Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

Joseph returned to Rachel, who knew how to accept him with untormented betrayal. And the next day, Joseph and Rebecca went to the small station on the outskirts of the city. Trains would slow down when they passed our town, only one small train a day would stop at the station that didn't even have a name. After the big curve, beyond the poplars, the trains would speed up and fly to unimagined distances that Joseph knew and Rebecca didn't. When Rebecca was a fourteen-year-old girl she saved the son of the stationmaster from being trampled. She didn't mean to save the child. The guard was a drunken lame Ukrainian called Jewish Death. The ant has five noses, said the Ukrainian to Rebecca and Joseph who had come to the station and gone up to the room of the bats, upstairs, and lovers he said, have only one limb. Then he sat in his chair, laughed, and drank his brandy. Joseph and Rebecca sat upstairs and held hands. Downstairs, the slow trains moved and the Ukrainian would bring them cookies and wine. A few days later, Rachel came. She found the two lovers holding hands and looking at one another. To translate the distress of the silence, she moved toward them stunned, hunched up in the pincers of their hands holding one another, and said: What dependence, Rebecca! That silence! And she put her head on Rebecca's lap and stroked her own womb and looked into Joseph's face and her cold heart was calm. Rebecca looked toward Joseph's son in Rachel's womb and thought of the dead children she had packed in the suitcase. Joseph looked at Rachel trying in vain to remember who she was. Rebecca pushed Rachel off her and said to Joseph: If you really love me, give your wife what she deserves, I have to know… Joseph said: I want you, but she laughed in his face, felt Rachel's womb, and said: First be a father of your son, beget him for me, too, and she left. Rachel got up and stood facing him. She said to him: You don't have to pretend anymore, Joseph. But to save something that died in me, at least embrace what you left in me. They hugged and then Rebecca shouted: I've got to see love, and they hugged again and then Joseph saw Rebecca in front of his eyes and was with her. Rebecca stood in the next room in the window bay overlooking the tracks and the avenue of poplars and looked at them. With all her might, she pitied Rachel's love for Joseph, but along with love a profound contempt was anchored in her that had always been embedded in her and now found a correct spelling. She said to herself: an ancient contempt came to me from a distant grave, and then the river laughed in her.

And the city concocted rumors. The mothers of Rachel and Rebecca locked their houses, put down the shutters, sat in Rachel's house, and wept. Together they sent their husbands to the rabbi of the island, delegates went out urgently to sages in other cities, and Nehemiah Schneerson leading his group of youngsters would try not to hear, not to know, to console himself with love of the Land of Israel, and at that time the three would walk in the forest, pick blackberries and red berries, and in an abandoned hut that Rebecca knew from her torments in the forest, Joseph and Rebecca would love in silence, Joseph trying to embrace Rebecca, press her to him, kiss her, and she let him but only a little and Rachel pleads with Rebecca to give Joseph herself and Rebecca despises Rachel and says, Why? Why?

One night, Rebecca's father came into her room and hit her; she slipped away from him and escaped. Rabbis wrote excommunication decrees and Rebecca returned to her hut. Rachel sat outside and Joseph was inside and made a fire of pieces of wood he had previously gathered. Rebecca let him undress her and stood before him naked. The fire enhanced the beauty of her body. She shut her eyes and let him stroke her. She didn't want to see the sight of her body in his eyes. I won't allow any love to confound the high price I set on the beauty I feel, she said. Shutting her eyes she could have been destroyed by gods Joseph said were in another location, and returned to the grave of her disappointments that were always her life itself. I'm part of the night, witches burned in fire, sleep, dreams, the pallbearers of Rebecca Secret Charity, she said, and Joseph was willing to die just to be borne by her, but he was afraid of the lofty words buzzing in his temples. Rebecca knew there wasn't even one corpse who would be ready for love like Joseph. Suddenly she abandoned her body, a wild joy she didn't know except from dreams came to her, Joseph's hands came, his body came close to her, blood started flowing when he came close to her, seasonal blood, she said, seasonal blood, Joseph, and he didn't see a thing, a forbidden woman, said Rebecca. And suddenly a tremor went through Joseph, Rebecca laughed in his face, he saw the laugh, hit her, and she dropped down, laughing, Rachel looked on hypnotized, and the blood still flowed and Rachel thought to herself: Who do I love, Joseph or Rebecca, and she knew that the hatred she felt for them was a kind of irreparable love. So she didn't know who she wanted to kill, and she hugged her son in her womb and called him to herself Secret Glory and Rebecca dreams, despicable in her own eyes, hugged in Joseph's arms, looked into his eyes and he is in her and her blood flows, and she gives birth to dead sons, all of them in her suitcase, and he still doesn't see the blood, and then Rebecca gets up and Joseph is still writhing on the ground, and she says: You're a fool, Joseph, you're the most beautiful man I ever met in my life, you kill you in me, and she started getting dressed. When she was dressed, Rachel came in and Joseph looked at her with the pain of his tormented body. Rebecca looked at Joseph and Rachel and they looked so distant, so threatening in their soft words.

In that longing, she was afraid she'd be a mirror there and see herself. In her eyes, they were so full of a future she didn't want to be in. Such a love mustn't be fostered because it's against all possibility of real disgust, she said and left. Joseph ran after her, pleaded, but Rebecca strode quickly and without turning around. From the windows of the city, frightened faces peeped out and contemptuous looks were hung on her and on Joseph running after her. Rebecca's mother put her head in the oven and Rachel's mother took her out of the oven, poured water on her, called the doctor, and Rebecca's father sat cross-legged and started praying, even though he hadn't prayed for years, and Rebecca walked to Nehemiah's house, and Nehemiah Schneerson's mother was knitting a shawl and looked outside and saw Rebecca knocking on the gate of the house. Nehemiah had dressed ahead of time, as if he were waiting for some sign. A few days before, when he saw Joseph walking around like a blind man, he wanted to mourn and then he went to the forest and vowed revenge against Judea for preventing him from avenging the cursed Exile, and said: In blood and fire Judea fell, in blood and fire Judea will rise, and now, dressed in warrior clothes he stood in the door he opened to Rebecca.

From his mother, Nehemiah inherited the intelligence of the quiet defeated people who fabricate small consolations. Rebecca said: If you want you can marry me, Nehemiah, I'll be your wife all the days of my life, and only yours, but if you don't want to, tell me now.

Later on, she told Nehemiah what had happened to her in the three days since Rachel's wedding. He was silent, sipped the tea his mother served, and his eyes filled with unshed tears. He didn't say a thing. Then they drank wine and the two of them were gripped by some spasm that united them so profoundly they had to embrace. And Rebecca felt peace for the first time in her life. For a moment she loved Joseph with an impossible love and hated him with an impossible hate, and that was the last time she thought about Joseph with that passion and disgust that had filled her from the moment she saw him at Rachel's wedding, and until her grandson Boaz was born she no longer yearned even one minute for the handsome man who was her brother, her cousin, and her only lover. When she felt peace, Nehemiah stopped being afraid of her. She drank wine and began talking gaily, she said: Does my educated lord know why God lays tefillin? Nehemiah looked out the window. In the window Joseph appeared. She said: Because it is written, The Lord hath sworn by his right hand. Does my young lord know that King David, like Joseph Rayna standing there outside, sang a song in his mother's belly? It is written that he sucked from the breasts of his mother and looked at her breasts. Don't blush, lad. And then he started singing. And it's written, Bless the Lord 0 my soul and forget not all his benefits, said Rabbi: that's because he made teats instead of intelligence. Not I, Nehemiah, the rabbis said: That's so he won't look at her groin. Don't blush! Nehemiah, who had almost not listened to her, said: You'll love me Rebecca, and she said: Maybe, maybe. I told you about David because of my violated honor, we'll go to America and start a new life. And Nehemiah said: No, to the Land of Israel, and she thought: We'll go there and from there we'll go to America. She didn't like to argue with him.