by Yoram Kaniuk
One night, Joseph's father appeared in workers' clothing, wearing a cap, and didn't ask to see his son at all. Joseph heard him come in and was filled with yearnings for his father. He put on his favorite clothes and all night long he sat on his bed and waited. He murmured Father! Father! But his father didn't answer. He was too proud to get up and go into his mother's room, he tried to cry but he couldn't. At dawn, he heard his father silently leave the house without telling him good-bye. Joseph buried his face in a bowl, poured cold water on himself, and stayed like that a long time, hardly breathing, and then he sneaked off, changed clothes, and went to his mother. He sat at the table, hit the tablecloth, and said: That man is no longer my father.
Joseph's mother told him that his father was confused, called her "Mezuzah," prayed in an embarrassing way, slept on the rug, didn't approach her, said he didn't remember if he had ever had a son, and looked lost and desperate in his new faith. Joseph said: There is no salvation, all those salvations have different names but all of them are nonsense, this life is what we have, not what doesn't exist. She wanted so much to hug her son but her hands didn't obey her. Afterward, she started bringing home her friends, the drunk old messiahs. They cultivated forbidden love with clamorous and wild lust and the children told Joseph, Your mother's a whore!
Joseph's poems became more and more glorious and the sight of his mother in the arms of old drunks eager to bring the messiah, stirred a strong impulse in him to honor the world with poems devoid of all connection with reality that would describe a nonexistent world. The house began to fill up with birdcages and every night one of the old boyfriends slaughtered one bird.
One moonlit night, for six straight hours Joseph's mother watched a slaughtered bird whose blood froze on the floor of the cage. The cage was gilded and the dead bird's mouth was sunk in a tiny saucer of water. When an old boyfriend came and started taking off his coat, she shifted her eyes from the cage and looked like a woman who had gone mad. The man was startled and threw his coat on the floor. Because he started cursing her, she spat on the coat, when he attacked her his foot hit the gold cage and the water spilled, he tried to steady himself, he touched the head of the bird, stumbled with a kind of swoop because he tried to keep from falling, his head split open and he died on the spot. Joseph came in and saw the chameleon of blood gushing from the old man's mouth. He went back to his room, took off his clothes, and fell asleep. In the morning, he didn't look at his mother. She hadn't budged all night. When she held out her hand to touch him, he started shrieking like a bird. She was very beautiful and pale then, at her feet lay the old man's body. His face was shriveled, his skin was yellowish, and his tongue was coiled outside. His wide-open eyes were gaping in an expression of extinguished amazement. His mother stood up, went to her room, and returned wearing a beautiful dress. Her face was serene but a spark of apostasy flashed in it. She giggled and Joseph saw her madness and thought: a demon entered her, even though he knew that demons don't enter human beings but live in them from birth. She said: Joseph my love, my old father is lying dead, I promised him to marry you off. She drank a little wine, looked at the old man, and said: I'm queen of the Hasmoneans. After they went down to the cellar she asked her son to lie down on his father's sanctification table where he'd perform his mysterious Sabbath rituals. She carefully placed four lit candles at the four corners of the table, looked at Joseph, held her hand out to him, and said: I'm the queen and I marry my lover. Joseph, whose wrath burned for his father, grasped his mother's hand and felt a mighty current of heat passing from her hand to his body. For a moment, the dress looked like a bridal gown and Joseph thought: maybe the moment of my death has come, when she asked, he broke the glass of his father's kiddush wine.
Joseph took the body of the old man wrapped in rags down to the courtyard, put it in a wheelbarrow, and took the corpse to the river. The municipal clerks came and asked him to help burn the cats because the plague was spreading to all parts of the city and the cats, they said, ate the mice the Jews burned in their houses to ward off the epidemic. After the cats were burned, he went down to the cellar and read the writings his father had left, read the "Words of the Days of the Lord" and felt vague but not intangible yearnings for the messiah Frank. He thought about the venom infiltrating his blood, about his mother, about the sorrow of his beauty, about his life, about his father, and thus he found out about Secret Charity and Rebecca Secret Charity. He went to the cemetery and searched for the tombstones. He found the graves of Rebecca and her father close together. He sat for hours and looked at the tombstone on the grave of Rebecca Secret Charity. He heard a tune coming from the grave and without moving he followed the tune and without moving his body he encountered daydreams that led him to realms where he had never been and on the tombstone, Rebecca's face began to be marked. At first the picture of her face was rough but it became clear. He burned a few branches in a pit, turned them into charcoal, and went over Rebecca's features with the charcoal, she looked a lot like him and didn't look like him at all. A painter of amulets came and copied Rebecca's face on paper and then went to his workshop and made Joseph an amulet of the face of Rebecca Secret Charity. And then came a letter from Russia with a curl of his father's hair. His father's will was addressed to his mother. Joseph wasn't mentioned in it. The letter said that Joseph's father plotted against some aged colonel and was sentenced to death. Not to be accused of devotion to a despicable religion, he hadn't said the Shema Israel and refused to accept forgiveness from a priest. When he was hanged, a writer wrote in the letter, he muttered words in Hebrew. He died as a revolutionary, said the letter, even though he was a troublemaking Jew all his life. Joseph went to the rabbi of the city and asked permission to be a Jew again. The rabbi blessed him and Joseph said: In fact, never was I anything, not a Christian, not a Jew, but the rabbi questioned him and received him back in the bosom of Judaism. Joseph's mother went on embroidering new royal gowns for herself that were just as beautiful and splendid as the arrogant words of her son. Joseph was sometimes her son, sometimes her husband, and sometimes an old adulterer who came to have sex with her. She tried to return to the Land of Israel and in her madness she began to recall her childhood there more vividly. She described Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and the Dead Sea to Joseph, and only years later, when he toured the Land of Israel, did he see how precise her description was and how correct were the details she painted and had never seen, and then she began to die and Joseph lay her in bed dressed in a royal gown, brought her hot tea and cookies, lay down next to her a whole night and hugged his trembling, weeping mother, who wanted to return to her homeland, and when she died, there was on her face a smile of bliss that Joseph had never seen there before. And then he wept. For the first time in his life, the handsome lad wept. He found a picture of his father, hung it on the wall, found a whip his father had kept in the cellar against the enemy who would come in the war between Gog and Magog and flogged his father's face until the picture was shredded. Joseph put on a splendid suit, shiny black boots, the black broad-brimmed hat of a Spanish grandee, picked up a short stick, and after arranging his mother's grave, he set out on the road.
In the women he found in his wandering, he sought the image of Rebecca that he wore as an amulet around his neck, but the only thing the women wanted from him was to be impregnated in his honor. When somebody in a tavern in Paris quoted a German philosopher who said that in vengeance and in love, women are more barbarous than men, Joseph said, and in life in general, and thought about the bold and roguish beauty of his great-grandmother.
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In those ten years of wandering, Joseph Rayna begat fifty-two sons and daughters. Women saw him (as one woman put it in a letter preserved in the Nazi archive, titled: "Female claims concerning the imaginary virility of individual Hebrews who abused the innocence of Aryan women and bred with them with impure blood (A) Hebrew gestation, (B) contrition of Aryan women, (C) example of Francesca Glauson who delivered her son to the Gestapo in Bonn in 1942 an
d after the boy died, in an incident that took place in a camp, she described in detail the cunning of Hebrew wooing and taught a class of girls in Haan and later in Hamburg how to escape those and other errors, Heidelberg, 1944") as a harsh and deformed angel noble as beggars can sometimes appear: delicate and sensual. Women, says the letter of that woman, Frau Helma Rauchsfinger, loved the arrogant indulgence of Joseph Rayna, his self-confidence demonstrated in a generous and light manner. By submitting to that man-like other Hebrews-they thought they were fighting sins that wanted so much to be committed and overcoming themselves to be worthy afterward for somebody who would compensate them for all the suffering mixed with tormented joy, a person who would grant them bliss and safety and would wipe away the disgrace they had to experience in their flesh to know it up close. There's nothing like carnal experience to grant a woman what a man can get from abstract thought, maybe, writes Frau Helma Rauchsfinger, a woman can't even think an abstract thought, only abstract hating and loving are allowed both men and women.
When I read that material years later I laughed also because all my lovers were sons of Joseph and also because all my life I had been searching for Joseph and didn't find him and even though I thought he was my father, I was the only person of all the descendents of Joseph who couldn't really have been his son.
Joseph remembered all his offspring and all his women. He loved them no more than they loved him, but he understood their lust for him, just as the flower surely understands that not every butterfly is in love with it, but needs its smell and its pollen.
Joseph treated his women with a chivalry that many people in the late nineteenth century said had disappeared from the world. After wandering in many countries, he came to Denmark. In a fishing village in northern Jutland, where the Baltic Sea and the Atlantic Ocean meet, at different water levels, in a restrained dreary and bewitched light, the most enchanted light he had ever seen, he met a good-looking painter, fair and sickly, she sat in the strong cold, wrapped in a yellow wool shawl that glowed in the distance and painted purple waves where a scarlet hue poured a sense of ancient death and a boat, abandoned by gray-faced sailors who would never return, was bobbing on them. In the enchanted light, the painter looked like a goddess carved from rock. And she said: In that boat sits my brother, who disappears every winter and someday will return. Later on, she told Joseph that her mother brought soil from the Holy Land and her father was buried there, I think, she said, that he was a wandering Jew who came upon Jutland as a youth, and lived his whole life as a Dane but before he died he recalled his origin and asked his family to bury him on the Mount of Olives. She expressed no opinion on the subject and didn't care if her father was a Jew or not. She was a painter and painted the strong light.
As the winter intensified, they wandered to the Netherlands, went to Paris, from there to Italy, sailed to Alexandria and from there to the Land of Israel. Those were good times in Joseph's life. He listened to the painter's story about the paintings she was to paint, loved her exciting asceticism, her lack of lust for him, and her sharp and unique love.
She also feared he would fall in love with her as she loved. Her belly swelled and when they came to Jerusalem, she died in his arms in the seventh month of her pregnancy. Joseph buried her next to her father's grave. Then he toured the Land of Israel and saw the vistas described by his mother who was the last queen of the Hasmonean line. On Mount Tabor, he met a German aristocrat, Adorno von Melchior who wanted to establish a Jewish kingdom in the Land of Israel. When Joseph met Sarah, the wife of the German aristocrat, he felt he was liable to sin against his great love hung around his neck as an amulet. Joseph became the secretary of the aristocrat von Melchior. He wrote his letters in a florid handwriting and the woman he loved almost more than all the women he had met slept like an animal with mustached men who would beat her, Druses in white kaffiyehs with sullen eyes, and she said: I do that to forgive you for your errors, and the aristocrat said: She doesn't sleep with me because she's my wife and she loves me. Joseph understood the profound bond between the two queens he had met in his life, his mother and Sarah the wife of the aristocrat, and when he saw how much she yearned for him, he tried to touch her but she rejected him even though her womb began to stab and she wanted to give him children. After she told him things in that vein, Joseph wrote seventeen poems, each a description of a part of her body he didn't know. In one of the poems he described Frau von Melchior's neck as it looked in the transparent and strong Jerusalem light when her collar fell down and the cleft of her bosom looked like the winding of a beloved snake. The Frau loved the poems and he read them to her standing at perfect and absurd attention. On his travels for von Melchior he met the Jewish Pioneers who were establishing the first settlements. He pitied their hard life and suffered the pain of their enslavement to Baron Rothschild. He liked to feast his eyes on the handsome daughters of the settlers in the burning afternoons of the Land of Israel. They were full of yearnings for their dream from the moment they started building their miserable houses. With gloomy expressions, they tried to celebrate, contracted malaria, and wept.
A year Joseph Rayna stayed in the Land of Israel. He wrote in one of his poems that the discovery of God among the rocks of the wasteland is testimony to the destruction of the nation. He parted from the farmers' daughters who, having no other songs, sang his songs as if they were hymns. He parted from the wife of the German aristocrat who loved him so much she fled for a month to some Druse sheikh who kept her tied to a rock in the mountains of Transjordan. After leaving a bouquet of flowers on the fresh grave of the Danish painter who had carried his son in her womb, he left the Land of Israel, went to Alexandria, wandered to Persia, came to India, and on a gloomy day in the winter of eighteen ninety-eight, he came back to our city. He went to his mother's grave, and then to the grave of Rebecca Secret Charity, the wife and daughter of Secret Charity, and closed himself in a room and wrote elusive songs about the splendid, pedigreed, and desired Land of Israel, and then he was discovered by a group of young people who'd gather in the forest, wave flags in secret, and dream of a settlement in the Land of Israel. In the exhausting cold, around a bonfire, the young people sat and sang songs brought by an emissary. They sang Joseph's songs without knowing it. Nehemiah Schneerson, the leader of the group, met Joseph in the cemetery when he went to say kaddish on his father's grave and invited him to tell his group about the Land of Israel.
In the group of young people craving salvation was one girl, a close friend of Rebecca Sorka who would ascend to the Land of Israel on the first day of the twentieth century and be called Rebecca Schneerson and would be the mother and grandmother of Boaz Schneerson. Joseph looked at Rachel and she trembled at the sight of the gigantic organ that was like a beam between the eyes of the well-born prince who told about the Land of Israel, without emotion or yearnings. Shutting her eyes, Rachel Brin gleaned a little of the light Joseph had taken from his great-grandmother's grave. The light balled up into pain in her womb. When Nehemiah heard Joseph's songs, which he had sung before without paying attention to their words (Joseph read the poems despondently but unashamedly), the blood drained from his face and at that moment Joseph would look at Rachel. Nehemiah was furious at the songs without knowing why. He was a genius in the yeshiva who had disappointed his rabbi, who had expected great things from him. But when Joseph read all his poems and Rachel felt stabbings in her belly, at that very moment, on the other side of the city, at the entrance to the forest, Rebecca Sorka got up, and far from her friend Rachel, whom she had recently abandoned, looked out the window of her room and saw a light glowing in the forest but she didn't see its reflection in the windowpane. In the forest, naked winter trees awaited her. It was evening and she didn't leave her house. These things are the absolute truth. When she woke up in the morning, at the sight of the ceiling above her, she said to herself: My death canopy! In the shadows of the chiaroscuro, in her eyes black dogs were depicted slicing a person's body. The person she didn't know but for som
e reason she thought she should know him. After she dismissed the maid who came to brush her long delicate hair, she crossed her legs, sat up in bed, and thought about the man she had seen before in her fantasies, which were still too tormenting for her to think about now. So she formulated them to herself with fake indifference and wrote Yeshua, deliverance, on the wall of the stove bulging into her room.
When she came out of her room, she brushed her hair herself in the kitchen over the simmering skillets and pots and when she saw a fish fluttering in the sink she threw her hairbrush to the floor, wrapped herself in a coat, and went out. Her mother's eyes followed her from the window and then the fish was destroyed by a blow that shook the table. Rebecca's mother said to the cook: They've gone crazy, the young people, they just go to America, to the Land of Israel, got no manners, what a world! The cook didn't understand what she meant and so she didn't answer her. Rebecca wandered around aimlessly. The light she saw in the window still distressed her, but guided her steps. Even now, in the stinging cold, she knew precisely how beautiful she was. Her beauty was the source of her yearnings for herself. The taste of the night hadn't yet vanished and Rebecca hugged herself without emotion and her hands shook. She didn't shout because she knew that nobody deserved to hear her shout. Now the wind flew snowflakes to her. The houses flogged by the wind were wrapped in a dull glow of frost from the squashed sun flickering between the heavy weary clouds.