A detectives complaint a.., p.1
A Detective's Complaint--A Novel, page 1
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“How I loathe heroes! Always getting in the way and acting so … so … heroic!”
—Skeletor, Masters of the Universe
EXTERIOR
1
Mighty is the terror of the empty page, but even mightier is the terror of silence. During the Gaza War I got up and left. Not all of a sudden. The trip had been planned months in advance. But everything seemed to be done in a rush, urgently. I passed among the things recumbent in the dark, trees, windmills, a vitreous field of stars. I slept at the speed of sleep. I slept in inevitable speed toward the killed children. A week and change after missiles were launched at Tel Aviv and fear became viscous on the streets of Ashkelon, a week and change after the aerial bombing by the Israeli military, a week and change after the images of the destroyed homes, expressions wrinkled with holy terror, my father came to me in a dream and wrapped his arms around me. It was a night laden with dreams. There were dreams that had me paralyzed with their visions, knowing I was dreaming, knowing I was powerless to change a single detail. I can’t remember when I ever saw my father so happy, his face glowing. He was younger than I am now when he fell off the boulders at the Tel Aviv Beach and shattered his skull. In the dream he was younger, perhaps as young as he was the day Yaffa and I peeked out from one of our regular hiding places, watching him and our mother sitting on a bench, bathed by the radiance of the sea. My mother’s head was resting against his shoulder, and his arm was wrapped around her shoulder. With the special instinct children have, we grasped that we had no place between those two. Or, at least, I did. Yaffa insisted on shoving in. My father was young, the world still rolled up like a scroll before him, awaiting his authority, his whims. I loved him then, perhaps. In my dream he said, Elish. I don’t remember when he ever spoke my name with such ease. I wondered why he showed up, outside of time and place. Where were we at that time, that time of dimness when only that which is made of certainty remains, and that which is questionable blurs and recedes? He detected my thought and asked if I wanted him to leave. I told him I could not decide, I was imagining myself from outside my body, my throat full of dirt. Passersby, if there were any, must have been watching a lone man talking to the air, moving in response to some binding invisible to them. The whole time, I was ensconced in his arms, not wishing to detach, whether due to the inertia of the dream or some hidden desire. I told him I could no longer distinguish between realities, between the data of senses and the rustle of the interior. He said, I thought you missed me. I hadn’t thought of him in years. Even my recoiling from the sea had faded ever since that dire day. Do you want me to leave? he asked again. I woke up before I had a chance to answer.
All morning long, I was preoccupied by the intensity of emotion that rose when I saw him, the vitality of the feeling. I’ve heard stories of women whose eggs were fertilized outside their fallopian tubes, in the space of their abdomen, growing into tiny fetuses that calcified. Decades later, an intensifying pain disclosed their existence, and the stone babies were extracted, perfect figurines, foreign bodies, pulled out of a flesh that had not been destined to carry them. That was how this dream pierced me. All morning long, the dream, and the pictures of the destruction of Gaza online, and the scared faces of Israeli civilians in stairwells, counting with growing fury the minutes before they could get back to their lives, which, thanks to the thin film of sanity they’d grown used to pulling over them, had become inured to the suffering of others. All morning long, my mind was embroiled, and I still had to speak at a literary festival.
2
I say I didn’t wake up because I wasn’t asleep. I was pulled at once from the twilight of sickness and dropped into another kind of twilight. I was ten years old, before the hot fevers of adolescence, I told them. I think only a few were listening. The audience wasn’t large. The Mediterranean Literary Festival in the city of Sète, in the south of France, had been organized negligently. Many other events were happening simultaneously all over town, and only thin canvas sheets, offering scant shade, separated the sweaty faces from the supremacy of sun. The church bells struck midday. My five detective novels were presented through convoluted passages, overwrought with superfluous adjectives. An opera singer, accompanied by a classical guitar, trilled a chant from Psalms. The biblical syllables trembled smoother than smooth on her lips in a Christian lilt, rising like smoke around us, foreign to us all. One woman walked out in protest. The Hebrew, she said, moving briskly, felt hard on her ears right now.
I’m returning to this moment, I said, because the nature of literature, and art in general, if I may exaggerate for a moment, is the act of repetition. A black-and-white movie was showing on television. A gloomy castle, melancholy clouds. A man comes to visit a friend he hasn’t seen in years and finds him plagued by a mysterious illness, his senses horrifyingly sharp, any too-rough fabric sending chills through his flesh, high notes making him cringe. He is submerged in darkness, his palate so tender that food torments him. He asks about his friend’s sister, whom he’d known and may have loved as a younger man. I said, Here, and in Israel, places where the sun rules over all beings, it is hard to imagine the depth of darkness, hard to conjure the trial that can train a preadolescent to understand it, but I did. I said, We also ought to think about the essence of knowing the world—what allows this knowing? Is it the experience of our brief time on this planet, or an ancient, mute memory awakening from within it, determining its shape? Or are we constantly haunted by a life that isn’t ours, a random life, by our perception, that ignites without our control? In that case, we always recognize the pattern of hauntedness. In that case, I recognized it—the terrible itching, the sound of etching, the sound of scratching against a wooden plank. I said that, in time, I learned the film was part of a series of Roger Corman adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories, and that these were low-budget films, hastily made, using secondhand sets, putting them to good use before they were taken apart. Back then, in my younger days, I couldn’t tell the difference. As an adult, rewatching the film, the meager sets, the amateurish cinematography, only bothered me in the beginning of the film. As I watched, I felt the same sense of stifling. When the scratching sounded again, I was thrown into that same midway space, where my field of vision was full of black spots, greasy oil stains.
You know the story, I said. Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Roderick Usher hears his sister’s nails scratching against the wall of her coffin and realizes he’d buried her alive. His growing realization culminates in the fall and destruction of his house, disrupting the long-standing Usher dynasty. What is the music I hear beyond the noise of reality, whose effort to get out of what hold? That is the riddle that won’t leave me alone, and that is why I write detective literature. I hope I never solve it.
3
That is the essence of things. I do not know how to document them, only approximately re-create them. I spoke at length, with some hesitation, my thoughts wandering. I spent the fifteen minutes allotted to me on a childhood memory, never getting to the point—how my reading of Poe was born, what I got from him, and how. An actor read two or three pages of my first book, which seemed to stand in complete opposition to the words I’d stuttered. The layer of intentional grayness and pedestrianism that blanketed my detective prose had nothing to do with the ringing of profundity, the subversion, the constant betrayal of the senses I’d tried to describe. The heavy glow reflecting from the stones of the church, the purple sparks of the bougainvillea in bloom, the fallout of the chinaberry surfing in on gusts of breeze from the sea, all hollowed out my arguments.
After my turn was over, a Venezuelan writer living in exile in Spain came up to speak. Short, dark, with a hypnotizing wisdom glinting in her eyes. They returned nothing to those watching her but the ways in which her observers thought themselves into existence. I was surprised to read in her bio in the festival catalog that she was forty years old. I was familiar with the subcutaneous refusal to let go of the tension of youth, the tyranny of will over metabolism. The plots of her books took place in her country of birth. She said she used to write short stories but wasn’t able to get them published. One day, a friend sent her an article about a detective-literature contest sponsored by an Argentinean daily paper. The writer read three detective novels by a famous Norwegian author and concluded that no special talent or knowledge of human nature was required to partake in the genre. She sent in her first five chapters and won what she perceived as a small fortune. But winning created two problems. She knew if she converted the sum to her local currency, its value would soon decrease due to inflation. And she knew that a novel about the religious followers of Hugo Chávez—those innocent civilians who were struck by the spirit of prophecy in public and announced that the deceased president was still alive, that his words were living and his doctrine true—could never be published in Venezuela. So she took advantage of the opportunity and traveled Spain-ward. Her speech was woven with jokes. Her French was throaty, the whistling consonants labialized. For a few moments, I parted with my distress and lost myself in the music of her words. The pages read from her book were also shaded by the same amused tone, as far as I could understand. Then the panel was opened to audience questions. The obvious questions were asked. I let the Venezuelan answer them all.
4
My trip was the result of transgression. Last summer I’d planned on going to Berlin to finish my most recent novel. I’d already bought a ticket and rented an apartment. Berlin, bleeding its wounds into the present. I thought about Alfred Döblin, I thought about Walter Benjamin, I thought about S. Y. Agnon. Manny Lahav, after returning from a second visit with his wife, said it was the city that had etched itself most starkly into their consciousness. Seven years separated both trips, but on the second one everything was familiar—the streets, the chill of the shade. He urged me to visit. Maybe you’ll find the solution you’ve been looking for there, he said. I’d spent close to a year wallowing in the ankle-deep water of my novel, unable to finish it, every plotline I conjured feeling secondhand. The transparent language of the book left me limp.
I never made it to Berlin. A week before my trip I woke up with my right ear clogged. I assumed there was water in my ear, and that the weighty feeling would lift within a matter of days. But the clogged sensation only worsened throughout the day. The next morning, it was replaced with a castration of sounds. I heard a baby crying in the stairwell, and the cry swirled in my ear canal, breaking into different tones. When I put on earphones, I found the high notes multiplying, distorting the musical balance. They veered off-key, grating. I couldn’t shut myself off from the world. I made an appointment with an ENT doctor. The Century Tower trembled, sleep-deprived. The Tel Aviv humidity had grown burdensome, enormous air conditioners humming beneath the pretensions of murky concrete. I’d arrived early. The hallway of the floor where the clinic was located was desolate, neoned. I waited in the hourless lighting. The doctor put a tuning fork to my forehead and his face wrinkled with suspicion. He instructed me to lie down. He inserted a frozen telescopic probe into my ear canal. The sensation sent a shiver through me. I thought about the machines that magnify our gaze to investigate the large and the small, turning us into gigantic eyes trapped within lenses. What cannot be translated into image falls away, and the scale ceases to be an experience and turns instead into a pothole.
Yes, the doctor determined, and when I hear him speaking the words in my mind, I add a kind of sigh, which may not actually have occurred. Neural-auditory damage, straight to the emergency room for a hearing test and possible hospitalization.
The map of Tel Aviv that was familiar to me from my strolls opened up in my mind, pushing aside the panic. I arrived at the emergency room, sweating. The brother of an Arab man whose hand had been injured by a saw and continued to bleed in spite of his bandages was in the midst of an argument with the receptionist regarding the delay in the doctor’s arrival. The wounded man gasped from the bed on which he was strewn. Not just him, but an entire orchestra of chatter, cries of woe, whispers, worried conversations, all molded into a racket within that space, in the eustachian tube, the cochlea.
A young intern sent me to have a hearing test on the ground floor. In the elevator, the infirm in their gowns and grievances, a mostly geriatric cluster, mottled here and there with the spots of childhood sorrow. I turned my face to the walls, but they were covered with mirrors. The sound technician checked that the earphones were placed properly, sealed off to outside noise. I followed her lips as they moved behind the double glass, her voice in the silence affixed to my head. Raise your hand every time you hear a sound, she said. A noisy haze filled my brain. I closed my eyes. A black space in which ringing spools flickered, metallic and deep, convoluted carvings of light. I raised my hand, then put it down. I was alert, I was prepared.
The technician read words off a page, which were first channeled into my left ear, then the right. Repeat after me, she ordered. When she lowered her voice, it shattered in my right ear, the words crumbling with the dirty distortion of cheap loudspeakers.
5
We don’t know all the reasons, the head doctor said. It’s a more common condition than people think, neural-auditory damage. It typically occurs in people over forty. He looked at the form in his hand. You’re forty-one, he exclaimed, I wouldn’t have guessed that. I nodded slowly, with the usual fatigue caused by the hoax of the flesh refusing to disclose the marks of time. In rare cases, the doctor continued, it turns out to be a benign tumor that can surgically be removed. Multiple sclerosis must also be eliminated. The common conjecture is that the cause is a virus that damages the auditory nerve. In 10 percent of documented cases, the problem goes away on its own without treatment. In 80 percent, the common procedure is effective. That’s not a bad prognosis, he said. I asked how they could administer treatment without a clear etiology.
We work with what we’ve got, he said. Sometimes a diagnosis is enough. The suggested treatment is steroids, taken orally for ten days. He answered all of my questions, but I didn’t manage to get a clear statement out of him, in spite of the medical lingo resting smoothly upon my tongue. I pictured his terms, the wheels of his thought, mixing with mine. The steroids support the ability of different systems to fight off infections, though they ultimately harm the immune system. Side effects can include facial edema due to fluid retention, mood swings, a rise in blood pressure and blood sugar. The doctor recommended full rest. The hospitalization was only for observation purposes, he pointed out. He said I might feel healthy, but that the steroids would weaken my body. I wondered out loud whether I should postpone my trip. He said I ought to cancel it. If it wasn’t a viral infection, the air pressure changes could cause a rupture of blood vessels. Until the problem was fully diagnosed or disappeared on its own, I would have to forget about traveling.
6
How I tired of the weakness of the body. It seemed I’d spent half of my youth burning with fever, I told the Venezuelan. She said she also laughed when she was invited to the festival and learned that for some reason the French defined Latin American culture as part of the Mediterranean culture of the Atlantic Ocean. I said there was some logic to it. A narrow-framed man, minuscule of mustache like a villain from an adventure novel, asked if he could join us. I looked around. The metal plate of the late sunset refracted on the crowded tables. The alley where we were sitting had been closed off for the festival and transformed into an outdoor sitting area for a restaurant serving festival participants. Buildings closed on it from both sides, walls smitten with wind and salt that had been absorbed so well they’d become their aroma, the substance of their creation. Lights could be seen behind the shields of windows, a hidden family life, the glue of evening lingering in it all, dusk refusing to come, and the heat of the day dwindled, its penetrating bluishness evaporated. The guy arrived in the nameless in-between hour. I recognized him, a viola player who’d played a mellifluous tune to open the event I’d attended. A male and a female writer had amiably chatted about the nature of romance, sadomasochism, and desire in the blinding glare of the Mediterranean. It seemed the demand of discovery carried within this glare was an obstacle in all matters concerning cellars, nooks, dim silences, pent-up urges.
I wasn’t the one who chose our line of conversation. The Venezuelan and I spoke briefly after our panel, then each went our separate ways, somewhat alarmed. We made plans to meet for dinner. She asked if my books contained themes of illness. I said they didn’t, that my detective, Benny Zehaviv, was a healthy man, robust even. Like many Israeli men, he’d successfully converted his covert, subterranean male depression into constant activity, sinking completely into routine life. The body is redeemed, I said, but the soul is sealed off. At first she thought I was joking, her lips curving toward a smile, then flattening out. She asked if it was always a choice, body or mind. I said yes, in Israel at least the common, spoken military language had vanquished the shock of reality. And if reality wasn’t apparent as bodily symptoms, the life of the mind was cut out. At least for men who grew up in Israel. And the women? she asked. They resolved the difficulty another way, I said. Hysterical maternity. If you think about it, she said, that style of mothering has tangible causes.
