Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [30]
Grouchy, Sneezy, Soc … Snoopy? No, you idiot. That’s the dog in Pogo. I mean Peanuts.
Onwards. These days I come across an account of Ismail ben Yussef’s latest pronouncement to be quoted in Time and instead of being outraged I find myself chuckling at the photograph of Cedric sporting a fez, dreadlocks, and a caftan coloured like a rainbow. Once, I actually wrote him a letter.
Salaam, Ismail:
I am writing to you on behalf of The Elders of Zion Foundation. We are raising money to establish mugging fellowships for black brothers and sisters in everlasting memory of three young bloodsucker kikes (Chaney,20 Goodman, and Schwerner), who ventured into Mississippi in 1964 to register black voters and, as a consequence, were murdered by a gang of ice-people. I trust we can count on your contribution.
Possibly you could also help me with a philosophical conundrum. I happen to agree with Louis Farrakhan’s aperçu that the ancient Egyptians were black. As further evidence, let me cite Flaubert in Egypt: A Sensibility on Tour. Anticipating Sheik Anta Diop’s claim that civilization’s cradle was black, he wrote of the Sphinx: “ … its head is grey, ears very large and protruding like a negro’s … [and] the fact that the nose is missing increases the flat, negroid effect … the lips are thick …”
But, holy cow, if the ancient Egyptians were black, then so was Moses, a prince in Pharaoh’s court. And then it follows that the slaves whom Moses liberated were also black, or he would have stuck out like the proverbial “n—— in the woodpile,” and the notoriously contrary Israelites would have complained, “Listen here, have we sunk so low that we’re going to wander through a desert for forty years led in circles by a shvartzer?”
So, assuming that Moses and his tribe were black, what perplexes me is that when the undeniably eloquent Farrakhan denounces my people, is it possible that, unbeknownst to him, he is in fact just another self-hating Jew, like Philip Roth?
I look forward to your reply, bro, not to mention your cheque, and enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope.
Allah Akbar!
Your old friend and admirer
BARNEY PANOFSKY
I’m still waiting for a reply.
(Rereading this old letter of mine recently, I suffered one of my frequent attacks of spiritual voice-mail: Miriam, my conscience, tripping me up again.)
If I could turn the clock back, it would be to those days when Miriam and I couldn’t keep our hands off each other. We made love in the woods and on a kitchen chair, after quitting a tedious dinner party early, and on hotel-room floors and trains, and once we were nearly caught at it in a bathroom at the Sha’ar Hashomayim synagogue at one of Irv Nussbaum’s fund-raising dinners. “You could have been excommunicated,” she said. “Just like Spinoza.”
One memorable afternoon, we did it on my office carpet. Miriam had arrived unexpectedly, coming straight from her obstetrician, pronounced fit, six weeks after she had given birth to Saul. She locked the door, shed her blouse, and stepped out of her skirt. “I was told that this is where you audition actresses.”
“Oh, my God,” I said, simulating shock, “what if my wife happens to drop by?”
“I am not only your wife,” she said, tugging at my belt, “and the mother of your children. I’m also your whore.”
Bliss was it to be alive when we would be wakened by children in their pyjamas tumbling helter-skelter into our bedroom and leaping onto the bed.
“Mommy’s got nothing on.”
“Neither has Daddy.”
How could I have failed to pick up the early distress signals, rare as they were? Once, on her return from what I had hoped would be a fun dinner with her former CBC Radio producer, Kip Horgan, that meddling bastard, she seemed distracted. She began to straighten picture frames on the walls and plump up sofa cushions,