B002FB6BZK EBOK (49 page)

At exactly one o'clock, Boaz is standing at Henkin's house. The house
is still neglected as then, the yard is a weave of crab grass and thistles, the
trees, like corpses, without foliage, trampled in some disaster that befell them. The sea is seen through two houses, in one of them a woman is beating a small dusty rug. Over the little grocery is an old sign, SMOKE MATUSSIAN.
Mr. Singer in a wrinkled shirt, beyond him the enclosures of the port, and
Boaz knocks on the door and Teacher Henkin in a white shirt and gray
trousers opens it and lets him in. For a moment, they look at one another,
then Henkin drops his eyes and without a word leads Boaz into the gloom
of the chilly house.

The shades block the light, a bulb is lit above a silent woman in a dark
dress, the woman raised her face, looked at Boaz with a long and weary
look, and without getting up or turning her face, she said: Will you drink
something? Coffee, juice, tea?

He looked at her, the closed photo album lay in front of her on the table.
He said: Thanks, and followed Teacher Henkin who led him with ostentatious impatience. But at the same time as if he also wanted to defend
himself against something. In the other room, he saw the library Menahem
used to joke about: books up to the ceiling, manila files, big notebooks, a
mess, a table lamp with a hexagonal, old-fashioned shade, peeling a little,
on the wall documents of the Jewish National Fund. Boaz sat down in a
chair across from Henkin and waited. The woman didn't even knock on
the door, she entered and put a tray with two glasses of juice, cookies, and
a steaming glass of tea with a slice of lemon next to it. Boaz said: Thanks,
but she had already slammed the door and didn't hear.

Boaz took out the poem and put it on the table, for some reason he
couldn't put it in Henkin's shaking hands.

Henkin picked up the poem, put on his reading glasses, felt the paper
and with his other hand, started stirring the tea and squeezing the lemon
slice. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket, wiped his fingers carefully,
put the handkerchief back in his pocket, and once again held the paper in
both hands. Boaz took a glass of juice and drank. His eyes wandered over
the shelves and he tried to read the titles of the books, what he wanted to
see was Love of Zion, but he didn't find Love of Zion among the books near
him. Henkin muttered, This is his handwriting, it's exactly his handwriting, a poem ...

And then he sank into reading that lasted about an hour. Never had
Boaz seen a person read a poem so devotedly. Henkin forgot that a person
was sitting across from him. He forgot the tea he had stirred and hadn't tasted. His glass of juice also remained undrunk until Boaz gulped it too.
The pale light through the cracks of the shutters dimmed for a moment,
maybe the sky was covered with clouds, Henkin didn't move, his lips stammered, his eyes blinked through the glass that emphasized their pupils,
from the other room came the sounds of water boiling and a fly buzzing,
somebody opened a door and locked it again, the sea breaking was heard
clearly and a car honked. Boaz felt disembodied. The light glowed on
Henkin, but Henkin wasn't there. On the horizon between two cracks of
the shutter a line of sky or sea was seen, he didn't know which, a dim light
that slowly darkened his eyes, a hand unattached to his body started hurting, he tried to feel the hand but couldn't, the pain wasn't his, suddenly he
was in an unfamiliar landscape, a name echoing in his brain: Baron Hirsch
Street, Tarnopol ... mountains wrapped in white savagery rising over him,
birch trees, in the distant mountains time goes backward and they become
different, bald, in a desert, high, rising to the sky, bright, Boaz thinks names
he never knew before: quartz crystals, orthoclase crystals, ancient granite
rocks, red and brown, even black, tiny gardens, like grooves of blood in the
expanses of wasteland, yellow flame, slopes hewn by ancient gods, perforated, stone beasts of prey, gigantic, in a gnawing expanse, sky hanging
obliquely, as if falling, crag crown, a cliff over a wadi wide as a person and
high as the sky, a plant called round-leafed cleome, a person he knows but
doesn't know who he is, somebody very close to him drinks tea with desert
wormwood, and Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg stands wearing a
uniform gleaming in the awful light, and says: Here the golden calf is buried! And a person finds the place of the golden calf from an ancient map,
and says to the Captain: Here a memorial to Dante Alighieri will be built.
The Captain says: He's not dead, Boaz isn't dead, he found a golden calf,
what an historiosophical find! Gibal Mussa, near a prairie crushed with
rocks, between snake and heron, raisins of sun here, the eagle eye that's
the innocent eye, in wadi channels that are the face of God, the face of
man, and there the nation was created.

When Henkin started talking, Boaz looked at his watch. An hour passed,
he knew he was in a place where he had never been, and now he also knew
what his father looked like, something that embarrassed him with Henkin
who now addressed him. You won't understand, Henkin spoke in an excited but quiet voice (you didn't discover the three k's, thinks Boaz sadly) unbelievable, really unbelievable ... I always believed, they laughed at me,
I told them, you don't know, you don't know him, his special qualities will
come out, I knew! And he had to rebel. This poem, Boaz, could have been
written only by one man, only by Menahem, that's what's special in the
poem, not its nature, others will testify to that, but its specialness, it's the
clear expression of a man who revealed himself and said something of his
own. Here's the house mentioned here, you surely won't understand, it
was destroyed to plant the boulevard. How angry he was then, he said:
They're building a wasteland, Father, and I remember, a little boy he was
before we moved here and that sycamore on the corner of Dizengoff and
Arlozorov, they cut down ... the Gilboa! We went on a field trip with the
school, a Passover outing it was, we stood on the top of the mountain, and
in the sunset I recited to them marvels of poetry: The beauty of Israel is
slain upon thy high places: how are the mighty fallen! And Menahem then
laughed at his father, here's the allusion to that poetry, to that moment, to
the fear at sunset, is that the food of our fields, an eternal curse or a momentary distress, what did we know, and the dead ant, in the fixing of facts
with a water meter, that is, a word meter. The magic of the poem is hypnotic, deciphering the lad, and his mother didn't believe, a son fell, she
said, another son in the cruel world, I knew that before he left us, more
precisely, when he left, I knew he'd set some nail, that he'd leave me some
sign from a concealed inner world. And the poem ... A poem that reveals
a person so much! That will be so personal and yet general, human, and I
waited.

And then Henkin yelled: You could have brought it before!

I forgot I had it, said Boaz.

That's some nerve, he said angrily. That's a violation of every moral
law...

And then he was silent, looked at Boaz, and tried to smile, for some
reason he didn't have to maintain his coolness now, his heart told him that
everything he wanted to know about Menahem was buried in this man.
And Boaz Schneerson wants to stop him, to put the clock back, but it was
no longer possible ...

You don't think the poem is wonderful? Henkin suddenly whispered.

I don't understand it, said Boaz.

That a boy writes like that, the only thing anybody ever asked of him
was not to walk on the lawn, says Teacher Henkin, to respect his elders,
to be proud of his wildness, new Jews riding horseback, and then comes a
moment of softness, of withdrawing inside, and the boy stops the enemy
with his body, silent words tell the horror of the stories, coming from him,
and he writes them letter by letter, and pulls out a submachine gun, goes
out to the last battle, fights for the life of his parents and friends, and is
killed, a bullet hits him, is mute and silent, and death flows from him, he
flows death and death flows on the mountains and leaves a hidden corner,
invisible to his father, the beautiful boy who was and they didn't know,
didn't know him, Hasha Masha, they and you, you thought, you're the poor
boy, you didn't understand, you didn't grasp! You too, my Hasha Masha ...

Dear Renate,

It's been a long time since I managed to find the emotional
strength to answer your letter. Last night they said on the radio
that the cold in Europe had passed and the snowstorms were
subsiding. I was glad. You ask me if Boaz came to us to defeat
us. On the word of a wounded lioness I can say: No! He came
because Henkin was looking for him. It was me he was afraid of.
He knew I don't believe. When he left the house, the day he
brought the poem, Henkin came to me with trembling hands,
holding the poem. I told him, Obadiah, it wasn't Menahem who
wrote that poem, Menahem loved the sea, he didn't write a
poem, he wasn't a hero like Boaz ... And he shoved me out of
the chair, that man who never killed a fly raised his hand and
brought me down. Then he went outside and banged his head
on the wall, I brought him a towel filled with ice cubes and
held it to his brow until the swelling went down. For twenty
hours he sat with me, Renate, twenty hours straight he talked
about the meaning of the poem, how that poem couldn't have
been written by anybody but Menahem! I fell asleep and he
went on talking. He didn't even know I fell asleep. Then he
fell asleep sitting up, muttering. I cooked, and made coffee. I
waited for him to wake up and he talked again. And so he gained not only a poem he read to his friends, printed and copied it, but also a son who before-and it's awful to say-he
didn't have.

And Boaz started coming. Henkin needed him. Can you
imagine a worse place for a sympathetic family atmosphere than
a house of mourning? But it was in the house of mourning of all
places that Boaz wanted love and forgiveness. That's what I
couldn't give him. Noga could.

If we had written our husbands' books, maybe we'd know on
what side of life death is found and so we'd have given birth to
stories and not begotten them. But I'm just an old Jew who sits
alone and thinks, not particularly profound things, I've got my
own contempt, I see a sea and Menahem still swimming there,
I can even still love Henkin ...

I'm a former quarry worker who married a teacher and raised
a dead son. You write to me about metaphysical visions and
about the Last Jew and your husband is seeking a story so as not
to write it and I understand, the abstraction of our men needs
to be turned into female concreteness, and then maybe a suddenness will be born that is not only foreseen but is even a vision, like a son who bursts out of you, to give birth is to produce
concreteness, to become a point, a house, and earth and water
to irrigate, to give birth is also to dig a grave. Maybe someday
the books will write the authors and not vice versa.

I raised a son and I did know who he was. Menahem didn't
want to jump beyond his navel. He wanted a good life and a sea,
not to do anything, just to live. That's all he wanted. Maybe
that's not sublime, but it's human. And Henkin sat and kept on
drinking the stories of Boaz, who told, and everything that happened to Boaz he projected onto Menahem. Everything he experienced, Henkin now experiences from the fictional life of
Menahem. And he wanted me to believe. I closed myself in the
room. Boaz would try to catch me with his charms, his charming
smile, his voice, he didn't know I'm impregnable. No Joseph
Rayna would get me pregnant.

Noga and I pretended. I needed her in some way that's hard
for me to grasp. Menahem was dear to Noga, she was tormented
by what was happening. Only later did she understand that he
didn't get the letter ending their relations. Henkin was mourning too much, his committee, and we remained together, I and
he with Menahem because he stopped consoling us. Noga has
a noble firmness that Menahem was the first to discover. And
effortlessly, completely naturally, she played Henkin's daughterin-law. She had one love to give that she exhausted on Menahem.
Maybe only somebody who invented a new Menahem could have
penetrated her armor, that secret I never understood. Only somebody who pretended he loved her before, saw her picture that
Menahem had in the war (Boaz told her that story and she didn't
believe it) and fell in love with her there, maybe even caused
Menahem's death out of love, only he could have touched her so
deeply.

For a while, Boaz thought he would be the last survivor of
his regiment. Like his father he thought he'd be some Last
Jew, and he went back to the settlement. Then he was idle.
He thought, Who were my parents? He was searching for something, didn't know what. He had money, he didn't have to do
anything. He wanted the days to pass and to pass with them, he
met Henkin and got a borrowed father, he sold a borrowed son,
he stole Noga. He pressed and she gave in. I told her: In my
house you won't sleep with Boaz! I couldn't bear it, I was afraid
of what Henkin would say and how he'd respond, now, he
thought, Noga could be proud of Menahem. She stroked me
with her gentle hands and said: You're right, Hasha.

And Henkin didn't see. A new son he discovered and nothing interested him. Only later on, two years later, when Boaz
and Noga were living together and Boaz came to Henkin and
told him: I faked the poem, why didn't you see the three fake
k's, the land mines I buried for you, why didn't you notice? I
saved him, he didn't save me! When he said that-and he said
that because he thought Noga was beginning to love Menahem again because of the stories he created-only then did the tumult take place that I told you about, Henkin's decline, Noga's
suicide attempt, and then Boaz turned into a vulture.

Even in all that he's not exactly guilty. At least with you, I
have to be honest. We were living in hell. Noga got pregnant. She
couldn't see Henkin, she had cheered him with long walks along
the Yarkon River, she couldn't see that proud man ridiculous as
he was in the days when he read his poem to every bereaved father and mother at the parties at the Shimonis. In some way that
may not have been clear to her, she pushed Boaz to tell Henkin
the truth. Indirectly she shattered Henkin's delusion. That was
a second death of his son, Renate, and that was hard. Boaz then
believed purely and simply that he did kill Menahem, the more
she refused to believe, the more he believed, and when she
talked about Menahem's beauty and his virtues, he yelled at her
and hit her. When Noga found out what happened, she came to
Henkin and told him: Boaz is lying, Menahem did write the
poem, but Henkin whispered to her: Why didn't you tell me you
were Boaz's girlfriend? We were close, why didn't you tell me?
And he looked at her, he had known her for years, loved her, and
said to her: Noga, you don't know how to lie! And she thought he
would do something, came to me trembling, I told her, Look,
little girl, he's a strong man, Henkin, an old-line Zionist, he was
in the Labor Brigade, he experienced hard things, he'll recover,
she talked to him some more and he couldn't answer and threw
a chair at her. She was hit and went outside. Then she brought
him flowers. Boaz came and said to her, What right do you have
to talk to Henkin about me, why do you interfere in my life, you
want Menahem back? He's not with me anymore either, and
Henkin heard, Boaz went into his room, all night long they
talked. She sat with me and we drank sweet vermouth. Two big
drunks. In the morning Boaz came out and slapped her face. In
the room Henkin sat with the poem, more broken than I'd ever
seen him, and then Noga got up, and said to Boaz: You know
what, you can go to hell, and she left. After she had gone, I sat, my head splitting from the drinking at night, Henkin got up and
walked to the seashore and went into the sea with his shoes and
clothes, and it was winter then. In the morning Boaz came back
and Henkin woke up and asked with a weary face, anxiously:
Where's Noga? He said: She died, Boaz, she died. I told him:
Stop, the two of you suffered blood, and the two of us went out
to look for Noga. Then I recalled the cave. In the world war,
Menahem and his friends, especially Amihud Giladi, who lived in
the house where Ebenezer now lives, would hide tea and rusks
and stones there to be partisans and fight the Germans who were
then in El Alamein, they wanted to build a fortress on the hills
where the Hilton now stands. Noga knew the old cave, she called
it "Menahem's cave." I told Boaz: She's surely in Menahem's
cave. That was a mistake, he was offended and said, What do you
mean, what cave, we've got our own places, what do you mean,
Menahem's cave. I told him: At least she can be there, but he
didn't want to believe it, wanted to go to other places, at night he
looked in all the places and didn't find her and there was nothing left for him to do but go with me even though he didn't want
to believe, I dragged him to the cave and he didn't even know
where it was, and Noga was there, had swallowed pills, we
dragged her to the corner of Jabotinsky, took a cab and went
straight to Hadassah Hospital, they pumped her stomach, and
she aborted Boaz's son, the grandson of the Last Jew!