Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
So when, maybe too late, I noticed the garden being cultivated next to
my house, when I saw a new rake, a new ladder, a hose, young virgin foliage and a sprinkler spinning, maybe then something penetrated my consciousness even though consciously, maybe as a defense from something I
was afraid of, I started working our garden and some audacious sickness,
certainly not acute, poured into me intoxicating letters of what I could
have read by myself if only I dared: furtive bliss, bliss stemming from the
fact that for a long time I hadn't yet succeeded in hating the garden because of the nothingness of my son. My wife then said to me: Obadiah,
what are you trying to do in old age? You'll start knocking nails for me and
knowing how they hang pictures on a wall, Obadiah, said my wife, you're
too old to be a human being-that she said now with a wickedness that
even she herself felt but couldn't stop herself, you'll start learning to long
for your son without the whole world knowing it, she added with a kind of
poison of love, maybe you'll even learn how to take out the garbage without spilling half on the floor and you'll learn how to make children who live
and don't die. Much as her words pained me, especially the last ones, I
knew it wasn't at me that she aimed her anger and even she herself was
sorry for her words and she said: The department of dead children is me,
you just watered gardens, children, a new nation, empty rhetoric, and my thirsty body. I saw her, I looked at her sad eyes. And with a solid longing
that lodged in me from the first day I saw her, her little body wrapped in
skin soft as down, her limbs that haven't grown old but only softened with
the years, her frightening orphanhood, and I said: Not everything is locked,
Hasha Masha, and I went outside, I meant love, maybe hate. I ripped up
some crabgrass. I started tending a garden in my old age. I stood there, I
knew she was looking at me, I thought of the album, of the photos of the trip
to Caesarea that her innocent eyes see through the binding of the album now
closed forever, I thought of her inability to really hate, I contemplated the
bright but blurred photo of the tour, the picture of Caesarea, a few children
in bathing suits, rocks, an older girl with a wet skirt clinging to the hard
body and to identify him and Menahem's face in the middle of the photo, his
hands held out to the sides, oxygen ate part of the picture, and his hands are
trying to embrace the world with a love that maybe really did lodge in him,
for life, for the garden, for Noga, for the sun, and for the sea and he's there
linked to his mother's words, not mine.
And so I discovered that the Giladis had disappeared and no longer lived
next door to us. Together we moved here, together we built our houses,
together we had children, Amihud their son and Menahem our son play
with one another, and then they fly kites and frolic in the bamboo nests
they called boos and look at the sea and swim. Here we came to live as a
national mission, to conquer another square of land for the nation, here in
the far north then, cut off, and now it's become part of a city with many
gigantic hotels and shops and cafes and restaurants. Giladi was an official
in the company to prepare for settlement and bought land all over Israel
from the old and spoiled effendis in Beirut or Damascus for the institutions
and he'd run around on his big motorcycle and there was always some big
secret on his face that he couldn't reveal and after Menahem's death, the
Giladis stopped coming and if they did come they felt uncomfortable and
fled, and so ties slackened and we were also cut off from other people we
knew and new ties were made that were essential, at least to me, and even
Amihud stopped coming and I dimly remember that he invited me to his
wedding or maybe some other event, and I couldn't go and then we didn't
see each other anymore and now I discover that they're not here anymore
and I didn't notice that they had moved. And I thought, funny how people
cut themselves off. The place took on a new form. The gardens I had de stroyed in my mourning, the Giladis whose secrets I had long ago not tried
to decipher in meandering conversations with Mr. Giladi, Ben-Yehuda Street
where I walk every morning is changing, tourists come to photograph ruins,
couples in cars on the seashore, petting or perhaps even copulating, and
Berla's kiosk has closed, the huts of the youth movement have disappeared,
and the sands have been concealed under the impetus of hotel building and
only Singer's little shop with an old sign advertising a brand of cigarettes
they don't make anymore is still here, and the sign hangs in the salty sea air,
rusted, groaning when the wind blows in winter, cobwebs of an old man who
was once the first one to wrap food in clean parchment paper and not in
newspaper, and we're left an abandoned island next to the closed port and
in the grocery they confirmed it, yes, a strange new neighbor lives there,
a refugee they told me. Comes to the store, buys, is silent, and goes, always
dressed for the theater, Singer's son told me, dragging a crate of eggs from
the pickup truck on the sidewalk, cartons of eggs in a crate, like all of us,
and so I paid attention to the garden that put an end to some gnawing
grief, some misery we all felt but didn't talk about, and there was fertilizer
there and suddenly piles of red loam and planting grass and you just don't
see who does it, he's solitary as a thief at night and working when everybody's sleeping maybe afraid of being seen and I work my garden and my
garden starts touching his garden and a kind of union is created here, I fix
and somebody else fixes, I uproot crabgrass and suddenly the street is full
of uprooted crabgrass and who the man is, I didn't know then.
And so we met, Ebenezer and I. When the pine tree looked green and
fresh and the bougainvillea started blooming and the piles of sand disappeared and the new lawn was planted and looked green and soft and
mowed and the geranium bushes started blooming I was filled with a kind
of pleasure, a plea for far-off days and the tombstone around my house was
shattered and my body stood erect, even my face took on color and at night
I could sleep from fatigue, and in my mind's eye I saw Menahem running
around in the garden I had planted for him, as if life has cycles and there's
a return from death, and he pushes a wheelbarrow as if it were a train and
goes toot toot and then I saw the walls of my house peeling and I bought
paint to paint them and I fixed the roof tiles and a carpenter came and
fixed the windows and I stretched new screens and I cleaned the gutters
and I made a new gate and I put Menahem's wheelbarrow next to the new faucet and my wife refused to go out to see and peeped out the window,
and who knows, maybe she smiled to herself, and I wanted to hug her and
she avoided me with an almost virginal laugh of an old woman, and she
even said: So what, Menahem will grow up in you to be a gardener. And she
tried to wipe away invisible tears and ran to our room and I didn't say a
thing, but then I saw my neighbor, he was pruning a rosebush that almost
touched a vine that started preening wildly on the trunk of the cypress that
looked green again and not dusty.
It was summer then, perhaps late summer, because of the heat I took off
my shirt and stayed in my undershirt. A nice smell of a watered garden
stood in the air, the cool of evening stood in the dark sky, and he stood also
in an undershirt but without the cap I wore and I saw how blasted and
white his body was, as if a dangerous malediction lodged in him, and yet in
his behavior, the way he pruned, the way he measured and plucked tendrils, there was some authenticity, some solid standing on the ground that
was his, surely this is how a person prunes a garden he longs for and is
rooted in, this is also how a person hates his garden and this is also how he
loves it, I was amazed at those phrases but they echoed in the back of my
mind. We stood there, two old men, watering gardens, who just a while ago
were tense, maybe we were safeguarding something, getting to know one
another through gardens, through our almost naked bodies, each one holding the strong flow of water like mighty gods trying to make the harsh and
obstinate earth fertile, I thought about the man's fractures, what holds him
together, I could see myself, an old teacher, looking like somebody who
stood for many years in front of children, teaching them why they would have
to die, and behind me the pictures of Herzl, Ben-Gurion, Berl Katznelson,
and Weizmann repeating Zionism that the children later realize on memorial walls that took the place of the pictures of the leaders and here he
belongs and yet as if he belongs, to those same echoes that made me send
Menahem from his first year to war, so those fractures would have a place
in the sun, I thought about Tel Aviv, from here it looks like a city joined
together obstinately and innocently, half its name Tel, mound, a place
where cities are buried and discovered after thousands of years, and half its
name, Aviv, spring, is blossoming, blossoming of what? I thought about a
line from the words of the Last Jew, he quoted the Yiddish poet Itzik
Manger on one of those tapes, who said: When they buried the last of the Gypsy kings, thirty thousand violins came to play on his grave and I thought
of what he said, what he quoted from some person who may have breathed
his last right after he said that, and Itzik Manger surely meant that he was
the last of the violinists playing on the grave of thirty thousand Jewish
kings. And at that moment each one of them turned into two-fifths of a
cent.
The sight of my neighbor made me sad, like somebody who's used to
investigating a situation woven of words, two separate entities, two different disasters, the disaster of the Last Jew and God and the disaster of the
wars my son falls in and surely it's from that junction, I thought, that the
great and awful moments of our life are woven, the junction of celebration
and the junction of nightmare, an illness of malediction leaving smoke that
came here to ask for steps for feet they didn't have anymore, an echo seeking a foothold, and yet a foothold that knew what its echo was.... Maybe
Hasha Masha really is right and there's no need to talk and a man can be
silent with his fellow man and know things that many words don't know,
maybe it was his accent, when we did speak, an accent composed of an
ancient phonetic layer of the natives of the Land of Israel, the way farmers
talk, which once, when I immigrated here in the early nineteen twenties, I
knew as a worker in their yards, and along with that some foreignness, a refugee language, in short here I hold in my hands an enormous sex organ of
some ancient god, spraying water, talking with a scarecrow that sprouted
in my neighbor's yard, a scarecrow who came from two disasters, and wonders. We talked of the Giladis and he claimed he didn't know them and
didn't know where they had disappeared, I was impolite, maybe because
of the heat and I asked myself who he was and where he came from, and
he peeped at me like an old acquaintance. With some practiced smile at
the edge of his mouth that lacked suppleness and yet was quite harsh, and
I sensed that his eyes were mocking me, as if he were saying: Old Henkin,
surely we're old friends and surely I knew where I knew him from and he
said surely my name is Ebenezer and the name of the woman who lives
with me and is married to me is Fanya R. He pronounced the words carefully and I sensed that he had a special need to feel the words as if he
weren't used to speaking Hebrew, which sounded, as I said, both rooted
and foreign. I sensed that he had a need to say "the woman who lives with
me" before "is married to me," an amazing phrase in itself, surely I would have said my wife and not the woman who's married to me as if she's married to him and he isn't married to her?
I thought about the Giladis, about his phrases, about the way he bent
over and plucked out tiny crabgrass that I may not have noticed, and then
he said: Did Boaz Schneerson come visit you yet? And I thought here it
comes, like then, when I learned my son died, simple things once again
start to take on a twisted meaning, as if everything was planned and he
started taking care of the Giladis' garden so two months later I could
come out and hear that name, Boaz Schneerson, from him, and suddenly
a distant memory flashed in me, the moment when Boaz maybe really
was standing here, still a young man who had just returned from the war,
raging and furious, he looked at me, and when I asked him who he was and
gave him some cold water he took off. I remember how he looked at me
then, and I felt a strange envy of him because he was alive and then when
I met him, years later, I didn't remember what I remembered now, and
now of all times, when the stranger asks me if Boaz Schneerson came again,
or perhaps he said "yet," to visit you, what does he have to do with Boaz?
What does he have to do with the person who destroyed my life and stirred
Hasha Masha's hostility, where does that stranger get a tie with us? I looked
at him in amazement and he managed to smile, a smile Boaz would surely
call the smile of a hunter of agricultural machines or something, Boaz's diabolical phrases. A pleasant wind now blew from the sea. The air cooled off
in a cooling and graying space, a bittersweet smell of geranium, and the blue
sea stretching beyond his back, an overloaded ship sails toward the port of
Ashdod, smoke rises from the ship's smokestacks, and the man measures me,
waits for an answer, or perhaps not, and I water, that's the safest thing. I
don't let the hose slip away, I don't let the stream dwindle and then the man
says: So? He doesn't come anymore, the bastard?
No! I said, almost reluctantly. His mouth was gaping open a little, a
bird of death I saw, a spasm I saw, invisible blood flows. A blasted cheek,
a bandage on an arm, the bold clear colors before sunset, spots of color on
the back, was he hit hard? The sight of the scars reminded me again of the
sight of Boaz. Back then, when I didn't recognize him, the sight of a captured jackal, and the man talked and straightened up again and I said what
I regretted afterward and after you say it there's no way back, I said: This
garden belonged to my son, Menahem, he fell in battles in Jerusalem, for him I replanted the garden. But he didn't pay attention to the seriousness
I tried to give that moment and he said: Surely you're going to the party
this evening, Mr. Henkin, Menahem's been dead a long time ...