The Last Jew

Isolated farms were now seen, frost stuck to them, the trees were naked, cars were seen driving on paths dwarfed by tall trees. About two hours later, the houses increased, the farms gave way to more elegant houses, and then an industrial area belching smoke and taverns, little signs, blinking at their doors, well-tended gardens attached to one another, another hill and naked treetops, and then the bus stopped. Sam looked at a woman who looked monstrous with her face stuck to the windowpane. She gaped her mouth open and blew on the window, her nose was smashed against it. Even in the strong cold, she looked despondent and forsaken. He waved his hand at her and the bus started moving.

For a long time he walked in the forest in the stinging cold and then in the fields, he saw houses with red roof tiles, haylofts, cowsheds, handsome rustic churches in domesticated groves, in the distance a hill was seen and on it a sweet, gray little town, with a gilded clock on its church steeple and then, when he came to the house, he opened the gate and a gigantic dog assaulted him. Sam climbed up on Ebenezer's tail and pulled hard, went down on all fours, kissed the snout of the dog who gasped heavily, hit him, petted him at the same time, and by the time the little woman hurried to the gate at the sound of the barking, the dog was lying next to Sam and wagging its tail, its mouth drooling and its face thrust in Sam's hand. Facing him was the old house surrounded by a big garden. The windows were shrouded in shades, the entrance was like a Greek temple, the chimneys belched thin smoke scattered in all directions by the wind. The dog didn't move at the sound of its mistress's hasty steps. Sam noticed the woman's antique beauty and looked at her calmly. She asked who he was and what he wanted. He told her that first he had to pee and then he could talk with her. She swallowed wind, her look passed angrily, maybe even more, offensively, over the dog's swooning back, and she said: This is a private house, sir, not a public lavatory. She used the professional terminology, and even that neutral name sounded coarse in her mouth. Her lips clamped righteously.

I come about Melissa, said Sam.

Now, when she looked at him again, she saw him through a thick cloud. He saw the blood drain out of her face. Her anger at the treacherous dog lying next to her young enemy increased, she banged her hand nervously on her thigh, and said: Melissa? Melissa's dead. The fact that Melissa had died so many years ago and suddenly she had to say that, embarrassed her immeasurably. Maybe for the first time in years, Melissa's death was so needless and yet painful. She dropped her eyes and saw the shoes that had walked in the fields and forest and the spots and the flickering of the trampled leaves, and she said pensively: Thirty years ago, and then she was scared and said in a voice almost shrieking at itself: What do you mean about Melissa?

I have to pee, said Sam.

She shrugged and yelled furiously at the dog: Come here, Smoky! The dog straightened up, looked at her, wagged its tail, and Sam hit his thigh and the dog clung to him as if it feared for its life and started shaking. Sam kicked it until it whined. She yelled: Why do you kick him? And Sam bent down and kissed it. She hissed furiously: A dog is supposed to guard the house from strangers! What are you here for?

To pee, said Sam.

Not you, him, she said, and she felt her position in the doorway of her house turn into a farce she didn't want to take part in. Sam said: I'm not a stranger and he understands, and then he noticed her sweet wickedness, an orphaned warmth, some old yearning on her face. Now he didn't know if she was a guard in the camp or the NCOs' housekeeper, so he could smile at her and say: Look lady, he won't bite me, he knows who's the master and who's the bitch, where do you pee in this splendid house?

The gentleman talks funny, said the woman. Her anger was more for the dog than for him. Her mouth gaped a little, she had to pluck up a properly shaped humility. Who are you? she asked again. Why… But now she also saw him more clearly, and a forgotten memory rose for a moment and extinguished in her, as if a forgotten picture was drawn and she didn't know what the picture was. Now she also looked scared.

Sam said: You've got no choice, don't let me pee in your beautiful yard. They walked inside. A maid in an apron who had just been shedding tears over a bowl of slaughtered onions came running up with her eyes red and dripping. You should have been here before, said the woman in a voice with a threat aimed for later.

I tried, said the maid with extinguished awe.

Trying isn't enough, barked the woman.

Let the dog bark, said Sam, it doesn't suit you, you were born delicate and only later comes life and makes us dogs. Believe me, I'm an expert. When she raised her hand she looked surprised at herself for almost striking him. His charming smile spread over her face. That only increased his dependence on her. Let me pee and then we'll talk about Melissa, he said. The maid genuflected at the name. He passed through the room, went into the corridor, turned right, and found a toilet.

Afterward, he looked for a towel. The maid who ran after him stood next to the door rubbing her hands on her apron. He went to her and wiped his hands on her apron and went into the living room, whose walls were covered with mounted animal heads. The woman was sitting in a straightbacked chair and looking at him. He felt close to the iron that came from her, all of her solid in a wonderfully shaped posture, he could feel the hatred in her eyes. A pleasant smell of spices crept into the room and was swallowed by a fragrance of roses. The drapery looked more beautiful from this side of the room. The woman could categorize corpses with model precision, he wanted to tell Kramer.

The thoughts were messed up in his mind, his mother acting Ophelia in a room closed with drapes, a smell of spices in a house they lived in for many years.

The dog who was clinging to his leg all the time growled and the mounted animals looked at him with flashing eyes.

Why did you come, she said.

I love her, said Sam. He smiled a smile of condolence and on the piano he could see the faded picture of Melissa in a white dress, a bouquet of flowers in her hand, and behind her a grown-up man holding a cigar in his hand. When she got up the dog growled again.

He knows you?

Dogs know me, said Sam.

But he can't know you, she said and was immediately embarrassed because she knew she had asked the wrong question.

That's love, said Sam. You know how beautiful she was, Melissa?

Her body shook, she dropped her eyes, shook her head and muttered. Why? Why? Why?

Don't know, he said. My name's Sam, I loved her, they took me to the fences. She came to me and said: I'm yours, she didn't even know my name is Sam, I came to ask for her hand and you said she's still dead.

The woman who was shaking got up, very slowly she sought a path between the carpets, the chairs, the easy chairs, the heavy electric lamp standing on an ancient pedestal, above her the stuffed animals watched. He got up and walked behind her. She stood shaking in the corridor. Her hand moved to the telephone. The maid appeared and Sam dismissed her furiously. He went to the woman, kissed the back of her neck, waited for her to hit him and then, when a jet of blood burst from his mouth, he hung up the phone, kissed her hard on the lips, wet her with his blood, and said: No need, I'm going, why do children die in such Paradises? It's not fair.

Maybe I'm dreaming, said the woman, maybe I'm really dreaming, maybe this isn't happening, I'm calling Smoky, come here Smoky, and he doesn't come, maybe it's not happening, maybe I'm dreaming, it was quiet, more than thirty years it was quiet.

I'm sorry, he said. He pushed her into the living room and sat her down on a chair, she buried her face in her hands and waited. She looked like somebody who doesn't know what to wait for anymore.

I don't know you! said Sam. I'm not willing to accept Melissa's death, I absolutely will not accept it.

You're a wicked cruel man, said the woman and stood up, sturdy now. The maid came in and tried to help her mistress get up and he pushed her until both women fell down. The dog rolled around on the rug and waited for somebody to applaud it. Sam broke a buffalo horn and tossed it on the floor. That's all, only slight damage, he said, why not? You'll pay for my visit. He pushed the two women into a little room whose door was open, jumped out the window, and ran. The dog ran after him, jumped over the fence, and went into the grove. He ran along the fields and the grove reappeared. He barged in among the trees and came to a small cemetery. It was dark now. It was barely possible to read the names. He searched for a tombstone with her name and didn't find it. He kissed a tombstone he thought was hers, saw people with flashlights searching for him, nodded at their innocence and said: My dear woman, I have overcome Kramer and Weiss and the German and Ukrainian guards and then the Soviet police and the occupation authorities and the Yugoslavians and the French and the Italians and the Danes, and those fools think they'll catch me with pitiful flashlights. Dogs barked in the distance and he understood their longing for him and barked back at them. The people with the dogs looked at one another and yelled, but the dogs stopped and wouldn't go on. Sam came to the bus stop, waited in the gloom of the thick trees until a bus came, he darted inside, paid, and fell asleep on the seat.

When Lionel asked him where he had been, he said: I went to visit Melissa. She doesn't love you anymore, Secret. Then, he went into his room, locked the door and fell asleep standing up, leaning on the door.

Committee of the Survivors of Hathausen/Division to Celebrate Liberation Day

New York,

Dear Sir (Samuel Lipker):

Attached is the questionnaire we informed you of. Please fill it out and send it to us as soon as possible. Erase what is superfluous.

Full name.

Parents' names.

Are they alive?

Other family members.

Their addresses.

Dates of internment in the camp.

Do you recall what you did? If you had a job, what was it?

Did you live in the blocks? Did you live in the Sonderkommando Services camp?

Detail why you think you survived.

Where did you go after the liberation?

How did you come to the United States?

Do you remember people who were with you in the camp?

Do you remember outstandingly cruel incidents?

Do you have a profession?

A brief history of your life, personal details, memories (if possible), experiences, songs you sang, dances. Do you have plans for the future? Do you remember Frieda Klopfen?

Please send us the form as soon as possible.

Yours,

Most sincerely.

To the Committee of Survivors of Hathausen,

Greetings,

My name is Sam Lipp. Frieda lay under a dog that crushed her. When they threw me into the fire, they remembered that I was fourteen years old and took me out of the fire. Then I chewed bones to understand the sky, which was mostly cloudy. I and my father live outside the planet earth. Why didn't you celebrate your entrance into the camp instead of your exit? You don't interest me and please don't send me any more material.

Samuel Lipker was killed in Hathausen and I do not know the place where he is buried.

Yours, SS Sturmbahnfuhrer Kramer (Samuel Lipker)

Later on, when he told Lionel of his trip to Melissa's house, Sam was smiling and Lionel was silent and pensive. He looked at Sam's face, lit a cigarette, outside it was pouring rain, and Lionel said: How did Mrs. Brooks look? And Sam said: She asked about you! Lionel laughed. Sam said: They're sending me letters for a celebration of the liberation, if they call, say I died, and he left. Lionel came back from his room where he'd help Sam with his homework. Because he had learned from Ebenezer the craft of remembering, he learned well and fast. He finished high school in a year. At first, they teased him because of his age, but the other students quickly learned not to get smart with him. Then, he went to NYU. Rachel said: He'll give you trouble, and Lionel would answer her: Mother, he's my son!

The stories Lionel wrote weren't bad, but they weren't any better than the stories he had written before. The sense of defeat was much less bitter than it was. By the time he started writing reviews for The New York Times, Lionel was close to fifty. The editor, who loved his stories that were printed in little journals and that granted him a certain cachet in marginal literary circles, asked him to write an article. Then he wrote more articles and soon after, he became the regular critic for the paper. When he was afflicted with melancholy visions of his life, Lionel said: Everything is past, the future is now behind me, the lad I was created a man and the man has lost the lad, the hopes were disappointed, even if they weren't very big, average men lead lives of quiet desperation, he quoted Thoreau, I exist, write, I'm a draftsman, not a creator. To take Sam's lampshade. The number of lampshades in the hackneyed kingdom of the eternal. To make a poem. My words grope in vain for a story others will write better than me. Watches Lily, sees the devil in Sam's eyes, and dies for another night. A year is three hundred sixty-five dogs. Sam Lipp is now twenty-three years old. Lily sat at home and read dictionaries, vocabularies, and the more precisely she learned English, the more she thought she forgot her native tongue. She taught herself with an anger she never imagined was in her to flee from the language she had grown up in, and she thought that in an idiomatic and fluent English, and that was how she could forget she once had parents and the more her children continued not to be born, the more her roots were erased, until she was forced to think for a long time to answer Sam who asked her the name of her father, who may still have been a prisoner of the Russians. Her life was a small ghetto protected from an insult she never felt, but his eyes were a witness to it. One night, when the snow piled up to the middle of the window and a strong wind blew outside, Sam came and lay next to Lily. Lionel whispered: Lily, he wants you, very slowly she turned her face, looked at him, let a tear pearling in her eyes soak the pillowcase, stretched out her hand, gently stroked Samuel's face, and Samuel said: You sleep with every filthy Jew, you don't even know what a gentile prick looks like. He pushed Lionel onto his side, pressed Lionel's eyes until he roared with pain, Lily felt his body choking her. She tried to crawl to Lionel, held her hand out to him, but Sam grabbed the hand, clasped it hard, and when she looked into his eyes she could see the snow piling up in the windows with eyes that once saw a forest on a hike with somebody who may have been her father. She laid her hands on his eyes, shut them, and he stroked her back until she shuddered, but now Melissa laughed inside her and Lionel, who felt pity for Sam and knew that tears covered his eyes, talked to her and when she raised her face she saw Lionel looking at her, the tears remained on his smooth chest, and even though she wanted him now, she could do nothing but defeat Samuel in him and her lips were caught in his watch chain, and she was so confused that even five years later, she could remember that the time was then one twenty-one in the morning. Samuel flipped her over, lay on her, slipped the pillow out from under her head so that Lionel's head was now higher than hers, put the pillow on her face, didn't press, straightened up a little so he could look at the three of them, and said: I love her, Lionel, but she loves you, don't worry, I'm trying to steal Melissa from you, but she's dead all the time too, and Lionel whispered: That's all right, Sam, and Lily tried to say something, but the pillow over her face didn't let her talk and Sam pounded on the pillow until it dropped off and fell on Lionel's chest as he lay there now, squashed the pillow with his head, and when Lily saw Lionel's face, she clasped Sam and at the same time pushed him off her. The snow kept piling up, Sam hit Lionel's leg to get him away from him, he grasped his father's face with his hand, hugged it hard and Lily thought she was cut because his hand was in her crotch. When she started crying, her face turned red and she touched Lionel pleadingly. She turned over, hugged Samuel. As he was above her, Samuel kissed Lionel on the lips, jumped out of bed, stuck Lionel to Lily, ran to the kitchen, banged his hand on the wall, poured water, brought a glass to the room, poured the water on them, pushed them closer together, and started singing a song a Ukrainian guard had once taught him as he hugged him from behind. Then, the three of them lay on their backs and looked at the snow. The dark was lighted by a streetlamp.

The stories you write, said Sam as if he were continuing a conversation he had started years ago, are still lifes, beautiful and dead. You're too respectable, Lionel, you're not young, your words have no proper story and you're waiting for a story in all the wrong places, and you let every fucking Jew fuck your wife.

Not everyone, said Lionel.

Everyone, Sam repeated.

This is a fascinating city. See how arrogant its snow is, added Samuel. You're searching for humiliation, Lionel, you're selling Samuel Lipker to a German woman. Look at your city, there's no melancholy eaten by moss in it as in the city where Joseph Rayna begat Samuel Lipker on a miserable actress, you measure others' pain with a yardstick. What do your tears know except what they have to glean from a city where everybody passes through like a Cossack in a pogrom? You searched for a son in the wrong place, you dismantle the enemy into elements, produce with your hands-or Lily demonstrates to you-a disaster that was supposed to happen to you and happened to me and her. And without you, Lionel! That yardstick! Grasp. Like loving Lily through me. I read in a book that Paul Klee the artist said that creation is to turn the unseen into the seen. Ebenezer would perform with me in nightclubs. I led him on a rope like a trained monkey. He really was the last survivor of the Jews and they really did all die, they don't know they died, but they died. He recited the words and they thought he was talking about something that once was. They didn't understand that he was talking about what maybe wasn't.

Tape / -

On a Wednesday shrouded in a doughy dust in the air, Sam left the house and walked as if he had some purpose. Lionel and Lily sat and read an article that appeared that day in the Atlantic. Lionel sat with his eyes shut and Lily read him his own article. He wasn't smiling and was listening intently. Tired birds were seen dying on branches heavy with dust. He met Riba-Riba at the corner of Thirteenth Street, next to the weaving machine shop. Riba-Riba's neck looked thin, her head was crowned with a splendid mane of hair, and when he told her how beautiful was the back of her neck in the distance, she giggled nervously. At the sight of her smile, he could sense that the end of the story that hadn't yet started wouldn't be especially pleasant, but since he was waiting again for a funeral that hadn't passed, something in him longed for a well-done rite, and Riba-Riba, with the embarrassed and defeated smile, may have been the proper answer to the sight of the birds that weren't birds of gold at all and looked as if they would land in a little while and die from the heavy heat. Riba-Riba said: When I presented the evening of Irish songs at the university, I waited for you, Sam, I waited awfully, and you fell asleep. Sam said: I was tired. When she said she was going to see a matinee performance of a Tennessee Williams play, he told her he'd go with her. He asked her to buy him a ticket for the seat behind her. Since her father owned a nightclub and her mother was a well-known Irish Gypsy, it wasn't hard for her to get tickets. She said: It's awful sexy to sit like that, so he chewed on her ear and kept her from seeing the play. Through her hair, he saw his mother acting on the stage. Outside stood Joseph Rayna with a bouquet of flowers and seeds of Samuel Lipker poured on his eyelashes. The actors were welltrained, they raised their voices in the right places and knew how to structure the pauses precisely. The critics' florid words hanging on the walls of the lobby suddenly began to be possible. But something rebelled in him, and he may have fallen asleep or chewed Riba-Riba's ear again if he hadn't sensed that all those days, all those years, he had wanted to do something those people were doing now on the stage, but not like his mother, or those actors, to do that as Joseph Rayna acting the lover, at the house where his mother acted for the indifferent walls. What he wanted more than anything in the world was to stand there and stage Ebenezer, himself, Weiss, Kramer, Lionel, and Lily. In other words, to stage the world that almost was and only Ebenezer remembered it.

When they went out, it was raining a warm spray. Sam pushed Riba-Riba to the entrance of a dark office building and fucked her standing up. She bit her lips and because she felt both humiliated and blissful, she asked Sam for a cigarette, stuck it in her mouth and acted as if she were in a silent movie. After he snatched the cigarette butt out of her mouth and threw it toward the entrance, they broke apart, she combed her hair, and then they went into a cafeteria. Sam glanced indifferently at the gigantic Camel cigarette belching smoke rings at the news making its way around the old New York Times building. Opposite was a gigantic Paramount ad showing Duke Ellington smiling along with Frank Sinatra.

When they went out, the misty rain was still falling. Sam started talking about death as a gesture. She wasn't sure and saw a church altar and Sam raising her up before God with white skin and blue eyes. Sam said: They indulge with embellished words. Try to depict life as if it's possible to resurrect life. Riba-Riba shook with some vague fear and hugged Sam. She said in a voice that was too loud: We started from love standing up and we'll end with a true feeling, and he said: Say "we screwed," and she blushed and said the word and then Sam became serious and kissed her face. Her mouth tasted of mint, toothpaste, and potatoes. They passed by a funeral home and Riba-Riba was afraid to go in with him, but he insisted and they went in.

In the splendid and darkened room lay a well-dressed corpse, painted and made up and even its shoes were polished. Soft, melancholy music with something metallic was heard in the background. A woman dressed in black and enveloped in a delicate black silk scarf raised the hem of the scarf a little and looked at Sam. She didn't look at Riba-Riba and she immediately dropped the scarf. Sam smiled at her sympathetically, but the woman only shook her head with a domesticated sadness and looked at the dead man. A crushed odor of flowers that may also have been artificial rose in his nose. A person in a costume that looked like a blend of an official uniform and a frock coat entered, stood next to the woman, and with profound and gloomy understanding looked at the body. With a hand that almost succeeded in trembling, he brushed two hairs off the dead man's brow and with careful gentleness he brushed the patent leather of his left shoe with a handkerchief he took out of his pocket. The woman, who was still staring at the dead man, whispered something none of them could hear. And then more people in black came into the room and stood next to the woman. One of them wiped a tear from his eye and put the tear in a handkerchief and the handkerchief in a pocket that was apparently reserved for tears. The person standing next to the man with the tear took a scrap of paper out of his overcoat pocket, put on his glasses, and read a poem in a monotonous voice. The poem was written by the deceased before he died, he emphasized sadly. The poem was a trade balance of a small company called A. B. Lin, in Long Island. It said that life is a conglomerate of big joys and little events. The last words of the poem were: "Melina, Melina, go in your Caddy to the sea and see for me the scene of sunset I haven't seen in twenty years." The woman didn't budge. Sam smiled but the man didn't smile back. They looked at Sam and Riba-Riba and tried to recall what side of the family they belonged to.

Tape / -

As far as I know (I'm reciting now), Sam Lipp went back to the theater he had been sunk in forever and didn't know it, so maybe the words "went back" are superfluous, like the word "deceased" mentioned above.

Tape / -

From a letter written by the prisoner (Number 3321/A) Kramer, to the PEN association of writers in the city of Cologne, a few weeks before he was turned over to the Polish authorities:

The letter and the journal I gave to your distinguished society, but as far as I understand, it used them adversely. Since they have not yet hanged (or shot) me, I am permitted to express my amazement that the writers of our nation are capable of distorting things like that and betraying the belief of a commander who served our homeland loyally. And as for Samuel Lipker, whom you ask about, I must say that when he associated in the camp with Ebenezer, I knew that his bestiality would someday be translated into troubles for us. Nevertheless, he remains alive. There was no decision on the matter. I remember Samuel once told me: Commander, maybe all of us betray something more sublime than we are, and judging should be a blissful act, right? Those were words on the tip of my tongue. I must state that if Samuel Lipker does something in his life he will appeal to the dark alleys of our great spirit, and not like a great many of you, he will not be afraid to ask why he betrayed our nation with his Fuhrer, will not be afraid to touch what the Americans call in weather reports "the eye of the hurricane."

Tape / -

Lily sits and combs her hair while Sam looks at her trying to understand. The beauty of her movements, holding the comb in the hair, the head bent above and behind to right or left, fill him with a dim sense of joy he never knew before.

Sam and Riba-Riba at the Easter service in church. The sorcerer is about to don garments of authority, his face is white and pale. He dons a gigantic hat that looks like a miniature church building. With his terrifying magic the sorcerer stops a great erosion of force that becomes thin and pleasant. The pulpit is high and gilded. Music bursts from all sides of the church, people in their best clothes, looking like they're embalmed, kneel at the altar of colored lights and a smell of incense rises into the air. Sam thinks that a temple like that can imprison divinity, speak in its name, tame it, and at the same time not let it in. The words whispered there are important and unimportant at the same time. The service isn't about life, but death. He thinks of the synagogue where he'd spent Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah eve in his childhood, its low ceiling, the poor God with a white beard sitting in the locked Ark with a few meager ornaments, and facing Him men wrapped in prayer shawls and a charred smell of tobacco rising from them. Sam stands at the mysterious service held in the pulpit and thinks that God has a place only through the mask, since only there is He truly strong and false. The confessionals furnish feelings with institutionalization that turns into a linguistic inquisition, a rule of power and force for a gossipy human mumbling, and like that, an ancient and savage Torah can become noble, full of splendor and so sexy. Sam didn't really know how close that notion of his was to the opinion of SS Sturmbahnfuhrer Kramer, to whom he once bowed whenever he saw him passing by.

One day, after Lily wrote two hundred words on his body starting with the letter A and drank fine rose wine that had been chilled in the refrigerator before she went to abort a German child at an abortion farm in the mountains of Pennsylvania (at that time Lionel was sitting offended with himself and imprisoned in guilt feelings and trying to write a story while wearing new house slippers he claimed sharpened his ability to think and Sam was trying to write for himself the nightmares of the past night), Sam looked at Lionel and said to him: Statistics, Lionel, write statistics in crappy rhymes! Make a ceremony. See a church. See a sorcerer with words in Latin. And Lionel said: She went to abort a son, Sam, and Sam said: Blessed be the just Judge, and went to Riba-Riba. She wanted to take him to the village, to her parents' house, to lie with him on the soft green lawn, introduce him to the cows and horses of her childhood, but he wanted to celebrate mysterious ceremonies and understand to whom the disaster truly happened. He introduced Riba-Riba to a fellow and told him, with premeditation (because he knew that the fellow was in love with Riba-Riba and would tell her what he would tell him) about their sex life and he did tell her. And then, he told Lily with a savage laugh, she was offended and phoned, and I hung up. She went with that Trevor and lay with him on the damp lawn near her stinking horses and cows and they got wet and came to the little church where a bored priest married them, and after that Sam tried to rape Lily in the kitchen and she said: They took a child out of me, Sam, don't touch me, and he slapped himself instead of slapping her.

Tape / -

Question: Have you ever known a person named Sam Lipp?

Ebenezer Schneerson: No.

Question: Where did Samuel Lipker disappear?

Ebenezer: He went for a moment and disappeared…

Question: Did Samuel Lipker have any connection with the theater?

Ebenezer: I was his puppet. He took money. He's also my son.

Question: What year are we living in?

Ebenezer: The clocks and calendars were set by Samuel. He doesn't come now. I need him.

Question: Thank you.

Tape / -

At night he'd wander around the city, to hear jazz at Bop City, Minton Playhouse, Birdland. Sam loved the organized improvisation, the celebratory sadness they made from New Orleans funeral music. He'd sit in a little bar on Eighth Avenue and order drinks for girls who would giggle at the sight of his eyes. "Awful eyes," one woman called him. Once he sat next to a girl with unstylish gray eyes, who reeked of perfume. The short hair no longer symbolized any regret and was deliberately miserable, cheap dye poured from it. When they drank, she mixed whiskey with water. Then they went to a small hotel, and when he fell asleep after she took pity on him and he called her: Crystal Heart, and she told him he was a darling wolf, she stole his money. The gonorrhea started two days later. The doctor gave him penicillin injections and then he went to see a play in the Village and fell asleep. On the fourth evening, he passed by the bar and saw her. He went to Washington Depot, came to the gate of the house, and the dog ran to him wagging its tail. He yelled: I love Melissa. Through the window Mrs. Brooks saw him and ran to the telephone, but he yelled: I've got American gonorrhea now! He kicked the dog and ran to the boulevard, where rain was falling on the thick treetops and didn't get to the lush ground full of the moisture of crushed leaves. He lay on the edge of a small field, between pines and oaks, and thought of why he had kicked the dog. He went into the forest and yelled: Melissa, Melissa, until he became hoarse and then he kissed a cow lying on the ground chewing. A person passing by said: Cows lying is a sign of rain. Sam wondered if the cows also knew that there really had been rain. He took the bus back to the city, and even though he was soaked to the skin, he fell asleep. When he returned to the bar to look for Crystal Heart, he was thrown out by the bartender in an apron, who had little eyes with a cold metallic glint in them. At dawn, he lay in wait for the bartender near the parking lot Mr. Blau had recently bought to build the biggest store for colored shirts in the eastern United States. He knocked down the bartender, wrapped him in a bag, and beat him until he heard his bones grow faint. Sam whispered to him: I wasn't born yesterday!

The man groaned but nobody heard. Later, the police found him. The cops who got a weekly payment happened to be at a crash course in Virginia and the substitute captain didn't want to reorganize the area. The bar was closed despite the damage to the police car and over the protest of the sergeant, who got forty dollars a month and came back from Virginia to get his take. Sam deigned to testify in court. He had received threats by phone and he wrote down every word that was said and told Lionel he was studying theater from life instead of vice versa, and Lionel looked at him and recalled how he fell asleep at the beautiful play they saw in the Village, tried to understand, but was tired and fell asleep. When they tried to stab him and missed-he didn't retract his complaint, even when a policeman who came back from the crash course tried to persuade him not to testify. After the sentence was declared, he felt relief, but also abhorrence. He looked cheerfully at Crystal Heart and at the kicked bartender. There were no marks on the bartender. Sam didn't admit to any attack. They looked at him with cold, flashing hatred, but he said: You're terrific. Everything exploded then, everything he had kept inside from the day he had left the camp was now a ring of suffocation. The play he went to see with RibaRiba opened the dam. Now he didn't know when he was dreaming and when he was daydreaming and all the time the SS men were beating him and he was shrieking, No! No! And he saw his mother naked and his father expecting him with a diamond in his rectum. Everything was woven in his mind with dark and humiliating ceremonies carried out on lighted stages.

Tape / -

Dear Lionel,

For some years now, I've been following your son. You asked me to help him, you told me to try to advise, you're a senior member of the university, you said, and I did keep my word. Sometimes it's hard for me to understand, Sam's past is a sealed chapter for me, while you refuse to tell me. When he dropped out of regular school and registered for the theater department, I was afraid, but his talent is impressive, and I thought to my self: Well, you also maintained that he should do whatever he wanted. But when day after day he wandered around cemeteries and seduced women to come with him to their houses and performed plays for them that later damaged them emotionally, I thought I should do something, but I didn't know how. What Sam could say in his defense in the case of that woman, Mrs. G., which you yourself were involved in: "She put on a striptease for me, because she thought men are aroused by black panties, and afterward because she thought I had a sexual disease-I told her about the gonorrhea I picked up-I kissed a boot and acted for her how I'd fuck its mate. And then she laughed, what's she complaining about all of a sudden?" It was hard for me to explain to him, the anger in him is incomprehensible to me. What attracts him is the human sewer, or magic. I don't understand what all that has to do with theater. In my opinion, he's playing with fire and that fire is buried inside him. He told me that on one of his visits to the cemeteries, a woman saw him, took him to her room, undid his trousers (these are his words), and when he penetrated her, he fell asleep. When he woke up, he said, she was naked and smoking a cigar. He said he turned on the radio. I'm reconstructing the details that coalesce into a picture you should be aware of. He said he combines tidbits in his mind like a man named Ebenezer did. Women in cemeteries, religious ceremonies, music he hears in jazz clubs-all that, he said, is intertwined, into one equation. And he can, he told me, recall who a disaster truly happened to. What disaster, Lionel? When he left the theater department and joined a theater that traveled throughout the state, you told me to persuade him not to go, but you know how much I tried and the result, nil! What I do know is that instead of studying theater in our department, one of the best in the United States, he worked in lighting, sets, as a stagehand, and learned to sew shrouds (his words) and to be a stage manager you claimed then that I should persuade him to work in what he really wanted to do and not in stage management of an amateur theater that traveled from one small town to another, but I didn't succeed. Look Lionel, Sam recently came back. He came back to the department and I accepted him. What you may not know is that he doesn't study but is preparing a play with three actors and has even managed to persuade me to help him. I'm writing to you because if there are complaints about my behavior, know that I tried, but he has some charm that compels you (me) to give in to him; and so it happened, Lionel, that people who studied four years in the department, successfully finished and did all their assignments, are waiting to put on their play while Sam, who didn't study in a regular way, who hit a teacher, who slept with, or in the words of one witness, raped two women directors we brought to the department, is producing a play and I, I am its sponsor. And as for the rest-

Yours…

After Sam's premiere performance, there on the stage covered with thousands of pairs of shoes while a gigantic heart pounded metallically and three actors fought some war against themselves, Rachel Blau decided to reveal to her son who Sam Lipp was and who Lionel's father was. Her husband told her: Why is that so important? I'll take care of everybody and if Sam wants theater and Lionel wants to write stories, let them. Rachel didn't argue with him. She took the subway because she didn't know how to drive and didn't want to waste money on a taxi. When she came out of the station, she fainted. People who from now on would look alike to her took her to a nearby hospital. Nuns dressed in white laid her in a narrow bed, above her hung a big crucifix and below burst the melancholy cold sound of the nuns' singing. When Lionel came, she smiled at him and thought he was all the people she had seen before. She was transferred to Mount Sinai Hospital but her condition didn't improve. Lily took Lionel's hand and then touched Rachel. Rachel didn't know who they were anymore. She turned to Sam and spoke Polish. She muttered and suddenly fell silent. Her face contorted and Sam told her in Polish: Regards to Rebecca Secret Charity. Lily said: She'll recover, but everybody knew she wouldn't.

A week later, the play of the shoes closed and the reviews came in. Sam listened and was silent. Then he said: The play was no good, but I know what I want and what I want will take time, but it will be better. He came home and saw Lionel and Lily sitting with dictionaries in their hands and Lily was editing an article for Lionel for The New York Times. Sam looked at them and glanced again at a story that Lionel published in Harpers, and said: I'm a wretched creature, Lionel, a creature others die for, Ebenezer recites them, I'm not an expert in writing stories, in your articles you're wise and smart, so you succeed, but the heroes in your stories aren't wise like you, and that's not good.

The next day, Lily found a letter. Sam had sent the letter with a dog he rented in a shop of postal dogs. The dog knocked on the door and Lily opened it. There was also a bill and she paid it, patted the dog, and it wagged its tail and left. The money was in its mouth. The letter said:

Lionel, here's a list of materials to weave your poems; twenty-one thousand synagogue curtains, seventeen tons of brown and black hair, six tons of blond hair, two tons of silver and gold teeth, eight million pairs of shoes, one million six hundred thousand pairs of earrings, two million three hundred thousand silver candlesticks, two million little Havdalah towers of silver and other metals. Two tons of diamonds, thousands of kilometers of train travel, coal for the trains, track repairs, employment of train workers. Thousands of kilometers of barbed wire fence and coils, thousands of tons of gas, bullets, spades for burial, crematoria, one million five hundred thousand used beds, factories, shops, research institutes, fur hats, granite hats, felt hats, cloth hats, wool hats. Dental crowns, phosphate from bones, fat for soap, cooking ovens fit for use, cars! Silver, dollars, marks, zlotys, francs-together, more than three billion dollars, machines, presses, stockings, overcoats, carpets, works of art, luxuries, etc….

I hired the dog who brings this letter from a shop on Fourteenth Street because he looks like Ebenezer. Calculate the burials, the killings, the fear, the frozen feet, the time wasted rewriting and writing every execution, spying, axes, chamber pots. Does the energy really get lost, Lionel, if all that is later turned into a book of tears hidden by Jews in cellars?

Tape / -

The Lamentfor the Death of the Jews was written over a year. Lionel revised, corrected, rewrote, and then, when it snowed nonstop for three straight days, the first chapter of the Lament was published in The New York Times. It was based on statistics. Reactions were immediate and excited. By the time the snow melted, Lionel had been interviewed on television and had signed a contract with Harper and Row. A few days before Christmas, Sam brought home a fir tree he bought on the street. Lionel, who was concluding a phone conversation with his new agent, said: Why on earth a tree, Sam? Got to be, said Sam, I'm fed up with cemeteries. I searched for life in zoos and I studied beautiful and natural death in the Museum of Natural History, I know how living creatures turn all dread and hostility into ceremony. A Christmas tree is also a ceremony. They hate together, love together, forgive together, kill together. Lily said: A beautiful tree, Lionel, and everybody has trees.

Not me, said Lionel. Rachel is still dying in the hospital. Saul Blau would bring shirts, and in pain at his wife's condition, he started in his mind's eye to dress his hungry children in all the shirts their parents, may they rest in Paradise, didn't have. Sam already had seven hundred sixtyseven shirts and didn't wear even one of them.

In London, the section that appeared in New York was published. Criticism was excited there, too. Dead Jews are excellent material for artistic success, says Sam, the death of a Jew works today, and Lionel who had turned into a success story, written up in Time, felt crushed, borrowed from Sam, incomprehensible to himself, humiliated.

Lionel didn't think all that was happening to him, he said: Jesus was a tremendous success story and he started believing that things were again happening to Sam, and Sam-dammit-won't put up a fir tree in my room.

Sam came out of the subway station. In his hand he held the hand of a tall girl. Her name was Licinda. Once they had studied acting together. When they acted an improvised piece and he called her Melissa, he was filled with a wave of warmth he had never felt, and then he mocked her and said how tall and shrewd she was. Maybe that's love, Licinda said then and he laughed. Licinda had long hair as smooth as silk. It was light brown and looked like a cascade. A rather nervous laugh was sketched on her open face by tormented nerves. Sam and Licinda walked in the dirty melting snow and bought wine and flowers. Loaded with shopping bags, they went down the steps and entered the house. Lily said: Sam brought a girlfriend with flowers and wine. Lionel saw the shy but aggressive laugh on Licinda's face and wanted to hug her as an old acquaintance. Lily took off Licinda's wet coat and gave her some hot wine and together they stood in front of the fireplace. Big logs wisped thin smoke and spread a pleasant warmth in the room, and Sam asked Licinda to help him. Lionel sat down in the brown easy chair, put on the new eyeglasses he had started using a few months earlier and wasn't yet used to, and Lily asked, What are you doing, and Sam said: Trimming the tree for Santa, Lionel. Lionel said: That's stupid, and Lily said: Lionel, your son wants a fir tree so let there be a tree, and Lionel said: He's a grown-up now, my sons die in private hospitals in Pennsylvania and don't put up fir trees in my apartments. They didn't respond, even though they saw Lily turn pale but recover immediately and they stood the tree in a box of sand, reinforced it, Licinda took out the ornaments that Sam had bought before and the chain of small lights she had hidden in her purse. Lionel asked: What exactly is your full name? And she said, My full name, Mr. Grumpy, is Licinda Eliot Hayden. Lionel said: His grandmother is dying and he puts up a fir tree! Licinda tried to help Lily put up water and make coffee, but Lionel got up from his easy chair, took a bottle of scotch out of the chest, poured drinks, added ice, and gave one to Licinda. She understands that better than coffee, he said angrily. Sam hung the chain of lights and plugged it in. For a moment the lights shorted out. They saw themselves as demons in the light of the red stumps of wood blazing in the fireplace. Sam fixed the broken light, fixed the short, and a pleasant light spread in the room. Lily went to Sam and gave him a cup of black coffee. He stood next to the tree he was trimming, drank the coffee as Lionel, Lily, and Licinda drank scotch and turned on the radio. Christmas songs were playing on the radio. He hummed the songs to himself, and Lionel said: Lily, light Hanukkah candles. Lily said: Not me, and not you either. I'm just a wasted father, said Lionel, I didn't teach you anything. Sam laughed and said: What I've forgotten you won't have time to learn. And then he added: You're too sentimental, Lionel. You're able to yearn for things that never were. I'll tell a story: A man married off his son to a woman. He made a banquet for his friends and when they had eaten, he said to his son, Go up to the attic and bring us wine from the barrel that's kept there. The son went up to the attic, went to the barrel, was bitten by a snake, and died. The father waited and the son didn't come down. The guests ate and the father went up and saw his son thrown dead between the barrels. He waited until the guests had eaten and drunk and finished reciting the blessing, and he said to them, Gentlemen, you didn't come to recite the blessing of the bridegrooms today, but the blessing of mourners. Not to bring my son to the wedding canopy did you come, but to put him in the grave.

Lily said: That's not Sam's voice, that's Ebenezer's voice. Licinda, who didn't want to understand and was frightened, said feverishly: What difference does that make? And Sam said: Christmas or Hanukkah, the main thing is that we're happy because I found myself a nice and wonderful woman and so cruel that her name is Licinda Eliot Hayden.

Licinda went to Sam, kissed him on the mouth, and said: It seems I love this man, and then she sat down in a chair, stretched her legs to the fire, and let the warmth enter into her until she felt the warmth suffocating her crotch and she started weeping. Sam asked her why she was weeping and she didn't answer, waited until the tears dried, and then asked if it really was allowed to sing Christmas carols in this house. Lionel said, No, but Sam said, Of course, and started to sing himself. Lily softly hummed "The Star of Bethlehem" and Licinda tried to sing but couldn't, because the tears moved from her face to her throat and Lionel, who wanted to lecture to her about the history of the Jewish people, decided to give up, shut his eyes and sank into a doze of weariness, which he later claimed was a characteristic result of his advanced age. Sam said: Safer to sing the songs of the winners, Lionel! But Lionel was already asleep, and Lily said: What the losers never understand is that there really aren't any winners in the world… And Sam looked at her, put on his coat and went out. Licinda watched him go, and Lionel who woke up saw the door shut, and said: Don't pay attention to every word he says, and he fell asleep again, but Lily said: Listen to him, he knows something none of your friends knows. Licinda shut her eyes, licked the little bit of whiskey still stuck to her lips, held her hand out, and Lionel, who opened his eyes again, held out a tired and shaking hand and poured her another drink. She poured the whiskey into the fire and brought her hand back to gesture a request.

No, no whiskey, she said and covered the mouth of the glass with her other hand. Lily went to the bedroom and came back from there in a white dress. Her hair was disheveled now. Sam, who came back with two bottles of wine, saw two angels standing next to the fireplace. He uncorked one bottle, poured into Licinda's empty glass, and also poured for himself, and after they drank, he said: Blessed art Thou 0 Lord our God King of the Universe who commanded us to light a Christmas tree, amen.

And then, when Licinda sat down, he ordered her to stand up, his voice was metallic and coarse. Lionel poured himself another glass of whiskey, this time without ice, and drank it without putting the glass down until he turned pale. Church bells were heard in the distance and Licinda started humming "Silent Night." Sam hugged Lily, put out the colored lights, and said: Lionel, sing something. Lionel asked: Sing what? His voice sounded of blood with an edge of whiskey. A song of thanksgiving to the god of Licinda and Lily, said Sam. Lionel said: I'm too drunk, and he fell into the easy chair. Sam said: Too bad I don't have nails. Lionel opened his eyes, took off his glasses, and looked at Lily. His face was impassive; Licinda looked drunk. Sam turned off the light again and plugged in the colored lights, Lily glowed against the dark tree. The branch moved, the electric lights went off and on, and Sam said: We're celebrating today one thousand nine hundred sixty-two years of His birth. Licinda tried to applaud, Lionel wanted to get up, and when he did, he slapped Sam's face, but Sam didn't react. Licinda said: That's beautiful, God! That's beautiful…

Advertising jingles were played on the radio. Lily released her hands from the tree, and Sam said: Two demonesses, he laughed and was sad at the same time. Lionel suddenly looked sad and gnarled. Sam said: The hangwomen look beautiful in the home of the hanged. Else Koch had a dog, his name was Man. Lionel, who muttered vague words, looked at the two women.

Licinda said: I met Sam when he did the play with the shoes and I'm scared… Lily said: Welcome to the home of the urban hangwomen. For the sake of argument, I'm Else Koch and you're the woman named Frieda with a white band on your arm trampled to death b y a gigantic dog..

Two hours after the birth of their messiah, when heavy snow started falling in the window, Licinda fell asleep in her chair. Lily stood fascinated at the tree and her eyes measured its beauty unlike the snores of Lionel, who firmly refused to admit that now that he had become a well-known poet, he started snoring. The light goes on and off. Sam pees sitting down on the toilet and forgets to get up, and then begins the event that Sam later called "the four lost years." None of them remembered exactly how it happened or what caused the years to disappear, but four years passed. Life flowed on the side, as if on another planet, Lionel published more and more chapters of the gigantic poem (seven hundred seventy-five pages) about the death of the Jews, Licinda came and went, there were months when she was apparently not there and Sam missed her or perhaps didn't, none of them remembered exactly. And then she came back and maybe she really wept as it seemed later. Sam hugged or hit her that time she remembered extremely unclearly as the day she broke the glass where Lionel collected the tears of angels. He was drunk and slept hugging the scrap of cloth of Sam's mother's dress and Sam was watching him. Other events took place: international or national, elections, one president fell and another was elected, thieves were arrested and one murderer drank the blood of his victim, the newspapers with Lionel's articles or articles about his poems were published regularly, none of them filed the oblivion precisely. Somebody, maybe Lily, said: Maybe we invented a machine of oblivion, but then they forgot they said that. A fortune teller Licinda may really have visited said: You're in love with a shadow; the man you live with doesn't exist, or he lives far away from here and Licinda was scared and ran away from the fortune teller's dark house and Sam staged plays, chose a group of actors and somehow, along with oblivion, as if in a dream everybody dreams together, united a troupe of actors, an auditorium was found at a university, they worked on the body, soul, and dialect of actors, Lily managed the house and the lives of Licinda, Sam, and Lionel, discovered in dictionaries words that were also forgotten, Sam was so immersed in forgetting that he once spoke for a long time in Yiddish with Licinda, and after years when the invention of time stirred ancient echoes in her, Licinda said: That's funny, Sam, and she started dreaming about people she had never known and who maybe really were her forefathers. The invention of extinct time wasn't a secret. An important poet claimed in an interview he granted one of the newspapers that Sam Lipp dictates his poems to Lionel from documented dreams filed by a Jewish magician who learned nine million words by heart and would recite them in seedy nightclubs.

Near the end of the long period of forgetting, Sam staged a play for two actors, closed the play because the words written by the playwright bored him. He wanted the Bronya the Beautiful to hold an apple in her mouth, he wanted to see his mother in the empty room, and he wanted Ebenezer, the camp, Kramer, the smell of bodies, he wanted to create a world nobody still believed ever existed. Licinda, who had long ago forgotten, stopped asking herself if she was in love with Sam and accepted her life with him as natural and started feeling children in her womb and was afraid of greenyellow eyes. She taught Sam quiet ceremonies of love, restrained lust, softness, and said: If I'm four years older it means they passed. Sam said: Ebenezer assigned me to be a witness, but how do you witness? Testimony has to be lies and by that to describe truth. The first time he produced Lionel's Lament for the Death of the Jews (an excerpt of the second cycle), the play was harshly criticized. He read the reviews calmly and said they were surely right, but he was more right. He taught his actors to be animals, to steal, to devour one another, to survive. They crawled and licked and hit one another, fought and learned to speak out of need and not desire. And Licinda sat in Sam's studio and took care of the wounded and offended actors, brought coffee and beer, mended, organized, supplied every detail, for long hours she talked with Lily, and at night she'd let loose.

Sam taught his actors and himself to act Darwin's theory of evolution, and started supporting them from the money Saul Blau would bring him from the shirts, five percent of their income belonged to him and he didn't know why. Rachel died alone quietly in a room full of flowers in a private hospital for incurables, and even at the time of her death, she didn't know who was who and didn't know that Sam Lipp wasn't Lionel and Lionel wasn't Joseph and Saul Blau was her husband. She smiled, shut her eyes, and from so much sadness and weariness she forgot to open them.

At his mother's funeral, Lionel stood and tried to remember his youth, and suddenly he grasped that all he had left were Samuel and Lily. He talked about Samuel's plays, and Lily said: He's not doing theater, he's creating the Fourth Reich! Then he put in a new door and the carpenter, who remembered Sam from the camp, said: Where's Ebenezer? And Samuel said: He died and I died too. The carpenter who remembered how Samuel used to bring him a slice of bread from the kitchen of the Sonderkommando, said: You know what's really awful? That we are alive. Lionel wrote a poem about that. The poem constituted a kind of end to the four extinct years. Critics started talking about Samuel's plays. His new theater evoked strong and contradictory reactions on both sides. At his birthday party, Sam sang a jolly song in Yiddish to the daughter of one of the actresses. Six of the actors could have been the baby's father and Samuel sang the song and started weeping. They saw the tears and Licinda ran away. And thus ended some camp with barbed wire fences, where they acted and dogs were sicced on them and he stood and whipped himself. In the morning when he got up, his leg was broken. The doctor couldn't explain the meaning of the phenomenon and put a cast on the leg. Samuel went to Licinda's parents, played chess with them, and taught them how to cheat at cards. In the small town in upstate New York he learned the annals of Licinda and connected her to the parents of his parents. And thus Licinda started having nightmares about the parents and grandparents Samuel knew from other places.

Among the salvations Licinda's grandfathers sought were salvations like the ones his parents' parents sought. And thus Samuel came to the story of Joseph de la Rayna and started adapting it for the theater. He told Licinda: You're my great love, you'll be what you always were, you'll be Frieda and Lilith. A German author wrote to Sam and Sam answered him. He wrote: I know who I am and who my father is and who Lionel's father is. Next time you'll be Weiss, but I'll be Kramer. Lily said: He's creating the Fourth Reich!

Tape / -

I've been talking for a few days now. Quoting. I didn't register the number of the tapes. Registered on the boxes. I'm tired. Are you a doctor, sir? Is it true that I masturbate into tapes? An unpleasant word for the first son of a settlement in the Land of Israel. Who lives in me and I don't live in him? You wanted to cure me, you make me talk, don't remember. Who taught me to hypnotize myself? The light is dimming, love that dream, the window, the ceiling, the gushing words, what else is left. The walls will fall. The treachery of mother, Joseph Rayna and Samuel. A garden is watered by Teacher Henkin. A dead son he raised. Boaz came. Said he was my son. Who's my son? I'm a pen that wrote a story, a story wrote a pen. They write about me, not worth a word. A tired carpenter of boxes for whores of SS men. Bad climate. One day a heat wave and then rain. Dana was soft as a caress. Mr. Klomin, friendly and lost. Mother? Her hatred. Walking to Marar to beat an Arab. Maybe I killed him. They said I said.

At the hems of a shepherd's cloak

I found a lover

Haughty near a stream near a stream,

A bird passed by a dream

The song a feather above

Is that love? Is that love?

Is that a song I remember?

Is this me?

Is it me speaking?

Who's speaking?

End.

My friend,

I attach here a report of Boaz Schneerson's lawyer. I hope you'll be interested in it. Incidentally, yesterday Ebenezer appeared at my house. He was wearing the kind of white suit they used to wear in Tel Aviv in the twenties. He knocked on the door and in his hand he held a bouquet of flowers, red chrysanthemums. I opened the door and he held the bouquet of chrysanthemums out to me and said he had come to wish me happy birthday. I told him, What's this, and he said: Isn't today your birthday? I thought a little and said: Right, and Hasha Masha and I had forgotten. I invited him in, he entered, sat on the sofa, and was silent. Then he got up, took a little tool out of the pocket of his white coat, and asked permission to fix our cabinet. Hasha Masha, who had come into the room a few minutes before, said: What's this? Why? He said: That's what I can do when I don't have my words, I've got information for the wood. Your cupboards and cabinets are dying, Henkin. He fixed the cabinet and then the easy chair and the cupboard and the chest. He went to his house and came back with a case full of bottles of lacquer in various shades and brushes and sandpaper and he smeared, filed, and smeared again. I loved to see him at his craft. He worked for many hours and stopped only once to drink a cup of tea that Hasha Masha gave him. This morning he returned to my house and looked at his work, fixed here and there and then I saw a smile spread over his lips. I said, Ebenezer, who knew wood in its distress, and he said, Nonsense, that's not what was, today it's nothing, and he left.

Yours, Obadiah Henkin

And here is the report.

To: The Assessing Official

For the Department of Investigations, Misgar Street 3, Tel Aviv.

In re: Income tax file of S.L.A. Company (Boaz Schneerson) No. 34/4654/8

From: Attorney Gideon (Janusz) Kramer, Ben-Yehuda Street 128, Tel Aviv.

(S.L.A. Inc.) Director: Boaz Schneerson, Tel Aviv.

Dear Mr. Mahluf,

As you know, my client is employed by the paratroopers of the Israeli Defense Force, heroes of the underground, saints of the Holocaust and ghetto fighters. My client's assistance to the bereaved families is widely known (See Appendix 1-letter from the branch of mourning-Ministry of Defense, letter from the branch of widows and orphans and letter from the branch of the bereaved). From 1952 until today, inclusive, the company (S.L.A.) has helped publish hundreds of memorial books. The company gathered material, helped directly or indirectly to publish other memorial books, helped establish district, local, brigade, family, and regimental memorials, initiated and established memorial barbed wire for Holocaust and heroism (including memorials), took care to locate, establish, maintain, populate, and decorate dozens of memorial rooms in public institutions, together with the Memorial to Sons it established meeting and unity houses, put up memorial plaques in schools, kindergartens, universities, and along with construction and repair companies (see appendices 2, 3, and 4) advised and assisted in establishing memorial monuments, signs of battles (including living reenactments of battles), public parks to the memory of the fallen and missing, and libraries in the name of those who fell. The S.L.A. company organized memorial conferences of brigades, battalions, the underground, official (132) district (245) military (334) ceremonies, and as aforementioned established the society of thirty-one (31) various memorials in various locations in Israel to commemorate the Holocaust and heroism. The company organized sixty-four assemblies and conferences to commemorate the fallen with subjects set in advance by the company in close and active cooperation with the Ministry of Defense, the (Israel Defense Forces) IDF, Yad Vashem, the Philharmonic Orchestra, Belt Berl, Belt Ze'ev Jabotinsky, and others.

In sum, those conferences (mentioned at the end), less the number of closed conferences of the Intelligence Institutenumber two hundred twenty-one.

In Appendices 6-10, you will find the names of hundreds of lecturers, paid consultants, payment for flag-raising, renovation, washing and maintaining memorials, care of tombstones, parking arrangements, payment for the Composers' and Authors' Association, orchestras and choirs, announcers, speakers, eulogists, poets paid royalties and/or one-time grants by the Company.

The Company also collects objects left on various battlefields, purchases objects that fell into unreliable hands, locates pieces of clothing, accessories, personal effects all over Israel.

Ever since listing for income tax purposes began, nine hundred fifty thousand kilometers of travel were listed. As for the value of the cars and jeeps, see Appendix 8a, which deals with the problem of attrition of cars and jeeps on battlefields and in the desert, and landmine insurance. The value of the insurance, amortization, small construction of barbed wire fences moved from their places-and in that matter, also see the judgment of the district judge in Jerusalem, A. Jacoby, in District Court Case 6/678 1961.

To calculate the correct value, it is necessary to add eightyone flights to Eilat and Sinai (for the aforementioned purposes), twenty-four trips abroad (financing activities of commemoration and fund-raising in Denmark, Germany, England, Holland, the US, South Africa, etc.), for contribution, consultation, commemoration, demarcation, and investigation.

Between 1952 and 1972, the Company employed for payment forty-six sculptors, two hundred craftsmen (carpenters, tinsmiths, ironworkers, painters, speakers, cantors, burial society, flagmakers, artists, graphic designers, chauffeurs, researchers, interviewers, tape recorders, maintenance workers, etc.).

A consultant from the Bergen-Belsen Society was employed by the company for two years at full payment and there were also royalties for printed material-all that in the sum of one hundred thousand dollars. Maintenance-two hundred fifty thousand pounds. Memorial for the Holocaust cost a sum impossible to detail here. The average sum for a reasonable calculation is one hundred thousand dollars, but the final sum has not yet been set.

Until '62, and in general, many documents are missing. The Company was then the private business of Boaz Schneerson and was not listed properly according to corporate law, but it paid its taxes as a private person. The sum of taxes was calculated and the difference was paid afterward according to a judgment (see Appendix 11).

Exchange of foreign currency was done according to the usual rates. Nontaxable contributions were calculated separately, they are listed in Appendix 12.

There were problems of publicity. The statue by Tamarin, who specialized in various trends of commemoration, constituted a problem in itself that is illustrative of all the problems. The great nuances of artists like Tamarin pose an especially difficult challenge to an attorney trying to prepare a report like this. There are memorials whose purpose is no longer known. Tamarin's fame grew because of the memorials and his fee also rose, because some of the agreements with the committees of parents and ad hoc committees were made prior to that. Cataloguing fame in the context of the fervor of those concerned with the issue casts doubt on a proper investigation of the expenses. Sometimes the date of concluding the memorials is so important they no longer calculate the signed contract and pay whatever comes to hand, and then S.L.A. has to bear financial responsibility, while its taxes are set according to contracts and memoranda of agreement, or receipts whose evidence is contradictory. There are memorials that were paid for, even though they were not erected because of stubbornness, or a public scandal. Merely dismantling memorials cost the Company about three hundred thousand pounds, moving memorials from place to place cost a great deal (see Appendix 16). Shifting the border, correcting mistakes, all that was not brought into the first account, and now has to be corrected.

Clearing rubble cost a fortune, but the tax is not valid in that matter, since the tax law does not take account of dangers of fire, war, etc. Payment to the army for burned tanks for memorials is calculated according to a price list that does not correspond with reality. In the case of operas of grief, bereavement, and plays of mourning, there is no precedent in the income tax legislation, while the value-added tax is high. Memorial conferences of underground organizations or regiments of the War of Independence are calculated differently from conferences of existing regiments that the IDF still refers to by name.

I want to mention a few numbers as an example of what is written in Appendices 17 and 18. Five hundred forty-five pamphlets for schools were printed and distributed by the S.L.A. Company without cooperation with other bodies. Pamphlets for kindergartens (544); songbooks for youth (134); pamphlets for preparing assemblies in grammar schools (524); pamphlets for junior high schools and vocational high schools were printed in hundreds of thousands of copies. Pamphlets such as "What to Sing on "How to Arrange Flowers at the Ceremony of " were printed in thousands of copies and distributed free. Pamphlets for young people in the Diaspora were printed in six teen languages. The price list was high because of the costs of translation, editing, and printing on quality paper. Records, help in writing musical or dramatic works, radio and television programs, ninety-six films for the Diaspora in cooperation with the Foreign Ministry and the Absorption Ministry. And if you add to all that the postponed payments, an unstable calculation of the rates of inflation and the cost of living, you will see the impossibility of a precise listing.

All the aforementioned does not take account of the personal contribution of Boaz Schneerson, his private expenses with regard to those activities and others are enumerated in the appendices. His activity on behalf of the committees of parents, the commemoration rooms, swimming pools in soldiers' homes, seminar rooms, youth hostels and their upkeep, mobile libraries in memory of the missing, and on this subject, see the letter of Jordana Etzioni of the Ministry of Defense and the letter of Mr. Obadiah Henkin, chairman of the Committee of Bereaved Parents and another letter of his vice chairman Isaiah Shimshoni.

Additional expenses with regard to lawsuits with artists, creators, craftsmen, committees of workers, the union of painters and sculptors, the union of engineers and architects were more than ten times more than a rough estimate. I attach to my letter the affidavit of Boaz Schneerson, given to attorney Bohan Tsedek, the letters of Henkin, Shimshoni, Jordana Etzioni, and others, and as a sign that these words are written innocently, three letters are attached above by members of the Committees of Bereaved Parents of World War II, the War of Independence, and the Six-Day War, separate from the central and national Committees of Parents. A letter from the Society of BergenBelsen in New York is also attached here, along with one from the Union of Fifty in England, a letter by Professor Israel S. Shauli on the sociology of bereavement, a letter by Mr. Nahum Naftali who teaches widowhood in three high schools (experimentally), and letters from three well-known intellectuals who have never taken part in any assembly or memorial book, and whose material has never been printed in this context and thus they have no axe to grind, and they are A. Galbovski, Avinoam Ha-Him, and D. N. Avigdor.

See also Appendices numbers 20-25-Commemoration, What Is It? (Jarushka and Aviram). "Bereavement and Insomnia," published by the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Judaism. "Poetry of Mourning, Revenge for Bereavement," by S. Nahmiahu. "Songs and Hymns for Holidays and Celebration," by Even Hen and Atara Shaked, etc.

Sincerely, Gideon (Janusz) Kramer, Tel Aviv

I have translated the contents for you, not the appendices. The trial took place before a judge in the district court. Boaz pleaded guilty. After you judged in his favor, Boaz wrote a letter to the judge thanking him, he said he was writing on behalf of Menahem Henkin, may the Lord avenge his blood. And I? I was silent.

Tape / -

Rebecca Schneerson's house, afternoon. On the table stands a steaming samovar, on either side of the table sit an old woman and a man in a uniform, decorated with medals and sporting an unidentified military cap. They're drinking tea. An Arab boy named Ahbed brings a plate with pistachios, sunflower seeds, halvah, biscuits, dumplings, and goat cheese; he serves a pitcher of water and two glasses. The old woman puts a sugar cube into her mouth and sucks the tea through the sugar.

Captain: Excellent tea.

Rebecca: Thanks for saying that, Captain, it's excellent even if you don't say so.

Captain: I say the tea is excellent because it's excellent and also because I think it's excellent.

Rebecca: You've been saying my tea is excellent for forty-five years now, Captain, you say it's excellent when it is excellent, and you say it's excellent even when it's not excellent. And always on Wednesday. I'm starting to doubt if I can believe your honesty, Captain.

Captain: I say the tea is excellent on Wednesday because only on Wednesday do you invite me. I say the tea is excellent even when it's not excellent for three reasons: One, I can't bear tea and I drink tea only be cause of you, so whether it's excellent or it's not, it tastes the same. And the second reason, I say it's excellent is because I know only one kind of tea and it's the tea I drink with you, and so it has to be excellent even when it's not excellent. Another reason is that I've been drinking tea with you for forty-five years now and you still stir strong feelings in me, if I were allowed to marry you, I would start drinking coffee also on Wednesday afternoons or continue drinking tea, and that would surely amount to the same thing, because I would be too happy to distinguish, just as the hope that you'll still deign to marry me allows me to enjoy your tea even when I loathe it. In South America, we're used to drinking coffee.

Rebecca: And when were you last in South America, Captain?

Captain: To be precise, I'm a colonel. And second, you're evading again.

Rebecca: I'm now over eighty, Captain. You won't be a colonel to me now, children you won't make me now, what good will it do you to marry me? Money you don't need and even if you did, I'd leave everything to Boaz and not give you a cent.

Captain: You don't appreciate the force of my love, Madame.

Rebecca: I'm not fond of that word, Captain.

Captain: I know, but I also know you wouldn't have drunk tea with me for forty-five years if you hadn't found something in me.

Rebecca: You didn't stop amusing me, Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg. You remind me of Michael Halperin in the lion's cage. You remind me of the of the splendid and absolutely needless way my husband died on the shores of Jaffa.

Captain: May he rest in peace.

Rebecca: As a Christian you don't have to say such things.

Captain: I also have memories.

Rebecca: Years ago you didn't have memories. You've changed with time, once you didn't have a childhood because you couldn't have been born in all the places you said you were born in. You're Argentinean, Jewish, Christian, Swiss, American, and you're also a spy and write for a French newspaper in Cairo.

Captain: The newspaper was closed thirty years ago. I've always admired you, Madame, and your late husband, too.

Rebecca: That's because you didn't know him, he wronged me.

Captain: He was a brave man.

Rebecca: He was innocent and beautiful, not brave. I'm brave.

Captain: You're very brave, Madame.

Rebecca: I'm also beautiful and lately you've been forgetting to say that.

Captain: You're the most beautiful woman I've ever known.

Rebecca: You say that so I'll agree to marry you. But this week is out of the question.

Captain: I've been waiting forty-five years now, Madame.

Rebecca: Another few days won't change anything.

Captain: At our age, it can change a lot. But I told you twenty-five years ago, in February, if you change your mind on a day that isn't Wednesday, you can always wake me up, I'm a light sleeper and I hear everything.

Rebecca: You're a light sleeper in my grandson's house.

Captain: In your son's house, Rebecca. Didn't you adopt him?

Rebecca: In your church and that's not legal.

Captain: It was legal in your eyes then and it's legal in the eyes of God.

Rebecca: God doesn't live here.

Captain: But you talk with him.

Rebecca: That's because of something else, not faith.

Captain: Your grandson or son worries me.

Rebecca: My son.

Captain: He worries me even though I love him.

Rebecca: My son died in the Holocaust. Boaz doesn't have to interest you.

Captain: I'm his godfather.

Rebecca: You're right, will you have some more to drink?

(She pours him another cup, he drinks with polite reluctance.)

Captain: Good.

Rebecca: What worries you?

Captain: He sells poems and monuments. He refuses to build me the Dante monument and he's got a girlfriend.

Rebecca: He's got me!

Captain: He's got one. She was the girlfriend of somebody who died. He killed her boyfriend. That's what Mrs. Hazin from the grocery store told me.

Rebecca: Her father was also a fool. I didn't know you went to the grocery store.

Captain: Once I went, I don't go anymore.

Rebecca: You insult him, Captain. Ever since he's been working in the burial society he hasn't been the boyfriend of any girl.

Captain: Yes he is, and I'm worried.

Rebecca: Stop worrying, I know everything, he's my son and my grandson.

Captain: Maybe he's also your father and husband? What about me?

Rebecca: You're starting to be sentimental again, Menkin. Now you'll start weeping on me. You're eighty years old now.

Captain: Even old men are allowed to cry, Rebecca.

Rebecca: Not to us.

Captain: I'm going now. Take it under advisement, I'll wait for you all my life, but my life now isn't something that will take much time.

Rebecca: I'll think about it. (Smiles sweetly.)

He gets up, kisses her cheek, salutes, exits. She sits, and the greatgrandson of Ahbed enters with a tray. She looks at the window and sees Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg's splendid back walking proudly toward Ebenezer's house.

Rebecca: That fool Dana!

Tape / -

Frustrated, unkempt and crimson, reminded, a whiskey in his hand, how to forget, in a bombastic letter to a judge consulting with a serial thief who sat with him in a bar and said an apple no longer symbolizes joy, Boaz. They lend envy today with interest, I'm drunk. The thief climbed on the balcony to make love to two lighted trees that had been brought here from civilized countries. A thick-bearded Anglo-Saxon from North Africa drew partitions on a map of a city that had been invented that morning with a joy that looked to experts more bored than it was supposed to be between three wars in which sympathy for Israel was almost uprooted along with the knowledge of forgotten courage. People were already drawing maps of cities where they were almost born and which had been annihilated long ago and they did that with chilly amazement, and then with a thief of flowerpots, on the balcony, above a ticking tranquillity, a fabric of tan tones and crumbling, filed in a nailed file cabinet with sorting tags that look like the homemade jam of a woman of a soldier's dreams, stood Boaz Schneerson and wrote a letter to the district court judge, chief judge, and an account of the days with him, and on him, and under him, and the thief forgives him and says: The arrow, sir, is no longer a symbol of regret just as the apple isn't a symbol of joy, and Boaz asks what is regret, he doesn't know, and then he recalls. He always recalls that there were days when he gave his temples the importance they craved, well-shorn temples, the best Middle Eastern tradition here on the shore of yearning. Shower, laced-up dresses of local charmers, lacking the lace of laciness for a person like me, a system in himself, hoodwinking eye and sin, a sin that isn't his sweet crimson air flowing and glowing, poets, and I am for the judge and he is for me, leather case with silk leather case of wild lexical melange of a lecherous word-thief, never let it be forgotten, he said with a glass of liquor in his hand, the face of a judge you can see only on unnecessary waking, yours, Boaz Schneerson! Women will stand in line, will learn birth and death in retrospective reconstruction, waving a smell of sour balsam who rises in that house of quarrels to die with me drink himself to death, and here, after they turned the maps into scattered tombstones and the present to an arrow sent to what almost was, his mind was swallowed up, his tongue was glued to the table of an overly enlightened woman's lap, Noga's here, Noga's there, Henkin will bite, Henkin will sing to me, to exclusivize the root and uproot the exclusive, the gray ancient preserved and choked, everything was spilled out, destroyed like the riddle of cities that don't exist, will here become the intercity mourning with drivers attached to the index, sucking the marrow of stone, we will die in a noontime nap, shame on the meek, horrible and terrible, a record of nothingness, the last rain abundantly and I rain from my own abundance, in the language of darkness, grace of whisper plowed and traps drought, this is how the sum of all roots routed in you, son of a bitch, was born…

Noga, Noga. Noga, who was a stranger to the hut on the seashore even before Boaz Schneerson moved to the attic apartment, she sat-and this is something that happened long before that-padded in a sheaf of light that shone on her, and she defended herself from her feelings. She didn't know what to do when they knocked on the door: to open, not to open, she worried, the sea spread out through the window, and she waited for Boaz to tell her. He didn't tell and she got up, hugged her shaking body in her hands, stretched them, went to the door, was a little amazed, and opened it. There stood a solid man wearing a beret who said something about how Boaz knew Menahem and maybe he also knew his son who fell in Ramle and loved to read the poems of the poet Ratosh. He wants to know if Boaz can arrange a meeting for him with the poet Ratosh. The poet Ratosh can explain to me, said the man, and Noga trembled because she knew that Boaz would bring him Ratosh the poet, to explain his son to him, then he showed the letters of the son and asked for an expert opinion, maybe to make a pamphlet of them? Letters full of names, Ratosh and the poems of his black wedding canopy and the night road from Mesilot to Sadeh Nahum and Belt She'an at night when the Arab dogs are barking and he quoted an excerpt from the book Pampilov's Men. The man measured the rectangle of sea in the window and smiled. Then, maybe about a month later, a child also came with a letter and Boaz said too loudly: If a woman comes here, give her coffee, I'm going down to swim in the sea.

But the woman was already on her way to him and the man whose son loved Ratosh's poems met her, but didn't know where she was going, and Boaz thought: Somebody said we have to find a moral equivalent of war, what's the equivalent of that nothingness, that dreadful, heartbreaking lust? Meanwhile, he put on a bathing suit and over the bathing suit he put on his pants and shirt. Noga looked at the sea. The woman walked past the hut. He'll search for the poet Ratosh, said Noga, what do I tell Menahem from Menahem, to Boaz from Boaz? But Boaz didn't go down to the sea. He sat down on the windowsill and drank the coffee Noga gave him before. Outside the wind raised leaves and papers and sand in the wind and yellow limestone flowers didn't budge. A ship sailed north and Noga stood up and facing the small mirror tried to put on a new belt. In the mirror, Noga saw Boaz's half-shut eyes and also the ship. What began as trying on the belt turned into being a game. She stretched the belt and released it, and said: I've got a riddle for you. A bagel distributor walked on Mapu Street and distributed four bagels to every apartment. When he came to the last apartment he saw he had only three bagels left. He panicked and thought: Where did the fourth bagel disappear? He reversed direction and searched for the bagel. He came back to the bakery and understood that he had lost the bagel on the way, but didn't know where. You know where the bagel disappeared? Boaz didn't open his eyes and his face was stuck to the rim of the cup and she knew he was measuring her with his eyes shut, that he was expert in looking with eyes shut and she played with the belt again, her face frozen, the man seeking the poet Ratosh still between her lashes and Boaz was silent and waited for the woman who was now walking in the street and he was still wearing a bathing suit under his clothes. Noga emitted a brief laugh that shriveled her cheeks and suddenly made her lost, burned, he wanted to get up and hug her, but he didn't know how much, sometimes, it was forbidden to touch her. And then Noga whispered: A fat man and a beautiful woman sat in a train compartment. The fat man was smoking a big cigar, and the beautiful woman was holding a barking dog on a leash. The beautiful woman said to the fat man: Sir, your cigar bothers my dog and so he's barking. The fat man with the cigar said: Your barking dog bothers my cigar. Finally, the beautiful woman rips the cigar out of the fat man's mouth and throws it on the platform. The fat man picks up the dog, removes its leash and throws the dog outside. The dog runs after the cigar and you know what he found?

Boaz didn't know.

He found the bagel the bagel seller lost, said Noga.

Boaz didn't respond and looked at the ship that had almost disappeared beyond the Sheraton. A sudden rain fell on the sands that scrunched up as if they too were ripples of water. A woman in a transparent raincoat approached the hut. That is a war ground and you don't see blood, said Boaz and looked at the sand. The woman passed by the German who was still selling suitcases here so that some day he could go back to Europe and he didn't know how to cross that cruel sea that erected a barrier between him and the landscape he yearned for. The woman thought: For two weeks now I've been trying to get here and have been afraid, and Noga heard the knock on the door even before the woman knocked, and she straightened up, took off the belt, Boaz didn't budge, and said: That's the woman who wrote to me. Noga said: You should have known where the bagel was, but Boaz stared at the door and Noga opened it and the woman came in out of the rain and sprayed water on the floor. Noga helped her take off her coat. She lit the stove and the woman stood between the stove and the door and when she looked at Boaz, she was no longer sure why she had come.

Boaz saw a child running along the sand in the rain. The woman was blighted, but her breasts were full.

After she spoke with her eyes almost shut, Noga went to a corner, sat and folded her legs and decided she was a statue. Menahem's poem, she said: "So charming, Teacher Henkin said to write to you, you have no idea how many times he read the poem to us, and my Yoram is also in that poem, they were all boys who gave birth to themselves, a poor generation, they tried to be answers to their parents' dreams which they themselves had to kill. Surely you'll forgive me. My late husband used to say: Take care of him, I won't hold out and he really didn't. Didn't I take care enough? Noga didn't budge and said: He forgives you, and she stared at Boaz hunched up on the windowsill. Boaz performed an experiment he had tried in his childhood after he read Yotam the Magician by Korczak, he tried to be invisible.

Yoram fell in Iraq-Manshiya. You must have known him! Everybody knew him in Tel Aviv. He'd walk on his hands on the shore from Frischmann to the pool in the north and back. Here's his picture, she said, and held out a hand with a picture suddenly, Yoram Pishinovsky, you're sure you didn't know him?

Boaz takes the photo and looks. Curly hair, serious eyes, soft thin cheeks, deathphoto. The serious and saccharine puppets with gigantic pompadours who left class photos that were too professional, he thought. Noga offers the woman coffee, but the woman doesn't want to drink. She can't sit either. Hidden treasures went down the drain, she says. Here, this is what we have left of him, and she takes a few drawings by Yoram out of the leather case and gives them to Boaz and wants to know where his Australian hat and Parker fountain pen disappeared. Sorry about such nonsense, but what's left of them? A fountain pen, and even that's lost! The Negev was cut off, and I searched, she said, and how do you know where to search for things like that? And something was needed? Then they showed me a grave, but there was no hat there and no Parker fountain pen, and I asked, and I'm a member of our club aren't I and every week, I come to the Shimonis, but nobody knows and then that poem and you…

We walk and Teacher Henkin explains. He also speaks nicely. But at least he's got a poem, no, Yoram didn't write poems. Now she said pensively, sadly, hunched up inside herself: I stand here and look at you and the young lady and the stove and I think: What folly, what am I searching for, you must think I'm a fool. And in the middle of her words, she stopped, picked up her coat, and started putting it on too hastily. Her defeat was total, in the depths of her heart she knew she had come in vain and that whole two weeks, she muttered, that whole two weeks, a vague hope lodged in her, now it's not! In her face Boaz saw that mysterious charm of pain when it's disguised as shame, what a patched-up fragility is life itself, from that human crease life burst forth that terrified him, he couldn't imagine it and thought about himself, about Menahem, and then he got up and took off the woman's coat, sat her in the chair, the rain stopped, the clouds sailed quickly and the blue sky appeared and he said: It will be all right, Yoram's mother, it will be all right. And a few days later, he brought the woman a Parker fountain pen and an Australian hat. Her house was full of plants. She grew them as if she wanted to hide in a jungle. Now she was practical, asked where to put the things, and Boaz built her a corner, hung the drawings from school, the letter from the Ministry of Defense, the map of the battle for Iraq-Manshiya that Boaz had brought her, the hat and the fountain pen he put on the cabinet, with an enlarged picture of Yoram framed in black. She stuck some money in his pocket, and said: You had expenses and I don't think you should bear them. He pushed away the money, but when he saw how she thrust the money into the pocket of his coat hanging on the hanger, he didn't say a thing. He also bound the compositions for her, and that's how, that's how it all started, said Noga-

Tape / -

For three days she didn't talk. And then she tried to talk and a choked moan burst out of her mouth and then they went into the other room, and he said: Noga, they need that and I bring them what they want. I didn't search for it, it found me. And you too, it happened unintentionally.

Tape / -

Noga sat in bed. She posted her legs like two shapely and tented triangles in the light from the lamp. Wearily her arms hugged her raised legs and her head rested on her knees. In the room the small electric heater burned, spreading a reddish light. Boaz was seen walking toward the water. Only wrinkles of sand and spots of damp remained from the storm. She smelled death and thought maybe the ceiling really had fallen on her at night. Her face was red from the light. The room smelled of cigarettes, rain, and wet sand. Boaz's supple body was seen solitary and gallant at the empty sea. She thought about the frozen water slowly warming his body, the light dwarfed distances, the opaque and airy sea, filled with a supple body of a snake. The crystalline swimming was more ancient than she, a thousand-year-old woman, death in her womb, everything was so unreliable: the woman with the money, those people who come, the trips, the notebooks he was starting to edit, that foolish man. She didn't move until she saw him come out of the water, spraying sea jets, in the cold he ran. She put on an old bathrobe she had brought from the Henkin house long ago and decided to brush her teeth with her fingers, to rub the gums with cold water and char a hem of the robe. He ran along the shore, maybe where Yoram Pishinovsky had walked on his hands and everybody would admire him. After she brushed her teeth with her fingers and burned the hem of the robe, she drank four cups of cold water, and gnashing her teeth as a betrayed woman she could wait for him again with such great lust.

Tape / -

To the Court, Tel Aviv

Re: Income Tax File No. 34/17656T. S.L.A. Company, Ltd.

Dear Sir,

My name is Noga Levin. For six years I have lived with Boaz Schneerson, director of the S.L.A. Company, Ltd., and I love him. I mention that detail even though I know the court does not consider issues of emotion, or even concepts of morality and justice, but law. Love and law do not necessarily overlap. Maybe loving means breaking the law? While there is a law of justice, there is surely no law of love. By the letter of the law, I also think Mr. Schneerson's acts are not to be faulted, as is clear from your correct and reasoned judgment. On the other hand, if I had to judge Boaz Schneerson, and my love would serve as some measure just as admissible as the testimony you heard and the papers you read-I may have judged him differently.

And again, I do not mean to cast doubt on your ethical integrity or your judicial talents, Judge. It is not you I'm judging, but myself.

I don't think I will be able to sleep quietly or look at myself in the mirror if I do not give vent to strong feelings of shame that fill me. Love, unlike the law, is relativity seeking cover.

With my own eyes, my dear sir, I saw a marginal issue in Boaz Schneerson's life turn into a flourishing business. The very fact that the death of strangers turns into a "business" in the usual sense of the word is not monstrous in my eyes. On the other hand, I am aware of the objective need, if pain can be called that, which turned the S.L.A. Company Ltd., into a business. That is, I am judging the situation of which Boaz Schneerson is only a symbol. Yet for me, he cannot be a symbol, but a man, a man I love.

I was not a mute witness, sir, but also a reluctant partner. In general, I can insist, but in fact, the business flourished and I helped. I was drawn into Boaz's wild adventure, first as a spectator and then as an advisor. It wasn't possible to stop the cart. Pain was driving the cart. I mean what people felt, yearnings for their sons, their husbands, their dear ones. When the cart came to the bottom of the mountain and I told Boaz Schneerson what I thought, and asked him to stop, he said he couldn't. What started as bad luck and then was inexorable, turned into ambition. And it was all innocent: first Henkin, then a man, then a woman who wanted an Australian hat and a Parker fountain pen, and then? Then it snowballed. Boaz brought together a bereaved father with a poet whose poems his son liked to read, so the poet would explain to the father who his son was. And Boaz even started getting interested in his acts because they contained some reply to the burning in him, a challenge, maybe it was a mercy killing, after death, of the best of the youth, to lose everything, maybe it was a reply to the fact that his grandmother saved him from death when he didn't want to come back. And by word of mouth, his name became famous. Anybody who needed a notebook came to him, anybody who needed a monument came, the personal need of every single one of those people was human, but the address was now an office with a telephone and a secretary and jeeps and cars and such, income tax files, and calculations of losses, and expenses, and an accountant and a lawyer.

There were real poems and letters, and there were also fakes. They need that, said Boaz, and I provide them with what they need. Isn't that a picture of a real situation? Surely, its ethics are definitely dubious, its relative morality-isn't. The death of others cannot be a source of resurrection. That death, sir, took his friends, him it didn't touch, what a revenge!

And then we had to move. The hut on the seashore was now full of portraits, objects, parts of burned tanks, maps, and in the penthouse apartment on Lilienblum Street, the rooms were now turned into offices and there was a secretary there and two typewriters, a Hebrew one and a foreign one, and file cabinets. The number of temples grew. Hundreds of booklets were written and edited. We became a company of gravediggers.

In the war, Boaz Schneerson lay among the dead and played dead. Two or three hundred times he was condemned to death because all the shots aimed at the dead could have killed him. Maybe that's how the notion of a vulture was stamped in his mind. It all started in the house of Mr. Henkin of the Committee of Bereaved Parents. He brought a poem there. He brought hope after death there. Menahem Henkin was the fellow I had a relationship with and some days I thought I was in love with him. Maybe that was the most awful thing of all, the sense of betraying love, revealing it in a true light, too late. Or perhaps in a late light, too true? We were mobilized then, we'd meet for a few days and part, I was afraid of him, I pitied him, and maybe I loved him, because a latent fear lodged in me that Menahem Henkin was destined to die, but then I also discovered that I didn't love him. I was alone, I had nobody to talk to, I sat with Menahem's mother and looked at her, at the locked seal on her handsome face and I didn't find solace, I couldn't say a thing, everybody knew that after the war we'd get married. His mother was worried, she didn't even try to admit the existence of my allusions, she wrote him letters that didn't get to their address, and knitted him socks that nobody wore, and I sat and wrote a letter to Menahem explaining to him why we had to part, for a moment I forgot the vague lodged fear in me, the fear that Menahem was destined to die. I sent the letter, and then we found out that he fell. I didn't know if he got the letter and I was still his girl. Uncles from Switzerland sent chocolate and gold earrings to the fiancee, the fiancee was me. Suitors were afraid of me. I sat in the Henkin house. Everybody wanted me to be the model widow. They didn't want the happiness of those who come back to their lovers, marry, and disappear into the gray everydayness of rationing and the new state, they wanted the little bit of splendor, the pain and bereavement that stuck to me and I sank into a slumber that lasted years. Menahem's mother understands now. Later on I understood that all the time she knew the love affair had ended long ago. She felt more than I knew, but she also thought I had betrayed her. Henkin was compelled to give concrete expression to his pain, I was his refuge. I divided myself between them, Henkin and his dead son. I recorded in the album, in a fluent handwriting, the names of the places where he was photographed. On the day Henkin brought Boaz Schneerson home, I knew that Boaz came to take me.

He wriggled and waited. I waited too. Menahem's mother sat and looked at me contemptuously. Death blended me with Menahem, through Boaz. In fact, after I loved Boaz, I could return to loving Menahem. Boaz, who didn't know I had stopped loving Menahem even before his death, tried to put a hand on me and then changed his mind and didn't. I waited. I didn't say a word but I wanted to. They always think they defeat me, both Menahem and Boaz, while I, I chose the two of them by myself. Boaz decided he had in fact killed Menahem because he saw a picture of me with Menahem, he loved me and came to take me away from him. He described to me how he killed Menahem to get me and I tried to pretend I believed. He was attached to me even though he tried to live without love. But he wanted Menahem's mother to forgive him for being alive instead of Menahem. And Boaz went on building a stage set for the dead. As a judge you must know: He didn't kill Menahem, Menahem died long before that, but… I told him, come on, let's start a new life. He fled but he didn't want to. There were meetings with army officers, parents, engineers, writers, poets, sculptors, planners, lighting experts, printers, I served coffee, tea, peanuts, wine, I was there, I saw him weeping as he sat and wrote fictional love letters, it was a humiliating spectacle. I told him: You're reducing them; what kind of victory is it that nobody will remember? And the apartment grew.

And everything was full of fabricated death.

I'm writing to you because I want you to know that no matter how reasoned your judgment was, it approves, as I do with my life, a serious act that may in truth not be judged. Like many people I know, and you too, without any premeditation, Boaz turned the nightmare into a celebration and then into a profession. But to the same extent, you can say a prison warden deserves punishment because he keeps under lock and key a person whose nature is to be free, or that you yourself sentence people to severe punishments when the natural law is that life precedes everything, you judge the person by the laws of society, not the laws of nature or life. I understand those considerations, I accept them, but because of those very reasons I must protest, at least to you, because you judged in favor of a man I love, and so you were the only person to whom I can address these words. I go to the Ministry of Defense and see thousands of notebooks. I peep. Oblivion is a medicine that, like life, is intended to circumvent death.

I thought then in court that maybe you would condemn something rooted so deeply here, so awful, but you made a judgment and a judgment didn't make you, you didn't indicate the root of the problem, I wasn't disappointed, I understood, I have no complaints. I attach a letter I wrote to the Levinsky Teachers' College on the night I got drunk for the first time in my life and Boaz raped me when I would have defended myself with a broken bottle in my hand and I didn't hit him.

Yours, Noga Levin

To the Administration of the Levinsky Teachers' College, Tel Aviv

Dear Sirs:

I was very interested in your announcement in the newspaper. You ask the students who attended the Teachers' Col lege who lost their husbands (or) their fiances (your word!) to send one page with the events of our life for the anniversary of the Teachers' College, and here is mine-

My name is Noga Levin. I finished school in nineteen fortyseven. My parents died two years before I was born in a small town near the Zxanten Gulf in southern China. We were the only Jews on the street. All my husbands died of the cancer of war. The last one was in his death throes on the way to the cemetery, but it wasn't possible to change the custom, and in the middle of the funeral, he died. If you're preparing a class reunion, please do not include me among the bereaved girls. Death terrifies me. I live with a man who refuses to marry me, because he loves me. All my love affairs were with dead men. Now that I live with a hangman, I weave a new rope for him. He kills my husbands and every time he succeeds, he brings me a black flower. So, it's not true that there are no black flowers-they should be grown in beds for memorial days and days of mourning and that could even have been a branch of export. On memorial days I sing sad English songs. I know somebody who sold a hundred thousand armored cars for days of mourning. With the money he got from the armored cars, he bought me a white dress and real pearls. Please take me off the list of volunteers for teaching widowhood, bereavement, orphanhood, and commemoration. I intend to live in Denmark with a dog close by and a thin man who smokes a pipe and works in a bank close to home and goes to work on a bicycle. I live with a man who lends his acts of heroism to all kinds of dead people. I think he's teaching me something I don't want to learn even when I was a student the Teachers' College. The main thing you didn't teach me. You taught me to live with death, you didn't teach me to live with life. And that's now a national phenomenon. Now I'm drunk and I feel how much I lack something called a hunger for life.

Respectfully, Noga Levin

Judge, the letter was returned to me, the director came to visit me. He found a cold, silent, and apparently handsome woman. That's what he said. I told him somebody wrote the letter in my name. After he left, Boaz Schneerson filed that letter under "trivialities." You do know the file "trivialities," the one that isn't taxable.

Yours, Noga Levin

I want, said Noga, for somebody to finish me off and Boaz. To destroy the devil in him that lives in me. To release us from the dependence on ourselves and on death. But the years pass. I'm here. I learned, Noga thought of driving a jeep, they collect parts of burned tanks and rotten berets, etc., etc., etc….

Tape / -

I got off the plane shrouded in foreignness. Ebenezer Schneerson got off the plane shrouded in foreignness. Around him was a state he didn't know. When he got into the bus from the plane to the air terminal with Fanya R., he tried to think, but he couldn't. he only said: When we come to Israel, there will be Israeli buses at the airport and Hebrew police. And Fanya R. said: Ebenezer, we've already come.

The clerk stamped his papers, the suitcases came on the baggage carousel, and he stood outside, facing the yelling cabdrivers, Fanya R. leaning on him and he looked at the turmoil.

They took a cab to the settlement. The driver was listening to a radio program and Ebenezer looked at the landscape he thought he was imagining. When they passed the tombstone of the paratroopers, Ebenezer asked to stop. He asked: Where is Marar? The driver turned his head, looked at the strange couple in amazement, stopped at the barrier of prickly pear that still remained here on the border of the citrus grove, and said, What? Marar? What Marar?

The village that was here, said Ebenezer.

Don't know, said the driver, that's the tombstone of paratroopers.

There was Marar here, said Ebenezer.

There was also Sodom and Gomorrah, said the driver, but the tourists don't find them and come to Tel Aviv, which is almost the same thing, and he laughed. He was smoking a pungent cigarette. Ebenezer looked for the houses sliding down the slope, like dovecotes, and didn't find them. Maybe there was no village, he thought, maybe there will be, I don't know, what do I know, maybe that's part of the things that are going to happen like my trip to Israel that is still to come. Something in him bothered him; there was Marar, there was Dana, they weren't, and a dull ticking of old lust stirred in him.

On the main street, nobody knew him. He was dragging a suitcase and Fanya R. walked behind him. They went down the slope, they passed by what had once been the threshing floor, saw new houses and handsome gardens, and an old DeSoto with a woman who looked like a scarecrow, wearing a wide-brimmed hat smoking a long thin cigar, and they came to Rebecca's house. He didn't recognize the house, but the sight of the aging Argentinean officer watering the garden, wearing a military cap, gave him a dull sense of belonging. Shaking with a sudden anger that gripped him, he grabbed Fanya R.'s hand and with his other hand, he pounded on the door. The door was hidden in a thicket of gigantic bougainvillea. The great-grandson of Ahbed opened the door, looked suspiciously at the Last Jew and the woman. The Last Jew said: We came to visit Mrs. Schneerson. The great-grandson of Ahbed said what he had been taught to say: She's not home and come back in a month and then you'll go again, and he tried to lock the door, but Ebenezer put a foot on the threshold and stopped the door. He said: You must be the grandson of Ahbed. The great-grandson of Ahbed didn't move a muscle, and said: I'm the great-grandson of Ahbed, and remove your foot, sir.

Tell the old lady her son has come back home, said Ebenezer.

Ahbed pushed Ebenezer, managed to lock the door, and disappeared. He put the suitcase down on the tiles at the entrance and waited.

A short while later, Ahbed opened the door a little and said: She said her son is dead, but since you're here already, come in. Fanya R. smiled. Ebenezer hugged her, and said: When we come to Israel, my mother will be excited. And Ebenezer tried to remember if it really was Rebecca, whose flyswatter he could hear now, curious. But he couldn't remember. When Ahbed asked them to come in to what was called the "salon," they walked like two frightened children. Ahbed locked the door behind them. Rebecca sat in an easy chair at a table with black domino tiles. Even Fanya R. could guess that Rebecca had just won a victory. She surveyed Ebenezer for a long time and her old beautiful eyes turned to Fanya R. She examined her impassively, and said: Ebenezer Schneerson, you were dead!

Her face was covered with a cloud of rumination and she looked as if she were trying to solve a riddle without help from anybody. She said: Now the Captain will have to move out of Boaz's house!

Whose?

Boaz's, she repeated. Ebenezer looked at her and tried to recall, but he couldn't. Fanya R. sat down on a chair, put her hands on the arms, one of which was carved with tiny features, and Ebenezer said: I'll live in Tel Aviv, near Samuel.

Who's Samuel? asked the old woman.

Samuel, said Ebenezer.

The old woman looked outside and saw the avenue of almond trees, and said: Where were you? He tried to think. Nothing concrete was clear to him. Where was I for so many years? He said: Samuel is my son, he came out of the camp and he'll come.

They told me you always wanted to go to America, added Ebenezer. Did you go? She smiled and wrung her hands. Ahbed entered the room and smiled. Ebenezer saw a carved bird on the windowsill. He looked at it and strong yearnings for the smell of sawdust filled him.

They were right, said the old woman.

But it's easier to find people here, said Ebenezer, Israel is smaller. And Rebecca said to Ahbed: Bring my son and that woman some cold juice and bring me wine. Ahbed looked at Ebenezer, blinked his eyes, tried to remember something, and went out.

He's the great-grandson of Ahbed, said the old woman. They always stay with me. When they attach Arabs to Israel, there's somebody to rely on. They're not Jews who disappear for fifty years and come to ask for Boaz's house for themselves.

Who's Boaz?

Your son. She said and smiled. And then she realized there was a danger lurking here whose nature she hadn't yet grasped. She looked at her son and thought about her father. A thousand years of life in distant places streamed from Ebenezer's face. She said: You left Ebenezer and you came back as some Diaspora Jew.

Fanya R. drank the juice Ahbed gave her. Rebecca started getting bored. For a moment she thought of Nehemiah as if he tried again to betray her and die for nothing. She said: Boaz is now my son, you were my son, maybe you still are my son, but you're old, Ebenezer, there were wars here and there's suddenly a state, there were locusts! Does your wife have sons? She had daughters, said Ebenezer.

Rebecca didn't respond, she got up with the suddenness that was always typical of her, came to Ebenezer and kissed his cheeks. For a moment, she was soft, her fingers combed his hair, and then she hugged the back of Fanya R., who straightened up and leaned forward. Then they sat down and were silent. Ahbed brought black coffee and they drank and ate cookies and peanuts and tiny sandwiches filled with cheese that was sweet but sharp. The fragrance of basil stood in the air. After dark, they moved to the dining room and sat around the table. Ebenezer tried to tell in three sentences what he remembered. Rebecca fell asleep and Ahbed came and carried her to her room sitting in her chair. Fanya R. picked up a carved bird that contained a lot of force. Tears flowed from her eyes at the sight of the birds on the windowsills. Ebenezer said: Look at the beautiful birds the old woman has.

The next day, Mr. Klomin came. He told Ebenezer how awful the Holocaust was, and Ebenezer listened to him and tried to mutter something but couldn't. All he remembered were things he wasn't sure had happened to him. From Mr. Klomin's words, he understood who Mr. Klomin was.

These things I'm saying now, I also know from what I heard, how I came to Rebecca's house, how she kissed me, how I didn't know who Klomin was, how I didn't know who Boaz was.

When Mr. Klomin told about Boaz, vague things started to clear up in his brain. He stroked Fanya R. and inquired about Boaz, he was sure they were talking about Samuel. Klomin said: He hangs around the house of the Teacher Henkin who lost a son in the war. A handsome fellow. And Klomin took a photo out of the drawer and showed it to Ebenezer. Ebenezer smiled and said: That's Samuel. And Fanya R. said: That's an old picture of Joseph Rayna.

When his bags came from the port, Ebenezer went to Tel Aviv and bought the Giladi house. When Boaz came to see him, Ebenezer said: Samuel, and fainted. For three days Ebenezer wept in a closed room and thought. After he came out of the room he almost knew things he hadn't known before that he knew. Boaz, who was disappointed, didn't show his emotions. He was scared as never before in his life. Fanya R. told him about her daughters. Their skin, she said, was grafted onto the body of a German who was burned in a tank. But when Ebenezer tried to understand who Boaz was and how he wasn't Samuel, Boaz said: Never mind, it's not so important, he left the house, and when he got to the corner of Hayarkon Street, he entered a yard and banged his head against a wall for a long time.

Mr. Klomin, who envisioned the meeting between Boaz and his father, began to feel a certain closeness to his grandson, maybe because time wasn't working to his advantage now, as he put it, or because Dana became concrete before his eyes the moment Ebenezer called his son Samuel.

Once every two weeks, for years, Mr. Klomin and Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg would meet in Tel Aviv to discuss their party affairs. Most of the people who had joined them over the years had died or were in old people's homes or in hospitals and had stopped being interested in the renewed Kingdom of Israel. A gigantic yoke of keeping the flame, as he defined it, fell on Klomin, and became heavier from year to year. The return of the last son gave him certain hopes that inconceivable things were happening. If Ebenezer came back, he said to the Captain as they walked in the street to their regular meeting place, all kinds of things can happen, he said and didn't elaborate. The two of them were up in years now. Whenever they'd walk in the street they'd discover a new city they hadn't known before, partly because they forgot. Suspicious-looking cars passed by and stopped at traffic signals that had just been planted on street corners. Mr. Klomin meditated aloud about the connection between the words grief and brief, dissect and connect, brave and wave, and then they went into the small old-fashioned cafe where they had once prepared the great revolt against the British Empire. They sat down in their regular places at the back window behind a gigantic bush that had turned gray over the years. Hidden from the eyes of passersby, they sat and whispered to one another. The Captain's uniform had faded long ago, a new replacement hadn't come. His once elegant hat looked shabby, even though he took such devoted care of it. He was already starting to forget for rather long periods why he ever had to go back to Egypt. As a sign of the passing years, he said to Mr. Klomin: I don't edit a French newspaper anymore, and Mr. Klomin, who had never believed the Captain had ever edited a newspaper in Cairo, thought to himself a bit, looked at the damp walls, the red plastic chairs, and said: Maybe you really didn't edit a newspaper for many years. The Captain's praise-wreathed past had faded with the years, bereft of that importance that had once been ascribed to it. And one of the two said, they didn't remember anymore which of them said it: Maybe we have to turn over a new leaf? And the Captain adjusted his folds that had grown flaccid, drank the thin coffee, and a shriveled old waitress, who remembered her youthful grace through them, said to her replacement waitress: Those were giant years, you felt electricity in the air, and what secrets they whispered there, and the new waitress came to them, bored, asked if they wanted anything, offered them the famous cheesecake and they laughed, in unison they laughed, and said: Us, cheesecake? Sometimes toast, not today, and then they gave in and ordered nut cake and said it was good, even though it had stood four days on the counter waiting for a defeated and hungry army, she pulled her apron, wiped a table that was already clean, looked bored toward another table covered with crumbs, and sat down to look at the street.

When the Captain, drinking coffee and chewing the hard nut cake, thought of what he had left of the past he had almost managed to live, he sank into depression, he thought of Rebecca, he thought of dark schemes he could no longer invent, and then a tear pearled in his left eye and he said to Mr. Klomin: But the memorial to Dante Alighieri I do have to erect.

It was because of the memorial, he said a few minutes later, that I came here fifty years ago, wasn't it. Mr. Klomin, who looked like a routed war hero who couldn't have been invented by the Captain even in his good days, pondered to himself: Boaz builds memorials, and here respected and unhesitating stands an ancient and firm fifty-year-old expectation. Not fair, he said sadly, really not fair…

Around them, people are selling and buying diamonds, exchanging earrings for foreign currency, and Menkin Jose Captain says: I've got a dim sense we won't succeed in establishing your kingdom, Klomin. And Klomin drinks the coffee, chews the unchewed cake, and says: The Prophets win again, Captain. He said that so sadly that tears filled the Captain's eyes. To the three hundred sixty letters he wrote to British commissioners, leaders of Israel, its ministers, noble American, French, and British leaders, chief rabbis, the Pope, the Dalai Lama, King Saud, the Prime Minister of Nigeria, the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union in New York and Left Poalei Zion in Brooklyn, no answer had come, except one, short and laconic, from Ben-Gurion. Ben-Gurion wrote: I read your letter carefully, if we build our state with innocence, boldness, faith and wisdom, we shall be redeemed. Until we do we will not be redeemed. Respectfully, David Ben-Gurion.

Mediocrities are always celebrated here, said Klomin, great minds are stoned to death. The gigantic figure of the kings is corrupted by frustrated poets, the Bible is written testimony to the greatness of great dreamers despite its tendentious values… Everything's a lie, Jeroboam the Second was a great king whose figure was reduced by poets, and Jeremiah who called for betrayal and throwing up your hands gets a whole book. The Russian Revolution of nineteen five failed in Russia and succeeded here. Secular Hasids devoid of real greatness believe in the miracle drug of hackneyed rhymes. They started with a demonstration against Nehemiah Schneerson and now they're building a state of shopkeepers and an oppressed kingdom. We, Captain, we're the last ones who see what could have been. A great historical moment was missed, now maybe it's too late. I intend to write one last letter, Captain, added Mr. Klomin in a loud voice and the old waitress, who hadn't yet taken off her apron, recalled the stormy days of the great revolutions and wonderful arguments, I'll write a six-hundred-page letter: The last will and testament of one who thought up the state. I'll write what reptiles they are! How they turned possible redemption into a new ghetto, or in the words of the poet Tshernikhovsky, "The Lord God conquered Canaan in a tempest-and He will be imprisoned in straps of tefillin!" My letter will be testimony of memory and a memorial to Dana my daughter, guilt of Samaria against love of Zion!

But he'll erect my memorial, said the Captain, who had stopped listening to his friend's speech some time ago. I'll call the last letter the will and testament of the last Jews, said Klomin, my grandchildren will read the letter as we read Herzl's prophetic writings today. After they parted, the Captain stood with a South American firmness and the old waitress came to him, held out her hand, and said, I've served you for thirty years now and today I'm retiring, I just wanted to say what an honor it has been for me to serve you, she burst into tears and ran away. The Captain, who tried to wipe a tear from his eye, discovered to his surprise that his eye was dry. He walked along the street slowly, turned right, and ran right into a tree. His sight was failing now, but his honor didn't allow him to wear eyeglasses, and he walked to Boaz's house.

Climbing to the roof was hard for him, but he rested on every floor, wiped his sweat and the pathetic image of the waitress was still stuck to his eyelids. For thirty years she had served him and he hadn't noticed her. When Boaz opened the door, the Captain walked in and was caught in the last light fluttering on the roof and touching the leaves of the trees and plants and herbs that Noga planted in flowerpots and barrels. A few chairs and an old easy chair stood there. The Captain sat down in the easy chair, and said: You could have been my grandson but in the end I did succeed in being your godfather.

Godfatherhood is also an obligation on the part of the godson, said Boaz and smiled. Boaz surveyed the Captain with a certain affection, maybe a lot more than he allowed himself. There was some imagination in the Captain, even fictional, even not clear, that, instead of winning a position, honor in the big government of the world, he agreed to live with us here in this forsaken place. The splendid figure of the Captain now stood in the twilight and looked to him like the abandoned god of a treacherous kingdom.

After they spoke, Boaz said: But why the memorial, why now all of a sudden? Because I'm waning, Boaz, said the Captain in a gloomy despair and a betrayed sadness, Dante wrote the world and then tried to build another world, he's my bereaved son! I've got the money. You've got the knowledge. You build memorials for everybody. Build one for me.

Maybe, said Boaz.

No maybe, said the Captain. You owe me and you'll build. I'll pay.

Boaz asked: Is there a specific place that will suit the memorial?

The Kastel, said the Captain. From there Jerusalem was seen in ruins by Gottfried of Bouillon. There the poor Crusaders ripped their clothes in ten ninety-nine before they went up to conquer Jerusalem. From the Kastel, the city is seen in its wretchedness by pilgrims in all generations. From there Dante could have seen it if he had gone up to it. Do you know the mountain? he asked.

Once, said Boaz, I conquered it for you inadvertently.

There we'll erect the memorial, said the Captain, whose faith in it was only strengthened by the authority of the words.

Noga refused to come along. She told Hasha Masha: Henkin wants to go with Boaz and the Captain, they're going to find a place for the memorial to Dante. Hasha Masha said: They'll put that Italian on their committee, what do you have to do with Boaz Schneerson! But Henkin put on his hat and kissed Noga on the cheek, hugged Hasha and left the house. Boaz and Noga's roof was new to him. Walls enclosed the little grove Noga planted. A plane circled in the sky on its way to Lod Airport. Henkin stood in the center of the roof, looked at the rusting houses of old Tel Aviv, and said: I'm torturing myself, what do I have to do with this mountain? And Boaz looked at Henkin with the same ancient and piercing affection he saw in the eyes of Ebenezer when he thought he was Samuel, and said: That mountain was the most important place in Menahem's life, but I confused everything and you won't believe anymore, so what's the point of talking-

Boaz drove the car and Henkin and the Captain in his uniform observed the very familiar landscape. Not far from the place where Menahem is buried, Boaz turned right and climbed up the mountain. The air was fragrant and pure. A wind whistled in the treetops, the mountains at that hour were clear and free of mist and came close together.

On top of the mountain stood a ruined structure. Below new structures were seen and Jews from Iran, Bukhara, and Afghanistan dressed in colorful clothing were walking around among the structures. A woman in a purple yashmak called out: The mother of the sons calls the Lord! A gray-haired mustached man appeared, and said: The wicked of the wicked is before you my lady, and she said strangers came up above and he turned his eyes aside and saw a car and three people, one of them a general, he picked up the old rifle and the cartridge of bullets, shot one bullet into the air, and the colorful people stopped what they were doing and looked up, and the woman yelled: Kill, kill, but the man approached Boaz, Henkin, and the Captain aiming the rifle at them, and Boaz said: We're from the Prime Minister's office, searching for a suitable place for a tombstone for an outstanding Jewish commander named Dante Alighieri who overcame the wicked Romans. The man, whose rifle slipped down, recalled his distant youth in misty mountains in a distant land, and the other people approached and stood around him. One man said: Commander? We had a dervish who was the son of Queen Esther, and lived in the mountains. He was a great Jewish hero and the king of all the Persians. Did you hear of Ahasuerus? Esther was his wife. Then we came to the river. Remember what river would come to the Land of Israel? It was forty days across, forty days we rode in a truck just to get across to the other side. And then, the little girl born after the big rain died, and from there in airplanes, and you're a commander, you want a tombstone? Why not? Jews or non-Jews? And everybody laughed and startled the pure air with mouths full of white, crooked, and black teeth. As a sign of friendship, the man put the rifle down on the ground and started singing, and everybody hummed along with him. The singer reminded the Captain of the ancient melodies they'd sing in the Temple, which was taken to Babylon and from there came to Spain and was preserved in monasteries by conversos, who were then exiled to the east and came to Persia and India and Kurdistan and Afghanistan, and from those chants Dante Alighieri wove the Divine Comedy, whose melody was heard by Emanuel the Roman who knew the melodies he took in with his mother's milk and the hidden and mysterious notes were latent in him…

Then they stood above, and the people, except for that silver-haired mustached man, went to their houses and Boaz told about the decisive battle on the Kastel. Henkin stopped his ears. He didn't want to hear. And so Teacher Henkin, stubbornly but courageously, missed the only chance he was given in his life to hear about one battle in which his son fought wisely and heroically.

After Abdul Khadr el-Husseini was killed by mistake, said Boaz, and any one of us could have shot him, including Menahem, he said and looked at Henkin, all the Arabs fled and then came a reinforcement of commanders and we saw them enter the path, yelling, but they didn't hear and then it was too late and Simon Alfasi shouted: "Privates retreat, the commanders will cover the retreat," and thirty-three commanders were killed to defend Boaz and Menahem and Joseph. Afterward, the Arabs discovered the body of their leader and they fled… And that started the decisive turning point in the War of Independence… Menahem's one shot!

Or yours, shouted Henkin who heard the last words.

Or mine, said Boaz sadly.

Henkin started thinking about the next Independence Day: Nineteen years have passed and what am I doing? I'm helping erect a tombstone for Dante that will look toward Menahem's Jerusalem, while for my poets I left abandoned graves in the old cemetery of Tel Aviv. And out of pondering and an ancient sense of treachery, Henkin said: I see shadows on the horizon, Boaz, and Boaz said: What shadows, and the Captain looked and said: There will be a war, and Boaz thought: They're making fun, those old men, what war can you see, but he didn't say a thing and looked at the old Bukharan who started singing again.

In the evening, the Captain sat with Rebecca. Rebecca said: He's probably fed up with memory books and he wants to be a memorial to himself, but without my Psalms, he won't succeed. And the Captain said: But what will become of us, Rebecca? He thought about Ebenezer who had recently come back and painted his house, and Rebecca said: What will be? All my enemies are dead, all I've got left is you, Captain, Roots is waiting for me, you're suffering from eight diseases and you won't recover from any of them, what do you want from an old woman like me?

Tape / -

Boaz was one of the first to go. Then Noga was mobilized too. Hasha Masha asked, Why you all of a sudden? And Noga, who came to visit her, said: They'll find something for me, I'm not considered married and the lists got mixed up. People stuck pieces of tape on windowpanes, Rebecca sat in her armchair and contemplated her life and didn't find anything in it that wasn't compelled in advance. Planes flew low and shook the house. The great-grandson of Ahbed disappeared, but came back. At the airport, foreign residents were evacuated. The Captain said: They built an Auschwitz here with a philharmonic orchestra and now they sit and wait. Why don't they strike? He wore his uniform and asked to be mobilized, but nobody even paid attention to his lunacy. Dayan was appointed Minister of Defense. Eskhol delivered a speech. On television, hordes of Egyptian recruits were seen marching to throw the Jews into the sea. The nation of Israel, said the Captain, sees Chmielnitski and Hitler assaulting it, and I pity Nasser. He was the only one who pitied him at that time. Early in the morning, the red sheet was hoisted and without music, and in a thin still voice, the nation of Israel went to the great war against fat Frieda who lay under the dog, thought Ebenezer, the fist clenched for three weeks gaped open.

And five days later everything was almost calm.

Tape / -

She took off her clothes and put them on the cot. Outside reigned the impermeable desert dark. In the next bed he lay, she couldn't imagine how he looked. She played a game of imagining him from his breathing, from the smell of shoes and socks. She strained her eyes and saw shadows. Outside voices sawed. Her skin shuddered and she rolled herself up in damp army blankets smelling faintly of Lysol. She lay down, her eyes gazing at the ceiling of the tent. He said: Wonder what you look like in the light. She said: I also want to know what you look like. Every night you're here and not seen. In the morning you disappear before I open my eyes. By the time I come back at night, you're in bed.

My name's Boaz, he told her. I'm a grown-up child who survived the wars. Killing and not killed. On the Richter scale of my metaphysical biology, I'm a nine. Your wonderful youth can be smelled. All I know about you is that you've got a lover, that you have difficult dreams I can hear, you're somebody one can definitely fall in love with, if one forgets the inconceivable and unbearable problems of love. For years now I haven't managed to die in just wars, and in unjust wars I don't die either. Maybe justice has nothing to do with death in war? Now that the war is ending soon, I'm still here. During the day I shoot the routed enemy. You've got a female rustle among your clothes. When you undress in the dark, there are tears in my eyes.

She said: That's nice of you. My stupid officer pushes me around all day. He's got clean fingernails, smells like perfume. You sound like a person who flourishes in wars.

I make no demands on you. It's true, I love another man. But you come back with a smell of death and dark. Last night I smelled blood. You sound like a professional soldier. You bring weapons in your hands, you kill and sleep, sleep and kill. In that shelling you slept like a baby. I don't know why they put us in the same tent. My officer tried to start with me again today. I erupted. He has soft, warm hands. He talked to me about twilight in a distant city, said I remind him of that. It was cold and the sergeant on duty yelled: I'll put all of them under arrest, and all of them cleaned the mud and the mud kept coming in. As far as I'm concerned, you should go to jail for mud. I'll smoke a cigarette now. And you?

I'm trying to think if you're pretty. That drives me nuts. Do you have breasts? Big ones? Small ones? And your face, terrific, I'm not terrific either, few people like me. I don't believe in marriage. And I don't believe in love, either, but I'm starting to doubt my ability not to love. Why do people want so much to be loved? All the fools and dummies ultimately find somebody who loves them. And the worst bastards also have friends and women. You can see that from the funerals. The dumber the man the bigger his funeral.

Today I got out of the half-track. I went to search for a land mine. In the distance I saw people in the desert. Men in coats and suits and tunics and women in pants and head kerchiefs. They were straying, aimlessly, their eyes burning from the desert wind. Hundreds of men and women. One of them had a red scarf. I yelled at them to watch out. There are land mines, I said, and they didn't hear and weren't scared. They showed me pictures of their sons. Every one had a picture of his son, you know the high school graduation pictures they make with the faces of stranglers of old women? Those are their sweeties, and they were searching for their sweeties in the desert. Everybody asks if I know his son. Missing, they say. One woman told me: You surely know him. Surely, why should I know him, but I said: Maybe, maybe I knew him. She said, search for him for me. I've got to find him. "Surely," that's the compelling word, don't you think? You with your small or big breasts. After the woman with the red scarf disappeared I smoked a cigarette. Some of the sons in the pictures had scared faces. Do you think those with scared faces die more than those whose faces aren't scared? I'd like you to have my picture… with an erect cock. Like now. You'll take the picture with the erect cock, walk in the sands and ask if somebody knows me. Maybe some poor girl I once inserted a souvenir into. She'll say: The shmuck's buried not far from here. And you, will you weep?

And what do you do in civilian life?

Grave digger, prepare my financial future.

You're trying to be cynical.

Trying, that's right. Not living in the right man. A girl came to me, she's got long chestnut-colored hair and bright eyes. Not especially pretty, but belonging to somebody so temptingly. She said to me: I'm searching for a man. I asked if I could be the man. She looked at me contemptuously and I saw how she belonged to her somebody and I was jealous. And then she repeated: I'm searching for a man. I told her: What about his picture? She didn't have one. And she blushed because she didn't have a picture. She said: Listen, I'm searching for a man I love, and she didn't add anything more. Will you also ask somebody about my cock, will you say then: I'm searching for a man I love?

Yes, she said, and she smoked a cigarette silently and her breath was fast, almost loud. You understand, he said, the girl put a semicolon after the man, because maybe he's dead. She didn't know his last name. She met him in a tent like this in Bir-Gafgafa in the dark. When there were still a lot more planes ripping the sky. She didn't know the declension: "I loved," everything was fresh and still in the present tense. Like the grammatical judgment of a language teacher. I turn over for a moment, the blanket stabs what's-his-name. Like this. She can't draw me the face of the lover. He had no geographical bearings or characteristics, normal or otherwise. No special signs. Only certain things, she said, swallowed those words. And then she said again with surprising speed: Things that can't be defined, she meant what happened to them together in the tent. Maybe she loved him because he died? How do I know? And if he died, maybe she'd love him forever. Isn't that safer?

She crushes the cigarette. Rustling is heard outside. Three half-tracks rumble up and brake. Music from the radio mixed with a roaring motor. The flash of pale blue light in the tent flap. A wind strikes the tarp. She sinks her head deep into the small hard pillow. I recall going out with my lover, she said.

He laughed.

And he's alive, she said.

Ah, but for how long?

A long time. Once he took me to the movies. That was soon after we met. He'd sit in cafes, go to matinees, waste time, sit next to me in the movies and even though he looked like a letch, he was afraid to stroke my back. I thought: Why doesn't he understand I've got breasts? Why doesn't he put a hand on my breasts, he thought I was a dangerous girl.

In the morning she sits at the teleprinter. Third shift. All the time she receives messages. Words appear-missing, missing, fell, fell, wounded. Names, numbers, identity tags. She drinks hot coffee from a cardboard cup and writes the dead. Suddenly she shrieks: Joseph Gimmeleon. Just yesterday he came into the teleprinter room and saw three girls and didn't know which one of us to desire more. So perplexed and lost he stood there. And I was the oldest. The officer with the soft sweaty hands didn't let him take us to the movies. He said: I'm from Haifa, and Talya made him a red paper flower. He stuck it in his shirt lapel and disappeared with Zelda. She phones the battalion. A field phone hums. A commander yells at Talya, come down from the line, she comes to a third in command who sleeps with her every third night. From the distance, from the war, a voice rising and falling like a roar answers her: What, what, Joseph, Joseph Gimmeleon, the body wasn't intact, they found a red paper flower. I'm coming tomorrow, and he hung up.

Bring you coffee, he asked.

Bring yourself, fool, she said.

I'm wiped out from the teleprinter, she said, but without naming names, and clean up your smell, don't want to smell death.

He stood in the tent flap. Took off his clothes. She strained her eyes but didn't see a thing. He said: Wait a minute. And then a car passed by in the distance and sprayed a little light. He stood there shaking and naked and she laughed.

He went to her and she said: You look like a skeleton. Want to touch you. Then if you want, you can. On a night like this I'm easily raped. Mainly by a living person, without a red paper flower, but don't try to be close or understanding, you'll just touch me and I you. In bed he hugged her and the shaking passed. Try to be romantic, she said, but without love. He said to her: I'll put a paper flower in you. She said: You're faking, you behave as if you know this body, think it's an instrument, be more careful, more calculating, you're sweet. And he said: No compliments, listen to the distant cannons, killing.

Then she stands up and he hugs her. Don't be a dead picture for me, she says. We fit in terms of height. Maybe we'll love each other again, she says, and they sway in an uncompromising prayer and things are forgotten. He steps on chewing gum and is disgusted. He also tosses her onto the bed, clings to her, that need to be loved by a real enemy who is you, and she puts her life on his erection and lies there, waiting, sweat pouring, that beauty of a mad lusty movement in a tent, you and I, two strangers. Listen, you can do with me what you want, but only in the dark and as an undesirable woman, as I am, don't relent, here I'm touching, touching with my feet the ceiling of the tent. Lick like that toward Mecca, yes press like that. Press… You think there's a God? I don't care. There are officers outside with national erections. You think there really are national goals. Here we can beget a Hebrew soldier for the ninth war, in this state a national mutation will take place and they'll beget children with rifles attached. You exaggerate, she said unemotionally. Everybody has a different name for what's happening here. Tomorrow you take the picture of that cock and walk in the sands and search for me. Ask horny soldiers if they knew me. Tell them you didn't know my first name or my last name. In that silence to penetrate to the throat and cut it. Generally, she says, I love first and only then do they come into me. Now it's vice versa. Who needs victory? Don't stop. I'm unable to love, he says, and she says: From death you came and to death you'll go, I'm lost between here and there.

And beyond them, far from there, people are killed. Bullets go astray at night. Airplanes go on final sallies. The teleprinter doesn't speak his name.

Then she smokes a cigarette. Silence. Pleasant odor of burned red war kerosene. If that smell is pleasant, it means I'm alive and well. The wind isn't blowing anymore, eh?

The wind isn't blowing, he said.

Talya had a boyfriend, she said.

You make friends fast. I've been here three and a half weeks and I've got only you. You've already got girlfriends, officers with wet hands, memories.

You should know me in civilian life. I silence the radio. But that's not important. My friend, Talya, had a boyfriend. Before the adjutant who slept with her. And I've also got an affair with you, even though I love somebody else.

Talya's boyfriend lives in America and sends her letters. She says that's convenient for her. She wants to know if she really loves him or not and the distance is a test. He'd come for every war. On the first plane he'd come. His unit loved him because he'd bring them presents-real jeans, lighters, American cigarettes. He once brought a mixer for one of them, she says.

Who?

Talya.

Oh. Give me a drag. He drags on the cigarette and puts it back in her lips. He looks at the dark, at the slit of pleasure of the juncture of her lips. A junction of pleasure of strength and softness. And she goes on: After the wars and the campaigns, Talya says, he goes back to America. He'd also bring whiskey. And for that war he came late. They had a pool about when he'd come and if. He came on the third day. From the airport he came straight here. His friends took blankets, a kitbag, and personal weapons for him. Even a little book of Psalms and the prayer of the warrior. He came straight to the desert with a James Bond case and a suit and tie, put on a uniform, and in two hours he went out in their half-track. Then he came back to Talya and she was in the clinic. They met by chance. They slept together one night. She says it was great. He forgot his James Bond case at her place and came back. The case was empty, she says. Why did he bring an empty case? Two days later, she went to his parents in Jerusalem. The father saw her and hugged her. The mother gave her a cup of tea. Talya sat in her filthy uniform and drank. They hung pictures of him all over the house. His father said: See how lucky we are, this time he didn't come. And the mother was glad the son didn't come, this time she had fears and dreams, but he didn't come so everything was fine. In America they're not fighting in the Sinai now.

I saw a father walking alone, he said. With a creased picture. He asks every soldier: Did you know him, did you know him? Me he didn't want to approach. He sat in the middle of the desert and dug, he searched for his son in a pit. Desperate. His son wasn't in the pit. All around were corpses of Egyptians. The wounded were brought from the Canal. He searched for his son in the pit, just because there was a pit there.

And there was one there who photographed a killed person, wore a kippah, and took twenty-eight pictures of the killed man from every angle until he ran out of film.

In the morning, the two of them came out of the tent. Not yet really morning, but they saw one another in the light. A pale desert light. Clear and pure. He started the jeep. She got in and sat next to him. Shadows of night and dew still mixed with sunrise. A gigantic convoy passed by them and they had to get off the road for a while and get out of the way. Sitting and looking, trucks with prisoners, soldiers with drooping heads, sleeping standing or sitting, two small buses full of singers, dancers, and mimes returning from the front, more prisoners with dead smiles spread over their faces, defective ammunition, spoils of crushed enemy tanks on carriages and command cars filled with wounded. One of the singers in the bus sang and the song was swallowed in the distant desert. The prisoners gazed with empty eyes. She flicked a cigarette. In the distance, civilians were seen, women with kerchiefs against the wind. Dogs running aimlessly, black and gray desert dogs, the light grows stronger, and a voice is heard: He comes only for wars, doesn't stay to live here, and now who will bury him? Then they drove on, a captured tank stood there, four foreign photographers wearing laced-up hats are posing the dead next to the tank. Moving the corpses and laying them in a nice position. While the photographers quarrel about where to put the last corpse of the rout, he spits and starts the motor. A soldier comes to them with a jerrican full of coffee. In the distance shots are heard. Three horses whinny and gallop toward the jeep, and she says: Like in the movies, while he takes out a transistor and puts it to his ear. The horses gallop and the shots cease. And then the horses disappear in the gigantic plain and shots echo once again.

People, old, young, women wrapped in kerchiefs, lie curled up in the desert. In their hands they hold photos. On their faces is the terror of the dream that may not be a dream anymore. He says to her: In an hour I'll take you back to the teleprinter! He wants her in the wet sand of the morning dew in the filtered and serene light, and when they stopped at a damaged car they saw a soldier connecting an electric razor to the battery and shaving. He stood naked in the morning chill and trembled. The soldier asked: Are you by any chance not dead people searching for their parents?

You're a son-of-a-bitch, he said to the soldier, we're going to make us our sons right here.

So who's the son-of-a-bitch here, said the soldier and went on shaving.

In the evening, after the teleprinter, he waited for her as if he hadn't seen her in a year. They went to the culture center. A month ago, Nasser said here that he'd throw the Jews into the sea. This doesn't look like a sea, said some sergeant major. But he wasn't laughing now. Airplanes tore the sky in sudden sallies. An arrogant atmosphere of numb tension prevailed. They sat facing a television set. They set up an antenna to receive broadcasts from Jerusalem that were just starting. Through the former Egyptian transmitter they can see the end of the war in the north. And H. Herzog talking about our forces. I'm drinking the wine of Latrun brought by the conquerors of Latrun, he thinks, and looks at H. Herzog talking about our forces, how terrific is H. Herzog, he's a General (Res.) and can talk; what and where to. He's also combed and talks with abysmal seriousness about wars. Wars aren't such a serious matter, H. Herzog. Our forces are a youth with a paper flower who shaves naked at a destroyed car and then dies. Or first dies and then shaves. Our forces is a man with a James Bond case who comes to wars from America and they're still drinking his whiskey here. Our forces is also H. Herzog himself telling what our forces are, what they do, did, will do.

When they went out they looked toward a dark point lighted for a moment by two spotlights. In the crisscross of the spotlights a half-track of the Burial Society was seen. Instead of a cannon, a hut was set up there. In the hut were our forces, their memory for a blessing. He said: See how they pack the children whose parents are searching for them in the sands. People dressed like crows with sidelocks and ritual fringes, and love thy neighbor as thyself, they put the children in the hut on the half-track. In their hands they hold prayer books they'd sometimes stick in their coat pockets. Even the driver wears a kippah, but he doesn't wear a coat over the prayer shawl. A young Hasid stood there, his face very pale, looked at the crisscross of the lights and sang: This is what my heart desires, pity please and do not overlook… He's also our forces, H. Herzog, he said.

When Boaz came to Rebecca's house, the old woman said, The Captain died. Boaz didn't respond but went into the bathroom, waited until the great-grandson of Ahbed brought him new clothes, filled the bathtub with hot water, and sat for a long time and rubbed his body. Noga phoned and he told her the Captain died.

Tape / -

Captain (Colonel) Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg died three days after the war began. That was one of the rare days when Rebecca allowed the Captain to come when it wasn't Wednesday night. When he drank the eternal tea the great-grandson of Ahbed poured for him, he saw Rebecca's legs under the table. He said: I see through the dress, as if your clothes were transparent, I don't see anything but bones and spots, he added pensively. Outside, supersonic booms were heard, and Rebecca said: Watch out, Captain, you look like you are covered with clouds. The Captain said: When we stood on the Kastel and talked about the memorial to Dante, I knew there would be a war, I saw an army ready, but it wasn't ready, I saw things that were to happen and that means I'm one foot in the future and the future of a person over eighty years old isn't an alternative to death anymore. And Rebecca said something and almost regretted the tone that didn't suit her, she said almost pleading: Don't die yet, I think I need you. He said: Interesting how beautiful you look without the clothes that disappeared from you, and she blushed and said: One by one they all go, don't let him take you, Menkin… not yet. Rebecca looked in his misty eyes and in her mind a memory surfaced of the river that pierced her, a sourish taste of blood rose from her insides to her lips and she said: When you see me naked after fifty years, Menkin, and I recall how I became pregnant from the river and begat Boaz, I start to be fond of you, Menkin…

In his attempt to smile, the Captain felt his bones dissolving, he stood up, kissed Rebecca's hand, and very slowly walked to his house. She watched him, but because her vision was blurred, she could see only an unclear mass walking on the path planted by Dana. The mass disappeared into the house and suddenly her throat felt dry. The Captain came to his room and felt the air running out of his lungs, his throat was choked, his body heavy. He lay in his bed, very slowly stretched his legs, even though it hurt, lit the table lamp, put his false teeth in a glass from which he sipped a little water, then he shook the glass to drizzle a little water on his hair, the glass was almost emptied, and he put his hat on his chest, his sword across his body, didn't take off his boots, but polished the medals he pinned on, and with his last strength, with a comb he held in a trembling hand, he combed the wet hair, and unable to see himself in a mirror he folded his hands, and when he saw the phosphorescent clock showing three a.m., he managed to pound the clock, stop time, and die.

Rebecca went into her room, locked the door, and for two days she didn't come out. When the great-grandson of Ahbed claimed that the corpse was rotting, she yelled at him not to come near her. Two days later, planes were heard passing over the house on their way north, and Rebecca went out of the room wearing a black dress and asked Ahbed to make her something to eat. She sat alone to eat and said: What great generals are starting to die now!

Nobody knew how to bury him. His splendid lying in bed evoked admiration and amazement mixed with an intoxicating atmosphere of victory. The rabbi waged a hard struggle not only with Rebecca but also with Mr. Klomin and a few other old men who began to show a suspicious fondness for the Captain. When Mr. Klomin went to the small church in Jaffa, there wasn't a single person alive who remembered the Captain. In the beautiful house among swans and rare birds where the old man dressed in white sank into the ground, lived three old Arabs. The rabbi who left before in high dudgeon now returned from Roots in an almost philosophical mood, a sense of death stuck to him too, but he still firmly refused to bury the Captain in Roots. Rebecca argued with an implacable vehemence that her husband had founded Roots even though of course he wasn't to blame for the stupid name they gave the cemetery, and she had, she claimed, the right of veto. The phrase "right of veto" she had heard on the radio in interpretations of H. Herzog about the war Boaz was fighting now to make Nehemiah's desired and dubious future present, she said.

Nor in the Captain's papers did they find anything to indicate how to bury him. The valises and crates said: "To Boaz Schneerson." Rebecca and Mr. Klomin searched in those closets and cases with Boaz's name. Mr. Klomin, who wore white in honor of the resurrected kingdom of Israel-but also his joy for the kingdom and his worry about the disgrace that would be brought down on it by the leaders of Israel who surely didn't understand the greatness of the hour-didn't cover his pain at the death of his one friend. Among the objects they found a hundred and fifty poems, some written by the Captain and some ancient poems, handwritten, love poems to the throat and neck, the breasts and shoulders of a beautiful lady, addressed to Rebecca, even though they were never sent to her. She wondered how Joseph's poems had come into the Captain's hands, but then she said to herself with a logic characteristic of the Captain: He was an editor of a French newspaper in Cairo, so! In the suitcases were secret plans of various undergrounds, models of memorials to the poet Dante Alighieri, a plan, called "secret," for irrigating the Negev, a booklet in the Captain's handwriting titled "Indications of the Burial Place of Moses, Hagar, Jacob, and Alcibiades the Greek," and even Mr. Klomin didn't recognize the last name on the list or what he had to do with Moses, Hagar, and Jacob. There were descriptions of passes to the Land of Israel from the north, the east, and the south, including the Mitla and Gidi passes in the Sinai desert. Precise and old descriptions of the Santa Katerina rift in the Sinai which was now occupied, plans for war and crossing rivers, a war of armor against armor as a revolutionary tactic, which apparently had not yet been tried or had been tried before the invention of the tank. There were also books of the Jew ish religion and the Greek Orthodox religion, Midrashim Eyn-Ya akov with a dedication in an old-fashioned, curled hand to Yossel Goldenberg, Argentinean books of war, "Books of the True Faith to the Children of the Religion of Moses Who Saw the Truth," dried flowers, maps of lands neither Mr. Klomin nor the geography teacher-who was summoned-could identify, maps of military campaigns with notes in a secret writing, copies of Mr. Klomin's letters from a state whose name was torn from the envelopes and its stamps destroyed. There were alphabetical lists of heads of the underground and the Haganah in the thirties and forties, leaders of Arab gangs, a list of the sexual perversions of high British officials, documentation of their acts, the copy of a secret correspondence between the chief of the American air force and the British attache about bombing or not bombing the railroad tracks to Auschwitz, various notes, including an announcement of the mufti of Jerusalem that "it's better for the English not to support the Jewish foul deed and not to believe their lies about what is happening in Europe as it were."

The American commander's rebuke of the pilot who mistakenly dropped a bomb on the death camp of Auschwitz: "From now on, be careful not to waste bombs on areas close to attack targets like the A. G. Farben factory, or any other industrial concentration." Rebecca and Mr. Klomin also found Mr. Klomin's letters filed by the date they were sent, a journal of Boaz's life, faded brown pictures of anonymous handsome women in splendid old-fashioned garb in unidentified places, a little girl's curl, and next to it an aging yellowed note: "Delicate Melissa." Names of the Mameluke military commanders, dubious research on seaweed, on Swiss democracy, history of the struggle for equal rights for women in the United States, history of the tango, cooking recipes, Bible stories illustrated with saccharine drawings, and an explicit request to be buried according to his real religion (not identified), in the natural place (without any indication of place), account books, checks and savings accounts in the name of Rebecca and Boaz Schneerson and Mr. Klomin, in Egypt, Israel, Switzerland, Argentina, the United States, and Sweden.

They buried the Captain in two places. He was buried in the little church in Jaffa and then his clothes were buried in Roots. The rabbi pretended not to see, and two tombstones were erected in his memory, one in the churchyard and one in Roots. Despite the protests of the rabbi and the director of the Burial Society, the schoolchildren, in white shirts, were forced to sing the national anthems of Israel, Argentina, Switzerland, the United States, and Egypt at the Captain's grave. Singing the last national anthem evoked strong protest even among Rebecca's supporters, but she insisted and it was hard to fight with her, especially since the young people were starting to come back from the war and most of the residents of the settlement were on their way to Jerusalem to see the miracle of the unified city. The consuls who were invited didn't come. Rebecca allowed the limited audience to see her shed a few tears at the grave. Mr. Klomin said: You missed the great kingdom of Israel that arose in spite of her foes, and Rebecca said: May you rest in peace, Captain, and when you come to your god, whoever he is, kiss his eyelids for all of us and be our advocate for our health and wealth.

On the way back from Roots, Rebecca walked faster than Mr. Klomin. She saw a castle in the clouds with a flag waving on it. In the castle, like a coil of silkworms, the Last Jew lay curled up. His eyes were shut and she felt a stab in her belly because when she sat on the deck of the ship and Ebenezer was inside her, she could sense the dream of Nehemiah Schneerson curled up in her, and then she saw Boaz come into the world and he was a copy of Joseph. She looked at the castle, the clouds moved, the mists scattered, and then she saw Ebenezer standing in the distance and looking at her. She called him to come home, and she said: The Captain is dead, Ebenezer, and he said: Before you looked at me as if you didn't see me. But she was too tired to answer him. They entered the house and when they sat in the room, Mr. Klomin started muttering vague words, his eyes were wet, crying now, he asked where was the queen who had once lived here whose sons had brought a disaster. He said: Dana will return from the Captain's house soon. Then he pulled out of his pocket a new map of "the liberated territories" that had been distributed two days before by the newspapers, and said: Greater Israel, the land of David, Solomon, and Alexander Yanai, and he started talking to the Captain and telling him the results of a poll of fifty-two members of the party who had died long ago, and then he bowed his head and banged on the table, Ebenezer started up and Mr. Klomin turned his face, smiled and said: In blood and fire Judah fell in blood and fire Judah… and he died. Rebecca said, Soon I'll be glad you came back, Ebenezer, see what a new plague of death has spread here, and she thought of the plague of death that ran rampant in the settlement years ago, and Ebenezer said: Samuel's forgetting machine is the watch set backward of the Last Jew! She looked at him in amazement, shut Mr. Klomin's eyes, but Ebenezer, who was excited and tried to understand what he had just said, wrote something in the little journal he had started carrying in his pocket in recent months and wrote in it things he thought, to know if he knew some things about himself. He didn't understand what disease of forgetting could have afflicted Samuel, and what was its connection to the watch set backward of the Last Jewwhich is me, and Samuel wasn't here at all. Rebecca who was already worrying about burying Mr. Klomin, forgot that Mr. Klomin never claimed to be an American citizen, and so the strict rabbi, who replaced the local rabbi who went to the desert to bury our forces of H. Herzog, didn't raise any difficulties, even though he asked who guaranteed that Mr. Klomin was indeed a Jew. Mr. Klomin was buried in Roots, next to the Captain, two single strangers in the parking lot of Nehemiah's pioneer paradise, said Rebecca, for whom phrases like "parking lot" or "right of veto" were new. She told Ebenezer, I'm old now and what's in store for me, who else will be taken from me, and then Boaz came back from the war and showered and sat in the bathroom and talked with Noga on the phone and went to the graves of the Captain and Mr. Klomin and let Rebecca read him five of the hundred and fifty poems written by Joseph Rayna and the Captain for Rebecca Schneerson and he fell asleep.

Tape / -

When he came to Tel Aviv the roof was locked. On the door hung a note: Be back soon, wait for me. Noga climbed up carrying a bag of groceries. They kissed, it was oppressively hot and they stayed on the roof. Below, horns honked as cars got stuck in the convoy. When they went into the house and Noga set the table with the groceries she had just bought, he noticed the pile of letters. There were invitations to memorials, construction bills, printed matter and pieces for proofreading; he kicked the pile and yelled: Come on, let's blow this place. The windows were open and from all of them came the song "Jerusalem of Gold." The song tells of how Jerusalem was empty of people until the Jewish paratroopers conquered it. Too bad we weren't defeated, said Boaz, I could have made you a beautiful corpse. She didn't answer, looked around and thought of the Captain and Mr. Klomin, if only for them the war should have been won. Then they ate hummus at Shmil's restaurant and drank cold water from a whiskey bottle and looked at the vegetables heaped up in the nearby store and fish were brought in nets to the fish warehouse, and Boaz started the car, and said to Shmil: The hummus was great, Shmil, and they left. They parked the car, went into the hotel and spoke English. Boaz said: We're foreign journalists, and the woman smiled and said in Hebrew: Go up to room twentysix. He sealed the windows, and said: The Captain shouldn't have died, Ebenezer is searching for Samuel, Talya's boyfriend died, I'm building tombstones, what a crappy victory!

Outside, maybe the sun set but they couldn't see. Downstairs in the lobby, colored paper strips were surely hung and the music was ear-piercing, but they didn't hear. They played child returning home to mother who's sleeping with the guard. Then they played boy whose father names him after his wife's lovers. Boaz said: I would curse your father if I knew which of his ninety-two women was your mother. And Noga said: You're killing Rebecca's saying, you should have said concubines. He said: It's an Arabic saying and I don't care. The lips burned. The air smelled of old urine, burning cars, and raw flaxseed oil. Noga thought: Is it truly possible to start all over from this moment? They crawled in imaginary battles and she played a girl who writes names on the teleprinter, stood before him only in a bra, he lay on the bed and she was ordered to be a vulture pouncing on a corpse. He didn't shut his eyes, lay without moving, tears flowed onto her cheeks but he didn't give up. When she hovered over him she looked artificial, transparent and airy, but when she landed she was heavy, and when he was filled with dread and yelled, she stopped and he signaled angrily: Go on! Go on! And the tears kept flowing, and Boaz said: Got to know how to celebrate victory before it turns into a bank account. She slapped his face and he played dead again, but his eyes were wide open. The ceiling was filthy and he said: You're a great vulture. Then, he squashed the vulture and kissed it and they lay there, and didn't move, like a couple of elderly lovers whose blood pressure would go up with every movement. They guessed the dark thickening outside and sensed the flow of the hours, the moments, minutes and seconds, and her insides were holding his power, and when a gloomy smile of triumph spread their lips, they fell asleep.

At dawn, Boaz woke up and was still inside her. When it hardened, she groaned in her sleep, but didn't wake up. Her lips were spread. After he got dressed he went down and bought coffee and rolls, butter and jam. And he came back. He opened the window, and when the light beams caressed her she woke up. She drank the coffee and ate two rolls with jam, sat up in bed, gathered the blanket and wrapped her legs in it, straightened her hair, and he said: I sat with the prime minister, and he told me to go see if the circles were really right. I went, but the foreign minister wasn't there anymore. Two young men were making emergency plans, but the Captain's plans were bolder. Then I bought pencils that said Made in China. Talya came and said the pencils belonged to her boyfriend and put them in the James Bond case and went to screw the adjutant. She said: All the foreign ministers went to a parade. I was suspicious, but I didn't say a thing. I bought you coffee and rolls. Two armored troop carriers collided and I photographed their burned skeletons. Then I made them into a memorial to Dante, who invented the armored troop carrier. When children being taken to the Magen David clinic asked me what circles I was asking about, I fled. Then some man I didn't know and maybe looked like me came out of the camp with a barbed wire fence, maybe me, and one of the foreign soldiers standing there said: Now there'll be bread. A man I love and was a father to me said: Now I'm not alive anymore, we remained alive, but this life isn't ours.

Noga said: You dream nice, the coffee's nice, but you've got to go back.

He asked: Where, Noga? He was sad and silent: Where?

She didn't answer and looked at the window as if there really was something there she wanted to see.

Tape / -

Yes…

Yes, I also know when they left the hotel. How many tips? Not counted. Sees an article in a pamphlet "Kingdom of Israel," Number 34B. "Before his premature death (quote from the article), A. N. (Akiva Nimrod) Klomin managed to finish page six hundred of his big final letter. That was on June fourth, nineteen sixty-seven. Then Mr. Klomin heard the news, the weather forecast from the Golan to southern Sinai-one day before the war ended-he stood in his bed, sang Hatikvah to the window, and died. But there is also another version…"

Tape / -

The Hebrew poet Emanuel the Roman lived in Rome between 1270 and 1332. He knew Dante Alighieri, cured him of his illnesses, held conversations with him, sang him the songs of the Temple he knew from his mother's milk, and gave Dante the ancient meters from which Dante spun his rhymes. Maybe he also loved Beatrice. He was a learned man, a bon vivant, and a poet. Aside from philosophy, Bible interpretations, and sonnets in Italian, he wrote the Notebooks of Emanuel on the model of The Wise One by Rabbi Judah al-Harizi. A witty satire, splendid and restrained rhetoric, poems of lust and love, full of wisdom of life and wisdom of the world, his one poem begins…

Tape / -

My dear friend in cold and rainy Germany, here it is light and warm.

Thanks for your last letter.

I asked myself if I am really and truly open to you. Can there be friendship between us? To myself I thought: What is real friendship? Is it possible to understand our encounter at Ebenezer Schneerson's home as an attempt to capture a shadow, when two sides, opposite from one another, you and I, hunt echoes that cannot be captured? You wanted details and I generalize, but I am still horrified and amused by the thought that the Last Jew will be written, or is perhaps already written, by an aging teacher acting-as his wife puts it-his bereaved love and by Germanwriter, a man of the world, an artist who collects literary prizes, whom critics compare with Proust, Joyce, Thomas Mann, and Faulkner, but he's unable to write the story of Ebenezer, Rebecca, Boaz, and Samuel by himself and needs these tidbits, the limping investigations of Teacher Henkin… From the mendacity of the two of us, from our mutual helplessness, will a book come, or perhaps they will be notes for somebody else, for a better violinist than us who will write this book? Maybe a book should be written as books were written in the Middle Ages. First one version of Faust or Hamlet, and then comes somebody else and writes another version, and on the basis of that version, a play is written, or even a book, and then comes somebody else and writes the new version and so on until Goethe or Shakespeare… Jordana managed to weep at the cemetery on the anniversary of Menahem's death. (Details!) She encountered Boaz. They met in the Ministry of Defense because of their common work. I don't know exactly how they met. I resented it, but I didn't say a word. Noga told me: "I love that sad Yemenite woman, I love her lost betrayal of Menahem, her dependence on Boaz."

Yes, and the meeting with Jordana. We planned an outing for the Committee of Bereaved Parents. On the phone, Jordana said: We'll meet in a cafe, because it's hard for me to sit and discuss these things in front of Hasha's mocking eyes. I'm no expert in the new cafes, and I remembered Kassit Cafe, once a meeting place for writers and artists, and I said: What about Kassit, and she said, Fine. I walked there and thought that if I had sat in Kassit after the war I would have met Boaz, who sat there then and waited for me. Unlike me, Jordana took a taxi and so she was late. After all the years when I hadn't set foot in the place, the waiters looked as if they were still expecting those artists. They waited on me nicely, immediately served me what I ordered, and smiled at me as if they were protesting the forsaken youngsters with wild manes sitting there.

A young woman with open lips, shut eyes, sat there looking as if she were rapt in mysterious thoughts. Artists yelled and cursed one another, and when a person entered and wanted to sit at an empty table, the waiter took it under advisement and then allowed him to sit and I recalled Mr. Soslovitch and at the same time also understood that he was dead, and at that very moment, Jordana entered the cafe and looked extinguished. Something in her face was depressed and bitter, she looked nervous, stood next to me distracted, I said Hello Jordana, I was so glad to see her, and she said Hey Henkin and corrected it to Hello Henkin, but the words were said distractedly, absentmindedly, she barely saw me, she sat down in a chair, muttered something, excused herself and got up, went to the bar, next to where the owner of the place always slept with his enormous belly thrust forward and his legs stretched out in front of him and on his face a sweet glow of a giant teddy bear, asked permission to use the phone, dialed and sank into a long whispered conversation, I saw her weep a few times and then hang up decisively, amazed at the emptiness that filled her and very slowly she came to me, tried to smile through the screen of tears, said: You look great, Henkin, she sat down next to me, put her hands on the table, played a little with the salt shaker that had more grains of rice than salt, lowered her hands in astonishment, the salt shaker hit the pepper shaker with a bang that was maybe too loud for her. She groped in her purse, took out a cigarette and lighter, put the cigarette back in her purse, lit a cigarette that had been stuck in the corner of her mouth before, for a moment, she shut her eyes whose lids pearled with tears, opened them wide in a certain amazement, as if she didn't know exactly where she was and if she had already ended the long phone conversation, she inhaled deeply on the cigarette, and all I could see was a sadness spiraling up in a thin curling smoke, and I, maybe because of my sensitivity to her, maybe because of memories that surfaced in me, I looked at the man sitting at Soslovitch's table drinking beer and I tried to think about him, and Jordana played with the lighter and said: What a day, what a day, twice she said that, as if she weren't at all sure she had said what she said. The sorrow I saw in the meeting of her lips looked as if the smoke came to the soles of her feet and clouded my ability to talk with her about the outing we were about to plan. I said to her: The man eating gizzards and drinking beer is sitting at the special table. Maybe it was an attempt to distract, I really don't know anymore. Mr. Soslovitch, I said to her, sold locomotives. Ever since the establishment of the state he sells only one locomotive a year. A confirmed bachelor. Always dressed up, with a tie and a handsome hat.

Soslovitch loved artists and so he'd come here with the Cohen family. Mr. Cohen was then a bank manager or a finan cial advisor, I don't remember anymore, and Mrs. Cohen, a big, handsome woman (her father was one of the founders of Wadi Hanin and left her some land) had a house that served as a salon for artists and writers. I'm not well-versed in gossip, but Mrs. Cohen and Mr. Soslovitch fell in love with one another in nineteen twenty-nine, while Mr. Cohen used to travel a lot and seemed satisfied. He performed important missions for the newborn state, loved his wife's artists, and was a close friend of Mr. Soslovitch. Every Saturday afternoon they'd meet at Kassit, sit at the regular table, eat and drink. Sometimes they'd even hug each other emotionally, or would become pale and sing sad songs in Yiddish or Russian or Hebrew. Mr. Soslovitch would come alone every afternoon, sit at his regular table, and until he'd leave, nobody dared to sit at the table. Now a stranger is sitting there, and that's a sign that Mr. Soslovitch is dead. And so, out of thoughts of distant years I didn't even know I remembered, Jordana said, half pensively and half provocatively: What does that have to do with us?

What does that have to do with us? I asked.

Me? she said, blushed and repeated: What does that have to do, you burst into an open door and that doesn't suit you, Henkin. I said to her: I was trying to distract you from your gloom, and Jordana said to me: You're too old and wise to believe that if you tell a woman like me about a locomotive salesman who sold one locomotive a year, I'll forget what I'm weeping about. Did stories like that help you?

I was silent and drank coffee.

Then she ordered a beer and I saw the beer foam stick to the lips of the fragile madonna of death, and then she hissed between her lips: Son of a bitch, that Boaz Schneerson. She tried to smile, tears again pearled in her eyes, and she said: Let's drop the son of a bitch and talk about the outing. The son of a bitch said the stalactite cave is a delightful place, so I want some other place, Henkin, and now she almost yelled, since the girl who was meditating mysterious thoughts opened her eyes wide and looked at us in amazement and let her head drop on the table and fell asleep. I thought, Who sells us locomotives today? But that thought didn't help me, I couldn't really be concerned.

A few days ago, Harvjiaja brought me a story that was published in one of our journals. The story was written by a writer who fought in the war with Boaz and Menahem. In the story, Boaz appears, along with Noga, and Jordana, under the names of Aminadam, Mira, and Shulamith. I translate the story for you with the original names so as not to confuse you. The title of the story is "Vulture." The story annoyed me. Only after I read it did I understand what Jordana's rage meant. I wondered how the writer knew things I didn't know. But those are facts and from them we have to interweave "our" story. The writer's name is Nadav ben-Ami.

[A part is missing]… And Jordana left her office and went to the street. The light was dazzling, people who were scared of the heat weren't the shadows she had thought. She stood in line for the bus and since she didn't have anything to do with her hands, she straightened her hair and tried to squint her eyes because of the dazzling light. On the bus she stood crowded between people who were pungent with sweat and the driver yelled, but his voice was blended into the turmoil. When she squeezed her ticket, her hand was wet and the coins in her hand seemed to be swimming in water. The sights passed by in the blurred windows, and a woman sitting next to where Jordana was standing tried without much success to open the window wider. When she came to the stop, she got off slowly, which annoyed the driver who muttered something and even locked the door when the blast of the lock hit her spine. A sudden burst of wind from an air-conditioned shop made her shudder with pleasure. She turned to the street, which, now, at dusk, was empty. The night watchman in the big building, whose lower floors were built now, put a pita in his mouth filled with tomatoes and olives. The tomato dripped red juice and he wiped the blood of the tomato with a lace handkerchief. When he tried to smile at her he looked distorted because of the tomato and maybe also because the olive pit didn't come out in time, so he spat out the pit and the smile was crushed. But she had already crossed the street and didn't hear the curse. A car sped by and she jumped, the watchman couldn't help laughing, and the tomato dripped even more and she looked at the house, and didn't move. Just as the woman who lived alone in the house next door started hanging laundry on the clothesline, Jordana lit a cigarette and immediately let the cigarette drop to the ground and crushed it with her foot. The watchman looked at the cigarette and the tiny spark that still flickered in it. Jordana went upstairs, even though she didn't know where she got the strength to climb.

Noga sat on the roof and embroidered. Jordana looked at Noga and Noga raised her face and said: It's so hot! Jordana couldn't say a thing, she touched Noga's face, let her stroke her hand softly, and as they stood there obeying something remaining between them without words for a moment, they seemed to be hoarding an anger that had dissolved into their standing. Jordana drank water straight from the faucet and only then did she pour herself a glass of water from the jar she took out of the refrigerator and drank from the glass until she was amazed that there wasn't a drop left in it. Dead tired, she looked at the old grandfather clock without hands and allowed her clothes, with a light and unconscious help of her hands, to drop off her. When she stood in front of the grandfather clock, which she was apparently still looking at, but didn't see, air blew from the vaulted window and she saw the upper end of the wheel of the setting sun and a plane was seen cutting the air and descending on the way to the airport. The breeze lightened the heat a little and her sweat cooled. As in a daze, she moved to the shower. For a little while she stood unmoving under the stream of cold water. Then, without drying herself with the many towels hanging there, she put on a robe, and dripping water, stuck to the robe that was clasped to her, she went out to the twilight on the roof and looked at its serene riot, and Noga said: Sit down, I'll make you coffee. And Jordana said: I'll make it myself, she sat and looked at Noga and saw again the woman hanging laundry in the house next door. She got up, and without looking at Noga, she went to the kitchen, put on water, waited until it boiled, poured Nescafe and some saccharine, went outside holding the full coffee cup, and said: I dripped all over your kitchen.

The wheel of the sun almost disappeared, leaving behind an astounding wake. The shadows were starting to fill the roof and penetrated between the flowerpots. Jordana, still dripping water, drank the coffee and started dancing. Noga came to her. They stood so close they almost touched one another, Jordana sipped the coffee she held behind Noga's back, the sun disappeared behind the department store, and Jordana said: What a disgusting pink, and Noga looked at the old antenna and saw a bird landing, cleaning its feathers, and soaring again. Noga gently pinched a bush growing in a giant flowerpot, picked a jasmine flower, brought it to her nose and smelled it as in a long ceremony and then, gently, she moved it back and forth in front of Jordana's nose. Jordana stood transfixed, her face almost didn't move toward the flower, her nostrils expanded, and then, with a quick movement, she tried to snatch the flower from Noga's hands, and in a twinkling, Noga managed to hide it behind her. When she moved and stamped on the floor, the phonograph started playing. Jordana could move from the spot, and so, even though she didn't pay any heed to it, she let the half-full cup drop from her hand and shatter on the floor. Only after the smash was heard did her hand start shaking again. Noga didn't avert her face. Her back reconsidered, and when Jordana came to her, she waited until she was clinging to her and bent over, picked up a shard of the coffee cup whose slivers were scattered around them and black coffee still poured from the shard. The coffee was thick and a drop fell on her shorts. Her leg was long and well-shaped, and Jordana went down on all fours and cleaned the drop of coffee dripping from the pants on Noga's well-shaped leg. Noga held out her hand, and moved it very close to Jordana's long hair, got wet from the water still dripping from the hair and Jordana stopped shaking.

The woman in the house next door started playing her Italian singers, and Jordana said: They always sound as if in the last opera they die and only then do they live.

Get up, said Noga.

Jordana couldn't get up, but she couldn't say that. She was stooped, curled up in herself, before her the day broke and shadows deepened, the light was swallowed up rather than disappeared, a plane passed by and left a long darkening white trail behind, the roofs were swallowed up in the dark that was already heavy and its dimness was cracked by flashes of lights. The wind that had blown before stopped, and the air stood still again. They cleaned up the shards, swept the roof and washed it with water, and then Jordana tried to direct her body to the two pleasures competing with one another: the Italian from the house next door and the melancholy rising from Noga's phonograph, but Noga refused to be caught in her mood that may have been impossible, and the stumbling, that was right for her, maybe therefore something that accompanied her from the moment she left the office. When she fell she thought she wanted to burst out laughing, but she didn't know why she didn't laugh. Her head hit the floor that was just cleaned, and Noga said: Come, let's go in and eat something.

When they went in, Noga slammed the door and turned on a light. She put out a plate of cheese and rolls, butter, and a bottle of red wine. The phonograph went on playing, maybe because Jordana changed the record, even though the two of them weren't aware of that, the light from the vaulted window was red and vied with the light of the lamp, and the burst of air was stronger now. They ate in silence and then Jordana spread butter on a roll, put a triangle of cheese on it, chewed, looked at the zigzag snake of light bursting from the broken vault above the grandfather clock, and said: I went with him to Independence Park, Noga, there were homos there and a woman with a dog. We searched for shade, in the distance I saw Henkin's roof, I ate lunch with him. Sad, Noga… Boaz's father put up a new television antenna, and Boaz didn't approve and didn't not approve. Near the demolished wall of the Muslim cemetery, he told me he loved me. I said to him: You don't love me, Boaz Schneerson, if you love, you love Noga, and he said: Maybe I'm not using the right words. I told him not to say anything, then he said, It's true, maybe I am tied to Noga, but I need you. I told him, I love you Boaz, say "love," don't say "tied," and he said, But Noga hates you, and then I told him: So what, and I laughed, Noga's feeling is stronger than your empty words.

Noga didn't say a thing and Jordana stood up, the roll in her hand, finished a glass of wine, looked at Noga, and said: How beautiful you are, Noga, you sit here, bring me into the house, give me coffee, cheese, red wine, and Boaz, tell me things so I'll understand him, what do all the ceremonies he makes for people tell you, you do know how to obliterate and you give him to me, some fine gift!

Maybe Boaz discovered my demon, only you know him, nobody else does, when I loved Menahem Henkin Boaz came and took that love too, even before he took me…

Noga started humming something that may have been some echo to the music from the phonograph. She said: You want to disgust me, to hurt me, but I'm protected, Jordana… Got to say what happens on the roof on Lilienblum Street, on that roof, not what happens in comparison with something else. There are time differences-in Los Angeles it's now ten hours earlier, but for me those are only words, now here and in Los Angeles is the same time. I've got my own time; you're there, Boaz is there, what happens to us, Menahem, you and Menahem, me and Menahem, no love is that love, in that moment Boaz has to see himself in your eyes, or even "only" in your eyes, that you will love him, that he will know how dreadful he is and of course wonderful, after the ten hours' difference he returned to me, and he was with me also ten hours or ten years before, and always will be. This is home. This home is not love or hatred and not what happens to you or to me or to him, at the limestone wall of the Muslim cemetery.

When did I have more than ten hours? said Jordana.

When you loved Menahem, said Noga with sudden anger that passed immediately.

Maybe, said Jordana, I once tried to feel what it is to be a bereaved father or mother, Noga?

It's almost all I tried, said Noga.

Jordana opened the door, cast off the robe that had dried long ago, stood in the pale light of the room, at the open door where lights capered, and said: Once I came home from the Committee of Parents, took off the marble look, I saw Henkin's eyes in my mind, I thought: What is love for somebody who died twenty years ago? I sat in the big armchair I had, with arms coated with disgusting black Chinese lacquer, I shut my eyes and tried to banish the eyes of the fathers and mother, I thought, I've got a son, I've got a son, I've got a son, and I felt him inside me, I was pregnant, and he was there, that son, I was happy, I didn't sleep, I just forgot I was some existing Jordana, I was me, but in another place, maybe ten hours' difference? Something like that, on second thought, I hurt, I invented a child who dies, I gave birth to him, that hurts but the pain was mine, I raised him in that ten hours' difference, and he was alive, he existed as you exist now in this room. I didn't look at the clock, didn't know how much time had passed, it was dark, I talked to him about grades at school and then about flu and why you have to stay at home another day and not go to school, and he went out and fell under a car, I ran out of the house where I was apparently living, but he was already crushed. After I returned from the cemetery, I thought here, he's not with me anymore, he isn't even for himself. But for me that was something else, he wasn't anyplace for anybody, not in Los Angeles, not here, not ten hours ahead not ten hours behind, I sat in the armchair, I can't even describe what I was feeling. I was choking, I tried to breathe, I knew that if I woke up I'd be relieved, but I didn't want to, or perhaps I couldn't. The knowledge that he isn't, totally isn't, no telephone would reach him, no letter would get to him, it was impossible… I gathered that emptiness from all the dead people I had filed, my nothingness was a dinosaur in me, swallowing every drop of air, I felt the emptiness penetrate again into my womb, but this time it was longing, like an ax, that cut the face, the feet, the cheeks, the roots of the eyes, his connection through me, cutting off from me, my eardrum was so taut that I could hear the heart beating, I started yelling, there was a wooden knife there, I brought it close, thrust it into my arm, blood flowed, I yelled, the neighbor rang the bell and then knocked on the door, I heard voices, I was in shock, the neighbor brought people, apparently I fainted, they broke down the door, I heard a siren, then I disappeared to it, I connected with it, there was one moment of bliss and pain and then I woke up in the hospital, they measured my blood pressure, tested my heart and blood, they bandaged me, my blood pressure was high, I said: My son died, my son died, and they were busy taking care of me and didn't pay attention. They gave me a shot of something and I fell asleep and came to only two days later and was loathsome in my own eyes, what a fuss I made for them, myself, I apologized to the neighbor… And then a week later I was eating lunch with the head of our department, we were eating in Olympia, suddenly I started yearning for the child, I looked at the people and they were eating moussaka and stuffed vegetables and shashlik and drinking beer and cold water and I was trying to eat and that yearning, like a flash that cuts the body and suddenly all the people became paper dolls and I saw them through walls and didn't sense them anymore, and I thought, that's how my people are, sitting in a meeting, in a car, suddenly that arrow that's stuck in them, like that, among people, among the living, next to shops, in a cafe, at the movies, suddenly you and the son, or the daughter, who aren't, and you feel and no word will express the feeling, and the tears have to roll in the belly, so they won't be seen, won't be misunderstood, and with whom to share this pain, and it's impossible, and another few times like that, I was sitting in the movies and suddenly I didn't have him there either, and on the seashore, among a crowd of people on Saturday, he wasn't, all the time crushed by a car, the expectation at night, I should have let months pass to get over the dead son I never had.

Jordana fell silent, she pinched her nipple lightly, found the stub of the mirror and looked at herself, Noga looked at Jordana in the mirror, saw the thin swarthy body and Jordana sucked in her belly and a spasm seemed to pass through it, she said: Right, I loved them, they were a yearning for something, Boaz is building an empire of dead people, I loathe that, and live with that, go to the Committee, smile, introduce parents to their sons, but inside I've got this son, once he was and remains forever, and Boaz, he's the only one besides you that I can talk to about that, tell him, today I met a dead person and then touch Boaz, know he's dead and he understands and somehow he also lives. What man would take a woman whose two men were killed and they say she kills her men, she's cursed. They say: Boaz loves the smell that comes from me, as from you, grows stronger from the death of others, mine, others, yours, vulture! He goes to war to be close to blood, meets you in a tent, you play Noga, he plays Boaz, and you can laugh at yourselves, me too, in his jeep, in his car, everyplace, with you, without you, shame, shameless, guilty, not guilty, I live without that official marble, without the curse, all of us in the cemetery, and it's allowed… And his grandmother who will live forever. Maybe Ebenezer… Once I went with Boaz to his grandmother, he told her: This is Jordana from the Ministry of Defense, as if I were the chief of staff. She smiled and told about the ants who would eat her someday. And Boaz, Boaz sat on her lap and she bounced her fist and stretched her fingers and said: Grandma baked a sweet cake, cut it in slices; gave it to Poopie, gave it to Moomi, gave it to Boaz, and then she sang some song in Yiddish, full of gloom and spiderwebs and he sat there, the one who meets dead people in my womb, who measures my veins to make them into threads to tie memorials, and listens to his grandmother talking to him as if he were five years old, and laughs… He sits in the lap of a woman who came to the Land of Israel before Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi, and hears about the bastards who destroyed everything for her and her husband who died on the shore at Jaffa, plays with her beautiful teeth, and she's like some ancient palace, a poster from Switzerland, elegant, and then he came to us two fools, and we're here Menahem's puss, with Henkin's words, stuck to our skin, in different planes of time, ten hours' difference, ten years, what's the difference, a Yemenite and a European, two beauties we, stretched to one another and he weaves us into his rage, hits, and we make him coffee. What, Noga, will be?

And the two of them stand there, Noga's legs touching Jordana's and Jordana lets Noga hug her, she has nothing to say, she holds Jordana and tears flow and you don't know which of them is shedding tears, or for whom they're shed, the phone rings and they answer the phone together and say he'll come back later and hang up and don't know where Noga starts and Jordana ends. The phonograph plays a Mozart concerto, the Italian opera on the next roof is over, the solitary woman there now has a television, rustling of a city, dark schemes, planes to Lod slice the dark sky filled with the roar of heat and then Boaz enters, glances at them, shuts his eyes, they're sunk in that hushed distance from one another like lovers, a feather touch, he washes his face, eats something he picked up from the table and then, when he starts combing his hair fear floods him, he wrenches Jordana away, pushes her to the torn upholstery, lies down next to Noga, looks into her crotch, averts his eyes to Jordana sitting cross-legged, and says: Look how charming she is, white, European, with her it's pressed and small like a seashell. He tries to laugh but doesn't make it. Now she started yearning and didn't yet want to know for whom. Again and again he strokes Noga's groin as she gnaws her fingernails, he tries to catch Jordana who slips away from him, and Jordana says: Let me love the two of you in the distance. She manages to climb onto the nightstand, cross her legs, disappear into the dark niche between the wall and the window with the opaque pane and he turns, caresses Noga, and Noga whispers: Not now. Offended, he hits her but she doesn't respond, goes on gnawing her fingernails, looking at Jordana sitting shrouded in shadows, and he says: Now! And Noga says: I don't feel like it, Boaz, not now, Jordana moves a little, her eyes measure the mattress at her feet, the closeness that had vanished before. He says: I want the two of you, I'm bursting from you, and then Noga said: Once you put a paper flower and were sensitive, now you're full of shadow, and Boaz yelled: Get down, Jordana, but Jordana didn't get down, not yet, and then the phone rang and he said: It's for you, Noga, who in the hell wants you? And Noga grabbed the receiver from his hand and whispered into it briefly, talked about some film they had to see and Boaz went to the kitchen and drank cold water and returned and yelled, Stop! Noga put her hand over the receiver and whispered: Stop, Boaz, and then he looked at Jordana and a slight smile started on her lips, and he said: What's going on here? A revolt of the streetwalkers? And Jordana laughed and then Noga whispered, Fine, see you, and replaced the receiver, went to the nightstand, bent over a little and started pulling Jordana's hands, which began, as in a dream, to stretch out to her with a pleasure Boaz couldn't bear, and Jordana shut her eyes and offered herself to anybody at all, she didn't care anymore, shuddering on the nightstand. Like a hedgehog, said Boaz, and went to the refrigerator and shrieked: Where's the beer, why don't they buy beer, and then he found a beer and drank it, put his head under the faucet and let the cold water stream and apparently also yelled because burbling noises came from the sink, and then Noga laughed and Boaz went to the other room and called out: Why isn't there any more beer? and Noga said: Because I didn't buy any, and he broke a chair, and Jordana said: Noga, he broke a chair, and Noga lifted her face and said: Jordana, Boaz Schneerson broke a chair, soon there won't be anything to break in this house and then we'll all get married and get new chairs from all the mothers and fathers, because there are three of us and we've got a lot of fathers and a lot of mothers, we've got Henkin and the whole Committee, and we'll get chairs and clocks, and Boaz threw a chair leg that didn't hit either of them, but could have, and said: You, you brought Jordana here, not me, you invited her to live here, not me… And Noga puts on the robe that Jordana took off, and says: Me? I didn't bring anybody, Boaz, I opened the door and some poor Jordana was standing there and I let her in, the ticket you paid for, and Jordana approached Noga who seemed sunk in a distant and maybe even malicious melancholy for a moment, as if she borrowed it from another body, maybe from Los Angeles, ten hours behind, and Noga pushed Jordana away and in a clear and quiet voice said: I'm my own rag, who am I? Do you have any idea of the harmony you destroyed? Do you really grasp who I am and why I am, and where I'm going and where I came from, without any connection to you or Menahem Henkin whom you killed or didn't kill. I myself became a memorial book for a fallen soldier who never was!