―In Chinese,‖ said Emil, ―the word for ‗enlightenment‘ is ‗flavor‘.‖
We were sitting in the usual café. Emil was in the middle of a roast beef sandwich.
He had brought me some drawings, charcoal on coarse paper. They reeked of flavor.
They were like a foreign grocery store, I thought, noisy and crowded and full of strange smells and tastes that you didn‘t know whether you liked or not. I said this to Emil. He was delighted.
―I want them to be like a foreign grocery store,‖ he smiled.
My feelings for him were so strong, I thought, and so varied, that even the feeling that I didn‘t feel strongly about him was almost tangible. That was what it was: my feelings for Emil were tangible. I didn‘t need to touch him. I didn‘t even have to see him. My feelings 18
had a physical quality. It was inexplicable to me. I didn‘t know whether I liked it or not.
But it was there. I could feel him pushing the buttons on the telephone as he dialed my number, and then the phone would ring.
How I felt about most men had a diaphanous radiance, as if they stood for something: values, faith, rage, truth – anything. But Emil, like an adroit defendant, represented himself.
Not always. In the beginning I had thrown my arms around him and buried my head in his waist. I would never do that now, I thought.
Oh, the betrayals and the harms and the damages we had undergone together. It was ludicrous. It was wearing me down. It was making him sick.
When it finally made him really sick, I had to take my part in curing him. To be cured, he became a completely different person, and I could put everything but his getting well out of my mind. When he was well I felt as though I could open my eyes after an indefinite period of keeping them shut tight in concentration on one thing: getting him well.
The hard times were still there, I found in the strain toward the end, and I almost lost my balance. Human beings were more peculiar than I had ever dreamed. The worst thing was that he was so normal, so ready to get up every day to the Times and the weather. How to explain, how to describe, my feelings for him? How to justify my need to know that he was all right? Protectiveness toward each other kept us alive.
Sometimes I thought that the whole problem was that, early on, my life had seemed a golden net of details waiting to snare me, and that I had, in hopeless confusion, eliminated every detail of life, until eating, sleeping, feeling in the moment became the enemy. I lived in my mind, my worries, my revelations. Now enlightenment suddenly was flavor. What could I do?
―I have to go back to reality now,‖ Emil had said after lunch. I had felt surprised and disappointed, knowing that all he was going back to was a cluttered apartment.
He had smiled at me. ―You have to distinguish between significance and reality,‖ he said kindly.
Could I?
When he had first been diagnosed with cancer I had given a poetry reading outdoors and cried wildly into the mike:
A Leaf for Sarajevo
Sorrow city,
Sarajevo,
thus your history is traced
your museums
19
left in rubble
and your life almost erased
Sarajevo,
city sorrow
for which the whole world is braced.
Braced and waiting,
Sarajevo,
sister sorrow
so like mine
as I wait and lean and listen
for an answer or a sign
sorrow glistens,
Sarajevo,
like a message or a line.
Sitting shiva,
Sarajevo,
for your temples and your mosques
but the world
will not recover
as it waves
from brave kiosks
knowledge that
the world has faltered,
altered. Look, my sister asks.
He was like a spider spinning a web, or a wasp making a nest. It was his instinct to make Byzantine structures, forms so elaborate the question of why he made them never entered his head. He would add a touch there, a glimmer there, ploddingly, like an animal laboriously carrying out God‘s will. His hands were heavy with clay. His mind was heavy with thought. Thought so deep it was all there was. He was like a bear with his head caught in a honey pot. He was numb with thought.
20
All day he ruminated on the intricacies of the design. His life, which had begun with such simple forms, love, obedience, goodness, had taken off like a skyrocket, and was now showering him with the stinging sparks of aftermath. But there was no explanation, he thought, or if there was, my back was turned. His back was often turned, he thought miserably. If he had just been there ….
His instinct was to paw another daub into place, as mine is to find the image that will contain. And of the spirals and curlicues of his dumb, instinctive, wondering way. I take this image: a bear, a stuffed bear, my childhood teddy bear, Winnie the Pooh, that bear of very little brain, heavily, obediently, reaching up to put in one more hunk of clay, wistfully, as though he could have been doing something other, but staying there, faithfully obediently, humbly, desirous of pleasing – whom? What instinct, invisible Presence?
We wrote puns to each other. I wrote him this:
Enough of this Barenboem meets girl syndrome. I buy you a Kreisler, and what do I get for dinner? Zigetti! You‘re Jascha Millstein around my neck. Who would have thought I‘d Murray Pereia? Does he know Brahms? Does Zino Francis Scotti? Stokowski gonna be a good violinist? And Itzat Perlman any better? You think they Artur Rubensteins?
I‘m no Schnabelieve me, but there‘s not Munch I don‘t know about the business, and I will tell you, honey, overture objections, I don‘t want to hurt your Felix, but at the box office they won‘t Szell.