The Last Jew

And then, again the empty silence of the south of the city will swallow them. That dark will prevail, planes will go on passing over the house on their way to the airport, Boaz is softened with, without, Noga, Jordana, everything is again as it was, but in the air there will be a sense that all that can't happen and that it's not possible anymore, that we, said Boaz, we take things too deeply, we can't do it simply, and we can't do it not-simply, and at four in the morning they woke up. If they had slept at all before.

Tape / -

Jordana went to the shower, stood and looked in the mirror and splashed cold water on her face, but she was still blazing. When she went back to the room, Noga and Boaz were sitting on the gigantic mattress. That pale light penetrating inside flickered and went out. Jordana said: I dreamed of the dog we had in the village, his name was Haman, he was old, I dreamed he devoured you.

She looked toward the window, her face was molded in the flickering light, etched like the face of somebody else. She said: Poor old Haman was a Don Juan. In the days when he was a real dog, he'd make bitches pregnant like a fish. Now she was filled with an envy that flooded her and almost choked her. She looked at Noga and Boaz and they didn't see the tears: You'll always be with each other, she said, you'll have each other, that dog was a son of a bitch, like you! Then she said, he'd still run after the smells of bitches, but they didn't want him anymore. When he was fourteen or thirteen and a half, I don't remember exactly, which is like ninety years, Boaz, maybe a hundred, he started falling in love with cats. We had a cat named Incense, she was always pregnant or nursing six or seven kittens. Haman started wooing Incense, and then, the kittens. When Incense was in heat, he'd sniff her all day long.

You're weeping, said Noga.

Those tears have nothing to do with you, said Jordana, or with Boaz either, I'm thinking about Incense, I'm weeping for old Haman, who am I talking to? The window? The streetwalkers of teleprinters? I've had it. I'm jumping out the window, I left a cigarette downstairs and across the street is a night watchman as lewd as old Haman. By the way, in the end he died.

Who? asked Noga, and Jordana said: Poor Haman.

Boaz stood up and started getting dressed, he said: Come on, let's get out of here, and Jordana kissed him with a lust Noga couldn't bear.

The beat of footsteps in the empty night streets embarrassed them. It extinguished the rage every one of them felt for the walls, the sourness of the coming morning.

When they came to the old cemetery, they found a locked gate. The watchman was sleeping in the little cubbyhole at the entrance. Boaz folded the handkerchief, put it on his head and woke up the tired, angry watchman. Boaz told him: There are two women here who came last night from Hong Kong seeking the grave of their father who was murdered in 1938.

Come in the morning, said the watchman, shaking with rage.

In the morning they're on trial, said Boaz, they'll expel them from Israel, it has to do with the Ministry of Defense. I don't really understand you, said the watchman, maybe you speak Yiddish?

This is a matter of life and death, Boaz answered in Yiddish. He took out a hundred pounds and gave them to the watchman. Look, it's worth it to us and you can go to sleep. The watchman examined the money, sniffed it, and said: Come in, just don't wake anybody up.

Boaz loved the watchman's sense of humor kindled at the sight of the money. That's surely how he bribes dead people, he said, and Jordana giggled, but that was more than Noga did.

Be careful not to step, said Boaz. They walked on loose paths soaked with dew. Night on tombstones. Names of Tel Aviv streets. Heads of Zionism, heads of Tel Aviv, leaders of the Yishuv, history in a field of tombstones, said Boaz. A boy jumped from the third floor in nineteen twenty-nine. The women wanted to leave, Boaz didn't.

Then they sat on Manya Bialik's grave and hummed a song. Now they were drunk on something in the air, in the pale light that started appearing in the dark. Noga said: We're pathetic and melodramatic, and that's nice. Jordana felt disappointed and didn't know why. The magic engendered by the place was starting to fade. The graves were only stones on loose ground. It was four-thirty in the morning. The moon was setting. When they sang, Jordana said: I'm not singing, I'm not a European who sings in cemeteries, and I won't be buried here either.

You too, said Boaz.

I want a kiss, she said.

Take it from Noga, said Boaz.

Jordana touched the ground and said: Dew of death! And they started walking out, they trod on the tombstones as if they were fleeing from somebody. That amused Boaz, not Noga. They picked up flowers left by visitors in vases, whose water had already turned moldy. I need a little wine, said Boaz, and Noga said: He needs a little wine, Jordana. They came to the gate as dawn began to break. The light was pale and a reddish glow was lit in the sky and looked like a crazy spot, as if sentenced to destruction by itself and Jordana started weeping softly and nervously. Noga hugged her shoulder. They stood near the corner of Ben-Yehuda. Boaz told them to sit down and wait for him and he started running. He ran along Ben-Yehuda and Allenby, passed by a liquor store, broke the window, took out two bottles of wine, and kept on running. A terrifying ringing came from the store, Boaz ran in yards, passed by thistles and cats, a police car appeared through an opening of the buildings, cars were already starting to move, and he came home, started the jeep, went back, picked up his lovers who were sitting in an entrance to a building huddled together, opened the two bottles of wine, and they drank. After the wine warmed their bodies and the dust from the cemetery was shaken off, they drove along the street and yelled wildly at the locked balconies and came to Ebenezer's house. Ebenezer was Boaz's father. He left him when Boaz was a year old.

There was a woman there, too. She was his daughter and the mother of the daughters of the lover of his grandmother before she got married. The daughters died. They-

I've translated for you up to here, because strange as it is, I saw the end of this "story" with my own eyes. Boaz told me that when the author of this story came back from the war, all the neighbors went out to the balcony, tossed flowers at him, threw candy at him, and held a royal reception for him because he was wounded. Boaz said he stood there and looked and thought: That putz who didn't see half of the war I saw receives a national honor because they think he almost died, while if he had died he would have won more, while I, said Boaz, have to apologize.

What interests me is how the author knew those details, and maybe he didn't know, maybe I'm making it all up, maybe I'm mixing things? How do I really know all that happened? Maybe I'm inventing and you're thinking: Jewish knowledge, he knows what to call Boaz, Jordana, and Ebenezer. Maybe it's me. Everything is only an optical illusion. People come seeking the grave of Madame Bovary, is Madame Bovary really buried there, somebody told me that too, but when they tell me about me, about myself and I tell, what am I telling? What they said or what I know, but in that matter, I've got nothing to add, it's hard for me to meet somebody who was in Menahem's battalion, fought along with him, and never came to talk with me.

The yelling I heard clearly. It was five in the morning. Hasha Masha said: Henkin, don't open the window, and I didn't. I sat at our window with the old shutters you can see through, if only the opening, and I saw it all. Boaz behaved like a wild man. In his hand he brandished an empty wine bottle, Jordana and Noga sat in the jeep. I saw the two trying to sit off to the side, slightly bent over, so that if I were awake, I wouldn't see them, but they were also drunk apparently and Jordana wept nonstop and Noga looked vile and aristocratic in the light of dawn, and Ebenezer in his pajamas said: Who's there?

And Boaz said: Your son, Samuel!

Ebenezer went outside, and Boaz said: It's me, Samuel, and in his voice I heard reverence, maybe a certain cry for help, surely a supplication, some breaking of a savage. Yes, said Ebenezer, you're Boaz, the son of Rebecca Schneerson.

Boaz looked at his father. He yelled at Jordana and Noga: This is my father! He came to die in the Holy Land with a woman who is both his sister and maybe his daughter and the sister of his mother. Look at him, in his opinion, I betrayed the two people he loved, one Samuel and one Dana who's supposed to be my mother. Jordana, my mother Dana, was murdered by Yemenites.

Arabs, hissed Noga angrily.

Ebenezer went to them, he raised his eyes to my house, he did know I was watching, I knew he responded to my hidden figure, maybe he needed my help.

What do you want, Boaz? asked Ebenezer. Clearly he seemed to be wrapped in a dream. I'll tell you what I want, said Boaz, and approached his father. He pushed him toward the fence and for a moment I almost couldn't see him, but Ebenezer moved and then I saw his eyes. I'll tell you, I've got two women like Our Teacher Moses, one black and one white, the two of them belonged to the son of your friend there, and he pointed to the shutter where I was hiding, and now do for them what you did for Samuel, recite your fucking knowledge, you're in a nightclub, Ebenezer, you set clocks back, I'm Samuel, you're in a nightclub in Cologne! Ebenezer, who knew wood in its distress, on whose horrible death I grew up, in a nightclub, you're entertaining gentiles with your wonderful memory, turn on your crappy computer, why don't you start. I'm tired, Boaz, said Ebenezer, and his voice contained some submission. He haggled, but we knew he meant to do what Boaz ordered him to do, and I understood: That small chance that his son was Samuel… I wanted to get into bed, block my ears, but I sat fascinated. Ebenezer shut his eyes, looked obsequious like a Jew in your caricatures, and for a long time he recited the annals of the Mendelssohn family, as if anybody really cared to know who was the banker, who was the musician, and who was the philosopher. Hasha Masha put up water and blocked her ears with cotton and I sat and listened. The girls stood on the side, apparently already in despair at hiding from me, and Ebenezer recited. It was a cheap circus act, the setting was the seashore, lifeguards' surfboards on the way to the sea carried by tanned fellows, girls in blue on the way to school, the garbage truck on Yordei Sira Street, and he's telling about some woman he asked what she would do after the Liberation and she said: I'm going back home to my son who was a Hitler-jugend and she spoke proudly of her son… She went back home, she said, and waited for her son, for her husband, and they didn't come. When she discovered that her son had put her in the camp, and now neither he nor her husband wanted to see her, she committed suicide in a hotel, and then Boaz, a uniquely humiliating act, he went into the house, brought out the hat of the Last Jew who stood humiliated, foaming at the mouth, stopped the woman delivering milk who was trying to pretend not to hear and demanded money from her, and she put half a pound into the hat and he went to the two girls, Jordana and Noga, and demanded money from them and they put it in the hat, and you could see they were scared and did that as if they were possessed by a demon, and Boaz took the hat and went back to Ebenezer and Ebenezer said: Samuel, you always know how to surprise me, and I thought: Well, at long last, I saw the Last Jew in a real performance, not like when he recited and talked about you but just as in the nightclub, and what a setting that was, a small street, a woman delivering milk, construction workers on their way to work, tanned girls and boys on their way to the seashore, the Hilton on the left, and then surprisingly, without Boaz sensing anything, the Last Jew took the watch off Boaz's wrist. Jordana and Noga didn't see, I did. Boaz wanted to go, his face was ashamed, and the Last Jew said: What time is it, Boaz? And Boaz searched for the watch and didn't understand where it was. And then the Last Jew waved the watch in front of Boaz's face and laughed, he laughed, really laughed, and said: There, there you wouldn't have lasted a day, you're not Samuel, and he threw the watch at him. And Boaz waited until his father went into the house, put on the watch, and went down on his knees and chewed the wet sand, even though the sun was a little warm now and his face was black and he wept. Never did I see Boaz Schneerson weep.

Yours with friendship and the hope of seeing you again soon,

Obadiah Henkin

Tape / -

One warm morning, Rebecca Schneerson got up and looked at the window she had looked through but hadn't seen for forty-two years. She rec ognized handsome almond trees, a thick-trunked eucalyptus, a weeping oak, lemon trees, and expanses of flowers and greenery up to the edge of the horizon. In the distance, she saw the road that hadn't been in the window forty-two years ago. Rebecca put on a white dress, wrapped herself in a shawl, and went out. She walked erect and confident, even though it had been years since she strolled on these paths. When she came to the center of the settlement, children buying gum at the kiosk peeped at her. They said: Here's the witch come out of her hole. Yehiel, the shopkeeper, whose father remembered Rebecca, wanted to go outside to greet her, but a vague fear kept him from doing that. Now that Rebecca felt that there were no more enemies of life in the settlement, the children of the first ones, their grandchildren, and great-grandchildren started loving her. Fears of her had been passed down as a legacy, but belief in their stories was even stronger than the worries, and there was talk in the settlement council of making amends for the ninetieth anniversary celebration. Among many candidates, thirty-one men and a woman were chosen as the founders of the settlement. Some of them did indeed found it, but Rebecca had long ago become the most senior and important founder of them all. She heard from a laborer who worked in her yard about the decision to fix the synagogue and call the main street, the Street of the First Ones, Nehemiah Schneerson Street and she told the reporter from Our Settlement who came to interview her (she even agreed to receive him), that the number of founders growing in inverse proportion to the realization of expectations worried her. Nehemiah died on the seashore in Jaffa, she said, and because of him, she had been living here for seventy-one years. There were ten families in the settlement at that time, then twenty, of the first four sons, only one was still alive, Ebenezer, who died and came back to life only because he went to the Holocaust. So, she added, Zionism has nothing to be proud of.

Rebecca Schneerson went into Mr. Brin's small department store, and Mr. Brin, who had never seen Rebecca life-size, said: It's a great honor for me that you came to me. And she said: No honor, Mr. Brin, I didn't come to you but to the only store in the settlement where you can find a tape recorder. I assume that if there were two stores, the prices would be more reasonable. He tried not to pay attention to the complaint and bitterness in her voice and served her with an exaggerated devotion that disgusted her. Ever since the Captain and Mr. Klomin had died, and all her enemies had been buried in Roots, she had lacked a certain adulation that Ahbed and his friends couldn't grant her since they were too simple to recognize her value.

Mr. Brin showed Rebecca Schneerson about sixteen different tape recorders, and since she didn't trust anybody, she chose the one Mr. Brin claimed was not as good as the others, but she had to have it. She allowed the disappointed Mr. Brin to wrap the tape recorder, picked up the package, and went home. She walked through the fields, saw the new houses, the farms and trees and orchards and gardens, and the new school and the community center and the old water tower, and she thought that in fact this wasn't such a bad place, that there was nice air here and the view was soft and beautiful and everything was painted now and not gnarled, people built and improved, trees grew, flowers bloomed, yards multiplied and were beautiful, the horizon stopped evoking gloomy expectations, the sky became softer and not exactly because of the cataracts in her eyes. She feared those thoughts, as if some long way, maybe the longest she had made since her forefathers' forefathers got her pregnant, a way that had gone on for more than two hundred years, was coming to its end. She wasn't afraid of the end, it wasn't death that scared her, what scared her was some more absolute end, beyond death, an end that torments everybody and only its contamination is felt, an end of what had been dreamed in her veins for two hundred years-Secret Charity, the curse, the river that pierced, Joseph and his poems of yearning, Nehemiah longing for Zion, could all that simply vanish, only because there was never a solid basis for the dream entrenched in some cosmic bitterness of a cruel God against those who betray His command of destruction?

When she came back home, through a row of sprinklers that evoked an amazement in her that she tried to chill, even though they'd water her gardens and she didn't know, she tended to the tape recorder for a while in her closed room, put the microphone to her mouth, and said aloud: One, two, three, and when she turned on the machine, her voice was heard, and even though she didn't recognize it at first, she immediately learned to use it. She said: Recording number one, Rebecca Schneerson, to whom it may concern and to whom it may not concern…

… Nehemiah was a handsome man. Boaz is my son. Ebenezer calls him Samuel. Collectors of charity, who dreamed of Mr. Klomin's kingdom, in vented a state that is a little bit of a dream and a little bit of a ghetto and a little bit of a military camp and a little bit of flowers. My tears for eight years were for nothing. The Captain isn't here. Everybody died on me. Ebenezer was amazed that the Captain ordered flowers placed every week on Dana's grave. I wouldn't have done that. What do they know about the Captain? He was a swindler, cunning, naive, and wise. How many wise Jews are there in this land? It's great wisdom to be a successful farmer, to build a good farm among Jews. Does the fact that I'm alive at least make me dead? I want to say something about Ebenezer. I married Nehemiah, not Joseph, and it's a lie to say I didn't love him. I wanted to save him in America and he didn't want to. Nehemiah taught me a lesson. He left me Ebenezer. Ebenezer went to search for the one he thought was his father, and in the end he married a woman who was both the daughter and the wife of his father. He comes to me and wants to know. What will I tell him? I think that even though Nehemiah was his father, Ebenezer is bound to Joseph and was born to bring Joseph back into the world through Boaz! Is it possible to love somebody, the son of somebody else, who grew in your belly, so that in the next generation your real son will come into the world? Ebenezer, the lost son. Whose son is he? The Last Jew, they call him. And I'll die after him. Lucky thing Boaz has no children. There will be a wilderness here with Ahbeds, as there was before we came here. But to tell Ebenezer I can't. I don't give birth because some man got me into bed. I brought two sons into the world. One was born by mistake from Dana in order to be my son again. Is he my grandson or my son? I lived the end of the story of Rebecca Secret Charity, but they don't believe in the satanic power of blood, in the awful flow of Satan. They believe in progress, they believe all awful things were an imagined curse with no foothold in the reality of progressive people who elect a hundred twenty fools to something they call a Knesset every four years, and they think they're successful and wise and clever because they learned to kill a few Arabs in tanks given them by gentiles, so that then it will be allowed, without any problems, to destroy them one by one… the river was at the end of my life or at the beginning and it's all the same, there was Joseph there, there was Nehemiah there, there were my father and mother. Ebenezer is the curse and he knows wood in its distress. Like an everlasting name he came back. He should be exhibited in a museum…

How much I wanted the love that would replace the dependence, the beauty, the yearning. Did I succeed in being promiscuous? Even that's a hard question. I remember once thinking I should let the Captain hug me, sometimes I did want to, but I thought, Is there somebody who can, with a few drops of water, put out the fire of hell burning in me? And life passed by. That's how it is. Life isn't what we live, but something that flows out of us. And I look around, Nehemiah and Dana died so that Boaz would be, Joseph isn't here, the Captain, I've got an avocado, flowers, fruit, chickens, a nightgown. What the hell don't I have? The flowers bloom, and I look around and ask what to tell Ebenezer, who wants an answer, and he's already past seventy, he wants to know, what will I tell him? That I'm ninety years old and can't say, so here, Ebenezer, with the only love I have left and that isn't aimed at anybody, not even myself, I swear, I'm telling you: Afayg! Up yours! Just up yours! It's not malice, be my son if you think so and want to be, not out of malice, you're quite lovable with all you've suffered with the woman you raised like a dried flower in one of Dana's old books, because I don't have anything else to say, not to you, not to the tape recorder, not to God, not to Satan, not to Rebecca Secret Charity, nothing. Up yours, that's what I've got to say, only that, up yours!

You're all that's left of Nehemiah. Of all the naive founders, of that nation, of you, of me, up yours!

And then Rebecca turned off the tape recorder and started laughing and the laughter turned into weeping and she locked the door, put her head under the blanket, and wept as she had wept seventy years before, a whole day, nonstop, and then she got up, washed her face, sat at the table, and Ahbed said: What happened, Madame, were you weeping? Were you laughing? And she said: Bring something to eat, Ahbed, and he said: Were you laughing or weeping? And she said: Afayg, up yours, Ahbed, do you know what that is, up yours? So up yours to you, all your sons who will inherit the land Nehemiah sowed with Ebenezers who knew wood in its distress, into me they came, from me they didn't go.

Tape/-

Noga Levin knocked on the door fearfully. More than she was afraid to come, she was afraid of Henkin peeping at her from his house. She thought, What is he thinking, why is he looking? Fanya R. opened the door, invited her in without a word, and went to put on a robe. Noga was bundled up in a scarf, she hoped it made her look older. Last night she told Boaz: I'm going to Ebenezer, I want to look old and wise, and Boaz, who wanted to answer, suffered an attack of yawning she didn't cause and so he couldn't answer her. By the time he finished yawning her footsteps were heard on the stairs.

Ebenezer, who had slept in his clothes ever since the war, put a blue sailor's coat over the clothes he had slept in and went into the room. He said: What is the lovely flower in my house? She laughed because she didn't expect him to behave so gallantly.

Noga said: Sit, Ebenezer. He sat, watched the sun rise through the open bathroom window. I came to apologize for Boaz's behavior, said Noga, he didn't mean it, he had been drinking, he lives in tension, he's sorry for what was-

Ebenezer averted his face and didn't see the sunrise now. In the big living-room window you could see the fences of the port and the demolished buildings, and the abandoned shore. He said: Remind me of what you're talking about, some things I remember and some I don't. She sipped the coffee Fanya R. gave her and stirred while walking, which seemed to Noga like hovering, and after a few sips, when the tasty coffee was inside her, she repeated word for word what had happened at the house when Boaz and Jordana and she came from the cemetery. Ebenezer shut his eyes, stretched out his hands, and said: He meant what he did, and I was a fool!

You weren't, said Noga.

When I was a little girl, said Noga, as if she were talking to herself, I once came home from school and Mother met me on the stairs and told me to go up and wait in the house. I went up and the door was locked. I knocked on the door and Father didn't answer. I thought maybe he wasn't sleeping but listening to the news. I went up to the roof, from the laundry room, I slid on the water pipe straight to our kitchen porch. I loved to slide because it was also a little dangerous. I went into the kitchen and water was boiling on the stove. I turned off the stove, ate a few grapes from the refrigerator, and holding a bunch of them, I went into the living room. My father was lying in bed and the radio was off. His leg was stretched to the side as if he were about to put on house slippers and get up. I think he was smiling, but maybe it was a grimace, I said to him: Father, why didn't you open the door, but my father didn't answer. I went to my room, opened the schoolbag, sharpened a pencil, took out the books and notebooks and started doing my homework. And then I thought, Why didn't he answer me? He always answers me, but at the same moment I also thought there was something wrong with the eraser I had bought and I had to exchange it at Lichtenstein's. I picked up the grapes I had put on a plate where I would once mix sand from the Negev and went back to the other room. He was still lying there, the foot was on the way to the house slipper, he didn't move. Everything was in the middle-middle of a smile, middle of putting on a shoe, like a photo of somebody who is both running and standing still for eternity. I thought he looked like marble. I touched him, his hand dropped and stayed hanging in the air between the bed and the floor. I turned on the radio, after a few seconds, the music started, and then I looked at him and suddenly I understood. I didn't grasp how I understood, because I had never seen a dead person before. But that dead person was my father. I started yelling and stamping my feet until the neighbors came. In the ashtray was a cigarette and then I didn't have a father and I asked myself what exactly I didn't have, what I lacked, Mother would get hysterical and swallow pills and miss him terribly. Once I dreamed that my father came back and didn't want to see me, you can't imagine how that hurt…

Ebenezer got up and stood in the middle of the room. A beam of light penetrated inside and made the small squares of lacquer on the nightstand glisten, his eye was covered with a dark scrim, for a moment he looked both solemn and a scarecrow that birds aren't scared of anymore. Fanya R. gave him a glass of water. He said: I asked him to help me, I don't know who I am and what I am, how can I know who Boaz is or who you are or who Henkin is?

Henkin is writing a book about somebody who doesn't exist, maybe I don't exist, when they shot Bronya the Beautiful, Boaz came, or perhaps it was Samuel, and then somebody came and took him. And fifty years passed. Rebecca's here, and Dana. It's all words, Noga, he says and doesn't feel. Only Fanya R. All the rest is words. Germanwriter too.

Noga said: You scare me when you look at me and say those things, I can't understand.

I'm waiting for Samuel, said Ebenezer. All you say is only words, I've got to see Samuel, Boaz is Samuel, but he isn't either.

Noga got up and went to him. Fanya R. smiled. Noga didn't remember ever seeing a smile like that; as if what was hidden in her or shaped in her, some bitter memory, was disguised to itself and it was itself and at the same time its mask. Fanya R. said: I'm not a talkative woman. You're a beautiful woman, all that is a punishment from God! Boaz looks like Joseph, so how is he the son of Ebenezer? Ebenezer thinks his daughters died, because those are Joseph's daughters. Something for you and for our story. You know how awful it is at night here. Always yearnings and always those dreams he recites. I'm with him, so what, troubles Boaz needs, he's a Sabra, Israel, army buddies, a hero, what, why does he need all that with dead souls and dead bodies and yearnings for the dead, and my little girls who wait in Ebenezer's brain. He's got memories, he doesn't have Ebenezer, he's got Samuel, he doesn't have Boaz, my daughters left, Mengele, twins he loved. He did experiments, and then more, what do we know about Boaz, about Noga that's you or about a Yemenite woman who came here with pain and also apologizing, yesterday, says Boaz isn't to blame and now you come with a story like her, see how much I'm talking, but Ebenezer doesn't have all of you. He's dead, all Jews died, standing with a white flag, with Samuel, hitting gentiles who come, exile, exile, you don't know! Samuel is his son and how will you understand, you!

(Fragments of reels of recording for cataloguing: tapes [6/76 and tape 5/90] were ruined, these are fragments of them that remained-)

Women who look like Jordana and Noga are sitting in row twelve on the aisle in the movie house "Pa'ar" in Tel Aviv. A matinee and cracking sunflower seeds. A Lufthansa plane, a Boeing 747 flight 005 takes off from Cologne. Jordana is weeping and so she can't see the film that Germanwriter doesn't see on the plane because he's sleeping. Noga buys more sunflower seeds, comes back, and sits down next to Jordana.

Boaz took a Carmel Duke car and went to the desert to hunt vultures. He parked the car next to a wadi, took the rifle, and walked alone, in a good mood, whistled something, the gigantic desert, yellow and savage. The Carmel Duke car is made of fiberglass. When he came back with a dead vulture and searched for the car he saw a skeleton. Camels passed by there, saw the car, and ate it. They left only the chassis and the motor and the chrome. He walked a whole day until he came to Yotbata. From there he went home. For a week he laughed, even when he saw the vulture stuffed for a school in Jerusalem.

Boaz told Noga about the camels and didn't tell Jordana.

Jordana claims that Boaz doesn't love her because he didn't tell her about the camels. Noga tries to undermine her certainty.

Noga thinks: Jordana tastes like hot peppers and wormwood and cheesecake.

Rebecca Schneerson dreamed she had wept for eight years. When she woke up she didn't know if she had dreamed she wept or wept and had really slept for eight years. She told Ahbed: I don't know what time is now. If now is now or not.

Ahbed asked Boaz what afayg, up yours, means.

The Captain's grave moved at night. Bedouins camping there with the flocks they brought from the south trembled with fear. The son of old Avigdorov, who was considered one of the thirty-one founders and had once loved Rebecca, but didn't have the courage in his heart to tell her, toddled along for six kilometers in the heavy heat to tell Rebecca the Captain's grave moved. She said: Tea you won't get for that, but know that if he moves in the grave it means he's preparing for future wars. The Captain was lazy in his life, and even more so in his death.

Fanya R. was scared, went to the store, and bought two dolls. Then she hid them. The waiter who came to serve drinks at the party that was held someplace else and got the address wrong, buried the dolls in the yard for her, under a tree. She paid him in German marks hidden in a pillow. Ebenezer went to the place where there had once been a village named Marar and picked chrysanthemums. Then he tried to plant them in his garden.

Boaz sat in his house and very slowly burned his hand. He didn't feel a thing. Noga covered her face with a pillow and Jordana went into the street and read obituary announcements. She didn't know the dead people. In the morning she read in the paper that a man had died. She went to his funeral, stood there, asked herself what she was doing, but didn't have a satisfactory answer. Somebody asked her if she was a relative, and she said: Maybe. Then she went to the office. Boaz came with the seared hand bandaged for a memorial book for an artillery regiment. Jordana tried to pretend she didn't know him. They talked with an alienation that suited their mood. But her hand, her hand groped for him. She told him about Mr. Soslovitch, a locomotive salesman. Boaz said: If Henkin had come to Kassit when I sat there three days and waited for him, and Mr. Soslovitch ordered a beer for me and I didn't drink it, I wouldn't have had to write the poem. And I don't think Mrs. Cohen ever slept with Mr. Soslovitch. Then they talked about the fact that their love had to end and maybe was already ended. She wept. All she could say was, I love both of you, Boaz, I love you and I love Noga. He said: Maybe, and left.

Germanwriter finished writing the novella and went over the last proofs. Renate was sick. As mentioned above, they flew Lufthansa Flight 005 to New York.

In New York Sam Lipp said: You act Licinda, Licinda, but you're not Licinda. Nobody can be himself.

A conversation in Tel Aviv: You remember Samuel Lipker from the Sonderkommando? He's my son's commander in the reserves.

I thought he died, said the man.

No, he was on the ship with my brother. The name of the ship was Salvation. He hasn't been seen since. Now, she said, he's called Boaz.

Sam, asked Licinda, were you ever in Jerusalem?

Yes, said Sam.

I dreamed about a house, she said, and I know I got the dream from you, the house wasn't big and there was a bakery in it.

Sam said: That was my grandfather's house on Baron Hirsch Street in Tarnopol.

Rebecca Schneerson's cow barn, said the Minister of Agriculture in the official ceremony, yielded the greatest quantity of milk by three point forty-six percent of all the cow barns in Israel. I am honored to award the family representative the medal for increasing and encouraging production. The great-grandson of Ahbed climbs onto the stage and accepts the award on behalf of Rebecca Schneerson, and shakes the minister's hand. The minister's wife whispers to the minister: He looks like an Arab.

The great-grandson of Ahbed hears that and says: I don't look like an Arab, I am an Arab. And he adds in Arabic, kata hirek, and descends.

Boaz put his mouth to Noga's hand, caught her white hair, and in silence held her hair in his mouth for two hours and twenty minutes. Noga wept, but the tears she wept circumvented Boaz's head, and in an arc, like flying deer, the tears landed on his knee. When dawn broke, he turned his mouth away and said: Anybody who wasn't defending you, Noga, doesn't know what perfection there is in words.

Noga made him tomato soup.

Jordana called and said: I slept in my house and it was sad, but. And hung up.

Boaz thought of Samuel in the camp and didn't know why he thought of Samuel in the camp. He said: My father didn't forgive me for not being there and I didn't forgive either. And Noga said: Look who's coming, it's Kootie-and-a-Half, hello Kootie-and-a-Half, and Kootie-and-a-Half bent over, and said: Who's that beautiful Yemenite woman who's blocking her ears?

A hard land, said Rebecca Schneerson.

A hard land, said Fanya R. She didn't sleep at night. The letters from the newspaper get into my eyes, she said. What dreams there are that I left there and live here. Maybe we'll win the next war? And how alone is it together?

Tape / -

New York, apologies for the delay.

My dear friend,

I meant to write to you on the plane, but I fell asleep. Renate is blessed with what can maybe be called psychosomatic wellness. Two weeks before I was informed of the trip, she was sick, but when they told me I had to fly to New York for the publication of the novella (The Beautiful Life of Christina Herzog), she recovered in a few hours. With my own eyes, I saw a red runny nose dry up. Your letter about Jordana and Noga, and the story you attached, evoked sad thoughts in me about my ability to understand the connections we're searching for: it was an instructive lesson.

Two days before the flight, Renate dreamed she dropped into an ocean and then drove a black hearse. The lights went out and she couldn't see the road, she had to go on driving and started veering toward the steep slope, and when she woke up from the dream, she yelled: Friedrich, Friedrich, but since she hadn't called him in years, and I had meanwhile woken up, I brought her a cup of coffee in bed and she drank and then told me the dream and said that Friedrich had to be here. So she went to the fortuneteller. For years now she hadn't been to her, but back when Friedrich died she had often visited astrologers and fortunetellers. You see, we also seek lost traces in quicksand. Renate thought Friedrich was alive on another plane of time and his death was not absolute. Ever since, an essential change has taken place in her and she doesn't delude herself anymore, doesn't participate in seances to contact our son, has returned to the silent despair of those who submit. That dream before the trip brought her back to the fortuneteller named Ruth, like most of the women in the life of Adam Stein, whom we talked about, and whose old circus Friedrich used to go to, even though he himself no longer appeared in the circus and nothing remains of it except the name-"Adam's Circus." The fortuneteller looked at the cards, made Renate a hasty horoscope, and after she talked with her about her nature and her past, things that need not be repeated here, she talked about the trip coming up in a day or two. There are encounters connected with the past in store for you, she said, and as for the flight, and you're flying soon, and Renate said: The flight's the day after tomorrow! The flight will be comfortable, she said and Renate said: But it's winter now and stormy, and the fortuneteller said, and I quote: "The flight will be smooth as butter."

When we were over the ocean, the head flight attendant came to us and said that the captain, who had seen me on television when I talked about my new book, invited me and my wife to the pilot's cabin. We went up to the cabin of the Boeing 747. The captain's name is Commandant Klein, and when we left Cologne after we took off, he said: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Lufthansa flight zero zero five from Cologne to New York, this is your captain, Commandant Klein speaking… And I thought about Adam Stein and I said Commander Klein caught me in the air, but Renate didn't pay attention and I shut up. Klein, a nice enough man, was excited by the modern instruments he showed us, the up-to-date radar, the boards and the miraculous accessories, and the view from the pilot's cabin really was spectacular: you see the sky before you and you don't sense you're flying, you're up above, you're not aware at all of the plane behind you and beneath you, and below the ocean is spread out and you're alone before that stillness, a gigantic panorama of stillness and red and green lights go on and off and hum, we drank good coffee, we talked about politics and the fact that writers essentially lack understanding of problems that he as a captain and a practical man who "still remembers a thing or two," maybe understands no better, but surely different. We talked about economics, the Common Market, and then we parted with a warm handshake and a promise that when we flew over the state of Maine, we'd be invited back and could stay there until we landed in New York. That will be an unforgettable experience, promised the captain.

Later on, they showed some film and I fell asleep and didn't see it. Renate, who doesn't sleep much on airplanes, rented earphones and watched. I slept so soundly I didn't hear the head flight attendant come to invite us to the pilot's cabin. Renate decided not to wake me, and since she knew I wasn't as excited as she was by new technologies of pop-up toasters, automatic washing machines, transistors, and such instruments, and since she knew that the sight of the landing wouldn't be so important to me-and I could always imagine it and tell about it as if I had seen it, as she put it with a smile-she spared me the early rising and went up to the pilot's cabin without me. As she sat there drinking coffee Commandant Klein said we'd soon enter a strong storm. He showed her the radar screen, and she heard the voices on the radio, and as she told me later, she could see the storm right before her eyes. It was, she said, a gigantic black mass, like a threatening square at some distance in front of the prow of the plane. Renate said: But that can't be! The captain asked why not. (I'm quoting her because this letter is also addressed to Hasha Masha and I think Renate would want Hasha to know these things.) And Renate said, Because Ruth said the flight would be smooth as butter. The commandant laughed and pointed to the black storm at a reasonable distance from the prow, but Renate insisted, it was important for her to believe. Later on she told me she thought she was red as a tomato, and she said: No, it can't be, and when the pilot finished laughing, Renate told me, she buried her face and looked at the floor and thought of a beautiful Bible verse that Hasha translated for her from Hebrew to German, even though it's also in our Bible, but in Hasha's translation, the sting wasn't lost, she thought about King David, of whom it was said that he was ruddy but withal of a beautiful countenance. She liked the word "withal" in that context. The wind velocity above Boston at the moment is one hundred ninety knots, said Commandant Klein and he wiped his nose, but the plane didn't dance. Renate asked: What happened to your storm? and the captain said: Soon, the storm simply moved left a little, and Renate looked ahead and did see a storm and from above it looked like a gigantic black box moving left toward the ocean, and the captain said: Soon! But his voice, she said, wasn't so confident, and it continued like that until the landing in New York. The storm moved left, like a snake, six minutes before the prow of the plane, and when we landed in New York, Renate told me (I of course was sleeping), the wind at Kennedy Airport was six knots, while only ten minutes before it was eighty knots. On the way, traces of the storm were seen and as we were descending, cities and villages wrapped in snow could be seen, and because it had already grown dark the lights were seen sparkling after a decent washing, and the commandant wasn't laughing anymore. Renate had to give all the members of the crew Ruth's address and phone number and when she came back to me, she woke me up and said: We're here, Ruth was right, and I woke up, looked outside and saw the plane approaching the Lufthansa gate, and Renate told me the story, brought me coffee in a plastic cup and I smiled. She didn't tell me she gave them the address and phone number, because she knew that would annoy me. She knew that my enemies, the extreme rightists and leftists, would make mincemeat of me in their newspapers. They'd write about the staunch rationalist who went to a fortuneteller. For they wouldn't write that Renate went to Ruth on her own, but would weave my name into the plot and would brew up a proper brew.

For two weeks I was quite busy. Along with my editor and a few other people from Harper & Row, I flew to six cities in a row, appeared on television and radio, held press conferences, was interviewed, lectured, and our young attache, a handsome woman named Kristina, took Renate and me to a lot of cocktail parties, endless meetings; I even gave a lecture at the PEN Club in New York, I'm not complaining, in our day a writer has to play the clown, the portable philosopher, and I had to do that for myself and my publishers, my agent and Renate. I know that Schiller and Goethe didn't fly to public relations tours, but needless to say the times-and the people-have changed. After two crammed weeks I parted from the editor, the attache, our consul, from some American writers, a few of whom I had met before, we took our bags, and instead of going to the airport, we went to a small hotel in Greenwich Village, slept quietly one night, and in the morning, I called Lionel.

Lionel was glad to meet me. I told him how much I liked the Laments on the Death of the Jews. He told me that he had high regard for me, after all, he said, I wrote the first article about you in The New York Times. And indeed, I remembered that he had written and was amazed that I hadn't thought about that, and after mutual compliments, I on the Laments and he on the novella, and after he expressed amazement that his Laments were now being published in all the countries of Europe except Germany, I said I was indeed astonished.

On our way to him, we bought white wine (made in Israel) and Renate bought a bouquet of flowers, and at a temperature of two below zero, in the cold wind blowing from the river, we came to Lionel's house. I must tell you that I was more excited than I had imagined.

Lily opened the door and was exactly what I had expected her to be, some undefined femininity, something between a lion and a summer flower. On her face the sadness of polished matter clean of sediments, was smiling serene, both deep and bright. At the age of forty, she looked rare, feminine, and an almost Mediterranean olive tone slipped among the northern tones as if they were bold storms on a marble surface. In her eyes is a dark touch and they look very bright, and yet the elusive gloom made them mysterious. She held out her hand and said in English: Welcome, she invited us inside and when we took off our coats and the warmth spread in our bodies, we offered the wine and the flowers and we saw Lionel. Lionel is tall, but not too tall, thin, his hair is silver and short and his face is lit by that light many Jewish intellectuals have, some mischievous flash in the dark eyes, wrapped in dark eyebrows, reflecting an alien, ancient melancholy, and when I looked at him I thought of the sentence of Spinoza (and Lionel's eyes reminded me of his), that God is celestial harmony and that His laws of morality are universal and hence are not an imitation of the laws of nature. Confronting Lionel's eyes, I thought that only Jews, that stubborn and wise tribe, could have created such a sublime and unnatural idea. Who if not the Jews had to know in their flesh how impossible that idea is, but the persistence in believing that there is a moral law that is not synonymous with the laws of nature, grants Hebrew tribalism the exciting, but no less annoying greatness. There was also some savagery etched on Lionel's face, something that strives for personal freedom, and I thought about the expression frozen fire, I thought to myself: Maybe that's how Joseph Rayna looked, or at least something from Joseph Rayna was looking at me and I couldn't take my eyes off Lionel, who was wearing a blue cashmere sweater and thin corduroy trousers and his hands are delicate, but not unmasculine. Lily persisted in speaking English with us, even when Lionel, Renate, and I were speaking German. I loved her for that, and in my heart, maybe I was also angry. The apartment is beautiful, the garden looked gray under the thin shroud of ice, I loved the furniture and the pictures on the walls. Later on, Renate told me that something in the blend (as she said) of the physical furniture, the pictures, the books and the atmosphere, reminded her of your apartment, although the apartments are so different. She talked about color and form that turn into an echo.

I thought about Cervantes's sentence that the pen is the tongue of the soul. Maybe the apartment is simply the thermometer of those who live in it. The conversation, of course, slid to the Last Jew. Never for a moment did I believe that Lily didn't know that Lionel and Sam are sons of the same father, but it was strange for me to think that Lionel didn't know that and that it was so important for those concerned that he not know. Later on, when I met Sam, I understood that he had to preserve lines of defense for himself and that he never trusted anybody-except Ebenezer and Lily-fully. After more than twenty years in the United States, he still felt foreign. As in his relations with Licinda, he always had to be on guard. Lily came from the same world of which Ebenezer is the last remnant. Deep in his heart, Sam Lipp believes that Ebenezer doesn't recite the Last Jew, but that he is the Last Jew, and everything seen in his eyes, and felt, is nothing but a delusion he's willing to live in, but whose logic he doesn't have to accept. That's strategic room for maneuver, a bit mendacious, a kind of pocket pogrom and anti-pogrom he keeps with him as a guarantee for his life. Thus Sam still sells his lampshade, hates what he can't forgive himself, takes revenge on himself for being prevented from taking revenge on the world that Ebenezer maintained was annihilated.

Sam's dreams are so strong that Lily started dreaming his dreams and sometimes she wakes up at night in a cold sweat (she told Renate this as she was drinking), gets up, goes to Sam and Licinda's room, and he's lying there, his eyes wide open, shaking, even Licinda started dreaming Sam's dreams.

I said I didn't know where Ebenezer was living today, but Lily glanced at me offended, since she knew very well that I knew, and then she said in German: Watch out, Sam does dangerous things, maybe what you don't know can sometimes be good.

Lionel told me he had found material in the public library that had been copied by a scholar from Brandeis University. It was a precise account of an evening in a nightclub in London where Ebenezer performed many years ago. I came on that material, said Lionel, when I discovered that one of the laments I wrote was made into an opera and the composer, a German Jew named Weiss, found the libretto in the library. I found a few laments whose provenance I didn't know, they weren't exactly my laments, but one of them was very similar to my sixth lament, about the child who extracted gold teeth. You know the lament, he said confidently, and I did indeed remember it. The composition is called "Sources for the Burial of Moses, Story of the Golden Calf and Its Location," and the material Ebenezer recited was that composition-in addition to the other laments, including my lament-and was composed from Ebenezer's words, by Yehuda Ber Avram ben Abraham and printed in Leipzig in 1984. And the year 1984 is still very far from us, said Lionel. I told him I knew about that composition and was quite amazed by it, and Lionel said that among the papers and manila files were annals of a Crusader (I immediately verified the story) and some meeting between SS Sturmbahnfuhrer Kramer and Nehemiah Schneerson, husband of Rachel Schneerson, a meeting that was held, said Lionel, in nineteen nine. I was excited to hear these things and asked if he didn't mean Boaz, and he said: No, Nehemiah. Lionel asked if that was so important, since I looked quite excited and my face was surely beaming and I said Yes, yes. He told me: I've got a copy of this material and I'll bring it to you. We sat and drank the wine we had brought and Lily didn't talk anymore, but chain-smoked, with restrained pensiveness, and then Lionel came back and gave me a copy of the material, I glanced at it and then put it in my pocket.

In every person hides an image of a first love that may never have been. Lily was my first love, a love I didn't know. Dreams of my youth were embodied not only in the meditations of sin of Ukrainian guards, as Sam put it, but also in my own meditations. There was also a moment I still regret, a moment when I envied Lionel for robbing me of the right to love Lily and in my heart I expressed that explicitly: Our Lily! And I hated myself for that thought. Renate, who sensed something, stroked my hand and let me feel that she understood and forgave, but she wasn't willing for me to continue, and I stopped. That was a moment of wrath, like a demon that attacked, stayed in me and left immediately.

Lily, who maybe also felt it, laughed and looked at me as if to say: You're all alike! But there was also some sign of her own guilt in her smile; if you were forged of this matter, what was I forged of, she surely thought. But the moment passed. Lionel spoke excellent German, he told us about Sam's work, about his theater, and said that Sam had been working for two years on a new play based on the story of Joseph de la Rayna and that Licinda, Sam's girlfriend, was acting in that play. The premiere was tomorrow, and when he asked if we'd like to see the play, we agreed enthusiastically and arranged to meet the next day. Late at night, we went outside, Lily accompanied us, it was snowing, the wind was strong, and then the wind stopped, and Lily said: I know your books, and she linked arms with Renate, who was trembling a little from the sharp transition from warmth to cold. You're decent people, said Lily, but I'm really not at all sure it's good that you came, things aren't yet healed, got to watch out, everybody's conspiring against him, he fights me against Lionel, he's got a broken, corrupt laugh, he's always expecting the blow to land, that play… Sam Lipp isn't producing a play, he's creating the Fourth Reich. She glanced at me, smiled and didn't continue, changed the subject, and said: But it's better like this, you came, maybe it's important that we met, I have to defend Sam and Lionel, I normally don't speak German. In my childhood I sang "Spring, fields, how beautiful are the blue and copper mountains." I sang the "Niederlandisches Dankgebet, Wacht am Rhine." Yes, sometimes, between Sam's dreams, to protect him, she suddenly said in broken German, I have to dream or sing in German… and then she tore her arm out of Renate's and ran home.

We hailed a cab and went to the hotel. By ten in the morning, I was sitting in the public library, in a closed room, and poring over the material. Not until five in the afternoon, when I was so hungry I was dizzy, did I leave. I found very valuable material for our book, Obadiah, and I'll send you copies of all the material as soon as I can. The story about Kramer's meeting with Nehemiah Schneerson amazed me early in the morning, when I read part of the material Lionel gave me. Eating brings an appetite. Even if Kramer's journal, which I read in Ebenezer's house, was (as Renate says) my creation, and I don't accept that crazy versionthe meeting between Nehemiah and Kramer absolutely cannot be the product of my imagination, no matter how fertile it is. In the report from London, Ebenezer tells about the meeting between his father and Kramer. (In his relation to the story, Kramer is not presented at all as a commander in whose camp he stayed. He tells a story of an encounter between a man-and only we, the readers, know was his father-and a German whom only we know was the commander of the camp where he stayed, in other words: he tells a story that is alien to him, unrelated, and that was enough to make me shudder.) Kramer, who was then a young man, went on a journey to the Land of Israel with an old German named Doctor Kahn, who never was a real physician. The two of them were residents of the village of Sharona, although Kramer was born in Willhelma, and only at the age of seven did he move to Sharona. The doctor, who had worked as a ship's physician for many years, collected butterflies, lived with an Arab lad, Higer, who was said to have been wounded once by mistake with his rifle, loved to swim, spawned children all over the east like some ancient god and spoke of turning Palestine into a German protectorate. On one of their journeys they came to a settlement in Judea, and that settlement was the settlement where Ebenezer was born (even though he doesn't mention that fact, and when he recited this story maybe he didn't know he was born there). They were caught in a storm, sought shelter, came to the house of Nehemiah and Rebecca Schneerson. Kramer (according to Ebenezer) describes Nehemiah as a handsome man for a Jew, hot-tempered like most Jews. And Rebecca (in his opinion) was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen even though she was a Jewess. Kramer told Nehemiah there would never be peace between the Jewish world and the Christian world, or the Muslim world. There won't be forgiveness, he said, until the so-called Jew of Jesus is taken out and the reality of the real Jews in the world is separated. Christianity, said Kramer, had a Greek, pagan tone, sublime and tragic in its essence. The idea of conscience and guilt feelings are the Jewish contribution that stuck to original Christianity. The Jews as a nation that rejects race-Gangbok-invented the ahistoricism of remorse. Pure chauvinism is foreign to Judaism, and there's nothing like pure chauvinism to cleanse and create, a solid element in the health of its nation. Would-be patriotic crusades have to be destroyed, he said, and then the Christian Jesus will be the natural god in the world where there are no witnesses to the Jewish betrayal of Him.

I won't weary you with the long speech Kramer delivered that night. We can be amazed only that he said those things in nineteen nine, if he really did say them. Kramer was drunk, drooling, and looked at the enormous expanses stretching to the Arab vines. He said: Today we no longer remember who was the first father of the eagle, evolution isn't only in nature, it also exists as a huge intellectual trap.

The argument was trenchant. Nehemiah's reasoning was, of course, ridiculous to the German. But despite all that, Kramer found Nehemiah charming. Maybe he saw him as a crucified one too miserable to worry about. He hated regretting pessimists and historical thinkers. For him, history was something that happens at this moment. He wanted to write to the German government, to describe the situation in the Holy Land, which monks and cunning spies were tempted to depict too romantically. He wanted to warn the government never to rely on the Jewish Yishuv that had German or Austrian subjects. He told Nehemiah: You've got a beautiful wife, and if I weren't a man of noble feelings, I would steal her from you. Afterward, Nehemiah went to visit him. The houses with handsome roofs, fields measured as with a ruler, the advanced agriculture, impressed Nehemiah. At night, he visited Dr. Kahn's room. He advised Nehemiah not to envy. He spoke with him about the splendid Jewish nation, which was beaten by all the great nations that lit up and went out, while it remained to tell that. He spoke with Nehemiah about the savage Germans, who sometimes had a stroke of wis dom, but lacked a tragic quality. They're even afraid of themselves, he said. The Jews have a rebellious, sober, and sad, maybe ironic, surely tragic deafness, he added, ultimately they will defeat the Kramer idea, just as your god overcame gods like Tamuz, Apollo, Dagon and Ba'al. The field of defeat will always be the hearts of men, he said sadly, and Kramer who heard the words beyond the wall, scolded him and got in return the proud poetry of an anthem and the finger held out to him as conciliation, and then the doctor finished drinking a whole bottle of wine and delivered confused speeches into the night.

Tape / -

In the evening, we went to the theater. The journalists had raised great expectations for a long time, so there was a big and curious audience. In the distance, I saw my publisher talking with the charming attache. They stared at me in amazement, but were afraid to come ask me what I was doing there. Lily and Renate went backstage and Lionel took me into the gigantic auditorium, with a semicircular stage at the end. Actors were already sitting on the stage, chatting among themselves. Somebody was weeping. They sat in a big camp with a barbed wire fence. A gigantic clock hung over the stage. A group of musicians played music composed of jazz elements, Hasidic melodies, and what astounded me more: I could hear through the first tune-like a leitmotif-the fearsome and exciting anthem of the Black Corps. It was a monstrous blend, and yet something pleasant was anchored in it. The musicians looked tired, I remembered the sight of the small chorus in the Blue Lizards Club in Copenhagen. Lily looked radiant. Her dress was light purple, her hair was plaited into thin braids that crowned her cascading hair. She smiled at me (now she returned with Renate and sat next to Lionel), and said: I'm a disgusting woman and had to challenge Sam. I'm scared of his Fourth Reich. Her beauty was ingenuous and wicked, I tried to understand her desperate war.

Here I have to note something: In my youth, I tried to write a description of the smell of a rose, and after many attempts, I gave up. If I were able to describe the play, I would of course do it, but when I returned home and tried to do that for you, for me, I couldn't. I have six drafts of a description of the play, and not one of them touches the terrifying and exciting, bold and fascinating phenomenon we saw that night. Never did I see theater like that. But when I say that, I say something about the smell of a rose. Maybe the gist of the play can be summed up in a few flashes and leave things there, so if you saw it someday you'd understand what I meant.

What we saw was a combination of Ebenezer in a nightclub and an attempt to convey with movement, music, acting, and monologues the story of Joseph de la Rayna. The big clock was set backward. We lived in two different times: a camp in the last hours before the surrender and a person haunted by demons who goes to Safed in the late sixteenth century to bring deliverance. The play was opened by Samuel Lipker, or more precisely, an actor who played him, who explained a few things about Ebenezer to the audience and announced that at the end of the play, baskets would be passed around, and every spectator would be entitled to contribute as much as he could for Ebenezer's hungry dead daughters. The story of Joseph was played in full: Joseph mortifies himself, leaves with his students to bring deliverance, prophets warn him, snow on the mountains of Safed, an intentional sin is greater than an unintentional good deed, Joseph's wedding ceremony, also a Frank, the false messiah with a Torah scroll and a whore on horseback. Destruction is essential. Joseph burns down a synagogue. Rabbis mourn at the throne, which is a stove in the middle of the camp, where soldiers without hands clap their lips at other recruits going to die and there sit Lilith and Ashmodai. They love the smell of divine incense. Joseph chews tallow. Smears himself with tallow. The students follow their teacher. Their tribulations, told by Ebenezer, are sung by a chorus, danced by dancers, and then Ashmodai and Lilith are caught. When the arrogant Joseph offers Lilith incense, a spark goes out of her mouth and burns the cords. Gigantic dogs assault the students. Joseph runs away. God yearns for Lilith and Ashmodai. The synagogue burns down. A woman translates for a lad the things said to him by a young woman who doesn't speak his language. Metaphysical pornography, Renate said to me. Joseph is flogged. All is lost. Salvation doesn't come. Ebenezer moves the clocks. A woman brings a dead baby into the world and actors sing numbers of death. Uniting with one another in human perversion. A bakery with a protesting woman put into an oven. Dogs metamorphosed into souls. Words incomprehensible at first and then blood-curdling. Silence, some epic of silence and movement, like animals who learned the annals of horror from the amoeba to SS Sturmbahnfuhrer Kramer who sits and laughs, blinking at Ebenezer at the throne of God, in the middle of a camp with a human barbed wire fence. I'm trying and not succeeding. I know, but a seventh draft won't be hidden anymore. A dog's head on a tray. Ebenezer recites. Tells the history of the Jews from their end to their beginning. The Fourth Reich, says Lily, and tears flow on her cheeks, history of Joseph de la Rayna, Joseph Rayna, his sons and daughters, that horror, Henkin, descending to the dark depths to discover light, some catastrophe in the order of the universe. To save objects, the captain throws the ship into the sea and drowns. And during the play I felt I was in fact participating, acting in the play while sitting, the actors were acting me, I them, and we, one another, and between the silences movement and sorcery, as in some magic rite, sitting heavy, an awful silence broken only by the nervous laughter of the audience, a laughter at pictures from the present blended with the camp, Kramer, Ebenezer, Joseph de la Rayna living in Safed, then and now, as if all times were desecrated and the clock starts going forward and backward and the awful terrifying music and yet more beautiful, the increasing movement, a very thin freeze prevailing, so thin there are no words. Four hours passed and we didn't even go out during the intermission. The woman who gave birth to a dead son did that when some of the audience went to the bathroom. The actors eat and drink onstage. They themselves also constitute part of the set and they dance. Licinda is Lilith, and also the woman who lets some boy crush her breasts, as he reads the numbers of trains that went there in the voice of a stock market announcer reading stock prices and she's indifferent, her eyes extinguished, Joseph flies from Sidon to Greece and enters the dream of the Queen of Greece, who orders him killed. Deliverance doesn't come and won't come, there's only death which all of you, says Samuel, all of you are in and it is with you. The Fourth Reich, says Lily. Lionel hears parts of his Laments, Ebenezer recites with his eyes shut, the clocks are broken, words are lopped off, until it all ends in a thin silence. Only Ebenezer stands there and then falls. And then he laughs. He doesn't know who he is. Maybe he's dead. The actors start applauding the stunned audience and only then, Henkin, only then, does the audience wake up from a state I'd call hypnotic and come out of the role it has played: a spectator of its own execution, and applauds.

Never did I hear such applause…

We went outside. A cold wind was blowing. We bundled up. In the distance I saw the charming Kristina waving a flaccid goodbye to me and disappearing into a cab. My publisher came, shook my hand, and didn't say a thing, looked at me, for a moment he forgot why he had come to me, and he left. We went to Lionel's house. Later, somebody brought the reviews. We also heard the review on television. Sam closed himself in his room and didn't come out. I went to him. He was sad and quiet. A spark of anger flickered in his eyes. I don't like art, he said, I don't make art, what do they want from me, everything they saw was truth, somebody showed them, what's the big deal. But I couldn't pity him. He created a great work and he was suffering because of that. To create something great is to touch painful nerves, it's to try to create, to challenge, to change a world, and they come and say: Oh, it was awfully beautiful, I understood it.

One General Allenby, said Sam, wanted to scare the Sudanese and told them: I command you with a telegram, I sit here with weapons and supervise the wires. What does it mean to create? I translate dreams into theater. By the same token, I could have been a professional murderer or an undertaker, I've got no compassion, Melissa-Licinda is an open wound, I need her and Lily, that's all. I smiled at him and he looked at me, and then he confessed to me about the letter I had once sent him. Lily smiled the honeyed smile of a jungle queen in a Walt Disney movie, and Sam said: Did you see how my naked parents lay there! You must know, your wife could have been an excellent Jewish shawl, there's no future for that stupid past, trying to teach actors to act "it," not "about," what comes out? A review in the Times: Powder and milkshake. A crooner and a football player understand better. Who am I doing theater for and why? I don't have electricity in my hands and I don't have flames. I have to do theater. What does art do? Except that one man I knew built beautiful boxes to stay alive and then I too, because of him, and the life I have left isn't the life I wanted, you know how many came out of Auschwitz alive? Thirty thousand, another two days of war and not even one would have come out alive to tell.

Henkin my friend, a malicious thought came to me: The next time I'm asked about the heroes of my fiction, I'll tell whoever asks that he really should ask the characters about the author and not the author about the characters. I thought about that as a result of something that happened to me and that I'll tell you now. I'm not a person who acts impulsively. I stayed in New York to meet Sam, Lionel, and Lily. The meeting with Sam was disappointing to some extent. The night after the party, I invited him to a small bar, we sat and drank. He didn't talk about anything but his hatred for the play he had worked on for years. He didn't open up to me. I couldn't really make him talk, even when I gave him some information that should have interested him. When I tried to talk with him about Ebenezer, he shut up, then he said to me: For me Ebenezer is dead! And didn't go on.

When I told him about Boaz he was silent a long time and I saw three things at the same time. He envied Ebenezer, whose existence he didn't admit, he envied Boaz, and he felt a profound fear. He said: That's nonsense! I was the only son of the Last Jew. Licinda is the incarnation of Melissa. Melissa is the love of my stepfather's youth. He said that, since he knew very well that I know they're brothers. But he chose not to relate to that and I didn't press him. I'm afraid of those combinations, he said, those crossroads, of you and of me. The real world doesn't exist anymore and we're its last witnesses. Why embellish them? Melissa is dead so we'll act for her the death of the Jews as she sits at the throne of honor and sells lampshades for ten percent profit. If God were dead, said Sam, we wouldn't have to suffer so much, but He's not dead, He exists as long as Jewish suffering exists. And then I did the irrational act I alluded to earlier, I write you now, and my hand shakes. I did something like Ebenezer's request, when he told you to ask me for his two daughters, something like Renate's desperate attempt with the fortuneteller, I went to Connecticut.

I came to Washington Depot at noon and went to the official Ford dealer. Mr. Brooks was sitting behind a glass wall reading a newspaper. When I looked at him, he turned his chair around, took off his reading glasses, and tried to see me. I walked around the gigantic show room and a smiling woman came up to me, and said: Aren't you the German writer we saw on television? I read your last book, she said after I said yes. You want to buy a car? At that moment, Mr. Brooks came out of his office and approached us. An old man dressed meticulously, his hair white, his nose thick and some thread of taut harshness around his eyes, he introduced himself to me, and said that an honored guest like me-he had also seen me on television-warranted special attention, and I said: That's fine, your assistant was friendly and generous, and she smiled, maybe even blushed. I looked at him, I spoke, but I tried to think of my son. What arose in the back of my mind was an impossible blend of Boaz, Sam, Friedrich, and Menahem. He looked at me as he spoke and I'm not sure I heard what he said, I tried to understand his mourning, but his mourning was hidden under so many masks that I could almost see myself in his eyes. I was moved to pity for him, I can't explain why, never did I pity you, Henkin, or myself, or even Renate. I said: I came to meet you Mr. Brooks, and please forgive me, I wanted very much to see the house where Melissa grew up, but I can't explain why to you.

He made a gesture as if to stop me, and I stopped talking. He seemed to be trying to digest my words, to understand them. After a bit, he said: My brother's granddaughter, Priscilla, is a student at Smith College in Northampton, not far from here. A very distinguished college… When the Catholics came to Northampton, they built a splendid church there, next to the college dorms. Do you know what the scholars of Smith College did? They put the chemistry lab in a building next to the church. The windows of the chemistry lab face the windows of the church, and for fifty years, sir, the Catholics, now the majority of the population in the city, except for the members of the college, have had to suffer the stench…

I nodded as if I understood the parable, even though I didn't yet completely fathom what he was talking about, I felt the shining chrome of a new Pontiac and now, in his sterile church, between a Ford coupe, an elegant Mercury and a big white Lincoln, Mr. Brooks tried to smile. I saw the lines of his face refuse to illustrate a real smile. The layers of his face interwoven with thin red threads expressed some grievance, maybe anger, maybe even a threat, but under the threat I made out lines of serenity. He said: Melissa died years ago… I don't read books, sir, but I saw you on television and I read about you in Time. You look and sound like a rational and honorable man, you come from a country I admire for its practicality, its culture, its industry. Do you know how much I wanted to sell BMW and Mercedes? Listen, he said, and now at long last he managed to smile, I'd be glad to have you over to the house, let's go there, you'll have lunch at my house, but sir, Melissa no longer is, she's not in me, and now he almost raised his voice, she's not in the house, she's not in my wife, she's not finally and definitely, it's been many years since I stopped missing her, I've got two sons and one of them will surely take over my business, Priscilla can stay at her college, in the chemistry department and know she's still fighting an ancient war against Catholics, and with us, that's a rare, maybe desirable, case of a sequence of generations, sir… We're not like you, and it's too bad, he added sadly.

He took me to his office overlooking the showroom, ordered coffee for me, and went out. I munched a crunchy cookie, I drank the coffee, and I waited. He came back, we put on our coats, and went out into the harsh cold. We got into his white Lincoln Continental, the heat came on immediately, he started the motor and we glided to his house.

I won't weary you with the details of the meal. There were whispered conferences, the mounted hides are still there. We drank sherry, Melissa's mother is a charming, gentle old woman, much harsher than her husband. One of the sons asked me a lot of question about the two Germanys and I tried to answer him to the best of my understanding. The lemon mousse (after the ribs and roast potatoes) was excellent, and the more we talked, the more perplexed we became. Why am I here, they weren't the only ones who wondered, I also wondered myself and didn't know what to say…

I knew the moment of truth was approaching, I was worried, and so were they, and Mrs. Brooks, with that cleverness our wives call "feminine intuition," told me a young man came years before and then they found out that his name was Sam Lipp, and now everybody's talking about him. I told her: I'm doing research for a new book, maybe not so new, and I met a lot of people, including Sam Lipp. Mrs. Brooks showed signs of restrained excitement. For a moment she looked both desirable and shriveled, like some mounted hide of insatiable passion. She drank a lot of wine and her tongue became faster and maybe a little inarticulate. She talked about Sam Lipp, about the articles she read, that he isn't interviewed, that there aren't any photos of him, and nevertheless she said: I recognized him, I knew that was him. Maybe she recalled that dog, called her dog to come to her, it was a new dog, she patted his curly head with a sense of mastery, of revenge for Sam Lipp, some terrible sense for chilly melodrama. And then she got up, paced back and forth, and Mr. Brooks lit a giant cigar, smoked it slowly, and belched clouds of white smoke, and the maid brought a tray with coffee cups. Sam Lipp, she said, also went to the cemetery and we chased him. The dog betrayed us, we should have caught him, that famous stage director, what is he doing? I'm afraid to go to the play, Bud and Priscilla tell wonders and miracles about it. He patted the dog. The dog melted in his hands. I'm talking a lot. What hatred there was in him. Anger. What did I do? That anger of his. Melissa isn't his. He loved her, he said. Jesus!

I was silent and looked at the crease in my pants. Mr. Brooks was quiet and pensive and his look was caught in the smoke wisping up from the cigar. His face was impassive, and then suddenly, something in Mr. Brooks's dead face lit up. That flash I sensed in him before, something that would look inside, immune, creating stories about the chemistry department turned from an alloy of tiny red gills and miniature lizards into an almost savage audacity, and the shriveled silence turned into genuine rage. He said: There is in them that anger, the stubbornness, the cleverness, the nerve to get into the wrong places, where they're not wanted. There are reasons, natural reasons, aren't there? And you know, who knows better than you.

Yes, I said, and tried not to get upset, not to give it away.

No, that's not what was in him, she said. True, he's one of them, but no. Even then I thought, a trapped wolf, foreign, with a frightening, almost filthy beauty, some generosity in evil, some agitation in rottenness, his play, even then he tried to please… What did Melissa have to do with him?

And I knew she meant, What do I have to do with Melissa?

I told you, sir, said Mr. Brooks, somebody didn't build enough chemistry departments next to what could have been a cemetery! Those were strong words and I kept silent, Henkin! She shut up, and unlike her husband, she didn't trust me. The perplexity about my coming hadn't yet been explained. But he was swept up now in some old, gnawing enmity. He didn't know Melissa, she said, he tried to steal her! There was one who sneaked in, but we knew how to get rid of him, and now Mr. Brooks was incensed against the writer sitting there, and he barked: We're playing with words, what do you have to do with Melissa! What do you want after fifty years, what, what, what?

I said: I met Sam Lipp, and-

And what? Melissa wasn't his, she died before he was born!

I'm investigating!

Investigating what?

I'm investigating the death of our children, I suddenly said, the death of Sam, who's disguised as living. The death of my son, the death of a boy named Menahem Henkin, the life of somebody who learned the history of the world by heart, Melissa is somehow interwoven in that story, I don't understand how, but I know and so I came here. Even before he met Licinda Hayden and called her Melissa, long before that, he was in love with Melissa and didn't even know her, just as I came from Cologne and find myself an unwelcome guest in your house, trying to know how you miss or don't miss Melissa. My son is dead. Sam Lipp, or as he was called before, Samuel Lipker, is also a fellow named Boaz Schneerson, and his events and the events of his father, I'm trying to write together with my friend who lives far away from here. He was in love with your daughter, knew her in another plane of time-an expression I learned from my spouse — and he's still searching for her, maybe in his disappointed love for Licinda Hayden who acted Lilith in his play…

I don't grasp what that has to do with it, said Mr. Brooks. He got up, his legs unsteady. He picked up the big glass ashtray standing there, and maybe he inadvertently dropped it and it shattered into thousands of slivers. At the sight of the smashed ashtray, he tried to smile, but his face managed only to grimace a little.

I do understand, Mrs. Brooks almost whispered. I remember looking at photos of Licinda Hayden, I saw her in Time, Newsweek, T h e N e w Y o r k T i m e s. I remember looking at the photos and thinking, I know her, but I didn't connect it… now I do. Does Sam know about Melissa's closeness to Licinda?

I'm not sure, I groped for something opaque and astonishing that I heard in her voice now. Mr. Brooks said: I'm sorry about the ashtray. He called the maid to come clean up the slivers. We sat silent and pensive and waited until she finished. Mrs. Brooks got up and left the room a moment. Mr. Brooks said to me: She was a beautiful child, Melissa.

I know, I said.

She shouldn't have died, he said in a voice that cast off fifty years of thick walls, I should have listened to him and taken her to a hospital in New York, but I was too proud.

I'm fond of people who, at a certain moment, can say something contrary to the foundation of their whole life, and can feel human remorse, and I thought of my father who never could. I almost loved that man.

Suddenly there wasn't anything more to say. I looked out the window and saw the naked trees, the rebuked, aristocratic, frozen landscape wrapped in snow, an enormous sun startled me, as if your blinding light that exposes everything fell on me here of all places, a beam of light from another world, and I fell silent. And then Mrs. Brooks came back. In some way that seemed marvelous, but equally clumsy, Mrs. Brooks tried to connect Licinda with somebody who could have been Melissa. Maybe the fact that three strange men came during fifty years to love Melissa endowed her daughter-and even her yearnings for her had vanished with the years-with some importance, some metaphysical refinement. She was surely thinking of Lionel, of Sam, of me, she thought Licinda lived for us what Melissa could have lived eternally for her. I'm talking now of disappointment. I don't know, tangled threads unite us, and to whom am I telling these things! You? My self-mockery perplexes me and I almost suggested to them to establish an international committee of parents, without any distinction of sex, religion, race, or nationality, would Mrs. Brooks accept that idea? I was amazed at myself, not at her, she spoke about family, maybe a stub of memory of Licinda rose from there. Maybe she really did say that Licinda is a distant relative, and maybe I'm fantasizing and quoting things she didn't say, but there was one thing I'm sure she talked about-she talked about some rabbi named Kriegel who came to Providence, Rhode Island, in seventeen seventy-three, about her family graced with a Protestant minister named Stiles, who then lived in Providence and was an expert in Hebrew and wrote a book about that Kriegel. I thought: Where do I know the name Kriegel, and I recalled, contemplating that rabbi from Hebron who performed the marriage of Rebecca Secret Charity with her dead lover, Kriegel, who went from Hebron to America. Mrs. Brooks spoke of him with uncritical generosity, as if she missed him, and this is not the place to tell what she said, since that story has nothing to do with our issue, but at night, when I came back to New York and got into bed, I thought maybe I heard something that's important for us to know and I didn't yet grasp the end of its thread, and I also knew, a few seconds before I fell asleep, that maybe as I talk about Licinda, she herself is extraneous to the story, it doesn't concern her, but Lilith that she personified, or perhaps it's Lilith who personifies Licinda?

I went back to the public library and a fellow Lionel recommended helped me. He showed me some interesting research on Kriegel, relations with the Protestant minister Stiles, the sermon Stiles delivered in the synagogue on Shavuoth, how Kriegel came to America in seventeen seventy-three, wearing a turban, a handsome, radiant man. The connection, which I still don't understand, pleased me. Between Kriegel, Minister Stiles, Melissa and Licinda. Did Melissa grow up and become Licinda? Were the two of them distant relatives, was Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg really-as I found out-the offspring of that Kriegel? Did he know he was his offspring? Could he have spawned his sons even after, beyond the generations that preceded him?

I sat with Lionel and Lily. It was late at night. Outside snow was falling. Sam and Licinda went out. Renate fell asleep. Then Lionel fell asleep too. Lily and I sat tired, our eyes almost shut, drunk, and sang children's songs. The next day, we flew home.

Dear Hasha,

I had a vision that lasted a whole day and I couldn't get rid of it. Menahem and Friedrich met in New York near Bloomingdale's. They went shopping. Friedrich bought leather suspenders and Menahem bought handkerchiefs and a belt. Menahem's hair was long and Friedrich's was shorter and the flap of a forehead could be seen on his head. Friedrich lied and said he had shot himself. Menahem said: You didn't shoot yourself, Friedrich, you shot somebody else and missed. They went to a Chinese restaurant. Neither of them knew how to use chopsticks. The old Chinese man laughed. They didn't know that was funny and ate with forks and knives. At the hotel, Melissa brought wine and they drank. Boaz came and jumped out the window. Menahem was impressed by the jump and Friedrich wasn't. They were drunk and sang. Friedrich was older than Menahem. They walked to the seashore. There was a cave there. Intense red colors were blended with sickly bluishness, a chaos of serenity they disappeared into dimness, as if out of weakness, wrapped in a thin halo of pinkishness, a kind of eternal sunset. Who said there's no life near death, they only said that there's no life after death! Everybody drowned there, alone. My husband claims I have a fever. I lie and write you. Maybe love is also preparing an alibi for the future, or the past. Menahem and Friedrich are consoled, they walked together on Fifth Avenue and laughed. Those were frozen tears of death. They flowed on him, on them, I felt an emptiness, maybe I yelled: Menahem, Menahem. I yearned for him.

Your love.

By the way: the director of your national theater held negotiations here with Sam Lipp to come to Israel to direct his play.

Love, Renate

Tape / -

Mr. Schneerson, do you really think ancient blood flows in us, don't you think you adopt a dangerous language? A kind of theatrical fascism, bereft of sharp positive critical thought-

I don't know what I think, my memory is me. I didn't ask others if they were fascists or progressives. Nor do I know where progressive people progress to. Thanks, Mr. Schneerson. No problem, when will Samuel come back?

Tape / -

And Rebecca Schneerson sat in her chair and felt in her bones how she was growing numb. When a giant bouquet of chrysanthemums came, sent by the grandchildren of the founders, she burst into a brief laugh. A note was stuck to the bouquet: May you live to a hundred and twenty. She looked at the floor and saw blurred spots. That cataract, she said, aside from that I'm healthy and could have had children, but there's nobody to do it for, she yelled at Ahbed: Put the flowers in a vase with a lot of water. See if the house is clean, and if they brought the jugs to the dairy, serve the mixture, and say if it's raining, Ahbed! He asked: Put out a finger? She said: Put! He stuck out a finger, got it wet a little, took a deep breath and said: It's not raining. Said the old woman: May Allah have pity, Bidak Zuker! He laughed and went off. The day began to leak to her through the cracks in the shutter, from the hayloft rose a sourish smell of wet straw. She said: There's a smell of flower piss here. In fact maybe she wasn't waiting for anybody, and so she drank black coffee Ahbed spiced with cardamom and basil. She lit a cigarette. At the age of ninety, she said to Horowitz's greatgrandson, you start smoking cigarettes, it doesn't impair health or longevity anymore. Horowitz's great-grandson came with his classmates to congratulate her. The children wanted to see the birds. They were taught in school about the birds of the first son of the settlement who died in the Holocaust and came back to life. Ahbed explained to them: They come from the whole country, even from abroad, want to give a lot of money, but she doesn't sell. She keeps everything. Even the mosquito nets are kept. Maybe the anopheles will come back, she said. After they left, she shut her eyes and since she didn't have anything to do, she waited for evening.

In the evening, Boaz and Noga and Ebenezer and Fanya R. came and took her to the community center. The full community center was decorated. A plaque still hung on the wall: Ebenezer, who knew wood in its distress. The minister of education came. Rebecca Schneerson had reached her ninetieth birthday. They also came from the television and the radio. There aren't any wastelands now between the settlements, she said, buildings reach to Jaffa and China, and there's no place to weep. She wore a white dress and looked beautiful and svelte. When the committee chairman spoke, she shut her eyes. Everybody looked at her old indifferent beauty. Her long hair slid over her shoulders. Her skin was smooth and swarthy, her eyes flashed and she would have wanted a dead gleam to be muffled in them. They sang "How Beautiful Are the Nights in Canaan" and "Pity Please" and "Do Not Forsake Us" and "In the Fields of Bethlehem." She smoked a cigarette. The committee chairman said: In honor of her birthday, Rebecca Schneerson has started smoking. Then, they aimed the micro phone at her mouth and she got up and pulled the microphone from its stand, as if she were a singer, and started talking with the microphone in her hand, and Boaz said to Noga: Look, Frank Sinatra!

Rebecca said: Now they want Rebecca Schneerson, not Dayan or Kojak. What's happening, maybe I'm an amusing woman. Years ago they were afraid of me. And I wept for eight years, there were problems, the dreamers died and Rebecca remained. Today they hear the Arabs returning to their houses at night from the yards and farms, and the last one to return at night is also the one who will remain here and that doesn't fit what Nehemiah dreamed, who like a Rudolph Valentino of Zionism, died on the shore of Jaffa.

The desert is a memorial to the God my forefathers knew in cellars… A poor Jew who died in the Holocaust tells Ebenezer a number of things that haven't yet been written and he follows the map and finds the Golden Calf. The God of Israel is hiding. The violence is as great as the evasion. In the riots of 'thirty-six, I sat with a rifle in my hand and waited, I didn't wash, three years I waited and they didn't dare come, but the Golden Calf was found for me by the counterfeit son. A first Jew told a last Jew: It's a lost story. Chaos was in the beginning, chaos will be in the end.

And after the uproar died down, she sat and laughed. Boaz and Ebenezer went to the Captain's house. Rebecca sat and looked out the window. Her anger at the bushes Dana had planted hadn't yet faded. They're still here, she said angrily, but nobody heard.

When they entered the house, Boaz and Ebenezer looked at the Captain's shattered splendor, his medals, his faded uniforms, the ten tattered visored hats, the elegant carved sticks. You know, said Boaz to his father, when I was a child, Rebecca would give birth to me with groans. I'd sit on the chair and see her give birth to me over and over. You offended me, I'm seeking a connection and don't find it, a rather stupid situation. Aside from the gifts, the money, the phony maps and stupid war plans, he thought, what else did the Captain leave? Ahbed, sent by Rebecca, went up to the attic, brought down suitcases, and said: She said to open these suitcases.

The Captain's papers were there, along with Mr. Klomin's journals, and hidden in the side of the suitcase was a manila file. On the yellowing oldfashioned manila file was written in a fluent handwriting: "The Torments of the Life Filled with Modesty and Honor of Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg, as Recorded by Professor Alexander Blum in Nineteen FortySix, according to a Prediction in a Fascinating Performance of a Jew Named Ebenezer Called the Last Jew in a Nightclub in Paris Called The Gay Kiwi."

So you knew about him, said Boaz.

Maybe I also know about him, too, said Ebenezer. But he didn't know. He didn't know if he really knew. I didn't know and I don't know…

No.

… And the handsome poet then left the city and rode in the chariot of Countess Flendrik. Stunned that she almost succeeded in loving, the countess stayed in the city and became the dream girl of tired angels. There was total silence. Birds, stopped in their flight and shaped in books and pictures, were sold to tourists who burst out of holes in the rickety ceilings of seventeen kinds of sky hung there like every unexpected disaster. The woman called herself Milat. Milat's father was dead now in the honor he may have deserved, but his tombstone was defaced by rioters. She called herself Leila and Alima in turn, and with the fetus in her womb, she set out with the memory of the awful night stamped so deeply in her that she forgot it. The poet read her poems in high-flown Hebrew and listed for her the names of a hundred women who had gotten pregnant in his honor and she pitied him and let him touch her womb. With a rare deerskin valise she wandered and her belly swelled. Money she didn't lack. When she came to America she was adopted by Mr. Luria before his death. The only condition was that her son would be considered Luria's legitimate son. And so Avigdor was born, son of the lecherous poet with the eyes of a demon, adopted by Mr. Luria, who wanted only for her to tell him how bold and noble he was in his life and in his dying. After she buried Mr. Luria, she called herself Dona Gracia. She loved the stories of Hebrew maidens who served their God in secret. Spanish noble aristocrats loved them. Privately, they bore the tiara of their pride as it was later expressed. Even the boldest military commander Don Juan Garmiro, who granted Queen Isabella the greatest cities of the heathens, loved a maiden whose heart was torn between her love for him and her loyalty. When Dona Gracia decided to go to Lebanon to stay with the Countess, who was still searching in the mountains for the ancient gold of the Romans, she took her son and went. The Countess welcomed her gladly and anointed the boy Avigdor with goat milk and golden water, brought her by Arab traders from their long journeys in China and India. Together they lived on an estate in the mountains, and in Aleppo were Jews who wove wonderful rugs, and an old woman who lived in Sidon knew the forgotten burial place of Jewish heroes who once ruled here. The woman's name was Lilith. So in the fusty streets of Sidon they called her a witch. Roman gold brought by desperate and forsaken Crusaders was found. The Countess and Alima-Leila-Milat and Avigdor traveled to Italy and were once again adopted by good people, who were able to grant them the final and desired bliss. She slaughtered them and then wept, they slandered her in the city. But backbiters aren't necessarily a valuable historical source. Even though she was full of death and charm, there was some endless procreation in her, a boundless youth. A pale man who kept wringing his hands timorously saw her and called himself Goldenberg. When he died he was buried with a politeness that suited him, because he claimed he was from the mountains in northern Switzerland. The Countess came to warm her body in a small hotel near Napaloya, and since they had already stayed in Pelfonz and the sea was wide, they went to a small and distant island and there Avigdor grew and became a sharp-witted lad, who could recite the Divine Comedy in eight languages. He would invent himself in fictions, live in them as somebody who needs a false biography, and then the Countess got sick and disappeared, and Milat, Dona Gracia, went back to Lebanon, married a balding Austrian consul filled with news and named Jospe, and went from there with her Austrian husband in a coffin. She embellished the coffin and put it in her cabin and played the mandolin for him, and thus they came to a small Argentinean city where there were relatives who hadn't yet come out of the cellars where the parents of their parents had put them, and were called by Christian names. There she buried the consul, and the old women who watched her and thought they were relatives began an extreme forgetting that was much appreciated in those remote places. Then came a bold American who wanted to move the Jews from Poland to the Land of Israel in sealed trains, like the trains that would later take Jews to another place. She learned to love his lined face. He adopted Avigdor, called him other names, bought him a notebook so he could copy the poems in Hebrew that were written for him by some father who may once have really begat him. Together they swam in Buenos Aires, and because of the inventions the American invented and were recorded in the name of her son, the lad was given new citizenship and was called Jose after his mother Josefa Dona Gracia, and when Avigdor-Joseph was twenty years old, he volunteered for the Russo-Japanese War, fought in the Japanese army, joined the routed Russian army, stirred his soldiers with speeches in fine French, which he acquired (along with the rest of his inventions) in Lebanon, with the Countess, and when he mistakenly killed a Japanese general who wanted to commit suicide out of boredom about a dubious victory and broke the heart of the attack regiment he led, he was awarded medals, which, in the market of Buenos Aires, were worth a title of nobility he had once been denied. So, he registered as Orthodox since that religion was less accepted, but was surely not understood as Judaism, and he could be sent on secret missions to the east, which he knew from his childhood. They told him: Why not Jose de Lupo, but he insisted and taught methods of warfare he'd invent himself, and with these methods the capital city was captured in the great revolution and so he was appointed commander first class.

All that may not have been and so maybe it was. Then Dona Gracia died and he buried her in a Greek Orthodox funeral ceremony, which he learned from ancient books he obtained in a long correspondence with the relatives of the Countess, who remembered him fondly from his youth, and thus he could get to the east and strike roots in the life of the colonial bureaucracy without evoking suspicion and that even enabled him to pretend, even when there was no need, to invent methods of attack and deception. Then there were wars that didn't have to be invented, and he learned not to fight in them admirably, and when he lived in Egypt, he came up with the idea that life is a corridor leading to a world in which his father and mother lived when there were still gods in the world, and only the great poetry of Dante Alighieri gave expression to the place where traces of things remained as they were before history was created which made everything monochrome, dark, and eager for destruction. And so he was enflamed by the great desire to erect memorials to Dante, which he established or didn't establish in various places in the world as tombstones people sometimes mistook and attributed them to somebody else. Giant tombstones where the names of those buried beneath them were sometimes fake. He felt superior in knowing that Dante Alighieri's tombstones conquered the world, and as reward for his happiness he would transport information from place to place, served so many masters that he had to peep in the small well-hidden booklet, written in code and based on key words from the Divine Comedy, to know who his real master was at the moment, and so he also started editing a newspaper nobody needed, and a little woman who was caught in the plot wrote the articles, received the payment of thirty-two subscribers with fictitious names and Jose, who was meanwhile also called Menkin and added the A to his name because of his love for mystery, initiated plans that certain governments paid enormous sums to acquire.

Tape / -

I don't remember anything, said Ebenezer. Why Menkin?

Maybe he was another father he didn't remember, said Boaz. They went back to Rebecca. The valise they brought was made of rare deerskin. Dona Gracia said: Boaz, who will expel the dust from your eyes, and she smiled. Outside schoolchildren sang songs in honor of Queen Rebecca, Noga chatted with Ahbed about the possibility of Jewish-Arab coexistence in the Land of Israel, and Ahbed said: Your husband buries Jews, and Rebecca said: Go to Dana's forest, and Ebenezer said: What forest, and she chuckled, and repeated: Go to the forest, and she added, It's my birthday and I want to talk with Noga, and after everybody left Rebecca said to Noga: Tell me about him.

And Noga suddenly pitied her.

She was holding a teacup with a silver handle, looked at the sugar cube on the saucer, sipped the strong tea, and said: What do I have to tell that you don't know, Rebecca? You came into a family that doesn't suit you, girl, said Rebecca, you lived with a dead lover. I know everything. Trying to be borne on wings and finding a butterfly in bed. Then a chrysalis. Then the children are shouting. I've got a son sitting there. I mean Ebenezer, a national wonder, knows by heart the annals of the Captain who came here to search for his father and found me. Ebenezer went to search for him, the father of your bridegroom-

He wasn't my bridegroom, said Noga, and the cup shook in her hand.

So he wasn't, but the father of somebody who was almost your bridegroom is investigating the annals of Ebenezer. Why do you have to get into all that? I'll die in another ten years, in nineteen eighty-four, I'll be a hundred years old.

Why all this bitterness?

Noga sipped the tea, put the cup down on the table, wrung her hands and crossed her legs sitting in the chair, and in the window, through the screen, flashed a sunbeam that turned the almond trees, the eucalyptus trees, and the prickly pear bushes into a hasty and wild blaze of chiaroscuro. She looked at Rebecca, and because of the dazzling light stuck in her eyes Rebecca vanished and was wrapped in a screen, as if she could no longer be touched. Outside the children sang Happy birthday Rebecca Schneerson and the Teacher All's Well conducted them. They were dressed in white and Noga stretched out a hand as if groping, lightly touched Rebecca's handsome cheeks, stood up, went to Rebecca and hugged her. Rebecca wanted to struggle with her, push her away, but stopped. She remained hugged by Noga, and a shudder went up her spine, when she turned her face to the window she no longer saw anything. The lenses of her eyeglasses were covered with mist and she couldn't, or wouldn't, wipe them. In total blindness, she could feel waves of love and refused them as she had done all her life, but now she didn't have even an iota of defiance or evil left. She said to Noga: I remember how a lion knelt before me, I didn't sing Hatikvah to him, I wasn't some Halperin! And Noga laughed, muttered something, put her lips to Rebecca's lips, kissed them lightly, and said: You're a beautiful woman, Rebecca, you're a brave warrior, but you won't break me.

Look, little girl, said Rebecca, and glanced in amazement at the other room where the quiet voices of Boaz, Ebenezer, and the great-grandson of Ahbed were heard, she smelled people and they walked around in her head, she used to say, and Ahbed came in for a moment, served Rebecca a glass of red wine, and Rebecca pushed Noga away from her, but stroked her face one more moment, as if she wanted to be sure that pure softness had indeed touched her. Ebenezer won't be alive in ten years, she said, and when he died in the Holocaust, I stood at his grave, from the second grave, he won't return. Somebody derides us, destroys us out of rage, doesn't hesitate, on the verge of a great degradation, and you come from a beautiful and sweet death of a boy who didn't burn in any fire. What have you got to do with us?

I want Boaz, said Noga, that's all, not all of you. I don't believe in circles with no exit-

And the Yemenite girl?

Noga looked at her and was silent. Then she lit a cigarette and asked Rebecca if she wanted to smoke. Rebecca said: Yes, give me something good. And Noga lit her an American cigarette, stuck it in the old woman's mouth, and the old woman inhaled smoke into her lungs, and laughed: Great like that…

Jordana doesn't matter, said Noga, they'll come and go, but Boaz will stay.

Maybe not?

He'll stay, said Noga.

I don't want him to, said the old woman.

I know, said Noga. Look, Rebecca, I know what you want from me.

What do I want, little girl?

I'm not a little girl anymore, and you sit here like a splendid and shattered palace and want Boaz to live in it with you, until the fire. Do we bother you?

Who's we? asked Rebecca, and a cherished panic blew from Noga. Who's we? Ebenezer and I.

Right, said the old woman and crushed the cigarette and now she was alert and vigorous. She wanted to get up, but remained sitting, deeply right, as that fool Horowitz used to say, deeply right I want you to move, clear out, leave me Boaz, what is ten years in your life?

Noga smiled a thin smile that now popped up on her open lips, and the concave line between the nose and the mouth sharpened became more severe as the smile tried to invent a subsistence area. She looked at the splendid old woman and said: That's not simple, Rebecca. We're not together because we want to be together.

No grandchildren, said Rebecca. That's forbidden! No great-grandchildren, look at the great-grandson of Ahbed, he comes to stare at his grandfather's land, so there won't be forgiveness. I need him, said the old woman. I didn't have anybody, the Captain died, Nehemiah died.

You've got Ebenezer, said Noga.

No I don't, said Rebecca. Then Rebecca contemplated and suddenly saw herself in a ridiculous light she had never been in, and because she didn't know how to behave in moments of weakness, she started shaking, and because the weakness was strange to her, she also wanted to bark, but the growls and the barks stayed inside her, deep inside her, and she looked at Noga, and saw how beautiful the young woman was and for a moment, she even thought: If I've lost Boaz, I've gained a wife, why should I ask, since when do I ask, how do I know what I really want, how do people know what they want, why do I want to be dependent when I wasn't dependent on anybody, and she stretched out her hand and started stroking Noga's face, and asked her: Where are you from, who do you belong to, where did you come from before the death that brought you to Teacher Henkin?

Noga was alert to rapid changes. For some reason that pain touched her heart, the effort to win a position that was completely unnecessary. She loved Rebecca's face. That woman bows her head before death, doesn't want crumbs, but the whole, can kill Boaz to hold onto him. Her heart was stirred to pity, and Noga who knew only one love envied Rebecca, who could ask of her what people ask in old, unreliable stories. She almost said: Take him, but she knew that both Rebecca and she depended on Boaz more than he depended on them.

Late at night, everybody was tipsy. Even Rebecca tried to dance and fell into Boaz's open arms, and he hugged her as somebody who knew he had lost her that day to a girl his foster mother saw as a reflection of purity in the features of a murderer.

Tape / -

When Jordana disappeared, they phoned from the Ministry of Defense. Then Noga sat down, and Boaz, holding a narghila to plant a pinch of cannabis in it, put the mouth of the narghila he had brought from Mount Sinai to Noga's mouth, and Noga looked like an old Indian sunk in meditation, and Boaz went to drizzle water on the cannabis bush, which had meanwhile grown solitary in a brown flowerpot, where a fragrant jasmine bush had previously grown. The roof was crammed with flowerpots and smells, Noga brought spices she had cultivated and pruned and watered, and Boaz, who tried to check whether airplanes were continuing to fly low toward the airport, felt a pleasant giddiness, he landed next to Noga and stroked her back. Noga said, Jordana disappeared!

When? asked Boaz.

They haven't heard from her in months, and only now did they call, the bastards.

Boaz took off the cotton shirt, smelled his own odor, and tossed the shirt into the corner of the room. Then he stood up, his torso naked, and tried to let the thoughts run around in his brain. He said: If you hadn't given her Menahem, she wouldn't have run away!

Noga didn't answer, and pondered quietly. Her face was furrowed with new lines that would disappear later. Her eyes were sunk deep in their sockets. He saw her body harden and wanted to ask her to stop thinking about Jordana, but Noga thought of what he said and suddenly a distant pain condensed in her that tormented her again, and she said: Why when you want to pity do you attack?

He stood still and didn't know what to do with himself, Noga clasped the narghila, thrust her hands in it and tossed it to Boaz. He ducked and the narghila hit the pile of sheets Noga was about to put into the linen closet. Then she dropped her eyes, and said: Where did she disappear?

Boaz said: Why is that so important? Maybe she just couldn't take it anymore?

Noga got up and went to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, looked at the row of eggs in their niches and picked up a carton of milk, opened it, tried to pour the milk into an empty space with no cup, changed her mind, put the milk in the refrigerator, and sat down in front of the old grandfather clock. The milk flowed on the countertop, and Boaz, who tried not to see Noga, pushed the pinch of cannabis into the narghila that wasn't broken. She searched for music, but on all the stations there was only talk. She turned off the radio and opened the chest, took out papers, and read aloud the numbers she had written at night after they returned from the unveiling of the memorial at the Dead Sea, when Boaz asked her to prepare the income tax report: the mileage doesn't fit the gas receipts, she said, and Boaz said: I can't calculate everything exactly. He saw Jordana's lost face among the memorial books, Obadiah Henkin strolling in the mountains and showing her where her beloved fought, tried to pity himself and Noga.

On the way to Henkin's house, they stopped at a cafe. Next to the wall, four men sat and talked. Around each one of them you could see the aura of foreignness. The old men yelled to one another in order to be scared less and to be present. Boaz could understand Jordana's not-being in the space between those men and themselves. He didn't know who they were, but they looked as if they were still expecting something that would never happen. And Boaz knew that wound, knew how to smell it in the distance, and Noga, who knew how much the pain costs afterward, asked Boaz to leave. He understood her fear and left. Henkin's house suddenly looked like a frontier. One window in Ebenezer's house was painted a new color. Why does he paint at night? he asked Noga, and Noga said: How do I know what your father does?

Obadiah Henkin sat at his table and looked at Boaz and at the door at the same time. Through the open door, Hasha could be seen carefully drawing Noga's wild hair off her forehead, and gave her a small round mirror. After they combed their hair and each looked in the little mirror, Hasha gave Noga a glass of cold lemonade, and Henkin said to Boaz: The story about Jordana has been worrying me a long time now. I didn't know what happened, the Shimonis said they saw her in Kiryat Haim. They went to the Galilee on their memorial day, on the way back they stopped for a cup of coffee, and in the distance they saw what Mrs. Shimoni described as a familiar back and then they made out her profile, but by the time Mrs. Shimoni stood up and found her coat hanging under three coats, she disappeared in the direction of what she described as a boulevard facing the highway. I really don't know what she's doing there…

Jordana's parents' family doctor knew some details he was willing to reveal. He told Noga: She went through a difficult experience. He didn't know where she lived or how to find her, but a doctor at the clinic in Kiryat Bialik called him about Jordana, and asked if she could take five-milligram Valiums and how to give it to her, and what were her reasons for needing Valium.

On the way to the suburbs of Haifa, cows were seen grazing near a field shaded by a row of thin-trunked cedars, and a heavy red horse was seen leaping with clumsy nobility. They bypassed Haifa and came to the suburbs in a heavy cloud of soot. The Carmel was buried in a giant bubble of sweetish stinking stickiness.

When they entered the small one-room apartment, Jordana looked docile, curled up in a giant armchair with torn upholstery, and remnants of foam rubber popped out of the worn back. In the small ugly mirror hanging next to the television that was on, she appeared sucking her thumb. Her eyes were fixed on the screen and on her face was a faded look. She raised her hand to beckon them in. On the screen was a teacher, the teacher was talking about decimals, it was a fifth-grade education program.

Boaz looked around, tried to take in the sight, maybe he even understood. He touched a leaf of a bunch of dead narcissi stuck in a blue vase, with no water. When he touched the leaf, dry white petals dropped off. The room had the musty odor of locked windows, orange peels, and skin lotion. Noga went to Jordana and hugged her from behind, and Jordana took Noga's hand, held it to her face, tears began flowing on her cheeks and she softened a bit, turned sideways toward the guests, stared stoned and stunned, tried to take her eyes off the screen, but when Boaz turned off the television the tears became clearer and hotter, and she turned the television back on in a panic, stared at the screen, as if she didn't see a thing, and Boaz turned it off again.

Jordana reached for the television, but fell down and Noga caught her. They picked her up and saw how thin she had become, sat her on a small sheet like a baby on a rough green bedspread. Jordana asked for water. Boaz went to the neglected kitchen, washed some glasses that were moldering in the sink, opened the refrigerator that held one egg, a rotten tomato, nuts, chocolate, and five jars of cold water that had been filled long ago and had turned yellow, took out some ice, put it in the glasses, poured tap water into them, and went back in the room. Jordana looked at him and for a moment, a smile ignited in her eyes. She drank two glasses of water in a row and asked for a cigarette. After she smoked a few minutes and smoke swirled around her face, she said: You remember that I once lost a child?

Noga looked at Jordana and didn't say a thing.

After that, I loved the two of you, and Menahem. Menahem I loved before. Then I couldn't. You shouldn't have found me, I don't belong to anybody Noga…

We love you, said Boaz, we were worried.

You don't love anybody, said Jordana, you're too distinguished to love. How's Obadiah?

He's worried about you, said Noga.

And about an hour later, seated on the sofa, her legs folded and her mouth gaping open, so blighted, beautiful against the background of the room laced with old wallpaper, Jordana said: Then I started watching television, they say I fell in love with it. I see all the programs in Israel, Jordan, and Lebanon, sometimes I get Cyprus. There's a guy here, Jacob, who set up an antenna for me with five directions. That's important.

Why is that important? asks Boaz.

'Cause I'm improving myself in a new direction, Boaz, at long last I'm building a past for myself that has a future.

Boaz got up and walked around the room, and Noga, who was sitting next to Jordana, hugged her. The infinite softness from Noga melted in Jordana a tremor that had begun to emerge when she took her eyes off the screen. You went out of your mind, Jordana, said Boaz, you've been imprisoned here day and night, sitting, what do you see, King Hussein, kissed wildly by officers of the armored corps? Cartoons? What are you wasting your life on!

This is my life, Boaz, and you have really no idea about somebody else's life. At night, when the light is over in the set, after the chapters of the Koran in Jordan, I see how the light pours into the screen, and then with four Valiums I fall asleep. And then Jordana yelled: I'm fed up, Boaz.

Then she whispered: The truth is I wanted to die, but I couldn't, death is too good for me, it belongs to those I love.

And Noga, Noga got up, maybe even darted up, and slapped Boaz's face. Her face bled pain, she started hitting the wall and Boaz in turn in a rage she didn't know was in her. Jordana tried to laugh, but her lips didn't move, she looked de trop and infantile and started sucking her thumb again. Boaz once again turned his face to the wall. An old calendar was hanging there, with a smiling swarthy girl holding a bunch of grapes.

When Boaz packed up her things, she didn't insist. He carefully wrapped the television, dragged the cartons to the big car, filled it so there was room for Noga and Jordana, and they left. He even paid the landlord. Jordana didn't look back, she just said: The new antenna you left here, too bad…

Boaz thought: What is it to sit in front of a television from three in the afternoon to twelve at night? But when he looked at her, she was dozing in Noga's arms. Noga, who had long ago wept at her outburst, but couldn't apologize, tried to signal something to him, but he didn't think of trying to understand. So deep was his contempt for Jordana. To himself he thought: She's leading me astray, that whore! When they got to the Henkin house, Hasha said: The undertaker's come, Obadiah.

Boaz left the two girls in the car. He removed an imaginary hat, turned to Hasha who was drinking tea at the table, and said: If you weren't the mother of my wife's husband, I would rape you. Hasha chuckled and said: You're scary, Mr. Schneerson, and she went on drinking her tea. After that, Henkin went out and hugged Jordana, who trembled in his arms. When they brought her inside, Henkin was more solid than he had been in years, and said: Hasha Masha, she was found in Kiryat Motzkin, she's in shock and needs rest, for now she'll stay in Menahem's room. Hasha looked at her with eyes that were scared at first and then calm, and said arrogantly: Why not? I'll have grandchildren to raise and somebody's diapers to change. Suddenly she let her head drop onto the table, and her head banged on the table. Boaz managed to notice that when the album was shifted by the bang, squares crowned with dust frames appeared. He called home. The girl who worked there said: There were a few invitations, the newspaper reports of the ceremony at the Dead Sea were fantastic…

Boaz said: In all those years I never came into the room. He saw the closed yellow writing desk, the coat hanging on a hook, Menahem's cloth cap, the picture of Lana Turner, yellowed with age, the chair next to an old issue of the children's magazine. In the other room Hasha sits and measures him in the distance, she knows how to curb the sweep of hostility she reluctantly felt for him, and that thought brought a crooked smile to his lips. He yelled: If you loved me, Hasha, I might have been saved, and Hasha looked toward the room and saw Boaz putting down the television, seeking the connection to the antenna to bring the cord to Henkin's outlet, and she said: This house is dry, Jordana can live in your enemy's room, Boaz, in fact that's what you all deserve.

When Henkin went to Hasha, she let him hug her, stood still, and for a long time she stayed in his arms. Then she reached out her hand, touched Boaz, and suddenly flushed, came even closer, stroked him, pushed him away from her, touched his hand and moved her hand away, sat down and stood up again, and called out: Jordana, turn on your television. She calmed down, sat down, and for the first time in a long time she looked at the pictures on the walls. From one of them looked Menahem's face. She said: I didn't even succeed in hating properly. You're the most corrupt person I knew, but I know one thing, you once saved a child, once you really saved Menahem, why couldn't you save him when you really should have?

Henkin muttered something to himself and Hasha called to him: Don't mutter, Henkin, when you need to you know how not to be in the right place, give me grandchildren, Boaz, you hear me, give me a grandson, I want to be a woman, you hear? To be a good old woman. Jordana slammed the door and the announcer's voice was heard clearly. Maybe she was trying to imprison things, not to let them be heard, she had to give birth to her children from the giant set she loved, that filled half the wall of the room of somebody who was her lover and now strangers want to give birth to his grandson… In fact a son, she said, and then she didn't hear another thing.

When Boaz came two days later and Jordana looked at him, he saw a chilly darkened look in her eyes. He understood how total the blow was.

Three poets spoke, said Jordana, I watched them. One was fair-haired, with beautiful blue, somewhat scared eyes, full of black gold, he talked like the last man in the world, something both bombastic and blighted, measured and solemn, as if he stood on the frontier of ability, and so he had to find the most beautiful and elegant words to describe that frontier. The second poet was full of joy to be talking, and the third was a little suicidal, defeated, sad, spoke evil of himself, maybe it was a plea, I looked at him, I wanted him to be good, and after a few minutes, he started twisting, muttered something, moved a little, I think the microphone slipped away from him, and then he smiled, and after the smile he said a few things I wasn't listening to, but his eyes weren't so sad anymore, the gloom almost disappeared, I think I was good for him.

Boaz listened and didn't say a word. He had already heard about that from Noga. Noga spoke with the doctor. The doctor claimed that he refused to put her in the hospital because she wasn't really sick but was hiding from herself. The idea that she was able to cure people of their sorrow through television scared Boaz. He did what he had wanted to do for a long timehe went to the man Jordana had succeeded in smiling at on television and knocked on his door. The man gave Boaz a cup of coffee, complained that he hadn't been paid for the writing Boaz used in many memorial books and even published in three albums. Boaz didn't respond to the complaint and asked what had happened to him on the television program. The man was somewhat perplexed and said: I sat there, the two of them were talking and I didn't know what to say, I'm getting old, nothing happened, suddenly I felt as if strange eyes were looking at me, without understanding what I was doing, I moved, the microphone almost fell, I smiled, I wasn't there anymore, I spoke, what I said afterward was all right, somebody got me into a conversation, I spoke out of that somebody's mouth and I spoke to him at the same time. I felt enormous love pouring to me.

Jordana asked them to let her help people. Doctors at Tel Hashomer Hospital laughed at Boaz when he told them the story, but Doctor Lowenthal said it was worth a try. Doctor Lowenthal (whose son was killed in a plane crash at the Suez Canal) sat next to Jordana in the Henkin house as she looked at petals. There was a sad saxophone player. Jordana said he had been worrying her for some time. She concentrated on him, and after a minute or two, he started smiling. In the middle of the fucking program, he said afterward, I'm sitting and playing, feeling shitty, all of a sudden some woman says give me a kiss. And I smiled, it was weird with all the directors and cameramen around.

And one day, when they saw a soldier who had lost his eyesight skiing on Mount Hermon, Jordana looked at the screen, concentrated, and suddenly she shouted in terror, fell on the ground, bounced, and by the time Boaz bent over her and kissed her hard and hit her, she calmed down. After that she fainted.

They took Jordana to the hospital. She grew fat and lay in a locked room without a doorknob. She doesn't want to see television. Wants to marry Menahem. Boaz promised her there was a rabbi who married his grandmother's grandmother to a dead man and he'd bring her that rabbi, but it might take time because the rabbi died two hundred years ago.

So I'll wait for him, said Jordana. And Noga wept and then said: But she does help people, she gave them a smile, what does it matter if it's a disease? It's a disease that does good for others and for her. We should have left her in the suburbs, she was happier and Boaz had no answer. He thought about Herod. King Herod, he said, ordered a hundred Jewish grandchildren arrested and left in a pit until he died. On the day he died, he ordered, they were to be executed one by one. He said they were to do this so they wouldn't have a holiday when he died. And the queen of Norway, Sigrid, ordered all her vassal kings to come to a banquet in her palace, and when all the vassal kings came and ate and drank, she burned the house down on them, and said: That will teach them to lust for the queen of Norway.

Tape / -

Jordana lay, her eyes impassive, her body twitching, needing injections of tranquilizers every few hours. All she needs, said Boaz, is a television set to love. To know that they didn't teach me psychiatry ten years. For a month Jordana tossed and turned, stopped twitching and started reading the temperatures in various cities in the world in the newspapers. She repeated indifferently: If only I had a private room with a big television set, I'd be able to help people get rid of their sadness. When they came to visit her, she'd shut her eyes and list the temperatures in the cities of the world: Oslo-3 degrees, Amsterdam-6, Copenhagen-3, and then she'd grimace mysteriously, like a person who can see far beyond what's visible, and say: A barometric low is moving over Turkey and causing clouds there, and Boaz holds her hand and tells her how empty the house is without her, and when she heard that she burst into wild laughter, bounced, and sometimes they'd have to tie her to the bed.

Tape / -

Boaz begat Ebenezer, Ebenezer begat Joseph and Nehemiah. Joseph begat Shlomzion. Shlomzion begat Light of the Gentiles. Light of the Gentiles begat Joshua. Joshua begat Spear Father of the Mountain. Spear Father of the Mountain begat himself. And Spear Father of the Mountain begat Joseph who begat Rebecca who gave birth to Secret Charity who begat.

Tape / -

Dear sir,

You surely remember your visit to our house a few months ago. You came, as you said, to understand the house where Melissa was born. Ever since you came to our house Melissa has returned to live in the house. I'm old and close to the place where you wait for ghosts my father used to tell me about, and maybe the very idea that three men, years apart, came to seek my daughter who died fifty years ago, instilled in me a vague dread. Maybe that etched on life itself. Something happened to my wife and me. After fifty years, we're poring over old notebooks again. Reading Melissa's school essays, I sit at home, I practically don't go to the office anymore, my oldest son runs the sales center, and today I thought: Our governor, he's also a Jew, I hope he won't come searching for Melissa.

My wife read me a section from the diary of Timothy Edward, one of the first in her family to immigrate to America. In his diary he describes how he stood on the deck of the ship in the port of Amsterdam on his way to America. On the deck of a nearby ship stood a Jew and prayed. They started talking. The Jew was on his way to Jerusalem to prepare the "dust of the Land of Canaan." Timothy Edward was on his way to prepare the "dust of the Land of Canaan" in the new world. They talked all night. The grandson of that Jew was that Rabbi Kriegel who came from Hebron to our city two hundred years ago. We talked about him, remember?

And with that story that connects Licinda, Melissa and Sam, I came to Lionel's house. Those were embarrassing moments. Sam looked at me in amazement, and Lionel, Lionel is old but hasn't changed. The same aristocratic look, wounded and stubborn, the same perplexed imposing figure, the same force. At the sight of him, some anger that had been burning in me for many years vanished. All of us loved Melissa. That was the most ridiculous and sublime thing that had ever happened to me.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, two men became friends on the decks of two ships on their way to prepare the same kingdom in different places and now, on Melissa's grave, they meet again, I said, not without an overdramatic expression so foreign to my nature.

We talked all night. Sam began. He spoke a long time about Melissa's eternal beauty. And I, I was silent and drank whiskey.

I Joined Sam on his trip to Northampton to see the students act parts of the play he had produced about a year ago. We flew in the Ford company plane. The idea that Ford was flying us there amused him quite a bit. Licinda didn't talk and we looked at the view below and tried to understand how our paths had crossed so many years after Melissa died. Below we saw snowcovered fields.

I told Sam what I told you about the Catholic church next to the chemistry lab. We were guests in the Gillette House. It was built about a hundred years ago with a contribution by Mr. Gillette, inventor of the razor blade. The girls of Gillette sang "Greensleeves" in thin, scary voices. Sam claimed that they looked like Melissa. He also told them: You who will marry the gods of industry, the leaders of this state, are acting in a drama about burned curtains of the Ark of the Covenant! They giggled nervously, and Sam said to Licinda: They're open to indecent suggestions like Melissa, and she-to her creditdidn't even answer. Sam, who drank a lot that night, lectured to the students about what there no longer is in Northampton (and I quote): Samrein or Samuelrein. You're acting in a drama about my naked mother! They turned their heads in amazingly delicate embarrassment and one even wept silently. He asked: Why should you act in a play about a diamond in a rectum? You know that the man who lay there and thought he was my father wasn't my father?

Joanna, the granddaughter of Priscilla and Bud, told me: I feel as if I were chewing my mother's head, blood is flowing between my legs and I'm laughing. And I, who never heard such things, especially not from somebody in my family, stroked her head with a gentleness which, if it had been in me years ago, would have saved a beloved person from death. I walked with Sam to the frozen lake. He went with a local rabbi to a meeting of young Jews. When the rabbi started chatting and talking with him about the meaning he found in his drama, he grabbed the rabbi by the ear and bent it. The rabbi couldn't get away from him and started twisting and shrieking, he bent over and yelled: Why? Why? Why? And Sam lifted him up, cleaned the snow off him, and said: I don't know why, sorry, but the rabbi was insulted and his ear burned and a few girls were gliding over the ice in charming tights, and the view that was so Ukrainian in Sam's eyes reminded me of my mother and my grandmother, and I felt I was stumbling again, but I wasn't sorry. Then they sang Jewish songs in a big house full of young people, and Sam spoke, and Licinda said to me: I love that Jewish Jesse James, and I told her I understood because Melissa loved him too.

Sam stood up surprisingly and informed them that he missed the girls of Gillette. They aren't seeking a messiah in the plains of Connecticut, he said, they simply belonged, he yelled. We went to the theater. He said something had to be fixed in the sections that were performed for him, and the girls gave him a gift of a green cotton shirt that said "Smith College-a hundred years of superior girls." They played coins like those my mother played when she was a student here. It was late at night, and the sound was clear and terrifying. People came from the television station in Hartford to interview him, but he refused to be interviewed. Licinda bent her thumb hard until it broke, and Sam bandaged it and said: Tell her how much I love her. Licinda wept, but maybe she wept because of the pain. When we came back to New York, there was a storm and we landed in a cloud of snow. We went to their house and Sam told Lionel that the gentile girls stood naked in a church and sang his La- mentsfor the Death of the Jews holding candles and were amazingly beautiful. Licinda went to the doctor and returned with a cast on her thumb. At night she lay with a thermometer in her mouth. Sam kept asking her what her temperature was, and she showed him her temperature with her fingers, but she didn't take the thermometer out of her mouth. They stole the destruction from me, said Sam, they made a play devoid of any risk or dread for the terrific girls of Gillette, that's how you get rich in America.

When he went to the Delmonico Hotel, I went with him. People were sitting around tables with bottles of wine and soda on them and turkeys and plates of pastry and vegetables and sweets. At the head table sat about ten dignitaries, and one of them said: Here's Sam Lipp, who has at long last deigned to honor us with his presence. And Sam, the focus of all eyes, stopped for a moment and asked in a loud voice: Where do I go? And the man said to him: To the table marked "Children of the Camp." I stayed at the end of the hall next to the journalists and in the distance I could understand how uneasy he was. Later he told me that when he sat there, he saw those people as they had been in April 'fortyfive. With Ebenezer's eyes he saw them, and they were all dead, he added. When they applauded him, he stood up and applauded them. People at the head table talked, one after another. Behind them hung a sign: "Twenty-five Years of Liberation," and a gigantic picture of a concentration camp hung there. And then Sam got up went to the stage, whispered with one of the dignitaries, and the man smiled and there was a hush and Sam picked up the microphone, started walking back and forth, eyes fixed on the hundreds of people sitting around turkey and bottles of wine, and said: I was born in the wrong place, because they put me at the wrong table. I wasn't born in a camp but in my mother's house. Why are the tables arranged like that? Why not by professions: tooth extractors, gravediggers, experts in diamonds, in gold teeth?

The murmuring in the hall started right from the start. You're the only family I've got, he said, not paying attention to what was going on, except for Mr. Brooks, the father of my beloved Melissa, but she didn't wait for me either. What nerve is it to assemble every year like this? We should have devastated Europe and not be eating turkey, but we didn't. We should have destroyed America, who threw us to the dogs, but we're getting rich and living off her. We had Einstein and Oppenheimer and Teller, why didn't we ask them to devastate the Western world instead of Hiroshima? SS Kramer was more reliable. Until the last minute, he knew who the enemy was and what he had to do. Ebenezer knew too and as far as he's concerned, you're all dead.

He looked at them. After a few minutes, he started singing and they joined in, one by one, and sang a song called "Nieder- landisches Dankgebet" as if he had hypnotized them. The head table sang too. They stood like slaughtered peacocks who had remained alive a few seconds, their eyes shut and sang innocently and devotedly, and the hall shook and the microphone whistled and screeched, and only the man sitting next to Sam looked pale and waved his hands, his name (I know because I saw him on television) was Eliahu Wiggs. He pushed Sam and slapped his face and the hubbub prevailed and Sam went on singing and everybody went on singing and then they assaulted the tables like a routed army and we left there.

You cannot understand, or you can understand better than anybody, how strange it is for a person like me to write these things. My background, my position, everything I was and did didn't prepare me for this week, but when you visited us, something snapped in me that may have been lying inside me for many years, that damn intimacy, almost despair, was born, something like closeness, to people who hundreds of years ago had cleared the forests of New England, burned in a foreign fire. As if I wanted to restore to Christianity what Sam Lipp, Lionel, and even you hold in your hand-some profound hatred, a shadow of a jealous and cruel God.

Before he ran away from the hall with Eliahu Wiggs's slap stuck to his face, he managed to take a few cookies. He stood at the cloakroom and with trembling hands he tried to put on the coat. He held the cookies in his mouth so his hands would be free. Eliahu Wiggs, furious, came out and yelled at him, but Sam couldn't answer him because his mouth was full of cookies. And suddenly I saw how two people could be hungrier than I ever knew. Eliahu wanted to slap Sam's face again, but the sight of the cookies was so attractive that he started weeping, quietly, and his hand that wanted to hit stuck to his body again, he turned his face right and left, and I thought: Those aren't the artificial tears Sam talked about before. With his skinny hand, he grabbed one cookie from Sam's mouth and started chomping it hungrily, and Sam held the cookies tight in his mouth and Eliahu wanted more and had to bring his thin, beautiful face close to Sam's mouth to snatch more, and suddenly it didn't matter what I or others saw, he put his face close and bit and Sam almost kissed him on the mouth and the two of them hugged or wrestled, and tears rolled on their cheeks and then Eliahu Wiggs pulled away, tears flowing on his cheeks, and disappeared into the hall.

We got into a taxi and Sam wanted to sleep for an hour, paid the driver in advance, apologized to him and me, and fell asleep. I sat and pondered what I was doing with him in a taxi, at night, in the cold, and the driver talked about the weather and about the near-accident of the Swissair flight at Kennedy Airport when he went there earlier, and then Sam woke up and asked the driver if he had aftershave and Sam got aftershave from the driver and sprayed a little on his face and told him to drive home.

I took Sam to my house. He and Licinda stayed with us for three days. We looked at them yearningly. My wife hugged him, drank too much, and said: If you want, you can marry Melissa, and she passed out. We took her to the hospital and she's been there for a month. I sit at her side and ask myself, What disaster did I bring down on her and on me? and I have no answer.

Yours,

A. M. Brooks

Tape / -

Greta Garbo as Ninotchka goes into a restaurant. She says to the waiter: Give me coffee without cream. A few minutes later, the waiter comes back and says: We have no cream, Madame. Is it all right without milk?

In my reflection she is I, she's my memory, she's the fact that maybe it will finally be revealed that I had no father. Not Nehemiah, not Joseph, an impure spirit of holiness entered my mother in the river. The river is my father. Old is my mother and cruel. Samuel is my son. Where are you, dear Samuel?

Tape / -

Dear Obadiah,

Some time ago, my phone rang at home and Sam Lipp, who was on the line, informed me that he had come to town and was living in a Lebensborn inn.

The name Lebensborn naturally made me shudder. When I hung up, I said to myself: There can't be a hotel with that name in our city. I took the phone book and scanned it and to my amazement I found a hotel called Ludwigshaus-Lebensborn. I assume the name doesn't mean much to you. But Samuel wasn't so innocent. During the war, Lebensborn was a pretty shady institution, yet was maintained by the heads of the party and called "Institute for the Improvement of the Race." In fact, it was a completely establishment whorehouse led by none other than the Reichsfuhrer in person. Aryan girls and officers were brought there, mainly SS officers of impeccable race and they could copulate and create a new generation of pure Aryans. According to my father (to his credit he had total contempt for the place), those were adulterous, purely bestial encounters, and human beings, said my father, could savor there the taste of protected, and even more important, legal promiscuity. In other words: Those were establishment, organized, numbered flirtations, and women whose husbands were on the front for a long time could come there anonymously (only the authorities knew who they were) and copulate with the best of the German men. According to my father, the institution was quite varied-and here you can hear the party member speaking-but at least here, unlike Paris, there weren't naked whores on skates with naked men running after them and falling and getting up and trying to catch them. There weren't impotent old men there peeping through the cracks. It was, my father added, an institution that was basically filthy, but clean in its operation, solid, even if full of adultery they called patriotic. I didn't ask him what he thought about that last word, maybe Friedrich did.

I told Sam I was coming immediately, and he said, and I could hear his smile on the phone: Don't rush, I've got something to do in the meantime. Maybe he was trying to hint to me that old patriots were still copulating there with heavenly girls. I put on my coat and went. He was waiting for me in what remained of a splendid lobby reminiscent of the old days. The building, like our famous cathedral, had never been blown up. He asked: Did you get a letter from Mr. Brooks, my first wife's father? I answered yes, and he said: That great man! We were sitting in his room. From the window Schiller Park could be seen, I used to play there as a child. We were sipping sherry from a bottle Sam had ordered earlier. The area was familiar to me from years gone by, and it had been a long time since I had set foot in that part of the city. Sam tried to explain something to me that was hard for me to understand, he said: Once I invented setting watches backward. Then I lived in reverse time and that's how the disease of forgetting was born, that lasted four years. My key was with Ebenezer and Ebenezer's key was with me. At Kennedy Airport I exchanged the ticket because I was afraid to fly to Israel, I wanted first to be in a place where they invented the key to my reverse time, so I would come to Israel and not somebody else.

The taste of the sherry, the sight of the park, a sweet memory of my childhood, imbued in me an absurd sense that everything became real only because it was said. If he had told me the moon was a rectangle, I would have accepted it as fact, so I could also see my mother sitting on a bench in Schiller Park, reading a newspaper or a book. I heard the voices of the old people who lived in the hotel and the voices came through the walls, maybe they were singing. It was hard to hear what song they were singing. Sam was a child whose mother called him to come to her and gave him candy. And so we were able to penetrate into areas of a place whose logic was different from the logic we were used to. We didn't yet know where we were and what the date was, and we talked, each one separately, but together, about the other's childhood as if we had exchanged identities. So we dialed together and somebody picked up the phone and said Schwabe here, and I said: This is Sam Lipp, a friend of Lily Schwabe, and the old man didn't even make a sound of amazement or resentment and said Yes, and what can I do for you, and I said to him: Lily, Lily your daughter, and he said You must have the wrong number sir, these days people get a lot of wrong numbers, and after a long time when I didn't let him off the line he admitted he once had a daughter named Lily, but not anymore. I'm an old man, he added, living on a small pension, living in my own apartment, he didn't hang up, maybe he tried not to be amazed, waited and I don't know exactly what he waited for, there was no longing or acceptance in his voice, and when I hung up, Sam said: Maybe he really is the man who knows who a disaster happened to.

Later on, Sam took me to a small club. I was born in this city and I thought I knew it well, but the alleys we walked in were strange to me. Sam knew that part of the city better than me. I thought to myself: The old man sounds like an indifferent, polite, and swinish murderer. Maybe he's a miserable person, but I didn't say those things aloud. The ruins were restored and Sam who knew the ruins before they were restored led me on winding paths as if everything that had been built since then hadn't been built yet.

I was surprised at the audacity of our architects who, when they restored that part of the city, preserved completely what had been and as they repaired and rebuilt, they even preserved the hiding places, hidden ways, produced over many years, in alleys where you could once evade creditors, police, or disgruntled women. Sam knew the way well, and I thought that if those architects had to reconstruct a sinking ship, they'd do it by preserving the sinking, even without preserving the ship. The nightclub was dim and filthy. Women with dyed hair and puffedup hairdos sat on high stools with round, ugly backs. Ear-piercing music blasted from a jukebox. In back, past the American cigarette machine we saw a stage loaded with boards and rags, a broken straw chair stood there and next to it, on its side, an old spotlight. We drank beer, ate Greek olives. The owner was a stocky man with a mustache, who addressed Sam: Your face is familiar to me, sir, eyes like that I can't forget! Sam smiled and said in a loud voice: Ladies and gentlemen, please set your watches back four hours, the time is four-thirty in the afternoon, April fifteenth… And the bartender said with a joy kindled in him: For God's sake, I remember him, the boy who was… those eyes… and then one of the women sitting next to me said in a loud voice: I'd screw with eyes like that and be willing to die the way they die in Naples, and a woman sitting next to her said: "After you see Naples." The first one said, What does it matter before, after! And the bartender yelled: Stop blabbing, and moved to the other side of the bar, hugged Sam, and I sat there a stranger, while Sam, maybe really wasn't a stranger… He climbed onto the stage and fixed the spotlight, plugged it in an outlet hidden behind boards and heaps of paper, shut his eyes, and asked everybody to set their watches back and they did, me too. One of the women started singing in a soft, clear voice, her voice sounded as if it were composed of glass slivers, Sam moved some old rugs, a mouse darted out to the shrieks of some women, the spotlight was lit and illuminated the face of the woman singing and she sat down on the broken chair, and the other women joined in and it wasn't like a choir singing but flickers of sounds, like a vanished expanse of audio mist. I waited for the bartender to smoke a Ritesma cigarette, pour light Rhine wine, and for gleaming aluminum insignia to be emblazoned on his shoulders, but everything was now faded, part of that invented past now without real glory, I felt how hollow everything is when it's out of place or time. Everything was divided into decimal fractions, which didn't add up to any reliable equation. An old picture of a girl with stretched-out legs, and a bird sitting on her belly, was discovered on a shabby wall behind the lighted stage. Above the girl's head flew angels of a saccharine nearly wiped-out color, the legs of the singing woman spread by themselves, she wore high black boots and her thighs looked gleaming and firm, and when she spread her legs a rubber snake was discovered tied to her belt, and the snake wound into her shaved crotch, and the moment the song was especially melancholy, almost whispered, Sam crushed her groin, and the snake darted out at him and bit his hand and he stroked the woman's crotch and she kept on singing. An innocent laugh spread over her face, her eyes were wide open with a kind of intimacy, perhaps hope, she spat out the chewing gum hidden in her mouth, shut her eyes and the bartender leaned over a little, shriveled, his head turned to me, and Sam called out: Come here, and I got up, looking stupid in my own eyes, but bereft of willpower, I climbed onto the stage, I was Kramer, it took a minute, my face changed, since the eyes looking at me saw him, not me. I talked about the last defensive operation in the Alps, about poor Eva who died in the bunker, how our holy soil was defended. On my knees I sat, like a boy scolded in a classroom, nobody was amazed, the bartender didn't move from his scrunched position, the woman went on singing with yearning eyes, I was defended by a bayoneted English soldier, Sam cited the number of unemployed in Cologne, Leipzig, Hesse, and Frankfurt in 'twenty-nine.

Sam's watch was set well, fat men smoked giant cigars and drank whiskey and soda and sang a contemptible Hallelujah. We prepared a putsch, Sam directed in silence, maybe we were too drunk, earlier we had drunk seven glasses of beer, I wanted to pee, but I didn't dare get up, the woman wept, it was in 'twentyeight that she wept, and the number of unemployed was worrisome, inflation was rampant, the rubber snake dropped out. Another girl, whose name I even remember, Johanna, sang "Deutschland abet Alles" and then a fat woman got up, rolled up her dress and peed on the stage, wiped herself with a strip of old newspaper and the pee flowed on the floor, and the woman on the chair licked her lips, and Sam recited stock prices in June 'twenty-nine, the price of gas, the price of vegetables, the price of newspapers, yearnings were born and I don't know whether those were yearnings for what was or for what was after that, faces were crying for help, I stood on my knees, somebody sang: The shark has pearly teeth dear, and he shows them pearly white, just a jackknife has old MacHeath dear, and he keeps it out of sight, she yelled: He's a shark! And Sam said: Watch out for sharks! To catch a shark you have to grab him by the tail, make him lie on his back. He dies because his belly isn't connected to the walls of his body, he's got a moving belly and he sheds it, said Sam, and I muttered some of your words, Kramer, twenty-four thousand teeth every ten years. And I, I can't move, I try to understand Sam and I know, know that deep inside me I do understand him, but I'm ashamed precisely because I do understand. The bartender is now trying to return the clock to the present, outside, somebody's knocking on the window, reality penetrates inside with a wild daring and I want to get up and maybe I did, the woman comes close to him and he kisses her and then slaps Kramer and looks at him in amazement, smears his face with powder he took out of some woman's purse and my head drops, and the more I want to get up, the more I drop, and am covered with powder, spew foam, and somebody thrusts a bottle of whiskey into my mouth, and I drink, and then, I stood, me, I who once shot at low-flying planes, and I spoke about "paratroopers" brought down by the bullets of our soldiers, the heroes, when the ghetto was burning, and how nice to see you landing dead from the roofs, from the burned houses, and I shot in retrospect, according to Sam's clock, reluctantly I aimed and shot into a propaganda film of the burning ghetto shot by my father and I was ridiculous in my own eyes, a chorus of fake women sang with artificial voices the anthem of the Black Corps of paratrooper shooters, Herr Reichsfuhrer, the ghetto is no more says (inside me) SS Sturmbahnfuhrer Stroop, and my father shoots pictures of his son shooting at the "paratroopers," and then the giant fire. And how beautiful it is to photograph the lapping fire, the houses collapsing, and they're still singing, and then Sam cuts his hand deeply with a knife he found on the counter, and I understand that Boaz left him the knife he took from Rebecca who took it from the knife-sharpener in Jaffa, it's all mixed up in my brain, maybe I'm dreaming, I and Jordana in the bath, hugged by a dream girl of death, the blood flowing on Sam's hand, I hit Sam and the spotlight, it's dark and the voices fall silent all at once.

The next day I woke up with a sharp headache between my eyes. The phone didn't stop ringing. The morning newspapers were hidden by Renate and our cleaning woman under the closets. Sam came to breakfast, jolly. The call from Mr. Schwabe was one of the only ones that felt strange and I said to Renate, Answer that call, and she picked up the phone and gave it right to me and I heard the strident, furious voice of the man even before I put it to my ear. He yelled and I held the phone away while, in my other hand, I held a cup of miracle juice Renate concocted to cure my nausea. He yelled: That man of yours, sir, came to my house, or perhaps you don't know, if I hadn't known you were an honorable man I would have honored you with a duel worthy of the name, and you wouldn't have been left with one ear to cure and even your nostrils would disappear along with what wraps them. I was smoking a pipe, suddenly there was a knock on the door, I opened it, and he stood, he stood there, you hear me? He stood there and smiled, pushed me into a chair and picked up the phone, you hear? And he dialed, I heard distant voices in the receiver, I was scared, and he said into the phone: Talk to Himmler, and he gave me the phone. I heard shouts from the other end, what happened? What happened? She shouted there and I said: Schwabe here, and she said: Who? And I said Schwabe of Badenstrasse and my pipe fell down, it fell down, the pipe, and she said: You're Schwabe of Badenstrasse, where's Sam, I said to her: I'm here and Sam is standing next to me, you listening? And Sam pushed me and yelled: Talk to her! And I'm an old man, what could I do, I said Who is this? And she said Lily! What Lily, I said to her, what joke is this, and she said, A really bad joke, maybe she wept, and who is she, if she's Lily where was she all these years? And then Greta came in, she takes care of me and I love her, she fixes everything, sews, she said: What's happening? And she looked at that man with a hatred I didn't find where to search for it inside me, and Lily says What? What? Is this Schwabe and I yelled: American filth, shit of American soldiers, you left a father in prison, took me years to crawl here, I found your stinking stockings in the empty house, and she laughed, she laughed then too, and the old woman said: Enough, you'll get a stroke, and the phone went dead and that Sam counts out marks for the call, gives them to Greta and she took them, why shouldn't she, but the heart is shaking with shame and even more, I'm furious, eighty-one years old, what do they want, and from me, and I hear Sam or what's-his-name, laughing or yelling and Greta isn't scared of him, no, she's not scared, her they measured for a uniform of real Junkers, her they didn't take out of that music and the pop and the long hair, and Sam told her, Tell how many Reichsmarks you got, those Reichsmarks were brought to you by Jews, and Greta sneered: The Reichsmarks are better from your hand than from anybody else, and he told her the Jews were coming back, and she said, There was no Lily, as if he had asked, but she asked from inside me, And tonight, when she has no teeth in her mouth, and that made the swinish clown laugh, and then he took out a pack of lewd cards from Frankfurt, or Japan, showed me, and said: You see, here's Lily with Jews! You want to buy the pictures? And I, what can I do and even Greta was now yelling with shame, and I explain to him: I'm an old retired soldier, living on a small pension, what do you want from me, and I get mad: Lily? Where was Lily? And he said I came back home, Father, and kisses me, that filth, you hear?

I hear, I told him, and I drink another cup Renate gave me and my head is bursting. And he yells into the receiver, an old man with manly telephone power, I think for no good reason you were waiting for me, that Sam tells me, you sat in pajamas and waited, and I say: I wasn't waiting, I'm cheating death, I don't sleep at night because eighty-one-year-olds die at night, and he says, Waiting for death? Germans die standing up, sir, he told me, the filth, at three in the morning, nineteen seventythree, and he tells me: Your daughter is a whore of Jews, and I yell: I don't have a daughter because I really don't, and he says a mothball of a woman and I remember every word, mothball of a woman, with a pedigreed womb, sing! He orders me and pushes Greta into the armchair where she was sitting and can't get into any deeper, and that friend of yours, tells me Take the cards, and hits me and kisses Greta on her toothless mouth and goes…

After Herr Schwabe hung up, Sam said with a calm that drove me crazy: Afterward I left his house and waited until the police car came. And then, after he said that, he fell asleep in his chair. I looked at him and suddenly my headache vanished. There's nothing like the sight of a lost person to cure a headache after such a night of drinking and humiliation. Renate took off his shoes and together we dragged him to the sofa, and the cleaning woman covered him and he slept for five straight hours. And then the evening papers came. When he woke up, we were busy reading. I wouldn't say those were especially thrilling moments. The papers made it clear that, at long last, my real face was revealed. The would-be rightist papers hinted at bitter things about my past and my dubious morals, and the so-called leftist papers explained without a shadow of a doubt that in the war I played much higher roles than had been thought. Of course, it was all formulated so that I can't sue anybody, and if I protested the injustice and the empty charge, I would look even more foolish.

They threatened me by phone, and friends who tried to encourage me said things like: I do understand you. Or: In your circumstances, it's easy to understand why, and so on… All of them hypocrites and flatterers. I decided to appear in a television interview and at least try to refute some of the charges against me. The producer of our television news is an old friend of mine. We were in school together, we once traveled together to Italy, Greece, and South America. He arranged that interview. It was an act of courage and resolution on his part.

In the television studio, I sat with Sam in the producer's office, the woman who prepared the report looked at Sam with wicked eyes and asked embarrassing questions. When she smiled she looked like a person who has started missing herself. Then I was interviewed and I returned home. I could have been interviewed in my house, but I wanted to be interviewed in the studio to impart much more credibility to my words, as if it wasn't only I who was talking, but the communications media. Sam drank hot chocolate and sat in front of the turned-off television. When the interview with me was broadcast, he turned on the television. We sat and didn't say a word, Renate smiled once and then averted her eyes and looked at Sam watching the program and her eyes suddenly became cold as steel.

And here are some news clippings for you.

… in his television appearance, he chose not to apologize. Nor did he try to cover up. He told candidly, and that candor has to be appreciated, how years ago he met a person who performed in nightclubs and was called the Last Jew, and about a fellow named Samuel Lipker who would lead him. He told how he investigated that person and now that Samuel-the American director Sam Lipp-came to our city, he swept him up into his world of horrors and made him act in his presence the commander who commanded both Sam Lipp and the one he called the Last Jew. Maybe what he said was candid, but equally unconvincing. Candor isn't necessarily a substitute for truth. Candor, like good intentions, is sometimes the road to hell. The poetic license our praised writer permits himself this time went beyond the boundary of good taste… On the contrary, the amazement about the past was even sharpened, his persistence in writing a book he can never write and doesn't write evokes a sense of intellectual impotence, ideological shallowness, and fear of critical readers, for if the book is so important to him, why did he write his other books? It is hard to accept as logical the fact of the clock set backward, the story about the fellow whose anger justifies disgraceful behavior in a nightclub and hectoring an old man, imprisoned in the past, who lives on a small pension, struck and pestered by a distinguished writer and a guest from America. Virgil (the moderator-A.S.) asked our writer why he had to go to a fortuneteller before his last trip to the United States, and didn't even get a satisfactory answer. Why does a writer try to pretend to be a beautiful person without delusions, when he secretly believes in superstitions of a clock set backward and secretly consults a fortuneteller. In his articles, he attacks the ignorance of what he calls worshippers of stars and signs. Our writer is caught here in naked hypocrisy!.. Great amazement… As for the intellectual integrity of a writer whose past was restored without pangs of conscience, and along with streetwalkers, profiteers, and pimps, he presents a shameful play about the resurrection of the Reich, when in the same week, he writes a trenchant article against performing the Passion in Bayreuth, because as he puts it, it is a basic and profound insult to human moral values and to the Jewish nation.

… sometimes even hypocrisy has to be consistent, even if it concerns shutting one's eyes and tormented candor. Along with his friends, our writer is trying to condemn us, our society, to condemn us for what he himself calls in his articles "Teutonic arrogance, and the lost souls of the patriarchs." For many years he has demanded again and again that we stop making-as he puts it-"tours of exaltation and disgrace in the lost forests of ancient myths, and that along with the other nations of Europe we live the noble majesty of the civil world promised in the future, even if it is bereft of a real past"..

Or:

… it is to be believed that he fell victim to a dangerous suggestion… A person doesn't set people back by an imaginary clock… His words were incredulous verbiage…"

Or:

… I was convinced! Convinced that our author was an embezzler in his past, that those great moments of truth he experienced were wasted and he has to apologize for…

The studio was inundated with phone calls, Henkin. Hundreds of people called in. Most of them didn't scold me for denying my past or for falling victim to it. I was asked if my wife is indeed of Jewish origin, and when I tried to explain, I was flooded with insulting answers in a righteous and disgusting way. I was even asked why there are so many "last Jews" in Germany. When I told the questioner that only thirty thousand Jews live in Germany and most of them are old retirees, I was told that that was thirty thousand too many, I was accused of lying to the authorities of the Reich about my wife's origin, I was accused of being related to the fortuneteller and Sam Lipp. They called me a crazy leftist and a stinking rightist and an intellectual pig and a man of dubious honor… what wasn't said in those endless conversations. Even my son was conjured up. I was asked if my son was murdered, committed suicide, or died of natural causes, and why he had to be educated to hate his grandfather, and who taught the boy to challenge the grandfather, for after all he was only following orders. Friedrich, said one woman in a shrill and annoying voice, was a charming boy whose parents destroyed him, and he had to die to atone for their sins, but she didn't identify herself and I asked myself where were my three million readers where were the critics and journalists who wrote such nice things about me, and because of them and for fear of their criticism, I hadn't yet written The Last Jew, but they were in hiding, didn't express an opinion, were tranquil and silent. I asked myself where were my books, The Lost Honor of Venus Daedelus? The English Lesson, The Awful Blow of the Soccer Goalie, where are my giant trumpet and the filmgoers, where is all that, but they weren't, they offended my son, they said: The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

What I didn't know, of course, was that, after the interview with me, a television crew was sent to the club. They filmed the seedy ladies, the stage where they were acting that night, the bartender, and they got unpleasant comments from them. They also went to Lily's father's house and heard his version, and all that was presented to the viewers, as Sam, Renate, and I were waiting in front of the television set that Sam didn't turn on. That was a real bond against me, a bond only I was guilty of.

The next day, I complained to my agent, who apologized and said he had been at the sea. I told him: In the winter? In the ice? And he muttered something and I hung up. Then I hugged Sam and drank tea with lemon and the producer called. He said: I heard you're angry. Sam Lipp sent us to the club and to Herr Schwabe. He said it was your idea! Don't feel guilty and don't get mad at us… I told him: That's nice. I'm not guilty. You're not. My agent's not guilty. Only Sam Lipp is guilty. If so, how come I know that both you and I are guilty?

And then Renate said in a quiet voice that froze my blood. She said: I want Friedrich to be buried next to Menahem Henkin.

A few days later, Sam called from Marseille. He told me he was waiting for Lionel in Cafe Glacier. Lionel would come interrogate him about his crimes. Then he called from the hotel and said he was calling from Lebensborn. Hotels like that should be erased from phone books, he said. And I did complain at city hall and in the next phone book that name won't appear again. Sam said, I'm waiting for a ship.

Then he called me from the Rome airport. He reversed the charges. He said: The journey has ended, Cafe Glacier isn't what it used to be, sometimes you have to destroy. He asked forgiveness, he asked me to ask forgiveness from Lily's father, from Renate, from everybody. From what he said, it was clear but not explicit, that he was in trouble, but managed to flee. I was freed by a person named Leopold Bardossi, he said, I don't know Italian. I'm flying to Israel in an hour, he said, got to erect a memorial to the greatest Italian poet.

As I write this letter, Sam is surely in Israel. Renate and I will come in a week. Don't tell anybody about our coming. Please find us a room in a hotel near you. The Israeli cleaning woman we recently hired just told me that last night they called about Samuel. I don't know what it is, but I'm in a hurry to send the letter and I'll tell you in person about what's in store for us from this episode.

Yours as always…

Tape / -

The General Consulate of Israel. Trieste.

Consul: Adam Navon.

Dear Mr. Henkin,

I'm writing you in reference to Samuel Lipker. Among the papers we found in his room was a letter addressed to you and your name also appears in several of his papers.

Aside from you, he had the address of a German writer we have tried to locate, but his Israeli cleaning woman did not understand the issue, and then we learned that he had taken off for Israel and on the way had stopped in Italy, but it is not known where. I hope Samuel Lipker will get in touch with you. If he does, please get in touch with Mrs. Hannah Aharoni, secretary of our department in the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem. My deputy, who will investigate the episode of Samuel Lipker's visit to the city, writes in his report:

Samuel Lipker was searching for a ship that was to sail for the Land of Israel on January first, nineteen hundred [sic!]. When he did not find that ship (it is now nineteen seventythree [sic!]), he tried to burn down the only synagogue in the city. He provoked people, offended passersby, sold stolen goods at the port, and is wanted by the police. The press is going mad to take advantage of that man's behavior to gore Israel. The press says that Samuel was seen in the company of whores, a hashish dealer (the evidence here is confused), etc….

It's not that these are important articles, although they do not indicate a great deal of affection. But on the other hand, when people are hit, gold watches are stolen from passersby who refuse to buy, people are flogged until they bleed, and anybody who tries to intervene-including a policeman who was badly beaten-is punished…. Apparently we must act, since we're the representatives of Israel here and even without all that our work is not easy. Please, therefore, if you hear something, let me know, and I will be grateful.

Yours, Adam Navon

Tape / -

Ebenezer and Fanya R. are walking along the seashore. Fanya is hopping, picking up snails and examining them. Ebenezer is trying to estimate the distance between himself and the turret of the mosque in Jaffa, and says: Jaffa is a rock. Jaffa of sundown. Jaffa of magic. Jaffa of abandoned smells. Let go of the snails, the sea wept them, nothing will influence me anymore. I dreamed a war will break out, I read the dream in a book that hasn't yet been written. That's what they say! The sea will be filled with blood. There's no iodine for blood of the sea.

In the distance a woman stands and yells at a child: Don't go in the water, Boaz. I told you not to. Listen, if you drown, don't you dare come back home.

Tape / -

Henkin reads Germanwriter's letter to Hasha. Germanwriter is going to Italy and from there he'll come. Henkin says: What will we do with Friedrich? And Hasha is silent. Henkin says: How, how, and Hasha says Shhh, Henkin. You're disturbing the rustle of the waves.

Tape / -

Boaz Schneerson: It's not just Noga. I live in a world I wasn't prepared for. And I'm half an orphan. Do you pity me? You're laughing! Jordana is woven of silken death, what are you woven of? They taught you to forget where you came from. At night, before sleep, an old nun read you sayings in Latin. You spat green blood. What exactly happened? Did you really find your dead father? Did you write a letter to the judge? The judge wrote to me. He wrote: In terms of morality, Noga Levin is right. So here you are, proof that you're right! The Last Jew, not our "last Jew," let him go into that sea, when he's thrown out. Let him throw up his hands, let him yell "I was right," and let him drown. What does it help to be always right? I'm not always right, but unlike you, I don't make Boazes miserable. Germanwriter is coming, Henkin's waiting for him. Your father never waited for another daughter, when he waited, he waited for you. The writer comes here to buy guided missiles produced by the military industry, rifles started with clothespins, Jewish genius, plastic tank turrets, dream-penetrating laser beams, water from the Jordan to alleviate material exhaustion-like planes that lost their fighting ability-sea sand to pulverize limbs, Jewish grenades to disperse student demonstrations, a philharmonic orchestra with stainless steel spires, the German leopards are supplied with soap made in Israel and in exchange they send us gas masks. What battle are the lords Herod and Mendelssohn preparing for us? The German command will buy Hebrew tents, go to Henkin, loathe him in my name…

And Sam Lipp-

Tape / -

Sam Lipp came to the old Ben-Gurion airport. When the plane extinguished its engines, the stewardess woke him up and said to him with a smile: I think we've arrived. He picked up his valise, brushed his hair, and got off. After a short bus trip, he came to customs. A policewoman hidden in a giant wooden basin stamped his passport; he walked slowly to the exit. Except for the valise in his hand, he hadn't brought anything with him. When he went outside, a hot wind blew and the light was still clear. In the distance he could almost love the ugliness surrounding everything like a wreath of thorns.

He got into a cab, stretched out, and said: The Hilton, Tel Aviv. He peeped out and through the windshield, the trees started becoming clear, the narrow road became more familiar, barbed wire fences posted in his mind between houses and boulevards faded away, he recalled that when he slept in the plane he dreamed he was walking on Baron Hirsch Street in Tarnopol carrying two challahs. Now, awake, he seemed to see the roads to Tarnopol. The driver was listening to music and smoking a cigarette. Hebrew words on the radio became familiar. Syllables he didn't know before became a surer texture, for some reason he was afraid of history, the structure of time, the molecules of relative time as opposed to absolute time. He thought: Melissa is waiting for me at the corner.

At the entrance to the hotel, he paid the driver. The exorbitant price didn't surprise him. When he came to the counter and said his name, the clerk dialed and a few minutes later a tall beautiful girl appeared holding a bouquet of flowers. She called a boy, put the one valise on a cart, and said to Sam: Welcome to the Hilton! And she handed him the bouquet with a ceremoniousness that seemed a little clumsy yet practiced. The beautiful girl said she was the representative of the public relations department and that the Hilton was proud to host him. She led him to a small room. He apologized for the delay (she muttered to herself that they had expected him a few days before), and after he signed the guest book studded with the names of the world's great, beginning with the signature of Ben-Gurion and then Frank Sinatra, he asked why it wasn't the other way around and Frank Sinatra didn't come before Ben-Gurion, and she tried to smile, but her teeth were too beautiful to waste on a meaningless smile, and they went up together to the seventeenth floor and he was put into the big suite. In one of the two rooms of the suite were bouquets of flowers sent by the American cultural attache, the national theater, and a telegram from the Minister of Education and Culture on a silver salver.

A basket of apples, flowers, cheese, biscuits, cookies, and crackers stood in the middle of the table. He picked up an apple and bit into it. The beauty put some notes on a big nightstand, opened the closed drapes, and he saw the lights of Tel Aviv. Sam said to the beauty: You're wasted in this temple, and she smiled a professional and polished smile. Then a person phoned and said he was the manager of the theater and was waiting for him at the airport, and he had just heard he had come and he was sorry, but he hadn't been home for five evenings when he had waited for Sam at the airport. Sam apologized; fatigue was leaking out of him in drops of sweat, and they arranged to meet the next day. The beauty checked the bathroom, Sam paid the boy who brought the valise and he wanted to pay her too, but the two of them looked at one another, didn't say a word and he said, Sorry, thrust the money into his pocket, and said: Thanks. She said: If you want anything call me and everything will be taken care of immedi ately. He told her: Everything's confused, something's messed up there, and he pointed toward the seashore where Ebenezer and Fanya R. were strolling slowly. Everything became shadows, his body shook, and she waited, something of the pain that filled him infected her. He offered her a cigarette she lit herself because his hands were shaking too much to light it for her, and she smoked the long cigarette he had apparently bought on the plane before he fell asleep. The room smelled of flowers, aftershave, and apples, and he asked her to sit down and she sat down and dragged on the cigarette and he asked why she was so beautiful, and she said with a modest smile that she had been a beauty queen, and he said That's it, how is it to be a beauty queen? And she said, You see, you work in the Hilton, and he smiled, but something in him didn't smile, wanted to flee, but he was stuck to himself and since he couldn't do anything, his hands waved, his face was pale, and then the beauty recalled that he had to record his personal details and she took a form out of her jacket pocket, and he recorded the details and said I should have filled out the details in Lebensborn, too, and she asked what was Lebensborn, and he told her: A hotel to improve racially pure kingdoms, and he filled out the form, and she took it from his hands and glanced at it, and asked the meaning of the word Gottglaubig he had written next to the word nationality, and he muttered to himself more than to her: One who has a real German faith, and she said, You must be drunk, no? And he said, I drank all the way, did you ever host Heinrich Kramer here, and she said she didn't know, but she could find out, and he said: Never mind, never mind, and then she stood up hesitantly, waited, put out the cigarette in the ashtray, and apologized, it was clear from her face how sorry she was that the crushed cigarette dirtied the polished ashtray, but he smiled at her and she wiggled out, beautiful, and he lay down in bed, looked at the ceiling, time passed, he didn't know how much, an hour, two, five, he munched on the apples, ate cookies, and thought which side does a fish piss on. Then he went to the bathroom and saw toilet paper and thought: That's Jewish toilet paper, and he was proud. Then he wanted to laugh at his pride, but his face muscles were impermeable to his will and not far from him, a plane flew low over Ebenezer's house and landed at the little airport near the big chimney, which he didn't yet know was Reading Chimney, and he said: I've got to be objective, think objectively, formulate, maybe there's also objective faith, objective theater, objective pain and disgrace, and thus he fell asleep for a little while and awoke and called the public relations department and was told that the beauty had gone home and would come back later to a reception for the ambassador of Peru.

Time flowed somehow. He fell asleep, and when he woke up, he felt as if his body were crumbling, he turned on the radio and tried to watch it as if it were television, but the radio had no screen and he closed the curtain, lay down, sweated, and dreamed he was watering a tree and the tree refused to drink the water. Maybe he really did order the boy because he came in wheeling a cart with a pot of coffee and cookies, and what was clear was that he said: The ambassador of Peru is staying in the end suite, and then he told him: My name's Samuel Lipker, and the boy said, Fine, sir, and slammed the door behind him as if it were made of thin glass.

Then he apparently ordered more food because with his own eyes he saw him gorging himself in the mirror and a girl who wasn't young, but not yet a woman, picked up the dishes and went off, leaving him a toothpick and an intoxicating smell of orange piss. The radio was on and he now understood some of the words, and once again a cold sweat started creeping on his back. He decided to take a shower or perhaps he took a shower because he had nothing else to do. The water flowing felt nice on his body that was strange to him. In the shower he smoked a cigarette under the stream of water, and so he also started longing for Melissa and Licinda and the beauty queen. Apparently more time passed because when he picked up the phone he was already dressed and combed. They replied that the beauty had come, but wasn't in her office, and who wants to know. He locked them in the phone and locked his feet in his shoes and went out to the small balcony and looked at the sea. When he went out to the corridor, he saw a woman bent over the carpet plucking up grains of dust. The sight was depressing. He pressed the button for the elevator and waited. Downstairs he searched for the beauty. Then he thought maybe he should search for the ambassador of Peru, but he didn't feel like asking. He felt pressure in his chest and sensed an incomprehensible need to look in the various mirrors and identify himself. He broke into a locked room with a skill he hadn't used in a long time, and there was the beauty queen. She wore fabulous clothes, her soft thin hands gleamed in the light of the big chandelier and her bright eyes were more violet than green or blue. Her hair was fair but without a clear tone, as if it were made of cardboard. She was also laughing, apparently at the ambassador of Peru. The ambassador was signing his name in the guest book after Sam Lipp's name, and he thought: She screws everybody, and went outside angrily. The sight of the charming beauty queen with the ambassador of Peru offended him. Outside he lit a cigarette.

Apparently he passed by the park because on the other side were rusted houses. He thought of a concept he didn't understand at all, he thought of a trigonometry of smell, something that reminded him of articles apparently written about his play. The city was full of one-way streets that became more and more familiar, burst out, and then disappeared. Even the boardwalk square was familiar to him, and he said: "Here's the square," as if he understood. An American girl with prominent nipples in her shirt passed by him and left a fragrant trail of white blood, he tried to see her from behind, but he didn't turn his face and so he lost her. He thought of the beauty kissing the bald head of the ambassador of Peru. Trees swayed in the wind and a precisely shaped cypress sharpened its crest to the sky. There were also stars, and he was glad about them. Beyond the window of a cafe, people sat and drank. He watched them and said to himself: Here's mother, here's mother, here's Aunt Leah, here's Lipkele. Here's Uncle Yom, here's Yashka, here's the Ukrainian. Maybe they sat naked in the cafe and policemen whipped them, but they smiled even though they had no teeth. He was terrified, but didn't do a thing about it. The manager of the cafe sat outside and read a score of "Making Whoopee." He thought, this is how they made a lady of jazz. And he thought about what Charlie Parker told him when he was hanging around New York searching for a celebration of authentic and well-woven social slime. The dead sat and acted his family for him. He wanted to break the window, and so he hurried on his way. Farther down was a boulevard, jazz and dead uncles, he thought, soda with straws, I'm walking in zigzags. Cafes full of sleepy young people, thinking thoughts. A girl wanted him to sign a petition against some occupation, he signed, in Hebrew, Samuel Lipker. He bought Le Figaro in a newspaper shop, because you could buy papers from all over the world there. It excited him that in a place of dead people you could buy newspapers in foreign languages and a little girl he had to notice could lick ice cream with a heartrending sweetness.

Apparently that night couldn't be reconstructed. An El Al plane reached its destination and Obadiah Henkin stood and waited for his guests. Boaz sat in Rebecca's house and heard how Nehemiah hated Joseph when he saw him in Rachel's face. Samuel Lipker saw a pair of legs in the opening of a house and next to the legs a small bottle of brandy. He stopped and looked at the legs and then at the owner of the legs. She smiled and licked her lips. Not far behind her appeared a shadow of a man wearing tight pants. Sam didn't say a thing and she became impatient. Finally he said to her: For ten dollars and the bottle too. She laughed and said: I'm not a whore for dollars, and that was the most beautiful thing he heard, a woman with a slightly charred face. On the mattress in the yard an open light appeared, blinking on and off, he tried to sleep with her, thought of the beauty queen in the hotel with the ambassador of Peru, but couldn't and he gave her another five dollars and heard yells not far away from there and stormy Greek music beyond the breakers of the sea. The mattress was filthy. The woman lifted her skirt, smiled, and held the bottle to her mouth and he drank from the bottle and forgot her and thought about the beauty and then lit her a cigarette. When the man in tight pants appeared, he ordered drinks for them all. The man saw the wad of dollars in Sam's hand, and yelled: There's a party and two other girls and three men immediately appeared.

The bar was dark with red lights burning in it. A fellow with an Uzi limped in. The fellow said to the bartender, who looked a little scared: That's an American sucker, what are you crying to me, and the soldier aimed the Uzi and laughed, and then they all laughed. Sam drank a lot and so did they. They told him to pay fifty dollars. He paid. Then he hugged them and started dancing. A buxom Greek woman tried to sing into a microphone, but an Arab tried to burn her dress. The scared bartender asked them not to cheat the American, but nobody paid attention to the bartender and took another thirty dollars from Sam. He also danced with the Greek woman. Then he said: That's like Paganini trying to compete with all of you in backgammon. They didn't really understand it and said: You want backgammon? And he said, Yes, and he let them cheat him at backgammon and he paid. And then he patted the fellow with the Uzi, crushed him, threw him at the lamp that went out immediately, aimed the other lamp at them, and also aimed the Uzi, cocked it and fired into the air. The police of the ten-twenty shift had gone now. He said quietly: Now stand up nice, and then he took all their wallets out of his pocket along with three watches and two chains with medallions and divided them, and they were too stunned to say a word, and he went to the counter, took out his dollars, counted, took more dollars out of the wallets and when his money was returned to him, he took five hundred pounds, and said to them: You wanted to fool me? Do you have any idea whom I've dealt with in my life? Do you have any idea who you're dealing with?

He sat down in a chair and burst out laughing. They looked at him. One of them wanted to get up and hit him, but one crushing blow was enough for him not to try again. Sam shot three more times into three foil cigarette packs pasted to the ceiling, returned the Uzi without a magazine to the limping soldier, and said: You don't understand anything, who's going to bring something to eat now, I'm paying!

And that was how the celebration began that ended later on the seashore when the Border Patrol, searching for terrorists, stopped them and he produced his documents (passport, certificate of honor from the Hilton, and a letter from the Minister of Education and Culture), and then they walked in the sand and sang. They said: What a real mafia this is, and he really took care of us, and the whore kept walking with him and went into the hotel with him, and in the distance he saw the beauty with three other women sitting and drinking coffee. He took the whore upstairs, took from his pocket a key he had previously taken out of the beauty's purse, opened the door of the suite of the ambassador of Peru, lay the whore on the bed, and she jumped up and down on the springy bed, and said: What a beautiful ceiling, and he said: You surely know rooms by the ceilings, and then he said: I'll be right back! And she wept at the sight of the wealth and beauty and the sea spread out in the window, and he went down, and the queen said with unrestrained malice: This isn't a hotel for such people! And he told her all that had happened, and he started laughing and there were tears in her queenly eyes, and he took her to his room and lay next to her, and said to her: Show me your gigantic artificial breasts, and she showed him, and then he entered her, and when he was inside her he called New York and said to Lionel: Listen, man, come here immediately, all of you, it's urgent, and he hung up.

Tape / -

Tonight (I'm talking into the tape recorder again), tonight something strange happened to me. I walked on the seashore with Fanya R. As usual, she picked up shells and threw them and I looked at the spires of the churches of Jaffa. When we came to the marina, I fell asleep on my feet. I don't know how that happened. My body stood still. You can say that a person who just now turned seventy-two is liable to fall asleep on his feet, but I'm not an expert in the lives of old people like me. From what I can tell from what she said, Fanya R. tried to carry me, but I was too heavy. Maybe because of the relation between the full moon and the low tide or the high tide, I don't know exactly, but it wasn't possible to move me from the spot, Fanya R. went to the Henkin home to call for help, but Henkin wasn't at home and Hasha and Fanya R. called Boaz, but the phone was apparently disconnected. They took a cab and went to Boaz (she told me), went up to the roof and called him. I lay on the chilly sand and slept. And then a rooster crowed. In my sleep I thought cocks were forgotten on the seashore of Tel Aviv, but with my own ears I heard the crowing.

I opened my eyes. A bearded sculptor wearing eyeglasses was sitting on the beach sculpting water. A policeman on a motorcycle passed by not far away, but didn't notice me. The flash of a spotlight illuminated the beach for a moment, and went out. When I turned my face, I saw the Hilton. The rooms were lit up in a bold mosaic. Independence Park above me was dark, but the moon lit up some trees and a sculpture that looked like a bird frozen in flight and a few pieces of limestone. I felt a need to die, to weep, to eat hamburgers, and then I understood that the hundreds of hours I had spoken, those dozens of tapes, had cast a high wall off me and I thought of my life, was it nice, was it good? I didn't know what to think, that was the first time in years I was almost liberated from all the people who had been talking in me until then, and I'm talking now on one moment, I'm talking not to myself, not to an anonymous audience, not in a nightclub, I'm talking to Germanwriter and to Henkin who will hear these things and will say, Ah, Ebenezer stopped being a Last Jew, and if I stop being a Last Jew, will they be able to write the book I wove for them from memories that weren't mine, and suddenly I was alone with my life, with Mother, with the old charred smell of the cowshed and the casuarinas and eucalyptus trees and the fragrance of citrus blossoms, and an awful longing for wood, for the face hidden in wood, burned in me, and I thought of Boaz, of a little boy I left here so many years ago, of Samuel, the two of them I felt as if they were struggling in me for a birthright, Esau and Jacob, in me, a hollow person like me, who went to search for a father and found a disaster and now starts returning from the disaster and bringing down more disasters. I longed for Dana, but also for Fanya R. I thought about the German who came today, about Hasha, about Henkin, about poor Jordana who went back to work at the Ministry of Defense and still watches television every night, suddenly I knew everything, but I didn't know anything, I didn't know other things I once knew, I almost didn't know things told me by the dead people I had amassed inside me and I kept myself from being myself, and that was how I was saved from death maybe even more than the boxes I built for Kramer, Weiss, and others, not everything was clear to me on the damp sand, I tried to get up, but I couldn't, I knew Fanya R. wouldn't let me stay like that, that she'd get help, and I waited, I wasn't afraid, I was tired, dead tired, and hungry, and thirsty, and my body ached, but it ached me! And that was my body that ached and I thought about Mother, about the awful life she lived, about the curse that patched up her life like glue, I thought: I couldn't be the son of Joseph because there's no wickedness in me, no anger, no rage, no vengeance, no glorious words, there are no splendid paper flowers in me, I'm not especially wise, I'm a simple man, like a sponge, my wisdom is in my hands, I know wood in its distress as it says on the wall in the community house in the settlement. I thought about Boaz and knew that even though he's my son he's also the son of Joseph and suddenly it wasn't strange anymore, I understood that there are things I may never understand. I thought about Einstein's theory and I couldn't recite it anymore, Kafka's stories, I didn't remember them, I remembered Mother working from morning till night and Ahbed helping her, how I sat in a corner, sucking a finger, hurting her bitterness, and how I wanted somebody to love me, and there wasn't anybody to love me and a deaf girl came and sat and looked at me, and then Dana and how Boaz was born and the struggle between Mother and Dana over Boaz and I hated him then, and Mr. Klomin and the Captain, and the children who plagued me because I wasn't like them, what a ridiculous thing I was, for a settlement of people who had started entering gold frames, I had nothing, only the wood and the passion to know who really was my father and how again and again I imagined father Nehemiah, whom I envied because he might or might not have been my real father, Nehemiah who died on the seashore of Jaffa, so as not to betray his dream, and gloomy memories rose in me on the seashore, pure memories I hadn't remembered for thirty years, I, Ebenezer Schneerson, an ashamed old man, who didn't hit me, who didn't strike or offend me in my life, and I, with a crooked back, in a hundred fifty nightclubs stand up and recite, so that Samuel Lipker can get rich, what a buffoon I was, but I loved Samuel, his boldness, my life was a contemptible collusion against myself, a pauper of shoe soles, who am I? Why am I? Something happens, a late awakening, second childhood, I know the limestone rocks now, the terror of barbed wire fences drops on me, Kramer turns into a distant picture, maybe I dreamed him too, but that's not important anymore and those yearnings… And I waited for Fanya R. I shook from the damp, I tried to sit up, but I didn't have the strength. But that wasn't important to me either, what was really important was after fifty years to be again somebody I once was, for good or for bad; what did they know about my thoughts, about my heavy and bitter meditations, when Mother and the Captain sat and talked and he would raise his voice and she, contemptuous but beautiful, and there was in her, beyond everything, some decency.

Tape / -

I'm Ebenezer Schneerson. I am suddenly me. I don't remember a thing except what happened to me, like many people, I'm just another person, love wood, lacquers, love the smell of sawdust, everything has dropped off me, I'm talking into a tape, maybe for the last time in my life, afterward I have and will have nothing to say, nothing to recite, I look around, the world's grown old. Only now do I understand that the trees Dana planted are no longer saplings, that our new house is old now and old-fashioned and nobody lives there. I see Ahbed and I don't know if he's the son or the grandson or the great-grandson, I try to shut my eyes, concentrate, nothing comes, I'm left with myself alone, a cockroach, like everybody, in the backyard of my life, with Fanya R., with a certain, unclear future, for a while, I have no more memories of others I'm only for myself.

Tape / -

The moment I came back to what I left years ago, today I know, was the moment when they met above, above me, in that room in the Hilton, and I didn't know. I saw many lights-I didn't see the one light he stood in, he looked outside and suddenly if he had yelled at me, from the balcony of the seventeenth floor I would have gone on reciting for him, and so the door was opened and slammed and I was finished, as I started, with some slow and uncertain dying toward nobeing…