The Last Jew

The young man got off the bus full of soldiers and hoisted his kitbag onto his shoulder. The bus took off, ants returned from a reconnaissance mission bearing pieces of leaves and stubs of wood, he looked here and there and saw a house, went in and on the table were fresh vegetables, cigarettes, and sweet juices. A woman whose hair had changed from shiny black to gray sat him down at the vegetables and wanted to see him eat. He swallowed the fresh vegetables and smoked a few cigarettes and then he put a few packs into the kitbag and drank some sweet-and-sour juice. She asked him if he was hungry and he said no, no. Then a few girls appeared at the window on the way to a tent. He glanced at them and wanted to ask one of them a question but he didn't find the question and went on sitting. He tried to locate tangible memories in himself but everything was mixed up. Somebody he thought was a commander and wore a ribbon on his shoulder tab asked him a few personal questions and out of his kitbag the young man took papers he himself avoided looking at, and the man studied them, took out a payment chit, and gave it to him. And he said: You'll surely go home, but the young man didn't remember anymore if he had really thought of going home and suddenly he really didn't know where that home was, he only nodded, picked up the kitbag, got into the jeep parked in the yard, and waited. A driver came and asked him what he was doing in the jeep. The young man said he wanted to go, never mind where. The driver looked at him with shrewd amazement and said: All of you came back fucked up, then he bent over the steering wheel and whispered: My brother went, I'm going to Gan Yavneh. The young man said: Take me to Marar. The driver started the jeep and didn't tell the young man that there was no more Marar. When they came the mountain was empty. The young man stood in the road, put down the kitbag, looked at what was a village, and thought: I live not far from here, but the distance between him and his home was now almost imaginary, he started retreating like somebody who truly dreaded knowing who he was.

Late in the evening he came to Tel Aviv and slept near the sanitation workers in the central bus station. A girl coming back from work stepped on him and he didn't say a word. In the morning he ate a bagel and drank lukewarm tea, went to the boulevard, and walked all along it. When he came to a bench that suited him he put the kitbag down again and sat down. He sat without moving from nine in the morning until five thirty in the evening. Most of the time he looked at the house opposite. The balconies were empty.

Children paraded by, carrying a blue and white flag, singing. He felt hungry but he didn't get up. Opposite a window opened and a woman looked at the sky and then closed the window. The cars passed with a frequency that made him try to understand its rules, but he couldn't. He touched the money in his pocket and thought maybe it was time to get up and go. But he didn't get up and he didn't go. A few downcast people walked along the boulevard. They held their hands clasped almost boldly behind their backs and their faces were down. They looked pale but maybe also full of imaginary gaiety; they imagined they were happy. They stopped not far from him; one of them spoke of some great hour that had not been missed and he was glad about the words that sounded familiar to him. Then sights passed before his eyes that he wanted to forget and blood flowed from him and he planned the destruction of the house opposite. He'd place the TNT on the doorsill behind the security wall. Then he'd connect the detonator and then the red wire and the white wire and would retreat to the bench, hide behind the bench, and activate it. The house wouldn't cave in immediately, but would be opened and then, slowly slowly would sink. When he thought about the anonymous people who would die in the house he felt a distant affection for them, almost a yearning, and in the back of his mind the house was gaping and caving in, gaping and caving in, and he took a pack of cigarettes out of the kitbag and chain-smoked a few. Then, thirsty, he found the hose used to water the boulevard, turned on the faucet, and drank. A sanitation worker tried to stop him, but the young man looked at him with controlled rage and the worker thought: Another one who came back, why do I need troubles. The celebration was in other places.

He thought maybe he should have stayed in camp and eaten fresh vegetables another few days. The gloomy woman with silvery hair could probably have suckled him. Then he could have sung to her how they die in Bab-el-Wad. But he sits here on the bench on the boulevard and the day is nearing its end and he's not yet aware of anything profound, very important, bothering him. Somebody is sitting here on the bench, he thought, but who is really sitting here? The thick trees intertwined in the sky created a kind of gigantic purple bridal veil above his head. Their trunks were oval. The blossoms were also a bit blue. The kitbag was laid on the mown but almost dead lawn that smelled of mold and dying grass. He felt the wetness penetrate the back of the bench, which was eaten by old wetness that hadn't dried. The tree facing him was all gnarled, leaves dropped slowly like a gentle rain of dead children. When he opened his eyes after a strained doze, he saw the foliage and the purple blue and could make out the distant sunset hidden by the buildings, and then he could also sense the redness and even see tatters of it. The sky growing dim, that whisper through the purple and blue nimbus. Once again he made out the wall of the house opposite. The wall was yellowish and tending to rust. On the balcony a woman now stood and hung up her little girl to dry. The little girl dropped and then jumped up with a cheer on what might have been a lawn hidden behind a low concrete wall. And the little girl laughed. What should have been terror was a loud rejoicing squashed to depression by a black Ford and the young man on the bench felt a certain regret, something repressed in the back of his mind wanted to see a woman drying a little girl. The woman vanished from the balcony, a door slammed, another car passed, and from Habima Theater appeared a young woman in a golden dress ignited by the twilight with a certain delicate charm, somehow connected with the joy of the little girl on the lawn. She stopped, looked at him, bent over, his legs heavy, his face tilted a little to the side, and said: Boaz, Boaz Schneerson, what are you doing here, and he didn't grasp that she was talking to him. He got up, picked up the kitbag, and from his angle of vision, when he stood up, a green pin now appeared clasping the young woman's hair, her lips looked spread in an amazement she was afraid to express properly, the lips were now clamped hard, maybe as an attempt to defend herself, the theater on the right seemed shrouded in concave light, so maybe he burst out laughing. The young woman said: You certainly don't even remember my name, and he nodded. Then he said: Not your name and not my name, even though you called me Boaz. She said: Boaz, you fell on your head, and he answered: Yes, I fell on my head. Suddenly I'm on the boulevard, what's on at Habima? She averted her face, looked at the thick-trunked sycamores, the sandy square, the building enveloped in gloom, and tried to recall. Her shoulder holding a purse moved, the purse slipped to the ground, her hand clenched uneasily, she tried to bend down to pick up the purse and yet as if she wanted to stay erect, the little girl opposite started throwing a ball against the wall. The spots above the foliage became dark, on her finger a gold ring was seen shining in the light of the prancing sunbeam, and he approached her, looked at the ring, put the kitbag down on the ground, and started pulling the ring off the finger. She said in pain, Stop, you're hurting me, but he said, I have to take off the ring. The ring was small and stuck to the finger and the young woman who was supposed to run stood still; a tiny spot of blood appeared flickering on her knuckle. She reached out her other hand, grabbed hold of him, pulled him to her in an attempt to get away from him; her eyes were bloodshot, the sky now grew dark fast and her hair clasped in a green pin dropped onto her face like a wild screen, for a moment she couldn't even see, in that second he managed to tear the ring off and her finger bled and when she slipped, he grabbed the finger, licked it, and cleaned off the blood. She slapped his face and shouted: You're really crazy, Boaz Schneerson, you're a bad animal, but after he licked the blood from his lips, he said: You shouldn't get married with phony rings, that's what's killing me. She pushed aside her hair, pulled it back, picked up the purse, looked at her hand, felt dizzy, something seemed shaky even in her crotch, and she said: I'm not married to anybody, I wasn't wearing a wedding ring, once when I met you, you went to Hepzibah and bought me a cheap ring. It's funny you don't remember. You came from the settlement, maybe that was the same ring.

Things cleared up now and that could be seen on his rounded forehead, his hardened body; he thrust the ring in his pocket and picked up the kitbag. You're Minna, maybe we really did know each other, who knows. She leaned on a tree and didn't notice that a dripping resin stuck to her dress and she could see purplish leaves falling into her hair. She said, You said you'd write to me, where were you in the war? And he shook his head and said more to himself than to her, Where the rings were I was too, I've got a collection of gold teeth of dead Arabs. And an ear that my friend, who died, would chew like gum. She tried to smile, the dark grew thicker, the change from evening to night was too swift. So my name's Boaz Schneerson, he said, here, take the ring from me and wait for me, I don't need phony rings. He held out the ring he took out of his pocket and started going away from her, he didn't turn around but walked backward, his face stuck to the sight of her, she stood leaning on the tree, her hair covered by a gloom drenched with leaves, and the little girl opposite yelled: Mama mama I've got to make peepee, a car sprayed water that may have been left there from the sloppy watering. In the thickening darkness the thick, gnarled, ancient sycamores looked like giant memorials, and she looked amazed at his back illuminated in the light in front of the theater that suddenly came on. The light didn't touch the kitbag or his hand and it looked like his hand were lopped off. She thought about a hand chewed like gum. The kitbag was the shadow of a dog that wasn't there. Close to the sand dunes the houses were scattered up to the row of cypresses whose outlines were now erased in the light crushed on their backs; for a moment, a stub of moon was seen above the house under construction and Boaz lit a cigarette, the smoke curled into the street that led nowhere. Maybe he once knew some girl who lived here, maybe it was on another boulevard. Minna's house with the red roof tiles. Everything was too blurred to be caught in a clear picture. She looked abandoned near the tree, far away, and he thought, maybe the little girl doesn't have gold teeth anymore. He stood still in the middle of the street and waited. Then the dull feeling of regret that had started filling him earlier was finished, his mouth was still full of the dampness of blood and then he smiled too. But the gloom covered his smile. When he saw the two headlights of the car heading for him, he thought it was the same car he saw before, even though maybe it wasn't. The lights moved toward him like the limbs of an enemy. And that's what he also said to Solomon on the way to Tel Aviv: Got to search for the enemy even after the war, to search for a proper defeat, and Solomon said: I'm not searching for any enemy, going to screw until the middle of next year, nonstop, stop only to eat fresh vegetables and halvah. The car came close and the driver, who had already seen Boaz, started honking his horn. The honking was mashed, from one of those broken horns, so Boaz felt generous toward the honking, but couldn't budge. The car approached and squealed to a stop; in the light of the streetlamp, it looked like a big ladybug. Another person was there who burst out of the kiosk hidden under an awning loaded with a heavy dropping of leaves. The kiosk light was dimmed by the black paint that hadn't been removed when the war ended; the person who came out of the kiosk held a pencil and a notebook and was writing something. On his lips was a smile he had brought with him from the kiosk and had nothing to do with what was going on outside. Boaz looked from the car to the person and back, wanted to smash the car, but the notebook in that man's hand excited him to some extent, as if all he wanted to do ever since he had come down from Jerusalem and knew that the battles were over was to see a person with a notebook and pencil. The driver got out of the car and started yelling. His voice was low, thick, and the words came out of his mouth a bit drawled, as if he could think even during anger. The person with the notebook and pencil immediately turned into a witness. You were standing here in the middle of the street, sir, and blocking traffic, he stated with angry politeness. And nobody asked him. Boaz, who was sparing with words and afraid to waste them, let the two men discuss it between themselves. He put down the kitbag and waited. The person with the notebook and pencil said: People like that should be run over, then they wouldn't stand in the middle of the street and stop traffic, and the driver said: If I hadn't stopped, he'd be dead, and he looked at Boaz, who didn't move from where he was standing in front of the car. The word dead inflamed the driver, who said it with a vague fear, and the person with the notebook and pencil now seemed dressed with rather exaggerated elegance, on his nose a scratch was clearly seen that could have come from an illegal chase of municipal tow trucks, thought Boaz and didn't know if he really had anything to do with those people, if he really spoke their language, if he understood what they were saying, and why the shoes of the person with the notebook and pencil had no laces. They spoke energetically to one another. The notebook in the man's hand shook and the driver wanted to go and then Boaz approached, with his strong hands that looked so delicate, he grasped the two heads, held them a moment as they were amazed, coupled them, moved one head away from the other, and then knocked the heads together. At the moment the smashing of the two skulls was heard, a car was seen trying to maneuver its way left. From there a wagon with a stooped carter was seen, and the wagon, unlike the car, passed by very slowly, the mare was old and weary and the carter was humming a song in Yiddish: There was a queen whose crown was sparkling, sparkling, there was a queen whose tomb was sparkling, sparkling. The two heads now moved away from one another, the car whose lights were still on blocked the picture of the cart and the other car, and after a silent pause, the cart and the car disappeared, the notebook dropped onto the ground and Boaz, illuminated by the lights, quickly tossed the kitbag into the car and when the driver yelled: What are you doing, sir? in his slow defensive voice, Boaz saw on his face the crushed expression of somebody who managed to stun with illogic but certainly with a certain methodicalness. I'm taking your auto, said Boaz, what I wanted was to lie on the street to ask forgiveness from your shoes. But his hands started hitting in rage, the little girl dropped from the balcony, that tranquility.

Minna wants him to remember her, the rage stunned him, a rage that brought a ring down on Minna, I'm sorry, he said, and when he jumped into the car, he yelled: My name is Boaz, but he should have said: I'm Boaz, he started the car and began driving. The stunned driver stood there next to the person with the notebook and pencil, his face crushed from the blow, and the man with the notebook searched for the pencil that might have fallen and clenched his arm that had been hit and Boaz drove fast down the slope of Dizengoff toward the huts on Nordau. He saw people huddled at the coffee shop where a news announcer's voice was coming, and he went on, he stopped at a breached bridge with a few bushes still burgeoning between its tatters and an iron skeleton was seen peeping out of what had apparently once been a complete structure. He parked the car, turned off the lights, took the kitbag, and went. He walked along the street and could smell the blood of the sea. The smell was calming and the crash of the waves was pleasant and demonstrated devotion and obstinacy.

When he lay on a cot in a tent on the seashore, in the small camp for soldiers who returned and didn't know where, or why they stayed there, he thought he didn't remember who Minna was and in fact he did remember, but it wasn't important to him. And then he realized that he was protecting somebody.

In the morning, he passed by a small hotel with a sign on its wall saying: "For Soldiers, Discount and Free Wash." He didn't know what was free and what was discounted and he went in. The clerk was snoozing and upstairs in the rooms, people were groaning. Maybe the clerk recorded their made-up names in his notebook. Boaz asked for what was free and found himself in a bathroom whose walls were filthy and whose mirrors were broken. He asked the man for toothpaste; the clerk was too tired to refuse. Boaz spread toothpaste on a fountain pen he took out of the kitbag and brushed his teeth. Then he wet his face and hair and combed his hair back with his fingers, and the broken mirror didn't give him any idea of how he looked. When he came out, the clerk said something about the war and hope and Boaz asked him if he was interested in buying gold teeth of Arabs. The clerk felt the toothpaste that Boaz returned to him and said: Enough already, everybody's got those jokes. Boaz didn't correct him, but went out, pounded his fist, and saw damp crumbling plaster, his hand was white from the blow and he walked along Hayarkon Street where the sea was seen flickering between the houses. A woman was hanging laundry out to dry and he wanted the sun to burn her men's clothes. When he came to the office, he saw a sign: "Office to Direct Soldiers Who Were Cut Off from Their Units." He climbed the stinking stairs and saw soldiers standing in a line. One of them said, There's a Romanian girl on Third Street, twenty cents a fuck. Boaz waited quietly and chewed imaginary gum. The soldiers wanted gum and he showed them a mouth with no gum. In the office sat a well-groomed officer wearing a handsome uniform, and his eyes were veiled in a panic that became beautiful in a properly functioning smile. Boaz appreciated that national authority. He answered the officer's questions calmly, pulled out the papers, and showed them to the officer. The officer said to him: Oh, you were there too, you deserve more, where's the weapon, they spoke a few minutes and a female soldier came in looking furious and wrote something on a small thin pink paper form. After he signed, he wanted to understand how far the female soldier's gigantic breasts reached, but she turned her back to him and said: Everybody, everybody, and he understood her, maybe in his heart he pitied her, with breasts like those to meet those dark schemes. When he went outside, he remembered dully that he had to go to the settlement, to Grandmother, but he knew the time hadn't yet come, he'd been moving around for a month now, he'd wait another few days. And he didn't know where he had been moving around for a month before he came here, the battles had ended before, he didn't remember what was the last battle, but he did remember saying to somebody, it's good that it's over but he didn't know if he really meant that. Different ants walked in a row toward a hole they had dug and in a nub sat a tree in a big pot. Somebody was watering the tree with a long hose and standing under the awning of a stationery store. From there you could see a big yard behind a house that might once have been a fashionable cafe. In the yard were pieces of chairs and posts with broken lanterns hanging on them. Boaz loaded the kitbag on his back, spread out his hands, bent down to balance the weight, as if he were walking on a tightrope, and walked toward the courtyard, where cats striped like tame tigers were yowling. He sat down in a broken chair in the courtyard and tried again to think. The ants and the beetles were a sign that his friends really did die and that he really did come back but if he could, he would have asked the officer more questions now, but since it was a waste of effort to go back up, he didn't. He fingered the money they had given him and didn't recognize the money. The money was written with Hebrew letters. That money already has a state, he said aloud and the cat jumped with trained wildness toward a broken lantern and planted its claws in it. So he went to the cafe not far from there and ordered coffee, cake, and a glass of soda. When he wanted to pay, he gave the waiter all the money and the waiter looked at him in shock, counted the necessary coins, and said, returning most of the money to him, You're funny today sir; but he said finny.

Boaz thought that as a funny, or finny, person, he had to see the car he had taken the day before but he knew that was only an excuse to return to some place, for no good reason, and the car surely wasn't there. He wanted to know where he should go. When he came, he saw the car parked where he had left it. The man from the grocery store who came outside to bring in the margarine thrown on the sidewalk by the driver of the worn-out and squeaky pickup truck said, You looking for an apartment here? There's one upstairs, rent control. Boaz said, That car is stolen! The man pondered a bit and bent over to pick up the margarine. Boaz picked up the case of margarine for him and dragged it inside. The man gave Boaz an Eskimo Pie and he nibbled at it. Boaz said, Cars should live in their own houses. The shopkeeper muttered something and said there were people here at night, but they left. And Boaz said they come and go all the time. Over the counter hung an announcement about food rationing and food coupons and Boaz read it carefully; the shopkeeper said, It'll be hot today. When he came out of the shop, he saw the driver in the distance, he leaped into the yard and climbed the tree. He looked and saw them checking the car and a person who looked like a plainclothes cop searched for fingerprints on the handle. That made him laugh, in the tree, and he slowly came down and started walking. They didn't even see him. He came to the tents, put down the kitbag, put on a clean but wrinkled shirt, and went out. After he sat for hours and looked at the sea, he went to Cafe Pilz. The music burst out and the waves of the sea looked silvery. He drank two spitfires and Menashke played songs on the accordion. Then they played a rumba and everybody danced. A girl Boaz later discovered in his arms tried to defend herself against the shock on his face. But she accepted Boaz's kiss with empty lips cut off from himself. She was offended and tried to look into his eyes but in the middle of the second kiss, with two spitfires in his belly and his head spinning, he left her slack-jawed and went toward London Square. She yelled something that was drowned in the noise of the sea. He expected her to be the daughter of the driver of the car and would sue him. So he groped in the empty pocket where he used to keep the gold teeth. Then he sat on a rock and looked at a bench not far from him. The bench was surely more comfortable to sit on because in the morning, when he went to the office, he saw that it was repainted. The sea spread out before him. The girl was still yelling, or the yelling was before and only the echo was heard now, the sea was locked because of the dark. The moon shed a little light but it was thin and curved and a car that might have broken down, parked with its lights on and illuminated the wrong section of the sea. Boaz leaned over the rock and behind it were white houses gleaming in the curved light, with eyes wide open he saw nonexistent eagles darting, swooping and a bright path, and a man yelling, they died, got to save the black. Boaz sat there terrified, shrouded in dread from some unknown source, thought about the baby that could have been born if the woman who got an indifferent kiss near Cafe Pilz was yelling something. Maybe Boaz was a bastard who fell on his head, he thought; maybe that's Minna, did I know her once, or not, Minna, and what does he have to do with all those Minnas, he told the baby kicking inside him: Wait a while, I'll give birth to you, pretty one, with two mothers, three fathers, and two grandfathers. Then he went down to the boardwalk and bumped into wires not reached by the car's headlights. Maybe they were laid here recently when the war was close to Tel Aviv, which always expected wars on her border.

Two young men stood at the door of a cafe that looked locked. They knocked on the door, but nobody opened it. He could imagine the cafe owner leaving, escaping in a boat, and not yet back. A girl in a short dress was standing in a shaded niche next to the door. For a moment, she rolled up her dress a little and the two young men laughed and approached her as in a slow dance, she raised the dress as if her hands were the hands of a doctor, but the touch was hesitant, wounded, and the lights of a passing car showed some profound contempt flickering deep in her eyes. The lights of the car that might have broken down were extinguished now and the sea was still silvered, calm, sealed in moon shadows. A cop passed by on a bike now and shone a flashlight on the bench Boaz had almost sat on before. Clouds of suspicions in the place were plastered but tangible. An ancient smell of damp and phony chill came from the park. For a moment he felt a secret bliss that he could feel a common fate with those two young men and share the girl's contempt for their springy steps, but the girl looked scared of the cop, turned around and lowered her dress with perhaps unexpected coarseness, they stood still again in front of the locked door and one of them started weeping. Now Boaz could make out how big they were, like wild bulls he used to see between Marar and the settlement. They were surely searching for a fille de joie with braids and a pinafore, their childhood love, he thought. But there was a war, and if two fools like them didn't die, they were superfluous like me. The two strode toward Hayarkon Street and from there to the Red House. In the Red House, somebody was playing the "Internationale" on a mandolin. An unseen woman was singing in a whisper the words that moved toward the sea and were mixed in it. Near the house was a barbed wire fence and two women soldiers with Sten guns were guarding it. The fence was rusty and behind it were only limestone hills and sea. The cannon that may really have stood here once was moved. Inside the Red House a forehead was seen and near it two crests of male hair. The overgrown young men stood facing the women soldiers and spoke coarsely. The women soldiers enveloped themselves in a secret mantle that had long ago been forced on them and tried not to get angry, and, even more, the second one (the first one was fatter) tried not to smile. The girl Boaz had earlier invented with the pinafore and flaxen hair, twelve years old, naive, now passed by the women soldiers, on her way to a belated piano lesson. The balconies in the house opposite, surely her parents' house, were wreathed in plants and flowers and a pleasant smell rose from the recently watered flowers. The little girl's beauty stunned the two young men walking behind her. They wept aloud again and the two female soldiers tried not to pity them. The little girl saved the moment for him and Boaz saw her laugh with the sudden joy of breasts that may have started sprouting. One of the two women soldiers said: Soldiers come and weep all the time, go know. Right, said the second woman soldier, a lot of weepers returned, what was there, and Boaz said: A lake of tears was there and anybody who returned brought the tears with him, but you guarded the secret ship here and you didn't know. The woman soldier said, The cannon, and Boaz said: But there is no cannon, and she said So what, just because there's no cannon, there's no need to guard? He tried to understand her logic, but the crescent moon now cast its full light and they saw how much his look was shrouded in disgust and they were afraid to get mixed up in some emotional adventure that wasn't yet wanted and they turned their stiff backs on him. The plump one looked better from behind.

At night he slept in his clothes and sweated even though it wasn't especially hot. In the morning he opened his eyes wide to the voice of a person standing over him and looking from his angle of vision as if he were tearing the tent with his kinky hair. The man read Boaz a new order of the day and Boaz, who was already awake and feeling the wetness of his clothes, said: I'm discharged, dummy. The man tried to be friendly. His yellowed teeth seemed to be searching for a more suitable mouth. The man said: That's your shock, Boaz, you don't remember me? Boaz looked at him and didn't remember. He said, fine, let's go, and since he didn't need to get dressed he went outside, took some sand, and rubbed it on his neck and his face. Then they walked among people who seemed for some reason to be rushing like actors in a silent movie. They went into a little cafe and Boaz was afraid he had lost his hearing. He said to the man: Yell something, and the man yelled, and Boaz said, I heard you, over and out. And then he put a finger in his ear and rummaged around a little while and said, I hear. The man said, He hears, that'll be fine. The woman who owned the place looked at Boaz. She saw how wrinkled he was and because of that she seemed to know his pain personally and she said: Take off your clothes and I'll clean them for you. But Boaz said: There's no point, take some money and bring me new clothes, pick them out yourself. He took off his clothes and remained in a black undershirt and shorts, he also enjoyed her obedience, sat in his shorts and undershirt with a man he surely didn't know, or else he wouldn't have sat with him in a cafe, and people who peeped inside saw a man in an undershirt and shorts and asked what happened and Boaz yelled: The enemy killed my clothes, that man raped my mother, pretends he's my father. The man laughed and Boaz didn't. He drank coffee and ate a roll and on it he slowly spread margarine and he didn't know if it was what he had dragged in from the sidewalk to the shop earlier or a week ago, and suddenly he wanted to know who Minna was. Maybe she really was the daughter of Gilboa the contractor? Boaz licked the jam from the jar and drank more coffee. At first he tried to count the cups of coffee, then he stopped. The woman came back with a bundle of new clothes and took pins out of the shirt, when the sleeves dropped down, he felt some excitement, as if a baby were born, he tried on the new clothes, took the bundle of old clothes outside and put it next to the bundle of clothes forgotten downstairs by new immigrants peeping from their rented room upstairs, or maybe they were waiting for the right time to bring them upstairs. Nor did they know what to do with the new flowerpots that were given them. The man sitting with him said, You have to forget, Boaz, come back home, they've started searching for you, they said you've been wandering around for a month now, I don't know why they're so worried about you, you've got a grandmother with citrus groves and vineyards and you've got money. What, you need help?

Not me, said Boaz and licked the jar of jam some more.

It says here, said the man, that the battles were hard. Boaz asked where it said and the man showed him a sheet of paper. The paper said Boaz Schneerson, fourth brigade, Har-El. Boaz said: What else does it say? And the man said: It says that you were mobilized in 'forty-seven. That you were trained in boats in Caesarea and then fought in Jerusalem. It says you took part in-and he listed one battle after another until Boaz got bored and stopped listening. The man added, you wound up in an ambush, so what? It says you played dead. That you lay and they shot at the dead, every moment you knew you'd die and you didn't, there were crows and vultures there, maybe hawks? Maybe falcons? Maybe eagles? I can imagine that it was awful, it says here that afterward you got up and there were another two who got up at the same time and you all ran.

I don't remember, said Boaz.

The man smiled and said, they didn't go down to the valley with the dead because the Jews had an atom bomb. And the bomb there was a Davidka shell, which explodes once every seven shots. Fifty percent of the giant shells don't explode. The shells really were gigantic, said Boaz, and they were shaped like an atom bomb.

The Jews got atom bombs from the Elders of Zion, said the Arabs. You drew clocks and you wrote mysterious numbers on the shells so that if they didn't explode, at least they'd frighten. The explosion worked by smell, said the Arabs, if an Arab soldier got close to it it exploded from the smell. The Jews were vaccinated against it, said the man, for example, in Hiroshima not one Jew was killed. The logic was perfect, Boaz said to him. So you were saved, said the man, I don't remember, said Boaz, but added: Grandmother recited Psalms throughout the war and saved me, even the battle I don't remember.

It bothers you to be rehabilitated, said the man.

But I wasn't there, said Boaz, it's a mistake, and the man said, go home and you'll remember, it'll help you. Boaz said, I still need to know who really came out of those battles, not sure it's me. The man listed names of the dead but Boaz stood up and wanted to pay. He said, I don't remember them, the man said, I'll pay, and Boaz saw the hair stuck to his scalp and thought maybe antitoxin for hair, a future invention, and with a razor blade he always kept in his pocket in a wrinkled old cigarette pack he wanted to cut his circumcision, but also the hair of that man, and the bitter rage evoked in him by that superfluous memory.

In the evening, he went down to the seashore. A man sat there sculpting. Boaz watched him. A couple lay between the darkness and the limestone hill, tossing and turning. The sculptor said: So what, I sculpt eternal statues in water. I sculpt Joshua, Moses, Nimrod the hero, Ben-Gurion. Up above they've already started building the last villas of Saints of the Holocaust Street. A party was going on in one of the houses and music burst out of an open window. A boy was dragging sardines and beer to the party. Near the ledge of the boardwalk were two crows that vanished into the sunset. Invisible walls collapsed on him and Boaz said to the sculptor: That sunset is sweet as fire, and the sculptor said to him, Got to know how to capture yells, and Boaz envied the sand under the lovers. He strode along the ledge of the boardwalk until it stopped. The sea cast a pale light of a city erased of houses, a streetlamp illuminated the sea magic, the iron of the ledge was rusty, and at the ledge stood a young woman and looked at the sea. Boaz stood not far from her and looked at the sea too. He didn't even know that she was standing, at any rate, he surely didn't think of it, he was thinking of Minna, why had he plucked the ring off her. When he discovered the woman he looked at her. She didn't move, as if she were waiting for somebody who hadn't come for some time now. A wild silence was strewn on her face, which she extinguished. She had a pug nose and her cheeks weren't symmetrical. Her eyes turned to him didn't see him. The question conveyed to him in her unseeing look was: How can a young man have eyes that are three thousand years old? Thus they approached one another and then he kissed her with a delicacy he felt she deserved and didn't know was in him. Embracing but each one alone, they ascended the path to the small hotel with the discount for soldiers and a free wash. They got the discount and like everybody else they wrote made-up names. Then she tried to weep and not say anything she'd regret afterward. Too bad I didn't ask her name, he thought several days later, but there was a crib there and they said, That will be our baby, she spoke broken Hebrew and said: There it was bad, and showed him marks on her arms and he tried to tell something and didn't know what, and they laughed because she was the almost imaginary lover of a person whose cruelty Boaz couldn't imagine but warmth flowed from her, that flame that melted her, and at three in the morning she said: I was beautiful and they saw only my back. And he wanted to tell her how beautiful she was now in bed, naked, but he didn't have women he dreamed about years ago and so he was silent. He wanted to understand how they penetrated her, how they didn't ask questions, and his distress became unbearable, he who wanted to be independent in love began pitying her and himself and almost spoke, and then she whispered to him don't say I love, don't you dare, and he got angry that she began teaching him and after they quarreled he brought her water and she drank from his hands, lapped it like a dog, and he got down on all fours and said: Don't love, don't love, and she said see, Hebrew, I don't know but they put into my body that thing to honor Jewish girls and in his mind's eye he saw her standing there alone waiting for somebody else on the beach of Tel Aviv and started wondering whether he had also been there, and the pressure in his chest grew and then he had to hit her, insult her, and before she managed to tell him her name, she got dressed in a hurry and said: I'm going, and he said fine and only afterward, after he lay for an hour and tried to shut his eyes, did he understand what he was losing, but by then it was too late. He thought about the little girl with flaxen hair next to the flowerpots and wanted to understand what was happening to all of them and said I'm Boaz Schneerson and he went down to the pay phone and called his grandmother in the settlement and talked with her for a long time and could sense her wicked laugh.

After he saw the cement in Mugrabi he ate a hot dog in a roll on the square. Behind him flew a distorted picture of Laurence Olivier, and the hot dog vendor tried to prove to him again that Goethe was greater than Shakespeare, less violent, more sophisticated. The clock showed the wrong time and Boaz recalled that in the war they said that after it was all over, they'd hold a brigade reunion in the telephone booth near Mugrabi. He started searching desperately for the young woman he had spent the night with but she wasn't anywhere. Among the things details began to be clear. A man limped toward the movie box office and a woman passed by him, bumped into him, hiccuped, and Boaz laughed. She had cruel small teeth, she dropped a hat, and when she picked it up she opened her purse, took out powder, and smeared it on her cheeks and then in the light of the streetlamp she smeared lipstick on her lips. Since he was stuck to the corner, he could see her gaping mouth, her squinting eyes, her teeth with a little bit of lipstick stuck to them, and then she blotted the lipstick with a handkerchief. Boaz tried to remember the dead, recalled that Menahem Henkin lay next to him, but was dead and his blood stuck to him, so Boaz wanted to break a clothes hanger because Menahem Henkin used to break hangers in his childhood, Menahem Henken told Boaz.

Then he went to see the second show of a film whose name he forgot, and felt as if he had come to the end of the road and where would he escape now, and then the strange event happened to him that I'm telling about in these tapes. Boaz stood at the kiosk and tried to read the head line of the evening paper and very close to the counter, next to a hurricane lamp, stood a young man Boaz was sure came out of the battle the man in the cafe had told him about. His head was wreathed with a halo of light and his face looked like the face of Boaz that the man had told him about. The kiosk owner said to the young man: So from the ship you were sent straight to the war? And the young man said, No, first I was in the port of Haifa. And the young man was so familiar, when Boaz looked at his arm in the light of the hurricane lamp and saw that it moved from his own shoulder. The young man finished drinking and now hid the newspaper headline from Boaz and over his head hung an ad for Nesher beer. Boaz thought, The betrayals will end for a while, so he also understood that no envy would save him but he knew that signals were sent to him from the depths of the war he had fought in, or that that young man had fought in for him. Headlights flashed and there were still many painted streetlamps from the war and the lights seemed to be caressing the gloom. Thoughts that didn't come from a certain place stuck in his mind and a bird built itself a nest on the roof of the kiosk. The man said: That's a honeysucker, so small, every year he comes and makes his nest on the roof. And the young man asked if that tiny sucker could be the same bird and Boaz who knew the answer from childhood, couldn't have spoken, stood on the side, darkened, terrified, the back of the young man's neck filled him with longings for Minna's finger dripping blood and he tried to remember when he had bought her the ring in Hepzibah where Grandmother thought he was stealing pens and erasers, but he couldn't recall. When the young man moved a shadow seemed to shift or a curtain to be pulled. The kiosk was gaping like a wound. A caprice of chiaroscuro made the young man look as if he were going away into a halo of light, but it was only outlines of non-body.

A man chewing sesame and drinking soda held a fragrant wormwood leaf between his fingers and the smell was tormenting and sweet. The desert wildness in the city street was sudden and assuaged some pain that gnawed in him. The man paid and the young man started walking and Boaz found himself hopping behind him, he was hopping because now he had a pain in his foot, wanted to stop, settle things, but he followed the young man like a blind man. And then he said: That young man took off Minna's ring, loves blood, is disguised as a crow. They eat sesame seeds in Tel Aviv with desert wormwood. I'm walking behind a yell that came from inside me, he said to himself, but what's happening to me, what am I, a car thief, a warmonger, that silence will drive me out of my mind: the young man turned into a dark street and went off toward a house with a thick tree sprouting from it. The tree was dead but the house around the tree wasn't destroyed. The crest of the tree wasn't seen in the dark. He searched for a house number on the wall and didn't find one. The name of the street wasn't written there either. The fence was low and beyond the house tombstones were seen, the dark obliterated the tops of the tombstones, but one tombstone was seen clearly and even the writing etched on it was seen prominently, maybe because of the light falling from a window where a broken shutter didn't block it. Then it became clear that aside from the tombstone lying here waiting to be moved to the cemetery, this was a cemetery for dead cars, maybe even the spoils of war. A person was walking in the yards, he had stones in his pocket and was searching for cats to throw the stones at. The cats looked like flashes in the headlights of the passing cars, slithering around tree trunks that looked as if they didn't have crests. The young man looked as if he were hesitating. I wanted to go back, he'll say years later, as an end of a story about people searching for themselves, I wanted to go back like a melody played long ago. In the yard the young man entered you could feel rusty nails and shards of bottles and hear the claws of cats leaping toward the hewn trunks. The tree that burst out of the house was seen from the corner where Boaz stood as if pickled in vinegar, maybe the house was merely a box.

The young man searched for a path among the shards of bottles and nails and suddenly felt a stream of water flowing from the next yard. In the window with the shallow light, a radio was heard and in his fantasy, Boaz could imagine the street going on even beyond the house that stood in the middle and cut it off. And farther on there was a building like a Greek temple with the municipal courthouse next to it and then the sea, whose breakers were heard even through the water rustling and the cats purring. On a small balcony latticed with crosses, an iron weave like an army range, maybe against snakes or other afflictions of nature, in a rusty can sprouted a geranium bush and its sharp smell, which surely came to him because of the water that had recently sprinkled it, filled Boaz's nostrils. Now he followed the young man and turned right toward the front of the house, a bare bulb hung there without a shade and a woman's robe on a peg that looked like a hook. On the hook stood a bird. The bird kept moving and its beak explored the source of the music coming from the radio and even in the gloom you could make out the gold color of its beak, maybe it was red and Boaz couldn't make the slim distinction. He thought: we had the barn in the settlement and now there's destruction there.

Then a scene flickered in his mind and he smiled. Teacher All's Well stands before the class in the settlement, excited, a dark spot starts showing at his fly, his pocket is puffed up from the cotton he bought at noon for his wife Eve, and put in his pocket, and the girls are giggling and the boys are weeping with laughter and Teacher All's Well is talking excitedly about Jacob's ladder… standing on the earth, the whole Land of Israel folded under the stone pillow of Our Father, the ladder facing up… Oh, what a wretched and sublime nation, he said, and Boaz now remembers the blush on the faces of the farmers' only daughters who had often seen bulls mounting cows and Mrs. Czkhstanovka standing next to the national flags and waiting for a bridegroom who never came, but they weren't used to seeing a teacher with wet trousers saying: Oh, what a wretched and sublime nation, struggling with God! Israel! An eternal struggle of the nation and its God, Nation and Land, Language and Fate… And the girls are giggling, the spot's spreading, maybe touching the cotton Margalit saw him buying with her own eyes from old Greenspan whose son committed suicide. And he said: Stiffnecked, struggling fateful struggles, disappointed but not ceasing to believe… maybe in order to lose! And that's something modern writers don't understand at all! And he looked at his flock, who had no idea who the modern writers were and what they meant and here, thinks Boaz, stands a young man, maybe I'm standing there, and thinking about spots on the trousers of Hebrew teachers. A garden of nails caught in a pale light and the smell of geraniums intoxicates and the crumbling stone fence and the tree inventing the house and everything here is longing.

And we're all of us acting in a Jewish Western, somebody will say later on, and then this moment will be remembered. The young man who may be he averts his face, Boaz knows it's impossible. The geranium, the longings, everything is mixed up here in a restrained essence. He didn't come to Tel Aviv to seek a new war, especially not against himself. But the enemy, it seemed to him, is shrouded in a smell of mothballs, I and not I, thought Boaz. When the young man turned to him, something forgotten flickered in Boaz's mind. He recalled that once he was in the battle the man in the cafe told him about, but he knew he didn't remember it, he thought then that the Boaz who went into the battle hadn't come out of it at all. Thirty-two killed. Menahem Henkin was killed there, too. But I didn't come out of it, somebody else came out of it, disguised as me. Now it was clear to him. The dark was such that as soon as the young man's face turned aside from the balcony and turned to him, he was blinded for a moment by the harsh light cast from the window when the light now came on. Out of a vague fear, he knew he had to choose, so there was a struggle between Boaz and the very tall mute young man. The light in the window went out and another light came on and a fire engine siren was heard wailing, racing in the next street, the young man was a cruel fighter, nobody could come out a winner in such a battle, thought Boaz. The nails stuck in his feet, the broken glass tore chunks out of his body, the geranium bush was abandoned. Its smell was forgotten in the smell of the cruel battle, blood flowed, and he didn't know if it was his blood or the young man's blood, the young man didn't talk, just groaned and roared, and Boaz tried to talk but no words were heard. Only afterward the young man groaned: You're all shit, what do you know. But now Boaz wasn't sure if he had really heard those words, he was just as struck as his enemy, the flight of the two of them was the most ridiculous thing Boaz could think of later on. How the two of us fled at the same time. He tramped on nails and glass shards and fled and saw another back fleeing from there and groaning and he groaned too, but now he couldn't know who was who, and Boaz imagined that that was all he wanted to know, who he wasn't, the bird with the gold beak flew off, the robe hanging on a peg before disappeared in a panic, a woman's hand was seen tugging the robe and maybe tore it, lights went on and off. Voices burst out of apartments where maybe they were trying to listen to a funny program at the end of the war, Hasidic music was heard in the distance, but what was clear to Boaz was that only one of them came from there and again he vaguely recalled that battle and he thought, Only one came out of that too even though maybe two of us were in it, who came out? Me or him, who comes out now: me or him, and he didn't know. And so, for a moment, when he stood in the street and people started appearing before his eyes, he could take pity on himself. But he was immediately disgusted with himself and stopped. Cleaned his wounds, but he recalled that he had gotten a tetanus shot some time ago and was protected from that harm; he wanted to be sure he wouldn't get rabies but that only embittered him even more.

The cats who were seen hiding between the fence and the house, where a tree was sprouting, were searching for a bend of the stones in the auto cemetery and suddenly they also fled all at once. The house couldn't be seen now. Who loses, who wins, the pain inside him, he hopped toward the tents on the seashore and wanted to get up and go to the settlement, to Grandmother, to be a live hero returning to the kindergarten teacher Eve and to her husband Teacher All's Well. Here, Eve, is a chick who did come back, your other chicks were left there. To see the gravestones, to forget. But he got up in the morning and went to the officer of the city. The office was humming with soldiers getting new uniforms or returning uniforms or requesting transfers. From the officer of the city he got addresses of those who had been with him. He tried to remember the battle he had left the day before yesterday and everything was mixed up in his mind, the battle, the movies, Laurence Olivier playing Hamlet, Goethe is better than Shakespeare. The girl he loved at night disappeared, maybe I dreamed all those things. He walked with the list in his pocket stood still in the street and saw an apartment on the second floor. On the balcony hung flowerpots and a gigantic awning covered it from the sun. He went up and knocked on the door. A woman opened it. She looked at him and tried to wipe away some tears seen drying in her left eye. Boaz said: I'm Boaz, I fought with Johnny. The woman brought him inside and gave him tea. He drank it and tried to talk, but he couldn't. She said, what are you seeking here, Boaz? He didn't know and so he left. Then he went to the cafe and sat for three days and waited for some parents to find him there. He bought a gigantic Bristol sheet and wrote on it in big letters "I know dead people," and hung the Bristol paper on the tree in front of Kassit Cafe, among the announcements of exhibitions and poetry books that were now starting to come out at dizzying speed. But only one man asked him if he knew Menashe Aharono- vitch and Boaz said he didn't. People who knew him laughed and Minna appeared with the torn finger and said Boaz was out of his mind but she didn't dare approach him. He sat there at the table, alone, full of a new joy that bloomed in him, waiting to give testimony. The waiters served him beer or coffee. The money ran out and he left. The policeman who tried to tear the Bristol sheet off the tree couldn't do it because Boaz fought for his right to give testimony. Three days later he sat with a woman he didn't know and tried to explain to her how the woman he had slept with in the hotel looked. The woman he didn't know thought that was surely love and didn't understand him at all even though he talked about love as if it was a war you died in. He wanted to tell her, That's perfect non-love, but I'm searching for her. And only at the end did he start striding toward Menahem Henkin's house. Here there was already a problem, he knew Menahem well, he defended Menahem, and after he died they said maybe he had been all right. Then the "maybe" was erased. The street was flooded with light but Boaz walked in the shade and when he had to cross the street he leaped across. He believed he'd find the young man who beat and was beaten by him embracing the woman he almost succeeded in loving in the hotel, but he didn't. Courtyards swallowed up the beautiful and the good who tried to seem indifferent. People were already starting to come out and seek a new substance in their new state, which distributed food coupons and declared austerity. When he came to Henkin's house, he saw a dim light, loved the name of the street, Deliverance Street, near the sea, small, pitiful houses, tipping over, and clearly they had once been nicer and more festive. He wanted to tell Henkin that he had sat in Kassit Cafe three days and waited for him and why didn't he come, but he saw a scarecrow of a man drying himself at a dead castor oil tree. Henkin looked suited to the place. His clothes were dark, his hat was from another decade, the music that burst out of him was a waltz of slaughtered ducks. He looked avenged and defeated. With eyes full of sad cunning Teacher Henkin searched for his son at a fence covered with brambles, now wretched and neglected. A small garbage cart stood there, empty, rusted, and the enclosures of the port looked too bright in the sunlight. The intense blue of the sky swallowed up the particle of distance between him and the sea. The houses protected only themselves. Henkin didn't protect anything. Boaz stood there stuck and waited and Henkin looked at him. After about an hour, Henkin went into the house, opened the slats of the shutter a little and peeped outside. Boaz went on standing. A little while later, he came outside and gave Boaz a glass of cold water. Boaz didn't drink it and returned the water to Henkin. He saw Menahem playing in the yard and thought, what could I have told him, Henkin couldn't have recognized Boaz's face because of the strong light and he saw only the stunned silhouette in the afternoon light and then he dared ask, he asked: Who are you?

Just, said Boaz.

Just what?

Just standing here.

Henkin wanted to ask, but some skepticism had already sneaked into him, that sense of loss that, anyway, he wouldn't answer him. He muttered something and said, And doesn't the young man have a name?

I did have, said Boaz and then he started pitying all that life here and he went away. He took the kitbag from the tent, walked to the central bus station and got on a bus. He had soldier's tickets and rode free. The discharge would start tomorrow. Henkin waited a few minutes and went inside. He locked the door and tried to recall the young man's face, but he couldn't.

Tape / -

And then a wind started blowing and Teacher Henkin said to his wife: They won't understand, Hasha Masha, they won't understand, there's an undermined system of fates here, look… but she didn't want to read.

Tape / -

… And once again I recall the young man who stood here years ago. Now I think it really was Boaz Schneerson but maybe I'm wrong. Boaz never confirmed that he stood here and took the glass of cold water and didn't deny it either. The story of the Last Jew was also constructed from the end to the beginning, and only after I invested a few years in my investigation of the Last Jew did I meet Ebenezer completely by chance, even though he was here, near me, all that time. And after the meeting with Ebenezer, doubts about the hundreds of pages I had written stirred in me and I decided to think about writing the book with that German. Maybe that writing itself is an attempt to decipher, to uncover the things whose logical sequence is so strange to me.

My dear son Menahem I lost many years ago. Menahem was killed in two different places: he was killed in battle in the valley near Mount Radar where he lay among thirty-two bodies, and he fell in battle for the Old City of Jerusalem, at dawn on May twentieth, nineteen forty-eight. Maybe she's right, Hasha Masha, who maintains that the glory of mourners in front of a mirror is common in me. I'm trying to reconstruct things: I then felt that life stopped all at once, wasn't in store for me anyplace else, the energy in me was masked by the pain that was too splendid in my wife's eyes, but was all I had left. I sank into endless thinking about my son and my own life was only a setting for the sorrow I shaped in me; like somebody who creates life on the model of death. I looked at my little house on Deliverance Street, near the old port of Tel Aviv, against the background of the sea that sinks there a bit to the north, makes a kind of semi-bow, and at the undrained station is a small airport where small planes land or take off over our house. I looked then at the desolation of the forsaken concrete of the port, the abandoned enclosures, the creased houses, and the dusty trees, eaten by sea salt, and the sand that penetrates everything here, thickens holes, turns everything living into scarred desolation bereft of beauty. It's hard for me to describe the essence of that pain, they're the strongest yearnings for a person whose death is never grasped. That death is in you, lives in you, in the chest, the dream, waking, slumbering grown to somewhere you have no idea of, and then the wakefulness, the emptiness, the waking distress. Memories are nothing but nonstop poundings in softness, maybe a mute shout in a dream and you don't know whether you're dreaming it or it's dreaming you.

In the cemeteries for those who fell in World War II, the anonymous graves say: "Known only to God." On a check you write: "Pay to the bearer," so it can't be transferred to somebody else. Pain has no heirs, there is no imagination that can hold the empty space left behind by some anonymous person known only to God, if God knew him as I do, he would hold the whole earth.

All I had left of Menahem were a few school notebooks, a naive scrapbook from the seventh grade, photos we took here and there of Menahem's grandfather and grandmother who have died meanwhile, of uncles, friends we used to meet sometimes. Photos in the drawers of our table or with Noga, who was still living with us then, before she went to live with Boaz. His mother hung Menahem's clothes in the closet. Our house is a closet for Menahem's clothes. A picture album, a few notebooks and that poem, enveloped by this house. Hasha Masha scoured the buttons, sewed on the ones that fell off, polished his shoes carefully, scoured the isolated objects we had left and I, who had once worked for a tailor to pay for my schooling, sewed the rips, stitched together, then I ironed everything and we hung them up in the closet and ever since then he's known only to God. All we had left was to sit and wait. We had to make up a life to justify what had ended.

Boaz Schneerson came and moved me out of my orbit, killed Menahem in another battle, brought him back to life, and put him to death again, but about that I'll have to talk later. Noga left us for Boaz and I went on teaching awhile, I was even principal for about two years. But when I figured out that I was talking to students who had finished school long ago and maybe were parents of their own children, when I figured out that in my increasingly frequent hallucinations I was talking to Menahem's friends who remained his age, on the day it ended, but in fact they had already graduated and were filling the world with mischief, or teaching, or running factories, and I called those kids by other names, when I saw that I was hallucinating, I resigned.

That was a few years ago, years after our son fell. The photos didn't help, nor did the endless walks every morning between seven and seven forty-five from our house in the north of the city to Mugrabi Square that had been obliterated meanwhile along with the clock that had anyway never shown the right time, but stood there like a clear sign of some stability that's gone now. Nothing helped, the emptiness was heavy as the nothingness of Menahem's shoes in the closet. Polished, shining, destined for nothing. At the end of every journey, thousands of kilometers in the same orbit, I remained alone.

Until I met Ebenezer I thought my investigation of the Last Jew resulted from a conversation I once had with somebody who had been the principal of our school, Demuasz, the teacher who had been there even longer than I. I have to say that compared to what Demuasz built I didn't contribute much and our school sank into a gray slumber of routine. What I did contribute is a wall of memory and every year the graduating students say with an embarrassed smile that the next reunion will be held on it. And then they also see Menahem's name carved there, heading the long list. I put up the wall by myself and there was some pleasure in beginning the long list with my son's name and adding after the name, as ordered by Demuasz, the words, May God avenge their blood. I didn't believe in those words, but I gave in. Today I know that in those days when I talked with Demuasz about the strange man who lived in his house, Ebenezer was moving into the Giladis' house next door to our house, but since I was so involved with myself and my solitude, I didn't pay any heed to that and didn't even notice that the Giladis moved out of here and a real estate agent was hanging around here tired and sweaty and I didn't see that night when Ebenezer came with a truckload of furniture and closed himself in the house and slammed the windows. Demuasz, who helped me quite a bit in my work on the Committee of Bereaved Parents, invited me then to his house and introduced me to the guest who was staying there. The guest was paralyzed, waving his arms like a double-edged sword, I don't know why that image came into my mind, or a sword of the Lord of Hosts, in a Jew of all people a sword is like a shattered sanctuary, and that smashed shard muttered vague words that nobody understood but when he met my eyes, and maybe he saw there a pain that touched his own pain, he told me in a few sentences about the Last Jew, but then he didn't yet know who he was. In my house I was inferior in my own eyes and in my wife's eyes. The death of my son, if I can be forgiven the expression, was a few sizes too big on me. The embarrassment of the father looking at the forever empty shoes of his son was a definite condition of enmity, and in me at least, a certain glory of timorous but not undramatic grief. I wouldn't say I was nice to people, I had a certain bitterness I didn't like in myself, but I couldn't control it, the yearnings for my son were also yearnings for exchange, a death for a death. Questions of why him, and if there is a fixed number of dead, why did fate pick a fight with me of all people. I didn't ask anybody why fate hadn't picked a fight with his son, I asked why it had picked a fight with me. My wife almost forgave me with painful contempt. The destroyed Jew in Demuasz's house was still alive, from me he was dying, from me he was also drawing some consolation, I don't understand why, maybe my bitterness suited him since dying is a condition of the present and not of the past. Noga was still living with us then and she and my wife would look together at the photos of Menahem, at the notebooks, they loved and hated one another in a kind of shared plot where I couldn't set foot. They were locked against me, I had to meet a dying Jew in a strange house to glory in my pain.

At the sight of him, I could more easily understand the life that Hasha Masha and Noga inspired in the cobwebs of our house. At the sight of him I understood how awful but also how encouraging it was to hear the breathing of my two women when I couldn't fall asleep and turned and tossed helplessly. The man told me about the Last Jew, about his knowledge. That night I dreamed I came home and killed Hasha Masha. She walked from room to room in her underwear and kept me from thinking about my son. Then I served Noga her blood in a glass. In the morning I wanted to cry but my eyes had been dry for years.

What looks one way today looked completely different then. I was already a person less arrogant in his pain, less elegant, less portrayed by himself, more submissive to real pain who changed his self-image as somebody who contains pain. Without the vitality that Noga imparted to our house, the house looked like a tomb. The windows were always shuttered, my wife in black, under the lamp that comes down almost to the table, the shade creates a familiar shaft of light, a shade I bought many years ago from a refugee who came to our house during the big Aliyah, and when I bought that shade, I seemed to be buying the skin of that refugee. I remember the crooked smile on his pale face, he also wanted to sell me a watch and rings, all gold, he told me, and I bought the wax-paper shade that turned yellow over the years. Its edge grew sharp as a clown's hat and it had burst now and was sewn and repaired but we didn't change it, just as then I still didn't take care of the yard or the house, we hadn't yet changed anything, we didn't buy any furniture or new curtains and beneath the shaft of light in the dim room at the table once polished and now rubbed beyond repair sat my wife, shrouded in a smell of moths and mints and tea with lemon mixed with orange peel. A smell of mothballs and old paint. Maybe because of that closed desolation, I accepted Demuasz's invitation and that's why I could sit facing that destroyed Jew and instead of trying to listen to him, I tried in my mind to compare one suffering with another, one pain with another. A crooked game, my wife would surely have said, and I would watch the man's silence, his dying eyes, his hands drawing wild illustrations for me in the dense air of the room, and it was then that he told me things.

Today when I reconstruct the things that led me to Ebenezer and the encounter with the German, I recall that that morning, when I went to Demuasz's house, I did see a stranger standing in the door of the Giladi house with his profile to me, I remember a sense of panicky haste I felt at the sight of him, something bothered me and at the same time erased the picture from my mind, like that quality I developed over years to dream that I'm late and then wake up with a start, a minute or two before the big old alarm clock rings. And the man stood there in his shabby but elegant clothes with some old humility, maybe even a spiteful clown but for some reason I didn't think about him, didn't register him in my mind, maybe I thought the man was a guest of the Giladis, maybe he inspired me with some vague dread. I came to Demuasz's house bearing in the depths of my mind a faded picture of Ebenezer, and the man in the Demuasz home was in bed, as if he were waiting for me, I thought, maybe he intends a ceremony of death for me to gore me with his pain. To triumph over me. I looked at the glass of water on the nightstand next to his bed, at his teeth in the glass, his eyes were wide open but hallucinating, his leg twitched under the thin blanket, above him hung an old picture of a butterfly surely left over from the days when Demuasz was a teacher of the nature of our Land and his lips started moving, gaped open and spread and were again covered with a scrim of feeble violence, I took off my hat, my hands were clasped in one another to preserve that measure of fitting courtesy I assume when necessary. A snort like a phony chirp of a bird rose from the man's nose and he said to me: Henkin, I want to say something, Demuasz was stunned and I, my habit for many years, I mechanically thrust my hands in my pockets and pulled out the square paper I always had in my pocket, and the sharpened pencil I never left home without, and when he spoke I of course wrote it down as if I were again Henkin-researcher, Henkin, one of the tough young men who plies his pencil, as my students once used to sing. And the man, still with his eyes shut (he shut them when he started speaking), his leg started twitching, and the false teeth in the glass, because of the tilt of my face and the flash of light, looked monstrous, gigantic, he said: The name of the company there is D. G. S., initials of Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Stadtlingsbekampfung M. B. H., an all-German company of fighters. In nineteen forty-four it paid dividends of two hundred percent to A. G. Farben, one of the three concerns they owned. The cost was nine hundred seventy-five deutsch marks for one hundred fifty kilos of Zyklon B. twenty-seven and a half marks a kilogram for one thousand five hundred human beings. At that time, the mark was worth twenty-five American cents, Mr. Henkin. That is, six dollars and seventy-five cents. In the summer of forty-four, Mr. Henkin, the life of a Jew was worth less than twofifths of a cent. And then they said that was too expensive. They sat in Berlin in armchairs and wrote a report. They wrote that that was too expensive. It's all economics, Mr. Henkin. So, they said, the children have to be thrown straight into the fire. They were frugal, he said, and knew what things cost.

He was silent and I held onto the square of paper in my hand and didn't know what to do with it. It took me a few minutes to understand what he was telling me. For a moment he opened his right eye, which was shrunk in swollen orbits and looked like a bluish-green sore, looked at me defiantly, as if he had beaten me in an exciting but exhausting game of chess and said, You understand? I know a lot of numbers from the Last Jew. Everything is numbered in him. The new Bible, you're a Hebrew teacher, has to be written from numbers. And then he shut his eyes, wheezed, and didn't talk anymore. I thought he had died but he was only slumbering and didn't wake up, then, but, when he spoke I thought about an amusement park where I used to go when I was a kid and where there were terrifying toys and I told Demuasz, who came in now, the smile of an expert on his Jew, he told me shh. And I told him. He said Yes, he quotes him now and then but he won't hold out much longer. I told Demuasz that I had heard the stories about the Last Jew from a bereaved mother whose son had fallen in the Sinai campaign and Demuasz said, Yes, the distress they bring from there, to save two-fifths of a cent, Henkin!

I went back home and my wife was sitting there under the sixty-watt bulb I could never change for a hundred watts because of her stubbornness, her beautiful face was resting on the binding of my son's closed photo album, guessing the photos perfectly, and I went to my study. I sat down at the desk where I hadn't worked for years now, took a smooth sheet of paper out of the drawer, picked up my Parker pen, checked it as a scribe checks his quill, and wrote "The Last Jew" and a few minutes later, I drew a thick line under those words and added in small, even modest letters, I'd say, maybe for camouflage: "A Study by Obadiah Henkin." And then I looked at the page and I knew I had to investigate that Jew and I looked at the window and saw the emptiness of the yard and the Giladi house and I dimly remembered seeing a person there in the morning but I didn't really think about him, his image flashed through my mind and was immediately erased, and some panic attacked me.

And again I found myself investigating, interviewing people, going to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, to Kibbutz Lohamei HaGetaot, I heard that the man who talked to me in Demuasz's house had been taken to the hospice in Gadera and had been lying there like a vegetable for a few weeks, suddenly he opened his eyes and said: Did Obadiah talk to him? And they asked him who? What? And he smiled, shut his eyes, and died. I thought about his words, about the mission he seemed to assign me, I thought about my wife in the ravines of light, the very solitary house, the empty rooms, the old samovar still heating water for tea and a long time ago I'd become acquainted with the ironic malice of the solitude decreed by pain that has to be acted to live it, and I started investigating the life of a man and all I could know about him were trifles. And at that time we are still living in a certain regularization of organized hostility, my wife and 1. She looks at me with transparent malice, sympathy, I'd say, and refuses to sleep in the same bed with me. At night I try to touch her, to reach out my hand, like a lovestruck boy, the two of us in our beds, tossing and turning, trying to sleep, no tranquilizer or sleeping pill helps, I'm trying to caress her but she doesn't respond to me, even though she's not angry either, she keeps inventing hope for me for other times, or maybe a fabrication for the past, you have to listen carefully to hear the quiet tears flowing on her cheeks, she never sobs aloud, she doesn't weep in the light, and she mocked my daily walks, my activity on the Committee for Bereaved Parents, my searching. After I brought home Boaz Schneerson and Noga was still living with us and what happened happened, her contempt changed to hostility, and her words became as sharp as a razor. She always wears black for herself, she doesn't share her pain with anybody, she doesn't go out of the house, my need to understand the lack of Menahem makes her suspicious, and she apparently has a need incomprehensible to me to be a perfect and unchanging enemy to herself to preserve some trace of closeness, a closeness that's hard to define, as if a shared secret helplessness and a strong hatred unites two people not because of the past but despite the past. I'd say that a canned love prevailed between us, frozen in a deep freeze, a love that has to be assessed with webs of amazement, transparen cies of the window through the heavy shades, furtive looks, stabbing sentences, the way each of us gets into bed apart but always together, at the very same time, and gets up separately but together, prepare without words for another day to live it together, but apart. We had no secrets, I told her everything and she was silent to me about everything. Love of Menahem was shared, but she saw one person and I saw another person. Maybe it was inevitable that like me, she too discovered she was cut off from the bond that bound us and yet she couldn't grant my request, forgive me for my behavior toward Boaz or toward myself or toward the Committee, she didn't forgive me for the life after death I tried in vain to grant Menahem.

Since she didn't leave the house, I'd do the shopping, pay the bills, collect the pension, take care of whatever had to be taken care of, and once a year, we'd go to Kiryat Anavim on Memorial Day. She'd do that reluctantly, with some distress, would get into a cab. Withdrawn into herself, on the path leading to the cemetery she'd walk alone, as if she couldn't bear any contact.

She wouldn't go to her son's grave, but came with me so I'd be sure my son was really buried there, since as far as she was concerned, he was buried there as he was buried everyplace else. The closer I went to the grave, the more exaggerated she became, maybe even magnificent to some extent, the place was so unimportant to her that a few times she missed some Memorial Days and refused to come with me. But when she did come, she'd stand there, enshrouded in herself, looking at me, and then she'd walk toward the road, sit stooped on the bench of the taxi stand, and wait for me.

At that time something else happened that only today I can connect with the Last Jew. I started working and fixing our garden then, cultivating it again. At the time, I thought resurrecting the idea of reviving the garden was accidental. Apparently I saw the buds of the renewed garden in the Giladi house and the sight of the graceful foliage near my window woke me out of my swoon of many years. On a certain day and I can't be precise about the timing, that man I described before as somebody who stood in the doorway of the Giladi house dressed like a clown with his profile turned to me started working the Giladi garden, which, like all the gardens on the street, had stopped blooming when my garden withered after Menahem was killed. Suddenly I began to neglect the mourning Teacher Henkin and to see a red-brown loam, a compost heap. To sense that wonderful, sweet, bitter, sharp smell, the sight of the trunk after years of looking out the window and seeing only gray and sand, and wind, and heat, and something neglected and stinking at the seashore and then, one day, the eyes light up at the sight of a new stem, at a spinning spurt of a sprinkler, at the sight of a rosebush and a bougainvillea starting to ignite, and the evening falling on it smoothes the ground and it doesn't fall anymore, doesn't drop like an estimated nothingness and a blossom that blooms for you evokes completely different longings, longings for life, for morning glories, and then I saw thorns in my garden, crabgrass, destruction, a heap of brown needles that fell from the pine tree, the ground covered with sand and dry leaves, and just like that, I started hoeing a little and then fixing here and there and suddenly I found myself working and hoeing and banging. Every day I'd work for two or three hours, in an undershirt and cap, I sweated, I fixed the faucet, I bought a new hose and sprinkler, and new life ignited, a life that died with the black villas. A lightness and lust filled me, my bones began to recover, not to creak, and how I loved that house I had bought in 'thirty-seven through the Hebrew teachers' organization at the time of the riots the Arabs call the great revolt, the remote neighborhood in north Tel Aviv at the edge of the city, and the new port born then and now dead and left barren and demolished and the street next to mine they called Gate of Zion, and I live on Deliverance, near the sea, nice small houses of teachers, union officials, and the neighborhood blossomed then, its gardens were handsome, the red roof tiles, the houses like little exclamation marks in the desert of sand near the sea, south of us stretched the hills and the Muslim cemetery, north of us forests to what my son called boos, Reading Station that was then small and insubstantial beyond the Yarkon River and then I planted a fine garden and Demuasz helped me choose its plants, and geraniums and climbing roses blossomed in it along with a fragrant jujube and mint and pansies, and in season lilies blossomed and a blaze of fine wildflowers and I planted a pine tree and two cedars and a purple bougainvillea that covered the front of the house after a few years and set fire to it with its sweet light and the castor oil tree that had been standing here for generations I didn't uproot and the soft lawn that needed a lot of watering and the sprinklers spun at night and made a pleasant intoxicating rustle and during the years of the great war, my son would take care of the garden and slowly it turned into his garden. He loved to prune, uproot crabgrass, tend the garden, good hands he had, he loved to work when nobody ordered him, not like in school where he had to work under the triumphant baton of Demuasz who also turned tending the garden into a national operation, here at home he was Menahem, master of himself, he'd frown capriciously and tell me, Henkin (he didn't call me father), go to your books and find me exactly how an Afghanistanian bamboo smells. That was almost our only point of contact, back then, but usually I'd let him work alone while I was locked in my room, investigating, correcting notebooks.

And at night, we'd set up a table in the garden and Menahem hung a lamp outside and we'd have supper on the lawn, yogurt, eggs, herring, salad, black bread and butter, or later margarine, near the bougainvillea with its cruel sweet colors and the breakers of the sea would be heard and the sirens of the ships and the launches sailing toward the ships, not to mention the crickets and the insects that would circle the lamp and Menahem loved to destroy them and I asked him not to kill them and his mother would look at him with some hushed sadness and say: Leave him alone Obadiah, after all he's a little boy. In her voice I could make out a complaint or submission, but back then I was too busy to have it out with her, and she'd say, Menahem is what we were, but I couldn't accept such an unpedagogical assumption that contradicted my craft that still lodged in me back then, imparting values.

A few days after we found out that Menahem had fallen there was a heat wave. We didn't yet know where they buried him and Jerusalem was still cut off from the coastal plain. I went outside, not yet understanding myself; I stood in the customary white shirt and shorts of those days, I picked up the hose by rote, turned on the faucet and aimed a jet of water at the roses dyed by the red and pink colors of sunset. The light was soft and the heat was heavy and the sea to my left was smooth and crystalline and suddenly I saw myself as a scarecrow watering his own grave, a teacher made of crystal, stuck forever in a conspiracy of death against my son, I tried to water for him the garden he wouldn't return to, I thought in terms of the grammar of nothingness, of the grammar of life, or nonlife, and a grammar of nothingness of my son suddenly became definite like the declension of a verb with no future and no past, and so maybe no present either, and the garden the nothingness of all things palpable like the declension of the verb "to die" was proof that Menahem became in this light, the numbing heat that blew as from a bellows, the foliage that in its wickedness wanted to live, that didn't long for Menahem like Yoash's dog that died of longings when he didn't return from the battles, but the garden didn't weep and didn't long, it wanted me to water it as if Menahem its owner weren't dead, the leaves were dropping, they had no grief, I hated that blossoming, the heat blew, the sea stretched to distant lands I could once have lived in, I thought to myself: What do you all want from me, you give birth to dead foliage. I wanted to take vengeance on somebody, the garden was the most convenient target, Menahem wasn't in it, shouldn't I have been mad at somebody, and I laughed at myself, Hebrew teacher, grammar of vengeance, watering gardens where wheelbarrows full of a son's loam won't go anymore, I turned off the faucet, the hose I left where it was (and it stayed like that for years until it rotted and was swallowed up in the heaps of sand that kept piling up), I went into the house and my wife looked at me and said: Did you turn off the water on the flowers, Obadiah? I said yes, and she said: That water, and I said: His garden and she said to me: His? She didn't ask, she said, and at the end of the word she put a hesitant question mark and so I neglected the garden, bushes of weeds began sprouting and I didn't uproot them and the faucet rusted and was blocked, sometimes I'd shut my eyes, I was waiting for him, expecting the evening, the table on the lawn, the herring, the-. "Henkin look up in the dictionary to screw a tomato in ancient Indian," I was expecting his joyous open laughter, humiliating me, the annihilated insects around the lamp, but everything is covered with nettles and yellowness and sand and obstinate callused melancholy shrouded our house and infected the other houses and the gardens ceased one after another, and maybe the Giladis were afraid to appear joyous with the hose next to our house, and slowly their garden was also humiliated and then it was too late to save it and anybody who could took heart and started all over, and then began a plague of dead gardens and it wasn't only Menahem who fell, Kuperman's son also disappeared and they didn't know where he was buried and Yehoshafat Neiya's son was badly wounded and was in the hospital, and slowly the foliage disappeared and only a few dusty stubborn trees remained and the street became dusty, lost its charm, and no longer had even an old-fashioned elegance, only something forlorn, more scorched than parched, and the weeds wove themselves into a new weave, as if death had its own interweaving, which is simply another form of the verb to be, a sprouting in a different direction, and something elite, distorted, miserable, but not without honor, took the place of the charm and the capricious sprinklers and the rounded roof tiles, the walls turned gray and it's true that in the house where your son grew up from the age of seven to the age of nineteen you don't seek aesthetic meaning at his empty shoes and his clothes in mothballs but I had a clear need to seek formal meanings, real formulations as I was accustomed to doing in the analysis of a story by Brenner or Genessin, something musical, maybe a feeling that had lodged in me and now disappeared, that behind every pain is a certain logic and that I had to decipher it for the students and there's understanding behind the complexity of the instincts and a wisdom woven in this or that pattern and grief and love have their own grammar.

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…

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?

And then my neighbor bent over and I heard a click, as if something that had been glued was freed.

We shut off the faucets. Darkness fell. You could have not died, I said in my heart to Menahem. Soon I'll go to Singer's store, as if years hadn't passed, as if my new neighbor didn't exist, I'll buy margarine, white bread, eggs, herring, and Mr. Giladi will be there with the smile full of a national secret on his face. And Singer will say to me: How are you today, Mr. Henkin, and I'll tell him everything's fine, Mr. Singer, oh these long summers…

My neighbor who remained mute and indifferent looked at me, I averted my face and went in my house, there wasn't even any point parting properly. My wife was standing in the kitchen washing dishes, she said, You stroked your little garden, Henkin? I told her, Don't start with me, Hasha, and she said, Masha, and I said to her, Hasha Masha. When we met on the road from Tiberias to Tsemakh her name was Masha, later on her friend Sarakh changed her name to Hasha. Now when I call her Hasha she says Masha, and when I call her Masha she says Hasha, so I call her Hasha Masha. You've got to know when to get into the grave and shut your eyes, she said, you're hurt, Henkin, what happened to you?

The neighbor asked about Boaz, and I told her what had happened.

She looked at me and smiled. I saw her appraising through me the lost character of Boaz Schneerson. I showered, put on my clothes, and stood there holding a cup of tea. I looked at the miracle of nature (as Noga put it) that was Hasha Masha, torments created some absolute unchanging in her. And once again a corrupt lust for her rose in me, a lust that at my age I was supposed to be weaned from, the teachers' organization had recently sent me for a routine examination and the doctor who was surely much younger than Menahem could have been gave me a thorough examination, put me on a stationary bike, measured blood pressure, blood, urine, heart, what-all, and then he said to me: You're in good shape, Henkin (as if he were talking about a used car), your arteries are the arteries of a forty-yearold, and I never heard about arterial stirrings but Hasha Masha evoked stirrings in me, arterial or not, I want her and every night she groans in the next bed, and I can't touch, and what should I do? Go look for some widow who'll have to get used to me and I to her? I could love only once in my life, give birth to one son, changing wasn't possible anymore.

I called the Shimonis and said I was sick and couldn't come this evening. My voice shook when I lied. My wife was putting up water and making more tea, the Shimonis said: No, out of the question. They spoke from both of their telephone extensions, from two rooms, as they usually did, they said: You've got to come, Henkin, he asked, and today he called again and asked to meet you. I told them I didn't understand why, I didn't know him, but they swore to me that he asked especially that I come and it was important and I mustn't dare not come, they said partly as a joke, partly as a hidden threat I had to discern. Hasha Masha is listening, smiling; I get dressed, a mildewed chill and a stifling of words on her lips she sits.

I came to the Committee of Bereaved Parents by chance, like all the things that had happened since my son fell. It was years ago. The garden was already destroyed, the house was wrapped in grief, the bonds between us and old friends were cut, I'd walk on Ben-Yehuda Street every morning, seeking, I'd teach, my heart wasn't in it. I'd be invited to circumcisions and weddings and I didn't go, I began wandering around aimlessly, and in an indifferent and alien human sea, I came on people whose eyes were perplexed and caught in my eyes, I sensed them, they sensed me, eyes staring, seeking something that wasn't there, vague, protected yet defeated looks, a gloomy pride of the vanquished, I smelled them and they smelled me, pain touched and engendered partnership, some necessary hold, I don't remember anymore exactly how it happened, maybe at the zoo where each of us separately used to take our dead sons to see the sights of their childhood. People feeding pigeons and pigeons flying calmly, feeling one another, and here's closeness, I had a son, we had, somebody comes to me in the street, carrying a briefcase, in it newspaper clippings his son had cut out for three years, surely there was some purpose in that cutting out, some goal, and what do you do with that, and the two notebooks he left behind and will the newspaper clippings explain my son to me, are they evidence he'll show to strangers, and who are the strangers, us, and so we started gathering not out of excessive love, not because of a common past, what remained between us was the heavy hatred of solitude, there was a need, maybe stupid but sunk inside us to introduce our sons to one another, each of us was amazed at the edge of his companion's pain, on buses, in parks, on streets, in cafes, stone butterflies trying to hunt their own shadow on the edge of the sidewalk, boasting of wings that became our dead sons, maybe that was an organized revolt against the life that gushed up around us, the new state, the national excitement, we wanted to be protected, together we could find the code words of our yearnings.

Hasha Masha didn't need any proof, she always had our son, not for one minute was he not with her, or more precisely, in her, she could long for him and not for somebody like herself. For her he wouldn't exist in conversations about him or in a reconstruction of the battles he took part in or measuring the road he took to the seashore in the morning, he was buried in her kitchen exactly as he was buried in the cemetery at Kiryat Anavim, he once lived so he's always alive, he once died, so he's always dead, she didn't need to translate him into something else as I did. If she wanted to, she could have known exactly how far he didn't grow. She didn't wait for his death to grant her life.

She seldom came to our Committee and later she no longer came even to important meetings. After years of chance encounters and tours to battlefields, the Committee turned into a fact, and I put my heart and soul into the activity of the Committee. The Shimonis made their house a regular meeting place that was quite convenient for all of us.

The meeting with Germanwriter wasn't something I longed for. The chairmanship of our Committee was ostensibly a technical matter, but I was the only one who always came by himself, and maybe the people sensed I was lonely not only for my son and aside from that I was an experienced teacher and even a school principal for a while, I knew quite a bit about printing and formulation, and anybody who wanted to publish a booklet in memory of his son could come to me and I knew what to advise him, close work relations were created between me and Jordana of the Commemoration Department, a harmonic system woven between us that considerably influenced the parents who joined us after Sinai and the SixDay War and those who fell between the wars who were mostly attacked in some national corner that can't be pinned down precisely, and now I had to come because Germanwriter asked explicitly for me and the Shimonis explained to me that the German was a member of some committee of noble-minded Germans, who cooperated with our committees all over Israel and there was already a thread of a Committee of International Friends, and the group of fifty from England, survivors of Buchenwald, through the German group subsidized a splendid booklet marking twenty years of the liberation of the camp and the slaughter of those survivors in the Land of Israel. An American group got a grant from them to plant a forest in the mountains of the Galilee not far from where the Shimonis' son fell and echoes of our sons found a response in various lands, international meetings were even held in Switzerland, England, Denmark, the United States, but I don't go to them since, on the day I ascended to the Land, in the month of Nisan nineteen twenty-one, I swore I would never leave this land and I intend never to break my vow, but the meetings take place and I prepare the material, write, correspond, attach photos, edit, and the German committee of which Germanwriter is a distinguished member financed quite a few commemoration activities and therefore I'm obliged to meet that noble-minded man and I can't, something mocks me, my neighbor with his requests, my conscience. My poor dear, says my wife contemptuously, it's really hard for Henkin to meet the international glory of his son, the representatives of the Foreign Ministry of the power of death, why don't you go, Obadiah?

Hasha Masha drinks her tea. In the glass, her teeth look quite white and big. Gray hair falls on her taut forehead, caught in the light of the sixtywatt bulb, she says from her glass, maybe hisses: Clowns of bereavement, Henkin. Members of an operetta deceiving your pain, your children will never be any more than what they were in their lives, Henkin, and I tell her with repressed rage, Ours, ours, Hasha Masha, ours! She says I had one son, Henkin, and he won't be anybody else, not because of the Committee, not because of Boaz Schneerson. My death is preserved in dark rooms, Henkin. And then I recall the episode of Boaz Schneerson and am silent because what will I say? But the German issue had another touch. The writer was very famous, they were waiting for him here, and maybe it really is so important for us to know what those who were our executioners are thinking? Maybe we like to be photographed on the rope? Pictures of hell on the walls of Paradise… And Hasha Masha gets up and makes herself some vegetable soup on that kind of kerosene stove that hasn't been used for some time, nothing had changed in her house, she has some definite nonobligation to the present, no faith in the future. I said to her: In biblical Hebrew there is no present tense at all, and she said: Obadiah Henkin, life is not Hebrew grammar. Life is Hebrew death, and I said angrily: But others die, too, all over the world people die in wars that are lost and not lost, and "others" is already grammar, because there is "other" and there are "other males" and "other females" and there is "they" and there is "we" and there is "you," I thought about that writer, about his words and what will I say to him and I talk about him with Hasha Masha, who turns her back to me and cooks vegetable soup for herself that smells wonderful but I don't eat despite my hunger, there's surely a meal waiting for me at the Shimonis and they're offended when I don't eat and I say: Maybe I won't go after all, what would Menahem say, there's also a matter of conscience and pride, maybe that's blasphemy, blasphemy of him, not us. She turned her face aside and looked at me for a long moment and next to her I saw a spot of oil that I notice at times on the wall, ever since that day many years ago when I threw the bottle of oil in anger at something she said, and she bent down and straightened up and laughed a mute repressed laugh, like weeping, and didn't answer, didn't fight, accepted my rage as well as my love with bitter and chilly sympathetic anger… How do you know what Menahem would say, she asked, on what authority do you struggle in his name? If he were a grownup today, maybe he would have gone there, maybe he would have imported gas stoves from there? Or color TVs? I shouted at her: No! No! No! And she said: Samuel Yankelevitch, who was your best student, to whom you regally granted very good grades when Menahem would come home with satisfactories and you said that's what you deserve, Menahem, didn't that brilliant Samuel Yankelevitch go there to buy gas masks he brought to Israel during the war, how do you know, did Menahem leave you a will?

Don't ask Menahem with that black magic, ask yourself, Henkin.

Outside was the fresh smell of approaching autumn. It was early evening. A time when the sourness of the air is clearly felt near the sea. When I was young I attended a German gymnasium, but when I came to the Land of Israel, I swore to read and write only Hebrew; my knowledge of English was superficial and almost inarticulate, I remember in 'thirtynine, the ship Patria came to the shore of Tel Aviv, not far from our house, got stuck on a sandbank, and all of us went out to the beach to mingle with the immigrants and carry them to the beach and confuse the English. I brought to our house a pale young man wearing a rotten belt, his teeth yellow in his mouth and dressed in capes and I remember sitting in the evening and the young man spoke German because he didn't know any other language, and he told things the mind refused to believe, I understood every word but something in me revolted, I couldn't talk with him, only mutter something, in those days I used to sit with the big map that Becker, the geography teacher, drew for me, my son helping me with pins and colored flags and I marking the fronts and the battles from the reports of the BBC and the Voice of Jerusalem. Menahem would laugh at his father even though he'd bring him the pins and flags and say: Henkin, beat the Germans on his map, the Jews are good for wars on maps. I was fascinated then by what the cafe experts called "the theater of war," and didn't pay heed to the contempt of one who would later be a real Jewish soldier, at least the double Menahem, the one who was and the one invented for me by Boaz, and now I can't tell them apart anymore, and I conquered Benghazi and retreated again to shape the border or to make a tactical retreat, years passed and I sat at the map, we conquered cities and we retreated, there were successful landings and less successful ones I accompanied the Red Army in its panicky retreat and then in its mighty victory procession. I was a strategic expert and at the Milo Club, where I'd stop to drink coffee with people who are mostly not among the living anymore, I was considered an expert in the information, but my heart was heavy, my family I had left there was destroyed, I went to the Jewish Agency with people and we knocked on windows, have to do more, we said, and they told us, we're doing, but that didn't satisfy us, and ever since then I've had a vague sense of disgust and offense that I wasn't there with them and this evening I have to represent a committee of dead youths to the hangman, no matter how many there are. I walk on Ben-Yehuda Street and turn toward Keren Kayemet Boulevard, lights sparkle, cars stop at traffic signals, cafes are buzzing as always, why, I wonder, did he ask to meet me of all people? As I was leaving the house, just a minute before I left the house, a window was opened in my neighbor's house, and I saw a woman's face looking toward our gate, maybe a painted face, as if her hair was blue and she was white, upright, glassy, and thus, pondering the sight of the woman who closed the window right after she saw my eyes staring at her, I came to the Shimonis' apartment and Jordana, our Yemenite, opened the door to me and looked wonderfully sweet and beautiful in the white dress she wore, maybe too sheer, but not offensive. Her dark, almost purple face stood out clearly on the white background of the dress and her hair was wrapped in two thin plaits that softly clasped her smooth head, her smile was open, her teeth were white, behind me the light suddenly went out and I was steeped in dark, and in front of me in the abundant light from the corridor stands the girl of our sons' dreams, gleaming in the flash of light, and I'm facing her, Henkin at the usual time, in person, my wife at home, alone, eating vegetable soup, the lost energy woven like a lordly and modest halo around the splendid hair of Jordana from the Ministry of Defense, a halo of the disaster we were all in, the enemy who comes to review the honor guard of dead youths.

In the doorway of the apartment of the Committee of the Dead stands Obadiah Henkin. A charred smell of his son rises in me. A German saving matches tosses my son straight into the fire, how much is two-fifths of an American cent in Israeli money? Sturmbahnfuhrer of literature counts matches and I come to meet him, how do the bereaved parents of Jewish children look in his eyes? My neighbor sends regards with a poem. Marar, from Marar, he sends regards, south, there Arabs were expelled sir, surely you weep for their fate, I can imagine that, and justly, and unjustly, a Yemenite woman beams at me in the doorway of the sanctuary of the Shimonis who have never lacked money, filing pains, come in, shaking hands, smiling, everything's professional, organized, very formal, one of the veteran Hebrew teachers, and I thought about Jordana's devotion to us, about her beauty wasted on us. Of all the sons, she told me, I love Menahem the best. At first I was amazed at the phrase, then I got used to it, as if it were obvious that of all the sons she'd choose Menahem, I would almost have married them off to one another, in moments of nightmare, at night, maybe against Noga, between one dozing and another. And when she came to our house and Hasha Masha looked at her suspiciously but also graciously, with a certain compassion, but without contempt, she didn't give in, wanted to see the photos again, to hear the poem Menahem wrote, spoke angrily of Noga who was unfaithful to Menahem and went to live with Boaz, back then she surely didn't know Boaz. I wanted to say to her: Look, Menahem died many years ago, you were then four, five, six years old, but she'd fix me with a wild look, ardent and virginal at the same time, what's the difference? As if love or life really could be divided into periods, everything is one piece, and if I've got our Menahem, why shouldn't she? Maybe Jordana was his great love? And she smiles a professional, almost cold smile at me, surely I know her dark side, when she sits in my house and loves my son with a desperate love. Here in the Shimonis' house, she's on duty, frozen, modest, smiling, embracing her dear parents, who knows how many of them were previously her lovers, and she dropped them for Menahem, her great love, what do I know? I know that there were two men in her life, something happened to both of them, they said of her that she kills men. They're afraid of her. She brings bad luck, they said, and ever since then enclosed in the department of commemoration, letters, poems, memorial books, statues, always willing to help, to run to the printers, to study, to find material, to find contributions or grants, and surely Menahem her great love was a fake Menahem, not the one that was but the one I made up out of Boaz's lies. But she loves him and I won't rob her of him, what do I understand about love? When my only love is Hasha Masha sitting now and loathing me in her heart and yet loving me in her own way, as if her malice is a dim yearning of flesh…

Everybody eats, standing or sitting, talking, Germanwriter sits in a corner, in the green armchair, surrounded by human beings and he notices me and something strange, mysterious lights up in his eyes for a moment and goes out, I think of Jordana, look at her, I think of the German, of his look, is that regret? Is that vengeance? Is that an impossible measuring to see the condemned after what happened, to measure them for the death that is destined and withheld from them?

Here they are, all of them, the Davids, the Cohens, the Sackses, the Ilans, all the parents Jordana and I assemble, connecting their nights of terror to days of tours to the Golan, Sinai, Jerusalem, air force bases, to places where the great battles took place, I tasted the delicacies Mrs. Shimoni served me, naturally I was careful not to munch the plastic vegetables, not to open by mistake the pack of cigarettes from which a rubber doll jumps out with a sharp screech, the Shimonis' sense of humor was never to my taste, but I envied their ability to laugh even next to the picture of their son, to buy nonsensical objects together in all kinds of places in the world, to return to an imaginary and impossible childhood, and Jordana, as always, knows how to appease, to rout the pain, to organize a group dance of graves. They eat they laugh they drink, and I always inspire here the same respect everybody needs at special moments when a correct quotation of a biblical chapter or of Alterman or Bialik grants metaphysical meaning to a moment, to say solemnly: Maybe once in a thousand years our death has meaning, and to see how they become serious at Alterman's words, aware that they have lost beloved sons, to see a sublime vision beyond the yellowing bindings of the books they've issued in their memory and are now forgotten in dusty cases… Mrs. Shimoni asked me if I liked the food, I said I never ate a better mushroom pie and she smiled at me, tapped my back and so at long last I could sit. Jordana finished a round of handshaking and hugs in the enormous room, and I could see her stand alone a moment, belonging and not belonging, trying to be drawn out of herself, not to be seen, with her eyes shut she stood, as if muttering a prayer that was foreign to us, everybody was buzzing around her, and then she stepped toward me, her back bent, sat down next to me, pressed her foot and thigh and carefully put her hand on mine, like a secret bride, gently crushed my hand as if her hands were also muttering incantations, and then she opened her eyes that had been shut when she sat down, or perhaps landed on the sofa, and very slowly the flush returned to her face and the smile was stuck in its place and once again she was charming and necessary to everybody and lost to herself. For some reason, I recalled the first time we met, when I came to her on behalf of the Committee of Parents, which was then in its infancy, to help me finance a book about the son of the writer Aviram who wrote heartrending texts about his son and we sat then for long nights and pasted the photos and the writer Aviram compiled lines from various poems and then, at the front of the book, he quoted Alterman: Don't say I came from dust, you came from the stranger who fell in your stead! Jordana now asked me how was Hasha Masha and I knew that in fact she wanted to ask me how was Menahem, but she didn't ask, I said that Hasha Masha was eating vegetable soup and loathing, and she understood, and then when she started comparing my clothes to the clothes of her uncle who was always dressed with splendid restraint and never as an actor in a play like most Israelis, I felt for the first time, after many years, a physical attraction to a strange woman, her body clinging to my body, her thigh to my thigh, her foot to my foot, I can imagine what was going on through the dress, where the legs led, as Menahem once told me when I asked him why he peeped on the stairs toward the second floor of my uncle Nevzal's house where a young woman went up with her dress flying. The secret of our youth, Jordana, on both sides of life, is alien to Menahem, negates him and something rose in me, something that for the first time in years opposed Menahem himself, maybe envied him, not against myself, and the death that led him away from me. Germanwriter still sat opposite, I could see him through the bodies moving in the room. Corruption fills me beside Jordana, she sees me as the father of her lover and I'm surely betraying both of them.

And then I heard her say in English: Yes, this is Mr. Henkin, and I raised my face, and a big man (now that he stood up I saw how big he was) stood over me, his eyes like two clear lakes, caught in a kind of thin veil as sometimes on the eyes of an aging dog, his face smiled a smile that was forced but also innocent and perfect, a wise smile intellectuals sometimes have, I tried to stand up but my legs became stiff and he said: Sit, sit, and Jordana stood up carefully so as not to cut herself off from my foot too forcefully and she chuckled, a chuckle that was a mixture of sympathetic complaint, See you, Henkin, she said in her official voice, and from now on, the picture of Menahem facing him is a group picture with a Yemenite girl, and the man stood over me, still smiling, a pensive second passed, Jordana was now smiling her saccharine smile at the drinks table, unsheathing fingernails of dry and charming purity (and I surely know her wild lust, her eyes staring at photos of Menahem, staring at his dead flesh) and she disappears now, mingles in the crowd, at the window the crests of the trees of the boulevard can be seen, a moon is shining on them a silvery light and a pleasant chill blows from the window. I didn't know what to do, my hand seemed to reach out by itself, I said: Yes, nice to meet you, my body still bound to the storm taking place in me before my son's fiancee vis-a-vis the bearishness of the German's full body, and then he sat, introduced himself, as if hangmen also have to be polite.

With his king-size body he completely filled the empty space left by the thin Jordana. His long legs rose a little, stuck to one another, even his head was higher than mine, although when he leaned his head on the back of the sofa and the soft fabric touched his hair, we were almost the same height and now I could peep at his profile. Before his face looked like a hybrid of a giant dog and ancient trees, something soft, kind, but his profile was different, harsh and sharp, his nose that looked a little squashed from the front looked aggressive from the side, arrogant, in his cheeks more existential suffering than real suffering was obvious, something serious, devoid of softness. His profile had some blend of innocent nobility but also soft earthiness, for a moment he even shriveled and became tinier than he really was and instead of Jordana's delightful behind there was now the giant ass of a German, solid, heavy, a man who looked sated but full of remorse, and suffering was stamped on his face, a suffering whose nature I didn't know, my mind was empty.

I didn't know what to say, I didn't know what not to say, maybe because of the picture of Amnon, the Shimonis' son, hanging across from me, thoughts were contradictory, so maybe I told him: When I was a child we had a sexton who would wait in the corner until the women got up from the bench and would sit down on the bench quickly so his body would absorb the warmth of their bodies, and I tried to laugh, even though he didn't succeed either, the two of us thought about Jordana who had been sitting here before, he tapped me carefully on the shoulder, his hand was manicured, delicate though very big, I spoke broken English and he looked forward toward the backs that were now wildly hugging the girl of our sons' dreams. Mrs. Shimoni walked around with a tray from one person to another, her cleaning woman served drinks, Mr. Shimoni in an amusing Tyrolean hat was standing at the bar and pouring drinks as if the whole thing were a big joke. The sons are laughing at them, I thought, and the German pulled a cigarette out of a handsome silver case, a pleasant smell of good tobacco wafted from it, he offered me a cigarette, I refused politely, he lit it with a gold lighter that seemed to be swallowed up in his gigantic hand, I was afraid he'd be burned but then he put the lighter back in his pocket, inhaled smoke and I could see how nice his suit was, the vest, once I was an expert in such things, an English suit, not stylish, solid, and yet, maybe because of the beautiful scarlet tie, maybe because of the sky-blue shirt, he didn't look like a prosperous merchant but like an artist who doesn't really want to look like an artist, a man of change but he also had the tranquility of clarity, which unites everything into a pleasant unity. And surely that's what we all aspire to, it suddenly angered me that he was such a good writer, as a gift to my son I wanted him to be a bad writer, but some sympathy was ignited in me, a closeness to the man, the expression of his eyes, when he heard my stupid story about the sexton he was gracious and not evasive, looked straight into my eyes, inhaled smoke, and was with me despite the great tumult around us. A picture of a Lag b'Omer bonfire rose in my mind, a gigantic effigy of Hitler was burned, Menahem and his friends sang, Hitler's dead your mother's sick a German submarine, and a woman who declares on the radio: To punish Hitler he shouldn't be killed, he should be brought to the Land of Israel and shown a kibbutz, and how children plant trees. I wanted to laugh but the innocence in his look was greater than the innocence I was thinking about, and that annoyed me, the smoke curled, we were still feeling each other out, a thigh touched my thigh, I thought about the bomb shelter on Halperin Street where my son used to smoke the first cigarettes he'd hide in the first-aid box back then when we sat in the shelters. I thought: I'm drawn to vengeance, maybe because of Jordana, a vengeance that doesn't suit me. The force that came from him, obstinate and cultivated, his hands clasped his knees and the cigarette burning in his hand next to his left knee, he looked at my hand, silence prevailed, and then he said: Maybe you're perplexed, is it because I'm a German? I tried to say something but the words stammered in my mouth, and he went on almost in a whisper, if so I can understand. I'm perplexed, I affirmed, but that's not the issue…

If you want me to go, I'll go, he said, over there, and he pointed to a group of people that included a tall handsome woman, there's my wife, you know, he added, and I gauged the resonance of his wife's whispers, "the Jews and the Germans, unlike the Latins, didn't seek or find the perfect form, but always some original amazement prevailed, if an abyss gaped at their feet they looked into it and found emptiness and filled it with hewn, new, cruel substance, some new reading of chaos in which is hidden something that wants to be discovered, some imperfection, a divine imperfectness," said the German and the emphasis of the connection restored me, it was precisely the somewhat awkward Gothic style that drew my heart to his fiction, I loved the practicality he wove from the devils that gushed in him, to which pain do I ascribe you, Germanwriter? Which side do you belong to? You're surrounded here with people, some of them came from your area, they listen to you, maybe you express them better than we do even though they've lived here for years, you express them better than we do, that's a certain failure of culture, of education, of vision..

They're incomprehensible, he said, his eye close to my face became watery, melted in the warmth now coming from him, obstinate, but disguised as pallor, I listen to the German of my readers at the Goethe Institute, they speak the German of my grandfather, of the writers I tried to learn from… And, without noticing it, we slipped into speaking German and even though I hadn't spoken German for about fifty years, my German wasn't broken, it flowed with a naturalness that was so fluent at first I didn't notice it, and neither did he. The florid language of my father, my educated teachers in Galicia, my uncles, strict teachers, everything came back to me, sat on my tongue, I thought, Culture! Language! He, Germanwriter, is surely the Bialik and the Alterman of thousands of human beings who live here, he's their real geography from which their longings, their loves, and their nightmares are woven, and they're said to be people who live in the past that never had a future and here is their future, somebody who can someday describe them, he lights another cigarette with the gold lighter, maybe Zyklon B, I tell him that sentence about our Germans, he smiles, Really? I don't think so… It passes…

And then I returned to the anger that had permeated me before. There was no closeness between the two nations, that was a one-sided love, the closeness of Jews and Germans, it's a lie, that's what they want to say today, the Jews lived in Cologne before there were Germans there. Ever since then they burned in desolation for fifteen hundred years. They stood on tiptoe and waited for kisses. That was a one-way struggle, sir, not closeness, the German your readers speak here is a language foreign to them, and they don't know, they're tolerated, no more, excuse me, but-

I know, he said, it's hard to understand… The Prussian state was founded by Teutonic peasants who came back from a Crusade and studied it here, in Palestine. From here they also brought the glass for the windows of their houses and the Bible and what I talked about before. But what was the switch? What was our eternal fortress? I'm seeking, searching, do you think there is really a chance?

He fell silent now. People's loud talking was heard, and more than talking, they were yelling at one another. Laughter was heard, somebody maybe munched on a plastic cucumber by mistake. On the walls, aside from the picture of Amnon Shimoni there was a picture of the Empress Theresa, pictures of snowy European landscapes, a photo of the River Zin in the Negev and an aerial photo of Jerusalem with the edge of the wings of the Mirage birds, a gift from the air force for bereaved families. All that was cut off from some possible answer to Marar, an answer to my neighbor whose request still presses on me, to wondering why he wanted to meet me, of all people, surely not to tell me how many readers he has here and how profound is the closeness between the murderers and the murdered, I tried to calm down, I found myself speaking ardently, in a language I hadn't spoken for fifty years, I tried to find in front of me an empty strip of wall (something rare in the Shimoni house), between china plates, pictures, objects, the Binding of Isaac drawn on glass and a small portrait of Goethe next to a Bedouin ruin that may have belonged to Amnon Shimoni or maybe the Shimonis bought it themselves, I didn't know, an empty strip of wall suddenly glittered, split off from all the objects and grew bright, next to a reddish shade of chiaroscuro colors on the wall whose whiteness had long ago darkened to a kind of pleasant, old patina yellow, a splendid shade of rust, and there I could imagine my face, without a frame, in a light purple, striped tone, without a face, as if the fading graffiti on the wall blended into the wall and doesn't exist except in the vision I created on the wall, a gesture of the existent toward its image, there I was revised in that nauseating light that now started becoming hard inside me, not toward what was in me but for what I could have been if I weren't formulated by ideas instead of trying to formulate them, and there I found myself, my body clinging to the body of the German and I could understand that bear next to me, smoking the cigarette that turns leaves of elusive bright thin smoke violet and telling him: I've got something to tell you, that is, I was asked to tell you, and he then held the smoke in his mouth, exhaled it very slowly, pensively, ardent but restrained. In my body clinging to him I felt him shrivel, grow hard, a car passed in the street and illuminated the pillars of the boardwalk for a moment and the two of us could look at the bored back of the girl of our sons' dreams, so thin, swarthy, in the white dress, hear our laughter mixed up in the tumult, he stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray and asked: What were you asked to tell me?

He didn't even know how to formulate the question. I liked that.

Staged regards, I said, embarrassed.

He said, Who? And now some tone of violence was heard in his voice, which Boaz would explain to me later, was in my voice when I told him to come to my house and bring Menahem's poem, a violence of those pressed to the wall who don't have any more words.

I told him: I've got a neighbor, he asked me, in fact he didn't ask but demanded, really, to deliver something to you and what he wanted to deliver to you is hard for me to deliver, courtesy obliges me to forget his request, while another obligation, a higher one, obliges me to tell you…

He smoked another cigarette and I knew I couldn't avoid it, I saw that in his eyes, the lighter was crushed in his gigantic hand, I thought of talking to him about lost wars, but I said: My neighbor said he's the scion of somebody named Secret Charity which means in German…

I understand the name, he said quickly, what did he say?

He said to tell you, that scion… He's the son of his great-grandson, he said in German, now he tried to smile, stubbed out another cigarette in the ashtray, and when he lifted his finger, I saw that it was stained with ash, he looked at me for a split second, took the lighter out of his hand, moved it to his other hand, lit it, I waited but he didn't take a cigarette out of the delicate case, and only raised his hand pensively and again tried to smile, like somebody caught red-handed he put down his hand put out the lighter and put it in his coat pocket. I said quickly: He asked me to ask you to give him back his daughters! I felt the blood drain out of my face. I was afraid to look at him. He gazed a bit, his eyes slowly shut, tense, a long time passed and maybe the time was short and I only imagined that it was long, and then he said in a voice that suddenly sounded as if it came from the other end of the room: Maybe that's why I came here, for somebody to ask me for his daughters.

For some reason I believed him, there was no pleading in his voice, no asking for forgiveness, no evasion. He said simply what, maybe, he had to say. I looked at the picture of the Shimonis' son, the room disappeared, I no longer saw the people. Our association was total, isolated, and then the German said to Henkin who builds castles in frail air: Ebenezer didn't have daughters, Mr. Henkin, like Samuel Lipker, his adopted son, he sells lampshades that weren't made from his parents!

Something in me revolted, even though I didn't understand the meaning of the words, I was filled with a vague longing to run away. I remember the first time we went to see my son's grave. When I stood at the gate of the cemetery I wanted to flee. As if my son was waiting for me there. I thought about circles; I go outside my room and there is no Giladi, a new neighbor lives there, works a garden, talks about north Tel Aviv, I then investigate the history of the Last Jew, and the Last Jew I investigate is named Ebenezer, why did he ask me for daughters he didn't have? Ebenezer, the one I investigated, didn't have daughters, he had a son, the son's name wasn't Samuel Lipker, what's the connection to Marar, to Boaz Schneerson, to Germanwriter? From what side does the sea die near my house, an old man once asked me on the seashore during an evening stroll, how are you sure that Hitler is dead? Did you see his body? How do you know? Germanwriter is talking and I'm listening to him slowly through my thoughts; they held a meeting for me at the Writers' Union, he said, it was hard, what I saw that morning at Yad Vashem was still echoing in me, not that I ever wanted to forget. They spoke, and something brings you close but nevertheless an accusation was heard in their words, what could I tell them? That I've already spent years investigating the history of the Last Jew, the great-grandson of Secret Charity? No, don't say a word, Mr. Henkin, I know what you do, so I asked to meet you, wait, maybe you don't know or you didn't know that Ebenezer Schneerson is the Last Jew.

Schneerson? I asked and felt my legs growing cold.

Schneerson, he said, your neighbor! Look, Mr. Henkin, I'm so sorry but he doesn't have and didn't have daughters! At that meeting with the writers one writer spoke excitedly; he said: We live in a world where people walk around who at night dream dreams that terrify them, he meant meThis is a land woven of nightmares of two hundred, three hundred thousand people and this venom of theirs is the texture of our life, he said, the foundation of this tribe that stands with a flag in hand under eighty meters of water, and then he said to me: Here's my friend, acquaintance I would say, his name is Boaz Schneerson, he thought he lost his father in an awful disaster, but his father, whom he didn't know at all, returned after forty years, and they don't know one another….

You understand Mr. Henkin, there are a lot of people here, not Ebenezer, not him, who really believed that awful absurdity that I may be able to return their daughters to them, what I really came to do is to return Ebenezer's daughters even though he didn't have any daughters.

I listened, I thought about Boaz, about my neighbor, I tried to believe everything I was hearing, that I wasn't dreaming and indeed I wasn't dreaming, he said those words and I was silent and listened. I tasted the wine I saw in a glass standing nearby; it tasted disgusting but it cooled me. And I sipped the wine again. And the writer said: Ebenezer who's the son of the great-grandson of Secret Charity.

I said scion, I said.

Yes, the son of his great-grandson, he said without listening to me at all, he's waiting for me. In the special language of Samuel Lipker whom you may not know, he asked you, Mr. Henkin, to bring me to him. We should go, ah, this party is starting to weary me.

I poured myself another glass of wine. Jordana came to us and tried to smile, I couldn't respond to her, and the writer said to Jordana: Call Mr. Givon from the Foreign Ministry for me a minute, I want to tell him something, my legs are heavy and I can't get up. She looked at him and I looked in her eyes and they were empty. The man from the Foreign Ministry came and we, two tame dogs, we looked at him and didn't know him. I drank more wine, the Germanwriter also sipped and Mr. Givon, splendidly dressed fitting his position, bowed to us and my neighbor on the sofa said to him: I'm going with Mr. Henkin and Givon said to him, Fine, tomorrow morning at ten we'll come get you. Please don't forget the luncheon with the Foreign Minister…

From my perspective, the German's leg looked like a mountain. I looked at the fold of his trousers, which was sharp and precise, I saw a spear. Beyond the boulevard a light was gleaming and from some hidden window came rhythmical, distant music, I drank more wine until the glass I was holding remained empty and one drop rolled around on the glass and left a delicate trail behind, a small drop of blood, small as a miniature galaxy in the process of final destruction.

When I reconstruct today what happened then, I remember that I was amazed. I started drinking everything that came to hand, from half-empty goblets, from bottles on the table, while the German drank in a more controlled manner, like somebody who's used to drinking, munched roasted peanuts, and then I knew I was drunk. The writer begged pardon and said he had to go to the bathroom a moment, he wandered toward the corridor and I pondered something that had happened long ago, in my childhood. It was the night of the Passover Seder, I drank wine then and went out of the room, I went up to our attic, I found there the piles of my father's books, textbooks, reading books, sex books, forbidden stories including a small booklet titled The Tale of Reb Joseph de la Rayna and His Five Students by Solomon Navarro. The subject of it had a name that was destroyed, and I read it drunk and shocked, and later on, that story is etched so deep in my memory-and that was the one and only time until that evening that I got drunk-until I wrote the first study in the Land of Israel on the case of Joseph de la Rayna. In that story I found some apocalyptic meaning for our enterprise here. For the great spiritual revolt. As I said it was my first study and as far as I know that study of mine preceded many greater scholars than I. And to this day I keep a letter of congratulations from Bialik about that study of mine that was published in 1912. Once in a moment of anger I even called my son Joseph, and when he wanted to know why, I told him the story and back then I didn't have time for my son as I do today, and he, for some reason, copied the story into his notebook and from then on whenever he rebelled-and he rebelled so many times-he'd turn to me with his refreshing and open laugh and say: Henkin, I bring salvation and I ask him, how, by pinching a little girl's behind? And he told me something like: Why don't you say ass, Henkin, why behind or buttocks? And how do you know I don't bring salvation? And I try to explain to him the tragic, pathetic structure of the yearning for revenge the enormous need for salvation, for breakthroughs and breakthroughs, talk about chains, about the sense of impotence toward the creation and the sense of betrayal of the nation but in vain.

Now I could have fun with my real son, not the Menahem Jordana is in love with, not my son that Boaz Schneerson created for me, but the one my wife shaped in her heart, impetuous, loving the sea, and I got up, my head spinning, the teacher Henkin who placed thirty-four generations of students walks like a drunkard, my son is smoking in the shelter, I approached the Shimonis who separated me from the wall opposite, the wall where my features were still stuck between the Bedouin ruin and the etching of Goethe. Gallantly, I took Mrs. Shimoni's pure, wrinkled hand, kissed it, and said to Jordana: Eat a plastic tomato, Jordana, and Mrs. Shimoni looked at me with measured, chilly defiance, she wasn't used to seeing me lose my poise and here I am a fool in her eyes, mischievous, and she tries to formulate something against me, something her son will transmit to my son, that's what we always do, bring our sons not only for the sake of closeness but also for the sake of conflict, listing virtues in our sons they didn't have, blazing up toward the dark death where our sons are cut up for a new fabric, and they're exaggerated there immeasurably and Mrs. Shimoni smiles at me, we're too sad to be vindictive, guardians of sin or judges, only wondering sometimes, and she smiles as if she understood at long last, everybody has his own apostasy, even Obadiah Henkin, and Jordana looks at me, knows me here and knows me in my house, half and halved, smiles an overly professional smile, and Mrs. Shimoni softens, forgives me, that awful need to remain loyal, Jordana glances at her, her hand held out in that same gallantry in which I kissed it, and I go to the wall, maybe, I don't see exactly… Contradictory thoughts in my mind and then the German's handsome wife appeared, introduced herself, a few words of parting were said, hands were shaken with exaggerated fervor, and the writer pressed on me with his outsized body and the wife said, My name's Renate, and I said Obadiah Henkin, he hugged my arm hard but gently and pulled me outside, Jordana tried to get to me, to catch my eye, maybe I saw a laugh on the lips of 'sixty-seven, but it was hard for me to create contact, and we left, Renate walked behind us, the door slammed.

My legs were heavy, I felt my body pulling me down and yet my head seemed weightless, in the staircase it was dark and I looked for the switch. And the German, even though he was such a well-known writer, didn't know how you illuminate Israeli staircases. With light legs, maybe too light, I searched for the switch with my hand stroking the walls. My hand came upon the doorbell of the neighbors' apartment, hit a bracket where a lamp or a mailbox may once have hung and then suddenly the light came on, and my hands on the wall were white with plaster, even my nose was white and the German lady was wiping the plaster with her finger. We went down the stairs and stood in the entrance hall, facing the gray-white brick wall that remained as a shelter from the days of World War II. I saw clearly-sharpened by my drunkenness-the soot of a cigarette crushed in a slot between two bricks. Renate also looked at the spot of soot illuminated by the dim light from the staircase so that those bricks, two bricks and between them was a spot, those bricks were lighted more brightly than the other bricks and when Renate stared at the spot next to the wall of darkened stones I saw how proper and handsome her clothes were: she wore a light gray Indian silk blouse, a faded scarlet skirt, a necklace of small delicate pearls, while she attached a restrained dark black comb in her hair. We walked slowly toward the car parked not far from there. The German opened the doors and for some reason I was glad it was an Escort assembled in Israel, and I, mocked by my son for knowing every article by Ahad Ha-Am and not knowing the difference between a tile roof and a DeSoto, I now know the names of cars, their virtues, from my incessant rambles I learned to know the capacity of a motor, what is a gearshift, whether the car is automatic or front-wheel drive and it was terrific of me to know for him not only yearnnnnings, as he'd say, or what difference does it make but what are Ford and Fiat and Escort. The German asked where we were going and I wanted to tell him: Ebenezer lives on Deliverance Street but I said: Go north here, and on Nordau Boulevard you turn left and…

The newly painted gate was gleaming in the silvery moonlight, I wanted to point to the rose and geranium bushes, my lightness was beginning to dissolve, the sea peeped through the two trees in front of our houses and somebody had already started grooming and pruning them, in that epidemic of resurrecting the gardens that had broken out in the neighborhood. I saw the shutters shift a moment, the flash of my wife in the cleft of the shutter, and when we went inside Hasha Masha was sitting under the sheaf of her light, forlorn, torn from the world, the light flattered her, I could see her beauty in the eyes of strangers too. Germanwriter and Renate his wife were bracketed in the door, next to the white spot I hadn't repainted, where I had once torn off the mezuzah in rage. The dull gleam in Renate's eyes grew even duller, I glanced at her, from where she stood, in the presence of the gloomy room she fished up the face of my wife and I saw how she was seduced by the beauty of Hasha Masha, how she warmed to her, maybe the wine sharpened my senses that I hadn't known before, and the light, more than flattering her emphasized her powerlessness, her clinging to a certain moment in her life. She looked at the opened door, at the two strangers, captured by Renate's eyes and suddenly she got up as if all those long hours she had been waiting only for them, slammed the door behind them, and was stirred to life. She held out her hand to the writer and his wife, and I wondered what had made my wife suddenly so calm, so domesticated, there wasn't a trace of the contempt or anger in her I'd usually see when I'd bring strangers home. She was glad, really glad to hold out her hand to Renate. She looked at her a long time and when Renate wanted to kiss her cheek she refused but with a friendly evasion, without challenge, as if it was a delaying tactic, the kiss grazed Hasha Masha's hair, and in her eyes a smile of sisters in sin ignited, which I couldn't understand except as a joke, since Renate looked at her and smiled too.

And as the two of them were looking at one another, the German was looking at pictures hung in our house, landscapes by the painter Shot, a small photo of my son, the heavy drapes, the old, simple furniture, and then Renate sat down. She sat on the front of the chair, her legs held tightly together, I wanted to tell her: No one will throw you out of here, but I didn't know what Hasha Masha had given away in her rare smile. The German was busy with some thought, as if he was and wasn't here at one and the same time, he smoked his cigarette, measured the face of my wife, his face became hard, maybe that was a challenge, maybe a measuring, I said in Hebrew: They're terrific and they want to meet our neighbor, but my wife wasn't listening to me at all, she hadn't even noticed my rare drunkenness, the German exhaled smoke from the cigarette and a cloud of smoke suddenly filled the room and Hasha Masha said to Renate in German I never knew she could speak, Come with me to the kitchen, I made cookies and cheesecake and there's also tea and coffee. For years she hadn't made anything for guests, the fact that she had clearly expected them to come perplexed me even more than her German, Renate almost skipped from the chair and the two women, who, despite the difference in their height, in a strange way looked like one another, were about to go to the kitchen but at that very moment Renate stared at the closed album, stopped a second, trembled, and Hasha Masha, who was attentive to her, came to the table, put a finger on the album and then on Renate's pale face, and then the two of them quickly took off for the kitchen, we were left alone in the room, the album was illuminated by the beam that always fell on Hasha Masha's head, shadows on the walls, my head was now light and elusive.

The German's hand began moving toward the album. He waited. A gigantic hand expecting, not asking but waiting, a hand hanging in the air, I said, Yes, look! He went to the table, stubbed out the cigarette in his hand and meanwhile I searched for an ashtray in the house where only Noga had smoked, and by the time I brought the ashtray the Shimonis had given us for our anniversary, that gigantic ugly seashell, the writer was already leafing through the album. He didn't pay any attention to the ashtray, just caught it in his big hand, without looking, crushed the stubbed-out cigarette with one spark still flashing in it, and looked at the photos with solemn slowness, page after page, and didn't say a thing, didn't ask, I wanted to say, Here's Menahem at six, here he is on a tour to the Carmel, but he didn't ask. I thought to myself, they and Hasha Masha know something, they know something about Menahem, about some life, and I don't.

Maybe because he was a German a forgotten picture from Romain Rolland's novel about Beethoven rose in the back of my mind. I recalled Beethoven's friend's description of the deaf genius listening intensely to music with his face impassive, as if, wrote Romain Rolland, the strength of the experience was too enormous to express in a look. I tried to understand what had been bothering me since the beginning of our conversation in the Shimonis' house, the sequence of accidents, the almost offensive circularity of Marar, Ebenezer Schneerson, Boaz, and somebody named Secret Charity and something that had now dissolved with the wine I had drunk and made me pleasantly dizzy, no, not the surprising link, not just that surprising closeness between Boaz and Ebenezer or the link of my investigation and the German's investigation, but something else I still didn't catch, maybe some fate I am to witness in the future no less than in the past, I said to him: Here is Menahem my son when he finished school, for example, the grammar school he attended, on his left is Amihud Giladi, the son of the owners of Ebenezer's house, before he moved here. He looked at me in amazement. His face was impassive, he was silent and in fact hinted to me that there was no need to detail those pictures and that the fact of Menahem's graduation from grammar school had nothing to do with what he was seeing now, as if Menahem's not-being had nothing to do with events when he was here, and whereas I knew I wasn't able to behave properly in such circumstances, that something theatrical and indulgent exulted in me at moments when I should behave in a precise and restrained way, I started telling the German who stood over the table and looked at the pictures in an unemotional silence, a story so characteristic of me, disgusting even myself but I couldn't change now of all times, before the photos of Menahem while his wife and my wife were developing a strange intimacy, I told him: A woman lived here on the street who recently opened a new shop, Salon de Pre she called the shop, once she was caught in the forest with a group of escapees from the ghetto, and Nazi soldiers-I said Nazis, not Germans! — caught them, the commander, she told me, was dressed very splendidly, wore riding pants, aluminum tags on his collar, a splendid silk hat on his head and in his hand he held a pistol and he shot, one after another the children dropped, and when he came to her and aimed the pistol at her son, on his finger pressing the trigger she saw a gold wedding ring, the soldiers were gathering wood for a bonfire and she stared at the finger, her child was pushed into her dress and with a vital flash of a besieged mother (my words, not hers) she said to him: Someday my children will take revenge on your children! And the officer's hand began shaking. At that moment maybe he understood, she told me, that there's a connection between his children and those children he shot as if they were an ecological nuisance, and he couldn't shoot that child. Throughout the war, he helped the woman. He'd show up from distant places, warn her, and take off. She wrote a letter to the court in Nuremberg and told the story. They wanted to know his name. She didn't know. They sent her pictures for identification and she couldn't identify him. I looked at him, he closed the album and looked at me, and then he said something strange, he said: Mr. Henkin, I didn't save any children! I felt embarrassed and I quickly moved the album to its place. Meanwhile the voices of our wives were heard again, I heard their whispering, and didn't understand them, they returned to the room with trays between them, for a second they looked at the closed album, as if they sensed it had been closed a minute or two before, I looked at the writer's face and it was impenetrable, a mouth mute now, I felt remote, I recalled the memorial day we had held recently for a commander when one of the government ministers said: We're in deep depression, this is a hard time, and from the grave of our loved one a beam of light bursts out to us and I stood there and something in me was revolted but I was also moved. Maybe both deceived and pained, a beam of light bursting out of death! In the ashtray the spark of smoke that burst from the stubbed-out cigarette could still be seen, my wife wanted to say something, the tray in her hand, I said: I'd have to say, he wrote a poem, I felt my legs buckle.

He didn't write any poem, said my wife in a soft voice, but Obadiah be lieves, she added in a voice that maybe for the first time in years didn't have an echo of the contempt she felt for me. Obadiah believes that through eternity the past can be improved. I preserve the album, added my wife and said to the writer, so that Henkin won't succeed in taking new pictures of Menahem.

And then she said to me in Hebrew: They're mourning just as much as we are, Henkin, but they don't have a committee of dead outings and foreign relations, look at them, see how much they miss a son!

It's not our son they miss, I said in Hebrew, and she smiled warmly at Renate, who stood a bit embarrassed in a corner, the tray in her hand. No, not the son of your committee, Obadiah Henkin, their son!

And then she said in German: See what a little kitchen like ours can hold, and he wants a new kitchen! They put the cakes and the tea and the coffee on the table and there was silence in the room, not an embarrassed silence, but a silence of something pleasant, as if we had returned from a long journey, we drank, we ate crisp, tasty cookies, suddenly my wife stood up, looked at Renate who had lit a cigarette with the gold lighter her husband handed to her, took the cigarette from Renate's hands, a long brown cigarette that burned with a strange pale light, inhaled and swallowed smoke, gave the cigarette back to Renate, hugged her arm, went to the old radio in the corner of the room, a gigantic radio that looked like an abandoned closet that we had bought thirty-five years before in the teachers' canteen and after a long moment some tune started bursting out of the box and my wife started moving to the rhythm of the music.

I didn't know if Germanwriter and his wife understood how strange it was to see my wife dancing after so many years, but I couldn't tell them again about the Jewish woman in the forest that Germanwriter aimed a gun at her son's temple, the stories of my son standing against his assailants were finished in me, my wife returned to the Tiberias-Tsemakh Road, maybe she danced to win me, to wipe out in me the thought of Teacher Sarakh whom Trotsky had hugged for three desperate nights. My wife set her body free, came alive wildly, held out her hand until Renate got up from the chair, put down her purse where she had been rummaging before, and her hand caught the held-out hand of Hasha Masha who was dancing and together they moved with a kind of rare lightness, with a kind of oblivion, as if the music flowed into their blood and they were stripping off their clothes before a sun god that had vanished and we weren't important to them anymore, they were dancing for themselves alone, not for us, maybe not even for Menahem, the pale light of the lamp created a halo around their dance, we sat, the two of us, Hebrewteacher and Germanwriter, looked at our wives dancing as in some magic ceremony and on their faces a lost light coming from inside them, not the light beaming from the grave that government minister talked about but a white pale light of life that once was and maybe returns, at that moment it returns, and then, in the middle of the dance when Renate and my wife were almost embracing, the writer stood up, glanced through the window at the house next door then sat down and his hand started shaking, he stared at his wife and said as if he were talking to himself: You're a very wise woman, Mrs. Henkin, men like him are hard to know, we don't have a way to know through the body, we get data but the data aren't connected, after all we don't know according to unformulated dimensions. Our son didn't fall in battle, he committed suicide, why does a son commit suicide? He put his head in a gas oven, locked the doors of his apartment, and died.

They stopped dancing and the music coming from the radio was distant, and delicate, Renate looked at my wife, hugged her shoulder, and tried to assess me, to understand something that maybe connected me and Hasha Masha and Renate, and was released like my wife from all abstract thought, said: It wasn't a gas oven, it was an electric oven, maybe he electrocuted himself by mistake, my husband has already written the story. Life is simpler and more awful than stories. No, not electric, Renate, said the writer, gas, and Renate said without a trace of theatricality: There was no gas in his house, there was electricity there, maybe that was necessary because you don't commit suicide in an electric oven! And she went back to dancing, her face opaque with a mute expression. I looked at the expression of silent madness on the faces of our wives, and the sight was so pleasant, everything that happened could not have been different, and for some reason Hasha Masha could pity me now without loathing me, for the first time in a long time, without judging, and the two of us again, adjacent circles, maybe not yet connecting, with Menahem who died twice and Friedrich, their son who died in an electric oven and a gas oven at one and the same time, suddenly it was clear that every son died more than once. And maybe that was submission for the first time, without protest, in a long time, "known only to God," and the check that says: "Pay to the bearer.. The writer suddenly smiled and said: If they weren't our wives we could fall in love with them! And my wife went to Renate, who also stopped dancing, and they sat at the small table where once, a tortoise Menahem brought from the yard slept a whole night (and I then tried to coax him to put out his head and he refused and Menahem said something and suddenly the tortoise put out his head and wagged it) the memory was ignited and went out immediately, the sound of a plane landing not far from our house was heard, and Hasha Masha sat for the first time since my son fell and talked about him with a stranger.

Tape / -

And about ten minutes later when the writer dozed off and I counted the planes fearing some new preparation, the two women got up, Hasha Masha put a black crocheted scarf on her shoulder and gave Renate another scarf, a red one, with smaller, more delicate loops and when we went out into the garden we looked like four bent old people. The sky was illuminated by the light of a full moon, an intoxicating summer night, gardens washed and the sound of sprinklers as then, years ago, the dead castor oil plant was kindled for a moment by a silvery moonbeam and the extinguished streetlamp near our house was lit, the wretched houses of our neighborhood now looked beautiful, almost splendid in their poverty, the enclosures of the port looked connected to one another and enchanted, brightness touching the crests of the trees disappearing in the sky, the dark illuminated and transparent, airy, somebody stole the city, breakers of the sea rustle the silence in the garden, my wife nods, as if desperate to confront me, and the forgiveness was already devoid of substance, unnecessary, that same old love on the back burner during all the hard days of contempt, those long years, was lit once again. And then in that moment, the shutter in my neighbor's house was lifted like a warning and I surely wasn't thinking of how we'd approach him, how we'd get in, what I'd tell him, and now my neighbor said through the window: Come in, I've been waiting for you; he spoke German and Renate, who had previously separated from my wife, hugged Hasha Masha's shoulder again, bent over a bit, something softened in her even more than before, and on her face I saw a flash of a wild laugh like a rare bird that suddenly shrieks.

My neighbor was wearing an old-fashioned, unstylish suit (like a costume), on his head a gangster cap from the 1920s, some splendor devoid of beauty and full of innocence, he had paper lips, maybe cardboard, Hitler did die on the seashore, a Lag b'Omer bonfire of a man, Menahem dancing, dancing, I wanted to burst out laughing if I hadn't recalled how theatrical I looked on memorial days and mourning ceremonies and in contrast I saw how comprehensible that was to the German, how much he expected to see Ebenezer dressed just like that. There was in that drama some contempt only sharpened by Renate's smile, the brazen pauper encountered the desired spectator, in the window he stood, asking us in, the light gleaming there, and Hasha Masha, without my saying anything to her, already knew what to say, what to do, how to go in, how to relate to the moment, how to live it from Renate's smile and Ebenezer's seriousness, and only an experienced teacher like me, who had stood all his life and observed life and thought he was teaching children how to expel the British in diversionary acts, could have watched not only a drama but even his son, seen everything as watching and being watched at the same time. And Germanwriter, like a giant thing bursting out of the dark, held out a hand to the window and said: Yes, yes, and as we approach the door the writer leaps into the room through the window, just like that, as if to lighten the moment, to grant it a certain unimportance-to reinforce its uniqueness. And now we're bisected, facing the reality of the room, Ebenezer declaimed by a jester from the street of the lost dejected and the magic of the enchanted moon in the sky in the window and I see the Last Jew whose sources I had been writing for several months, close to here, on my desk, through the window locked with the old repainted shutter…

The home itself surprised me enough. Not only because it was so unlike the Giladis' home but because for some reason I expected meager furnishings, as if Ebenezer's belonging both to Marar and the Holocaust required some obvious trigonometry, but in the room we entered through the corridor there were black shelves with birds carved of wood as if they wanted to fly. And a wonderful cabinet and a gigantic grandfather clock. And between the clean furniture made like ancient works of art and marvelously preserved, there was nothing but an emptiness emphasized more than appeased. As if the spaces of the house were deliberately filled with life, there was no dust, no spider web, no grain of sand, only a thin volatile smell of Lysol that had dried long ago, of scorching, of pungent sweets and flowers taken out of a vase. The white walls, the glowing neon light, everything looked like part of a stage set, like a home that has no life in it but is cleaned constantly and awaits some spectacle that's about to take place. The grandfather clock struck now, a beautiful Gothic cabinet polished with purplish, maybe dark red, lacquer, some romanticism, some jest of the last creations of nonexistent worlds, my neighbor dressed like a buffoon stood there next to the giant bear and not far from him stood a woman, tall, her hair really bluish, her eyes leaden, her expression strange and yet painful, without a smile, as if she were trying to defend her buffoon. The German shook Ebenezer's hand and said, Oh, thank God, and Renate smiled at the woman, who didn't hold out her hand. Ebenezer smiled at me, clapped his hands without a sound, and Renate said: We came! And she sat on a chair whose back was covered with puffed pillows, and above hung two chandeliers, one beautiful, adorned with crystals without electric light, while the other, simple, only one strong neon light, illuminated the room, and Renate didn't look alone in her chair and blended in with the general atmosphere. Ebenezer went to the grandfather clock and when he separated the German from the clock, the writer sat down and pulled out another cigarette and lighted it and I tried to understand from my wife what was going to happen. On Ebenezer's face was a smile I had sometimes encountered on the faces of students caught red-handed, a painted pleading smile, and my neighbor suddenly shut his eyes, with the expression of a puppy dog, he stooped over a bit, illustrated on the wall, between the grandfather clock and the cabinet, and started reciting something, in Polish. When I raised my head I heard the numbers of the trains of Warsaw and their schedules, I was perplexed, I had read about the Last Jew, and yet, there was something so perverse in his appearance, so unsuitable, his wife stood there like an orphaned question mark, the grandfather clock swung its pendulum, the writer shut his eyes, inhaled smoke, tossed the unextinguished cigarette into the ashtray shaped like a ship's porthole, and Renate's embarrassed, Ebenezer crouched, a little Jew of contemptible humility, trying to please, and Renate yells: Enough, enough, and the writer says: Ebenezer, no! And he tries to continue but the writer yells, No, no! And I try not to look ashamed, try to sit, my wife looks at me understandingly, as if at long last cooperation between us has returned, some form of the shared and full Ebenezer's melody sounded like a prayer of the first part of the night, nocturnal Psalms in a study house, I didn't know what to say, the writer looked angry, and then Ebenezer stopped, his body shaking like an epileptic's, stopped shaking and he started laughing, he said: No? Not because of that? And I thought about the hours he had waited, about the days, about the daughters he asked for, I wanted to show the German that there was some picture album here of the daughters he claimed Ebenezer didn't have, and Ebenezer straightened up, pulled his clothes, picked up a bottle standing on the table illuminated by a strong light and drank from the bottle without pouring into a glass, and said: Excuse me, and took another swallow and gave the bottle to the German, the German drank a little and took out eyeglasses to read the label. The German said, I understand, I understand, and Ebenezer said: Fine vodka that, the best, and the German read the label again, drank again from the bottle (didn't wipe the mouth of the bottle) said: Good vodka, like a song, and Ebenezer said: You're quoting me, and the German said, I always quote you, Ebenezer…

When the two of them gave me the bottle I refused. I said I had drunk enough for one evening. I looked at my wife. For some reason she didn't react to my words but held out her hand, took the bottle, tasted it, and smiled, she didn't even grimace. Everybody accepted her sipping as obvious, the little radio played some tune and my neighbor said in French, What a sweet sin! The music will cover everything, and Germanwriter smiled, poured a shot glass, raised it said in Hebrew "L'Chaim," and drank. The eyeglasses he had taken out before to read the label were still on his nose, small ones, the kind worn by old tailors on the end of their noses. The two of them emptied the bottle in five or six glasses one after another in marvelous acrobatics, they made the shot glasses fly into their mouths, swallowed the sharp vodka without batting an eyelash as if they were trying to wet the kidneys and liver, I really envied their ability to drink like that. My wife now sat with eyes shut wrapped in the black shawl, I wondered what she was thinking about. When we stood at my son's grave I also wondered sometimes what she was thinking about.

And then the two men started talking, the two women and I were silent, Renate sipped a small glass of sherry from time to time and the tall blue woman gave us cookies and tiny tasty pastries and later some cold beet borscht. The two men talked about the German's investigation of the Last Jew, the book he wanted to write, and I, the "great" scholar of the man, was silent. I tried to ponder the chain of events taking place before my eyes, I thought of the stormy winter day when I came back from my daily walk on Ben-Yehuda Street, not so long ago, it was raining hard, and I was soaked, trying with all my might to hold onto my hat so it wouldn't fly away and then I saw Ebenezer standing in the garden and watering. It was so surprising that I forgot it, a person watering a garden in a downpour, maybe that was the first time I saw him and I didn't yet notice him, and then the rumors about the Giladis, the stories about the real estate agent sniffing around in the street, I recalled how one day in a meeting at the Shimonis, I thought of the new garden and then Mrs. Shimoni said something about the science of widowhood and bereavement, she talked about a curriculum to be proposed to the Ministry of Education and to be taught according to her by widows and orphans. She said she had discussed that with a famous psychologist and the psychologist wrote a monograph about the Israeli theory of bereavement, how "the togetherness" of committees like ours dulls the pain and maybe people should be taught before the disaster happens to them to spare them the hard years we all went through until we found a way to live with the disaster…. I thought then about the garden, maybe even then I pondered the Last Jew, I thought she was talking about how (like her) you grow plants against solitude, how you buy dolls jumping out of cigarette boxes (or plastic vegetables), against pain, how you move out of your house and start talking about the deceased-as she put it-in the present tense! And then the poem written by Menahem was mentioned and it was said that poems and essays and letters should be filed long before death, children should be taught not to throw away things like poems, essays, photos their parents can use afterward, and I was terrified and shouted but they didn't pay attention to me and yet there was some relationship to me in those things since I was the person who found a poem by his son and they didn't know that the poem wasn't written by Menahem and how the sex kitten of our dead looked at us then and I thought how that dark plot was hatched to blend us, to bring here a Last Jew who would touch what was concealed in my yearnings, I thought about Friedrich, the Germans' son, did he die by electricity or gas, suddenly that was really important…