Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
And then she said in German: See what a little kitchen like ours can
hold, and he wants a new kitchen! They put the cakes and the tea and the
coffee on the table and there was silence in the room, not an embarrassed
silence, but a silence of something pleasant, as if we had returned from a
long journey, we drank, we ate crisp, tasty cookies, suddenly my wife stood
up, looked at Renate who had lit a cigarette with the gold lighter her husband handed to her, took the cigarette from Renate's hands, a long brown
cigarette that burned with a strange pale light, inhaled and swallowed
smoke, gave the cigarette back to Renate, hugged her arm, went to the old
radio in the corner of the room, a gigantic radio that looked like an abandoned closet that we had bought thirty-five years before in the teachers'
canteen and after a long moment some tune started bursting out of the box
and my wife started moving to the rhythm of the music.
I didn't know if Germanwriter and his wife understood how strange it
was to see my wife dancing after so many years, but I couldn't tell them
again about the Jewish woman in the forest that Germanwriter aimed a gun
at her son's temple, the stories of my son standing against his assailants
were finished in me, my wife returned to the Tiberias-Tsemakh Road,
maybe she danced to win me, to wipe out in me the thought of Teacher
Sarakh whom Trotsky had hugged for three desperate nights. My wife set
her body free, came alive wildly, held out her hand until Renate got up
from the chair, put down her purse where she had been rummaging before,
and her hand caught the held-out hand of Hasha Masha who was dancing and together they moved with a kind of rare lightness, with a kind of
oblivion, as if the music flowed into their blood and they were stripping off
their clothes before a sun god that had vanished and we weren't important
to them anymore, they were dancing for themselves alone, not for us, maybe
not even for Menahem, the pale light of the lamp created a halo around their
dance, we sat, the two of us, Hebrewteacher and Germanwriter, looked at our wives dancing as in some magic ceremony and on their faces a lost light
coming from inside them, not the light beaming from the grave that government minister talked about but a white pale light of life that once was
and maybe returns, at that moment it returns, and then, in the middle of
the dance when Renate and my wife were almost embracing, the writer
stood up, glanced through the window at the house next door then sat
down and his hand started shaking, he stared at his wife and said as if he
were talking to himself: You're a very wise woman, Mrs. Henkin, men like
him are hard to know, we don't have a way to know through the body, we
get data but the data aren't connected, after all we don't know according
to unformulated dimensions. Our son didn't fall in battle, he committed
suicide, why does a son commit suicide? He put his head in a gas oven,
locked the doors of his apartment, and died.
They stopped dancing and the music coming from the radio was distant,
and delicate, Renate looked at my wife, hugged her shoulder, and tried to
assess me, to understand something that maybe connected me and Hasha
Masha and Renate, and was released like my wife from all abstract thought,
said: It wasn't a gas oven, it was an electric oven, maybe he electrocuted
himself by mistake, my husband has already written the story. Life is simpler and more awful than stories. No, not electric, Renate, said the writer,
gas, and Renate said without a trace of theatricality: There was no gas in
his house, there was electricity there, maybe that was necessary because
you don't commit suicide in an electric oven! And she went back to dancing, her face opaque with a mute expression. I looked at the expression
of silent madness on the faces of our wives, and the sight was so pleasant, everything that happened could not have been different, and for
some reason Hasha Masha could pity me now without loathing me, for
the first time in a long time, without judging, and the two of us again, adjacent circles, maybe not yet connecting, with Menahem who died twice and
Friedrich, their son who died in an electric oven and a gas oven at one and
the same time, suddenly it was clear that every son died more than once.
And maybe that was submission for the first time, without protest, in a long
time, "known only to God," and the check that says: "Pay to the bearer ..
The writer suddenly smiled and said: If they weren't our wives we could fall
in love with them! And my wife went to Renate, who also stopped dancing,
and they sat at the small table where once, a tortoise Menahem brought from the yard slept a whole night (and I then tried to coax him to put out
his head and he refused and Menahem said something and suddenly the
tortoise put out his head and wagged it) the memory was ignited and went
out immediately, the sound of a plane landing not far from our house was
heard, and Hasha Masha sat for the first time since my son fell and talked
about him with a stranger.
Tape / -
And about ten minutes later when the writer dozed off and I counted
the planes fearing some new preparation, the two women got up, Hasha
Masha put a black crocheted scarf on her shoulder and gave Renate another scarf, a red one, with smaller, more delicate loops and when we went
out into the garden we looked like four bent old people. The sky was illuminated by the light of a full moon, an intoxicating summer night, gardens washed and the sound of sprinklers as then, years ago, the dead
castor oil plant was kindled for a moment by a silvery moonbeam and the
extinguished streetlamp near our house was lit, the wretched houses of
our neighborhood now looked beautiful, almost splendid in their poverty,
the enclosures of the port looked connected to one another and enchanted,
brightness touching the crests of the trees disappearing in the sky, the
dark illuminated and transparent, airy, somebody stole the city, breakers
of the sea rustle the silence in the garden, my wife nods, as if desperate to
confront me, and the forgiveness was already devoid of substance, unnecessary, that same old love on the back burner during all the hard days of
contempt, those long years, was lit once again. And then in that moment,
the shutter in my neighbor's house was lifted like a warning and I surely
wasn't thinking of how we'd approach him, how we'd get in, what I'd tell
him, and now my neighbor said through the window: Come in, I've been
waiting for you; he spoke German and Renate, who had previously separated from my wife, hugged Hasha Masha's shoulder again, bent over a bit,
something softened in her even more than before, and on her face I saw a
flash of a wild laugh like a rare bird that suddenly shrieks.
My neighbor was wearing an old-fashioned, unstylish suit (like a costume), on his head a gangster cap from the 1920s, some splendor devoid of
beauty and full of innocence, he had paper lips, maybe cardboard, Hitler
did die on the seashore, a Lag b'Omer bonfire of a man, Menahem dancing, dancing, I wanted to burst out laughing if I hadn't recalled how theatrical
I looked on memorial days and mourning ceremonies and in contrast I saw
how comprehensible that was to the German, how much he expected to
see Ebenezer dressed just like that. There was in that drama some contempt only sharpened by Renate's smile, the brazen pauper encountered
the desired spectator, in the window he stood, asking us in, the light
gleaming there, and Hasha Masha, without my saying anything to her, already knew what to say, what to do, how to go in, how to relate to the
moment, how to live it from Renate's smile and Ebenezer's seriousness,
and only an experienced teacher like me, who had stood all his life and
observed life and thought he was teaching children how to expel the British in diversionary acts, could have watched not only a drama but even his
son, seen everything as watching and being watched at the same time. And
Germanwriter, like a giant thing bursting out of the dark, held out a hand
to the window and said: Yes, yes, and as we approach the door the writer
leaps into the room through the window, just like that, as if to lighten the
moment, to grant it a certain unimportance-to reinforce its uniqueness.
And now we're bisected, facing the reality of the room, Ebenezer declaimed by a jester from the street of the lost dejected and the magic of
the enchanted moon in the sky in the window and I see the Last Jew
whose sources I had been writing for several months, close to here, on my
desk, through the window locked with the old repainted shutter ...
The home itself surprised me enough. Not only because it was so unlike
the Giladis' home but because for some reason I expected meager furnishings, as if Ebenezer's belonging both to Marar and the Holocaust required
some obvious trigonometry, but in the room we entered through the corridor there were black shelves with birds carved of wood as if they wanted
to fly. And a wonderful cabinet and a gigantic grandfather clock. And between the clean furniture made like ancient works of art and marvelously
preserved, there was nothing but an emptiness emphasized more than
appeased. As if the spaces of the house were deliberately filled with life,
there was no dust, no spider web, no grain of sand, only a thin volatile
smell of Lysol that had dried long ago, of scorching, of pungent sweets and
flowers taken out of a vase. The white walls, the glowing neon light, everything looked like part of a stage set, like a home that has no life in it but
is cleaned constantly and awaits some spectacle that's about to take place. The grandfather clock struck now, a beautiful Gothic cabinet polished with
purplish, maybe dark red, lacquer, some romanticism, some jest of the last
creations of nonexistent worlds, my neighbor dressed like a buffoon stood
there next to the giant bear and not far from him stood a woman, tall, her
hair really bluish, her eyes leaden, her expression strange and yet painful,
without a smile, as if she were trying to defend her buffoon. The German
shook Ebenezer's hand and said, Oh, thank God, and Renate smiled at the
woman, who didn't hold out her hand. Ebenezer smiled at me, clapped his
hands without a sound, and Renate said: We came! And she sat on a chair
whose back was covered with puffed pillows, and above hung two chandeliers, one beautiful, adorned with crystals without electric light, while the
other, simple, only one strong neon light, illuminated the room, and Renate
didn't look alone in her chair and blended in with the general atmosphere.
Ebenezer went to the grandfather clock and when he separated the German from the clock, the writer sat down and pulled out another cigarette
and lighted it and I tried to understand from my wife what was going to
happen. On Ebenezer's face was a smile I had sometimes encountered on
the faces of students caught red-handed, a painted pleading smile, and
my neighbor suddenly shut his eyes, with the expression of a puppy dog,
he stooped over a bit, illustrated on the wall, between the grandfather
clock and the cabinet, and started reciting something, in Polish. When I
raised my head I heard the numbers of the trains of Warsaw and their
schedules, I was perplexed, I had read about the Last Jew, and yet, there
was something so perverse in his appearance, so unsuitable, his wife
stood there like an orphaned question mark, the grandfather clock swung
its pendulum, the writer shut his eyes, inhaled smoke, tossed the unextinguished cigarette into the ashtray shaped like a ship's porthole, and
Renate's embarrassed, Ebenezer crouched, a little Jew of contemptible
humility, trying to please, and Renate yells: Enough, enough, and the
writer says: Ebenezer, no! And he tries to continue but the writer yells,
No, no! And I try not to look ashamed, try to sit, my wife looks at me understandingly, as if at long last cooperation between us has returned, some
form of the shared and full Ebenezer's melody sounded like a prayer of the
first part of the night, nocturnal Psalms in a study house, I didn't know
what to say, the writer looked angry, and then Ebenezer stopped, his body
shaking like an epileptic's, stopped shaking and he started laughing, he said: No? Not because of that? And I thought about the hours he had
waited, about the days, about the daughters he asked for, I wanted to
show the German that there was some picture album here of the daughters he claimed Ebenezer didn't have, and Ebenezer straightened up,
pulled his clothes, picked up a bottle standing on the table illuminated
by a strong light and drank from the bottle without pouring into a glass,
and said: Excuse me, and took another swallow and gave the bottle to the
German, the German drank a little and took out eyeglasses to read the
label. The German said, I understand, I understand, and Ebenezer said:
Fine vodka that, the best, and the German read the label again, drank
again from the bottle (didn't wipe the mouth of the bottle) said: Good
vodka, like a song, and Ebenezer said: You're quoting me, and the German said, I always quote you, Ebenezer ...
When the two of them gave me the bottle I refused. I said I had drunk
enough for one evening. I looked at my wife. For some reason she didn't
react to my words but held out her hand, took the bottle, tasted it, and
smiled, she didn't even grimace. Everybody accepted her sipping as obvious, the little radio played some tune and my neighbor said in French,
What a sweet sin! The music will cover everything, and Germanwriter
smiled, poured a shot glass, raised it said in Hebrew "L'Chaim," and drank.
The eyeglasses he had taken out before to read the label were still on his
nose, small ones, the kind worn by old tailors on the end of their noses.
The two of them emptied the bottle in five or six glasses one after another
in marvelous acrobatics, they made the shot glasses fly into their mouths,
swallowed the sharp vodka without batting an eyelash as if they were trying to wet the kidneys and liver, I really envied their ability to drink like
that. My wife now sat with eyes shut wrapped in the black shawl, I wondered what she was thinking about. When we stood at my son's grave I also
wondered sometimes what she was thinking about.