by Yoram Kaniuk
Boaz said: In all those years I never came into the room. He saw the closed yellow writing desk, the coat hanging on a hook, Menahem's cloth cap, the picture of Lana Turner, yellowed with age, the chair next to an old issue of the children's magazine. In the other room Hasha sits and measures him in the distance, she knows how to curb the sweep of hostility she reluctantly felt for him, and that thought brought a crooked smile to his lips. He yelled: If you loved me, Hasha, I might have been saved, and Hasha looked toward the room and saw Boaz putting down the television, seeking the connection to the antenna to bring the cord to Henkin's outlet, and she said: This house is dry, Jordana can live in your enemy's room, Boaz, in fact that's what you all deserve.
When Henkin went to Hasha, she let him hug her, stood still, and for a long time she stayed in his arms. Then she reached out her hand, touched Boaz, and suddenly flushed, came even closer, stroked him, pushed him away from her, touched his hand and moved her hand away, sat down and stood up again, and called out: Jordana, turn on your television. She calmed down, sat down, and for the first time in a long time she looked at the pictures on the walls. From one of them looked Menahem's face. She said: I didn't even succeed in hating properly. You're the most corrupt person I knew, but I know one thing, you once saved a child, once you really saved Menahem, why couldn't you save him when you really should have?
Henkin muttered something to himself and Hasha called to him: Don't mutter, Henkin, when you need to you know how not to be in the right place, give me grandchildren, Boaz, you hear me, give me a grandson, I want to be a woman, you hear? To be a good old woman. Jordana slammed the door and the announcer's voice was heard clearly. Maybe she was trying to imprison things, not to let them be heard, she had to give birth to her children from the giant set she loved, that filled half the wall of the room of somebody who was her lover and now strangers want to give birth to his grandson ... In fact a son, she said, and then she didn't hear another thing.
When Boaz came two days later and Jordana looked at him, he saw a chilly darkened look in her eyes. He understood how total the blow was.
Three poets spoke, said Jordana, I watched them. One was fair-haired, with beautiful blue, somewhat scared eyes, full of black gold, he talked like the last man in the world, something both bombastic and blighted, measured and solemn, as if he stood on the frontier of ability, and so he had to find the most beautiful and elegant words to describe that frontier. The second poet was full of joy to be talking, and the third was a little suicidal, defeated, sad, spoke evil of himself, maybe it was a plea, I looked at him, I wanted him to be good, and after a few minutes, he started twisting, muttered something, moved a little, I think the microphone slipped away from him, and then he smiled, and after the smile he said a few things I wasn't listening to, but his eyes weren't so sad anymore, the gloom almost disappeared, I think I was good for him.
Boaz listened and didn't say a word. He had already heard about that from Noga. Noga spoke with the doctor. The doctor claimed that he refused to put her in the hospital because she wasn't really sick but was hiding from herself. The idea that she was able to cure people of their sorrow through television scared Boaz. He did what he had wanted to do for a long timehe went to the man Jordana had succeeded in smiling at on television and knocked on his door. The man gave Boaz a cup of coffee, complained that he hadn't been paid for the writing Boaz used in many memorial books and even published in three albums. Boaz didn't respond to the complaint and asked what had happened to him on the television program. The man was somewhat perplexed and said: I sat there, the two of them were talking and I didn't know what to say, I'm getting old, nothing happened, suddenly I felt as if strange eyes were looking at me, without understanding what I was doing, I moved, the microphone almost fell, I smiled, I wasn't there anymore, I spoke, what I said afterward was all right, somebody got me into a conversation, I spoke out of that somebody's mouth and I spoke to him at the same time. I felt enormous love pouring to me.
Jordana asked them to let her help people. Doctors at Tel Hashomer Hospital laughed at Boaz when he told them the story, but Doctor Lowenthal said it was worth a try. Doctor Lowenthal (whose son was killed in a plane crash at the Suez Canal) sat next to Jordana in the Henkin house as she looked at petals. There was a sad saxophone player. Jordana said he had been worrying her for some time. She concentrated on him, and after a minute or two, he started smiling. In the middle of the fucking program, he said afterward, I'm sitting and playing, feeling shitty, all of a sudden some woman says give me a kiss. And I smiled, it was weird with all the directors and cameramen around.
And one day, when they saw a soldier who had lost his eyesight skiing on Mount Hermon, Jordana looked at the screen, concentrated, and suddenly she shouted in terror, fell on the ground, bounced, and by the time Boaz bent over her and kissed her hard and hit her, she calmed down. After that she fainted.
They took Jordana to the hospital. She grew fat and lay in a locked room without a doorknob. She doesn't want to see television. Wants to marry Menahem. Boaz promised her there was a rabbi who married his grandmother's grandmother to a dead man and he'd bring her that rabbi, but it might take time because the rabbi died two hundred years ago.
So I'll wait for him, said Jordana. And Noga wept and then said: But she does help people, she gave them a smile, what does it matter if it's a disease? It's a disease that does good for others and for her. We should have left her in the suburbs, she was happier and Boaz had no answer. He thought about Herod. King Herod, he said, ordered a hundred Jewish grandchildren arrested and left in a pit until he died. On the day he died, he ordered, they were to be executed one by one. He said they were to do this so they wouldn't have a holiday when he died. And the queen of Norway, Sigrid, ordered all her vassal kings to come to a banquet in her palace, and when all the vassal kings came and ate and drank, she burned the house down on them, and said: That will teach them to lust for the queen of Norway.
Tape / -
Jordana lay, her eyes impassive, her body twitching, needing injections of tranquilizers every few hours. All she needs, said Boaz, is a television set to love. To know that they didn't teach me psychiatry ten years. For a month Jordana tossed and turned, stopped twitching and started reading the temperatures in various cities in the world in the newspapers. She repeated indifferently: If only I had a private room with a big television set, I'd be able to help people get rid of their sadness. When they came to visit her, she'd shut her eyes and list the temperatures in the cities of the world: Oslo-3 degrees, Amsterdam-6, Copenhagen-3, and then she'd grimace mysteriously, like a person who can see far beyond what's visible, and say: A barometric low is moving over Turkey and causing clouds there, and Boaz holds her hand and tells her how empty the house is without her, and when she heard that she burst into wild laughter, bounced, and sometimes they'd have to tie her to the bed.
Tape / -
Boaz begat Ebenezer, Ebenezer begat Joseph and Nehemiah. Joseph begat Shlomzion. Shlomzion begat Light of the Gentiles. Light of the Gentiles begat Joshua. Joshua begat Spear Father of the Mountain. Spear Father of the Mountain begat himself. And Spear Father of the Mountain begat Joseph who begat Rebecca who gave birth to Secret Charity who begat.
Tape / -
Dear sir,
You surely remember your visit to our house a few months ago. You came, as you said, to understand the house where Melissa was born. Ever since you came to our house Melissa has returned to live in the house. I'm old and close to the place where you wait for ghosts my father used to tell me about, and maybe the very idea that three men, years apart, came to seek my daughter who died fifty years ago, instilled in me a vague dread. Maybe that etched on life itself. Something happened to my wife and me. After fifty years, we're poring over old notebooks again. Reading Melissa's school essays, I sit at home, I practically don't go to the office anymore, my oldest son runs the sales center, and today I thought: Our governor, he's also a Jew, I hope he won't come searching for Meliss
a.
My wife read me a section from the diary of Timothy Edward, one of the first in her family to immigrate to America. In his diary he describes how he stood on the deck of the ship in the port of Amsterdam on his way to America. On the deck of a nearby ship stood a Jew and prayed. They started talking. The Jew was on his way to Jerusalem to prepare the "dust of the Land of Canaan." Timothy Edward was on his way to prepare the "dust of the Land of Canaan" in the new world. They talked all night. The grandson of that Jew was that Rabbi Kriegel who came from Hebron to our city two hundred years ago. We talked about him, remember?
And with that story that connects Licinda, Melissa and Sam, I came to Lionel's house. Those were embarrassing moments. Sam looked at me in amazement, and Lionel, Lionel is old but hasn't changed. The same aristocratic look, wounded and stubborn, the same perplexed imposing figure, the same force. At the sight of him, some anger that had been burning in me for many years vanished. All of us loved Melissa. That was the most ridiculous and sublime thing that had ever happened to me.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, two men became friends on the decks of two ships on their way to prepare the same kingdom in different places and now, on Melissa's grave, they meet again, I said, not without an overdramatic expression so foreign to my nature.
We talked all night. Sam began. He spoke a long time about Melissa's eternal beauty. And I, I was silent and drank whiskey.
I Joined Sam on his trip to Northampton to see the students act parts of the play he had produced about a year ago. We flew in the Ford company plane. The idea that Ford was flying us there amused him quite a bit. Licinda didn't talk and we looked at the view below and tried to understand how our paths had crossed so many years after Melissa died. Below we saw snowcovered fields.
I told Sam what I told you about the Catholic church next to the chemistry lab. We were guests in the Gillette House. It was built about a hundred years ago with a contribution by Mr. Gillette, inventor of the razor blade. The girls of Gillette sang "Greensleeves" in thin, scary voices. Sam claimed that they looked like Melissa. He also told them: You who will marry the gods of industry, the leaders of this state, are acting in a drama about burned curtains of the Ark of the Covenant! They giggled nervously, and Sam said to Licinda: They're open to indecent suggestions like Melissa, and she-to her creditdidn't even answer. Sam, who drank a lot that night, lectured to the students about what there no longer is in Northampton (and I quote): Samrein or Samuelrein. You're acting in a drama about my naked mother! They turned their heads in amazingly delicate embarrassment and one even wept silently. He asked: Why should you act in a play about a diamond in a rectum? You know that the man who lay there and thought he was my father wasn't my father?
Joanna, the granddaughter of Priscilla and Bud, told me: I feel as if I were chewing my mother's head, blood is flowing between my legs and I'm laughing. And I, who never heard such things, especially not from somebody in my family, stroked her head with a gentleness which, if it had been in me years ago, would have saved a beloved person from death. I walked with Sam to the frozen lake. He went with a local rabbi to a meeting of young Jews. When the rabbi started chatting and talking with him about the meaning he found in his drama, he grabbed the rabbi by the ear and bent it. The rabbi couldn't get away from him and started twisting and shrieking, he bent over and yelled: Why? Why? Why? And Sam lifted him up, cleaned the snow off him, and said: I don't know why, sorry, but the rabbi was insulted and his ear burned and a few girls were gliding over the ice in charming tights, and the view that was so Ukrainian in Sam's eyes reminded me of my mother and my grandmother, and I felt I was stumbling again, but I wasn't sorry. Then they sang Jewish songs in a big house full of young people, and Sam spoke, and Licinda said to me: I love that Jewish Jesse James, and I told her I understood because Melissa loved him too.
Sam stood up surprisingly and informed them that he missed the girls of Gillette. They aren't seeking a messiah in the plains of Connecticut, he said, they simply belonged, he yelled. We went to the theater. He said something had to be fixed in the sections that were performed for him, and the girls gave him a gift of a green cotton shirt that said "Smith College-a hundred years of superior girls." They played coins like those my mother played when she was a student here. It was late at night, and the sound was clear and terrifying. People came from the television station in Hartford to interview him, but he refused to be interviewed. Licinda bent her thumb hard until it broke, and Sam bandaged it and said: Tell her how much I love her. Licinda wept, but maybe she wept because of the pain. When we came back to New York, there was a storm and we landed in a cloud of snow. We went to their house and Sam told Lionel that the gentile girls stood naked in a church and sang his La- mentsfor the Death of the Jews holding candles and were amazingly beautiful. Licinda went to the doctor and returned with a cast on her thumb. At night she lay with a thermometer in her mouth. Sam kept asking her what her temperature was, and she showed him her temperature with her fingers, but she didn't take the thermometer out of her mouth. They stole the destruction from me, said Sam, they made a play devoid of any risk or dread for the terrific girls of Gillette, that's how you get rich in America.
When he went to the Delmonico Hotel, I went with him. People were sitting around tables with bottles of wine and soda on them and turkeys and plates of pastry and vegetables and sweets. At the head table sat about ten dignitaries, and one of them said: Here's Sam Lipp, who has at long last deigned to honor us with his presence. And Sam, the focus of all eyes, stopped for a moment and asked in a loud voice: Where do I go? And the man said to him: To the table marked "Children of the Camp." I stayed at the end of the hall next to the journalists and in the distance I could understand how uneasy he was. Later he told me that when he sat there, he saw those people as they had been in April 'fortyfive. With Ebenezer's eyes he saw them, and they were all dead, he added. When they applauded him, he stood up and applauded them. People at the head table talked, one after another. Behind them hung a sign: "Twenty-five Years of Liberation," and a gigantic picture of a concentration camp hung there. And then Sam got up went to the stage, whispered with one of the dignitaries, and the man smiled and there was a hush and Sam picked up the microphone, started walking back and forth, eyes fixed on the hundreds of people sitting around turkey and bottles of wine, and said: I was born in the wrong place, because they put me at the wrong table. I wasn't born in a camp but in my mother's house. Why are the tables arranged like that? Why not by professions: tooth extractors, gravediggers, experts in diamonds, in gold teeth?
The murmuring in the hall started right from the start. You're the only family I've got, he said, not paying attention to what was going on, except for Mr. Brooks, the father of my beloved Melissa, but she didn't wait for me either. What nerve is it to assemble every year like this? We should have devastated Europe and not be eating turkey, but we didn't. We should have destroyed America, who threw us to the dogs, but we're getting rich and living off her. We had Einstein and Oppenheimer and Teller, why didn't we ask them to devastate the Western world instead of Hiroshima? SS Kramer was more reliable. Until the last minute, he knew who the enemy was and what he had to do. Ebenezer knew too and as far as he's concerned, you're all dead.
He looked at them. After a few minutes, he started singing and they joined in, one by one, and sang a song called "Nieder- landisches Dankgebet" as if he had hypnotized them. The head table sang too. They stood like slaughtered peacocks who had remained alive a few seconds, their eyes shut and sang innocently and devotedly, and the hall shook and the microphone whistled and screeched, and only the man sitting next to Sam looked pale and waved his hands, his name (I know because I saw him on television) was Eliahu Wiggs. He pushed Sam and slapped his face and the hubbub prevailed and Sam went on singing and everybody went on singing and then they assaulted the tables like a routed army and we left there.
You cannot understand, or you can understand better than anybody, how strange it is for a person like
me to write these things. My background, my position, everything I was and did didn't prepare me for this week, but when you visited us, something snapped in me that may have been lying inside me for many years, that damn intimacy, almost despair, was born, something like closeness, to people who hundreds of years ago had cleared the forests of New England, burned in a foreign fire. As if I wanted to restore to Christianity what Sam Lipp, Lionel, and even you hold in your hand-some profound hatred, a shadow of a jealous and cruel God.
Before he ran away from the hall with Eliahu Wiggs's slap stuck to his face, he managed to take a few cookies. He stood at the cloakroom and with trembling hands he tried to put on the coat. He held the cookies in his mouth so his hands would be free. Eliahu Wiggs, furious, came out and yelled at him, but Sam couldn't answer him because his mouth was full of cookies. And suddenly I saw how two people could be hungrier than I ever knew. Eliahu wanted to slap Sam's face again, but the sight of the cookies was so attractive that he started weeping, quietly, and his hand that wanted to hit stuck to his body again, he turned his face right and left, and I thought: Those aren't the artificial tears Sam talked about before. With his skinny hand, he grabbed one cookie from Sam's mouth and started chomping it hungrily, and Sam held the cookies tight in his mouth and Eliahu wanted more and had to bring his thin, beautiful face close to Sam's mouth to snatch more, and suddenly it didn't matter what I or others saw, he put his face close and bit and Sam almost kissed him on the mouth and the two of them hugged or wrestled, and tears rolled on their cheeks and then Eliahu Wiggs pulled away, tears flowing on his cheeks, and disappeared into the hall.
