Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

Then, since her splendid words only confirmed their suppositions and even sharpened their cunning, the Arabs announced, even without consulting anymore among themselves, that when they said a hundred pounds they didn't mean a hundred pounds, but the wind distorted their words and when she looked at the Arabs with ostentatious ennui, and peeped surreptitiously at the place where the harbor of Gaza was likely to be, and sixty-six warships had already started raising smoke in her eyes, the price went up to a hundred and fifty and then to two hundred English pounds, and then Rebecca took the money with generous weariness, got into the carriage, called the Captain to get in with her, and said: Yallah, let's get out of here, we'll buy the lands for your army someplace else.

When she came back to the settlement Haya Horowitz and Frumka Berdichevski saw a smile on Rebecca's lips. The rumor spread like wildfire and the farmers wearing clothes taken out of mothballs began coming to her house with bouquets of flowers and bottles of wine. They said, Congratulations, and when is the wedding? And Ebenezer, who was summoned from the citrus grove, appeared holding a new bird that had almost managed to fly out of the wood in which it was carved, saw the laugh on his mother's lips, and the laugh frightened him. The farmers were insulted when they heard there wouldn't be a wedding, not now-as she said-and not at any other date, and they went off disappointed and then Nathan, Nehemiah's old friend, began dying and Rebecca, who hadn't seen him for some time, went to visit him. She sat next to him, held his hand, told him not to be afraid of death because there's nothing more awful than life, and then she told him about the Arabs and how they had given her two hundred English pounds for land she hadn't intended to buy. He burst out laughing and didn't stop for three days until he died with a smile on his lips. The settlement forgave Rebecca for all her insults over the years because of the laugh she gave Nathan on his deathbed. At Nathan's funeral in Roots, Rebecca recalled the first day she had come to Israel and wept. But they didn't see the first tears Rebecca wept since she went to Jaffa with Nehemiah.

At night, she lay in bed with her eyes wide open and thought about Nathan. She thought that twenty years had passed since she married Nehemiah. She tried to grasp her life and to understand what she had meant to do with it if people like Nathan died while others grew old and her mongoloid son sat in the citrus grove with a deaf girl and sculpted birds. Ebenezer came to her. She smelled his smell of resin and wood and lay still in bed with her eyes shut. He sat on the stool not far from her bed and wanted to know if the laugh he saw when she returned from the trip to the Negev was the laugh of Joseph Rayna. She told him, Maybe, maybe, but don't hang too many hopes on that. The next day, after many years of not doing that, he carved the portrait of Joseph again and she looked at the portrait and didn't say a word, suddenly Ebenezer seemed so unworthy of the gigantic and splendid war waged inside her by two valiant and desperate men like Joseph and Nehemiah, that all she could tell him was: There's a resemblance in the face but there's no resemblance in the spirit of the face.

Ebenezer was ashamed, he went outside and hurt himself with an almond branch and had to go to the doctor. Rebecca said: Nathan's wife saw you hurt, so watch where you walk, your girlfriend is only deaf and not blind, and he said: She hasn't been my girlfriend for a long time, she's married to a laborer and lives far away.

The new doctor's name was Zosha Merimovitch. Even as a child, he had known the legends about Rebecca by heart. The legends began to be embroidered back in nineteen ten, two years after Rebecca buried Nehemiah. She went back to Jaffa then to buy a plow and stayed in a small hotel.

It was a hot day, Zosha Merimovitch was told, and Rebecca went out in the morning to buy a plow and old Michael Halperin, filled with the fury of many languid Jews, stood at the circus that had come to town and saw Jews wearing white suits, with delicate hands, smelling of perfume. He tried to excite them with the idea of a Hebrew army of ragamuffins that would conquer the land of his fathers from its robbers, bring it to life, and restore it to what it was and they nodded fondly at the barefoot ancient prophet splendid in his oriental garb, but their eyes were fixed on the beautiful Egyptian dancer, shaking her buttocks to the sound of the drum and the oud, and on the caged lion. An Arab knife-sharpener stood there and sharpened sickles, knives, and swords for all the wars Halperin said were coming. And then Michael Halperin entered the lion's cage, and the crowd held its breath. He stroked the lion's mane, stood facing him, sang Hatikvah and the modir didn't know if it was forbidden to sing it even in a lion's cage, and the lion lay on the ground, fixed watery bored eyes on Halperin, and fell asleep. The lion's grating breath and Halperin's singing were the only sounds. The lion's hair looked like Halperin's.

Halperin's singing in the lion's cage stirred memories in Rebecca of the songs of Joseph Rayna. She said to herself: Heroes in a cage of a tame lion, a cheap stage setting, a stupid attempt at would-be salvation. The words of Hatikvah always made her feel melancholy. Words full of longing for artificial horses and visions of returning from a hunt in a nonexistent forest. She despised Halperin because no Hebrew army, she thought, would spring up from his shouts and the bombastic song in a cage. And, unnoticed, Rebecca went into the cage, locked the door behind her, and then there was a silence people had never heard before. You could hear, said Zosha Merimovitch's mother, the sound of the oil in the bottles on the stand of the old oil vendor, whose knife stopped being sharpened at that moment by the knife-sharpener.

Rebecca opened the lion's maw, managed to look into its mouth, and saw how big its teeth were. The Turkish modir now stood up and started lashing himself with a turbatsh and Rebecca, who didn't know what language the lion spoke, ordered it in Arabic, which she thought was closer to its language than any other language she knew, to roll over and play cat for her. The lion did as she ordered and to the spectators, who may have invented some of it, its movements looked like coquettish rotating movements and some versions have it that even its roar sounded like a cat's meow, but Zosha clearly remembers that in the conversation about that subject, various opinions were expressed about the purring, since a Turkish cat whines yeow and a Hebrew one yooo and an English one meow, so there was no consensus about whether the poor lion whined like a cat, and the lion, who apparently smiled at Rebecca, lay on its back and then got up and roared and she didn't budge until it walked in front of her, knelt, turned its face, and she stroked its mane, straightened her dress, wiped off a few pieces of straw that had stuck to it, and said: No blood and fire, no hope, this is a place of circuses and Jews, there's nobody to erect a kingdom of Judea for here, Michael Halperin, there's no reason, and she went out of the cage. The doctor Zosha Merimovitch, who was then a little boy, trembled with fear when he heard the story and people told how Michael Halperin then went to Rebecca, bowed to her as he had once bowed to the lion, and she said to him, The lion of Judah bows to a miserable lady of exile? And in a mocking voice, she went on: You're a funny Jew, Halperin, go save another nation in another place, but never mind, you're the closest thing to a lion I've seen since the Wondrous One was here and taught the fools in the settlement how to smell the feet of robbers who went through the field. Grand pianos they've now bought for their daughters, and she left.

The doctor, now a grown-up, waited for Ebenezer. Now and then he peeped at her house but never managed to see her. And she refused to go to doctors. He waited for the bold fellow, the hybrid of Michael Halperin, Rebecca Schneerson, and Nimrod the hero. His contempt for Ebenezer was perfect, he treated him without looking at him.