Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

If you want me to go, I'll go, he said, over there, and he pointed to a group of people that included a tall handsome woman, there's my wife, you know, he added, and I gauged the resonance of his wife's whispers, "the Jews and the Germans, unlike the Latins, didn't seek or find the perfect form, but always some original amazement prevailed, if an abyss gaped at their feet they looked into it and found emptiness and filled it with hewn, new, cruel substance, some new reading of chaos in which is hidden something that wants to be discovered, some imperfection, a divine imperfectness," said the German and the emphasis of the connection restored me, it was precisely the somewhat awkward Gothic style that drew my heart to his fiction, I loved the practicality he wove from the devils that gushed in him, to which pain do I ascribe you, Germanwriter? Which side do you belong to? You're surrounded here with people, some of them came from your area, they listen to you, maybe you express them better than we do even though they've lived here for years, you express them better than we do, that's a certain failure of culture, of education, of vision..

They're incomprehensible, he said, his eye close to my face became watery, melted in the warmth now coming from him, obstinate, but disguised as pallor, I listen to the German of my readers at the Goethe Institute, they speak the German of my grandfather, of the writers I tried to learn from… And, without noticing it, we slipped into speaking German and even though I hadn't spoken German for about fifty years, my German wasn't broken, it flowed with a naturalness that was so fluent at first I didn't notice it, and neither did he. The florid language of my father, my educated teachers in Galicia, my uncles, strict teachers, everything came back to me, sat on my tongue, I thought, Culture! Language! He, Germanwriter, is surely the Bialik and the Alterman of thousands of human beings who live here, he's their real geography from which their longings, their loves, and their nightmares are woven, and they're said to be people who live in the past that never had a future and here is their future, somebody who can someday describe them, he lights another cigarette with the gold lighter, maybe Zyklon B, I tell him that sentence about our Germans, he smiles, Really? I don't think so… It passes…

And then I returned to the anger that had permeated me before. There was no closeness between the two nations, that was a one-sided love, the closeness of Jews and Germans, it's a lie, that's what they want to say today, the Jews lived in Cologne before there were Germans there. Ever since then they burned in desolation for fifteen hundred years. They stood on tiptoe and waited for kisses. That was a one-way struggle, sir, not closeness, the German your readers speak here is a language foreign to them, and they don't know, they're tolerated, no more, excuse me, but-

I know, he said, it's hard to understand… The Prussian state was founded by Teutonic peasants who came back from a Crusade and studied it here, in Palestine. From here they also brought the glass for the windows of their houses and the Bible and what I talked about before. But what was the switch? What was our eternal fortress? I'm seeking, searching, do you think there is really a chance?

He fell silent now. People's loud talking was heard, and more than talking, they were yelling at one another. Laughter was heard, somebody maybe munched on a plastic cucumber by mistake. On the walls, aside from the picture of Amnon Shimoni there was a picture of the Empress Theresa, pictures of snowy European landscapes, a photo of the River Zin in the Negev and an aerial photo of Jerusalem with the edge of the wings of the Mirage birds, a gift from the air force for bereaved families. All that was cut off from some possible answer to Marar, an answer to my neighbor whose request still presses on me, to wondering why he wanted to meet me, of all people, surely not to tell me how many readers he has here and how profound is the closeness between the murderers and the murdered, I tried to calm down, I found myself speaking ardently, in a language I hadn't spoken for fifty years, I tried to find in front of me an empty strip of wall (something rare in the Shimoni house), between china plates, pictures, objects, the Binding of Isaac drawn on glass and a small portrait of Goethe next to a Bedouin ruin that may have belonged to Amnon Shimoni or maybe the Shimonis bought it themselves, I didn't know, an empty strip of wall suddenly glittered, split off from all the objects and grew bright, next to a reddish shade of chiaroscuro colors on the wall whose whiteness had long ago darkened to a kind of pleasant, old patina yellow, a splendid shade of rust, and there I could imagine my face, without a frame, in a light purple, striped tone, without a face, as if the fading graffiti on the wall blended into the wall and doesn't exist except in the vision I created on the wall, a gesture of the existent toward its image, there I was revised in that nauseating light that now started becoming hard inside me, not toward what was in me but for what I could have been if I weren't formulated by ideas instead of trying to formulate them, and there I found myself, my body clinging to the body of the German and I could understand that bear next to me, smoking the cigarette that turns leaves of elusive bright thin smoke violet and telling him: I've got something to tell you, that is, I was asked to tell you, and he then held the smoke in his mouth, exhaled it very slowly, pensively, ardent but restrained. In my body clinging to him I felt him shrivel, grow hard, a car passed in the street and illuminated the pillars of the boardwalk for a moment and the two of us could look at the bored back of the girl of our sons' dreams, so thin, swarthy, in the white dress, hear our laughter mixed up in the tumult, he stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray and asked: What were you asked to tell me?

He didn't even know how to formulate the question. I liked that.

Staged regards, I said, embarrassed.

He said, Who? And now some tone of violence was heard in his voice, which Boaz would explain to me later, was in my voice when I told him to come to my house and bring Menahem's poem, a violence of those pressed to the wall who don't have any more words.

I told him: I've got a neighbor, he asked me, in fact he didn't ask but demanded, really, to deliver something to you and what he wanted to deliver to you is hard for me to deliver, courtesy obliges me to forget his request, while another obligation, a higher one, obliges me to tell you…

He smoked another cigarette and I knew I couldn't avoid it, I saw that in his eyes, the lighter was crushed in his gigantic hand, I thought of talking to him about lost wars, but I said: My neighbor said he's the scion of somebody named Secret Charity which means in German…

I understand the name, he said quickly, what did he say?

He said to tell you, that scion… He's the son of his great-grandson, he said in German, now he tried to smile, stubbed out another cigarette in the ashtray, and when he lifted his finger, I saw that it was stained with ash, he looked at me for a split second, took the lighter out of his hand, moved it to his other hand, lit it, I waited but he didn't take a cigarette out of the delicate case, and only raised his hand pensively and again tried to smile, like somebody caught red-handed he put down his hand put out the lighter and put it in his coat pocket. I said quickly: He asked me to ask you to give him back his daughters! I felt the blood drain out of my face. I was afraid to look at him. He gazed a bit, his eyes slowly shut, tense, a long time passed and maybe the time was short and I only imagined that it was long, and then he said in a voice that suddenly sounded as if it came from the other end of the room: Maybe that's why I came here, for somebody to ask me for his daughters.