LITMIR.BIZ

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with wonder. Her compassionate warning, ‘Never bring children up like a truck,’ still resonates in my mind. She worshiped perfection. She strove to perfect her little Zoltan by forcing me to practice violin six hours a day. At night I slept with my violin. I caressed the G and D strings as I dozed off, and even learned a Mozart sonata in my sleep. However, such childhood intensity habits have long-term effects. As you see, in my present armchair mode, I am physically immobile and mentally stagnant. Could there be hidden meaning in this paralysis, a cosmic sign? I yearn for epistemological certitude.”

      Rays of sunlight slipped through the Venetian blinds and fell in diagonal patterns across the Turkish carpet. Martha fumbled with the wall plug and pushed the straws of her broom into the electric socket, cleaning its interior. “Meaning is important. Direction is vital.” Emphasizing her point, she straightened up, raised her broom in the medieval Order of Teutonic Knights of Jerusalem diagonal spear position, and, in martial tone, trumpeted, “Ordo domus Sanctæ Mariæ Theutonicorum Hierosolymitanorum!” Bending towards Zany’s right ear, she whispered Three Questions: “Doktor, why were you born? Why are you here? What is your purpose?”

      Zany shook his head. “Martha, I’m disappointed. You have worked for me ten years, and you still don’t know why?” He waved his hand, conducting his thoughts in three-quarter time. “My goal has always been self-elevation. Even now, in my static condition, I fervently wish I could leave my armchair and cross the living room. Perhaps I might even stand at the staircase, and rise to the second floor!”

      Martha glanced at a cluster of cobwebs on the ceiling. Spying their creator, a small black spider hanging from one of the webs, she briefly considered the nature of Tarentella dancing in Naples. After her nimble mind had filtered notions of Platonic idealism, Marxist dialectical materialism, the imprecations of Vladimir Lenin, and faux-Yiddish dialectics of Heinrich von Tubbehoffenspiegel, she turned to Dr. Zany, and said, “I appreciate purposeful thinking about the Ends of Man, and the sturdiness of your teleological philosophy. What are your terms?” She swatted the spider.

      Zany remembered his performance of the Bruch violin concerto before one thousand camels and their riders at St. Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mt. Sinai. Imagining Moses holding a burning bush high in his right hand, the doctor pushed himself up from his armchair, stamped his foot on the floor, and in stentorian voice exclaimed: “I speak in biblical terms!”

      Then he sank back.

      Martha’s question had forced him to consider his future. He remained silent, cupping his chin in puzzlement.

      A few hours later, he asked, “Martha, do you think Mother and Father Zany will join my celestial adventure?”

      “Of course,” she replied. “Everyone likes a heavenly quest. But, mein Doktor, there are obstacles. First you must free yourself of lassitude. Ausgeschnel your sitzfleisch zeitgeist. Empower yourself. Get up!”

      Zany bowed his head in agreement. “I know,” he said. “The mystery of motivation. Reach the second floor. Before such elevation is attained, I must rise again.”

       2

      DREAMS

      WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE for breakfast, mein Doktor?” Martha asked. Rays of cascading sunlight had brightened the kitchen.

      Raising his bedtime sunglasses, Zany pondered the question. He leaned hard on his thinking leg while his right thumb, calloused from years of violin bowing, slowly stroked his magyar nose.

      Martha waited impatiently, tapping an Austrian waltz on her frying pan.

      “What do you need?”

      “A dream. A big one!”

      Zany lifted a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped a tear from his eye. “A land without dreams is worse than a desert.”

      “Then dream!” Martha declared. “Indeed, life without dreams is unbearable. So is death. But life, especially for you, my doktor, is a dream. Dreaming is part of your shamanic tradition and Hungarian heritage.”

      Zoltan’s shoulders sagged in resignation. Beads of perspiration broke out on his forehead as thoughts of his recent concert tour of Jordan rose in his mind. He remembered the Nabatean ruins of Petra, where he had performed the Camel Violin Concerto by the Ma’anian oud virtuoso Ahmad Al Aswara before ten thousand swaying fans. Wiping off the sweat, he sighed, “Where did I lose my dream? How do I find another? Shall I invent one? Are dreams born of the same Void from which the Music Master created the world?”

      He continued his inner journey along the twisted wadis of his dried- up past. “Once, my concert performances excited me. But now they have reached their apotheosis. I sit here faded and finished. Where are my new challenges? Can one weave new cloth from old wool?”

      “Yes, your skills have been perfected,” Martha remarked. “You’ve gone as far as you can go. Sleeping in the old life is healthy during transitions. But this somnambulance is temporary. New worlds lie ahead.”

      Zany considered his struggle. The face of discouragement rose before him. Opposites clashed: an internal battleground soaked in bloody choices of absence or nothingness.

      Yet hope glimmered: “It means working harder, sinking deeper into what I’ve got,” Zany declared. “Give up the horizontal. Pursue the vertical. Depth instead of width. To regain my freshness, I need not fondle the same old tit. On to new breasts! But where? When Captain Marvel said, ‘Shazzam!’ did he mean me? Perhaps I’ll write a new Zany composition.”

      “What would you compose?” asked Martha.

      Indeed, what sperm cells was the Music Master carrying on His silver tray today? Would notes and majestic sound even be part of the doctor’s future? Only a rooster could tell.

      A rooster! Zany turned to face his garden. Bees and gnats flew in all directions.

       3

      LIFE OF ATTILA

      ATTILA ZANY, A BRILLIANT Linguistic student, had graduated from New York’s Maritime High School the previous June at age sixteen. Two months later, after accepting admission to Western Bustard University, he drove cross country to Copper Gulch Country, Colorado. There, in the college town of Springing Tree ten thousand feet above sea level, he settled into his dormitory single, spread his books on the floor, nailed a Hungarian cannon poster on the wall, lay down on the fresh linen of his new bed, and fell into a deep sleep of happy exhaustion.

      Two days later, waking refreshed and exhilarated, he took an exploratory walk around town. Passing beneath a canopy of leafy maples, he spied a grocery selling fresh vegetables. Picking up some tomatoes and munching them carefully, he peered into the window of a clothing store specializing in camping equipment; beside the store stood a weapons disposal unit, followed by a book store featuring a sale of Karl Marx’s Das Capital edited by Leslie Lenin, great-grandson of Friedrich Engels. Attila went inside, purchased a paperback copy, sat down on the curb, opened the book, lay back to read a few pages, and soon fell asleep on the sidewalk. The high altitude with its thin oxygenation had slowed his bodily and mental processes, quieted his emotions, especially his violent streak, and given him a headache.

      However, the rarified atmosphere also facilitated etymological analysis, creating subtle linguistic shifts, not only in his command of classical Latin and Greek, but in his continued study of Ugoritic, Phoenician, Akkadian, and Sumerian. It was in fact during that first semester at Bustard, his so- called “Sidewalk Period,” as he dozed on cement, that Attila formulated his Theory of Linguistic Connection, the notion that ancient Sumerian and modern Finno-Ugric came from the same linguistic family. “Ur,” as in Abraham’s Ur of the Chaldeans, and the biblo-Chaldean city of Erech (Ur-ech), had names closely related to their modern Hungarian equivalent Ur, meaning “master” or “mister.” Attila practiced his developing linguistic skills on his cell phone, calling his father Ur Zany and bowing before the technology

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