by Yoram Kaniuk
The universe, as she revealed to Joseph later on, chose to crush in herself her own great talent, a talent she was forbidden to waste for the pittance of small inauthentic theaters with an audience smelling of popcorn and fried onions. If only I had been born in Paris, she said.
The great love affair of her life began like every war, quite by chance. It was of course a moment that would later be described as unforgettable, and was preceded by steps that of course could not be changed. She was stand ing there in a flower shop and, as she put it, smelling the aroma of the distant rivers that watered those delicate flowers when Joseph Rayna, the aging lover of women, saw her reflection in the window and began wooing her with a courtesy that was splendid, wicked, but so tired it looked elegant and theatrical to her. He bought her all the flowers in the display window and five boys had to carry home the baskets of flowers and at the sight of them she laughed a wild laugh, which this time-uncriticized- came from within herself. The boys bore the flowers with lockjaw discipline. The secret had to be equally elegant and concealed. After acting Electra and Antigone all her life before walls crammed with plates and pictures, now she stood at the flowers and waited for a love letter from Joseph Rayna. Abrom Mendelstein, who would later be shot and laid diagonally on top of his two brothers and his father, with whom he would dig the grave, lent Samuel's mother his room. Since he couldn't carry on a real affair, he loved to see love flourishing in his friends. He was a teacher of Akkadian and Aramaic and his wife Frumka was such a free woman that she had had three lovers by then, and she didn't make love to them because of firm reluctance to yield to feelings that didn't throb in her. She belonged to a small progressive and stormy faction that seceded from the central section, and she also seceded from the general party in the Warsaw committee, whose sixty-two members split into six different trends and once a week, Samuel's mother was lent the small apartment and Joseph would arrive gasping from all the stairs he had to climb.
With him, Samuel's mother could declaim in French drenched in ancient and sweet idioms the ancient Medea, full of evil and passion, and plot against herself. In her late youth, as the mother of Samuel, whose miserable father was Joseph, she began to sing, and was cheerful even though a bit vague from so much life that had landed on her and she thought quite a bit of things she had seen as if they were written in a book and not really real.
Searching his father's naked body before he put it on the heap of corpses to be burned, Samuel was amazed at the sight of his parents' surprising nakedness. He succumbed to the profound feeling of disgust and gratitude when he found the diamond.
Lionel Secret once asked his mother Rachel: Who was my father? And Rachel Brin, Rayna, now Blau, said: I was married to a man named Nathan Secret, he died, I came to America because my friend Rebecca kept talking about the trees dripping gold of America. They didn't drip gold and she went to Palestine. Until I married Saul Blau who started selling his shirts, I worked hard. Today our trees are all right, she said.
Tape / -
Lionel Secret, who was once called Secret Glory, was a frightened child and at night, to fall asleep he would sing Schubert lieder to himself and until the age of eleven, his voice was thin as a girl's. Rachel had two daughters and two sons with Saul Blau and Lionel grew up to be a tall fellow with an ascetic handsome face, his hair was black, somebody said he looked like a butterfly trapped and proud at the same time. A dimple of eternal pondering was set into his right cheek and made him look determined, but also thoroughly confused.
When the war broke out, Lionel enlisted and after training in England, he was sent to Europe and for seven days he shot at an enemy whose precise location was confused by the maps. When the mistake was discovered, half his battalion was taken prisoner, and the remaining soldiers stopped shooting at the empty hay loft and waited for Lionel, who was familiar with the impressive parades of the brown shirts on York Avenue, near his house, and he called to his comrades to flee. Three deigned to join him. They slipped away, lay in the rotten hayloft, and when the Germans came in with their prisoners, Lionel prepared an attack like the game he had once played in summer camp where he was assigned the role of the Indian. More soldiers who had previously thought they had no chance to escape came to help them, destroyed their captors and made their way to brigade headquarters, which had gone astray and was tramping in a direction not only imprecise, but also unknown. Lionel managed to deliver his prisoners, earn a salute of honor from an old commander who yearned for more successful and chivalrous wars, fight a few weeks in battles better prepared but still lost, see a British plane brought down, hear its pilot yelling Shema Israel under the parachute the Germans peppered with bullets, engage in diversionary operations in which he taught an aged commander how to smell Germans by the smell of beets and potatoes, and lead a unit of Australians and Canadians to a town completely different from the description in the briefing. In that operation, a British soldier was shot who lobbed a hand grenade and knocked out an armored car with a German brigade com mander and his Polish adjutant, the Pole tried to shoot and in his death throes, he hit a little girl standing there playing with her two dogs, and on its way to the little girl the bullet also passed through Lionel, who managed to destroy the armored car completely and to shoot a last bullet at the Pole, and at the end of all that he was taken to the hospital.
Lionel won two medals, which were awarded him by a brigadier general, who still remembered his fury at the sight of a Jewish tailor bent over in a small street in Liverpool.
By the time Lionel, the fifty-third son of Joseph Rayna, returned to America, he was an officer in the British army. After Pearl Harbor, the United States was forced to enter the war declared on it by the Germans. Lionel commanded a training school in the southern United States. After toiling for half a year training young men, he was sent to Europe to take part in the great Landing. After he was wounded again, this time by shrapnel, he was transferred to intelligence, to the division of interrogation and liaison. Aside from English, Lionel knew Yiddish, German, Polish, Russian, French, and Sanskrit, and those languages, at least some of them, along with his profound knowledge of Latin and ancient Greek, helped him considerably to be considered an excellent interrogation officer. And indeed, he was promoted, and in 'forty-five, a few months before the war ended, he attained the rank of major, and General Eisenhower, in a letter of an efficient secretary, thanked him for his contribution to the war effort and awarded him a special medal for outstanding service, bravery, and model behavior.
There was a moment when Lionel, who still thought of himself as Secret Glory, thought that the stories he hadn't yet managed to write were also the only stories he would write. He even thought of choosing some death of honor. The novel he thought of writing about Joseph Rayna, whom his mother had told him about with her eyes filled with youthful mischief, refused to be written. He published some short stories in important journals with small circulation. And once he wrote a letter to Rebecca Schneerson in Palestine. Her answer was matter-of-fact: if you're really a mature person, you will probably understand how much your fate can't touch my heart, you're in America with your mother and I'm not, I'm busy in the cowshed and with the almond trees, the war didn't pass over us, Nehemiah died on the shore of Jaffa, you asked about my son who's wandering around Europe. I don't know, I think he was killed, the adulterer Joseph Rayna didn't make me children, but on the other hand nobody can know for sure who was the father of my son, yours, Rebecca Schneerson.
When Lionel was thirteen, he loved a twelve-year-old girl who lived on the other side of the city. She lived in a big house surrounded by a fine garden, planned by an English landscape architect especially for her father, the main Ford dealer in the area. Lionel would bring her flowers he picked in the fields, wrote poems to her, and told her about the stories he would write when he grew up. The girl's name was Melissa and she had bright and beautiful oval eyes and sparkling brown hair. One day Melissa threw away the flowers, turned her face away, and said in a voice choke
d with weeping whose subtleties he didn't understand: My mother told me I'm big enough not to be a girlfriend of some Jew from Poland. Lionel returned home, sang lieder to the toilet, and wept behind the locked door. Rachel said: That happens in Poland, not in America. He listened to her and said: Maybe it shouldn't happen here, but it did. A month later, Melissa got sick. The doctors couldn't diagnose her illness. Melissa asked her mother to call Lionel and he came. By now she had little breasts and her eyes became more white than bright and Lionel shut his eyes which were almost weeping and saw the angel of death sitting between Melissa's eyelashes. Later on, when he would come out of the hayloft and fight the Germans he would do that to save Melissa and her parents, he would feel that he was returning them good for bad. Lionel wanted to pray but didn't know what God they prayed to in the elegant house of the main Ford dealer. He stroked Melissa and told her how much he loved her. She showed him pictures of movie actresses filled with sweet smiles and he told her she was more beautiful than they were. Her sweet eyelashes and her face were now full of something he knew was death. But Melissa's parents, who tried not to see Lionel, said: She's got the flu and in a few days she'll get better. Lionel pleaded with them to send her to the hospital in New York, but they said angrily that the doctors of New York were no better than the doctors of their city. He told Melissa: I think of you, I'll always love you, and she told him she'd always love him and in secret they signed a lifetime contract. The contract was hidden in Lionel's pocket and Melissa asked him to forgive her for what she had once said to him. After I told you what Mother told me to say, I wept all night long! she said. Her eyes dimmed, he saw how close death was and called her mother in alarm, and her mother told him: She's tired and you should go now, Lionel. He told her: My name is Secret Glory, and she looked at him, saw the flash of wrath burning in his eyes and something primeval and ancient made her tremble even though she didn't even know what it was. Her parents brought young Brook to read her the history of the struggle for the Connecticut River from the journal Our Connecticut, a bimonthly and a source of pride for many buyers of cars from Melissa's father. Melissa lay with her eyes shut, pale and transparent as a butterfly and with a slight effort she managed not to listen to young Brook.
He didn't go to Melissa's funeral. Two years later, he went to New York to school. His mother and her husband moved to New Jersey. In New York, he clung to a girl who talked about class warfare and her cunning and elusive body wasn't at all like the purity in Melissa's eyes. Lionel wrote a few more stories, and to descend to the masses, he tried to live with the woman who cleaned his father's house, was unfaithful to her with a girl from Radcliffe, went on a long trip around the world, a trip that lasted six years, and then he spent two years closed in a room and wrote a novel that wasn't accepted by any publisher, and then he went to a small city, started teaching in a college, and for three years he collected old cars, ambulances, locomotives, tow trucks, and buses, and parked them in a lot he leased and would walk among those cars and think, Why do I collect this garbage? I don't even like to drive and detest every car and every bus I collect.
Saul Blau expanded his business and opened a few shirt shops. Lionel met the woman who had once been an elusive girl and talked about class warfare, now she took Lionel to her old parents' house and during the Kiddush, she raised her glass to toast the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which, in her words, liberated the toilers from the malice of the capitalist war. Lionel scolded her, he yelled that she was Jewish filth, words she treated with such abysmal tolerance and contempt that she almost burst out laughing. Then Lionel went to enlist in the Canadian brigades at the Canadian consulate in New York, and went off to fight as we said, because of that woman for the lost Jewish honor. He of course couldn't tell her that he was going to fight for Melissa, for Melissa's parents and their Ford cars. The lot of cars, buses, and ambulances he sold. His stepfather told him: Don't worry, Secret, you're all right in my hands, I'll invest your money and add as much and more, you'll be both a hero and rich.
Saul, Rachel's husband, liked to pound his hand on the table and say: Oh, just be healthy! He conquered the field of cheap shirts with diligence, guile, and restraint. He said: I push the shirts on them so my parents who were murdered in a pogrom will lie in warm shirts in their grave. Rachel, who didn't understand the connection between his dead parents and the shirt stores spreading over the city, loved in her husband the lack of Joseph's madness. At night, she secretly longed for the forests, Rebecca, the language of syllables, and one day, she said: Someday I'll visit Rebecca in her forest in Palestine.
When Rachel heard the Nazis singing on York Avenue and saw their goose-step marching, she locked the shutters of Lionel's apartment right over a big bar whose owner was passing out wine and cakes to those in the parade, and she asked Lionel: What will be? He told her he would fight them for her too. She said: Lionel, you're not a child, you're a grown man, forty years old, not married, not settled, without a serious profession, and they're strong. Watch out for them, and when she looked into his eyes she saw a smile capering in them, some weary and glowing splendor of dignity that reminded her of Joseph Rayna's face and she was sorry, so sorry, she had had to grant her son a father like Joseph Rayna, which would surely bring destruction on him in the war against the Germans now shouting in the street below. Weariness and life did their work and she had neither the strength nor the will to tell her son who his father was. Suddenly she said: The words of Joseph Rayna could have been a reply to those satanic parades. After Lionel enlisted, Rachel waited for him behind the locked shutters. Every week she went to his apartment and would arrange his books.
Lionel came to Cologne as an interrogator of prisoners. He came there on the same day that Ebenezer Schneerson and Samuel Lipker came to Paris, where they started performing in a small nightclub. In Cologne, Lionel met Lily Schwabe. When he saw her he understood that Melissa hadn't died, and children who had once shot at airplanes near the destroyed factory now stood almost naked in the street and pointed at Lionel, who strode to the temporary headquarters. The city was destroyed. Lionel helped a local Jewish committee find Jewish children hidden in monasteries and other hiding places and weren't told that the war was over. After thinking about Lily, he made a decision to give her up from the start. He was also afraid that another Melissa would die on him.
After he gave up Lily, he went to the river. He sat at the river and drank juice from a can. Near the place where he was sitting, workers were digging under a destroyed house and taking out corpses of prisoners of war killed in air raids. In the river he saw moss and oil spots and scum, but fish he didn't see. He didn't see fish because even the dead fish were fished out by the hungry Germans. He was disgusted with himself for being sad at seeing hungry Germans. That thought brought him back to Lily. She looked too hungry to be Melissa. Everything metamorphoses into everything, everybody lives again and again, death is a cease-fire, he thought. He went back to the city and found himself in an army canteen. He bought kerosene, clothes, oil, soap, sausage, canned milk, wine, cheese, cigarettes, dairy products, and other groceries, put everything into a kitbag, and went to Lily's house. Lily touched the groceries, tentatively, and, with her eyes shut, her hands stroked the canned milk. She smiled shyly, nervously smoothed her faded dress, and started cooking. Music came from a soldiers' cafe not far from there, and then she set the table and after everything was perfectly arranged-the gleaming, old dishes-she burst into tears. Lionel got up, went to her, stroked her and then licked her tears. She stood without moving and let him lick her eyes. Then they sat at the table and ate. He looked in amazement at her ravenous eating. They drank some wine and sat at the window where bonfires were seen. Two whole days they didn't go out of the house.
Later on, Lily will tell Lionel that the blood shed then was the blood of her virginity and that he was the first man in her life. When Lily saw Lionel, almost twenty years older than her, standing in the door of her house and holding a kitbag in his hands, she felt for the first t
ime in her life an enormous need to belong to somebody. A day before, as she sat in the office among disgruntled women and waited to renew her temporary ID, she saw Lionel walking in his uniform. She remembered that, when he passed by her, there was an innocent dismay on his face, and only then did he discover her and start talking with her and she smiled, even though she didn't know she was Melissa, and then he said: What is this Lily Schwabe, and she said: Lily Schwabe is a woman who lives in a destroyed house, and she gave him her address-something she had never doneand he went off and she was afraid she'd never see him again, until he showed up.
Two days later, Lionel stood in the little bathroom, facing the mirror that had cracked long ago, and cut his face with a razor blade. Lily, who thought he was trying to commit suicide, yelled and ran to him and tried to take the razor out of his hand, and then he told her in German: I'm not committing suicide, I just cut myself. She was amazed to hear the German, and said: Why didn't you tell me you speak German, and then he said: Don't worry, Melissa, and she said: My name is Lily and you speak German. Suddenly the sight of the people he interrogated rose in his mind's eye, the convulsions of laughter, the attempt to be cunning, but still strong, the endless deceit of those who didn't know anything, always they knew nothing, and he said to himself: I shouldn't have found her here. His hands shook and he slapped her. He said: I know how to say that in German, too, and she sat down on a broken chair, stroked her face, and said: Take the child, too! And he said angrily: There is no child and there won't be any child, and she said: Then take the no-child. And then she told him about her father taken prisoner by the Russians, he tried to trap her, to know if she was lying to him, but after a while-and he was an excellent interrogator-he understood that Lily Schwabe really didn't know why that war had raged. She knew French, German, literature, and history, but because of her reason and some profound wisdom in her, she didn't know why that war had raged. She didn't know that people died in camps. That offended Lionel. He knew that everybody said that, it was convenient for him to know that they said and recalled things and tried to pass on to the agenda. But to meet somebody like Lily, and to understand, to understand that she truly didn't know, that was beyond his understanding. He told her: You're not guilty, In sinne der Anklage-Nicht schuldig, as the war criminals then claimed. She wasn't angry at him for hitting her, and he said: You taught yourself to be devoid of moral judgment, but neither did she understand why Lionel's Judaism constituted any difficulty in their relations. She understood only that he shouldn't have German children. And she said that. She tried to understand what happened, to explain how she had shut herself off, maybe against her will, maybe because of some indifference, maybe because of a fear that she couldn't hold out, she lived on the periphery, and the war passed by her, the city was blown up, people went away and didn't come back, but she didn't ask questions, maybe she feared the answers, she only remembered that near the end of the war, she saw the young children, she'd see them on their way to the nearby school, shooting at low-flying planes and being killed, and older prisoners of war, bound with ropes, loading sandbags to defend them and being killed too. Lionel said to her: You're the wrong product of the Third Reich, everything was wasted on you!