17 May 2013
[This is also an old meeting, but I met a funny man this week who reminded me of Yochanan, and I’m finding it hard to write about him (the funny man), so instead I’ll copy this description of Yochanan out of my diary.]
If I didn’t have the sheets of poems in my pocket, I could easily believe that the whole thing never happened, that it was just an odd dream that I can’t quite shake off, an escapist fantasy. Already I’m starting to forget – and so I write.
Michal came over this morning, and we talked , sat and talked, talked and walked. She’s great, exactly who I need at the moment. We went to Hurshat Hayareach, the Moon Grove, and walked around, and then I remembered the man I had seen in the bushes a few weeks ago. I had been looking for an old well that I heard you could jump into and swim in, but instead I found Yochanan – again, that memory is also dreamlike – so I led Michal through a path behind the hedges growing around the Leper Hospital to see if he was there. Michal was reluctant, held back, then held my hand and followed. I didn’t know exactly what to expect, what we would find, but he was there, and remembered me too. He introduced himself to Michal as Yochanan, and I think she was terrified of him: an old man, sitting between the branches of the bush in some kind of nest that he’d built, with books and sheets of paper strewn around him, parsley and coriander and garlic, bottles filled with a dark yellow liquid. He looked harmless to me, but strange. His straggly white beard ended with single hairs reaching down to his stomach, he wore a few layers, an army shirt over the top, tracksuit bottoms, and something that looked like homemade slippers, or maybe thick misshapen socks on his feet. Again, it’s hard to describe, I remember him as a smiling face bobbing up and down, the other details are vague in my mind. He asked our names, and then focussed on Michal. “Michal, Michal. Micha? Michal.” He rolled the word around, trying it out, tasting it. “Do you know who Michal was in the Tanach?” He ignored, or didn’t hear that she said yes, and told her that she got angry at King David. Michal replied quickly that she also saved David’s life – Yochanan laughed, and that broke the ice between all of us. “Yes, we always remember the bad things and forget the good, even me. Thank you for reminding me.” He pointed at the brown Tanach in his stash of books, told us he was reading through it now. He asked us what we did. “I listen”, I said, and he laughed again, repeated my words, and nodded. “I sing”, said Michal, and that set him off. He started singing some verses from Psalms. His voice was deep, beautiful, it seemed more powerful than the frail man in front of us, it reverberated deep inside me, it made me put my doubts to the side, suspend my disbelief, it fitted perfectly with the surrealness of everything else in that nest. Michal later said that it was beautiful because he meant every word, and that’s a good way to describe him, honest.
The conversation rambled on from topic to topic, everything he said was fantastic and irrational, but I’m sure he believed every word he said. He claimed he was a doctor, five kids, he showed us a book he was writing, he pulled out bottles of medicines and said he’d be dead by now without the potions he makes, he told us about people he treated there, in the bush, he offered to clear up my spots, he expanded on theories about blood circulation, and men and women. At one point we talked about poems, and he pulled out a sheet of Dickinson from a mysterious inner pocket, and read out a poem that he had half-memorised. The effect of the poem – which was a great one, I’d read it before – was a bit spoiled by his attempt at an English accent. He gave me a copy, and it took me a while to realise that it was hand-written; maybe the neatest handwriting I’ve ever seen.
“I dwell in Possibility
A fairer House than Prose
More numerous of Windows
Superior for Doors”
I tried to replicate the handwriting, but can’t. Anyway, the memories are drying up, fading away. All that’s left is the sheet of poems, and these last memories that I’ve written down here. I swear that every word is true.
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