Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

One day, after Lily wrote two hundred words on his body starting with the letter A and drank fine rose wine that had been chilled in the refrigerator before she went to abort a German child at an abortion farm in the mountains of Pennsylvania (at that time Lionel was sitting offended with himself and imprisoned in guilt feelings and trying to write a story while wearing new house slippers he claimed sharpened his ability to think and Sam was trying to write for himself the nightmares of the past night), Sam looked at Lionel and said to him: Statistics, Lionel, write statistics in crappy rhymes! Make a ceremony. See a church. See a sorcerer with words in Latin. And Lionel said: She went to abort a son, Sam, and Sam said: Blessed be the just Judge, and went to Riba-Riba. She wanted to take him to the village, to her parents' house, to lie with him on the soft green lawn, introduce him to the cows and horses of her childhood, but he wanted to celebrate mysterious ceremonies and understand to whom the disaster truly happened. He introduced Riba-Riba to a fellow and told him, with premeditation (because he knew that the fellow was in love with Riba-Riba and would tell her what he would tell him) about their sex life and he did tell her. And then, he told Lily with a savage laugh, she was offended and phoned, and I hung up. She went with that Trevor and lay with him on the damp lawn near her stinking horses and cows and they got wet and came to the little church where a bored priest married them, and after that Sam tried to rape Lily in the kitchen and she said: They took a child out of me, Sam, don't touch me, and he slapped himself instead of slapping her.

Tape / -

Question: Have you ever known a person named Sam Lipp?

Ebenezer Schneerson: No.

Question: Where did Samuel Lipker disappear?

Ebenezer: He went for a moment and disappeared…

Question: Did Samuel Lipker have any connection with the theater?

Ebenezer: I was his puppet. He took money. He's also my son.

Question: What year are we living in?

Ebenezer: The clocks and calendars were set by Samuel. He doesn't come now. I need him.

Question: Thank you.

Tape / -

At night he'd wander around the city, to hear jazz at Bop City, Minton Playhouse, Birdland. Sam loved the organized improvisation, the celebratory sadness they made from New Orleans funeral music. He'd sit in a little bar on Eighth Avenue and order drinks for girls who would giggle at the sight of his eyes. "Awful eyes," one woman called him. Once he sat next to a girl with unstylish gray eyes, who reeked of perfume. The short hair no longer symbolized any regret and was deliberately miserable, cheap dye poured from it. When they drank, she mixed whiskey with water. Then they went to a small hotel, and when he fell asleep after she took pity on him and he called her: Crystal Heart, and she told him he was a darling wolf, she stole his money. The gonorrhea started two days later. The doctor gave him penicillin injections and then he went to see a play in the Village and fell asleep. On the fourth evening, he passed by the bar and saw her. He went to Washington Depot, came to the gate of the house, and the dog ran to him wagging its tail. He yelled: I love Melissa. Through the window Mrs. Brooks saw him and ran to the telephone, but he yelled: I've got American gonorrhea now! He kicked the dog and ran to the boulevard, where rain was falling on the thick treetops and didn't get to the lush ground full of the moisture of crushed leaves. He lay on the edge of a small field, between pines and oaks, and thought of why he had kicked the dog. He went into the forest and yelled: Melissa, Melissa, until he became hoarse and then he kissed a cow lying on the ground chewing. A person passing by said: Cows lying is a sign of rain. Sam wondered if the cows also knew that there really had been rain. He took the bus back to the city, and even though he was soaked to the skin, he fell asleep. When he returned to the bar to look for Crystal Heart, he was thrown out by the bartender in an apron, who had little eyes with a cold metallic glint in them. At dawn, he lay in wait for the bartender near the parking lot Mr. Blau had recently bought to build the biggest store for colored shirts in the eastern United States. He knocked down the bartender, wrapped him in a bag, and beat him until he heard his bones grow faint. Sam whispered to him: I wasn't born yesterday!

The man groaned but nobody heard. Later, the police found him. The cops who got a weekly payment happened to be at a crash course in Virginia and the substitute captain didn't want to reorganize the area. The bar was closed despite the damage to the police car and over the protest of the sergeant, who got forty dollars a month and came back from Virginia to get his take. Sam deigned to testify in court. He had received threats by phone and he wrote down every word that was said and told Lionel he was studying theater from life instead of vice versa, and Lionel looked at him and recalled how he fell asleep at the beautiful play they saw in the Village, tried to understand, but was tired and fell asleep. When they tried to stab him and missed-he didn't retract his complaint, even when a policeman who came back from the crash course tried to persuade him not to testify. After the sentence was declared, he felt relief, but also abhorrence. He looked cheerfully at Crystal Heart and at the kicked bartender. There were no marks on the bartender. Sam didn't admit to any attack. They looked at him with cold, flashing hatred, but he said: You're terrific. Everything exploded then, everything he had kept inside from the day he had left the camp was now a ring of suffocation. The play he went to see with RibaRiba opened the dam. Now he didn't know when he was dreaming and when he was daydreaming and all the time the SS men were beating him and he was shrieking, No! No! And he saw his mother naked and his father expecting him with a diamond in his rectum. Everything was woven in his mind with dark and humiliating ceremonies carried out on lighted stages.

Tape / -

Dear Lionel,

For some years now, I've been following your son. You asked me to help him, you told me to try to advise, you're a senior member of the university, you said, and I did keep my word. Sometimes it's hard for me to understand, Sam's past is a sealed chapter for me, while you refuse to tell me. When he dropped out of regular school and registered for the theater department, I was afraid, but his talent is impressive, and I thought to my self: Well, you also maintained that he should do whatever he wanted. But when day after day he wandered around cemeteries and seduced women to come with him to their houses and performed plays for them that later damaged them emotionally, I thought I should do something, but I didn't know how. What Sam could say in his defense in the case of that woman, Mrs. G., which you yourself were involved in: "She put on a striptease for me, because she thought men are aroused by black panties, and afterward because she thought I had a sexual disease-I told her about the gonorrhea I picked up-I kissed a boot and acted for her how I'd fuck its mate. And then she laughed, what's she complaining about all of a sudden?" It was hard for me to explain to him, the anger in him is incomprehensible to me. What attracts him is the human sewer, or magic. I don't understand what all that has to do with theater. In my opinion, he's playing with fire and that fire is buried inside him. He told me that on one of his visits to the cemeteries, a woman saw him, took him to her room, undid his trousers (these are his words), and when he penetrated her, he fell asleep. When he woke up, he said, she was naked and smoking a cigar. He said he turned on the radio. I'm reconstructing the details that coalesce into a picture you should be aware of. He said he combines tidbits in his mind like a man named Ebenezer did. Women in cemeteries, religious ceremonies, music he hears in jazz clubs-all that, he said, is intertwined, into one equation. And he can, he told me, recall who a disaster truly happened to. What disaster, Lionel? When he left the theater department and joined a theater that traveled throughout the state, you told me to persuade him not to go, but you know how much I tried and the result, nil! What I do know is that instead of studying theater in our department, one of the best in the United States, he worked in lighting, sets, as a stagehand, and learned to sew shrouds (his words) and to be a stage manager you claimed then that I should persuade him to work in what he really wanted to do and not in stage management of an amateur theater that traveled from one small town to another, but I didn't succeed. Look Lionel, Sam recently came back. He came back to the department and I accepted him. What you may not know is that he doesn't study but is preparing a play with three actors and has even managed to persuade me to help him. I'm writing to you because if there are complaints about my behavior, know that I tried, but he has some charm that compels you (me) to give in to him; and so it happened, Lionel, that people who studied four years in the department, successfully finished and did all their assignments, are waiting to put on their play while Sam, who didn't study in a regular way, who hit a teacher, who slept with, or in the words of one witness, raped two women directors we brought to the department, is producing a play and I, I am its sponsor. And as for the rest-