by Yoram Kaniuk
We went into the house. The heavy curtains preserved the night chill and for the first time in years we got into one bed together, dressed, but hugging, still silent. She kissed me softly and fell asleep. I wept but she didn't see. We woke up in the afternoon. We were hungry; we felt like two kids. We ate something Hasha Masha warmed up and we fell asleep again. This time we took off our clothes. We hugged, if we had been young we would have given birth to a son. The son would die afterward. But we were too old to give birth. It was beautiful to return to my wife's dark and fascinating openings. She hugged me and dug her fingernails into me. I thought to myself, She's become a cat, the mother of my dead son. We opened the windows and Hasha Masha made good coffee. A knock was heard on the door. I opened it and in the door stood Germanwriter and his wife. He was holding a big bouquet of flowers. We drank coffee, we looked at Ebenezer's house. The German said: Now he'll pretend to be sleeping. And indeed the windows were shut.
We got into the car and drove off. The road to Jerusalem was exciting as always. The German looked at the trees and the mountains and after the ardor of talking the night before the words seemed to have died out and were no longer stammered. Renate told how her son once took his sock, wiped his nose, and then put the sock back on. She laughed. Hasha Masha also laughed. The writer was tired and pensive. When we arrived, he said suddenly: What a beautiful place. We parked the car and walked on the path toward the cemetery. The light was savage but the trees soothed it. Their thick crests covered us. The path was full of dry and wet pine needles, the graves were lined up like a military parade. We stopped at Menahem's tombstone. His name was engraved in stone and so was his army number. I wanted to say something. And all I could say was, Here, next to Menahem, Yashka is buried. Yashka fell in one of the two battles in which Menahem was killed. Nothing is known about him except his name, he came to Cyprus in a ship of illegal immigrants, from Cyprus he came to Haifa and from there he went to the last battle he took part in. They weren't even sure of his name.
Meanwhile night fell. We stood there a long time. The moonlight that now beamed tried to save the horrifying sight of the dead lined up under the hewn stones. It all looked like a cheap stage set for something with no name, the pain, for some reason, maybe because of the passing night, was also fuller and more divided, desolate, and so I had nothing to say. I looked at my new friends, they guessed me correctly, I knew that from their faces. On the way back, the writer said: Who remains there, you or him?
I didn't answer, I thought. And then I said: Funny that Ebenezer thinks you wrote the journal. He didn't answer.
We saw each other twice more before they left. We sat a long night in Ebenezer's house and he told us, as in a dream, about Secret Charity and his mother Rebecca. Some things I knew from my investigation of him and some the German knew. We smiled at one another like two conspirators. Then the Germans left and we went to the airport with them. I had never been there before: the noise, the turmoil, the giant planes, all that was new to me.
Hasha Masha and I went back to playing World War II games. I corrected the old map. Jordana came and went, Noga came sometimes. In the game of old battles we came to the Normandy landing. Now I used more perfect flags, with pins with round colored heads. I bought a television set and I started cooking. It's hard for me to understand how a strict and harsh teacher like me turned into a cook. I love the smell of cooking and that activity whose purpose you see immediately. Ebenezer gave me two carved birds. I bought flowerpots and planted cactuses and the garden is growing beautiful. Hasha Masha found some soothing that allows us to go on living, she even started playing the old piano I bought her. She plays Russian and Israeli folk songs and a lot of Chopin, Brahms, Mendelssohn, and Schumann. There's so much romanticism still in those old bones. At night after we hug we dream of Menahem. Each of us with his or her own dream. But we're together now and only the dreams are apart and come together again. A month later, our committee received a big contribution from Germany to plant a forest in the name of the fallen of Brigade G. I was chosen to speak on behalf of the bereaved parents. At night Hasha Masha told me: I hate sacrifices to the dead, but you spoke well, Obadiah. I thought about Boaz, about his father who calls him Samuel, about his grandmother Rebecca in the settlement, near what was once Marar, near the vineyards, near the almond trees. I thought: When will the German and I be able to write together the book about the Last Jew? Or perhaps that will be a book about ourselves?
I didn't know.
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Samuel Lipker of the Sonderkommando. What do you mean some gravedigger of the dead. Eitdatius was Bishop in Shaybes. He wrote the continuation of the memoirs of the world from the year three hundred seventy-eight AD to four hundred sixty-eight. He continued the tradition of Jerome and Eusebius of Caesarea. Aaron ben Amos, of the tribe of Levi, Aaron Aurora of Babylon, Aaron head of the court in Pombaditha. Aaron head of the court in Zelikow (the glory of Uziel) Aaron rabbi of the city of Knishin (author of "Jacob's Coat)" .. .
Aaron Rav ben Rabbi-not the author of "Oil of Myrrh" but the grandson of the author of "Name of the Great" .. .
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With a good bottle of orange soda to be thirsty. Henkin hadn't been seen for a few days now. The sea ranges from turbulent to billowy. When I came to the Land of Israel, Samuel appeared and called me father. I said to him Samuel, and he said, I'm Boaz. And he despised me. Maybe he wanted to cry. Me too, old mother Rebecca laughed a hissing wicked laugh. There was a rage in her because I returned after forty years and didn't explain to her why. Maybe the jackal who raped her in her youth laughed in her. Ever since, my dear Samuel, I've been waiting for you!
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Maybe that's the preface to the Last Jew by the director of the solar system who's based in Berlin, thinks that television antennas are arms asking heaven for salvation, sees wonderful people writing letters to one another and finds a small music box in abandoned houses where they listen to innocent melodies and say, Oh, what beautiful work. And the lord of the solar system sits and tries to restore the history for me, I want to get to Boaz who returned from the war at another time, hit a woman on the boulevard, coveted her phony gold ring, then invented Menahem for Henkin and killed him one more time, the director who writes a book like a shoplifter in a piano store; a deep sense of frustration. God had to create the world, but after He created it He changed His mind but by then it was too late. The gods of the solar system can indeed create or perhaps even have to, but they can't participate in running the world they created, since it's their night, in the morning they wake up from it and it's like a shadow. God created the world out of His waking. His point of view is different from the point of view of what are called human beings. He destroyed a world and created a mixture of chaos, storm clouds of gas from explosions in space, all those were the awakening of the world when his moon hit it. But for what are called human beings that was an event that was yet to happen. For God it had already happened.
In the beginning was the destruction. Hard to understand that in light of the ethical findings of God on the face of the earth. The time has come to tell the truth and to disappear. It bores me to see people who died a thousand years ago born and thinking their torments have meaning. For God, the aforementioned Boaz and Samuel and Ebenezer died long ago. The world no longer exists. Five hundred frightened travelers stuck for a few months now in a sophisticated spaceship on its way to the stars of Andromeda are freezing. When they reach their destination the ape will begin to resemble man and three billion years later Abraham the Hebrew will go to the land of Canaan. The words "ethics" and "forgiveness" remind us, slaves of the directorship of the system, of the words "ice cream" and "treason." The origin of God is from a green and yellow moss that grew in the depths of space. The Jews turned God into what never could have been; an imaginary and arid god. The real God knew about the grief brought on Him by His believers and the creators of His imaginary image. The grief of those Jews chilled his wrath at their stubbornness a bit,
and so He fell in love with the smell of Jewish grief; the grief was a real challenge and only thus did the tragicomic encounter between God and His chosen people take place.
The first Adam lived in two fictional versions. One was with Lilith and the other was with Eve. I'm an expert on the creations. I live in the solar system, sit here in Berlin to teach you wisdom. All of that is still to happen. And Cush will beget Nimrod, a mighty one in the earth. The Pathrusim begat the Casluhim, Arphaxad begat Salah, and Salah Eber, Serug begat Nahor, and Terah begat Abram. Abram will beget Isaac and Ishmael. Jacob the son of Isaac will beget Simeon, Levi, and Joseph, the sons of Judah will be Er and Onan, Tamar the daughter-in-law of Judah will give birth to Pharez with one stroke of strong and splendid passion. Ram will beget Amminadab, Amminadab Nahshon, Nahshon Salmon, Salmon will beget Boaz, Boaz Jesse, Jesse David. Generations will pass. And somebody will invent the wheel and will domesticate wheat and prophesy. Then Avrum ben ha-Rav Kriv will beget the Vulgar of Vilna who will beget Praise of Israel who will beget Unworthy in His Faith May He Live Long. Who saw the light and his eyes were extinguished from sight. Unworthy will beget Secret Charity. Secret Charity will meet the messiah Frank riding on the horse of a knight with a naked woman rabbi. Rebecca Secret Charity will be the daughter and wife of Secret Charity. Her grandchildren will be Joseph Rayna and Rebecca. Rebecca will give birth to Ebenezer. Ebenezer will beget Boaz. Joseph Rayna will beget another hundred sons and daughters. Samuel Lipker's betrayed father, the son of Joseph, will bequeath a diamond in his rectum to Samuel, Boaz will be the adopted son of his grandmother Rebecca and the stepbrother of his father.
Wanderings, hostility, and unimaginably vast expanses of grief filled the life of the Hebrews with yearning. From their place of birth they learned the price of foreignness. They were forced to invent a god and heaven even before they had ground to walk on. That is their ancient curse. Their roots long for the air, their treetops for the ground. Only people who understood heaven before they understood earth could imagine a universe and a creation as punishment or reward. In their flight to their savage pride, out of a passion for vengeance, hatred of domestication and lusts for uncompromising rebellions, they clung to one thing that had no foothold in any reality, to words. They had a language before they had houses, they had a grammar before they had a land, so they could create a future even when they didn't have a past. They created for themselves a creator god who judges the future according to what was. The desert was imprisoned in their soul, the wanderings were their homeland. God was more important than man. With the Hebrews, imagined glory turned into denial of life with unbridled lust for it. An inconceivable yearning was born in them for something even the very old people, who remembered everything that never happened (and invented in exchange a changing past) couldn't formulate explicitly. The times were wild. Tribes and tribes joined forces in ancestral homes. They captured cities and burned them. Desperate ones went to the land whose wine is good, whose women made merry in the vineyards, its villages happy, whose gods were small, nice, and cunning, and they brought with them a jealous and rough God. Thus they learned desire and curiosity instead of learning domestication and obedience. Bereft of annihilated temples, what the Hebrews measured all the time because of the words that couldn't defend their stubborn savagery, was invented time. Hence the torments were necessary. And thus God knew there was a people who created Him. Others had ceremonies that belonged to a place, not to yearnings, God saw the disgrace and laughed. That was the one and only time He laughed. Ever since then He has been indifferent and gloomy. He's still waiting for the beginning of time flowing from its end, there are no more people in the world, there's a black hole in the sky from the place where there was a world and He's waiting. Only five hundred passengers in the spaceship going to the stars of Andromeda remained. It won't get any place, its time is borrowed from a nonexistent clock. It doesn't fit divine time. In the invented past of the Hebrews there were fathers and poets who called themselves prophets. Inventors of sublime words for a people who captured words and were captured by them. The land the Hebrews longed for was hard, lordly, capricious, hating lords, incoercible, loving ephemeral lovers, hating wild lovers who sing her songs of beloveds. The Hebrews had to surrender to their most awful passions to know better than all others how lost wars are won and so they invented defeat as a sign of their life and survival as a code of life. The Hebrews always knew the grief of extremities, therefore they were so stubborn, and with their own hands they created for themselves the instruments that always brought destruction upon them. The wanderings begat Torah and intentions of purity, the laws-the punishment; the punishment was God. From the frying pan into the fire, like splendor. That is how we were born, always to be burned, they said, and the angels heard and wept. Only God remains indifferent. He meets the people on their way from their end to their beginning. How can He grieve at the torments of man if His first encounter with him is after all his descendants have already died? In that walking backward, He has no ethics and He has no sorrow and the anguish alien to Him is left only to them. Fate is not a law of nature. It's inanimate nature. There's a need for that splendid invented past. What they always knew about God was the distance of time they invented and it is the opposite of the imaginary but imperative divine time between their unnecessary universe and the realm of their impossible yearnings. To belong to a place that doesn't belong to you. To serve an indifferent God out of a disappointed passion for His love, I can understand that here in Berlin better than any other place. This is their great contribution to current events. They brought God to armed revolt against the laws of the Milky Way, in their extinction the Hebrews were kings of a proud and invented past, in their flight to the past they laid the foundations of their mass grave.
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Ebenezer was born five months after Rebecca Schneerson came to the Land of Israel. He didn't know who his father was. Rebecca Schneerson married Nehemiah Schneerson a year and a month prior to that. Before that her name was Rebecca Sorka.
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When Rebecca Sorka, who came to the Land of Israel as Rebecca Schneerson, was born, the sun refused to shine. A Hasid who fled from a city of which nothing remains but a few traces, and who was padded with a blanket of feathers flying in the wind, then sat in a cellar and shouted. Rebecca Sorka was born but she refused to open her eyes. They shook her hard and she started breathing and when she opened her eyes she saw her mother. Her mother looked at her and was scared: on her daughter's lips was such strong contempt she was afraid to raise her to her breast to suckle her. The baby started flowing toward her mother's breast and caught it in her hands, she was strong enough to grab the breast and seek the nipple. Her face was full and more pale than red and a lovely down covered her head. As she suckled her, Rebecca's mother felt, maybe because of the darkness in the room, that the baby refused to suck, that all she wanted was to hold the breast. She was even more frightened, and waited for the sun, but the sun didn't shine that day. The baby fell asleep with her mouth stuck to her mother's breast. She didn't bite it and the midwife touched her forehead and her sweat was cold. Outside, Jews gathered who had stayed in the synagogue and were waiting to return to their destroyed city, and shouted, What a city with no sun! And in the yards when deaf Yossel's rooster crowed, Yossel went to the woods to search for the sun and bring its light, at that time the Hasid who shouted in the cellar died and Rebecca Sorka chirped and a drop of blood appeared on her upper lip. Furious peasants lighted a big fire at the synagogue to appease the cross, and when the fire started spreading, the baby smiled as her eyes stared at the flames capering on the windowpane. That night deaf Yossel slaughtered his rooster and when the fire was finally extinguished the rooster was found safe and sound under the embers of the bonfire the furious peasants had set. An old woman who claimed she remembered the children of Israel wandering from the Promised Land and saw the Temple in its splendor dreamed that from the belly of Leah Sorka came a witch. But Rebecca was too fragile and
delicate, according to her father, for them to bring three rabbis to take the demon out of her. A Hasid stood outside at the gate and shouted: Damned reincarnation, damned reincarnation, but at that time everybody was concerned with the rooster that emerged whole from the fire and they forgot Rebecca. Rebecca's father, who had already dreamed of expanding his business outside the district, said: Over my dead body will they bring rabbis to talk about the newborn baby. And Rebecca's mother, who nodded to her husband in compassionate silence, prayed with restrained devotion disturbed only by the sound of the crickets. The crickets that shouldn't have been in the house that day chirped incessantly, and in the morning, when the sun Yossel had sought in the forest decided to return to the city, two scholars brought up the body of the Hasid from the cellar, his face was wrenched in a contortion and under his eyes three holes were seen clearly. The midwife claimed he was crucified. Many thought the holes were such strong pleas that they broke through and erupted and brought upon him the tormented death that bears a hint. After the Hasid was taken out of the cellar, the midwife got up and fled the house.
That night, the tombstone of Rebecca the daughter and wife of Secret Charity cracked, the Rebecca who was the mother of the grandmother of Rebecca Sorka who would come to the Land of Israel on the first day of the twentieth century and be called Rebecca Schneerson. Deaf Yossel, who went to the cemetery with his hands stained with the blood of the rooster he had slaughtered right after they found him safe and sound from the fire, saw the tombstone of Rebecca Secret Charity bending over and straightening up again.
