Touch the Water, Touch the Wind Read online

  Pain and humiliation suddenly got the better of Elyashar, Moshe. The bloodthirsty painted redskin stirred in his trousers, the tomahawk was brandished, and from all the caverns and hideouts came a war whoop of hatred and fury. Private Elyashar, Moshe began to gesture coarsely, snigger, and plead in guttural English; he even used bad language. An ugly gleam lit his eyes and half his face twisted in a filthy smile.

  Like a forest fire it seized hold of his comrades too. They trembled visibly. Suddenly a heavy bitter silence fell. The air grew dark. Not a sound was heard. The place was remote and far from help. Even the black water seemed to be seething and plotting.

  The band of players turned to go. After a moment Sandy and Harry started running, dragging Audrey by her arms. She ran with them, tears trickling down her cheeks. Stones pursued them. Private Elyashar, maddened by his tortures, screamed outrageous curses after them in Arabic. Until the enemy soldiers beyond the border heard and cursed back with fourfold vigor.

  Toward dawn light firing was heard. A complaint was lodged.

  30

  On the edge of the lake in the beautiful German town of Baden-Baden stands a hut made to look like the witch's house in Hansel and Gretel. From this hut small rowboats are rented for boating on the lake, mainly to foreign tourists and nature-seeking couples.

  One cold blue spring day the hut was being watched from concealed vantage points by three strangers. All three were young and athletic, with short-cropped fair hair, strikingly good-looking and amazingly like one another in appearance. They remained in their hiding-places watching the hut.

  One of them, hidden in the thick cover of an ancient tree, was listening attentively to the earpiece of a tiny wireless receiver. The second, concealed among the reeds, kept the hut under constant observation through the sights of an accurate, silent rifle. The third, wearing a diving-suit, waited beneath the surface of the shallow water for any event which might require his intervention.

  And now, down the path leading to the hut there stepped a brisk little man, a short, small-fingered man with batlike ears straining forward. He looked like a rabbi who had turned his collar up as high as possible and slunk out to an adulterous assignation on the edge of town. He was not young, and the woman on account of whom he had turned his coat collar up and dabbed cologne behind his ears this morning, for whom he now hired the best rowboat, alone with whom he gently rowed into the center of the lake—the woman was not young, either.

  But charming, and attractive, and exquisite in every line.

  She was tall and thin, with a gentle downward slope to her shoulders: she looked as though she had suddenly grown faint and needed support. This quality was deceptive, and even at a distance a second glance would reveal the ruthless strength contained in the line of her chin or the sudden movement of her small hand as it deftly brushed a speck of dust or a spot of mud from her green woolen dress.

  Far out on the lake, as the clear blue sky shone down on Baden-Baden, Fedoseyeva suddenly donned one of her most precise smiles. The man was enchanted. He forgot his opening line, at once recovered himself. But Stefa anticipated him:

  "It is a great pleasure for me finally to make your acquaintance after all these years. I am full of respect, full of admiration. Were it not that our profession deprives us of the right to compromising keepsakes I should ask you for your autograph here and now. What I mean to say is that I am one of your most devoted admirers. Now to come to the point. I cannot understand what your calculations show you. Which is your credit column and which is your debit column. I am making you a simple, straightforward offer: I am giving and it is up to you to take, with supreme caution. Why should you not take? I am not charging anything. And don't tell me you suspect a trick or a trap. Such a suspicion, as you must understand, greatly damages our mutual self-respect. Help yourself. I am all yours. Grads and for nothing. Call it an emotional need. Call it a Zionistic impulse. I shan't change my mind and I shan't make any conditions, apart from the insistence that you receive me with enormous caution. But, after all, in the art of caution you are the great maestro. Let us decide on the necessary arrangements. Do not weary me with questions about the considerations and motives which make me suddenly choose to unbosom myself to a man like you. Then we'll say farewell and adieu. Do you accept or not?"

  The little man did not answer at once. He mused for a while, and as he did so he closed one eye almost completely, as if to economize on his eyesight.

  Suddenly he leapt up as if stung, almost upsetting the boat; quick as a flash he put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a lighter as Stefa fished her cigarettes out of her handbag.

  Then he smiled, and when his companion did not smile back he closed his other eye too. And he started to speak, at length, with unfathomable patience and in a Talmudic singsong:

  'Yes, yes, Madame. Yes indeed. You can't have a baby through the mails, if you will forgive the expression. Da, I apologize, I apologize from the bottom of my heart for my choice of words. Excitement is my undoing, Madame. It was the excitement that made me adopt a vulgar and suspicious tone.

  "I am sure you can understand my feelings, Madame. Here am I, here are you, there is no one else about, we are alone, floating on the water, and water—so I believe with all my heart—is a very important element, one of the mainstays of life. And so, Madame—permit me—Madame Pomeranz, so we meet in a strange town and row out to the middle of a lake in such extraordinary circumstances, and moreover we have, as you so rightly say, for many years had connections with one another, well, how should I put it, we have felt strongly drawn toward each other, we have spent long hours contemplating each other from a distance, there has been an emotional bond between us, and I am sure you will agree with me when I say that emotional bonds are the essence of the social structure. And what amusing games we have played with each other all these years. What naughty pranks we have got up to. I was about to compare our long-standing relationship to a flirtation conducted through intermediaries. But this time I held my tongue and said nothing. So, now we have met. It is still hard to believe. We were like dreamers, dear lady, if you will permit me to employ Biblical language. Da, language is an inestimable gift; who can exhaust its praises? But at once I pinch myself, Madame—so—and bang go all the excited dreams. Now, as you request, for the realia. I am wide awake and ready for anything. Command, Madame: the worm Jacob and the hind Israel hearken as one to the voice of Mother Russia. Eh bien. How blue the sky is; despite oneself one thinks of the poems of Goethe, or the visions of the romantic philosophers. And by the way, is Madame Fedoseyeva in earnest? Or does she mean to make fun of a lonely man who is no longer young, and make a laughingstock of hiM——of me, that is-once and for all? Madame must try to understand me: I am a wounded man, I have already been badly hurt by young ladies—two or three of them. That was all a whole generation ago, however. Nevertheless, Madame, unworthy apprehensions, an incurable suspiciousness, a constitutional insecurity, a fear of the fair sext certain prejudices—all these compel me to put your intentions to the test before giving free reign, as they say, to my emotions. I must have some token, some slight evidence of the seriousness of your intentions. For instance, a teeny-weeny droplet of the fuel which Engineer Kumin, Osip Grigorich, has been clever enough to manufacture. A tiny drop, enough perhaps to fill the lighter in my pocket, or else perhaps not a drop, no fuel at all, but the good Engineer himself might be induced to take advantage of this opportunity and join you on your journey. Moreover, when you come to us, as soon as the first joyful moments are over, I shall have to restrain our joy and connect certain plugs and disconnect others, to make certain alterations in the points of contact, a matter of elementary legerdemain whose purpose I shall not attempt for a moment to conceal from you, Madame: it is to block the escape routes, however fantastic they may seem. To burn all your bridges. And the purpose of this is to remove any feelings of regret, because regret is, in my humble opinion, a constant source of mental anguish. Let us give vent to words which our
beloved Elisha Pomeranz would not use, but which we, being lovers of poetry, may legitimately employ: we shall remove you from the clutches of Mother Russia, and carefully and lovingly plant you, once and for all time, in the soil of Israel, in the hope and certain conviction that in the land of our fathers you will blossom and bloom sevenfold."

  Stefa:

  "We understand each other, more or less. That is good. I must only repeat and emphasize that Palestine will have to take very good care of me and of him. My people will be furious, they have a long arm, the risk is grave. Incidentally, while you were mentioning Kumin and talking about solid fuel or something of the sort, songbirds began to sing among the trees and I could not hear that part of what you were saying. It is twenty past three."

  The little man:

  "But of course, dear lady. Rest assured, as the apple of our eye we shall protect you, and the man who is so dear to you. With all due respect, between lovers such things should be understood even without words. We shall take perfectly good care of you both. Permit me, Madame, forgive me, I am a trite man and I am about to make a trite observation. To what end did we go through blood and fire to establish a free Jewish state? Why, first and foremost surely to provide a safe refuge for every persecuted Jew. And by the way, dear lady, surely you know something about us by now: we may bark at a shark—but we're kind to a hind. And here we have concrete illustration of the abstract idea of family reunion, of the notion of repentance ... tears well up in our eyes, dear lady, and who would be fool enough to deny that tears are a sure sign of emotion?"

  Fedoseyeva:

  "Silence. Now listen with both ears. Any day between the second and the sixteenth of February, between six o'clock and ten o'clock in the evening, at the Albergo Ambassadore in Milan, have two women waiting for me. Women, not men. Two of them. And no one else. No hidden strangers, such as you saw fit to lay on for our meeting here today. A sign, by the way, of extraordinarily bad manners on your part. These two women who will wait for me, if they see me smoking a cigarette, they will know that I am not alone, that I have company. In that case they must run for their lives, because they will be in great danger. If I am not smoking when they see me, I am in their hands and everything will depend on their dexterity. Now we must part. Give no hint or clue for the time being to the man I am going to in Palestine. Only protect him from harm. If anything should happen to him, I shall be of no use to you and you will not see me alive again. Now make for the shore. Naturally you are free to tell me anything else if you so wish, I do not of course forbid you to speak to me, your manners are so evidently good, please say whatever you like. But you must forgive me if from now on I do not listen. Those birds are singing again. And I am suffering from migraine. Farewell. Remember to drive carefully."

  31

  A week after Ernst and his two middle-aged lady friends visited Pomeranz's room, the following Friday night, the Cultural Committee planned a modest celebration of the discovery and its discoverer.

  But an hour or two before the appointed time, the guest of honor suffered the loss of his dog. The dog had stretched his legs, stared for some minutes through the window toward the fading hills, or perhaps at the curtains moving in the breeze, then he had suddenly given way and died as if suddenly stricken with absent-mindedness or unbearable boredom.

  They assumed that Pomeranz would be sad, and out of delicacy of feeling they decided to postpone the party. A dusty moon glowed in the east. And because there were no clouds racing across the sky, the moon stood stubbornly, solidly still.

  In the dining hall they showed instead a detective thriller, a black-and-white American mystery about a crime, false motive, true motive. Pomeranz sat alone on the bench in the little garden opposite his house. Far away in the darkness a cow lowed stupidly, lowed again and stopped. Strange dogs, wolf dogs, stood huge and dark at the edge of the wood with wet snouts, raising their slavering muzzles to the moon. Through the pine trees a mad moon bit them. All night long the huge dogs howled.

  32

  Day by day Pomeranz's fame spread through the country and abroad. People with problems or aspirations continually wrote to him, came, probed. He pursued his nightly studies, making calculations by the light of his desk lamp, putting out cautious feelers in unimaginable regions where mathematics and music were as close as two separate rivers issuing from the melting of the same snows.

  But what can simple folk know of the private life of the virtuoso, the daily routine of a man no longer young left alone with his body.

  Prolonged celibacy: relations of pent-up boredom, of faint disgust, with the inescapable body, with its whims, its demands, its impositions. For years he had found it repulsive. Its relentless, loathsome needs. There was no refuge from this blue-veined, capricious body, as if one were condemned to spending the rest of one's life shut up in a single room with some sweaty aging relation, with swollen veins and foul breath. And endless grumbles and tantrums and denials and complaints.

  The tightlipped effort to concentrate in spite of everything, to escape, to elude the foe, to explore and investigate a limpid, almost airless sphere, while all the time beyond the thin partition an excited girl laughs screams pleads as if she were being rolled in honey or having her soles pricked with tiny needles. Audrey Audrey.

  Your body odor on the towel. Clench your teeth and restrain yourself.

  The ruthless tyranny of the cheap alarm clock: Get up. Go to bed. Sit down.

  The dishes in the sink.

  The irritating tendency of the black shoe polish to dry and crack because the lid of the tin has not been put back quite straight.

  The milk going sour too soon.

  A dull, sticky taste in the throat.

  Black coffee.

  Heartburn.

  A hacking cough in the early morning.

  The stink of your aging body which emanates even from the armchair, from the bedspread. The endlessly repeated sweeping. The invincible dust.

  The daily carpet-beating.

  And all the time the continual wheezing, like the wheezing of an old woman.

  The humiliating need to remind yourself at such moments, you are the discoverer, you are the celebrity, you are the virtuoso, so pull yourself together and wash the dishes.

  Talking to yourself—in Polish.

  And the feeling of despair when you can't find a simple, everyday word.

  The numerous petty irritations: a few grains of sugar fall on the floor, throngs of exultant ants appear, you snatch the insect spray and go out to do battle, at once a large paraffin stain starts spreading on your trousers.

  Moments of carelessness: your sleeve knocks a cup off the table. It shatters on the floor. A pool of spilled coffee. And to drive the humiliating lesson home, the rug, too, is stained.

  Or, say, the clean underwear finding its way by mistake into the dirty laundry, the teaspoon ending up somehow in your trouser pocket, comic mishaps, the laboriously replaced light bulb turning out to be a dead one itself, lemon squeezed into milk tea, all so shaming, and wasn't the whole point supposed to be the power to work wonders, to reveal something of the harmony of the spheres, to work some kind of salvation?

  Over everything, like the glass eyes of a stuffed bear, this coarse bitter hunger, night and day, for a woman's gracious bounty.

  Rise up and put off your flesh, and rest and peace will come. Could any truth be simpler than this.

  33

  When Stefa first visited Engineer Kumin in Novosibirsk he told her that his old father lived on top of a holy mountain in Palestine and wrote poems of yearning for Zion.

  But Old Kumin merely lived in an old people's home in Givatayim.

  In addition to the digestive disorder which had enabled him to leave Russia, the old man also suffered from outbursts of melancholy and a dripping ear. He was a tall, bent man of eighty-two, with rosy cheeks and cloudy blue eyes. Despite his various aches and pains, there was something strong and sharp about him, like a bird of prey.

  Even
though he had never worn glasses and even now his eyesight was adequate, his nose seemed somehow bare and overprominent, as if he had just lost his spectacles and the outside world had become totally blurred. He had a perpetual expression of dumfounded malice.

  Indeed, many people supposed him to be a foolish old man. He was in the habit of appearing without warning at meetings of poets, at conferences of educationalists and public leaders, pouncing on the microphone with liberal use of his elbows and tongue, and furiously denouncing someone or something in a strong Russian accent and roars of rusty anger. He also penned frequent letters to the editors of the newspapers vehemently maintaining that this or that matter of public interest was bound to end badly.

  His deafness and his constant fury protected him against every sign of disrespect or derision from the ignorant masses. If they replied to his assertions, he did not listen, If they argued with him, he did not hear. Once during the Silver Jubilee celebrations Kumin mounted the rostrum of the Trades Union Council, stood over Prime Minister Eshkol, and loudly proclaimed: You, Sir, are a troubler of Israel. Before he could be seized he had made with surprising speed for the door and walked out of the hall in disgust. He returned at once to his room in the old people's home and began composing a long and bitter epistle addressed to the writer Haim Hazaz.

  Before the Russian Revolution Gershon Kumin had been a pharmacist, surgical assistant, and poet in Odessa. In the course of his life he had suffered many colorful vicissitudes, some of them noble, others base and degrading. Not only had he fallen in love as a young man with a non-Jewish girl student, but he was married against his will to a girl from the violently anti-Zionist Getzler family. When he sent some poems of yearning for Zion to the famous literary editor Ravnitsky, Ravnitsky wrote back that although they were priceless gems all the poems would need to be drastically shortened. And even though at the end of his letter Ravnitsky called him the "sweet singer of Zion," Kumin never forgot or forgave the abhorrent phrase "drastically shortened." Then the Revolution broke out. First his wife and then his only daughter fell in love with the bloody anarchist Fyodor Sosloparov and followed him to Samarkand, to the Chinese border, to Kamchatka, and there the three of them disappeared without trace. It was said that they had died, or committed suicide together, or that the steppe wolves had eaten them on their travels, or perhaps that they had managed to escape by boat to the Isles of Japan, or even to flee across the Bering Strait over the ice. There was a rumor at one time that the three revolutionaries had eventually reached Argentina, where they had made a fortune in canned beef.