by Yoram Kaniuk
They returned to the settlement and Nehemiah delivered a speech that lasted from six in the evening to three in the morning, and the farmers sat lit by the halo of light, and there was still a distant echo in it of their dreams. Six hours Nehemiah talked and nobody budged. Even Rebecca sat fascinated to hear the visions Nehemiah spoke of and she really didn't know that she saw them. In the middle of his speech, Nehemiah looked at her and understood sadly that Rebecca's mind was made up. That night he parted from every corner of the farm, kissed his son for a long time, and like thieves in the night, Nehemiah and Rebecca left with their things hastily packed and after another farewell from their son who didn't understand a thing, they rode to Jaffa. Ebenezer watched them from the distance and didn't weep. Rebecca said to him: I'm going with Father and you'll join us as soon as we get settled. She didn't want to bring Ebenezer to America but she didn't want to say that, neither to Nehemiah nor to her son. Ebenezer sat and etched the face of an owl on wood. Even when Nehemiah wept for a long time and hugged him, he didn't say a thing. He just tried to understand what was happening to the piece of wood when you carve it like that so the face of the owl looks as if it burst out of the wood and is also destroying it, shattering it to pieces and at the same time, honoring it.
Nehemiah was silent all the way to Jaffa. Rebecca, who didn't know what to think about, was still dozing and trying to dream about the last days, and when she woke up and they were close to the citrus groves of Jaffa and saw the palm trees at the entrance to the city, she recalled the small details that had joined together into some picture that was not yet clear to her, and when she looked at Nehemiah she saw on his face the expression that had covered his face on the day of Rachel's wedding. His hatred now for Joseph was so strong that Rebecca almost fell in love with him.
And suddenly from the dread that filled her, maybe because of remorse, she wanted so much to save Nehemiah, to give up, to be somebody she never thought she could be, to take Nehemiah back to the settlement to his son and to his lands and to his friends, but she didn't know how to do that and was silent. Jaffa was now a different city. Jewish shops were opened in the narrow streets. Carts from settlements in Judea and the Galilee came to the city, people bought agricultural machines and seeds and sold farm products, and the city was teeming with life and they were already starting to build the new neighborhood of Tel Aviv on the sands north of the city and Arabs were still smoking narghilas next to the mosque and Turks were standing barefoot and listening to an orchestra of ragamuffins from Egypt and slapped their faces whenever they fell asleep while playing and ships anchored in the port and two locomotives were added to the railroad junction whose tracks already reached the edge of the desert and Nehemiah and Rebecca stole into the hotel.
Nehemiah didn't go out the door of the hotel and Rebecca bought a few souvenirs for her friend Rachel, met Jews she thought she had known before, and saw an elderly consul stroking the body of an Arab boy on a dark streetcorner, and then she drank tea with mint with the Jewish agent Joseph Abravanel, who reminded her that his son would someday rule the Land and didn't mock her, but quietly arranged the tickets and the cabin on the ship that had already tooted and the toots were already dancing on its masts and the ship looked menacing and beautiful among the little waves capering on the shore and then she sat next to her husband and said: I smell fire, and he said in a hollow cracked voice, You smell the future, and she felt stabbings in her womb as if there were a child in it and she wanted to give birth for Nehemiah to all the dead children she had once known but she was silent and said to him: What did I do to you, Nehemiah, and he said: You were Rebecca, you were what you were, don't cry, I love you more than any person in the world and I won't tell you again how much I love you because you won't believe me. She smiled at him and hugged him, but he put her off and as she was falling asleep, she seemed to hear the sound of weeping, but since she had never heard Nehemiah weep, she thought somebody else was weeping in one of the rooms.
Early the next morning they went to the port. The valises stood at the jetty with the boats, Nehemiah said some harsh words to Joseph Abravanel, who was dressed in white, and paid a few cents less than what was demanded. He haggled and Rebecca had never seen Nehemiah haggle. Afterward-as agreed in advance-he put her on the boat, since he had to load the valises on another boat. Rebecca stood on the boat, she couldn't sit down. Something in her was still steeped in an incomprehensible dread. The ship tooted and she trembled. She wanted to weep, but she had no tears. She wanted to go back and couldn't now. The sailors raised their oars and pushed the boat. They jumped on a big wave and Rebecca saw Nehemiah standing and looking at her, but because of the strong light, his face was clearly seen despite the distance. And even though she was scared, she didn't yet know what she was scared of.
Banners and flags rose and fell on the masts. Rebecca thought for a moment about eight years of tears. Nehemiah stood on the shore, the rising tears on his face were incomprehensible in view of his erect and aristocratic stance. Something was ruined and she didn't know what. He looked so bold and tense that in a little while he would leap and rush to battle. Nehemiah vanished behind some shed, and right at that moment she grasped what was liable to happen and started yelling, but the roar of the sea swallowed her yells, she started hitting the passengers and they were alarmed and the sailors rowed her back to shore and she jumped off and ran in the shallow water and everybody looked at her and silence reigned and she came to the corner of the mosque just one minute after Nehemiah, with eyes wide open, but without seeing a thing, took out a gun, aimed it and shot his temple.
Very slowly Nehemiah collapsed onto the ground he had sworn never to leave. When Rebecca came to him he was still trying to touch the Land and his body was already dead. People gathered around Nehemiah. And Rebecca lay there with her mouth stuck to his, trying to make Nehemiah breathe, until they separated them and dragged her away from there and carried his body to one of the sheds. The ship tooted again and Rebecca looked one last time at the ship waving its flags, and very slowly she started walking toward the dead body of her husband. Clotted blood was stuck to his lips. The gun was still in his hand. The Turk wanted to write down something, but she told him: There's nothing for you to write, he's been buried here for nine years.
She touched his forehead and said: You shouldn't have done that to me, Nehemiah, and an awful anger, an anger steeped in love, rose in her and overcame her, and she gave into that anger and let it twist her face, and the Turk who saw her was forced to fall and then to run from there as if he had seen the sun coming out of a hole in his pants.
At the funeral, in Roots, she stood silent. Nobody dared approach her. Ebenezer, who stood not far from her, was also silent. She didn't shed a tear. They don't deserve that, she thought, but she also knew that there were no more tears inside her to weep even if they did deserve them. Ebenezer said the orphan's kaddish and Rebecca went back home, closed the windows and the doors and said: No mourning, nothing. Nobody will come in here.
On the last day of mourning, Ebenezer finished carving two heads of wood. He called them Father and Mother, one of the heads was Rebecca while the second was Joseph Rayna. And then Rebecca assaulted Ebenezer, broke his carvings, and started a successful farm.
My friend Goebbelheydrichhimmel.
Tape / -
About two weeks ago, I returned from a visit to Israel. Because of the heavy fog in northern Germany, we were forced to land in Copenhagen. A freezing rain was falling and it was impossible to see a thing. We took a cab and went to a small hotel near Herdospladsen. I called Inga, who by the way sends you warm regards. She came immediately and as usual didn't leave us alone. She fed us at a small, and I must say excellent, restaurant not far from the hotel. Then she informed us she was taking us to a party at the American ambassador's. When we got to the ambassador's house there were only a few guests left, including an Israeli, a native of Copenhagen, who fought in the war of independence in Israel, returned there in the fifties, liv
ed there, worked as a journalist for an Israeli newspaper and for a Danish newspaper and was now the editor-in-chief of Politikan, his name is Pundak, a pleasant and wise man of principle who can formulate things in a way that isn't harsh, doesn't place perplexing full-stops, a cultured man in the old sense of the word, an excellent editor and a fascinating conversationalist. His wife Suzy is a woman with a profound bubbling in her, whose rare common sense, existential perplexity with a thin patina of a smile that's liable to be broken any minute spread over her face. There were also a few writers there who are familiar to you, too. Herbert Pundak saved me from an unnecessary conversation with an American colonel who thought that now that I returned from Israel we had a lot in common. He and I, thought the colonel, understand those Jews. I didn't want to quarrel as soon as I came, and the ambassador, who, by the way, is a German Jew, came to us, and looked too cordial for me to cause a diplomatic incident. I felt tired. The trip in the morning to Lod Airport, parting from the friends I had made there, the flight, the trip to the hotel, the dinner with Inga, and now the party, all that dropped some heaviness that I couldn't yet get away from for some reason. So we sat in a big pleasant room and sipped punch. I sat in a big comfortable fine leather armchair, across from me above a fireplace was a big black wall. I turned the chair around a bit, the color of the black wall turned blue a bit, and then, when I heard the editor of Politikan explaining something about Israeli foreign policy, and the ambassador trying to argue with him, I saw the face of the Fuhrer looking at me above the fireplace and I shuddered. Inga, who sat next to me, asked what happened, and I said: What's missing on that wall is the picture of Hitler! My knees buckled, I felt as if my blood ran out. I was sorry for what I had said, but I really did see the Fuhrer looking at me in that splendid room. The ambassador got up, stood over me, Renate sipped punch, he looked at the wall in silence, and said: Were you here then? When I said I had never been here in my life and didn't understand why I had said what I did, the ambassador came to sit down next to me, stroked my knee, chomped on a cigar and then lit it, and also lit the cigarette I took out of my coat pocket, and said: You're sure? I said: I'm sure. Funny, said the ambassador, this was the house of the governor Werner Best. A decent navy man, and his assistant Diekwitz, also a navy man, who informed the underground of the expected expulsion of the Jews, and afterward the house was transferred to the Americans, and here, on that wall, until forty-five, was a picture of the Fuhrer, and the armchair you're sitting in was there at that time, only with different upholstery, of course. Next to it is a trap door, the governor was sensitive to explosions and under this room, which is an addition to the original house, a big shelter was dug. He'd sit here, smoking, drinking wine, with the opening next to him leading to the shelter ...
On the way back to the hotel I saw a crowd of Wehrmacht soldiers marching along those ancient and beautiful streets in the winter gloom. At the hotel, I drank more wine. Renate wept at night, wrote a postcard to a woman she had met in Israel, fortunately I love Renate too much to give my opinion on her foreignness. After thirty years of marriage she told me that night of all times about her youth in those days when you and I would shoot at low-flying planes, did you know, that when Renate heard that the Fuhrer committed suicide she wounded herself and had to be put in the hospital, and back then the hospitals were crammed to the gills, weren't they? The next day, the sky cleared up and we flew home.
I had a strange dream. I was waiting for my father at the railroad station. Renate came arm in arm with an old Jewish woman. A man who may have been a Jewish pimp from a Sturmer cartoon asked me what side the snake pees on.
I'm sitting at home now, in the room you know well. Behind me is the beautiful picture of the black horse. You write that my last book sold three million copies. I was glad to get the nice articles you sent me. The depth of the article from the New York Times amazed me, I never heard of the author of that article, Lionel Secret, but the name does ring a bell only I can't decipher or locate it on the map of my memories. I loved the thin irony of the article seeing my book as my most successful suicide attempt, the one you can photograph and go on looking at it. I remember my father telling me that the film he took in the Warsaw Ghetto was a beautiful film. When I saw the film afterward I understood what he meant. The book I've been trying to write all those years about the Last Jew doesn't interest you. But in addition, it also refuses to be written. I'm now rewriting a novella I wrote a few years ago but my heart is given to "The Last Jew" that's stuck in my craw. In Israel, I met Ebenezer. The meeting didn't do me any good. I met a man named Henkin who's also investigating the Last Jew (he's not a writer) and his wife is the woman that Renate loved in Israel. Ebenezer's mother, Rebecca, I didn't meet. She's very old, they say she's still beautiful. For some reason, I was afraid to go visit her in her settlement.
Since you're not only my editor and publisher, but also my close friend, I must explain to you clearly where I stand now. I know, you've worked hard for many years to promote me. You published my books when nobody else wanted them, you believed in me despite the bad or indifferent criticism or the thousands of copies you had to bury because nobody wanted to buy them, and I, I of all people, now sit and write what our reader won't want to read and our critic will trash, and the most awful thing of all, what is hard even for me to write. The book can be written by two different people, my dear, by me and by that Henkin. And then it won't be the book you wanted, will it? I am my father's son and Obadiah Henkin is the father of Menahem Henkin, who fell in Israel. Someplace, an ancient battlefield is stretching between us, and in that battlefield is a person devoid of memory of his personality who is also part of me and part of him. It's like two men trying to beget a son together. There's a nice saying: The best poem is a lie. What is the German lie and what is the Jewish lie that can create on paper the existing character, painfully existing, of Ebenezer Schneerson, son of Rebecca and father of Boaz Schneerson, stepfather of Samuel Lipker, a man who hoarded knowledge to remain a last Jew in a war that you, I, and he were in together on both sides of a death that's now being forgotten?
Grief is banal. Life is banal. Death is banal. Everything is banal. The tormented and monstrous words. What to do? I have to prophesy Ebenezer through Henkin and he has to prophesy him through me. What will come out of all that may be bad but necessary. I know how much these words upset you.
What I can't grasp in that banality is the symmetry. Boaz and Samuel Lipker are the same age, born the same day, one in Tarnopol in Galicia and the other in a settlement in Judea. They look alike. When Ebenezer met Samuel in the camp he didn't know that Samuel was the last son of Joseph Rayna whom he went to Europe to seek and came to us. He didn't know that Samuel and Boaz are alike because he had left Boaz when he was a year old and hadn't seen him since. So isn't it funny that, when Ebenezer returned to Israel forty years later and met Boaz (and Samuel whom he hadn't seen for many years), he said: Samuel! And Boaz was offended to the depths of his soul. I have to understand Ebenezer, his mind, the words he hoards and then sells to foreigners in seedy nightclubs. I understand that you want another book, you want a different story, but I, I have no other way, I have to live in the stammering attempt to write a book that doesn't want to be written ...