Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

Complete chaos. Menahem attacks, says Boaz, and then, during the battle, he's wounded by a stray bullet. His brain is pierced and he dies on the spot. If I had caught the bullet, it wouldn't have been a stray! Menahem didn't suffer, Henkin… The governor didn't heed the request for help, the besieged people went back to the Jewish Quarter with food and a little bit of ammunition. They found out that new fighters were coming to relieve Boaz and his companions. They pulled out with the dead and wounded. The new ones who came were old men from the corps of elderly who weren't fit to fight and didn't know why they were sent. The retreating Arabs saw the wheel turn, girded their loins, and drove out the old men. The exhausted inhabitants of the Jewish Quarter surrendered by waving a white flag. At the same time, Henkin discovered later, in the headquarters on Schneller sat a hundred armed fighters who weren't sent. Menahem fell for nothing, said Henkin to Hasha Masha. The liberation of the Old City was postponed for nineteen years. Meanwhile, Menahem came back and was killed in another battle, a battle that didn't get into the history book.

Did my son fall for nothing? Henkin will ask.

Did he fall in an unknown battle there, or in the Old City?

He fell, says Hasha Masha, even if he died in a traffic accident, he didn't return.

The merchants on Ben-Yehuda Street set their watches by Henkin. They're building a new city around him, and only the sea remains stuck to itself. And he doesn't know, they say. Henkin took down the mezuzah on the second day of the Six-Day War, when the Chief Rabbi said that the Israel Defense Forces won because of the will of God. Hasha Masha thinks: Why did fate connect two such different people as Menahem and his father? Menahem was impetuous, friendly, loved the sea, didn't believe especially, didn't not believe, tied cats' tails, smoked in shelters, a simple boy, I loved him, but Henkin needs a hero and a poet.

He searches for his son on Ben-Yehuda Street as if Menahem is no more on Shenkin Street than on Ben-Yehuda Street. The Committee of Bereaved Parents, what a feast they make there with the plastic vegetables. What does Jordana who loves my son want from me? What an insane nation…

Noga understands, knows, and only he, Obadiah, sets the watches of those miserable merchants. Your devotion, Noga, is a noble trouble. I understand, know that you stopped loving Menahem and stayed with us, I don't bear a grudge against you, but to love you for that I can't and you know that. Let Henkin think what he wants, ponders Hasha Masha.

Years later, Hasha Masha will write to Renate:

My dear,

You asked how those years passed. They passed. I sat and waited. For what? For nothing. Noga wrote Menahem a letter telling him she had stopped loving him. He was killed before he got the letter. She stayed with us. She rejected suitors out of hand. Men don't understand death, Renate.

Here is a description of a tour of Teacher Henkin: On the ruins of the Turkish fortress, between Nordau and Jabotinsky Boulevards, which used to be called Ingathering of the Exiles Street, they've built a new building. Instead of the Moses and Shapiro families new people now live there who closed the balconies with sliding shutters. Atom Bar, teeming with Jewish whores and Australian soldiers, changed its name and now its clientele are old Poles and women with weary faces. Then there was a club of aging artists there.

The bicycle repairman says: He's wearing a hat again. The perfume shop that used to be a grocery is now on the way to being a women's shoe boutique. The Czech shoemaker, who couldn't forgive himself for choking his sick wife in the bunker and brought new machines from France, died from missing his wife, and left the store to two young men who sold it to a used car dealer. What had been a vineyard until 'forty-eight turned into a big shapeless building with a turret facing the sea. A splendid victory for a lot of seasonal change, says old Damausz, who lives above the perfume shop, next to the grocery of Halfon of the women's shoes who later opened a paint store and even later a small restaurant with a sign that said: "Original Ashkara Melange from Jerusalem." And Mrs. Yehoyakhina Sheets of the flower shop looks at the "Original Ashkara Melange from Jerusalem" and says: How beautiful it used to be here. The German tobacco vendor whose wife ran away with the Great Dane dog and his son who wasn't killed in the explosion of the bridges in 'forty-six now manages the new branch of Bank Leumi. Henkin walks in a maze of changes. They know him, Renate, he doesn't know them.

What was once the bulletin board where Menahem used to post declarations against the White Paper is now a marble building with an office for modern matchmaking, as if there is modern and nonmodern matchmaking. Well-packed white buildings on the next corner take on a Mediterranean patina, rust in the iron, in the cement. A slow destruction gnaws the chill beauty, among the ruins walks Obadiah. The owner of the store on the corner was once a women's hairdresser named Nadijda Litvinovskaya. She sits in the window of "Sex and Beauty." They blink their false eyelashes, and manicure men too. A state of dying sycamores, she says, water flows in the winter and in the summer is an awful light. My daughters married contractors from Herzliya Pituah, children go to school with diplomats' children. How are you, Mr. Henkin? Thank you, he always says, how many years? Maybe five, maybe more. A small country with falafel, without opera, with Sabras, come to me to be beautiful with black on the seashore on a body like Negresses. And I say, Here's Teacher Henkin walking, how's the missus, and he says, Thank you. After the barber shop, I had a salon, after the salon a boutique. Then Sex and Beauty. His son is still dead, poor soul. And the soda vendor who now sells "modern beverages" says carrot juice for women goes well now. And Mrs. Pitsovskaya, five streets past Mugrabi, Mrs. Pitsovskaya says: Thank you, he'll say to me. My son's teacher, he'd learn and forget what he learned, and now he's money and knows what the teacher never knew. That's life, no? One with sense is a poor soul, one without sense makes money. Rich people have sense, too, says Halfon sadly. All poor men aren't wise and all rich men aren't fools, he adds. And the husband of Zipporah Glory-Splendor stopped selling eggs on the black market, will import instant coffee, now imports rare clothes from Hong Kong at the other end of the world. If all the Chinese jumped at the same time, the world would move and we'd be in Saudi Arabia and we'd have oil and they'd be in the sea, says Halfon. His boy sometimes kills in wars and then goes to Bezalel to be an artist, says Marianne Abramovitch. And Mrs. Lustig from the candy store died of cancer of love, they say in the next shop, she played the piano, forgot to sell candy, it was hard to digest, and the son of the neighbor upstairs, who died of an inflammation of the urinary tract, was once a naughty boy who tried to trip Henkin who said Thank you, didn't see, looked, tripped, didn't see. When will there be peace, Mr. Henkin? asks the man who sells purses and cases. Henkin doesn't know, smiles with the contemplation of a bereavedfather, Renate, that's the wisdom of that man, maybe cunning, maybe a lifeline, and he says, What do I know: Abravanel's pharmacy on the way back turned into a travel agency. The messiah who used to sit in the street and smoke twigs sells carpets and in exchange forgot the redemption we expected so much. They sell gifts and souvenirs.

Shops for watches and windowpanes that used to sell radios and phonographs.

Tape / -

And this is how Teacher Henkin met Boaz Schneerson. It was a nice day and suddenly the first rain of the season started falling. Teacher Henkin struggled with the wind, but the rain fell in front of him, didn't yet get to him. He rowed toward Mugrabi Square, passed by Sex and Beauty, Mr. Nussbaum was already setting his watch and then he entered the rain, raindrops whipped him obliquely, touching the sidewalk like dancing magnets, the dust was erased, beyond the display windows wrapped in mists Teacher Henkin looked like he was rowing in the sea. From an opening in the clouds a prancing sunbeam slices the well-trimmed hedge for a moment and wafts a fragrance of jasmine. Across from the German bookstore on the corner of Idelson, the rain stops. Teacher Henkin looks at the visual illusion. The rain falls up to Idelson Street, and from then on, to what was once Mugrabi Square, rain doesn't fall and the sky isn't cloudy. The border of the black cloud is right over him. The bookstore owner smiles at Teacher Henkin, who doesn't heed him today. Nor does he peep into the display window to see the beautiful wrappings he looks at with love and pain. Old books bound by aged binders, how many of them are still alive, I don't know, but today he doesn't look. Behind him, the rain is seen in the display window as a geometric disaster, both tame and wild. Facing him on the dry curb stands a young man. The young man isn't especially tall but isn't short. Pinioned in a raincoat that comes to his waist, the young man stands and looks at the rain on the other side of the street. The young man sees Henkin and his yellow-green eyes, exaggerated to a certain extent by a prancing sunbeam, look as if they're trying to penetrate that miracle that facing him stands a man in a black coat and hat in a strong oblique rain, while he stands on dry land. Henkin isn't able to think logically and tell himself: If you walked ten, fifteen years on Ben-Yehuda Street to seek traces of a dead son and a familiar person came to you standing on dry land as if obeying your secret intentions, an event happened, certain wishes were answered, but the rain was too pesky for Teacher Henkin, who was seeking Boaz without knowing that he was seeking Boaz to understand what he was seeing.