Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

Jordana asked them to let her help people. Doctors at Tel Hashomer Hospital laughed at Boaz when he told them the story, but Doctor Lowenthal said it was worth a try. Doctor Lowenthal (whose son was killed in a plane crash at the Suez Canal) sat next to Jordana in the Henkin house as she looked at petals. There was a sad saxophone player. Jordana said he had been worrying her for some time. She concentrated on him, and after a minute or two, he started smiling. In the middle of the fucking program, he said afterward, I'm sitting and playing, feeling shitty, all of a sudden some woman says give me a kiss. And I smiled, it was weird with all the directors and cameramen around.

And one day, when they saw a soldier who had lost his eyesight skiing on Mount Hermon, Jordana looked at the screen, concentrated, and suddenly she shouted in terror, fell on the ground, bounced, and by the time Boaz bent over her and kissed her hard and hit her, she calmed down. After that she fainted.

They took Jordana to the hospital. She grew fat and lay in a locked room without a doorknob. She doesn't want to see television. Wants to marry Menahem. Boaz promised her there was a rabbi who married his grandmother's grandmother to a dead man and he'd bring her that rabbi, but it might take time because the rabbi died two hundred years ago.

So I'll wait for him, said Jordana. And Noga wept and then said: But she does help people, she gave them a smile, what does it matter if it's a disease? It's a disease that does good for others and for her. We should have left her in the suburbs, she was happier and Boaz had no answer. He thought about Herod. King Herod, he said, ordered a hundred Jewish grandchildren arrested and left in a pit until he died. On the day he died, he ordered, they were to be executed one by one. He said they were to do this so they wouldn't have a holiday when he died. And the queen of Norway, Sigrid, ordered all her vassal kings to come to a banquet in her palace, and when all the vassal kings came and ate and drank, she burned the house down on them, and said: That will teach them to lust for the queen of Norway.

Tape / -

Jordana lay, her eyes impassive, her body twitching, needing injections of tranquilizers every few hours. All she needs, said Boaz, is a television set to love. To know that they didn't teach me psychiatry ten years. For a month Jordana tossed and turned, stopped twitching and started reading the temperatures in various cities in the world in the newspapers. She repeated indifferently: If only I had a private room with a big television set, I'd be able to help people get rid of their sadness. When they came to visit her, she'd shut her eyes and list the temperatures in the cities of the world: Oslo-3 degrees, Amsterdam-6, Copenhagen-3, and then she'd grimace mysteriously, like a person who can see far beyond what's visible, and say: A barometric low is moving over Turkey and causing clouds there, and Boaz holds her hand and tells her how empty the house is without her, and when she heard that she burst into wild laughter, bounced, and sometimes they'd have to tie her to the bed.

Tape / -

Boaz begat Ebenezer, Ebenezer begat Joseph and Nehemiah. Joseph begat Shlomzion. Shlomzion begat Light of the Gentiles. Light of the Gentiles begat Joshua. Joshua begat Spear Father of the Mountain. Spear Father of the Mountain begat himself. And Spear Father of the Mountain begat Joseph who begat Rebecca who gave birth to Secret Charity who begat.

Tape / -

Dear sir,

You surely remember your visit to our house a few months ago. You came, as you said, to understand the house where Melissa was born. Ever since you came to our house Melissa has returned to live in the house. I'm old and close to the place where you wait for ghosts my father used to tell me about, and maybe the very idea that three men, years apart, came to seek my daughter who died fifty years ago, instilled in me a vague dread. Maybe that etched on life itself. Something happened to my wife and me. After fifty years, we're poring over old notebooks again. Reading Melissa's school essays, I sit at home, I practically don't go to the office anymore, my oldest son runs the sales center, and today I thought: Our governor, he's also a Jew, I hope he won't come searching for Melissa.

My wife read me a section from the diary of Timothy Edward, one of the first in her family to immigrate to America. In his diary he describes how he stood on the deck of the ship in the port of Amsterdam on his way to America. On the deck of a nearby ship stood a Jew and prayed. They started talking. The Jew was on his way to Jerusalem to prepare the "dust of the Land of Canaan." Timothy Edward was on his way to prepare the "dust of the Land of Canaan" in the new world. They talked all night. The grandson of that Jew was that Rabbi Kriegel who came from Hebron to our city two hundred years ago. We talked about him, remember?

And with that story that connects Licinda, Melissa and Sam, I came to Lionel's house. Those were embarrassing moments. Sam looked at me in amazement, and Lionel, Lionel is old but hasn't changed. The same aristocratic look, wounded and stubborn, the same perplexed imposing figure, the same force. At the sight of him, some anger that had been burning in me for many years vanished. All of us loved Melissa. That was the most ridiculous and sublime thing that had ever happened to me.

Two hundred and fifty years ago, two men became friends on the decks of two ships on their way to prepare the same kingdom in different places and now, on Melissa's grave, they meet again, I said, not without an overdramatic expression so foreign to my nature.

We talked all night. Sam began. He spoke a long time about Melissa's eternal beauty. And I, I was silent and drank whiskey.

I Joined Sam on his trip to Northampton to see the students act parts of the play he had produced about a year ago. We flew in the Ford company plane. The idea that Ford was flying us there amused him quite a bit. Licinda didn't talk and we looked at the view below and tried to understand how our paths had crossed so many years after Melissa died. Below we saw snowcovered fields.

I told Sam what I told you about the Catholic church next to the chemistry lab. We were guests in the Gillette House. It was built about a hundred years ago with a contribution by Mr. Gillette, inventor of the razor blade. The girls of Gillette sang "Greensleeves" in thin, scary voices. Sam claimed that they looked like Melissa. He also told them: You who will marry the gods of industry, the leaders of this state, are acting in a drama about burned curtains of the Ark of the Covenant! They giggled nervously, and Sam said to Licinda: They're open to indecent suggestions like Melissa, and she-to her creditdidn't even answer. Sam, who drank a lot that night, lectured to the students about what there no longer is in Northampton (and I quote): Samrein or Samuelrein. You're acting in a drama about my naked mother! They turned their heads in amazingly delicate embarrassment and one even wept silently. He asked: Why should you act in a play about a diamond in a rectum? You know that the man who lay there and thought he was my father wasn't my father?

Joanna, the granddaughter of Priscilla and Bud, told me: I feel as if I were chewing my mother's head, blood is flowing between my legs and I'm laughing. And I, who never heard such things, especially not from somebody in my family, stroked her head with a gentleness which, if it had been in me years ago, would have saved a beloved person from death. I walked with Sam to the frozen lake. He went with a local rabbi to a meeting of young Jews. When the rabbi started chatting and talking with him about the meaning he found in his drama, he grabbed the rabbi by the ear and bent it. The rabbi couldn't get away from him and started twisting and shrieking, he bent over and yelled: Why? Why? Why? And Sam lifted him up, cleaned the snow off him, and said: I don't know why, sorry, but the rabbi was insulted and his ear burned and a few girls were gliding over the ice in charming tights, and the view that was so Ukrainian in Sam's eyes reminded me of my mother and my grandmother, and I felt I was stumbling again, but I wasn't sorry. Then they sang Jewish songs in a big house full of young people, and Sam spoke, and Licinda said to me: I love that Jewish Jesse James, and I told her I understood because Melissa loved him too.