by Yoram Kaniuk
And that's how he bought a German streetwalker, Renate. I should have been more than I was or perhaps less, maybe an amorous girl, weeping after the death of the Fuhrer in the bunker, something made me transparent, bereft of location and caught in a maze, they talked about some life in America, about me, about Sam, about me and Lionel, and I wanted to shout, What about me, and they knew, the two of them, that I wasn't important anymore, not out of wickedness, out of love that the two of them even then had to share, and I didn't yet understand what glowing hell I now got myself into, go home I said to myself, buy yourself a poor little husband, cook potatoes for him, let him flourish on the holy ground where you were born and where you'll be buried, but I couldn't, I was born in the air, and above, above everything, faced off, like two knights, my two men fought a desperate war for the heart of an imaginary aristocrat, who no longer lives in a nonpalace where the big, splendid and superfluous duel was held. I wanted to say, You're in love with a shadow, but I knew not to talk, maybe I really was somebody and didn't know it.
I disguised myself as an abandoned queen, I was to them what they wanted me to be. Later a past will be created and I'll be able to make a defense pact with it, for war or peace, I was packed, virginal, an invisible blood flowed from my lips, I gave myself to them and they were genuine lovers, so dreadful, so innocent, Jews trying to buy their dream in a world that wiped them out. Maybe I was what was necessary, everything was a provocation against the world, I was pathetic, possible, and eagle-y.
I applauded the fat singer who tried to thank me so much she almost stumbled. The contempt on her face wasn't hidden by the smile she wanted to direct at Lionel's pocket, which was supposed to be opened for her. The lights of a motorboat looked like embers in the fog. Outside, Ebenezer looked for his dear one. I thought, Could I ever have saved Samuel?
I knew I could save Lionel. But Sam and I were too alike. I, the Ukrainian guard, and the German who hugged him and killed his mother, all of us were too alike. A whore broke a bottle on the table next to us and with the broken bottle, she threatened the drunken sailor with tattooed writing on his hands and he tried to burn her nipple with a cigarette. And that's how that preserved moment was born when we all fought to make each other lose. Our lost honor. I'm trying to describe to you, Renate, a lost moment of anguish and bliss.
Did I have permission to warn them that underneath the mantle of serious transparent and beautified merrymaking, I'm a hard woman?
When we went outside we saw Sam get the money from the maitre d', maybe we were ashamed, to a certain extent we were also a little proud. The maitre d' smiled obediently and gave Sam (Samuel) the money. I think he swindled him, but Sam didn't haggle. It was too late now to go back to the starting point.
And we walked along the boulevard. Love and hostility in equal parts, I thought, where will I get the strength to cope with these two Jews, with a man who buried his mother and father and sells them to every soldier, and Lionel, forty-five years old, seeking himself in sewer images. When we came to the hotel we were so tired that even the dark contemptuous look of the old woman at the reception desk had no effect on us. We couldn't talk anymore. Between me and Lionel was a lust that could be smashed with an ax, I hugged Lionel, he smiled at me, shut his eyes, like a licentious sailor he put his hand on my crotch, turned his eyes to Sam, and fell asleep. Sam fixed his eyes on Lionel's hand and very slowly shut his eyes, then I fell asleep too. The next day, we went to Cologne. Lionel said: What's this about converting to Judaism? We made a deal, you don't have to involve God in such a matter, but I said to him: I have to cut myself off, I want a circumcision, and Sam didn't say a thing but murmured thanks to me for knowing how to kill my parents and not only my children.
I improved my English, which had become an obsession for me. I bought dictionaries, I learned words by heart. Everything had to be formulated correctly, so I would have to cope with Lionel in his and Melissa's words, to understand him in his own words. And the rest you know, somebody remained behind, I don't know that Lily, drawn on a faded ad for Ritesma cigarettes they don't smoke anymore in your country ...
Tape / -
Dear Mr. Henkin,
Your letter reached the Department of Investigation of the Missing a short time ago. As for your issue I recall that before his death, your son, may the Lord avenge his blood, served for some time under my command. I decided to examine your questions both as a sign of my devotion and my emotions, since Menahem, his memory for a blessing, fell many years ago and I still remember him well. You wanted to know if a man named Samuel Lipker had ever come to Israel, and if he served here. I went through the old files, and I found the following details (they don't appear in chronological order, but merely as fragments and I copy them as they are). When we asked him (Lipker) what he would do now, he said he'd finish the war and go to drain the Amazon in Brazil. They pay good money to drain the swamps and cut down the forests, he said. He took part in the diversionary battle at Mount Radar. Thirty-two men were killed there. Three played dead and at dusk, they got up and ran away. One of them was Boaz Schneerson, the son of a man killed in the Holocaust. The name of the second one I don't know. The third apparently was Samuel Lipker. Before that he took part in the battle of Latrun. He joined a brigade without being registered properly; it seems there wasn't time. He came to Latrun straight from the port of Haifa. As far as we can tell, he came to Haifa after being caught on the ship Salvation (Paducah) and was in a British internment camp in Cyprus. The ship left Marseille in 'forty-six. Contradictory evidence exists concerning his boarding the ship. A number of people who were on the ship claim that Ebenezer Schneerson, Samuel's companion, was last seen keeping his place in the line to board the ship, but Samuel didn't come back and was seen talking with the American officer who would bring food, cigarettes, and weapons he managed to smuggle out of the nearby American army camp. Three men testify that his father, that is, Ebenezer Schneerson, disappeared but he himself did return to the line and boarded the ship. At that time, there were no detailed lists, but my investigation shows that most of the ship's passengers I talked to don't explicitly remember if Samuel Lipker was on the ship, except for two who claim that he was there and came to Cyprus with them. When the battle occurred between the little ship with two smokestacks and the British Royal Navy, Samuel fought along with them. They remember that he guarded the deck and with a hose of salty water he sent the people back to the hold of the ship so that a new shift of people could come up on deck to eat, go to the toilet, and get some fresh air. In the battle with the British, three Jews were killed, a little girl who was born and died that same day was called Salvation, and was buried at sea. The commander fought with the one gun he had.
Outraged he was. He tried to run away from Cyprus and was beaten. Later he started his commercial deals and with the fortune he had he continued to make money. Those deals flourished until May seventeenth, nineteen forty-eight. Then Samuel Lipker was put on a ship-even though there is no exact list of passengers, and some claim he wasn't there-brought along with five hundred other young men who were trained secretly at the port of Haifa, were trained two days more and sent to the battle of Latrun. At night, Samuel found a way to escape and came to the other side of Bab-el-Wad. At the Arab village Bidu he met the members of the fifth battalion of Harel. He was transferred to Kiryat Anavim. Nobody remembers him, except for one woman, a medic, who said that a quiet fellow came. He was apparently a handsome young man, she said, but sported a dirty, bristly beard, and it was impossible to recognize him. He joined a division of sappers sent on a diversionary operation near Mount Radar, and as I said, many were killed in the action, while he played dead and was saved. When they came back to Kiryat Anavim, one of them went to try to kill the commander who had abandoned them, while Samuel disappeared.
After the war, he apparently came to Tel Aviv. Walking in the street, seeking what he (later) termed before the investigating officer a new biography he could live in, he ran into somebody at a kiosk who w
as his age and it seemed to him they had been in a battle together, and that man hit him in an empty lot near the house where Samuel Lipker thought he found a young widow, to whom he was sent by a member of the battalion. The blows were apparently serious and he was wounded and hit back at the person who apparently looked like him. Afterward, he changed his name to Joseph Rayna. And after a certain period for which I have no testimony, he was called Joseph Ranan. When he found out that he was considered killed and that a grave was dug for him in Kiryat Anavim, he said that was fine and let them think that Samuel Lipker had died in the battle of Mount Radar. He was sent to an officers' course where he claimed he was born in Israel and even described his parents' home. He changed the money he had apparently brought with him for valuable objects, traded in them even during the officers' course and then bought himself an apartment, and rented out the apartment the army gave him. Then he was sent to train recruits, suffered a failure in a battle he went to with his recruits. He didn't go drain the Amazon, because the sailors on the Greek ship he was supposed to board looked like white slave traders. Disguised as somebody else whom he himself apparently didn't know, he taught himself basic Hebrew. He got entangled in lies that he couldn't get out of or perhaps he did get out of them and I don't know, he had a plan he devised that nobody would be good enough to hear. And he wrote songs that one girl, whose parents were killed in the Bialystok ghetto, claimed were surprisingly similar to songs her parents had sung in the Zionist club, Young Judea. The girl was afraid of him and ran away and by then he was called Joey Gold and many legends were spun about him. He fought a personal war against an unreal army, and at night after bloody battles he sat in his house and wrote songs that were said to be composed of adjectives and overly exalted words and they smelled moldy, abandoned, and obsolete. After he killed a prisoner in the Gaza operation (the details aren't clear enough because the killer of the prisoner also appears under another name), he was punished, but in the Sinai campaign, he was called back into the army. He commanded a unit that parachuted behind enemy lines. The flanking operation he commanded clashed with the original plan and even though it succeeded, he was rebuked for his rashness, won a medal for heroism but was demoted, which he apparently resented. Then he sold his house, bought an abandoned house in Jaffa, cultivated a beautiful garden, but people who call him by different names aren't sure if it really is the same person. He looked for the man who wounded him when he came back from the war, but didn't find him. He was violent and soft only at times, said one woman who wished to remain anonymous. The investigator at the trial held for him said: Maybe that man doesn't exist, he's both alive and dead. He killed and somebody else was punished. Who is Joey Gold, asked the investigator and added: I can't swear that he exists. The documents say you were killed, he said to Joey Gold, and Joey Gold said, Maybe I really did die.
At the trial, apparently, he said: We don't go like sheep to the slaughter. Here there won't be another Maidanek. The judge reprimanded him for those words and said: You belong to an arrogant generation that was born in Israel and isn't able to understand. After a jail term, he returned to his house in Jaffa. He learned how to play seventeen different musical instruments, wrote poems nobody reads anymore, and very slowly faded away, as if the earth swallowed him up. I can't describe that any better, but there are almost no milestones after that.
Tape / -
I, Ebenezer, what do I know?
Alphabet-Sandwich Islands; the number of letters is twelve (Jewish knowledge!). Burmese alphabet-nineteen letters. Italian-twenty. Bengalese-twenty-one. Hebrew, Assyrian, Akkadian, and Sumeriantwenty-two letters each. Spanish and Slavic-twenty-seven. Arabictwenty-eight. Persian and Coptic-thirty-two. Georgian-thirty-five. Armenian-thirty-eight. Russian-forty-one. Muscovite Russian-fortythree. Sanskrit and Japanese-fifty. Ethiopian-two hundred and two.
Miracle of the passive voice in Hebrew: We were passed over, lamed! We were torn asunder!
The Bible (in English)-thirty-nine books in the Old Testament. Nine hundred twenty-nine chapters. Twenty-three thousand two hundred fourteen verses. Five hundred ninety thousand, four hundred thirty-nine words, two million seven hundred twenty-eight thousand one hundred letters.
In all languages the name of the deity is composed of only four letters: Latin-Deus. Greek-Zeus. Hebrew-Adon. Aramaic-Adad. ArabicAlla. The same is true of Parsi, Trtr, and the Jadga language. In Egyptian Oman or Zaut. In east Indian, Asgi or Zagl. In Japanese Jain. In Turkish -Aadi. In ancient Scandinavian-Odin. In Croatian-Duga. In Dalmatian -Ront. In Tyranian-Ahir. In Etruscan-Chur. In Swedish-Kodr. In Irish-Dich. In German-Gott. In French-Dieu. In Spanish-Dios. In Paroani-Leon.
Tape / -
At a formal luncheon on the ship, the captain asked Lionel who was the boy he had adopted, and Lionel said: His name is Samuel Lipker, and Samuel said: That's a grievous error, sir, my name is Sam Lipp, and I was born in Boston. They sat on deck. Soldiers served iced tea to the returning heroes. From the Statue of Liberty, an escort rowed out to the ships that sprayed jets of water and colored balloons were flown on the piers. Samuel looked and said: A whole city is waiting for me. He said that without any emotion.
Tape / -
When Mother built.
When Rebecca Schneerson built her destroyed farm in the settlement, a spark of apostasy flashed in her. Enraged by Nehemiah's death, she built a model farm. She erected a modern cow barn, built a dovecote and a chicken coop, planted citrus groves and vineyards, her vegetable patch was big and well-watered, she had fields of clover, corn, and barley, she built an incubator for chicks, the first incubator in Judea, and in the annual milk production contest, two of her cows usually won first place. One day, when Ebenezer was fifteen years old, and the Great War was in its second year and Turkish and German officers would stop in her house on their way south, Ebenezer was hit by a stone thrown at him by an Arab. Ebenezer, sitting on a piece of wood and carving it, was concentrating so hard he didn't see a thing, but Rebecca came out to hit the son of the Arab who stood near his father. The man came to defend his son. Rebecca shaded her forehead with her hand, and said to the Arab: I would curse your father if I knew which of the ninety-two lovers your mother had was really your father! And the Arab enjoyed the curse more than he was offended by it. His donkey deposited droppings next to his feet. Rebecca laid the stick on the ground and wiped the sweat off her brow. The Arab said: You're an angry woman, I'm Ahbed. She said to him: Listen, there's a good farm here, there's a garden, there's food, come with your stupid son, work here, and I'll pay you more than all the seedy dignitaries in Marar, and that's how Ahbed started working for Rebecca and living in the old cow barn Rebecca fixed up for him. After the war, when locusts and hunger destroyed the rage in the settlers, Rebecca was the first one to restore her farm. Then Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg came to the Land with the British Service, as it was called then. The captain, who edited a French periodical in Cairo, before that had been an officer in the Argentinean army, an American citizen, with a name he claimed was Swiss, and belonged to the Greek Orthodox church. Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg came to the Land to prepare, as he put it, a tombstone worthy of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, which a young officer in His Majesty's army in Jerusalem thought it fitting to erect. The young British officer was excited by the return to the land of the Bible and thought the Captain planned to erect a memorial to the prophet Jeremiah, and only later did he realize his error. The bureaucracy was still in its infancy, the Arabs sharply attacked the Balfour Declaration, the government appointed a Jew as the first commissioner in Judea, and Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg, known as an international expert on Dante Alighieri, claimed that the series of incidents described above was a sign that the desired memorial would be erected. Nobody understood the logic of the series of incidents, but since the idea was so confused, they thought something was indeed hiding behind it. Some claimed that the whole issue of the memorial was simply an optical illusion and the Captain was a spy, but nobody knew who he was spying f
or or why. The Arabs, who then began to fear that the Jews had come to steal the land from them, were afraid that the Jewish commissioner would divert the water of the Yarkon River to London and the water of the Jordan to the arid plains of England. That was the time when a young engineer in the military service came up with an idea about ships to bring icebergs from the north to the Mediterranean, and the Arabs also saw that idea as a Zionist plot to steal the desert from its eternal inhabitants. They heard that there was a Jewish river in Asia, where Jewish kings and princes lived, headed by a queen as tall as a two-story house, and the river stopped flowing on the Sabbath. They were afraid the Yarkon and the Jordan would also stop on the Sabbath and then the black goats would cross the Jordan also on winter days too. They demanded that if the Jordan really was stopped it should also be stopped on Friday, their day of rest. The river (the Sambatyon) was invented by Jewish liars who Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg thought were his ancestors back when they lived in the eleventh century, of whom, he said, not even one trace remained of the survivors. So the Captain was able to invent a family tree for himself going back to the eleventh century, dream of memorials, and come to the Land of Israel disguised as whatever he wanted, and after the Arabs finished worrying about the fate of the water, they started getting anxious about the idea of the memorial. And all that happened before the Captain would come to the settlement. First, they claimed, they never heard of the poet. Second, the editor of the Jaffa newspaper, Nasser, wrote Dante was a fanatical anti-Muslim, while it is a Jew disguised as an Orthodox Greek who wants to build the memorial, and we've got enough of our own imposters and spies, and dignitaries hastened to hold ceremonies of reconciliation in proper houses overflowing with charred meat and steaming coffee but nothing helped. Nasser wrote in his newspaper that no tombstone would be erected to Dante in the land that was holy to Muslims because Mohammed's legendary horse rose from there to heaven. The Captain, who came to the settlement at the height of the struggle for the memorial, sat in the community center erected by Nehemiah and read a Hebrew newspaper from Jaffa, and saw Rebecca and her son in the distance, walking in the street. Ebenezer was now a lad of nineteen and held in his hands a sawed-down tree trunk. The Captain got to his feet, pressed his sword to his thigh, and followed Rebecca from a distance, which he privately called a distance of decency. The young staff officer who was reprimanded for confusing Jeremiah with Dante was seeking an outstanding Arab poet to pacify the Arabs, and the Captain who moved between the monasteries and the churches in the Land in an attempt to bribe the abbots of the monasteries and the priests of the religion to support the idea of a memorial to Dante encountered a firm and hostile refusal. The Captain had instructive theories, which nobody he met was interested in, like the theory about the site of Moses's grave, and without knowing about the melody of the Psalms that Rebecca later taught herself (maybe she knew it from her childhood) he taught himself the book of Psalms, so he could recite it by heart from beginning to end and from end to beginning. The Captain really didn't get excited when he heard the idea that he was a triple spy and that he had also been a spy in the war, he didn't even get excited that under the aegis of the British government he continued, according to the slanderers, to write sharp and satanic articles against Great Britain in his French newspaper in Cairo where he hadn't been for months. When the Captain saw Rebecca walking with her son, as he put it later, he was filled with that longing that a self-respecting South American (or Mexican, according to Rebecca) captain feels one moment before he's executed. He followed Rebecca, and Ebenezer, who turned around, saw him, and said to his mother: A man in a uniform is following us, and she said: A fool with a sword, like Joseph with his songs. Rebecca had plans for the new government and, as she told Ebenezer, she somehow counted on the certain folly of the Mexican buffoon who would follow her home, knock on her door, and stand at attention, and when he did indeed do that she opened the door to him, and his sword struck the post and the Captain saluted chivalrously, or as she put it, like every dumb Turk when a beautiful Jewish woman passes by, and she brought him into her house, let him sit alone for a long time, sent Ahbed to him with a glass of cold water and then with a tray where a carafe of coffee and small cups wobbled and only then did she come in, dressed in an elegant gown, and they chatted about the weather, government upheavals, locusts, typhus, the banishments the Turks had enforced, and she told how she had fostered irrigation when people were tortured and killed and the Arabs then raised their heads and said: The Jews under our feet, but me, she said, they didn't touch, they'd come and look at me and a poor German in an officer's uniform played melancholy tunes for me and would moon after me. All the time, Rebecca was devising her plans and now and then she peeped at the face of the Captain staring at her with a savage intensity so shrouded with respect that he couldn't see her.