[89]
We’ve written elsewhere of our trip on the train to Bulgaria and how in the train there were only us and an old Bulgarian woman who drank wine and ate sugar and then what happened at the border crossing. Now we remember how we went to the city of Gabrovo because we’d heard it had a museum of humor.
It was a very hot day and maybe because of that no one in Gabrovo smiled when we asked where the museum was. In the museum (possibly in the entire city) there was what they call a blackout, and therefore the long neon lights weren’t lit and the big ceiling fans were still. In most of the rooms there weren’t any windows, and so we walked around in the dark, sweating profusely, and barely able to see the outlines (which is to say, the wooden frames) of the drawings. Moreover, in each room of the museum there stood a scowling Bulgarian woman in a guard’s uniform.
We walked out into the light of day and saw, at the entrance to the museum, a gypsy making an old bear dance. We thought about all the memories that the bear must have held in its soul, and we were filled with awe.
[90]
Nothing comes to an end. There are extremely subtle things like a changing wind or passing thought and they are endless. Or things that are extremely thick like a cough or a clothes closet, and they too have no end. Or very slow things and very fast things that are fast and slow at once (like the memory of trains or mounds of coal) and therefore do not come to an end.
We saw physics textbooks and noticed how much sadness was trapped between the crumpled covers. We saw forks whose tines were taller than the spires of Notre Dame.
We saw things that were very large, like the space through which starlight passes, and we saw wonders such as a tree or a weather vane or a convoy of ants and Russian men and Belgian men (and women of course), and all of these things are endless.
[91]
Apropos Belgium. There was a thick-skinned woman selling latkes in the market in Antwerp. We asked for one and she held the latke in her hand and didn’t stretch her hand out toward us. We stood there like that for a while, as though in a film that had gotten stuck, until we realized that first we had to offer up the coin and only then would we receive the latke.
No doubt there were at the time latke thieves in Antwerp, and the woman was wary. And in fact the temptation to steal latkes in the Antwerp market is great. Likewise the temptation to stick one’s foot out (while someone’s walking blithely along) is great, in the market at Antwerp, or elsewhere.
Or to slap someone without any reason. But no more than that. Knives are foreign to our nature. Also pistols and rifles.
But we’re happy if soup gets spilled on someone, especially if it has chicken legs in it. Generally speaking. We’re happy at the sight of others’ misfortune.
[92]
A journalist by the name of Kashkhanski wrote what he wrote about another book of ours in which we spoke candidly of our lives.
He had a certain compassion about him, something one often finds in this country’s builders. Most likely he had a hard time holding back tears, and would look as though through a fog at the white buildings of Tel Aviv.
The soft-mindedness of these people breaks our heart. Their feet are firmly planted in the wailing of Yosef Haim Brenner, but their spirits are free and they see what corresponds and doesn’t, beginning with the sefirah Ayin (Nothing) and ending at the sefirah Malkhut (Kingdom) — which is to say, here. Where it says on the door, KASHKHANSKI.
Sometimes we miss those people, as the thrush longs for the dove. If we could meet them in the cafés of Tel Aviv, we would.
At night we toss from side to side and sometimes we dream that we’re standing in a huge synagogue but instead of reading the prayer book everyone is reading the evening paper.
[93]
Our Great Pyrenees never has anything critical to say about us. He gets straight to the heart of things. If there’s sorrow he sees sorrow. If it’s joy — he sees the joy. Lesser dogs run away from him, and he doesn’t even glance in their direction. The garbage-bin cats look on at him tranquilly and don’t so much as budge from their places, not even if his fur almost grazes them as he passes.
His heart beats like the bell of a great temple, and in his eyes you can see the residue of the earliest stages of the universe (before the great break of creation).
And there is also a person like that. At a bakery. In the Arab village of Tarshiha. These are the ideas that Plato talked about. Dog. Man.
[94]
However you put it, the shards of things too are whole in their way. Once we met a book reviewer who wrote a sad poem.
No doubt she longed for a world without books or a world in which books contained just a single word, repeated endlessly.
It was clear that her room (most likely in a rented apartment) held a dirty glass shelf with four or five jars of face cream. And cassettes by that singer, what’s her name? Mercedes Sosa.
And that same dress for whenever she went out, since the other dresses were cruel to her figure. And the books. Something about revolutions. And psychology. And Saramago’s most recent novel.
We don’t know if she shaved her legs, but if she did we’d suggest that she find an editor in chief, at a publishing house, who would stroke them.
[95]
This is also the answer to the Zen riddle about the sound of the one hand, and also the answer to the torments that Freud says a person endures. That is, that someone should touch someone, and so forth.
We think that our readers should use this book to look for another person. For instance, he should make it fall to the floor in a bar or a pub and then pick it up and ask a woman: Is this yours? Or put two glasses of red wine on it (we’ll make sure it’s big enough) or stick a knife into it and say, If the knife reaches the word love, you’ll leave with me (we’ll be sure to scatter the word throughout the book) or, If your back hurts you should put something hard under your head (and therefore we’ll put out a hardback special edition).
Once (we remember) we used to pile books on a chair in order to reach high places.
[96]
We know a man who took one of the poet Shneor Zalman’s books with him to his grave (which is to say, we knew him).
Our readers may not know this, but Shneor Zalman fought against Shmuel Yosef Agnon so that he, and not Agnon, might win the Swedish prize. Each of them (Shneor Zalman and Agnon) had supporters, who sought to undermine one another and wrote letters and summoned ambassadors and convened mutually hostile committees.
Now both of these writers (and most of their readers) are dead and other writers (and readers) have taken their places, but we haven’t heard of anyone (apart from that one man) taking a book with him to his grave.
At the cemetery we saw blank tombstones and we understood that most of these people were waiting for their spouses. But if you’re going to take a book with you when you go, you should take Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends. .
[97]
We don’t know why happiness is so sad. Maybe because we see pieces of things, like a hand or a mezuzah, and want the whole thing.
My stepmother Francesca was already 83 and her eyes had gone dim. She could barely make out — and only then with great difficulty and with special lenses — very large shapes, and nonetheless she played bridge. She’d bring the cards very close to the lenses. At the same time she’d be speaking to Mrs. Shtiasny and Mrs. Minoff with great excitement about one thing or another.