The Same Sea (15 page)

You didn't. The boy has gone. The boy who was yours has gone. This
evening in the square three neon signs in Sinhalese and one in English:
Xanadu dance bar, first and last drink free on the house. Order a gin. Talk
for a while to one of those easy girls who by the way is also called Xanadu.
A boy. Lost. Not mine. Vanished. Don't know his name. He always calls me
Your Honor and I call him Come-Here. Eight. Or six. Who can tell?
So many children abandoned here. Maybe he needs help. He may be
screaming to me in the dark. Or no longer screaming. On the barbed wire
opposite is a torn scrap of kite. Another kite. Not ours. And warm rain
has been hanging for hours in the air. Sit and mourn. There's plenty of time.
Xanadu stays open till daylight.

At six in the evening Bettine is walking along the shadier sidewalk to Viterbo's pharmacy, a woman with attractive hips, wearing a skirt made of an Indian material, and earrings, with her hair bobbed, her handbag swinging from her shoulder. Two days ago she won six hundred shekels in the lottery, and she is going to spend the money on Albert as well as herself. Besides acamol and calcium tablets, she is going to buy essence of propolis and echinacea, ginseng, and capsules of garlic and zinc. On second thought she will also get some brewers yeast and a jar of royal jelly for Dita who is looking washed-out, and two little toothbrushes and some vanilla-flavored toothpaste for her grandchildren on Friday evening. There's something cheap about that Dita, she's so caught up in herself, always preening, but she's rather touching too. The truth is it wouldn't hurt that bulldog Dubi Dombrov if someone took care of him. (Bettine casts a fleeting glance on his behalf toward a display of health care products but warns herself, Don't overdo it) As she leaves the pharmacy at twenty past six, Mr. Viterbo follows her with a smile that has no ostensible cause yet is not groundless. Instead of heading straight for Albert's she walks, clutching her plastic bag, to the seaside esplanade from which one can see the sun moving fairly fast toward the sea which, for its part, receives its sharp stabs of simple color and responds with its own complex colors. If you stop talking sometimes, my
teacher
Zelda said to me when I was about seven, maybe things will sometimes be able to speak to you. Long afterward I found in a poem of hers "
a very faint quivering that moves the leaves when they meet the light of the dawn.
" Bettine is a far less thin-skinned mortal than my teacher Zelda, but something sometimes reminds me of her, for instance the way Bettine says, Listen, here's what I saw, or, Now don't you repeat that. A few days ago she said to me, Try to visualize what is implied in the bureaucratic expression "expired" that we use ten times a day without hearing what it is actually saying, but if you stop to think about it there is good reason to be startled. In my dream I am still in the pharmacy where I've been sent to return something embarrassing, like a bra or a garter belt from her clothesline that has somehow ended up at our place by mistake, and I try to give it back but she argues with me, Take a boy like Giggy, take someone like Dombrov even, and I say to her, I have taken them, and she smiles, not at me but at the pharmacist Viterbo, who smiles with her against me as he wraps a mouth organ for me which I haven't bought. Dear Bettine (I say to her in the dream as though I am greeting her at some formal occasion), why don't you bring your grandchildren over to our place this weekend, to play with our grandchildren? It wont fuse together, she says, and I am amazed in my dream and suddenly I'm not at the pharmacy but running across a plot of wasteland as the sirens howl. Little boy don't believe. Or do. Believe. What then. An invisible presence, she says, a terrible mute presence, and everything, from a stone to an urge, brings us not its sound, or an echo of its sound, but only a shadow of a shadow of a shadow or maybe not even that, but only a trembling, only a longing for shadow. Such is Bettine's creed, such is her faith. One evening in the summer she called me in Arad to chat about some book she was reading, and she told me she thought it was all quite hopeless really but at the same time quite amusing, because it turns out that something that never was and never will be is all that we have and that is what she wants to fuse together. Dear Bettine. If only they would let you.

In south Bat Yam they're building a new mall, they've closed a grocery shop
and opened a fashion boutique or a bank, dedicated a garden to Yitzhak
Rabin, with a fountain and benches. In Bangladesh there has been more
flooding: the monsoon has washed away bridges, villages and crops. Not here.
Here we are expecting primaries, scuds or devaluation, whichever comes first.
Ben-Gal & Partners have purchased a new plot to build luxury apartments
and duplexes and commissioned a ninety-second promotional film from
Dubi Dombrov: your dream home, penthouse with sea view. Dita Inbar
wrote the script. Apart from that, she's been to the hairdresser's, and bought
a spring dress and sandals. She is writing another screenplay
about the eccentric Greek in Jaffa who brought the dead back for
a short while, before he died himself. Then his heirs quarrelled about his flat.
Instead of a lawsuit, for a modest fee, Albert Danon has worked out a
compromise. On Tuesday Bettine is giving him supper, on Thursday night
she is coming round for tea and cakes on the veranda. The winter is ending.
The birds are at work. This light is pleasant and the nights are quiet.

Now everything is closed in Bat Yam except the duty pharmacy, where
a cool neon light is flickering. Behind the counter, in a white coat, sits
an Italian Jew, no longer young, who for three hours has been reading
line by line everything written in the daily paper, which while he reads
has become yesterday's paper. He wonders aloud but he knows that
there will be no answer. From the pocket of his white coat he takes
a pen and taps the side of his empty cup four or five times. It is not the
sound that startles him but the renewed silence: now it is really pure.

For ever. He's gone. And from now on
it will hurt. Get up. Go. To bed. Or
not. Sit down. Have another gin
or don't Go out. Come back. He's
not Only there, on the rumpled canvas,
a cigarette-butt of his smell is left
among the brew of fish smells.

The sky is dark and empty. A mist flows through a mist.
It has not rained this evening. It seems it will not rain.

Its grey and calm here. Getting darker. A still bird on a post.
Two cypresses grow almost joined. A third one grows apart.

I'm curious to know why there is this smell of smoke
although there is no fire. A piece of an old kite

is hanging on the fence. A mist drifts through a mist.
I'm not there any longer, yet I'm all there: standing still.

Here is how we could sum it all up. A man is at home. His son is not here.
His daughter-in-law is staying with him for the time being. She
goes out. Comes back. She has someone in the meantime. He's doing well,
sleeps with her when he's free, a smart lad, who comes and goes.

A man is sitting at his desk It is night. All is quiet. His son
is not here. On the sideboard place mats, lace doilies, and two
photographs. Sea at the window. Brown furniture. Tonight
he has to check some accounts. What balances. What doesn't.

A widow with bobbed hair was here earlier this evening,
almost by chance, she drops in now and then for a glass
of tea. The winter is passing. The sea remains. As for the light,
it goes and it comes. Now like this and now like that.

Tonight he needs to work out his profits and losses, what
does it profit a man. Rows of columns. Sorrow is not
like this: it has no measure. The carpenter is dead. The desk
is still here. The Narrator is running his fingers over it.

He's told the story of himself and of his mother, he's tried to avoid
the word "like." He's told the tale of a wandering Russian merchant
who did not reach China and would never see his home again.
The tale of a snowman that roams alone among the rugged

mountains; he's told of the sea and of Chandartal. It revolves,
the whole business, it comes and it goes. The moon tonight
is pale and sharp, frightening the garden, twisting the fence,
tapping lightly on your window: now please begin all over again.

Even you. Everyone. All Bat Yam will be full of new people and they
in their turn, all alone in the night, will wonder at times with surprise what
the moon is doing to the sea and what is the purpose of silence. And they too
will have no reply. All of this hangs more or less on a thread. The purpose
of silence is silence.

And now it's as clear as can be. The moon is bending low over the dark of
the sea, drawing up toward itself expanses of many waters and the mighty
waves of the deep, covering them as if with lead. All over the sea the moon
spreads a quicksilver web which it draws in and heaves up to itself. That
is what I am talking about.

Now he is resting up in a cheap inn in a small town in the south
of Sri Lanka. Through the crisscrossed bars three huts, a slope,
little sailing boats, the Indian Ocean, warm, its waves are sharp
slivers of green bottleglass in the harsh sun. Maria is not here. She
has gone to Goa, from where she may return to Portugal Or
she may not. Its hard for her. In the tiny cell is a stool, a rusty nail,
a hanger, a yellow rush mat, and in the corner a mattress.
There is a cracked washbasin whose enamel surface is scarred by black
patches. A nibbled electric wire curls slackly along the walls, draped
in cobwebs. A hotplate stained brown by milk that has boiled over
and not been cleaned for years. And there is a picture cut out of a
magazine, showing the Queen of England, with an air of faint distaste,
bending and patting the head of an almost crying local child, his shabby
trousers drooping, his limbs gaunt, a starving alley-cat.
The picture is dotted with fly droppings. And there is a cracked sink,
and a tap leaking rusty water drop by drop. Lie down now on
the mattress and listen. You've been here and there, you've sought
and you've found, this is the place. And when the daylight fades,
when the damp tropical evening smothers this glassy light, you
will still lie on this mattress, sweating and listening, not
missing a drop. And in the night too, and tomorrow: drop drop
drop and this is Xanadu. You've arrived. Here you are.

Moon in the morning moon in the evening wreaking light in the night
skeletal all the day hurting every part O my child Absalom my son
my son Absalom, the desk is here the bed is here the guitar is here but
you are a dream moon in the night moon in the day glowing on the sea
pale in the window, preying on every living part my son my son.

Giggy Ben-Gal who had arrived back only the previous day from Brussels
drove in his new BMW to look at an old orange grove near Binyamina
that was about to be dug up. He had had a reliable tip that in a couple of years
this whole area would be released for housing. It would pay to snap up today
at the price of farmland what tomorrow would be prime building lots in a
sought-after district. He sat till evening in a fairly run-down village house,
was offered thick coffee and home made carob jam, and had a jocular
conversation with the heirs of the deceased farmer. The younger son was
on the ball, he'd served in a crack regiment; the older son seemed rather
tricky, saying hardly a word, with one eye closed and the other only half
open, too mean to waste more than a quarter of a look on you.
Every time the conversation inched in the direction of a deal, he would throw
in a sour half-sentence. Forget it, mate. We weren't born yesterday either.
At last, as it was getting dark, Giggy stood up and said, Right, OK, let's
put it on hold, first the two of you try to sort out what game you're in, then
give me a call and we'll talk, here's my card. Instead of driving straight back
into town he decided to take another look at the orange grove that was dying
because it didn't pay to irrigate it. There was a giant ficus tree nearby,
bowed with age, and beneath it Giggy parked and walked down the rows
of orange trees, treading on thistles and whistling. Birds whose names he
didn't know replied from the branches, chattering, pleading, as though
they too were trying to sell him some marvelous piece of property
that they had no real idea of the value of, nor of its potential. For a quarter
of an hour he wandered, forcing his way through ferns and brambles until thick
darkness settled over the neglected grove and it was only with difficulty,
after getting lost, that he managed to locate his ficus tree, but his new BMW
had vanished with his cell phone inside it and all the birds fell silent all at once,
as though their singing had been no more than a cunning trick to lure
and distract him, so as to help the thief. Giggy was left all alone
in this out-of-the-way place where it was definitely not healthy to be alone
after dark, especially unarmed. He started to grope his way through the
undergrowth toward the village but the long low building he was heading for
turned out to be no more than an abandoned packing shed, and suddenly
a jackal or fox broke into a howl. Rather close. And in the distance dogs
barked and the darkness filled with stealthy movements. Giggy sat down
on the ground and leaned back against the wall of the dilapidated shed,
sensing the stab of cold stars among the branches of the grove and the glow
of his watch and patches of shadow among the trees. For a few moments
he cursed, then he stopped. He felt calm. A cold, mute beauty, a deep wide
night was opening up before his eyes. Here and there large shadows looked
at him and a feminine breeze from the sea inserted its fine fingers between his
shirt and his skin and for a moment he felt that all this, breeze, branches,
stars, even the darkness itself, was staring at him as though patiently waiting
for some delayed coin to drop. The dead farmers house where he had spent
most of the day, with its two palm trees in front, suddenly
struck him as perfect for
Nirit's Love
: the cypresses all round the yard,
the tumbledown henhouses, the stacks of utility furniture,
the flower-patterned plaster all stained, the plywood and formica surfaces
blistered and peeling at the edges, this was the perfect location.
And now he opened himself up to hear the prickly carpet of crickets
and a cow lowing in the dark as though it was his own soul keening and
village women in the distance answered with a heart-rending Russian tune
the like of which you would never hear again in Tel Aviv. Arise now
and go, light and calm get up and go in search of what you have lost.