Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
In the women he found in his wandering, he sought the image of Rebecca
that he wore as an amulet around his neck, but the only thing the women
wanted from him was to be impregnated in his honor. When somebody
in a tavern in Paris quoted a German philosopher who said that in vengeance and in love, women are more barbarous than men, Joseph said,
and in life in general, and thought about the bold and roguish beauty of
his great-grandmother.
Tape / -
In those ten years of wandering, Joseph Rayna begat fifty-two sons and
daughters. Women saw him (as one woman put it in a letter preserved in
the Nazi archive, titled: "Female claims concerning the imaginary virility
of individual Hebrews who abused the innocence of Aryan women and bred
with them with impure blood (A) Hebrew gestation, (B) contrition of Aryan
women, (C) example of Francesca Glauson who delivered her son to the
Gestapo in Bonn in 1942 and after the boy died, in an incident that took
place in a camp, she described in detail the cunning of Hebrew wooing and taught a class of girls in Haan and later in Hamburg how to escape those
and other errors, Heidelberg, 1944") as a harsh and deformed angel noble
as beggars can sometimes appear: delicate and sensual. Women, says the
letter of that woman, Frau Helma Rauchsfinger, loved the arrogant indulgence of Joseph Rayna, his self-confidence demonstrated in a generous
and light manner. By submitting to that man-like other Hebrews-they
thought they were fighting sins that wanted so much to be committed and
overcoming themselves to be worthy afterward for somebody who would
compensate them for all the suffering mixed with tormented joy, a person
who would grant them bliss and safety and would wipe away the disgrace
they had to experience in their flesh to know it up close. There's nothing
like carnal experience to grant a woman what a man can get from abstract
thought, maybe, writes Frau Helma Rauchsfinger, a woman can't even
think an abstract thought, only abstract hating and loving are allowed
both men and women.
When I read that material years later I laughed also because all my
lovers were sons of Joseph and also because all my life I had been
searching for Joseph and didn't find him and even though I thought he
was my father, I was the only person of all the descendents of Joseph
who couldn't really have been his son.
Joseph remembered all his offspring and all his women. He loved them
no more than they loved him, but he understood their lust for him, just as
the flower surely understands that not every butterfly is in love with it, but
needs its smell and its pollen.
Joseph treated his women with a chivalry that many people in the late
nineteenth century said had disappeared from the world. After wandering in many countries, he came to Denmark. In a fishing village in northern
Jutland, where the Baltic Sea and the Atlantic Ocean meet, at different water
levels, in a restrained dreary and bewitched light, the most enchanted light
he had ever seen, he met a good-looking painter, fair and sickly, she sat in
the strong cold, wrapped in a yellow wool shawl that glowed in the distance
and painted purple waves where a scarlet hue poured a sense of ancient
death and a boat, abandoned by gray-faced sailors who would never return,
was bobbing on them. In the enchanted light, the painter looked like a
goddess carved from rock. And she said: In that boat sits my brother, who
disappears every winter and someday will return. Later on, she told Joseph that her mother brought soil from the Holy Land and her father was buried there, I think, she said, that he was a wandering Jew who came upon
Jutland as a youth, and lived his whole life as a Dane but before he died he
recalled his origin and asked his family to bury him on the Mount of Olives.
She expressed no opinion on the subject and didn't care if her father was
a Jew or not. She was a painter and painted the strong light.
As the winter intensified, they wandered to the Netherlands, went to
Paris, from there to Italy, sailed to Alexandria and from there to the Land of
Israel. Those were good times in Joseph's life. He listened to the painter's
story about the paintings she was to paint, loved her exciting asceticism, her
lack of lust for him, and her sharp and unique love.
She also feared he would fall in love with her as she loved. Her belly
swelled and when they came to Jerusalem, she died in his arms in the seventh month of her pregnancy. Joseph buried her next to her father's grave.
Then he toured the Land of Israel and saw the vistas described by his
mother who was the last queen of the Hasmonean line. On Mount Tabor, he
met a German aristocrat, Adorno von Melchior who wanted to establish a
Jewish kingdom in the Land of Israel. When Joseph met Sarah, the wife of
the German aristocrat, he felt he was liable to sin against his great love
hung around his neck as an amulet. Joseph became the secretary of the
aristocrat von Melchior. He wrote his letters in a florid handwriting and the
woman he loved almost more than all the women he had met slept like an
animal with mustached men who would beat her, Druses in white kaffiyehs
with sullen eyes, and she said: I do that to forgive you for your errors, and
the aristocrat said: She doesn't sleep with me because she's my wife and
she loves me. Joseph understood the profound bond between the two
queens he had met in his life, his mother and Sarah the wife of the aristocrat, and when he saw how much she yearned for him, he tried to touch her
but she rejected him even though her womb began to stab and she wanted
to give him children. After she told him things in that vein, Joseph wrote
seventeen poems, each a description of a part of her body he didn't know.
In one of the poems he described Frau von Melchior's neck as it looked in
the transparent and strong Jerusalem light when her collar fell down and the
cleft of her bosom looked like the winding of a beloved snake. The Frau
loved the poems and he read them to her standing at perfect and absurd
attention. On his travels for von Melchior he met the Jewish Pioneers who were establishing the first settlements. He pitied their hard life and suffered the pain of their enslavement to Baron Rothschild. He liked to feast
his eyes on the handsome daughters of the settlers in the burning afternoons
of the Land of Israel. They were full of yearnings for their dream from the
moment they started building their miserable houses. With gloomy expressions, they tried to celebrate, contracted malaria, and wept.
A year Joseph Rayna stayed in the Land of Israel. He wrote in one of his
poems that the discovery of God among the rocks of the wasteland is testimony to the destruction of the nation. He parted from the farmers' daughters who, having no other songs, sang his songs as if they were hymns. He
parted from the wife of the German aristocrat who loved him so much she
fled for a month to some Druse sheikh who kept her tied to a rock in the
mountains of Transjordan. After leaving a bouquet of flowers on the fresh
grave of the Danish painter who had carried his son in her womb, he left
the Land of Israel, went to Alexandria, wandered to Persia, came to India,
and on a gloomy day in the winter of eighteen ninety-eight, he came back to
our city. He went to his mother's grave, and then to the grave of Rebecca
Secret Charity, the wife and daughter of Secret Charity, and closed himself
in a room and wrote elusive songs about the splendid, pedigreed, and desired
Land of Israel, and then he was discovered by a group of young people who'd
gather in the forest, wave flags in secret, and dream of a settlement in the
Land of Israel. In the exhausting cold, around a bonfire, the young people sat
and sang songs brought by an emissary. They sang Joseph's songs without
knowing it. Nehemiah Schneerson, the leader of the group, met Joseph in
the cemetery when he went to say kaddish on his father's grave and invited
him to tell his group about the Land of Israel.
In the group of young people craving salvation was one girl, a close friend
of Rebecca Sorka who would ascend to the Land of Israel on the first day of
the twentieth century and be called Rebecca Schneerson and would be the
mother and grandmother of Boaz Schneerson. Joseph looked at Rachel and
she trembled at the sight of the gigantic organ that was like a beam between the eyes of the well-born prince who told about the Land of Israel,
without emotion or yearnings. Shutting her eyes, Rachel Brin gleaned a
little of the light Joseph had taken from his great-grandmother's grave. The
light balled up into pain in her womb. When Nehemiah heard Joseph's
songs, which he had sung before without paying attention to their words (Joseph read the poems despondently but unashamedly), the blood drained
from his face and at that moment Joseph would look at Rachel. Nehemiah
was furious at the songs without knowing why. He was a genius in the
yeshiva who had disappointed his rabbi, who had expected great things
from him. But when Joseph read all his poems and Rachel felt stabbings in
her belly, at that very moment, on the other side of the city, at the entrance to the forest, Rebecca Sorka got up, and far from her friend Rachel,
whom she had recently abandoned, looked out the window of her room and
saw a light glowing in the forest but she didn't see its reflection in the
windowpane. In the forest, naked winter trees awaited her. It was evening
and she didn't leave her house. These things are the absolute truth. When
she woke up in the morning, at the sight of the ceiling above her, she said
to herself: My death canopy! In the shadows of the chiaroscuro, in her eyes
black dogs were depicted slicing a person's body. The person she didn't
know but for some reason she thought she should know him. After she
dismissed the maid who came to brush her long delicate hair, she crossed
her legs, sat up in bed, and thought about the man she had seen before in
her fantasies, which were still too tormenting for her to think about now.
So she formulated them to herself with fake indifference and wrote Yeshua,
deliverance, on the wall of the stove bulging into her room.
When she came out of her room, she brushed her hair herself in the
kitchen over the simmering skillets and pots and when she saw a fish
fluttering in the sink she threw her hairbrush to the floor, wrapped herself
in a coat, and went out. Her mother's eyes followed her from the window
and then the fish was destroyed by a blow that shook the table. Rebecca's
mother said to the cook: They've gone crazy, the young people, they just go
to America, to the Land of Israel, got no manners, what a world! The cook
didn't understand what she meant and so she didn't answer her. Rebecca
wandered around aimlessly. The light she saw in the window still distressed
her, but guided her steps. Even now, in the stinging cold, she knew precisely
how beautiful she was. Her beauty was the source of her yearnings for herself. The taste of the night hadn't yet vanished and Rebecca hugged herself
without emotion and her hands shook. She didn't shout because she knew
that nobody deserved to hear her shout. Now the wind flew snowflakes to
her. The houses flogged by the wind were wrapped in a dull glow of frost
from the squashed sun flickering between the heavy weary clouds.
Rebecca took an apple out of her pocket, polished it on the fabric of her
coat, and bit into it. The bittersweet apple pleased her. Snowflakes started
sticking to her coat, she tasted in her mouth the jaws of the dogs preying
on the man of her fantasy. Before getting up in the morning, before she
opened her eyes, and as usual she counted the dead children she envisioned, she lost her reflection in the window and saw the dead in the
obituaries plucked off the synagogue wall and hung over her bed. The dogs'
teeth smelled like perfume. She put the dead children into a gigantic suitcase clasped with leather straps.
The suitcase exploded and eyes burst out of it. The eyes were words
plucked from the obituaries, they flew in the room and sought a hold in the
paper where they had been written before. The words would stroke her
and torture and all the time she would think quickly: How many dead do
I really know, and would count the dead and make a list on a scrap of paper
and look at the list and say: There were more and I don't remember.
Rebecca spat an apple pip and trembled. A thin layer of ice covered the
wooden boards that had been laid next to the houses. People passing by
were so wrapped up that only their eyes showed. A carriage harnessed to
a pair of horses wrapped in blankets passed by and sprayed mud. When she
entered the copse, the top branches of the trees were already touching the
shreds of sky sailing quickly under the heavy clouds instead of over them.
By the time she climbed up the hill, the charm of the flying sky was extinguished and the air was layers of heavy, hostile gray. An unseen hand
played with the sun that was seen flickering now and then, heavy, and
immediately extinguished. At the moment of flickering, the top branches
of the trees would move in the wind like sparks and she saw that as a sign
that everything was crushed and broken and so she could blend more easily
into something as hopeless and stupid as she. And then, as if by accident,
she came to a river. The river was frozen and white. From the shadows of
light she imagined she saw a cow munching snow across the river. Then
she understood that those were linden trees. On the bank of the river, she
stood still; I'm darling and wicked, she said, threw away the rest of the
apple, took hold of the hem of her skirts, and lifted them.
Her naked skin was notched now by a strong burst of wind from the
river. The cold was crushing and came with a blow of wind, and stabbed
her. She felt a lust she had never known before. The wind ripped into her body, through her groin gaping to it, and she felt the cold penetrate through
the veins into her innards, enter her belly, up to her throat and choke her.
Her nipples hardened and her body sharpened. Blissful now as never before, she was disgusted with herself, started smiling and the cold changed
to downy warmth. And again was sharp as a razor. Her heart beat hard. The
stone that had lain on her chest for many days began to melt. I won't have
to search for my other half anymore, she said to herself, if I stand in profile, they won't see me. The razor cut her, she put her hand on it and felt
the warm blood. She collected the blood in her hand and licked it. Across
the river, once again a linden tree disguised as a cow munched snow that
now turned black. She felt licentious and wonderful and wanted to marry
a woman. Threshold of my violated honor, she said with a splendor just as
false as the sudden bliss before that, I'm done with sadness, eighteen useless years old, the blood now flowed from her mouth, not from her groin.
Inside her, something refused to pity her and so she felt grateful. The kingdom of naked trees around her was a pierced slave to her, lords of cutting
down, glorious in evil, she said. An indifferent aristocratic and frosty wind
blew toward her. And then, on the verge of her bloody defeat, she undid
her skirts, let them drop, gathered her hair in the kerchief she kept in her
pocket, rubbed her hands with ice, put her frozen palms on her face, wiped
the blood of her groin from her mouth, and stepped back as if the river
were a lord and you couldn't turn your back on him. She thought: nothing
can ever again endanger my beauty, and the solitude filled her with joy and
the joy created tears that weren't tears of sorrow, they were red in the
extinguished and kindled light and they dropped onto the ice.