Muck Page 9
Now everyone was looking at him in dumbfounded silence. The twin waitress took several steps toward him, and he realized that she meant to ask him to leave. In a far corner, the blind waitress wept while the model hugged her and tried to calm her down. Noa, at his side, covered her forehead with the palm of her hand and looked fixedly at the table, as if she wanted to be shoved in and buried between the narrow slits of her five fingers. The poets drummed on their table with their sharpened pencils or with the ruler that served them in drawing up their classification tables. A large, charred chunk of liver was frying on the grill, and smoke began to spread throughout the café and bookstore. A veteran writer—recipient of the Israel Prize, one of the fixtures at the Bookworm—got up, hesitated, like someone who knows the worth of his words, and declared: Bullshit. Then he hesitated once more, enveloped in thin layers of smoke and the odor of cooking oil, before saying again: Bu-hul-shit. His two attendants supported him on either side; he glared at Jeremiah and slowly sat down again.
Jeremiah raised the jug. He wanted to stand on the table but of course didn’t. He displayed the jug before the eyes of all the seated customers the way a magician flaunts an empty top hat. And someone said, Are you an idiot or what? Titters, chortles … The blind waitress had returned to work in the meantime and was bringing bread and olives to one of the customers when one of the poets stretched his arm out as she passed by him and in a single motion snatched a black olive from the bowl, tossed it in the air, threw back his head, bit sharply into the olive as it dropped into his mouth, chewed out the pit, and spit it out in an arc. The pit landed on Jeremiah’s table, and the other poets applauded in amazement. So Jeremiah stood on the table after all. Noa flinched and got up and moved toward the window. She could see her stall down there, closed for the day and covered in a gray tarpaulin held fast by several rocks lest the winds sweep it away.
Jeremiah was barely managing to keep his balance. He smashed the jug on the floor. It shattered loudly. The twin waitress hastened to sweep up the pieces with a broom and dustpan. Thus says the Lord of Hosts, Jeremiah shouted, without a mike. Even so will I break this people and this city, as one breaks a potter’s vessel, so that it can never be mended. And they shall bury in Tophet, until there is no room to bury. Thus will I do to this place and to its inhabitants. Even making this city like Tophet. And the houses of Jerusalem, and the houses of the kings of Judah, like the place of Toph … The rest of his words were swallowed up in the din of tables being dragged and customers rising and stretching and the espresso machine putting on steam like a locomotive, and Mattaniah, raising his lips from Noa’s ear, told Jeremiah, Listen, that was sure one hell of a speech. It was actually pretty funny, he said with unexpected generosity, but get a grip on yourself, come join us, we’ll make room for you at our table. There’s no future in imitating the Bible, believe me, there’s no public for that sort of thing; no one understands most of the language anymore, it’s a generation of ignoramuses. I understood everything, natch, said Mattaniah, but I don’t count for much. And he pretended to hear the sound of barking coming from behind and turned around to look, like someone worried about his dog … and the veteran writer stood up with the help of his two attendants and ever so slowly—commanding due reverence—strode calmly toward the elevator that led to the rooftop helipad above the café. He, as was his habit, forgot to pay, and the blind waitress fumbled after him and called out, Motta, Motta, the bill. From his place on the table, standing high up like a tightrope walker in the emptying bookstore, Jeremiah caught sight of Noa through the large window overlooking the wadi, with her Moabite embroidered shoulder bag, surrounded by the five poets. From where he stood, it appeared to him that she was engrossed in explaining something to them, as she gesticulated and swept her arms broadly, while they, in their turn, matched their own strides to hers and listened to her attentively.
8
THAT SAME NIGHT, Mattaniah went down and opened the front door of his home on Yishai Street in Abu Tor, although it was 1:00 or 2:00 a.m. and he hadn’t heard any knocking. Undoubtedly, there had been some sound or other, barking or scratching at the door, he’d think several hours later, in the first flush of morning, but in all honesty he couldn’t remember hearing a thing. Tukulti, his mastiff, was standing on the front step, just as he’d stood countless times in the past, whenever he returned from one of his solo strolls through the neighborhood, or from a quick exit into the courtyard to peer up and howl at the moon. Mattaniah had adopted his dog in response to an appeal by the old critic Broch, whose dog, Sargon, gave birth to a litter of six puppies—it turned out that Sargon wasn’t a stud but a bitch, though, for whatever reason, the critic insisted on addressing her as male; who can know the ways of the righteous or look into the hearts of the pious? And so six young writers hastened to unburden the old critic’s senior, four-legged aide-de-camp of her puppies, adopting Sargon’s six offspring, and they could still be seen in town, or at book launches, trailing their dogs. Broch christened the puppies with proper Akkadian names, in order to continue the dynasty: Mattaniah received the puppy Tukulti-Ninurta, named after Tukulti-Ninurta I, King of Assyria, it goes without saying. But the name was far too long, and hence got shortened the same day to Tukulti, to the indignation of both Broch and Sargon.
This time, however, the dog wasn’t meant to return. Yet here he was, hobbling into the house. He wheezed, went to his habitual corner, laid his head on the floor, and shut his eyes. Mattaniah stared at him, astonished, clasping the knob of the half-open door. That very morning, making his way to the Bookworm to meet his friends, as was his habit, he’d stopped next to the city dog pound, tied Tukulti to a nearby drinking fountain, opened the lowest spigot, the one intended for dogs, and beat a retreat without looking back. Several days earlier, a critique had been published in the book-review supplement in the popular section devoted to what were called negative recommendations. Broch was the endorser. The section aimed to zap out of existence works that were considered particularly harmful to the culture, and Mattaniah’s last book, Assyrian Hymns, won the place of honor. No one was surprised. Everyone was waiting for the blow to fall: This collection of poems of ecstatic praise to Sennacherib, King of Assyria, apart from being pure trash, objectively speaking, cannot be said to have appeared at the most opportune of moments, given that the Assyrian Empire is on the verge of collapsing, and, in our learned opinion, its monumental pseudo-Assyrian style only worsens the insult to our national poetry, opined Broch in his dispassionate and measured tone. But Mattaniah had chosen Sennacherib because he was the son and heir of Sargon II, the great King of Assyria, and in doing so endeavored by implication to sing the praises of Broch’s dog, and by way of metonymy to praise Broch himself, of course, and perhaps afford him a little pleasure alongside whatever other intangible dividends had been yielded by his lifetime as a critic. But Broch wasn’t able to follow such twists and turns of thought, and his spirit did not rest, nor did it remain silent. Greatly inflamed, he flew into a rage and tipped the scales in Mattaniah’s disfavor. If our poet was at least familiar with basic Assyrian, Broch carried on, dispensing his usual words of praise—that is to say, of scathing attack—if at least he knew the fundamentals of cuneiform and the basic declensions in Akkadian … But this poet, apart from his family lineage—doubtful in itself, not to say fabricated—doesn’t have much to offer us wretched readers, writing on a newfangled laptop even as he pretends to be carving into ancient clay tablets. Indeed, it’s like someone singing opera in a shower of sewage, the critic said, moderating his words. Though, indeed, in this case, we haven’t even been lucky enough to be presented with sewage but, rather, absolute, dissolute aridity. The shower is dry, alas, but the stench won’t go away, and the Assyrian hymns of our dear friend Mattaniah—a chariot of Israel, and its charioteer!—amount to nothing more than a hard stink between soft covers. Or perhaps even soft isn’t a fitting description for this book, Broch remarked—now as though muttering to himself as his strength deserted h
im. After all, we don’t call a looseness in the bowels soft but simply wet. That, in a nutshell, dear reader, is the fundamental contradiction at work in the oxymoronic Assyrian hymns of this poet—we forgot his name in the process of writing this review, Broch added, but it is of no import—it is a malodorous aridity that can also be described, from a different vantage, as a product of the runs, or perhaps a watery dysentery; we won’t split hairs on this last point. The common ground—Broch clarified—is, of course, the stench, oh, the dreadful stench. There are telltale signs. You look at a pair of stained briefs and can’t remember precisely when you had such terrible diarrhea, and out of embarrassment you fling them into the garbage or the fire, not into the laundry. Thus, into the rubbish I flung these Hymns, Broch wrote, but I have yet to feel any relief, and who knows whether I will ever feel relieved.
The title of the article had been “There Came No More Such Spices,” a title whose full irony was revealed only upon a second reading. And Mattaniah, who read and reread the review—he might even have been able to pretend it didn’t actually concern him were it not for his photograph adjoining the article, under which was the caption STINKS—rose to his feet, and without a second thought put his huge dog on his leash, drove out to the dog pound, and, lips pressed tightly together, tied the creature up and swore that he’d drive straight to the critic’s home and strangle old Broch then and there: with both hands he’d clutch his crooked neck and crush it like a sheet of scratch paper. But on his way over, his brother—May His Glory Be Exalted—called, his brother whom he hadn’t heard from for at least two years, and said, I read some kind of write-up on you in the paper. So Mattaniah didn’t drive out, needless to say, to Broch’s place; he only managed to abandon the dog, and if anyone asked what happened to Tukulti he’d say the dog got run over, and he would smear his spare leash with mud and dip it in the bloody juices of a steak purchased for the occasion—this was how he planned to corroborate the supposedly deadly accident. And he convinced himself that within minutes someone was bound to arrive and take the dog into the pound and feed him some dry food, and, hey presto: Peace unto Israel. Let the high praise of God be in their mouths and a two-edged sword in their hand, he thought, seething, to execute vengeance on the nations. He returned home and picked up the paper, hoping the review would somehow have dropped out of sight. Indeed, to his stupefaction, it was nowhere to be seen, as though it had been erased from the back page of the book-review supplement; but then he realized that he’d glanced at one of the old holiday issues he kept around, and he slowly directed his gaze to his own eyes in the current issue, eyes that gazed back at him sternly, ringed in Assyrian curls, above the stink and below the spices.
Mattaniah realized, as he tore down the multi-lane Begin Expressway, that what had been done was done and the dog wasn’t coming back. He suddenly recalled with a certain affection how Tukulti used to pick up sticks in the street and bring them home, like a bird building a nest that never gets built but whose components only get endlessly masticated, and how Tukulti used to wake him up every morning by licking his ears, and how Tukulti would howl at the moon. Doubtless he’d be sold to Moabite merchants, and what they did to dogs Mattaniah didn’t know, nor did he want to know; that is, he knew perfectly well, because in the vicinity of Dhiban tens of thousands of dogs were annually slaughtered for food; an entire village of workers from the Far East chase after and catch dogs every year in order to slaughter them.
Mattaniah took a wrong turn, and all of a sudden he found himself heading for Mount Scopus. The light rail sped by on schedule and almost collided with him; he slammed on his brakes and turned around and drove back, tears welling in his eyes because he was remembering the time a nightmare shook him awake on the couch and Tukulti was standing there beside him and laid his paw on his cheek, careful not to scratch; Mattaniah had fallen back asleep, and the nightmare faded away. What’s got into your head, you idiot, abandoning a dog because of a review?! After all, everyone knows that a book Broch savages is without any doubt extra special, inasmuch as hatchet jobs are Broch’s way of pointing out the novelty of a book, his way of signposting a literary breakthrough, while he lavishes praise on the mediocre in a sort of witty contrariness. And, in any case, why take revenge on a dog? Are you out of your mind? Mattaniah made a sharp U-turn and steered his car back to the dog pound, making plans about how he’d spoil the abandoned dog with snacks and a bowl of cottage cheese and he’d prepare all of Tukulti’s favorite delicacies. But when Mattaniah returned to the water fountain—ah!—Tukulti was not there. He made his way back home and swore that as soon as he got back he’d grab the spare leash and use it to hang himself in his bedroom, but, needless to say, he neither grabbed the leash nor hanged himself. He sobbed bitterly over his rotten heart, and over the dog that had undoubtedly been snatched by now and locked in a van on its way to the slaughterhouse in Moab. And he reread the review, and suddenly he saw how accurate it was, how very precise, and in effect constructive and helpful, how Broch had written it for Mattaniah’s own good, and had said these things only to spur him on, with nothing less than the highest professional integrity, mixed with humor—what, is humor only a tool to use against one’s enemies? No, Mattaniah was finally catching on, and he realized that it was unquestionably true: pseudo-Assyrian poetry wasn’t going to save him. He took down from his shelf the twenty complimentary copies of Assyrian Hymns he’d received from the publisher and burned them—or he intended to burn them, but told himself, I’ll reread it tomorrow at dawn before making my final decision, and then, undoubtedly, I’ll burn them all.
He fell asleep, crushed. And in his dream he saw a large crocodile creeping closer and closer, and the crocodile was the size of Jerusalem, or maybe the city had shrunk to the size of a dollhouse, and the crocodile opened its jaws, but Mattaniah awoke and the crocodile vanished. He stumbled to the door, expecting the devil to be waiting there, holding a small hatchet with which he would chop out Mattaniah’s wicked heart. But only his dog was there, after some twelve hours gone. Tukulti’s leash was chewed and hung on him like a tie. He padded in, skulked to his corner, and laid his head on the floor. And Mattaniah approached and stood over him and then lay down beside him on the floor, and there they both slept, Mattaniah’s brawny, tattooed arm resting on the dog’s back to protect him from all possible harm and from fear of the encroaching night. At the break of day, they got up, and the dog didn’t show any signs of ill will; he proceeded to his bowl as he did every day, and Mattaniah measured out his helping and added more and more snacks. The dog ate, but only the exact amount he was accustomed to. Mattaniah noticed that he still hadn’t removed the leash, so he removed the leash and saw that it was now considerably shorter. He tied it to the spare leash that he’d planned to dip in blood, and they stepped out in silence, and circled the neighborhood just as they’d done only yesterday. Tukulti took a long time peeing alongside the cypress, as was his custom. When they bumped into acquaintances or poets, Mattaniah lowered his head and didn’t say a word, as if he had taken a vow of silence.
And they returned home, and for the first time Mattaniah called out to him to jump on his bed, and again they dozed off together, as though sleep-deprived. In his new dream, someone was about to die in some hospice or another; it was Mattaniah’s mother, his Assyrian mother, as it were. And she was about to die in Nineveh, where she lived in his dream, and next to her there stood a gigantic Assyrian dog, who always sensed when someone was about to die and would comfort those about to depart. The dream escaped him when he awoke, and the dog he’d dreamed of, too. But in the dream Mattaniah had asked his mother, who’d rested her hand on the hospice dog, Where are you going? And she replied, Over there.
* * *
THE FOLLOWING DAY, Mattaniah and Tukulti once again strode down the streets of Jerusalem. He caught sight of Jeremiah from afar as the latter entered a hummus joint, slumped into a chair, and pushed aside the sports pages. Mattaniah had applied ointments to and bandaged his dog’s leg
, which he’d discovered had been injured. And he remembered that he had an appointment at twelve, though he couldn’t recall with whom or where. Whomever he was supposed to meet, he wasn’t going to make it. Their legs bore them to the light rail, and they sped to the Dung Gate station where they got out and headed for the gourmet pet store nearby.
He immediately recognized the same young woman he’d seen two days ago at the Bookworm sitting next to Jeremiah. She stood at a stall alongside a worker who was wrapping several plates as he stared at her from a short distance, his dog at his side. He tried to imagine the way her inner thighs would feel, leading up to her crotch, as well as the taste of her lips. Her hair was clipped short, and she was slender and tall, with a copper earring in one ear. He shut his eyes and imagined licking the lobe and the earring. Her ass was so narrow, he thought he’d be able to cover it with his palm and lift her one-handed. He was certain she’d spent time in Edom or Moab, so he rolled up his sleeves, reckoning that his foreign tattoos would impress her. He approached the stall and casually examined the jugs, bowls, and ceramic pots. She didn’t remember him from the café, he noted instantly, and felt surprisingly relieved. He bought a bowl, handing her hard cash; she made out his tattoos, and her eyes widened. To his astonishment, she could read Akkadian. She held his hand and slipped her fingertips to the back of his arm and read and translated the words on his arm, and then she did the same for his other arm; he told her that unfortunately the rest was under his shirt. Not to mention his pants, he muttered, turning his head aside. By the following day, she’d already read him his back and his chest and his legs and his entire body, and she showed him her own scant tattoos. And when she mounted him, her eyes looked fixedly at the cuneiform on his chest rather than into his eyes. Mattaniah had a scented candle, and he lit its black, crooked wick in the little bowl he had bought from her and pulled down the blinds. The light glittered for a moment in her earring, and he saw the green fleck in the copper.