by Yoram Kaniuk
And at night, we'd set up a table in the garden and Menahem hung a lamp outside and we'd have supper on the lawn, yogurt, eggs, herring, salad, black bread and butter, or later margarine, near the bougainvillea with its cruel sweet colors and the breakers of the sea would be heard and the sirens of the ships and the launches sailing toward the ships, not to mention the crickets and the insects that would circle the lamp and Menahem loved to destroy them and I asked him not to kill them and his mother would look at him with some hushed sadness and say: Leave him alone Obadiah, after all he's a little boy. In her voice I could make out a complaint or submission, but back then I was too busy to have it out with her, and she'd say, Menahem is what we were, but I couldn't accept such an unpedagogical assumption that contradicted my craft that still lodged in me back then, imparting values.
A few days after we found out that Menahem had fallen there was a heat wave. We didn't yet know where they buried him and Jerusalem was still cut off from the coastal plain. I went outside, not yet understanding myself; I stood in the customary white shirt and shorts of those days, I picked up the hose by rote, turned on the faucet and aimed a jet of water at the roses dyed by the red and pink colors of sunset. The light was soft and the heat was heavy and the sea to my left was smooth and crystalline and suddenly I saw myself as a scarecrow watering his own grave, a teacher made of crystal, stuck forever in a conspiracy of death against my son, I tried to water for him the garden he wouldn't return to, I thought in terms of the grammar of nothingness, of the grammar of life, or nonlife, and a grammar of nothingness of my son suddenly became definite like the declension of a verb with no future and no past, and so maybe no present either, and the garden the nothingness of all things palpable like the declension of the verb "to die" was proof that Menahem became in this light, the numbing heat that blew as from a bellows, the foliage that in its wickedness wanted to live, that didn't long for Menahem like Yoash's dog that died of longings when he didn't return from the battles, but the garden didn't weep and didn't long, it wanted me to water it as if Menahem its owner weren't dead, the leaves were dropping, they had no grief, I hated that blossoming, the heat blew, the sea stretched to distant lands I could once have lived in, I thought to myself: What do you all want from me, you give birth to dead foliage. I wanted to take vengeance on somebody, the garden was the most convenient target, Menahem wasn't in it, shouldn't I have been mad at somebody, and I laughed at myself, Hebrew teacher, grammar of vengeance, watering gardens where wheelbarrows full of a son's loam won't go anymore, I turned off the faucet, the hose I left where it was (and it stayed like that for years until it rotted and was swallowed up in the heaps of sand that kept piling up), I went into the house and my wife looked at me and said: Did you turn off the water on the flowers, Obadiah? I said yes, and she said: That water, and I said: His garden and she said to me: His? She didn't ask, she said, and at the end of the word she put a hesitant question mark and so I neglected the garden, bushes of weeds began sprouting and I didn't uproot them and the faucet rusted and was blocked, sometimes I'd shut my eyes, I was waiting for him, expecting the evening, the table on the lawn, the herring, the-. "Henkin look up in the dictionary to screw a tomato in ancient Indian," I was expecting his joyous open laughter, humiliating me, the annihilated insects around the lamp, but everything is covered with nettles and yellowness and sand and obstinate callused melancholy shrouded our house and infected the other houses and the gardens ceased one after another, and maybe the Giladis were afraid to appear joyous with the hose next to our house, and slowly their garden was also humiliated and then it was too late to save it and anybody who could took heart and started all over, and then began a plague of dead gardens and it wasn't only Menahem who fell, Kuperman's son also disappeared and they didn't know where he was buried and Yehoshafat Neiya's son was badly wounded and was in the hospital, and slowly the foliage disappeared and only a few dusty stubborn trees remained and the street became dusty, lost its charm, and no longer had even an old-fashioned elegance, only something forlorn, more scorched than parched, and the weeds wove themselves into a new weave, as if death had its own interweaving, which is simply another form of the verb to be, a sprouting in a different direction, and something elite, distorted, miserable, but not without honor, took the place of the charm and the capricious sprinklers and the rounded roof tiles, the walls turned gray and it's true that in the house where your son grew up from the age of seven to the age of nineteen you don't seek aesthetic meaning at his empty shoes and his clothes in mothballs but I had a clear need to seek formal meanings, real formulations as I was accustomed to doing in the analysis of a story by Brenner or Genessin, something musical, maybe a feeling that had lodged in me and now disappeared, that behind every pain is a certain logic and that I had to decipher it for the students and there's understanding behind the complexity of the instincts and a wisdom woven in this or that pattern and grief and love have their own grammar.
So when, maybe too late, I noticed the garden being cultivated next to my house, when I saw a new rake, a new ladder, a hose, young virgin foliage and a sprinkler spinning, maybe then something penetrated my consciousness even though consciously, maybe as a defense from something I was afraid of, I started working our garden and some audacious sickness, certainly not acute, poured into me intoxicating letters of what I could have read by myself if only I dared: furtive bliss, bliss stemming from the fact that for a long time I hadn't yet succeeded in hating the garden because of the nothingness of my son. My wife then said to me: Obadiah, what are you trying to do in old age? You'll start knocking nails for me and knowing how they hang pictures on a wall, Obadiah, said my wife, you're too old to be a human being-that she said now with a wickedness that even she herself felt but couldn't stop herself, you'll start learning to long for your son without the whole world knowing it, she added with a kind of poison of love, maybe you'll even learn how to take out the garbage without spilling half on the floor and you'll learn how to make children who live and don't die. Much as her words pained me, especially the last ones, I knew it wasn't at me that she aimed her anger and even she herself was sorry for her words and she said: The department of dead children is me, you just watered gardens, children, a new nation, empty rhetoric, and my thirsty body. I saw her, I looked at her sad eyes. And with a solid longing that lodged in me from the first day I saw her, her little body wrapped in skin soft as down, her limbs that haven't grown old but only softened with the years, her frightening orphanhood, and I said: Not everything is locked, Hasha Masha, and I went outside, I meant love, maybe hate. I ripped up some crabgrass. I started tending a garden in my old age. I stood there, I knew she was looking at me, I thought of the album, of the photos of the trip to Caesarea that her innocent eyes see through the binding of the album now closed forever, I thought of her inability to really hate, I contemplated the bright but blurred photo of the tour, the picture of Caesarea, a few children in bathing suits, rocks, an older girl with a wet skirt clinging to the hard body and to identify him and Menahem's face in the middle of the photo, his hands held out to the sides, oxygen ate part of the picture, and his hands are trying to embrace the world with a love that maybe really did lodge in him, for life, for the garden, for Noga, for the sun, and for the sea and he's there linked to his mother's words, not mine.
And so I discovered that the Giladis had disappeared and no longer lived next door to us. Together we moved here, together we built our houses, together we had children, Amihud their son and Menahem our son play with one another, and then they fly kites and frolic in the bamboo nests they called boos and look at the sea and swim. Here we came to live as a national mission, to conquer another square of land for the nation, here in the far north then, cut off, and now it's become part of a city with many gigantic hotels and shops and cafes and restaurants. Giladi was an official in the company to prepare for settlement and bought land all over Israel from the old and spoiled effendis in Beirut or Damascus for the institutions and he'd run around
on his big motorcycle and there was always some big secret on his face that he couldn't reveal and after Menahem's death, the Giladis stopped coming and if they did come they felt uncomfortable and fled, and so ties slackened and we were also cut off from other people we knew and new ties were made that were essential, at least to me, and even Amihud stopped coming and I dimly remember that he invited me to his wedding or maybe some other event, and I couldn't go and then we didn't see each other anymore and now I discover that they're not here anymore and I didn't notice that they had moved. And I thought, funny how people cut themselves off. The place took on a new form. The gardens I had de stroyed in my mourning, the Giladis whose secrets I had long ago not tried to decipher in meandering conversations with Mr. Giladi, Ben-Yehuda Street where I walk every morning is changing, tourists come to photograph ruins, couples in cars on the seashore, petting or perhaps even copulating, and Berla's kiosk has closed, the huts of the youth movement have disappeared, and the sands have been concealed under the impetus of hotel building and only Singer's little shop with an old sign advertising a brand of cigarettes they don't make anymore is still here, and the sign hangs in the salty sea air, rusted, groaning when the wind blows in winter, cobwebs of an old man who was once the first one to wrap food in clean parchment paper and not in newspaper, and we're left an abandoned island next to the closed port and in the grocery they confirmed it, yes, a strange new neighbor lives there, a refugee they told me. Comes to the store, buys, is silent, and goes, always dressed for the theater, Singer's son told me, dragging a crate of eggs from the pickup truck on the sidewalk, cartons of eggs in a crate, like all of us, and so I paid attention to the garden that put an end to some gnawing grief, some misery we all felt but didn't talk about, and there was fertilizer there and suddenly piles of red loam and planting grass and you just don't see who does it, he's solitary as a thief at night and working when everybody's sleeping maybe afraid of being seen and I work my garden and my garden starts touching his garden and a kind of union is created here, I fix and somebody else fixes, I uproot crabgrass and suddenly the street is full of uprooted crabgrass and who the man is, I didn't know then.
And so we met, Ebenezer and I. When the pine tree looked green and fresh and the bougainvillea started blooming and the piles of sand disappeared and the new lawn was planted and looked green and soft and mowed and the geranium bushes started blooming I was filled with a kind of pleasure, a plea for far-off days and the tombstone around my house was shattered and my body stood erect, even my face took on color and at night I could sleep from fatigue, and in my mind's eye I saw Menahem running around in the garden I had planted for him, as if life has cycles and there's a return from death, and he pushes a wheelbarrow as if it were a train and goes toot toot and then I saw the walls of my house peeling and I bought paint to paint them and I fixed the roof tiles and a carpenter came and fixed the windows and I stretched new screens and I cleaned the gutters and I made a new gate and I put Menahem's wheelbarrow next to the new faucet and my wife refused to go out to see and peeped out the window, and who knows, maybe she smiled to herself, and I wanted to hug her and she avoided me with an almost virginal laugh of an old woman, and she even said: So what, Menahem will grow up in you to be a gardener. And she tried to wipe away invisible tears and ran to our room and I didn't say a thing, but then I saw my neighbor, he was pruning a rosebush that almost touched a vine that started preening wildly on the trunk of the cypress that looked green again and not dusty.
It was summer then, perhaps late summer, because of the heat I took off my shirt and stayed in my undershirt. A nice smell of a watered garden stood in the air, the cool of evening stood in the dark sky, and he stood also in an undershirt but without the cap I wore and I saw how blasted and white his body was, as if a dangerous malediction lodged in him, and yet in his behavior, the way he pruned, the way he measured and plucked tendrils, there was some authenticity, some solid standing on the ground that was his, surely this is how a person prunes a garden he longs for and is rooted in, this is also how a person hates his garden and this is also how he loves it, I was amazed at those phrases but they echoed in the back of my mind. We stood there, two old men, watering gardens, who just a while ago were tense, maybe we were safeguarding something, getting to know one another through gardens, through our almost naked bodies, each one holding the strong flow of water like mighty gods trying to make the harsh and obstinate earth fertile, I thought about the man's fractures, what holds him together, I could see myself, an old teacher, looking like somebody who stood for many years in front of children, teaching them why they would have to die, and behind me the pictures of Herzl, Ben-Gurion, Berl Katznelson, and Weizmann repeating Zionism that the children later realize on memorial walls that took the place of the pictures of the leaders and here he belongs and yet as if he belongs, to those same echoes that made me send Menahem from his first year to war, so those fractures would have a place in the sun, I thought about Tel Aviv, from here it looks like a city joined together obstinately and innocently, half its name Tel, mound, a place where cities are buried and discovered after thousands of years, and half its name, Aviv, spring, is blossoming, blossoming of what? I thought about a line from the words of the Last Jew, he quoted the Yiddish poet Itzik Manger on one of those tapes, who said: When they buried the last of the Gypsy kings, thirty thousand violins came to play on his grave and I thought of what he said, what he quoted from some person who may have breathed his last right after he said that, and Itzik Manger surely meant that he was the last of the violinists playing on the grave of thirty thousand Jewish kings. And at that moment each one of them turned into two-fifths of a cent.
The sight of my neighbor made me sad, like somebody who's used to investigating a situation woven of words, two separate entities, two different disasters, the disaster of the Last Jew and God and the disaster of the wars my son falls in and surely it's from that junction, I thought, that the great and awful moments of our life are woven, the junction of celebration and the junction of nightmare, an illness of malediction leaving smoke that came here to ask for steps for feet they didn't have anymore, an echo seeking a foothold, and yet a foothold that knew what its echo was.... Maybe Hasha Masha really is right and there's no need to talk and a man can be silent with his fellow man and know things that many words don't know, maybe it was his accent, when we did speak, an accent composed of an ancient phonetic layer of the natives of the Land of Israel, the way farmers talk, which once, when I immigrated here in the early nineteen twenties, I knew as a worker in their yards, and along with that some foreignness, a refugee language, in short here I hold in my hands an enormous sex organ of some ancient god, spraying water, talking with a scarecrow that sprouted in my neighbor's yard, a scarecrow who came from two disasters, and wonders. We talked of the Giladis and he claimed he didn't know them and didn't know where they had disappeared, I was impolite, maybe because of the heat and I asked myself who he was and where he came from, and he peeped at me like an old acquaintance. With some practiced smile at the edge of his mouth that lacked suppleness and yet was quite harsh, and I sensed that his eyes were mocking me, as if he were saying: Old Henkin, surely we're old friends and surely I knew where I knew him from and he said surely my name is Ebenezer and the name of the woman who lives with me and is married to me is Fanya R. He pronounced the words carefully and I sensed that he had a special need to feel the words as if he weren't used to speaking Hebrew, which sounded, as I said, both rooted and foreign. I sensed that he had a need to say "the woman who lives with me" before "is married to me," an amazing phrase in itself, surely I would have said my wife and not the woman who's married to me as if she's married to him and he isn't married to her?