Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
He sat down in a chair and burst out laughing. They looked at him. One
of them wanted to get up and hit him, but one crushing blow was enough
for him not to try again. Sam shot three more times into three foil cigarette
packs pasted to the ceiling, returned the Uzi without a magazine to the
limping soldier, and said: You don't understand anything, who's going to
bring something to eat now, I'm paying!
And that was how the celebration began that ended later on the seashore when the Border Patrol, searching for terrorists, stopped them and
he produced his documents (passport, certificate of honor from the Hilton,
and a letter from the Minister of Education and Culture), and then they
walked in the sand and sang. They said: What a real mafia this is, and he
really took care of us, and the whore kept walking with him and went into
the hotel with him, and in the distance he saw the beauty with three other
women sitting and drinking coffee. He took the whore upstairs, took from
his pocket a key he had previously taken out of the beauty's purse, opened
the door of the suite of the ambassador of Peru, lay the whore on the bed,
and she jumped up and down on the springy bed, and said: What a beautiful ceiling, and he said: You surely know rooms by the ceilings, and then
he said: I'll be right back! And she wept at the sight of the wealth and
beauty and the sea spread out in the window, and he went down, and the
queen said with unrestrained malice: This isn't a hotel for such people!
And he told her all that had happened, and he started laughing and there
were tears in her queenly eyes, and he took her to his room and lay next
to her, and said to her: Show me your gigantic artificial breasts, and she
showed him, and then he entered her, and when he was inside her he
called New York and said to Lionel: Listen, man, come here immediately,
all of you, it's urgent, and he hung up.
Tape / -
Tonight (I'm talking into the tape recorder again), tonight something
strange happened to me. I walked on the seashore with Fanya R. As usual,
she picked up shells and threw them and I looked at the spires of the churches of Jaffa. When we came to the marina, I fell asleep on my feet. I
don't know how that happened. My body stood still. You can say that a
person who just now turned seventy-two is liable to fall asleep on his feet,
but I'm not an expert in the lives of old people like me. From what I can
tell from what she said, Fanya R. tried to carry me, but I was too heavy.
Maybe because of the relation between the full moon and the low tide or
the high tide, I don't know exactly, but it wasn't possible to move me from
the spot, Fanya R. went to the Henkin home to call for help, but Henkin
wasn't at home and Hasha and Fanya R. called Boaz, but the phone was
apparently disconnected. They took a cab and went to Boaz (she told me),
went up to the roof and called him. I lay on the chilly sand and slept. And
then a rooster crowed. In my sleep I thought cocks were forgotten on the
seashore of Tel Aviv, but with my own ears I heard the crowing.
I opened my eyes. A bearded sculptor wearing eyeglasses was sitting on
the beach sculpting water. A policeman on a motorcycle passed by not far
away, but didn't notice me. The flash of a spotlight illuminated the beach
for a moment, and went out. When I turned my face, I saw the Hilton. The
rooms were lit up in a bold mosaic. Independence Park above me was dark,
but the moon lit up some trees and a sculpture that looked like a bird frozen in flight and a few pieces of limestone. I felt a need to die, to weep,
to eat hamburgers, and then I understood that the hundreds of hours I had
spoken, those dozens of tapes, had cast a high wall off me and I thought of
my life, was it nice, was it good? I didn't know what to think, that was the
first time in years I was almost liberated from all the people who had been
talking in me until then, and I'm talking now on one moment, I'm talking
not to myself, not to an anonymous audience, not in a nightclub, I'm talking to Germanwriter and to Henkin who will hear these things and will say,
Ah, Ebenezer stopped being a Last Jew, and if I stop being a Last Jew, will
they be able to write the book I wove for them from memories that weren't
mine, and suddenly I was alone with my life, with Mother, with the old
charred smell of the cowshed and the casuarinas and eucalyptus trees and
the fragrance of citrus blossoms, and an awful longing for wood, for the face
hidden in wood, burned in me, and I thought of Boaz, of a little boy I left
here so many years ago, of Samuel, the two of them I felt as if they were
struggling in me for a birthright, Esau and Jacob, in me, a hollow person
like me, who went to search for a father and found a disaster and now starts returning from the disaster and bringing down more disasters. I longed for
Dana, but also for Fanya R. I thought about the German who came today,
about Hasha, about Henkin, about poor Jordana who went back to work at
the Ministry of Defense and still watches television every night, suddenly
I knew everything, but I didn't know anything, I didn't know other things
I once knew, I almost didn't know things told me by the dead people I had
amassed inside me and I kept myself from being myself, and that was how
I was saved from death maybe even more than the boxes I built for Kramer,
Weiss, and others, not everything was clear to me on the damp sand, I tried
to get up, but I couldn't, I knew Fanya R. wouldn't let me stay like that,
that she'd get help, and I waited, I wasn't afraid, I was tired, dead tired,
and hungry, and thirsty, and my body ached, but it ached me! And that was
my body that ached and I thought about Mother, about the awful life she
lived, about the curse that patched up her life like glue, I thought: I
couldn't be the son of Joseph because there's no wickedness in me, no
anger, no rage, no vengeance, no glorious words, there are no splendid
paper flowers in me, I'm not especially wise, I'm a simple man, like a
sponge, my wisdom is in my hands, I know wood in its distress as it says
on the wall in the community house in the settlement. I thought about
Boaz and knew that even though he's my son he's also the son of Joseph
and suddenly it wasn't strange anymore, I understood that there are things
I may never understand. I thought about Einstein's theory and I couldn't
recite it anymore, Kafka's stories, I didn't remember them, I remembered
Mother working from morning till night and Ahbed helping her, how I sat
in a corner, sucking a finger, hurting her bitterness, and how I wanted
somebody to love me, and there wasn't anybody to love me and a deaf girl
came and sat and looked at me, and then Dana and how Boaz was born and
the struggle between Mother and Dana over Boaz and I hated him then,
and Mr. Klomin and the Captain, and the children who plagued me because I wasn't like them, what a ridiculous thing I was, for a settlement of
people who had started entering gold frames, I had nothing, only the wood
and the passion to know who really was my father and how again and again
I imagined father Nehemiah, whom I envied because he might or might
not have been my real father, Nehemiah who died on the seashore of Jaffa,
so as not to betray his dream, and gloomy memories rose in me on the seashore, pure memories I hadn't remembered for thirty years, I, Ebenezer Schneerson, an ashamed old man, who didn't hit me, who didn't strike or
offend me in my life, and I, with a crooked back, in a hundred fifty nightclubs stand up and recite, so that Samuel Lipker can get rich, what a buffoon I was, but I loved Samuel, his boldness, my life was a contemptible
collusion against myself, a pauper of shoe soles, who am I? Why am I? Something happens, a late awakening, second childhood, I know the limestone
rocks now, the terror of barbed wire fences drops on me, Kramer turns into
a distant picture, maybe I dreamed him too, but that's not important anymore and those yearnings ... And I waited for Fanya R. I shook from the
damp, I tried to sit up, but I didn't have the strength. But that wasn't important to me either, what was really important was after fifty years to be
again somebody I once was, for good or for bad; what did they know about my
thoughts, about my heavy and bitter meditations, when Mother and the
Captain sat and talked and he would raise his voice and she, contemptuous
but beautiful, and there was in her, beyond everything, some decency.
Tape / -
I'm Ebenezer Schneerson. I am suddenly me. I don't remember a thing
except what happened to me, like many people, I'm just another person,
love wood, lacquers, love the smell of sawdust, everything has dropped off
me, I'm talking into a tape, maybe for the last time in my life, afterward I
have and will have nothing to say, nothing to recite, I look around, the
world's grown old. Only now do I understand that the trees Dana planted
are no longer saplings, that our new house is old now and old-fashioned and
nobody lives there. I see Ahbed and I don't know if he's the son or the
grandson or the great-grandson, I try to shut my eyes, concentrate, nothing comes, I'm left with myself alone, a cockroach, like everybody, in the
backyard of my life, with Fanya R., with a certain, unclear future, for a while,
I have no more memories of others I'm only for myself.
Tape / -
The moment I came back to what I left years ago, today I know, was the
moment when they met above, above me, in that room in the Hilton, and
I didn't know. I saw many lights-I didn't see the one light he stood in, he
looked outside and suddenly if he had yelled at me, from the balcony of the
seventeenth floor I would have gone on reciting for him, and so the door was opened and slammed and I was finished, as I started, with some slow
and uncertain dying toward nobeing ...
Tape / -
Mr. Ofen, Opal Books Ltd.
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.