Moods Read online

  Also by Yoel Hoffmann

  FROM NEW DIRECTIONS

  * * *

  Bernhard

  The Christ of Fish

  Curriculum Vitae

  The Heart Is Katmandu

  Katschen & The Book of Joseph

  The Shunra and the Schmetterling

  MOODS

  [1]

  Ever since finishing my last book, I’ve been thinking of how to begin the next one.

  Beginning is everything and needs to contain, like the seed of a tree, the work as a whole.

  And so, what I see is the figure of a man descending (from the sidewalk?) five or six steps to a basement apartment, and he’s halfway there.

  I know it’s a love story. And maybe there’s a woman in the basement apartment. It’s probably November.

  [2]

  I remember things that happened in an empty building (which is to say, one they hadn’t yet finished building) in Ramat Gan, in the fifties.

  Then too (as now) legs were the principal thing. The world was full of legs of all sorts and there was movement in space. Someone—Ezra Danischevsky—said to me once: I want to be an elevator repairman (you can imagine the motion and its various directions).

  In that (empty) building, a woman who’s now seventy-four (if she’s not dead) took off her dress.

  [3]

  And so his name—that of the man going down the steps—is, most likely, Nehemiah. Not because it’s true, but because of that combination of sounds—“his name” and “is . . . Nehemiah,” and because of its implicit acknowledgment of God, without whom perhaps the world exists, though He is the master of words.

  It’s hard to call a woman by name because Nothingness swallows everything, and the one contains the many, although, in other respects, highly partial, her name is possibly Hermione.

  A policeman or two pass on the street and their legs are now on an imaginary plane above which sits the head of a man.

  After my father died, I spritzed his deodorant into my armpits for three or four months. It smelled like musk.

  My father also had a Schaffhausen watch, which wasn’t removed even when he fell into a coma.

  [4]

  I too (Yoel Hoffmann, that is) once went like that down steps to a place where a French woman waited.

  I’d trailed her from the Metro stop to the building’s entrance, and since she looked at me and twirled the key on her finger suggestively, I followed her down to the basement apartment.

  Maybe the scene with Nehemiah is only a memory of this scene, and what I did, he’ll do as well.

  Bookstores hold an infinite number of memories like these, but only a few speak in praise of whores.

  [5]

  The act of love gives birth to blue birds, just as once we could walk through a door without having to open it. Girls set entire streets on fire. Kiosks floated into the air. People wailed as though in distress, but perfumed vapors rose from their lips.

  In the room, the French woman held out a hand (one of the two she had) and took the thousand-franc bill, as one takes the wine and wafer from a priest.

  [6]

  A forty-watt bulb (elsewhere I’ve called it an electric pear) lit up the bed but the picture of the Virgin (and Child) stood outside the cone of light like an omen. Sometimes one sees a sign, like ARLOSOROFF STREET, and goes there, and in fact the street’s just like that.

  The French woman pulled the dress up over her head and stood there utterly naked (I remember an accountant who always said, “Bottom line—” which is to say, “net”)—no bra, no panties.

  [7]

  Literature’s so pathetic. We peddle fabric with a sun painted on it and no one even looks up.

  The bed. Thighs. The backside. A person who wants to know the flesh had best bite into his finger. Only then will he know.

  And he should see my Aunt Edith. How she fell into herself, in the wheelchair, until her mouth sank into her jaw and her jaw sank into her chest and still she said—time after time, until she died—noch (which is to say, “more”).

  [8]

  The woman was maybe forty and had (she said) a child in the country. The act of love she undertook as one turns the pages of a newspaper (Le Figaro, for example).

  Undoubtedly. She thought of other things during intercourse. Maybe she saw a woman in the village calling her son: Claude, Claude. Or the candles that one lights at church. In any event, she held me, as the Virgin in the picture holds the Child, and sighed.

  [9]

  I could write about how the Bible that the principal gave me at the end of eighth grade saved my life (it was in the pocket of my army vest and the bullet went into it up to the Book of Nehemiah) or, how, as though in an American movie, I went to the wedding of a girl I was in love with once and at the last minute etcetera. Which is to say, a bona fide story with plot twists and intrigue and an ending cut off like a salami (to keep it modern).

  Books like those have at least three hundred and twenty eight pages, and in the end mobs of people running around you like holograms.

  But I can’t, because of the turquoise sunbirds.

  [10]

  And because of the picture (The Potato Eaters) Van Gogh painted maybe some thirty times, each time the light falling in a different manner.

  Which makes me think of the potatoes at the Austrian old age home in Ramat Gan.

  My Aunt Edith and Francesca, my stepmother, saw these potatoes on blue plastic plates and sometimes their forks sparkled in the light of the light. Not to mention Mr. Cohen, who sat at another table and was a hundred years old.

  As in the chorus of Beethoven’s Ninth, there wasn’t a single potato that wasn’t in its proper place.

  [11]

  Ezra Danischevsky did indeed become an elevator repairman, but in Los Angeles. He summoned, so I heard, Haim Gluzman, and the two of them installed elevators there.

  You’re walking horizontally and suddenly you’re lifted along a vertical axis. After a while, you descend the vertical axis and go back to walking horizontally. Sometimes you’re parallel to the ground (that is, your entire body is horizontal), as when making love.

  [12]

  The French woman washed below her navel in the bidet and talked about Algiers, which needed (like her) to be French. Outside it was raining, and maybe love was born at the sight of her toes.

  How many books have I written in order to conceal that sight, and here, at last, it’s revealed. I do now what I didn’t do then, and one by one I kiss them. From the little toe on her right foot up to the big one, and from the big toe on her left down to the little one. If there were hair on my head it would fall across the sole of her foot. May His great Name be exalted and sanctified.

  [13]

  My stepmother Francesca called the ground Boden. The two of us walked across the ground but, because of this other name, it (the ground) carried her differently.

  There was a Mrs. Minoff, whose silk stockings every so often would develop a run (in Hebrew then they called it a “train”). Mrs. Minoff and my stepmother Francesca exchanged romance novels (in German), and sometimes they were joined in this by Mrs. Shtiasny, whose husband was Italian.

  Mrs. Shtiasny’s Italian husband died suddenly in a dentist’s waiting room. The three (namely, Francesca, my stepmother, Mrs. Minoff, and Mrs. Shtiasny) stood there a good long while at the cemetery by the door to the room where the corpses are wash
ed. My stepmother Francesca finally went in and when she came out she looked at Mrs. Shtiasny and said: Nah Yah.

  [14]

  In popular parlance people say “don’t make yourself out to be” this or that, but we’re always making ourselves out to be something. Only the blood flows without being told where to go (if readers would like a fine Merlot, they should look into Yiron wines).

  There’s no longer any limit to the things that I (from here on in I’ll say “we,” out of embarrassment) are able to say. We can make soup from ghosts (which is to say, we can say that). We can push nails in from the wrong end. We know the difference between ourselves and others. Which is to say, others are imprisoned within their skin. We guess, for years. Paint mezuzahs. Steep tea. Grind. Herd. Toast. And on and on. We can say a single thing an infinite number of times.

  We also ask for forgiveness. From the widow. From the air-conditioner technician. From the saleswoman at the Castro store.

  [15]

  It’s strange that the German word for widow is Witwe. Imagine that a man might say: I saw a Witwe. No one would think he had seen a widow.

  I remember the smells in the widow’s home. The smell of the old suitcase over the closet. The smell of the sewing machine (which stood in the middle of the room precisely), and the smell of the pillows.

  As in other books that speak of widows, so too the widow in this one hung a picture of her dead husband on the wall.

  [16]

  If we had to introduce her as a character we could say she was wide like the woman doctor at the end of Ya’akov Shabtai’s novel. Scenes of distant gardens, and she was kneeling.

  Which brings to mind St. Ignatius of Padova, who, in the thirteenth century, sailed on a fishing boat to Alexandria, where (through miraculous acts) he saved a hundred Muslim women.

  St. Ignatius, most likely, loathed the flesh, but when he blessed the women (each in turn), prayers rose up from them.

  [17]

  If you walked the length of the Hebrew Encyclopedia you’d get to a balcony from which you could see the sea. Sometimes we stood there all alone because the widow was speaking on the telephone, or taking a bath.

  What broke our hearts was the volume of supplemental entries. We saw in our mind’s eye how the widow would look for corrections there, and also for updates to all the other volumes, and she could hardly bear the fragments of the moon above Tel Aviv. Or else she’d go into the kitchen and sit, and the teakettle would suddenly shriek.

  [18]

  We don’t know if this book will make it into print, but all of a sudden we’ve understood that authors breathe.

  Haim Be’er is breathing, and Amos Oz is breathing, and we too are taking breaths. The heart, it’s true, can skip a beat, but one can’t skip a breath or breathe backward—only chronologically. Many things are bound so deeply, and we still haven’t spoken of air and photosynthesis, etcetera.

  And it happens that a writer can die before he’s completed a word (chinaberry, for instance), or that he might pass away between books and the posthumous book won’t be written.

  [19]

  What exactly the widow was thinking no one ever knew. Most likely she thought we’d move into her apartment, and that in due course she’d remarry.

  These things become clear in memory as well, for instance, that once she said something that had to do with it being two years since that day, and that she’d asked to have new tiles put in or had moved the Persian rug from its place. And the grocery store beneath her apartment, which had rolls by six-thirty in the morning. But mostly seeing her there on all fours, her knees on the ground and the palms of her hands on the floor.

  [20]

  One can write in a figurative fashion and one can write abstractly. But you’ll have to ask the academicians how to distinguish between the two.

  The cattle prod (our Bible teachers told us about) is, for example, abstract, but the number eight is figurative without a doubt.

  A week ago at Café Henrietta (at 186 Arlosoroff Street) I saw a man whose name was apparently Chedorlaomer. In matters like these the elements mix. In any event, it’s wise to aim at the middle ground between the two: that’s where mercy is.

  [21]

  The Schaffhausen watch on my father’s wrist when he died held within it tiny springs (not what they put in watches today) and nevertheless its hands displayed the correct time.

  It’s possible to see how, with very fine tweezers, the Swiss watchmaker would take such a spring from the table. The Swiss man himself is made of such springs, even if they don’t work as they should within him.

  The men who held these springs are already dead, or very old, and their wives have died as well. Picture the wife of a watchmaker. How she places a bowl of beets on the table.

  [22]

  Now we’re experiencing pain in the chest and don’t remember if the heart is on the right side or the left. The night is deep and the (digital) clock shows that it’s two-thirty.

  We’re thinking of networks. Spider webs. A chain of shoe stores. Or fishermen’s nets and networks that the eyes can’t see.

  And childhood loves. How we waited each morning for the girl who sat on the third bench and all the halls in the school led to her. She came through our heart as though it were the Mandelbaum Gate, but the heart (of flesh) was smaller then because we were children.

  Now the butcher shops are closed, and the butchers are sleeping in their large beds. May God watch over them and their wives.

  [23]

  Because he has only a single life (though “life” in Hebrew is plural—hayyim), a person always returns to the same things.

  The girl in third grade—her name wasn’t what we said it was in another book. In fact we loved two girls at once. The other one was in 3-G, and her homeroom teacher was Yitzhak Karton (penultimate stress), but we’ve forgotten her name.

  In the schoolyard there were faucets, and all the girls drank from them, and we could see all sorts of braids like a book that’s being translated into many languages.

  [24]

  Our heart breaks at the sight of fire hydrants, or words like home cooking.

  How many grocers we’ve seen (at stores) and we’ve never once placed our hand on their head as the Pope might. Some of them came from Auschwitz, and now they’re dead, and we just said white bread, or two hundred grams of cheese, and left the mailboxes as they were and didn’t kneel before them or lift up our hands.

  We said “we need to call the plumber,” as though the power of speech were an ordinary matter.

  [25]

  Later on, Bracha Kalvari asked us to undo her bra, and we went behind her like St. Francis of Brindisi, who wandered through graveyards and looked at the tombstones only from the side that was smooth.

  And there was Nehamah Nehamah. The absolute parity between her first name and last seemed to determine that she would surrender her body into the hands of others as well.

  But those were the days of Billie Holiday, and so every act of what we called petting trailed a saxophone’s echo.

  [26]

  This book barely mentions men but we owe several (from back then) a slap.

  Now it’s hard to settle such accounts. We could hire a private eye to find out where they live, but then we’d be faced with men who bear almost no resemblance to who they were. And we today are different too, and undoubtedly these old men would have trouble remembering us.

  And we could settle up with the teachers as well, but they’re dead, and most likely are teaching others who have died.

  [27]

  Joy. Breakers. A laughing dove. Tea
bags. Bacchanalia. Miscarriage of justice. Thoughts. A hip’s rise. Pay stubs. Paso doble. Armageddon. Six of. Bilateralism. Oxymoron. Marble. Raspberry juice. Gustav the Great. Teeth. Serbonian Bog. Concubine. Copper mines. Vayzata. Irkutsk. Osmosis. Allies. Schopenhauer. Salmon, etcetera.

  Yes. And we’ve forgotten runnels.

  [28]

  Rossini (the classical station’s saying just now) was plagued by backaches in 1842.

  In Japanese the back is senaka. Senaka, we think, is the perfect word for it. More accurate than, for instance, back, or Rücken.

  They pressed the back of the crucified one against the cross (as we once pressed Penina Tuchner against the kitchen cabinet) and the men below saw only his chest. But the back bore the brunt of the torment because it was pressed against the boards.

  [29]

  I had a dream: We’re (which is to say, I’m) alone at an airport. But the monitor’s showing departures only. Which is to say, planes at that airport only take off.

  If we could surround everything with words (as others do), we would. But we see just a very little. The extent of things blends into the surrounding space.

  Once we went to a psychoanalyst and understood that she hated her husband.

  [30]

  In autumn the walls of the house grow cold. You listen to Billie Holiday and it seems you’re hearing a Bach Passion.

  You think about the soul of a hen. How she stares and sees things, like a wheelbarrow or a pitchfork. And about the soul of a horse.

  Suddenly you ask yourself what turpentine is. You’re thinking: I’m a man. What of it?

  For all we’ve said in a contorted fashion, we ask forgiveness. When we talked about the pancreas and the circuits of heaven and didn’t know what children know who hide their faces in their hands and shout: “Ready or not, here I come.”