by Yoram Kaniuk
Tape / -
Lily sits and combs her hair while Sam looks at her trying to understand. The beauty of her movements, holding the comb in the hair, the head bent above and behind to right or left, fill him with a dim sense of joy he never knew before.
Sam and Riba-Riba at the Easter service in church. The sorcerer is about to don garments of authority, his face is white and pale. He dons a gigantic hat that looks like a miniature church building. With his terrifying magic the sorcerer stops a great erosion of force that becomes thin and pleasant. The pulpit is high and gilded. Music bursts from all sides of the church, people in their best clothes, looking like they're embalmed, kneel at the altar of colored lights and a smell of incense rises into the air. Sam thinks that a temple like that can imprison divinity, speak in its name, tame it, and at the same time not let it in. The words whispered there are important and unimportant at the same time. The service isn't about life, but death. He thinks of the synagogue where he'd spent Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah eve in his childhood, its low ceiling, the poor God with a white beard sitting in the locked Ark with a few meager ornaments, and facing Him men wrapped in prayer shawls and a charred smell of tobacco rising from them. Sam stands at the mysterious service held in the pulpit and thinks that God has a place only through the mask, since only there is He truly strong and false. The confessionals furnish feelings with institutionalization that turns into a linguistic inquisition, a rule of power and force for a gossipy human mumbling, and like that, an ancient and savage Torah can become noble, full of splendor and so sexy. Sam didn't really know how close that notion of his was to the opinion of SS Sturmbahnfuhrer Kramer, to whom he once bowed whenever he saw him passing by.
One day, after Lily wrote two hundred words on his body starting with the letter A and drank fine rose wine that had been chilled in the refrigerator before she went to abort a German child at an abortion farm in the mountains of Pennsylvania (at that time Lionel was sitting offended with himself and imprisoned in guilt feelings and trying to write a story while wearing new house slippers he claimed sharpened his ability to think and Sam was trying to write for himself the nightmares of the past night), Sam looked at Lionel and said to him: Statistics, Lionel, write statistics in crappy rhymes! Make a ceremony. See a church. See a sorcerer with words in Latin. And Lionel said: She went to abort a son, Sam, and Sam said: Blessed be the just Judge, and went to Riba-Riba. She wanted to take him to the village, to her parents' house, to lie with him on the soft green lawn, introduce him to the cows and horses of her childhood, but he wanted to celebrate mysterious ceremonies and understand to whom the disaster truly happened. He introduced Riba-Riba to a fellow and told him, with premeditation (because he knew that the fellow was in love with Riba-Riba and would tell her what he would tell him) about their sex life and he did tell her. And then, he told Lily with a savage laugh, she was offended and phoned, and I hung up. She went with that Trevor and lay with him on the damp lawn near her stinking horses and cows and they got wet and came to the little church where a bored priest married them, and after that Sam tried to rape Lily in the kitchen and she said: They took a child out of me, Sam, don't touch me, and he slapped himself instead of slapping her.
Tape / -
Question: Have you ever known a person named Sam Lipp?
Ebenezer Schneerson: No.
Question: Where did Samuel Lipker disappear?
Ebenezer: He went for a moment and disappeared ...
Question: Did Samuel Lipker have any connection with the theater?
Ebenezer: I was his puppet. He took money. He's also my son.
Question: What year are we living in?
Ebenezer: The clocks and calendars were set by Samuel. He doesn't come now. I need him.
Question: Thank you.
Tape / -
At night he'd wander around the city, to hear jazz at Bop City, Minton Playhouse, Birdland. Sam loved the organized improvisation, the celebratory sadness they made from New Orleans funeral music. He'd sit in a little bar on Eighth Avenue and order drinks for girls who would giggle at the sight of his eyes. "Awful eyes," one woman called him. Once he sat next to a girl with unstylish gray eyes, who reeked of perfume. The short hair no longer symbolized any regret and was deliberately miserable, cheap dye poured from it. When they drank, she mixed whiskey with water. Then they went to a small hotel, and when he fell asleep after she took pity on him and he called her: Crystal Heart, and she told him he was a darling wolf, she stole his money. The gonorrhea started two days later. The doctor gave him penicillin injections and then he went to see a play in the Village and fell asleep. On the fourth evening, he passed by the bar and saw her. He went to Washington Depot, came to the gate of the house, and the dog ran to him wagging its tail. He yelled: I love Melissa. Through the window Mrs. Brooks saw him and ran to the telephone, but he yelled: I've got American gonorrhea now! He kicked the dog and ran to the boulevard, where rain was falling on the thick treetops and didn't get to the lush ground full of the moisture of crushed leaves. He lay on the edge of a small field, between pines and oaks, and thought of why he had kicked the dog. He went into the forest and yelled: Melissa, Melissa, until he became hoarse and then he kissed a cow lying on the ground chewing. A person passing by said: Cows lying is a sign of rain. Sam wondered if the cows also knew that there really had been rain. He took the bus back to the city, and even though he was soaked to the skin, he fell asleep. When he returned to the bar to look for Crystal Heart, he was thrown out by the bartender in an apron, who had little eyes with a cold metallic glint in them. At dawn, he lay in wait for the bartender near the parking lot Mr. Blau had recently bought to build the biggest store for colored shirts in the eastern United States. He knocked down the bartender, wrapped him in a bag, and beat him until he heard his bones grow faint. Sam whispered to him: I wasn't born yesterday!
The man groaned but nobody heard. Later, the police found him. The cops who got a weekly payment happened to be at a crash course in Virginia and the substitute captain didn't want to reorganize the area. The bar was closed despite the damage to the police car and over the protest of the sergeant, who got forty dollars a month and came back from Virginia to get his take. Sam deigned to testify in court. He had received threats by phone and he wrote down every word that was said and told Lionel he was studying theater from life instead of vice versa, and Lionel looked at him and recalled how he fell asleep at the beautiful play they saw in the Village, tried to understand, but was tired and fell asleep. When they tried to stab him and missed-he didn't retract his complaint, even when a policeman who came back from the crash course tried to persuade him not to testify. After the sentence was declared, he felt relief, but also abhorrence. He looked cheerfully at Crystal Heart and at the kicked bartender. There were no marks on the bartender. Sam didn't admit to any attack. They looked at him with cold, flashing hatred, but he said: You're terrific. Everything exploded then, everything he had kept inside from the day he had left the camp was now a ring of suffocation. The play he went to see with RibaRiba opened the dam. Now he didn't know when he was dreaming and when he was daydreaming and all the time the SS men were beating him and he was shrieking, No! No! And he saw his mother naked and his father expecting him with a diamond in his rectum. Everything was woven in his mind with dark and humiliating ceremonies carried out on lighted stages.
Tape / -
Dear Lionel,
For some years now, I've been following your son. You asked me to help him, you told me to try to advise, you're a senior member of the university, you said, and I did keep my word. Sometimes it's hard for me to understand, Sam's past is a sealed chapter for me, while you refuse to tell me. When he dropped out of regular school and registered for the theater department, I was afraid, but his talent is impressive, and I thought to my self: Well, you also maintained that he should do whatever he wanted. But when day after day he wandered around cemeteries and seduced women to come with him to their houses and performed plays for them that later damaged t
hem emotionally, I thought I should do something, but I didn't know how. What Sam could say in his defense in the case of that woman, Mrs. G., which you yourself were involved in: "She put on a striptease for me, because she thought men are aroused by black panties, and afterward because she thought I had a sexual disease-I told her about the gonorrhea I picked up-I kissed a boot and acted for her how I'd fuck its mate. And then she laughed, what's she complaining about all of a sudden?" It was hard for me to explain to him, the anger in him is incomprehensible to me. What attracts him is the human sewer, or magic. I don't understand what all that has to do with theater. In my opinion, he's playing with fire and that fire is buried inside him. He told me that on one of his visits to the cemeteries, a woman saw him, took him to her room, undid his trousers (these are his words), and when he penetrated her, he fell asleep. When he woke up, he said, she was naked and smoking a cigar. He said he turned on the radio. I'm reconstructing the details that coalesce into a picture you should be aware of. He said he combines tidbits in his mind like a man named Ebenezer did. Women in cemeteries, religious ceremonies, music he hears in jazz clubs-all that, he said, is intertwined, into one equation. And he can, he told me, recall who a disaster truly happened to. What disaster, Lionel? When he left the theater department and joined a theater that traveled throughout the state, you told me to persuade him not to go, but you know how much I tried and the result, nil! What I do know is that instead of studying theater in our department, one of the best in the United States, he worked in lighting, sets, as a stagehand, and learned to sew shrouds (his words) and to be a stage manager you claimed then that I should persuade him to work in what he really wanted to do and not in stage management of an amateur theater that traveled from one small town to another, but I didn't succeed. Look Lionel, Sam recently came back. He came back to the department and I accepted him. What you may not know is that he doesn't study but is preparing a play with three actors and has even managed to persuade me to help him. I'm writing to you because if there are complaints about my behavior, know that I tried, but he has some charm that compels you (me) to give in to him; and so it happened, Lionel, that people who studied four years in the department, successfully finished and did all their assignments, are waiting to put on their play while Sam, who didn't study in a regular way, who hit a teacher, who slept with, or in the words of one witness, raped two women directors we brought to the department, is producing a play and I, I am its sponsor. And as for the rest-
Yours ...
After Sam's premiere performance, there on the stage covered with thousands of pairs of shoes while a gigantic heart pounded metallically and three actors fought some war against themselves, Rachel Blau decided to reveal to her son who Sam Lipp was and who Lionel's father was. Her husband told her: Why is that so important? I'll take care of everybody and if Sam wants theater and Lionel wants to write stories, let them. Rachel didn't argue with him. She took the subway because she didn't know how to drive and didn't want to waste money on a taxi. When she came out of the station, she fainted. People who from now on would look alike to her took her to a nearby hospital. Nuns dressed in white laid her in a narrow bed, above her hung a big crucifix and below burst the melancholy cold sound of the nuns' singing. When Lionel came, she smiled at him and thought he was all the people she had seen before. She was transferred to Mount Sinai Hospital but her condition didn't improve. Lily took Lionel's hand and then touched Rachel. Rachel didn't know who they were anymore. She turned to Sam and spoke Polish. She muttered and suddenly fell silent. Her face contorted and Sam told her in Polish: Regards to Rebecca Secret Charity. Lily said: She'll recover, but everybody knew she wouldn't.
A week later, the play of the shoes closed and the reviews came in. Sam listened and was silent. Then he said: The play was no good, but I know what I want and what I want will take time, but it will be better. He came home and saw Lionel and Lily sitting with dictionaries in their hands and Lily was editing an article for Lionel for The New York Times. Sam looked at them and glanced again at a story that Lionel published in Harpers, and said: I'm a wretched creature, Lionel, a creature others die for, Ebenezer recites them, I'm not an expert in writing stories, in your articles you're wise and smart, so you succeed, but the heroes in your stories aren't wise like you, and that's not good.
The next day, Lily found a letter. Sam had sent the letter with a dog he rented in a shop of postal dogs. The dog knocked on the door and Lily opened it. There was also a bill and she paid it, patted the dog, and it wagged its tail and left. The money was in its mouth. The letter said:
Lionel, here's a list of materials to weave your poems; twenty-one thousand synagogue curtains, seventeen tons of brown and black hair, six tons of blond hair, two tons of silver and gold teeth, eight million pairs of shoes, one million six hundred thousand pairs of earrings, two million three hundred thousand silver candlesticks, two million little Havdalah towers of silver and other metals. Two tons of diamonds, thousands of kilometers of train travel, coal for the trains, track repairs, employment of train workers. Thousands of kilometers of barbed wire fence and coils, thousands of tons of gas, bullets, spades for burial, crematoria, one million five hundred thousand used beds, factories, shops, research institutes, fur hats, granite hats, felt hats, cloth hats, wool hats. Dental crowns, phosphate from bones, fat for soap, cooking ovens fit for use, cars! Silver, dollars, marks, zlotys, francs-together, more than three billion dollars, machines, presses, stockings, overcoats, carpets, works of art, luxuries, etc....
I hired the dog who brings this letter from a shop on Fourteenth Street because he looks like Ebenezer. Calculate the burials, the killings, the fear, the frozen feet, the time wasted rewriting and writing every execution, spying, axes, chamber pots. Does the energy really get lost, Lionel, if all that is later turned into a book of tears hidden by Jews in cellars?
Tape / -
The Lamentfor the Death of the Jews was written over a year. Lionel revised, corrected, rewrote, and then, when it snowed nonstop for three straight days, the first chapter of the Lament was published in The New York Times. It was based on statistics. Reactions were immediate and excited. By the time the snow melted, Lionel had been interviewed on television and had signed a contract with Harper and Row. A few days before Christmas, Sam brought home a fir tree he bought on the street. Lionel, who was concluding a phone conversation with his new agent, said: Why on earth a tree, Sam? Got to be, said Sam, I'm fed up with cemeteries. I searched for life in zoos and I studied beautiful and natural death in the Museum of Natural History, I know how living creatures turn all dread and hostility into ceremony. A Christmas tree is also a ceremony. They hate together, love together, forgive together, kill together. Lily said: A beautiful tree, Lionel, and everybody has trees.
Not me, said Lionel. Rachel is still dying in the hospital. Saul Blau would bring shirts, and in pain at his wife's condition, he started in his mind's eye to dress his hungry children in all the shirts their parents, may they rest in Paradise, didn't have. Sam already had seven hundred sixtyseven shirts and didn't wear even one of them.
In London, the section that appeared in New York was published. Criticism was excited there, too. Dead Jews are excellent material for artistic success, says Sam, the death of a Jew works today, and Lionel who had turned into a success story, written up in Time, felt crushed, borrowed from Sam, incomprehensible to himself, humiliated.
Lionel didn't think all that was happening to him, he said: Jesus was a tremendous success story and he started believing that things were again happening to Sam, and Sam-dammit-won't put up a fir tree in my room.
Sam came out of the subway station. In his hand he held the hand of a tall girl. Her name was Licinda. Once they had studied acting together. When they acted an improvised piece and he called her Melissa, he was filled with a wave of warmth he had never felt, and then he mocked her and said how tall and shrewd she was. Maybe that's love, Licinda said then and he laughed. Licinda had long hair as smooth as silk
. It was light brown and looked like a cascade. A rather nervous laugh was sketched on her open face by tormented nerves. Sam and Licinda walked in the dirty melting snow and bought wine and flowers. Loaded with shopping bags, they went down the steps and entered the house. Lily said: Sam brought a girlfriend with flowers and wine. Lionel saw the shy but aggressive laugh on Licinda's face and wanted to hug her as an old acquaintance. Lily took off Licinda's wet coat and gave her some hot wine and together they stood in front of the fireplace. Big logs wisped thin smoke and spread a pleasant warmth in the room, and Sam asked Licinda to help him. Lionel sat down in the brown easy chair, put on the new eyeglasses he had started using a few months earlier and wasn't yet used to, and Lily asked, What are you doing, and Sam said: Trimming the tree for Santa, Lionel. Lionel said: That's stupid, and Lily said: Lionel, your son wants a fir tree so let there be a tree, and Lionel said: He's a grown-up now, my sons die in private hospitals in Pennsylvania and don't put up fir trees in my apartments. They didn't respond, even though they saw Lily turn pale but recover immediately and they stood the tree in a box of sand, reinforced it, Licinda took out the ornaments that Sam had bought before and the chain of small lights she had hidden in her purse. Lionel asked: What exactly is your full name? And she said, My full name, Mr. Grumpy, is Licinda Eliot Hayden. Lionel said: His grandmother is dying and he puts up a fir tree! Licinda tried to help Lily put up water and make coffee, but Lionel got up from his easy chair, took a bottle of scotch out of the chest, poured drinks, added ice, and gave one to Licinda. She understands that better than coffee, he said angrily. Sam hung the chain of lights and plugged it in. For a moment the lights shorted out. They saw themselves as demons in the light of the red stumps of wood blazing in the fireplace. Sam fixed the broken light, fixed the short, and a pleasant light spread in the room. Lily went to Sam and gave him a cup of black coffee. He stood next to the tree he was trimming, drank the coffee as Lionel, Lily, and Licinda drank scotch and turned on the radio. Christmas songs were playing on the radio. He hummed the songs to himself, and Lionel said: Lily, light Hanukkah candles. Lily said: Not me, and not you either. I'm just a wasted father, said Lionel, I didn't teach you anything. Sam laughed and said: What I've forgotten you won't have time to learn. And then he added: You're too sentimental, Lionel. You're able to yearn for things that never were. I'll tell a story: A man married off his son to a woman. He made a banquet for his friends and when they had eaten, he said to his son, Go up to the attic and bring us wine from the barrel that's kept there. The son went up to the attic, went to the barrel, was bitten by a snake, and died. The father waited and the son didn't come down. The guests ate and the father went up and saw his son thrown dead between the barrels. He waited until the guests had eaten and drunk and finished reciting the blessing, and he said to them, Gentlemen, you didn't come to recite the blessing of the bridegrooms today, but the blessing of mourners. Not to bring my son to the wedding canopy did you come, but to put him in the grave.
