by Yoram Kaniuk
Samuel understood that by nine in the morning when Frieda started looking for linens to make white flags. Ebenezer is slower. An enlightened camp, Samuel Lipker says to Wood, an enlightened camp with electricity, water, and a French chef.
Night falls. Samuel falls asleep. He earned enough on the first evening of life. In the morning a new sun breaks forth. Somebody took pity on the Germans digging and filling gigantic graves and gave them food. They swallow hungrily. Kramer sits without moving in the place where he sat yesterday. Maybe he didn't shut his eyes either. Weiss is transferred to the improvised interrogation room. Kramer says contemptuously: Now he'll sing them oratorios, but his voice is hoarse. Ebenezer approaches Kramer, touches him. Kramer looks at his Jew. A long meaningless look. They no longer have anything to say to one another. A whole day, the one and only day in their lives, each looked at the other. Kramer doesn't want to smile. Cold, hunger, and obstinacy have done their work. He waits for the secret orders.
Avenues in light Ebenezer sees. Near him they're still digging. He thinks: When did I meet Samuel Lipker, when did I leave Palestine, is it still there, what happened to the beautiful bougainvillea, did I ever really have bougainvillea? Maybe there really is a horizon near the church I saw yesterday for the first time. For three years I didn't hear its bells. What do I remember? I've got to learn my life.
Then Ebenezer leaves the Red Cross hut. Somebody had already managed to draw a Star of David on the hut. Kramer is still sitting pensively. A woman is standing over him and yelling: Say where they killed my children. Where did they kill them, there were three, Haimke, Ruha, and Shmil, where did they kill them? Not far from here is a fine camp of officers, like a pastoral painting. It was here all the time, says Ebenezer, and Ebenezer didn't know. They talk about distributing ration cards, updating, registering, spraying, about food portions and medicine. Captain Wood is rather busy today. The blocks have almost all been destroyed. Old Jews set up a synagogue in a tent. Look for a Torah scroll in the garbage. At night a psychiatrist in a sailor's cap arrives. A woman stands above him and looks at him. She's amazed at how he can sleep in that noise. Look how he sleeps, he hasn't got dreams! And Captain Wood says: He'll understand, he at least has to understand, got to find a way to separate between total disbelief and reality, between life in London after the month of the blitz we came out and found the fog, the street, that's what saved us, they've got to start finding something and understanding. Ebenezer doesn't understand that the church exists! What are the Germans burying, asks the Red Cross man, can I really examine every body? And how many bodies are here? Ebenezer shuts his eyes and says: Abramovitch five, Avigovitch three, Anishevitch two, Baborovsky three, Bennoam two, Bronovitch ... What is he doing? asks Captain Wood and Samuel says: He's counting for you how many there were here in the three years so you can examine the corpses from the list. There's no need, yells Captain Wood, suddenly flushed, as if the number of dead is meant to indict him, and he stops Ebenezer, who opens his eyes. He looks and sees that the numbers he was about to deliver are registered with surprising clarity on Kramer's face. Ebenezer tries to maintain the barrier, he looks at the sky, a small plane lands not far from here, he tries to find the sky as Captain Wood once found a street and fog. Grass, cows grazing not far away, when did we see cows? He doesn't remember and isn't sure he really didn't see. Samuel is making deals with soldiers, selling souvenirs, already inventing himself the lampshade made from his parents, and selling it to them, and they weep quite a bit hearing Samuel Lipker's story. By the end of the day, the story was practiced and recited properly, without mistakes, from now on, he'll easily find the place where the soldiers' tears of remorse flow and will make a deal that's not bad. He understands that there's money in tear ducts. Kramer has now turned into a landmark. Two steps from Kramer, on the right, there's a psychiatrist who has gotten up and is trying to understand, to help. Let him hold white underpants, says somebody. Why are they making a picnic of all this? says Captain Wood in a moment of perplexity. The barbed wire fence is already starting to totter, strewn with dead dogs who fled and were electrocuted. People are washing, scared of the light. A little girl asks a soldier for candy and next to her stands a table full of candy. Hard to understand, thinks Ebenezer, but possible to peep, Fraulein Klopfer sits tied up next to Kramer, lowers her eyes, and Samuel says to Captain Wood: When they threw babies into the fire she took a baby, tossed it up and aimed it so it would fall straight down, like a rock into water. You'd be amazed how much a year-old baby wants to live and how he leaps and shrieks. Look at her! That's how you'll find the street and the fog. A sunbeam prances on the Germans digging. A blond boy with blue-gray eyes stands on the edge of the pit and hands his father a sandwich. His face is transparent, so fair. The father chews hungrily and mutters something, and the little girl at the table, to the right of Kramer, swallows some chocolate and her face is smeared, and an American soldier takes a picture of a little girl brown with chocolate next to the DDT showers. Clouds float in the sky. How do you guess, Fraulein Klopfer, thinks Captain Wood. She lifts her face and looks at the dim glow of the horizon, valiant Germans are digging pits and filling them with the dead, that destroyed harmony shatters in her a vital force that Kramer is trying to suck out of the air as if he were waiting for dispatches, the Fuhrer won't forsake us, he says confidently. Does Captain Wood understand the meaning that I'm not the Last Jew, that a disaster happened and Samuel doesn't know who the disaster happened to? This is how a very powerful system is devised, says the psychiatrist.
Who will arrange the battle Ebenezer is now shaping in his memory, his chronicles, thinks the psychiatrist sitting with Ebenezer in a special tent set up for him.
I knew I'd be the last to give up!
How did you think about that?
I didn't think. It came by itself.
And in the previous camp?
There I didn't think, and don't remember exactly.
Will you hypnotize yourself to remember?
Samuel can help me.
Samuel, come help him.
Samuel approaches, stands next to Ebenezer, says: Shut your eyes, set your watch back. Kramer stands up to come see the box you made for him and then ...
I came to Birkenau. For years I searched for Joseph Rayna. Here I was almost the first one. They built the hut after I was inside. Three years here is the climax!
And what did you do?
Don't remember ... at night they didn't shoot me, but they told me, at first there were no chambers here.
Gas?
Gas.
And what did they do?
They tried with a diesel motor and heavy oil, says Samuel, that took an hour to suffocate thirty people in a closed truck. Weiss came and saw my box.
Then you made boxes?
Yes, says Samuel, and that's how he remembered.
How?
He heard people murmuring. They were finished and were dead. They were hungry, stunned, groaned at night, talked, he started remembering, doesn't know how, he said: I'll be the last one who will guard everything they know.
Humiliated?
Maybe he didn't say humiliated, isn't humiliated too strong?
Perhaps. I wasn't there. You come from another world, Mr. Schneerson.
But he's here.
Yes, he's here, but look, he isn't anymore.
I don't know, if he was, he'll probably remain.
No, he isn't.
I didn't have the strength to remember the other things, so maybe I could not know how awful it is to live here.
To ignore?
Yes. And not to think. Just remember things I don't understand anyway.
There were geniuses here. Do you know what a mine of knowledge was lost here? Only a little of that he remembers.
Why?
Everything came according to a certain music, the words came one by one, incomprehensible but etched. You think I'll ever be free of that?
I don't know.
Let's say, I thought
about Wittgenstein's theory, there is such a man, isn't there?
Yes.
I thought about it, don't understand it, but every word of his I know. I remembered his words and I forgot what I did before.
Everything comes at the price of something, says Samuel.
Apparently, says the psychiatrist.
I'm a superficial man. I thought I'd hide and they'd come and then I'd tell them. I loved a woman. I left everything, but I don't remember now. I remember their words. Got to be freed first. I already remember Captain Wood and you, sir, a sign that I'm not the Last Jew. A sign that I'm also starting to remember things that are happening to me.
Then they passed through small cities, slipped between closed borders, and the money Samuel earned was enough to slip from place to place. Samuel said: The dumb psychiatrist thought you're a sorcerer and not a poor soul who drills from the words of others. In one city they met a woman who knew Ebenezer. During the war she had sewn uniforms for armies that had passed through there. He asked her to tell him what he had searched for there fifteen years before and she didn't want to remember. When they came to the destroyed street of the Jews they met some Jews who were standing and feeling the ruins in amazement. Samuel and Ebenezer stood on the side. They had no concrete memories here. Poles came out of a nearby house and started beating them. Samuel spat and Ebenezer looked on in astonishment. He thought: Kramer was right. Then he started talking with Samuel about Palestine. Didn't remember much. Remembered his mother, the settlement. Remembered dimly, he had to make an effort. Samuel didn't want to hear. What will I do in a savage land? There they won't throw stones at you for coming to feel destroyed stones, said Ebenezer. Everywhere there are pogroms, said Samuel, I'll teach you to hit them where it hurts. Why did you leave, asked Samuel, but Ebenezer didn't know anymore, something about Joseph Rayna ... I was ultimately an echo that picked up echoes, says Ebenezer, Captain Wood, who attended Eton and Oxford, doesn't hold a stick in his hand, doesn't understand, I'm with Samuel, where to?
Echoes touch echoes, pain touches pain. What a gigantic sky like a canopy of death.
My dear Goebbelheydrichhimmel, that's all for now. Second draft. The words aren't yet stuck together precisely. Imagine writing achtung today when the meaning of the word in the dictionary is: term of respect!
I remember back then, in Denmark, when I sent you my first stories. Those were different times. We tried to understand what had happened to us, you were also steeped in dread then and tried to investigate. I wrote you the story about myself, a soldier who created contact with the enemy and was sent back in shame from the occupied land to command children shooting at low-flying planes. You wondered then, you were even afraid that what I did in Denmark would disturb the publication of my book. Then I came back and you supported me, I'm grateful, if not for your help, who knows where I'd be today? You want Germany without remorse because in the end remorse doesn't help. An artist, a boy, a magician, not a Jew ... a Jew in a story sounds too simple, to write about Jews means writing not only about Wasserman, Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Buber, and Einstein-we're allowed to talk about them, in articles and lecturesbut also about moneylenders, wretched street musicians, a schmaltzy wedding orchestra, knitted skullcaps, ritual fringes, and you think, Ah, literary judenrein is after all a certain enlightenment. Symbols? Yes: fish, midget, architect, only not Mr. Cohen who lived in Cologne and has been burned on our bonfires for one thousand five hundred years, looks like a caricature, sells kosher salami.
Samuel Lipker now blows up Arab villages and so we can erase him from literature, what do I have to do with him, you ask, what do I have to do with the story of Ebenezer? Who's interested in Ebenezer? I understand, for you he's superfluous, for me he's hard, because with Ebenezer I'll be a stranger in the literature and the cinema where I'm one of the central pillars. And I'm not talking about the literature and cinema that are judenrein! All of us knew some Samuel Lipker, didn't we, in school, on the street, we had a common biography, and where are they? Ebenezer didn't know he couldn't enter great German literature. Human tatters here and there, and nothing else. I can invite my translators from all over the world to a splendid conference, lecture to them, and maybe a translator will even come from Israel, they'll all sit, and I've got money to do that, don't I, and I'll explain the subtleties to them, but none of them will be bold enough to ask me where in my fiction is Hans who once lived in the house where we're meeting. He's just some Ebenezer, some carpenter. See how much more interesting Kramer is than Ebenezer? Why do we need Ebenezer in Kramer's story?
Kramer grits his teeth when the Jews are involved in a revolt against themselves and us, he knows how to keep his mouth shut and not say what he once said in awful words, and he's right, dammit, they've got no right to blow up quiet villages, but maybe I have no right to tell them that. I should investigate Kramer, and not only against the background of Wilhelmstrasse, but also against the background of Walter Benjamin, or his family who maybe played in the women's orchestra of Auschwitz. How enlightened and beautiful we are today. They gave us European manure, six million graves, and we gave them an extension. Now we're right again and again they're not. Act nice, we tell them, and then we'll talk to you. You destroyed the Arab village of Marar, so why are you still talking! We buy eternity with sublime conscientiousness, with measured words, without mentioning names. And Lipker sells and buys cigarettes. Ebenezer sells knowledge in nightclubs. Not nice. A literary Jew is Freud, not Lipker! What you want is a nice story about a carter's ass. He pees and sees through the prism of urine the fisherman and the farmer's wife kneeling. You want indifferent, estranged words, mother died on Sunday, was born on Posen Street. You want a thin literature in a world where literature has nothing more to say. But look, we're successful, they read us. Maybe you're right and I'm not, but your rightness is starting not to interest me, my friend, Ebenezer's rightness is more perverse, incomprehensible, but more important to me.
Meanwhile until I can write what you and my friends will sneer at, I will write my novella, I'll finish it, I promised and I'll keep my promise. Afterward, we'll sit, Henkin and I, and together we'll write a book, from both sides of the absurd, from both sides of death. I'll describe everything, every single detail, there'll be a pissing snake there, and Hitler who didn't die, and Jews who aren't literary, maybe even without qualities, love is a banal issue, like hate, like death.
That's it so far, because soon I'll start being banal again. The words don't scare me anymore. With a bitter sneer I'll write the prologue to what you call an epilogue. I'll write my lament, along with Henkin, an old investigator who lost a son in the war with the Arabs, and you'll have to publish a book that won't gain you anything, that critics will desecrate and not celebrate, that people won't read and won't buy.
Tape / -
Joseph Rayna died, appropriately, on his birthday. Sixty-two years old he was at his death. He stood at a wall, his hands raised, his body blighted, bereft of the spirit of life even before he would die. Until his final days he had walked around erect with a crooked indulgent smile on his lips, as if everything happening before his eyes was known to him long before. Maybe it was the smile of schadenfreude. Beautiful was Joseph, as old angels are when a tired and bored God stopped taking an interest in sugary young men. A man in whose arms a Hebrew queen had died, whose father was hanged, and for whom a hundred women got pregnant. I searched for him, I knew he hadn't gone to America, but I didn't find him. His hollow songs Joseph had burned in his mind long before his death. Samuel Lipker was born from an almost absurd coupling between Joseph and a lustful woman who acted heroines she loved in a locked room all her life. Samuel's father didn't know that Samuel wasn't his son. He left Samuel a diamond in his body. He and his wife were too decent to accept the truth and admit it, so they learned how to live alongside it, to console themselves with the silence between them. They refused to admit what deviated in them.
Tape / -
When Samuel's mother went to the st
ore to buy bread and flowers, she'd look at the trees or the display window as if those too were paintings by some genius artist. Her devotion to the beauty and glory of art was so great that she was afraid to deal with them in public. So as not to shame what she secretly called: that muse!
