The Same Sea (10 page)

Sit down Albert Take off your coat.
Let's draw the curtain. Light the light.
I was asleep. What never mind,

don't worry. It was time I woke.
I'll put some water on for coffee
and throw a bedspread over the mess.

I'll make us both some cheese on toast.
Thanks for the heater. And the nightie.
Your wife's. And what a pretty blue.

It may suit me some years from now.
Just wait there while I have a shower.
Or come with me. Take off your shoes.

And take that off, while I undress.
Now come with me. No, don't be shy.
There is a custom in Ladakh,

perhaps an ancient marriage law:
they marry three or four brothers
together to a single bride.

Three brothers. And a single bride.
Stop shivering, and touch me here.
Touch, it's not me, it's only cloth.

Its only cotton: touch me here.
Think that its happening in a dream
high in the hills of Chandartal.

My fingers are like alleyways,
my palm's a square. You cross it, then
you stop. My arm is like a curving road,

my shoulder is a river bed and then
the neck's a bridge. Then you can choose
to go this way, or that To wait. To wait.

In a dream in a cloud in passion
and wonder. Just listen to the thunder.

When he left, the rain had stopped. The boulevard was a girl
stripped naked and beaten up by a gang, and left lying there on her back
ripped and drenched. Now she hears trees,
promising her a kind of second silence, which belongs
at the end of shame and degradation, a still, small silence,
a kind of birth: I shall no longer raise my eyes to the hills
but lie quietly now in a puddle
of muddy still waters. Here is the breeze. Here are rumors
of birds' wings, stitching the damp air, unstitching,
restitching, unstitching again. Everything now is grey
and tender. Rest. In peace. Smelling sweetly
of good rain and earth. Everything is past.

Eyes. Eyes. Eyes in the water eyes in the branches eyes in the curtains eyes in the jug and eyes in the pillow. Nadia remembers Nadia as a little girl in an organdie frock or a pleated skirt, with ribbons in her plaits, Sabbath eve silver candlesticks warm hallah raisin wine blessings and table songs sit up straight please and stop squinting. She remembers gleaming white lace-trimmed napkins, porcelain bowls the color of the sea, a woven wall rug, little baskets, sauce boats, the smell of basil, lavender and ginger, and candied fruit Eyes, eyes, and Nadia remembers squirrels in the branches of the deserted garden milky-white mist in the hills snow blossoming on a darkening meadow the poignant tolling of a bell at dusk, dark woods that whispered rumors when the wind blew, the howl of a wolf on a winters night beyond the garden fence, the dovecote and the cockerel and the billy goat that frightened her in the dusk when she was sent out to fetch wood from the shed in the yard. Eyes in the water eyes in the night eyes eyes in my back, in my breasts, Nadia remembers old secrets, aged ten and a half in the morning, her father stripped to the waist up a ladder retiling the roof, and herself handing him up tiles one by one, inhaling the scent of his sweat and the sight of his nipples concealed in the steelwork of his chest bringing a secret trickle to her own ungrown nipples, she remembers the sudden flutter in her tummy and how the sun shone on his bare stooping back, as her father laid tile after tile and his muscles eyes eyes seemed to burrow between his shoulderblades. And once she watched her brother Michael hiding crouched in the back of the woodshed milking the dogs erection a blood-red butchers-shop udder protruding horribly from the covering fur and the two of them, Michael and the dog, thirstily panting and lolling and then soft thunder rolled in her tummy and turning she ran from die woodshed and that same night the first blood appeared on her nightdress with her terrified tears and the pain as though a maggot had wriggled inside her. In a whisper her mother taught her how to and how not to and when, and how women hide their impurity from menfolk's eyes and how to smother the smell, and she also said that this was the curse of Eve: every woman is punished and sullied with blood, recompense for the serpent and apple, in sorrow shalt thou bring forth thy children and there is no way back and only in pregnancy and in old age do we get some relief Eyes in the back eyes on the roof eyes on disgrace eyes on the festivals, Nadia remembers her handkerchiefs lace-edged brassieres satin ribbons suspender belts translucent silk embroidered blouses corsets and headscarves, schemes and intrigues of virtuous women a cesspit concealed under layers of velvet, muffled laughter and sneers of old women leering aunts winking caressing deriding and gradually covering her with a silky cobweb of the spidery order of women, catching and trussing her in a network of transparent threads, initiating her by degrees into the mysteries of the sect, labyrinthine lies filigrees of guile a subversive sisterhood in the face of the male sex intrigues of ancient stratagems delicate perfumes, jewellery, cosmetics, eyes, eyes, evil eye. Nadia remembers a baby imprisoned in the underground lair of the priestesses of an all-female cult, rules of modesty, rules of menstrual impurity, rules of prudence, qualities of innocent cunning, powders and creams, eyeblack and rouge, the masculine nature you have to learn to arouse and to repel, grace is false and beauty is vain, but without them beware that you do not end up unwanted and dusty on the shelf) heaven forbid. Give them an inch and they take a mile, give them two inches and they 11 cast you aside like an empty vessel, a woman is a pot filled to the brim with honey and shame, a locked garden and a reserved spring, a delight concealed until her redeemer cometh, no male stranger may approach, but neither should he be kept far
off,
keep him hungry and thirsty but occasionally feed him a crumb, cautiously always as if unawares lest you become a byword and a disgrace. Eyes, eyes, evil eye, amulets, giggles, whispers, intrigues, feminine plots and laws of womanhood, how to arouse love while preserving your modesty,
dizzying
incense, enchanting repulsion, she wanted to flee and she wanted to die, she wanted to run to the world of the squirrels to be for all time neither woman nor man but a tiny timorous creature which is all eyes and almost no body.

But there, on the road to Patna, in the night train coming down from
the mountains, winding at a snails pace into the valley, a shabby old train,
ancient carriages, wooden benches, and the engine fed on
sliced tree trunks, sparks flying by the window, swallowed up in
the depth of the darkness, faint lights in the distance, wretched villages,
mud huts, he thinks of writing a postcard to his father, and another
to Dita Inbar, to say to them both never mind. Tomorrow in Patna station
he will buy cards and stamps and post them. Never mind,
he wanted to say. Never mind that you took my father, such a thin,
childlike man, into the shower to see your body. Let him see it. Never
mind. I like the idea. And you took his hand and placed it here and there
to feel. Never mind that he saw you, never mind that he touched. After all,
he recoiled at once and fled to wander dazed on the boulevard among tattered
papers in the rain. No harm done. Never mind. After all, when I was a baby
his wife suckled me and changed my diaper, and lulled me to sleep on her
tummy, and now my wife does the same to him. Soon he will become a baby.

Dubi Dombrov is waiting at ten in the morning in Café Limor for a date
which will never materialize because it has not been arranged. He leafs
through a newspaper, glancing repeatedly at his watch as though she is
already late. In fact his morning is fairly clear: there is nothing in his schedule
except some postponed chores, insurance premiums, bills, a dermatologists fee
and accumulated parking tickets. On this December morning you can see,
through the window, a pair of Russian girls by a road sign, laughing, ogling
a biker in gloves and black leathers whose Suzuki roars between his thighs
like a bull. At the entrance to the Odeon salon for "Bridal Styling—let us
give you the finishing touch" stands a man in a dinner jacket and bow tie,
wailing on a fiddle, his eyes seemingly closed. A penguin washed up in
the Levant. There is also a grasshopper of a Hasid in the street, pestering
passersby, soliciting them to put on
tefillin.
Dubi Dombrov, with a pale-green
silk scarf round his neck, orders a cup of coffee with a slice of jam cake
and fishes out the script of
Nirit's Love,
to polish it up: Far from the city far
from Café Limor stands an old village house, adjoining the cemetery, with
a tiled roof and chimney stack, thirty to forty fruit trees, some beehives and
a dovecote, all surrounded with a stone wall, drowned in the shade of dense
cypress trees. Here is where she will come for a few days and nights to
sweeten his solitude. True, he is a pretty repulsive guy, that is why she feels
sorry for him, but inside he is deep. Before her eyes, in the course
of three days and nights, he will shine through brilliant and pure, he will
slough off his hideous crust, be purged of the dross of defects, humiliations
and lies, and stand before her like a candle whose light quivers gently among
heaps of junk. Here in Café Limor, because of the low clouds, the shadow
is gradually lapping up the puddles of feeble electric light as though sucking it
up through a straw. Wait for me. Wait just a bit. Maybe this Giggy will
wangle us a grant from that fund that his father is one of the trustees of and
you and I together will come up with a production that will leave everyone
stunned and we'll walk away with a load of prizes and make tons of dough,
and then you and I. Or else. Or I could drop everything and go off tomorrow
to the Himalayas too, to shed my dead skin and set out in search of a spark.
He pours another spoonful of sugar into his coffee, which has soaked up
three spoonfuls already, stirs, and forgets to drink it. Should he go to her
right now. Should he suggest that they make a fresh start. Wait for me. Wait
just a bit. Or perhaps first he should send her a subtly worded love letter so
she'll see he's not just another stud but above all a spiritual being. With
thumb and forefinger he signals to the waiter to bring him a short espresso,
and he continues to leaf through the script, sniffing and rooting around,
leaving coffee stains on the pages and his sleeve, and pencilling notes in
the margins, while his other hand absentmindedly adds sugar and stirs,
then adds more sugar and stirs again.

From morning to evening the light shines outside, not realizing
that it is light. Tall trees inhale silence with no need
to discover the essential essence of treedom. Empty steppes
stretch out forever on their backs without reflecting on
the pathos of their emptiness. Shifting sands shift and do not ask
how long or why or where to. All this wonderful existence is wonderful
but never wonders. The moon rises red, looking like a spilt eye,
searing the darkness of the sky, unsurprised by its own desolation. A cat
dozes on a wall. Dozing and breathing. Nothing more. Night after night
the wind whirls and blows over forests and hills. It whirls
continually. And blows. Not thinking and not appealing.
Only you, dust and humors, all night long you write
and erase, looking for a reason, a way to correct.

After the screw Giggy got up, put on a pair of sweat pants and
a shirt with a crocodile on it, picked up the phone,
and ordered a couple of speedy pizzas for Melchett 20, chop-chop.
She was wearing her jeans and his pullover. They laid the coffee table,
fork opposite knife, knife opposite fork, a pair of cups and two wine glasses.

The delivery boy sniffed the sweat of sex, stared at her with cuddly
puppy's eyes (she had forgotten to zip up her jeans). She felt sorry
for him, such a soulful, shy boy, she guessed at a mist of down
on his cheek that it would be quite nice to touch. Like a day-old chick. She
stood up. Took the boxes from him. She felt like letting him have. Just a kiss.

She stopped herself. At the door she touched his arm with her breast,
transmitted a spark and picked up a flicker, felt the scorch of an embarrassed
flame. When he had gone she sat down at the table. She saw a hair on her
plate. Hers? Giggy's? Or the boy's? The pizza was barely warm. The glass
had a gold band. Dita drank a little. Giggy winked at her, she nodded, not

necessarily at him. She pushed away her glass. Closed her eyes: there is a sea,
there are mountains. This flat is too chop-chop. The knife in his hand. The
fork in hers. Far from here there are forests. Rivers. Chandartal.
And darkness and winter and all their host too. You
are munching here and they stand silent. This fork is none too clean.

In a cheap room in a shabby inn she opens the window, leans out,
and fills her lungs with a cocktail of smells: mango blossom,
sewage, cooking odors, rotting fruit, cattle dung.

The night is tepid. The river
is
steaming. The darkness is bathed in faint decay.
In the cleft between her breasts Maria drips five or six drops of pungent
scent She closes the window. Eats some fish. This fork is none too dean.

And seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came, if haply he might find
any fruit on it: and when he came to it he found nothing but leaves, for the time
of figs was not yet She glances in the mirror. Eye pencil. Powder. Tissue.

Lipstick. If your right eye offends you. If salt loses its flavor. Changes
her skirt Her client will be late. He will pay. Strip.
Demand in English to do it spoon-fashion,

like two spoons in a drawer. In this position
Maria feels swaddled, protected, not like
a harlot being taken but, so it seems for a moment,

as though her back is attached to the cross and the cross is united
with her flesh. And after that Jesus said to her, Go in peace my daughter
for thy demon hath departed. Then she showers, eats some toast,