Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

She also feared he would fall in love with her as she loved. Her belly swelled and when they came to Jerusalem, she died in his arms in the seventh month of her pregnancy. Joseph buried her next to her father's grave. Then he toured the Land of Israel and saw the vistas described by his mother who was the last queen of the Hasmonean line. On Mount Tabor, he met a German aristocrat, Adorno von Melchior who wanted to establish a Jewish kingdom in the Land of Israel. When Joseph met Sarah, the wife of the German aristocrat, he felt he was liable to sin against his great love hung around his neck as an amulet. Joseph became the secretary of the aristocrat von Melchior. He wrote his letters in a florid handwriting and the woman he loved almost more than all the women he had met slept like an animal with mustached men who would beat her, Druses in white kaffiyehs with sullen eyes, and she said: I do that to forgive you for your errors, and the aristocrat said: She doesn't sleep with me because she's my wife and she loves me. Joseph understood the profound bond between the two queens he had met in his life, his mother and Sarah the wife of the aristocrat, and when he saw how much she yearned for him, he tried to touch her but she rejected him even though her womb began to stab and she wanted to give him children. After she told him things in that vein, Joseph wrote seventeen poems, each a description of a part of her body he didn't know. In one of the poems he described Frau von Melchior's neck as it looked in the transparent and strong Jerusalem light when her collar fell down and the cleft of her bosom looked like the winding of a beloved snake. The Frau loved the poems and he read them to her standing at perfect and absurd attention. On his travels for von Melchior he met the Jewish Pioneers who were establishing the first settlements. He pitied their hard life and suffered the pain of their enslavement to Baron Rothschild. He liked to feast his eyes on the handsome daughters of the settlers in the burning afternoons of the Land of Israel. They were full of yearnings for their dream from the moment they started building their miserable houses. With gloomy expressions, they tried to celebrate, contracted malaria, and wept.

A year Joseph Rayna stayed in the Land of Israel. He wrote in one of his poems that the discovery of God among the rocks of the wasteland is testimony to the destruction of the nation. He parted from the farmers' daughters who, having no other songs, sang his songs as if they were hymns. He parted from the wife of the German aristocrat who loved him so much she fled for a month to some Druse sheikh who kept her tied to a rock in the mountains of Transjordan. After leaving a bouquet of flowers on the fresh grave of the Danish painter who had carried his son in her womb, he left the Land of Israel, went to Alexandria, wandered to Persia, came to India, and on a gloomy day in the winter of eighteen ninety-eight, he came back to our city. He went to his mother's grave, and then to the grave of Rebecca Secret Charity, the wife and daughter of Secret Charity, and closed himself in a room and wrote elusive songs about the splendid, pedigreed, and desired Land of Israel, and then he was discovered by a group of young people who'd gather in the forest, wave flags in secret, and dream of a settlement in the Land of Israel. In the exhausting cold, around a bonfire, the young people sat and sang songs brought by an emissary. They sang Joseph's songs without knowing it. Nehemiah Schneerson, the leader of the group, met Joseph in the cemetery when he went to say kaddish on his father's grave and invited him to tell his group about the Land of Israel.

In the group of young people craving salvation was one girl, a close friend of Rebecca Sorka who would ascend to the Land of Israel on the first day of the twentieth century and be called Rebecca Schneerson and would be the mother and grandmother of Boaz Schneerson. Joseph looked at Rachel and she trembled at the sight of the gigantic organ that was like a beam between the eyes of the well-born prince who told about the Land of Israel, without emotion or yearnings. Shutting her eyes, Rachel Brin gleaned a little of the light Joseph had taken from his great-grandmother's grave. The light balled up into pain in her womb. When Nehemiah heard Joseph's songs, which he had sung before without paying attention to their words (Joseph read the poems despondently but unashamedly), the blood drained from his face and at that moment Joseph would look at Rachel. Nehemiah was furious at the songs without knowing why. He was a genius in the yeshiva who had disappointed his rabbi, who had expected great things from him. But when Joseph read all his poems and Rachel felt stabbings in her belly, at that very moment, on the other side of the city, at the entrance to the forest, Rebecca Sorka got up, and far from her friend Rachel, whom she had recently abandoned, looked out the window of her room and saw a light glowing in the forest but she didn't see its reflection in the windowpane. In the forest, naked winter trees awaited her. It was evening and she didn't leave her house. These things are the absolute truth. When she woke up in the morning, at the sight of the ceiling above her, she said to herself: My death canopy! In the shadows of the chiaroscuro, in her eyes black dogs were depicted slicing a person's body. The person she didn't know but for some reason she thought she should know him. After she dismissed the maid who came to brush her long delicate hair, she crossed her legs, sat up in bed, and thought about the man she had seen before in her fantasies, which were still too tormenting for her to think about now. So she formulated them to herself with fake indifference and wrote Yeshua, deliverance, on the wall of the stove bulging into her room.

When she came out of her room, she brushed her hair herself in the kitchen over the simmering skillets and pots and when she saw a fish fluttering in the sink she threw her hairbrush to the floor, wrapped herself in a coat, and went out. Her mother's eyes followed her from the window and then the fish was destroyed by a blow that shook the table. Rebecca's mother said to the cook: They've gone crazy, the young people, they just go to America, to the Land of Israel, got no manners, what a world! The cook didn't understand what she meant and so she didn't answer her. Rebecca wandered around aimlessly. The light she saw in the window still distressed her, but guided her steps. Even now, in the stinging cold, she knew precisely how beautiful she was. Her beauty was the source of her yearnings for herself. The taste of the night hadn't yet vanished and Rebecca hugged herself without emotion and her hands shook. She didn't shout because she knew that nobody deserved to hear her shout. Now the wind flew snowflakes to her. The houses flogged by the wind were wrapped in a dull glow of frost from the squashed sun flickering between the heavy weary clouds.

Rebecca took an apple out of her pocket, polished it on the fabric of her coat, and bit into it. The bittersweet apple pleased her. Snowflakes started sticking to her coat, she tasted in her mouth the jaws of the dogs preying on the man of her fantasy. Before getting up in the morning, before she opened her eyes, and as usual she counted the dead children she envisioned, she lost her reflection in the window and saw the dead in the obituaries plucked off the synagogue wall and hung over her bed. The dogs' teeth smelled like perfume. She put the dead children into a gigantic suitcase clasped with leather straps.

The suitcase exploded and eyes burst out of it. The eyes were words plucked from the obituaries, they flew in the room and sought a hold in the paper where they had been written before. The words would stroke her and torture and all the time she would think quickly: How many dead do I really know, and would count the dead and make a list on a scrap of paper and look at the list and say: There were more and I don't remember.