Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
And Sam Lipp-
Tape / -
Sam Lipp came to the old Ben-Gurion airport. When the plane extinguished its engines, the stewardess woke him up and said to him with a
smile: I think we've arrived. He picked up his valise, brushed his hair, and
got off. After a short bus trip, he came to customs. A policewoman hidden
in a giant wooden basin stamped his passport; he walked slowly to the exit.
Except for the valise in his hand, he hadn't brought anything with him.
When he went outside, a hot wind blew and the light was still clear. In the
distance he could almost love the ugliness surrounding everything like a
wreath of thorns.
He got into a cab, stretched out, and said: The Hilton, Tel Aviv. He
peeped out and through the windshield, the trees started becoming clear,
the narrow road became more familiar, barbed wire fences posted in his
mind between houses and boulevards faded away, he recalled that when he
slept in the plane he dreamed he was walking on Baron Hirsch Street in
Tarnopol carrying two challahs. Now, awake, he seemed to see the roads
to Tarnopol. The driver was listening to music and smoking a cigarette. Hebrew words on the radio became familiar. Syllables he didn't know before became a surer texture, for some reason he was afraid of history, the
structure of time, the molecules of relative time as opposed to absolute
time. He thought: Melissa is waiting for me at the corner.
At the entrance to the hotel, he paid the driver. The exorbitant price
didn't surprise him. When he came to the counter and said his name, the
clerk dialed and a few minutes later a tall beautiful girl appeared holding
a bouquet of flowers. She called a boy, put the one valise on a cart, and said
to Sam: Welcome to the Hilton! And she handed him the bouquet with a
ceremoniousness that seemed a little clumsy yet practiced. The beautiful
girl said she was the representative of the public relations department and
that the Hilton was proud to host him. She led him to a small room. He
apologized for the delay (she muttered to herself that they had expected
him a few days before), and after he signed the guest book studded with
the names of the world's great, beginning with the signature of Ben-Gurion
and then Frank Sinatra, he asked why it wasn't the other way around and
Frank Sinatra didn't come before Ben-Gurion, and she tried to smile, but
her teeth were too beautiful to waste on a meaningless smile, and they
went up together to the seventeenth floor and he was put into the big
suite. In one of the two rooms of the suite were bouquets of flowers sent
by the American cultural attache, the national theater, and a telegram from
the Minister of Education and Culture on a silver salver.
A basket of apples, flowers, cheese, biscuits, cookies, and crackers stood
in the middle of the table. He picked up an apple and bit into it. The
beauty put some notes on a big nightstand, opened the closed drapes, and
he saw the lights of Tel Aviv. Sam said to the beauty: You're wasted in this
temple, and she smiled a professional and polished smile. Then a person
phoned and said he was the manager of the theater and was waiting for him
at the airport, and he had just heard he had come and he was sorry, but he
hadn't been home for five evenings when he had waited for Sam at the
airport. Sam apologized; fatigue was leaking out of him in drops of sweat,
and they arranged to meet the next day. The beauty checked the bathroom, Sam paid the boy who brought the valise and he wanted to pay her
too, but the two of them looked at one another, didn't say a word and he
said, Sorry, thrust the money into his pocket, and said: Thanks. She said:
If you want anything call me and everything will be taken care of immedi ately. He told her: Everything's confused, something's messed up there,
and he pointed toward the seashore where Ebenezer and Fanya R. were
strolling slowly. Everything became shadows, his body shook, and she
waited, something of the pain that filled him infected her. He offered her
a cigarette she lit herself because his hands were shaking too much to light
it for her, and she smoked the long cigarette he had apparently bought on
the plane before he fell asleep. The room smelled of flowers, aftershave, and
apples, and he asked her to sit down and she sat down and dragged on the
cigarette and he asked why she was so beautiful, and she said with a modest smile that she had been a beauty queen, and he said That's it, how is it
to be a beauty queen? And she said, You see, you work in the Hilton, and he
smiled, but something in him didn't smile, wanted to flee, but he was stuck
to himself and since he couldn't do anything, his hands waved, his face was
pale, and then the beauty recalled that he had to record his personal details
and she took a form out of her jacket pocket, and he recorded the details and
said I should have filled out the details in Lebensborn, too, and she asked
what was Lebensborn, and he told her: A hotel to improve racially pure kingdoms, and he filled out the form, and she took it from his hands and glanced
at it, and asked the meaning of the word Gottglaubig he had written next to
the word nationality, and he muttered to himself more than to her: One who
has a real German faith, and she said, You must be drunk, no? And he said,
I drank all the way, did you ever host Heinrich Kramer here, and she said she
didn't know, but she could find out, and he said: Never mind, never mind,
and then she stood up hesitantly, waited, put out the cigarette in the ashtray, and apologized, it was clear from her face how sorry she was that the
crushed cigarette dirtied the polished ashtray, but he smiled at her and she
wiggled out, beautiful, and he lay down in bed, looked at the ceiling, time
passed, he didn't know how much, an hour, two, five, he munched on the
apples, ate cookies, and thought which side does a fish piss on. Then he
went to the bathroom and saw toilet paper and thought: That's Jewish toilet paper, and he was proud. Then he wanted to laugh at his pride, but his
face muscles were impermeable to his will and not far from him, a plane flew
low over Ebenezer's house and landed at the little airport near the big chimney, which he didn't yet know was Reading Chimney, and he said: I've got
to be objective, think objectively, formulate, maybe there's also objective
faith, objective theater, objective pain and disgrace, and thus he fell asleep for a little while and awoke and called the public relations department and
was told that the beauty had gone home and would come back later to a
reception for the ambassador of Peru.
Time flowed somehow. He fell asleep, and when he woke up, he felt as
if his body were crumbling, he turned on the radio and tried to watch it as
if it were television, but the radio had no screen and he closed the curtain,
lay down, sweated, and dreamed he was watering a tree and the tree refused to drink the water. Maybe he really did order the boy because he
came in wheeling a cart with a pot of coffee and cookies, and what was
clear was that he said: The ambassador of Peru is staying in the end suite,
and then he told him: My name's Samuel Lipker, and the boy said, Fine,
sir, and slammed the door behind him as if it were made of thin glass.
Then he apparently ordered more food because with his own eyes he saw
him gorging himself in the mirror and a girl who wasn't young, but not yet a
woman, picked up the dishes and went off, leaving him a toothpick and an
intoxicating smell of orange piss. The radio was on and he now understood
some of the words, and once again a cold sweat started creeping on his back.
He decided to take a shower or perhaps he took a shower because he had
nothing else to do. The water flowing felt nice on his body that was strange
to him. In the shower he smoked a cigarette under the stream of water, and
so he also started longing for Melissa and Licinda and the beauty queen.
Apparently more time passed because when he picked up the phone he was
already dressed and combed. They replied that the beauty had come, but
wasn't in her office, and who wants to know. He locked them in the phone
and locked his feet in his shoes and went out to the small balcony and looked
at the sea. When he went out to the corridor, he saw a woman bent over the
carpet plucking up grains of dust. The sight was depressing. He pressed the
button for the elevator and waited. Downstairs he searched for the beauty.
Then he thought maybe he should search for the ambassador of Peru, but he
didn't feel like asking. He felt pressure in his chest and sensed an incomprehensible need to look in the various mirrors and identify himself. He broke
into a locked room with a skill he hadn't used in a long time, and there was
the beauty queen. She wore fabulous clothes, her soft thin hands gleamed in
the light of the big chandelier and her bright eyes were more violet than
green or blue. Her hair was fair but without a clear tone, as if it were made
of cardboard. She was also laughing, apparently at the ambassador of Peru. The ambassador was signing his name in the guest book after Sam Lipp's
name, and he thought: She screws everybody, and went outside angrily. The
sight of the charming beauty queen with the ambassador of Peru offended
him. Outside he lit a cigarette.
Apparently he passed by the park because on the other side were rusted
houses. He thought of a concept he didn't understand at all, he thought of
a trigonometry of smell, something that reminded him of articles apparently
written about his play. The city was full of one-way streets that became more
and more familiar, burst out, and then disappeared. Even the boardwalk
square was familiar to him, and he said: "Here's the square," as if he understood. An American girl with prominent nipples in her shirt passed by him
and left a fragrant trail of white blood, he tried to see her from behind, but
he didn't turn his face and so he lost her. He thought of the beauty kissing
the bald head of the ambassador of Peru. Trees swayed in the wind and a
precisely shaped cypress sharpened its crest to the sky. There were also
stars, and he was glad about them. Beyond the window of a cafe, people sat
and drank. He watched them and said to himself: Here's mother, here's
mother, here's Aunt Leah, here's Lipkele. Here's Uncle Yom, here's Yashka,
here's the Ukrainian. Maybe they sat naked in the cafe and policemen
whipped them, but they smiled even though they had no teeth. He was
terrified, but didn't do a thing about it. The manager of the cafe sat outside
and read a score of "Making Whoopee." He thought, this is how they made
a lady of jazz. And he thought about what Charlie Parker told him when he
was hanging around New York searching for a celebration of authentic and
well-woven social slime. The dead sat and acted his family for him. He
wanted to break the window, and so he hurried on his way. Farther down was
a boulevard, jazz and dead uncles, he thought, soda with straws, I'm walking
in zigzags. Cafes full of sleepy young people, thinking thoughts. A girl
wanted him to sign a petition against some occupation, he signed, in Hebrew, Samuel Lipker. He bought Le Figaro in a newspaper shop, because you
could buy papers from all over the world there. It excited him that in a place
of dead people you could buy newspapers in foreign languages and a little girl
he had to notice could lick ice cream with a heartrending sweetness.
Apparently that night couldn't be reconstructed. An El Al plane reached
its destination and Obadiah Henkin stood and waited for his guests. Boaz sat
in Rebecca's house and heard how Nehemiah hated Joseph when he saw him in Rachel's face. Samuel Lipker saw a pair of legs in the opening of a house
and next to the legs a small bottle of brandy. He stopped and looked at the
legs and then at the owner of the legs. She smiled and licked her lips. Not
far behind her appeared a shadow of a man wearing tight pants. Sam didn't
say a thing and she became impatient. Finally he said to her: For ten dollars
and the bottle too. She laughed and said: I'm not a whore for dollars, and that
was the most beautiful thing he heard, a woman with a slightly charred face.
On the mattress in the yard an open light appeared, blinking on and off, he
tried to sleep with her, thought of the beauty queen in the hotel with the
ambassador of Peru, but couldn't and he gave her another five dollars and
heard yells not far away from there and stormy Greek music beyond the
breakers of the sea. The mattress was filthy. The woman lifted her skirt,
smiled, and held the bottle to her mouth and he drank from the bottle and
forgot her and thought about the beauty and then lit her a cigarette. When
the man in tight pants appeared, he ordered drinks for them all. The man
saw the wad of dollars in Sam's hand, and yelled: There's a party and two
other girls and three men immediately appeared.
The bar was dark with red lights burning in it. A fellow with an Uzi
limped in. The fellow said to the bartender, who looked a little scared:
That's an American sucker, what are you crying to me, and the soldier aimed
the Uzi and laughed, and then they all laughed. Sam drank a lot and so did
they. They told him to pay fifty dollars. He paid. Then he hugged them
and started dancing. A buxom Greek woman tried to sing into a microphone, but an Arab tried to burn her dress. The scared bartender asked
them not to cheat the American, but nobody paid attention to the bartender and took another thirty dollars from Sam. He also danced with the
Greek woman. Then he said: That's like Paganini trying to compete with
all of you in backgammon. They didn't really understand it and said: You
want backgammon? And he said, Yes, and he let them cheat him at backgammon and he paid. And then he patted the fellow with the Uzi, crushed
him, threw him at the lamp that went out immediately, aimed the other
lamp at them, and also aimed the Uzi, cocked it and fired into the air. The
police of the ten-twenty shift had gone now. He said quietly: Now stand
up nice, and then he took all their wallets out of his pocket along with
three watches and two chains with medallions and divided them, and they
were too stunned to say a word, and he went to the counter, took out his dollars, counted, took more dollars out of the wallets and when his money
was returned to him, he took five hundred pounds, and said to them: You
wanted to fool me? Do you have any idea whom I've dealt with in my life?
Do you have any idea who you're dealing with?