The second bowed more deeply still and said: Of late the autumn wind has blown, and the maple leaves are turning red. Within our humble rooms you can meet Cherry Blossom, who is, it’s true, thirty-six, but full of tricks, or Drawn Sword, who can bend herself, for your distinguished pleasure, in all four directions. Twenty thousand yen. And Lotus Flower, about whom you’ve no doubt heard, is thirty.
[139]
Cherry Blossom took off her obi but didn’t remove her kimono. She bowed deeply and said: Mr. Gaijin (Mister Foreign Man). Does Japan please you? Have you seen the rock garden at Ryoanji? Or the great statue of the Buddha at Nara? Does Mr. Gaijin know that it’s possible to crawl through his nostrils?
Yes. Cherry Blossom lives in Kyoto. Cherry Blossom’s mother was also a geisha. Cherry Blossom’s younger sister is a maiko at the House of the Full Moon, in the Gion Quarter.
Has Mr. Gaijin left a wife behind in his country? Is her hair blonde? Cherry Blossom is no longer young, but is her figure not that of a young woman?
Then Cherry Blossom took up the koto and plucked on its strings the ancient song,
A moon in the pond—
But the waters do not break,
And the moon stays dry.
[140]
Sometimes the waters of the pond are stirred and the moon disappears. Then we go out to the street at four thirty in the morning and see the silhouette of the newspaper deliveryman and hear the paper hitting the pavement. The air is very cold at this hour and even one’s memories freeze. Women we’ve known are suspended in inner space like icicles.
At five thirty the municipality turns off the streetlights and at six the sun, the Sonne (that son of a bitch), does what it does behind the post office. In the street, the garbage truck moves along then stops. We greet Beber, the garbageman, and at that very moment the sun comes up, glorious and dripping with sex, over the roof of the post office, and so we stand there, two men and one large woman, till the driver of the garbage truck yells out, Nu, Beber, let’s go already.
[141]
We owe nothing to no one. Certainly not a story. If we’d like we could write a single word 7,837 times. A word is as cheap as a stick. Or we could compose our sentences along the lines of Japanese syntax (that is, from the end to the beginning). Or insist that the publisher burn the bottom edge of the book so that the reader’s hand will be blackened by the charcoaled page.
Whoever doesn’t get it can go to hell. Let all those intellectuals with their pursed lips go to hell and take their stash of Paxil with them. The women too. Things would be better between us without all that wisdom of I’m looking for myself, and so forth.
We suggest that you put your hand behind the bookshelves and knock the books over onto the floor. You can see how they open in the air like a fan.
And you’re entitled to smash all the light bulbs. Why not. You’ll see the children glow with joy. You’ll tell them that now it’s time for the other lights.
[142]
There’s a certain amount of noise in Mrs. Rauschenberg’s name. But she was without a doubt the quietest woman we’ve ever known.
Like Sisera’s mother, she sat all day by the window and looked out toward the villages of Hiriyya and Sakiyya (which were there before the ’48 war).
No one knew what Mrs. Rauschenberg was thinking. If this were a story we’d write that she’d lost such and such at Auschwitz. But in fact it wasn’t possible to know if she’d ever had anything to lose.
That’s all. If we had any other information (we could, for instance, write that we remember the scent of Yardley soap that wafted up from her, or the fine netting that covered the hair on her head), we wouldn’t hide this from our readers.
[143]
We think that Mrs. Rauschenberg was silent till the day she died, and Miss Rigby (from the Beatles’ song) also didn’t speak very often.
Because what, at this point, is there to say? At most one has to tell the grocer what one wants, or else one gets a mango instead of tomatoes.
We were at the university and saw that people go into rooms at regular intervals and one person then speaks before them for a very long time. We remember things of that sort from our childhood, when we heard the croaking of frogs or when the cicadas (in Japan, for example) sent up their sound day and night, during the summer.
But the frogs and cicadas say just one thing, which is most likely very important. Something about the water in the swamp, or the warm air, or the desperate need to mate.
And that’s how it should be in the university. A person should enter and say to everyone (even for an hour and a half or more) things like “I’m Mattityahu. My mother’s name is Rivkah. My father is Eliezar. Yes, please. .” And so on.
[144]
Because once we traveled by bus from Tiberias to Tel Aviv and beside us sat a woman who had a large basket of eggs on her lap.
We didn’t speak at all, but by the time we reached the town of Tabor a great closeness had developed between us and at Hadera we could no longer (which is to say, I could no longer) think of ourselves as alone in the world.
The hardest moment came at the Central Bus Station when the woman got off the bus and went somewhere else. Then we thought (as our heart emptied), What’s Iphigenia in Aulis to us? Or macroeconomics? Or sociology? Or the conjugation of verbs? Or theories concerning metallic strength and tensility? Or generally, what’s what they call perspective or point of view to us? We wanted to lie down under the great wheels of the bus and die. And we swear before man and eternity (and that includes all the psychologists and their ilk) that we’ve never been more sane than we were at that moment, when that woman with the eggs left us behind.
[145]
Each time we think that we’ve come to the end of the book we’re reminded of something else to say. We remember how our children were very young and how, as we held their hands and hurried from place to place, they flew in the wind like kites.
We also recall how we were offended in all sorts of places. Especially in Switzerland. Everything there (including the landscape) was so utterly orderly, and as a result we were hurt to the core (or maybe that should be to the cores).
The visible police directed things outside, and the hidden police held sway within. The moment we crossed the border, we were sent (one can’t say we were thrown, since no one throws things there) into an internal prison, one of those places where everyone sits in a cell made of iron and sees his neighbors through bars on the side and his guards through bars in front of him.
We also recall Lake Biwa, which resembles a huge violin, and when it’s still one can see the cities on the opposite shore doubled there, above and in the water.
[146]
And we remember also the thousands of candles that the Japanese float on the surface of the lake. These are the souls of family ancestors and maybe my great-grandfather Ausiás Goldschlag was among them as well.
We’re imagining him hovering over the face of the waters, his great beard singed by the flame of the candle and the Japanese all around him staring in wonder but bowing politely.
One should perhaps explain these memories (a brain and so on) but we’re sparing our readers explanations of that sort. For they too (the readers) deserve a little rest. So they can spread the fields of their recollection far from the skull and toward the cities and the villages of Europe, toward Baghdad and Kurdistan and Morocco and Algeria, enormous regions — larger than the box of the brain by a factor of more than a million.