Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
The American commander's rebuke of the pilot who mistakenly
dropped a bomb on the death camp of Auschwitz: "From now on, be careful not to waste bombs on areas close to attack targets like the A. G. Farben
factory, or any other industrial concentration." Rebecca and Mr. Klomin
also found Mr. Klomin's letters filed by the date they were sent, a journal of Boaz's life, faded brown pictures of anonymous handsome women
in splendid old-fashioned garb in unidentified places, a little girl's curl,
and next to it an aging yellowed note: "Delicate Melissa." Names of the
Mameluke military commanders, dubious research on seaweed, on Swiss
democracy, history of the struggle for equal rights for women in the United
States, history of the tango, cooking recipes, Bible stories illustrated with
saccharine drawings, and an explicit request to be buried according to his
real religion (not identified), in the natural place (without any indication
of place), account books, checks and savings accounts in the name of
Rebecca and Boaz Schneerson and Mr. Klomin, in Egypt, Israel, Switzerland, Argentina, the United States, and Sweden.
They buried the Captain in two places. He was buried in the little
church in Jaffa and then his clothes were buried in Roots. The rabbi pretended not to see, and two tombstones were erected in his memory, one
in the churchyard and one in Roots. Despite the protests of the rabbi and the director of the Burial Society, the schoolchildren, in white shirts, were
forced to sing the national anthems of Israel, Argentina, Switzerland, the
United States, and Egypt at the Captain's grave. Singing the last national
anthem evoked strong protest even among Rebecca's supporters, but she
insisted and it was hard to fight with her, especially since the young people
were starting to come back from the war and most of the residents of the
settlement were on their way to Jerusalem to see the miracle of the unified city. The consuls who were invited didn't come. Rebecca allowed the
limited audience to see her shed a few tears at the grave. Mr. Klomin said:
You missed the great kingdom of Israel that arose in spite of her foes, and
Rebecca said: May you rest in peace, Captain, and when you come to your
god, whoever he is, kiss his eyelids for all of us and be our advocate for our
health and wealth.
On the way back from Roots, Rebecca walked faster than Mr. Klomin.
She saw a castle in the clouds with a flag waving on it. In the castle, like
a coil of silkworms, the Last Jew lay curled up. His eyes were shut and she
felt a stab in her belly because when she sat on the deck of the ship and
Ebenezer was inside her, she could sense the dream of Nehemiah
Schneerson curled up in her, and then she saw Boaz come into the world
and he was a copy of Joseph. She looked at the castle, the clouds moved,
the mists scattered, and then she saw Ebenezer standing in the distance
and looking at her. She called him to come home, and she said: The Captain is dead, Ebenezer, and he said: Before you looked at me as if you
didn't see me. But she was too tired to answer him. They entered the
house and when they sat in the room, Mr. Klomin started muttering vague
words, his eyes were wet, crying now, he asked where was the queen who
had once lived here whose sons had brought a disaster. He said: Dana will
return from the Captain's house soon. Then he pulled out of his pocket a
new map of "the liberated territories" that had been distributed two days
before by the newspapers, and said: Greater Israel, the land of David,
Solomon, and Alexander Yanai, and he started talking to the Captain and
telling him the results of a poll of fifty-two members of the party who had
died long ago, and then he bowed his head and banged on the table,
Ebenezer started up and Mr. Klomin turned his face, smiled and said: In
blood and fire Judah fell in blood and fire Judah ... and he died. Rebecca
said, Soon I'll be glad you came back, Ebenezer, see what a new plague of death has spread here, and she thought of the plague of death that ran
rampant in the settlement years ago, and Ebenezer said: Samuel's forgetting machine is the watch set backward of the Last Jew! She looked at him
in amazement, shut Mr. Klomin's eyes, but Ebenezer, who was excited and
tried to understand what he had just said, wrote something in the little
journal he had started carrying in his pocket in recent months and wrote
in it things he thought, to know if he knew some things about himself. He
didn't understand what disease of forgetting could have afflicted Samuel,
and what was its connection to the watch set backward of the Last Jewwhich is me, and Samuel wasn't here at all. Rebecca who was already worrying about burying Mr. Klomin, forgot that Mr. Klomin never claimed to be
an American citizen, and so the strict rabbi, who replaced the local rabbi
who went to the desert to bury our forces of H. Herzog, didn't raise any
difficulties, even though he asked who guaranteed that Mr. Klomin was
indeed a Jew. Mr. Klomin was buried in Roots, next to the Captain, two
single strangers in the parking lot of Nehemiah's pioneer paradise, said
Rebecca, for whom phrases like "parking lot" or "right of veto" were new.
She told Ebenezer, I'm old now and what's in store for me, who else will
be taken from me, and then Boaz came back from the war and showered
and sat in the bathroom and talked with Noga on the phone and went to
the graves of the Captain and Mr. Klomin and let Rebecca read him five of
the hundred and fifty poems written by Joseph Rayna and the Captain for
Rebecca Schneerson and he fell asleep.
Tape / -
When he came to Tel Aviv the roof was locked. On the door hung a
note: Be back soon, wait for me. Noga climbed up carrying a bag of groceries. They kissed, it was oppressively hot and they stayed on the roof. Below,
horns honked as cars got stuck in the convoy. When they went into the
house and Noga set the table with the groceries she had just bought, he
noticed the pile of letters. There were invitations to memorials, construction bills, printed matter and pieces for proofreading; he kicked the pile
and yelled: Come on, let's blow this place. The windows were open and
from all of them came the song "Jerusalem of Gold." The song tells of how
Jerusalem was empty of people until the Jewish paratroopers conquered it.
Too bad we weren't defeated, said Boaz, I could have made you a beautiful corpse. She didn't answer, looked around and thought of the Captain and
Mr. Klomin, if only for them the war should have been won. Then they ate
hummus at Shmil's restaurant and drank cold water from a whiskey bottle
and looked at the vegetables heaped up in the nearby store and fish were
brought in nets to the fish warehouse, and Boaz started the car, and said
to Shmil: The hummus was great, Shmil, and they left. They parked the
car, went into the hotel and spoke English. Boaz said: We're foreign journalists, and the woman smiled and said in Hebrew: Go up to room twentysix. He sealed the windows, and said: The Captain shouldn't have died,
Ebenezer is searching for Samuel, Talya's boyfriend died, I'm building
tombstones, what a crappy victory!
Outside, maybe the sun set but they couldn't see. Downstairs in the
lobby, colored paper strips were surely hung and the music was ear-piercing,
but they didn't hear. They played child returning home to mother who's
sleeping with the guard. Then they played boy whose father names him
after his wife's lovers. Boaz said: I would curse your father if I knew which
of his ninety-two women was your mother. And Noga said: You're killing
Rebecca's saying, you should have said concubines. He said: It's an Arabic
saying and I don't care. The lips burned. The air smelled of old urine, burning cars, and raw flaxseed oil. Noga thought: Is it truly possible to start all
over from this moment? They crawled in imaginary battles and she played
a girl who writes names on the teleprinter, stood before him only in a bra, he
lay on the bed and she was ordered to be a vulture pouncing on a corpse. He
didn't shut his eyes, lay without moving, tears flowed onto her cheeks but
he didn't give up. When she hovered over him she looked artificial, transparent and airy, but when she landed she was heavy, and when he was filled
with dread and yelled, she stopped and he signaled angrily: Go on! Go on!
And the tears kept flowing, and Boaz said: Got to know how to celebrate
victory before it turns into a bank account. She slapped his face and he played
dead again, but his eyes were wide open. The ceiling was filthy and he said:
You're a great vulture. Then, he squashed the vulture and kissed it and they
lay there, and didn't move, like a couple of elderly lovers whose blood pressure would go up with every movement. They guessed the dark thickening
outside and sensed the flow of the hours, the moments, minutes and seconds, and her insides were holding his power, and when a gloomy smile of
triumph spread their lips, they fell asleep.
At dawn, Boaz woke up and was still inside her. When it hardened, she
groaned in her sleep, but didn't wake up. Her lips were spread. After he
got dressed he went down and bought coffee and rolls, butter and jam. And
he came back. He opened the window, and when the light beams caressed
her she woke up. She drank the coffee and ate two rolls with jam, sat up
in bed, gathered the blanket and wrapped her legs in it, straightened her
hair, and he said: I sat with the prime minister, and he told me to go see if
the circles were really right. I went, but the foreign minister wasn't there
anymore. Two young men were making emergency plans, but the Captain's
plans were bolder. Then I bought pencils that said Made in China. Talya
came and said the pencils belonged to her boyfriend and put them in the
James Bond case and went to screw the adjutant. She said: All the foreign
ministers went to a parade. I was suspicious, but I didn't say a thing. I bought
you coffee and rolls. Two armored troop carriers collided and I photographed
their burned skeletons. Then I made them into a memorial to Dante, who
invented the armored troop carrier. When children being taken to the Magen
David clinic asked me what circles I was asking about, I fled. Then some man
I didn't know and maybe looked like me came out of the camp with a barbed
wire fence, maybe me, and one of the foreign soldiers standing there said:
Now there'll be bread. A man I love and was a father to me said: Now I'm not
alive anymore, we remained alive, but this life isn't ours.
Noga said: You dream nice, the coffee's nice, but you've got to go back.
He asked: Where, Noga? He was sad and silent: Where?
She didn't answer and looked at the window as if there really was something there she wanted to see.
Tape / -
Yes...
Yes, I also know when they left the hotel. How many tips? Not counted.
Sees an article in a pamphlet "Kingdom of Israel," Number 34B. "Before
his premature death (quote from the article), A. N. (Akiva Nimrod)
Klomin managed to finish page six hundred of his big final letter. That was
on June fourth, nineteen sixty-seven. Then Mr. Klomin heard the news,
the weather forecast from the Golan to southern Sinai-one day before the
war ended-he stood in his bed, sang Hatikvah to the window, and died.
But there is also another version ..."
Tape / -
The Hebrew poet Emanuel the Roman lived in Rome between 1270
and 1332. He knew Dante Alighieri, cured him of his illnesses, held conversations with him, sang him the songs of the Temple he knew from his
mother's milk, and gave Dante the ancient meters from which Dante spun
his rhymes. Maybe he also loved Beatrice. He was a learned man, a bon
vivant, and a poet. Aside from philosophy, Bible interpretations, and sonnets in Italian, he wrote the Notebooks of Emanuel on the model of The Wise
One by Rabbi Judah al-Harizi. A witty satire, splendid and restrained rhetoric, poems of lust and love, full of wisdom of life and wisdom of the world,
his one poem begins ...
Tape / -
My dear friend in cold and rainy Germany, here it is light and
warm.
Thanks for your last letter.
I asked myself if I am really and truly open to you. Can there
be friendship between us? To myself I thought: What is real
friendship? Is it possible to understand our encounter at Ebenezer
Schneerson's home as an attempt to capture a shadow, when two
sides, opposite from one another, you and I, hunt echoes that
cannot be captured? You wanted details and I generalize, but
I am still horrified and amused by the thought that the Last
Jew will be written, or is perhaps already written, by an aging
teacher acting-as his wife puts it-his bereaved love and by
Germanwriter, a man of the world, an artist who collects literary prizes, whom critics compare with Proust, Joyce, Thomas
Mann, and Faulkner, but he's unable to write the story of
Ebenezer, Rebecca, Boaz, and Samuel by himself and needs
these tidbits, the limping investigations of Teacher Henkin ...
From the mendacity of the two of us, from our mutual helplessness, will a book come, or perhaps they will be notes for somebody else, for a better violinist than us who will write this book?
Maybe a book should be written as books were written in the
Middle Ages. First one version of Faust or Hamlet, and then comes somebody else and writes another version, and on the
basis of that version, a play is written, or even a book, and then
comes somebody else and writes the new version and so on
until Goethe or Shakespeare ... Jordana managed to weep at the
cemetery on the anniversary of Menahem's death. (Details!) She
encountered Boaz. They met in the Ministry of Defense because
of their common work. I don't know exactly how they met. I resented it, but I didn't say a word. Noga told me: "I love that sad
Yemenite woman, I love her lost betrayal of Menahem, her dependence on Boaz."
Yes, and the meeting with Jordana. We planned an outing for
the Committee of Bereaved Parents. On the phone, Jordana said:
We'll meet in a cafe, because it's hard for me to sit and discuss
these things in front of Hasha's mocking eyes. I'm no expert in
the new cafes, and I remembered Kassit Cafe, once a meeting
place for writers and artists, and I said: What about Kassit, and
she said, Fine. I walked there and thought that if I had sat in
Kassit after the war I would have met Boaz, who sat there then
and waited for me. Unlike me, Jordana took a taxi and so she
was late. After all the years when I hadn't set foot in the place,
the waiters looked as if they were still expecting those artists.
They waited on me nicely, immediately served me what I ordered, and smiled at me as if they were protesting the forsaken
youngsters with wild manes sitting there.