Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
I applauded the fat singer who tried to thank me so much
she almost stumbled. The contempt on her face wasn't hidden
by the smile she wanted to direct at Lionel's pocket, which was
supposed to be opened for her. The lights of a motorboat
looked like embers in the fog. Outside, Ebenezer looked for his
dear one. I thought, Could I ever have saved Samuel?
I knew I could save Lionel. But Sam and I were too alike. I,
the Ukrainian guard, and the German who hugged him and killed
his mother, all of us were too alike. A whore broke a bottle on the
table next to us and with the broken bottle, she threatened the
drunken sailor with tattooed writing on his hands and he tried to
burn her nipple with a cigarette. And that's how that preserved
moment was born when we all fought to make each other lose.
Our lost honor. I'm trying to describe to you, Renate, a lost moment of anguish and bliss.
Did I have permission to warn them that underneath the
mantle of serious transparent and beautified merrymaking, I'm
a hard woman?
When we went outside we saw Sam get the money from the
maitre d', maybe we were ashamed, to a certain extent we were
also a little proud. The maitre d' smiled obediently and gave Sam
(Samuel) the money. I think he swindled him, but Sam didn't
haggle. It was too late now to go back to the starting point.
And we walked along the boulevard. Love and hostility in
equal parts, I thought, where will I get the strength to cope
with these two Jews, with a man who buried his mother and
father and sells them to every soldier, and Lionel, forty-five
years old, seeking himself in sewer images. When we came to
the hotel we were so tired that even the dark contemptuous look of the old woman at the reception desk had no effect on us.
We couldn't talk anymore. Between me and Lionel was a lust
that could be smashed with an ax, I hugged Lionel, he smiled
at me, shut his eyes, like a licentious sailor he put his hand on
my crotch, turned his eyes to Sam, and fell asleep. Sam fixed his
eyes on Lionel's hand and very slowly shut his eyes, then I fell
asleep too. The next day, we went to Cologne. Lionel said:
What's this about converting to Judaism? We made a deal, you
don't have to involve God in such a matter, but I said to him: I
have to cut myself off, I want a circumcision, and Sam didn't say
a thing but murmured thanks to me for knowing how to kill my
parents and not only my children.
I improved my English, which had become an obsession for
me. I bought dictionaries, I learned words by heart. Everything
had to be formulated correctly, so I would have to cope with
Lionel in his and Melissa's words, to understand him in his own
words. And the rest you know, somebody remained behind, I
don't know that Lily, drawn on a faded ad for Ritesma cigarettes
they don't smoke anymore in your country ...
Tape / -
Dear Mr. Henkin,
Your letter reached the Department of Investigation of the
Missing a short time ago. As for your issue I recall that before his
death, your son, may the Lord avenge his blood, served for some
time under my command. I decided to examine your questions
both as a sign of my devotion and my emotions, since Menahem,
his memory for a blessing, fell many years ago and I still remember him well. You wanted to know if a man named Samuel Lipker
had ever come to Israel, and if he served here. I went through the
old files, and I found the following details (they don't appear in
chronological order, but merely as fragments and I copy them as
they are). When we asked him (Lipker) what he would do now,
he said he'd finish the war and go to drain the Amazon in Brazil.
They pay good money to drain the swamps and cut down the
forests, he said. He took part in the diversionary battle at Mount Radar. Thirty-two men were killed there. Three played dead and
at dusk, they got up and ran away. One of them was Boaz
Schneerson, the son of a man killed in the Holocaust. The name
of the second one I don't know. The third apparently was
Samuel Lipker. Before that he took part in the battle of Latrun.
He joined a brigade without being registered properly; it seems
there wasn't time. He came to Latrun straight from the port of
Haifa. As far as we can tell, he came to Haifa after being caught on
the ship Salvation (Paducah) and was in a British internment camp
in Cyprus. The ship left Marseille in 'forty-six. Contradictory evidence exists concerning his boarding the ship. A number of
people who were on the ship claim that Ebenezer Schneerson,
Samuel's companion, was last seen keeping his place in the line
to board the ship, but Samuel didn't come back and was seen
talking with the American officer who would bring food, cigarettes, and weapons he managed to smuggle out of the nearby
American army camp. Three men testify that his father, that is,
Ebenezer Schneerson, disappeared but he himself did return to
the line and boarded the ship. At that time, there were no detailed lists, but my investigation shows that most of the ship's
passengers I talked to don't explicitly remember if Samuel Lipker
was on the ship, except for two who claim that he was there and
came to Cyprus with them. When the battle occurred between
the little ship with two smokestacks and the British Royal Navy,
Samuel fought along with them. They remember that he guarded
the deck and with a hose of salty water he sent the people back
to the hold of the ship so that a new shift of people could come up
on deck to eat, go to the toilet, and get some fresh air. In the
battle with the British, three Jews were killed, a little girl who was
born and died that same day was called Salvation, and was buried
at sea. The commander fought with the one gun he had.
Outraged he was. He tried to run away from Cyprus and was
beaten. Later he started his commercial deals and with the fortune he had he continued to make money. Those deals flourished until May seventeenth, nineteen forty-eight. Then Samuel
Lipker was put on a ship-even though there is no exact list of passengers, and some claim he wasn't there-brought along
with five hundred other young men who were trained secretly
at the port of Haifa, were trained two days more and sent to the
battle of Latrun. At night, Samuel found a way to escape and
came to the other side of Bab-el-Wad. At the Arab village Bidu
he met the members of the fifth battalion of Harel. He was
transferred to Kiryat Anavim. Nobody remembers him, except
for one woman, a medic, who said that a quiet fellow came. He
was apparently a handsome young man, she said, but sported a
dirty, bristly beard, and it was impossible to recognize him. He
joined a division of sappers sent on a diversionary operation near
Mount Radar, and as I said, many were killed in the action,
while he played dead and was saved. When they came back to
Kiryat Anavim, one of them went to try to kill the commander
who had abandoned them, while Samuel disappeared.
After the war, he apparently came to Tel Aviv. Walking in
the street, seeking what he (later) termed before the investigating officer a new biography he could live in, he ran into somebody at a kiosk who was his age and it seemed to him they had
been in a battle together, and that man hit him in an empty lot
near the house where Samuel Lipker thought he found a young
widow, to whom he was sent by a member of the battalion. The
blows were apparently serious and he was wounded and hit
back at the person who apparently looked like him. Afterward,
he changed his name to Joseph Rayna. And after a certain period for which I have no testimony, he was called Joseph Ranan.
When he found out that he was considered killed and that a
grave was dug for him in Kiryat Anavim, he said that was fine
and let them think that Samuel Lipker had died in the battle of
Mount Radar. He was sent to an officers' course where he
claimed he was born in Israel and even described his parents'
home. He changed the money he had apparently brought with
him for valuable objects, traded in them even during the officers' course and then bought himself an apartment, and rented
out the apartment the army gave him. Then he was sent to
train recruits, suffered a failure in a battle he went to with his recruits. He didn't go drain the Amazon, because the sailors on
the Greek ship he was supposed to board looked like white
slave traders. Disguised as somebody else whom he himself
apparently didn't know, he taught himself basic Hebrew. He
got entangled in lies that he couldn't get out of or perhaps he
did get out of them and I don't know, he had a plan he devised
that nobody would be good enough to hear. And he wrote songs
that one girl, whose parents were killed in the Bialystok ghetto,
claimed were surprisingly similar to songs her parents had sung
in the Zionist club, Young Judea. The girl was afraid of him and
ran away and by then he was called Joey Gold and many legends
were spun about him. He fought a personal war against an unreal army, and at night after bloody battles he sat in his house
and wrote songs that were said to be composed of adjectives
and overly exalted words and they smelled moldy, abandoned, and
obsolete. After he killed a prisoner in the Gaza operation (the
details aren't clear enough because the killer of the prisoner
also appears under another name), he was punished, but in
the Sinai campaign, he was called back into the army. He commanded a unit that parachuted behind enemy lines. The flanking operation he commanded clashed with the original plan and
even though it succeeded, he was rebuked for his rashness, won
a medal for heroism but was demoted, which he apparently resented. Then he sold his house, bought an abandoned house in
Jaffa, cultivated a beautiful garden, but people who call him by
different names aren't sure if it really is the same person. He
looked for the man who wounded him when he came back from
the war, but didn't find him. He was violent and soft only at
times, said one woman who wished to remain anonymous. The
investigator at the trial held for him said: Maybe that man doesn't
exist, he's both alive and dead. He killed and somebody else was
punished. Who is Joey Gold, asked the investigator and added: I
can't swear that he exists. The documents say you were killed, he
said to Joey Gold, and Joey Gold said, Maybe I really did die.
At the trial, apparently, he said: We don't go like sheep to
the slaughter. Here there won't be another Maidanek. The judge reprimanded him for those words and said: You belong to
an arrogant generation that was born in Israel and isn't able to
understand. After a jail term, he returned to his house in Jaffa.
He learned how to play seventeen different musical instruments, wrote poems nobody reads anymore, and very slowly
faded away, as if the earth swallowed him up. I can't describe
that any better, but there are almost no milestones after that.
Tape / -
I, Ebenezer, what do I know?
Alphabet-Sandwich Islands; the number of letters is twelve (Jewish
knowledge!). Burmese alphabet-nineteen letters. Italian-twenty.
Bengalese-twenty-one. Hebrew, Assyrian, Akkadian, and Sumeriantwenty-two letters each. Spanish and Slavic-twenty-seven. Arabictwenty-eight. Persian and Coptic-thirty-two. Georgian-thirty-five.
Armenian-thirty-eight. Russian-forty-one. Muscovite Russian-fortythree. Sanskrit and Japanese-fifty. Ethiopian-two hundred and two.
Miracle of the passive voice in Hebrew: We were passed over, lamed!
We were torn asunder!
The Bible (in English)-thirty-nine books in the Old Testament. Nine
hundred twenty-nine chapters. Twenty-three thousand two hundred fourteen verses. Five hundred ninety thousand, four hundred thirty-nine words,
two million seven hundred twenty-eight thousand one hundred letters.
In all languages the name of the deity is composed of only four letters:
Latin-Deus. Greek-Zeus. Hebrew-Adon. Aramaic-Adad. ArabicAlla. The same is true of Parsi, Trtr, and the Jadga language. In Egyptian
Oman or Zaut. In east Indian, Asgi or Zagl. In Japanese Jain. In Turkish
-Aadi. In ancient Scandinavian-Odin. In Croatian-Duga. In Dalmatian
-Ront. In Tyranian-Ahir. In Etruscan-Chur. In Swedish-Kodr. In
Irish-Dich. In German-Gott. In French-Dieu. In Spanish-Dios. In
Paroani-Leon.
Tape / -
At a formal luncheon on the ship, the captain asked Lionel who was the
boy he had adopted, and Lionel said: His name is Samuel Lipker, and
Samuel said: That's a grievous error, sir, my name is Sam Lipp, and I was born in Boston. They sat on deck. Soldiers served iced tea to the returning heroes. From the Statue of Liberty, an escort rowed out to the ships
that sprayed jets of water and colored balloons were flown on the piers.
Samuel looked and said: A whole city is waiting for me. He said that without any emotion.
Tape / -
When Mother built.
When Rebecca Schneerson built her destroyed farm in the settlement,
a spark of apostasy flashed in her. Enraged by Nehemiah's death, she built
a model farm. She erected a modern cow barn, built a dovecote and a
chicken coop, planted citrus groves and vineyards, her vegetable patch
was big and well-watered, she had fields of clover, corn, and barley, she
built an incubator for chicks, the first incubator in Judea, and in the annual
milk production contest, two of her cows usually won first place. One day,
when Ebenezer was fifteen years old, and the Great War was in its second
year and Turkish and German officers would stop in her house on their way
south, Ebenezer was hit by a stone thrown at him by an Arab. Ebenezer,
sitting on a piece of wood and carving it, was concentrating so hard he
didn't see a thing, but Rebecca came out to hit the son of the Arab who
stood near his father. The man came to defend his son. Rebecca shaded
her forehead with her hand, and said to the Arab: I would curse your father
if I knew which of the ninety-two lovers your mother had was really your
father! And the Arab enjoyed the curse more than he was offended by it.
His donkey deposited droppings next to his feet. Rebecca laid the stick on
the ground and wiped the sweat off her brow. The Arab said: You're an
angry woman, I'm Ahbed. She said to him: Listen, there's a good farm here,
there's a garden, there's food, come with your stupid son, work here, and
I'll pay you more than all the seedy dignitaries in Marar, and that's how
Ahbed started working for Rebecca and living in the old cow barn Rebecca
fixed up for him. After the war, when locusts and hunger destroyed the
rage in the settlers, Rebecca was the first one to restore her farm. Then
Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg came to the Land with the British
Service, as it was called then. The captain, who edited a French periodical in Cairo, before that had been an officer in the Argentinean army, an
American citizen, with a name he claimed was Swiss, and belonged to the Greek Orthodox church. Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg came to the
Land to prepare, as he put it, a tombstone worthy of the Italian poet Dante
Alighieri, which a young officer in His Majesty's army in Jerusalem thought
it fitting to erect. The young British officer was excited by the return to
the land of the Bible and thought the Captain planned to erect a memorial to the prophet Jeremiah, and only later did he realize his error. The bureaucracy was still in its infancy, the Arabs sharply attacked the Balfour
Declaration, the government appointed a Jew as the first commissioner in
Judea, and Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg, known as an international
expert on Dante Alighieri, claimed that the series of incidents described
above was a sign that the desired memorial would be erected. Nobody
understood the logic of the series of incidents, but since the idea was so
confused, they thought something was indeed hiding behind it. Some
claimed that the whole issue of the memorial was simply an optical illusion
and the Captain was a spy, but nobody knew who he was spying for or why.
The Arabs, who then began to fear that the Jews had come to steal the
land from them, were afraid that the Jewish commissioner would divert
the water of the Yarkon River to London and the water of the Jordan to the
arid plains of England. That was the time when a young engineer in the
military service came up with an idea about ships to bring icebergs from
the north to the Mediterranean, and the Arabs also saw that idea as a Zionist plot to steal the desert from its eternal inhabitants. They heard that
there was a Jewish river in Asia, where Jewish kings and princes lived,
headed by a queen as tall as a two-story house, and the river stopped flowing on the Sabbath. They were afraid the Yarkon and the Jordan would also
stop on the Sabbath and then the black goats would cross the Jordan also
on winter days too. They demanded that if the Jordan really was stopped
it should also be stopped on Friday, their day of rest. The river (the
Sambatyon) was invented by Jewish liars who Captain Jose Menkin A.
Goldenberg thought were his ancestors back when they lived in the eleventh century, of whom, he said, not even one trace remained of the survivors. So the Captain was able to invent a family tree for himself going back
to the eleventh century, dream of memorials, and come to the Land of
Israel disguised as whatever he wanted, and after the Arabs finished worrying about the fate of the water, they started getting anxious about the idea
of the memorial. And all that happened before the Captain would come to the settlement. First, they claimed, they never heard of the poet. Second, the editor of the Jaffa newspaper, Nasser, wrote Dante was a fanatical anti-Muslim, while it is a Jew disguised as an Orthodox Greek who
wants to build the memorial, and we've got enough of our own imposters
and spies, and dignitaries hastened to hold ceremonies of reconciliation in
proper houses overflowing with charred meat and steaming coffee but
nothing helped. Nasser wrote in his newspaper that no tombstone would
be erected to Dante in the land that was holy to Muslims because
Mohammed's legendary horse rose from there to heaven. The Captain,
who came to the settlement at the height of the struggle for the memorial, sat in the community center erected by Nehemiah and read a Hebrew newspaper from Jaffa, and saw Rebecca and her son in the distance,
walking in the street. Ebenezer was now a lad of nineteen and held in his
hands a sawed-down tree trunk. The Captain got to his feet, pressed his
sword to his thigh, and followed Rebecca from a distance, which he privately called a distance of decency. The young staff officer who was reprimanded for confusing Jeremiah with Dante was seeking an outstanding
Arab poet to pacify the Arabs, and the Captain who moved between the
monasteries and the churches in the Land in an attempt to bribe the abbots of the monasteries and the priests of the religion to support the idea
of a memorial to Dante encountered a firm and hostile refusal. The Captain had instructive theories, which nobody he met was interested in, like
the theory about the site of Moses's grave, and without knowing about the
melody of the Psalms that Rebecca later taught herself (maybe she knew
it from her childhood) he taught himself the book of Psalms, so he could
recite it by heart from beginning to end and from end to beginning. The
Captain really didn't get excited when he heard the idea that he was a
triple spy and that he had also been a spy in the war, he didn't even get
excited that under the aegis of the British government he continued, according to the slanderers, to write sharp and satanic articles against Great
Britain in his French newspaper in Cairo where he hadn't been for months.
When the Captain saw Rebecca walking with her son, as he put it later,
he was filled with that longing that a self-respecting South American (or
Mexican, according to Rebecca) captain feels one moment before he's
executed. He followed Rebecca, and Ebenezer, who turned around, saw
him, and said to his mother: A man in a uniform is following us, and she said: A fool with a sword, like Joseph with his songs. Rebecca had plans for
the new government and, as she told Ebenezer, she somehow counted on
the certain folly of the Mexican buffoon who would follow her home, knock
on her door, and stand at attention, and when he did indeed do that she
opened the door to him, and his sword struck the post and the Captain
saluted chivalrously, or as she put it, like every dumb Turk when a beautiful Jewish woman passes by, and she brought him into her house, let him
sit alone for a long time, sent Ahbed to him with a glass of cold water and
then with a tray where a carafe of coffee and small cups wobbled and only
then did she come in, dressed in an elegant gown, and they chatted about
the weather, government upheavals, locusts, typhus, the banishments the
Turks had enforced, and she told how she had fostered irrigation when
people were tortured and killed and the Arabs then raised their heads and
said: The Jews under our feet, but me, she said, they didn't touch, they'd
come and look at me and a poor German in an officer's uniform played
melancholy tunes for me and would moon after me. All the time, Rebecca
was devising her plans and now and then she peeped at the face of the
Captain staring at her with a savage intensity so shrouded with respect that
he couldn't see her.