Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
Jordana reached for the television, but fell down and Noga caught her.
They picked her up and saw how thin she had become, sat her on a small
sheet like a baby on a rough green bedspread. Jordana asked for water. Boaz
went to the neglected kitchen, washed some glasses that were moldering in
the sink, opened the refrigerator that held one egg, a rotten tomato, nuts,
chocolate, and five jars of cold water that had been filled long ago and had
turned yellow, took out some ice, put it in the glasses, poured tap water into
them, and went back in the room. Jordana looked at him and for a moment,
a smile ignited in her eyes. She drank two glasses of water in a row and asked
for a cigarette. After she smoked a few minutes and smoke swirled around
her face, she said: You remember that I once lost a child?
Noga looked at Jordana and didn't say a thing.
After that, I loved the two of you, and Menahem. Menahem I loved
before. Then I couldn't. You shouldn't have found me, I don't belong to
anybody Noga ...
We love you, said Boaz, we were worried.
You don't love anybody, said Jordana, you're too distinguished to love.
How's Obadiah?
He's worried about you, said Noga.
And about an hour later, seated on the sofa, her legs folded and her
mouth gaping open, so blighted, beautiful against the background of the
room laced with old wallpaper, Jordana said: Then I started watching television, they say I fell in love with it. I see all the programs in Israel, Jordan,
and Lebanon, sometimes I get Cyprus. There's a guy here, Jacob, who set
up an antenna for me with five directions. That's important.
Why is that important? asks Boaz.
'Cause I'm improving myself in a new direction, Boaz, at long last I'm
building a past for myself that has a future.
Boaz got up and walked around the room, and Noga, who was sitting next
to Jordana, hugged her. The infinite softness from Noga melted in Jordana
a tremor that had begun to emerge when she took her eyes off the screen.
You went out of your mind, Jordana, said Boaz, you've been imprisoned here
day and night, sitting, what do you see, King Hussein, kissed wildly by officers of the armored corps? Cartoons? What are you wasting your life on!
This is my life, Boaz, and you have really no idea about somebody else's
life. At night, when the light is over in the set, after the chapters of the
Koran in Jordan, I see how the light pours into the screen, and then with
four Valiums I fall asleep. And then Jordana yelled: I'm fed up, Boaz.
Then she whispered: The truth is I wanted to die, but I couldn't, death
is too good for me, it belongs to those I love.
And Noga, Noga got up, maybe even darted up, and slapped Boaz's face.
Her face bled pain, she started hitting the wall and Boaz in turn in a rage
she didn't know was in her. Jordana tried to laugh, but her lips didn't
move, she looked de trop and infantile and started sucking her thumb
again. Boaz once again turned his face to the wall. An old calendar was
hanging there, with a smiling swarthy girl holding a bunch of grapes.
When Boaz packed up her things, she didn't insist. He carefully wrapped
the television, dragged the cartons to the big car, filled it so there was room
for Noga and Jordana, and they left. He even paid the landlord. Jordana
didn't look back, she just said: The new antenna you left here, too bad ...
Boaz thought: What is it to sit in front of a television from three in the
afternoon to twelve at night? But when he looked at her, she was dozing in
Noga's arms. Noga, who had long ago wept at her outburst, but couldn't
apologize, tried to signal something to him, but he didn't think of trying to
understand. So deep was his contempt for Jordana. To himself he thought:
She's leading me astray, that whore! When they got to the Henkin house,
Hasha said: The undertaker's come, Obadiah.
Boaz left the two girls in the car. He removed an imaginary hat, turned
to Hasha who was drinking tea at the table, and said: If you weren't the
mother of my wife's husband, I would rape you. Hasha chuckled and said:
You're scary, Mr. Schneerson, and she went on drinking her tea. After that, Henkin went out and hugged Jordana, who trembled in his arms. When
they brought her inside, Henkin was more solid than he had been in years,
and said: Hasha Masha, she was found in Kiryat Motzkin, she's in shock
and needs rest, for now she'll stay in Menahem's room. Hasha looked at her
with eyes that were scared at first and then calm, and said arrogantly: Why
not? I'll have grandchildren to raise and somebody's diapers to change.
Suddenly she let her head drop onto the table, and her head banged on the
table. Boaz managed to notice that when the album was shifted by the bang,
squares crowned with dust frames appeared. He called home. The girl who
worked there said: There were a few invitations, the newspaper reports of
the ceremony at the Dead Sea were fantastic ...
Boaz said: In all those years I never came into the room. He saw the
closed yellow writing desk, the coat hanging on a hook, Menahem's cloth
cap, the picture of Lana Turner, yellowed with age, the chair next to an old
issue of the children's magazine. In the other room Hasha sits and measures him in the distance, she knows how to curb the sweep of hostility she
reluctantly felt for him, and that thought brought a crooked smile to his
lips. He yelled: If you loved me, Hasha, I might have been saved, and
Hasha looked toward the room and saw Boaz putting down the television,
seeking the connection to the antenna to bring the cord to Henkin's outlet,
and she said: This house is dry, Jordana can live in your enemy's room,
Boaz, in fact that's what you all deserve.
When Henkin went to Hasha, she let him hug her, stood still, and for a
long time she stayed in his arms. Then she reached out her hand, touched
Boaz, and suddenly flushed, came even closer, stroked him, pushed him
away from her, touched his hand and moved her hand away, sat down and
stood up again, and called out: Jordana, turn on your television. She calmed
down, sat down, and for the first time in a long time she looked at the
pictures on the walls. From one of them looked Menahem's face. She said:
I didn't even succeed in hating properly. You're the most corrupt person I
knew, but I know one thing, you once saved a child, once you really saved
Menahem, why couldn't you save him when you really should have?
Henkin muttered something to himself and Hasha called to him: Don't
mutter, Henkin, when you need to you know how not to be in the right
place, give me grandchildren, Boaz, you hear me, give me a grandson, I want
to be a woman, you hear? To be a good old woman. Jordana slammed the door and the announcer's voice was heard clearly. Maybe she was trying to
imprison things, not to let them be heard, she had to give birth to her children from the giant set she loved, that filled half the wall of the room of
somebody who was her lover and now strangers want to give birth to his
grandson ... In fact a son, she said, and then she didn't hear another thing.
When Boaz came two days later and Jordana looked at him, he saw a
chilly darkened look in her eyes. He understood how total the blow was.
Three poets spoke, said Jordana, I watched them. One was fair-haired,
with beautiful blue, somewhat scared eyes, full of black gold, he talked like
the last man in the world, something both bombastic and blighted, measured and solemn, as if he stood on the frontier of ability, and so he had to
find the most beautiful and elegant words to describe that frontier. The
second poet was full of joy to be talking, and the third was a little suicidal,
defeated, sad, spoke evil of himself, maybe it was a plea, I looked at him,
I wanted him to be good, and after a few minutes, he started twisting,
muttered something, moved a little, I think the microphone slipped away
from him, and then he smiled, and after the smile he said a few things I
wasn't listening to, but his eyes weren't so sad anymore, the gloom almost
disappeared, I think I was good for him.
Boaz listened and didn't say a word. He had already heard about that from
Noga. Noga spoke with the doctor. The doctor claimed that he refused to
put her in the hospital because she wasn't really sick but was hiding from
herself. The idea that she was able to cure people of their sorrow through
television scared Boaz. He did what he had wanted to do for a long timehe went to the man Jordana had succeeded in smiling at on television and
knocked on his door. The man gave Boaz a cup of coffee, complained that he
hadn't been paid for the writing Boaz used in many memorial books and even
published in three albums. Boaz didn't respond to the complaint and asked
what had happened to him on the television program. The man was somewhat perplexed and said: I sat there, the two of them were talking and I
didn't know what to say, I'm getting old, nothing happened, suddenly I felt
as if strange eyes were looking at me, without understanding what I was
doing, I moved, the microphone almost fell, I smiled, I wasn't there anymore,
I spoke, what I said afterward was all right, somebody got me into a conversation, I spoke out of that somebody's mouth and I spoke to him at the same
time. I felt enormous love pouring to me.
Jordana asked them to let her help people. Doctors at Tel Hashomer
Hospital laughed at Boaz when he told them the story, but Doctor
Lowenthal said it was worth a try. Doctor Lowenthal (whose son was killed
in a plane crash at the Suez Canal) sat next to Jordana in the Henkin house
as she looked at petals. There was a sad saxophone player. Jordana said he
had been worrying her for some time. She concentrated on him, and after
a minute or two, he started smiling. In the middle of the fucking program,
he said afterward, I'm sitting and playing, feeling shitty, all of a sudden
some woman says give me a kiss. And I smiled, it was weird with all the
directors and cameramen around.
And one day, when they saw a soldier who had lost his eyesight skiing
on Mount Hermon, Jordana looked at the screen, concentrated, and suddenly she shouted in terror, fell on the ground, bounced, and by the time
Boaz bent over her and kissed her hard and hit her, she calmed down. After
that she fainted.
They took Jordana to the hospital. She grew fat and lay in a locked
room without a doorknob. She doesn't want to see television. Wants to
marry Menahem. Boaz promised her there was a rabbi who married his
grandmother's grandmother to a dead man and he'd bring her that rabbi,
but it might take time because the rabbi died two hundred years ago.
So I'll wait for him, said Jordana. And Noga wept and then said: But she
does help people, she gave them a smile, what does it matter if it's a disease? It's a disease that does good for others and for her. We should have
left her in the suburbs, she was happier and Boaz had no answer. He thought
about Herod. King Herod, he said, ordered a hundred Jewish grandchildren
arrested and left in a pit until he died. On the day he died, he ordered,
they were to be executed one by one. He said they were to do this so they
wouldn't have a holiday when he died. And the queen of Norway, Sigrid,
ordered all her vassal kings to come to a banquet in her palace, and when
all the vassal kings came and ate and drank, she burned the house down on
them, and said: That will teach them to lust for the queen of Norway.
Tape / -
Jordana lay, her eyes impassive, her body twitching, needing injections
of tranquilizers every few hours. All she needs, said Boaz, is a television set
to love. To know that they didn't teach me psychiatry ten years. For a month Jordana tossed and turned, stopped twitching and started reading
the temperatures in various cities in the world in the newspapers. She
repeated indifferently: If only I had a private room with a big television set,
I'd be able to help people get rid of their sadness. When they came to visit
her, she'd shut her eyes and list the temperatures in the cities of the world:
Oslo-3 degrees, Amsterdam-6, Copenhagen-3, and then she'd grimace
mysteriously, like a person who can see far beyond what's visible, and say:
A barometric low is moving over Turkey and causing clouds there, and Boaz
holds her hand and tells her how empty the house is without her, and when
she heard that she burst into wild laughter, bounced, and sometimes
they'd have to tie her to the bed.
Tape / -
Boaz begat Ebenezer, Ebenezer begat Joseph and Nehemiah. Joseph
begat Shlomzion. Shlomzion begat Light of the Gentiles. Light of the Gentiles begat Joshua. Joshua begat Spear Father of the Mountain. Spear Father
of the Mountain begat himself. And Spear Father of the Mountain begat
Joseph who begat Rebecca who gave birth to Secret Charity who begat.
Tape / -
Dear sir,
You surely remember your visit to our house a few months
ago. You came, as you said, to understand the house where
Melissa was born. Ever since you came to our house Melissa has
returned to live in the house. I'm old and close to the place
where you wait for ghosts my father used to tell me about, and
maybe the very idea that three men, years apart, came to seek
my daughter who died fifty years ago, instilled in me a vague
dread. Maybe that etched on life itself. Something happened to
my wife and me. After fifty years, we're poring over old notebooks again. Reading Melissa's school essays, I sit at home, I
practically don't go to the office anymore, my oldest son runs
the sales center, and today I thought: Our governor, he's also a
Jew, I hope he won't come searching for Melissa.
My wife read me a section from the diary of Timothy Edward, one of the first in her family to immigrate to America. In his diary he describes how he stood on the deck of the ship in
the port of Amsterdam on his way to America. On the deck of
a nearby ship stood a Jew and prayed. They started talking. The
Jew was on his way to Jerusalem to prepare the "dust of the
Land of Canaan." Timothy Edward was on his way to prepare
the "dust of the Land of Canaan" in the new world. They
talked all night. The grandson of that Jew was that Rabbi
Kriegel who came from Hebron to our city two hundred years
ago. We talked about him, remember?