AVIYA KUSHNER
613
most political and most anti-religious, Amichai was still a tremendously
sensual poet. Here, for example, he asks for a burial ritual that diverges
from strict tradition, because the Chevra Kadisha members are always
the same gender as the deceased. But the focus, for Amichai, was still
the body, always the body:
When I die, I want only women
to
handle me in the Chevra
Kadisha
and
to
do with my body as they please: cleanse my ears of the last
words I heard, wipe my lips of the last words I said,
erase the sights I saw from my eyes, smooth my brow of worries
and fold my arms across my chest like the sleeves of a shirt after
ironing.
In
the creased and tanned faces around me, raptly listening to the
radio, I saw pain. I also saw sparkle, what I thought were remembrances
of Amichai's humor, his moving and erotic lines about, say, his wife's
shoes, or a woman's hair. Amichai was aware of the little things, as in
this passage in his latest book,
Open Closed Open,
which includes this
advice
to
his twentysomething daughter:
Don't forget the tremendous power of hair that fans out free and open,
and the tremendous power of hair pulled back, coiled tight
like a dancer's.
All around me, as people sweated their way home and fiercely held
on to their Shabbat supplies as more riders crammed into the bus, I
heard comments about seeing Amichai in the supermarket, before he
got too sick to shop. This was a man who was around, who had been
present.
By Sunday morning, the city's ubiquitous bulletin boards were over–
whelmed with white signs framed in black lines : the classic announce–
ment of a death in Israel. All through the city, those awful posters
stared. Instead of the usual wife and children listed as mourners, there
in black letters were the mayor of Jerusalem and the city's top officials
listed as mourners. The city itself was listed as a mourner.
That struck no one as odd. Imagine New York City listed in the obit–
uaries as the next-of-kin for one of its deceased writers. Amichai, of
course, was Jerusalem's great friend. He wrote of her as a child, a lover,
a companion, and an enigma. She was always on his mind, and he was
