Motti Read online

  MOTTI

  OTHER WORKS IN

  DALKEY ARCHIVE PRESS’S

  HEBREW LITERATURE SERIES

  Dolly City

  Orly Castel-Bloom

  Heatwave and Crazy Birds

  Gabriela Avigur-Rotem

  Homesick

  Eshkol Nevo

  Life on Sandpaper

  Yoram Kaniuk

  MOTTI

  a novel by

  ASAF SCHURR

  TRANSLATED AND WITH AN

  AFTERWORD BY TODD HASAK-LOWY

  Series Editor: Rachel S. Harris

  DALKEY ARCHIVE PRESS

  CHAMPAIGN AND LONDON

  Originally published in Hebrew as Motti by Babel, Tel Aviv, 2008

  Copyright © 2008 by Asaf Schurr

  English translation © by the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature

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

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Shur, Asaf.

  [Moti. English]

  Motti: a novel / by Asaf Schurr; translated and with an afterword by Todd Hasak-Lowy.--1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-56478-655-5

  I. Hasak-Lowy, Todd, 1969-II. Title.

  PJ5055.41.U733M6813 2011

  892.4’37--dc22

  2011002839

  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

  www.dalkeyarchive.com

  To good Cookie

  As you embark on a new path

  MOTTI

  Contents

  FIRST OUTSIDE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  SECOND IN BETWEEN

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  THIRD INSIDE

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  FOURTH OUTSIDE

  Chapter 58

  TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD

  HEBREW LITERATURE SERIES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Structurally, this book is strict. Strict and very simple. A symmetrical pyramid with a summit of clouds and a base of Euclidian geometry. Nevertheless, it’s a book, not a concert or some sort of performing art, I don’t get the chance to sit in the theater and offer suggestions during rehearsals. And there’s no division between the audience and the stage. You’re the performers and the audience all at once, and everything is already out of my control. Therefore I can only request that you read attentively, or at least not with complete indifference. Even with joy, perhaps, those paragraphs worthy of it. From my perspective it’s all the same now. At any rate, I do not know and will never know most of you, and if you die (even in the middle of a chapter) I’ll never know a thing about it.

  Yes, that’s how it is. In our own eyes we’re very important, but for almost everyone else our death won’t even warrant a few lines in the local paper. Think of all the people you pass on the street every week. Some of them have already died, and you didn’t even notice. And we will too, some day, and our absence won’t be felt by those who remain, walking the streets in the evening, out with the dog, or on the way to the trash with a big bag of garbage.

  And because of this the simplicity. Because of this. There are almost no games here, no deception, there is no deviousness at all in this book. No manipulation. Everything is simple as can be. Everything is on the table. The cards are on the table, the tablecloth is on the table, everything is on the table, open the refrigerator, there’s nothing in it, everything is on the table, everything, look underneath, nothing there either, everything is on the table and in midair the table stands.

  FIRST

  OUTSIDE

  Sure, I hate to paint. First of all it’s work, second it’s smelly, third it’s a mess, fourth it takes up space. Don’t like to paint. I paint only when I have to.

  —Rafi Lavi in an interview with Dana Gillerman, Haaretz

  All propositions are results of truth-operations on the elementary propositions.

  The truth-operation is the way in which a truth-function arises from elementary propositions.

  According to the nature of truth-operations, in the same way as out of elementary propositions arise their truth-functions, from truth-functions arises a new one. Every truth-operation creates from truth-functions of elementary propositions another truth-function of elementary propositions, i.e. a proposition. The result of every truth-operation on the results of truth-operations on elementary propositions is also the result of one truth-operation on elementary propositions.

  Every proposition is the result of truth-operations on elementary propositions.

  —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

  1

  Motti loved Menachem like a brother. That is, despite himself. Perhaps they met in the army. This is not uncommon among Israelis.

  Perhaps they met before that, in school. Possibly even in college. Yet from the very beginning, the balance of power was clear. Menachem always had the upper hand, even when this hand was patting his friend’s shoulder.

  This is how it is: Like a smack across a dog’s snout, the first meeting of two people can determine the structure, the shared soul, of their relationship. It carves a pattern in them, cuts a path like water through a stone (it scars, in other words). And once a balance of power is set, no lever, no matter how strong, will ever shift it. Even among wolf packs the hierarchy is more fluid than among humans, who, steeped in our habits and laws, never budge from a pattern, once established. And if Motti and Menachem really did meet in the army, it’s obvious which one of them was the commanding officer. Obvious, because despite the many years that have passed since then, this rule was scorched into Motti and hasn’t faded. Sure, part of him understands that the Menachem he knew back then—always screaming and always punishing and all powerful; it was safer to stick close to him at all times, since otherwise he could pop up suddenly and give an order, could punish you for anything—that this Menachem was wearing a mask, and that the real Menachem is the one he knows now, his good friend Menachem. Yet even though he knows this, Motti has still never truly convinced
himself, over the course of all the years since (they’ve spent a hundred hours together as friends for each difficult hour they had back then), that then it was only a mask, while this is now Menachem’s true face. At any moment, he fears, Menachem’s face is liable to fall away from him like so many dirty clothes, revealing the old, remembered features below. At any moment he could start abusing Motti like he used to, and Motti would obey.

  Motti’s willingness to obey, along with his courtesy, provided him a wonderful buffer, the way electric fences leave an uncontaminated area all around. Breathing room. No one can enter here, he told himself, worried he needed this space, afraid that others would hurt him. Never admitting to himself the real reason for keeping this distance: that he ascribed so much importance to himself that he felt the slightest act on his part might cause someone else grievous injury.

  What are you doing tonight? Menachem asked over the telephone. I was thinking about leaving Edna at home with the little ones and going out for a drink. Are you with me? Pick you up at your place at eight thirty?

  Sure, Motti said to him. Eight thirty.

  Ya’alla, Menachem said. Eight thirty. I’m fucking crazy about you.

  I love you, too, my brother, Motti said.

  Hey, man, are you turning fag on me or what?

  Nah, Motti said, I was just talking. I didn’t mean it. I just wanted to see how it rolled off the tongue.

  And that’s the problem: even though all true expressions are a matter of rolling, not all true problems are a matter of expression—and yet, many problems stem precisely from this, that is, from the desire to see how they roll. Because from the moment it becomes possible to say a thing, even something untrue, it becomes necessary to say it, to let it roll, and so it takes on motion and expands, and let’s see you try to stop it then (impossible). And the moment it’s spoken and comes into being, it’s a beautiful and common mistake to think that maybe it’s true. But we can say all sorts of things, wonderful things. It doesn’t mean a thing. But the temptation—oh, the temptation—to say them (and the need to believe them)!

  2

  He sits next to the table and reads the paper, his cell phone dismantled and slowly drying on the business section (before, when he was done speaking with Menachem, it fell right into the sink). His beloved dog Laika rests her head on his thigh, and he scratches behind her right ear absentmindedly. Then her ears stand up and she hurries to the door; a moment later Motti too hears Ariella’s keys jingling as she comes up the stairs. Excited, like Laika, he hurries to greet her. One must be prepared: he gathers up the garbage bag from the can, and before she arrives at the door he’s already there. Turns the bolt and opens. She comes up the stairs toward him, her colorful handbag on her shoulder. He hurries to her, and she raises her eyes to him and smiles.

  Hi, Ariella.

  Again she smiles at him, a small set of keys in her hand.

  Laika missed you, he says and hurries down the stairs. Laika’s tail wags from behind the closed door, and sensitive as Motti is to this sound, his sleeve is so close to Ariella’s hair as they pass by one another. Patience is a virtue. A wonderful virtue. Motti will wait as long as he has to. His real life waits, concealed inside the future like a jewel in a thick cloth.

  Meanwhile she goes up the stairs, the key already in her hand. She opens the door and goes inside, turns and smiles at him before being closed inside the apartment. After taking out the trash Motti will stand again for a moment next to the living room wall, this being the wall that separates his place from hers. The cold wall on his cheek, he breathes deeply. Patient. Every day, over and over again, his heart breaks. (Every day. It’s a biological miracle.) Over and over again his heart breaks and light pours inside, glowing or whatever light does from inside this abyss, this rift that has opened inside him.

  In the evening Menachem came and they went out drinking. They didn’t talk about anything of much importance, and Menachem often slapped Motti on the back and talked about fucking and laughed loudly. Motti paid for both their beers, and afterward returned home and went out for a walk with Laika. She sniffed around the garbage cans longer than usual, and he peeked at his watch every second to make sure that he’d manage to sleep six and a half hours exactly, that he’d manage to drink coffee and take a quick shower before the time that Ariella would leave her apartment, that he would again manage to see her on the stairs. A day will come when he’ll speak to her for real, but in the meantime there’s no rush.

  They went to sleep, the two of them, Laika and Motti. And he hurried to fall asleep, so that he wouldn’t find himself unoccupied, lost inside a forest of minutes in which there’s nothing to do. Before dawn, Laika whimpered as though she’d had a bad dream. Still asleep, his hand descended. He petted her, she calmed down, fell asleep again. My little wolf pack, that’s what he calls her. My little wolf pack.

  3

  In the morning, since his first class was cancelled, he was late leaving. Drank coffee next to the window looking out on the street. And that’s why he was there, honestly, just an accident, when Ariella was leaving the apartment. Followed her with his eyes as she went away down the sidewalk alone, until she disappeared from sight. Years from now perhaps they’ll leave the building like this, together. They’ll walk hand in hand until the end of the street, and then they’ll kiss and turn away to go about their business. During work he’ll think of her. Full of happiness and satisfaction he’ll attend to his classes, in a good mood, in high spirits. During the break he’ll sit in the teachers’ lounge, but he won’t talk about her. Relationships are a personal matter. Though it’s not impossible that they, him and her together, will befriend another couple (this in addition to Menachem and Edna, with whom they’ll perhaps go on vacation once or twice a year). Sometimes they’ll meet at home, for dinner and a pleasant conversation and cake and coffee, sometimes they’ll go to a movie. The kind of movies there are sure to be by then! Out of the world special effects. Though sometimes they’ll happen upon some foreign film at a small movie house (or at the Cinémathèque). After the movie they’ll go drink a glass of wine somewhere nearby, and if he worried less about her getting sick or hurt, they’d also smoke cigarettes, French ones even.

  And on other days, at home, many years from now, they won’t meet with anyone and won’t go anywhere special. They’ll get home at the end of the workday and have a bite to eat. They’ll go out together to the street each evening, for a relaxing walk with Laika. No, not with Laika. Many years from now we said, and by then Laika will already be dead (tears well up at the thought, but he doesn’t cry), okay, not with Laika, maybe a different dog, a different female, one of her offspring, why not, even though she was already spayed long ago, it would take a miracle, but this too is possible, indeed miracles fall on the world like rain, you need only to catch one and not let go.

  4

  Whoever isn’t familiar with the details, or didn’t take an active part in the Soviet space program, is liable to think that Laika’s body burned up as it reentered the atmosphere. Just a few hours she spent in space, and within a short time she died. Afterward, it was hinted that her food was poisoned, that her air ran out as planned, that this was a mercy killing, so she wouldn’t suffer from the great heat of the friction between the spaceship’s side panels and the atmosphere, the atmosphere that, in principle, allows us to live, even though in this instance the opposite would be true. Later on it was said that she did in fact die from the heat after all, despite all precautions, something went wrong with the spaceship, something got screwed up, we apologize for this regrettable incident.

  But no, it wasn’t so simple. How could Laika’s soul leave her body in such a quotidian way? After all, she wasn’t only the first living being to go into orbit—she was also the first to die there. The first to sow the seeds of death in what was already a gaping expanse of death: an offering to the big nothing. Like ancient tribesmen we sent her into the darkness ahead of us, to appease whatever is out there, so it wouldn’t t
ake whomever would follow, sealed in a closed metal case within a darkness wide as wide can be. (Indeed, there wasn’t even a window. Entirely enclosed, confined to a narrow, forsaken space, absolutely miniscule, inside that other, wide-open space.)

  It doesn’t matter what time it happened, the clock slices time up arbitrarily, and even that it only does beneath the skies, not above them. The dog, a stray, was restless, was frightened when strapped into its harness, when the engines were fired. When the acceleration flattened her, she was terrified. Did she actually know what was happening there? Did she know, as everyone around her knew—all the people petting and training and feeding her, and then the ones measuring and preparing and keeping her healthy—that she would die in a moment? Doubtful she knew. (“A strange lightness envelops her,” Ben Vered wrote, “her ears float in the little cell, and so do her legs and tail.” So he wrote, but I myself don’t believe it. I saw the apparatus she was harnessed into—they restrained her so tightly there wasn’t room for her legs to float, and not her tail either. Her ears, perhaps.) Did she understand the source of the great pressure, and then the source of the terrible, increasing heat? Doubtful she understood. Did she wish that her fur might fall out everywhere, forming strands that would encircle the spaceship, like the stubble clinging to a bald man’s head after a trim? Doubtful that she did. Instead, before she died, before she suffocated, perhaps (desperate for air), before she was cooked in her own skin, the inner heavens opened and a great light spilled out. A pleasure that was greater even than a treat. Greater than running in a field, even though she never enjoyed such a run; they took her straight from the cold streets of Moscow to the lab.