Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

My legs were heavy, I felt my body pulling me down and yet my head seemed weightless, in the staircase it was dark and I looked for the switch. And the German, even though he was such a well-known writer, didn't know how you illuminate Israeli staircases. With light legs, maybe too light, I searched for the switch with my hand stroking the walls. My hand came upon the doorbell of the neighbors' apartment, hit a bracket where a lamp or a mailbox may once have hung and then suddenly the light came on, and my hands on the wall were white with plaster, even my nose was white and the German lady was wiping the plaster with her finger. We went down the stairs and stood in the entrance hall, facing the gray-white brick wall that remained as a shelter from the days of World War II. I saw clearly-sharpened by my drunkenness-the soot of a cigarette crushed in a slot between two bricks. Renate also looked at the spot of soot illuminated by the dim light from the staircase so that those bricks, two bricks and between them was a spot, those bricks were lighted more brightly than the other bricks and when Renate stared at the spot next to the wall of darkened stones I saw how proper and handsome her clothes were: she wore a light gray Indian silk blouse, a faded scarlet skirt, a necklace of small delicate pearls, while she attached a restrained dark black comb in her hair. We walked slowly toward the car parked not far from there. The German opened the doors and for some reason I was glad it was an Escort assembled in Israel, and I, mocked by my son for knowing every article by Ahad Ha-Am and not knowing the difference between a tile roof and a DeSoto, I now know the names of cars, their virtues, from my incessant rambles I learned to know the capacity of a motor, what is a gearshift, whether the car is automatic or front-wheel drive and it was terrific of me to know for him not only yearnnnnings, as he'd say, or what difference does it make but what are Ford and Fiat and Escort. The German asked where we were going and I wanted to tell him: Ebenezer lives on Deliverance Street but I said: Go north here, and on Nordau Boulevard you turn left and…

The newly painted gate was gleaming in the silvery moonlight, I wanted to point to the rose and geranium bushes, my lightness was beginning to dissolve, the sea peeped through the two trees in front of our houses and somebody had already started grooming and pruning them, in that epidemic of resurrecting the gardens that had broken out in the neighborhood. I saw the shutters shift a moment, the flash of my wife in the cleft of the shutter, and when we went inside Hasha Masha was sitting under the sheaf of her light, forlorn, torn from the world, the light flattered her, I could see her beauty in the eyes of strangers too. Germanwriter and Renate his wife were bracketed in the door, next to the white spot I hadn't repainted, where I had once torn off the mezuzah in rage. The dull gleam in Renate's eyes grew even duller, I glanced at her, from where she stood, in the presence of the gloomy room she fished up the face of my wife and I saw how she was seduced by the beauty of Hasha Masha, how she warmed to her, maybe the wine sharpened my senses that I hadn't known before, and the light, more than flattering her emphasized her powerlessness, her clinging to a certain moment in her life. She looked at the opened door, at the two strangers, captured by Renate's eyes and suddenly she got up as if all those long hours she had been waiting only for them, slammed the door behind them, and was stirred to life. She held out her hand to the writer and his wife, and I wondered what had made my wife suddenly so calm, so domesticated, there wasn't a trace of the contempt or anger in her I'd usually see when I'd bring strangers home. She was glad, really glad to hold out her hand to Renate. She looked at her a long time and when Renate wanted to kiss her cheek she refused but with a friendly evasion, without challenge, as if it was a delaying tactic, the kiss grazed Hasha Masha's hair, and in her eyes a smile of sisters in sin ignited, which I couldn't understand except as a joke, since Renate looked at her and smiled too.

And as the two of them were looking at one another, the German was looking at pictures hung in our house, landscapes by the painter Shot, a small photo of my son, the heavy drapes, the old, simple furniture, and then Renate sat down. She sat on the front of the chair, her legs held tightly together, I wanted to tell her: No one will throw you out of here, but I didn't know what Hasha Masha had given away in her rare smile. The German was busy with some thought, as if he was and wasn't here at one and the same time, he smoked his cigarette, measured the face of my wife, his face became hard, maybe that was a challenge, maybe a measuring, I said in Hebrew: They're terrific and they want to meet our neighbor, but my wife wasn't listening to me at all, she hadn't even noticed my rare drunkenness, the German exhaled smoke from the cigarette and a cloud of smoke suddenly filled the room and Hasha Masha said to Renate in German I never knew she could speak, Come with me to the kitchen, I made cookies and cheesecake and there's also tea and coffee. For years she hadn't made anything for guests, the fact that she had clearly expected them to come perplexed me even more than her German, Renate almost skipped from the chair and the two women, who, despite the difference in their height, in a strange way looked like one another, were about to go to the kitchen but at that very moment Renate stared at the closed album, stopped a second, trembled, and Hasha Masha, who was attentive to her, came to the table, put a finger on the album and then on Renate's pale face, and then the two of them quickly took off for the kitchen, we were left alone in the room, the album was illuminated by the beam that always fell on Hasha Masha's head, shadows on the walls, my head was now light and elusive.

The German's hand began moving toward the album. He waited. A gigantic hand expecting, not asking but waiting, a hand hanging in the air, I said, Yes, look! He went to the table, stubbed out the cigarette in his hand and meanwhile I searched for an ashtray in the house where only Noga had smoked, and by the time I brought the ashtray the Shimonis had given us for our anniversary, that gigantic ugly seashell, the writer was already leafing through the album. He didn't pay any attention to the ashtray, just caught it in his big hand, without looking, crushed the stubbed-out cigarette with one spark still flashing in it, and looked at the photos with solemn slowness, page after page, and didn't say a thing, didn't ask, I wanted to say, Here's Menahem at six, here he is on a tour to the Carmel, but he didn't ask. I thought to myself, they and Hasha Masha know something, they know something about Menahem, about some life, and I don't.

Maybe because he was a German a forgotten picture from Romain Rolland's novel about Beethoven rose in the back of my mind. I recalled Beethoven's friend's description of the deaf genius listening intensely to music with his face impassive, as if, wrote Romain Rolland, the strength of the experience was too enormous to express in a look. I tried to understand what had been bothering me since the beginning of our conversation in the Shimonis' house, the sequence of accidents, the almost offensive circularity of Marar, Ebenezer Schneerson, Boaz, and somebody named Secret Charity and something that had now dissolved with the wine I had drunk and made me pleasantly dizzy, no, not the surprising link, not just that surprising closeness between Boaz and Ebenezer or the link of my investigation and the German's investigation, but something else I still didn't catch, maybe some fate I am to witness in the future no less than in the past, I said to him: Here is Menahem my son when he finished school, for example, the grammar school he attended, on his left is Amihud Giladi, the son of the owners of Ebenezer's house, before he moved here. He looked at me in amazement. His face was impassive, he was silent and in fact hinted to me that there was no need to detail those pictures and that the fact of Menahem's graduation from grammar school had nothing to do with what he was seeing now, as if Menahem's not-being had nothing to do with events when he was here, and whereas I knew I wasn't able to behave properly in such circumstances, that something theatrical and indulgent exulted in me at moments when I should behave in a precise and restrained way, I started telling the German who stood over the table and looked at the pictures in an unemotional silence, a story so characteristic of me, disgusting even myself but I couldn't change now of all times, before the photos of Menahem while his wife and my wife were developing a strange intimacy, I told him: A woman lived here on the street who recently opened a new shop, Salon de Pre she called the shop, once she was caught in the forest with a group of escapees from the ghetto, and Nazi soldiers-I said Nazis, not Germans! — caught them, the commander, she told me, was dressed very splendidly, wore riding pants, aluminum tags on his collar, a splendid silk hat on his head and in his hand he held a pistol and he shot, one after another the children dropped, and when he came to her and aimed the pistol at her son, on his finger pressing the trigger she saw a gold wedding ring, the soldiers were gathering wood for a bonfire and she stared at the finger, her child was pushed into her dress and with a vital flash of a besieged mother (my words, not hers) she said to him: Someday my children will take revenge on your children! And the officer's hand began shaking. At that moment maybe he understood, she told me, that there's a connection between his children and those children he shot as if they were an ecological nuisance, and he couldn't shoot that child. Throughout the war, he helped the woman. He'd show up from distant places, warn her, and take off. She wrote a letter to the court in Nuremberg and told the story. They wanted to know his name. She didn't know. They sent her pictures for identification and she couldn't identify him. I looked at him, he closed the album and looked at me, and then he said something strange, he said: Mr. Henkin, I didn't save any children! I felt embarrassed and I quickly moved the album to its place. Meanwhile the voices of our wives were heard again, I heard their whispering, and didn't understand them, they returned to the room with trays between them, for a second they looked at the closed album, as if they sensed it had been closed a minute or two before, I looked at the writer's face and it was impenetrable, a mouth mute now, I felt remote, I recalled the memorial day we had held recently for a commander when one of the government ministers said: We're in deep depression, this is a hard time, and from the grave of our loved one a beam of light bursts out to us and I stood there and something in me was revolted but I was also moved. Maybe both deceived and pained, a beam of light bursting out of death! In the ashtray the spark of smoke that burst from the stubbed-out cigarette could still be seen, my wife wanted to say something, the tray in her hand, I said: I'd have to say, he wrote a poem, I felt my legs buckle.