Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
He wriggled and waited. I waited too. Menahem's mother
sat and looked at me contemptuously. Death blended me with
Menahem, through Boaz. In fact, after I loved Boaz, I could return to loving Menahem. Boaz, who didn't know I had stopped
loving Menahem even before his death, tried to put a hand on
me and then changed his mind and didn't. I waited. I didn't say
a word but I wanted to. They always think they defeat me, both
Menahem and Boaz, while I, I chose the two of them by myself.
Boaz decided he had in fact killed Menahem because he saw a
picture of me with Menahem, he loved me and came to take me
away from him. He described to me how he killed Menahem
to get me and I tried to pretend I believed. He was attached
to me even though he tried to live without love. But he
wanted Menahem's mother to forgive him for being alive instead of Menahem. And Boaz went on building a stage set for
the dead. As a judge you must know: He didn't kill Menahem,
Menahem died long before that, but ... I told him, come on,
let's start a new life. He fled but he didn't want to. There were
meetings with army officers, parents, engineers, writers, poets,
sculptors, planners, lighting experts, printers, I served coffee,
tea, peanuts, wine, I was there, I saw him weeping as he sat and wrote fictional love letters, it was a humiliating spectacle. I told
him: You're reducing them; what kind of victory is it that nobody will remember? And the apartment grew.
And everything was full of fabricated death.
I'm writing to you because I want you to know that no matter how reasoned your judgment was, it approves, as I do with
my life, a serious act that may in truth not be judged. Like
many people I know, and you too, without any premeditation,
Boaz turned the nightmare into a celebration and then into a
profession. But to the same extent, you can say a prison warden
deserves punishment because he keeps under lock and key a
person whose nature is to be free, or that you yourself sentence
people to severe punishments when the natural law is that life
precedes everything, you judge the person by the laws of society, not the laws of nature or life. I understand those considerations, I accept them, but because of those very reasons I must
protest, at least to you, because you judged in favor of a man I
love, and so you were the only person to whom I can address
these words. I go to the Ministry of Defense and see thousands
of notebooks. I peep. Oblivion is a medicine that, like life, is
intended to circumvent death.
I thought then in court that maybe you would condemn something rooted so deeply here, so awful, but you made a judgment
and a judgment didn't make you, you didn't indicate the root of
the problem, I wasn't disappointed, I understood, I have no
complaints. I attach a letter I wrote to the Levinsky Teachers'
College on the night I got drunk for the first time in my life and
Boaz raped me when I would have defended myself with a broken bottle in my hand and I didn't hit him.
Yours, Noga Levin
To the Administration of the Levinsky Teachers' College,
Tel Aviv
Dear Sirs:
I was very interested in your announcement in the newspaper. You ask the students who attended the Teachers' Col lege who lost their husbands (or) their fiances (your word!) to
send one page with the events of our life for the anniversary of
the Teachers' College, and here is mine-
My name is Noga Levin. I finished school in nineteen fortyseven. My parents died two years before I was born in a small
town near the Zxanten Gulf in southern China. We were the only
Jews on the street. All my husbands died of the cancer of war.
The last one was in his death throes on the way to the cemetery,
but it wasn't possible to change the custom, and in the middle of
the funeral, he died. If you're preparing a class reunion, please do
not include me among the bereaved girls. Death terrifies me. I
live with a man who refuses to marry me, because he loves me.
All my love affairs were with dead men. Now that I live with a
hangman, I weave a new rope for him. He kills my husbands and
every time he succeeds, he brings me a black flower. So, it's not
true that there are no black flowers-they should be grown in
beds for memorial days and days of mourning and that could even
have been a branch of export. On memorial days I sing sad English songs. I know somebody who sold a hundred thousand armored cars for days of mourning. With the money he got from the
armored cars, he bought me a white dress and real pearls. Please
take me off the list of volunteers for teaching widowhood, bereavement, orphanhood, and commemoration. I intend to live in
Denmark with a dog close by and a thin man who smokes a pipe
and works in a bank close to home and goes to work on a bicycle.
I live with a man who lends his acts of heroism to all kinds of
dead people. I think he's teaching me something I don't want
to learn even when I was a student the Teachers' College. The
main thing you didn't teach me. You taught me to live with
death, you didn't teach me to live with life. And that's now a
national phenomenon. Now I'm drunk and I feel how much I lack
something called a hunger for life.
Respectfully, Noga Levin
Judge, the letter was returned to me, the director came to
visit me. He found a cold, silent, and apparently handsome woman. That's what he said. I told him somebody wrote the
letter in my name. After he left, Boaz Schneerson filed that letter under "trivialities." You do know the file "trivialities," the
one that isn't taxable.
Yours, Noga Levin
I want, said Noga, for somebody to finish me off and Boaz. To destroy
the devil in him that lives in me. To release us from the dependence on
ourselves and on death. But the years pass. I'm here. I learned, Noga
thought of driving a jeep, they collect parts of burned tanks and rotten
berets, etc., etc., etc....
Tape / -
I got off the plane shrouded in foreignness. Ebenezer Schneerson got off
the plane shrouded in foreignness. Around him was a state he didn't know.
When he got into the bus from the plane to the air terminal with Fanya R.,
he tried to think, but he couldn't. he only said: When we come to Israel,
there will be Israeli buses at the airport and Hebrew police. And Fanya R.
said: Ebenezer, we've already come.
The clerk stamped his papers, the suitcases came on the baggage carousel, and he stood outside, facing the yelling cabdrivers, Fanya R. leaning on
him and he looked at the turmoil.
They took a cab to the settlement. The driver was listening to a radio
program and Ebenezer looked at the landscape he thought he was imagining. When they passed the tombstone of the paratroopers, Ebenezer asked
to stop. He asked: Where is Marar? The driver turned his head, looked at
the strange couple in amazement, stopped at the barrier of prickly pear
that still remained here on the border of the citrus grove, and said, What?
Marar? What Marar?
The village that was here, said Ebenezer.
Don't know, said the driver, that's the tombstone of paratroopers.
There was Marar here, said Ebenezer.
There was also Sodom and Gomorrah, said the driver, but the tourists
don't find them and come to Tel Aviv, which is almost the same thing, and
he laughed. He was smoking a pungent cigarette. Ebenezer looked for
the houses sliding down the slope, like dovecotes, and didn't find them. Maybe there was no village, he thought, maybe there will be, I don't know,
what do I know, maybe that's part of the things that are going to happen
like my trip to Israel that is still to come. Something in him bothered him;
there was Marar, there was Dana, they weren't, and a dull ticking of old
lust stirred in him.
On the main street, nobody knew him. He was dragging a suitcase and
Fanya R. walked behind him. They went down the slope, they passed by
what had once been the threshing floor, saw new houses and handsome gardens, and an old DeSoto with a woman who looked like a scarecrow, wearing
a wide-brimmed hat smoking a long thin cigar, and they came to Rebecca's
house. He didn't recognize the house, but the sight of the aging Argentinean
officer watering the garden, wearing a military cap, gave him a dull sense
of belonging. Shaking with a sudden anger that gripped him, he grabbed
Fanya R.'s hand and with his other hand, he pounded on the door. The
door was hidden in a thicket of gigantic bougainvillea. The great-grandson of
Ahbed opened the door, looked suspiciously at the Last Jew and the woman.
The Last Jew said: We came to visit Mrs. Schneerson. The great-grandson of
Ahbed said what he had been taught to say: She's not home and come
back in a month and then you'll go again, and he tried to lock the door,
but Ebenezer put a foot on the threshold and stopped the door. He said: You
must be the grandson of Ahbed. The great-grandson of Ahbed didn't move a
muscle, and said: I'm the great-grandson of Ahbed, and remove your foot, sir.
Tell the old lady her son has come back home, said Ebenezer.
Ahbed pushed Ebenezer, managed to lock the door, and disappeared.
He put the suitcase down on the tiles at the entrance and waited.
A short while later, Ahbed opened the door a little and said: She said
her son is dead, but since you're here already, come in. Fanya R. smiled.
Ebenezer hugged her, and said: When we come to Israel, my mother will
be excited. And Ebenezer tried to remember if it really was Rebecca,
whose flyswatter he could hear now, curious. But he couldn't remember.
When Ahbed asked them to come in to what was called the "salon,"
they walked like two frightened children. Ahbed locked the door behind
them. Rebecca sat in an easy chair at a table with black domino tiles. Even
Fanya R. could guess that Rebecca had just won a victory. She surveyed
Ebenezer for a long time and her old beautiful eyes turned to Fanya R. She
examined her impassively, and said: Ebenezer Schneerson, you were dead!
Her face was covered with a cloud of rumination and she looked as if she
were trying to solve a riddle without help from anybody. She said: Now the
Captain will have to move out of Boaz's house!
Whose?
Boaz's, she repeated. Ebenezer looked at her and tried to recall, but he
couldn't. Fanya R. sat down on a chair, put her hands on the arms, one of
which was carved with tiny features, and Ebenezer said: I'll live in Tel
Aviv, near Samuel.
Who's Samuel? asked the old woman.
Samuel, said Ebenezer.
The old woman looked outside and saw the avenue of almond trees, and
said: Where were you? He tried to think. Nothing concrete was clear to
him. Where was I for so many years? He said: Samuel is my son, he came
out of the camp and he'll come.
They told me you always wanted to go to America, added Ebenezer. Did
you go? She smiled and wrung her hands. Ahbed entered the room and
smiled. Ebenezer saw a carved bird on the windowsill. He looked at it and
strong yearnings for the smell of sawdust filled him.
They were right, said the old woman.
But it's easier to find people here, said Ebenezer, Israel is smaller. And
Rebecca said to Ahbed: Bring my son and that woman some cold juice and
bring me wine. Ahbed looked at Ebenezer, blinked his eyes, tried to remember something, and went out.
He's the great-grandson of Ahbed, said the old woman. They always stay
with me. When they attach Arabs to Israel, there's somebody to rely on.
They're not Jews who disappear for fifty years and come to ask for Boaz's
house for themselves.
Who's Boaz?
Your son. She said and smiled. And then she realized there was a danger lurking here whose nature she hadn't yet grasped. She looked at her
son and thought about her father. A thousand years of life in distant places
streamed from Ebenezer's face. She said: You left Ebenezer and you came
back as some Diaspora Jew.
Fanya R. drank the juice Ahbed gave her. Rebecca started getting bored.
For a moment she thought of Nehemiah as if he tried again to betray her
and die for nothing. She said: Boaz is now my son, you were my son, maybe you still are my son, but you're old, Ebenezer, there were wars here and
there's suddenly a state, there were locusts! Does your wife have sons?
She had daughters, said Ebenezer.
Rebecca didn't respond, she got up with the suddenness that was always
typical of her, came to Ebenezer and kissed his cheeks. For a moment, she
was soft, her fingers combed his hair, and then she hugged the back of
Fanya R., who straightened up and leaned forward. Then they sat down
and were silent. Ahbed brought black coffee and they drank and ate cookies and peanuts and tiny sandwiches filled with cheese that was sweet but
sharp. The fragrance of basil stood in the air. After dark, they moved to the
dining room and sat around the table. Ebenezer tried to tell in three sentences what he remembered. Rebecca fell asleep and Ahbed came and
carried her to her room sitting in her chair. Fanya R. picked up a carved
bird that contained a lot of force. Tears flowed from her eyes at the sight
of the birds on the windowsills. Ebenezer said: Look at the beautiful birds
the old woman has.
The next day, Mr. Klomin came. He told Ebenezer how awful the Holocaust was, and Ebenezer listened to him and tried to mutter something but
couldn't. All he remembered were things he wasn't sure had happened to
him. From Mr. Klomin's words, he understood who Mr. Klomin was.
These things I'm saying now, I also know from what I heard, how I came
to Rebecca's house, how she kissed me, how I didn't know who Klomin
was, how I didn't know who Boaz was.
When Mr. Klomin told about Boaz, vague things started to clear up in
his brain. He stroked Fanya R. and inquired about Boaz, he was sure they
were talking about Samuel. Klomin said: He hangs around the house of the
Teacher Henkin who lost a son in the war. A handsome fellow. And Klomin
took a photo out of the drawer and showed it to Ebenezer. Ebenezer smiled
and said: That's Samuel. And Fanya R. said: That's an old picture of Joseph
Rayna.