by Yoram Kaniuk
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The wandering Kabydius was the son of one of the Hungarian tribes. In his youth, in a little village in the Carpathian Mountains, he met a Jewish family. The family celebrated a holiday that was alien to him. After he was banished from his lands by his father, whom he tried to kill, he wandered to Rome. For some time he stayed there with a group of monks and along with another monk, he loved a twelve-year-old girl who died in their arms, and so he called himself Kabydius the Sad. The other monk went outside the city walls and was devoured by dogs. After he learned that his father had died, Kabydius went back to his homeland. In the mountains, he met the same Jewish family. The father of the family was an old man whose tongue had been cut out by some riffraff on its way to join Peter the Hermit. One of the old man's granddaughters was a handsome lass with a swollen belly. The village where they had lived before was burned down. The girl was pregnant from the one who had cut out her father's tongue. Kabydius wanted to kill them, but changed his mind and hugged the handsome girl and her mother fell to her knees and pleaded with him to wound her and not her pregnant daughter.
Kabydius, who was confused by his hatred for his father and his disappointed love for the twelve-year-old girl, sought "a bandage" for his soul full of sadness of the world, as he put it, and approached the mother. When he asked to marry the daughter and be a father to her son, he was banished by a group of audacious Jews who burst out from a distant place at night. Kabydius wanted to go back and take vengeance on the Jews, but it had started snowing and he went to seek his estate and discovered that, in his absence, his father had bequeathed it to his brothers and they banished him. Ashamed of his lust for that Jewess, he searched for the riffraff that had cut out her father's tongue and was introduced to Peter the Hermit. Peter made an indelible impression on him. He was ugly and strange, but a real leader of knaves and belligerent men. In the hermit's eyes, he saw light. The crusade to the Holy Land was at its height and Kabydius didn't join his peers but went with Peter the Hermit, as his servant.
The great battle took place in Antioch and only afterward did they descend along the shore toward Jaffa. The knights, writes Kabydius, mocked him and said: What is a man like you doing among streetwalkers, thieves, and rapists? and he said to them: Peter is the leader and I wash his feet for the sake of Our Lord the Messiah. They called him Peter the Dark and were afraid of him. The knights teased him-he doesn't give his pedigree in the book, but hints that the others knew it-and he had to fight a duel against one of the knights and even to run him through with his sword. Kabydius provides a detailed description of the battle for Jerusalem, the ship they dragged from the port of Jaffa and turned into a ram to batter the wall, how Gottfried of Bouillon knelt at the sight of the Holy City, the siege of the city, the bloody battles, how they circled the wall of Jerusalem for seven days and seven nights, and how the Savior was revealed on the Mount of Olives and they burst through the walls, and the blood, he said, as is also mentioned in other sources, flowed up to their knees, and cursed Jews were entrenched in the last tower, fighting along with the Muslims and were burned alive. And then he heard a voice: The holiday you saw on the mountains was my holiday, you're here and I rule over you, and Kabydius was angry and his heart filled with dread and he told Peter, who commanded him to be flagellated. He accepted his punishment in stoical silence, he wrote, and when the whip was laid on his back, his head was bald, he felt a genuine regret and exaltation he had never known before. After the coronation of Beaudoin as king of Jerusalem, Kabydius went to the Galilee. Along the roads, they built fortresses then. In the blazing heat of August he scaled a high mountain and joined a group of monks and Muslim prisoners, who were busy building a fortress. He began hewing stones. They told him not to hew stones because it was contemptible work meant for slaves. He said: I committed heavy sins and I must atone for them. They listened to him as a hewer from far away. They said he could grant to stone the charms of both European and Eastern art.
Three years later, his memory began to break down. A cloud shrouded his soul; he could remember only the stones he had hewn the day before. Peter was not seen again, counts and barons were appointed to the estates of the Holy Land, a struggle raged between the priests and the royal house of Beaudoin, but Kabydius remained far away from those events. The Count of Accra, who was brought in a sedan chair to see Kabydius the hewer, looked at the stones and said: I want Kabydius to build my castle. And so it was. Then, he wandered, went up to Jerusalem to see the Kingdom of Jesus on earth and in the streets of Accra silk cloths were stretched to hide the blinding light, ships from Genoa brought delights from the East and glass from Tyre was brought and used for windows, something that had not yet been seen in Europe. From the Arabs he learned the theory of the arch to allow for high ceilings in their buildings, he went down to Caesarea and built there too, he participated in building halls for knights in Accra and fortresses in the Galilee, the Golan Heights, and Bashan, and within ten years, Kabydius was one of the great builders in northern Israel.
Kabydius was in the prime of life, and was sated with wars and excommunications when he met Judith in a small Jewish village not far from the fortress he was building. At night, said Kabydius, Judith would fly off, in the morning she'd come back. Like everybody who desired her, she abused him too. When he wanted to beat her, she slipped away from him. Her family plotted against him and he wanted to burn down their house. At night, bitter people came and beat him until he bled. He wanted to tell Count Montfort about that, but a crow followed him and tried to poke out his eyes. Judith was picking flowers. It was after the rain. When he raped her she laughed and when he swore love to her she spat in his face. When her belly grew, and his son balled up in her, he wanted to marry her, his memory returned to him, he remembered the lass in the Carpathian Mountains, and he said: Maybe she's the same woman or I'm cursed by Jewish witches. Judith refused to marry him. He dimly recalled when he lived in Rome with the monks and loved a little girl. All my life, he thought, I've been caught in ropes with a curse and I can't get away from it, where is the whip that will take Jews out of my insides. He came to Judith, tied her to a post, whipped her, kissed her, and all night long he talked with her. She sneered at him, her hands tied, her eyes flashing, and when he asked again and again to marry her and be a father to his son, she laughed. When he castrated himself before her eyes and felt them taking him on a stretcher as he was bleeding, he recalled seeing a spiteful joy sparkling in her eyes. He came back to Judith with his face burned and emaciated and was a eunuch in her yard.
He was allowed to play with his son. Kabydius was old now. Judith was called mistress of the village where a knight served as her slave. She didn't marry anybody, and he hewed stones and built her another house more beautiful than the houses of the Galilee. There he sat and wrote his history, his shame, his regret, his sorrow, and his love of a woman who was once a little girl in Rome, then a woman in the Carpathian Mountains, and then a mistress in the Galilean Mountains. At night he would carve birds for his son.
... That's only a collection of fragments from the story, and you can peruse it when you receive the material. After I read, I asked myself how and why did this story, fictional or not, get into Ebenezer's hands? Is bird-carving coincidental? Those questions will remain without an answer for the time being. I can assume that bird-carving is Ebenezer's addition, but if it is an addition, why did he add it here and not someplace else? Why is bird-carving not mentioned in the nine million words investigated by the Institute? And the story of the Golden Calf and the place where Moses is buried, for instance ... the area of Santa Katerina in the Sinai was barred to Ebenezer.
Now that we can get to it, it's easy to think of his descriptions. But when Ebenezer recited that book (which I listed for you at the beginning of my letter), the area was hard to go to and was in the hands of the Egyptians, when could Ebenezer have been there? In my humble opinion, he never could have been there. I don't know if traces of this ahistorical or even historical myth
can truly be found, but the descriptions of the place, the geography, the names of the crystals, the stones, the rocks, the various areas, the climate, the lifestyle of the Bedouins, the monks, all that is precise. It is true that people visited there throughout the years, but it was surely not Ebenezer who invented what they saw or didn't see. The date of writing this ancient book is in another few years. What does that mean? Why did Ebenezer insist that the book be written like that, that the secrets in it are things that happened so long ago? According to various calculations (see appendix) I found in the Book of Salvation, which Ebenezer quotes and copies of it are also found in other places, the year 1984 will be the year of destruction. Also according to the prophecy of Astronomus, the decline before the annihilation begins in that year. The place where Moses is buried isn't clear, according to the book, but when I went with the members of our Committee on a trip to the Sinai last year, I was able to follow Ebenezer's guidelines and I found monasteries that even the Society for the Preservation of Nature didn't know about, I discovered waterfalls, wonderful oases, and sights were revealed described precisely in the book to be published years later, and recited by Ebenezer!
What else can I tell you? I'm sorry I can't respond to your request. When I ascended to the Land of Israel in the early 1920s, I swore I would never leave here. Why did I swear, why do I keep this oath? It's hard for me to answer. Jordana keeps coming. Her love for Menahem touches my heart. Maybe the mean ing of Kabydius's book is that love may really be only between the dead and the living? Maybe that's the meaning of the story of Ebenezer, Boaz, Menahem, Rebecca, Joseph, Nehemiah, and Friedrich? I'm not a literary scholar, I'm a tired old teacher, but there's surely food for thought here. The love people are afflicted with like a disease is a relationship between naught and aught. Maybe later, life began to envy death and imitated impotence.
Maybe everything that was didn't have to be. As I write these confused things to you, Jordana is sitting in the other room and looking at an album of pictures of Menahem. Hasha Masha is drinking coffee. Boaz is wandering around in his jeep and immortalizing the dead. You write me that Samuel Lipker claims that Lionel doesn't know that Samuel is his brother. It always seems to me that Samuel is here and hasn't really gone to America. Something of his spirit sometimes sits on my neck. When Ebenezer called Boaz Samuel, I knew that was more than a mere coincidence.
Yours ...
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When Yazhik was three years old, I had, said Yazhik, three hens. I fought with Petlura in 'nineteen. Ever since then I learned why hens have a red comb, Ebenezer, the blood was soaked in chewed grass, in berries, the woman my father slaughtered I saw in my dreams night after night for four years and two months, except for one night when I was drunk and couldn't dream. Then I counted the poplar trees in a radius of seventeen kilometers around our house. There were twenty-six thousand, five hundred thirty-two trees. They were cut down at a rate I tried to understand and couldn't. Meanwhile, the farm grew and two hundred eighty hens were added-and three new roosters. The number of trees decreased in the snowstorm of 'twenty-six, I found a woman whose mother was a Jew. She almost loved me, but I was tempted to tell her who my father was and she remembered poor Nakhcha, her uncle whose hand was cut off in that pogrom I couldn't tell you about. Seventy thousand Jews died in that pogrom under cover of the great revolution. Maybe since then my hostility has sprouted for people with squashed noses. What am I doing here? I hid a little Jewish girl, the woman I found dead, I stopped counting poplars, the hens went to Berlin in a freight train, the little girl lay under the stairs, upstairs my mother was dying with a candle at her head, night after night I went down and talked with the little girl and she was scared. And only later was she not so scared. In the dark she sat for three years, until the bent legs were stuck together, shin to thigh, I went to fetch a doctor to separate the shin from the thigh, under the stairs smelled of rotten flesh, I brought her cabbage and potatoes, her eyes were burning and her forehead was blazing. They killed the little girl with one blow, without separating the shin from the thigh, they left my mother to die alone with the crucifix hanging over her bed. The Sturmbahnfuhrer from the General- gouvernement stood and preened in the mirror in my mother's room, he wore oak clusters on his collar, his boots were gleaming, the guards would spit and a slave would rub them, me they tied to a cart and the Ukrainians pointed at me as if they had reasons, and said Yazhik the Jew-lover, I tried to count the reasons and discovered that in the end they were only one reason, and I stopped, I always liked to count, I saw bodies, arms cut off, I wasn't one of you, I didn't have to die but to live on the border of death and starvation, I saw them bring the people, scare them with clubs, blows, undress them and then straight to the showers and lock the door, they were more confused than scared, and then that revolt broke out with one hand grenade that barely killed one soldier, a machine gun from the tower shot and it all ended as it had begun, outside next to the mass graves stood people and searched. Later, years after the war, came the Poles, opened graves and searched for diamonds in corpses and that's how they found out what was under the ground. It once belonged to my grandfather, his name was also Yazhik. You won't die, Ebenezer, and you didn't die. I saw your box when I worked cleaning the home of the General Gouverneur. On the walls they hung pretty pictures, I counted a hundred and thirty-two pictures, two hundred etchings, a hundred tapestries, forty-nine easy chairs, twenty-two carpets! Once I brought champagne and milk to their party and then they discovered the little girl when I went to get a doctor to separate her shin from her thigh, there I saw your box. The box played "Silent Night." Once I counted ships in the river, I wanted to dream of how I'd go to Canada, I had some uncle there who didn't write a word, but was there. The ships sailed without me, I remembered Petlura, my uncle was his soldier, now in Canada, you remember how a ship looks: masts, cables, chimneys, flags, and here I'm drawing you a ship, Ebenezer.
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I look at what he draws, try to remember and can't. It seems his name was Yazhik. Where did they all go?
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Among the hundreds of women standing at the ropes stretched by the marines was Rachel Blau. When the ship anchored the sirens' wail sawed through the port and flags were raised and lowered at a dizzying pace and then the gangplank was lowered and the first off were the coffins. Then the wounded were carried on stretchers. On the dock stood tense young marines in polished uniforms, saluting. A band played marches. Lionel disembarked with the wounded officers who received a noisy welcome and women shrieked hysterically. Rachel discovered him between a young woman and a back turned to her with his eyes fixed on the ship. Only when he turned around did Rachel see Joseph Rayna and trembled. If she hadn't been pressed among the hysterical women, the wife of the Shirt King would have collapsed, but they pressed her and she didn't collapse. The young Joseph Rayna, gazing at the city, looked as if all the women waving their hands had come only for him. He smiled at them, and Rachel saw Lionel hold on to him and with the young woman they came down the gangplank.
When she looked at Joseph, Lionel said: Mother, meet Samuel, and he said: Sam, my name's Sam, and she smiled, and what once she couldn't do she now did in the arms of her son, she pitied herself, forced a smile, and shook Lily's hand.
Lily glanced at Rachel and saw how Samuel and Rachel looked at one another. Lily kissed Rachel's face.
The band went on playing and Lionel muttered something to a young officer who limped toward him and slipped away from there to the open arms of a young woman holding a baby. Lionel was the oldest officer of the group, his hair was gray, carrying the kitbag he looked like a military commander in propaganda movies. Genghis Khan he isn't, said Rachel doubtfully, like her husband, she too thought Lionel would never excel at selling shirts, but neither of them had expectations. Her husband maintained with a trace of envy that Lionel was meant to hover through life as an artist, and Rachel said: But he was a brave soldier, and her husband said: A good soldier is a luxury, I have to sel
l them shirts and our younger son will carry on my business, Lionel will be fine, I'll take care of him, let him just be healthy, in a family like ours we also need poets, he said with an understanding whose generosity evoked contempt in Rachel's eyes. She loved her husband with a quiet love full of regret for the life she had once cast away to gain what Rebecca had taught her not to want.
Sam saw the tall buildings, a train passed overhead, the ships wailed and an airplane was seen landing at LaGuardia Airport. The might he saw before his eyes terrified Sam, but he remained calm and tried to understand how much Rachel understood about who he was, and when he understood that she understood, he relaxed, that was a victory over Lionel, and he needed that victory.
Outside the fenced area the cars were parked, and in the distance Saul Blau appeared in a checked shirt waiting for his family and listening to a baseball game on the radio. Next to him stood three youngsters who waved at Lionel, who kissed each of them, shook hands warmly with Saul, and Saul shook everybody's hand and tried to hug Lily who was almost swooning and after they got into the station wagon, and started driving, Saul carried on a conversation all by himself. He asked about the war and answered his own questions. He explained where they were going and asked if they knew where they were going, Sam meditated and sank into a doze and thought about the flag that had been raised, and the trumpets, he saw a gray sky touching the sharp roofs, and Saul said: They fucked the Germans and the Japanese, now they'll have money to buy shirts. Sam looked at the street, Lily sat pressed against him, silent. The bustling streets changed to bridges winding into one another. He felt his erection secretly oppressing, wanted to rape a bridge or shirts, to rip the words from the mouth of the man who raised shirts and talked about how it would now be hot in his parents' grave.
