by Yoram Kaniuk
Boaz thought that as a funny, or finny, person, he had to see the car he had taken the day before but he knew that was only an excuse to return to some place, for no good reason, and the car surely wasn't there. He wanted to know where he should go. When he came, he saw the car parked where he had left it. The man from the grocery store who came outside to bring in the margarine thrown on the sidewalk by the driver of the worn-out and squeaky pickup truck said, You looking for an apartment here? There's one upstairs, rent control. Boaz said, That car is stolen! The man pondered a bit and bent over to pick up the margarine. Boaz picked up the case of margarine for him and dragged it inside. The man gave Boaz an Eskimo Pie and he nibbled at it. Boaz said, Cars should live in their own houses. The shopkeeper muttered something and said there were people here at night, but they left. And Boaz said they come and go all the time. Over the counter hung an announcement about food rationing and food coupons and Boaz read it carefully; the shopkeeper said, It'll be hot today. When he came out of the shop, he saw the driver in the distance, he leaped into the yard and climbed the tree. He looked and saw them checking the car and a person who looked like a plainclothes cop searched for fingerprints on the handle. That made him laugh, in the tree, and he slowly came down and started walking. They didn't even see him. He came to the tents, put down the kitbag, put on a clean but wrinkled shirt, and went out. After he sat for hours and looked at the sea, he went to Cafe Pilz. The music burst out and the waves of the sea looked silvery. He drank two spitfires and Menashke played songs on the accordion. Then they played a rumba and everybody danced. A girl Boaz later discovered in his arms tried to defend herself against the shock on his face. But she accepted Boaz's kiss with empty lips cut off from himself. She was offended and tried to look into his eyes but in the middle of the second kiss, with two spitfires in his belly and his head spinning, he left her slack-jawed and went toward London Square. She yelled something that was drowned in the noise of the sea. He expected her to be the daughter of the driver of the car and would sue him. So he groped in the empty pocket where he used to keep the gold teeth. Then he sat on a rock and looked at a bench not far from him. The bench was surely more comfortable to sit on because in the morning, when he went to the office, he saw that it was repainted. The sea spread out before him. The girl was still yelling, or the yelling was before and only the echo was heard now, the sea was locked because of the dark. The moon shed a little light but it was thin and curved and a car that might have broken down, parked with its lights on and illuminated the wrong section of the sea. Boaz leaned over the rock and behind it were white houses gleaming in the curved light, with eyes wide open he saw nonexistent eagles darting, swooping and a bright path, and a man yelling, they died, got to save the black. Boaz sat there terrified, shrouded in dread from some unknown source, thought about the baby that could have been born if the woman who got an indifferent kiss near Cafe Pilz was yelling something. Maybe Boaz was a bastard who fell on his head, he thought; maybe that's Minna, did I know her once, or not, Minna, and what does he have to do with all those Minnas, he told the baby kicking inside him: Wait a while, I'll give birth to you, pretty one, with two mothers, three fathers, and two grandfathers. Then he went down to the boardwalk and bumped into wires not reached by the car's headlights. Maybe they were laid here recently when the war was close to Tel Aviv, which always expected wars on her border.
Two young men stood at the door of a cafe that looked locked. They knocked on the door, but nobody opened it. He could imagine the cafe owner leaving, escaping in a boat, and not yet back. A girl in a short dress was standing in a shaded niche next to the door. For a moment, she rolled up her dress a little and the two young men laughed and approached her as in a slow dance, she raised the dress as if her hands were the hands of a doctor, but the touch was hesitant, wounded, and the lights of a passing car showed some profound contempt flickering deep in her eyes. The lights of the car that might have broken down were extinguished now and the sea was still silvered, calm, sealed in moon shadows. A cop passed by on a bike now and shone a flashlight on the bench Boaz had almost sat on before. Clouds of suspicions in the place were plastered but tangible. An ancient smell of damp and phony chill came from the park. For a moment he felt a secret bliss that he could feel a common fate with those two young men and share the girl's contempt for their springy steps, but the girl looked scared of the cop, turned around and lowered her dress with perhaps unexpected coarseness, they stood still again in front of the locked door and one of them started weeping. Now Boaz could make out how big they were, like wild bulls he used to see between Marar and the settlement. They were surely searching for a fille de joie with braids and a pinafore, their childhood love, he thought. But there was a war, and if two fools like them didn't die, they were superfluous like me. The two strode toward Hayarkon Street and from there to the Red House. In the Red House, somebody was playing the "Internationale" on a mandolin. An unseen woman was singing in a whisper the words that moved toward the sea and were mixed in it. Near the house was a barbed wire fence and two women soldiers with Sten guns were guarding it. The fence was rusty and behind it were only limestone hills and sea. The cannon that may really have stood here once was moved. Inside the Red House a forehead was seen and near it two crests of male hair. The overgrown young men stood facing the women soldiers and spoke coarsely. The women soldiers enveloped themselves in a secret mantle that had long ago been forced on them and tried not to get angry, and, even more, the second one (the first one was fatter) tried not to smile. The girl Boaz had earlier invented with the pinafore and flaxen hair, twelve years old, naive, now passed by the women soldiers, on her way to a belated piano lesson. The balconies in the house opposite, surely her parents' house, were wreathed in plants and flowers and a pleasant smell rose from the recently watered flowers. The little girl's beauty stunned the two young men walking behind her. They wept aloud again and the two female soldiers tried not to pity them. The little girl saved the moment for him and Boaz saw her laugh with the sudden joy of breasts that may have started sprouting. One of the two women soldiers said: Soldiers come and weep all the time, go know. Right, said the second woman soldier, a lot of weepers returned, what was there, and Boaz said: A lake of tears was there and anybody who returned brought the tears with him, but you guarded the secret ship here and you didn't know. The woman soldier said, The cannon, and Boaz said: But there is no cannon, and she said So what, just because there's no cannon, there's no need to guard? He tried to understand her logic, but the crescent moon now cast its full light and they saw how much his look was shrouded in disgust and they were afraid to get mixed up in some emotional adventure that wasn't yet wanted and they turned their stiff backs on him. The plump one looked better from behind.
At night he slept in his clothes and sweated even though it wasn't especially hot. In the morning he opened his eyes wide to the voice of a person standing over him and looking from his angle of vision as if he were tearing the tent with his kinky hair. The man read Boaz a new order of the day and Boaz, who was already awake and feeling the wetness of his clothes, said: I'm discharged, dummy. The man tried to be friendly. His yellowed teeth seemed to be searching for a more suitable mouth. The man said: That's your shock, Boaz, you don't remember me? Boaz looked at him and didn't remember. He said, fine, let's go, and since he didn't need to get dressed he went outside, took some sand, and rubbed it on his neck and his face. Then they walked among people who seemed for some reason to be rushing like actors in a silent movie. They went into a little cafe and Boaz was afraid he had lost his hearing. He said to the man: Yell something, and the man yelled, and Boaz said, I heard you, over and out. And then he put a finger in his ear and rummaged around a little while and said, I hear. The man said, He hears, that'll be fine. The woman who owned the place looked at Boaz. She saw how wrinkled he was and because of that she seemed to know his pain personally and she said: Take off your clothes and I'll clean them for you. But Boaz said: There's no point, ta
ke some money and bring me new clothes, pick them out yourself. He took off his clothes and remained in a black undershirt and shorts, he also enjoyed her obedience, sat in his shorts and undershirt with a man he surely didn't know, or else he wouldn't have sat with him in a cafe, and people who peeped inside saw a man in an undershirt and shorts and asked what happened and Boaz yelled: The enemy killed my clothes, that man raped my mother, pretends he's my father. The man laughed and Boaz didn't. He drank coffee and ate a roll and on it he slowly spread margarine and he didn't know if it was what he had dragged in from the sidewalk to the shop earlier or a week ago, and suddenly he wanted to know who Minna was. Maybe she really was the daughter of Gilboa the contractor? Boaz licked the jam from the jar and drank more coffee. At first he tried to count the cups of coffee, then he stopped. The woman came back with a bundle of new clothes and took pins out of the shirt, when the sleeves dropped down, he felt some excitement, as if a baby were born, he tried on the new clothes, took the bundle of old clothes outside and put it next to the bundle of clothes forgotten downstairs by new immigrants peeping from their rented room upstairs, or maybe they were waiting for the right time to bring them upstairs. Nor did they know what to do with the new flowerpots that were given them. The man sitting with him said, You have to forget, Boaz, come back home, they've started searching for you, they said you've been wandering around for a month now, I don't know why they're so worried about you, you've got a grandmother with citrus groves and vineyards and you've got money. What, you need help?
Not me, said Boaz and licked the jar of jam some more.
It says here, said the man, that the battles were hard. Boaz asked where it said and the man showed him a sheet of paper. The paper said Boaz Schneerson, fourth brigade, Har-El. Boaz said: What else does it say? And the man said: It says that you were mobilized in 'forty-seven. That you were trained in boats in Caesarea and then fought in Jerusalem. It says you took part in-and he listed one battle after another until Boaz got bored and stopped listening. The man added, you wound up in an ambush, so what? It says you played dead. That you lay and they shot at the dead, every moment you knew you'd die and you didn't, there were crows and vultures there, maybe hawks? Maybe falcons? Maybe eagles? I can imagine that it was awful, it says here that afterward you got up and there were another two who got up at the same time and you all ran.
I don't remember, said Boaz.
The man smiled and said, they didn't go down to the valley with the dead because the Jews had an atom bomb. And the bomb there was a Davidka shell, which explodes once every seven shots. Fifty percent of the giant shells don't explode. The shells really were gigantic, said Boaz, and they were shaped like an atom bomb.
The Jews got atom bombs from the Elders of Zion, said the Arabs. You drew clocks and you wrote mysterious numbers on the shells so that if they didn't explode, at least they'd frighten. The explosion worked by smell, said the Arabs, if an Arab soldier got close to it it exploded from the smell. The Jews were vaccinated against it, said the man, for example, in Hiroshima not one Jew was killed. The logic was perfect, Boaz said to him. So you were saved, said the man, I don't remember, said Boaz, but added: Grandmother recited Psalms throughout the war and saved me, even the battle I don't remember.
It bothers you to be rehabilitated, said the man.
But I wasn't there, said Boaz, it's a mistake, and the man said, go home and you'll remember, it'll help you. Boaz said, I still need to know who really came out of those battles, not sure it's me. The man listed names of the dead but Boaz stood up and wanted to pay. He said, I don't remember them, the man said, I'll pay, and Boaz saw the hair stuck to his scalp and thought maybe antitoxin for hair, a future invention, and with a razor blade he always kept in his pocket in a wrinkled old cigarette pack he wanted to cut his circumcision, but also the hair of that man, and the bitter rage evoked in him by that superfluous memory.
In the evening, he went down to the seashore. A man sat there sculpting. Boaz watched him. A couple lay between the darkness and the limestone hill, tossing and turning. The sculptor said: So what, I sculpt eternal statues in water. I sculpt Joshua, Moses, Nimrod the hero, Ben-Gurion. Up above they've already started building the last villas of Saints of the Holocaust Street. A party was going on in one of the houses and music burst out of an open window. A boy was dragging sardines and beer to the party. Near the ledge of the boardwalk were two crows that vanished into the sunset. Invisible walls collapsed on him and Boaz said to the sculptor: That sunset is sweet as fire, and the sculptor said to him, Got to know how to capture yells, and Boaz envied the sand under the lovers. He strode along the ledge of the boardwalk until it stopped. The sea cast a pale light of a city erased of houses, a streetlamp illuminated the sea magic, the iron of the ledge was rusty, and at the ledge stood a young woman and looked at the sea. Boaz stood not far from her and looked at the sea too. He didn't even know that she was standing, at any rate, he surely didn't think of it, he was thinking of Minna, why had he plucked the ring off her. When he discovered the woman he looked at her. She didn't move, as if she were waiting for somebody who hadn't come for some time now. A wild silence was strewn on her face, which she extinguished. She had a pug nose and her cheeks weren't symmetrical. Her eyes turned to him didn't see him. The question conveyed to him in her unseeing look was: How can a young man have eyes that are three thousand years old? Thus they approached one another and then he kissed her with a delicacy he felt she deserved and didn't know was in him. Embracing but each one alone, they ascended the path to the small hotel with the discount for soldiers and a free wash. They got the discount and like everybody else they wrote made-up names. Then she tried to weep and not say anything she'd regret afterward. Too bad I didn't ask her name, he thought several days later, but there was a crib there and they said, That will be our baby, she spoke broken Hebrew and said: There it was bad, and showed him marks on her arms and he tried to tell something and didn't know what, and they laughed because she was the almost imaginary lover of a person whose cruelty Boaz couldn't imagine but warmth flowed from her, that flame that melted her, and at three in the morning she said: I was beautiful and they saw only my back. And he wanted to tell her how beautiful she was now in bed, naked, but he didn't have women he dreamed about years ago and so he was silent. He wanted to understand how they penetrated her, how they didn't ask questions, and his distress became unbearable, he who wanted to be independent in love began pitying her and himself and almost spoke, and then she whispered to him don't say I love, don't you dare, and he got angry that she began teaching him and after they quarreled he brought her water and she drank from his hands, lapped it like a dog, and he got down on all fours and said: Don't love, don't love, and she said see, Hebrew, I don't know but they put into my body that thing to honor Jewish girls and in his mind's eye he saw her standing there alone waiting for somebody else on the beach of Tel Aviv and started wondering whether he had also been there, and the pressure in his chest grew and then he had to hit her, insult her, and before she managed to tell him her name, she got dressed in a hurry and said: I'm going, and he said fine and only afterward, after he lay for an hour and tried to shut his eyes, did he understand what he was losing, but by then it was too late. He thought about the little girl with flaxen hair next to the flowerpots and wanted to understand what was happening to all of them and said I'm Boaz Schneerson and he went down to the pay phone and called his grandmother in the settlement and talked with her for a long time and could sense her wicked laugh.
