Black Box (14 page)

What is there left of all our joy, yours and mine, Ilana? Only perhaps joy at the other’s misfortunes. Embers of a dead fire. And here we are, puffing on those embers from halfway around the globe in the hope of fanning a momentary flicker of malice. What a foolish waste, Ilana. I give in. I’m ready to sign a document of capitulation here and now.

And what will you do with me? Of course. There is no other way. Nature herself decrees that the routed male be enslaved. He is castrated and made to serve. He shrinks to the size of a Sommo. So you will have two of us: one to worship you and sweeten your nights with his religious passion, the other to finance these spiritual nuptials. What should I write on the next check?

I’ll buy you both whatever you want. Ramallah? Bab Allah? Baghdad? My hatred is dying and in its place I am falling under the spell of my father’s impetuous generosity. He intended to leave his fortune, at the end of his days, to build homes for consumptive poets on top of Mount Tabor and Mount Gilboa. I shall use my money to arm both sides in the battle that will erupt one day between Boaz and Sommo.

And now I shall tell you a story. A sketch for a romantic novel. An opening for a
tragedia dell’arte.
The year is 1959. A young major in the regular army brings his intended to meet his almighty father. The girl has a Slavic face, sexy in a dreamy way, but not particularly beautiful in the accepted sense. There is something beguiling in her expression of childlike surprise. Her parents brought her here from Lodz when she was four. They have both died on her. Apart from a sister in a kibbutz, she has no family left in the world. Since leaving the army she has earned her living as a copy editor for a popular weekly. She is hoping to publish some poetry.

And this morning she is visibly worried: what she has heard about the father does not bode well. Her personality and background are certain not to be to his liking, and she has heard alarming stories about his fits of rage. She sees the meeting with the father therefore as a sort of fateful interview. After some hesitation, she decides to wear a shiny white blouse and a flowery spring skirt, perhaps to emphasize the surprised-little-girl effect. Even her hussar, magnificent in his starched uniform, appears a little tense.

And at the gateway to the estate between Binyamina and Zikhron Yaakov, pacing up and down on his gravel path and fingering a fat cigar as though it were a gun, Volodya Gudonski, the great dealer in land and importer of iron, awaits them. Tsar Vladimir the Terrible. Among the many stories circulating about him they tell how, when he was still a pioneer in charge of stone quarries, in 1929, he killed three Arab brigands by himself, with a sledge hammer. And they tell how he was the lover of two Egyptian princesses. And they also tell how, after he had embarked on his import business and made a small fortune out of his dealings with the British Army, it once happened that the High Commissioner at a reception affectionately called him a “clever Jew,” and the Tsar, on the spot, roared at the High Commissioner and challenged him to a fistfight in the middle of the party, and when the man declined called him a “British chicken.”

The hussar and his intended were greeted on their arrival with iced pomegranate juice and then taken on a long tour of inspection of the length and breadth of the estate, whose fields were worked by Circassian laborers from Galilee. And there was an ornamental pool with a fountain and goldfish, and a rose garden with a collection of rare varieties imported from Japan and Burma. Zeev-Benjamin Gudonski talked without stopping, lecturing with picturesque enthusiasm, wooing, as though overflowing with whimsical exaggeration, his son’s fiancée. Cutting and handing her whatever flower her eyes lighted upon. Clasping her shoulders in an expansive gesture. Jokingly kneading her fine shoulder blades. Bestowing upon her the honorary rank of thoroughbred filly. His deep Russian voice waxed enthusiastic over the elegance of her ankles. And suddenly he demanded with a roar to be shown her knees at once.

Meanwhile the Crown Prince was firmly and absolutely deprived of the right of speech for the whole duration of the visit. He was not permitted to utter a single cheep. What alternative did he have, therefore, but to grin like an idiot and occasionally relight the cigar that had gone out in his father’s mouth. Even now, in Chicago, as he writes down for you his memories of that day, seventeen years later, he suddenly has the feeling that that idiotic grin is spreading over his face again. And a ghostly breeze blows on the embers of his hatred for you, because you were so thrilled to join in the tyrant’s game. You even, with peals of schoolgirlish laughter, repeatedly exposed your knees to his gaze. An enchanting blush colored your cheeks as you did so. Whereas I must have been as pale as a corpse.

Next the young couple was invited to a meal in the dining room, where French windows afforded a view of the Mediterranean from the top of the escarpment of Zikhron. Christian Arab servants in tail coats served pickled fish with vodka, consomme, meat, fish, fruit, cheese, and ice cream. And a regular caravan of glasses of steaming tea straight from the samovar. Every refusal or apology provoked bellows of titanic rage.

As evening came on, the Tsar, in the library, still determinedly strangled at birth any sentence that the cowed prince tried to speak: the father was busy up to his ears with the
krassavitsa,
and must not be disturbed. She was asked to play the piano. Requested to recite a poem. Examined in literature, politics, and art history. A record was placed on the phonograph and she was obliged to dance a waltz with the tipsy giant, who trod on her toes. To all these challenges she responded readily, good-humoredly, like someone trying to please a child. Then the old man began to tell rude jokes of the spiciest variety. Her face reddened, but she did not deny him her rippling laughter. At one o’clock in the morning the dictator finally fell silent, grasped the tip of his bushy mustache between brown finger and thumb, closed his eyes, and fell fast asleep in his armchair.

The couple exchanged glances and gestured to each other to leave him a note and depart: they had not planned to spend the night there. But as they were leaving on tiptoe, the Tsar leapt from his place and kissed the beauty on both cheeks, and then, lengthily, on her mouth. And delivered a stunning clap on the back of the neck to his son and heir. At half past two he called Jerusalem, woke a dazed Zakheim from a sweet conspiratorial dream, and bombarded him with instructions to purchase an apartment in Jerusalem for the young couple first thing in the morning and to invite “the world and his wife” to the wedding, to take place “ninety days from yesterday.”

And we had only gone to see him so that he could meet you. We had not yet discussed the question of marriage. Or if we had, you had spoken and I had hesitated.

To our wedding, which did indeed take place three months later, he actually forgot to come: he had found himself a new mistress in the meantime and had taken her to the Norwegian fjords for a honeymoon. As he regularly did with his new mistresses, at least twice a year.

One bright morning, a short time after our wedding, when I was away on brigade maneuvers in the Negev, he turned up in Jerusalem and started to explain to you delicately, almost sheepishly, that his son—to his great sorrow—was merely a “bureaucratic spirit,” whereas the two of you were “like a pair of trapped eagles.” And therefore on his bended knee he implored you to consent to spend with him “just one magical night.” And he immediately swore to you by all that was precious and holy to him that he would not touch you with so much as his little finger—he was no villain—but would merely listen to your playing and your reading of poems and go for a walk with you in the mountains around the city, concluding with the view of the “metaphysical sunrise” from the top of the YMCA tower. When you refused him, he called you a “little Polish shopkeeper” who had lured his son into your “clutches” with your “tricks,” and he took his presence elsewhere. (During those nights you and I had already started to excite ourselves by playing at threesomes. Even if at that time we had not yet advanced beyond the realm of the imagination. Was the Tsar the first third man in your fantasies? The first lie you told me?)

When Boaz was born, for some reason Volodya Gudonski was staying in northern Portugal. But he managed to send a check from there to some dubious Italian firm, which dispatched to us an official certificate testifying that somewhere in the Himalayas there was a Godforsaken peak that would henceforth and forevermore be named on all maps “Boaz Gideon Peak.” You must check to see if the piece of paper still exists. Perhaps your messiah will found a settlement there. And in 1963, when Boaz was two or three years old, Volodya Gudonski decided to become a recluse. He sent his army of mistresses scattering to the four corners of the globe, Zakheim he tortured like a Scythian, and us he adamantly refused to see even for a brief audience—he considered us to be degenerates. (Had he noticed something from his exalted throne? Did he nurse some suspicion?) He shut himself away within the four walls of his estate, hired a couple of armed guards, and devoted his days and nights to learning Persian. And then astrology and the Doctor Feldenkreis Method. Doctors hired by Zakheim he sent packing like dogs. One day he upped and dismissed all his workmen with a wave of the hand. Since then the orchard has gradually been turning into a jungle. One day he upped and sacked the domestic servants and guards as well, leaving himself only one old Armenian to play billiards with him in the cellar of the dilapidated house. Father and the Armenian slept on camp beds in the kitchen and lived on canned food and beer. The door from the kitchen to the rest of the house was secured with a crossbeam and nails. Branches of the trees in the garden began to grow through the broken upstairs windows into the bedrooms. Plants and bushes grew in the ground-floor rooms. Rats and snakes and night birds nested in the corridors. Creepers climbed up the two staircases, reached the first floor, ramified from room to room, penetrated the ceiling, pushed up a few roof tiles, and so found their way out to the sunshine again. Eager roots sprouted between the decorated floor tiles. Tens or hundreds of pigeons requisitioned the house for their own use. But Volodya Gudonski chatted in fluent Persian to his Armenian. He also discovered the weak point in the Feldenkreis Method and burned the book.

One day we risked our lives, defied his Biblical curse, and went to see him, the three of us. To our great surprise he received us gladly and even tenderly. Large tears rolled down his new beard, a Tolstoyan beard that covered his Brezhnevian features. He addressed me in Russian, using an expression that can best be translated as “foundling.” He used the same expression in speaking to Boaz. Every ten minutes he would drag Boaz down to the cellar, and after each of these excursions the boy would return clutching a present of a coin from the time of Turkish rule. You he called “Nusya,” “Nusya maya,” after my mother, who died when I was five. He bewailed your pneumonia and blamed the doctors and himself. Finally he roared at you with his last strength that you did away with yourself deliberately, just to torment him, and therefore he would leave his “fortune” to build a home for starving poets.

And indeed he began to scatter his wealth in all directions: rogues and charlatans swarmed around him, demanding donations to funds to make Galilee Jewish or the Red Sea blue. Not unlike what has been happening to me recently. Zakheim worked away patiently, discreetly, at transferring the property to my name. But the old man summoned up the strength to fight back. Twice he sacked Zakheim (and I hired him). He set up a panel of lawyers. He paid for three dubious professors to come from Italy and sign an attestation of sanity for him. For nearly two years the property went on leaking. Until Zakheim managed to get him taken in for observation and eventually committed. And then he changed his tune again and wrote and signed a detailed will in our favor, together with a short, melancholy letter in which he forgave us and asked our forgiveness and warned us against each other and implored us to have pity on the child, and signed it with the words “I bow down in awe before the depth of your afflictions.”

Since 1966 he has been living in a private room in a sanatorium on Mount Carmel. Silently staring at the sea. Twice I went to see him, but he did not recognize me. Is it true, as Zakheim tells me, that you still visit him occasionally. What for?

It was with his money that we built the villa in Yefe Nof. Even though the abandoned castle between Binyamina and Zikhron is still registered in my name. Zakheim maintains that its value has reached a peak, and begs me to sell quickly, before the fashion changes. Perhaps I should leave it all for some scheme? To drain the Huleh Marshes? Or to paint the Black Sea white? Or to rescue stray dogs? In fact, why not to Boaz? To Sommo? To both of them? I shall compensate your Sommo for everything: his color, his height, his humiliation. I shall give him a belated dowry. I have nothing to do with my property. Or with the time I have left.

Or perhaps I won’t leave it to anybody just yet. On the contrary, I’ll come back. I shall move into the crumbling kitchen, remove the beam from the door leading to the rest of the house, and slowly restore it. I shall mend the broken fountain. Restock the pool with goldfish. I shall establish my own settlement. Perhaps we shall run away there, the two of us? And live like a couple of pioneers in the crumbling building? In your honor I shall dress in black robes and put a cowl over my head.

Only write and let me know what you want.

I am left owing you an answer: Why did I divorce you? Among the papers on my desk is a note in which I wrote that the word
ritual
comes from the Latin
ritus,
which means something like “right condition.” Or perhaps “fixed habit.” As for
fanaticism,
it may possibly come from
fanum,
meaning “temple” or “place of worship.” And what of
humility? Humility
comes from
humilis,
which comes, it seems, from
humus,
“earth.” And is there humility in the earth? Apparently anyone can come and do whatever he feels like doing to it. Dig and plow and sow. But eventually it swallows all its masters. Standing there, eternally silent.