Yoram Kaniuk - The Last Jew

Noga, Noga. Noga, who was a stranger to the hut on the seashore even before Boaz Schneerson moved to the attic apartment, she sat-and this is something that happened long before that-padded in a sheaf of light that shone on her, and she defended herself from her feelings. She didn't know what to do when they knocked on the door: to open, not to open, she worried, the sea spread out through the window, and she waited for Boaz to tell her. He didn't tell and she got up, hugged her shaking body in her hands, stretched them, went to the door, was a little amazed, and opened it. There stood a solid man wearing a beret who said something about how Boaz knew Menahem and maybe he also knew his son who fell in Ramle and loved to read the poems of the poet Ratosh. He wants to know if Boaz can arrange a meeting for him with the poet Ratosh. The poet Ratosh can explain to me, said the man, and Noga trembled because she knew that Boaz would bring him Ratosh the poet, to explain his son to him, then he showed the letters of the son and asked for an expert opinion, maybe to make a pamphlet of them? Letters full of names, Ratosh and the poems of his black wedding canopy and the night road from Mesilot to Sadeh Nahum and Belt She'an at night when the Arab dogs are barking and he quoted an excerpt from the book Pampilov's Men. The man measured the rectangle of sea in the window and smiled. Then, maybe about a month later, a child also came with a letter and Boaz said too loudly: If a woman comes here, give her coffee, I'm going down to swim in the sea.

But the woman was already on her way to him and the man whose son loved Ratosh's poems met her, but didn't know where she was going, and Boaz thought: Somebody said we have to find a moral equivalent of war, what's the equivalent of that nothingness, that dreadful, heartbreaking lust? Meanwhile, he put on a bathing suit and over the bathing suit he put on his pants and shirt. Noga looked at the sea. The woman walked past the hut. He'll search for the poet Ratosh, said Noga, what do I tell Menahem from Menahem, to Boaz from Boaz? But Boaz didn't go down to the sea. He sat down on the windowsill and drank the coffee Noga gave him before. Outside the wind raised leaves and papers and sand in the wind and yellow limestone flowers didn't budge. A ship sailed north and Noga stood up and facing the small mirror tried to put on a new belt. In the mirror, Noga saw Boaz's half-shut eyes and also the ship. What began as trying on the belt turned into being a game. She stretched the belt and released it, and said: I've got a riddle for you. A bagel distributor walked on Mapu Street and distributed four bagels to every apartment. When he came to the last apartment he saw he had only three bagels left. He panicked and thought: Where did the fourth bagel disappear? He reversed direction and searched for the bagel. He came back to the bakery and understood that he had lost the bagel on the way, but didn't know where. You know where the bagel disappeared? Boaz didn't open his eyes and his face was stuck to the rim of the cup and she knew he was measuring her with his eyes shut, that he was expert in looking with eyes shut and she played with the belt again, her face frozen, the man seeking the poet Ratosh still between her lashes and Boaz was silent and waited for the woman who was now walking in the street and he was still wearing a bathing suit under his clothes. Noga emitted a brief laugh that shriveled her cheeks and suddenly made her lost, burned, he wanted to get up and hug her, but he didn't know how much, sometimes, it was forbidden to touch her. And then Noga whispered: A fat man and a beautiful woman sat in a train compartment. The fat man was smoking a big cigar, and the beautiful woman was holding a barking dog on a leash. The beautiful woman said to the fat man: Sir, your cigar bothers my dog and so he's barking. The fat man with the cigar said: Your barking dog bothers my cigar. Finally, the beautiful woman rips the cigar out of the fat man's mouth and throws it on the platform. The fat man picks up the dog, removes its leash and throws the dog outside. The dog runs after the cigar and you know what he found?

Boaz didn't know.

He found the bagel the bagel seller lost, said Noga.

Boaz didn't respond and looked at the ship that had almost disappeared beyond the Sheraton. A sudden rain fell on the sands that scrunched up as if they too were ripples of water. A woman in a transparent raincoat approached the hut. That is a war ground and you don't see blood, said Boaz and looked at the sand. The woman passed by the German who was still selling suitcases here so that some day he could go back to Europe and he didn't know how to cross that cruel sea that erected a barrier between him and the landscape he yearned for. The woman thought: For two weeks now I've been trying to get here and have been afraid, and Noga heard the knock on the door even before the woman knocked, and she straightened up, took off the belt, Boaz didn't budge, and said: That's the woman who wrote to me. Noga said: You should have known where the bagel was, but Boaz stared at the door and Noga opened it and the woman came in out of the rain and sprayed water on the floor. Noga helped her take off her coat. She lit the stove and the woman stood between the stove and the door and when she looked at Boaz, she was no longer sure why she had come.

Boaz saw a child running along the sand in the rain. The woman was blighted, but her breasts were full.

After she spoke with her eyes almost shut, Noga went to a corner, sat and folded her legs and decided she was a statue. Menahem's poem, she said: "So charming, Teacher Henkin said to write to you, you have no idea how many times he read the poem to us, and my Yoram is also in that poem, they were all boys who gave birth to themselves, a poor generation, they tried to be answers to their parents' dreams which they themselves had to kill. Surely you'll forgive me. My late husband used to say: Take care of him, I won't hold out and he really didn't. Didn't I take care enough? Noga didn't budge and said: He forgives you, and she stared at Boaz hunched up on the windowsill. Boaz performed an experiment he had tried in his childhood after he read Yotam the Magician by Korczak, he tried to be invisible.

Yoram fell in Iraq-Manshiya. You must have known him! Everybody knew him in Tel Aviv. He'd walk on his hands on the shore from Frischmann to the pool in the north and back. Here's his picture, she said, and held out a hand with a picture suddenly, Yoram Pishinovsky, you're sure you didn't know him?

Boaz takes the photo and looks. Curly hair, serious eyes, soft thin cheeks, deathphoto. The serious and saccharine puppets with gigantic pompadours who left class photos that were too professional, he thought. Noga offers the woman coffee, but the woman doesn't want to drink. She can't sit either. Hidden treasures went down the drain, she says. Here, this is what we have left of him, and she takes a few drawings by Yoram out of the leather case and gives them to Boaz and wants to know where his Australian hat and Parker fountain pen disappeared. Sorry about such nonsense, but what's left of them? A fountain pen, and even that's lost! The Negev was cut off, and I searched, she said, and how do you know where to search for things like that? And something was needed? Then they showed me a grave, but there was no hat there and no Parker fountain pen, and I asked, and I'm a member of our club aren't I and every week, I come to the Shimonis, but nobody knows and then that poem and you…

We walk and Teacher Henkin explains. He also speaks nicely. But at least he's got a poem, no, Yoram didn't write poems. Now she said pensively, sadly, hunched up inside herself: I stand here and look at you and the young lady and the stove and I think: What folly, what am I searching for, you must think I'm a fool. And in the middle of her words, she stopped, picked up her coat, and started putting it on too hastily. Her defeat was total, in the depths of her heart she knew she had come in vain and that whole two weeks, she muttered, that whole two weeks, a vague hope lodged in her, now it's not! In her face Boaz saw that mysterious charm of pain when it's disguised as shame, what a patched-up fragility is life itself, from that human crease life burst forth that terrified him, he couldn't imagine it and thought about himself, about Menahem, and then he got up and took off the woman's coat, sat her in the chair, the rain stopped, the clouds sailed quickly and the blue sky appeared and he said: It will be all right, Yoram's mother, it will be all right. And a few days later, he brought the woman a Parker fountain pen and an Australian hat. Her house was full of plants. She grew them as if she wanted to hide in a jungle. Now she was practical, asked where to put the things, and Boaz built her a corner, hung the drawings from school, the letter from the Ministry of Defense, the map of the battle for Iraq-Manshiya that Boaz had brought her, the hat and the fountain pen he put on the cabinet, with an enlarged picture of Yoram framed in black. She stuck some money in his pocket, and said: You had expenses and I don't think you should bear them. He pushed away the money, but when he saw how she thrust the money into the pocket of his coat hanging on the hanger, he didn't say a thing. He also bound the compositions for her, and that's how, that's how it all started, said Noga-