B002FB6BZK EBOK (67 page)

Rebecca Schneerson went into Mr. Brin's small department store, and
Mr. Brin, who had never seen Rebecca life-size, said: It's a great honor for
me that you came to me. And she said: No honor, Mr. Brin, I didn't come
to you but to the only store in the settlement where you can find a tape
recorder. I assume that if there were two stores, the prices would be more
reasonable. He tried not to pay attention to the complaint and bitterness
in her voice and served her with an exaggerated devotion that disgusted
her. Ever since the Captain and Mr. Klomin had died, and all her enemies had been buried in Roots, she had lacked a certain adulation that Ahbed
and his friends couldn't grant her since they were too simple to recognize
her value.

Mr. Brin showed Rebecca Schneerson about sixteen different tape recorders, and since she didn't trust anybody, she chose the one Mr. Brin
claimed was not as good as the others, but she had to have it. She allowed
the disappointed Mr. Brin to wrap the tape recorder, picked up the package, and went home. She walked through the fields, saw the new houses,
the farms and trees and orchards and gardens, and the new school and the
community center and the old water tower, and she thought that in fact
this wasn't such a bad place, that there was nice air here and the view was
soft and beautiful and everything was painted now and not gnarled, people
built and improved, trees grew, flowers bloomed, yards multiplied and were
beautiful, the horizon stopped evoking gloomy expectations, the sky became softer and not exactly because of the cataracts in her eyes. She feared
those thoughts, as if some long way, maybe the longest she had made since
her forefathers' forefathers got her pregnant, a way that had gone on for
more than two hundred years, was coming to its end. She wasn't afraid of
the end, it wasn't death that scared her, what scared her was some more
absolute end, beyond death, an end that torments everybody and only its
contamination is felt, an end of what had been dreamed in her veins for
two hundred years-Secret Charity, the curse, the river that pierced,
Joseph and his poems of yearning, Nehemiah longing for Zion, could all
that simply vanish, only because there was never a solid basis for the dream
entrenched in some cosmic bitterness of a cruel God against those who
betray His command of destruction?

When she came back home, through a row of sprinklers that evoked an
amazement in her that she tried to chill, even though they'd water her
gardens and she didn't know, she tended to the tape recorder for a while
in her closed room, put the microphone to her mouth, and said aloud: One,
two, three, and when she turned on the machine, her voice was heard, and
even though she didn't recognize it at first, she immediately learned to use
it. She said: Recording number one, Rebecca Schneerson, to whom it may
concern and to whom it may not concern ...

... Nehemiah was a handsome man. Boaz is my son. Ebenezer calls him
Samuel. Collectors of charity, who dreamed of Mr. Klomin's kingdom, in vented a state that is a little bit of a dream and a little bit of a ghetto and
a little bit of a military camp and a little bit of flowers. My tears for eight
years were for nothing. The Captain isn't here. Everybody died on me.
Ebenezer was amazed that the Captain ordered flowers placed every week
on Dana's grave. I wouldn't have done that. What do they know about the
Captain? He was a swindler, cunning, naive, and wise. How many wise
Jews are there in this land? It's great wisdom to be a successful farmer, to
build a good farm among Jews. Does the fact that I'm alive at least make
me dead? I want to say something about Ebenezer. I married Nehemiah,
not Joseph, and it's a lie to say I didn't love him. I wanted to save him in
America and he didn't want to. Nehemiah taught me a lesson. He left me
Ebenezer. Ebenezer went to search for the one he thought was his father,
and in the end he married a woman who was both the daughter and the
wife of his father. He comes to me and wants to know. What will I tell him?
I think that even though Nehemiah was his father, Ebenezer is bound to
Joseph and was born to bring Joseph back into the world through Boaz! Is
it possible to love somebody, the son of somebody else, who grew in your
belly, so that in the next generation your real son will come into the world?
Ebenezer, the lost son. Whose son is he? The Last Jew, they call him. And
I'll die after him. Lucky thing Boaz has no children. There will be a wilderness here with Ahbeds, as there was before we came here. But to tell
Ebenezer I can't. I don't give birth because some man got me into bed. I
brought two sons into the world. One was born by mistake from Dana in
order to be my son again. Is he my grandson or my son? I lived the end of
the story of Rebecca Secret Charity, but they don't believe in the satanic
power of blood, in the awful flow of Satan. They believe in progress, they
believe all awful things were an imagined curse with no foothold in the
reality of progressive people who elect a hundred twenty fools to something they call a Knesset every four years, and they think they're successful
and wise and clever because they learned to kill a few Arabs in tanks given
them by gentiles, so that then it will be allowed, without any problems, to
destroy them one by one ... the river was at the end of my life or at the
beginning and it's all the same, there was Joseph there, there was
Nehemiah there, there were my father and mother. Ebenezer is the curse
and he knows wood in its distress. Like an everlasting name he came back.
He should be exhibited in a museum...

How much I wanted the love that would replace the dependence, the
beauty, the yearning. Did I succeed in being promiscuous? Even that's a
hard question. I remember once thinking I should let the Captain hug me,
sometimes I did want to, but I thought, Is there somebody who can, with
a few drops of water, put out the fire of hell burning in me? And life passed
by. That's how it is. Life isn't what we live, but something that flows out
of us. And I look around, Nehemiah and Dana died so that Boaz would be,
Joseph isn't here, the Captain, I've got an avocado, flowers, fruit, chickens,
a nightgown. What the hell don't I have? The flowers bloom, and I look
around and ask what to tell Ebenezer, who wants an answer, and he's already past seventy, he wants to know, what will I tell him? That I'm ninety
years old and can't say, so here, Ebenezer, with the only love I have left
and that isn't aimed at anybody, not even myself, I swear, I'm telling you:
Afayg! Up yours! Just up yours! It's not malice, be my son if you think so
and want to be, not out of malice, you're quite lovable with all you've suffered with the woman you raised like a dried flower in one of Dana's old
books, because I don't have anything else to say, not to you, not to the tape
recorder, not to God, not to Satan, not to Rebecca Secret Charity, nothing.
Up yours, that's what I've got to say, only that, up yours!

You're all that's left of Nehemiah. Of all the naive founders, of that
nation, of you, of me, up yours!

And then Rebecca turned off the tape recorder and started laughing and
the laughter turned into weeping and she locked the door, put her head
under the blanket, and wept as she had wept seventy years before, a whole
day, nonstop, and then she got up, washed her face, sat at the table, and
Ahbed said: What happened, Madame, were you weeping? Were you laughing? And she said: Bring something to eat, Ahbed, and he said: Were you
laughing or weeping? And she said: Afayg, up yours, Ahbed, do you know
what that is, up yours? So up yours to you, all your sons who will inherit the
land Nehemiah sowed with Ebenezers who knew wood in its distress, into
me they came, from me they didn't go.

Tape/-

Noga Levin knocked on the door fearfully. More than she was afraid to
come, she was afraid of Henkin peeping at her from his house. She thought,
What is he thinking, why is he looking? Fanya R. opened the door, invited her in without a word, and went to put on a robe. Noga was bundled up in a scarf,
she hoped it made her look older. Last night she told Boaz: I'm going to
Ebenezer, I want to look old and wise, and Boaz, who wanted to answer, suffered an attack of yawning she didn't cause and so he couldn't answer her. By
the time he finished yawning her footsteps were heard on the stairs.

Ebenezer, who had slept in his clothes ever since the war, put a blue
sailor's coat over the clothes he had slept in and went into the room. He
said: What is the lovely flower in my house? She laughed because she
didn't expect him to behave so gallantly.

Noga said: Sit, Ebenezer. He sat, watched the sun rise through the open
bathroom window. I came to apologize for Boaz's behavior, said Noga, he
didn't mean it, he had been drinking, he lives in tension, he's sorry for
what was-

Ebenezer averted his face and didn't see the sunrise now. In the big
living-room window you could see the fences of the port and the demolished buildings, and the abandoned shore. He said: Remind me of what
you're talking about, some things I remember and some I don't. She sipped
the coffee Fanya R. gave her and stirred while walking, which seemed to
Noga like hovering, and after a few sips, when the tasty coffee was inside
her, she repeated word for word what had happened at the house when
Boaz and Jordana and she came from the cemetery. Ebenezer shut his eyes,
stretched out his hands, and said: He meant what he did, and I was a fool!

You weren't, said Noga.

When I was a little girl, said Noga, as if she were talking to herself, I
once came home from school and Mother met me on the stairs and told me
to go up and wait in the house. I went up and the door was locked. I
knocked on the door and Father didn't answer. I thought maybe he wasn't
sleeping but listening to the news. I went up to the roof, from the laundry
room, I slid on the water pipe straight to our kitchen porch. I loved to slide
because it was also a little dangerous. I went into the kitchen and water
was boiling on the stove. I turned off the stove, ate a few grapes from the
refrigerator, and holding a bunch of them, I went into the living room. My
father was lying in bed and the radio was off. His leg was stretched to the
side as if he were about to put on house slippers and get up. I think he was
smiling, but maybe it was a grimace, I said to him: Father, why didn't you
open the door, but my father didn't answer. I went to my room, opened the schoolbag, sharpened a pencil, took out the books and notebooks and
started doing my homework. And then I thought, Why didn't he answer
me? He always answers me, but at the same moment I also thought there
was something wrong with the eraser I had bought and I had to exchange
it at Lichtenstein's. I picked up the grapes I had put on a plate where I
would once mix sand from the Negev and went back to the other room. He
was still lying there, the foot was on the way to the house slipper, he didn't
move. Everything was in the middle-middle of a smile, middle of putting
on a shoe, like a photo of somebody who is both running and standing still
for eternity. I thought he looked like marble. I touched him, his hand
dropped and stayed hanging in the air between the bed and the floor. I
turned on the radio, after a few seconds, the music started, and then I
looked at him and suddenly I understood. I didn't grasp how I understood,
because I had never seen a dead person before. But that dead person was
my father. I started yelling and stamping my feet until the neighbors came.
In the ashtray was a cigarette and then I didn't have a father and I asked
myself what exactly I didn't have, what I lacked, Mother would get hysterical and swallow pills and miss him terribly. Once I dreamed that my father
came back and didn't want to see me, you can't imagine how that hurt ...

Ebenezer got up and stood in the middle of the room. A beam of light
penetrated inside and made the small squares of lacquer on the nightstand
glisten, his eye was covered with a dark scrim, for a moment he looked both
solemn and a scarecrow that birds aren't scared of anymore. Fanya R. gave
him a glass of water. He said: I asked him to help me, I don't know who I am
and what I am, how can I know who Boaz is or who you are or who Henkin is?

Henkin is writing a book about somebody who doesn't exist, maybe I
don't exist, when they shot Bronya the Beautiful, Boaz came, or perhaps it
was Samuel, and then somebody came and took him. And fifty years
passed. Rebecca's here, and Dana. It's all words, Noga, he says and doesn't
feel. Only Fanya R. All the rest is words. Germanwriter too.

Noga said: You scare me when you look at me and say those things, I
can't understand.

I'm waiting for Samuel, said Ebenezer. All you say is only words, I've got
to see Samuel, Boaz is Samuel, but he isn't either.

Noga got up and went to him. Fanya R. smiled. Noga didn't remember
ever seeing a smile like that; as if what was hidden in her or shaped in her, some bitter memory, was disguised to itself and it was itself and at the
same time its mask. Fanya R. said: I'm not a talkative woman. You're a
beautiful woman, all that is a punishment from God! Boaz looks like
Joseph, so how is he the son of Ebenezer? Ebenezer thinks his daughters
died, because those are Joseph's daughters. Something for you and for our
story. You know how awful it is at night here. Always yearnings and always
those dreams he recites. I'm with him, so what, troubles Boaz needs, he's a
Sabra, Israel, army buddies, a hero, what, why does he need all that with
dead souls and dead bodies and yearnings for the dead, and my little girls
who wait in Ebenezer's brain. He's got memories, he doesn't have Ebenezer,
he's got Samuel, he doesn't have Boaz, my daughters left, Mengele, twins he
loved. He did experiments, and then more, what do we know about Boaz,
about Noga that's you or about a Yemenite woman who came here with
pain and also apologizing, yesterday, says Boaz isn't to blame and now you
come with a story like her, see how much I'm talking, but Ebenezer
doesn't have all of you. He's dead, all Jews died, standing with a white
flag, with Samuel, hitting gentiles who come, exile, exile, you don't
know! Samuel is his son and how will you understand, you!