Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

And Rebecca looked at the tears on the walls, the tears that didn't want to return to her aged eyes, and she was silent and maybe others said for her what she was supposed to say: The end is inherent in the beginning, a pit makes a tree, a tree makes a pit, so Ebenezer invented a book that hasn't yet been written, but he knew it by heart, and by his estimate, she's a hundred years old, and everything is filled with tears for something real. Battlefields of dead children, Henkin and rabbinical responsa, holy walls, holy ground, graves, a holy wall, what does all that have to do with my forefathers for whom God was to gnash your teeth, rage, and glory they sought Him in vain. The messiah will come someday when we don't need him anymore, she said, big dreams bring small ends and Rebecca tried to hold on, for the first time in her life, not to what others dreamed for her, but to what she built with her own hands and didn't pay any attention to-her farm, the fields, the citrus groves, the Ahbeds, the fruit, the horses, the flowers in plastic awnings, the vegetables, winter growths, the transparent air held in the cloths of the fruit trees, the hens that don't stop laying, the prize cows, she didn't seem sure that the farm she built as revenge for Nehemiah's death existed, that everything that happened did indeed happen to her and not to somebody else who was pierced by a river, fell in love for a splendid and despicable moment with a handsome poet under his wedding canopy, killed a husband on the shore of Jaffa in a lion's cage as an endearing reply to the ailments of the inspired soul of Michael Halperin, her vision of the Hebrew army was never necessary, while Klomin wove it into five thousand pages of letters of recommendation to high commissioners, ministers, famous people, rulers, anybody… so Rebecca grew indignant and said: They just go on inventing a past for themselves to console Nehemiah, to understand poor Nathan whom I killed with a kiss when I told him about the Arabs who gave me money, and she looked at Noga and wanted Noga to give her Boaz until the day she died and she wouldn't be with him, Noga who was already seen, or perhaps would still see, Sam and would be confused and would give birth to a son who would be both Sam's son and Boaz's son and nobody would know, and more awful than anythingRebecca wouldn't know, and that would be the real up yours, and Rebecca would ask and Noga would tell her: I'm not telling you, Rebecca, and you'll die years later, a hundred years old she'll be at her death and she won't know who is the father of the heir of Secret Charity, and Ebenezer won't know because of notknowing, she'll say, and Noga will say: That's not right, Rebecca, you knew and you didn't say. And I know too and don't say, and that's the sweet revenge of the soft woman who was Noga who one day, at the age of forty-five, when she'd become pregnant, wouldn't agree to tell who was the father of the child, who would then go on being Joseph with green-yellow eyes and would live into the next millennium, when all of us won't be here and maybe he won't be either, if the destruction does come and the Messiah will come riding on an ass with broken legs, and will tarry, and won't come even after we don't need him, when everything will be or was, in the words of the chief of staff of the solar system, destroyed. And so, from Rebecca Schneerson's yearnings for a son, whom she delivered to herself at the trees and bushes planted by "that Dana," out of yearnings, the settlement could be seen in its splendor along with the rot eating it. Ninety years and the rot now comes to the roots of yearning, the spots of damp, falling walls, trees that came to fill the space of a furious light without corners, already rotten and falling in the rain, and Rebecca looks at them, or through them. What does a beautiful old woman with cataracts see? What can she see, thinks Germanwriter, maybe his architects could put her back together again, fill her interstices and the interstices of the settlement with a renewed antiquity, made of synthetic materials, and then the spider webs could be seen, and Rebecca said: Boaz, maybe we really didn't succeed in not loving. Was that a question or a challenge, thought the writer, and he didn't know, Noga tried to listen to the echo rising from the words, like a biblical old woman, some Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite, who killed her lover. Out of love and loyalty she killed! And I, who will I kill, said Rebecca as if she read her mind, who? Me? Who didn't I kill? My parents and my parents' parents I killed, so that Noga will give birth to a son and nobody will know who his father is and I will die without an heir, and the word "heir" came to her from television, when she'd watch the news and hear H. Herzog talk about our forces which was always Boaz in the desert, striking my enemy, sir, and what difference does it make who wins, she said, what's important is who loses, and I know how losers look, like Joseph's love poems, look at the settlement, they said there, and it's no longer known who said it, and they looked outside, the vineyard of Nathan's and Nehemiah's dreams. Rebecca came to this place to plant shirt trees in America. Plain new houses fill the interstices. Between Marar and the other Arab village they built a passage then and it's now a settlement and then it's "the settlement," and it swallows Nehemiah's old settlement, a settlement where we old women, who buried our buffoons in Roots, sit and knit ninety years, said Rebecca and sees Yemenites, Iraqis, and Poles establishing a small town here and in the river stuffed fish cruise in the Land of Canaan, near a settlement where most of its founders submitted to the need to dig a pit for the first ones next to the synagogue, close to the community center named after Ebenezer who knew wood in its distress, near the tombstone for Dante Alighieri that the Captain didn't manage to erect, but maybe the whole settlement is a tombstone for a poet, every poet, Joseph or Dante, what difference does it make, they all try to phrase a nonexistent and not very important situation, some fictional space that happens because of people, because of the tears still waiting for her on the walls, and in the distance sit the last old women of the settlement knitting sweaters for the grandchildren, who still come see them in their fine cars, and the new houses straggle into one another, lost, fearing the venom, from the dream they never knew, children trying to learn it in the museum or the pit-of-thefirst-ones, the name of the Wondrous One is one of the founding fathers and All's Well is old now and maybe dead, and Eve, a poor old woman, lies in her bed and dreams of her chicks who went to build her a state and came back graves, and one of them-Boazsits in the Hilton and tries to be himself.

And Germanwriter sits and eats sweet gefilte fish served him by Ahbed and tells about songs he used to read to Friedrich and Jordana shuts her eyes and ponders, who, who, who, he tells about the songs and how Friedrich asked who sang those songs and he said: We, I sang, my son, and then Friedrich refused to read even one of my books, said Germanwriter, not even one story, and I wrote for him and he didn't read, he went to his grandfather and asked him: How could you? And he didn't read. He fought me, read stories of younger authors, and in their war against me maybe they were closer to Friedrich's grandfather than I was and he didn't know, and he died, and we at least tried to give an answer about something that no longer had any meaning, but was the essence of our life, to know why we were what we were, he didn't forgive, didn't read my books, said Germanwriter, and Rebecca said: They're all like that, they die and don't know, like those who live in Nehemiah's settlement and read in the museum that Nehemiah built a model farm and don't know who really built or why, anger built, not love of kings, and what came out of all that? Ebenezer carved in wood the face of Joseph, not his! And then they went from there, and Boaz, if he was there, would say: This time not in a stolen car! as if it really was important that he once stole a car, and he adds: Maybe what I need to do is erect a big memorial, remember how we went to Kastel? And there Henkin could have met Menahem if only he believed me, and on a high hill, fifteen stories of a memorial, a revolving restaurant on top, conference rooms, memorial rooms, and pictures of all those who fell in the wars of Israel, thousands of standard-size pictures, and rooms for those who will be, rooms of memory for those who died in the Holocaust, for the ghetto fighters. Guides in uniforms will explain the wars and the salvations according to the expressions of those who fell, and a room will be devoted to Dante, maybe a whole floor, to the poet who almost created a world from the tunes of the Temple, and then they brought me an unwanted salvation from the mouth of Rebecca, according to the Captain who always brought good tidings, as if he came here because of our wishes more than because of the illogical urgency to erect a memorial to Dante here, and the memorial may not be erected, because Boaz is trying to sink into the depression he craves so much and wants to know who is the father of his child and Noga won't tell and he doesn't know if, when he was with Licinda as Sam, Sam wasn't with Noga as Boaz, or perhaps they knew everything and kept quiet, or maybe those things didn't happen and somebody is now writing the last words, his description of one indescribable moment, a moment when one side of the coin met the other side. Somebody is now inventing not only a past but a present in which those things take place, and what happens is a prediction forward and backward, like the history that's already disappearing from the world and only historians are left without history, to describe something that is no longer remembered, that disappeared with the houses of Cologne where Germanwriter lived until he came to bury his son next to Menahem Henkin who died instead of Boaz and didn't want to be saved as Menahem wanted to live near the sea, with Hasha Masha, and maybe with two orphan girls from Diskin or even with Noga whose belly will swell and who knows who is the father of her son, that wise woman, just as they won't know things and we won't know who was the father of Ebenezer, even though it's quite clear who his father was, if not the river, then who, somebody who reads and listens to the tapes can know, but Rebecca is silent and then silence prevails, and Germanwriter thinks of his son and why he didn't read his books and hurts, now of all times he hurts, just like Melissa, whose father wrote him letters and tells, and calls Lionel, and Lionel goes to Connecticut, where he hadn't been since he was a boy in love and everything is different there, Mr. Brooks's awkward supplication turned into "a lament on the death of little girls," his offices are called "Melissa Inc.," and the sales center is called "Melissa Ford Motors," and the main street is called "Melissa Street," and there's a souvenir shop there called "The Shop of Poor Little Melissa," and The New York Times published an article about the city where masses of young people stream, and Time wrote about it, and Newsweek, and they talk about Melissa whom Sam Lipp fell in love with thirty years after she died, and a German writer came to search for her fifty years after her death and miserable youths stream here and stand at Melissa's grave holding signs, "We love you, Melissa,"-and "There's life before death," and they go to the shop and buy "Melissa souvenirs" and "Melissa dolls," and some of them commit suicide there or try to commit suicide, and they've set up a first aid station with a doctor and a psychologist and a person who studies those cases for the University of Michi gan, and there's a game called "Game of Melissa Memory" and "Beautiful and Wretched Melissa Toothpaste," and a book with blank pages, with a picture of Melissa on the cover and everybody writes his sad thoughts there and sends them to a certain address and gets a raffle prize every month, and Hollywood is making a movie about Melissa and what happened to her after her death, and people pay high prices for cars, and from all over America they flock to buy Melissa cars. What a world, writes Mr. Brooks, and Lionel comes and everybody applauds him as if he were a hero, he wrings his hands, bends down, tries to flee, thinks about Licinda, asks her to come, but she doesn't, and Lily sits and is angry or laughs, who knows, and they go to Israel, to Sam, who is still locked in a room with Boaz or with himself, and they bring the smell of the great success of poor Melissa fifty years after her death and…