Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
Then he went to see the second show of a film whose name he forgot,
and felt as if he had come to the end of the road and where would he escape now, and then the strange event happened to him that I'm telling
about in these tapes. Boaz stood at the kiosk and tried to read the head line of the evening paper and very close to the counter, next to a hurricane
lamp, stood a young man Boaz was sure came out of the battle the man in
the cafe had told him about. His head was wreathed with a halo of light and
his face looked like the face of Boaz that the man had told him about. The
kiosk owner said to the young man: So from the ship you were sent straight
to the war? And the young man said, No, first I was in the port of Haifa.
And the young man was so familiar, when Boaz looked at his arm in the light
of the hurricane lamp and saw that it moved from his own shoulder. The
young man finished drinking and now hid the newspaper headline from Boaz
and over his head hung an ad for Nesher beer. Boaz thought, The betrayals will end for a while, so he also understood that no envy would save
him but he knew that signals were sent to him from the depths of the
war he had fought in, or that that young man had fought in for him. Headlights flashed and there were still many painted streetlamps from the war
and the lights seemed to be caressing the gloom. Thoughts that didn't
come from a certain place stuck in his mind and a bird built itself a nest on
the roof of the kiosk. The man said: That's a honeysucker, so small, every
year he comes and makes his nest on the roof. And the young man asked
if that tiny sucker could be the same bird and Boaz who knew the answer
from childhood, couldn't have spoken, stood on the side, darkened, terrified, the back of the young man's neck filled him with longings for Minna's
finger dripping blood and he tried to remember when he had bought her
the ring in Hepzibah where Grandmother thought he was stealing pens
and erasers, but he couldn't recall. When the young man moved a shadow
seemed to shift or a curtain to be pulled. The kiosk was gaping like a
wound. A caprice of chiaroscuro made the young man look as if he were
going away into a halo of light, but it was only outlines of non-body.
A man chewing sesame and drinking soda held a fragrant wormwood leaf
between his fingers and the smell was tormenting and sweet. The desert
wildness in the city street was sudden and assuaged some pain that gnawed
in him. The man paid and the young man started walking and Boaz found
himself hopping behind him, he was hopping because now he had a pain
in his foot, wanted to stop, settle things, but he followed the young man
like a blind man. And then he said: That young man took off Minna's ring,
loves blood, is disguised as a crow. They eat sesame seeds in Tel Aviv with
desert wormwood. I'm walking behind a yell that came from inside me, he said to himself, but what's happening to me, what am I, a car thief, a warmonger, that silence will drive me out of my mind: the young man turned
into a dark street and went off toward a house with a thick tree sprouting
from it. The tree was dead but the house around the tree wasn't destroyed.
The crest of the tree wasn't seen in the dark. He searched for a house number on the wall and didn't find one. The name of the street wasn't written
there either. The fence was low and beyond the house tombstones were
seen, the dark obliterated the tops of the tombstones, but one tombstone
was seen clearly and even the writing etched on it was seen prominently,
maybe because of the light falling from a window where a broken shutter
didn't block it. Then it became clear that aside from the tombstone lying
here waiting to be moved to the cemetery, this was a cemetery for dead
cars, maybe even the spoils of war. A person was walking in the yards, he
had stones in his pocket and was searching for cats to throw the stones at.
The cats looked like flashes in the headlights of the passing cars, slithering around tree trunks that looked as if they didn't have crests. The young
man looked as if he were hesitating. I wanted to go back, he'll say years
later, as an end of a story about people searching for themselves, I wanted
to go back like a melody played long ago. In the yard the young man entered you could feel rusty nails and shards of bottles and hear the claws of
cats leaping toward the hewn trunks. The tree that burst out of the house
was seen from the corner where Boaz stood as if pickled in vinegar, maybe
the house was merely a box.
The young man searched for a path among the shards of bottles and
nails and suddenly felt a stream of water flowing from the next yard. In the
window with the shallow light, a radio was heard and in his fantasy, Boaz
could imagine the street going on even beyond the house that stood in the
middle and cut it off. And farther on there was a building like a Greek
temple with the municipal courthouse next to it and then the sea, whose
breakers were heard even through the water rustling and the cats purring.
On a small balcony latticed with crosses, an iron weave like an army range,
maybe against snakes or other afflictions of nature, in a rusty can sprouted
a geranium bush and its sharp smell, which surely came to him because of
the water that had recently sprinkled it, filled Boaz's nostrils. Now he followed the young man and turned right toward the front of the house, a bare
bulb hung there without a shade and a woman's robe on a peg that looked like a hook. On the hook stood a bird. The bird kept moving and its beak
explored the source of the music coming from the radio and even in the
gloom you could make out the gold color of its beak, maybe it was red and
Boaz couldn't make the slim distinction. He thought: we had the barn in
the settlement and now there's destruction there.
Then a scene flickered in his mind and he smiled. Teacher All's Well
stands before the class in the settlement, excited, a dark spot starts showing at his fly, his pocket is puffed up from the cotton he bought at noon for
his wife Eve, and put in his pocket, and the girls are giggling and the boys
are weeping with laughter and Teacher All's Well is talking excitedly about
Jacob's ladder ... standing on the earth, the whole Land of Israel folded
under the stone pillow of Our Father, the ladder facing up ... Oh, what
a wretched and sublime nation, he said, and Boaz now remembers the
blush on the faces of the farmers' only daughters who had often seen
bulls mounting cows and Mrs. Czkhstanovka standing next to the national flags and waiting for a bridegroom who never came, but they weren't
used to seeing a teacher with wet trousers saying: Oh, what a wretched and
sublime nation, struggling with God! Israel! An eternal struggle of the nation and its God, Nation and Land, Language and Fate ... And the girls
are giggling, the spot's spreading, maybe touching the cotton Margalit saw
him buying with her own eyes from old Greenspan whose son committed
suicide. And he said: Stiffnecked, struggling fateful struggles, disappointed
but not ceasing to believe ... maybe in order to lose! And that's something
modern writers don't understand at all! And he looked at his flock, who
had no idea who the modern writers were and what they meant and here,
thinks Boaz, stands a young man, maybe I'm standing there, and thinking
about spots on the trousers of Hebrew teachers. A garden of nails caught in
a pale light and the smell of geraniums intoxicates and the crumbling stone
fence and the tree inventing the house and everything here is longing.
And we're all of us acting in a Jewish Western, somebody will say later
on, and then this moment will be remembered. The young man who may
be he averts his face, Boaz knows it's impossible. The geranium, the longings, everything is mixed up here in a restrained essence. He didn't come
to Tel Aviv to seek a new war, especially not against himself. But the
enemy, it seemed to him, is shrouded in a smell of mothballs, I and not I,
thought Boaz. When the young man turned to him, something forgotten flickered in Boaz's mind. He recalled that once he was in the battle the
man in the cafe told him about, but he knew he didn't remember it, he
thought then that the Boaz who went into the battle hadn't come out of it
at all. Thirty-two killed. Menahem Henkin was killed there, too. But I
didn't come out of it, somebody else came out of it, disguised as me. Now
it was clear to him. The dark was such that as soon as the young man's face
turned aside from the balcony and turned to him, he was blinded for a
moment by the harsh light cast from the window when the light now came
on. Out of a vague fear, he knew he had to choose, so there was a struggle
between Boaz and the very tall mute young man. The light in the window
went out and another light came on and a fire engine siren was heard wailing, racing in the next street, the young man was a cruel fighter, nobody
could come out a winner in such a battle, thought Boaz. The nails stuck in
his feet, the broken glass tore chunks out of his body, the geranium bush
was abandoned. Its smell was forgotten in the smell of the cruel battle,
blood flowed, and he didn't know if it was his blood or the young man's
blood, the young man didn't talk, just groaned and roared, and Boaz tried
to talk but no words were heard. Only afterward the young man groaned:
You're all shit, what do you know. But now Boaz wasn't sure if he had
really heard those words, he was just as struck as his enemy, the flight of
the two of them was the most ridiculous thing Boaz could think of later on.
How the two of us fled at the same time. He tramped on nails and glass
shards and fled and saw another back fleeing from there and groaning and
he groaned too, but now he couldn't know who was who, and Boaz imagined that that was all he wanted to know, who he wasn't, the bird with the
gold beak flew off, the robe hanging on a peg before disappeared in a panic,
a woman's hand was seen tugging the robe and maybe tore it, lights went
on and off. Voices burst out of apartments where maybe they were trying
to listen to a funny program at the end of the war, Hasidic music was heard
in the distance, but what was clear to Boaz was that only one of them came
from there and again he vaguely recalled that battle and he thought, Only
one came out of that too even though maybe two of us were in it, who came
out? Me or him, who comes out now: me or him, and he didn't know. And
so, for a moment, when he stood in the street and people started appearing before his eyes, he could take pity on himself. But he was immediately
disgusted with himself and stopped. Cleaned his wounds, but he recalled that he had gotten a tetanus shot some time ago and was protected from
that harm; he wanted to be sure he wouldn't get rabies but that only embittered him even more.
The cats who were seen hiding between the fence and the house, where
a tree was sprouting, were searching for a bend of the stones in the auto
cemetery and suddenly they also fled all at once. The house couldn't be
seen now. Who loses, who wins, the pain inside him, he hopped toward the
tents on the seashore and wanted to get up and go to the settlement, to
Grandmother, to be a live hero returning to the kindergarten teacher Eve
and to her husband Teacher All's Well. Here, Eve, is a chick who did come
back, your other chicks were left there. To see the gravestones, to forget.
But he got up in the morning and went to the officer of the city. The office was humming with soldiers getting new uniforms or returning uniforms or requesting transfers. From the officer of the city he got addresses
of those who had been with him. He tried to remember the battle he had
left the day before yesterday and everything was mixed up in his mind, the
battle, the movies, Laurence Olivier playing Hamlet, Goethe is better than
Shakespeare. The girl he loved at night disappeared, maybe I dreamed all
those things. He walked with the list in his pocket stood still in the street
and saw an apartment on the second floor. On the balcony hung flowerpots
and a gigantic awning covered it from the sun. He went up and knocked on
the door. A woman opened it. She looked at him and tried to wipe away
some tears seen drying in her left eye. Boaz said: I'm Boaz, I fought with
Johnny. The woman brought him inside and gave him tea. He drank it and
tried to talk, but he couldn't. She said, what are you seeking here, Boaz?
He didn't know and so he left. Then he went to the cafe and sat for three
days and waited for some parents to find him there. He bought a gigantic
Bristol sheet and wrote on it in big letters "I know dead people," and hung
the Bristol paper on the tree in front of Kassit Cafe, among the announcements of exhibitions and poetry books that were now starting to come out at
dizzying speed. But only one man asked him if he knew Menashe Aharono-
vitch and Boaz said he didn't. People who knew him laughed and Minna
appeared with the torn finger and said Boaz was out of his mind but she
didn't dare approach him. He sat there at the table, alone, full of a new joy
that bloomed in him, waiting to give testimony. The waiters served him
beer or coffee. The money ran out and he left. The policeman who tried to tear the Bristol sheet off the tree couldn't do it because Boaz fought for
his right to give testimony. Three days later he sat with a woman he didn't
know and tried to explain to her how the woman he had slept with in the
hotel looked. The woman he didn't know thought that was surely love and
didn't understand him at all even though he talked about love as if it was
a war you died in. He wanted to tell her, That's perfect non-love, but I'm
searching for her. And only at the end did he start striding toward Menahem
Henkin's house. Here there was already a problem, he knew Menahem well,
he defended Menahem, and after he died they said maybe he had been all
right. Then the "maybe" was erased. The street was flooded with light but
Boaz walked in the shade and when he had to cross the street he leaped
across. He believed he'd find the young man who beat and was beaten by
him embracing the woman he almost succeeded in loving in the hotel, but
he didn't. Courtyards swallowed up the beautiful and the good who tried
to seem indifferent. People were already starting to come out and seek a
new substance in their new state, which distributed food coupons and
declared austerity. When he came to Henkin's house, he saw a dim light,
loved the name of the street, Deliverance Street, near the sea, small, pitiful houses, tipping over, and clearly they had once been nicer and more
festive. He wanted to tell Henkin that he had sat in Kassit Cafe three days
and waited for him and why didn't he come, but he saw a scarecrow of a
man drying himself at a dead castor oil tree. Henkin looked suited to the
place. His clothes were dark, his hat was from another decade, the music
that burst out of him was a waltz of slaughtered ducks. He looked avenged
and defeated. With eyes full of sad cunning Teacher Henkin searched for
his son at a fence covered with brambles, now wretched and neglected. A
small garbage cart stood there, empty, rusted, and the enclosures of the
port looked too bright in the sunlight. The intense blue of the sky swallowed up the particle of distance between him and the sea. The houses
protected only themselves. Henkin didn't protect anything. Boaz stood
there stuck and waited and Henkin looked at him. After about an hour,
Henkin went into the house, opened the slats of the shutter a little and
peeped outside. Boaz went on standing. A little while later, he came outside and gave Boaz a glass of cold water. Boaz didn't drink it and returned
the water to Henkin. He saw Menahem playing in the yard and thought,
what could I have told him, Henkin couldn't have recognized Boaz's face because of the strong light and he saw only the stunned silhouette in the
afternoon light and then he dared ask, he asked: Who are you?