by Yoram Kaniuk
Boaz didn't know.
He found the bagel the bagel seller lost, said Noga.
Boaz didn't respond and looked at the ship that had almost disappeared beyond the Sheraton. A sudden rain fell on the sands that scrunched up as if they too were ripples of water. A woman in a transparent raincoat approached the hut. That is a war ground and you don't see blood, said Boaz and looked at the sand. The woman passed by the German who was still selling suitcases here so that some day he could go back to Europe and he didn't know how to cross that cruel sea that erected a barrier between him and the landscape he yearned for. The woman thought: For two weeks now I've been trying to get here and have been afraid, and Noga heard the knock on the door even before the woman knocked, and she straightened up, took off the belt, Boaz didn't budge, and said: That's the woman who wrote to me. Noga said: You should have known where the bagel was, but Boaz stared at the door and Noga opened it and the woman came in out of the rain and sprayed water on the floor. Noga helped her take off her coat. She lit the stove and the woman stood between the stove and the door and when she looked at Boaz, she was no longer sure why she had come.
Boaz saw a child running along the sand in the rain. The woman was blighted, but her breasts were full.
After she spoke with her eyes almost shut, Noga went to a corner, sat and folded her legs and decided she was a statue. Menahem's poem, she said: "So charming, Teacher Henkin said to write to you, you have no idea how many times he read the poem to us, and my Yoram is also in that poem, they were all boys who gave birth to themselves, a poor generation, they tried to be answers to their parents' dreams which they themselves had to kill. Surely you'll forgive me. My late husband used to say: Take care of him, I won't hold out and he really didn't. Didn't I take care enough? Noga didn't budge and said: He forgives you, and she stared at Boaz hunched up on the windowsill. Boaz performed an experiment he had tried in his childhood after he read Yotam the Magician by Korczak, he tried to be invisible.
Yoram fell in Iraq-Manshiya. You must have known him! Everybody knew him in Tel Aviv. He'd walk on his hands on the shore from Frischmann to the pool in the north and back. Here's his picture, she said, and held out a hand with a picture suddenly, Yoram Pishinovsky, you're sure you didn't know him?
Boaz takes the photo and looks. Curly hair, serious eyes, soft thin cheeks, deathphoto. The serious and saccharine puppets with gigantic pompadours who left class photos that were too professional, he thought. Noga offers the woman coffee, but the woman doesn't want to drink. She can't sit either. Hidden treasures went down the drain, she says. Here, this is what we have left of him, and she takes a few drawings by Yoram out of the leather case and gives them to Boaz and wants to know where his Australian hat and Parker fountain pen disappeared. Sorry about such nonsense, but what's left of them? A fountain pen, and even that's lost! The Negev was cut off, and I searched, she said, and how do you know where to search for things like that? And something was needed? Then they showed me a grave, but there was no hat there and no Parker fountain pen, and I asked, and I'm a member of our club aren't I and every week, I come to the Shimonis, but nobody knows and then that poem and you ...
We walk and Teacher Henkin explains. He also speaks nicely. But at least he's got a poem, no, Yoram didn't write poems. Now she said pensively, sadly, hunched up inside herself: I stand here and look at you and the young lady and the stove and I think: What folly, what am I searching for, you must think I'm a fool. And in the middle of her words, she stopped, picked up her coat, and started putting it on too hastily. Her defeat was total, in the depths of her heart she knew she had come in vain and that whole two weeks, she muttered, that whole two weeks, a vague hope lodged in her, now it's not! In her face Boaz saw that mysterious charm of pain when it's disguised as shame, what a patched-up fragility is life itself, from that human crease life burst forth that terrified him, he couldn't imagine it and thought about himself, about Menahem, and then he got up and took off the woman's coat, sat her in the chair, the rain stopped, the clouds sailed quickly and the blue sky appeared and he said: It will be all right, Yoram's mother, it will be all right. And a few days later, he brought the woman a Parker fountain pen and an Australian hat. Her house was full of plants. She grew them as if she wanted to hide in a jungle. Now she was practical, asked where to put the things, and Boaz built her a corner, hung the drawings from school, the letter from the Ministry of Defense, the map of the battle for Iraq-Manshiya that Boaz had brought her, the hat and the fountain pen he put on the cabinet, with an enlarged picture of Yoram framed in black. She stuck some money in his pocket, and said: You had expenses and I don't think you should bear them. He pushed away the money, but when he saw how she thrust the money into the pocket of his coat hanging on the hanger, he didn't say a thing. He also bound the compositions for her, and that's how, that's how it all started, said Noga-
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For three days she didn't talk. And then she tried to talk and a choked moan burst out of her mouth and then they went into the other room, and he said: Noga, they need that and I bring them what they want. I didn't search for it, it found me. And you too, it happened unintentionally.
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Noga sat in bed. She posted her legs like two shapely and tented triangles in the light from the lamp. Wearily her arms hugged her raised legs and her head rested on her knees. In the room the small electric heater burned, spreading a reddish light. Boaz was seen walking toward the water. Only wrinkles of sand and spots of damp remained from the storm. She smelled death and thought maybe the ceiling really had fallen on her at night. Her face was red from the light. The room smelled of cigarettes, rain, and wet sand. Boaz's supple body was seen solitary and gallant at the empty sea. She thought about the frozen water slowly warming his body, the light dwarfed distances, the opaque and airy sea, filled with a supple body of a snake. The crystalline swimming was more ancient than she, a thousand-year-old woman, death in her womb, everything was so unreliable: the woman with the money, those people who come, the trips, the notebooks he was starting to edit, that foolish man. She didn't move until she saw him come out of the water, spraying sea jets, in the cold he ran. She put on an old bathrobe she had brought from the Henkin house long ago and decided to brush her teeth with her fingers, to rub the gums with cold water and char a hem of the robe. He ran along the shore, maybe where Yoram Pishinovsky had walked on his hands and everybody would admire him. After she brushed her teeth with her fingers and burned the hem of the robe, she drank four cups of cold water, and gnashing her teeth as a betrayed woman she could wait for him again with such great lust.
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To the Court, Tel Aviv
Re: Income Tax File No. 34/17656T. S.L.A. Company, Ltd.
Dear Sir,
My name is Noga Levin. For six years I have lived with Boaz Schneerson, director of the S.L.A. Company, Ltd., and I love him. I mention that detail even though I know the court does not consider issues of emotion, or even concepts of morality and justice, but law. Love and law do not necessarily overlap. Maybe loving means breaking the law? While there is a law of justice, there is surely no law of love. By the letter of the law, I also think Mr. Schneerson's acts are not to be faulted, as is clear from your correct and reasoned judgment. On the other hand, if I had to judge Boaz Schneerson, and my love would serve as some measure just as admissible as the testimony you heard and the papers you read-I may have judged him differently.
And again, I do not mean to cast doubt on your ethical integrity or your judicial talents, Judge. It is not you I'm judging, but myself.
I don't think I will be able to sleep quietly or look at myself in the mirror if I do not give vent to strong feelings of shame that fill me. Love, unlike the law, is relativity seeking cover.
With my own eyes, my dear sir, I saw a marginal issue in Boaz Schneerson's life turn into a flourishing business. The very fact that the death of strangers turns into a "business" in the usual sense of the word is not monstrous
in my eyes. On the other hand, I am aware of the objective need, if pain can be called that, which turned the S.L.A. Company Ltd., into a business. That is, I am judging the situation of which Boaz Schneerson is only a symbol. Yet for me, he cannot be a symbol, but a man, a man I love.
I was not a mute witness, sir, but also a reluctant partner. In general, I can insist, but in fact, the business flourished and I helped. I was drawn into Boaz's wild adventure, first as a spectator and then as an advisor. It wasn't possible to stop the cart. Pain was driving the cart. I mean what people felt, yearnings for their sons, their husbands, their dear ones. When the cart came to the bottom of the mountain and I told Boaz Schneerson what I thought, and asked him to stop, he said he couldn't. What started as bad luck and then was inexorable, turned into ambition. And it was all innocent: first Henkin, then a man, then a woman who wanted an Australian hat and a Parker fountain pen, and then? Then it snowballed. Boaz brought together a bereaved father with a poet whose poems his son liked to read, so the poet would explain to the father who his son was. And Boaz even started getting interested in his acts because they contained some reply to the burning in him, a challenge, maybe it was a mercy killing, after death, of the best of the youth, to lose everything, maybe it was a reply to the fact that his grandmother saved him from death when he didn't want to come back. And by word of mouth, his name became famous. Anybody who needed a notebook came to him, anybody who needed a monument came, the personal need of every single one of those people was human, but the address was now an office with a telephone and a secretary and jeeps and cars and such, income tax files, and calculations of losses, and expenses, and an accountant and a lawyer.
There were real poems and letters, and there were also fakes. They need that, said Boaz, and I provide them with what they need. Isn't that a picture of a real situation? Surely, its ethics are definitely dubious, its relative morality-isn't. The death of others cannot be a source of resurrection. That death, sir, took his friends, him it didn't touch, what a revenge!
And then we had to move. The hut on the seashore was now full of portraits, objects, parts of burned tanks, maps, and in the penthouse apartment on Lilienblum Street, the rooms were now turned into offices and there was a secretary there and two typewriters, a Hebrew one and a foreign one, and file cabinets. The number of temples grew. Hundreds of booklets were written and edited. We became a company of gravediggers.
In the war, Boaz Schneerson lay among the dead and played dead. Two or three hundred times he was condemned to death because all the shots aimed at the dead could have killed him. Maybe that's how the notion of a vulture was stamped in his mind. It all started in the house of Mr. Henkin of the Committee of Bereaved Parents. He brought a poem there. He brought hope after death there. Menahem Henkin was the fellow I had a relationship with and some days I thought I was in love with him. Maybe that was the most awful thing of all, the sense of betraying love, revealing it in a true light, too late. Or perhaps in a late light, too true? We were mobilized then, we'd meet for a few days and part, I was afraid of him, I pitied him, and maybe I loved him, because a latent fear lodged in me that Menahem Henkin was destined to die, but then I also discovered that I didn't love him. I was alone, I had nobody to talk to, I sat with Menahem's mother and looked at her, at the locked seal on her handsome face and I didn't find solace, I couldn't say a thing, everybody knew that after the war we'd get married. His mother was worried, she didn't even try to admit the existence of my allusions, she wrote him letters that didn't get to their address, and knitted him socks that nobody wore, and I sat and wrote a letter to Menahem explaining to him why we had to part, for a moment I forgot the vague lodged fear in me, the fear that Menahem was destined to die. I sent the letter, and then we found out that he fell. I didn't know if he got the letter and I was still his girl. Uncles from Switzerland sent chocolate and gold earrings to the fiancee, the fiancee was me. Suitors were afraid of me. I sat in the Henkin house. Everybody wanted me to be the model widow. They didn't want the happiness of those who come back to their lovers, marry, and disappear into the gray everydayness of rationing and the new state, they wanted the little bit of splendor, the pain and bereavement that stuck to me and I sank into a slumber that lasted years. Menahem's mother understands now. Later on I understood that all the time she knew the love affair had ended long ago. She felt more than I knew, but she also thought I had betrayed her. Henkin was compelled to give concrete expression to his pain, I was his refuge. I divided myself between them, Henkin and his dead son. I recorded in the album, in a fluent handwriting, the names of the places where he was photographed. On the day Henkin brought Boaz Schneerson home, I knew that Boaz came to take me.
He wriggled and waited. I waited too. Menahem's mother sat and looked at me contemptuously. Death blended me with Menahem, through Boaz. In fact, after I loved Boaz, I could return to loving Menahem. Boaz, who didn't know I had stopped loving Menahem even before his death, tried to put a hand on me and then changed his mind and didn't. I waited. I didn't say a word but I wanted to. They always think they defeat me, both Menahem and Boaz, while I, I chose the two of them by myself. Boaz decided he had in fact killed Menahem because he saw a picture of me with Menahem, he loved me and came to take me away from him. He described to me how he killed Menahem to get me and I tried to pretend I believed. He was attached to me even though he tried to live without love. But he wanted Menahem's mother to forgive him for being alive instead of Menahem. And Boaz went on building a stage set for the dead. As a judge you must know: He didn't kill Menahem, Menahem died long before that, but ... I told him, come on, let's start a new life. He fled but he didn't want to. There were meetings with army officers, parents, engineers, writers, poets, sculptors, planners, lighting experts, printers, I served coffee, tea, peanuts, wine, I was there, I saw him weeping as he sat and wrote fictional love letters, it was a humiliating spectacle. I told him: You're reducing them; what kind of victory is it that nobody will remember? And the apartment grew.
And everything was full of fabricated death.
I'm writing to you because I want you to know that no matter how reasoned your judgment was, it approves, as I do with my life, a serious act that may in truth not be judged. Like many people I know, and you too, without any premeditation, Boaz turned the nightmare into a celebration and then into a profession. But to the same extent, you can say a prison warden deserves punishment because he keeps under lock and key a person whose nature is to be free, or that you yourself sentence people to severe punishments when the natural law is that life precedes everything, you judge the person by the laws of society, not the laws of nature or life. I understand those considerations, I accept them, but because of those very reasons I must protest, at least to you, because you judged in favor of a man I love, and so you were the only person to whom I can address these words. I go to the Ministry of Defense and see thousands of notebooks. I peep. Oblivion is a medicine that, like life, is intended to circumvent death.
I thought then in court that maybe you would condemn something rooted so deeply here, so awful, but you made a judgment and a judgment didn't make you, you didn't indicate the root of the problem, I wasn't disappointed, I understood, I have no complaints. I attach a letter I wrote to the Levinsky Teachers' College on the night I got drunk for the first time in my life and Boaz raped me when I would have defended myself with a broken bottle in my hand and I didn't hit him.
Yours, Noga Levin
To the Administration of the Levinsky Teachers' College, Tel Aviv
Dear Sirs:
I was very interested in your announcement in the newspaper. You ask the students who attended the Teachers' Col lege who lost their husbands (or) their fiances (your word!) to send one page with the events of our life for the anniversary of the Teachers' College, and here is mine-
My name is Noga Levin. I finished school in nineteen fortyseven. My parents died two years before I was born in a small town near the Zxanten Gulf in southern China. We were
the only Jews on the street. All my husbands died of the cancer of war. The last one was in his death throes on the way to the cemetery, but it wasn't possible to change the custom, and in the middle of the funeral, he died. If you're preparing a class reunion, please do not include me among the bereaved girls. Death terrifies me. I live with a man who refuses to marry me, because he loves me. All my love affairs were with dead men. Now that I live with a hangman, I weave a new rope for him. He kills my husbands and every time he succeeds, he brings me a black flower. So, it's not true that there are no black flowers-they should be grown in beds for memorial days and days of mourning and that could even have been a branch of export. On memorial days I sing sad English songs. I know somebody who sold a hundred thousand armored cars for days of mourning. With the money he got from the armored cars, he bought me a white dress and real pearls. Please take me off the list of volunteers for teaching widowhood, bereavement, orphanhood, and commemoration. I intend to live in Denmark with a dog close by and a thin man who smokes a pipe and works in a bank close to home and goes to work on a bicycle. I live with a man who lends his acts of heroism to all kinds of dead people. I think he's teaching me something I don't want to learn even when I was a student the Teachers' College. The main thing you didn't teach me. You taught me to live with death, you didn't teach me to live with life. And that's now a national phenomenon. Now I'm drunk and I feel how much I lack something called a hunger for life.