“ ‘I knew immediately you were kosher,’ she told me in the morning after the night spent awake; she was gazing there, where a woman gazes at a man, ‘O, rose of Sharon…’ I looked there, too. My whole life I was ashamed. I was always different from others. My parents never told me why.
“I was ashamed before my classmates during the medical examinations, I was ashamed in the showers at the pool, I was ashamed at the army recruitment, I was ashamed while making love…
“And suddenly, the most beautiful woman since the time of Creation looks between my legs and says a miraculous sentence:
“I KNEW IMMEDIATELY YOU WERE KOSHER!!”
The astonished listeners on the Liars’ Bench exhaled, then swallowed.
“I didn’t leave her come morning. Her words were a magical shem. I lay back alongside her, and was as assiduous as the legendary Golem!
“And so, gentlemen, love holds me like the Jewish faith.”
Overwhelmed, all the men stare with respect at this man who like his Aaron swims in a river as wide as the Volga, swimming with ardor toward a great song of life, a life that will never stop being beautiful if a magnificent Jewess tells you you’re kosher. And though the men keep silent, it’s a silence that’s actually a fierce applause; every one in his own hidden self searches for the marvelous, the kosher, and no one protests at all when Franta Psoria, the King of the Liars, raises his hand and exclaims:
“Well, bartender, a beer’s all around, on me! Come let us honor our new King!”
AN APPEARANCE, HUMAN
I am a city. I’m full of people. Nothing human is strange to me. I love people. But not because they are great.
I love them because they are small.
There are a lot of them, and they’re all lonesome. Fettered, they yearn for freedom. They pray for immortality, and yet they don’t survive the touch of death, the Medusa jellyfish. They thought up money and they eternally lack it.
They explained their dreams and then they took sleeping pills.
It’s hard to survive. I, city of Most, know that — as did Pompeii, Carthage, and ancient Rome.
O, how I know it. Just one look into the mining pit behind the church. It’s hard to survive.
It’s even harder to live.
I saw a cloud in the sky yesterday.
It rode out above the city, a black conscience. This cloud had a lance. A helmet and a shield. A horse and rider was the cloud. Both of them skin and bone. I knew that some of the people down there would see them, too. People have imagination, after all.
And they will recognize that Don Quixote on his horse can ride out of anywhere, even out of the fog, clouds and gray smoke. Things are never explicit, are they? At everything sad and crazy perhaps one should gaze with imagination. Perhaps even the blackest cloud can be transformed into a knight, tilting at windmills of nothingness with the most virtuous of manners.
Man is insignificant and crazy.
He shouts under the arch of the bridge and exults over the echo.
He imagines his reflection in the mirror will remain there forever. He is conceived and he fits into his mother’s belly. He dies and fits into a small tin box.
And yet it has occurred to me that Man can be compared to a cloud. Neither are what they seem to be.
Whoever has imagination can see their long lances, the sad heights, and the most virtuous acts performed in the name of a love.
I am a city. I’m not a tree. But I know the tree. And I also know the wood from the tree. And the paper from the wood of the tree I’ve seen innumerably.
But only a person with imagination, a man who once stood in the mud with his head bent back observing the dark clouds above him, could on the paper from the wood of the tree of this world of this life on this planet of this universe of this infinitude, write to another person a confession of this kind:
I know I love you, even if I kid you,
And your craziness I praise to the skies,
We are the only men betrothed
You, Quixote, and me, your Cervantes.
Remember, Quixote, when once again in your armor
You ride at the mills and once again they all laugh at you,
Remember, Quixote, your author fears you,
Afraid you would stop loving him.
That you would leave him, because he didn’t make you divine,
But wanted to know the whole truth of the soul.
Your author, Quixote, himself became more than ridiculous.
His craziness becoming crazed — crazy through and through.
AN APPEARANCE, PUPPY
How is it that when the children of the city are still just puppies, they prance about in my streets? How is it that when they hardly know how to walk, they already know how to run, to tear, fly about, spin, dash, sprint and scream at the apartment blocks as if they were the trees of the forest? How is it, when they should only know to fulfill their merit badges and to play their puppy-love games? They also know how to get into the orchard, whenever they want to, and how to tear apples both for their sweet taste and for the sheer joy of it all — joy, because adults lurk in the orchard. There, the grownups have already learned how to walk and forgotten how to run and have treated themselves to German shepherds; not to foster friendships with the puppies, only to frighten them, as these German shepherds keep watch over the apples and know how to tear and to bite and to run just like the puppies do, only much faster.
I am again in Vtelno, I, city, with my children, as the boys bring over the fence apples as if from the Garden of Eden. And just as in the days of the Corrida in sunny Spain when the bulls are driven out from their stalls and into the streets to undertake a frantic chase and courageously fulfill their merit badges, here the guardians of the apples hold gladiator games between the German shepherds and the puppies.
The boys escape from yellow fangs over the ugly barbed wire. The German shepherds smack the fence with their muzzles. It’s a close shave. They make it by only a hair.
This time, my puppies are faster.
Breathing heavily, they bite into the Edenic fruits of childhood, seized in their frantic escape.
What’s left for the German shepherds and the grownups are only the rotting apples fallen to the grass.
Thanks to their pride, they have only as much as the worms.
AN APPEARANCE, FINAL
People know they can’t run away from themselves.
If they do run away, they know they’ll eventually come back.
A man takes leave of his childhood, quits babbling, begins thinking and becomes an adult. He’s reasonable, and the whole world belongs to him. Until he begins to come back to himself. Then, he suddenly shrinks, and when he wants to tell the people around him that he’s seen Paris, Rome and Cairo, and personally knows Sophia Loren, he finds himself beginning to babble again, as he discovers himself coming back to the stage of his childhood.
He hasn’t gone far.
Who will be willing to listen to his babble now? Where did he ever find comprehension? Where did they understand him then, where will they understand him now? Is there such a place to which he can come back, from Paris, Rome, Cairo, from a couple of loves, from a couple of equations among many unknowns, from the inscrutable breast of Sophia Loren? Is there such a place he can get to by train? Is there such a place, where all the train conductors are poets? Is there such a train, such a train station, whose conductors would all recite verse to him? Is there such a poem that can be understood by all? And what are its words?