Rhyming Life and Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

pages you have written, and she is a pleasant and almost pretty girl, only not really attractive.
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    To one side, in one of the back rows, sits a boy – no, it’s a man: gaunt, slightly shrivelled, he looks like a monkey that has lost most of its fur and just has some tufts left on its sunken cheeks, a shabby man in his sixties, with a thinning crest of hair like an anaemic cockscomb. He could be, let’s say, a low-ranking activist who has been thrown out of the section office because he was caught passing confidential papers to an agent from another party, since when he has eked out a living by giving private maths lessons.
    Arnold Bartok would be a good name for him. A month ago he was sacked from his part-time job sorting parcels in a private courier company. His shirt collar is discoloured by sweat and grime, histrousers hang loose from his hips, he hardly ever bothers to wash his shirts or his underwear, and his sandals are worn out. Arnold Bartok spends his evenings composing memos addressed to ministers, journalists and members of the Knesset, writes letters to the editors of various newspapers, pens urgent messages to the State Comptroller or the President, and he suffers terribly from piles. Specially in the early hours.
    He lives with his mother, Ophelia, whose legs are paralysed. The two of them sleep under the same sheet on a worn-out mattress in their room, which is no more than a windowless cubicle that was once his father’s little laundry. Since his father died the iron shutters of the laundry have been permanently closed and secured with a padlock, and the only entrance is at the rear, from the yard, through a warped plywood door. The toilets are in a corrugated-iron lean-to at the other end of the yard, but they are out of reach for the disabled widow, who is dependent on an enamel chamber pot that Arnold Bartok has to put under her every hour or two and then go out and empty in the cracked toilet bowl in the lean-to, and wash underthe tap between the dustbins. Black spots have appeared where the enamel of the chamber pot is worn or chipped, so that even after being washed and scrubbed and disinfected with bleach the pot always looks dirty.
    For years now his mother has refused to address him by his proper name, Arnold, but maliciously insists on calling him Araleh or Arke, and when he remonstrates, Stop it, Mama, that’s enough, you know very well that my name is Arnold, his paralysed mother, coquettish as a spoilt little girl, cries exultantly from behind her glasses: What, again? What happened now? What’s the matter with you, Araleh? Why you so angry with me? You want maybe to beat me a little? Like what your sainted father, God rest his soul, used to do? Is that what you want, Araleh? You want to beat me, huh?
    Is Arnold Bartok the wretch who has just chuckled or sniggered again, for the third or fourth time? Is it deliberate mockery, the Author asks himself, or jealousy? Or disgust? Or anger? Or perhaps this is the abstract, depersonalised sound of suffering itself?
    The Author tries to imagine Arnold Bartok, in nothing but his sweaty underwear, at a quarter tothree at night in the damp, mouldy laundry, pulling the smelly chamber pot out from underneath his mother’s body, then panting with the effort as he turns her on her front to wipe her clean and fit her with a dry pad.
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    And so, when he is finally invited to speak, the Author appears at his best, and replies to the audience’s questions patiently, modestly and seriously. Occasionally he uses simple analogies or examples from everyday life. He takes his time as he expounds the difference between explaining and telling a story. He cites in passing Cervantes, Gogol, Balzac, and even Chekhov and Kafka. He tells a few anecdotes that reduce the audience to laughter. He launches a few sly digs at the literary critic, while he praises his presentation and thanks him for the profundity of his observations. As he speaks,