by Yoram Kaniuk
When Henkin started talking, Boaz looked at his watch. An hour passed, he knew he was in a place where he had never been, and now he also knew what his father looked like, something that embarrassed him with Henkin who now addressed him. You won't understand, Henkin spoke in an excited but quiet voice (you didn't discover the three k's, thinks Boaz sadly) unbelievable, really unbelievable ... I always believed, they laughed at me, I told them, you don't know, you don't know him, his special qualities will come out, I knew! And he had to rebel. This poem, Boaz, could have been written only by one man, only by Menahem, that's what's special in the poem, not its nature, others will testify to that, but its specialness, it's the clear expression of a man who revealed himself and said something of his own. Here's the house mentioned here, you surely won't understand, it was destroyed to plant the boulevard. How angry he was then, he said: They're building a wasteland, Father, and I remember, a little boy he was before we moved here and that sycamore on the corner of Dizengoff and Arlozorov, they cut down ... the Gilboa! We went on a field trip with the school, a Passover outing it was, we stood on the top of the mountain, and in the sunset I recited to them marvels of poetry: The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen! And Menahem then laughed at his father, here's the allusion to that poetry, to that moment, to the fear at sunset, is that the food of our fields, an eternal curse or a momentary distress, what did we know, and the dead ant, in the fixing of facts with a water meter, that is, a word meter. The magic of the poem is hypnotic, deciphering the lad, and his mother didn't believe, a son fell, she said, another son in the cruel world, I knew that before he left us, more precisely, when he left, I knew he'd set some nail, that he'd leave me some sign from a concealed inner world. And the poem ... A poem that reveals a person so much! That will be so personal and yet general, human, and I waited.
And then Henkin yelled: You could have brought it before!
I forgot I had it, said Boaz.
That's some nerve, he said angrily. That's a violation of every moral law...
And then he was silent, looked at Boaz, and tried to smile, for some reason he didn't have to maintain his coolness now, his heart told him that everything he wanted to know about Menahem was buried in this man. And Boaz Schneerson wants to stop him, to put the clock back, but it was no longer possible ...
You don't think the poem is wonderful? Henkin suddenly whispered.
I don't understand it, said Boaz.
That a boy writes like that, the only thing anybody ever asked of him was not to walk on the lawn, says Teacher Henkin, to respect his elders, to be proud of his wildness, new Jews riding horseback, and then comes a moment of softness, of withdrawing inside, and the boy stops the enemy with his body, silent words tell the horror of the stories, coming from him, and he writes them letter by letter, and pulls out a submachine gun, goes out to the last battle, fights for the life of his parents and friends, and is killed, a bullet hits him, is mute and silent, and death flows from him, he flows death and death flows on the mountains and leaves a hidden corner, invisible to his father, the beautiful boy who was and they didn't know, didn't know him, Hasha Masha, they and you, you thought, you're the poor boy, you didn't understand, you didn't grasp! You too, my Hasha Masha ...
Dear Renate,
It's been a long time since I managed to find the emotional strength to answer your letter. Last night they said on the radio that the cold in Europe had passed and the snowstorms were subsiding. I was glad. You ask me if Boaz came to us to defeat us. On the word of a wounded lioness I can say: No! He came because Henkin was looking for him. It was me he was afraid of. He knew I don't believe. When he left the house, the day he brought the poem, Henkin came to me with trembling hands, holding the poem. I told him, Obadiah, it wasn't Menahem who wrote that poem, Menahem loved the sea, he didn't write a poem, he wasn't a hero like Boaz ... And he shoved me out of the chair, that man who never killed a fly raised his hand and brought me down. Then he went outside and banged his head on the wall, I brought him a towel filled with ice cubes and held it to his brow until the swelling went down. For twenty hours he sat with me, Renate, twenty hours straight he talked about the meaning of the poem, how that poem couldn't have been written by anybody but Menahem! I fell asleep and he went on talking. He didn't even know I fell asleep. Then he fell asleep sitting up, muttering. I cooked, and made coffee. I waited for him to wake up and he talked again. And so he gained not only a poem he read to his friends, printed and copied it, but also a son who before-and it's awful to say-he didn't have.
And Boaz started coming. Henkin needed him. Can you imagine a worse place for a sympathetic family atmosphere than a house of mourning? But it was in the house of mourning of all places that Boaz wanted love and forgiveness. That's what I couldn't give him. Noga could.
If we had written our husbands' books, maybe we'd know on what side of life death is found and so we'd have given birth to stories and not begotten them. But I'm just an old Jew who sits alone and thinks, not particularly profound things, I've got my own contempt, I see a sea and Menahem still swimming there, I can even still love Henkin ...
I'm a former quarry worker who married a teacher and raised a dead son. You write to me about metaphysical visions and about the Last Jew and your husband is seeking a story so as not to write it and I understand, the abstraction of our men needs to be turned into female concreteness, and then maybe a suddenness will be born that is not only foreseen but is even a vision, like a son who bursts out of you, to give birth is to produce concreteness, to become a point, a house, and earth and water to irrigate, to give birth is also to dig a grave. Maybe someday the books will write the authors and not vice versa.
I raised a son and I did know who he was. Menahem didn't want to jump beyond his navel. He wanted a good life and a sea, not to do anything, just to live. That's all he wanted. Maybe that's not sublime, but it's human. And Henkin sat and kept on drinking the stories of Boaz, who told, and everything that happened to Boaz he projected onto Menahem. Everything he experienced, Henkin now experiences from the fictional life of Menahem. And he wanted me to believe. I closed myself in the room. Boaz would try to catch me with his charms, his charming smile, his voice, he didn't know I'm impregnable. No Joseph Rayna would get me pregnant.
Noga and I pretended. I needed her in some way that's hard for me to grasp. Menahem was dear to Noga, she was tormented by what was happening. Only later did she understand that he didn't get the letter ending their relations. Henkin was mourning too much, his committee, and we remained together, I and he with Menahem because he stopped consoling us. Noga has a noble firmness that Menahem was the first to discover. And effortlessly, completely naturally, she played Henkin's daughterin-law. She had one love to give that she exhausted on Menahem. Maybe only somebody who invented a new Menahem could have penetrated her armor, that secret I never understood. Only somebody who pretended he loved her before, saw her picture that Menahem had in the war (Boaz told her that story and she didn't believe it) and fell in love with her there, maybe even caused Menahem's death out of love, only he could have touched her so deeply.
For a while, Boaz thought he would be the last survivor of his regiment. Like his father he thought he'd be some Last Jew, and he went back to the settlement. Then he was idle. He thought, Who were my parents? He was searching for something, didn't know what. He had money, he didn't have to do anything. He wanted the days to pass and to pass with them, he met Henkin and got a borrowed father, he sold a borrowed son, he stole Noga. He pressed and she gave in. I told her: In my house you won't sleep with Boaz! I couldn't bear it, I was afraid of what Henkin would say and how he'd respond, now, he thought, Noga could be proud of Menahem. She stroked me with her gentle hands and said: You're right, Hasha.
And Henkin didn't see. A new son he discovered and nothing interested him. Only later on, two years later, when Boaz and Noga were living together and Boaz came to Henkin and told him: I faked the poem, why didn't yo
u see the three fake k's, the land mines I buried for you, why didn't you notice? I saved him, he didn't save me! When he said that-and he said that because he thought Noga was beginning to love Menahem again because of the stories he created-only then did the tumult take place that I told you about, Henkin's decline, Noga's suicide attempt, and then Boaz turned into a vulture.
Even in all that he's not exactly guilty. At least with you, I have to be honest. We were living in hell. Noga got pregnant. She couldn't see Henkin, she had cheered him with long walks along the Yarkon River, she couldn't see that proud man ridiculous as he was in the days when he read his poem to every bereaved father and mother at the parties at the Shimonis. In some way that may not have been clear to her, she pushed Boaz to tell Henkin the truth. Indirectly she shattered Henkin's delusion. That was a second death of his son, Renate, and that was hard. Boaz then believed purely and simply that he did kill Menahem, the more she refused to believe, the more he believed, and when she talked about Menahem's beauty and his virtues, he yelled at her and hit her. When Noga found out what happened, she came to Henkin and told him: Boaz is lying, Menahem did write the poem, but Henkin whispered to her: Why didn't you tell me you were Boaz's girlfriend? We were close, why didn't you tell me? And he looked at her, he had known her for years, loved her, and said to her: Noga, you don't know how to lie! And she thought he would do something, came to me trembling, I told her, Look, little girl, he's a strong man, Henkin, an old-line Zionist, he was in the Labor Brigade, he experienced hard things, he'll recover, she talked to him some more and he couldn't answer and threw a chair at her. She was hit and went outside. Then she brought him flowers. Boaz came and said to her, What right do you have to talk to Henkin about me, why do you interfere in my life, you want Menahem back? He's not with me anymore either, and Henkin heard, Boaz went into his room, all night long they talked. She sat with me and we drank sweet vermouth. Two big drunks. In the morning Boaz came out and slapped her face. In the room Henkin sat with the poem, more broken than I'd ever seen him, and then Noga got up, and said to Boaz: You know what, you can go to hell, and she left. After she had gone, I sat, my head splitting from the drinking at night, Henkin got up and walked to the seashore and went into the sea with his shoes and clothes, and it was winter then. In the morning Boaz came back and Henkin woke up and asked with a weary face, anxiously: Where's Noga? He said: She died, Boaz, she died. I told him: Stop, the two of you suffered blood, and the two of us went out to look for Noga. Then I recalled the cave. In the world war, Menahem and his friends, especially Amihud Giladi, who lived in the house where Ebenezer now lives, would hide tea and rusks and stones there to be partisans and fight the Germans who were then in El Alamein, they wanted to build a fortress on the hills where the Hilton now stands. Noga knew the old cave, she called it "Menahem's cave." I told Boaz: She's surely in Menahem's cave. That was a mistake, he was offended and said, What do you mean, what cave, we've got our own places, what do you mean, Menahem's cave. I told him: At least she can be there, but he didn't want to believe it, wanted to go to other places, at night he looked in all the places and didn't find her and there was nothing left for him to do but go with me even though he didn't want to believe, I dragged him to the cave and he didn't even know where it was, and Noga was there, had swallowed pills, we dragged her to the corner of Jabotinsky, took a cab and went straight to Hadassah Hospital, they pumped her stomach, and she aborted Boaz's son, the grandson of the Last Jew!
We sat there, Noga and I, Boaz was miserable, more miserable than I had ever seen him and he told me that he didn't kill Menahem, but he should have killed him, and who did he tell? He told me that! And Noga said: I'll never give birth now, and then I wept too. And then Boaz's business developed and she helped him. She told me: He is what he is, and I love him. And she helped him, but everything began with Henkin, he went to his committee, years before, read them Menahem's poem. And then he brought the Defense Ministry into the picture, and Jordana the Yemenite who fell in love with Menahem, and that business that flourished.
Tape / -
A few words about words. A vulture is an artificial bird, with a broad wingspan, a twisted beak, the vulture is the hawk, the falcon, the bearded vulture. Vulture is a general name for all birds of prey and also the name of a specific bird, the precise identity of the vulture is not known, I, Ebenezer, what do I understand about vultures? In that winter, among corpses, didn't a man stand there named Hans Kritacal who is today a teacher in Hamburg? Five Ukrainians with axes beheaded thirty-two children, and he didn't stand and recite a poem?
What sadness is spread over everything here.
Tape / -
From the letter of Obadiah Henkin.
... And I don't know whether to be glad about your offer or to be sad. For a long time I've lived beyond gladness or sadness, so let us say that I accept your offer, or perhaps it was my offer? To cooperate in writing the book between two experienced writers, each on his own, something that may never see the light of day. In your last letter, along with Renate's beautiful letter, you write me that you wrote to Samuel Lipker (Sam Lipp) in America and about the answer you got. I think that answer is indeed important and I translated it into Hebrew.
You wanted to know what exactly I call "the external additions."
Among the books Ebenezer knew by heart (aside from those we've already talked about and catalogued), is also a treasure that can't be known exactly. In addition to the report of the Institute there is material (about a million words) whose sources are not known and yet are quoted from books. In other words, this isn't personal knowledge by this or that person, but knowledge taken from books (through people, of course) whose identity I can't verify. I shall list some of those books that may be most important to us:
1) "Travels of the Tribe of Menashe," by anonymous, in manuscript, copied in 1454 by Rabbi Joachin Eliahu, Amsterdam.
2) "Tribulations of the Sad Knight Kabydius, His Journey to the Land of Israel with Peter the Hermit and his Love for Judith." The name of the author isn't mentioned in Ebenezer's words, but the transcription is from the year 1343, Paris.
3) "Sources for the Burial of Moses, Story of the Golden Calf and Its Location." Written by Reb Yehuda Ber Avram ben Abraham (maybe a convert?), printed in Leipzig in the year 1984 (sic!), a year that is still far from us-Ebenezer insists that the date is correct and doesn't remember if he saw it or is only quoting.
4) "Kinds of Jews" by Sergei Szerpowsky and his son, Warsaw 1745.
5) "History of the Nation of Israel According to the Creator," by anonymous, printed in Tarnopol in 1767.
6) "Source of the Animals and the Creation, God as a Chariot that Was," by the Divine Kabbalist Ahmed Abidion ben-Haalma Downcast Eyes, printed in Istanbul in the year 50 after the death of the Messiah (apparently meaning Shabtai Zvi).
There are of course more books, but I haven't yet investigated. The books I listed above are not found in any library or known collection of books. Nor are they mentioned in any other place (I checked with the librarians in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Copenhagen, Paris, London, New York, and other archives), nor are they mentioned in any other book, and that may be the major problem, because if they are not mentioned, are they knowledge or fiction? And if fiction, whose?
Considering what we know about Ebenezer, he couldn't have invented those books. The books I examined constituted (each in itself) a conceptual, planned and formatted whole, sequences of facts that can be checked, and cases that really can be checked sound authentic. The material is on its way to you so you can review it more carefully, but the story of the Sad Christian Knight Kabydius can serve as an example. His tribulations in the Holy Land match other writings we're familiar with. Even the description of the siege of the city of Trier, where Peter the Hermit was helped by the Jews (who were then slaughtered), is similar to descriptions we have from other sources, even though Kabydius himself is not mentioned in any other source. The story of Judith sounds quite authentic as we now discover more and
more details today about the existence of many Jewish settlements in the Land of Israel during the time of the First Crusade and later.
