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Translated from Russian by Natalya Belinsky.

All Rights Reserved © Lord & the Author

Author Publishing House 'Garden of Eden'

The Favourite of Israel

(Selected Letters to the Future)

CONTENTS

Letter One

HABITUS

I realize - it is not some cakewalk to life's end. But you look at this snoot! As if a skunk is sitting under his nose all the time. And he assures that it is a typical Jewish habitus. That is - an appearance!
"What the heaviest thing is there at your place - to kill you at once? Not to let you feel unhappy!" I tell him.
"The life is hard…" He becomes a little more vivid, and goes back to his habitus momentarily.
"I guess, you have to count every coin, you hardly keep body and soul together, but if you only could know what is the absence of money as I know it! And bob's your uncle! I keep smiling!"
"Your habitus isn't Jewish."
"My? Well, look at my profile! I need no proof of identity!"
"Never mind. You are a mongrel."
"Okay. Let it be! But I don't understand you yet. Are you ill?"
"No."
"Are you a drifter?"
"No."
"Are you hungry?"
"No."
"Do you have to be in the altogether?"
"No."
"So, due to what is such a snoot?"
"To habitus!"
"Well, let it go hang, your habitus! Say 'che-e-ese'!"
"Che-e-ese…"
"Good heaven, it's even worse now! Maybe, it is really inherent! O! He's smiling! Oh, he has died… Ah, my dear habitus, habitus, habitus! Ah, my dear habitus, everything has gone…"

Letter Two

CAPITALIZED

All of us are subject to emigration - if not abroad, then to kingdom come; because not each movement is life, but each life is movement. And death… Here I am positive: even in death, there is daylight, but there's no death in life!
And so, my family and me had nothing to live upon in Alma-Ata. On the other hand, we were teed off about that national madness, which got under our skin. For all the residents of the around-Alma-Ata world, I'll explain that it is in Kazakhstan, which, in its turn, is in the CIS, which, in its turn, is in the former USSR, which was well known to many people by the only word 'Russia', though it is house-to-house (i.e. sheer) Central Asia. During the last year, my wife didn't work, because her salary had turned to the sum, which didn't cover her expenses of commutes and calkins; I was running through different schools, they paid me six and a half rates, and that was enough for the family only to victual for three weeks. And I got according almost the highest category! The last week, our son, a student, would feed the family and pay for flat, telephone and light. He took a saxophone and, playing, passed the hat in dirty streets, markets, and rag fairs. Near him, at every step, one could see the first violin of some orchestra, and Ph.D., and generally, the intellect of the merchants' brethren had half grown, at least.
I used to take a guitar, to go up Kok-Tube (a little mountain with little restaurants) sometimes, too, and to sing. It's kinda passing the hat as well. I sang to the whole world! To generals and colonels of militia and national security, mafiosos and gangsters of all ranks, and, imagine, even to simply good people - from time to time. It happened. But more and more seldom. The life pressed those people away. Some of them were removed to a rag fair, some - to heaven, some - abroad. I chose - abroad! To Israel! It was the most real variant - minding our absence of money presence. The more so, that my father, who had supported me until he died, and then, afterlife, gave me his kind warm hand: he was a JEW.
And I used to conceal the fact: not to hear any obscenity addressed to him and me once again, and not to see curls of the lips. Though such a JEW as my father was a full synonym to the words 'a REAL MAN'.
It is not surprising at all that I have a special attitude to Jews. And a bar for them was placed higher than for others. That was why I tried… not to communicate with them! Not to be disappointed irrevocably. After my father, I met such Jews in my life that they would better have not been met. Now I know where the shoe pinches, and at that time, I was about identifying myself as an anti-Semite. Their desperate striving to survive and to get at least some presence had driven them into two very dependable, for the first glance, ruts; but they lead to an abyss. Look more attentive - and you'll see there almost all the mankind. 'The measure for all things is a thing!' and 'The measure for all things is an idea!' are their credo. And my father's credo was, 'A MAN is the measure of all things!' That is all.
That was why, when the black hole of Kazakhstan let us go, I didn't ask Lord for the things that are usually asked for in such situations.
"O my Lord!" I was praying. "Send us, at least for the first period, well, not much chop, but simply normal people!"
I even didn't dare to dream about good Jews.
"Look!" I used to say to my wife. "Your aunt, though once removed, had left six months before us - and we've got neither an address, nor an invitation to house us for a night! The chief fable of all her letters to her mother is her plentiful and treated with imagination food, her plentiful sleep, and her plentiful sea baths. I don't speak about our acquaintances yet. As if they have been levelled by a bomb…"
God heard me - and normal people began to appear. Even a sallow neurasthenic cramp began to disappear from passengers, though their hands were jerking in fright for a long time still, groping their bags and wallets with documents and dollars.
Some Doctor of Science was even laughing.
"Snook to him!" he was repeating joyfully and endlessly. "Not a cent! Neither for the computer, nor for the disks!"
I kept silence. They had shaken one hundred fifty dollars out of me for 'the simplified variant of baggage checking'. And I hadn't carried anything forbidden, really! Only a diskette with my novel under the working title 'Beat a Sheeny in Yourself - Save a Jew!'.
And God kept carrying the load. Normal Customs met us in Tel-Aviv. They dispensed our baggage normally and admitted us to citizenship normally. Normal people were going round about. And they seemed to be… sober. Sober men? It was so hard to believe in it! Simply impossible! Nevertheless, there was one anomaly there. But it had nothing to do with people. The sky! The bluest July sky in December! Like in 'Clouds' by Lermontov!
We were going to move to the hotel already, when I looked around once more and took my wife's jotter.
"Call to your friend's sister! Call to the Belfers! They live in Tel-Aviv!"
"No soap. Everybody has already left for work," my beauty answers.
"Call!"
Seva, the Belfers' elder son, answered the phone.
"How nice!" he bawled into his receiver. "What a mercy that you've caught me! I'm leaving for army just now. We are waiting for you so much! Chop-chop - to our place! Well, as for chops, they are in the refrigerator, the key to the door is under the mat in front of the flat! Eat and sleep! See you later!"
My wife hung up.
I kept silence.
I was shocked…

Letter Three

THE WAYS OF GOD

'In the early life', it means in the USSR, I wasn't seeking for any friendship with Jews; neither with all the rest, by the by. But especially with Jews! In if someone of them became my fellow or friend, that was due not to the fact that he was a Jew, but to the fact that he was a MAN!
Mark was ninety-two years old, and I was forty-eight, but we were in cahoots.
Friendship!
Somebody was always sitting on the bench near our entrance, and everyone was younger than Mark. But it was possible to speak to them only about daily bread, and to Mark… One could speak to Mark about everything! When we were talking, the bench turned to be the centre of hot discussions and tilts, humour and heresy, and everything else you wish. It was a little Israel; Jerusalem, which was opened for all religions and philosophies. Sometimes Zoofar-Aga took participation in those debates, sometimes - Petrovich with Nadezhda Georgievna, and sometimes - even Roman Solomonovich and Boris Moiseyevich. But we were twosome oftener.
"I know, Arcady, what I'm saying," my dear Mark's voice is heard for me as if this very moment. "Our Jewish God is wicked!"
"Wicked? God? Mark, what are you saying?" I'm exclaiming. "God can be neither wicked nor kind. There is neither Good nor Evil as independent categories! There are deeds and phenomena bringing either harm or use. And mind - only at this definite time- span, among these personages and only in the given system of coordinates. Even sex in one case is violence, that is evil, and in another - good and blessing!"
"No, our God is wicked!" Mark repeated stubbornly, and twinkled with his glass eye. "As a matter of fact, I'm not Mark Samuilovich, but Mordehai Shmulevich. And I know what I'm saying. But, in spite of the fact that our God is wicked, the local one is even more malicious! If I were younger, and if diabetes hadn't plucked out one my eye, as it does with the second nowadays, I should leave for Israel like a shot. And I should be Mordehai Shmulevich. And you say God can't be wicked. He can - and how!"
"He can't, Mark, can't! God is neither Good nor Evil, neither an old man nor a youth with a golden bagel above his upper charka. God is the first, and the second, and the third, and the thirty third, and whatever you wish else!" I was holding my ground not less stubbornly. "God is a phenomenon! It is incomprehensible for us yet! And often, we can't see the expediency of his deeds. The focus of our sight is under our nose! We both, you and me, may be here now, and not in Israel, only to speak namely about it! That's all! All your and my life is only for this conversation."
"Well, let it be. And what about the devil?"
"It's a myth! In the best case, it is a phantom materialized by us ourselves. And in the worst one - it's a failure in the system of God's balance between creation and destruction. You see, Mark, I look at this world and see that there aren't two initially independent and valuable units in it. There is only one, multiplying and embodying in its infinite quantity. Each its bit is a part and the whole at the same time. It's difficult for us to imagine this, but it is so. As well as it is difficult to imagine infinity in this world, minding its finiteness in all its manifestations. And a part of God is in each thin leaf, in each of us, and it can increase or decrease. And as the call, so the echo. And its results will be alighted in the most unexpected place."
"Ye-a-a…" Listening to me and thinking about his own, Mark pronounced in a plangent manner. "I was given the place of honour in the synagogue - when I was able to get there. I should read the Torah… And where have you picked up all those hurly-burly scraps of knowledge? From what Talmud?"
I didn't answer. Mark new perfectly well that my Talmud is me myself.
"Well, let's change the subject," Mark decided to break silence. "Look, isn't anybody thereabout?"
"No."
"Then - only between you and me!"
"What's all the palaver about, Mark? Only between you and me - and the bedpost, I mean, my wife!"
"Okay. Your Lenochka, okay. Imagine, my daughter presented me seventy centimetres of smoked sausage. And I'm blind. I see nothing. But yesterday I palped the sausage - and it is only twenty centimetres in length. Not more! I understand that Katya has got her own family." (Katya was my young next-door neighbour who used to do and cook for Mark.) "But my children didn't underpay for her services at all. And I've noticed that she always filches something. And she says that it is necessary to increase the pay, because of inflation. And if I expose her, I'll have my trouble for nothing. Who will come to me? My children and grandchildren aren't in need of me… Now, you know how it is going: don't honour thy father and thy mother, and in the best case, pay for thy father and… don't give a fuck!"
"Just hang loose!" I say. "You see that it's no earthly reason to expose, don't you? And your children and grandchildren have got more money than not to present you something eatable else. And do you wish me present? I've got a few blocks of processed cheese, straight off the ice. By the way, you sausage seems to be not of high quality. Katya's boy has been running off for the third day already. That's the best and alive approval of my theory of the world model."
"Is it? Well, I'll give her those twenty centimetres as well."
"You are such a villain, Mark! Throw it away - and all is over! And might you have mistaken? It happens on the wrong side of thirty three…"
"Definitely not. The difference is too large. Seventy centimetres were two days ago - and twenty are today! Cervelat sausage isn't a pork sword to decrease so much due to reclining! Okay. You must be right: better a lean peace than a fat victory," Mark concluded and started standing up. "Guide me home!"
Having reached the doorstep already, he added, "You take both Good and Evil nonchalantly, and don't attack any fool! And use your tool, and play it cool! Maybe, you're right in all the rest as well… Good night!"
Next day Mark didn't leave the house. Not to break the door, his relatives decided to enter the flat through the window (Mark lived on the ground floor). I entered it in the same way. It happened so… Mark… Well, what are words for if the interlocutor is no more?
A few months later, I was in Tel-Aviv already.

Letter Four

STEW

The voice of God sounds loudly, only when he shows temper or punishes. In other cases, one should keep his ears open.
"My baby, if you aren't the best, you won't be anybody!" God whispered to everyone at birth, but there were only few ones who heard that.
And if he even did hear, then has forgotten while growing. Really, it's difficult to be in such a strain all the time. Jews were holding up for more than two thousand years, and now even they give way. Many of them become imitators. To speak the truth, before now it happened sometimes that someone bammed, but all the rest were made by circumstances learn by rote chock-a-block, and absorb the most productive out of their environment, and improve themselves. It was the Serbonian bog. The alley they were stalemated turned to be blind. They had neither their own state, nor their own mailed fist; so, they had to self-affirm with the help of gold, mind, and talent. And some persons really did work out and concentrate some things. Well, small wonder, minding the term…
But the most unexampled results of centuries-old pressing and unusual viability revealed themselves in the twentieth century. The compressed spring was released - and it flew up so high that became seen everywhere. Einstein, Shostakovich, Pasternak, Landau… There, there! I wanted to put Rothschild beside - but far from it! Nothing of the sort. Though that sort is perfectly distinguished, too. And the main his merit was not his money, but the fact that he bought land for Jews in Israel for that money and created a glorified park, open to the public, for free.
And so, poke your finger at any talent - and it seems to be either a Russian or a Chukchee, and dig farther down - a Jew! And don't grind your teeth, dear anti-Semites. They can blunt, Lord forbid. Who would pay such close attention to Jews, who would spur them so effectively but you? Should you be a Solomon, you don't exist when nobody either compliments you on that or reproaches you! So, don't overshoot your natural average rate of the humankind and its aggressiveness. And be healthy forever! Amen!
It remains for me to add that, in spite of historical situations and mutations, God doesn't throw talents about. Nevertheless, as I've already said, he gives a chance to everybody. You may pretend to be the ace of aces and put on dog till the crack of doom, but talent is a custom-made product - the same as Lord is. And even if they unexpectedly flock somewhere, anyway each of them is in a class by himself. Moreover, if it is feast today, then for sure fast tomorrow. And sometimes, it is fast on the same day when it is feast. For instance, in that case. I advert to imitators. They are plentiful as blackberries. I don't mean actors! There is at least someone heaven-born among them. I refer to those who are belly-ruled. Yet, they bawl at the top of lungs about being God-inspired. Imitators! What can you ask of them besides ads? Such specimens exist… I was brought by the wind of repatriation into the thick of sales agents, especially of furniture-picture commercial travelers. And there are heaps and heaps of those imitators among them! Well, shoppy people are shoppy people, but these ones are exclusively special! They didn't hear the voice of God in their time; they don't hear it now; more of that - they lost their own voice in the year dot.
"Try," they set up their pipes, "palm these articles off, when the market is glutted with them!"
"Then don't palm them off," I say. "Bring those pictures to people as joy, not as mere subjects of sale."
"Are you mad?" they laugh. "You must belong to those who were stringed to crosses and stakes. And we tend to live. And to live well!"
"You tend to litter, not to live!" I think and recollect 'Stew'.
Such a young Sheila - seemingly unpresentable, thin. She used to take her bag with pictures, and become fully distorted at once… She could scarcely drag one foot after the other! And she would rumple her hair and sully her cheek before entering a room…
So, she rings at the door.
They open the door - and see her box at once.
"Ah, pictures! No, we don't want any pictures!"
"Don't you? What a pity…" Stew murmurs. "And do you happen to have just a fritter of bread?"
"Yes, we do happen," they feel abashed. "Come in!"
Well, she throws her bag at the door and passes to a kitchen. She has forgotten about her bag! And she starts telling the following story - always one and the same.
"My man took me here," she says. "But I'm Russian! And he is a Jew. Two children… Little… One is half a year old, and another is a year and a half. And he left me - eloped with some wench… I can't find him… Nor alimony… Nothing! And where should I go now - a Russian? Nobody would take me even for free. And babies… They fall ill in turn… A painter found me… He has schlepped me for a week already, and what's the use of me? I don't know how to do it in general! A good, kind person will buy one or two pictures out of pity… Well, I'll make twenty or thirty shekels on this. He gives me ten shekels per each piece. Next day I buy some milk to my kids, and wait. In the evening, I leave them with a granny… I don't know at all, what to do… To pay for the skhar-dira (i.e. rented accommodation) soon…"
They ply her with food and drink, give something in a package…, and say, "Well, show, what is there in your bag?"
She used to come back empty. Eleven pictures of every twelve were left. And people wouldn't haggle - though that beggar demanded the most exorbitant prices. Uncircumscribed ones! Agents were rolling on the floor laughing, while listening to her. She was their idol. She washed herself, and then opened the bag.
"Help yourselves!"
"Okay… What's there?" the trade brethren were dying with laughter.
"Ah! Again some stew is littered…"
That was why they called her Stew. And what children could she have? What Russian could she be?..
In three months, she bought an auto and became a market manager. But it would be better if she really were not a Jew. We are brought in the mire over the odds already. And I have been pegged at, too… Thank you, Stew!

Letter Five

SABBATH

I don't understand what they mean asking, 'Do you believe in God?'. That is the same as to ask, 'Do you believe in Newton's law?'. You may believe or not, but an apple always falls from the tree down, not up. And what department is in charge of your contacts with the Supreme Creator - that is your personal choice. That is the one you like more. I assure you, Lord won't give a toss about your belonging to Moslems, Christians, Judaists, Buddhists, atheists, or flying Yogis. The main for you is to exist after the image and likeness of God. To be human beings, not beasts!
Everything grows stock still in Israel, when Friday turns into Saturday. Sabbath! Everybody has his rest. It's an excellent tradition! I like very much generally, when people have a rest and rejoice. It even seems to me that they look like human beings only then. Do you remember what God said when kicked Adam and Eve out of Paradise?
"In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread!"
It means that every activity undertaken to earn living is a curse! 'Horse that will not carry a saddle must have no oats' is the same story. I know for sure, because I should feel that, how it is difficult to work from dawn till sunset, from dark till dark for he who has nothing to eat. Everyone would feel absolutely done in! But if he eats regularly, he can freely do without a pickaxe and a spade. And no craving for the red challenge banner! Freebee is so sweet! As sweet as honey! The memory of Eden is still alive!
It is for normal people.
But deviants are found sometimes. Their brains were beaten out yet by Darwin. And that's why they enjoy in an absolutely unnatural way. "Every our workday is a holiday," they sing and aggress, to a hair's breadth of wild apes. As for me, I think that it is due to their deep-rooted overwork. Both physical and mental. And not because of labour, but because of work - and they are not things of the same sort. Because of their discord with the nature. Because of their inner conflict and permanent strain. Because of disharmony! But I don't berate them. What is the good of it - to reproach a footless one with his lameness? He is to be pitied only. Or to be helped to cross the street - and that is even better…
And so, my favourite Sabbath is around, and I fag away. Namely because my family waits for its daily bread. I rub along with a huge box and painters' 'troubles'. Do you remember those words from the song? 'One artist lived at one time. He rubbed through troubles and harm…' So, he lives somewhere (and let him! all honour to him!), and I rub along, and rub through, and move about his 'troubles'. It looks as if I'll chine in a little while. Mind that some of the pictures are glassed. "Ah," I think, "it would be nice to meet the deadline - the first star, not to disturb religious people too much." (The Sabbath full swing begins namely from the first star.) But I am not able to work against time! In one flat, they say no politely, in another, they smile with pity and sympathy. They understand that I step out of religious line not thanks to my good life. And in the third…
"Where are you barging to, shit!" a Caucasian-type bloke in a skullcap (that is such a small religious cap on the top of the head). "It's a sacred day, and that polecat carries his daub! How you only dare to work, you arsehole! I'll kick you out, I tell you!"
"I'm sorry," I say, "for disturbance. I've thought, until the first star…"
"Wha-at? I'll light you such a star - you'll see all the stars without heaven! All your bones will fly out of your bag!"
I'm going heels over head, clattering with the box, and think to myself, "What for? His threats are malarkey! They impose such heavy fines for manhandling here that one will think a thousand times before he ventures. Ah, come what may! As well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb!"
I go to the next house and ring at the very first door. A woman opens it.
"Oh, you've come pat to the occasion! I've just thought about pictures!" she said.
My hat! It's a mere lottery!
Nevertheless, I notice that the woman's eyes scintillate, but there's termless melancholy in their depth. I arrange pictures and try to cheer her almost mechanically.
"Art," I say, "is the same as love. I mean - it is not some small potatoes! And the sense of beauty is given not to everybody. A feeling heart and a gentle soul are necessary for that. A vital spark," I say, "can't ignite some square head that has only monetary notes, grub, booze, and grabbing reflex in his mind, heart, and soul. Such individuals do exist! They only absorb and excrete. Bowels, not people!"
"You polecat!" sounds from somewhere, from the depth of the flat, and it even seems to me for a second that this is the same Caucasian.
Yet, it isn't him. That one was skinny and withered, like an overdried date, and this one… A purple with furiousness man, in underpants and with the most enormous belly, rushes into the room.
"What are you belting out here? Come on, come on!" he roars.
I look at the woman, and see triumph in her eyes.
"Aha," I think. "Everything is clear. I'll make you cry 'havoc!' just now!"
"You see," I say, "the term 'human being' means a person with a highly developed brain, and not a mammal with a highly developed maw. On the other hand, a maw is necessary for all primates, of course, and it isn't necessary to be a human being for boasting about it…"
"Ah! In my house! Crud! Turd! Stinker!" the bohunk yelps and flies on me.
My eyes snapped shut, and I… keep where I am!
"Hang it all!" I think. "Either he'll cook my goose, or I'll be well off for a year - due to the fine for blows causing injuries…"
I feel that a wind has blown - and that's all. He has run past me. He could put two and two together! Well, hallelujah! I open my eyes. What's the matter? The spouses have grappled with each other - in a corner, near their telephone.
"Mishtara! Call mishtara in!" the bohunk managed to get out through a frog in his throat.
I throw the pictures to the box - and take off. 'Mishtara' means 'police' and it's an endless task for me to get outside of it, as a classic said. You never know though - maybe, I shall manage to do it, but it's better not to try…
I ran out and had quite a slog mechanically, until set my mind at rest.
"Way enough! Sabbath! Today I won't work any more," I think.
And at the same time, I myself touch the bell, mechanically again.
"Who's that?" sounds, very stridulous.
"Messiah!" I blurt out unexpectedly.
"Who? Who?"
"Messiah, mummy! In my own person!"
"I don't know such one!" the old woman's voice croaks, and I hear its owner squaring herself to the spy-hole.
But I've kicked over the traces already. I caulk the spy-hole with my thumb and go on.
"Well, how so? Not to know the releaser! And do you remember Jesus Christ, at least?"
"No," she says. "I don't. You confound me with somebody else."
"Don't tell me!" I show surprise. "Is it Nazareth Illit?"
"Yes. And whom are you searching for?"
"Not I'm searching, but I'm searched for. They're waiting for my coming."
"How's that?"
"It is so…"
"You must have confounded addresses. I'm not waiting for anybody."
The elderly lady is fairly talkative. And I have a mental rest.
"Maybe, you would let me in," I say. "We'll speak - talk of one thing and another…"
"What for? We are speaking already."
"But I'll show you pictures."
"What pictures?"
"Artistic. In natural oil. In farmer one!"
"No need. And if you stay here, I'll call for police," the granny croaks, and I hear her going away.
"Why are you in such a hurry? I'm Messiah! God is with us!"
Silence.
I turn round. Dear me! I've dripped with cold sweat. Somebody in white is standing on the stairs and staring at me with hate, mutely. Only later, I descried a skullcap upon him, and at that moment I thought - Jesus Christ!
And it fell into my mind to mount a rostrum so clearly! I was afire with enthusiasm for that! So, to mount the rostrum - and not some regional or state, but the world one! And everyone would be listening to me, but neither picking his nose nor delving into pockets for anything.
"Compatriots!" I should shout in telepathic-cosmic language.
And I should shout in such a manner that all place of worship of all kinds would start with all their ministers due to that Divine vibration.
"Earthmen! Those who believe, who hesitate, and professed infidels! Any religion and ideology are good and blessed, if it makes a person kinder, better, and more tolerant. And if on the contrary, then… Don't put Lord into a rage! 'I will repay'! And inescapably!"
Do you hear me? Ah?..

Letter Six

MASKS

Israel is a little country, but its horizons are horizonless!
Nahum and me drive here and there. The car is his. My one is driven only with my imagination. And we don't only ride, of course, but offer pictures to people. The pictures in oil, and every possible. It's a piece of a cherry pie for Nahum, and I try to maintain my family - so to say, to obey the main God's law, 'thou shalt not die'.
And so, one day, we are moving from the point A to the point B, and Nahum is instructing me - teaching me the sense - drilling a… tufter, as one could say.
"Today we've got a new triptych in our boxes," he says. "'Masks' and 'The two halves of the Moon'. You may say - a set. It is - avant-garde! People have learnt those words already. I'll tell you what legend I use to sell them, and then think yourself. And so… First of all, I place the pictures to the foreground. A man's head is on the right, a woman's one - on the left. Both are in masks. 'The two halves of the Moon' are in the middle. She is a beautiful woman, and it is naturally that she must always gravitate to the person of the opposite sex - I mean to the man's head. So, this gravitation is symbolized by 'The two halves of the Moon', to some extent. Though, we have to speak more particularly about them. You see, I say, when a person leaves his home being as fit as a fiddle, wants to stay the same till the end of the day (or not to have his spirits fallen, what is better). But nothing comes of it! There are a lot of different irritants from all quarters. We are in all sucker lists! They sucker us all! They pull the wool over our eyes! You come home - and begin to bite, in your turn. 'Yea! Surely!' clients agree. Here you are! And now, psychics recommend us to defend ourselves. At least nominally. So, we put on some cover. Some cope. To see, but not to be seen by anybody. Not to let him pinch or prick us. And an artist presents such a cope in the form of a mask. That is the mask of defence. There's a kind of a spy-hole, with the help of which the artist sees. If they go outside in their copes, all the rest see that they are in the copes. What to touch them for, when there are crowds of the undefended? And that thing is the man's door. On his right, in the place of his ear. It's ajar. And information enters it. Necessary pieces of information move to the head… Here, as if thoughts are depicted… And unnecessary ones move down along this line. To ground. One-two! And an unnecessary thing has darted away at once. And here, the line that is as if clenched with his teeth, - it is the line of tranquillity. The man left his house being calm - and he came back in the same manner, being calm. The woman has no such a line. Do you see? That is a man - that is a woman! Do you see? There are some characteristic features in the picture that fit either a female head, or a male one. The man's head is even a little larger. A little coarser… 'Uh-huh', they agree. And the third picture is called 'The two halves of the Moon that are speaking to each other sitting on the bench'. The painter entitled it so. You can say that they are two halves of the Earth or of the Sun. But the author guessed that it is the Moon. Why is it the Moon? Because we see it, basically, only at night. And mind - if there are no clouds in the sky. And in fact, the Moon exists round the clock and sees everything. It sees us. So, the two halves of the Moon are communicating with each other. Solving problems. Earthy. Not earthy. Some global ones. Some of ours. Mercantile. Smalltime… And if you have luxuriant imagination, then, looking at the picture, you can meditate as if you are looking at the Moon. So much information is hidden here! You see that some mountains are shown there… Something else… And if you are looking for a long time and attentively, you forget that these are pictures… 'And why is this strip below the Moon?' they start asking. 'I've told you already - that's because the two halves as if are sitting on the bench. And they are speaking.' That's all. How are these pictures sold? They are sold suddenly…"

And here we are - the point B. I hump the box - and ahead! Three multi-storey houses have been crisscrossed. Nothing! No buyers!
A ring at the door of some cottage. A male opens - gorged indecorously. He can't need anything by convention. Okay, where nothing is, nothing can be had. And I have my shoulder mashed up…
"Let me use your lavatory," I say.
"Come in," he nods, understanding.
I throw the box in the corridor and go to the lavatory. Then to the bathroom. I go away and say, "Listen, as soon as I entered I conceived hatred for you. But having visited your lavatory and your bathroom, I see that you're a real man!"
"Why is it?" the male squints incredulously.
"It's very simple. Only real men shave with such a shaving cream as yours."
"Well, take a seat. Have a rest," he relaxes.
I enter the room. What's that? The box is in the middle, in a professional manner, and such a small, pleasantly rounded, and generally perfectly easy on the eye dame is rummaging there.
"All that is unnecessary," she says without a backward glance, "and these ones I'll examine…"
And she takes away 'Masks'.
I became wholly flabby at once. I became so defenceless, so helpless - and somehow confused. The matter was that my organism copied Nahum automatically. That is his manoeuvre. His manner. His innate feature. Not to reason, but to be reasoned. And what is the main - I myself miss the moment when I begin to woof word for word all that he was word-painting in the car. With his intonations. With his gestures… Well, a spirit rapping - that's all! By and large, I've sung the sing in Nahum's voice, and the male chuckles.
"I'll die," he says, "but won't hang this rubbish on my wall!"
I, keeping the view of a sacrifice, go to take the pictures and to put them into the box, and suddenly… (It's a good word - 'suddenly'. I like it. Since my childhood! Beginning with 'The Library of Adventures'…)
"Haim, you are wrong!" the dame says and removes my will-less hand. "You're very clever and gifted, but now you are wrong. It is simply out of your capacity. You are God in your business, and here I am God! You," - it's to me, - "don't know yourself what you brought. The 'Black Square', in comparison with it, is a hole in a flat place. Malevich is a weaver from 'The Emperor's New Clothes' by Andersen! And not only Malevich. People like to be taken in. And the more unusual is the deception, the stronger is the love and the larger the figure of thankfulness. What is the price of each 'Mask'?"
"Two hundred and fifty!" I blurt out the maximum - and guess at once that I've sold too cheap.
"Shekels?" the dame is surprised.
"Dollars!" I react absolutely like Nahum and regret that pounds sterling are unaccepted here.
"Well that's that, a word spoken is past recalling. I didn't give a loose to your tongue. You would have been able to get tenfold. Such a day is today. And you've come across clearly not poor, but very fair buyers…"
The sweat beaded on me. One chance for all the Israeli population!
"Haim!" the dame continues. "Write a cheque for the whole triptych. What's there according to the exchange rate? Seven hundred and fifty by three, that is… Two and four hundred and fifty. Oh, well! Write three thousand shekels - and don't detain the man."
"Tanechka…" Haim tried to begin, but the dame interrupted him abruptly, in a severe and unappealable manner.
"Who made you buy those shares, owe to which we have ascended? And the deal with that gangster from Moscow? One can buy a villa on these pictures, as chance offers!"
In half a minute, I got the cheque, and the sweat beaded on me again.
"Haim, don't pull such a face! Business likes smiles," the dame said softer that time, and estranged herself from the pictures to some distance.
"Firstly, the works are very beautiful," she continued, admiring. "I think, they'll harmonize with any interior; moreover with ours. They will dignify any furniture, even the oldest one. It doesn't mean that we don't have to change ours… The pictures create deep philosophical mood, the atmosphere of peace at home… Don't jerk, Haim! I am right! Look how beautiful these colours mix - gold, this deep red, and that plain grey! At any time, round the clock, you'll look at these pictures - and some state of grandeur, wisdom, relaxation, and rest will appear immediately. But, at the same time, they don't let us relax and escape. Look, what energetics they carry! The definite one! This combination of gold and deep red, vinous tint gives that special energetics - some charge for your soul. Do you feel it?"
"Yes!" I answered unintentionally.
Haim kept silence. But he was looking! Looking at the pictures!
"There you go." That unusual woman smiled at me thankfully and continued - that time for both of us. "But if you are interested in finding out some plot - here you are, in any quantity! This is a woman's figure. Look at it! It is as mysterious as a sphinx. Time presents in it. Some inviolability. Some quietism. The man - here, we are under the influence of his special energetics. If quietness is there, then an impulse to some activity is here. Look how they balance each other! The same is hidden in philosophy, too: a woman carries some order, and a man keeps moving ahead. You feel it being presented in the pictures, don't you? Right?"
"Yes!" I said again.
Haim kept silence.
"There you go." The woman smiled thankfully once more. "This one balances, and this one calls somewhere up. And in the centre - the world is. Look! Such a planet of two halves. It unites. This is the symbol of unity. The symbol of the mutual peace. Of the mutual atmosphere. Of Yin and Yang that run into one another. Look, how much they have in common - and they are different at the same time. Very beautiful!.. But the art of painting - it isn't only a plot…"
Haim stood up and went away. Tanechka, without batting an eye, continued - simply a little louder.
"No! It isn't only a plot. It isn't only a form, an object, a view, a landscape, but it is a colour as well. As music influences with sound, so painting make an effect with colour. You do know perfectly well that the red agitate us, the green calms, and so on. And so, a colour scheme, the harmony of colours, the skill of harmonizing them - all that is brought by avant-garde painting. In such cases, an artist doesn't copy an object, but tries to cause some emotional state with the help of colour. Here it is - the example of such avant-garde!"
Tatyana addressed me, but showed at the door, at which Haim was standing. He was holding the broached bottle of brandy, wineglasses, and a few cans of juice.
"Hm, yea… Such mighty accords of the grey, the golden and the red…"
Haim took a seat at the table and motioned me to have a drink. I shook my head. Then he helped himself to brandy, saluted her wife with his wineglass, and drank off.

Tatyana continued, just as if nothing had happened.
"These colour combinations are beautiful as they are, aren't they? The pictures sound. They sound! Do you feel? Like music! It elevates you! Like Beetchoven! Like music by Beetchoven, this harmony of the golden, red, grey, black colours sound with mighty chords. Would you peer, please? You will like to get a kind of such a rise out of these pictures. It mustn't be nervous. On the contrary! Such deep philosophical mood. If you have any imagination…"
"Oh, if!" Haim feel real grief unexpectedly. "My imagination doesn't grow out of one hundred and fifty grams."
"Don't be so modest, my river foal! Half a litre and more may be within the bounds of your possibility." Tatyana rapped on her husband's head slightly and went on. "And so, the art of avant-garde supposes some enigma. Some border between an artist and a spectator. Avant-garde initiate the spectator to puzzle out the mystery. To open that door. To clear the hurdle, probably. It demands of the spectator some fantasy. Some ability to read. To go deeply. To understand this thing-in-itself. It is really a thing-in-itself! It is really some mystery. It's some enigma. And that's why it is continuously addressing the spectator a challenge to create jointly. That is the thing! If you meet a challenge, you have to stimulate your fantasy for ever and a day. To look for some new answers, new solutions to the puzzle - and it is before your eyes all the time! This is co-authorship! This is co-creation! That is one more attraction of avant-garde!"
"Here!" Haim shed tears. "Tanya has got three degree certificates. She is worth her weight in gold, but I can't wangle her into an expert work even for money. There's no need in Russians! Still less - humanitarians. She deals with that stinky business with me… Daggles different manufacture for lavatory pans to and fro. Though, no multi-millionaire with his narrow super-logarithmic forehead is fit to hold a candle to her! Kings and princes weren't fools, if they played violins. Painted… Wrote poetry! And they weren't fools being patrons of arts. Having eaten their fill, they understood, felt that any material without spirituality not worth an old song. That everything is dust but Devine. Spiritual…"
Tanechka saw me off.
"Do you know how your 'Masks' can be named?" she asked, shutting the wicket. "'The Stars of the Revolution'! On the right - Lenin's head, on the left - Krupskaya's one. And in the middle - their brainchild is. The splitting world!"
"Yes… Really… Resemble… Screamingly! Even the woman's hairdo looks like Nadezhda Konstantinovna's upsweep!"
And I burst laughing.
"But nevertheless, the 'Black Square' by Malevich… So categorically…"
"Nonsense! The litmus paper of the mankind's foolishness!" the unusual woman rebuffed. "If to plot a point and to advertise it with the help of authorities' opinion, and then to write below 'It costs one million dollars' - they will be all eyes. Crowds! And they will be tchicking, and turning up the whites of eyes, and find in this point God knows what. The hypnotism of authorized names and figures is irresistible. Especially of figures. Anything can seem for a million."
And, with a very picturesque wink, Tatyana nodded into the cottage depth…

Letter Seven

LADIES

Israel is a point where the compasses of history are stuck!
It's true, something like that I've said already, but it doesn't matter. Such a thought may be repeated. Somewhere a loose end draws its laced circles and semicircles, and the effect of all those things is seen here. And how clearly!
Yesterday I carried the masterpieces of the Israeli pictorial art by Russian-speaking artists again. I hope that they are not too anti-artistic. But people don't take them! Even more of that! As soon as they see my box - thwack! Before the very nose! With the door.
But I don't take offence. I shout to a spy-hole, "Dresden! Louver! Hermitage!"
They don't react. People are tired. They work like slaves. Certainly, I mean those proletarians whom I generally get to. Sometimes you've scratched your way into a flat - the mistress is still moving, but the master isn't. He's kayoed! He was able only to rich the sofa on all fours. And now he is sleeping his hear on the sofa and his knees on the floor. And here I am! With pictures.
But I want! I want, ladies and gentlemen, besides marketing, to make an air hole for people. To instill some salubrious optimism, so to say. Though, what a goddamned optimism may be, when you hardly breathe…
I'm ringing.
A woman is on the doorstep.
I instill optimism.
"Oh, at last I've found you!"
"What has happened?" she gets frightened.
"Why? Don't you remember me?"
"No… I don't…"
"Indeed? And I've got your portrait. It's painted at a glance."
"Oh, really?"
"S'welp! Shall we look?"
"Well, let us…" she becomes more vivid, "But not at the door…"
"Surely, surely!" I nod and think that I shall have to show 'A Girl in a Hat'. All the rest are landscapes.
I put the box - and…
"Here you are! The very image!"
"Me? Naked?"
Thank Heaven! She has noticed only that!
"Ah, yes. It's the painter's fantasy. Surrealism!"
"And why the eyes are squint?"
"Well, he has seen in such a way. It's such blinking. Sexy!"
"No, it's not me," she guesses at last.
"Oh, factually!" I agree, and we both laugh. "But it resembles you, nevertheless. It's beautiful, isn't it?"
"Yes," the mistress agrees, and gains colour.
In a nutshell, I've sold the picture. And with a landscape thrown in - on silk.
I think, "The evening has begun well! Keep your fingers crossed! Touch the wood!"
If someone thinks that it is easy and simple to enter any apartment house, or, more of that, any flat, any cottage, or, more of that, a guarded villa - let him try. Here, in Israel, they let you in sometimes, in spite of wandering terrorists-suicides with their belts full of explosive; and somewhere in America, you'll be simply sent to the Russian mother, beloved of all, or police will be called. Speaking honestly, as for the memory of the above-mentioned remarkable woman, there is no matter for complaint here, as well. When native Israelis want to make a display of their knowledge of Russian, they cuss out ornately and enthusiastically. For them, that is something like a password to your heart - even if it is burden with some doctorate thesis on polite literature.
But closer to the events!
An hour passed. The next hour passed…
"Nil! I've endangered the success, after all…"
Rapping with the box with pictures on the banister of the next multi-storey block porch, I thought about the evanescence of human life. I went up in an elevator to the eighth floor, and at the time of my reflection, I have been going downstairs, tooting the ringer of all flats. Nobody was in need of painting - either glassed, too heavy, or non-glassed, and not easy, too. Actually, one bloke seemed to swallow the bait - but swam away at once.
"Hush-sh!" He pressed his finger to the lips. "I'm superlatively alone!"
"Why?"
"All the rest are sleeping!"
A lady shot forth too. Having half opened the door with a safety chain, she heard out my bulbul trills about painting and its use for life and love and, removing her eyes, cooed unexpectedly, "You're a very dangerous man! Very!"
"Why?"
"You speak very nice."
"So what? Are you afraid that I'll seduce you, or that you'll buy all my goods?"
"I'm afraid…," the lady whispered, depressing her dewy, gazelle-like eyes.
"Of what?" I began to play tricks. "We'll be in pocket in both cases. The goods are good, so am I. Isn't it so?"
"It is," she said cowardly, and shut the door. "I'm sorry!" was heard already behind it.
And I ran forth.
At last, nearly on the ground floor, somebody gave me a fisheye, snorted and threw open the gates to his Paradise. Because of the suddenness, I was sucked almost to the end of the flat corridor.
Nobody…
Smack!
I turned round and saw a madam of powerful build firstly keying the door, then latching it thrice, and, finally, blocking with a safety chain.
"Wonderful!" she is soliloquizing. "That's the thing… Let him in… At last… And why are you standing here? It is for the first time?" she addresses me, now commandingly and talking turkey.
I stick fast.
Then the madam grasps the box strap and almost pulls me with it into the room.
I smile only.
One of the reasons is that a client is always right (as well as a buyer is always right, a reader is always right, a fool is always… well, and so forth), and another… No, it's better not to think about it…
"Brandy, wine, vodka?" is heard from the kitchen, and I don't smile any more.
Having caught the box, I step back and… throw it down.
No use! Though the key sticks out from the keyhole, but this gladiator in a skirt will run a quarry to earth at a jump. The more so that a bunking victim is a kaif for a raptor.
"So… The main is not to show that I'm frightened. Otherwise, she'll manage at once… The fact that she will make me drunk, and rape with one finger is out of question. There, how her eyes glisten! She's without a man at least for a year… So many lonely-hearts have rained thick upon me in Israel! What should I do? What should I do?"
And at that moment, I saw a guitar. And there, a little photo of Bulat Okudzhava in a black frame was glued.
"Here it is! Here my rescue is!"
Having been vividly interested in the instrument, I put it in tune and sang 'A Grape-Stone' - and then, without a pause, the whole series of anti-sexual compositions of a kind…
It took effect! The recently passed author helped me. All honour to him - and lest we forget, from here to eternity! The madam was keeping eyes glued on me! And somewhere at the middle of the repertoire, she knocked back half a glass of vodka and started crying. And how she was crying! One may say that the windows of heaven opened. Ohs, and ahs, and sighs, and groans - everything took place. I didn't know how to becalm her. To say more strictly, I knew, but absolutely didn't want…
At last, the storm subsided.
That cloudburst was raging for about five minutes, but it brought relief to both of us. And we were separating like swore friends. I arranged a private view at our parting even. I sold no one picture; nevertheless, a meeting with art and almost heavenly love took the whole possible place.
Opening the mousetrap, the madam didn't succumb yet and, having looked at me, moistened her thirsty lips. But, to her personal credit, she recovered her temper and recited hastily, "Let's join our hands, my friend, not to give up apart and singly!"
"Amen!" I answered instead of 'farewell', and didn't knock at a single door that day.
Being at home already, I noticed that one landscape on silk had been left at her place.
"God gave it - God took it," I decided. "You have to pay for everything, if you don't want to pay dear for all!"

Letter Eight

MYTHS

The whole world shouts about successes of medicine, and its ill successes are buried in the ground. And Israel isn't an exception. But here, the fact is that the main reason of it roots in the lack of information, as a rule, - and not only in medicine. So, don't believe anybody implicitly, and don't play a role of an easy mark. Hear and verify everything be yourselves, whenever possible. Israel is, less or more, a civilized state, and they don't add the blood of babies-olims (the local name of repatriates) to matzo dough here - neither the blood of babies-Christians in the rest parts of the world. That's why disinformation is such an insecure thing! Especially when it concerns your health or someone's life. I've got a first-hand experience in it; but, fortunately, I've survived.
And the case seemed to be a soft touch firstly. I used to carry monstrous, heavy boxes with pictures round the houses. And once, I bent down to extract the next very suspicious masterpiece, and felt as if some placer of bullet stars hit my reins. As if a supernova explosion took place there. I unbent, tugging slightly. A step, the next one… It sort of passed. But since that time, I've begun to lop. And some pain appeared in the upper part of my hip, increasingly. It would be better to stay at home for a week - but the family must be fed! If you sell a picture or two - the family is happy. The table is groaning with food. There are bananas, and oranges, and sausages, and beverages on it. My daughter even dares to ask for the moon… sorry, I mean - for new shoes. And our guests drink different tasty wines and praise them highly. And, naturally, they offer grandfatherly advice with all their hearts. I hear this, that and the other: it is necessary to use the 'Kuznetsov's applicator' - and the pain goes from bad to worse; I should put some American belt on - and the pain goes from worse to much worse; a very hot-water bottle must help - and it has made my eyes start from their sockets at last. And they started to such an extent that I ran to koopat-holim - kinda polyclinic. However, 'ran' - it is grossly exaggerated. If you had seen me running, you would never have wanted to go. On the one hand, I'm running; on the other hand, my wife is trying to dodge a clash and an overthrow - because my body is prancing so that I myself am afraid.
But it is necessary to tell you that I didn't go to ulpan (that is the courses of studying language) not even once, and I am a perfect duffer at Hebrew. Well, 'shalom' (i.e. 'hello' and 'peace' at the same time), 'ken' ('yes'), 'lo' ('no'), a couple of words more - let them be, but that is all. Why? Don't ask! That is a special subject. My wife tries to speak in a hit-and-miss fashion… She takes a shot at jabbering something, but they don't understand her. And I am hardly standing - just ready to sit on the floor. Or even to lie down…
At last, they registered me somewhere, nicked me some shekels (it's a local piece of money) for something, and showed me to a greased mannequin doctor. Certainly, he is a perfect duffer, too. But in that case - at Russian. Wigwag - no sense out of us, neither of him. He probed toes, calves, and then - shoot with his finger into my left hip! Me - 'A-a-a!!!'. A half of Israel heard it!
And he only smiled - 'cause understood, my dear, what the trouble was. Yet, I have been showing it since the first second of our visit - in such a manner that a Papuan would guess.
With gestures, with gestures - we went down, and I was laid onto a couch. Before I could say Jack Robinson - a nurse with a syringe appeared near me. I fell dumb with horror. I have a backlash to injections. Each time when I was given an injection, they had to be drawing me out of the jaws of death for about an hour and a half. But how can I explain that my life is not standard?
In all cases, I opened my mouth, but the needle had been forced into my flesh already.
That's all! I feel that chill has gone up from my legs, and the nurse has left for somewhere. To get her salary, probably… That meteoric thought wasn't so silly. Local medics that work at koopat-holims, are paid more than enough, thank Heaven! Surely, it is compared to our ridiculous wages. I mean those who have recently arrived to the Holy Land for permanent residence. The locals call us 'olims', but it is a separate and not less merry subject than my story. So, let's return to our bulls in a china shop… Sorry, to our sheep in the ship - certainly, sheep!
Some time passed. Alive! Pure luck! More of that - the pain seems to abate a little. But now, stress is striking down. If not my wife, I wouldn't get home. Oh, how beautiful and nice she was seen by me that moment! And the nurse started speaking Russian unexpectedly. Firstly, I thought that it was auditory hallucinations. No, she explained me in all details that the tablets prescribed by the mannequin should be taken after meals. But not a word about the fact that they are as poisonous as copperas. Apparently, it is an Israeli strategic secret for olims. I said I suffered with a gastric ulcer, but she just turned a deaf ear to me.
I have been taking the tablets for three days - and my eyes start from their sockets again. But that time - because of gastritis. They reduce pain to some extent, but gastritis is a hard nut to crack, because it is a spring from their loins - and it looks as if it even was planned in some secret laboratories of the intelligence center to determine the pureness of Jewish blood.
Well, I failed in the exam! So what? I had to rush to the koopat-holim - but that time solely to a Russian-speaking doctor.
She met me like the salute of our motherland.
"Well, how's there?" she asks.
"Bad!" I say. "Pre-Marxian primitive brigandage! O-oh!"
"That's okay," the doctor says.
"What's okay?"
"That we cut and ran in time."
"You did it in time, indeed," I think. "And I am - a runner-away!"
As if she heard it.
"Poor, poor you are!" she said.
"Not only poor," I answer. "Now I'm unhappy, too."
"Now, now… I'll prescribe you the most optimal variant…" she soothes me, and first of all thrusts one injection more…
I shan't call in question my compatriot's methods. I believe them to be right. But only not for me, that moment. Apparently, I'm a too specific by-Jewish anomaly. It is proved by further events.
Next day I fell on all fours, and didn't find it in heart to show up for the doctor in such a state. I was knocked down by merciless pain. And one of well-wishers and mythmakers notified me that calling a doctor was impossible. And if it was even possible, then for very big bucks. And what bucks could I have? (Why not to phone and to verify? But - myths, myths! We've become accustomed to them so much!) I've bitten my teeth into my lips and said to my wife, "Give me an anaesthetic injection!"
She is crying, "I'm afraid! I've never done it!"
"My Lord!" I groan. "Here's a pillow! Exercise! And don't you conceive the idea to spend money on single-use syringes! We've got a home-made 'Record'!"
We boiled the syringe with needles, but everything was white with sediment. There is such water here.
We rinsed them, hit or miss…
I took the medicine with the syringe, but some milky midst was wavering there, all the same.
"Eh, my Russian luck!" I shout to my wife. "Goods and chattels mustn't go to waste! Force it!"
She is dissolving in tears: "I'm afraid!"
"Push it!" I bawl my head off.
Pop!
She did it!
She applies pressure to the hub, the syringe jerks… And I recollect the colour of the medicine and whisper, "Kyrie!.."
The danger is over.
But the pain came back in four hours - it followed me like a dog.
I was thrashing about during a week. I should dunk a wiper into the latest portion of my urine and cover sore places with it; meditate being popeyed (though what meditation might have been with such pain?); I went (more correct - lay) hungry and thirsty for a day and a half, massaged furiously points on my legs, arms, half-mad face and ears, and was praying in the classical Mohammedan position, devotedly and with exasperation.
It didn't work.
I shout to my wife, "Give me a telephone of that private pirate! He who cured asthma of an acquaintance of an acquaintance of yours! He seems to take less money than koopat-holim!" (A myth.) "What is more important at last - a trick or a treat?"
I'll specify just now - I am not a grab-all. But what it cost for me, a paterfamilias, only olims can understand who came to the country practically penniless, like me; those who rushed to bust their guts right and left, and for any wage - even for one being offered tongue-in-cheek. The main was not to find ourselves having neither house or home, nor a piece of bread in half a year. The matter is that olims get something here in the first half a year. It is a so-called 'absorption basket' - not to let olims peg out and to have candidates for drawing to the color, on occasion.
To make a long story short, I phoned.
"Doctor!" I wail to the receiver. "It hurts! High time to put my head in a noose!"
"Keep up your spirits!" a vivacious male baritone answers. "I'm under way already!"
Oh, what a doctor he was! A wizard! Such a headpiece! A real member of the St. Petersburg intelligentsia! And generally, a person I took a liking to in all aspects. The first thing he said to me was, "Don't worry! I shan't take much out of you!"
No doubt, I guessed that it is a psychotherapeutic maneuver, but all the same, I felt a kind of relief.
On the spot, minding my gastritis and my delicate inner-world, he annulled all anaesthetic tablets and injections, and then extracted ultrasound and laser boxes out of his case, some electrical stimulators more, and a monstrous American electrical masseur; I renamed it right there intuitively, and called the thing 'the Trotsky ice-axe'. Then he crossed himself… No, it seemed to me due to the pain. He put the 'ice-axe' back, and made up his mind to massage me by hand previously - as our grandfathers had done. He spit on his hands a few times… Oh no! Hallucinations again… He powdered his hands with talc. That's the thing! So, he powdered his hands and me with that white ash and started…
I was crying the whole night after his procedures. More of that, I crept away to the hall, to the mattress, not to let my children and wife see and hear it.
Next day was the same, but up-going. It means that last time God gave a gentle indication of something that prevented using of the 'ice-axe'; but that time the thing began to hop on my back and leg like a Gypsy at a wedding feast.
"Oh, poor am I! Oh, unhappy!" I started howling in some absolutely deep-chested voice.
"It happens… It is a reaction to physiotherapy…" the nice doctor tried to calm me, but saw that it had no effect, and added, "Your father would be glad…"
It worked! The last phrase retrieved a part of my courage. The matter is that my parent, deceased but beloved and highly respected by me all my life, was a physiotherapist.
And I endured - in the name of the healthful and light future, as well as all of us for seventy years under pseudo-socialism. And what should I have done with it? What was the good of yelling? Nevertheless, some good presents sometimes. If the baby doesn't cry, his mother doesn't understand. When I, in spite of set jaws, began to emit some absolutely otherworldly sounds, the healer stopped.
"Something is wrong…" he started perplexedly, and added, "I'll prescribe you antibiotics better…"
A genius!
More of that - a hero, too, no doubts. Because a doubtful doctor living on the income of his private practice is a bankrupt. All of them here (and there as well, since definite time) have such a view, as if they have seized God by the beard while studying at the medical institute, and to quit hold of it now - nix on that game!
Well, let it be. Pain makes us say any truth. And if you mind that, after all, I'm a clear-cut specific by-Jewish anomaly, then, generally - what claims can be here?
But the pain began to remit, very slowly yet. And though I was wiggling at the outskirts of consciousness, standing on all fours, but I didn't think about a rope and a noose still. And I was not impressed either with chronical sleep loss and pain accumulation, or with reality resembling raving. Because some hope glimmered. And the voice of Lord sounded more and more insistently and louder. Firstly, the Moon got to its gibbous phase. And the doctor disappeared somewhere. Speaking honestly, he visited me four days later, being sorry so much, but it was the day after the fair. I felt myself better without his healthful purgatory set. And to make totally sure that it was a fact, as well as the presence of God, I did announce lying-in-state - for the last time! And what is another way to possess real faith? Only with your own experience!
And I didn't make a mistake. All in all, in an hour after the benefactor had gone, the presence of God was proved. And in what a way! Grating my teeth and whining, I dialed up - and burst into laughter suddenly. You should have heard that laughter!
"Doctor!" I rumbled, crying with happiness that time. "We'll draw a check for a certain sum of money - you'll define it. But may I ask you for one thing? Only one! Don't say no, please!"
"Yes, no doubts!" was heard in the receiver, very pleasantly and intelligently.
"Don't come any more, doctor! Please!"
He didn't take amiss.
A man of genius!

P.S. I hardly walk still. But I stand fairly masterfully. Though, I don't sit yet. That's why I am writing these lines staying at the same animal-like Maughli's posture. But I'm writing, and not crying. Even on the contrary! I called for my charming family physician from our koopat-holim, paid for the call - I can say, almost nothing, and… a miracle took place. She saw me running with about the floor like a cockroach, with slippers on my feet and hands, and got very surprised.
"I have never seen," she said, "one racing so vividly with his disks fallen out. Come on, get up, and go!"
And I got up and… went! Like Lazar! Laughing softly with happiness and recollecting Christ with the tears of tenderness, I was breaking the ground of moving, like footless Meresyev, and whispering the favourite pun of my unforgettable parent, as if it was a prayer, "in spite of the treatment, patients were recovering… like flies!"
Honestly speaking, someone, after all, has told me that nobody publish my works until I lay off my trousers and show my cut document. We'll see! If the books are published, then it is a myth too!

Letter Nine

A FIG

A Jew must make an impression! It doesn't matter what namely impression, but he must!
It isn't my own opinion. Generally speaking, I believe that nobody must do anything. But if you wish - you are welcome!
And so, I'm again about the thing we are sick and tired of - about money! Because of it, Jews make their mark. Sometimes people even can't understand if Jews make money, or money makes Jews. One put it baldly, "I get orgasm only in one case - when I get a cheque!"
That's the Jew! Extra!
And I'm - fair to middling… And in general, I'm not a Jew, but a son of a Jew, and it is on the sharp decline there, as well here. Nevertheless, money is wanted… Rather not so wanted, as it is needed brutally. The more so that to work like a horse is impossible for me now, but I'm not yet out of hand (or of mouth?) as for eating. And the flat is rented. It's a trouble! Simply awful!
Besides, Nahum, my bosom friend, continues to poison my heart. If he didn't make a little (actually - not little at all!) money in one place, then he gobbled up a king's ransom in another. And everything is among other things. Slightly! Passing by! Without efforts! Even if he buys a lottery ticket, he hits the jackpot! Well, not a jackpot itself, but in all cases…
"Israel is a good village!" his folks exclaim.
Why not? Though I am a Jew's son, I don't argue. But when I buy the same ticket - nuts to me!
"The wish must be innocent. Innocent!" Nahum doesn't subside. "And don't flutter about! The Fortune doesn't like neurotics!"
And who is a neurotic? Me? Never! I'm dead calm! Well, hang it all - that lottery together with its dolly kiosks! This taint is at every step! It's like rash. Let's take the last week, for instance. Eight million were raffled. Nahum raked in again. A thousand and a half. And to me - a fig anew…
"Did everybody wish innocently?" I ask my relatives.
They keep silence - even don't explain away.
"And what about mine?" my dear child is curious.
She isn't a little girl already, but is as loudmouthed as before. But then she's dyed-in-the-wool! Because - produce of dam…
"Yours is a foozle," I say. "Here it is! I haven't even checked it in. It has been staying in my pocket the whole time. You disobey your father! 'I myself, I myself…' It is only to show your strong-headedness and to spite me you underlined your klutzy five, seven, ten, thirteen, twenty-eight and forty-five almost in all your cells. And the lottery loan, for you to know… Here we go… Five, seven, ten, thirteen, twenty-eight, and forty… five…"
Oh yea… Then everything was beyond imagination… And it has echoed up to now… It could not be concocted voluntarily… And the main reason is that a son of a Jew fails to follow suit! Even a son of a bitch is better!
And here Nahum has come. Purebred! Now he'll be spinning stories again - about illimitable wealth and democracy.
"Shalom, Nahusha!.."

Letter Ten

KEEP UP THE LEVEL, GENYTLEMEN!

No nostalgia about the past must exist if the life becomes more and more interesting. And the most interesting - death! - is in the future. What is there? It's devastatingly interesting! The main is that the process would run its natural course and as scheduled by God. And tortures would be given moderately - not for a halter and bestial rancour, but only for a contrast and drive.
And, by all appearances, I maintain a schedule still. At least, I try not to break it. I've both bathed in the sea and suffered pain enough, and I haven't lost all my faith in people yet. The last is the best present! Especially here, in Israel! You know, all of us - an Ethiopian, and a Moroccan, and a Russian, and a Korean, and a Frenchman, and an Englishman; and God knows whom else - are Jews here. And nobody has done me any dirt up to now (well, excluding this… or that…). Though, judging by different talks and my own observations, that is not a general rule at all, and my variant is rather temporary and occasional than permanent and stable.
All may be! But I don't beat my head against a wall. And what is more, I try not to snivel. Simply because it has no use. As a poet said, "You are crying, you are laughing - but the end will be the same!" So, let your life go in such a way as mine does now, and not differently. Lo - and rules and exceptions will change over. And generally, if a sea is crawling with sharks, then what now - can't a gold fish rejoice? Noway! Snorks!
I hurt my spine, and it was necessary to examine it with 'SITI' (kinda x-ray examination from all the sides) in Tel-Aviv. And some acquaintances of a friend of my wife helped us. (I'd like to tell you what their names were: Kleiman Abraham, alias Arcady in the past, Soviet life, and Kleiman Dora, alias Tonya in the past life, whose maidenhood family name was very famous - Masamed.) They drove me laid-up for thirty kilometres at night and passed from hand to hand to another people, neither our folks and nor relatives at all - the very Belfers that had harboured us in Israel, as if we were their kin. And neither that family slept that night, factually. (The checkup was timed to take place at 4 a.m.) They loaded me in their car and accompanied high and low. You see, what a welcome gift from Lord it is! They are not Jews, but angels! Both the country and the world itself must know their heroes: here they are! People say that one more nation exists, a high percentage of which is of fine quality: Americans! As for me, I believe that Russian citizens and all the residents of the former USSR are cooler all the same; nevertheless, if it is so, then the earthy heaven is really not far off. I tell the world! So, keep up the level, gentlemen! Don't lower the bar! And much less don't foul your own nest. Or else, I've dropped in to the 'Sokhnoot' (the Jewish Agency that is destined to patronize repatriates for the first time) and heard the Song of Songs of the twentieth century:
"Ha-a-ate! Oh, how much I hate you! I hated all like you even in the Soviet Union! You won't work here! No-o! I will do everything not to let you be sitting here! I'll launch a campaign!"
"That's put the lid on it!" I think. "Somebody was deprived of something, or some additional payment isn't given to somebody."
Those present keep one's ears open, too.
A damsel, beautiful in form, but absolutely disgusting in dull and indifferent facial expression, moved over only.
"What is the rumpus about?" She gave a yawn. "I don't understand…"
"Thank God, that's some nonsense," I thought again and sighed with relief.
It was nonsense, really; but many wars began namely because of it.
"Why 'rumpus'?" an obvious academie, i.e. a college-bred man, yelled even louder then earlier, choking and sputtering. "Have you wanted to sell that ticket to me? Have you?"
"Well, what of it?"
"And you've said, 'You will buy a ticket, and then I'll tell you who act.' What's that? Mockery? How do you work? Where is a programme? People need information about actors that come. Am I right or not?" he addressed the audience.
Everybody started nodding compassionately.
"But we ourselves don't know who will come," the damsel yawned.
"Then why do you sell tickets?" The man suffocated with indignation. "Why?"
"We want to sell - and we sell. You don't want to buy - don't buy. Those Jews are so peculiar people! Everybody is obliged to them for something to the end of time…" The alabastrine beauty gaped once more and turned her back.
"And who are you? Not a Jew?" the repatriates bawled out. "What a spoils-woman, a bone-idle girl! You gather not Jews, but low-paid manpower! Food for powder!"
"Shadowboxing!" I thought and rushed to the street.
The sun was shining; birds were singing; flowers were exhaling fragrance; the beat of waves was heard from a nearby beach. I recollected the acquaintances of the acquaintances of my wife and smiled.
"People say Jews love money. They'd rather love each other! As well as all the rest, by the by…" I concluded and, keeping acting as scheduled by God, went to duck into heavy, but tender at the same time waves of the Mediterranean Sea…

Letter Eleven

THE ROMANCE BY SVIRIDOV

If a person is unhappy, it doesn't mean at all that he is good. And not always, it is necessary to commiserate with him. I do know such chaps! And you know, too. They suffer either from gluttony or from some diet when their refrigerators are full; sometimes they suffer from their interests: as if they put all their capital into a business, and now they are broken. And all of them are not simply sons of toil - but even its parents and grandchildren at the same time! Alexey Konstantinovich Tolstoy must have written about namely their tortures, 'we hardly managed a sturgeon in our Duma yesterday!'
About two weeks ago, I was standing in the street playing violin, and two ladies met before my eyes. They both were about forty or forty-five years old; satiated, bonny; possessing limos and diamonds.
They exchanged kisses.
They shed tears.
It was clear that they hadn't seen each other for a long time.
"How's it going?" one of them asks.
"Well, what to tell you…" another one answers, "I work very hard. Yesterday I said to my children, 'Children, if I die, don't cry! Remember that your mummy has gone to have a rest!'"
"That's it!" the first says. "I say almost the same to my folks…"
Well, examples are plentiful! I've got some acquaintances. Yesterday they repined at their unhappy lot - and have been repining still. Once, my son and me are standing in the street near the central department store of Alma-Ata, in Kazakhstan land. He is blowing into his saxophone, and I am bashing out on a guitar. Less and less alms are given every day. Those who possess it don't go by foot. And if they even do go, you will never draw it from them. And as for those who go, it's high time to give alms to them themselves.
Suddenly, "Hi! How are you doing?"
We look - these are our acquaintances.
"Here we go!" we answer. "Go begging."
"We're in Queer Street, too," they say. "Look, we've worn down-at-heel sneakers for the third year already. The salary is not adequate to buy petrol. The car is old. It gobbles like an elephant!"
And the poor things hoisted sail. My son was astonished: how they hadn't disdained to approach us.
I say, "Apparently, the sneakers are camouflage, or rather simply convenient, and they gave the opportunity to condescend."
And I read it like a book - because in half a year they sold their 'Mercedes', not the worst at all, and 'hardly' bought a 'BMW'. A new one, and of the latest model already. With a petrol station!
And with us, all is OK - today as well as yesterday. In the morning, I stand in the Smelyansky Street in the town of Netanya, which is in the 'village' of Israel. And my son stands opposite the iriya (town hall). He was blowing - and is blowing, and I am bashing out - not on a guitar, but a violin already. I do a fret-cutting of the romance by Sviridov, and not with a fret saw, but with a fiddlestick. And less and less alms are given here. Though I play louder and louder…

(The romance by Sviridov is heard.)

Letter Twelve

TEMPTATION

A bloke dropped a huge wallet. It fell, opened, and there dollars lay being pressed up to the stop. The bloke takes his seat in the car and closes the door…
"Good Heavens! Do tell he will drive away! Do tell he will manage before I run up to him!" I think.
And all that is because of my world view, almost religious. And it is firm - each one has got his own account with the empyrean bank. And everything that you'll snatch here is a trifle as compared to your income there, if you don't snatch here. But I know for sure one more thing: if you find something out and an owner isn't besides, don't rush searching. Don't put Lord into a rage! Take His present thankfully. And if the owner besides, then give all back! Otherwise, it is theft!
"It's hard to run, I don't know why… It seems to be not far away, but my legs are tripping… But no - the bloke has started the engine already… It's necessary to be in time… That is your chance! C'mon, c'mon!"
The empyrean taximeter is clip-clopping as if it has gone bugs - in all parts of my body…
I'm just on time!
I picked the wallet up and stopped the auto almost by the wheel.
The bloke nearly flipped; he threw the wallet on the seat and flew away without a peep… Even didn't say 'thank you'…
Such horrors, here you are… I'm not sure even now, if I acted right. And nobody will relieve my mind. Nobody but death, maybe…

Letter Thirteen

A MALE!

When you have nothing to say, you always can speak about money, love and weather. The central subject is the most familiar for me. But the first is not needless, by no means. That's why, following the everyday rule stating that good fortune is good riddance of any misfortune, I'm waiting for life dirt tricks for the whole time. And they don't keep me waiting.
And if it is so, then it's better to move bottom-up than top to bottom. That is - from worse to better, and not on the contrary. The more so that recently my son has come to a decision, too, that either firstly tortures and demolitions, and then pleasures, or firstly pleasures, and then tortures and demolitions in this world. No, he is neither a drug addict nor a sadist-and-masochist. He isn't even an alcoholic. He is simply a normal person. So, I keep repeating from time to time, for some drive, "Reckon upon the worst, and hope for the best!"
Yesterday, I tried to go out as a janitor, and… they didn't take me! They are up to their ears in vacancies, but - not for me! My snoot is suspect. Especially - in glasses! I seem to be too clever for such a job, and that's why dangerous. Well, all 'nigger-drivers' got their job through pull and good sib and ethnic connections! Their norm is a gravy train. Their salary is about six times as ours. I haven't got even a reference letter. And who will give it to me? I have been entreated as a maniac by some acquaintances since long ago. I mean not those who babied me, but those who play harp in word and balalaika in practice. When a disk fall out of my spine, they, with their logorrhea, extended their sympathy to me at least, and touched me very much with their pretending to be real people; but as soon as I claimed that I should continue to write, more of that - to write in Russian, and neither to study Hebrew nor to grab highly paid work - that killed them! They do smile still, but it is the smile of psychiatrists. It turns out that they are really interested not in anybody as he is, but only in those who can be a potential object of the diversification of their attention, hostility and affinity. Then - you are welcome! Then they are you friends and benefactors! Certainly, for that time when you are a saddle-fast. And that's the very best variant. That's the peak of their moral and soul beauty!
I spitted in a fruity manner, took my violin - and left for streets. Janitors with carts, buckets and brooms, happy and not too intellectual (in spite of the myths about massy professorate contingent of in that sphere), walk past me. They smile! One of them stopped, was hearing for a while, turned his thumb up, and as if pinned a medal on me, "A male!"
I began to play even more vividly. High opinion needs high return. I rasp and think, "Eh, Arkasha, should we be down in the dumps? Ill luck in career - good luck in God's love! Well, if anything, there are only two states - happy and unhappy! And am I unhappy? Yes, my money is tight, but in all cases, it is money! And not everyone has a gift to guess that the 'raison d'etre' is not money and bijouterie, but communication. Only when a kindred spirit dies, something does clarify in some minds. And the fact that the quality of communication is a report to Lord and to oneself, is actually known unto very few. As well as the criterion of the quality: if the cause you serve is dead or alive, whether it is destruction or construction. It is people that puzzle me: they worship carrion (the same money, for instance), and complain of life…"
I think over all those things and don't notice that a policeman has stopped his scooter opposite to me.
"Hullo!" he shouts, and my fiddlestick gets its rest.
Now he'll be banishing me. It happens, though seldom.
The policeman says something in Hebrew, politely, but resolutely, and I pretend that I understand him. By the way, I really understand - though not his words, but intonations and gestures; besides, my previous experience helps me. Somebody from a neighboring house is sick and tired of my music, and he has called in the police.
"Beseder! Okay!" I nod and go away, with vexation but without after-pains.
It would have been worse if the person had suffered torments, but kept silence. Yes, his heavenly balance would have been better - but mine has been worse! (That is of my world conceptualization.)
Now, where to go - that is the question. There are places where people flow like an affluent river, but in those places, every twenty metres, grey-haired eagles with harmonicas sit. If one stand between them, they'll crab him. And where no people are, there no sense is.
I was walking for some time, and then stood near the art shop. At least, a little bit more congenial. At first, I began to play softly, as if I stood there perpetually; but then somebody threw five shekels to me - and I could not stand it. As soon as I stroke up 'La Cumparsita', the street seemed to start.
"Eh! Hullo!"
I don't know what possessed me! They expel me again!
I shoved the violin in the fiddle-case, placed the fiddle-case under my arm, and shove off.
No sooner had I stood at a crossing than some mature kicker rolled up to me - with a revolver stuck in his belt. (Many carry the hugest revolvers along. Such a situation is!) He felt like speaking. Well, ostensibly, he used to drink with Zhirinovsky, he would hang out with the present-day President of Russia, and he is such a fool that has left not for America, but for Israel. Such a typical insurance Jewish song 'With the same broken wash-tab'. Mind that factually, that honored Zhirinovsky's mate being a security officer has got highly sizable subsistence.
He was torturing me for half an hour, and I was pretending to feel hellish pity for him. When that empire fragment, the very same witness and participant of its breakdown went away, I was ready to cry with happiness - so easy I felt myself. Communication is OK when it is not obtruded; otherwise, it is awful!
I was playing for about ten minutes. Not a kopeck! And here, my acquaintance, a beggar, is approaching me. He is my namesake, but of retiring age. The namesake doesn't wait for the smiles of fortune like me, but he goes straight up to people and begs.
"Sonny!" he addressed me. "I am sorry for you! Entire Israel and its surroundings hear your violin, but your fiddle-case is empty. These rascals give alms voluntarily only to cripples, and it is only that the rabbinate guarantee them Eden for this."
"Well, I have some problems with my back too!" I try to laugh off, but my namesake is very serious and very unshaven today.
"And who sees it?" he asks. "It has to be written! Or shake with all your body with vibrato!"
"Interference will occur!" I keep joking.
"The main question is if money occurs! Things must come right not only for those… but for you as well - I need it so much! Then I'll sleep easily. I shan't be so ashamed of myself and all the rest Jews."
"Thank you, oldie!" I say, and my eyes moisten. "I'll try. But only for your special benefit. For me, after all, consciousness is primary, and substance is secondary!"
Ah, how I played after he had gone! Honestly speaking, my fortune didn't grow, but my spirits rose.
"A male!" It switched me again.
I look - and see the same janitor-Persian who was in the morning. He is shaking his upped thumb, and his mouth resembles a rainbow, because is protruded from one his ear to another.
"Play 'The Oginski Polonaise'," he says. "I've loved it since my childhood."
"Here you are!"
"A male!" the Persian hits the ether once more and, having been listening, moves on.
My spirits are high for some time, but a policeman expels me again. Now I don't catch why, but I leave at once. To argue with power, especially in Russian, is not only senseless, but dangerous too. Once upon a time, in Kazakhstan, my son tried, being young and inexperienced. Thank God, he stayed alive! That's why I pop off - though it's too early to go home, and I have no wish to play. When one is out of money, and they don't let him get a living - it causes a terrible plight! One will grudge the worst nickayoner (the one who mops and cleans rooms). He always earns his crust, and I am not able to find even such a follow-up. It's the real fate! As if somebody forms a corridor for me to go in a necessary direction. To get definite experience…
Ah! Come what may! I'm going to play in front of the town hall. Usually, my son stands there, but now he is at home already. In the afternoon, my heir studies up to enter the Jerusalem University. He would not live by alms for the whole life! But neither would he be a person like the one I have been acquainted recently. Such a young metronome-businessman. A pragmatist, as dull as ditch-water; as good as a corpse, but quicksilver and active as a spermatozoon. There's only one difference between them: a sperm cell tries to merge and to create a new life, and the 'hopeful' - to contaminate and to eat away.
I reached the town hall, set my violin, stroke up the 'Monty Csardas'. And I think, "To hell with him! It is long since I became more a human being than a beast. And I'm thrice a biophil - with all the primary and secondary sexual characters and my creative passion! It means that I desire, do desire, and once more - more than desire… but now - to sleep! And I won't change this kaif for not for one's ears. And I wish the same to you, assigned that 'give me!' is for a beast, and 'take it!' is a HUMAN BEING."

(The 'vivace' part of the 'Monty Csardas' is heard.)

Letter Fourteen

THE PRETENSIONS OF THE INDIGENT BEGGAR

Underdogs are those who speak a lot. Lucky dogs are dumb creatures. So, I want to speak. More so, that nobody has thrown a shekel yet into my old fiddle-case today. And that is bad. And absolutely for the reason you've thought about - it goes without saying; but because my wife will wake snakes about my status again. Oh yeah! Even her friends blush when they get to know on what our family lives now.
The status is really… The next is only beyond the veil!
"Either you leave streets and start studying Hebrew or I'll leave you!" I hear those words every time when I haven't got any proceeds.
Between you and me, I hear the same when I've got them, too. But especially - when I haven't.
She is ashamed!
And me?
This is mere blether that to be a busker is of the same honour as to be a lawyer. Nix on that game! I don't know how the others feel about that, but for me, it is the road to the Calvary. My mastery leaves something to be desired. Well, I ain't a professional, I am not! I was learning to play violin only for a year, in the far season of my youth - and I say! It came in handy! Pulling stunts with my fiddlestick - the 'Sentimental Waltz' by Tchaikovsky, here we go! - I try to forget where I am and what I am. But - plop! - a coin has fallen. And I bow, and utter 'thank you' in Hebrew.
By the way, about Hebrew. I used to study it. I should try. Many times. Basically, as far as there. In Kazakhstan. To no purpose! Any language is unget-at-able for me. That's why, not to waste my time and energy, I even don't try to learn it. You can take me for an idiot, but it is so. On the other hand, I've met the very best clinical idiots here, and they patter in three or even five languages. They slaver and hum, but people understand them - and not ones like those 'polyglots', but much cleverer… And my language is no good. Any one! Besides Russian. And even it has to be studied up all the time. For example, I absolutely cotton on the modern slang of those who went at large from Russian quods. Every word sort of clear and screamingly picturesque, and together they compose a mere rebus. And because of such my gifts, the choice of jobs is practically equal to zero. And so, here I stand. It is necessary to feed the family.
As a matter of fact, some pieces of cherry pie fall to my lot - but seldom. The other day, let's say, I was pushing a cart with stones. Archaeological excavations. At last, I knocked to pieces my C-note shoes and earned the same sum. But that is another story. And now…
One 'The Golden Pen' prizewinner dashed off a feature about my and my son's activity for the hugest Russian-language newspaper 'Vremya' (or 'Time', if you prefer). The title is 'Two-Lapidus-Two, Chuchundra (that is our doggie) and Others'. If you read it, you would esteem press even higher:

"Meanwhile, the elder daughter, Lena found some cushy job. The younger one gnaws the granite of school scholarship. Oleg, having overcome Hebrew, appeared with his saxophone at the open spaces of Netanya streets. And soon, Lapidus Senior himself, with joint semi-flexed, got down to playing music in the streets…"

How do you like it? I like it very much! It's a typical masterpiece of the freethinking journalism. The elder daughter has found no work, especially a cushy job, yet. The younger one, seventeen-years-old, gnaws cigarettes mainly, with the same ruffians as she is, and comes home towards morning. And I have heard nothing at all from my son about his deadly fight with Hebrew - and much less about his historical and glorious victory. He is practically conflict-free even in his relations with English…
Though about my semi-flexed extremities - that's true. Then, it was so because of spine pain, now the cause is the state of my mind. And the statement that out tiny, shabby, having fleas and only three legs doggie Chuchundra scoffs only 'Pedigree Pal' - it is mere drivel. The stray creature had been taken by us just before we left for Israel, and it had intolerance to any preserves for dogs. Only some slops or something of the kind, natural and sappy, is to Chucha's liking - as well as to Huckleberry Finn's one.
But one more coin is thrown! Thank you! Many thanks! Be healthy and happy! That is the smallest coin, but never mind! The main is that it is from the heart… Well, who gives? Mainly, they are pensioners, invalids, and children. The haves are the last persons to do it. They may only say between teeth, "Go and work! Young, healthy - and you live by alms! Shame on you! You discredit us!"
Here! They spit at me. The main is that I discredit them!
"I am ashamed! Ashamed! Not half!" I say. "You must have any welcome suggestions for me!"
No suggestions! Not at all! Only good wishes…
Some bloke was bringing home to me for a long time that he would give alms to junkies not for toffee. I say, "If a man asks and you are able to give - then give, and don't reason. A junky asks for alms not being in clover. The trap snapped him. He is perishing! So, if you can't get him out of it - show him some human kindness with a piece of money, at least! And then, how do you know that he is a junky and not a modern, but ill-timed Korolyov or Einstein? And their wives and folks might have left them because of their ideas, damned and useless for their up-to-the-minute family budget."
"No," the bloke says, "I see at once, who is a junky and who is not."
And he seemed to be going to thrust his hand into his pocket, but changed his mind. Apparently, he got the hang of me, too…
By the by, a great number of passers-by slip their hands into their pockets, un then can't get it out by any means. And they roam around the country in such a manner, hanging down their head. I understand them - and compassionate very much. They haven't become people yet, but the process has already begun - hard and painful…
And, naturally, it is very touchingly to observe how many people peek in my fiddle-case and reckon up what is there - as if they fit the amount on themselves. Just in case. Some of them see that the sum is little, and throw something else. As if for their own future. Thank them, too! Because dog's meat lovers exist as well. They stare very purposefully. For them, devil may care that someone pays fancy price for picking up those dribs and drabs all day and night long. This 'someone' often has to lie naked on a carton. In the middle of sidewalk. In dirt, snot, and dog's shit… The other day, two hefty fellows stooped as if to throw something, and one of them stole a five-shekel coin. The only one! I tell him, "Maybe you need more - then help yourself! There is about five shekels more…"
No reaction. He only chuckles. He doesn't want small change. He's got such a status - whoopee!
Nothing of the kind has happened even in the present squalid Soviets. A vag or a bandit rather will throw then extract. More so for 'Ave Maria' by Schubert.
And generally, they give poor alms here. Especially to musicians. Very poor! It may be differently in other foreign countries, but in Israel - poor. But the most humiliating and hard situation is when they give no alms at all. You are playing, playing… Until handicraft spasm occurs… And not a rap…
And just now, one has looked into my almost empty fiddle-case, been hearing for a while, and said, "What a boring country! No soap! There's nothing to do for me!"
And he turns bridle… Then he pulls himself together, comes back, throws ten shekels, and adds, "Thank you! Or else, one can die with the blues here…"

(The first measures of 'Kampanella' by Paganini are heard.)

Letter Fifteen

A VOICE

Once, I'm sitting at the sea, admiring a sunset, and - suddenly, loudly, from God knows where:
"Israel is a wonderful country! Here, almost everybody becomes the one he is factually. And if once, you turn to be livestock that is slogging its guts out and chewing around the clock, you have always been it then - irrespective of your diplomas and degrees!"
"My God, where's a pen? Ah, here it is…"
I wrote it down. I managed. It looks like nothing has been broken in my organism…
I'm keeping admiring. A half of the sky is covered with gold and raspberry juice. God's grace! Such delight! And suddenly:
"Live today! Tomorrow may never come! But only live, not pollute!"
"A pen! A pen!.."
It's written down. There is weakness and trembling in my legs. And in my eyes… Nothing is in my eyes! They are only batting at the sunset, that's all.
"Don't believe anybody! Neither me! In no case! Believe you only!" was heard above the sea again, and again, only I heard that.
"My God, is it you?"
"Yes! It's you!"
"Who - 'you'? Me or you?"
Silence…
"Enforced good is evil!" my indignant inner voice shouts, and the very same one, but from somewhere outside, replies at once, "Right! But every cloud has a silver lining!"
Psychiatry of the first water. That is for normal people. But it's a norm for me. That's why I ingeminate my only prayer, daily and especially after each contact of a kind:
"Thank you, Lord, that you sent me the severities that I am able to overcome!"

Letter Sixteen

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD

If you come to Israel, you will hardly meet, immediately and everywhere, such idiots as I meet. I've got a suspicion even that I'm all by myself here in general.
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,1" I say, and they reply me, "You may thrust your clever ideas into your ass. In the
beginning was money!"
Here they are - the heroes and the descendants of the Old and New Testaments! They are in gold and in limousines. And if only one of them says that he has got money! Nobody has! Poor people…
On the other hand, there are such characters on my not historical native soil (I mean - not in Israel) as well - up to your ears. Especially now… About half a year ago, one my acquaintance, the owner of 'works, and newspapers, and ships', was blown away. Three pot shots. And one proof round through the head. In broad daylight, in his rich office, in full view of all visitors.
The killer got into his car and - zing! And that croaked one is lying and staring at his wealth. And heretofore, they had smoked his daughter, then - his mother, and only then - his wife. And he didn't learn the lesson! More so, that he used to argue with me. (One always can find what to argue with me about. I can be whatsoever but dull!) And I should tell him in my wackiness that, theoretically, everyone can become rich (he could kill or rob, after all), but nobody can become talented. And even here, quality differs. For instance, the talent of making and getting money always has gastro-enteric etymology, not cardio-spiritual.
Senselessly! He was one of those wiseacres who always believed, believe, and will believe that everyone and everything can be bought. Even imperishable memory and recognition. As though only their price is a stumbling block.
Well, inasmuch as this story will be read century in, century out, then my acquaintance has already got to the eternity. Though, cuffo. You would draw money out of cold meat, would you? And being an idiot that is not eternized yet even with such an unassuming memorial as the Temple of Vasily Blazhenny, I keep harping, drumming and 'medabering' that in the beginning was the Word (alias Thought!). And the Word was with God. And the Word was God. Cheers!
Because this is - good!

Letter Seventeen

THREE BUCKETS OF SHIT
(A letter to my not historical motherland)

My dear and long-suffering fellow countryman - Russian, or Kazakh, or Ukrainian, or a Turk, or Uigur, or Ingush, or anybody else!
"Israel - not the country to where it is necessary to go and where it is necessary to live!" not very clever, but very practical people used to say to me.
And they are right, no doubts. Actually, it's good only for pilgrims. It was so in the times of Mark Twain, it is so today, and save God, but it may be so tomorrow. Even local
_______________
1 Bible. - Revised Standard Version. - New Testament. - John.1 [1].

millionaires prefer to live not here for the largest part of the year; all the rest only dream about it.
And I should have never come if it had been possible. And not only to Israel, but nowhere at all. That is to say, I should become a seasonal migrant for a while, travel, and come back. To my Fatherland! Not a mythic and 'historical', but the real one. Even not to the place where I was born, but where I became adult and where my father, rich in the affection of me, closed his days.
But I have no Fatherland now. They deprived us of it! Without any cause. On the day when the autochthonic nationality was declared the title nation.
Since that moment, I have been able to do anything, I have been able to be anything, but, if there are 'the titled' from their birth with title state national language, then I'm always the second, the third and hell knows which else, but originally defective. And still less a master in this country, but at the best case - a guest. And even had I mugged up as if I were Kazakh, I should have been figured out in two twos.
"Do you speak Kazakh?"
"No."
"Piss off, you bantling!"
However, the segregation of national and language groups took place before, too, and it was rather appreciable and hateful. But it has become so up-front, impudent, and administrative only nowadays - in the period of so-called democratization, which proves to be tyranny and imposing Fascism.
"Turn!" the state ordered. (The yesterday's first secretary of the Kazakhstan Communist Party CC and today's President, and the tomorrow's sultan or Fuhrer was the embodiment of it.)
And people and unpeople started their moving. And they have seen for themselves once more that the earth is round, and they are paltry blobs and cogs manipulated by prevailing authorities as the last want.
But now, it is there, and I am, thank goodness, here - where I was promised to supplement my menu with a bucket of shit as well. I even used to joke about it: as if I should go down the ramp and demand it immediately. For the sake of time saving. Not to prolong that culinary pleasure for years.
Deuce a bit! People must neither hasten nor slow any natural process. Firstly, inflation enlarged the bucket thrice at least, and secondly, one can't recover after taking all drugs at once. And the main thing: where is the substance? You won't see even funeral processions here. A newcomer can think hotheadedly that it is the land of the immortals. Only in a month after my coming, I've learned that people die here as lively as anywhere else; but concerned persons have to be at that celebration in time. The funeral takes place on the day of the death, and without any orchestras and fanfares. On the other hand, they put up fliers in black frames, but try to understand what is written there! Because here, in the orthodox Jewish state of America, it is customary to smile always, to whicker like horses and to repeat the favourite byword 'beseder' (alternatively 'OK').
"How are you?"
"Beseder!"
"How are your parents?"
"Beseder! They died!"
It is difficult to orientate yourself being new to the sight. You've just stretched your mouth smiling - and your money has been already squeezed from you. Mainly for housing. Well, what do you want? Israel is a state-usurer. The specialization is traditional. That's why it is monoethnic, in spite of it ethnic variety. And it's only nationality is - money!
Those who came from the USSR (CIS) are succoured by Russian optimism. It is stronger than American. And what have all the rest to do? How could you explain them that the most sure and useful way of behaviour is not to cry like a banshee in despair, but to jip up and down dancing and to rap after every 'beseder', "It's some mess, but not a woe. Woes are in days to come!"
However, even that mantra helps not always. I was trying to see only good facts and to feel only positive things so much - God knows it! Even the name for my first collection of stories written here has been fantastical: 'The Promised Land is peaceful'. Kinda wish for tomorrow…
It hasn't worked!
The life can't be cheated. It is variegated, and while it is variegated and rich in contrast, it is interesting (excluding those cases when people kill or oppress each other!). And everything joyful that I was writing or I am writing, is truth; and all not joyful is all the more so. And, against the common sense of uncompromising reformers, one thing comes of another, and another one comes of the first.
Knowing about it, I didn't choose the place of residence in Israel. More exactly, I was going to move to Haifa.
"Where's kaif, ah? - In Haifa!" It sounded very invitingly.
But when the moving became not a literary construction, but a real horror, my nerves snapped, and I left all things to the Most High; in Russian it is 'hit-or-miss'.
It worked!
It was found that, of all available, Netanya is the best place. For me! For someone, even Jerusalem is not the pile of stones and junk, but Paradise. And for someone, even Tel-Aviv is luxury, though I have never seen more disgusting cities. On the other hand, what my age is! Only a little more than fifty. Again, my assessment criterions are rather biological than pragmatic. And I say nothing at all about Arabian settlements. Their level of ecological and architectural comfort is inconceivable for me. So, now I live like Booratino (alias Pinoccio) in the town at the shore of the Mediterranean Sea. Holding my long nose instead of a bag… Because I added one more aberration to all the rest: each guest is god-given. Even if he is an enemy! And who won't go to the warm sea? Especially to my place. To freeload until hell freezes over… So… You are welcome!
Incidentally, Albina and Yura from our Fatherland have paid us a visit - praise the Lord, only for a month. But they promise to come for two months next year.
"Hello, you dear! Oh no, not simply dear, but precious ones! In all regards! Why are you staring in amazement? Yes, I'm an angel! And the full name is an angel shark! With teeth and even feathers in the form of moustache. And where is my guitar?..

Oh, farewell to my creative work!
That folk have wedged me to a writer's block.
They bunk with me, booze freebee, restless guys,
But they're a sight for my offended eyes!"

And then - 'We've brought you peace', in the purest Hebrew:

"Heveinu shalom aleichem!
Heveinu shalom aleichem!
Heveinu shalom aleichem!
Heveinu shalom, shalom, shalom aleichem! 1"

(Songs, music and carousal from dusk to dawn;
from dawn to dusk.)

Letter Eighteen

DRUDGERY

David was lovingly brushing away a huge wild bowlder with a brush for the second hour already. Marina and me were staring at him in wonder. Highlands, torn to pieces and very rugged, depressed with its histrionics. Factually, my foolological and archaeological epopee resembled life not too much, too. Emotional Marina, a librarian from Bryansk, has still rejoiced at any chip of six thousand years ago, having been found by her; and I have already thrown all of the kind overboard. The romanticism of the contact with high antiquity quickly broke up on a barrow, a pick, a bucket with ground and stones, and the sun. Especially because I read in a newspaper one of those days that only prisoners had broken stones there before, besides, at their own will. And now, it is one of the state methods in its struggle with unemployment - with corresponding minimum wage and, for sure, profitable perk for an agency firm.
Something burst at a kilometer from us, and an eddy of dust marked the place of the explosion.
"Bombing!" Marina shouted and ducked a curtsy, to be on the safe side.
"Oh no. They are driving a way," David made us peaceful.
He even put his tongue out with assiduity. It proved the guess that the former owner of all pay-toilets of Eupatoria liked cleanness, order, and perfection in all, because we were spectators of turning the stone in jewelry.
And it was estimated and appreciated. Students-archaeologists, not being too sophisticated, praised us not for low observable, but difficult digging inwardly, sideward, and up, but namely for that impressive 'diamond'.

And at once three vivid brushes
Started energetic rushes!

And not in vain! The surface of our mother Earth has become merry, and its appearance quickly begun to look really festively.
__________________________
1 Shalom Aleichem. - A Jewish folk song.

At the break, all the three stationed themselves in the shade of a tree that was growing lonely, namely in our sector. There I relaxed, and, chewing my sandwiches, made my Sermon on the Mount.
"Israelis! And Jews, too!" I said. We are not able to dig as deep as the Earth centre today. And we've got a very little chance to manage tomorrow. And all the surface up to the horizon, at full length and width, demands too many work, too. So, no sense to be in a hurry. Well, you'll find an earthen piece of broken pottery - and what? They have got tones of such fragments. Yes, they try to paste them together, but it has the same colour of reason as beating a dead horse. And the main thing is that we've got no part in it. Even if we excavate a buried treasure, they'll pay us minimum wage, as well as at present. So what?
"You've found gold - run away!" David smiled.
"Well, it goes without saying. But if we want to hold out until it takes place, we have to exert all our intellectual abilities to the utmost extent not to do anything, but to make the opposite impression. Even in that case, we shall be sucked dry. But a little bit later. And while our intellect doesn't leave us - let's stay human beings!"
"Yes!" - said David in the voice of Kapitsa, the anchor of the 'Obvious, Yet Incredible'.
"Here we go," I continued. "We can't do without creative work and acting here. Have you ever seen jailbirds or slaves working?"
"No," David and Marina answered with one accord.
"And I have. As soon as an overseer turns away, they petrify stock-still. He turns head backward - movement begins slowly. If not to do that - death! They will harry you to death, and then bury! You see, there isn't any norm! We are get out in the morning and driven to bay in the evening. Our luck, nevertheless, is in - we are at the periphery, and they can see us only from the east. And we get hourly pay. So, up and at them! Time is our friend! All the rest is our enemy!"
Oh, what a show it was! We even managed to take advantage of a roaring excavator with an Israeli driver in it. He understood not too much, but would stand between the archaeologists' observation post and us just in time.
And everybody was glad. And the ground around us looked so that it was possible to wait for an UFO landing. Apparently, that was the reason why I began to use cosmic terminology. Clock-watching periodically, I shouted, "Five minutes passed - no in-flight emergency! Inter-orbital transfer time is three hours and thirty minutes! The end exercise point is skhar-dira (i.e. the beloved rented flat)!"
"O-oh!" everyone used to heave a sigh of relief.
On the fourth day, Marina started speaking about some advantages of alfresco work, comparing it with being an assembly line worker in a stinky workshop. And David didn't kill the next scorpion, but evacuate it out of the bounds of the excavations that day.
But - alas! It couldn't last for a long time. Life is not a film where one can use a still-frame mode and image scrolling endlessly. Ancient people said that 'light comes from the East'; however, it was darkness that came to us from that side. A madam about thirty-five years old jumped out of there and rushed to us. Our young overlookers were pattering after her and chirping plaintively. Having stood stock still before the glaringly polished landscape for a second, the madam tampered into the bucket with those broken pieces and, having been not satisfied, began to raise her voice and poke her finger at the ground, the sky, and us. And, inasmuch as neither she nor the students knew anything but foul words in Russian, I speechified again, against the background of their sensual yells. Moreover, the address was prophetic, as it had to be in the Holy Land.
"Finita la commedia!" I said. "I'm a perfect duffer at their Bird language, but intonations are higher than meaning. And all this is because of me. Only yesterday, I was going to cop a stone jug from the shed and dig it out here, but neglected it. It's the Russian temper! Bit I won't capitulate. Let them crucify me and deprive of those pitiful shekels, but rhythm and weather here will be set by me, not be them. Or else, 'Russians are so-and-so'. Gold may be easily told! We are not slaves - slaves are not we!"
And we were broken up.
More of that! The madam ordered the shovel man to root the tree out with a view to detect anything artificial under it.
The tree was thrown down to a ravine, and David started crying…
The madam merely flown up. The biophilic sentimentality of the Crimea repatriate was for her like a bone in her throat. More so, that David, a naive and gentle heart, being the oldest hand at Hebrew among us, with his tears guttering down, tried to save our trio there and then. However, thereafter, when we collided with our barrows, he only spitted, on the condition that there was some saliva in his mouth, and cussed out.
Only Marina got sitting rather pretty. And thank goodness! She managed to sit tight, carrying buckets with stones under the awning… And I was placed at the very centre (in the sunshine!). Right near the table (in the shade!), namely which was the command post of the madam and her adolescent archaeogirls.
Smiling charmingly and scanning her very iffy form from head to foot impudently and delightfully, I inserted a comment 'Butifool wooman!' a few times, and very timely. (In English, it means 'A fair lady!') And then, under the shelter of that strategic soft sawder, I started working with those who loaded my buckets and cart.
"Fewer! Fewer!"
"What - fewer?" deep-chested Yefim wondered.
"Hack with you pick once in a way! And don't brandish with your spade too hard… The ground isn't a female. If you pick it more violently and enthusiastically, it won't get overwhelmed with gratitude. Look at our Ethiopian! He has the skill of work in stone-pits."
"Veri gud, kamarad!" I showed my thumbs up to the black and blue youth, and he winked at me very archly and smartly.
Yefim and our Ethiopian worked in big rectangles one and a half metre in depth cut in the ground. And one empty square more was situated farther; a hole with a winch above it dehisced in it.
Right opposite, in another, much deeper square, a nice girl was grubbing. She wasn't seen under the ground; only sometimes, full buckets appeared, and the second girl took them up. And there, two corpulent aunties were sifting the contents with the goal of finding anything unnatural. Something was found there the day before, and now next surprises were expected.
Surely, the madam's expectations were the greatest. She was consumed by the greedy and insatiable fire of archaeologism and grave-diggerism, and she was consuming everybody. The dead became more important than the alive, and that anchor of any fanaticism swept away the last odds and ends of intellect and sense. Thanks to her, three onetime breaks turned to one (half an hour) plus pathetic fifteen minutes devoted to all deficiency needs at once. All the rest time, the more and more accelerating rush of gnawing the dirt took place; all who rebelled used to be fired and replaced with others next day. Those who worked under the awning and under the ground could take it somehow; but in the sunlight, it was Gehenna. Physical activity combined with heat dehydrated an organism in a few minutes. After each spurt with my cart, I drank like a fish, but all the same, my tongue seamed to be a grater.
Fortunately, somebody fell down to the gap in company with his barrow, and, while he and his instrument were being extracted and taken back to this world, the possibility of respiring appeared. Then my Ethiopian dug out a huge stone dish, and the pros' wild jam-up and hopping around it distracted attention out of us. More so, that some archaeological guru came.
"Fima!" I prayed. "Slower and gentler! And a half of a bucket at a time, dear! My hands fall off!"
"You must be out of your mind!" was heard above the rock in pure Russian, and we started. "Don't dig under the rock! One was already swamped there, under the winch, a week ago!"
"I have always known that God speaks Russian," I replied thankfully. "Hallelujah! But our working front is determined by that madam…"
"Well, let her creep," the guru (it was namely he) hemmed, and gave her a good hammering, but now in Hebrew.
It resulted in the most unexpected things. Apparently, having counted the professor's joke for an allowance (someone of ours translated it into Hebrew), the madam took a flash after the superstar's departure and, singing happily, headed for namely that hole in the third quadrant. That time, Yefim moved buckets down to her with the help of the notorious winch, and they flew up at once, topfull.
Less than in ten minutes, the territory of the square got glutted. They ordered David help me, but she was too fast to work with her even in such a manner. Mind that it became absolutely impossible to save our pains somehow at least, and they were decreasing crucially. After the Ethiopian discovery, that plugger was eager to find anything by herself so much that she was digging like a mole.
At last, the inevitable event happened: the madam was engulfed. They unearthed her and brought to senses, but the working day was over.
"How does Death mow - from right to left or from left to right?" I asked Yefim, and he, smiling happily, answered immediately, "Straight and towards it itself!"
"Right!" David caught up, freeing the cart from picks, spades, and a breaker. "Work changes a man into an ape and kills it!"
"Not creative work! Not creative… Poor ape!" I whispered and… lost consciousness.

Letter Nineteen

STAIRS TO THE SKY

Each morning, I walk out alone along the road, and when I see anybody with a bundle where sandwiches may be, I get on his back and ask to say a good word for me relatively any work. The yesterday's Jews of the USSR are bluffed with unemployment; they get even mightier scare, and moo something negative unanimously. It seems that everyone is in horror of my waylaying for him. And what are their jobs? Street cleaning, scrubbing, ancillary works, and other sad apologies for professional life. Maybe, you think, what chauvinism can be here? Well, it is! They are elite, and I'm a hedge-born good-for-nothing.
Okay, God is the best judge for them. I turn back and go home. There, I pick up my pet in my arms (it is a shabby waif, a 'special Moscow' lap-dog Chucha) and head for the embankment. I take a place on a bench, and, as far as I don't see a soul around, I either speak to Chucha or pass to an inner monologue.
"One doesn't come to this world as a human being. One becomes a human being!" I say. "Chucha, I've seen a dog that was a human, but rarely I see humans among people. Here, one is jogging. What is he?"
I look at the sportsman-pensioner and come down a little.
"The more I learn about men, the more I love all pets and hens!" my parent used to sigh grievously, and now I begin to realise why.
It isn't a mere chance that such respect for animals has appeared in wealthy countries. They got sated, quenched, played sufficiently with their cars and other schlock - and found suddenly that there was only emptiness and loneliness around them. Because there was emptiness inside them during all their life. But everybody wants to be a person! Here, how quickly this one is running! He is eager to such an extent that it's enough to make you despair. His secret ambition is to correspond to the divine image and likeness - and by all means, with God's larger part in him. I'm acquainted with him. A former goldsmith from Kiev. He was born a kind of anthropoid, but the creature hasn't yet managed to become a human.
And no wonder! If to take Gogol's 'Auditor', then even the governor of a town was surprised when saw only pig snouts instead of faces.
And what about women? They've got so emancipated that dry up as women. They don't feel any need for either a family or children. For them, it is - slavery! But if the violent struggle for personal independence turns to be insularity and aloofness, then where and how can one become a human? It is possible only in communication. And communication always is dependence and mutual aid.
"Yes, Chucha, there's no troubled water to fish in the world for such egotists, cormorants, and shylocks as that goldsmith. They were born manlike, and they will die as amoebas. And they will stay those single-celled organisms after their death, too."
I cuddled the doggie, and Chucha licked my cheek and yapped.
"Now, now, don't boggle! You are safe from it. You are an innocent creature, and, unless you don't become a human, your way leads only up. And the goldsmith won't have too much trouble, either. An amoeba has its sensory organs as well; hence, it can enjoy, too. With the first signal system. And maybe, even with the second one. Nobody knows it for sure. Memory fails everyone when he transfers to a new life, no mistake."
"But I remember nothing," I keep thinking. "Though something strange and unaesthetic invades my dreams sometimes. It happens that you wake up - and don't understand in what incarnation you are. Mere human compassion you treat as a miracle, and reluctance to be represented in an unfavourable light in the eyes of one's acquaintances - as heroic conduct."
Well, it is clear! The euphoria of a person having got out of hell is natural. Very few people are able to sacrifice selflessly. And I'm not among them. Each time having concocted good, I think, "Aha, I've done a good deed! At a boy!"
But even so, it is good. It is good because it is perspective. And it is perspective because it is creative. And if it is creative, then it is according to the will of Heaven. In a nutshell, there's the mass of excuses for one's own imperfectness.
And how I idealize some acquaintances! Especially on paper. 'Angels! Seraphs!'
Actually, when emotions fade, I see the difficulties of some human decision-making very evidently; I hear discussions - 'to help or not to help', and know for sure where they hardly could brook me and what sigh of relief they heaved when I left.
"O bitch-ah-Chicha, a man sows a deed - he shall reap a habit, a man sows a habit - he shall reap a character, a man sows a character - he shall reap a fate, and if a man sows his fate, he shall reap either Eden or hell, and besides, in this world as a rule. And the same is with you. Soul evolution and degradation are doubtless, and when scientists prove it experimentally, nothing new will happen. In due course, everything takes its place, and everyone stays before himself and the Lord with his realized genuine quality - whether it is a balsam or a poison."
The doggie wagged the tail, and I even thought for a second that Chucha had savvied something of my dried pilpul.
But - no! Miracles are miracles namely because they happen seldom. Two Dobermans with their master were running down along a lawn right to us. And I hardly comprehended what might happen when Chucha tore out of my hands and, squeaking joyfully, hobbled on her three paws to chum up. (The back right paw had already been broken before we took the doggie - apparently, in Chucha's childhood; it could not grow like three others, but vets were under apprehension of its life and renounced an operation.) The Dobermans' master shouted something in his not-Russian, but it was too late. The elite dogs attacked my former drifter, and Chucha's squeaking got such quality that even the goldsmith stopped and started towards us, anticipating pleasure from a bloody show.
But the dog's luck is really good! Whilom, Chucha shoot out from under wheels a few times; and that time, the pet kept a whole skin.
The goldsmith sighed disappointedly, and jogged along the road. And I recalled the Belfers. (I remind you once more that they were the people who welcomed us on the first day of our life in Israel.)
"Here, you have already begun to come out of soak," they have said recently. "Israel and 'the chosen people' are dusted with powdered sugar not in all places at all!"
Brave people! They are aware of their worth, and of those with whom they communicate, and my panegyrics didn't turn their heads. But alas, alas! - my own one becomes harder and harder. And it is awful! Sometimes, it is so desirable 'for oblivion, to sleep', namely in the manner described by Lermontov; but I have to get up at 4 a.m. and to run in quest of some money. Otherwise, my starving family will go meet Maker - or it will disintegrate. Besides, they can kick downstairs out of the lodgings for non-payment of rent. (I saw such a variant with my own eyes.) That's why I get inebriated by happiness, when someone offers his hand and smiles. Yet even in such a case, I know that it is done for his own comfort at the most, and not for me.
Chucha nestled the nose against my palm and died down. Naturally, it was pleasant. But even so, I thought that to get pleasure because somebody gets pleasure isn't the perfection of achievements. Certainly, it is better than to luxuriate at one's cost, but it is the profit motive of the animal nature at the same time as well.
"Yes, my dog," I pronounced. "A real human level - it is when one either may get his pleasure or rather may get not it, but only tortures, but when all that is for the others' pleasure. And when such a state has already become natural; when it is not a rule-of-thumb. When there's no fret, self-cannibalism, hesitation. Pray God we become a little bit nearer to it, at least. And a little workload would be very apropos. It is necessary to get money for non-thinking about it…"
I caressed Chucha, took the dog, and stood up.
"A-ah, Chuchundra!" I stretched myself with delight. "It is possible to throw scruples overboard, no doubt; but then it is useless to get into a huff if you become a stub or a cockroach after the death. As for me, I don't want to. Neither I want to be born anthropoid. I am fed up! How did Volodya Vysotsky write?

'If your life was a soul feast,
You'll be again a person!
But if you was a real beast,
The things will only wo-orsen!'1"

Letter Twenty

MY HAPPINESS

The degree of freedom is the degree of a manoeuvre. And surely, money gives it (I mean the manoeuvre possibility). To some extent… So, I have nothing against money as the means of that manoeuvre. And who has anything against means as means? Especially if he has got them. But on the other hand, one may stay free in prison and be a slave out of it. In that case, he is a slave of money and of everything that he buys with it. And very often, the well-fixed ones don't notice that they become the lucky rascals of the famous parable:

"'Hurrah! I've grabbed a bear!'
'Then draw it here!'
'Well, it doesn't let me go!'"
___________
1 Vysotsky V. A Ditty about the Transmigration of Souls.

So, I advert to what I have just said - I'm safe from such a hunting situation. And if someone calls me even a lower-income today, he will sin his soul to perdition. But everyone is craving for freedom. Without it, there's nothing to live for. Otherwise, why should I have taken the job of a worker on the dustcart footboard? That is such an iron plate on the sides of a dustcart back part.
Certainly, I'd better have become a street cleaner, but I wasn't admitted by competitive examination. Alkies, bindle punk, old men shuffling feebly along are admitted, but I wasn't. Apparently, there's something especially wrong. And I had dreamt about fresh air, a broom, and a dustpan so much…
But I hoped on (hope springs eternal in the human breast) and was waiting for a phoning from the refuse centre. Not the one that is in command of street cleaners, but one of those that runs the show with sanitation cars.
It is necessary to notice that I'm a clear-cut nighthawk. It means that I've waken up not earlier than at 9 a.m. all my life. If I get up an hour earlier, then I'm ill all day long. And here, the work begins at five. So, I got up at 4 a.m.; and now, I'm sitting and waggling. I'm going all-out not to crash back. It's five o'clock! No phoning. 6 a.m.! No. I'm as if on pins and needles. Seven! I spit, fell, slept…
Next day, my fast sleep was broken by the hammering on the door. The boss himself came for me. I rushed on his heels in blind haste - having tumbled out of bed, without drinking, without eating, without pe… Okay, it's clear! I was so excited that forgot everything. But I've got a job!!!
We are riding in his car. The chief, a young Russian-language athlete with two blue veinlets at his left temple, is bringing something about the dynamics of my future activities home to me, but I hear almost nothing - especially as I catch that it is necessary to work only four hours (which will turn to be full seven in reality!). There's no way back. A man that has not dragged a mammoth to his hearth and home is a potential impotent!
And here a dustcart is. It is as huge as a bus. And a little man turns around it. As it has proved nearby, he is even stronger and more pumped up than his boss. He pulls containers out of yards at a stroke, hooks them on rear-of-vehicle mill-cogs, then he presses one of three handles, and a hydraulic system lifts them and discharges rubbish into the womb of the dumping body. Another handle - and the rubbish is chewed inside.
I kept my wits about one immediately, and demonstrated a furious pace. Yet, another one wasn't possible. The boss saw that I could manage it, eyed a little, and went away.
"Job! Job!" I heard at once in Russian - and shivered.
The workmate appeared to be an original Israeli with the stock of three (!) Russian words. The same was with our driver.
"Job! Job!" the Israeli repeated impatiently and rigidly, and pointed a finger at the next containers.
And things were moving. More precisely, the dustcart made a move, and we ran behind it. Even more precisely, it was me who ran mainly. Before containers are emptied and rolled back to their place, the dustcart has already started. If you've managed to leap up onto a footboard on the move, your luck is good. You'll reach next containers by car. And if you haven't managed, then grasp your legs with your hands - and hurry after. You've overtaken it - turn left. Or right. Seize containers, offload them, put back to their place - and chop-chop after the departing dustcart. Then you've leaped up onto a footboard, grabbed hold of anything that came to hand, bumped against some pieces of iron - and drive, recover breath. If you hang on at the right side, then you've got only stink and reek out of the slop womb, and if your side is left, then you are soused into diesel heat by the tail pipe. The head is spinning!
About an hour passed, when it began to strike home to me that I am sunk - and how! And the problem was not in impossibility (for me!) to lift some of those containers, and even not in those pace, running and jumps, each of which could have finished under the wheels. The thing that I had always been afraid of and hated all my life, saluted me in its splendour and beauty: there was no possibility for a maneuver! Not any! I was running and running as if being fasten to the tail of a distracted horse, and the young proletarian of Erets Israel (the State of Israel) kept pepping me up:
"Chop-chop! Cheerly-cheerly! Job!"
"It is impossible to pair a fallow-deer and an ass!" I snapped automatically after the next dressing-down.
"Ya! Ya!" having understood nothing, the aborigine agreed 'in foreign', and pushed me away to touch up a container.
"O sole mio!" in some more time I wheezed out (that time in bad Italian), because I hadn't taken any headwear in a hurry. And that was why I had to try to cover my top with my palms in turn. And I kept smiling - to the four winds; all the time; like a foreigner on a visit; with a corpse's smile…
For my luck, the Israeli had fried by that time, too. He brought the vehicle to a halt, ran to a villa, and started drinking water out of a street faucet. I gawked at the white spot of his skullcap, but, as soon as it seceded, I rushed to water and spilt over myself from head to foot.
However, the aborigine didn't let me cool off and satisfy thirst to a nicety.
"Job-job!" he shouted again, and the transport started.
The very next container contained rubble and debris. When the machine emptied it, the eddy of cement and the hell knows what else covered us and left upon me. Each dweller of any refuse bin or precipitation tank would have burst with envy looking at my design. Even the aborigine's hard features unbent - honestly speaking, not because of some black feeling, but neither due to any compassion. Some token satisfied smile flew past his face - and went underground immediately.
Namely that inadequate reaction was the thing that puzzled me. Unexpectedly, I saw the fact that I wouldn't have ever seen. I was 'let into' - both as a green ass and a repatriate who doesn't know their language. Besides, they didn't do anything specially for that purpose. And it was no necessity to do anything! A pause is a little bit less, a rate is a little bit higher, and that's all. The fact that I could croak easily didn't disturb anybody. The same is in prison: it's nobody's business what are the feelings and claims of a victim experiencing 'pulling a train'.
And I got angry. I didn't become embittered, but namely got angry. As in former times, in my far youth. And happened what had to happen: my tiredness disappeared! At once! In a blink! As if somebody turned something off or on in my organism.
'To him who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also,'1 sounded in my head ready
__________________
1 Bible. - Revised Standard Version. - New Testament. - Luke.6 [29].

at hand, and I obeyed gratefully, though generally, I don't agree with such a way of reaching the conscience of the thick-skinned. Under those circumstances, it was the only variant leading to victory. That was why I realized it in such a manner that my torturers' eyes became evidently wider. No, I neither rushed under four wheels nor took a header into the slop womb, though the unspeakably attractive little whitish lake of liquid stinking
had already been swashing there. I stretched my mouth swiftly again (up to optimistic infinity) and started the process I hadn't finished yet. But how!
Containers were flying like empty footwear boxes.
More of that!
Pulling them on my side easily, I begin to tackle the Israeli's ones…
But the main was the easiness with which I was running. It would happen only in the same far youth, when I used to run marathons twenty to forty kilometers before competitions. My lungs became clenched and unclenched mechanically, and I wasn't me, and all that happened was seen as if from the outside.
At that time, I should not have given a toss about the notorious footboard. Even when the cart was on a long clear line, I only washed out the aborigine's invitation to take my honourable standing room.
I was flying above the Earth like an angel; I swilled myself out three more times; all the muck adhered to me threefold; but the aborigines (the driver and my partner) didn't chuckle any more. They understood that I should not pop off with a heart attack like the previous repatriate. He died namely beside that cart. I learned about it approximately in two weeks - and went goosy, because it rattled me to realize unexpectedly how close I had been to it. Oh, how close!
And that's all.
Mechanically, or rather because of the impossibility to quit, I dealt with the domesticities that day. But when the boss with two blue veinlets at his temple phoned me and started engaging me to turn up to work next day, I refused. Just at that time, my energetic reactor conked out, and I told him that one must not make money at the cost of life - it doesn't matter whether it is your life or somebody else's…
He didn't understand me. Neither he understood who was the lady, Tachycardia by name, that visited me, and why she didn't leave. My endurance, incredible for a novice, and supposed sexuality made such an appearance that the scavenging boss even offered me a place in a Russian-language rubbish team. It was considerable promotion and the unique privilege, but I refused again. Flatly!
And I was right. My intuition and former sport memory didn't let me down. Only on the fifth day, I gave up taking Valocardin and was able to move not screaming at every step because of the pain shooting up the muscles of my arms and legs.
For those lucky devils who don't know what this medicine is, I'll clear out. Valocardin is a heart preparation, but not the special kind of alcohol or a dope.
No, in all cases, it is necessary to make my way to yard-keepers, and not to catch whatever. Savlanoot! In the local aboriginal it means, 'it's dogged that does it'! Oh, here we are, it's a buzz! May it be from there? How happy I am! I'm running, I'm here!..

My broom flies, bold, high and mighty,
Over street dunghills.
I should be the best of wipers,
Who'll transfer me skills?

Letter Twenty-One

ZVEROSKOTINISM

Fleet rate is defined according to the rate not of the mightiest destroyer or cruiser, but of the slowest one. So, you can safely direct your attention to me and those people who are even in a worse situation. But you shouldn't call us ungrateful. We don't croak in silence, but yell our head off, and it does Israel and the whole world only good. They will exist longer! Though, speaking honestly, I believe that any institution or state is a person's enemy. Having been formed for us, they work more and more for themselves finally, ergo - against us. And don't fable about a good bureaucrat. Maybe, he is good as a person, but never as a bureaucrat!
And with it, I believe in the rule of bureaucracy. It means that one is supposed to obtain something, he'll obtain it under all circumstances; if one isn't supposed to, then he can to find some trick that helps to obtain that something, nevertheless. But here, the help of an advocate or somebody else who is 'self-denying' and 'cherubic' to the same extent. Namely those 'heavenly-minded' limbs of the law and ruthless moolah extortionists explained me that, according to the state Israeli standard, I got to the crappiest age group. I am neither a pensioner nor a young stud. And if it is so, then they give me neither a job nor pension; even no disability benefit, regarding my intervertebral disk having come out, though my leg is bad, and it is even difficult to sit sometimes, like it was earlier. They say that if I were a bachelor, they would pay something; but taking into account that I have a family and my wife works, they cannot. As if she, our seventeen-year-old daughter, the lame doggie Chucha and I can live on my wife's pitiful minimum.
I, a commoner with a nation cocktail in my heart and my blood, shall never understand the Jewish, or more exactly, bureaucratic logics. Yet, 'pure-blooded' Jews nose something and take some measures. For instance, many of them divorce before coming to Israel, and allot their children, if there are any, to get a grant as if they are single mothers or single fathers. These people are moneytactic, though that is not only their good luck, bud bad one too, and it will bring them degradation and downfall in future.
And until the wheel of divine correction doesn't turn, I die.
But not completely.
At the daytime, I catch at my violin, and at the morning, I search for a job.
The other day, it has been such a lucky miss! Being half-dead, I was walking and walking along the route Netanya - Tel-Aviv, I was begging and begging, and finally, one Russian-speaking employer took pity on me. He engaged me as a nickayoner (I'm reminding - a cleaner) to a supermarket. It was situated thirty kilometers from Netanya, in the northern part of Tel-Aviv. A brush, a dustpan, a duster, a bucket full of water and - forward! At one fling, I forced my way to the headmost step of the CIS repatriates' elite and professional hierarchy.
I didn't ask anything about wages. Thank God if it is a minimum; still, it may be even less. As a rule here, all wages for a job of such qualification. And it doesn't matter whether it is an easy work or the one bordering upon a heart attack and a stroke.
That one was - on the dot! Well, they didn't let me to stop and to take a rest for a second; in eight hours, my legs would grow numb; nevertheless, it was absolutely incomparably with the dustcart race. It was a mere paradise! More so that I had a tremendous lot of communication. Almost all salesmen and nickayoners are Russian. I mean, they have the same distinctive local figured noses and smart-ass eyes, but from there - from the USSR.
It should seem, humidify floors - and enjoy. But not at all! I'm not the one who rests on his laurels. Those romantic words are said about me:

"Rebellious, he's storm pursuing,
As if the peace is in the storms."1

Speaking the truth, there's a simpler variant of the same thought, a popular one: "A pig will always find a puddle."
And I did find!
There were no watching TV cameras, and their function was fulfilled by people. My associates got used to that procedure, as well as they got used to stink, and could hardly understand, why such a natural for them distrust and shadowing shocked me so deeply.
"To rod! And not somehow, but to bleed white!" I heard in my head after the very first work hour.
And no remorse! On the contrary, suddenly I felt the great justice of the motto 'Loot the loot!' with all my skin. I had a strong suspicion before, too, that sometimes, to 'clean up' a fellow creature is not a sin, but a noble deed; and at that moment, it seemed to me that somebody had sealed that criminal idea.
Straining all my producer and actor skills (I've got such a higher education and some experience), I nicked a couple of sweeties for a start, and melted one of them in my mouth. It was dangerous to chew it. A spy might have been round each corner.
Hardly had I thought about it, as their chief matron stared at my pocket, overloaded with a notebook. Moving her lips and fingers voluptuously, that carrion crow in a black jacket, a black skirt and with a black bag began to approach. The rapacious and grasping look of a necrophagous was giving her completely. Trade police!
Do you imagine it?
I didn't start waiting until she caught at some material evidence, and besides, a wrong one, God forbid! I took the notebook out, fluffed it up, and shook. To my horror, something brown slipped out of it at once…
"A sweetie! No! God be praised! A cockroach!.."
_______________
1 Lermontov M. Sail. - Translated by M. Mostov.

The madam grinned crookedly, and, without stopping her moving, got next to an absent-minded woman who had left her cheque at a cash desk…
The same day, I was about getting into a mess once more. Leaving my workplace, I practically managed to bring out my leftover sandwiches and grape. The personnel simply opened their mouths when they got the news. I had to throw out it all. How could I prove that the grape was taken from my home, and not from their shop?
Next day, I didn't bring any food. Besides, I left mechanically money at home. Only being in the supermarket, I remembered that namely that day I would have to go by public conveyances (usually, there was haul). That inflamed my psyche even more. Nay, the 'crow' appeared at the most undesirable moment and in the most unlikely places. She knew her nasty stuff, but I didn't know mine.
At the time of the midday meal, my head began to swim with strain and hunger. So, I pilfered a pita (such a little round flat bread that forms a pocket for filling) still and went upstairs, to our locker room. There were two tables, chairs, a boiler in it, and some sugar, coffee, tea, and milk were put near the washstand. (Until now, I haven't got to know whether they were stolen or bought by somebody for all of us.) No sooner had I taken a place and put the bread to my lips than a young paymistress sitting at the next table asked, "And why is the pita with no filling? Have you brought it through a cash register?"
All the blood rushed to my head. And she had to go and do the same! Her salary was the same small potatoes as mine, but she is a patriot! And the defender of what? Of the property, the owner of which lives and fattens in America, and doesn't give a damn for Israel and for her personally. Oh my! She is cheated - and ready to lick their boots!.. Stop! I have to pull myself together…
"Don't tell me!" I say ingratiatingly and even gently. "I've stolen the pita…"
The paymistress listened in wide-mouthed astonishment, and then she blinked very frequently and murmured, "They can catch you…"
"If you don't squeal on me, then no fear; and if you will, I'll knife you…"
You would have seen what happened to the poor thing! The girl was of a distinct Caucasian belonging, and she didn't get the point of the joke - the more so that my mug resembles a Caucasian one as well. She didn't speak a word, and, as pale as a ghost, hardly finished her work. I didn't foreknow and a fortiori didn't want such a reaction, but at that moment, I had my own problems. The second day was in its prime. And what did I manage to do? Nothing!
It was hard cheese! No sooner had I ascertained where I could carry out some things than namely there they began to throw out heaps of products and goods of high quality, from my point of view. They carried away quite fresh pastry, biscuits, puff pasties with different fillings, chocolate and other sweet stuff, as well as chickens, scallops, nuts… Good gracious! In no wise could I keep tabs on the stuff that was freely carried into the dump behind the supermarket. The emporium had to be closed next day, and that was the cause of all that hustle. At the same time, the staff was forbidden eating that production during the day, and even at the time of its removal. Buyers might taste everything till they were full, but not we. By the way, I had never eaten the stolen pita, and at the moment of the narration, I was quaking with hunger rather intensively. Yet, the main cause was not hunger, but resentment. But as only two not too busy shomers (i.e. workers that examine bags and cheques at entrance and exit) were in the shop, I, imitating doing up with my dustpan and broom beside one of them, began to let off steam, little by little. I expressed a few ideas about the meanness and the earthliness of so-called capitalism and the thrice-criminal form of the socialism, under which we had been brought up. And there, unexpectedly, I was confronted by the passionate defence of the principle 'Homo homini nihil est'.
"It is no socialism! It is capitalism, thank God!" the shomer said, moved his chin upward in a characteristic Mussolini's manner, and then stuck it out.
"But there is neither socialism nor capitalism either here or there!" I was astonished. "And what is the difference between them for us? On one hand, it is 'come on, get on the ball, - glory to the heads and the sharp image of four letters to us', and on the other hand, it is 'come on, get on the ball, - money to an owner and the same phallic symbol to us'. All those words are only terms! They serve party priests and political scientists. Neither fascism nor socialism and capitalism exist, existed, or will exist. Only CHELOVISM (HUMANITISM) and zveroskotinism (brutalizing beastism) are, were, and will be in reality."
"And when everyone grabs, dog eat dog, then it is communism," the shomer smirked.
"Not 'grabs', but 'confides in each other'. And it is not communism, but again CHELOVISM. Let's say, I'm sure that all the members of your family have got their own bank accounts, and this is only mine, and that is only yours."
"No doubt!" the shomer replied with pronounced dignity. "There's no your chelovism at my place. I've got some determinate order there!"
"You've got some boredom and nonsense, but no order there!" I wanted to notice, but said nothing.
One shouldn't tell such persons more than they are able to understand. They think that they are happy retreating into their shell, and they will never believe that there is something else, much more of that, out of it. And they are all-sufficient. They reached their potential. They are dead!
Later, I saw the beardie sitting into his brilliant vehicle - and burst out laughing. Whom was I arguing with? He had only that limousine and satisfied well-being instead of his mind and heart…
But it was necessary to undertake something. I had let off steam to some extent, but my robbery, which would go down to posterity, was not getting on. That was why I brought nothing along in principle next time. I treated paying even a few shekels for meal that was thrown away liberally, as super-derision and humiliation. It had nothing in common with either benefit or excessive profit. It was pure zombying and taming of the huckstering monster Buy'N'Sell. So, I started stealing food in a hard-boiled manner. And I managed not bad at all - mire so that I had to ascertain whether my rage wasn't caused by banal hunger and proletarian envy.
I did ascertain.
I got full up.
My brains became clearer, indeed. Well, how much shall I take out? Trifles! Nobody will even notice. And even should he notice, then he won't appreciate it at its true value. But if it all is burnt slightly…
I started. The exactness was mystical: at that moment namely, a horrid yell of savage might and triumph sounded somewhere near cash desks. Buyers, like children, stayed put and turned their heads north.
A cataclysm didn't keep us waiting. Ten seconds had not elapsed when everybody saw my might-have-been future approaching us with all its speed. Two robust workers of the supermarket (or maybe, they were agents) straddled a Slav, smiling perplexedly and being full as a fiddle. His hands were anchored by the crow to the handhold of the trolley, which was heaped with odds and ends. The victorious convulsion of the detective orgasm began somewhere on the crow's forearm and distorted her face like agony.
I stepped aside, and… butchers called me at that moment. Their utility room was flooded.
"Well, I'll show you, riffraff!" I gritted my teeth, not realizing clearly, whom I was speaking to.
The butchers didn't hear my threat, but they caught the intonation and took it personally. One word led to another, and I gave it hot to them! In two or three phrases, I depictured all unattractiveness of their swinish life. It consisted in the famous triad: to take in, to take out, and to hump. And when those insulted bullheads began to strain their beef brains to recall for what they had been born, they weren't able to think out anything but 'to live up to death'.
It is still a question what would have been the final result of my intellectual fencing, if buyers hadn't been in the shop. Grumbling and cooling down, my opponents went back to their counter, and I finished sweeping and set off for trashcan cleaning.
"I'll make you a good row…" It kept running through my mind. "I saw some fuel in the warehouse… I would ask for the second shift…"
A saleswoman was crying beside one of the cans. Half an hour before she had been serving a buyer. Another client, ignoring the fact, demanded to serve her immediately.
"Just a minute!" the saleswoman pronounced - and was discharged.
The good client, sticking to the beaten track, went to the manager at once; there, she didn't neglect to inform against the poor girl.
Horribly!
I became flustered.
It was unbearable! In three days, I've got the mean yearly dose of negative emotions.
"Why are you rushing about?" somebody asked.
I turned back.
Nobody.
I mean, there were some people, but everybody minds his own business.
"Well, why are you turning? Everyone is other-directed, and you are kinda antsy. You philosopher bedraggled! You man of God! Go home - and to bed. And never set foot in this place again!"
"You buzz off!" the second voice sounded. "Buzz off, I say!"
"Is it to me?" I asked, and none of those present reacted.
"No, to him. Fuck off, you beast!" the voice repeated. "And you go home and never come back. He is right here. Otherwise, we shall be not two, but the entire Knesset!"
I had my sleep out for three days and three nights. With medicines. And on the fourth day, I took my violin, and - to the street. I touched its strings with the bow. It's spring! About twenty years vanished without a trace. And what a tune was twanged! What words started sounding in my head!

"Oh my heart, what's gnawing you, why are you ill at ease?
It looks like winds touch responsive strings.
Many songs about love are sung in dreams,
I'll sing my one; I'll give it your beauty wings."

Letter Twenty-Two

SOMEONE SAWS - SOMEONE EATS!

It isn't necessary to be a Solomon or Sherlock Holms to look and see simple and evident things. When they began to gossip about Koba (Joseph Stalin) for the umpteenth time, I said to neighboring old men, without disguise and clearly, from my point of view:
"My precious! He did push the Lenin's matter through. To tell the truth, the last seemed to start understanding at the end of his life that he had chosen a wrong way, but it was too late. The structure, which was created by him, nailed him himself, in full accordance with the law of mirror. What you show the same shall you see! And the received zilch is a result for science, in all cases. Though for you, it's a little joy, surely. But what do you want, my yesterday's Stalinists? One mustn't corral people into happiness, like sheep into the receptacles for cattle!"
And when they were giving Sakharov a rocket, and the same old men were stabbing the air before transistor receivers in anger, I almost began to cry. I even had a lump in my throat, because my heart was yearning over them.
"He is conscience! Your conscience!" I hissed in warm blood, and heard the answer:
"He is a Jew! He is not Sakharov, but Zuckermann! You look at his mug - the very image of Judas Iscariot!"
"Let him be even an old nigger!" I uttered hoarsely. "Conscience has nothing to do with any national identity! And then, almost all real intellectuals took the features of classical pictorial Jews in later years. Even Academician Likhachov's face became almost Biblical in his old age; and he, according to his passport and genealogy was the most Russian of all Russians…"
But particularly, I was upset with the shortsightedness of the old men and the first and last President of the USSR. He neglected Yavlinsky's economical programme, and thereby crossed out both the Soviet Union and him himself; and the old men ran down and derided both '500 Days' and its author with the same enthusiasm. In their time, they cursed Solzhenitsin and his works in the same manner, though they had never set eyes either on him or on them. Thank God, almost all are still alive, and let me, my dear old men, say once more what I think about all that idiotic jazz in Russia and around it, on the territory of the former USSR.
In post-war Germany, such a modest chancellor and scientist lived. But only through his economical programme, the FRG made a lunge, and in some ten or fifteen years, it
________________
1 Matusovsky M. Oh my heart, why are you ill at ease?

changed from ruins to the richest country in the world. No American investment dollars would have worked as if by magic, if he had not been there. So, take good note of it, Russians, Israelis, and extraterrestrials: great political policy is not only a variety show with a Fuhrer parade, but money as well: either to your pocket, or out of it. And for the absence of time, health, and funds, I stopped proving that two and two makes four, and peeled out. As people say, 'a blessing in disguise', and a stray's dream to live at the sea and to eat mandarins came true.
And what? In general, the dream is right; more of that, it is achieved through suffering. Whatever you may say and however, you may agonize, but life here in Israel and life there in the CIS are the horses of absolute different colours. Yet, some people exist who don't care a straw about abject poverty and social troubles around them. These people have got money and act as if there were no to-morrow. And my heart is bleeding and the food sticks in my throat, if somebody beside is hungry. As for me, it is better to be a poor man among the rich than to be a rich man among poor folk. So, I eat mandarins my fill now, and swim in the sea nearly every other day and all the year round. It is the middle of December now, and the weather is nobby! You dive into the waves of crystal clarity (they are not too crystal in summer), give a start with coolness, warm yourself jumping from one wave crest to another - and run along the sand edge to horizontal and all the others bars. Do five exercises or such, look at the shining sun - and you'll eager to live! And if you turn on the television at home and watch Russian programmes (now, we have got three of them here) - it is enough to make you weep! Though, nolens volens, but the things that take place today were seen by me yesterday, and it didn't hold out the seventh heaven. I am eager to believe that, when you read these lines, the historical smog will self-destruct - at least partially, and the tender sun will shine for everybody, not only for 'accumulators' and those who, like me, had a narrow escape!
About two years before my leaving for Israel, I had acted out a versified episode with kids as actors. The episode was dedicated to 23 February - the former Day of the Soviet Army, then - merely the Men's Day. When I was writing the text, I thought that people would enjoy the fun; but when I staged it…

"Now, the pupils of the second form 'B' will act out a sketch, 'Someone sows - someone eats'," the compere gave out, and little beggars ran out of the auditorium right to the stage, shouting joyfully 'Hurrah! A break!'
One boy began to elbow and cry something. All children grouped at once and recited in concert:

"When a break at school began,
Vovka raised a row,"
Vovka:
"My pop is a superman,
He can strike a blow!
Once they attacked us uptown.
We gave them a dressing down!
Stubborn Daddy turned to bay,
Pulled their ears right away!"
Katya:
"Phew, and is he famous greatly?
My dad is an expert.
He was thrice irradiated,
But he hit the pay dirt,
Did his best for each and every,
Was rewarded for his deeds.
He is clever, kind, and merry,
His life is a feat indeed!"
Igor:
"And my dad is a physician.
He can save his patients.
He is like the best magician -
Health is his creation!"
Vera:
"Listen, my pa is a teacher.
It's too much for everyone!
But you know his best feature:
He could teach the worst of Huns."
Marat:
"Mine's an artist!"
Ira:
"Mine's a chief!"
Alyona:
"Mine is simply dad, in brief!"
Boys:
"We raised hell and made a dust."
Girls:
"We got tired - all of us."
Alic:
"Only one dived into eating:
He liked caviare, not a beating.
Then he took toothsome dessert
Then the boy sighed out,
'No problem! Let's concert.
I'll disperse your doubts.
All the fathers are of use,
No need to get the blues!
Someone saws, and someone eats!'"
All in chorus (perplexedly):
"Then he turned back on us."
Nadya:
"He was waited in the street
By a new 'Mercedes'!"
Vitaly:
"Then Vitaly, not a talker,
Sighed, 'My father is a worker.
He is given a wet shirt,
But we never have dessert.
We could not afford a cake
Even on my birthday,
'Cause his wages are a flake,
And my dad isn't dodgy.'"
Igor:
"Mine's physician, you know;
All the same - no money though!"
Katya:
"Katya whispered, 'Mine is now
Not in science, but in chow.
He sells clothes and food,
But he is in pensive mood'…"
Andrey:
"And Andrey said, 'Don't be blue!
The best father is a Jew!
All the family will leave -
We shall live in Tel-Aviv!
I invite you, guys, with me.
We'll be rich and wealthy!
You will bathe in all three seas,
Sunburnt, strong and healthy!
Hit the nail and make a hit!
He who saws is he who eats!'"
All in chorus:
"You look like cats on hot bricks!
Have you felt a stroke?
Oh, don't mind the tricks!
It was kinda joke!"

"Hi-hi!" somebody uttered in complete silence, and the voice trailed off.
The present lifted the veil from the future, and such cold and despair breathed out of there, that we did feel a stroke - the uncanny sort of fear…

Letter Twenty-Three

A THESIS
(for a degree of the Doctor of all the Earth,
the Galaxy, the Universe, and all the rest…)
Subject:
'God and His Threshold'

False academics, doctors, rectors, and all the other candidate small fry and riffraff, I am a diametric person. It means that I'm never yours! More of that: I'm a rather uneducated one. I mean pseudo-scientific pilpul and the abundance of stolen and simply borrowed ideas. And it is pure nonsense for your circle. I am even not quite sure that the Kulikovsky Battle took place namely 8 September 1380. I didn't participate in the battle - so, I doubt. Truly speaking, I've got a decoration 'The Exemplary Worker of the KazSSR Popular Schooling' and a certificate for it; but I got it not waiting for your affection and blessings. Simply, I went and took the deserved award. Like Julius Caesar! And my most torturous and shameful activity was the composing of fantastically positive record in honours list for me myself.
Yet, I am not the worst variant. God was even more ignorant and less educated when He created the world. At least, I watch TV, and He acted haphazardly at the Beginning, comparing with nothing and orienting himself with respect to no one. And when He 'saw that it was good', He was happy as a child. To all appearances, his idea 'live and learn' is a variant number two, for people like me. Number one is for Him himself. I mean that the essence is the same, but deadlines differ…
This rascal has never had any objections to learning by our mistakes. It doesn't mean that he is a perfect fool, and we are not so perfect. More so that any knowledge and information without intellect is rubbish! It was He who suggested I would say so faithfully! I myself should never hit upon the idea! And those who make a profit out of other people's scientific works conceal such things - like Koshchey the Deathless hid his egg.
But I myself saw another thing. There can be no mistake about it. The way from a beast to God is through a man, but the way from God to a beast is through him, as well. A hundred to one, it has already been written somewhere; and somebody put the idea into circulation, and now he rests on his laurels. But in our case, I myself have seen, I myself have guessed that to be a brute seems simpler and easier, but it is not beneficial, because it is boring, after all. And to be God is troublesome, no doubt, but much merrier…
And what I shall tell you now - you'll fell down! It turns out that we are partners with him. Or maybe, even more intimate. That is, we drudge together. It's as simple as anything else. You remember, 'in the image and likeness, in the image and likeness'… It is creative potential! He was creating nature - we are creating culture. You only have a look: one Hippocratic fundamental rule 'Don't harm!' is equal to all the Ten Commandments plus thousands of suchlike, not less useful. Indeed, 'cognition comes through comparison' - but not through opposition! Not through one's disgrace, the aim of which is to feel your own magnitude. Nature doesn't know that damnation of the humankind - immature flag-waving and its forms (racism, nationalism etc.). 'Man proposes, but God disposes' - it is about the oneness of opposites, but not 'Heil!' to 'the most elite'.
It's so weird to think that a bumblebee feels itself more significant than an elephant. Or on the contrary… Each has his own place - and is irreplaceable there! And it is silly to make meet head-on (and even to compare) Pushkin and Mayakovsky, Beethoven and Rachmaninov, Russian or Chinese and a Jew, or me and the cock of the granny Krylov's fable 'The Donkey and the Nightingale'. Each one has his own peak, and nobody competes. So, it's no sense to break lances and to clear out whose one is larger and who can longer. The mentioned-above clever book for idiots (they are reading and reading - and you might as well talk to a brick wall) doesn't chatter idly, 'Thou shalt not covet'1 (or don't envy!) to have what other people own.
Certainly, different people have got different expediency and its scale. Well, and what? Namely due to that, harmony exists. It is great and infinitely divisible, but sole forever. Each one sees as much as it is necessary for his realization. And thank goodness for it! Otherwise, nothing would subsist. And the greediest, the meanest, and the vainest crave for the best and the utmost; for them, there is a notification right from the sky office. It is profitable when someone who hasn't been heaped with favours in some sphere is delighted (but doesn't abase himself while admiring!) with that one who is gifted in this field; the gifted one is delighted with a really talented person; that one adore a genius; and all, together and separately, admire Him, and that one who is above Him, and all those who are above all of Them, ad infinitum. And all this, finally, is again Him and only Him. But if hatred concatenates them - it will be lights out for everyone. And even without any hatred, all of them - a genius, a talent, and Lord our God himself - degrade and turn to monsters, if they don't draw up a lower one, but trample down and disparage him. Such heresy… Generally, it seems to me that God is similar to a man. I mean - by nature. And nothing human is alien to Him. Now I mean weak points and mistakes. He is a very warm creature… A very warm and own one… For me. But for somebody else, maybe… Though He Himself said, "You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them" 2!
And it is not to make everyone glorify only Him, but to help us not to look aside, but to get to the root of things. But He had, has and, God grant, will always have all but hatred. Where God is, there only love is! Well, it is clear… And only it, only love rules the world; and he who knows anything, knows the fact, too.
Haw… What else did I want to say? Such memory! While I was writing about one thing, the other went out of my brains… Because the third and God knows which thought is on my mind…
Ah, it has come in on me! Everything that I'm saying to you is a waste of time. All the same, you'll sail your own boat. And you'll be right. Lord is interested in the process and the elements of abruptness, but not only in a result; in each one's way to perfection, but not in Good Friday frontispieces and prelapsarian intentions. Even this world was created
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1 Bible. - Revised Standard Version. - Old Testament. - Exodus 20:7.
2 Bible. - Revised Standard Version. - Old Testament. - Exodus 20:4-5.

by Him as a specific for boredom caused by monotony. So, if you lead a drab existence and are bored, then something goes wrong. It means that somewhere, you've taken the wrong way or turning. Though, you might have got to the divine null zone to accumulate energy, thoughts, and plans for the next spurt in the creation of your own Universe… It happens… But anyway, it is advisable to it with your mouth, but not… with your not-mouth. So, bon appetit!
Not long ago, I've met one Doctor of Science. Here in Israel, they become rusty, like lying-up dreadnoughts.
We got into conversation.
About creation and destruction.
The subject seems to be not too new and original, but how we grappled! I tell him:
"Okay, I am stupid! I look, and I always wonder at evident phenomena and at the fact that they are evident to nobody. For example, general moving. Everything moves, every which way, but ultimately, only to and fro. And each one's problem is trifling: to make a choice - to or fro…"
"Oh no," he says. "The third way exists."
"The third?.. Well, okay. Let it! Let them be ten or one hundred ways. (Though I am sure that they are two. The third one is zero, but it can exist only if we remove movement, that is life!) I don't mind the existing everything that exists in nature. But let a thief know that he is a thief, and not an expropriator, let a killer realize that he is a killer, and not a nature cleaner or a breadwinner, and let a blackguard guess that he is a rotter, but not a standard or a specimen. Let it even happen so that only they know the fact, nobody else! That will do to make life more or less tolerable. And, finally, destruction and 'to each according to his deserts!' are an exclusive and professional God's right, but not anybody else's or with anybody else. If the idea percolates into majority's head, the firm will guarantee the availability of Elysium in this world."
"Nothing of the kind," the doctor says. "A man is the top dog on the Earth. You yourself repeat all the time - in the image and likeness, in the image and likeness!"
"Right!" I reply. "But it's about 'Chinese Wall'. About taboos! About something that a man mustn't destroy. And to create - you are welcome! As much as you want! Like God!"
"No!" the erudite person jibs.
It seems to be a trifle, but how difficult it is for him to agree! Because this trifle and suchlike make him change his whole Weltanschauung. These trifles are namely the reference points, from which either world birth or world downfall begins.
And particularly, we grappled concerning clergymen. I say that neither prophets and ministers of religion, nor anybody of mortals has the right to the death of his fellow creature or his habitat; he mumbles and waggles his head. Actually, it is even strange. What odd bloodthirstiness he has! What use it is if we die in due time, all the same! There are people who have love at the love back, not hatred, and who can foresee any future from any point of the present, the past, and their creative variants; only those personalities have the right to… no, even not to death, but to correction and renovation through it. And those who speculate in one of His names are always doomed to failure. Always!
"No!" the doctor says.
"So, if in this world, someone rent away his neighbour's head or sent somebody to rend it off, in the name of Allah, Christ, Goddess Kali, or a president, Elysium is well-provided for him?"
"Yes, it is!" the unbridled atheist answers. "Measure for measure, and 'all who take the sword will perish by the sword'1"!
"Good Gracious! But I'm not about it! I don't negate the world reflectivity and violence as it is, do I? Especially as defence. I'm against destruction as the way of existence. Well, even nature doesn't exist without violence as a stimulus. But neither has it existed, if it is not the remedy for inertia, but a winepress. As far as it goes, the entire Universe appeared as a result of some impulse. Namely it, the divine impulse, generated movement, and the movement begot life. And I shall defend my home and my family with my teeth and any lasers, like every normal person. But only at the level of necessary defence. That is, to keep safe as a biological species. Though, BEING a HUMAN, I will always try to civilize violence. I mean, to look for and to find a permanently changing measure - a condition under which both of violation and aggression are creation, not destruction. That is one of human functions on earth! That is the main creative sense of being in my favourite image and likeness of God!"
The erudite person disagrees. He doesn't agree - that is all! Maybe, because I have got no scientific degree, maybe, another reason exists. He nods assent, but he says the same, "No!"
So, we parted with him with such a result - having agreed to differ. Neither must you take into consideration everything that I say. More so that I have one non-ordinary feature more, that is dual personality. Sometimes, it seems to me that God is me, and it seems to God that He is me.
But it's nothing! They say it is curable. Especially here, in Israel. Two thousand years ago, the precedent took place. Yet, the fact of my being half-Jew and half-Russian is a very ill luck… or maybe, it is my way… Because, when my Russian half of the heart is eager to be unlocked and yells a Gypsy 'eh!', my Jewish part shrinks and groans in all world languages, 'oh!'.
It's really hellfire! Fire and brimstone!

Letter Twenty-Four

ELITE

Each one has an anti-Semite inside, or an anti-Russianite, an anti-Americanite, an anti-Asianite, an anti-Africanite, an anti-Europeite - an anti-humanite!
I can be speaking on that subject non-stop. I have endured much…
I remember my father and me go to Alma-Ata for some equipment for his physiotherapy room (I was about eight or nine years old, and there was nobody to sit in). As soon as we were going to return home, the head physician, a robust bohunk, appeared all of a sudden. He left for the town on his business, recollected that a lorry would be
__________
1 Bible. - Revised Standard Version. - New Testament. - Matthew 26:52.

available on his way back, and decided to use it. In all cases, it was better than to go by overloaded public conveyances. For him, all those sunlamps and high-frequency amplifiers were trifles. Either he had never been too deep in thoughts in life or in medicine; he knew only one: to cut! He was a bit of a surgeon… Kinda horseleech…
But I learned it about seven years later. And at the time of narration, it was unclear for me why that sombre gaffer had taken his place in the cab and required to us to go either to the open body - or wherever we wished.
Naturally, my father chose the first. The head physician was quite able to pile up the egg-shells anyplace. But it came to my notice much later, too. And at the time I'm speaking about, I grew numb, really. It was about thirty degrees of frost, and we had to travel about thirty (thirty again!) kilometres distance. Of course, you've already understood that it was winter, and wind added to those thirty degrees other ten degrees, if not more. To make a long story short, my swarthy daddy began to thrash the cab with his fists and to ask, and then - to require the gaffer to take me inside.
"The car belongs to the hospital, and I am a head physician!" the gaffer said. "If you don't like it, try to hitch a lift. Long-arm."
And then, in 1955-1956, nothing happened like today. One could be standing for an hour waiting for an auto or a bus, crammed up to Guinness World Records. More of that: my father had been striving for the equipment during two years. There was no such stuff he had ordered for the patients of the former Cossack village Talgar hospital even in Alma-Ata.
Whatever my parent was saying, expressing his indignation and amazement, the gaffer head physician remained firmly and irrevocably fixed in his first resolution. At last, our driver broke off to take his huge sheepskin and to throw my father's light overcoat over his shoulders.
The head physician even didn't shiver in his splendid fur coat.
Thus we arrived, my father and me, with arms round each other, rubbing our noses and cheeks…
Certainly, after that, my Father who is in heaven now, being a bitter-ender, had never greeted that torch of public health service. Fortunately, the head physician was dismissed soon, either because of some extraordinary and medicine-made cold meat or because of infinite boorishness. But had Lapidus Nahum Arcadyevich heard the things I heard being a witness of the driver and surgeon's high words, then I don't know what everything would have resulted in. Although my father was slender, he was dead quick-moving, when honour and consciousness were at issue. For the surgeon's good luck, and my parent's one as well, my dad climbed into the vehicle body in order to set straight a box with an apparatus.
"I won't sit to shit next to a Yid, not speaking about lapping him! Hitler should have annihilated all of them! One turd is worse of another…" The gaffer surgeon said it easy and with dignity, and tucked his fur coat under him…
And recently, in our Netanya, which is in the 'village' of Israel, a very characteristic of our unmerciful era incident took place, too. The Americans was going to bomb Iraq, because it was just like its leader to send rocket presents with chemical agents or with operative anthrax at any moment. (Poor peoples! Who governs them!) They say, one little cube of that 'harmless' pest guarantees the last sleep for a million of bipeds. So, the subjects of the David's Star went off the deep end, because the first turn should have been theirs. And people swarmed to get gas-masks - as it was in the Soviet Union not too many years ago; though there, great crowds hoped to get some sausage. I would have tailed on; but I can't. Any queue is a hard row to hoe for me. I have only to see ten people who are staring at each other's back of the head with a stupid and cowardly air, and brain-fag and angioneurosis start attacking me at once. In such a state, without gas-masks, water supply and any reserve of food, my family and me waited until the peaceful resolution of the conflict.
But here, the person in question isn't me. People were standing during eight to ten hours, and one Russian-speaking madam disappeared for a few moments to lavatory. And when she came back, they didn't let her get inside. Another madam of the queue, unfortunately Russian-speaking too, took up the cudgels for her. (All the rest Russian-speaking citizens shamefully pretended to be Hebrew native speakers.) And so, that woman took up the cudgels for the first one, and police and security thrashed her. People say that four policemen and six watchmen knocked her off her feet down to concrete floor, and kicked her.
But that's not the thing!
The thing is how some native Israelis of the queue, and almost all Israelis-policemen, who had come to Israel from somewhere in their time, too, acted. During that nicest occurrence, they were spitting enthusiastically and giving vent to their wishes: as for them, 'dirty Russians' had to make themselves scarce to their fool's Russia, to get gas-masks there, and to choke with their Jewry, which had been bought for thirty pieces of silver. (The knowledge of one's own history is laudable!)
The hatred to the Jews from the USSR was beating with such force that someone else was taken bad. They say that he was Russian, but had a big classic Jewish nose.
Certainly, to become and be a human, it is necessary to be on the alert. As soon as one relaxes a little, his swinish muzzle starts springing forth out of him… More so that everybody comes to this world being sure, that ME is ME, and only for that reason I am always better than YOU are. These self-deception and airs are necessary for the development of babies and kids; but they are simply ridiculous, when a person has already matured and become able to realize that actually, I am YOU, and YOU are ME, and WE are both ME and YOU, and those who lived yesterday and will live tomorrow. And under such conditions, it is impossible to feel oneself higher than another one, battening on his humiliation. And such forms of chauvinism as racism and nationalism are really too much…
I had a pal (may he rest in peace!). He grew old and grey, but one his side stayed green, as it had been in his youth. Talented and interesting, he was an anti-Semite, or more exactly, a Jew persecutor. Minding his moral virtues, splendid all-round education and inherent inclinations, it was such misfortune - Heaven forbid! A beast, underfed with intellect and experience, lived in his heart. Scarcely had he let the brute wake up when he turned to nothing. I mean, everything humane disappeared! That is why I recognize only two nations: a HUMAN and shit! All the rest is politics! That is, some race for power and spheres of influence. And no smiles, please! A talk is fairly strong - especially for those who get metabolic disease if there is no national identification. Politicians come and go; and for ages, people have been breathless with blood, tears, and primordially groundless mutual hatred. So, I am not going either to curtsey or to cringe before anybody. Far in the years of pseudo-socialism, they firstly, all day long, were trying to knife me only because I am Russian, and then - to shoot, because I am a Jew. (The same story happened again with one personage that resembles me very much. You'll receive its particulars later.) And so, firstly they wanted to knife me, and then - to shoot… And it is simply impossible to count how many times they close my face in, outraged, and discriminated me. And some thoughts appeared, naturally. For those who caught it half!
I am not against calling Germans - Germans, Americans - Americans, Jews - Jews, and a spade - a spade. On the contrary, I'm ready to mount the scaffold for their and all the rest's opportunity to be themselves, and not ruck. But if the dispute is about quality, then I see only two nations: a HUMAN and shit. And for me - no more! Nation - it is culture! And nothing more. No blood! Neither red and yellow, nor blue and pure! And if you are a personality with your own culture, you are a nation as well.
"My best regards and love to five milliards, and in the future - to countless billions and trillions of elite nations!"
That is what God said.
All of us are elite!
Each one - in due time!
A divine ray jumps and lights up with responsibility one after another, if not a holy family, then the whole people and all the humankind. But it has never illuminated international claims to be surpassing. Look what happens! Jews - what Jews are up to! Well, not all and not too many of them, but for them, to be chauvinists is monstrous! They were daggled to and fro all over the world more than two thousand years… And Hitler? He taught us such a lesson that bad is the best! And what? What happens? They snapped out of it a little - and have to go and do the same! Pressing disappeared, and degradation began immediately. No immunity! We are elite! Both martyrs and winners, both rich and poor, both shit and humans - all! And all that is only because we are Jews. It was established, they say, by God. Hitler used to lay all responsibility on God, too. 'God is with us!' was written even on soldiers' buckles. They think God sticks his tuppence everywhere. That's why, when I hear people use the word 'elite', I hear the word 'war' at once. Where it is the first, there it is the second.
No doubt, it is tempting to believe that you are something particular - of higher quality than anything in the world. Besides, it has been so since you were born, for nothing. Though, if we consider objectively, protoplasm is protoplasm. Especially when it degrades. On the other hand, I've been an 'ear-witness' of one conversation recently.
"What is to be done?" an aged man asked an elderly woman. "They don't like us anywhere!"
"Well, that's that," she replied quietly. "Then we have to become better…"
That is a wise woman! The pride of Israel and the whole mankind…
So, if we have a discussion, then I keep recognizing only two nations: a HUMAN and shit!
It would be possible to stop there. But what to do with an acquaintance of my friends? More so, that he is always getting underfoot. As if he has got a feeling that I'll immortalize him. His mother and father's Jewry traces its roots almost back to Abraham and Sarah.
So, a friend of him comes to him from America.
"Such horror!" he shouts. "How do you live here? This thing is at much less cost in our country. And that one is dirt-cheap!"
"Why, are you cuckoo?" The direct descendant of all Jews' foremother and forefather turns red and chokes with indignation. "To say it to me, a real and hereditary Israeli! Well, that is my motherland! The motherland of my ancestors! You're a hairsplitter! A small rootless American fry!.."
And he almost collars his mate. And he almost spit in his pal's face.
And everything would have been passable, if they hadn't raised his wages by one hundred shekels the day before. Because you should have seen him, when the same hundred was stopped out of his wages! Abuse! Too foul language! And one and the same like an incantation:
"Incinerators! Incinerators are necessary! All over Israel! I'll employ you too! I'll give you a spade! You'll be turning Yids!"

Letter Twenty-Five

THE SONG BY ABAY
(a pupil's solo with my accompaniment)

"Who's that - Monte Cristo?"
"A count."
"And what did he do?"
"He was imprisoned."
"And who's that - Abay?"
"The great enlightener of Kazakhstan."
"And what did he do?"
"He translated Pushkin's works."
"And who's that - Pushkin?"
"The great descendant of Ethiopians."
"That's good."
"Rather! He's a Jew too, though…"

(Clever Israel Dicks)

Not that place is best of all where we haven't been at all, but that place is best of all where the world goes well with us all!
Israel goes well with me now. Recently, it has been not so nice, but now it is simply excellent. Everything is like in a wonderful song: 'Clouds disappear, winds do not come near, and the sky is blue and bright again!' What will be tomorrow, I don't know, but now hakol beseder, and barukh hashem! I.e., everything is OK, thank God!
Well, my feather is high, and that's that! It doesn't matter that within three hours today, they have thrown only twelve shekels and some small change into my fiddle-case, and I have left for Tel-Aviv with a view to scrape twenty or thirty shekels more. But a
return ticket costs twenty shekels today. So, I go not by bus or a jitney, but by an emigrant from the USSR like me, a stayer cycle 'Start-Road' with heavy 'Tourist' wheels. Notwithstanding, thirty kilometres to Tel-Aviv, five kilometres of city driving and the same distance back are not too much, taking into account my poverty. It could be worse. More so, as I walk in such a manner, and I no longer fall with dehydration and muscle heaviness at the end of the road each time. Netanya is a little town, and after 2 p.m., not a single person is in the street there. And in Tel-Aviv, some people do pace here and there at this time…
It's a fabulous country! Here, nobody will thrust a knife into you without rhyme or reason, neither give a blow on your head to pull off something not too worn-out from your body, nor stuff with lead by mistake. Your may walk by yourself day and night. Especially if you are an unemployed. And no fear! It is kinda kaif that I would get only in my childhood, at that through my ignorance and naivety. It must not be so at the territory, which groans due to terrorist acts and permanently stays belligerent, but it is. Certainly, there are crimes and venereal 'joys', but one has got so many chances to run into trouble as to win a jackpot. And the sun shines here at the daytime and… I've been about saying 'at night', because everything is illuminated at night with the same brightness as at night. And people… With them, everything is like everywhere: it depends. Though, the people on the whole are well disposed and not aggressive. However, it is rather due to a full stomach, not to any special nature or views. Feed a cannibal - and he will smile, but then he will eat you all the same - when occasion offers…
Good heaven, what I am telling! Absolutely not the things I feel! It's the ashes of yesterday's pessimism…

A sea! That is incontestable asset (but again, gosh, if it is no storm and you don't sink). What a rascal one must be to get indignant even here - the sea is wet, the sea is not always hot like tea, and clean like a tear. When I am in the sea, I love with happiness. Not each time, but almost each. It is a contact with nature, and through it - with God, somewhere on a transcendent level. I.e., an absolute contact. It is such a pleasure, like… like… No, sex will be much pettier and local… Though it is fine as well!
Ooh! Three road-trains have rushed one after another. The handlebar was on the verge of being wrested by an airwave. Lorry speed is equal to the speed of passenger cars here, but lorry mass and volume are awful! It's good that the yellow line reserves some place on asphalt, and if it is nowhere in sight or it is very close to a kerb, to bicycle there is to face certain death. Who of my acquaintances from the USSR would undergo such degrading trips, I wonder? I don't ask about aborigines at all. They all are car owners, and they are too big for their britches. Maybe, their way of holding their glasses is not very genteel, but as for the rest, their selectness, that is chauvinism, is to the fore. They made their way! Not in the world, of course, but they do think that namely there.
A pupil of mine was making his way, too.
In the world, as well!

When I was a master of theatrical circles in Houses of Young Pioneers and schools, there was such a boy, Yura Mickelband. In parts, he resembled me in my youth, but namely in parts. From his fourth form till the senior class, he was the mover and the star of any show. He had a mass of energy, as well as talent. There was only one problem: he was surrounded by his relatives - pragmatists to the very marrow of their bones, with the most cynical pounds-shillings-and-pence philosophy! Its definite percentage led to positive and constructive solutions, like the percentage of putrid smell in the savour of a rose; nevertheless, it didn't change the true property in any case. But while he was growing, especially after his marriage, those features suppressed all the rest, and the light failed, having been entrapped with moneybags. Yet, it was later; but at first…
Yura's originality and the exigency of self-affirmation worked wonders. Having transferred to another school, he had become the celebrity of the whole district before he was graduated from school. In contrast to me, Yura always informed everybody proudly that he was a Jew. Having been stricken with his triboluminescence, self-sufficiency, and energy, almost all the hooligans of the school and the district wore self-made David's Stars on their neck chains, and, joyfully burring, called themselves Jews in the highest meaning of the word. It meant - HUMANS! Kazakhs, Uigurs, Russians, and Koreans - all of them accepted Yura's giyur (i.e. conversion to Judaism). Israel was the country of light, intellect, abundance, and love. Kinda materialization of the Communist mirages. Though, it was rather a play than anything serious. Children are children, even if they are fairly adult and their coming of age is an epoch in their life. And you understand that Yura generally wasn't so naive and blind to believe in fairy-tales. You will find a few stories of his juvenescent life in the 'Tales about Tasty and Healthy Life', and now I recollect another period of his life.
When one pedals by a new route or runs a marathon, his head rests itself to the full. Well, it is not by accident that professional sport isn't noted for superior intelligence… That is why those ones, whose conduct reveals much expenditure of grey matter, run and jump furiously with their faces distorted with usefulness in the morning and in the evening. And Vladimir Ilyich Lenin used to be running around his cell and his study to and fro as well, to have at least little refreshment of his genius.
I battle for my survival too, almost like Lenin. Honestly speaking, my reasons are absolutely not revolutionary, but shamefully cheapskate ones. I'm going to grab something to myself!
Howbeit, my head has its rest. And this is reflected not in transcendent standing back from day-to-day business, but in recollections. Today they are about Yurich…
Never half a year passes after events described in the 'Tales' but he runs to me, with an aureola of joy and agitation about him.
"Arcady Nahumovich, it's in the bag! The Theatre Institute is a sure thing!" he who was almost my son shouts right off the bat.
Yura's decision to enter the actor faculty of that Institute (needless to say it was named for Abay!) was not spontaneous at all. And it goes without saying that not the crazy wish to serve merciless Melpomene forced his hand. Simply the infant prodigy's school-leaving certificate sparkled with middle-level marks 'three' (don't mix up with 'carriage-and-three'!) like Brezhnev (the main political figure of the USSR stagnation period) glared with medals, and the knowledge was given more by life than by the literary classics and schoolbooks. But to enter any institution of higher education was badly wanted. Academies had a right to defer, and to live at the command of 'hup, two' was worse than to be shot for Yura.
"On the first day, I come to the access course," Yura says being breathless with agitation. "Only me and Tima. Either Rodoslovsky or Bogoslovsky. There are sixteen entrants in our group. Two of them are us, lads. All the rest are petticoat. Each one is such a leading lady. It's an actual total loss! Let's say, a certain Marina:
'Ah girls, indeed! Will you stop it, please?'
And her hand is put aside in such a theatrical manner, and her fingers are protruded so capriciously.
'Look, I have been entering for three years already - and in no way can I enter… I was half-cocked there… And there, too… And then he miscomprehended me…'
Okay… One madam is twenty-five years old in the group; the second is twenty-three. All the rest are eighteen and nineteen; there are also two tenth-form girls among them.
Not sixteen, but fourteen or thirteen of us came. A pedagogue separated us according to diction defects. He asks, 'Well, who will go to the backboard first?' Tima shouts, 'Mickelband! Mickelband!'
Everybody hangs up. They giggle tensely. I am meek as a lamb. That is because all of them show their erudition, speak like men of genius, and I have been smitten under the fifth rib with all that. It grated on me at once. Galka from the House of Young Pioneers has wanted to intervene in those theatrical debates, but I tell her:
'Galka, if you are sitting beside me now, then listen to me attentively. Sit still. Confidently! The main is self-confidence! No unnatural feigned high. If it is funny - laugh, not funny - don't laugh. No need to do anything artificially. No artificialness! Everything must be naturally.'
She says:
'I am not used to it. At the Komsomol staff of the House of Young Pioneers, one has to laugh after every word. Otherwise, he isn't 'of ours'!'
'Sit still,' I reply. 'You have to get accustomed to a normal healthy non-party life.'
'All right,' she murmurs. 'I'll take only your advice, Mickelband.'
'Here we are! Listen to me - and everything will be okay!'
We are sitting.
The pedagogue says, 'Begin the exercise 'Let's make acquaintance'!'
Well, let us.
'Yura Mickelband! Born in the year seventy one!'
And so forth…
We have been aahing a little over those who are twenty-five and twenty-three, and here a girl comes in. It's something else! I'll show now! Bones. All legs. Height is six feet three inches or more. All clothes hang on her… A teacher of the Russian language and literature by profession. Ugly as a sin, pimply, with her hair upswept and locked and ribs standing out right and left… Such a mass of bones, nothing more… All movements are awkward and unexpected. Jerky and ungainly. Absolute absence of plasticity! And she's lame in one leg, and she squints so nicely…
'I have been entering,' she says, 'for eight years already. And they tell me, 'you've done a little wrong here, you've done not so right there… Would you, please, do in another way just here'… And they drive me out… Well, they don't drive me out, but say, 'Come on… Try next year… Maybe… We hope'…'
I tumbled at once to the fact that I could let her pass: she wasn't my rival. More so that she has gone to the blackboard at once, and says in such a gentle and shy voice, 'I'll be reciting poetry!'
The pedagogue:
'Well, you are welcome!'
The pedagogue is patient; he hears everyone out, points out their mistakes and keeps his countenance, though it is no-go. So, she has begun to recite - in a fine quavering voice, desperately and so emotionally that I am even struck with shame:

'Horses' hoofs clatter
Was like a tocsin:
Grip,
grab,
grub…'1

And much more in the same strain. All Mayakovsky's poetry. And then - in such a dejected, hopeless manner:
'Well, how am I? Is it good? Well, what is wrong?'
I stay a coldfish. I drew sixteen numbers on a piece of paper, and stroke one off at once.
The second girl was Marina. That one who started getting everyone worked up from the very beginning. In such an abrupt manner. Effusively. Somehow feverishly, and in fear that she could be interrupted:
'And let's name our group thus and thus… And let's make it so and so…'
But the main thing is that when the head of the access course is away, the girl keeps silence and as if looks down on us. But the head has only to appear - and Marina begins to activate the fount of her eloquence immediately. Probably, somebody has taught her…
'Come on!' the head says. 'Come to the blackboard and recite some poetry!'
And the girl is rather goppin'. The face like a bulldog chewing a wasp… Such a swamp donkey - spotty, with some towy hair. But she behaves… As an absolutely spiffing fine lady! Knee-high to a mosquito, but high-hat!
She has dashed out to the blackboard.
Her right hand is pressed to her heart; her left one is protruded. As though being out of air running. With a sigh, she raised her eyebrows a little, wrinkled up her little forehead, twinkled strangely with her eyes, and began in such a soft, gentle way:
'I loved you…'
And then - suddenly desperately:
'And, it may be, from my soul…'
And at once, she started almost singing. It was singsong:
'The former love has never gone away…'
Again - desperately:
'But let it not recall to you my dole!'
Her hand neared her forehead… She mops her brow… And with blank despair:
'I wish not sadden you in any way!'
And there, she began to cry:
'I loved you silently, without hope, fully,
In diffidence, in jealousy, in pain…'
_______________
1 Mayakovsky V. Good Attitude toward Horses.

Then, her voice was trembled with hoarseness. It was obvious that she had no possibility to restrain herself. And now, she herself is trembling in such a manner, I don't know whatchamacallit… She is sobbing already… She has turned red in the face like a tomato… This is the summit!
'I loved you so tenderly and truly…'
And here, at last, the final lines are heard, with vocal utterance sent to eternity:
'As let you else be loved by any man.'1
'What? It is all right, isn't it?' she asks modestly. 'Do you wish me recite anything else?'
'Not at all! Thank you very much! Don't, don't!'
I stroke the second figure off immediately.
Then, three Kazakh girls with poor Russian performed. One of them came forward and started reciting broad Kazakh:
'Pushkin, 'Song of Prince Aleg'! Vengeance on the rootless corde… of raiding Kosars! Yipe! Kazakhs! Ouch!...'
The second:
'I fill read Paustovsky!'
'And what works by Paustovsky do you know?'
'I know very many, but one verse is I know by hard.'
'You are welcome!'
Well, she recited somehow…
The third Kazakh girl is such a Valkyrie. The muzzle is… indescribable. The loin hangs down… She hides it somehow…
'And I don't know nothing today! I'm agitated today! And tomorrow I shall come to you… between this and then… And I'll read you anyth… a… any… th…'
The pedagogue, 'Well, you stutter, don't you?'
'Ya… A… A lit… al… a little…'
I wrote off three numbers at once. Noncompetitive!
So, ten of us have stayed.
Two more girls appear. One of them was nothing out of the common; the second one, about seventeen, made up her face, put on all her finery! And with her Aris… I'm sorry! Such a filly! And she recites 'Leningraders, children of mine'2! So mightily. The last trump, you know. With howling:
'Leningraders, children of ma-a-aine!'…
The pedagogue says, 'Well, I am not able to keep correcting you all the time. All of you make the same mistakes…'
'They are all alike in appearance!' I translated for myself, and crossed two more names out.
And I've told you that not all guys came together. One-two! The door has opened, and such a lassie bounces into the room - Sashenka. And she announces right off the bat, in such an anxious and frightened manner, 'I'm of the Panel Games! I'm a team captain!'
Such a lovely poppet! I react promptly:
'Okay, sweetheart! Take a seat! Cool it! Now, now, babe!'
_______________
1 Pushkin A. I loved you... - Translated by Y. Bonver.
2A poem by Jambyl.

She asked me later, 'Why do you call me 'sweetheart'? It likes me well…' Okay… She does the grand; let her… I could read in the mistress's face that she called forth admiration neither, and crossed her off.
Then Tima came forward. The lad is eighteen years old. The very image of a sissy! All his manners, gliding gestures… His softly cooing voice, drawling… Such a little lad, with protruded tails. Answering the question about his repertoire, he started posing:
'Indeed… Let's drop it… Okay… I'll recite… Let it be…'
He recited something. The mistress says, 'Well, you are quite a good boy, but we'll see…'
I crossed him off too.
Last but one was Galka Denikina - from the House of Young Pioneers. She sings Russian romances well, but hunches a little…
But in general, everything was within reasonable limits, and I decided not to obliterate her; I went to the blackboard and recited:

'For us, for young pioneers,
Vitreous palaces are built.
We here from everywhere 'che-e-ers!'
We are helped not to know wilt.
Our broth-th-thers, sisters, and fath-th-thers
Every brick of our life gilt.
Yes, about us they bother!
The whole world is rebuilt!
For Communist labour is our lilt!
May labour heroes be praised up to the hilt!'

It was nonpareil! It was fare-the-well! They all were dead and done for! What did I recite that parody for? I had to show the startup that has true potential and to propel the mistress, to make her speak, or she gives everyone the brush-off. Nothing extraordinary!
'You know,' she began, 'such nice poetry… And why have you touched that topic?'
'Well,' I answer, 'we've got perestroika now, you know! All those decorations become a thing of the past…'
And I know for sure that they, pedagogues, deal with the problem of changeover (or non-changeover) to cost accounting. And to say the truth, I kept in stock nothing but that verse. You remember, I put on an act being in the fifth form. So, I've used it.
'And who is the author?' she asks.
'I don't remember even,' I answer. 'It is only a passage… But not everyone would get a decoration for the hell of it…' I get her worked up, and she steps in immediately.
'Certainly! I don't argue with you! But the main part… And why, when you say 'every brick of our life gilt', - why do you show it?'
'And how do you mean?' I reply. 'To make it clear for everyone. To make it obvious…'
'And why do you drawl pronouncing 'che-e-ers' and 'broth-th-thers and fath-th-thers'?'
I answer, 'Well, it was necessary to stress them somehow!'
'I've understood that you presented it satirically…' she says thoughtfully. '…That you interpreted it satirically. Did you do it on purpose?'
'Right you are!' I claim deadpan, and without delay began to rouse her to recite anything herself.
When I heard her reciting, I got the idea of what she likes. I realized how to blindside her in case of need. It turns out, that she likes some childish stuff, something like 'Little Bo Peep has lost her seep'. I chalked it up…
Next day, there was dancing. And everybody comes - ready to go on! Oh, mother dear! Bejesus! Those cows with their porky fannies! They pranked themselves out with tights!..
They tested me, bowed in all directions, and then asked, 'Have you ever taken dancing lessons?'
'No,' I react, 'I haven't! I have taken nothing, I don't know anything!'
I played possum! But a talented one - with some dower. I bent to and fro, made an obeisance - and stroke off my notebook fifteen names at once.
Well, I saw various poor fish there. Let's say, one guy was registering in a very interesting manner. A certain Oleg. He came on Monday, saw his name being on the rolls, wrote something in his pocketbook, ticked something, and went away. Today, he has come, tipped his hat, made acquaintance, and - one-two! - gone away. A queer beggar… Maybe, he's a stool pigeon?.. Well… So, today we've got acting technique. Mutt's nuts! A woman from Leningrad is a mistress… Each one began to introduce himself again. In such a manner, his head on his heart:
'Marina Agathonovna! I work there and there, I was born then and then!'
The pedagogue pulls a wry face. She doesn't like pathos. But I can put two and two together! So, it needs to stuff up with simplicity. And suddenly I see that the pedagogue's little sun is running around, and she doesn't know what to do with him. Here we go - I mothered him, and she really cottoned to me at once. I brought in on the ground floor! The child had a big toy car, and we went to play to another room that was empty. And there, after we had played with the car enough, I began to play piano, '7.40', and to teach her cub to play it. She liked it very much. Then she dropped some hints about her Leningrad contacts with Jews, and that they are very clever people, and that she respects them.
'Aha!' I thought. 'She hasn't learnt yet that I'm a Jew…'"

You don't think that some sleepy-town theatrical college could resist such mass of charm, know-how, and providence; do you? If to recollect and alter Mayakovsky's lines, we can say, the mass of Yura came to us, through entrances and crannies; and it began to speak in bass, without help of nannies…

About a year passed. The brilliant straight A student runs into my room and shouts right off the bat, as before:
"Arcady Nahumovich, it takes the bun! Now I bring them a box of soap and sell it backstage, then soap powder!"
"To whom, to whom? Where - backstage? Take a seat, catch your breath!"
"To pedagogues! To whom else?" Yura laughs. "Now they order noodles, such long…"
"A-a… Let's go to the kitchen!"
"Well, I'm fed up! Well…"
"Okay, come on! A satisfied student is nonsense!"
"Well… And it can be done in two ticks," Yura goes on, sitting at my kitchen table. "Soap powder, for instance. You go to any laundry, ask there… I need soap powder! It is left, I know… Add sodium carbonate instead of the powder, and put aside the powder… I come at the end of the week, such a sack stands there already, and it waits for me. I slid dough into a laundress's hand, the sack is placed into my bag, and I go away… And I would sell the soap powder to our pedagogues, three kilos to each one. Everybody came to me with little bags, and I poured it their portions backstage. With a ladle… With sneezing… And everybody is so cultured - it is horrible! There are a lot of doorplates 'No smoking' in the college, and all people walk along corridors and smoke…
'Mickelband!' someone of pedagogues shouts. 'Let's go and have a smoke!'
All hell is let loose! And it is seen everywhere that the institution keeps up with the times - the perestroika is in full swing! They plaster old chinks to make them look like new ones…"
"What do you mean? Stanislavsky?"
"What Stanislavsky? I mean the building itself. Old plaster peels off! I say, it is easier to scalp it, because when they plastered, they kneaded wrong grout; it needs a new coat with right grout. Tightly! And the administration calls repairers every year. And the plaster becomes as stiff as a board after renewal. These hardheads smarm the coat, show their work: everything is smooth - and painted! Three days later, somebody will yell at the top of his voice 'O-o!' - and we get intumescent coating again. They wait for the next year… Well, no wonder! Some pedagogues bawl about the building time and again, 'Mickelband, Petrov, Sidorov, let's go and have a drink!'
There is some staircase in the building, and under them, empty bottles and tins remain always; beer gurgles at their bottoms, like urinalysis samples. And old granny sets foot there: she gathers empty bottles in the park firstly, and then comes to our Institute. They always sell beer in our canteen. And some stronger drinks… Bottles are under the Dean's table… No pedagogue comes sober. Oh no, there are some, of course… Tarantass Bangerovna… Somebody else… But mainly, all of them drink. Thus, Tarantass Bangerovna comes to our classroom and says, 'What a leaden facial expressions! You are funny! Something has ha-a-appened… Tricky-y-y…' And the matter is that all students are on a bender. Sultriness…"
"Tarantass?"
"Well, yea! She is a teacher of Kazakh. It was us who gave her such a name. Now she patters, and then she can't put two words together.
'I want to make your acquaintance, guys!' We hardly understood it for the first time. 'You are welcome to correct me! Because my Russian is poor. I'll learn it at your expense…'
And so forth. And at the end - unexpectedly, haughtily, slowly, and in evil part - her pithy sayings:
'And you don't conta-a-act! And you never want to contact! I go to you with my pulse… With my whatsit… And you don't want! Why am I standing here? What for? I don't know…'
To let us enter her class, she was preparing us during three weeks. Firstly, we had classes in the corridor: she prepared us. There cubicles with earphones for all the students in her classroom, and she sits at the remote control desk. They have set it only this year. And those Kazakh prick-ears hear music of the spheres! And she manages with controls… This one to be switched to this cubicle, and that one - to that one… That's a laugh! She settles down in an immured glass, and can intercept each one. For example, I say, 'Sixteenth, I am calling', let it be, 'Twentieth!', and we speak Kazakh with the twentieth. Clearly, nobody speaks Kazakh; simply I fraternize with one girl… he - with another… and the mistress sits at her control! Each student has chosen a girl, and she is sitting and listening…
'Hey! You speak not Kazakh! Come on! That's all! Finish! That's all! I switch off!'
One-two! - and she actually cuts it off at a most undesirable moment. And your girl - one-two! - will change to another boy. This is kinda communication… Once we see her go from a bus carrying two bags. And she is on her last legs, clop-clop-clop… I approach her:
'Talamkass Bazangerovna, let me help you!'
'Oh, zhaksy-y (good)! O-o! Aksakal! Aksakal!'
I say, 'Why 'aksakal'? You've taught us that 'aksakal' means 'a white beard' literally.'
'It means 'a respected person', too.'
And then, she used to tell everyone that I am an aksakal. Kazakhs maltreat women, so my behaviour was for her a real shock. She was telling us for two lessons what 'aksakal' is… Well, about those earphones. There are four guys in our group who are fond of radio engineering. So, they got sick and tired of all that balderdash; they brought a tape-recorder, recorded the whole lesson, and did something with that new controller. As a result, whenever she wiretaps, she gets to the tape-recorder line and listens to her native Kazakh language… those dialogues… Do you see? And we switch to anybody we like, and speak, and enjoy ourselves… at last, she says, 'What's the matter? The same dialogue all the time! All the same! For crying out loud! I give you new material every day…'
You see, she listens to the tape-recorder in her corner, and we are all by ourselves… We are speaking during two academic hours. Well, we think, it's time to finish! The guys put on their considering cap, savvied, spent a little more time on the problem - and it took effect. She speaks, and her words go back to her earphones.
The mistress:
'Number eighteen! Don't interrupt!'
A voice in the earphones:
'Don't interrupt!'
She - in a louder voice:
'Don't interrupt!'
The reaction is louder too, naturally:
'Don't interrupt!'
And she is a perfect duffer at technique!
She - desperately:
'Don't let!'
The voice in her earphones:
'Don't let!'
She:
'Don't let - what?'
The voice - even louder:
'Don't let - what?'
To piss oneself laughing!
At last, she called technicians, and they fixed the problem.
'O-o! The highest level!' she delivered with satisfaction. 'Or else, here we are! This year only, it all has been set! Then, the first-year students came - and broke everything. Though I have got a full instruction. To operate the apparatus. Here, the first button must be pressed, here - the second one, here - the third…'
But our guys resolved to stay chin-up. They crooked her keys, made duplicates, and regulated everything so that now, when she enters the room, all loud speakers bellow in a thunderous voice, 'Salamat syzba, Talamkass Bazangerovna!' It means nothing seditious but 'how do you do, Tarantass Bangerovna!'. Then, the moment she wants to say 'stand up!', the same loud speakers bellow in her voice the same words, but in Kazakh, naturally. And all the classes are being held in the same vein… And today, she comes, put her earphones on, and hears someone heaving on a potty, and then - 'blu-blu!' - flushing the toilet. Washing off! 'Ptshee!.. A-a!.. U-uh!.. Blu-blu!.. Ptshhhh!..' Well, obvious constipation!"

I stepped on the brakes and dismounted from my bicycle. If you've already forgotten the situation, I'll refresh your memory: I have left for Tel-Aviv to scrape, in other words to pass the hat. And so, an Israeli stopped me and pantomimed to help him. He was trying to unscrew and change one wheel of his very presentable limousine. I was tormenting myself over it for some time, I jumped and fell all over on my leg abutting against spanner arm, and, having desponded, I unscrewed it unexpectedly. The first nut, the second one, and so on… The thankful Israeli grasped my hand, and started shaking it and shouting loudly and enthusiastically, "Yob tvoyu mat! Yob tvoyu mat!" He believed those words to be the vehement protestations of gratitude in Russian, and didn't suspect of their real meaning - 'fuck your mother'.
"You are welcome!" I replied not less politely, and we parted friends.

Unfortunately, it wasn't just the same with Yura… As soon as I read him my written version of his school stories, he broke off and began to fight shy of me. And it seems to me that it was not because of his fear that someone of his acquaintances would read the stories, but due to the thought that he himself could somehow have cashed in on his fount of eloquence.
Such a naive boy! He thought that to turn one's talent into money is no sweat!
I have got a clear memory of his last unselfish revelation. We were sitting in the same micro-kitchen, drinking the same strong tea and speaking about the same Centre of Culture and Creative Education.
"The master of stage movement tormented us almost to death with those rolls!" Yura was telling and looking - shamefacedly, but lasciviously - at the pot of raspberry jam, almost empty. "Either he likes it or doesn't know anything else, but we have been doing nothing but somersaulting for half a year already. This worker makes a dive into the gym, shouts 'Roll-roll!', and rushes to the corridor again, to smoke or to freshen the nip. And we are turning… And what else should we do?.. But we have got a certain Pornobek Mamyn Mamynovich. That's the cat's meow! A real nugget! A master of music! An associate professor! The Candidate of Musical behavilogical Sciences!"
"Of what sciences?"
"Musical behavilogical! He calls it in such a way. This is his neologism from the word 'behave'. His best compliment and appreciation is, 'You behave musically!'.
He noted me when we met each other for the first time. That day, I made a tardy appearance, but had a brand-new suit on.
'Come in, friend, come in, comrade!' I heard suddenly. 'A-a, probably you are smoking for a long time. It is not beautiful. Health is deep-six, and money goes to an ass of an ass. And music - it enriches a man. And no need to force yourself! You want to sit - sit! You don't want - stand! Why will you force you?'
There, he got sight of my suit - and smiled like a brewer's horse:
'Here! Look all! He is a very good student! Very! His suit says about his intellect. He is able to dress up - it is taste! And taste - it is music! All this is on one thread tied! A red thread lies through it. Get the picture? The first of ours… I will make your acquaintance with Abay. I think, you'll love Abay too, because Abay - he is like it… Like sun! But Abay will be after habituation with reading and writing. Musical one! All together, seven notes. Do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si! Well? How is possible to write music of seven notes? New! How does it go? Four lessons for thoughts!..'
Four lessons… We went and thought it over four days. At last, somebody prompted him that it had no sense to cast his precious pearls before those who were graduated from a conservatory or a school of music.
'We-ell,' Pornobek said. 'Who of you studied musical education?'
Nineteen students put their hands up. Only one fellow and I have got no academic credentials.
'Good. You two will come to my lessons, and all the rest will try to pass a test. It means - to play. And we shall start every lesson with the song by Abay. I shall be singing the song by Abay to you.'
And he sings 'Tatyana's Letter to Eugene Onegin'. A certain Abay's song. Do you know it?"
"No."
"Don't you know it?"
"No."
"Listen! It's such galimatias - napoo!"
"Softer, Yura, softer!"
"It's the softest option! No salts! So, he sang the song and set me to piano:
'You are a very good boy. Go and sit at the piano. Here, listen to me! You have a woman, no? A wife, yes? You set you hand on her shoulder? Well, a piano is the same. It is my woman. You got it? A contakht must be! A contakht!'"
"He is right," I remark, and Yura doesn't argue, but goes on:
"'Here, you stand near a woman, yes? You set you hand on her shoulder, yes? And what does she do? Pulsetates! Yes? In such a manner she pulsetates! Yes? Something as that… And she… penetrates your soul! Your heart beats stronger. Everything cowers so… And you feel uneasy. In such a position. Yes? It is only an insolent fellow can let himself to sock that woman, but a clever man, a talented one, who studies at some theatre college, - he can't let. And a piano is the same. When it is blandly to it, it itself plays and sings instead of you. And a woman is the same. When it is blandly to her, she repays with the same. Mutually! You see, mutual contakhts must be! You are good with her - she is good with you! You are… It is like life! Do you take the seat? Take!'
I sit down at the piano.
'Put a hand! Each fingher must know its place. It mustn't be without work. Because each man in society works to eat bread. The same is with a fingher. Everything is of trifles, and then big life grows. Big music! I read it, there, I don't remember where… I studied, generally… I play myself since I was nine. I had a fortepiano… so small… they made those things before… My father brought it to me from Moscow. My father was a man of genius! Only he couldn't read… We lived in an aul… He brought the piano to me… I played… Then, when I was thirty, they bought me a big piano. Not father, though… My uncle! My uncle bought me the piano. I was thirty and called… Oh, twenty-nine!.. Yea… Called a master! I played excellently already… I must be… There is a genius sitting inside me! But, you see, the age is wrong. Everything passed. With years… I was taught music, and I start writing. I wrote four songs. Here you are - my book! Third form, for children. Here is my song! An associate professor Mamyn Mamynovich! You see? Look everyone!'
Everyone looked.
'Here, first form… A song! You see here - an associate professor Mamyn Mamynovich. Write it down: asso-ci-ate pro-fes-sor!'"
"So, there is one little song of him in each book, and he says he is an author of those three books, doesn't he?" I asked.
"Yes, he does. But he is really the author of one book. He never forgets about it:
'And here is one more my book… quite little. A musical cre-a-tu-re. It isn't published yet. I smite on it four years - and can't publish it. Why - I don't know! I maintained a thesis with it… I was a director of a musical school, a director of a conservatory, and a director of one academy of music. There I was… And then they put me higher and higher for some reasons… And now, they sent me to the college… How to say it? I climbed higher and higher, yes? And now, they put me lower again, well? For what - I don't know! I was in Japan. In Korea. In… Okay! I fixed on… Yea, on music! Aha! Here, listen! Every little fingher must beat all these notes, as if a little hen pecks. Little hens slowly - tuh… tuh… tuh!.. Little hens quicker - knock-knock-knock!.. And it must so… Each to know its place! And a note! Like a woman! Here… A note… Yes? It is as if a woman's body. Yes? Keys! A keyboard! It is… You stroke a woman in this place… Yes? She likes it. And here - she doesn't like. You see what mutual connection is, ah? So you must understand it… Here! Though, frankly speaking, I don't like women… I… They told me in my youth, 'Treat them well!'. I treated well. I had two wifes. Now I live with the third. I have four children… I paid alimony… Now I don't pay. Adult children! One my of children learns in Moscow. In a training school. He will be… a fitter. A ventilator! He will work in Alma-Ata. Here! A man minds his work. He is with insulating tape since his childhood… You know? That's it! He linked conductors!.. I sent him there… My friend lives there and studies… A good friend… Here!.. Where did I fix on?'
'Fingers! Fingers!'
'That's it!.. As if a little hen pecks… Ah! About women! I respect them very strong… But, truly saying… I don't know where someone told me… or I learned by reading somewhere, yes? Well, you know a tram, yes? It goes! And it has one line - a circle! Yes? Sometimes, a tram runs, yes? Off the track! Here… Look!.. You stand on a stop… A tram passed. Yes? And you looked at it somehow so… It went away - no need to run after it… A next will come! The same is with a woman. You stand… And she comes to you, here, yes? She went away - no need to run after her. A next will come! It happens there, one tram will run off the track… The same is a woman - she will go somewhere alone… But then, they will give another one, ah? From another trolleybus… tram park. Is it so? Is it? You understand me? Is it?'
'Yea, yea! It is!'
'Well, they will give another! And it will always be so. Always! Stand on one place. Like an idol! You stand on one place and wait for your tram. Until your tram comes and stops on the spot. It will stop so that can't get it on. Or it will run off the track near you… 'Cause it can't without you any more… And then… The same is with a woman. You see, it's politics!.. This is my… Well! You are a clever boy, very. I give you a theme for a thesis: 'Abay's creation in the light of… whatsit… time! Of the twentieth century'! You must write four questions on the theme, and if I like them, I'll copy these questions out… You'll find material… I'll give you… It is written on two my pages, truly speaking… Of genius, like Einstein! I prepared it… How you think, I want to see!'
'I think like you!'
'Right! It is very well! Because I got my thesis on it. I am an associate professor! Here I go. You don't believe, do you? You want me to show? Here - look… a document… And it is written on it, 'Mamyn Mamynovich is an associate professor'. So, you write… And on the second year, yes?.. I have a pupil… If something is not clear, yes? So, my pupil is there… Go to him… I'll bring him here now…'
Imagine, he calmly steps outside, takes out the student of his classes, and brings him to us. That's the thing! Everyone look at him!
'It is my pupil. I am proud of him! I taught him two years, and he plays as if he has seven-year studying, yes? Well, he… didn't study seven years, as all others, yes? No diploma. He has two years - and plays all! Sit down! Come on, as I taught you…'
And the lad seems to be clever, serious. Play up to the teacher to the utmost. The same as me! He fell into a muse, concentrated - and…
'Mamyn Mamynovich, I felt!'
'Here! He felt that woman, as a piano! Is there a contakht?'
'Yes, Mamyn Mamynovich!'
'Come on!'
And the pupil plays the song by Abay! The same! Do you understand?
Mamyn Mamynovich sits down, in such a way, with the tenderest emotion:
'Ah, so go-o-od! Ah, so go-o-od! Now, the other! Put your hands on the piano! Ready?'
'Ready!'
'Come on!'
And the pupil plays another piece if music: 'Onegin's Song to Tatyana'. By Mamay, too… Oh, by that… whatchamacallit… Abay! Mamyn himself is going and tapping a rhythm:
'Do you feel what distinct rhythm Abay has? He didn't know… He didn't know to write notes… And it all circulated in such a way… Everything was so, from people… And here, cheers! A man of such a genius he was! By the way, my folks knew him. It does me great honour! Okay… You (it's to the student) go to your classes, and we'll meet with you next time. Good?'
And so, I am a full-timer at his classes, and tomorrow, I'll visit with him. He left a note in the classroom. 'Yura Mickelband, come to see me. We'll be drinking tea. My third wife will be acquainted. And my piano is waiting!' He has got such an association: a piano is a woman; a woman is a tram. Hi finds such parallels everywhere. So good-natured… Say:
'Mamyn Mamynovich, may I miss a lesson?'
'Yes, yes! You are welcome! What is after your own heart! I understand you! Here, your heart isn't in it today, is it? And no need to force yourself! It is bad, when you force yourself! I remember my third form, yes? I studied in my aul there, yes? You know an aul, yes? What it is… I lived in yurt. Here, I didn't want to go, yes? To study Russian. Though, now I regret… I speak Russian badly… But I didn't want to go, yes? And we had a teacher there. Don't force yourself, he says. Don't force! When it comes itself - in no time all will be! The same is with all. The same is with women. Here, you like a woman, but you feel some disgust there… And you don't know why, yes? Don't force yourself, or her! You'll do badly for her and for you. And when you see that both have a contakht, then - you are welcome… Here, you will give all from you… And she will…'"

…Bang! A double bus monster pressed me to a border stone, and there, the front wheel got to a ditch. I rushed aside, my bicycle almost got under the bus wheels, and the fiddle-case sticking out of my backpack, hurt my head.
Tel-Aviv!
My disposition ruffled perceptibly. But not for a long time. Such an unusual day today! I had hardly been scraping there for ten minutes when somebody threw a banknote to the fiddle-case. I untucked it - fifty shekels! Even though they threw only twenty shekels about within the next two hours, I returned home smiling. Those fifty shekels were thrown for the song by Abay. Not for the song Yura had told me about, but for the real one.
A magic melody, ladies and gentlemen!

(The song by Abay is heard.)

Letter Twenty-Six

THE ORGASM WAS GAINING MOMENTUM!
(Sexual Eccentrics)

The sun was falling. The flame of the evening glow was penetrating clouds with fire streaks, and they, in turn, were pouring purple and bronze all around. Puffs of charcoal smoke and intolerably tantalizing broil odours veiled the seafront, and the little town on the sea, with its industrial zone and other smells, hardly revealed itself behind hotel towers and a beneficial precipice. The resort area of an almost year-round and everyday 'week-end' was getting into the swing of evening and night pulsation.
"A-a-ah! O-o-oh!"
The beach shivered.
"O-o-oh! Ah! A-a-ah!"
The beach stopped in its tracks.
An overhead kiting paraglider alternated slumping with soaring.
The fact that the 'flying mattress' can sustain two people wasn't unknown, but the tricks of those two on its slings!..
The 'aeronauts' made a striking picture in magic sunset light. And their occupation was three times as much striking. More so that both of them were naked, young, and judging by mise en scenes and props, very extreme and provocative.
"A-a-ah! Ah! O-o-oh!" was heard the higher the farther, the lower the nearer.
Having thrown back my head, I, like almost all who were or weren't swimming, feasted my eyes upon that heroic charm, and even if I dithered, then it was absolutely not the dither, which blew proudly the swimming trunks of my neighbour - the grizzled war-horse of sexual valour.
"I get orgasm only in one case - when I get cheques; and you must get it only working, working, and working again!" - sounded in my head in spite of the situation.
That phrase has evidently ripened in these latter days. One very 'real' Jew liked it very much. I was not keen on it at all - or on its author, though he was 'of ours'. It means - from there! From the former Soviet Union!
Of course, freebies, if they are not in Eden, deprave, and in this world, relaxing is good after strain, but nobody must substitute living with dead all the time, and then, due to senselessness, melancholy, and emasculation, put his neck into the noose and shout 'Save our souls'!
And so, the crud that gets orgasm only thanks to bank cheques, plundered there, and has become a petty proprietor here. And that is the worst and meanest kind of bloodsuckers I have ever met. As for me, they have no equal - in victimization, humiliation, and deception. As for paper-pushers 'of ours', I generally keep my mouth shut. They are afraid for their beds of roses, and that is why they are especially merciless. And all together - both those and these - as if revenge for the fatal error of Moses and leaving not so horrible (and even nice if we are speaking about feed-in) Egyptian slavery.
And this is the case! The Patriarch had no need to torture his people in vain and pull them as one person about the desert for forty years. At least, he had to choose the predisposed to freedom! In such a case, all today's obviously lame under the hat descendants of monkeys who call themselves Jews, would have been the sample of humanity; and I've said it many times and say all over again that it is the real sign of the Chosen people and of His image and likeness.
But it is about those 'of ours'. Neither they who not 'of ours' are much better. And their primitive spontaneity is really amazing. Here, as a rule, a petty proprietor or a paper-pusher who has not been touched by any civilization, is a leader and a male, and we are not only his slaves, but the members of his pack as well. And our sex doesn't matter at all. He gets some ass off all of…
"A-a-ah! Ah! O-o-oh!"
"What direction do police look in?" the grizzled one muttered and showed me his back.
"In what direction! As if you don't see! There they are! They deal with bloats on the yonder side of the beach! One has already been fished out, and now they are looking for the second…" I answered in my thoughts and returned to my not too pleasant, but absolutely intimate feelings.
One would think, what might be simpler and less conflict than street cleaning? Sweep clean, and that's all! But in fact, it fails.
"Lo tov!" ("Bad!") my next petty proprietor shouts.
"Where is bad? Everything is licked clean, isn't it?.."
My efforts have their clear reasons, and there is no mythically beneficial workaholic German and Japanese genetics and bigotry in them. Till nowadays, I haven't been able to budge in Hebrew. That's why I try to do my best. To bear close scrutiny and to stay at least on-the-job as long as possible.
But the ape-man simply must carp. To make me not forget even for a second who I am and who he is.
"Lo tov!" ("Bad!") The scoundrel shouts still louder, and his eyes become bloodshot.
Aha! I got it! In the morning, I swept clean splinters of glass after an accident at the crossing, but if one looks from one side and up to it (and he does!), then, surely, he can see grains that shine in the sun somewhere. Everything is clear! He wants not only to find fault, but more of that - to dip me in shit. To show what schlep I am, and what panjandrum he is. I have to sweat my guts out for a year more, till I have a right to next six months' scanty unemployment benefit, which is a spiracle for me; so - you are welcome! Zeal and care feature my face; I grab a brush and sweep the cleanest asphalt.
Nothing is here!
"Beseder? Okay?" I ask warily.
"Mishugah! Crazy! Lo tov!" the polecat bawls, wrests the instrument of desired labour from me (actually, some time ago, I was dreaming of that work like a lunatic), and sweeps himself.
Nothing is here!
"Don't you want to work? Lekh habaita! (Go home!)" the macho yells and throws the brush down.
"Rotse! Rotse!" ("I want! I want!") I outvoice him, seize the broom's next-of-kin, and rub the asphalt again, and even more vigorously.
In my head, I hear the peals of the famous 'Arise ye workers from your slumbers! Arise ye prisoners of want! For reason in revolt now thunders and at last ends the age of cant!..'
"A-a-ah! Ah! A-a-ah! Ah! O-o-oh!"
As if my heart lightened a little. As if you struggle. But all it is 'as if'! They have recently proposed me to put in a hitch with a builder. As if they pay more there. God forbid! There, today workers exert themselves to the utmost, like two hundred years ago, when they would carry everything using only buckets. From one floor to another! And no industrial safety! Almost each day, we hear radio messages about those who fell to their death.
"A-ah! Ah! Oh! Oh! Ah! Ah!.."
Should I land a blow in his muzzle with the brush, ah? What a temptation! Tremendous!
I rub even stronger to give the silly thought the wind - and here it is, my next fortune! No point in trailing the business out any longer for my 'Abramgutan', or more exactly, the most primitive hamadryad! He pointed the territory, which had to be scraped by me till God knew what time, and galloped away by his red-back vehicle. Now, he will jeer at the next lame duck. Or he won't… If he weeps his fill with my blood…
Well, why have I been hung up on assaults? Here, what a nice festive and idling are in the heavens! It is a real pleasure to look and to hear! Okay, I will begin the selling of my books since tomorrow again. After dealing with the broom, of course. After the broom! In the evening! When people have their meal and relax after some such work. Such enormous piles have become dusty in my storeroom for many years already! My wife is threatening to throw everything on the scrap heap for very long. Maybe, I'll find the bean at least in that cake finally…
"Ah! Ah! Oh! Oh! Ah! A-a-ah!.. O-o-oh!"
The paraglider started convulsing like a wounded bird, and… fell down!
"A-ah!" echoed along the beach.
"Fu-uh!" whiffed at once.
The 'Flying Dutchman' took the air and… wafted swimmingly with its placated crew in the direction of Haifa.
My swimming trunks turned to be close-fitting.
"Thank God! At last! We shan't die out! And in a pinch, the old guard will support in any moment!" I thought with relief, and followed the grizzled old campaigner running to the sea.

P.S. And at the same time, on the other side of the beach…
Well, they had a matter out! Everything was settled, God be praised!
To the accompaniment of vivifying sky whoops, one bloat was recovered from a fainting fit, and the second had got out of the sea well in advance of the 'air-show'… and stuck fast near an easy-on-the-eye dame.

Letter Twenty-Seven

THE ROAD TO EDEN

The road to hell (if it exists somewhere but in this world!) is paved not simply with good intentions, but with enforced ones. That's why the selling of my books resembles a variety show more than a healthy market act with the participation of brokers and publishers. But what is left for me to do? The run is short, nobody knows my name; and even for those authors who are popular, bookshops give only thirty percent of selling price if they sell the book; and it is even less than its prime cost. So, I run… Some time ago, I used to sell pictures in the same way, and then it was no picnic; and what can I say now? One's own is own! Accordingly, I come across much more insults and unexpectedness…
"Buy books!" I don't impose, but propose. "They are super goods! They don't get out of order and don't turn to be yesterday's dishes next day, and the longer it will stay at your place, the better for you. They are magic books! The main is to buy them! It's not of necessity to read them! These books are not for everyone, but for each one! Even for one who can't read and has no wish to. They will remain at your place and extend happiness…"
"Manya!" is heard out of the depth of the next flat. "Give him thirty shekels. Otherwise, he will never go away!"
"Don't distort me, please!" I resent. "I shall go away anyway. But thirty shekels will hasten the process."
As good as a circus!
But with the elements of autosuggestion.
"No complexes!" I have got the ax to grind. "It is not a money-spinner. If it is market, then it is market. As it may be. More so that no money - no new masterpieces. Cock-and-bull stories about masterpieces that immediately bring glory and money are not for us. More often, glory comes to an author after his death, and money goes to the first comer. It is a shame, no doubt! Some political pawn throws mud at his yesterday's friends and compatriots - and millions are in his pocket. And here, I could say, you try to carry the word of God, but cannot wangle even thirty shekels for sustenance and recovery of publishing expenses."
Here is an acrimonious bloke with red eyes, and a skullcap on the crown of his head on the threshold.
"I have got everything!" he tells me proudly. "A car, and a flat, and a villa. I want nothing; especially your rubbish."
"Rubbish?" I am surprised. "You haven't read a line yet; why is it 'rubbish'? Should God come to your place tomorrow, you'll make fun of him and drive him out. Because he will bring the testimonies again. Only a few non-profit-making proposals…"
"God?" the bloke chokes with indignation. "Are you God?"
But it is impossible to run down me. The house is new, fifteen-storeyed. He holds out two-storey marathon - and remains behind. Because it would be useful for his heart to run up- and downstairs regularly. Even if breathlessness takes place sometimes. Especially when you have the legs of your client. It was even worse formerly. My box with pictures prevented. And now, I fly feather-light.
I did fly to my destination. Two grannies had hardly opened the door - and:
"Go to the dogs! All manner of men kick their heels in our stairwells!"
And the other has to go and drone the same!
"Don't pull the wool over my eyes!"
"But I haven't even started yet…"
"You just try!"
And some gloomy and dark-haired one attacks me, as if I'm his wife's lover:
"Why? What? Why?"
I shove books to him like a red-rag to a bull:
"Do you recognize them?"
"What? Who?"
"It's me. The cover picture. And here, it's me too - in front of you. A classic, alive, but not acknowledged as yet."
"Well, what the hell?"
"And the question is, did they use to sing lullabies to you in your childhood? 'Sleep, my baby, sleep, my dear, hush-a-hushaby'?"
"Well, what the hell?"
"It means that the books are for you!"
"What are you coming at? What?"
"Good heavens! What I am coming at! Now - only at buying them. The books are interesting. Amusing. Spiritual food! Do you follow me? People recover while reading them! Here, this one is only thirty shekels - and for the whole life! And this one is twenty. And each of them has something of another one…"
"Don't!" the Caucasian eagle rolls the whites of his eyes.
"No doubt!" I could not stick it any longer.
"What are you coming at? What?"
But I'm running away already. A gleam of intelligence is even more dangerous than its total absence.
As a matter of fact, some exceptions exist. One pretended to be an original Israeli. He mutters something in Hebrew and his mug is of Ryazan - five-by-five!
"Well, why do you feign?" I ask as gentle as I can. "All the same, I see that you know by heart all Lermontov's works and a half of Mayakovsky's. And the lines by Yesenin. I'm sure: 'You would sit on so many men's lap; and at present I am lapping you.' And your face is the clearest map of all Russian roads!"
"And what's with yours? Is America depicted on your forehead?" the Israeli reveals himself.
"On mine, the most sincere warmth and sympathy for you are!" I take my best stand at last. "A man with taste and intellect is such a rarity in this Old Testament desert, in spite of different fairy-tales about masses of clever and talented Jews!"
"How much?"
"This one is thirty, and that one…"
"I take both!"
"That's the sale! Good begun! The business gets on its feet!"
In one flat, a huge bandog sits in semi-darkness, in an enormous arm-chair, on a clean bed-sheet, before a TV-set. The dog looks attentively at the screen, and pays zero attention to me. And no sooner than I made up my mind to retreat, I heard, 'bow-wow!'.
"Are you a dog, or something?" The dog's master is astonished.
The bandog casts down his eyes shamefacedly, and turns his head from the right to the left, and then to the right again.
"What's the name of your dog?" I start in a flattering manner.
"He is not a dog!"
"And who's he?"
"A bandog!"
"So, my book is exactly for him!" I try to joke.
"It's quite possible," the master replies so seriously that I feel strange. "Here you are, fifty. Write, 'To bandog Vladimir - from the author'."
For crying out loud! But I write…
And at last, in the last today's flat, a joyful and bald-headed tubby reads the names of the books, aloud and with delight: 'In Israel, all's tranquil…', 'The Favourite of Israel'…
He disappeared.
I wait, being in a fog.
He appears, with money and a pen.
"Sign, please!"
"What's your name?"
"Israel Abrahamovich!"
Finish!
Fireworks, applauses, happiness, and new masterpieces are guaranteed!
Dedicated to my Father who is in heaven!

ISRAEL