by Yoram Kaniuk
That was an awful night, said the writer. Three hours you spoke, in the Blue Lizards Club. You hypnotized yourself, and then I heard the melody, the rhythm. You prayed a distant prayer I didn't know. Then we talked. You knew exactly who I was. Then I didn't yet understand that you didn't have what the experts call "self-consciousness" and I didn't know you were a man without a history. For hours I interrogated you in the small hotel where you and Samuel were staying. I paid Samuel two marks for every half hour. He sat with a watch in his hand, and every half hour he asked me for money, and I paid, even for one minute not more, did you know then that Boaz Schneerson and Samuel Lipker were born on the same day at the same time? Did you know then that Boaz your son, whom you abandoned in a settlement, and Samuel, whom you found in a camp, were two sides of the same coin, almost the perfect image of one another? You told me then that Boaz was your bastard son! That Boaz and Samuel were identical twins born in different places to different mothers and maybe, maybe also to different fathers! Here's another irony. Here sits Obadiah Henkin, who meets Boaz who brings him a new son, Henkin investigates your history, and you live next door to him while I'm in Cologne, today I live there, no longer in Kanudstrof in Zeeland in an old schoolhouse, I live in a nice house and write a story, the title of the story is "The Last Jew."
I've got a new typewriter, no longer a shabby typewriter, a perfect IBM that can almost write by itself like that fish that once started singing to itself on the Baltic shore and we threw stones at an unseen enemy and warships cruised along the frozen shore toward Norway and then thawed the ice there on the sea, and we carved names in the ice ... And you, Henkin, what's with your investigation? Are you able to understand? In an investigation there is no retrospective prophesy as in fiction, no poetic license! Henkin investigates and doesn't know that Ebenezer is Ebenezer, that Boaz is his son, and Samuel Lipker today is Sam Lipp and adopted in America by a Jewish poet who wrote laments on the death of the Jews, he betrayed you, Ebenezer, from the pile of corpses you pulled him out, supported him in nightclubs in Europe, led by him like a dog and today he got rich from you and disappeared and left you Boaz, Henkin, and you don't know what to say to Boaz, who lives with a girl named Noga who was Menahem Henkin's lover, what would have happened if my son had lived and came here to feel remorse, as he used to do in the not-so-distant past, what would have happened to him if he had met Noga? Would Jordana from the Ministry of Defense have matched him with her? My wife was dancing before to distant music from an old-fashioned radio, and I understood, suddenly I understood the German's lost rage, that was our book, Henkin, yours and mine, he'd look at me and his eye wandered a moment, each one by himself alone can't write it, together, maybe ... I was maybe supposed to write about my father, not a bad man, didn't throw children into the fire, didn't shoot children with a gold ring, Henkin, all together he was in charge of propaganda. He photographed the burning Warsaw Ghetto, photographed for history. You know what he once said, he said: They didn't want to hear. He meant the world. He said, We took one step, he said, and we waited, there was no shout, and we took another step and another, and then we thought, in fact they're waiting, that whole big world was waiting for us to succeed, and my father photographed the silence, photographed propaganda films, wrote a few monographs on the Jewish race, who didn't write? My son Friedrich didn't forgive. Maybe he agreed and so he committed suicide? Maybe he found too much understanding in the depths of his heart? Can I guess? Through Ebenezer I thought I'd find an answer, but I haven't found anything yet, my father told me: six days the destroyed ghetto burned and it was possible to read a newspaper two kilometers from the ghetto, maybe three, with a father like mine, a grandson commits suicide.
Who knows why your son died, said Renate without raising her head.
How can I write the story I can't not write? I asked you then, Ebenezer, why Denmark of all places, and you said there's a reason, my stepfather, that's what you told me after Samuel looked at you and you shut your eyes a moment, my stepfather, that's what you said almost loved a woman here who died on him.
Joseph Rayna maybe wasn't my father, said Ebenezer.
Maybe?
Maybe, yes, he said.
I remember, then, on that night, in the club, you recited the books of the disappeared Warsaw writers, the stories of Kafka, the poetry of a poet named Idah ibn Tivon, I tried to understand, there was no relation between things, everything was desolate, shrouded in some stinking glory, I'd say, and then you came down. The musicians crept to the stage, and played again. Samuel distributed baskets, in perfect order, as in church, and everybody passed the basket left or right, depending on the number of the row, and they contributed their funds to the basket and Samuel looked at them with his magnetic charm, that was a shameful drama, Ebenezer ... And I want to read you an interesting document. In my father's cell was a man whom three countries wanted the right to kill. In his favor it can be said only that, as for him, he loathed all three countries to the same extent. When I went to see my father, right after I met you, he asked me what I was doing in Denmark and I told him I was writing. He said to me: Don't tell them too much, they won't believe you anyway. Then that man was extradited to Poland and hanged there. Before he was hanged he wrote his journal. I want to read a part of it now.
Kramer?
Kramer, said the German, SS Sturmbahnfuhrer Kramer, he muttered. He muttered something about a cunning race and my father said, Why write about people who can't create and I slapped my father, not Kramer, he told me that Ebenezer Schneerson was his dog. He was born in Willhelma and then moved to Sharona. Today your capitol hill is located there, said the German, but then it was a village of German Templars! No?
It was.
Kramer and Ebenezer were natives of the same land. When Kramer came to Germany he was considered an expert on Jewish matters, along with the Mufti of Jerusalem who was to establish the army of the Greater Third Reich. But he didn't get to that.
Tape / -
And I thought about Sharona. It was there I saw Menahem for the last time. He came then from Caesarea. They gathered them in one of those beautiful gatherings. I went to him. I sat facing him and my son sat there and drank cold water. His face was tanned and a glimmer of apostasy flashed in it. He knew where he was going, but he refused to tell. I told him to be careful, and he said: Henkin, I'm a big boy now and I know how to kill and to be careful. He didn't offer me a drink from the canteen of cold water as if I too were part of the enemy he was about to fight. We didn't know what to say to one another. On the rifle he held, a new rifle he had just cleaned from the oil and kerosene and that wafted a pungent odor, a swastika was etched. Those rifles meant for the German army were produced in Czechoslovakia before the end of the war, from Czechoslovakia they came here. I resented that. My son was indifferent, he said: It's good for war like any other rifle, you can't choose your enemies just as you can't choose your friends, I prefer to fight the Swiss, but they aren't shooting at me. The Czechs sent me a rifle, he said, what do I care who it was meant for before? I told him, There are myths, there are words, that has a value, and he said, No value, no symbol, you're too old to understand, Henkin.
After he died you understood him, said Hasha Masha, who opened her eyes wide for a moment.
I was silent. I was thinking, we all were thinking. The light in the window was bittersweet. Bluish, a pleasant wind blew, a fragrance of sea and lemon trees.
Germanwriter asked for a glass of water, Fanya R. who lost two daughters for Ebenezer brought the writer a glass of water. The German wore deerskin shoes. Renate looked as if all her stars had died, what happened to the chorus of dead angels she had conducted before, why isn't she singing? Ebenezer sits and waits. The writer puts on his glasses and reads ...
... I met Ebenezer Schneerson in the winter of 'forty-three, it was after Christmas. I remember exactly the argument between me and SS Uber- sturmbahnfuhrer Weiss. I told Weiss I was destined to establish a splendid Arab army, or else to fight on the front
like a hero and not to serve throughout the war as the deputy commander of a camp, and he told me: You were wounded in the leg, my dear Kramer, you were stationed in a place that suited you. No matter how sad and conservative my feelings were, my scale of values had always been consistent and stable and so I was silent. I knew that as deputy I had to supervise my commander. Weiss and I would watch one another, as they once said about the Germans and the French on the front in World War I, like two china dogs on a cabinet and on the prowl.
Being a patriotic worshipper by nature, strong yearnings were rooted in me for my ancient homeland, I was graced with a stubborn aspiration to be the heir of Heydrich and Muller, but the world didn't have to know about that. After a long and stormy struggle in which I was demoted to a position of a covered scarecrow with an aluminum lapel on his coat collar and wearing shiny boots, what I had left was the ability to detest. I did that abstractly. Solid and hidden carefully. Hence, my manners were perfect and thus I also hated Weiss. Commander Weiss's work forced him to stay in his office late at night. The food in 'forty-three was still good, our cook, at least, was French. The French did steal the Italian cuisine but they improved it immeasurably. And so, on my way to his office at seven twenty in the morning I often had the privilege of seeing Weiss tired from his sleepless nights in his bed in the office.
His nights, he told me, were a constant tour of hell. I loathed his use of the story of the distinguished poet in the context of the solution of the Semitic problem. I also suffered quite a bit from the fact that I had to put the rare and only copy of the Divine Comedy in a closet next to haberdashery, between suits and shirts. But authority as we know goes down while responsibility goes up, and so I had the honor of obeying one whose words disgusted me, and I had to listen to confused and meaningless speeches about the descent of the Muslims, whom I wanted to lead in our war against the British and the Russians, vis-a-vis Dante. The word Muslims rises here in my mind in view of the fact that they started then, to my displeasure, to call worn-out Jews Musulmen. Weiss claimed that the Muslims wouldn't forgive the distinguished poet for putting Mohammed and his son Ali in hell while he hung their intestines at the entrance. As somebody who saw pigs like Captain Roehm who lusted after men-in a moment of drunkenness, Weiss had the nerve to tell me that it was he who recruited the Fuhrer into the party-hanged on hooks like butchered meat, I had to rise above myself not to challenge that claim. I told him, But Salah-a-Din was put along with "infidels" like Homer and Virgil in a corner of infidels who had a great soul, and he said, Yes, yes, but Homer wasn't a Christian and I said, And us? We're different Christians, we belong to the SS Reiterstandarten, sifting the nobility from the filth, burning the dirt, our faith dear Weiss, as Rosenberg put it, is pure chauvinism; Jesus's mother served as a temple and with the support of an important priest, she bore a German soldier with fair hair and blue eyes from the tribes of the Germans in the Roman army who moved north from the Carpathians, and we became Gutglaubig: people with pure German faith of Nordic origin and not talmudist Yids filled with remorse and when we drive in our shining Horick and Maubach cars, we present a powerful future and not some primitive and frustrated Christianity, but Weiss didn't answer me. In his heart I know he detested me, I could see his mousy eyes looking at me with distrust, he knew very well that every word he said to me would be reported to Berlin, in his own heart he feared our illustrious Wotan customs that bore us in sublime excitement to the pure German soil to ancient altars or to the light of torches in a strong song of brotherhood. He was and still is a traditionalist, he commands death that smells Christian. My obedient nature often impelled me to those clashes with Weiss despite the fact that I was almost anonymous in our hierarchy while he-the miserable Christian-was called by his first name by Goring and Goebbels, Dr. Frick, Ley, and Kerl who knew him from the days when the Fuhrer was in prison. His SS card had three digits, two or three numbers behind the Reichsfuhrer. But I already said, my obedience was my first nature and not some random careerist blindness. We'd sniff each other all the time, each trying to discover his companion's secrets, "his companion," from my point of view should be written in quotation marks. I wrote before that I had a special privilege of seeing him sleeping at seven twenty in the morning and so I could also see the special way he woke up. The servant on duty who was usually a Pole, with his always delicate and beautiful hands-Weiss knew how to select handsome young men to serve him-would remove the blanket and stick a cigarette between his master's lips. And then he would carefully light the cigarette, wait until his master started sucking the smoke a little and his eyes would then express buds of waking. When he got out of bed he'd do it with a concentrated and frozen and maybe even savage leap. On the way to the warm bath, prepared for him in time, with the cigarette in his mouth, he'd open his old book of Walter von der Poloida or the poem of Ludwig and would read the book through its binding. He would immediately sink into recitation and by the time he entered the bathroom, the water was lukewarm. After a year he was able to repeat word for word what he hadn't read that morning. But to the same extent he was able to shout at me that he didn't consider the attempt plausible to restore to the modern world of the Third Reich the old-fashioned exalted aura of ancient German gods. Those gods too, he told me once with typical sincerity-sent word for word to my superiors in Berlin-impose infinite chains on man, impose too great a burden on a pure organism that, more than it loves or is enslaved to the gods, is enslaved to ritual. What we are trying to create, he said, is a ritual and not a myth. And I of course was filled with honest, maybe even patriotic, grievance.
After one of Weiss's endless one-way arguments with me (I was silent then with outstanding nobility) he showed me as a gesture of reconcilia tion-he apparently detested the instructions sent from Berlin as a result of my letters-a small wooden box and asked me with a jocularity steeped in horrifying transparent malice, what I thought of that box, I looked, the box opened to the opening notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. I felt the box in my hands, felt my eyes fill with tears, I said to him: I haven't seen such a marvelous creation in many years, and that was truly true.
He lit an Egyptian cigarette whose delicate smell blazed up in my nose, drank wine from a bottle he used to keep in front of him. Those expensive cigarettes he used to chain-smoke and would put them out on his hand. For some reason he wouldn't crush the cigarettes in the many ashtrays heaped up in his room. I looked at the box again, outside, through the windowpane hazed with gray smoke. The landscape was gray, desolate, monotonous, and gloomy. This was not the proper place to show a rare creation of art. I asked Weiss if he had bought that box on one of his tours of duty in the East where he had served many years earlier as an agent for oriental objets d'art, something he'd do between his frequent appearances as an understudy opera singer in provincial towns whose names were known for not appearing on maps. He chuckled at me and said-something I of course understood immediately was not true-Mr. Beautiful People, those works are created here!
Then he told me about some ludicrous Jew who could do magic with wood. My friends in Berlin, he told me with a smile and a hint that didn't escape me, compete, after knocking themselves out about certain letters that come to them from here about ideological instability, institutional instability. Kramer, brotherhood of the leaders, for who'll get a box, who'll get a grandfather clock, who'll get an intricate frame smeared with endless lacquers and the secret of their blend isn't understood by the most famous experts.
And I'm there ... Perfection evokes in me a dreadful sense of quiet bliss. I told him excitedly, without responding to his hints: Goethe said that the greatest virtue a man can reach is amazement, and I, I feel now a mastery and modesty of endless amazement, that's an enlightened and special work of art, can that be done by a blind man?
Can a bloodthirsty Jew, a perverse mutation, create that work? Weiss smiled and went on sipping the French wine and immediately, as an answer characteristic of him, with red eyes of drunkenness, started reciting to me the Niebelung
enlied shrouded in tragic fates.
I went outside, the gigantic courtyard was empty. I had to find the Jew. I didn't ask Weiss, I knew he'd despise me too gracefully. I'm capable of smelling them from afar. And he was indeed sitting in the small storeroom under the guardroom that was never used, under a bare bulb hanging on an electrical cord at a table heaped with tin boxes full of liquids, pieces of wood, paste, planes, hammers, nails, and other objects scattered in imploring disorder. My look was apparently especially bold since he looked aside, froze on the spot, and stayed like that. With my supple cane I signaled to him to go outside. He obeyed immediately, blinked his malicious eyes, and from far away in the gray air, smelling the approaching odor of a Yid, two hundred purebred dogs started barking in their kennels.
He didn't look flaccid and faint like the other Jews but there was no pride of a human being in him either. He wore tatters I wouldn't have given to a pig. He maintained a distance of a meter and a half from me, as if that measure was natural to him and not just a form of obedience. I told him to come close to me and he didn't. I saw his body stiffen; closeness to us was forbidden and he knew that in his body, as a genetic code, but after I raised my voice and waved my cane, he came close. I wanted to discover his image. When he came close I whipped him, he bent over with a typical Jewish dexterity but didn't make a sound. The first blow struck him, but his evasion of the second blow almost made me stumble. He straightened up and said a sentence to me that I shall never forget, he said to me: My name's Ebenezer Schneerson, Herr SS Sturmbahnfuhrer, and there is no acceptable reason for you to hit me, by day I'm the carpenter of SS Obersturmbahnfuhrer Weiss, at night I'm your Jew! And then you can hit me. I noticed the tone of the words. He knew how to emphasize the fact that Weiss's rank was higher than mine but he also knew that I had more power than Weiss. That Yid knew how to play Berlin against our camp, and if somebody needed proof of the force of cunning, that was a smashing example, and if my blood didn't go to my head that was because of the strict education I had obtained in my youth when I was sent to the homeland to complete my schooling, and because my father didn't spare me a decent education worthy of the name. Think before you hit, my father told me, and hit them so that the blow will evoke respect, more than strength, the memory of the blow is more important than anything. But there's no denying that at the sound of Ebenezer's words I was stunned. "My poor puppy ran away from here," I quoted in my mind a line from some forgotten song, and at that time I also saw before my eyes my sisters, Lotte, Sylvia, Kaete, and Eva, I saw my sweet mother in her new house in the homeland, an exact copy of our house in Palestine, in my thoughts I saw them listening to a sweet melody notes bursting from those beautiful music boxes, I saw them putting in a handsome cabinet the pearl necklaces and the beautiful objects I used to bring them now and then from organized tours in the liberated areas of France, Poland, Holland, and Belarus, and I said: Stand, dog, and he stood, I ordered him to make me a box like the one I had seen in Weiss's room but with a different tune, and he said, With your generous permission, and after I didn't say anything else, the dog waited a while and then without turning his face, as was customary, he walked to his kennel, his back knew the way, he didn't stumble, he didn't slip, but he walked backward as if he were born to walk backward. His eyes fixed on me the whole time, weren't lowered. He was frightened, he was very frightened, but he also knew not to show that fear. What a silly demonstration of courage when all I had to do was hang him on the hook and let his guts rot. His face was familiar to me, his name struck waves in my mind for some reason.