B002FB6BZK EBOK (32 page)

Who will arrange the battle Ebenezer is now shaping in his memory, his
chronicles, thinks the psychiatrist sitting with Ebenezer in a special tent
set up for him.

I knew I'd be the last to give up!

How did you think about that?

I didn't think. It came by itself.

And in the previous camp?

There I didn't think, and don't remember exactly.

Will you hypnotize yourself to remember?

Samuel can help me.

Samuel, come help him.

Samuel approaches, stands next to Ebenezer, says: Shut your eyes, set
your watch back. Kramer stands up to come see the box you made for him
and then ...

I came to Birkenau. For years I searched for Joseph Rayna. Here I was
almost the first one. They built the hut after I was inside. Three years here
is the climax!

And what did you do?

Don't remember ... at night they didn't shoot me, but they told me, at
first there were no chambers here.

Gas?

Gas.

And what did they do?

They tried with a diesel motor and heavy oil, says Samuel, that took an
hour to suffocate thirty people in a closed truck. Weiss came and saw my
box.

Then you made boxes?

Yes, says Samuel, and that's how he remembered.

How?

He heard people murmuring. They were finished and were dead. They
were hungry, stunned, groaned at night, talked, he started remembering,
doesn't know how, he said: I'll be the last one who will guard everything
they know.

Humiliated?

Maybe he didn't say humiliated, isn't humiliated too strong?

Perhaps. I wasn't there. You come from another world, Mr. Schneerson.

But he's here.

Yes, he's here, but look, he isn't anymore.

I don't know, if he was, he'll probably remain.

No, he isn't.

I didn't have the strength to remember the other things, so maybe I
could not know how awful it is to live here.

To ignore?

Yes. And not to think. Just remember things I don't understand anyway.

There were geniuses here. Do you know what a mine of knowledge was
lost here? Only a little of that he remembers.

Why?

Everything came according to a certain music, the words came one by
one, incomprehensible but etched. You think I'll ever be free of that?

I don't know.

Let's say, I thought about Wittgenstein's theory, there is such a man,
isn't there?

Yes.

I thought about it, don't understand it, but every word of his I know. I
remembered his words and I forgot what I did before.

Everything comes at the price of something, says Samuel.

Apparently, says the psychiatrist.

I'm a superficial man. I thought I'd hide and they'd come and then I'd
tell them. I loved a woman. I left everything, but I don't remember now.
I remember their words. Got to be freed first. I already remember Captain
Wood and you, sir, a sign that I'm not the Last Jew. A sign that I'm also
starting to remember things that are happening to me.

Then they passed through small cities, slipped between closed borders,
and the money Samuel earned was enough to slip from place to place.
Samuel said: The dumb psychiatrist thought you're a sorcerer and not a
poor soul who drills from the words of others. In one city they met a woman
who knew Ebenezer. During the war she had sewn uniforms for armies that
had passed through there. He asked her to tell him what he had searched for
there fifteen years before and she didn't want to remember. When they
came to the destroyed street of the Jews they met some Jews who were
standing and feeling the ruins in amazement. Samuel and Ebenezer stood
on the side. They had no concrete memories here. Poles came out of a
nearby house and started beating them. Samuel spat and Ebenezer looked
on in astonishment. He thought: Kramer was right. Then he started talking with Samuel about Palestine. Didn't remember much. Remembered
his mother, the settlement. Remembered dimly, he had to make an effort. Samuel didn't want to hear. What will I do in a savage land? There
they won't throw stones at you for coming to feel destroyed stones, said
Ebenezer. Everywhere there are pogroms, said Samuel, I'll teach you to
hit them where it hurts. Why did you leave, asked Samuel, but Ebenezer
didn't know anymore, something about Joseph Rayna ... I was ultimately
an echo that picked up echoes, says Ebenezer, Captain Wood, who attended Eton and Oxford, doesn't hold a stick in his hand, doesn't understand, I'm with Samuel, where to?

Echoes touch echoes, pain touches pain. What a gigantic sky like a
canopy of death.

My dear Goebbelheydrichhimmel, that's all for now. Second draft. The
words aren't yet stuck together precisely. Imagine writing achtung today
when the meaning of the word in the dictionary is: term of respect!

I remember back then, in Denmark, when I sent you my first stories.
Those were different times. We tried to understand what had happened to
us, you were also steeped in dread then and tried to investigate. I wrote
you the story about myself, a soldier who created contact with the enemy
and was sent back in shame from the occupied land to command children
shooting at low-flying planes. You wondered then, you were even afraid
that what I did in Denmark would disturb the publication of my book.
Then I came back and you supported me, I'm grateful, if not for your help,
who knows where I'd be today? You want Germany without remorse because in the end remorse doesn't help. An artist, a boy, a magician, not a
Jew ... a Jew in a story sounds too simple, to write about Jews means writing not only about Wasserman, Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Buber,
and Einstein-we're allowed to talk about them, in articles and lecturesbut also about moneylenders, wretched street musicians, a schmaltzy wedding orchestra, knitted skullcaps, ritual fringes, and you think, Ah, literary
judenrein is after all a certain enlightenment. Symbols? Yes: fish, midget,
architect, only not Mr. Cohen who lived in Cologne and has been burned
on our bonfires for one thousand five hundred years, looks like a caricature,
sells kosher salami.

Samuel Lipker now blows up Arab villages and so we can erase him from
literature, what do I have to do with him, you ask, what do I have to do
with the story of Ebenezer? Who's interested in Ebenezer? I understand,
for you he's superfluous, for me he's hard, because with Ebenezer I'll be a
stranger in the literature and the cinema where I'm one of the central pillars. And I'm not talking about the literature and cinema that are judenrein!
All of us knew some Samuel Lipker, didn't we, in school, on the street, we
had a common biography, and where are they? Ebenezer didn't know he
couldn't enter great German literature. Human tatters here and there, and
nothing else. I can invite my translators from all over the world to a splendid conference, lecture to them, and maybe a translator will even come
from Israel, they'll all sit, and I've got money to do that, don't I, and I'll
explain the subtleties to them, but none of them will be bold enough to ask me where in my fiction is Hans who once lived in the house where
we're meeting. He's just some Ebenezer, some carpenter. See how much
more interesting Kramer is than Ebenezer? Why do we need Ebenezer in
Kramer's story?

Kramer grits his teeth when the Jews are involved in a revolt against
themselves and us, he knows how to keep his mouth shut and not say what
he once said in awful words, and he's right, dammit, they've got no right to
blow up quiet villages, but maybe I have no right to tell them that. I should
investigate Kramer, and not only against the background of Wilhelmstrasse,
but also against the background of Walter Benjamin, or his family who
maybe played in the women's orchestra of Auschwitz. How enlightened
and beautiful we are today. They gave us European manure, six million
graves, and we gave them an extension. Now we're right again and again
they're not. Act nice, we tell them, and then we'll talk to you. You destroyed the Arab village of Marar, so why are you still talking! We buy
eternity with sublime conscientiousness, with measured words, without
mentioning names. And Lipker sells and buys cigarettes. Ebenezer sells
knowledge in nightclubs. Not nice. A literary Jew is Freud, not Lipker! What
you want is a nice story about a carter's ass. He pees and sees through the
prism of urine the fisherman and the farmer's wife kneeling. You want indifferent, estranged words, mother died on Sunday, was born on Posen Street.
You want a thin literature in a world where literature has nothing more to
say. But look, we're successful, they read us. Maybe you're right and I'm not,
but your rightness is starting not to interest me, my friend, Ebenezer's rightness is more perverse, incomprehensible, but more important to me.

Meanwhile until I can write what you and my friends will sneer at, I will
write my novella, I'll finish it, I promised and I'll keep my promise. Afterward, we'll sit, Henkin and I, and together we'll write a book, from both
sides of the absurd, from both sides of death. I'll describe everything, every
single detail, there'll be a pissing snake there, and Hitler who didn't die,
and Jews who aren't literary, maybe even without qualities, love is a banal
issue, like hate, like death.

That's it so far, because soon I'll start being banal again. The words
don't scare me anymore. With a bitter sneer I'll write the prologue to
what you call an epilogue. I'll write my lament, along with Henkin, an old investigator who lost a son in the war with the Arabs, and you'll have to
publish a book that won't gain you anything, that critics will desecrate and
not celebrate, that people won't read and won't buy.

Tape / -

Joseph Rayna died, appropriately, on his birthday. Sixty-two years old he
was at his death. He stood at a wall, his hands raised, his body blighted,
bereft of the spirit of life even before he would die. Until his final days he
had walked around erect with a crooked indulgent smile on his lips, as if
everything happening before his eyes was known to him long before. Maybe
it was the smile of schadenfreude. Beautiful was Joseph, as old angels are
when a tired and bored God stopped taking an interest in sugary young men.
A man in whose arms a Hebrew queen had died, whose father was hanged,
and for whom a hundred women got pregnant. I searched for him, I knew he
hadn't gone to America, but I didn't find him. His hollow songs Joseph had
burned in his mind long before his death. Samuel Lipker was born from an
almost absurd coupling between Joseph and a lustful woman who acted heroines she loved in a locked room all her life. Samuel's father didn't know that
Samuel wasn't his son. He left Samuel a diamond in his body. He and his
wife were too decent to accept the truth and admit it, so they learned how
to live alongside it, to console themselves with the silence between them.
They refused to admit what deviated in them.

Tape / -

When Samuel's mother went to the store to buy bread and flowers,
she'd look at the trees or the display window as if those too were paintings
by some genius artist. Her devotion to the beauty and glory of art was so
great that she was afraid to deal with them in public. So as not to shame
what she secretly called: that muse!

The universe, as she revealed to Joseph later on, chose to crush in herself her own great talent, a talent she was forbidden to waste for the pittance of small inauthentic theaters with an audience smelling of popcorn
and fried onions. If only I had been born in Paris, she said.

The great love affair of her life began like every war, quite by chance. It
was of course a moment that would later be described as unforgettable, and
was preceded by steps that of course could not be changed. She was stand ing there in a flower shop and, as she put it, smelling the aroma of the
distant rivers that watered those delicate flowers when Joseph Rayna, the
aging lover of women, saw her reflection in the window and began wooing
her with a courtesy that was splendid, wicked, but so tired it looked elegant and theatrical to her. He bought her all the flowers in the display
window and five boys had to carry home the baskets of flowers and at the
sight of them she laughed a wild laugh, which this time-uncriticized-
came from within herself. The boys bore the flowers with lockjaw discipline. The secret had to be equally elegant and concealed. After acting
Electra and Antigone all her life before walls crammed with plates and
pictures, now she stood at the flowers and waited for a love letter from
Joseph Rayna. Abrom Mendelstein, who would later be shot and laid diagonally on top of his two brothers and his father, with whom he would dig the
grave, lent Samuel's mother his room. Since he couldn't carry on a real
affair, he loved to see love flourishing in his friends. He was a teacher of
Akkadian and Aramaic and his wife Frumka was such a free woman that she
had had three lovers by then, and she didn't make love to them because of
firm reluctance to yield to feelings that didn't throb in her. She belonged
to a small progressive and stormy faction that seceded from the central
section, and she also seceded from the general party in the Warsaw committee, whose sixty-two members split into six different trends and once
a week, Samuel's mother was lent the small apartment and Joseph would
arrive gasping from all the stairs he had to climb.

With him, Samuel's mother could declaim in French drenched in ancient and sweet idioms the ancient Medea, full of evil and passion, and
plot against herself. In her late youth, as the mother of Samuel, whose miserable father was Joseph, she began to sing, and was cheerful even though a
bit vague from so much life that had landed on her and she thought quite a
bit of things she had seen as if they were written in a book and not really real.

Searching his father's naked body before he put it on the heap of
corpses to be burned, Samuel was amazed at the sight of his parents' surprising nakedness. He succumbed to the profound feeling of disgust and
gratitude when he found the diamond.