Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
Just, said Boaz.
Just what?
Just standing here.
Henkin wanted to ask, but some skepticism had already sneaked into
him, that sense of loss that, anyway, he wouldn't answer him. He muttered
something and said, And doesn't the young man have a name?
I did have, said Boaz and then he started pitying all that life here and
he went away. He took the kitbag from the tent, walked to the central bus
station and got on a bus. He had soldier's tickets and rode free. The discharge would start tomorrow. Henkin waited a few minutes and went inside. He locked the door and tried to recall the young man's face, but he
couldn't.
Tape / -
And then a wind started blowing and Teacher Henkin said to his wife:
They won't understand, Hasha Masha, they won't understand, there's an
undermined system of fates here, look ... but she didn't want to read.
Tape / -
... And once again I recall the young man who stood here years ago.
Now I think it really was Boaz Schneerson but maybe I'm wrong. Boaz
never confirmed that he stood here and took the glass of cold water and
didn't deny it either. The story of the Last Jew was also constructed from
the end to the beginning, and only after I invested a few years in my investigation of the Last Jew did I meet Ebenezer completely by chance, even
though he was here, near me, all that time. And after the meeting with
Ebenezer, doubts about the hundreds of pages I had written stirred in me
and I decided to think about writing the book with that German. Maybe
that writing itself is an attempt to decipher, to uncover the things whose
logical sequence is so strange to me.
My dear son Menahem I lost many years ago. Menahem was killed in
two different places: he was killed in battle in the valley near Mount Radar
where he lay among thirty-two bodies, and he fell in battle for the Old City
of Jerusalem, at dawn on May twentieth, nineteen forty-eight. Maybe she's right, Hasha Masha, who maintains that the glory of mourners in front of
a mirror is common in me. I'm trying to reconstruct things: I then felt that
life stopped all at once, wasn't in store for me anyplace else, the energy in
me was masked by the pain that was too splendid in my wife's eyes, but
was all I had left. I sank into endless thinking about my son and my own
life was only a setting for the sorrow I shaped in me; like somebody who
creates life on the model of death. I looked at my little house on Deliverance Street, near the old port of Tel Aviv, against the background of the
sea that sinks there a bit to the north, makes a kind of semi-bow, and at
the undrained station is a small airport where small planes land or take off
over our house. I looked then at the desolation of the forsaken concrete of
the port, the abandoned enclosures, the creased houses, and the dusty
trees, eaten by sea salt, and the sand that penetrates everything here,
thickens holes, turns everything living into scarred desolation bereft of
beauty. It's hard for me to describe the essence of that pain, they're the
strongest yearnings for a person whose death is never grasped. That death
is in you, lives in you, in the chest, the dream, waking, slumbering grown
to somewhere you have no idea of, and then the wakefulness, the emptiness, the waking distress. Memories are nothing but nonstop poundings
in softness, maybe a mute shout in a dream and you don't know whether
you're dreaming it or it's dreaming you.
In the cemeteries for those who fell in World War II, the anonymous
graves say: "Known only to God." On a check you write: "Pay to the bearer,"
so it can't be transferred to somebody else. Pain has no heirs, there is no
imagination that can hold the empty space left behind by some anonymous
person known only to God, if God knew him as I do, he would hold the
whole earth.
All I had left of Menahem were a few school notebooks, a naive scrapbook from the seventh grade, photos we took here and there of Menahem's
grandfather and grandmother who have died meanwhile, of uncles, friends
we used to meet sometimes. Photos in the drawers of our table or with
Noga, who was still living with us then, before she went to live with Boaz.
His mother hung Menahem's clothes in the closet. Our house is a closet for
Menahem's clothes. A picture album, a few notebooks and that poem,
enveloped by this house. Hasha Masha scoured the buttons, sewed on the
ones that fell off, polished his shoes carefully, scoured the isolated objects we had left and I, who had once worked for a tailor to pay for my schooling, sewed the rips, stitched together, then I ironed everything and we
hung them up in the closet and ever since then he's known only to God.
All we had left was to sit and wait. We had to make up a life to justify what
had ended.
Boaz Schneerson came and moved me out of my orbit, killed Menahem
in another battle, brought him back to life, and put him to death again, but
about that I'll have to talk later. Noga left us for Boaz and I went on teaching awhile, I was even principal for about two years. But when I figured out
that I was talking to students who had finished school long ago and maybe
were parents of their own children, when I figured out that in my increasingly frequent hallucinations I was talking to Menahem's friends who remained his age, on the day it ended, but in fact they had already graduated
and were filling the world with mischief, or teaching, or running factories,
and I called those kids by other names, when I saw that I was hallucinating, I resigned.
That was a few years ago, years after our son fell. The photos didn't
help, nor did the endless walks every morning between seven and seven
forty-five from our house in the north of the city to Mugrabi Square that
had been obliterated meanwhile along with the clock that had anyway
never shown the right time, but stood there like a clear sign of some stability that's gone now. Nothing helped, the emptiness was heavy as the
nothingness of Menahem's shoes in the closet. Polished, shining, destined
for nothing. At the end of every journey, thousands of kilometers in the
same orbit, I remained alone.
Until I met Ebenezer I thought my investigation of the Last Jew resulted from a conversation I once had with somebody who had been the
principal of our school, Demuasz, the teacher who had been there even
longer than I. I have to say that compared to what Demuasz built I didn't
contribute much and our school sank into a gray slumber of routine. What
I did contribute is a wall of memory and every year the graduating students
say with an embarrassed smile that the next reunion will be held on it. And
then they also see Menahem's name carved there, heading the long list.
I put up the wall by myself and there was some pleasure in beginning the
long list with my son's name and adding after the name, as ordered by
Demuasz, the words, May God avenge their blood. I didn't believe in those words, but I gave in. Today I know that in those days when I talked with
Demuasz about the strange man who lived in his house, Ebenezer was
moving into the Giladis' house next door to our house, but since I was so
involved with myself and my solitude, I didn't pay any heed to that and
didn't even notice that the Giladis moved out of here and a real estate
agent was hanging around here tired and sweaty and I didn't see that night
when Ebenezer came with a truckload of furniture and closed himself in
the house and slammed the windows. Demuasz, who helped me quite a bit
in my work on the Committee of Bereaved Parents, invited me then to his
house and introduced me to the guest who was staying there. The guest
was paralyzed, waving his arms like a double-edged sword, I don't know
why that image came into my mind, or a sword of the Lord of Hosts, in a
Jew of all people a sword is like a shattered sanctuary, and that smashed
shard muttered vague words that nobody understood but when he met my
eyes, and maybe he saw there a pain that touched his own pain, he told me
in a few sentences about the Last Jew, but then he didn't yet know who
he was. In my house I was inferior in my own eyes and in my wife's eyes.
The death of my son, if I can be forgiven the expression, was a few sizes too
big on me. The embarrassment of the father looking at the forever empty
shoes of his son was a definite condition of enmity, and in me at least, a
certain glory of timorous but not undramatic grief. I wouldn't say I was nice
to people, I had a certain bitterness I didn't like in myself, but I couldn't
control it, the yearnings for my son were also yearnings for exchange, a death
for a death. Questions of why him, and if there is a fixed number of dead,
why did fate pick a fight with me of all people. I didn't ask anybody why fate
hadn't picked a fight with his son, I asked why it had picked a fight with me.
My wife almost forgave me with painful contempt. The destroyed Jew in
Demuasz's house was still alive, from me he was dying, from me he was also
drawing some consolation, I don't understand why, maybe my bitterness
suited him since dying is a condition of the present and not of the past. Noga
was still living with us then and she and my wife would look together at the
photos of Menahem, at the notebooks, they loved and hated one another in
a kind of shared plot where I couldn't set foot. They were locked against me,
I had to meet a dying Jew in a strange house to glory in my pain.
At the sight of him, I could more easily understand the life that Hasha
Masha and Noga inspired in the cobwebs of our house. At the sight of him I understood how awful but also how encouraging it was to hear the breathing of my two women when I couldn't fall asleep and turned and tossed
helplessly. The man told me about the Last Jew, about his knowledge.
That night I dreamed I came home and killed Hasha Masha. She walked
from room to room in her underwear and kept me from thinking about my
son. Then I served Noga her blood in a glass. In the morning I wanted to
cry but my eyes had been dry for years.
What looks one way today looked completely different then. I was already a person less arrogant in his pain, less elegant, less portrayed by himself, more submissive to real pain who changed his self-image as somebody
who contains pain. Without the vitality that Noga imparted to our house,
the house looked like a tomb. The windows were always shuttered, my
wife in black, under the lamp that comes down almost to the table, the
shade creates a familiar shaft of light, a shade I bought many years ago from
a refugee who came to our house during the big Aliyah, and when I bought
that shade, I seemed to be buying the skin of that refugee. I remember the
crooked smile on his pale face, he also wanted to sell me a watch and rings,
all gold, he told me, and I bought the wax-paper shade that turned yellow
over the years. Its edge grew sharp as a clown's hat and it had burst now
and was sewn and repaired but we didn't change it, just as then I still
didn't take care of the yard or the house, we hadn't yet changed anything, we didn't buy any furniture or new curtains and beneath the shaft
of light in the dim room at the table once polished and now rubbed beyond
repair sat my wife, shrouded in a smell of moths and mints and tea with
lemon mixed with orange peel. A smell of mothballs and old paint. Maybe
because of that closed desolation, I accepted Demuasz's invitation and
that's why I could sit facing that destroyed Jew and instead of trying to
listen to him, I tried in my mind to compare one suffering with another,
one pain with another. A crooked game, my wife would surely have said,
and I would watch the man's silence, his dying eyes, his hands drawing
wild illustrations for me in the dense air of the room, and it was then that
he told me things.
Today when I reconstruct the things that led me to Ebenezer and the
encounter with the German, I recall that that morning, when I went to
Demuasz's house, I did see a stranger standing in the door of the Giladi
house with his profile to me, I remember a sense of panicky haste I felt at the sight of him, something bothered me and at the same time erased the
picture from my mind, like that quality I developed over years to dream
that I'm late and then wake up with a start, a minute or two before the big
old alarm clock rings. And the man stood there in his shabby but elegant
clothes with some old humility, maybe even a spiteful clown but for some
reason I didn't think about him, didn't register him in my mind, maybe I
thought the man was a guest of the Giladis, maybe he inspired me with
some vague dread. I came to Demuasz's house bearing in the depths of my
mind a faded picture of Ebenezer, and the man in the Demuasz home was
in bed, as if he were waiting for me, I thought, maybe he intends a ceremony of death for me to gore me with his pain. To triumph over me. I
looked at the glass of water on the nightstand next to his bed, at his teeth
in the glass, his eyes were wide open but hallucinating, his leg twitched
under the thin blanket, above him hung an old picture of a butterfly surely
left over from the days when Demuasz was a teacher of the nature of our
Land and his lips started moving, gaped open and spread and were again
covered with a scrim of feeble violence, I took off my hat, my hands were
clasped in one another to preserve that measure of fitting courtesy I assume
when necessary. A snort like a phony chirp of a bird rose from the man's
nose and he said to me: Henkin, I want to say something, Demuasz was
stunned and I, my habit for many years, I mechanically thrust my hands in my
pockets and pulled out the square paper I always had in my pocket, and the
sharpened pencil I never left home without, and when he spoke I of course
wrote it down as if I were again Henkin-researcher, Henkin, one of the
tough young men who plies his pencil, as my students once used to sing.
And the man, still with his eyes shut (he shut them when he started speaking), his leg started twitching, and the false teeth in the glass, because of
the tilt of my face and the flash of light, looked monstrous, gigantic, he
said: The name of the company there is D. G. S., initials of Deutsche
Gesellschaft fur Stadtlingsbekampfung M. B. H., an all-German company
of fighters. In nineteen forty-four it paid dividends of two hundred percent
to A. G. Farben, one of the three concerns they owned. The cost was nine
hundred seventy-five deutsch marks for one hundred fifty kilos of Zyklon
B. twenty-seven and a half marks a kilogram for one thousand five hundred
human beings. At that time, the mark was worth twenty-five American cents, Mr. Henkin. That is, six dollars and seventy-five cents. In the summer of forty-four, Mr. Henkin, the life of a Jew was worth less than twofifths of a cent. And then they said that was too expensive. They sat in
Berlin in armchairs and wrote a report. They wrote that that was too expensive. It's all economics, Mr. Henkin. So, they said, the children have to
be thrown straight into the fire. They were frugal, he said, and knew what
things cost.