Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

Sincerely, Gideon (Janusz) Kramer, Tel Aviv

I have translated the contents for you, not the appendices. The trial took place before a judge in the district court. Boaz pleaded guilty. After you judged in his favor, Boaz wrote a letter to the judge thanking him, he said he was writing on behalf of Menahem Henkin, may the Lord avenge his blood. And I? I was silent.

Tape / -

Rebecca Schneerson's house, afternoon. On the table stands a steaming samovar, on either side of the table sit an old woman and a man in a uniform, decorated with medals and sporting an unidentified military cap. They're drinking tea. An Arab boy named Ahbed brings a plate with pistachios, sunflower seeds, halvah, biscuits, dumplings, and goat cheese; he serves a pitcher of water and two glasses. The old woman puts a sugar cube into her mouth and sucks the tea through the sugar.

Captain: Excellent tea.

Rebecca: Thanks for saying that, Captain, it's excellent even if you don't say so.

Captain: I say the tea is excellent because it's excellent and also because I think it's excellent.

Rebecca: You've been saying my tea is excellent for forty-five years now, Captain, you say it's excellent when it is excellent, and you say it's excellent even when it's not excellent. And always on Wednesday. I'm starting to doubt if I can believe your honesty, Captain.

Captain: I say the tea is excellent on Wednesday because only on Wednesday do you invite me. I say the tea is excellent even when it's not excellent for three reasons: One, I can't bear tea and I drink tea only be cause of you, so whether it's excellent or it's not, it tastes the same. And the second reason, I say it's excellent is because I know only one kind of tea and it's the tea I drink with you, and so it has to be excellent even when it's not excellent. Another reason is that I've been drinking tea with you for forty-five years now and you still stir strong feelings in me, if I were allowed to marry you, I would start drinking coffee also on Wednesday afternoons or continue drinking tea, and that would surely amount to the same thing, because I would be too happy to distinguish, just as the hope that you'll still deign to marry me allows me to enjoy your tea even when I loathe it. In South America, we're used to drinking coffee.

Rebecca: And when were you last in South America, Captain?

Captain: To be precise, I'm a colonel. And second, you're evading again.

Rebecca: I'm now over eighty, Captain. You won't be a colonel to me now, children you won't make me now, what good will it do you to marry me? Money you don't need and even if you did, I'd leave everything to Boaz and not give you a cent.

Captain: You don't appreciate the force of my love, Madame.

Rebecca: I'm not fond of that word, Captain.

Captain: I know, but I also know you wouldn't have drunk tea with me for forty-five years if you hadn't found something in me.

Rebecca: You didn't stop amusing me, Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg. You remind me of Michael Halperin in the lion's cage. You remind me of the of the splendid and absolutely needless way my husband died on the shores of Jaffa.

Captain: May he rest in peace.

Rebecca: As a Christian you don't have to say such things.

Captain: I also have memories.

Rebecca: Years ago you didn't have memories. You've changed with time, once you didn't have a childhood because you couldn't have been born in all the places you said you were born in. You're Argentinean, Jewish, Christian, Swiss, American, and you're also a spy and write for a French newspaper in Cairo.

Captain: The newspaper was closed thirty years ago. I've always admired you, Madame, and your late husband, too.

Rebecca: That's because you didn't know him, he wronged me.

Captain: He was a brave man.

Rebecca: He was innocent and beautiful, not brave. I'm brave.

Captain: You're very brave, Madame.

Rebecca: I'm also beautiful and lately you've been forgetting to say that.

Captain: You're the most beautiful woman I've ever known.

Rebecca: You say that so I'll agree to marry you. But this week is out of the question.

Captain: I've been waiting forty-five years now, Madame.

Rebecca: Another few days won't change anything.

Captain: At our age, it can change a lot. But I told you twenty-five years ago, in February, if you change your mind on a day that isn't Wednesday, you can always wake me up, I'm a light sleeper and I hear everything.

Rebecca: You're a light sleeper in my grandson's house.

Captain: In your son's house, Rebecca. Didn't you adopt him?

Rebecca: In your church and that's not legal.

Captain: It was legal in your eyes then and it's legal in the eyes of God.

Rebecca: God doesn't live here.

Captain: But you talk with him.

Rebecca: That's because of something else, not faith.

Captain: Your grandson or son worries me.

Rebecca: My son.

Captain: He worries me even though I love him.

Rebecca: My son died in the Holocaust. Boaz doesn't have to interest you.

Captain: I'm his godfather.

Rebecca: You're right, will you have some more to drink?

(She pours him another cup, he drinks with polite reluctance.)

Captain: Good.

Rebecca: What worries you?

Captain: He sells poems and monuments. He refuses to build me the Dante monument and he's got a girlfriend.

Rebecca: He's got me!

Captain: He's got one. She was the girlfriend of somebody who died. He killed her boyfriend. That's what Mrs. Hazin from the grocery store told me.

Rebecca: Her father was also a fool. I didn't know you went to the grocery store.

Captain: Once I went, I don't go anymore.

Rebecca: You insult him, Captain. Ever since he's been working in the burial society he hasn't been the boyfriend of any girl.

Captain: Yes he is, and I'm worried.

Rebecca: Stop worrying, I know everything, he's my son and my grandson.

Captain: Maybe he's also your father and husband? What about me?

Rebecca: You're starting to be sentimental again, Menkin. Now you'll start weeping on me. You're eighty years old now.

Captain: Even old men are allowed to cry, Rebecca.

Rebecca: Not to us.

Captain: I'm going now. Take it under advisement, I'll wait for you all my life, but my life now isn't something that will take much time.

Rebecca: I'll think about it. (Smiles sweetly.)

He gets up, kisses her cheek, salutes, exits. She sits, and the greatgrandson of Ahbed enters with a tray. She looks at the window and sees Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg's splendid back walking proudly toward Ebenezer's house.

Rebecca: That fool Dana!

Tape / -

Frustrated, unkempt and crimson, reminded, a whiskey in his hand, how to forget, in a bombastic letter to a judge consulting with a serial thief who sat with him in a bar and said an apple no longer symbolizes joy, Boaz. They lend envy today with interest, I'm drunk. The thief climbed on the balcony to make love to two lighted trees that had been brought here from civilized countries. A thick-bearded Anglo-Saxon from North Africa drew partitions on a map of a city that had been invented that morning with a joy that looked to experts more bored than it was supposed to be between three wars in which sympathy for Israel was almost uprooted along with the knowledge of forgotten courage. People were already drawing maps of cities where they were almost born and which had been annihilated long ago and they did that with chilly amazement, and then with a thief of flowerpots, on the balcony, above a ticking tranquillity, a fabric of tan tones and crumbling, filed in a nailed file cabinet with sorting tags that look like the homemade jam of a woman of a soldier's dreams, stood Boaz Schneerson and wrote a letter to the district court judge, chief judge, and an account of the days with him, and on him, and under him, and the thief forgives him and says: The arrow, sir, is no longer a symbol of regret just as the apple isn't a symbol of joy, and Boaz asks what is regret, he doesn't know, and then he recalls. He always recalls that there were days when he gave his temples the importance they craved, well-shorn temples, the best Middle Eastern tradition here on the shore of yearning. Shower, laced-up dresses of local charmers, lacking the lace of laciness for a person like me, a system in himself, hoodwinking eye and sin, a sin that isn't his sweet crimson air flowing and glowing, poets, and I am for the judge and he is for me, leather case with silk leather case of wild lexical melange of a lecherous word-thief, never let it be forgotten, he said with a glass of liquor in his hand, the face of a judge you can see only on unnecessary waking, yours, Boaz Schneerson! Women will stand in line, will learn birth and death in retrospective reconstruction, waving a smell of sour balsam who rises in that house of quarrels to die with me drink himself to death, and here, after they turned the maps into scattered tombstones and the present to an arrow sent to what almost was, his mind was swallowed up, his tongue was glued to the table of an overly enlightened woman's lap, Noga's here, Noga's there, Henkin will bite, Henkin will sing to me, to exclusivize the root and uproot the exclusive, the gray ancient preserved and choked, everything was spilled out, destroyed like the riddle of cities that don't exist, will here become the intercity mourning with drivers attached to the index, sucking the marrow of stone, we will die in a noontime nap, shame on the meek, horrible and terrible, a record of nothingness, the last rain abundantly and I rain from my own abundance, in the language of darkness, grace of whisper plowed and traps drought, this is how the sum of all roots routed in you, son of a bitch, was born…