by Yoram Kaniuk
Time flowed somehow. He fell asleep, and when he woke up, he felt as if his body were crumbling, he turned on the radio and tried to watch it as if it were television, but the radio had no screen and he closed the curtain, lay down, sweated, and dreamed he was watering a tree and the tree refused to drink the water. Maybe he really did order the boy because he came in wheeling a cart with a pot of coffee and cookies, and what was clear was that he said: The ambassador of Peru is staying in the end suite, and then he told him: My name's Samuel Lipker, and the boy said, Fine, sir, and slammed the door behind him as if it were made of thin glass.
Then he apparently ordered more food because with his own eyes he saw him gorging himself in the mirror and a girl who wasn't young, but not yet a woman, picked up the dishes and went off, leaving him a toothpick and an intoxicating smell of orange piss. The radio was on and he now understood some of the words, and once again a cold sweat started creeping on his back. He decided to take a shower or perhaps he took a shower because he had nothing else to do. The water flowing felt nice on his body that was strange to him. In the shower he smoked a cigarette under the stream of water, and so he also started longing for Melissa and Licinda and the beauty queen. Apparently more time passed because when he picked up the phone he was already dressed and combed. They replied that the beauty had come, but wasn't in her office, and who wants to know. He locked them in the phone and locked his feet in his shoes and went out to the small balcony and looked at the sea. When he went out to the corridor, he saw a woman bent over the carpet plucking up grains of dust. The sight was depressing. He pressed the button for the elevator and waited. Downstairs he searched for the beauty. Then he thought maybe he should search for the ambassador of Peru, but he didn't feel like asking. He felt pressure in his chest and sensed an incomprehensible need to look in the various mirrors and identify himself. He broke into a locked room with a skill he hadn't used in a long time, and there was the beauty queen. She wore fabulous clothes, her soft thin hands gleamed in the light of the big chandelier and her bright eyes were more violet than green or blue. Her hair was fair but without a clear tone, as if it were made of cardboard. She was also laughing, apparently at the ambassador of Peru. The ambassador was signing his name in the guest book after Sam Lipp's name, and he thought: She screws everybody, and went outside angrily. The sight of the charming beauty queen with the ambassador of Peru offended him. Outside he lit a cigarette.
Apparently he passed by the park because on the other side were rusted houses. He thought of a concept he didn't understand at all, he thought of a trigonometry of smell, something that reminded him of articles apparently written about his play. The city was full of one-way streets that became more and more familiar, burst out, and then disappeared. Even the boardwalk square was familiar to him, and he said: "Here's the square," as if he understood. An American girl with prominent nipples in her shirt passed by him and left a fragrant trail of white blood, he tried to see her from behind, but he didn't turn his face and so he lost her. He thought of the beauty kissing the bald head of the ambassador of Peru. Trees swayed in the wind and a precisely shaped cypress sharpened its crest to the sky. There were also stars, and he was glad about them. Beyond the window of a cafe, people sat and drank. He watched them and said to himself: Here's mother, here's mother, here's Aunt Leah, here's Lipkele. Here's Uncle Yom, here's Yashka, here's the Ukrainian. Maybe they sat naked in the cafe and policemen whipped them, but they smiled even though they had no teeth. He was terrified, but didn't do a thing about it. The manager of the cafe sat outside and read a score of "Making Whoopee." He thought, this is how they made a lady of jazz. And he thought about what Charlie Parker told him when he was hanging around New York searching for a celebration of authentic and well-woven social slime. The dead sat and acted his family for him. He wanted to break the window, and so he hurried on his way. Farther down was a boulevard, jazz and dead uncles, he thought, soda with straws, I'm walking in zigzags. Cafes full of sleepy young people, thinking thoughts. A girl wanted him to sign a petition against some occupation, he signed, in Hebrew, Samuel Lipker. He bought Le Figaro in a newspaper shop, because you could buy papers from all over the world there. It excited him that in a place of dead people you could buy newspapers in foreign languages and a little girl he had to notice could lick ice cream with a heartrending sweetness.
Apparently that night couldn't be reconstructed. An El Al plane reached its destination and Obadiah Henkin stood and waited for his guests. Boaz sat in Rebecca's house and heard how Nehemiah hated Joseph when he saw him in Rachel's face. Samuel Lipker saw a pair of legs in the opening of a house and next to the legs a small bottle of brandy. He stopped and looked at the legs and then at the owner of the legs. She smiled and licked her lips. Not far behind her appeared a shadow of a man wearing tight pants. Sam didn't say a thing and she became impatient. Finally he said to her: For ten dollars and the bottle too. She laughed and said: I'm not a whore for dollars, and that was the most beautiful thing he heard, a woman with a slightly charred face. On the mattress in the yard an open light appeared, blinking on and off, he tried to sleep with her, thought of the beauty queen in the hotel with the ambassador of Peru, but couldn't and he gave her another five dollars and heard yells not far away from there and stormy Greek music beyond the breakers of the sea. The mattress was filthy. The woman lifted her skirt, smiled, and held the bottle to her mouth and he drank from the bottle and forgot her and thought about the beauty and then lit her a cigarette. When the man in tight pants appeared, he ordered drinks for them all. The man saw the wad of dollars in Sam's hand, and yelled: There's a party and two other girls and three men immediately appeared.
The bar was dark with red lights burning in it. A fellow with an Uzi limped in. The fellow said to the bartender, who looked a little scared: That's an American sucker, what are you crying to me, and the soldier aimed the Uzi and laughed, and then they all laughed. Sam drank a lot and so did they. They told him to pay fifty dollars. He paid. Then he hugged them and started dancing. A buxom Greek woman tried to sing into a microphone, but an Arab tried to burn her dress. The scared bartender asked them not to cheat the American, but nobody paid attention to the bartender and took another thirty dollars from Sam. He also danced with the Greek woman. Then he said: That's like Paganini trying to compete with all of you in backgammon. They didn't really understand it and said: You want backgammon? And he said, Yes, and he let them cheat him at backgammon and he paid. And then he patted the fellow with the Uzi, crushed him, threw him at the lamp that went out immediately, aimed the other lamp at them, and also aimed the Uzi, cocked it and fired into the air. The police of the ten-twenty shift had gone now. He said quietly: Now stand up nice, and then he took all their wallets out of his pocket along with three watches and two chains with medallions and divided them, and they were too stunned to say a word, and he went to the counter, took out his dollars, counted, took more dollars out of the wallets and when his money was returned to him, he took five hundred pounds, and said to them: You wanted to fool me? Do you have any idea whom I've dealt with in my life? Do you have any idea who you're dealing with?
He sat down in a chair and burst out laughing. They looked at him. One of them wanted to get up and hit him, but one crushing blow was enough for him not to try again. Sam shot three more times into three foil cigarette packs pasted to the ceiling, returned the Uzi without a magazine to the limping soldier, and said: You don't understand anything, who's going to bring something to eat now, I'm paying!
And that was how the celebration began that ended later on the seashore when the Border Patrol, searching for terrorists, stopped them and he produced his documents (passport, certificate of honor from the Hilton, and a letter from the Minister of Education and Culture), and then they walked in the sand and sang. They said: What a real mafia this is, and he really took care of us, and the whore kept walking with him and went into the hotel with him, and in the distance he saw the beauty with three other women sitting
and drinking coffee. He took the whore upstairs, took from his pocket a key he had previously taken out of the beauty's purse, opened the door of the suite of the ambassador of Peru, lay the whore on the bed, and she jumped up and down on the springy bed, and said: What a beautiful ceiling, and he said: You surely know rooms by the ceilings, and then he said: I'll be right back! And she wept at the sight of the wealth and beauty and the sea spread out in the window, and he went down, and the queen said with unrestrained malice: This isn't a hotel for such people! And he told her all that had happened, and he started laughing and there were tears in her queenly eyes, and he took her to his room and lay next to her, and said to her: Show me your gigantic artificial breasts, and she showed him, and then he entered her, and when he was inside her he called New York and said to Lionel: Listen, man, come here immediately, all of you, it's urgent, and he hung up.
Tape / -
Tonight (I'm talking into the tape recorder again), tonight something strange happened to me. I walked on the seashore with Fanya R. As usual, she picked up shells and threw them and I looked at the spires of the churches of Jaffa. When we came to the marina, I fell asleep on my feet. I don't know how that happened. My body stood still. You can say that a person who just now turned seventy-two is liable to fall asleep on his feet, but I'm not an expert in the lives of old people like me. From what I can tell from what she said, Fanya R. tried to carry me, but I was too heavy. Maybe because of the relation between the full moon and the low tide or the high tide, I don't know exactly, but it wasn't possible to move me from the spot, Fanya R. went to the Henkin home to call for help, but Henkin wasn't at home and Hasha and Fanya R. called Boaz, but the phone was apparently disconnected. They took a cab and went to Boaz (she told me), went up to the roof and called him. I lay on the chilly sand and slept. And then a rooster crowed. In my sleep I thought cocks were forgotten on the seashore of Tel Aviv, but with my own ears I heard the crowing.
I opened my eyes. A bearded sculptor wearing eyeglasses was sitting on the beach sculpting water. A policeman on a motorcycle passed by not far away, but didn't notice me. The flash of a spotlight illuminated the beach for a moment, and went out. When I turned my face, I saw the Hilton. The rooms were lit up in a bold mosaic. Independence Park above me was dark, but the moon lit up some trees and a sculpture that looked like a bird frozen in flight and a few pieces of limestone. I felt a need to die, to weep, to eat hamburgers, and then I understood that the hundreds of hours I had spoken, those dozens of tapes, had cast a high wall off me and I thought of my life, was it nice, was it good? I didn't know what to think, that was the first time in years I was almost liberated from all the people who had been talking in me until then, and I'm talking now on one moment, I'm talking not to myself, not to an anonymous audience, not in a nightclub, I'm talking to Germanwriter and to Henkin who will hear these things and will say, Ah, Ebenezer stopped being a Last Jew, and if I stop being a Last Jew, will they be able to write the book I wove for them from memories that weren't mine, and suddenly I was alone with my life, with Mother, with the old charred smell of the cowshed and the casuarinas and eucalyptus trees and the fragrance of citrus blossoms, and an awful longing for wood, for the face hidden in wood, burned in me, and I thought of Boaz, of a little boy I left here so many years ago, of Samuel, the two of them I felt as if they were struggling in me for a birthright, Esau and Jacob, in me, a hollow person like me, who went to search for a father and found a disaster and now starts returning from the disaster and bringing down more disasters. I longed for Dana, but also for Fanya R. I thought about the German who came today, about Hasha, about Henkin, about poor Jordana who went back to work at the Ministry of Defense and still watches television every night, suddenly I knew everything, but I didn't know anything, I didn't know other things I once knew, I almost didn't know things told me by the dead people I had amassed inside me and I kept myself from being myself, and that was how I was saved from death maybe even more than the boxes I built for Kramer, Weiss, and others, not everything was clear to me on the damp sand, I tried to get up, but I couldn't, I knew Fanya R. wouldn't let me stay like that, that she'd get help, and I waited, I wasn't afraid, I was tired, dead tired, and hungry, and thirsty, and my body ached, but it ached me! And that was my body that ached and I thought about Mother, about the awful life she lived, about the curse that patched up her life like glue, I thought: I couldn't be the son of Joseph because there's no wickedness in me, no anger, no rage, no vengeance, no glorious words, there are no splendid paper flowers in me, I'm not especially wise, I'm a simple man, like a sponge, my wisdom is in my hands, I know wood in its distress as it says on the wall in the community house in the settlement. I thought about Boaz and knew that even though he's my son he's also the son of Joseph and suddenly it wasn't strange anymore, I understood that there are things I may never understand. I thought about Einstein's theory and I couldn't recite it anymore, Kafka's stories, I didn't remember them, I remembered Mother working from morning till night and Ahbed helping her, how I sat in a corner, sucking a finger, hurting her bitterness, and how I wanted somebody to love me, and there wasn't anybody to love me and a deaf girl came and sat and looked at me, and then Dana and how Boaz was born and the struggle between Mother and Dana over Boaz and I hated him then, and Mr. Klomin and the Captain, and the children who plagued me because I wasn't like them, what a ridiculous thing I was, for a settlement of people who had started entering gold frames, I had nothing, only the wood and the passion to know who really was my father and how again and again I imagined father Nehemiah, whom I envied because he might or might not have been my real father, Nehemiah who died on the seashore of Jaffa, so as not to betray his dream, and gloomy memories rose in me on the seashore, pure memories I hadn't remembered for thirty years, I, Ebenezer Schneerson, an ashamed old man, who didn't hit me, who didn't strike or offend me in my life, and I, with a crooked back, in a hundred fifty nightclubs stand up and recite, so that Samuel Lipker can get rich, what a buffoon I was, but I loved Samuel, his boldness, my life was a contemptible collusion against myself, a pauper of shoe soles, who am I? Why am I? Something happens, a late awakening, second childhood, I know the limestone rocks now, the terror of barbed wire fences drops on me, Kramer turns into a distant picture, maybe I dreamed him too, but that's not important anymore and those yearnings ... And I waited for Fanya R. I shook from the damp, I tried to sit up, but I didn't have the strength. But that wasn't important to me either, what was really important was after fifty years to be again somebody I once was, for good or for bad; what did they know about my thoughts, about my heavy and bitter meditations, when Mother and the Captain sat and talked and he would raise his voice and she, contemptuous but beautiful, and there was in her, beyond everything, some decency.
Tape / -
I'm Ebenezer Schneerson. I am suddenly me. I don't remember a thing except what happened to me, like many people, I'm just another person, love wood, lacquers, love the smell of sawdust, everything has dropped off me, I'm talking into a tape, maybe for the last time in my life, afterward I have and will have nothing to say, nothing to recite, I look around, the world's grown old. Only now do I understand that the trees Dana planted are no longer saplings, that our new house is old now and old-fashioned and nobody lives there. I see Ahbed and I don't know if he's the son or the grandson or the great-grandson, I try to shut my eyes, concentrate, nothing comes, I'm left with myself alone, a cockroach, like everybody, in the backyard of my life, with Fanya R., with a certain, unclear future, for a while, I have no more memories of others I'm only for myself.
Tape / -
The moment I came back to what I left years ago, today I know, was the moment when they met above, above me, in that room in the Hilton, and I didn't know. I saw many lights-I didn't see the one light he stood in, he looked outside and suddenly if he had yelled at me, from the balcony of the seventeenth floor I would have gone on reciting for him, and so the door was opened and slammed and I was finished, as I started,
with some slow and uncertain dying toward nobeing ...
Tape / -
Mr. Ofen, Opal Books Ltd.
