Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

And then, again the empty silence of the south of the city will swallow them. That dark will prevail, planes will go on passing over the house on their way to the airport, Boaz is softened with, without, Noga, Jordana, everything is again as it was, but in the air there will be a sense that all that can't happen and that it's not possible anymore, that we, said Boaz, we take things too deeply, we can't do it simply, and we can't do it not-simply, and at four in the morning they woke up. If they had slept at all before.

Tape / -

Jordana went to the shower, stood and looked in the mirror and splashed cold water on her face, but she was still blazing. When she went back to the room, Noga and Boaz were sitting on the gigantic mattress. That pale light penetrating inside flickered and went out. Jordana said: I dreamed of the dog we had in the village, his name was Haman, he was old, I dreamed he devoured you.

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?