Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

Lily said: That's not Sam's voice, that's Ebenezer's voice. Licinda, who didn't want to understand and was frightened, said feverishly: What difference does that make? And Sam said: Christmas or Hanukkah, the main thing is that we're happy because I found myself a nice and wonderful woman and so cruel that her name is Licinda Eliot Hayden.

Licinda went to Sam, kissed him on the mouth, and said: It seems I love this man, and then she sat down in a chair, stretched her legs to the fire, and let the warmth enter into her until she felt the warmth suffocating her crotch and she started weeping. Sam asked her why she was weeping and she didn't answer, waited until the tears dried, and then asked if it really was allowed to sing Christmas carols in this house. Lionel said, No, but Sam said, Of course, and started to sing himself. Lily softly hummed "The Star of Bethlehem" and Licinda tried to sing but couldn't, because the tears moved from her face to her throat and Lionel, who wanted to lecture to her about the history of the Jewish people, decided to give up, shut his eyes and sank into a doze of weariness, which he later claimed was a characteristic result of his advanced age. Sam said: Safer to sing the songs of the winners, Lionel! But Lionel was already asleep, and Lily said: What the losers never understand is that there really aren't any winners in the world… And Sam looked at her, put on his coat and went out. Licinda watched him go, and Lionel who woke up saw the door shut, and said: Don't pay attention to every word he says, and he fell asleep again, but Lily said: Listen to him, he knows something none of your friends knows. Licinda shut her eyes, licked the little bit of whiskey still stuck to her lips, held her hand out, and Lionel, who opened his eyes again, held out a tired and shaking hand and poured her another drink. She poured the whiskey into the fire and brought her hand back to gesture a request.

No, no whiskey, she said and covered the mouth of the glass with her other hand. Lily went to the bedroom and came back from there in a white dress. Her hair was disheveled now. Sam, who came back with two bottles of wine, saw two angels standing next to the fireplace. He uncorked one bottle, poured into Licinda's empty glass, and also poured for himself, and after they drank, he said: Blessed art Thou 0 Lord our God King of the Universe who commanded us to light a Christmas tree, amen.

And then, when Licinda sat down, he ordered her to stand up, his voice was metallic and coarse. Lionel poured himself another glass of whiskey, this time without ice, and drank it without putting the glass down until he turned pale. Church bells were heard in the distance and Licinda started humming "Silent Night." Sam hugged Lily, put out the colored lights, and said: Lionel, sing something. Lionel asked: Sing what? His voice sounded of blood with an edge of whiskey. A song of thanksgiving to the god of Licinda and Lily, said Sam. Lionel said: I'm too drunk, and he fell into the easy chair. Sam said: Too bad I don't have nails. Lionel opened his eyes, took off his glasses, and looked at Lily. His face was impassive; Licinda looked drunk. Sam turned off the light again and plugged in the colored lights, Lily glowed against the dark tree. The branch moved, the electric lights went off and on, and Sam said: We're celebrating today one thousand nine hundred sixty-two years of His birth. Licinda tried to applaud, Lionel wanted to get up, and when he did, he slapped Sam's face, but Sam didn't react. Licinda said: That's beautiful, God! That's beautiful…

Advertising jingles were played on the radio. Lily released her hands from the tree, and Sam said: Two demonesses, he laughed and was sad at the same time. Lionel suddenly looked sad and gnarled. Sam said: The hangwomen look beautiful in the home of the hanged. Else Koch had a dog, his name was Man. Lionel, who muttered vague words, looked at the two women.

Licinda said: I met Sam when he did the play with the shoes and I'm scared… Lily said: Welcome to the home of the urban hangwomen. For the sake of argument, I'm Else Koch and you're the woman named Frieda with a white band on your arm trampled to death b y a gigantic dog..

Two hours after the birth of their messiah, when heavy snow started falling in the window, Licinda fell asleep in her chair. Lily stood fascinated at the tree and her eyes measured its beauty unlike the snores of Lionel, who firmly refused to admit that now that he had become a well-known poet, he started snoring. The light goes on and off. Sam pees sitting down on the toilet and forgets to get up, and then begins the event that Sam later called "the four lost years." None of them remembered exactly how it happened or what caused the years to disappear, but four years passed. Life flowed on the side, as if on another planet, Lionel published more and more chapters of the gigantic poem (seven hundred seventy-five pages) about the death of the Jews, Licinda came and went, there were months when she was apparently not there and Sam missed her or perhaps didn't, none of them remembered exactly. And then she came back and maybe she really wept as it seemed later. Sam hugged or hit her that time she remembered extremely unclearly as the day she broke the glass where Lionel collected the tears of angels. He was drunk and slept hugging the scrap of cloth of Sam's mother's dress and Sam was watching him. Other events took place: international or national, elections, one president fell and another was elected, thieves were arrested and one murderer drank the blood of his victim, the newspapers with Lionel's articles or articles about his poems were published regularly, none of them filed the oblivion precisely. Somebody, maybe Lily, said: Maybe we invented a machine of oblivion, but then they forgot they said that. A fortune teller Licinda may really have visited said: You're in love with a shadow; the man you live with doesn't exist, or he lives far away from here and Licinda was scared and ran away from the fortune teller's dark house and Sam staged plays, chose a group of actors and somehow, along with oblivion, as if in a dream everybody dreams together, united a troupe of actors, an auditorium was found at a university, they worked on the body, soul, and dialect of actors, Lily managed the house and the lives of Licinda, Sam, and Lionel, discovered in dictionaries words that were also forgotten, Sam was so immersed in forgetting that he once spoke for a long time in Yiddish with Licinda, and after years when the invention of time stirred ancient echoes in her, Licinda said: That's funny, Sam, and she started dreaming about people she had never known and who maybe really were her forefathers. The invention of extinct time wasn't a secret. An important poet claimed in an interview he granted one of the newspapers that Sam Lipp dictates his poems to Lionel from documented dreams filed by a Jewish magician who learned nine million words by heart and would recite them in seedy nightclubs.

Near the end of the long period of forgetting, Sam staged a play for two actors, closed the play because the words written by the playwright bored him. He wanted the Bronya the Beautiful to hold an apple in her mouth, he wanted to see his mother in the empty room, and he wanted Ebenezer, the camp, Kramer, the smell of bodies, he wanted to create a world nobody still believed ever existed. Licinda, who had long ago forgotten, stopped asking herself if she was in love with Sam and accepted her life with him as natural and started feeling children in her womb and was afraid of greenyellow eyes. She taught Sam quiet ceremonies of love, restrained lust, softness, and said: If I'm four years older it means they passed. Sam said: Ebenezer assigned me to be a witness, but how do you witness? Testimony has to be lies and by that to describe truth. The first time he produced Lionel's Lament for the Death of the Jews (an excerpt of the second cycle), the play was harshly criticized. He read the reviews calmly and said they were surely right, but he was more right. He taught his actors to be animals, to steal, to devour one another, to survive. They crawled and licked and hit one another, fought and learned to speak out of need and not desire. And Licinda sat in Sam's studio and took care of the wounded and offended actors, brought coffee and beer, mended, organized, supplied every detail, for long hours she talked with Lily, and at night she'd let loose.