What she didn’t see she would feel, and what she couldn’t feel she’d imagine, and she never said (or thought) that something was missing. If she’d gone up to the Himalayas the Rishis would have borne her aloft on their palms and burned incense at her feet.
What annoyed us was her habit of speaking only of practical matters. But this is one of our faults.
[98]
There are people who return the Divine Presence to Tel Aviv when they smoke cannabis. A great cloud wafts up over this city of sin, and all in a flash is forgiven.
People who are usually quite sharp (journalists, etcetera) find it a challenge to distinguish between a knife and fork, but a benevolent spirit enters their bones, and over the course of an hour or two they forget (which is so unlike them) all the appropriate ways of behaving.
We knew a man whose two names (first and last) were modern. Something like Yaron Yar-Ad, or Ran Ziv-Or (during the days of those kibbutz sandals that cost four hundred shekels). He was highly conscious politically, and therefore occasionally ate sashimi from the lunchtime menu. Now (under his cloud of hashish), he even loves settlers.
We need to check in Genesis to see on what day God created the grasses (just now it seems too hard to remember) and offer up a prayer of thanksgiving.
[99]
There are people in whose bodies cannabis can always be found, and they don’t need to mix it with tobacco and light a cigarette, like that same distant relative (who was born in 1921) we used to call Uncle Shamu.
First, he jumped off an illegal immigrants’ boat into the sea, near the coast of Caesarea, wearing a wide-brimmed hat.
Second, he immediately befriended (after two or three days) an Arab widow he’d met in Jaffa and went to live in her home. That widow in time became the only person who could speak high Hungarian in the entire Muslim world.
Third, he sold fountain pens, the nibs of which were made of gold. He found himself a small store on the border between Tel Aviv and Jaffa and over it hung the sign SHAMU PENS.
Fourth, he went into a mosque wrapped in a tallis.
But most of all, when he walked (from Tel Aviv to Jaffa and back) his shoes moved along at the height of the upper windows and the wide-brimmed hat on his head passed over the rooftops.
[100]
Generally speaking. What floats floats. There’s nothing one can do about it. The news is divided into grammatical components. Syllables here, and consonants there. Sometimes you hear, as though it were Czech, a word with seventeen consonants.
Every woman opens her arms. White sheets flutter in the breeze. Suddenly Doctor Semmelweis arrives (he discovered the cause of childbed fever). You drink espresso and think about a cabbage salad. The Hebrew cantillation signs are homosexual. You go to the Home Center and ask for earphones and they give you birds. It seems to you that water is flowing under the streets. You see the rays of the sun one by one, as though in a child’s drawing. No one is more lovable than the plumber. Yoel Hoffmann is the name of a powder. You hear the muezzin everywhere.
Evening is morning, although it’s evening and the morning is morning, and nonetheless we don’t get confused.
[101]
We haven’t yet spoken of the great theories of mankind. Sometimes the spirit spins around itself like a whirlpool at sea, and the soul sinks.
Some people bow before nothing. Or plead to what’s beyond the world to come and save them.
Whoever goes to hell goes to hell. Who’s saved is saved. What do we know? Maybe far beyond the world, in a place unreached by the oldest starlight, a teddy bear sits and no one knows. Or a narcissus. Who doesn’t get drunk on their scent?
We can now reveal to the readers of this book a deep secret, but they’re not allowed to reveal it to readers of other books.
Feet follow one another. Hands cut through the air. The mouth opens and closes. The inner organs expand and contract, according to their nature. What’s outside is standing or walking.
Prayers can be heard everywhere, whether a person says them aloud or not. Frogs need only themselves. The marsh reeds know the right direction.
And because these things are set forth here, it’s a wonder this book is sold for so little.
[102]
Here we would like to introduce a new character. The landlord at 7 Nahalat Shivah Street, in Tel Aviv.
His name was given to him a day or two after he was born. They made meatballs and invited guests. The crystal dishes came out of the sideboard.
When he got bigger he rode on the tram, and at the Gymnasia he wore a hat with a visor. Now he’s already old, and whenever he goes down a staircase he groans.
This is the man. His neighbor in the building next door (number 9) suits this chapter better. Readers can see (if they hide in the courtyard) how she goes down the stairs with the garbage. When she returns to her apartment she places different pots on the stove.
These two, granted, are minor characters, but they’re major minor characters.
[103]
The words falsification of corporate documents frighten us. Maybe we’re also committing such a crime. On the other hand, books like these can hardly be thought of as corporate documents, and we do our best not to lie. Witness the previous chapter.
Other writers lie all the time. They play around with names and change dates and whatnot. We, however, lied only with regard to the girls we had a crush on in fifth grade and sixth grade, because they’re married now (though some are widows) and we’ve already seen how one of their husbands looked at us.
Writers should be brought to trial not over things like that but for inflicting boredom. There should be a clause about that in the criminal code. We, too, are sometimes guilty of this.
Imagine for a moment that we’re found guilty of inflicting boredom on our readers and we’re thrown into prison and sit there among the crime families. On second thought, that’s better than sitting in Tel Aviv at fancy stores like the Bookworm.
[104]
Here we can relate the sly doings of Mrs. Shtiasny and her Italian husband and Mrs. Minoff and my stepmother Francesca, and how they traveled to the Rukenshtein Pension in the hills of Safed.
In those days no one traveled by taxi more than a few streets, and this only when something dire was involved. Nonetheless, they went by taxi, something that gave rise to considerable grumbling in the Austrian old age home. (They were accused of being haughty, wasting money, and the like.)
As a kind of punishment from on high (this is how the others saw it), Mrs. Shtiasny’s Italian husband almost fell out of the taxi when he tried to slam the door while it was moving. To this day, some of the Arab elders of Acre remember the wondrous sight of a taxi passing through the Old City and the back door suddenly opening and a tall Jew being shot from it like a shell being fired from the barrel of a cannon and two women holding his legs and pulling him back inside.
At the Miron Junction Mrs. Minoff tried to slam the broken door and the whole thing happened again. That is, the door opened wide because of the wind and Mrs. Minoff tumbled out and was pulled back in by Mrs. Shtiasny and her Italian husband.
At the pension itself Mrs. Shtiasny’s Italian husband suffered a bout of sleepwalking and wandering into Mrs. Minoff’s room. But this we’ve already alluded to elsewhere.
[105]
From this incident with the taxi the readers can learn of the difference between fabrication (which we call fiction) and life.