The Last Jew

Tape / -

Mr. Ofen, Opal Books Ltd.

Sir:

Everything you have read so far, what I said, what I wrote, what Henkin says and wrote, everything was said by the man we're investigating, whose life we have tried to restore and understand. The words were all his, even my words were his: these hundreds of pages! Will I be able to interweave the book? Will Henkin and I succeed? From now on, I begin a series of hypotheses, from now on I no longer know things right. I gave you the things in their language reinvented by Ebenezer, most of them true, always recited, from now on I'm left with myself alone, Ebenezer is no longer who he was, even though he's still alive, and I have nothing but questions, amazement, I want to fill up the space, to grant you some authenticity, not to stumble, I've been here two months now, you call, my agent calls, I've got at least to know where the paths are leading that were paved by Ebenezer and now I have to walk on them with Henkin.

My son Friedrich we buried on a warm day, when a western wind blew and handsome pines sheltered us. Friedrich is buried next to Menahem Henkin. As far as I'm concerned, that fact has a kind of brazenness. The ceremony was modest, but not unemotional. Between the rocks, on the plain where the olive groves of Samaria and the vineyard of the Judean Mountains meet, in the steep and rocky mountain pass, the Teutonic lad who was my son is buried. Like the Crusader Werner from the city of Greiz who ascended to a temple that wasn't his. On my son's tombstone, only his first name is carved: Friedrich. At the ceremony, I read a chapter from Psalms and the monologue from Macbeth: Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. For a long time we stood still, evening descended, the trees rustled in the wind, and that was the first time I felt I was leaving Friedrich in a place that was truly real and not only yearnings and deceitful geography. In the back of my mind I saw an ancient father as the Crusader Werner from the city of Greiz, who was brought to Jaffa on a mule along with the corpse of Gottfried of Bouillon and afterward his brother Beaudoin became great and was king of Jerusalem. I thought to myself, You're not a king here but a guest on probation, and your roots will be in the air with the treetops in the ground and maybe you'll learn, after death, to long for what you never reach. In some place I then understood Rebecca Schneerson, the daughter of his great-granddaughter, the daughter and wife of Secret Charity, her zealotry, her hatred, her beauty. No person who is pierced by a river can live among living people. And Friedrich came home, even though this may not be the home he expected.

What I can say for sure-and the very word "sure" becomes strange and elusive in my eyes-is that Samuel Lipker started searching for traces of himself in a city he knew well and whose language and forgiveness he knew in his blood.

Ebenezer, who stopped being the Last Jew, looks miserable. Something very defined, that sharpens differences, was erased from him. He's no longer a man of mystery, but an old man who wants to atone for what he sees as his unimaginably exaggerated testimony. Boaz and he sat and talked. Boaz told him how he came to be what he calls "a vulture," when all he really wanted to do was nothing, just live, as people just die, and here are all the committees and the commemorations and the memorials and memorial books and Noga and Jordana. They talked about Boaz's childhood, about the Captain who converted him to Christianity or perhaps didn't convert him to Christianity, there's nobody now who knows what really happened. The two of them left the room, something that seemed to glow all night was dulled now, and when Boaz went to celebrate what he called "his new freedom," and we, Renate, Hasha, and I, sat and talked with Ebenezer and made him hot tea, Samuel Lipker went to the Ministry of Defense to find out if a person of that name was killed in one of the wars. That seemed to be a rather logical step, but later on, when I found out about it, and today I can't say why, I thought maybe that was his last betrayal of logic. Jordana, who had recently returned to work, saw him and said: Boaz, what are you doing here? And I of course don't know if it was Samuel who was offended at hearing the name Boaz, or Boaz who was insulted when his father called him Samuel, but the reaction was the same, anger, embarrassment, pain, maybe even hope, so he smiled at her and took her to a small cafe, they talked and she said: If I had a neat room, if they had gotten me an established television, I could help people liberate them from dread, I'd look at the screen and they would be purified. Samuel Lipker grasped something we didn't, maybe that was a spontaneous response to the beauty of the swarthy queen of death, maybe it was the old thirst for dark ceremonies. He said: Stop playing the fool, maybe once you could cure people through a television set because you were sick and sick people can work miracles, but you're recovered now and you're dependent on your sickness, you're acting the woman who can help, but you know you can't anymore, that game is over. And when he hugged her at the entrance to the small office building surrounded by a garden heaped with papers and empty receipts, she felt, as she told me later, that she was hugged by Boaz, who once knew how to sleep with her, scold her, love her in his own way, but never hugged her, didn't envelop her in that longing that was in Samuel. She told him something strange, she said: That's exactly how the dead would hug me. He told her: I hug you because I'm a shadow of somebody and with me you can be free of your dependence on death, and Jordana saw, or felt, life, real life, the life people live before they die, starting to flow in her, to her, from her, and she smiled, maybe she was happy at everything there ever was, not because she loved somebody, but because she didn't have to love anybody to accept herself as she was.

I have no idea what Sam did in the next three days. I was busy with conversations with Henkin, I went to see the Museum of the Holocaust and Heroism, so I don't know how it happened or who really published the ad in the paper. Henkin thinks that Jordana, who still kept a key to Boaz's apartment, sneaked into the apartment, took an old picture of Boaz and printed the ad. Hasha, or perhaps it was Renate, is sure that Sam himself published the ad in the papers, while Henkin is sure it was Boaz. At any rate, the ad was published in the Friday papers, and it showed a photo of Boaz (or Samuel), with black tangled hair, burning eyes, and under the photo was the caption: Samuel Lipker, who came to Israel from Cyprus on May 14, 1948, is requested, for his own good, to come to room 1720 in the Hilton in Tel Aviv for his reward.

On that Friday, Noga and Renate went to Caesarea to search for antiquities. They returned happy and flushed from the wind, and Renate said to me: You walk in those soft sands and suddenly there's a coin that's been waiting for you for two thousand years. And then Henkin showed them the ad. Noga looked at the ad and said: That won't end well.

I went outside, it was a nice morning and an early autumn chill was blowing, I walked along Hayarkon Street, in the distance I thought I saw people I knew: Jordana, Hans Strombe, my childhood friend, the journalist Joachim Davis, Stephen Goyfer, the honorary consul of Colombia, and I thought: Why was the Captain devoted to the idea of the memorial to Dante Alighieri, what's the meaning of his story-the story of his life that was found among his belongings that may have been his life and may not-and I didn't rightly know, I thought maybe it was so simple it was impossible for me to see things correctly, particularly in light of the fact that this morning, there was in the paper a picture of one man who is two and I'm a father whose son is buried in two places and Henkin is father to a lad who was killed in two places, maybe precisely on that background I'm trying to see things that in a rearview mirror are perfectly normal. Maybe the Captain really loved Dante's great poetry with all his might, maybe he wanted to show that Dante's hell was human and pleasant compared with what the Captain envisioned for Ebenezer, and he came to the Land of Israel to try to prepare a spiritual awakening there that would combine the poet with the prophets, the memories, Jeremiah and Jesus, with whom he belonged in spirit, with those Pioneers who came to bring salvation, with the future victims of the idea of freedom of the vision of salvation, and Dante looked to him as Spinoza looked to the manager of the dairy on the settlement-as joining one thing with another, as a real model for the conjunction of poetry with its sources, not physical sources but heavenly ones in an Israeli version. In other words: A memorial to Dante isn't foreign to the landscape that produced great poets like Isaiah, Amos, or the author of the Psalms. Byron's Greece should have been the Captain's Land of Israel, and Goethe and Byron may have sought an excuse to build spiritual ropes to the real world in the wrong place. Here, in the place where God revealed Himself, who spoke from the mouths of Job and Amos, he should have lived the eternal life of a person who sang the lament of the possible world out of malicious and sublime love, out of dread of what was in store, dread that came from him and didn't penetrate heaven.

I climbed up to the Hilton and went to the public relations department. The stormy sea could be seen through the window. The beauty queen was filing her nails. She knew my name and suggested I sign the guest book, but I explained to her that I wasn't staying at the hotel, and she also agreed that it was better if I didn't sign. I asked her about Sam. She put her nail file in a drawer, locked it, scrunched her beautiful eyebrows, was silent a moment, and said: He's closed in the room, I can't talk to him, he's cruel.

I asked her if anybody had been searching for him, and she said: What do you mean, and anyway, I don't have detectives. I showed her the newspaper. She looked at the picture a long time and put her head down on the desk. I saw tears on the Hilton stationery. I stroked her head and told her how beautiful and wise she was and I left. The man in me added the word "wise" to stroke what I couldn't, or didn't dare, stroke. That was one of those easy moments when I discover how much grief a person has to have inside him to run away completely from the horny lad in every one of us. A flattery may bear fruit, but her tears were also tears I should have wept, not because she wasn't wise, but because I really don't know if she was wise or not, and I say "wise" to her because she's beautiful.

I found myself a table overlooking the bank of elevators and ordered coffee. Hours I sat. I ordered more coffee and ate cake. Women in bathing suits passed by. I was intent. And then I saw him come in. And when he groped in his pocket I knew he was holding the newspaper clipping. Hesitantly, he walked toward the bank of elevators and I saw him, even though he couldn't see me. The beauty queen passing behind him appeared in the mirror for a moment, so they couldn't even meet; the hotel detective I had spotted before lit a cigarette. Two laughing girls pass by, looking tanned and pure. Boaz stands intent, and then comes to an elevator, he steps inside, the elevator fills with people, the beauty queen is swallowed up in the opening behind the counters, a new light is lit above me. The waitress wants to be paid, because her shift has now ended. Very slowly the door of the elevator slams shut on Boaz's face, and here the story ends, from now on even my hypothesis won't have any basis in fact. What is Henkin doing? What's happening to the actors of the national theater who are waiting for Sam Lipp, and surely don't know that at this moment he's waiting in his apartment in the hotel for Joseph Rayna's last game of vengeance? And I sit-a person who once shot at low-flying planes, who saluted with upraised hand and yelled Heil-in the Hilton Hotel in Tel Aviv, in my mind's eye accompanying Boaz Schneerson, victim of a disaster brought by generations of seekers of deliverance and stubborn and angry people. And I feel that right here, at the moment of battle, the story I still have to write or recite like Ebenezer, is condensing, the story I have to reconstruct from the tapes, to fake myself in it, and I see the door of the elevator slam shut, and suddenly there is absolutely no certainty that what was said really was, that my son had to be buried far from home, that the elevator really is going up, and I see the red numbers jumping on the control board, trying to see the destruction, the haberdashers now locking their shops in the emptying streets, the climbers darting at crumbling and mourning chocolate houses, trying to get a foothold in this moment, I'm writing to you about it, something I started a long time ago, and to guess, to walk on the carpet, to come to the doorway, to wait with the creator of the Fourth Reich, and along with him to open the door, but I can no longer know what will happen now when those two men meet.

And on the seventeenth floor of the Hilton Hotel in Tel Aviv the elevator door opens and a person is seen getting off the elevator. He stands still. Waits until the door slams shut behind him. His face is tanned, a white hair flickers from his mane of hair, which doesn't seem to have thinned over the years. At the age of forty-five, he looks younger, but also older, than his age. He gropes in his pocket, lights a cigarette, walks on the carpet. His eyes are like the eyes of a hyena at night, thinks a cleaning woman passing by, carrying a bucket and a broom. He stops at a door. Beyond the door, as beyond the concrete wall that stood for years in Jerusalem and bisected the city, Asia, China, India, something distant, unknown, stretching out, beyond the door he stands, so he knocks.

The door opens and he can't see very well because of the glowing light from the open window. He doesn't say a thing, looks at somebody he may have to struggle with again. A locked yard with a tree and a hook and a bird, and distant music rises in his brain, he enters, and after the door is locked behind him, in the lobby a well-dressed, tall, heavyset man gets up, pays for his coffee, looks at the small light bulbs on the control board of the elevator, and leaves. Far away from there sits Rebecca Schneerson, facing a grove of almond trees, measuring herself in the windowpane, cleaned for her by the great-grandson of Ahbed and she wants in vain to touch the source of her prayers that could once make such a strong hatred throb in her that she gaped open a hole in the universe. Now she hurls empty looks and doesn't even hold the flyswatter anymore and she drinks wine as she sits for the men who couldn't make her forget the sweet smell of Joseph, who almost kindled in her her heavy and needless betrayal of love, and she thinks: Who am I waiting for, as if a pesky fly came and reported to her on the state of the farm, on crops that grew nicely, on a northwest wind, and she wants to know what's happening in a place where she doesn't know that anything is happening. She doesn't know that Boaz and Samuel are meeting now, she doesn't know that something that took place years ago, when two young men met and struggled, a struggle she really didn't pray for, is now reaching its conclusion. And Jordana, who dusted three thousand books waiting for her with pictures of eternal youths, returns to Henkin's house and teaches Noga and Renate how to clean the bluish rust off ancient coins, how the liquid forces the ancient letters and the ancient images to be exposed, and Renate looks at the countenance of Emperor Hadrian and sees how his face grows sad, how those features waited for her on the sands of Caesarea for two thousand years and nobody touched the countenance. A wind blew, rain fell, and after all those years coins emerged that were lost absentmindedly by some Roman soldier, who hasn't been among the living for ages, for Renate and Noga of all people, and now Jordana is cleaning them with a stinking liquid and the countenance of the Emperor Hadrian grows clear, and Noga, maybe, tries to listen to the voice of Boaz's ancient blood that has gushed up in her now too, and she thinks: Where did the blood disappear that poured here, on the sands, for thousands of years, the blood that went deep into the center of gravity of the earth, a place where Rebecca dug toward the sky, with the awful anger that pervaded her and is now starting to fade, as if after more than ninety years of life in a place where she didn't want to live, the anger is starting to be a needless, almost ridiculous embellishment, and you don't know who to be angry at anymore and you can't even be angry at yourself anymore, and so, Noga thought of her lovers, of Jordana who loved Menahem and Boaz, and now is maybe in love with Friedrich and will soon paste his pictures in the album and under each picture she'll write in her fluent handwriting: Place, date, general description, so she'll be able to look at his volume without opening it again, to guess the dim, grim force of time that doesn't turn hair gray anymore, and flows without moving, and Jordana goes to Menahem's room, turns on the television, wants to weep, tears seek her eyes and don't find them, and then she breaks the screen, but the ice cream man's ear-piercing music is heard outside and nobody hears the smashing blow, and Fanya R. yells: Stop it! We don't want ice cream! And the wrinkled man goes away routed, with his ice cream, and there aren't any children here anymore to sell ice cream to, says Hasha, and Jordana sits Henkin down and talks with him about renewing the activity of the Committee of Bereaved Parents and tells him that everybody is waiting for him and he has to do things, travel, search for new sites, the pain has to be extinguished, she knows, she gave birth to a dead son and she knows, she also broke the screen and Henkin sits and listens, looking at the beautiful Yemenite woman. What's happening there in the room, thinks Germanwriter standing up in the lobby of the Hilton, what's happening to them there that I can't guess, and Henkin thinks of what Jordana said, wants to answer her, maybe turn everything back, go back to the starting point, stand before his son a moment, and say to him: Menahem, you don't have to write poems, if you don't want to. Hasha Masha says you're a man of the sea. Henkin knew that no lad who came from Hasha Masha's womb would believe that Henkin who says those things really means them, and he can despise himself until he smiles at Jordana who strokes his hand and tries to lead him to battlefields where others fought for her and for him, and suddenly he says with a contempt that once was in Hasha but she doesn't have it now: Why don't you make love with something like a television, but she isn't offended now and moves to the agenda, he's going to tell me about the locomotive salesman, that sonofabitch, she said to herself, he thought that because of my love for Menahem he bought me for life, and I'm free to love whoever I want, she said and laughed, and Noga saw the laugh caught on her face like a wounded bird and she tried to get up, but her legs were heavy and she didn't get up, and Renate went to put on water.

Henkin thinks: That strange Yemenite woman, she endured everything and remained dry, from all the rain of death she remained dry, and Rebecca sits in her room, Ahbed paces back and forth, and she thinks: Something's happening, and then a distant rage passes through her-not her own-one that went astray and passed through her on the way to her sources, from her toenails, which once stood at the river and let it pierce the girl she was, to give up everything so she could be angry at herself, stumble on mastery, live a life that contradicted itself, so that her life was a betrayal of her desires, to take vengeance on herself, on the desires she didn't really have, and she said: Somebody tells me up yours, somebody enters the room, does to me what Nehemiah did when he committed suicide on the shore of Jaffa, and when I was born the sun went out and a rooster didn't die, deaf Joseph went to bring a new sexton to the city, the rabbi of Lody who caused Napoleon's defeat at the gates of Moscow, but the house of the Last Jew is still locked despite the sudden shouts of that prompter Fanya R., the windows are slammed shut, the repainted shutters are closed, the antenna sways in the wind, and in the hotel the tall beauty queen sits down, in a purple dress and a white collar, next to Germanwriter, who's about to leave, and says: So what will be? Germanwriter, who thinks of avenging that moment when everything takes place, the moment when two men meet and you don't know what happens to them, looks at the local beauty queen who was international and came back to her scale, wringing her hands, and he notices that she's removed the red nail polish and her fingernails are also pale, and he thinks: Did she really kiss the Ambassador of Peru, did a whore from Hayarkon Street really sleep in his bed on the seventeenth floor, as that really was important to what happens to the writer deep in his heart, where there were once stories that wanted to be written as he used to tell Renate, and the beauty queen sits and starts gnawing her nails, looking to the side, stealing a scared look at the writer, and gnawing. He thinks: Let me have a hand, and he says: Let me gnaw, and she says: Why not, and he gnaws one fingernail and wants to laugh in the hotel lobby. He gnaws, Germanwriter, the queen, a fingernail…

And he thinks about the hotel, about Henkin sitting in his house now, letting his thoughts roam free, pondering shelters, about Eva in the shelter when Goebbels comes and tells the Fuhrer: The queen of Russia is dead, and Goebbels doesn't mean the queen of Russia, who managed to get routed at the last minute by King Friedrich for whom my son was named, he means Roosevelt, the miracle that may still happen…

The fact of the beauty queen's beauty, thinks Germanwriter, should have been an advance payment on the account of death. Some reply to life, to expectations, to dread, and isn't really a reply, not her face, not her bittersweet body, not even her measured grief about Sam, whom she spent a night with. It can be guessed how he asks Sam what happened in the room, and Sam tells him: He knocked on the door, we stood still, two mirrors looking at one another, he told me who he was, we talked about the struggle then, I tried to remember, I almost recalled, I told about the Fourth Reich. He was sad to hear about Ebenezer in the wretched nightclubs. We ordered vodka. We drank.

When he asked Boaz, Boaz will answer, Boaz will surely answer in similar language, will say: Somebody published an ad in the paper with my picture. I came. The window was open, the planes that came a few minutes later to Father's house passed by the open window, their lights blinked on and off. We drank vodka. We talked about ourselves. I told about Rebecca, the Captain, the Captain's Dante Alighieri, I said, Maybe a monument has to be erected to Dante, to the fallen ones, to ourselves, to Henkin, to Menahem, to Friedrich, a gigantic monument where you can see the whole land and then die, and he smiled. We fought. We hit one another. He hit hard, but I wasn't weak either. We didn't know who hit whom, then one went out. I'm not sure who. And Sam will say, Right, and there was a beauty queen there. And Boaz will say: All of life, all that suddenly was, balled up for one moment and then silence.

A pianist wearing a toupee started playing old Hollywood songs. The queen got up and Germanwriter went outside and started walking in the street. And then he saw Boaz, and now it was hard to know if that really was Boaz after the meeting in the hotel, the one moment we all focused on, or perhaps it was before, but it can't be denied that Boaz passed by in a jeep and stopped and asked him to get in, and they took Noga who said: What happened to you, were you wounded? And he said: I tried to screw a lioness, and Noga said, Beware of us. And soon after, they came to the settlement, the serene old houses in foliage shrouded in shadows of nightfall, the great-grandson of Ahbed opened the door and Rebecca was seen through the door as if she were trying to classify walls, windows, and objects, not to see the almond groves and the citrus groves, and on her face is an old smile, no longer forced, as if the meeting that was or will be between Samuel and Boaz extinguished in her the last ruse she had brought with her to the Land of Israel on the first day of the twentieth century, and he pondered whether, as Goethe said, miracle is the beloved son of faith, what was seen in Rebecca's eyes was the beginning of a fixed and constant end, or a coefficient of the suicides on the verge of the last compromise a woman like her can make with what she had once decided her fate would be and it turned out otherwise, and then she didn't allow things to take place, but reconstructed what never happened. As if, with her own hands, she knocked down her fate by bringing death and destruction on everything around her, so she could realize in her body and mind what others fought over, while she refused reality; some devotion to something sublime and yet hopeless at the same time. She hugged Boaz, but suddenly her hands flowed off his body, maybe off the bodies of Secret Charity and Joseph and Nehemiah and her son, who is now maybe looking at the sea and the ripples of waves on the shore at the yellowed boards and shells, counting the memories he had lost, so he could at long last remember who he really was and be Ebenezer who maybe doesn't really exist, and start over to mutter and know wood in its distress. Rebecca's face was weary, through the German she looked and saw the walls and the objects she had classified before. On the walls, she said afterward, she counted nine million tears like the number of words Ebenezer knew, tears she had wept for eight years so Nehemiah would avenge her. That poor handsome man of mine, she said softly, and nothing helped; the tears were waiting for her on the walls along with the eyes that once, when she was a girl, she packed in a suitcase with the names of dead people she took down from the walls of the synagogue. The innocent smile of Rachel Brin, who died of danger and didn't tell Lionel, now on his way to the Land of Israel, who his father was, as if he didn't know, as if he really didn't know Joseph and the Captain in his blood, as if his Laments weren't based on the melody Rebecca used to split the heavens with her anger, to protect Boaz who would be saved in the war and so Menahem Henkin would die instead of him. There's no pity, she said then, and she meant the melody Emanuel the Roman taught Dante Alighieri and Joseph taught his offspring, two hundred fifty-two offspring, and thousands of offspring throughout the globe, stumbling, routed, and writing books, selling subscriptions, locomotives, irons, computers, building cities, teaching children, healers, maybe patients and dying people, the whole kit and caboodle is this moment, Germanwriter will think, maybe the whole thing is nothing but one melody, some tune that came from the Temple through the Spanish exiles to various corners of the universe, and that's how those wretched and proud poor people could unite into one fabric, into a game of football with no winners but only losers. Like me, he said, like Friedrich, Jordana's lover.

And Rebecca looked at the tears on the walls, the tears that didn't want to return to her aged eyes, and she was silent and maybe others said for her what she was supposed to say: The end is inherent in the beginning, a pit makes a tree, a tree makes a pit, so Ebenezer invented a book that hasn't yet been written, but he knew it by heart, and by his estimate, she's a hundred years old, and everything is filled with tears for something real. Battlefields of dead children, Henkin and rabbinical responsa, holy walls, holy ground, graves, a holy wall, what does all that have to do with my forefathers for whom God was to gnash your teeth, rage, and glory they sought Him in vain. The messiah will come someday when we don't need him anymore, she said, big dreams bring small ends and Rebecca tried to hold on, for the first time in her life, not to what others dreamed for her, but to what she built with her own hands and didn't pay any attention to-her farm, the fields, the citrus groves, the Ahbeds, the fruit, the horses, the flowers in plastic awnings, the vegetables, winter growths, the transparent air held in the cloths of the fruit trees, the hens that don't stop laying, the prize cows, she didn't seem sure that the farm she built as revenge for Nehemiah's death existed, that everything that happened did indeed happen to her and not to somebody else who was pierced by a river, fell in love for a splendid and despicable moment with a handsome poet under his wedding canopy, killed a husband on the shore of Jaffa in a lion's cage as an endearing reply to the ailments of the inspired soul of Michael Halperin, her vision of the Hebrew army was never necessary, while Klomin wove it into five thousand pages of letters of recommendation to high commissioners, ministers, famous people, rulers, anybody… so Rebecca grew indignant and said: They just go on inventing a past for themselves to console Nehemiah, to understand poor Nathan whom I killed with a kiss when I told him about the Arabs who gave me money, and she looked at Noga and wanted Noga to give her Boaz until the day she died and she wouldn't be with him, Noga who was already seen, or perhaps would still see, Sam and would be confused and would give birth to a son who would be both Sam's son and Boaz's son and nobody would know, and more awful than anythingRebecca wouldn't know, and that would be the real up yours, and Rebecca would ask and Noga would tell her: I'm not telling you, Rebecca, and you'll die years later, a hundred years old she'll be at her death and she won't know who is the father of the heir of Secret Charity, and Ebenezer won't know because of notknowing, she'll say, and Noga will say: That's not right, Rebecca, you knew and you didn't say. And I know too and don't say, and that's the sweet revenge of the soft woman who was Noga who one day, at the age of forty-five, when she'd become pregnant, wouldn't agree to tell who was the father of the child, who would then go on being Joseph with green-yellow eyes and would live into the next millennium, when all of us won't be here and maybe he won't be either, if the destruction does come and the Messiah will come riding on an ass with broken legs, and will tarry, and won't come even after we don't need him, when everything will be or was, in the words of the chief of staff of the solar system, destroyed. And so, from Rebecca Schneerson's yearnings for a son, whom she delivered to herself at the trees and bushes planted by "that Dana," out of yearnings, the settlement could be seen in its splendor along with the rot eating it. Ninety years and the rot now comes to the roots of yearning, the spots of damp, falling walls, trees that came to fill the space of a furious light without corners, already rotten and falling in the rain, and Rebecca looks at them, or through them. What does a beautiful old woman with cataracts see? What can she see, thinks Germanwriter, maybe his architects could put her back together again, fill her interstices and the interstices of the settlement with a renewed antiquity, made of synthetic materials, and then the spider webs could be seen, and Rebecca said: Boaz, maybe we really didn't succeed in not loving. Was that a question or a challenge, thought the writer, and he didn't know, Noga tried to listen to the echo rising from the words, like a biblical old woman, some Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite, who killed her lover. Out of love and loyalty she killed! And I, who will I kill, said Rebecca as if she read her mind, who? Me? Who didn't I kill? My parents and my parents' parents I killed, so that Noga will give birth to a son and nobody will know who his father is and I will die without an heir, and the word "heir" came to her from television, when she'd watch the news and hear H. Herzog talk about our forces which was always Boaz in the desert, striking my enemy, sir, and what difference does it make who wins, she said, what's important is who loses, and I know how losers look, like Joseph's love poems, look at the settlement, they said there, and it's no longer known who said it, and they looked outside, the vineyard of Nathan's and Nehemiah's dreams. Rebecca came to this place to plant shirt trees in America. Plain new houses fill the interstices. Between Marar and the other Arab village they built a passage then and it's now a settlement and then it's "the settlement," and it swallows Nehemiah's old settlement, a settlement where we old women, who buried our buffoons in Roots, sit and knit ninety years, said Rebecca and sees Yemenites, Iraqis, and Poles establishing a small town here and in the river stuffed fish cruise in the Land of Canaan, near a settlement where most of its founders submitted to the need to dig a pit for the first ones next to the synagogue, close to the community center named after Ebenezer who knew wood in its distress, near the tombstone for Dante Alighieri that the Captain didn't manage to erect, but maybe the whole settlement is a tombstone for a poet, every poet, Joseph or Dante, what difference does it make, they all try to phrase a nonexistent and not very important situation, some fictional space that happens because of people, because of the tears still waiting for her on the walls, and in the distance sit the last old women of the settlement knitting sweaters for the grandchildren, who still come see them in their fine cars, and the new houses straggle into one another, lost, fearing the venom, from the dream they never knew, children trying to learn it in the museum or the pit-of-thefirst-ones, the name of the Wondrous One is one of the founding fathers and All's Well is old now and maybe dead, and Eve, a poor old woman, lies in her bed and dreams of her chicks who went to build her a state and came back graves, and one of them-Boazsits in the Hilton and tries to be himself.

And Germanwriter sits and eats sweet gefilte fish served him by Ahbed and tells about songs he used to read to Friedrich and Jordana shuts her eyes and ponders, who, who, who, he tells about the songs and how Friedrich asked who sang those songs and he said: We, I sang, my son, and then Friedrich refused to read even one of my books, said Germanwriter, not even one story, and I wrote for him and he didn't read, he went to his grandfather and asked him: How could you? And he didn't read. He fought me, read stories of younger authors, and in their war against me maybe they were closer to Friedrich's grandfather than I was and he didn't know, and he died, and we at least tried to give an answer about something that no longer had any meaning, but was the essence of our life, to know why we were what we were, he didn't forgive, didn't read my books, said Germanwriter, and Rebecca said: They're all like that, they die and don't know, like those who live in Nehemiah's settlement and read in the museum that Nehemiah built a model farm and don't know who really built or why, anger built, not love of kings, and what came out of all that? Ebenezer carved in wood the face of Joseph, not his! And then they went from there, and Boaz, if he was there, would say: This time not in a stolen car! as if it really was important that he once stole a car, and he adds: Maybe what I need to do is erect a big memorial, remember how we went to Kastel? And there Henkin could have met Menahem if only he believed me, and on a high hill, fifteen stories of a memorial, a revolving restaurant on top, conference rooms, memorial rooms, and pictures of all those who fell in the wars of Israel, thousands of standard-size pictures, and rooms for those who will be, rooms of memory for those who died in the Holocaust, for the ghetto fighters. Guides in uniforms will explain the wars and the salvations according to the expressions of those who fell, and a room will be devoted to Dante, maybe a whole floor, to the poet who almost created a world from the tunes of the Temple, and then they brought me an unwanted salvation from the mouth of Rebecca, according to the Captain who always brought good tidings, as if he came here because of our wishes more than because of the illogical urgency to erect a memorial to Dante here, and the memorial may not be erected, because Boaz is trying to sink into the depression he craves so much and wants to know who is the father of his child and Noga won't tell and he doesn't know if, when he was with Licinda as Sam, Sam wasn't with Noga as Boaz, or perhaps they knew everything and kept quiet, or maybe those things didn't happen and somebody is now writing the last words, his description of one indescribable moment, a moment when one side of the coin met the other side. Somebody is now inventing not only a past but a present in which those things take place, and what happens is a prediction forward and backward, like the history that's already disappearing from the world and only historians are left without history, to describe something that is no longer remembered, that disappeared with the houses of Cologne where Germanwriter lived until he came to bury his son next to Menahem Henkin who died instead of Boaz and didn't want to be saved as Menahem wanted to live near the sea, with Hasha Masha, and maybe with two orphan girls from Diskin or even with Noga whose belly will swell and who knows who is the father of her son, that wise woman, just as they won't know things and we won't know who was the father of Ebenezer, even though it's quite clear who his father was, if not the river, then who, somebody who reads and listens to the tapes can know, but Rebecca is silent and then silence prevails, and Germanwriter thinks of his son and why he didn't read his books and hurts, now of all times he hurts, just like Melissa, whose father wrote him letters and tells, and calls Lionel, and Lionel goes to Connecticut, where he hadn't been since he was a boy in love and everything is different there, Mr. Brooks's awkward supplication turned into "a lament on the death of little girls," his offices are called "Melissa Inc.," and the sales center is called "Melissa Ford Motors," and the main street is called "Melissa Street," and there's a souvenir shop there called "The Shop of Poor Little Melissa," and The New York Times published an article about the city where masses of young people stream, and Time wrote about it, and Newsweek, and they talk about Melissa whom Sam Lipp fell in love with thirty years after she died, and a German writer came to search for her fifty years after her death and miserable youths stream here and stand at Melissa's grave holding signs, "We love you, Melissa,"-and "There's life before death," and they go to the shop and buy "Melissa souvenirs" and "Melissa dolls," and some of them commit suicide there or try to commit suicide, and they've set up a first aid station with a doctor and a psychologist and a person who studies those cases for the University of Michi gan, and there's a game called "Game of Melissa Memory" and "Beautiful and Wretched Melissa Toothpaste," and a book with blank pages, with a picture of Melissa on the cover and everybody writes his sad thoughts there and sends them to a certain address and gets a raffle prize every month, and Hollywood is making a movie about Melissa and what happened to her after her death, and people pay high prices for cars, and from all over America they flock to buy Melissa cars. What a world, writes Mr. Brooks, and Lionel comes and everybody applauds him as if he were a hero, he wrings his hands, bends down, tries to flee, thinks about Licinda, asks her to come, but she doesn't, and Lily sits and is angry or laughs, who knows, and they go to Israel, to Sam, who is still locked in a room with Boaz or with himself, and they bring the smell of the great success of poor Melissa fifty years after her death and…

They visited Friedrich's grave. It was beautiful and delicate and a wind wisped in the treetops. Henkin seemed in tune with the landscape. Leads a group of parents to Nabi Samuel. And Germanwriter, who never broke his own pattern and didn't let himself fall like that, stands for one hour every day and reads his novellas and stories to his dead son, and the beloved Jordana brings people to see the writer who reads his works at the grave of a boy who didn't want to read his father's works, and Renate waits with patience and love, maybe a little contempt, which she inherited from Hasha Masha but she understands, like Hasha Masha she understands their need to love like that after death which they could fix, if they were able to fear life less, and he stands and reads his works and the wind is pleasant in Bab-el-Wad, where they died in the wars and read stories to dead sons who will be brought from far away by the Holocaust Fund of the needleworkers in Cologne to help their bereaved brothers in Israel.

Once in Cologne, Ebenezer said, Germanwriter recalls: If Moses hadn't grown up in an Egyptian house, would he have been able to think of rebellion? A Hebrew would have thought about uprising and not of a rebellion that is a revolution. Only at a river with a king who's a god and whose divinity is geometric, tangential, and congruent with the laws of low tide and high tide, the moon and the sun, only there, in harsh strips of ripples of water, on the edge of the desert, could it have become clear finally that a mighty mechanics of water regulation in an arid desert is a kingdom, is the Lord, is God, the imprisonment of revolts, and from that root of a river came prison and slavery and uprisings and freedom. The river is geometrical freedom as well as eternal slavery. In the desert the Egyptian turned into the Jew. On Mount Sinai, they turn real and necessary tyranny into the anarchy of an arid wasteland that burns in the blood. They needed Moses and he, whose soul was embittered by revolt, of a hard speech and of a hard language, an ancient desert aristocrat, needed the grandsons of Jacob who were crazy for the wilderness, filled with bitterness and depression, the spirit of rocky ground of lost yearnings for a past they almost had.

And then he quoted the passage: Everything is foreseen and permission is given. He said that was the whole Torah in a nutshell. So Samuel boarded the ship Salvation and went to the Land of Israel, and at the same time he met Lionel and went to America. It was some fateful decision before he was born. It was known in circles of heaven that Samuel will die like that and not otherwise, so he had to board the Salvation, fight the British, be sent to Cyprus, ascend to the Land of Israel, be the wolf who learned to play seventeen different instruments. But permission was also given, and Sam is the permission given, so he rebelled against his blood.

Thus pondered Germanwriter in the glow of nightfall. Henkin and Hasha and Ebenezer and Fanya R. also sat in the room. All of them were over seventy except Fanya R., and nobody could know how old she was. There was a sense that everybody lived in that moment when Boaz sits in Samuel Lipker's room and something that can't be known is happening there, something nobody can imagine, although the meeting is more imperative than all the meetings discussed in the hundreds of Ebenezer's tapes, in the letters Henkin wrote to Germanwriter and German writer to Henkin, what could have been more imperative than that meeting, decreed by fate in another thousand years when the last offspring of Boaz and Sam will sit in a spaceship, on the way to the stars of Andromeda, bound to the world along with the last human beings on their way to the cosmic explosion that will come after, or before, and then at that moment that was, and may arrive, it was decided that that meeting will be and everything that happened before, including Renate, "Rhapsody in Blue," the inflation of the 'twenties, the fate of foreign subjects in the Ottoman Empire, all that happened so that Sam and Boaz will be imprisoned together in a room. The moon was full, they sat in Henkin's room, there was a clear feeling that every single one of them destroyed his loved ones and in burying them entered the grave standing up, like Secret Charity, and resided there with the loved ones who died by their hand, or whose fate was decreed by another accidental assignment, who knows, and it was clear that they're united in a dark connection whose thread was in the hands of a Captain, and now it was impossible to ask him anything, that everything is vague and yet there was life and there were nice moments and there were days and there were wonderful nights and nobody succeeds in loving somebody who deserves his love, but in running away to something like love, to be saved from the vengeance of death, that maybe Rebecca was right when she married Nehemiah and not Joseph, for everybody whoever married Joseph Rayna paid a price that is then not forgiven, anybody who married love begat offspring who owed something that couldn't be reformed. And then you find love split on the shore of Jaffa and you pick up Nehemiah and don't restore him to life and abandon Ebenezer and Boaz is born and kills Dana and begets Sam and ends with a son Noga carries inside her and will be the object of the great destruction that people carried from one generation to another to avenge the empty heaven for their love for a peculiar nation that was forgotten in ashes.

And it was that evening, Noga sat pressed to the window, they were gloomy, Rebecca phoned and was worried about Boaz. Henkin pondered and one of them, Sam or Boaz, slapped Licinda's face, and Lily started speaking German, and Lionel thought about a cookbook of medieval pilgrims like Shira Rabat- Batim, and Licinda, angry, hurting from the slap, got up and recited one tape on the moment when Kramer is tied to German soldier in a wheelbarrow, and Ebenezer sees Kramer and doesn't yet understand how a German can be hungry and Kramer refuses to eat or drink and Ebenezer envies him, hates him, is maybe liberated from him, at least he recites something to him, from somebody's mouth, about identities and exchanging identities, and Kramer waits, the hangman's rope will always find him ready to die a patriotic death withheld from many, Boaz will think, when Jordana looks at him with the chill hatred of a woman who once loved, and there is no hatred chillier, quieter, more malicious than the hatred of a betrayed woman, and Licinda, whom everybody lusts for, beautiful, lithe, and out of place, recites what Sam crammed into her and they listen, eager to know what they always knew, in love with her with an impossible love, getting her pregnant artificially like some Joseph impregnating women who was the father of them all, and Henkin says: Enough, enough, and she stops and bursts into tears and then suddenly Jordana smiles.

And up above, in the suite overlooking the sea at whose shore Rebecca Schneerson looked angrily seventy-three years earlier, sit Boaz and his alter ego. After the wrestling, as they later told Germanwriter, they drank vodka, what will they say to each other? If there were an answer there would be no need for all these tapes, but there isn't. Some moment requisitioned from the space of time, from its own history, from the building where the event didn't take place, and in Rebecca's house, with the tape recorder next to her where she once recorded herself facing the rot of the old settlement, and all that's left of her is her fictional past and fictional dreams of a polite Captain and a rabbinical prodigy, who went to a war to the bitter end against frustrated prophets and died on the shore of Jaffa, sits Ebenezer and suddenly says: Marar is now a destroyed village, a sign that I'm again listening to myself, and Fanya R. smiles at him sympa thetically, even though she's filled with envy for memories of Dana on the road between Rebecca's house and Ebenezer's old house, where the Captain lived and that was registered in the name of Boaz Schneerson or in fact, although the old woman didn't know, it was registered in the name of S.L.A. Ltd. because of income tax regulations that weren't intended to tax the dead, or were intended only for that, and Ebenezer says: There was a time, he said, when I forgot Hebrew, Hebrew flew away and wasn't, I spoke in so many voices that I forgot, and I'd recite words in other languages spelled backward. When I had to open a door I closed it. German or Polish I read from right to left, I wanted to open a bottle and I put the cork in instead of taking the cork out, and then Hasha Masha said: A big donation came for the memorial, and Henkin went to the Ministry of Defense and came back with weeping eyes and thought about what happened, or didn't happen, in the hotel on the seventeenth floor. Germanwriter says: Right, it's ridiculous and cunning, but Brooks senior sent a check to the government of Israel, and nobody is willing to turn down money to create the memorial that Boaz scoffs at and says won't be erected, but S.L.A. Ltd. will be the initiator and Boaz will bury his head in his hands and say: Enough, I'm not ready for that, and goes out, and Hasha sneers in a whisper, "Melissa Gifts," "Melissa and All Her Suicides," which was created in the world by the poem of rage, a poem Boaz wrote for my husband so he could love his son who loved the sea.

And Lionel will sit at night and tell about his mother and Rebecca will want to weep and won't be able to, and then that moment will end as it began, with uncertainty, and one of them will go out, Sam or Boaz, and a few days later, a siren will be heard and Talya's friend from the adjutant's office won't come this time because he didn't come back from the last war, and they'll search for Boaz and Noga to give them orders, and Noga will laugh with a belly full of a fetus and none of them knows who the father is, revenge of a woman who found her father dead in a room and loved a violent lad and stopped loving him to live in Henkin's house and turn into a product of national mourning until Boaz came and betrothed her to Jordana and Sam and Licinda, in whose veins Melissa lived and this time declared a revolt, and Rebecca pleaded, Give me Boaz, don't bring a son into the world, who's the father of the son? And Noga is silent, withdrawn, in love with her swollen belly, will bring a son into the world and they won't know who the father is. Joy filled her when they came to bring her a mobilization order that was needless because the computer was wrong. She had long ago passed the age and would no longer stay in a tent with Boaz and play licentious streetwalker in light of the headlights of the armored troop carrier in the desert, and Sam or Boaz, whoever came out of the room and they don't know who, or perhaps they do know and pretend they don't know, will go to the war that started, and again they wait for Rebecca's expected disaster, but she's silent, searching the sky to drill a hole in it, doesn't find it, is offended to her last disgrace, and Boaz or Sam, in a uniform, will go to the airport, three gigantic transport planes were parked there, emergency doors gaping open, a unit of young soldiers sat on what had once been a lawn. The sky is clear and no wind blows. The roar of the motors is ear-piercing. Officers and noncoms run back and forth, messengers come with flashes of orders, whistles are heard on all sides. And he stands there, in a battle uniform with sand stuck to it from a previous battle, washed but not ironed. The insignia of rank aren't conspicuous. The greenyellow eyes scare the recruits. He asks which of them was in the last war, and there isn't one who had fought then. He explains to them what they have to do: get into the planes and then parachute into another field, and from there to the front. The sun is beating down and he's sweating. He turns to a young soldier who looks pensive and handsome, with curly hair, and calls out: Soldier, get up! And the soldier gets up. Scared, you can see how scared he is. Run to the canteen and bring paper and pencils. And the soldier says: Yessir, and runs. The soldiers are sitting. Somebody starts humming, tomorrow when the army takes off its uniforms… The soldier comes back. The planes are roaring. A liaison officer comes and whispers something in his ear. First aid kits and stretchers are loaded onto the plane.

He orders the soldier who had returned and was standing at attention: Give every soldier a pencil and paper! They look at him in amazement, but nobody opens his mouth.

The soldier gives every one of the soldiers a pencil and paper.

They don't see that their commander is weeping, he's weeping with his eyes shut.

The sun beats down and the motors are ear-piercing.

May Jordana not love you, he says. And then he yells: This is an order, everybody has a pencil and paper. Everyone, every one of you now write a poem and give it to me with your first name, last name, serial number, and address.

He yells: That's an order! One soldier whispers: That commander was in all the wars, I'm not getting in trouble, and he starts writing. And the commander yells: You've got five minutes, so step on it!

And they write fast.

Forward! he yells.

He collects the poems, puts them in a manila file. Calls the sergeant. Sends him with the manila file. To put it in headquarters under the name of Schneerson until. The soldiers finish loading their gear and boarding the planes, once again a siren sounds. He follows them, swallowed up in the plane, and takes off.

And the moment up there doesn't end. They're still there, even though Boaz or Sam was swallowed up in the plane. And then everything ended and Noga gave birth to a son. Ebenezer died and was buried in Roots. Fanya R. will die after him. Lionel and Lily went back to America. Licinda will direct Sam's play at the national theater. Sam will stay or go, what do we know who's who. They came back. Three secretaries are trying to make order in the files of S.L.A. Ltd. Letters come from all over Israel, millions of dollars from the money of "Melissa Inc." And everything's desolate. Boaz sits and looks out the window. Sam is dusty inside him. As was said in the book Ebenezer quoted and that will be written in another few years, Rebecca will die on the seventh of Adar, the day of Moses' death, in nineteen eighty-four, a hundred years old she'll be at her death. After her burial Roots will be closed for lack of space. Next to Nehemiah her husband Rebecca will be buried. In the safe, along with the writings of the Captain, are the poems written by the soldiers, and Noga raises her son. He's got green-yellow eyes and he plays with the wooden birds once carved by a man named Ebenezer.

When the last of the Jews died, God held His breath a moment, and said: They're finished? And the director said: Yes. He said: There was something about them, what was it? And the director said: They loved You with all their heart. And He said: What a waste, and shut His eyes for another thousand years, that passed in retrospect, backward and forward. Marar is now in the lands of the town that was a settlement, the wine press is a museum like everything that never was, and Noga says to her son: Someday, if you write a poem, give it to me and I'll give it to your father. She didn't say who, and Boaz smiled and Licinda said: I know who the Captain was, he was the one poem of Joseph Rayna that took on flesh, stayed here and brought together the grandfather of the grandfather of my grandfather in the port of Amsterdam with the grandfather of the grandfather of your grandfather who was ascending to the Land of Israel.

And so, because of the baby whose father nobody knows, all these things had to happen, and in fact they didn't happen exactly like that, but it could have been the last of the Jews, it could also have been a dream and also rot and also a dying end, and anybody who tries to turn a dream into reality inherits disappointment, and Rebecca, who tried to turn anger into a dream, knew that better than the others, so she took vengeance on Nehemiah by letting his dream be a grandson whose father nobody knows and nobody knows when he'll be the Last Jew.