Motti (2 page)

He sits next to the table and reads the paper, his cell phone dismantled and slowly drying on the business section (before, when he was done speaking with Menachem, it fell right into the sink). His beloved dog Laika rests her head on his thigh, and he scratches behind her right ear absentmindedly. Then her ears stand up and she hurries to the door; a moment later Motti too hears Ariella's keys jingling as she comes up the stairs. Excited, like Laika, he hurries to greet her. One must be prepared: he gathers up the garbage bag from the can, and before she arrives at the door he's already there. Turns the bolt and opens. She comes up the stairs toward him, her colorful handbag on her shoulder. He hurries to her, and she raises her eyes to him and smiles.

Hi, Ariella.

Again she smiles at him, a small set of keys in her hand.

Laika missed you, he says and hurries down the stairs. Laika's tail wags from behind the closed door, and sensitive as Motti is to this sound, his sleeve is so close to Ariella's hair as they pass by one another. Patience is a virtue. A wonderful virtue. Motti will wait as long as he has to. His real life waits, concealed inside the future like a jewel in a thick cloth.

Meanwhile she goes up the stairs, the key already in her hand. She opens the door and goes inside, turns and smiles at him before being closed inside the apartment. After taking out the trash Motti will stand again for a moment next to the living room wall, this being the wall that separates his place from hers. The cold wall on his cheek, he breathes deeply. Patient. Every day, over and over again, his heart breaks. (Every day. It's a biological miracle.) Over and over again his heart breaks and light pours inside, glowing or whatever light does from inside this abyss, this rift that has opened inside him.

In the evening Menachem came and they went out drinking. They didn't talk about anything of much importance, and Menachem often slapped Motti on the back and talked about fucking and laughed loudly. Motti paid for both their beers, and afterward returned home and went out for a walk with Laika. She sniffed around the garbage cans longer than usual, and he peeked at his watch every second to make sure that he'd manage to sleep six and a half hours exactly, that he'd manage to drink coffee and take a quick shower before the time that Ariella would leave her apartment, that he would again manage to see her on the stairs. A day will come when he'll speak to her for real, but in the meantime there's no rush.

They went to sleep, the two of them, Laika and Motti. And he hurried to fall asleep, so that he wouldn't find himself unoccupied, lost inside a forest of minutes in which there's nothing to do. Before dawn, Laika whimpered as though she'd had a bad dream. Still asleep, his hand descended. He petted her, she calmed down, fell asleep again. My little wolf pack, that's what he calls her. My little wolf pack.

In the morning, since his first class was cancelled, he was late leaving. Drank coffee next to the window looking out on the street. And that's why he was there, honestly, just an accident, when Ariella was leaving the apartment. Followed her with his eyes as she went away down the sidewalk alone, until she disappeared from sight. Years from now perhaps they'll leave the building like this, together. They'll walk hand in hand until the end of the street, and then they'll kiss and turn away to go about their business. During work he'll think of her. Full of happiness and satisfaction he'll attend to his classes, in a good mood, in high spirits. During the break he'll sit in the teachers' lounge, but he won't talk about her. Relationships are a personal matter. Though it's not impossible that they, him and her together, will befriend another couple (this in addition to Menachem and Edna, with whom they'll perhaps go on vacation once or twice a year). Sometimes they'll meet at home, for dinner and a pleasant conversation and cake and coffee, sometimes they'll go to a movie. The kind of movies there are sure to be by then! Out of the world special effects. Though sometimes they'll happen upon some foreign film at a small movie house (or at the Cinémathèque). After the movie they'll go drink a glass of wine somewhere nearby, and if he worried less about her getting sick or hurt, they'd also smoke cigarettes, French ones even.

And on other days, at home, many years from now, they won't meet with anyone and won't go anywhere special. They'll get home at the end of the workday and have a bite to eat. They'll go out together to the street each evening, for a relaxing walk with Laika. No, not with Laika. Many years from now we said, and by then Laika will already be dead (tears well up at the thought, but he doesn't cry), okay, not with Laika, maybe a different dog, a different female, one of her offspring, why not, even though she was already spayed long ago, it would take a miracle, but this too is possible, indeed miracles fall on the world like rain, you need only to catch one and not let go.

Whoever isn't familiar with the details, or didn't take an active part in the Soviet space program, is liable to think that Laika's body burned up as it reentered the atmosphere. Just a few hours she spent in space, and within a short time she died. Afterward, it was hinted that her food was poisoned, that her air ran out as planned, that this was a mercy killing, so she wouldn't suffer from the great heat of the friction between the spaceship's side panels and the atmosphere, the atmosphere that, in principle, allows us to live, even though in this instance the opposite would be true. Later on it was said that she did in fact die from the heat after all, despite all precautions, something went wrong with the spaceship, something got screwed up, we apologize for this regrettable incident.

But no, it wasn't so simple. How could Laika's soul leave her body in such a quotidian way? After all, she wasn't only the first living being to go into orbit—she was also the first to die there. The first to sow the seeds of death in what was already a gaping expanse of death: an offering to the big nothing. Like ancient tribesmen we sent her into the darkness ahead of us, to appease whatever is out there, so it wouldn't take whomever would follow, sealed in a closed metal case within a darkness wide as wide can be. (Indeed, there wasn't even a window. Entirely enclosed, confined to a narrow, forsaken space, absolutely miniscule, inside that other, wide-open space.)

It doesn't matter what time it happened, the clock slices time up arbitrarily, and even that it only does beneath the skies, not above them. The dog, a stray, was restless, was frightened when strapped into its harness, when the engines were fired. When the acceleration flattened her, she was terrified. Did she actually know what was happening there? Did she know, as everyone around her knew—all the people petting and training and feeding her, and then the ones measuring and preparing and keeping her healthy—that she would die in a moment? Doubtful she knew. (“A strange lightness envelops her,” Ben Vered wrote, “her ears float in the little cell, and so do her legs and tail.” So he wrote, but I myself don't believe it. I saw the apparatus she was harnessed into—they restrained her so tightly there wasn't room for her legs to float, and not her tail either. Her ears, perhaps.) Did she understand the source of the great pressure, and then the source of the terrible, increasing heat? Doubtful she understood. Did she wish that her fur might fall out everywhere, forming strands that would encircle the spaceship, like the stubble clinging to a bald man's head after a trim? Doubtful that she did. Instead, before she died, before she suffocated, perhaps (desperate for air), before she was cooked in her own skin, the inner heavens opened and a great light spilled out. A pleasure that was greater even than a treat. Greater than running in a field, even though she never enjoyed such a run; they took her straight from the cold streets of Moscow to the lab.

As if kind hands reached out and released her from her body (her bones remained, as clean as clean can be, to drift through space). Never before had she been so embraced. Her spiritual fur sparkled from such pleasure, and her spiritual tail wagged as if she was at play. She saw the light that persisted even within the absolute darkness of space, and small growls of excitement and expectation, satisfaction even, broke out from inside her spiritual throat. (Or so Motti thinks, now appeased. He's always like this. Stories that never happened and small mysteries, too—even those strange personal questionnaires in the newspaper, they always bother him. He never approaches them casually. Always so serious.) Laika was released from her body, from everything, she's quite free now, absolutely free, free to do as she pleases, no, freer even than that, she is even free from the fetters of her own desire.

Did she bark? I have to know if she barked. And how the echo sounded in that narrow space. If it sounded like distant dogs answering her.

 

We also close up space so that voices can echo—but whose voice? The events of the world (the world itself) are woven into a living network of overlapping dimensions. Motti's fingers of thought are sent toward things past like the fingers of a weaver wanting to try something different, to free each strand from an unsightly tapestry one knot at a time, to strive for something marvelous and new.

He will lie on his back in their bed, the bed that is theirs, and she'll take the thick pen resting on the nightstand right next to the bed, and she'll say, turn over. So he'll lie on his stomach in their bed, in the bed that is theirs, and she will write on his back, with the thick pen, property of Ariella. This here Motti is private and nontransferable. This Motti left our factory in good condition. This side up. Private. Not to be consumed after expiration date. Does not contain preservatives. Motti, for me and mine. Mine mine mine.

It will be like in that movie, what's it called. He'll tell her, that tickles, what are you writing? And she'll read to him. Which hand does she write with, right or left? Let's say right. She'll read to him and he'll add, we thank you for choosing Motti. Motti, for you and yours. Caution, fragile.

Good God! He could learn to make things with his hands! He'll make her necklaces, bracelets, chains, he'll make everything she needs. He'll do woodworking. He'll make her a pencil case if she needs one. He'll sew her a stethoscope case. A case for things you use to mark trails, for drawing maps, for veterinary medicine, for particle acceleration, for social work, for the philosophy of science, for the repair of electrical devices. He'll sew her a dress, a shirt, bell-bottom pants, a lunch bag for breaks at school (if she becomes a teacher, that is).

That's the way it is. Best for him, for Motti, are doorways. Sitting in a waiting room, bent over his number in line, sitting in a corridor with no one demanding anything, with no one glancing over his shoulder, no one telling him off or praising him. A certain amount of tension is a given with him, without his even thinking about it, like a fish in water or a man in the atmosphere, so it dissipates: the rules are known, and he doesn't have to do anything at all.

It accumulated in him, what else is there to say. It accumulated like bits of asbestos in the lungs of a fiber factory worker, sooner or later it'll reach a critical level. How much misery and frustration can one actually take? (And the answer, of course, is a lot, quite a lot. Entire long lives of this, and no creature will compensate Motti for it afterward, when the pulsing biological system—that is, his living, active body—shuts down. This will be his wasted life. His life and that's it. All this in small, ongoing portions, you get used to it. Only occasional little symptoms, sighs of dissatisfaction, and barely even a hint that anything else is possible, that there's a life of comfort and freedom out there, that there might be a place to relax in.) He didn't believe in great acts. Didn't believe in his ability to break through the tedious maze that is his life, to shatter the structure once and for all, his habits, his personality (every sort of behavior can be reinforced and encouraged, rewarded bit by bit until it becomes second nature; who would have guessed that it's possible to reinforce unbehavior in this way too?).

At first he would watch movies on video. Night after night, in front of the screen. Here too, time is beyond his control: on the faint display the digits turn over backward. Meanwhile he sits idly, his thoughts can either wander or not wander, drawn into the plot and then popping out again, free, and that's how it is again and again, there isn't a single constraint or necessity, just the silence of time. That's how it was at first, but after some time his attention began to wander to the supporting actors. The thought wouldn't leave him alone. Certainly they studied acting for years, waited for their chance, embarrassed themselves in children's plays, prayed over every tenth-rate part in a commercial on some local channel. So, again, he lost track of the plot, and now the lead actors as well. He couldn't take it anymore. Sometimes the supporting cast was more talented than the leads. Sometimes their noses were too big, or they looked too much like someone famous, and who needs two Harrison Fords, Brad Pitts, or Moshe Ivgys? Maybe one of them was an old woman by the time she got a part in a movie. Maybe she'd dreamed about acting since she was seven. Here, after years of frustration behind a counter at a shitty hotel (alternatively, a counter at some tax or transportation office, or any other office, unfulfilling but sadly not a temp job), she's finally got a part, at last facing the camera. Motti sat in the dark and cried bitterly, and then he sat in the dark and watched the film's credits until the end. So many people worked so hard, got home late, their children already tucked into bed and asleep, their spouses possibly cheating on them out of loneliness—and what, a man can't even spare the time necessary to redeem them, even without their knowing, to read their names and give thanks? Art is a letter written on the surface of time—someone wrote it, how can we not read it? But also over the following nights he remains sitting facing the credits and then facing the empty screen, waiting. He doesn't watch movies the way I did in my own childhood, with the thought that maybe they hid secret messages there, at the end of the movie, on the end of the reel, and that maybe a wild adventure would spin out from them. He doesn't watch that way. And if anyone could see him from outside, they might think that he's a sick man, a very unfortunate man, sitting in the dark and rocking absentmindedly back and forth in his chair. But looks from the outside are not to be trusted.