Life itself should be lived like that. As in a silent film in which one sees only a single hut with a rooster strutting every so often from the left side of the screen toward the right, and a little while later coming back across it.
Once every thousand years or so a word will be heard. Like the sound of very distant thunder. A word like zoo or zero or zillion. Words, that is, which start with the final letter.
In this world there won’t be any information at all. That is, it won’t be possible to store anything. Memory will be something else entirely. More like a pane of transparent glass. And matter? Whatever you’d like it to be. But endless. One thing within another.
On second thought, even that word is superfluous. Perhaps the sound is sufficient. Something like the “A” that a tuning fork makes when the string instruments are being tuned. But only the “A.” Without the program or the concert that follows.
[180]
We’ve come to death and even to life that resembles death and the book’s still going on.
Maybe because we like to drink a certain kind of sherry. Not the kind they import to Israel, but another one. If we could remember what it was called, we’d ask our wine store to bring us a case of it.
We don’t want to say banal things about people we love, etcetera. We just want to say something about the wondrous nature of the heart. The muscle itself. That it’s stretched and contracted some seventy times a minute sixty minutes each hour and twenty-four hours a day three hundred and sixty-five days a year for maybe eighty years, and only the wizards of arithmetic can figure out how many beats that makes.
And, because we’re grateful to this muscle, wherever it comes from and wherever it’s going, it’s forbidden for us to die before our time and we need to observe all the commandments in the proper manner, such as, for instance, the one concerning the sherry.
And if we remember the name of that wine we’ll insist that the publisher order maybe eighty cases and distribute the bottles to bookstores, so that the readers can taste it.
[181]
We’d like to share all sorts of things with our readers. Not just wine.
For example, in Japanese, the syllable ka is like a question mark. You say something like “We’re going to Tokyo tomorrow.” But if you add a ka to the end of the sentence, the meaning changes to “Are we going to Tokyo tomorrow?”
The reader can read books that way. That is, as though there were a ka at the end of every sentence. The book would then be a long series of questions (among others about the sun and the moon and the stars) and we could call it The Book of Great Doubt. We could even call it The Book of Tremendous Doubt if we added the ka to the end of every word. But there’s no need to go that far.
In fact, faith is preferable to doubt. It’s better to read the book as though there were an exclamation mark at the end of every sentence. Or better still, as though each sentence were followed by those three letters that religious Jews are always adding to everything—bet, samekh, dalet (which stand for “with the help of God”) — and then we could call it The Book of Great Faith.
Imagine putting bet, samekh, dalet before every sentence and ka at its end. Then what?
[182]
These things are linked to Mr. Yellinek. We didn’t count him as one of our neighbors and then (when Mr. Nahmias fixed his mailbox for him) we spoke of him as though he were one.
The reader might ask himself: Is Mr. Yellinek a neighbor or not? Or worse, he could ask himself if Mr. Yellinek even exists.
But this is a question that shouldn’t be asked. Everyone exists. Especially Mrs. Shtiasny and her Italian husband. If you start casting doubt on this or that character you’ll need, at the end of the day, to doubt the existence of all the characters — even the author himself (that is, Yoel Hoffmann), and worse still, yourself.
And so, Mr. Yellinek exists exactly as Mrs. Shtiasny exists and as her Italian husband exists. You can see him here and there (mostly in Tel Aviv) standing in front of mailboxes.
Generally speaking. The word exists is an ugly word. At most it might suit a kind of screw but not all of creation. And if our readers insist on using it, they should at least write it with a ks instead of an x.
[183]
January two thousand and nine. During the war we inhale the air that we exhale and not new air. Our dark father, who stands behind our biographical father, gives birth to us.
In this way too mankind goes astray. It gathers up information all the time like a mad quartermaster, but during a war even the mad go mad.
When we were soldiers we never managed to get things straight and polish what was supposed to be polished. Our steel helmet rocked from side to side, our backpack slipped off of our shoulders, our canteen got dirty, and the rifle was never properly calibrated. Our dark father accompanied us wherever we went and our mother was far away or dead.
There was always someone very short (shorter even than Mr. Yellinek) who made everyone laugh. Mostly his name was Yirmiyahu but everyone called him Yirmi and every once in a while Yahu. What was so funny about him? For instance, he stuffed his ammunition pouch not with extra rounds but with cans of sardines and slabs of cheese. He was the one who’d light the fire and then piss on the coals before we left. Everyone had a girlfriend (or everyone said they did) and he was the only one who didn’t. But he had some thingamajig that he loved. A pocketknife or a large marble or a pen on which a naked woman rose and fell.
[184]
The German word for war is krieg, and it’s a word that suits a kind of cracker (or rusk) and not the shedding of blood. Francesca, my stepmother, sometimes said krieg but, because of her build, it sounded different.
Generally, a word depends on who says it. Think, for example, of the philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz and Mary, the Holy Virgin. We’re having a hard time thinking of a word that both might have uttered, but it’s clear that if they said that word, in each case we’d imagine something completely different.
Once we knew a woman who wanted a child very badly but miscarried every one she conceived. She sat in cafés and so on, like everyone, but every time — roughly once a year — when they asked her (and also when they didn’t), she’d say: The baby died.
Correct. The baby would have died in any case. He’d have died in a war or of old age. And so it’s possible to say such a thing about every baby. But that he died before she managed to see him. And that he died before he managed to see her. And that afterward she sat in cafés and had to say those words. All these things are harder even than war to bear.
[185]
We should seat Mr. Yellinek (and Yirmiyahu from the army) on the backs of wild geese, so they can fly far above the earth like Nils Holgersson.
We’ll have to say goodbye to them as they’re going beyond the borders of the book. Wild geese don’t comply with literary convention. But they’ll hover in other worlds and from a great height see the well-tended fields and the places where people live. They won’t be able to see people from that height, and so the journey will involve a certain amount of loneliness. But imagine that the heavens are one huge mailbox and letters arrive for Mr. Yellinek from distances that he can’t fathom.