B002FB6BZK EBOK (41 page)

On the third evening, they came to the crossroads of the desert. Above
rose a mountain and on was it the holy house of the Shiite priests. In the
distance, dawn illuminated the mountains of Moab and a profound serenity
reigned over everything. Birds began chirping, when they came to the top
Dana didn't find flowers but thorns, thistles, and nettle flowers she was
afraid to pick because they blossomed only one day a year. They were ordered to say Salaam aleikum ya ahl el-kubur, which means Greetings to you who dwell in the graves. And at the same time, Ebenezer began blessing
with head bent: El-salaam aleikum ya ahl el-duniya, which means Greetings
to you people of this world. And then the old man there told them that if
they forgot those words their only son would die within three months, their
house would be destroyed by fire, and their name would be wiped off the
face of the earth. Dana said: We don't have a son, and Ebenezer said: We
will have a son and his name will be Boaz. Dana asked why Boaz, and
Ebenezer said: Because he will be the grandson of Nehemiah. And when
she asked what would happen if they had a daughter, he said: We won't
have a daughter, we'll have a son.

From the moment he was born, Rebecca claimed that Boaz was her son,
that she had held him in her womb as a pledge. Dana held the baby, suckled him, and was afraid to let Rebecca touch him. At night Rebecca started
whispering her Psalms angrily and furiously, prayed to a lord of another
world, a strange, hostile one, who once lived with her forefathers in cellars.
Dana wept and told Ebenezer that Rebecca was praying for her death, and
Ebenezer tried to calm her but didn't know how to say that in the few
words he used. He said: I'll protect you, Dana. She hates me, said Dana,
and wept. I'm so scared, she loved Samuel, I wanted to understand, I
couldn't, I looked at my son, he doesn't look like me, not like his mother,
he had green-yellow eyes like the eyes of a demon, he laughed, a laughing
baby he was, he touched his mother and would turn his face away from her,
and Ebenezer went to his mother and said to her:

Tape / -

You're praying for Dana's death, said Ebenezer. And she said: I'm praying to who I want and for what I want. You're not even the son of your father, not the grandson of your grandfather, you didn't come out of me, you
came out of the coffin of a Jew who died of typhus and was buried in Jaffa
under another name. Give me the only son I deserve. At night Rebecca
yelled at the fence so they would hear: Ebenezer is the son of Nehemiah!
Who else could be the father of a mongoloid who begets sons of a king if
not a man who died on his wife at the shore of Jaffa to punish her for a life
she didn't want to live? No Joseph would have begat a silent bird carver
who tries to sleep with the daughter of a eunuch from Tel Aviv who begat
his daughter from a charter translated from ancient Latin.

Dana heaped up pillows and boxes and blocked the doorway and
Ebenezer paved a new path around the old house and Rebecca sat at the
fence and wished for her grandson and couldn't see him. At night, no light
was turned on in the house. Ebenezer sat in the house holding a rifle.
Every noise made Dana Jump. One day, one of Dana's friends was brought
who had a stomachache and volunteered to guard the yard and whenever
he saw Rebecca approaching he aimed his rifle at her and said: I'll shoot
you, and she giggled and said Shoot, fool, and he aimed, trembled, and
didn't dare shoot until one day he crossed over the barricade and hired
himself out to work in her yard.

Tape / -

Boaz was born in the nearby settlement, in a small hospital, on April
third, nineteen twenty-eight. On that day and at that hour, in Tarnopol,
Galicia, Samuel Lipker was born. Samuel's sire then wrote a great poem on
his unrequited love for Rebecca Schneerson. Then he wrote a lament on
the death of Jews that would be written again later on by a man named
Lionel Secret. The lament and the love poem to Rebecca were the only
two successful poems ever written by Joseph Rayna. But they were left
with his clothes before he was shot to death. No one remains who will
remember them except for one man who recited them to Ebenezer and
then died with a piece of bread wet from the damp of the wall stuck in
his mouth. Joseph wrote about the most horrible disaster as if he envisioned it. The words walked among ruins of Jews and a path strewn with
human obstacles who didn't know what they hoarded in their minds, came
to Ebenezer, who stood in Cologne and recited the lamentation and the
love poem. In its words, Ebenezer heard a distant melody reminding him
of his love for his mother. And Joseph Rayna didn't go to America to save
himself because he thought that if he went there, he would betray
Rebecca. And so, without knowing, Lionel Secret learned from Ebenezer
the melody of the great lament he would write years later, and would restore the first love of his mother Rachel, her love for Rebecca Secret Charity and the great-granddaughter of her daughter, but by the time he wrote
the lament, his mother was dead and buried in New Jersey under the name
of Rachel Blau, faithful wife of Saul Blau.

Those are the annals of Israel. Abraham begat Isaac. Isaac begat Jacob,
end.

Tape / -

When Mr. Klomin came to the settlement to see his grandson, Dana
claimed that Rebecca had sent him to spy. Mr. Klomin came with the
Captain, who had just returned from Rebecca's house. Rebecca stood at
the fence separating her house from her son's house, and Mr. Klomin,
who knocked on the door, didn't get an answer. He wanted to read to his
daughter the six-hundred-page letter he had written to the High Commissioner. The Captain also considered that letter the piece de resistance of
the life of Mr. Klomin, who started believing the rumors that had been
making the rounds of the Yishuv for some time that the Captain was secretly inciting the Arabs to revolt (he didn't know exactly against whom)
and therefore Mr. Klomin believed that that inciter should be used to remove the foreign government from the Land by means of his loyal or hidden servants. The Captain's generosity enabled the recruitment of about
twenty new members into the party, but the source of his money became
more suspect when Shoshana Sakhohtovskaya returned from Egypt.
Shoshana was the daughter of Nathan, Nehemiah's old friend, and married
a Jewish officer in the British army who was stationed in Cairo and he was
said to own two factories for holes in pennies (one for the hole of a penny,
and one for the hole of a tuppence). Shoshana told with a fervor that almost made her face bearable, that the Captain's newspaper sold only
thirty-four copies, was merely a deception and behind it, she said, hid a
secret, international, maybe even religious body, she almost shouted, a
body whose purpose is to convert the Jews of the Land of Israel to Christianity and keep the Land from turning into a Zionist base. The Captain
was too polite and in love to try to refute those accusations, which seemed
exaggerated even to him, although he did see something in them that was
fair to some extent. In his opinion, the accusations were partly correct, but
imprecise, maybe even malicious, and he pledged himself by his nobility,
which he occasionally called "South American nobility" and "Swiss courtesy," to silence and would wring his hands, and say: I said what I said out
of love, I don't go back there, that's a fact, I'm no longer friendly with the English, I live in the settlement, and the proof was so dubious that everybody almost tended to accept it and Shoshana Sakhohtovskaya sat at night,
gobbled up all the oranges on a tree she had planted with her own hands
as a child. She heaped up the peels in a pyramid and when a black bird
with a yellow beak stood on the tip of the pyramid and nodded its head and
an owl screeched at night, Shoshana burst into bitter weeping, and called
out: At least I have someplace to go back to. The Captain didn't explain what
places he didn't go back to, and people wondered about those places, for a
person generally isn't born in Argentina, Switzerland, and the United States.
He has to choose, said those who were considered experts in the ways of
the world. The elders of the settlement, who were grateful to Rebecca for
Nehemiah and for Nathan's happy death, said: The Captain's Greek Orthodoxy is not exactly the religion that prevails in Argentina, the United States
of America, or Switzerland, so when the Captain went to get his things that
would come three times a year in a ship to the port, a few members of the
settlement watched him and with their own amazed eyes (Mr. Klomin stood
with them, even though he was ashamed of it) saw a gigantic trunk taken off,
placed on the shore, and a British officer loaded it on a cart and took it to the
shed, where the Captain was waiting. An aged consul stood next to him,
eating an apple. The case was opened, there were new uniforms there,
medals, and hats with padded visors. They also saw how the Captain was
granted new insignia, which the aged consul pinned to his epaulettes, and he
shouted unambiguously in a loud voice so they too could hear that the Captain was now promoted to the rank of colonel and the adorned scroll in the
consul's hand was seen even from where they were hiding. The insignia were
made of gold, the new visor was woven of silk fibers, silver and gold.

Later on, when Rebecca wanted to know more details about the event
that had been described to her in great detail, she asked Captain (Colonel)
Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg to read her the scroll. One paragraph in the
scroll seemed to her to suit the Captain to a tee. The paragraph said:
Colonel Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg valiantly defended the homeland,
destroyed, captured, burned, smashed, split, sliced, trapped, penetrated,
attacked, surrounded, crushed, broke, overcame, breached, caught, repelled, cleansed, cracked ... And Rebecca listened to the words, was silent, and then said: It's nice of you that after all those deeds you're willing
to waste time with simple people like us. They sat, drank a little brandy, the Captain smelled of imported flowers, and she said: Here you are with
us and we're fond of you, Captain, and for us you'll always be Captain, they
suspect you, respect and esteem you, you buy us gifts, but who you really
are we don't know and maybe we won't know.

Rebecca, who was too busy with her attempt to capture Boaz, was really
not surprised that not only the Captain and the manager of the wine press
were wooing her, but also the Jewish husband of Shoshana Sakhohtovskaya,
who owned two factories for holes, who came to visit. She told him: You
should be ashamed of yourself. You're married to the daughter of my distinguished friend Nathan.

The war for the fate of Boaz was then at its height. The fence between
the houses was thickened. For more than a year now, Rebecca hadn't seen
Ebenezer or Boaz. Boaz would cry at night and she would yearn for him.
Ebenezer started having nightmares he wasn't used to and Dana claimed
that Rebecca was casting spells on him through the fence. When he woke
up, he looked at Boaz and hated him. He said to Dana: He looks like
Joseph, and she said: Ebenezer, this child is your son and I'm not to blame
for who he looks like. Rebecca spread the rumor that the child was brought
from Joseph to her through Dana's womb, and Dana grew melancholy and
made bitter claims against the mother of Ebenezer, whose nightmares
thickened with her dread.

One day Ebenezer burst the barriers, punched the guard he had once
employed and who worked for his mother, stood at her chair, and pleaded
with her to leave them alone and not harm Dana. She's all I've got, he said.
I had nothing, Father died, you weren't there, I've got Dana! And she said:
You two don't interest me, Ebenezer. Not you and not your Dana. You've
got my son, give him to me, take your Dana and go to hell. You pray for her
death, said Ebenezer. She laughed and said: I've got no control over what the
Holy One Blessed Be He does. I filled my part of the deal with your father,
he wanted you and I have Boaz. And until he's mine, I won't shut up.

Rebecca turned her face away and through the window screen she saw
Ebenezer's back as he went off and a longing she had never known passed
through her, a longing to bequeath to Boaz her life and her property. For
the first time in her life she felt that she had surrendered to the most ridiculous of feelings, to pure unconditional love. The yearning flattered her
but also scared her.

A few weeks later, when Boaz reached his first birthday, Dana went out
to look for Ebenezer, who hadn't returned from the citrus grove for three
days. He sat in his hut and tried to discover his father's real face in a tree.
Suddenly, the sky darkened and a heavy rain poured down. The drops fell
savagely on the ground and looked gigantic, a wind blew and the sky turned
black, a haze filled the air, the foliage looked purple, the sun that flickered
for a moment between the clouds was almost green and a thick dust from the
desert grew turgid in the eddy. Lightning flashes struck the ground and cut
the air with a loud whistle. Two Arabs driving a load of spices on a donkey
on their way from the desert to the village of Marar saw Dana lit in the light
of the flashes. She was wet and her dress clung to her body. One of them
attacked her. Her wet hair fell on her face and his old friend grabbed it and
her when she tried to defend herself from the rain. The first one grabbed her
with his hands, stretched over her and tried to rape her. She fought him with
all her might, bit and kicked, but the mud was moldy and she couldn't see
a thing. When she fainted from swallowing mud the old man said to the
young one: Come on, let's get out, we've killed her. He tried to give her
artificial respiration but her body was cold. Out of dread he took out an aluminum cup and started digging a pit. They buried Dana, but she was still
alive. She tried to get up but the earth crushed her and broke her clavicle.
She tried to move, and her head bumped into a rock. Ebenezer heard the
roars, put on the old raincoat hanging in the hut, and went out. He walked
in the rain, soaked to the skin. And then he saw, he didn't yet understand
what he saw, he thought of going on, and turned around. He tried to listen
to Dana's heart, but her heart wasn't beating. He sat next to her, looked at
her trampled body and didn't shed a tear. He picked up her body, cleaned
her face and body, straightened her dress, and carried her in his arms. He
came to the settlement where all the inhabitants were sequestered in their
houses and looking out the windows at the rainstorm and the windswept
street. They saw Ebenezer carrying his wife's body. People came out of their
houses and started following him. Old Horowitz came outside and bowed his
head, tears gushed in his eyes. Ebenezer didn't say a word. He took Dana to
the threshold of his mother's house, put her body on the doorsill, and called
out: Here you are! You wanted her dead and you got it.