Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

When she came back home, through a row of sprinklers that evoked an amazement in her that she tried to chill, even though they'd water her gardens and she didn't know, she tended to the tape recorder for a while in her closed room, put the microphone to her mouth, and said aloud: One, two, three, and when she turned on the machine, her voice was heard, and even though she didn't recognize it at first, she immediately learned to use it. She said: Recording number one, Rebecca Schneerson, to whom it may concern and to whom it may not concern…

… Nehemiah was a handsome man. Boaz is my son. Ebenezer calls him Samuel. Collectors of charity, who dreamed of Mr. Klomin's kingdom, in vented a state that is a little bit of a dream and a little bit of a ghetto and a little bit of a military camp and a little bit of flowers. My tears for eight years were for nothing. The Captain isn't here. Everybody died on me. Ebenezer was amazed that the Captain ordered flowers placed every week on Dana's grave. I wouldn't have done that. What do they know about the Captain? He was a swindler, cunning, naive, and wise. How many wise Jews are there in this land? It's great wisdom to be a successful farmer, to build a good farm among Jews. Does the fact that I'm alive at least make me dead? I want to say something about Ebenezer. I married Nehemiah, not Joseph, and it's a lie to say I didn't love him. I wanted to save him in America and he didn't want to. Nehemiah taught me a lesson. He left me Ebenezer. Ebenezer went to search for the one he thought was his father, and in the end he married a woman who was both the daughter and the wife of his father. He comes to me and wants to know. What will I tell him? I think that even though Nehemiah was his father, Ebenezer is bound to Joseph and was born to bring Joseph back into the world through Boaz! Is it possible to love somebody, the son of somebody else, who grew in your belly, so that in the next generation your real son will come into the world? Ebenezer, the lost son. Whose son is he? The Last Jew, they call him. And I'll die after him. Lucky thing Boaz has no children. There will be a wilderness here with Ahbeds, as there was before we came here. But to tell Ebenezer I can't. I don't give birth because some man got me into bed. I brought two sons into the world. One was born by mistake from Dana in order to be my son again. Is he my grandson or my son? I lived the end of the story of Rebecca Secret Charity, but they don't believe in the satanic power of blood, in the awful flow of Satan. They believe in progress, they believe all awful things were an imagined curse with no foothold in the reality of progressive people who elect a hundred twenty fools to something they call a Knesset every four years, and they think they're successful and wise and clever because they learned to kill a few Arabs in tanks given them by gentiles, so that then it will be allowed, without any problems, to destroy them one by one… the river was at the end of my life or at the beginning and it's all the same, there was Joseph there, there was Nehemiah there, there were my father and mother. Ebenezer is the curse and he knows wood in its distress. Like an everlasting name he came back. He should be exhibited in a museum…

How much I wanted the love that would replace the dependence, the beauty, the yearning. Did I succeed in being promiscuous? Even that's a hard question. I remember once thinking I should let the Captain hug me, sometimes I did want to, but I thought, Is there somebody who can, with a few drops of water, put out the fire of hell burning in me? And life passed by. That's how it is. Life isn't what we live, but something that flows out of us. And I look around, Nehemiah and Dana died so that Boaz would be, Joseph isn't here, the Captain, I've got an avocado, flowers, fruit, chickens, a nightgown. What the hell don't I have? The flowers bloom, and I look around and ask what to tell Ebenezer, who wants an answer, and he's already past seventy, he wants to know, what will I tell him? That I'm ninety years old and can't say, so here, Ebenezer, with the only love I have left and that isn't aimed at anybody, not even myself, I swear, I'm telling you: Afayg! Up yours! Just up yours! It's not malice, be my son if you think so and want to be, not out of malice, you're quite lovable with all you've suffered with the woman you raised like a dried flower in one of Dana's old books, because I don't have anything else to say, not to you, not to the tape recorder, not to God, not to Satan, not to Rebecca Secret Charity, nothing. Up yours, that's what I've got to say, only that, up yours!

You're all that's left of Nehemiah. Of all the naive founders, of that nation, of you, of me, up yours!

And then Rebecca turned off the tape recorder and started laughing and the laughter turned into weeping and she locked the door, put her head under the blanket, and wept as she had wept seventy years before, a whole day, nonstop, and then she got up, washed her face, sat at the table, and Ahbed said: What happened, Madame, were you weeping? Were you laughing? And she said: Bring something to eat, Ahbed, and he said: Were you laughing or weeping? And she said: Afayg, up yours, Ahbed, do you know what that is, up yours? So up yours to you, all your sons who will inherit the land Nehemiah sowed with Ebenezers who knew wood in its distress, into me they came, from me they didn't go.

Tape/-

Noga Levin knocked on the door fearfully. More than she was afraid to come, she was afraid of Henkin peeping at her from his house. She thought, What is he thinking, why is he looking? Fanya R. opened the door, invited her in without a word, and went to put on a robe. Noga was bundled up in a scarf, she hoped it made her look older. Last night she told Boaz: I'm going to Ebenezer, I want to look old and wise, and Boaz, who wanted to answer, suffered an attack of yawning she didn't cause and so he couldn't answer her. By the time he finished yawning her footsteps were heard on the stairs.

Ebenezer, who had slept in his clothes ever since the war, put a blue sailor's coat over the clothes he had slept in and went into the room. He said: What is the lovely flower in my house? She laughed because she didn't expect him to behave so gallantly.

Noga said: Sit, Ebenezer. He sat, watched the sun rise through the open bathroom window. I came to apologize for Boaz's behavior, said Noga, he didn't mean it, he had been drinking, he lives in tension, he's sorry for what was-

Ebenezer averted his face and didn't see the sunrise now. In the big living-room window you could see the fences of the port and the demolished buildings, and the abandoned shore. He said: Remind me of what you're talking about, some things I remember and some I don't. She sipped the coffee Fanya R. gave her and stirred while walking, which seemed to Noga like hovering, and after a few sips, when the tasty coffee was inside her, she repeated word for word what had happened at the house when Boaz and Jordana and she came from the cemetery. Ebenezer shut his eyes, stretched out his hands, and said: He meant what he did, and I was a fool!

You weren't, said Noga.

When I was a little girl, said Noga, as if she were talking to herself, I once came home from school and Mother met me on the stairs and told me to go up and wait in the house. I went up and the door was locked. I knocked on the door and Father didn't answer. I thought maybe he wasn't sleeping but listening to the news. I went up to the roof, from the laundry room, I slid on the water pipe straight to our kitchen porch. I loved to slide because it was also a little dangerous. I went into the kitchen and water was boiling on the stove. I turned off the stove, ate a few grapes from the refrigerator, and holding a bunch of them, I went into the living room. My father was lying in bed and the radio was off. His leg was stretched to the side as if he were about to put on house slippers and get up. I think he was smiling, but maybe it was a grimace, I said to him: Father, why didn't you open the door, but my father didn't answer. I went to my room, opened the schoolbag, sharpened a pencil, took out the books and notebooks and started doing my homework. And then I thought, Why didn't he answer me? He always answers me, but at the same moment I also thought there was something wrong with the eraser I had bought and I had to exchange it at Lichtenstein's. I picked up the grapes I had put on a plate where I would once mix sand from the Negev and went back to the other room. He was still lying there, the foot was on the way to the house slipper, he didn't move. Everything was in the middle-middle of a smile, middle of putting on a shoe, like a photo of somebody who is both running and standing still for eternity. I thought he looked like marble. I touched him, his hand dropped and stayed hanging in the air between the bed and the floor. I turned on the radio, after a few seconds, the music started, and then I looked at him and suddenly I understood. I didn't grasp how I understood, because I had never seen a dead person before. But that dead person was my father. I started yelling and stamping my feet until the neighbors came. In the ashtray was a cigarette and then I didn't have a father and I asked myself what exactly I didn't have, what I lacked, Mother would get hysterical and swallow pills and miss him terribly. Once I dreamed that my father came back and didn't want to see me, you can't imagine how that hurt…