by Yoram Kaniuk
And then the Captain saw the row of Ebenezer's birds coated with black lacquer. The birds stood on the cabinet, and when the Captain looked at them they looked so wonderful he almost forgot why he had come to that house. He stood stooped over, conspicuous by the sudden change in him, and the birds looked as if they were trying to fly. Only later on, when he had sipped the fine wine Rebecca had gotten from the manager of the winepress with every shipment of wine grapes, only then, perhaps as a response to the bliss that flooded him at the sight of the birds and Rebecca's beauty, only then did he start talking about the life and bliss possible for strangers as for relatives, and after all, he said to her: Every husband and wife were once strangers to one another, and she said: And that's how they remain, Captain, and he tried not to hear what she said, expressed his admiration of the birds, and Rebecca said: Those rare birds are carved by my Mongoloid son. And Ebenezer, who was sitting in a corner cracking sunflower seeds, said: She means me, sir, and the Captain said: It's impossible to carve birds wooden and metaphysical at the same time without a Jewish brain! And Rebecca said: But as far as I can tell, you're not a Jew, Captain, and he said: I am what I am, according to a preformed model, made to change with circumstances, and Goldenberg is indeed a Swiss name, but my father, who wasn't Swiss, could also have been called Goldenberg. She didn't understand exactly what he meant, but she didn't think it was important enough to rack her brains over. He said to her: There is no reality, honorable Mrs. Schneerson, there are only distant memories, real hatred, and unrequited love. Rebecca asked: Doesn't unrequited love have to start at some requited point? and he thought she was joking, but for some reason she enjoyed the conversation, and he said: No, unrequited love is the beginning situation of a dream that realizes reality. There's a certain opposition here, he added, but in time everything becomes clear. I'm cursed by everybody, Jews, Arabs, English, Christians, Shiites, Sunnis, Alawis, and that's how I can defend myself. If I had one friend I was fond of, or one nation I could cling to without prior conditions, and respect, maybe I would lose the right of criticism and shorten my honor and my life. Did you notice, dear lady, that I said "honor" before "life"? If I'm not honored, I live in a cloud of fake and unnecessary honor. Only somebody who has his own friend or group is truly in danger, so I'm safer than everybody and tremble with love that is not yet realized as unrequited from the start and so is full of opportunity never to be realized, but that love is very close, and I am more protected than endangered as many thought.
The Captain excitedly felt the birds. He claimed they were wonderful creations, maybe the most wonderful he had seen since the bronze, stone, and wood statues he had seen in the museum in Cairo, and suddenly he spoke with no real connection to the birds, said that Arab children had to be taught how to paint the eyes of a dead fish to look as if it had just been caught. He even tried to learn from Ebenezer the secret of the lacquers and the sort of metaphysical geometry, as he put it, of his works. Ebenezer spoke slowly and Rebecca gazed vacantly at the ceiling. He said: I mix lacquers and carpenters' glue, solutions, I invented a spray, resin, I know how to wound trees without hurting them, know flowers with colorful pollen, and I hear the wood by its weeping and laughing, carve faces and birds, sometimes I recognize the faces and sometimes not. Rebecca said her son wasn't exactly a great scholar and had only gone as far as sixth grade in the settlement school whose level of education was as high as its ethics. And if his father were alive, he would have taught him something. Only after the Captain had gallantly proposed marriage and an impressive dowry and had been turned down with a politeness that really wasn't characteristic of Rebecca did he clutch his sword to his thigh again and hear Rebecca talk about what she wanted to talk with him when she saw him following her in the street. She talked about the complicated network of canals to transport the water of the Jordan from its sources straight to the Negev and the south. That way, she said, we can buy miserable desert land for pennies and then, secretly, transport water and work the land and establish the agriculture my husband dreamed of but I realized, and we'll be rich as the Jews in America. The Captain was excited to hear the words, in his mind's eye he already saw the big canal, the dams, the dike, and the twisting, state-of-the-art pipe. Soon after, he promised Rebecca to convey her ideas to the authorities, who sounded like his cousins when he mentioned them, he recited to her the book of Psalms from beginning to end and from end to beginning and Ebenezer fell asleep in his chair even when two members of the settlement whistled to him in the window to come with them to beat up an Arab who stole Horowitz's mare.
The Captain stood in the middle of the room Rebecca had built in memory of Nehemiah and recited. A murmur that reminded her of Nehemiah's look when he spoke about the Land of Israel now rose in her ears. Ebenezer woke up, listened a moment, and then fixed in himself some memory of reciting words that were the same as a very certain music and he tried to think of the birds flying in his mind and he had to cage them in wood, for he had never invented a bird but caged the birds of his mind in the wood he carved, and he let the wood follow the prepared shapes and Rebecca saw Ebenezer open his eyes wide and shut them again and she pondered the melody sunk deep in her heart and didn't pay any heed to it, and some tune that played with Nehemiah's old excitement and her weeping on his last day, those were yearnings that turned into a melody more ancient than those yearned for and talked about and observed, something ancient that rose in her and overcame her, and she pondered the history of her family, pondered Rebecca Secret Charity, and said: It wasn't in vain that those awful people lived and dreamed and shouted, and she thought about the profound and hidden connection there seemed to be between swindlers like her and the Captain and God. Suddenly she understood that if she uttered aloud the chapters of Psalms, whose mysterious melancholy she always knew, but hadn't dwelt on, the chapters would turn into a force that would reach the farthest place she could imagine, and the touch would turn the impending death into something that could be directed. Her legs grew light her head was suddenly empty, light and flighty. And out of an anger that gnawed at her against Nehemiah she started forgiving him now of all times because he had managed to hurt her so perfectly, and she thought about her relation to herself, that is to the God of her fathers, the God played as a clown by her fellow farmers in the Land where there is no shade or corners, and night falls suddenly black and ruddy. Ebenezer panted. Poor orphan, she said to herself. The Captain's solidity was splendid, she had to admit that he was a noble man with no purpose or homeland and that the strip of light gleaming on him was both his geography and his biography. What worlds woven in the force of the words could start revolutions in the cosmic order, she thought, a thought foreign to her. And deep inside her, she could feel how she once again gathers corpses in the suitcase, writes "Deliverance" on the ceiling, her virginity cut off at the terrorist river, some threatening and frightening force caught in her words about the Land, building and with the word destroying, and she said to herself: There's a connection between circumlocution and circumcision, a Mount Nebo of words, words that bring rain in due season and not in due season. Rebecca knew that those Psalms or the melody heard from them have no connection with belief or nonbelief, just as her life with Nehemiah and her nonlife with Joseph Rayna had no connection with love or nonlove. And so she returned to the room where the Captain was still reciting. Her son dozing in his chair dreams of birds in shining lacquer and in her a barrier was now planted that would later be fixed, between her and her milieu, and a melody of the Book of Psalms that would be the meaning of her life. When the Captain finished reciting he sat down to drink wine and his face was pale from the effort, his nose looked red and his cheeks looked gray, but she applauded him, and at that moment, long before he was born, Boaz Schneerson was saved from the death lurking for him in the war.
Ebenezer then built his hut in the citrus grove near the water tower, not far from the hill of the Wondrous One and nobody knows anymore why it was called that. The hill overlooked the fields and the des
olation from the east to the distant mountains on the horizon, and a deaf girl who lived in the nearby settlement came one day and stayed there, sitting and watching for long hours as he built boxes or carved birds and she watched in silence. Ebenezer didn't miss his father, whose disgrace he had had to hear for years from his mother, he only yearned for Rebecca and she wasn't his. To herself she admitted that she had never managed to love Ebenezer more than she had managed not to love him, or to love his father. But those rare moments of affection for Nehemiah that increased after his death didn't touch her son. He didn't look like her, he didn't look like Joseph or Nehemiah. He didn't look like her father or like Nehemiah's mother, he didn't look like anybody she knew. Rebecca started reciting the book of Psalms a week after Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg erected his tent, which reminded her of the Wondrous One's splendid tent, and he started digging the rock of Hagar wife of Abram, which, according to his calculations, was buried there. He had ancient maps showing him ancient places long forgotten. That day in the citrus grove, Ebenezer carved his father's image on a wooden board that he planed and filed and covered with lacquer and the deaf girl wept. And then, for the first time in his life, Ebenezer knew the taste of love. The touch was nice. The deaf girl's face was twisted like a captured bird, but her voice wasn't heard and that scared him. When he lay in bed afterward and looked at the tin ceiling above his hut he felt exalted and didn't know why. His mother, who had started sitting in the big chair at the screened window with the book of Psalms in one hand and a flyswatter in the other and Ahbed and the laborers working the farm, imposed a considerable yoke on him too and he had to go out to plow and harvest, to take care of the chicken coop and the cow barn, and among the laborers who worked in the yard he met a Jew wearing a kippah who didn't believe in the resurrection of the world according to Marx and Engels like the other laborers in the other yards, prayed devotedly, and waited patiently for the messiah. He was a humble man and not unpleasant, who loved the deaf girl with a quiet and restrained love. When he'd see her coming back from the citrus grove with a light gleaming on her face, he was filled with longing and thought: If only I could grant her a soft and dreamy beauty like that. Ebenezer he privately loathed, he called him an idolater. Later on, Ebenezer explained to the deaf Starochka why he couldn't really love her and how much he yearned for somebody he didn't know who and she wanted to tell him something about her love but her inability to talk saved her from an absurd plea and she walked to the settlement, sat in the yard, and the Hasidic laborer brought her a glass of water, looked at her a long time until she grasped how strong his love was, took his hand, and kissed it. Then she started going to the synagogue and praying devotedly, smeared her crotch with red, and went to the wedding canopy with all the laborers standing around and calling out Mazal tov, Mazal tov.
His wife's silence, the laborer said later, was the grammar of messianism. He said that against Ebenezer's idolatry, but they didn't understand his words anymore than he himself understood the decree of his life and his marriage to a virgin whose wild shouts he saw in his mind's eye a thousand times when she came out of Ebenezer's hut. In those days, the Captain stopped digging for Hagar's rock and started seeking the stones of Jacob's Ladder in the mountain opposite and people who hadn't visited her house for years once again knocked on Rebecca's door and talked with her about agricultural matters on which she was an expert as she often said, reluctantly, and in the settlement rumors spread about her impending marriage.
The rumors were premature, but the Captain didn't despair and went on proposing marriage, money, travels to distant lands, and a pedigree from the eleventh century, and so when Rebecca brought up the idea of traveling south with him to find out whether those lands in the desert could be bought until her plans for the canals would be realized, he saw that as a sign whose plausibility nobody of course would understand, that the memorial to Dante Alighieri would be erected and on the other hand his desired marriage to Rebecca was already sealed. Ebenezer was left to manage the farm, the Hasidic laborer went to the Hasid village in the south, and was replaced by another laborer who wasn't a Hasid, but didn't want to foment revolution against the capitalists, Ahbed the son had long ago replaced his father who was about to die and milked the cows and the Captain and Rebecca rode in a carriage hitched to a pair of horses to the lands of Ruhama.
It was a fragrant spring day after a stormy sudden rain and flowers appeared blooming in places that were always arid. They came to a squashed hill where she had stopped on her journey with Nehemiah on their last trip. Everything was desolate and hills and hallucinatory yellow expanses stretched to the horizon. Rebecca was furious at Nehemiah that she had to travel to these distant places instead of him, with a Mexican stuffed animal who could be set as a scarecrow against planes, and then an Arab came to them who popped up from the ground wearing a suit and behind himbetween the rows of prickly pear-walked some short Bedouins.
The Arab greeted them and Rebecca gave the customary reply and then the Arab sat down and she and the Captain immediately sat too, and the Bedouins sat not far from them, and the Arab fiddled with some amber beads in his hands, and asked: So you're suddenly here and why are you suddenly here, maybe you've got family here? Rebecca smiled and said: My family is three clods from the right and the Arab laughed and the Bedouins laughed too and the Captain, who didn't understand Arabic, or pretended not to understand, tried not to laugh and looked at the horizon, something Rebecca wanted him very much to do, because the horizon was in the west and there was Gaza City, and she said: I'm just touring for no good reason, empty and wonderful, why not, and the Arab, whose misbakha in his hand began moving nervously, said: For no good reason? By my eyes, people don't come here for no good reason with a chariot and generals. Later on, Rebecca explained to the Captain that since the truth is not accepted literally in the Land of Israel, the Arab understood that the distinguished lady in the chariot and the general who surely commanded big armies came here to sniff land and buy it for some secret army that would destroy the holy places of Islam, which, as everybody knows, are south of here, about twenty days away. And since he knew she was a Jew, he also knew the exorbitant price. She waited. The Arab muttered something to himself and went off and half an hour later he returned with two more Arabs. The Bedouins were ordered to gather branches and twigs for a bonfire. They made sweet black tea; Rebecca and the Captain drank it very slowly with the Bedouins, who smacked their lips to impart to the scene the honor due it. The two men who came with the Arab were even more eminent than he was, dressed more splendidly, even though a smell of sheep dung and fragrant wormwood rose from them. They whispered together, their faces darkened and they whispered together again and excitedly offered Rebecca a hundred English pounds if she'd get out of there. She said: With all my heart, I thank you for your generous offer and appreciate your magnanimity and your ignorance of Arabic numerals, which you gave to the world along with the alcohol you don't even drink, one hundred English pounds is a hole in the penny of the hair of my late grandmother who is buried so far from here that I don't remember her name anymore and so I am not left without a mother to thank for your generosity and with the necessary modesty of a woman with a thousand soldiers at her disposal not far from here, to tell you to leave me and my friend the field marshal alone before the armies come who are now on sixty-six English warships at the shore of Gaza and peace on Ishmael and on the holes of all the pennies. Not only did they listen to her tensely, but the Captain was also listening. He thought he should smile, but he understood from her trembling and her tension that he better not take his eyes off the point he was staring at.
