B002FB6BZK EBOK (11 page)

They're incomprehensible, he said, his eye close to my face became
watery, melted in the warmth now coming from him, obstinate, but disguised as pallor, I listen to the German of my readers at the Goethe Institute, they speak the German of my grandfather, of the writers I tried to
learn from ... And, without noticing it, we slipped into speaking German
and even though I hadn't spoken German for about fifty years, my German
wasn't broken, it flowed with a naturalness that was so fluent at first I didn't notice it, and neither did he. The florid language of my father, my
educated teachers in Galicia, my uncles, strict teachers, everything came
back to me, sat on my tongue, I thought, Culture! Language! He, Germanwriter, is surely the Bialik and the Alterman of thousands of human beings
who live here, he's their real geography from which their longings, their
loves, and their nightmares are woven, and they're said to be people who
live in the past that never had a future and here is their future, somebody
who can someday describe them, he lights another cigarette with the gold
lighter, maybe Zyklon B, I tell him that sentence about our Germans, he
smiles, Really? I don't think so ... It passes ...

And then I returned to the anger that had permeated me before. There
was no closeness between the two nations, that was a one-sided love, the
closeness of Jews and Germans, it's a lie, that's what they want to say
today, the Jews lived in Cologne before there were Germans there. Ever
since then they burned in desolation for fifteen hundred years. They
stood on tiptoe and waited for kisses. That was a one-way struggle, sir,
not closeness, the German your readers speak here is a language foreign
to them, and they don't know, they're tolerated, no more, excuse me,
but-

I know, he said, it's hard to understand ... The Prussian state was
founded by Teutonic peasants who came back from a Crusade and studied it here, in Palestine. From here they also brought the glass for the windows of their houses and the Bible and what I talked about before. But
what was the switch? What was our eternal fortress? I'm seeking, searching, do you think there is really a chance?

He fell silent now. People's loud talking was heard, and more than
talking, they were yelling at one another. Laughter was heard, somebody
maybe munched on a plastic cucumber by mistake. On the walls, aside
from the picture of Amnon Shimoni there was a picture of the Empress
Theresa, pictures of snowy European landscapes, a photo of the River Zin
in the Negev and an aerial photo of Jerusalem with the edge of the wings
of the Mirage birds, a gift from the air force for bereaved families. All that
was cut off from some possible answer to Marar, an answer to my neighbor
whose request still presses on me, to wondering why he wanted to meet
me, of all people, surely not to tell me how many readers he has here and
how profound is the closeness between the murderers and the murdered, I tried to calm down, I found myself speaking ardently, in a language I
hadn't spoken for fifty years, I tried to find in front of me an empty strip
of wall (something rare in the Shimoni house), between china plates, pictures, objects, the Binding of Isaac drawn on glass and a small portrait of
Goethe next to a Bedouin ruin that may have belonged to Amnon Shimoni
or maybe the Shimonis bought it themselves, I didn't know, an empty strip
of wall suddenly glittered, split off from all the objects and grew bright,
next to a reddish shade of chiaroscuro colors on the wall whose whiteness
had long ago darkened to a kind of pleasant, old patina yellow, a splendid
shade of rust, and there I could imagine my face, without a frame, in a light
purple, striped tone, without a face, as if the fading graffiti on the wall
blended into the wall and doesn't exist except in the vision I created on the
wall, a gesture of the existent toward its image, there I was revised in that
nauseating light that now started becoming hard inside me, not toward what
was in me but for what I could have been if I weren't formulated by ideas
instead of trying to formulate them, and there I found myself, my body clinging to the body of the German and I could understand that bear next to me,
smoking the cigarette that turns leaves of elusive bright thin smoke violet
and telling him: I've got something to tell you, that is, I was asked to tell you,
and he then held the smoke in his mouth, exhaled it very slowly, pensively,
ardent but restrained. In my body clinging to him I felt him shrivel, grow
hard, a car passed in the street and illuminated the pillars of the boardwalk
for a moment and the two of us could look at the bored back of the girl of our
sons' dreams, so thin, swarthy, in the white dress, hear our laughter mixed
up in the tumult, he stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray and asked: What
were you asked to tell me?

He didn't even know how to formulate the question. I liked that.

Staged regards, I said, embarrassed.

He said, Who? And now some tone of violence was heard in his voice,
which Boaz would explain to me later, was in my voice when I told him to
come to my house and bring Menahem's poem, a violence of those pressed
to the wall who don't have any more words.

I told him: I've got a neighbor, he asked me, in fact he didn't ask but
demanded, really, to deliver something to you and what he wanted to deliver to you is hard for me to deliver, courtesy obliges me to forget his request, while another obligation, a higher one, obliges me to tell you ...

He smoked another cigarette and I knew I couldn't avoid it, I saw that
in his eyes, the lighter was crushed in his gigantic hand, I thought of talking to him about lost wars, but I said: My neighbor said he's the scion of
somebody named Secret Charity which means in German ...

I understand the name, he said quickly, what did he say?

He said to tell you, that scion ... He's the son of his great-grandson, he
said in German, now he tried to smile, stubbed out another cigarette in the
ashtray, and when he lifted his finger, I saw that it was stained with ash,
he looked at me for a split second, took the lighter out of his hand, moved
it to his other hand, lit it, I waited but he didn't take a cigarette out of the
delicate case, and only raised his hand pensively and again tried to smile,
like somebody caught red-handed he put down his hand put out the lighter
and put it in his coat pocket. I said quickly: He asked me to ask you to give
him back his daughters! I felt the blood drain out of my face. I was afraid
to look at him. He gazed a bit, his eyes slowly shut, tense, a long time
passed and maybe the time was short and I only imagined that it was long,
and then he said in a voice that suddenly sounded as if it came from the
other end of the room: Maybe that's why I came here, for somebody to ask
me for his daughters.

For some reason I believed him, there was no pleading in his voice, no
asking for forgiveness, no evasion. He said simply what, maybe, he had to
say. I looked at the picture of the Shimonis' son, the room disappeared, I
no longer saw the people. Our association was total, isolated, and then the
German said to Henkin who builds castles in frail air: Ebenezer didn't
have daughters, Mr. Henkin, like Samuel Lipker, his adopted son, he
sells lampshades that weren't made from his parents!

Something in me revolted, even though I didn't understand the meaning of the words, I was filled with a vague longing to run away. I remember the first time we went to see my son's grave. When I stood at the gate
of the cemetery I wanted to flee. As if my son was waiting for me there. I
thought about circles; I go outside my room and there is no Giladi, a new
neighbor lives there, works a garden, talks about north Tel Aviv, I then
investigate the history of the Last Jew, and the Last Jew I investigate is
named Ebenezer, why did he ask me for daughters he didn't have?
Ebenezer, the one I investigated, didn't have daughters, he had a son, the son's name wasn't Samuel Lipker, what's the connection to Marar, to Boaz
Schneerson, to Germanwriter? From what side does the sea die near my
house, an old man once asked me on the seashore during an evening stroll,
how are you sure that Hitler is dead? Did you see his body? How do you
know? Germanwriter is talking and I'm listening to him slowly through my
thoughts; they held a meeting for me at the Writers' Union, he said, it was
hard, what I saw that morning at Yad Vashem was still echoing in me, not
that I ever wanted to forget. They spoke, and something brings you close
but nevertheless an accusation was heard in their words, what could I tell
them? That I've already spent years investigating the history of the Last Jew,
the great-grandson of Secret Charity? No, don't say a word, Mr. Henkin, I
know what you do, so I asked to meet you, wait, maybe you don't know or
you didn't know that Ebenezer Schneerson is the Last Jew.

Schneerson? I asked and felt my legs growing cold.

Schneerson, he said, your neighbor! Look, Mr. Henkin, I'm so sorry but
he doesn't have and didn't have daughters! At that meeting with the writers one writer spoke excitedly; he said: We live in a world where people
walk around who at night dream dreams that terrify them, he meant meThis is a land woven of nightmares of two hundred, three hundred thousand people and this venom of theirs is the texture of our life, he said, the
foundation of this tribe that stands with a flag in hand under eighty meters
of water, and then he said to me: Here's my friend, acquaintance I would
say, his name is Boaz Schneerson, he thought he lost his father in an awful
disaster, but his father, whom he didn't know at all, returned after forty
years, and they don't know one another....

You understand Mr. Henkin, there are a lot of people here, not Ebenezer,
not him, who really believed that awful absurdity that I may be able to return their daughters to them, what I really came to do is to return Ebenezer's
daughters even though he didn't have any daughters.

I listened, I thought about Boaz, about my neighbor, I tried to believe
everything I was hearing, that I wasn't dreaming and indeed I wasn't
dreaming, he said those words and I was silent and listened. I tasted the
wine I saw in a glass standing nearby; it tasted disgusting but it cooled me.
And I sipped the wine again. And the writer said: Ebenezer who's the son
of the great-grandson of Secret Charity.

I said scion, I said.

Yes, the son of his great-grandson, he said without listening to me at all,
he's waiting for me. In the special language of Samuel Lipker whom you
may not know, he asked you, Mr. Henkin, to bring me to him. We should
go, ah, this party is starting to weary me.

I poured myself another glass of wine. Jordana came to us and tried to
smile, I couldn't respond to her, and the writer said to Jordana: Call Mr.
Givon from the Foreign Ministry for me a minute, I want to tell him something, my legs are heavy and I can't get up. She looked at him and I looked
in her eyes and they were empty. The man from the Foreign Ministry came
and we, two tame dogs, we looked at him and didn't know him. I drank more
wine, the Germanwriter also sipped and Mr. Givon, splendidly dressed
fitting his position, bowed to us and my neighbor on the sofa said to him:
I'm going with Mr. Henkin and Givon said to him, Fine, tomorrow morning at ten we'll come get you. Please don't forget the luncheon with the
Foreign Minister ...

From my perspective, the German's leg looked like a mountain. I looked
at the fold of his trousers, which was sharp and precise, I saw a spear. Beyond the boulevard a light was gleaming and from some hidden window
came rhythmical, distant music, I drank more wine until the glass I was
holding remained empty and one drop rolled around on the glass and left
a delicate trail behind, a small drop of blood, small as a miniature galaxy in
the process of final destruction.

When I reconstruct today what happened then, I remember that I was
amazed. I started drinking everything that came to hand, from half-empty
goblets, from bottles on the table, while the German drank in a more controlled manner, like somebody who's used to drinking, munched roasted
peanuts, and then I knew I was drunk. The writer begged pardon and said
he had to go to the bathroom a moment, he wandered toward the corridor
and I pondered something that had happened long ago, in my childhood.
It was the night of the Passover Seder, I drank wine then and went out of the
room, I went up to our attic, I found there the piles of my father's books,
textbooks, reading books, sex books, forbidden stories including a small
booklet titled The Tale of Reb Joseph de la Rayna and His Five Students by
Solomon Navarro. The subject of it had a name that was destroyed, and
I read it drunk and shocked, and later on, that story is etched so deep in my memory-and that was the one and only time until that evening that
I got drunk-until I wrote the first study in the Land of Israel on the case
of Joseph de la Rayna. In that story I found some apocalyptic meaning for
our enterprise here. For the great spiritual revolt. As I said it was my first
study and as far as I know that study of mine preceded many greater scholars than I. And to this day I keep a letter of congratulations from Bialik
about that study of mine that was published in 1912. Once in a moment of
anger I even called my son Joseph, and when he wanted to know why, I
told him the story and back then I didn't have time for my son as I do
today, and he, for some reason, copied the story into his notebook and from
then on whenever he rebelled-and he rebelled so many times-he'd turn
to me with his refreshing and open laugh and say: Henkin, I bring salvation
and I ask him, how, by pinching a little girl's behind? And he told me something like: Why don't you say ass, Henkin, why behind or buttocks? And
how do you know I don't bring salvation? And I try to explain to him the
tragic, pathetic structure of the yearning for revenge the enormous need
for salvation, for breakthroughs and breakthroughs, talk about chains, about
the sense of impotence toward the creation and the sense of betrayal of the
nation but in vain.