Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
We sat there, Noga and I, Boaz was miserable, more miserable than I had ever seen him and he told me that he didn't kill
Menahem, but he should have killed him, and who did he tell?
He told me that! And Noga said: I'll never give birth now, and
then I wept too. And then Boaz's business developed and she
helped him. She told me: He is what he is, and I love him. And
she helped him, but everything began with Henkin, he went to
his committee, years before, read them Menahem's poem. And
then he brought the Defense Ministry into the picture, and
Jordana the Yemenite who fell in love with Menahem, and that
business that flourished.
Tape / -
A few words about words. A vulture is an artificial bird, with a broad wingspan, a twisted beak, the vulture is the hawk, the falcon, the bearded vulture. Vulture is a general name for all birds of prey and also the name of a
specific bird, the precise identity of the vulture is not known, I, Ebenezer,
what do I understand about vultures? In that winter, among corpses, didn't
a man stand there named Hans Kritacal who is today a teacher in Hamburg?
Five Ukrainians with axes beheaded thirty-two children, and he didn't stand
and recite a poem?
What sadness is spread over everything here.
Tape / -
From the letter of Obadiah Henkin.
... And I don't know whether to be glad about your offer or
to be sad. For a long time I've lived beyond gladness or sadness,
so let us say that I accept your offer, or perhaps it was my offer?
To cooperate in writing the book between two experienced
writers, each on his own, something that may never see the light
of day. In your last letter, along with Renate's beautiful letter,
you write me that you wrote to Samuel Lipker (Sam Lipp) in
America and about the answer you got. I think that answer is
indeed important and I translated it into Hebrew.
You wanted to know what exactly I call "the external additions."
Among the books Ebenezer knew by heart (aside from those
we've already talked about and catalogued), is also a treasure that
can't be known exactly. In addition to the report of the Institute
there is material (about a million words) whose sources are not
known and yet are quoted from books. In other words, this isn't
personal knowledge by this or that person, but knowledge taken
from books (through people, of course) whose identity I can't
verify. I shall list some of those books that may be most important
to us:
1) "Travels of the Tribe of Menashe," by anonymous, in manuscript, copied in 1454 by Rabbi Joachin Eliahu, Amsterdam.
2) "Tribulations of the Sad Knight Kabydius, His Journey to the
Land of Israel with Peter the Hermit and his Love for Judith."
The name of the author isn't mentioned in Ebenezer's words,
but the transcription is from the year 1343, Paris.
3) "Sources for the Burial of Moses, Story of the Golden Calf
and Its Location." Written by Reb Yehuda Ber Avram ben
Abraham (maybe a convert?), printed in Leipzig in the year
1984 (sic!), a year that is still far from us-Ebenezer insists
that the date is correct and doesn't remember if he saw it or
is only quoting.
4) "Kinds of Jews" by Sergei Szerpowsky and his son, Warsaw
1745.
5) "History of the Nation of Israel According to the Creator,"
by anonymous, printed in Tarnopol in 1767.
6) "Source of the Animals and the Creation, God as a Chariot
that Was," by the Divine Kabbalist Ahmed Abidion ben-Haalma Downcast Eyes, printed in Istanbul in the year 50 after
the death of the Messiah (apparently meaning Shabtai Zvi).
There are of course more books, but I haven't yet investigated. The books I listed above are not found in any library or
known collection of books. Nor are they mentioned in any other
place (I checked with the librarians in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv,
Copenhagen, Paris, London, New York, and other archives), nor
are they mentioned in any other book, and that may be the major
problem, because if they are not mentioned, are they knowledge or fiction? And if fiction, whose?
Considering what we know about Ebenezer, he couldn't have
invented those books. The books I examined constituted (each
in itself) a conceptual, planned and formatted whole, sequences
of facts that can be checked, and cases that really can be
checked sound authentic. The material is on its way to you so
you can review it more carefully, but the story of the Sad Christian Knight Kabydius can serve as an example. His tribulations
in the Holy Land match other writings we're familiar with.
Even the description of the siege of the city of Trier, where Peter the Hermit was helped by the Jews (who were then
slaughtered), is similar to descriptions we have from other
sources, even though Kabydius himself is not mentioned in any
other source. The story of Judith sounds quite authentic as we
now discover more and more details today about the existence
of many Jewish settlements in the Land of Israel during the
time of the First Crusade and later.
Tape / -
The wandering Kabydius was the son of one of the Hungarian tribes. In his youth, in a little village in the Carpathian
Mountains, he met a Jewish family. The family celebrated a
holiday that was alien to him. After he was banished from his
lands by his father, whom he tried to kill, he wandered to
Rome. For some time he stayed there with a group of monks
and along with another monk, he loved a twelve-year-old girl
who died in their arms, and so he called himself Kabydius the
Sad. The other monk went outside the city walls and was devoured by dogs. After he learned that his father had died,
Kabydius went back to his homeland. In the mountains, he met
the same Jewish family. The father of the family was an old man
whose tongue had been cut out by some riffraff on its way to
join Peter the Hermit. One of the old man's granddaughters
was a handsome lass with a swollen belly. The village where
they had lived before was burned down. The girl was pregnant
from the one who had cut out her father's tongue. Kabydius
wanted to kill them, but changed his mind and hugged the
handsome girl and her mother fell to her knees and pleaded
with him to wound her and not her pregnant daughter.
Kabydius, who was confused by his hatred for his father and
his disappointed love for the twelve-year-old girl, sought "a bandage" for his soul full of sadness of the world, as he put it, and
approached the mother. When he asked to marry the daughter
and be a father to her son, he was banished by a group of audacious Jews who burst out from a distant place at night. Kabydius
wanted to go back and take vengeance on the Jews, but it had started snowing and he went to seek his estate and discovered
that, in his absence, his father had bequeathed it to his brothers and they banished him. Ashamed of his lust for that Jewess,
he searched for the riffraff that had cut out her father's tongue
and was introduced to Peter the Hermit. Peter made an indelible impression on him. He was ugly and strange, but a real
leader of knaves and belligerent men. In the hermit's eyes, he
saw light. The crusade to the Holy Land was at its height and
Kabydius didn't join his peers but went with Peter the Hermit,
as his servant.
The great battle took place in Antioch and only afterward did
they descend along the shore toward Jaffa. The knights, writes
Kabydius, mocked him and said: What is a man like you doing
among streetwalkers, thieves, and rapists? and he said to them:
Peter is the leader and I wash his feet for the sake of Our Lord
the Messiah. They called him Peter the Dark and were afraid of
him. The knights teased him-he doesn't give his pedigree in
the book, but hints that the others knew it-and he had to fight
a duel against one of the knights and even to run him through
with his sword. Kabydius provides a detailed description of the
battle for Jerusalem, the ship they dragged from the port of Jaffa
and turned into a ram to batter the wall, how Gottfried of Bouillon knelt at the sight of the Holy City, the siege of the city, the
bloody battles, how they circled the wall of Jerusalem for seven
days and seven nights, and how the Savior was revealed on the
Mount of Olives and they burst through the walls, and the
blood, he said, as is also mentioned in other sources, flowed up
to their knees, and cursed Jews were entrenched in the last
tower, fighting along with the Muslims and were burned alive.
And then he heard a voice: The holiday you saw on the mountains was my holiday, you're here and I rule over you, and
Kabydius was angry and his heart filled with dread and he told
Peter, who commanded him to be flagellated. He accepted his
punishment in stoical silence, he wrote, and when the whip was
laid on his back, his head was bald, he felt a genuine regret and
exaltation he had never known before. After the coronation of Beaudoin as king of Jerusalem, Kabydius went to the Galilee.
Along the roads, they built fortresses then. In the blazing heat
of August he scaled a high mountain and joined a group of
monks and Muslim prisoners, who were busy building a fortress.
He began hewing stones. They told him not to hew stones because it was contemptible work meant for slaves. He said: I
committed heavy sins and I must atone for them. They listened
to him as a hewer from far away. They said he could grant to
stone the charms of both European and Eastern art.
Three years later, his memory began to break down. A cloud
shrouded his soul; he could remember only the stones he had
hewn the day before. Peter was not seen again, counts and barons were appointed to the estates of the Holy Land, a struggle
raged between the priests and the royal house of Beaudoin, but
Kabydius remained far away from those events. The Count of
Accra, who was brought in a sedan chair to see Kabydius the
hewer, looked at the stones and said: I want Kabydius to build
my castle. And so it was. Then, he wandered, went up to Jerusalem to see the Kingdom of Jesus on earth and in the streets of
Accra silk cloths were stretched to hide the blinding light, ships
from Genoa brought delights from the East and glass from Tyre
was brought and used for windows, something that had not yet
been seen in Europe. From the Arabs he learned the theory of
the arch to allow for high ceilings in their buildings, he went
down to Caesarea and built there too, he participated in building halls for knights in Accra and fortresses in the Galilee, the
Golan Heights, and Bashan, and within ten years, Kabydius was
one of the great builders in northern Israel.
Kabydius was in the prime of life, and was sated with wars
and excommunications when he met Judith in a small Jewish
village not far from the fortress he was building. At night, said
Kabydius, Judith would fly off, in the morning she'd come back.
Like everybody who desired her, she abused him too. When he
wanted to beat her, she slipped away from him. Her family plotted against him and he wanted to burn down their house. At
night, bitter people came and beat him until he bled. He wanted to tell Count Montfort about that, but a crow followed
him and tried to poke out his eyes. Judith was picking flowers.
It was after the rain. When he raped her she laughed and when
he swore love to her she spat in his face. When her belly grew,
and his son balled up in her, he wanted to marry her, his
memory returned to him, he remembered the lass in the
Carpathian Mountains, and he said: Maybe she's the same
woman or I'm cursed by Jewish witches. Judith refused to marry
him. He dimly recalled when he lived in Rome with the monks
and loved a little girl. All my life, he thought, I've been caught
in ropes with a curse and I can't get away from it, where is the
whip that will take Jews out of my insides. He came to Judith,
tied her to a post, whipped her, kissed her, and all night long he
talked with her. She sneered at him, her hands tied, her eyes
flashing, and when he asked again and again to marry her and be
a father to his son, she laughed. When he castrated himself before her eyes and felt them taking him on a stretcher as he was
bleeding, he recalled seeing a spiteful joy sparkling in her eyes.
He came back to Judith with his face burned and emaciated
and was a eunuch in her yard.
He was allowed to play with his son. Kabydius was old now.
Judith was called mistress of the village where a knight served
as her slave. She didn't marry anybody, and he hewed stones
and built her another house more beautiful than the houses of
the Galilee. There he sat and wrote his history, his shame, his
regret, his sorrow, and his love of a woman who was once a little
girl in Rome, then a woman in the Carpathian Mountains, and
then a mistress in the Galilean Mountains. At night he would
carve birds for his son.
... That's only a collection of fragments from the story, and
you can peruse it when you receive the material. After I read, I
asked myself how and why did this story, fictional or not, get
into Ebenezer's hands? Is bird-carving coincidental? Those
questions will remain without an answer for the time being. I
can assume that bird-carving is Ebenezer's addition, but if it is
an addition, why did he add it here and not someplace else? Why is bird-carving not mentioned in the nine million words
investigated by the Institute? And the story of the Golden Calf
and the place where Moses is buried, for instance ... the area
of Santa Katerina in the Sinai was barred to Ebenezer.
Now that we can get to it, it's easy to think of his descriptions. But when Ebenezer recited that book (which I listed for
you at the beginning of my letter), the area was hard to go to
and was in the hands of the Egyptians, when could Ebenezer
have been there? In my humble opinion, he never could have
been there. I don't know if traces of this ahistorical or even historical myth can truly be found, but the descriptions of the place,
the geography, the names of the crystals, the stones, the rocks,
the various areas, the climate, the lifestyle of the Bedouins, the
monks, all that is precise. It is true that people visited there
throughout the years, but it was surely not Ebenezer who invented what they saw or didn't see. The date of writing this ancient book is in another few years. What does that mean? Why did
Ebenezer insist that the book be written like that, that the secrets in it are things that happened so long ago? According to
various calculations (see appendix) I found in the Book of Salvation, which Ebenezer quotes and copies of it are also found in
other places, the year 1984 will be the year of destruction. Also
according to the prophecy of Astronomus, the decline before
the annihilation begins in that year. The place where Moses is
buried isn't clear, according to the book, but when I went with
the members of our Committee on a trip to the Sinai last year,
I was able to follow Ebenezer's guidelines and I found monasteries that even the Society for the Preservation of Nature
didn't know about, I discovered waterfalls, wonderful oases, and
sights were revealed described precisely in the book to be published years later, and recited by Ebenezer!