyes, eyes, evil eye. Nadia remembers a baby imprisoned in the underground lair of the priestesses of an all-female cult, rules of modesty, rules of menstrual impurity, rules of prudence, qualities of innocent cunning, powders and creams, eyeblack and rouge, the masculine nature you have to learn to arouse and to repel, grace is false and beauty is vain, but without them beware that you do not end up unwanted and dusty on the shelf) heaven forbid. Give them an inch and they take a mile, give them two inches and they 11 cast you aside like an empty vessel, a woman is a pot filled to the brim with honey and shame, a locked garden and a reserved spring, a delight concealed until her redeemer cometh, no male stranger may approach, but neither should he be kept far off, keep him hungry and thirsty but occasionally feed him a crumb, cautiously always as if unawares lest you become a byword and a disgrace. Eyes, eyes, evil eye, amulets, giggles, whispers, intrigues, feminine plots and laws of womanhood, how to arouse love while preserving your modesty, dizzying incense, enchanting repulsion, she wanted to flee and she wanted to die, she wanted to run to the world of the squirrels to be for all time neither woman nor man but a tiny timorous creature which is all eyes and almost no body.

Never mind

But there, on the road to Patna, in the night train coming down from

the mountains, winding at a snails pace into the valley, a shabby old train,

ancient carriages, wooden benches, and the engine fed on

sliced tree trunks, sparks flying by the window, swallowed up in

the depth of the darkness, faint lights in the distance, wretched villages,

mud huts, he thinks of writing a postcard to his father, and another

to Dita Inbar, to say to them both never mind. Tomorrow in Patna station

he will buy cards and stamps and post them. Never mind,

he wanted to say. Never mind that you took my father, such a thin,

childlike man, into the shower to see your body. Let him see it. Never

mind. I like the idea. And you took his hand and placed it here and there

to feel. Never mind that he saw you, never mind that he touched. After all,

he recoiled at once and fled to wander dazed on the boulevard among tattered

papers in the rain. No harm done. Never mind. After all, when I was a baby

his wife suckled me and changed my diaper, and lulled me to sleep on her

tummy, and now my wife does the same to him. Soon he will become a baby.

He adds sugar and stirs then adds more sugar

Dubi Dombrov is waiting at ten in the morning in Café Limor for a date

which will never materialize because it has not been arranged. He leafs

through a newspaper, glancing repeatedly at his watch as though she is

already late. In fact his morning is fairly clear: there is nothing in his schedule

except some postponed chores, insurance premiums, bills, a dermatologists fee

and accumulated parking tickets. On this December morning you can see,

through the window, a pair of Russian girls by a road sign, laughing, ogling

a biker in gloves and black leathers whose Suzuki roars between his thighs

like a bull. At the entrance to the Odeon salon for "Bridal Styling — let us

give you the finishing touch" stands a man in a dinner jacket and bow tie,

wailing on a fiddle, his eyes seemingly closed. A penguin washed up in

the Levant. There is also a grasshopper of a Hasid in the street, pestering

passersby, soliciting them to put on tefillin. Dubi Dombrov, with a pale-green

silk scarf round his neck, orders a cup of coffee with a slice of jam cake

and fishes out the script of Nirit's Love, to polish it up: Far from the city far

from Café Limor stands an old village house, adjoining the cemetery, with

a tiled roof and chimney stack, thirty to forty fruit trees, some beehives and

a dovecote, all surrounded with a stone wall, drowned in the shade of dense

cypress trees. Here is where she will come for a few days and nights to

sweeten his solitude. True, he is a pretty repulsive guy, that is why she feels

sorry for him, but inside he is deep. Before her eyes, in the course

of three days and nights, he will shine through brilliant and pure, he will

slough off his hideous crust, be purged of the dross of defects, humiliations

and lies, and stand before her like a candle whose light quivers gently among

heaps of junk. Here in Café Limor, because of the low clouds, the shadow

is gradually lapping up the puddles of feeble electric light as though sucking it

up through a straw. Wait for me. Wait just a bit. Maybe this Giggy will

wangle us a grant from that fund that his father is one of the trustees of and

you and I together will come up with a production that will leave everyone

stunned and we'll walk away with a load of prizes and make tons of dough,

and then you and I. Or else. Or I could drop everything and go off tomorrow

to the Himalayas too, to shed my dead skin and set out in search of a spark.

He pours another spoonful of sugar into his coffee, which has soaked up

three spoonfuls already, stirs, and forgets to drink it. Should he go to her

right now. Should he suggest that they make a fresh start. Wait for me. Wait

just a bit. Or perhaps first he should send her a subtly worded love letter so

she'll see he's not just another stud but above all a spiritual being. With

thumb and forefinger he signals to the waiter to bring him a short espresso,

and he continues to leaf through the script, sniffing and rooting around,

leaving coffee stains on the pages and his sleeve, and pencilling notes in

the margins, while his other hand absentmindedly adds sugar and stirs,

then adds more sugar and stirs again.

Adagio

From morning to evening the light shines outside, not realizing

that it is light. Tall trees inhale silence with no need

to discover the essential essence of treedom. Empty steppes

stretch out forever on their backs without reflecting on

the pathos of their emptiness. Shifting sands shift and do not ask

how long or why or where to. All this wonderful existence is wonderful

but never wonders. The moon rises red, looking like a spilt eye,

searing the darkness of the sky, unsurprised by its own desolation. A cat

dozes on a wall. Dozing and breathing. Nothing more. Night after night

the wind whirls and blows over forests and hills. It whirls

continually. And blows. Not thinking and not appealing.

Only you, dust and humors, all night long you write

and erase, looking for a reason, a way to correct.

Nocturne

After the screw Giggy got up, put on a pair of sweat pants and

a shirt with a crocodile on it, picked up the phone,

and ordered a couple of speedy pizzas for Melchett 20, chop-chop.

She was wearing her jeans and his pullover. They laid the coffee table,

fork opposite knife, knife opposite fork, a pair of cups and two wine glasses.

The delivery boy sniffed the sweat of sex, stared at her with cuddly

puppy's eyes (she had forgotten to zip up her jeans). She felt sorry

for him, such a soulful, shy boy, she guessed at a mist of down

on his cheek that it would be quite nice to touch. Like a day-old chick. She

stood up. Took the boxes from him. She felt like letting him have. Just a kiss.

She stopped herself. At the door she touched his arm with her breast,

transmitted a spark and picked up a flicker, felt the scorch of an embarrassed

flame. When he had gone she sat down at the table. She saw a hair on her

plate. Hers? Giggy's? Or the boy's? The pizza was barely warm. The glass

had a gold band. Dita drank a little. Giggy winked at her, she nodded, not

necessarily at him. She pushed away her glass. Closed her eyes: there is a sea,

there are mountains. This flat is too chop-chop. The knife in his hand. The

fork in hers. Far from here there are forests. Rivers. Chandartal.

And darkness and winter and all their host too. You

are munching here and they stand silent. This fork is none too clean.

Meanwhile, in Bengal, the woman Maria

In a cheap room in a shabby inn she opens the window, leans out,

and fills her lungs with a cocktail of smells: mango blossom,

sewage, cooking odors, rotting fruit, cattle dung.

The night is tepid. The river is steaming. The darkness is bathed in faint decay.

In the cleft between her breasts Maria drips five or six drops of pungent

scent She closes the window. Eats some fish. This fork is none too dean.

And seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came, if haply he might find

any fruit on it: and when he came to it he found nothing but leaves, for the time

of figs was not yet She glances in the mirror. Eye pencil. Powder. Tissue.

Lipstick. If your right eye offends you. If salt loses its flavor. Changes

her skirt Her client will be late. He will pay. Strip.

Demand in English to do it spoon-fashion,

like two spoons in a drawer. In this position

Maria feels swaddled, protected, not like

a harlot being taken but, so it seems for a moment,

as though her back is attached to the cross and the cross is united

with her flesh. And after that Jesus said to her, Go in peace my daughter

for thy demon hath departed. Then she showers, eats some toast,

and falls asleep with the threadbare acrylic doll from Italy

that has travelled with her from bed to bed. She dreams of bread

baked in a cottage. Talitha numi: sleep girl. Tomorrow, Chandartal.

Talitha kumi

Talitha kumi—get up girl, its already half past nine. She works at the Hilton she's living in Mazeh she gets up in Melchett her parents are abroad and this morning she's going to Amirim Street, and already her head is fit to burst. Dubi rang to say that Giggy says that his father has wrangled us some finance, seed money to make the film, not in cash just an undertaking to top up an investment on condition we prove and on condition this and on condition that and also on condition that we sign up a director who has to be pretty well known, and we have to sign (my head my head) you and we have to sign, and we have to prove sources of finance authenticated by a registered accountant and Dubi says that Giggy made it a condition that he and his father should be kept in the picture and that he, that is Dubi, would open a special account, the Nirit account, and he would deposit such and such a sum at once and in the next phase Giggy's source would inject an equivalent sum and not a cent would leave the account without both their signatures, that is Dubi and Giggy, not you, not you, you're not investing a penny, on the contrary, we are purchasing the copyright from you, we is Dubi and Giggy, and you will get a token sum now and so much percent if it works out. In addition we have to sign up at least two guarantors. Get up girl drink some coffee take an aspirin and go to Bat Yam (my head my head) to sign this paper to sign only if Albert lets me, only if he assures me that the paper is OK. And Giggy will come and Dombrov as well and Bettine too for sure and maybe a lawyer. Albert will serve tea and savory sticks, Bettine will get up to help him but I'll stop her with a look. I'll go to the kitchen and she wont dare follow she'll just burn me up with that voodoo stare that she picked up from some old Greek who calls up the dead and fucks up the living. Now who's going to lend me two hundred shekels. Get moving Nirit go to Bat Yam.

How would I like to write?

Like an old Greek who calls up the dead and shakes up the living. Or like

a snowman passing alone and barefoot. To record the mountain to note

the sea with a fine tip, like sketching out a pattern for embroidery.

To write like a Russian travelling merchant making his way from here

to China. He finds a shack. And sketches it. In the evening he looks,

in the night he draws, and he finishes before dawn. Then he pays and

goes on his way with the break of day.

With or without

Like an open fracture like a broken bone sticking out of the torn flesh, my

mother rises in the night from the shadow on the ceiling, saying to me Amek

its two o'clock why aren't you asleep and why are you smoking again. Go

to the kitchen child drink some warm milk then get back into bed and sleep.

Don't think about me in the night I am insomnia think instead about foggy

rain in the forest and a fox seeking shelter among fir trees in the dark and it

will lull you to sleep. In the dark among the fir trees Old Somnia walks

with a wet headscarf sodden dress soaked to the skin a crooked stick in her

shrivelled hand a weary witch named Somnia roams in the dark in the rain

lost in the foggy trees shuffling from shadow to shadow wandering away

from me out there yet passing through me on her way, backwards and

forwards, criss-crossing me like a valley that she has turned from a valley

into a vale of tears with her sleepless wandering. Maybe all this is just because

I have left some door flapping.

Dita offers

Give me five minutes to try to sort out this screwed-up business. People are

constantly being ditched. Here in Greater Tel Aviv for example I bet

the daily total of ditchings is not far short of the figure for burglaries.

In New York the statistics must be even higher. Your mother killed herself

and left you quite shattered. And haven't you yourself ditched any number

of women? Who in turn had ditched whomever they ditched in favor of you,

and those ditched guys had certainly left some wounded Ditchinka lying

on the battlefield. It's all a chain reaction. OK, I'm not saying, I admit

being ditched by your own parents is different, it bleeds longer.

Specially a mother. And you an only son. But for how long? Your whole life?

The way I see it being in mourning for your mother for forty-five years is

pretty ridiculous. It's more than ridiculous: it's insulting to other women.

Your wife, for instance. Or your daughters. I find it a turn-off myself.

Why don't you try and see it my way for a moment: I'm twenty-six and you'll

soon be sixty, a middle-aged orphan who goes knocking on women's doors

and guess what he's come to beg for. The fact that before my parents

were even born your mother called you Amek isn't a life sentence. It's

high time you gave her the push. Just the way she chucked you. Let her

wander round her forests at night without you. Let her find herself

some other sucker. It's true it's not easy to ditch your own mother, so why

don't you stick her in some other scene, not in a forest, let's say in a lake:

cast her as the Loch Ness monster, which as everyone knows may be

down there or may not exist, but one thing is certain, whatever you see or

think you see on the surface isn't the monster, it's just a hoax or an illusion.

But how

Ditch her, you say, it's easy for you to say it,

bail out like a fighter pilot ditching a plane

that's in a spin or on fire. But how can you jump from a plane

that's already crashed and rusted or sunk under the waves?

From out there, from one of the islands

This morning outside her window Bettine Carmel sees

grey rain, shutters, washtubs, puddles in a deserted backyard.

Between kitchen balconies bare clotheslines are strung.

Ugliness and beauty, Bettine reflects, both attest, or at least point,

to the existence of some invisible presence, a silent, awesome

presence of which they bring us neither the voice nor the echo

but only a shadow of a shadow. Where is the boat, Bettine?

Where are those islands you mentioned? Here there is only

a peeling back wall. Rusty shutters. Tin roofs. And rain

pouring down not in torrents but splat, splat: like pus. A bus

bursts puddles and throws up mud like a whale's spout.

Where are those islands, Bettine? When do we sail?

And where to? Avram's old toilet things have been standing

next to the basin in your bathroom for twenty-one years,

a stiffened shaving brush, a dried shaving stick and a blunt

razor, and out there among the garbage cans in the yard in all that rain

a wet cat writhes, wailing hoarsely with tormented desire.

Those islands you mentioned, Bettine, when you asked me

if I believed in them, the Invisible Carmel, a silent awesome

presence, instead of replying yes or no I cracked a joke. I

tossed you some vapid witticism because then, when you asked me,

I was simply not all there. There was no me at home in my head.

Now that I'm back in residence there is no need to ask me

if I believe or disbelieve in those islands because as of this moment

those islands are me and from out there, from one of the islands,

I am calling to you through the rain, You come too, Bettine.

There is definitely every reason to hope

Bettine, you come too. There's a meeting at Amirim Street about Nirit's Love,

tea and coffee are being sipped, savory sticks nibbled. Dombrov is full of

words and Giggy Ben-Gal is picking his teeth. In a brass lamp in the shape of

a pomegranate all four bulbs are lit because the day is gloomy. The new

contract looks fair, but still Bettine rewords a clause, for the sake of clarity,

and Albert raises three questions and suggests a couple of minor changes.

Absalom in his head, Absalom, my son my son. In Bengal now it's five o'clock;

on the radio they said the Brahmaputra has flooded. Stay clear of the water,

my son. Keep away from low-lying areas. As for the Narrator, he is having

a whispered conversation with Dita at one end of the sofa, the script lying

across their laps. (Albert phoned him in Arad and asked him to read it, to

give his opinion, to come, if he could, to the meeting.) Two hundred yards

from here, the sea is having a whispered conversation with the sea, not

cracking jokes but trying on silver baubles, taking them off, putting them on,

polishing them, replacing emerald with lead. On the chair where Nadia used

to sit is a pile of coats, scarves, we were all afraid it would rain, so far it has

held off but it still looks threatening. Seemingly lit from within, clouds

are swept eastward to the mountains and on toward Bengal. There, in the

center of Dacca, in a corner of Cafe Mondial, Rico is waiting for two of the

Dutchmen whom he arranged to meet up with here when he last saw them

in Tibet. How is he to know that they've been in the Hague since the day

before yesterday? This coffee table, the chairs, the armchair, the sideboard,

were all made by Elimelech the carpenter some twenty years ago for a song

because he and Albert both came from Sarajevo, they were vaguely related

and had been school friends. Albert checked the carpenter's accounts

every year and filled out his tax return. That is an old story, long since over.

Giggy Ben-Gal now makes a suggestion: What this story needs, apart from

Nirit and her hermit who lives on the edge of a village, is another twist, like

a one-night stand with an Arab farmhand, or lets say a little lesbian scene

with a neighbor. Bettine suggests finishing with the bit where Nirit and

the man are feeding the pigeons, because what comes afterward,

the traveller, the dead fox, seems too morbid to her and overly

symbolic. Dubi considers that the traveller definitely adds a deep mystical

element to the ending. As for the Narrator, he recommends deleting several

of the long silences which he regards as a bit of an affectation. Dita says

nothing. Albert hesitantly apologizes and remarks that silences can actually

sometimes express what words cannot. Meanwhile Bettine stands up, clears

away the cups and plates, and stops on her way to the kitchen to open

the curtains wide. The sight of the wintry sea which is now a virulent green

makes her think that maybe this whole argument is unnecessary. Wrapped

in the silence of empty spaces the brightly-lit earth floats from darkness to

darkness. More tea? Or some coffee? No thanks — everyone has got

things to do, promises to keep, business to see to, chores that can't be put off.

Thank you. Must say goodbye and be off. It was nice, and as for the project,

the script, it's in excellent hands. There is every reason to hope it

will enjoy enormous success. Were off to a flying start.

Who cares

After that, in the car, the news. A soldier in the South Lebanon Army

has been fatally wounded and two Israelis slightly injured. In

Hazor in Galilee another small business has closed, its nine employees

are on hunger strike. A math teacher in Netanya has been

abusing his daughters for the past six years. A car went off the road

near Betar and ended up in a ravine: a father and mother and

their two sons; a daughter who survived is in a critical condition.

Epidemic and famine in Burundi. A woman in Holon has jumped.

The rain will continue. There is a warning of flooding

in low-lying areas. And a hurricane in the United States.

Who cares about Nirit's Love.

Little boy don't believe

In the summer of 1946 my mother and father rented a holiday room

in the flat of a tailor in Bat Yam. One night I was woken by a

coughing sound that was not coughing, and that was the first time in my life

that I heard a grown-up stranger crying through the wall. All

the darkness long he cried, and awake and frightened I lay still not to

disturb my parents until when the darkness was weaker I crept out and

saw him on the balcony his shoulders were shaking a bird flew up in the

silence of the dawn and the man pointed to it and said to me Little boy,

don't believe. Fifty years have gone by and the bird is no longer

or the man. Or my parents. Only the sea is still there

and even it has changed from deep blue

to grey. Little boy don't believe. Or do. Believe. Who cares.

Nadia hears

The bird wakes her. Lying on her back with her eyes shut, thinking

What's left apart from the place mat she's started and may still finish.

What's left is a wish that the pain will go away

that it will all go away and stop bending over her.

She lies as though she has left her launching pad and is now

moving along the Milky Way and already the planet

from which she was launched is far off, has shrunk till it can no longer be

distinguished from tens of thousands of other stars.

A bird on a branch calls to her and Nadia is lying

wiping away the good and the bad, like a woman who has nearly

finished washing the floor, walking backward toward the door, drawing

the mop toward her, all she has left to do is to wipe away the traces on

the wet floor of her own footprints. The pain is still sleeping: her hostile

body has not woken with her at the sound of the bird, with all its knives.

Even shame, her lifetime companion, has gone. It has ceased to gnaw at her.

Everything is letting go of her and Nadia is letting go of everything,

like a pear from a branch: the pear is not picked but a ripened pear drops.

Right now at four in the morning Nadia is the most alone she has ever been,

not alone like a sick woman hearing a bird in a garden but alone like a bird

with no garden no branch no wing. She lays her shrivelled hand on her

withered breast because suddenly for a moment the sound of the bird is

confused with a cry from a cradle at night, the baby's lips are open wide

to tickle her breast, or perhaps it is not her baby but a man covering it

with his palm, stroking it squeezing and soothing, slipping the nipple

between his lips describing with his tongue on her flesh

shivers that descend to the roots of her spine

and thus the needles of pain awake from their sleep and like

a small child in the dark she puts a finger in her mouth. Narimi narimi

has gone and now she needs an injection.

Half a letter to Albert

After the funeral I wrote a letter to Albert, half of it personal, which I do not

want to quote here, and the other half a kind of meditation, which I

shall reconstruct in other words. The desert and the sea, like you, insist on

balancing a joint bank account, evaporation, clouds, floods, the wind whirls

continually, rivers run into the sea, but there is no comfort in this:

from now on you are on your own without her among the heavy

brown furniture with embroidered mats lace curtains bellied for a moment by

the sea breeze which the next moment lets them hang slack. Whenever

I'm in town I'll try to drop in for a glass of tea. Try to be strong, Albert,

and phone me whenever you like. As for the assessments I sent you to check,

there's no hurry, it's not at all urgent.

The Narrator drops in for a glass of tea and Albert says to him

I read an article of yours, fire and brimstone, in yesterdays Yediot. Rico

showed it to me, he said, Read this, Dad, and don't get worked up,

just try to grasp where we are living and where all this lunacy is leading us.

That's what he said, more or less. I think he's even further to the left

than you, this repressive state and so on. I'm not so moral a person

as either of you, but I don't like the present situation much either.

Mostly I say nothing, from a deep-seated fear that in responding to

this or that wrong even I may come out with things that are not exactly

right. Anger sends out secondaries. Naturally I have every respect

for the brave child who shouts that the emperor is naked when the

crowd is cheering Long live the emperor. But the situation today is that the

crowd is yelling that the emperor is naked and maybe for that reason

the child ought to find something new to shout, or else he should

say what he has to say without shouting. As it is, there is so much

noise, even here, the whole country is full of screaming, incantations,

amulets, trumpets, fifes and drums. Or else the opposite, biting sarcasm:

everyone denouncing everyone else. Personally I'm of the opinion

that any criticism of public affairs ought to contain shall we say up to

twenty percent sarcasm, twenty percent pain, and sixty percent

clinical seriousness, otherwise everyone is mocking and jeering at each other,

everyone starts making false noises and everything is filled with malice.

Help yourself, have some of the other one, Nadia's sister-in-law baked them

for me so I'd have something to offer people who come to pay

their condolences. Try the cheesecake, whichever you like, they're both

very good. When you write for the papers, of course you must write

whatever you wish, even harsh things, but don't forget that the human

voice may have been created to express both protest and ridicule, but

essentially it contains a considerable percentage of quiet, precise speech

which is meant to come out in measured words. It may seem

that amid all the hubbub such a voice has no chance,

but nevertheless its worth using it, even in a small room among three

or four listeners. There are still some people in this country who maintain

that the emperor is usually neither naked nor fully dressed, but, for example,

wearing clothes that do not suit him. He may even be excellently

dressed, but every bit as foolish as the cheering crowd, or the other

crowd that is no longer cheering, but jeering, or shouting that

the emperor is dead, or deserves to be. And anyway, who says that

a naked emperor is such a bad thing? After all, aren't the crowd also naked,

and the tailor and the little boy? Perhaps the best thing for you is to

steer clear of the procession altogether. Stay put in your house in Arad

and try to write in a quiet way if you can. At times like these, quiet

is the most precious commodity in the country. And let there be no

misunderstanding, I'm talking about quiet, definitely not about silence.

In Bangladesh in the rain Rico understands for a moment

With his back to his mother on the bridge in the warm rain

between a small town and a swamp Rico hears wet voices

in the distance. Women, foggy bears, are laughing in the flooded

field and one of them waves to him, inviting him to join them.

His waterlogged hair in his face and a whiff of stray smell

that reminds him of overripe figs, the smell of Dita with his

tongue in her ear and his hand stroking the inside of her thigh.

The warm rain keeps falling and under the bridge the muddy

river flows porridge-like. Sorrow and desire come, desire rises like

mercury in the thermometer of his cock pressed against the wall

of the bridge while his hands move to and fro over the rough

parapet He looks at the trees with their roots half-exposed

in the soggy air, extra-terrestrial fingers, clutching at nothing.

Because his back is to his mother, inevitably he is facing

his father. If he turns his back on his father he will face

his mother again. He must change this staging, move my parents

closer to each other so that I can have my back to both

and return. The peasant woman who was calling him gives up

and stoops toward the mud, as the rain goes on and on.

Magnificat

Morning of orange-tinged joy: I get up at half past four and by five I have

finished my coffee and am settling down at my desk, and almost at once

there emerge two fully-formed lines running straight from my pen to

the paper like a kitten weaving on tiptoe out of the bushes, there they are

as though they were not written but always existed, not mine but their own.

The light of the hills to the east cannot keep its hands to itself, shamelessly

groping at private parts, causing heavy breathing all around, in birds branches

sand bees, so here we are delightedly leaving the desk and going off to work

in the garden, although it is not even six, the fictional Narrator, the whole

cast of characters, the implied author, the early-rising writer, and I.

Roses, myrtles, bougainvillaea, violets and sage have all gathered dewdrops

and are now gently lit. Rico and Giggy Ben-Gal are clearing the ground

round the two lemon trees, while Nadia, my father and Dombrov are pruning

suckers from the roses and Avram is helping the author and Albert to hoe

the edges of the flowerbed, weeding by hand among the flowers. Bettine,

my mother and Dita are stooping and tying sweet peas to canes and even

the Russian merchant stops on his way to China, and repairs the vine trellis,

while my daughter Fania helps him, asking him how much they know

in Nanking about Nizhni and how Nizhni looks from Nanking, and Maria

is planting a window box and here are the Dutchmen as well, Thomas Johan

Wim and Paul, making holes in the ground where Elimelech the carpenter

tells them to, and my daughter Galia is pruning even though she would

definitely have laid the whole thing out quite differently, and the man who

was Nadia's first husband hums as he rakes up dead leaves and my son Daniel

turns over the soil, improvising tunes with the fork, and the carpenter's

daughter follows him with a roller, while Rajeb spreads fertilizer. In Sea Road

and in Cyclamen Street my little grandchildren, Dean, Nadav, Alon and Ya'el,

are still dreaming, while here in the garden, careful not to wake them, I caress

the sweet air that trembles around their hair, suppressing a powerful urge

to lick their cheeks or foreheads, to nibble their toes with my teeth.

Morning of orange-tinged joy, every wish is switched off and only delight

is alight. Grief fear and shame are as far from me today as one dream is

from another. I take off my shoes, play the hose on my feet my plants and

the light, whatever I have lost I forget, whatever has hurt me has faded,

whatever I have given up on I have given up on, whatever I am left with

will do. My children's thirty fingers, my grandchildren's forty, and my garden,

and my body, the few lines that came right this morning, and here at the window

my lovely wife who is close to the core of life is calling us all indoors, there is

bread ready sliced cheese and olives and salad, and soon there'll be coffee

as well. Later I'll go back to my desk and maybe I'll manage to bring back

the young man who went off to the mountains to seek the sea

that was there all the time right outside his own home. We have wandered

enough. It is time to make peace.

Where am I

Why do we never see you anywhere, they say to him, why

do you bury yourself in that hole, they say, far away from your friends,

with no parties, no nights out, no fun, you ought to get out,

see people, clock in, show your face, at least give some signs

of life. Forget it, he says to them, I get up at five o'clock have a coffee

and by the time I have erased and written six or seven lines

the day's already over and evening is falling to erase.

In the evening, at a quarter to eleven, Bettine phones the Narrator

Bettine is at home again tonight. She has drawn the curtains and rolled down the blinds to the balcony so as not to have to see the fat neighbor opposite excavating his nose, hairy in an undershirt and sweat pants gawking from his armchair at some sitcom on the television. On the other side the sea, smooth tonight, chilly, shining darkly, a sea like the black glass nameplate of a respectable firm, with lines of gleaming gold writing, a pricey, highly polished sea, Current Liquidations Ltd. Bettine is in her armchair, lit by the glow from a parchment lamp shade, reading Troyat's biography of Chekhov. At the end of each page she shuts her eyes and thinks about the Narrator, he must be in Arad in the desert now, at the desk that Elimelech the carpenter made for him. She dips a honey cake into the tea that has gone cold in the cup at her side: on the cover is a photograph of Dr. Chekhov, almost a young man but his soft beard and hair and eyebrows are turning silver. He is wearing a striped jacket with wide lapels and a waistcoat, a stiff collar with a bow tie that is slightly askew, and a sad pince-nez secured by a cord. His eyes are those of a humble doctor who has made his diagnosis and knows what is going to happen but has not told his patient yet, although he knows that it is his duty to tell him now. I'm not the Almighty, his eyes say to the patient in front of him, after all you've known for some time now deep down inside, although you hoped, I hoped too, that these tests would surprise us and announce a reprieve. I cannot grant a reprieve, say Dr. Chekhov's eyes in the photograph, but I can and must do something now to block the pain. I'll prescribe you some tincture of opium. I'll also give you a sleeping potion, and some morphine injections to help you breathe. Get plenty of fresh air, sunshine and rest, don't try to do anything, just wrap up warm and sit in a wicker chair in the garden in the shade of the arbor and dream. Our business here is grim and hopeless, it goes round and round in circles, it is dreary and troublesome, but I'll prescribe you a dream and delusion, that you will still recover, that you will drive in your carriage to Tula, to Kazan, that you will still send rafts laden with merchandise down the river, that you will still buy Nikitin's estate at a favorable price, that you will still charm Tania Fyodorovna into leaving that vulgar Gomilev and coming back to you. Sit and dream. Dr. Chekhov is lying, and the shadow of a humble smile flits around the corners of his mouth. My soul is weary, he writes to Suvorin in August 1892, "I am bored. Not my own master, thinking about nothing but diarrhea, waking suddenly at night at the bark of a dog or a knock at the gate, are they coming to call for you? Travelling in a trap drawn by a worn-out mare along unknown tracks, reading about nothing but cholera, waiting for nothing but its coming, and at the same time feeling totally indifferent to the illness and the people you are treating." And in another letter: "The peasants are coarse, filthy, suspicious, I am the most wretched of the doctors in the district, my carriage and horse are useless, I do not know the roads, I cant see anything at night, I have no money. I tire very quickly, and above all I cannot forget that I must write, and I have a mighty urge to spit on the cholera and sit down and write." Bettine lays the book face down open on the arm of her chair and goes to the kitchen to put the kettle on for tea. Through her kitchen window the fat neighbor in his kitchen window opposite, in a long-sleeved vest and sweat pants, leans staring into the darkness or peering into her window, is caught out and smiles guiltily, perhaps he is dreaming about sending rafts down the river. Bettine draws the curtain and shuts him out. It's a quarter to eleven, the Narrator is still up, she dials. Sorry to call so late. I just wanted to tell you that Dita has moved back to Albert's because she has lent the flat he rented for her in Mazeh Street to Dombrov, who has been evicted from his own flat because he owes rent, and Giggy Ben-Gal, who promised to advance him some cash on account, has gone off to Spain and forgotten. And there was a postcard yesterday from Bengal, he's still chasing his shadow, as usual. Do you happen to have read Troyat's book about Chekhov? It brings me, right here in Bat Yam, a sense of fallen leaves in the snow, a sense of vast gardens abandoned to the autumn wind. It's all quite hopeless really, but at the same time quite diverting. It turns out that something that never was and never will be is all that we have. We are woken suddenly at night, every time a dog barks or a gate creaks, but the barking subsides to a whimper, the gate stops creaking, and all is quiet again. Did I interrupt you while you were writing? I'm sorry. Good night. By the way, next time you're in Tel Aviv call me, we'll have a glass of tea at my place or on Albert's veranda. It wasn't bad, what you wrote about the sea tonight, a pricey sea, smooth black with golden letters, a respectable company, Current Liquidations Ltd. Spit on the cholera. Just sit down and get on with your writing.

In a remote fishing village in the south of Sri Lanka Maria asks Rico

A virgin? A waitress? A nun? What shall I be tonight? Only not

your mother again. But first of all play the flute. Not in here. Lets

go down to the beach; there you can play for me and tell me

a story. One by one the fishing boats are taking to the sea

in a shimmer of lamps, licking the waves with their oars,

like tongues on a breast Maria is in a wind-swollen skirt he

is barefoot in jeans and a T-shirt walking not by her side

but a few steps behind her. Whenever he played he drew

to him animals, bushes, meadows, mountains bent over

to hear, streams left their beds, the north wind froze not to miss

a note, the birds fell silent, even the sirens stopped singing

and listened. When his beloved died he followed her down

to the underworld, charmed Persephone with his playing,

from the eyes of Death himself he wrung five or six iron tears,

and he hypnotized his dog. Surely every poet every musician

every charlatan tries like him to bring back the dead. The one condition

was that he not turn back or look behind, that he

walk ahead without turning around. On the face of it this

was an easy condition, an obvious security measure, to protect

the privacy of the underworld. Hades, however, that iron-teared

rhymester, knew his victim's mind: the wise man's eyes may be

in his head, but not so the poet's. A poet's eyes are in the back

of his neck. The minstrel always plays facing backward.

And so, as black turned to grey, his arms were drawn to embrace her

but she was no longer there. To play or to touch. Either or.

Since then he has been a wanderer and a fugitive like the young David

in the caves of Adullam, playing to the forests that froze to

hear his notes, playing to the hills. Try to imagine it Maria:

the rivers of sounds that have traversed the world since then,

including thunders, screams, barks, melodies, pleas, coughs,

shots, whispers, flutterings, the sighing of trillions of leaves,

earthquakes, drips, chirps, confessions, echoes and ripples of

echoes, all the innumerable sounds that, like everlasting autumn,

have long since buried the trickle of his piping. The winter

of the scuds, that I told you about in Bengal, Dita and I went together

to the old cemetery in a kibbutz called Ayyelet Hashahar, where

you can sometimes hear a sort of sound that promises you tonight

whatever you want on condition that you don't look back.

His father rebukes him again and also pleads a little

Listen carefully. This is your father speaking. A simple man,

a rather grey man, and so on and so forth, but still your father. The only one

you have, and that's something your irony can't change.

That cheap woman you're with may let off

fireworks in bed, I'm not an expert in such matters

and I'm sorry to mention it, but fireworks

go out and time is drying up and the summer is over and you are

not back. The summer is over the autumn is gone and what about you,

where are you? Shrouded in fog in limbo in the arms

of a whore. It's lucky your mother — well, never mind. Don't hang up.

Just a minute. Listen to me: Dita is back here. In your room.

Sometimes, just in my mind's eye, I look at her and think,

my grandchild is drying up. Wait. Don't put the phone down. The autumn

is over and you are just mist. Last night I dreamed of my own father,

he was kneading dough, grunting hoarsely in Ladino, Stupido Albert,

asno, in ten more minutes se hizo hamets. This call

is already costing me a fortune, but there's one more thing I have to tell you:

under the same roof she is waiting and so am I. There is something not right

about this. The summer is over and the autumn is gone; the rain brings me

a smell of dust. Don't come back too late.

In between

Like a sooty engine at the end of its journey the lit half

of the earth drags wearily toward the shadow

while the dark half gropes at the first line of light.

Dita whispers

My hand in the hay of your old chest

plucks straw

to line our nest

But Albert stops her

Her hand so light in the hay of my chest. On the back

of her hand my shrivelled hand. She's on my own. I'm on her own.

On my veranda. We are alone. The sea has taken, the sea

has given. A slim silhouette and a little shadow. A timid

shadow. That turns. Escapes. The sea gives and the sea

takes.

Then, in the kitchen, Albert and Dita

She is making an omelette, he is chopping a salad, her shoulder brushes

the skin of his arm like lips touching a lace veil. A cup drops. It doesn't break.

He takes this as a favorable omen: salad with olives, a big omelette,

yoghurt with honey and fresh strong black bread with ewes' milk cheese.

All this at nearly two o'clock at night, in Sri Lanka it's already morning

while here there's the smell of the kitchen after a meal. They clear away

the dishes, he'll wash up tomorrow, right now it's late. In the bathroom

the two of them: he in grey flannel pyjamas, she with a T-shirt down

to her thighs, he with his back to her, facing the bowl, she facing

the mirror, brushing her teeth, he's in his slippers, her feet are bare,

before going to sleep he wants to sew a button on for her,

on the side, on the waist of her orange skirt that he takes on his arm

to his room like a bride to her wedding bed. Close and breathing, close and

chilly, beyond his window the sea sighs. The doors are locked. Soon the bird

Scorched earth

The teeth of time, smoke without fire. On the bade of my hand

I see the brown mark that once used to be, at the very same spot,

on my father's gnarled hand. And so my father is back

from underground. For years he has failed and now, at last,

remembered to hand over to his son a patch of pigment

from his estate. The teeth of time. Scorch-mark without fire.

Ancestral seal. The gift of the dead

on the back of your hand.

Good, bad, good

Maria can also read fortunes. She reads them in coffee grounds,

she puts on her glasses to read, Maria is not so young any more. There's

good news and bad news in the coffee. The bad news is that time

flies. The good news is that time heals. That the evening is fine.

The bad news, that we're out of coffee. And almost out of money.

Look, there's a goat, staring at us like a widow,

maybe she's mistaken us for a mother and son, never mind,

let her live with her mistake, after all, why should we argue with a goat?

Especially a goat who's a widow. Tonight we'll eat dates, we'll sleep on this

straw, and not shoo her away. Come here, touch me. Tomorrow Chandartal.

Dubi Dombrov tries to express

Twenty to three in the morning. This is the time, not six, that ought to be at the bottom of a clock: the lowest time, when you can see what's going to happen. Dubi Dombrov calls Dita Inbar who is napping over the City News behind die hotel reception desk, her cheek resting on her hand; by her side, in a plastic cup, some lemonade is losing the last of its fizz. Sorry, he says, I just thought you might be free now to chat a bit. I suddenly had this idea that if you could manage to touch your old man, say, or some other old man, for nine thousand dollars or so, it would put me in the clear, as they say. We could spread our wings and make one hell of a film. With money like that I'd even give you a fifty-fifty share of Dombrov Productions Ltd. We'll repay the money within a year. We won't just repay it, we'll double it. Two people who count, top people at Channel 2, have read the revised script and definitely see potential in it. The problem is that I'm a bit in the red. I've sold the Fiat (with nine parking tickets and only two days left on the insurance) but don't worry, I'll clear out of your flat in Mazeh Street the moment I get the money Giggy promised. Besides which I've got eczema, besides which I missed two months of my alimony and today I got a sequestration order in the mail plus a call-up for the reserves, twelve days in Kastina, besides which I haven't moved my bowels for three days. Excuse the details. If the old man won't chip in nine thousand maybe he could make it two, or even a grand? I've got a painting by Tumarkin that must be worth twice that, I'll make it a gift to you. Anyway, I've been wanting to give you something personal, something beautiful for some time. It's a rather repulsive picture, actually, but it's all I've got, Dita. Nobody can give what he hasn't got. I'm not asking anything from you Dita, only that you should try to see me in a slightly different light sometimes. If you can. As for the money, get as much as you can, the old man is wild about you, and you'll see that our film will take off after all. Even a couple of grand would do for starters, after that you'll be amazed how this venture of ours will run all by itself. Believe me, I wouldn't for the life of me ask you for a penny if I had any choice. Tell me, Dita says, have you any idea what time it is? And tell me, Dita says, where are you living, anyway. To which Dubi Dombrov replies, with his bad breath hitting her across the switchboard and the wire, You want the truth? Were living in a flash. All of us. In a flash — it describes time and in a way it also describes space too. Honest, I wish I could put my body into storage, or mortgage it. I don't care if I don't get a cent for it. I'd even pay. All my troubles come from this lump of flesh that's clung to me since I was a child and doesn't let me rise above it. Nothing good ever came from it It guzzles fuel like crazy and all it ever does is make me blush or squirm. This body of mine is forever flat on its face. If only I could get around town without it everything would be so easy. I'd stage a project the likes of which this city has never seen before. I'd be free from sleeping and breathing and smoking, no belly, no reserve duty, no debts, no fear of AIDS, I wouldn't give a shit. For all I care the Scuds can come again and take it off my back. Or I'll sell it to an organ bank or even donate it to a forensic lab or a transplant center, and then I'd go off to the beach as free as the air. And take it easy. Or I'd go further, Tibet, Goa, I could take your boyfriend's place and send him back to you, even though really I don't believe all this shit, that he's hanging out there with some Portuguese chick, his own private fado singer, some kind of sexy hot-gospeller, that whole business is just a load of bullshit, he's probably blowing his mind in some hole in India and the whole Maria thing is all in the Narrator's head, and he's the one you should really talk to, if you just fluttered your eyelashes at him and got him to make a couple of phone calls to the right people, he must know them all, then our film would be halfway to being made. Even that Giggy of yours is just a load of bullshit when it comes to it, and so am I, even more so. The real reason I called you at 3 a.m. is that I thought it was the only way I'd finally have the guts to express my feelings, and look what came out instead: a lump of shit. What time do you finish your shift? I'll wait for you outside the hotel, OK? Or perhaps I won't What's the use.

Scherzo

He's fond of cheese, he chops salads fine,

no mortal man can chop them finer. Better a live

dog who this morning sent a thousand dollars to his son and to Dita

wrote a check for the sum of NIS 3,500. He's discontinued

his savings plan even though he knows the money's going down the tube.

Now he's reading Yediot and discovering that the state of the country

is also going from bad to worse. The magnates are arrogant,

peacock for foreign affairs, peacock for home affairs, little foxes

with high-falutin words. Dispensing a poor mans wisdom: tax adviser to

a greengrocer, an air-conditioning installer, he screws up his brown

face in the mirror like a raisin. To himself he says: The days

are going by. Yes sir, they are. The days are going by. I'm sorry

sir, excuse me sir, we're just about

to dose. So sit down and finish going through these accounts. Try at least

to clear your desk The newspaper can wait. Afterward, if there's time

you can change your shirt and go over to Bettine's. Go over there, stay

a while, chat, come home. Whatever you do it's no use.

Mother craft

Bettine, how are you? It's Dita. I'm calling to ask if by any chance

you've got his glasses? The dark ones? In the black case? No? Oh well,

we'll keep looking then. They must be here somewhere. Are you coming

over this evening? I'm working nights: I leave here at seven to be

at the hotel by eight. Do come. You can both have supper and sit outside

and chat on the veranda, only don't switch the light on, the mosquitoes

are hellish. You told me last winter that I make him needlessly sad,

or give him pointless needs, or something like that. I don't remember

exactly. Now I feel like telling you you shouldn't worry, Bettine.

There are no casualties. On the contrary: we both seem to be

definitely holding our own, if one can say that, and that's

how it is Bettine. I saw a big story in the paper today with pictures,

anxious moments in space, searching for the mother craft, is it or

isn't it out of control, I think something like that happens to lots

of people almost every day: finding losing finding again and

gasping for air. How on earth did we get here? It doesn't matter. If you

do happen to find his glasses will you bring them with you

when you come this evening. Even if you don't find them, come anyway.

It's better for the two of you to spend the evening together

than alone. And don't bring loads of stuff with you: I've

done plenty of shopping, the fridge is full.

It's me

Now it's me. I used to be Nadia and now

I'm not a spirit or a reincarnation or a ghost. Now

I'm the air my son breathes in his sleep on the straw,

I'm the sleep of the woman who's resting her head

on his shoulder. I'm also the sleep of my husband

who's fallen asleep on the living room couch

I'm my daughter-in-law's dream, her head in her hands

on the hotel desk I'm the swish of the curtain

that the sea stirs through the window. That's me.

I am all of their sleep.

A tale from before the last elections

A Knesset Member, Pessach Kedem, from Kibbutz Yikhat, found himself

left off the party list because of an intrigue, because some

cunning son-of-a-bitch grabbed his safe place near the top of the list.

Recovering from the shock and indignation he looked for a place, even

not a safe one, to hide his face in shame, a place secure from pitying

or gloating looks. At last, they say, his confidants managed to find him

a temporary billet as managing director or just company secretary

of some private ravine in the Tortoiseshell Range, down in the desert

not far from Arad. That's where the man now sits making notes,

remembering, filming, scheming, growing armor, hiding his head,

retracting his limbs, burying his face in his armored plates, reviewing

the situation, transforming himself from an MK into a tortoise. And how

about you? Do you feel you are safe and secure near the top of the list?

Half-remembering, you have forgotten

Meanwhile he is working as a night watchman in a run-down refrigeration

plant belonging to a Belgian fishery company in the Gulf of Kirindi, beneath

a curtain of dark hills. Maria has moved on. Beyond those hills there is a

steamy primeval jungle sweat-soaked with unceasing rains where there are

monkeys, parrots, bats and huge snakes. Aus Israel, the Austrian engineer leered

with a conspiratorial wink, ach so, in that case he certainly wont fall asleep on

the job or just sit there gaping if a light flashes on the control panel. His wage,

in Sri Lankan rupees, is three and a half dollars plus a fish he can grill on

the embers after midnight, and each morning when he leaves he can take

two fish fresh from the boats. His broom closet at the inn costs less than

a dollar a day, and he spends a similar sum on rice, vegetables, a rented

mosquito net, postcards and stamps. Meanwhile there's a boy, an abandoned

child, whom he inherited from the previous watchman (who got him from

his own predecessor), a quick-moving, shadowy creature, who somehow

belongs to the fishery, he sleeps by day in some disused cooling compartment

and at night among bearded pipes sticky with solidified engine oil, living

the life of a little fish thief or honorary assistant night watchman. In and out

of the dark gaps between refrigerators he slinks wolfishly, barefoot, he is six

or possibly eight, he is in tatters, every night he is reborn after midnight, out

of the shadows at the smell of grilled fish, an old rag round his loins, timidly

sniffing he cleverly overtakes his own shadow and penetrates the circle of

the watchman's fire, panting, his skin quivering to escape. In vain you attempt

in English sprinkled with crumbs of Sinhalese, Come child here don't be

afraid: he's been abused by other watchmen, before you, who seduced him

with their smell of fish, and did one thing and another. Now he's more

careful: give me first. Just throw him a tidbit of fish and he leaps, catches it

in his teeth in mid-flight, retreats with his spoils to the shadows, then

reappears to flicker around the ring of the fire, his pupils reducing the flames

to embers, his face in the half-light angelic but impure, a sly dishonest angel

well versed in gradations of winks, experienced in this and that: the previous

watchmen had done one thing and another, and another, but always he

had managed to float up to the surface of the swamp, velvety, girlish, unsullied,

with just a cunning-cautious spark in his eye. Night by night you throw

the tidbits less and less far, till at last he dares to snatch one from your hand

and flee. Or thus: you hold the fish just a little bit higher than he can jump,

till he tells you his name, where he lives, who his parents are. He doesn't

know. Nowhere. Never had any. So whose is he then? In guttural English,

with the Sinhalese trill: Yourr honorr's sirr. And a bow. As he speaks he leaps and

snatches the fish, sweet potato, or rice, with three swift hands. His voice

is warm and brown, like the smell of roast chestnuts. Within a few nights

he is climbing up of his own accord to nestle in your lap while skillfully

caressing you in one way and another, and also another, until you spot

what he's up to and stop him and carry him in your arms to your mattress

(submissive, pitiful, experienced, lying on his tummy for you). You cover

him with a sheet of greasy canvas, but he looks up at you with surprise, before

falling asleep all at once. You lay one hand on his forehead and the other

on your own, as though you were your mother. Soft and tired like the child

your head drops on your chest and the darkness draws out of you the hum

of a Bulgarian children's song without words, or with words you've forgotten,

half-remembering you have forgotten, but like the corpse of a drowned man

you can make out the shape of what you've forgotten. Toward dawn

you open your eyes, you're alone on the mattress, the child

has vanished without a trace, in the window silhouettes of boats

coming up from the seabed of night, all around the derelict plant mangy dogs

are barking, skinny dogs shrieking then sinking to a whimper, as a murky sun

chokes through the screen of haze: an opaque sunrise that resembles

a diseased, inflamed eye. Take a few fish and go to your bed. It's so hot.

It will come

It will come like a cat before evening. Soft and quick it will come.

Drowsy-cruel, sharp and light, it will come, silently,

on hovering paws, bow-taut back, furry, silky, evil,

crouching to spring it will come like a knife. Honing it will come. Its pupils

tiger-yellow, it is stealthy, arched, fawning, it will come like a cat

on a wall, lying in wait, patiently, coiled like a spring. It has seen a moth.

It wont give up.

Burning coals

It will come; it wont give up. Until it comes come back to me, don't

disappear, at least in the nights come back to me desire of women:

when I was a skinny pimply youth, day and night dreaming poems

dreaming women day and night you didn't leave me: with me

when I lay down, with me when I rose up, burning coals of my night

and shame of my day in my bed, at my school, in the street, in the fields,

scorched by desire for a woman but without a woman: a unicorn

in the morning in the daytime in the evening in my dreams, a brassière

hanging on a washing line, a pair of girls' sandals in the hall, a pencil

turning in the sharpener, a plump thick-braided girl soldier putting

a spoon full of sticky plum jam to her mouth, my blood thickened

to warm honey. Or in the evening, behind a curtain, the silhouette

of a woman combing another woman's hair, any rounded movement,

stirring, kneading, any sound descending to a whisper, a girl sewing

a button on her dress, the feel of face cream or soap, a rude joke,

a dirty word, a whiff of perfume mingled with a secret hint

of woman's sweat, fountained up scalding geyser,

surrounded with a vapour of shame. Even the word "woman" printed

or the curves of "breast" in cursive writing, or the sight of some

furniture on its back with its legs in the air made the stew

of my lust boil over and my body clench like a fist. Now an old male,

a unicorn of memories on his bed pleads with you to come back

to come back, desire of women, to come back to him at night,

give him back at least in a dream that trembling give back the scorch

of glowing coals, lest he forget you, lest he forget come what may come,

on hovering silken paws, soft, furry, yellow-eyed, comes sharp,

light and silent with sharp panthers fangs and a woman's curves.

Bettine tells Albert

Every weekend they bring the grandchildren to see me: the girl is a lamb

and the boy is a bear, she calls me Ranny Tee and he

pulls my hair. On Friday night they stay with me

and snuggle in my bed. I protect them

from the nightmares and the cold, and they protect me

from loneliness and death.

Never far from the tree

The apple never falls far from the tree. The tree stands

at the apples bedside. The tree turns yellow and the apple turns brown

the tree sheds damp leaves. The leaves shroud

the apple. The cold wind leafs through them.

Winter comes autumn is over the tree is eaten the apple

rots. Very soon it will come. It will come it will hurt.

A postcard from Sri Lanka

Dear Dad and Dita, on the other side you can see three trees and a stone.

The stone is the grave of a girl called Irene, the daughter of Major Geoffrey

and Daphne Homer. Who were these Homers? Why did they come here?

What were they looking for? Nobody in the village can remember. Nobody

can explain either why they made a postcard out of it. Were they living here

or just passing through? I scraped the moss off the stone with my knife

and discovered that she died of malaria, at the age of twenty, in the summer

of 1896: more than a hundred years ago. Did her parents, that evening,

six hours before her death, still lie to her and say that she was getting better,

that in a couple of days she would be frilly recovered? And what did she feel

when, between bouts of hallucination, she had a moment of lucidity, like a

hunted antelope, when she intercepted an exchange of glances and suddenly

realized that this was her death, that they had given up hope for her,

her parents and the doctor, that they were lying to her out of pity

and saying that the fever was abating and that by tomorrow

she would be better? Did she whisper That's enough, stop

pretending? Or did she feel sufficiently sorry for them to pretend right to

the end that she believed the lie that was tacitly contradicted by her mother's

weeping? And as she died convulsed by the light of a hurricane lamp

in the tent at four in the morning, who wiped the last beads of sweat from

her forehead? Who went outside first and who stayed with her a little longer

in the half-darkness of the tent? When morning came did Major Homer

force himself to shave? And did someone hand her mother a handkerchief

soaked in valerian? Because of the heat did they bury her that very morning

or did they wait till evening? And where and how did they travel on

from here? Did they leave at once? Or the next day? And how did the jungle

stand around the grave the first night after they left? A hundred years

have passed, so the pain has been stilled. Who is there to grieve? I wonder

whether somewhere in the world there is still an old comb or nail file

or mother-of-pearl brooch that belonged to that Irene. Perhaps in some

drawer in an unused walnut dressing table, or a mouldy attic somewhere

in Wiltshire? And who will want to keep her things, if any have survived?

And what for? Only I, who have no photograph and no image of her, felt sad

yesterday for that Irene. Just for a moment. Then it passed. I ate a grilled

fish with some rice and fell asleep. Today everything is fine. Don't worry.

Albert blames

Haven't I told you a thousand times Nadia I beg you stop filling his head with such nonsense once and for all, he's still young and easily frightened, don't stuff him full of wolves and witches and snow, ghosts in the cellar and goblins in the forest. There aren't any forests or goblins here. We came to this country to put all that behind us, to live on yoghurt and salad with an omelette, to settle down, to change, to defend ourselves when we have no alternative, to banish the old troubles, to be cured of the ancient horror, to sit under the vine in the garden, to recover gradually from everything that happened before, and to begin to distinguish here at last between what is possible and what is sheer lunacy. Haven't I told you a thousand times that my son has to grow up to be a useful member of society, a decent, sensible man with no nonsense in his head in the clouds but with both feet planted firmly on the ground in this land where there are no cottages in the forest but only warm sand and housing schemes. That is what we have, I told you, and what we haven't got we must simply learn to do without. To draw a line. Now look what's happened because of you. You've filled his head with fairies and fog and you yourself have grown feathers and a beak and flown off into the cold. You've left me all these lace doilies and embroidered place mats, who needs them? We could have had a grandson by now. Or a granddaughter.

Like a well where you wait to hear

Toward evening the boy, who still called him Yourr Honorr, would whistle to drag him out of the dungeon of sweaty sleep, and the two of them would climb the hill to catch crickets, or go to the seashore to pick up seashells to sell. They saw Superman together twice at the Globe Cinema and when they came out they wrestled panting on the grass. He went to the store run by the man from Taiwan and from his meager savings he bought the child a pair of khaki shorts, some vests, sandals with soles made from tires, he ended up looking like a young scamp from Israel in the old days. Each evening he bought him a Coke, some dates, bubble gum, occasionally a sticky brown sweet made locally from coconut and honey. He taught him to play a game of marbles from Tel Aviv, and they also made a kite. At night, on duty, you used to grill him a fish over the fire and talk, and the boy would listen, and sometimes a sly look flickered across his face which showed for an instant that he was not always as angelic as he looked. In the mornings, for instance, when you were asleep would he curl up in a heap of rags in the disused refrigeration unit, or on a battered mattress in some shed, or would he go off somewhere else to collect what was due to him? One day you bought him a bubble pipe from the Taiwanese, and that is how you were seen, an angular, tousled young man in jeans and a T-shirt with a Hebrew slogan ("Let the animals live"), with a dark-skinned, rather feminine little boy, in a pair of new sandals and a kibbutz-style vest which had once been white, the two of you blowing bubbles. So what if some people were beginning to gossip, at the hostel, at the refrigeration plant. The philandering Austrian engineer slapped you in various places and leered, neighing Ach so! At the kiosk, when you had finished blowing bubbles, the boy learned from you the latest Tel Aviv slang. Then you bought two sticks of chewing gum and you sat chewing together on the stone opposite the petrol pump. Perhaps you should ask some passing tourist to take a Polaroid photo. And send it In a letter. So they'd know. This child, listen, looks at you like a little abandoned monkey, not exactly looking you in the eye, more in the mouth, as though through your mouth he can see what's inside you. Besides which, he taught me a trick with a coin, the Devil only knows who taught it to him and what other things he knows without anyone knowing. He's like one of those lizards where if you pull off their tail they grow a new one, or more precisely like a well where you throw a stone in and wait to hear but you don't hear anything.

A negative answer

Question in a dream: and what was the fate of that well-mannered man, the draper who always knew what to say and what to pass over in silence? The man who was Nadia Danon's first husband? A scrubbed and scented, cheerful man, inclined to fixed habits, who sang Sabbath songs delightfully in a rich, resonant tenor voice. He may be living to this day in a suburb of Marseilles or Nice, pink-cheeked, flourishing, surrounded by charming widows. Or perhaps he is here in Israel, living in Kiryat Ono, a widower and pensioner, the treasurer of the House Committee, still hoping that one day his only daughter Rachel, a twice-divorced doctor of forty, will return from San Antonio or Toronto, marry a moderately observant Jew, open her own private clinic, and invite him to live with them, let's say in a modest little cabin at the end of their garden. To his question in a dream he receives a negative answer. She is there and you are here, totally on your own since the day Rex was run over. You have to get over your grief, put on a jacket and tie, pick up your carved cane, and go to the Animal Protection Society to choose yourself a new puppy despite everything, and start all over again. But it will be difficult to relate to a new puppy now: if you call him Rex he will remind you every day that Rex no longer exists, and if you call him Chief he won't help you forget anything. Better to give up dream questions and get on at last with finding a replacement for that refrigerator that rumbles like a heavy smoker and interrupts your sleep.

Abishag

It's cold tonight. And rainy.

His hands are so thin.

He's not really old

and I'm not in his arms.

His hands are so tender

clasped in my palms,

I'm changing a baby

born to me from his son.

He's really not old. Restless,

the sea outside in the dark

exhales. Thrashes. Gropes

the sandy beach with its waves.

As though changing his grandson

my hands encircle his.

For a moment he was a baby,

but now he's a father again.

He closes his eyes to keep watch

A small surprise party: the people who work at the Property Tax Board are

saying goodbye tonight to an old colleague who has reached retirement age.

So from eight to midnight Albert has offered to look after Bettine's

grandchildren who are sleeping in her bed. On a shelf in her bedroom is

a photo of her husband Avram, a distant relation of Nadia's, with a precisely

trimmed grey moustache, and a beret on his head. A smell of talc and

shampoo enfolds Bettine's habitual faint perfume. The little girl is fast asleep,

clutching a sheep with a missing ear, from time to time in her sleep she takes

a single deep breath. The boy is tossing and turning, he's worried, he fears

the worst, he thinks there's a bear lurking in the corridor. In vain Albert

carries him outside to see for himself that there's nothing there. He is

frightened. He wants his mummy. He wants Granny 'Tine. He wants

the light on. He asks Albert to turn off the dark, quick. In vain Albert sings

a Serbian lullaby from his childhood in Sarajevo and another haunting song

in Bulgarian with which Nadia used to lull Rico and herself to sleep. In vain.

A faint light comes from the kitchen and a glimmer from a street lamp enters through the window, trembling slightly because of

the sea breeze stirring in the chinaberry tree. Albert goes to the kitchen

to warm a bottle that Nadia has prepared before she went out. Bettine,

he corrects himself. But Nadia won't let go. He returns to the bedroom

and finds the boy asleep. Now he goes down on his knees on the matting

to pick up the animals, bricks, books, a xylophone missing two of its bars,

stoops to lay a teddy bear by the boy's shoulder, covers both children with

a blanket, sits down in Bettine's armchair, and closes his eyes to keep watch.

Xanadu

— till one evening he does not come to whistle, Wake up Yourr Honorr, let's

go get a Coke, and then let's go shrimping in the shallow rock pools in

the bay. First you scan the sky for the dragon kite you made him. Not there.

That night he does not pop out as usual from the shadows behind the pipes

and the smell of grilled fish.

Nor the next day.

He has disappeared.

In vain you go looking for him at the plant, in the cellars, on the shore, in

his disused refrigerator, to no avail you quiz the soft-drink seller

in the square or the Taiwanese storekeeper: vest khaki shorts a pair of

suspenders like an H? Always lugging a bag full of snails and Coca-Cola tops?

No use. So many children are abandoned here, cocksuckers, beggars,

pickpockets, who can tell them apart? The fishermen you question

this morning snicker, wink, what's the problem, find another one instead,

there's no shortage of his sort here. Has he been kidnapped? Got lost?

Drowned? Or found another uncle on the side? Only yesterday you washed

his hair; the boy bit, struggled, but came back in the evening with a gift for

you: a live jellyfish in a can of seawater. And the grief like a creeping stone:

the boy isn't here. He's gone. The boy who was here has gone. The boy

has gone. Lost. With his blue bag of snails and his sandals made from tires,

tied with a frayed string. A dustboy, so velvety, he found you rather odd,

what's the matter with you, a corrupt angel's smile, innocently seductive, pure

and smart, but suddenly a startled little monkey would cling and cuddle

in your arms, huddling and burrowing with a take-good-care-of-me.

You didn't. The boy has gone. The boy who was yours has gone. This

evening in the square three neon signs in Sinhalese and one in English:

Xanadu dance bar, first and last drink free on the house. Order a gin. Talk

for a while to one of those easy girls who by the way is also called Xanadu.

A boy. Lost. Not mine. Vanished. Don't know his name. He always calls me

Your Honor and I call him Come-Here. Eight. Or six. Who can tell?

So many children abandoned here. Maybe he needs help. He may be

screaming to me in the dark. Or no longer screaming. On the barbed wire

opposite is a torn scrap of kite. Another kite. Not ours. And warm rain

has been hanging for hours in the air. Sit and mourn. There's plenty of time.

Xanadu stays open till daylight.

If only thy let her

At six in the evening Bettine is walking along the shadier sidewalk to Viterbo's pharmacy, a woman with attractive hips, wearing a skirt made of an Indian material, and earrings, with her hair bobbed, her handbag swinging from her shoulder. Two days ago she won six hundred shekels in the lottery, and she is going to spend the money on Albert as well as herself. Besides acamol and calcium tablets, she is going to buy essence of propolis and echinacea, ginseng, and capsules of garlic and zinc. On second thought she will also get some brewers yeast and a jar of royal jelly for Dita who is looking washed-out, and two little toothbrushes and some vanilla-flavored toothpaste for her grandchildren on Friday evening. There's something cheap about that Dita, she's so caught up in herself, always preening, but she's rather touching too. The truth is it wouldn't hurt that bulldog Dubi Dombrov if someone took care of him. (Bettine casts a fleeting glance on his behalf toward a display of health care products but warns herself, Don't overdo it) As she leaves the pharmacy at twenty past six, Mr. Viterbo follows her with a smile that has no ostensible cause yet is not groundless. Instead of heading straight for Albert's she walks, clutching her plastic bag, to the seaside esplanade from which one can see the sun moving fairly fast toward the sea which, for its part, receives its sharp stabs of simple color and responds with its own complex colors. If you stop talking sometimes, my teacher Zelda said to me when I was about seven, maybe things will sometimes be able to speak to you. Long afterward I found in a poem of hers "a very faint quivering that moves the leaves when they meet the light of the dawn." Bettine is a far less thin-skinned mortal than my teacher Zelda, but something sometimes reminds me of her, for instance the way Bettine says, Listen, here's what I saw, or, Now don't you repeat that. A few days ago she said to me, Try to visualize what is implied in the bureaucratic expression "expired" that we use ten times a day without hearing what it is actually saying, but if you stop to think about it there is good reason to be startled. In my dream I am still in the pharmacy where I've been sent to return something embarrassing, like a bra or a garter belt from her clothesline that has somehow ended up at our place by mistake, and I try to give it back but she argues with me, Take a boy like Giggy, take someone like Dombrov even, and I say to her, I have taken them, and she smiles, not at me but at the pharmacist Viterbo, who smiles with her against me as he wraps a mouth organ for me which I haven't bought. Dear Bettine (I say to her in the dream as though I am greeting her at some formal occasion), why don't you bring your grandchildren over to our place this weekend, to play with our grandchildren? It wont fuse together, she says, and I am amazed in my dream and suddenly I'm not at the pharmacy but running across a plot of wasteland as the sirens howl. Little boy don't believe. Or do. Believe. What then. An invisible presence, she says, a terrible mute presence, and everything, from a stone to an urge, brings us not its sound, or an echo of its sound, but only a shadow of a shadow of a shadow or maybe not even that, but only a trembling, only a longing for shadow. Such is Bettine's creed, such is her faith. One evening in the summer she called me in Arad to chat about some book she was reading, and she told me she thought it was all quite hopeless really but at the same time quite amusing, because it turns out that something that never was and never will be is all that we have and that is what she wants to fuse together. Dear Bettine. If only they would let you.

The winter is ending

In south Bat Yam they're building a new mall, they've closed a grocery shop

and opened a fashion boutique or a bank, dedicated a garden to Yitzhak

Rabin, with a fountain and benches. In Bangladesh there has been more

flooding: the monsoon has washed away bridges, villages and crops. Not here.

Here we are expecting primaries, scuds or devaluation, whichever comes first.

Ben-Gal & Partners have purchased a new plot to build luxury apartments

and duplexes and commissioned a ninety-second promotional film from

Dubi Dombrov: your dream home, penthouse with sea view. Dita Inbar

wrote the script. Apart from that, she's been to the hairdresser's, and bought

a spring dress and sandals. She is writing another screenplay

about the eccentric Greek in Jaffa who brought the dead back for

a short while, before he died himself. Then his heirs quarrelled about his flat.

Instead of a lawsuit, for a modest fee, Albert Danon has worked out a

compromise. On Tuesday Bettine is giving him supper, on Thursday night

she is coming round for tea and cakes on the veranda. The winter is ending.

The birds are at work. This light is pleasant and the nights are quiet.

A sound

Now everything is closed in Bat Yam except the duty pharmacy, where

a cool neon light is flickering. Behind the counter, in a white coat, sits

an Italian Jew, no longer young, who for three hours has been reading

line by line everything written in the daily paper, which while he reads

has become yesterday's paper. He wonders aloud but he knows that

there will be no answer. From the pocket of his white coat he takes

a pen and taps the side of his empty cup four or five times. It is not the

sound that startles him but the renewed silence: now it is really pure.

He's gone

For ever. He's gone. And from now on

it will hurt. Get up. Go. To bed. Or

not. Sit down. Have another gin

or don't Go out. Come back. He's

not Only there, on the rumpled canvas,

a cigarette-butt of his smell is left

among the brew of fish smells.

All there

The sky is dark and empty. A mist flows through a mist.

It has not rained this evening. It seems it will not rain.

Its grey and calm here. Getting darker. A still bird on a post.

Two cypresses grow almost joined. A third one grows apart.

I'm curious to know why there is this smell of smoke

although there is no fire. A piece of an old kite

is hanging on the fence. A mist drifts through a mist.

I'm not there any longer, yet I'm all there: standing still.

Going and coming

Here is how we could sum it all up. A man is at home. His son is not here.

His daughter-in-law is staying with him for the time being. She

goes out. Comes back. She has someone in the meantime. He's doing well,

sleeps with her when he's free, a smart lad, who comes and goes.

A man is sitting at his desk It is night. All is quiet. His son

is not here. On the sideboard place mats, lace doilies, and two

photographs. Sea at the window. Brown furniture. Tonight

he has to check some accounts. What balances. What doesn't.

A widow with bobbed hair was here earlier this evening,

almost by chance, she drops in now and then for a glass

of tea. The winter is passing. The sea remains. As for the light,

it goes and it comes. Now like this and now like that.

Tonight he needs to work out his profits and losses, what

does it profit a man. Rows of columns. Sorrow is not

like this: it has no measure. The carpenter is dead. The desk

is still here. The Narrator is running his fingers over it.

He's told the story of himself and of his mother, he's tried to avoid

the word "like." He's told the tale of a wandering Russian merchant

who did not reach China and would never see his home again.

The tale of a snowman that roams alone among the rugged

mountains; he's told of the sea and of Chandartal. It revolves,

the whole business, it comes and it goes. The moon tonight

is pale and sharp, frightening the garden, twisting the fence,

tapping lightly on your window: now please begin all over again.

Silence

Even you. Everyone. All Bat Yam will be full of new people and they

in their turn, all alone in the night, will wonder at times with surprise what

the moon is doing to the sea and what is the purpose of silence. And they too

will have no reply. All of this hangs more or less on a thread. The purpose

of silence is silence.

Draws in, Jills, heaves

And now it's as clear as can be. The moon is bending low over the dark of

the sea, drawing up toward itself expanses of many waters and the mighty

waves of the deep, covering them as if with lead. All over the sea the moon

spreads a quicksilver web which it draws in and heaves up to itself. That

is what I am talking about.

At journey's end

Now he is resting up in a cheap inn in a small town in the south

of Sri Lanka. Through the crisscrossed bars three huts, a slope,

little sailing boats, the Indian Ocean, warm, its waves are sharp

slivers of green bottleglass in the harsh sun. Maria is not here. She

has gone to Goa, from where she may return to Portugal Or

she may not. Its hard for her. In the tiny cell is a stool, a rusty nail,

a hanger, a yellow rush mat, and in the corner a mattress.

There is a cracked washbasin whose enamel surface is scarred by black

patches. A nibbled electric wire curls slackly along the walls, draped

in cobwebs. A hotplate stained brown by milk that has boiled over

and not been cleaned for years. And there is a picture cut out of a

magazine, showing the Queen of England, with an air of faint distaste,

bending and patting the head of an almost crying local child, his shabby

trousers drooping, his limbs gaunt, a starving alley-cat.

The picture is dotted with fly droppings. And there is a cracked sink,

and a tap leaking rusty water drop by drop. Lie down now on

the mattress and listen. You've been here and there, you've sought

and you've found, this is the place. And when the daylight fades,

when the damp tropical evening smothers this glassy light, you

will still lie on this mattress, sweating and listening, not

missing a drop. And in the night too, and tomorrow: drop drop

drop and this is Xanadu. You've arrived. Here you are.

Here

Moon in the morning moon in the evening wreaking light in the night

skeletal all the day hurting every part O my child Absalom my son

my son Absalom, the desk is here the bed is here the guitar is here but

you are a dream moon in the night moon in the day glowing on the sea

pale in the window, preying on every living part my son my son.

What you have lost

Giggy Ben-Gal who had arrived back only the previous day from Brussels

drove in his new BMW to look at an old orange grove near Binyamina

that was about to be dug up. He had had a reliable tip that in a couple of years

this whole area would be released for housing. It would pay to snap up today

at the price of farmland what tomorrow would be prime building lots in a

sought-after district. He sat till evening in a fairly run-down village house,

was offered thick coffee and home made carob jam, and had a jocular

conversation with the heirs of the deceased farmer. The younger son was

on the ball, he'd served in a crack regiment; the older son seemed rather

tricky, saying hardly a word, with one eye closed and the other only half

open, too mean to waste more than a quarter of a look on you.

Every time the conversation inched in the direction of a deal, he would throw

in a sour half-sentence. Forget it, mate. We weren't born yesterday either.

At last, as it was getting dark, Giggy stood up and said, Right, OK, let's

put it on hold, first the two of you try to sort out what game you're in, then

give me a call and we'll talk, here's my card. Instead of driving straight back

into town he decided to take another look at the orange grove that was dying

because it didn't pay to irrigate it. There was a giant ficus tree nearby,

bowed with age, and beneath it Giggy parked and walked down the rows

of orange trees, treading on thistles and whistling. Birds whose names he

didn't know replied from the branches, chattering, pleading, as though

they too were trying to sell him some marvelous piece of property

that they had no real idea of the value of, nor of its potential. For a quarter

of an hour he wandered, forcing his way through ferns and brambles until thick

darkness settled over the neglected grove and it was only with difficulty,

after getting lost, that he managed to locate his ficus tree, but his new BMW

had vanished with his cell phone inside it and all the birds fell silent all at once,

as though their singing had been no more than a cunning trick to lure

and distract him, so as to help the thief. Giggy was left all alone

in this out-of-the-way place where it was definitely not healthy to be alone

after dark, especially unarmed. He started to grope his way through the

undergrowth toward the village but the long low building he was heading for

turned out to be no more than an abandoned packing shed, and suddenly

a jackal or fox broke into a howl. Rather close. And in the distance dogs

barked and the darkness filled with stealthy movements. Giggy sat down

on the ground and leaned back against the wall of the dilapidated shed,

sensing the stab of cold stars among the branches of the grove and the glow

of his watch and patches of shadow among the trees. For a few moments

he cursed, then he stopped. He felt calm. A cold, mute beauty, a deep wide

night was opening up before his eyes. Here and there large shadows looked

at him and a feminine breeze from the sea inserted its fine fingers between his

shirt and his skin and for a moment he felt that all this, breeze, branches,

stars, even the darkness itself, was staring at him as though patiently waiting

for some delayed coin to drop. The dead farmers house where he had spent

most of the day, with its two palm trees in front, suddenly

struck him as perfect for Nirit's Love: the cypresses all round the yard,

the tumbledown henhouses, the stacks of utility furniture,

the flower-patterned plaster all stained, the plywood and formica surfaces

blistered and peeling at the edges, this was the perfect location.

And now he opened himself up to hear the prickly carpet of crickets

and a cow lowing in the dark as though it was his own soul keening and

village women in the distance answered with a heart-rending Russian tune

the like of which you would never hear again in Tel Aviv. Arise now

and go, light and calm get up and go in search of what you have lost.

Translator's Note

The Same Sea is replete with allusions to the Bible, the rabbinic writings and modern Hebrew literature. It is not essential to its reading to be able to identify and locate all these allusions, and I felt that to indicate them all by means of footnotes would interfere with the readers enjoyment, but I offer here the references of some of the recurrent biblical allusions, particularly those which might otherwise seem puzzling. The commonest allusions, too frequent and generally familiar to be given here, are to the story of David, told in i and 2 Samuel and the beginning of i Kings. The two short texts, the Song of Songs (or Song of Solomon) and Ecclesiastes, are also alluded to, as are the Psalms and the Book of Job, in particular the following verses (all quoted from the Authorized King James version):

Song of Songs

1:15 Behold, thou art fair, my love; behold thou art fair; thou hast doves' eyes.

2:7… by the roes, and by the hinds of the field, that ye stir not up, nor awake my love, till he please.

2:9 My beloved is like a roe or a young hart: behold, he standeth behind our wall, he looketh forth at the windows, shewing himself through the lattice.

2:16 My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies.

5:1 I am come into my garden, my sister, my spouse: I have gathered my myrrh with my spice; I have eaten my honeycomb with my honey; I have drunk my wine with my milk…

5:2 I sleep, but my heart waketh: it is the voice of my beloved that knocketh, saying, Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled: for my head is filled with dew, and my locks with the drops of the night.

5:4 My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him.

5:5 I rose up to open to my beloved; and my hands dropped with myrrh and my fingers with sweet smelling myrrh, upon the handles of the lock.

8:7 Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it: if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned.

Ecclesiastes

1:2 Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.

1:3 What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?

1:4 One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.

1:5 The sun also riseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.

1:6 The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.

1:7 All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.

1:8 All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.

1:9 The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

11:7 Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun:

11:8 But if a man live many years, and rejoice in them all;, yet let him remember the days of darkness; for they shall be many. All that cometh is vanity.

Psalms

42:1 As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.

Job

1:21 Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taketh away; blessed be the name of the Lord.

The New Testament allusions are mainly to the Gospels. Of the many references to post-biblical Hebrew literature I shall single out one which seems particularly relevant. It is a poem by Rahel (1890–1931):

Only of myself I know how to tell,

my world is as narrow as an ant's,

like an ant too my burden I carry,

too great and heavy for my frail shoulder.

My way too — like the ant's to the treetop—

is a way of pain and toil;

a gigantic hand, assured and malicious,

a mocking hand lies over all.

All my paths are made bleak and tearful

by the constant dread of this giant hand.

Why do you call to me, wondrous shores?

Why do you lie to me, distant lights?

Nicholas de Lange

Cambridge, May 2000

Footnotes

*English in the original.

[back]

Content

Amos Oz
The Same Sea

A Note on Pronunciation

A cat

A bird

Details

Later, in Tibet

Calculations

A mosquito

It's hard

Alone

A suggestion

Nadia looks

Rico looks

On the other side

All of a sudden

Olives

Sea

Fingers

You can hear

A shadow

Through us both

Albert in the night

Butterflies to a tortoise

The story goes like this

The miracle of the loaves and the fishes

Back in Bat Yam his father upbraids him

But his mother defends him

Bettine breaks

In the Temple of the Echo

Blessed

Missing Rico

No butterflies and no tortoise

And what is hiding behind the story?

Refuge

In the light-groping darkness

In lieu of prayer

The woman Maria

A feather

Nirit's love

A Psalm of David

David according to Dita

She comes to him hut he is busy

He isn't lost and even if he is

Desire

Like a miser who has sniffed a rumor of gold

Shame

He resembles

The Narrator copies from the dictionary of idioms

A postcard from Thimphu

A pig in a poke

She goes out and he stays in

And when the shadows overwhelmed him

A shadow harem

Rico considers bis father's defeat

Rico reconsiders a text he has heard from his father

The cross on the way

Seabed bird

He hesitates, nods and lays out

Outsiders

Synopsis

The peace process

In the middle of the hottest day in August

The riddle of the good carpenter who had a deep bass voice

Duet

The well-fed dog and the hungry dog

Stabat Mater

Comfort

Subversion

Exile and kingdom

An ugly bloated baby

Soon

Rico shouts

A hand

Chandartal

What never was and has gone

Get out

Only the lonely

Rico feels

And the same evening Dita too

A wish stirs

I think

A web

Rico thinks about the mysterious snowman

One by one

Your son longs

A wandering merchant from Russia who was on his way to China

It's not a matter of jealousy

It's only because of me that it came back to her

Every morning he goes to meet

What I wanted and what I knew

De profundis

Giggy responds

Dies irae

My hand on the latch of the window

And you

The hart

At the end of the jetty

Passing through

Then he walks around for a while and returns to Rothschild Boulevard

Squirrel

Never mind

He adds sugar and stirs then adds more sugar

Adagio

Nocturne

Meanwhile, in Bengal, the woman Maria

Talitha kumi

How would I like to write?

With or without

Dita offers

But how

From out there, from one of the islands

There is definitely every reason to hope

Who cares

Little boy don't believe

Nadia hears

Half a letter to Albert

The Narrator drops in for a glass of tea and Albert says to him

In Bangladesh in the rain Rico understands for a moment

Magnificat

Where am I

In the evening, at a quarter to eleven, Bettine phones the Narrator

In a remote fishing village in the south of Sri Lanka Maria asks Rico

His father rebukes him again and also pleads a little

In between

Dita whispers

But Albert stops her

Then, in the kitchen, Albert and Dita

Scorched earth

Good, bad, good

Dubi Dombrov tries to express

Scherzo

Mother craft

It's me

A tale from before the last elections

Half-remembering, you have forgotten

It will come

Burning coals

Bettine tells Albert

Never far from the tree

A postcard from Sri Lanka

Albert blames

Like a well where you wait to hear

A negative answer

Abishag

He closes his eyes to keep watch

Xanadu

If only thy let her

The winter is ending

A sound

He's gone

All there

Going and coming

Silence

Draws in, Jills, heaves

At journey's end

Here

What you have lost

Translator's Note

Footnotes