Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

And then he sank into reading that lasted about an hour. Never had Boaz seen a person read a poem so devotedly. Henkin forgot that a person was sitting across from him. He forgot the tea he had stirred and hadn't tasted. His glass of juice also remained undrunk until Boaz gulped it too. The pale light through the cracks of the shutters dimmed for a moment, maybe the sky was covered with clouds, Henkin didn't move, his lips stammered, his eyes blinked through the glass that emphasized their pupils, from the other room came the sounds of water boiling and a fly buzzing, somebody opened a door and locked it again, the sea breaking was heard clearly and a car honked. Boaz felt disembodied. The light glowed on Henkin, but Henkin wasn't there. On the horizon between two cracks of the shutter a line of sky or sea was seen, he didn't know which, a dim light that slowly darkened his eyes, a hand unattached to his body started hurting, he tried to feel the hand but couldn't, the pain wasn't his, suddenly he was in an unfamiliar landscape, a name echoing in his brain: Baron Hirsch Street, Tarnopol… mountains wrapped in white savagery rising over him, birch trees, in the distant mountains time goes backward and they become different, bald, in a desert, high, rising to the sky, bright, Boaz thinks names he never knew before: quartz crystals, orthoclase crystals, ancient granite rocks, red and brown, even black, tiny gardens, like grooves of blood in the expanses of wasteland, yellow flame, slopes hewn by ancient gods, perforated, stone beasts of prey, gigantic, in a gnawing expanse, sky hanging obliquely, as if falling, crag crown, a cliff over a wadi wide as a person and high as the sky, a plant called round-leafed cleome, a person he knows but doesn't know who he is, somebody very close to him drinks tea with desert wormwood, and Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg stands wearing a uniform gleaming in the awful light, and says: Here the golden calf is buried! And a person finds the place of the golden calf from an ancient map, and says to the Captain: Here a memorial to Dante Alighieri will be built. The Captain says: He's not dead, Boaz isn't dead, he found a golden calf, what an historiosophical find! Gibal Mussa, near a prairie crushed with rocks, between snake and heron, raisins of sun here, the eagle eye that's the innocent eye, in wadi channels that are the face of God, the face of man, and there the nation was created.

When Henkin started talking, Boaz looked at his watch. An hour passed, he knew he was in a place where he had never been, and now he also knew what his father looked like, something that embarrassed him with Henkin who now addressed him. You won't understand, Henkin spoke in an excited but quiet voice (you didn't discover the three k's, thinks Boaz sadly) unbelievable, really unbelievable… I always believed, they laughed at me, I told them, you don't know, you don't know him, his special qualities will come out, I knew! And he had to rebel. This poem, Boaz, could have been written only by one man, only by Menahem, that's what's special in the poem, not its nature, others will testify to that, but its specialness, it's the clear expression of a man who revealed himself and said something of his own. Here's the house mentioned here, you surely won't understand, it was destroyed to plant the boulevard. How angry he was then, he said: They're building a wasteland, Father, and I remember, a little boy he was before we moved here and that sycamore on the corner of Dizengoff and Arlozorov, they cut down… the Gilboa! We went on a field trip with the school, a Passover outing it was, we stood on the top of the mountain, and in the sunset I recited to them marvels of poetry: The beauty of Israel is slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen! And Menahem then laughed at his father, here's the allusion to that poetry, to that moment, to the fear at sunset, is that the food of our fields, an eternal curse or a momentary distress, what did we know, and the dead ant, in the fixing of facts with a water meter, that is, a word meter. The magic of the poem is hypnotic, deciphering the lad, and his mother didn't believe, a son fell, she said, another son in the cruel world, I knew that before he left us, more precisely, when he left, I knew he'd set some nail, that he'd leave me some sign from a concealed inner world. And the poem… A poem that reveals a person so much! That will be so personal and yet general, human, and I waited.

And then Henkin yelled: You could have brought it before!

I forgot I had it, said Boaz.

That's some nerve, he said angrily. That's a violation of every moral law…

And then he was silent, looked at Boaz, and tried to smile, for some reason he didn't have to maintain his coolness now, his heart told him that everything he wanted to know about Menahem was buried in this man. And Boaz Schneerson wants to stop him, to put the clock back, but it was no longer possible…

You don't think the poem is wonderful? Henkin suddenly whispered.

I don't understand it, said Boaz.

That a boy writes like that, the only thing anybody ever asked of him was not to walk on the lawn, says Teacher Henkin, to respect his elders, to be proud of his wildness, new Jews riding horseback, and then comes a moment of softness, of withdrawing inside, and the boy stops the enemy with his body, silent words tell the horror of the stories, coming from him, and he writes them letter by letter, and pulls out a submachine gun, goes out to the last battle, fights for the life of his parents and friends, and is killed, a bullet hits him, is mute and silent, and death flows from him, he flows death and death flows on the mountains and leaves a hidden corner, invisible to his father, the beautiful boy who was and they didn't know, didn't know him, Hasha Masha, they and you, you thought, you're the poor boy, you didn't understand, you didn't grasp! You too, my Hasha Masha…

Dear Renate,

It's been a long time since I managed to find the emotional strength to answer your letter. Last night they said on the radio that the cold in Europe had passed and the snowstorms were subsiding. I was glad. You ask me if Boaz came to us to defeat us. On the word of a wounded lioness I can say: No! He came because Henkin was looking for him. It was me he was afraid of. He knew I don't believe. When he left the house, the day he brought the poem, Henkin came to me with trembling hands, holding the poem. I told him, Obadiah, it wasn't Menahem who wrote that poem, Menahem loved the sea, he didn't write a poem, he wasn't a hero like Boaz… And he shoved me out of the chair, that man who never killed a fly raised his hand and brought me down. Then he went outside and banged his head on the wall, I brought him a towel filled with ice cubes and held it to his brow until the swelling went down. For twenty hours he sat with me, Renate, twenty hours straight he talked about the meaning of the poem, how that poem couldn't have been written by anybody but Menahem! I fell asleep and he went on talking. He didn't even know I fell asleep. Then he fell asleep sitting up, muttering. I cooked, and made coffee. I waited for him to wake up and he talked again. And so he gained not only a poem he read to his friends, printed and copied it, but also a son who before-and it's awful to say-he didn't have.

And Boaz started coming. Henkin needed him. Can you imagine a worse place for a sympathetic family atmosphere than a house of mourning? But it was in the house of mourning of all places that Boaz wanted love and forgiveness. That's what I couldn't give him. Noga could.

If we had written our husbands' books, maybe we'd know on what side of life death is found and so we'd have given birth to stories and not begotten them. But I'm just an old Jew who sits alone and thinks, not particularly profound things, I've got my own contempt, I see a sea and Menahem still swimming there, I can even still love Henkin…