The Last Jew

When Rebecca felt the labor pains approaching, she went to Jaffa. A few hours after she came, Ebenezer was born. It was a warm day in early spring and a few days later, Nehemiah came, his face was joyful. He looked at his son, the first son of the settlement, looked at Rebecca and saw her chilly smile and looked at his son again. Doctor Hisin refused to let him hold his baby, but when he looked at his son, he perceived, not how much he looked like him, since the infant didn't yet look like anybody, but how much the baby didn't look like Joseph. He examined every centimeter in his baby's face and was then appeased, kissed Rebecca, and said to her: Suckle the young lion, Rebecca, and she shut her eyes, picked up the infant, and reluctantly began suckling it.

About a month later, her milk was still flowing but her heart was cold. She was returned to the settlement on Saturday night and the next day, the rabbi was brought from the nearby settlement and circumcised Ebenezer Schneerson, and Rebecca stood there and watched the rite of circumcision as if they were circumcising a stranger's child. And around Ebenezer, the first in Judea, stood barefoot houses charred by the beating sun. Rebecca hadn't imagined such a shrill light. She searched for corners of shade and found a baby running around between her legs. Nehemiah's sublime ideas didn't withstand malaria, typhus, and robbers. Heat waves would blaze and the hot wind plowed furrows in the ground that hadn't been worked for hundreds of years. The water was drawn from a nearby well, and when the well was destroyed more wells had to be dug. Trees born beautiful and green looked withered and weary. Rebecca observed her son, her house, and began weeping the tears that had stood behind her eyelashes the day she came to the Land of Israel. Eight years, Rebecca wept nonstop. A very little bit of the ardor of Nehemiah's speech clung to his acts. The house he built listed to the side, the nails would come out on the other side of the wall, the saplings were never planted in time and were never trimmed in time, the water came late to the ditches he didn't know how to dig properly.

The Baron's official, smelling of eau de cologne and wearing charming clothes, came with the Arab workers and the workers uprooted what was left of the citrus fruits. Instead they planted more vineyards. For some time, the synagogue turned into the official's residence. Little girls from distant settlements played a piano there that had been brought on a cart and the playing filled the broad street of the night with a dull melancholy. The flies multiplied feverishly, the pipes rusted, the roofs didn't stand in the wind, two girls from the Galilee went to live with the official in the synagogue and didn't come out of the house for a week. Drunken shrieks were heard even in the distant fields. One night, a flock of vultures was seen waiting for corpses. People were scared and started praying, but there was nowhere to do it. They prayed in the street, in the field, on the carts, in the barns where the cows refused to give enough milk. Nathan went outside and yelled: Not yet, not yet, and Nehemiah went to drive the vultures away with a stick he had cut from a hollow old fig tree that collapsed and died. The vultures didn't flee. Every morning, one of the farmers had to clean the house of the official who kept spitting black watermelon seeds all over. At night, the men gathered and Nehemiah persuaded them to rebel against the official and throw him out. The official discovered that Nehemiah was fomenting a rebellion and incited the farmers against him. At night, Nehemiah was called to the official's house to clean the latrine. Nehemiah refused to go. He was ordered to leave the settlement. Everything was mortgaged and he had no grounds to claim his plot of land. The Arab police came with the Turkish modir and the white-clad official accompanied them. He tried to smile in French. The Turk was hypnotized by the splendid French and kissed him on the mouth. One of his choked girls groaned, Rebecca laughed through her tears and went into the house, looked around, and said: This isn't our house, Ebenezer. Nehemiah and Rebecca packed their belongings, the members stood ashamed but didn't lift a finger. Anybody who dared help Nehemiah could expect to be expelled. At that time, Nathan was in the nearby settlement in the middle of an argument with the local rabbi about the year of shemittah when the land must remain uncultivated and the pointlessness of following its commandments. Nehemiah walked with his belongings to the edge of the settlement and at the collapsed dead hollow fig tree, he built a hut. Nehemiah called the hut Secret Glory after the son of Rachel Brin, and only later on, when the haggling was over and the official dismissed, did Nehemiah return to his house and Secret Glory was forgotten and turned into an area overlooking the path of the cemetery, where the first members of the settlement who died were buried, even though the first dead woman was buried in the nearby settlement, but then Nathan still fought the idea that death could live with the builders of the new Land of Israel. Rebecca went on weeping and in her mind's eye she saw the splendid carts of America and a future full of baskets of flowers and American officials equal to her beauty. Her tears didn't stop even when Nehemiah drove away the vultures, and their improved house was nicer this time and Ebenezer started crawling on its floor.

At that time, a new official came who was more audacious than his predecessor, didn't spend time with young girls, but hated what he called those ignorant farmers with a blind hatred. He had big plans to bring ships up to Jerusalem to ram its wall and make it a big and fine open city, but nobody heeded his ideas. He came to the Land because he heard songs of a man who would sing in the cabarets of Jewish intellectuals in Poland and his name was Joseph Rayna. In Ha-Tsefira he read that the Crusaders had brought a ship up from Jaffa to Jerusalem and used it to ram the wall, he also read in a Russian newspaper that Jesus was then seen on the Mount of Olives, and after a week-long procession around the city, the wall fell. The official hired fifty Arabs who tried to bring a rotting Greek ship up from Ashkelon to Jaffa and from there to Jerusalem, but in Ramle, the Arabs ran away and because he was left without a ship and without employment, he was sent to the settlement that embittered the lives of the officials. He was chosen for that purpose by an official who met his orphaned comrade on his way from Jerusalem to Jaffa. He was so bored by the monotony of the road that he refused to look at it. The official heard Nehemiah lecturing at the community center on the citrus fruit that was to make the place flourish and discovered that, in litigation over the land of his hut, differences of opinion were revealed in favor of the Turkish side. He brought police from the splendid house of the Kamikam in Wadi Hanin and arrested Rebecca and Nehemiah and a few other people, put them in handcuffs, and took them to Ramle. Three Arab mukhtars, who had previously received a decent bribe, swore honestly that Rebecca Schneerson had whored with them in the fields near Hakhnazarea. The Arab mukhtars, who received a decent gift from a Sephardi Jew from Jaffa, who was urgently brought in a wagon hitched to four horses along with a drunk old German doctor named Dr. Kahn, tried to change their testimony, but were beaten in the courthouse and testified again what they had testified before. Rebecca looked straight at them, stopped weeping, sharpened her beauty, and they were filled with a fear that chained their body and they felt they couldn't move. Then, they opened their mouth and, in the eyes of the witch, they said: We were wrong, kill us, but we were wrong, that woman didn't whore with anybody, we lied. The big governor who came from Jerusalem didn't want to roil the waves and acquitted Rebecca. The Arabs were afraid but he also acquitted them. He delivered a venomous speech, but since he was tired and weary from a pleasant leave in Beirut, he delivered his speech in blunt words but with eyes shut with fatigue. He said that Zionism is a crime, that the Jews want to banish the masters of the Land, and why all of a sudden did they come to a land that wasn't theirs? Did they decide to crucify messiahs here again? he asked. Since most of those in attendance had no idea that the Jews had ever crucified messiahs they looked at the governor's moving lips with vague awe. The Jews, he said, were a superfluous people, wherever they were they caused trouble and wanted to start a world revolution. They are ruled by the El ders of Zion who sit in a secret house in Jerusalem and direct the world. They want to rule the whole globe, he said, and Rebecca woke him from his fantasies and said: Maybe the whole cosmos, but since he didn't understand the word and was very tired, he laughed. And when the governor laughs, all the Turks laugh too. Before he left, the governor told Rebecca: After all, that Jesus was also one of yours, and only Mohammed came in the desert and not from some hole of a Jewess. But then a rich man from the Jaffa center arrived with a Turkish modir, whose bribe amounted to a fortune and the matter was settled, and Nehemiah's lands were returned to him and he built a hut on the land, and the house that remained empty was turned into a chicken coop that Rebecca fixed up afterward.

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To bring order into things, a famous tea agent was brought who would write fiery articles about Zionism as a spiritual center. And the wise old man, who was the first Jew who saw Arabs in the Land, wrote a fiery article and for the first time since Nehemiah killed prophets in his room at night, he hit a beloved and admired person. The matter was forgiven. People said that Nehemiah suffered enough when he saw foreigners vilifying his wife, who hadn't stopped weeping. A Jew from the committee argued with the agent and the official who wanted to bring a ship up to Jerusalem. They stood next to the well the official had taken for himself and distributed its water according to his own malice. He stood there wearing an officer's uniform unidentified with any known plan, a woman held a parasol over his head, but the argument ended to everybody's satisfaction. The water was transferred to the authority of the committee, the house was sold, and Nehemiah won the official tenancy of his house. One youth slaughtered himself at the well in torments of malaria. Those who came to his funeral were arrested and taken in handcuffs to Ramle. Rebecca saw a Turkish shavish approaching her as she went to visit Nehemiah, who was one of those arrested. After a hefty ransom was paid, they were all released. Rebecca didn't forgive the shavish who looked at her and lusted for her. When he approached her in the garden of the Russian church and tried to lift her onto the mare, she kicked him. He chased her to her house in the settlement. At the house Rebecca shot the mare and the shavish thought he had been shot himself and lay on the ground a whole day without moving. The fellow who slaughtered himself lay dead in the community center, and the men decided to cancel the excommunication of Rabbi Nathan and mark the plot of Secret Glory as a cemetery for the settlement. Horowitz said: If Yashka died (that fellow who committed suicide), we're all liable to die and it's impossible to bury everybody in another settlement, since we can't have one settlement all for the living and another all for the dead. And after they dug the first grave, they put a fence around the plot. Nehemiah delivered an excited speech about the torments brought by the purification of salvation and resurrection. Excited by Nehemiah's impressive words, the men sat and argued what to call the cemetery. The names "House of the Eternal" and "Cemetery" and "House of the Next World" didn't appeal to them. Nehemiah thought there was no need to give it a name. It's enough that we know, he said, that we'll be buried there. But Jews yelled and somebody suggested calling the place "Roots." Nehemiah said: Absolutely not. Anybody who calls his first cemetery "Roots" calls the Jewish state that will rise here "Hill of Graves" and that's forbidden. But his words fell on deaf ears and the name remained.

The official left one day and didn't come back. The synagogue was renovated and was once again a place for prayer. The citrus fruits were also planted and flourished. The new authority was more enlightened. The Turks were busy with the Young Turks' revolution and were bound by secret letters that would come in the middle of the night from anonymous and veiled emissaries. Nehemiah again gave speeches in the community center and in Roots. Rebecca didn't stop weeping, and between her and Nehemiah grew Ebenezer. The Turks, who were waiting for the end of the revolution, said: The Jews will kill each other all by themselves and that will save us gallows and expensive bullets. From pogroms we came, Rebecca told Ebenezer, who didn't yet understand the meaning of the words, and to pogroms we shall return. Between the speeches, Nehemiah had to fertilize, chop, plow, and sow. He was delicate and fragile. The climate of the Land was hard for him, and he struggled with it in a silence produced by a lover's envy. The farmers did win a certain freedom but still felt like slaves. In Nehemiah's house, Rebecca's depressed spirit prevailed and a foolish child got underfoot. The drought that year was worse than the last year and some of the new citrus groves died, but in the winter the new saplings that had been planted grew as high as a child and the rain came in time and then came the Bedouins and started grazing their flocks on the young saplings. When the farmers resisted the Bedouins, they attacked at night. The Arab guard ran away and appeared the next day accompanied by Turkish police and asked for the money he was owed. Within a few days, the area was devoured by the black goats. The carts that went to the distant fields were attacked by the friends of the guard who didn't get his gold, even though the Turks got what was coming to them to ignore the place. One day the young farmers hid in the cart, with sticks in their hands, covered themselves with straw and sacks, and when they were attacked by the Bedouins, they burst out of the cart, about twenty of them, and beat the Bedouins roundly. The next day, Nehemiah made a long speech into the night: our force is our reply, he said, blow for blow.

A young Arab woman from the village of Marar cooked and laundered in Nehemiah's house. His fields flourished because of the help of his experienced friend Nathan. He now had a small dairy, a chicken coop, a vegetable garden, there was a quarry whose profits the farmers shared. In the nearby settlement bigger houses were built. The women played piano. The men drank tea or coffee and smoked cigarettes. The officials vanished, replaced by various committees and representatives of institutions. In the Jerusalem newspaper with a circulation of five thousand readers, they called the nearby settlement Little Paris. At night the girls sang a Puccini opera and an eminent man from Poland applauded so enthusiastically that everybody refused to join him for fear of offending him. He contributed money to the settlers to buy gramophones. The disease of music increased the appetite of the cows the Arabs milked in the nearby barns. Nehemiah's comrades, who heard him talk about the new "Hellenizers" in the nearby settlement, envied the inhabitants of the settlement and the delightful girls in splendid clothes and secretly brought fine fabrics from Jaffa, gorgeous abbiyas from Damascus, silk from Tadmor, carpets from Aleppo, and kerosene lamps from Gaza, and the mosquitoes, said Nehemiah contemptuously, now had to stick to choice silk, because they didn't like the sacks anymore. There were more Arab settlers who came from Egypt to spread rumors of the Jews' gold. As the way became harder, Nehemiah's love for that Land grew greater. Logic and facts of life had no place in his considerations. He grew roots at an alarming rate, and Nehemiah would give speeches that were not forgotten many years later. He would swallow quinine against malaria and see visions: behold, Rebecca stopped weeping and is bringing up an ancient Hebrew shepherd for him. Every week he would examine Ebenezer to be sure he didn't look like Joseph. Rachel Brin, who went to America with her son Secret Glory, wrote Rebecca a long remorseful letter. She told that she had divorced, married a shirt dealer from Long Island, moved to a place called Connecticut, and Secret Glory, now called Lionel, would go to an American school next year. Rebecca wept more bitterly when she read the letter and then she crumpled it up and rubbed her son's face in it.

Ebenezer didn't understand what was said to him. Because of the Hebrew, the Yiddish, and the Arabic that were spoken in the house, he seemed to doubt whether there really was any language that suited him and was silent in all three languages.

One night Nathan was arrested and nobody knew why. Nehemiah defended him and later, when he came back home, Rebecca had to take care of him. He said: Kiss your son, and she said: In America love your son, Nehemiah, and then Horowitz's brother returned from some distant village where they grew silkworms, and when he tried to interest Nehemiah in the big silk production that could be developed here with the ancient mulberry trees in the grove near the big cave, he was bitten by a sneaky snake and died, and then Nehemiah spoke in Roots about silk production. Rosy dreams of those who buy damascene silk, he said, and even spoke again about distress and hope, but because of Rebecca they expelled him and because of Ebenezer they pitied him and the child who grew up without a language would wallow in the fields, murmuring vague words that weren't like a human language, and Nehemiah kept fading while his love for his son grew with Rebecca's tears. An Arab woman raised his son. A screen of tears separated him and Rebecca. Nehemiah, who now spoke of a Jewish church and of masses of Jews coming on big ships, had to see his son grow up like an Arab dog with a cropped tail and mute. And then new Pioneers came to the settlement, whose coming Nehemiah wished for. They were quarried from a different rock, strong, desperate, and focused in their belief. They established two labor parties, and sought positions for their war. Since the only capitalist they could find who was even willing to wrestle with them was Nehemiah Schneerson, they went to foment the revolution in front of his house. Since they believed that the future was in their pocket, their obstinacy was dismal and deadly serious. In their eyes the Arab woman who worked in Nehemiah's yard was an exploited proletarian. When they yelled at his house: "Death to capitalism," "Long live the world revolution," and "Long live Hebrew labor," he came out to them in his tattered clothes, tried to stir yearnings in them for what he yearned for, and they thought he was trying to divert them from their righteous opinion. Rebecca, who never looked at them, had to drive them away because her Arab woman wanted to sleep, and in the nearby settlement a woman still stood with a parasol, but the official who had been under the parasol had gone. And the laborers tried to engage the Arab woman in conversation and explain to her in excited Russian how exploited she was.

When he went into first grade, Ebenezer was the worst student in the class. He refused to read and was bored with the books his father read him with desperate assiduousness. He'd chomp on vine leaves and gaze at the trees and fields for a long time and find a small measure of solace in them. Only when he started playing with the logs in the yard did the desolation vanish from his face. Then he started carving. He was eight years old. He carved a bird and suddenly he was quiet and happy. He learned to carve human faces and birds before he knew how to write the words bird and man. The Hebrew hero who would grow here on his native land found tranquility. He'll be a carpenter like that fool from Jaffa, said Rebecca between one tear and another.

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One night, after Ebenezer sat all day in the yard and carved a bird and sang, Nehemiah thought: Maybe my whole life was a mistake, Rebecca is weeping, my son is carving birds and can't tell the difference between see and sea. He put on his clothes, went outside, saw his son bent over a piece of wood, kissed him, hitched up a cart, and went to Jaffa. There he bought a plow and returned in the morning. Two laborers arguing fervently about Plekhanov's theory were sitting in his yard and eating grapes. Rebecca sat in a chair and tears covered her like a curtain. Nehemiah was covered with warts and sunburned and his hands were suddenly weak. Ebenezer was sleeping with his mouth gaping and looked like a bird he had carved the day before. Nehemiah walked in the fields and a full moon was hung in the sky and an intoxicating aroma of citrus blossoms filled him, he saw his mare and stroked her and let her gallop home and went on walking along the hedges of prickly pears and acacias. Suddenly he heard a rustling, saw his friend Nathan dressed in tatters and looking like a madman. In his hand he held a bottle of wine, which he offered to Nehemiah. Nathan was distraught, his mouth sprayed foam, and when he tried to talk he couldn't. Nehemiah didn't know what to do with the bottle in his hands and so he started drinking from it. When he drank he started thinking of Joseph Rayna, his songs, his hatred for him even before he knew who Rebecca was, he thought of the fifty-two sons Joseph begat with women he chanced upon. He thought about his love for Rebecca and more than he understood it, he felt for her that feeling like the beloved moth in the kerosene lamp. He thought he was thinking of Joseph out of loathing, but he also felt some admiration of a man betrayed and despised. Rebecca will never be mine here, he said to himself, this land is foreign to her and as long as they sing Joseph's songs here, she'll remain the lover of that noble pampered rogue and because of that I'll never be able to let her leave me, he said, and he understood the labyrinth of his torments as a circle with no exit.

Some time later, Nathan managed to say something that had been swallowed in his mouth a long time. He vilified himself, the settlement, Ebenezer, Rebecca, Nehemiah, the Zionist Committee, the Lovers of Zion, the new laborers, he looked at Nehemiah as if he had only now discovered him, kissed his face and vanished into the night. Nehemiah returned home. Rebecca stood tied to the mare, alarm on her face. When she saw him she went back to weeping the tears that had previously stopped on her cheeks. He went down on his knees and told her how much he loved her. He grabbed her by the waist, dragged her home with a force she didn't know was in him and she yelled: I thought you went to America without me! And then he locked the door and lay with her furiously, and the delicate man who was Nehemiah saw hostility in Rebecca's eyes, got up and started beating her and from her tears she burst out laughing. But she also loved the suddenly strong hands and his desperate embrace and they lay together in silence and he stroked her and penetrated her like preservative and kindled in her some spark of children she had once buried in suitcases. Afterward, he sat naked and asked forgiveness and she said: In love there is no forgiveness, Nehemiah, I'm yours, and that's it, just let's leave here, and she stroked his face and kissed him and then they lay like two young people who didn't know what love was and talked and Nehemiah said to Rebecca: Our strange child, I love. And she said: Maybe you'll tell him, and Nehemiah said he couldn't. And she remembered how Joseph Rayna waited for his father who didn't come and in her heart she wept for the awful days in store for her son she couldn't love and her husband couldn't understand and couldn't get up and tell him how much he loved him. After he fell asleep, Rebecca looked at him and said to herself: We will leave here, my love, we'll build a life in a place where you can make a future and not only a made-up past.

His love for Rebecca intensified so much in those days that he had to scrunch up his face to recall the reason for the eternal quarrel between them that had made Rebecca weep for seven whole years now. Nehemiah almost stopped giving speeches, spent less time in the community center, wrote fewer letters to Zionist leaders, and didn't stop trying to seduce his wife, who looked at him with a delight that once alarmed her when she discovered it herself. Nehemiah would look at his son and think that maybe his son was happy in his ignorance and that shamed him. He was now working a few hours a day for a Hungarian who built wine barrels and was an expert in sawing trees, polishing them, and cutting them and mixing lacquer and other preservatives. Ebenezer was willing to lie around his place all day, refused to go to school, and the Hungarian would look at him through his pince-nez, laugh, and say: They want educated Jews, but only ignoramuses will build them a land! And he laughed. And at that time, after the Arab pogroms and the great theft of the Bedouins who emptied the barns came the Wondrous One on a noble white mare, with thin legs and a long delicate neck. He sat on a tufted saddle built like a kind of dwelling and was dressed like a high priest with a breastplate and emeralds and a silk gown and a sky blue kaffiyeh, he was girt with a sword and two rifles and belts of rifle bullets, and everybody was sure a distinguished Arab robber had come to the settlement. As they stood in tribute to his impressive appearance, the Wondrous One got off the mare, who whinnied and stroked his supple back with her head, and he said in an ancient Hebrew accent: Hear 0 Israel the Lord our God the Lord is One. And when everybody was stunned and even awestruck, the man said: Joshua conquered Canaan by sword and storm, you won't conquer it by planting vineyards. I live in the Arabian Desert. Who I am doesn't matter, I heard about Jews who came to renew a kingdom and I said to myself, I'll teach them war against the Arabs, you see the Bedouins and you don't know their dignity and malice and cunning, you fight the wrong enemy with sticks.

He pitched a tent for himself on the edge of the settlement and would cook his meals with his own hands. Women from all around came in carts to see the prince of the Jews. A new wind started blowing in the settlement, backs that had been bowed for years suddenly straightened up. Even Ebenezer's wood carvings stopped interesting folks. The Wondrous One taught them savagery and speed and surprise and night raids and aggressive defense and outflanking maneuvers. He taught smells and winds and seeing in the dark and how to tell an enemy horse from one that isn't by its droppings and how it creases the leaves and branches, and everybody became eager for war. And once again a light shone in the beautiful faces of the men who had come to the Land to build. The Wondrous One was cruel, fast, mysterious, and decisive, but after the training and fabulous nocturnal sorties he would close himself in his tent in silence. One night, when the men stayed in the fields on a test sortie beyond the settlement, only he and the women were left, the Wondrous One entered Rebecca's house, sat on the mat, politely dismissed the Arab woman, and the Arab woman fell on her face and wept to hear the flowery Arabic in his mouth and said that was the Jewish messiah, and left, and then the Wondrous One drank a cup of coffee Rebecca served him and told her she was a beautiful woman and belonged to the desert. And for the first time in seven years, Rebecca stopped weeping. Long afterward, Boaz, Rebecca Schneerson's grandson and son sat, and his yellow-green devil eyes will stare at her with a wicked smile and will scold her serenely for reciting Psalms in the war and saving him from the death he deserved more than Menahem Henkin, Yoske, the naked Nahazia, and Yashka, and would ask again as before what the Wondrous One said that night the old people had been telling about for fifty years now, and she will say: Nothing, Boaz, it's all legends, he wanted me to come with him to the desert, they're all like Joseph Rayna, words, words.

After he left Rebecca's house, the Wondrous One went to his tent. And after the men returned, he blessed them, spoke of future wars, tried to hint at the essential missions, packed up his tent, and at night he vanished and nobody knew when or where. The next night, the Bedouin herds came onto the fields that had just been planted. On the Sabbath morning a man came to the synagogue and yelled: Herds in the fields! The rabbi wasn't in the settlement that Sabbath and an argument broke out about whether war against the Bedouins was a life-saving act that canceled the Sabbath. Nehemiah jumped up, mounted his mare, and started galloping. When the others saw him, they also mounted their mares and donkeys and still wrapped in prayer shawls, they dealt the Bedouins a crushing blow, as they had learned from the Wondrous One. After that, Nehemiah never went back to the synagogue. Then Rebecca started coming to the synagogue. Malicious rumors spread, but Rebecca sat in the women's section and smiled at the Ark of the Covenant as if she were conversing with the Holy One Blessed Be He. The tears were seen again in her eyes. She didn't pray but sat and stared at God in the Ark of the Covenant and was silent. After she returned from the synagogue she saw Nehemiah pulling up crabgrass. Bitterness filled her. Nehemiah tried to kiss her but she slipped away from him. So beautiful she was in the morning light! Ebenezer sat in the corner of the yard and carved a bird's face. And then the sound of the locusts was heard. Everybody ran to the fields and made bonfires. Some tried to get rid of the locusts with prayers and others by banging on cans. One of the bonfires spread and burst into a conflagration that reached Nathan's cowshed. Rebecca, who saw the fire, ran and stumbled into a pothole. An Arab galloping by her whipped her. She tried to pull the whip and bring him down from the horse, but the whip slipped out of her hand. She was hit in the face and covered with blood. There were no paved roads and water flooded from the gutter. The roof of Nehemiah and Rebecca's house burst and a week later, when the first rains of the season began, the strongest the Land had ever known, the roof Nehemiah tried in vain all night long to reinforce with a pole collapsed. The clothes in valises in mothballs, waiting to go to America, were flooded, everything turned into pulp in one downpour and Rebecca saw all the tears she had hidden among the clothes and they melted right before her eyes. Your tears have brought destruction upon us, said Nehemiah bitterly, but she didn't think he deserved a reply. The cows were terrified by the torches, the horses whinnied, and Nathan's donkey burst into the house and crushed the ladder Nehemiah was standing on and holding up the roof. The Arab woman fled in panic and five days later the cracks took on a brown-yellow tone and Rebecca sat and looked at the destroyed house and at Nehemiah, whose body and spirit were broken and then suddenly, he turned pale, dropped, and shut his eyes. A few days later, the doctor was called from the nearby settlement. He examined Nehemiah and brought another expert from Jaffa who came riding on a brown horse and the two of them told Rebecca that Nehemiah wasn't suffering from any disease they knew. Rebecca knew what Nehemiah's disease was, but didn't think the doctor would understand. As far as she was concerned, her husband's shriveled face, his shut eyes, his burned skin, and his broad forehead constituted authentic proof of the disease of despairing love that Rebecca, as somebody who had never loved except through somebody else, knew well. For many days, Rebecca sat at Nehemiah's bed and nursed him in his illness. And Ebenezer, the first Sabra in the settlement, would carve wood and be silent and Nehemiah woke up one day, stared wearily and dully at his son and his wife and whispered: Stop weeping; extinguish the tears, you won. We'll do what you want!

She didn't know how you think about going to America without tears. There was a heat wave and a strong wind blew and people seemed to be walking like shadows seeking a foothold in corners that were like shade, but didn't stop the wind. The sky was heavy and brown. An intoxicating smell of thistles rose in her nose. She pitied Nehemiah for not leaving her and now he had to pay the price of her stubborn war, but she didn't know how to tell him that. When he recovered from his illness, Nehemiah looked like a different man. A puerile rashness seized him. He put on a light-colored suit he had bought from Hazti who came every week in a cart loaded with luxuries, and something that had always been stormy in him was now appeased. He'd walk around the settlement like a hopeless lover of it, talking with his neighbors, making new plans, preparing an irrigation system, a new community center, a paved street, planting almond trees, building a sanatorium for asthmatics. His friends looked at the man whose fields and farms were failures, whose citrus groves suffered more than others, whose wife had been weeping nonstop for eight years now, whose son carved wood, and recalled the stormy nights on the threshing floor, the dreams he tried to inspire in them and were so in love with him that they were forced to invent in their common past things that never had been and never were, to increase his image and love even more. In Nathan's house a few people gathered to celebrate Ebenezer's ninth birthday. The boy sat in a corner and didn't want to talk, just looked at them and showed them a carved bird and when he laughed he looked like a jackal. Rebecca rubbed her face and was silent. Nehemiah looked outside, drank a little wine, raised his glass and said: To a hundred and twenty Ebenezer, looked outside and through the window he saw the darkness descending, lovely roofs, citrus groves, vineyards, ornamental trees, cypresses, cowsheds, chicken coops, a suppressed smell of hay stood in the air and he told them how much he loved them and added: Doesn't Ebenezer look like me? And Nathan said he doesn't look like you, Nehemiah, but thank God, he doesn't look like anybody else either. At night, Nehemiah said to Rebecca: Let's leave Ebenezer with Nathan and go on a trip. Rebecca put on a yellow dress and wrapped a scarf and in the autumn of nineteen nine, nine years after they came to the Land of Israel, Rebecca and Nehemiah left riding on two donkeys to part from the land of Nehemiah's dream. They rode along wadis and ancient riverbeds, met groups of young Pioneers quarrying rock in remote places and living on farms in the mountains. Nehemiah said: They will succeed where we failed. They yearn less for the past and more for the future. They would conquer the Land because it's theirs, they didn't come to ask for pity but to rape the Land. In Jerusalem, Rebecca prayed at the Western Wall and Nehemiah watched her from the distance. They crossed the Jezreel Valley, rode among desolated swamps, toured the Galilee, and after a journey along the Jordan, they came to the Dead Sea, lay there on their backs, and the salt bore them and the mountains around were a shadow of something that didn't exist at all. Rebecca said: I'm looking into a mirror, and she laughed, and he loved to hear her laugh. At night, they slept embracing. Never had they loved one another so much. She almost forgot her body's longing for Joseph. Nehemiah's courtesy was only salt poured on the violent and seductive sweetness. Something is dying in him, she said to herself, and something else is maybe lit. She began to be filled with hope and regret at the same time.

They returned to the settlement and Nehemiah delivered a speech that lasted from six in the evening to three in the morning, and the farmers sat lit by the halo of light, and there was still a distant echo in it of their dreams. Six hours Nehemiah talked and nobody budged. Even Rebecca sat fascinated to hear the visions Nehemiah spoke of and she really didn't know that she saw them. In the middle of his speech, Nehemiah looked at her and understood sadly that Rebecca's mind was made up. That night he parted from every corner of the farm, kissed his son for a long time, and like thieves in the night, Nehemiah and Rebecca left with their things hastily packed and after another farewell from their son who didn't understand a thing, they rode to Jaffa. Ebenezer watched them from the distance and didn't weep. Rebecca said to him: I'm going with Father and you'll join us as soon as we get settled. She didn't want to bring Ebenezer to America but she didn't want to say that, neither to Nehemiah nor to her son. Ebenezer sat and etched the face of an owl on wood. Even when Nehemiah wept for a long time and hugged him, he didn't say a thing. He just tried to understand what was happening to the piece of wood when you carve it like that so the face of the owl looks as if it burst out of the wood and is also destroying it, shattering it to pieces and at the same time, honoring it.

Nehemiah was silent all the way to Jaffa. Rebecca, who didn't know what to think about, was still dozing and trying to dream about the last days, and when she woke up and they were close to the citrus groves of Jaffa and saw the palm trees at the entrance to the city, she recalled the small details that had joined together into some picture that was not yet clear to her, and when she looked at Nehemiah she saw on his face the expression that had covered his face on the day of Rachel's wedding. His hatred now for Joseph was so strong that Rebecca almost fell in love with him.

And suddenly from the dread that filled her, maybe because of remorse, she wanted so much to save Nehemiah, to give up, to be somebody she never thought she could be, to take Nehemiah back to the settlement to his son and to his lands and to his friends, but she didn't know how to do that and was silent. Jaffa was now a different city. Jewish shops were opened in the narrow streets. Carts from settlements in Judea and the Galilee came to the city, people bought agricultural machines and seeds and sold farm products, and the city was teeming with life and they were already starting to build the new neighborhood of Tel Aviv on the sands north of the city and Arabs were still smoking narghilas next to the mosque and Turks were standing barefoot and listening to an orchestra of ragamuffins from Egypt and slapped their faces whenever they fell asleep while playing and ships anchored in the port and two locomotives were added to the railroad junction whose tracks already reached the edge of the desert and Nehemiah and Rebecca stole into the hotel.

Nehemiah didn't go out the door of the hotel and Rebecca bought a few souvenirs for her friend Rachel, met Jews she thought she had known before, and saw an elderly consul stroking the body of an Arab boy on a dark streetcorner, and then she drank tea with mint with the Jewish agent Joseph Abravanel, who reminded her that his son would someday rule the Land and didn't mock her, but quietly arranged the tickets and the cabin on the ship that had already tooted and the toots were already dancing on its masts and the ship looked menacing and beautiful among the little waves capering on the shore and then she sat next to her husband and said: I smell fire, and he said in a hollow cracked voice, You smell the future, and she felt stabbings in her womb as if there were a child in it and she wanted to give birth for Nehemiah to all the dead children she had once known but she was silent and said to him: What did I do to you, Nehemiah, and he said: You were Rebecca, you were what you were, don't cry, I love you more than any person in the world and I won't tell you again how much I love you because you won't believe me. She smiled at him and hugged him, but he put her off and as she was falling asleep, she seemed to hear the sound of weeping, but since she had never heard Nehemiah weep, she thought somebody else was weeping in one of the rooms.

Early the next morning they went to the port. The valises stood at the jetty with the boats, Nehemiah said some harsh words to Joseph Abravanel, who was dressed in white, and paid a few cents less than what was demanded. He haggled and Rebecca had never seen Nehemiah haggle. Afterward-as agreed in advance-he put her on the boat, since he had to load the valises on another boat. Rebecca stood on the boat, she couldn't sit down. Something in her was still steeped in an incomprehensible dread. The ship tooted and she trembled. She wanted to weep, but she had no tears. She wanted to go back and couldn't now. The sailors raised their oars and pushed the boat. They jumped on a big wave and Rebecca saw Nehemiah standing and looking at her, but because of the strong light, his face was clearly seen despite the distance. And even though she was scared, she didn't yet know what she was scared of.

Banners and flags rose and fell on the masts. Rebecca thought for a moment about eight years of tears. Nehemiah stood on the shore, the rising tears on his face were incomprehensible in view of his erect and aristocratic stance. Something was ruined and she didn't know what. He looked so bold and tense that in a little while he would leap and rush to battle. Nehemiah vanished behind some shed, and right at that moment she grasped what was liable to happen and started yelling, but the roar of the sea swallowed her yells, she started hitting the passengers and they were alarmed and the sailors rowed her back to shore and she jumped off and ran in the shallow water and everybody looked at her and silence reigned and she came to the corner of the mosque just one minute after Nehemiah, with eyes wide open, but without seeing a thing, took out a gun, aimed it and shot his temple.

Very slowly Nehemiah collapsed onto the ground he had sworn never to leave. When Rebecca came to him he was still trying to touch the Land and his body was already dead. People gathered around Nehemiah. And Rebecca lay there with her mouth stuck to his, trying to make Nehemiah breathe, until they separated them and dragged her away from there and carried his body to one of the sheds. The ship tooted again and Rebecca looked one last time at the ship waving its flags, and very slowly she started walking toward the dead body of her husband. Clotted blood was stuck to his lips. The gun was still in his hand. The Turk wanted to write down something, but she told him: There's nothing for you to write, he's been buried here for nine years.

She touched his forehead and said: You shouldn't have done that to me, Nehemiah, and an awful anger, an anger steeped in love, rose in her and overcame her, and she gave into that anger and let it twist her face, and the Turk who saw her was forced to fall and then to run from there as if he had seen the sun coming out of a hole in his pants.

At the funeral, in Roots, she stood silent. Nobody dared approach her. Ebenezer, who stood not far from her, was also silent. She didn't shed a tear. They don't deserve that, she thought, but she also knew that there were no more tears inside her to weep even if they did deserve them. Ebenezer said the orphan's kaddish and Rebecca went back home, closed the windows and the doors and said: No mourning, nothing. Nobody will come in here.

On the last day of mourning, Ebenezer finished carving two heads of wood. He called them Father and Mother, one of the heads was Rebecca while the second was Joseph Rayna. And then Rebecca assaulted Ebenezer, broke his carvings, and started a successful farm.

My friend Goebbelheydrichhimmel.

Tape / -

About two weeks ago, I returned from a visit to Israel. Because of the heavy fog in northern Germany, we were forced to land in Copenhagen. A freezing rain was falling and it was impossible to see a thing. We took a cab and went to a small hotel near Herdospladsen. I called Inga, who by the way sends you warm regards. She came immediately and as usual didn't leave us alone. She fed us at a small, and I must say excellent, restaurant not far from the hotel. Then she informed us she was taking us to a party at the American ambassador's. When we got to the ambassador's house there were only a few guests left, including an Israeli, a native of Copenhagen, who fought in the war of independence in Israel, returned there in the fifties, lived there, worked as a journalist for an Israeli newspaper and for a Danish newspaper and was now the editor-in-chief of Politikan, his name is Pundak, a pleasant and wise man of principle who can formulate things in a way that isn't harsh, doesn't place perplexing full-stops, a cultured man in the old sense of the word, an excellent editor and a fascinating conversationalist. His wife Suzy is a woman with a profound bubbling in her, whose rare common sense, existential perplexity with a thin patina of a smile that's liable to be broken any minute spread over her face. There were also a few writers there who are familiar to you, too. Herbert Pundak saved me from an unnecessary conversation with an American colonel who thought that now that I returned from Israel we had a lot in common. He and I, thought the colonel, understand those Jews. I didn't want to quarrel as soon as I came, and the ambassador, who, by the way, is a German Jew, came to us, and looked too cordial for me to cause a diplomatic incident. I felt tired. The trip in the morning to Lod Airport, parting from the friends I had made there, the flight, the trip to the hotel, the dinner with Inga, and now the party, all that dropped some heaviness that I couldn't yet get away from for some reason. So we sat in a big pleasant room and sipped punch. I sat in a big comfortable fine leather armchair, across from me above a fireplace was a big black wall. I turned the chair around a bit, the color of the black wall turned blue a bit, and then, when I heard the editor of Politikan explaining something about Israeli foreign policy, and the ambassador trying to argue with him, I saw the face of the Fuhrer looking at me above the fireplace and I shuddered. Inga, who sat next to me, asked what happened, and I said: What's missing on that wall is the picture of Hitler! My knees buckled, I felt as if my blood ran out. I was sorry for what I had said, but I really did see the Fuhrer looking at me in that splendid room. The ambassador got up, stood over me, Renate sipped punch, he looked at the wall in silence, and said: Were you here then? When I said I had never been here in my life and didn't understand why I had said what I did, the ambassador came to sit down next to me, stroked my knee, chomped on a cigar and then lit it, and also lit the cigarette I took out of my coat pocket, and said: You're sure? I said: I'm sure. Funny, said the ambassador, this was the house of the governor Werner Best. A decent navy man, and his assistant Diekwitz, also a navy man, who informed the underground of the expected expulsion of the Jews, and afterward the house was transferred to the Americans, and here, on that wall, until forty-five, was a picture of the Fuhrer, and the armchair you're sitting in was there at that time, only with different upholstery, of course. Next to it is a trap door, the governor was sensitive to explosions and under this room, which is an addition to the original house, a big shelter was dug. He'd sit here, smoking, drinking wine, with the opening next to him leading to the shelter…

On the way back to the hotel I saw a crowd of Wehrmacht soldiers marching along those ancient and beautiful streets in the winter gloom. At the hotel, I drank more wine. Renate wept at night, wrote a postcard to a woman she had met in Israel, fortunately I love Renate too much to give my opinion on her foreignness. After thirty years of marriage she told me that night of all times about her youth in those days when you and I would shoot at low-flying planes, did you know, that when Renate heard that the Fuhrer committed suicide she wounded herself and had to be put in the hospital, and back then the hospitals were crammed to the gills, weren't they? The next day, the sky cleared up and we flew home.

I had a strange dream. I was waiting for my father at the railroad station. Renate came arm in arm with an old Jewish woman. A man who may have been a Jewish pimp from a Sturmer cartoon asked me what side the snake pees on.

I'm sitting at home now, in the room you know well. Behind me is the beautiful picture of the black horse. You write that my last book sold three million copies. I was glad to get the nice articles you sent me. The depth of the article from the New York Times amazed me, I never heard of the author of that article, Lionel Secret, but the name does ring a bell only I can't decipher or locate it on the map of my memories. I loved the thin irony of the article seeing my book as my most successful suicide attempt, the one you can photograph and go on looking at it. I remember my father telling me that the film he took in the Warsaw Ghetto was a beautiful film. When I saw the film afterward I understood what he meant. The book I've been trying to write all those years about the Last Jew doesn't interest you. But in addition, it also refuses to be written. I'm now rewriting a novella I wrote a few years ago but my heart is given to "The Last Jew" that's stuck in my craw. In Israel, I met Ebenezer. The meeting didn't do me any good. I met a man named Henkin who's also investigating the Last Jew (he's not a writer) and his wife is the woman that Renate loved in Israel. Ebenezer's mother, Rebecca, I didn't meet. She's very old, they say she's still beautiful. For some reason, I was afraid to go visit her in her settlement.

Since you're not only my editor and publisher, but also my close friend, I must explain to you clearly where I stand now. I know, you've worked hard for many years to promote me. You published my books when nobody else wanted them, you believed in me despite the bad or indifferent criticism or the thousands of copies you had to bury because nobody wanted to buy them, and I, I of all people, now sit and write what our reader won't want to read and our critic will trash, and the most awful thing of all, what is hard even for me to write. The book can be written by two different people, my dear, by me and by that Henkin. And then it won't be the book you wanted, will it? I am my father's son and Obadiah Henkin is the father of Menahem Henkin, who fell in Israel. Someplace, an ancient battlefield is stretching between us, and in that battlefield is a person devoid of memory of his personality who is also part of me and part of him. It's like two men trying to beget a son together. There's a nice saying: The best poem is a lie. What is the German lie and what is the Jewish lie that can create on paper the existing character, painfully existing, of Ebenezer Schneerson, son of Rebecca and father of Boaz Schneerson, stepfather of Samuel Lipker, a man who hoarded knowledge to remain a last Jew in a war that you, I, and he were in together on both sides of a death that's now being forgotten?

Grief is banal. Life is banal. Death is banal. Everything is banal. The tormented and monstrous words. What to do? I have to prophesy Ebenezer through Henkin and he has to prophesy him through me. What will come out of all that may be bad but necessary. I know how much these words upset you.

What I can't grasp in that banality is the symmetry. Boaz and Samuel Lipker are the same age, born the same day, one in Tarnopol in Galicia and the other in a settlement in Judea. They look alike. When Ebenezer met Samuel in the camp he didn't know that Samuel was the last son of Joseph Rayna whom he went to Europe to seek and came to us. He didn't know that Samuel and Boaz are alike because he had left Boaz when he was a year old and hadn't seen him since. So isn't it funny that, when Ebenezer returned to Israel forty years later and met Boaz (and Samuel whom he hadn't seen for many years), he said: Samuel! And Boaz was offended to the depths of his soul. I have to understand Ebenezer, his mind, the words he hoards and then sells to foreigners in seedy nightclubs. I understand that you want another book, you want a different story, but I, I have no other way, I have to live in the stammering attempt to write a book that doesn't want to be written…

Tape / -

Attached below, another chapter of the draft, the third copy. If you compare it to the previous copy (that you disliked so much) you'll see that in principle I didn't change things, I just cooled them a little, I distanced myself, I let people shape themselves a little in view of the words that didn't stick to them. And so…

Bent over he was at the barbed wire fence, maybe more than bent over, he was leaning forward, and his whole life would pass in that second like a flash with nothing except memories of others, and he won't know if what passed through his mind was his life.

A woman in rags passed by on the other side of the fence. She said: Are you all right, Schneerson?

I'm looking at you through a fence we haven't passed through for years, he said, I look and I see. He didn't know how he knew they hadn't passed through it for years if he didn't remember who he was and what happened to him.

I'm eating, said the woman.

And then a slice of bread she held in her mouth dropped. The bread fell on the ground covered with bone dust that flew in the wind. She bent over in alarm, picked up the slice, cleaned it with her hand and put it back in her mouth. At that moment, Samuel appeared, touched Ebenezer, and said to her: See how much food they brought, sausages, cheese, bread, and she smiled, the slice of bread in her mouth, and then she fled wildly.

Ebenezer stood still because he had nowhere to go. Everything was in motion. Bonfires were lit. A tank was slowly squashing the drooping roof of a gigantic block that had previously collapsed. Imagined shapes of human beings, staggering, dressed in pajamas or tatters. A soldier vomits. Hands of a dead man leaning on a wall, like a skeleton who started walking and stopped, the hands are stretched forward, clenched into fists, the skin is flayed. A Spitfire was circling in the air and dropping paratroopers full of food and medicine and uttering a purity of distances no longer unimaginable. For a moment Ebenezer sensed the stench that had been with him for three years.

April fifteen, nineteen forty-five. Five hours and five minutes after noon. A long twilight, whose long faded shadows, twined with fiery hues, create calculated uncertainty and solid vagueness, an hour with no boundaries, until the dark that may really descend again. On the horizon blue mountains, treetops and silence. A gleaming gold of a tank tramps to the block. Behind Ebenezer the blocks still stand in a long line, a ditch perpendicular to them, its banks concave. A second glimmer of a passage from one planet to another. In the distance, SS Sturmbahnfuhrer Kramer is seen. Tied with a coarse rope. Two British soldiers guard him. One of them touches him, almost pushes him, and Kramer tries to wave his hand, as if he wanted not to wave the white flag, his eyes keep revealing contempt and at the same time keep surveying the destruction, the tanks crushing his blocks, their sloping roofs, and those people in pajamas. The impulse is mechanical, his hands are bound and he can't wave them, he drops his hands and once again straightens his hands behind, Ebenezer sneaks a look at him from the distance, and very slowly turns his back to him. Ebenezer feels a stab in his back, as if he were shot, but Samuel's hand is stroking him, Samuel doesn't see what Ebenezer sees, he's already far away from here, in a future that's almost solid and bound to reality, Kramer doesn't interest him anymore. Ebenezer wants not to see the humiliation, he didn't want it. A British officer who had previously been seen chatting with the tall, ruddy Red Cross representative then asked Ebenezer something and Ebenezer said: It's true that I was almost the first one in this camp. But I'm not the last! And he blushed at the sound of his words. The "but" sounded arrogant and coarse. The architect Herr Lustig made them a stylized roof, Kramer requested, Weiss approved, and so he got sloping roofs with a unique angle for that camp. The originality of their slope is an interesting modular plan, said Herr Lustig. Concentrating vertical force. The arc on which the roof is set doesn't have to be a concrete support but only its bottom half, you can learn from these dimensions in the Alhambra, for example, he added. A city isn't houses, Herr Lustig then said, camp and city, town and future concentration of human beings will constitute a planned texture and not some accidental combination of beautiful or ugly structures, streets or squares, it will be a unit in itself!

The officer who sees the corpses all around wipes sweat from his brow and thinks he has no choice but to bow to Ebenezer and he does, as if he were viewing a natural force, gallops on a horse, Jehu King of Israel a chariot too fast, and Ebenezer stands up too fast, pickling for four years, and yet too fast, and he thinks, Toward what? They lived in those blocks? He has no satisfactory answer. To what? Hard to know. He has to organize a journey of dying people. To bring them quickly to some sanity. So they won't eat with their fingers and won't be so alarmed. Kramer is sitting there, he could have shot him.

A waste of a bullet, thought the officer.

I'm a carpenter, aren't I? said Ebenezer as if continuing innocently, I understand wood, huts, screws, nails. These are excellent huts but they're not meant to accommodate a thousand people in one hut without heat or toilets. I'm not complaining, he added, and the Red Cross man tried to laugh.

Why not? asked the officer.

I don't know, said Ebenezer.

Beyond the grove appeared people in civilian clothes. Their faces furious, led like a rebellious flock, kicking and cursing. Farmers brought to German Poland at the beginning of the war, one of them dressed like a rich man, bags under his eyes, tall and pale. British soldiers are leading them. A few of them stand still and the soldiers urge them on. Then they stop and wait for instructions. A mixture of orders from a microphone in English, German, Yiddish, makes that unreal moment concrete. The orders are barked out unreliably, thinks Ebenezer, they haven't imagined where they're going, they should put Kramer in charge! The civilians, who had lived in the area for years, are expecting a salvo of shots that will destroy them. They're shaking before the rifle barrels in the hands of the soldiers. Nobody bothers to explain to them. They're led to the giant pits that were dug a few days before and they think that here they'll be shot here. But instead of burying themselves they're assigned to bury those they didn't have time to burn. Abomination appears on their faces, so some of them were filled with indifferent heroism; not to yell or plead. In silence they worked, in silence they vomited, in silence they understood the respectinducing sight of Kramer. When they passed by Ebenezer Schneerson they saw the first person in their life who lived in peace on an alien planet. Until today, they hadn't seen such human beings up close, but only as miniaturized geometric shapes. They had to lower their eyes. Kramer didn't hesitate to sneer at their look. Ebenezer still thought they were only lords with bad timing. That was a perplexing moment from Samuel's point of view, who's the stumbling block here and who would change places with whom?!

Ebenezer thought: Never did they know a real shame of humiliation, if they had known they would go into those graves and not come out. But Kramer knew them (and Ebenezer) very well, thought Samuel, Ebenezer is trying to locate himself: I'm the memory of things. I'm a crapper of the Poles. I'm a hidden light Gold told about before he died. I'm an electromagnetic equation. I hover in the wind. A music room of symbols. The culture room where Bronya the Beautiful was shot with an apple in her mouth. The girlfriend of entertainers from the east. Barefoot, almost tired, they fell asleep trying to make Kramer laugh. He stood, in his hand a gun aimed at them and they tried to sing comic songs. In the searing cold of the evening, in the light of the nearby glow of the explosions, but then Kramer fell asleep standing up, the gun in his hand and bliss on his face. How do you understand that sight?

A week before the end, Sturmbahnfuhrer Weiss agreed to fix the Fuhrer's frame. And Ebenezer was assigned to fix it. Ebenezer tries to locate things. The entertainers were killed in an air raid on the way from the camp to Hathausen. Everybody kept Jewish prayer books in their cases to sell after the defeat. Like Samuel, they're also living in the future already. Ebenezer hasn't yet moved, Kramer is sitting and watching his Jew. Samuel is lusting for the wallets of the British soldiers. Kramer's Jew doesn't understand why they tied the commander's hands, Kramer isn't used to being tied. And then a Jewish soldier of the British army barked, at Kramer he barked, to emphasize the gravity of the moment, to defend himself with hostility, because of the need to disguise himself as a dog, and Kramer smiled, calm, he knows Jewish dogs, an inflexible and inelegant race, the soldier can't see what Ebenezer saw, the twilight darkened now and only Ebenezer, who had learned in childhood to see the eyes of jackals in the dark, saw Kramer's glowing eyes.

You and I, he said.

Then he looked at the darkening horizon. The charm in it earlier vanished. A reddish winding spark looked threaded like a shoelace. Two poplars were still seen blurry in the distance, beyond the grove that was no longer seen, and further away the small church was seen. Look at the new church, said Ebenezer.

It was here all the time, said Samuel.

I didn't see it until now, said Ebenezer.

You didn't look, said Samuel.

And it was here?

All the time, said Samuel.

Funny, said Ebenezer.

But Samuel also understood that Ebenezer was now thinking about the railroad car that brought him here because then, in the railroad car, the years he had had before ended. Then the church was seen and afterward was wiped out like all the memories and now it was new. Samuel smiled at the food now brought in open railroad cars. A plunder of food lighted by hurricane lamps and spotlights. A fresh lemon fell to the ground, and when a German tried to pick it up he was kicked by a soldier who tried to laugh and didn't laugh. But the German didn't want to straighten up now. There was no point. Somebody yelled: Get up, and Ebenezer said to the English captain: You really think I'm a joke about an elephant?

The Englishman said to him: I don't think you're a joke about an elephant, Mr. Schneerson. I do, said Ebenezer. They brought me and I remember now. Who am I who remembers? Don't know. There was a floor. And German soldiers and Jewish forced laborers from Vilna were still alive. The first hut they built around me. I arranged the joints, I put in the nails, I supervised the work, from inside, and they built the walls around me. That's how you trap an elephant, isn't it? You draw a trap around him and he's inside. Maybe I'm still building the hut the tank is destroying. And what now? Go know, my back is turned to Kramer, who sees me in the dark even if his hands are tied.

You're not alone, said the Englishman, who had known something about psychology before the war and once in London saw Sigmund Freud get into a black car driven by a young woman. There was no joy in his voice when Ebenezer tried to stitch the tatters of dark with leaps of words. The glowing light of the hurricane lamps and the spotlights covered the area and distanced it from him. The man on the microphone almost pleaded: You've got to be free! You've got to be free! Free? Without Kramer? That's absurd, said Ebenezer.

It will cost a lot, he said afterward to the officer. Women were still hiding in the huts, peeping out, scared. Skeletons in pajamas dropped after eating the first time, typhus will eat them, he said in English, officials and doctors ran around here and there. DDT showers operated vigorously. A tank fed the motor of the generator that operated the electricity. The Germans who had been brought to Germanify Poland dug in silence and buried the dead in the dark. Nobody paid attention to them anymore.

Weiss wasn't found. He's worth a lot, Weiss, said a German soldier who sat tied up in a wheelbarrow. Ebenezer gazed in wonder at the sight of hunger and thirst that split his lips. Did you ever see hungry Germans? he asked Samuel, who wanted to sell food to the German, but the German only had marks and pfennigs and that didn't satisfy him and the Englishman was starting to show signs of impatience and the Red Cross man thought that was disgusting. Then another German rummaged in his pockets and found money. Samuel helped him search, went and brought food and water. He took the watch from the German in the wheelbarrow, he told Ebenezer, who looked at him sadly: I piss on the Englishman, what do I care what he thinks of me! And they devoured the food. The Germans don't have diamonds in their rectums, said Samuel, and there's no point searching. He's got a watch, and that one has a camera, here it is. Everything's for you, Ebenezer. I'm taking care of you! The German's face was red, he was eating bullybeef and overcooked fruit and vegetables. The English officer averted his eyes. The Germans burying the dead in the pits looked mutely at the German chomping in the wheelbarrow and their mouths started chomping air.

Got to find Weiss, yelled the English Captain Wood. He yelled at Kramer: Your commander has gotten away from us! Kramer didn't answer. He was staring at Ebenezer. The wretched stance was an instance of offense to him, Ebenezer had to remember that moment, he even wanted to take pity on Kramer, not Kramer the commander but Kramer the prisoner, Kramer who even now was Weiss's deputy, but he couldn't. No feeling throbbed in him. He thought maybe they were members of the same band of grave robbers. Got to spray, yelled the Englishman, and find Weiss. Coarse eating, typhus, lice, more DDT, less eating. You've got to be free! Germans to work. The smell is awful, got to bury and burn as fast as possible, otherwise they'll die of plague. Destroy the blocks! And maybe Ebenezer said: Leave something for a memory, otherwise they won't believe us. Kramer should be given to a circus, let him be taken from place to place and tell. The Englishman looked at him with open animosity and Samuel laughed. He feels uncomfortable, that Captain Wood. He sees death and Kramer feels something, he doesn't know what. What world is there outside? asks Samuel and tries to sell food to the Germans in exchange for watches and rings. Memory is Jewish science, scoffs Kramer, and a young Australian who replaced one of the guards pushed Kramer and in the process hit him in the ribs. But he didn't show them the pain, not while Ebenezer was standing in front of him. The German in the wheelbarrow finished eating and started shaking. A jeep sped by and sprayed thick dust. The German who was covered with white material tried to wipe it off his face, but his hands were greasy from the food and Samuel said: It's bone dust, and the German shook even more and tried not to see the skeleton of a woman in pajamas who stopped not far from him and held an apple, her mouth was toothless, she spat at the German and in terror she wiped the dust off him with her hands. I wipe myself on all of you like paper, said Samuel. The German waited for his tears to flow and wash away the spit but they didn't flow. He doesn't like the taste of our spit, said Samuel, and a salvo of shots was heard in the distance, the microphone went on barking.

The improvised white flags were waving by ten. The tramping tanks stopped on the fences. Why didn't you think of a decent and splendid defeat? he asked Kramer, who blocked his ears. White panties instead of flags, that's a disgrace, isn't it? Fat Frieda, for whom the French chef would make fish heads, stuck a white ribbon to her sleeve and ran outside when she heard the tramping tanks. An enormous wolfhound burst out of the guardroom and chomped a hand that had previously been torn off, dripping thick material that may really have been blood, thought Ebenezer, the dog sat down on Frieda and she yelled: She's here! The dog loved her and lay on her to protect her and licked her, and she yelled: Get off of me, monster, but he didn't understand the orders and licked and Frieda was crushed, turned pale, turned blue. What love, said Samuel afterward, and the tanks split the fences and people in pajamas peeped as if they didn't believe. Skeletons who came to life walked on the ground padded with bone dust and the dog was called Brutus. Until they shot the dog, somebody said: Those were barks permeated with ideological awareness! And then Weiss was seen fleeing for his life with a bottle of wine in his hand and the picture of the Fuhrer he managed to throw at the dog who was shot. The dog licked the Fuhrer as he died. Not exactly a heartwarming picture when Frieda was crushed to death. The funniest thing of all, said somebody, was that Weiss looked shocked but was afraid to throw his cigarette on the ground so as not to litter the yard. And they didn't know where he was. Those bonfires, the food that came, the British officers, Captain Wood who took a position next to Ebenezer all day. Eat! Drink! You've got to be free! shrieked the microphone.

Then they die in DDT showers. Final solution of life, says a man who swallowed too much food and he turns pale and drops, his hand outstretched, still managing to trap a slice of sausage and chokes. And tranquility reigns, at long last tranquility reigns. Imaginary, not imaginary, one toilet for four hundred German workers. Stench mixed with an aroma of a distant meadow. Captain Wood a crumbled empire with medals on his chest. Historic spectacle, he says to himself, St. Bartholomew's night, and Kramer doesn't budge. It's to his credit, isn't it, thinks Ebenezer, he didn't ask for food. When he was given a glass of water, he held it in his tied hands. And then he poured out the water. Some time has to pass, time that will grant these moments their meaning, and the moment hasn't yet come. Kramer is trying to give his sitting that proud solidity he saw in the propaganda films that were wasted on him. He looks at his last battlefield. His soldiers are in wheelbarrows or graves, tied up, pleading for food and water. A momentary ritual nightmare, he said to Ebenezer, who couldn't hear him. In a little while we'll know what to do, the Fuhrer has surely left instructions, there's something to be done, but we don't yet know what, got to gain time, a retreat for some time and then we'll attack again. Kramer is seeking some sign, why didn't he devastate the land along with the traitors. It all has to be started over, says Kramer. And Ebenezer is amazed at how he can read Kramer's mind, even today. Kramer says to the Englishman: I beg your pardon for the water I spilled, I'm talking now as one officer to another, but without getting any orders what can I do? The Englishman didn't understand Kramer's splendid German, and went on drinking his beer, and spitting. The sight of the splendid death of another officer who was mistakenly shot by an English soldier cleaning his weapon pleased him quite a bit, even though it was incorrect in terms of military protocol. The gravediggers also saw in the death the nobility they were denied and didn't yet know how to be despised properly. Weiss the fool is hiding under the dead Jews, thought Kramer, I'm still secretly recording things about him, as long as I haven't received an explicit order to report what Weiss is doing. And the dead officer dropped masterfully. And in contrast to his splendid death, Weiss was now taken out of the corpses and, shaking in terror, was led to them. Some of the skeletons he lay under were still breathing, his mouth dripped the remains of wine he had drunk in hiding. They sit him down next to Kramer and somebody kicks him too, he bites his lips, wails until his hands are tied. Don't blindfold him, says Samuel, let him learn to see! And the English obey Samuel Lipker. Weiss asks for food and water and the soldiers bring it to him. He holds out his tied hands, chews hungrily and drinks water. He tries to wipe his face but he can't. Finally he manages to wipe his face with his forearms. Kramer points to the dead officer and says: There died a manly officer, you sell yourself for a slice of bread! Weiss doesn't answer and looks around. Something isn't clear to him. His eyes run from Kramer stuck to him to Captain Wood, he's trying to know where the power is. Maybe there's some mistake here. There was no mistake, says Kramer. Weiss doesn't get it yet. People are passing by him with wheelbarrows full of cadavers and he turns his face aside. Only when Kramer challenges Weiss and looks at him with restrained and tranquil contempt does Ebenezer understand that maybe the war is over.

Samuel understood that by nine in the morning when Frieda started looking for linens to make white flags. Ebenezer is slower. An enlightened camp, Samuel Lipker says to Wood, an enlightened camp with electricity, water, and a French chef.

Night falls. Samuel falls asleep. He earned enough on the first evening of life. In the morning a new sun breaks forth. Somebody took pity on the Germans digging and filling gigantic graves and gave them food. They swallow hungrily. Kramer sits without moving in the place where he sat yesterday. Maybe he didn't shut his eyes either. Weiss is transferred to the improvised interrogation room. Kramer says contemptuously: Now he'll sing them oratorios, but his voice is hoarse. Ebenezer approaches Kramer, touches him. Kramer looks at his Jew. A long meaningless look. They no longer have anything to say to one another. A whole day, the one and only day in their lives, each looked at the other. Kramer doesn't want to smile. Cold, hunger, and obstinacy have done their work. He waits for the secret orders.

Avenues in light Ebenezer sees. Near him they're still digging. He thinks: When did I meet Samuel Lipker, when did I leave Palestine, is it still there, what happened to the beautiful bougainvillea, did I ever really have bougainvillea? Maybe there really is a horizon near the church I saw yesterday for the first time. For three years I didn't hear its bells. What do I remember? I've got to learn my life.

Then Ebenezer leaves the Red Cross hut. Somebody had already managed to draw a Star of David on the hut. Kramer is still sitting pensively. A woman is standing over him and yelling: Say where they killed my children. Where did they kill them, there were three, Haimke, Ruha, and Shmil, where did they kill them? Not far from here is a fine camp of officers, like a pastoral painting. It was here all the time, says Ebenezer, and Ebenezer didn't know. They talk about distributing ration cards, updating, registering, spraying, about food portions and medicine. Captain Wood is rather busy today. The blocks have almost all been destroyed. Old Jews set up a synagogue in a tent. Look for a Torah scroll in the garbage. At night a psychiatrist in a sailor's cap arrives. A woman stands above him and looks at him. She's amazed at how he can sleep in that noise. Look how he sleeps, he hasn't got dreams! And Captain Wood says: He'll understand, he at least has to understand, got to find a way to separate between total disbelief and reality, between life in London after the month of the blitz we came out and found the fog, the street, that's what saved us, they've got to start finding something and understanding. Ebenezer doesn't understand that the church exists! What are the Germans burying, asks the Red Cross man, can I really examine every body? And how many bodies are here? Ebenezer shuts his eyes and says: Abramovitch five, Avigovitch three, Anishevitch two, Baborovsky three, Bennoam two, Bronovitch… What is he doing? asks Captain Wood and Samuel says: He's counting for you how many there were here in the three years so you can examine the corpses from the list. There's no need, yells Captain Wood, suddenly flushed, as if the number of dead is meant to indict him, and he stops Ebenezer, who opens his eyes. He looks and sees that the numbers he was about to deliver are registered with surprising clarity on Kramer's face. Ebenezer tries to maintain the barrier, he looks at the sky, a small plane lands not far from here, he tries to find the sky as Captain Wood once found a street and fog. Grass, cows grazing not far away, when did we see cows? He doesn't remember and isn't sure he really didn't see. Samuel is making deals with soldiers, selling souvenirs, already inventing himself the lampshade made from his parents, and selling it to them, and they weep quite a bit hearing Samuel Lipker's story. By the end of the day, the story was practiced and recited properly, without mistakes, from now on, he'll easily find the place where the soldiers' tears of remorse flow and will make a deal that's not bad. He understands that there's money in tear ducts. Kramer has now turned into a landmark. Two steps from Kramer, on the right, there's a psychiatrist who has gotten up and is trying to understand, to help. Let him hold white underpants, says somebody. Why are they making a picnic of all this? says Captain Wood in a moment of perplexity. The barbed wire fence is already starting to totter, strewn with dead dogs who fled and were electrocuted. People are washing, scared of the light. A little girl asks a soldier for candy and next to her stands a table full of candy. Hard to understand, thinks Ebenezer, but possible to peep, Fraulein Klopfer sits tied up next to Kramer, lowers her eyes, and Samuel says to Captain Wood: When they threw babies into the fire she took a baby, tossed it up and aimed it so it would fall straight down, like a rock into water. You'd be amazed how much a year-old baby wants to live and how he leaps and shrieks. Look at her! That's how you'll find the street and the fog. A sunbeam prances on the Germans digging. A blond boy with blue-gray eyes stands on the edge of the pit and hands his father a sandwich. His face is transparent, so fair. The father chews hungrily and mutters something, and the little girl at the table, to the right of Kramer, swallows some chocolate and her face is smeared, and an American soldier takes a picture of a little girl brown with chocolate next to the DDT showers. Clouds float in the sky. How do you guess, Fraulein Klopfer, thinks Captain Wood. She lifts her face and looks at the dim glow of the horizon, valiant Germans are digging pits and filling them with the dead, that destroyed harmony shatters in her a vital force that Kramer is trying to suck out of the air as if he were waiting for dispatches, the Fuhrer won't forsake us, he says confidently. Does Captain Wood understand the meaning that I'm not the Last Jew, that a disaster happened and Samuel doesn't know who the disaster happened to? This is how a very powerful system is devised, says the psychiatrist.

Who will arrange the battle Ebenezer is now shaping in his memory, his chronicles, thinks the psychiatrist sitting with Ebenezer in a special tent set up for him.

I knew I'd be the last to give up!

How did you think about that?

I didn't think. It came by itself.

And in the previous camp?

There I didn't think, and don't remember exactly.

Will you hypnotize yourself to remember?

Samuel can help me.

Samuel, come help him.

Samuel approaches, stands next to Ebenezer, says: Shut your eyes, set your watch back. Kramer stands up to come see the box you made for him and then…

I came to Birkenau. For years I searched for Joseph Rayna. Here I was almost the first one. They built the hut after I was inside. Three years here is the climax!

And what did you do?

Don't remember… at night they didn't shoot me, but they told me, at first there were no chambers here.

Gas?

Gas.

And what did they do?

They tried with a diesel motor and heavy oil, says Samuel, that took an hour to suffocate thirty people in a closed truck. Weiss came and saw my box.

Then you made boxes?

Yes, says Samuel, and that's how he remembered.

How?

He heard people murmuring. They were finished and were dead. They were hungry, stunned, groaned at night, talked, he started remembering, doesn't know how, he said: I'll be the last one who will guard everything they know.

Humiliated?

Maybe he didn't say humiliated, isn't humiliated too strong?

Perhaps. I wasn't there. You come from another world, Mr. Schneerson.

But he's here.

Yes, he's here, but look, he isn't anymore.

I don't know, if he was, he'll probably remain.

No, he isn't.

I didn't have the strength to remember the other things, so maybe I could not know how awful it is to live here.

To ignore?

Yes. And not to think. Just remember things I don't understand anyway.

There were geniuses here. Do you know what a mine of knowledge was lost here? Only a little of that he remembers.

Why?

Everything came according to a certain music, the words came one by one, incomprehensible but etched. You think I'll ever be free of that?

I don't know.

Let's say, I thought about Wittgenstein's theory, there is such a man, isn't there?

Yes.

I thought about it, don't understand it, but every word of his I know. I remembered his words and I forgot what I did before.

Everything comes at the price of something, says Samuel.

Apparently, says the psychiatrist.

I'm a superficial man. I thought I'd hide and they'd come and then I'd tell them. I loved a woman. I left everything, but I don't remember now. I remember their words. Got to be freed first. I already remember Captain Wood and you, sir, a sign that I'm not the Last Jew. A sign that I'm also starting to remember things that are happening to me.

Then they passed through small cities, slipped between closed borders, and the money Samuel earned was enough to slip from place to place. Samuel said: The dumb psychiatrist thought you're a sorcerer and not a poor soul who drills from the words of others. In one city they met a woman who knew Ebenezer. During the war she had sewn uniforms for armies that had passed through there. He asked her to tell him what he had searched for there fifteen years before and she didn't want to remember. When they came to the destroyed street of the Jews they met some Jews who were standing and feeling the ruins in amazement. Samuel and Ebenezer stood on the side. They had no concrete memories here. Poles came out of a nearby house and started beating them. Samuel spat and Ebenezer looked on in astonishment. He thought: Kramer was right. Then he started talking with Samuel about Palestine. Didn't remember much. Remembered his mother, the settlement. Remembered dimly, he had to make an effort. Samuel didn't want to hear. What will I do in a savage land? There they won't throw stones at you for coming to feel destroyed stones, said Ebenezer. Everywhere there are pogroms, said Samuel, I'll teach you to hit them where it hurts. Why did you leave, asked Samuel, but Ebenezer didn't know anymore, something about Joseph Rayna… I was ultimately an echo that picked up echoes, says Ebenezer, Captain Wood, who attended Eton and Oxford, doesn't hold a stick in his hand, doesn't understand, I'm with Samuel, where to?

Echoes touch echoes, pain touches pain. What a gigantic sky like a canopy of death.

My dear Goebbelheydrichhimmel, that's all for now. Second draft. The words aren't yet stuck together precisely. Imagine writing achtung today when the meaning of the word in the dictionary is: term of respect!

I remember back then, in Denmark, when I sent you my first stories. Those were different times. We tried to understand what had happened to us, you were also steeped in dread then and tried to investigate. I wrote you the story about myself, a soldier who created contact with the enemy and was sent back in shame from the occupied land to command children shooting at low-flying planes. You wondered then, you were even afraid that what I did in Denmark would disturb the publication of my book. Then I came back and you supported me, I'm grateful, if not for your help, who knows where I'd be today? You want Germany without remorse because in the end remorse doesn't help. An artist, a boy, a magician, not a Jew… a Jew in a story sounds too simple, to write about Jews means writing not only about Wasserman, Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Buber, and Einstein-we're allowed to talk about them, in articles and lecturesbut also about moneylenders, wretched street musicians, a schmaltzy wedding orchestra, knitted skullcaps, ritual fringes, and you think, Ah, literary judenrein is after all a certain enlightenment. Symbols? Yes: fish, midget, architect, only not Mr. Cohen who lived in Cologne and has been burned on our bonfires for one thousand five hundred years, looks like a caricature, sells kosher salami.

Samuel Lipker now blows up Arab villages and so we can erase him from literature, what do I have to do with him, you ask, what do I have to do with the story of Ebenezer? Who's interested in Ebenezer? I understand, for you he's superfluous, for me he's hard, because with Ebenezer I'll be a stranger in the literature and the cinema where I'm one of the central pillars. And I'm not talking about the literature and cinema that are judenrein! All of us knew some Samuel Lipker, didn't we, in school, on the street, we had a common biography, and where are they? Ebenezer didn't know he couldn't enter great German literature. Human tatters here and there, and nothing else. I can invite my translators from all over the world to a splendid conference, lecture to them, and maybe a translator will even come from Israel, they'll all sit, and I've got money to do that, don't I, and I'll explain the subtleties to them, but none of them will be bold enough to ask me where in my fiction is Hans who once lived in the house where we're meeting. He's just some Ebenezer, some carpenter. See how much more interesting Kramer is than Ebenezer? Why do we need Ebenezer in Kramer's story?

Kramer grits his teeth when the Jews are involved in a revolt against themselves and us, he knows how to keep his mouth shut and not say what he once said in awful words, and he's right, dammit, they've got no right to blow up quiet villages, but maybe I have no right to tell them that. I should investigate Kramer, and not only against the background of Wilhelmstrasse, but also against the background of Walter Benjamin, or his family who maybe played in the women's orchestra of Auschwitz. How enlightened and beautiful we are today. They gave us European manure, six million graves, and we gave them an extension. Now we're right again and again they're not. Act nice, we tell them, and then we'll talk to you. You destroyed the Arab village of Marar, so why are you still talking! We buy eternity with sublime conscientiousness, with measured words, without mentioning names. And Lipker sells and buys cigarettes. Ebenezer sells knowledge in nightclubs. Not nice. A literary Jew is Freud, not Lipker! What you want is a nice story about a carter's ass. He pees and sees through the prism of urine the fisherman and the farmer's wife kneeling. You want indifferent, estranged words, mother died on Sunday, was born on Posen Street. You want a thin literature in a world where literature has nothing more to say. But look, we're successful, they read us. Maybe you're right and I'm not, but your rightness is starting not to interest me, my friend, Ebenezer's rightness is more perverse, incomprehensible, but more important to me.

Meanwhile until I can write what you and my friends will sneer at, I will write my novella, I'll finish it, I promised and I'll keep my promise. Afterward, we'll sit, Henkin and I, and together we'll write a book, from both sides of the absurd, from both sides of death. I'll describe everything, every single detail, there'll be a pissing snake there, and Hitler who didn't die, and Jews who aren't literary, maybe even without qualities, love is a banal issue, like hate, like death.

That's it so far, because soon I'll start being banal again. The words don't scare me anymore. With a bitter sneer I'll write the prologue to what you call an epilogue. I'll write my lament, along with Henkin, an old investigator who lost a son in the war with the Arabs, and you'll have to publish a book that won't gain you anything, that critics will desecrate and not celebrate, that people won't read and won't buy.

Tape / -

Joseph Rayna died, appropriately, on his birthday. Sixty-two years old he was at his death. He stood at a wall, his hands raised, his body blighted, bereft of the spirit of life even before he would die. Until his final days he had walked around erect with a crooked indulgent smile on his lips, as if everything happening before his eyes was known to him long before. Maybe it was the smile of schadenfreude. Beautiful was Joseph, as old angels are when a tired and bored God stopped taking an interest in sugary young men. A man in whose arms a Hebrew queen had died, whose father was hanged, and for whom a hundred women got pregnant. I searched for him, I knew he hadn't gone to America, but I didn't find him. His hollow songs Joseph had burned in his mind long before his death. Samuel Lipker was born from an almost absurd coupling between Joseph and a lustful woman who acted heroines she loved in a locked room all her life. Samuel's father didn't know that Samuel wasn't his son. He left Samuel a diamond in his body. He and his wife were too decent to accept the truth and admit it, so they learned how to live alongside it, to console themselves with the silence between them. They refused to admit what deviated in them.

Tape / -

When Samuel's mother went to the store to buy bread and flowers, she'd look at the trees or the display window as if those too were paintings by some genius artist. Her devotion to the beauty and glory of art was so great that she was afraid to deal with them in public. So as not to shame what she secretly called: that muse!

The universe, as she revealed to Joseph later on, chose to crush in herself her own great talent, a talent she was forbidden to waste for the pittance of small inauthentic theaters with an audience smelling of popcorn and fried onions. If only I had been born in Paris, she said.

The great love affair of her life began like every war, quite by chance. It was of course a moment that would later be described as unforgettable, and was preceded by steps that of course could not be changed. She was stand ing there in a flower shop and, as she put it, smelling the aroma of the distant rivers that watered those delicate flowers when Joseph Rayna, the aging lover of women, saw her reflection in the window and began wooing her with a courtesy that was splendid, wicked, but so tired it looked elegant and theatrical to her. He bought her all the flowers in the display window and five boys had to carry home the baskets of flowers and at the sight of them she laughed a wild laugh, which this time-uncriticized- came from within herself. The boys bore the flowers with lockjaw discipline. The secret had to be equally elegant and concealed. After acting Electra and Antigone all her life before walls crammed with plates and pictures, now she stood at the flowers and waited for a love letter from Joseph Rayna. Abrom Mendelstein, who would later be shot and laid diagonally on top of his two brothers and his father, with whom he would dig the grave, lent Samuel's mother his room. Since he couldn't carry on a real affair, he loved to see love flourishing in his friends. He was a teacher of Akkadian and Aramaic and his wife Frumka was such a free woman that she had had three lovers by then, and she didn't make love to them because of firm reluctance to yield to feelings that didn't throb in her. She belonged to a small progressive and stormy faction that seceded from the central section, and she also seceded from the general party in the Warsaw committee, whose sixty-two members split into six different trends and once a week, Samuel's mother was lent the small apartment and Joseph would arrive gasping from all the stairs he had to climb.

With him, Samuel's mother could declaim in French drenched in ancient and sweet idioms the ancient Medea, full of evil and passion, and plot against herself. In her late youth, as the mother of Samuel, whose miserable father was Joseph, she began to sing, and was cheerful even though a bit vague from so much life that had landed on her and she thought quite a bit of things she had seen as if they were written in a book and not really real.

Searching his father's naked body before he put it on the heap of corpses to be burned, Samuel was amazed at the sight of his parents' surprising nakedness. He succumbed to the profound feeling of disgust and gratitude when he found the diamond.

Lionel Secret once asked his mother Rachel: Who was my father? And Rachel Brin, Rayna, now Blau, said: I was married to a man named Nathan Secret, he died, I came to America because my friend Rebecca kept talking about the trees dripping gold of America. They didn't drip gold and she went to Palestine. Until I married Saul Blau who started selling his shirts, I worked hard. Today our trees are all right, she said.

Tape / -

Lionel Secret, who was once called Secret Glory, was a frightened child and at night, to fall asleep he would sing Schubert lieder to himself and until the age of eleven, his voice was thin as a girl's. Rachel had two daughters and two sons with Saul Blau and Lionel grew up to be a tall fellow with an ascetic handsome face, his hair was black, somebody said he looked like a butterfly trapped and proud at the same time. A dimple of eternal pondering was set into his right cheek and made him look determined, but also thoroughly confused.

When the war broke out, Lionel enlisted and after training in England, he was sent to Europe and for seven days he shot at an enemy whose precise location was confused by the maps. When the mistake was discovered, half his battalion was taken prisoner, and the remaining soldiers stopped shooting at the empty hay loft and waited for Lionel, who was familiar with the impressive parades of the brown shirts on York Avenue, near his house, and he called to his comrades to flee. Three deigned to join him. They slipped away, lay in the rotten hayloft, and when the Germans came in with their prisoners, Lionel prepared an attack like the game he had once played in summer camp where he was assigned the role of the Indian. More soldiers who had previously thought they had no chance to escape came to help them, destroyed their captors and made their way to brigade headquarters, which had gone astray and was tramping in a direction not only imprecise, but also unknown. Lionel managed to deliver his prisoners, earn a salute of honor from an old commander who yearned for more successful and chivalrous wars, fight a few weeks in battles better prepared but still lost, see a British plane brought down, hear its pilot yelling Shema Israel under the parachute the Germans peppered with bullets, engage in diversionary operations in which he taught an aged commander how to smell Germans by the smell of beets and potatoes, and lead a unit of Australians and Canadians to a town completely different from the description in the briefing. In that operation, a British soldier was shot who lobbed a hand grenade and knocked out an armored car with a German brigade com mander and his Polish adjutant, the Pole tried to shoot and in his death throes, he hit a little girl standing there playing with her two dogs, and on its way to the little girl the bullet also passed through Lionel, who managed to destroy the armored car completely and to shoot a last bullet at the Pole, and at the end of all that he was taken to the hospital.

Lionel won two medals, which were awarded him by a brigadier general, who still remembered his fury at the sight of a Jewish tailor bent over in a small street in Liverpool.

By the time Lionel, the fifty-third son of Joseph Rayna, returned to America, he was an officer in the British army. After Pearl Harbor, the United States was forced to enter the war declared on it by the Germans. Lionel commanded a training school in the southern United States. After toiling for half a year training young men, he was sent to Europe to take part in the great Landing. After he was wounded again, this time by shrapnel, he was transferred to intelligence, to the division of interrogation and liaison. Aside from English, Lionel knew Yiddish, German, Polish, Russian, French, and Sanskrit, and those languages, at least some of them, along with his profound knowledge of Latin and ancient Greek, helped him considerably to be considered an excellent interrogation officer. And indeed, he was promoted, and in 'forty-five, a few months before the war ended, he attained the rank of major, and General Eisenhower, in a letter of an efficient secretary, thanked him for his contribution to the war effort and awarded him a special medal for outstanding service, bravery, and model behavior.

There was a moment when Lionel, who still thought of himself as Secret Glory, thought that the stories he hadn't yet managed to write were also the only stories he would write. He even thought of choosing some death of honor. The novel he thought of writing about Joseph Rayna, whom his mother had told him about with her eyes filled with youthful mischief, refused to be written. He published some short stories in important journals with small circulation. And once he wrote a letter to Rebecca Schneerson in Palestine. Her answer was matter-of-fact: if you're really a mature person, you will probably understand how much your fate can't touch my heart, you're in America with your mother and I'm not, I'm busy in the cowshed and with the almond trees, the war didn't pass over us, Nehemiah died on the shore of Jaffa, you asked about my son who's wandering around Europe. I don't know, I think he was killed, the adulterer Joseph Rayna didn't make me children, but on the other hand nobody can know for sure who was the father of my son, yours, Rebecca Schneerson.

When Lionel was thirteen, he loved a twelve-year-old girl who lived on the other side of the city. She lived in a big house surrounded by a fine garden, planned by an English landscape architect especially for her father, the main Ford dealer in the area. Lionel would bring her flowers he picked in the fields, wrote poems to her, and told her about the stories he would write when he grew up. The girl's name was Melissa and she had bright and beautiful oval eyes and sparkling brown hair. One day Melissa threw away the flowers, turned her face away, and said in a voice choked with weeping whose subtleties he didn't understand: My mother told me I'm big enough not to be a girlfriend of some Jew from Poland. Lionel returned home, sang lieder to the toilet, and wept behind the locked door. Rachel said: That happens in Poland, not in America. He listened to her and said: Maybe it shouldn't happen here, but it did. A month later, Melissa got sick. The doctors couldn't diagnose her illness. Melissa asked her mother to call Lionel and he came. By now she had little breasts and her eyes became more white than bright and Lionel shut his eyes which were almost weeping and saw the angel of death sitting between Melissa's eyelashes. Later on, when he would come out of the hayloft and fight the Germans he would do that to save Melissa and her parents, he would feel that he was returning them good for bad. Lionel wanted to pray but didn't know what God they prayed to in the elegant house of the main Ford dealer. He stroked Melissa and told her how much he loved her. She showed him pictures of movie actresses filled with sweet smiles and he told her she was more beautiful than they were. Her sweet eyelashes and her face were now full of something he knew was death. But Melissa's parents, who tried not to see Lionel, said: She's got the flu and in a few days she'll get better. Lionel pleaded with them to send her to the hospital in New York, but they said angrily that the doctors of New York were no better than the doctors of their city. He told Melissa: I think of you, I'll always love you, and she told him she'd always love him and in secret they signed a lifetime contract. The contract was hidden in Lionel's pocket and Melissa asked him to forgive her for what she had once said to him. After I told you what Mother told me to say, I wept all night long! she said. Her eyes dimmed, he saw how close death was and called her mother in alarm, and her mother told him: She's tired and you should go now, Lionel. He told her: My name is Secret Glory, and she looked at him, saw the flash of wrath burning in his eyes and something primeval and ancient made her tremble even though she didn't even know what it was. Her parents brought young Brook to read her the history of the struggle for the Connecticut River from the journal Our Connecticut, a bimonthly and a source of pride for many buyers of cars from Melissa's father. Melissa lay with her eyes shut, pale and transparent as a butterfly and with a slight effort she managed not to listen to young Brook.

He didn't go to Melissa's funeral. Two years later, he went to New York to school. His mother and her husband moved to New Jersey. In New York, he clung to a girl who talked about class warfare and her cunning and elusive body wasn't at all like the purity in Melissa's eyes. Lionel wrote a few more stories, and to descend to the masses, he tried to live with the woman who cleaned his father's house, was unfaithful to her with a girl from Radcliffe, went on a long trip around the world, a trip that lasted six years, and then he spent two years closed in a room and wrote a novel that wasn't accepted by any publisher, and then he went to a small city, started teaching in a college, and for three years he collected old cars, ambulances, locomotives, tow trucks, and buses, and parked them in a lot he leased and would walk among those cars and think, Why do I collect this garbage? I don't even like to drive and detest every car and every bus I collect.

Saul Blau expanded his business and opened a few shirt shops. Lionel met the woman who had once been an elusive girl and talked about class warfare, now she took Lionel to her old parents' house and during the Kiddush, she raised her glass to toast the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which, in her words, liberated the toilers from the malice of the capitalist war. Lionel scolded her, he yelled that she was Jewish filth, words she treated with such abysmal tolerance and contempt that she almost burst out laughing. Then Lionel went to enlist in the Canadian brigades at the Canadian consulate in New York, and went off to fight as we said, because of that woman for the lost Jewish honor. He of course couldn't tell her that he was going to fight for Melissa, for Melissa's parents and their Ford cars. The lot of cars, buses, and ambulances he sold. His stepfather told him: Don't worry, Secret, you're all right in my hands, I'll invest your money and add as much and more, you'll be both a hero and rich.

Saul, Rachel's husband, liked to pound his hand on the table and say: Oh, just be healthy! He conquered the field of cheap shirts with diligence, guile, and restraint. He said: I push the shirts on them so my parents who were murdered in a pogrom will lie in warm shirts in their grave. Rachel, who didn't understand the connection between his dead parents and the shirt stores spreading over the city, loved in her husband the lack of Joseph's madness. At night, she secretly longed for the forests, Rebecca, the language of syllables, and one day, she said: Someday I'll visit Rebecca in her forest in Palestine.

When Rachel heard the Nazis singing on York Avenue and saw their goose-step marching, she locked the shutters of Lionel's apartment right over a big bar whose owner was passing out wine and cakes to those in the parade, and she asked Lionel: What will be? He told her he would fight them for her too. She said: Lionel, you're not a child, you're a grown man, forty years old, not married, not settled, without a serious profession, and they're strong. Watch out for them, and when she looked into his eyes she saw a smile capering in them, some weary and glowing splendor of dignity that reminded her of Joseph Rayna's face and she was sorry, so sorry, she had had to grant her son a father like Joseph Rayna, which would surely bring destruction on him in the war against the Germans now shouting in the street below. Weariness and life did their work and she had neither the strength nor the will to tell her son who his father was. Suddenly she said: The words of Joseph Rayna could have been a reply to those satanic parades. After Lionel enlisted, Rachel waited for him behind the locked shutters. Every week she went to his apartment and would arrange his books.

Lionel came to Cologne as an interrogator of prisoners. He came there on the same day that Ebenezer Schneerson and Samuel Lipker came to Paris, where they started performing in a small nightclub. In Cologne, Lionel met Lily Schwabe. When he saw her he understood that Melissa hadn't died, and children who had once shot at airplanes near the destroyed factory now stood almost naked in the street and pointed at Lionel, who strode to the temporary headquarters. The city was destroyed. Lionel helped a local Jewish committee find Jewish children hidden in monasteries and other hiding places and weren't told that the war was over. After thinking about Lily, he made a decision to give her up from the start. He was also afraid that another Melissa would die on him.

After he gave up Lily, he went to the river. He sat at the river and drank juice from a can. Near the place where he was sitting, workers were digging under a destroyed house and taking out corpses of prisoners of war killed in air raids. In the river he saw moss and oil spots and scum, but fish he didn't see. He didn't see fish because even the dead fish were fished out by the hungry Germans. He was disgusted with himself for being sad at seeing hungry Germans. That thought brought him back to Lily. She looked too hungry to be Melissa. Everything metamorphoses into everything, everybody lives again and again, death is a cease-fire, he thought. He went back to the city and found himself in an army canteen. He bought kerosene, clothes, oil, soap, sausage, canned milk, wine, cheese, cigarettes, dairy products, and other groceries, put everything into a kitbag, and went to Lily's house. Lily touched the groceries, tentatively, and, with her eyes shut, her hands stroked the canned milk. She smiled shyly, nervously smoothed her faded dress, and started cooking. Music came from a soldiers' cafe not far from there, and then she set the table and after everything was perfectly arranged-the gleaming, old dishes-she burst into tears. Lionel got up, went to her, stroked her and then licked her tears. She stood without moving and let him lick her eyes. Then they sat at the table and ate. He looked in amazement at her ravenous eating. They drank some wine and sat at the window where bonfires were seen. Two whole days they didn't go out of the house.

Later on, Lily will tell Lionel that the blood shed then was the blood of her virginity and that he was the first man in her life. When Lily saw Lionel, almost twenty years older than her, standing in the door of her house and holding a kitbag in his hands, she felt for the first time in her life an enormous need to belong to somebody. A day before, as she sat in the office among disgruntled women and waited to renew her temporary ID, she saw Lionel walking in his uniform. She remembered that, when he passed by her, there was an innocent dismay on his face, and only then did he discover her and start talking with her and she smiled, even though she didn't know she was Melissa, and then he said: What is this Lily Schwabe, and she said: Lily Schwabe is a woman who lives in a destroyed house, and she gave him her address-something she had never doneand he went off and she was afraid she'd never see him again, until he showed up.

Two days later, Lionel stood in the little bathroom, facing the mirror that had cracked long ago, and cut his face with a razor blade. Lily, who thought he was trying to commit suicide, yelled and ran to him and tried to take the razor out of his hand, and then he told her in German: I'm not committing suicide, I just cut myself. She was amazed to hear the German, and said: Why didn't you tell me you speak German, and then he said: Don't worry, Melissa, and she said: My name is Lily and you speak German. Suddenly the sight of the people he interrogated rose in his mind's eye, the convulsions of laughter, the attempt to be cunning, but still strong, the endless deceit of those who didn't know anything, always they knew nothing, and he said to himself: I shouldn't have found her here. His hands shook and he slapped her. He said: I know how to say that in German, too, and she sat down on a broken chair, stroked her face, and said: Take the child, too! And he said angrily: There is no child and there won't be any child, and she said: Then take the no-child. And then she told him about her father taken prisoner by the Russians, he tried to trap her, to know if she was lying to him, but after a while-and he was an excellent interrogator-he understood that Lily Schwabe really didn't know why that war had raged. She knew French, German, literature, and history, but because of her reason and some profound wisdom in her, she didn't know why that war had raged. She didn't know that people died in camps. That offended Lionel. He knew that everybody said that, it was convenient for him to know that they said and recalled things and tried to pass on to the agenda. But to meet somebody like Lily, and to understand, to understand that she truly didn't know, that was beyond his understanding. He told her: You're not guilty, In sinne der Anklage-Nicht schuldig, as the war criminals then claimed. She wasn't angry at him for hitting her, and he said: You taught yourself to be devoid of moral judgment, but neither did she understand why Lionel's Judaism constituted any difficulty in their relations. She understood only that he shouldn't have German children. And she said that. She tried to understand what happened, to explain how she had shut herself off, maybe against her will, maybe because of some indifference, maybe because of a fear that she couldn't hold out, she lived on the periphery, and the war passed by her, the city was blown up, people went away and didn't come back, but she didn't ask questions, maybe she feared the answers, she only remembered that near the end of the war, she saw the young children, she'd see them on their way to the nearby school, shooting at low-flying planes and being killed, and older prisoners of war, bound with ropes, loading sandbags to defend them and being killed too. Lionel said to her: You're the wrong product of the Third Reich, everything was wasted on you!

Lionel got up, walked around the room, and for three straight hours, he delivered a speech to her about the continuity of the Jewish fate, about the lost echoes of their footsteps, and he left. Two days later he came back. He'd bring groceries, and she would cook. You're learning to eat, he told her, envying her hunger. All the time he would talk about his shortcomings, his advanced age, his failure as a writer, his life as a superfluous journey between nothing and nothing, and Lily who began to understand that her name was not only Lily but also Melissa, began to learn English, and one day she sat among his dirty clothes and laundered them and thought about a certain word she had learned that day, and shouted it to Lionel who was in the bath, and he opened the door, saw the young woman sitting there lovesick with his clothes and gave her some answer about the word she had uttered, and then he understood the meaning of his love, he understood it from her concern with his clothes and with words, understood what sensuality a woman could grant to the pants of a man she loved, and how far she could go to speak a language that is the soul of things and their formulation before they were in the world. Now he saw Lily imprisoned in a world that for some reason didn't take vengeance on her because it didn't know what profound rebelliousness was buried in her, how she could betray herself, her parents, all out of a total dissociation, out of a rare ability to be like a wax statue in a legend in which a prince appears and grants her life. Her life is my sad echo, he said to himself, and loved her as much as he was disgusted by her and by himself, loved her more than anybody else he had ever loved in his life.

Tape / -

When Ebenezer and Samuel Lipker came to Cologne, Samuel stood in the street and distributed announcements about the performance. He had no guilt about dragging Ebenezer to that place. As far as he was concerned, the enemy should also enjoy. Lionel heard about the performance and decided to take Lily. When they entered the small wretched nightclub they were greeted by the owner, a very thin man with smoky eyes, holding rattles to be shaken, and when they sat down at a big wooden table where people had carved their names for years, two gigantic glasses of beer were already standing before them and in front was a small lighted stage. The place was crowded, the smoke of cheap cigarettes spiraled up from all sides, and whenever Ebenezer declaimed, the room thundered with the excited rattles. Next to Lionel and Lily sat five hugging men who wept all the time. For some reason, the tears the men wept were so big that when he looked at them, Lionel could see how the space left by Ebenezer's words, words with nothing behind them except borrowed memory, stirred laugh ducts in five men who came here to demonstrate disguised laughter. Ebenezer looked to Lionel like a repulsive Jew who wanted to look like a repulsive Jew, rather stooped, and Lionel wearing the uniform of an American officer felt uncomfortable, he was amazed not only that that man was amusing people who would have tortured him a year ago, but also at his own amazement. Lily understood that Ebenezer was reciting things he didn't understand, but as far as she was concerned, there was something in that fact itself that justified what she had tried to explain to Lionel without much success, that she too had lived ten years in a recital and didn't understand that she was reciting, didn't even want to understand.

And then Lionel noticed Samuel Lipker. Between the excerpts, Samuel praised the Last Jew who was appearing here before this distinguished audience, as he put it. He spoke like a person reporting on percentages of interest or a rise in stocks, restrained and aloof, and all the while his face was thrust at the audience, he had to know who his real enemy was, he had to overpower them and Lionel understood his look better than he understood Lily's enthusiasm at hearing the things Ebenezer was reciting. Lionel hated the covetousness he discerned in Samuel's eyes. He saw in him something that reminded him of the awful moments of his life, when he saw in the mirror a person he himself didn't know. And then Ebenezer said: I now list essays on the history of the hostility to the repulsive Jews (he didn't say that mockingly, he said it dryly, as if he had no opinion)Distinguished gentlemen, set your watches a thousand years back. I'm trying again, I said then boldly: the news according to Benbas, the dialogue with Trifo by Justin Martyr, the pamphlet against the heretics by Iraeneus, I'm sorry about the whisper, reading from a distance, dead letters torn in my mind, a smell of a distant church, a ringing that deserted the bells and remains hovering in the air, torturing Jews by Tertullian, calling God by Lactinius, and that fool Kramer thought only about the essay by Isidor of Sevilla and his pamphlet against the Jews. A great expert you had there! Kramer… removing all the heretics and an explanatory essay against Jews by Hippolyte, tasteless kinds of flesh of Jews by Novatian and a selection of testimonies by Nissa and testimonies from the Old Testament against the Jews, proof of the Good Tidings, history of the church by Eusebius. Eight sermons against the Jews and proof to the Jews and the Christians that Jesus is God by Chrysostom, a pamphlet by Saint Augustine, his Heavenly City… Rhymes against the Jews by Ephraim the Syrian, Sergei de Abraga: the Torah of Jacob and the proofs against the Jews by Ephrat, the sermons of Masrog, the Sabbath against the Jews by Isidore… Something is omitted here, and the book of Orthodox faith, a dialogue of Jason and Papikies, a dialogue of Timothy of Aquilla, a dialogue of Asnasius and Pepsicus, and Philo, and Lily thought Ebenezer was singing. When she said that, Lionel looked at her and suddenly couldn't recognize her. Inside him, a melody he knew from childhood began singing in him. Melissa is listening to my father's melody, thought Lionel, who was my father? But when Ebenezer started quoting poems by eighteenth-century Polish poets, the ruddy-cheeked old man with the red flower in his lapel was moved to tears and frenziedly wrote down every word in a big notebook in front of him. His hand flew over the paper, his eyes were almost shut and some coquettish smile spread over his face. When Ebenezer moved to the stories of the Cadet from the Zohar and then to the stories of the Brothers Grimm, the old man said: Forty years I've been investigating forgotten Polish poetry, both of us, he and I, the only ones in the world who still remember. I sit in London, sir, investigate, encyclopedias empty of that poetry, no books, there was a man who remembered and passed it on to Ebenezer, in his mind he holds onto that sublime poetry, I copy it to publish it. Is there anything more awful than a nation forgetting its songs, Lord! Of all the dozens of poets he knows-I follow him from city to city-only three are still known to scholars of Polish literature. Who was the man who taught him that poetry? Could it have been a Jew? How does a Jew who died know that poetry? And the man wept and Lionel didn't know exactly what he was weeping about. He covered the notebook so the tears wouldn't melt the words he wrote and he started shaking the rattle. I don't know, if he'd ask me I'd be amazed, do I really know those poems? Maybe Germanwriter knows. The man stopped shaking the rattle and again wrote something. Lily swallowed a piece of orange Lionel gave her.

And then Ebenezer stood up to the cheering rattles. A bitter smile flickered in the corners of his mouth. Those who didn't just want to shake the rattles applauded. Ebenezer looked tired and pale. Samuel Lipker gave him a glass of beer. Lily said: That lad looks like you! Lionel, who had known that from the first moment, glared at his venomous beauty, he shifted his eyes to Ebenezer and thought: Ebenezer and I are the same age. I'm with Lily Schwabe and he's with Samuel Lipker, and he envied Lily's beautiful eyes that saw that beauty.

Anger at himself made him shiver and he diverted his hostility to war against Lily.

And Lily was an easy enemy, thought Lionel with his characteristic bitterness. And then a murderer who had been dormant in him ever since Melissa shut her eyes was kindled in him. His hands reached out to Lily to strangle her. There was a lot of noise. A flush rose onto Lily's cheeks. She saw the hands reaching out to her. Samuel Lipker stared long and wantonly at Lionel, who felt his look. He dropped his hands and buried his face in them. Lily sidled up to him and caressed his hand, shook the rattle exaggeratedly, and sipped the beer. The Pole stood up and went to sit someplace else. Lionel wanted to get up. Ebenezer was standing on the side of the stage and looked like a grasshopper stuck to a blackboard in a biology class. Lily is watered by an artificial rain, he thought, and Melissa, my angel, you died before my eyes. Samuel Lipker now told how he had met Ebenezer, how Ebenezer learned his knowledge. He told how they had crossed borders and countries, and said: This performance is designed to collect money for our families, we glean pennies to save souls from death. He didn't expatiate on what death and only the smiling expression of Ebenezer's eyes clarified for Lionel the disgrace of the moment. When they passed the baskets among the audience, Samuel's eyes examined the room carefully but kept coming back to Lionel. When the basket came to Lionel, Lily wanted to pay, but he caught her hand, held the basket for a whole minute, looked at the money heaped up in it and passed it on. Samuel looked at the basket that dropped out of Lionel's hand, and his eyes expressed some contempt and then Samuel said, his eyes staring into Lionel's eyes: Ebenezer has to save his daughters! But Lionel knew and didn't know how he knew that Ebenezer had no daughters. Now he wanted to see Samuel's defeat but maybe even then that love for that bold and attractive lad stirred in him, and the closeness he felt for Lily made him shiver even more, he had to kiss or die, her or him, he went outside and threw up. Then, he took the rattle and shook it in the street until they came to Lily's house. People dressed in rags sitting huddled at bonfires next to what once were their houses looked with characteristic loathing at somebody who had lost them their palaces, and he yelled: I piss on you and the dream girl of the Third Reich also laughed. At home, Lionel said: I'm forty-four years old and I weep without tears. And you, a daughter of the thousand-year Reich-and you laugh! You're an ad for Ritesma and Simon cigarettes, a painting of the great German school, sitting with a kike born in Poland and wanting children he doesn't have to give you.

Lily made tea for the drunken Lionel and then she lay down beside him and was Melissa with little nipples who killed angels of death with her soft eyelashes.

What made you Lily made Himmler Himmler, said Lionel with his eyes shut. And thus he started writing her a farewell letter in his mind. She told him: What's simple about love? You were the first man in my life and you'll be the last. She didn't understand how Lionel knew that Ebenezer had no daughters. She wanted Ebenezer to have daughters. Lionel got angry, but couldn't explain why Ebenezer had no daughters. And so maybe he felt she was immune to him, maybe because of her love, maybe because of her youth as a wunderkind of the Hitler-jugend maybe she had never been a member of, and they talked about the resemblance between Samuel and Lionel. Lionel got angry, as if the heavy blood coursing in him truly had a voice and a shape as the professors and sages in this city had taught for ten years. A scene of a dream she had had arose in Lily's mind. In her dream, she told him, her father, who was now a prisoner of the Russians, was stumbling in a forest and she was a baby bird. Her father picked up the baby bird and decided to cook it. Then he would shoot at birds who came to ask for the baby bird. He put her into a basket, and walked, and that's how I was adopted, she said. Lionel thought of Joseph Rayna. Once, when he had heard about him, he had wanted so much for him to be his father so he could kill him. He thought of how his mother had told him about Rebecca Schneerson who would translate people into an eternal texture of contempt like copy paper that transmits things and serves as a fluent copy but preserves the original. Those thoughts begat in him an almost regal lust that was translated into a tormented and enormous night of love and copulation like some whorehouse of angels, he thought, and when he woke up and saw her sleeping, he noticed how white and clear her eyes were. Don't die on me, he said in a panic. And then he sank into sleep and when he woke up he saw her eyes wide open and looking at him. The responsibility filled him with a bitter taste. She'll look so beautiful on York Avenue, she'll dry the tears of the world, she has no right to wonder about Ebenezer's lost daughters, and he said to her: When Samuel Lipker searched for diamonds in corpses, you sat and drew sunsets with flags at the Baltic shore and a heroic and bold race lusted for you with avid eyes, but she didn't answer him. She tried to remember how beautiful it was to fall asleep in his arms, and she said: But if you decided that I'm Melissa, then let me be Melissa retroactively, too. The vanishing figure of her father didn't grieve her. In her dream, she remembered, she dreamed that somebody pointed an accusing finger at her, but since she never knew what guilt was she didn't know what the finger meant. You know, she said, you're now all the memories I have, I came to you from total darkness.

That night he said he had to go away for a while. He brought a lot of groceries and two pairs of nylon stockings. She was silent and looked at him, and whispered: I'll be here, Lionel. Soon, they'll finish repairing the house across the street, the apartment there belonged to my grandmother, she died in the war. The phone number in her apartment is 46655. If you don't come back and don't call, you'll find me behind Himmelstrasse, in the new cemetery, in the northern part where they're now burying people. Look for the letter S. I'll die secretly even if you don't come back, but if I die, Lionel, all your women will be dead in my eyelashes like the eyelashes that filled Melissa's death. If there's life after death, and if Germans are allowed to enter there, I'll wait for you there, too.

For a whole year they didn't see one another. At night, he called her from distant cities, had long conversations with her and once wept into the phone for two whole hours and didn't say a word and she listened. Once she told him about the house she had moved to, told that she was working in the committee of DPs and people were coming back from Poland and Czechoslovakia and other places and searching for their families and she tried to find the addresses. Lily told that an American officer sent her a package of food every week and he whispered, It's me, you fool, and she laughed, he wasn't sure, and she said, I know my dear, and I'm waiting for you. And he told her: You're naive, Lily, and she said: Maybe, I eat little, don't look bad. I bought two new dresses, also sewed you a coat of thick cloth I found in an excavation under a house they repaired and I made myself a shroud, Jews die in shrouds, don't they? Thinking about your eyes and Samuel's. About your oval ellipses, demons have green-yellow eyes wrapped in oval ellipses!

Lionel, who was interrogating prisoners in various cities, got in touch with Jews who were busy sneaking across borders and ascending to the Land of Israel. He got them cigarettes and food and for a long time he'd hang around in places where roads converged of Jews fleeing from northern Europe and flowing south to get to the Land of Israel. Lily understood who he was seeking and once told him, When you find him come back to me.

Tape / -

That year, the wandering of peoples began, my friend Goebbelheydrich- himmel. People, like little ants, slipped across borders, through mountains, in forests, slowly slowly came to gathering places near Marseilles or Naples, in the forests of Yugoslavia, in many places they gathered. And I searched for Ebenezer.

Tape / -

Lionel travels. People start setting real clocks, no longer covering up sin. My mother was a lampshade, said Samuel, and Ebenezer now performed in a hundred and sixty nightclubs. Now he appeared on a list of professional nightclub entertainers. And one night in Marseilles Lionel Secret sees a long line of Jews. The Jews are waiting to board a small ship named Redemption. A small ship, like a Mississippi riverboat, says an American standing not far from it and goes off. A young man comes to Lionel, too short to be the thug who taught ourselves to be, his arms strong, he clasps Lionel's hands and thanks him for the cigarettes and food, asks Lionel to get weapons too. Emotionally, it's still hard for Lionel to smuggle weapons they'll use to fight the British. The British medals still flutter over his shirt pocket. The line to the ship winds around along a deserted and forgotten quay. The people sit or stand, buy, sell, hold onto their miserable belongings, scared of every stranger, and Lionel notices Ebenezer and Samuel. Ebenezer is sitting on a suitcase. At the sight of Lionel, Samuel takes off and Ebenezer points to an empty place and says, Sit down, take a place in line, we're going.

Samuel told me to go, he added, and I'm going. Samuel says I was born there. One of the Israelis announces on the loudspeaker that the boilers have broken down and there may be a delay of a few hours. Tea will be distributed to you, he added, but nobody got up, they're afraid to lose their place. There's room for four hundred people on the ship, and there are seven hundred people standing here. Sounds of strife are heard in the distance. Behind a destroyed enclosure, a battle rages between Samuel Lipker and another man. The man bought a defective camera from Samuel and is demanding his money back. Lionel leaves Ebenezer gazing at the water of the port striking the concrete wall, and stands not far from the enclosure, Samuel hits the man and then wants to go back to the line and then he looks at Ebenezer's back, Ebenezer is sitting up and dozing with his eyes wide open, Samuel discovers Lionel looking at him, shifts his eyes from Ebenezer to the American officer. The power coming from him annoys him, he says: You think you're an important person because you've got a house and money, I remember how you saved a few pennies! I've got a few francs, maybe you need a little money to buy some ice cream or chewing gum? Lionel, who looks from Samuel to Ebenezer, feels some calm, as if his whole life had been aimed at this moment, some moment when he had to know well how to act, and he said: Looks like I hoped you'd come back.

You don't sound sorry, said Samuel.

Give me the money you said, Lionel suddenly says furiously.

Samuel seeks in his pocket and gives Lionel a few pennies. Lionel takes them, counts each and every penny, and tosses them into the sea. The pennies are swallowed up in the water, and Samuel says: I worked hard for that money, sir!

He worked, says Lionel, and points at Ebenezer.

You're helping these miserable Jews? asks Samuel. You're an old miser who got medals of dead soldiers, I know guys like you. Lionel didn't an swer. For a moment, he looked to the side, fog started moving toward the port, people started making bonfires from tree bark they had gleaned.

You don't answer, said Samuel.

No, I don't answer.

Why didn't you give me money then?

Because you sold things that weren't yours, he said, and Ebenezer had no daughters.

Samuel looked to the side and he also looked at Ebenezer now. An amazement he didn't understand flooded him. He felt animosity and softness at one and the same time. Ebenezer looked like somebody who was finished here, on the edge of that water. Samuel, who started acting the poor soul, bent over a little and said: I've got something here that they made from my parents, this lampshade, you can't know what was there!

Lionel was tense at every word. Samuel's cunning stirred old memories in him. A boy standing at the window of Melissa's house and waiting for a signal. For some reason he was less furious now than he thought he'd be. Maybe suffering does have some reward, he said to Samuel, but I'm not the man who will give it to you. That lampshade you sell to the soldiers who believe you isn't your parents. You deserve a lot more, but you also deserve less than what you demand! Don't try to lie to me. I'm fond of you because of what you are, not because of what you can sell me.

I'll sell the truth, said Samuel angrily. In his mind's eye he now succeeded in seeing his naked parents.

You're lying, said Lionel.

Samuel measured Lionel, looked again at Ebenezer, and said: If we leave here, they won't let me back.

If you want, they'll let you, said Lionel. And he felt like somebody who steals a piece of bread from a pauper. And they started walking in the fog that thickened and covered the port and Ebenezer who sensed something, turned his face, saw Samuel's back far away in the fog and wanted to run after him, but he was afraid to lose his place in line and by the time he made up his mind, Samuel and Lionel had disappeared in the fog.

Tape / -

I don't remember, I sat there. Somebody who was me, he thought. What was he thinking about? About somebody he loves, he thought. Some yearning, to love somebody like that, without conscience or regret, and they would have destroyed him if not for my boxes. Bronya the Beautiful with an apple in her mouth, she connected us, held us, on what authority did he go, I didn't know, but I didn't know who's thinking what I say now, confused, lost and alone, without myself, my memories, no, his image in me, a lust to embrace him, to hold the hand, forgiveness from him for asking about all the things I didn't do.

In the cab, Samuel was silent. Lionel looked at the gray houses and next to them the bay spread out, gleaming in the dull light. They got out of the cab and climbed the stairs of Cafe Glacier, the big balcony was closed. They sat at a little table, the place was almost empty.

Now tell me, said Lionel and offered Samuel a cigarette. Samuel lit it with a little lighter Lionel handed him, he looked at the lighter and Lionel said, Keep it, and Samuel held onto the lighter, wanted to give it back but couldn't, buried it in his pocket, and started talking with the cigarette in his mouth. That American officer looked naive to Samuel, but also bold. For a moment, he thought about a possible love affair between his dead mother and the officer and from the recesses of memory rose a picture of his mother, dressed in festive clothes, next to a statue of a bearded poet and Samuel is eating candy wrapped in gold foil and afterward he would straighten the foil and bury it in his pocket. If only I could really understand his suffering, he thought. Lionel said: Look, man, for a long time now I've been interrogating people, I read you and you think, Ah, how naive is this Lionel Secret and don't know that my name is Lionel Secret, but I know that your name is Samuel Lipker, I don't know who your father was, who your mother was, I don't know exactly what world you came from. He bent over a little, the cigarette dropped its ash on the table, the place began to fill up, beyond the locked balcony, the sun began to set, the sea was transparent and gleaming.

What did you get the medal for?

I fought.

What did you do before?

I wrote stories.

Why?

I don't know, said Lionel.

So don't write them, said Samuel, and began drinking the wine they were served. Lionel tasted the wine. In the distance, fogs thickened even on the nearby boulevards, haberdashery salesmen seemed hidden in niches, he felt like hugging the fellow, stories that should be written-are written, he said, the rest don't matter, and you're right.

I'm not so sure I want to be right, said Samuel. But then the moment became soft and pleasant and Lionel looked confident sitting across from him, Ebenezer is simple and pure, said Lionel, you're not. You always divide everything into black and white, said Samuel, that's why I can defeat you.

Not me.

You're also them.

That's what I wanted to write about, said Lionel.

And do you have a car?

I have a lot with buses, cars and tractors, fire engines and pickup trucks. I used to play with them like toys.

I'll have a Mercedes, said Samuel. Part of my wealth stays with Ebenezer. He'll need it. The rest is with me. I'll wear nice clothes and drive a splendid car. Lionel advanced his hand and stroked Samuel's head. Samuel's eyes were glassy, he looked in despair at the stroking hand. Lionel wanted to explain to Samuel who he was and what his life had been. But Samuel kept his distance and when Lionel understood why he had waited all the time, why he had been searching for Samuel and didn't know he had been searching for him, why he was sitting with him now, he wasn't able to explain, he got up, begged his pardon, and said he'd come back. He found the telephone and Samuel called the tall maitre d' with watery eyes who was looking at him with wicked indifference, and said quickly: Pad the bill! Afterward we'll split it fifty-fifty! The maitre d' smiled, a gold tooth danced in his mouth. Samuel suddenly had a dreadful erection. Some tear duct he'd forgotten started pressing on his eyes, tears of people he didn't know wept in him, he didn't want to be caught again by those maitres d', and the maitre d' hissed between his teeth: It'll be fine, and he went off. Samuel sat and looked at the food he'd been served and for a moment it seemed to him that he was loved. He just didn't know by whom.

Lionel called his hotel and the old woman at the reception desk said one minute, Mr. Secret, and transferred the call to his room, where he had an extension because of his high rank and even from here he could smell the old woman's sly smile.

On his bed sat Lily. She wore a bathrobe she had brought from Cologne and was shaking with cold. She closed the windows but the cold didn't stop. She didn't know how to turn on the heat. The phone rang and she was afraid to answer. She had gone through a lot of trouble to get a travel permit. She even promised one of the officers she'd go out with him and that was how she found out where he lived and went to him and the old woman at the reception desk now became fussy, and Lily had to bribe her with the last of her money, and now, when she wants to surprise Lionel with or without his lovers, the phone rings. Her hand reaches for the receiver, but the hand doesn't manage to pick it up. The phone stopped ringing and she picked up the extinguished receiver and heard beeping. Then her eyes starting shedding tears and she tried to talk to the dead receiver. Lionel tried to dial again, but his line was busy. Lily dropped the receiver, put it on its cradle and stood up. Her body trembled, the window was covered with mist. She hugged herself. And then the phone rang again. She picked up the receiver and didn't stop weeping. Lionel recognized the sound of Lily's tears. He said to her, Don't cry, little girl, but she didn't stop. She tried to talk but only fragmentary syllables burst out of her mouth. All those tears piled up in her for years, she later told Lionel, at long last I was Melissa, maybe I died and your voice talked to a dead woman and I didn't know what to say. Only after a few minutes did she say, Yes my dear, I'm here, sorry.

I know you're here, he said to her.

His laugh was calming and offensive, but she had already learned what was in store for her, a whole year in a closed room she had acted at night the wife of a child thrown into the fire, learned in books what she could have known if only she had opened her eyes earlier while acting herself in another garb, and learned to hate in herself what Lionel loved in her. She knew he was searching for Ebenezer to try to forgive himself and she couldn't take part in the forgiveness. She had nothing to complain about. He called her. He heard her body rustling in the distance. She asked where are you and he told her, and she said: I need you here, and she blushed. And she told him she blushed. I'm dining with the fellow who appeared with the Last Jew in the nightclub, he said, Boulevard Canbiere, Cafe Glacier, upstairs.

I'm coming, she said.

And now Samuel Lipker is looking at her. The light in the hall dims, the erection still prevents him from standing up. A torn ad for Ritesma cigarettes waves on the wall. He knows the ad hung in the room of the guard who'd hug him and give him candy. On the ad for Ritesma or Koli cigarettes was a photo of a typist, maybe it was a drawing, the drawing was Lily. Now he could know how German guards' cigarettes create for him the Melissa that Lionel tried to tell about earlier. The guards in the camp loved her too, and that strengthened her unimaginably, now he could sit across from her, loathe her, understand her, he already teased Lionel who probably beat and tortured her to teach her what love is. She was and still is the girl of all our dreams he thought. Even of Leibke who was shot by the guard, and the man who castrated himself after Bronya the Beautiful refused him. Bronya the Beautiful with the apple in her mouth. No, they didn't look alike. Bronya looked like his mother, Lily was a wild song in the Tyrolean Mountains. With her he could capture stars or hunt electric rabbits. Beautiful only for herself. And the love she showered on Lionel made her forbidden. Like death, he thought, to sleep with her is to sleep with cancer, she looks at Samuel and at Lionel and recalls the frightening lad she saw in the nightclub, and when Lionel looked at her and caressed her with his eyes, Lionel thought: She may not know that a disaster happened, but she knows exactly who it didn't happen to. Lionel pronounced the names of the dishes he had ordered for her in a charming French accent that made Samuel measure Ebenezer against Lionel again, he also wanted to understand what they wanted from him and how much he had to pay, and what he would have to pay. The ships in the port hooted, the noise in the cafe grew louder, waiters tried to please Lionel, Samuel imagined himself sleeping with Lily and stroking Lionel's hair, and for a moment, his parents appeared to him walking arm in arm in the street, houses began falling on them and they vanished along with the pain in him whenever Ebenezer would recite the past that none of them knew. Lily tried to eat but had no appetite. Her lips were shaped like her eyes. The lines are clear, a slight flush rose on her cheeks, something in her image recalled not only ads for Ritesma cigarettes, but also pale northern twilights. Some total defeat melted in her. The struggle between himself, thrown into the fire, and the pallor of her face enchanted him, and he could understand things in her face that Lionel couldn't. Her hair was especially fair in the light of the lamp above her. When she fixed her eyes on Samuel, his erection stopped and he calmed down, as if he had met his mother's lover. He said: My mother was an actress in a house full of carpets and she'd act for me. Ebenezer's memories were enough for me, my mother also had a husband. He was an unsuitable lover for my mother, she wanted opera generals. I'm a corrupt angel and look like it. So do you. In her late youth, after she finished being a communist, my mother seriously thought of going to a convent or into international prostitution-I imagine from Ebenezer-her lover was an old man by then, made hundreds of children with weary women, Ebenezer sometimes recites some of his poems, once I was in love with them.

I know, said Lionel.

Samuel glanced wearily, laughed at Lily, and said: So will you marry me, Lily?

And she looked at him and decreed, No! and turned pale. He tried to pretend to weep, but he burst out laughing and they looked at him. Suddenly, maybe for the first time in years, he didn't know how to act himself.

And then he started telling Lily about the lampshade they made of his parents. He said those words while his eyes, where a rusty gray flash now sparkled, were fixed on Lionel. She stopped trying to eat the duck wing and Samuel measured her movements like a panther waiting to pounce. Lionel's hands moved, the smile was a mask for tension, Samuel smoked another cigarette and didn't want to light it with the lighter he had taken from Lionel before. He was afraid she'd recognize the lighter and despise him. The ash straggled until it dropped. When the ash dropped, Lily felt as if her belly were shriveling.

People wearing clothes too big for them, with berets and caps or shabby Hollywood hats on their heads, entered and sat around the tables and ate eagerly. The waiters ran back and forth. A woman in a sparkling red dress sang on a small stage, lighted with a beam that turned her face into an overcultivated mask. At the piano sat a pianist with a thin beard who looked bored and tired. Now and then, he sipped from a bottle standing on the piano. American, Swedish, and African sailors came in with their temporary, dyed women. They would all order cognac or calvados and slurp fish soup. The Bay of Marseille was lighted, a motorboat groaned rhythmically, drunken sailors banged on the tables and shouted demands for food. The light outside was growing dim, and the locked balcony was full of cigarette butts and papers flying in the wind. In the distance, the sea looked like a black mass.

Ebenezer, now looking for Samuel in the city, said to the investigator years later: I didn't look like a Muselman because Samuel Lipker and Kramer would bring me thin beet soup and bread.

Dear Renate,

You asked me why, back then in Marseille, that is, what impelled us, what exactly happened, I didn't know what to answer you then and today I don't either. Aside from my love, I don't find words that can convey the precise experience. But since you asked, I'll try. I sat facing the two of them, Lionel and Samuel Lipker, and longed with all my soul to die.

Lionel then looked toward the balcony, I don't know if we saw that sea. Samuel tried to steal me from Lionel. He also got up and recited to the diners an excerpt of Ebenezer they knew by heart, but they didn't applaud him. They were furious that he had disturbed their eating, and had disturbed the fat singer's singing. The sea was locked in the distance. A balcony full of cigarette butts. I wanted to go to the movies. They were then showing The Arch of Triumph with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, who sat like us in Cafe Glacier, on Boulevard Canbiere and drank Calvados. Lionel sketched something on the white paper on the table, sipped the wine that Samuel gulped, and said sadly to Sam (Samuel): If you think you have to go back to the line you can. The two of you can open a war souvenir shop in Jerusalem named for Joseph Rayna. I heard that his songs became national anthems there. Sam looked at Lionel and Lionel looked at Sam. Those two men suddenly looked like two dead men fighting over me. I wanted to express my opposition, but I didn't know if I had it coming. I knew I had to perform Gretchen for them and not talk. I don't know if you've ever been for sale in the Jew market, Renate! I was an essential enemy to them, maybe (and this is ridiculous) a desired enemy, and Sam was so sunk in the moment, in the happening itself, that he had to measure it carefully since he wasn't used to it. I wanted so much to return things to their simple and human concreteness, to deviate from the tragicomic event, as Lionel put it later. Those two poets, great-grandsons of messiahs, didn't see me with flesh-andblood eyes, maybe not only with those eyes. They saw me as some substitute for an argument in order to gore one another. The singer sang in a nasal voice and Sam mocked her, maybe that was a certain response to his failure to make the drunken sailors laugh by reciting things Ebenezer remembered and that weren't important to them. The sailors tried to defend the play of their love with the wretched streetwalkers and would hit and shout and kiss, and Sam thought, I read his mind didn't I; I can't swindle this man anymore. Precisely in his weakness, he's strong! A weakness of supple and tense softness and Lionel said to him: But on the other hand, you can also stay with Lily (he didn't say "you can stay with me," he only uttered my name).

Then the haggling started. I was the payment, so they didn't ask me. Lionel said something about the possibility that Sam would live with me, and he said: Lily will be a mother to you, and Sam said, Mother? An ad for a fucking cigarette will be a mother to me? I've got enough dead mothers and fathers, and Lionel said: You've got a dead mother and two dead fathers, you'll have a new father and mother and I'm still not mentioned by name. Renate, nobody talks directly to me or with me, doesn't ask anything, but I deserve it, why did I come here? They were discussing payment and I'm hanging in front of them on a hook, unkosher meat in a Jewish market. They have to triumph over one another in a defeat that will of course be all mine and mine alone, I was silent, Renate, I was silent and suddenly had an appetite and I tasted the dishes Lionel ordered and that I couldn't eat before. Lionel talked about the fact that I wouldn't have children, the level of the execution of the castration had been so high that for a moment, I felt how all the children I was supposed to give birth to flowed out of me and died on my lips, and I felt blood between my lips and I licked them and they didn't know what I was doing with my lips, and Sam said: She's trying to be sexy like Hedy Lamarr. What children? asked Sam, and Lionel said: She won't give birth to children who will later have to defend the lost homeland of lampshades, and Sam said: There was no lampshade, and Lionel said: There were, but not yours, and then he laughed, and the singer was also offended, she turned her face away and sang in another direction, and a drunken sailor hit a whore, who dropped onto the floor. There was a thud, the bored pianist burst out laughing and played more excitedly, and the waiters ran and brought drinks and food and I was sold there, a few kilograms of Lily, a few liters of Lily juice is there juice of Lily? I was silent there. No Ingrid Bergman sat on the balcony of Cafe Glacier with yearning eyes and a great melancholy love for Charles Boyer. In the end, I was miserable German mincemeat, good for swindling themselves that I was somebody else, I shot them at low-flying airplanes.

And that's how he bought a German streetwalker, Renate. I should have been more than I was or perhaps less, maybe an amorous girl, weeping after the death of the Fuhrer in the bunker, something made me transparent, bereft of location and caught in a maze, they talked about some life in America, about me, about Sam, about me and Lionel, and I wanted to shout, What about me, and they knew, the two of them, that I wasn't important anymore, not out of wickedness, out of love that the two of them even then had to share, and I didn't yet understand what glowing hell I now got myself into, go home I said to myself, buy yourself a poor little husband, cook potatoes for him, let him flourish on the holy ground where you were born and where you'll be buried, but I couldn't, I was born in the air, and above, above everything, faced off, like two knights, my two men fought a desperate war for the heart of an imaginary aristocrat, who no longer lives in a nonpalace where the big, splendid and superfluous duel was held. I wanted to say, You're in love with a shadow, but I knew not to talk, maybe I really was somebody and didn't know it.

I disguised myself as an abandoned queen, I was to them what they wanted me to be. Later a past will be created and I'll be able to make a defense pact with it, for war or peace, I was packed, virginal, an invisible blood flowed from my lips, I gave myself to them and they were genuine lovers, so dreadful, so innocent, Jews trying to buy their dream in a world that wiped them out. Maybe I was what was necessary, everything was a provocation against the world, I was pathetic, possible, and eagle-y.

I applauded the fat singer who tried to thank me so much she almost stumbled. The contempt on her face wasn't hidden by the smile she wanted to direct at Lionel's pocket, which was supposed to be opened for her. The lights of a motorboat looked like embers in the fog. Outside, Ebenezer looked for his dear one. I thought, Could I ever have saved Samuel?

I knew I could save Lionel. But Sam and I were too alike. I, the Ukrainian guard, and the German who hugged him and killed his mother, all of us were too alike. A whore broke a bottle on the table next to us and with the broken bottle, she threatened the drunken sailor with tattooed writing on his hands and he tried to burn her nipple with a cigarette. And that's how that preserved moment was born when we all fought to make each other lose. Our lost honor. I'm trying to describe to you, Renate, a lost moment of anguish and bliss.

Did I have permission to warn them that underneath the mantle of serious transparent and beautified merrymaking, I'm a hard woman?

When we went outside we saw Sam get the money from the maitre d', maybe we were ashamed, to a certain extent we were also a little proud. The maitre d' smiled obediently and gave Sam (Samuel) the money. I think he swindled him, but Sam didn't haggle. It was too late now to go back to the starting point.

And we walked along the boulevard. Love and hostility in equal parts, I thought, where will I get the strength to cope with these two Jews, with a man who buried his mother and father and sells them to every soldier, and Lionel, forty-five years old, seeking himself in sewer images. When we came to the hotel we were so tired that even the dark contemptuous look of the old woman at the reception desk had no effect on us. We couldn't talk anymore. Between me and Lionel was a lust that could be smashed with an ax, I hugged Lionel, he smiled at me, shut his eyes, like a licentious sailor he put his hand on my crotch, turned his eyes to Sam, and fell asleep. Sam fixed his eyes on Lionel's hand and very slowly shut his eyes, then I fell asleep too. The next day, we went to Cologne. Lionel said: What's this about converting to Judaism? We made a deal, you don't have to involve God in such a matter, but I said to him: I have to cut myself off, I want a circumcision, and Sam didn't say a thing but murmured thanks to me for knowing how to kill my parents and not only my children.

I improved my English, which had become an obsession for me. I bought dictionaries, I learned words by heart. Everything had to be formulated correctly, so I would have to cope with Lionel in his and Melissa's words, to understand him in his own words. And the rest you know, somebody remained behind, I don't know that Lily, drawn on a faded ad for Ritesma cigarettes they don't smoke anymore in your country…

Tape / -

Dear Mr. Henkin,

Your letter reached the Department of Investigation of the Missing a short time ago. As for your issue I recall that before his death, your son, may the Lord avenge his blood, served for some time under my command. I decided to examine your questions both as a sign of my devotion and my emotions, since Menahem, his memory for a blessing, fell many years ago and I still remember him well. You wanted to know if a man named Samuel Lipker had ever come to Israel, and if he served here. I went through the old files, and I found the following details (they don't appear in chronological order, but merely as fragments and I copy them as they are). When we asked him (Lipker) what he would do now, he said he'd finish the war and go to drain the Amazon in Brazil. They pay good money to drain the swamps and cut down the forests, he said. He took part in the diversionary battle at Mount Radar. Thirty-two men were killed there. Three played dead and at dusk, they got up and ran away. One of them was Boaz Schneerson, the son of a man killed in the Holocaust. The name of the second one I don't know. The third apparently was Samuel Lipker. Before that he took part in the battle of Latrun. He joined a brigade without being registered properly; it seems there wasn't time. He came to Latrun straight from the port of Haifa. As far as we can tell, he came to Haifa after being caught on the ship Salvation (Paducah) and was in a British internment camp in Cyprus. The ship left Marseille in 'forty-six. Contradictory evidence exists concerning his boarding the ship. A number of people who were on the ship claim that Ebenezer Schneerson, Samuel's companion, was last seen keeping his place in the line to board the ship, but Samuel didn't come back and was seen talking with the American officer who would bring food, cigarettes, and weapons he managed to smuggle out of the nearby American army camp. Three men testify that his father, that is, Ebenezer Schneerson, disappeared but he himself did return to the line and boarded the ship. At that time, there were no detailed lists, but my investigation shows that most of the ship's passengers I talked to don't explicitly remember if Samuel Lipker was on the ship, except for two who claim that he was there and came to Cyprus with them. When the battle occurred between the little ship with two smokestacks and the British Royal Navy, Samuel fought along with them. They remember that he guarded the deck and with a hose of salty water he sent the people back to the hold of the ship so that a new shift of people could come up on deck to eat, go to the toilet, and get some fresh air. In the battle with the British, three Jews were killed, a little girl who was born and died that same day was called Salvation, and was buried at sea. The commander fought with the one gun he had.

Outraged he was. He tried to run away from Cyprus and was beaten. Later he started his commercial deals and with the fortune he had he continued to make money. Those deals flourished until May seventeenth, nineteen forty-eight. Then Samuel Lipker was put on a ship-even though there is no exact list of passengers, and some claim he wasn't there-brought along with five hundred other young men who were trained secretly at the port of Haifa, were trained two days more and sent to the battle of Latrun. At night, Samuel found a way to escape and came to the other side of Bab-el-Wad. At the Arab village Bidu he met the members of the fifth battalion of Harel. He was transferred to Kiryat Anavim. Nobody remembers him, except for one woman, a medic, who said that a quiet fellow came. He was apparently a handsome young man, she said, but sported a dirty, bristly beard, and it was impossible to recognize him. He joined a division of sappers sent on a diversionary operation near Mount Radar, and as I said, many were killed in the action, while he played dead and was saved. When they came back to Kiryat Anavim, one of them went to try to kill the commander who had abandoned them, while Samuel disappeared.

After the war, he apparently came to Tel Aviv. Walking in the street, seeking what he (later) termed before the investigating officer a new biography he could live in, he ran into somebody at a kiosk who was his age and it seemed to him they had been in a battle together, and that man hit him in an empty lot near the house where Samuel Lipker thought he found a young widow, to whom he was sent by a member of the battalion. The blows were apparently serious and he was wounded and hit back at the person who apparently looked like him. Afterward, he changed his name to Joseph Rayna. And after a certain period for which I have no testimony, he was called Joseph Ranan. When he found out that he was considered killed and that a grave was dug for him in Kiryat Anavim, he said that was fine and let them think that Samuel Lipker had died in the battle of Mount Radar. He was sent to an officers' course where he claimed he was born in Israel and even described his parents' home. He changed the money he had apparently brought with him for valuable objects, traded in them even during the officers' course and then bought himself an apartment, and rented out the apartment the army gave him. Then he was sent to train recruits, suffered a failure in a battle he went to with his recruits. He didn't go drain the Amazon, because the sailors on the Greek ship he was supposed to board looked like white slave traders. Disguised as somebody else whom he himself apparently didn't know, he taught himself basic Hebrew. He got entangled in lies that he couldn't get out of or perhaps he did get out of them and I don't know, he had a plan he devised that nobody would be good enough to hear. And he wrote songs that one girl, whose parents were killed in the Bialystok ghetto, claimed were surprisingly similar to songs her parents had sung in the Zionist club, Young Judea. The girl was afraid of him and ran away and by then he was called Joey Gold and many legends were spun about him. He fought a personal war against an unreal army, and at night after bloody battles he sat in his house and wrote songs that were said to be composed of adjectives and overly exalted words and they smelled moldy, abandoned, and obsolete. After he killed a prisoner in the Gaza operation (the details aren't clear enough because the killer of the prisoner also appears under another name), he was punished, but in the Sinai campaign, he was called back into the army. He commanded a unit that parachuted behind enemy lines. The flanking operation he commanded clashed with the original plan and even though it succeeded, he was rebuked for his rashness, won a medal for heroism but was demoted, which he apparently resented. Then he sold his house, bought an abandoned house in Jaffa, cultivated a beautiful garden, but people who call him by different names aren't sure if it really is the same person. He looked for the man who wounded him when he came back from the war, but didn't find him. He was violent and soft only at times, said one woman who wished to remain anonymous. The investigator at the trial held for him said: Maybe that man doesn't exist, he's both alive and dead. He killed and somebody else was punished. Who is Joey Gold, asked the investigator and added: I can't swear that he exists. The documents say you were killed, he said to Joey Gold, and Joey Gold said, Maybe I really did die.

At the trial, apparently, he said: We don't go like sheep to the slaughter. Here there won't be another Maidanek. The judge reprimanded him for those words and said: You belong to an arrogant generation that was born in Israel and isn't able to understand. After a jail term, he returned to his house in Jaffa. He learned how to play seventeen different musical instruments, wrote poems nobody reads anymore, and very slowly faded away, as if the earth swallowed him up. I can't describe that any better, but there are almost no milestones after that.

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I, Ebenezer, what do I know?

Alphabet-Sandwich Islands; the number of letters is twelve (Jewish knowledge!). Burmese alphabet-nineteen letters. Italian-twenty. Bengalese-twenty-one. Hebrew, Assyrian, Akkadian, and Sumeriantwenty-two letters each. Spanish and Slavic-twenty-seven. Arabictwenty-eight. Persian and Coptic-thirty-two. Georgian-thirty-five. Armenian-thirty-eight. Russian-forty-one. Muscovite Russian-fortythree. Sanskrit and Japanese-fifty. Ethiopian-two hundred and two.

Miracle of the passive voice in Hebrew: We were passed over, lamed! We were torn asunder!

The Bible (in English)-thirty-nine books in the Old Testament. Nine hundred twenty-nine chapters. Twenty-three thousand two hundred fourteen verses. Five hundred ninety thousand, four hundred thirty-nine words, two million seven hundred twenty-eight thousand one hundred letters.

In all languages the name of the deity is composed of only four letters: Latin-Deus. Greek-Zeus. Hebrew-Adon. Aramaic-Adad. ArabicAlla. The same is true of Parsi, Trtr, and the Jadga language. In Egyptian Oman or Zaut. In east Indian, Asgi or Zagl. In Japanese Jain. In Turkish — Aadi. In ancient Scandinavian-Odin. In Croatian-Duga. In Dalmatian — Ront. In Tyranian-Ahir. In Etruscan-Chur. In Swedish-Kodr. In Irish-Dich. In German-Gott. In French-Dieu. In Spanish-Dios. In Paroani-Leon.

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At a formal luncheon on the ship, the captain asked Lionel who was the boy he had adopted, and Lionel said: His name is Samuel Lipker, and Samuel said: That's a grievous error, sir, my name is Sam Lipp, and I was born in Boston. They sat on deck. Soldiers served iced tea to the returning heroes. From the Statue of Liberty, an escort rowed out to the ships that sprayed jets of water and colored balloons were flown on the piers. Samuel looked and said: A whole city is waiting for me. He said that without any emotion.

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When Mother built.

When Rebecca Schneerson built her destroyed farm in the settlement, a spark of apostasy flashed in her. Enraged by Nehemiah's death, she built a model farm. She erected a modern cow barn, built a dovecote and a chicken coop, planted citrus groves and vineyards, her vegetable patch was big and well-watered, she had fields of clover, corn, and barley, she built an incubator for chicks, the first incubator in Judea, and in the annual milk production contest, two of her cows usually won first place. One day, when Ebenezer was fifteen years old, and the Great War was in its second year and Turkish and German officers would stop in her house on their way south, Ebenezer was hit by a stone thrown at him by an Arab. Ebenezer, sitting on a piece of wood and carving it, was concentrating so hard he didn't see a thing, but Rebecca came out to hit the son of the Arab who stood near his father. The man came to defend his son. Rebecca shaded her forehead with her hand, and said to the Arab: I would curse your father if I knew which of the ninety-two lovers your mother had was really your father! And the Arab enjoyed the curse more than he was offended by it. His donkey deposited droppings next to his feet. Rebecca laid the stick on the ground and wiped the sweat off her brow. The Arab said: You're an angry woman, I'm Ahbed. She said to him: Listen, there's a good farm here, there's a garden, there's food, come with your stupid son, work here, and I'll pay you more than all the seedy dignitaries in Marar, and that's how Ahbed started working for Rebecca and living in the old cow barn Rebecca fixed up for him. After the war, when locusts and hunger destroyed the rage in the settlers, Rebecca was the first one to restore her farm. Then Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg came to the Land with the British Service, as it was called then. The captain, who edited a French periodical in Cairo, before that had been an officer in the Argentinean army, an American citizen, with a name he claimed was Swiss, and belonged to the Greek Orthodox church. Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg came to the Land to prepare, as he put it, a tombstone worthy of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, which a young officer in His Majesty's army in Jerusalem thought it fitting to erect. The young British officer was excited by the return to the land of the Bible and thought the Captain planned to erect a memorial to the prophet Jeremiah, and only later did he realize his error. The bureaucracy was still in its infancy, the Arabs sharply attacked the Balfour Declaration, the government appointed a Jew as the first commissioner in Judea, and Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg, known as an international expert on Dante Alighieri, claimed that the series of incidents described above was a sign that the desired memorial would be erected. Nobody understood the logic of the series of incidents, but since the idea was so confused, they thought something was indeed hiding behind it. Some claimed that the whole issue of the memorial was simply an optical illusion and the Captain was a spy, but nobody knew who he was spying for or why. The Arabs, who then began to fear that the Jews had come to steal the land from them, were afraid that the Jewish commissioner would divert the water of the Yarkon River to London and the water of the Jordan to the arid plains of England. That was the time when a young engineer in the military service came up with an idea about ships to bring icebergs from the north to the Mediterranean, and the Arabs also saw that idea as a Zionist plot to steal the desert from its eternal inhabitants. They heard that there was a Jewish river in Asia, where Jewish kings and princes lived, headed by a queen as tall as a two-story house, and the river stopped flowing on the Sabbath. They were afraid the Yarkon and the Jordan would also stop on the Sabbath and then the black goats would cross the Jordan also on winter days too. They demanded that if the Jordan really was stopped it should also be stopped on Friday, their day of rest. The river (the Sambatyon) was invented by Jewish liars who Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg thought were his ancestors back when they lived in the eleventh century, of whom, he said, not even one trace remained of the survivors. So the Captain was able to invent a family tree for himself going back to the eleventh century, dream of memorials, and come to the Land of Israel disguised as whatever he wanted, and after the Arabs finished worrying about the fate of the water, they started getting anxious about the idea of the memorial. And all that happened before the Captain would come to the settlement. First, they claimed, they never heard of the poet. Second, the editor of the Jaffa newspaper, Nasser, wrote Dante was a fanatical anti-Muslim, while it is a Jew disguised as an Orthodox Greek who wants to build the memorial, and we've got enough of our own imposters and spies, and dignitaries hastened to hold ceremonies of reconciliation in proper houses overflowing with charred meat and steaming coffee but nothing helped. Nasser wrote in his newspaper that no tombstone would be erected to Dante in the land that was holy to Muslims because Mohammed's legendary horse rose from there to heaven. The Captain, who came to the settlement at the height of the struggle for the memorial, sat in the community center erected by Nehemiah and read a Hebrew newspaper from Jaffa, and saw Rebecca and her son in the distance, walking in the street. Ebenezer was now a lad of nineteen and held in his hands a sawed-down tree trunk. The Captain got to his feet, pressed his sword to his thigh, and followed Rebecca from a distance, which he privately called a distance of decency. The young staff officer who was reprimanded for confusing Jeremiah with Dante was seeking an outstanding Arab poet to pacify the Arabs, and the Captain who moved between the monasteries and the churches in the Land in an attempt to bribe the abbots of the monasteries and the priests of the religion to support the idea of a memorial to Dante encountered a firm and hostile refusal. The Captain had instructive theories, which nobody he met was interested in, like the theory about the site of Moses's grave, and without knowing about the melody of the Psalms that Rebecca later taught herself (maybe she knew it from her childhood) he taught himself the book of Psalms, so he could recite it by heart from beginning to end and from end to beginning. The Captain really didn't get excited when he heard the idea that he was a triple spy and that he had also been a spy in the war, he didn't even get excited that under the aegis of the British government he continued, according to the slanderers, to write sharp and satanic articles against Great Britain in his French newspaper in Cairo where he hadn't been for months. When the Captain saw Rebecca walking with her son, as he put it later, he was filled with that longing that a self-respecting South American (or Mexican, according to Rebecca) captain feels one moment before he's executed. He followed Rebecca, and Ebenezer, who turned around, saw him, and said to his mother: A man in a uniform is following us, and she said: A fool with a sword, like Joseph with his songs. Rebecca had plans for the new government and, as she told Ebenezer, she somehow counted on the certain folly of the Mexican buffoon who would follow her home, knock on her door, and stand at attention, and when he did indeed do that she opened the door to him, and his sword struck the post and the Captain saluted chivalrously, or as she put it, like every dumb Turk when a beautiful Jewish woman passes by, and she brought him into her house, let him sit alone for a long time, sent Ahbed to him with a glass of cold water and then with a tray where a carafe of coffee and small cups wobbled and only then did she come in, dressed in an elegant gown, and they chatted about the weather, government upheavals, locusts, typhus, the banishments the Turks had enforced, and she told how she had fostered irrigation when people were tortured and killed and the Arabs then raised their heads and said: The Jews under our feet, but me, she said, they didn't touch, they'd come and look at me and a poor German in an officer's uniform played melancholy tunes for me and would moon after me. All the time, Rebecca was devising her plans and now and then she peeped at the face of the Captain staring at her with a savage intensity so shrouded with respect that he couldn't see her.

And then the Captain saw the row of Ebenezer's birds coated with black lacquer. The birds stood on the cabinet, and when the Captain looked at them they looked so wonderful he almost forgot why he had come to that house. He stood stooped over, conspicuous by the sudden change in him, and the birds looked as if they were trying to fly. Only later on, when he had sipped the fine wine Rebecca had gotten from the manager of the winepress with every shipment of wine grapes, only then, perhaps as a response to the bliss that flooded him at the sight of the birds and Rebecca's beauty, only then did he start talking about the life and bliss possible for strangers as for relatives, and after all, he said to her: Every husband and wife were once strangers to one another, and she said: And that's how they remain, Captain, and he tried not to hear what she said, expressed his admiration of the birds, and Rebecca said: Those rare birds are carved by my Mongoloid son. And Ebenezer, who was sitting in a corner cracking sunflower seeds, said: She means me, sir, and the Captain said: It's impossible to carve birds wooden and metaphysical at the same time without a Jewish brain! And Rebecca said: But as far as I can tell, you're not a Jew, Captain, and he said: I am what I am, according to a preformed model, made to change with circumstances, and Goldenberg is indeed a Swiss name, but my father, who wasn't Swiss, could also have been called Goldenberg. She didn't understand exactly what he meant, but she didn't think it was important enough to rack her brains over. He said to her: There is no reality, honorable Mrs. Schneerson, there are only distant memories, real hatred, and unrequited love. Rebecca asked: Doesn't unrequited love have to start at some requited point? and he thought she was joking, but for some reason she enjoyed the conversation, and he said: No, unrequited love is the beginning situation of a dream that realizes reality. There's a certain opposition here, he added, but in time everything becomes clear. I'm cursed by everybody, Jews, Arabs, English, Christians, Shiites, Sunnis, Alawis, and that's how I can defend myself. If I had one friend I was fond of, or one nation I could cling to without prior conditions, and respect, maybe I would lose the right of criticism and shorten my honor and my life. Did you notice, dear lady, that I said "honor" before "life"? If I'm not honored, I live in a cloud of fake and unnecessary honor. Only somebody who has his own friend or group is truly in danger, so I'm safer than everybody and tremble with love that is not yet realized as unrequited from the start and so is full of opportunity never to be realized, but that love is very close, and I am more protected than endangered as many thought.

The Captain excitedly felt the birds. He claimed they were wonderful creations, maybe the most wonderful he had seen since the bronze, stone, and wood statues he had seen in the museum in Cairo, and suddenly he spoke with no real connection to the birds, said that Arab children had to be taught how to paint the eyes of a dead fish to look as if it had just been caught. He even tried to learn from Ebenezer the secret of the lacquers and the sort of metaphysical geometry, as he put it, of his works. Ebenezer spoke slowly and Rebecca gazed vacantly at the ceiling. He said: I mix lacquers and carpenters' glue, solutions, I invented a spray, resin, I know how to wound trees without hurting them, know flowers with colorful pollen, and I hear the wood by its weeping and laughing, carve faces and birds, sometimes I recognize the faces and sometimes not. Rebecca said her son wasn't exactly a great scholar and had only gone as far as sixth grade in the settlement school whose level of education was as high as its ethics. And if his father were alive, he would have taught him something. Only after the Captain had gallantly proposed marriage and an impressive dowry and had been turned down with a politeness that really wasn't characteristic of Rebecca did he clutch his sword to his thigh again and hear Rebecca talk about what she wanted to talk with him when she saw him following her in the street. She talked about the complicated network of canals to transport the water of the Jordan from its sources straight to the Negev and the south. That way, she said, we can buy miserable desert land for pennies and then, secretly, transport water and work the land and establish the agriculture my husband dreamed of but I realized, and we'll be rich as the Jews in America. The Captain was excited to hear the words, in his mind's eye he already saw the big canal, the dams, the dike, and the twisting, state-of-the-art pipe. Soon after, he promised Rebecca to convey her ideas to the authorities, who sounded like his cousins when he mentioned them, he recited to her the book of Psalms from beginning to end and from end to beginning and Ebenezer fell asleep in his chair even when two members of the settlement whistled to him in the window to come with them to beat up an Arab who stole Horowitz's mare.

The Captain stood in the middle of the room Rebecca had built in memory of Nehemiah and recited. A murmur that reminded her of Nehemiah's look when he spoke about the Land of Israel now rose in her ears. Ebenezer woke up, listened a moment, and then fixed in himself some memory of reciting words that were the same as a very certain music and he tried to think of the birds flying in his mind and he had to cage them in wood, for he had never invented a bird but caged the birds of his mind in the wood he carved, and he let the wood follow the prepared shapes and Rebecca saw Ebenezer open his eyes wide and shut them again and she pondered the melody sunk deep in her heart and didn't pay any heed to it, and some tune that played with Nehemiah's old excitement and her weeping on his last day, those were yearnings that turned into a melody more ancient than those yearned for and talked about and observed, something ancient that rose in her and overcame her, and she pondered the history of her family, pondered Rebecca Secret Charity, and said: It wasn't in vain that those awful people lived and dreamed and shouted, and she thought about the profound and hidden connection there seemed to be between swindlers like her and the Captain and God. Suddenly she understood that if she uttered aloud the chapters of Psalms, whose mysterious melancholy she always knew, but hadn't dwelt on, the chapters would turn into a force that would reach the farthest place she could imagine, and the touch would turn the impending death into something that could be directed. Her legs grew light her head was suddenly empty, light and flighty. And out of an anger that gnawed at her against Nehemiah she started forgiving him now of all times because he had managed to hurt her so perfectly, and she thought about her relation to herself, that is to the God of her fathers, the God played as a clown by her fellow farmers in the Land where there is no shade or corners, and night falls suddenly black and ruddy. Ebenezer panted. Poor orphan, she said to herself. The Captain's solidity was splendid, she had to admit that he was a noble man with no purpose or homeland and that the strip of light gleaming on him was both his geography and his biography. What worlds woven in the force of the words could start revolutions in the cosmic order, she thought, a thought foreign to her. And deep inside her, she could feel how she once again gathers corpses in the suitcase, writes "Deliverance" on the ceiling, her virginity cut off at the terrorist river, some threatening and frightening force caught in her words about the Land, building and with the word destroying, and she said to herself: There's a connection between circumlocution and circumcision, a Mount Nebo of words, words that bring rain in due season and not in due season. Rebecca knew that those Psalms or the melody heard from them have no connection with belief or nonbelief, just as her life with Nehemiah and her nonlife with Joseph Rayna had no connection with love or nonlove. And so she returned to the room where the Captain was still reciting. Her son dozing in his chair dreams of birds in shining lacquer and in her a barrier was now planted that would later be fixed, between her and her milieu, and a melody of the Book of Psalms that would be the meaning of her life. When the Captain finished reciting he sat down to drink wine and his face was pale from the effort, his nose looked red and his cheeks looked gray, but she applauded him, and at that moment, long before he was born, Boaz Schneerson was saved from the death lurking for him in the war.

Ebenezer then built his hut in the citrus grove near the water tower, not far from the hill of the Wondrous One and nobody knows anymore why it was called that. The hill overlooked the fields and the desolation from the east to the distant mountains on the horizon, and a deaf girl who lived in the nearby settlement came one day and stayed there, sitting and watching for long hours as he built boxes or carved birds and she watched in silence. Ebenezer didn't miss his father, whose disgrace he had had to hear for years from his mother, he only yearned for Rebecca and she wasn't his. To herself she admitted that she had never managed to love Ebenezer more than she had managed not to love him, or to love his father. But those rare moments of affection for Nehemiah that increased after his death didn't touch her son. He didn't look like her, he didn't look like Joseph or Nehemiah. He didn't look like her father or like Nehemiah's mother, he didn't look like anybody she knew. Rebecca started reciting the book of Psalms a week after Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg erected his tent, which reminded her of the Wondrous One's splendid tent, and he started digging the rock of Hagar wife of Abram, which, according to his calculations, was buried there. He had ancient maps showing him ancient places long forgotten. That day in the citrus grove, Ebenezer carved his father's image on a wooden board that he planed and filed and covered with lacquer and the deaf girl wept. And then, for the first time in his life, Ebenezer knew the taste of love. The touch was nice. The deaf girl's face was twisted like a captured bird, but her voice wasn't heard and that scared him. When he lay in bed afterward and looked at the tin ceiling above his hut he felt exalted and didn't know why. His mother, who had started sitting in the big chair at the screened window with the book of Psalms in one hand and a flyswatter in the other and Ahbed and the laborers working the farm, imposed a considerable yoke on him too and he had to go out to plow and harvest, to take care of the chicken coop and the cow barn, and among the laborers who worked in the yard he met a Jew wearing a kippah who didn't believe in the resurrection of the world according to Marx and Engels like the other laborers in the other yards, prayed devotedly, and waited patiently for the messiah. He was a humble man and not unpleasant, who loved the deaf girl with a quiet and restrained love. When he'd see her coming back from the citrus grove with a light gleaming on her face, he was filled with longing and thought: If only I could grant her a soft and dreamy beauty like that. Ebenezer he privately loathed, he called him an idolater. Later on, Ebenezer explained to the deaf Starochka why he couldn't really love her and how much he yearned for somebody he didn't know who and she wanted to tell him something about her love but her inability to talk saved her from an absurd plea and she walked to the settlement, sat in the yard, and the Hasidic laborer brought her a glass of water, looked at her a long time until she grasped how strong his love was, took his hand, and kissed it. Then she started going to the synagogue and praying devotedly, smeared her crotch with red, and went to the wedding canopy with all the laborers standing around and calling out Mazal tov, Mazal tov.

His wife's silence, the laborer said later, was the grammar of messianism. He said that against Ebenezer's idolatry, but they didn't understand his words anymore than he himself understood the decree of his life and his marriage to a virgin whose wild shouts he saw in his mind's eye a thousand times when she came out of Ebenezer's hut. In those days, the Captain stopped digging for Hagar's rock and started seeking the stones of Jacob's Ladder in the mountain opposite and people who hadn't visited her house for years once again knocked on Rebecca's door and talked with her about agricultural matters on which she was an expert as she often said, reluctantly, and in the settlement rumors spread about her impending marriage.

The rumors were premature, but the Captain didn't despair and went on proposing marriage, money, travels to distant lands, and a pedigree from the eleventh century, and so when Rebecca brought up the idea of traveling south with him to find out whether those lands in the desert could be bought until her plans for the canals would be realized, he saw that as a sign whose plausibility nobody of course would understand, that the memorial to Dante Alighieri would be erected and on the other hand his desired marriage to Rebecca was already sealed. Ebenezer was left to manage the farm, the Hasidic laborer went to the Hasid village in the south, and was replaced by another laborer who wasn't a Hasid, but didn't want to foment revolution against the capitalists, Ahbed the son had long ago replaced his father who was about to die and milked the cows and the Captain and Rebecca rode in a carriage hitched to a pair of horses to the lands of Ruhama.

It was a fragrant spring day after a stormy sudden rain and flowers appeared blooming in places that were always arid. They came to a squashed hill where she had stopped on her journey with Nehemiah on their last trip. Everything was desolate and hills and hallucinatory yellow expanses stretched to the horizon. Rebecca was furious at Nehemiah that she had to travel to these distant places instead of him, with a Mexican stuffed animal who could be set as a scarecrow against planes, and then an Arab came to them who popped up from the ground wearing a suit and behind himbetween the rows of prickly pear-walked some short Bedouins.

The Arab greeted them and Rebecca gave the customary reply and then the Arab sat down and she and the Captain immediately sat too, and the Bedouins sat not far from them, and the Arab fiddled with some amber beads in his hands, and asked: So you're suddenly here and why are you suddenly here, maybe you've got family here? Rebecca smiled and said: My family is three clods from the right and the Arab laughed and the Bedouins laughed too and the Captain, who didn't understand Arabic, or pretended not to understand, tried not to laugh and looked at the horizon, something Rebecca wanted him very much to do, because the horizon was in the west and there was Gaza City, and she said: I'm just touring for no good reason, empty and wonderful, why not, and the Arab, whose misbakha in his hand began moving nervously, said: For no good reason? By my eyes, people don't come here for no good reason with a chariot and generals. Later on, Rebecca explained to the Captain that since the truth is not accepted literally in the Land of Israel, the Arab understood that the distinguished lady in the chariot and the general who surely commanded big armies came here to sniff land and buy it for some secret army that would destroy the holy places of Islam, which, as everybody knows, are south of here, about twenty days away. And since he knew she was a Jew, he also knew the exorbitant price. She waited. The Arab muttered something to himself and went off and half an hour later he returned with two more Arabs. The Bedouins were ordered to gather branches and twigs for a bonfire. They made sweet black tea; Rebecca and the Captain drank it very slowly with the Bedouins, who smacked their lips to impart to the scene the honor due it. The two men who came with the Arab were even more eminent than he was, dressed more splendidly, even though a smell of sheep dung and fragrant wormwood rose from them. They whispered together, their faces darkened and they whispered together again and excitedly offered Rebecca a hundred English pounds if she'd get out of there. She said: With all my heart, I thank you for your generous offer and appreciate your magnanimity and your ignorance of Arabic numerals, which you gave to the world along with the alcohol you don't even drink, one hundred English pounds is a hole in the penny of the hair of my late grandmother who is buried so far from here that I don't remember her name anymore and so I am not left without a mother to thank for your generosity and with the necessary modesty of a woman with a thousand soldiers at her disposal not far from here, to tell you to leave me and my friend the field marshal alone before the armies come who are now on sixty-six English warships at the shore of Gaza and peace on Ishmael and on the holes of all the pennies. Not only did they listen to her tensely, but the Captain was also listening. He thought he should smile, but he understood from her trembling and her tension that he better not take his eyes off the point he was staring at.

Then, since her splendid words only confirmed their suppositions and even sharpened their cunning, the Arabs announced, even without consulting anymore among themselves, that when they said a hundred pounds they didn't mean a hundred pounds, but the wind distorted their words and when she looked at the Arabs with ostentatious ennui, and peeped surreptitiously at the place where the harbor of Gaza was likely to be, and sixty-six warships had already started raising smoke in her eyes, the price went up to a hundred and fifty and then to two hundred English pounds, and then Rebecca took the money with generous weariness, got into the carriage, called the Captain to get in with her, and said: Yallah, let's get out of here, we'll buy the lands for your army someplace else.

When she came back to the settlement Haya Horowitz and Frumka Berdichevski saw a smile on Rebecca's lips. The rumor spread like wildfire and the farmers wearing clothes taken out of mothballs began coming to her house with bouquets of flowers and bottles of wine. They said, Congratulations, and when is the wedding? And Ebenezer, who was summoned from the citrus grove, appeared holding a new bird that had almost managed to fly out of the wood in which it was carved, saw the laugh on his mother's lips, and the laugh frightened him. The farmers were insulted when they heard there wouldn't be a wedding, not now-as she said-and not at any other date, and they went off disappointed and then Nathan, Nehemiah's old friend, began dying and Rebecca, who hadn't seen him for some time, went to visit him. She sat next to him, held his hand, told him not to be afraid of death because there's nothing more awful than life, and then she told him about the Arabs and how they had given her two hundred English pounds for land she hadn't intended to buy. He burst out laughing and didn't stop for three days until he died with a smile on his lips. The settlement forgave Rebecca for all her insults over the years because of the laugh she gave Nathan on his deathbed. At Nathan's funeral in Roots, Rebecca recalled the first day she had come to Israel and wept. But they didn't see the first tears Rebecca wept since she went to Jaffa with Nehemiah.

At night, she lay in bed with her eyes wide open and thought about Nathan. She thought that twenty years had passed since she married Nehemiah. She tried to grasp her life and to understand what she had meant to do with it if people like Nathan died while others grew old and her mongoloid son sat in the citrus grove with a deaf girl and sculpted birds. Ebenezer came to her. She smelled his smell of resin and wood and lay still in bed with her eyes shut. He sat on the stool not far from her bed and wanted to know if the laugh he saw when she returned from the trip to the Negev was the laugh of Joseph Rayna. She told him, Maybe, maybe, but don't hang too many hopes on that. The next day, after many years of not doing that, he carved the portrait of Joseph again and she looked at the portrait and didn't say a word, suddenly Ebenezer seemed so unworthy of the gigantic and splendid war waged inside her by two valiant and desperate men like Joseph and Nehemiah, that all she could tell him was: There's a resemblance in the face but there's no resemblance in the spirit of the face.

Ebenezer was ashamed, he went outside and hurt himself with an almond branch and had to go to the doctor. Rebecca said: Nathan's wife saw you hurt, so watch where you walk, your girlfriend is only deaf and not blind, and he said: She hasn't been my girlfriend for a long time, she's married to a laborer and lives far away.

The new doctor's name was Zosha Merimovitch. Even as a child, he had known the legends about Rebecca by heart. The legends began to be embroidered back in nineteen ten, two years after Rebecca buried Nehemiah. She went back to Jaffa then to buy a plow and stayed in a small hotel.

It was a hot day, Zosha Merimovitch was told, and Rebecca went out in the morning to buy a plow and old Michael Halperin, filled with the fury of many languid Jews, stood at the circus that had come to town and saw Jews wearing white suits, with delicate hands, smelling of perfume. He tried to excite them with the idea of a Hebrew army of ragamuffins that would conquer the land of his fathers from its robbers, bring it to life, and restore it to what it was and they nodded fondly at the barefoot ancient prophet splendid in his oriental garb, but their eyes were fixed on the beautiful Egyptian dancer, shaking her buttocks to the sound of the drum and the oud, and on the caged lion. An Arab knife-sharpener stood there and sharpened sickles, knives, and swords for all the wars Halperin said were coming. And then Michael Halperin entered the lion's cage, and the crowd held its breath. He stroked the lion's mane, stood facing him, sang Hatikvah and the modir didn't know if it was forbidden to sing it even in a lion's cage, and the lion lay on the ground, fixed watery bored eyes on Halperin, and fell asleep. The lion's grating breath and Halperin's singing were the only sounds. The lion's hair looked like Halperin's.

Halperin's singing in the lion's cage stirred memories in Rebecca of the songs of Joseph Rayna. She said to herself: Heroes in a cage of a tame lion, a cheap stage setting, a stupid attempt at would-be salvation. The words of Hatikvah always made her feel melancholy. Words full of longing for artificial horses and visions of returning from a hunt in a nonexistent forest. She despised Halperin because no Hebrew army, she thought, would spring up from his shouts and the bombastic song in a cage. And, unnoticed, Rebecca went into the cage, locked the door behind her, and then there was a silence people had never heard before. You could hear, said Zosha Merimovitch's mother, the sound of the oil in the bottles on the stand of the old oil vendor, whose knife stopped being sharpened at that moment by the knife-sharpener.