The Same Sea (8 page)

so cold and evil crouching over you tearing and preying
forcibly planting in your womb a monster a bloated baby
shout out dont let it Mother bite kick and scratch
gouge its eyeballs out so obedient cotton wool
bite and scratch dont lie down so submissively dont let it
feast on your flesh relishing you all bit by bit
yes rip it gouge it yes tear its eyes out so shout

its crouching to dismember you liver pancreas and kidney
seeping into your spleen tearing you creeping from ovary
to gut sucking and chewing at your diaphragm
planting venomous fangs into lung and palate fight it
my chewed mother get it by the throat dont let it
Mother slain lamb shout.

It's a little less hot today which is why I asked him to come and sit with me on the veranda from where we can see the garden and breathe the nearby sea. This summer is already trailing signs of tiredness but it is still cruel and changeable, a capricious old tyrant. I put two liter bottles of mineral water on the table, remembering from last time how insatiably thirsty he is. The tax file he brought with him seems, at first glance, not entirely above board, it is sloppy and may have cut a few corners. Dombrov is a small company producing mainly advertisements and short public information films, the risk of fires in summer, the importance of wearing a seat belt. I'll go over it for him. Put it straight. It's a matter of two or three hours' work. And in the meantime the sea breeze comes and goes. On the garden seat below us a black cat lay dozing. Once again he talked about chance and guiding hands, like the first morning. It was not chance, in his view, that brought Dita and him together. Would it seem absurd if he confided in me that her script exactly describes his life and even his most intimate fantasy? A quiet house in a village, adjacent to a cemetery, with a tiled roof and thirty or forty fruit trees, a dovecote and a beehive, all surrounded with a stone wall and shaded by tall cypresses, and a young woman, Nirit, who because of a moment of compassion or some other fleeting emotion comes to stay for a few days, despite the fact that women usually find him repulsive. That is her script in a nutshell and it exactly represents the fantasy that has haunted him for many years, and that he has never told to another man or woman. It's a fact. Is it really possible, Mr. Danon, that it's just coincidence? How on earth did she manage to write a stranger's innermost dream? And another mysterious thing, how do you explain that she brought this script to me of all people? Half the inhabitants of Tel Aviv are producers. Or think they are. Do you really believe, Mr. Danon, that it's all just coincidence?

To this, naturally, I neither had nor could have an answer one way or the other—who can say—however I was surprised that this time, unlike his previous visit, he did not touch the glass of water I had poured him, which fountained bubbles excitedly till it grew tired, and subsided. As though in the meantime he had undergone a thorough detox. Instead, while he was expounding his views on probability, he attacked the fruit I had put in front of him, pears, grapes, apples, and devoured it without noticing what he was doing, munching, dripping, unaware that he was staining his clothes, what is just chance, Mr. Danon, and what is the result of the guiding hand of fate? I was astonished that he attributed some kind of
decisive
authority
to
me of all people. If we had lived lets say a couple of hundred years ago you might have imagined that he had come to me to ask for her hand in marriage and meanwhile here he was beating about the bush.

It's not easy to know, I said, whether there is such a thing as a guiding hand, and it's even harder to explain towards what and to what purpose this hand, if it exists, is or is not guiding what appears to us as chance. I sometimes wonder myself. To be sure what I said did not contain any answer, but somehow he seemed satisfied, even happy: on hearing the words "I sometimes wonder myself" his greedy mole's face suddenly lit up, and for an instant through this expression I caught a glimpse of a sad, unloved child, whose father has suddenly given him an unexplained pat on the back, that he has interpreted as a caress. Before I had any notion where or why, my hand reached out, touched him lightly on the shoulder as I saw him to the door, and "Don't worry," I said, but why did I say it, "we'll check through your tax papers and maybe straighten them out a bit, get in touch next week and don't even mention money."

It drips. It stops. It trickles.
The water tastes like wine.
A sluggish little fountain
in the courtyard of the shrine.

We've reached Ladakh, the "country
of the children of the moon,"
along the River Chandar,
and a lake named Chandartal.

The village is called Tiksa,
Tiksa Gumpa is the shrine,
the woman's name, Maria: you're
the one that she recalls.

The one who kissed her feet.
Yes, I mean you: come here.
Did you know there is a custom
in the region of Ladakh

to give one bride in marriage
to two or three young men,
to two or three young brothers.
It's you that she recalls.

The fountain flows and falters,
it stops and starts again
in the courtyard of the shrine.

The stone here is not chiselled,
but plastered white and red.
The shrine is Tiksa Gumpa,
the woman Maria. Come

to me. Fear not. I'm talking
to you. Tonight my lips
you shall open. Tonight
I'll be with you. Tiksa Gumpa
is the shrine and the lake is
Chandartal.

Maria too is lost, she roams from shrine to shrine,
sleeps, rises, packs her bag, sometimes in the company
of wayfaring men. Her beauty is wearing thin. Her face
is wrinkled by wind, sun and frost. The promised land
has gone or was it just a mirage? Whatever she has given
has been taken, and whatever is left will perish.

Promised lands are a lie. There is
no wondrous snowman in the mountain ravines. Only
in the sea there awaits her what never was
and has gone. Tonight the boy is with her.
Tomorrow alone. Chandartal.

Voices he hears, Tatars. What Tatars. Which Tatars.
Tatars in his head. Come back tomorrow, preferably
in a different frame of mind. Come back without the voices.
Without the Tatars. Without the torture. He is dead,
Elimelech the carpenter. On the windowsill a candle burns,
for the end of Sabbath or for remembrance. Who is crying
shouting Tatars to distinguish between weekday and
disaster? Elimelech the carpenter is dead hanged in the shed in the yard
looking like a practical joke, it was Rajeb who found him. Nine years on
and tomorrow his daughter is to be wed, I am invited to the wedding
and preferably in a different frame of mind. She is marrying
a land dealer around Nablus and they are settling
in Elon Moreh. Where are these omens coming from?
Tatars. Candle in the window. Elimelech the carpenter taught Rajeb
to sing duets with him, basso profundo and tenor, both
out of tune. Four armed settlers will support the posts
of her bridal canopy and you will stand with Albert
who is coming from Bat Yam. Palely the carpenter's daughter
smiles. The bridal veil is very fine. A bunch of roses
and a well-fed bridegroom. Sabbath end? Remembrance? And the rabbi
leaps and dances Tatars. Get out. What Tatars. Where
are the omens coming from and who is calling me where?
The carpenter hanged himself and Rajeb returned to Hebron.
He has not been seen since. Some say he ran away to Sudan
others that he was caught or killed constructing an explosive device,
and others are Tatars. Thick darkness and a candle outside the hired hall.
A car park. Silence. Dogs barking in the distance at a moon
that does not answer. Get out. Cut your roots and go.

Evening and she has not come. Next door a child is crying, tiredly,
monotonously, knowing that nothing will help. In the one-room flat
I have rented for her in Mazeh Street there is no phone yet And even
if there were I wouldn't. This evening she won't come. On my own eating
black bread, cheese and olives. It's a long evening. Everyone is on his own
this evening and I too am on my own. I am wondering whether the money I
sent has reached you. Anxious about avalanches, landslides on those slopes.
Or awake, reading by candlelight in the cold in an abandoned temple. The
evening is still. The child who was crying before is quiet now. Here at my
kitchen window the sea is talking about autumn already. Another glass of tea
and I'll sit down to check a balance sheet that doesn't balance. Many send in
their accounts. Only the lonely know how to be accurate.

Yes the night is really cold and the snow reminds him of his father.
It creeps like a tiny furry creature
slinking across the valley.

Quiet and even, it gropes at the roof and the walls.
In the dark the sleepwrapped snow on tiptoe,
silent and anxious, spreads a blanket over him.

In a foam-filled bath
she pities their loneliness:
one wanted me to mother him
the other looks to me as a daughter.
To be a woman to both of them
is something I can only do in the bath.

Evening. Rain falls on the empty desert hills. Chalk and flint and the smell
of dust being wetted after an arid summer. A wish stirs: to be
what I would have been had I not known what is known. To be before
knowledge. Like the hills. Like a rock on the surface of the moon.
Simply there, motionless, and trusting
in the length of its shelf life.

Night. In the garden ploughs a breeze. A cat,
I think a cat, pads among bushes, a shadow
flitting among the shadows. It sniffs or guesses
something hidden from me. What is not mine to sense
is taking shape there now without me. Cypresses
tremble slightly, black, in a motion of mourning,
I think beside the wall. Something there is touching
some other thing. Something is expiring. Ostensibly
all this is taking shape right before my eyes
as I watch the garden from this window. So I think.
In fact all this has always happened and always will
but only ever behind my back.

Waking tired at twenty to five. Lights. A pee. A wash. Then standing
with a coffee at the window. Chilly mist still in the bushes. The garden
light continues signalling to itself. The lawn is still damp.
Empty. Chairs, with legs in the air, upside down on the garden table.
There is a milky light
toward dawn, lest we forget that we are in
the Milky Way, a remote galaxy flickering until it fades out.

Until it fades out five-o'clock-in-the-morning things are happening. A
startled bird calls out in surprise, as though this were the very first morning.
Or the very last. Between two branches of a ficus an early spider is at work.
From the humors of its body it spins a tight net in which it hunts
twenty or thirty dewdrops that do not sit idle either but catch splinters
of light and multiply each one sevenfold. Every captive splinter, for its part,
translates itself to lightning. Until the paper arrives I'll sit down and write too.

Man that is born of woman bears his parents on his shoulders. No, not on
his shoulders. Within him. All his life he is bound to bear them,
together with all their host, their parents, their parents' parents,
a Russian doll heavy with child back to the first generation:
wherever he walks he bears his forebears, when he lies down he bears
his forebears and when he rises up he bears them, or if he wanders far or
stays in his place. Night after night he shares his cot with his father
and his couch with his mother until his day comes.

But that snowman is not born of woman. Weightless and naked
it roams alone on the barren mountains. Neither born nor begetting
neither loving nor thirsty for love. It has never mourned
nor lost a living soul. Ageless it floats over the snows,
fatherless, motherless, homeless, timeless and deathless. Alone.

He rolls down the woman Maria's stockings, one by one, his eyes
digging into her flesh. These are the eyes of the flesh. The eyes
of his spirit are closed. Were they not closed he would see Maria not
in her ripe sensuality but as she will look in old age, shrivelled like a
dried fig. If he opened the eyes of his spirit the desires of the flesh
would subside. His lust would turn to dust.

Or it could be put like this: climbing a tortuous track in the mountains,
between two chasms. His glance is alert and sharp but the eyes of his spirit
are shut If he opens them just for an instant, he will feel dizzy and fall.

All this is ancient knowledge: the eyes of the flesh covet, the eye of the spirit
goes dark, he who is here is you without you, he who is not
here is not here, but if so why love a woman? Why walk across chasms?

Your son longs for the extinction of sleep. And at once
he sleeps. The wind outside the hut
howls. A fox slinks by in the wood
and there is a night bird hidden in the leaves
seeing what is coming but choosing to pass over

in silence. In seventeen hundred and six
a wandering merchant from Russia who was on his way to China
breathed his last in this hut. He died
alone in his sleep and was buried in the wood
where he sank into the depth of oblivion.

to take furs and precious stones from Nizhni to Nanking, and from Nanking
brought back jewelery and silk. He was fond of drinking and eating at
wayside inns, strange travellers' tales at night in front of a blazing fire,
and servant girls' favors on a straw palliasse by the light of a clay lamp.
He took pleasure in shrewd selling and in haggling for a bargain, fine
patient dealing, resembling courtship, or loveplay in which
he who lasts longest wins, and the swift have no advantage: he who desires
must feign indifference and cloak his eagerness with uncertainty. In the spring
he set his steps eastward and returned homeward in the fall, crossing
rivers and forests, steppes and mountain passes, and every year
the hoard of coins buried in his courtyard grew and grew.