Yoel Hoffmann - Moods

[75]

That song broke our hearts and later so did Eleanor Rigby.

Here are some other things that break the heart: An old door. A glass left out in the yard. A woman’s foot squeezed into shoes, so her toes become twisted. A grocer whose store no one goes into. Above all, a husband and wife who don’t talk to each other. One-eyed cats. Junkyards. The stairwells of old buildings. A small boy on his way to school. Old women sitting all day by the window. Display windows with only a single item or two, coated with dust. A shopping list. Forty-watt bulbs. Signs with an ampersand (such as ZILBERSTEIN & CHAMNITZER), and when a person we love disappears (at a train station, for instance) into the distance.

[76]

Mrs. Shtiasny’s Italian husband kept a bottle of brandy in the pantry and drank from it every so often.

One day during the fifties he opened the pantry door and a large package of noodles fell out and the noodles scattered across the floor.

This event resembled (in miniature) that meteor crashing into Siberia. We saw how thousands of trees were leveled at once in precisely the same formation as the noodles.

So it is that similar patterns run through the world. The lines in a leaf and the veins in the leg of a diabetic. The concave places in a woman’s body and the valleys of regions like Provence. Heavenly bodies and uncut diamonds scattered about on a large table at the polishing workshop, and so on.

Mrs. Shtiasny got down on her knees and gathered up all the noodles, one by one. And because times were hard, she washed them under tap water and turned them into a soup.

[77]

And there was another thing. That a man knocked on the door and asked for a glass of water. He was carrying a large bundle of rugs on his shoulder and when he’d had enough to drink he spread one out on the hallway floor and said: “This is authentic, from Paras” (he stressed the first syllable, as Persian does).

The rug was the color of a pomegranate and held within it the forms of small birds and all sorts of flowers, and among them, equidistant from one another, were people.

He put down the glass on the edge of the rug and the small people near the glass got up from the rug and took a drink from the water left in the glass, then returned to their places among the birds and the flowers.

Many of the things recollected in this book are fiction. But the memory of this event, which we call (amongst ourselves) “the great thirst in the hall,” is real.

[78]

Yesterday we read in the paper that a man broke a glass at his own wedding (in remembrance of the Temple’s destruction) and shards of glass went into the sole of his foot and he was taken directly from the chuppah to the hospital, and there they removed the glass from his flesh and bandaged his foot and as soon as he left he hired a lawyer and sued the owners of the banquet hall.

Imagine for a moment the crucified one coming down from the cross and hiring a lawyer. He’d have thrown history off its course, and who knows what disasters might have ensued.

Better for a person to accept his fate and head off on his honeymoon while his foot is bleeding and only there, as the sheets turn red, let out a groan.

Sometimes things are sevenfold worse, as when a man manages to break the glass and his feet are fine but his wife then scowls for forty years.

[79]

Certain people are named Jorge and it’s quite likely that they are scattered, not by chance but along the lines of geometric patterns (at the apex of a triangle or at a rectangle’s corners), all across Israel.

And in fact it makes little difference if one Jorge takes the place of another. If he sometimes finds there an extra child or a refrigerator of a different color, he quickly gets used to it and to the woman who, in any event, everyone calls “Jorge’s wife.”

These are the turns life takes, and it takes us here and there, sometimes in Adidas sneakers and sometimes in Crocs and the like.

These changes are easier by night, when outlines blur, and nearly every man is willing to take in nearly every woman and vice versa.

[80]

And there are those who believe that movements like these (that is, who goes to whom, etc.) are scribbled in the stars, but we lift our eyes and see something else spelled out there.

First, what’s written is written on infinite paper. Second, it’s silent (that is, it can’t be pronounced). And third, it’s very very old.

But beneath that writing that no one can read we receive the great effulgence that’s possible to see in tall towers of canned food.

At night, when the supermarket closes, the cashiers go out into the street and return to their room-and-a-half beneath what’s written in the heavens — and no doubt it’s written that death will surely come, and so we shouldn’t worry so much. After all, we too are made of stardust, and there is no difference between the stuff of the stars and us.

[81]

Day after day Uncle Ladislaus lay in bed and wiggled his ears. And though he owned a donkey, he didn’t make house calls. The donkey, which he tied to a pomegranate tree, brayed out of boredom and Aunt Matusya brought it leftover compote.

In those days you could see in the sky (there were no factories or street lights) a million stars. Below, between Herzl and Yahalom Streets, you sometimes saw the mayor, fat Krinitzi.

Our lives (which is to say, my life) was contained within a much smaller body, and all we wanted in this world was that this girl or that one would agree to be our girlfriend.

[82]

At this time most of the boys were named Tuvya. Girls were called Kinneret. The air was full of the scent of cypress trees (and countless lewd images). Teachers were usually called Yehudit.

But all this we’ve already said elsewhere. What good do those memories do? They’re made of the stuff of dreams, and the stuff of dreams (as it says in the Talmud, Gittin 52) makes nothing happen.

We’ll go with everyone to the mall and pass by the stores like herds of buffalo on the savanna. Then we’ll sit in front of large plasma screen TVs.

After all, Uncle Ladislaus and Mrs. Shtiasny and her Italian husband and my stepmother Francesca are already dead. Others now are living.

And what’s left of that world? Nothing. Only eternal truths, such as that two plus two equals four or that the sum of a triangle’s angles is always one hundred and eighty.

[83]

Maybe we’ll write (in a leaner style) a contemporary story. For instance:

At six o’clock, Zivit opened her eyes and yawned. She already heard the noise of the first bus from the street. I need to move to a new place, she thought to herself. Two cups stood on the table with coffee grounds in them. Only when her eyes fell on the cups did she remember Ohad. She turned her head toward the pillow beside her and saw his hairy back. She recognized the curl she’d made on his back before they fell asleep. Is this the man, she wondered, I’m destined to grow old with? Various thoughts passed through her mind. What about his son, she thought. Will Ohad want him to live with us? He’s always saying that his ex is destroying the kid, and he almost went to a lawyer about it. And if it weren’t for the social worker’s report about the mother, the child would already be living with them. Am I cut out, she asked herself, to act as a mother to someone else’s child? I doubt I can be a good mother to a child of my own.

She picked up her panties and bra from the rug and threw them into the hamper. Then she stood for a long while in front of the closet and finally chose a thong and a lace bra that was nearly see-through. She walked around in the room like that, wearing only her panties and bra, hoping that Ohad would open his eyes and see her, but he was fast asleep. No wonder, she thought, after last night’s wild sex.