by Yoram Kaniuk
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When he came to Tel Aviv the roof was locked. On the door hung a note: Be back soon, wait for me. Noga climbed up carrying a bag of groceries. They kissed, it was oppressively hot and they stayed on the roof. Below, horns honked as cars got stuck in the convoy. When they went into the house and Noga set the table with the groceries she had just bought, he noticed the pile of letters. There were invitations to memorials, construction bills, printed matter and pieces for proofreading; he kicked the pile and yelled: Come on, let's blow this place. The windows were open and from all of them came the song "Jerusalem of Gold." The song tells of how Jerusalem was empty of people until the Jewish paratroopers conquered it. Too bad we weren't defeated, said Boaz, I could have made you a beautiful corpse. She didn't answer, looked around and thought of the Captain and Mr. Klomin, if only for them the war should have been won. Then they ate hummus at Shmil's restaurant and drank cold water from a whiskey bottle and looked at the vegetables heaped up in the nearby store and fish were brought in nets to the fish warehouse, and Boaz started the car, and said to Shmil: The hummus was great, Shmil, and they left. They parked the car, went into the hotel and spoke English. Boaz said: We're foreign journalists, and the woman smiled and said in Hebrew: Go up to room twentysix. He sealed the windows, and said: The Captain shouldn't have died, Ebenezer is searching for Samuel, Talya's boyfriend died, I'm building tombstones, what a crappy victory!
Outside, maybe the sun set but they couldn't see. Downstairs in the lobby, colored paper strips were surely hung and the music was ear-piercing, but they didn't hear. They played child returning home to mother who's sleeping with the guard. Then they played boy whose father names him after his wife's lovers. Boaz said: I would curse your father if I knew which of his ninety-two women was your mother. And Noga said: You're killing Rebecca's saying, you should have said concubines. He said: It's an Arabic saying and I don't care. The lips burned. The air smelled of old urine, burning cars, and raw flaxseed oil. Noga thought: Is it truly possible to start all over from this moment? They crawled in imaginary battles and she played a girl who writes names on the teleprinter, stood before him only in a bra, he lay on the bed and she was ordered to be a vulture pouncing on a corpse. He didn't shut his eyes, lay without moving, tears flowed onto her cheeks but he didn't give up. When she hovered over him she looked artificial, transparent and airy, but when she landed she was heavy, and when he was filled with dread and yelled, she stopped and he signaled angrily: Go on! Go on! And the tears kept flowing, and Boaz said: Got to know how to celebrate victory before it turns into a bank account. She slapped his face and he played dead again, but his eyes were wide open. The ceiling was filthy and he said: You're a great vulture. Then, he squashed the vulture and kissed it and they lay there, and didn't move, like a couple of elderly lovers whose blood pressure would go up with every movement. They guessed the dark thickening outside and sensed the flow of the hours, the moments, minutes and seconds, and her insides were holding his power, and when a gloomy smile of triumph spread their lips, they fell asleep.
At dawn, Boaz woke up and was still inside her. When it hardened, she groaned in her sleep, but didn't wake up. Her lips were spread. After he got dressed he went down and bought coffee and rolls, butter and jam. And he came back. He opened the window, and when the light beams caressed her she woke up. She drank the coffee and ate two rolls with jam, sat up in bed, gathered the blanket and wrapped her legs in it, straightened her hair, and he said: I sat with the prime minister, and he told me to go see if the circles were really right. I went, but the foreign minister wasn't there anymore. Two young men were making emergency plans, but the Captain's plans were bolder. Then I bought pencils that said Made in China. Talya came and said the pencils belonged to her boyfriend and put them in the James Bond case and went to screw the adjutant. She said: All the foreign ministers went to a parade. I was suspicious, but I didn't say a thing. I bought you coffee and rolls. Two armored troop carriers collided and I photographed their burned skeletons. Then I made them into a memorial to Dante, who invented the armored troop carrier. When children being taken to the Magen David clinic asked me what circles I was asking about, I fled. Then some man I didn't know and maybe looked like me came out of the camp with a barbed wire fence, maybe me, and one of the foreign soldiers standing there said: Now there'll be bread. A man I love and was a father to me said: Now I'm not alive anymore, we remained alive, but this life isn't ours.
Noga said: You dream nice, the coffee's nice, but you've got to go back.
He asked: Where, Noga? He was sad and silent: Where?
She didn't answer and looked at the window as if there really was something there she wanted to see.
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Yes...
Yes, I also know when they left the hotel. How many tips? Not counted. Sees an article in a pamphlet "Kingdom of Israel," Number 34B. "Before his premature death (quote from the article), A. N. (Akiva Nimrod) Klomin managed to finish page six hundred of his big final letter. That was on June fourth, nineteen sixty-seven. Then Mr. Klomin heard the news, the weather forecast from the Golan to southern Sinai-one day before the war ended-he stood in his bed, sang Hatikvah to the window, and died. But there is also another version ..."
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The Hebrew poet Emanuel the Roman lived in Rome between 1270 and 1332. He knew Dante Alighieri, cured him of his illnesses, held conversations with him, sang him the songs of the Temple he knew from his mother's milk, and gave Dante the ancient meters from which Dante spun his rhymes. Maybe he also loved Beatrice. He was a learned man, a bon vivant, and a poet. Aside from philosophy, Bible interpretations, and sonnets in Italian, he wrote the Notebooks of Emanuel on the model of The Wise One by Rabbi Judah al-Harizi. A witty satire, splendid and restrained rhetoric, poems of lust and love, full of wisdom of life and wisdom of the world, his one poem begins ...
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My dear friend in cold and rainy Germany, here it is light and warm.
Thanks for your last letter.
I asked myself if I am really and truly open to you. Can there be friendship between us? To myself I thought: What is real friendship? Is it possible to understand our encounter at Ebenezer Schneerson's home as an attempt to capture a shadow, when two sides, opposite from one another, you and I, hunt echoes that cannot be captured? You wanted details and I generalize, but I am still horrified and amused by the thought that the Last Jew will be written, or is perhaps already written, by an aging teacher acting-as his wife puts it-his bereaved love and by Germanwriter, a man of the world, an artist who collects literary prizes, whom critics compare with Proust, Joyce, Thomas Mann, and Faulkner, but he's unable to write the story of Ebenezer, Rebecca, Boaz, and Samuel by himself and needs these tidbits, the limping investigations of Teacher Henkin ... From the mendacity of the two of us, from our mutual helplessness, will a book come, or perhaps they will be notes for somebody else, for a better violinist than us who will write this book? Maybe a book should be written as books were written in the Middle Ages. First one version of Faust or Hamlet, and then comes somebody else and writes another version, and on the basis of that version, a play is written, or even a book, and then comes somebody else and writes the new version and so on until Goethe or Shakespeare ... Jordana managed to weep at the cemetery on the anniversary of Menahem's death. (Details!) She encountered Boaz. They met in the Ministry of Defense because of their common work. I don't know exactly how they met. I resented it, but I didn't say a word. Noga told me: "I love that sad Yemenite woman, I love her lost betrayal of Menahem, her dependence on Boaz."
Yes, and the meeting with Jordana. We planned an outing for the Committee of Bereaved Parents. On the phone, Jordana said: We'll meet in a cafe, because it's hard for me to sit and discuss these things in front of Hasha's mocking eyes. I'm no expert in the new cafes, and I remembered Kassit Cafe, once a meeting place for writers and artists, and I said: What about Kassit, and she said, Fine. I walked there and thought that
if I had sat in Kassit after the war I would have met Boaz, who sat there then and waited for me. Unlike me, Jordana took a taxi and so she was late. After all the years when I hadn't set foot in the place, the waiters looked as if they were still expecting those artists. They waited on me nicely, immediately served me what I ordered, and smiled at me as if they were protesting the forsaken youngsters with wild manes sitting there.
A young woman with open lips, shut eyes, sat there looking as if she were rapt in mysterious thoughts. Artists yelled and cursed one another, and when a person entered and wanted to sit at an empty table, the waiter took it under advisement and then allowed him to sit and I recalled Mr. Soslovitch and at the same time also understood that he was dead, and at that very moment, Jordana entered the cafe and looked extinguished. Something in her face was depressed and bitter, she looked nervous, stood next to me distracted, I said Hello Jordana, I was so glad to see her, and she said Hey Henkin and corrected it to Hello Henkin, but the words were said distractedly, absentmindedly, she barely saw me, she sat down in a chair, muttered something, excused herself and got up, went to the bar, next to where the owner of the place always slept with his enormous belly thrust forward and his legs stretched out in front of him and on his face a sweet glow of a giant teddy bear, asked permission to use the phone, dialed and sank into a long whispered conversation, I saw her weep a few times and then hang up decisively, amazed at the emptiness that filled her and very slowly she came to me, tried to smile through the screen of tears, said: You look great, Henkin, she sat down next to me, put her hands on the table, played a little with the salt shaker that had more grains of rice than salt, lowered her hands in astonishment, the salt shaker hit the pepper shaker with a bang that was maybe too loud for her. She groped in her purse, took out a cigarette and lighter, put the cigarette back in her purse, lit a cigarette that had been stuck in the corner of her mouth before, for a moment, she shut her eyes whose lids pearled with tears, opened them wide in a certain amazement, as if she didn't know exactly where she was and if she had already ended the long phone conversation, she inhaled deeply on the cigarette, and all I could see was a sadness spiraling up in a thin curling smoke, and I, maybe because of my sensitivity to her, maybe because of memories that surfaced in me, I looked at the man sitting at Soslovitch's table drinking beer and I tried to think about him, and Jordana played with the lighter and said: What a day, what a day, twice she said that, as if she weren't at all sure she had said what she said. The sorrow I saw in the meeting of her lips looked as if the smoke came to the soles of her feet and clouded my ability to talk with her about the outing we were about to plan. I said to her: The man eating gizzards and drinking beer is sitting at the special table. Maybe it was an attempt to distract, I really don't know anymore. Mr. Soslovitch, I said to her, sold locomotives. Ever since the establishment of the state he sells only one locomotive a year. A confirmed bachelor. Always dressed up, with a tie and a handsome hat.
Soslovitch loved artists and so he'd come here with the Cohen family. Mr. Cohen was then a bank manager or a finan cial advisor, I don't remember anymore, and Mrs. Cohen, a big, handsome woman (her father was one of the founders of Wadi Hanin and left her some land) had a house that served as a salon for artists and writers. I'm not well-versed in gossip, but Mrs. Cohen and Mr. Soslovitch fell in love with one another in nineteen twenty-nine, while Mr. Cohen used to travel a lot and seemed satisfied. He performed important missions for the newborn state, loved his wife's artists, and was a close friend of Mr. Soslovitch. Every Saturday afternoon they'd meet at Kassit, sit at the regular table, eat and drink. Sometimes they'd even hug each other emotionally, or would become pale and sing sad songs in Yiddish or Russian or Hebrew. Mr. Soslovitch would come alone every afternoon, sit at his regular table, and until he'd leave, nobody dared to sit at the table. Now a stranger is sitting there, and that's a sign that Mr. Soslovitch is dead. And so, out of thoughts of distant years I didn't even know I remembered, Jordana said, half pensively and half provocatively: What does that have to do with us?
What does that have to do with us? I asked.
Me? she said, blushed and repeated: What does that have to do, you burst into an open door and that doesn't suit you, Henkin. I said to her: I was trying to distract you from your gloom, and Jordana said to me: You're too old and wise to believe that if you tell a woman like me about a locomotive salesman who sold one locomotive a year, I'll forget what I'm weeping about. Did stories like that help you?
I was silent and drank coffee.
Then she ordered a beer and I saw the beer foam stick to the lips of the fragile madonna of death, and then she hissed between her lips: Son of a bitch, that Boaz Schneerson. She tried to smile, tears again pearled in her eyes, and she said: Let's drop the son of a bitch and talk about the outing. The son of a bitch said the stalactite cave is a delightful place, so I want some other place, Henkin, and now she almost yelled, since the girl who was meditating mysterious thoughts opened her eyes wide and looked at us in amazement and let her head drop on the table and fell asleep. I thought, Who sells us locomotives today? But that thought didn't help me, I couldn't really be concerned.
A few days ago, Harvjiaja brought me a story that was published in one of our journals. The story was written by a writer who fought in the war with Boaz and Menahem. In the story, Boaz appears, along with Noga, and Jordana, under the names of Aminadam, Mira, and Shulamith. I translate the story for you with the original names so as not to confuse you. The title of the story is "Vulture." The story annoyed me. Only after I read it did I understand what Jordana's rage meant. I wondered how the writer knew things I didn't know. But those are facts and from them we have to interweave "our" story. The writer's name is Nadav ben-Ami.
[A part is missing] ... And Jordana left her office and went to the street. The light was dazzling, people who were scared of the heat weren't the shadows she had thought. She stood in line for the bus and since she didn't have anything to do with her hands, she straightened her hair and tried to squint her eyes because of the dazzling light. On the bus she stood crowded between people who were pungent with sweat and the driver yelled, but his voice was blended into the turmoil. When she squeezed her ticket, her hand was wet and the coins in her hand seemed to be swimming in water. The sights passed by in the blurred windows, and a woman sitting next to where Jordana was standing tried without much success to open the window wider. When she came to the stop, she got off slowly, which annoyed the driver who muttered something and even locked the door when the blast of the lock hit her spine. A sudden burst of wind from an air-conditioned shop made her shudder with pleasure. She turned to the street, which, now, at dusk, was empty. The night watchman in the big building, whose lower floors were built now, put a pita in his mouth filled with tomatoes and olives. The tomato dripped red juice and he wiped the blood of the tomato with a lace handkerchief. When he tried to smile at her he looked distorted because of the tomato and maybe also because the olive pit didn't come out in time, so he spat out the pit and the smile was crushed. But she had already crossed the street and didn't hear the curse. A car sped by and she jumped, the watchman couldn't help laughing, and the tomato dripped even more and she looked at the house, and didn't move. Just as the woman who lived alone in the house next door started hanging laundry on the clothesline, Jordana lit a cigarette and immediately let the cigarette drop to the ground and crushed it with her foot. The watchman looked at the cigarette and the tiny spark that still flickered in it. Jordana went upstairs, even though she didn't know where she got the strength to climb.
Noga sat on the roof and embroidered. Jordana looked at Noga and Noga raised her face and said: It's so hot! Jordana couldn't say a thing, she touched Noga's face, let her stroke her hand softly, and as they stood there obeying something remaining between them without words for a moment, they seemed to be hoarding an anger that had dissolved into their standing. Jordana drank water straight from the faucet and only then did she pour herself a gl
ass of water from the jar she took out of the refrigerator and drank from the glass until she was amazed that there wasn't a drop left in it. Dead tired, she looked at the old grandfather clock without hands and allowed her clothes, with a light and unconscious help of her hands, to drop off her. When she stood in front of the grandfather clock, which she was apparently still looking at, but didn't see, air blew from the vaulted window and she saw the upper end of the wheel of the setting sun and a plane was seen cutting the air and descending on the way to the airport. The breeze lightened the heat a little and her sweat cooled. As in a daze, she moved to the shower. For a little while she stood unmoving under the stream of cold water. Then, without drying herself with the many towels hanging there, she put on a robe, and dripping water, stuck to the robe that was clasped to her, she went out to the twilight on the roof and looked at its serene riot, and Noga said: Sit down, I'll make you coffee. And Jordana said: I'll make it myself, she sat and looked at Noga and saw again the woman hanging laundry in the house next door. She got up, and without looking at Noga, she went to the kitchen, put on water, waited until it boiled, poured Nescafe and some saccharine, went outside holding the full coffee cup, and said: I dripped all over your kitchen.
The wheel of the sun almost disappeared, leaving behind an astounding wake. The shadows were starting to fill the roof and penetrated between the flowerpots. Jordana, still dripping water, drank the coffee and started dancing. Noga came to her. They stood so close they almost touched one another, Jordana sipped the coffee she held behind Noga's back, the sun disappeared behind the department store, and Jordana said: What a disgusting pink, and Noga looked at the old antenna and saw a bird landing, cleaning its feathers, and soaring again. Noga gently pinched a bush growing in a giant flowerpot, picked a jasmine flower, brought it to her nose and smelled it as in a long ceremony and then, gently, she moved it back and forth in front of Jordana's nose. Jordana stood transfixed, her face almost didn't move toward the flower, her nostrils expanded, and then, with a quick movement, she tried to snatch the flower from Noga's hands, and in a twinkling, Noga managed to hide it behind her. When she moved and stamped on the floor, the phonograph started playing. Jordana could move from the spot, and so, even though she didn't pay any heed to it, she let the half-full cup drop from her hand and shatter on the floor. Only after the smash was heard did her hand start shaking again. Noga didn't avert her face. Her back reconsidered, and when Jordana came to her, she waited until she was clinging to her and bent over, picked up a shard of the coffee cup whose slivers were scattered around them and black coffee still poured from the shard. The coffee was thick and a drop fell on her shorts. Her leg was long and well-shaped, and Jordana went down on all fours and cleaned the drop of coffee dripping from the pants on Noga's well-shaped leg. Noga held out her hand, and moved it very close to Jordana's long hair, got wet from the water still dripping from the hair and Jordana stopped shaking.