Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

In the cemeteries for those who fell in World War II, the anonymous graves say: "Known only to God." On a check you write: "Pay to the bearer," so it can't be transferred to somebody else. Pain has no heirs, there is no imagination that can hold the empty space left behind by some anonymous person known only to God, if God knew him as I do, he would hold the whole earth.

All I had left of Menahem were a few school notebooks, a naive scrapbook from the seventh grade, photos we took here and there of Menahem's grandfather and grandmother who have died meanwhile, of uncles, friends we used to meet sometimes. Photos in the drawers of our table or with Noga, who was still living with us then, before she went to live with Boaz. His mother hung Menahem's clothes in the closet. Our house is a closet for Menahem's clothes. A picture album, a few notebooks and that poem, enveloped by this house. Hasha Masha scoured the buttons, sewed on the ones that fell off, polished his shoes carefully, scoured the isolated objects we had left and I, who had once worked for a tailor to pay for my schooling, sewed the rips, stitched together, then I ironed everything and we hung them up in the closet and ever since then he's known only to God. All we had left was to sit and wait. We had to make up a life to justify what had ended.

Boaz Schneerson came and moved me out of my orbit, killed Menahem in another battle, brought him back to life, and put him to death again, but about that I'll have to talk later. Noga left us for Boaz and I went on teaching awhile, I was even principal for about two years. But when I figured out that I was talking to students who had finished school long ago and maybe were parents of their own children, when I figured out that in my increasingly frequent hallucinations I was talking to Menahem's friends who remained his age, on the day it ended, but in fact they had already graduated and were filling the world with mischief, or teaching, or running factories, and I called those kids by other names, when I saw that I was hallucinating, I resigned.

That was a few years ago, years after our son fell. The photos didn't help, nor did the endless walks every morning between seven and seven forty-five from our house in the north of the city to Mugrabi Square that had been obliterated meanwhile along with the clock that had anyway never shown the right time, but stood there like a clear sign of some stability that's gone now. Nothing helped, the emptiness was heavy as the nothingness of Menahem's shoes in the closet. Polished, shining, destined for nothing. At the end of every journey, thousands of kilometers in the same orbit, I remained alone.

Until I met Ebenezer I thought my investigation of the Last Jew resulted from a conversation I once had with somebody who had been the principal of our school, Demuasz, the teacher who had been there even longer than I. I have to say that compared to what Demuasz built I didn't contribute much and our school sank into a gray slumber of routine. What I did contribute is a wall of memory and every year the graduating students say with an embarrassed smile that the next reunion will be held on it. And then they also see Menahem's name carved there, heading the long list. I put up the wall by myself and there was some pleasure in beginning the long list with my son's name and adding after the name, as ordered by Demuasz, the words, May God avenge their blood. I didn't believe in those words, but I gave in. Today I know that in those days when I talked with Demuasz about the strange man who lived in his house, Ebenezer was moving into the Giladis' house next door to our house, but since I was so involved with myself and my solitude, I didn't pay any heed to that and didn't even notice that the Giladis moved out of here and a real estate agent was hanging around here tired and sweaty and I didn't see that night when Ebenezer came with a truckload of furniture and closed himself in the house and slammed the windows. Demuasz, who helped me quite a bit in my work on the Committee of Bereaved Parents, invited me then to his house and introduced me to the guest who was staying there. The guest was paralyzed, waving his arms like a double-edged sword, I don't know why that image came into my mind, or a sword of the Lord of Hosts, in a Jew of all people a sword is like a shattered sanctuary, and that smashed shard muttered vague words that nobody understood but when he met my eyes, and maybe he saw there a pain that touched his own pain, he told me in a few sentences about the Last Jew, but then he didn't yet know who he was. In my house I was inferior in my own eyes and in my wife's eyes. The death of my son, if I can be forgiven the expression, was a few sizes too big on me. The embarrassment of the father looking at the forever empty shoes of his son was a definite condition of enmity, and in me at least, a certain glory of timorous but not undramatic grief. I wouldn't say I was nice to people, I had a certain bitterness I didn't like in myself, but I couldn't control it, the yearnings for my son were also yearnings for exchange, a death for a death. Questions of why him, and if there is a fixed number of dead, why did fate pick a fight with me of all people. I didn't ask anybody why fate hadn't picked a fight with his son, I asked why it had picked a fight with me. My wife almost forgave me with painful contempt. The destroyed Jew in Demuasz's house was still alive, from me he was dying, from me he was also drawing some consolation, I don't understand why, maybe my bitterness suited him since dying is a condition of the present and not of the past. Noga was still living with us then and she and my wife would look together at the photos of Menahem, at the notebooks, they loved and hated one another in a kind of shared plot where I couldn't set foot. They were locked against me, I had to meet a dying Jew in a strange house to glory in my pain.

At the sight of him, I could more easily understand the life that Hasha Masha and Noga inspired in the cobwebs of our house. At the sight of him I understood how awful but also how encouraging it was to hear the breathing of my two women when I couldn't fall asleep and turned and tossed helplessly. The man told me about the Last Jew, about his knowledge. That night I dreamed I came home and killed Hasha Masha. She walked from room to room in her underwear and kept me from thinking about my son. Then I served Noga her blood in a glass. In the morning I wanted to cry but my eyes had been dry for years.

What looks one way today looked completely different then. I was already a person less arrogant in his pain, less elegant, less portrayed by himself, more submissive to real pain who changed his self-image as somebody who contains pain. Without the vitality that Noga imparted to our house, the house looked like a tomb. The windows were always shuttered, my wife in black, under the lamp that comes down almost to the table, the shade creates a familiar shaft of light, a shade I bought many years ago from a refugee who came to our house during the big Aliyah, and when I bought that shade, I seemed to be buying the skin of that refugee. I remember the crooked smile on his pale face, he also wanted to sell me a watch and rings, all gold, he told me, and I bought the wax-paper shade that turned yellow over the years. Its edge grew sharp as a clown's hat and it had burst now and was sewn and repaired but we didn't change it, just as then I still didn't take care of the yard or the house, we hadn't yet changed anything, we didn't buy any furniture or new curtains and beneath the shaft of light in the dim room at the table once polished and now rubbed beyond repair sat my wife, shrouded in a smell of moths and mints and tea with lemon mixed with orange peel. A smell of mothballs and old paint. Maybe because of that closed desolation, I accepted Demuasz's invitation and that's why I could sit facing that destroyed Jew and instead of trying to listen to him, I tried in my mind to compare one suffering with another, one pain with another. A crooked game, my wife would surely have said, and I would watch the man's silence, his dying eyes, his hands drawing wild illustrations for me in the dense air of the room, and it was then that he told me things.