Amos Oz - Touch the Water, Touch the Wind

Deep in the outer darkness the friar can hear the roar of a night train, and the sudden wailing of the engine as it approaches a junction.

Through the bars of the window the man watches two lean girl students at the corner of the lane, beneath a yellow street lamp, writing, no doubt in red, on a dark wall. Presumably they are writing a slogan against the established order.

From the darkness of his tiny cell in the Dominican friary the lone watcher fancies he observes that the two girls are freezing in the bitter cold and one of them is even sobbing or perhaps rather chuckling in silent malice. The steel razor shoots a lightning spark into his watching eye, the white of the eye glows red, and now the friar too chuckles to himself and quietly grinds his teeth.

Then he puts the flaming razor to his throat. With his free hand he pulls his left ear. The back of his hand is extraordinarily hairy, a monkey's paw, and beneath the tangled black tufts the luxuriant flesh is as red as raw steak, as if there were no skin covering it. Thick dark-blue veins intertwine, seemingly unable to contain the throbbing of the heavy blood. Each heartbeat makes the blood vessels shudder and jump as if they are about to burst. Something is pushing, something is evidently struggling to burst out, a blind swell thrusting outward. This powerful body, there is no mistaking it, would never collapse under the weight of years or fade away in weakness; it would burst outward from the force of the pent-up tide.

Every morning, an hour and a half before sunrise, the big-boned friar is in the habit of shaving with a cut-throat razor and ice-cold water. He shaves at the window of his cell, without a looking-glass, from memory; he knows all the features of his face by heart, like a simple time.

The breadth and coarseness of the jaws.

The heaviness of the chin.

The almost monumental span of the nostrils, like mighty, shameless arches.

The friar has also forsworn lather forever: nothing but blade and bare skin.

And so, with dry gleaming razor on dry cardboard skin, he cuts through the bristles with short powerful strokes like a lumberjack felling a forest.

Here is no self-mortification, certainly no joy of self-denial or humiliation of the flesh through pain, but, rather, the very opposite of all these virtues: his violent nightly shave affords him shudders of pleasure, a sensual enjoyment which he is neither willing nor able to conceal. He draws the finely stropped razor across his large jowl with strong, controlled strokes. He shaves cautiously at the point where the veins pulse warm and close beneath the skin, in the pit of the throat. The crackling sound of the bristles as they respond to the razor sends a delicious shudder down his back, fully arousing the big-boned body, spreading a flood of inner moans to the very tips of his toes, in his loins an exultant diapason, accompanied by tortures of boiling oil, of burning poison, flashes of criss-crossing sensations. Fire within ice.

All this takes place without the slightest haste. As slowly as the flesh can stand, luxuriously, drawing out every movement, savoring the echo responding from the depths, with great precision, with practiced concentration and the utmost sensitivity.

And yet on closer inspection there is no doubt that this is all a constant striving toward spiritual ecstasy:

The very razor, a heavy, solid instrument when viewed normally, tapers gradually before your very eyes to a thin fine point, straining at its tip to rise upward, to escape from the realm of the physical. Just like a Gothic spire the razor is nothing less than solid matter straining on tiptoe toward distant ethereal heights, the gradual purification of steel whose very soul yearns ardently for insubstantiality, and more, to become pure idea or spirit.

And similarly the urgency of the blood struggling to burst out of the imprisonment of the flesh, to be released and become an unrestrained, unbounded flow.

And similarly the movements of the furry hand holding the razor with the precise grip of a virtuoso, as if there were no razor, no nocturnal shaving, but as if he were playing the violin to himself in his cell by candlelight, the Dominican Friar Topf.

And similarly the crackling of the bristles, a subtle variation on the crackling of mighty forests in a terrible summer fire.

And similarly the sensual pleasure streaming inward and assailing some crucial point in the pit of the stomach or at the base of the spine until the throat holds back a low groan and every nerve bursts into a rhythmic spasm.

And similarly with the first hints of murky daylight, the last rays of moonlight on the row of poplars in the lane. The friary walls. The two girls, too, laughing and freezing outside, or perhaps waiting for a sign. And the wailing of the train to the night's embrace. And the night itself, gradually dying away. The bars in the window. The crucifix on the cell wall. The pious books. The shame. The ecstasy. The creeping on of death. The smell of distant darkness. Suffering. Silence. Stony tranquillity.

The beautiful German town of Baden-Baden has been chosen as the venue for a world congress of mathematical logicians and philosophers.

The aged philosopher Martin Heidegger, despite being a rather controversial personality, is to deliver the opening address.

And now, at noontide, the red van of the Mobile Mail hurries up along the steep winding road among the gloomy Galilean hills. A cloud of dust surrounds the van, its horn blares, and Elisha Pomeranz too has received — in a large pile of otherwise uninteresting mail — an official invitation heavily embossed and sealed with a gold seal: the pleasure of his highly esteemed presence is requested and he is invited to honor the Congress by delivering a lecture on the subject of mathematical infinity. It is further requested that he be so kind as to submit in advance a synopsis or abstract of the lecture he proposes to deliver, for purposes of prior consideration and for the information of the other honored participants. In expectant anticipation, faithfully and with deep admiration, Germany, such-and-such a date, such-and-such a year.

For several days Pomeranz weighed the invitation in his mind. He measured various angles and ranges, compared possible trajectories, as if he had been given the responsibility of digging a canal to link the New Kingdom of Poland in the Isles of Greece with the Baltic — or else to dismiss the responsibility out of hand.

Suddenly he made up his mind to accept and to attend.

Mieczyslaw the First or Przywolski the Last, can it be that the powers will abandon you in the place where sentence will publicly be pronounced.

And if the powers do abandon you precisely at that time and in that place, even that can only be to the good.

Let it be the lion's mouth, the crowds of doubters and mockers, the place of bloodshed.

His decision filled him with excitement, almost with joy. He said to himself:

"So far."

And also:

"The glass eyes of the stuffed bear."

And:

"Heidegger in person. Heidegger himself."

The Kibbutz Committee approved the journey at once, gladly and in a friendly spirit.

At the same meeting they noted that Pomeranz intended to continue to devote half his time to the sheep, and that he intended to carry on as usual repairing members' watches and giving extra tuition to the backward pupils.

These facts created a positive and highly sympathetic impression. There were some who revised their previous bad opinions of Elisha. There were others who shrugged their shoulders and said, Well. Or, Very well. And, of course, there were others again who had their own ideas, who saw in all this devotion a pose of false humility which they considered worse than any pride or arrogance: Oh, look, he's taking his turn at dish washing in the dining hall, just like a mere mortal, just like one of us, quick, get a camera, you must get a shot of this, he's acting at being human, the Lord of the Infinite playing the Good Samaritan.