That’s what the struggle is about. You think I really care so much that this pair of yuppies are prostituting our profession? As if anyone could prostitute it any further. There’s no taboo that hasn’t been broken long ago. They’ve already used real pictures of executions. And what is this unrestrained use of children, if not contempt for childhood. You look at the children made use of by advertising. You see the old expressions on the faces of the little smartypants parroting the words the cynical copywriters put in their mouths, and you want to vomit. And both of us have already used children more than once. And when we demeaned children
in our advertising, I loathed myself. But I did it. And I loathe the pornographic use that Golanchick and Moranchick are making of children and old people in their advertising of this fucking pill. But this isn’t what makes me so mad. I’m not a pious virgin. I’m an old whore. Like you. What makes me mad—or rather, who makes me mad is you. You saw what was happening. You saw Mona’s game. You saw how she built the conflict between me and those two little pishers. With a Mona Lisa smile she did everything to bring me to the moment when she could get rid of me with a kick in the balls. Tell me that I’m no longer relevant. That I need to admit it, step aside. The next stage will come when she tells me that an advertising agency isn’t a geriatric institution. Yes, yes. That’s what she’ll say.
You’re the only person who could have delivered her a knockout. Told her: Madam, Mackie’s a friend of mine, and you’re not going to walk all over him. Nobody touches my friend. You could have done it easily, without risking a fingernail. All you had to do was open your mouth and say: We’re going with Mackie’s idea. End of story. But this time, the minute I needed you, you weren’t there.
What happened to you since you went into the mountain and risked your life to rescue me? Now I’m asking for help, and you’re abandoning me and you don’t care. What kind of a person have you become? What kind of a person are you, Bill?
Listen, Yadanuga, Shakespeare raises his eyes from the fish and sees the evening descending on the sea and the blood rapidly draining from the slaughtered clouds, leaving piles of gray rags in the celestial rubbish dump. Against this
background, on the other side of their table, strewn with plundered
mezze
saucers, and pieces of pita bread, and broken lobster shells, and the decapitated heads of little red mullets, and chips bloody with crushed tomatoes, the face of the bearded man opposite him appears to him like the landscape of a disaster zone, and he feels a powerful urge to put out his hand and stroke this sad face with love and great pity, and to kiss the puzzled eyes staring at him as if at some undecipherable riddle, and he hears Shakespeare speak from his mouth.
You ask me a little question: what kind of a person am I. We’ve been friends ever since I remember myself, but we’ve never talked the way you talked to me now. I never asked you who you really are, and you’ve never asked me what kind of a person I am.
If it bothers you—Yadanuga begins to say, but Shakespeare cuts him short:
No, no, on the contrary. After all these years, and after everything we’ve done together, it’s time we sat together like this, quietly, over a bottle of whiskey, and talked about ourselves, even if it isn’t easy for us. And perhaps precisely because it’s so hard for us. To tell the truth, I don’t even know how to begin to answer you. And from where. From what. So forgive me if things come out in a muddle. In bits and pieces. When I try to think about myself, I can only think in fragments, splinters, broken bits and pieces. I can only give you fragments. Take them however you can, and put them in any order you like.
I won’t put your words in order, Shakespeare, says Yadanuga. There comes a moment when a man is a broken vessel, and any well-constructed story is a complete lie. Give me fragments of truth and don’t sell me a well-told lie with a beginning, a middle and an end.
Excellent, says Shakespeare. That will make it a lot easier for me, because I haven’t been a good story for a long
time. And the more time passes, the more of a story full of contradictions and dead zones I become. There’s a dark side of the moon too, where I’ve never been, and I can’t tell you what happens there and what comes from there. The lit side of a man is the side that other men see. Your lit side is the side that I see now.
I’m with you on this motorbike, says Yadanuga. Step on the gas and don’t stop.
Okay, says Shakespeare. So what kind of a person am I. Let’s see. Maybe I’m a person with an artificial aspiration to the meaningless. Now that I hear these words coming out of my mouth, I ask myself where they came from. But let’s put that question aside. Let’s tackle the statement itself, as if it contains some truth. The very fact that it came out of my mouth shows that something in there, on the upper cortex of the right lobe of the brain, arranged those words one after the other: a person with an artificial aspiration to the meaningless. How do I know that it comes from the upper cortex of the right lobe of the brain? Because I can feel that this spot is now activated. I can feel the heat and weight of some mass there. But let’s get back to the statement itself. Let’s see what words it draws behind it. And I’m giving you notice that from now on I take no responsibility for the words that come out of my mouth. I’m a person with an artificial aspiration to the meaningless, because it has more life than a life that aspires to the meaningful. What do you say to that?
That’s what I always liked about you, admits Yadanuga. That you were an invention.
All four of us were an invention, corrects Shakespeare. We operated in the wild territory of pure, immoral, asocial, unnatural, inhuman action: we executed. We didn’t murder. Murder is a natural, human act. Every murder has a motive. Committing a murder is surrendering to nature. Execution
is something else entirely. It’s an artificial act, without any motive on the part of the executor. Remember how we operated when we operated well: we executed people without instinct or urge. Our act was a simple, pure, vulgar act, calculated as a game. And this I received and learned from you, Yadanuga.
You learned that from me? protests Yadanuga. I learned it from you!
No, no, Yadanuga. Of the two of us, you were always the natural player, and I was the one who had to acquire every new ability with tremendous effort. By learning. By practicing. Through exhaustive training. When we were kids, you were the gifted athlete. The champion sprinter, high and long jumper. Not to mention ball games. You grasped every new game on the spot. And I trailed behind you clumsily and awkwardly. Everything you did easily, gracefully, thanks to the perfectly proportioned, athletic body you received from nature—I had to torture myself to acquire.
But why did you do it? wonders Yadanuga. You had other gifts. You had imagination and inventiveness that none of the rest of us had. To this day I don’t understand where you got the name Yadanuga for me from.
From the same place that you got Shakespeare for me.
Good, that was completely natural, says Yadanuga. You always saw things that nobody else saw. You had amazing powers of observation, and that was a gift from nature.
Yes, that’s true, says Shakespeare. I wasn’t born for action. I was born to be an observer, and if I’d accepted myself as I was—that’s what I would have been all my life. But the minute I realized that that was what nature intended for me, I rebelled. Ever since then what people call ‘nature’ doesn’t interest me. Only the artificial attracts me. I never wanted to be only an onlooker and observer of the world. Today I know that from my early childhood nothing fascinated me
like the magic of action. The magic of the body. And that’s exactly what I tried to do all my life. To turn disadvantage into perfection.
Look how strange it is, says Yadanuga, when we were young, I was sure you would be a poet. In the end you became the most physical of all of us.
And perhaps the activity of the poet, in its origins, isn’t linguistic but physical, Shakespeare muses aloud.
You know what, says Yadanuga, when I think about babies, I understand what you’re talking about.
I was actually thinking about play-actors, says Shakespeare.
You’re not only talking about the theater, clarifies Yadanuga.
Certainly not, says Shakespeare. I’m talking about every act of play. A man who plays is a poet of the body. Poetry interests me only when it leaves a space that demands to be filled by play-acting. By the presence of the body. By a physical act. That’s what’s so fascinating about sound and movement, that it’s impossible to separate them from a body acting here and now. On the other hand, written words can be separated from physical existence, and that’s the danger of words.
Because that’s what makes it possible to construct with the help of words a story that’s all a lie? Yadanuga reads Shakespeare’s next thought.
Yes, says Shakespeare, Thomas Mann thought that music was dangerous, because it is liable to arouse men to irrational action, but the truth is that there is no power on earth that motivates men to acts of violence more than a false story well told.
Are you thinking of the story of the exodus from Egypt and the giving of the Torah and the promise of the land and the conquest and settlement? asks Yadanuga.
And the story of impregnation by the Holy Ghost and the birth of a man who’s the son of God, and his crucifixion,
offers Shakespeare, and Yadanuga continues the same train of thought with quotations from the Koran, which both of them learnt by heart in Arabic, in an Iraqi accent, with the help of Jonas:
And the story about ‘the hereafter, to which the righteous believers are to aspire to pass speedily, and only the sinners will never aspire to death, for fear of the punishment awaiting them for their sins, for Allah knows the sinners, and therefore you will find them more eager for life than any other man, and even more than the idolaters, and every one of them hopes to live for a thousand years!’
‘And after you have become believers’, laughs Shakespeare, ‘many of the people of the Book, out of envy, wish to return you from your belief to unbelief.…’
‘Because they have recognized your truth’! Yadanuga adds quotation to quotation, and Shakespeare concludes:
‘Do not call those killed for the sake of Allah dead, for they are alive! And you Jews, who were given the Book, believe in the revelation that has been sent down to us now, which confirms what was previously in your hands, before we smash your faces to a pulp’!
Ah, Jonas, Jonas, sighs Yadanuga, where are you now?
Nowhere, says Shakespeare. If the dead were anywhere, they wouldn’t be dead.
I see him, says Yadanuga, his gaze lost in the dark of the cyberspace of his brain. I see Jonas with his enormous nose, and his hard, heavy hand that could break five tiles at once.
We see the dead like we see stars that haven’t existed for millions of light years. The light they radiated before they were extinguished goes on reaching us as if they still existed, even though they died long ago, says Shakespeare. And those who remembered their dead, and saw them in
their imagination, invented the beautiful story of the world to come, where they go on existing.
Interesting that every new false story rests on a false story that preceded it, like a man without a leg on a man without an arm, and the two of them lean on a deaf man, and woe to whoever makes fun of the pretension of these cripples to represent the true, the just, the good and the beautiful, muses Yadanuga, and concludes: there really is nothing more dangerous and violent and murderous than a false story well told.
Which is why I say that the act of a true poet is not in words, but in what is left unsaid. Which has to be filled by a physical presence and by action.
All this is well and good, Yadanuga rouses himself from the philosophical discussion into which the two of them have unintentionally been drawn, but I asked you who you are, and once again you succeeded in slipping away and disappearing among all these words.
That’s what I am, says Shakespeare.
What exactly? demands Yadanuga.
An escape from direct confrontation with any form of violence, laughs Shakespeare, an escape that I’ve elevated to an art.
The question I asked you, ‘Who are you?’ is a form of violence? wonders Yadanuga.
You remember the test we took before we were accepted into the unit? Shakespeare replies with a question.
We took all kinds of tests, says Yadanuga. Which one precisely do you mean?
The decisive test, says Shakespeare.
Heart-lungs stress test?
Yes, says Shakespeare, and he elaborates: accelerated heartbeat in a situation of excitement, of fear, of exertion,
and mainly—the combination of all three factors in a situation of extreme stress.
What about it? asks Yadanuga.
Do you remember your results?
No, says Yadanuga, how could I remember?
Your heart beat rose from forty five at rest to sixty-three in excitement-fear-exertion.
How can you remember details like that? demands Yadanuga in astonishment.
Because at that stage, after hard, back-breaking exercise and training, I succeeded in attaining only fifty beats at rest and sixty seven under stress. You know what my heart beat is now, sitting and talking to you?
No, says Yadanuga, what is it?
Thirty two beats a minute, says Shakespeare, and he adds: When we fought on the beach, after running, I reached forty.
You still train, Yadanuga half asks half states.
Yes, admits Shakespeare. I want to achieve total control over my heartbeat, up to complete cessation.
You’re insane, states Yadanuga. Dangerously insane. Our war is over, and you haven’t accepted it. You continue developing yourself as a lethal weapon.
Not at all, protests Shakespeare. It has nothing to do with weapons. There are fakirs in India who can stop their heats beating for fifteen seconds and even twenty, and they’re not in the least warlike.
So why do you do it? inquires Yadanuga. Are your sins so terrible that you want to live a thousand years, like Mohammed says in the Sura of the Cow?