Black Box (32 page)

Perhaps like this: At twenty to eight, after the setting of the sun and before the extinction of the flickering fire brands on the sea horizon. And, of all places, on the broken bench at the beginning of the slope, close to the edge of the cliff, facing the orchard, which has grown into a subtropical forest but which Boaz has begun to restore to its original state. There is a mound of stones at the spot where the well used to be. Not a well really, but a water hole, which his father dug here once to collect rain water. Ilana sitting beside him. Both his hands, growing cold, held between hers: for there are times when she and I, like two shy children, silently hold hands. You have a generous spirit and will not think any the worse of her for that.

And so, while I am writing the pages that are before you, I am gradually becoming inclined to obey my son, who told me yesterday, in his even, indifferent voice, that instead of moldering in Hadassah Hospital, where they could probably do nothing to help me, I’d be better off staying here and catching (as he put it) some peace.

Didn’t my presence bother them?

“You pay.”

Did they want me to try to be useful in some way? Could I give some sort of classes? or lectures?

“But nobody here tells anyone else what to do.”

Do? But I do virtually nothing here.

“That’s the best thing for you: sit quietly.”

I shall indeed stay. Quietly. Will you be generous and let them both stay a little longer? Day by day I shall entertain your daughter. I shall make her a shadow-monster theater with my fingers on the wall. (It was Zakheim who taught me. When I was six. Or seven.) I shall continue to exchange views with her about the nature of fire and water and what lizards dream about. She’ll make me medicines from mud, soapy water, and pine cones. And day by day, with the evening breeze, I shall sit with Ilana on the bench to listen to the rustling of the pine tree.

It is a question of only a short time.

And you are fully entitled to refuse and demand their instant return.

By the way, Boaz suggests that you come and join us too. As he puts it, you can contribute the benefit of your experience as a construction worker, on condition you do not try to make everybody eat kosher food. That is what Boaz says. What do you think?

If you demand it, I shall send them without delay to Jerusalem in a taxi and not grumble. (What right have I to grumble?) You know, sir, my death seems quite reasonable. Don’t mistake my meaning: I am not talking of a death wish or anything like that (there is no difficulty about that: I have an excellent handgun given to me once by a Pentagon general), but another kind of wish entirely: not to exist at all. To cancel my presence retroactively. To make it so that I am not born. To pass from the outset to some other mode: a eucalyptus, for example. Or a bare hill in Galilee. Or a stone on the surface of the moon.

By the way, Boaz has allocated to Ilana and Yifat the best part of the house: he chose to put them on the ground floor, in the semicircular room that looks out through French windows at the roofs of the kibbutz below us, at the banana plantations, the coastal strip, and the sea. (Sea gulls before dawn. Deep brilliance at midday. Bluish clouds every evening.) Once this room housed my father’s grandiose library (I never saw him open a book). Now they have painted it a sort of penetrating psychedelic blue. An old fisherman’s net adorns its high ceiling. It contains, besides four beds covered with army blankets and a peeling, cracked chest of drawers, a pile of sacks of chemical fertilizer and several drums of gasoline. Some enamored girl has painted over an entire wall the image of Boaz, naked and radiant, striding with closed eyes over a calm patch of water.

Instead of walking on the water, he is passing my window at this minute, sitting on the small tractor he has recently purchased (with my money). Trailing a disk harrow. And your daughter, like a little monkey, is sitting in his lap with her hands between his on the wheel. By the way, she has learned to ride the donkey almost by herself. It is a very young, docile donkey. (Last night, in the dark, I mistook it for a dog and almost stroked it. Since when do I stroke dogs? Or donkeys?) Once, near Bir Tamadeh in the Sinai, a stupid camel got into my firing zone. It walked slowly along a low ridge at a range of two thousand yards. Slightly above the barrel we were using as a target. The gunner fired two shots at it and missed. The loader asked to have a go and he missed too. Entering the spirit of competition, I got down into the gunner’s seat and fired, and I missed as well. The camel stopped and calmly assessed the spots where the shells had landed. With a fourth shot I took its head off. And I could see clearly through my binoculars the jet of blood that shot up to a height of a yard or two. The decapitated neck went on turning this way and that, as though looking for the severed head, when it turned backward and sprayed the hump with blood, like an elephant spraying himself with his trunk, and eventually with graceful slowness the camel folded its slender front legs, folded its hind legs, knelt down and lay on its belly, laid its gushing neck in the sand, and froze thus on the ridge like a strange statue, which I vainly tried to blow up with another three shells. Suddenly from the dead area there sprang a Bedouin waving his arms, and I gave orders to stop firing and clear out.

There is the sea breeze stirring the chimes again. I stop and leave the Baby Hermes alone to ask myself whether I am out of my mind. Why am I pouring myself out before you? Why should I write a confession for you? Is it a sick desire to appear ridiculous to you? Or, on the contrary, to receive absolution? From you? And in general, Monsieur Sommo, what is the foundation for your blind confidence in the existence of a “supreme Providence”? atonement? rewards and punishments? or grace? Where did you scrape it from? Would you kindly offer some proof? Work a little miracle? Turn my walking stick into a snake? Or your wife into a pillar of salt, perhaps? Or else get up and admit that the whole thing is just foolishness, stupidity, narrow-mindedness, deception, abasement, and fear.

Zakheim describes you as a cunning, ambitious fanatic, although not without Jesuitical talents and fine political instincts. According to Boaz you are nothing but a well-meaning nuisance, Ilana, in her customary style, attributes to you more or less the holiness of the Archangel Gabriel. Or at the very least the halo of a secret saint. Even though, in a different mood, she detects a Levantine side in you. You have even managed to arouse a certain curiosity in me.

But what is holiness, Mr. Sommo? I have wasted some nine years of my life on a futile quest for a reasonable and more or less unemotional definition. Perhaps you will approve of me and agree to enlighten me? For I still have no idea. Even the dictionary definition of holiness strikes me as empty and shallow, if not essentially circular. And I still have a kind of need to succeed in deciphering something. Even though my time has run out. But even so: holiness? Or purpose? And grace? What does a wolf understand of the moon at which it howls with its neck extended? What does a moth understand of the flame into which it hurls itself? Or a camel-slayer of redemption? Can you help me?

But no sanctimonious sermonizing, you hypocritical fart, who dares boast to me that you have never shed a drop of blood. That you have never touched a hair of an Arab’s head. That you are redeeming the Holy Land by licking it. Driving all the aliens out of it by means of charms and spells mixed with my money. Purging the patrimony of our forefathers with pure olive oil. Fucking my wife, inheriting my house, saving my son, investing my fortune, and then showering me with Biblical expostulations at my moral turpitude. You wear me out. You irritate like a mosquito. You have nothing new to offer me. I have long since finished with your sort and turned to more complex types. Take the money and run well out of my range.

As for me, what can I offer you except my dying soon? You hope in your letter that “the cup may pass”—well it really is “passing,” in fact it is nearly empty. You accuse me of stealing the “poor man’s ewe lamb” and the crumbs of your meal. But in reality I am the one who is now picking up crumbs from under your kosher table. You threaten me that soon I shall have to “stand and face my fate,” but the fact is that I can hardly stand at all. You can hear bells, but the bells are right here, above my head. What more do you demand, sir? To eat of the sacrifices of the dead?

And apropos of sacrifices of the dead, dear Zakheim values me at roughly two million dollars. So that even after deducting Boaz’s half, your share is definitely not petty cash. You will be able to ride around in a limousine from your “first step of redemption” to the next one. Zakheim and his yellow-headed daughter are threatening to drop in this week: he has decided to take me “by force if necessary” to Jerusalem in his car for my radiotherapy at Hadassah, and on the same trip to return to you your lost sheep. I, however, while writing these pages, have finally decided to stay here. What do I need to look for in Jerusalem? To expire amid dribbling prophets and barking messianic lunatics? I am staying with my son. I shall fold sacks to the end. Sort radishes. Wind old lengths of string. Perhaps I shall send for the clown who was my father from Haifa: we can hold a family billiards marathon until I drop dead. Will you let her stay with me a little longer? Please? Maybe you will be given an extra coupon for your collection of good deeds?

Boaz tells me, with a twist of the lips somewhere between boredom and contempt, that one of his mistresses here once used to pour water on the hands of an old guru in Wisconsin who was able, she claims, to heal malignant diseases by means of bee stings. And I, to my surprise, amused myself this morning by thrusting a stick into the beehive. But Boaz’s bees, being as distracted and worn out as I am or as peace-loving as he is, buzzed all around me but refused to sting. Maybe the odor of death that clings to me repelled them. Or else perhaps they do not deign to cure those of little faith?

So here we are again, inadvertently, with my old obsession: turning every stray bee into the bearer of a theological question, only to attack it with gritted teeth and squash it, together with its question. To derive a new question from its hollow death. And hurry to shatter the new question with a direct shot. For nine years I have been wrestling with Machiavelli, taking Hobbes and Locke limb from limb, unstitching Marx at the seams, burning with desire to prove once and for all that it is neither the selfishness nor the baseness nor the cruelty in our nature that turns us into a species that destroys itself. We annihilate ourselves (and shall soon wipe out our entire species) precisely because of our “higher longings,” because of the theological disease. Because of the burning need to be “saved.” Because of an obsession with redemption. What is the obsession with redemption? Only a mask for a complete absence of the basic talent for life. This is the talent that every cat is endowed with. Whereas we, like the whales that dash themselves against the shore in an impulse to mass suicide, suffer from an advanced degeneration of the talent for life. Hence the popular urge to destroy and annihilate what we have so as to hack a path to regions of redemption that have never existed and are not even possible. To sacrifice our lives cheerfully, to eradicate other people ecstatically, for the benefit of some vague false magic that seems to us to be a “Promised Land.” Some kind of mirage that is considered “superior to life itself.” And what on earth has not been considered superior to life itself? In Uppsala in the fourteenth century two monks slew ninety-eight orphans in a single night and then did away with themselves, all because a blue fox had appeared at a window of their monastery as a sign that the Virgin was waiting for them. Therefore: to cover the ground over and over again “with a carpet of our split brains / like white roses”? a carpet destined for the pure footsteps of some unlikely savior (according to the poem by a local fanatic, who certainly succeeded in fixing himself a fine brain-spill from twenty pistol bullets that the British landed in his skull). Or in a different local variation: “For peace is but mud / so renounce soul and blood / for the sake of the glory concealed.” What concealed glory, Mr. Sommo? Are you out of your mind? Take a look at your daughter sometime: that is the only hidden glory. There is none other. It’s a shame to waste words on you. You will murder her. You will murder everything that moves all around. And you will call it “birth pangs of the Messiah” and acceptance of divine judgment. You may even outdo me, and manage to commit murder without shedding a drop of blood. You will boil in olive oil and mutter thrice “Holy.”

I have just had a short lunch break. A girl by the name of Sandra came up to my room barefoot and, smiling as though moonstruck, set before me an aluminum teapot full of a fragrant infusion of herbs and a plate covered with another plate. A hard-boiled egg cut in half. Some olives. Slices of tomato and cucumber. Onion rings. Two slices of homemade bread spread with goat cheese flavored with garlic. And honey in a miniature bottle. I nibbled and sipped and poured myself some more. This Sandra went on standing there in her djellaba, watching me with unconcealed curiosity. Perhaps she had instructions to count my bites. And yet, as though afraid of me, she stayed near the door. Which she had not closed behind her.

I decided to try to hold a simple conversation with her. Even though as a general rule I haven’t the slightest idea of casual conversation with strangers. Where was she from, if she didn’t mind my asking?