Uncle Shamu and his Muslim wife are already dead and their son Moshe left for America and opened a refrigerator business there. We visited him when we were in New York. He lives in Queens, and his wife, who came from Croatia, made us latkes. As we said goodbye, Moshe hugged us and gave us a fountain pen. One of those pens that his father, Uncle Shamu, had left behind.
In Tel Aviv, at the last store that sells vintage fountain pens (on Allenby Street), they replaced the rubber ink sac, straightened the gold nib just a little, and sold us a new inkwell. Sometimes we dip the nib into the well, fill the pen with ink, then squirt the ink back out.
[156]
On this night (2009, between the third and fourth of January) the cannons are roaring and therefore the muses have to be silenced. In any case, they’re infernal females who trouble the sleep of man.
All we can think of is the song we heard a long time ago, when we were little. Maybe Francesca, my stepmother, sang it. O dear Augustin, Augustin, Augustin, O Augustin, my dear, all is lost.
Uncle Max, my stepmother Francesca’s father’s brother, was taken by the Gestapo to a concentration camp. He clutched his World War I medals to his chest and hobbled along on his wooden leg (the leg of flesh he’d given as a gift to Germany) out to the street.
His leg most likely went up in smoke at Auschwitz. But if we had it today we’d set it afire now in order to warm up the people of Gaza, who are freezing.
[157]
Now that we’ve remembered the song about Augustin, we also remember the tongue twisters my stepmother Francesca taught us.
Try saying the following: “Der Potsdamer Postkutscher putzt den Potsdamer Postkutschekasten” (that is, approximately, the Potsdam post coach’s coachman cleans the postbox of the post coach of Potsdam).
Or: “Herr von Hagen darf ich fra-gen, wie viel Kra-gen, Sie getra-gen, als Sie la-gen krank am Ma-gen in der Hauptstadt Kopenha-gen” (more roughly still, Dare I ask, Mr. von Hagen, / how tight was the collar you wore when you gagged on / the apple core, which left you sore, / in the capital’s hospital, in Copenhagen).
Or (in Berlin German): “Ick sitze da und esse Klops, / uff eenmal kloppt’s / ick denk nanu! Nanu denk ick / Ick jehe raus und kieke, / und wer steht draußen? Icke!” (which says, more or less, I’m sitting and eating my supper, / and then there’s a knock at the door—/ Who is it, I wonder, who is it for? / So I go out to see—/ and. . who’s standing there? / Me!).
[158]
And in fact, wherever you look you’ll see yourself. And others too are only images on the screen that’s you.
As a woman once said to us: What am I to you? When you look at me you see only yourself. And I’m here. Here. Here. That’s what she said, and she pounded her fist against her heart.
Her name, that woman’s, was Francine, and in the end she left us. She went back to her home in Quebec and became an English teacher. Now she’s standing there and explaining the difference between the first person and the third person. If we’d known that difference then, we wouldn’t have lost her.
[159]
Francine spoke Canadian French, which is like Yiddish in relation to German.
She bathed with two bars of soap and explained that each bar suited a different part of the body. Fine down sprouted along her legs and when the sun came up across them, it seemed as though the down was cast in gold.
We could write countless stories. “Francine on the Beach” (how the big toe of her right foot was cut by a piece of glass and she cried, “Zut alors”) or “Francine on Shenkin Street” (how she tried on a pair of boots and removed them with a kick and one boot landed on the top shelf) or “Francine at the Café” (how she spilled her beer onto the pavement stone just to watch it fizz).
We don’t know which sun comes up over Quebec and which moon lights up its night. Most likely a different sun and a different moon. But if it’s the same sun that rises here and the same moon that lights our night I would write on them with two long brushes (a brush for day and a brush for night) “O Francine.”
[160]
The reader can no doubt guess what sort of music we’re trying to compose. Mostly blues. That sentimental melancholy suits us as a suit fits a tailor’s dummy. If someone tells us to look at something rationally, in a major key — as, for instance, Telemann did — we get angry.
Take the shelves in the supermarket. They’re trying to tempt us to process the arrangement of boxes and packages systematically. But we see cornflakes and think of snowflakes falling on the Siberian tundra, or we see soup mix and think of stardust.
Whoever understands these things can join the secret order whose members send one another signs by moving their pinkies ever so slightly. Look carefully. You’ll find them, even at gatherings of the bar association.
Once we saw a man like that at the train station in Budapest and we fell all over him.
[161]
We’ve forgotten to tell our readers about our neighbors. Mr. Nahmias occasionally makes a swerving kicking motion. He’s a fan of the Liverpool soccer team. The neighbor on the other side, Mr. Sapoznikov, goes up and down the stairs while reading Globes, the financial paper. Our Hello-how-are-you relations are much better with Mrs. Nahmias than they are with Mrs. Sapoznikov.
One floor down there’s an architect whose name is Pnei-Gal, but we don’t see him very often, because (so we’ve heard) he’s an ecological architect. Which is to say, he designs houses that work in harmony with the earth and so on.
Pnei-Gal, the architect, is a very thin man with narrow shoulders, but we usually see only his back. Mr. Sapoznikov, on the other hand, who owns an excavation equipment company, usually comes at us head on, that is, from the front.
Of all the women in our entry we’re partial to Mrs. Nahmias. Mrs. Sapoznikov looks too much like her husband, and the architect, Pnei-Gal, lives alone, or with another man.
We think this chapter’s all confused, maybe because we don’t really have a clear sense of our neighbors.
[162]
We won’t talk about our immediate family in this book. We’ve already done that in another book, and there too we’ve concealed certain things. But between us, which is to say, ourselves and ourselves, we know that every word in it is dedicated to Nurit in lieu of a thousand bouquets of flowers.
What can be revealed is the view through the window. The mountain. What’s in front of it and behind it and to its sides (and also above it) is always in motion. It alone stands there, as they say, immobile and silent.
And it has no name. And one can see it only as it is. And it can’t be explained or criticized or made fun of.
We ask God’s forgiveness for the fact that we’ve sometimes (in distress) prayed to it. But we worship the mountain.
[163]
At the foot of the mountain there’s a creek that dries up in summer and if you follow the water-worn pebbles and stones you’ll get (after three miles) to a pool containing translucent fish.
We remember the legend about the city beneath Lake Baikal in Siberia. We saw how, during the winter, when the lake is frozen, people lie on its surface and look into it and sometimes they go back to their villages along the shore with a mysterious expression on their faces.
Some of them never leave their wooden homes. They sit all winter long and look out at other lakes, the ones at the bottom of their souls. In any event, anyone who sees the sunken city (outside or within) knows something that the others don’t.