Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
When they went out, it was raining a warm spray. Sam pushed Riba-Riba
to the entrance of a dark office building and fucked her standing up. She
bit her lips and because she felt both humiliated and blissful, she asked
Sam for a cigarette, stuck it in her mouth and acted as if she were in a silent movie. After he snatched the cigarette butt out of her mouth and
threw it toward the entrance, they broke apart, she combed her hair, and
then they went into a cafeteria. Sam glanced indifferently at the gigantic
Camel cigarette belching smoke rings at the news making its way around
the old New York Times building. Opposite was a gigantic Paramount ad
showing Duke Ellington smiling along with Frank Sinatra.
When they went out, the misty rain was still falling. Sam started talking
about death as a gesture. She wasn't sure and saw a church altar and Sam
raising her up before God with white skin and blue eyes. Sam said: They
indulge with embellished words. Try to depict life as if it's possible to
resurrect life. Riba-Riba shook with some vague fear and hugged Sam. She
said in a voice that was too loud: We started from love standing up and
we'll end with a true feeling, and he said: Say "we screwed," and she
blushed and said the word and then Sam became serious and kissed her
face. Her mouth tasted of mint, toothpaste, and potatoes. They passed by
a funeral home and Riba-Riba was afraid to go in with him, but he insisted
and they went in.
In the splendid and darkened room lay a well-dressed corpse, painted
and made up and even its shoes were polished. Soft, melancholy music
with something metallic was heard in the background. A woman dressed
in black and enveloped in a delicate black silk scarf raised the hem of the
scarf a little and looked at Sam. She didn't look at Riba-Riba and she immediately dropped the scarf. Sam smiled at her sympathetically, but the
woman only shook her head with a domesticated sadness and looked at the
dead man. A crushed odor of flowers that may also have been artificial rose in his nose. A person in a costume that looked like a blend of an official
uniform and a frock coat entered, stood next to the woman, and with profound and gloomy understanding looked at the body. With a hand that
almost succeeded in trembling, he brushed two hairs off the dead man's
brow and with careful gentleness he brushed the patent leather of his left
shoe with a handkerchief he took out of his pocket. The woman, who was
still staring at the dead man, whispered something none of them could
hear. And then more people in black came into the room and stood next to
the woman. One of them wiped a tear from his eye and put the tear in a
handkerchief and the handkerchief in a pocket that was apparently reserved for tears. The person standing next to the man with the tear took
a scrap of paper out of his overcoat pocket, put on his glasses, and read a
poem in a monotonous voice. The poem was written by the deceased before he died, he emphasized sadly. The poem was a trade balance of a small
company called A. B. Lin, in Long Island. It said that life is a conglomerate of big joys and little events. The last words of the poem were: "Melina,
Melina, go in your Caddy to the sea and see for me the scene of sunset I
haven't seen in twenty years." The woman didn't budge. Sam smiled but
the man didn't smile back. They looked at Sam and Riba-Riba and tried to
recall what side of the family they belonged to.
Tape / -
As far as I know (I'm reciting now), Sam Lipp went back to the theater
he had been sunk in forever and didn't know it, so maybe the words "went
back" are superfluous, like the word "deceased" mentioned above.
Tape / -
From a letter written by the prisoner (Number 3321/A) Kramer, to the
PEN association of writers in the city of Cologne, a few weeks before he
was turned over to the Polish authorities:
The letter and the journal I gave to your distinguished society,
but as far as I understand, it used them adversely. Since they
have not yet hanged (or shot) me, I am permitted to express my
amazement that the writers of our nation are capable of distorting things like that and betraying the belief of a commander who served our homeland loyally. And as for Samuel Lipker, whom
you ask about, I must say that when he associated in the camp
with Ebenezer, I knew that his bestiality would someday be
translated into troubles for us. Nevertheless, he remains alive.
There was no decision on the matter. I remember Samuel once
told me: Commander, maybe all of us betray something more
sublime than we are, and judging should be a blissful act, right?
Those were words on the tip of my tongue. I must state that if
Samuel Lipker does something in his life he will appeal to the
dark alleys of our great spirit, and not like a great many of you, he
will not be afraid to ask why he betrayed our nation with his
Fuhrer, will not be afraid to touch what the Americans call in
weather reports "the eye of the hurricane."
Tape / -
Lily sits and combs her hair while Sam looks at her trying to understand.
The beauty of her movements, holding the comb in the hair, the head bent
above and behind to right or left, fill him with a dim sense of joy he never
knew before.
Sam and Riba-Riba at the Easter service in church. The sorcerer is about
to don garments of authority, his face is white and pale. He dons a gigantic hat that looks like a miniature church building. With his terrifying magic
the sorcerer stops a great erosion of force that becomes thin and pleasant.
The pulpit is high and gilded. Music bursts from all sides of the church,
people in their best clothes, looking like they're embalmed, kneel at the
altar of colored lights and a smell of incense rises into the air. Sam thinks
that a temple like that can imprison divinity, speak in its name, tame it,
and at the same time not let it in. The words whispered there are important and unimportant at the same time. The service isn't about life, but
death. He thinks of the synagogue where he'd spent Yom Kippur and Rosh
Hashanah eve in his childhood, its low ceiling, the poor God with a white
beard sitting in the locked Ark with a few meager ornaments, and facing Him
men wrapped in prayer shawls and a charred smell of tobacco rising from
them. Sam stands at the mysterious service held in the pulpit and thinks
that God has a place only through the mask, since only there is He truly
strong and false. The confessionals furnish feelings with institutionalization that turns into a linguistic inquisition, a rule of power and force for a gossipy human mumbling, and like that, an ancient and savage Torah can
become noble, full of splendor and so sexy. Sam didn't really know how
close that notion of his was to the opinion of SS Sturmbahnfuhrer Kramer,
to whom he once bowed whenever he saw him passing by.
One day, after Lily wrote two hundred words on his body starting with
the letter A and drank fine rose wine that had been chilled in the refrigerator before she went to abort a German child at an abortion farm in the
mountains of Pennsylvania (at that time Lionel was sitting offended with
himself and imprisoned in guilt feelings and trying to write a story while
wearing new house slippers he claimed sharpened his ability to think and
Sam was trying to write for himself the nightmares of the past night),
Sam looked at Lionel and said to him: Statistics, Lionel, write statistics
in crappy rhymes! Make a ceremony. See a church. See a sorcerer with
words in Latin. And Lionel said: She went to abort a son, Sam, and Sam
said: Blessed be the just Judge, and went to Riba-Riba. She wanted to
take him to the village, to her parents' house, to lie with him on the soft
green lawn, introduce him to the cows and horses of her childhood, but
he wanted to celebrate mysterious ceremonies and understand to whom
the disaster truly happened. He introduced Riba-Riba to a fellow and
told him, with premeditation (because he knew that the fellow was in
love with Riba-Riba and would tell her what he would tell him) about
their sex life and he did tell her. And then, he told Lily with a savage
laugh, she was offended and phoned, and I hung up. She went with that
Trevor and lay with him on the damp lawn near her stinking horses and
cows and they got wet and came to the little church where a bored priest
married them, and after that Sam tried to rape Lily in the kitchen and
she said: They took a child out of me, Sam, don't touch me, and he
slapped himself instead of slapping her.
Tape / -
Question: Have you ever known a person named Sam Lipp?
Ebenezer Schneerson: No.
Question: Where did Samuel Lipker disappear?
Ebenezer: He went for a moment and disappeared ...
Question: Did Samuel Lipker have any connection with the theater?
Ebenezer: I was his puppet. He took money. He's also my son.
Question: What year are we living in?
Ebenezer: The clocks and calendars were set by Samuel. He doesn't
come now. I need him.
Question: Thank you.
Tape / -
At night he'd wander around the city, to hear jazz at Bop City, Minton
Playhouse, Birdland. Sam loved the organized improvisation, the celebratory sadness they made from New Orleans funeral music. He'd sit in a
little bar on Eighth Avenue and order drinks for girls who would giggle at
the sight of his eyes. "Awful eyes," one woman called him. Once he sat
next to a girl with unstylish gray eyes, who reeked of perfume. The short
hair no longer symbolized any regret and was deliberately miserable, cheap
dye poured from it. When they drank, she mixed whiskey with water. Then
they went to a small hotel, and when he fell asleep after she took pity on
him and he called her: Crystal Heart, and she told him he was a darling
wolf, she stole his money. The gonorrhea started two days later. The doctor gave him penicillin injections and then he went to see a play in the
Village and fell asleep. On the fourth evening, he passed by the bar and saw
her. He went to Washington Depot, came to the gate of the house, and the
dog ran to him wagging its tail. He yelled: I love Melissa. Through the
window Mrs. Brooks saw him and ran to the telephone, but he yelled: I've
got American gonorrhea now! He kicked the dog and ran to the boulevard,
where rain was falling on the thick treetops and didn't get to the lush
ground full of the moisture of crushed leaves. He lay on the edge of a small
field, between pines and oaks, and thought of why he had kicked the dog.
He went into the forest and yelled: Melissa, Melissa, until he became
hoarse and then he kissed a cow lying on the ground chewing. A person
passing by said: Cows lying is a sign of rain. Sam wondered if the cows also
knew that there really had been rain. He took the bus back to the city, and
even though he was soaked to the skin, he fell asleep. When he returned
to the bar to look for Crystal Heart, he was thrown out by the bartender in
an apron, who had little eyes with a cold metallic glint in them. At dawn,
he lay in wait for the bartender near the parking lot Mr. Blau had recently
bought to build the biggest store for colored shirts in the eastern United States. He knocked down the bartender, wrapped him in a bag, and beat
him until he heard his bones grow faint. Sam whispered to him: I wasn't
born yesterday!
The man groaned but nobody heard. Later, the police found him. The
cops who got a weekly payment happened to be at a crash course in Virginia and the substitute captain didn't want to reorganize the area. The bar
was closed despite the damage to the police car and over the protest of the
sergeant, who got forty dollars a month and came back from Virginia to get
his take. Sam deigned to testify in court. He had received threats by phone
and he wrote down every word that was said and told Lionel he was studying theater from life instead of vice versa, and Lionel looked at him and
recalled how he fell asleep at the beautiful play they saw in the Village,
tried to understand, but was tired and fell asleep. When they tried to stab
him and missed-he didn't retract his complaint, even when a policeman
who came back from the crash course tried to persuade him not to testify.
After the sentence was declared, he felt relief, but also abhorrence. He
looked cheerfully at Crystal Heart and at the kicked bartender. There were
no marks on the bartender. Sam didn't admit to any attack. They looked
at him with cold, flashing hatred, but he said: You're terrific. Everything
exploded then, everything he had kept inside from the day he had left the
camp was now a ring of suffocation. The play he went to see with RibaRiba opened the dam. Now he didn't know when he was dreaming and
when he was daydreaming and all the time the SS men were beating him
and he was shrieking, No! No! And he saw his mother naked and his father
expecting him with a diamond in his rectum. Everything was woven in his
mind with dark and humiliating ceremonies carried out on lighted stages.
Tape / -
Dear Lionel,
For some years now, I've been following your son. You asked
me to help him, you told me to try to advise, you're a senior
member of the university, you said, and I did keep my word.
Sometimes it's hard for me to understand, Sam's past is a sealed
chapter for me, while you refuse to tell me. When he dropped
out of regular school and registered for the theater department,
I was afraid, but his talent is impressive, and I thought to my self: Well, you also maintained that he should do whatever he
wanted. But when day after day he wandered around cemeteries and seduced women to come with him to their houses and
performed plays for them that later damaged them emotionally,
I thought I should do something, but I didn't know how. What
Sam could say in his defense in the case of that woman, Mrs. G.,
which you yourself were involved in: "She put on a striptease
for me, because she thought men are aroused by black panties,
and afterward because she thought I had a sexual disease-I
told her about the gonorrhea I picked up-I kissed a boot and
acted for her how I'd fuck its mate. And then she laughed,
what's she complaining about all of a sudden?" It was hard for
me to explain to him, the anger in him is incomprehensible to
me. What attracts him is the human sewer, or magic. I don't
understand what all that has to do with theater. In my opinion,
he's playing with fire and that fire is buried inside him. He told
me that on one of his visits to the cemeteries, a woman saw
him, took him to her room, undid his trousers (these are his
words), and when he penetrated her, he fell asleep. When he
woke up, he said, she was naked and smoking a cigar. He said
he turned on the radio. I'm reconstructing the details that coalesce into a picture you should be aware of. He said he combines tidbits in his mind like a man named Ebenezer did.
Women in cemeteries, religious ceremonies, music he hears in
jazz clubs-all that, he said, is intertwined, into one equation.
And he can, he told me, recall who a disaster truly happened to.
What disaster, Lionel? When he left the theater department
and joined a theater that traveled throughout the state, you told
me to persuade him not to go, but you know how much I tried
and the result, nil! What I do know is that instead of studying
theater in our department, one of the best in the United States,
he worked in lighting, sets, as a stagehand, and learned to sew
shrouds (his words) and to be a stage manager you claimed then
that I should persuade him to work in what he really wanted to
do and not in stage management of an amateur theater that
traveled from one small town to another, but I didn't succeed. Look Lionel, Sam recently came back. He came back to the
department and I accepted him. What you may not know is that
he doesn't study but is preparing a play with three actors and
has even managed to persuade me to help him. I'm writing to
you because if there are complaints about my behavior, know
that I tried, but he has some charm that compels you (me) to
give in to him; and so it happened, Lionel, that people who
studied four years in the department, successfully finished and
did all their assignments, are waiting to put on their play while
Sam, who didn't study in a regular way, who hit a teacher, who
slept with, or in the words of one witness, raped two women
directors we brought to the department, is producing a play and
I, I am its sponsor. And as for the rest-