Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
Before I could digest the words, I said: I'm supposed to go out this
evening, but I'm not yet sure I will and once again I wanted to gain time,
to understand how he knew what he knew, how he knew my son's name,
how he knew I would go out that evening, was he spying on me; his face
was shriveled now, as if he had just been taken out of the grave, his hands
didn't shake, he held the hose with a certain cunning and only his torso
was seen moving a little, as if he were praying and even laughing a laugh
pieced together of tatters of pain and seeking a foothold, assembled, and
stitched together again, he even demonstrated some insolent shyness. His
ear turned red, and his cheek drooped toward a strong and handsome chin
and a dimple was hollowed in the cheek, and suddenly out of the blue, in
an improvised but wonderfully measured formulation he said: Go, go. It's
important to us that you go!
And the hose surely granted me freedom of maneuver and I did aim it
at another bush, I started filling the hollow and I thought: Is his pain really more than my pain, can pain be learned? Had he lost more than I? I
recalled how Noga visited us suddenly, that was about two or three months
ago. She came into the house as if she were hopping on air and not on the
ground, as usual, so delicate and yet something solid in her as always. She
sat next to Hasha Masha and was silent. Her eyes were fixed on the album
of the one who had been her lover.
My wife got up, went to the kitchen, and brought tea. She put on the
water in the kitchen in silence, her hands holding the kerosene stove and
not seared. My wife touched Noga's forehead with a finger, maybe measuring her son by the love of his youth, by my total incomprehension.
Noga sat, more beautiful than ever even though she looked scared that
day. Uneasy, she put on her shawl and took it off again with hands that
were almost shaking. Every now and then she looked in the mirror and
sat next to my wife and then Hasha Masha gave her a black comb and Noga
combed her hair and then she gave Hasha Masha some small tweezers she
pulled out of her purse. The tweezers were silver plated and capered for a
moment in the room whose light came between the slats of the slightly
open shutters, and Hasha Masha plucked out two or three hairs from her left eyebrow and then returned the tweezers to Noga and went to the
kitchen and put on another kettle of water and came back and let the water
steam and when the kettle (I didn't dare do a thing) was empty and about
to turn to carbon, Noga got up slowly, almost deliberately, put the hairs
carefully into the ashtray, and the hairs that Hasha Masha had plucked
were mixed in the water from the vase that was poured into the ashtray and
Noga put down the ashtray, touched my wife's head lightly, walked to the
kitchen, filled the kettle with water, and the kettle fizzed and groaned,
and Hasha Masha, with a certain arrogance, took out her new reading
glasses and sat frozen with the reading glasses on her face and then Noga
held out a sheet of paper and said: That's what I wrote to the judge about
Boaz, and I wondered how Hasha Masha knew that Noga intended to show
her a letter she had written to the judge about Boaz, and my wife read the
letter and nodded her head and glanced mutely at Noga and Noga didn't
lower her eyes but smiled and Hasha Masha said: You know how to condemn scoundrels, Noga, and you also know how to sleep in their beds, and
Noga didn't say a thing but took the letter from Hasha Masha and folded
it up carefully and put it back in the purse and then with the delicate
movement of a tame eagle, she took the glasses off Hasha Masha's eyes
folded them up and put them into the case waiting for them on the table
and Noga measured the room again as she used to do on hundreds of evenings when I sat with her here when she still lived with us, looked through
me and saw a wall and on it, as always, still hung the yellow landscape by
the painter Shot, a picture whose frame had been shattered for years now,
and after she drank the tea and Hasha Masha put the glasses on Noga's
eyes and measured her with a look and took off the glasses and Noga blinked
like somebody who isn't used to reading glasses, Noga took out some
chewing gum, folded the paper, delicately put the gum into her mouth,
chewed it with her mouth closed for a minute or two, went into the bathroom, threw it in the toilet, flushed it, and returned to the table and sat
down. Her hand reached forward and in it was the strip of paper that
wrapped the chewing gum. Hasha Masha carefully folded the strip of rustling paper and put it in the ashtray, waited until Noga gave her a box of
matches and lit a match, burned the paper along with the handful of hairs
and then Noga got up, kissed me on my forehead and said, I love you, old Henkin, caressed Hasha Masha, who shut her eyes, giving her face an expression of pleasure and regret, and left the house.
I went outside, I looked at the brilliant sea, I found an old teacher looking at a wall he had painted with his own hands and he was ludicrous in his
own eyes, superfluous vis-a-vis the silence of Noga and Hasha Masha, I said
to myself, utter a song! Hasha Masha lived the moment and every moment
was final, a tumult that begins and ends. Menahem is a foundation, not a
display window ...
My neighbor is smiling now, maybe he's also reading my mind, this moment is his! The water flows in the hose and I watch the stream of water,
blended in it, flowing with it and then I'm finished on my neighbor's contours of pain and my pain is suddenly opaque, as if a miracle happened to
it. But it doesn't let me flee from myself.
Go, he said, go, Mr. Henkin, it's important for all of us.
Who's all of us? I asked.
He didn't answer. His stream was sharper than mine. His water was
more concentrated, and he enjoyed the sight of the water flowing from
him, absorbed in the hollows, mixing with the organic mulch, annihilating
the desolation the Giladis had left behind. There was an arrogant and malicious meekness in him, I thought, as if he were protecting himself, even
from me, as if he were connected to the deed he was doing and to a possible escape from himself, he was routed and protesting at the same time.
All of us is a lot of people, he said, all of us is me, it's the woman who
lives with and is married to me ... here in the north, he said, the wind is
humid, rusts, in the south the air is dry and purer.
In the south?
He didn't hear my question. He said: I'm not used to the north, the air
makes me sick.... I was amazed at the use of the word "north" applied to
Tel Aviv. I didn't understand what south he meant, and then, to add perplexity to my perplexity, he said: Near Marar the smells of orange blossoms were
preserved in the clear thin air for a month after they finished blooming.
Since I didn't know what to ask, I said, You were in the south? From
my words you could have thought I was talking about Sudan or Ethiopia.
I thought about Marar, it was an Arab village I used to pass by years ago on
my way south. The village was destroyed in the war my son fell in. I hadn't heard the name of the village since 'forty-eight. Boaz surely passed by
Marar on his way to the settlement where he was born and where he returned to see his grandmother. The village was destroyed and not a trace
remains of it except for a paratrooper memorial erected at the foot of it
years later. I didn't have time to think when he said: Yes, the sand sticks
to everything, the wind isn't harmonic, sometimes it is, sometimes it
isn't, degree of dryness against degree of humidity, here is not the south,
Mr. Henkin, and Boaz should have known that and protested, my neighbor's stream of water was now sparkling in the bright light of approaching dusk, and in the extracted sword blade flashed a bold rainbow full of
colorful impulsiveness. Who are you meeting tonight, Mr. Henkin, he
said more than asked.
A writer, I said and added with a thoroughly inappropriate apology: I was
invited to a reception and haven't yet decided.
An Israeli?
No, I said, anger rising in me now: a Hebrew writer doesn't hold receptions. Too bad, said my neighbor with genuine grief that filled me with wrath
because naivete, ignorance, and stupidity sometimes infuriate me more than
simple belligerence. I don't know a lot, Mr. Henkin, said my neighbor, do
you know what it means to be a person who has no life history? A man without a history? Not knowing anything but what you don't have to know. I ask,
I don't mean to irritate. Now I really did pity him without knowing exactly
why, I said, The problem is that I was invited to a meeting I don't want to
go to. A meeting with a foreign writer, I added ...
Foreign and hostile? he asked.
I laughed, a stream of water gleamed. He looked at me, even tried unsuccessfully to smile.
I said foreign, not hostile I hope, what does it mean that you have no life
history?
I don't know, that's what they tell me, an important writer?
Yes, an important writer, I said.
I thought about the order of his words, the order of the questions, he
was silent a moment, tried to read my mind and of course that incensed
me, I shifted the hose to the bed of onions while he raised his eyes to the
horizon now covered with reddish purple clouds and he asked, And where
is that good and foreign writer from?
Germany, I said, swallowing the word, his roses stood erect after drinking
so much and now looked terrifying in their pleasant and venomous beauty.
And he's a good man? he asked.
He took off his hat. He had gray hair, pulled back with sweat. Drops of
water coursed on his cheeks.
I think so, I said, I read his books, in Hebrew translation, of course, he's
decent, no doubt about that, I felt funny apologizing to him, stripping
naked in front of him, while as for him I don't know a thing about him, but
I went on, what does it mean, decent? He takes dogs across the street? Old
women? I assume he's decent, that the self behind the words is decent and
honest. I think, I said, that he succeeds in doing what great literature
should do, which is to give birth to things that haven't yet been born, reveal what was invisible, give legitimacy to the absurd and surely our lives
are nothing if not completely absurd. His face was closed, he was listening
or not, I don't know. The roar of the water in the hoses was louder. The
silence of the approaching evening enveloped us. I tried to understand
what a man with no life history thinks, a man from whom nobody expects
anything. I thought about the Shimonis' apartment, where the Committee
of Bereaved Parents meets every single week. The thundering laughter
internalized somehow whenever Jordana from the Ministry of Defense
started chewing one of the plastic vegetables in a bowl there, as if by
mistake. She's a Yemenite, Jordana, her teeth are white, once when she
chewed the plastic vegetable she said to me: Too bad they put life into the
china statue I was meant to be. When was the last time I saw a china doll
in the form of a Yemenite woman? And I didn't laugh, and those sad parents laughed as if they'd fall out of their clothes and only Jordana and I
didn't laugh. They needed to laugh together, loathe together, live together, and those plastic vegetables they don't remove from the table of
the Shimonis whose son fell in the battle for the fortress of Navi Yehoshua
in the Galilee, which turned their house into a club, never did you feel that
you were disturbing there, that you were intruding on their privacy, and at
their house the meeting would be held this evening ...
Mr. Henkin, maybe you can do me a favor, said my neighbor, his eyes
fixed on the sunset that now ran riot as usual, full of cheap splendor and
glory, purple clouds slowly joining together in the sky, turning gray and a
light kindled in them, like a last attempt at life, a small plane flew low, intending to land in the small airport beyond Reading, its lights going off
and coming on and it made a big circle in the sky where a flock of birds
sailed in a hypnotic, geometric silence.
Maybe you'd do me a favor, he said.
Of course, I said. Not a muscle moved in him now. Sculpted against
the horizon. A flow of blood toward the thorny rosebushes, a sunset full
of arrogance.
Tell the important and decent German writer that the scion of Secret
Charity wants ...
Who? I asked.
Tell him the scion of Secret Charity wants.
I laughed, since I'm expert at doing the wrong things at the wrong
time. My neighbor didn't move and I thought he didn't sense my laughter, maybe he didn't hear it. And then he said, the muscles of your mouth,
Mr. Henkin, don't know how to laugh. That has to be learned too. I tried to
protest because his words were sharp, too sudden, but he waved his hand
as if driving off some pest, another plane circled now and started landing,
the water in my hose dwindled a moment, as if in spite, maybe Hasha
Masha was taking a shower, maybe she flushed the toilet, and then from
the silence and my stream of water that had almost stopped, he said: Tell
him I want him to give me back my daughters.
All my life I was a rational man. A realist-Zionist, as Demuasz used to
put it enthusiastically, the infidel shall live by his faith. Pascal's statement
that the heart has reasons that reason does not know was just as alien to me
as Kafka's stories. But ever since the disaster, I have clung more and more
to nonrational contexts. An amazing idea rose in my mind: the German will
surely explain to me what my neighbor said and that thought infuriated me
very much and also excited me. Everything was so unexpected for Henkin,
who had done the same things all his life, loved one woman, one son, one
house, one land, one language, one dream, taken the same route every
single morning, hundreds of times, read one chapter of the Bible and one
legend from the book of legends of Bialik and Ravnitsky and suddenly the
reason that reason doesn't know ... So I tried to put into my stance a pride
he had robbed from me. A right I had toiled to cultivate, as my wife says,
my right to suffer. The water returned to the hose, I thought about his
semicolon, the semicolon between the last words, and because of that a current of electricity passed through my spine, a semicolon I once tried to
teach my students and I became absurd to them. I thought about my wife
who despises me now when she maybe gets up from the toilet we put in
years ago and isn't white anymore, yellow and bluish snakes creep on its
sides, I thought of Menahem who would sit on the toilet or as Amihud
Giladi said when he used to come visit me: The toilet Menahem learned
to masturbate on and I then pretended not to understand, and Amihud
said: He taught me to masturbate, and I tried to imagine my son masturbating in the toilet, I, who dreaded the very thought of it. I thought of
Menahem, pushing a wheelbarrow, saying, Here's the train with a cold
bringing red loam, and then masturbating with Amihud, maybe that's the
answer to the daughters of that neighbor who suddenly have a garden of
their own?! My thoughts, like my torments, are overcultivated. And suddenly some response to my neighbor standing there waiting for his daughters bursts in me and illuminates my pain in a wretched light, so righteous
is he there facing me, facing me in the righteousness of his no-daughters and
I think about the one who from now on I'll secretly call Germanwriter, what
I'll say to him, how I'll talk with him, the bereaved father once again brought
me very low, that homonym, member of the Committee of Bereaved Parents, who doesn't laugh when Jordana of the Ministry of Defense chews
plastic vegetables mistakenly or not. I always measure dimensions by nondimensions. In the newspaper I first pause at announcements, Yoram and
Hannah Tsipori are pleased to announce the birth of their daughter Liat, and
I loathe with unbridled loathing the grandchildren born to children who
were even younger than Menahem and I see my neighbor, yearning for his
daughters, he didn't mention a number, but more than one, with that hose
of his in the light of sunset that already falls more than descends, what is
it to lose daughters, two, three daughters? A picture rises in my mind, I
teach Hebrew grammar, Teacher Sarakh knocks on the door, the picture
of King George behind my back, covered with fly droppings, the war of
Teacher Henkin against the British Empire and in our school, we also sang
Hatikvah as if it was a ritual of taking an oath to the Bar Kokhba Uprising,
we even had a socialist tendency some nationalist touch, the hands in the
classroom go up to answer a question and Teacher Sarakh knocks and I
open the door and see a hand holding an ear and the ear is stuck to a body
and the body is the body of Menahem, and it's burning with awful anger, he broke hangers, your son! And I have to lock the door immediately so the
students won't see, ostensibly quiet and restrained, inside me hums the
strict father I have to play, as always, bereaved father, nationalist father,
resurrecter of gardens, and my son stands there, his ear in the hand of
Teacher Sarakh, a smile on his face and she's shaking, You're merciful
with him, she says, I remember the word merciful, like a gracious lord, and
that hatred of hers, for me, for Menahem who broke her hangers, he broke
more of mine but I'm still silent, her anger from the days when we all met
on the Tiberias-Tsemakh road and she and Hasha Masha quarried stones
and I came to work and at night I lectured on Hebrew poetry and I taught
Hebrew to those pioneer men and women, and she wanted Menahem to
be hers and I wanted Hasha Masha for a wife, and not her, even though
she was so educated and knew Rosa Luxembourg and they said that
Trotsky had embraced her for three nights in a row and then was captured,
and she walked on foot from Russia to Turkey and from there sailed in a
ship to the Land of Israel and here I come, teaching, talking, hewing words
in the glowing air of the Galilean nights, and I don't have a Menahem for
her, I knew only one woman, and her eyes were full of doves that flew off
and didn't return. And I told her: Not hangers, coat hangers, and she
wanted to be choked or to choke because for such sad and loyal barbarian
women it's all the same, hangers, coat hangers, what difference does it
make, but back then precision was important to me, my neighbor is waiting, why is he waiting, I don't have any daughters for him. I then took my
son to Demuasz and said Demuasz, here's Menahem, who broke coat hangers in the hall. And he repressed a smile and asked why did you break
hangers, Menahem, and Menahem said that they were there and blocked
his view of the wall. And I, I corrected him there, I said, the coat hangers
blocked you, and Teacher Sarakh looked at me both excited and frightening, and I think of the grammar as her weary face of the shout, how it
shouts or weeps in correct grammar. Today I know that what is written has
to be written despite grammar and not because of it, Menahem died with
all the tables of tenses and verbs, pain isn't measured in commas, but my
neighbor's semicolon was so precise, only a tongue can be precise like that,
can describe something that's both awful and precise and so even scarier
than the thing itself ... And she waits there, Sarakh, for me to punish him,
she wants to see the whipping, the gallows, only when she sees the blood of one who could have been her son will she calm down, understand the
precise meaning of the flydroppings on the face of King George. And then
they demoted Menahem to a lower class for a week, and he sat next to a
little girl and pinched her, maybe he was looking for her breasts and
pinched her behind. A shriek rose and they called us, and Menahem's
mother said: You go, you're the pedagogue, not me, and I went and the
parents of the little girl, I even remember her name, Hedda Topolovsky,
her father it seems to me rolled cigars and her mother, her mother I don't
remember, maybe she worked for him as a model, I'm starting to be ironic
in old age. And that Mrs. Hedda Topolovsky, what's she doing today, the
little girl my son pinched, maybe she runs the branch of the Merry Wives of
Windsor in Haifa, or maybe she teaches in the school for the blind or maybe
she's a high-priced whore, she's surely alive, the poor girl he pinched and
maybe she hasn't recovered since then and searches for Menahem in dark
corners, in luxury cars she rides in with her splendid pink behind, and
surely all those little girls that I to my distress was the first to discover
their breasts even before the boys hit their backs as evidence of the new
bras they wore, every one of them had a pink behind in their youth and
later they grew and the pinkness disappeared, and they don't have
Menahem in the streets where their behinds rustle in pink panties instead of the behinds that turn white and yellow with the years and they
say: Hello, Teacher Henkin, and I know them but their names I don't
know and what difference does it make now, their names they sold for
some name of a husband that Menahem could have been or not, hangers,
coat hangers ... Maybe they get into them all their lives with coat hangers, without coat hangers, all the officers, all the criminals that filled our
land, and Teacher Sarakh, with legs that swelled up on the way from Siberia to the Land of Israel, hit the soldiers entering into the pink behinds to
defend her from Menahem who could have been her dead stepson and not
the son of Hasha Masha and then I scolded my son, stubborn and rebellious son I said, but deep inside me I tried to defend him, I knew I was a
sinner ... Why, Hasha Masha, why didn't you see how I tried to defend
your son even then, when I was busy educating many generations for the
state in the making?