by Yoram Kaniuk
Sir:
Everything you have read so far, what I said, what I wrote, what Henkin says and wrote, everything was said by the man we're investigating, whose life we have tried to restore and understand. The words were all his, even my words were his: these hundreds of pages! Will I be able to interweave the book? Will Henkin and I succeed? From now on, I begin a series of hypotheses, from now on I no longer know things right. I gave you the things in their language reinvented by Ebenezer, most of them true, always recited, from now on I'm left with myself alone, Ebenezer is no longer who he was, even though he's still alive, and I have nothing but questions, amazement, I want to fill up the space, to grant you some authenticity, not to stumble, I've been here two months now, you call, my agent calls, I've got at least to know where the paths are leading that were paved by Ebenezer and now I have to walk on them with Henkin.
My son Friedrich we buried on a warm day, when a western wind blew and handsome pines sheltered us. Friedrich is buried next to Menahem Henkin. As far as I'm concerned, that fact has a kind of brazenness. The ceremony was modest, but not unemotional. Between the rocks, on the plain where the olive groves of Samaria and the vineyard of the Judean Mountains meet, in the steep and rocky mountain pass, the Teutonic lad who was my son is buried. Like the Crusader Werner from the city of Greiz who ascended to a temple that wasn't his. On my son's tombstone, only his first name is carved: Friedrich. At the ceremony, I read a chapter from Psalms and the monologue from Macbeth: Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. For a long time we stood still, evening descended, the trees rustled in the wind, and that was the first time I felt I was leaving Friedrich in a place that was truly real and not only yearnings and deceitful geography. In the back of my mind I saw an ancient father as the Crusader Werner from the city of Greiz, who was brought to Jaffa on a mule along with the corpse of Gottfried of Bouillon and afterward his brother Beaudoin became great and was king of Jerusalem. I thought to myself, You're not a king here but a guest on probation, and your roots will be in the air with the treetops in the ground and maybe you'll learn, after death, to long for what you never reach. In some place I then understood Rebecca Schneerson, the daughter of his great-granddaughter, the daughter and wife of Secret Charity, her zealotry, her hatred, her beauty. No person who is pierced by a river can live among living people. And Friedrich came home, even though this may not be the home he expected.
What I can say for sure-and the very word "sure" becomes strange and elusive in my eyes-is that Samuel Lipker started searching for traces of himself in a city he knew well and whose language and forgiveness he knew in his blood.
Ebenezer, who stopped being the Last Jew, looks miserable. Something very defined, that sharpens differences, was erased from him. He's no longer a man of mystery, but an old man who wants to atone for what he sees as his unimaginably exaggerated testimony. Boaz and he sat and talked. Boaz told him how he came to be what he calls "a vulture," when all he really wanted to do was nothing, just live, as people just die, and here are all the committees and the commemorations and the memorials and memorial books and Noga and Jordana. They talked about Boaz's childhood, about the Captain who converted him to Christianity or perhaps didn't convert him to Christianity, there's nobody now who knows what really happened. The two of them left the room, something that seemed to glow all night was dulled now, and when Boaz went to celebrate what he called "his new freedom," and we, Renate, Hasha, and I, sat and talked with Ebenezer and made him hot tea, Samuel Lipker went to the Ministry of Defense to find out if a person of that name was killed in one of the wars. That seemed to be a rather logical step, but later on, when I found out about it, and today I can't say why, I thought maybe that was his last betrayal of logic. Jordana, who had recently returned to work, saw him and said: Boaz, what are you doing here? And I of course don't know if it was Samuel who was offended at hearing the name Boaz, or Boaz who was insulted when his father called him Samuel, but the reaction was the same, anger, embarrassment, pain, maybe even hope, so he smiled at her and took her to a small cafe, they talked and she said: If I had a neat room, if they had gotten me an established television, I could help people liberate them from dread, I'd look at the screen and they would be purified. Samuel Lipker grasped something we didn't, maybe that was a spontaneous response to the beauty of the swarthy queen of death, maybe it was the old thirst for dark ceremonies. He said: Stop playing the fool, maybe once you could cure people through a television set because you were sick and sick people can work miracles, but you're recovered now and you're dependent on your sickness, you're acting the woman who can help, but you know you can't anymore, that game is over. And when he hugged her at the entrance to the small office building surrounded by a garden heaped with papers and empty receipts, she felt, as she told me later, that she was hugged by Boaz, who once knew how to sleep with her, scold her, love her in his own way, but never hugged her, didn't envelop her in that longing that was in Samuel. She told him something strange, she said: That's exactly how the dead would hug me. He told her: I hug you because I'm a shadow of somebody and with me you can be free of your dependence on death, and Jordana saw, or felt, life, real life, the life people live before they die, starting to flow in her, to her, from her, and she smiled, maybe she was happy at everything there ever was, not because she loved somebody, but because she didn't have to love anybody to accept herself as she was.
I have no idea what Sam did in the next three days. I was busy with conversations with Henkin, I went to see the Museum of the Holocaust and Heroism, so I don't know how it happened or who really published the ad in the paper. Henkin thinks that Jordana, who still kept a key to Boaz's apartment, sneaked into the apartment, took an old picture of Boaz and printed the ad. Hasha, or perhaps it was Renate, is sure that Sam himself published the ad in the papers, while Henkin is sure it was Boaz. At any rate, the ad was published in the Friday papers, and it showed a photo of Boaz (or Samuel), with black tangled hair, burning eyes, and under the photo was the caption: Samuel Lipker, who came to Israel from Cyprus on May 14, 1948, is requested, for his own good, to come to room 1720 in the Hilton in Tel Aviv for his reward.
On that Friday, Noga and Renate went to Caesarea to search for antiquities. They returned happy and flushed from the wind, and Renate said to me: You walk in those soft sands and suddenly there's a coin that's been waiting for you for two thousand years. And then Henkin showed them the ad. Noga looked at the ad and said: That won't end well.
I went outside, it was a nice morning and an early autumn chill was blowing, I walked along Hayarkon Street, in the distance I thought I saw people I knew: Jordana, Hans Strombe, my childhood friend, the journalist Joachim Davis, Stephen Goyfer, the honorary consul of Colombia, and I thought: Why was the Captain devoted to the idea of the memorial to Dante Alighieri, what's the meaning of his story-the story of his life that was found among his belongings that may have been his life and may not-and I didn't rightly know, I thought maybe it was so simple it was impossible for me to see things correctly, particularly in light of the fact that this morning, there was in the paper a picture of one man who is two and I'm a father whose son is buried in two places and Henkin is father to a lad who was killed in two places, maybe precisely on that background I'm trying to see things that in a rearview mirror are perfectly normal. Maybe the Captain really loved Dante's great poetry with all his might, maybe he wanted to show that Dante's hell was human and pleasant compared with what the Captain envisioned for Ebenezer, and he came to the Land of Israel to try to prepare a spiritual awakening there that would combine the poet with the prophets, the memories, Jeremiah and Jesus, with whom he belonged in spirit, with those Pioneers who came to bring salvation, with the future victims of the idea of freedom of the vision of salvation, and Dante looked to him as Spinoza looked to the manager of the dairy on the se
ttlement-as joining one thing with another, as a real model for the conjunction of poetry with its sources, not physical sources but heavenly ones in an Israeli version. In other words: A memorial to Dante isn't foreign to the landscape that produced great poets like Isaiah, Amos, or the author of the Psalms. Byron's Greece should have been the Captain's Land of Israel, and Goethe and Byron may have sought an excuse to build spiritual ropes to the real world in the wrong place. Here, in the place where God revealed Himself, who spoke from the mouths of Job and Amos, he should have lived the eternal life of a person who sang the lament of the possible world out of malicious and sublime love, out of dread of what was in store, dread that came from him and didn't penetrate heaven.
I climbed up to the Hilton and went to the public relations department. The stormy sea could be seen through the window. The beauty queen was filing her nails. She knew my name and suggested I sign the guest book, but I explained to her that I wasn't staying at the hotel, and she also agreed that it was better if I didn't sign. I asked her about Sam. She put her nail file in a drawer, locked it, scrunched her beautiful eyebrows, was silent a moment, and said: He's closed in the room, I can't talk to him, he's cruel.
I asked her if anybody had been searching for him, and she said: What do you mean, and anyway, I don't have detectives. I showed her the newspaper. She looked at the picture a long time and put her head down on the desk. I saw tears on the Hilton stationery. I stroked her head and told her how beautiful and wise she was and I left. The man in me added the word "wise" to stroke what I couldn't, or didn't dare, stroke. That was one of those easy moments when I discover how much grief a person has to have inside him to run away completely from the horny lad in every one of us. A flattery may bear fruit, but her tears were also tears I should have wept, not because she wasn't wise, but because I really don't know if she was wise or not, and I say "wise" to her because she's beautiful.
I found myself a table overlooking the bank of elevators and ordered coffee. Hours I sat. I ordered more coffee and ate cake. Women in bathing suits passed by. I was intent. And then I saw him come in. And when he groped in his pocket I knew he was holding the newspaper clipping. Hesitantly, he walked toward the bank of elevators and I saw him, even though he couldn't see me. The beauty queen passing behind him appeared in the mirror for a moment, so they couldn't even meet; the hotel detective I had spotted before lit a cigarette. Two laughing girls pass by, looking tanned and pure. Boaz stands intent, and then comes to an elevator, he steps inside, the elevator fills with people, the beauty queen is swallowed up in the opening behind the counters, a new light is lit above me. The waitress wants to be paid, because her shift has now ended. Very slowly the door of the elevator slams shut on Boaz's face, and here the story ends, from now on even my hypothesis won't have any basis in fact. What is Henkin doing? What's happening to the actors of the national theater who are waiting for Sam Lipp, and surely don't know that at this moment he's waiting in his apartment in the hotel for Joseph Rayna's last game of vengeance? And I sit-a person who once shot at low-flying planes, who saluted with upraised hand and yelled Heil-in the Hilton Hotel in Tel Aviv, in my mind's eye accompanying Boaz Schneerson, victim of a disaster brought by generations of seekers of deliverance and stubborn and angry people. And I feel that right here, at the moment of battle, the story I still have to write or recite like Ebenezer, is condensing, the story I have to reconstruct from the tapes, to fake myself in it, and I see the door of the elevator slam shut, and suddenly there is absolutely no certainty that what was said really was, that my son had to be buried far from home, that the elevator really is going up, and I see the red numbers jumping on the control board, trying to see the destruction, the haberdashers now locking their shops in the emptying streets, the climbers darting at crumbling and mourning chocolate houses, trying to get a foothold in this moment, I'm writing to you about it, something I started a long time ago, and to guess, to walk on the carpet, to come to the doorway, to wait with the creator of the Fourth Reich, and along with him to open the door, but I can no longer know what will happen now when those two men meet.
And on the seventeenth floor of the Hilton Hotel in Tel Aviv the elevator door opens and a person is seen getting off the elevator. He stands still. Waits until the door slams shut behind him. His face is tanned, a white hair flickers from his mane of hair, which doesn't seem to have thinned over the years. At the age of forty-five, he looks younger, but also older, than his age. He gropes in his pocket, lights a cigarette, walks on the carpet. His eyes are like the eyes of a hyena at night, thinks a cleaning woman passing by, carrying a bucket and a broom. He stops at a door. Beyond the door, as beyond the concrete wall that stood for years in Jerusalem and bisected the city, Asia, China, India, something distant, unknown, stretching out, beyond the door he stands, so he knocks.
The door opens and he can't see very well because of the glowing light from the open window. He doesn't say a thing, looks at somebody he may have to struggle with again. A locked yard with a tree and a hook and a bird, and distant music rises in his brain, he enters, and after the door is locked behind him, in the lobby a well-dressed, tall, heavyset man gets up, pays for his coffee, looks at the small light bulbs on the control board of the elevator, and leaves. Far away from there sits Rebecca Schneerson, facing a grove of almond trees, measuring herself in the windowpane, cleaned for her by the great-grandson of Ahbed and she wants in vain to touch the source of her prayers that could once make such a strong hatred throb in her that she gaped open a hole in the universe. Now she hurls empty looks and doesn't even hold the flyswatter anymore and she drinks wine as she sits for the men who couldn't make her forget the sweet smell of Joseph, who almost kindled in her her heavy and needless betrayal of love, and she thinks: Who am I waiting for, as if a pesky fly came and reported to her on the state of the farm, on crops that grew nicely, on a northwest wind, and she wants to know what's happening in a place where she doesn't know that anything is happening. She doesn't know that Boaz and Samuel are meeting now, she doesn't know that something that took place years ago, when two young men met and struggled, a struggle she really didn't pray for, is now reaching its conclusion. And Jordana, who dusted three thousand books waiting for her with pictures of eternal youths, returns to Henkin's house and teaches Noga and Renate how to clean the bluish rust off ancient coins, how the liquid forces the ancient letters and the ancient images to be exposed, and Renate looks at the countenance of Emperor Hadrian and sees how his face grows sad, how those features waited for her on the sands of Caesarea for two thousand years and nobody touched the countenance. A wind blew, rain fell, and after all those years coins emerged that were lost absentmindedly by some Roman soldier, who hasn't been among the living for ages, for Renate and Noga of all people, and now Jordana is cleaning them with a stinking liquid and the countenance of the Emperor Hadrian grows clear, and Noga, maybe, tries to listen to the voice of Boaz's ancient blood that has gushed up in her now too, and she thinks: Where did the blood disappear that poured here, on the sands, for thousands of years, the blood that went deep into the center of gravity of the earth, a place where Rebecca dug toward the sky, with the awful anger that pervaded her and is now starting to fade, as if after more than ninety years of life in a place where she didn't want to live, the anger is starting to be a needless, almost ridiculous embellishment, and you don't know who to be angry at anymore and you can't even be angry at yourself anymore, and so, Noga thought of her lovers, of Jordana who loved Menahem and Boaz, and now is maybe in love with Friedrich and will soon paste his pictures in the album and under each picture she'll write in her fluent handwriting: Place, date, general description, so she'll be able to look at his volume without opening it again, to guess the dim, grim force of time that doesn't turn hair gray anymore, and flows without moving, and Jordana goes to Menahem's room, turns on the television, wants to weep, tears seek her eyes and don't find them, and then she breaks the screen, but the ice cream man's ear-piercing music is hea
rd outside and nobody hears the smashing blow, and Fanya R. yells: Stop it! We don't want ice cream! And the wrinkled man goes away routed, with his ice cream, and there aren't any children here anymore to sell ice cream to, says Hasha, and Jordana sits Henkin down and talks with him about renewing the activity of the Committee of Bereaved Parents and tells him that everybody is waiting for him and he has to do things, travel, search for new sites, the pain has to be extinguished, she knows, she gave birth to a dead son and she knows, she also broke the screen and Henkin sits and listens, looking at the beautiful Yemenite woman. What's happening there in the room, thinks Germanwriter standing up in the lobby of the Hilton, what's happening to them there that I can't guess, and Henkin thinks of what Jordana said, wants to answer her, maybe turn everything back, go back to the starting point, stand before his son a moment, and say to him: Menahem, you don't have to write poems, if you don't want to. Hasha Masha says you're a man of the sea. Henkin knew that no lad who came from Hasha Masha's womb would believe that Henkin who says those things really means them, and he can despise himself until he smiles at Jordana who strokes his hand and tries to lead him to battlefields where others fought for her and for him, and suddenly he says with a contempt that once was in Hasha but she doesn't have it now: Why don't you make love with something like a television, but she isn't offended now and moves to the agenda, he's going to tell me about the locomotive salesman, that sonofabitch, she said to herself, he thought that because of my love for Menahem he bought me for life, and I'm free to love whoever I want, she said and laughed, and Noga saw the laugh caught on her face like a wounded bird and she tried to get up, but her legs were heavy and she didn't get up, and Renate went to put on water.
Henkin thinks: That strange Yemenite woman, she endured everything and remained dry, from all the rain of death she remained dry, and Rebecca sits in her room, Ahbed paces back and forth, and she thinks: Something's happening, and then a distant rage passes through her-not her own-one that went astray and passed through her on the way to her sources, from her toenails, which once stood at the river and let it pierce the girl she was, to give up everything so she could be angry at herself, stumble on mastery, live a life that contradicted itself, so that her life was a betrayal of her desires, to take vengeance on herself, on the desires she didn't really have, and she said: Somebody tells me up yours, somebody enters the room, does to me what Nehemiah did when he committed suicide on the shore of Jaffa, and when I was born the sun went out and a rooster didn't die, deaf Joseph went to bring a new sexton to the city, the rabbi of Lody who caused Napoleon's defeat at the gates of Moscow, but the house of the Last Jew is still locked despite the sudden shouts of that prompter Fanya R., the windows are slammed shut, the repainted shutters are closed, the antenna sways in the wind, and in the hotel the tall beauty queen sits down, in a purple dress and a white collar, next to Germanwriter, who's about to leave, and says: So what will be? Germanwriter, who thinks of avenging that moment when everything takes place, the moment when two men meet and you don't know what happens to them, looks at the local beauty queen who was international and came back to her scale, wringing her hands, and he notices that she's removed the red nail polish and her fingernails are also pale, and he thinks: Did she really kiss the Ambassador of Peru, did a whore from Hayarkon Street really sleep in his bed on the seventeenth floor, as that really was important to what happens to the writer deep in his heart, where there were once stories that wanted to be written as he used to tell Renate, and the beauty queen sits and starts gnawing her nails, looking to the side, stealing a scared look at the writer, and gnawing. He thinks: Let me have a hand, and he says: Let me gnaw, and she says: Why not, and he gnaws one fingernail and wants to laugh in the hotel lobby. He gnaws, Germanwriter, the queen, a fingernail ...