Private Novelist (18 page)

        
Your feet are like the snow's

        
Your ears descend like maple seeds

        
More slowly past your nose

        
Than diatoms that ornament

        
The ocean's turgid coils;

        
Come, delegate yourself to glide

        
To me on subtle hydrofoils! . . .

I remember how I came to write, under duress, this flagrantly criminal work, reminiscent of the poems composed by robots in the works of Stanisław Lem. I enrolled in a poetry workshop (I have mentioned it before), and at the very first meeting the professor asked each student to write a word on the chalkboard. Then he asked us all to go home and write poems that employed every word on the list.

I can't remember which word was mine, but I remember the white-faced, red-haired boy who wrote “turgid.”

To return from these digressions to the topic of digression: Educated people are taught to value prose for its economy and poetry for its opacity, and in this their taste differs so completely from mine that, in fact, I may well have read, in the reading public's eyes, instead of “everything,” virtually “nothing.” For example, despite my having read the complete works of De Quincey and every word ever published by George Eliot except her translation of
Das Leben Jesu,
I cannot recall ever having seen or touched a book by Raymond Carver. In my mind, he appears as a sodden, terse combination of John Cheever and Charles Bukowski, lifting sketchy tales of cancer
and divorce from country and western songs. Where did this impression come from? Who can say? But he is truly famous and popular.

When Mary and Yigal got home they put Meyer to bed and went out to talk on the balcony.

“YIGAL, HE CAN'T LIVE HERE.”

“Why not?”

“Can you imagine what it must be like for him? You saw how he responds to you.”

“So where will he live?”

“I was thinking of getting him his own place. There are lots of little apartments around here—”

“You're forgetting one thing. He's supposed to protect me from Rafi.”

“He will, Yigal, he will,” Mary said. She ran her hand along the balcony railing and looked sorrowfully down at the street. “But give him time.”

“What if I don't have any time? What about tonight, and tomorrow, and the next six months?”

“I don't know.”

Yigal went inside to see if Meyer was awake. “Meyer?” he called. The bear ducked his head and inched under the pillow, trying to hide. “Meyer, I'm so sorry. I am so deeply sorry. I never suspected how you felt. I forgot what I'd done, and the whole thing is one of the most disgraceful episodes of my life.” Meyer succeeded in pulling down the near edge of the pillow. Only the tip of one leg poked out. “Mary?”

“What?”

“Can you tell what he's feeling?”

“If you leave the room, maybe.” Mary lifted the pillow and peeked underneath. Meyer was quivering and shaking his head. “Leave the room, Yigal.”

About half an hour later Mary and Meyer appeared at my door. They stayed overnight, and in the morning, while Yigal went to see Rafi after receiving an urgent summons, we went shopping. We covered a big cardboard box inside and out with flowered contact paper and put it under a table in a corner of the living room. Inside we placed a sofa cushion, a small rug, a doll's rocking chair, and a selection of houseplants. “Meyer?” we called out. “We made you your own private place, where no one else is allowed to go.”

Meyer approached, feeling his way along the floor. “What is he looking for?” Mary asked.

“You know what—it could be his eye. I think it's in Yigal's pocket.” Meyer cocked his head at me and began to shiver, rolling over into a fetal position. Mary scooped him up and took him to bed just as Yigal sat opposite Rafi, fingering Meyer's eye.

“Rye Playland was no help at all,” Yigal said. “I'm still considering a trip to Iceland.”

“What's in your pocket? Souvenir?”

Yigal gave him the button. “Look familiar?”

“It reminds me of—you know, it's a little strange who it reminds me of.”

“Actually, it's not strange at all.” He took the button back and held it in his hand. “By the way, the target doesn't exist.”

“That's fine, because the committee met last night and we voted to offer you a pension. I wanted to keep you on, but there was a consensus to—to let you go . . .”

Yigal eased the pistol out of his waistband and laid it on the desk. “Any more formalities?”

Rafi started to pick up the gun, then seemed to change his mind. He wiped his hands on his lapels and smiled. “Yigal, you really have done excellent work, and I'm going to ask the committee to double your pension. I'm also nominating you for the Har-Zion Award, and I'm going to name a suite of offices after you, in Dimona. Privately, I'd like to offer you an opportunity to purchase shares in the expansion of the Eilat dolphin reef.”

Yigal took the gun back and smiled. “Thank you. My retirement comes as a pleasant surprise. As you know, my wife is pregnant, and I look forward to spending quality time with our child.” Rafi was laughing as Yigal closed the door.

Yigal had seriously misinterpreted one of his remarks. The button reminded Rafi of certain pajamas worn by a certain somebody's mother on certain occasions between 1952 and 1956, and not, as Yigal had assumed, of Moshe Dayan. Moshe Dayan's pajamas, Rafi recalled, had large, flat buttons of light blue Bakelite. Then he sighed and returned to work. The Kibbutz Negba pajama parties were legendary, but belonged to a time and a mood that would never return again. He thought of the lines of Luis Cernuda:

        
Adolescente fui en días idénticos a nubes,

        
Cosa grácil, visible por penumbra y reflejo,

        
Y extraño es, si ese recuerdo busco,

        
Que tanto, tanto duela sobre el cuerpo de hoy. . . .

Roughly, “I was adolescent in a haze of delicate confusion, but the remembrance brings only pain to the body I have now.”

Soon after, Yigal and Mary began having their big fights
about prenatal care. I would hear the door rattling and there would be Meyer, dusty from the stairs, pushing to be let in. From below I could hear Yigal shouting about folic acid and ultrasounds.

Meyer nestled into my arms and looked up gratefully. His new eyes were neatly picked out in blue-and-white embroidery floss, and he had a tiny red line for a mouth. All his ruptures were neatly darned, and he wore a different outfit every day. He lived in the box, which he had rigged up with a washcloth for a door, and spent most of his time listening intently to talk radio call-in shows.

I was beginning to show the strain of separation from Zohar. When he called I found his excuses increasingly thin. Our conversations—at least on my side—became sarcastic. “The Cubs in the World Series? When hell freezes over! Can't you do any better than that? How about some lost Schubert songs discovered extant as microscopic fragments in recycled newsprint papering the ladies' room of a bell tower in St. Petersburg?”

“Actually, Nell, you're not far from the truth—”

I screamed. I heard Meyer's characteristic thud as he hit the floor downstairs and ran to safety on the balcony. Sometimes I wondered if instead of giving him eyes, we should have sewn his ears shut.

“I've been invited to examine a piano that has not been touched since it was played by Chopin. It's been enshrined, more or less, in the drawing room of a mansion in Bydgoszcz. The youngest daughter in each generation is entrusted with ensuring that—”

“That's it, Zohar. Make up your mind. It's him or me.”

There was a long silence. “I've been writing some prose-poetry,” he said. “About my students. There's a recurring
image that haunts me—mechanical cockroaches.” He blew his nose.

I was moved by pity and asked, “Did you know Elad Manor is seeing that little nympho you were so crazy about?”

“Elad Manor? He couldn't fuck his way out of a paper bag!” I sensed Zohar's machismo emerging again from the cocoon where it had briefly sheltered, unable to thrive in the touchy-feely, romantic atmosphere of an American sports team. “Elad Manor hasn't done anything worth mentioning since
Sailing Toward the Sunset,
and that was, what, let me see, almost six weeks ago. Elad Manor is washed up. By next week nobody will remember the name of Elad Manor, except maybe that ungrateful minx—she'll remember him every time she takes her penicillin—did you see him?”

“Yigal saw him read at Beit Haomanim.”

He gagged. “If I were Avner Shats, I would put out a contract on Elad Manor.”

“Zohar, think what you're saying! Avner knew the risk going in. He knew if he let Elad lay claim to his poetry, Elad would probably end up with ten or twelve beautiful teenaged lovers—he told me so himself. Avner knows the seductive power of words, unlike some other people I could name who write obsessively about mechanical cockroaches. Anyway, you should hear what Elad is writing now. I hate it when people write about war. It's such a cheap effect. Of course, everybody worships him. Amos Oz is saying he's going to shoot himself on television so Elad can be the new prophet of Eretz Israel, or something like that.”

“I must come home,” Zohar said. “My country needs me. Expect me soon. Give my love to the eerie little bear.”

“Meyer,” I said. “Good-bye, my love! Until tomorrow!”

SUMMER TIDES HAVE STRIPPED MUCH
of the sand from the beach below the Roman city of Apollonia, and Zohar and I often walk there now to seek pretty shells and Phoenician mosaic tiles. On Saturday as I skirted the waterline, a narrow black form caught my eye, a digital watch which proved to be exactly identical to Zohar's, but one hour faster. Crusted with salt and worn smooth by the action of the waves, it had apparently functioned in the Mediterranean for three months, since the end of daylight saving time.

As
Sailing Toward the Sunset
flirts ever more promiscuously with satire, I often think of Ödön von Horváth's beautiful novel
Youth Without God,
and its injunction to abandon ridicule in favor of sincere praise of that which is highest. Why then should I hesitate to reveal the brand name of the heroic wristwatch? If it did not in fact survive three months in the bitter waters of the ancient and historic cesspool, it can only have come to us via the Suez Canal. Perhaps a fish coughed it up on the beach, like Jonah; perhaps it fell from an Indian freighter; very possibly, waterspouts were involved. Whatever its origin, I stand in awe of the Casio F91W, our gift from the sea.

As William Blake once wrote,

        
Mock on, mock on, [Avner], [Nell];

        
Mock on, mock on; 'tis all in vain!

        
You throw the [watch into the sea],

        
And the wind blows it back again.

        
And every [watch] becomes a gem

        
Reflected in the beams divine;

        
Blown back they blind the mocking eye,

        
But still in Israel's paths they shine.

Mary pulled her beret down over her ears and shivered. We were sitting outside in the shade at the café downstairs. I hadn't seen her in several days. Her nose was red from crying.

“What's wrong with Yigal? Is he crazy?” she moaned. “He wants me to stay here and never leave, and he wants to raise his child himself, and he wants me to get all these tests to make sure it's okay—it's a seal pup, all right? How okay is that?”

“Maybe it's you he's worried about.”

“Then he should let me go! It's not me, it's his pup. Ever since I've been pregnant he's so possessive. Except when he ran off, did I mention that?”

“You did.”

“He ignores me now. He spends all his time model railroading with Meyer. He never touches me except to do this weird listening, palpating routine like he thinks he's some sort of obstetrician.”

“Listen, Mary,” I said. “You have to put yourself in his position. He just lost his job, he's in love with a seal, and he's living with an ersatz Winnie-the-Pooh he raped and abandoned. He doesn't feel he has any control over his environment, so he's
trying to control what he can, like your diet and the model railroad. Don't you think it makes him feel good, when the little train goes around and around, and he can make it go faster and slower?”

“I guess,” she sniffled. “The train is great. Meyer loves it too. You know, Meyer's an odd character.”

“Yes?” I encouraged her. I wanted to know what she found so unusual about Meyer.

“What I mean is, he's completely independent, yet there's nothing he can do for himself. If he wants to see a book, you have to open it for him and turn the pages. But if you didn't open it, he'd be fine. He has his house, and his radio. Except that he's so cute, and tragic, and Yigal feels really guilty, so he just sits there all the time, watching him, waiting to see if he wants something, trying out different things to see if he likes them . . .”

Just then, two floors up, Meyer sat on the carpet studying an aerial view of the Temple Mount. He indicated to Yigal that he needed a better map. Yigal opened a file cabinet and found a tourist guide to the Old City of Jerusalem. “Something more detailed?” he asked. “Are you looking for something for driving, or as a pedestrian?” Yigal turned the pages one by one until they arrived at the City of David, at which point Meyer nodded and looked fixedly at the model railroad. “You want to go to Jerusalem on the train? It's too late to go today. Is tomorrow all right?” Meyer nodded again. As Yigal lifted the phone to call for the train schedule, he added, “Are you sure it wouldn't be okay to drive?”

Then he saw, stuck to the bulletin board with a pin, the Order of Har-Zion. With a flash of insight, his brief psychogenic fugue ended as it had begun.

He turned and stared at Meyer. “Mind if I look in your
house? Yes? Well, I'm looking anyway.” Yigal lay down and lifted the washcloth. He felt around inside until his hand encountered something heavy and rectangular. “Meyer, what the hell is this? Is this, or is this not, the box of Kalashnikov cartridges I thought I had lost?” Meyer looked at the floor. “Meyer, you have been a very bad bear, and you are not going to Jerusalem tomorrow.” Yigal kept feeling around inside Meyer's house until he found a shiv, several lengths of wire, a perfume bottle, a disposable camera, and almost three thousand shekels in cash. He opened the bottle carefully over the sink. It contained ether. “Bad, bad bear,” Yigal repeated, placing Meyer unceremoniously in a briefcase and locking it shut.

We saw him come out the front door. “Yigal, over here!” Mary waved cheerfully. “Where are you headed?”

“I wasn't sure,” he said, sitting down. “We have some serious Meyer trouble.” He told the story and concluded, patting the briefcase, “He's in here.”

Mary was outraged. “How could you do such a thing?!” She snatched the briefcase from Yigal. “What's the combination? Meyer, Meyer, everything's going to be fine!”

“No,” Yigal told Mary.

I held her arm to keep her from running. “Wait,” I said. “What if it's like this: What if this isn't Meyer at all? What if Meyer doesn't get any benefit from being animated this way? You say all he does is sit and listen to talk radio, right? Well, what if what he'd really rather do is live on a shelf and be played with every so often? What I'm saying is, maybe this has nothing to do with Meyer.”

She sat down. “Ask Meyer.”

Yigal opened the briefcase and put Meyer on the table, after taking away the letter opener he'd concealed in his tiny
underpants. Meyer looked around nervously, then sat down by the sugar. “You ask him, Mary,” Yigal said.

Mary picked him up and he snuggled almost violently against her, trying to lose himself between her breasts. “Poor little Meyer,” she said. “Is this really hard for you?” Meyer nodded. “Would you rather rest?” He nodded again and actually made a sort of tiny whimpering sound, God knows how, but we kept our distance.

“Is it Yigal?” He shook his head. “Is it Moshe?” He nodded. She loosened a thread at his neck and found the edge of the parchment. “Tell me if this doesn't feel good,” she said, drawing it slowly from between two lumpy wads of cotton batting. Meyer kept nodding and nodding, and then, suddenly, was inert.

We were all silent for a long time. Mary held the name in her hand, reading it over and over, and then said, “That was the saddest thing I ever saw.” She gave Meyer to Yigal, who hugged him, sobbing. The waitress finally noticed him. “Double espresso,” Yigal said through his tears.

“Another large cappuccino,” I added. “Can I see that?” Mary handed me the all-powerful name of Moshe Dayan. “Now what do we do with it? Eating it or rolling a joint with it are definitely out.”

“Do you think it could be improved?” Mary said. “Like, if we tucked it into a good book?”

“What languages do you think it can read?” I asked Yigal. “I like Mary's idea a lot. I want to start it on some Robert Walser right away.”

“I think this is a case for a demonologist,” Yigal said, “but after what I've heard about their general level of expertise, my proposal is as follows.” He stirred his coffee. “First, we need to see what the smallest effective dose is. How big a piece of
this name is needed to animate objects? In fact, I don't think we should be touching it without gloves. It could be influencing our thoughts. There's some basic information we need before we can formulate an effective disposal plan. Actually, thinking about it, I'd rather just assume that even the smallest particles could be dangerous, which inclines me to favor sealing it in a concrete block and—Nell, didn't you say your brother has a job dropping things into deep trenches in the Gulf of Mexico?”

“He sure does,” I said proudly.

“Well, that's my plan,” Yigal concluded. “Concrete block, ocean trench.”

“Except what if the concrete block rises out of the ocean, flies through the sky, and lands smack-dab on the Dome of the Rock?” Mary asked.

“Oh.” We were silent again.

“And at first everybody thinks it's a bomb, and then a meteor, but then they crack it open—”

“We get the picture,” I said. “This is a tough one.”

“We could bury it in a mine. Except then it might animate the whole earth.” Yigal was pensive. “We don't know where it would stop.”

“Maybe all the oil from Saudi Arabia would flow to Tel Aviv and start gushing out of the storm sewers,” Mary suggested. “And it would rain once a week, all summer long. And then giant volcanoes—”

I suddenly thought of a different tactic and interrupted. “It needs to go somewhere where there are safeguards already in place. A political group, say, that's already frustrated and under surveillance. Make sure it gets into people we know are inept, instead of some heavy object that could prove dangerous.”

They both looked at me and smiled. “Nell's right,” Yigal
said. “That's genius. And I have a brilliant idea to go along with it.”

“I don't want to know,” I said.

“Is it that soccer team you hate?” Mary asked.

“I don't want to say,” Yigal said. “Hey, where's the parchment?”

We looked all around. “I guess it blew away,” Mary said. Yigal jumped up and ran down the street while I scoured the sidewalk. The name of Moshe Dayan was nowhere to be found.

Mary shrugged. “So what? It's best of all this way. What can a name do to hurt anybody?”