Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

Later on, Lily will tell Lionel that the blood shed then was the blood of her virginity and that he was the first man in her life. When Lily saw Lionel, almost twenty years older than her, standing in the door of her house and holding a kitbag in his hands, she felt for the first time in her life an enormous need to belong to somebody. A day before, as she sat in the office among disgruntled women and waited to renew her temporary ID, she saw Lionel walking in his uniform. She remembered that, when he passed by her, there was an innocent dismay on his face, and only then did he discover her and start talking with her and she smiled, even though she didn't know she was Melissa, and then he said: What is this Lily Schwabe, and she said: Lily Schwabe is a woman who lives in a destroyed house, and she gave him her address-something she had never doneand he went off and she was afraid she'd never see him again, until he showed up.

Two days later, Lionel stood in the little bathroom, facing the mirror that had cracked long ago, and cut his face with a razor blade. Lily, who thought he was trying to commit suicide, yelled and ran to him and tried to take the razor out of his hand, and then he told her in German: I'm not committing suicide, I just cut myself. She was amazed to hear the German, and said: Why didn't you tell me you speak German, and then he said: Don't worry, Melissa, and she said: My name is Lily and you speak German. Suddenly the sight of the people he interrogated rose in his mind's eye, the convulsions of laughter, the attempt to be cunning, but still strong, the endless deceit of those who didn't know anything, always they knew nothing, and he said to himself: I shouldn't have found her here. His hands shook and he slapped her. He said: I know how to say that in German, too, and she sat down on a broken chair, stroked her face, and said: Take the child, too! And he said angrily: There is no child and there won't be any child, and she said: Then take the no-child. And then she told him about her father taken prisoner by the Russians, he tried to trap her, to know if she was lying to him, but after a while-and he was an excellent interrogator-he understood that Lily Schwabe really didn't know why that war had raged. She knew French, German, literature, and history, but because of her reason and some profound wisdom in her, she didn't know why that war had raged. She didn't know that people died in camps. That offended Lionel. He knew that everybody said that, it was convenient for him to know that they said and recalled things and tried to pass on to the agenda. But to meet somebody like Lily, and to understand, to understand that she truly didn't know, that was beyond his understanding. He told her: You're not guilty, In sinne der Anklage-Nicht schuldig, as the war criminals then claimed. She wasn't angry at him for hitting her, and he said: You taught yourself to be devoid of moral judgment, but neither did she understand why Lionel's Judaism constituted any difficulty in their relations. She understood only that he shouldn't have German children. And she said that. She tried to understand what happened, to explain how she had shut herself off, maybe against her will, maybe because of some indifference, maybe because of a fear that she couldn't hold out, she lived on the periphery, and the war passed by her, the city was blown up, people went away and didn't come back, but she didn't ask questions, maybe she feared the answers, she only remembered that near the end of the war, she saw the young children, she'd see them on their way to the nearby school, shooting at low-flying planes and being killed, and older prisoners of war, bound with ropes, loading sandbags to defend them and being killed too. Lionel said to her: You're the wrong product of the Third Reich, everything was wasted on you!

Lionel got up, walked around the room, and for three straight hours, he delivered a speech to her about the continuity of the Jewish fate, about the lost echoes of their footsteps, and he left. Two days later he came back. He'd bring groceries, and she would cook. You're learning to eat, he told her, envying her hunger. All the time he would talk about his shortcomings, his advanced age, his failure as a writer, his life as a superfluous journey between nothing and nothing, and Lily who began to understand that her name was not only Lily but also Melissa, began to learn English, and one day she sat among his dirty clothes and laundered them and thought about a certain word she had learned that day, and shouted it to Lionel who was in the bath, and he opened the door, saw the young woman sitting there lovesick with his clothes and gave her some answer about the word she had uttered, and then he understood the meaning of his love, he understood it from her concern with his clothes and with words, understood what sensuality a woman could grant to the pants of a man she loved, and how far she could go to speak a language that is the soul of things and their formulation before they were in the world. Now he saw Lily imprisoned in a world that for some reason didn't take vengeance on her because it didn't know what profound rebelliousness was buried in her, how she could betray herself, her parents, all out of a total dissociation, out of a rare ability to be like a wax statue in a legend in which a prince appears and grants her life. Her life is my sad echo, he said to himself, and loved her as much as he was disgusted by her and by himself, loved her more than anybody else he had ever loved in his life.

Tape / -

When Ebenezer and Samuel Lipker came to Cologne, Samuel stood in the street and distributed announcements about the performance. He had no guilt about dragging Ebenezer to that place. As far as he was concerned, the enemy should also enjoy. Lionel heard about the performance and decided to take Lily. When they entered the small wretched nightclub they were greeted by the owner, a very thin man with smoky eyes, holding rattles to be shaken, and when they sat down at a big wooden table where people had carved their names for years, two gigantic glasses of beer were already standing before them and in front was a small lighted stage. The place was crowded, the smoke of cheap cigarettes spiraled up from all sides, and whenever Ebenezer declaimed, the room thundered with the excited rattles. Next to Lionel and Lily sat five hugging men who wept all the time. For some reason, the tears the men wept were so big that when he looked at them, Lionel could see how the space left by Ebenezer's words, words with nothing behind them except borrowed memory, stirred laugh ducts in five men who came here to demonstrate disguised laughter. Ebenezer looked to Lionel like a repulsive Jew who wanted to look like a repulsive Jew, rather stooped, and Lionel wearing the uniform of an American officer felt uncomfortable, he was amazed not only that that man was amusing people who would have tortured him a year ago, but also at his own amazement. Lily understood that Ebenezer was reciting things he didn't understand, but as far as she was concerned, there was something in that fact itself that justified what she had tried to explain to Lionel without much success, that she too had lived ten years in a recital and didn't understand that she was reciting, didn't even want to understand.

And then Lionel noticed Samuel Lipker. Between the excerpts, Samuel praised the Last Jew who was appearing here before this distinguished audience, as he put it. He spoke like a person reporting on percentages of interest or a rise in stocks, restrained and aloof, and all the while his face was thrust at the audience, he had to know who his real enemy was, he had to overpower them and Lionel understood his look better than he understood Lily's enthusiasm at hearing the things Ebenezer was reciting. Lionel hated the covetousness he discerned in Samuel's eyes. He saw in him something that reminded him of the awful moments of his life, when he saw in the mirror a person he himself didn't know. And then Ebenezer said: I now list essays on the history of the hostility to the repulsive Jews (he didn't say that mockingly, he said it dryly, as if he had no opinion)Distinguished gentlemen, set your watches a thousand years back. I'm trying again, I said then boldly: the news according to Benbas, the dialogue with Trifo by Justin Martyr, the pamphlet against the heretics by Iraeneus, I'm sorry about the whisper, reading from a distance, dead letters torn in my mind, a smell of a distant church, a ringing that deserted the bells and remains hovering in the air, torturing Jews by Tertullian, calling God by Lactinius, and that fool Kramer thought only about the essay by Isidor of Sevilla and his pamphlet against the Jews. A great expert you had there! Kramer… removing all the heretics and an explanatory essay against Jews by Hippolyte, tasteless kinds of flesh of Jews by Novatian and a selection of testimonies by Nissa and testimonies from the Old Testament against the Jews, proof of the Good Tidings, history of the church by Eusebius. Eight sermons against the Jews and proof to the Jews and the Christians that Jesus is God by Chrysostom, a pamphlet by Saint Augustine, his Heavenly City… Rhymes against the Jews by Ephraim the Syrian, Sergei de Abraga: the Torah of Jacob and the proofs against the Jews by Ephrat, the sermons of Masrog, the Sabbath against the Jews by Isidore… Something is omitted here, and the book of Orthodox faith, a dialogue of Jason and Papikies, a dialogue of Timothy of Aquilla, a dialogue of Asnasius and Pepsicus, and Philo, and Lily thought Ebenezer was singing. When she said that, Lionel looked at her and suddenly couldn't recognize her. Inside him, a melody he knew from childhood began singing in him. Melissa is listening to my father's melody, thought Lionel, who was my father? But when Ebenezer started quoting poems by eighteenth-century Polish poets, the ruddy-cheeked old man with the red flower in his lapel was moved to tears and frenziedly wrote down every word in a big notebook in front of him. His hand flew over the paper, his eyes were almost shut and some coquettish smile spread over his face. When Ebenezer moved to the stories of the Cadet from the Zohar and then to the stories of the Brothers Grimm, the old man said: Forty years I've been investigating forgotten Polish poetry, both of us, he and I, the only ones in the world who still remember. I sit in London, sir, investigate, encyclopedias empty of that poetry, no books, there was a man who remembered and passed it on to Ebenezer, in his mind he holds onto that sublime poetry, I copy it to publish it. Is there anything more awful than a nation forgetting its songs, Lord! Of all the dozens of poets he knows-I follow him from city to city-only three are still known to scholars of Polish literature. Who was the man who taught him that poetry? Could it have been a Jew? How does a Jew who died know that poetry? And the man wept and Lionel didn't know exactly what he was weeping about. He covered the notebook so the tears wouldn't melt the words he wrote and he started shaking the rattle. I don't know, if he'd ask me I'd be amazed, do I really know those poems? Maybe Germanwriter knows. The man stopped shaking the rattle and again wrote something. Lily swallowed a piece of orange Lionel gave her.