by Yoram Kaniuk
Who? asked Noga, and Jordana said: Poor Haman.
Boaz stood up and started getting dressed, he said: Come on, let's get out of here, and Jordana kissed him with a lust Noga couldn't bear.
The beat of footsteps in the empty night streets embarrassed them. It extinguished the rage every one of them felt for the walls, the sourness of the coming morning.
When they came to the old cemetery, they found a locked gate. The watchman was sleeping in the little cubbyhole at the entrance. Boaz folded the handkerchief, put it on his head and woke up the tired, angry watchman. Boaz told him: There are two women here who came last night from Hong Kong seeking the grave of their father who was murdered in 1938.
Come in the morning, said the watchman, shaking with rage.
In the morning they're on trial, said Boaz, they'll expel them from Israel, it has to do with the Ministry of Defense. I don't really understand you, said the watchman, maybe you speak Yiddish?
This is a matter of life and death, Boaz answered in Yiddish. He took out a hundred pounds and gave them to the watchman. Look, it's worth it to us and you can go to sleep. The watchman examined the money, sniffed it, and said: Come in, just don't wake anybody up.
Boaz loved the watchman's sense of humor kindled at the sight of the money. That's surely how he bribes dead people, he said, and Jordana giggled, but that was more than Noga did.
Be careful not to step, said Boaz. They walked on loose paths soaked with dew. Night on tombstones. Names of Tel Aviv streets. Heads of Zionism, heads of Tel Aviv, leaders of the Yishuv, history in a field of tombstones, said Boaz. A boy jumped from the third floor in nineteen twenty-nine. The women wanted to leave, Boaz didn't.
Then they sat on Manya Bialik's grave and hummed a song. Now they were drunk on something in the air, in the pale light that started appearing in the dark. Noga said: We're pathetic and melodramatic, and that's nice. Jordana felt disappointed and didn't know why. The magic engendered by the place was starting to fade. The graves were only stones on loose ground. It was four-thirty in the morning. The moon was setting. When they sang, Jordana said: I'm not singing, I'm not a European who sings in cemeteries, and I won't be buried here either.
You too, said Boaz.
I want a kiss, she said.
Take it from Noga, said Boaz.
Jordana touched the ground and said: Dew of death! And they started walking out, they trod on the tombstones as if they were fleeing from somebody. That amused Boaz, not Noga. They picked up flowers left by visitors in vases, whose water had already turned moldy. I need a little wine, said Boaz, and Noga said: He needs a little wine, Jordana. They came to the gate as dawn began to break. The light was pale and a reddish glow was lit in the sky and looked like a crazy spot, as if sentenced to destruction by itself and Jordana started weeping softly and nervously. Noga hugged her shoulder. They stood near the corner of Ben-Yehuda. Boaz told them to sit down and wait for him and he started running. He ran along Ben-Yehuda and Allenby, passed by a liquor store, broke the window, took out two bottles of wine, and kept on running. A terrifying ringing came from the store, Boaz ran in yards, passed by thistles and cats, a police car appeared through an opening of the buildings, cars were already starting to move, and he came home, started the jeep, went back, picked up his lovers who were sitting in an entrance to a building huddled together, opened the two bottles of wine, and they drank. After the wine warmed their bodies and the dust from the cemetery was shaken off, they drove along the street and yelled wildly at the locked balconies and came to Ebenezer's house. Ebenezer was Boaz's father. He left him when Boaz was a year old.
There was a woman there, too. She was his daughter and the mother of the daughters of the lover of his grandmother before she got married. The daughters died. They-
I've translated for you up to here, because strange as it is, I saw the end of this "story" with my own eyes. Boaz told me that when the author of this story came back from the war, all the neighbors went out to the balcony, tossed flowers at him, threw candy at him, and held a royal reception for him because he was wounded. Boaz said he stood there and looked and thought: That putz who didn't see half of the war I saw receives a national honor because they think he almost died, while if he had died he would have won more, while I, said Boaz, have to apologize.
What interests me is how the author knew those details, and maybe he didn't know, maybe I'm making it all up, maybe I'm mixing things? How do I really know all that happened? Maybe I'm inventing and you're thinking: Jewish knowledge, he knows what to call Boaz, Jordana, and Ebenezer. Maybe it's me. Everything is only an optical illusion. People come seeking the grave of Madame Bovary, is Madame Bovary really buried there, somebody told me that too, but when they tell me about me, about myself and I tell, what am I telling? What they said or what I know, but in that matter, I've got nothing to add, it's hard for me to meet somebody who was in Menahem's battalion, fought along with him, and never came to talk with me.
The yelling I heard clearly. It was five in the morning. Hasha Masha said: Henkin, don't open the window, and I didn't. I sat at our window with the old shutters you can see through, if only the opening, and I saw it all. Boaz behaved like a wild man. In his hand he brandished an empty wine bottle, Jordana and Noga sat in the jeep. I saw the two trying to sit off to the side, slightly bent over, so that if I were awake, I wouldn't see them, but they were also drunk apparently and Jordana wept nonstop and Noga looked vile and aristocratic in the light of dawn, and Ebenezer in his pajamas said: Who's there?
And Boaz said: Your son, Samuel!
Ebenezer went outside, and Boaz said: It's me, Samuel, and in his voice I heard reverence, maybe a certain cry for help, surely a supplication, some breaking of a savage. Yes, said Ebenezer, you're Boaz, the son of Rebecca Schneerson.
Boaz looked at his father. He yelled at Jordana and Noga: This is my father! He came to die in the Holy Land with a woman who is both his sister and maybe his daughter and the sister of his mother. Look at him, in his opinion, I betrayed the two people he loved, one Samuel and one Dana who's supposed to be my mother. Jordana, my mother Dana, was murdered by Yemenites.
Arabs, hissed Noga angrily.
Ebenezer went to them, he raised his eyes to my house, he did know I was watching, I knew he responded to my hidden figure, maybe he needed my help.
What do you want, Boaz? asked Ebenezer. Clearly he seemed to be wrapped in a dream. I'll tell you what I want, said Boaz, and approached his father. He pushed him toward the fence and for a moment I almost couldn't see him, but Ebenezer moved and then I saw his eyes. I'll tell you, I've got two women like Our Teacher Moses, one black and one white, the two of them belonged to the son of your friend there, and he pointed to the shutter where I was hiding, and now do for them what you did for Samuel, recite your fucking knowledge, you're in a nightclub, Ebenezer, you set clocks back, I'm Samuel, you're in a nightclub in Cologne! Ebenezer, who knew wood in its distress, on whose horrible death I grew up, in a nightclub, you're entertaining gentiles with your wonderful memory, turn on your crappy computer, why don't you start. I'm tired, Boaz, said Ebenezer, and his voice contained some submission. He haggled, but we knew he meant to do what Boaz ordered him to do, and I understood: That small chance that his son was Samuel ... I wanted to get into bed, block my ears, but I sat fascinated. Ebenezer shut his eyes, looked obsequious like a Jew in your caricatures, and for a long time he recited the annals of the Mendelssohn family, as if anybody really cared to know who was the banker, who was the musician, and who was the philosopher. Hasha Masha put up water and blocked her ears with cotton and I sat and listened. The girls stood on the side, apparently already in despair at hiding from me, and Ebenezer recited. It was a cheap circus act, the setting was the seashore, lifeguards' surfboards on the way to the sea carried by tanned fellows, girls in blue on the way to school, the garbage truck on Yordei Sira Street, and he's telling about some woman he asked what she would do after the Liberation and she said: I'm going bac
k home to my son who was a Hitler-jugend and she spoke proudly of her son ... She went back home, she said, and waited for her son, for her husband, and they didn't come. When she discovered that her son had put her in the camp, and now neither he nor her husband wanted to see her, she committed suicide in a hotel, and then Boaz, a uniquely humiliating act, he went into the house, brought out the hat of the Last Jew who stood humiliated, foaming at the mouth, stopped the woman delivering milk who was trying to pretend not to hear and demanded money from her, and she put half a pound into the hat and he went to the two girls, Jordana and Noga, and demanded money from them and they put it in the hat, and you could see they were scared and did that as if they were possessed by a demon, and Boaz took the hat and went back to Ebenezer and Ebenezer said: Samuel, you always know how to surprise me, and I thought: Well, at long last, I saw the Last Jew in a real performance, not like when he recited and talked about you but just as in the nightclub, and what a setting that was, a small street, a woman delivering milk, construction workers on their way to work, tanned girls and boys on their way to the seashore, the Hilton on the left, and then surprisingly, without Boaz sensing anything, the Last Jew took the watch off Boaz's wrist. Jordana and Noga didn't see, I did. Boaz wanted to go, his face was ashamed, and the Last Jew said: What time is it, Boaz? And Boaz searched for the watch and didn't understand where it was. And then the Last Jew waved the watch in front of Boaz's face and laughed, he laughed, really laughed, and said: There, there you wouldn't have lasted a day, you're not Samuel, and he threw the watch at him. And Boaz waited until his father went into the house, put on the watch, and went down on his knees and chewed the wet sand, even though the sun was a little warm now and his face was black and he wept. Never did I see Boaz Schneerson weep.
Yours with friendship and the hope of seeing you again soon,
Obadiah Henkin
Tape / -
One warm morning, Rebecca Schneerson got up and looked at the window she had looked through but hadn't seen for forty-two years. She rec ognized handsome almond trees, a thick-trunked eucalyptus, a weeping oak, lemon trees, and expanses of flowers and greenery up to the edge of the horizon. In the distance, she saw the road that hadn't been in the window forty-two years ago. Rebecca put on a white dress, wrapped herself in a shawl, and went out. She walked erect and confident, even though it had been years since she strolled on these paths. When she came to the center of the settlement, children buying gum at the kiosk peeped at her. They said: Here's the witch come out of her hole. Yehiel, the shopkeeper, whose father remembered Rebecca, wanted to go outside to greet her, but a vague fear kept him from doing that. Now that Rebecca felt that there were no more enemies of life in the settlement, the children of the first ones, their grandchildren, and great-grandchildren started loving her. Fears of her had been passed down as a legacy, but belief in their stories was even stronger than the worries, and there was talk in the settlement council of making amends for the ninetieth anniversary celebration. Among many candidates, thirty-one men and a woman were chosen as the founders of the settlement. Some of them did indeed found it, but Rebecca had long ago become the most senior and important founder of them all. She heard from a laborer who worked in her yard about the decision to fix the synagogue and call the main street, the Street of the First Ones, Nehemiah Schneerson Street and she told the reporter from Our Settlement who came to interview her (she even agreed to receive him), that the number of founders growing in inverse proportion to the realization of expectations worried her. Nehemiah died on the seashore in Jaffa, she said, and because of him, she had been living here for seventy-one years. There were ten families in the settlement at that time, then twenty, of the first four sons, only one was still alive, Ebenezer, who died and came back to life only because he went to the Holocaust. So, she added, Zionism has nothing to be proud of.
Rebecca Schneerson went into Mr. Brin's small department store, and Mr. Brin, who had never seen Rebecca life-size, said: It's a great honor for me that you came to me. And she said: No honor, Mr. Brin, I didn't come to you but to the only store in the settlement where you can find a tape recorder. I assume that if there were two stores, the prices would be more reasonable. He tried not to pay attention to the complaint and bitterness in her voice and served her with an exaggerated devotion that disgusted her. Ever since the Captain and Mr. Klomin had died, and all her enemies had been buried in Roots, she had lacked a certain adulation that Ahbed and his friends couldn't grant her since they were too simple to recognize her value.
Mr. Brin showed Rebecca Schneerson about sixteen different tape recorders, and since she didn't trust anybody, she chose the one Mr. Brin claimed was not as good as the others, but she had to have it. She allowed the disappointed Mr. Brin to wrap the tape recorder, picked up the package, and went home. She walked through the fields, saw the new houses, the farms and trees and orchards and gardens, and the new school and the community center and the old water tower, and she thought that in fact this wasn't such a bad place, that there was nice air here and the view was soft and beautiful and everything was painted now and not gnarled, people built and improved, trees grew, flowers bloomed, yards multiplied and were beautiful, the horizon stopped evoking gloomy expectations, the sky became softer and not exactly because of the cataracts in her eyes. She feared those thoughts, as if some long way, maybe the longest she had made since her forefathers' forefathers got her pregnant, a way that had gone on for more than two hundred years, was coming to its end. She wasn't afraid of the end, it wasn't death that scared her, what scared her was some more absolute end, beyond death, an end that torments everybody and only its contamination is felt, an end of what had been dreamed in her veins for two hundred years-Secret Charity, the curse, the river that pierced, Joseph and his poems of yearning, Nehemiah longing for Zion, could all that simply vanish, only because there was never a solid basis for the dream entrenched in some cosmic bitterness of a cruel God against those who betray His command of destruction?
When she came back home, through a row of sprinklers that evoked an amazement in her that she tried to chill, even though they'd water her gardens and she didn't know, she tended to the tape recorder for a while in her closed room, put the microphone to her mouth, and said aloud: One, two, three, and when she turned on the machine, her voice was heard, and even though she didn't recognize it at first, she immediately learned to use it. She said: Recording number one, Rebecca Schneerson, to whom it may concern and to whom it may not concern ...
... Nehemiah was a handsome man. Boaz is my son. Ebenezer calls him Samuel. Collectors of charity, who dreamed of Mr. Klomin's kingdom, in vented a state that is a little bit of a dream and a little bit of a ghetto and a little bit of a military camp and a little bit of flowers. My tears for eight years were for nothing. The Captain isn't here. Everybody died on me. Ebenezer was amazed that the Captain ordered flowers placed every week on Dana's grave. I wouldn't have done that. What do they know about the Captain? He was a swindler, cunning, naive, and wise. How many wise Jews are there in this land? It's great wisdom to be a successful farmer, to build a good farm among Jews. Does the fact that I'm alive at least make me dead? I want to say something about Ebenezer. I married Nehemiah, not Joseph, and it's a lie to say I didn't love him. I wanted to save him in America and he didn't want to. Nehemiah taught me a lesson. He left me Ebenezer. Ebenezer went to search for the one he thought was his father, and in the end he married a woman who was both the daughter and the wife of his father. He comes to me and wants to know. What will I tell him? I think that even though Nehemiah was his father, Ebenezer is bound to Joseph and was born to bring Joseph back into the world through Boaz! Is it possible to love somebody, the son of somebody else, who grew in your belly, so that in the next generation your real son will come into the world? Ebenezer, the lost son. Whose son is he? The Last Jew, they call him. And I'll die after him. Lucky thing Boaz has no children. There will be a wilderness here with Ahbeds, as there was before we came here. But
to tell Ebenezer I can't. I don't give birth because some man got me into bed. I brought two sons into the world. One was born by mistake from Dana in order to be my son again. Is he my grandson or my son? I lived the end of the story of Rebecca Secret Charity, but they don't believe in the satanic power of blood, in the awful flow of Satan. They believe in progress, they believe all awful things were an imagined curse with no foothold in the reality of progressive people who elect a hundred twenty fools to something they call a Knesset every four years, and they think they're successful and wise and clever because they learned to kill a few Arabs in tanks given them by gentiles, so that then it will be allowed, without any problems, to destroy them one by one ... the river was at the end of my life or at the beginning and it's all the same, there was Joseph there, there was Nehemiah there, there were my father and mother. Ebenezer is the curse and he knows wood in its distress. Like an everlasting name he came back. He should be exhibited in a museum...
How much I wanted the love that would replace the dependence, the beauty, the yearning. Did I succeed in being promiscuous? Even that's a hard question. I remember once thinking I should let the Captain hug me, sometimes I did want to, but I thought, Is there somebody who can, with a few drops of water, put out the fire of hell burning in me? And life passed by. That's how it is. Life isn't what we live, but something that flows out of us. And I look around, Nehemiah and Dana died so that Boaz would be, Joseph isn't here, the Captain, I've got an avocado, flowers, fruit, chickens, a nightgown. What the hell don't I have? The flowers bloom, and I look around and ask what to tell Ebenezer, who wants an answer, and he's already past seventy, he wants to know, what will I tell him? That I'm ninety years old and can't say, so here, Ebenezer, with the only love I have left and that isn't aimed at anybody, not even myself, I swear, I'm telling you: Afayg! Up yours! Just up yours! It's not malice, be my son if you think so and want to be, not out of malice, you're quite lovable with all you've suffered with the woman you raised like a dried flower in one of Dana's old books, because I don't have anything else to say, not to you, not to the tape recorder, not to God, not to Satan, not to Rebecca Secret Charity, nothing. Up yours, that's what I've got to say, only that, up yours!