Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
And he thinks about the hotel, about Henkin sitting in his
house now, letting his thoughts roam free, pondering shelters,
about Eva in the shelter when Goebbels comes and tells the
Fuhrer: The queen of Russia is dead, and Goebbels doesn't
mean the queen of Russia, who managed to get routed at the
last minute by King Friedrich for whom my son was named, he
means Roosevelt, the miracle that may still happen ...
The fact of the beauty queen's beauty, thinks Germanwriter,
should have been an advance payment on the account of death.
Some reply to life, to expectations, to dread, and isn't really a
reply, not her face, not her bittersweet body, not even her measured grief about Sam, whom she spent a night with. It can be
guessed how he asks Sam what happened in the room, and Sam
tells him: He knocked on the door, we stood still, two mirrors
looking at one another, he told me who he was, we talked about
the struggle then, I tried to remember, I almost recalled, I told
about the Fourth Reich. He was sad to hear about Ebenezer in
the wretched nightclubs. We ordered vodka. We drank.
When he asked Boaz, Boaz will answer, Boaz will surely answer in similar language, will say: Somebody published an ad in
the paper with my picture. I came. The window was open, the
planes that came a few minutes later to Father's house passed
by the open window, their lights blinked on and off. We drank
vodka. We talked about ourselves. I told about Rebecca, the
Captain, the Captain's Dante Alighieri, I said, Maybe a monument has to be erected to Dante, to the fallen ones, to ourselves,
to Henkin, to Menahem, to Friedrich, a gigantic monument
where you can see the whole land and then die, and he smiled.
We fought. We hit one another. He hit hard, but I wasn't weak
either. We didn't know who hit whom, then one went out. I'm
not sure who. And Sam will say, Right, and there was a beauty
queen there. And Boaz will say: All of life, all that suddenly was,
balled up for one moment and then silence.
A pianist wearing a toupee started playing old Hollywood
songs. The queen got up and Germanwriter went outside and
started walking in the street. And then he saw Boaz, and now it was hard to know if that really was Boaz after the meeting in the
hotel, the one moment we all focused on, or perhaps it was
before, but it can't be denied that Boaz passed by in a jeep and
stopped and asked him to get in, and they took Noga who said:
What happened to you, were you wounded? And he said: I tried
to screw a lioness, and Noga said, Beware of us. And soon after,
they came to the settlement, the serene old houses in foliage
shrouded in shadows of nightfall, the great-grandson of Ahbed
opened the door and Rebecca was seen through the door as if
she were trying to classify walls, windows, and objects, not to
see the almond groves and the citrus groves, and on her face is
an old smile, no longer forced, as if the meeting that was or will
be between Samuel and Boaz extinguished in her the last ruse
she had brought with her to the Land of Israel on the first day
of the twentieth century, and he pondered whether, as
Goethe said, miracle is the beloved son of faith, what was seen
in Rebecca's eyes was the beginning of a fixed and constant
end, or a coefficient of the suicides on the verge of the last compromise a woman like her can make with what she had once decided her fate would be and it turned out otherwise, and then
she didn't allow things to take place, but reconstructed what
never happened. As if, with her own hands, she knocked down
her fate by bringing death and destruction on everything around
her, so she could realize in her body and mind what others
fought over, while she refused reality; some devotion to something sublime and yet hopeless at the same time. She hugged
Boaz, but suddenly her hands flowed off his body, maybe off the
bodies of Secret Charity and Joseph and Nehemiah and her son,
who is now maybe looking at the sea and the ripples of waves
on the shore at the yellowed boards and shells, counting the
memories he had lost, so he could at long last remember who he
really was and be Ebenezer who maybe doesn't really exist, and
start over to mutter and know wood in its distress. Rebecca's face
was weary, through the German she looked and saw the walls and
the objects she had classified before. On the walls, she said afterward, she counted nine million tears like the number of words Ebenezer knew, tears she had wept for eight years so Nehemiah
would avenge her. That poor handsome man of mine, she said
softly, and nothing helped; the tears were waiting for her on the
walls along with the eyes that once, when she was a girl, she
packed in a suitcase with the names of dead people she took
down from the walls of the synagogue. The innocent smile of
Rachel Brin, who died of danger and didn't tell Lionel, now on
his way to the Land of Israel, who his father was, as if he didn't
know, as if he really didn't know Joseph and the Captain in his
blood, as if his Laments weren't based on the melody Rebecca
used to split the heavens with her anger, to protect Boaz who
would be saved in the war and so Menahem Henkin would die
instead of him. There's no pity, she said then, and she meant the
melody Emanuel the Roman taught Dante Alighieri and Joseph
taught his offspring, two hundred fifty-two offspring, and thousands of offspring throughout the globe, stumbling, routed, and
writing books, selling subscriptions, locomotives, irons, computers, building cities, teaching children, healers, maybe patients
and dying people, the whole kit and caboodle is this moment,
Germanwriter will think, maybe the whole thing is nothing but
one melody, some tune that came from the Temple through the
Spanish exiles to various corners of the universe, and that's how
those wretched and proud poor people could unite into one fabric, into a game of football with no winners but only losers. Like
me, he said, like Friedrich, Jordana's lover.
And Rebecca looked at the tears on the walls, the tears that
didn't want to return to her aged eyes, and she was silent and
maybe others said for her what she was supposed to say: The
end is inherent in the beginning, a pit makes a tree, a tree
makes a pit, so Ebenezer invented a book that hasn't yet been
written, but he knew it by heart, and by his estimate, she's a
hundred years old, and everything is filled with tears for something real. Battlefields of dead children, Henkin and rabbinical
responsa, holy walls, holy ground, graves, a holy wall, what does
all that have to do with my forefathers for whom God was to
gnash your teeth, rage, and glory they sought Him in vain. The messiah will come someday when we don't need him anymore,
she said, big dreams bring small ends and Rebecca tried to hold
on, for the first time in her life, not to what others dreamed for
her, but to what she built with her own hands and didn't pay
any attention to-her farm, the fields, the citrus groves, the
Ahbeds, the fruit, the horses, the flowers in plastic awnings, the
vegetables, winter growths, the transparent air held in the cloths
of the fruit trees, the hens that don't stop laying, the prize
cows, she didn't seem sure that the farm she built as revenge
for Nehemiah's death existed, that everything that happened
did indeed happen to her and not to somebody else who was
pierced by a river, fell in love for a splendid and despicable
moment with a handsome poet under his wedding canopy,
killed a husband on the shore of Jaffa in a lion's cage as an endearing reply to the ailments of the inspired soul of Michael
Halperin, her vision of the Hebrew army was never necessary,
while Klomin wove it into five thousand pages of letters of recommendation to high commissioners, ministers, famous people,
rulers, anybody ... so Rebecca grew indignant and said: They
just go on inventing a past for themselves to console Nehemiah,
to understand poor Nathan whom I killed with a kiss when I
told him about the Arabs who gave me money, and she looked
at Noga and wanted Noga to give her Boaz until the day she
died and she wouldn't be with him, Noga who was already seen,
or perhaps would still see, Sam and would be confused and would
give birth to a son who would be both Sam's son and Boaz's son
and nobody would know, and more awful than anythingRebecca wouldn't know, and that would be the real up yours,
and Rebecca would ask and Noga would tell her: I'm not telling
you, Rebecca, and you'll die years later, a hundred years old she'll
be at her death and she won't know who is the father of the heir
of Secret Charity, and Ebenezer won't know because of notknowing, she'll say, and Noga will say: That's not right, Rebecca,
you knew and you didn't say. And I know too and don't say, and
that's the sweet revenge of the soft woman who was Noga who
one day, at the age of forty-five, when she'd become pregnant, wouldn't agree to tell who was the father of the child, who would
then go on being Joseph with green-yellow eyes and would live
into the next millennium, when all of us won't be here and
maybe he won't be either, if the destruction does come and the
Messiah will come riding on an ass with broken legs, and will
tarry, and won't come even after we don't need him, when everything will be or was, in the words of the chief of staff of the solar
system, destroyed. And so, from Rebecca Schneerson's yearnings for a son, whom she delivered to herself at the trees and
bushes planted by "that Dana," out of yearnings, the settlement
could be seen in its splendor along with the rot eating it. Ninety
years and the rot now comes to the roots of yearning, the spots
of damp, falling walls, trees that came to fill the space of a furious light without corners, already rotten and falling in the rain,
and Rebecca looks at them, or through them. What does a beautiful old woman with cataracts see? What can she see, thinks
Germanwriter, maybe his architects could put her back together
again, fill her interstices and the interstices of the settlement
with a renewed antiquity, made of synthetic materials, and then
the spider webs could be seen, and Rebecca said: Boaz, maybe
we really didn't succeed in not loving. Was that a question or a
challenge, thought the writer, and he didn't know, Noga tried
to listen to the echo rising from the words, like a biblical old
woman, some Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite, who killed her
lover. Out of love and loyalty she killed! And I, who will I kill,
said Rebecca as if she read her mind, who? Me? Who didn't I
kill? My parents and my parents' parents I killed, so that Noga
will give birth to a son and nobody will know who his father is
and I will die without an heir, and the word "heir" came to her
from television, when she'd watch the news and hear H. Herzog
talk about our forces which was always Boaz in the desert, striking my enemy, sir, and what difference does it make who wins,
she said, what's important is who loses, and I know how losers
look, like Joseph's love poems, look at the settlement, they said
there, and it's no longer known who said it, and they looked outside, the vineyard of Nathan's and Nehemiah's dreams. Rebecca came to this place to plant shirt trees in America. Plain new
houses fill the interstices. Between Marar and the other Arab
village they built a passage then and it's now a settlement and
then it's "the settlement," and it swallows Nehemiah's old settlement, a settlement where we old women, who buried our buffoons in Roots, sit and knit ninety years, said Rebecca and sees
Yemenites, Iraqis, and Poles establishing a small town here and
in the river stuffed fish cruise in the Land of Canaan, near a
settlement where most of its founders submitted to the need to
dig a pit for the first ones next to the synagogue, close to the
community center named after Ebenezer who knew wood in its
distress, near the tombstone for Dante Alighieri that the Captain
didn't manage to erect, but maybe the whole settlement is a
tombstone for a poet, every poet, Joseph or Dante, what difference does it make, they all try to phrase a nonexistent and not
very important situation, some fictional space that happens because of people, because of the tears still waiting for her on the
walls, and in the distance sit the last old women of the settlement knitting sweaters for the grandchildren, who still come see
them in their fine cars, and the new houses straggle into one
another, lost, fearing the venom, from the dream they never
knew, children trying to learn it in the museum or the pit-of-thefirst-ones, the name of the Wondrous One is one of the founding
fathers and All's Well is old now and maybe dead, and Eve, a poor
old woman, lies in her bed and dreams of her chicks who went to
build her a state and came back graves, and one of them-Boazsits in the Hilton and tries to be himself.
And Germanwriter sits and eats sweet gefilte fish served him
by Ahbed and tells about songs he used to read to Friedrich and
Jordana shuts her eyes and ponders, who, who, who, he tells
about the songs and how Friedrich asked who sang those songs
and he said: We, I sang, my son, and then Friedrich refused to
read even one of my books, said Germanwriter, not even one
story, and I wrote for him and he didn't read, he went to his
grandfather and asked him: How could you? And he didn't read.
He fought me, read stories of younger authors, and in their war against me maybe they were closer to Friedrich's grandfather
than I was and he didn't know, and he died, and we at least
tried to give an answer about something that no longer had any
meaning, but was the essence of our life, to know why we were
what we were, he didn't forgive, didn't read my books, said
Germanwriter, and Rebecca said: They're all like that, they die
and don't know, like those who live in Nehemiah's settlement
and read in the museum that Nehemiah built a model farm and
don't know who really built or why, anger built, not love of
kings, and what came out of all that? Ebenezer carved in wood
the face of Joseph, not his! And then they went from there, and
Boaz, if he was there, would say: This time not in a stolen car!
as if it really was important that he once stole a car, and he
adds: Maybe what I need to do is erect a big memorial, remember how we went to Kastel? And there Henkin could have met
Menahem if only he believed me, and on a high hill, fifteen
stories of a memorial, a revolving restaurant on top, conference
rooms, memorial rooms, and pictures of all those who fell in the
wars of Israel, thousands of standard-size pictures, and rooms
for those who will be, rooms of memory for those who died in
the Holocaust, for the ghetto fighters. Guides in uniforms will
explain the wars and the salvations according to the expressions
of those who fell, and a room will be devoted to Dante, maybe
a whole floor, to the poet who almost created a world from the
tunes of the Temple, and then they brought me an unwanted
salvation from the mouth of Rebecca, according to the Captain
who always brought good tidings, as if he came here because of
our wishes more than because of the illogical urgency to erect
a memorial to Dante here, and the memorial may not be
erected, because Boaz is trying to sink into the depression he
craves so much and wants to know who is the father of his child
and Noga won't tell and he doesn't know if, when he was with
Licinda as Sam, Sam wasn't with Noga as Boaz, or perhaps they
knew everything and kept quiet, or maybe those things didn't
happen and somebody is now writing the last words, his description of one indescribable moment, a moment when one side of the coin met the other side. Somebody is now inventing
not only a past but a present in which those things take place,
and what happens is a prediction forward and backward, like
the history that's already disappearing from the world and only
historians are left without history, to describe something that is
no longer remembered, that disappeared with the houses of
Cologne where Germanwriter lived until he came to bury his son
next to Menahem Henkin who died instead of Boaz and didn't
want to be saved as Menahem wanted to live near the sea, with
Hasha Masha, and maybe with two orphan girls from Diskin or
even with Noga whose belly will swell and who knows who is the
father of her son, that wise woman, just as they won't know
things and we won't know who was the father of Ebenezer, even
though it's quite clear who his father was, if not the river, then
who, somebody who reads and listens to the tapes can know, but
Rebecca is silent and then silence prevails, and Germanwriter
thinks of his son and why he didn't read his books and hurts, now
of all times he hurts, just like Melissa, whose father wrote him
letters and tells, and calls Lionel, and Lionel goes to Connecticut, where he hadn't been since he was a boy in love and everything is different there, Mr. Brooks's awkward supplication
turned into "a lament on the death of little girls," his offices are
called "Melissa Inc.," and the sales center is called "Melissa Ford
Motors," and the main street is called "Melissa Street," and
there's a souvenir shop there called "The Shop of Poor Little
Melissa," and The New York Times published an article about the
city where masses of young people stream, and Time wrote about
it, and Newsweek, and they talk about Melissa whom Sam Lipp fell
in love with thirty years after she died, and a German writer came
to search for her fifty years after her death and miserable youths
stream here and stand at Melissa's grave holding signs, "We love
you, Melissa,"-and "There's life before death," and they go to
the shop and buy "Melissa souvenirs" and "Melissa dolls," and
some of them commit suicide there or try to commit suicide, and
they've set up a first aid station with a doctor and a psychologist
and a person who studies those cases for the University of Michi gan, and there's a game called "Game of Melissa Memory" and
"Beautiful and Wretched Melissa Toothpaste," and a book with
blank pages, with a picture of Melissa on the cover and everybody
writes his sad thoughts there and sends them to a certain address
and gets a raffle prize every month, and Hollywood is making a
movie about Melissa and what happened to her after her death,
and people pay high prices for cars, and from all over America they
flock to buy Melissa cars. What a world, writes Mr. Brooks, and
Lionel comes and everybody applauds him as if he were a hero, he
wrings his hands, bends down, tries to flee, thinks about Licinda,
asks her to come, but she doesn't, and Lily sits and is angry or
laughs, who knows, and they go to Israel, to Sam, who is still
locked in a room with Boaz or with himself, and they bring the
smell of the great success of poor Melissa fifty years after her
death and ...