Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
Lionel Secret once asked his mother Rachel: Who was my father? And
Rachel Brin, Rayna, now Blau, said: I was married to a man named Nathan
Secret, he died, I came to America because my friend Rebecca kept talking about the trees dripping gold of America. They didn't drip gold and she
went to Palestine. Until I married Saul Blau who started selling his shirts,
I worked hard. Today our trees are all right, she said.
Tape / -
Lionel Secret, who was once called Secret Glory, was a frightened child
and at night, to fall asleep he would sing Schubert lieder to himself and
until the age of eleven, his voice was thin as a girl's. Rachel had two daughters and two sons with Saul Blau and Lionel grew up to be a tall fellow with
an ascetic handsome face, his hair was black, somebody said he looked like
a butterfly trapped and proud at the same time. A dimple of eternal pondering was set into his right cheek and made him look determined, but also
thoroughly confused.
When the war broke out, Lionel enlisted and after training in England,
he was sent to Europe and for seven days he shot at an enemy whose precise location was confused by the maps. When the mistake was discovered,
half his battalion was taken prisoner, and the remaining soldiers stopped
shooting at the empty hay loft and waited for Lionel, who was familiar with
the impressive parades of the brown shirts on York Avenue, near his house,
and he called to his comrades to flee. Three deigned to join him. They
slipped away, lay in the rotten hayloft, and when the Germans came in
with their prisoners, Lionel prepared an attack like the game he had once
played in summer camp where he was assigned the role of the Indian.
More soldiers who had previously thought they had no chance to escape
came to help them, destroyed their captors and made their way to brigade
headquarters, which had gone astray and was tramping in a direction not
only imprecise, but also unknown. Lionel managed to deliver his prisoners,
earn a salute of honor from an old commander who yearned for more successful and chivalrous wars, fight a few weeks in battles better prepared
but still lost, see a British plane brought down, hear its pilot yelling Shema
Israel under the parachute the Germans peppered with bullets, engage in
diversionary operations in which he taught an aged commander how to
smell Germans by the smell of beets and potatoes, and lead a unit of Australians and Canadians to a town completely different from the description
in the briefing. In that operation, a British soldier was shot who lobbed a
hand grenade and knocked out an armored car with a German brigade com mander and his Polish adjutant, the Pole tried to shoot and in his death
throes, he hit a little girl standing there playing with her two dogs, and on
its way to the little girl the bullet also passed through Lionel, who managed
to destroy the armored car completely and to shoot a last bullet at the Pole,
and at the end of all that he was taken to the hospital.
Lionel won two medals, which were awarded him by a brigadier general,
who still remembered his fury at the sight of a Jewish tailor bent over in a
small street in Liverpool.
By the time Lionel, the fifty-third son of Joseph Rayna, returned to
America, he was an officer in the British army. After Pearl Harbor, the United
States was forced to enter the war declared on it by the Germans. Lionel
commanded a training school in the southern United States. After toiling
for half a year training young men, he was sent to Europe to take part in
the great Landing. After he was wounded again, this time by shrapnel, he
was transferred to intelligence, to the division of interrogation and liaison.
Aside from English, Lionel knew Yiddish, German, Polish, Russian, French,
and Sanskrit, and those languages, at least some of them, along with his
profound knowledge of Latin and ancient Greek, helped him considerably
to be considered an excellent interrogation officer. And indeed, he was
promoted, and in 'forty-five, a few months before the war ended, he attained the rank of major, and General Eisenhower, in a letter of an efficient
secretary, thanked him for his contribution to the war effort and awarded
him a special medal for outstanding service, bravery, and model behavior.
There was a moment when Lionel, who still thought of himself as Secret Glory, thought that the stories he hadn't yet managed to write were
also the only stories he would write. He even thought of choosing some
death of honor. The novel he thought of writing about Joseph Rayna, whom
his mother had told him about with her eyes filled with youthful mischief,
refused to be written. He published some short stories in important journals
with small circulation. And once he wrote a letter to Rebecca Schneerson in
Palestine. Her answer was matter-of-fact: if you're really a mature person,
you will probably understand how much your fate can't touch my heart,
you're in America with your mother and I'm not, I'm busy in the cowshed
and with the almond trees, the war didn't pass over us, Nehemiah died on
the shore of Jaffa, you asked about my son who's wandering around Europe.
I don't know, I think he was killed, the adulterer Joseph Rayna didn't make me children, but on the other hand nobody can know for sure who was the
father of my son, yours, Rebecca Schneerson.
When Lionel was thirteen, he loved a twelve-year-old girl who lived on
the other side of the city. She lived in a big house surrounded by a fine
garden, planned by an English landscape architect especially for her father,
the main Ford dealer in the area. Lionel would bring her flowers he picked
in the fields, wrote poems to her, and told her about the stories he would
write when he grew up. The girl's name was Melissa and she had bright
and beautiful oval eyes and sparkling brown hair. One day Melissa threw
away the flowers, turned her face away, and said in a voice choked with
weeping whose subtleties he didn't understand: My mother told me I'm
big enough not to be a girlfriend of some Jew from Poland. Lionel returned
home, sang lieder to the toilet, and wept behind the locked door. Rachel
said: That happens in Poland, not in America. He listened to her and said:
Maybe it shouldn't happen here, but it did. A month later, Melissa got sick.
The doctors couldn't diagnose her illness. Melissa asked her mother to call
Lionel and he came. By now she had little breasts and her eyes became more
white than bright and Lionel shut his eyes which were almost weeping and
saw the angel of death sitting between Melissa's eyelashes. Later on, when
he would come out of the hayloft and fight the Germans he would do that to
save Melissa and her parents, he would feel that he was returning them good
for bad. Lionel wanted to pray but didn't know what God they prayed to in
the elegant house of the main Ford dealer. He stroked Melissa and told her
how much he loved her. She showed him pictures of movie actresses filled
with sweet smiles and he told her she was more beautiful than they were.
Her sweet eyelashes and her face were now full of something he knew was
death. But Melissa's parents, who tried not to see Lionel, said: She's got
the flu and in a few days she'll get better. Lionel pleaded with them to
send her to the hospital in New York, but they said angrily that the doctors
of New York were no better than the doctors of their city. He told Melissa:
I think of you, I'll always love you, and she told him she'd always love him
and in secret they signed a lifetime contract. The contract was hidden in
Lionel's pocket and Melissa asked him to forgive her for what she had once
said to him. After I told you what Mother told me to say, I wept all night
long! she said. Her eyes dimmed, he saw how close death was and called
her mother in alarm, and her mother told him: She's tired and you should go now, Lionel. He told her: My name is Secret Glory, and she looked at
him, saw the flash of wrath burning in his eyes and something primeval and
ancient made her tremble even though she didn't even know what it was.
Her parents brought young Brook to read her the history of the struggle for
the Connecticut River from the journal Our Connecticut, a bimonthly and a
source of pride for many buyers of cars from Melissa's father. Melissa lay
with her eyes shut, pale and transparent as a butterfly and with a slight
effort she managed not to listen to young Brook.
He didn't go to Melissa's funeral. Two years later, he went to New
York to school. His mother and her husband moved to New Jersey. In
New York, he clung to a girl who talked about class warfare and her cunning and elusive body wasn't at all like the purity in Melissa's eyes. Lionel
wrote a few more stories, and to descend to the masses, he tried to live
with the woman who cleaned his father's house, was unfaithful to her
with a girl from Radcliffe, went on a long trip around the world, a trip
that lasted six years, and then he spent two years closed in a room and
wrote a novel that wasn't accepted by any publisher, and then he went
to a small city, started teaching in a college, and for three years he collected old cars, ambulances, locomotives, tow trucks, and buses, and parked
them in a lot he leased and would walk among those cars and think, Why
do I collect this garbage? I don't even like to drive and detest every car and
every bus I collect.
Saul Blau expanded his business and opened a few shirt shops. Lionel
met the woman who had once been an elusive girl and talked about class
warfare, now she took Lionel to her old parents' house and during the
Kiddush, she raised her glass to toast the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which,
in her words, liberated the toilers from the malice of the capitalist war.
Lionel scolded her, he yelled that she was Jewish filth, words she treated
with such abysmal tolerance and contempt that she almost burst out laughing. Then Lionel went to enlist in the Canadian brigades at the Canadian
consulate in New York, and went off to fight as we said, because of that
woman for the lost Jewish honor. He of course couldn't tell her that he was
going to fight for Melissa, for Melissa's parents and their Ford cars. The lot
of cars, buses, and ambulances he sold. His stepfather told him: Don't
worry, Secret, you're all right in my hands, I'll invest your money and add
as much and more, you'll be both a hero and rich.
Saul, Rachel's husband, liked to pound his hand on the table and say:
Oh, just be healthy! He conquered the field of cheap shirts with diligence,
guile, and restraint. He said: I push the shirts on them so my parents who
were murdered in a pogrom will lie in warm shirts in their grave. Rachel,
who didn't understand the connection between his dead parents and the
shirt stores spreading over the city, loved in her husband the lack of
Joseph's madness. At night, she secretly longed for the forests, Rebecca,
the language of syllables, and one day, she said: Someday I'll visit Rebecca
in her forest in Palestine.
When Rachel heard the Nazis singing on York Avenue and saw their
goose-step marching, she locked the shutters of Lionel's apartment right
over a big bar whose owner was passing out wine and cakes to those in the
parade, and she asked Lionel: What will be? He told her he would fight
them for her too. She said: Lionel, you're not a child, you're a grown man,
forty years old, not married, not settled, without a serious profession, and
they're strong. Watch out for them, and when she looked into his eyes she
saw a smile capering in them, some weary and glowing splendor of dignity
that reminded her of Joseph Rayna's face and she was sorry, so sorry, she
had had to grant her son a father like Joseph Rayna, which would surely
bring destruction on him in the war against the Germans now shouting in
the street below. Weariness and life did their work and she had neither the
strength nor the will to tell her son who his father was. Suddenly she said:
The words of Joseph Rayna could have been a reply to those satanic parades. After Lionel enlisted, Rachel waited for him behind the locked shutters. Every week she went to his apartment and would arrange his books.
Lionel came to Cologne as an interrogator of prisoners. He came there
on the same day that Ebenezer Schneerson and Samuel Lipker came to
Paris, where they started performing in a small nightclub. In Cologne,
Lionel met Lily Schwabe. When he saw her he understood that Melissa
hadn't died, and children who had once shot at airplanes near the destroyed factory now stood almost naked in the street and pointed at Lionel,
who strode to the temporary headquarters. The city was destroyed. Lionel
helped a local Jewish committee find Jewish children hidden in monasteries and other hiding places and weren't told that the war was over. After
thinking about Lily, he made a decision to give her up from the start. He
was also afraid that another Melissa would die on him.
After he gave up Lily, he went to the river. He sat at the river and drank
juice from a can. Near the place where he was sitting, workers were digging
under a destroyed house and taking out corpses of prisoners of war killed
in air raids. In the river he saw moss and oil spots and scum, but fish he
didn't see. He didn't see fish because even the dead fish were fished out
by the hungry Germans. He was disgusted with himself for being sad at
seeing hungry Germans. That thought brought him back to Lily. She
looked too hungry to be Melissa. Everything metamorphoses into everything, everybody lives again and again, death is a cease-fire, he thought. He
went back to the city and found himself in an army canteen. He bought
kerosene, clothes, oil, soap, sausage, canned milk, wine, cheese, cigarettes,
dairy products, and other groceries, put everything into a kitbag, and went
to Lily's house. Lily touched the groceries, tentatively, and, with her eyes
shut, her hands stroked the canned milk. She smiled shyly, nervously
smoothed her faded dress, and started cooking. Music came from a soldiers' cafe not far from there, and then she set the table and after everything was perfectly arranged-the gleaming, old dishes-she burst into
tears. Lionel got up, went to her, stroked her and then licked her tears.
She stood without moving and let him lick her eyes. Then they sat at the
table and ate. He looked in amazement at her ravenous eating. They drank
some wine and sat at the window where bonfires were seen. Two whole
days they didn't go out of the house.