Flights of Love, page 19
“Yes they are, Tina is, and others too. Your prejudice is like every prejudice; it has something to do with reality and something to do with fear, and it makes life somewhat easier, like all the boxes and drawers you put people into. You’ll constantly find something about me that confirms your prejudice, how I think maybe, or how I dress, or like just now, that I laughed at the holes in your clothes.”
She stood up, came to him, knelt down before him, and laid her head in his lap. “I will try to see you less against the background of my own culture, against which things you say sometimes . . . ,” she looked for a word that would not ignite the argument again, “bother me, and to see things more against yours. And I want to learn yours better.”
“You’re my sweetheart.” He bent down to her, laid his head on hers and his arms on her shoulders. “I’m sorry I got so furious.” She smelled good and felt good. They would make love. It would all be lovely again. He looked forward to it. He looked in the lighted windows of the building across the street, saw people moving back and forth, talking, drinking, watching TV. He imagined their view of Sarah’s building. A couple who have argued and made up. A couple in love.
10
WHEN DO YOU have to admit to yourself that an argument is not just an argument? That it’s not a thunderstorm to be followed by sunshine, and not a rainy season, followed by a barometric high, but just normal lousy weather? That making up solves nothing, takes care of nothing, but only signals exhaustion and makes room for a shorter or longer pause to be followed by more argument.
No, Andi told himself, I’m exaggerating. Sometimes we don’t get along and we argue, but then we make up and get along again. Two people who love each other sometimes get along better, sometimes worse, and sometimes not at all. That’s how it is. How often you’re allowed to argue—there’s no rule about that. Anyway, it’s not a matter of whether you get along, but whether you tolerate each other. Whether you tolerate each other because you’re two of a kind, or don’t tolerate each other because you’re not. Whether one person gives up whatever separates him from the other, or holds on to it.
All utopias begin with conversion. People say good-bye to old religions, convictions, and ways of life and consent to the new ones of the utopian project—that’s conversion, not a lightning bolt from heaven, an awakening, ecstasy, or some other silliness. Those things happened too. But Andi was amazed that conversion to a utopian project was usually a sober personal decision. It was true especially for the wives and husbands of those who signed up for a utopian project. Love, the desire to live together, the impossibility of living in the normal world and in utopia at the same time, the chance of a better life for your children, the chance of professional and economic success for yourself—that was it. It wasn’t enough to understand someone else’s utopian enthusiasm, and it wasn’t necessary to share it. What was necessary was to give up the normal world that separated you from the other person.
One day in the office Andi asked his two colleagues, “If an adult male converts to Judaism and isn’t circumcised, does he have to be circumcised?”
One of them sat up straight and leaned back in his chair. “Is it true that Europeans aren’t circumcised?”
The other one remained bent over his books. “Yes, he must. And why not? Abraham circumcised himself when he was ninety-nine years old. But the convert doesn’t have to circumcise himself; the mohel does it.”
“Is he a doctor?”
“Not a doctor, but an expert. Cut around the upper foreskin and clip off the lower foreskin, push the skin back down below the glans, and drain the wound—you don’t need a doctor for that.”
Andi grabbed between his legs, his hand protecting his penis. “Without an anesthetic?”
“Without an anesthetic?” His colleague turned to him. “What sort of horrors do you suspect us of? No, adult circumcision is done with a local. Have you found a group of Jews that dispensed with circumcision? Some Jews in the nineteenth century wanted to modify or do away with it.”
Andi asked his colleague about the source of his knowledge and learned that the man’s father was a rabbi. He also learned that the convert who is already circumcised has to undergo a kind of symbolic circumcision. “You can’t cut off what’s already been cut off. But you can’t do entirely without ritual, either.”
Andi saw the point. You couldn’t do without ritual. But to undergo the ritual of having his upper foreskin sliced and his lower clipped by a mohel using a local anesthetic, to let him push the skin back below the glans and drain the wound, to hand his body over to religious injunctions, to bare his penis to someone with whom he had no connection—be it love or a doctor-patient relationship or the trust between friends—to let it be manhandled and maimed, to show it not just to the mohel but quite possibly to a rabbi and various elders, witnesses, and godparents, to stand there the whole time with his pants down or just in his stocking feet with no pants, waiting for the ritual to end, while the shot wears off and his heavily bandaged penis is crammed back into his pants and his bloody foreskin is lying there in a ritual bowl—no, he was not prepared to do that. If there was to be a circumcision, it would be on his terms. He would arrange it so that it was not so personally embarrassing or painful. If he was to become a Jew, then a circumcised one.
Andi thought of baptism, of nuns and recruits shorn of their hair, of SS men and concentration camp prisoners with their tattoos, of cattle being branded. Hair grows back, tattoos can be removed, and you reemerge from the baptismal water no different, at least externally, from before. What sort of religion is it that isn’t content with the symbol of surrender, but instead demands that the surrender leave an irreversible physical mark? A surrender that the mind may betray, but to which the body must forever be faithful?
11
THAT WAS the same question that his friend, who had become a surgeon, asked when he visited him his first day back in Heidelberg. “Why do you want to get involved with a religion that starts by cutting off your weenie?”
“It’s just the foreskin.”
“I know. But what if the knife slips . . .” He grinned.
“Cut the jokes. I love this woman, and she loves me, and we can’t handle the fact that we come from two different worlds. So I’m simply changing over to hers . . .”
“Just like that.”
“Germans become Americans, Protestants become Catholics, and I’ve met a black man in the synagogue who’s a Jew now, but was an Adventist before that. Just like I became a Christian, without believing or praying, I can become a Jew, too. I meditate in church, but why shouldn’t I meditate just as well in a synagogue as in a church? The liturgy in a synagogue is no less beautiful than in a church. And the rituals at home—well, there wasn’t much of that in my home, and I’d like more.”
His friend shook his head.
“I mean it. Either she has to become like me, or I become like her. You really tolerate only your own kind.”
They were sitting in the same Italian restaurant where they used to meet as students. There were one or two new faces among the waiters, one or two new pictures on the walls, but otherwise the place hadn’t changed. Just as in the old days, Andi had ordered salad, spaghetti bolognese, and red wine, and his friend had ordered a bowl of soup, pizza, and beer. Just as in the old days, his friend had the feeling he was the sober and practical one, who also bore the responsibility imposed on a sober and practical mind when dealing with romantics and utopians. The ideas that Andi had got in his head over the years!
“A woman who would demand—”
“Sarah isn’t demanding anything of me. She doesn’t even know I want to be circumcised, and that’s why I’m here. I told her that I was going to give a lecture at a conference.”
“Well, okay. But what are you doing with a woman you can’t speak openly with?”
“Openness presumes you’re standing on common ground. Whether or not you’re standing on common ground—that’s not something you talk about, it’s something you decide.”
His friend shook his head. “Just picture it. Your girlfriend doesn’t want the baby she’s carrying and gets an abortion without saying a word to you. You’d be mad as hell.”
“Yes, because she’d be taking something from me. I’m not taking anything from Sarah, I’m giving her something.”
“You don’t know that. Maybe she loves your foreskin. Maybe she doesn’t share your weird theory and wants to live with you not because you’re the same, but because you’re different. Maybe she doesn’t take things as seriously as you do when you argue. Maybe she likes to argue.”
Andi gazed at him sadly. “I can only do what I think is right. You think my theory is weird—wherever I look, back in history or in the present, in the grand scheme of things and in the details, I find it’s confirmed.”
“Doesn’t it bother you that the decisive step for applying your theory would be a lie?”
“How do you mean?”
“You want to become a Jew for Sarah, but you want to wriggle your way out of what it actually takes to become a Jew. You find it embarrassing, it might hurt more than necessary—and you don’t want that.” His friend teased him. “I’m beginning to understand why the Jews came up with circumcision. They don’t want any limp dicks who . . .”
Andi laughed. “They don’t want any uncircumcised limp dicks, that’s all. That’s why I want you to circumcise mine. Will you do it?”
His friend laughed, too. “Just picture it . . .”
It was like one of those discussions they had had as students. Just picture it, your friend is a terrorist, the police are looking for him, and he asks you to hide him. Just picture it, your friend wants to commit suicide, is paralyzed, and needs your help. Just picture it, your friend confesses that he has slept with your girlfriend. Just picture it, your friend becomes a successful artist— will you tell him that his paintings are bad? That his wife is cheating on him? That some good deed he’s done will ruin his life?
“You’d like to get it over with as soon as possible.”
“I want to get back to New York and Sarah as soon as possible.”
“Then come by tomorrow at noon. I’ll give you a light general anesthetic, and when you wake up the wound will have stitches that won’t need to be removed, because the part inside dissolves and the rest falls off. You’ll have to change the bandage now and then, just gauze and panthenol. In three weeks you’ll be good as new.”
“What’s that supposed to mean.”
“What does it mean that your weenie will be good as new? What do you suppose?”
12
THE OPERATION wasn’t bad. The pain afterward was bearable and completely gone after a few days. But Andi was constantly aware that his penis was part of him, a wounded and threatened part. When he bandaged it, when he carefully tucked it away as he put on his pants or felt the pain of it if he made a wrong move or touched it wrong—he kept trying to protect it when he moved or touched it—it commanded his attention.
He was in his hometown, where he had grown up and worked before leaving for New York and where he would work when he returned. He stayed with his parents, who were glad to have him home, but left him in peace, and when he met with colleagues and friends, they picked up the conversation right where they had left off. Sometimes he would run into a friend from high school, a former teacher or girlfriend, who didn’t know he had been gone for almost a year and would soon be leaving again, and they greeted him as if he still lived here. He could have moved through his hometown like a fish through water.
But he felt stranded, as if he had arrived where he didn’t belong, as if the town and its landscape of mountains, rivers, and plain were no longer his home. The streets where he walked were full of memories—here was a cellar window beside which he and a friend had played marbles on the sidewalk, there a bike shed in a driveway where he and his first girlfriend had stood to get out of the rain and had kissed. At one intersection on the way to school he had got his bicycle wheel caught in the trolley tracks and fallen, and in the park, beyond that wall there, his mother had practiced painting watercolors with him one Sunday morning. He could paint the town with the brush of his memory and in the colors of his past happiness, of past hopes and past sadness. But it was different now, he couldn’t enter into the picture. When his memories invited him in, when he tried to live in the unity of past and present that mean home, a little movement, some accidental touch of the change purse or key ring in his pants pocket would call up a very different memory— his circumcision and, as part of his circumcision, the question of where he belonged.
In New York? In the Kehilath-Yeshurun synagogue? With Sarah? He called her every day, in the early afternoon when it was early morning there and she was still lying in bed or having breakfast. He invented a couple of conference events and told her about walks he’d taken, about meetings with friends and colleagues, and about relatives she’d met at the marble anniversary party. “I miss you,” she said, and “I love you.” And he said, “I miss you, too,” and “I love you, too.” He asked her what and how she was doing, and she told him about both their neighbors’ dogs, about a tennis match with a former professor, and about the plots and intrigues that a woman working on another computer game had tried to involve their publisher in. He understood every word and yet didn’t understand a thing. He had left his feeling for certain allusions, for New York irony, sarcasm, and seriousness, in New York. Or had it been cut off along with his foreskin? He assumed that Sarah meant what she said a little ironically. She usually meant what she said a little ironically. But what in fact was the point of her irony?
Sitting at work in New York, he would constantly fantasize about making love with Sarah. The fantasy didn’t interrupt him in the middle of a thought or a sentence. But once the thought was completed or the sentence written down, he would look up and see the rain outside and picture himself making love with Sarah listening to the rain. Or he would be sitting on a park bench watching children and picture himself making love with Sarah, making a child with her. Or he would see a woman with her back to him, leaning against a wall and gazing out at the Hudson, and he would imagine that she was Sarah and picture himself stepping up behind her, lifting her skirt, and entering her. When he was tired he would picture her falling asleep after they had made love, his stomach against her butt and his hand between her breasts, wrapped in the scent of love. But he had left these fantasies and longings in New York, if only because of the painful erections they might cause.
Or maybe it had to be that way? Wasn’t it natural for him not to belong to his old home and still not belong to his new one either? Don’t you have to go through noman’s-land when you’re changing sides?
13
THE PLANE above the Atlantic is a no-man’s-land, too. You eat, drink, sleep, wake up, do nothing or work, but whatever you do it’s all just airy potentiality, until the plane lands and you’ve arrived. Only after you’ve brought your full stomach, that feeling of relaxation, or the work you’ve done back to earth is any of it real. Andi would not have been surprised if the plane had crashed.
He stepped out of the cool airport terminal and into the heavy hot air of New York. It was loud, there was a press and tangle of cars, with honking taxis and a dispatcher who kept order among taxis and waiting passengers by blowing on his whistle. Andi looked for Sarah, although she had told him that she wouldn’t be picking him up, that nobody in New York picks anyone up at the airport. It was too hot in the taxi if he closed the window, and there was a draft if he opened it. “Grab a cab, and come to me as fast as you can,” Sarah had said. Actually he couldn’t afford a taxi. He didn’t understand why he should come as fast as he could. What difference would it make if he arrived an hour later? Or three or seven? Or a day? Or a week?
Sarah had bought flowers, a large bouquet of red and yellow roses. She had put the champagne on ice and clean sheets on the bed. She was waiting for him in a shortsleeved man’s shirt that barely covered her butt. She looked seductive and she seduced him before he could even feel the fear he had assumed would be part of the first time since his circumcision—fear that it would hurt or feel wrong and unpleasant or that he would be impotent. “I missed you,” she said, “I missed you so much.”
She didn’t notice that he was circumcised. Not as they made love, not when he got up naked to open the champagne and bring the filled glasses back to the bed, not when they showered together. They went out to eat and to the movies and returned home across the shimmering asphalt. Andi knew Sarah so well, her voice, her smell, her hips when he put his arm around her. Were they closer now? Did he belong more to her, to her world, to this city and this country?
As they ate she told him about a trip to South Africa that she was supposed to take with her employer and asked if he wanted to come along. He said he regretted not having visited South Africa during apartheid, a world that he could have seen and now was gone forever. She looked at him, and he knew what she was thinking. But he realized that it didn’t matter. He searched for his old sense of outrage, his old need to contradict and set things right, but found nothing. She said nothing.
Before they fell asleep they lay there facing each other. He gazed at her face in the white light of the streetlight. “I’m circumcised.”
She reached for his penis. “Were you . . . no, you weren’t . . . or were . . . hey, you’ve got me really confused now. Why are you saying that you’re circumcised?”
“Oh, no reason.”
“I thought you weren’t. But if you are, then . . .” She shook her head. “It’s not so common in Europe as it is here, is it?”
