Rhyming Life and Death Read Free Page A

fizzy evening.
    Drink up, in your own time, and then we’ll go out there and take on our audience. They could do with shaking up, in my humble opinion. You can be as provocative as you like, my dear. Don’t spare them! Right, if you’ve finished your drink, let’s be getting out there. They must be cursing us by now.
    And so the two of them, the Author and the old culture-merchant, step out of the wings in Indian file and walk towards the front of the stage, looking as solemn and serious as a pair of bailiffs. A rapid flurry of whispers runs round the hall, perhaps because theAuthor is wearing a summer shirt, khaki shorts and sandals, and looks less like an artist than a kibbutznik who’s been sent into town to organise a peace rally, or like a reserve army officer in mufti. They say that in his private life he’s actually quite a simple guy, on a personal level, I mean, someone like you and me, and look what complicated books he comes up with. He probably had a difficult childhood. It would be interesting to know what he’s like to live with. Not that easy, to judge by his books. They say he’s divorced? Isn’t he? Not just once but twice? You can tell from his books: there’s no smoke without fire. Anyway, he looks completely different in his pictures. He’s aged quite a bit. How old do you think he is? He must be forty-five or so, don’t you think? Forty-five at the outside. You want to know the truth, I would have sworn, literally sworn, that he was taller than he is.
    *
    They put the Author in the middle, between the professional reader, who will read passages aloud from the Author’s work, and the literary critic. They shake hands. They nod. Rochele Reznik withdraws her fingers from his clasp quickly, as though she’sbeen burnt. The Author makes a mental note that the handshake made her slim neck blush more than her cheeks.
    The cultural organiser gets to his feet heavily, tries out the microphone, and clears his throat. He starts by welcoming the very mixed and multi-generational audience gathered here this evening, he apologises for the air conditioning not working, quipping that every cloud has a silver lining – the breakdown means that for once we don’t have to put up with its infernal humming and so this time we will not miss one word.
    Then he lists the programme for this evening, promising the event will conclude with questions and answers, in the form of a no-holds-barred discussion with our guest whom, he declares gleefully, it is truly superfluous to introduce, despite which, to justify his presence, he spends the next ten minutes relating the Author’s life story and listing all his books (erroneously attributing to his paternity a famous novel by another writer), and concludes his introductory remarks by repeating to the audience in his high-spirited way the Author’s witticism on the staircase just now: our bridegroom of this evening was surprised to learn we had waited for him and not begun the programme withouthim, hee-hee! Apropos of which it is not inappropriate to quote the well-known lines of the veteran poet Tsefania Beit-Halachmi, from his book
Rhyming Life and Death
, which goes something like this:
    You’ll always find them side by side:
    never a groom without a bride.
    Yes. And now, with your permission, we shall proceed to this evening’s programme. Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the monthly meeting of the Good Book Club at the refurbished Shunia Shor and the Seven Victims of the Quarry Attack Cultural Centre. I am very pleased to be able to say that the Good Book Club has been meeting here on a regular basis every month for the past eleven and a half years.
    *
    The Author, listening to this, decides not to smile. He appears thoughtful, faintly sad. The audience’s eyes are on him, but he, apparently paying no attention, deliberately fixes his gaze on the picture of the Labour leader Berl Katznelson on