Rhyming Life and Death (3 page)

In vain.

By this time the Author is totally immersed in his usual tricks. Resting the palms of his hands on his temples (a gesture learned from his father, a minor diplomat), he stops listening and starts looking around the hall, to steal an embittered expression here, a lascivious one there, or a miserable one, to catch a pair of legs just as they uncross and are about to cross themselves again, to seize a mop of unruly white hair, or a passionately expectant face, to spot a rivulet of perspiration running down deep into the crack between a pair of breasts. Over there, in the distance, next to the emergency exit, he can make out a pale, narrow, intelligent-looking face, like that of a student who has dropped out of a yeshiva and become, let us say, an enemy of the established social order. And here, in the third row, a suntanned girl with nice breasts, in a sleeveless green top, is absent-mindedly stroking her shoulder with her long fingers.

It is as though he were picking their pockets while the audience is immersed in the byways of his writing with the literary expert as their guide.

*

In the front, over there, a broad-faced, heavily built woman is sitting with her vein-lined legs wide apart, she has long ago abandoned any attempt at dieting, beauty is a delusion after all, she has given up caring about her appearance and determined to ascend to higher spheres. She does not take her eyes off the speaker, the literary expert, for a moment, her lips are parted with the sweetness of the cultural experience she is undergoing.

Almost in a straight line behind her a boy of about sixteen is moving restlessly on his chair; he looks unhappy, perhaps he is a budding poet, his face is pimply and his untidy hair looks like dusty steel wool. The torments of his age and the burden of his nightly practices have etched a tearful look on his face, and through his pebble lenses he loves this Author
de profundis
, secretly and passionately: my suffering is your suffering, your soul is my soul, you are the only one who can understand, for I am the soul that pines in solitude among the pages of your books.

*

On the other side of the hall from the boy sits a stocky figure with the distinct look of a trade-union
hack, who ten or fifteen years ago was probably still an idealistic teacher in an old school in a working-class suburb now gentrified, perhaps even the retired deputy head of the regional educational department. His jawline looks squashed, his salt-and-pepper eyebrows are wild and bushy, and a cockroach-shaped birthmark nestles on his upper lip, just beneath his right nostril. The Author imagines that before the end of the session we shall have an opportunity to hear from this stout fellow a summary of his views: it is all but certain that he has come here this evening not to broaden his horizons or to enjoy himself but specifically so that he can rise to his feet after the speakers have had their say, thump on the table, and express once and for all his negative opinion of what is called ‘contemporary Hebrew literature', which contains nothing at all of what is needed at the present time, in the early 1980s, but unfortunately is crammed full of everything that we have no need of whatsoever.

*

The Author, for his part, decides to name the old teacher Dr Pessach Yikhat. The waitress at the café
he has called Ricky. The gangster's henchman will continue to be Mr Leon while the name Shlomo Hougi still suits his stooping sidekick. The budding poet will be Yuval Dahan, but when he timidly sends his first poems to a literary editor he will sign himself Yuval Dotan. The culture-thirsty woman will be called Miriam Nehorait (the kids on her estate call her Mira the Horror). The story will be set in an old building with peeling walls, in Reines Street in Tel Aviv. Slowly a frail bond will be established between Miriam Nehorait and the bespectacled boy. One morning he will be sent to her flat on an errand by his mother. He will be treated to a glass of juice and two home-made biscuits but will politely decline a third one and will also refuse an apple. As he leaves he will mumble confusedly that no, he doesn't play an instrument and that yes, he does sometimes write a bit. Nothing much. Just odd efforts.

He turns up again a couple of days later, as she has invited him to show her his poems, which she finds not in the least immature, on the contrary, they have an emotional depth, a richness of language, an aesthetic refinement, and an immense love of humanity and of nature. And this time the boy does
accept an apple, which she peels for him, as well as three biscuits and some juice.

A week later Yuval knocks on her door again. The following days too. Miriam Nehorait makes her sweet, sticky fruit compote for him, and he shyly hands her a gift he has bought, a fossilised snail imprisoned in a lump of pale blue glass. On the following evenings she occasionally touches his arm or his shoulder lightly while they talk. From surprise or else maternal tenderness she overlooks his hand that once – and once only – climbs awkwardly, almost by accident, up her dress to rest for the space of three or four breaths, as though fainting, on her breast. It is at that very moment that a neighbour, Lisaveta Kunitsin, happens to look through her kitchen window, and so malicious gossip snuffs out something that hardly happened, and it all ends in disgrace. Miriam Nehorait goes on stewing her fruit compote for him, as sweet as jam and as sticky as glue, she lets it cool and keeps it in the refrigerator for him, but the young Yuval Dotan never returns to her flat, except in his poems and his dreams, and in his murky nocturnal fantasies, on
account of which he makes up his mind that there is no reason to go on living, but he postpones the act until after this literary evening because he pins some vague hope on a meeting with the Author who will understand his affliction and will surely want to stretch out a friendly hand, and, who knows, may even invite him to his home, will be impressed by his poems, and after a while, when acquaintance has ripened into friendship and friendship has become a spiritual bond – at this point the fantasy becomes almost more miraculous and pleasurable than the boy can bear – the Author may open the doors of the world of literature to him. A wonderful, glittering world, a world that will eventually offer a dizzying recompense for the poet's suffering, rapt applause and the admiration of daintily swooning girls and the love of mature women burning to lavish on you everything you have touched in your dreams and things that even in your dreams you have not seen.

*

It might make sense to tell the story in the first person, from the point of view of one of the
neighbours, Yerucham Shdemati, for example, the rotund cultural administrator who introduced you this evening and quoted the couplet from
Rhyming Life and Death
by Tsefania Beit-Halachmi.

It's an airless summer evening, and Yerucham is relaxing in the dark, tired and sweaty, his ruddy face criss-crossed unhealthily by blue veins, sitting on a shabby easy chair on the balcony of his two-roomed flat in a workers' housing development, with his swollen feet soaking in a bowl of cold water, casting his mind over the few memories he has left of his mother, who died in Kharkov sixty-six years ago, when he was only six (her name, like that of the gossipy neighbour, was Lisaveta). Right underneath his balcony a whispered conversation is going on. He ought to get up and go indoors at once, he has no right, no business, to eavesdrop on what they are saying to each other, but it is too late, because if he gets up now he will disturb the couple and embarrass himself. With no decent way out, Yerucham
Shdemati goes on sitting uncomfortably on his balcony, but decides for the sake of decency to cover his ears with his thick hands. However, before doing so, he leans over the balcony and recognises the silhouette of Yuval Dahan, his neighbours' shy teenage son, and the whispered lilt of Miriam Nehorait, which he cannot mistake because once, many years ago, on the night the Soviets sent the first sputnik into space, et cetera.

*

It might be possible to invest in the figure of the veteran cultural administrator one or two traits taken from the literary critic (who right now is expounding the paradox of changing points of view in the work): for example, he could contribute the semicircle of white hair that, Ben-Gurion fashion, adorns the latter's freckled head; his buzzing, rebarbative presence, like a swarm of angry bees; perhaps even his triumphal delivery, like someone whose argument has just been conclusively rebutted but who, politely reining in his anger, does not give an inch but stuns his assailants with a doubly decisive riposte sealed with a courteous sting in its tail. The Author is inclined to give the lecturer twenty
years as a widower and an only daughter, named Aya, who after perversely finding religion has married a settler from Elon Moreh in the West Bank. The name that suits him best is Yakir Bar-Orian (Zhitomirski). Such are the Author's peccadillos while Bar-Orian reaches his peroration, in which he presents the work before us as a trap, as a hermetically sealed chamber of mirrors with no door or window. Just at this point a snigger is heard again in some corner of the hall, a strangled laugh full of mockery and despair, disturbing the Author and causing him to lose the thread of his subversive thoughts. Suddenly he is dying for a cigarette.

*

How about the poet Tsefania Beit-Halachmi, from whose book
Rhyming Life and Death
the cultural administrator in his opening remarks cited the couplet ‘You'll always find them side by side: / never a groom without a bride'? Is he still alive? It is years now since his verse stopped appearing in literary supplements and magazines. His very name is forgotten, except perhaps by a few residents of old
people's homes. Yet once, when the Author was young, his poems were quoted at every ceremony, every celebration or public meeting.

(This poem was played and sung to a melancholy Russian-style tune; a whole generation, the Author among them, sang it, in voices quivering with sadness and longing, around campfires and on kibbutz lawns. But now both the words and the tune have been forgotten. Just like the naive poet himself.)

When the jesting spirit descended upon him, Beit-Halachmi was capable of rhyming like this: ‘Only a horse / never questions his course', or ‘As babbling brooks flow to a pool / so are the words of a prattling fool'.

When the Author was fifteen or so, a girl in his class at school (who was attractive rather than pretty) gave him a book called
Narcissus and
Goldmund
by Hermann Hesse, and she wrote on the flyleaf these lines by Tsefania Beit-Halachmi:

*

Once Bar-Orian has concluded his discourse it is Rochele Reznik's turn to read out four short extracts from the Author's new book. She is pretty and shy, pretty yet not attractive, a slim, demure woman of thirty-five or so, with a single, dark old-fashioned plait falling over her shoulder and hiding her left breast.

She is wearing a cream cotton dress, sleeveless but buttoned up to the neck, printed with a pattern of blue or purple cyclamen. With her dress, her plait and her demure bearing she looks to the Author like a pioneer girl left over from a previous generation. Or does she come from a religious background?

Rochele Reznik is standing facing the audience, her back slightly bent over the page, her forehead
leaning towards the microphone, her slim forearms supporting your book as though it were a tray laden with glasses, and she reads as though there were nothing in your book except love and tenderness. Even the vitriolic dialogue that you wrote as though you were scattering shards of glass she reads with gentleness and feeling.

Why have you come here this evening, the Author asks himself, what can you get out of it? You ought to be at home right now, sitting at your desk, or lying on your back on the rug, making out shapes on the ceiling. What obscure demon drives you to come out again and again to these gatherings? Instead of being here, you could be sitting quietly at home, listening to Cantata BWV 106, the ‘Actus tragicus'. You could have been an engineer designing railways for difficult mountain terrains, as you dreamed of doing when you were little. (When his father was serving as secretary at the embassy in Bogotá, the Author, then aged twelve, went on a trip in a mountainous region where the ramshackle train wound its way among dizzying drops, a journey that still haunts his dreams.)

And in fact why do you write? And who for?
What is your message, if any? What role do your books play and what good do they do anybody? What answers have you got to the important questions, or at least to some of them?

Compassion and grace, that is what Rochele Reznik finds in the pages you have written, and she is a pleasant and almost pretty girl, only not really attractive.

*

To one side, in one of the back rows, sits a boy – no, it's a man: gaunt, slightly shrivelled, he looks like a monkey that has lost most of its fur and just has some tufts left on its sunken cheeks, a shabby man in his sixties, with a thinning crest of hair like an anaemic cockscomb. He could be, let's say, a low-ranking activist who has been thrown out of the section office because he was caught passing confidential papers to an agent from another party, since when he has eked out a living by giving private maths lessons.

Arnold Bartok would be a good name for him. A month ago he was sacked from his part-time job sorting parcels in a private courier company. His shirt collar is discoloured by sweat and grime, his
trousers hang loose from his hips, he hardly ever bothers to wash his shirts or his underwear, and his sandals are worn out. Arnold Bartok spends his evenings composing memos addressed to ministers, journalists and members of the Knesset, writes letters to the editors of various newspapers, pens urgent messages to the State Comptroller or the President, and he suffers terribly from piles. Specially in the early hours.