Black Box (13 page)

TRIED TO REACH YOU BY TELEPHONE THIS IS UNREPEATABLE OFFER CALL IMMEDIATELY FOR DETAILS NOT LONG AGO YOU WERE PRESSING ME TO SELL WHATS THE MATTER WITH YOU MANFRED

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PERSONAL ZAKHEIM JERUSALEM ISRAEL

I SAID NEGATIVE ALEX

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GIDEON NICFOR LONDON

BOAZ IN TROUBLE AGAIN POLICE LOOKING FOR HIM YOU MAY REQUIRE FUNDS URGENTLY PURCHASER IS WILLING TO PAY NINE HUNDRED IMMEDIATELY IN WILLIAM TELL SALVO TO YOUR ACCOUNT IN MAGIC MOUNTAIN THINK CAREFULLY MANFRED

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PERSONAL ZAKHEIM JERUSALEM ISRAEL

GIVE BOAZ MY ADDRESS SO HE CAN CONTACT ME DIRECT AND STOP NAGGING ALEX

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GIDEON NICFOR LONDON

THE DEVIL KNOWS WHERE BOAZ IS WHAT ABOUT ZIKHRON PROPERTY STOP CHANGING YOUR MIND EVERY FIVE MINUTES OR YOULL END UP LIKE YOUR FATHER MANFRED

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PERSONAL ZAKHEIM JERUSALEM ISRAEL

GIVE ME A BREAK ALEX

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SOMMO TARNAZ 7 JERUSALEM ISRAEL

INFORM ME IMMEDIATELY WHATS UP WITH BOAZ DO YOU NEED MY HELP WIRE ME AT NICFOR LONDON ALEXANDER GIDEON

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DOCTOR GIDEON C/O NICFOR LONDON

EVERYTHING IS ALL RIGHT NOW WE GOT THE NEW POLICE RECORD CLOSED TOO ONCE HE UNDERTOOK TO STUDY AND WORK IN KIRYAT ARBA DONT NEED ANY FAVORS WHAT ABOUT YOUR DONATION MICHAEL SOMMO

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To Ilana,
PRIVATE
By hand of Mr. M. Zakheim, Attorney

Chicago
28.6.76

Dear Weeping Willow,

I got back here this morning after my term in London and a few lectures in Holland and Sweden. Just before I left London I got your long letter, which dear old Zakheim forwarded to me. The letter with the juices and the jungles. I read it in the plane somewhere over Newfoundland. Why did I divorce you? That’s your question this time. We’ll deal with that in a minute.

But meanwhile I hear that Boaz has struck again. And that Sommo has come to the rescue again. I’m beginning to like this fixed pattern. My only reservations are about the bill that he’ll be sending me soon no doubt, together with interest.

Has Boaz started to grow side locks yet? Is he going to live with the religion freaks on the West Bank? Has Sommo given him a choice between a pioneering settlement and a reform school? That’s just fine. If I know Boaz, it won’t be long before the settlers start cursing Sommo and the day they agreed to take on our skull-smasher.

My answer to your question is: No, I shall not come to see you, except perhaps in dreams. If you had pleaded with me to stay far away from you, to have pity on you and not sully with my presence your pure new life with your humble restaurant violinist, who is playing on your Stradivarius, I might just have come running. But you are imploring me, Ilana. The thick smell of your desire, the smell of figs that were picked too long ago, reaches all the way here. Although I won’t deny that I am astonished at your efforts to avoid your fixed habit and write a letter without any lies in it. It’s nice that you’re working on yourself. We can carry on for a while.

I owe you an answer to your simple, cunning question: Why did I divorce you seven and a half years ago?

Well done, Ilana. Ten points for putting the question. I’d like to put it in the newspapers, on television even: “Rahab rides again—sleeps with three divisions then wonders why she’s been divorced. Says: All I really wanted was to come out all right in the end.”

I’m evading the issue. I’ll try to find an answer for you. The sad thing is, my hatred is starting to go. It’s getting thin and grey, just like my hair. And apart from my hatred, what have I got left? Only money. Which is also being gradually drained out of my veins into Sommo’s tanker. Don’t interfere with my death, Ilana. For seven years I was slowly sinking into the fog, and all of a sudden you swooped down on me to wreck my death as well. You attacked without warning with your fresh troops while my tired old tanks are silent, without fuel or ammunition. Perhaps even starting to rust.

And in the middle of this assault you have the nerve to write to me that grace and tenderness and compassion exist. The murderess starts chanting psalms to elevate her victim’s soul?

Did you happen to notice the motto from the New Testament that I chose as the epigraph for my book. I borrowed it straight from Jesus, who remarked at one moment in one of his inspired moods: “Those who live by the sword shall die by the sword.” Which did not prevent that delicate zealot from raising his voice on another occasion and roaring: “Do not think I came to bring peace to the world; I did not come to bring peace but a sword.” And the sword ended up by eating him as well.

What will you do with your sword once you have felled the dragon? Will you present it to Gush Emunim, the scabbard to Mazkeret Gideon and the blade to Tel Alexander, those two great West Bank settlements that will be built with my money?

But surely the sword you wrenched from my grasp will wilt and fade and melt between your fingers. The blade will turn into a jellyfish. And in the strategic reserve, fresh and ready for the fray, fueled with deadly hatred and armed to the teeth with my arctic malice, Boaz Gideon is waiting for you. Your pincer movement, your plot to team Boaz up with Sommo so as to outflank me, will end badly for you. Boaz will gobble up Sommo and you will be left with nowhere to flee to, face to face with my killer child, who can slay a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass.

I ask myself why I did not follow your good advice, why I didn’t throw your first letter, like a live scorpion, straight into the fire, as soon as I read the opening sentence? Now I don’t even have the right to resent you: after all, you generously offered me in advance the way to avoid the trap you were laying for me. You did not fear for a moment that I would get out of the net. You recognized an insect that was out of its mind at the smell of a female in heat. I didn’t have a chance. You are stronger than I am, in the same ratio as the sun is stronger than snow. Have you ever heard of carnivorous plants? They are female plants that can exude a scent of sexual juices over a great distance, and the poor insect is drawn from miles away into the jaws that are going to close around it. It’s all over, Ilana. Checkmate. As after a plane crash, we have sat down and analyzed, by correspondence, the contents of the black box. And from now on, in the words of our decree, we have no further demands on each other.

But what will your victory give you?

Thousands of years ago a certain man of Ephesus looked at the fire burning in front of his eyes and proclaimed: “Its victory will be its destruction.” What will you do with the sword when you have wiped me out? What will you do with yourself? You will be extinguished pretty damn quick, Madame Sommo. You will age. You will put on a lot of weight. Your golden hair will grow dull. You will have to bleach it a ghastly peroxide blond. As long as you don’t take to wearing a head scarf. You will have to drown the smells of your degenerating body in deodorants. Your breasts will fill with fat, and your dazzling bosom, as usually happens to Polish matrons, will rise up to meet your chin. Which for its part will lengthen and go halfway to meet the bosom. The nipples will become pale and bloated, like drowned corpses. Your legs will swell. A network of varicose veins will spread from hip to foot. The corsets in which you will be obliged to contain your cascades of flesh will groan fit to burst as you fasten them. Your posterior will become beastlike. Your vulva will flap and stink. Even a virgin soldier or a retarded youngster will flee from your charms as from the wild advances of a female hippopotamus in heat. Your tame party hack, little Monsieur Pardon, will trail around after you in a dazed state, like a puppy dog after a cow, until he stumbles on some lively girl student who will effortlessly pull him out and extricate him, thankful and out of breath, from under the mountain lying on top of him. And so the episode of your Saharan carnival will finally come to an end. A lover who knows neither laughter nor levity is getting closer and closer to you. Perhaps for you he will put on his black robe and cowl as you asked.

I stopped writing to you and stood at my high window (on the twenty-seventh floor of an office building by the lakeside in Chicago, built of glass and steel and somewhat resembling a ballistic missile). I stood there for about half an hour looking for a truthful and lethal answer to your question: mate in three moves.

Try to picture this man, if you can, thinner than you remember and with much less hair, in dark blue corduroy trousers and a red cashmere sweater. Even though in principle, as you say, he is in black and white. Standing at the window with his brow pressed against the glass. The eyes in which you detect an “arctic malice” search the outside world where the light is fading. And his hands are in his pockets. Clenched. Every few minutes he shrugs his shoulders for some reason and hums in a British sort of way. A coldness passes through his bones. He shudders, removes his hands from his pockets, and clasps his shoulders with his arms crossed. This is the embrace of those who have nobody. And yet, for all that, a tight-coiled animal element still endows his silent standing by the window with some characteristic of inner tension: as though flexed to leap back like lightning and anticipate his assailants.

But there is no reason for tension. The world is red and strange. A strong wind blows off the lake and dashes clumps of fog against the silhouettes of the tall buildings. The dusk light pours over the clouds, the water, the nearby towers, an alchemical quality. A transparent orange hue. Opaque and yet transparent. Not a single sign of life can he spy from his window. Apart from millions of salvos of foam capering on the surface of the lake, as though the water had rebelled and tried to convert itself into another substance altogether: slate, for example. Or granite. Every now and again the wind erupts and the windowpanes chatter like teeth. Death appears to him now not like a hovering threat, but like an event that has been going on for some time already. And here is a strange bird being swept toward his window with spasmodic flapping, describing circles and loops as though trying to sketch an inscription in space: perhaps the wording of the answer to you that he is looking for? Until all of a sudden it comes rushing toward the glass and almost bursts in his face as he realizes at last that it was not a bird at all but just a sheet of newspaper trapped in the claws of the wind. Why did we part, Ilana? What took hold of me and made me suddenly extinguish the furnaces of our hell? Why did I betray us? An empty evening is falling violently on Chicago. Lightning flashes of white-hot iron bluster from horizon to horizon like flares, and now convoys of thunder are starting to roll in the distance, as though my tank battles are pursuing me here all the way from the Sinai. Has it ever occurred to you to ask yourself how a monster mourns? The shoulders heave in a rapid, compulsive rhythm, and the head extends forcefully forward and downward. Like a dog coughing. The belly is seized by frequent cramps, and the breathing becomes a hoarse gurgling. The monster chokes with rage at the fact of being a monster and writhes in monstrous spasms. I have no answer, Ilana. My hatred is dying and my wisdom is expiring with it.

As soon as I came back to my desk to continue writing to you, there was a power cut. Just imagine: America—and power cuts! After a moment of blackness, the emergency lighting came on: pale, skeletal neon, looking like moonlight on chalk hills in the desert. The most electric moments in my life were spent in the desert, charging and trampling under my tracks all that lay in my path, smashing with my gunfire whatever displayed signs of life, raising columns of fire and smoke, causing clouds of dust to billow up, shaking the whole world with the roar of thirty engines, inhaling like an intoxicating drug the smell of scorched rubber, the stench of charred flesh and burning metal, leaving behind me a trail of destruction and empty shell cases, and at night, hunched over a map, devising clever stratagems by the light of the dead moon, shedding its silver over the dead chalk hills. To be sure, I could have answered you with a burst of machine-gun fire: I could have said, for example, that I threw you out because you had started to rot. Because your carryings-on, even with apes and he-goats, had begun to get boring. Because I had had enough. Lost interest.

But we had agreed to dispense with lies. After all, all these years I could sleep only with you. All my life, in fact, because I was a virgin when I met you. When I take into my bed some little admirer, pupil, secretary, interviewer, you appear and intrude yourself between us. If ever you forget to turn up, my sleeping partner has to help herself out. Or make do with an evening of philosophy. If I am a demon, Ilana, then I am a genie, and you are my bottle. I’ve never managed to escape.

Nor have you, for that matter, Lady Sommo. If you are a demon, I am
your
bottle.

I read in Bernanos that unhappiness is a source of blessing. To this Catholic honeydew I replied in my book that all happiness is basically a trite Christian invention. Happiness, I wrote, is kitsch. It has nothing in common with the
eudaimonia
of the Greeks. Whereas in Judaism the whole idea of happiness does not exist; there isn’t even a word corresponding to it in the Bible. Apart, perhaps, from the satisfaction of approval, a positive feedback from God or your neighbor: “Blessed are the undefiled in the way,” for instance. Judaism recognizes only joy. As in the verse “Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth.” Ephemeral joy, like the fire of the cryptic Heraclitus, whose victory is its destruction, joy whose converse is wrapped up in it and in fact actually makes it possible.