by Yoram Kaniuk
You're all that's left of Nehemiah. Of all the naive founders, of that nation, of you, of me, up yours!
And then Rebecca turned off the tape recorder and started laughing and the laughter turned into weeping and she locked the door, put her head under the blanket, and wept as she had wept seventy years before, a whole day, nonstop, and then she got up, washed her face, sat at the table, and Ahbed said: What happened, Madame, were you weeping? Were you laughing? And she said: Bring something to eat, Ahbed, and he said: Were you laughing or weeping? And she said: Afayg, up yours, Ahbed, do you know what that is, up yours? So up yours to you, all your sons who will inherit the land Nehemiah sowed with Ebenezers who knew wood in its distress, into me they came, from me they didn't go.
Tape/-
Noga Levin knocked on the door fearfully. More than she was afraid to come, she was afraid of Henkin peeping at her from his house. She thought, What is he thinking, why is he looking? Fanya R. opened the door, invited her in without a word, and went to put on a robe. Noga was bundled up in a scarf, she hoped it made her look older. Last night she told Boaz: I'm going to Ebenezer, I want to look old and wise, and Boaz, who wanted to answer, suffered an attack of yawning she didn't cause and so he couldn't answer her. By the time he finished yawning her footsteps were heard on the stairs.
Ebenezer, who had slept in his clothes ever since the war, put a blue sailor's coat over the clothes he had slept in and went into the room. He said: What is the lovely flower in my house? She laughed because she didn't expect him to behave so gallantly.
Noga said: Sit, Ebenezer. He sat, watched the sun rise through the open bathroom window. I came to apologize for Boaz's behavior, said Noga, he didn't mean it, he had been drinking, he lives in tension, he's sorry for what was-
Ebenezer averted his face and didn't see the sunrise now. In the big living-room window you could see the fences of the port and the demolished buildings, and the abandoned shore. He said: Remind me of what you're talking about, some things I remember and some I don't. She sipped the coffee Fanya R. gave her and stirred while walking, which seemed to Noga like hovering, and after a few sips, when the tasty coffee was inside her, she repeated word for word what had happened at the house when Boaz and Jordana and she came from the cemetery. Ebenezer shut his eyes, stretched out his hands, and said: He meant what he did, and I was a fool!
You weren't, said Noga.
When I was a little girl, said Noga, as if she were talking to herself, I once came home from school and Mother met me on the stairs and told me to go up and wait in the house. I went up and the door was locked. I knocked on the door and Father didn't answer. I thought maybe he wasn't sleeping but listening to the news. I went up to the roof, from the laundry room, I slid on the water pipe straight to our kitchen porch. I loved to slide because it was also a little dangerous. I went into the kitchen and water was boiling on the stove. I turned off the stove, ate a few grapes from the refrigerator, and holding a bunch of them, I went into the living room. My father was lying in bed and the radio was off. His leg was stretched to the side as if he were about to put on house slippers and get up. I think he was smiling, but maybe it was a grimace, I said to him: Father, why didn't you open the door, but my father didn't answer. I went to my room, opened the schoolbag, sharpened a pencil, took out the books and notebooks and started doing my homework. And then I thought, Why didn't he answer me? He always answers me, but at the same moment I also thought there was something wrong with the eraser I had bought and I had to exchange it at Lichtenstein's. I picked up the grapes I had put on a plate where I would once mix sand from the Negev and went back to the other room. He was still lying there, the foot was on the way to the house slipper, he didn't move. Everything was in the middle-middle of a smile, middle of putting on a shoe, like a photo of somebody who is both running and standing still for eternity. I thought he looked like marble. I touched him, his hand dropped and stayed hanging in the air between the bed and the floor. I turned on the radio, after a few seconds, the music started, and then I looked at him and suddenly I understood. I didn't grasp how I understood, because I had never seen a dead person before. But that dead person was my father. I started yelling and stamping my feet until the neighbors came. In the ashtray was a cigarette and then I didn't have a father and I asked myself what exactly I didn't have, what I lacked, Mother would get hysterical and swallow pills and miss him terribly. Once I dreamed that my father came back and didn't want to see me, you can't imagine how that hurt ...
Ebenezer got up and stood in the middle of the room. A beam of light penetrated inside and made the small squares of lacquer on the nightstand glisten, his eye was covered with a dark scrim, for a moment he looked both solemn and a scarecrow that birds aren't scared of anymore. Fanya R. gave him a glass of water. He said: I asked him to help me, I don't know who I am and what I am, how can I know who Boaz is or who you are or who Henkin is?
Henkin is writing a book about somebody who doesn't exist, maybe I don't exist, when they shot Bronya the Beautiful, Boaz came, or perhaps it was Samuel, and then somebody came and took him. And fifty years passed. Rebecca's here, and Dana. It's all words, Noga, he says and doesn't feel. Only Fanya R. All the rest is words. Germanwriter too.
Noga said: You scare me when you look at me and say those things, I can't understand.
I'm waiting for Samuel, said Ebenezer. All you say is only words, I've got to see Samuel, Boaz is Samuel, but he isn't either.
Noga got up and went to him. Fanya R. smiled. Noga didn't remember ever seeing a smile like that; as if what was hidden in her or shaped in her, some bitter memory, was disguised to itself and it was itself and at the same time its mask. Fanya R. said: I'm not a talkative woman. You're a beautiful woman, all that is a punishment from God! Boaz looks like Joseph, so how is he the son of Ebenezer? Ebenezer thinks his daughters died, because those are Joseph's daughters. Something for you and for our story. You know how awful it is at night here. Always yearnings and always those dreams he recites. I'm with him, so what, troubles Boaz needs, he's a Sabra, Israel, army buddies, a hero, what, why does he need all that with dead souls and dead bodies and yearnings for the dead, and my little girls who wait in Ebenezer's brain. He's got memories, he doesn't have Ebenezer, he's got Samuel, he doesn't have Boaz, my daughters left, Mengele, twins he loved. He did experiments, and then more, what do we know about Boaz, about Noga that's you or about a Yemenite woman who came here with pain and also apologizing, yesterday, says Boaz isn't to blame and now you come with a story like her, see how much I'm talking, but Ebenezer doesn't have all of you. He's dead, all Jews died, standing with a white flag, with Samuel, hitting gentiles who come, exile, exile, you don't know! Samuel is his son and how will you understand, you!
(Fragments of reels of recording for cataloguing: tapes [6/76 and tape 5/90] were ruined, these are fragments of them that remained-)
Women who look like Jordana and Noga are sitting in row twelve on the aisle in the movie house "Pa'ar" in Tel Aviv. A matinee and cracking sunflower seeds. A Lufthansa plane, a Boeing 747 flight 005 takes off from Cologne. Jordana is weeping and so she can't see the film that Germanwriter doesn't see on the plane because he's sleeping. Noga buys more sunflower seeds, comes back, and sits down next to Jordana.
Boaz took a Carmel Duke car and went to the desert to hunt vultures. He parked the car next to a wadi, took the rifle, and walked alone, in a good mood, whistled something, the gigantic desert, yellow and savage. The Carmel Duke car is made of fiberglass. When he came back with a dead vulture and searched for the car he saw a skeleton. Camels passed by there, saw the car, and ate it. They left only the chassis and the motor and the chrome. He walked a whole day until he came to Yotbata. From there he went home. For a week he laughed, even when he saw the vulture stuffed for a school in Jerusalem.
Boaz told Noga about the camels and didn't tell Jordana.
Jordana claims that Boaz doesn't love her because he didn't tell her about the camels. Noga tries to
undermine her certainty.
Noga thinks: Jordana tastes like hot peppers and wormwood and cheesecake.
Rebecca Schneerson dreamed she had wept for eight years. When she woke up she didn't know if she had dreamed she wept or wept and had really slept for eight years. She told Ahbed: I don't know what time is now. If now is now or not.
Ahbed asked Boaz what afayg, up yours, means.
The Captain's grave moved at night. Bedouins camping there with the flocks they brought from the south trembled with fear. The son of old Avigdorov, who was considered one of the thirty-one founders and had once loved Rebecca, but didn't have the courage in his heart to tell her, toddled along for six kilometers in the heavy heat to tell Rebecca the Captain's grave moved. She said: Tea you won't get for that, but know that if he moves in the grave it means he's preparing for future wars. The Captain was lazy in his life, and even more so in his death.
Fanya R. was scared, went to the store, and bought two dolls. Then she hid them. The waiter who came to serve drinks at the party that was held someplace else and got the address wrong, buried the dolls in the yard for her, under a tree. She paid him in German marks hidden in a pillow. Ebenezer went to the place where there had once been a village named Marar and picked chrysanthemums. Then he tried to plant them in his garden.
Boaz sat in his house and very slowly burned his hand. He didn't feel a thing. Noga covered her face with a pillow and Jordana went into the street and read obituary announcements. She didn't know the dead people. In the morning she read in the paper that a man had died. She went to his funeral, stood there, asked herself what she was doing, but didn't have a satisfactory answer. Somebody asked her if she was a relative, and she said: Maybe. Then she went to the office. Boaz came with the seared hand bandaged for a memorial book for an artillery regiment. Jordana tried to pretend she didn't know him. They talked with an alienation that suited their mood. But her hand, her hand groped for him. She told him about Mr. Soslovitch, a locomotive salesman. Boaz said: If Henkin had come to Kassit when I sat there three days and waited for him, and Mr. Soslovitch ordered a beer for me and I didn't drink it, I wouldn't have had to write the poem. And I don't think Mrs. Cohen ever slept with Mr. Soslovitch. Then they talked about the fact that their love had to end and maybe was already ended. She wept. All she could say was, I love both of you, Boaz, I love you and I love Noga. He said: Maybe, and left.
Germanwriter finished writing the novella and went over the last proofs. Renate was sick. As mentioned above, they flew Lufthansa Flight 005 to New York.
In New York Sam Lipp said: You act Licinda, Licinda, but you're not Licinda. Nobody can be himself.
A conversation in Tel Aviv: You remember Samuel Lipker from the Sonderkommando? He's my son's commander in the reserves.
I thought he died, said the man.
No, he was on the ship with my brother. The name of the ship was Salvation. He hasn't been seen since. Now, she said, he's called Boaz.
Sam, asked Licinda, were you ever in Jerusalem?
Yes, said Sam.
I dreamed about a house, she said, and I know I got the dream from you, the house wasn't big and there was a bakery in it.
Sam said: That was my grandfather's house on Baron Hirsch Street in Tarnopol.
Rebecca Schneerson's cow barn, said the Minister of Agriculture in the official ceremony, yielded the greatest quantity of milk by three point forty-six percent of all the cow barns in Israel. I am honored to award the family representative the medal for increasing and encouraging production. The great-grandson of Ahbed climbs onto the stage and accepts the award on behalf of Rebecca Schneerson, and shakes the minister's hand. The minister's wife whispers to the minister: He looks like an Arab.
The great-grandson of Ahbed hears that and says: I don't look like an Arab, I am an Arab. And he adds in Arabic, kata hirek, and descends.
Boaz put his mouth to Noga's hand, caught her white hair, and in silence held her hair in his mouth for two hours and twenty minutes. Noga wept, but the tears she wept circumvented Boaz's head, and in an arc, like flying deer, the tears landed on his knee. When dawn broke, he turned his mouth away and said: Anybody who wasn't defending you, Noga, doesn't know what perfection there is in words.
Noga made him tomato soup.
Jordana called and said: I slept in my house and it was sad, but. And hung up.
Boaz thought of Samuel in the camp and didn't know why he thought of Samuel in the camp. He said: My father didn't forgive me for not being there and I didn't forgive either. And Noga said: Look who's coming, it's Kootie-and-a-Half, hello Kootie-and-a-Half, and Kootie-and-a-Half bent over, and said: Who's that beautiful Yemenite woman who's blocking her ears?
A hard land, said Rebecca Schneerson.
A hard land, said Fanya R. She didn't sleep at night. The letters from the newspaper get into my eyes, she said. What dreams there are that I left there and live here. Maybe we'll win the next war? And how alone is it together?
Tape / -
New York, apologies for the delay.
My dear friend,
I meant to write to you on the plane, but I fell asleep. Renate is blessed with what can maybe be called psychosomatic wellness. Two weeks before I was informed of the trip, she was sick, but when they told me I had to fly to New York for the publication of the novella (The Beautiful Life of Christina Herzog), she recovered in a few hours. With my own eyes, I saw a red runny nose dry up. Your letter about Jordana and Noga, and the story you attached, evoked sad thoughts in me about my ability to understand the connections we're searching for: it was an instructive lesson.
Two days before the flight, Renate dreamed she dropped into an ocean and then drove a black hearse. The lights went out and she couldn't see the road, she had to go on driving and started veering toward the steep slope, and when she woke up from the dream, she yelled: Friedrich, Friedrich, but since she hadn't called him in years, and I had meanwhile woken up, I brought her a cup of coffee in bed and she drank and then told me the dream and said that Friedrich had to be here. So she went to the fortuneteller. For years now she hadn't been to her, but back when Friedrich died she had often visited astrologers and fortunetellers. You see, we also seek lost traces in quicksand. Renate thought Friedrich was alive on another plane of time and his death was not absolute. Ever since, an essential change has taken place in her and she doesn't delude herself anymore, doesn't participate in seances to contact our son, has returned to the silent despair of those who submit. That dream before the trip brought her back to the fortuneteller named Ruth, like most of the women in the life of Adam Stein, whom we talked about, and whose old circus Friedrich used to go to, even though he himself no longer appeared in the circus and nothing remains of it except the name-"Adam's Circus." The fortuneteller looked at the cards, made Renate a hasty horoscope, and after she talked with her about her nature and her past, things that need not be repeated here, she talked about the trip coming up in a day or two. There are encounters connected with the past in store for you, she said, and as for the flight, and you're flying soon, and Renate said: The flight's the day after tomorrow! The flight will be comfortable, she said and Renate said: But it's winter now and stormy, and the fortuneteller said, and I quote: "The flight will be smooth as butter."
When we were over the ocean, the head flight attendant came to us and said that the captain, who had seen me on television when I talked about my new book, invited me and my wife to the pilot's cabin. We went up to the cabin of the Boeing 747. The captain's name is Commandant Klein, and when we left Cologne after we took off, he said: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Lufthansa flight zero zero five from Cologne to New York, this is your captain, Commandant Klein speaking ... And I thought about Adam Stein and I said Commander Klein caught me in the air, but Renate didn't pay attention and I shut up. Klein, a nice enough man, was excited by the modern instruments he showed us, the up-to-date radar, the boards and the miraculous accessories, and the view from the pilot's cabin really wa
s spectacular: you see the sky before you and you don't sense you're flying, you're up above, you're not aware at all of the plane behind you and beneath you, and below the ocean is spread out and you're alone before that stillness, a gigantic panorama of stillness and red and green lights go on and off and hum, we drank good coffee, we talked about politics and the fact that writers essentially lack understanding of problems that he as a captain and a practical man who "still remembers a thing or two," maybe understands no better, but surely different. We talked about economics, the Common Market, and then we parted with a warm handshake and a promise that when we flew over the state of Maine, we'd be invited back and could stay there until we landed in New York. That will be an unforgettable experience, promised the captain.
Later on, they showed some film and I fell asleep and didn't see it. Renate, who doesn't sleep much on airplanes, rented earphones and watched. I slept so soundly I didn't hear the head flight attendant come to invite us to the pilot's cabin. Renate decided not to wake me, and since she knew I wasn't as excited as she was by new technologies of pop-up toasters, automatic washing machines, transistors, and such instruments, and since she knew that the sight of the landing wouldn't be so important to me-and I could always imagine it and tell about it as if I had seen it, as she put it with a smile-she spared me the early rising and went up to the pilot's cabin without me. As she sat there drinking coffee Commandant Klein said we'd soon enter a strong storm. He showed her the radar screen, and she heard the voices on the radio, and as she told me later, she could see the storm right before her eyes. It was, she said, a gigantic black mass, like a threatening square at some distance in front of the prow of the plane. Renate said: But that can't be! The captain asked why not. (I'm quoting her because this letter is also addressed to Hasha Masha and I think Renate would want Hasha to know these things.) And Renate said, Because Ruth said the flight would be smooth as butter. The commandant laughed and pointed to the black storm at a reasonable distance from the prow, but Renate insisted, it was important for her to believe. Later on she told me she thought she was red as a tomato, and she said: No, it can't be, and when the pilot finished laughing, Renate told me, she buried her face and looked at the floor and thought of a beautiful Bible verse that Hasha translated for her from Hebrew to German, even though it's also in our Bible, but in Hasha's translation, the sting wasn't lost, she thought about King David, of whom it was said that he was ruddy but withal of a beautiful countenance. She liked the word "withal" in that context. The wind velocity above Boston at the moment is one hundred ninety knots, said Commandant Klein and he wiped his nose, but the plane didn't dance. Renate asked: What happened to your storm? and the captain said: Soon, the storm simply moved left a little, and Renate looked ahead and did see a storm and from above it looked like a gigantic black box moving left toward the ocean, and the captain said: Soon! But his voice, she said, wasn't so confident, and it continued like that until the landing in New York. The storm moved left, like a snake, six minutes before the prow of the plane, and when we landed in New York, Renate told me (I of course was sleeping), the wind at Kennedy Airport was six knots, while only ten minutes before it was eighty knots. On the way, traces of the storm were seen and as we were descending, cities and villages wrapped in snow could be seen, and because it had already grown dark the lights were seen sparkling after a decent washing, and the commandant wasn't laughing anymore. Renate had to give all the members of the crew Ruth's address and phone number and when she came back to me, she woke me up and said: We're here, Ruth was right, and I woke up, looked outside and saw the plane approaching the Lufthansa gate, and Renate told me the story, brought me coffee in a plastic cup and I smiled. She didn't tell me she gave them the address and phone number, because she knew that would annoy me. She knew that my enemies, the extreme rightists and leftists, would make mincemeat of me in their newspapers. They'd write about the staunch rationalist who went to a fortuneteller. For they wouldn't write that Renate went to Ruth on her own, but would weave my name into the plot and would brew up a proper brew.