Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

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Joseph Rayna grew up and didn't know his forefathers. His father pondered ancient books in secret and his mother was a thin; bright-eyed woman. Joseph was the sort of child you see sometimes at the entrance to Paradise: beautiful children, sorrowful and cruel, who serve as minions of gods who amuse themselves with them. His curls weren't shorn and his eyes were green-gold like the eyes of a demon and wrapped in ovalish ellipses like the rustle of a butterfly's wing.

When he attended heder, the children would make fun of him. He'd fix them with his serene and arrogant look and they'd be awed. Later one of the children said that Joseph had a green halo around his head and sometimes he'd turn himself into glass and you could see through him. But his eyes, said the child, remained opaque with savagery and they penetrated me and I saw dogs and wolves preying on humans on mountains I had never seen in my life.

Afterward Joseph's father moved to the other side of the city. He read ancient writings left by Secret Charity the father of his grandfather, who had to be willingly ravished to bring repair, and he converted.

Joseph's mother, busy with her embarrassing love for her son, followed her husband. Joseph was baptized and given a name nobody remembered anymore. Like his grandfather's father, her husband sat in a cellar and made kiddush secretly to keep the commandments of God in secret. Once when Joseph fell asleep in the park a group of young girls passed by him. They were shaken at the sight of him, stopped and looked at him. He woke up but didn't open his eyes and they couldn't resist the temptation and touched him, they shrieked and fled in panic. He opened his eyes slowly and looked serenely at their panicky running. Some man who stood there and caught them red-handed scolded them, one of the girls who feared the rage of her father, a district officer, said: He tried to play with us, and so a policeman appeared at Joseph's house and took him to prison. In prison Joseph was beaten and the police called him filthy Jew, and asked why did you do that, and he said quietly: I'm not a Jew and I'm not filthy and I didn't do a thing. The police were scared when he talked because he laughed as he spoke while they beat him harshly. His demon's eyes were shrouded in a harsh and indulgent dusk and they were forced to put him in solitary confinement. The girl who told her father the officer the story had a nightmare that night, repented, went to church and confessed, and the priest told her forget everything and say eighteen Ave Marias but she went to her father and told him. Her father, who was a person who had a conscience but also a position in the city, went to the prison and released Joseph. Outside, he slapped Joseph's face and said: I don't know who's lying and who's not, but you get the benefit of the doubt. Joseph looked at the hand that had hit him and said to the district officer: Some day you'll find that hand outside your body and whether there is a God or not, your punishment is already prepared and is found in the air, I see it and it will strike you. The man was stunned, and by the time he finished thinking confused thoughts that ran around in his brain, Joseph left. About a year later his hand was lopped off and then he was afflicted with a serious illness and when he searched for Joseph, he was no longer to be found. Then Joseph started writing his poems.

To get around himself like his grandfather Secret Charity, he wrote the poems in Hebrew, which he remembered from his days in heder. He would illustrate his poems with stylized drawings and his mother would hang them on cords around her bed. His father joined a group of monks who wanted to prepare the Holy Inquisition in the Ukraine and Poland. In those monkish rituals, Joseph's father was tortured with richly imaginative instruments of torture the monks tried to copy from old books brought from Spain two hundred years earlier. He sensed that by that humiliation he woke hidden forces from their slumber. Then the father disappeared and in a letter that came to Joseph's mother two years later the father wrote: Ever since I read Karl Marx, my world has changed. I abandoned the flayers who sell opium to the masses. The future is latent in the class war that will come and in which the working man will defeat the parasites, in the new world there will no longer be the exploiters and the exploited, no Christians, no Jews, no Muslims, but only workers and those who stand in the way of the revolution have to be burned. Yours always. Joseph's mother went on praying to the old gods, but her passion for her son made her feel very guilty and the fact that she didn't yearn for her husband sharpened those feelings and so, to justify her life, she joined a group calling themselves messianic Christians.

One night, Joseph's father appeared in workers' clothing, wearing a cap, and didn't ask to see his son at all. Joseph heard him come in and was filled with yearnings for his father. He put on his favorite clothes and all night long he sat on his bed and waited. He murmured Father! Father! But his father didn't answer. He was too proud to get up and go into his mother's room, he tried to cry but he couldn't. At dawn, he heard his father silently leave the house without telling him good-bye. Joseph buried his face in a bowl, poured cold water on himself, and stayed like that a long time, hardly breathing, and then he sneaked off, changed clothes, and went to his mother. He sat at the table, hit the tablecloth, and said: That man is no longer my father.

Joseph's mother told him that his father was confused, called her "Mezuzah," prayed in an embarrassing way, slept on the rug, didn't approach her, said he didn't remember if he had ever had a son, and looked lost and desperate in his new faith. Joseph said: There is no salvation, all those salvations have different names but all of them are nonsense, this life is what we have, not what doesn't exist. She wanted so much to hug her son but her hands didn't obey her. Afterward, she started bringing home her friends, the drunk old messiahs. They cultivated forbidden love with clamorous and wild lust and the children told Joseph, Your mother's a whore!

Joseph's poems became more and more glorious and the sight of his mother in the arms of old drunks eager to bring the messiah, stirred a strong impulse in him to honor the world with poems devoid of all connection with reality that would describe a nonexistent world. The house began to fill up with birdcages and every night one of the old boyfriends slaughtered one bird.

One moonlit night, for six straight hours Joseph's mother watched a slaughtered bird whose blood froze on the floor of the cage. The cage was gilded and the dead bird's mouth was sunk in a tiny saucer of water. When an old boyfriend came and started taking off his coat, she shifted her eyes from the cage and looked like a woman who had gone mad. The man was startled and threw his coat on the floor. Because he started cursing her, she spat on the coat, when he attacked her his foot hit the gold cage and the water spilled, he tried to steady himself, he touched the head of the bird, stumbled with a kind of swoop because he tried to keep from falling, his head split open and he died on the spot. Joseph came in and saw the chameleon of blood gushing from the old man's mouth. He went back to his room, took off his clothes, and fell asleep. In the morning, he didn't look at his mother. She hadn't budged all night. When she held out her hand to touch him, he started shrieking like a bird. She was very beautiful and pale then, at her feet lay the old man's body. His face was shriveled, his skin was yellowish, and his tongue was coiled outside. His wide-open eyes were gaping in an expression of extinguished amazement. His mother stood up, went to her room, and returned wearing a beautiful dress. Her face was serene but a spark of apostasy flashed in it. She giggled and Joseph saw her madness and thought: a demon entered her, even though he knew that demons don't enter human beings but live in them from birth. She said: Joseph my love, my old father is lying dead, I promised him to marry you off. She drank a little wine, looked at the old man, and said: I'm queen of the Hasmoneans. After they went down to the cellar she asked her son to lie down on his father's sanctification table where he'd perform his mysterious Sabbath rituals. She carefully placed four lit candles at the four corners of the table, looked at Joseph, held her hand out to him, and said: I'm the queen and I marry my lover. Joseph, whose wrath burned for his father, grasped his mother's hand and felt a mighty current of heat passing from her hand to his body. For a moment, the dress looked like a bridal gown and Joseph thought: maybe the moment of my death has come, when she asked, he broke the glass of his father's kiddush wine.