Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
Lionel called his hotel and the old woman at the reception desk said
one minute, Mr. Secret, and transferred the call to his room, where he had an extension because of his high rank and even from here he could smell
the old woman's sly smile.
On his bed sat Lily. She wore a bathrobe she had brought from Cologne
and was shaking with cold. She closed the windows but the cold didn't stop.
She didn't know how to turn on the heat. The phone rang and she was afraid
to answer. She had gone through a lot of trouble to get a travel permit. She
even promised one of the officers she'd go out with him and that was how
she found out where he lived and went to him and the old woman at the
reception desk now became fussy, and Lily had to bribe her with the last of
her money, and now, when she wants to surprise Lionel with or without his
lovers, the phone rings. Her hand reaches for the receiver, but the hand
doesn't manage to pick it up. The phone stopped ringing and she picked up
the extinguished receiver and heard beeping. Then her eyes starting shedding tears and she tried to talk to the dead receiver. Lionel tried to dial
again, but his line was busy. Lily dropped the receiver, put it on its cradle
and stood up. Her body trembled, the window was covered with mist. She
hugged herself. And then the phone rang again. She picked up the receiver
and didn't stop weeping. Lionel recognized the sound of Lily's tears. He said
to her, Don't cry, little girl, but she didn't stop. She tried to talk but only
fragmentary syllables burst out of her mouth. All those tears piled up in her
for years, she later told Lionel, at long last I was Melissa, maybe I died and
your voice talked to a dead woman and I didn't know what to say. Only after
a few minutes did she say, Yes my dear, I'm here, sorry.
I know you're here, he said to her.
His laugh was calming and offensive, but she had already learned what
was in store for her, a whole year in a closed room she had acted at night
the wife of a child thrown into the fire, learned in books what she could
have known if only she had opened her eyes earlier while acting herself in
another garb, and learned to hate in herself what Lionel loved in her. She
knew he was searching for Ebenezer to try to forgive himself and she
couldn't take part in the forgiveness. She had nothing to complain about.
He called her. He heard her body rustling in the distance. She asked where
are you and he told her, and she said: I need you here, and she blushed.
And she told him she blushed. I'm dining with the fellow who appeared
with the Last Jew in the nightclub, he said, Boulevard Canbiere, Cafe
Glacier, upstairs.
I'm coming, she said.
And now Samuel Lipker is looking at her. The light in the hall dims, the
erection still prevents him from standing up. A torn ad for Ritesma cigarettes waves on the wall. He knows the ad hung in the room of the guard
who'd hug him and give him candy. On the ad for Ritesma or Koli cigarettes was a photo of a typist, maybe it was a drawing, the drawing was
Lily. Now he could know how German guards' cigarettes create for him
the Melissa that Lionel tried to tell about earlier. The guards in the camp
loved her too, and that strengthened her unimaginably, now he could sit
across from her, loathe her, understand her, he already teased Lionel who
probably beat and tortured her to teach her what love is. She was and still
is the girl of all our dreams he thought. Even of Leibke who was shot by
the guard, and the man who castrated himself after Bronya the Beautiful
refused him. Bronya the Beautiful with the apple in her mouth. No, they
didn't look alike. Bronya looked like his mother, Lily was a wild song in
the Tyrolean Mountains. With her he could capture stars or hunt electric
rabbits. Beautiful only for herself. And the love she showered on Lionel
made her forbidden. Like death, he thought, to sleep with her is to sleep
with cancer, she looks at Samuel and at Lionel and recalls the frightening
lad she saw in the nightclub, and when Lionel looked at her and caressed
her with his eyes, Lionel thought: She may not know that a disaster happened, but she knows exactly who it didn't happen to. Lionel pronounced
the names of the dishes he had ordered for her in a charming French accent that made Samuel measure Ebenezer against Lionel again, he also
wanted to understand what they wanted from him and how much he had
to pay, and what he would have to pay. The ships in the port hooted, the
noise in the cafe grew louder, waiters tried to please Lionel, Samuel imagined himself sleeping with Lily and stroking Lionel's hair, and for a moment, his parents appeared to him walking arm in arm in the street, houses
began falling on them and they vanished along with the pain in him whenever Ebenezer would recite the past that none of them knew. Lily tried to
eat but had no appetite. Her lips were shaped like her eyes. The lines are
clear, a slight flush rose on her cheeks, something in her image recalled not
only ads for Ritesma cigarettes, but also pale northern twilights. Some total
defeat melted in her. The struggle between himself, thrown into the fire,
and the pallor of her face enchanted him, and he could understand things in her face that Lionel couldn't. Her hair was especially fair in the light
of the lamp above her. When she fixed her eyes on Samuel, his erection
stopped and he calmed down, as if he had met his mother's lover. He said:
My mother was an actress in a house full of carpets and she'd act for me.
Ebenezer's memories were enough for me, my mother also had a husband.
He was an unsuitable lover for my mother, she wanted opera generals. I'm
a corrupt angel and look like it. So do you. In her late youth, after she finished being a communist, my mother seriously thought of going to a convent or into international prostitution-I imagine from Ebenezer-her lover
was an old man by then, made hundreds of children with weary women,
Ebenezer sometimes recites some of his poems, once I was in love with
them.
I know, said Lionel.
Samuel glanced wearily, laughed at Lily, and said: So will you marry me,
Lily?
And she looked at him and decreed, No! and turned pale. He tried to
pretend to weep, but he burst out laughing and they looked at him. Suddenly, maybe for the first time in years, he didn't know how to act himself.
And then he started telling Lily about the lampshade they made of his
parents. He said those words while his eyes, where a rusty gray flash now
sparkled, were fixed on Lionel. She stopped trying to eat the duck wing
and Samuel measured her movements like a panther waiting to pounce.
Lionel's hands moved, the smile was a mask for tension, Samuel smoked
another cigarette and didn't want to light it with the lighter he had taken
from Lionel before. He was afraid she'd recognize the lighter and despise
him. The ash straggled until it dropped. When the ash dropped, Lily felt
as if her belly were shriveling.
People wearing clothes too big for them, with berets and caps or shabby
Hollywood hats on their heads, entered and sat around the tables and ate
eagerly. The waiters ran back and forth. A woman in a sparkling red dress
sang on a small stage, lighted with a beam that turned her face into an
overcultivated mask. At the piano sat a pianist with a thin beard who
looked bored and tired. Now and then, he sipped from a bottle standing on
the piano. American, Swedish, and African sailors came in with their temporary, dyed women. They would all order cognac or calvados and slurp fish
soup. The Bay of Marseille was lighted, a motorboat groaned rhythmically, drunken sailors banged on the tables and shouted demands for food. The
light outside was growing dim, and the locked balcony was full of cigarette
butts and papers flying in the wind. In the distance, the sea looked like a
black mass.
Ebenezer, now looking for Samuel in the city, said to the investigator
years later: I didn't look like a Muselman because Samuel Lipker and
Kramer would bring me thin beet soup and bread.
Dear Renate,
You asked me why, back then in Marseille, that is, what impelled us, what exactly happened, I didn't know what to answer
you then and today I don't either. Aside from my love, I don't
find words that can convey the precise experience. But since
you asked, I'll try. I sat facing the two of them, Lionel and
Samuel Lipker, and longed with all my soul to die.
Lionel then looked toward the balcony, I don't know if we
saw that sea. Samuel tried to steal me from Lionel. He also got
up and recited to the diners an excerpt of Ebenezer they knew
by heart, but they didn't applaud him. They were furious that
he had disturbed their eating, and had disturbed the fat singer's
singing. The sea was locked in the distance. A balcony full of
cigarette butts. I wanted to go to the movies. They were then
showing The Arch of Triumph with Ingrid Bergman and Charles
Boyer, who sat like us in Cafe Glacier, on Boulevard Canbiere
and drank Calvados. Lionel sketched something on the white
paper on the table, sipped the wine that Samuel gulped, and
said sadly to Sam (Samuel): If you think you have to go back to
the line you can. The two of you can open a war souvenir shop
in Jerusalem named for Joseph Rayna. I heard that his songs became national anthems there. Sam looked at Lionel and Lionel
looked at Sam. Those two men suddenly looked like two dead
men fighting over me. I wanted to express my opposition, but I
didn't know if I had it coming. I knew I had to perform Gretchen
for them and not talk. I don't know if you've ever been for sale
in the Jew market, Renate! I was an essential enemy to them,
maybe (and this is ridiculous) a desired enemy, and Sam was so sunk in the moment, in the happening itself, that he had to measure it carefully since he wasn't used to it. I wanted so much to
return things to their simple and human concreteness, to deviate
from the tragicomic event, as Lionel put it later. Those two
poets, great-grandsons of messiahs, didn't see me with flesh-andblood eyes, maybe not only with those eyes. They saw me as
some substitute for an argument in order to gore one another.
The singer sang in a nasal voice and Sam mocked her, maybe that
was a certain response to his failure to make the drunken sailors
laugh by reciting things Ebenezer remembered and that weren't
important to them. The sailors tried to defend the play of their
love with the wretched streetwalkers and would hit and shout
and kiss, and Sam thought, I read his mind didn't I; I can't
swindle this man anymore. Precisely in his weakness, he's strong!
A weakness of supple and tense softness and Lionel said to him:
But on the other hand, you can also stay with Lily (he didn't say
"you can stay with me," he only uttered my name).
Then the haggling started. I was the payment, so they didn't
ask me. Lionel said something about the possibility that Sam
would live with me, and he said: Lily will be a mother to you,
and Sam said, Mother? An ad for a fucking cigarette will be a
mother to me? I've got enough dead mothers and fathers, and
Lionel said: You've got a dead mother and two dead fathers,
you'll have a new father and mother and I'm still not mentioned
by name. Renate, nobody talks directly to me or with me,
doesn't ask anything, but I deserve it, why did I come here?
They were discussing payment and I'm hanging in front of
them on a hook, unkosher meat in a Jewish market. They have
to triumph over one another in a defeat that will of course be all
mine and mine alone, I was silent, Renate, I was silent and suddenly had an appetite and I tasted the dishes Lionel ordered
and that I couldn't eat before. Lionel talked about the fact
that I wouldn't have children, the level of the execution of the
castration had been so high that for a moment, I felt how all
the children I was supposed to give birth to flowed out of me
and died on my lips, and I felt blood between my lips and I licked them and they didn't know what I was doing with my
lips, and Sam said: She's trying to be sexy like Hedy Lamarr.
What children? asked Sam, and Lionel said: She won't give
birth to children who will later have to defend the lost homeland
of lampshades, and Sam said: There was no lampshade, and
Lionel said: There were, but not yours, and then he laughed, and
the singer was also offended, she turned her face away and sang in
another direction, and a drunken sailor hit a whore, who dropped
onto the floor. There was a thud, the bored pianist burst out laughing and played more excitedly, and the waiters ran and brought
drinks and food and I was sold there, a few kilograms of Lily, a few
liters of Lily juice is there juice of Lily? I was silent there. No
Ingrid Bergman sat on the balcony of Cafe Glacier with yearning
eyes and a great melancholy love for Charles Boyer. In the end, I
was miserable German mincemeat, good for swindling themselves
that I was somebody else, I shot them at low-flying airplanes.
And that's how he bought a German streetwalker, Renate. I
should have been more than I was or perhaps less, maybe an amorous girl, weeping after the death of the Fuhrer in the bunker,
something made me transparent, bereft of location and caught in
a maze, they talked about some life in America, about me, about
Sam, about me and Lionel, and I wanted to shout, What about
me, and they knew, the two of them, that I wasn't important anymore, not out of wickedness, out of love that the two of them
even then had to share, and I didn't yet understand what glowing hell I now got myself into, go home I said to myself, buy yourself a poor little husband, cook potatoes for him, let him flourish
on the holy ground where you were born and where you'll be buried, but I couldn't, I was born in the air, and above, above everything, faced off, like two knights, my two men fought a desperate
war for the heart of an imaginary aristocrat, who no longer lives in
a nonpalace where the big, splendid and superfluous duel was
held. I wanted to say, You're in love with a shadow, but I knew
not to talk, maybe I really was somebody and didn't know it.
I disguised myself as an abandoned queen, I was to them
what they wanted me to be. Later a past will be created and I'll be able to make a defense pact with it, for war or peace, I was
packed, virginal, an invisible blood flowed from my lips, I gave
myself to them and they were genuine lovers, so dreadful, so
innocent, Jews trying to buy their dream in a world that wiped
them out. Maybe I was what was necessary, everything was a
provocation against the world, I was pathetic, possible, and
eagle-y.