Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

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On a Wednesday shrouded in a doughy dust in the air, Sam left the house and walked as if he had some purpose. Lionel and Lily sat and read an article that appeared that day in the Atlantic. Lionel sat with his eyes shut and Lily read him his own article. He wasn't smiling and was listening intently. Tired birds were seen dying on branches heavy with dust. He met Riba-Riba at the corner of Thirteenth Street, next to the weaving machine shop. Riba-Riba's neck looked thin, her head was crowned with a splendid mane of hair, and when he told her how beautiful was the back of her neck in the distance, she giggled nervously. At the sight of her smile, he could sense that the end of the story that hadn't yet started wouldn't be especially pleasant, but since he was waiting again for a funeral that hadn't passed, something in him longed for a well-done rite, and Riba-Riba, with the embarrassed and defeated smile, may have been the proper answer to the sight of the birds that weren't birds of gold at all and looked as if they would land in a little while and die from the heavy heat. Riba-Riba said: When I presented the evening of Irish songs at the university, I waited for you, Sam, I waited awfully, and you fell asleep. Sam said: I was tired. When she said she was going to see a matinee performance of a Tennessee Williams play, he told her he'd go with her. He asked her to buy him a ticket for the seat behind her. Since her father owned a nightclub and her mother was a well-known Irish Gypsy, it wasn't hard for her to get tickets. She said: It's awful sexy to sit like that, so he chewed on her ear and kept her from seeing the play. Through her hair, he saw his mother acting on the stage. Outside stood Joseph Rayna with a bouquet of flowers and seeds of Samuel Lipker poured on his eyelashes. The actors were welltrained, they raised their voices in the right places and knew how to structure the pauses precisely. The critics' florid words hanging on the walls of the lobby suddenly began to be possible. But something rebelled in him, and he may have fallen asleep or chewed Riba-Riba's ear again if he hadn't sensed that all those days, all those years, he had wanted to do something those people were doing now on the stage, but not like his mother, or those actors, to do that as Joseph Rayna acting the lover, at the house where his mother acted for the indifferent walls. What he wanted more than anything in the world was to stand there and stage Ebenezer, himself, Weiss, Kramer, Lionel, and Lily. In other words, to stage the world that almost was and only Ebenezer remembered it.

When they went out, it was raining a warm spray. Sam pushed Riba-Riba to the entrance of a dark office building and fucked her standing up. She bit her lips and because she felt both humiliated and blissful, she asked Sam for a cigarette, stuck it in her mouth and acted as if she were in a silent movie. After he snatched the cigarette butt out of her mouth and threw it toward the entrance, they broke apart, she combed her hair, and then they went into a cafeteria. Sam glanced indifferently at the gigantic Camel cigarette belching smoke rings at the news making its way around the old New York Times building. Opposite was a gigantic Paramount ad showing Duke Ellington smiling along with Frank Sinatra.

When they went out, the misty rain was still falling. Sam started talking about death as a gesture. She wasn't sure and saw a church altar and Sam raising her up before God with white skin and blue eyes. Sam said: They indulge with embellished words. Try to depict life as if it's possible to resurrect life. Riba-Riba shook with some vague fear and hugged Sam. She said in a voice that was too loud: We started from love standing up and we'll end with a true feeling, and he said: Say "we screwed," and she blushed and said the word and then Sam became serious and kissed her face. Her mouth tasted of mint, toothpaste, and potatoes. They passed by a funeral home and Riba-Riba was afraid to go in with him, but he insisted and they went in.

In the splendid and darkened room lay a well-dressed corpse, painted and made up and even its shoes were polished. Soft, melancholy music with something metallic was heard in the background. A woman dressed in black and enveloped in a delicate black silk scarf raised the hem of the scarf a little and looked at Sam. She didn't look at Riba-Riba and she immediately dropped the scarf. Sam smiled at her sympathetically, but the woman only shook her head with a domesticated sadness and looked at the dead man. A crushed odor of flowers that may also have been artificial rose in his nose. A person in a costume that looked like a blend of an official uniform and a frock coat entered, stood next to the woman, and with profound and gloomy understanding looked at the body. With a hand that almost succeeded in trembling, he brushed two hairs off the dead man's brow and with careful gentleness he brushed the patent leather of his left shoe with a handkerchief he took out of his pocket. The woman, who was still staring at the dead man, whispered something none of them could hear. And then more people in black came into the room and stood next to the woman. One of them wiped a tear from his eye and put the tear in a handkerchief and the handkerchief in a pocket that was apparently reserved for tears. The person standing next to the man with the tear took a scrap of paper out of his overcoat pocket, put on his glasses, and read a poem in a monotonous voice. The poem was written by the deceased before he died, he emphasized sadly. The poem was a trade balance of a small company called A. B. Lin, in Long Island. It said that life is a conglomerate of big joys and little events. The last words of the poem were: "Melina, Melina, go in your Caddy to the sea and see for me the scene of sunset I haven't seen in twenty years." The woman didn't budge. Sam smiled but the man didn't smile back. They looked at Sam and Riba-Riba and tried to recall what side of the family they belonged to.

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As far as I know (I'm reciting now), Sam Lipp went back to the theater he had been sunk in forever and didn't know it, so maybe the words "went back" are superfluous, like the word "deceased" mentioned above.

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From a letter written by the prisoner (Number 3321/A) Kramer, to the PEN association of writers in the city of Cologne, a few weeks before he was turned over to the Polish authorities:

The letter and the journal I gave to your distinguished society, but as far as I understand, it used them adversely. Since they have not yet hanged (or shot) me, I am permitted to express my amazement that the writers of our nation are capable of distorting things like that and betraying the belief of a commander who served our homeland loyally. And as for Samuel Lipker, whom you ask about, I must say that when he associated in the camp with Ebenezer, I knew that his bestiality would someday be translated into troubles for us. Nevertheless, he remains alive. There was no decision on the matter. I remember Samuel once told me: Commander, maybe all of us betray something more sublime than we are, and judging should be a blissful act, right? Those were words on the tip of my tongue. I must state that if Samuel Lipker does something in his life he will appeal to the dark alleys of our great spirit, and not like a great many of you, he will not be afraid to ask why he betrayed our nation with his Fuhrer, will not be afraid to touch what the Americans call in weather reports "the eye of the hurricane."

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Lily sits and combs her hair while Sam looks at her trying to understand. The beauty of her movements, holding the comb in the hair, the head bent above and behind to right or left, fill him with a dim sense of joy he never knew before.

Sam and Riba-Riba at the Easter service in church. The sorcerer is about to don garments of authority, his face is white and pale. He dons a gigantic hat that looks like a miniature church building. With his terrifying magic the sorcerer stops a great erosion of force that becomes thin and pleasant. The pulpit is high and gilded. Music bursts from all sides of the church, people in their best clothes, looking like they're embalmed, kneel at the altar of colored lights and a smell of incense rises into the air. Sam thinks that a temple like that can imprison divinity, speak in its name, tame it, and at the same time not let it in. The words whispered there are important and unimportant at the same time. The service isn't about life, but death. He thinks of the synagogue where he'd spent Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah eve in his childhood, its low ceiling, the poor God with a white beard sitting in the locked Ark with a few meager ornaments, and facing Him men wrapped in prayer shawls and a charred smell of tobacco rising from them. Sam stands at the mysterious service held in the pulpit and thinks that God has a place only through the mask, since only there is He truly strong and false. The confessionals furnish feelings with institutionalization that turns into a linguistic inquisition, a rule of power and force for a gossipy human mumbling, and like that, an ancient and savage Torah can become noble, full of splendor and so sexy. Sam didn't really know how close that notion of his was to the opinion of SS Sturmbahnfuhrer Kramer, to whom he once bowed whenever he saw him passing by.