by Yoram Kaniuk
They visited Friedrich's grave. It was beautiful and delicate and a wind wisped in the treetops. Henkin seemed in tune with the landscape. Leads a group of parents to Nabi Samuel. And Germanwriter, who never broke his own pattern and didn't let himself fall like that, stands for one hour every day and reads his novellas and stories to his dead son, and the beloved Jordana brings people to see the writer who reads his works at the grave of a boy who didn't want to read his father's works, and Renate waits with patience and love, maybe a little contempt, which she inherited from Hasha Masha but she understands, like Hasha Masha she understands their need to love like that after death which they could fix, if they were able to fear life less, and he stands and reads his works and the wind is pleasant in Bab-el-Wad, where they died in the wars and read stories to dead sons who will be brought from far away by the Holocaust Fund of the needleworkers in Cologne to help their bereaved brothers in Israel.
Once in Cologne, Ebenezer said, Germanwriter recalls: If Moses hadn't grown up in an Egyptian house, would he have been able to think of rebellion? A Hebrew would have thought about uprising and not of a rebellion that is a revolution. Only at a river with a king who's a god and whose divinity is geometric, tangential, and congruent with the laws of low tide and high tide, the moon and the sun, only there, in harsh strips of ripples of water, on the edge of the desert, could it have become clear finally that a mighty mechanics of water regulation in an arid desert is a kingdom, is the Lord, is God, the imprisonment of revolts, and from that root of a river came prison and slavery and uprisings and freedom. The river is geometrical freedom as well as eternal slavery. In the desert the Egyptian turned into the Jew. On Mount Sinai, they turn real and necessary tyranny into the anarchy of an arid wasteland that burns in the blood. They needed Moses and he, whose soul was embittered by revolt, of a hard speech and of a hard language, an ancient desert aristocrat, needed the grandsons of Jacob who were crazy for the wilderness, filled with bitterness and depression, the spirit of rocky ground of lost yearnings for a past they almost had.
And then he quoted the passage: Everything is foreseen and permission is given. He said that was the whole Torah in a nutshell. So Samuel boarded the ship Salvation and went to the Land of Israel, and at the same time he met Lionel and went to America. It was some fateful decision before he was born. It was known in circles of heaven that Samuel will die like that and not otherwise, so he had to board the Salvation, fight the British, be sent to Cyprus, ascend to the Land of Israel, be the wolf who learned to play seventeen different instruments. But permission was also given, and Sam is the permission given, so he rebelled against his blood.
Thus pondered Germanwriter in the glow of nightfall. Henkin and Hasha and Ebenezer and Fanya R. also sat in the room. All of them were over seventy except Fanya R., and nobody could know how old she was. There was a sense that everybody lived in that moment when Boaz sits in Samuel Lipker's room and something that can't be known is happening there, something nobody can imagine, although the meeting is more imperative than all the meetings discussed in the hundreds of Ebenezer's tapes, in the letters Henkin wrote to Germanwriter and German writer to Henkin, what could have been more imperative than that meeting, decreed by fate in another thousand years when the last offspring of Boaz and Sam will sit in a spaceship, on the way to the stars of Andromeda, bound to the world along with the last human beings on their way to the cosmic explosion that will come after, or before, and then at that moment that was, and may arrive, it was decided that that meeting will be and everything that happened before, including Renate, "Rhapsody in Blue," the inflation of the 'twenties, the fate of foreign subjects in the Ottoman Empire, all that happened so that Sam and Boaz will be imprisoned together in a room. The moon was full, they sat in Henkin's room, there was a clear feeling that every single one of them destroyed his loved ones and in burying them entered the grave standing up, like Secret Charity, and resided there with the loved ones who died by their hand, or whose fate was decreed by another accidental assignment, who knows, and it was clear that they're united in a dark connection whose thread was in the hands of a Captain, and now it was impossible to ask him anything, that everything is vague and yet there was life and there were nice moments and there were days and there were wonderful nights and nobody succeeds in loving somebody who deserves his love, but in running away to something like love, to be saved from the vengeance of death, that maybe Rebecca was right when she married Nehemiah and not Joseph, for everybody whoever married Joseph Rayna paid a price that is then not forgiven, anybody who married love begat offspring who owed something that couldn't be reformed. And then you find love split on the shore of Jaffa and you pick up Nehemiah and don't restore him to life and abandon Ebenezer and Boaz is born and kills Dana and begets Sam and ends with a son Noga carries inside her and will be the object of the great destruction that people carried from one generation to another to avenge the empty heaven for their love for a peculiar nation that was forgotten in ashes.
And it was that evening, Noga sat pressed to the window, they were gloomy, Rebecca phoned and was worried about Boaz. Henkin pondered and one of them, Sam or Boaz, slapped Licinda's face, and Lily started speaking German, and Lionel thought about a cookbook of medieval pilgrims like Shira Rabat- Batim, and Licinda, angry, hurting from the slap, got up and recited one tape on the moment when Kramer is tied to German soldier in a wheelbarrow, and Ebenezer sees Kramer and doesn't yet understand how a German can be hungry and Kramer refuses to eat or drink and Ebenezer envies him, hates him, is maybe liberated from him, at least he recites something to him, from somebody's mouth, about identities and exchanging identities, and Kramer waits, the hangman's rope will always find him ready to die a patriotic death withheld from many, Boaz will think, when Jordana looks at him with the chill hatred of a woman who once loved, and there is no hatred chillier, quieter, more malicious than the hatred of a betrayed woman, and Licinda, whom everybody lusts for, beautiful, lithe, and out of place, recites what Sam crammed into her and they listen, eager to know what they always knew, in love with her with an impossible love, getting her pregnant artificially like some Joseph impregnating women who was the father of them all, and Henkin says: Enough, enough, and she stops and bursts into tears and then suddenly Jordana smiles.
And up above, in the suite overlooking the sea at whose shore Rebecca Schneerson looked angrily seventy-three years earlier, sit Boaz and his alter ego. After the wrestling, as they later told Germanwriter, they drank vodka, what will they say to each other? If there were an answer there would be no need for all these tapes, but there isn't. Some moment requisitioned from the space of time, from its own history, from the building where the event didn't take place, and in Rebecca's house, with the tape recorder next to her where she once recorded herself facing the rot of the old settlement, and all that's left of her is her fictional past and fictional dreams of a polite Captain and a rabbinical prodigy, who went to a war to the bitter end against frustrated prophets and died on the shore of Jaffa, sits Ebenezer and suddenly says: Marar is now a destroyed village, a sign that I'm again listening to myself, and Fanya R. smiles at him sympa thetically, even though she's filled with envy for memories of Dana on the road between Rebecca's house and Ebenezer's old house, where the Captain lived and that was registered in the name of Boaz Schneerson or in fact, although the old woman didn't know, it was registered in the name of S.L.A. Ltd. because of income tax regulations that weren't intended to tax the dead, or were intended only for that, and Ebenezer says: There was a time, he said, when I forgot Hebrew, Hebrew flew away and wasn't, I spoke in so many voices that I forgot, and I'd recite words in other languages spelled backward. When I had to open a door I closed it. German or Polish I read from right to left, I wanted to open a bottle and I put the cork in instead of taking the cork out, and then Hasha Masha said: A big donation came for the memorial, and Henkin went to the Ministry of Defense and came back with weeping eyes and thought about what happened, or didn't happen, in t
he hotel on the seventeenth floor. Germanwriter says: Right, it's ridiculous and cunning, but Brooks senior sent a check to the government of Israel, and nobody is willing to turn down money to create the memorial that Boaz scoffs at and says won't be erected, but S.L.A. Ltd. will be the initiator and Boaz will bury his head in his hands and say: Enough, I'm not ready for that, and goes out, and Hasha sneers in a whisper, "Melissa Gifts," "Melissa and All Her Suicides," which was created in the world by the poem of rage, a poem Boaz wrote for my husband so he could love his son who loved the sea.
And Lionel will sit at night and tell about his mother and Rebecca will want to weep and won't be able to, and then that moment will end as it began, with uncertainty, and one of them will go out, Sam or Boaz, and a few days later, a siren will be heard and Talya's friend from the adjutant's office won't come this time because he didn't come back from the last war, and they'll search for Boaz and Noga to give them orders, and Noga will laugh with a belly full of a fetus and none of them knows who the father is, revenge of a woman who found her father dead in a room and loved a violent lad and stopped loving him to live in Henkin's house and turn into a product of national mourning until Boaz came and betrothed her to Jordana and Sam and Licinda, in whose veins Melissa lived and this time declared a revolt, and Rebecca pleaded, Give me Boaz, don't bring a son into the world, who's the father of the son? And Noga is silent, withdrawn, in love with her swollen belly, will bring a son into the world and they won't know who the father is. Joy filled her when they came to bring her a mobilization order that was needless because the computer was wrong. She had long ago passed the age and would no longer stay in a tent with Boaz and play licentious streetwalker in light of the headlights of the armored troop carrier in the desert, and Sam or Boaz, whoever came out of the room and they don't know who, or perhaps they do know and pretend they don't know, will go to the war that started, and again they wait for Rebecca's expected disaster, but she's silent, searching the sky to drill a hole in it, doesn't find it, is offended to her last disgrace, and Boaz or Sam, in a uniform, will go to the airport, three gigantic transport planes were parked there, emergency doors gaping open, a unit of young soldiers sat on what had once been a lawn. The sky is clear and no wind blows. The roar of the motors is ear-piercing. Officers and noncoms run back and forth, messengers come with flashes of orders, whistles are heard on all sides. And he stands there, in a battle uniform with sand stuck to it from a previous battle, washed but not ironed. The insignia of rank aren't conspicuous. The greenyellow eyes scare the recruits. He asks which of them was in the last war, and there isn't one who had fought then. He explains to them what they have to do: get into the planes and then parachute into another field, and from there to the front. The sun is beating down and he's sweating. He turns to a young soldier who looks pensive and handsome, with curly hair, and calls out: Soldier, get up! And the soldier gets up. Scared, you can see how scared he is. Run to the canteen and bring paper and pencils. And the soldier says: Yessir, and runs. The soldiers are sitting. Somebody starts humming, tomorrow when the army takes off its uniforms ... The soldier comes back. The planes are roaring. A liaison officer comes and whispers something in his ear. First aid kits and stretchers are loaded onto the plane.
He orders the soldier who had returned and was standing at attention: Give every soldier a pencil and paper! They look at him in amazement, but nobody opens his mouth.
The soldier gives every one of the soldiers a pencil and paper.
They don't see that their commander is weeping, he's weeping with his eyes shut.
The sun beats down and the motors are ear-piercing.
May Jordana not love you, he says. And then he yells: This is an order, everybody has a pencil and paper. Everyone, every one of you now write a poem and give it to me with your first name, last name, serial number, and address.
He yells: That's an order! One soldier whispers: That commander was in all the wars, I'm not getting in trouble, and he starts writing. And the commander yells: You've got five minutes, so step on it!
And they write fast.
Forward! he yells.
He collects the poems, puts them in a manila file. Calls the sergeant. Sends him with the manila file. To put it in headquarters under the name of Schneerson until. The soldiers finish loading their gear and boarding the planes, once again a siren sounds. He follows them, swallowed up in the plane, and takes off.
And the moment up there doesn't end. They're still there, even though Boaz or Sam was swallowed up in the plane. And then everything ended and Noga gave birth to a son. Ebenezer died and was buried in Roots. Fanya R. will die after him. Lionel and Lily went back to America. Licinda will direct Sam's play at the national theater. Sam will stay or go, what do we know who's who. They came back. Three secretaries are trying to make order in the files of S.L.A. Ltd. Letters come from all over Israel, millions of dollars from the money of "Melissa Inc." And everything's desolate. Boaz sits and looks out the window. Sam is dusty inside him. As was said in the book Ebenezer quoted and that will be written in another few years, Rebecca will die on the seventh of Adar, the day of Moses' death, in nineteen eighty-four, a hundred years old she'll be at her death. After her burial Roots will be closed for lack of space. Next to Nehemiah her husband Rebecca will be buried. In the safe, along with the writings of the Captain, are the poems written by the soldiers, and Noga raises her son. He's got green-yellow eyes and he plays with the wooden birds once carved by a man named Ebenezer.
When the last of the Jews died, God held His breath a moment, and said: They're finished? And the director said: Yes. He said: There was something about them, what was it? And the director said: They loved You with all their heart. And He said: What a waste, and shut His eyes for another thousand years, that passed in retrospect, backward and forward. Marar is now in the lands of the town that was a settlement, the wine press is a museum like everything that never was, and Noga says to her son: Someday, if you write a poem, give it to me and I'll give it to your father. She didn't say who, and Boaz smiled and Licinda said: I know who the Captain was, he was the one poem of Joseph Rayna that took on flesh, stayed here and brought together the grandfather of the grandfather of my grandfather in the port of Amsterdam with the grandfather of the grandfather of your grandfather who was ascending to the Land of Israel.
And so, because of the baby whose father nobody knows, all these things had to happen, and in fact they didn't happen exactly like that, but it could have been the last of the Jews, it could also have been a dream and also rot and also a dying end, and anybody who tries to turn a dream into reality inherits disappointment, and Rebecca, who tried to turn anger into a dream, knew that better than the others, so she took vengeance on Nehemiah by letting his dream be a grandson whose father nobody knows and nobody knows when he'll be the Last Jew.