Cut Throat Dog (6 page)

Where shall we escape to? she interrupts his thoughts.

I have a place in Santo Domingo, he hears Shakespeare picking up the story he had started telling Bridget.

Santo Domingo! she exclaims enthusiastically.

Have you been there? he asks.

No, never, she admits. What’s it like?

Full of villas. He starts giving her a detailed description of an island landscape—white villas, each of which is crazier and more grotesque than the next, for they all embody the dreams of heaven on earth conceived in the minds of people with no imagination, and the island as a whole looks like a parody of a bourgeois paradise, with little gardens and trim lawns in front of the houses, little pools and barbecues in the back yards, and the villas are surrounded by hedges with thorns as long as fingers, and in the tourist season, which is in winter, they fill up with noisy foreign tourists, most of
them from Germany, and then the pubs and bars too are full of bored men, avid for little holiday adventures—he goes on painting a picture of whose relation to reality he has no idea—but on the day that the tourist season comes to an end all of them get into their hired cars and make for the airport, and for a few hours the roads are jammed, and the charter planes take off one after the other into the depths of the green tropical sky, and the next day the villas stand silent and empty, and only the stray cats prowl the gardens which seem to have been abandoned in a hurry, as if the panic-stricken inhabitants left suddenly, fleeing for their lives, and here and there security guards patrol the streets, their cars driving slowly down the deserted streets, and a few bored maintenance men in white overalls water the abandoned gardens, and anyone who stays on after the exodus of the seasonal visitors feels profound loneliness and boredom from which there is no escape, for the deserted pubs only deepen the sense of isolation, especially in the afternoon hours, especially on the days when tropical storms rage and the rain comes down from the sky like curtains of gray water, and you can sit there in an empty pub, downing glass after glass of Bahama-mama or Winnie-wacky-woo—

Winnie-wacky-woo, she cries gaily, I like the sound of that!

Then full steam ahead for the Caribbean islands! he commands the crew, leans with both hands on the deck railing, and waits for the ship to sail into the night sea. The white solar heaters, and the glass panes of the reflectors attached to them, glitter like thousands of fishing boats at night by the water in Tel Aviv. He looks down into the back yard of the building. A dilapidated oven lies on its side next to a smashed glass door, with an old exercise bicycle rusting beside it. Full steam ahead for the Caribbean islands! he commands again from the heights of the bridge, but the many-storied monster stays still, immobile as the Cutty Sark
standing in dry dock in Greenwich, refusing to spread its sails and put out to sea.

Sorry, Captain Antoniu, no more voyages tonight.

Captain Antoniu, he hears them calling his name, Captain Antoniu dos Shaninas do los Rugashivas.

He disliked not only his legs, but also his arms and all the other parts of his body, and he couldn’t stand his name either. He gave expression to these feelings in a poem. No, not a poem, an epoch making poetic novel in verse, composed of a cycle of seventy-eight, no, a hundred and seventy-eight, poems, like ‘Eugene Onegin’, whose opening poem began with the words:

This poem-novel, which heralded a new era in poetry, a return to classical meter and rhyme, was immediately translated into seventeen, no, twenty-seven languages, and rose to the top of the best-seller lists in eight, no, eighteen, countries.

In the opening poem, stunning in its simplicity, the mysterious poet, dos Shaninas, succinctly sums up his attitude towards himself in the following words:

There is no need to quote the poem in its entirety here. As soon as it was published, shortly after the death of the
poet, its lines became a byword for the new poetry, and the public is already well acquainted with them.

Indeed, it was only after his departure that the full extent of his astonishing creation would be revealed. A box full of papers closely covered with his cramped writing would be found under his bed, in the modest room in which he lived his secret life, in the heart of the teeming city which paid no mind to the intellectual giant passing like a shadow through its streets, always wearing the same hat. No, not a hat, a beret. No, not a beret, a peaked cap. A dark brown leather cap. Almost black with use.

On the fiftieth anniversary of his death, when the bronze statue of the poet, in which he was seen sitting at a table in the little cafe where he was a habitue, was unveiled, the television would interview women with necks generously wrinkled by the pleasures of life, and they would declaim his poems to the camera in voices full of emotion, and confess with damp eyes and no inhibitions: ‘His lines turned us on, his words wet our panties’, and one grandmother in a wheelchair would gush in the ears of her blushing granddaughter: ‘His poems simply stripped you bare. When I read his poem ‘Take your baby my love/ Take my prick in your hands’ for the first time I couldn’t breathe, I panted so hard my mother came running in a panic to see what had happened.

Yes, Monsieur Rejvani, you should have been a poet. How did you allow them to tempt you into imprisoning the joy of your youth in liquidation operations, and burying the rest of your life in advertising? First you murdered for them, and now you’re selling them vegetables, chickens, fruit, banks, computers and quack medicines. Take all those lost years and throw them into the trash. In your soul you remained a poet, of that there is no doubt. You introduced direct speech into poetry. The simple description of what
people see when they close their eyes and live moments of happiness. When a loving hand touches them in the exact places they want to be touched. Write the poems that nobody will write in your place.

The fact that one day Hanin stopped writing poetry led to much speculation in those distant days and gave birth to rumors that Haninai had not really written those wonderful poems, published in the collection ‘Shock poems’, himself, but that he had come into possession of a notebook belonging to an anonymous comrade in arms, a solitary youth who had fallen in battle. Straight off the boat, or the plane, the anonymous poet Yohanan had landed in the slaughter fields of the most terrible war of all the wars in the war-sick East. He had time to meet a nurse with a braid. He had time to fall in love with her, to spend the night talking to her, but when he set off in the morning he remembered that he had forgotten to ask her name. On his way to his last battle he told his story to Honen Avihai, and made him swear that if he fell in battle, Heynan would give the notebook he carried on his body to the girl with the braid who had never left his side.

But the shady Hananya had published the poems he found in Yohanan the anonymous warrior’s notebook under his own name, shamelessly, and after he published the last of the poems in the notebook the wellspring of his poetry had dried up forever. But this rumor gave birth to a further rumor, according to which H. N. Hanialik himself had invented the rumor about the solitary fallen soldier’s notebook, and also taken care to spread it.

One literary researcher, in his attempts to arrive at the truth among the rumors, discovered to his astonishment that Honen, with his reputation as a social butterfly, with all the girls hanging round his neck, didn’t actually have one close friend, and everything those considered close to him knew
about him came from rumors, and none of them could point to the source of those rumors. Yes, he didn’t have a single friend.

.… Apart from Yadanuga—a corruption of ‘Yad-anuga’ or ‘Tender Hand’—who now emerges from the jaws of the elevator which previously swallowed Mona. First his solid head appears, crowned with a mane of silver curls, beneath which his eyes, full of childish wonder, twinkle mischievously, then his broad shoulders push their way out, and finally this overgrown infant emerges in all his ungainly height. Yadanuga pierces him with a sharp look—one of those precise looks which always ended in a body lying at the side of the road, or sitting at the wheel of a car with a hole between the eyes—and asks in an amused tone of voice:

What’s the matter with you, Shakespeare? Everyone’s waiting for you.

For Yadanuga he’s Shakespeare, just as for him Yad-anuga is Yadanuga, and not Yudaleh Nugilevski, who to his widowed mother is still her good little boy Yudinka, who leaves a soccer game in the middle if she calls him, and comes running to ask her what she wants him to do. And in high school he was the tough daring athlete Roofy, who even then excelled at walking on the parapets of high roofs and acrobatic riding on the Matchless Motorcycle his uncle Yehiel Nugilevsky-Nagil brought back from the army. And in the assassination squad, where they served together, he was discovered to possess a delicate hand, capable of skewering a lizard on the branch of a jacaranda tree with a commando knife at a distance of eight meters, and therefore he was Yadanuga in the team of the ‘Cunning Cooks’, of which only the two of them had
survived, and Hanina uses this ineffable name only when no strange ear is in the vicinity, and Yehuda Nugilevski too calls him Shakespeare only under the same conditions. In the presence of the other employees of the advertising agency Yadanuga becomes Mackie, and Shakespeare becomes Hanina.

Yadanuga, says Shakespeare, and then he says again: Yadanuga …

And since at least three seconds, if not four, of silence pass between ‘Yadanuga’ and ‘Yadanuga’, the latter responds with a short ‘What’, leaving all options open, and Shakespeare repeats once more:

Yadanuga.… I didn’t sleep all night. And he immediately corrects himself: Maybe I slept for two hours.

What’s up? asks Yadanuga, who reads his friend like an old book full of pencil lines. Don’t tell me you’re still stuck with Adonis’s ghost.

It’s much more complicated than you think, says Shakespeare.

I thought you came back because you’d recovered from that illusion at last.

It’s not an illusion, says Shakespeare.

Listen, says Yadanuga, after you called from New York and told me you were on his tracks, I spoke to Tzibeleh. He got into the archives and went over the report by the Belgian pathologist, who by the way died a couple of years ago—

I know the de Odecker document off by heart, says Shakespeare, and it’s no longer relevant.

The de Odecker document isn’t relevant?!

Look, says Shakespeare, even if this guy isn’t Adonis, although I think he is, I’ve gotten somebody else involved, someone who has nothing to do with the affair, and this person’s life will be in danger as long as Tony is free.

Tony? says Yadanuga in surprise. But he wasn’t called Tony. He was called Tino.

Yes, confirms Shakespeare, his official name was Tino the Syrian.

He wasn’t actually a Syrian, Yadanuga tries to clarify something forgotten to himself. He was some kind of English-Spaniard or German-Italian wasn’t he?

He was a Belorussian of English-German descent, Shakespeare corrects him.

Right, right! Yadanuga’s memory grows clearer, like a distant dream whose details suddenly, at the magic touch of a word, or a sound, or a picture, begin to emerge from the mists. His name wasn’t Tino at all!

No, that was his alias in their network, Shakespeare fills in another detail.

Right, his name was Anatol! Yadanuga eagerly adds another details to the mosaic emerging from under the sands of oblivion.

Anatol? Shakespeare introduces a doubt into Yadanuga’s heart, without offering an alternative.

Just a minute, just a minute, not Anatol, Yadanuga corrects himself, Anthony.… Anton!

Do you remember his face? asks Shakespeare. Could you draw his face for me without the beard?

How can I draw his face for you without the beard? protests Yadanuga. All they gave us then was a blurred photograph … you could hardly see anything. That’s why we came too close to him. Because we weren’t sure if it was him.… And Jonas paid for it with his life.

What exactly do you remember?

In the photo he had a black beard that covered half his face. That’s all I remember.

In the period when we were looking for him, you made all kinds of sketches of his face, says Shakespeare.

Yes I did, says Yadanuga, but years have passed since then.

Can you find those sketches?

How can I? I don’t even remember what I drew them on.

You had a little Kohinoor notebook, with an orange cover.

You know how many of those notebooks I’ve been through since then?

Perhaps you could try to reconstruct his face from memory, take off the beard and add twenty years?

Shakespeare, Yadanuga laughs despairingly, I can make you twenty sketches, what good will it do?

I don’t know, admits Shakespeare. On every trip it seems to me at least five times that I’ve seen him. In the end it’s just some guy. But this time I have a feeling—

You don’t want a repeat performance of the story with that poor waiter from Islay, warns Yadanuga.

That’s the problem, says Shakespeare. That’s why I’m asking you what you remember. Your visual memory is the only thing I have to rely on.

What do I remember.… Yadanuga tries to fish up details. I remember something with brown and white.

What brown and white?

Is there such a thing as a brown-white wine?

A brown-white wine?! It sounds like that bastard wine whose taste changes from bottle to bottle.

Right! It was called ‘Vino bastardo’ I think, the wine he liked, a sweet Spanish wine, don’t you remember they gave it to us to taste, so we would be able to identify it?

Wait a minute, wait a minute, Shakespeare remembers, bastardo … that rings a bell.

And he liked white carnations with red stripes.

That’s it, says Shakespeare. He was wearing a white shirt with red stripes, or maybe the opposite: a red shirt with white stripes.