Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
In the doorway of the apartment of the Committee of the Dead stands
Obadiah Henkin. A charred smell of his son rises in me. A German saving
matches tosses my son straight into the fire, how much is two-fifths of an
American cent in Israeli money? Sturmbahnfuhrer of literature counts
matches and I come to meet him, how do the bereaved parents of Jewish children look in his eyes? My neighbor sends regards with a poem.
Marar, from Marar, he sends regards, south, there Arabs were expelled
sir, surely you weep for their fate, I can imagine that, and justly, and unjustly, a Yemenite woman beams at me in the doorway of the sanctuary of
the Shimonis who have never lacked money, filing pains, come in, shaking
hands, smiling, everything's professional, organized, very formal, one of the
veteran Hebrew teachers, and I thought about Jordana's devotion to us,
about her beauty wasted on us. Of all the sons, she told me, I love Menahem
the best. At first I was amazed at the phrase, then I got used to it, as if it
were obvious that of all the sons she'd choose Menahem, I would almost
have married them off to one another, in moments of nightmare, at night,
maybe against Noga, between one dozing and another. And when she came
to our house and Hasha Masha looked at her suspiciously but also graciously,
with a certain compassion, but without contempt, she didn't give in, wanted
to see the photos again, to hear the poem Menahem wrote, spoke angrily of
Noga who was unfaithful to Menahem and went to live with Boaz, back
then she surely didn't know Boaz. I wanted to say to her: Look, Menahem
died many years ago, you were then four, five, six years old, but she'd fix
me with a wild look, ardent and virginal at the same time, what's the difference? As if love or life really could be divided into periods, everything
is one piece, and if I've got our Menahem, why shouldn't she? Maybe
Jordana was his great love? And she smiles a professional, almost cold smile
at me, surely I know her dark side, when she sits in my house and loves my
son with a desperate love. Here in the Shimonis' house, she's on duty, frozen, modest, smiling, embracing her dear parents, who knows how many of
them were previously her lovers, and she dropped them for Menahem, her great love, what do I know? I know that there were two men in her life,
something happened to both of them, they said of her that she kills men.
They're afraid of her. She brings bad luck, they said, and ever since then
enclosed in the department of commemoration, letters, poems, memorial
books, statues, always willing to help, to run to the printers, to study, to
find material, to find contributions or grants, and surely Menahem her
great love was a fake Menahem, not the one that was but the one I made
up out of Boaz's lies. But she loves him and I won't rob her of him, what
do I understand about love? When my only love is Hasha Masha sitting now
and loathing me in her heart and yet loving me in her own way, as if her
malice is a dim yearning of flesh ...
Everybody eats, standing or sitting, talking, Germanwriter sits in a corner, in the green armchair, surrounded by human beings and he notices me
and something strange, mysterious lights up in his eyes for a moment and
goes out, I think of Jordana, look at her, I think of the German, of his look,
is that regret? Is that vengeance? Is that an impossible measuring to see
the condemned after what happened, to measure them for the death that
is destined and withheld from them?
Here they are, all of them, the Davids, the Cohens, the Sackses, the Ilans,
all the parents Jordana and I assemble, connecting their nights of terror to
days of tours to the Golan, Sinai, Jerusalem, air force bases, to places where
the great battles took place, I tasted the delicacies Mrs. Shimoni served
me, naturally I was careful not to munch the plastic vegetables, not to open
by mistake the pack of cigarettes from which a rubber doll jumps out with
a sharp screech, the Shimonis' sense of humor was never to my taste, but
I envied their ability to laugh even next to the picture of their son, to buy
nonsensical objects together in all kinds of places in the world, to return
to an imaginary and impossible childhood, and Jordana, as always, knows
how to appease, to rout the pain, to organize a group dance of graves. They
eat they laugh they drink, and I always inspire here the same respect everybody needs at special moments when a correct quotation of a biblical chapter or of Alterman or Bialik grants metaphysical meaning to a moment, to
say solemnly: Maybe once in a thousand years our death has meaning, and
to see how they become serious at Alterman's words, aware that they have
lost beloved sons, to see a sublime vision beyond the yellowing bindings of
the books they've issued in their memory and are now forgotten in dusty cases ... Mrs. Shimoni asked me if I liked the food, I said I never ate a
better mushroom pie and she smiled at me, tapped my back and so at
long last I could sit. Jordana finished a round of handshaking and hugs in
the enormous room, and I could see her stand alone a moment, belonging and not belonging, trying to be drawn out of herself, not to be seen,
with her eyes shut she stood, as if muttering a prayer that was foreign to
us, everybody was buzzing around her, and then she stepped toward me,
her back bent, sat down next to me, pressed her foot and thigh and carefully put her hand on mine, like a secret bride, gently crushed my hand as
if her hands were also muttering incantations, and then she opened her
eyes that had been shut when she sat down, or perhaps landed on the sofa,
and very slowly the flush returned to her face and the smile was stuck in
its place and once again she was charming and necessary to everybody and
lost to herself. For some reason, I recalled the first time we met, when I
came to her on behalf of the Committee of Parents, which was then in its
infancy, to help me finance a book about the son of the writer Aviram who
wrote heartrending texts about his son and we sat then for long nights and
pasted the photos and the writer Aviram compiled lines from various poems
and then, at the front of the book, he quoted Alterman: Don't say I came
from dust, you came from the stranger who fell in your stead! Jordana now
asked me how was Hasha Masha and I knew that in fact she wanted to ask
me how was Menahem, but she didn't ask, I said that Hasha Masha was
eating vegetable soup and loathing, and she understood, and then when
she started comparing my clothes to the clothes of her uncle who was
always dressed with splendid restraint and never as an actor in a play like
most Israelis, I felt for the first time, after many years, a physical attraction
to a strange woman, her body clinging to my body, her thigh to my thigh,
her foot to my foot, I can imagine what was going on through the dress,
where the legs led, as Menahem once told me when I asked him why he
peeped on the stairs toward the second floor of my uncle Nevzal's house
where a young woman went up with her dress flying. The secret of our
youth, Jordana, on both sides of life, is alien to Menahem, negates him and
something rose in me, something that for the first time in years opposed
Menahem himself, maybe envied him, not against myself, and the death
that led him away from me. Germanwriter still sat opposite, I could see
him through the bodies moving in the room. Corruption fills me beside Jordana, she sees me as the father of her lover and I'm surely betraying
both of them.
And then I heard her say in English: Yes, this is Mr. Henkin, and I raised
my face, and a big man (now that he stood up I saw how big he was) stood
over me, his eyes like two clear lakes, caught in a kind of thin veil as sometimes on the eyes of an aging dog, his face smiled a smile that was forced
but also innocent and perfect, a wise smile intellectuals sometimes have,
I tried to stand up but my legs became stiff and he said: Sit, sit, and
Jordana stood up carefully so as not to cut herself off from my foot too
forcefully and she chuckled, a chuckle that was a mixture of sympathetic
complaint, See you, Henkin, she said in her official voice, and from now on,
the picture of Menahem facing him is a group picture with a Yemenite girl,
and the man stood over me, still smiling, a pensive second passed, Jordana
was now smiling her saccharine smile at the drinks table, unsheathing fingernails of dry and charming purity (and I surely know her wild lust, her
eyes staring at photos of Menahem, staring at his dead flesh) and she disappears now, mingles in the crowd, at the window the crests of the trees
of the boulevard can be seen, a moon is shining on them a silvery light and
a pleasant chill blows from the window. I didn't know what to do, my hand
seemed to reach out by itself, I said: Yes, nice to meet you, my body still
bound to the storm taking place in me before my son's fiancee vis-a-vis the
bearishness of the German's full body, and then he sat, introduced himself,
as if hangmen also have to be polite.
With his king-size body he completely filled the empty space left by the
thin Jordana. His long legs rose a little, stuck to one another, even his head
was higher than mine, although when he leaned his head on the back of the
sofa and the soft fabric touched his hair, we were almost the same height
and now I could peep at his profile. Before his face looked like a hybrid of
a giant dog and ancient trees, something soft, kind, but his profile was
different, harsh and sharp, his nose that looked a little squashed from the
front looked aggressive from the side, arrogant, in his cheeks more
existential suffering than real suffering was obvious, something serious,
devoid of softness. His profile had some blend of innocent nobility but
also soft earthiness, for a moment he even shriveled and became tinier
than he really was and instead of Jordana's delightful behind there was
now the giant ass of a German, solid, heavy, a man who looked sated but full of remorse, and suffering was stamped on his face, a suffering whose
nature I didn't know, my mind was empty.
I didn't know what to say, I didn't know what not to say, maybe because of the picture of Amnon, the Shimonis' son, hanging across from
me, thoughts were contradictory, so maybe I told him: When I was a child
we had a sexton who would wait in the corner until the women got up from
the bench and would sit down on the bench quickly so his body would absorb the warmth of their bodies, and I tried to laugh, even though he didn't
succeed either, the two of us thought about Jordana who had been sitting
here before, he tapped me carefully on the shoulder, his hand was manicured, delicate though very big, I spoke broken English and he looked forward toward the backs that were now wildly hugging the girl of our sons'
dreams. Mrs. Shimoni walked around with a tray from one person to another, her cleaning woman served drinks, Mr. Shimoni in an amusing
Tyrolean hat was standing at the bar and pouring drinks as if the whole
thing were a big joke. The sons are laughing at them, I thought, and the
German pulled a cigarette out of a handsome silver case, a pleasant smell
of good tobacco wafted from it, he offered me a cigarette, I refused politely, he lit it with a gold lighter that seemed to be swallowed up in his
gigantic hand, I was afraid he'd be burned but then he put the lighter back
in his pocket, inhaled smoke and I could see how nice his suit was, the
vest, once I was an expert in such things, an English suit, not stylish, solid,
and yet, maybe because of the beautiful scarlet tie, maybe because of the
sky-blue shirt, he didn't look like a prosperous merchant but like an artist
who doesn't really want to look like an artist, a man of change but he also
had the tranquility of clarity, which unites everything into a pleasant unity.
And surely that's what we all aspire to, it suddenly angered me that he was
such a good writer, as a gift to my son I wanted him to be a bad writer, but
some sympathy was ignited in me, a closeness to the man, the expression
of his eyes, when he heard my stupid story about the sexton he was gracious and not evasive, looked straight into my eyes, inhaled smoke, and was
with me despite the great tumult around us. A picture of a Lag b'Omer
bonfire rose in my mind, a gigantic effigy of Hitler was burned, Menahem
and his friends sang, Hitler's dead your mother's sick a German submarine,
and a woman who declares on the radio: To punish Hitler he shouldn't be
killed, he should be brought to the Land of Israel and shown a kibbutz, and how children plant trees. I wanted to laugh but the innocence in his look
was greater than the innocence I was thinking about, and that annoyed me,
the smoke curled, we were still feeling each other out, a thigh touched my
thigh, I thought about the bomb shelter on Halperin Street where my son
used to smoke the first cigarettes he'd hide in the first-aid box back then
when we sat in the shelters. I thought: I'm drawn to vengeance, maybe
because of Jordana, a vengeance that doesn't suit me. The force that came
from him, obstinate and cultivated, his hands clasped his knees and the
cigarette burning in his hand next to his left knee, he looked at my hand,
silence prevailed, and then he said: Maybe you're perplexed, is it because
I'm a German? I tried to say something but the words stammered in my
mouth, and he went on almost in a whisper, if so I can understand. I'm
perplexed, I affirmed, but that's not the issue ...
If you want me to go, I'll go, he said, over there, and he pointed to a
group of people that included a tall handsome woman, there's my wife, you
know, he added, and I gauged the resonance of his wife's whispers, "the
Jews and the Germans, unlike the Latins, didn't seek or find the perfect
form, but always some original amazement prevailed, if an abyss gaped at
their feet they looked into it and found emptiness and filled it with hewn,
new, cruel substance, some new reading of chaos in which is hidden something that wants to be discovered, some imperfection, a divine imperfectness," said the German and the emphasis of the connection restored me,
it was precisely the somewhat awkward Gothic style that drew my heart to
his fiction, I loved the practicality he wove from the devils that gushed
in him, to which pain do I ascribe you, Germanwriter? Which side do you
belong to? You're surrounded here with people, some of them came from
your area, they listen to you, maybe you express them better than we do
even though they've lived here for years, you express them better than we
do, that's a certain failure of culture, of education, of vision .. .