Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

Then they talked about her nipples, and he said: I let you get married and I didn't tell at the rabbinate, you'll teach me how to love, and she said either you know by yourself or it's not important. They kissed one another with serene passion, shrouded in the past, everything flowed slowly now, he calmed down inside her and she reached out, her hand took a flower from the vase and laid it on her chest. Then, rage stirred in him, he thought of Menahem that he was screwing for him, and about the poem, he fucked her and then he lay on his back, struck, and his eyes began shedding tears. At first she thought it was the water flowing from the flower, but when she saw the tears, she was scared. She sat up straight and said: Never did I see Boaz crying! He bent over, put on his shoes, and said to her: I have to invent for somebody who's dead, I'm going and don't make yourself beautiful for anybody, you don't know what pain will be on your father's face the day you die. She took a thermometer out of the drawer of the nightstand and put it in her mouth. He looked at the book she was reading and saw that it was a report of an income tax evader. He asked her if she read that book a lot and she shook her head and didn't take the thermometer out of her mouth. He wrenched the thermometer out and she said, Yes, mainly because my father is one of the main characters, he put the thermometer back in and she shook her head and he didn't know if she was really laughing. He asked, What's with you? You'll sit like that until morning, and she nodded. He went up to the window, caught a branch and once again pushed himself and was on the tree and when he crossed above the street, a motorcycle roared by underneath him. The streets were empty and he walked to the tents where he had once lived. The tent that was his was lighted by a hurricane lamp. A worker was sleeping there. Boaz went in and the worker didn't wake up. He looked under the bed and found an old carton. He picked up the carton and went outside. The sea stretched before him and two people were seen walking on the boardwalk. A dog barked, the hotel where he had once stayed with a woman whose name he didn't know was dark. He walked to his hut, went upstairs, opened the door, a few minutes later he sat at the small table and the lamp was lit and he tried to think of Menahem's letter, and what he would do with it. When Menahem died, Mr. Henkin, said the commander, he received an order to move, soldiers were lacking, every death was a national annoyance, not like today.

Boaz Schneerson

I checked your Thompson, it's dirty, I cleaned it. They say you'll be active tonight, they're going up on some crappy hill, I didn't mention to you that you look tired. I owe you my life. A moral obligation, my father would surely say. I found a saboteur's knife in Amnon's clothes-he stole the clothes from the horse. I'm going up to Jerusalem to see Fiesta in Mexico for the tenth time, crazy about Esther Williams, she's all there is. I wanted to tell you something important, Boaz, I wasn't able to save your life. Thinking only about how you get out of all that. I'm drunk on the champagne you all brought from Katamon. You bathed in champagne, I drank. I'm thinking about home, father and mother, mother's all right. And Noga? She's silent. I belong to her as you belong to orphanhood, but maybe I love her, and she? There's no contact with the plain and I don't receive telepathic messages. And here's the list you asked me for: in the platoon, twenty are left not wounded and not dead. There are four shirts in the warehouse, not too clean. There's also an overcoat of Yashka the partisan, who may really have had another name. Possible to mend and wear. There are two torn flak jack ets, five black undershirts, a package of Fishinger bittersweet chocolate, three stocking caps, one with holes, and a few coats, I think-five. In Mapu's Love of Zion, there are nicer descriptions, ask my father. There's one girl in Jerusalem, not the prettiest, but at night you don't see anyway. Her parents were stuck in Tel Aviv and couldn't come back to their dear daughter, who puts out and also puts out omelets with eggs she bought on the black market. Her address is Love of Zion Street 5, 3rd floor. If you get by there, go to her. She knows you from the stories. Eat an omelet in her warm bed. The twins asked about you, thank you for my life and I hope you die a true national hero.

Yours, Menahem Henkin

Tape / -

I could have composed the letter in short, poetic lines, Henkin, but you won't want that, eh?

Boaz sits at the table. It's four in the morning. The roof is burning in a black silence. Menahem wouldn't have written: Clods of dirt mounded up/I will shelter my soul in yearning. The poems don't get women pregnant anymore, Boaz thought, but their innocence is exciting, how was the illegitimate father of a hundred offspring able to write such innocent lines? An ancient smell of a starched collar rises in Boaz's nose, an aged, old-fashioned adulterer, with flowers in his hand, chocolate in flowered paper, roses. He had learned Menahem's handwriting before, now he tries to shape a poem. Very slowly the rhymes are constructed and he sharpens, edits, I need another Menahem, trees, groves, Tel Aviv, peeling houses, burning sun, and annihilated jackals, sunset, melancholy-a beautiful word, melancholy. And so dawn breaks, breaking dawn! I laugh. Boaz copies the poem, in three places he writes k's not like Menahem, maybe to give himself away, he scorches the paper a little, scrunches it, pours tobacco and sand on it, tramples it, straightens it, wets it and dries it. Turns off the light, disconnects the telephone left by the former owner of the house, and falls asleep.

At exactly one o'clock, Boaz is standing at Henkin's house. The house is still neglected as then, the yard is a weave of crab grass and thistles, the trees, like corpses, without foliage, trampled in some disaster that befell them. The sea is seen through two houses, in one of them a woman is beating a small dusty rug. Over the little grocery is an old sign, SMOKE MATUSSIAN. Mr. Singer in a wrinkled shirt, beyond him the enclosures of the port, and Boaz knocks on the door and Teacher Henkin in a white shirt and gray trousers opens it and lets him in. For a moment, they look at one another, then Henkin drops his eyes and without a word leads Boaz into the gloom of the chilly house.

The shades block the light, a bulb is lit above a silent woman in a dark dress, the woman raised her face, looked at Boaz with a long and weary look, and without getting up or turning her face, she said: Will you drink something? Coffee, juice, tea?

He looked at her, the closed photo album lay in front of her on the table. He said: Thanks, and followed Teacher Henkin who led him with ostentatious impatience. But at the same time as if he also wanted to defend himself against something. In the other room, he saw the library Menahem used to joke about: books up to the ceiling, manila files, big notebooks, a mess, a table lamp with a hexagonal, old-fashioned shade, peeling a little, on the wall documents of the Jewish National Fund. Boaz sat down in a chair across from Henkin and waited. The woman didn't even knock on the door, she entered and put a tray with two glasses of juice, cookies, and a steaming glass of tea with a slice of lemon next to it. Boaz said: Thanks, but she had already slammed the door and didn't hear.

Boaz took out the poem and put it on the table, for some reason he couldn't put it in Henkin's shaking hands.

Henkin picked up the poem, put on his reading glasses, felt the paper and with his other hand, started stirring the tea and squeezing the lemon slice. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket, wiped his fingers carefully, put the handkerchief back in his pocket, and once again held the paper in both hands. Boaz took a glass of juice and drank. His eyes wandered over the shelves and he tried to read the titles of the books, what he wanted to see was Love of Zion, but he didn't find Love of Zion among the books near him. Henkin muttered, This is his handwriting, it's exactly his handwriting, a poem…