KR Online - The Kenyon Review

Mix Tape: Cellar Door

What’s so beautiful about cellar door? These two little words have gotten a lot of attention from Donnie Darko, Dorothy Parker, and beyond.

“If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world.”

Bookworms beware: Even if you’re only five years old, overdue library books could land you in the clink.

Anyone remember Seinfeld’s experience with the library cop?

We all read in the yellow trolley bus, the yellow trolley bus, the yellow trolley bus…

The Great MFA Debate returns, this time at Ploughshares.

Now babies can literally cut their teeth on great literature. Absurd, right?

Remembering poets Dorothea Tanning and Wisława Szymborska.

Chateaubriand; Nothing to Undo That Can’t Be Done Again

Chateaubriand

Love me here, a tangle in the wire, complicate
my limbs with your mouth. Like the trail,
we’re a handful of breadcrumbs, the boy
whispering himself to sleep at the library,
the book slipping from his lap. We haven’t
lived long enough to knot cherry stems

together with our tongues. A girl
from another town was pinned against a fence
with the grill of a pickup while jogging.
The guy behind the wheel, a stranger, lived
on her street. You see, it happens

like this: one day, you’re eating Chateaubriand,
the next, you can barely pronounce tender,
or make use of the skin that preserved it . . .

. . . Tickle my feet as gravel once did.
Remind me of balms and salves to keep
our organs safe. Like a grape, leave me
in my skin, as I nestle in your cheek,
making a home of your darkest, inside spaces.

Nothing to Undo That Can’t Be Done Again

On the first day, we ripped carpet from the room’s bones,
rolled it like clay, stacked ourselves into man, and ate

Eggs Benedict in the breakfast nook. Light fell like a body
through the ceiling, onto our plates, and we ate.

Our neighbors were sleeping in our walls,
we could hear them across fields. We tore the paper down,

found we were equal parts inside and out. As though
we were the windows our neighbors looked into at night.

As though our brights were on and nobody would flash
to warn us. On the third day, we laid our hammers

on maps of places we’d been, tacked photos
onto our cupboards. We’d forgotten plates and forks,

took seriously what fruit flies confirmed about memory
and sleep. We couldn’t trust the water slapping the shore downhill

from a sea of corn. The oak fence was barbed in the backyard:
when it fell, nobody called to tell us. Eagle, coyote, turkey—

on the eighth day, the farmer shot them all and loosened
the sheep’s noose. His collie chased everything to pasture.

The Last Four Seasons

Autumn

In Hakusan-cho, the maple leaves turned red and orange and yellow. Hiro Tanaguchi thought of many places other than where he was and of many people whom he’d left or who had left him. He was a man who struggled with the present and with being aware in the moment, in any given moment. This had nothing to do with his age, seventy-one. He’d been like this since he was a boy. He recalled always missing something just past or always longing for something yet to happen.

When Hiro thought about the course of his life, it seemed a great accident. Every turn he took had been a surprise, and looking back, it all fit piece after crooked piece, as lotus flowers linked and blanketed a pond.

Hiro knew the history of his town. He knew landmarks: statues, temples and shrines, natural springs and all sorts of other things. He knew the stories behind them and sometimes he made up stories for them—a legend, a myth, a mystery. He knew about nature and the land he’d been living on for the past seventy-one years in Mie Prefecture. He even talked in town once about how to keep the air and water and soil clean. He’d been a teacher, and a principal, and on the town board of education. As people go, Hiro Tanaguchi was famous in Hakusan-cho, and well respected.

But lately, Hiro had to remind himself to pay attention and live in the present. His parents were long dead, his wife dead, and his only daughter, Haruka, lived in Tokyo with her husband and two children. On the bullet train, Tokyo was four hours away, but it was far enough from his small town life in Mie-ken. He saw Haruka only when they came for New Year’s for four days. He was proud of his daughter and wanted nothing more than her happiness, but he was ashamed he could not keep his family close by, or in his family home.

He was ashamed to be old and alone, because it was family that kept people alive, he thought, from beginning to end. What had he done to be neglected like this? He would not dare ask Haruka, he would not beg for her attention, but he felt sad some days, and far away from anyone he loved.

Hiro had a pair of shoes for everything he did. He wore a pair of brown leather loafers when he was outside and in public places; he had a pair of blue and white puffy checkered slippers to wear inside his house; he had a thick pair of red slippers for the toilet; he had a pair of green knee-high rubber boots for his vegetable gardens and rice fields; and a pair of white canvas shoes he slid on for driving. Hiro had many more shoes too. He lived in a one hundred year old dark house, and because this was the house in which he was born and had inherited, he rarely threw anything away. He had shoes stuffed in his closets and some in cabinet drawers. He had dusty rocks on shelves and outdoor specimens in glass jars—beetles, dragonflies, locusts—with faded paper name markers on them. He had chipping plaster busts his brother had made thirty-five years ago sitting on a window sill. One was of Hiro and the nose was missing. The plaster was dirty but where the nose was gone it looked like a fresh white piece of broken chalk. Hiro had poster-sized calendars with photos of Japan hanging in his sitting room. He had four posters. One with Mount Fuji in the center from 1987. Another was from 1992, the year his wife died. One calendar was current for 2004/2005 and had photos of the four seasons: red and orange Japanese maple trees, snow on a red bridge over a koi pond, cherry blossoms in bloom along the banks of a river in Kyoto and a pair of wooden sandals by the entrance of a cedar temple door, and a red tori in the sea of Japan in green summer. The fourth was from 2000, the year he fell in love with Yuki Yasuko on the town bus. It was one of the best years of his life.

He once told Yuki about his daughter, of her being far away and not coming home. Yuki was a fair-skinned, pensive beauty. She was a widow with three children of her own, two of whom lived on her street. The third had drowned in the river many years ago, so she, too, knew of loss and longing. She listened to Hiro while she watched the passing rice fields. Autumn harvests of tied grasses hung out to dry over wooden racks or sometimes stood on their own throughout a field like teepees. As the rice bundles turned from green to tan they looked like the skirts of brooms in the stubbly-cut fields. They reminded Hiro of women in long skirts waiting for their husbands to return from a war. When he finished talking about his daughter, Yuki looked up at the bus ceiling, then at him, her hands resting on her thigh. “This is very simple,” she said. She nodded and turned her dark eyes back to the window, to the mist rising from the green mountains. “This is your destiny.”

Winter

In December in Hakusan-cho, the narcissus bloomed white and yellow in every garden and field and the town smelled fresh and clean. By mid-December, the air turned cold overnight, and winter came.

Hiro Tanaguchi went to the onsen bathing house five nights a week in winter and three nights a week during the rest of the year, where among the hot water and steam he would think about destiny, and wonder if he’d chosen all that had happened in his life or if the same events and people would have found him one way or another. He wondered if he had a lesson to learn in this life and what, after all this time, that lesson was. He sat in the cedar bath feeling cleansed of so many things from the day, the week, the month. He moved to the waterfall in the corner and sat on a small flat rock so his neck and shoulders were under the weight of the falling water. He shut his eyes. The water sounded like the static of white noise as it poured onto him and over him, warm all over. In these moments, he was cleansed of having a brief affair with Nanami Sakai when he was twenty-six. He was cleansed from telling his neighbor he wasn’t lonely at all and that he liked his time alone. He was cleansed from feeling resentful toward his daughter for hardly visiting and acting distant and independent like an American.

After his onsen he went home for dinner and sake. He loved sake, hot and cold, its dry smoothness and how his face went red and his shoulders eased and fell after a few sips. His good friends called him Sake, he told them to, and he liked it. Hiro also smoked four cigarettes every night in his sitting room. He sat on the worn green couch and looked around the room. He drank his sake out of a tall clear glass and looked at objects and dates that marked his life. Sometimes he could hear his own mother or father, and recall his father sitting in the very same spot with sake and a cigarette, while his mother cleaned the kitchen after dinner and made onigiri for breakfast with leftover rice. Hiro liked to think of this room as a memory museum. A place where he could sit and know all of who he was, all of what had been.

He’d proposed to his wife in this room and his father had died in this room. He died sitting upright, his head leaned back against the wall, a smile on his face. It was such a rare thing, his father smiling, that Hiro wanted to remember him like that. Hiro was seventeen and not afraid of his dead father, who had not been well. His mother was in the bath after dinner and so Hiro found his camera and took pictures of his father, who rarely smiled for a photo, but there was his father, smiling, finally a happy man.

Haruka had been an avid photographer. His wife encouraged Haruka and gave her a manual Nikon with three lenses when she was twelve. Haruka documented the whole town of Hakusan, and Hiro remembered her following him around for what seemed like a year. A shu-click shu-click as common as the beat of crickets. Hiro was quiet with his daughter; they needed few words between them. He took copies of some of her photos: one of his wife in her yukata, one of their house from behind the rice fields, and one of her self-portraits in which she was in the forefront and he was in the background, not far away but unaware of the camera. He and Haruka looked in the same direction, toward the setting sun, dragonflies buzzing and diving above their heads.

Now, Haruka, her husband, Kodai, and their two children were coming for New Year’s. Hiro cleaned the house by wiping down the tatami mats with a damp cloth and straightening the kitchen and bathroom. Haruka did most of the cooking but he bought fresh ingredients for tempura, nabe, sushi, miso, and the traditional kagami-mochi for desert. They would arrive to Nagoya on the Shinkansen and then take the Limited Express train the hour and a half to Hakusan-cho. The children, two girls named Satsuki and Seina, were well-behaved and smart. They hoped for snow each year so they could play outside and build snow forts and snow animals like they had seen pictures of from the Sapporo Ice Festival in Hokkaido. Satsuki was ten and liked to make paper cranes. Seina was six and favored beetles.

It had snowed very little the winter before and so Hiro prayed for snow. He went to the onsen at 4 p.m., then he came home and smoked one cigarette in the back room in the quiet. At five o’clock he drove to the train station and waited for his family to arrive.

At 5:10 p.m. the bell rang as the Limited Express approached the platform. Hiro stepped out of his truck to greet Haruka, Kodai and his granddaughters. It was a clear night and the stars set in the sky above Hakusan-cho and a thumbnail moon tilted low over the station. Mist clung to the lips of the hills. Hiro saw little Seina first—short black hair and big eyes, the happiest child. Then Satsuki, a delicate and fragile child full of grace. They ran past the ticket-taker to grab and squeal at their grandfather.

“Ojisan, Ojisan,” they said.

He loved them. For the first time in months he smiled without faking it. When he looked up, Haruka stood in front of him and they bowed.

Hiro took them back to the house on small hilly roads. Seina and Satsuki whispered in the back about the dark night sky, the darkness of the country, and they pointed to stars.

“There are no stars in Yokohama,” Satsuki said.

“Yes, there are,” Haruka said. “They’re everywhere.”

“Well, you can’t see them at home,” Seina said. “They hide.”

“It’s easy to get lost in cities,” Hiro said. “Always bright and noisy and no space to see.”

“Yokohama is very nice, father, and nothing is lost but a few stars.”

Hiro shook his head. More was lost than stars. Was he the only one who thought so? Was he a pessimist or too nostalgic? Was he a sad, silly man feeling sorry for himself? He wished Haruka and her family could stay longer and that they could know each other in small, familiar, intimate ways again. He’d never paid attention to those things until she went away: evening tea, baths, having her ride in the car on errands, gardening. Of course children grow up, leave, and get busy with their own lives. He didn’t want children again. He wanted to know his daughter as an adult. He wanted to know how they were different and alike. He wanted to know what part of him was a part of her.

On New Year’s Eve day the children played in the falling snow. Their cheeks were blotchy and red, their eyes bright and shiny. The children had a bath, and they all ate nabe, sushi, tempura, drank hot sake and Sapporo beer. Haruka said she was tired. “We’ll be asleep before the temple bells ring in the new year,” she said.

“It’s tradition to go to the temple,” Hiro said.

“We’re not used to being outside and up late,” she said.

Hours passed. The house was quiet. Hiro watched people in other countries celebrating on the television—New York City, Rio de Janiero, Singapore. At seven minutes to midnight he heard the start of the temple bells in his own town. Haruka and her family slept and he didn’t wake them. He put on his coat, hat, gloves and boots and walked down under the bridge toward Sada Temple. There was another bell on the other side of town going off; deep, resonant gongs echoing in the night from the heavy, brass temple bells. It was lovely. He said aloud to himself, “It is almost 2005 and I will walk into it with my head held high.”

At Sada Temple children and their parents pulled back a large brass handle and pushed it to sound the bell. It was loud up close. He stood behind a hedge in the shadows and looked up at the sky. The snow had stopped and the bright thumbnail moon was high and white as bone. There was Orion, the Pleiades, the Big Dipper and so many planets and shining things above them. So much in this world.

He held his hands together in prayer against his chest and told himself everything he was grateful for. He was grateful for a new start, and for his house, and to go to sleep tonight under his down comforter after a hot bath. He was grateful for plum sake and plain sake, for hot and cold sake. He was grateful for Haruka, Kodai, Satsuki, and Seina. He was grateful to have loved.

He walked home on crunchy, icy roads. It was a windy night. Cold air blew into his house and rattled the windows. The wind whistled and rushed and whipped the laundry lines against the sliding glass door. His futon was hard, his back hurt, his shoulders hurt from laying on his side, his neck didn’t feel right when he tried to lie on his stomach. He thought about his teeth, his receding gums, the heart and lungs in his chest, the hair graying on the crown of his head, the wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. He feared the Tokai earthquake that Japan was waiting for. He wondered where he would go after he died, and then chastised himself for worrying and thinking such foolish thoughts. He laid on his futon on the floor and listened to the swirling night air trying to push through, knocking. He was wide awake at 2 a.m., 4 a.m., 6 a.m. He was aware of the thin walls and how little there was between him and the night world. He wanted company and he wanted to be taken care of and watched over. He wanted someone to love him.

Spring

Hiro Tanaguchi planted three varieties of tarot root in his garden in March—each got a long row of dirt, and sixty bulbs of each variety went into the ground. They sprouted shoots of bright green above the earth in April and shaped into leafy dark green spades in the summer months. They would be pulled out of the ground in October—an autumn food for roasting or eating in miso soup. Hiro walked into the woods where a tree stump grew shitake mushrooms from its side. He pulled off four, cooked them on his portable gas grill, and sprinkled soy sauce on top. He sat sipping green tea and eating mushrooms in the sun. He looked forward to dinnertime when he could drink sake and it would lull him into a sound sleep. If you could drink a lot, you were strong and healthy. Hiro was very strong when it came to drinking sake. He was in top form.

In April, Hiro put on his green knee-high rubber boots to plant rice in his field. By late April, the warm set in fast. The seasons were true in Hakusan-cho, but changed quickly from one to the next—from a cool fall day to a cold winter, from a warm spring evening to a humid swell of heat in the span of a night.

Outside, people rode bicycles, farmers tilled fields and planted food for fall harvests, futons aired on balconies, and the cherry blossoms were close to peaking and would soon sail off into the air and cover the ground like snow. After planting, Hiro went to a park where trees bloomed along a river. People sat on grassy banks eating sushi and bento and drinking sake. They sat under trees full of pink and purple and white flowers, and pink and red paper lanterns that lit up at dusk like glowing hearts in the night.

On May 9th, his seventy-second birthday, Hiro walked up the hill behind his house to the shrine. The dirt path was wide and wound up through bamboo trees and five-hundred-year-old cedars. The willowy bamboo trees created a lightness in the forest with their delicate, feather-like leaves and smooth, notched stalks. He could sleep in a place like this, and he thought maybe one day he should. Even though he was seventy-two, and he knew he was seventy-two, Hiro felt like he was fifty years old, maybe forty-five on good days, and with his fit body and young face, he didn’t look much over sixty. He had good health, strong legs, and taut skin for a man his age. He stood still in the path and looked around. No one else was there. He walked off the path, into the wood, knelt down, sat on the moist ground, and slowly lowered himself onto his back until he looked straight up along the bamboo stalks reaching high into the blue. “What a miracle. All of this,” he said, and laid his palms flat on the dirt and patted the earth.

When he rose, Hiro climbed the 400 steps to the temple. He wasn’t a religious man, but he lit an incense stick. He believed in something bigger than himself, but he didn’t know what to call it. He stuck the incense in the pot of sand, clapped his hands together and bowed, then waved the incense smoke toward the top of his head for the smoke to purify him.

Summer

When the heat came in late June it was humid and heavy. Hiro Tanaguchi’s house was old and the walls were packed mud and straw that kept pockets of the house cool, but the heat was still dense. Hiro kept a bowl of ice cubes and a towel on the floor next to his futon to cool his face and neck and wrists.

He woke in his room at 4 a.m. and lowered the baby bamboo rolls outside over the windows of the house for shade. He drank two cups of cold brown tea and ate onigiri with a sour plum in the middle, and a pear which he cut into cubes and ate with a toothpick. He sat on the tatami mat at his low dining table in front of a fan with the lights off. When he was done eating, he rinsed his hands in the kitchen sink and splashed his face with water. In the foyer he put on a wide-brimmed straw hat and slipped from his blue checkered slippers into his green rubber boots. In the car he slipped into his white canvas shoes and drove to his rice field, where, before getting out, he put on his green rubber boots again.

The sky was dark and had not yet begun to lighten. He waded through one row of rice, his boots sinking and sucking in the mud. He ran his hands along the tops of the green plants. The rice shifted and swayed in the wind. There were fields all around, and no noise but the shay-shaying of rice grasses, and the bullfrogs and cicadas and crickets still making their night noise, as if the whole town were one big organism with a pulse.

By the time Hiro walked the length of one row, trees and mountains and rooftops became dark silhouettes against the sky, and across the river to the left of Ieki Mountain there was a crack of light. A swarm of dragonflies hovered and glowed above like small flying angels. As a child Hiro was told dragonflies were ancestors come to check in every summer, so he treated them with respect—those beautiful creatures, so many of them, so many dead and gone from him. He stood in the middle of his rice field in the rising light of early morning. The sky was like the delicate paper of a shoji screen being torn, and behind it was sun and blue and clouds. Behind it was the world.

On East-West Dialogue

Translated from Arabic by Suneela Mubayi

I arrive at Lydd airport. At passport control, I present my passport through a small opening in the glass panel to the officer sitting behind it. We wait a little until first three security personnel arrive, then four others—two policemen and a policewoman, and an interrogator from the Israeli intelligence services accompanied by a young woman who remains with us during questioning, most likely for the same reason that male doctors summon a female nurse to remain in the room when a woman’s reproductive organs are examined. The intelligence services want to examine my private world, in an interview that will not take long, the interrogator assures me, if I “cooperate” with them. I have just arrived from Berlin. I stayed there approximately two months, participating in a project called the “West–Eastern Divan” that aims to foster dialogue between the East and the West. Why should the subject of East and West concern me? I let my thoughts flow like water over sand, spontaneously sneaking between the grains, so they may find an answer to the question.

Two issues. The first is my overwhelming love for light, which I go looking for every morning in the east, to shake off the weight of the night’s darkness. From there, I wander and accompany the sun, whenever possible, on its trajectory toward the west, where it disappears. Herein lies the second issue. When the sun disappears, darkness descends upon me, bringing with it a sense of loneliness, anxiety, insomnia, heat or cold, mosquitoes, and a perpetual desire to know what time it is and how much time remains for me to sleep. Some say that lying with one’s head pointed north and feet pointed south, or sometimes the opposite, helps one fall asleep. And so, upon my arrival at any place on earth, I rush to discover which directions are east and west, so as to determine where north and south lie. Then I turn my bed toward the latter as if it were a compass. Thus I get rid of whatever could technically hinder my sleep; now any other obstacle will be purely psychological.

Concerning East–West dialogue: I try again to push my thoughts between the grains of sand. And nothing happens, as if the water supply has suddenly been cut off. Drought and emptiness. I pose the question to myself again, time after time. In the end, I resort to science instead of nature. I recall what my nephew told me several years ago. In one of the medicine classes he was attending at university, the lecturer asked the students what they thought was the primary cause of lung cancer. Smoking, replied one of the students. The lecturer commented that that was the correct answer, then asked, what was the second most common cause of lung cancer? No one answered. “Smoking,” he responded. What was the third? Smoking. The fourth? Smoking. The fifth? Smoking. The sixth? Smoking. The seventh? Smoking. The eighth? Smoking. The ninth? Smoking. The top nine causes of lung cancer are smoking. It may be said that at least the top four causes of my participation in any activity whose subject is East–West dialogue are money. And if the amount were doubled, it could then be said that the top nine causes of my participation in activities of this kind are money.

Still, I should indicate that, whether male or female, one need not be particularly materialistic to think this way. It is simply that nothing else surpasses the importance of money in such a case, since, generally speaking, I do not know how to engage in dialogue, and am not even inclined to it as an idea. I know better how to write in silence; occasionally, I am tempted by the desire to engage in a monologue without being interrupted by anyone, or to listen to others engage in the same kind of monologue without interrupting them. I prefer that. And luckily, even though this good luck sometimes frightens me, when I arrived in Berlin as part of the West–Eastern Divan project, I discovered that the German writer who was supposed to be my partner in dialogue was not in Berlin, and that it was not clear when she would come or for how long she would stay. So I went on sitting alone in a sixth-floor apartment whose gray color and neutral furniture resembled those of airports. Usually, the clouds outside also covered the sky, making the view through the window seem like part of the apartment’s design. These clouds would begin to rain from time to time, which justified my remaining inside sitting on the couch more or less throughout my stay in Berlin. During this time, I continued to search for a minimum degree of happiness and to cling to it tightly. Of course I went out of the apartment a few times, mostly to get food. The first time I did so, the owner of a hair salon with no customers on the street on which I was living accompanied me outside so she could direct me to the nearest grocery store. It was called Rewe, which was written on the storefront placard in yellow outlined by two red lines; or the opposite, I forgot which moments after she told me. Red or yellow double lines, between which the word Rewe was stretched out in yellow or red. I walked. I crossed street after street, beneath a load of anxiety that gripped me after half a minute of searching. Where are you, Rewe? I know you are here, somewhere . . . Reeeeeewwweee?

Rewe. I walk through the door and the warm smell of the place floods my nose. Actually, I do not know what I want to buy, and as soon as I do know what I want, I do not know where to find it on the shelves. So I wander around the shelves continuously, repeatedly, as a lack of self-confidence grows inside me, especially in front of the calm, white dairy refrigerator. All the products on the shelves see me hesitate before them, which betrays my unfamiliarity with them and my foreignness in this place. I look at them, move my eyes from shelf to shelf, trying in my mind to create a meal constituted from all these products. I avoid thinking of pasta, which could only aggravate my sense of loneliness and poverty.

Veal with apples, tomatoes, onions, salt, pepper and oil, with pasta on the side, and maybe a green salad as well, with lettuce and tomato. I also have to buy vinegar and I want some wine. For breakfast tomorrow, cheese, eggs, bread and butter, and for dinner there will most likely be leftovers from today’s meal. I’m bored. I look at my shopping basket, which is now filled with things to the point of irritation. Ultimately, everything I have bought and will buy in the next fifteen years is boring. And in Rewe it also becomes colorless, as the white light that floods the store makes the products look completely pale. I head to the cash register and stand there like an imbecile, scanning the face of the lady who works behind it, looking for a smile, following her as she scans what I have purchased with the barcode reader. If only she would look at me and smile, even a tiny smile. Or if she would just look at me. The beeping of the items as she scans them over the screen is unbearable. She must hear it every day, from morning to evening, for days and years on end. Dear heavens. She does not smile at me. I walk back home. I climb up to the sixth floor. I enter the kitchen and when I begin to take the things out from the bags the smell of Rewe floods my nose again, just as I suddenly realize that I am missing love to a monstrous degree.

The following day it begins to rain even more heavily than it had in the previous three days. I continue to follow the movements of the car’s wipers, engaged in wiping the rain off the front windshield, as we make our way to a small literary festival being held in a large house on the banks of a lake near Berlin. During the festival, my face begins to hurt from so much smiling. But in this harsh world, it is nice for one to smile at one’s fellow human; do you understand, Ms. Rewe? The only two breaks from smiling are when I eat some sausages and when a journalist asks me if I, as an Arab woman, am facing death threats from my family.

I find myself unable to resist the idea, and begin to think about who in my family might kill me. It could not possibly be my father, since he is eternally busy and would not have time even to listen to the idea. My mother only cares about the plants around the house, but in her free time she would surely mourn my death. My eldest brother would not be able to leave town, as it is now the almond harvesting season and he is the only one left in the family who can supervise this operation, since his eldest son broke his leg. My second eldest brother is a sad story; he distanced himself from the family years ago because of family disputes. Possibly he would call whoever finally kills me to congratulate him, since this is what he has started doing lately: calling family members to congratulate them or offer condolences according to the occasion, but nothing more. How sad it is, and how much I have missed him. My sisters are out of the question, as they are nonviolent and completely reject the use of violent methods, or at least I hope so. Other than that, I have two paternal uncles. One, whom I have not seen for fifteen years, and whose children I have not seen for twenty, is in Houston, Texas. None of them would even be able to recognize me in order to carry out the murder. They would have killed the director of the DAAD, who is standing a meter away from me, especially as she is not blonde and her hair is curly like mine. My second uncle is very sweet but also somewhat strange; I have the feeling that he would not do it. There remain his four sons. The eldest is also eccentric and does not like people at all; he will not even meet them. The second is impossible. I categorically refuse to let him get involved in my murder, as he has the worst political views imaginable. That leaves two, and in reality they are my only two friends from that side of the family. I prefer the younger one. He is still a university student. Right now, he must be enjoying his summer vacation after finishing his exams. It would most likely be possible for him to carry out the task. Maybe the middle son of my eldest brother, who, to tell the truth, is my most beloved family member, would come with him. He is a wonderful, crazy person, and owns a bar as crazy as he is. He is an even better candidate than my cousin for the task of killing me, as it would be a shame for the latter to destroy his future like that, after having successfully made it to his fourth year of studying dentistry; which is, for those who don’t know, one of the most boring subjects you can study, to the point that it makes you want to commit suicide. However, I think that this cousin would not let my middle nephew kill me all by himself, as they are very close friends. He would come along, at least to entertain him on the way here. And since they will not have been informed of the mission far enough in advance, they will not be able to obtain a gun inside Germany. They will pass by Rewe and buy a kitchen knife, then head directly here. For my part, when I see them, I will stand up to embrace them, since I know nothing of their intentions. But as I draw closer to them, I will notice the anger and harshness in their eyes, of which I know they are capable, but not for a day did I think they would direct it at me. Ever. I will be startled. I will ask them, in a sad, scared, trembling voice: “What’s the matter? What’s the matter?”

They will say: We’ve come to kill you.
            —Why?
            —Because you’re a terrible disappointment.
            —Me? How?
            —What are you doing with these people, smiling at them like an idiot? And how can you let this idiot ask you a question as idiotic as he is? You’re free to accept being insulted like this, but why do you accept an insult directed at us, your family, as well?
            — . . .
            —What even brought you here?
            —There is this project that has to do with dialogue between the East and the West.
            —What is this rubbish?
            —Nothing serious, I just needed some money.
            —You’re insane! (My nephew shouts.) Money?! You could’ve asked me or my grandfather (i.e., my father) for however much money you wanted!
            —But you know me, and how I need to be financially independent in order to liberate myself.
            —Oh, we get it. Yes, we get it. Now will you now get it yourself?

I bow my head. They say they will let me reflect for a bit. They will wait for me behind that distant tree. Suddenly, I remember the journalist who asked me the question. With sad eyes, I turn toward him and point in the direction of the tree. There, do you see that tree, that one? My nephew and cousin are standing there with a knife. They might pounce on me at any moment and slaughter me. What do you advise me to do?

Other than that, there was no noticeable opportunity to participate in any kind of dialogue between East and West. With the writer with whom I was supposed to conduct such a dialogue, half a dialogue may have occurred. At the start of the trip from damn I forget the name of the city to Cologne, she said to me that when she came to visit me in Palestine, I should not expect that she would spend the whole day sitting and chatting with my mother. Actually, and I say this with severe embarrassment, I felt relieved after she told me this, as my mother likes neither people nor conversation, and has made it clear to me, ever since I entered nursery school, that none of my friends were welcome in the house, even those I was close to to the point of suffocation. But what is this whole obsession with my family?

After a few days, my English brother-in-law, who also happened to be one of my dearest friends, died, something that I can only blame on such obsession.

On my way back from the airport after the funeral, I walked into a small bar that gave the impression that it was frequented only by an elderly crowd from the working and unemployed classes. I ordered a Jameson. The bartender did not know what that was, so I ordered a J&B. They didn’t have it. What is there? Red Label and Jack Daniels. Do you have a cigarette? Let me look. The bartender looked and looked, and two elderly men also began looking. Then, finally, he remembered. One of the customers had once left behind a pack of unfiltered Gitanes. Never mind. We kept on thanking and bidding each other goodbye for about five minutes, and I never went into that bar again. I think that was my last contribution to the dialogue between East and West.

Of course, there are a few old friends of mine in this city from the East. I do not know how much the project that I am participating in aims to facilitate dialogue between the East and the East. But what can I do, this is what happened! And I am not a racist who will only engage in dialogue with Westerners.

In the context of East–East dialogue, I meet an old friend of mine from Jerusalem, a smart and handsome photographer. I believe that many of my lady friends concur with this description. “How’s the photography? Do you have any new projects?” I ask him, taking the initiative. He responds that he has not photographed anything for a long time.
—What are you doing now?
—I’m a security guard at a car park.

Suddenly, I see his handsome face shrink. Then I notice the couch on which he has curled up into a tiny ball; you can hardly distinguish his small head, which has turned into a single black spot in a place full of immigrants, of whom he is one. The reality of the misery of migration frightens me to the extent that I do not call him again, nor does he bother himself with calling me.

Finally, there is my friend Franz Biberkopf, the only one who has continued to visit me from time to time and to encourage me to go out and walk around in some of Berlin’s streets and neighborhoods. Tiegelzestrasse, Rosenthaler Platz, Rosenthalerstrasse, Alsacestrasse, Invalidenstrasse, Ackerstrasse, Charlottenburg, Neukölln, Schöneberg, Tempelhof, Potsdam, Spandau, Friedrichsfelde, Karlhorst, Wannsee (the neighborhood I live in), Gronerstrasse, Alexanderplatz, Lutherengerstrasse, Friedrich-Karlstrasse, Brunnenstrasse, Karlstrasse, Oranienburgerstrasse, Hackescher Markt (which has granted me some love at different times and in different situations), and the zoo.

At the entrance to the zoo a young man sits in a cage, selling tickets with a picture of a laughing monkey on them. In reality, though, what prompted me to enter the zoo was not the monkey, but rather the lion and the gazelles. I imagined I would find the lion in the open-air section that a sign indicated was designated for him, the lioness, and their two cubs. After searching carefully among the brown rocks, I was finally able to pick out the lioness and the two cubs, but not the lion. A slight pain struck me, the kind that afflicts someone when they go somewhere specifically to see someone, but do not fully know the extent of their desire to see this person until they do not find him. A slight pain. I continued my tour for a little while, without really concentrating. Then I passed by a small building with glass boxes on its sides that contained small animals resembling cats, squirrels, mice, bats, and the like, many of them. Suddenly, from several meters away, I saw him. He was lying down by himself behind the bars that were there instead of glass, on a patch no larger than two or three meters square, if my idea of a meter’s length is correct. In front of the bars was a throng of children, each accompanied by at least one parent. When I came to stand beside them, the lion turned to me and lowered his eyelids, blinking at me. I in turn responded by lowering my eyelids, blinking back. After that, we began directing long gazes at one another, gazes that I was not familiar with and that I would not dare to give or consent to receive from anyone in the world. And I do not know why, but it was as if the monstrosity of this wild beast somehow seemed close to my monstrous solitude. I wished that I could extend my hand through the cage and stroke him, but the large piece of raw meat thrown beside him prevented me from doing so, so we contented ourselves with gazing and blinking at one another. After the waves of visitors had renewed themselves several times, I became somewhat afraid that the guards at the zoo would take notice of us, so I moved away from him, leaving him behind me in the cage. I did not look back. Sadness had completely overwhelmed me by the time I arrived in the deer section, so I did not bother to think about them as more than meat to eat for dinner in a restaurant on Wrangelstrasse. What a pathetic attempt to express my affection to him, he who had touched me deeply. Well, there are also the mines in the area around Bochum, which also touched me deeply. Dark tunnels that extend for hundreds of miles within the bowels of the earth, under calm, clean buildings and streets. Good luck to whoever comes back up from there.

Other than that, not a single being infringed on my silence as I sat alone and wrote, day after day, on the sixth floor at number twelve on a miserable street whose name no one cares to know. And so the days in Berlin went by until the day came for me to depart, onboard a morning flight to Lydd.

I go to sleep that night at three in the morning and wake up at four to wait for the taxi that will take me to the airport at five, except that it does not come until six, and my flight is in less than an hour. But we arrive, and I am dripping with sweat. I head to the security gates. Three officers are standing near them. One of them treats me in an openly degrading way. I ask her to speak to me politely, but she tells me that this is how she speaks and that I must comply with her orders. I refuse to pass through the gates and her filthiness increases. Then I look at her calmly and say: “You don’t even know what the things you’re doing remind me of. Do you know what my nationality is?” I hold up my Israeli passport in front of her face. She falls silent. Another guard comes forward and speaks courteously. He conducts the security check quickly and everything is over. On the way to the plane, I reflect upon the whole episode. I am Palestinian, have brown skin and completely Arab features. Maybe the security guard sees that, or maybe this is simply how she talks. But my Israeli passport suddenly makes me worthy of different treatment—courtesy and respect. Well then, what should I prefer? For six million Palestinians or Arabs to be killed at the hands of the Nazis so that I might get better treatment, or for them not to be killed, and consequently for me to accept being treated atrociously? I do not succeed in reaching a decision.

This is everything I was able to recall for the Israeli intelligence, except of course for the episode with the security officer at the airport in Berlin. The interrogator concluded the dialogue between us by asking if I had a Visa or MasterCard. I answered no, after which I was released, until the next time.

Ducks on the Pond: Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding

New York, NY: Little, Brown and Co., 2011. 528 pages. $25.99.

In the late 1990s, I moonlighted as a slap-hitting second baseman for the Kenyon College Lords, one of the most historically inept sports teams in NCAA history. I came into Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, a first novel about baseball at a liberal arts college, with suspicion. I’m no longer as charmed by those years spent shagging flies in the cold Ohio spring and studying late into the night as I once was. My experience at Kenyon now seems fairly interchangeable with the experiences of anyone who attended some other small respected college. To my surprise, Harbach’s novel made me appreciate that time in my life once again not because of the similarities between his novel and my experience but because he has crafted a world that manages to be both familiar and unique.

The Art of Fielding does not limit itself to being a “baseball book” or a collegiate bildungsroman. Though it centers on Henry Skrimshander, a slick-fielding shortstop cut from the Ozzie Smith mold, as he pursues the NCAA record for consecutive errorless games, the novel expands out from the diamond to address the multitude of small dramas unfolding at Westish College, “a small, venerable but . . . slightly decrepit liberal arts school on the western shore of Lake Michigan.”

Harbach surrounds Henry with a well-wrought cast of characters, each of whom gets to tell his or her story through close third-person narrations. There is Mike Schwartz, Henry’s best friend and the team’s catcher, who is facing an uncertain future after being rejected by every law school he applied to; Owen Dunne, Henry’s gay, racially-mixed roommate, who begins a relationship with the previously heterosexual president of Westish, Guert Affenlight; and there is Affenlight’s daughter, Pella, who returns to the nest at twenty-three to escape her marriage.

While Harbach has received due praise for writing a novel that explores the nuances of male relationships, it is the character of Pella who ties the novel together. Pella travels to Westish in the midst of “the kind of emphatic gesture she was famous for,” carrying only a wicker bag from a beach trip taken nine months prior. She’s left her husband David, an architect ten years her senior who convinced Pella to marry him when she was still in boarding school. Pella has missed out on precisely the experience that a school like Westish sells to its students and their deep-pocketed parents—four transformative years of intense study, character-building, and a sprinkle of experimentation before adulthood. Unlike the men in the book, who are sheltered by Westish from the “real world” (pardon the phrase, but what else to call it?), Pella comes to Westish to recover from the bruises of that world.

Harbach is at his best when he captures the breakdown of Pella’s marriage to the controlling David and her own diminishing sense of self in a beautiful scene about unexplained desire. He writes:

Once, late at night, not long after she’d moved to San Francisco, she’d really, really wanted to cut up a slightly mushy avocado and rub the pit in her palms. It was an ecstasy-type desire, though she hadn’t taken ecstasy. She made David drive her to three supermarkets to find the right avocado. She told him she was craving guacamole—a more acceptable urge, if just barely. Luckily he’d fallen asleep while she was rolling the slimy pit in her palms, pretending to make guacamole. In the morning, having buried the chips and yellow mush in the trash, she claimed to have eaten it all. She still had no idea how to make guacamole.

Harbach encapsulates all of Pella’s sadness in a scene unexpected and entirely authentic. She is embarrassed by her desire, tells a white lie to avoid explaining herself, and yet she is dependent on David. She is trapped. When he falls asleep, Pella is relieved because he will not witness this passionate moment with the pit of an avocado, and the fact that she can’t share that with him is all the proof we need to know the marriage was doomed.

Westish proves itself capable of understanding Pella even when she doesn’t understand herself. She rebuilds her life without the help of her father, who is wrapped up in his sexual experimentations with Owen. A beauty who’s put on extra weight, Pella’s first act is to trek through the early morning snow to the college pool and begin regaining her strength. Harbach, who peppers the book with references to “masculine thinkers”—the stoics, Emerson, Melville—suggests those supposedly male values apply equally to Pella. Pella knows one must first understand her body and then work on the mind. Unlike the men in the book, who romanticize these philosophies as some sort of creed to live by, for Pella they are simply common sense.

Both Henry and Mike are behind Pella on this curve of self-realization. The men in the novel must first realize they are fallible and then confront those failures. Henry loses the ability to throw a baseball accurately and comes to understand that striving for perfection in a game where even the best hitters are successful only three times out of ten is flawed ambition. Mike must accept that Yale Law is not where he belongs, that even though he tells us that, “Those who cannot do, coach,” he is more coach than talent. And Guert Affenlight, at his advanced age, learns to accept and then act on his sexual desire, which is not a failure but taboo, considering the circumstances. But Pella has already embraced her imperfections. Though she is the most “broken” character in The Art of Fielding, she is also its wisest.

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