Amos Oz - Touch the Water, Touch the Wind

And the war ended.

Blood poisoning. Pneumonia. Exhaustion.

Large peasants with broad sashes and clay pipes, suspicious men with bushy whiskers, took Pomeranz to a tumbledown hospital in northern Hungary. It was in a long narrow valley, a swampy region fed by the Carpathian streams. Here they raised lean pigs and strange vegetables, and an alarming number of the children were deformed from birth.

The barracks of the ducal regiment were now a revolutionary hospital, or it may originally have been stables. The walls were daubed with crooked Magyar crosses. At the top of each cross someone had pinned brightly colored pictures of the fathers of the Russian Revolution. The portraits had been hurriedly or clumsily torn from some propaganda pamphlet, and their outlines were irregular.

Pomeranz was laid on two sacks of straw. His groin and armpits were sprayed with DDT and he was given antisyphilis tablets from the stocks left behind by the Germans. No other medicines were available as yet.

There was a Ruthenian doctor, as tiny as a grasshopper and wrecked by nicotine. He believed with perfect faith that Dziobak Przywolski was indeed the son of a virgin and that he had risen from the dead. But then he also ascribed virgin birth to Stalin, to the Polish Marshal Smigly-Rydz, to several local herdsmen, and, finally — in a sudden fit of high-pitched fury — to himself as well.

In sum, the unwashed Ruthenian doctor argued that every proletarian, provided he was not Pontius Pilate or Judas Iscariot, must be Jesus. He argued by elimination: if you are not Jesus, who are you? To support this opinion, and also his claim to be the inventor of aspirin, he produced a parchment scroll written and sealed in a Ukrainian dialect, and he insisted that this same dialect had been used by the writer Gogol in his early works.

All the doctor's ideas were enthusiastically seconded by a one-armed organist, a local man, who was indisputably related to the Bach family; he had once made his living by eating live flies in a cabaret in Budapest, and now he was in the habit of kicking at every door and shouting, Serve them right, serve them right, they've got their just deserts, load of skunks, everything that's hit them on land and sea and air is only a foretaste of the punishment that's waiting for them in Heaven, in the Angelic Realm, even outside the Solar System, if you'll all just keep quiet for a moment you'll hear for yourselves the sound of the knives being sharpened.

Pomeranz lay very quiet. He was regaining his strength. The place gave him perfect rest and healing. His mouth organ lay untouched.

One night, by the light of a crazed Hungarian candle, the Ruthenian entered, neighing wildly, bringing the virgin Mary herself to the invalid's bed. She smelled of milk and rye and goat dung, and she was lacking most of her teeth. Pomeranz opened his eyes wide, tore her sackcloth off her, inhaled her smell, Jewish loneliness suddenly flooded him so that his soul wanted to burst out howling. But his watchmaker's fingers retained their precision and expertise. They brought the virgin Mary to shrill giggles, pleading whimpers, desperate sighs, she began to revel with her legs with her teeth with her nails. The doctor and his friend the organist stood beside the ragged palliasse and shielded the cavorting flame from the wind with their hands as a wild draft swept through the cellar and they sang Ave Maria in harmony like an angelic choir until the vision was fulfilled and the holy virgin was led out of the stable laughing cursing dripping blood sweat and tears.

Pomeranz recovered, too. He got up and continued on his way, to the Land where Spring reigns eternal.

Where is that land, that Promised Land, Joy of the World, our journey's end?

Pomeranz now carried several new sets of documents:

Bulgarian.

Polish.

Red Cross.

Jewish Agency.

Red Partisan Brotherhood.

And he sometimes had whole packages of Rumanian cigarettes. A Russian greatcoat. Superbly German fur-lined boots. And, what was more, a pair of woolen gloves from the Joint Distribution Committee. It was a slow, lunatic journey, through the length and breadth of the Balkans. As if his soul's inner flow had been beset by a sudden stammer, a need to linger, to prepare, to setde something once and for all. He tried in Vienna. He tried in South Tyrol. And once, in a Zionist refugee hostel named after Max Nordau, Pomeranz happened to hear the gospel from his Promised Land. David Ben-Gurion, on his way to London, stayed overnight and addressed the survivors, passionately and with the fervor of inner conviction, a fire blazing in our breasts, human chaff will once again become a nation, we shall rebuild the Temple, set the land aflame with a blaze of green.

Pomeranz was almost tempted to take out his mouth organ and play an accompaniment.

Only, the next morning persistent rumors spread among the refugees that it had not been Ben-Gurion at all, but someone else, an impersonator, a double, a dummy sent to draw the assassins' fire.

So the dreamy son of a watchmaker began frantically buying and selling bales of cloth. For the time being. In private he belched and belched. The mouth organ lay untouched. Was there still a mouth organ, or was that too perhaps a double, a deliberate imposture?

Now he only worked wonders when no one was looking. And he restricted himself to minor, trivial actions, like lighting a cigarette with a fountain pen, or soothing an aching tooth. He would not have hesitated to steal chickens left and right, if there had been any chickens to steal.

And sold them for lire. And changed them into drachmas. Converted to dollars. For the time being.

In Piraeus he was involved for some days and weeks with Polish deserters who were smuggling parts for sewing machines from port to port, westward toward Marseille. His job was to remove the rust, to stamp them with false names, to paint them convincing colors. The deserters, who were mostly old sailors, called Pomeranz Mieczyslaw the First, because they ecstatically believed that the Princess Magda Izawolska had conceived an illegitimate child by the late Pope, and that he was her son.

Indeed, one night they anointed him with sewing-machine oil King of the New Poland. The tavern walls shook all night long with the sounds of cheering and singing. There was a rumor that the Americans were on the point of setting up a new kingdom of Poland in the Aegean Islands under the protection of the Ninth Airborne Division. Until circumstances changed. And when the right time came, they would join Greece to the Baltic by a gigantic canal.

The deserters were preparing for the dawn of the New Poland, purifying their souls, enthusiastically anticipating the great moment, dedicatedly stealing whatever they might need on the day, clothing, food, wine, rifles and pistols, and especially flags and bugles. Pomeranz, for his part, ran a printing press and produced quantities of Swiss promissory notes.

He said to himself:

Wine, sardines, women, greatcoat, cigarettes, you've got everything for nothing. They don't demand anything from you in return. And if some stars suddenly wake up and start singing in the distance before dawn, why, all you have to do is stand alone on the quayside in Piraeus till daybreak, concentrate hard, and listen in perfect silence. You don't need to give any answer. This is Greece. The New Kingdom of Poland. Just say good night to the American sentry. Accept a cigarette. Przywolski the Last or Mieczyslaw the First, stand and smoke with your collar turned up. And because the sea is close at hand, proffer the glowing stub to the black water.

Stefa and the Professor jointly sent a lengthy and anguished letter of complaint to Professor Heidegger. Among other things they propounded a model for a hypothetical synthesis between suffering and the will: a kind of reciprocity, a new definition of the subjective-objective relationship in a sphere laden with will and suffering.