The Same Sea (11 page)

and falls asleep with the threadbare acrylic doll from Italy
that has travelled with her from bed to bed. She dreams of bread
baked in a cottage.
Talitha numi
: sleep girl. Tomorrow, Chandartal.

Talitha kumi
—get up girl, its already half past nine. She works at the Hilton she's living in Mazeh she gets up in Melchett her parents are abroad and this morning she's going to Amirim Street, and already her head is fit to burst. Dubi rang to say that Giggy says that his father has wrangled us some finance, seed money to make the film, not in cash just an undertaking to top up an investment on condition we prove and on condition this and on condition that and also on condition that we sign up a director who has to be pretty well known, and we have to sign (my head my head) you and we have to sign, and we have to prove sources of finance authenticated by a registered accountant and Dubi says that Giggy made it a condition that he and his father should be kept in the picture and that he, that is Dubi, would open a special account, the Nirit account, and he would deposit such and such a sum at once and in the next phase Giggy's source would inject an equivalent sum and not a cent would leave the account without both their signatures, that is Dubi and Giggy, not you, not you, you're not investing a penny, on the contrary, we are purchasing the copyright from you, we is Dubi and Giggy, and you will get a token sum now and so much percent if it works out. In addition we have to sign up at least two guarantors. Get up girl drink some coffee take an aspirin and go to Bat Yam (my head my head) to sign this paper to sign only if Albert lets me, only if he assures me that the paper is OK. And Giggy will come and Dombrov as well and Bettine too for sure and maybe a lawyer. Albert will serve tea and savory sticks, Bettine will get up to help him but I'll stop her with a look. I'll go to the kitchen and she wont dare follow she'll just burn me up with that voodoo stare that she picked up from some old Greek who calls up the dead and fucks up the living. Now who's going to lend me two hundred shekels. Get moving Nirit go to Bat Yam.

Like an old Greek who calls up the dead and shakes up the living. Or like
a snowman passing alone and barefoot. To record the mountain to note
the sea with a fine tip, like sketching out a pattern for embroidery.
To write like a Russian travelling merchant making his way from here
to China. He finds a shack. And sketches it. In the evening he looks,
in the night he draws, and he finishes before dawn. Then he pays and
goes on his way with the break of day.

Like an open fracture like a broken bone sticking out of the torn flesh, my
mother rises in the night from the shadow on the ceiling, saying to me Amek
its two o'clock why aren't you asleep and why are you smoking again. Go
to the kitchen child drink some warm milk then get back into bed and sleep.
Don't think about me in the night I am insomnia think instead about foggy
rain in the forest and a fox seeking shelter among fir trees in the dark and it
will lull you to sleep. In the dark among the fir trees Old Somnia walks
with a wet headscarf sodden dress soaked to the skin a crooked stick in her
shrivelled hand a weary witch named Somnia roams in the dark in the rain
lost in the foggy trees shuffling from shadow to shadow wandering away
from me out there yet passing through me on her way, backwards and
forwards, criss-crossing me like a valley that she has turned from a valley
into a vale of tears with her sleepless wandering. Maybe all this is just because
I have left some door flapping.

Give me five minutes to try to sort out this screwed-up business. People are
constantly being ditched. Here in Greater Tel Aviv for example I bet
the daily total of ditchings is not far short of the figure for burglaries.
In New York the statistics must be even higher. Your mother killed herself
and left you quite shattered. And haven't you yourself ditched any number
of women? Who in turn had ditched whomever they ditched in favor of you,
and those ditched guys had certainly left some wounded Ditchinka lying
on the battlefield. It's all a chain reaction. OK, I'm not saying, I admit
being ditched by your own parents is different, it bleeds longer.
Specially a mother. And you an only son. But for how long? Your whole life?
The way I see it being in mourning for your mother for forty-five years is
pretty ridiculous. It's more than ridiculous: it's insulting to other women.
Your wife, for instance. Or your daughters. I find it a turn-off myself.
Why don't you try and see it my way for a moment: I'm twenty-six and you'll
soon be sixty, a middle-aged orphan who goes knocking on women's doors
and guess what he's come to beg for. The fact that before my parents
were even born your mother called you Amek isn't a life sentence. It's
high time you gave her the push. Just the way she chucked you. Let her
wander round her forests at night without you. Let her find herself
some other sucker. It's true it's not easy to ditch your own mother, so why
don't you stick her in some other scene, not in a forest, let's say in a lake:
cast her as the Loch Ness monster, which as everyone knows may be
down there or may not exist, but one thing is certain, whatever you see or
think you see on the surface isn't the monster, it's just a hoax or an illusion.

Ditch her, you say, it's easy for you to say it,
bail out like a fighter pilot ditching a plane
that's in a spin or on fire. But how can you jump from a plane
that's already crashed and rusted or sunk under the waves?

This morning outside her window Bettine Carmel sees
grey rain, shutters, washtubs, puddles in a deserted backyard.
Between kitchen balconies bare clotheslines are strung.
Ugliness and beauty, Bettine reflects, both attest, or at least point,
to the existence of some invisible presence, a silent, awesome
presence of which they bring us neither the voice nor the echo
but only a shadow of a shadow. Where is the boat, Bettine?
Where are those islands you mentioned? Here there is only
a peeling back wall. Rusty shutters. Tin roofs. And rain
pouring down not in torrents but splat, splat: like pus. A bus
bursts puddles and throws up mud like a whale's spout.
Where are those islands, Bettine? When do we sail?
And where to? Avram's old toilet things have been standing
next to the basin in your bathroom for twenty-one years,
a stiffened shaving brush, a dried shaving stick and a blunt
razor, and out there among the garbage cans in the yard in all that rain
a wet cat writhes, wailing hoarsely with tormented desire.
Those islands you mentioned, Bettine, when you asked me
if I believed in them, the Invisible Carmel, a silent awesome
presence, instead of replying yes or no I cracked a joke. I
tossed you some vapid witticism because then, when you asked me,
I was simply not all there. There was no me at home in my head.
Now that I'm back in residence there is no need to ask me
if I believe or disbelieve in those islands because as of this moment
those islands are me and from out there, from one of the islands,
I am calling to you through the rain, You come too, Bettine.

Bettine, you come too. There's a meeting at Amirim Street about
Nirit's Love
,
tea and coffee are being sipped, savory sticks nibbled. Dombrov is full of
words and Giggy Ben-Gal is picking his teeth. In a brass lamp in the shape of
a pomegranate all four bulbs are lit because the day is gloomy. The new
contract looks fair, but still Bettine rewords a clause, for the sake of clarity,
and Albert raises three questions and suggests a couple of minor changes.
Absalom in his head, Absalom, my son my son. In Bengal now it's five o'clock;
on the radio they said the Brahmaputra has flooded. Stay clear of the water,
my son. Keep away from low-lying areas. As for the Narrator, he is having
a whispered conversation with Dita at one end of the sofa, the script lying
across their laps. (Albert phoned him in Arad and asked him to read it, to
give his opinion, to come, if he could, to the meeting.) Two hundred yards
from here, the sea is having a whispered conversation with the sea, not
cracking jokes but trying on silver baubles, taking them off, putting them on,
polishing them, replacing emerald with lead. On the chair where Nadia used
to sit is a pile of coats, scarves, we were all afraid it would rain, so far it has
held off but it still looks threatening. Seemingly lit from within, clouds
are swept eastward to the mountains and on toward Bengal. There, in the
center of Dacca, in a corner of Cafe Mondial, Rico is waiting for two of the
Dutchmen whom he arranged to meet up with here when he last saw them
in Tibet. How is he to know that they've been in the Hague since the day
before yesterday? This coffee table, the chairs, the armchair, the sideboard,
were all made by Elimelech the carpenter some twenty years ago for a song
because he and Albert both came from Sarajevo, they were vaguely related
and had been school friends. Albert checked the carpenter's accounts
every year and filled out his tax return. That is an old story, long since over.
Giggy Ben-Gal now makes a suggestion: What this story needs, apart from
Nirit and her hermit who lives on the edge of a village, is another twist, like
a one-night stand with an Arab farmhand, or lets say a little lesbian scene
with a neighbor. Bettine suggests finishing with the bit where Nirit and
the man are feeding the pigeons, because what comes afterward,
the traveller, the dead fox, seems too morbid to her and overly
symbolic. Dubi considers that the traveller definitely adds a deep mystical
element to the ending. As for the Narrator, he recommends deleting several
of the long silences which he regards as a bit of an affectation. Dita says
nothing. Albert hesitantly apologizes and remarks that silences can actually
sometimes express what words cannot. Meanwhile Bettine stands up, clears
away the cups and plates, and stops on her way to the kitchen to open
the curtains wide. The sight of the wintry sea which is now a virulent green
makes her think that maybe this whole argument is unnecessary. Wrapped
in the silence of empty spaces the brightly-lit earth floats from darkness to
darkness. More tea? Or some coffee? No thanks—everyone has got
things to do, promises to keep, business to see to, chores that can't be put off.
Thank you. Must say goodbye and be off. It was nice, and as for the project,
the script, it's in excellent hands. There is every reason to hope it
will enjoy enormous success. Were off to a flying start.

After that, in the car, the news. A soldier in the South Lebanon Army
has been fatally wounded and two Israelis slightly injured. In
Hazor in Galilee another small business has closed, its nine employees
are on hunger strike. A math teacher in Netanya has been
abusing his daughters for the past six years. A car went off the road
near Betar and ended up in a ravine: a father and mother and
their two sons; a daughter who survived is in a critical condition.
Epidemic and famine in Burundi. A woman in Holon has jumped.
The rain will continue. There is a warning of flooding
in low-lying areas. And a hurricane in the United States.
Who cares about
Nirit's Love.

In the summer of 1946 my mother and father rented a holiday room
in the flat of a tailor in Bat Yam. One night I was woken by a
coughing sound that was not coughing, and that was the first time in my life
that I heard a grown-up stranger crying through the wall. All
the darkness long he cried, and awake and frightened I lay still not to
disturb my parents until when the darkness was weaker I crept out and
saw him on the balcony his shoulders were shaking a bird flew up in the
silence of the dawn and the man pointed to it and said to me Little boy,
don't believe. Fifty years have gone by and the bird is no longer
or the man. Or my parents. Only the sea is still there
and even it has changed from deep blue
to grey. Little boy don't believe. Or do. Believe. Who cares.

The bird wakes her. Lying on her back with her eyes shut, thinking
What's left apart from the place mat she's started and may still finish.
What's left is a wish that the pain will go away
that it will all go away and stop bending over her.
She lies as though she has left her launching pad and is now
moving along the Milky Way and already the planet
from which she was launched is far off, has shrunk till it can no longer be
distinguished from tens of thousands of other stars.
A bird on a branch calls to her and Nadia is lying
wiping away the good and the bad, like a woman who has nearly
finished washing the floor, walking backward toward the door, drawing
the mop toward her, all she has left to do is to wipe away the traces on
the wet floor of her own footprints. The pain is still sleeping: her hostile
body has not woken with her at the sound of the bird, with all its knives.
Even shame, her lifetime companion, has gone. It has ceased to gnaw at her.
Everything is letting go of her and Nadia is letting go of everything,
like a pear from a branch: the pear is not picked but a ripened pear drops.
Right now at four in the morning Nadia is the most alone she has ever been,
not alone like a sick woman hearing a bird in a garden but alone like a bird
with no garden no branch no wing. She lays her shrivelled hand on her
withered breast because suddenly for a moment the sound of the bird is
confused with a cry from a cradle at night, the baby's lips are open wide
to tickle her breast, or perhaps it is not her baby but a man covering it
with his palm, stroking it squeezing and soothing, slipping the nipple
between his lips describing with his tongue on her flesh
shivers that descend to the roots of her spine
and thus the needles of pain awake from their sleep and like
a small child in the dark she puts a finger in her mouth.
Narimi narimi
has gone and now she needs an injection.