Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

When Lionel asked him where he had been, he said: I went to visit Melissa. She doesn't love you anymore, Secret. Then, he went into his room, locked the door and fell asleep standing up, leaning on the door.

Committee of the Survivors of Hathausen/Division to Celebrate Liberation Day

New York,

Dear Sir (Samuel Lipker):

Attached is the questionnaire we informed you of. Please fill it out and send it to us as soon as possible. Erase what is superfluous.

Full name.

Parents' names.

Are they alive?

Other family members.

Their addresses.

Dates of internment in the camp.

Do you recall what you did? If you had a job, what was it?

Did you live in the blocks? Did you live in the Sonderkommando Services camp?

Detail why you think you survived.

Where did you go after the liberation?

How did you come to the United States?

Do you remember people who were with you in the camp?

Do you remember outstandingly cruel incidents?

Do you have a profession?

A brief history of your life, personal details, memories (if possible), experiences, songs you sang, dances. Do you have plans for the future? Do you remember Frieda Klopfen?

Please send us the form as soon as possible.

Yours,

Most sincerely.

To the Committee of Survivors of Hathausen,

Greetings,

My name is Sam Lipp. Frieda lay under a dog that crushed her. When they threw me into the fire, they remembered that I was fourteen years old and took me out of the fire. Then I chewed bones to understand the sky, which was mostly cloudy. I and my father live outside the planet earth. Why didn't you celebrate your entrance into the camp instead of your exit? You don't interest me and please don't send me any more material.

Samuel Lipker was killed in Hathausen and I do not know the place where he is buried.

Yours, SS Sturmbahnfuhrer Kramer (Samuel Lipker)

Later on, when he told Lionel of his trip to Melissa's house, Sam was smiling and Lionel was silent and pensive. He looked at Sam's face, lit a cigarette, outside it was pouring rain, and Lionel said: How did Mrs. Brooks look? And Sam said: She asked about you! Lionel laughed. Sam said: They're sending me letters for a celebration of the liberation, if they call, say I died, and he left. Lionel came back from his room where he'd help Sam with his homework. Because he had learned from Ebenezer the craft of remembering, he learned well and fast. He finished high school in a year. At first, they teased him because of his age, but the other students quickly learned not to get smart with him. Then, he went to NYU. Rachel said: He'll give you trouble, and Lionel would answer her: Mother, he's my son!

The stories Lionel wrote weren't bad, but they weren't any better than the stories he had written before. The sense of defeat was much less bitter than it was. By the time he started writing reviews for The New York Times, Lionel was close to fifty. The editor, who loved his stories that were printed in little journals and that granted him a certain cachet in marginal literary circles, asked him to write an article. Then he wrote more articles and soon after, he became the regular critic for the paper. When he was afflicted with melancholy visions of his life, Lionel said: Everything is past, the future is now behind me, the lad I was created a man and the man has lost the lad, the hopes were disappointed, even if they weren't very big, average men lead lives of quiet desperation, he quoted Thoreau, I exist, write, I'm a draftsman, not a creator. To take Sam's lampshade. The number of lampshades in the hackneyed kingdom of the eternal. To make a poem. My words grope in vain for a story others will write better than me. Watches Lily, sees the devil in Sam's eyes, and dies for another night. A year is three hundred sixty-five dogs. Sam Lipp is now twenty-three years old. Lily sat at home and read dictionaries, vocabularies, and the more precisely she learned English, the more she thought she forgot her native tongue. She taught herself with an anger she never imagined was in her to flee from the language she had grown up in, and she thought that in an idiomatic and fluent English, and that was how she could forget she once had parents and the more her children continued not to be born, the more her roots were erased, until she was forced to think for a long time to answer Sam who asked her the name of her father, who may still have been a prisoner of the Russians. Her life was a small ghetto protected from an insult she never felt, but his eyes were a witness to it. One night, when the snow piled up to the middle of the window and a strong wind blew outside, Sam came and lay next to Lily. Lionel whispered: Lily, he wants you, very slowly she turned her face, looked at him, let a tear pearling in her eyes soak the pillowcase, stretched out her hand, gently stroked Samuel's face, and Samuel said: You sleep with every filthy Jew, you don't even know what a gentile prick looks like. He pushed Lionel onto his side, pressed Lionel's eyes until he roared with pain, Lily felt his body choking her. She tried to crawl to Lionel, held her hand out to him, but Sam grabbed the hand, clasped it hard, and when she looked into his eyes she could see the snow piling up in the windows with eyes that once saw a forest on a hike with somebody who may have been her father. She laid her hands on his eyes, shut them, and he stroked her back until she shuddered, but now Melissa laughed inside her and Lionel, who felt pity for Sam and knew that tears covered his eyes, talked to her and when she raised her face she saw Lionel looking at her, the tears remained on his smooth chest, and even though she wanted him now, she could do nothing but defeat Samuel in him and her lips were caught in his watch chain, and she was so confused that even five years later, she could remember that the time was then one twenty-one in the morning. Samuel flipped her over, lay on her, slipped the pillow out from under her head so that Lionel's head was now higher than hers, put the pillow on her face, didn't press, straightened up a little so he could look at the three of them, and said: I love her, Lionel, but she loves you, don't worry, I'm trying to steal Melissa from you, but she's dead all the time too, and Lionel whispered: That's all right, Sam, and Lily tried to say something, but the pillow over her face didn't let her talk and Sam pounded on the pillow until it dropped off and fell on Lionel's chest as he lay there now, squashed the pillow with his head, and when Lily saw Lionel's face, she clasped Sam and at the same time pushed him off her. The snow kept piling up, Sam hit Lionel's leg to get him away from him, he grasped his father's face with his hand, hugged it hard and Lily thought she was cut because his hand was in her crotch. When she started crying, her face turned red and she touched Lionel pleadingly. She turned over, hugged Samuel. As he was above her, Samuel kissed Lionel on the lips, jumped out of bed, stuck Lionel to Lily, ran to the kitchen, banged his hand on the wall, poured water, brought a glass to the room, poured the water on them, pushed them closer together, and started singing a song a Ukrainian guard had once taught him as he hugged him from behind. Then, the three of them lay on their backs and looked at the snow. The dark was lighted by a streetlamp.

The stories you write, said Sam as if he were continuing a conversation he had started years ago, are still lifes, beautiful and dead. You're too respectable, Lionel, you're not young, your words have no proper story and you're waiting for a story in all the wrong places, and you let every fucking Jew fuck your wife.

Not everyone, said Lionel.

Everyone, Sam repeated.

This is a fascinating city. See how arrogant its snow is, added Samuel. You're searching for humiliation, Lionel, you're selling Samuel Lipker to a German woman. Look at your city, there's no melancholy eaten by moss in it as in the city where Joseph Rayna begat Samuel Lipker on a miserable actress, you measure others' pain with a yardstick. What do your tears know except what they have to glean from a city where everybody passes through like a Cossack in a pogrom? You searched for a son in the wrong place, you dismantle the enemy into elements, produce with your hands-or Lily demonstrates to you-a disaster that was supposed to happen to you and happened to me and her. And without you, Lionel! That yardstick! Grasp. Like loving Lily through me. I read in a book that Paul Klee the artist said that creation is to turn the unseen into the seen. Ebenezer would perform with me in nightclubs. I led him on a rope like a trained monkey. He really was the last survivor of the Jews and they really did all die, they don't know they died, but they died. He recited the words and they thought he was talking about something that once was. They didn't understand that he was talking about what maybe wasn't.