[81]
Day after day Uncle Ladislaus lay in bed and wiggled his ears. And though he owned a donkey, he didn’t make house calls. The donkey, which he tied to a pomegranate tree, brayed out of boredom and Aunt Matusya brought it leftover compote.
In those days you could see in the sky (there were no factories or street lights) a million stars. Below, between Herzl and Yahalom Streets, you sometimes saw the mayor, fat Krinitzi.
Our lives (which is to say, my life) was contained within a much smaller body, and all we wanted in this world was that this girl or that one would agree to be our girlfriend.
[82]
At this time most of the boys were named Tuvya. Girls were called Kinneret. The air was full of the scent of cypress trees (and countless lewd images). Teachers were usually called Yehudit.
But all this we’ve already said elsewhere. What good do those memories do? They’re made of the stuff of dreams, and the stuff of dreams (as it says in the Talmud, Gittin 52) makes nothing happen.
We’ll go with everyone to the mall and pass by the stores like herds of buffalo on the savanna. Then we’ll sit in front of large plasma screen TVs.
After all, Uncle Ladislaus and Mrs. Shtiasny and her Italian husband and my stepmother Francesca are already dead. Others now are living.
And what’s left of that world? Nothing. Only eternal truths, such as that two plus two equals four or that the sum of a triangle’s angles is always one hundred and eighty.
[83]
Maybe we’ll write (in a leaner style) a contemporary story. For instance:
At six o’clock, Zivit opened her eyes and yawned. She already heard the noise of the first bus from the street. I need to move to a new place, she thought to herself. Two cups stood on the table with coffee grounds in them. Only when her eyes fell on the cups did she remember Ohad. She turned her head toward the pillow beside her and saw his hairy back. She recognized the curl she’d made on his back before they fell asleep. Is this the man, she wondered, I’m destined to grow old with? Various thoughts passed through her mind. What about his son, she thought. Will Ohad want him to live with us? He’s always saying that his ex is destroying the kid, and he almost went to a lawyer about it. And if it weren’t for the social worker’s report about the mother, the child would already be living with them. Am I cut out, she asked herself, to act as a mother to someone else’s child? I doubt I can be a good mother to a child of my own.
She picked up her panties and bra from the rug and threw them into the hamper. Then she stood for a long while in front of the closet and finally chose a thong and a lace bra that was nearly see-through. She walked around in the room like that, wearing only her panties and bra, hoping that Ohad would open his eyes and see her, but he was fast asleep. No wonder, she thought, after last night’s wild sex.
[84]
Some of our readers are no doubt saying to themselves: At last, a real story. I wonder what will happen next.
We don’t know if we can say what will happen next. For that we’d need real inspiration, and inspiration, as we know, comes from somewhere else, like prophecy.
Where will Zivit go once she’s fully dressed? Will she wake Ohad up before she leaves the apartment? And will Ohad go home, change his clothes, shower, and go from there to work? Will he call his ex and ask how the child is? Or maybe he’ll call another woman? And so on and on with questions like these.
Once we met a woman named Rina Bartoldi. We remember that she said, “That hasn’t yet been determined” (something to do with the age of the universe, 14.5 billion years or less). One could still see signs of beauty in her face, as in certain neighborhoods in south Tel Aviv.
We remember her even though some thirty years have passed because her age and the age of the universe were linked to one another, and because of the great distance between the two (that is, the two ages) and also because she stood in the world and spoke of its start and used the ugly word determined. All that and the fact that she looked like a pelican.
If this book didn’t already have a name we’d call it The Long Loneliness of Rina Bartoldi.
[85]
Meanwhile (that is, between the first part of the previous section and the second) we also saw a doctor who specialized in hypertension.
The doctor himself was a little pale and his head tilted to the side. Generally speaking. There are many people whose head tilts to the side. Apparently it’s hard to hold the head straight, and most of the time we’re preoccupied with getting it right.
The doctor wasn’t especially concerned about our blood pressure. We were there for all of seven minutes and still, as soon as we left we felt a kind of longing. We drove home through Kiryat Motzkin and Acre and Nahariya, and all the while the sun was on our left.
The moon hadn’t yet risen, or maybe it was very pale and therefore we didn’t see it. But we saw other things (the sea, for instance, and the Nahariya train station) and all this we thought we should share with our readers.
[86]
And also our dreams. That we’re flying above a lake or buying a kerosene stove with a chimney pipe for two hundred and twenty shekels.
We can also share with our readers that gray, amorphous primal sadness, which has no clear-cut place and no particular reason for being, apart from the awful apathy of things (like walls or entire cities or voices on the radio) that take up their places, by themselves, while nothing of them comes to us.
Once we saw the philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz in Jerusalem, next to the old Bezalel Art Academy. He was walking alone and carrying a jar in his hand.
[87]
We can do something godlike and create a person. Let’s call him Sha’ul Sachs. We’ll give him a defect. One arm is too long, or his chin is.
We’ll lead him from place to place. He’ll have a sun of his own and a moon. Others will call him Sha’ul, and some will call him Mr. Sachs.
He’ll gradually grow older (or grow gradually older — we’re entitled to choose between the two) and in the end he’ll die and we can buy a rectangle in the newspaper—Ma’ariv or Ha’aretz—and write inside it: Sha’ul Sachs is no more.
The sun and the moon we’ll leave in place. That way we can see the actual sun and the fictive one side by side, and the two moons.
Once, in Rome, next to the main train station, we went into a church and confessed before a priest.
This is what we said to him: Father, we’ve been carrying around heavy feelings of guilt. Heavy feelings of regret. Heavy feelings of hope. And, nonetheless, great love.
The priest said: Don’t look in books. Sometimes they say one thing and God has decreed something else. We’ve heard that the red wine in Palestine is excellent.
[88]
In Alexandroupoli we met a Greek priest. He was sitting on a stool in front of a blacksmith’s shop, holding a skewer in his hand and biting into the flesh of a grilled chicken.
We not live here, he said. On high mountain. Come each shix mont or sho, ate. . dreenk. . woamen. . haahaa.
He said something in Greek to the blacksmith and the blacksmith made a circle with his finger and thumb and stuck a finger of his other hand into the circle, maybe because he thought we hadn’t understood the word woamen.
Beyond the shop there was a boulevard lined with palm trees and the Greek sun hovered on the horizon.
Then we went to the train station and there we were told that the train to Bulgaria would leave the following day at shix. The shky went red and the shun shet.