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in Bruno and send me all kinds of material. You’d be surprised how much has been written about him. Mostly in Polish. And I’ve come across a number of theories concerning his lost novel, The Messiah: that it’s about how Bruno lures the Messiah into the Drohobycz Ghetto with his spellbinding prose, or that it’s about the Holocaust and Bruno’s last years under the Nazi Occupation. But you and I know better, don’t we? Life is what interested Bruno. Simple, everyday life; for him the Holocaust was a laboratory gone mad, accelerating and intensifying human processes a hundredfold …

In any case, they all praise him. They say he’s one of the greatest writers of the century; they compare him to Kafka, Proust, and Rilke. They disapprove of my writing about him. They tactfully suggest that to write about him one would have to be a writer of comparable stature at least. Well, I don’t care. It’s not their Bruno I’m writing about. I read their letters politely, and tear the papers to bits, and then, as of course you know, when I come to see you in Tel Aviv, I climb the breakwater, ho-hum, just taking a little stroll up here on the rocks, when suddenly I shake my pockets out and a heap of shredded paper hits the water, plumpety-plump, anyone notice anything? Those lettersmean more to you than they do to me, anyway. Maybe you detest academic harangues, but if I know you, you’ll paste the pieces together and file them below in your benthic archives. You’re not about to part with documents like these.

And I also wanted to tell you that I’m back to my old self again. That is, I’m back to my old style. The style my poems were written in. And Bruno is slowly letting go of my pen. He’s peeling off. I have only a few notebooks left now which nobody would ever be able to identify positively as either his or mine. And of course you and I both know I was merely the vessel, the writing hand, the weak link through which his stifled energy could flow.

I can’t stop coming back to you. I come back to tell you the real story, the story I can’t put down in writing as it really happened, as it should be told: not sensibly, but ardently. From start to finish. For once you’re going to listen to something that isn’t directly about you, and you will listen patiently and quietly (I wouldn’t dream of asking you to listen eagerly) to everything that happened to me when I returned from Narvia, damn you, listen. That is, let the Bruno in you listen.

On May 25, 1980 (I remember the exact date), I received a parting gift from Ayala: The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz. I’d never heard of the book before, and I was even put off by the German ring of the author’s name. Anyway, I started reading it immediately, mainly because of the bitter circumstances in which it had been given to me, and because of the giver.

And then suddenly, ten pages into the book, I forgot everything and read in breathless excitement, the way you might read a letter smuggled to you over the back roads and byways, a terse communication from the brother you had assumed was dead all these years. It was the first time I ever began to reread a book as soon as I finished it. And I’ve read it a good many times since. For months it was the only book I needed. It was The Book for me in the sense Bruno had yearned for that great tome, sighing, a stormy Bible, its pages fluttering in the wind like an overblown rose—and I believe I read it as such a letter deserves to be read: knowing that what is written on the page is less significant than the pages torn out and lost; pages so explicit they were expunged for fear that they would fall into the wrong hands …

And I did something I haven’t done since I was a child: I transcribed entire paragraphs in my notebook. To help me remember, and to feelthe words streaming out of my pen and collecting on the page. On the first page I copied his indirect testimony that God’s hand had passed over his face while he slept, and transformed him into one who knows what he knows not and whose drooping eyes are filled with sublime intimations of distant worlds …

Then one night, a few weeks later, I woke out of a sound sleep and knew for certain that Bruno had not been murdered in the Drohobycz Ghetto in 1942. He had escaped. When I say “escaped,” I don’t mean it in the usual sense of the word but, in the special sense Bruno might have given a word like “pensioner,” signifying someone who crosses the prescribed and generally accepted borders and brings himself into the magnetic field of a different dimension of existence, traveling light … Whenever I finished copying some passage, my pen would jiggle around a few more times and litter the page with a line or two of my own—though how shall I put it—in Bruno’s voice, by straining to hear him, having clearly perceived his desperate need to express himself, now that he was deprived of his writing hand. How well I understand the agony, the affliction of a writer in exile like him. I mean “exile” in a very broad sense, and I, as you know, proffered my hand and my pen.

How strange it is. And frightening.

Because just think, here I was—a Hebrew poet with four books out in a highly distinctive style, a style one paragon of literary criticism who crooks his little finger when he writes described as “thin-lipped,” and which Ayala called “mean and niggardly”—experiencing a veritable stampede of panting, perspiring words in my notebook like the mating dance of the peacock, or a vivid cloud of hummingbirds,