by Yoram Kaniuk
I don't grasp what that has to do with it, said Mr. Brooks. He got up, his legs unsteady. He picked up the big glass ashtray standing there, and maybe he inadvertently dropped it and it shattered into thousands of slivers. At the sight of the smashed ashtray, he tried to smile, but his face managed only to grimace a little.
I do understand, Mrs. Brooks almost whispered. I remember looking at photos of Licinda Hayden, I saw her in Time, Newsweek, T h e N e w Y o r k T i m e s . I remember looking at the photos and thinking, I know her, but I didn't connect it ... now I do. Does Sam know about Melissa's closeness to Licinda?
I'm not sure, I groped for something opaque and astonishing that I heard in her voice now. Mr. Brooks said: I'm sorry about the ashtray. He called the maid to come clean up the slivers. We sat silent and pensive and waited until she finished. Mrs. Brooks got up and left the room a moment. Mr. Brooks said to me: She was a beautiful child, Melissa.
I know, I said.
She shouldn't have died, he said in a voice that cast off fifty years of thick walls, I should have listened to him and taken her to a hospital in New York, but I was too proud.
I'm fond of people who, at a certain moment, can say something contrary to the foundation of their whole life, and can feel human remorse, and I thought of my father who never could. I almost loved that man.
Suddenly there wasn't anything more to say. I looked out the window and saw the naked trees, the rebuked, aristocratic, frozen landscape wrapped in snow, an enormous sun startled me, as if your blinding light that exposes everything fell on me here of all places, a beam of light from another world, and I fell silent. And then Mrs. Brooks came back. In some way that seemed marvelous, but equally clumsy, Mrs. Brooks tried to connect Licinda with somebody who could have been Melissa. Maybe the fact that three strange men came during fifty years to love Melissa endowed her daughter-and even her yearnings for her had vanished with the years-with some importance, some metaphysical refinement. She was surely thinking of Lionel, of Sam, of me, she thought Licinda lived for us what Melissa could have lived eternally for her. I'm talking now of disappointment. I don't know, tangled threads unite us, and to whom am I telling these things! You? My self-mockery perplexes me and I almost suggested to them to establish an international committee of parents, without any distinction of sex, religion, race, or nationality, would Mrs. Brooks accept that idea? I was amazed at myself, not at her, she spoke about family, maybe a stub of memory of Licinda rose from there. Maybe she really did say that Licinda is a distant relative, and maybe I'm fantasizing and quoting things she didn't say, but there was one thing I'm sure she talked about-she talked about some rabbi named Kriegel who came to Providence, Rhode Island, in seventeen seventy-three, about her family graced with a Protestant minister named Stiles, who then lived in Providence and was an expert in Hebrew and wrote a book about that Kriegel. I thought: Where do I know the name Kriegel, and I recalled, contemplating that rabbi from Hebron who performed the marriage of Rebecca Secret Charity with her dead lover, Kriegel, who went from Hebron to America. Mrs. Brooks spoke of him with uncritical generosity, as if she missed him, and this is not the place to tell what she said, since that story has nothing to do with our issue, but at night, when I came back to New York and got into bed, I thought maybe I heard something that's important for us to know and I didn't yet grasp the end of its thread, and I also knew, a few seconds before I fell asleep, that maybe as I talk about Licinda, she herself is extraneous to the story, it doesn't concern her, but Lilith that she personified, or perhaps it's Lilith who personifies Licinda?
I went back to the public library and a fellow Lionel recommended helped me. He showed me some interesting research on Kriegel, relations with the Protestant minister Stiles, the sermon Stiles delivered in the synagogue on Shavuoth, how Kriegel came to America in seventeen seventy-three, wearing a turban, a handsome, radiant man. The connection, which I still don't understand, pleased me. Between Kriegel, Minister Stiles, Melissa and Licinda. Did Melissa grow up and become Licinda? Were the two of them distant relatives, was Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg really-as I found out-the offspring of that Kriegel? Did he know he was his offspring? Could he have spawned his sons even after, beyond the generations that preceded him?
I sat with Lionel and Lily. It was late at night. Outside snow was falling. Sam and Licinda went out. Renate fell asleep. Then Lionel fell asleep too. Lily and I sat tired, our eyes almost shut, drunk, and sang children's songs. The next day, we flew home.
Dear Hasha,
I had a vision that lasted a whole day and I couldn't get rid of it. Menahem and Friedrich met in New York near Bloomingdale's. They went shopping. Friedrich bought leather suspenders and Menahem bought handkerchiefs and a belt. Menahem's hair was long and Friedrich's was shorter and the flap of a forehead could be seen on his head. Friedrich lied and said he had shot himself. Menahem said: You didn't shoot yourself, Friedrich, you shot somebody else and missed. They went to a Chinese restaurant. Neither of them knew how to use chopsticks. The old Chinese man laughed. They didn't know that was funny and ate with forks and knives. At the hotel, Melissa brought wine and they drank. Boaz came and jumped out the window. Menahem was impressed by the jump and Friedrich wasn't. They were drunk and sang. Friedrich was older than Menahem. They walked to the seashore. There was a cave there. Intense red colors were blended with sickly bluishness, a chaos of serenity they disappeared into dimness, as if out of weakness, wrapped in a thin halo of pinkishness, a kind of eternal sunset. Who said there's no life near death, they only said that there's no life after death! Everybody drowned there, alone. My husband claims I have a fever. I lie and write you. Maybe love is also preparing an alibi for the future, or the past. Menahem and Friedrich are consoled, they walked together on Fifth Avenue and laughed. Those were frozen tears of death. They flowed on him, on them, I felt an emptiness, maybe I yelled: Menahem, Menahem. I yearned for him.
Your love.
By the way: the director of your national theater held negotiations here with Sam Lipp to come to Israel to direct his play.
Love, Renate
Tape / -
Mr. Schneerson, do you really think ancient blood flows in us, don't you think you adopt a dangerous language? A kind of theatrical fascism, bereft of sharp positive critical thought-
I don't know what I think, my memory is me. I didn't ask others if they were fascists or progressives. Nor do I know where progressive people progress to. Thanks, Mr. Schneerson. No problem, when will Samuel come back?
Tape / -
And Rebecca Schneerson sat in her chair and felt in her bones how she was growing numb. When a giant bouquet of chrysanthemums came, sent by the grandchildren of the founders, she burst into a brief laugh. A note was stuck to the bouquet: May you live to a hundred and twenty. She looked at the floor and saw blurred spots. That cataract, she said, aside from that I'm healthy and could have had children, but there's nobody to do it for, she yelled at Ahbed: Put the flowers in a vase with a lot of water. See if the house is clean, and if they brought the jugs to the dairy, serve the mixture, and say if it's raining, Ahbed! He asked: Put out a finger? She said: Put! He stuck out a finger, got it wet a little, took a deep breath and said: It's not raining. Said the old woman: May Allah have pity, Bidak Zuker! He laughed and went off. The day began to leak to her through the cracks in the shutter, from the hayloft rose a sourish smell of wet straw. She said: There's a smell of flower piss here. In fact maybe she wasn't waiting for anybody, and so she drank black coffee Ahbed spiced with cardamom and basil. She lit a cigarette. At the age of ninety, she said to Horowitz's greatgrandson, you start smoking cigarettes, it doesn't impair health or longevity anymore. Horowitz's great-grandson came with his classmates to congratulate her. The children wanted to see the birds. They were taught in school about the birds of the first son of the settlement who died in the Holocaust and came back to life. Ahbed explained to them: They come from the whole country, even from abroad, want to give a lot of money, but
she doesn't sell. She keeps everything. Even the mosquito nets are kept. Maybe the anopheles will come back, she said. After they left, she shut her eyes and since she didn't have anything to do, she waited for evening.
In the evening, Boaz and Noga and Ebenezer and Fanya R. came and took her to the community center. The full community center was decorated. A plaque still hung on the wall: Ebenezer, who knew wood in its distress. The minister of education came. Rebecca Schneerson had reached her ninetieth birthday. They also came from the television and the radio. There aren't any wastelands now between the settlements, she said, buildings reach to Jaffa and China, and there's no place to weep. She wore a white dress and looked beautiful and svelte. When the committee chairman spoke, she shut her eyes. Everybody looked at her old indifferent beauty. Her long hair slid over her shoulders. Her skin was smooth and swarthy, her eyes flashed and she would have wanted a dead gleam to be muffled in them. They sang "How Beautiful Are the Nights in Canaan" and "Pity Please" and "Do Not Forsake Us" and "In the Fields of Bethlehem." She smoked a cigarette. The committee chairman said: In honor of her birthday, Rebecca Schneerson has started smoking. Then, they aimed the micro phone at her mouth and she got up and pulled the microphone from its stand, as if she were a singer, and started talking with the microphone in her hand, and Boaz said to Noga: Look, Frank Sinatra!
Rebecca said: Now they want Rebecca Schneerson, not Dayan or Kojak. What's happening, maybe I'm an amusing woman. Years ago they were afraid of me. And I wept for eight years, there were problems, the dreamers died and Rebecca remained. Today they hear the Arabs returning to their houses at night from the yards and farms, and the last one to return at night is also the one who will remain here and that doesn't fit what Nehemiah dreamed, who like a Rudolph Valentino of Zionism, died on the shore of Jaffa.
The desert is a memorial to the God my forefathers knew in cellars ... A poor Jew who died in the Holocaust tells Ebenezer a number of things that haven't yet been written and he follows the map and finds the Golden Calf. The God of Israel is hiding. The violence is as great as the evasion. In the riots of 'thirty-six, I sat with a rifle in my hand and waited, I didn't wash, three years I waited and they didn't dare come, but the Golden Calf was found for me by the counterfeit son. A first Jew told a last Jew: It's a lost story. Chaos was in the beginning, chaos will be in the end.
And after the uproar died down, she sat and laughed. Boaz and Ebenezer went to the Captain's house. Rebecca sat and looked out the window. Her anger at the bushes Dana had planted hadn't yet faded. They're still here, she said angrily, but nobody heard.
When they entered the house, Boaz and Ebenezer looked at the Captain's shattered splendor, his medals, his faded uniforms, the ten tattered visored hats, the elegant carved sticks. You know, said Boaz to his father, when I was a child, Rebecca would give birth to me with groans. I'd sit on the chair and see her give birth to me over and over. You offended me, I'm seeking a connection and don't find it, a rather stupid situation. Aside from the gifts, the money, the phony maps and stupid war plans, he thought, what else did the Captain leave? Ahbed, sent by Rebecca, went up to the attic, brought down suitcases, and said: She said to open these suitcases.
The Captain's papers were there, along with Mr. Klomin's journals, and hidden in the side of the suitcase was a manila file. On the yellowing oldfashioned manila file was written in a fluent handwriting: "The Torments of the Life Filled with Modesty and Honor of Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg, as Recorded by Professor Alexander Blum in Nineteen FortySix, according to a Prediction in a Fascinating Performance of a Jew Named Ebenezer Called the Last Jew in a Nightclub in Paris Called The Gay Kiwi."
So you knew about him, said Boaz.
Maybe I also know about him, too, said Ebenezer. But he didn't know. He didn't know if he really knew. I didn't know and I don't know ...
No.
... And the handsome poet then left the city and rode in the chariot of Countess Flendrik. Stunned that she almost succeeded in loving, the countess stayed in the city and became the dream girl of tired angels. There was total silence. Birds, stopped in their flight and shaped in books and pictures, were sold to tourists who burst out of holes in the rickety ceilings of seventeen kinds of sky hung there like every unexpected disaster. The woman called herself Milat. Milat's father was dead now in the honor he may have deserved, but his tombstone was defaced by rioters. She called herself Leila and Alima in turn, and with the fetus in her womb, she set out with the memory of the awful night stamped so deeply in her that she forgot it. The poet read her poems in high-flown Hebrew and listed for her the names of a hundred women who had gotten pregnant in his honor and she pitied him and let him touch her womb. With a rare deerskin valise she wandered and her belly swelled. Money she didn't lack. When she came to America she was adopted by Mr. Luria before his death. The only condition was that her son would be considered Luria's legitimate son. And so Avigdor was born, son of the lecherous poet with the eyes of a demon, adopted by Mr. Luria, who wanted only for her to tell him how bold and noble he was in his life and in his dying. After she buried Mr. Luria, she called herself Dona Gracia. She loved the stories of Hebrew maidens who served their God in secret. Spanish noble aristocrats loved them. Privately, they bore the tiara of their pride as it was later expressed. Even the boldest military commander Don Juan Garmiro, who granted Queen Isabella the greatest cities of the heathens, loved a maiden whose heart was torn between her love for him and her loyalty. When Dona Gracia decided to go to Lebanon to stay with the Countess, who was still searching in the mountains for the ancient gold of the Romans, she took her son and went. The Countess welcomed her gladly and anointed the boy Avigdor with goat milk and golden water, brought her by Arab traders from their long journeys in China and India. Together they lived on an estate in the mountains, and in Aleppo were Jews who wove wonderful rugs, and an old woman who lived in Sidon knew the forgotten burial place of Jewish heroes who once ruled here. The woman's name was Lilith. So in the fusty streets of Sidon they called her a witch. Roman gold brought by desperate and forsaken Crusaders was found. The Countess and Alima-Leila-Milat and Avigdor traveled to Italy and were once again adopted by good people, who were able to grant them the final and desired bliss. She slaughtered them and then wept, they slandered her in the city. But backbiters aren't necessarily a valuable historical source. Even though she was full of death and charm, there was some endless procreation in her, a boundless youth. A pale man who kept wringing his hands timorously saw her and called himself Goldenberg. When he died he was buried with a politeness that suited him, because he claimed he was from the mountains in northern Switzerland. The Countess came to warm her body in a small hotel near Napaloya, and since they had already stayed in Pelfonz and the sea was wide, they went to a small and distant island and there Avigdor grew and became a sharp-witted lad, who could recite the Divine Comedy in eight languages. He would invent himself in fictions, live in them as somebody who needs a false biography, and then the Countess got sick and disappeared, and Milat, Dona Gracia, went back to Lebanon, married a balding Austrian consul filled with news and named Jospe, and went from there with her Austrian husband in a coffin. She embellished the coffin and put it in her cabin and played the mandolin for him, and thus they came to a small Argentinean city where there were relatives who hadn't yet come out of the cellars where the parents of their parents had put them, and were called by Christian names. There she buried the consul, and the old women who watched her and thought they were relatives began an extreme forgetting that was much appreciated in those remote places. Then came a bold American who wanted to move the Jews from Poland to the Land of Israel in sealed trains, like the trains that would later take Jews to another place. She learned to love his lined face. He adopted Avigdor, called him other names, bought him a notebook so he could copy the poems in Hebrew that were written for him by some father who may once have really begat him. Together they swam in Buenos Aires, and because of the inventions the American i
nvented and were recorded in the name of her son, the lad was given new citizenship and was called Jose after his mother Josefa Dona Gracia, and when Avigdor-Joseph was twenty years old, he volunteered for the Russo-Japanese War, fought in the Japanese army, joined the routed Russian army, stirred his soldiers with speeches in fine French, which he acquired (along with the rest of his inventions) in Lebanon, with the Countess, and when he mistakenly killed a Japanese general who wanted to commit suicide out of boredom about a dubious victory and broke the heart of the attack regiment he led, he was awarded medals, which, in the market of Buenos Aires, were worth a title of nobility he had once been denied. So, he registered as Orthodox since that religion was less accepted, but was surely not understood as Judaism, and he could be sent on secret missions to the east, which he knew from his childhood. They told him: Why not Jose de Lupo, but he insisted and taught methods of warfare he'd invent himself, and with these methods the capital city was captured in the great revolution and so he was appointed commander first class.
All that may not have been and so maybe it was. Then Dona Gracia died and he buried her in a Greek Orthodox funeral ceremony, which he learned from ancient books he obtained in a long correspondence with the relatives of the Countess, who remembered him fondly from his youth, and thus he could get to the east and strike roots in the life of the colonial bureaucracy without evoking suspicion and that even enabled him to pretend, even when there was no need, to invent methods of attack and deception. Then there were wars that didn't have to be invented, and he learned not to fight in them admirably, and when he lived in Egypt, he came up with the idea that life is a corridor leading to a world in which his father and mother lived when there were still gods in the world, and only the great poetry of Dante Alighieri gave expression to the place where traces of things remained as they were before history was created which made everything monochrome, dark, and eager for destruction. And so he was enflamed by the great desire to erect memorials to Dante, which he established or didn't establish in various places in the world as tombstones people sometimes mistook and attributed them to somebody else. Giant tombstones where the names of those buried beneath them were sometimes fake. He felt superior in knowing that Dante Alighieri's tombstones conquered the world, and as reward for his happiness he would transport information from place to place, served so many masters that he had to peep in the small well-hidden booklet, written in code and based on key words from the Divine Comedy, to know who his real master was at the moment, and so he also started editing a newspaper nobody needed, and a little woman who was caught in the plot wrote the articles, received the payment of thirty-two subscribers with fictitious names and Jose, who was meanwhile also called Menkin and added the A to his name because of his love for mystery, initiated plans that certain governments paid enormous sums to acquire.