by Yoram Kaniuk
After he saw the cement in Mugrabi he ate a hot dog in a roll on the square. Behind him flew a distorted picture of Laurence Olivier, and the hot dog vendor tried to prove to him again that Goethe was greater than Shakespeare, less violent, more sophisticated. The clock showed the wrong time and Boaz recalled that in the war they said that after it was all over, they'd hold a brigade reunion in the telephone booth near Mugrabi. He started searching desperately for the young woman he had spent the night with but she wasn't anywhere. Among the things details began to be clear. A man limped toward the movie box office and a woman passed by him, bumped into him, hiccuped, and Boaz laughed. She had cruel small teeth, she dropped a hat, and when she picked it up she opened her purse, took out powder, and smeared it on her cheeks and then in the light of the streetlamp she smeared lipstick on her lips. Since he was stuck to the corner, he could see her gaping mouth, her squinting eyes, her teeth with a little bit of lipstick stuck to them, and then she blotted the lipstick with a handkerchief. Boaz tried to remember the dead, recalled that Menahem Henkin lay next to him, but was dead and his blood stuck to him, so Boaz wanted to break a clothes hanger because Menahem Henkin used to break hangers in his childhood, Menahem Henken told Boaz.
Then he went to see the second show of a film whose name he forgot, and felt as if he had come to the end of the road and where would he escape now, and then the strange event happened to him that I'm telling about in these tapes. Boaz stood at the kiosk and tried to read the head line of the evening paper and very close to the counter, next to a hurricane lamp, stood a young man Boaz was sure came out of the battle the man in the cafe had told him about. His head was wreathed with a halo of light and his face looked like the face of Boaz that the man had told him about. The kiosk owner said to the young man: So from the ship you were sent straight to the war? And the young man said, No, first I was in the port of Haifa. And the young man was so familiar, when Boaz looked at his arm in the light of the hurricane lamp and saw that it moved from his own shoulder. The young man finished drinking and now hid the newspaper headline from Boaz and over his head hung an ad for Nesher beer. Boaz thought, The betrayals will end for a while, so he also understood that no envy would save him but he knew that signals were sent to him from the depths of the war he had fought in, or that that young man had fought in for him. Headlights flashed and there were still many painted streetlamps from the war and the lights seemed to be caressing the gloom. Thoughts that didn't come from a certain place stuck in his mind and a bird built itself a nest on the roof of the kiosk. The man said: That's a honeysucker, so small, every year he comes and makes his nest on the roof. And the young man asked if that tiny sucker could be the same bird and Boaz who knew the answer from childhood, couldn't have spoken, stood on the side, darkened, terrified, the back of the young man's neck filled him with longings for Minna's finger dripping blood and he tried to remember when he had bought her the ring in Hepzibah where Grandmother thought he was stealing pens and erasers, but he couldn't recall. When the young man moved a shadow seemed to shift or a curtain to be pulled. The kiosk was gaping like a wound. A caprice of chiaroscuro made the young man look as if he were going away into a halo of light, but it was only outlines of non-body.
A man chewing sesame and drinking soda held a fragrant wormwood leaf between his fingers and the smell was tormenting and sweet. The desert wildness in the city street was sudden and assuaged some pain that gnawed in him. The man paid and the young man started walking and Boaz found himself hopping behind him, he was hopping because now he had a pain in his foot, wanted to stop, settle things, but he followed the young man like a blind man. And then he said: That young man took off Minna's ring, loves blood, is disguised as a crow. They eat sesame seeds in Tel Aviv with desert wormwood. I'm walking behind a yell that came from inside me, he said to himself, but what's happening to me, what am I, a car thief, a warmonger, that silence will drive me out of my mind: the young man turned into a dark street and went off toward a house with a thick tree sprouting from it. The tree was dead but the house around the tree wasn't destroyed. The crest of the tree wasn't seen in the dark. He searched for a house number on the wall and didn't find one. The name of the street wasn't written there either. The fence was low and beyond the house tombstones were seen, the dark obliterated the tops of the tombstones, but one tombstone was seen clearly and even the writing etched on it was seen prominently, maybe because of the light falling from a window where a broken shutter didn't block it. Then it became clear that aside from the tombstone lying here waiting to be moved to the cemetery, this was a cemetery for dead cars, maybe even the spoils of war. A person was walking in the yards, he had stones in his pocket and was searching for cats to throw the stones at. The cats looked like flashes in the headlights of the passing cars, slithering around tree trunks that looked as if they didn't have crests. The young man looked as if he were hesitating. I wanted to go back, he'll say years later, as an end of a story about people searching for themselves, I wanted to go back like a melody played long ago. In the yard the young man entered you could feel rusty nails and shards of bottles and hear the claws of cats leaping toward the hewn trunks. The tree that burst out of the house was seen from the corner where Boaz stood as if pickled in vinegar, maybe the house was merely a box.
The young man searched for a path among the shards of bottles and nails and suddenly felt a stream of water flowing from the next yard. In the window with the shallow light, a radio was heard and in his fantasy, Boaz could imagine the street going on even beyond the house that stood in the middle and cut it off. And farther on there was a building like a Greek temple with the municipal courthouse next to it and then the sea, whose breakers were heard even through the water rustling and the cats purring. On a small balcony latticed with crosses, an iron weave like an army range, maybe against snakes or other afflictions of nature, in a rusty can sprouted a geranium bush and its sharp smell, which surely came to him because of the water that had recently sprinkled it, filled Boaz's nostrils. Now he followed the young man and turned right toward the front of the house, a bare bulb hung there without a shade and a woman's robe on a peg that looked like a hook. On the hook stood a bird. The bird kept moving and its beak explored the source of the music coming from the radio and even in the gloom you could make out the gold color of its beak, maybe it was red and Boaz couldn't make the slim distinction. He thought: we had the barn in the settlement and now there's destruction there.
Then a scene flickered in his mind and he smiled. Teacher All's Well stands before the class in the settlement, excited, a dark spot starts showing at his fly, his pocket is puffed up from the cotton he bought at noon for his wife Eve, and put in his pocket, and the girls are giggling and the boys are weeping with laughter and Teacher All's Well is talking excitedly about Jacob's ladder ... standing on the earth, the whole Land of Israel folded under the stone pillow of Our Father, the ladder facing up ... Oh, what a wretched and sublime nation, he said, and Boaz now remembers the blush on the faces of the farmers' only daughters who had often seen bulls mounting cows and Mrs. Czkhstanovka standing next to the national flags and waiting for a bridegroom who never came, but they weren't used to seeing a teacher with wet trousers saying: Oh, what a wretched and sublime nation, struggling with God! Israel! An eternal struggle of the nation and its God, Nation and Land, Language and Fate ... And the girls are giggling, the spot's spreading, maybe touching the cotton Margalit saw him buying with her own eyes from old Greenspan whose son committed suicide. And he said: Stiffnecked, struggling fateful struggles, disappointed but not ceasing to believe ... maybe in order to lose! And that's something modern writers don't understand at all! And he looked at his flock, who had no idea who the modern writers were and what they meant and here, thinks Boaz, stands a young man, maybe I'm standing there, and thinking about spots on the trousers of Hebrew teachers. A garden of nails caught in a pale light and the smell of geraniums intoxicates and the crumbling stone fence and the tree inventing t
he house and everything here is longing.
And we're all of us acting in a Jewish Western, somebody will say later on, and then this moment will be remembered. The young man who may be he averts his face, Boaz knows it's impossible. The geranium, the longings, everything is mixed up here in a restrained essence. He didn't come to Tel Aviv to seek a new war, especially not against himself. But the enemy, it seemed to him, is shrouded in a smell of mothballs, I and not I, thought Boaz. When the young man turned to him, something forgotten flickered in Boaz's mind. He recalled that once he was in the battle the man in the cafe told him about, but he knew he didn't remember it, he thought then that the Boaz who went into the battle hadn't come out of it at all. Thirty-two killed. Menahem Henkin was killed there, too. But I didn't come out of it, somebody else came out of it, disguised as me. Now it was clear to him. The dark was such that as soon as the young man's face turned aside from the balcony and turned to him, he was blinded for a moment by the harsh light cast from the window when the light now came on. Out of a vague fear, he knew he had to choose, so there was a struggle between Boaz and the very tall mute young man. The light in the window went out and another light came on and a fire engine siren was heard wailing, racing in the next street, the young man was a cruel fighter, nobody could come out a winner in such a battle, thought Boaz. The nails stuck in his feet, the broken glass tore chunks out of his body, the geranium bush was abandoned. Its smell was forgotten in the smell of the cruel battle, blood flowed, and he didn't know if it was his blood or the young man's blood, the young man didn't talk, just groaned and roared, and Boaz tried to talk but no words were heard. Only afterward the young man groaned: You're all shit, what do you know. But now Boaz wasn't sure if he had really heard those words, he was just as struck as his enemy, the flight of the two of them was the most ridiculous thing Boaz could think of later on. How the two of us fled at the same time. He tramped on nails and glass shards and fled and saw another back fleeing from there and groaning and he groaned too, but now he couldn't know who was who, and Boaz imagined that that was all he wanted to know, who he wasn't, the bird with the gold beak flew off, the robe hanging on a peg before disappeared in a panic, a woman's hand was seen tugging the robe and maybe tore it, lights went on and off. Voices burst out of apartments where maybe they were trying to listen to a funny program at the end of the war, Hasidic music was heard in the distance, but what was clear to Boaz was that only one of them came from there and again he vaguely recalled that battle and he thought, Only one came out of that too even though maybe two of us were in it, who came out? Me or him, who comes out now: me or him, and he didn't know. And so, for a moment, when he stood in the street and people started appearing before his eyes, he could take pity on himself. But he was immediately disgusted with himself and stopped. Cleaned his wounds, but he recalled that he had gotten a tetanus shot some time ago and was protected from that harm; he wanted to be sure he wouldn't get rabies but that only embittered him even more.
The cats who were seen hiding between the fence and the house, where a tree was sprouting, were searching for a bend of the stones in the auto cemetery and suddenly they also fled all at once. The house couldn't be seen now. Who loses, who wins, the pain inside him, he hopped toward the tents on the seashore and wanted to get up and go to the settlement, to Grandmother, to be a live hero returning to the kindergarten teacher Eve and to her husband Teacher All's Well. Here, Eve, is a chick who did come back, your other chicks were left there. To see the gravestones, to forget. But he got up in the morning and went to the officer of the city. The office was humming with soldiers getting new uniforms or returning uniforms or requesting transfers. From the officer of the city he got addresses of those who had been with him. He tried to remember the battle he had left the day before yesterday and everything was mixed up in his mind, the battle, the movies, Laurence Olivier playing Hamlet, Goethe is better than Shakespeare. The girl he loved at night disappeared, maybe I dreamed all those things. He walked with the list in his pocket stood still in the street and saw an apartment on the second floor. On the balcony hung flowerpots and a gigantic awning covered it from the sun. He went up and knocked on the door. A woman opened it. She looked at him and tried to wipe away some tears seen drying in her left eye. Boaz said: I'm Boaz, I fought with Johnny. The woman brought him inside and gave him tea. He drank it and tried to talk, but he couldn't. She said, what are you seeking here, Boaz? He didn't know and so he left. Then he went to the cafe and sat for three days and waited for some parents to find him there. He bought a gigantic Bristol sheet and wrote on it in big letters "I know dead people," and hung the Bristol paper on the tree in front of Kassit Cafe, among the announcements of exhibitions and poetry books that were now starting to come out at dizzying speed. But only one man asked him if he knew Menashe Aharono- vitch and Boaz said he didn't. People who knew him laughed and Minna appeared with the torn finger and said Boaz was out of his mind but she didn't dare approach him. He sat there at the table, alone, full of a new joy that bloomed in him, waiting to give testimony. The waiters served him beer or coffee. The money ran out and he left. The policeman who tried to tear the Bristol sheet off the tree couldn't do it because Boaz fought for his right to give testimony. Three days later he sat with a woman he didn't know and tried to explain to her how the woman he had slept with in the hotel looked. The woman he didn't know thought that was surely love and didn't understand him at all even though he talked about love as if it was a war you died in. He wanted to tell her, That's perfect non-love, but I'm searching for her. And only at the end did he start striding toward Menahem Henkin's house. Here there was already a problem, he knew Menahem well, he defended Menahem, and after he died they said maybe he had been all right. Then the "maybe" was erased. The street was flooded with light but Boaz walked in the shade and when he had to cross the street he leaped across. He believed he'd find the young man who beat and was beaten by him embracing the woman he almost succeeded in loving in the hotel, but he didn't. Courtyards swallowed up the beautiful and the good who tried to seem indifferent. People were already starting to come out and seek a new substance in their new state, which distributed food coupons and declared austerity. When he came to Henkin's house, he saw a dim light, loved the name of the street, Deliverance Street, near the sea, small, pitiful houses, tipping over, and clearly they had once been nicer and more festive. He wanted to tell Henkin that he had sat in Kassit Cafe three days and waited for him and why didn't he come, but he saw a scarecrow of a man drying himself at a dead castor oil tree. Henkin looked suited to the place. His clothes were dark, his hat was from another decade, the music that burst out of him was a waltz of slaughtered ducks. He looked avenged and defeated. With eyes full of sad cunning Teacher Henkin searched for his son at a fence covered with brambles, now wretched and neglected. A small garbage cart stood there, empty, rusted, and the enclosures of the port looked too bright in the sunlight. The intense blue of the sky swallowed up the particle of distance between him and the sea. The houses protected only themselves. Henkin didn't protect anything. Boaz stood there stuck and waited and Henkin looked at him. After about an hour, Henkin went into the house, opened the slats of the shutter a little and peeped outside. Boaz went on standing. A little while later, he came outside and gave Boaz a glass of cold water. Boaz didn't drink it and returned the water to Henkin. He saw Menahem playing in the yard and thought, what could I have told him, Henkin couldn't have recognized Boaz's face because of the strong light and he saw only the stunned silhouette in the afternoon light and then he dared ask, he asked: Who are you?
Just, said Boaz.
Just what?
Just standing here.
Henkin wanted to ask, but some skepticism had already sneaked into him, that sense of loss that, anyway, he wouldn't answer him. He muttered something and said, And doesn't the young man have a name?
I did have, said Boaz and then he started pitying all that life here and he went away. He took the kitbag from the tent
, walked to the central bus station and got on a bus. He had soldier's tickets and rode free. The discharge would start tomorrow. Henkin waited a few minutes and went inside. He locked the door and tried to recall the young man's face, but he couldn't.
Tape / -
And then a wind started blowing and Teacher Henkin said to his wife: They won't understand, Hasha Masha, they won't understand, there's an undermined system of fates here, look ... but she didn't want to read.
Tape / -
... And once again I recall the young man who stood here years ago. Now I think it really was Boaz Schneerson but maybe I'm wrong. Boaz never confirmed that he stood here and took the glass of cold water and didn't deny it either. The story of the Last Jew was also constructed from the end to the beginning, and only after I invested a few years in my investigation of the Last Jew did I meet Ebenezer completely by chance, even though he was here, near me, all that time. And after the meeting with Ebenezer, doubts about the hundreds of pages I had written stirred in me and I decided to think about writing the book with that German. Maybe that writing itself is an attempt to decipher, to uncover the things whose logical sequence is so strange to me.
My dear son Menahem I lost many years ago. Menahem was killed in two different places: he was killed in battle in the valley near Mount Radar where he lay among thirty-two bodies, and he fell in battle for the Old City of Jerusalem, at dawn on May twentieth, nineteen forty-eight. Maybe she's right, Hasha Masha, who maintains that the glory of mourners in front of a mirror is common in me. I'm trying to reconstruct things: I then felt that life stopped all at once, wasn't in store for me anyplace else, the energy in me was masked by the pain that was too splendid in my wife's eyes, but was all I had left. I sank into endless thinking about my son and my own life was only a setting for the sorrow I shaped in me; like somebody who creates life on the model of death. I looked at my little house on Deliverance Street, near the old port of Tel Aviv, against the background of the sea that sinks there a bit to the north, makes a kind of semi-bow, and at the undrained station is a small airport where small planes land or take off over our house. I looked then at the desolation of the forsaken concrete of the port, the abandoned enclosures, the creased houses, and the dusty trees, eaten by sea salt, and the sand that penetrates everything here, thickens holes, turns everything living into scarred desolation bereft of beauty. It's hard for me to describe the essence of that pain, they're the strongest yearnings for a person whose death is never grasped. That death is in you, lives in you, in the chest, the dream, waking, slumbering grown to somewhere you have no idea of, and then the wakefulness, the emptiness, the waking distress. Memories are nothing but nonstop poundings in softness, maybe a mute shout in a dream and you don't know whether you're dreaming it or it's dreaming you.
