Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

Avenues in light Ebenezer sees. Near him they're still digging. He thinks: When did I meet Samuel Lipker, when did I leave Palestine, is it still there, what happened to the beautiful bougainvillea, did I ever really have bougainvillea? Maybe there really is a horizon near the church I saw yesterday for the first time. For three years I didn't hear its bells. What do I remember? I've got to learn my life.

Then Ebenezer leaves the Red Cross hut. Somebody had already managed to draw a Star of David on the hut. Kramer is still sitting pensively. A woman is standing over him and yelling: Say where they killed my children. Where did they kill them, there were three, Haimke, Ruha, and Shmil, where did they kill them? Not far from here is a fine camp of officers, like a pastoral painting. It was here all the time, says Ebenezer, and Ebenezer didn't know. They talk about distributing ration cards, updating, registering, spraying, about food portions and medicine. Captain Wood is rather busy today. The blocks have almost all been destroyed. Old Jews set up a synagogue in a tent. Look for a Torah scroll in the garbage. At night a psychiatrist in a sailor's cap arrives. A woman stands above him and looks at him. She's amazed at how he can sleep in that noise. Look how he sleeps, he hasn't got dreams! And Captain Wood says: He'll understand, he at least has to understand, got to find a way to separate between total disbelief and reality, between life in London after the month of the blitz we came out and found the fog, the street, that's what saved us, they've got to start finding something and understanding. Ebenezer doesn't understand that the church exists! What are the Germans burying, asks the Red Cross man, can I really examine every body? And how many bodies are here? Ebenezer shuts his eyes and says: Abramovitch five, Avigovitch three, Anishevitch two, Baborovsky three, Bennoam two, Bronovitch… What is he doing? asks Captain Wood and Samuel says: He's counting for you how many there were here in the three years so you can examine the corpses from the list. There's no need, yells Captain Wood, suddenly flushed, as if the number of dead is meant to indict him, and he stops Ebenezer, who opens his eyes. He looks and sees that the numbers he was about to deliver are registered with surprising clarity on Kramer's face. Ebenezer tries to maintain the barrier, he looks at the sky, a small plane lands not far from here, he tries to find the sky as Captain Wood once found a street and fog. Grass, cows grazing not far away, when did we see cows? He doesn't remember and isn't sure he really didn't see. Samuel is making deals with soldiers, selling souvenirs, already inventing himself the lampshade made from his parents, and selling it to them, and they weep quite a bit hearing Samuel Lipker's story. By the end of the day, the story was practiced and recited properly, without mistakes, from now on, he'll easily find the place where the soldiers' tears of remorse flow and will make a deal that's not bad. He understands that there's money in tear ducts. Kramer has now turned into a landmark. Two steps from Kramer, on the right, there's a psychiatrist who has gotten up and is trying to understand, to help. Let him hold white underpants, says somebody. Why are they making a picnic of all this? says Captain Wood in a moment of perplexity. The barbed wire fence is already starting to totter, strewn with dead dogs who fled and were electrocuted. People are washing, scared of the light. A little girl asks a soldier for candy and next to her stands a table full of candy. Hard to understand, thinks Ebenezer, but possible to peep, Fraulein Klopfer sits tied up next to Kramer, lowers her eyes, and Samuel says to Captain Wood: When they threw babies into the fire she took a baby, tossed it up and aimed it so it would fall straight down, like a rock into water. You'd be amazed how much a year-old baby wants to live and how he leaps and shrieks. Look at her! That's how you'll find the street and the fog. A sunbeam prances on the Germans digging. A blond boy with blue-gray eyes stands on the edge of the pit and hands his father a sandwich. His face is transparent, so fair. The father chews hungrily and mutters something, and the little girl at the table, to the right of Kramer, swallows some chocolate and her face is smeared, and an American soldier takes a picture of a little girl brown with chocolate next to the DDT showers. Clouds float in the sky. How do you guess, Fraulein Klopfer, thinks Captain Wood. She lifts her face and looks at the dim glow of the horizon, valiant Germans are digging pits and filling them with the dead, that destroyed harmony shatters in her a vital force that Kramer is trying to suck out of the air as if he were waiting for dispatches, the Fuhrer won't forsake us, he says confidently. Does Captain Wood understand the meaning that I'm not the Last Jew, that a disaster happened and Samuel doesn't know who the disaster happened to? This is how a very powerful system is devised, says the psychiatrist.

Who will arrange the battle Ebenezer is now shaping in his memory, his chronicles, thinks the psychiatrist sitting with Ebenezer in a special tent set up for him.

I knew I'd be the last to give up!

How did you think about that?

I didn't think. It came by itself.

And in the previous camp?

There I didn't think, and don't remember exactly.

Will you hypnotize yourself to remember?

Samuel can help me.

Samuel, come help him.

Samuel approaches, stands next to Ebenezer, says: Shut your eyes, set your watch back. Kramer stands up to come see the box you made for him and then…

I came to Birkenau. For years I searched for Joseph Rayna. Here I was almost the first one. They built the hut after I was inside. Three years here is the climax!

And what did you do?

Don't remember… at night they didn't shoot me, but they told me, at first there were no chambers here.

Gas?

Gas.

And what did they do?

They tried with a diesel motor and heavy oil, says Samuel, that took an hour to suffocate thirty people in a closed truck. Weiss came and saw my box.

Then you made boxes?

Yes, says Samuel, and that's how he remembered.

How?

He heard people murmuring. They were finished and were dead. They were hungry, stunned, groaned at night, talked, he started remembering, doesn't know how, he said: I'll be the last one who will guard everything they know.

Humiliated?

Maybe he didn't say humiliated, isn't humiliated too strong?

Perhaps. I wasn't there. You come from another world, Mr. Schneerson.

But he's here.

Yes, he's here, but look, he isn't anymore.

I don't know, if he was, he'll probably remain.

No, he isn't.

I didn't have the strength to remember the other things, so maybe I could not know how awful it is to live here.

To ignore?

Yes. And not to think. Just remember things I don't understand anyway.

There were geniuses here. Do you know what a mine of knowledge was lost here? Only a little of that he remembers.

Why?

Everything came according to a certain music, the words came one by one, incomprehensible but etched. You think I'll ever be free of that?

I don't know.

Let's say, I thought about Wittgenstein's theory, there is such a man, isn't there?

Yes.

I thought about it, don't understand it, but every word of his I know. I remembered his words and I forgot what I did before.

Everything comes at the price of something, says Samuel.

Apparently, says the psychiatrist.

I'm a superficial man. I thought I'd hide and they'd come and then I'd tell them. I loved a woman. I left everything, but I don't remember now. I remember their words. Got to be freed first. I already remember Captain Wood and you, sir, a sign that I'm not the Last Jew. A sign that I'm also starting to remember things that are happening to me.