The Last Jew

Rebecca opened the lion's maw, managed to look into its mouth, and saw how big its teeth were. The Turkish modir now stood up and started lashing himself with a turbatsh and Rebecca, who didn't know what language the lion spoke, ordered it in Arabic, which she thought was closer to its language than any other language she knew, to roll over and play cat for her. The lion did as she ordered and to the spectators, who may have invented some of it, its movements looked like coquettish rotating movements and some versions have it that even its roar sounded like a cat's meow, but Zosha clearly remembers that in the conversation about that subject, various opinions were expressed about the purring, since a Turkish cat whines yeow and a Hebrew one yooo and an English one meow, so there was no consensus about whether the poor lion whined like a cat, and the lion, who apparently smiled at Rebecca, lay on its back and then got up and roared and she didn't budge until it walked in front of her, knelt, turned its face, and she stroked its mane, straightened her dress, wiped off a few pieces of straw that had stuck to it, and said: No blood and fire, no hope, this is a place of circuses and Jews, there's nobody to erect a kingdom of Judea for here, Michael Halperin, there's no reason, and she went out of the cage. The doctor Zosha Merimovitch, who was then a little boy, trembled with fear when he heard the story and people told how Michael Halperin then went to Rebecca, bowed to her as he had once bowed to the lion, and she said to him, The lion of Judah bows to a miserable lady of exile? And in a mocking voice, she went on: You're a funny Jew, Halperin, go save another nation in another place, but never mind, you're the closest thing to a lion I've seen since the Wondrous One was here and taught the fools in the settlement how to smell the feet of robbers who went through the field. Grand pianos they've now bought for their daughters, and she left.

The doctor, now a grown-up, waited for Ebenezer. Now and then he peeped at her house but never managed to see her. And she refused to go to doctors. He waited for the bold fellow, the hybrid of Michael Halperin, Rebecca Schneerson, and Nimrod the hero. His contempt for Ebenezer was perfect, he treated him without looking at him.

The Captain moved to the nearby settlement, which was big and rather close to both Jaffa and Jerusalem, and the door of his house said: Captain J.M.A.G., Citizen of the United States, Argentina, French Editor, Please do not visit on Sunday and Wednesday. The Captain's trip to Cairo was postponed again and again and every Wednesday he would ride to the settlement to visit Rebecca, sit in her house, tell her about his plans, and give her a most discouraging account of the irrigation plan for the Middle East she had devised and still expected to realize, even though for some time now she didn't remember why she had ever devised that plan. The Captain didn't give up his idea of marrying Rebecca. He listened patiently to her tribulations, the story of her weeping for eight years, the story of her life with Nehemiah and her tribulations with her stupid son, who goes to a doctor who probably studied horse doctoring in Beirut, to put iodine and a bandage on his face. For some reason, the Captain saw the story of her going into the lion's cage as overwhelming proof that she would marry him someday. Because she could never understand the disposition of the Captain's ostensibly logical connections, she took the words literally and learned how to go on refusing him politely. She would say her "no" pensively as if she meant "yes," while gazing softly at the Captain's increasingly pale face, and so she could keep his hope on a back burner and know that every Wednesday he would come visit her to propose new ideas to her and some of them really weren't bad, like building the airport years later.

While Rebecca was pondering how much alike were the Wondrous One, Joseph, the Captain, and the German officer who played songs for her during the war, new settlers came to the settlement. The Turkish modir, who was banished from the Land by the British, sent her a love letter from Istanbul and the manager of the wine press started sending love letters with shipments of brandy he would send to her home. The economy improved, new rest homes were even built for rheumatics since the air of the place was good for them. Roads were paved and the settlement was enveloped in thick green foliage, and there were corners where the sun never penetrated, and Rebecca went on protecting her son at a limited distance of time and space. One day a young teacher came to the settlement from Tel Aviv whose name was Dana Klomin. She brought twelve little children to show them the pit of the first settlers, which they had started digging next to the synagogue some years before. In the community center hung pictures of the early days and one of the farmers took the children on a tour of the community center and showed them the pit, Roots, and told about the tribulations, the torments, and the malaria. He told about Nathan and Nehemiah and the Wondrous One who came riding from the Arabian deserts to teach war. The teacher Dana was short, round, handsome in the unaccepted meaning of the word-as Rebecca put it-her eyes were gray, and when she twisted her ankle on a tour of the Hill of Tears, she was taken to the home of Zosha Merimovitch the doctor, who knew her father in Tel Aviv, and when he fixed her heel and bandaged it she saw on the windowsill a bird made of wood that Ebenezer had brought the doctor as a sign of gratitude for his cure. She looked at the bird in amazement, and said: That's a bird of paradise, it almost flies and doesn't fly, like me, who carves such a handsome bird? The doctor, who never caught on that there was anything special about the bird or Ebenezer, refused to see and turned his face away when he'd come to him, put the bird on the windowsill because he didn't know where to put it, said: That bird was made by Ebenezer Schneerson, who sits alone in the citrus grove and carves.

The children were resting in the Horowitz home. Dana Klomin limped slowly to the citrus grove. It was a beautiful day, and she deluded herself that she was going because of the beautiful day and the charming and pleasant view, but what led Dana Klomin, whose ankle hurt, was the rare sight of the bird. Dana's father believed in one thing only-in the charter. He thought he was the only one who still followed in the path of the greatest Jew of our generation, Theodor Herzl. He was excited by the Hebrew kingdom modeled on Rome, with a senate and an enlightened king, and for him Zionism wasn't only a solution to the distress of the Jews-or returning them to their homeland-but also an act of legal and historical justice. Mr. Klomin thought the Land was empty of people, the Arabs who lived in it were accidental wayfarers, no one ever called that land by name except the Jews, he said excitedly. It wasn't the homeland of any nation, no city was a capital for them, only the longings of the Jews preserved the Land from total disappearance, he claimed. He quoted Disraeli, who said in his book Tancred. "The vineyards of Israel have ceased to exist, but the eternal law enjoins the Children of Israel still to celebrate the vintage. A race that persist its celebrating their vintage, although they have no fruits to gather, will regain their vineyards."

A plot of land without declaring a historic homeland, without a flag, an anthem, or a legal system, was merely an aftermath of nothing. The emptiness of the Land was the implementation of an essentially ahistorical political mishap that demanded legal correction, a kind of leadership fraud, and the proud Israeli nation had to accept the charter for the Land of Israel and establish a strong and enlightened kingdom there on the European model and not on the savage Asian one, establish a supreme court there, a parliament, a decent and consistent constitution, enact a law of languages allowing only Hebrew and ancient Latin and the Hebrew army that would arise would establish those points of Zionist settlement that Jewish poverty had established so far without any real vision or proper planning. Zionism had to be made into a profitable business, he argued with the fervor of a person incited by an idea that nobody can or will take seriously. He was just as disappointed in his daughter as Rebecca was in her son. Like Rebecca, he also hoped his grandson might follow in his path. He had ideas about breeding his daughter, an expression he himself adopted, with a scion of the house of David, but the only scion of the house of David, Mr. Joseph Abravanel, seemed cheap, Levantine, and devoid of greatness, and the son was even dumber than his father. Mr. Klomin even thought of trying to marry his daughter off to some European prince, but since he didn't know who to appeal to in the matter, he didn't do anything. Dana, who had lost her mother, attended teachers' college and all she wanted to do was dry flowers, teach, and give birth to her own children so they would also love to smell flowers. She loved the settlements, hated Tel Aviv, which had grown and was noisy and pretentious now, she read old novels in yellowing bindings and dreamed of the simple and beautiful life in the lap of nature. She loved everything beautiful created by man or nature. She hated her father's big words, but she loved the solitary and stubborn man who raised her after her mother died in childbirth. When he furiously argued to her that what we need are warrior engineers and chemists and jurists and not teachers, Dana said to him: But I love flowers and the smell of rain and a grape harvest, and he twisted his face and shouted: From romanticism you beget stupid children, not a Jewish state after two thousand years, Dana!

What angered him especially was her collection of smells. She'd collect leaves and plants and blend them with liquid and seal the smells in jars and call every smell by its own name. She had a bottle of lust and a bottle of the smell of humility, and a bottle of a pauper kingdom, and a bottle of Tyre and Sidon, and a bottle of licorice essence, and more and more bottles whose very sight stirred gloomy despair in Mr. Klomin-who, of course, was always dressed to be taken to some king or high commissioner. Her friends went up to the Galilee and sang bold songs, sprouted mighty mustaches, and tapped each other on the shoulder. New settlements were set up at night and Dana's friends guarded them, but for her they lacked the poetry she was seeking, the sadness, the shame, her smells sought birds like the one she saw on the windowsill of Dr. Zosha Merimovitch, whose father once argued for three straight nights with Mr. Klomin about the squadron leaders he wanted to command the future Hebrew army. She dreamed of a heavy pensive man who would spare her the need to choose between her father and her friends.

For three days Dana Klomin stayed in the citrus grove. The students got a short letter brought to them by the grandson of Ahbed. In the letter, Dana wrote: Forgive me for staying, give warm regards to the teachers and don't judge me harshly, I can't leave, yours in friendship and love, Dana. The students returned to Tel Aviv with the janitor of the school who cursed the teacher who fell in love with a carpenter, and on the way they saw a man wearing a strange uniform driving a wagon loaded with splendid furniture and sporting a sword. That was Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg, who after a sharp argument with the committee of the nearby settlement in which he tried to explain for the hundred and first time why his name alone was a guarantee of his being Swiss and that the Greek Orthodox church is the desired answer the Jews were waiting for, while they claimed against him that he was a fantasizer, a traitor, cheating his nation and his religion, and they said: How long will you stay with us? He put on his fine clothing, wanted to go to Rebecca, but since it wasn't Wednesday, he did what he would have done if it weren't Wednesday and he had no words. He went for a tour and when he came to Gaza he saw an Arab wearing rags and selling antique furniture, who claimed it was furniture of Modo-Louigo fifteen, or in another language: in the style of Louis XV, he bought it as an imaginary wedding gift for Rebecca and was now driving it in a cart to her house. When Dana entered the hut, Ebenezer lifted his face, smiled at her, and went on working. Then he looked at her injured heel, took the heel in his strong, rough hands, looked at it, and for the first time in his life felt that he belonged to something bigger than himself.

He gently twisted the heel, stared at it long and hard, and felt so close to the heel, loved the skin, the way the heel coiled into the foot, looked at Dana, and said: I think I've been waiting for you for years, but I'm not good with words and I have to go back to carving, wait. She waited a whole day. Her eyes were veiled with a grief that may have always been in her and turned into tense expectation. At night they lay down beside each other on the mattress of leaves outside and the sky hung above them, peeping between branches, the sky was starry and black. Three days and three nights they stayed there. When he looked at her she felt that all the smells she had caged in bottles were now one person she wanted to pity and take care of his strong hands that were gently creating a bird or a portrait, out of a joyous intoxication, a dark sadness, and a disguised heaviness.

The two of them were no longer children. Ebenezer, who many years later will be the Last Jew in seedy nightclubs of Europe, was then an eccentric fellow of twenty-six and a deaf woman had once loved to touch him. Because he didn't know many words, he didn't clearly think love; he bit Dana's earlobes and thought "doves." She said to herself: Maybe that's not love, but that is what I was looking for. He thought: Got to give her a house, give her a child, and her own pepper tree. They laughed, something Ebenezer couldn't do without recalling his mother's angry face.

Dana didn't understand why she yearned for a person who wasn't exciting, who made her feel heavy. Years later, when Ebenezer would sit in a little city in Poland and think of Dana, he'd say to himself: Why didn't I tell her I loved her more than anybody in the world and never could I love anybody like that? But he recalled that when he was with her he didn't even know he loved her. All he knew was that he had to be with her.

The wedding was held right after the harvest. Most of the farmers dressed in white brought gifts. Rebecca, who sat in a house full of antique Louis XV furniture, looked at Dana as if she were seeing the greatest fraud of the century. What did she find in my son? She pitied Nehemiah, whose dreams of Abner ben-Ner and Yiftach begat a pensive and foolish man who touches a short, plump woman, smiles as if he were a mechanical doll. Beyond the fence of the settlement the house of Dana and Ebenezer was built. That was the first house outside the wall of the first settlers. Rebecca built the house because Ebenezer had to stay close to the farm; somebody has to protect what I established, she said, even if he does carve birds. The house she built for her son was handsome, abutted the vineyard with the ancient pool still in the middle, whose bottom was Crusader and whose turret was Mameluke.

Mr. Klomin, who came to the wedding furious and betrayed, was wearing a light-colored suit with a flower in his lapel. He was amazed at the sight of Rebecca Schneerson's elegant house and happy above all to meet the Captain in his official uniform. The two of them whispered together in Dana's new kitchen, among jars full of flowers smelling like jujubes, wormwood, mint, and citrus blossoms mixed with the smell of fresh paint, and after a long talk each hugged the other's shoulders, shook hands, and looked excited.

And on the day he parted from his daughter, Mr. Klomin increased his party by one hundred percent: it now had a leader and a single member.

The Captain was appointed deputy squadron leader responsible for organization and indicating avenues of financing, activities and political empowerment, preparing strategy and tactics, and in addition the Captain was to train leaders of the army of gladiators, lieutenants, and pashas that would be established someday when the old-new constitution would be shaped and the nation would recognize its three hundred Gideons, and then the Argentinean with American citizenship and the Swiss name, who belonged to the Greek Orthodox Church, was responsible for protocol, military, taxation, consolidation, building and general strategic forecasting.

Pleasant smells blew from the citrus groves and the fields. Dana's schoolmates came from the Galilee on horseback; they tapped each other on the shoulder and yelled. They danced bold and "awful" dances, as Rebecca put it, until the wee hours of the morning. The splendid kingdom is realized here by a carpenter and wild people shrieking, said Mr. Klomin sadly, and he gazed yearningly at the nobility of the Captain and Rebecca. He saw them as a symbol of his dream. Rebecca agreed to describe to him what she felt when she entered the lion's cage. Mr. Klomin looked at the Captain's padded visor, ostentatiously hated the roars of the wild Pioneers, saw his son-in-law standing on the side gazing, and said: They should have begat Rebecca and the Captain, and not vice versa.

The feast was made from the Captain's recipes and the farmers drank and sang and recalled Nehemiah and his beautiful words, and late at night, when the Pioneers were still singing around a bonfire, the aging farmers sat on the side and yearningly sang old songs they had once learned from Joseph Rayna and wept when they recalled those distant days, and said: Here we married off the first son of the settlement. After they left, Dana sat and looked at the sky. Ebenezer sat next to her. Rebecca thought of men who see the features and don't understand the essence. She thought of Joseph, of the Wondrous One, of the Captain, of Mr. Klomin, and then she thought a thought that was so strange to her she tried to get it out of her mind and couldn't. She thought: Maybe we nevertheless did something important here; maybe this settlement and that whole deed aren't as small as I thought, maybe there was something in Nehemiah's vision that hasn't entirely vanished and wasn't in vain? But then she saw in her mind's eye the great war that was coming and the Pioneers shooting at the enemy and the Arabs sharpening knives in Jaffa for all the future wars and she feared for Boaz, whose image she could already discover in her.

In the morning, two Arab women cleaned up the destruction and Rebecca looked at the new house and thought, What can those two fools do at night? and she wanted to laugh despite the scattered leftovers, empty wine bottles, and the flowers eagerly pulled up. In the room, the lamentations of the oldtimers still echoed. In the sunlight, it was hard for her to see last night's thoughts as real. And so she could almost forgive her son. In the house next door, the gramophone Mr. Zucker had recently bought started playing Beethoven's violin concerto. The speaker was aimed at Rebecca's house and she linked the music with the pleasant fields of morning, the dew, the almond grove in the distance, the mountains on the horizon, and again she saw the impending storm of war and started reciting Psalms to try to change something in the world, and if she had thought of that deed in real terms, she would probably have burst out laughing. Afterward Ebenezer and Dana went for a walk. Ebenezer sewed a handsome tent, they loaded the burden on one mule and Dana rode on a second mule and Ebenezer got off and picked flowers for Dana, who put them in a bag tied to the saddle, and thus they went up to the mountains and down to the valleys, crossed wadis and rivers and at night, they looked at the stars and felt an intense closeness, some longing for one another they had a name for and didn't know how to call it, and they'd lie like that, clinging desperately, breathing each other's breath, and Ebenezer wanted to say things, but didn't know how to say them, and his hands would knead her strongly and gently. He carved birds for her, built boxes for her, crowned her with portraits, and she lusted for him, touched him in surprising places, and they would laugh wildly, like hyenas, listening to the jackals wailing in the distances and answering them.

On the third evening, they came to the crossroads of the desert. Above rose a mountain and on was it the holy house of the Shiite priests. In the distance, dawn illuminated the mountains of Moab and a profound serenity reigned over everything. Birds began chirping, when they came to the top Dana didn't find flowers but thorns, thistles, and nettle flowers she was afraid to pick because they blossomed only one day a year. They were ordered to say Salaam aleikum ya ahl el-kubur, which means Greetings to you who dwell in the graves. And at the same time, Ebenezer began blessing with head bent: El-salaam aleikum ya ahl el-duniya, which means Greetings to you people of this world. And then the old man there told them that if they forgot those words their only son would die within three months, their house would be destroyed by fire, and their name would be wiped off the face of the earth. Dana said: We don't have a son, and Ebenezer said: We will have a son and his name will be Boaz. Dana asked why Boaz, and Ebenezer said: Because he will be the grandson of Nehemiah. And when she asked what would happen if they had a daughter, he said: We won't have a daughter, we'll have a son.

From the moment he was born, Rebecca claimed that Boaz was her son, that she had held him in her womb as a pledge. Dana held the baby, suckled him, and was afraid to let Rebecca touch him. At night Rebecca started whispering her Psalms angrily and furiously, prayed to a lord of another world, a strange, hostile one, who once lived with her forefathers in cellars. Dana wept and told Ebenezer that Rebecca was praying for her death, and Ebenezer tried to calm her but didn't know how to say that in the few words he used. He said: I'll protect you, Dana. She hates me, said Dana, and wept. I'm so scared, she loved Samuel, I wanted to understand, I couldn't, I looked at my son, he doesn't look like me, not like his mother, he had green-yellow eyes like the eyes of a demon, he laughed, a laughing baby he was, he touched his mother and would turn his face away from her, and Ebenezer went to his mother and said to her:

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You're praying for Dana's death, said Ebenezer. And she said: I'm praying to who I want and for what I want. You're not even the son of your father, not the grandson of your grandfather, you didn't come out of me, you came out of the coffin of a Jew who died of typhus and was buried in Jaffa under another name. Give me the only son I deserve. At night Rebecca yelled at the fence so they would hear: Ebenezer is the son of Nehemiah! Who else could be the father of a mongoloid who begets sons of a king if not a man who died on his wife at the shore of Jaffa to punish her for a life she didn't want to live? No Joseph would have begat a silent bird carver who tries to sleep with the daughter of a eunuch from Tel Aviv who begat his daughter from a charter translated from ancient Latin.

Dana heaped up pillows and boxes and blocked the doorway and Ebenezer paved a new path around the old house and Rebecca sat at the fence and wished for her grandson and couldn't see him. At night, no light was turned on in the house. Ebenezer sat in the house holding a rifle. Every noise made Dana Jump. One day, one of Dana's friends was brought who had a stomachache and volunteered to guard the yard and whenever he saw Rebecca approaching he aimed his rifle at her and said: I'll shoot you, and she giggled and said Shoot, fool, and he aimed, trembled, and didn't dare shoot until one day he crossed over the barricade and hired himself out to work in her yard.

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Boaz was born in the nearby settlement, in a small hospital, on April third, nineteen twenty-eight. On that day and at that hour, in Tarnopol, Galicia, Samuel Lipker was born. Samuel's sire then wrote a great poem on his unrequited love for Rebecca Schneerson. Then he wrote a lament on the death of Jews that would be written again later on by a man named Lionel Secret. The lament and the love poem to Rebecca were the only two successful poems ever written by Joseph Rayna. But they were left with his clothes before he was shot to death. No one remains who will remember them except for one man who recited them to Ebenezer and then died with a piece of bread wet from the damp of the wall stuck in his mouth. Joseph wrote about the most horrible disaster as if he envisioned it. The words walked among ruins of Jews and a path strewn with human obstacles who didn't know what they hoarded in their minds, came to Ebenezer, who stood in Cologne and recited the lamentation and the love poem. In its words, Ebenezer heard a distant melody reminding him of his love for his mother. And Joseph Rayna didn't go to America to save himself because he thought that if he went there, he would betray Rebecca. And so, without knowing, Lionel Secret learned from Ebenezer the melody of the great lament he would write years later, and would restore the first love of his mother Rachel, her love for Rebecca Secret Charity and the great-granddaughter of her daughter, but by the time he wrote the lament, his mother was dead and buried in New Jersey under the name of Rachel Blau, faithful wife of Saul Blau.

Those are the annals of Israel. Abraham begat Isaac. Isaac begat Jacob, end.

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When Mr. Klomin came to the settlement to see his grandson, Dana claimed that Rebecca had sent him to spy. Mr. Klomin came with the Captain, who had just returned from Rebecca's house. Rebecca stood at the fence separating her house from her son's house, and Mr. Klomin, who knocked on the door, didn't get an answer. He wanted to read to his daughter the six-hundred-page letter he had written to the High Commissioner. The Captain also considered that letter the piece de resistance of the life of Mr. Klomin, who started believing the rumors that had been making the rounds of the Yishuv for some time that the Captain was secretly inciting the Arabs to revolt (he didn't know exactly against whom) and therefore Mr. Klomin believed that that inciter should be used to remove the foreign government from the Land by means of his loyal or hidden servants. The Captain's generosity enabled the recruitment of about twenty new members into the party, but the source of his money became more suspect when Shoshana Sakhohtovskaya returned from Egypt. Shoshana was the daughter of Nathan, Nehemiah's old friend, and married a Jewish officer in the British army who was stationed in Cairo and he was said to own two factories for holes in pennies (one for the hole of a penny, and one for the hole of a tuppence). Shoshana told with a fervor that almost made her face bearable, that the Captain's newspaper sold only thirty-four copies, was merely a deception and behind it, she said, hid a secret, international, maybe even religious body, she almost shouted, a body whose purpose is to convert the Jews of the Land of Israel to Christianity and keep the Land from turning into a Zionist base. The Captain was too polite and in love to try to refute those accusations, which seemed exaggerated even to him, although he did see something in them that was fair to some extent. In his opinion, the accusations were partly correct, but imprecise, maybe even malicious, and he pledged himself by his nobility, which he occasionally called "South American nobility" and "Swiss courtesy," to silence and would wring his hands, and say: I said what I said out of love, I don't go back there, that's a fact, I'm no longer friendly with the English, I live in the settlement, and the proof was so dubious that everybody almost tended to accept it and Shoshana Sakhohtovskaya sat at night, gobbled up all the oranges on a tree she had planted with her own hands as a child. She heaped up the peels in a pyramid and when a black bird with a yellow beak stood on the tip of the pyramid and nodded its head and an owl screeched at night, Shoshana burst into bitter weeping, and called out: At least I have someplace to go back to. The Captain didn't explain what places he didn't go back to, and people wondered about those places, for a person generally isn't born in Argentina, Switzerland, and the United States. He has to choose, said those who were considered experts in the ways of the world. The elders of the settlement, who were grateful to Rebecca for Nehemiah and for Nathan's happy death, said: The Captain's Greek Orthodoxy is not exactly the religion that prevails in Argentina, the United States of America, or Switzerland, so when the Captain went to get his things that would come three times a year in a ship to the port, a few members of the settlement watched him and with their own amazed eyes (Mr. Klomin stood with them, even though he was ashamed of it) saw a gigantic trunk taken off, placed on the shore, and a British officer loaded it on a cart and took it to the shed, where the Captain was waiting. An aged consul stood next to him, eating an apple. The case was opened, there were new uniforms there, medals, and hats with padded visors. They also saw how the Captain was granted new insignia, which the aged consul pinned to his epaulettes, and he shouted unambiguously in a loud voice so they too could hear that the Captain was now promoted to the rank of colonel and the adorned scroll in the consul's hand was seen even from where they were hiding. The insignia were made of gold, the new visor was woven of silk fibers, silver and gold.

Later on, when Rebecca wanted to know more details about the event that had been described to her in great detail, she asked Captain (Colonel) Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg to read her the scroll. One paragraph in the scroll seemed to her to suit the Captain to a tee. The paragraph said: Colonel Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg valiantly defended the homeland, destroyed, captured, burned, smashed, split, sliced, trapped, penetrated, attacked, surrounded, crushed, broke, overcame, breached, caught, repelled, cleansed, cracked… And Rebecca listened to the words, was silent, and then said: It's nice of you that after all those deeds you're willing to waste time with simple people like us. They sat, drank a little brandy, the Captain smelled of imported flowers, and she said: Here you are with us and we're fond of you, Captain, and for us you'll always be Captain, they suspect you, respect and esteem you, you buy us gifts, but who you really are we don't know and maybe we won't know.

Rebecca, who was too busy with her attempt to capture Boaz, was really not surprised that not only the Captain and the manager of the wine press were wooing her, but also the Jewish husband of Shoshana Sakhohtovskaya, who owned two factories for holes, who came to visit. She told him: You should be ashamed of yourself. You're married to the daughter of my distinguished friend Nathan.

The war for the fate of Boaz was then at its height. The fence between the houses was thickened. For more than a year now, Rebecca hadn't seen Ebenezer or Boaz. Boaz would cry at night and she would yearn for him. Ebenezer started having nightmares he wasn't used to and Dana claimed that Rebecca was casting spells on him through the fence. When he woke up, he looked at Boaz and hated him. He said to Dana: He looks like Joseph, and she said: Ebenezer, this child is your son and I'm not to blame for who he looks like. Rebecca spread the rumor that the child was brought from Joseph to her through Dana's womb, and Dana grew melancholy and made bitter claims against the mother of Ebenezer, whose nightmares thickened with her dread.

One day Ebenezer burst the barriers, punched the guard he had once employed and who worked for his mother, stood at her chair, and pleaded with her to leave them alone and not harm Dana. She's all I've got, he said. I had nothing, Father died, you weren't there, I've got Dana! And she said: You two don't interest me, Ebenezer. Not you and not your Dana. You've got my son, give him to me, take your Dana and go to hell. You pray for her death, said Ebenezer. She laughed and said: I've got no control over what the Holy One Blessed Be He does. I filled my part of the deal with your father, he wanted you and I have Boaz. And until he's mine, I won't shut up.

Rebecca turned her face away and through the window screen she saw Ebenezer's back as he went off and a longing she had never known passed through her, a longing to bequeath to Boaz her life and her property. For the first time in her life she felt that she had surrendered to the most ridiculous of feelings, to pure unconditional love. The yearning flattered her but also scared her.

A few weeks later, when Boaz reached his first birthday, Dana went out to look for Ebenezer, who hadn't returned from the citrus grove for three days. He sat in his hut and tried to discover his father's real face in a tree. Suddenly, the sky darkened and a heavy rain poured down. The drops fell savagely on the ground and looked gigantic, a wind blew and the sky turned black, a haze filled the air, the foliage looked purple, the sun that flickered for a moment between the clouds was almost green and a thick dust from the desert grew turgid in the eddy. Lightning flashes struck the ground and cut the air with a loud whistle. Two Arabs driving a load of spices on a donkey on their way from the desert to the village of Marar saw Dana lit in the light of the flashes. She was wet and her dress clung to her body. One of them attacked her. Her wet hair fell on her face and his old friend grabbed it and her when she tried to defend herself from the rain. The first one grabbed her with his hands, stretched over her and tried to rape her. She fought him with all her might, bit and kicked, but the mud was moldy and she couldn't see a thing. When she fainted from swallowing mud the old man said to the young one: Come on, let's get out, we've killed her. He tried to give her artificial respiration but her body was cold. Out of dread he took out an aluminum cup and started digging a pit. They buried Dana, but she was still alive. She tried to get up but the earth crushed her and broke her clavicle. She tried to move, and her head bumped into a rock. Ebenezer heard the roars, put on the old raincoat hanging in the hut, and went out. He walked in the rain, soaked to the skin. And then he saw, he didn't yet understand what he saw, he thought of going on, and turned around. He tried to listen to Dana's heart, but her heart wasn't beating. He sat next to her, looked at her trampled body and didn't shed a tear. He picked up her body, cleaned her face and body, straightened her dress, and carried her in his arms. He came to the settlement where all the inhabitants were sequestered in their houses and looking out the windows at the rainstorm and the windswept street. They saw Ebenezer carrying his wife's body. People came out of their houses and started following him. Old Horowitz came outside and bowed his head, tears gushed in his eyes. Ebenezer didn't say a word. He took Dana to the threshold of his mother's house, put her body on the doorsill, and called out: Here you are! You wanted her dead and you got it.

He took a knife from the hiding place in the cowshed and went to the nearby village. An old man for whom he had once carved the dead faces of his daughters told him: Go to Marar, you'll see a donkey with a damaged saddle at the house of Abu-Hassein, and you'll know. Ebenezer climbed up to the village. The inhabitants were hiding from the storm. His smell was blended with the downpour and the dogs didn't smell him and didn't bark. He came to Abu-Hassein's house, saw the donkey at the next house, examined the saddle and called the Arabs to come outside. They came out, the old man started trembling, but Ebenezer whose hands were strong, grabbed the young one, smelled Dana's odor on his clothes, and killed him with two stabs. The old man started running away, men from the settlement ran up, and dragged Ebenezer back to the settlement. In the yard, they washed the blood off Ebenezer. All night Ebenezer sat on the doorsill of Rebecca's house next to Dana's body and watched it. Rebecca looked outside and saw her son and his dead wife and wanted to go to them, but Ebenezer warned her not to come. The rain stopped, the sky cleared up, and a fragrance of spring filled the air. There was no trace of the storm except for the lightning damage, split tree trunks, and a lot of sand piled up wet and sticky. The next day, the funeral was held, Rebecca stood on the side, between the Captain and Mr. Klomin. Mr. Klomin, gazing, tried to understand the meaning of the empty space that filled him. With his great expertise in the charter and the illegality of the British Mandate, he had never noticed how much he loved his daughter. Now when he felt love, he didn't know what to do with it. At the open grave, Ebenezer told his wife: You were a gift given to me and taken from me, this morning I looked in the mirror, there was nobody there. And then the cantor recited the prayer for the dead and they filled the grave with dirt and Roots grew by one more corpse. He returned from Roots alone. He sat a long time and looked at his son. He wanted to touch him, but he didn't. The child's eyes were wide open. For a moment Ebenezer thought the child was smiling. His eyes were mocking, and Ebenezer got up and slammed the door. He stood next to his house, looked at the path where Dana had planted roses and geraniums and at the pepper tree he had planted for her and at her herb garden, and he yelled: Rebecca, I'm going to find who cursed us. Rebecca approached the child and looked at him. Her son's bowed figure was seen from the myrtle tree on the path. He was twenty-seven years old. The year was nineteen twenty-seven. The month was April. The air was drenched with the intoxicating smells of spring. The Captain moved to Ebenezer's house. The paths and flowers went on blooming every year. The dried flowers in the books and the sweet smells in the jars and bottles stayed where they were.

Forty years, Ebenezer Schneerson didn't see his mother.

Tape / -

Your blood Dana. Your Dana blood. Blood blood. Your blood Dana. Dana Dana your blood. The blood of Dana. Dana. Blood blood blood Dana. Blood of Dana, blood. Blood your blood Dana Dana. Your blood Dana. Your Dana blood. Dana blood. Dana Dana. Your blood Dana. Blood.

They said I went to Marar to kill an Arab. I don't remember. I tell how I went to kill an Arab in Marar and I don't remember. An empty space I am. Stories of others or of others about me. Who am I? Forty years searching and don't know.

After forty years I came and saw him, and I said to him: Samuel! I was so happy that Samuel was here. But that was Boaz. He was offended. What do I know about Boaz?

Tape / -

Teacher Henkin met Boaz years after Menahem was killed. When he retired, there was nobody to say good-bye to. The teachers had changed. Damausz sat in his house and embroidered his old dreams over and over again. Old Teacher Sarakh with her swollen legs didn't even bother to come say good-bye to him. She grows silkworms and gazes at the sea getting blocked across from her house. Teacher Henkin bought a new overcoat and a broad-brimmed hat and every morning as usual, he went on walking from his house on Deliverance Street to Mugrabi Square, which had meanwhile been destroyed, and then back home again. "Grief of the world," Teacher Obadiah Henkin would say to himself at the new hotels, crushing the handsome hills at the seashore, the new houses, the discotheques, the banks popping up like mushrooms. Here and there, a few veteran teachers still live, Histadrut members, who now add a second story to their little houses and will soon sell the houses for accelerated development. Only the corner of Henkin's street remained lost between the new building sites closing in on it. They're wiping out the sea, dammit, said the baker's wife to Mr. Henkin, and he said, Yes, yes, too bad about Noga, thought Henkin, what's she doing? She lived with us, Hasha Masha and she, like two conspirators. A bare bulb over my wife, the garden hasn't yet been renewed, the paint is peeling. Unlike Hasha Masha, Teacher Henkin doesn't know that relations between Noga and Menahem-what he privately called their engagement-ended a few weeks before Menahem fell.

How many years does Teacher Henkin walk in that set route? He stopped counting. Ten, fifteen years? He's not sure anymore. The years are accompanied by demonstrations of hesitation, partial juggling of retreat, attempts to understand death from a new, unusual angle, getting to know the bereaved parents, the Committee of Bereaved Parents, the Shimonis, all that happened while he walked every single day, at the same time, on Ben-Yehuda Street to Mugrabi Square and back. Later on, after he'd meet Boaz, it became clear to Teacher Henkin that his son didn't fall in the battle of Mount Radar, but in a battle that would stir heroic feelings in him at first, that battle for the Old City. Teacher Henkin, who had had many illusions shattered in his life, was angry about the battle in the Old City, which might have been won if not for the order of Ben-Gurion, whom he had once thought great. But he wouldn't get his son back in either case, Hasha Masha will then say, and he'll stare at her, but then he won't be angry anymore at her hostility.

And so he also learned the battle for the Old City: the weary fighters of the Harel Brigade (and Menahem, he thought then, was one of them) bombarded Mount Zion every night from Yemin Moshe whose residents had previously been evacuated. And the mountain was captured. Menahem was in the armored car that climbed the mountain from the Valley of Hinnom. The fighters met in the Dormition Monastery, next to King David's Tomb, near the place of the seder the Christians call the Last Supper. After a short rest, the fighters were assembled in Bishop Gubat's school next to the monastery, and in the shadow of Byzantine acacias, they ate grape leaves stuffed with dry bread. From the other side of the narrow path separating the mountain from the Old City, on the splendid Tower of Suleiman sat the fighters of the Arab Legion commanded by British Colonel Wood. Colonel Wood, who graduated with honors from Eton and had a degree from Cambridge, had previously served in Europe, was one of those who liberated Hathausen concentration camp, fought in the Pacific, and then volunteered to help his old friend Glubb Pasha organize the army of the grandson of the Sharif of Mecca. Now he held a stick in his hand, which once, when liberating the camp, he refused to hold.

In the besieged Jewish Quarter, a handful of Jews remained, whose ammunition and food were running out. By order of Ben-Gurion, the governor of Jewish Jerusalem refused the offer of the rescue battle made by the members of the Harel Brigade. The governor claimed he didn't have reinforcements that the fighters of the Harel Brigade were exhausted and a considerable part of their fighters were killed or wounded. The commander of the Harel force decided to carry out the operation despite the governor's refusal, and that was a historical moment, thought Henkin excitedly. Ben-Gurion, who feared the rage of the fighters, approved the operation but at the same time he ordered the governor not to assist it. We need a historian, said Henkin, who will come and arrange the data, so that battle can be summarized properly. The commander said: We have to strike the enemy while he's stunned from the battle on the mountain. The night before, a hole was made in the roof of the Dormition Church by a Davidka shell that tried to hit a target far away from there and missed. The enemy had tanks, armored cars, and artillery. Colonel Wood relied on his weapons and his loyal soldiers. At dawn, an armored car approached the wall of the Old City and poured fire on the nearby Jaffa Gate. Seven Iraqi and British officers were taken prisoner. On Mount Zion sat Menahem along with Boaz. He wasn't thinking of the international conspiracies, of Ben-Gurion writhing in the torments of his decision, of the governor and his struggle with the commander of Harel, he was waiting to finish the war, go back home, live, then he got a cone of explosives and crawled toward Zion Gate. Over the gate were two heavy machine guns, whose range covered the narrow path and you had to slip under it. The explosive was connected to a wire and to the cone, and you could push it with a pole under the coil of the barbed war fence stretched there. At three twenty AM, on the twentieth of May nineteen forty-eight, the cone burst the fences, a mighty explosion was heard, shots were fired feverishly, and Zion Gate was breached. In the smoke of shooting and explosions, Menahem and his comrades burst into the city that previously, in a brief and laconic but emotional ceremony, the commander had called the Eternal City. In the short ceremony, the commander said in a restrained tone: One thousand eight hundred seventy-seven years ago we were exiled from here, you are the first to climb the wall of the Eternal City, hold on and embrace it. When Henkin will tell his wife about that, she will say to him: Is your pain less because of that?

Ra'anana ran first, followed by the rest of the fighters. A soldier who had laid explosives at the gate with Menahem lay wounded; later on they would pick him up. Menahem ran behind Boaz, shooting at the wall on which Colonel Wood's terrified officers and soldiers were fighting boldly. The Armenians, in the winding street to the Jewish Quarter, watch in awe, the fighters hold explosives, rifles, submachine guns, and food. The commander says on the walkie-talkie: They're losing control, complete surprise, send fighters to replace us, we're bleeding, if you send them fast, the Old City will be in our hands by nightfall, over and out. From the other end, there was no answer. Bearded, weary fighters burst out of the besieged Jewish Quarter. A brief but joyous encounter. Shells land on all sides. White flags start flying over the houses of the Old City. The Arab fighters are losing control and starting to flee, Colonel Wood can't hold his fighters. They're fleeing. Havaja Wood, they yell at him, nothing to be done, and he, stunned, waves the stick he's holding. You have to learn from the enemy, he'll say later on, and he doesn't mean Kramer, but Menahem Henkin.

Complete chaos. Menahem attacks, says Boaz, and then, during the battle, he's wounded by a stray bullet. His brain is pierced and he dies on the spot. If I had caught the bullet, it wouldn't have been a stray! Menahem didn't suffer, Henkin… The governor didn't heed the request for help, the besieged people went back to the Jewish Quarter with food and a little bit of ammunition. They found out that new fighters were coming to relieve Boaz and his companions. They pulled out with the dead and wounded. The new ones who came were old men from the corps of elderly who weren't fit to fight and didn't know why they were sent. The retreating Arabs saw the wheel turn, girded their loins, and drove out the old men. The exhausted inhabitants of the Jewish Quarter surrendered by waving a white flag. At the same time, Henkin discovered later, in the headquarters on Schneller sat a hundred armed fighters who weren't sent. Menahem fell for nothing, said Henkin to Hasha Masha. The liberation of the Old City was postponed for nineteen years. Meanwhile, Menahem came back and was killed in another battle, a battle that didn't get into the history book.

Did my son fall for nothing? Henkin will ask.

Did he fall in an unknown battle there, or in the Old City?

He fell, says Hasha Masha, even if he died in a traffic accident, he didn't return.

The merchants on Ben-Yehuda Street set their watches by Henkin. They're building a new city around him, and only the sea remains stuck to itself. And he doesn't know, they say. Henkin took down the mezuzah on the second day of the Six-Day War, when the Chief Rabbi said that the Israel Defense Forces won because of the will of God. Hasha Masha thinks: Why did fate connect two such different people as Menahem and his father? Menahem was impetuous, friendly, loved the sea, didn't believe especially, didn't not believe, tied cats' tails, smoked in shelters, a simple boy, I loved him, but Henkin needs a hero and a poet.

He searches for his son on Ben-Yehuda Street as if Menahem is no more on Shenkin Street than on Ben-Yehuda Street. The Committee of Bereaved Parents, what a feast they make there with the plastic vegetables. What does Jordana who loves my son want from me? What an insane nation…

Noga understands, knows, and only he, Obadiah, sets the watches of those miserable merchants. Your devotion, Noga, is a noble trouble. I understand, know that you stopped loving Menahem and stayed with us, I don't bear a grudge against you, but to love you for that I can't and you know that. Let Henkin think what he wants, ponders Hasha Masha.

Years later, Hasha Masha will write to Renate:

My dear,

You asked how those years passed. They passed. I sat and waited. For what? For nothing. Noga wrote Menahem a letter telling him she had stopped loving him. He was killed before he got the letter. She stayed with us. She rejected suitors out of hand. Men don't understand death, Renate.

Here is a description of a tour of Teacher Henkin: On the ruins of the Turkish fortress, between Nordau and Jabotinsky Boulevards, which used to be called Ingathering of the Exiles Street, they've built a new building. Instead of the Moses and Shapiro families new people now live there who closed the balconies with sliding shutters. Atom Bar, teeming with Jewish whores and Australian soldiers, changed its name and now its clientele are old Poles and women with weary faces. Then there was a club of aging artists there.

The bicycle repairman says: He's wearing a hat again. The perfume shop that used to be a grocery is now on the way to being a women's shoe boutique. The Czech shoemaker, who couldn't forgive himself for choking his sick wife in the bunker and brought new machines from France, died from missing his wife, and left the store to two young men who sold it to a used car dealer. What had been a vineyard until 'forty-eight turned into a big shapeless building with a turret facing the sea. A splendid victory for a lot of seasonal change, says old Damausz, who lives above the perfume shop, next to the grocery of Halfon of the women's shoes who later opened a paint store and even later a small restaurant with a sign that said: "Original Ashkara Melange from Jerusalem." And Mrs. Yehoyakhina Sheets of the flower shop looks at the "Original Ashkara Melange from Jerusalem" and says: How beautiful it used to be here. The German tobacco vendor whose wife ran away with the Great Dane dog and his son who wasn't killed in the explosion of the bridges in 'forty-six now manages the new branch of Bank Leumi. Henkin walks in a maze of changes. They know him, Renate, he doesn't know them.

What was once the bulletin board where Menahem used to post declarations against the White Paper is now a marble building with an office for modern matchmaking, as if there is modern and nonmodern matchmaking. Well-packed white buildings on the next corner take on a Mediterranean patina, rust in the iron, in the cement. A slow destruction gnaws the chill beauty, among the ruins walks Obadiah. The owner of the store on the corner was once a women's hairdresser named Nadijda Litvinovskaya. She sits in the window of "Sex and Beauty." They blink their false eyelashes, and manicure men too. A state of dying sycamores, she says, water flows in the winter and in the summer is an awful light. My daughters married contractors from Herzliya Pituah, children go to school with diplomats' children. How are you, Mr. Henkin? Thank you, he always says, how many years? Maybe five, maybe more. A small country with falafel, without opera, with Sabras, come to me to be beautiful with black on the seashore on a body like Negresses. And I say, Here's Teacher Henkin walking, how's the missus, and he says, Thank you. After the barber shop, I had a salon, after the salon a boutique. Then Sex and Beauty. His son is still dead, poor soul. And the soda vendor who now sells "modern beverages" says carrot juice for women goes well now. And Mrs. Pitsovskaya, five streets past Mugrabi, Mrs. Pitsovskaya says: Thank you, he'll say to me. My son's teacher, he'd learn and forget what he learned, and now he's money and knows what the teacher never knew. That's life, no? One with sense is a poor soul, one without sense makes money. Rich people have sense, too, says Halfon sadly. All poor men aren't wise and all rich men aren't fools, he adds. And the husband of Zipporah Glory-Splendor stopped selling eggs on the black market, will import instant coffee, now imports rare clothes from Hong Kong at the other end of the world. If all the Chinese jumped at the same time, the world would move and we'd be in Saudi Arabia and we'd have oil and they'd be in the sea, says Halfon. His boy sometimes kills in wars and then goes to Bezalel to be an artist, says Marianne Abramovitch. And Mrs. Lustig from the candy store died of cancer of love, they say in the next shop, she played the piano, forgot to sell candy, it was hard to digest, and the son of the neighbor upstairs, who died of an inflammation of the urinary tract, was once a naughty boy who tried to trip Henkin who said Thank you, didn't see, looked, tripped, didn't see. When will there be peace, Mr. Henkin? asks the man who sells purses and cases. Henkin doesn't know, smiles with the contemplation of a bereavedfather, Renate, that's the wisdom of that man, maybe cunning, maybe a lifeline, and he says, What do I know: Abravanel's pharmacy on the way back turned into a travel agency. The messiah who used to sit in the street and smoke twigs sells carpets and in exchange forgot the redemption we expected so much. They sell gifts and souvenirs.

Shops for watches and windowpanes that used to sell radios and phonographs.

Tape / -

And this is how Teacher Henkin met Boaz Schneerson. It was a nice day and suddenly the first rain of the season started falling. Teacher Henkin struggled with the wind, but the rain fell in front of him, didn't yet get to him. He rowed toward Mugrabi Square, passed by Sex and Beauty, Mr. Nussbaum was already setting his watch and then he entered the rain, raindrops whipped him obliquely, touching the sidewalk like dancing magnets, the dust was erased, beyond the display windows wrapped in mists Teacher Henkin looked like he was rowing in the sea. From an opening in the clouds a prancing sunbeam slices the well-trimmed hedge for a moment and wafts a fragrance of jasmine. Across from the German bookstore on the corner of Idelson, the rain stops. Teacher Henkin looks at the visual illusion. The rain falls up to Idelson Street, and from then on, to what was once Mugrabi Square, rain doesn't fall and the sky isn't cloudy. The border of the black cloud is right over him. The bookstore owner smiles at Teacher Henkin, who doesn't heed him today. Nor does he peep into the display window to see the beautiful wrappings he looks at with love and pain. Old books bound by aged binders, how many of them are still alive, I don't know, but today he doesn't look. Behind him, the rain is seen in the display window as a geometric disaster, both tame and wild. Facing him on the dry curb stands a young man. The young man isn't especially tall but isn't short. Pinioned in a raincoat that comes to his waist, the young man stands and looks at the rain on the other side of the street. The young man sees Henkin and his yellow-green eyes, exaggerated to a certain extent by a prancing sunbeam, look as if they're trying to penetrate that miracle that facing him stands a man in a black coat and hat in a strong oblique rain, while he stands on dry land. Henkin isn't able to think logically and tell himself: If you walked ten, fifteen years on Ben-Yehuda Street to seek traces of a dead son and a familiar person came to you standing on dry land as if obeying your secret intentions, an event happened, certain wishes were answered, but the rain was too pesky for Teacher Henkin, who was seeking Boaz without knowing that he was seeking Boaz to understand what he was seeing.

(I don't know if these things were written in Hasha Masha's letter. I recite them and now I don't know, maybe they were in the letter and maybe I'm quoting another source, what do I know?) The young man dropped his hands with restrained nervousness that didn't cover impatience and anxiety, and then Henkin thought: Maybe he's waiting for me, and understood, and the young man turned his face aside, took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, those hands were familiar to Henkin. The slight tremor, the slight restraint of the tremor, the young man takes out a pack of matches, lights a cigarette and bends the match, looks here and there and doesn't toss it to the ground, which amazes Henkin, the street is whipped by wind and the young man puts the extinguished match in his pocket, exhales smoke, turns his face again, and he says to himself, Teacher, here's a teacher, and he knows he's thinking about something else, but he doesn't know what he's thinking. The cigarette is a shelter, the rain on the side of the teacher is also a shelter. Between them stands the ruin, will the teacher cross the street?

Teacher Henkin waits until the little car that burst out of Jordan Street passes by him, its left side is already whipped by rain and its right side is dry. He looks at his watch as if it's important to know what time it is now. Music comes from a locked apartment. He knows it's a Bach piano concerto. And then he crossed the street and stood on the dry land, looked behind him to make sure he has come from the rain, the cloud hasn't yet moved, Henkin is leaking water, while the young man is dry and wearing a raincoat, the cigarette held for a moment in his hand and then he thrusts it back in his mouth. And his mouth takes on the shape of a question mark. Therefore, the encounter became like most important encounters, through small misunderstandings, through alternating rain and dry, through a cigarette that should herald a change. The roof of Mugrabi Cinema was open, and the roar of its closing was heard. From the window above peeps the face of a worker closing the roof. The young man flicks the cigarette into a niche, the match is bent in his pocket, the cigarette in a niche, the time is eight-oh-five, and then Teacher Henkin has to cope with some uneasiness that fills him, shuts his eyes, says: Hello, and the young man tries to look surprised, hesitates, wrings his hands and separates them as if they bothered him, and says: Yes, hello.

My name's Obadiah, says Teacher Henkin, you're familiar to me, were you my student and I forgot?

As he said that he thought: Did a student wait for him here in the dry part to toss a cigarette into a niche?

I wasn't your student, said Boaz, I had a kindergarten teacher who knows us even when we grow up. She says the features of the face don't change.

You're familiar to me.

You're familiar to me too, says the young man, but he says the words warily and then they understand. The moment the rain crosses the street, both of them see the same picture in their mind's eye: years before, Boaz stands in front of Henkin's house on Deliverance Street, measuring it, observing, not saying a word, refusing a glass of water, and Henkin goes into the house and looks at him through the shutter.

My name's Boaz Schneerson, he says, you're Menahem's father.

After they went into the cafe, the worker came out of the kitchen, closed the windows, and stretched the covers over the chairs on the sidewalk. Boaz and Teacher Henkin sat down at a table and a weary waitress got up from where she was sprawled, chewing gum, slowly came to them and they ordered coffee, one roll, and cake for Boaz. Teacher Henkin also ordered a glass of soda. He tries to sit more authoritatively, as if it were important to set the balance of power and know who was more important, who had more rights. And Boaz understood and didn't resent him. He understood that Henkin had to win where people like him always lose. Recognizing his look blended of reproach and envy, he decided to ignore it. I have no other line of defense, he said to himself and was amazed at the words "line of defense," which he had heard from Rebecca. The conversation flowed while drinking coffee. At first there were gropings, Henkin took off the hat, asked Boaz if he really was the young man who once stood in front of his house, and Boaz tried to evade but his face answered yes, and he couldn't explain why, he just said, I was angry then. Why didn't you ever come to us, asked Henkin. I didn't know, said Boaz, for some reason I didn't know. His death was too much for us, we didn't manage to live afterward, maybe the next generation will be more successful. He wanted, he wanted so much to tell Henkin how he once saved Menahem from death, by mistake, when they shot at them from the village of Koloniya and Menahem shot through the peephole of the armored car and he suddenly was pushed to him, took him down, and a bullet penetrated the armored car and bounced around in it and hit one of the guys who was slightly wounded, and Menahem was saved. For how long? What will he tell him? I saved your son so he could die a month later? So, from the hopeful eyes of that handsome old man, dignified in the enjoyment of his loss, Boaz told how Menahem had saved him from death. He also put in suddenly's, as if there are suddenly's in war. Very slowly, the scene changes, the story changes, the image of Menahem grows bigger, Henkin's eyes demand more and more and Boaz talks from the man's desires, it's sad for him to sit across from that man, who seeks Menahem and finds Boaz, so he tells him stories of Boaz as if they were stories of Menahem, what difference does it make, he won't die from that again, thinks Boaz and Teacher Henkin swallows every word, a strong wind flies dust, the rain whips down, the waitress shivers, winter's coming, leaves fly in the wind, cars look elusive in the oblique downpour that fills the street with spraying water, and he tells Henkin his son who was Boaz, he tells and exaggerates and he doesn't care, good luck to him, he thinks, from the things he tells he even starts loving Menahem, a national hero he creates, Menahem who would tell him about the English in the Muslim cemetery and who would peep at them screwing Ruthie Zelmonovski's sister. Single-handedly, Menahem now conquers Jerusalem for Teacher Henkin…

And there was also a moment of no return. And maybe all those tapes were meant only to describe that moment, so I know, my son said what he said and from then on everything was obscured, it's hard for me to understand how, because of one song, such a strong revolution takes place, Boaz spoke, maybe it was an indifference coordinated with the fears, the eyes of Teacher Henkin demanding more, pleading, dictating, Boaz reads in them things he has no time to discern precisely, to decipher, he has to talk, he restores the dead Menahem, magnifies, turns his death in a diversionary action near Mount Radar into death in the Old City, there was a mistake in the recording, he said, the reports were confused, another Menahem fell near Mount Radar, I was in both battles and I know, Menahem saved me, helped the wounded, they don't know what happened to him, he became so human, something in him started to pity, the opposite of what he tried to be, he sat in the courtyard, says Boaz, the guys were killed on Mount Radar and he waited for us to decide what unit he belonged to. We held a discussion, it was decided to accept him, that was the moment he showed me the poem, he quoted a poem then and I write too: and it was written in Henkin's eyes: Poem! Poem! And Boaz reads word for word: Poem! Poem! As if he were first learning to read, and Teacher Henkin is silent, drinking thirstily, unable to conceal from Boaz his other son, the one Hasha Masha mourns, the one Noga loved, was another Menahem and Boaz discovered him, but he knew all the time that Menahem was different, they didn't know, he knew. A poem he wrote, Boaz reads on Menahem's father's face, and that's how the poem was sold to the teacher who had thought all his life in the ancient skill of his profession, systematically, around and around, and the poem will bring redemption to men who are so in need of the right word, the proving word, the knowing word. And Boaz now forgets Menahem who, between battles, took him to the movies to see Fiesta in Mexico, the one and only film showing in besieged Jerusalem and the owner of the movie theater sat outside and waited for somebody to come and watch it, and the divine Esther Williams jumps every night, at the same time, with the electricity from a private generator, into a beautiful blue pool, and Ricardo Montalban with splendid sideburns and brilliantined hair sings with a Mexican accent and Estherke swims in a shiny bathing suit and her teeth are white, and then he took him to the twins and one of them was a little hunchbacked and had a wounded look in her eyes and they sucked lollipops he had brought from the black market. A bereaved father wants a Menahem he dreamed about at night. As if imprisoned in the hands of that teacher, Boaz sells heroism and a poem. He'll love me, Boaz says to himself, he'll love me, and a deep wound inside him all his life gapes open. They drank another cup of coffee, something becomes clear in Teacher Henkin's face. One eye still pondering, he finishes sipping the coffee, looks at the new cigarette in Boaz's mouth, even hands him a match from the box of matches on the table. The rain outside stopped for a moment and then intensified, and then Boaz lopped off the match on the table, looked at the heavy clouds in the window, somebody drew a rabbit on its steam, and a little girl sitting there sang: Come to me, butterfly grand, come back to me, sit on my hand, and she said: I love my rabbit. And there were also faces she had drawn, and the waitress wiped the table with a gray rag, trying to gather up the cigarette butts and Menahem grows stronger, his image is opened to a new biography, a salvation of the wounded, the battle for the Old City, explosives in the Wall, after all, Hasha Masha said afterward, after all why should you blame Boaz? He sat with Henkin and Henkin wants to be worthy of his son, wants his son to be worthy of some ideal so he can love him, what did Boaz do? He told Henkin Menahem as if he were Boaz. What Boaz did in the war was copied to my son. And Boaz erased himself, was he looking for a father for himself? I don't know. I loathe the fellow, but I also understand him. The devil in him, that innocence to read in Henkin's eyes what he longs for.

But while Boaz was completely sunk in his new creation, Henkin suddenly gaped out of the thoughts from his starched suit, became serious, grave, the teacher I met on the Tiberias Tsemakh road, that gentle savage who read us poems and quarried and knew how to love this body of mine with hands full of softness and honor, and he said: The poem, Boaz, what about the poem?

What poem?

The poem Menahem wrote.

Oh.

I want it.

But…

No but.

Boaz came back to reality and once again found himself sitting in the cafe. The waitress was sitting in a corner humming to herself. The rain subsided and strips of blue sky appeared between the clouds.

The poem disappeared.

Find it.

Where?

You'll find it, Boaz Schneerson, and you'll bring it. You know where I live, you came once, and now I know why.

Henkin leaned forward, his eyes cold, Henkin's dead son, says Boaz with restrained fear, is indifferent now, his dead son wrote him a poem. What does he want from me, fucking Henkin?

Bring it!

I'll look for it, said Boaz. Henkin observes him seriously, Boaz is terrified in the chair.

You will bring it.

A teacher's grammar: I shall bring, you will bring, we shall bring, where shall I bring it from?

Bring it from wherever you bring it, says the teacher of Hebrew language and literature.

I'll look for it.

You'll find it, says Henkin and starts to get up, and then he turns to Boaz: Tomorrow afternoon. I can't, said Boaz.

Tomorrow afternoon, said Henkin and all the softness disappeared, no poet was written on his brow… a father's acquisitiveness, Boaz didn't take it into account. Tomorrow afternoon. Deliverance Street, near Singer's store. I'm waiting for you, his voice is cruel, rigid. He wants to pay, but Henkin doesn't let him. I'll pay, says Henkin. He counts the coins, puts the wallet back in his pants pocket, puts on his coat, his hat, repeats: Tomorrow afternoon. When Teacher Henkin goes outside the wind scatters the fastsailing clouds. Across the street, on the wall of the house, gigantic wet spots appear, the street is gleaming with the sudden sun, Boaz remains on the corner, lights a cigarette, puts the match in his mouth, and tramples on the cigarette.

Tape / -

Report 5/677-E. S.-(The Last Jew)

By 1946 we found out about Ebenezer Schneerson. We had been tracking him for about a year and in January 1946, we created an initial contact with him. His impresario-as Samuel Lipker was called-presented us with unacceptable conditions. He demanded that the material to be published be recorded in his name, and that in exchange for every hour of debriefing the aforementioned (Samuel Lipker) would be paid ten dollars. Our then modest institution could not have accepted those demands and henceforth the meeting with Ebenezer was postponed until the year nineteen fifty-six 1956. When he came to us, Ebenezer was fifty-six years old. He suffered from pain in the pelvis, his fractures are patched up but are abnormal, his body is scarred from the blows he received, and even though the scars have healed he urgently needed treatment. His heart is abnormal, his pulse is too rapid, his blood pressure is high, he was borderline diabetic.

This report does not constitute research but is an introduction to research that will be documented forthwith, and is to be seen only as an interim report. When Ebenezer Schneerson came to us, we discovered that during the years since his release from the camp his intellectual activity had been reduced to a minimum. Only after long conversations did he become free for what he himself called "the need to do something in this life." He could not say explicitly "this life of mine." The word "mine" wasn't clear to him. His life was reduced to words he guarded. The body was only a tool to protect what his brain preserved. In conversations we held with him at the time of awakening (seventeen recorded conversations) when he was in a non-alert condition, he talked a lot about being the only survivor of the Jewish nation. In sixteen of the conversations, he repeated the sentence: "All the Jews died and I have to tell the world what they knew."

In the period he stayed with us, he created a genuine and first contact with a stranger. Traveling to the nearby hospital to treat his burns, he met Mrs. Fanya R. (Debriefing File Number F.R./6/444). Fanya R. was hospitalized in various institutions and when Ebenezer met her, she was in the small hospital then financed by a fund called the Fund for the WarDamaged, whose origin is not clearly defined. These were people sent to the camps for obscure reasons, or whose postwar status is not clear. Mrs. Fanya R. was sent to the camp because she was the lover and mother of the daughters of a Jew named Joseph Rayna, and later it turned out that Ebenezer thought this Joseph was his father. Joseph Rayna was shot to death in Dachau. The aged Joseph Rayna met Fanya R. under circumstances that the abovementioned is not interested in telling. She gave birth to twins named Danka and Toleda. When the girls were five years old, Fanya R. learned that her mother, Kathe nee Prausen, married her husband Mr. Prausen when Fanya R. was a year old. Before that, her mother lived for some time with another person. To make a long story short, note that Fanya R. discovered that Joseph Rayna was her mother's lover and that she was not only the mother of his daughters, but also their sister. Her emotional condition, which was bad in any event, grew even worse and in the camp she cleaned latrines. Her daughters were taken away from her and when the war was over, she went in search of them. They were killed by Dr. Mengele, whose experiments on twins are widely known. Only when she met Ebenezer did something stir in Fanya R. that had previously been dead. After a certain period, her condition improved, her attempts to hurt herself almost stopped, and in March nineteen fifty-eight, Ebenezer Schneerson and Fanya R. were married in a modest civil ceremony.

Ebenezer claimed that he was the stepfather of both his wife and her daughters. As far as he was concerned, he was the brother of his daughters, his own uncle, and even his mother's brother. I'm almost my own father, he smiled at us. In a ceremony held in our institution, Ebenezer adopted Fanya R.'s dead daughters, and, the two were retroactively named Danka and Toleda Schneerson.

Ebenezer claimed to us that he had married Fanya R. out of sympathy. He loved, he said, only one woman, whose name was Dana and his mother murdered her. Samuel Lipker, he said, was searching for him because they had gotten separated from one another in a heavy fog in the port of Marseille.

After he started opening up to his past (for example, his recall of Joseph Rayna and his relation to him), it became clear from things he dredged up from inside himself with difficulty (we spent several days on that) that he had wandered in Europe and searched for somebody he thought was his father and on his way he came to Russia. After the signing of the MolotovRibbentrop Pact and the division of Poland, he was expelled (as a Pole) from the Polish territory that had stopped being Russian and was then expelled to Russia as a Ukrainian. In the struggle between the Belarussians and the Ukrainians for German sympathy, he was caught in a maze of schemes and this is not the place to describe them, and in the twists of the cosmos he discovered that the Jews were glad when the Russians came, but were bitterly disappointed. The Poles in the area were landowners who had previously been moved there by the Polish government to hinder the progress of the Belarussians who were expecting the Germans, while as for the Germans, they disappointed them too after they came. Crossing the border to German Poland (along with a group of Jewish youths returning to organize the Pioneer Youth there), he was captured by the Germans. He managed to run away and came to a Polish village. The Poles who thought he was a Ukrainian turned him over to the Belarussians who judged him for what they called "despicable Polish subversion." Naive and uneducated, he didn't understand the delicate subtleties in those relations of nations, and in Operation Barbarossa he was captured again. When he ran away (he was swift and strong), he was tortured by Yugoslavian partisans who were searching for a way out to the Russian forests and thought he was a hostile Jewish-German spy. He was caught in a tight net-and this is not exactly the place to go into detail-of Lithuanian, Russian, Jewish, Belarussian, Ukrainian, and Polish schemers, and at any rate, his Judaism was only one more pretext for abusing him, and a millstone to hang accusations of identity on him of which he was ignorant. Lacking an ideological background, it was easier for him when he was captured by the Germans as a Jew. The Sonderkommando caught him and this time he couldn't run away. Now his pedigree was clear. No importance was ascribed to the fact of his birth in Palestine.

What stands out in Ebenezer is the lack of individuality in the accepted sense of the word. One of our investigators called him "a man without qualities" from Musil's well-known book. But that of course is only one aspect and does not characterize his personality. His love for his wife Dana and for Samuel Lipker is not the love of a man without qualities. His life is made of too many libels for him not to be aware of some of them. After he spent time in several camps, he was taken to Hathausen and was the first prisoner there and even helped build the camp. From what we know, it was his skill in the art of carpentry that kept him alive.

For a few weeks we observed his work and although at first he refused to get involved again with carpentry, he eventually agreed to show us his handiwork. He was ordered by our investigator to build a small pipe rack. For two weeks we observed his production. Clearly the final shape wasn't clear to him; the rack resulted from a need called in this report "particular," that is: to be this rack and no other, and that a metaphor of a wellknown concept. Ebenezer built drawers for pipecleaners, matches, of various sizes, he lined the concavity with green cloth, he used forty-two different lacquers he created from solutions of glue powder and other materials. He skillfully planed tiny pieces of wood and interwove them in a marquetry: the rack was the product of many combined details (things Ebenezer apparently imagined, but didn't know) and the product was a rack of restrained beauty and uniqueness. We sent the rack to four different museums (in Amsterdam, Vienna, Berlin, and London), and the unanimous opinion was that this is an excellent rack, the handiwork of an early nineteenth-century artist. Dr. Rosenberg of Vienna, the greatest expert in European cabinetry of the period 1795–1838, mentioned the names of only two artists who were capable of building that rack and claimed that we had presented him an absurd riddle, since he knew every rack made by those artists, while an imitation of the rack of those artists was impossible. Thus it is hard to argue that Ebenezer Schneerson is a man without qualities.

After we collected other works by Ebenezer, in the homes of former SS officers, we made a small exhibition of his works. The exhibition was presented only in our research institute. We wanted to print a modest booklet in honor of the event, but Ebenezer refused, saying that only Samuel Lipker had the right to do that.

His story in the camp (and his survival as a carpenter, if what he produced can be called carpentry) is told in the expanded research. What can be said positively is that there was a certain moment when Ebenezer decided to give up being the Last Jew in the world. Out of an empathy he developed for his imprisoned companions, fear that many geniuses and scholars, writers, and researchers would die without leaving a trace of their knowledge. In our work with him we have penetrated to only a certain area of investigation of his memory. In his hallucination under hypnosis he told us how he once sat in a woman's house, a woman he apparently respected and maybe even had relations with, and hated himself for what he called his betrayal of Dana. At night he sat in a little room, he told us, and tried to recall Dana. Her precise image eluded him. All he could remember was a vague form of a woman. He felt a need to remember her exactly as she had been, something that's hard for the human memory to do. He had no photos. So he sat, stared at the burning oven, concentrated and very slowly remembered a small dimple in Dana's right cheek. He meditated on the dimple for a long time until it was completely clear in his memory. Then, he left it and meditated on her nose. When the nose was clear, he left it for a while and the mouth began to be drawn in his mind and only then he connected the dimple in the cheek and the cheek to the nose and the mouth and did he connect the throat to the orbits of the eyes and come to the hair, which at first was separated from the other parts of the face and joined to them, and so, very slowly, Dana's image was drawn like a crossword puzzle that became a precise photo he'd see before his eyes. Her legs, for example, he recalled when he thought about the hike they had once taken to the desert and Dana tripped and he smeared the wound with medicinal leaves he had learned from the Bedouins. Ever since then, he said, Dana appears whenever I need to remember her, he shuts his eyes, thinks of the stove and Dana's image rises in his mind. He claims he has many keys he remembers dimly but when he needs them they appear in the back of his mind and through them he remembers things. For example, Einstein's theory of relativity depends on thinking of the smell of roasted coffee. A pince-nez raises before him the entire Pentateuch.

Did he learn to photograph knowledge? It's hard to say since he didn't read the knowledge and if he photographed it, he photographed the voice that recited the knowledge. If so, the word "recorded" will be more appropriate. But that doesn't explain anything. At most it can describe a process whose source remains blocked. According to a representative sample, we measured about nine million words that Ebenezer knew orally. For instance, in nightclubs where he appeared with Samuel Lipker, he often recited lists of those killed in the pogroms of 1915–1919. The knowledge was divided by towns (the key to that knowledge was drummed out by the fire department orchestra in Livorno). Many of the towns he mentioned were wiped off the face of the earth and there is no longer a trace of them on maps. In a forgotten Jewish book titled The Scroll of Slaughter, we found one section he recited almost completely. Of the two hundred pages we copied of our tapes I shall present a few examples: Garbatishi, Kortivo district, Minsk Gubernia, six Jewish families. Granov, Haysen district, Podolia Gubernia (attack of Petlura's Cossacks) eight families, etc….

Or an alphabetical list of the murdered: Golobibsky-Haim Austoroy, fortyfive years old, his son Jacob, seventeen years old, or in one town: Klibanov, Elijah, seventy-one years old, along with his wife Hayke. Israel Zvi Goldenberg, forty-five years old, Israel David Klayman, fifty-five years old, murdered along with his two sons-in-law, Isaac and Samuel… And then: Hanna Gradover, Simha Feinstein, his son Nahman. Lev Austoroy, his wife Sareke, his daughter Rebecca and his son Elijah. Abraham Lapolski, Moshe Kalike, Yosef Krayz, Leah, daughter of Arye Hoykhman. Her husband Yanek and her four children (their names are erased from the tape), Isaac Posman, Meir ben Arye, Parties Hadash… Joseph Joffe… Benjamin ben Elijah… Toni daughter of Haim Serberiazsek, Pisanoy Baruch Beamer…

The number of killed in those towns and villages (only to the letter C) amounts to two thousand one hundred.

The lists of Jewish communities we found at Yad Vashem and other institutions include some of the names mentioned by Ebenezer. We discovered that all the names that appear on tombstones or in lists, in books, in the scrolls of slaughter, also appear in Ebenezer's recital, but there are many names he recites that have no alternative indication.

In one town-fortunately for us, the register of its Jewish community has remained intact-were names of all the Jews who had lived there. Ebenezer recited all their names. After this timing and what was said above, it is clear to us that what he knows, he knew precisely. And there are things only he knows or that we cannot know more than what he knows. Meanwhile, of course…

What made the research even more difficult is the disorder of the knowledge or the illogic in the logic of memory. For some time, we entertained the idea that there was a logic unknown to us in this illogic, but that remained an intellectual amusement. You do know that his encyclopedic knowledge is not systematic at all; books in five or six languages, the Bible, and suddenly brilliant lies about astrophysics (made up by a mad genius), a long solid study refuting Einstein's theory, an atomic structure of the world according to the order of the letters in the Book of Genesis, annals of the world according to a person named Pumishankovitch who argues that God was created after the world and the Torah of the Jews is nothing but an attempt to combine the annals of nature with the annals of antinature, a book about the world as a fallen planet in a system of stars that were extinguished long ago, a rather bold theory about the influence of the battle of Albania on technological development. A hundred and fifty pages of The Jewish Wars by Josephus Flavius in reverse order, books of mythology describing unknown myths documented with knowledge and skill, even though they're apparently fakes. Books of religion and science, journals of three people who tried to measure their love for one another by writing hasty lines in the depths of the earth until they passed out, the stories of Kafka, stories of the Hasids, journeys of the emissaries of the Land of Israel to future generations of the eighth century to the end of the nineteenth century, family trees going back to the first generation, calculations of the end of days according to the books of Daniel, Ezekiel, and Nostradamus, and documents of wars, mathematical theories, the poetry of Homer, the poetry of Virgil, Dante, and other writers I attach in a separate appendix.

Ebenezer doesn't understand the material he knows, he doesn't discriminate, doesn't judge, doesn't know the material isn't Jewish knowledge. The number of twins who studied in orphanages in Lodz between the two world wars is no less important than Kafka's letter to his father. What is important to us is that everything he knows seems important to him because it's somehow knowledge and so the thoughts or nonthoughts of an ant are important and so is the length of the road between Marseille and Bordeaux. As far as he's concerned, everything is Jewish knowledge because it was conveyed to him by Jews. What happened is that like everybody who remembered more important (or unimportant) details he had to carry many more keys with him, and that was to be done by turning his own ego into something even more unimportant. In other words, he learned to remember by learning to forget.

We all remember millions of unimportant details about ourselves. Every such detail had to be forgotten in order to be substituted by impersonal knowledge.

The memory, as we know, is somehow a chemical instrument. Ebenezer's handiwork helped him quite a bit in amassing knowledge. A piece of wood was for him what for others was life, utopia, hope. As a craftsman who understands wood, his brain cells, or some of them, turned into sponges of knowledge and at the same time also into extinguishers of themselves. Therefore, the key of the "keys" is buried in the substitution of physiodynamic materials (if we can use that terminology). The memory of one day in distant childhood, a day a normal person can contemplate for hours and find in it images, smells, feelings, exchanges of words, surprises; in Ebenezer, that turned into the key to a book, to a system of stars, to what didn't happen to himself and thus the memory cell changes its purpose (we talked above about a chemical instrument), and instead of remembering things that were, he remembered things that were not. And in this case, there are and there aren't are all the same. Just as a rack or a cupboard turned from an unclear idea into what can be called "rack reality" or "cupboardness" from the need of the details to harmonize. And that is really how the knowledge Ebenezer acquired was photographed or recorded. They piled up and Ebenezer's brain turned more and more into an instrument alien to himself and unlike other brains, also cut off from itself. In other words, into a sick brain that distinguished between knowledge that knows for the per son himself and knowledge that is alien and destined for others. Thus Ebenezer's individuality could be more and more forgotten and hence his great dependence on Samuel who was to Ebenezer what a normal brain is to another person-both guide and leader. Ebenezer's consciousness of knowledge was in fact a total unconsciousness of himself and also one aspect of the forgetting of his individuality. That is: Ebenezer's remembering was the opposite of nonhuman. Maybe in that the Germans succeeded to a certain extent: a subhuman turned into a nonhuman to survive and to defeat the commandment to be like that.

In the brain that was alien to him, Ebenezer knew there were no more Jews in the world because he decided to survive. A person who knows Einstein's theory by heart can understand that if there was Samuel, then not all the Jews were dead. But things are more complicated particularly in this point. The survival of the Jews (those who did survive) his brain could not absorb. Something deep inside him knew, and still knows, that he is the last survivor. So even now he records everything he says, hears, and sees in order to remember.

Hence your conversations with him that night you described to me, in his house, along with the Israeli teacher Henkin, were recorded by him and remembered by him now as Jewish knowledge along with what he learned in the camp. In his rare consciousness, Ebenezer constantly reconstructs life at one point in the eternal and unchanging present, and prophesies (if we can use that unprofessional term) his past he didn't experience, while what he reads no longer is. As the god in the composition of the madman Ebenezer quotes on behalf of the director of the solar system who describes God as creating from the end to the beginning and merciless, because all life has already died and He meets them on their way-from their death to their beginning. That's how he himself is. As far as he's concerned, they all died and he recites knowledge about something that no longer exists, and not only of those who no longer exist. What I'm writing to you now and will be given to Ebenezer as a copy to keep will also be read by him and recalled as Jewish knowledge. I mean these words literally, the words you're reading now… What Ebenezer knows, he knows because the words were recited to him. Even the words he recites about himself. Even what he knows about himself. Hence he's deprived of judgment about the value of information, of a book or any system of knowledge dormant in him. He paints the world he wants to guard on the walls of his consciousness. There is a sentence by Professor Sharfstein (an Israeli philosopher) that may be able to describe this situation precisely. The sentence appears in a book titled The Artist in Western Culture. There he says: The god Siva, without a brush and without paints, drew the world on the walls of his own consciousness.

We tried to investigate according to known experiments, for example the experiments of Professor Alexander Luria. Following his example, we urged Ebenezer to recall something that happened in his childhood. We told him about something that happened to him that we found out from a source other than him. When we talked to him about that memory, connected with his dead wife, and we measured his pulse, the pulse speeded up and then fell back. When we asked him to recite a forgotten memory also connected with Dana, a memory he dredged up from what he himself had amassed from things he had heard about himself, from others, the pulse rate was much weaker (seventy-two beats as opposed to a hundred twenty). We tried many other experiments enumerated in the full report and this is not the place to go into detail. The process was repeated several times. The memories that were not told to him did not change the pulse rate. They were alien to him, even though they had happened to him and were a considerable part of the web of his life.

Comparisons with people whose memories are as phenomenal as his did not help us either. We questioned A. G., who now appears all over Europe on television screens and defeats sophisticated computers with quick and correct answers. That gave us no help. Those people were conscious of what they knew. They learned when they were in distress and did that to remain alive, so that in the meantime they would not be impaired. They did not erase themselves to fill the empty space of their brain with knowledge. They learned equations or books by heart because they had to triumph over nothingness and fear.

I attach the tapes. I understand from your words that the book you and the Israeli teacher want to write will be composed or woven mainly of our tapes. Keep in mind that the life of Sam Lipp (Samuel Lipker), for example, is known to Ebenezer only when he was in a trance of indexing his memory. In his real life he doesn't know. In his real life Samuel may also be dying. The Jews are still all dying, and always will die. Hence, we in fact did not succeed in deciphering the secret of Ebenezer's memory, but only in documenting the nature of remembrance. Just as Ebenezer builds racks, so he builds a world of knowledge. The conversion and shoe sizes of a group of Warsaw writers. For us at least the mystery remains. Are we witnessing a kind of spiritual suicide? Vengeance? Escape? I said before: Ebenezer doesn't judge. As far as he's concerned, the Germans are neither bad nor good. Not those he meets today, and not those he met before. The shadows in his brain have no concrete reality. The shadows have no judgment, no past and no future. Fanya R. is his wife. Does Ebenezer live with her or does somebody Ebenezer imagines as Ebenezer live with her? We have questions that only a metaphysical and historiological pathology could solve and therefore science, as in many cases, remains helpless. Art may indeed grant legitimacy to the absurd. Existence is absurd. Ebenezer is absurd and there's no possibility of granting him legitimacy, maybe it's possible to tell him, not about him. As for us, we shall send you the full research, but if our research adds to the perplexity or enlightens it, only Ebenezer's God knows.

Yours truly,

Alexander Twiggy Henderson Levy

Tape / -

Got to bring Henkin the poem, thinks Boaz.

Thinking poem.

Menahem poem.

Boaz remembered how they brought Menahem Henkin to the school gym. The commander looked at the three corpses and said: So Henkin got a summons? And he wrote: Menahem Henkin, Palmah, Harel, the fourth brigade, headquarters company, to inform the parents, Deliverance Street, Tel Aviv.

Fuck it, he said, soon I won't have any live soldiers left! From Tel Aviv, a soldier went to inform the Henkin family that their son had fallen. Boaz lay under a tree and smoked. Years later, he would part from Teacher Henkin on Ben-Yehuda Street. The sky is blue and the clouds float quickly. The vendor of German books crossed the street and walked past Hayarkon Street. Boaz started walking to the central bus station, stood in line, boarded the bus and fell asleep. An hour later, he came to the settlement, it was afternoon. Rebecca expected him as always. She didn't measure, she didn't complain, she didn't pressure, she sat at the screened window and waited. For some years now, Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg had been living in Ebenezer's old house. The house is rented to him with a lease renewed every year. If Boaz wants to live here someday, he'll have someplace to live, said the old woman.

A month after Ebenezer disappeared and boarded the ship that took him to Europe, Rebecca Schneerson went to the offices of the National Committee in Jerusalem. She asked to speak with the head of the committee. They told her that the head of the committee was abroad on a mission. She said she wanted to adopt her grandson as her son. She was told that wasn't possible. Rebecca tried the chief rabbinate and the various district offices and deigned to meet with people whose existence she once wouldn't have been willing to admit. The Captain's connections with the British Mandate authorities weren't any help either. A grandmother can adopt her grandson, she was told, but to state explicitly and officially that Boaz is Rebecca's son by birth was not possible. She wrote a long letter explaining her request. According to her, there was no proof that the person called his mother did indeed give birth to him. In another letter, she claimed that Boaz was her son from a marriage she had never disclosed. She quoted a well-known and reliable Russian newspaper that told of a woman who got pregnant in eighteen twenty-one, while her son was born thirtytwo years later. But even this quotation, which, after a visit from the Captain, was authenticated by three old Russians in the Russian Compound in Jerusalem, didn't make the required impact. When serious arguments were raised against a retrospective pregnancy, she deigned with the courtesy of a desperate woman to refrain from hearing the explanations and whispered to the Captain: They always were and still are fools. Later on, she'll tell Boaz: I was impregnated by a river. Don't turn up your aristocratic nose, even a distinguished mother like me sometimes gets pregnant, the river lusted for me and I for him, all your life you've seen streams, what do you know about a river. Do you know that the Americans bought the Dnieper and transported it to America? And Boaz said: You find a way to say America every chance you get. How do you transport a river? He was ten years old then and she was his mother.

I love him, Rebecca said to the Captain with uncharacteristic candor. I love him like the clods of earth love the dead. Like the riverbank loves the river. I love him as you could have been able to love if you were as false and splendid as Joseph Rayna and as innocent and beautiful as Nehemiah. When I fell in love with Boaz I gave birth to what I didn't want to give birth to all the years, and Ebenezer who's wandering around in Europe didn't come from me, Nehemiah brought him to me and I reluctantly nursed him. If your god can make a virgin give birth to a son, Boaz can be born from a grandmother who loved him before he was born. At last, the Captain gave in and with two Arabs from Marar and Mr. Klomin, they went to visit a friend of the Captain who lived in an ancient house with a wooden turret in a tropical garden on a hill crowned by cypresses and palms, near Jaffa.

The road to the house passed over a small wooden bridge. Years ago a small wadi flowed under the bridge, and even the ancient water had stopped flowing in it. Between geranium, jasmine, rose, and violet bushes the gentle chirping of rare birds was heard and in the small pool in the center of the yard crowned with thick evergreens, gray and white ducks floated, and one swan who looked arrogant and strange in the musty dank garden.

The Captain's friend was old, wrapped in a cloak that may once have been white. The man put on a pince-nez and his face looked like ancient parchment. For a long time, the two of them walked, hugging, among the bushes and whispered together in a language none of the guests understood. Then they stopped, the Captain put his hand in the old man's sash, hiccuped, thrust a paper-wrapped package into the sash, which the old man took in his hands, sniffed like tobacco, smiled, and then the two of them hugged with masculine savagery, the old man's face was so glowing and joyful that even Rebecca felt a slight stab of bliss in her belly. The old man came to Boaz, called an Arab boy wearing an abbiya, who had stood all the time in the shadow of the ancient marble pillar swathed in ivy that climbed up it to a locked window whose recess was more imagined than visible. The boy entered the house and came back with a tray and handed out cold juice and tasty ice cream. After they listened to the bird, which the Captain claimed was called a bird of "the real opposite," which repeated the same chirp one hundred fifty times an hour, without the slightest change, the old man, who was holding Boaz in his clasped hands, said: I've got a document that will suit him, Mrs. Schneerson, and he hugged Boaz's shoulders and Boaz smelled a smell he later knew was the smell of death. Rebecca wanted to say something, Mr. Klomin straightened up and his face turned gray, but the Captain put a nervous but agile finger on her lips and whispered, so Mr. Klomin would also hear: Everything's fine, there's no baptism, let me take care of things, money and God are my business… The old man disappeared into the house. Boaz and the Arab boy threw stones at the swan, and as Rebecca was trying to assess the brigades of Klomin's Hebrew army against the odor left by the moldy old man, a peacock sallied forth from the bushes. The peacock proudly bore a gigantic colorful tail and it looked to her as if it were desired by the sun and the trees, indulged and arrogant, and the birds stopped chirping and then she thought about Joseph and about Boaz and her insides cramped as if she were giving birth to Boaz, and then the old man came back, hopped on his feet that touched and didn't touch the pebbles of the stream scattered on the paths, held out a parchment scroll to Rebecca, grabbed Boaz, who approached him with the Arab boy standing on the side and smiling with teeth that were almost black, and then he turned to the Captain and said: I do this because of our Lord the Messiah and because of the great patriots who fought in the bold battles of our homeland, and to Rebecca he said: Dante Alighieri Boaz Schneerson of the house of Tefanus, in the name of an ancient hero, Ella the Tyrean, who delivered his mother from the claws of a cruel potentate and granted her his eternal youth and his delicate manhood and appreciated her as a slave of the church and an angel of the hosts of the Lord, Dante Alighieri Benedictus Boaz Schneerson, hallowed by being your legal son and the fruit of your loins. And you Rebecca Schneerson confess here and now before me and before the living God that there was never any doubt in your heart that this child is your son, your flesh and blood! And this lad will be your son from now on forever. Amen. Rebecca, who had never been eager to say words of prayer in the Promised Land, said "amen" in a soft voice, and the man said, If there is anyone here who wants to protest or who does not agree let him now raise his voice or forever hold his peace… And then Mr. Klomin yelled, all flushed and fervent: I, I object, and the old man smiled at him, tried with all his might to hear Klomin's yell, and said: If so, I see there are no objections? And Mr. Klomin now shoved the Captain closer to the old man and yelled into his ear: I, I'm his grandfather! And the old man delayed a moment, a moderate atrophied smile caught at the corner of his mouth, and said: Since there are no objections, I hereby declare Boaz Dante Alighieri Benedictus the legal son of Rebecca Schneerson. May it be His will.

Rebecca looked at the old man. His serenity in contrast to Mr. Klomin's yelling became foggy and then his eye was covered with a cold metallic glint. Klomin tried to yell, but he too fell mute at the sight. The two Arabs from Marar bristled where they stood. The old man sank into the ground until he was no longer seen. Later on Mr. Klomin (who then filled his mouth with water) would say: The ground was loose because under the building there was certainly an ancient excavation and he sank into it, maybe it was a graveyard from the period of the kings of Judah, Mr. Klomin would add, during the summer they lived in the coastal plain, maybe it was a center of magnetic heaviness, and Rebecca's hungry look turned to a spear point of the yearnings of two thousand years united in her and she didn't know and sold her grandson to the bosom of foreigners and her ancient blood was then roused to avenge her and foreigners who plot evil against us and the magnetic center turned into an archaeological incident because of the forgotten grave of a Hebrew king. Rebecca laughed, and said: He seeks kings everywhere, simple Jews also lived in this land, Klomin, kings lived in palaces. And Mr. Klomin, sunk in glowing contemplation of the future of the new-old Israeli kingdom, said in embarrassment and longing for the great moments that had all apparently been before he was born and he had already despaired of finding them in his life, that if a person understood the great moment in which he lived, he could experience things beyond time and place.

Rebecca didn't want to hear about the graves of ancient kings. She saw a gentile sinking into the ground. The Arabs were willing to swear to it with a thumbprint. She still remembered Nehemiah's war against the prophets. In her heart she laughed at the poor men who always fight wars that were decided long ago. Boaz remembered the peacock and the old man who disappeared into the ground. Never did he accept his adoption by Rebecca as more than a sufficient reason to torment her or love her as the only person he knew whose loyalty to him he never doubted. She was mine, my mother and my father betrayed me, he said to Noga.

The next day, Boaz had to stand before a big crowd at the community center and tell how the old gentile sank into the yard and disappeared. Some of the founders who limped to the community center shook their heads. Rebecca didn't come. Horowitz's daughter shouted: She always was a witch and always will be… Nehemiah knew that and so he died, she taught Aryeh to play the piano.

Tongues began wagging freely and used what Boaz told. There was no television back then, Noga, Boaz will say later on, and there was still fantasy in the air. She killed the mare of the baron's official, yelled an old woman whose false teeth fell out of her mouth from enthusiasm and her son had to search for them among the feet of the old people that smelled of powder against prickly heat and cow dung. She killed Nehemiah and Dana, she hates us, she lives in the settlement and closes herself up. Germans played for her on the piano during the war when they burned cowsheds of All's Well and Meshulam, her Captain is a spy for the Armenians and Americans and he's a Greek like we're Turks. She injects milk hormones into her cows so they'll win the contests. Her chickens are bewitched and lay eggs nonstop and don't even have time to eat. When the bull sees her he immediately mounts all the cows in the barn. Boaz burst out laughing and the others also felt they were talking nonsense and laughed, in fact nobody was really afraid anymore. Even the exact description of the old man sinking into the dirt wasn't very scary, Rebecca no longer aroused in them more than an enormous need to describe their life as a certain miracle in which she was the leaven. They remembered the Wondrous One and Nehemiah as if they were her lovers. Lately, they were filled with yearnings for Ebenezer. After all, Ebenezer was the first son of the settlement who had changed in their eyes into a mysterious and miraculous tale. As they looked at the birds he left behind they began to be filled with forgiveness for the child they were never able to understand. They didn't forget how he walked in the rainswept street with Dana's body in his arms. His image grew to dimensions it had never had before, and as his death grew more certain, his qualities became more refined. A wood carver turned into a wondrous sculptor. And then it was also decided unanimously to call the community center built by Nehemiah in the name of his dead son and they put a wooden plaque up at the entrance and carved on it: Community Center in Memory of Ebenezer Schneerson Who Knew Wood in Its Distress.

Boaz, who grew up in Rebecca's house, didn't resent the facts of his life, which changed with the years. He succumbed to the essential quality of the settlement, a quality that turned into an incurable disease, to create the past according to the givens of the present and to live in a fictional past as much as possible. His age changed. Later on, when he tried to correct the date of his birth, he couldn't anymore and he remained the age written by the Captain in the document given him by the old man who sank into the dirt, and the Captain's retrospective godfatherhood turned into a fait accompli. Boaz was the only lad in the settlement who had two birth dates, two godfathers (Klomin and the Captain), two mothers, a father in heaven, and three grandfathers: Klomin, Nehemiah, and Joseph Rayna. One of them, and he didn't know which, was also his father or perhaps wasn't, as he used to say afterward. A woman named Rachel Brin who grew shirt trees in America is his aunt, her son Secret Glory also called Lionel Secret is his cousin, the world was created when Secret Charity went down to a cellar and started sallying forth at night and made nineteen children with his stunned wife. There they shouted in cellars, said Rebecca, and not in ridiculous community centers…

Boaz was a taciturn lad. In a small settlement like that one, it's hard to guess the force of hostility and jealousy children feel for somebody who has three grandfathers, a mysterious father, and two mothers who gave birth to imaginary fathers. What the children of the founders didn't know began to be added to what the founders themselves had now forgotten, and their children's children added the rest. Horowitz's son opened an institute for the improvement of seeds that were marketed in many countries. The hothouses they started building were the first of their kind. The produce of the citrus groves, the vineyards, and the fields was good and the yield of the cowsheds was high. The eleven sons of the settlement who fell in the riots of 'twenty-nine and 'thirty-six were joined by heroes who fell in other places and were adopted after their death. Roots, which started as a small handful of graves, turned into a national parade ground hidden by pruned trees from the hot desert winds. Florid speeches were delivered in Roots on memorial days, some of which were invented as needed. Even the death date of the Wondrous One began to be commemorated among most of the nation, children in uniforms carried bouquets of flowers and stood with wooden spears in their hands and swore loyalty to the nation and to the future of the settlement. Choral singing was an integral part of the ceremonies. Throughout the Land of Israel, there wasn't a settlement whose choir sang only in the cemetery. All's Well, principal of the school who was also the husband of the kindergarten teacher Eve, sat in Rebecca's house and tried to learn from her the melody of Nehemiah's speeches from which, he thought, Nehemiah embroidered his "historical" speeches. And she would make up new melodies for him, which he tried unsuccessfully to imitate. Very slowly, he learned the fictional melodies. The Captain, who knew melodies from distant lands, taught him the art of measured grief, the words of the hymn of death, and even the consolations of the old man, who for twenty years was tormented by a damaged heart, succeeded in his premature death, at the age of eighty, to be eulogized as a Pioneer and a hero rich in deeds, who at his death bequeathed us life.

The rabbi of the nearby settlement was now beginning to enjoy coming to the settlement. He knew that here, God was the one Rebecca Schneerson conspired with, but he no longer had enough strength to fight the war of the Lord. A late spring would grant the settlement more spring than the nearby settlements. Old Horowitz told the journalist who came to interview him that the marvelous sculptures of Ebenezer, who was almost Boaz's father, were the most beautiful artistic creations he had ever seen. The aphorism about Ebenezer on the wall of the community center was contributed by the Captain. The farmers helped Boaz overcome the enmity of the children. The yearning looks of the girls he learned to accept as he had to accept his grandmother's Psalms or the mysterious whispers of Mr. Klomin and the Captain about the national-royal party. They still plotted stratagems. Every Wednesday, the Captain still asked for Rebecca's hand and got a negative reply. There was no reply from the British crown even after five letters of five hundred pages each. That was the great imminent war that granted Mr. Klomin the possibility of preparing an innovative strategy, using a short-range tactic to solve the problem of British rule. The royalist party won the settlement (with the Captain's modest support) a contract to sell citrus fruit to the British army, whose troops increased. The best agricultural deal since the beginning of the Jewish Yishuv in the Land was buying the land for a big airport. At a time when the rumor spread that the settlement was infected with the disease of death and old people were dying at the rate of one a week, the sons of the founders, with the aging Captain as agent, sold lands at an exorbitant price to build an airport. Some of the founders were fictitious in any case, and so only the local historians were interested in bearing witness to the disease of death, especially since the price yielded such great wealth. At the eulogy of old Horowitz, who wept at the sight of Nehemiah dancing with Nathan on the day he came to the settlement forty years before and followed Ebenezer when he returned Dana's body, it was said of him that he was a Pioneer not only of Hebrew agriculture in the Land, but also of aviation in the Land of Israel. From here, said Principal All's Well, the airplanes of Judah will fly to strike the enemies of the Lord. A third of the land for the new field, whose airplanes Horowitz prophesied, according to his eulogy, belonged to Rebecca. While Ebenezer was wandering from Poland to eastern Ukraine and to Russia and from there to the camps, Boaz and the other children of the settlement were working to build a new airport. The adult workers learned to appreciate his silence and the quality of his work. Boaz was then thirteen years old, strong with a solid body, and after only two weeks he was appointed supervisor of the work of his older comrades and his salary was raised. That, of course, was without any connection to his special relations with Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg, whom the British discovered was a great air force expert. Boaz didn't ask how the Captain or even Colonel (for he was promoted), who had never fought in any war that anybody had ever heard of, knew how to build airfields. But when he saw how the field was built and the planes started landing, and even more marvelous, taking off, and how satisfied the British were with the field, the row of concrete antitank structures, the way of sheltering airplanes against an air raid, and building decoys to mislead the enemy, Boaz said to himself: What's to ask, maybe in Argentina they fought with airplanes in the last century. But he wasn't even sure the Captain came from Argentina. The British looked at Boaz and said: He's clever like all the Jews, and he laughed. His yellow-green eyes caused incomprehensible excitement among the officers' wives, who sat around a lot in chaise longues topped with parasols held by Arabs from Marar and looked at him. They didn't know he was building a future airfield for Mr. Klomin's royalist party. They would look at him excitedly, giggle, long for children in their wombs, and didn't know it. They were too delicate to express what every one of the children of the settlement understood; but Boaz didn't care.

He walked around among the intersection of the looks of the English women who drank cold juice, as Rebecca said later, as beautiful angels walk around at the entrance to Paradise and try to bribe the gods with their beautiful eyes. She took that sentence, although she messed it up a bit, from a description of Joseph Rayna, who she knew sometimes was Boaz's father. Where could such a resemblance between them come from? she asked herself with a pain she didn't reveal to anybody, not even Boaz, how can it be that Joseph Rayna and Boaz Schneerson were one person born at different times?

At least he doesn't fall in love with those women, she said to herself, at least he doesn't get ugly women pregnant. And then she clapped her hands and Ahbed, the grandson of Ahbed, brought her a cup of tea.

After twelve months of war, in 'forty-eight, after he wandered around for a while and didn't know how long, he met somebody who was his double. He took a fake gold ring off the finger of Minna, the building contractor's daughter, and came to the settlement. Autumn made the descending evening silent and dangerous. The threshing floor wasn't there anymore. Instead of the threshing floor was the big house surrounded by a garden. A black DeSoto was parked next to the house. He thought of the chicks of the kindergarten teacher Eve that had died so they could build a new house here with a DeSoto. He recalled the car he had stopped in Tel Aviv, and thought maybe he shouldn't have banged the heads of those two people together. A woman wrapped in a shawl stood in the glow of evening and pruned a rosebush. In that soft, splendid hour she looked like a firefly. The light glowed on her, flitted and returned. Somebody inside the house was playing with a flashlight. She stood out against the background of the summer ground that had drunk the first rains of the season that morning. On the way, in the bus, he saw two Arabs in the field. The sight of them calmed him. They weren't an enemy he had to shoot at.

The Arabs in the field allowed him to think of Rebecca. They were sheikhs; planted in the landscape like scarecrows, cut out of it, without challenge, without the affection or longing of All's Well her husband or Eve whose chicks didn't all return and some were buried in Roots to her husband's florid speeches. The Arabs in the field were domesticated in it. Nor did he resent it, because he thought about his grandfather Nehemiah who couldn't be like them. I'm the wrong man who returned from the war, he thought, and it's her fault! No threshing floor, no Menashe, no Menahem Henkin, no double, no redhead, in the end there's me. On the porches, in the chill evening wind, sit the old women, Grandmother will bury them all and when my turn comes, she'll bury me too. And then she'll go back to Joseph Rayna somewhere in the green moss at the end of the solar system.

He saw children at the bougainvillea bush and thought about a little girl he had once known. They spawn like fish, produce Hebrew soldiers in an assembly line for Eve the kindergarten teacher. I've come back without your chicks, Eve! The soldiers died for you, proudly they carried to their graves the exalted words you instilled in them. Did that help them? So you've got a flag! In the bus, a woman sat next to him and read a magazine. She wore a purple dress and her lips were painted. She didn't know that Marar no longer exists, she didn't even know there ever was a village here named Marar. She read indifferently about the homemade ink flag hoisted in Eilat. The picture shows a person climbing a pole and hanging an improvised flag. The Arabs don't draw flags with ink, Marar was destroyed, they killed Menahem and they go on plowing. The woman in the bus smiled at him. What? Marar? You didn't know, new in the Land, you lived in Beersheba, a new housing project, in the war, it was bad. She talked about another war when Ebenezer died and we built an airfield for the British. A radio is open to the evening, the old women sit listening to music, the wind blows silently, the trees move in restrained splendor, the old women don't recognize Boaz, they don't know that Ebenezer's son brought them the state. Boaz returned intact, not wounded, no woman stood up for him in the bus. All's Well won't make a speech for me, he thought bitterly, no flag will wave, no enemy will be arrested for my dead body. That "togetherness," which started in Eve's kindergarten and continued in the threshing floor when they all sang "there was a young woman at Kinnereth" and I sat on the side, I prepared the next wars with Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg. I helped him woo Rebecca. I told him how she looked without a bra and without panties, and he blushed. He clutched a sword he no longer wore belted at his side, stood gazing, the girls sang about the threshing floor, and I sang and didn't sing. The truth is that what oppressed him most was that he couldn't get killed. I have nothing to come back to, he said to himself, and those who did have where to come back to and what to come back to, didn't return. That's not glory, Eve.

From the day Boaz was mobilized until the war was over, Rebecca Schneerson sat pinned to her chair. My men die too much, she thought. She wasn't really interested whether Boaz wanted to or not, she decided he would return and she recited Psalms. Some nights she shouted the verses and other nights she whispered them. Today she got up from her chair. She knew Boaz was coming back home. And Boaz is walking on the path, evening has fallen now, the no-threshing floor in the distance. One summer when he worked in the Burial Society to understand "what life is woven of," he sat with Tova Kavenhazer on the threshing floor. She was quite beautiful then. They hugged and he pressed against her and she felt his eyes penetrating her body through her dress, and then he told her about Nimitz's body, how they embalmed it, washed and wrapped it in a tallith, and Tova Kavenhazer jumped up in alarm, pushed his hands aside, and yelled: With the hands you embrace dead bodies, you embrace me? And he thought, With the hands I embrace her I embrace dead bodies, and ever since then he often pondered that sentence. She ran away. I was left with the thoughts, embracing dead bodies and embracing Tova Kavenhazer… She yelled: Don't you dare touch me, Boaz Schneerson! Later she married a shopkeeper from Akron who sold bootleg vodka.

When he entered the house, the Captain stood up, saluted, hugged Boaz, shook his hand, and left. Boaz put the kitbag on the ground and looked at Rebecca. She moved her hands a little, almost said something, but didn't. Behind her, through the screened window, the skeletons of almond trees were seen and the moon was starting to light the roof of the cowshed. They looked at one another and her mouth became soft and yet it was firm, and then he took a step toward her, his body rigid, stuck to the center of gravity in a space he didn't know yet, regulated by glory, and hit her hard. The accumulated rage pitched the old woman aside, dropped her to the ground, and Boaz trampled on her and from the window of Ebenezer's house, the stunned Captain peeped out. In the distance music came from a radio, the Captain who was afraid to interfere, tried to move so as not to see anymore. Rebecca lay on the ground, her body heavy and shrunken, her lips rounded, and a strange smile on the opening of her lips. The lips seemed stuck to her mouth. The lamp moved from the blow and then stayed still, murmurs of pain were heard, Boaz kicked her again and she shrank up and growled, but the smile didn't depart from her mouth, a thin slit of abomination popped up and vanished, and then the slit was filled with blood that flowed like a chameleon, and in the pain a groan of laughter was heard. The old woman lay shriveled and laughing; jets of blood burst from her face and her wide-open eyes.

Boaz went to the window, hit it, and yelled: That's not for you, Captain! And when the Captain took off, he made out the curbstones of the path and for a moment something the Captain had once told him flashed in his brain: Your mother built the path, and he asked then, Who, Rebecca? And the Captain said, No, Dana, and for the first time in his life he felt a longing for a stranger and hated himself so much. Boaz turned from the window, an oppressive compassion lay on him, he picked Rebecca up off the floor, sat her in her chair, brought a bottle of cognac, washed her face, and then kissed her wounds. She sat silent, blood still gushing, smelling of flowers, cognac, and sweat, she picked up the flyswatter that had fallen, wiped her dress, and since she couldn't yet talk, she pointed to her purse on a small chest of drawers next to the door, and Boaz handed her the purse, she opened the purse, rummaged around in it, took out a brush, undid her long hair from the pins that were trying to hold it, and started brushing it. After her hair was smooth, she got up, went to the bathroom, turned on the faucet, and let a stream of water flow on her face for a long time. Then she wiped her face, went back and sat down in her easy chair, and Boaz looked at the beautiful woman who had smeared a little powder on her face, stretched it, put the black scarf on her back, and said: A new state you've got, every Negro's got a state, Indians in movies have a state, Charlie Chaplin has a state, my grandfather's grandfather didn't have a state, but he was wise and didn't stand at attention every day at flags, like stupid Eve. I came back, said Boaz and didn't know what to say.

I waited for you. I went to the settlement. There's a new watchmaker there, came here a few years ago. Hung up a blue and white flag, stood there in the sun and sang one of Joseph's songs. They've got ministers in top hats, like Stutberg's automobile! Nehemiah knew when to die and where, on the border! They made themselves an army of Mr. Klomin and the Captain, won a state from some Arabs who didn't know the shape of a pogrom and don't know on what side you write what they never could read and made a state for Ben-Gurion, Princess Elizabeth, and Shirley Temple! So what? Did you fight for them too? You look tired, it was hard to bring a state to the people of Israel? Maybe you're hungry. Eat something, Boaz.

But what does all that have to do with Stutberg's car? he asked.

His automobile, when he brought it, everybody came to admire. It was a first auto. He opened the hood of the motor and everybody, Horowitz the dummy, Nathan Nehemiah's friend, and even Holtz who later married somebody who was almost your mother and didn't talk, even he stood there with a kippah on his head and admired, and they said: A motor that drives a cart like ten horses, ten kilometers an hour! All the insides of the auto were outside, now they look at the insides of the Jewish state, what a wonder! The Jews have a state too.

Eat something, she said.

She made a theatrical gesture that amazed Boaz. She stretched out her hand and her last word rang like a period and not a question mark, not an answer, not a suggestion-a gesture. She reached out her hand, her face became tender, and yet, as always, some thin thread of chill malice was stretched on her face and the blood still flickered from invisible scratches and Boaz felt his feet stagger, went to her, sat down on her solid lap and she hugged him, laid his head on her chest, and when he tried to weep, whimpers blurted out of his mouth like the whimpers of the jackal in his childhood when the settlement was girded by whimpering jackals and at night he would listen to them and try to understand their shrieks.

She stroked his face with her thin hands, kissed his neck, and whispered: I had to, Boaz, it was one night, I sat here in the chair, it was dark, the generator wasn't working and the civil guard walked in the street wearing berets and yelled to put out the light. In the distance, machine gun shots were heard from Negba and I felt in my flesh how Boaz in the mountains, is stabbed, shot, almost dead, eyes shut, I saw vultures, vultures with your eyes, Boaz, vultures, beaks of death, I aimed the words into the sky, to the river that throbbed, to Secret Charity, and I recited Psalms in an ancient melody, and you walked between the bullets, and you lay down and didn't die, I stopped, I stopped short, the vultures wanted your flesh, the eyes, the words stuck to you, you lay in my words, and a few hours later, something happened, I don't know what, I fell, as I fell before when you hit me, I drank blood, and Ahbed, the grandson of Ahbed, was scared, he didn't leave with the other Arabs and stayed, he yelled: You fall, Madame, they see blood in the dark, too, the window was open now, I was full of blood, I said to him, Shut up, Ahbed, and you ran, and you fled into the mountains, I had no choice, Boaz.

I know, he said.

Later, they told me there was a battle in the Old City and you died. I said you didn't die. People came from the settlement. They said, I have a grandson there, recite Psalms for him, what could I say? My Psalms don't belong to their grandsons. Hillanddale and God's Joy lost a grandson, what could I do? My Psalms weren't meant for their sons and grandsons… In our city there was a woman who went mad. People came and tried to get the madness out of her with fire and sulfur and they couldn't. She was possessed by the spirit of a heretic who ran away to Germany. They tried spells and it didn't work. She shrieked and her eyes burned, they raised heavy smoke and it didn't help. Need connection, they said, need connection. They said: a false messiah is eight hundred and fourteen and Joshua son of Miriam is eight hundred fourteen, but it didn't work, not even Shabtai Zvi. Didn't work, they blew the shofar, and said Lord King and pass away and the spirit didn't leave. They shouted, Out evil one, and then they said, There's Rebecca there, bring her. They clothed me in a gown and scarf so they wouldn't see my face and they took me. I used to sleep with my eyes open back then. I said to the man, Out evil one, come to me, I was beautiful, come hug me, the rabbi was scared and blocked his ears, didn't want to hear, I said I'm yours, I thought about the river that would make me pregnant some day, and the spirit left, I felt it strong in my body, a piece of him stayed in me, didn't leave, I spat and then he was scared and part of him ran away. They saw the window opened and he flew, you think those are tales, but he flew, then I left, they wrote his name on an amulet and the man came back, because they didn't write the name of the woman on the amulet, but by then I wasn't there and after eight days of the circumcision, she died foaming at the mouth.

I hit you because of the Psalms I don't even believe in, said Boaz. I don't either, said Rebecca, and she got up and warmed the meal she had made every single day for two weeks.

And he ate. He was even hungrier than before. He swallowed the food and drank red wine. She said: All the old people are finished, young people die in wars and you remain. The disease of death is raging here. The Captain and I remain in the meantime. He stands outside and envies. I'll let him wait until tomorrow. Your godfather, don't forget. The Captain had a plan to conquer Egypt in one night. The army is here, he said, got to send soldiers to Egypt and conquer the whole land at night and the sources of the Nile and then Farouk's soldiers won't have anyplace to go back to. But he did build an airfield for the English and the English won.

Where do I get a poem?

When Boaz came home, Rebecca was sitting at the window, he recalled that night after the war. Since then she bequeathed me everything, he said to himself, but something in him was worn. Rain fell and drainpipes whimpered. The leaves on the trees stood erect, straightened up, the dust left after the watering was routed, the vines Dana had planted years ago were opened to the falling rain, illuminated in the beams of electric light from the windows. Never does she ask Boaz where he came from and why. He stands, looks at his father's carved birds still trying to fly.

She said: Still sitting in the cafe and wasting time?

Yes, he said. In her hand she held a bouquet of flowers. The sense that he had once had parents perplexed him again.

Rebecca looked at him. He came to her and kissed her on the mouth. She shrank. In the distance, the face of the Captain was seen waving to her. They sat and looked out the window, the rain fell, he said: I've got to find some poem, I told somebody his son wrote poems.

Take Joseph's poems, said Rebecca. The words there are a space between things, that's what they want, don't reveal too much, it was like Joseph, bold in bed and a liar on paper. He rummaged around in an old desk and found a big envelope. He chose a few poems Joseph Rayna had written to the German noblewoman named Frau von Melchior on the beauty of her neck, her face, and her legs, took eight poems and read them and started laughing. Three poems he knew from school skits.

I didn't know they were his!

They don't know either, she said.

The rain stopped and the wind dispersed the clouds. Boaz passed by on a neglected path, the rain has just stopped, the black sky is strewn with stars, and he walks like a snake, eludes, even though nobody is pursuing him, in his pocket the poems of Joseph Rayna. From the opening in the trees, he could see people eating supper, he could guess what they were eating now. The radio played music from the war-Don't tell me good-bye, just tell me cheers, for war is but a dream soaked in blood and tears. He threw a stone at a window and went on. The window shattered before he disappeared and a shrieking woman came outside, her husband apparently holding a dog's leash, but Boaz was already beyond the prickly pear hedge. In the distance he could see Nathan's son tracking him with a flashlight and the woman screamed: Come here, you hero, let's see if you've got any blood! And her husband said to her: Don't waste your strength, the dog growled but didn't bark, he was an old dog, about thirteen years old, he knew Boaz even before Nathan's son, at the age of forty-five, decided to get married. Between the prickly pear hedges, he found wood sorrel. The wood sorrel shouldn't be there now, he chewed the wood sorrel, crushed it and sucked fragrant, wet, and bitter jujube leaves. From there he slipped off to the citrus grove, in front of him stands a water tower and behind it Naftali's farm is lighted by the light of the night milking, from Dr. Zosha Merimovitch's house came a weeping woman, next to the no-threshing floor he stopped. In the distance a tractor could be seen leaving the lighted dairy. Empty milk buckets clinked. He walked along a path where young people once marched to future wars in front of All's-Well's flag, a scent of washed earth was a restrained reply to the silence of the jackals that had disappeared. In the dairy sat old Berlinsky, reading Spinoza as usual. Next to him, milk jugs were heaped up and a sourish smell came from the dairy. Boaz walked in back, found an empty can, emptied a little milk from the jug standing there, and drank. The taste of the fresh, unfiltered, unpasteurized milk, pleased his palate, he licked, and could see old Berlinsky amazed as ever at the absolute but surprising beauty of the refined logic of Spinoza's ethics. He could imagine how in a few moments, the old man's eyes would be veiled as he again ponders the injustice inflicted on such a great spirit. And that was a blatant injustice, he'd yell at them when they'd bring the milk at night, he was a prince of the Jews, why don't they forgive him now that there's a state, why don't they go down on their knees and beat their breast for the sin. Even Rebecca would blurt out a few good words now and then about the old man, and nobody knew where he came from or what he had done before he came here at the end of the war. After he drank some more milk, he came to the house on the no-threshing floor. He could see, even at that hour, how beautiful were Mrs. Ophelia's roses. In the house of the firefly, the phonograph played Faure's requiem, he knew the music from Tova Kavenhazer's house. He remembered Tova's father trying to point a menacing finger at Rebecca's house and saying: She fights us as if we sinned when we ran away from Germany, and then he'd play for Boaz the requiem of Faure or Verdi or Vivaldi, and would say: What does she know, a savage from the dark of the ghetto. Boaz broke into the old DeSoto, hot-wired it, released the handbrake, and let the car slide to the foot of the hill. When he came to the foot of the hill, next to Noah's house, he started the motor and drove off.

The radio didn't work, but the car's lighter was fine and Boaz was filled with respect for the old car. He lit a cigarette and hummed a song to himself. The road was almost empty. Fresh smells of virgin land rose to his nose, a smell of just fallen rain, of night, windows were open, for a moment he completely forgot that tomorrow at one in the afternoon, he had to bring a poem.

After he entered the city, he ran out of gas at the corner of Shenkin and Ahad Ha-Am. Boaz pushed the DeSoto to the side of the street and saw a bored policeman. The policeman was feeling his gun and looking at the dark display windows. Boaz asked the policeman if he had a pen. The policeman said he did and gave it to Boaz. He asked, Why do you need a pen? Boaz said: I stole a car and I want to leave a note. The policeman said: You've got a Sabra sense of humor, and he laughed. Boaz took out a scrap of paper and wrote: I took the car because my ass is shaking in buses, in America there are more Jews, but on the other hand, there are buses at night there, too. A state isn't all of the dream. There's no gas in the car. Return to Mrs. A. name of the settlement… Signed, Generous Contaminated.

He thanked the policeman and the policeman went on his way, Boaz waited a little, pinned the note under the windshield wiper and heard a rooster crowing. He didn't know there were roosters in Tel Aviv, and when he looked at his watch he couldn't see the hands because the phosphorus had worn off long ago. He walked along Ahad Ha-Am Street, came to BenZion Boulevard, sensed people slumbering beyond the walls, and if they had been made of glass, he could have seen them weeping. Near Habima Theater, he saw the end of the boulevard and thought of Minna, sometimes when he'd think of her, he'd come to her, bite her, an affair of many years, where to, where from, for whom, and in the middle she got married and divorced and was now alone again, the bleeding finger. He saw people drinking coffee at the kiosk, most of the sycamores here were torn down, the sands covered with unfinished structures, somebody started building a gigantic parking lot next to the old streetlamp, on Chen Boulevard there were little houses, their lights out, and Boaz climbed a tree, came to the top branch, pushed himself, touched the window, pushed it, and landed in a room. A small lamp hung over Minna. She was reading a book. She looked at Boaz, who stood up, and said: Boaz Schneerson, where do you come from? He said: Where do I come from? There are no doors in the house anymore, said Minna, in his free time Boaz takes off fake wedding rings or plays Tarzan. Then he got into her bed and hugged her. She said: After all these years either you love me or you're going to hell. You take off my ring in the middle of the street, come, go, come back, disappear, I've had it, I'm a big girl, want a real life with a husband next to me, I'm not just for sleeping with when you get a hard-on, Boaz.

Then they talked about her nipples, and he said: I let you get married and I didn't tell at the rabbinate, you'll teach me how to love, and she said either you know by yourself or it's not important. They kissed one another with serene passion, shrouded in the past, everything flowed slowly now, he calmed down inside her and she reached out, her hand took a flower from the vase and laid it on her chest. Then, rage stirred in him, he thought of Menahem that he was screwing for him, and about the poem, he fucked her and then he lay on his back, struck, and his eyes began shedding tears. At first she thought it was the water flowing from the flower, but when she saw the tears, she was scared. She sat up straight and said: Never did I see Boaz crying! He bent over, put on his shoes, and said to her: I have to invent for somebody who's dead, I'm going and don't make yourself beautiful for anybody, you don't know what pain will be on your father's face the day you die. She took a thermometer out of the drawer of the nightstand and put it in her mouth. He looked at the book she was reading and saw that it was a report of an income tax evader. He asked her if she read that book a lot and she shook her head and didn't take the thermometer out of her mouth. He wrenched the thermometer out and she said, Yes, mainly because my father is one of the main characters, he put the thermometer back in and she shook her head and he didn't know if she was really laughing. He asked, What's with you? You'll sit like that until morning, and she nodded. He went up to the window, caught a branch and once again pushed himself and was on the tree and when he crossed above the street, a motorcycle roared by underneath him. The streets were empty and he walked to the tents where he had once lived. The tent that was his was lighted by a hurricane lamp. A worker was sleeping there. Boaz went in and the worker didn't wake up. He looked under the bed and found an old carton. He picked up the carton and went outside. The sea stretched before him and two people were seen walking on the boardwalk. A dog barked, the hotel where he had once stayed with a woman whose name he didn't know was dark. He walked to his hut, went upstairs, opened the door, a few minutes later he sat at the small table and the lamp was lit and he tried to think of Menahem's letter, and what he would do with it. When Menahem died, Mr. Henkin, said the commander, he received an order to move, soldiers were lacking, every death was a national annoyance, not like today.

Boaz Schneerson

I checked your Thompson, it's dirty, I cleaned it. They say you'll be active tonight, they're going up on some crappy hill, I didn't mention to you that you look tired. I owe you my life. A moral obligation, my father would surely say. I found a saboteur's knife in Amnon's clothes-he stole the clothes from the horse. I'm going up to Jerusalem to see Fiesta in Mexico for the tenth time, crazy about Esther Williams, she's all there is. I wanted to tell you something important, Boaz, I wasn't able to save your life. Thinking only about how you get out of all that. I'm drunk on the champagne you all brought from Katamon. You bathed in champagne, I drank. I'm thinking about home, father and mother, mother's all right. And Noga? She's silent. I belong to her as you belong to orphanhood, but maybe I love her, and she? There's no contact with the plain and I don't receive telepathic messages. And here's the list you asked me for: in the platoon, twenty are left not wounded and not dead. There are four shirts in the warehouse, not too clean. There's also an overcoat of Yashka the partisan, who may really have had another name. Possible to mend and wear. There are two torn flak jack ets, five black undershirts, a package of Fishinger bittersweet chocolate, three stocking caps, one with holes, and a few coats, I think-five. In Mapu's Love of Zion, there are nicer descriptions, ask my father. There's one girl in Jerusalem, not the prettiest, but at night you don't see anyway. Her parents were stuck in Tel Aviv and couldn't come back to their dear daughter, who puts out and also puts out omelets with eggs she bought on the black market. Her address is Love of Zion Street 5, 3rd floor. If you get by there, go to her. She knows you from the stories. Eat an omelet in her warm bed. The twins asked about you, thank you for my life and I hope you die a true national hero.

Yours, Menahem Henkin

Tape / -

I could have composed the letter in short, poetic lines, Henkin, but you won't want that, eh?

Boaz sits at the table. It's four in the morning. The roof is burning in a black silence. Menahem wouldn't have written: Clods of dirt mounded up/I will shelter my soul in yearning. The poems don't get women pregnant anymore, Boaz thought, but their innocence is exciting, how was the illegitimate father of a hundred offspring able to write such innocent lines? An ancient smell of a starched collar rises in Boaz's nose, an aged, old-fashioned adulterer, with flowers in his hand, chocolate in flowered paper, roses. He had learned Menahem's handwriting before, now he tries to shape a poem. Very slowly the rhymes are constructed and he sharpens, edits, I need another Menahem, trees, groves, Tel Aviv, peeling houses, burning sun, and annihilated jackals, sunset, melancholy-a beautiful word, melancholy. And so dawn breaks, breaking dawn! I laugh. Boaz copies the poem, in three places he writes k's not like Menahem, maybe to give himself away, he scorches the paper a little, scrunches it, pours tobacco and sand on it, tramples it, straightens it, wets it and dries it. Turns off the light, disconnects the telephone left by the former owner of the house, and falls asleep.

At exactly one o'clock, Boaz is standing at Henkin's house. The house is still neglected as then, the yard is a weave of crab grass and thistles, the trees, like corpses, without foliage, trampled in some disaster that befell them. The sea is seen through two houses, in one of them a woman is beating a small dusty rug. Over the little grocery is an old sign, SMOKE MATUSSIAN. Mr. Singer in a wrinkled shirt, beyond him the enclosures of the port, and Boaz knocks on the door and Teacher Henkin in a white shirt and gray trousers opens it and lets him in. For a moment, they look at one another, then Henkin drops his eyes and without a word leads Boaz into the gloom of the chilly house.

The shades block the light, a bulb is lit above a silent woman in a dark dress, the woman raised her face, looked at Boaz with a long and weary look, and without getting up or turning her face, she said: Will you drink something? Coffee, juice, tea?

He looked at her, the closed photo album lay in front of her on the table. He said: Thanks, and followed Teacher Henkin who led him with ostentatious impatience. But at the same time as if he also wanted to defend himself against something. In the other room, he saw the library Menahem used to joke about: books up to the ceiling, manila files, big notebooks, a mess, a table lamp with a hexagonal, old-fashioned shade, peeling a little, on the wall documents of the Jewish National Fund. Boaz sat down in a chair across from Henkin and waited. The woman didn't even knock on the door, she entered and put a tray with two glasses of juice, cookies, and a steaming glass of tea with a slice of lemon next to it. Boaz said: Thanks, but she had already slammed the door and didn't hear.

Boaz took out the poem and put it on the table, for some reason he couldn't put it in Henkin's shaking hands.

Henkin picked up the poem, put on his reading glasses, felt the paper and with his other hand, started stirring the tea and squeezing the lemon slice. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket, wiped his fingers carefully, put the handkerchief back in his pocket, and once again held the paper in both hands. Boaz took a glass of juice and drank. His eyes wandered over the shelves and he tried to read the titles of the books, what he wanted to see was Love of Zion, but he didn't find Love of Zion among the books near him. Henkin muttered, This is his handwriting, it's exactly his handwriting, a poem…

And then he sank into reading that lasted about an hour. Never had Boaz seen a person read a poem so devotedly. Henkin forgot that a person was sitting across from him. He forgot the tea he had stirred and hadn't tasted. His glass of juice also remained undrunk until Boaz gulped it too. The pale light through the cracks of the shutters dimmed for a moment, maybe the sky was covered with clouds, Henkin didn't move, his lips stammered, his eyes blinked through the glass that emphasized their pupils, from the other room came the sounds of water boiling and a fly buzzing, somebody opened a door and locked it again, the sea breaking was heard clearly and a car honked. Boaz felt disembodied. The light glowed on Henkin, but Henkin wasn't there. On the horizon between two cracks of the shutter a line of sky or sea was seen, he didn't know which, a dim light that slowly darkened his eyes, a hand unattached to his body started hurting, he tried to feel the hand but couldn't, the pain wasn't his, suddenly he was in an unfamiliar landscape, a name echoing in his brain: Baron Hirsch Street, Tarnopol… mountains wrapped in white savagery rising over him, birch trees, in the distant mountains time goes backward and they become different, bald, in a desert, high, rising to the sky, bright, Boaz thinks names he never knew before: quartz crystals, orthoclase crystals, ancient granite rocks, red and brown, even black, tiny gardens, like grooves of blood in the expanses of wasteland, yellow flame, slopes hewn by ancient gods, perforated, stone beasts of prey, gigantic, in a gnawing expanse, sky hanging obliquely, as if falling, crag crown, a cliff over a wadi wide as a person and high as the sky, a plant called round-leafed cleome, a person he knows but doesn't know who he is, somebody very close to him drinks tea with desert wormwood, and Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg stands wearing a uniform gleaming in the awful light, and says: Here the golden calf is buried! And a person finds the place of the golden calf from an ancient map, and says to the Captain: Here a memorial to Dante Alighieri will be built. The Captain says: He's not dead, Boaz isn't dead, he found a golden calf, what an historiosophical find! Gibal Mussa, near a prairie crushed with rocks, between snake and heron, raisins of sun here, the eagle eye that's the innocent eye, in wadi channels that are the face of God, the face of man, and there the nation was created.

When Henkin started talking, Boaz looked at his watch. An hour passed, he knew he was in a place where he had never been, and now he also knew what his father looked like, something that embarrassed him with Henkin who now addressed him. You won't understand, Henkin spoke in an excited but quiet voice (you didn't discover the three k's, thinks Boaz sadly) unbelievable, really unbelievable… I always believed, they laughed at me, I told them, you don't know, you don't know him, his special qualities will come out, I knew! And he had to rebel. This poem, Boaz, could have been written only by one man, only by Menahem, that's what's special in the poem, not its nature, others will testify to that, but its specialness, it's the clear expression of a man who revealed himself and said something of his own. Here's the house mentioned here, you surely won't understand, it was destroyed to plant the boulevard. How angry he was then, he said: They're building a wasteland, Father, and I remember, a little boy he was before we moved here and that sycamore on the corner of Dizengoff and Arlozorov, they cut down… the Gilboa! We went on a field trip with the school, a Passover outing it was, we stood on the top of the mountain, and in the sunset I recited to them marvels of poetry: The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen! And Menahem then laughed at his father, here's the allusion to that poetry, to that moment, to the fear at sunset, is that the food of our fields, an eternal curse or a momentary distress, what did we know, and the dead ant, in the fixing of facts with a water meter, that is, a word meter. The magic of the poem is hypnotic, deciphering the lad, and his mother didn't believe, a son fell, she said, another son in the cruel world, I knew that before he left us, more precisely, when he left, I knew he'd set some nail, that he'd leave me some sign from a concealed inner world. And the poem… A poem that reveals a person so much! That will be so personal and yet general, human, and I waited.

And then Henkin yelled: You could have brought it before!

I forgot I had it, said Boaz.

That's some nerve, he said angrily. That's a violation of every moral law…

And then he was silent, looked at Boaz, and tried to smile, for some reason he didn't have to maintain his coolness now, his heart told him that everything he wanted to know about Menahem was buried in this man. And Boaz Schneerson wants to stop him, to put the clock back, but it was no longer possible…

You don't think the poem is wonderful? Henkin suddenly whispered.

I don't understand it, said Boaz.

That a boy writes like that, the only thing anybody ever asked of him was not to walk on the lawn, says Teacher Henkin, to respect his elders, to be proud of his wildness, new Jews riding horseback, and then comes a moment of softness, of withdrawing inside, and the boy stops the enemy with his body, silent words tell the horror of the stories, coming from him, and he writes them letter by letter, and pulls out a submachine gun, goes out to the last battle, fights for the life of his parents and friends, and is killed, a bullet hits him, is mute and silent, and death flows from him, he flows death and death flows on the mountains and leaves a hidden corner, invisible to his father, the beautiful boy who was and they didn't know, didn't know him, Hasha Masha, they and you, you thought, you're the poor boy, you didn't understand, you didn't grasp! You too, my Hasha Masha…

Dear Renate,

It's been a long time since I managed to find the emotional strength to answer your letter. Last night they said on the radio that the cold in Europe had passed and the snowstorms were subsiding. I was glad. You ask me if Boaz came to us to defeat us. On the word of a wounded lioness I can say: No! He came because Henkin was looking for him. It was me he was afraid of. He knew I don't believe. When he left the house, the day he brought the poem, Henkin came to me with trembling hands, holding the poem. I told him, Obadiah, it wasn't Menahem who wrote that poem, Menahem loved the sea, he didn't write a poem, he wasn't a hero like Boaz… And he shoved me out of the chair, that man who never killed a fly raised his hand and brought me down. Then he went outside and banged his head on the wall, I brought him a towel filled with ice cubes and held it to his brow until the swelling went down. For twenty hours he sat with me, Renate, twenty hours straight he talked about the meaning of the poem, how that poem couldn't have been written by anybody but Menahem! I fell asleep and he went on talking. He didn't even know I fell asleep. Then he fell asleep sitting up, muttering. I cooked, and made coffee. I waited for him to wake up and he talked again. And so he gained not only a poem he read to his friends, printed and copied it, but also a son who before-and it's awful to say-he didn't have.

And Boaz started coming. Henkin needed him. Can you imagine a worse place for a sympathetic family atmosphere than a house of mourning? But it was in the house of mourning of all places that Boaz wanted love and forgiveness. That's what I couldn't give him. Noga could.

If we had written our husbands' books, maybe we'd know on what side of life death is found and so we'd have given birth to stories and not begotten them. But I'm just an old Jew who sits alone and thinks, not particularly profound things, I've got my own contempt, I see a sea and Menahem still swimming there, I can even still love Henkin…

I'm a former quarry worker who married a teacher and raised a dead son. You write to me about metaphysical visions and about the Last Jew and your husband is seeking a story so as not to write it and I understand, the abstraction of our men needs to be turned into female concreteness, and then maybe a suddenness will be born that is not only foreseen but is even a vision, like a son who bursts out of you, to give birth is to produce concreteness, to become a point, a house, and earth and water to irrigate, to give birth is also to dig a grave. Maybe someday the books will write the authors and not vice versa.

I raised a son and I did know who he was. Menahem didn't want to jump beyond his navel. He wanted a good life and a sea, not to do anything, just to live. That's all he wanted. Maybe that's not sublime, but it's human. And Henkin sat and kept on drinking the stories of Boaz, who told, and everything that happened to Boaz he projected onto Menahem. Everything he experienced, Henkin now experiences from the fictional life of Menahem. And he wanted me to believe. I closed myself in the room. Boaz would try to catch me with his charms, his charming smile, his voice, he didn't know I'm impregnable. No Joseph Rayna would get me pregnant.

Noga and I pretended. I needed her in some way that's hard for me to grasp. Menahem was dear to Noga, she was tormented by what was happening. Only later did she understand that he didn't get the letter ending their relations. Henkin was mourning too much, his committee, and we remained together, I and he with Menahem because he stopped consoling us. Noga has a noble firmness that Menahem was the first to discover. And effortlessly, completely naturally, she played Henkin's daughterin-law. She had one love to give that she exhausted on Menahem. Maybe only somebody who invented a new Menahem could have penetrated her armor, that secret I never understood. Only somebody who pretended he loved her before, saw her picture that Menahem had in the war (Boaz told her that story and she didn't believe it) and fell in love with her there, maybe even caused Menahem's death out of love, only he could have touched her so deeply.

For a while, Boaz thought he would be the last survivor of his regiment. Like his father he thought he'd be some Last Jew, and he went back to the settlement. Then he was idle. He thought, Who were my parents? He was searching for something, didn't know what. He had money, he didn't have to do anything. He wanted the days to pass and to pass with them, he met Henkin and got a borrowed father, he sold a borrowed son, he stole Noga. He pressed and she gave in. I told her: In my house you won't sleep with Boaz! I couldn't bear it, I was afraid of what Henkin would say and how he'd respond, now, he thought, Noga could be proud of Menahem. She stroked me with her gentle hands and said: You're right, Hasha.

And Henkin didn't see. A new son he discovered and nothing interested him. Only later on, two years later, when Boaz and Noga were living together and Boaz came to Henkin and told him: I faked the poem, why didn't you see the three fake k's, the land mines I buried for you, why didn't you notice? I saved him, he didn't save me! When he said that-and he said that because he thought Noga was beginning to love Menahem again because of the stories he created-only then did the tumult take place that I told you about, Henkin's decline, Noga's suicide attempt, and then Boaz turned into a vulture.

Even in all that he's not exactly guilty. At least with you, I have to be honest. We were living in hell. Noga got pregnant. She couldn't see Henkin, she had cheered him with long walks along the Yarkon River, she couldn't see that proud man ridiculous as he was in the days when he read his poem to every bereaved father and mother at the parties at the Shimonis. In some way that may not have been clear to her, she pushed Boaz to tell Henkin the truth. Indirectly she shattered Henkin's delusion. That was a second death of his son, Renate, and that was hard. Boaz then believed purely and simply that he did kill Menahem, the more she refused to believe, the more he believed, and when she talked about Menahem's beauty and his virtues, he yelled at her and hit her. When Noga found out what happened, she came to Henkin and told him: Boaz is lying, Menahem did write the poem, but Henkin whispered to her: Why didn't you tell me you were Boaz's girlfriend? We were close, why didn't you tell me? And he looked at her, he had known her for years, loved her, and said to her: Noga, you don't know how to lie! And she thought he would do something, came to me trembling, I told her, Look, little girl, he's a strong man, Henkin, an old-line Zionist, he was in the Labor Brigade, he experienced hard things, he'll recover, she talked to him some more and he couldn't answer and threw a chair at her. She was hit and went outside. Then she brought him flowers. Boaz came and said to her, What right do you have to talk to Henkin about me, why do you interfere in my life, you want Menahem back? He's not with me anymore either, and Henkin heard, Boaz went into his room, all night long they talked. She sat with me and we drank sweet vermouth. Two big drunks. In the morning Boaz came out and slapped her face. In the room Henkin sat with the poem, more broken than I'd ever seen him, and then Noga got up, and said to Boaz: You know what, you can go to hell, and she left. After she had gone, I sat, my head splitting from the drinking at night, Henkin got up and walked to the seashore and went into the sea with his shoes and clothes, and it was winter then. In the morning Boaz came back and Henkin woke up and asked with a weary face, anxiously: Where's Noga? He said: She died, Boaz, she died. I told him: Stop, the two of you suffered blood, and the two of us went out to look for Noga. Then I recalled the cave. In the world war, Menahem and his friends, especially Amihud Giladi, who lived in the house where Ebenezer now lives, would hide tea and rusks and stones there to be partisans and fight the Germans who were then in El Alamein, they wanted to build a fortress on the hills where the Hilton now stands. Noga knew the old cave, she called it "Menahem's cave." I told Boaz: She's surely in Menahem's cave. That was a mistake, he was offended and said, What do you mean, what cave, we've got our own places, what do you mean, Menahem's cave. I told him: At least she can be there, but he didn't want to believe it, wanted to go to other places, at night he looked in all the places and didn't find her and there was nothing left for him to do but go with me even though he didn't want to believe, I dragged him to the cave and he didn't even know where it was, and Noga was there, had swallowed pills, we dragged her to the corner of Jabotinsky, took a cab and went straight to Hadassah Hospital, they pumped her stomach, and she aborted Boaz's son, the grandson of the Last Jew!

We sat there, Noga and I, Boaz was miserable, more miserable than I had ever seen him and he told me that he didn't kill Menahem, but he should have killed him, and who did he tell? He told me that! And Noga said: I'll never give birth now, and then I wept too. And then Boaz's business developed and she helped him. She told me: He is what he is, and I love him. And she helped him, but everything began with Henkin, he went to his committee, years before, read them Menahem's poem. And then he brought the Defense Ministry into the picture, and Jordana the Yemenite who fell in love with Menahem, and that business that flourished.

Tape / -

A few words about words. A vulture is an artificial bird, with a broad wingspan, a twisted beak, the vulture is the hawk, the falcon, the bearded vulture. Vulture is a general name for all birds of prey and also the name of a specific bird, the precise identity of the vulture is not known, I, Ebenezer, what do I understand about vultures? In that winter, among corpses, didn't a man stand there named Hans Kritacal who is today a teacher in Hamburg? Five Ukrainians with axes beheaded thirty-two children, and he didn't stand and recite a poem?

What sadness is spread over everything here.

Tape / -

From the letter of Obadiah Henkin.

… And I don't know whether to be glad about your offer or to be sad. For a long time I've lived beyond gladness or sadness, so let us say that I accept your offer, or perhaps it was my offer? To cooperate in writing the book between two experienced writers, each on his own, something that may never see the light of day. In your last letter, along with Renate's beautiful letter, you write me that you wrote to Samuel Lipker (Sam Lipp) in America and about the answer you got. I think that answer is indeed important and I translated it into Hebrew.

You wanted to know what exactly I call "the external additions."

Among the books Ebenezer knew by heart (aside from those we've already talked about and catalogued), is also a treasure that can't be known exactly. In addition to the report of the Institute there is material (about a million words) whose sources are not known and yet are quoted from books. In other words, this isn't personal knowledge by this or that person, but knowledge taken from books (through people, of course) whose identity I can't verify. I shall list some of those books that may be most important to us:

1) "Travels of the Tribe of Menashe," by anonymous, in manuscript, copied in 1454 by Rabbi Joachin Eliahu, Amsterdam.

2) "Tribulations of the Sad Knight Kabydius, His Journey to the Land of Israel with Peter the Hermit and his Love for Judith." The name of the author isn't mentioned in Ebenezer's words, but the transcription is from the year 1343, Paris.

3) "Sources for the Burial of Moses, Story of the Golden Calf and Its Location." Written by Reb Yehuda Ber Avram ben Abraham (maybe a convert?), printed in Leipzig in the year 1984 (sic!), a year that is still far from us-Ebenezer insists that the date is correct and doesn't remember if he saw it or is only quoting.

4) "Kinds of Jews" by Sergei Szerpowsky and his son, Warsaw 1745.

5) "History of the Nation of Israel According to the Creator," by anonymous, printed in Tarnopol in 1767.

6) "Source of the Animals and the Creation, God as a Chariot that Was," by the Divine Kabbalist Ahmed Abidion ben-Haalma Downcast Eyes, printed in Istanbul in the year 50 after the death of the Messiah (apparently meaning Shabtai Zvi).

There are of course more books, but I haven't yet investigated. The books I listed above are not found in any library or known collection of books. Nor are they mentioned in any other place (I checked with the librarians in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Copenhagen, Paris, London, New York, and other archives), nor are they mentioned in any other book, and that may be the major problem, because if they are not mentioned, are they knowledge or fiction? And if fiction, whose?

Considering what we know about Ebenezer, he couldn't have invented those books. The books I examined constituted (each in itself) a conceptual, planned and formatted whole, sequences of facts that can be checked, and cases that really can be checked sound authentic. The material is on its way to you so you can review it more carefully, but the story of the Sad Christian Knight Kabydius can serve as an example. His tribulations in the Holy Land match other writings we're familiar with. Even the description of the siege of the city of Trier, where Peter the Hermit was helped by the Jews (who were then slaughtered), is similar to descriptions we have from other sources, even though Kabydius himself is not mentioned in any other source. The story of Judith sounds quite authentic as we now discover more and more details today about the existence of many Jewish settlements in the Land of Israel during the time of the First Crusade and later.

Tape / -

The wandering Kabydius was the son of one of the Hungarian tribes. In his youth, in a little village in the Carpathian Mountains, he met a Jewish family. The family celebrated a holiday that was alien to him. After he was banished from his lands by his father, whom he tried to kill, he wandered to Rome. For some time he stayed there with a group of monks and along with another monk, he loved a twelve-year-old girl who died in their arms, and so he called himself Kabydius the Sad. The other monk went outside the city walls and was devoured by dogs. After he learned that his father had died, Kabydius went back to his homeland. In the mountains, he met the same Jewish family. The father of the family was an old man whose tongue had been cut out by some riffraff on its way to join Peter the Hermit. One of the old man's granddaughters was a handsome lass with a swollen belly. The village where they had lived before was burned down. The girl was pregnant from the one who had cut out her father's tongue. Kabydius wanted to kill them, but changed his mind and hugged the handsome girl and her mother fell to her knees and pleaded with him to wound her and not her pregnant daughter.

Kabydius, who was confused by his hatred for his father and his disappointed love for the twelve-year-old girl, sought "a bandage" for his soul full of sadness of the world, as he put it, and approached the mother. When he asked to marry the daughter and be a father to her son, he was banished by a group of audacious Jews who burst out from a distant place at night. Kabydius wanted to go back and take vengeance on the Jews, but it had started snowing and he went to seek his estate and discovered that, in his absence, his father had bequeathed it to his brothers and they banished him. Ashamed of his lust for that Jewess, he searched for the riffraff that had cut out her father's tongue and was introduced to Peter the Hermit. Peter made an indelible impression on him. He was ugly and strange, but a real leader of knaves and belligerent men. In the hermit's eyes, he saw light. The crusade to the Holy Land was at its height and Kabydius didn't join his peers but went with Peter the Hermit, as his servant.

The great battle took place in Antioch and only afterward did they descend along the shore toward Jaffa. The knights, writes Kabydius, mocked him and said: What is a man like you doing among streetwalkers, thieves, and rapists? and he said to them: Peter is the leader and I wash his feet for the sake of Our Lord the Messiah. They called him Peter the Dark and were afraid of him. The knights teased him-he doesn't give his pedigree in the book, but hints that the others knew it-and he had to fight a duel against one of the knights and even to run him through with his sword. Kabydius provides a detailed description of the battle for Jerusalem, the ship they dragged from the port of Jaffa and turned into a ram to batter the wall, how Gottfried of Bouillon knelt at the sight of the Holy City, the siege of the city, the bloody battles, how they circled the wall of Jerusalem for seven days and seven nights, and how the Savior was revealed on the Mount of Olives and they burst through the walls, and the blood, he said, as is also mentioned in other sources, flowed up to their knees, and cursed Jews were entrenched in the last tower, fighting along with the Muslims and were burned alive. And then he heard a voice: The holiday you saw on the mountains was my holiday, you're here and I rule over you, and Kabydius was angry and his heart filled with dread and he told Peter, who commanded him to be flagellated. He accepted his punishment in stoical silence, he wrote, and when the whip was laid on his back, his head was bald, he felt a genuine regret and exaltation he had never known before. After the coronation of Beaudoin as king of Jerusalem, Kabydius went to the Galilee. Along the roads, they built fortresses then. In the blazing heat of August he scaled a high mountain and joined a group of monks and Muslim prisoners, who were busy building a fortress. He began hewing stones. They told him not to hew stones because it was contemptible work meant for slaves. He said: I committed heavy sins and I must atone for them. They listened to him as a hewer from far away. They said he could grant to stone the charms of both European and Eastern art.

Three years later, his memory began to break down. A cloud shrouded his soul; he could remember only the stones he had hewn the day before. Peter was not seen again, counts and barons were appointed to the estates of the Holy Land, a struggle raged between the priests and the royal house of Beaudoin, but Kabydius remained far away from those events. The Count of Accra, who was brought in a sedan chair to see Kabydius the hewer, looked at the stones and said: I want Kabydius to build my castle. And so it was. Then, he wandered, went up to Jerusalem to see the Kingdom of Jesus on earth and in the streets of Accra silk cloths were stretched to hide the blinding light, ships from Genoa brought delights from the East and glass from Tyre was brought and used for windows, something that had not yet been seen in Europe. From the Arabs he learned the theory of the arch to allow for high ceilings in their buildings, he went down to Caesarea and built there too, he participated in building halls for knights in Accra and fortresses in the Galilee, the Golan Heights, and Bashan, and within ten years, Kabydius was one of the great builders in northern Israel.

Kabydius was in the prime of life, and was sated with wars and excommunications when he met Judith in a small Jewish village not far from the fortress he was building. At night, said Kabydius, Judith would fly off, in the morning she'd come back. Like everybody who desired her, she abused him too. When he wanted to beat her, she slipped away from him. Her family plotted against him and he wanted to burn down their house. At night, bitter people came and beat him until he bled. He wanted to tell Count Montfort about that, but a crow followed him and tried to poke out his eyes. Judith was picking flowers. It was after the rain. When he raped her she laughed and when he swore love to her she spat in his face. When her belly grew, and his son balled up in her, he wanted to marry her, his memory returned to him, he remembered the lass in the Carpathian Mountains, and he said: Maybe she's the same woman or I'm cursed by Jewish witches. Judith refused to marry him. He dimly recalled when he lived in Rome with the monks and loved a little girl. All my life, he thought, I've been caught in ropes with a curse and I can't get away from it, where is the whip that will take Jews out of my insides. He came to Judith, tied her to a post, whipped her, kissed her, and all night long he talked with her. She sneered at him, her hands tied, her eyes flashing, and when he asked again and again to marry her and be a father to his son, she laughed. When he castrated himself before her eyes and felt them taking him on a stretcher as he was bleeding, he recalled seeing a spiteful joy sparkling in her eyes. He came back to Judith with his face burned and emaciated and was a eunuch in her yard.

He was allowed to play with his son. Kabydius was old now. Judith was called mistress of the village where a knight served as her slave. She didn't marry anybody, and he hewed stones and built her another house more beautiful than the houses of the Galilee. There he sat and wrote his history, his shame, his regret, his sorrow, and his love of a woman who was once a little girl in Rome, then a woman in the Carpathian Mountains, and then a mistress in the Galilean Mountains. At night he would carve birds for his son.

… That's only a collection of fragments from the story, and you can peruse it when you receive the material. After I read, I asked myself how and why did this story, fictional or not, get into Ebenezer's hands? Is bird-carving coincidental? Those questions will remain without an answer for the time being. I can assume that bird-carving is Ebenezer's addition, but if it is an addition, why did he add it here and not someplace else? Why is bird-carving not mentioned in the nine million words investigated by the Institute? And the story of the Golden Calf and the place where Moses is buried, for instance… the area of Santa Katerina in the Sinai was barred to Ebenezer.

Now that we can get to it, it's easy to think of his descriptions. But when Ebenezer recited that book (which I listed for you at the beginning of my letter), the area was hard to go to and was in the hands of the Egyptians, when could Ebenezer have been there? In my humble opinion, he never could have been there. I don't know if traces of this ahistorical or even historical myth can truly be found, but the descriptions of the place, the geography, the names of the crystals, the stones, the rocks, the various areas, the climate, the lifestyle of the Bedouins, the monks, all that is precise. It is true that people visited there throughout the years, but it was surely not Ebenezer who invented what they saw or didn't see. The date of writing this ancient book is in another few years. What does that mean? Why did Ebenezer insist that the book be written like that, that the secrets in it are things that happened so long ago? According to various calculations (see appendix) I found in the Book of Salvation, which Ebenezer quotes and copies of it are also found in other places, the year 1984 will be the year of destruction. Also according to the prophecy of Astronomus, the decline before the annihilation begins in that year. The place where Moses is buried isn't clear, according to the book, but when I went with the members of our Committee on a trip to the Sinai last year, I was able to follow Ebenezer's guidelines and I found monasteries that even the Society for the Preservation of Nature didn't know about, I discovered waterfalls, wonderful oases, and sights were revealed described precisely in the book to be published years later, and recited by Ebenezer!

What else can I tell you? I'm sorry I can't respond to your request. When I ascended to the Land of Israel in the early 1920s, I swore I would never leave here. Why did I swear, why do I keep this oath? It's hard for me to answer. Jordana keeps coming. Her love for Menahem touches my heart. Maybe the mean ing of Kabydius's book is that love may really be only between the dead and the living? Maybe that's the meaning of the story of Ebenezer, Boaz, Menahem, Rebecca, Joseph, Nehemiah, and Friedrich? I'm not a literary scholar, I'm a tired old teacher, but there's surely food for thought here. The love people are afflicted with like a disease is a relationship between naught and aught. Maybe later, life began to envy death and imitated impotence.

Maybe everything that was didn't have to be. As I write these confused things to you, Jordana is sitting in the other room and looking at an album of pictures of Menahem. Hasha Masha is drinking coffee. Boaz is wandering around in his jeep and immortalizing the dead. You write me that Samuel Lipker claims that Lionel doesn't know that Samuel is his brother. It always seems to me that Samuel is here and hasn't really gone to America. Something of his spirit sometimes sits on my neck. When Ebenezer called Boaz Samuel, I knew that was more than a mere coincidence.

Yours…

Tape / -

When Yazhik was three years old, I had, said Yazhik, three hens. I fought with Petlura in 'nineteen. Ever since then I learned why hens have a red comb, Ebenezer, the blood was soaked in chewed grass, in berries, the woman my father slaughtered I saw in my dreams night after night for four years and two months, except for one night when I was drunk and couldn't dream. Then I counted the poplar trees in a radius of seventeen kilometers around our house. There were twenty-six thousand, five hundred thirty-two trees. They were cut down at a rate I tried to understand and couldn't. Meanwhile, the farm grew and two hundred eighty hens were added-and three new roosters. The number of trees decreased in the snowstorm of 'twenty-six, I found a woman whose mother was a Jew. She almost loved me, but I was tempted to tell her who my father was and she remembered poor Nakhcha, her uncle whose hand was cut off in that pogrom I couldn't tell you about. Seventy thousand Jews died in that pogrom under cover of the great revolution. Maybe since then my hostility has sprouted for people with squashed noses. What am I doing here? I hid a little Jewish girl, the woman I found dead, I stopped counting poplars, the hens went to Berlin in a freight train, the little girl lay under the stairs, upstairs my mother was dying with a candle at her head, night after night I went down and talked with the little girl and she was scared. And only later was she not so scared. In the dark she sat for three years, until the bent legs were stuck together, shin to thigh, I went to fetch a doctor to separate the shin from the thigh, under the stairs smelled of rotten flesh, I brought her cabbage and potatoes, her eyes were burning and her forehead was blazing. They killed the little girl with one blow, without separating the shin from the thigh, they left my mother to die alone with the crucifix hanging over her bed. The Sturmbahnfuhrer from the General- gouvernement stood and preened in the mirror in my mother's room, he wore oak clusters on his collar, his boots were gleaming, the guards would spit and a slave would rub them, me they tied to a cart and the Ukrainians pointed at me as if they had reasons, and said Yazhik the Jew-lover, I tried to count the reasons and discovered that in the end they were only one reason, and I stopped, I always liked to count, I saw bodies, arms cut off, I wasn't one of you, I didn't have to die but to live on the border of death and starvation, I saw them bring the people, scare them with clubs, blows, undress them and then straight to the showers and lock the door, they were more confused than scared, and then that revolt broke out with one hand grenade that barely killed one soldier, a machine gun from the tower shot and it all ended as it had begun, outside next to the mass graves stood people and searched. Later, years after the war, came the Poles, opened graves and searched for diamonds in corpses and that's how they found out what was under the ground. It once belonged to my grandfather, his name was also Yazhik. You won't die, Ebenezer, and you didn't die. I saw your box when I worked cleaning the home of the General Gouverneur. On the walls they hung pretty pictures, I counted a hundred and thirty-two pictures, two hundred etchings, a hundred tapestries, forty-nine easy chairs, twenty-two carpets! Once I brought champagne and milk to their party and then they discovered the little girl when I went to get a doctor to separate her shin from her thigh, there I saw your box. The box played "Silent Night." Once I counted ships in the river, I wanted to dream of how I'd go to Canada, I had some uncle there who didn't write a word, but was there. The ships sailed without me, I remembered Petlura, my uncle was his soldier, now in Canada, you remember how a ship looks: masts, cables, chimneys, flags, and here I'm drawing you a ship, Ebenezer.

Tape / -

I look at what he draws, try to remember and can't. It seems his name was Yazhik. Where did they all go?

Tape / -

Among the hundreds of women standing at the ropes stretched by the marines was Rachel Blau. When the ship anchored the sirens' wail sawed through the port and flags were raised and lowered at a dizzying pace and then the gangplank was lowered and the first off were the coffins. Then the wounded were carried on stretchers. On the dock stood tense young marines in polished uniforms, saluting. A band played marches. Lionel disembarked with the wounded officers who received a noisy welcome and women shrieked hysterically. Rachel discovered him between a young woman and a back turned to her with his eyes fixed on the ship. Only when he turned around did Rachel see Joseph Rayna and trembled. If she hadn't been pressed among the hysterical women, the wife of the Shirt King would have collapsed, but they pressed her and she didn't collapse. The young Joseph Rayna, gazing at the city, looked as if all the women waving their hands had come only for him. He smiled at them, and Rachel saw Lionel hold on to him and with the young woman they came down the gangplank.

When she looked at Joseph, Lionel said: Mother, meet Samuel, and he said: Sam, my name's Sam, and she smiled, and what once she couldn't do she now did in the arms of her son, she pitied herself, forced a smile, and shook Lily's hand.

Lily glanced at Rachel and saw how Samuel and Rachel looked at one another. Lily kissed Rachel's face.

The band went on playing and Lionel muttered something to a young officer who limped toward him and slipped away from there to the open arms of a young woman holding a baby. Lionel was the oldest officer of the group, his hair was gray, carrying the kitbag he looked like a military commander in propaganda movies. Genghis Khan he isn't, said Rachel doubtfully, like her husband, she too thought Lionel would never excel at selling shirts, but neither of them had expectations. Her husband maintained with a trace of envy that Lionel was meant to hover through life as an artist, and Rachel said: But he was a brave soldier, and her husband said: A good soldier is a luxury, I have to sell them shirts and our younger son will carry on my business, Lionel will be fine, I'll take care of him, let him just be healthy, in a family like ours we also need poets, he said with an understanding whose generosity evoked contempt in Rachel's eyes. She loved her husband with a quiet love full of regret for the life she had once cast away to gain what Rebecca had taught her not to want.

Sam saw the tall buildings, a train passed overhead, the ships wailed and an airplane was seen landing at LaGuardia Airport. The might he saw before his eyes terrified Sam, but he remained calm and tried to understand how much Rachel understood about who he was, and when he understood that she understood, he relaxed, that was a victory over Lionel, and he needed that victory.

Outside the fenced area the cars were parked, and in the distance Saul Blau appeared in a checked shirt waiting for his family and listening to a baseball game on the radio. Next to him stood three youngsters who waved at Lionel, who kissed each of them, shook hands warmly with Saul, and Saul shook everybody's hand and tried to hug Lily who was almost swooning and after they got into the station wagon, and started driving, Saul carried on a conversation all by himself. He asked about the war and answered his own questions. He explained where they were going and asked if they knew where they were going, Sam meditated and sank into a doze and thought about the flag that had been raised, and the trumpets, he saw a gray sky touching the sharp roofs, and Saul said: They fucked the Germans and the Japanese, now they'll have money to buy shirts. Sam looked at the street, Lily sat pressed against him, silent. The bustling streets changed to bridges winding into one another. He felt his erection secretly oppressing, wanted to rape a bridge or shirts, to rip the words from the mouth of the man who raised shirts and talked about how it would now be hot in his parents' grave.

In the house of the Shirt King, they consumed with exaggerated ardor the supper that Rachel had cooked. They drank Coca-Cola and sweet wine and the host wasn't compelled to try to talk for them all, nor did he know that his wife's first lover was sitting here. He told Lionel about his war experience. Lionel was silent, looked out the window, and ate slowly. Saul said: I transported machine gun shells for the howitzers. My father fought alongside the Ukrainians and I fought alongside the Austrians, we stood and shot, and then I saw Father, his memory for a blessing, shooting at me and we stopped together. We were in one city and in two different armies, that's how it was to be a Jew back then! Our synagogue was besieged. Always ready, what remained there, what remained? Nothing! But to shoot your father, you didn't have that in this war, Lionel. Lionel didn't answer and looked at Lily. At night she shook in his arms and the shaking went through the wall and touched Samuel. He forgot he was Sam, thought he was Samuel, and started shaking too. Rachel lay with her eyes wide open next to her husband and saw Joseph and didn't know if she yearned for him or if it was once again Rebecca who yearned inside her. The house was surrounded by a fine garden and Lionel explained to Sam that the garden was supposed to be like the garden of the Ford Motor King in his hometown in Connecticut. Samuel saw a moon that looked like a splendid coin and shone like cold metal, the trees moved in the wind, the house was overheated, and Samuel had to open the window and a cold wind penetrated the room. Samuel thought: I'll teach that Shirt King, and when the rage subsided a little, he whispered: Fuck her, Lionel, put your Jewish prick in!

They found a nice apartment on Morton Street in Greenwich Village. When they finished furnishing it, Rachel came to visit them. She looked uneasily at the apartment, which looked more like the apartment of a beggar than the apartment of an heir to a shirt kingdom. There were a few modern lamps and one cabinet that wasn't especially ancient, but the chairs, the easy chairs, the tables, and the cabinets looked strange to her, the paintings were full of some mold that depressed her. She looked painfully at the world she had fled, while Joseph walked around the house looking at her as if she were an old whore selling her wares in a display window.

Her thoughts about Joseph were confused and depressing. She simply didn't know how to think of Joseph, facing his son. Sam left the room, passed by Rachel, who was looking at Lionel. And in the small yard squeezed between gray walls, Lily sat on a wicker chair amid the old wet fallen leaves and thrust a needle into embroidery. Sam looked at the locked windows above the small gardens connected to one another, but no one was seen in the windows.

You're sitting on my mother's dress, said Sam. She raised her face and looked at him. She put down the embroidery and without a word moved aside to the chair. The chair was empty. She looked at the empty chair, shrugged and went inside. Her face remained impassive. She waited until he'd disappeared and continued embroidering.

When he looked at Rachel, her look was dreamy, perplexed, when he felt he disgusted her, he also disgusted himself, went out to the street, walked to Seventh Avenue, and turned north. In a small square, he discovered a luncheonette. Through the window, big empty tables were seen, he went in, ordered a hot dog, slathered a thick layer of mustard on it, ate, drank a cup of coffee, his English was fluent by now, but nobody noticed his accent. Not far from there, he saw a man carrying an aquarium. He followed the man. The man turned into a side street, stopped at a restaurant, and started going down the stairs. The sign on the door said: "The Five Tightrope Dancers." At the entrance, there were no tightrope dancers, but an aquarium. In the aquarium were elusive rare fish. He loved the bold cunning colors. A person in a white coat said to him: Beautiful, eh? Dangerous and very poisonous! Everything beautiful is dangerous, and vice versa! Sam said: A city of philosophers, and continued looking at the fish. In the distance cars were heard honking, a subway train passed and the building shook. He wanted to lead a dog named Ebenezer and take the money out of those people's pockets. Lionel is a lifeline but also an obstacle, he thought. When he went outside, the sky was rounding. Two people in overalls were hanging ornaments over the street. The wind moved the wires where the workers were hanging the ornaments. A woman who passed by said, What a nice Thanksgiving it will be. The cold increased, and the workers finished hanging the ornaments. And then he saw his first funeral in America. The coffin lay in an open car, embellished with wreathes of flowers and behind, in a gigantic black car sat people dressed in black. A mounted policeman passed by him. A dog stood tied to the fish store and barked at the coffin, the workers crossed the street behind the cars, one of them genuflected, the other ate a sandwich of four slices of bread with white saliva dripping from them.

He went back home and when he passed by Rachel, he tried to pretend she didn't exist. He went into his room, locked the door behind him, stood silently shaking, and through the window he saw Lily's back.

Lily got up, her back disappeared from his view, the yard was suddenly full of moss and greenery stuck to the old crusted stones. When they entered the apartment, the landlord said: Sherlock Holmes stayed here for two whole days when he was in New York. He said that with an impenetrable face, and Lionel said: That's nice, did he also sit in the garden? And the landlord said: There he solved the murder, and didn't expatiate on what murder. A woman now stuck her head out one of the windows, gaped open her mouth that swallowed wind, and Sam could see the firm teeth in the distance, he thought about her thighs, about the juncture of her legs with her thigh and felt warmth inside him. He didn't sit down and read the books he should have read, but slipped through the yard and entered the room. The voices of Rachel and Lionel were heard dully from the living room. Lily lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. Sam went to her, undid the button of her shirt, grasped her breast and looked into her eyes. Her look was cold and distant. She put her hand on his erection and he squeezed her breast, and said: Tamed eagle! And she was silent, and when her hand touched him he smiled, moved away from her, and she didn't even bother to button her shirt. He went to Lionel's desk and started burrowing among the papers. Lily lay and watched him calmly. The drawer was neat. Sam said: Secret Glory is with his stepmother and I'm with the ad for Ritesma Cigarettes. Lipp is lip in English. I'll buy a Mercedes and Maubach and Horick. Whores of public remorse, Lily.

She didn't answer him, shifted the embroidery she had been holding in her other hand, and put it on the cabinet and buttoned her shirt. He took a bundle of papers out of an envelope and glanced at them. What are you looking for? she asked.

I've already found it, he said. Then he wrote something on a scrap of paper, put the papers in the drawer, and said: Tell your man he shouldn't have taken me, I'm not worth his beauty or your beauty. Look, he added, I wandered around with a Jewish dog, I sold condoms and lampshades, I had it good. Sam took his mother's strip of fabric out of his pocket and put the fabric on Lily's face. She didn't budge and didn't move the fabric off her face. He waited, picked up the fabric, looked at it, shrugged and put it back in his pocket. He waited but she didn't say anything. He noticed her tears trying to tear the scrim of her eyes. But she didn't weep, and he said: I saw an American funeral and venomous fish in an aquarium. They've got a hard life here in America, give me money, I've got to go, I'll come back later and don't let them try to be rebuilt with my money. She stretched out her hand mechanically, opened a drawer, took out a bundle of bills and coins and gave it to him. Sam picked up two coins that fell on the ground, and examined the bills in the light of the lamp next to the bed, and said: They must be counterfeit! He counted the money as bank tellers count money. You sit here and sew corpses, he said, you sewed corpses for women mourning in gigantic cars, you really think you can be my mother?

Self-pity doesn't suit you, Sam, said Lily and turned her face away.

That's right, said Sam. What do you know? You're just a filthy Jewess, and he left.

On the way out, he yelled at Rachel: Stay well, Grandma! She tried to see him in the opening of the corridor, but couldn't say a thing, her mouth was dry, and when he went out she said: You made yourself an apartment of rage, live like artists, stay well. Lionel served his trembling mother coffee as Sam's back was seen on the sidewalk, striding quickly.

The wind blew harder, workers were still hanging ornaments over the windswept street. In twenty-six minutes and thirty-two seconds-on the new watch Lionel bought him-he arrived. At the information window he asked for the bus to Washington Depot. The woman said mechanically in a very clear, hasty, nonhuman voice: Have to go to… to arrive… at… and from there… from… to… and… the price is… And she was already talking to somebody else. He went down the escalator to Platform Fourteen. Not many people were in line, and those who were seemed to know one another, even though they practically weren't talking. A little girl with yellow hair asked him if he really was the Brooklyn Bridge. He whispered something to her in Polish, and she apologized and ran to her mother, who was laughing aloud at the comics section she was reading and chewing the end of a pencil that was crumbling between her teeth. Then he got on the bus, waited until the doors were locked, and shut his eyes. Calm enveloped him. He thought, these wouldn't get on the trains, at most they'd work guarding and burying corpses. He issued precise orders of burial and opened his eyes. The tunnel was over and the light was strong for a moment, they rode along a street whose houses seemed to be dying. Then they entered another tunnel, a single policeman stood in an alcove chewing gum. At the end of the tunnel, light was seen at last, then everything was gray, isolated houses and fields. Sam saw cows and a little church and hills. The sun peeped out for a moment between the low rounded clouds. The bus was overheated and Sam opened the window, but people asked him to close it. The little girl was sitting at the back of the bus, her mother was still laughing at the comics she was reading. Sam signaled to them that he was deaf and couldn't hear. They said: Poor thing, but he's got to close the window. A man in a yellow suit and one of Saul Blau's colorful shirts, smelling of cheap perfume, got up and tried to close the window. Sam started struggling with him, the man was surprised and didn't know what to do. The others were silent and indifferent, wrapped themselves in their overcoats and looked as if they were freezing in the strong wind. The man said: Must not be an American, doesn't understand English. He was amazed to hear his own words, something wasn't right. He stood up, his hands intertwined in Sam's, and said: What I meant was that he's deaf in English. Sam kept the window open, but two men coming back from a deer hunt, dressed in gigantic hunting jackets, got up, overcame him, and locked the window. Then they laughed and passed a bottle of whiskey in a brown paper bag from hand to hand. Sam burst out laughing. A woman sitting in front of him turned to look at him and turned pale. The man next to her was reading a newspaper, and said: They come here like flies, got to know how to behave with those who come, got to show them who's boss here. The woman slapped the man and he yelled: Whore! When she turned her face again, she hadn't yet answered the man's yell and he went back to reading the paper. Her face was full of amazement and then suddenly innocence. Sam smiled until she blushed. He pointed at her breasts and drew enormous circles with his hands. Even though she stopped blushing the man with her was afraid to look. The headlines of the evening paper looked threatening through his eyeglasses.