Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
He walked around among the intersection of the looks of the English
women who drank cold juice, as Rebecca said later, as beautiful angels walk
around at the entrance to Paradise and try to bribe the gods with their
beautiful eyes. She took that sentence, although she messed it up a bit,
from a description of Joseph Rayna, who she knew sometimes was Boaz's
father. Where could such a resemblance between them come from? she
asked herself with a pain she didn't reveal to anybody, not even Boaz, how
can it be that Joseph Rayna and Boaz Schneerson were one person born at
different times?
At least he doesn't fall in love with those women, she said to herself, at
least he doesn't get ugly women pregnant. And then she clapped her hands
and Ahbed, the grandson of Ahbed, brought her a cup of tea.
After twelve months of war, in 'forty-eight, after he wandered around for
a while and didn't know how long, he met somebody who was his double.
He took a fake gold ring off the finger of Minna, the building contractor's
daughter, and came to the settlement. Autumn made the descending evening silent and dangerous. The threshing floor wasn't there anymore. Instead of the threshing floor was the big house surrounded by a garden. A
black DeSoto was parked next to the house. He thought of the chicks of
the kindergarten teacher Eve that had died so they could build a new house
here with a DeSoto. He recalled the car he had stopped in Tel Aviv, and
thought maybe he shouldn't have banged the heads of those two people
together. A woman wrapped in a shawl stood in the glow of evening and
pruned a rosebush. In that soft, splendid hour she looked like a firefly.
The light glowed on her, flitted and returned. Somebody inside the house
was playing with a flashlight. She stood out against the background of the
summer ground that had drunk the first rains of the season that morning. On
the way, in the bus, he saw two Arabs in the field. The sight of them calmed
him. They weren't an enemy he had to shoot at.
The Arabs in the field allowed him to think of Rebecca. They were
sheikhs; planted in the landscape like scarecrows, cut out of it, without
challenge, without the affection or longing of All's Well her husband or Eve
whose chicks didn't all return and some were buried in Roots to her
husband's florid speeches. The Arabs in the field were domesticated in it.
Nor did he resent it, because he thought about his grandfather Nehemiah
who couldn't be like them. I'm the wrong man who returned from the war, he thought, and it's her fault! No threshing floor, no Menashe, no Menahem
Henkin, no double, no redhead, in the end there's me. On the porches, in
the chill evening wind, sit the old women, Grandmother will bury them all
and when my turn comes, she'll bury me too. And then she'll go back to
Joseph Rayna somewhere in the green moss at the end of the solar system.
He saw children at the bougainvillea bush and thought about a little girl
he had once known. They spawn like fish, produce Hebrew soldiers in an
assembly line for Eve the kindergarten teacher. I've come back without
your chicks, Eve! The soldiers died for you, proudly they carried to their
graves the exalted words you instilled in them. Did that help them? So
you've got a flag! In the bus, a woman sat next to him and read a magazine.
She wore a purple dress and her lips were painted. She didn't know that
Marar no longer exists, she didn't even know there ever was a village here
named Marar. She read indifferently about the homemade ink flag hoisted
in Eilat. The picture shows a person climbing a pole and hanging an improvised flag. The Arabs don't draw flags with ink, Marar was destroyed, they
killed Menahem and they go on plowing. The woman in the bus smiled
at him. What? Marar? You didn't know, new in the Land, you lived in
Beersheba, a new housing project, in the war, it was bad. She talked about
another war when Ebenezer died and we built an airfield for the British. A
radio is open to the evening, the old women sit listening to music, the
wind blows silently, the trees move in restrained splendor, the old women
don't recognize Boaz, they don't know that Ebenezer's son brought them
the state. Boaz returned intact, not wounded, no woman stood up for him
in the bus. All's Well won't make a speech for me, he thought bitterly, no
flag will wave, no enemy will be arrested for my dead body. That "togetherness," which started in Eve's kindergarten and continued in the threshing floor when they all sang "there was a young woman at Kinnereth" and I
sat on the side, I prepared the next wars with Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg.
I helped him woo Rebecca. I told him how she looked without a bra and
without panties, and he blushed. He clutched a sword he no longer wore
belted at his side, stood gazing, the girls sang about the threshing floor, and
I sang and didn't sing. The truth is that what oppressed him most was that
he couldn't get killed. I have nothing to come back to, he said to himself,
and those who did have where to come back to and what to come back to,
didn't return. That's not glory, Eve.
From the day Boaz was mobilized until the war was over, Rebecca
Schneerson sat pinned to her chair. My men die too much, she thought.
She wasn't really interested whether Boaz wanted to or not, she decided
he would return and she recited Psalms. Some nights she shouted the verses
and other nights she whispered them. Today she got up from her chair.
She knew Boaz was coming back home. And Boaz is walking on the path,
evening has fallen now, the no-threshing floor in the distance. One summer when he worked in the Burial Society to understand "what life is
woven of," he sat with Tova Kavenhazer on the threshing floor. She was
quite beautiful then. They hugged and he pressed against her and she felt
his eyes penetrating her body through her dress, and then he told her
about Nimitz's body, how they embalmed it, washed and wrapped it in a
tallith, and Tova Kavenhazer jumped up in alarm, pushed his hands aside,
and yelled: With the hands you embrace dead bodies, you embrace me?
And he thought, With the hands I embrace her I embrace dead bodies, and
ever since then he often pondered that sentence. She ran away. I was left
with the thoughts, embracing dead bodies and embracing Tova Kavenhazer
... She yelled: Don't you dare touch me, Boaz Schneerson! Later she married a shopkeeper from Akron who sold bootleg vodka.
When he entered the house, the Captain stood up, saluted, hugged
Boaz, shook his hand, and left. Boaz put the kitbag on the ground and
looked at Rebecca. She moved her hands a little, almost said something,
but didn't. Behind her, through the screened window, the skeletons of
almond trees were seen and the moon was starting to light the roof of the
cowshed. They looked at one another and her mouth became soft and yet
it was firm, and then he took a step toward her, his body rigid, stuck to the
center of gravity in a space he didn't know yet, regulated by glory, and hit
her hard. The accumulated rage pitched the old woman aside, dropped
her to the ground, and Boaz trampled on her and from the window of
Ebenezer's house, the stunned Captain peeped out. In the distance music
came from a radio, the Captain who was afraid to interfere, tried to move
so as not to see anymore. Rebecca lay on the ground, her body heavy and
shrunken, her lips rounded, and a strange smile on the opening of her lips.
The lips seemed stuck to her mouth. The lamp moved from the blow and
then stayed still, murmurs of pain were heard, Boaz kicked her again and
she shrank up and growled, but the smile didn't depart from her mouth, a thin slit of abomination popped up and vanished, and then the slit was
filled with blood that flowed like a chameleon, and in the pain a groan of
laughter was heard. The old woman lay shriveled and laughing; jets of
blood burst from her face and her wide-open eyes.
Boaz went to the window, hit it, and yelled: That's not for you, Captain!
And when the Captain took off, he made out the curbstones of the path
and for a moment something the Captain had once told him flashed in his
brain: Your mother built the path, and he asked then, Who, Rebecca? And
the Captain said, No, Dana, and for the first time in his life he felt a longing for a stranger and hated himself so much. Boaz turned from the window, an oppressive compassion lay on him, he picked Rebecca up off the
floor, sat her in her chair, brought a bottle of cognac, washed her face, and
then kissed her wounds. She sat silent, blood still gushing, smelling of
flowers, cognac, and sweat, she picked up the flyswatter that had fallen,
wiped her dress, and since she couldn't yet talk, she pointed to her purse
on a small chest of drawers next to the door, and Boaz handed her the
purse, she opened the purse, rummaged around in it, took out a brush,
undid her long hair from the pins that were trying to hold it, and started
brushing it. After her hair was smooth, she got up, went to the bathroom,
turned on the faucet, and let a stream of water flow on her face for a long
time. Then she wiped her face, went back and sat down in her easy chair,
and Boaz looked at the beautiful woman who had smeared a little powder
on her face, stretched it, put the black scarf on her back, and said: A new
state you've got, every Negro's got a state, Indians in movies have a state,
Charlie Chaplin has a state, my grandfather's grandfather didn't have a
state, but he was wise and didn't stand at attention every day at flags, like
stupid Eve. I came back, said Boaz and didn't know what to say.
I waited for you. I went to the settlement. There's a new watchmaker
there, came here a few years ago. Hung up a blue and white flag, stood
there in the sun and sang one of Joseph's songs. They've got ministers in
top hats, like Stutberg's automobile! Nehemiah knew when to die and
where, on the border! They made themselves an army of Mr. Klomin and
the Captain, won a state from some Arabs who didn't know the shape of
a pogrom and don't know on what side you write what they never could
read and made a state for Ben-Gurion, Princess Elizabeth, and Shirley
Temple! So what? Did you fight for them too? You look tired, it was hard to bring a state to the people of Israel? Maybe you're hungry. Eat something, Boaz.
But what does all that have to do with Stutberg's car? he asked.
His automobile, when he brought it, everybody came to admire. It was
a first auto. He opened the hood of the motor and everybody, Horowitz
the dummy, Nathan Nehemiah's friend, and even Holtz who later
married somebody who was almost your mother and didn't talk, even he
stood there with a kippah on his head and admired, and they said: A motor
that drives a cart like ten horses, ten kilometers an hour! All the insides of
the auto were outside, now they look at the insides of the Jewish state,
what a wonder! The Jews have a state too.
Eat something, she said.
She made a theatrical gesture that amazed Boaz. She stretched out her
hand and her last word rang like a period and not a question mark, not an
answer, not a suggestion-a gesture. She reached out her hand, her face
became tender, and yet, as always, some thin thread of chill malice was
stretched on her face and the blood still flickered from invisible scratches
and Boaz felt his feet stagger, went to her, sat down on her solid lap and
she hugged him, laid his head on her chest, and when he tried to weep,
whimpers blurted out of his mouth like the whimpers of the jackal in his
childhood when the settlement was girded by whimpering jackals and at
night he would listen to them and try to understand their shrieks.
She stroked his face with her thin hands, kissed his neck, and
whispered: I had to, Boaz, it was one night, I sat here in the chair, it was
dark, the generator wasn't working and the civil guard walked in the street
wearing berets and yelled to put out the light. In the distance, machine
gun shots were heard from Negba and I felt in my flesh how Boaz in the
mountains, is stabbed, shot, almost dead, eyes shut, I saw vultures,
vultures with your eyes, Boaz, vultures, beaks of death, I aimed the words
into the sky, to the river that throbbed, to Secret Charity, and I recited
Psalms in an ancient melody, and you walked between the bullets, and you
lay down and didn't die, I stopped, I stopped short, the vultures wanted
your flesh, the eyes, the words stuck to you, you lay in my words, and a few
hours later, something happened, I don't know what, I fell, as I fell before
when you hit me, I drank blood, and Ahbed, the grandson of Ahbed, was
scared, he didn't leave with the other Arabs and stayed, he yelled: You fall, Madame, they see blood in the dark, too, the window was open now, I was
full of blood, I said to him, Shut up, Ahbed, and you ran, and you fled into
the mountains, I had no choice, Boaz.
I know, he said.
Later, they told me there was a battle in the Old City and you died. I
said you didn't die. People came from the settlement. They said, I have a
grandson there, recite Psalms for him, what could I say? My Psalms don't
belong to their grandsons. Hillanddale and God's Joy lost a grandson, what
could I do? My Psalms weren't meant for their sons and grandsons ... In
our city there was a woman who went mad. People came and tried to get
the madness out of her with fire and sulfur and they couldn't. She was
possessed by the spirit of a heretic who ran away to Germany. They tried
spells and it didn't work. She shrieked and her eyes burned, they raised
heavy smoke and it didn't help. Need connection, they said, need
connection. They said: a false messiah is eight hundred and fourteen and
Joshua son of Miriam is eight hundred fourteen, but it didn't work, not
even Shabtai Zvi. Didn't work, they blew the shofar, and said Lord King
and pass away and the spirit didn't leave. They shouted, Out evil one, and
then they said, There's Rebecca there, bring her. They clothed me in a
gown and scarf so they wouldn't see my face and they took me. I used to
sleep with my eyes open back then. I said to the man, Out evil one, come
to me, I was beautiful, come hug me, the rabbi was scared and blocked his
ears, didn't want to hear, I said I'm yours, I thought about the river that
would make me pregnant some day, and the spirit left, I felt it strong in my
body, a piece of him stayed in me, didn't leave, I spat and then he was
scared and part of him ran away. They saw the window opened and he
flew, you think those are tales, but he flew, then I left, they wrote his name
on an amulet and the man came back, because they didn't write the name
of the woman on the amulet, but by then I wasn't there and after eight
days of the circumcision, she died foaming at the mouth.