Muck Page 7

  And so they got talking, though Jeremiah didn’t introduce himself, and she didn’t recognize him at first, what with his scruffy beard and the years that had piled up behind them both. He asked what the name Potsherd Gate meant, and she said, Well, it was actually called the Dung Gate when it was out behind the current gate, but the Potsherd Gate sounds nicer, and, anyway, broken pieces of earthenware were dumped there. And she picked up a shard to show him. He asked whether she had a cheap jug for him, and she gave him one, and he asked if it was imported, and she replied that she herself had made the jug. It’s a clay jug, made of the scraps of other jugs; in this jug there are a whole lot of other jugs that died, and so you might say it’s a kind of miracle, my putting them back together again. Noa spoke quietly, earnestly: The vision of the dry bones is a complicated affair for human beings, but for jugs it’s simple; for a jug it doesn’t matter if its neck once belonged to some other jug, and if its body is nothing more than the remnants of ten different shattered bodies. As long as it holds cold water without leaking, it’s a whole vessel, she said. And he told her, I’m Jeremiah, you forgot me; and she stared at him, and covered his beard with one hand, and peered into his eyes, and said, It’s been years.

  Later, they sat beside the stall and caught up with each other, filling in the last five long years, ever since they both turned seventeen. Of course, he didn’t speak to her of the events of the last two days. She, too, skipped over several episodes. She let slip several words in Moabite to her hired hand: I’ll be back soon, she said, as she wrapped Jeremiah’s jug in rustling brown paper. But for some reason Jeremiah asked her to keep the jug’s neck exposed, so she neatly removed the wrapping paper and folded it into her embroidered shoulder bag. She looked at his locket and asked him if there was something inside, and he said, I’m carrying an almond, and she touched the locket with her finger and asked if she could see it, and he carefully unfastened the necklace and sprung the locket open and removed the almond and placed it in his open palm and then closed his fist, and she saw the photo of a girl inside the open locket, and asked wordlessly who she was, and Jeremiah answered in kind.

  As they skirted the harbor and crossed the Cinematheque bridge, a school of fish darted around below, and after a few paces, short of breath, Noa said, Maybe we can sit down for a bit. All the while, Jeremiah was carrying his jug. They turned left and made their way up to the Scottish Hospice, where there were outdoor tables and shade. Clouds scudded overhead. It was possible to sit back for a while, sequestered, listening. And Noa remembered Jeremiah’s sister, and asked, How many years has it been? She’d forgotten his sister’s name and asked him, and Jeremiah said, Mom decided that we wouldn’t mention her by name anymore. You can call her your sister. And Noa remembered all sorts of things, such as how Jeremiah’s mother once came to school to talk to them about dancing. What is dance in the first place? Why dance, she asked; after all, one can walk and sit and lie and run, the body doesn’t force anyone to make this kind of a movement. And then she did something strange, abrupt; Noa imitated the movement, facing Jeremiah. Your mother is such a good-looking woman, she said. You can see that she isn’t from around here. And Jeremiah, who had no recollection of his mother’s visit to their school, said: She told me that all dancers were very beautiful people when they danced. That dance made them beautiful. And at times something of that survives when the dance ends; the beauty of the dance movement lingers when they go to the grocery store an hour, a day, a month, a year later. I never saw my mother’s beauty, Jeremiah said. She was simply my mother. But my sister—now, she was beautiful. I didn’t inherit their good looks, he added dryly. I resemble my father; only the color of my eyes comes from her. Everything else is from him. Noa looked at him and wanted to say something, but held back. And your mother? Jeremiah wanted to ask, but didn’t, because he’d now remembered her mother’s misshapen hand and went pale. And Jeremiah wanted to tell her something about the Babylonians and the exile that was about to take place, about the long march, but he held back. After all, he didn’t know whether she would have to go into exile or not, and most of all he wished she’d just stay with him a bit longer—no, a lot longer—and he knew perfectly well what would happen if he made even the slightest reference to destruction, exile, and prophecy.

  She showed him her hand and said, Look how much dirt has collected between my nails and fingers. And he said, There are guest rooms at the hospice, and they must have bathtubs and hot water … It must be great to lie in a hot tub facing the harbor. She said, You’ve grown a beard. He said, Yes, it’s been growing this last week; my electric razor broke. And she said, That’s no excuse, and laughed. I can shave it off for you, she said, with fingernail scissors. Just kidding—it suits you. And what happened to your head? I bumped it, he replied. When I woke up.

  She took out a cigarette and smoked silently. I’ve got to go back down to the stall, she said. Maybe we’ll meet again? You’re around? Are you still living with your parents, over there in the village? And he said, No, I rented a one-room apartment a while ago on Ha-Yarmukh Street. She didn’t know where that was. And he heard himself say, Forget it, it isn’t important; it’s pretty far. A shadow of surprise clouded her face, and she wondered what had happened, and told him: I’m staying at my mother’s apartment. You remember where that is, don’t you? In the Wolfson Towers. And Jeremiah, on account of the wave of murkiness that was suddenly sweeping over him, said, I forgot everything, Noa, I’ve completely blotted everything out.

  He accompanied her down the slope in the direction of her stall, and stopped on the bridge and apologized: I’m feeling anxious today, he said; it’d be great to see you again. He wanted to tell her that he’d loved her five years ago—it wasn’t true, but the memory of the love he conjured now felt like true love. After all, looking back, he could have loved her, he certainly could have. He wanted to please her in some way, so he told her, as though mockingly, Next time, give me a snapshot of you and I’ll put it in my locket. And she said, A thing or two has to happen before we get to swap locket photos, no? And he got frightened and said, Yes, yes, you’re right, they’ll happen, those things will happen—maybe tomorrow? Maybe we’ll meet again tomorrow? And she said, Tomorrow is so far off. I’ll close up the stall and we’ll hang out. Okay? And though he wanted to run for it, he said, Great.

  7

  HE WAITED FOR HER, staring into space at the corner of the city wall, and then they made their way to the cable car and ascended to the Bookworm Café and Bookstore, overlooking the water and the Hinnom Valley basin. From the height of the cable car, Noa had caught sight of her stall and her Moabite assistant, who was slowly arranging the merchandise before closing the shop early. And she felt the stare of—for a second she forgot the name of her assistant—latch on to the scruff of her neck, on to her body, and a fleeting vision surged up within her, the sight of herself leaping out of the cable car and hovering in the air over the valley.

  The waitress smiled at Jeremiah from behind the counter and admired his jug. She removed two tea bags from a wooden box. Jeremiah nodded. The waitress had a twin sister, and Jeremiah never knew with whom he was talking. One of them he liked, and the other not; that is to say, there was one who knew him and was likable, and there was one who didn’t know him and who made a show of ignoring him, and in this way he could tell the two apart—except, of course, that he couldn’t be absolutely sure that the one who ignored him was the sister who didn’t know him. After all, maybe the first sister, the one who knew him, had chosen that day to ignore him? They waited for their tea, staring at the table, staring at their hands resting on the edge of the table, not talking, their thoughts turned inward. All of a sudden, he wanted to put an end to it: Who’s got the energy to start dating? You’re not sixteen anymore, he thought. And he caught her glancing at her watch and wondered whether he hadn’t been typically overhasty in making plans with her. The jug stood on the table. Jeremiah told Noa, I can identify with this jug: one half’s its father,
the other its mother, but Dad and Mom are also half and half, and so on and so forth; we’re all puzzles of shards from earlier jugs, and, seen from such a vantage, he said, your jug speaks the truth. And he wanted to add: I’ll smash it now, and from the man will reemerge his parents, and his parents’ parents, all the empty dead will return, and the man himself, the jug, will disappear. All that remains of the man’s bones and innards will be spread on the rooftops as food for the fowl of the air. He completely forgot that he’d been charged to wander around with the jug for several weeks. Now he wanted to rid himself of the jug as soon as possible. He thought that, with the smashing of the jug, his own task would end as well, and he started to ask Noa, What would you say if I smashed … But just then a pair of thick legs pushed their way through to the back of the café-bookstore, and Jeremiah suddenly felt a powerful wallop on his shoulder and raised his head. It was a poet—the name escaped Jeremiah just now, though he knew that this guy was one of King Jehoiakim’s younger and disparaged brothers. The selfsame poet had invited him, Jeremiah, about a year ago, to take part in a small literary soirée. And Jeremiah had agreed. Though there’s no money in it, the poet had said—we’re not paying and we’re not getting paid, our wares are despised, there’s no demand. Literary evenings are a huge bore, and depressing to boot; ninety percent of the poets are depressives and ten percent are manic-depressive, the poet had said a year ago, or maybe he was saying it at this very moment—it was all the same. He exchanged glances with Jeremiah and Noa, picked up the jug, and examined it with an expert eye, turning and turning it between two fingers. You made it? Noa nodded, and he said, Amazing. This is museum-caliber ceramics. And what gorgeous hands, too. He placed the jug on Noa’s paper napkin, carefully. To read poetry is mania or depression, mostly depression, and there’s no money in depression, none.

  A well-known model entered, accompanied by her manager and by an unattractive friend of hers, who never left her side, in order to highlight her beauty. The poet stared at her, dumbfounded, because he kept a magazine photograph of her in a drawer at home, a picture of her lying on the beach in the sun in all her voluptuousness and parting her lips toward his own. At the adjoining table sat three female poets slotted for close to a year now to be named Young Female Poets of the Year. The poet shot a sidelong glance at them and said: Poets; I’m telling you, someone needs to send a black Mercedes to their homes in the middle of the night and drive them to some empty lot in the industrial zone and make them disappear. That’s the Assyrian style, and it’s proved itself, in Assyria they feed their poets to the lions, he said, that’s the best literary criticism ever, the maw of a lion. It’s far more effective than old man Broch. Broch is a wet kitten compared with critics in the Nineveh cages, and those cages are the sharpest and most piercing literary supplement around. He pulled a chair up to their table without asking permission, sat down, and looked at Noa, extending his sweaty hand, which she shook feebly as she glanced at the tattoos on his arm. The poet—whose name Jeremiah could not for the life of him remember, even though he thought that he’d seen him around lately—grabbed the menu and ran his eyes down its contents. They’ve got a superb eggplant-and-tahini tortilla here, he said, but, no, nothing for me, I can’t allow myself more than tea; I’ve got to lose weight, I need to get back to the gym. Yeah, most poets are nothing more than poetasters, and then you’ve got the poetesses, whom I divide, the poet told Noa—all the while taking in her figure as best he could in spite of her coat—into various subcategories. For instance, you have your herbal-tea poetesses and then your chocolate soy-milk poetesses. Rarest of all are your coffee or black-tea poetesses—most, to be frank, fall into the soy-milk category. Bahhh, I could puke, he said, and, you know, the herbal-tea poetesses wear brightly colored clothes, baggy linen pants, and they sport straw hats with two-meter-wide brims, and they smear their faces with maniacal levels of sunscreen, and stroll around in the streets, and frequent the cafés, and order herbal tea and spill it all on their baggy pants, and then they say, Oy, I’ve got to go now! And anyway, the poet added, sometimes they just don’t feel so good, and in the middle of a reading or a meeting or a salon they just get up and split, leaving you in mid-sentence. And, you know, as it happens, you were all for them, you were even considering publishing them, but, no, all of a sudden they don’t feel so good. As he spoke, he looked at Noa, not at Jeremiah, and now and then at the window, as if addressing the artificial lake gleaming through the glass. But most of the time they sit at home on antidepressants, he said; after all, they’re smoking women. He stole a glance at the model, who was indeed smoking and twisting her lips to guide the smoke toward the crack in a nearby window, laughing euphorically. You’re familiar with the expression smoking woman? the poet asked. I invented it—and I also use another one, well-built woman, you know, black clothes, a small tattoo on her shoulder blade, more wide-brimmed hats, a hundred bracelets on her wrists, a lot of Timna copper in her ears, raven-black hair, well, and they, too, drink only chocolate soy milk, actually hot chocolate soy milk, you know, with just a bit of powdered chocolate and plenty of soy milk with a sticky film on top. Bahhh. I don’t want to name names, he said, we all know whom we’re talking about.

  Jeremiah thought of asking the guy what his classification was, as a poet, but he knew it would only provide an opportunity for the man to go on holding forth, and consequently he didn’t say a word, but only kept stealing glances every so often at Noa, who didn’t show any signs of impatience—on the contrary, it appeared that the young poet’s pronouncements fascinated her, as indeed proved to be the case when she asked the poet, What about Yona Wollach? The poet slapped the table and said: Yona Wollach! Come on, really—hhhaaa—at her best she was a coffee poet, one of the rarest, but later she planted herself squarely among the soy milk. Most of them finish squarely in soy milk, he said, deep in the soy milk, and that’s only when they didn’t start there in the first place, from the very first moment, from their first book, from the first poem they sent to a literary supplement, faxing it in, of course, because poetesses always have a fax machine at home and they communicate with the world via the fax machine. They haven’t heard about e-mail yet, and they don’t like to talk on the phone. They’re scared to hear a stranger’s voice; hence all that’s left is the fax machine; sending a letter by snail mail is out of the question; leaving the house, after all, might take a month of preparation.

  Jeremiah stared at the jug on the table, and his heart started thumping as though he were about to walk onstage under glaring lights. The poet pounded the table every so often as he delivered his diatribe, and Noa steadied her jug on the napkin lest it fall. Jeremiah admitted to himself that he wanted to keep in touch with her—no, to renew their relationship—but he knew that breaking her jug would only hamper his chances, even though he had bought the jug and it was now his. He wanted to press the jug against his chest; he wanted to stand on the table and announce to everyone that there was a sort of earthbound Leviathan on the prowl, and that its mouth was open wide as it approached from the north, that it was creeping along the roadways and would soon arrive and gulp them all down, that the days of the kingdom of Jehoiakim under the protection of Egypt were about to end, that everything that was now happening was already the end, the last lines on the last page in the last chapter of the book that had been persistently written over hundreds of years. He gestured to the waitress.

  Noa, who’d never met anyone like this poet, was stunned and utterly captivated; it didn’t take long for Jeremiah to feel put out by his monologue, which droned on and on, like a mosquito’s insistent buzz close to the ear that won’t let you fall asleep. All that remains is the fax machine, the man buzzed on, an old fax machine, with that old acidic paper, yellowing within a day, crumbling like papyrus from the days of Pharaoh Amenhotep IV. They feed their poems into their machines, the voice buzzed, and send them to a literary supplement for the Passover holidays; they fax the supplement, and their poetry flickers and hums as it passes thr
ough the machine, line after line, dzem, dzem, dzem, and they ask to look at proofs, which they never receive, the poet said with a sigh; and anyway, by the time the proofs finally do arrive, they’ve committed themselves to a psychiatric ward, where they’re served hot chocolate consisting of a cocoa substitute and water and a god-awful whitener. That’s the sad story, that’s the whole sad story of the new Hebrew poetry. The poet spoke in all innocence, seemingly, as though stating the obvious, talking about the weather. And he stuck his hand out of the window and said, It isn’t raining.

  There was a blind waitress at the café, too; they did their best to let her work, and it was a wonder, the way she carried her tray and tea without sight and never spilled a drop. The waitress served them two cups of tea and moved the jug aside, and Jeremiah shot his hand out in fright to rescue the jug, as it were. The poet said, I’ll have the same please, a cup of tea like Jeremiah, and Jeremiah, in order to change the subject, without thinking twice, simply wanting to liven this pathetic poet up a bit, this man with his curly beard and his tall Assyrian pointed cap and the cuneiform tattoos that covered his nape and his arms and who knows where else they reached under his clothes, said: So you’re actually a tea poet yourself, is that right? And the poet froze, glared at him in alarm mixed with contempt, and said, That’s very funny, that’s brilliant, Jeremiah, what you just said, but, look, I know how to insult people, too. He went silent for a second, recalling an incident from the after-school youth science club they’d both attended, he and Jeremiah, a decade ago, and how Jeremiah once swiped some blood from the laboratory and sat on the stolen test tube, and the instructor asked what’s that, and Jeremiah told her that he’d pissed blood. I peed blood in my pants, the poet recalled Jeremiah claiming. Now, however, he didn’t say a word of this to Jeremiah, but, rather, enjoyed the advantage that the humiliating memory gave him, and laughed at Jeremiah squatting on the bloody beaker. His laughter boomed and disturbed some of the Bookworm customers, including four other poets sitting at a corner table, engrossed in a fresh pack of cards from which they were drawing and shuffling the queens. The waitress approached with his tea and served it and said, Mattaniah, if you don’t mind lowering your voice a bit—people are trying to read here. And Mattaniah (Right, that’s his name!) looked around and said, as if speaking over Jeremiah’s and Noa’s heads, I’m done with you both; bye, now. He took his tea from the blind waitress’s hand as she stepped back so he could pass by, and without as much as a nod made his way to the table of his four bosom friends, who looked up at him in slight disgust.