Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

Henkin thinks: That strange Yemenite woman, she endured everything and remained dry, from all the rain of death she remained dry, and Rebecca sits in her room, Ahbed paces back and forth, and she thinks: Something's happening, and then a distant rage passes through her-not her own-one that went astray and passed through her on the way to her sources, from her toenails, which once stood at the river and let it pierce the girl she was, to give up everything so she could be angry at herself, stumble on mastery, live a life that contradicted itself, so that her life was a betrayal of her desires, to take vengeance on herself, on the desires she didn't really have, and she said: Somebody tells me up yours, somebody enters the room, does to me what Nehemiah did when he committed suicide on the shore of Jaffa, and when I was born the sun went out and a rooster didn't die, deaf Joseph went to bring a new sexton to the city, the rabbi of Lody who caused Napoleon's defeat at the gates of Moscow, but the house of the Last Jew is still locked despite the sudden shouts of that prompter Fanya R., the windows are slammed shut, the repainted shutters are closed, the antenna sways in the wind, and in the hotel the tall beauty queen sits down, in a purple dress and a white collar, next to Germanwriter, who's about to leave, and says: So what will be? Germanwriter, who thinks of avenging that moment when everything takes place, the moment when two men meet and you don't know what happens to them, looks at the local beauty queen who was international and came back to her scale, wringing her hands, and he notices that she's removed the red nail polish and her fingernails are also pale, and he thinks: Did she really kiss the Ambassador of Peru, did a whore from Hayarkon Street really sleep in his bed on the seventeenth floor, as that really was important to what happens to the writer deep in his heart, where there were once stories that wanted to be written as he used to tell Renate, and the beauty queen sits and starts gnawing her nails, looking to the side, stealing a scared look at the writer, and gnawing. He thinks: Let me have a hand, and he says: Let me gnaw, and she says: Why not, and he gnaws one fingernail and wants to laugh in the hotel lobby. He gnaws, Germanwriter, the queen, a fingernail…

And he thinks about the hotel, about Henkin sitting in his house now, letting his thoughts roam free, pondering shelters, about Eva in the shelter when Goebbels comes and tells the Fuhrer: The queen of Russia is dead, and Goebbels doesn't mean the queen of Russia, who managed to get routed at the last minute by King Friedrich for whom my son was named, he means Roosevelt, the miracle that may still happen…

The fact of the beauty queen's beauty, thinks Germanwriter, should have been an advance payment on the account of death. Some reply to life, to expectations, to dread, and isn't really a reply, not her face, not her bittersweet body, not even her measured grief about Sam, whom she spent a night with. It can be guessed how he asks Sam what happened in the room, and Sam tells him: He knocked on the door, we stood still, two mirrors looking at one another, he told me who he was, we talked about the struggle then, I tried to remember, I almost recalled, I told about the Fourth Reich. He was sad to hear about Ebenezer in the wretched nightclubs. We ordered vodka. We drank.

When he asked Boaz, Boaz will answer, Boaz will surely answer in similar language, will say: Somebody published an ad in the paper with my picture. I came. The window was open, the planes that came a few minutes later to Father's house passed by the open window, their lights blinked on and off. We drank vodka. We talked about ourselves. I told about Rebecca, the Captain, the Captain's Dante Alighieri, I said, Maybe a monument has to be erected to Dante, to the fallen ones, to ourselves, to Henkin, to Menahem, to Friedrich, a gigantic monument where you can see the whole land and then die, and he smiled. We fought. We hit one another. He hit hard, but I wasn't weak either. We didn't know who hit whom, then one went out. I'm not sure who. And Sam will say, Right, and there was a beauty queen there. And Boaz will say: All of life, all that suddenly was, balled up for one moment and then silence.

A pianist wearing a toupee started playing old Hollywood songs. The queen got up and Germanwriter went outside and started walking in the street. And then he saw Boaz, and now it was hard to know if that really was Boaz after the meeting in the hotel, the one moment we all focused on, or perhaps it was before, but it can't be denied that Boaz passed by in a jeep and stopped and asked him to get in, and they took Noga who said: What happened to you, were you wounded? And he said: I tried to screw a lioness, and Noga said, Beware of us. And soon after, they came to the settlement, the serene old houses in foliage shrouded in shadows of nightfall, the great-grandson of Ahbed opened the door and Rebecca was seen through the door as if she were trying to classify walls, windows, and objects, not to see the almond groves and the citrus groves, and on her face is an old smile, no longer forced, as if the meeting that was or will be between Samuel and Boaz extinguished in her the last ruse she had brought with her to the Land of Israel on the first day of the twentieth century, and he pondered whether, as Goethe said, miracle is the beloved son of faith, what was seen in Rebecca's eyes was the beginning of a fixed and constant end, or a coefficient of the suicides on the verge of the last compromise a woman like her can make with what she had once decided her fate would be and it turned out otherwise, and then she didn't allow things to take place, but reconstructed what never happened. As if, with her own hands, she knocked down her fate by bringing death and destruction on everything around her, so she could realize in her body and mind what others fought over, while she refused reality; some devotion to something sublime and yet hopeless at the same time. She hugged Boaz, but suddenly her hands flowed off his body, maybe off the bodies of Secret Charity and Joseph and Nehemiah and her son, who is now maybe looking at the sea and the ripples of waves on the shore at the yellowed boards and shells, counting the memories he had lost, so he could at long last remember who he really was and be Ebenezer who maybe doesn't really exist, and start over to mutter and know wood in its distress. Rebecca's face was weary, through the German she looked and saw the walls and the objects she had classified before. On the walls, she said afterward, she counted nine million tears like the number of words Ebenezer knew, tears she had wept for eight years so Nehemiah would avenge her. That poor handsome man of mine, she said softly, and nothing helped; the tears were waiting for her on the walls along with the eyes that once, when she was a girl, she packed in a suitcase with the names of dead people she took down from the walls of the synagogue. The innocent smile of Rachel Brin, who died of danger and didn't tell Lionel, now on his way to the Land of Israel, who his father was, as if he didn't know, as if he really didn't know Joseph and the Captain in his blood, as if his Laments weren't based on the melody Rebecca used to split the heavens with her anger, to protect Boaz who would be saved in the war and so Menahem Henkin would die instead of him. There's no pity, she said then, and she meant the melody Emanuel the Roman taught Dante Alighieri and Joseph taught his offspring, two hundred fifty-two offspring, and thousands of offspring throughout the globe, stumbling, routed, and writing books, selling subscriptions, locomotives, irons, computers, building cities, teaching children, healers, maybe patients and dying people, the whole kit and caboodle is this moment, Germanwriter will think, maybe the whole thing is nothing but one melody, some tune that came from the Temple through the Spanish exiles to various corners of the universe, and that's how those wretched and proud poor people could unite into one fabric, into a game of football with no winners but only losers. Like me, he said, like Friedrich, Jordana's lover.