B002FB6BZK EBOK (66 page)

She looked toward the window, her face was molded in
the flickering light, etched like the face of somebody else.
She said: Poor old Haman was a Don Juan. In the days when
he was a real dog, he'd make bitches pregnant like a fish.
Now she was filled with an envy that flooded her and almost
choked her. She looked at Noga and Boaz and they didn't see
the tears: You'll always be with each other, she said, you'll
have each other, that dog was a son of a bitch, like you! Then
she said, he'd still run after the smells of bitches, but they
didn't want him anymore. When he was fourteen or thirteen
and a half, I don't remember exactly, which is like ninety
years, Boaz, maybe a hundred, he started falling in love with
cats. We had a cat named Incense, she was always pregnant
or nursing six or seven kittens. Haman started wooing Incense, and then, the kittens. When Incense was in heat, he'd
sniff her all day long.

You're weeping, said Noga.

Those tears have nothing to do with you, said Jordana, or
with Boaz either, I'm thinking about Incense, I'm weeping for
old Haman, who am I talking to? The window? The streetwalkers of teleprinters? I've had it. I'm jumping out the
window, I left a cigarette downstairs and across the street is
a night watchman as lewd as old Haman. By the way, in the
end he died.

Who? asked Noga, and Jordana said: Poor Haman.

Boaz stood up and started getting dressed, he said: Come
on, let's get out of here, and Jordana kissed him with a lust
Noga couldn't bear.

The beat of footsteps in the empty night streets embarrassed them. It extinguished the rage every one of them felt
for the walls, the sourness of the coming morning.

When they came to the old cemetery, they found a locked
gate. The watchman was sleeping in the little cubbyhole at
the entrance. Boaz folded the handkerchief, put it on his head and woke up the tired, angry watchman. Boaz told him:
There are two women here who came last night from Hong
Kong seeking the grave of their father who was murdered in
1938.

Come in the morning, said the watchman, shaking with
rage.

In the morning they're on trial, said Boaz, they'll expel
them from Israel, it has to do with the Ministry of Defense.
I don't really understand you, said the watchman, maybe
you speak Yiddish?

This is a matter of life and death, Boaz answered in Yiddish. He took out a hundred pounds and gave them to the
watchman. Look, it's worth it to us and you can go to sleep.
The watchman examined the money, sniffed it, and said:
Come in, just don't wake anybody up.

Boaz loved the watchman's sense of humor kindled at the
sight of the money. That's surely how he bribes dead people,
he said, and Jordana giggled, but that was more than Noga did.

Be careful not to step, said Boaz. They walked on loose
paths soaked with dew. Night on tombstones. Names of Tel
Aviv streets. Heads of Zionism, heads of Tel Aviv, leaders of
the Yishuv, history in a field of tombstones, said Boaz. A boy
jumped from the third floor in nineteen twenty-nine. The
women wanted to leave, Boaz didn't.

Then they sat on Manya Bialik's grave and hummed a
song. Now they were drunk on something in the air, in the
pale light that started appearing in the dark. Noga said:
We're pathetic and melodramatic, and that's nice. Jordana
felt disappointed and didn't know why. The magic engendered by the place was starting to fade. The graves were only
stones on loose ground. It was four-thirty in the morning.
The moon was setting. When they sang, Jordana said: I'm not
singing, I'm not a European who sings in cemeteries, and I
won't be buried here either.

You too, said Boaz.

I want a kiss, she said.

Take it from Noga, said Boaz.

Jordana touched the ground and said: Dew of death! And
they started walking out, they trod on the tombstones as if they
were fleeing from somebody. That amused Boaz, not Noga.
They picked up flowers left by visitors in vases, whose water
had already turned moldy. I need a little wine, said Boaz, and
Noga said: He needs a little wine, Jordana. They came to the
gate as dawn began to break. The light was pale and a reddish
glow was lit in the sky and looked like a crazy spot, as if sentenced to destruction by itself and Jordana started weeping
softly and nervously. Noga hugged her shoulder. They stood
near the corner of Ben-Yehuda. Boaz told them to sit down and
wait for him and he started running. He ran along Ben-Yehuda
and Allenby, passed by a liquor store, broke the window, took
out two bottles of wine, and kept on running. A terrifying ringing came from the store, Boaz ran in yards, passed by thistles
and cats, a police car appeared through an opening of the buildings, cars were already starting to move, and he came home,
started the jeep, went back, picked up his lovers who were sitting in an entrance to a building huddled together, opened the
two bottles of wine, and they drank. After the wine warmed
their bodies and the dust from the cemetery was shaken off,
they drove along the street and yelled wildly at the locked balconies and came to Ebenezer's house. Ebenezer was Boaz's father. He left him when Boaz was a year old.

There was a woman there, too. She was his daughter and
the mother of the daughters of the lover of his grandmother
before she got married. The daughters died. They-

I've translated for you up to here, because strange as it is, I
saw the end of this "story" with my own eyes. Boaz told me that
when the author of this story came back from the war, all the
neighbors went out to the balcony, tossed flowers at him, threw
candy at him, and held a royal reception for him because he was
wounded. Boaz said he stood there and looked and thought: That
putz who didn't see half of the war I saw receives a national honor because they think he almost died, while if he had died
he would have won more, while I, said Boaz, have to apologize.

What interests me is how the author knew those details, and
maybe he didn't know, maybe I'm making it all up, maybe I'm
mixing things? How do I really know all that happened? Maybe
I'm inventing and you're thinking: Jewish knowledge, he knows
what to call Boaz, Jordana, and Ebenezer. Maybe it's me. Everything is only an optical illusion. People come seeking the grave
of Madame Bovary, is Madame Bovary really buried there,
somebody told me that too, but when they tell me about me,
about myself and I tell, what am I telling? What they said or
what I know, but in that matter, I've got nothing to add, it's
hard for me to meet somebody who was in Menahem's battalion, fought along with him, and never came to talk with me.

The yelling I heard clearly. It was five in the morning. Hasha
Masha said: Henkin, don't open the window, and I didn't. I sat
at our window with the old shutters you can see through, if only
the opening, and I saw it all. Boaz behaved like a wild man. In
his hand he brandished an empty wine bottle, Jordana and Noga
sat in the jeep. I saw the two trying to sit off to the side, slightly
bent over, so that if I were awake, I wouldn't see them, but
they were also drunk apparently and Jordana wept nonstop
and Noga looked vile and aristocratic in the light of dawn, and
Ebenezer in his pajamas said: Who's there?

And Boaz said: Your son, Samuel!

Ebenezer went outside, and Boaz said: It's me, Samuel, and
in his voice I heard reverence, maybe a certain cry for help,
surely a supplication, some breaking of a savage. Yes, said
Ebenezer, you're Boaz, the son of Rebecca Schneerson.

Boaz looked at his father. He yelled at Jordana and Noga:
This is my father! He came to die in the Holy Land with a
woman who is both his sister and maybe his daughter and the
sister of his mother. Look at him, in his opinion, I betrayed the
two people he loved, one Samuel and one Dana who's supposed
to be my mother. Jordana, my mother Dana, was murdered by
Yemenites.

Arabs, hissed Noga angrily.

Ebenezer went to them, he raised his eyes to my house, he
did know I was watching, I knew he responded to my hidden
figure, maybe he needed my help.

What do you want, Boaz? asked Ebenezer. Clearly he seemed
to be wrapped in a dream. I'll tell you what I want, said Boaz,
and approached his father. He pushed him toward the fence
and for a moment I almost couldn't see him, but Ebenezer
moved and then I saw his eyes. I'll tell you, I've got two women
like Our Teacher Moses, one black and one white, the two of
them belonged to the son of your friend there, and he pointed
to the shutter where I was hiding, and now do for them what
you did for Samuel, recite your fucking knowledge, you're in a
nightclub, Ebenezer, you set clocks back, I'm Samuel, you're in
a nightclub in Cologne! Ebenezer, who knew wood in its distress, on whose horrible death I grew up, in a nightclub, you're
entertaining gentiles with your wonderful memory, turn on
your crappy computer, why don't you start. I'm tired, Boaz,
said Ebenezer, and his voice contained some submission. He
haggled, but we knew he meant to do what Boaz ordered him
to do, and I understood: That small chance that his son was
Samuel ... I wanted to get into bed, block my ears, but I sat
fascinated. Ebenezer shut his eyes, looked obsequious like a
Jew in your caricatures, and for a long time he recited the annals
of the Mendelssohn family, as if anybody really cared to know
who was the banker, who was the musician, and who was the
philosopher. Hasha Masha put up water and blocked her ears
with cotton and I sat and listened. The girls stood on the side,
apparently already in despair at hiding from me, and Ebenezer
recited. It was a cheap circus act, the setting was the seashore,
lifeguards' surfboards on the way to the sea carried by tanned
fellows, girls in blue on the way to school, the garbage truck on
Yordei Sira Street, and he's telling about some woman he asked
what she would do after the Liberation and she said: I'm going
back home to my son who was a Hitler-jugend and she spoke
proudly of her son ... She went back home, she said, and waited for her son, for her husband, and they didn't come. When she
discovered that her son had put her in the camp, and now neither
he nor her husband wanted to see her, she committed suicide in
a hotel, and then Boaz, a uniquely humiliating act, he went into
the house, brought out the hat of the Last Jew who stood humiliated, foaming at the mouth, stopped the woman delivering
milk who was trying to pretend not to hear and demanded
money from her, and she put half a pound into the hat and he
went to the two girls, Jordana and Noga, and demanded money
from them and they put it in the hat, and you could see they
were scared and did that as if they were possessed by a demon,
and Boaz took the hat and went back to Ebenezer and Ebenezer
said: Samuel, you always know how to surprise me, and I thought:
Well, at long last, I saw the Last Jew in a real performance, not
like when he recited and talked about you but just as in the
nightclub, and what a setting that was, a small street, a woman
delivering milk, construction workers on their way to work,
tanned girls and boys on their way to the seashore, the Hilton
on the left, and then surprisingly, without Boaz sensing anything, the Last Jew took the watch off Boaz's wrist. Jordana and
Noga didn't see, I did. Boaz wanted to go, his face was ashamed,
and the Last Jew said: What time is it, Boaz? And Boaz searched
for the watch and didn't understand where it was. And then the
Last Jew waved the watch in front of Boaz's face and laughed,
he laughed, really laughed, and said: There, there you wouldn't
have lasted a day, you're not Samuel, and he threw the watch at
him. And Boaz waited until his father went into the house, put
on the watch, and went down on his knees and chewed the wet
sand, even though the sun was a little warm now and his face
was black and he wept. Never did I see Boaz Schneerson weep.

Yours with friendship and the hope of seeing you again soon,

Obadiah Henkin

Tape / -

One warm morning, Rebecca Schneerson got up and looked at the window she had looked through but hadn't seen for forty-two years. She rec ognized handsome almond trees, a thick-trunked eucalyptus, a weeping
oak, lemon trees, and expanses of flowers and greenery up to the edge of
the horizon. In the distance, she saw the road that hadn't been in the window forty-two years ago. Rebecca put on a white dress, wrapped herself in
a shawl, and went out. She walked erect and confident, even though it had
been years since she strolled on these paths. When she came to the center of the settlement, children buying gum at the kiosk peeped at her.
They said: Here's the witch come out of her hole. Yehiel, the shopkeeper,
whose father remembered Rebecca, wanted to go outside to greet her, but
a vague fear kept him from doing that. Now that Rebecca felt that there
were no more enemies of life in the settlement, the children of the first
ones, their grandchildren, and great-grandchildren started loving her. Fears
of her had been passed down as a legacy, but belief in their stories was
even stronger than the worries, and there was talk in the settlement council of making amends for the ninetieth anniversary celebration. Among many
candidates, thirty-one men and a woman were chosen as the founders of the
settlement. Some of them did indeed found it, but Rebecca had long ago
become the most senior and important founder of them all. She heard from
a laborer who worked in her yard about the decision to fix the synagogue and
call the main street, the Street of the First Ones, Nehemiah Schneerson
Street and she told the reporter from Our Settlement who came to interview
her (she even agreed to receive him), that the number of founders growing in inverse proportion to the realization of expectations worried her.
Nehemiah died on the seashore in Jaffa, she said, and because of him, she
had been living here for seventy-one years. There were ten families in the
settlement at that time, then twenty, of the first four sons, only one was still
alive, Ebenezer, who died and came back to life only because he went to the
Holocaust. So, she added, Zionism has nothing to be proud of.