Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
And then the Captain saw the row of Ebenezer's birds coated with black
lacquer. The birds stood on the cabinet, and when the Captain looked at
them they looked so wonderful he almost forgot why he had come to that
house. He stood stooped over, conspicuous by the sudden change in him,
and the birds looked as if they were trying to fly. Only later on, when he
had sipped the fine wine Rebecca had gotten from the manager of the
winepress with every shipment of wine grapes, only then, perhaps as a
response to the bliss that flooded him at the sight of the birds and
Rebecca's beauty, only then did he start talking about the life and bliss
possible for strangers as for relatives, and after all, he said to her: Every
husband and wife were once strangers to one another, and she said: And
that's how they remain, Captain, and he tried not to hear what she said,
expressed his admiration of the birds, and Rebecca said: Those rare birds
are carved by my Mongoloid son. And Ebenezer, who was sitting in a corner cracking sunflower seeds, said: She means me, sir, and the Captain
said: It's impossible to carve birds wooden and metaphysical at the same
time without a Jewish brain! And Rebecca said: But as far as I can tell, you're not a Jew, Captain, and he said: I am what I am, according to a
preformed model, made to change with circumstances, and Goldenberg
is indeed a Swiss name, but my father, who wasn't Swiss, could also have
been called Goldenberg. She didn't understand exactly what he meant, but
she didn't think it was important enough to rack her brains over. He said
to her: There is no reality, honorable Mrs. Schneerson, there are only distant memories, real hatred, and unrequited love. Rebecca asked: Doesn't
unrequited love have to start at some requited point? and he thought she
was joking, but for some reason she enjoyed the conversation, and he said:
No, unrequited love is the beginning situation of a dream that realizes
reality. There's a certain opposition here, he added, but in time everything
becomes clear. I'm cursed by everybody, Jews, Arabs, English, Christians,
Shiites, Sunnis, Alawis, and that's how I can defend myself. If I had one
friend I was fond of, or one nation I could cling to without prior conditions,
and respect, maybe I would lose the right of criticism and shorten my
honor and my life. Did you notice, dear lady, that I said "honor" before
"life"? If I'm not honored, I live in a cloud of fake and unnecessary honor.
Only somebody who has his own friend or group is truly in danger, so I'm
safer than everybody and tremble with love that is not yet realized as unrequited from the start and so is full of opportunity never to be realized,
but that love is very close, and I am more protected than endangered as
many thought.
The Captain excitedly felt the birds. He claimed they were wonderful
creations, maybe the most wonderful he had seen since the bronze, stone,
and wood statues he had seen in the museum in Cairo, and suddenly he
spoke with no real connection to the birds, said that Arab children had to
be taught how to paint the eyes of a dead fish to look as if it had just been
caught. He even tried to learn from Ebenezer the secret of the lacquers
and the sort of metaphysical geometry, as he put it, of his works. Ebenezer
spoke slowly and Rebecca gazed vacantly at the ceiling. He said: I mix lacquers and carpenters' glue, solutions, I invented a spray, resin, I know how
to wound trees without hurting them, know flowers with colorful pollen,
and I hear the wood by its weeping and laughing, carve faces and birds,
sometimes I recognize the faces and sometimes not. Rebecca said her son
wasn't exactly a great scholar and had only gone as far as sixth grade in the
settlement school whose level of education was as high as its ethics. And if his father were alive, he would have taught him something. Only after
the Captain had gallantly proposed marriage and an impressive dowry and
had been turned down with a politeness that really wasn't characteristic of
Rebecca did he clutch his sword to his thigh again and hear Rebecca talk
about what she wanted to talk with him when she saw him following her
in the street. She talked about the complicated network of canals to transport the water of the Jordan from its sources straight to the Negev and the
south. That way, she said, we can buy miserable desert land for pennies
and then, secretly, transport water and work the land and establish the
agriculture my husband dreamed of but I realized, and we'll be rich as the
Jews in America. The Captain was excited to hear the words, in his mind's
eye he already saw the big canal, the dams, the dike, and the twisting,
state-of-the-art pipe. Soon after, he promised Rebecca to convey her ideas
to the authorities, who sounded like his cousins when he mentioned them,
he recited to her the book of Psalms from beginning to end and from end
to beginning and Ebenezer fell asleep in his chair even when two members
of the settlement whistled to him in the window to come with them to
beat up an Arab who stole Horowitz's mare.
The Captain stood in the middle of the room Rebecca had built in
memory of Nehemiah and recited. A murmur that reminded her of
Nehemiah's look when he spoke about the Land of Israel now rose in her
ears. Ebenezer woke up, listened a moment, and then fixed in himself
some memory of reciting words that were the same as a very certain music
and he tried to think of the birds flying in his mind and he had to cage
them in wood, for he had never invented a bird but caged the birds of his
mind in the wood he carved, and he let the wood follow the prepared
shapes and Rebecca saw Ebenezer open his eyes wide and shut them
again and she pondered the melody sunk deep in her heart and didn't pay
any heed to it, and some tune that played with Nehemiah's old excitement
and her weeping on his last day, those were yearnings that turned into a
melody more ancient than those yearned for and talked about and observed, something ancient that rose in her and overcame her, and she pondered the history of her family, pondered Rebecca Secret Charity, and said:
It wasn't in vain that those awful people lived and dreamed and shouted,
and she thought about the profound and hidden connection there seemed
to be between swindlers like her and the Captain and God. Suddenly she understood that if she uttered aloud the chapters of Psalms, whose mysterious melancholy she always knew, but hadn't dwelt on, the chapters would
turn into a force that would reach the farthest place she could imagine,
and the touch would turn the impending death into something that could
be directed. Her legs grew light her head was suddenly empty, light and
flighty. And out of an anger that gnawed at her against Nehemiah she
started forgiving him now of all times because he had managed to hurt
her so perfectly, and she thought about her relation to herself, that is to the
God of her fathers, the God played as a clown by her fellow farmers in the
Land where there is no shade or corners, and night falls suddenly black and
ruddy. Ebenezer panted. Poor orphan, she said to herself. The Captain's
solidity was splendid, she had to admit that he was a noble man with no
purpose or homeland and that the strip of light gleaming on him was both
his geography and his biography. What worlds woven in the force of the
words could start revolutions in the cosmic order, she thought, a thought
foreign to her. And deep inside her, she could feel how she once again
gathers corpses in the suitcase, writes "Deliverance" on the ceiling, her
virginity cut off at the terrorist river, some threatening and frightening
force caught in her words about the Land, building and with the word
destroying, and she said to herself: There's a connection between circumlocution and circumcision, a Mount Nebo of words, words that bring rain
in due season and not in due season. Rebecca knew that those Psalms or
the melody heard from them have no connection with belief or nonbelief,
just as her life with Nehemiah and her nonlife with Joseph Rayna had no
connection with love or nonlove. And so she returned to the room where
the Captain was still reciting. Her son dozing in his chair dreams of birds
in shining lacquer and in her a barrier was now planted that would later be
fixed, between her and her milieu, and a melody of the Book of Psalms that
would be the meaning of her life. When the Captain finished reciting he sat
down to drink wine and his face was pale from the effort, his nose looked
red and his cheeks looked gray, but she applauded him, and at that moment, long before he was born, Boaz Schneerson was saved from the death
lurking for him in the war.
Ebenezer then built his hut in the citrus grove near the water tower, not
far from the hill of the Wondrous One and nobody knows anymore why it
was called that. The hill overlooked the fields and the desolation from the east to the distant mountains on the horizon, and a deaf girl who lived in
the nearby settlement came one day and stayed there, sitting and watching for long hours as he built boxes or carved birds and she watched in silence. Ebenezer didn't miss his father, whose disgrace he had had to hear
for years from his mother, he only yearned for Rebecca and she wasn't his.
To herself she admitted that she had never managed to love Ebenezer
more than she had managed not to love him, or to love his father. But
those rare moments of affection for Nehemiah that increased after his
death didn't touch her son. He didn't look like her, he didn't look like
Joseph or Nehemiah. He didn't look like her father or like Nehemiah's
mother, he didn't look like anybody she knew. Rebecca started reciting the
book of Psalms a week after Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg erected
his tent, which reminded her of the Wondrous One's splendid tent, and he
started digging the rock of Hagar wife of Abram, which, according to his
calculations, was buried there. He had ancient maps showing him ancient
places long forgotten. That day in the citrus grove, Ebenezer carved his
father's image on a wooden board that he planed and filed and covered
with lacquer and the deaf girl wept. And then, for the first time in his life,
Ebenezer knew the taste of love. The touch was nice. The deaf girl's face
was twisted like a captured bird, but her voice wasn't heard and that scared
him. When he lay in bed afterward and looked at the tin ceiling above his
hut he felt exalted and didn't know why. His mother, who had started sitting in the big chair at the screened window with the book of Psalms in one
hand and a flyswatter in the other and Ahbed and the laborers working the
farm, imposed a considerable yoke on him too and he had to go out to plow
and harvest, to take care of the chicken coop and the cow barn, and among
the laborers who worked in the yard he met a Jew wearing a kippah who
didn't believe in the resurrection of the world according to Marx and
Engels like the other laborers in the other yards, prayed devotedly, and
waited patiently for the messiah. He was a humble man and not unpleasant, who loved the deaf girl with a quiet and restrained love. When he'd
see her coming back from the citrus grove with a light gleaming on her
face, he was filled with longing and thought: If only I could grant her a soft
and dreamy beauty like that. Ebenezer he privately loathed, he called him
an idolater. Later on, Ebenezer explained to the deaf Starochka why he
couldn't really love her and how much he yearned for somebody he didn't know who and she wanted to tell him something about her love but her
inability to talk saved her from an absurd plea and she walked to the settlement, sat in the yard, and the Hasidic laborer brought her a glass of water,
looked at her a long time until she grasped how strong his love was, took
his hand, and kissed it. Then she started going to the synagogue and
praying devotedly, smeared her crotch with red, and went to the wedding
canopy with all the laborers standing around and calling out Mazal tov,
Mazal tov.
His wife's silence, the laborer said later, was the grammar of messianism. He said that against Ebenezer's idolatry, but they didn't understand
his words anymore than he himself understood the decree of his life and
his marriage to a virgin whose wild shouts he saw in his mind's eye a thousand times when she came out of Ebenezer's hut. In those days, the Captain stopped digging for Hagar's rock and started seeking the stones of
Jacob's Ladder in the mountain opposite and people who hadn't visited her
house for years once again knocked on Rebecca's door and talked with her
about agricultural matters on which she was an expert as she often said,
reluctantly, and in the settlement rumors spread about her impending
marriage.
The rumors were premature, but the Captain didn't despair and went
on proposing marriage, money, travels to distant lands, and a pedigree from
the eleventh century, and so when Rebecca brought up the idea of traveling south with him to find out whether those lands in the desert could be
bought until her plans for the canals would be realized, he saw that as a
sign whose plausibility nobody of course would understand, that the memorial to Dante Alighieri would be erected and on the other hand his desired marriage to Rebecca was already sealed. Ebenezer was left to manage
the farm, the Hasidic laborer went to the Hasid village in the south, and
was replaced by another laborer who wasn't a Hasid, but didn't want to
foment revolution against the capitalists, Ahbed the son had long ago replaced his father who was about to die and milked the cows and the Captain and Rebecca rode in a carriage hitched to a pair of horses to the lands
of Ruhama.
It was a fragrant spring day after a stormy sudden rain and flowers appeared blooming in places that were always arid. They came to a squashed
hill where she had stopped on her journey with Nehemiah on their last trip. Everything was desolate and hills and hallucinatory yellow expanses
stretched to the horizon. Rebecca was furious at Nehemiah that she had to
travel to these distant places instead of him, with a Mexican stuffed animal who could be set as a scarecrow against planes, and then an Arab came
to them who popped up from the ground wearing a suit and behind himbetween the rows of prickly pear-walked some short Bedouins.