Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

Ebenezer got up and stood in the middle of the room. A beam of light penetrated inside and made the small squares of lacquer on the nightstand glisten, his eye was covered with a dark scrim, for a moment he looked both solemn and a scarecrow that birds aren't scared of anymore. Fanya R. gave him a glass of water. He said: I asked him to help me, I don't know who I am and what I am, how can I know who Boaz is or who you are or who Henkin is?

Henkin is writing a book about somebody who doesn't exist, maybe I don't exist, when they shot Bronya the Beautiful, Boaz came, or perhaps it was Samuel, and then somebody came and took him. And fifty years passed. Rebecca's here, and Dana. It's all words, Noga, he says and doesn't feel. Only Fanya R. All the rest is words. Germanwriter too.

Noga said: You scare me when you look at me and say those things, I can't understand.

I'm waiting for Samuel, said Ebenezer. All you say is only words, I've got to see Samuel, Boaz is Samuel, but he isn't either.

Noga got up and went to him. Fanya R. smiled. Noga didn't remember ever seeing a smile like that; as if what was hidden in her or shaped in her, some bitter memory, was disguised to itself and it was itself and at the same time its mask. Fanya R. said: I'm not a talkative woman. You're a beautiful woman, all that is a punishment from God! Boaz looks like Joseph, so how is he the son of Ebenezer? Ebenezer thinks his daughters died, because those are Joseph's daughters. Something for you and for our story. You know how awful it is at night here. Always yearnings and always those dreams he recites. I'm with him, so what, troubles Boaz needs, he's a Sabra, Israel, army buddies, a hero, what, why does he need all that with dead souls and dead bodies and yearnings for the dead, and my little girls who wait in Ebenezer's brain. He's got memories, he doesn't have Ebenezer, he's got Samuel, he doesn't have Boaz, my daughters left, Mengele, twins he loved. He did experiments, and then more, what do we know about Boaz, about Noga that's you or about a Yemenite woman who came here with pain and also apologizing, yesterday, says Boaz isn't to blame and now you come with a story like her, see how much I'm talking, but Ebenezer doesn't have all of you. He's dead, all Jews died, standing with a white flag, with Samuel, hitting gentiles who come, exile, exile, you don't know! Samuel is his son and how will you understand, you!

(Fragments of reels of recording for cataloguing: tapes [6/76 and tape 5/90] were ruined, these are fragments of them that remained-)

Women who look like Jordana and Noga are sitting in row twelve on the aisle in the movie house "Pa'ar" in Tel Aviv. A matinee and cracking sunflower seeds. A Lufthansa plane, a Boeing 747 flight 005 takes off from Cologne. Jordana is weeping and so she can't see the film that Germanwriter doesn't see on the plane because he's sleeping. Noga buys more sunflower seeds, comes back, and sits down next to Jordana.

Boaz took a Carmel Duke car and went to the desert to hunt vultures. He parked the car next to a wadi, took the rifle, and walked alone, in a good mood, whistled something, the gigantic desert, yellow and savage. The Carmel Duke car is made of fiberglass. When he came back with a dead vulture and searched for the car he saw a skeleton. Camels passed by there, saw the car, and ate it. They left only the chassis and the motor and the chrome. He walked a whole day until he came to Yotbata. From there he went home. For a week he laughed, even when he saw the vulture stuffed for a school in Jerusalem.

Boaz told Noga about the camels and didn't tell Jordana.

Jordana claims that Boaz doesn't love her because he didn't tell her about the camels. Noga tries to undermine her certainty.

Noga thinks: Jordana tastes like hot peppers and wormwood and cheesecake.

Rebecca Schneerson dreamed she had wept for eight years. When she woke up she didn't know if she had dreamed she wept or wept and had really slept for eight years. She told Ahbed: I don't know what time is now. If now is now or not.

Ahbed asked Boaz what afayg, up yours, means.

The Captain's grave moved at night. Bedouins camping there with the flocks they brought from the south trembled with fear. The son of old Avigdorov, who was considered one of the thirty-one founders and had once loved Rebecca, but didn't have the courage in his heart to tell her, toddled along for six kilometers in the heavy heat to tell Rebecca the Captain's grave moved. She said: Tea you won't get for that, but know that if he moves in the grave it means he's preparing for future wars. The Captain was lazy in his life, and even more so in his death.

Fanya R. was scared, went to the store, and bought two dolls. Then she hid them. The waiter who came to serve drinks at the party that was held someplace else and got the address wrong, buried the dolls in the yard for her, under a tree. She paid him in German marks hidden in a pillow. Ebenezer went to the place where there had once been a village named Marar and picked chrysanthemums. Then he tried to plant them in his garden.

Boaz sat in his house and very slowly burned his hand. He didn't feel a thing. Noga covered her face with a pillow and Jordana went into the street and read obituary announcements. She didn't know the dead people. In the morning she read in the paper that a man had died. She went to his funeral, stood there, asked herself what she was doing, but didn't have a satisfactory answer. Somebody asked her if she was a relative, and she said: Maybe. Then she went to the office. Boaz came with the seared hand bandaged for a memorial book for an artillery regiment. Jordana tried to pretend she didn't know him. They talked with an alienation that suited their mood. But her hand, her hand groped for him. She told him about Mr. Soslovitch, a locomotive salesman. Boaz said: If Henkin had come to Kassit when I sat there three days and waited for him, and Mr. Soslovitch ordered a beer for me and I didn't drink it, I wouldn't have had to write the poem. And I don't think Mrs. Cohen ever slept with Mr. Soslovitch. Then they talked about the fact that their love had to end and maybe was already ended. She wept. All she could say was, I love both of you, Boaz, I love you and I love Noga. He said: Maybe, and left.

Germanwriter finished writing the novella and went over the last proofs. Renate was sick. As mentioned above, they flew Lufthansa Flight 005 to New York.

In New York Sam Lipp said: You act Licinda, Licinda, but you're not Licinda. Nobody can be himself.

A conversation in Tel Aviv: You remember Samuel Lipker from the Sonderkommando? He's my son's commander in the reserves.

I thought he died, said the man.

No, he was on the ship with my brother. The name of the ship was Salvation. He hasn't been seen since. Now, she said, he's called Boaz.

Sam, asked Licinda, were you ever in Jerusalem?

Yes, said Sam.

I dreamed about a house, she said, and I know I got the dream from you, the house wasn't big and there was a bakery in it.

Sam said: That was my grandfather's house on Baron Hirsch Street in Tarnopol.

Rebecca Schneerson's cow barn, said the Minister of Agriculture in the official ceremony, yielded the greatest quantity of milk by three point forty-six percent of all the cow barns in Israel. I am honored to award the family representative the medal for increasing and encouraging production. The great-grandson of Ahbed climbs onto the stage and accepts the award on behalf of Rebecca Schneerson, and shakes the minister's hand. The minister's wife whispers to the minister: He looks like an Arab.

The great-grandson of Ahbed hears that and says: I don't look like an Arab, I am an Arab. And he adds in Arabic, kata hirek, and descends.

Boaz put his mouth to Noga's hand, caught her white hair, and in silence held her hair in his mouth for two hours and twenty minutes. Noga wept, but the tears she wept circumvented Boaz's head, and in an arc, like flying deer, the tears landed on his knee. When dawn broke, he turned his mouth away and said: Anybody who wasn't defending you, Noga, doesn't know what perfection there is in words.