[72]
In December we’re exiled to chillier regions and see death in action.
There my father (Andreas Avraham) hides from Francesca, my stepmother, records he bought because the money he receives (in transparent bills) isn’t enough for her.
The music he listens to consists of a single sound, like the straight line on the monitor when the heart stops beating. The scent of eternity is like that of goulash. Everything’s frozen over. Jokes one tells are revealed in full like that famous rainbow arched through a cloud. Each season extends to infinity. You stand there, and the streets run on beneath you. Women lie down forever. A faint soft sound like the fur of a foal (of a donkey) wafts through the air, and the colors are all pastel.
[73]
But sometimes the dead remain on the surface of the earth, like those we saw in Dublin, in the basement of St. Michan’s Church.
There was a crusader there who died over six hundred years ago. He was large, and they sawed off his feet so he would fit into the coffin. And there was a thief who’d had his hands hacked off because he’d used them to steal, and his feet chopped off because he’d fled. And a nun who died at a ripe old age and whose tiny fingernails were preserved, as though she were still alive. And two brothers who rebelled against the British and were hanged, and their bodies, miraculously, didn’t decompose at all until live Irishmen came and laid flowers at their heads and something wafting up from them (the flowers) made the men decompose.
Generally speaking. The world is full of miracles. How fingernails grow and hair gets long and we clip them both. How doors are slammed. And how the River Liffey, which cuts Dublin in two, runs on and on.
[74]
At times we’re reminded of the future. How we’ll sit by a window and see a mountain’s silhouette. And we’ll turn our head toward the room and see the silhouette of a man. We remember the scent of the morning papers during the twenties (of the twenty-first century).
We know this scrambling of time will cost us. We’ll sink into a dark mood and, maybe, during the middle of the month see the moon when it’s full. That great big pill of Prozac.
We’ve already talked of the woman psychoanalyst, but we haven’t yet told our readers that once we saw a male analyst as well. Mostly we remember two things. The waiting room and that he was mortal.
If we could make a request of the readers we’d ask that they send us (c/o this book’s publisher) all the words of the song that begins: “Five years passed for Mikha’el / While he danced away / He had no work he had to do / And he was free to play. .”
[75]
That song broke our hearts and later so did Eleanor Rigby.
Here are some other things that break the heart: An old door. A glass left out in the yard. A woman’s foot squeezed into shoes, so her toes become twisted. A grocer whose store no one goes into. Above all, a husband and wife who don’t talk to each other. One-eyed cats. Junkyards. The stairwells of old buildings. A small boy on his way to school. Old women sitting all day by the window. Display windows with only a single item or two, coated with dust. A shopping list. Forty-watt bulbs. Signs with an ampersand (such as ZILBERSTEIN & CHAMNITZER), and when a person we love disappears (at a train station, for instance) into the distance.
[76]
Mrs. Shtiasny’s Italian husband kept a bottle of brandy in the pantry and drank from it every so often.
One day during the fifties he opened the pantry door and a large package of noodles fell out and the noodles scattered across the floor.
This event resembled (in miniature) that meteor crashing into Siberia. We saw how thousands of trees were leveled at once in precisely the same formation as the noodles.
So it is that similar patterns run through the world. The lines in a leaf and the veins in the leg of a diabetic. The concave places in a woman’s body and the valleys of regions like Provence. Heavenly bodies and uncut diamonds scattered about on a large table at the polishing workshop, and so on.
Mrs. Shtiasny got down on her knees and gathered up all the noodles, one by one. And because times were hard, she washed them under tap water and turned them into a soup.
[77]
And there was another thing. That a man knocked on the door and asked for a glass of water. He was carrying a large bundle of rugs on his shoulder and when he’d had enough to drink he spread one out on the hallway floor and said: “This is authentic, from Paras” (he stressed the first syllable, as Persian does).
The rug was the color of a pomegranate and held within it the forms of small birds and all sorts of flowers, and among them, equidistant from one another, were people.
He put down the glass on the edge of the rug and the small people near the glass got up from the rug and took a drink from the water left in the glass, then returned to their places among the birds and the flowers.
Many of the things recollected in this book are fiction. But the memory of this event, which we call (amongst ourselves) “the great thirst in the hall,” is real.
[78]
Yesterday we read in the paper that a man broke a glass at his own wedding (in remembrance of the Temple’s destruction) and shards of glass went into the sole of his foot and he was taken directly from the chuppah to the hospital, and there they removed the glass from his flesh and bandaged his foot and as soon as he left he hired a lawyer and sued the owners of the banquet hall.
Imagine for a moment the crucified one coming down from the cross and hiring a lawyer. He’d have thrown history off its course, and who knows what disasters might have ensued.
Better for a person to accept his fate and head off on his honeymoon while his foot is bleeding and only there, as the sheets turn red, let out a groan.
Sometimes things are sevenfold worse, as when a man manages to break the glass and his feet are fine but his wife then scowls for forty years.
[79]
Certain people are named Jorge and it’s quite likely that they are scattered, not by chance but along the lines of geometric patterns (at the apex of a triangle or at a rectangle’s corners), all across Israel.
And in fact it makes little difference if one Jorge takes the place of another. If he sometimes finds there an extra child or a refrigerator of a different color, he quickly gets used to it and to the woman who, in any event, everyone calls “Jorge’s wife.”
These are the turns life takes, and it takes us here and there, sometimes in Adidas sneakers and sometimes in Crocs and the like.
These changes are easier by night, when outlines blur, and nearly every man is willing to take in nearly every woman and vice versa.
[80]
And there are those who believe that movements like these (that is, who goes to whom, etc.) are scribbled in the stars, but we lift our eyes and see something else spelled out there.
First, what’s written is written on infinite paper. Second, it’s silent (that is, it can’t be pronounced). And third, it’s very very old.
But beneath that writing that no one can read we receive the great effulgence that’s possible to see in tall towers of canned food.
At night, when the supermarket closes, the cashiers go out into the street and return to their room-and-a-half beneath what’s written in the heavens — and no doubt it’s written that death will surely come, and so we shouldn’t worry so much. After all, we too are made of stardust, and there is no difference between the stuff of the stars and us.