Private Novelist (11 page)

“I have a better idea. Put it in your back pocket and pretend it's not there.”

“Okay.” She waited a moment, concentrating. “It's gone! Do you want to ride again?”

Actually, it wasn't gone at all. Mary had liked it and wanted to keep it. She thought Yigal was silly to throw it away.

YIGAL'S REASONS FOR HIS ACTION
were as follows: The
Dakar,
purchased in 1968 in England by the Israeli navy, vanished without a trace on its maiden voyage. Mr. Pickwick seemed to be connected with both the Dolphin Star Temple in Mount Rainier, Maryland, and his apartment on Basel Street. An ancient relic of the House of David bore the image of a silkie.

This structure seemed to Yigal like a house of cards. If one element was removed or changed, the whole thing would fall, and then instead of having to understand the power relations of the disparate elements, he could extract the card he wanted and be done with it. The hypothesis Yigal wanted to test by depositing the medallion in the silkie ATM could be summarized in one word: monotheism. Are the House of David and cash advances to silkies handled by the same guy? A positive answer, Yigal thought, would be a real convenience.

Just a week before, Yigal, a logical positivist, would not have regarded the question as meaningful. Now, like Hamlet, he was somewhat more open-minded. Unfortunately, it did not occur to him that the medallion might be a mass-produced
popular item worn by silkies as a brief fad in the 1890s, with no connection to the House of David at all, unless you include its role as evidence that the last remaining heir, instead of marrying a Jewish woman, had married someone about as unlike a Jewish woman as a person can get, namely a silkie; and that this closely guarded fact, which effectively put an end to all hope of a Messiah, came out only at the woman's death, when the medallion was found on a fish-gut string around her neck. Her five grotesquely deformed children had died in infancy, but their graves, under a row of lilac trees in the Jewish cemetery in Fishguard, were empty. Had the bodies been removed for religious reasons and reburied in unmarked graves outside the walls? How did an Israeli sailor come into possession of the medallion, and who ordered his murder?

I'm not saying that's what happened, but it didn't occur to Yigal, which shows that the luxury of married life was beginning to soften his intellect. Yigal was conscious that he might be missing something very important and obvious, but he couldn't imagine what.

I was having a busy week. Activity at the port was increasing, mostly because of a phenomenon I could easily explain, but didn't care to: a constant traffic of dolphins over, around, and under Mr. Pickwick. This had brought out, in addition to the religious and disco elements, every young mother in Tel Aviv. An intimidating riot of strollers blocked access to the seawall, on which toddlers were perched, their mothers holding their waists and telling them, “Look! Look! Dolphins!” The dolphins leaped obligingly from wave to wave. Spinner dolphins, common dolphins, spotted dolphins, bottlenose, a pair of young minke whales—everyone was there, and the crowd was getting thicker and thicker.

It reminded me of the practice Pierre Louÿs, in his turn-of-the-century soft-core freak-book
Aphrodite,
attributed to the ancient Greeks: Women, wearing whatever flattered them most, which in the case of hot post-adolescents meant nothing at all, would loiter near a certain Athenian wall on which men were in the habit of writing their own names, the names of women, and a price per woman. When a woman saw her name connected with a man and a price she could accept, she would stand under it for a while, waiting for him.

I always wondered what
Aphrodite
was doing in the Modern Library, usually a squeaky-clean repository of family classics. The heroine of
Aphrodite
was the most beautiful of the professional courtesans (strange how inoffensive that word sounds) and a nymphomaniac bisexual. Her beauty is darker, more full, more exotic than that of the Greeks—accordingly, it comes out after a bit that she is a “Hebrew.” She mesmerizes men with her native love poetry, “My tummy is a baby goat,” “My head is terrible like an army with banners,” etc., which according to Louÿs leaves Greek erotic poetry in the dust. In the end she dies painfully, imprisoned for impersonating the goddess, but not before a sadistic Greek takes her portrait in marble in the throes of a love I will not discuss or describe. The book was a gift to me. I read it and forgot about it until, years later, I found it and threw it in the trash.

Many people think it is wrong to throw books in the trash. They think because they happen to love some books, they should love all the others too. Their relation to books, regardless of their content, is one of respectful stewardship buoyed by paranoia, and they would see my disposal of
Aphrodite
as a criminal combination of censorship and infanticide. These are the people who give all their worst books, which they would not read again, to charity. This is surely why much of
my most disturbing childhood reading was done at Girl Scout camp, where I read
The View from Pompey's Head,
a long novel about the one-drop rule (the protagonist discovers that he is black), two years in a row and memorized a manual for seducing teenage boys—I remember how it said I should sit: left elbow on back of chair, right hand on left knee, left leg crossed over right leg to produce illusion of maximum thigh-plumpness.

It is a common practice in America today to write outraged, grief-stricken articles about library administration, on the lines of “Crouching by the back door like a demonic hungry hell-toad was an immense garbage dumpster filled with—can you imagine the horror—books!” They do not stop to imagine the tears of boredom in the dusty eyes of the bibliographers who are charged with determining, before each book is discarded, that it has never been read, has never been cited, was obsolete at publication, and will cost eighty dollars to deacidify.

How do people come to love books for their own sake?

My theory is that the process begins in early childhood. A child who is reading a book quickly becomes conscious that he has never been quieter, and has never appeared more intelligent. He need only look up for a moment to see that his parents are swimming in effulgent self-satisfaction and pride. Long before he can read himself, he finds that allowing himself to be read to makes his parents more docile, gentle, and patient. “Junior loves books more than anything,” they proudly say as he chews on a corner of
Pat the Bunny
following a performance. Mentally, they see him surrounded by books—a lawyer, a professor. . . . In his teens he discovers that reading has the power to liberate him from other chores. “I can't do that now,” he calls out from under a blanket, “I've got ten more
pages.” The parents see a lawyer, a professor. . . . They forget that he is reading one of the later, less coherent sequels to
Tarzan of the Apes.
Jane has been kidnapped again—will Tarzan arrive in time to save her from being used sexually? Who is most effective in a fair fight—apes, Bantu, or little tiny white people ten inches tall?

I read only the first twenty volumes. I kept them in a special pink box with a handle, like a lunch box. Every afternoon I practiced in the woods around our house. My goal, to climb from one tree to another without touching the ground, was quite limited and specific, but I never attained it. It was a mature white pine and hardwood forest where most trees had their first branches about thirty feet up.

Around this time, I was known to perform strange feats of strength in the president's physical fitness thing (I can't remember what it was called), some Nixonian program to toughen up the youth of America. Asked to hang by their hands with their chins over a bar, other little girls would drop after five seconds, but I stayed for a minute, until I was asked to let go by the teacher. I did something like seventy-five sit-ups, with my legs straight on the floor. My weak event was the six-hundred-yard walk/run, perhaps because Edgar Rice Burroughs had emphasized brute strength over aerobic fitness.

Mr. Pickwick remained motionless in the water. The authorities still denied its existence. It was almost forgotten in the general joy over the “gamboling” and “playing” of the toothed whales in all their variety, their constant comings and goings, their eager departures for assignations, and their hurried returns.

Last night (I assume the reader has no difficulty detecting shifts from fiction to nonfiction, but in case there is some
confusion, an explanatory note: everything I write about Avner Shats and
Sailing Toward the Sunset
is 100 percent true) I went with Zohar to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art to hear a performance of avant-garde classical music. It turned out to cost sixty shekels, so during the first half I took a walk to Dizengoff Square to see the revolving multicolored fountain shoot flames while loudspeakers blared
Swan Lake.
Suspended on an aerial plaza over Dizengoff Street, the fountain, which bears an inscription to something like world peace, may be the least tasteful object in the world. I looked up at it, laughing and smiling, for several minutes and then returned to the concert hall, where the intermission was just starting. Zohar introduced me to a number of composers, novelists, poets, visual artists, and men who said they were all of the above or some lesser combination. I told each of the men that I was writing an English version of
Sailing Toward the Sunset
by Avner Shats, based not on the Hebrew original but on rumors and hearsay. Despite the supposed artistic sophistication of each of them, all became confused. None had heard of Shats' book. I am pleased to think that in the carapace of their dependence on mass media I was able to pry open a crack through which each was afforded a glimpse of Shats' work, despite the fact that it still has not been reviewed except by the radio personality who consigned it to the abyss.

BEFORE I WROTE ABOUT ÖDÖN VON
Horváth's novel
Youth Without God,
I thought I should check that it's available in English. I know it's available in French, because the only mention I've ever seen of it was as
Jeunesse sans dieu
. Von Horváth, an Austrian, was known for broadly cynical and harsh socialist satires like the play
Faith, Hope, and Charity
and the novel
The Eternal Philistine,
literary equivalents of the caricatures of George Grosz.

Youth Without God
(1937), his second-to-last work, is written in rhythmic one-sentence paragraphs, like a poem, although it is mostly about intrigue among little boys. The book concerns a teacher's conversion to resistance, prompted at first by an aesthetic concern: the coldness of his students. They test themselves dispassionately, seeking new experience for its own sake, and they dismiss and satirize everything they see. He knows that everything he does (camping trips, the books he reads with them, the essays he assigns) is intended to harden them for war, and he does his best to help them prepare. But he winces a little, involuntarily, drawing the attention of “the Club,” four boys who meet secretly to discuss banned books. Club members must swear never to express
contempt in any form. After the teacher loses his job, his home, and his reputation, he begins to wish openly that he could find God. Finally an elderly baker tells him: “God is in our house. He lives with us because we never fight.” God, the teacher realizes, is a real experience, but a delicate one, which even the mildest dishonesty or ridicule will scare away.

Von Horváth died in Paris in 1938. He was walking to his hotel from an appointment about the film rights to
Youth Without God
when a tree branch fell on his head.

Anyhow, I thought the fastest way to the English version of
Youth Without God
might be Amazon, for which I hear nothing but praise. When I entered the Amazon site (for the first time) and searched for the exact title, I received the following truly ingratiating response, worthy of the younger von Horváth:

CLOSE MATCHES FOR THIS SEARCH
:

A Night Without Armor: Poems
by Jewel Kilcher (hardcover)

Siblings Without Rivalry: How to Help Your Children Live Together so You Can Live Too
by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish (paperback)

Don't Go to the Cosmetics Counter Without Me: An Eye-Opening Guide to Brand-Name Cosmetics
by Paula Begoun with Bryan Barron (paperback)

Ancient Secret of the Fountain of Youth, Vol. 1
by Peter Kelder; foreword by Bernie S. Siegel (hardcover)

How to Survive Without a Salary: Learning How to Live the Conserver Lifestyle
by Charles Long (paperback)

Without Remorse
by Tom Clancy (mass market paperback)

I'm not making that up—it said “close matches.” Would it really be so bad if somebody burned every copy in existence of each of the books above? Don't they all sound like they started life as articles in
Woman's Day
? I'm not trying to promote wasteful bonfires in public squares—the whole process could easily be accomplished without publicity, as was the suppression of
Youth Without God
. I favor the use of books to generate electric power. Tel Aviv (this may come as a surprise to my American readers) is bitterly cold in the winter—that is, it rains every third day while the temperature hovers around 60, and no one has central heat. The net effect is like that of the boarding school in
Jane Eyre. Without Remorse
could be used to provide two minutes' complimentary energy to every Israeli, which he could use to fill a hot water bottle and tuck it under his shirt.

Mary naturally assumed that Tel Aviv would always be toasty warm. The heat of the summer, which reminded her of a potter's kiln, seemed unlikely to give way any time in the foreseeable future, and no one had told her about the winter, which, after all, is quickly over.

Her sealskin lay in a furrier's storage locker, like so many other sealskins before, but she had not forgotten it. She had a habit of putting it on now and then, unlike other silkies who would abandon theirs for good, letting themselves blend gradually with the mass of humanity. She liked keeping her options open, and never burning bridges.

She was desperately curious to know the origins of the strange medallion. The next morning she went to the Jewish Museum, approached a curator, said, “Umm,” turned, and
left the building. In the afternoon she walked slowly between long, dark display cases in the Met, hoping to see something similar. In the evening she sat in bed, absentmindedly switching channels, and the next day she went to the New York Public Library, where Yigal was spending all his time. She didn't see him (he was down in the maps division, and she was in general reference) and she strode up to someone and said, “Hi! I'm trying to figure out what this is.” The librarian, who felt rather irritated after spending twenty minutes with a man in search of the very best pancake recipe, was pleased to speak with someone like Mary, who kept her distance and didn't smell funny. He led her to the huge black catalog books in deep recesses along the walls and asked, “Do you have some clue what you're looking for?”

“What do you think?” Mary said, handing him the medallion. “I heard it might be connected with the House of David, the Jewish kings, but to me it looks like a seal with breasts.”

“Are there silkies in Wales? David is the patron saint of Wales.”

“Silkies are Irish,” she said. “But I guess they could get around, if they wanted. How did a Jewish king get to be patron saint of Wales?”

The librarian shook his head, reminding her that one question was enough, and started her ordering books on ancient coins. Two hours later, she had:

          
1.
  
A depiction of a leopard that made it look like a seal

          
2.
  
Ditto, depiction of a lion

          
3.
  
Ditto, a camel

          
4.
  
Ditto, a wildcat

          
5.
  
Etc.

Wouldn't everything be simple, she wondered, if all of them were really intended as seals in the first place? The wheel was a symbol of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, but the breasts could signify the Roman virgin martyr Agatha. . . . She considered her options and ordered a book on Egypt. That night at seven she'd made up her mind: The medallion was fourth century Egyptian. It depicted, in a sad and clumsy way, Saint Catherine and a sphinx. In other words, it was extremely boring and disappointing.

Mary felt she should get rid of it before Yigal noticed she still had it. It was probably worth something to someone, and it seemed a shame to throw it in the trash, but she couldn't sell it, and besides, Yigal might expect her to be able to get it back on a moment's notice. So she did the only thing she could: She stopped by a post office, and she mailed it to me.

Her letter was open and candid.

This is something I want you to keep for me. I think it's Saint Catherine and a sphinx, but apparently Yigal thinks it has something to do with the heir to the Israeli throne. He gave it to me to send away, so now I'm sending it away.

New York is great. Yigal spends a lot of time reading about the subway. We go to museums. We had sushi—yum!

I can't wait to meet Zohar! I hope he gets back soon!

Zohar was sleeping peacefully under thick felt blankets at his last stop before Kathmandu. After a bath and a shave, he'd turned into the most popular member of the tour group. All
of them—yuppies desperate for just a whiff of the old odor of culture and sophistication they remembered from college, driven to acquiring it in the crushingly efficient way natural to people with twelve days' annual leave—were in awe of Zohar. Here was a man who existed to analyze the piano works of Beethoven, whatever the price—a man who would endure any hardship, who never took a day off, who would never be finished, always driven, always unsatisfied, always moving on, a solitary cowboy on the high plains of the Beaux-Arts, who had arrived at insights too deep to be shared with dilettantes like them, which didn't keep them from hanging around to buy him drinks every night, just so they could hear him say things like “I hate all classical music.” He was having a great time, except in the mornings. There is no Turkish coffee in Nepal. To the Americans he only said mournfully, “That's not coffee.” Each of them, especially the single women, privately resolved to visit Israel in the near future.