Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

I know, said Lionel.

Samuel glanced wearily, laughed at Lily, and said: So will you marry me, Lily?

And she looked at him and decreed, No! and turned pale. He tried to pretend to weep, but he burst out laughing and they looked at him. Suddenly, maybe for the first time in years, he didn't know how to act himself.

And then he started telling Lily about the lampshade they made of his parents. He said those words while his eyes, where a rusty gray flash now sparkled, were fixed on Lionel. She stopped trying to eat the duck wing and Samuel measured her movements like a panther waiting to pounce. Lionel's hands moved, the smile was a mask for tension, Samuel smoked another cigarette and didn't want to light it with the lighter he had taken from Lionel before. He was afraid she'd recognize the lighter and despise him. The ash straggled until it dropped. When the ash dropped, Lily felt as if her belly were shriveling.

People wearing clothes too big for them, with berets and caps or shabby Hollywood hats on their heads, entered and sat around the tables and ate eagerly. The waiters ran back and forth. A woman in a sparkling red dress sang on a small stage, lighted with a beam that turned her face into an overcultivated mask. At the piano sat a pianist with a thin beard who looked bored and tired. Now and then, he sipped from a bottle standing on the piano. American, Swedish, and African sailors came in with their temporary, dyed women. They would all order cognac or calvados and slurp fish soup. The Bay of Marseille was lighted, a motorboat groaned rhythmically, drunken sailors banged on the tables and shouted demands for food. The light outside was growing dim, and the locked balcony was full of cigarette butts and papers flying in the wind. In the distance, the sea looked like a black mass.

Ebenezer, now looking for Samuel in the city, said to the investigator years later: I didn't look like a Muselman because Samuel Lipker and Kramer would bring me thin beet soup and bread.

Dear Renate,

You asked me why, back then in Marseille, that is, what impelled us, what exactly happened, I didn't know what to answer you then and today I don't either. Aside from my love, I don't find words that can convey the precise experience. But since you asked, I'll try. I sat facing the two of them, Lionel and Samuel Lipker, and longed with all my soul to die.

Lionel then looked toward the balcony, I don't know if we saw that sea. Samuel tried to steal me from Lionel. He also got up and recited to the diners an excerpt of Ebenezer they knew by heart, but they didn't applaud him. They were furious that he had disturbed their eating, and had disturbed the fat singer's singing. The sea was locked in the distance. A balcony full of cigarette butts. I wanted to go to the movies. They were then showing The Arch of Triumph with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, who sat like us in Cafe Glacier, on Boulevard Canbiere and drank Calvados. Lionel sketched something on the white paper on the table, sipped the wine that Samuel gulped, and said sadly to Sam (Samuel): If you think you have to go back to the line you can. The two of you can open a war souvenir shop in Jerusalem named for Joseph Rayna. I heard that his songs became national anthems there. Sam looked at Lionel and Lionel looked at Sam. Those two men suddenly looked like two dead men fighting over me. I wanted to express my opposition, but I didn't know if I had it coming. I knew I had to perform Gretchen for them and not talk. I don't know if you've ever been for sale in the Jew market, Renate! I was an essential enemy to them, maybe (and this is ridiculous) a desired enemy, and Sam was so sunk in the moment, in the happening itself, that he had to measure it carefully since he wasn't used to it. I wanted so much to return things to their simple and human concreteness, to deviate from the tragicomic event, as Lionel put it later. Those two poets, great-grandsons of messiahs, didn't see me with flesh-andblood eyes, maybe not only with those eyes. They saw me as some substitute for an argument in order to gore one another. The singer sang in a nasal voice and Sam mocked her, maybe that was a certain response to his failure to make the drunken sailors laugh by reciting things Ebenezer remembered and that weren't important to them. The sailors tried to defend the play of their love with the wretched streetwalkers and would hit and shout and kiss, and Sam thought, I read his mind didn't I; I can't swindle this man anymore. Precisely in his weakness, he's strong! A weakness of supple and tense softness and Lionel said to him: But on the other hand, you can also stay with Lily (he didn't say "you can stay with me," he only uttered my name).

Then the haggling started. I was the payment, so they didn't ask me. Lionel said something about the possibility that Sam would live with me, and he said: Lily will be a mother to you, and Sam said, Mother? An ad for a fucking cigarette will be a mother to me? I've got enough dead mothers and fathers, and Lionel said: You've got a dead mother and two dead fathers, you'll have a new father and mother and I'm still not mentioned by name. Renate, nobody talks directly to me or with me, doesn't ask anything, but I deserve it, why did I come here? They were discussing payment and I'm hanging in front of them on a hook, unkosher meat in a Jewish market. They have to triumph over one another in a defeat that will of course be all mine and mine alone, I was silent, Renate, I was silent and suddenly had an appetite and I tasted the dishes Lionel ordered and that I couldn't eat before. Lionel talked about the fact that I wouldn't have children, the level of the execution of the castration had been so high that for a moment, I felt how all the children I was supposed to give birth to flowed out of me and died on my lips, and I felt blood between my lips and I licked them and they didn't know what I was doing with my lips, and Sam said: She's trying to be sexy like Hedy Lamarr. What children? asked Sam, and Lionel said: She won't give birth to children who will later have to defend the lost homeland of lampshades, and Sam said: There was no lampshade, and Lionel said: There were, but not yours, and then he laughed, and the singer was also offended, she turned her face away and sang in another direction, and a drunken sailor hit a whore, who dropped onto the floor. There was a thud, the bored pianist burst out laughing and played more excitedly, and the waiters ran and brought drinks and food and I was sold there, a few kilograms of Lily, a few liters of Lily juice is there juice of Lily? I was silent there. No Ingrid Bergman sat on the balcony of Cafe Glacier with yearning eyes and a great melancholy love for Charles Boyer. In the end, I was miserable German mincemeat, good for swindling themselves that I was somebody else, I shot them at low-flying airplanes.

And that's how he bought a German streetwalker, Renate. I should have been more than I was or perhaps less, maybe an amorous girl, weeping after the death of the Fuhrer in the bunker, something made me transparent, bereft of location and caught in a maze, they talked about some life in America, about me, about Sam, about me and Lionel, and I wanted to shout, What about me, and they knew, the two of them, that I wasn't important anymore, not out of wickedness, out of love that the two of them even then had to share, and I didn't yet understand what glowing hell I now got myself into, go home I said to myself, buy yourself a poor little husband, cook potatoes for him, let him flourish on the holy ground where you were born and where you'll be buried, but I couldn't, I was born in the air, and above, above everything, faced off, like two knights, my two men fought a desperate war for the heart of an imaginary aristocrat, who no longer lives in a nonpalace where the big, splendid and superfluous duel was held. I wanted to say, You're in love with a shadow, but I knew not to talk, maybe I really was somebody and didn't know it.