Private Novelist (20 page)

“Let it go, let it go,” my friend Ms. Jumbo Loopy Chenille would say to all this, and she would be right. People today are often heard to remark that I am articulate. Why should they be made to suspect that my verbal skill, such as it is, originated not in a habit of speaking, but in a lifetime spent preparing a single essay (any length, as long as it might hold the wandering attention of the listener from start to finish) on the subject “Why are you crying?” By the time I first heard the question at age fifteen, I had already reasoned that there might be an inverse proportion between a given subject's willingness to ask it and his or her ability to understand the response. Therefore, over the years, I prepared and presented many heavily edited, audience-specific versions of the essay. I suspected that the original would easily fill a book, but who would read it? In November 1996, at age thirty-two, I finally succeeded in communicating the essay in its entirety. I wrote it all by hand, and mailed it away. While I wrote it, I lived in a state of angelic peace. When I imagined the recipient reading it, I saw him bathed in golden light. Sometimes I wonder what it said.

Having delivered myself of my own magnum opus, I was at last ready to turn my attention to the great works of others, such as Avner Shats.

THE PLOT OF
SAILING TOWARD THE
Sunset
seems forced and dry after the lurid glory of the mailbox, but being a novel, it must march on. October turned to November, the leaves fell, and the first snow spangled the tree branches—in Vermont I mean—while in Tel Aviv the summer continued unabated, but somewhat less like an oven. With December came the jelly doughnuts of Hanukkah, not unlike those which John F. Kennedy claimed he resembled so closely in his famous speech “
Ich bin ein Berliner.
” The weather cooled by several degrees, and Mary began to look pregnant. January: A time of frosty chill on Mount Hermon, where Shats sat placidly fulfilling his military reserve duty. February, month of Israel's arbor day and the cruel holiday of Purim, arrived just as the weeds of the Galilee hit nine feet in height, fueled by the turgor pressure of constant rain on saturated ground. March brought with it huge poppies, daisies and anemones, swarms of birds, and mushrooms. In April four storks passed over, heading for Holland, and Mary had her baby.

She was perfectly beautiful, downy soft and white, with
huge black eyes and long whiskers stiff as nylon. They named her Rakeffet, after a potted plant. Mary bought a cat brush and saved all the fur as it fell out. She never did quite decide what to do with it, and it's still in the top of their closet in a transparent plastic bag.

Little Rakeffet was Yigal's pride and joy, so it was no big shock to anyone except Mary when, at the age of eight weeks, she was found following him around the kitchen with her skin hanging by one leg. “I don't really want to consider the implications,” Mary said, “but it's fine by me.” A month later she came upstairs with Rakeffet and the skin, looking upset. “Help me get her into this,” she begged. We pinched and squeezed until Rakeffet squeaked and moaned, but it was no use—we couldn't get it over her head. Yigal's parents then materialized and insisted on having a party called a
brita,
i.e., the feminine version of a circumcision. (Rakeffet emerged unharmed.) Yes, those were lively, entertaining times, but now I should get back to the really rich stuff: “My Memoirs and Parents.” Come to think of it, I should leave my parents out of it, since they might read this far someday, so I'll just call it: “My Memoirs.”

When I was eighteen, my mother and I took a trip to Greater Detroit, where my elder brother was in school. After two years on a tuba scholarship at Valley Forge Military Academy, he had chosen to attend the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He was majoring, of course, in mathematics, but had elected, in his first semester, to study both elementary Hebrew and elementary Arabic, and his grades were suffer
ing. In the second semester, after our visit, he accepted his tuition money from our mother and used it to buy a very large and even mysterious stereo system. I remember the amplifier well, a silver cube with a vertical row of red LEDs and one knob. His record was
The Velvet Underground and Nico.
I bought him
Songs of Leonard Cohen,
and he played them both.

Together we went to visit a very nice and charming woman whom we all like very much. She had visited us in California in 1966 to bear an illegitimate son, so she had known my elder brother and me from an early age. As we sat in a festive circle around her Christmas table, she turned to David and asked, “Do you remember Nell's imaginary friend you killed?”

He did not. Neither did I. She went on to tell how I had possessed, as a very small child, one friend. This friend was small enough to fit in my hand, and no one else touched him. I carried him in my pocket, and when I sat down, wherever I was, I always placed him carefully next to me.

One day, David and I were playing with a wagon, and in the commotion David saw that my friend was alone. He picked up my friend with two fingers and raised it over his head. I stood petrified in terror, my mouth like an O, the woman said, as David slowly parted his thumb and forefinger and watched my friend fall to the concrete. I remained motionless with my hands on my cheeks for a few seconds, and then I began screaming. I continued screaming for hours, and I never had another imaginary friend, at least not until November 1996.

After November 1996 I reorganized my priorities along lines suggested by Montaigne's “On Some Verses of Virgil.”

The little slip of parchment flew on the dry wind. It flew right over the Ayalon Highway, and over Ben Gurion Airport and the monastery at Latrun and Zohar's sister's apartment and the walls of the Old City, and eventually it flew right into East Jerusalem, and then across the Jordan, still heading east, at which point everyone lost sight of it as if it had never existed, though it was to undertake several interesting confidential projects.

Meyer went to live with Yigal's six-year-old cousin in Kibbutz Be'eri. A year later, he lay on top of a water tank, disintegrating in the sun. He turned to lint.

Zohar and I lay in bed and I told him about my next novel,
Volvox.
“Remember
Vox
?” I asked. “This is just like that, except it's about unicelled flagellates.” There were clear echoes of my novel #0—the novel before my first novel (
Sailing Toward the Sunset
is my second novel)—which I always assumed it would be my life's work to write. Titled
Autobiography of a Radiolarian,
it showed the influence of Solzhenitsyn all too plainly: The protagonist, a small diatom, is caught in a deep ocean current that will take two hundred years to cross the Atlantic and release her off the coast of France, but meanwhile she is forced to confront the globigerine ooze, a vast graveyard of near-infinite numbers of her friends and family. I never wrote a word of it, until in 1993 I decided that the first issue of my punk rock fanzine should include a work of fiction. Modestly, I titled the piece “Fiction.”

Rfmx left the sea at the age of four. . . .

The next few sentences concern her efforts to get drunk in New York City with no money. Eventually, frustrated, she resolves to seek the company of other radiolaria. Rescued from them by heroic baby lambs, she becomes a professional shepherdess, drinking brandy on her back in the Sheep Meadow and watching them frolic and play until her death at age six. The lambs say the same line over and over: “Baa!” I.e., they are difficult to understand, but it is clear that everything they say is positive and that all their intentions are good.

I realize now that I forgot to explain what I meant by Yigal's lofty feeling of superiority vis-à-vis the sexuality of American men.

Israeli men maintain:

1. That American men are obsessed with large breasts.

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence—it really is, because you can't help trampling the grass on the side where you are, but anyhow, perhaps those American men would enjoy visiting Tel Aviv. I attribute the absurdly large breasts of some American lingerie models to internal competition in the industry, the same force that supposedly led a Nevada strip club in the 1960s to advertise a “topless nursing mother of six” who was a dachshund. The glamor of dominatrices arises in a similar way—submissive men are not actually very picky, but with so many doms jockeying for the submissive dollar, a competitive subculture arises on its own. The top echelon comes to function as a cartel, bringing some assurance of decent pay and safe working conditions to its members. Like the possession of a dentist's chair or a cattle
prod, absurd breasts function for the model, in marketing terms, as a “point of difference.”

2. That American men are obsessed with blow jobs.

This is quite true. I blame it on estrogenic drinking water and the “growth hormone” in American beef. Together, these have reduced the median American penis by 35 percent over the last fifty years (I base my estimate on anecdotal evidence and on drawings and tables found in a strangely comprehensive hygiene manual of the 1920s, property of the University of Pennsylvania), while the American woman has become a giantess. If you can't see the connection, just forget I said anything at all.

3. That American pornography is perversely clinical.

I have seen two American porno films, which is two too many. As everyone admits, they are all the same: the beige bedspread, the stock footage, Ron Jeremy. Only once did I catch a glimpse of foreign smut. A French movie featured a character addicted to pornography, and in the video he was watching, two very attractive young people went to a beach, parked their motorcycle, and began to make out. It was actually sort of romantic—compared with American porn, it was
Pride and Prejudice
—so I think I know what the Israelis mean.

There is no Israeli pornography. Zohar showed me the explicit passage in
A Baby Comes into the World
that got him through adolescence:

And here's how the thing happens: Father and Mother lie down together, close to each other,
and the penis enters into the vagina. The spermatozoa in the semen come out of the penis and swim. . . .

Yigal, Mary, and Rakeffet went for a walk on the beach. They sat down to watch the sun touch the horizon and seem to melt and flatten to it, making a hot-pink Krembo shape. Then they bought ice cream. Rakeffet dropped her ice cream and ran very fast on the sand with her arms out, saying, “I'm a bird!”

“You are not a bird,” Mary contradicted.

Then she and Yigal looked at each other and kissed tenderly, for they noticed that the novel had ended. The time for reviews had come.

Under the pen name “Nell Zink,” critically acclaimed author Avner Shats has rewritten his commercial failure
Sailing Toward the Sunset
as an easy-to-read, palatable, and naive spy thriller, set in a small glass booth above the falls of the Rhine. The Swiss setting hints at involvement in the struggle to recover lost Jewish assets, and before the novel ends we see that the hero has definitely come into some money somehow. But
Sailing Toward the Sunset
is not merely a legal procedural on the intricacies of Swiss banking law—it incorporates elements of romance, horror, and a revealing look backward at the historic moment of Israel's victory in the Six-Day War. The technical details regarding the use of dolphins in contemporary submarine warfare
are fascinating. On the negative side, Shats underestimates the importance of science fiction in English literature (I, for one, would never have learned English without it), but, all in all,
Sailing Toward the Sunset
is the perfect Israeli thriller.

Readers of
Swallows and Amazons
and
The Wind in the Willows
will recall the pleasure of “messing about in boats.” I am pleased to say that at last Israel can boast an author willing to gratify our long-suppressed national desire to float, both physically and mentally. Too many writers have succumbed to the large bribes offered by manufacturers of military hardware, and have applied their energies to international spy thrillers designed to promote a sense of urgent paranoia and a renewal of Cold War–style tensions. Zink bucks this trend, turning inward in ever-smaller circles until at last her plot assumes the form of a very small and unidentifiable animal which appears to be sleeping soundly.

Nell Zink's first novel,
Sailing Toward the Sunset,
takes us on a nostalgic journey to the rural Virginia of her early youth, where she was in possession of a small green wooden boat, somewhat like a punt. Although it leaked and had to be bailed constantly with a margarine tub, she was able to spend hours
floating in it on a large eighteenth-century millpond hidden in the woods behind her house. This experience functions more as a scar or a burden than anything else, and there is no better argument for the common practice of raising children without privacy.

THIS STORY WILL BE COMPOSED IN
bad English, the up-and-coming lingua franca of the European Union and, with any luck, the world. Bad English incongruously pairs transparent simplicity with high-flown academic jargon. Willful misapprehension of everyday words and ignorance of cliché make bad English a forceful vehicle for literary expression. Precursors and predecessors to this work include the classic novelette
Heart of Darkness
. A self-respecting native English speaker would shudder at his own bathos as he penned the phrase “heart of darkness” and laugh at anyone who suggested he make his villain's last words “the horror”—after all, who can actually say it? Available options include Brooklynese (“the hara”), “the whore” (what always happens when I try to say it), and a solemn precision not really suggestive of a dying man who's not playing a vampire. Other masterworks of bad English include the romantic era. So as you can see, you don't have to be a European like Joseph Conrad to write in bad English. I am still, as I write, arguably American, but I feel that seven years' absence, along with a lot of practice talking pidgin to foreigners, have qualified me to write as poorly as he did.

Every sentence in bad English is short, short, short. Individual phrases may be dauntingly terse, even inherently paradoxical, but constructions are stripped down to the point of blank tautology. Argumentation has no place in what is essentially a prose style originated by American high school teachers. Where someone hoping to bring an effective argument might expect to be permitted to save his conclusion for the end where it might seem more convincing, Americans know that conclusions belong up front as “topic sentences” and even
en détail
as “abstracts.” By the way, anyone who thought that last sentence was a long one is already so inured to patois that he wouldn't know high culture if it bit him on the butt—which in its turn might indeed constitute a topic sentence for this story, which is about high culture.

“Oh no,” you are surely sighing, “this is going to be a story in a kitsch language about kitsch and I refuse to read it.” Well, guess what—you have no choice! How many centuries has it been since Western culture peaked? Two, maybe three? Do you really expect anyone, not just me, but anyone to write a story in 2005 that will tell you something you didn't know about the human condition? Maybe I will, but only by a sin of omission on your part; I could rehash everything from Pushkin to Platonov, and who would notice? Nobody. I don't mean that you don't have a choice but to read this story, just that any story you pick up is going to be kitsch by the time it hits your consciousness, if not before, so you might as well get used to it.

Yesterday a German student told me all about how much William Blake loved Jesus. The German student in this story is a bit more sophisticated than that. For one, he's been studying
art history intensively for almost nine years, and for two, he's one of the best postdocs at his university and was given a scholarship to spend three months in an exclusive villa on the outskirts of Florence while working on a project that could give his career a major jump-start. His name is David (pronounced
Dah-veed
).

David lived in a villa that the artist Max Klinger had willed to Kaiser Wilhelm. An immense mansion in toasted marshmallow color with green shutters, it was shaded by a high and crumbling garden wall bordering the old road to Siena. The garden's many blue and pink mirror balls reflected tall cypresses and occasionally late roses, which were still, in November, blooming. David's room was on the fifth or sixth floor (the stairs were very confusing), high up in a corner, not quite under the roof, in a bare but largish stone cell that must have been built to house a whole bunch of maids. His room had two windows.

Across the hall was an aging Israeli writer who seemed generally disappointed by life and was writing some sad book about something, possibly a socialist embittered by the failure of communism (David wasn't sure at all, but he happened to have seen big reference books about Russian history in the room). Next door was an extremely good-looking girl. She looked very young. She told the Israeli writer she was nineteen and from the Crimea and a lesbian, and he told David. David believed it, because she would go to the shower wearing only a smallish towel. To get to the shower, you had to go down the hall, down a spiral stairway to a larger hall, through a public area to a really big staircase in an atrium, and down another spiral stairway to the shower, which was
on a landing. Looking down from the gallery in the atrium, you could see the real inhabitants of the villa come and go—the artists. The writers and scholars in the little stone cells were some kind of afterthought. The other people living on the hall were a German novelist in his sixties and an English art historian. David studiously avoided the art historian. In a place as picked over as Florence, it would be some kind of miracle if you met someone in the same field who didn't feel he was competing with you directly. In this case, the competition was right out in the open. David got as far as the word “Giotto” before the Englishman rolled his eyes back in his head and moaned. He avoided the German novelist because he was German, and who goes to Florence to meet other Germans? Besides, the novelist was famous, and he didn't want anyone to think he was sucking up. He was more or less terrified of the beautiful girl, so his main conversational partner, when rain led him to settle in early for the night upstairs, was the Israeli.

“What does she make?” David asked.

“That is not entirely clear,” said the Israeli. “I like to think she's a poet, probably because she has no books at all, and she doesn't paint or do anything else downstairs. I talked to Siegfried about her.” That was his name for the regal (as in flowers and string quartets going into rooms where David and the Israeli weren't welcome, discreet laughter as they walked away, condescension whenever they spoke) German in a green suit who ran the place. “He said she's here as a favor to an old friend who knew her mother, something like that.”

David laughed.

“Okay, I know what you're thinking. The old friend is Siegfried's wilting, forgotten dick.” David laughed again. “But I swear I believe her. She is a lesbian. Otherwise the Earth is
a cruel planet devoid of hope, and I'm not ready to accept that yet.”

“For me, it's better when she is not a lesbian,” said David.

“Then you are a great optimist,” replied the Israeli. “To me, she is the world's most desperate heterosexual slut, who became a lesbian overnight to avoid sleeping with me.” David laughed. “That is, just in time to avoid rejecting me on some concrete personal basis of which there is all too abundant proof. An unregenerate nymphomaniac, until she met me and I healed her. Now she thinks only of spiritual values and the delicate love of a like-minded girl who is probably even more beautiful. I am quite sure she is a poet, now that she dreams of this girl, even if she was not a poet before, but a nymphomaniac slut. I am her savior.”

“I will ask to read her poetry,” said David. “This we call a win-win situation. If she is a lesbian, she will like it. If she is not a lesbian, she will like it. Every poet likes it.”

“But it's in Russian. I see her taking notes in the garden.”

David sighed.

David was both an art historian and a chemist. Right off, you can see he's from the wrong side of the tracks. An influential art historian from an established family of professors can see an ear tacked up on a wall a mile off and immediately say, “Rembrandt,” but David would most likely take a week to think it over before he says, “I like the ear, but it's recent. Still, it's a great ear, one of Rembrandt's best ear designs ever, honestly, even if it was painted by a restorer in 1951.” It's an unwelcome new discipline. It used to be you could say, “Painting X was ineptly restored.” People like David force you to admit that it was obliterated. David wanted to be the type who gets to proclaim works authentic on aesthetic grounds alone,
but that kind of deep sensibility can only be inherited. Or at least, art history departments work as though it can only be inherited, which boils down to the same thing. So he took up chemistry.

His project in Florence was, generally speaking, a deep, dark secret. There was no media presence. A bulldozer ripping out an old rail line had hit rocks that turned out to be the tops of the walls of something Etruscan. They put up a high fence and called in an American team (except for the ultra-specialist David), which was slowly digging and making drawings. He had a lab in two containers on the site and it was all terribly exciting. When people at the villa asked what he was doing, he said,
“Affreschi di Giotto.”
It had to be kept quiet because, no matter what they found, the high-speed magnetic-levitation rail line was going right through the middle of it come hell or high water.

It wasn't all Etruscan. It was a very solid structure and had seen a lot of use. There was something for everyone, from Byzantine graffiti to broken glass. It was tucked into a ravine next to the river not far from town. There was some discussion as to whether it might have been buried deliberately and not merely covered by erosion, and many were intrigued by the evidence that a tunnel had been dug to it from the river at some point before the 1920s. (That was the date of the newest condoms.) (Explanation: rats.) In slow increments, David was working his way through samples and scrapings. A picture was emerging of an ancient and unglamorous granary, or possibly a temple of Artemis in a sacred grove, or perhaps just one of those places you drop off an infant you'd rather not see again. Or at least there were plenty of small bits of human bone in the dirt covering the floor, all pretty much ground to dust by archaic mass
tourism of some kind, or maybe pigs or cattle. The place had once been surrounded by trees. All were cut down on the same day in 755 B.C. Around the same time, someone had hammered quite a few pegs into the interior walls—all at the same height, but at irregular intervals, as if to hang crepe paper for a party while drunk. David kept his distance from archaeologists. His specialty was analyzing lint.

There were five artists living downstairs in palatial apartments, according to the German novelist:

          
1.
  
A Macedonian guy who pretended to be Iranian. He sketched male nudes, beautifully, from memory.

          
2.
  
A German of the Leipzig school, painter of schematic architectural exteriors.

          
3.
  
Another German from Leipzig, a copyist of advertising circulars.

          
4.
  
A Swiss sculptor in cheese.

          
5.
  
An elderly Dutchwoman whose turbid landscapes recalled prowling archangels in the angry coalescing of their impasto skies.

“Sculptor in cheese?” said the Israeli.

“In Switzerland are many, many cows,” the German novelist replied. “The government gives a subvention for every way to use more milk.” They were walking together across an open plaza downtown on their way to an art performance. One of the more significant central churches, with a small pietà by Bernini and an irreplaceable inlaid agate floor, had been half filled with scaffolding and a collapsible aboveground swimming pool into which a world-famous video artist was about to jump naked. Since the local cardinal was to give a
benediction first, in Italian, and they had tickets from Siegfried for a VIP area up front, they were walking very slowly.

“Why cheese?” mused the Israeli. “I suspect this artist. Where cheese is made, there are two smell possibilities. One is fungus, the other is a penetrating smell of vomit, a smell that flings a person to the floor in involuntary contractions.”

“It is not only cheese,” the German added. “At times, there are other products of Swiss and French agriculture in his work.” He stumbled against a low step leading to the portico of the church. “Owa, the leg. I am telling you, Eyal, I have a problem with my knee.” He sat down on the steps.

Eyal, the Israeli, paused in front of him with his hands in his pockets, looking up at the heavy bronze door of the church, which was slowly closing, pulled by invisible hands from inside. A group of young students of both sexes raced past them and through the door at the last second.

The German, Ingo, stretched out his leg and groaned. “Go in, go without me.”

“No, why? It's a nice night, here outside. Perhaps it's better here than there.” They could hear the hugely amplified droning of the cardinal. “You have a bad knee?”

“In general, I never walk. Kierkegaard either, or, you know it? Either I never walk and everyone knows I am old, or I walk and everyone knows I am old.”

The humid air seemed to be staining the marble a cool shade of electric blue, and the Israeli had no urge to enter the cathedral. He sat down next to the German. There was scattered applause from the church, then a monumental synthesizer chord that rose to a muffled wailing. “Let's go,” Ingo said. They both stood up.

The church door opened and a woman of about fifty-three emerged. She stood facing them, wearing high heels, dark
tights, and a short red overcoat, and said clearly, in English, “It's unbearable. It's awful. Don't go in there.”

“We do not plan to do this. We only rest a short while on the veranda,” said Ingo. He stopped leaning on his walking stick and stood precariously upright. With great graciousness, he removed a cigarette case from his inside breast pocket and added, “Pleased to meet you. Cigarette?”

She waved off the cigarette and said, “The guy is so hairy. Jesus Christ. He looks like some kind of German left-wing nudist from the eighties. I always thought that was him in his other videos. It must have been a model. Good God.”