Life on Sandpaper Read online

  LIFE ON SANDPAPER

  OTHER WORKS IN DALKEY ARCHIVE PRESS’S HEBREW LITERATURE SERIES

  Dolly City

  Orly Castel-Bloom

  Homesick

  Eshkol Nevo

  LIFE ON SANDPAPER

  YORAM KANIUK

  TRANSLATED BY ANTHONY BERRIS

  Series Editor: Rachel S. Harris

  DALKEY ARCHIVE PRESS

  CHAMPAIGN AND LONDON

  Originally published in Hebrew as Chaim Al Neiar Zchuchit by Yedioth Aharonoth, Tel Aviv, 2003

  Copyright © 2003 by Yoram Kaniuk

  Published by arrangement with the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kaniuk, Yoram.

  [Hayim ‘al neyar zekhukhit. English]

  Life on sandpaper / Yoram Kaniuk; translated by Anthony Berris. -- 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-56478-613-5

  1. Kaniuk, Yoram. 2. Authors, Israeli--Biography. I. Berris, Anthony. II. Title.

  PJ5054.K326H2313 2011

  892.4’36--dc22

  [B]

  2010038344

  Partially funded by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency

  The Hebrew Literature Series is published in collaboration with the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature and sponsored by the Office of Cultural Affairs, Consulate General of Israel in New York

  The publication of this book was sponsored by the Oded Halahmy Foundation for the Arts, Inc.

  www.dalkeyarchive.com

  Cover: design by Danielle Dutton

  Dedicated to

  Lee Becker (Kaniuk) Theodore

  Gabriel Solomon (Gandy) Brodie

  Charlie (Bird) Parker

  Alfred Thornton Baker III

  Author’s Note

  It isn’t entirely incorrect to call this book a work of fiction, despite its being an account of my memories from a certain period of my life, and despite the fact that many of its characters might also appear in history books concerning those same years.

  As Aristotle said, “It is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen—what is possible…. The poet and the historian differ [in that] one relates what has happened, the other what may happen.”

  CONTENTS

  LUCK BE A LADY

  LUCK BE A LADY

  There had been a war and I was wounded. When I got back I was remote and detached from everything, didn’t speak for days and would draw on the walls because I’d killed people before I’d kissed a girl. We were drinking at Café Piltz with Menashke Baharav who played “The Battle in the Negev Plains” and I went out to the old boardwalk by the sea. I stood there and sensed a living thing nearby. A pungent, sweet fragrance. And I sneaked a look and there was a woman’s silhouette. We moved toward one another gradually. Finally, without a word, we kissed. My leg was in a cast and I dragged myself along with her up the London Garden to the Excelsior, a so-called hotel for soldiers. We went up to the room where there was a narrow single bed and a few rotting apples. In the window was the sea. And a full moon. She shouted in German and kissed my boot thinking I was a Gestapo agent. She was oh-so-good and showed me what to do. In the morning we looked at one another. We couldn’t just ask what’s your name, what’s yours. We stood on Ben-Yehuda Street eating pretzels and she looked at me lovingly and I at her, and I didn’t know what to say and started walking north from Bugrashov Street toward my parents’ house and the street filled up with carts, buses, bicycles, a few cars. I realized then that I wanted her, and she watched me, pained, from afar, turned around and walked away, defeated in my new country. I recalled the tang of distant places that came from her, her clothes that gave off a foreign fragrance. I tried to follow her but I was limping and she vanished into the morning noise, her eyes withdrawn. I loved a girl who’d previously been another man’s girlfriend and had stopped loving him before he’d managed to die but was obliged to sit with his family, mourning as if she was still his girl. We used to slip away to the park to be together. She felt guilty and ended up leaving me, but then fell in love with a friend of mine.

  It takes a lot of nerve to bang your head against the wall. These are the things I leave behind. Simcha begat Sarah, Joseph, and Alexander. Mordechai begat Moshe and Bluma. His great-grandmother, a Jewish queen, rode naked on a horse through the town so that salvation would come. In 1970, H. said: Danny’s dead, Bill’s dead, once again our generation is starting to die. Sarah, my mother, said at the old cemetery, when she went to visit her friends, that she remembered how, in May 1921, they’d brought Brenner and his comrades to the high-school building. They had been torn apart, mutilated, there were twenty-two of them. She said: I covered their disfigured bodies with sheets. They were buried together since it was impossible to tell who was who. Forgive me that this is my legacy to you.

  I worked on an immigrant ship and was made fun of when I went to the museum in Naples instead of to “69,” the best brothel in town. Outside they were selling little girls for ten cigarettes each. A young woman holding a little girl by the hand said: My sister. Clean. Shaved. Young. I gave her some change and went to the museum. The young woman prayed to the Madonna, behind whom a barefooted priest who’d collect horse manure for heating had placed an oil lamp, so that it would look like the image was weeping. In the museum they had the Pompeian Frescoes. I was hungry. A thin man with a huge pot tied to his belly was selling spaghetti. I asked for some. With or without, he asked. With, I replied. He pulled two bottles from his pockets, took a swig from each, gargled the mixture in his mouth, and sprayed it onto the spaghetti. I walked a short distance so he wouldn’t see and threw the stuff away. Hordes of children sprang up and devoured it, even the newspaper wrapping. I took an antiquated taxi to my friends at “69,” who laughed: A socialist has come to the heart of capitalist decadence. There was a naked woman there spinning around on a piano stool, and made-up girls for sale sat around making faces. A friend brought over a gaunt, frightened girl. This one, he said, has only been here since Tuesday. I took her and bought her some trinkets she’d been staring at in a shop window and then some shoes and a coat. The dollar was worth at least five hundred lira and we felt rich. I took her to a restaurant in Santa Lucia, one of the dozens of empty restaurants waiting for customers who never came. I fed her. She ate like a tigress. The waiters with their stained sleeves made chewing motions and I invited them to eat too. The chef came over and I invited him and his assistant as well. And also the owner, who sat like a commanding officer supervising everything, and they were all scared of him, but he was hungry too, so I asked him to join us. We drank wine. Mount Vesuvius gleamed in the light coming from some ship. I took her for a walk. She said, My name is Angelina, and asked for shoelaces. I bought them for her. She tied them together into a long string that she then tied to my wrist and said, I’m your dog, don’t leave me. The immigrants were already on board. We launched the Pan York and Angelina cried at the port. Grandmother died. Grandfathers and grandmothers died. My parents, Moshe and Sarah, died. Friends died. A year in Jerusalem on the roof of an old monastery school. A huge tree in the courtyard. They said that St. Hieronymus once sat under it.

  Then came a year in Paris. We painted. Café Le Dôme. A few affairs and the story with Flora. Why, of all things, was it the movie version of Guys and Dolls, which I saw in May 2002 in a building that’s a year older than me on Bilu Street, and in which they sing “Luck Be a Lady Tonight,” why was it that particular movie that triggered this book, this journey. At the opening of my first exhibition in 1952 at the Feigel Gallery on F
ifty-seventh Street, New York, New York, a woman named Beulah I didn’t know then but with whom I later became very close bought a painting. I was thrilled because I’d made two hundred dollars. I realized that if I’d sold one painting at the opening I’d sell many more over the two weeks of the exhibition. At the end of the evening there were ten of us left, maybe more. We were drunk on the sweet wine that Feigel, who’d discovered Kokoschka in Prague, had served the guests. I invited them all to a Lebanese restaurant that was usually almost empty. The owner, Anton, would come to the table, recommend things from the menu, take our orders, write them down meticulously, stand at the hatch in the kitchen wall, shout out the entire order, go into the kitchen, prepare the food, call out all the orders from the kitchen, then come out, take the tray he’d placed on the window ledge from inside, serve, and quietly go back inside to wash the dishes and, before his customers left, wipe the table. After we’d eaten I bought everybody tickets to Guys and Dolls, which was then ending its Broadway run after many years. I spent all the money I’d received for the painting. Life as a musical: funny, human, illusory, and at eleven-thirty at night we walked to Forty-second Street where there was a movie theater that screened comedies. There were convex mirrors in the foyer that distorted everyone who walked in. We were drinking from a bottle of bourbon that Cyril Johnson, the drummer, had bought. There was a huge Wurlitzer there, spitting sparks and with revolving arrows at the top, making exploding sounds and laughing horribly, and Cyril told it, I’m from Mars, what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this? I don’t remember which movie we saw, two movies actually, and I can’t remember the second one either. It was cold and started snowing. We went home. Not that we really had homes. We sang “Luck Be a Lady Tonight” and then I made it to bed with or without someone but I can’t remember that bit either.

  In the morning I went to the drugstore on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street. I ate eggs over easy and thought, who in the world could have invented a more original name for the stuff. There was an old man sitting there, already drunk, I could see how he was making an effort and failing to find his mouth with his hand and introduce a roll into it. I fed him. He asked for a cigarette, I gave him one and lit it. The jukebox was playing “Moonlight in Vermont.” The guy said I was probably an awful artist. I told him about what had happened the night before because I didn’t have anybody else to tell, since whomever it was who’d been or not been with me, shared or not shared my bed, had disappeared early in the morning, assuming she’d spent the night, and we hadn’t had the chance to talk. The guy did his best to enjoy the story and asked how much I’d gotten for the painting and I said two hundred bucks and remembered that three years earlier in Paris, Katya Granoff, for whom Soutine was a religion, had shown a few of my paintings at her gallery on Rue de Seine. An American had bought one. Back then everybody used to sit in the Café Le Dôme with a glass of water and two coffees. Out of the blue I had thirty thousand francs, which back then amounted to a whole month’s salary behind a desk. I walked over to a taxi parked in the middle of Boulevard Montparnasse. I got in and told the driver, Drive! I said it like a bigshot. He was surprised and asked where to. All day, I said. We drove. I saw Paris through the eyes of an American millionaire. I bought wine and cheese for the driver. He sang to me. He had a rough voice and a questionable ear but he was nice and polite. Every few hours I gave him some more money. We drove to Maxim’s and went inside. They tried to stop us because we didn’t look like their sort of clientele but Paris was impoverished then, there was one traffic light in the whole city, at the Trocadero, and I gave the maitre d’ a hundred and the driver and myself sat down and for a few thousand more ate the most sumptuous meal of my life. The driver was euphoric and shouted to the other drivers as they passed us, America, America! We drove over the bridges, stopped at the Café de l’Opera and had coffee and pastries. Finally it was evening, we got back to Le Dôme, the guys saw me get out of the taxi, the driver hugged and kissed me. I went into the café and discovered that I didn’t have a sou left for a cup of coffee. The man who bought my painting was a wealthy American who’d brought the first Cadillac the French had ever seen over from New York to Paris. He brought his wife and daughter, the tall Yolanda, as well.

  The next day, Yolanda came for her father’s painting. She saw my squalid room and spoke to the concierge who shouted at her, I’ve told him, I’ve got no blankets for him, he can cover himself with girls. Yolanda went to the épicerie and brought wine and food. She saw me as some starving artist out of the movies and we spent a day and a night together. Her body language was soft but angry as well. Retroactive anger, maybe. I sketched her in charcoal. Her father didn’t know. Her mother did. Her mother had a sharp face, a short nose, luxuriant hair, eyes like an owl’s. It wasn’t long before she too took me to bed. I carried on for a few days alternating between mother and daughter. I wasn’t particularly proud of myself but my conscience then was, as it remained for many years to come, weaker than my need to be with a woman, any woman, single, widowed, young or old. In the end they met in my room and there was shouting and tears, but they still conspired against the father, he agreed to buy another painting and drove his Cadillac around, taking pleasure in seeing the French people he despised, ever since he’d served in the US Army in Paris, admiring his car, while he called them all collaborators. I looked up Yolanda in New York. Like most of my women she was tall. She refused to see me, but her mother wanted to. For her I was a pale boy, Jewish, but different from her. Deep sorrow and lust and recklessness were in me, she said. We met once in a while in hotels that she chose and we’d curse at one another. She hated me and I loved being with her and she bought me three beautiful shirts and a warm coat and one day she vanished. The daughter wouldn’t talk to me on the phone. In Paris there was Flora. She looked and moved like Arletty in Children of Paradise.

  Arletty, the beautiful actress, was no saint, and at her trial staged by French hypocrites she angrily defended her relations with the Germans: “My heart belongs to France, but my ass is international.” I went to a bistro in Montparnasse. Anyone who wasn’t sad was kicked out. Flora seemed blind to her own beauty. I looked at her and she at me. A few days later I already knew that her name was Flora. She had a shy smile, but also a mysterious coldness about her, making her face a mask. Her eyes reflected this strange melancholy, and there was an embarrassing awkwardness between us. After a clumsy attempt at courting her, she saved our story from falling flat by ensuring that we’d stand embracing by the Seine. Afterward, in my room. She’d come in the daytime. At night she disappeared. All the while a Rolls-Royce would be parked by the house, and in it a grim-faced older man in a fur coat. The chauffeur in his cap would get out, raise his head, look at my window, and get back into the car. She said that the man was her fiancé. I understood that because of something that had happened a long time ago she now had to marry him. Again and again she asked me to order her to stay with me. She said there were secrets, dark intrigues, she spoke of beatings, of death, she sang some anthem, maybe Ukrainian, declared that she wished she didn’t love me. She said something about a place where there was shooting. About hounds and the man who’d bought her. I didn’t understand love because back in the youth movement in Zionist-Socialist Israel I’d learned that love was just something you either discussed or sang about. I didn’t understand, how could I give her orders? I didn’t understand those secrets threaded through the sewer mazes of her sinister history. I said that I couldn’t love her and certainly couldn’t give her orders. She asked me to teach her how to say “Ze’evi” in Hebrew, wolflike, and she learned how to say, “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn.”

  In Paris, 1950, the Soviet Union was a sort of religion. “Chips fly when you chop down trees,” they’d say each time they heard about another half million people slaughtered by Stalin. Thorez, the man who’d lead the revolution in France; Stalin, the dove of peace, progressive culture, socialist realism; while Flora�
��s religion was the Zodiac. Fatally deceived by degenerate capitalism whose day was surely coming. She suddenly came in wearing heavy clothes, a fur coat, patent-leather pumps, she spoke of fate, wealth as liberty, revulsion at the masses, contempt for the shirkers, she carried the stench of decay. Fear of black cats. Fear of sitting on a suitcase. She’d repeat the word Ze’evi over and over and the sexy Biblical verse I’d taught her, “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he treadeth out the corn.” She said she had to have an answer, stood in the small attic room and said this was the moment for me to command her. I said, Are you out of your mind? You want me to debase another human being? Man is the image of Creation. She looked anxious and her eyes sparked contempt and then she pulled away from me. She’d come wearing heavy clothing but it was hot. July. She went down to rue de Rennes and started walking. The Rolls-Royce drove after her and she threw the fur coat inside. On seeing her from above I had an epiphany. I recalled Bialik’s saddest poem: “From the window, a potted flower / gazes all day down at the garden / There in the garden are all its friends / while up here all alone it stands.” In the revelation I smelled onion mixed with roses and I saw a bridal veil. I realized that I loved her. That I did understand after all. I understood that she was an ox that shouldn’t be muzzled in my corn. I quickly went downstairs but she had vanished. I ran as far as Saint-Germain, and just like with the refugee girl in Tel Aviv by the sea, and like in Children of Paradise, in the tragic and unforgettable final scene when Jean-Louis Barrault loses Arletty in the crowd, I saw her and I shouted at her. A big colorful procession appeared from the direction of Saint-Michel. It was the 14th of July. She didn’t hear and disappeared. I searched for her all over Paris, remembering her divine scornful look. Just like Arletty’s. She didn’t touch things. There was always air between what she held and the object itself. She loved submissively, but with anger.