Yitzhak Orpaz - Death of Lysanda: Two Novellas

OTHER WORKS IN DALKEY ARCHIVE PRESSS
HEBREW LITERATURE SERIES

Dolly City
Orly Castel-Bloom

Heatwave and Crazy Birds
Gabriela Avigur-Rotem

Homesick
Eshkol Nevo

Kin
Dror Burstein

Life on Sandpaper
Yoram Kaniuk

Motti
Asaf Schurr

TRANSLATED BY R ICHARD F LINT

Editors Note

The pages that follow were written by Naphtali Noi himself. They were discovered in a prison cell by one of my acquaintances, a policeman, who, thinking they would interest me, passed them on.

They did interest me. I felt they had to be published.

For the convenience of the reader, I have edited and arranged the pages in a reasonable sequence, retaining almost all of their contents.

I have tried to preserve, as much as is possible, the tone of the original. And it is for the reader to judge.

I

I fixed myself a light meal in the kitchen. It was already two oclock in the morningthe time I usually come home from the newspaper, where I work as a proofreader, and fix myself a light meal. I was tired and wanted to sleep. I would have fallen on my bed and gone straight to sleep, but I was so tired that I did not have the strength to go against habit. My hands did what they had done so many nights, and I found myself leaning over the small kitchen cupboard, with tea and cheese sandwiches in front of me, and an old newspaper spread out under them.

I was very tired, but as I saw characters I glanced over them to seek out a missing i or a superfluous einevitable for a proofreaderand my eyes fell on two items. The first was an advertisement for a film, in which He and She featured; She, wicked and corrupt from birth, (here I was annoyed by the use of a comma instead of a colon) an illegitimate child. He: a tempestuous playboy driven out of his mind by youthful passion. And both of them like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, naked and unashamed. The final sentence was printed entirely in Gothic script. Underneath this advertisement was a news item about a man who had killed his wife and told his interrogators: I had a headache and couldnt sleep all night. I got up in the morning and wandered around the yard. I saw a big rock. I picked it up and dropped it on my wifes head.

The wifes name was Eve. I was taken by the clear, restrained, almost classical style of this paragraph.

The window in front of me was open and I really do not know why it bothered me. Anyhow, I grabbed it and shook it, trying to close it, before taking the tea in my hand. I was still new on the roof of this old houseI had not been here for more than four weeksand I was not yet accustomed to all its nooks and crannies. In any case, the window frame, after hitting against the sill, opened up again, dragging with it the other frame. I threw my hand forward to stop it so that the pane would not smash into the corner of the shelf, but before I could reach it I knocked over the cup of tea. The tea spilled out, the cup broke, and I looked around me and saw that it was night. Deepest night. And the wind whistling through the window and the window wide open.

I went out on to the roof. The roof was square, but the darkness was thick, and I could not see its corners. And the trees that always lined the street below were also invisible. As I could not see the corners of the roof, I did not see the plants I raised and nurtured so diligently in the corners of the roof. I heard only a kind of rustle from them, something like a frightened breathing. Then a wind came and cast a feverish tingling over the roof. It wound around like a black flame. Perhaps I felt that a more powerful wind was followinganyway I went into my room and fell on my face. I lay there, feeling on my back and on my neck that all the doors and all the windows had burst wide open.

I opened an eyeand from then on I lay, one eye closed and one eye open.

II

Before Naphtali Noi came to this city he had been married to a girl from an Orthodox family in Jerusalem. Her name was Leah. The marriage had lasted four years (Just like a pair of doves, you never hear them coming in or going out, the neighbors had said) and they had no children.

In the mornings Naphtali used to work in the archives of one of the museums of which Jerusalem is so full, and in the afternoons he would study in their quiet apartment, jotting down notes, while Leah walked on tiptoe so as not to disturb his work. From time to time he would go out with his friend Peretz to the Judean Hills, where they would hunt wild duck and hedgehogs and bring the meat home. Leah couldnt stand it and Naphtali had to eat it alone.

One day he dragged home a skinned hedgehog, stuck by its blood to a filthy sack, and found Leah vomiting, laughing through her tears and saying, Theres a child in my womb. Theres a child in my womb. Naphtali refused to believe this, but he saw that his wifes stomach was swollen. He washed the blood off his hands, began feeling her stomach, and with a trembling hand pulled out from under her dress the feather pillow that she always loved to clasp in her lap. And Leah laughed through her tearsslowly the tears overwhelmed the laughter, I told you, I told you theres a child in my womb, but you dont believe me, you dont believe me. Naphtali went up to the roof of the house and looked out at the steeples and domes of the churches of which Jerusalem is so full.

Then he took up taxidermy.

From Jerusalem Naphtali set out for any high mountain peak. And on one of these, near Kibbutz Omrah in Galilee, he met Sternik, who used to stuff birds and small animals and sell them.

Sternik was proud of his craft and strict about its rules. He taught Naphtali patience in operating on a dead animal. Smoke a pipeits food for patience, he said. Naphtali started smoking a pipe. But with all the rest he was not so successful. Sternik taught him how to draw out the blood gradually, how to clean off the dirt with various solutions and how to write out a kind of identity card for the dead animal, with personal details like total length, weight, wingspan, sex, color of eyes, length of beak, contents of stomach, and so on. Then how to move the wings of the carcass from side to side to render them flexible before the operation.

The operation, explained Sternik, mainly consists of turning the bird inside out as one does a glove, in the process amputating, step by step, only those parts whose amputation allows the maximum preservation of the skin in its entirety. Thus, the eyes are thrown away and their color noted, the brain is thrown away and the skull retained, and the skin is carefully cleaned of fat. Thenand only thenthe skin is to be turned (againlike a glove) back, to be given the appearance of a living creature by means of joining and stuffing. Naphtali was a good listener, but a poor pupil. Sternik taught him to respect the creatures and to set them up after the operation in their normal position, that which was most natural to them. Not in the manner of some charlatans (some have made it into even this respected craft)who set up a bird with one wing raised and a foot tensed, as if poised for flight, with its beak open, ready to screech.

It seems that Naphtali did not quite understand Sternik. He tired very quickly of all rules. Instead of soft, flexible wire, he used springy steel, and instead of sawdust that had been specially imported from abroad, he stuffed seaweed into the open bellies. Nor did he observe the precise sequence of steps of the operation. But what particularly aroused his fastidious teachers ire was Naphtalis stylehis style of setting up the bird. Naphtali found no respect whatever, in himself, for the normal stance of a creature; he saw no heresy in a bird tensing for flight. On the contrary, the normal, natural pose of the creature annoyed him. His eyes rolled, his pipe clattered between his teeth. In a state of elation he would lengthen the short neck of the thrush, bend the straight beak of the kingfisher, shorten the legs of the hawk, tear off the feathers and stick round, owl-like eyes into the head of the pigeon. Actually he aimed at greater and more terrible distortions than these, but Sterniks professional strictness kept him in check. Who was Naphtali Noi quarrelling with? He had left Jerusalem and his wife, had stopped eating meat, but went on killing the creatures of the Creator. What for? To give them a new form.