Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

And then Ebenezer stood up to the cheering rattles. A bitter smile flickered in the corners of his mouth. Those who didn't just want to shake the rattles applauded. Ebenezer looked tired and pale. Samuel Lipker gave him a glass of beer. Lily said: That lad looks like you! Lionel, who had known that from the first moment, glared at his venomous beauty, he shifted his eyes to Ebenezer and thought: Ebenezer and I are the same age. I'm with Lily Schwabe and he's with Samuel Lipker, and he envied Lily's beautiful eyes that saw that beauty.

Anger at himself made him shiver and he diverted his hostility to war against Lily.

And Lily was an easy enemy, thought Lionel with his characteristic bitterness. And then a murderer who had been dormant in him ever since Melissa shut her eyes was kindled in him. His hands reached out to Lily to strangle her. There was a lot of noise. A flush rose onto Lily's cheeks. She saw the hands reaching out to her. Samuel Lipker stared long and wantonly at Lionel, who felt his look. He dropped his hands and buried his face in them. Lily sidled up to him and caressed his hand, shook the rattle exaggeratedly, and sipped the beer. The Pole stood up and went to sit someplace else. Lionel wanted to get up. Ebenezer was standing on the side of the stage and looked like a grasshopper stuck to a blackboard in a biology class. Lily is watered by an artificial rain, he thought, and Melissa, my angel, you died before my eyes. Samuel Lipker now told how he had met Ebenezer, how Ebenezer learned his knowledge. He told how they had crossed borders and countries, and said: This performance is designed to collect money for our families, we glean pennies to save souls from death. He didn't expatiate on what death and only the smiling expression of Ebenezer's eyes clarified for Lionel the disgrace of the moment. When they passed the baskets among the audience, Samuel's eyes examined the room carefully but kept coming back to Lionel. When the basket came to Lionel, Lily wanted to pay, but he caught her hand, held the basket for a whole minute, looked at the money heaped up in it and passed it on. Samuel looked at the basket that dropped out of Lionel's hand, and his eyes expressed some contempt and then Samuel said, his eyes staring into Lionel's eyes: Ebenezer has to save his daughters! But Lionel knew and didn't know how he knew that Ebenezer had no daughters. Now he wanted to see Samuel's defeat but maybe even then that love for that bold and attractive lad stirred in him, and the closeness he felt for Lily made him shiver even more, he had to kiss or die, her or him, he went outside and threw up. Then, he took the rattle and shook it in the street until they came to Lily's house. People dressed in rags sitting huddled at bonfires next to what once were their houses looked with characteristic loathing at somebody who had lost them their palaces, and he yelled: I piss on you and the dream girl of the Third Reich also laughed. At home, Lionel said: I'm forty-four years old and I weep without tears. And you, a daughter of the thousand-year Reich-and you laugh! You're an ad for Ritesma and Simon cigarettes, a painting of the great German school, sitting with a kike born in Poland and wanting children he doesn't have to give you.

Lily made tea for the drunken Lionel and then she lay down beside him and was Melissa with little nipples who killed angels of death with her soft eyelashes.

What made you Lily made Himmler Himmler, said Lionel with his eyes shut. And thus he started writing her a farewell letter in his mind. She told him: What's simple about love? You were the first man in my life and you'll be the last. She didn't understand how Lionel knew that Ebenezer had no daughters. She wanted Ebenezer to have daughters. Lionel got angry, but couldn't explain why Ebenezer had no daughters. And so maybe he felt she was immune to him, maybe because of her love, maybe because of her youth as a wunderkind of the Hitler-jugend maybe she had never been a member of, and they talked about the resemblance between Samuel and Lionel. Lionel got angry, as if the heavy blood coursing in him truly had a voice and a shape as the professors and sages in this city had taught for ten years. A scene of a dream she had had arose in Lily's mind. In her dream, she told him, her father, who was now a prisoner of the Russians, was stumbling in a forest and she was a baby bird. Her father picked up the baby bird and decided to cook it. Then he would shoot at birds who came to ask for the baby bird. He put her into a basket, and walked, and that's how I was adopted, she said. Lionel thought of Joseph Rayna. Once, when he had heard about him, he had wanted so much for him to be his father so he could kill him. He thought of how his mother had told him about Rebecca Schneerson who would translate people into an eternal texture of contempt like copy paper that transmits things and serves as a fluent copy but preserves the original. Those thoughts begat in him an almost regal lust that was translated into a tormented and enormous night of love and copulation like some whorehouse of angels, he thought, and when he woke up and saw her sleeping, he noticed how white and clear her eyes were. Don't die on me, he said in a panic. And then he sank into sleep and when he woke up he saw her eyes wide open and looking at him. The responsibility filled him with a bitter taste. She'll look so beautiful on York Avenue, she'll dry the tears of the world, she has no right to wonder about Ebenezer's lost daughters, and he said to her: When Samuel Lipker searched for diamonds in corpses, you sat and drew sunsets with flags at the Baltic shore and a heroic and bold race lusted for you with avid eyes, but she didn't answer him. She tried to remember how beautiful it was to fall asleep in his arms, and she said: But if you decided that I'm Melissa, then let me be Melissa retroactively, too. The vanishing figure of her father didn't grieve her. In her dream, she remembered, she dreamed that somebody pointed an accusing finger at her, but since she never knew what guilt was she didn't know what the finger meant. You know, she said, you're now all the memories I have, I came to you from total darkness.

That night he said he had to go away for a while. He brought a lot of groceries and two pairs of nylon stockings. She was silent and looked at him, and whispered: I'll be here, Lionel. Soon, they'll finish repairing the house across the street, the apartment there belonged to my grandmother, she died in the war. The phone number in her apartment is 46655. If you don't come back and don't call, you'll find me behind Himmelstrasse, in the new cemetery, in the northern part where they're now burying people. Look for the letter S. I'll die secretly even if you don't come back, but if I die, Lionel, all your women will be dead in my eyelashes like the eyelashes that filled Melissa's death. If there's life after death, and if Germans are allowed to enter there, I'll wait for you there, too.

For a whole year they didn't see one another. At night, he called her from distant cities, had long conversations with her and once wept into the phone for two whole hours and didn't say a word and she listened. Once she told him about the house she had moved to, told that she was working in the committee of DPs and people were coming back from Poland and Czechoslovakia and other places and searching for their families and she tried to find the addresses. Lily told that an American officer sent her a package of food every week and he whispered, It's me, you fool, and she laughed, he wasn't sure, and she said, I know my dear, and I'm waiting for you. And he told her: You're naive, Lily, and she said: Maybe, I eat little, don't look bad. I bought two new dresses, also sewed you a coat of thick cloth I found in an excavation under a house they repaired and I made myself a shroud, Jews die in shrouds, don't they? Thinking about your eyes and Samuel's. About your oval ellipses, demons have green-yellow eyes wrapped in oval ellipses!