The Last Jew

In my house, about fifty meters away from that room, two hundred typed pages were lying on the table. Everything was ready there for me to continue my investigation, but now I learned things I had never realized, things the files I had examined and the tapes I had listened to hadn't taught me at all, like Menahem my son I didn't write my poem either, the German wrote it, I listen to the conversation between the two men, how close they are to one another… still groping, as if that was a postponed lifeor-death meeting, and in the end I was the messenger boy. I looked at Renate's eyes. They were damp but she wasn't crying. I saw in her eyes a spark of understanding, as if she were saying to me, Look, Henkin, how they're playing, how they're trying to touch one another, their eagerness to play a game considerably obscures their ability to triumph over one another, there's no need to play now, Ebenezer, said the German, I shouldn't have given a sign, I would have found you.

I needed a sign, said Ebenezer and poured himself another glass. They drank, and then Ebenezer smiled: The daughters! You don't remember things, said the German, everything was internal signs, what do you remember? You remember only your knowledge, so you didn't have to make an effort, Secret Charity is also a memory you learned from somebody else, you don't even remember who you are!

That's right, said Ebenezer. I'm a man without qualities, that's what they said at the institute.

The German wanted to say something but stopped himself more for us than for Ebenezer. He drank another glass and groped for Ebenezer's hand. I was searching for you, said the writer.

He was searching, said Renate and my wife opened her eyes wide and looked at her with a sympathetic smile. He asked and investigated said Renate, they didn't know, even in the Foreign Ministry they didn't know.

Ebenezer is a small person in Israel, said Ebenezer and shut his eyes to remember who he was, ID number 454322, no papers, only the health service and an election stub. The number there like a number on the arm. One number more, that's all.

Ebenezer was silent and looked at him, he tried to imagine his mother Rebecca. He couldn't remember, he tried.

And the son?

Here Ebenezer woke up, an echo of personal memory struck him, he said: Ask Henkin.

I was silent and looked at my wife. A stub of a smile hung on her lips, but even if she was thinking of Boaz Schneerson, she didn't say a thing.

And then the German said: When was that? 'Forty-six?

And Ebenezer who had almost shut his eyes, opened them wide and said: I don't remember, tell me, tell me why you were searching for me today, why did I want to see you. Before, when I wanted to recite, why did you stop me? You want to tell me something about me, about yourself, tell, what I remember I say, but I don't have a personal memory and what I do have is worthless anyway!

Yes, said the German, now more for us than for Ebenezer, who was listening intensely, it was in 'forty-six. I was living in Zeeland then, in a little village, about an hour from Copenhagen, I rented a neglected old schoolhouse among estates and farms, I renovated it a little, and in the big room next to the giant window, looking at the beautiful monochromatic landscape, I sat and wrote. In my youth I learned Scandinavian languages. My mother was of Danish extraction, I didn't want to live in Germany then. One day I had to go to Copenhagen to buy writing supplies and a coat for the approaching winter. I had practically no money and I saved on the trip, but I had no choice. I walked in the street whose name I don't remember today and a young man came to me, about seventeen years old, and introduced himself as Samuel Lipker the impresario, as he said, he spoke German to me and was the first man who knew as soon as he saw me that I was German. He said he was an American of Norwegian extraction who had been imprisoned in a Jewish concentration camp. I looked at him. He had eyes that were both awful and beautiful, enveloped by violet eyebrows, green mixed with gold, in his look you could perceive a bold Satanism but also some softness, he measured his words carefully, and something in the way he stood made you uneasy. He talked as if he were telling a secret: If you want to see a performance of a tremendous artist, a reincarnation of the magician Houdini, who was also, as you know, a Jew, come this evening to the Blue Lizards Club, and you won't be sorry. Then he smiled at me pleasantly, the smile of an accomplice in crime and said, So see you, Hans. I said to him, My name isn't Hans, and I started talking Danish to him but he laughed and said: Hans Kramer, SS. Dening. I know you, you've all got a fried smell of God in your pocket, and all the time he smiled at me, See you, Hans, and went off. A lot of swindlers were hanging out in Europe at that time, selling churches, nonexistent cities, whatnot, the boy was a broken vessel but his German made me curious, the page he gave me and that I held in my hand said in a broken language that Ebenezer the Great is the Last Jew, scion of a family of rabbis descending from the Prophet Jeremiah and today he is the human calculator who can't be beaten or defied. That evening, said the mimeographed sheet, the Last Jew would perform in the Blue Lizards Club and everybody who came would leave intoxicated.

I bought what I came to buy, it was raining again, I walked in the rain and I thought: I'll go back to the village, the train leaves in about an hour, I'll go back and write, every minute's a waste. But a cold wind was blowing and I went into a small restaurant, ate something, and then didn't find a bus and I got into a cab and when I wanted to say: Take me to the railroad station, I saw a glowing sign in the distance: Jesus is the Messiah! I said to the driver: The Blue Lizards Club, and I dozed off.

I went down a few dark steps and entered a roofed internal yard. A short man in a suit smelling of garlic mixed with kerosene asked me for the price of admission.

Ebenezer now got up from the chair, went to the window and looked outside. His body was trembling. In the window the moon started setting. A pale glow rose from the street lamps along the old enclosure of the port. The writer took a sip of vodka, munched a few peanuts, wiped his mouth with a paper napkin stuck in a charmingly beautiful wooden triangle, and continued.

The dank hall was quite big and humming with people. I sat in the last row as if I had learned their theory of safety from the Jews. Always be close to an escape route. Two shabby musicians sat on the little stage and played. They played Hasidic tunes and their eyes were shut, and I wasn't sure they knew where they were, I thought at the time about what the English had said about Wagner, that his music was probably nicer on the ear when it wasn't heard. The tunes were shrill, not precise, without pain or laughter. Maybe there was some point to that revolting playing. A waiter wearing an apron came to me and even though I hadn't ordered anything, he served me a double shot of aquavit and when I finished drinking the aquavit two glasses of beer were brought to my table, along with a few pickles and herring with some small onions and a pinch of cheese in a copper bowl that wasn't especially clean.

Now that fellow I had met in the street climbed onto the stage, in the same clothes, and shouted Heil! And the people laughed and applauded flaccidly as if they only put their hands together and their laugh was also definite but blurred. The musicians flowed to the back of the stage and fell asleep sitting up and I felt some fraternity in the hall, as if everybody knew each other from time immemorial and I was the only stranger there. My being German filled me with dread. I looked behind, the doorway was close by. The man at the entrance stood there, didn't look at the stage, but at the ceiling, I looked at the ceiling and saw silvery cigarette packs pasted to it. I thought about German soldiers who had spent time here and that only increased my uneasiness, the fellow smiled, I looked back at him when there was a hush in the hall, he said: I'm Lipker, remember? Danny from America. Ebenezer and I are glad to return to beautiful Copenhagen. Some of you suffer from ailurophobia, fear of cats, or androphobia, fear of men, or optophobia, fear of opening one's eyes, or some suffer from the typical American disease, archinutirophobia, fear of getting peanut butter stuck on the palate, or even who suffer from phobophobia, fear of fear, all those, said Samuel Lipker with a smile, are requested to leave now and you'll get your money back.

He put his hand on his pocket. As if all the treasures of the globe were in his pocket, nobody got up, he stopped smiling. If you don't laugh, said Samuel Lipker, it means that we really have come to Copenhagen. And that's good. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome in total silence the genius, the man who possesses the most knowledge in the world, the memory of all generations, on two feet, millions of words by heart, welcome the Last Jew!

And then Ebenezer, you climbed onto the stage, you wore the clothes in which you welcomed us tonight. You were pale, a hush was cast over the audience, they were waiting for you, and when you appeared, Samuel said: Birthplace-Palestine. Education-six years of grammar school. Loyal remnant of the Third Reich, carpenter, you didn't listen, you stood there, flooded by the spotlight shining on you, you shut your eyes, Samuel whispered a few words and only you heard, you didn't respond, didn't move, stood as if you were praying, stooped over, you looked like a pauper, you'd evoke pity and contempt and then Samuel said in a monotone that may have been a signal to you: Ladies and gentlemen, set your watches three years back, the time is seven twenty a.m., snow is falling, gray, smoke, two cows are electrocuted on the fence, January, a train rumbles. And you were concentrated on one point, stooped over, wretched, like an epileptic, and the audience-that amazed me-set their watches, as if you really could set watches three years back and a few minutes later, time no longer existed, and I say minutes and maybe it was hours, a voice sounded from the audience: Einstein's theory of relativity. I waited, it was possible to hear the dead herring in the onion sauce, and then you recited, you recited quietly, in a monotone, in Polish, and then in Danish, the theory of relativity. When you spoke Polish, Samuel translated, and I knew a little Polish, my father was in charge of propaganda in Poland for a while, and my son, you don't know, committed suicide after the conversation with my father, a conversation my father demanded and I opposed, he demanded that the grandson know and not wonder and after that you were asked to recite other things, the audience knew what to ask, what to request, they knew you, they loved you, maybe they hated you, I don't know, and yet it was so touching, I drank my two glasses of beer, I ate the herring, and you recited Jewish knowledge, Danish was also Jewish knowledge as far as you were concerned, you recited in great detail the annals and strange deaths of Christian saints and the annals of their authentication, you quoted with maximum precision (I checked it later) the love affairs of the popes up to the fourteenth century. Then you recited the annals of the Jews of Spain and the system of counting used at the time of the Talmud, and I listened in despair, I enjoyed and was absurd in my own eyes, excited. You entertained, it was awful, you stood at your own end and you laughed, because you knew things that shouldn't be known, that nobody can or should know by heart. You were an acrobat of words, annals, history, and the audience loved you, loved the disgust and the entertainment, they were tired, it was after the war, hunger reigned, you amused them, they drank their beer, ate the herring and the shreds of cheese, and listened.

Henkin the teacher, thinks Teacher Henkin, is sitting in a house that is both familiar and unfamiliar, he is looking at the subject of his investigation and his ears are surely burning, Hasha Masha looks at him, does she feel compassion? Henkin investigated the history of the Falashas. The story of Joseph de la Rayna, Masada and Yavneh. Survival versus the fever of revolt, wrote about the greatest heroic speech written in the history of Judaism, the patriotic speech every Israeli student learns by heart, the speech of Eleazar ben Yair about Masada, written by Josephus Flavius, that is, Yohanan the Traitor who commanded the siege of Yodfat, sur rendered, joined the Romans and wrote the history of their war against the Jews and with his own hands wrote the speech of great hope, the dying speech of Eleazar ben Yair. Only if you steal the victory from the Romans will you be remembered and that's how the Jewish memory was born, and the Last Jew is its last product, or perhaps not the last…

Some time ago I read in the paper that they were seeking soldiers at a salary of two hundred pounds a day for the Roman army. They were making a movie about the Masada revolt. And they really did set their watches back. In the Land of Israel, written time didn't exist then, Henkin, Hebrew time has its own logic. That attempt of mine to write about Ebenezer is my last attempt. And now it was stolen from me, too, a good writer doesn't have to be a commander of a bad camp.

I look at the big cabinet to the left of Ebenezer. Three squares constitute the center of each door of the cabinet. Made of veneer, so many shades of brown and beige and yellow and black that isn't exactly black but isn't brown either, woven into one another, etched with wonderful acrobats, winding and cunning, lacquer backgrounds, delicate work of stripes and slats, some intelligent musicality, for with his own hands Ebenezer had built that cabinet just as he had built the grandfather clock, and all the other furniture of the house, and had even carved the birds.

Who would have wasted days and nights to bring the wood to such a charming and complex decadence, to rinse the lacquer to lechery like some artificial rain, like a sweet psalm to wood, subdue the tones to a marvelous harmony, and he stands here before me, the father of Boaz who destroyed my life and recites not to me, not to his great investigator, but to a German who tossed into the fire the last of the blacksmiths, the last of the carpenters, the last of the great artists, the last of the kings where a single violin played on the millions of their graves, Jewish entertainers in Warsaw, the electricians, the physicians, the great adulterers, that sadness that was thrown into the fire, two-fifths of an American cent, I look at the cabinet, who will still build such cabinets? You, Ebenezer? The world that wanted you to disappear comes to applaud you in nightclubs… And soon it's morning, they drink tasty, cold borscht, with a little sour cream, chilly, a pleasant wind blows from the sea, and the German says, Henkin brought me, he doesn't even know who you are!

I knew and I didn't know, I stammered pensively.

He knew and didn't know, said my wife with a laugh that was not devoid of warmth.

And Boaz, said my neighbor.

A fine dog, said my wife, a purebred, green and gold eyes, charm and devilishness.

A purebred, said my wife, son of a father who fled from him to be a Last Jew, took a great lust to kill a Jew, took Noga and Menahem Henkin, and Obadiah, my dear doesn't understand, the love that was suddenly kindled in her.

Renate got up and gave Hasha Masha a cookie. Hasha Masha gnawed on the cookie from Renate's hand. The German was silent, took a pack of papers out of his pocket and leafed through it, then he said: These are letters you wrote me, Ebenezer, and Ebenezer scanned the letters in the glow of the neon light and my wife fell asleep or perhaps only shut her eyes with a cookie in her mouth. Renate stroked my wife's head and started conducting an invisible chorus as if we were now to hear the singing of dead angels.

That was an awful night, said the writer. Three hours you spoke, in the Blue Lizards Club. You hypnotized yourself, and then I heard the melody, the rhythm. You prayed a distant prayer I didn't know. Then we talked. You knew exactly who I was. Then I didn't yet understand that you didn't have what the experts call "self-consciousness" and I didn't know you were a man without a history. For hours I interrogated you in the small hotel where you and Samuel were staying. I paid Samuel two marks for every half hour. He sat with a watch in his hand, and every half hour he asked me for money, and I paid, even for one minute not more, did you know then that Boaz Schneerson and Samuel Lipker were born on the same day at the same time? Did you know then that Boaz your son, whom you abandoned in a settlement, and Samuel, whom you found in a camp, were two sides of the same coin, almost the perfect image of one another? You told me then that Boaz was your bastard son! That Boaz and Samuel were identical twins born in different places to different mothers and maybe, maybe also to different fathers! Here's another irony. Here sits Obadiah Henkin, who meets Boaz who brings him a new son, Henkin investigates your history, and you live next door to him while I'm in Cologne, today I live there, no longer in Kanudstrof in Zeeland in an old schoolhouse, I live in a nice house and write a story, the title of the story is "The Last Jew."

I've got a new typewriter, no longer a shabby typewriter, a perfect IBM that can almost write by itself like that fish that once started singing to itself on the Baltic shore and we threw stones at an unseen enemy and warships cruised along the frozen shore toward Norway and then thawed the ice there on the sea, and we carved names in the ice… And you, Henkin, what's with your investigation? Are you able to understand? In an investigation there is no retrospective prophesy as in fiction, no poetic license! Henkin investigates and doesn't know that Ebenezer is Ebenezer, that Boaz is his son, and Samuel Lipker today is Sam Lipp and adopted in America by a Jewish poet who wrote laments on the death of the Jews, he betrayed you, Ebenezer, from the pile of corpses you pulled him out, supported him in nightclubs in Europe, led by him like a dog and today he got rich from you and disappeared and left you Boaz, Henkin, and you don't know what to say to Boaz, who lives with a girl named Noga who was Menahem Henkin's lover, what would have happened if my son had lived and came here to feel remorse, as he used to do in the not-so-distant past, what would have happened to him if he had met Noga? Would Jordana from the Ministry of Defense have matched him with her? My wife was dancing before to distant music from an old-fashioned radio, and I understood, suddenly I understood the German's lost rage, that was our book, Henkin, yours and mine, he'd look at me and his eye wandered a moment, each one by himself alone can't write it, together, maybe… I was maybe supposed to write about my father, not a bad man, didn't throw children into the fire, didn't shoot children with a gold ring, Henkin, all together he was in charge of propaganda. He photographed the burning Warsaw Ghetto, photographed for history. You know what he once said, he said: They didn't want to hear. He meant the world. He said, We took one step, he said, and we waited, there was no shout, and we took another step and another, and then we thought, in fact they're waiting, that whole big world was waiting for us to succeed, and my father photographed the silence, photographed propaganda films, wrote a few monographs on the Jewish race, who didn't write? My son Friedrich didn't forgive. Maybe he agreed and so he committed suicide? Maybe he found too much understanding in the depths of his heart? Can I guess? Through Ebenezer I thought I'd find an answer, but I haven't found anything yet, my father told me: six days the destroyed ghetto burned and it was possible to read a newspaper two kilometers from the ghetto, maybe three, with a father like mine, a grandson commits suicide.

Who knows why your son died, said Renate without raising her head.

How can I write the story I can't not write? I asked you then, Ebenezer, why Denmark of all places, and you said there's a reason, my stepfather, that's what you told me after Samuel looked at you and you shut your eyes a moment, my stepfather, that's what you said almost loved a woman here who died on him.

Joseph Rayna maybe wasn't my father, said Ebenezer.

Maybe?

Maybe, yes, he said.

I remember, then, on that night, in the club, you recited the books of the disappeared Warsaw writers, the stories of Kafka, the poetry of a poet named Idah ibn Tivon, I tried to understand, there was no relation between things, everything was desolate, shrouded in some stinking glory, I'd say, and then you came down. The musicians crept to the stage, and played again. Samuel distributed baskets, in perfect order, as in church, and everybody passed the basket left or right, depending on the number of the row, and they contributed their funds to the basket and Samuel looked at them with his magnetic charm, that was a shameful drama, Ebenezer… And I want to read you an interesting document. In my father's cell was a man whom three countries wanted the right to kill. In his favor it can be said only that, as for him, he loathed all three countries to the same extent. When I went to see my father, right after I met you, he asked me what I was doing in Denmark and I told him I was writing. He said to me: Don't tell them too much, they won't believe you anyway. Then that man was extradited to Poland and hanged there. Before he was hanged he wrote his journal. I want to read a part of it now.

Kramer?

Kramer, said the German, SS Sturmbahnfuhrer Kramer, he muttered. He muttered something about a cunning race and my father said, Why write about people who can't create and I slapped my father, not Kramer, he told me that Ebenezer Schneerson was his dog. He was born in Willhelma and then moved to Sharona. Today your capitol hill is located there, said the German, but then it was a village of German Templars! No?

It was.

Kramer and Ebenezer were natives of the same land. When Kramer came to Germany he was considered an expert on Jewish matters, along with the Mufti of Jerusalem who was to establish the army of the Greater Third Reich. But he didn't get to that.

Tape / -

And I thought about Sharona. It was there I saw Menahem for the last time. He came then from Caesarea. They gathered them in one of those beautiful gatherings. I went to him. I sat facing him and my son sat there and drank cold water. His face was tanned and a glimmer of apostasy flashed in it. He knew where he was going, but he refused to tell. I told him to be careful, and he said: Henkin, I'm a big boy now and I know how to kill and to be careful. He didn't offer me a drink from the canteen of cold water as if I too were part of the enemy he was about to fight. We didn't know what to say to one another. On the rifle he held, a new rifle he had just cleaned from the oil and kerosene and that wafted a pungent odor, a swastika was etched. Those rifles meant for the German army were produced in Czechoslovakia before the end of the war, from Czechoslovakia they came here. I resented that. My son was indifferent, he said: It's good for war like any other rifle, you can't choose your enemies just as you can't choose your friends, I prefer to fight the Swiss, but they aren't shooting at me. The Czechs sent me a rifle, he said, what do I care who it was meant for before? I told him, There are myths, there are words, that has a value, and he said, No value, no symbol, you're too old to understand, Henkin.

After he died you understood him, said Hasha Masha, who opened her eyes wide for a moment.

I was silent. I was thinking, we all were thinking. The light in the window was bittersweet. Bluish, a pleasant wind blew, a fragrance of sea and lemon trees.

Germanwriter asked for a glass of water, Fanya R. who lost two daughters for Ebenezer brought the writer a glass of water. The German wore deerskin shoes. Renate looked as if all her stars had died, what happened to the chorus of dead angels she had conducted before, why isn't she singing? Ebenezer sits and waits. The writer puts on his glasses and reads…

… I met Ebenezer Schneerson in the winter of 'forty-three, it was after Christmas. I remember exactly the argument between me and SS Uber- sturmbahnfuhrer Weiss. I told Weiss I was destined to establish a splendid Arab army, or else to fight on the front like a hero and not to serve throughout the war as the deputy commander of a camp, and he told me: You were wounded in the leg, my dear Kramer, you were stationed in a place that suited you. No matter how sad and conservative my feelings were, my scale of values had always been consistent and stable and so I was silent. I knew that as deputy I had to supervise my commander. Weiss and I would watch one another, as they once said about the Germans and the French on the front in World War I, like two china dogs on a cabinet and on the prowl.

Being a patriotic worshipper by nature, strong yearnings were rooted in me for my ancient homeland, I was graced with a stubborn aspiration to be the heir of Heydrich and Muller, but the world didn't have to know about that. After a long and stormy struggle in which I was demoted to a position of a covered scarecrow with an aluminum lapel on his coat collar and wearing shiny boots, what I had left was the ability to detest. I did that abstractly. Solid and hidden carefully. Hence, my manners were perfect and thus I also hated Weiss. Commander Weiss's work forced him to stay in his office late at night. The food in 'forty-three was still good, our cook, at least, was French. The French did steal the Italian cuisine but they improved it immeasurably. And so, on my way to his office at seven twenty in the morning I often had the privilege of seeing Weiss tired from his sleepless nights in his bed in the office.

His nights, he told me, were a constant tour of hell. I loathed his use of the story of the distinguished poet in the context of the solution of the Semitic problem. I also suffered quite a bit from the fact that I had to put the rare and only copy of the Divine Comedy in a closet next to haberdashery, between suits and shirts. But authority as we know goes down while responsibility goes up, and so I had the honor of obeying one whose words disgusted me, and I had to listen to confused and meaningless speeches about the descent of the Muslims, whom I wanted to lead in our war against the British and the Russians, vis-a-vis Dante. The word Muslims rises here in my mind in view of the fact that they started then, to my displeasure, to call worn-out Jews Musulmen. Weiss claimed that the Muslims wouldn't forgive the distinguished poet for putting Mohammed and his son Ali in hell while he hung their intestines at the entrance. As somebody who saw pigs like Captain Roehm who lusted after men-in a moment of drunkenness, Weiss had the nerve to tell me that it was he who recruited the Fuhrer into the party-hanged on hooks like butchered meat, I had to rise above myself not to challenge that claim. I told him, But Salah-a-Din was put along with "infidels" like Homer and Virgil in a corner of infidels who had a great soul, and he said, Yes, yes, but Homer wasn't a Christian and I said, And us? We're different Christians, we belong to the SS Reiterstandarten, sifting the nobility from the filth, burning the dirt, our faith dear Weiss, as Rosenberg put it, is pure chauvinism; Jesus's mother served as a temple and with the support of an important priest, she bore a German soldier with fair hair and blue eyes from the tribes of the Germans in the Roman army who moved north from the Carpathians, and we became Gutglaubig: people with pure German faith of Nordic origin and not talmudist Yids filled with remorse and when we drive in our shining Horick and Maubach cars, we present a powerful future and not some primitive and frustrated Christianity, but Weiss didn't answer me. In his heart I know he detested me, I could see his mousy eyes looking at me with distrust, he knew very well that every word he said to me would be reported to Berlin, in his own heart he feared our illustrious Wotan customs that bore us in sublime excitement to the pure German soil to ancient altars or to the light of torches in a strong song of brotherhood. He was and still is a traditionalist, he commands death that smells Christian. My obedient nature often impelled me to those clashes with Weiss despite the fact that I was almost anonymous in our hierarchy while he-the miserable Christian-was called by his first name by Goring and Goebbels, Dr. Frick, Ley, and Kerl who knew him from the days when the Fuhrer was in prison. His SS card had three digits, two or three numbers behind the Reichsfuhrer. But I already said, my obedience was my first nature and not some random careerist blindness. We'd sniff each other all the time, each trying to discover his companion's secrets, "his companion," from my point of view should be written in quotation marks. I wrote before that I had a special privilege of seeing him sleeping at seven twenty in the morning and so I could also see the special way he woke up. The servant on duty who was usually a Pole, with his always delicate and beautiful hands-Weiss knew how to select handsome young men to serve him-would remove the blanket and stick a cigarette between his master's lips. And then he would carefully light the cigarette, wait until his master started sucking the smoke a little and his eyes would then express buds of waking. When he got out of bed he'd do it with a concentrated and frozen and maybe even savage leap. On the way to the warm bath, prepared for him in time, with the cigarette in his mouth, he'd open his old book of Walter von der Poloida or the poem of Ludwig and would read the book through its binding. He would immediately sink into recitation and by the time he entered the bathroom, the water was lukewarm. After a year he was able to repeat word for word what he hadn't read that morning. But to the same extent he was able to shout at me that he didn't consider the attempt plausible to restore to the modern world of the Third Reich the old-fashioned exalted aura of ancient German gods. Those gods too, he told me once with typical sincerity-sent word for word to my superiors in Berlin-impose infinite chains on man, impose too great a burden on a pure organism that, more than it loves or is enslaved to the gods, is enslaved to ritual. What we are trying to create, he said, is a ritual and not a myth. And I of course was filled with honest, maybe even patriotic, grievance.

After one of Weiss's endless one-way arguments with me (I was silent then with outstanding nobility) he showed me as a gesture of reconcilia tion-he apparently detested the instructions sent from Berlin as a result of my letters-a small wooden box and asked me with a jocularity steeped in horrifying transparent malice, what I thought of that box, I looked, the box opened to the opening notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. I felt the box in my hands, felt my eyes fill with tears, I said to him: I haven't seen such a marvelous creation in many years, and that was truly true.

He lit an Egyptian cigarette whose delicate smell blazed up in my nose, drank wine from a bottle he used to keep in front of him. Those expensive cigarettes he used to chain-smoke and would put them out on his hand. For some reason he wouldn't crush the cigarettes in the many ashtrays heaped up in his room. I looked at the box again, outside, through the windowpane hazed with gray smoke. The landscape was gray, desolate, monotonous, and gloomy. This was not the proper place to show a rare creation of art. I asked Weiss if he had bought that box on one of his tours of duty in the East where he had served many years earlier as an agent for oriental objets d'art, something he'd do between his frequent appearances as an understudy opera singer in provincial towns whose names were known for not appearing on maps. He chuckled at me and said-something I of course understood immediately was not true-Mr. Beautiful People, those works are created here!

Then he told me about some ludicrous Jew who could do magic with wood. My friends in Berlin, he told me with a smile and a hint that didn't escape me, compete, after knocking themselves out about certain letters that come to them from here about ideological instability, institutional instability. Kramer, brotherhood of the leaders, for who'll get a box, who'll get a grandfather clock, who'll get an intricate frame smeared with endless lacquers and the secret of their blend isn't understood by the most famous experts.

And I'm there… Perfection evokes in me a dreadful sense of quiet bliss. I told him excitedly, without responding to his hints: Goethe said that the greatest virtue a man can reach is amazement, and I, I feel now a mastery and modesty of endless amazement, that's an enlightened and special work of art, can that be done by a blind man?

Can a bloodthirsty Jew, a perverse mutation, create that work? Weiss smiled and went on sipping the French wine and immediately, as an answer characteristic of him, with red eyes of drunkenness, started reciting to me the Niebelungenlied shrouded in tragic fates.

I went outside, the gigantic courtyard was empty. I had to find the Jew. I didn't ask Weiss, I knew he'd despise me too gracefully. I'm capable of smelling them from afar. And he was indeed sitting in the small storeroom under the guardroom that was never used, under a bare bulb hanging on an electrical cord at a table heaped with tin boxes full of liquids, pieces of wood, paste, planes, hammers, nails, and other objects scattered in imploring disorder. My look was apparently especially bold since he looked aside, froze on the spot, and stayed like that. With my supple cane I signaled to him to go outside. He obeyed immediately, blinked his malicious eyes, and from far away in the gray air, smelling the approaching odor of a Yid, two hundred purebred dogs started barking in their kennels.

He didn't look flaccid and faint like the other Jews but there was no pride of a human being in him either. He wore tatters I wouldn't have given to a pig. He maintained a distance of a meter and a half from me, as if that measure was natural to him and not just a form of obedience. I told him to come close to me and he didn't. I saw his body stiffen; closeness to us was forbidden and he knew that in his body, as a genetic code, but after I raised my voice and waved my cane, he came close. I wanted to discover his image. When he came close I whipped him, he bent over with a typical Jewish dexterity but didn't make a sound. The first blow struck him, but his evasion of the second blow almost made me stumble. He straightened up and said a sentence to me that I shall never forget, he said to me: My name's Ebenezer Schneerson, Herr SS Sturmbahnfuhrer, and there is no acceptable reason for you to hit me, by day I'm the carpenter of SS Obersturmbahnfuhrer Weiss, at night I'm your Jew! And then you can hit me. I noticed the tone of the words. He knew how to emphasize the fact that Weiss's rank was higher than mine but he also knew that I had more power than Weiss. That Yid knew how to play Berlin against our camp, and if somebody needed proof of the force of cunning, that was a smashing example, and if my blood didn't go to my head that was because of the strict education I had obtained in my youth when I was sent to the homeland to complete my schooling, and because my father didn't spare me a decent education worthy of the name. Think before you hit, my father told me, and hit them so that the blow will evoke respect, more than strength, the memory of the blow is more important than anything. But there's no denying that at the sound of Ebenezer's words I was stunned. "My poor puppy ran away from here," I quoted in my mind a line from some forgotten song, and at that time I also saw before my eyes my sisters, Lotte, Sylvia, Kaete, and Eva, I saw my sweet mother in her new house in the homeland, an exact copy of our house in Palestine, in my thoughts I saw them listening to a sweet melody notes bursting from those beautiful music boxes, I saw them putting in a handsome cabinet the pearl necklaces and the beautiful objects I used to bring them now and then from organized tours in the liberated areas of France, Poland, Holland, and Belarus, and I said: Stand, dog, and he stood, I ordered him to make me a box like the one I had seen in Weiss's room but with a different tune, and he said, With your generous permission, and after I didn't say anything else, the dog waited a while and then without turning his face, as was customary, he walked to his kennel, his back knew the way, he didn't stumble, he didn't slip, but he walked backward as if he were born to walk backward. His eyes fixed on me the whole time, weren't lowered. He was frightened, he was very frightened, but he also knew not to show that fear. What a silly demonstration of courage when all I had to do was hang him on the hook and let his guts rot. His face was familiar to me, his name struck waves in my mind for some reason.

I couldn't shut my eyes that night. A scene from the recesses of my youth rose and bothered me and wasn't clear. I heard the sounds of the night, the orders of the guards, I was restless, those eyes of his, I knew them, I got dressed and went to the office to check what block he lived in. There were about a thousand creatures there lying on bunks. None of them paid any attention to me. What could hardly be called human beings were twined into one another like leeches. In the light of my flashlight, some of them were seen chomping breadcrumbs, their faces full of mad lust, hungry, some were rubbing the breadcrumbs on the damp boards to moisten them, others were picking lice out of their heads and swallowing them, others were scraping the sweat off the wall with their tongues, the Latvian and Ukrainian guards huddled around the small stove were amazed to see me. The wooden boards groaned, people muttered in their sleep or in dying that spared us the need to destroy some of them with our own hands every night. He looked straight into my eyes, as if he were waiting for me. I ordered him to get up and he got up. His rags now looked as if they were wrapping a scarecrow. I ordered him to stand on all fours and he obeyed. I was so stunned by it that my grief and offense increased. I was mighty and at the same time the deputy of a fool, a powerful and noble cog in a dark machine of strict and necessary laws. To preserve my honor I had to act as I demanded others act, the chain of orders I was part of created divinity, not vice versa, when I ordered him to recite the prayer Adon 0lam sitting like a dog he told me he didn't know the prayer by heart, that infuriated me not because of what he said but because of the fact that when I attended the Hebrew course in my training as an SS Reiterstandarten I was almost the only one who knew anything about Judaism. And when we were told that every Jew knew the prayer Adon 0lam by heart, I said there were many Jews today who didn't know it. And they laughed at me. The course was superficial and short, we could have succeeded much better if our knowledge had been much better. When I asked my commander, who was an ignoramus about Jewish matters, to read to the students, all of them loyal commanders and good Nazis, the important pamphlet "The Catholic Faith against the Jews" by Isidor of Seville, and I claimed that that was one of the most ancient German works even though it was written in Roman, the commander said: We don't need to learn from the Catholics who the Jews are! As if that was what I meant. He said, and I'll never forget this: An ancient pamphlet a hundred years old shouldn't interest us when we have "The Myth of the Twentieth Century" by Rosenberg. I said, Commander, this pamphlet is more than a thousand years old and it explains to us how ancient and rooted our loathing is and even how justified it is, but instead of listening to me he became hostile to me and it wasn't only because of my wound in the first battle I participated in that I was transferred to the camp, but also because of the enmity of that commander who later participated in the revolt of the generals. And I was denied the bliss of serving the Fuhrer with the courage I knew was in me, because of the miserable jealousy of a person who was later hanged on a hook and died very slowly dripping blood and kicking.

And so I stood facing him, I yelled: Pray Adon 0lam, pray what you don't know. And he muttered something in Hebrew and then I opened my fly and urinated on him. The need to trample him was denied me, I could only insult him.

About a week later, special relationships between him and me started to take shape. Not deliberately at first. I wasn't proud of them then, and I'm not proud of them today. Weiss claimed correctly that I was confusing aesthetics with ethics and we sank into that eternal argument. I sank into a gloomy despair. I was the prisoner of my enemy and I loathed Weiss's perverse ideas. I wrote about the argument between us to my superiors in Berlin. And once again, as in the past, I was answered with a harsh and quarrelsome laconicism and even when I wrote them how Weiss composed a strident oratorio based on the song of the birds whose chirping he could imitate very well (integrating his life as a merchant of oriental objets d'art and a singer in coarse opera), intertwined with selected quotations from the speeches of the Fuhrer, even that letter received an almost amused answer. In the letter I wrote how Weiss would sing his oratorio when he was sitting in his easy chair, an Egyptian cigarette in his hand that was filthy with ash, his face thrust in a dreadful picture of pastoral slopes as a background to a dance of phony satyrs, a footnote of painters puffed up with self-importance and devoid of talent, and next to the picture, dirty and with a broken frame, hung a picture of the Fuhrer. The landscape was framed for him by a Jew-I wrote them-while the picture of the Fuhrer had stood desolate and ruined for two years. In reply to that letter of mine, I was told I would do better to pay attention to the decreasing portions of hair that were essential for our manufacture of mattresses. And that was maybe because the exaggerated interest of certain deputy camp commanders in irrelevant oratorios and their inattention to what required attention was increasing, and the camp commander, it said there, who works to the best of his ability deserves the support of his deputy since he cannot supervise everything.

… I, the letter also said, had to continue to supervise but to worry less about the education of the commander, not to go easy on him at all, but to remember that there are people whose SS document is among the first five hundred documents and ideological problems of the Reich are solved now by thousands of professors and experts in famous universities like Gottingen, Berlin, and Heidelberg and they do excellent ideological work. Nevertheless and despite all that, they thank me for my devotion and loyalty and are proud of me even though, because of the burden of work in the service of the nation and the Fuhrer, they cannot answer me except at certain times.

Therefore I went on with my deeds because my education imposed an obligation of honor on me to serve the homeland even if it involved danger or even a personal sacrifice. From that point of view, there was something in common between me and Ebenezer, the two of us were condemned to freedom and exploited by people who lacked nobility and imagination. And I could not get to the truly great men up above, because of the ignoramuses that stood between them and me, like Weiss, for example.

I talked about relations between me and Ebenezer. I was of course a volcano against a mosquito. But Ebenezer, unlike all my cannons, had a pair of intelligent hands, I was drawn to them. As a dilettante of the noble sort, and out of an infinite yearning for beauty, I learned to understand the perfection that is totally useless. When I listen to Beethoven's "Jesus on the Mount of Olives" or to Schutz's "Seven Words on the Cross," I can feel the unshakeable greatness of the German idealistic nature, that controlled boldness, sharp and original, some painful and tormented closeness full of bliss for perfection, an attempt to touch the untouchable, a wise and imaginative thoroughness along with a visionary penchant, a pure and virginal ideal, a struggle of man against himself and against others at one and the same time, with joy and disappointment necessarily intertwined, and not because of those circumstances or others and together they light a fire that is both ardent and burning, blood that is both beautiful and terrifying. If they left me here, in my cell, between one death sentence and another, yearning for something, after the defeat and the betrayal of the grateful liberated nations, these yearnings are not yearnings for life, but for a great culture we were about to rescue but didn't succeed, because the rescuers themselves were always unfit for the greatness of the mission. The Jewish culture of remorse once again ruled us and I can sense that in the things I read in prison. In the camp I saw behavior that didn't deserve the word "cultural," but my distinguished teacher was the monk Daniel who wrote "I gather spirit and hunt a hare with a bull and swim against the stream" and an ancient and noble taste fills my veins when I hear those things whose opposite are written now. The German person has some notion, even though it's often denied by him, of necessary worlds, and it sometimes seems imperative as a means and not an end. It is the Jews themselves who will suffer again someday, from the totality of our imaginary remorse and morality. German pangs of conscience will punish the Jews for their very existence, whereas our punishment was only for the quality of their existence.

I loved the way Ebenezer worked with wood, building boxes, the wisdom of his hands. His idea of "the Last Jew" I thought a dubious joke. But today many admire the parts of his memory in seedy cafes and cheap nightclubs. Like one of the innocents was this man. One of my friends, Sonderkommando SS Lieutenant Sheridan, once invited me to the camp where he worked. At dinner I met an officer I remember as even more splendidly dressed than we were. I remembered him from my schooldays in the homeland as the son of a distinguished and coarse farmer, whose father's estates stretched over a gigantic area near the duchies of ancient and historic Schleswig-Holstein, not far from the Danish border. All he could do in the camp was to become an absurd trickster who managed to get apples or bras out of villas or a pair of pants out of nostrils but was unable to get a decent living from his father's estates or to demonstrate the boldness of a German commando. I always knew he would sing the arias of Aida off-key but with ridiculous gaiety, while the celestial melodies of Bach or Buxtehude im parted such mighty boredom to him that he was able to sing them without being off-key in the slightest with practiced pleasure only because he was bored. I told that because we tend to exaggerate our excitement about things outside the realm of nature as it were, like Ebenezer's tricks of memory and the incomprehension of his boxes and frames. How remarkable that a boob like him learned knowledge he thought was Jewish knowledge. Did he understand what he remembered? When I was in Paris years ago (I was given a Christmas leave from the camp) I met an old woman, half German, who had once been married to an Argentinean colonel. She introduced me to a young and handsome woman who loved to hear my stories and the songs I'd sing when she sat at the piano and played. Maybe that really was the love of my life. She once told me that she and the old woman-she called her noble-loved to hypnotize, and that sounded amusing after the quantity of wine we had drunk, and I succumbed to their pleas and was hypnotized and she wrote word for word what I said while I was in a trance and what I said was the precise history of the annals of a life a hundred fifty years before I was born. I piled up instructive and almost unknown details and the old woman who had inherited memories from days when somebody from her family served in the kaiser's army, burst into bitter weeping since I remembered places that no longer exist and battles nobody remembers. We checked in the SS library in Berlin, and in forgotten books we confirmed every single detail. In my youth I didn't know a thing about the man I described. Was it because of the hypnotic pleasure of that charming woman (who was later slaughtered brutally by barbarians of the French Underground), was it because of that that somebody had to admire me? If I deserve appreciation it's because of my love of beauty and because of my service to the Reich. And Ebenezer was a minor prophet of ideas that others expressed. It was the Duke of Wellington who said that great nations aren't capable of appreciating small wars. The opposite is also true… their memory is also their curse, Ebenezer captured knowledge, but his hands, his hands knew something else!

I'd come to Ebenezer's chamber and sit there. That life I had left was not the life I aspired to. He was afraid, he knew that unlike Weiss, I was a real enemy. But I was captivated by his creation. With thin knives he'd slice strips of veneer, put them together, twine them into one another, carve birds or portraits, spread lacquer whose secret ingredients and composition were known "in his hands." On the first nights I'd flog him but he never mentioned that to me, he made the kind of frames you don't see anymore, built grandfather clocks, more beautiful than anything I've ever seen in my life. A small kerosene stove would burn there and after a while I came every day, I brought a jug of coffee and by necessity we even drank together, he and I, I couldn't not come. Something enchanted me; I hated him but I couldn't take my eyes off his work.

I didn't like only the above-mentioned works, like Weiss, but also and mainly the act itself. That man knew wood in its distress.

I loved his hands, his fingers hypnotized by the big German magnet hanging over the altars of Wotan. I could be only me. The things I said in the courthouse in Nuremberg were only partial. When I was reading my words from the written text the bored Russian officer's snoring was clearly heard. Fortunately, I didn't have to pay attention to what I was saying then. One day, when Ebenezer was mixing lacquer, he turned pale and started talking. His words were a kind of recitation. I heard in them a distant, familiar, Jewish melody. He spoke without excitement. His hands were then shaping an eagle on a frame that looked both very ancient and new. He spoke and I wrote. Why did I write? Today I can no longer understand. Maybe it was an internal compulsion to know what caused the sordid creation to be noble in his hands. He spoke about the contracts won by some Neumark and Berl Shmuel in a contract of leasing salt and delivering it to merchants and Jewish suppliers named Simon Isaac Rosen, Isaac Shonberg, Jacob Lederman, and Michael Ettinger, and they got rich. When the Polish bank borrowed the sum of forty-two million zlotys in eighteen twenty-nine, the loan was financed by the commercial house of S. A. Frankel and the Berlin bankers connected with him in business contracts and even contacts with noble families… in eighteen thirty-five Jacob Epstein and Samuel Frankel were granted a loan of a million rubles…

Germanwriter stopped reading. His hands shook when he put the pages down on the table. Ebenezer looked at him. Renate shuts her eyes and stretches in her chair. My wife looks at the sea starting to turn blue in a pale and distinguished dawn. Fanya R. serves us coffee. We drink without a word.

Ebenezer said: And I recited those things?

The writer was silent, sipped the coffee and smiled.

Apparently yes, said Ebenezer, and also looked to the sea.

You were sleeping among the dying, said the German, you don't remember, you thought even Palestine was already conquered. That the whole world was German, that somebody had to preserve the knowledge. Geniuses were dying next to you, you said. Homer's poetry was Jewish poetry to you. But Kramer loved your boxes. I can understand. That's an astounding table, he said, and pointed to the table. And it was indeed astoundingly beautiful.

Germanwriter is now drinking Israeli Elite instant coffee, stirs in a spoonful of sugar and a little milk and is seeing a Land of Israel sunrise, like the one Ebenezer fled from to the barbed-wire fences, to Kramer. Renate says: I want to hear more and then not to hear any more ever again, and he, Germanwriter, smiles: To sit with Ebenezer, he says, and with Henkin, to read what Kramer wrote…

He was a pig and still is a pig, said Ebenezer shutting his eyes as if he were trying to remember. No anger was heard in his voice.

You mean what my husband wrote, said Renate with a smile, and reached out her hand and embraced my wife's hand, which moved to her. Ebenezer smiled again, tried to understand. Fanya R. gave Ebenezer a few pills, which he swallowed quickly and then drank a glass of water; you don't sound angry, I said with my characteristic foolishness.

My wife peeped at me, was silent a moment, became serious, and said: Anger and hatred are too narrow to include, Henkin. No response is possible. Impossible to investigate hatred or love, that you'll never understand. So your German invented a camp commander for himself.

I think he was! says Ebenezer.

Now he remembers, says Renate.

The German didn't respond. He was waiting for that, acted as if he were expecting all those words. My wife said: Can I hate those who killed Menahem? I'm too small to hate them, or to understand, or to love, or to forgive.

Time moved slowly. The light was already full when the writer put his glasses on again and went on reading. Ebenezer curled up in a corner and looked like a toy bear. On his face an old, refined, unnecessary pain was crushed.

… The amazing thing was that Ebenezer, who carved and recited, knew practically nothing himself. Once I made an interesting experiment. I said to Ebenezer: You told me about Goethe's poem "Peace above All the Mountaintops," and Ebenezer stared at me a moment and went on working. I said to him: You told me that the big beautiful tree where Goethe wrote that wonderful poem is in Hessen and around it you said a concentration camp was built. I said to Ebenezer: You're the one who said that every burgermeister felt a need to have some little camp of his own and the burgermeister of Hessen wanted a camp but didn't give up the tree. People were dying there but the ancient beautiful tree wasn't cut down. He looked at me and muttered something. I looked at him and then he said: Right, I said it. I laughed because he hadn't told me those words, I said. But he didn't remember what he had recited and so he thought those words had also been said by him. I tried to think about that wonderful tree, about that mighty spiritual strength endowed by that race that doesn't cut down an ancient tree where an admired poet sat and wrote the pinnacle of his lyric poems but neither does it give up a small concentration camp, maybe not an especially important one, around it. He was silent, what can I learn about his strange nature?

I wrote what came out of his mouth. Today I'm able to relate to those things as to my great foolishness, because that was how I also turned into a product of Jewish knowledge. A small payment and a debt of no honor. What do I have to do with the tractate on Jewish innkeepers in Polish journalism? He quoted and I wrote down, a famous essay (according to him) by a person named Christof Hilyavski, "Project, or a New Light on Sorrowful Expressions that Accuse the Jews and that Is Found in Seven Paragraphs (Kramer) for Increasing the Income of the State Treasury at the Conclusion of the Days of Freedom Stated in the Articles of Confederation Presented to the Honorable Delegates of the Confederation of the Republic in Warsaw in 1789"!

And here is a part of the libelous document (apparently I was selective):

How to correct that-

That is the remedy,

We have enough trees,

Too few hanging trees.

Hang Jews every year…

And Makolski's writings on Jewish innkeepers who exploit the peasants and enslave them, and testimony on who exploited whom and when. Ebenezer knows names, dates, indictments, and what he calls with characteristic arrogance: "A few gentiles with a conscience" like Bartolomei Djakonski, whose essay he quotes: "Principles of Agriculture, Craft and Commerce" of 1790, which is simply an analysis (expanding the words of one who fed Ebenezer) on the difficult economic situation of that time, and devotes his writing to the Jewish tenants, explains the reasons for their so-called tragic situation, their being surrounded by drunken peasants owning small farms, who are always guilty toward them, and the problem of forced superintendence, flaying the peasants' skin by the Polish nobility (which the Jews, of course, are accused of) by means of their contracts with the tenant Jews and I hear names of those with nailed ears like JaczekYszrszki, representative to the Sejm Mattheusz Tupur-Butorimowicz, spokesmen for the liberal Polish aristocracy… And the growth of the population of Warsaw from eighteen sixteen (see the adjustment) 13,579 Jews and 65,641 non-Jews. Later (eighteen twenty-five) 28,044 Jews and 98,399 non-Jews, and by the end (nineteen fourteen) 73,074 Jews and 547,470 non-Jews-the rate of residency, the rate of books of traitors. The rate of left-handed writings-what wonderful knowledge!

Sometimes I wanted to stop. I was so full of wrath then. But I restrained myself. I can imagine here in this prison cell, when three countries want to hang me on their rope with the claim that they aren't fascist countries like us and the flag is no longer a value but only an asset, but it's important to them to hang me on a local rope full of values, they need the myth of the rope wound around my neck, those colors! I can think with perfect equanimity about the white, northern night of late summer in Copenhagen or Jutland, people drinking beer, outside a white night light, clouds and rain streaming, a beautiful and gloomy city, canals, ships past the old port, the stock market building of Copenhagen crowned with giant snakes. Domesticated Viking savagery. And Ebenezer, a jester of death, tells them about a Polish nobility, teaches them a Polish or talmudic song, the number of matchboxes sold in Belarus in the nineteenth century, how many depressions can be counted in Tolstoy's War and Peace, how many Jewish witches were burned at the stake by bored priests in Frankfurt…

Germanwriter stops reading a moment, he peeps at the bright light outside, his tired voice, the venomous light stroking the waves of the sea, the port appears now in its ugliness, the old enclosures reveal their real poverty. And he says: I'm reading because I had to read these things to Ebenezer. And I wonder why? Why did he need me, why was it necessary to read this journal to me too? Is there somebody that I, Obadiah Henkin, can ask for my son?

I want to know how I met Samuel Lipker, said Ebenezer suddenly.

Renate smiled and I looked at Ebenezer. Suddenly he was like a young boy, his eyes were illuminated, some wild freedom danced wildly in them, and his skin grew soft, became thinner, transparent. Read, he said, read from your story.

From Kramer's diary! said the German, unable to hide a thin smile that capered for a second in his eyes.

Tell me about Samuel!

The writer put his glasses back on and scanned the papers.

… Once we played chess. And I beat Ebenezer in five games. Sometime later he asked me to play with him again. I said to him: We played and I beat you but you don't remember anymore. We played a little and he beat me four games in a row. After I racked my brain I discovered that all his games were copies of the games played by famous grandmasters. Somebody transferred some more "Jewish knowledge" to him and I laughed. I liked to look at him, at his hand, at his spirit that moved it. An earthly technical link to a celestial melody. I didn't know but I wanted to be a witness to creation. A witness to the emergence of art. An exalted character is the character of the spectator. Who knows how to see. I called him by name. I also knew Samuel's name and that was almost strange. For us they were numbers, every single one was a number, and nothing else, just like the woman who cleans her house, and-here I quote the Reichsfuhrer-doesn't call the vermin she burns by name. But I couldn't sit for long days with a number without a name. My generosity to him was so simple in its ardor that I couldn't aggravate its rarity anymore. Ebenezer met Samuel Lipker on the day a German civilian, a worker in the camp and a rather decent man named Hans Taufer, shot an apple he held in the mouth of a girl they called Bronya the Beautiful. That was at a discharge party for one of the commanders who was afflicted with a serious liver disease, and in those days, the days of the shameful and unnecessary retreat from Stalingrad where the generals betrayed the Fuhrer and brought upon us the most awful disaster. In those days a party was a plausible excuse to dissipate the amassed gloom a little. It was a lovely dusk, drawn out and reddish, proper and wild in equal measure. Samuel Lipker was part of the Sonderkommando. He was burrowing-that fact I don't know from my own eyes but secondhand-in the mouth of a corpse, found a forgotten gold tooth and hid it. At that time, Ebenezer was standing next to the wire fence whose pillars curved in (I once told Weiss it would be good to create pillars that would look like they were crying outside and not inside) and then the shot that killed Bronya the Beautiful was heard. Hans Taufer didn't kill her on purpose. He was drunk and his hand shook. Ebenezer bent down and Samuel, who was burrowing in the teeth of the dead, also bent down low. Everybody knows how Jews bend down when they hear shots. Their famous survival is ultimately a bovine fear. When they bent over and looked at the window where Bronya the Beautiful was shot each recognized the other. Maybe they smelled, as a trapped animal smells its companion. Samuel crawled to Ebenezer. He gave him a piece of greenish bread, spat on it, and Ebenezer chewed. Samuel evoked longings in Ebenezer, as he told me later. When he saw that evasive and cunning lad he understood he wouldn't be the only one who would give up his life. A terrifying sense that surely also excited him. When he told me, I felt a kind of envy I was forbidden as an SS officer. I envied the love of the beetle for the flea. And because I write only truth I have to examine that. Maybe in Ebenezer's relation to me I was seeking something denied me, I was always flooded by the chill hard hatred of those around me. Even the last sight of the Jews wasn't especially likable. Weiss was busy with his miserable oratorio, drinking wine, and his endless meditation on the distant landscapes. The Ukrainians and the Germans with us were dreadfully simple and coarse. None of them had hands that could shape a box like a Grunwald drawing, a declaration of celestial disbelief in the cosmos and also a disappointed praise of God, and Ebenezer's love was kindled at the sight of a lad who was constantly busy rummaging in the mouths and testicles of corpses that were later burned. Their attraction to one another was for a past that was fictional but absolute as far as they were concerned. The spark that engendered love was, as I said, the sight of the dead Bronya.

And she died very slowly. In the window the sergeants' girl could be seen bowing as if she were made of iron. Very slowly she bent down, very slowly she died, when I wrote to Berlin about that whore, a few months before that (she was indeed the most beautiful girl I had ever seen except for some woman I once saw in a settlement in Palestine, and today I know she's Ebenezer's mother but then of course I didn't know) I didn't get a real answer. The reply I did get stated that I deserved praise for strict preservation of the exalted sexual practices of the German race, but… somebody wrote there, a fuck from behind or in front doesn't matter so much in certain cases of pressure, it said there, an SS sergeant is permitted to relax in one way or another (without specification) that letter was written to me at the height of the contemptible air attack of the Americans, surely of Jewish origin, who didn't understand what their leaders did, that what we were doing here was not only for the Third Reich, but for the whole civilized world. A testimony to their leaders' reconciliation with our acts and vice versa, how hypocritical the way we're punished now, when there are no more Jews in Europe and they may roar in public. When there were a lot of Jews alive they were afraid they'd knock on their locked doors.

They saw Bronya the Beautiful bleeding. The apple (as I understood) had dropped out of her mouth. She stood naked and the apple was supposed to look amusing in her mouth, and the shot was supposed to pass by her upstretched hand, but Hans Taufer missed. What amazed Ebenezer, as he told me later, when he quoted the story from Samuel who saw it along with him, was that after the shooting Bronya was still standing, even though she was surely already dead. A soldier started photographing her, bent over and photographed her from below, an officer named Kassinpoppinger who once called me "a dark and handsome man," photographed her from the top of the window where he had climbed earlier, Samuel told Ebenezer: She's disguised with blood, and Ebenezer remembered those words as "Jewish knowledge," a wise saying about the disguise of blood, she couldn't even die as a human being but had to stop time and drop very slowly, permeate with dread the brains of sergeants who fucked her from behind. She stood, Ebenezer told me, as if the officer who photographed her from on high was a magnet pulling her up, as a kind of revolt against the law of gravity of the earth, as if it wasn't possible for her to fall. And only after she froze in her death did she land and disappear from the eyes of the two observers, Samuel smiled wickedly and said: Bronya the Beautiful. He loved her. He didn't want to waste tears where the death of Bronya the Beautiful was a technical error of a German soldier who, despite everything known about him, was liable to miss his aim, a disaster happened, Ebenezer thought then (and Samuel remembered and told him), and Samuel doesn't know who the disaster happened to.

And then Ebenezer took Samuel to our alcove and showed him our birds, the boxes that were almost done, the grandfather clock, the frames, and for the first time since the boy Samuel had come to the camp, he said to Ebenezer (who told me), he felt life inside him, something dim bubbled up in him, agitation over Bronya's death and joy over the possible flight of wonderful wooden birds, as if he understood for the first time, he said, that there was something in imagination to fly away from here, and that there was someplace to fly to, that is another realm, beyond the fences. In other words: hope, the last thing somebody could have expressed, was starting to bubble up in him.

Ebenezer now said: He loved her. And they were shooting pictures all the time. I recall, that was scary, how much they shot pictures of her dead, and Samuel loved her. She loved him, too. Wildness, real wildness and joy. The soldiers and guards also loved Samuel. He had demonic eyes, like a phony gold ring. When he saw a phony ring he'd get excited and angry. As if he were looking in a mirror. Like a panther he'd stride there, bury and burn corpses, and seek in the bodies and find gold teeth or diamonds in rectums. Even there he bought and sold! As he did with me after the war when he dragged me to nightclubs and would sell my memory… When he got to the camp, maybe a few months afterward, maybe not there but in Birkenau, he saw his parents. They were naked. He never saw his parents naked and he was scared. He couldn't believe he'd see them naked. Their nakedness was too deep a betrayal. They were glazed and always dressed, impermeable, not connected to their bodies, to toilets, to jokes, to sleeping together, he thought they slept like two glass statues. On his father's face was a frozen smile as if a split second before his death he still thought, Ah, what a stupid joke! And so Samuel turned into a cat of corpses. Between his dead father's testicles he found a diamond. That was a strange gift of a strict father. Samuel knew how to plot, to walk between the drops, and the guards loved to touch him, he didn't care. Until he saw my birds. Sometimes they did things to him, he didn't see and he didn't hear. So they didn't kill him because of their rage, as usual, didn't crush him with an ax as they did to one child I saw, after they abused him.

Ebenezer stopped all at once, looked at the German who sat with his glasses still on his nose and the papers in front of him on his lap. The German wanted to continue, now he'd have to finish. He smiled at Ebenezer as if he were giving him a grade, as if he loved how Ebenezer filled in the crossword for him with a small square of knowledge, of words, and he continued…

… Samuel found one of his mother's dresses under the ass of a Polish guard. The guard was sitting in an armchair in the yard, next to the gate to the latrines and fucking a little girl who looked like a skeleton. Then he got up and Samuel slipped away, cut out a strip of fabric from the dress, and hid the fabric in his pocket. I loved-or perhaps the word "love" doesn't suit this journal-I sympathized with the way Samuel knew how to play the poor Jew and the soldiers loved the game, too. He knew you had to live another day. Another day, another two days, and that's how he got to the end. Chaos reigned. The radio didn't tell us the truth until the last moment. Documents had to be destroyed, burned, purged, and suddenly everything was over. So it wasn't Samuel's humble and disciplined attitude that saved him, but the disorder that ruled during the destruction of the camp. But when he did play it was a beautiful game. I loved to see his downcast look, his eyes running around like the eyes of a trapped mouse. No, he wasn't afraid, he wanted them to think he was afraid, it was just as amusing as the small and doleful choir in torn shoes that came from the eastern front to entertain us and the people in it stood shocked, split, hungry, and tried to make us laugh, and they dropped to the ground out of fatigue and hunger and Samuel stood there, I saw him, and peeped at them. He examined their acting ability, that beautiful bastard…

Germanwriter, who had stood and read for some time now, fell asleep, knocking his head on the paper. I thought of Samuel Lipker looking for diamonds in rectums. The writer's glasses dropped off and fell to the floor. Fortunately for him the lenses were plastic. The light in the room was soft, and outside laborers were heard on their way to work. A car passed by in the empty street and made noise. Ebenezer gave me a long and vital look, as if he never slept, Renate wanted to go to her husband but couldn't. Ebenezer said: Poor Henkin! Samuel the great actor! Came to you and shuffled the cards for you, played your son, I wanted daughters from the German and you'll ask him for him. Samuel's not a bad man, just amoral, born without a mother and an evil grandmother raised him. I know her, she's my mother. The German's journal makes me laugh. Only a journal like that can make a man like me laugh.

No Samuel came to me, I said, tired, and part of me was already asleep. Did Boaz come to me? Ebenezer looked at me a long time and turned his face away, maybe I really did hurt him. Renate asked: Was there really a commander named Kramer?

He knew a little bit about the poem of wood, said Ebenezer, your husband is a good writer, maybe too good. What in fact happened to us, I met him years ago, didn't I?

Years ago, mumbled the German either asleep or terrified and then he stirred suddenly, with a kind of sharp and panicky waking, picked up his glasses, stretched his slightly crumpled clothes. He said: So many things ago!

What things? Ebenezer looked amused again. A puppet acts, I thought to myself. A person who builds gardens in the dark. An enormous need to know who he was stirs in me and gives no signs. He said: We sat and talked, I remember. I remember, more and more I remember who I am and why I am. And so the knowledge was forgotten and that's good. A human being will come from me yet. You wrote to me. Then the contact was broken. The scholars who studied me at the institute told me, He writes, he writes, and what did you write? A fictional journal. Listen, don't make me what I'm not. And we searched for one another, why? Can I know? You should know. Or Henkin who Samuel came to and stole his daughter-in-law Noga from him. Mrs. Henkin, I wanted to tell you words of an old man who loved only one woman in his life, you're a very handsome woman!

She thanked him, my wife, and smiled at me. That was her first smile at me in years.

I was terrified.

Who was Secret Charity? I asked.

The two of them looked at me and wanted to answer and then Ebenezer said, You'll know everything, Henkin, everything you'll know, what was over long ago is starting over… Look, it's morning now and before it was night. Maybe a new millennium is starting?

We went outside. The sun was already beating down and Renate was supporting my wife. We walked to the car. Ebenezer fell asleep on his feet. His wife dragged him inside and started lowering the shutters. Before he disappeared, his hat slipped off and he picked it up with some tired and clownish acrobatics. Renate sat behind the wheel and the writer fell asleep next to her. I shook the old man's hand. Renate kissed my wife, who bent over to her, she started the car, and drove off.

We went into the house. The heavy curtains preserved the night chill and for the first time in years we got into one bed together, dressed, but hugging, still silent. She kissed me softly and fell asleep. I wept but she didn't see. We woke up in the afternoon. We were hungry; we felt like two kids. We ate something Hasha Masha warmed up and we fell asleep again. This time we took off our clothes. We hugged, if we had been young we would have given birth to a son. The son would die afterward. But we were too old to give birth. It was beautiful to return to my wife's dark and fascinating openings. She hugged me and dug her fingernails into me. I thought to myself, She's become a cat, the mother of my dead son. We opened the windows and Hasha Masha made good coffee. A knock was heard on the door. I opened it and in the door stood Germanwriter and his wife. He was holding a big bouquet of flowers. We drank coffee, we looked at Ebenezer's house. The German said: Now he'll pretend to be sleeping. And indeed the windows were shut.

We got into the car and drove off. The road to Jerusalem was exciting as always. The German looked at the trees and the mountains and after the ardor of talking the night before the words seemed to have died out and were no longer stammered. Renate told how her son once took his sock, wiped his nose, and then put the sock back on. She laughed. Hasha Masha also laughed. The writer was tired and pensive. When we arrived, he said suddenly: What a beautiful place. We parked the car and walked on the path toward the cemetery. The light was savage but the trees soothed it. Their thick crests covered us. The path was full of dry and wet pine needles, the graves were lined up like a military parade. We stopped at Menahem's tombstone. His name was engraved in stone and so was his army number. I wanted to say something. And all I could say was, Here, next to Menahem, Yashka is buried. Yashka fell in one of the two battles in which Menahem was killed. Nothing is known about him except his name, he came to Cyprus in a ship of illegal immigrants, from Cyprus he came to Haifa and from there he went to the last battle he took part in. They weren't even sure of his name.

Meanwhile night fell. We stood there a long time. The moonlight that now beamed tried to save the horrifying sight of the dead lined up under the hewn stones. It all looked like a cheap stage set for something with no name, the pain, for some reason, maybe because of the passing night, was also fuller and more divided, desolate, and so I had nothing to say. I looked at my new friends, they guessed me correctly, I knew that from their faces. On the way back, the writer said: Who remains there, you or him?

I didn't answer, I thought. And then I said: Funny that Ebenezer thinks you wrote the journal. He didn't answer.

We saw each other twice more before they left. We sat a long night in Ebenezer's house and he told us, as in a dream, about Secret Charity and his mother Rebecca. Some things I knew from my investigation of him and some the German knew. We smiled at one another like two conspirators. Then the Germans left and we went to the airport with them. I had never been there before: the noise, the turmoil, the giant planes, all that was new to me.

Hasha Masha and I went back to playing World War II games. I corrected the old map. Jordana came and went, Noga came sometimes. In the game of old battles we came to the Normandy landing. Now I used more perfect flags, with pins with round colored heads. I bought a television set and I started cooking. It's hard for me to understand how a strict and harsh teacher like me turned into a cook. I love the smell of cooking and that activity whose purpose you see immediately. Ebenezer gave me two carved birds. I bought flowerpots and planted cactuses and the garden is growing beautiful. Hasha Masha found some soothing that allows us to go on living, she even started playing the old piano I bought her. She plays Russian and Israeli folk songs and a lot of Chopin, Brahms, Mendelssohn, and Schumann. There's so much romanticism still in those old bones. At night after we hug we dream of Menahem. Each of us with his or her own dream. But we're together now and only the dreams are apart and come together again. A month later, our committee received a big contribution from Germany to plant a forest in the name of the fallen of Brigade G. I was chosen to speak on behalf of the bereaved parents. At night Hasha Masha told me: I hate sacrifices to the dead, but you spoke well, Obadiah. I thought about Boaz, about his father who calls him Samuel, about his grandmother Rebecca in the settlement, near what was once Marar, near the vineyards, near the almond trees. I thought: When will the German and I be able to write together the book about the Last Jew? Or perhaps that will be a book about ourselves?

I didn't know.

Tape / -

Samuel Lipker of the Sonderkommando. What do you mean some gravedigger of the dead. Eitdatius was Bishop in Shaybes. He wrote the continuation of the memoirs of the world from the year three hundred seventy-eight AD to four hundred sixty-eight. He continued the tradition of Jerome and Eusebius of Caesarea. Aaron ben Amos, of the tribe of Levi, Aaron Aurora of Babylon, Aaron head of the court in Pombaditha. Aaron head of the court in Zelikow (the glory of Uziel) Aaron rabbi of the city of Knishin (author of "Jacob's Coat)"..

Aaron Rav ben Rabbi-not the author of "Oil of Myrrh" but the grandson of the author of "Name of the Great"..

Tape / -

With a good bottle of orange soda to be thirsty. Henkin hadn't been seen for a few days now. The sea ranges from turbulent to billowy. When I came to the Land of Israel, Samuel appeared and called me father. I said to him Samuel, and he said, I'm Boaz. And he despised me. Maybe he wanted to cry. Me too, old mother Rebecca laughed a hissing wicked laugh. There was a rage in her because I returned after forty years and didn't explain to her why. Maybe the jackal who raped her in her youth laughed in her. Ever since, my dear Samuel, I've been waiting for you!

Tape / -

Maybe that's the preface to the Last Jew by the director of the solar system who's based in Berlin, thinks that television antennas are arms asking heaven for salvation, sees wonderful people writing letters to one another and finds a small music box in abandoned houses where they listen to innocent melodies and say, Oh, what beautiful work. And the lord of the solar system sits and tries to restore the history for me, I want to get to Boaz who returned from the war at another time, hit a woman on the boulevard, coveted her phony gold ring, then invented Menahem for Henkin and killed him one more time, the director who writes a book like a shoplifter in a piano store; a deep sense of frustration. God had to create the world, but after He created it He changed His mind but by then it was too late. The gods of the solar system can indeed create or perhaps even have to, but they can't participate in running the world they created, since it's their night, in the morning they wake up from it and it's like a shadow. God created the world out of His waking. His point of view is different from the point of view of what are called human beings. He destroyed a world and created a mixture of chaos, storm clouds of gas from explosions in space, all those were the awakening of the world when his moon hit it. But for what are called human beings that was an event that was yet to happen. For God it had already happened.

In the beginning was the destruction. Hard to understand that in light of the ethical findings of God on the face of the earth. The time has come to tell the truth and to disappear. It bores me to see people who died a thousand years ago born and thinking their torments have meaning. For God, the aforementioned Boaz and Samuel and Ebenezer died long ago. The world no longer exists. Five hundred frightened travelers stuck for a few months now in a sophisticated spaceship on its way to the stars of Andromeda are freezing. When they reach their destination the ape will begin to resemble man and three billion years later Abraham the Hebrew will go to the land of Canaan. The words "ethics" and "forgiveness" remind us, slaves of the directorship of the system, of the words "ice cream" and "treason." The origin of God is from a green and yellow moss that grew in the depths of space. The Jews turned God into what never could have been; an imaginary and arid god. The real God knew about the grief brought on Him by His believers and the creators of His imaginary image. The grief of those Jews chilled his wrath at their stubbornness a bit, and so He fell in love with the smell of Jewish grief; the grief was a real challenge and only thus did the tragicomic encounter between God and His chosen people take place.

The first Adam lived in two fictional versions. One was with Lilith and the other was with Eve. I'm an expert on the creations. I live in the solar system, sit here in Berlin to teach you wisdom. All of that is still to happen. And Cush will beget Nimrod, a mighty one in the earth. The Pathrusim begat the Casluhim, Arphaxad begat Salah, and Salah Eber, Serug begat Nahor, and Terah begat Abram. Abram will beget Isaac and Ishmael. Jacob the son of Isaac will beget Simeon, Levi, and Joseph, the sons of Judah will be Er and Onan, Tamar the daughter-in-law of Judah will give birth to Pharez with one stroke of strong and splendid passion. Ram will beget Amminadab, Amminadab Nahshon, Nahshon Salmon, Salmon will beget Boaz, Boaz Jesse, Jesse David. Generations will pass. And somebody will invent the wheel and will domesticate wheat and prophesy. Then Avrum ben ha-Rav Kriv will beget the Vulgar of Vilna who will beget Praise of Israel who will beget Unworthy in His Faith May He Live Long. Who saw the light and his eyes were extinguished from sight. Unworthy will beget Secret Charity. Secret Charity will meet the messiah Frank riding on the horse of a knight with a naked woman rabbi. Rebecca Secret Charity will be the daughter and wife of Secret Charity. Her grandchildren will be Joseph Rayna and Rebecca. Rebecca will give birth to Ebenezer. Ebenezer will beget Boaz. Joseph Rayna will beget another hundred sons and daughters. Samuel Lipker's betrayed father, the son of Joseph, will bequeath a diamond in his rectum to Samuel, Boaz will be the adopted son of his grandmother Rebecca and the stepbrother of his father.

Wanderings, hostility, and unimaginably vast expanses of grief filled the life of the Hebrews with yearning. From their place of birth they learned the price of foreignness. They were forced to invent a god and heaven even before they had ground to walk on. That is their ancient curse. Their roots long for the air, their treetops for the ground. Only people who understood heaven before they understood earth could imagine a universe and a creation as punishment or reward. In their flight to their savage pride, out of a passion for vengeance, hatred of domestication and lusts for uncompromising rebellions, they clung to one thing that had no foothold in any reality, to words. They had a language before they had houses, they had a grammar before they had a land, so they could create a future even when they didn't have a past. They created for themselves a creator god who judges the future according to what was. The desert was imprisoned in their soul, the wanderings were their homeland. God was more important than man. With the Hebrews, imagined glory turned into denial of life with unbridled lust for it. An inconceivable yearning was born in them for something even the very old people, who remembered everything that never happened (and invented in exchange a changing past) couldn't formulate explicitly. The times were wild. Tribes and tribes joined forces in ancestral homes. They captured cities and burned them. Desperate ones went to the land whose wine is good, whose women made merry in the vineyards, its villages happy, whose gods were small, nice, and cunning, and they brought with them a jealous and rough God. Thus they learned desire and curiosity instead of learning domestication and obedience. Bereft of annihilated temples, what the Hebrews measured all the time because of the words that couldn't defend their stubborn savagery, was invented time. Hence the torments were necessary. And thus God knew there was a people who created Him. Others had ceremonies that belonged to a place, not to yearnings, God saw the disgrace and laughed. That was the one and only time He laughed. Ever since then He has been indifferent and gloomy. He's still waiting for the beginning of time flowing from its end, there are no more people in the world, there's a black hole in the sky from the place where there was a world and He's waiting. Only five hundred passengers in the spaceship going to the stars of Andromeda remained. It won't get any place, its time is borrowed from a nonexistent clock. It doesn't fit divine time. In the invented past of the Hebrews there were fathers and poets who called themselves prophets. Inventors of sublime words for a people who captured words and were captured by them. The land the Hebrews longed for was hard, lordly, capricious, hating lords, incoercible, loving ephemeral lovers, hating wild lovers who sing her songs of beloveds. The Hebrews had to surrender to their most awful passions to know better than all others how lost wars are won and so they invented defeat as a sign of their life and survival as a code of life. The Hebrews always knew the grief of extremities, therefore they were so stubborn, and with their own hands they created for themselves the instruments that always brought destruction upon them. The wanderings begat Torah and intentions of purity, the laws-the punishment; the punishment was God. From the frying pan into the fire, like splendor. That is how we were born, always to be burned, they said, and the angels heard and wept. Only God remains indifferent. He meets the people on their way from their end to their beginning. How can He grieve at the torments of man if His first encounter with him is after all his descendants have already died? In that walking backward, He has no ethics and He has no sorrow and the anguish alien to Him is left only to them. Fate is not a law of nature. It's inanimate nature. There's a need for that splendid invented past. What they always knew about God was the distance of time they invented and it is the opposite of the imaginary but imperative divine time between their unnecessary universe and the realm of their impossible yearnings. To belong to a place that doesn't belong to you. To serve an indifferent God out of a disappointed passion for His love, I can understand that here in Berlin better than any other place. This is their great contribution to current events. They brought God to armed revolt against the laws of the Milky Way, in their extinction the Hebrews were kings of a proud and invented past, in their flight to the past they laid the foundations of their mass grave.

Tape / -

Ebenezer was born five months after Rebecca Schneerson came to the Land of Israel. He didn't know who his father was. Rebecca Schneerson married Nehemiah Schneerson a year and a month prior to that. Before that her name was Rebecca Sorka.

Tape / -

When Rebecca Sorka, who came to the Land of Israel as Rebecca Schneerson, was born, the sun refused to shine. A Hasid who fled from a city of which nothing remains but a few traces, and who was padded with a blanket of feathers flying in the wind, then sat in a cellar and shouted. Rebecca Sorka was born but she refused to open her eyes. They shook her hard and she started breathing and when she opened her eyes she saw her mother. Her mother looked at her and was scared: on her daughter's lips was such strong contempt she was afraid to raise her to her breast to suckle her. The baby started flowing toward her mother's breast and caught it in her hands, she was strong enough to grab the breast and seek the nipple. Her face was full and more pale than red and a lovely down covered her head. As she suckled her, Rebecca's mother felt, maybe because of the darkness in the room, that the baby refused to suck, that all she wanted was to hold the breast. She was even more frightened, and waited for the sun, but the sun didn't shine that day. The baby fell asleep with her mouth stuck to her mother's breast. She didn't bite it and the midwife touched her forehead and her sweat was cold. Outside, Jews gathered who had stayed in the synagogue and were waiting to return to their destroyed city, and shouted, What a city with no sun! And in the yards when deaf Yossel's rooster crowed, Yossel went to the woods to search for the sun and bring its light, at that time the Hasid who shouted in the cellar died and Rebecca Sorka chirped and a drop of blood appeared on her upper lip. Furious peasants lighted a big fire at the synagogue to appease the cross, and when the fire started spreading, the baby smiled as her eyes stared at the flames capering on the windowpane. That night deaf Yossel slaughtered his rooster and when the fire was finally extinguished the rooster was found safe and sound under the embers of the bonfire the furious peasants had set. An old woman who claimed she remembered the children of Israel wandering from the Promised Land and saw the Temple in its splendor dreamed that from the belly of Leah Sorka came a witch. But Rebecca was too fragile and delicate, according to her father, for them to bring three rabbis to take the demon out of her. A Hasid stood outside at the gate and shouted: Damned reincarnation, damned reincarnation, but at that time everybody was concerned with the rooster that emerged whole from the fire and they forgot Rebecca. Rebecca's father, who had already dreamed of expanding his business outside the district, said: Over my dead body will they bring rabbis to talk about the newborn baby. And Rebecca's mother, who nodded to her husband in compassionate silence, prayed with restrained devotion disturbed only by the sound of the crickets. The crickets that shouldn't have been in the house that day chirped incessantly, and in the morning, when the sun Yossel had sought in the forest decided to return to the city, two scholars brought up the body of the Hasid from the cellar, his face was wrenched in a contortion and under his eyes three holes were seen clearly. The midwife claimed he was crucified. Many thought the holes were such strong pleas that they broke through and erupted and brought upon him the tormented death that bears a hint. After the Hasid was taken out of the cellar, the midwife got up and fled the house.

That night, the tombstone of Rebecca the daughter and wife of Secret Charity cracked, the Rebecca who was the mother of the grandmother of Rebecca Sorka who would come to the Land of Israel on the first day of the twentieth century and be called Rebecca Schneerson. Deaf Yossel, who went to the cemetery with his hands stained with the blood of the rooster he had slaughtered right after they found him safe and sound from the fire, saw the tombstone of Rebecca Secret Charity bending over and straightening up again.

When a crow swooped down on him, he tried to flee but couldn't budge from his place. Yossel, who contemplated Rebecca's birth, understood that the devil came back to lodge in the city and Rebecca Secret Charity accepted the birth of Rebecca Sorka with a blessing. That was the anniversary of a bold struggle remembered by only three men, the struggle between the rabbi of Lody and Rabbi Israel of Koznitz.

The fate of Napoleon Bonaparte at the siege of Moscow then hung in the balance. The rabbi of Lody, nine hundred kilometers from Moscow, feared the secularization of the Jews that would come with the destruction of Moscow, while the rabbi of Koznitz thought the fate of the Jews would be better if Napoleon won. After a bitter struggle between the opponents, the two decided that if neither side overcame, the war would intensify and a bitter fate was in store for the Jews. Hence, the question was not only to bring the war to a quick conclusion, but also which side should lose. On Sunday, the eve of Rosh Hashanah, Rabbi Israel immersed in the ritual bath, prepared himself for prayer, and wanted to get to the blowing of the shofar before the rabbi from Lody started praying. When he put the shofar to his mouth his heart grew faint and he felt that the rabbi of Lody took the blasts from him without taking the shofar from him. And so he shouted: He came before me, snatched the blasts and won! The device of snatching the blasts, brought Napoleon his immediate downfall. The rabbi grew excited in private and at night they said they saw tears wandering around his room seeking to return to his face. Meanwhile, deaf Yossel returned to the city. He told how the tombstone of Rebecca daughter and wife of Secret Charity had gone for a walk; the refugees in the synagogue interrupted and called yearningly to their city and the smell of burning stood in the air and Rebecca Sorka sucked slowly and important things that should have been done were forgotten. Leah Sorka, Rebecca's mother, didn't forget and said, They should have taken the demon out of Rebecca and now it's too late.

Avrum ben ha-Rav Kriv begat the Vulgar of Vilna. The Vulgar begat the Prayer of Israel who begat Isaac Unworthy in His Faith May He Live Long, who saw the fire and his eyes grew dim. Unworthy in His Faith May He Live Long begat Secret Charity. Secret Charity met the messiah Frank riding on a horse with a naked woman rabbi. The messiah carried a torch and coined phrases good for all times. Secret Charity stood at a window on a winter night and saw the messiah get into his daughter's virginal bed. That was after he carried the Torah in a splendid ceremony whose cursed origin is remembered by the old people. In those turbulent years visions were seen as sunsets or rain are seen today. Secret Charity saw the Shekhinah in Exile and his heart broke at the injustice and he wanted to repair. He knew the world had to be purified to fit the letters of the Torah that were created before it was created. Because the messiah Frank converted, Secret Charity understood that messianism was a secret to be hidden and not to be revealed, and that there was an urgent need to be ravished, to confound the world to restore it to its origin. After the death of the convert messiah he stopped the moon for two whole days and the moon didn't set. Profoundly contemptuous of his ability to change the creation without knowing if that was the right way, he married a woman, went into the cellar, and lived buried there his whole life. He performed rituals, made calculations with the letters of the Torah, and discovered that in a certain order the words of the Torah sound like a melody that subdues all grief. From the rabbi of Lody, he learned to snatch shofar blasts and even groans of Jews who didn't know their groans were snatched by him. He decided to tell his fabrications only to himself; that way he could not believe them. Upstairs in his house, his wife sold bread, challahs, and bagels, and refused to admit the existence of her husband. She raised the sixteen children he'd beget in brief but very joyous sorties to her room, and there he also told her about his ravishment in the cellar, about the repairs he made in his solitude, and his children now and then were exiled to the cellar to take part in rituals where they saw their father connecting phrases. Then Secret Charity died full of yearnings for the messiah, and the most beautiful of his daughters was Rebecca Secret Charity whose grave shifted the day Rebecca Sorka was born a hundred years later. And Boaz Schneerson, the grandson and son of Rebecca, eighty years later, when he'll return safe from the war, will shout at his grandmother: Why didn't I die? I could have died, I had no reason to live when my friends died, why did you say Psalms for me all the days of the war and save me? and he hit her.

When Rebecca, the most beautiful of Secret Charity's daughters, was twelve years old and sister to eleven brothers and sisters whose number was to be great, the baker whose wife sang in the room next to the bakery died and the house collapsed on them. Rebecca went to the study house and asked some well-known saints who were steeped in prayer to tie themselves to the incense bowl and rise to heaven with it. They had to do that to challenge the Holy One Blessed Be He, she said, they tried to bribe heaven with anger, not supplication, their tears flow in vain and aren't seen there. Anger had always nested in her and the old men in the study house weren't embarrassed and tried to go back to their prayers. When she stood there her womanly fear was a soft and cunning loveliness and even the saints in their time couldn't resist the temptation and they thought forbidden thoughts about her body rustling with gloomy joy shrouded in dark ancient mold and steeped in passion. Rebecca's mother, who was busy selling challahs and bread and bagels, wanted to rid her daughter of the anger with a quick marriage. After refusing thirty-one fellows, some of whom even fled from her because of her venomous tongue, she saw her mother weeping. Her father had recently died and was buried standing up as he requested in his will, in a Christian-style coffin, and around her sat her fifteen brothers and sisters waiting to be married and she said: There's no point crying. Times were hard and because of concerns for livelihood and fears nobody went out then to pull out messiahs and Rebecca remained alone with signed and unsigned excommunications and declarations, many written by her thirty-one defeated suitors.

One day her mother took her to a distant city and gave her to some childless relatives. The old couple were dying in their room and Rebecca nursed them in their illness, started sewing in their workshop, and when they died, on that day and at that hour, she inherited the house with the little workshop next to it. Sitting in the workshop, Rebecca met one of the descendants of the converted messiah, nobody dared to get close to him even though he had returned to his faith long ago and grew cherries in a distant orchard. Rebecca betrothed herself to him and the city made a fuss. He was a quiet and strong fellow and was called Son of the Prostitute. Two days after the betrothal he vomited blood in the middle of the street and collapsed amid incomprehensible shouts. In death, his face was green and his eyes turned around. Rebecca carried him home on her back, took the washing implements and the shrouds from under the old folks' bed, washed his body, purified it, and wrapped it in a tallith. And then she wanted to marry her fiance. Nobody had heard of marrying a dead man and so they called for Rabbi Kriegel, Rebecca's uncle who went from the Land of Israel to a place called America and stopped on the way to visit his family and was an expert in Jewish customs in Yemen, North Africa and Persia, and Rabbi Kriegel, who would later come to Providence, Rhode Island, brought evidence and proofs and when the marriage canopy was set up in the cemetery the men trembled and the women hid behind the trees and the rabbi stood there, his face grave, and married the son of the prostitute to Rebecca. She broke the glass herself and then said to the rabbi: In exile we married the Shekhinah, said my father, my father your uncle, married, in the cellar, a dead nation to restore her to life, and the people said: Behold, here lives a seamstress whose wedding speech is bewitchingly beautiful and she's a virgin and a widow and a divorcee.

Then Rebecca sold her property and disappeared. Once again these were times of riots, and aside from the singed smell of Jews, thirty-four witches were also burned in the city square. Rebecca stood and looked at the fire. The women's eyes were laughing and when they burned they cursed and shouted, but they weren't afraid. A vindictive cold overflowed from them and singed the fire. What Rebecca saw, as she put it, was divine disobedience, she loved that sight, and felt as if she were looking in the mirror. Rebecca Sorka who came to the Land of Israel as Rebecca Schneerson would know that look inside her and would live with it all her life. Rebecca Secret Charity had curved, rounded cheeks, lips and some mysterious expression stamped in her gold-green eyes. She has a mute and ancient look, said one of the fellows who tried not to think of her body, she inherited that from the place where time was before it was created. In the cemetery she would eat her daily meal with her dead husband and feel close to her father, Secret Charity, with whom she could talk. He'd stand in the coffin and she'd sit on the edge of the grave and converse with him in a whisper.

She didn't stay very long in our city either but took off and opened a sewing shop in a nearby town. She learned to weave and embroider in a form that would match her father's phrases. She captured the melody for which the embroidery could have been a mantle, as if she was wrapping webs of dream on tree trunks. One day a Jew came to the city who was neither young nor old. Around his neck hung a sign that said: "Jew son of Jew, tortured and saved, please help this mute man who saw horror and returned from it," and it was signed by five well-known rabbis. Rebecca saw him walking in the street from the door of her workshop and the Jews read the sign, looked into his eyes where dread was frozen, tried to approach, and he repelled. Rebecca put on one of the wedding gowns she had just finished sewing and went outside with her assistant. Her dress dazzled the man's eyes. He came to her as if some force were drawing him to her. Tears flowed from his eyes and melted immediately. She saw Secret Charity and took pity on her father. The gown she wore was the gown of the daughter of Rabbi Yakub the Mountain. The stranger entered her workshop and the assistant brought him a glass of water. He looked at Rebecca and she felt he saw through her. The rhythm of his movements was like the melody that would bubble up in her when she sewed. Thus she understood that the man knew the melody of the holy books and the combinations of letters he may have inherited from her father. Since he wanted to speak he opened his mouth wide but no sound came out and then he again drank the water he'd been given. Rebecca, who had put on the wedding gown that wasn't hers, said: I'll call you Secret Charity after my father, his memory for a blessing, and the stranger nodded as if to say: that was, is, and will be my name. As a sign of gratitude, he fixed on her a tranquil look whose dread was dimmed for a moment; the look had a boldness that shook the folds of her gown and for the first time in her life she felt her body cling to the gown she was wearing, his look was demanding, soft and without pressure, and she saw his bitter despair, quiet and sure of himself. After they married they moved to our city to be close to her father's grave. She left as Secret Charity and returned as Secret Charity.

On the day she returned the man started speaking. He stood at the grave of Rebecca's father and suddenly words came into his mouth. At first he stammered, then he spoke fluently. Since for many years he hadn't talked, he couldn't tell exactly what had happened to him and after he mourned for the fate of the nation, he started seeing his wife with the same eyes others had seen her and he started longing for her. But he knew how to muffle his longing to intensify the malice and terror she sought in him. She gave him two living children and two dead ones. The two living ones were Rebecca and Joseph de la Rayna. She got special permission to name her daughter after herself, and she named her son Joseph de la Rayna. She wanted her son to be named after a bold sinner. Her son studied fervently with the persecutors of the messiah, refused to think of messianism that still filled hearts with savagery, lusted for the restrictions he imposed on himself and changed his name to Joseph Rayna and after he touched his mother and felt that like everybody else he also saw her as a naked woman, he went to another city, studied with a strict and handsome rabbi who spat whenever the name of those abominations was brought up by one of his students and forbade Joseph to mention his grandfather Secret Charity and his mother. Joseph married a young woman who brought a considerable dowry and a debilitating kidney disease and served as rabbi in a small town where he almost reluctantly inducted young men into the army of the Lord, put sticks in their hands, and even though he knew he was committing a grave sin, made them swear to wage heroic war and also added a formula of miracles he had learned from his rabbi; they had to learn to be defeated heroically, he said, but in his heart he dissented. When he was scolded for the sticks he gave the lads, he claimed he had a dream and in it he was told what to do, and he repented and to the day she died he didn't see his mother who poured into his soul the savage passions he wanted so much to suppress in himself. His wife groaned in her illness, his children were thin and pale, and he'd go to his sister Rebecca, sit with her, hold her hand, and fervently speak evil of his mother and his grandfather and say, Mother's damned sorcery. His sister bore in her heart the memory of the nights when they would adjure angels and devils and call on Satan. Since she was also afraid of his passions, she married a man so short and anonymous she could barely have remembered his name if he hadn't been killed a year later by a group of bored priests when she was in the last months of her pregnancy. She gave birth to a son and sat with her brother who had meanwhile become a widower and asked on what day did Our Rabbi Moses die? When she found out that Moses died on the seventh of Adar, she measured the days and the hours, went to her mother, asked her to sew her a beautiful wedding gown and her mother didn't ask a thing and sat down and sewed her daughter a wedding gown, and on the seventh of Adar at one o'clock in the morning, Rebecca, daughter of Rebecca Secret Charity, died wearing the wedding gown her mother made her and that looked like a shroud more than a gown. Rebecca Secret Charity lived many more years, her husband died as he stood at the window and saw somebody who may have been the messiah Frank whom Rebecca's father once saw at that window riding a horse. Even as she was dying, Rebecca looked as beautiful as in her youth. A thin channel of malice was stretched on her face. She didn't die like other people but became transparent, and one day she smiled to herself, lay down in bed, and died. In her death she looked like a dead butterfly stuck with a pin on white paper. That was a winter day and rain sprayed and her son, who stood next to her, wept, and when he wept people saw the tears stop and stand still in the air between his eyes and the open grave. Jews said they didn't remember such an event since Secret Charity stopped the moon for three whole nights. The tears, said the Jews, looked like wooden birds; both birds and fixed, not moving. From the grave rose a tune. People thought it was the song of the choir of the Temple. Not far from there, Secret Charity was buried standing up. On his tombstone stood a crow, and that's how Secret Charity could have seen his daughter's grave.

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Joseph Rayna grew up and didn't know his forefathers. His father pondered ancient books in secret and his mother was a thin; bright-eyed woman. Joseph was the sort of child you see sometimes at the entrance to Paradise: beautiful children, sorrowful and cruel, who serve as minions of gods who amuse themselves with them. His curls weren't shorn and his eyes were green-gold like the eyes of a demon and wrapped in ovalish ellipses like the rustle of a butterfly's wing.

When he attended heder, the children would make fun of him. He'd fix them with his serene and arrogant look and they'd be awed. Later one of the children said that Joseph had a green halo around his head and sometimes he'd turn himself into glass and you could see through him. But his eyes, said the child, remained opaque with savagery and they penetrated me and I saw dogs and wolves preying on humans on mountains I had never seen in my life.

Afterward Joseph's father moved to the other side of the city. He read ancient writings left by Secret Charity the father of his grandfather, who had to be willingly ravished to bring repair, and he converted.

Joseph's mother, busy with her embarrassing love for her son, followed her husband. Joseph was baptized and given a name nobody remembered anymore. Like his grandfather's father, her husband sat in a cellar and made kiddush secretly to keep the commandments of God in secret. Once when Joseph fell asleep in the park a group of young girls passed by him. They were shaken at the sight of him, stopped and looked at him. He woke up but didn't open his eyes and they couldn't resist the temptation and touched him, they shrieked and fled in panic. He opened his eyes slowly and looked serenely at their panicky running. Some man who stood there and caught them red-handed scolded them, one of the girls who feared the rage of her father, a district officer, said: He tried to play with us, and so a policeman appeared at Joseph's house and took him to prison. In prison Joseph was beaten and the police called him filthy Jew, and asked why did you do that, and he said quietly: I'm not a Jew and I'm not filthy and I didn't do a thing. The police were scared when he talked because he laughed as he spoke while they beat him harshly. His demon's eyes were shrouded in a harsh and indulgent dusk and they were forced to put him in solitary confinement. The girl who told her father the officer the story had a nightmare that night, repented, went to church and confessed, and the priest told her forget everything and say eighteen Ave Marias but she went to her father and told him. Her father, who was a person who had a conscience but also a position in the city, went to the prison and released Joseph. Outside, he slapped Joseph's face and said: I don't know who's lying and who's not, but you get the benefit of the doubt. Joseph looked at the hand that had hit him and said to the district officer: Some day you'll find that hand outside your body and whether there is a God or not, your punishment is already prepared and is found in the air, I see it and it will strike you. The man was stunned, and by the time he finished thinking confused thoughts that ran around in his brain, Joseph left. About a year later his hand was lopped off and then he was afflicted with a serious illness and when he searched for Joseph, he was no longer to be found. Then Joseph started writing his poems.

To get around himself like his grandfather Secret Charity, he wrote the poems in Hebrew, which he remembered from his days in heder. He would illustrate his poems with stylized drawings and his mother would hang them on cords around her bed. His father joined a group of monks who wanted to prepare the Holy Inquisition in the Ukraine and Poland. In those monkish rituals, Joseph's father was tortured with richly imaginative instruments of torture the monks tried to copy from old books brought from Spain two hundred years earlier. He sensed that by that humiliation he woke hidden forces from their slumber. Then the father disappeared and in a letter that came to Joseph's mother two years later the father wrote: Ever since I read Karl Marx, my world has changed. I abandoned the flayers who sell opium to the masses. The future is latent in the class war that will come and in which the working man will defeat the parasites, in the new world there will no longer be the exploiters and the exploited, no Christians, no Jews, no Muslims, but only workers and those who stand in the way of the revolution have to be burned. Yours always. Joseph's mother went on praying to the old gods, but her passion for her son made her feel very guilty and the fact that she didn't yearn for her husband sharpened those feelings and so, to justify her life, she joined a group calling themselves messianic Christians.

One night, Joseph's father appeared in workers' clothing, wearing a cap, and didn't ask to see his son at all. Joseph heard him come in and was filled with yearnings for his father. He put on his favorite clothes and all night long he sat on his bed and waited. He murmured Father! Father! But his father didn't answer. He was too proud to get up and go into his mother's room, he tried to cry but he couldn't. At dawn, he heard his father silently leave the house without telling him good-bye. Joseph buried his face in a bowl, poured cold water on himself, and stayed like that a long time, hardly breathing, and then he sneaked off, changed clothes, and went to his mother. He sat at the table, hit the tablecloth, and said: That man is no longer my father.

Joseph's mother told him that his father was confused, called her "Mezuzah," prayed in an embarrassing way, slept on the rug, didn't approach her, said he didn't remember if he had ever had a son, and looked lost and desperate in his new faith. Joseph said: There is no salvation, all those salvations have different names but all of them are nonsense, this life is what we have, not what doesn't exist. She wanted so much to hug her son but her hands didn't obey her. Afterward, she started bringing home her friends, the drunk old messiahs. They cultivated forbidden love with clamorous and wild lust and the children told Joseph, Your mother's a whore!

Joseph's poems became more and more glorious and the sight of his mother in the arms of old drunks eager to bring the messiah, stirred a strong impulse in him to honor the world with poems devoid of all connection with reality that would describe a nonexistent world. The house began to fill up with birdcages and every night one of the old boyfriends slaughtered one bird.

One moonlit night, for six straight hours Joseph's mother watched a slaughtered bird whose blood froze on the floor of the cage. The cage was gilded and the dead bird's mouth was sunk in a tiny saucer of water. When an old boyfriend came and started taking off his coat, she shifted her eyes from the cage and looked like a woman who had gone mad. The man was startled and threw his coat on the floor. Because he started cursing her, she spat on the coat, when he attacked her his foot hit the gold cage and the water spilled, he tried to steady himself, he touched the head of the bird, stumbled with a kind of swoop because he tried to keep from falling, his head split open and he died on the spot. Joseph came in and saw the chameleon of blood gushing from the old man's mouth. He went back to his room, took off his clothes, and fell asleep. In the morning, he didn't look at his mother. She hadn't budged all night. When she held out her hand to touch him, he started shrieking like a bird. She was very beautiful and pale then, at her feet lay the old man's body. His face was shriveled, his skin was yellowish, and his tongue was coiled outside. His wide-open eyes were gaping in an expression of extinguished amazement. His mother stood up, went to her room, and returned wearing a beautiful dress. Her face was serene but a spark of apostasy flashed in it. She giggled and Joseph saw her madness and thought: a demon entered her, even though he knew that demons don't enter human beings but live in them from birth. She said: Joseph my love, my old father is lying dead, I promised him to marry you off. She drank a little wine, looked at the old man, and said: I'm queen of the Hasmoneans. After they went down to the cellar she asked her son to lie down on his father's sanctification table where he'd perform his mysterious Sabbath rituals. She carefully placed four lit candles at the four corners of the table, looked at Joseph, held her hand out to him, and said: I'm the queen and I marry my lover. Joseph, whose wrath burned for his father, grasped his mother's hand and felt a mighty current of heat passing from her hand to his body. For a moment, the dress looked like a bridal gown and Joseph thought: maybe the moment of my death has come, when she asked, he broke the glass of his father's kiddush wine.

Joseph took the body of the old man wrapped in rags down to the courtyard, put it in a wheelbarrow, and took the corpse to the river. The municipal clerks came and asked him to help burn the cats because the plague was spreading to all parts of the city and the cats, they said, ate the mice the Jews burned in their houses to ward off the epidemic. After the cats were burned, he went down to the cellar and read the writings his father had left, read the "Words of the Days of the Lord" and felt vague but not intangible yearnings for the messiah Frank. He thought about the venom infiltrating his blood, about his mother, about the sorrow of his beauty, about his life, about his father, and thus he found out about Secret Charity and Rebecca Secret Charity. He went to the cemetery and searched for the tombstones. He found the graves of Rebecca and her father close together. He sat for hours and looked at the tombstone on the grave of Rebecca Secret Charity. He heard a tune coming from the grave and without moving he followed the tune and without moving his body he encountered daydreams that led him to realms where he had never been and on the tombstone, Rebecca's face began to be marked. At first the picture of her face was rough but it became clear. He burned a few branches in a pit, turned them into charcoal, and went over Rebecca's features with the charcoal, she looked a lot like him and didn't look like him at all. A painter of amulets came and copied Rebecca's face on paper and then went to his workshop and made Joseph an amulet of the face of Rebecca Secret Charity. And then came a letter from Russia with a curl of his father's hair. His father's will was addressed to his mother. Joseph wasn't mentioned in it. The letter said that Joseph's father plotted against some aged colonel and was sentenced to death. Not to be accused of devotion to a despicable religion, he hadn't said the Shema Israel and refused to accept forgiveness from a priest. When he was hanged, a writer wrote in the letter, he muttered words in Hebrew. He died as a revolutionary, said the letter, even though he was a troublemaking Jew all his life. Joseph went to the rabbi of the city and asked permission to be a Jew again. The rabbi blessed him and Joseph said: In fact, never was I anything, not a Christian, not a Jew, but the rabbi questioned him and received him back in the bosom of Judaism. Joseph's mother went on embroidering new royal gowns for herself that were just as beautiful and splendid as the arrogant words of her son. Joseph was sometimes her son, sometimes her husband, and sometimes an old adulterer who came to have sex with her. She tried to return to the Land of Israel and in her madness she began to recall her childhood there more vividly. She described Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and the Dead Sea to Joseph, and only years later, when he toured the Land of Israel, did he see how precise her description was and how correct were the details she painted and had never seen, and then she began to die and Joseph lay her in bed dressed in a royal gown, brought her hot tea and cookies, lay down next to her a whole night and hugged his trembling, weeping mother, who wanted to return to her homeland, and when she died, there was on her face a smile of bliss that Joseph had never seen there before. And then he wept. For the first time in his life, the handsome lad wept. He found a picture of his father, hung it on the wall, found a whip his father had kept in the cellar against the enemy who would come in the war between Gog and Magog and flogged his father's face until the picture was shredded. Joseph put on a splendid suit, shiny black boots, the black broad-brimmed hat of a Spanish grandee, picked up a short stick, and after arranging his mother's grave, he set out on the road.

In the women he found in his wandering, he sought the image of Rebecca that he wore as an amulet around his neck, but the only thing the women wanted from him was to be impregnated in his honor. When somebody in a tavern in Paris quoted a German philosopher who said that in vengeance and in love, women are more barbarous than men, Joseph said, and in life in general, and thought about the bold and roguish beauty of his great-grandmother.

Tape / -

In those ten years of wandering, Joseph Rayna begat fifty-two sons and daughters. Women saw him (as one woman put it in a letter preserved in the Nazi archive, titled: "Female claims concerning the imaginary virility of individual Hebrews who abused the innocence of Aryan women and bred with them with impure blood (A) Hebrew gestation, (B) contrition of Aryan women, (C) example of Francesca Glauson who delivered her son to the Gestapo in Bonn in 1942 and after the boy died, in an incident that took place in a camp, she described in detail the cunning of Hebrew wooing and taught a class of girls in Haan and later in Hamburg how to escape those and other errors, Heidelberg, 1944") as a harsh and deformed angel noble as beggars can sometimes appear: delicate and sensual. Women, says the letter of that woman, Frau Helma Rauchsfinger, loved the arrogant indulgence of Joseph Rayna, his self-confidence demonstrated in a generous and light manner. By submitting to that man-like other Hebrews-they thought they were fighting sins that wanted so much to be committed and overcoming themselves to be worthy afterward for somebody who would compensate them for all the suffering mixed with tormented joy, a person who would grant them bliss and safety and would wipe away the disgrace they had to experience in their flesh to know it up close. There's nothing like carnal experience to grant a woman what a man can get from abstract thought, maybe, writes Frau Helma Rauchsfinger, a woman can't even think an abstract thought, only abstract hating and loving are allowed both men and women.

When I read that material years later I laughed also because all my lovers were sons of Joseph and also because all my life I had been searching for Joseph and didn't find him and even though I thought he was my father, I was the only person of all the descendents of Joseph who couldn't really have been his son.

Joseph remembered all his offspring and all his women. He loved them no more than they loved him, but he understood their lust for him, just as the flower surely understands that not every butterfly is in love with it, but needs its smell and its pollen.

Joseph treated his women with a chivalry that many people in the late nineteenth century said had disappeared from the world. After wandering in many countries, he came to Denmark. In a fishing village in northern Jutland, where the Baltic Sea and the Atlantic Ocean meet, at different water levels, in a restrained dreary and bewitched light, the most enchanted light he had ever seen, he met a good-looking painter, fair and sickly, she sat in the strong cold, wrapped in a yellow wool shawl that glowed in the distance and painted purple waves where a scarlet hue poured a sense of ancient death and a boat, abandoned by gray-faced sailors who would never return, was bobbing on them. In the enchanted light, the painter looked like a goddess carved from rock. And she said: In that boat sits my brother, who disappears every winter and someday will return. Later on, she told Joseph that her mother brought soil from the Holy Land and her father was buried there, I think, she said, that he was a wandering Jew who came upon Jutland as a youth, and lived his whole life as a Dane but before he died he recalled his origin and asked his family to bury him on the Mount of Olives. She expressed no opinion on the subject and didn't care if her father was a Jew or not. She was a painter and painted the strong light.

As the winter intensified, they wandered to the Netherlands, went to Paris, from there to Italy, sailed to Alexandria and from there to the Land of Israel. Those were good times in Joseph's life. He listened to the painter's story about the paintings she was to paint, loved her exciting asceticism, her lack of lust for him, and her sharp and unique love.

She also feared he would fall in love with her as she loved. Her belly swelled and when they came to Jerusalem, she died in his arms in the seventh month of her pregnancy. Joseph buried her next to her father's grave. Then he toured the Land of Israel and saw the vistas described by his mother who was the last queen of the Hasmonean line. On Mount Tabor, he met a German aristocrat, Adorno von Melchior who wanted to establish a Jewish kingdom in the Land of Israel. When Joseph met Sarah, the wife of the German aristocrat, he felt he was liable to sin against his great love hung around his neck as an amulet. Joseph became the secretary of the aristocrat von Melchior. He wrote his letters in a florid handwriting and the woman he loved almost more than all the women he had met slept like an animal with mustached men who would beat her, Druses in white kaffiyehs with sullen eyes, and she said: I do that to forgive you for your errors, and the aristocrat said: She doesn't sleep with me because she's my wife and she loves me. Joseph understood the profound bond between the two queens he had met in his life, his mother and Sarah the wife of the aristocrat, and when he saw how much she yearned for him, he tried to touch her but she rejected him even though her womb began to stab and she wanted to give him children. After she told him things in that vein, Joseph wrote seventeen poems, each a description of a part of her body he didn't know. In one of the poems he described Frau von Melchior's neck as it looked in the transparent and strong Jerusalem light when her collar fell down and the cleft of her bosom looked like the winding of a beloved snake. The Frau loved the poems and he read them to her standing at perfect and absurd attention. On his travels for von Melchior he met the Jewish Pioneers who were establishing the first settlements. He pitied their hard life and suffered the pain of their enslavement to Baron Rothschild. He liked to feast his eyes on the handsome daughters of the settlers in the burning afternoons of the Land of Israel. They were full of yearnings for their dream from the moment they started building their miserable houses. With gloomy expressions, they tried to celebrate, contracted malaria, and wept.

A year Joseph Rayna stayed in the Land of Israel. He wrote in one of his poems that the discovery of God among the rocks of the wasteland is testimony to the destruction of the nation. He parted from the farmers' daughters who, having no other songs, sang his songs as if they were hymns. He parted from the wife of the German aristocrat who loved him so much she fled for a month to some Druse sheikh who kept her tied to a rock in the mountains of Transjordan. After leaving a bouquet of flowers on the fresh grave of the Danish painter who had carried his son in her womb, he left the Land of Israel, went to Alexandria, wandered to Persia, came to India, and on a gloomy day in the winter of eighteen ninety-eight, he came back to our city. He went to his mother's grave, and then to the grave of Rebecca Secret Charity, the wife and daughter of Secret Charity, and closed himself in a room and wrote elusive songs about the splendid, pedigreed, and desired Land of Israel, and then he was discovered by a group of young people who'd gather in the forest, wave flags in secret, and dream of a settlement in the Land of Israel. In the exhausting cold, around a bonfire, the young people sat and sang songs brought by an emissary. They sang Joseph's songs without knowing it. Nehemiah Schneerson, the leader of the group, met Joseph in the cemetery when he went to say kaddish on his father's grave and invited him to tell his group about the Land of Israel.

In the group of young people craving salvation was one girl, a close friend of Rebecca Sorka who would ascend to the Land of Israel on the first day of the twentieth century and be called Rebecca Schneerson and would be the mother and grandmother of Boaz Schneerson. Joseph looked at Rachel and she trembled at the sight of the gigantic organ that was like a beam between the eyes of the well-born prince who told about the Land of Israel, without emotion or yearnings. Shutting her eyes, Rachel Brin gleaned a little of the light Joseph had taken from his great-grandmother's grave. The light balled up into pain in her womb. When Nehemiah heard Joseph's songs, which he had sung before without paying attention to their words (Joseph read the poems despondently but unashamedly), the blood drained from his face and at that moment Joseph would look at Rachel. Nehemiah was furious at the songs without knowing why. He was a genius in the yeshiva who had disappointed his rabbi, who had expected great things from him. But when Joseph read all his poems and Rachel felt stabbings in her belly, at that very moment, on the other side of the city, at the entrance to the forest, Rebecca Sorka got up, and far from her friend Rachel, whom she had recently abandoned, looked out the window of her room and saw a light glowing in the forest but she didn't see its reflection in the windowpane. In the forest, naked winter trees awaited her. It was evening and she didn't leave her house. These things are the absolute truth. When she woke up in the morning, at the sight of the ceiling above her, she said to herself: My death canopy! In the shadows of the chiaroscuro, in her eyes black dogs were depicted slicing a person's body. The person she didn't know but for some reason she thought she should know him. After she dismissed the maid who came to brush her long delicate hair, she crossed her legs, sat up in bed, and thought about the man she had seen before in her fantasies, which were still too tormenting for her to think about now. So she formulated them to herself with fake indifference and wrote Yeshua, deliverance, on the wall of the stove bulging into her room.

When she came out of her room, she brushed her hair herself in the kitchen over the simmering skillets and pots and when she saw a fish fluttering in the sink she threw her hairbrush to the floor, wrapped herself in a coat, and went out. Her mother's eyes followed her from the window and then the fish was destroyed by a blow that shook the table. Rebecca's mother said to the cook: They've gone crazy, the young people, they just go to America, to the Land of Israel, got no manners, what a world! The cook didn't understand what she meant and so she didn't answer her. Rebecca wandered around aimlessly. The light she saw in the window still distressed her, but guided her steps. Even now, in the stinging cold, she knew precisely how beautiful she was. Her beauty was the source of her yearnings for herself. The taste of the night hadn't yet vanished and Rebecca hugged herself without emotion and her hands shook. She didn't shout because she knew that nobody deserved to hear her shout. Now the wind flew snowflakes to her. The houses flogged by the wind were wrapped in a dull glow of frost from the squashed sun flickering between the heavy weary clouds.

Rebecca took an apple out of her pocket, polished it on the fabric of her coat, and bit into it. The bittersweet apple pleased her. Snowflakes started sticking to her coat, she tasted in her mouth the jaws of the dogs preying on the man of her fantasy. Before getting up in the morning, before she opened her eyes, and as usual she counted the dead children she envisioned, she lost her reflection in the window and saw the dead in the obituaries plucked off the synagogue wall and hung over her bed. The dogs' teeth smelled like perfume. She put the dead children into a gigantic suitcase clasped with leather straps.

The suitcase exploded and eyes burst out of it. The eyes were words plucked from the obituaries, they flew in the room and sought a hold in the paper where they had been written before. The words would stroke her and torture and all the time she would think quickly: How many dead do I really know, and would count the dead and make a list on a scrap of paper and look at the list and say: There were more and I don't remember.

Rebecca spat an apple pip and trembled. A thin layer of ice covered the wooden boards that had been laid next to the houses. People passing by were so wrapped up that only their eyes showed. A carriage harnessed to a pair of horses wrapped in blankets passed by and sprayed mud. When she entered the copse, the top branches of the trees were already touching the shreds of sky sailing quickly under the heavy clouds instead of over them. By the time she climbed up the hill, the charm of the flying sky was extinguished and the air was layers of heavy, hostile gray. An unseen hand played with the sun that was seen flickering now and then, heavy, and immediately extinguished. At the moment of flickering, the top branches of the trees would move in the wind like sparks and she saw that as a sign that everything was crushed and broken and so she could blend more easily into something as hopeless and stupid as she. And then, as if by accident, she came to a river. The river was frozen and white. From the shadows of light she imagined she saw a cow munching snow across the river. Then she understood that those were linden trees. On the bank of the river, she stood still; I'm darling and wicked, she said, threw away the rest of the apple, took hold of the hem of her skirts, and lifted them.

Her naked skin was notched now by a strong burst of wind from the river. The cold was crushing and came with a blow of wind, and stabbed her. She felt a lust she had never known before. The wind ripped into her body, through her groin gaping to it, and she felt the cold penetrate through the veins into her innards, enter her belly, up to her throat and choke her. Her nipples hardened and her body sharpened. Blissful now as never before, she was disgusted with herself, started smiling and the cold changed to downy warmth. And again was sharp as a razor. Her heart beat hard. The stone that had lain on her chest for many days began to melt. I won't have to search for my other half anymore, she said to herself, if I stand in profile, they won't see me. The razor cut her, she put her hand on it and felt the warm blood. She collected the blood in her hand and licked it. Across the river, once again a linden tree disguised as a cow munched snow that now turned black. She felt licentious and wonderful and wanted to marry a woman. Threshold of my violated honor, she said with a splendor just as false as the sudden bliss before that, I'm done with sadness, eighteen useless years old, the blood now flowed from her mouth, not from her groin. Inside her, something refused to pity her and so she felt grateful. The kingdom of naked trees around her was a pierced slave to her, lords of cutting down, glorious in evil, she said. An indifferent aristocratic and frosty wind blew toward her. And then, on the verge of her bloody defeat, she undid her skirts, let them drop, gathered her hair in the kerchief she kept in her pocket, rubbed her hands with ice, put her frozen palms on her face, wiped the blood of her groin from her mouth, and stepped back as if the river were a lord and you couldn't turn your back on him. She thought: nothing can ever again endanger my beauty, and the solitude filled her with joy and the joy created tears that weren't tears of sorrow, they were red in the extinguished and kindled light and they dropped onto the ice.

The tears of blood resurrected a passion in her she didn't remember being in her, to know what would happen to her after the stone in her chest melted.

Rachel Brin came to talk with her. She saw Rebecca light and hovering. Rachel was her only friend. Maybe she pitied her. Later on, Rebecca would say that Rachel was simply a necessary device to be saved at long last from the need to know how unnecessary love is. New winds were blowing in the land then, new books were read, people fled to distant places. The riots left an unprecedented rage. In the attic, Rebecca found books her father had inherited from Secret Charity, his great-grandfather. Rebecca saw the world in translation. But as in translation, she couldn't pity the dead people she collected in her boxes, not even her aunt who died near her. Her grandmother's dying was a poem in a foreign language for her. So she created her own language of syllables and taught it to Rachel Brin. Rachel believed Rebecca that there were enchanted trees and when they'd lie in bed under the obituaries and the words would fly in the room, some ancient anger that Rachel didn't know would slowly pass from Rebecca's body to Rachel's. At the age of seventeen, Rachel Brin was what Rebecca would never be, a love that came from Rebecca's body and disguised itself as a body. So, Joseph Rayna's unborn son burned so much in her. With her good common sense, Rachel understood what others never did: that Rebecca was able to love only a love that others loved for her. What was strong in Rebecca turned dreamy and loving in Rachel. You've got to learn how to stumble in order to triumph, Rebecca told her, but Rachel found in her room only dry tears and wept them for two days. She looked at the tears and saw the beautiful rainbows and couldn't appease Rebecca, and when she started to weep the weeping of Rebecca's world, the letters flew into Rebecca's eyes and she laughed. Rachel was startled and felt a stab of a son in her womb. So, Rachel turned Rebecca's truths into a game, and would help her cut out obituaries just because she didn't understand why she did it. She spoke the language of syllables with her and didn't know why. You have to learn to build yourself a coffin and live in it, said Rebecca, but Rachel thought about beauty and about life. Rebecca learned about her great-grandfather who was buried standing up, she wanted to understand who was Rebecca Secret Charity who bought herself a shroud at the age of fifteen, measured it, and kept it under her bed. Till the day she died, she slept in bed as in a coffin, under the mattress, the shroud, the soap, and the brushes hidden. She prepared her grave and wanted to live in it. Nehemiah Schneerson, whose girlfriend intended to ascend to the Land of Israel, saw Rebecca for the first time when she was gathering obituaries. Nehemiah, the hope of the Gaon Rabbi, then fighting the struggle of the gods against the prophets of Israel who, in his opinion, were bringing disaster and destruction onto the nation. He wanted to ascend to the Land of Israel to restore the kingdom of David and Solomon, to grow Japhets and Boazes and not to cultivate prophets and mourners anymore. Maybe that's why he hated Joseph's embellished songs so much, even though they were filled with freedom and love of the Land of Israel. He loathed the ethics that brought a heavy disaster onto his people. Between Elijah and Ahab, he chose Ahab; between Saul and David, he chose Saul. He was born in the destruction, the prophets prophesied me, he said, I'll prophesy their disgrace, and the old rabbi wept.

So deep was Nehemiah Schneerson's grief for the destruction of Jerusalem that he couldn't understand that what he wept for was the image of Rebecca Sorka tearing down obituaries from the wall of the synagogue. He studied math and engineering and history and prepared himself to extinguish his wrath in decadent exile. When Rachel Brin wanted to join Nehemiah, the boys were embarrassed, but Nehemiah said: We're creating a new nation and woman is part of that creation, no more separation between men and women, together we shall strike the decadent exile. He didn't yet take off his hat, but he did stop wearing ritual fringes. And so Rachel met Joseph Rayna, who came to tell about the Land of Israel. They weren't scared by the stories of malaria and torments. What did scare Nehemiah were the songs, and when Rachel gazed at Joseph Rayna, who decided to drop anchor and stop moving, Nehemiah felt betrayed. That didn't excite Joseph, and when Rachel watched disaster approaching her body, Nehemiah saw songs that poured a cunning sweetness and didn't touch distress. As far as he was concerned, the songs were artificial fire dreamed by the locomotives he saw at the edge of the city. What does a locomotive dream? he asked. Saints weep in cellars, he said, they don't seek a locomotive's dream. And when three hundred Hasids stood on the roofs and shouted "Our God is the Lord," and tried to mediate between the nation of Israel and its Maker, Nehemiah felt betrayed because of the shouting on the roofs and because of the songs and because of the disgraceful beauty of Joseph Rayna, who told more about himself than he told about the Land of Israel. He doesn't belong to her, thought Nehemiah. The shudder in Rachel Brin's body infected Nehemiah and he didn't understand that what he felt was fear. The Land of Israel of the songs looked like a fraud to him. The rattle of Purim noisemakers mustn't be adorned with yearnings. He of course didn't understand then that he was jealous of his wife's lover.

When Nehemiah spoke of the weeping eye of God, Joseph said: I thought you killed God, and Nehemiah thought: Maybe I did, but your songs, he said, they're words about nothing and Joseph said: So what? Why should they be about something? I don't yearn for anything, Nehemiah. And all that time, Nehemiah didn't sense the electricity between Joseph and Rachel Brin. He thought: There's no grace, there's no messiah, there's no real foe, only words and anger. He didn't know those awful words flying in Rebecca Sorka's room and seeking a foothold in a reality they didn't deserve.

Tape / -

Many years later, when Ebenezer sat in Rebecca Schneerson's room at the settlement, after forty years had vanished, he'll tell his mother about what I heard from a dying Jew in Block Forty-six. The dying Jew told me the history of a monk he called "our pauper monk, crown of the gentiles, our noble brother Avidius, man of dreams, flint, and humility." In a letter Avidius wrote to a woman he had loved many years before, and now she was forbidden him, he tried to describe his feelings in the eight years he had sat bound to a stone pillar in the Sinai Desert. He described his torments, his endless gazing at the heat, the wind, the rain, the birds, the desolation, and after five years, he wrote, the silence passed, the flesh passed, leaving delight spinning rustling and unseen webs, both dark and pure. As if the dread were tamed to silk of stones that dropped and melted in the heat and were heavenly dust on the earth disappearing under the stone pillar and throughout the expanse, silence reigned, and love sprouted from the heat and the silence, unbearable, independent love, without flesh or spirit, generous love without slander, a rare touch of a butterfly's legs in a fire that doesn't destroy but flickers, taming sorrow to scan silently the reality you're part of and it is no longer in you, only a prayer prayed by a solitary angel for you and strong and wonderful bliss fills the heart, and Rebecca will then tell Ebenezer: I know, for eight years I wept for Nehemiah, the nonlove I found in the river, and then I came into being without compromise and it's impossible, isn't it, Rebecca will say then, impossible to try to extinguish the force of love in love!

Tape / -

The love Rachel Brin saw in Nehemiah's eyes was alien to her passion and yet like it. She pondered the imbroglio she had come upon and thought, Rebecca is busy rambling after herself and so I'm left alone, I came here as her emissary, Nehemiah is probably thinking of her but saying the words of Joseph, Joseph is looking at me, while I'm giving birth to his sons, maybe Nehemiah hates in Joseph his nonexistent love for Rebecca?

When she walked, she heard steps behind her. The rain that fell earlier had stopped. She felt silence. There was a bridge there and she stopped on it. Joseph approached and clung to her. They started flowing with the ice floes in the river that looked as if they were striking one another and stopped flowing separately. A hot, round ball took shape in her. That was her first kiss, and even though she was trembling, she didn't feel love. She was scared by how much her body longed for the man and how empty her heart was. On her retina she could have described his body to herself through his clothes. Later, they would meet in remote barns or secretly in Joseph's room, at night, and he taught her body to love delicately, but also when they were together they felt that some alien hand was playing with them. When she became pregnant, she went to her sister in the big city. Her sister took her to a doctor. The doctor only confirmed what she knew. She returned to the city and suggested to Joseph to run away. But he said: I've run away enough.

When it became known, Rachel's mother summoned Uncle Zelig, whom the Russians called the Bear, and the Jews called him Secret Glory. Broadshouldered he was, with a mighty body and little eyes like the eyes of a mouse, watery and blue, he lived alone in a distant garden, guarded it, prayed a lot with the few words he knew. For twenty years he served in the Czar's army and it was said that he slaughtered people in the wars and didn't forget whence he came. His niece Rachel he loved more than anything. He came to the city bringing with him a goat that he said was touched by a peacock's feather. The golden fleece will soon be found. The newborn will be named Secret Glory after me, he said, but he went in vain to Joseph's house: Joseph wanted to marry Rachel. The city concocted rumors and everybody accused Rebecca whose grandmother's grandmother was Rebecca Secret Charity. Rabbis wrote bans but when Zelig asked them to stop they did because for a long time Zelig Secret Glory had considerable strength, was simply one of the Just Men. Rachel's parents came out of their quarantine, and a Russian sorcerer brought by Rachel's mother to sprinkle sulfuric acid on the threshold of Joseph Rayna's house looked like a scared vulture, and the house seemed wrapped in flames, but Joseph told them: Why are you acting like fools, I'm marrying Rachel Brin and nobody will stop me especially since there's no need to try to persuade me. When Rachel was with him, she learned to shut her eyes and think she was Rebecca. Now, when there were no more passions left in her, she went to the wedding canopy as the mother of Rebecca's son. Rachel's mother agreed to invite Rebecca to the wedding. Rebecca came with her parents. The house was already humming with people. That was a disaster everybody watched joyfully. Mr. Brin was rich enough to evoke envy. Two days before the wedding drunken Cossacks had beaten two Jews in the street. The police who came six hours later seemed to be searching for hens and beat Jews at random to distinguish between their profound contempt and the Cossacks' enraged drunkenness. In Rachel's house, nineteen of the twenty Klezmers were playing, one of them lay dead in the cemetery. But the celebration couldn't be postponed. Rebecca's father looked at his daughter and said: You're dressed as if you were the bride, and she answered him: Maybe I really am?

Rebecca embroidered her gown with her own hands; her mother envied her. In Rachel's house, brandy, food, and baked goods were served magnanimously, everybody started hugging one another and guests came from far away in carriages and Rebecca looked at her father. When she got her period at the age of fifteen, she thought the blood gushing from her was the blood of her parents, and now that it came out, I'm not anybody's anymore, she said then to herself. She recalled that now, as she walked to Rachel's house. Rebecca's father said: That's nice, what you made, and Mr. Brin wrung his hands and said: They killed the flute player but what, if we wait until they don't kill Jews, we won't be able to get married and there won't be new Jews to kill. Nehemiah stood with his group of lads. When he saw Rebecca he trembled a moment and suddenly understood his anger at Joseph. From far away, Rebecca saw her bridegroom's back. The position of his back was brittle, tense, and yet Rebecca could discern, reluctantly, the nobility and remorse in it. Rachel kissed Rebecca, whom she hadn't seen for a long time, and burst into tears. From far away, Joseph's back was still taut. Rachel tried to say something in the language of syllables, but the syllables flew away from her and she couldn't find them. She was wearing a beautiful and ancient wedding gown whose tassels and fringes were made of gold embroidery. Rebecca asked where the beautiful gown came from and Rachel said that her father found that old gown in the home of a poor sage, who told him that in that wedding gown of Rebecca Secret Charity, the daughter and wife of Secret Charity, Joseph's grandfather, had walked to her wedding canopy. Secret Glory stood next to Rachel's father. To Rebecca his eyes looked like small chameleons. When he looked at her, like many others, he too felt some uneasiness, because he was embarrassed, he started moving here and there and after she looked straight at him, he lowered his eyes and somebody said to him: That's Rivkele, Rachel's friend and Rebecca corrected angrily: Rebecca!

The young people said: An anarchist poet entered the kennel and will bark! And they laughed when Rebecca came back to the room, one of the men looked at her who laughed at Joseph brashly and said: Look, a wild man is tamed! She took out a demon who was with her from the river and waved it at him. He stood still, and the glass of brandy in his hand was emptied without him drinking from it. The fellow looked at the emptied glass and was terrified. Rebecca turned away from him and once again her look was drawn to the taut back of the bridegroom. Rachel's kiss and weeping were additional proof that maybe the river didn't stop for the disaster. The stone came back and lay on her chest. With her kiss, Rachel stuck Joseph to Rebecca's lips. Joseph, who felt the sudden silence, turned around and saw the glass that was emptied and then saw a woman's back slipping out but when he wanted to understand what happened, new guests entered and started hugging him with clumsy wildness. Nehemiah came to him and congratulated him. You're very polite, Mr. Schneerson, said Joseph. Once, Joseph added, I saw a wedding in your Judea, the bride was covered with dust. In your holy books didn't you read about dust? Will love of Zion wipe out the dust? A destruction isn't only demolished palaces, a destruction is also endless misery. Then came a rabbi riding on a donkey. In his modest coat a radish somebody gave him. He smelled of garlic. The bride curtsied in the dust and her eyes were yellow. They threw rice at them. The donkey brayed instead of the musical instruments they didn't have, the canopy was put up in the field. The bridegroom smashed a glass but was afraid to break it for real. I wrote them a song and they still sing it to this day.

Rebecca went to Rachel in the next room. In the mirror, Rachel's mother was seen putting a pin in her hair. Rachel fell into Rebecca's arms and wept again. Rachel said: This is your son, Rebecca! Not mine, we've had a disaster! Rebecca shook her head angrily and said: This is your coffin, Rachel, not mine. He's got fifty-two sons and daughters, said Rachel. He's a pedigreed little god who spawns and begets all over, and Rebecca said: You're a fool, Rachel Brin, you're a foolish and contemptible little girl. Love your husband! What else is left for you to do? And Rachel who was offended, said with a wicked smile taught her by recent months: See what a disaster the emissary from the Land of Israel your Nehemiah has brought on us!

Mine?

Not yours?

Rebecca was amazed at the new strange phrase, but she cherished it in her heart and didn't say a thing.

She mingled with the crowd. Nehemiah tried to fish out her profile. The musicians played with fake gaiety. Rebecca saw a back hugged savagely by uncles and cousins and relatives. Violins ripping. Outside, it started snowing. In the big room there was a sour smell of human beings, and wine and pots of delicacies and flowers. On the wall hung a charity box of Rabbi Meir Ba'al ha-Nes and underneath it was a flowerpot with a bush in it. Rebecca was pushed to the wall and stood with her head next to the box and her legs touching the bush. Now Joseph and Rachel stood close to one another and four men held the wedding canopy over them. One of the men was Nehemiah. When she looked at Joseph, she knew him from her dreams, that was the black man sliced by dogs. As her lover was pledged to Rachel, Rebecca saw the tears Rachel tried constantly to wipe away, and then Joseph noticed Rebecca. He noticed her when the rabbi talked and he put the ring on his bride's finger and said: Behold, you are consecrated to me, and then for the first time in his life, Joseph Rayna fell in love with his grandmother's mother's mother who stood and looked at him now with a gleaming smile on her lips. Because he turned pale, Rachel held him up, she looked here and there, and saw Rebecca. As soon as the ceremony was over, Joseph was cut off from his bride.

Rebecca left the room a few minutes before the end of the ceremony. She passed through various rooms, crossed the kitchen, and went outside. Beyond the paved square stood the old house where she had sat years ago with Rachel and talked about bewitched trees. Outside there was an intense chill and all she wore was a thin dress. She climbed the stairs of the old house and everything was empty except for some old pieces of furni ture and objects tossed here and there. She went into the frozen sewing room and sat at the window. She picked up a few old bags and cloths basted coarsely, reeking of an old summer, and wrapped herself in them. She was warmed a little, but the stone didn't melt in her chest. She put her face against the windowpane and looked outside. Snow fell and a rooster came out, pecked in the snow, and pranced back to his shelter. Clouds touched the chimney of the new house and from the windows you could see the festivity through the mists coming together and parting again, when she looked at the rooster, she recalled how she held Joseph's hand before she was born. When the rooster came out again, Joseph was standing in the door of the room and she didn't even turn her face to him; in advance, she knew every movement he'd make. At that time, Rachel said: Apparently he's scared, he'll come back soon, he's not used to getting married, veteran libertines don't get married every day and everybody laughed and drank and she left the room. Joseph dragged a broken chair and sat down behind her. He took a bottle of vodka out of his pocket and started drinking. Downstairs in the yard Rachel appeared in her bridal gown. Her eyes looked around until she raised them and her look met Rebecca's eyes in the window. Trembling with cold, she hugged her shivering body. For a moment, her look froze, then a painful smile crept over her face, her hair scattered in the wind, her gown was covered with sticky snow, and she turned back to the house.

Joseph Rayna's lips were seared, he couldn't think. All he had left in the world was painted on the amulet around his neck and on the back turned to him. Rachel went into the house, asked the musicians to stop a moment and announced with a choked and giggling laugh that her bridegroom had apparently drunk too much and with all due respect to the guests was already in bed and snoring like a slaughtered bird and please excuse him, and the musicians started playing again and Nehemiah looked into Rachel's eyes and was silent and pale and Rachel went up to her room, shut the door, locked it, lay in her bed and instead of crying, she burst out in a laughter that was quite different from the laughter that choked her before; she laughed so wildly she had to bury her head in the blanket.

In the attic of the old house sat Rebecca Sorka. For one moment she turned her face and looked at the handsome man sitting there. She found a sooty old lantern, Joseph gave her matches, and she lit it. He held out the amulet to her. She looked at it a long time and said: That's me? And he said: Yes. She touched his hand and said: You've got a wife in bed, Joseph, and we're brother and sister. Because she knew Joseph's face so well and he knew her face so well, there was no point talking. When they held hands, they felt the guile of the loving couples who had toiled for generations to permeate the two of them with that longing, destruction, and disgrace, the profound and sublime loathing they felt for themselves. The lamplight moved in the wind winding in the frozen room. Outside the snow went on falling. Rebecca said: Now go to Rachel, tomorrow night I'll wait for you at the bridge.

The next day she waited for him wrapped in a coat. The cold was intense. Rebecca told Joseph about the river. Holding hands and walking along the path covered with blackened snow, they felt that their distress didn't humiliate them enough. I don't want any child from you, Joseph, said Rebecca, why did you come and kill the river for me?

Joseph returned to Rachel, who knew how to accept him with untormented betrayal. And the next day, Joseph and Rebecca went to the small station on the outskirts of the city. Trains would slow down when they passed our town, only one small train a day would stop at the station that didn't even have a name. After the big curve, beyond the poplars, the trains would speed up and fly to unimagined distances that Joseph knew and Rebecca didn't. When Rebecca was a fourteen-year-old girl she saved the son of the stationmaster from being trampled. She didn't mean to save the child. The guard was a drunken lame Ukrainian called Jewish Death. The ant has five noses, said the Ukrainian to Rebecca and Joseph who had come to the station and gone up to the room of the bats, upstairs, and lovers he said, have only one limb. Then he sat in his chair, laughed, and drank his brandy. Joseph and Rebecca sat upstairs and held hands. Downstairs, the slow trains moved and the Ukrainian would bring them cookies and wine. A few days later, Rachel came. She found the two lovers holding hands and looking at one another. To translate the distress of the silence, she moved toward them stunned, hunched up in the pincers of their hands holding one another, and said: What dependence, Rebecca! That silence! And she put her head on Rebecca's lap and stroked her own womb and looked into Joseph's face and her cold heart was calm. Rebecca looked toward Joseph's son in Rachel's womb and thought of the dead children she had packed in the suitcase. Joseph looked at Rachel trying in vain to remember who she was. Rebecca pushed Rachel off her and said to Joseph: If you really love me, give your wife what she deserves, I have to know… Joseph said: I want you, but she laughed in his face, felt Rachel's womb, and said: First be a father of your son, beget him for me, too, and she left. Rachel got up and stood facing him. She said to him: You don't have to pretend anymore, Joseph. But to save something that died in me, at least embrace what you left in me. They hugged and then Rebecca shouted: I've got to see love, and they hugged again and then Joseph saw Rebecca in front of his eyes and was with her. Rebecca stood in the next room in the window bay overlooking the tracks and the avenue of poplars and looked at them. With all her might, she pitied Rachel's love for Joseph, but along with love a profound contempt was anchored in her that had always been embedded in her and now found a correct spelling. She said to herself: an ancient contempt came to me from a distant grave, and then the river laughed in her.

And the city concocted rumors. The mothers of Rachel and Rebecca locked their houses, put down the shutters, sat in Rachel's house, and wept. Together they sent their husbands to the rabbi of the island, delegates went out urgently to sages in other cities, and Nehemiah Schneerson leading his group of youngsters would try not to hear, not to know, to console himself with love of the Land of Israel, and at that time the three would walk in the forest, pick blackberries and red berries, and in an abandoned hut that Rebecca knew from her torments in the forest, Joseph and Rebecca would love in silence, Joseph trying to embrace Rebecca, press her to him, kiss her, and she let him but only a little and Rachel pleads with Rebecca to give Joseph herself and Rebecca despises Rachel and says, Why? Why?

One night, Rebecca's father came into her room and hit her; she slipped away from him and escaped. Rabbis wrote excommunication decrees and Rebecca returned to her hut. Rachel sat outside and Joseph was inside and made a fire of pieces of wood he had previously gathered. Rebecca let him undress her and stood before him naked. The fire enhanced the beauty of her body. She shut her eyes and let him stroke her. She didn't want to see the sight of her body in his eyes. I won't allow any love to confound the high price I set on the beauty I feel, she said. Shutting her eyes she could have been destroyed by gods Joseph said were in another location, and returned to the grave of her disappointments that were always her life itself. I'm part of the night, witches burned in fire, sleep, dreams, the pallbearers of Rebecca Secret Charity, she said, and Joseph was willing to die just to be borne by her, but he was afraid of the lofty words buzzing in his temples. Rebecca knew there wasn't even one corpse who would be ready for love like Joseph. Suddenly she abandoned her body, a wild joy she didn't know except from dreams came to her, Joseph's hands came, his body came close to her, blood started flowing when he came close to her, seasonal blood, she said, seasonal blood, Joseph, and he didn't see a thing, a forbidden woman, said Rebecca. And suddenly a tremor went through Joseph, Rebecca laughed in his face, he saw the laugh, hit her, and she dropped down, laughing, Rachel looked on hypnotized, and the blood still flowed and Rachel thought to herself: Who do I love, Joseph or Rebecca, and she knew that the hatred she felt for them was a kind of irreparable love. So she didn't know who she wanted to kill, and she hugged her son in her womb and called him to herself Secret Glory and Rebecca dreams, despicable in her own eyes, hugged in Joseph's arms, looked into his eyes and he is in her and her blood flows, and she gives birth to dead sons, all of them in her suitcase, and he still doesn't see the blood, and then Rebecca gets up and Joseph is still writhing on the ground, and she says: You're a fool, Joseph, you're the most beautiful man I ever met in my life, you kill you in me, and she started getting dressed. When she was dressed, Rachel came in and Joseph looked at her with the pain of his tormented body. Rebecca looked at Joseph and Rachel and they looked so distant, so threatening in their soft words.

In that longing, she was afraid she'd be a mirror there and see herself. In her eyes, they were so full of a future she didn't want to be in. Such a love mustn't be fostered because it's against all possibility of real disgust, she said and left. Joseph ran after her, pleaded, but Rebecca strode quickly and without turning around. From the windows of the city, frightened faces peeped out and contemptuous looks were hung on her and on Joseph running after her. Rebecca's mother put her head in the oven and Rachel's mother took her out of the oven, poured water on her, called the doctor, and Rebecca's father sat cross-legged and started praying, even though he hadn't prayed for years, and Rebecca walked to Nehemiah's house, and Nehemiah Schneerson's mother was knitting a shawl and looked outside and saw Rebecca knocking on the gate of the house. Nehemiah had dressed ahead of time, as if he were waiting for some sign. A few days before, when he saw Joseph walking around like a blind man, he wanted to mourn and then he went to the forest and vowed revenge against Judea for preventing him from avenging the cursed Exile, and said: In blood and fire Judea fell, in blood and fire Judea will rise, and now, dressed in warrior clothes he stood in the door he opened to Rebecca.

From his mother, Nehemiah inherited the intelligence of the quiet defeated people who fabricate small consolations. Rebecca said: If you want you can marry me, Nehemiah, I'll be your wife all the days of my life, and only yours, but if you don't want to, tell me now.

Later on, she told Nehemiah what had happened to her in the three days since Rachel's wedding. He was silent, sipped the tea his mother served, and his eyes filled with unshed tears. He didn't say a thing. Then they drank wine and the two of them were gripped by some spasm that united them so profoundly they had to embrace. And Rebecca felt peace for the first time in her life. For a moment she loved Joseph with an impossible love and hated him with an impossible hate, and that was the last time she thought about Joseph with that passion and disgust that had filled her from the moment she saw him at Rachel's wedding, and until her grandson Boaz was born she no longer yearned even one minute for the handsome man who was her brother, her cousin, and her only lover. When she felt peace, Nehemiah stopped being afraid of her. She drank wine and began talking gaily, she said: Does my educated lord know why God lays tefillin? Nehemiah looked out the window. In the window Joseph appeared. She said: Because it is written, The Lord hath sworn by his right hand. Does my young lord know that King David, like Joseph Rayna standing there outside, sang a song in his mother's belly? It is written that he sucked from the breasts of his mother and looked at her breasts. Don't blush, lad. And then he started singing. And it's written, Bless the Lord 0 my soul and forget not all his benefits, said Rabbi: that's because he made teats instead of intelligence. Not I, Nehemiah, the rabbis said: That's so he won't look at her groin. Don't blush! Nehemiah, who had almost not listened to her, said: You'll love me Rebecca, and she said: Maybe, maybe. I told you about David because of my violated honor, we'll go to America and start a new life. And Nehemiah said: No, to the Land of Israel, and she thought: We'll go there and from there we'll go to America. She didn't like to argue with him.

Joseph and Rachel asked for compassion, but she banished them. I'll bear the hatred that hates the only love I could have had, she said. There were pogroms then and people hid in their houses and Nehemiah went out with his group to defend the lives of the people and they were forced into exile for fear of the authorities and Rebecca followed him, and after the ransom was paid, people said: Something new happened to the Jews, and Rebecca laughed, it was because of her hatred that those things had come, and then Rebecca and Nehemiah got married with a haste caused by the time and the dread. Hasids again went up to the roofs and shouted to God, Secret Glory died choked by a drunken Cossack who beat up a Jew, and two wrinkled old women died holding onto one another in terror. A house was burned and the smell of its smoke filled the street and a child was thrown into the fire. Only relatives were invited to the wedding of Rebecca and Nehemiah, there were no musicians, people were busy fixing their destroyed houses, and Nehemiah told them: Why fix what will be destroyed again, go to the Land of Israel, and they laughed at him. But Rebecca's father came at night, hugged his daughter, touched Nehemiah's arm, and said: Maybe that's a vision of death, maybe this nation can't be revived, but go and erect a house for me there. Rebecca's mother stood on the side and didn't say a word. Something deep and old rested on her beautiful face. They had to slip out of the city at night. An old carter took them over the border. The new arrest warrant against Nehemiah had been delayed in a tavern where a clever Jew deceived the officials with cheap brandy. The Ukrainian who wanted to reward Rebecca for his melancholy kept the drunk until morning. After wandering a lot, Rebecca and Nehemiah came to the city of Trieste. Rebecca went to the coffinmaker and told him of the coffin she wanted for her husband and the splendid coffin of her husband, when her stomach swelled up, she took with her on the ship. As the distance between her and Joseph grew, she could love him like a shadow blended with who she once was. Now Rebecca Schneerson was taken to the land she didn't want to go to with a fetus in her belly and a husband in a coffin.

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The journey to Jaffa took ten days. The sea was strong, and near Crete, the stairs broke and the sailors stretched ropes along the moldy corridors, and in the crowded halls people lay groaning. Rebecca sat on deck and knitted a scarf. The waves would break at her feet and didn't touch her. A Russian officer, splendidly dressed, brought her a cup of tea and said: For a brave and beautiful lady. She looked through him and saw the breakers stopping at what could have been her steps. Twice a day she would go down to the belly of the ship and sit at her husband's coffin and then would go up and sit on deck. Looking with meticulous indifference at the Christian pilgrims, the Hasids in black caftans, shouting and screeching, and the Pioneers who would recite the moldy poems of Joseph Rayna and long for a place they had never been.

The morning they left Alexandria for Jaffa, the storm stopped. The seagulls danced dances woven of ancient and stylized geometry over the two masts where endless banners in various colors waved in the wind. Rebecca wondered if the seagulls didn't see an ancient Phoenician ship now, and then, as she was stroking her belly, she wanted to sacrifice to the god still remembered only by those eternal birds. But the times of the birds and the times of the passengers were different. The phenomenon of the ship would pass against the eternity of the celestial fabric and the sight only filled her with yearning for another reality, for a place you don't long for and where you don't return. America, discovered by her grandfather's grandfather, Rabbi Kriegel, on his journey from Hebron, was the realm of her dreams when she went to Nehemiah's house and asked him to marry her. She wanted to be reborn. Even though she had never seen Rabbi Kriegel, she remembered him as a disillusioned man who married Rebecca Sweet Charity to her dead fiance. Thinking about America, she understood the Hasids and pilgrims coming to the Land of Israel to visit the graves of the dead, but she couldn't forgive the Pioneers for the insolence fostered in them by yearnings as if that place hadn't died two thousand years ago. The seagulls were an ancient sign that the time of the Phoenicians and the raging gods still existed despite the dreams of the Pioneers. The birds tried to bribe the sky with their satanic and delicate flying but her husband's coffin was launched precisely because of the hidden wisdom of the seagulls. The sea grew calm. Her belly seemed too heavy. The eternal glass of tea brought her by the Russian officer was too sweet and in front of her was the saltiness of the water that almost touched her feet, but stopped just before her. The shore approached. The pilgrims sang excited songs whose words they read in ancient books smelling of dank gray they held in their quaking hands. The Pioneers donned berets, white shirts, and coats. Wrapped in bliss they looked toward the light strewn on the long sandy shore. When the ship dropped anchor opposite the hill of Jaffa, Rebecca folded the scarf she had knitted, straightened up and stood at the ship's railing, and her gigantic belly touched the steel cables. In the distance, boats were seen rowing toward the ship. In the boats sat sailors with thick mustaches and big bodies. The sky was clear and waves struck the sides of the ship that dropped its anchors and hooted. The light was clear but shrouded with a certain stiffness, which even now, on the first of January, in the year nineteen hundred, looked both pungent and clear. Rebecca looked at the hill. She saw mosques and churches, and beyond the mosques and the churches sands stretched to the horizon. A caravan of camels raised clouds of dust and a few distant treetops sweetened the bitterness of the yellow desolation. A smell of lemons and sea salt rose to her nose. She felt no sense of returning home. Never had she felt she had come to a more foreign place.

The sailors carefully put her down into the boat. Then the coffin was brought down and placed next to her. Her swollen belly and her husband in the coffin awed the sailors and they were afraid to look straight into the beautiful face of the woman to whom the Russian officer offered a flower before she was taken down from the ship. She despised their fear of the evil eye but in her heart she appreciated their pretense of indifference. She always loved events devoid of value that were played with too much importance. Someday she would tell Boaz that in the end a state is a flag with a land.

The sailors rowed vigorously toward the port and when she came to the shore, a Turk in a green uniform with a red tarboosh was waiting there, and behind him stood a barefoot Arab lad holding a somewhat torn parasol over the head of his master. The Turk was holding a truncheon in his hand and tried to smile at her. He stood in a vacuum strictly preserved by both Turks and Arabs. Wherever he walked, he was surrounded by that reverential vacuum. Behind him, near the wall of the big mosque, sat Arabs smoking narghilas; not far from them stood skinny horses whinnying and stamping their feet. A gigantic pile of oranges was seen, and behind it, against the background of a small shop, two skinned oxen were hung on hooks. The blood poured down to the ground, but because of the blinding light she didn't see the blood. Her slippery jumping made the Turk under the parasol bend down a bit, and he leaned aside with ostentatious exaggeration. He said in Arabic: A beautiful woman for a dead Jew. The Arabs who couldn't come close to him laughed in the niche of the mosque and one of them laughed and started choking. The smoke of the narghilas flowed into them like snakes. The Turk, maybe he thought they were laughing at him, hit one of the Arabs with his truncheon. The Arab fell, his legs got wound up in each other, and his white tongue twisted out. Two coals sprayed on his dress and somebody crushed a sharp-smelling lemon and put out the sparks. The Arab tried to laugh in his fear but the Turk farted in his face and the Arab swallowed the moldy air, lifted the sole of his foot, showed it to the Turk who was no longer paying attention to him. And he shouted: I'm your sole! And through his lifted foot and the truncheon that very slowly returned from its blow, Rebecca's skirt was visible to the Arab. The Turk withdrew, made room for the beautiful lady, and two barefoot sailors carefully put down Nehemiah's coffin. The Turk said with philosophical restraint, in French: We're born and we die. And he stared at Ebenezer who was still in the sixth month of his gestation.

A Jew in a white suit, and only when he got close did she see how dirty its cuffs were, approached and called the two sailors. From the distance, Rebecca had seen him wiping the sweat from his forehead after he took off the straw hat, and his watery eyes trying to hint something to her. When he started playing with coins he took out of his coat pocket and bouncing them one by one, she caught the lust the coins evoked in the eyes of the sailors and so she could calm down.

The Jew with her concluded the negotiations and approached her. Once again he took off his hat and said: Don't worry, madam, a room is waiting for you, if it can be called that, in a hotel, and tomorrow, the funeral will be held. And Rebecca said: I'm not worried, sir. I'll stay a while and then I'll go to America. The Jew wiped his sweat again, took out a chain of amber beads, played with them a little, and muttered: I don't care where you go, madam, or when. Jews come and Jews go. For me it's the same money. Permission for your husband's coffin is just as expensive as the return ticket you're going to buy from me. He didn't wait for her answer. Then he laughed. His laugh lacked symmetry and so it sounded thoroughly superfluous to her.

Joseph's hands rested like cotton on her body and were wiped out with the passing of his laugh. Now when she felt his sweat, she felt a certain closeness to him, maybe because he wasn't part of the wild vista of Nehemiah's longings either. If you need something, he said, don't hesitate to call me. Mr. Aviyosef Abravanel, everybody knows me! Scion of the house of David. When a kingdom is restored to Israel, after these ragamuffins, my son won't have to stand here and greet ships in corners bearing impending disaster, and his eyes flashed now, his pain changed into bliss. He didn't notice her contemplation or the change in her treatment of him, he was looking at Jews lying near the enclosures, waiting to board the ship depressed and despairing of the land, looking at the Pioneers who just came and who looked too excited and hungry for love of the Land that has no love to give, and he said: They don't know the laws of the exhilarating corruption of these Turks… their savagery, you've got to know how to make that baksheesh look delicate and cunning. When my son is king of Israel, guards will stand here in scarlet and silver, with flashing swords in their hands and the birds will sing verses from the Song of Solomon in Hebrew. The Turk with the truncheon now approached Mr. Aviyosef Abravanel. Mr. Abravanel put the string of amber beads in his pocket, lowered his face a bit, stooped over, and yet-and she saw that clearly-precisely measured his rigidity and the power of his money against the truncheon in the hands of the authorities. The Turk's look was both covetous and wicked. Mr. Abravanel's stoop was measured and the obsequiousness was precise. She didn't imagine how much she would enjoy that, she also felt stabbings in her belly, the pain passed and of all the names that rose in her mind, the last of them was Ebenezer. But Ebenezer was the only name Nehemiah intended for his son. She felt no love for the fetus in her womb. The stabbing belonged to Rachel's belly. The son who was to fill water jars for beautiful women of Bethlehem and to plow the land of his forefathers was only a proper and undesirable pause for her, for the disgrace she had brought on herself with her love for Joseph Rayna and her marriage to Nehemiah, two things, and she knew that well, that shouldn't have happened. Many years later, when she'd sit at the screened window with the flyswatter in her hand, looking joylessly at the almond groves she had cultivated, at her good citrus groves and vineyards, and Ahbed, the grandson or great-grandson of Ahbed, would put the big old fan in front of her and try to turn it on even though the generator was broken, she'd think of Boaz who was both her grandson and her son and would say to herself: How come Boaz, Nehemiah's grandson, would be the spit and image of Joseph Rayna? And the dark plot in her blood would then be poured into the tune that never let go of her, the tune of her secret unknown even to herself.

Moshe Isaac was born in Bukovina. In Poland he married Sarah, daughter of Rabbi Where-the-Wind-Goes-Down. After he moved to Galicia and begat five sons, his last son Jacob was born, and then he died and didn't move the rod even in the wind. Jacob who moved mountains with his eyes that went blind from thirst for salvation begat Joachim the Dane, who went to seek the traces of the Dane who saw the Sambatyon River circumventing the realms of Sabbath, found a wife in Russia, and became enslaved to her compassion for him. His son Sambatyon the Dane begat Nehazia the Dane, who was also called the Genius of Tarnopol, who returned his forefathers to the soil and annulled the observation of the sky not through books. Nehazia married his cousin Miriam, daughter of Elijah, and begat Avrum the tavern owner who taught children, and hid creatures who saw sights they shouldn't have seen and showed them the straight path. From many torments, he died while walking and was buried in a small cemetery where a two-headed cow was later seen. Avrum begat Moshe Isaac who learned a little math, wrote three books, and in his dreams would see a city named Berlin and knew the names of its streets by heart even though he had never been there. He married a wise and modest woman named Leah. Leah raised two daughters who died of typhus and a young son named Nehemiah. Moshe Isaac died young and had time to hear his son Nehemiah learn Talmud. Nehemiah left the faith, taught and studied the Torah of the Land of Israel, married Rebecca the daughter of the great-granddaughter of Secret Charity, husband and father of Rebecca Secret Charity. Nehemiah begat… The ship emitted a long siren and then a short one. The birds circled above the church that looked like cardboard from here. The light was blinding. Ebenezer stabbed the womb of his mother who was looking at the sands of the Land and didn't come to it.

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Rebecca followed Mr. Abravanel's Arabs, who led the coffin on the back of a donkey. Behind her, the sea ended and now she was walking in dark moldy alleys. Niches that may have been shops swarmed with dusky human beings with burning eyes, beyond there the honking of a train was heard whose locomotive tried in vain to bestow an importance on the city but the palm trees had beautiful shapes and thin trunks. Rebecca calculated precisely the delusion in which she followed her man's coffin, and if there was any beauty in the shabby outposts of the ancient east that hysterical women sometimes used to exaggerate and glorify, she knew how to protest that misleading vision with smiling rage. The tears that would later flow from her eyes for eight years in a row were already waiting for her through her eyelashes. The new and ugly hotel was teeming with noisy Jews. Outside vegetables and flowers were sold and the smell of charred meat stood in the air. The fragrance of lemons and the sea only intensified the smell of charred meat revolving on spits as if human beings were being roasted. The coffin was put in her room. After the door closed behind them and the Jew in the white suit arranged everything and even hinted to the Turk who had followed them all the way to wait for him, only then did she calm down. When she decided not to weep yet, her eyelids almost swelled with tears. She went to the coffin and looked outside. She saw houses closing in on her from all sides. She looked here and there, lowered the filthy shade, opened the top of the coffin and Nehemiah got up, stretched, and hugged his wife. He said he would never again lie ten days in a coffin, even if he had to die for it. His face beamed with joy that didn't fade because of what he could see through the window or from the cracks of the coffin. When they looked outside through the transparent and filthy shade, Rebecca and Nehemiah saw two completely different landscapes.

The hotel was in turmoil. Jews who wanted to board the ship honking in the harbor sought buyers for their miserable belongings. Arabs haggled cunningly and the dignitaries among them would spit at every Jew heading for the ship, and Nehemiah, who was watching his wife's face, didn't see the Jewish lords wearing suits and smelling of perfume who came to take care of the new immigrants, to arrange their papers, if they had any, and talked with the Pioneers as if they were recalcitrant children who came to embitter their lives. Nehemiah said to Rebecca: I swear to you, Rebecca, I've come home and I won't leave here. And she, who longed with all her soul to leave here, was too stunned by the solemnity of his words to respond. She thought: I've got his son in my belly, he'll learn. From the window, on the other side of the room, a little square was seen with a carousel spun by a donkey and a camel. An Egyptian dancer in red and bright scarves danced there to the cheers of mustached men who cheered and applauded and thrust money between her breasts. Her eyes were painted, and even from the window they looked bold. The donkey spinning the carousel with the camel stopped, and a man in the uniform of a retired emperor whipped him and cursed in Italian. At night, they put into Nehemiah's coffin the body of the man who died of typhus, Rebecca took from her trunk a black silk dress and a black silk scarf, and the next day she went to the funeral with a sweet expression of modesty steeped with charm on her face.

The tears she had wanted to weep the day before now flowed, cultivated, proper, and foreign to her. They were meant for a man she didn't even know, and another man she didn't even know praised Nehemiah, a cantor recited the prayer for the dead and somebody volunteered to say kaddish. The Turk who stood there all the time and stared at Rebecca wanted them to put up a tombstone immediately. And the tombstone was ready that very day with the engraving: Nehemiah ben Moshe Isaac Schneerson, born in Ukraine in 1880, buried in the Land of Israel in the month of Teveth 5660 (1900). The Love of Zion Burns in his Heart. The Turk asked the translator to translate for him. The translator read: "Nehemiah Schneerson born in Russia in the year eighteen eighty, buried in Palestine in the month of January nineteen hundred. The love of his wife will accompany him." Rebecca whispered to the Jew in the white suit: What is he saying, and he translated for her. She said, Why did he say Russia, and the Jew said: For him, Ashkenazi Jews are born only in Russia, for the Turk it's all the same, anyway he doesn't know where that is. The Turk smiled, received what was coming to him, and left. Later on, what was written would be corrected and the document signed by two rabbis along with the photo of the grave against the background of the Mount of Olives would be sent to the family of the dead man in Aleppo, Syria.

Nehemiah wasn't thrilled by the sight of Mr. Abravanel, who came to talk with him in the locked hotel room about the wretched settlements. An empty suit, he said to Rebecca who made tea and served them. A pleasant wind blew from the sea. Nehemiah wanted to go immediately. Rebecca wasn't thrilled, but the hotel wasn't her heart's delight either and so it was decided to leave the next night. Mr. Abravanel, whose son would rule Israel after those ragamuffins, arranged everything and the next day a cart waited for them at the door of the hotel. Nobody peeped out the windows. The streets were dark. The Turks were already beating one another in their dark rooms. The cold of the night before vanished in a dry chill. A wind blew from the Libyan deserts. A precarious smell of cardamom, raisins, and droppings rose in Rebecca's nose. Nehemiah smelled lemons and honey. The road was deserted and the sky was strewn with stars.

On the day Nehemiah and Rebecca came to Jaffa, the settlements were transferred from Baron Rothschild to the IKA Company. The settlers knew the new company wouldn't soon fire the staff. The carter who brought Nehemiah and Rebecca said: It'll be bad! Everything will go down the drain, and Rebecca asked him what could go down the drain and he didn't answer, but cursed his horses.

Despite the worry, Nehemiah felt a quiet bliss. In the shadows of the mountains in the distance, he saw the sights of his childhood, the carter began singing melodies and one of them was Joseph Rayna's sad song about the rivers of the Land of Israel going to the Temple to ask forgiveness. Nehemiah longed for his wife, touched her belly, and said: That son, let it be mine! And Rebecca, who knew what he wanted to ask, didn't say a thing.

By morning, the jackals' wailing stopped and a clear blue light began filling the world. Nehemiah didn't shut his eyes and Rebecca dozed off. In the distance, as on a saccharine color postcard, the Arab village of Marar was seen, all of it like a beehive. Dogs barked and a smell of droppings and sweet basil rose from the village turned by the sun now rising fast into a kind of ruined ancient city. Later, the heat intensified with the eastern wind from the desert, and a struggle of forces raged between winter and the hot wind and when they passed by some fig trees and sycamores, the sun already blinding their eyes, the settlement emerged in the distance. A few neglected and cracking houses, fleeing, maybe eluding, thought Rebecca, limestone fence trying to unite the houses into one block, a few young trees, and some desolation that wasn't created or dissolved. The heat was heavy now and Rebecca felt dizzy.

Nathan, Nehemiah's old friend, rode up on a white mare and even in the distance he hugged the image of Nehemiah in his empty arms. Nehemiah roared with joy at him. Rebecca was amazed and said: At night he learned to talk with wolves? And the carter said to her, Those are jackals, Madam, not wolves, and she said: Jackals, wolves, same pest. When they came to what Nathan called the center of the settlement and what Rebecca privately called that miserable hole, the sun was beating down with its full force. Near the synagogue, whose second story was still under construction, stood the miserable-looking men who were trying in vain to stand proudly. Nathan, who used to sit with Nehemiah in the forest and was his teacher before he ascended to the Land of Israel four years earlier, was wearing a dusty beret and his face was seared by the sun. He hugged Nehemiah, looked at Rebecca, and a forgotten smile rose up and crept over his lips. The people whose clothes looked to Rebecca as if they belonged to another climate surrounded them, there was great excitement, for some reason everybody thought that what had been broken in those years would be fixed with Nehemiah's coming, that his good sense and integrity were a hope they had cherished for days and nights. They said: Everything here is sold to the Baron, but we won't be dependent on his charity. Nehemiah smiled, some of the men he knew, others he knew only by rumor, their letters he had read several times, moldy water flowed along the ditch where they stood, Nehemiah thought of Abner ben-Ner and his heroes, and saw Arab children, barefoot, splashing in the moldy water, dragging piles of straw on their backs. A pesky buzzing of flies struck his ears but he tried not to hear. Nathan said: Soon our community will be blessed, and riots of agreement rose from mouths that were parts of faces that tried to adorn the moment with a smile that was stuck years ago to old valises. The young vineyards, crests of trees that were planted, and the limestone wall touching the houses, everything made Rebecca clearly suspicious. Nathan took off his shoes, looked at his old friend, and in the blinding light that had no corners, no ends, struck by a hot wind sharp as a razor, he started dancing with his arms spread out to the sides, and everybody stood as if they were turned to stone. The carter unhitched his horses and gave them something to chew from the crib, and Nathan, (very) isolated now, danced with a slow, hesitant movement as if he were groping in an invisible space, with his eyes shut, with great devotion, and Nehemiah put his coat on the ground, took off his shoes, too, and with the devotion of Hasids standing on the roof and yelling The Lord is God, he hugged Nathan and together they danced while everybody looked at them without budging.

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Then the things were taken off the wagon and moved to the house that had stood empty ever since the death of the woman nobody had known and by the time they tried to ask her she was unconscious and died. She was buried in the nearby settlement because the idea of death could still be fought and a cemetery of Pioneers looked like a superfluous demonstration of failure. The ruined house was moldy and in the middle of the combined kitchen-bedroom lay a dead dog. Rebecca tried to fix the house and Nehemiah to tile the roof with the help of his friends. The smell of the dead dog remained there a long time. At night, all the men crowded onto the roof, held a bottle of wine they drank because of the sudden cold that replaced the hot wind, and to the sound of monotonous, quiet singing, they finished the roof Nehemiah tried to tile. The Turks who slept in their tent next to the settlement came at dawn with the dogs but the roof was done. Furiously, they tore down some vines, lit a bonfire, and made coffee. When the coffee was ready, one of the Turks poured coffee on his friend. His friend got up and shot him. The corpse lay there with gaping eyes. Rebecca passed by with her swollen belly and saw the dead man. Suddenly she recalled the smell in the ruin and thought, Is that smell the smell of a dog? Then, she said to herself: Now I know who the dead woman was. She hurried to the cart standing there, asked the driver to take her to the nearby settlement, came there about an hour later, went to the Baron's official who was sitting there with a young girl on his lap and listening to music played for him by two pale little girls dressed in white, on flutes, and she said: The name of the woman you buried here was Jane Doe. The official saw before him a splendid woman filled with a fetus, lusted for her but was also disgusted by her, and he said: Who's the woman? And Rebecca said, She lived in an orchard near our city, she was crazy and saw visions, her father was a cobbler who was murdered by rioters, she saw her mother turned into ashes, please write her name on the tombstone, and then she returned to the settlement and with a fluttering heart she wondered why she had done what she did. A jackal who fell in love with one of the bitches who came with the Turks wailed at Rebecca's house, she blocked her ears and tried to return to the river and there was nothing around her but desert and jackals and a smell of Turks and the blood of one Turk still close to the maw of the jackal who had approached the blood and sniffed it eagerly. The yard was full of thistles and thorns and in the summer the snakes would come rustle among the stones. The rain came down and the wind broke the roof tiles. Rebecca said to Nehemiah: Look at the limestone wall of the settlement, you've built a ghetto here. And Nehemiah twisted his face, which was already seared by the sun and was sad like the faces of his comrades and wrinkles were beginning to be plowed on his forehead, and he said: We need a defense, Rebecca, the Land isn't ours yet. And she said: And it won't be, and she turned her face and went to the yard and dug a pit and didn't know why she dug a pit. In the morning, Nehemiah came out and saw the pit, deepened it and said: I'm building an outhouse. He didn't know how to pull up crabgrass any better than to dig a pit. The outhouse he put up collapsed in the first rain. The crabgrass covered the vegetables he planted. The vineyard he was given was the property of IKA. In the summer the grapes would be taken away from him and he would get only a partial payment. Then Nehemiah thought of citrus fruits. The members heard that Nehemiah had an important idea and wanted to assemble, but the synagogue wasn't finished and the members said: How can we live here without a cultural center? They went to one of the abandoned huts and fixed it up and the next night, they called it the "Community Center." They assembled in the "Community Center" and even Rebecca, who was in the last week of her pregnancy, came. Nehemiah talked about citrus fruits, how it would be possible to grow them and market them, how it would be possible to be independent of IKA and the Baron. Nathan and his friend Horowitz went to Jaffa, bought saplings, returned, and planted the first citrus grove, but a deluge came nonstop for three days and three nights and the saplings were crushed and destroyed.