Cut Throat Dog by Joshua Sobol, Dalya Bilu

says fuck it, we’ve lost him. The Alsatian’s face turns a poisonous green, the color of tattoo ink. His lips are turning purple. His eyes open and for a split second his pupils reflect the green tropical sky, and then they suddenly go dull and they no longer reflect anything. They look at each other.They each wait for somebody else to say it, but all of them, with their throats choked up, maintain the right to silence.
    And that’s the moment, says Shakespeare, that you stand up in the middle of the boat and produce a bitch of a monologue, God only knows where from:
    What a genius you were. What a noble mind was destroyed here. Always, when we stood at a loss confronting the impossible, you would analyze the situation with your Cartesian French mind, going straight to the heart of the matter with the elegance of a knight, cutting to the chase with a stroke of a Samurai’s sword and the sharp intelligence of a Yeshiva scholar from Alsace. And now you lie here, at the bottom of a fishing boat, on a foreign river in a foreign land, a marvelous miracle of a man, and it’s all over for you, over and done, and we have nowhere to take you, friend. Forgive us, Danny, we’re giving you up to the river.
    As one man they lift Daniel Altwasser, who for the first time Shakespeare has dared to call by his name, and lay him very gently in the water, over the side of the boat. The tide takes the body, rocks and spins it for a moment, until it slowly sinks into the brown water. But the Alsatian never disappeared. At this very moment he’s here with us, muses Yadanuga, and he senses the reluctance of Shakespeare, who is standing in front of him rooted to the spot, to enter the conference room, which is full of smoke and steeped in the fragrance of marijuana, like the Temple of Shiva in Bangalore. But here the sweetish scent is coming from the joints which Moran is rolling with her long fingers. And he says to himself exactly the same words he said then, as they stood in the boat and looked at the body as the muddy water spread over its monk’s habit and stained it brown, like coffee seeping into a white sugar cube: We talk wildly. We come up with all kinds of random sentences. Belonging to a world that doesn’t yet know why things happen. Surrounded bysenseless killing and meaningless death. And what do we understand? Nothing.

14
    Shakespeare Shakespeare, thinks Yadanuga, where did you find those words at that moment on that muddy river, words which described what our lives were with such precision. And in his head, from darkness to darkness, a selection of action scenes rush past, as if they had been cut out of many movies and stuck together into one sequence. A mustachioed man, wearing a well-tailored ultramarine suit, gets into a maroon Renault 16 next to a public park, slams the door, starts the engine, and breaks into body parts flying between fragments of metal inside a ball of fire that scorches the foliage of a chestnut tree, bright with the fresh new green of the end of spring, and then a coded knock in Morse, dash-dash-dot-dot at the hotel door, and a fat naked man, his paunch spilling over the top of his green boxer shorts, opens the door in the middle of the night and gets a bullet between the eyes from a silencer that coughs into his face at point blank range, and he falls backward on the carpet, and the crown of his limp penis peeps in one-eyed astonishment from the opening of his shorts, and a man’s voice on the telephone says ‘Pronto’ in Italian with a heavy gutteral accent, and a finger presses eight-one-zero, and from the other end of the line an explosion is heard and after it the long shrill whistle of a disconnected line, and four men in the overalls of the French electric corporation skip like goats and spray eight men sitting round a table with miniaturized machine guns, and chairs turn over, and a fisherman’s cabin goes up in flames, and a boat blows up at sea, and people with arms and legs outspread