by Yoram Kaniuk
The woman who was shaking got up, very slowly she sought a path between the carpets, the chairs, the easy chairs, the heavy electric lamp standing on an ancient pedestal, above her the stuffed animals watched. He got up and walked behind her. She stood shaking in the corridor. Her hand moved to the telephone. The maid appeared and Sam dismissed her furiously. He went to the woman, kissed the back of her neck, waited for her to hit him and then, when a jet of blood burst from his mouth, he hung up the phone, kissed her hard on the lips, wet her with his blood, and said: No need, I'm going, why do children die in such Paradises? It's not fair.
Maybe I'm dreaming, said the woman, maybe I'm really dreaming, maybe this isn't happening, I'm calling Smoky, come here Smoky, and he doesn't come, maybe it's not happening, maybe I'm dreaming, it was quiet, more than thirty years it was quiet.
I'm sorry, he said. He pushed her into the living room and sat her down on a chair, she buried her face in her hands and waited. She looked like somebody who doesn't know what to wait for anymore.
I don't know you! said Sam. I'm not willing to accept Melissa's death, I absolutely will not accept it.
You're a wicked cruel man, said the woman and stood up, sturdy now. The maid came in and tried to help her mistress get up and he pushed her until both women fell down. The dog rolled around on the rug and waited for somebody to applaud it. Sam broke a buffalo horn and tossed it on the floor. That's all, only slight damage, he said, why not? You'll pay for my visit. He pushed the two women into a little room whose door was open, jumped out the window, and ran. The dog ran after him, jumped over the fence, and went into the grove. He ran along the fields and the grove reappeared. He barged in among the trees and came to a small cemetery. It was dark now. It was barely possible to read the names. He searched for a tombstone with her name and didn't find it. He kissed a tombstone he thought was hers, saw people with flashlights searching for him, nodded at their innocence and said: My dear woman, I have overcome Kramer and Weiss and the German and Ukrainian guards and then the Soviet police and the occupation authorities and the Yugoslavians and the French and the Italians and the Danes, and those fools think they'll catch me with pitiful flashlights. Dogs barked in the distance and he understood their longing for him and barked back at them. The people with the dogs looked at one another and yelled, but the dogs stopped and wouldn't go on. Sam came to the bus stop, waited in the gloom of the thick trees until a bus came, he darted inside, paid, and fell asleep on the seat.
When Lionel asked him where he had been, he said: I went to visit Melissa. She doesn't love you anymore, Secret. Then, he went into his room, locked the door and fell asleep standing up, leaning on the door.
Committee of the Survivors of Hathausen/Division to Celebrate Liberation Day
New York,
Dear Sir (Samuel Lipker):
Attached is the questionnaire we informed you of. Please fill it out and send it to us as soon as possible. Erase what is superfluous.
Full name.
Parents' names.
Are they alive?
Other family members.
Their addresses.
Dates of internment in the camp.
Do you recall what you did? If you had a job, what was it?
Did you live in the blocks? Did you live in the Sonderkommando Services camp?
Detail why you think you survived.
Where did you go after the liberation?
How did you come to the United States?
Do you remember people who were with you in the camp?
Do you remember outstandingly cruel incidents?
Do you have a profession?
A brief history of your life, personal details, memories (if possible), experiences, songs you sang, dances. Do you have plans for the future? Do you remember Frieda Klopfen?
Please send us the form as soon as possible.
Yours,
Most sincerely.
To the Committee of Survivors of Hathausen,
Greetings,
My name is Sam Lipp. Frieda lay under a dog that crushed her. When they threw me into the fire, they remembered that I was fourteen years old and took me out of the fire. Then I chewed bones to understand the sky, which was mostly cloudy. I and my father live outside the planet earth. Why didn't you celebrate your entrance into the camp instead of your exit? You don't interest me and please don't send me any more material.
Samuel Lipker was killed in Hathausen and I do not know the place where he is buried.
Yours, SS Sturmbahnfuhrer Kramer (Samuel Lipker)
Later on, when he told Lionel of his trip to Melissa's house, Sam was smiling and Lionel was silent and pensive. He looked at Sam's face, lit a cigarette, outside it was pouring rain, and Lionel said: How did Mrs. Brooks look? And Sam said: She asked about you! Lionel laughed. Sam said: They're sending me letters for a celebration of the liberation, if they call, say I died, and he left. Lionel came back from his room where he'd help Sam with his homework. Because he had learned from Ebenezer the craft of remembering, he learned well and fast. He finished high school in a year. At first, they teased him because of his age, but the other students quickly learned not to get smart with him. Then, he went to NYU. Rachel said: He'll give you trouble, and Lionel would answer her: Mother, he's my son!
The stories Lionel wrote weren't bad, but they weren't any better than the stories he had written before. The sense of defeat was much less bitter than it was. By the time he started writing reviews for The New York Times, Lionel was close to fifty. The editor, who loved his stories that were printed in little journals and that granted him a certain cachet in marginal literary circles, asked him to write an article. Then he wrote more articles and soon after, he became the regular critic for the paper. When he was afflicted with melancholy visions of his life, Lionel said: Everything is past, the future is now behind me, the lad I was created a man and the man has lost the lad, the hopes were disappointed, even if they weren't very big, average men lead lives of quiet desperation, he quoted Thoreau, I exist, write, I'm a draftsman, not a creator. To take Sam's lampshade. The number of lampshades in the hackneyed kingdom of the eternal. To make a poem. My words grope in vain for a story others will write better than me. Watches Lily, sees the devil in Sam's eyes, and dies for another night. A year is three hundred sixty-five dogs. Sam Lipp is now twenty-three years old. Lily sat at home and read dictionaries, vocabularies, and the more precisely she learned English, the more she thought she forgot her native tongue. She taught herself with an anger she never imagined was in her to flee from the language she had grown up in, and she thought that in an idiomatic and fluent English, and that was how she could forget she once had parents and the more her children continued not to be born, the more her roots were erased, until she was forced to think for a long time to answer Sam who asked her the name of her father, who may still have been a prisoner of the Russians. Her life was a small ghetto protected from an insult she never felt, but his eyes were a witness to it. One night, when the snow piled up to the middle of the window and a strong wind blew outside, Sam came and lay next to Lily. Lionel whispered: Lily, he wants you, very slowly she turned her face, looked at him, let a tear pearling in her eyes soak the pillowcase, stretched out her hand, gently stroked Samuel's face, and Samuel said: You sleep with every filthy Jew, you don't even know what a gentile prick looks like. He pushed Lionel onto his side, pressed Lionel's eyes until he roared with pain, Lily felt his body choking her. She tried to crawl to Lionel, held her hand out to him, but Sam grabbed the hand, clasped it hard, and when she looked into his eyes she could see the snow piling up in the windows with eyes that once saw a forest on a hike with somebody who may have been her father. She laid her hands on his eyes, shut them, and he stroked her back until she shuddered, but now Melissa laughed inside her and Lionel, who felt pity for Sam and knew that tears covered his eyes, talked to her and when she raised her face she saw Lionel looking at her, the tears remained on his smooth chest, and even though she
wanted him now, she could do nothing but defeat Samuel in him and her lips were caught in his watch chain, and she was so confused that even five years later, she could remember that the time was then one twenty-one in the morning. Samuel flipped her over, lay on her, slipped the pillow out from under her head so that Lionel's head was now higher than hers, put the pillow on her face, didn't press, straightened up a little so he could look at the three of them, and said: I love her, Lionel, but she loves you, don't worry, I'm trying to steal Melissa from you, but she's dead all the time too, and Lionel whispered: That's all right, Sam, and Lily tried to say something, but the pillow over her face didn't let her talk and Sam pounded on the pillow until it dropped off and fell on Lionel's chest as he lay there now, squashed the pillow with his head, and when Lily saw Lionel's face, she clasped Sam and at the same time pushed him off her. The snow kept piling up, Sam hit Lionel's leg to get him away from him, he grasped his father's face with his hand, hugged it hard and Lily thought she was cut because his hand was in her crotch. When she started crying, her face turned red and she touched Lionel pleadingly. She turned over, hugged Samuel. As he was above her, Samuel kissed Lionel on the lips, jumped out of bed, stuck Lionel to Lily, ran to the kitchen, banged his hand on the wall, poured water, brought a glass to the room, poured the water on them, pushed them closer together, and started singing a song a Ukrainian guard had once taught him as he hugged him from behind. Then, the three of them lay on their backs and looked at the snow. The dark was lighted by a streetlamp.
The stories you write, said Sam as if he were continuing a conversation he had started years ago, are still lifes, beautiful and dead. You're too respectable, Lionel, you're not young, your words have no proper story and you're waiting for a story in all the wrong places, and you let every fucking Jew fuck your wife.
Not everyone, said Lionel.
Everyone, Sam repeated.
This is a fascinating city. See how arrogant its snow is, added Samuel. You're searching for humiliation, Lionel, you're selling Samuel Lipker to a German woman. Look at your city, there's no melancholy eaten by moss in it as in the city where Joseph Rayna begat Samuel Lipker on a miserable actress, you measure others' pain with a yardstick. What do your tears know except what they have to glean from a city where everybody passes through like a Cossack in a pogrom? You searched for a son in the wrong place, you dismantle the enemy into elements, produce with your hands-or Lily demonstrates to you-a disaster that was supposed to happen to you and happened to me and her. And without you, Lionel! That yardstick! Grasp. Like loving Lily through me. I read in a book that Paul Klee the artist said that creation is to turn the unseen into the seen. Ebenezer would perform with me in nightclubs. I led him on a rope like a trained monkey. He really was the last survivor of the Jews and they really did all die, they don't know they died, but they died. He recited the words and they thought he was talking about something that once was. They didn't understand that he was talking about what maybe wasn't.
Tape / -
On a Wednesday shrouded in a doughy dust in the air, Sam left the house and walked as if he had some purpose. Lionel and Lily sat and read an article that appeared that day in the Atlantic. Lionel sat with his eyes shut and Lily read him his own article. He wasn't smiling and was listening intently. Tired birds were seen dying on branches heavy with dust. He met Riba-Riba at the corner of Thirteenth Street, next to the weaving machine shop. Riba-Riba's neck looked thin, her head was crowned with a splendid mane of hair, and when he told her how beautiful was the back of her neck in the distance, she giggled nervously. At the sight of her smile, he could sense that the end of the story that hadn't yet started wouldn't be especially pleasant, but since he was waiting again for a funeral that hadn't passed, something in him longed for a well-done rite, and Riba-Riba, with the embarrassed and defeated smile, may have been the proper answer to the sight of the birds that weren't birds of gold at all and looked as if they would land in a little while and die from the heavy heat. Riba-Riba said: When I presented the evening of Irish songs at the university, I waited for you, Sam, I waited awfully, and you fell asleep. Sam said: I was tired. When she said she was going to see a matinee performance of a Tennessee Williams play, he told her he'd go with her. He asked her to buy him a ticket for the seat behind her. Since her father owned a nightclub and her mother was a well-known Irish Gypsy, it wasn't hard for her to get tickets. She said: It's awful sexy to sit like that, so he chewed on her ear and kept her from seeing the play. Through her hair, he saw his mother acting on the stage. Outside stood Joseph Rayna with a bouquet of flowers and seeds of Samuel Lipker poured on his eyelashes. The actors were welltrained, they raised their voices in the right places and knew how to structure the pauses precisely. The critics' florid words hanging on the walls of the lobby suddenly began to be possible. But something rebelled in him, and he may have fallen asleep or chewed Riba-Riba's ear again if he hadn't sensed that all those days, all those years, he had wanted to do something those people were doing now on the stage, but not like his mother, or those actors, to do that as Joseph Rayna acting the lover, at the house where his mother acted for the indifferent walls. What he wanted more than anything in the world was to stand there and stage Ebenezer, himself, Weiss, Kramer, Lionel, and Lily. In other words, to stage the world that almost was and only Ebenezer remembered it.
When they went out, it was raining a warm spray. Sam pushed Riba-Riba to the entrance of a dark office building and fucked her standing up. She bit her lips and because she felt both humiliated and blissful, she asked Sam for a cigarette, stuck it in her mouth and acted as if she were in a silent movie. After he snatched the cigarette butt out of her mouth and threw it toward the entrance, they broke apart, she combed her hair, and then they went into a cafeteria. Sam glanced indifferently at the gigantic Camel cigarette belching smoke rings at the news making its way around the old New York Times building. Opposite was a gigantic Paramount ad showing Duke Ellington smiling along with Frank Sinatra.
When they went out, the misty rain was still falling. Sam started talking about death as a gesture. She wasn't sure and saw a church altar and Sam raising her up before God with white skin and blue eyes. Sam said: They indulge with embellished words. Try to depict life as if it's possible to resurrect life. Riba-Riba shook with some vague fear and hugged Sam. She said in a voice that was too loud: We started from love standing up and we'll end with a true feeling, and he said: Say "we screwed," and she blushed and said the word and then Sam became serious and kissed her face. Her mouth tasted of mint, toothpaste, and potatoes. They passed by a funeral home and Riba-Riba was afraid to go in with him, but he insisted and they went in.
In the splendid and darkened room lay a well-dressed corpse, painted and made up and even its shoes were polished. Soft, melancholy music with something metallic was heard in the background. A woman dressed in black and enveloped in a delicate black silk scarf raised the hem of the scarf a little and looked at Sam. She didn't look at Riba-Riba and she immediately dropped the scarf. Sam smiled at her sympathetically, but the woman only shook her head with a domesticated sadness and looked at the dead man. A crushed odor of flowers that may also have been artificial rose in his nose. A person in a costume that looked like a blend of an official uniform and a frock coat entered, stood next to the woman, and with profound and gloomy understanding looked at the body. With a hand that almost succeeded in trembling, he brushed two hairs off the dead man's brow and with careful gentleness he brushed the patent leather of his left shoe with a handkerchief he took out of his pocket. The woman, who was still staring at the dead man, whispered something none of them could hear. And then more people in black came into the room and stood next to the woman. One of them wiped a tear from his eye and put the tear in a handkerchief and the handkerchief in a pocket that was apparently reserved for tears. The person standing next to the man with the tear took a scrap of paper out of his overcoat pocket, put on his glasses, and read a poem in a monotonous voice. The poem w
as written by the deceased before he died, he emphasized sadly. The poem was a trade balance of a small company called A. B. Lin, in Long Island. It said that life is a conglomerate of big joys and little events. The last words of the poem were: "Melina, Melina, go in your Caddy to the sea and see for me the scene of sunset I haven't seen in twenty years." The woman didn't budge. Sam smiled but the man didn't smile back. They looked at Sam and Riba-Riba and tried to recall what side of the family they belonged to.
Tape / -
As far as I know (I'm reciting now), Sam Lipp went back to the theater he had been sunk in forever and didn't know it, so maybe the words "went back" are superfluous, like the word "deceased" mentioned above.
Tape / -
From a letter written by the prisoner (Number 3321/A) Kramer, to the PEN association of writers in the city of Cologne, a few weeks before he was turned over to the Polish authorities:
The letter and the journal I gave to your distinguished society, but as far as I understand, it used them adversely. Since they have not yet hanged (or shot) me, I am permitted to express my amazement that the writers of our nation are capable of distorting things like that and betraying the belief of a commander who served our homeland loyally. And as for Samuel Lipker, whom you ask about, I must say that when he associated in the camp with Ebenezer, I knew that his bestiality would someday be translated into troubles for us. Nevertheless, he remains alive. There was no decision on the matter. I remember Samuel once told me: Commander, maybe all of us betray something more sublime than we are, and judging should be a blissful act, right? Those were words on the tip of my tongue. I must state that if Samuel Lipker does something in his life he will appeal to the dark alleys of our great spirit, and not like a great many of you, he will not be afraid to ask why he betrayed our nation with his Fuhrer, will not be afraid to touch what the Americans call in weather reports "the eye of the hurricane."