by Yoram Kaniuk
He gently twisted the heel, stared at it long and hard, and felt so close to the heel, loved the skin, the way the heel coiled into the foot, looked at Dana, and said: I think I've been waiting for you for years, but I'm not good with words and I have to go back to carving, wait. She waited a whole day. Her eyes were veiled with a grief that may have always been in her and turned into tense expectation. At night they lay down beside each other on the mattress of leaves outside and the sky hung above them, peeping between branches, the sky was starry and black. Three days and three nights they stayed there. When he looked at her she felt that all the smells she had caged in bottles were now one person she wanted to pity and take care of his strong hands that were gently creating a bird or a portrait, out of a joyous intoxication, a dark sadness, and a disguised heaviness.
The two of them were no longer children. Ebenezer, who many years later will be the Last Jew in seedy nightclubs of Europe, was then an eccentric fellow of twenty-six and a deaf woman had once loved to touch him. Because he didn't know many words, he didn't clearly think love; he bit Dana's earlobes and thought "doves." She said to herself: Maybe that's not love, but that is what I was looking for. He thought: Got to give her a house, give her a child, and her own pepper tree. They laughed, something Ebenezer couldn't do without recalling his mother's angry face.
Dana didn't understand why she yearned for a person who wasn't exciting, who made her feel heavy. Years later, when Ebenezer would sit in a little city in Poland and think of Dana, he'd say to himself: Why didn't I tell her I loved her more than anybody in the world and never could I love anybody like that? But he recalled that when he was with her he didn't even know he loved her. All he knew was that he had to be with her.
The wedding was held right after the harvest. Most of the farmers dressed in white brought gifts. Rebecca, who sat in a house full of antique Louis XV furniture, looked at Dana as if she were seeing the greatest fraud of the century. What did she find in my son? She pitied Nehemiah, whose dreams of Abner ben-Ner and Yiftach begat a pensive and foolish man who touches a short, plump woman, smiles as if he were a mechanical doll. Beyond the fence of the settlement the house of Dana and Ebenezer was built. That was the first house outside the wall of the first settlers. Rebecca built the house because Ebenezer had to stay close to the farm; somebody has to protect what I established, she said, even if he does carve birds. The house she built for her son was handsome, abutted the vineyard with the ancient pool still in the middle, whose bottom was Crusader and whose turret was Mameluke.
Mr. Klomin, who came to the wedding furious and betrayed, was wearing a light-colored suit with a flower in his lapel. He was amazed at the sight of Rebecca Schneerson's elegant house and happy above all to meet the Captain in his official uniform. The two of them whispered together in Dana's new kitchen, among jars full of flowers smelling like jujubes, wormwood, mint, and citrus blossoms mixed with the smell of fresh paint, and after a long talk each hugged the other's shoulders, shook hands, and looked excited.
And on the day he parted from his daughter, Mr. Klomin increased his party by one hundred percent: it now had a leader and a single member.
The Captain was appointed deputy squadron leader responsible for organization and indicating avenues of financing, activities and political empowerment, preparing strategy and tactics, and in addition the Captain was to train leaders of the army of gladiators, lieutenants, and pashas that would be established someday when the old-new constitution would be shaped and the nation would recognize its three hundred Gideons, and then the Argentinean with American citizenship and the Swiss name, who belonged to the Greek Orthodox Church, was responsible for protocol, military, taxation, consolidation, building and general strategic forecasting.
Pleasant smells blew from the citrus groves and the fields. Dana's schoolmates came from the Galilee on horseback; they tapped each other on the shoulder and yelled. They danced bold and "awful" dances, as Rebecca put it, until the wee hours of the morning. The splendid kingdom is realized here by a carpenter and wild people shrieking, said Mr. Klomin sadly, and he gazed yearningly at the nobility of the Captain and Rebecca. He saw them as a symbol of his dream. Rebecca agreed to describe to him what she felt when she entered the lion's cage. Mr. Klomin looked at the Captain's padded visor, ostentatiously hated the roars of the wild Pioneers, saw his son-in-law standing on the side gazing, and said: They should have begat Rebecca and the Captain, and not vice versa.
The feast was made from the Captain's recipes and the farmers drank and sang and recalled Nehemiah and his beautiful words, and late at night, when the Pioneers were still singing around a bonfire, the aging farmers sat on the side and yearningly sang old songs they had once learned from Joseph Rayna and wept when they recalled those distant days, and said: Here we married off the first son of the settlement. After they left, Dana sat and looked at the sky. Ebenezer sat next to her. Rebecca thought of men who see the features and don't understand the essence. She thought of Joseph, of the Wondrous One, of the Captain, of Mr. Klomin, and then she thought a thought that was so strange to her she tried to get it out of her mind and couldn't. She thought: Maybe we nevertheless did something important here; maybe this settlement and that whole deed aren't as small as I thought, maybe there was something in Nehemiah's vision that hasn't entirely vanished and wasn't in vain? But then she saw in her mind's eye the great war that was coming and the Pioneers shooting at the enemy and the Arabs sharpening knives in Jaffa for all the future wars and she feared for Boaz, whose image she could already discover in her.
In the morning, two Arab women cleaned up the destruction and Rebecca looked at the new house and thought, What can those two fools do at night? and she wanted to laugh despite the scattered leftovers, empty wine bottles, and the flowers eagerly pulled up. In the room, the lamentations of the oldtimers still echoed. In the sunlight, it was hard for her to see last night's thoughts as real. And so she could almost forgive her son. In the house next door, the gramophone Mr. Zucker had recently bought started playing Beethoven's violin concerto. The speaker was aimed at Rebecca's house and she linked the music with the pleasant fields of morning, the dew, the almond grove in the distance, the mountains on the horizon, and again she saw the impending storm of war and started reciting Psalms to try to change something in the world, and if she had thought of that deed in real terms, she would probably have burst out laughing. Afterward Ebenezer and Dana went for a walk. Ebenezer sewed a handsome tent, they loaded the burden on one mule and Dana rode on a second mule and Ebenezer got off and picked flowers for Dana, who put them in a bag tied to the saddle, and thus they went up to the mountains and down to the valleys, crossed wadis and rivers and at night, they looked at the stars and felt an intense closeness, some longing for one another they had a name for and didn't know how to call it, and they'd lie like that, clinging desperately, breathing each other's breath, and Ebenezer wanted to say things, but didn't know how to say them, and his hands would knead her strongly and gently. He carved birds for her, built boxes for her, crowned her with portraits, and she lusted for him, touched him in surprising places, and they would laugh wildly, like hyenas, listening to the jackals wailing in the distances and answering them.
On the third evening, they came to the crossroads of the desert. Above rose a mountain and on was it the holy house of the Shiite priests. In the distance, dawn illuminated the mountains of Moab and a profound serenity reigned over everything. Birds began chirping, when they came to the top Dana didn't find flowers but thorns, thistles, and nettle flowers she was afraid to pick because they blossomed only one day a year. They were ordered to say Salaam aleikum ya ahl el-kubur, which means Greetings to you who dwell in the graves. And at the same time, Ebenezer began blessing with head bent: El-salaam aleikum ya ahl el-duniya, which means Greetings to you people of this world. And then the old man there told them that if they forgot those words their only son would die within three months, their house would be destroyed by fire, and their nam
e would be wiped off the face of the earth. Dana said: We don't have a son, and Ebenezer said: We will have a son and his name will be Boaz. Dana asked why Boaz, and Ebenezer said: Because he will be the grandson of Nehemiah. And when she asked what would happen if they had a daughter, he said: We won't have a daughter, we'll have a son.
From the moment he was born, Rebecca claimed that Boaz was her son, that she had held him in her womb as a pledge. Dana held the baby, suckled him, and was afraid to let Rebecca touch him. At night Rebecca started whispering her Psalms angrily and furiously, prayed to a lord of another world, a strange, hostile one, who once lived with her forefathers in cellars. Dana wept and told Ebenezer that Rebecca was praying for her death, and Ebenezer tried to calm her but didn't know how to say that in the few words he used. He said: I'll protect you, Dana. She hates me, said Dana, and wept. I'm so scared, she loved Samuel, I wanted to understand, I couldn't, I looked at my son, he doesn't look like me, not like his mother, he had green-yellow eyes like the eyes of a demon, he laughed, a laughing baby he was, he touched his mother and would turn his face away from her, and Ebenezer went to his mother and said to her:
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You're praying for Dana's death, said Ebenezer. And she said: I'm praying to who I want and for what I want. You're not even the son of your father, not the grandson of your grandfather, you didn't come out of me, you came out of the coffin of a Jew who died of typhus and was buried in Jaffa under another name. Give me the only son I deserve. At night Rebecca yelled at the fence so they would hear: Ebenezer is the son of Nehemiah! Who else could be the father of a mongoloid who begets sons of a king if not a man who died on his wife at the shore of Jaffa to punish her for a life she didn't want to live? No Joseph would have begat a silent bird carver who tries to sleep with the daughter of a eunuch from Tel Aviv who begat his daughter from a charter translated from ancient Latin.
Dana heaped up pillows and boxes and blocked the doorway and Ebenezer paved a new path around the old house and Rebecca sat at the fence and wished for her grandson and couldn't see him. At night, no light was turned on in the house. Ebenezer sat in the house holding a rifle. Every noise made Dana Jump. One day, one of Dana's friends was brought who had a stomachache and volunteered to guard the yard and whenever he saw Rebecca approaching he aimed his rifle at her and said: I'll shoot you, and she giggled and said Shoot, fool, and he aimed, trembled, and didn't dare shoot until one day he crossed over the barricade and hired himself out to work in her yard.
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Boaz was born in the nearby settlement, in a small hospital, on April third, nineteen twenty-eight. On that day and at that hour, in Tarnopol, Galicia, Samuel Lipker was born. Samuel's sire then wrote a great poem on his unrequited love for Rebecca Schneerson. Then he wrote a lament on the death of Jews that would be written again later on by a man named Lionel Secret. The lament and the love poem to Rebecca were the only two successful poems ever written by Joseph Rayna. But they were left with his clothes before he was shot to death. No one remains who will remember them except for one man who recited them to Ebenezer and then died with a piece of bread wet from the damp of the wall stuck in his mouth. Joseph wrote about the most horrible disaster as if he envisioned it. The words walked among ruins of Jews and a path strewn with human obstacles who didn't know what they hoarded in their minds, came to Ebenezer, who stood in Cologne and recited the lamentation and the love poem. In its words, Ebenezer heard a distant melody reminding him of his love for his mother. And Joseph Rayna didn't go to America to save himself because he thought that if he went there, he would betray Rebecca. And so, without knowing, Lionel Secret learned from Ebenezer the melody of the great lament he would write years later, and would restore the first love of his mother Rachel, her love for Rebecca Secret Charity and the great-granddaughter of her daughter, but by the time he wrote the lament, his mother was dead and buried in New Jersey under the name of Rachel Blau, faithful wife of Saul Blau.
Those are the annals of Israel. Abraham begat Isaac. Isaac begat Jacob, end.
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When Mr. Klomin came to the settlement to see his grandson, Dana claimed that Rebecca had sent him to spy. Mr. Klomin came with the Captain, who had just returned from Rebecca's house. Rebecca stood at the fence separating her house from her son's house, and Mr. Klomin, who knocked on the door, didn't get an answer. He wanted to read to his daughter the six-hundred-page letter he had written to the High Commissioner. The Captain also considered that letter the piece de resistance of the life of Mr. Klomin, who started believing the rumors that had been making the rounds of the Yishuv for some time that the Captain was secretly inciting the Arabs to revolt (he didn't know exactly against whom) and therefore Mr. Klomin believed that that inciter should be used to remove the foreign government from the Land by means of his loyal or hidden servants. The Captain's generosity enabled the recruitment of about twenty new members into the party, but the source of his money became more suspect when Shoshana Sakhohtovskaya returned from Egypt. Shoshana was the daughter of Nathan, Nehemiah's old friend, and married a Jewish officer in the British army who was stationed in Cairo and he was said to own two factories for holes in pennies (one for the hole of a penny, and one for the hole of a tuppence). Shoshana told with a fervor that almost made her face bearable, that the Captain's newspaper sold only thirty-four copies, was merely a deception and behind it, she said, hid a secret, international, maybe even religious body, she almost shouted, a body whose purpose is to convert the Jews of the Land of Israel to Christianity and keep the Land from turning into a Zionist base. The Captain was too polite and in love to try to refute those accusations, which seemed exaggerated even to him, although he did see something in them that was fair to some extent. In his opinion, the accusations were partly correct, but imprecise, maybe even malicious, and he pledged himself by his nobility, which he occasionally called "South American nobility" and "Swiss courtesy," to silence and would wring his hands, and say: I said what I said out of love, I don't go back there, that's a fact, I'm no longer friendly with the English, I live in the settlement, and the proof was so dubious that everybody almost tended to accept it and Shoshana Sakhohtovskaya sat at night, gobbled up all the oranges on a tree she had planted with her own hands as a child. She heaped up the peels in a pyramid and when a black bird with a yellow beak stood on the tip of the pyramid and nodded its head and an owl screeched at night, Shoshana burst into bitter weeping, and called out: At least I have someplace to go back to. The Captain didn't explain what places he didn't go back to, and people wondered about those places, for a person generally isn't born in Argentina, Switzerland, and the United States. He has to choose, said those who were considered experts in the ways of the world. The elders of the settlement, who were grateful to Rebecca for Nehemiah and for Nathan's happy death, said: The Captain's Greek Orthodoxy is not exactly the religion that prevails in Argentina, the United States of America, or Switzerland, so when the Captain went to get his things that would come three times a year in a ship to the port, a few members of the settlement watched him and with their own amazed eyes (Mr. Klomin stood with them, even though he was ashamed of it) saw a gigantic trunk taken off, placed on the shore, and a British officer loaded it on a cart and took it to the shed, where the Captain was waiting. An aged consul stood next to him, eating an apple. The case was opened, there were new uniforms there, medals, and hats with padded visors. They also saw how the Captain was granted new insignia, which the aged consul pinned to his epaulettes, and he shouted unambiguously in a loud voice so they too could hear that the Captain was now promoted to the rank of colonel and the adorned scroll in the consul's hand was seen even from where they were hiding. The insignia were made of gold, the new visor was woven of silk fibers, silver and gold.
Later on, when Rebecca wanted to know more details about the event that had been described to her in great detail, she asked Captain (Colonel) Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg to read her the scroll. One paragraph in the scroll seeme
d to her to suit the Captain to a tee. The paragraph said: Colonel Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg valiantly defended the homeland, destroyed, captured, burned, smashed, split, sliced, trapped, penetrated, attacked, surrounded, crushed, broke, overcame, breached, caught, repelled, cleansed, cracked ... And Rebecca listened to the words, was silent, and then said: It's nice of you that after all those deeds you're willing to waste time with simple people like us. They sat, drank a little brandy, the Captain smelled of imported flowers, and she said: Here you are with us and we're fond of you, Captain, and for us you'll always be Captain, they suspect you, respect and esteem you, you buy us gifts, but who you really are we don't know and maybe we won't know.
