by Yoram Kaniuk
In the cemeteries for those who fell in World War II, the anonymous graves say: "Known only to God." On a check you write: "Pay to the bearer," so it can't be transferred to somebody else. Pain has no heirs, there is no imagination that can hold the empty space left behind by some anonymous person known only to God, if God knew him as I do, he would hold the whole earth.
All I had left of Menahem were a few school notebooks, a naive scrapbook from the seventh grade, photos we took here and there of Menahem's grandfather and grandmother who have died meanwhile, of uncles, friends we used to meet sometimes. Photos in the drawers of our table or with Noga, who was still living with us then, before she went to live with Boaz. His mother hung Menahem's clothes in the closet. Our house is a closet for Menahem's clothes. A picture album, a few notebooks and that poem, enveloped by this house. Hasha Masha scoured the buttons, sewed on the ones that fell off, polished his shoes carefully, scoured the isolated objects we had left and I, who had once worked for a tailor to pay for my schooling, sewed the rips, stitched together, then I ironed everything and we hung them up in the closet and ever since then he's known only to God. All we had left was to sit and wait. We had to make up a life to justify what had ended.
Boaz Schneerson came and moved me out of my orbit, killed Menahem in another battle, brought him back to life, and put him to death again, but about that I'll have to talk later. Noga left us for Boaz and I went on teaching awhile, I was even principal for about two years. But when I figured out that I was talking to students who had finished school long ago and maybe were parents of their own children, when I figured out that in my increasingly frequent hallucinations I was talking to Menahem's friends who remained his age, on the day it ended, but in fact they had already graduated and were filling the world with mischief, or teaching, or running factories, and I called those kids by other names, when I saw that I was hallucinating, I resigned.
That was a few years ago, years after our son fell. The photos didn't help, nor did the endless walks every morning between seven and seven forty-five from our house in the north of the city to Mugrabi Square that had been obliterated meanwhile along with the clock that had anyway never shown the right time, but stood there like a clear sign of some stability that's gone now. Nothing helped, the emptiness was heavy as the nothingness of Menahem's shoes in the closet. Polished, shining, destined for nothing. At the end of every journey, thousands of kilometers in the same orbit, I remained alone.
Until I met Ebenezer I thought my investigation of the Last Jew resulted from a conversation I once had with somebody who had been the principal of our school, Demuasz, the teacher who had been there even longer than I. I have to say that compared to what Demuasz built I didn't contribute much and our school sank into a gray slumber of routine. What I did contribute is a wall of memory and every year the graduating students say with an embarrassed smile that the next reunion will be held on it. And then they also see Menahem's name carved there, heading the long list. I put up the wall by myself and there was some pleasure in beginning the long list with my son's name and adding after the name, as ordered by Demuasz, the words, May God avenge their blood. I didn't believe in those words, but I gave in. Today I know that in those days when I talked with Demuasz about the strange man who lived in his house, Ebenezer was moving into the Giladis' house next door to our house, but since I was so involved with myself and my solitude, I didn't pay any heed to that and didn't even notice that the Giladis moved out of here and a real estate agent was hanging around here tired and sweaty and I didn't see that night when Ebenezer came with a truckload of furniture and closed himself in the house and slammed the windows. Demuasz, who helped me quite a bit in my work on the Committee of Bereaved Parents, invited me then to his house and introduced me to the guest who was staying there. The guest was paralyzed, waving his arms like a double-edged sword, I don't know why that image came into my mind, or a sword of the Lord of Hosts, in a Jew of all people a sword is like a shattered sanctuary, and that smashed shard muttered vague words that nobody understood but when he met my eyes, and maybe he saw there a pain that touched his own pain, he told me in a few sentences about the Last Jew, but then he didn't yet know who he was. In my house I was inferior in my own eyes and in my wife's eyes. The death of my son, if I can be forgiven the expression, was a few sizes too big on me. The embarrassment of the father looking at the forever empty shoes of his son was a definite condition of enmity, and in me at least, a certain glory of timorous but not undramatic grief. I wouldn't say I was nice to people, I had a certain bitterness I didn't like in myself, but I couldn't control it, the yearnings for my son were also yearnings for exchange, a death for a death. Questions of why him, and if there is a fixed number of dead, why did fate pick a fight with me of all people. I didn't ask anybody why fate hadn't picked a fight with his son, I asked why it had picked a fight with me. My wife almost forgave me with painful contempt. The destroyed Jew in Demuasz's house was still alive, from me he was dying, from me he was also drawing some consolation, I don't understand why, maybe my bitterness suited him since dying is a condition of the present and not of the past. Noga was still living with us then and she and my wife would look together at the photos of Menahem, at the notebooks, they loved and hated one another in a kind of shared plot where I couldn't set foot. They were locked against me, I had to meet a dying Jew in a strange house to glory in my pain.
At the sight of him, I could more easily understand the life that Hasha Masha and Noga inspired in the cobwebs of our house. At the sight of him I understood how awful but also how encouraging it was to hear the breathing of my two women when I couldn't fall asleep and turned and tossed helplessly. The man told me about the Last Jew, about his knowledge. That night I dreamed I came home and killed Hasha Masha. She walked from room to room in her underwear and kept me from thinking about my son. Then I served Noga her blood in a glass. In the morning I wanted to cry but my eyes had been dry for years.
What looks one way today looked completely different then. I was already a person less arrogant in his pain, less elegant, less portrayed by himself, more submissive to real pain who changed his self-image as somebody who contains pain. Without the vitality that Noga imparted to our house, the house looked like a tomb. The windows were always shuttered, my wife in black, under the lamp that comes down almost to the table, the shade creates a familiar shaft of light, a shade I bought many years ago from a refugee who came to our house during the big Aliyah, and when I bought that shade, I seemed to be buying the skin of that refugee. I remember the crooked smile on his pale face, he also wanted to sell me a watch and rings, all gold, he told me, and I bought the wax-paper shade that turned yellow over the years. Its edge grew sharp as a clown's hat and it had burst now and was sewn and repaired but we didn't change it, just as then I still didn't take care of the yard or the house, we hadn't yet changed anything, we didn't buy any furniture or new curtains and beneath the shaft of light in the dim room at the table once polished and now rubbed beyond repair sat my wife, shrouded in a smell of moths and mints and tea with lemon mixed with orange peel. A smell of mothballs and old paint. Maybe because of that closed desolation, I accepted Demuasz's invitation and that's why I could sit facing that destroyed Jew and instead of trying to listen to him, I tried in my mind to compare one suffering with another, one pain with another. A crooked game, my wife would surely have said, and I would watch the man's silence, his dying eyes, his hands drawing wild illustrations for me in the dense air of the room, and it was then that he told me things.
Today when I reconstruct the things that led me to Ebenezer and the encounter with the German, I recall that that morning, when I went to Demuasz's house, I did see a stranger standing in the door of the Giladi house with his profile to me, I remember a sense of panicky haste I felt at the sight of him, something bothered me and at the same time erased the picture from my mind, like that quality I developed over years to dream that I'm late and then wake up with a start, a minute or tw
o before the big old alarm clock rings. And the man stood there in his shabby but elegant clothes with some old humility, maybe even a spiteful clown but for some reason I didn't think about him, didn't register him in my mind, maybe I thought the man was a guest of the Giladis, maybe he inspired me with some vague dread. I came to Demuasz's house bearing in the depths of my mind a faded picture of Ebenezer, and the man in the Demuasz home was in bed, as if he were waiting for me, I thought, maybe he intends a ceremony of death for me to gore me with his pain. To triumph over me. I looked at the glass of water on the nightstand next to his bed, at his teeth in the glass, his eyes were wide open but hallucinating, his leg twitched under the thin blanket, above him hung an old picture of a butterfly surely left over from the days when Demuasz was a teacher of the nature of our Land and his lips started moving, gaped open and spread and were again covered with a scrim of feeble violence, I took off my hat, my hands were clasped in one another to preserve that measure of fitting courtesy I assume when necessary. A snort like a phony chirp of a bird rose from the man's nose and he said to me: Henkin, I want to say something, Demuasz was stunned and I, my habit for many years, I mechanically thrust my hands in my pockets and pulled out the square paper I always had in my pocket, and the sharpened pencil I never left home without, and when he spoke I of course wrote it down as if I were again Henkin-researcher, Henkin, one of the tough young men who plies his pencil, as my students once used to sing. And the man, still with his eyes shut (he shut them when he started speaking), his leg started twitching, and the false teeth in the glass, because of the tilt of my face and the flash of light, looked monstrous, gigantic, he said: The name of the company there is D. G. S., initials of Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Stadtlingsbekampfung M. B. H., an all-German company of fighters. In nineteen forty-four it paid dividends of two hundred percent to A. G. Farben, one of the three concerns they owned. The cost was nine hundred seventy-five deutsch marks for one hundred fifty kilos of Zyklon B. twenty-seven and a half marks a kilogram for one thousand five hundred human beings. At that time, the mark was worth twenty-five American cents, Mr. Henkin. That is, six dollars and seventy-five cents. In the summer of forty-four, Mr. Henkin, the life of a Jew was worth less than twofifths of a cent. And then they said that was too expensive. They sat in Berlin in armchairs and wrote a report. They wrote that that was too expensive. It's all economics, Mr. Henkin. So, they said, the children have to be thrown straight into the fire. They were frugal, he said, and knew what things cost.
He was silent and I held onto the square of paper in my hand and didn't know what to do with it. It took me a few minutes to understand what he was telling me. For a moment he opened his right eye, which was shrunk in swollen orbits and looked like a bluish-green sore, looked at me defiantly, as if he had beaten me in an exciting but exhausting game of chess and said, You understand? I know a lot of numbers from the Last Jew. Everything is numbered in him. The new Bible, you're a Hebrew teacher, has to be written from numbers. And then he shut his eyes, wheezed, and didn't talk anymore. I thought he had died but he was only slumbering and didn't wake up, then, but, when he spoke I thought about an amusement park where I used to go when I was a kid and where there were terrifying toys and I told Demuasz, who came in now, the smile of an expert on his Jew, he told me shh. And I told him. He said Yes, he quotes him now and then but he won't hold out much longer. I told Demuasz that I had heard the stories about the Last Jew from a bereaved mother whose son had fallen in the Sinai campaign and Demuasz said, Yes, the distress they bring from there, to save two-fifths of a cent, Henkin!
I went back home and my wife was sitting there under the sixty-watt bulb I could never change for a hundred watts because of her stubbornness, her beautiful face was resting on the binding of my son's closed photo album, guessing the photos perfectly, and I went to my study. I sat down at the desk where I hadn't worked for years now, took a smooth sheet of paper out of the drawer, picked up my Parker pen, checked it as a scribe checks his quill, and wrote "The Last Jew" and a few minutes later, I drew a thick line under those words and added in small, even modest letters, I'd say, maybe for camouflage: "A Study by Obadiah Henkin." And then I looked at the page and I knew I had to investigate that Jew and I looked at the window and saw the emptiness of the yard and the Giladi house and I dimly remembered seeing a person there in the morning but I didn't really think about him, his image flashed through my mind and was immediately erased, and some panic attacked me.
And again I found myself investigating, interviewing people, going to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, to Kibbutz Lohamei HaGetaot, I heard that the man who talked to me in Demuasz's house had been taken to the hospice in Gadera and had been lying there like a vegetable for a few weeks, suddenly he opened his eyes and said: Did Obadiah talk to him? And they asked him who? What? And he smiled, shut his eyes, and died. I thought about his words, about the mission he seemed to assign me, I thought about my wife in the ravines of light, the very solitary house, the empty rooms, the old samovar still heating water for tea and a long time ago I'd become acquainted with the ironic malice of the solitude decreed by pain that has to be acted to live it, and I started investigating the life of a man and all I could know about him were trifles. And at that time we are still living in a certain regularization of organized hostility, my wife and 1. She looks at me with transparent malice, sympathy, I'd say, and refuses to sleep in the same bed with me. At night I try to touch her, to reach out my hand, like a lovestruck boy, the two of us in our beds, tossing and turning, trying to sleep, no tranquilizer or sleeping pill helps, I'm trying to caress her but she doesn't respond to me, even though she's not angry either, she keeps inventing hope for me for other times, or maybe a fabrication for the past, you have to listen carefully to hear the quiet tears flowing on her cheeks, she never sobs aloud, she doesn't weep in the light, and she mocked my daily walks, my activity on the Committee for Bereaved Parents, my searching. After I brought home Boaz Schneerson and Noga was still living with us and what happened happened, her contempt changed to hostility, and her words became as sharp as a razor. She always wears black for herself, she doesn't share her pain with anybody, she doesn't go out of the house, my need to understand the lack of Menahem makes her suspicious, and she apparently has a need incomprehensible to me to be a perfect and unchanging enemy to herself to preserve some trace of closeness, a closeness that's hard to define, as if a shared secret helplessness and a strong hatred unites two people not because of the past but despite the past. I'd say that a canned love prevailed between us, frozen in a deep freeze, a love that has to be assessed with webs of amazement, transparen cies of the window through the heavy shades, furtive looks, stabbing sentences, the way each of us gets into bed apart but always together, at the very same time, and gets up separately but together, prepare without words for another day to live it together, but apart. We had no secrets, I told her everything and she was silent to me about everything. Love of Menahem was shared, but she saw one person and I saw another person. Maybe it was inevitable that like me, she too discovered she was cut off from the bond that bound us and yet she couldn't grant my request, forgive me for my behavior toward Boaz or toward myself or toward the Committee, she didn't forgive me for the life after death I tried in vain to grant Menahem.
Since she didn't leave the house, I'd do the shopping, pay the bills, collect the pension, take care of whatever had to be taken care of, and once a year, we'd go to Kiryat Anavim on Memorial Day. She'd do that reluctantly, with some distress, would get into a cab. Withdrawn into herself, on the path leading to the cemetery she'd walk alone, as if she couldn't bear any contact.
She wouldn't go to her son's grave, but came with me so I'd be sure my son was really buried there, since as far as she was concerned, he was buried there as he was buried everyplace else. The closer I went to the grave, the more exaggerated she became, maybe even magnificent to some extent, the place was so unimportant to her that a few times she missed some Memorial Days and re
fused to come with me. But when she did come, she'd stand there, enshrouded in herself, looking at me, and then she'd walk toward the road, sit stooped on the bench of the taxi stand, and wait for me.
At that time something else happened that only today I can connect with the Last Jew. I started working and fixing our garden then, cultivating it again. At the time, I thought resurrecting the idea of reviving the garden was accidental. Apparently I saw the buds of the renewed garden in the Giladi house and the sight of the graceful foliage near my window woke me out of my swoon of many years. On a certain day and I can't be precise about the timing, that man I described before as somebody who stood in the doorway of the Giladi house dressed like a clown with his profile turned to me started working the Giladi garden, which, like all the gardens on the street, had stopped blooming when my garden withered after Menahem was killed. Suddenly I began to neglect the mourning Teacher Henkin and to see a red-brown loam, a compost heap. To sense that wonderful, sweet, bitter, sharp smell, the sight of the trunk after years of looking out the window and seeing only gray and sand, and wind, and heat, and something neglected and stinking at the seashore and then, one day, the eyes light up at the sight of a new stem, at a spinning spurt of a sprinkler, at the sight of a rosebush and a bougainvillea starting to ignite, and the evening falling on it smoothes the ground and it doesn't fall anymore, doesn't drop like an estimated nothingness and a blossom that blooms for you evokes completely different longings, longings for life, for morning glories, and then I saw thorns in my garden, crabgrass, destruction, a heap of brown needles that fell from the pine tree, the ground covered with sand and dry leaves, and just like that, I started hoeing a little and then fixing here and there and suddenly I found myself working and hoeing and banging. Every day I'd work for two or three hours, in an undershirt and cap, I sweated, I fixed the faucet, I bought a new hose and sprinkler, and new life ignited, a life that died with the black villas. A lightness and lust filled me, my bones began to recover, not to creak, and how I loved that house I had bought in 'thirty-seven through the Hebrew teachers' organization at the time of the riots the Arabs call the great revolt, the remote neighborhood in north Tel Aviv at the edge of the city, and the new port born then and now dead and left barren and demolished and the street next to mine they called Gate of Zion, and I live on Deliverance, near the sea, nice small houses of teachers, union officials, and the neighborhood blossomed then, its gardens were handsome, the red roof tiles, the houses like little exclamation marks in the desert of sand near the sea, south of us stretched the hills and the Muslim cemetery, north of us forests to what my son called boos, Reading Station that was then small and insubstantial beyond the Yarkon River and then I planted a fine garden and Demuasz helped me choose its plants, and geraniums and climbing roses blossomed in it along with a fragrant jujube and mint and pansies, and in season lilies blossomed and a blaze of fine wildflowers and I planted a pine tree and two cedars and a purple bougainvillea that covered the front of the house after a few years and set fire to it with its sweet light and the castor oil tree that had been standing here for generations I didn't uproot and the soft lawn that needed a lot of watering and the sprinklers spun at night and made a pleasant intoxicating rustle and during the years of the great war, my son would take care of the garden and slowly it turned into his garden. He loved to prune, uproot crabgrass, tend the garden, good hands he had, he loved to work when nobody ordered him, not like in school where he had to work under the triumphant baton of Demuasz who also turned tending the garden into a national operation, here at home he was Menahem, master of himself, he'd frown capriciously and tell me, Henkin (he didn't call me father), go to your books and find me exactly how an Afghanistanian bamboo smells. That was almost our only point of contact, back then, but usually I'd let him work alone while I was locked in my room, investigating, correcting notebooks.
