by Yoram Kaniuk
Lily said: That's not Sam's voice, that's Ebenezer's voice. Licinda, who didn't want to understand and was frightened, said feverishly: What difference does that make? And Sam said: Christmas or Hanukkah, the main thing is that we're happy because I found myself a nice and wonderful woman and so cruel that her name is Licinda Eliot Hayden.
Licinda went to Sam, kissed him on the mouth, and said: It seems I love this man, and then she sat down in a chair, stretched her legs to the fire, and let the warmth enter into her until she felt the warmth suffocating her crotch and she started weeping. Sam asked her why she was weeping and she didn't answer, waited until the tears dried, and then asked if it really was allowed to sing Christmas carols in this house. Lionel said, No, but Sam said, Of course, and started to sing himself. Lily softly hummed "The Star of Bethlehem" and Licinda tried to sing but couldn't, because the tears moved from her face to her throat and Lionel, who wanted to lecture to her about the history of the Jewish people, decided to give up, shut his eyes and sank into a doze of weariness, which he later claimed was a characteristic result of his advanced age. Sam said: Safer to sing the songs of the winners, Lionel! But Lionel was already asleep, and Lily said: What the losers never understand is that there really aren't any winners in the world ... And Sam looked at her, put on his coat and went out. Licinda watched him go, and Lionel who woke up saw the door shut, and said: Don't pay attention to every word he says, and he fell asleep again, but Lily said: Listen to him, he knows something none of your friends knows. Licinda shut her eyes, licked the little bit of whiskey still stuck to her lips, held her hand out, and Lionel, who opened his eyes again, held out a tired and shaking hand and poured her another drink. She poured the whiskey into the fire and brought her hand back to gesture a request.
No, no whiskey, she said and covered the mouth of the glass with her other hand. Lily went to the bedroom and came back from there in a white dress. Her hair was disheveled now. Sam, who came back with two bottles of wine, saw two angels standing next to the fireplace. He uncorked one bottle, poured into Licinda's empty glass, and also poured for himself, and after they drank, he said: Blessed art Thou 0 Lord our God King of the Universe who commanded us to light a Christmas tree, amen.
And then, when Licinda sat down, he ordered her to stand up, his voice was metallic and coarse. Lionel poured himself another glass of whiskey, this time without ice, and drank it without putting the glass down until he turned pale. Church bells were heard in the distance and Licinda started humming "Silent Night." Sam hugged Lily, put out the colored lights, and said: Lionel, sing something. Lionel asked: Sing what? His voice sounded of blood with an edge of whiskey. A song of thanksgiving to the god of Licinda and Lily, said Sam. Lionel said: I'm too drunk, and he fell into the easy chair. Sam said: Too bad I don't have nails. Lionel opened his eyes, took off his glasses, and looked at Lily. His face was impassive; Licinda looked drunk. Sam turned off the light again and plugged in the colored lights, Lily glowed against the dark tree. The branch moved, the electric lights went off and on, and Sam said: We're celebrating today one thousand nine hundred sixty-two years of His birth. Licinda tried to applaud, Lionel wanted to get up, and when he did, he slapped Sam's face, but Sam didn't react. Licinda said: That's beautiful, God! That's beautiful ...
Advertising jingles were played on the radio. Lily released her hands from the tree, and Sam said: Two demonesses, he laughed and was sad at the same time. Lionel suddenly looked sad and gnarled. Sam said: The hangwomen look beautiful in the home of the hanged. Else Koch had a dog, his name was Man. Lionel, who muttered vague words, looked at the two women.
Licinda said: I met Sam when he did the play with the shoes and I'm scared ... Lily said: Welcome to the home of the urban hangwomen. For the sake of argument, I'm Else Koch and you're the woman named Frieda with a white band on your arm trampled to death b y a gigantic dog ..
Two hours after the birth of their messiah, when heavy snow started falling in the window, Licinda fell asleep in her chair. Lily stood fascinated at the tree and her eyes measured its beauty unlike the snores of Lionel, who firmly refused to admit that now that he had become a well-known poet, he started snoring. The light goes on and off. Sam pees sitting down on the toilet and forgets to get up, and then begins the event that Sam later called "the four lost years." None of them remembered exactly how it happened or what caused the years to disappear, but four years passed. Life flowed on the side, as if on another planet, Lionel published more and more chapters of the gigantic poem (seven hundred seventy-five pages) about the death of the Jews, Licinda came and went, there were months when she was apparently not there and Sam missed her or perhaps didn't, none of them remembered exactly. And then she came back and maybe she really wept as it seemed later. Sam hugged or hit her that time she remembered extremely unclearly as the day she broke the glass where Lionel collected the tears of angels. He was drunk and slept hugging the scrap of cloth of Sam's mother's dress and Sam was watching him. Other events took place: international or national, elections, one president fell and another was elected, thieves were arrested and one murderer drank the blood of his victim, the newspapers with Lionel's articles or articles about his poems were published regularly, none of them filed the oblivion precisely. Somebody, maybe Lily, said: Maybe we invented a machine of oblivion, but then they forgot they said that. A fortune teller Licinda may really have visited said: You're in love with a shadow; the man you live with doesn't exist, or he lives far away from here and Licinda was scared and ran away from the fortune teller's dark house and Sam staged plays, chose a group of actors and somehow, along with oblivion, as if in a dream everybody dreams together, united a troupe of actors, an auditorium was found at a university, they worked on the body, soul, and dialect of actors, Lily managed the house and the lives of Licinda, Sam, and Lionel, discovered in dictionaries words that were also forgotten, Sam was so immersed in forgetting that he once spoke for a long time in Yiddish with Licinda, and after years when the invention of time stirred ancient echoes in her, Licinda said: That's funny, Sam, and she started dreaming about people she had never known and who maybe really were her forefathers. The invention of extinct time wasn't a secret. An important poet claimed in an interview he granted one of the newspapers that Sam Lipp dictates his poems to Lionel from documented dreams filed by a Jewish magician who learned nine million words by heart and would recite them in seedy nightclubs.
Near the end of the long period of forgetting, Sam staged a play for two actors, closed the play because the words written by the playwright bored him. He wanted the Bronya the Beautiful to hold an apple in her mouth, he wanted to see his mother in the empty room, and he wanted Ebenezer, the camp, Kramer, the smell of bodies, he wanted to create a world nobody still believed ever existed. Licinda, who had long ago forgotten, stopped asking herself if she was in love with Sam and accepted her life with him as natural and started feeling children in her womb and was afraid of greenyellow eyes. She taught Sam quiet ceremonies of love, restrained lust, softness, and said: If I'm four years older it means they passed. Sam said: Ebenezer assigned me to be a witness, but how do you witness? Testimony has to be lies and by that to describe truth. The first time he produced Lionel's Lament for the Death of the Jews (an excerpt of the second cycle), the play was harshly criticized. He read the reviews calmly and said they were surely right, but he was more right. He taught his actors to be animals, to steal, to devour one another, to survive. They crawled and licked and hit one another, fought and learned to speak out of need and not desire. And Licinda sat in Sam's studio and took care of the wounded and offended actors, brought coffee and beer, mended, organized, supplied every detail, for long hours she talked with Lily, and at night she'd let loose.
Sam taught his actors and himself to act Darwin's theory of evolution, and started supporting them from the money Saul Blau would bring him from the shirts, five percent of their income belonged to him and he didn't know why. Rachel died alone quietly in a room full of flowers in
a private hospital for incurables, and even at the time of her death, she didn't know who was who and didn't know that Sam Lipp wasn't Lionel and Lionel wasn't Joseph and Saul Blau was her husband. She smiled, shut her eyes, and from so much sadness and weariness she forgot to open them.
At his mother's funeral, Lionel stood and tried to remember his youth, and suddenly he grasped that all he had left were Samuel and Lily. He talked about Samuel's plays, and Lily said: He's not doing theater, he's creating the Fourth Reich! Then he put in a new door and the carpenter, who remembered Sam from the camp, said: Where's Ebenezer? And Samuel said: He died and I died too. The carpenter who remembered how Samuel used to bring him a slice of bread from the kitchen of the Sonderkommando, said: You know what's really awful? That we are alive. Lionel wrote a poem about that. The poem constituted a kind of end to the four extinct years. Critics started talking about Samuel's plays. His new theater evoked strong and contradictory reactions on both sides. At his birthday party, Sam sang a jolly song in Yiddish to the daughter of one of the actresses. Six of the actors could have been the baby's father and Samuel sang the song and started weeping. They saw the tears and Licinda ran away. And thus ended some camp with barbed wire fences, where they acted and dogs were sicced on them and he stood and whipped himself. In the morning when he got up, his leg was broken. The doctor couldn't explain the meaning of the phenomenon and put a cast on the leg. Samuel went to Licinda's parents, played chess with them, and taught them how to cheat at cards. In the small town in upstate New York he learned the annals of Licinda and connected her to the parents of his parents. And thus Licinda started having nightmares about the parents and grandparents Samuel knew from other places.
Among the salvations Licinda's grandfathers sought were salvations like the ones his parents' parents sought. And thus Samuel came to the story of Joseph de la Rayna and started adapting it for the theater. He told Licinda: You're my great love, you'll be what you always were, you'll be Frieda and Lilith. A German author wrote to Sam and Sam answered him. He wrote: I know who I am and who my father is and who Lionel's father is. Next time you'll be Weiss, but I'll be Kramer. Lily said: He's creating the Fourth Reich!
Tape / -
I've been talking for a few days now. Quoting. I didn't register the number of the tapes. Registered on the boxes. I'm tired. Are you a doctor, sir? Is it true that I masturbate into tapes? An unpleasant word for the first son of a settlement in the Land of Israel. Who lives in me and I don't live in him? You wanted to cure me, you make me talk, don't remember. Who taught me to hypnotize myself? The light is dimming, love that dream, the window, the ceiling, the gushing words, what else is left. The walls will fall. The treachery of mother, Joseph Rayna and Samuel. A garden is watered by Teacher Henkin. A dead son he raised. Boaz came. Said he was my son. Who's my son? I'm a pen that wrote a story, a story wrote a pen. They write about me, not worth a word. A tired carpenter of boxes for whores of SS men. Bad climate. One day a heat wave and then rain. Dana was soft as a caress. Mr. Klomin, friendly and lost. Mother? Her hatred. Walking to Marar to beat an Arab. Maybe I killed him. They said I said.
At the hems of a shepherd's cloak
I found a lover
Haughty near a stream near a stream,
A bird passed by a dream
The song a feather above
Is that love? Is that love?
Is that a song I remember?
Is this me?
Is it me speaking?
Who's speaking?
End.
My friend,
I attach here a report of Boaz Schneerson's lawyer. I hope you'll be interested in it. Incidentally, yesterday Ebenezer appeared at my house. He was wearing the kind of white suit they used to wear in Tel Aviv in the twenties. He knocked on the door and in his hand he held a bouquet of flowers, red chrysanthemums. I opened the door and he held the bouquet of chrysanthemums out to me and said he had come to wish me happy birthday. I told him, What's this, and he said: Isn't today your birthday? I thought a little and said: Right, and Hasha Masha and I had forgotten. I invited him in, he entered, sat on the sofa, and was silent. Then he got up, took a little tool out of the pocket of his white coat, and asked permission to fix our cabinet. Hasha Masha, who had come into the room a few minutes before, said: What's this? Why? He said: That's what I can do when I don't have my words, I've got information for the wood. Your cupboards and cabinets are dying, Henkin. He fixed the cabinet and then the easy chair and the cupboard and the chest. He went to his house and came back with a case full of bottles of lacquer in various shades and brushes and sandpaper and he smeared, filed, and smeared again. I loved to see him at his craft. He worked for many hours and stopped only once to drink a cup of tea that Hasha Masha gave him. This morning he returned to my house and looked at his work, fixed here and there and then I saw a smile spread over his lips. I said, Ebenezer, who knew wood in its distress, and he said, Nonsense, that's not what was, today it's nothing, and he left.
Yours, Obadiah Henkin
And here is the report.
To: The Assessing Official
For the Department of Investigations, Misgar Street 3, Tel Aviv.
In re: Income tax file of S.L.A. Company (Boaz Schneerson) No. 34/4654/8
From: Attorney Gideon (Janusz) Kramer, Ben-Yehuda Street 128, Tel Aviv.
(S.L.A. Inc.) Director: Boaz Schneerson, Tel Aviv.
Dear Mr. Mahluf,
As you know, my client is employed by the paratroopers of the Israeli Defense Force, heroes of the underground, saints of the Holocaust and ghetto fighters. My client's assistance to the bereaved families is widely known (See Appendix 1-letter from the branch of mourning-Ministry of Defense, letter from the branch of widows and orphans and letter from the branch of the bereaved). From 1952 until today, inclusive, the company (S.L.A.) has helped publish hundreds of memorial books. The company gathered material, helped directly or indirectly to publish other memorial books, helped establish district, local, brigade, family, and regimental memorials, initiated and established memorial barbed wire for Holocaust and heroism (including memorials), took care to locate, establish, maintain, populate, and decorate dozens of memorial rooms in public institutions, together with the Memorial to Sons it established meeting and unity houses, put up memorial plaques in schools, kindergartens, universities, and along with construction and repair companies (see appendices 2, 3, and 4) advised and assisted in establishing memorial monuments, signs of battles (including living reenactments of battles), public parks to the memory of the fallen and missing, and libraries in the name of those who fell. The S.L.A. company organized memorial conferences of brigades, battalions, the underground, official (132) district (245) military (334) ceremonies, and as aforementioned established the society of thirty-one (31) various memorials in various locations in Israel to commemorate the Holocaust and heroism. The company organized sixty-four assemblies and conferences to commemorate the fallen with subjects set in advance by the company in close and active cooperation with the Ministry of Defense, the (Israel Defense Forces) IDF, Yad Vashem, the Philharmonic Orchestra, Belt Berl, Belt Ze'ev Jabotinsky, and others.
In sum, those conferences (mentioned at the end), less the number of closed conferences of the Intelligence Institutenumber two hundred twenty-one.
In Appendices 6-10, you will find the names of hundreds of lecturers, paid consultants, payment for flag-raising, renovation, washing and maintaining memorials, care of tombstones, parking arrangements, payment for the Composers' and Authors' Association, orchestras and choirs, announcers, speakers, eulogists, poets paid royalties and/or one-time grants by the Company.
The Company also collects objects left on various battlefields, purchases objects that fell into unreliable hands, locates pieces of clothing, accessories, personal effects all over Israel.
Ever since listing for income tax purposes began, nine hundred fifty thousand kilometers of travel were listed. As for the value of the cars and jeeps, see Appendix 8a, w
hich deals with the problem of attrition of cars and jeeps on battlefields and in the desert, and landmine insurance. The value of the insurance, amortization, small construction of barbed wire fences moved from their places-and in that matter, also see the judgment of the district judge in Jerusalem, A. Jacoby, in District Court Case 6/678 1961.
To calculate the correct value, it is necessary to add eightyone flights to Eilat and Sinai (for the aforementioned purposes), twenty-four trips abroad (financing activities of commemoration and fund-raising in Denmark, Germany, England, Holland, the US, South Africa, etc.), for contribution, consultation, commemoration, demarcation, and investigation.
Between 1952 and 1972, the Company employed for payment forty-six sculptors, two hundred craftsmen (carpenters, tinsmiths, ironworkers, painters, speakers, cantors, burial society, flagmakers, artists, graphic designers, chauffeurs, researchers, interviewers, tape recorders, maintenance workers, etc.).