Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
He was silent and I held onto the square of paper in my hand and didn't
know what to do with it. It took me a few minutes to understand what he
was telling me. For a moment he opened his right eye, which was shrunk
in swollen orbits and looked like a bluish-green sore, looked at me defiantly, as if he had beaten me in an exciting but exhausting game of chess and
said, You understand? I know a lot of numbers from the Last Jew. Everything
is numbered in him. The new Bible, you're a Hebrew teacher, has to be
written from numbers. And then he shut his eyes, wheezed, and didn't talk
anymore. I thought he had died but he was only slumbering and didn't
wake up, then, but, when he spoke I thought about an amusement park
where I used to go when I was a kid and where there were terrifying toys
and I told Demuasz, who came in now, the smile of an expert on his Jew,
he told me shh. And I told him. He said Yes, he quotes him now and then
but he won't hold out much longer. I told Demuasz that I had heard the
stories about the Last Jew from a bereaved mother whose son had fallen in
the Sinai campaign and Demuasz said, Yes, the distress they bring from
there, to save two-fifths of a cent, Henkin!
I went back home and my wife was sitting there under the sixty-watt
bulb I could never change for a hundred watts because of her stubbornness, her beautiful face was resting on the binding of my son's closed photo
album, guessing the photos perfectly, and I went to my study. I sat down
at the desk where I hadn't worked for years now, took a smooth sheet of
paper out of the drawer, picked up my Parker pen, checked it as a scribe
checks his quill, and wrote "The Last Jew" and a few minutes later, I drew
a thick line under those words and added in small, even modest letters, I'd
say, maybe for camouflage: "A Study by Obadiah Henkin." And then I looked
at the page and I knew I had to investigate that Jew and I looked at the
window and saw the emptiness of the yard and the Giladi house and I dimly remembered seeing a person there in the morning but I didn't really think
about him, his image flashed through my mind and was immediately erased,
and some panic attacked me.
And again I found myself investigating, interviewing people, going to
Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, to Kibbutz Lohamei HaGetaot, I
heard that the man who talked to me in Demuasz's house had been taken
to the hospice in Gadera and had been lying there like a vegetable for a few
weeks, suddenly he opened his eyes and said: Did Obadiah talk to him?
And they asked him who? What? And he smiled, shut his eyes, and died.
I thought about his words, about the mission he seemed to assign me, I
thought about my wife in the ravines of light, the very solitary house, the
empty rooms, the old samovar still heating water for tea and a long time
ago I'd become acquainted with the ironic malice of the solitude decreed
by pain that has to be acted to live it, and I started investigating the life
of a man and all I could know about him were trifles. And at that time we
are still living in a certain regularization of organized hostility, my wife and
1. She looks at me with transparent malice, sympathy, I'd say, and refuses
to sleep in the same bed with me. At night I try to touch her, to reach out
my hand, like a lovestruck boy, the two of us in our beds, tossing and turning, trying to sleep, no tranquilizer or sleeping pill helps, I'm trying to
caress her but she doesn't respond to me, even though she's not angry either, she keeps inventing hope for me for other times, or maybe a fabrication for the past, you have to listen carefully to hear the quiet tears flowing
on her cheeks, she never sobs aloud, she doesn't weep in the light, and she
mocked my daily walks, my activity on the Committee for Bereaved Parents, my searching. After I brought home Boaz Schneerson and Noga was
still living with us and what happened happened, her contempt changed
to hostility, and her words became as sharp as a razor. She always wears
black for herself, she doesn't share her pain with anybody, she doesn't go
out of the house, my need to understand the lack of Menahem makes her
suspicious, and she apparently has a need incomprehensible to me to be a
perfect and unchanging enemy to herself to preserve some trace of closeness, a closeness that's hard to define, as if a shared secret helplessness and
a strong hatred unites two people not because of the past but despite the
past. I'd say that a canned love prevailed between us, frozen in a deep
freeze, a love that has to be assessed with webs of amazement, transparen cies of the window through the heavy shades, furtive looks, stabbing sentences, the way each of us gets into bed apart but always together, at the
very same time, and gets up separately but together, prepare without
words for another day to live it together, but apart. We had no secrets, I
told her everything and she was silent to me about everything. Love of
Menahem was shared, but she saw one person and I saw another person.
Maybe it was inevitable that like me, she too discovered she was cut off
from the bond that bound us and yet she couldn't grant my request, forgive
me for my behavior toward Boaz or toward myself or toward the Committee, she didn't forgive me for the life after death I tried in vain to grant
Menahem.
Since she didn't leave the house, I'd do the shopping, pay the bills,
collect the pension, take care of whatever had to be taken care of, and once
a year, we'd go to Kiryat Anavim on Memorial Day. She'd do that reluctantly, with some distress, would get into a cab. Withdrawn into herself, on
the path leading to the cemetery she'd walk alone, as if she couldn't bear
any contact.
She wouldn't go to her son's grave, but came with me so I'd be sure my
son was really buried there, since as far as she was concerned, he was buried there as he was buried everyplace else. The closer I went to the grave,
the more exaggerated she became, maybe even magnificent to some extent, the place was so unimportant to her that a few times she missed some
Memorial Days and refused to come with me. But when she did come,
she'd stand there, enshrouded in herself, looking at me, and then she'd
walk toward the road, sit stooped on the bench of the taxi stand, and wait
for me.
At that time something else happened that only today I can connect
with the Last Jew. I started working and fixing our garden then, cultivating it again. At the time, I thought resurrecting the idea of reviving the
garden was accidental. Apparently I saw the buds of the renewed garden
in the Giladi house and the sight of the graceful foliage near my window
woke me out of my swoon of many years. On a certain day and I can't be
precise about the timing, that man I described before as somebody who
stood in the doorway of the Giladi house dressed like a clown with his
profile turned to me started working the Giladi garden, which, like all the
gardens on the street, had stopped blooming when my garden withered after Menahem was killed. Suddenly I began to neglect the mourning
Teacher Henkin and to see a red-brown loam, a compost heap. To sense
that wonderful, sweet, bitter, sharp smell, the sight of the trunk after years
of looking out the window and seeing only gray and sand, and wind, and
heat, and something neglected and stinking at the seashore and then, one
day, the eyes light up at the sight of a new stem, at a spinning spurt of a
sprinkler, at the sight of a rosebush and a bougainvillea starting to ignite,
and the evening falling on it smoothes the ground and it doesn't fall anymore, doesn't drop like an estimated nothingness and a blossom that blooms
for you evokes completely different longings, longings for life, for morning glories, and then I saw thorns in my garden, crabgrass, destruction, a
heap of brown needles that fell from the pine tree, the ground covered
with sand and dry leaves, and just like that, I started hoeing a little and
then fixing here and there and suddenly I found myself working and hoeing and banging. Every day I'd work for two or three hours, in an undershirt
and cap, I sweated, I fixed the faucet, I bought a new hose and sprinkler,
and new life ignited, a life that died with the black villas. A lightness and
lust filled me, my bones began to recover, not to creak, and how I loved
that house I had bought in 'thirty-seven through the Hebrew teachers'
organization at the time of the riots the Arabs call the great revolt, the
remote neighborhood in north Tel Aviv at the edge of the city, and the
new port born then and now dead and left barren and demolished and
the street next to mine they called Gate of Zion, and I live on Deliverance,
near the sea, nice small houses of teachers, union officials, and the neighborhood blossomed then, its gardens were handsome, the red roof tiles, the
houses like little exclamation marks in the desert of sand near the sea,
south of us stretched the hills and the Muslim cemetery, north of us forests to what my son called boos, Reading Station that was then small and
insubstantial beyond the Yarkon River and then I planted a fine garden and
Demuasz helped me choose its plants, and geraniums and climbing roses
blossomed in it along with a fragrant jujube and mint and pansies, and in
season lilies blossomed and a blaze of fine wildflowers and I planted a pine
tree and two cedars and a purple bougainvillea that covered the front of the
house after a few years and set fire to it with its sweet light and the castor oil tree that had been standing here for generations I didn't uproot and
the soft lawn that needed a lot of watering and the sprinklers spun at night and made a pleasant intoxicating rustle and during the years of the great
war, my son would take care of the garden and slowly it turned into his
garden. He loved to prune, uproot crabgrass, tend the garden, good hands
he had, he loved to work when nobody ordered him, not like in school
where he had to work under the triumphant baton of Demuasz who also
turned tending the garden into a national operation, here at home he was
Menahem, master of himself, he'd frown capriciously and tell me, Henkin
(he didn't call me father), go to your books and find me exactly how an
Afghanistanian bamboo smells. That was almost our only point of contact,
back then, but usually I'd let him work alone while I was locked in my
room, investigating, correcting notebooks.
And at night, we'd set up a table in the garden and Menahem hung a
lamp outside and we'd have supper on the lawn, yogurt, eggs, herring,
salad, black bread and butter, or later margarine, near the bougainvillea
with its cruel sweet colors and the breakers of the sea would be heard and
the sirens of the ships and the launches sailing toward the ships, not to
mention the crickets and the insects that would circle the lamp and
Menahem loved to destroy them and I asked him not to kill them and his
mother would look at him with some hushed sadness and say: Leave him
alone Obadiah, after all he's a little boy. In her voice I could make out a
complaint or submission, but back then I was too busy to have it out with
her, and she'd say, Menahem is what we were, but I couldn't accept such
an unpedagogical assumption that contradicted my craft that still lodged
in me back then, imparting values.
A few days after we found out that Menahem had fallen there was a heat
wave. We didn't yet know where they buried him and Jerusalem was still
cut off from the coastal plain. I went outside, not yet understanding myself; I stood in the customary white shirt and shorts of those days, I picked
up the hose by rote, turned on the faucet and aimed a jet of water at the
roses dyed by the red and pink colors of sunset. The light was soft and the
heat was heavy and the sea to my left was smooth and crystalline and suddenly I saw myself as a scarecrow watering his own grave, a teacher made
of crystal, stuck forever in a conspiracy of death against my son, I tried to
water for him the garden he wouldn't return to, I thought in terms of the
grammar of nothingness, of the grammar of life, or nonlife, and a grammar
of nothingness of my son suddenly became definite like the declension of a verb with no future and no past, and so maybe no present either, and the
garden the nothingness of all things palpable like the declension of the verb
"to die" was proof that Menahem became in this light, the numbing heat
that blew as from a bellows, the foliage that in its wickedness wanted to
live, that didn't long for Menahem like Yoash's dog that died of longings
when he didn't return from the battles, but the garden didn't weep and
didn't long, it wanted me to water it as if Menahem its owner weren't
dead, the leaves were dropping, they had no grief, I hated that blossoming,
the heat blew, the sea stretched to distant lands I could once have lived in,
I thought to myself: What do you all want from me, you give birth to dead
foliage. I wanted to take vengeance on somebody, the garden was the most
convenient target, Menahem wasn't in it, shouldn't I have been mad at
somebody, and I laughed at myself, Hebrew teacher, grammar of vengeance, watering gardens where wheelbarrows full of a son's loam won't go
anymore, I turned off the faucet, the hose I left where it was (and it stayed
like that for years until it rotted and was swallowed up in the heaps of sand
that kept piling up), I went into the house and my wife looked at me and
said: Did you turn off the water on the flowers, Obadiah? I said yes, and she
said: That water, and I said: His garden and she said to me: His? She didn't
ask, she said, and at the end of the word she put a hesitant question mark
and so I neglected the garden, bushes of weeds began sprouting and I
didn't uproot them and the faucet rusted and was blocked, sometimes I'd
shut my eyes, I was waiting for him, expecting the evening, the table on
the lawn, the herring, the-. "Henkin look up in the dictionary to screw a
tomato in ancient Indian," I was expecting his joyous open laughter, humiliating me, the annihilated insects around the lamp, but everything is
covered with nettles and yellowness and sand and obstinate callused melancholy shrouded our house and infected the other houses and the gardens
ceased one after another, and maybe the Giladis were afraid to appear joyous with the hose next to our house, and slowly their garden was also humiliated and then it was too late to save it and anybody who could took
heart and started all over, and then began a plague of dead gardens and it
wasn't only Menahem who fell, Kuperman's son also disappeared and they
didn't know where he was buried and Yehoshafat Neiya's son was badly
wounded and was in the hospital, and slowly the foliage disappeared and
only a few dusty stubborn trees remained and the street became dusty, lost its charm, and no longer had even an old-fashioned elegance, only something forlorn, more scorched than parched, and the weeds wove themselves
into a new weave, as if death had its own interweaving, which is simply
another form of the verb to be, a sprouting in a different direction, and
something elite, distorted, miserable, but not without honor, took the
place of the charm and the capricious sprinklers and the rounded roof tiles,
the walls turned gray and it's true that in the house where your son grew
up from the age of seven to the age of nineteen you don't seek aesthetic
meaning at his empty shoes and his clothes in mothballs but I had a clear
need to seek formal meanings, real formulations as I was accustomed to
doing in the analysis of a story by Brenner or Genessin, something musical,
maybe a feeling that had lodged in me and now disappeared, that behind
every pain is a certain logic and that I had to decipher it for the students
and there's understanding behind the complexity of the instincts and a
wisdom woven in this or that pattern and grief and love have their own
grammar.