by Yoram Kaniuk
The German's hand began moving toward the album. He waited. A gigantic hand expecting, not asking but waiting, a hand hanging in the air, I said, Yes, look! He went to the table, stubbed out the cigarette in his hand and meanwhile I searched for an ashtray in the house where only Noga had smoked, and by the time I brought the ashtray the Shimonis had given us for our anniversary, that gigantic ugly seashell, the writer was already leafing through the album. He didn't pay any attention to the ashtray, just caught it in his big hand, without looking, crushed the stubbed-out cigarette with one spark still flashing in it, and looked at the photos with solemn slowness, page after page, and didn't say a thing, didn't ask, I wanted to say, Here's Menahem at six, here he is on a tour to the Carmel, but he didn't ask. I thought to myself, they and Hasha Masha know something, they know something about Menahem, about some life, and I don't.
Maybe because he was a German a forgotten picture from Romain Rolland's novel about Beethoven rose in the back of my mind. I recalled Beethoven's friend's description of the deaf genius listening intensely to music with his face impassive, as if, wrote Romain Rolland, the strength of the experience was too enormous to express in a look. I tried to understand what had been bothering me since the beginning of our conversation in the Shimonis' house, the sequence of accidents, the almost offensive circularity of Marar, Ebenezer Schneerson, Boaz, and somebody named Secret Charity and something that had now dissolved with the wine I had drunk and made me pleasantly dizzy, no, not the surprising link, not just that surprising closeness between Boaz and Ebenezer or the link of my investigation and the German's investigation, but something else I still didn't catch, maybe some fate I am to witness in the future no less than in the past, I said to him: Here is Menahem my son when he finished school, for example, the grammar school he attended, on his left is Amihud Giladi, the son of the owners of Ebenezer's house, before he moved here. He looked at me in amazement. His face was impassive, he was silent and in fact hinted to me that there was no need to detail those pictures and that the fact of Menahem's graduation from grammar school had nothing to do with what he was seeing now, as if Menahem's not-being had nothing to do with events when he was here, and whereas I knew I wasn't able to behave properly in such circumstances, that something theatrical and indulgent exulted in me at moments when I should behave in a precise and restrained way, I started telling the German who stood over the table and looked at the pictures in an unemotional silence, a story so characteristic of me, disgusting even myself but I couldn't change now of all times, before the photos of Menahem while his wife and my wife were developing a strange intimacy, I told him: A woman lived here on the street who recently opened a new shop, Salon de Pre she called the shop, once she was caught in the forest with a group of escapees from the ghetto, and Nazi soldiers-I said Nazis, not Germans!-caught them, the commander, she told me, was dressed very splendidly, wore riding pants, aluminum tags on his collar, a splendid silk hat on his head and in his hand he held a pistol and he shot, one after another the children dropped, and when he came to her and aimed the pistol at her son, on his finger pressing the trigger she saw a gold wedding ring, the soldiers were gathering wood for a bonfire and she stared at the finger, her child was pushed into her dress and with a vital flash of a besieged mother (my words, not hers) she said to him: Someday my children will take revenge on your children! And the officer's hand began shaking. At that moment maybe he understood, she told me, that there's a connection between his children and those children he shot as if they were an ecological nuisance, and he couldn't shoot that child. Throughout the war, he helped the woman. He'd show up from distant places, warn her, and take off. She wrote a letter to the court in Nuremberg and told the story. They wanted to know his name. She didn't know. They sent her pictures for identification and she couldn't identify him. I looked at him, he closed the album and looked at me, and then he said something strange, he said: Mr. Henkin, I didn't save any children! I felt embarrassed and I quickly moved the album to its place. Meanwhile the voices of our wives were heard again, I heard their whispering, and didn't understand them, they returned to the room with trays between them, for a second they looked at the closed album, as if they sensed it had been closed a minute or two before, I looked at the writer's face and it was impenetrable, a mouth mute now, I felt remote, I recalled the memorial day we had held recently for a commander when one of the government ministers said: We're in deep depression, this is a hard time, and from the grave of our loved one a beam of light bursts out to us and I stood there and something in me was revolted but I was also moved. Maybe both deceived and pained, a beam of light bursting out of death! In the ashtray the spark of smoke that burst from the stubbed-out cigarette could still be seen, my wife wanted to say something, the tray in her hand, I said: I'd have to say, he wrote a poem, I felt my legs buckle.
He didn't write any poem, said my wife in a soft voice, but Obadiah be lieves, she added in a voice that maybe for the first time in years didn't have an echo of the contempt she felt for me. Obadiah believes that through eternity the past can be improved. I preserve the album, added my wife and said to the writer, so that Henkin won't succeed in taking new pictures of Menahem.
And then she said to me in Hebrew: They're mourning just as much as we are, Henkin, but they don't have a committee of dead outings and foreign relations, look at them, see how much they miss a son!
It's not our son they miss, I said in Hebrew, and she smiled warmly at Renate, who stood a bit embarrassed in a corner, the tray in her hand. No, not the son of your committee, Obadiah Henkin, their son!
And then she said in German: See what a little kitchen like ours can hold, and he wants a new kitchen! They put the cakes and the tea and the coffee on the table and there was silence in the room, not an embarrassed silence, but a silence of something pleasant, as if we had returned from a long journey, we drank, we ate crisp, tasty cookies, suddenly my wife stood up, looked at Renate who had lit a cigarette with the gold lighter her husband handed to her, took the cigarette from Renate's hands, a long brown cigarette that burned with a strange pale light, inhaled and swallowed smoke, gave the cigarette back to Renate, hugged her arm, went to the old radio in the corner of the room, a gigantic radio that looked like an abandoned closet that we had bought thirty-five years before in the teachers' canteen and after a long moment some tune started bursting out of the box and my wife started moving to the rhythm of the music.
I didn't know if Germanwriter and his wife understood how strange it was to see my wife dancing after so many years, but I couldn't tell them again about the Jewish woman in the forest that Germanwriter aimed a gun at her son's temple, the stories of my son standing against his assailants were finished in me, my wife returned to the Tiberias-Tsemakh Road, maybe she danced to win me, to wipe out in me the thought of Teacher Sarakh whom Trotsky had hugged for three desperate nights. My wife set her body free, came alive wildly, held out her hand until Renate got up from the chair, put down her purse where she had been rummaging before, and her hand caught the held-out hand of Hasha Masha who was dancing and together they moved with a kind of rare lightness, with a kind of oblivion, as if the music flowed into their blood and they were stripping off their clothes before a sun god that had vanished and we weren't important to them anymore, they were dancing for themselves alone, not for us, maybe not even for Menahem, the pale light of the lamp created a halo around their dance, we sat, the two of us, Hebrewteacher and Germanwriter, looked at our wives dancing as in some magic ceremony and on their faces a lost light coming from inside them, not the light beaming from the grave that government minister talked about but a white pale light of life that once was and maybe returns, at that moment it returns, and then, in the middle of the dance when Renate and my wife were almost embracing, the writer stood up, glanced through the window at the house next door then sat down and his hand started shaking, he stared at his wife and said as if he were talking to himself: You're a very wise woman, Mrs. Henkin, men like him are
hard to know, we don't have a way to know through the body, we get data but the data aren't connected, after all we don't know according to unformulated dimensions. Our son didn't fall in battle, he committed suicide, why does a son commit suicide? He put his head in a gas oven, locked the doors of his apartment, and died.
They stopped dancing and the music coming from the radio was distant, and delicate, Renate looked at my wife, hugged her shoulder, and tried to assess me, to understand something that maybe connected me and Hasha Masha and Renate, and was released like my wife from all abstract thought, said: It wasn't a gas oven, it was an electric oven, maybe he electrocuted himself by mistake, my husband has already written the story. Life is simpler and more awful than stories. No, not electric, Renate, said the writer, gas, and Renate said without a trace of theatricality: There was no gas in his house, there was electricity there, maybe that was necessary because you don't commit suicide in an electric oven! And she went back to dancing, her face opaque with a mute expression. I looked at the expression of silent madness on the faces of our wives, and the sight was so pleasant, everything that happened could not have been different, and for some reason Hasha Masha could pity me now without loathing me, for the first time in a long time, without judging, and the two of us again, adjacent circles, maybe not yet connecting, with Menahem who died twice and Friedrich, their son who died in an electric oven and a gas oven at one and the same time, suddenly it was clear that every son died more than once. And maybe that was submission for the first time, without protest, in a long time, "known only to God," and the check that says: "Pay to the bearer .. The writer suddenly smiled and said: If they weren't our wives we could fall in love with them! And my wife went to Renate, who also stopped dancing, and they sat at the small table where once, a tortoise Menahem brought from the yard slept a whole night (and I then tried to coax him to put out his head and he refused and Menahem said something and suddenly the tortoise put out his head and wagged it) the memory was ignited and went out immediately, the sound of a plane landing not far from our house was heard, and Hasha Masha sat for the first time since my son fell and talked about him with a stranger.
Tape / -
And about ten minutes later when the writer dozed off and I counted the planes fearing some new preparation, the two women got up, Hasha Masha put a black crocheted scarf on her shoulder and gave Renate another scarf, a red one, with smaller, more delicate loops and when we went out into the garden we looked like four bent old people. The sky was illuminated by the light of a full moon, an intoxicating summer night, gardens washed and the sound of sprinklers as then, years ago, the dead castor oil plant was kindled for a moment by a silvery moonbeam and the extinguished streetlamp near our house was lit, the wretched houses of our neighborhood now looked beautiful, almost splendid in their poverty, the enclosures of the port looked connected to one another and enchanted, brightness touching the crests of the trees disappearing in the sky, the dark illuminated and transparent, airy, somebody stole the city, breakers of the sea rustle the silence in the garden, my wife nods, as if desperate to confront me, and the forgiveness was already devoid of substance, unnecessary, that same old love on the back burner during all the hard days of contempt, those long years, was lit once again. And then in that moment, the shutter in my neighbor's house was lifted like a warning and I surely wasn't thinking of how we'd approach him, how we'd get in, what I'd tell him, and now my neighbor said through the window: Come in, I've been waiting for you; he spoke German and Renate, who had previously separated from my wife, hugged Hasha Masha's shoulder again, bent over a bit, something softened in her even more than before, and on her face I saw a flash of a wild laugh like a rare bird that suddenly shrieks.
My neighbor was wearing an old-fashioned, unstylish suit (like a costume), on his head a gangster cap from the 1920s, some splendor devoid of beauty and full of innocence, he had paper lips, maybe cardboard, Hitler did die on the seashore, a Lag b'Omer bonfire of a man, Menahem dancing, dancing, I wanted to burst out laughing if I hadn't recalled how theatrical I looked on memorial days and mourning ceremonies and in contrast I saw how comprehensible that was to the German, how much he expected to see Ebenezer dressed just like that. There was in that drama some contempt only sharpened by Renate's smile, the brazen pauper encountered the desired spectator, in the window he stood, asking us in, the light gleaming there, and Hasha Masha, without my saying anything to her, already knew what to say, what to do, how to go in, how to relate to the moment, how to live it from Renate's smile and Ebenezer's seriousness, and only an experienced teacher like me, who had stood all his life and observed life and thought he was teaching children how to expel the British in diversionary acts, could have watched not only a drama but even his son, seen everything as watching and being watched at the same time. And Germanwriter, like a giant thing bursting out of the dark, held out a hand to the window and said: Yes, yes, and as we approach the door the writer leaps into the room through the window, just like that, as if to lighten the moment, to grant it a certain unimportance-to reinforce its uniqueness. And now we're bisected, facing the reality of the room, Ebenezer declaimed by a jester from the street of the lost dejected and the magic of the enchanted moon in the sky in the window and I see the Last Jew whose sources I had been writing for several months, close to here, on my desk, through the window locked with the old repainted shutter ...
The home itself surprised me enough. Not only because it was so unlike the Giladis' home but because for some reason I expected meager furnishings, as if Ebenezer's belonging both to Marar and the Holocaust required some obvious trigonometry, but in the room we entered through the corridor there were black shelves with birds carved of wood as if they wanted to fly. And a wonderful cabinet and a gigantic grandfather clock. And between the clean furniture made like ancient works of art and marvelously preserved, there was nothing but an emptiness emphasized more than appeased. As if the spaces of the house were deliberately filled with life, there was no dust, no spider web, no grain of sand, only a thin volatile smell of Lysol that had dried long ago, of scorching, of pungent sweets and flowers taken out of a vase. The white walls, the glowing neon light, everything looked like part of a stage set, like a home that has no life in it but is cleaned constantly and awaits some spectacle that's about to take place. The grandfather clock struck now, a beautiful Gothic cabinet polished with purplish, maybe dark red, lacquer, some romanticism, some jest of the last creations of nonexistent worlds, my neighbor dressed like a buffoon stood there next to the giant bear and not far from him stood a woman, tall, her hair really bluish, her eyes leaden, her expression strange and yet painful, without a smile, as if she were trying to defend her buffoon. The German shook Ebenezer's hand and said, Oh, thank God, and Renate smiled at the woman, who didn't hold out her hand. Ebenezer smiled at me, clapped his hands without a sound, and Renate said: We came! And she sat on a chair whose back was covered with puffed pillows, and above hung two chandeliers, one beautiful, adorned with crystals without electric light, while the other, simple, only one strong neon light, illuminated the room, and Renate didn't look alone in her chair and blended in with the general atmosphere. Ebenezer went to the grandfather clock and when he separated the German from the clock, the writer sat down and pulled out another cigarette and lighted it and I tried to understand from my wife what was going to happen. On Ebenezer's face was a smile I had sometimes encountered on the faces of students caught red-handed, a painted pleading smile, and my neighbor suddenly shut his eyes, with the expression of a puppy dog, he stooped over a bit, illustrated on the wall, between the grandfather clock and the cabinet, and started reciting something, in Polish. When I raised my head I heard the numbers of the trains of Warsaw and their schedules, I was perplexed, I had read about the Last Jew, and yet, there was something so perverse in his appearance, so unsuitable, his wife stood there like an orphaned question mark, the grandfather clock swung its pendulum, the writer shut his eyes, inhaled smoke, tossed the unextin
guished cigarette into the ashtray shaped like a ship's porthole, and Renate's embarrassed, Ebenezer crouched, a little Jew of contemptible humility, trying to please, and Renate yells: Enough, enough, and the writer says: Ebenezer, no! And he tries to continue but the writer yells, No, no! And I try not to look ashamed, try to sit, my wife looks at me understandingly, as if at long last cooperation between us has returned, some form of the shared and full Ebenezer's melody sounded like a prayer of the first part of the night, nocturnal Psalms in a study house, I didn't know what to say, the writer looked angry, and then Ebenezer stopped, his body shaking like an epileptic's, stopped shaking and he started laughing, he said: No? Not because of that? And I thought about the hours he had waited, about the days, about the daughters he asked for, I wanted to show the German that there was some picture album here of the daughters he claimed Ebenezer didn't have, and Ebenezer straightened up, pulled his clothes, picked up a bottle standing on the table illuminated by a strong light and drank from the bottle without pouring into a glass, and said: Excuse me, and took another swallow and gave the bottle to the German, the German drank a little and took out eyeglasses to read the label. The German said, I understand, I understand, and Ebenezer said: Fine vodka that, the best, and the German read the label again, drank again from the bottle (didn't wipe the mouth of the bottle) said: Good vodka, like a song, and Ebenezer said: You're quoting me, and the German said, I always quote you, Ebenezer ...
When the two of them gave me the bottle I refused. I said I had drunk enough for one evening. I looked at my wife. For some reason she didn't react to my words but held out her hand, took the bottle, tasted it, and smiled, she didn't even grimace. Everybody accepted her sipping as obvious, the little radio played some tune and my neighbor said in French, What a sweet sin! The music will cover everything, and Germanwriter smiled, poured a shot glass, raised it said in Hebrew "L'Chaim," and drank. The eyeglasses he had taken out before to read the label were still on his nose, small ones, the kind worn by old tailors on the end of their noses. The two of them emptied the bottle in five or six glasses one after another in marvelous acrobatics, they made the shot glasses fly into their mouths, swallowed the sharp vodka without batting an eyelash as if they were trying to wet the kidneys and liver, I really envied their ability to drink like that. My wife now sat with eyes shut wrapped in the black shawl, I wondered what she was thinking about. When we stood at my son's grave I also wondered sometimes what she was thinking about.