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A Wound in the Jewish War: From Cohen’s Lost Manuscript

The airport. A description of the airport. Yes, I recognize this. It’s an airport. How pleasant to recognize it from mere words. How real it is, the marble, the neon, the bad ball pens. Or is this the bank? No, it’s the airport.

There was one seat left on the plane to Tel Aviv. Nothing can stop me. My luck has changed. The girls in uniform smile at my airport style. I hate to leave them all behind. This man’s travelling. I am thin again and loose. I suntan myself from within.

I cruised the racks of cards and books. I bought an envelope and filled it with all the drachmas I had in my pocket and mailed it back to the island with a note which began Dearest One. Without her blessing my freedom was precarious.

I had seen a man and a man had seen me. I had seen him move to watch me. He was young, thin, moustached, light-footed, grey-suited, nor did his business seem to be flying. I had seen him watching carefully as I sat on the marble floor in a marble corner waiting for flight news. I supposed I was too old to be sitting on the floor and my leather bag which I sat beside in a most friendly manner was altogether too old. My bag was the nearest thing I had to a dog. I might have been patting it.

Now as I left the airport post office he intercepted me. He was very light-footed and I was not so much stopped as my movement diverted. He showed me something in his wallet and politely explained, Security. Please follow me. I followed him, not to an office as I expected, but into a Men’s Room, the nearest public Men’s Room. I said to myself, This is the fine edge of a humiliation.

We stopped at the sinks. The mirrors were bright. One policeman was shaving. At the urinals another policeman was pissing. There were no civilians in this Men’s Room. I hope I don’t have to undress. I hope my courage is not tested.

-Passport.

-Amessos.

-How is it you speak Greek?

-I live here. I am a Greek-lover.

Must we endure this tedious anecdote? It illumines nothing. It merely happened. Your organ was not smashed across the porcelain with a billy-club. We who have observed the extraction of ten fingernails resent these luxuries.

-Why are you leaving us, O Greek-lover?

We terminate this anecdote as of now. Although it is well-meaning and not deliberately false, it is already too inaccurate and flat to be of any value to either the reader or the writer.

-I’m going to Israel. The war.

We were waiting to be searched before boarding the aircraft. I could see that certain people had recognized me. No one I wanted to fuck but some I wanted to look at naked, especially a girl whose eyes are looking at me now, suddenly she’s so kind and lovely.

Their names are Asher and Margolit. They are standing in front of me in the line. We introduced ourselves. They said they knew who I was. Get me out of here. He was earnest, bearded, muscular, excited, blue fanatic eyes. He surprised me by saying, I’d like to be your friend, if it’s possible. Shit, I have to take this man seriously. The cities are blacked out, it’s hard to get around, would I like to stay with them that night? Thank you. Let my seats be far from them so I can sit alone. No pressure coming from Margolit. She is counting time by her own slow clock.

-Did you tell him your other name? Margolit asked him.

-No. I told him the only name I have.

The story is that Asher is American, a convert to Judaism, a citizen of Israel, circumcised last year. So he had his wound in the Jewish war, he had paid in adult sin and blood to be numbered among us. It was in his jeans but he carried the mutilation across his shoulder like a duffel-bag, and peeking over his load of suffering was the crazy grin of a Jesus freak, a California mystic screaming, God is our History. These are people who believe in words. Should we have let them look at our Bible? People like me wrote the Bible. We did it out of malice and despair.

We land in Tel Aviv, Asher checks in at the military desk and shows them his deferment. He has diabetes. I am in my myth home but I have no proof and I cannot debate and I am in no danger of believing myself. We wait for a friend’s car. It is very dark. All the headlights are painted blue. Speaking no Hebrew I enjoy my legitimate silence. We drove slowly on the darkened highways listening to news of the war on the radio. I didn’t ask them to interpret the solemn voices. I have homes here and there, I never understand the languages where I have my homes.

It was two in the morning when we came to the house of Margolit’s parents in Herzliya, a suburb of Tel Aviv. That was Judith’s window, her younger sister. Oh there is a younger sister. We threw pebbles at the window.

I stand up in the morning and I give praise to the lord who has delivered sunlight into the world and the beams of his star against my skin. I am the army of a thousand men but he is one forever and forever. Here I am, dear father. You pour out my heart into your world. The snow in Montreal.

We threw pebbles at her window, or did we call up? I never lie to you.

Judith came down and opened the door. Please let me into her nightgown. Her mother woke up, a tall handsome jewess from Finland. We sat around the dining-room table waiting for the water to boil. Judith’s dressing-gown parted for an instant and her warm sleepy thighs sent forth a lonely feast all laid for no one, and drew a curtain over it with a gesture of automatic modesty.

We travellers had come looking for the war, an airplane filled with us. Judith and her mother didn’t know where the war was. They had tried to volunteer for things but all they had managed to do was plant flowers on a kibbutz a few afternoons ago. It was rather disturbing feeling so untouched by it, and listening to sad news on the radio every hour. They still went to the beach every day. The war was somewhere else.

-Did you come to sing for the troops? they asked.

-No, I came to gobble up the younger sister.

-I didn’t think so, Asher said. He thought I had come for the same reasons as he and Margolit. To be there. Not to stand idly by our brother’s blood. Perhaps to recover from the vanities of the singing profession. It is becoming clear that neither the night nor the family will marry me and Judith in the guestroom or behind the house or meeting accidentally on the way to the bathroom. I guess I’ll say goodnight. Thank you for the hospitality. Myself, I do not like male strangers in the house, but you are obviously on a higher spiritual rung than me. I notice that Asher refers to God from time to time. He has indications of what God wants us to do. All of us look at him strangely as if to say, This lunatic seems to be taking it all seriously.

Directions to the bus stop. Waiting alone for the bus. The first moment without people. Just me and my brown leather bag. The independent observer.

I checked into the Gad Hotel after a bus ride along the sea during which I blessed myself for being alone and not with you.*1 The Gad Hotel is bed for soldiers and hookers, Hayarkon Street near Frischman. I was given room eight.

Now Aleece was present in the small office when I signed my name and gave my number. I did not know what her function was but I knew she was connected to the hotel. There was something absent and mechanical in her presence. [She had] stainless steel legs. They were extremely tall, shapely but austere and muscular, and they soared above her spikes like the steel scaffolding of a bridge. She was a sexual construction. I have touched her holes and looked into her clear blue eyes of panic and I am not certain she is not a robot. Her hair was blond and perfect but too thin, as if she had neglected to renew it at the inventor’s. She said she was from Amsterdam, but her speech was not perfected and she spoke no language very well. She was the one before the inventor’s masterpiece, when his energy was lust, and he was still trying to establish in the gross world his ideal sexual fantasy. This is a strange flower in a small hotel.

I climbed the stairs with the key and my brown leather bag and I entered room eight.*2 I heard Aleece mounting the steps behind me. Room eight. My own room in a warm country. A bed, a table, a chair. Perhaps I could become a poet again. Aleece was making noises in the hall. I could see the ocean in the late afternoon outside the window. I should look at the ocean but I don’t feel like it. The interior voice said, you will only sing again if you give up lechery. Choose. This is a place where you may begin again. But I want her, wuf, wuf. Please let me have her. Throw yourself upon your stiffness and take up your felt pen.

She makes noise in the hallway

Come in

She comes in

Out to the balcony

Stand behind her

Say, Lean over

Up with her skirt

Drool in my hand

to open it up

Watch the sunset

over her hair

Are you connected

to the hotel the chambermaid

No, I’m the one

you are writing about

the one who sails down

the pillars of blood

from brain to isthmus

and lost in your unhanded trousers

I cause myself to come true

How noble I felt after writing these lines. Aleece had gone away. The emanations of my labor had cleared the hallway.

Skip Notes

*1 It’s not entirely clear to whom Cohen’s occasional slips into the second person are addressed, though Suzanne is the likeliest candidate.

*2 Like the Greek landowner Cohen meets on the ship in the previous section, Aleece is a character familiar to readers of Death of a Lady’s Man, where a version of this episode appears. It’s as if the parts of the manuscript that seem the tawdriest, and which reflect most poorly on him, were the ones Cohen wanted to publish.

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