Rhyming Life and Death (6 page)

He reflects that Chekhov has already mapped out the route by which one can approach a strange lady by paying court to her lapdog. But even Chekhov did not explain to us how, once you have established acquaintance and got into conversation, you proceed from there. How, for example, do you get close to a girl who clutches a jealous cat to her breast, a growling bundle of fur that will surely scratch anyone who attempts to usurp its place?

*

And so the Author takes his leave on a note of controlled warmth. He promises to phone her, yes, definitely, very soon. By the light of the street lamp he hurriedly strokes her plait, and tries to look her straight in the eyes, but her eyes are once more lowered in the direction of the tips of her shoes or the cracked pavement. Rochele Reznik, a hunted squirrel with an expression of panic on her small
face, also looks as though she may bite, perhaps because of the way her front teeth protrude. She suddenly proffers a tiny, cold hand for a hasty handshake; the other hand still presses his new book, wrapped in brown paper secured with two rubber bands, to her chest. While she withdraws her hand from his with an almost imperceptible movement that suggests a day-old chick, she suddenly smiles sadly and says: Goodnight, and thank you for everything. Thank you very much, really. And there's something else I wanted to say, I don't know how to put it, I just wanted to tell you that I don't think I'll ever forget this evening. I'll never forget the pharmacy and the back room with the poisons, or your uncle who slapped the member of the Knesset and then they both became ill.

*

The Author roams the streets for an hour or an hour and a half. His feet lead him away from the well-lit avenue to side streets, and unfamiliar alleyways, where all the shutters are barred and only an occasional anaemic street lamp sleepily casts a murky glow. As he walks he smokes two more cigarettes
and does the sum in his head: seven or eight since the start of the evening.

Two couples, their arms round one another, cross his path on their way to bed from a night out, and one of the girls lets out a shriek of horror, as though someone has whispered some outrageous possibility to her. The Author tries to imagine this possibility in detail, turning it round and round, looking for some kind of juicy excitement in it, but the incubus of the airless dungeon where Arnold Bartok and his mother Ophelia are shut away on their bed that is damp with sweat kills his nascent desire even before it can start up: the elderly mother and her middle-aged son are both stewing in their sweat on a single shapeless mattress, a skinny, veiny body straining to lift a massive heap of flabby flesh, and to push the chamber pot underneath – like a pair of wrestlers in the dark, the son grunting and the mother groaning, while a mosquito hums in the darkness like a tiny drill, there, or here, or both here and there.

Uncle Osya, the anarchist, the piano tuner, lived all alone in a small back room in the basement of an old building on Brenner Street, he was generally out of work, sometimes he took an odd job as a removal
man or a house painter, and even when he was in his thirties – a podgy albino – everyone always called him ‘Oska-nu-kak', meaning ‘Well, Oska, how's it going?', and they jokingly said of him that in the recesses of his subterranean hideout he concealed the beautiful niece of the ousted Soviet leader Leon Trotsky from the British authorities and from the party.

Even as a child the Author knew that this was only a joke, that there were no beauties hidden in his eccentric uncle's basement, but now, for an instant, he is suddenly sorry that he never had the courage to peep behind the mouldy greenish oilcloth that hung from wall to wall, concealing the innermost sanctum of the basement.

And he regrets his cowardice: why didn't you invite yourself up to Rochele Reznik's room? Behind that shy pallor of hers there probably lurks a feverish thirst, a blend of childlike innocence, unfulfilled desire, and a kind of silent, passionate submissive devotion flowing from her admiration and gratitude. It was right there at your fingertips, it was throbbing softly in the palm of your hand, and you let it escape. Idiot.

*

As for the poet Tsefania Beit-Halachmi, Bumek Schuldenfrei, the Author does the sums and concludes that he must have passed away long since. Many years ago he had his own regular poet's corner on the back page of the weekend supplement of the newspaper
Davar
, surrounded with a flowery border adorned in each corner with a sketch of a smiling mask. Or maybe it was sneering. The poems in
Rhyming Life and Death
, as the Author recalls, were not satirical or mordant, but generally addressed the problems of the day with good-natured if somewhat condescending amusement: absorption of immigrants, transit camps, austerity measures, the conquest of the desert, the draining of the Huleh swamp, the housing shortage, border incidents and raids by infiltrators, the corruption and bureaucracy that overshadowed the public life of the young State. He represented the younger generation, the muscular, suntanned native-born sabras, as outwardly tough but dedicated, morally responsible and wonderfully sensitive on the inside.

All the enemies of the Jewish people down the ages – the Ukrainians, the Poles, the Germans, the Arabs, the British, the priests, the effendis, the Bolsheviks,
the Nazis, the innumerable anti-Semites that are spawned everywhere – were portrayed in
Rhyming Life and Death
as heartless villains whose world is filled with nothing but malice, hatred and
Schadenfreude
directed against us. The home-grown villains, such as the dissident Zionist organisations, the Communists, the detractors of the trade-union movement and the opponents of the organised Jewish community, appeared in Beit-Halachmi's book as petty, narrow-minded people with twisted souls. He thoroughly abhorred those bohemians who aped the ways of Paris and Hollywood, and he had nothing but disgust for all those cynical, uprooted intellectuals who knew only how to pour scorn and sarcasm on everything, together with their scribbles about modern art, that amounted to no more than the emperor's new clothes.

As for the Yemenites, animals, tillers of the soil and gentle children, for these he reserved verses radiant with paternal affection. He placed them on a pedestal, going into raptures over the purity of their innocence and the simplicity of their souls. But occasionally Tsefania Beit-Halachmi's rhymed column was infused with a hint of something that
was neither political nor ideological, a mysterious tinge of sorrow that had nothing whatever to do with his class consciousness or patriotic fervour, like those lines the Author had quoted at the reading:

Sometimes he included a short epitaph for someone who was dead and forgotten except in the occasional thoughts of a child or grandchild, and even this memory was ephemeral because, with the death of the last person who remembered him, the subject of the poem would die a second and final death.

*

Once, the Author recalls, Beit-Halachmi published a piece under the heading ‘Clearing out the leaven', about the tendency of all things gradually to fade, to become worn out, objects and loves, clothes and ideals, homes and feelings, everything becomes tattered and threadbare, and eventually turns to dust.

He made frequent use of the word ‘alone', which on occasion he replaced with the rarer word ‘forlorn'.

Once upon a time, in the thirties and forties and even perhaps in the early fifties, the poet used to appear frequently on Friday evenings before a crowd of his fans in cultural centres, Health Fund sanatoria, trade-union gatherings or meetings of the Movement for Popular Education: he would read from his poems, accompanied by a lady pianist who was no longer in the first flush of youth or an emotional Russian singer with a deep contralto voice and a generous but not indecent décolleté. After his reading and the musical interludes, he would enjoy chatting with his audience, debating good-naturedly, pinching the cheeks of the children and sometimes of grown women, he would sign copies of his books and revel in the affection of his public, many of whom in those days could recite entire poems of his by heart.

And then what happened? Perhaps, for example, his wife died one morning in an accident with an electric iron. And the poet waited a year and a half before marrying his big-bosomed accompanist. Who abandoned him a fortnight after the wedding and
ran away to America with her sister's brother-in-law, a cosmetics manufacturer with a pleasing tenor voice.

Or perhaps he is still alive, the poet Tsefania Beit-Halachmi? Totally forgotten, he drags out the remainder of his days somewhere, let's say in a remote private old folks' home in a workers' village at the edge of the Hefer Valley. Or in some godforsaken nursing home on the outskirts of Yokneam. His toothless mouth chews a piece of white bread to a pulp. He spends hours on end sitting in a brown armchair with an upholstered footstool on the veranda of the home where he lives; his mind is still as clear as ever but it is many years since he saw any point in writing poems or publishing them in the paper, now he is happy with a glass of tea and the quiet of the garden, the changing shapes of the clouds, and he still enjoys, in fact he enjoys more and more, observing the colours of the trees in the garden and inhaling the smell of freshly mown grass:

All day long he sits in his armchair on the veranda, reading with curiosity a novel by a young writer who grew up in a religious community but abandoned the commandments, or the memoirs of the founder of a charitable organisation. His eyesight is still good and he does not need glasses to read. Suddenly he comes across his own name mentioned in passing in the book, together with a couple of his old rhymes, which suddenly afford the old poet a childish pleasure, and he smiles and moves his lips as he reads the lines of verse: he himself has almost forgotten them, and he supposed, without rancour, that everyone else has forgotten them too, but here they are in the book by this young woman, and he finds them not bad at all.

His innocent, round eyes are blue and clear under his white eyebrows, like twin mountain pools surmounted by snowy crags, his body that used to be rotund is now as skinny as a child's, smooth and hairless, wrapped in a white flannel dressing gown printed with the logo of the old folks' home and the motto ‘Young at heart!'. A small bubble of saliva appears in the corner of the poet's mouth, on the left side. Every two or three hours the nurse, Nadia, brings him a glass of lemon tea and a sugar lump, and a
slice of white bread with the crust removed. He sits peacefully for hours on end without moving, placidly breathing the country air and smelling the smells, with faint snorts, chewing his bread pulp, dozing, or wide awake, with the book by the young woman from the religious neighbourhood lying open face down on his lap, thinking about her and wondering whether death can be entirely, unrecognisably different from life. Surely there must be some resemblance, at least a hint of a resemblance, between the time before and after death, because there is after all a hint of a resemblance between any two times or situations in the world. Maybe that is how the poet sits all day staring with his thoughtful blue eyes at the swaying of the treetops and the movement of the clouds.

But a simple calculation shows that it is hardly possible that this poet is still alive. His weekly column, ‘Rhyming Life and Death', ceased to appear many years ago. The weekend supplement of
Davar
is on its last legs. The trade-union movement, the Histadrut, is no longer what it was. Instead of workers' councils with cultural commissions with a sense of mission and a moral obligation to go out to the ordinary people and raise their cultural level,
the country is full of clever manpower resource companies and slave dealers who import herds of maids and forced labourers from poor countries.

Probably this poet passed away long ago, died of a cerebral haemorrhage and was hastily buried one windy, rainy day, in a funeral attended only by a clutch of elderly party workers swathed in overcoats and huddling under a canopy of black umbrellas, and now he is buried not far from here, in a plot reserved for militant poets and thinkers, surrounded by his friends and foes, the poets of his generation, Bartini and Broides, Hanania Reichman, Dov Chomsky, Kamzon, Lichtenbaum and Maytos, Hanan Shadmi, Hanani, Akhai and Ukhmani.

*

Hallo, sorry, is that Lucy? Lucy? This is Ricky here. I don't suppose you remember me. Just a minute, I'll tell you where from. Just a moment. I'm sorry. You've got such a pretty voice still, Lucy, like the taste of red wine. I'm Ricky – remember? Charlie's Ricky? From the thing with Charlie? You remember, Lucy? About fifteen years ago? I'm the Ricky that used to work at Isabella and Carmen's Beauty and Bridal Salon at the bottom of Allenby? Yes. It's me. Like, you and me was rivals then? Do you remember all that, Lucy? It's like even then I felt like I liked you even more than him? Like maybe I started going out with him just so's I could, like, smell your smell on him? No, wait, Lucy, don't hang up, I swear, it's not what you think, believe me I'm the most normal human being in the whole world, just listen, give me two minutes. Never mind how I got hold of your number, with your new surname. I found it and that's that. Is it, like, your husband's name? Never mind. My fling with Charlie, do you remember? It took about a week, eight days maybe. Something like that. Barely. Then he went back to you. Crawled back, I should say. In any case, the whole thing with me was only because of you, Lucy, it only happened because you'd finished with him for a bit
and specially because even then I was mad about you but I was too shy to tell you. Well, now, let's get to the point. It's like this. The reason I'm calling you is that maybe you feel like meeting up sometime, just the two of us, somewhere, we can sit and chat about all of that? And other things too? No, I don't mind where, you choose? But I'm paying? The coffee's on me? Tell me, Lucy, have you got a husband? Or somebody? Children? God forbid, I'm not giving you the third degree. Absolutely not. What gave you that idea? OK, Lucy, fine. Why not? Only don't think that I'm some kind of a psycho. It's like this. I often find myself thinking about you, Lucy, about your neck, your voice, your kind heart, your eyes, the mind you had in those days. A thousand times better than mine. It was as if you and me was on one side and Charlie was, well – believe me, I've already forgotten that Charlie. Why do we need to talk about him? Like, I've got nothing in common with him? Just with you, Lucy. Even though quite a few years have gone past, I haven't got over you. Listen, Lucy, this is how it is with me, just don't laugh at me, don't get the idea that I'm some poor bitch who's got nothing better to do with herself than to ring up someone from way back? No, don't take
it like that. Try to take it, like, you and me, we're in the same boat? What do you mean, what do I mean in the same boat? Didn't Charlie chuck you the same way he chucked me? Used us and crumpled us up and threw us in the bin like an old Kleenex? OK, look, Lucy, we can't talk about this on the phone. Believe me, even though you must be thinking that I'm totally weird. Just a minute, Lucy, just a minute, don't hang up on me. Listen. It's like this: I'm not with anyone. Man or woman, if that's what you happen to be thinking. I've got nobody at all. Apart from you, I mean. Because often in my thoughts and even in my dreams in the middle of the night I imagine you and me together, Lucy? In a relationship? Partners? No, not what you're thinking, like, more like two sisters? You're probably thinking it's a bit wild? Totally wild, even? Aren't you? What, don't you ever think about how the two of us, you and me, one week after the other, one after the other, in the same hotel in Eilat, in the same room, in the same king-size bed, how we both did it for him at night and even in the middle of the day? We did, like, exactly the same positions for him. First it was you then a week later it was me and a week after that it was you again? There were a whole
lot of times when he called me Lucy in the dark, once in broad daylight, in a sushi restaurant, and I was literally over the moon each time he called me Lucy. I expect there were a whole lot of times in the dark when he called you Ricky? No? And didn't he say to you too sometimes suddenly, Come on, sweetie, give me a goblet –
you
know what I mean – and do it as slow as you can? Or, Come here, doll, let me tie you up a bit? Or, Let me watch you peeing standing up? No? And then, after he chucked me out and went back to you, and the two of you went to the same hotel and the same room in Eilat, don't tell me you never thought about me there? Just a few times? Just thinking, like, that Ricky did exactly this for him, and this? And maybe that? Didn't it ever cross your mind that he must have taken that Ricky out to the Las Vegas Bar and fed her from the spoon and tickled her there under her skirt with the cocktail stick from the olive? Don't tell me you've never thought about the two of us as though we were the same woman only split in two? What do you say to the idea that we could go, the two of us, to Eilat some day, let's say – take a room in the same hotel? The same room even? Lucy, no, don't hang up on me, I'm not nuts or anything, you've
got to believe me, I'm just not, give me another couple of minutes? Lucy? Lucy?