Yoel Hoffmann - Moods

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

Copyright 2010 by Yoel Hoffmann

Translation copyright 2015 by Peter Cole

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted ina newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or website review, no part of this bookmay be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, includingphotocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,without permission in writing from the Publisher.

Moods is published by arrangement with theKeter Publishing House and the Harris/Elon Agency of Israel.

First published as a New Directions Paperbook ( NDP1306 ) in 2015

Manufactured in the United States of America

Design by Erik Rieselbach.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-PublicationData

Hoffmann, Yoel.

[Matsve ruah. English]

Moods / Yoel Hoffmann ; translated by Peter Cole.

Originally published as: Matsve ruah. Yerushalayim : Keter,c2010.

ISBN 978-0-8112-2382-9

ISBN 978-0-8112-2383-6 (e-book)

1. Psychological fiction. 2. Experimental fiction,Jewish.
I. Cole, Peter, 1957 translator. II. Title.

PJ5054.H6319M3713 2015

892.43'6dc23 2015001270

New Directions Books are published for JamesLaughlin

by New Directions Publishing Corporation

80 Eighth Avenue, New York 10011

[1]

Ever since finishing my last book, Ive been thinking of howto 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 thesidewalk?) five or six steps to a basement apartment, and hes halfway there.

I know its a love story. And maybe theres a woman in the basementapartment. Its probably November.

[2]

I remember things that happened in an empty building (whichis to say, one they hadnt yet finished building) in Ramat Gan, in the fifties.

Then too (as now) legs were the principal thing. The world was full oflegs of all sorts and there was movement in space. SomeoneEzraDanischevskysaid to me once: I want to be an elevator repairman (you canimagine the motion and its various directions).

In that (empty) building, a woman whos now seventy-four (if shes notdead) took off her dress.

[3]

And so his namethat of the man going down thestepsis, most likely, Nehemiah. Not because its true, but because of thatcombination of soundshis name and is... Nehemiah, and because of itsimplicit acknowledgment of God, without whom perhaps the world exists, though He isthe master of words.

Its hard to call a woman by name because Nothingness swallowseverything, and the one contains the many, although, in other respects, highlypartial, her name is possibly Hermione.

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

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

My father also had a Schaffhausen watch, which wasnt removed even whenhe fell into a coma.

[4]

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

Id trailed her from the Metro stop to the buildings entrance, andsince she looked at me and twirled the key on her finger suggestively, I followedher down to the basement apartment.

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

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

[5]

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

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

[6]

A forty-watt bulb (elsewhere Ive called it an electric pear)lit up the bed but the picture of the Virgin (and Child) stood outside the cone oflight like an omen. Sometimes one sees a sign, like ARLOSOROFF STREET , andgoes there, and in fact the streets just like that.

The French woman pulled the dress up over her head and stoodthere utterly naked (I remember an accountant who always said, Bottom linewhich is to say, net)no bra, no panties.

[7]

Literatures so pathetic. We peddle fabric with a sun paintedon it and no one even looks up.

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

And he should see my Aunt Edith. How she fell into herself, in thewheelchair, until her mouth sank into her jaw and her jaw sank into her chest andstill she saidtime after time, until she diednoch (which isto say, more).

[8]

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

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

[9]

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

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

But I cant, because of the turquoise sunbirds.

[10]

And because of the picture (The Potato Eaters) VanGogh painted maybe some thirty times, each time the light falling in a differentmanner.

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

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

As in the chorus of Beethovens Ninth, there wasnt a single potato thatwasnt 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 theminstalled elevators there.

Youre walking horizontally and suddenly youre lifted along a verticalaxis. After a while, you descend the vertical axis and go back to walkinghorizontally. Sometimes youre parallel to the ground (that is, your entire body ishorizontal), as when making love.

[12]

The French woman washed below her navel in the bidet andtalked 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, its revealed. I do now what I didnt 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 herleft down to the little one. If there were hair on my head it would fall across thesole of her foot. May His great Name be exalted and sanctified.