Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
Two young men stood at the door of a cafe that looked locked. They
knocked on the door, but nobody opened it. He could imagine the cafe
owner leaving, escaping in a boat, and not yet back. A girl in a short dress
was standing in a shaded niche next to the door. For a moment, she rolled
up her dress a little and the two young men laughed and approached her
as in a slow dance, she raised the dress as if her hands were the hands of
a doctor, but the touch was hesitant, wounded, and the lights of a passing car showed some profound contempt flickering deep in her eyes. The
lights of the car that might have broken down were extinguished now and
the sea was still silvered, calm, sealed in moon shadows. A cop passed by
on a bike now and shone a flashlight on the bench Boaz had almost sat on
before. Clouds of suspicions in the place were plastered but tangible. An
ancient smell of damp and phony chill came from the park. For a moment
he felt a secret bliss that he could feel a common fate with those two young
men and share the girl's contempt for their springy steps, but the girl
looked scared of the cop, turned around and lowered her dress with perhaps unexpected coarseness, they stood still again in front of the locked
door and one of them started weeping. Now Boaz could make out how big
they were, like wild bulls he used to see between Marar and the settlement. They were surely searching for a fille de joie with braids and a pinafore, their childhood love, he thought. But there was a war, and if two
fools like them didn't die, they were superfluous like me. The two strode
toward Hayarkon Street and from there to the Red House. In the Red
House, somebody was playing the "Internationale" on a mandolin. An unseen woman was singing in a whisper the words that moved toward the sea
and were mixed in it. Near the house was a barbed wire fence and two
women soldiers with Sten guns were guarding it. The fence was rusty and
behind it were only limestone hills and sea. The cannon that may really
have stood here once was moved. Inside the Red House a forehead was
seen and near it two crests of male hair. The overgrown young men stood
facing the women soldiers and spoke coarsely. The women soldiers enveloped themselves in a secret mantle that had long ago been forced on them
and tried not to get angry, and, even more, the second one (the first one was fatter) tried not to smile. The girl Boaz had earlier invented with the
pinafore and flaxen hair, twelve years old, naive, now passed by the women
soldiers, on her way to a belated piano lesson. The balconies in the house
opposite, surely her parents' house, were wreathed in plants and flowers
and a pleasant smell rose from the recently watered flowers. The little
girl's beauty stunned the two young men walking behind her. They wept
aloud again and the two female soldiers tried not to pity them. The little
girl saved the moment for him and Boaz saw her laugh with the sudden joy
of breasts that may have started sprouting. One of the two women soldiers
said: Soldiers come and weep all the time, go know. Right, said the second
woman soldier, a lot of weepers returned, what was there, and Boaz said:
A lake of tears was there and anybody who returned brought the tears
with him, but you guarded the secret ship here and you didn't know. The
woman soldier said, The cannon, and Boaz said: But there is no cannon,
and she said So what, just because there's no cannon, there's no need to
guard? He tried to understand her logic, but the crescent moon now cast
its full light and they saw how much his look was shrouded in disgust and
they were afraid to get mixed up in some emotional adventure that wasn't
yet wanted and they turned their stiff backs on him. The plump one looked
better from behind.
At night he slept in his clothes and sweated even though it wasn't especially hot. In the morning he opened his eyes wide to the voice of a
person standing over him and looking from his angle of vision as if he were
tearing the tent with his kinky hair. The man read Boaz a new order of the
day and Boaz, who was already awake and feeling the wetness of his clothes,
said: I'm discharged, dummy. The man tried to be friendly. His yellowed
teeth seemed to be searching for a more suitable mouth. The man said:
That's your shock, Boaz, you don't remember me? Boaz looked at him and
didn't remember. He said, fine, let's go, and since he didn't need to get
dressed he went outside, took some sand, and rubbed it on his neck and
his face. Then they walked among people who seemed for some reason to
be rushing like actors in a silent movie. They went into a little cafe and
Boaz was afraid he had lost his hearing. He said to the man: Yell something,
and the man yelled, and Boaz said, I heard you, over and out. And then he
put a finger in his ear and rummaged around a little while and said, I hear.
The man said, He hears, that'll be fine. The woman who owned the place looked at Boaz. She saw how wrinkled he was and because of that she
seemed to know his pain personally and she said: Take off your clothes and
I'll clean them for you. But Boaz said: There's no point, take some money
and bring me new clothes, pick them out yourself. He took off his clothes
and remained in a black undershirt and shorts, he also enjoyed her obedience, sat in his shorts and undershirt with a man he surely didn't know, or
else he wouldn't have sat with him in a cafe, and people who peeped inside saw a man in an undershirt and shorts and asked what happened and
Boaz yelled: The enemy killed my clothes, that man raped my mother,
pretends he's my father. The man laughed and Boaz didn't. He drank coffee and ate a roll and on it he slowly spread margarine and he didn't know
if it was what he had dragged in from the sidewalk to the shop earlier or a
week ago, and suddenly he wanted to know who Minna was. Maybe she
really was the daughter of Gilboa the contractor? Boaz licked the jam from
the jar and drank more coffee. At first he tried to count the cups of coffee,
then he stopped. The woman came back with a bundle of new clothes and
took pins out of the shirt, when the sleeves dropped down, he felt some
excitement, as if a baby were born, he tried on the new clothes, took the
bundle of old clothes outside and put it next to the bundle of clothes
forgotten downstairs by new immigrants peeping from their rented room
upstairs, or maybe they were waiting for the right time to bring them upstairs. Nor did they know what to do with the new flowerpots that were
given them. The man sitting with him said, You have to forget, Boaz, come
back home, they've started searching for you, they said you've been wandering around for a month now, I don't know why they're so worried about
you, you've got a grandmother with citrus groves and vineyards and you've
got money. What, you need help?
Not me, said Boaz and licked the jar of jam some more.
It says here, said the man, that the battles were hard. Boaz asked where
it said and the man showed him a sheet of paper. The paper said Boaz
Schneerson, fourth brigade, Har-El. Boaz said: What else does it say? And
the man said: It says that you were mobilized in 'forty-seven. That you
were trained in boats in Caesarea and then fought in Jerusalem. It says you
took part in-and he listed one battle after another until Boaz got bored
and stopped listening. The man added, you wound up in an ambush, so
what? It says you played dead. That you lay and they shot at the dead, every moment you knew you'd die and you didn't, there were crows and
vultures there, maybe hawks? Maybe falcons? Maybe eagles? I can imagine
that it was awful, it says here that afterward you got up and there were
another two who got up at the same time and you all ran.
I don't remember, said Boaz.
The man smiled and said, they didn't go down to the valley with the
dead because the Jews had an atom bomb. And the bomb there was a
Davidka shell, which explodes once every seven shots. Fifty percent of the
giant shells don't explode. The shells really were gigantic, said Boaz, and
they were shaped like an atom bomb.
The Jews got atom bombs from the Elders of Zion, said the Arabs. You
drew clocks and you wrote mysterious numbers on the shells so that if they
didn't explode, at least they'd frighten. The explosion worked by smell,
said the Arabs, if an Arab soldier got close to it it exploded from the smell.
The Jews were vaccinated against it, said the man, for example, in Hiroshima not one Jew was killed. The logic was perfect, Boaz said to him. So
you were saved, said the man, I don't remember, said Boaz, but added:
Grandmother recited Psalms throughout the war and saved me, even the
battle I don't remember.
It bothers you to be rehabilitated, said the man.
But I wasn't there, said Boaz, it's a mistake, and the man said, go home
and you'll remember, it'll help you. Boaz said, I still need to know who
really came out of those battles, not sure it's me. The man listed names of
the dead but Boaz stood up and wanted to pay. He said, I don't remember
them, the man said, I'll pay, and Boaz saw the hair stuck to his scalp and
thought maybe antitoxin for hair, a future invention, and with a razor blade
he always kept in his pocket in a wrinkled old cigarette pack he wanted to
cut his circumcision, but also the hair of that man, and the bitter rage
evoked in him by that superfluous memory.
In the evening, he went down to the seashore. A man sat there sculpting. Boaz watched him. A couple lay between the darkness and the limestone hill, tossing and turning. The sculptor said: So what, I sculpt eternal
statues in water. I sculpt Joshua, Moses, Nimrod the hero, Ben-Gurion. Up
above they've already started building the last villas of Saints of the Holocaust Street. A party was going on in one of the houses and music burst out
of an open window. A boy was dragging sardines and beer to the party. Near the ledge of the boardwalk were two crows that vanished into the
sunset. Invisible walls collapsed on him and Boaz said to the sculptor: That
sunset is sweet as fire, and the sculptor said to him, Got to know how to
capture yells, and Boaz envied the sand under the lovers. He strode along
the ledge of the boardwalk until it stopped. The sea cast a pale light of a
city erased of houses, a streetlamp illuminated the sea magic, the iron of
the ledge was rusty, and at the ledge stood a young woman and looked at
the sea. Boaz stood not far from her and looked at the sea too. He didn't
even know that she was standing, at any rate, he surely didn't think of it,
he was thinking of Minna, why had he plucked the ring off her. When he
discovered the woman he looked at her. She didn't move, as if she were
waiting for somebody who hadn't come for some time now. A wild silence
was strewn on her face, which she extinguished. She had a pug nose and
her cheeks weren't symmetrical. Her eyes turned to him didn't see him.
The question conveyed to him in her unseeing look was: How can a young
man have eyes that are three thousand years old? Thus they approached
one another and then he kissed her with a delicacy he felt she deserved
and didn't know was in him. Embracing but each one alone, they ascended
the path to the small hotel with the discount for soldiers and a free wash.
They got the discount and like everybody else they wrote made-up names.
Then she tried to weep and not say anything she'd regret afterward. Too
bad I didn't ask her name, he thought several days later, but there was a
crib there and they said, That will be our baby, she spoke broken Hebrew
and said: There it was bad, and showed him marks on her arms and he
tried to tell something and didn't know what, and they laughed because
she was the almost imaginary lover of a person whose cruelty Boaz couldn't
imagine but warmth flowed from her, that flame that melted her, and at
three in the morning she said: I was beautiful and they saw only my back.
And he wanted to tell her how beautiful she was now in bed, naked, but he
didn't have women he dreamed about years ago and so he was silent. He
wanted to understand how they penetrated her, how they didn't ask questions, and his distress became unbearable, he who wanted to be independent in love began pitying her and himself and almost spoke, and then she
whispered to him don't say I love, don't you dare, and he got angry that she
began teaching him and after they quarreled he brought her water and
she drank from his hands, lapped it like a dog, and he got down on all fours and said: Don't love, don't love, and she said see, Hebrew, I don't know
but they put into my body that thing to honor Jewish girls and in his
mind's eye he saw her standing there alone waiting for somebody else on
the beach of Tel Aviv and started wondering whether he had also been
there, and the pressure in his chest grew and then he had to hit her, insult
her, and before she managed to tell him her name, she got dressed in a
hurry and said: I'm going, and he said fine and only afterward, after he lay
for an hour and tried to shut his eyes, did he understand what he was losing, but by then it was too late. He thought about the little girl with flaxen
hair next to the flowerpots and wanted to understand what was happening
to all of them and said I'm Boaz Schneerson and he went down to the pay
phone and called his grandmother in the settlement and talked with her
for a long time and could sense her wicked laugh.
After he saw the cement in Mugrabi he ate a hot dog in a roll on the
square. Behind him flew a distorted picture of Laurence Olivier, and the
hot dog vendor tried to prove to him again that Goethe was greater than
Shakespeare, less violent, more sophisticated. The clock showed the wrong
time and Boaz recalled that in the war they said that after it was all over,
they'd hold a brigade reunion in the telephone booth near Mugrabi. He
started searching desperately for the young woman he had spent the night
with but she wasn't anywhere. Among the things details began to be clear.
A man limped toward the movie box office and a woman passed by him,
bumped into him, hiccuped, and Boaz laughed. She had cruel small teeth,
she dropped a hat, and when she picked it up she opened her purse, took
out powder, and smeared it on her cheeks and then in the light of the
streetlamp she smeared lipstick on her lips. Since he was stuck to the corner, he could see her gaping mouth, her squinting eyes, her teeth with a
little bit of lipstick stuck to them, and then she blotted the lipstick with
a handkerchief. Boaz tried to remember the dead, recalled that Menahem
Henkin lay next to him, but was dead and his blood stuck to him, so Boaz
wanted to break a clothes hanger because Menahem Henkin used to break
hangers in his childhood, Menahem Henken told Boaz.