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You think you cute,
so you piss on the floor.
Be a hero
and shit on the ceiling.’- Address on Cleveland Greyhound Bus station men's convenience
Instructor: What are ethics?
Student: Ummm . . . ethics is like when someone wants to kill you and you go to kill him first.- Classroom Vignettes, political science seminar, recorded by Professor Don Peretz
‘ History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.'
- Stephen Dedalus, in James Joyce's Ulysses
Where am I?
Who am I?
What am I?Your name is Avram Blok. Your father is Baruch. Your mother, Shoshanah. Conception, Budapest, in the ruins of war. Birth, aboard the immigrant ship, Irma Klein, en route from Trieste to Palestine. Your first utterance, a strangled cry, as usual. (Do we have to labour the obvious?) Education: Jerusalem, kindergarten, primary, secondary. Army service, from 1965. Your army number: 958633. Your identity card number: 3425648. Your health insurance number: 876432. The size of your shoes: Nine. The size of your collar: 40. Inside leg: 78 centimetres. Colour of hair: Brown (or was until depilation due to natural causes in coma; no carcinogenic evidence). Colour of eyes: Brown. Present location: Bed 15, Ward 6, T-t State Mental Hospital. Present condition: wheelchair case. Distinguishing features: A long record of chronic malingering. GET ON YOUR FEET, SLACKER! We don't have to tell you all this, do we? You know the whole fucking schmeer. Faking innocence as usual, eh, Yul Brynner? Lying there quiet as a corpse, offering nothing, evading your responsibilities...
The Man With No Past.
A likely story.WE KNOW HOW TO DEAL WITH YOUR KIND!
Contours of the bed, line, white, metal bars, tubes entering the body, the left nostril, the nose, a linkage to the outside world, part of which can be wheeled down ruts of tiles, the walls of the corridors, dull blue-grey, plaster bulging like random braille symbols - Remember the Rorschach, brothers! clues for the moronity of science, the limits of organized imagination, order in the swirl, meaning in chaos, desire under the elms, teahouses in august moons, decembrist rebellions, armies on the march, Uzzymandias, remember the alarm-O, sirens in the night, blackouts at noon, the winter sun in the crosslights of barred windows, rumbling vehicles without, the sound of thunder, waterworks from the sky, laughter and tears, jam sandwiches, the old schoolhouse door, benches at dawn, wellington boots at mourning, fusillades over graves, cantankerous cantors, the bar mitzvah boy, the hand writing, the open Book, examinations failed, certificates passed, forms of progress, urine and faecal, the little jar of piss, the phial of crap, whitecoats to the rescue, prick of the needle, a tumescence renewed, shades of Nurse Nili, the philosopher stoned, the unknown soldier, absent friends, keening relatives, clerks from the ministry, army Charlie chaplains, prick of the needle, the wheeled chair, comrades in misfortune, sunflower seeds underfoot, grinning nutcase faces, One of Us, Return to Sender, Address Unknown, tumescence again, rub-a-dub-dub, laxation certified, a self-expressed toilet graffito:
KILL THE DOCTORS!! FREE AVRAM BLOK!
A mere drop in the ocean . . .
Anybody there??
- Good morning. My name is Yakin. I am to try to help you to recover the hidden power of language. Speaking in tongues, ha, ha, ha. I believe it's all there, just reserved for better times. I teach deaf and dumb persons, but your case should be simpler. We are dealing with memory, which is like sex, no? heh, heh, heh. Once practised, never completely erased.
We shall begin with pictures:
Chicken Sabbath Candlestick Armoured command car
- Afternoon, habibi. My name is Kimchi. I am from the Department of Social Services. My aim here is to guide you back into the ambience of society, blah, blah, blah. For three years you have been, how shall we say, in orbit, in the stratosphere ... But while you were up there, to and behold, the State has been paying you five hundred shekels a month health insurance benefit! How about that? Now, mind you, if we were paying you in dollars, you'd be in clover, but you know how it is, in this climate, money rots, nothing's constant. Fiduciary corrosion. Very painful. Nevertheless, five hundred shekels a month, a total of eighteen thousand shekels; with tax deductions and all that goes with the empire, protecting us against our Enemies, Goddamn them, that leaves you with about ten grand. At the going rate, if you can get off your ass, comrade, you might clear eighteen hundred dollars. Am I the bearer of Good News or am I not, Goddamit? Let's shake hands on it and remember: the State is not just a mountain of shit, boy - we look after our own! You don't understand? Well, no wonder. What you lack is a true sense of history...
HISTORY, MAN! Bend your ears: on May 17, 1977, Menachem Begin of the opposition Unity Party became the Prime Minister of the State of Israel. Born on August 16, 1913, in Brest Litovsk on the River Bug, then in Poland, he had been active in the `Beitar' youth movement founded by one Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky, a charismatic diaspora politician who believed the Jewish State would come about in Palestine not by wheeler-dealing in the back rooms of super-powers but by an act of rebellion and conquest, by fire and sword: `In Blood and Fire Judaea Fell; In Blood and Fire Judaea Shall Rise Again,' his followers, and Menachem Volfovitch Begin among them, sang. Menachem Volfovitch wished to join the irregular soldiers of Jabotinsky's National Military Organization-the `Irgun Tsva'i Le'umi'-in Palestine, which was fighting for Jewish sovereignty by means of violent retaliation against Arab acts of terror and violence in their own rebellion against the Jewish settlers and the British Mandate Government. However, now hear this, schmendrick - Menachem Volfovitch was delayed in his Palestinian anabasis by the German army's invasion of Poland in 1939, which precipitated him, as a Pole and a Jew, east, towards the Russians, who arrested the poor bugger and sentenced him to eight years in a Siberian labour camp as an `agent of British Imperialism'.
Meanwhile, you son of a she dog's spittle, down south, in Egyptland, a number of young army officers were muttering ominously under their moustaches about the onerousness of British rule and eyeing, as the war progressed, the growing success of General Rommel in the Western deserts with more than a smidgin of favour. Among them were two firebrands, Captains Gamal Abd-el Nasser and Anwar el-Sadat, a quiet youth from a village in Upper Egypt. In February 1942 the British humiliated the Egyptian King, Farouk, who had grown so fat he could hardly waddle from one twelve-course beano to another, by forcing upon him at gunpoint a Prime Minister of their own choosing.
The young officers, despising the corrupt King, but despising the British even more, were inclined to welcome the approach of a Nazi agent, Herr Eppler, alias Hussein Jaafer, who had crossed the desert in a jeep cunningly daubed with British markings with a moneybelt of fake UK fivers. Ach, Himmel! he was rumbled, however, by an Egyptian dancer named Hikmat Fahmi, who shopped the lot to British Intelligence.
Meanwhile, in Siberia - are you still listening? - young Begin, who had exhausted both his Soviet interrogators and the common criminals in the Gulag with filibusters on the subject of Zionism, Blood and Fire and the Redemption of the Homeland he had as yet not laid one eye on, was released suddenly as a result of a treaty between Yosske Stalin and the exiled Polish General Sikorski. Menachem later described the aftermath thus: `We proceeded on our way to freedom. On foot, in goods trains, in passenger trains, clinging to the sides. Southwards, southwards... The Caspian port of Krasnovodsk... the small Persian port of Pahlevi... We crossed the mighty mountains. Babylon. Bagdad... And here was Transjordan. Our heritage... The eastern bank of the Jordan - Eretz Israel. The military convoy stopped. We rested. I left the automobile, waded a little way into the grass, and drank in the odour of the fields of my Homeland…'
Jasmine. Honeysuckle. And myrrh. And frankincense. And saffron. And calamus. And cinnamon. And fresh dew. And pomegranates. And lemon trees. And other assorted Jaffa produce. And pine. And coniferous fir. And vineyards. And fields of barley. And wheat. And cornoil. And sunflower seeds. And cashew nuts. And fistuk halabi. And roast chestnuts. And salted peanuts. And fresh bagels. And ice cream on the bustle of Dizengoff Street. And falafel. And turkey schnitzel. And blintzes. And hamburgers in stale pitta. And kebabs. And shawarma. And grilled hearts. And grease spattering on whispering embers. And softened asphalt at the peak of summer. And rubber tyres burning during political turmoil. And the sweating armpits of men and women hanging on to straps in buses. And the diesel fumes, of buses, trucks, trains. And tar on the packed beach. And sulphur, from the pride of industry. And petrol, from an excess of napalm deposited upon our Enemies ...- But Avram Blok was still engaged on his long day's journey out of night and fog ... By day, wheeled about the dull grey corridors of the asylum by nurses or his fellow inmates, by night, the long march through the nuclear wasteland of the holocaust of his choice. The earth, fused perhaps into a flat grainy surface, the seas boiled away, skeletons of fish everywhere, starving fishmongers, stalls and kiosks of budding post-apocalypse entrepreneurs, piled with brie-a-brae of lost civilizations: bottle openers, Swiss army knives, defunct walkmans, burnt-out dishwashers, fairy liquid, model aeroplanes from cornflake packets. Blok, crawling like a flea upon a formica tabletop. Naked, without even a pocket handkerchief to hide his dangling dong. A single lightbulb flickering above him, continually at the point of failure. `Electrician! Electrician!' But only shadows came to answer his call...
-You hear me, lad? This is the second lesson: building a vocabulary. Pay attention to the following sample passage: `Yossi goes to the post office to post a letter. The letter is addressed to his uncle, Benyamin, who lives in West Germany. Uncle Benyamin has a dry goods store in Hamburg. How happy he is to receive Yossi's letter. He shows it to his sister, Gertrude, who is Yossi's aunt. She is overjoyed. A letter from Yossi! she cries. We must frame it on the wall, along with your graduation certificate and the testimonial from the Israel National Fund. Uncle Benyamin goes down to the hardware store to look for a picture frame… Sit up straight, Mister Blok, I am beginning to suspect what they say about you is true. They are paying me to try and help you, not to jerk off by myself out here. I see I'm not getting through even one millimetre. OK, let's take it from the top...
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