Imagine if the word turns out to be prow. Or Binyamina. Or epaulettes. Or hydraulic. Or gurgle (which is probably onomatopoeic). Or drowse. Or you.
[130]
We could, toward the end of the book, tell about a murder, and then when the woman asks, Who killed him, the detective will answer, You.
Or we could make it a love story, and the woman will ask, And who is that woman you always dream of, and the man will answer, You.
And what then? What happens in books after they end? Then, and only then, does the true story begin. Again there’s no end. No division between different things. All the colors come at once. Forms are found within each other, even if that involves a contradiction (a square circle, for instance, etcetera). Scents mix. There’s a spectrum of sounds that Maria Callas never even dreamt of. The size of the pages (after the last one) is infinite. They’re white like the Siberian tundra in winter. Whoever reads those pages reads himself to death.
[131]
Saroyan understood these things. He’d always fall toward those other pages and return (out of compassion) to the book itself. He knew the old women who sifted lentils, and the Mexican workers’ dogs.
There was never a more religious man, and therefore he drank and gambled and went to whorehouses (in books and beyond them), and every word he wrote was charged, like high tension power lines, with thousands of volts.
And he was a great thief. If we’re missing a key we can be sure it’s in the celestial pocket of his suit. He’d lift the mustache right off our face, and even slip our wife away.
In fact we’ve forgotten our name and think we’re called Saroyan. When someone says Yoel Hoffmann, we think he’s speaking to another person.
No wonder it’s so hard to separate Siamese twins. Because they have just a single heart, one of them usually dies.
[132]
Today the muses, damn them, went elsewhere. They come and go as they like, and we’re in their hands like a weather vane in the wind.
We haven’t seen them with our actual eyes, but it’s said that there are seven. And in fact, when they all come at once, the noise is unbearable. One says Write this, and another Write that, and they fight with each other and sometimes coax us into writing drivel, or worse, what’s true.
Mostly they sing like a choir of angels or those women in Hawaii who hang leis from their necks and sway their hips. But when an evil spirit gets into them, each one goes into a corner of the room and screams. And then you sink into the lowest of spirits and begin to write — like some kind of clerk — all sorts of facts. And she left. And the phone rang. And the train arrived at the station. And the street was wet with rain. And they drew pistols, etcetera etcetera.
These are the muses of sanity, destroyers of art — who tempt writers and poets to enter into a marriage with them, then send them to take out the garbage, or fix the faucet.
[133]
Dzhokhar Akhmadov, a poet from Chechnya, said to us once: You see eagles whose wingspan covers Grozny and all the surrounding plains. My elderly mother looks out through the window, but the glass is broken. Nights crawl like a hungry hyena. You’ve come from a far-off place and so my soul grows faint. Have you ever seen a Muslim cloud? Or a cloud that’s Greek Orthodox?
People died of tuberculosis. Some in stairwells, with fire from the bombs lighting up their faces. I didn’t know you before today, but I’ve long known you would come, and now we can go to a single grave. You see these hands? Think of an infant and think of a mortar.
[134]
As though in a slaughterhouse, we need to strip off all of our skin — down to the very last piece. We’re the butcher and also the beast. And if the blood doesn’t flow toward the drainage channels, there is no literature and there is no poetry.
Once we sat in a Tel Aviv café (we realize there’s more to Tel Aviv than cafés, but when we go there we’ve nowhere to sleep), and we saw through the glass a woman pushing a carriage and in the carriage there was a baby. Where is that woman now? And the baby?
Poetry’s found in the melting tar of summer rooftops, in which you can see the imprint of the soles of shoes.
We remember that Uncle Shamu once held a fountain pen up to the sun and with his other hand pointed to the nib and said: See, it’s gold.
[135]
Since we’ve thought of Uncle Shamu we’ve also thought of Dr. Kalish, who’d say the words “as well” (und auch) for no reason at all.
Dr. Kalish was a doctor of the humanities. He’d studied ancient history, or something like it, at the University of Leipzig and came to Palestine with Dr. Zoltan Forschner (who was a medical doctor), my Aunt Edith’s husband.
Why are we mentioning all these things? Because when the Italians bombed Tel Aviv (during the second world war) Dr. Kalish’s house was cut in two and Dr. Kalish and his wife (Frau Dr. Kalish) were exposed to the world as they were sitting at the kitchen table and eating an omelet.
During that same bombardment many people died, but Dr. Kalish and his wife were brought down on a ladder from the third floor, and from there they took a taxi to my Aunt Edith and her husband Zoltan, and they stayed with them (in their other room) for something like half a year.
[136]
We were six or seven then, and now can confess that we’d go to my Aunt Edith’s apartment (five buildings away) only to hear Dr. Kalish say und auch (as well).
He’d say, for instance, “Where is the skillet und auch,” or “What time is it und auch,” or “The Germans are retreating und auch,” or “Emma”—this was Frau Dr. Kalish’s name—“come here please und auch,” and so on.
For days (no, weeks and months) we’d think about what this und auch meant. That is, we realized that Dr. Kalish saw much more than other people did, but we didn’t know what he saw.
Once we plucked up our courage and we too said und auch (something along the lines of “What does it say in this book und auch”), but Dr. Kalish just looked at us, surprised.
Today we think it should be mandatory, by law, for all people to use this expression at the end of every sentence. So as not to get too smug.
[137]
There’s someone else we wanted to talk about but we’ve forgotten his name and how he looks.
We remember only the other things. That he was a body’s length from the earth’s surface. That he came near and grew distant. That night came over him and the day made him bright, and things of this sort.
We can’t recall anyone more precisely. Therefore we miss him, and because we can’t remember his name, our longing is greater than we can say.
This person is with us wherever we go, and without him we’d die of a broken heart. And if this seems overly clever to someone, then maybe he should look at himself.
This man is also the hero of this book that we’re writing (and of all the books that we’ve written to date). If we could bring him to mind, we wouldn’t need to write.
[138]
We’ve already discussed Japan in this book. Here we simply want to mention the two distinguished prostitutes from Kyoto.
The first bowed deeply and said: We welcome you under our meager roof. We’re honored that you’ve chosen this lowly establishment. With the greatest possible humility we would like to begin by playing the samisen for you, and to the sound of its music a maiko (young geisha), who goes by the name of Rose’s Scent, will dance before you an ancient dance of desire. Ten thousand yen.