Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

For three days Dana Klomin stayed in the citrus grove. The students got a short letter brought to them by the grandson of Ahbed. In the letter, Dana wrote: Forgive me for staying, give warm regards to the teachers and don't judge me harshly, I can't leave, yours in friendship and love, Dana. The students returned to Tel Aviv with the janitor of the school who cursed the teacher who fell in love with a carpenter, and on the way they saw a man wearing a strange uniform driving a wagon loaded with splendid furniture and sporting a sword. That was Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg, who after a sharp argument with the committee of the nearby settlement in which he tried to explain for the hundred and first time why his name alone was a guarantee of his being Swiss and that the Greek Orthodox church is the desired answer the Jews were waiting for, while they claimed against him that he was a fantasizer, a traitor, cheating his nation and his religion, and they said: How long will you stay with us? He put on his fine clothing, wanted to go to Rebecca, but since it wasn't Wednesday, he did what he would have done if it weren't Wednesday and he had no words. He went for a tour and when he came to Gaza he saw an Arab wearing rags and selling antique furniture, who claimed it was furniture of Modo-Louigo fifteen, or in another language: in the style of Louis XV, he bought it as an imaginary wedding gift for Rebecca and was now driving it in a cart to her house. When Dana entered the hut, Ebenezer lifted his face, smiled at her, and went on working. Then he looked at her injured heel, took the heel in his strong, rough hands, looked at it, and for the first time in his life felt that he belonged to something bigger than himself.

He gently twisted the heel, stared at it long and hard, and felt so close to the heel, loved the skin, the way the heel coiled into the foot, looked at Dana, and said: I think I've been waiting for you for years, but I'm not good with words and I have to go back to carving, wait. She waited a whole day. Her eyes were veiled with a grief that may have always been in her and turned into tense expectation. At night they lay down beside each other on the mattress of leaves outside and the sky hung above them, peeping between branches, the sky was starry and black. Three days and three nights they stayed there. When he looked at her she felt that all the smells she had caged in bottles were now one person she wanted to pity and take care of his strong hands that were gently creating a bird or a portrait, out of a joyous intoxication, a dark sadness, and a disguised heaviness.

The two of them were no longer children. Ebenezer, who many years later will be the Last Jew in seedy nightclubs of Europe, was then an eccentric fellow of twenty-six and a deaf woman had once loved to touch him. Because he didn't know many words, he didn't clearly think love; he bit Dana's earlobes and thought "doves." She said to herself: Maybe that's not love, but that is what I was looking for. He thought: Got to give her a house, give her a child, and her own pepper tree. They laughed, something Ebenezer couldn't do without recalling his mother's angry face.

Dana didn't understand why she yearned for a person who wasn't exciting, who made her feel heavy. Years later, when Ebenezer would sit in a little city in Poland and think of Dana, he'd say to himself: Why didn't I tell her I loved her more than anybody in the world and never could I love anybody like that? But he recalled that when he was with her he didn't even know he loved her. All he knew was that he had to be with her.

The wedding was held right after the harvest. Most of the farmers dressed in white brought gifts. Rebecca, who sat in a house full of antique Louis XV furniture, looked at Dana as if she were seeing the greatest fraud of the century. What did she find in my son? She pitied Nehemiah, whose dreams of Abner ben-Ner and Yiftach begat a pensive and foolish man who touches a short, plump woman, smiles as if he were a mechanical doll. Beyond the fence of the settlement the house of Dana and Ebenezer was built. That was the first house outside the wall of the first settlers. Rebecca built the house because Ebenezer had to stay close to the farm; somebody has to protect what I established, she said, even if he does carve birds. The house she built for her son was handsome, abutted the vineyard with the ancient pool still in the middle, whose bottom was Crusader and whose turret was Mameluke.

Mr. Klomin, who came to the wedding furious and betrayed, was wearing a light-colored suit with a flower in his lapel. He was amazed at the sight of Rebecca Schneerson's elegant house and happy above all to meet the Captain in his official uniform. The two of them whispered together in Dana's new kitchen, among jars full of flowers smelling like jujubes, wormwood, mint, and citrus blossoms mixed with the smell of fresh paint, and after a long talk each hugged the other's shoulders, shook hands, and looked excited.

And on the day he parted from his daughter, Mr. Klomin increased his party by one hundred percent: it now had a leader and a single member.

The Captain was appointed deputy squadron leader responsible for organization and indicating avenues of financing, activities and political empowerment, preparing strategy and tactics, and in addition the Captain was to train leaders of the army of gladiators, lieutenants, and pashas that would be established someday when the old-new constitution would be shaped and the nation would recognize its three hundred Gideons, and then the Argentinean with American citizenship and the Swiss name, who belonged to the Greek Orthodox Church, was responsible for protocol, military, taxation, consolidation, building and general strategic forecasting.

Pleasant smells blew from the citrus groves and the fields. Dana's schoolmates came from the Galilee on horseback; they tapped each other on the shoulder and yelled. They danced bold and "awful" dances, as Rebecca put it, until the wee hours of the morning. The splendid kingdom is realized here by a carpenter and wild people shrieking, said Mr. Klomin sadly, and he gazed yearningly at the nobility of the Captain and Rebecca. He saw them as a symbol of his dream. Rebecca agreed to describe to him what she felt when she entered the lion's cage. Mr. Klomin looked at the Captain's padded visor, ostentatiously hated the roars of the wild Pioneers, saw his son-in-law standing on the side gazing, and said: They should have begat Rebecca and the Captain, and not vice versa.

The feast was made from the Captain's recipes and the farmers drank and sang and recalled Nehemiah and his beautiful words, and late at night, when the Pioneers were still singing around a bonfire, the aging farmers sat on the side and yearningly sang old songs they had once learned from Joseph Rayna and wept when they recalled those distant days, and said: Here we married off the first son of the settlement. After they left, Dana sat and looked at the sky. Ebenezer sat next to her. Rebecca thought of men who see the features and don't understand the essence. She thought of Joseph, of the Wondrous One, of the Captain, of Mr. Klomin, and then she thought a thought that was so strange to her she tried to get it out of her mind and couldn't. She thought: Maybe we nevertheless did something important here; maybe this settlement and that whole deed aren't as small as I thought, maybe there was something in Nehemiah's vision that hasn't entirely vanished and wasn't in vain? But then she saw in her mind's eye the great war that was coming and the Pioneers shooting at the enemy and the Arabs sharpening knives in Jaffa for all the future wars and she feared for Boaz, whose image she could already discover in her.

In the morning, two Arab women cleaned up the destruction and Rebecca looked at the new house and thought, What can those two fools do at night? and she wanted to laugh despite the scattered leftovers, empty wine bottles, and the flowers eagerly pulled up. In the room, the lamentations of the oldtimers still echoed. In the sunlight, it was hard for her to see last night's thoughts as real. And so she could almost forgive her son. In the house next door, the gramophone Mr. Zucker had recently bought started playing Beethoven's violin concerto. The speaker was aimed at Rebecca's house and she linked the music with the pleasant fields of morning, the dew, the almond grove in the distance, the mountains on the horizon, and again she saw the impending storm of war and started reciting Psalms to try to change something in the world, and if she had thought of that deed in real terms, she would probably have burst out laughing. Afterward Ebenezer and Dana went for a walk. Ebenezer sewed a handsome tent, they loaded the burden on one mule and Dana rode on a second mule and Ebenezer got off and picked flowers for Dana, who put them in a bag tied to the saddle, and thus they went up to the mountains and down to the valleys, crossed wadis and rivers and at night, they looked at the stars and felt an intense closeness, some longing for one another they had a name for and didn't know how to call it, and they'd lie like that, clinging desperately, breathing each other's breath, and Ebenezer wanted to say things, but didn't know how to say them, and his hands would knead her strongly and gently. He carved birds for her, built boxes for her, crowned her with portraits, and she lusted for him, touched him in surprising places, and they would laugh wildly, like hyenas, listening to the jackals wailing in the distances and answering them.