Are you afraid to be alive today? Yadanuga asks her.
No, what should I be afraid of? she asks in surprise.
For someone condemned to death, today is yesterday’s fear, just as tomorrow is today’s fear.
Who’s condemned to death? she asks.
Anyone who’s alive, he says.
Whoa!
laughs Talitha.
Shakespeare smiles. He knows his friend. When Yadanuga starts talking in proverbs, it means he’s trying to make an impression, or in other words: in a state of sexual arousal. I wonder what the next proverb will be, he says to himself and surrenders to the pleasure of the whiskey.
So he’s going to America to act the role of the sheriff? she teases.
The role of the bat, he says.
Could you explain?
The bat is blind by day, but sees very well at night: like justice.
Whoa!
she compliments him on the metaphor.
There are fruit bats, and there are vampires, Yadanuga takes advantage of his success to conclude on a fateful note: And Shakespeare is a vampire.
Shakespeare—is that from his parents?
It’s from the unit, Yadanuga reveals a secret that nobody knows but her, and takes the trouble to elaborate on the meaning of the name as well: The guy made up plots that we lived, and some of us died of them, in the fifth act.
Wow, says Talitha. What act are we in now?
The fourth act, says Yadanuga. The complications are coming to a head.
Whoa
, she expresses her curiosity, I’d love to stay until the end of the fifth act, but I have to get back to that table. I left them in the middle of their order.
We’re here, Yadanuga reassures her, take your time.
You won’t run away?
Don’t worry, says Yadanuga and points to his half empty glass. Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t take off without fuel. We’re completely at your mercy.
I’ll be back, she promises, my shift will be over soon.
When you join us, bring another three double shots of Lagavulin, requests Yadanuga, and after she leaves he becomes serious and turns to his friend:
Are you really going to look for him?
I have to.
Because of the girl?
I have to find out if this character is Adonis, says Shakespeare.
Shakespeare! Forget Adonis! Yadanuga begs him. You finished him off on that chase in the desert. Intelligence received reliable information. The unit closed his file. I had a gut-feeling that he was done for the minute you came back from the chase. I told you straight out—
Sorry, Shakespeare cuts him off, I don’t trust the head of intelligence, or your gut-feelings. I’m a leg-man. I have to meet the man myself to be sure that it’s not him.
And if it is him, what will you do? Kill him?
I don’t know, says Shakespeare. First I have to meet him. Whatever happens will happen.
Yeah, yeah … says Yadanuga, who is already somewhere else. What a girl! Did you see the job she did on the phone? IQ of 160 minimum. How about that ‘topopo salad’ hey? What am I supposed to do with a girl like that?
Trust her, recommends Shakespeare. Let her take the lead.
How did we get here? Yadanuga tries to return to reality.
It all began from me abandoning you to Mona’s mercies, Shakespeare offers him a starting point and leaves it to him to choose between the present abandonment and the one that took place a quarter of a century ago, when he set out on the suicide mission in the snowy mountains of Norway.
Yes, says Yadanuga. This time his tone is conciliatory, philosophical, suffused with a kind of aesthetic indifference,
as if they were talking about the sexual habits of the lizard-fish.
Imagine that I took your side, suggests Shakespeare. That I forced Mona to accept your idea. You would have been satisfied. You wouldn’t have invited me to come with you, we wouldn’t have ridden on your motorbike to the prostitutes’ beach, we wouldn’t have run on the sand, we wouldn’t have fought, we wouldn’t have gone wild, we wouldn’t have breathed the sea air, and our blood wouldn’t have sent ions of iodine to our nervous system, and then we wouldn’t have become hungry for fish and wine, we wouldn’t have arrived at this restaurant, and you wouldn’t have met your Talitha.
Interesting, Yadanuga maintains his philosophical tone and ignores the ‘your Talitha’, interesting how things happen in life.
On condition that we’re there when they happen, puts in Shakespeare.
Yadanuga sips the golden liquid from which a sweet, pleasant smell, reminiscent of an English fruit cake, rises and spreads, gradually evaporating and developing into a bitter conclusion, like the insight which now enters his mind, that this noble single malt, with every sip, presents you with the taste of an entire life cycle, from the smoke of youth, through the ripe sweetness of middle age, where he is now, up to the rich bitterness of old age, which is approaching fast in order to put an end to the whole affair—and he wants to share this new insight with his companion, and he takes a deep breath, raises his glass, examines the reflection of the light in the golden liquid, and says in one breath:
I’m glad that we finally found the courage to talk about something we’ve never talked about in our whole lives.
It’s not a question of courage, says Shakespeare.
Of what then? The wisdom of old age?
God forbid, says Shakespeare. Once we were silent, because we were foolish enough to think that we were wise. Today we are wise enough at least to know how foolish we were.
Were? Yadanuga grins. And what are we now?
We’re not wise enough yet to know what fools we are now, Shakespeare agrees with his friend, but if we live a little longer perhaps one day we’ll know that too.
And what in your opinion can we know in the place we’re at today? asks Yadanuga, and Shakespeare replies:
Today we can know that every execution we carried out was tantamount to street theater.
Street theater? You’ll have to explain yourself.
Our executions provided entertainment for the mob that adored us when we turned the television screen for its sake into the hangman’s square. When the news arrived of another murderer whose mattress exploded underneath him in a hotel in Athens, or another terrorist who went up in smoke when he ignited his Renault 16 next to the Luxembourg Gardens, the mob would gather in the evening round the court of justice of our day, in other words the television screen, to celebrate the execution with beer and popcorn, and to applaud the anonymous hangmen who carried out the job professionally and skillfully. But beware, my friend: the very same mob will change its attitude and tear the hangman to pieces on the day he removes the electronic hood from his head and dares to show his human face on the television screen; on the day he informs the mob intoxicated by the blood of his decision to take early retirement from the hangman’s job. And God help him if at the same time he takes the opportunity to express his doubts as to the power of the death sentence to deter future murderers. Because the mob is still a long way from reaching the conclusions reached by its hangmen.
What are you trying to say, wonders Yadanuga.
I don’t know, Shakespeare admits. I simply went with the words and let them lead me where they would.
Are you trying to say that everything we did was just part of some bloody carnival?
If that’s what you understood, then apparently that’s what the words said, Shakespeare accepts the interpretation.
But you also say that there’s no avoiding this bloody carnival, because the mob needs it.
Apparently, agrees Shakespeare. The carnival of blood is apparently a vital part of the play in which we played the part of the hangmen.
So what can the hangmen do at this stage? wonders Yadanuga.
Nothing, says Talitha, who joins their table bringing with her three double shots of Lagavulin, hangmen, like everybody else, can only play the roles assigned to them.
Until when? Yadanuga asks the young woman who sits down at his left hand with all the naturalness and intimacy that exists between two people accepting their mutual attraction.
Until the play is over, says Talitha and raises her glass and clinks it with Shakespeare’s glass, and then with Yadanuga’s, and toasts
‘Lehayim’
, and sips the whiskey, her laughing eyes gazing intently and with undisguised delight into the childlike eyes of the man with the mane of gray hair.
What a stinking drink! She pulls a face. How can you bear to drink it?
With memories, says Yadanuga in a deep voice, with blood, sweat and tears.
It smells like the stuff used to disinfect chicken coops, states Talitha, wrinkling her nose.
Where do you know about chicken coops from? asks Yadanuga.
Have you forgotten that Shakespeare brought me from a farm? replies Talitha.
Let me smell, Yadanuga buries his nose in the golden wheat of her hair and confirms: right, from a farm. But which one?
A funny farm for old men, she laughs. Don’t take it to heart, I’m only joking. The truth is that I have cousins in Ramot-Hashavim, who have a hatchery and a brooder house. When I was a child I used to spend my summer vacations there. Between one batch of chicks and the next they would disinfect the coop with something that smelled like this whiskey. Afterwards they would spread sawdust over the cement floor before bringing in the new batch of chicks. The air would fill with the soft cheeping of hundreds of chicks, who would gather under tin heaters in the shape of wide pyramids, where it was warm and cozy.
And what kind of taste do you have in your mouth now? inquires Yadanuga.
Actually a warm, sweet taste, like carobs, she sounds surprised.
In a minute the bitterness will hit you, Yadanuga prepares her for the development of the taste of the golden liquid from Scotland.
Whoa!
confirms Talitha and grips Yadanuga’s tender hand. Awesome! Really awesome!
And what do you really do, apart from waitressing? asks Yadanuga.
Exactly what Shakespeare said, she laughs, I’m an actress.
We saw the way you acted Winnie, says Shakespeare. Not bad at all.
The truth is that I’m not quite an actress yet. I’m studying acting. In my third year.
Do you have a steady job here? asks Yadanuga.
The truth is that this is my last day here. From tomorrow I’m in Eilat.
With friends? probes Yadanuga.
Alone, she says. But before things get complicated, I have to confess that I’m not from a family of hangmen. My parents are doctors, and my grandfather was a doctor too.
Dear oh dear, says Yadanuga, what are we going to do now?
Just a minute, Shakespeare intervenes, what kind of doctors?
My father specializes in back surgery, and my grandfather is an anatomist and a well known pathologist.
Excellent! exclaims Shakespeare.
What’s so excellent about it? demands Talitha.
At this hesitant stage of the development of the relationship Shakespeare hurries to inform his astonished listeners that the profession of modern surgery is closely connected to that of the hangman. Since the Middle Ages, and on the threshold of the modern age, when the hangmen also carried out the sentences of amputation of the fingers, cutting off of the hands, and dislocation of the shoulders of those convicted of petty crimes, they had to be well versed in the anatomy of the skeleton, the muscles and the blood vessels, for a hangman who inadvertently caused the death of a person sentenced to have his hand amputated, risked being severely punished himself by having his arm cut off, and there was a well known case of a hangman from Klagenfurt, who was condemned to death after having caused the death of a man sentenced to have his arm amputated. And if this wasn’t enough, it turned out that doctors and anatomists kept in close touch with
hangmen, so that the latter would put at their disposal, for a fee, the bodies of those condemned to death who had no relatives to claim their bodies. But the close connections between the hangmen and the physicians didn’t end there, for when the profession of hangman began to decline, and the execution of the death sentence was transferred from the gallows of the public square to the dungeons of the prison houses, hangmen were obliged to look for a new profession, and since the traditions of their calling had gained them a detailed knowledge of anatomy, many of them naturally turned to the profession of medicine, and ancient dynasties of hangmen produced dynasties no less illustrious of medical men, especially in the fields of anatomy, pathology and surgery. Thus the ‘killer’ became a ‘healer’, and from the philosophical point of view this is not surprising—for who is better qualified to rescue mortal men from the claws of death than the Angel of Death himself? And from where will the healers of the soul of a human society afflicted with the syndrome of the dance of death come, if not from the ranks of the hangmen carefully selected and trained by this same society to regale them with the rituals of the carnival of blood to which they have become addicted, the spectacles which have become one of the needs of the soul spoken of by the Jewish philosopher Simone Weil who sought death in the Spanish civil war—but who, in her ineptitude, one night walked straight into a cauldron of boiling oil in which some members of the International Brigade were frying chips on the Gerona front, and to her shame and disgrace forced her Yiddishe Mama to take a taxi from Paris to the Spanish front in order to collect her revolutionary daughter and take her back to the warm bosom of her bourgeois family in the sixteenth arrondissement, which annoyed her to such an extent that she became a fan of Hitler’s out of spite. And she didn’t
rest until she killed herself in a fit of anorexia in the refuge which her mother imposed on her when the family fled to England for fear of the Nazis who invaded France, otherwise she would presumably have landed up in Auschwitz, where she would have marched happily into the gas chambers, just as she had marched into the cauldron of boiling oil, and thus fulfilled the dream of her executioners, who would have been delighted to see their victims becoming their own executioners, in order to prove the rule that the work of the wicked in always done by the righteous, and in certain cases even by the victims themselves—