by Yoram Kaniuk
Rebecca, who was too busy with her attempt to capture Boaz, was really not surprised that not only the Captain and the manager of the wine press were wooing her, but also the Jewish husband of Shoshana Sakhohtovskaya, who owned two factories for holes, who came to visit. She told him: You should be ashamed of yourself. You're married to the daughter of my distinguished friend Nathan.
The war for the fate of Boaz was then at its height. The fence between the houses was thickened. For more than a year now, Rebecca hadn't seen Ebenezer or Boaz. Boaz would cry at night and she would yearn for him. Ebenezer started having nightmares he wasn't used to and Dana claimed that Rebecca was casting spells on him through the fence. When he woke up, he looked at Boaz and hated him. He said to Dana: He looks like Joseph, and she said: Ebenezer, this child is your son and I'm not to blame for who he looks like. Rebecca spread the rumor that the child was brought from Joseph to her through Dana's womb, and Dana grew melancholy and made bitter claims against the mother of Ebenezer, whose nightmares thickened with her dread.
One day Ebenezer burst the barriers, punched the guard he had once employed and who worked for his mother, stood at her chair, and pleaded with her to leave them alone and not harm Dana. She's all I've got, he said. I had nothing, Father died, you weren't there, I've got Dana! And she said: You two don't interest me, Ebenezer. Not you and not your Dana. You've got my son, give him to me, take your Dana and go to hell. You pray for her death, said Ebenezer. She laughed and said: I've got no control over what the Holy One Blessed Be He does. I filled my part of the deal with your father, he wanted you and I have Boaz. And until he's mine, I won't shut up.
Rebecca turned her face away and through the window screen she saw Ebenezer's back as he went off and a longing she had never known passed through her, a longing to bequeath to Boaz her life and her property. For the first time in her life she felt that she had surrendered to the most ridiculous of feelings, to pure unconditional love. The yearning flattered her but also scared her.
A few weeks later, when Boaz reached his first birthday, Dana went out to look for Ebenezer, who hadn't returned from the citrus grove for three days. He sat in his hut and tried to discover his father's real face in a tree. Suddenly, the sky darkened and a heavy rain poured down. The drops fell savagely on the ground and looked gigantic, a wind blew and the sky turned black, a haze filled the air, the foliage looked purple, the sun that flickered for a moment between the clouds was almost green and a thick dust from the desert grew turgid in the eddy. Lightning flashes struck the ground and cut the air with a loud whistle. Two Arabs driving a load of spices on a donkey on their way from the desert to the village of Marar saw Dana lit in the light of the flashes. She was wet and her dress clung to her body. One of them attacked her. Her wet hair fell on her face and his old friend grabbed it and her when she tried to defend herself from the rain. The first one grabbed her with his hands, stretched over her and tried to rape her. She fought him with all her might, bit and kicked, but the mud was moldy and she couldn't see a thing. When she fainted from swallowing mud the old man said to the young one: Come on, let's get out, we've killed her. He tried to give her artificial respiration but her body was cold. Out of dread he took out an aluminum cup and started digging a pit. They buried Dana, but she was still alive. She tried to get up but the earth crushed her and broke her clavicle. She tried to move, and her head bumped into a rock. Ebenezer heard the roars, put on the old raincoat hanging in the hut, and went out. He walked in the rain, soaked to the skin. And then he saw, he didn't yet understand what he saw, he thought of going on, and turned around. He tried to listen to Dana's heart, but her heart wasn't beating. He sat next to her, looked at her trampled body and didn't shed a tear. He picked up her body, cleaned her face and body, straightened her dress, and carried her in his arms. He came to the settlement where all the inhabitants were sequestered in their houses and looking out the windows at the rainstorm and the windswept street. They saw Ebenezer carrying his wife's body. People came out of their houses and started following him. Old Horowitz came outside and bowed his head, tears gushed in his eyes. Ebenezer didn't say a word. He took Dana to the threshold of his mother's house, put her body on the doorsill, and called out: Here you are! You wanted her dead and you got it.
He took a knife from the hiding place in the cowshed and went to the nearby village. An old man for whom he had once carved the dead faces of his daughters told him: Go to Marar, you'll see a donkey with a damaged saddle at the house of Abu-Hassein, and you'll know. Ebenezer climbed up to the village. The inhabitants were hiding from the storm. His smell was blended with the downpour and the dogs didn't smell him and didn't bark. He came to Abu-Hassein's house, saw the donkey at the next house, examined the saddle and called the Arabs to come outside. They came out, the old man started trembling, but Ebenezer whose hands were strong, grabbed the young one, smelled Dana's odor on his clothes, and killed him with two stabs. The old man started running away, men from the settlement ran up, and dragged Ebenezer back to the settlement. In the yard, they washed the blood off Ebenezer. All night Ebenezer sat on the doorsill of Rebecca's house next to Dana's body and watched it. Rebecca looked outside and saw her son and his dead wife and wanted to go to them, but Ebenezer warned her not to come. The rain stopped, the sky cleared up, and a fragrance of spring filled the air. There was no trace of the storm except for the lightning damage, split tree trunks, and a lot of sand piled up wet and sticky. The next day, the funeral was held, Rebecca stood on the side, between the Captain and Mr. Klomin. Mr. Klomin, gazing, tried to understand the meaning of the empty space that filled him. With his great expertise in the charter and the illegality of the British Mandate, he had never noticed how much he loved his daughter. Now when he felt love, he didn't know what to do with it. At the open grave, Ebenezer told his wife: You were a gift given to me and taken from me, this morning I looked in the mirror, there was nobody there. And then the cantor recited the prayer for the dead and they filled the grave with dirt and Roots grew by one more corpse. He returned from Roots alone. He sat a long time and looked at his son. He wanted to touch him, but he didn't. The child's eyes were wide open. For a moment Ebenezer thought the child was smiling. His eyes were mocking, and Ebenezer got up and slammed the door. He stood next to his house, looked at the path where Dana had planted roses and geraniums and at the pepper tree he had planted for her and at her herb garden, and he yelled: Rebecca, I'm going to find who cursed us. Rebecca approached the child and looked at him. Her son's bowed figure was seen from the myrtle tree on the path. He was twenty-seven years old. The year was nineteen twenty-seven. The month was April. The air was drenched with the intoxicating smells of spring. The Captain moved to Ebenezer's house. The paths and flowers went on blooming every year. The dried flowers in the books and the sweet smells in the jars and bottles stayed where they were.
Forty years, Ebenezer Schneerson didn't see his mother.
Tape / -
Your blood Dana. Your Dana blood. Blood blood. Your blood Dana. Dana Dana your blood. The blood of Dana. Dana. Blood blood blood Dana. Blood of Dana, blood. Blood your blood Dana Dana. Your blood Dana. Your Dana blood. Dana blood. Dana Dana. Your blood Dana. Blood.
They said I went to Marar to kill an Arab. I don't remember. I tell how I went to kill an Arab in Marar and I don't remember. An empty space I am. Stories of others or of others about me. Who am I? Forty years searching and don't know.
After forty years I came and saw him, and I said to him: Samuel! I was so happy that Samuel was here. But that was Boaz. He was offended. What do I know about Boaz?
Tape / -
Teacher Henkin met Boaz years after Menahem was killed. When he retired, there was nobody to say good-bye to. The teachers had changed. Damausz sat in his house and embroidered his old dreams over and over again. Old Teacher Sarakh with her swollen legs didn't even bother to come say good-bye to him. She grows silkworms and gazes at the sea getting blocked across from her house. Teacher Henkin bought
a new overcoat and a broad-brimmed hat and every morning as usual, he went on walking from his house on Deliverance Street to Mugrabi Square, which had meanwhile been destroyed, and then back home again. "Grief of the world," Teacher Obadiah Henkin would say to himself at the new hotels, crushing the handsome hills at the seashore, the new houses, the discotheques, the banks popping up like mushrooms. Here and there, a few veteran teachers still live, Histadrut members, who now add a second story to their little houses and will soon sell the houses for accelerated development. Only the corner of Henkin's street remained lost between the new building sites closing in on it. They're wiping out the sea, dammit, said the baker's wife to Mr. Henkin, and he said, Yes, yes, too bad about Noga, thought Henkin, what's she doing? She lived with us, Hasha Masha and she, like two conspirators. A bare bulb over my wife, the garden hasn't yet been renewed, the paint is peeling. Unlike Hasha Masha, Teacher Henkin doesn't know that relations between Noga and Menahem-what he privately called their engagement-ended a few weeks before Menahem fell.
How many years does Teacher Henkin walk in that set route? He stopped counting. Ten, fifteen years? He's not sure anymore. The years are accompanied by demonstrations of hesitation, partial juggling of retreat, attempts to understand death from a new, unusual angle, getting to know the bereaved parents, the Committee of Bereaved Parents, the Shimonis, all that happened while he walked every single day, at the same time, on Ben-Yehuda Street to Mugrabi Square and back. Later on, after he'd meet Boaz, it became clear to Teacher Henkin that his son didn't fall in the battle of Mount Radar, but in a battle that would stir heroic feelings in him at first, that battle for the Old City. Teacher Henkin, who had had many illusions shattered in his life, was angry about the battle in the Old City, which might have been won if not for the order of Ben-Gurion, whom he had once thought great. But he wouldn't get his son back in either case, Hasha Masha will then say, and he'll stare at her, but then he won't be angry anymore at her hostility.
And so he also learned the battle for the Old City: the weary fighters of the Harel Brigade (and Menahem, he thought then, was one of them) bombarded Mount Zion every night from Yemin Moshe whose residents had previously been evacuated. And the mountain was captured. Menahem was in the armored car that climbed the mountain from the Valley of Hinnom. The fighters met in the Dormition Monastery, next to King David's Tomb, near the place of the seder the Christians call the Last Supper. After a short rest, the fighters were assembled in Bishop Gubat's school next to the monastery, and in the shadow of Byzantine acacias, they ate grape leaves stuffed with dry bread. From the other side of the narrow path separating the mountain from the Old City, on the splendid Tower of Suleiman sat the fighters of the Arab Legion commanded by British Colonel Wood. Colonel Wood, who graduated with honors from Eton and had a degree from Cambridge, had previously served in Europe, was one of those who liberated Hathausen concentration camp, fought in the Pacific, and then volunteered to help his old friend Glubb Pasha organize the army of the grandson of the Sharif of Mecca. Now he held a stick in his hand, which once, when liberating the camp, he refused to hold.
In the besieged Jewish Quarter, a handful of Jews remained, whose ammunition and food were running out. By order of Ben-Gurion, the governor of Jewish Jerusalem refused the offer of the rescue battle made by the members of the Harel Brigade. The governor claimed he didn't have reinforcements that the fighters of the Harel Brigade were exhausted and a considerable part of their fighters were killed or wounded. The commander of the Harel force decided to carry out the operation despite the governor's refusal, and that was a historical moment, thought Henkin excitedly. Ben-Gurion, who feared the rage of the fighters, approved the operation but at the same time he ordered the governor not to assist it. We need a historian, said Henkin, who will come and arrange the data, so that battle can be summarized properly. The commander said: We have to strike the enemy while he's stunned from the battle on the mountain. The night before, a hole was made in the roof of the Dormition Church by a Davidka shell that tried to hit a target far away from there and missed. The enemy had tanks, armored cars, and artillery. Colonel Wood relied on his weapons and his loyal soldiers. At dawn, an armored car approached the wall of the Old City and poured fire on the nearby Jaffa Gate. Seven Iraqi and British officers were taken prisoner. On Mount Zion sat Menahem along with Boaz. He wasn't thinking of the international conspiracies, of Ben-Gurion writhing in the torments of his decision, of the governor and his struggle with the commander of Harel, he was waiting to finish the war, go back home, live, then he got a cone of explosives and crawled toward Zion Gate. Over the gate were two heavy machine guns, whose range covered the narrow path and you had to slip under it. The explosive was connected to a wire and to the cone, and you could push it with a pole under the coil of the barbed war fence stretched there. At three twenty AM, on the twentieth of May nineteen forty-eight, the cone burst the fences, a mighty explosion was heard, shots were fired feverishly, and Zion Gate was breached. In the smoke of shooting and explosions, Menahem and his comrades burst into the city that previously, in a brief and laconic but emotional ceremony, the commander had called the Eternal City. In the short ceremony, the commander said in a restrained tone: One thousand eight hundred seventy-seven years ago we were exiled from here, you are the first to climb the wall of the Eternal City, hold on and embrace it. When Henkin will tell his wife about that, she will say to him: Is your pain less because of that?
Ra'anana ran first, followed by the rest of the fighters. A soldier who had laid explosives at the gate with Menahem lay wounded; later on they would pick him up. Menahem ran behind Boaz, shooting at the wall on which Colonel Wood's terrified officers and soldiers were fighting boldly. The Armenians, in the winding street to the Jewish Quarter, watch in awe, the fighters hold explosives, rifles, submachine guns, and food. The commander says on the walkie-talkie: They're losing control, complete surprise, send fighters to replace us, we're bleeding, if you send them fast, the Old City will be in our hands by nightfall, over and out. From the other end, there was no answer. Bearded, weary fighters burst out of the besieged Jewish Quarter. A brief but joyous encounter. Shells land on all sides. White flags start flying over the houses of the Old City. The Arab fighters are losing control and starting to flee, Colonel Wood can't hold his fighters. They're fleeing. Havaja Wood, they yell at him, nothing to be done, and he, stunned, waves the stick he's holding. You have to learn from the enemy, he'll say later on, and he doesn't mean Kramer, but Menahem Henkin.
Complete chaos. Menahem attacks, says Boaz, and then, during the battle, he's wounded by a stray bullet. His brain is pierced and he dies on the spot. If I had caught the bullet, it wouldn't have been a stray! Menahem didn't suffer, Henkin ... The governor didn't heed the request for help, the besieged people went back to the Jewish Quarter with food and a little bit of ammunition. They found out that new fighters were coming to relieve Boaz and his companions. They pulled out with the dead and wounded. The new ones who came were old men from the corps of elderly who weren't fit to fight and didn't know why they were sent. The retreating Arabs saw the wheel turn, girded their loins, and drove out the old men. The exhausted inhabitants of the Jewish Quarter surrendered by waving a white flag. At the same time, Henkin discovered later, in the headquarters on Schneller sat a hundred armed fighters who weren't sent. Menahem fell for nothing, said Henkin to Hasha Masha. The liberation of the Old City was postponed for nineteen years. Meanwhile, Menahem came back and was killed in another battle, a battle that didn't get into the history book.
Did my son fall for nothing? Henkin will ask.
Did he fall in an unknown battle there, or in the Old City?
He fell, says Hasha Masha, even if he died in a traffic accident, he didn't return.
The merchants on Ben-Yehuda Street set their watches by Henkin. They're building a new city around him, and only the sea remains stuck to itself. And he doesn't know, they say. Henkin took down the mezuzah on the second day of the Six-D
ay War, when the Chief Rabbi said that the Israel Defense Forces won because of the will of God. Hasha Masha thinks: Why did fate connect two such different people as Menahem and his father? Menahem was impetuous, friendly, loved the sea, didn't believe especially, didn't not believe, tied cats' tails, smoked in shelters, a simple boy, I loved him, but Henkin needs a hero and a poet.
He searches for his son on Ben-Yehuda Street as if Menahem is no more on Shenkin Street than on Ben-Yehuda Street. The Committee of Bereaved Parents, what a feast they make there with the plastic vegetables. What does Jordana who loves my son want from me? What an insane nation ...
Noga understands, knows, and only he, Obadiah, sets the watches of those miserable merchants. Your devotion, Noga, is a noble trouble. I understand, know that you stopped loving Menahem and stayed with us, I don't bear a grudge against you, but to love you for that I can't and you know that. Let Henkin think what he wants, ponders Hasha Masha.
Years later, Hasha Masha will write to Renate:
My dear,
You asked how those years passed. They passed. I sat and waited. For what? For nothing. Noga wrote Menahem a letter telling him she had stopped loving him. He was killed before he got the letter. She stayed with us. She rejected suitors out of hand. Men don't understand death, Renate.
Here is a description of a tour of Teacher Henkin: On the ruins of the Turkish fortress, between Nordau and Jabotinsky Boulevards, which used to be called Ingathering of the Exiles Street, they've built a new building. Instead of the Moses and Shapiro families new people now live there who closed the balconies with sliding shutters. Atom Bar, teeming with Jewish whores and Australian soldiers, changed its name and now its clientele are old Poles and women with weary faces. Then there was a club of aging artists there.
