by Yoram Kaniuk
I couldn't shut my eyes that night. A scene from the recesses of my youth rose and bothered me and wasn't clear. I heard the sounds of the night, the orders of the guards, I was restless, those eyes of his, I knew them, I got dressed and went to the office to check what block he lived in. There were about a thousand creatures there lying on bunks. None of them paid any attention to me. What could hardly be called human beings were twined into one another like leeches. In the light of my flashlight, some of them were seen chomping breadcrumbs, their faces full of mad lust, hungry, some were rubbing the breadcrumbs on the damp boards to moisten them, others were picking lice out of their heads and swallowing them, others were scraping the sweat off the wall with their tongues, the Latvian and Ukrainian guards huddled around the small stove were amazed to see me. The wooden boards groaned, people muttered in their sleep or in dying that spared us the need to destroy some of them with our own hands every night. He looked straight into my eyes, as if he were waiting for me. I ordered him to get up and he got up. His rags now looked as if they were wrapping a scarecrow. I ordered him to stand on all fours and he obeyed. I was so stunned by it that my grief and offense increased. I was mighty and at the same time the deputy of a fool, a powerful and noble cog in a dark machine of strict and necessary laws. To preserve my honor I had to act as I demanded others act, the chain of orders I was part of created divinity, not vice versa, when I ordered him to recite the prayer Adon 0lam sitting like a dog he told me he didn't know the prayer by heart, that infuriated me not because of what he said but because of the fact that when I attended the Hebrew course in my training as an SS Reiterstandarten I was almost the only one who knew anything about Judaism. And when we were told that every Jew knew the prayer Adon 0lam by heart, I said there were many Jews today who didn't know it. And they laughed at me. The course was superficial and short, we could have succeeded much better if our knowledge had been much better. When I asked my commander, who was an ignoramus about Jewish matters, to read to the students, all of them loyal commanders and good Nazis, the important pamphlet "The Catholic Faith against the Jews" by Isidor of Seville, and I claimed that that was one of the most ancient German works even though it was written in Roman, the commander said: We don't need to learn from the Catholics who the Jews are! As if that was what I meant. He said, and I'll never forget this: An ancient pamphlet a hundred years old shouldn't interest us when we have "The Myth of the Twentieth Century" by Rosenberg. I said, Commander, this pamphlet is more than a thousand years old and it explains to us how ancient and rooted our loathing is and even how justified it is, but instead of listening to me he became hostile to me and it wasn't only because of my wound in the first battle I participated in that I was transferred to the camp, but also because of the enmity of that commander who later participated in the revolt of the generals. And I was denied the bliss of serving the Fuhrer with the courage I knew was in me, because of the miserable jealousy of a person who was later hanged on a hook and died very slowly dripping blood and kicking.
And so I stood facing him, I yelled: Pray Adon 0lam, pray what you don't know. And he muttered something in Hebrew and then I opened my fly and urinated on him. The need to trample him was denied me, I could only insult him.
About a week later, special relationships between him and me started to take shape. Not deliberately at first. I wasn't proud of them then, and I'm not proud of them today. Weiss claimed correctly that I was confusing aesthetics with ethics and we sank into that eternal argument. I sank into a gloomy despair. I was the prisoner of my enemy and I loathed Weiss's perverse ideas. I wrote about the argument between us to my superiors in Berlin. And once again, as in the past, I was answered with a harsh and quarrelsome laconicism and even when I wrote them how Weiss composed a strident oratorio based on the song of the birds whose chirping he could imitate very well (integrating his life as a merchant of oriental objets d'art and a singer in coarse opera), intertwined with selected quotations from the speeches of the Fuhrer, even that letter received an almost amused answer. In the letter I wrote how Weiss would sing his oratorio when he was sitting in his easy chair, an Egyptian cigarette in his hand that was filthy with ash, his face thrust in a dreadful picture of pastoral slopes as a background to a dance of phony satyrs, a footnote of painters puffed up with self-importance and devoid of talent, and next to the picture, dirty and with a broken frame, hung a picture of the Fuhrer. The landscape was framed for him by a Jew-I wrote them-while the picture of the Fuhrer had stood desolate and ruined for two years. In reply to that letter of mine, I was told I would do better to pay attention to the decreasing portions of hair that were essential for our manufacture of mattresses. And that was maybe because the exaggerated interest of certain deputy camp commanders in irrelevant oratorios and their inattention to what required attention was increasing, and the camp commander, it said there, who works to the best of his ability deserves the support of his deputy since he cannot supervise everything.
... I, the letter also said, had to continue to supervise but to worry less about the education of the commander, not to go easy on him at all, but to remember that there are people whose SS document is among the first five hundred documents and ideological problems of the Reich are solved now by thousands of professors and experts in famous universities like Gottingen, Berlin, and Heidelberg and they do excellent ideological work. Nevertheless and despite all that, they thank me for my devotion and loyalty and are proud of me even though, because of the burden of work in the service of the nation and the Fuhrer, they cannot answer me except at certain times.
Therefore I went on with my deeds because my education imposed an obligation of honor on me to serve the homeland even if it involved danger or even a personal sacrifice. From that point of view, there was something in common between me and Ebenezer, the two of us were condemned to freedom and exploited by people who lacked nobility and imagination. And I could not get to the truly great men up above, because of the ignoramuses that stood between them and me, like Weiss, for example.
I talked about relations between me and Ebenezer. I was of course a volcano against a mosquito. But Ebenezer, unlike all my cannons, had a pair of intelligent hands, I was drawn to them. As a dilettante of the noble sort, and out of an infinite yearning for beauty, I learned to understand the perfection that is totally useless. When I listen to Beethoven's "Jesus on the Mount of Olives" or to Schutz's "Seven Words on the Cross," I can feel the unshakeable greatness of the German idealistic nature, that controlled boldness, sharp and original, some painful and tormented closeness full of bliss for perfection, an attempt to touch the untouchable, a wise and imaginative thoroughness along with a visionary penchant, a pure and virginal ideal, a struggle of man against himself and against others at one and the same time, with joy and disappointment necessarily intertwined, and not because of those circumstances or others and together they light a fire that is both ardent and burning, blood that is both beautiful and terrifying. If they left me here, in my cell, between one death sentence and another, yearning for something, after the defeat and the betrayal of the grateful liberated nations, these yearnings are not yearnings for life, but for a great culture we were about to rescue but didn't succeed, because the rescuers themselves were always unfit for the greatness of the mission. The Jewish culture of remorse once again ruled us and I can sense that in the things I read in prison. In the camp I saw behavior that didn't deserve the word "cultural," but my distinguished teacher was the monk Daniel who wrote "I gather spirit and hunt a hare with a bull and swim against the stream" and an ancient and noble taste fills my veins when I hear those things whose opposite are written now. The German person has some notion, even though it's often denied by him, of necessary worlds, and it sometimes seems imperative as a means and not an end. It is the Jews themselves who will suffer again someday, from the totality of our imaginary remorse and morality. German pangs of conscience will punish the Jews for their very existence, whereas our punishment was only for the quality
of their existence.
I loved the way Ebenezer worked with wood, building boxes, the wisdom of his hands. His idea of "the Last Jew" I thought a dubious joke. But today many admire the parts of his memory in seedy cafes and cheap nightclubs. Like one of the innocents was this man. One of my friends, Sonderkommando SS Lieutenant Sheridan, once invited me to the camp where he worked. At dinner I met an officer I remember as even more splendidly dressed than we were. I remembered him from my schooldays in the homeland as the son of a distinguished and coarse farmer, whose father's estates stretched over a gigantic area near the duchies of ancient and historic Schleswig-Holstein, not far from the Danish border. All he could do in the camp was to become an absurd trickster who managed to get apples or bras out of villas or a pair of pants out of nostrils but was unable to get a decent living from his father's estates or to demonstrate the boldness of a German commando. I always knew he would sing the arias of Aida off-key but with ridiculous gaiety, while the celestial melodies of Bach or Buxtehude im parted such mighty boredom to him that he was able to sing them without being off-key in the slightest with practiced pleasure only because he was bored. I told that because we tend to exaggerate our excitement about things outside the realm of nature as it were, like Ebenezer's tricks of memory and the incomprehension of his boxes and frames. How remarkable that a boob like him learned knowledge he thought was Jewish knowledge. Did he understand what he remembered? When I was in Paris years ago (I was given a Christmas leave from the camp) I met an old woman, half German, who had once been married to an Argentinean colonel. She introduced me to a young and handsome woman who loved to hear my stories and the songs I'd sing when she sat at the piano and played. Maybe that really was the love of my life. She once told me that she and the old woman-she called her noble-loved to hypnotize, and that sounded amusing after the quantity of wine we had drunk, and I succumbed to their pleas and was hypnotized and she wrote word for word what I said while I was in a trance and what I said was the precise history of the annals of a life a hundred fifty years before I was born. I piled up instructive and almost unknown details and the old woman who had inherited memories from days when somebody from her family served in the kaiser's army, burst into bitter weeping since I remembered places that no longer exist and battles nobody remembers. We checked in the SS library in Berlin, and in forgotten books we confirmed every single detail. In my youth I didn't know a thing about the man I described. Was it because of the hypnotic pleasure of that charming woman (who was later slaughtered brutally by barbarians of the French Underground), was it because of that that somebody had to admire me? If I deserve appreciation it's because of my love of beauty and because of my service to the Reich. And Ebenezer was a minor prophet of ideas that others expressed. It was the Duke of Wellington who said that great nations aren't capable of appreciating small wars. The opposite is also true ... their memory is also their curse, Ebenezer captured knowledge, but his hands, his hands knew something else!
I'd come to Ebenezer's chamber and sit there. That life I had left was not the life I aspired to. He was afraid, he knew that unlike Weiss, I was a real enemy. But I was captivated by his creation. With thin knives he'd slice strips of veneer, put them together, twine them into one another, carve birds or portraits, spread lacquer whose secret ingredients and composition were known "in his hands." On the first nights I'd flog him but he never mentioned that to me, he made the kind of frames you don't see anymore, built grandfather clocks, more beautiful than anything I've ever seen in my life. A small kerosene stove would burn there and after a while I came every day, I brought a jug of coffee and by necessity we even drank together, he and I, I couldn't not come. Something enchanted me; I hated him but I couldn't take my eyes off his work.
I didn't like only the above-mentioned works, like Weiss, but also and mainly the act itself. That man knew wood in its distress.
I loved his hands, his fingers hypnotized by the big German magnet hanging over the altars of Wotan. I could be only me. The things I said in the courthouse in Nuremberg were only partial. When I was reading my words from the written text the bored Russian officer's snoring was clearly heard. Fortunately, I didn't have to pay attention to what I was saying then. One day, when Ebenezer was mixing lacquer, he turned pale and started talking. His words were a kind of recitation. I heard in them a distant, familiar, Jewish melody. He spoke without excitement. His hands were then shaping an eagle on a frame that looked both very ancient and new. He spoke and I wrote. Why did I write? Today I can no longer understand. Maybe it was an internal compulsion to know what caused the sordid creation to be noble in his hands. He spoke about the contracts won by some Neumark and Berl Shmuel in a contract of leasing salt and delivering it to merchants and Jewish suppliers named Simon Isaac Rosen, Isaac Shonberg, Jacob Lederman, and Michael Ettinger, and they got rich. When the Polish bank borrowed the sum of forty-two million zlotys in eighteen twenty-nine, the loan was financed by the commercial house of S. A. Frankel and the Berlin bankers connected with him in business contracts and even contacts with noble families ... in eighteen thirty-five Jacob Epstein and Samuel Frankel were granted a loan of a million rubles ...
Germanwriter stopped reading. His hands shook when he put the pages down on the table. Ebenezer looked at him. Renate shuts her eyes and stretches in her chair. My wife looks at the sea starting to turn blue in a pale and distinguished dawn. Fanya R. serves us coffee. We drink without a word.
Ebenezer said: And I recited those things?
The writer was silent, sipped the coffee and smiled.
Apparently yes, said Ebenezer, and also looked to the sea.
You were sleeping among the dying, said the German, you don't remember, you thought even Palestine was already conquered. That the whole world was German, that somebody had to preserve the knowledge. Geniuses were dying next to you, you said. Homer's poetry was Jewish poetry to you. But Kramer loved your boxes. I can understand. That's an astounding table, he said, and pointed to the table. And it was indeed astoundingly beautiful.
Germanwriter is now drinking Israeli Elite instant coffee, stirs in a spoonful of sugar and a little milk and is seeing a Land of Israel sunrise, like the one Ebenezer fled from to the barbed-wire fences, to Kramer. Renate says: I want to hear more and then not to hear any more ever again, and he, Germanwriter, smiles: To sit with Ebenezer, he says, and with Henkin, to read what Kramer wrote ...
He was a pig and still is a pig, said Ebenezer shutting his eyes as if he were trying to remember. No anger was heard in his voice.
You mean what my husband wrote, said Renate with a smile, and reached out her hand and embraced my wife's hand, which moved to her. Ebenezer smiled again, tried to understand. Fanya R. gave Ebenezer a few pills, which he swallowed quickly and then drank a glass of water; you don't sound angry, I said with my characteristic foolishness.
My wife peeped at me, was silent a moment, became serious, and said: Anger and hatred are too narrow to include, Henkin. No response is possible. Impossible to investigate hatred or love, that you'll never understand. So your German invented a camp commander for himself.
I think he was! says Ebenezer.
Now he remembers, says Renate.
The German didn't respond. He was waiting for that, acted as if he were expecting all those words. My wife said: Can I hate those who killed Menahem? I'm too small to hate them, or to understand, or to love, or to forgive.
Time moved slowly. The light was already full when the writer put his glasses on again and went on reading. Ebenezer curled up in a corner and looked like a toy bear. On his face an old, refined, unnecessary pain was crushed.
... The amazing thing was that Ebenezer, who carved and recited, knew practically nothing himself. Once I made an interesting experiment. I said to Ebenezer: You told me about Goethe's poem "Peace above All the Mountaintops," and Ebenezer stared at me a moment and went on working. I said to him: You told me that the big beautiful tree where Goethe wrote that wonderful poem is in Hess
en and around it you said a concentration camp was built. I said to Ebenezer: You're the one who said that every burgermeister felt a need to have some little camp of his own and the burgermeister of Hessen wanted a camp but didn't give up the tree. People were dying there but the ancient beautiful tree wasn't cut down. He looked at me and muttered something. I looked at him and then he said: Right, I said it. I laughed because he hadn't told me those words, I said. But he didn't remember what he had recited and so he thought those words had also been said by him. I tried to think about that wonderful tree, about that mighty spiritual strength endowed by that race that doesn't cut down an ancient tree where an admired poet sat and wrote the pinnacle of his lyric poems but neither does it give up a small concentration camp, maybe not an especially important one, around it. He was silent, what can I learn about his strange nature?
