B002FB6BZK EBOK (72 page)

Your love.

By the way: the director of your national theater held negotiations here with Sam Lipp to come to Israel to direct his play.

Love, Renate

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Mr. Schneerson, do you really think ancient blood flows in us, don't you
think you adopt a dangerous language? A kind of theatrical fascism, bereft
of sharp positive critical thought-

I don't know what I think, my memory is me. I didn't ask others if they
were fascists or progressives. Nor do I know where progressive people progress to. Thanks, Mr. Schneerson. No problem, when will Samuel come back?

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And Rebecca Schneerson sat in her chair and felt in her bones how she
was growing numb. When a giant bouquet of chrysanthemums came, sent
by the grandchildren of the founders, she burst into a brief laugh. A note
was stuck to the bouquet: May you live to a hundred and twenty. She looked at the floor and saw blurred spots. That cataract, she said, aside
from that I'm healthy and could have had children, but there's nobody to
do it for, she yelled at Ahbed: Put the flowers in a vase with a lot of water.
See if the house is clean, and if they brought the jugs to the dairy, serve the
mixture, and say if it's raining, Ahbed! He asked: Put out a finger? She
said: Put! He stuck out a finger, got it wet a little, took a deep breath and
said: It's not raining. Said the old woman: May Allah have pity, Bidak Zuker!
He laughed and went off. The day began to leak to her through the cracks
in the shutter, from the hayloft rose a sourish smell of wet straw. She said:
There's a smell of flower piss here. In fact maybe she wasn't waiting for
anybody, and so she drank black coffee Ahbed spiced with cardamom and
basil. She lit a cigarette. At the age of ninety, she said to Horowitz's greatgrandson, you start smoking cigarettes, it doesn't impair health or longevity
anymore. Horowitz's great-grandson came with his classmates to congratulate her. The children wanted to see the birds. They were taught in school
about the birds of the first son of the settlement who died in the Holocaust
and came back to life. Ahbed explained to them: They come from the whole
country, even from abroad, want to give a lot of money, but she doesn't sell.
She keeps everything. Even the mosquito nets are kept. Maybe the anopheles will come back, she said. After they left, she shut her eyes and since she
didn't have anything to do, she waited for evening.

In the evening, Boaz and Noga and Ebenezer and Fanya R. came and
took her to the community center. The full community center was decorated. A plaque still hung on the wall: Ebenezer, who knew wood in its
distress. The minister of education came. Rebecca Schneerson had
reached her ninetieth birthday. They also came from the television and
the radio. There aren't any wastelands now between the settlements, she
said, buildings reach to Jaffa and China, and there's no place to weep. She
wore a white dress and looked beautiful and svelte. When the committee
chairman spoke, she shut her eyes. Everybody looked at her old indifferent
beauty. Her long hair slid over her shoulders. Her skin was smooth and swarthy, her eyes flashed and she would have wanted a dead gleam to be muffled
in them. They sang "How Beautiful Are the Nights in Canaan" and "Pity
Please" and "Do Not Forsake Us" and "In the Fields of Bethlehem." She
smoked a cigarette. The committee chairman said: In honor of her birthday, Rebecca Schneerson has started smoking. Then, they aimed the micro phone at her mouth and she got up and pulled the microphone from its
stand, as if she were a singer, and started talking with the microphone in
her hand, and Boaz said to Noga: Look, Frank Sinatra!

Rebecca said: Now they want Rebecca Schneerson, not Dayan or Kojak.
What's happening, maybe I'm an amusing woman. Years ago they were
afraid of me. And I wept for eight years, there were problems, the dreamers died and Rebecca remained. Today they hear the Arabs returning to
their houses at night from the yards and farms, and the last one to return
at night is also the one who will remain here and that doesn't fit what
Nehemiah dreamed, who like a Rudolph Valentino of Zionism, died on
the shore of Jaffa.

The desert is a memorial to the God my forefathers knew in cellars ...
A poor Jew who died in the Holocaust tells Ebenezer a number of things
that haven't yet been written and he follows the map and finds the Golden
Calf. The God of Israel is hiding. The violence is as great as the evasion.
In the riots of 'thirty-six, I sat with a rifle in my hand and waited, I didn't
wash, three years I waited and they didn't dare come, but the Golden Calf
was found for me by the counterfeit son. A first Jew told a last Jew: It's a
lost story. Chaos was in the beginning, chaos will be in the end.

And after the uproar died down, she sat and laughed. Boaz and Ebenezer went to the Captain's house. Rebecca sat and looked out the window.
Her anger at the bushes Dana had planted hadn't yet faded. They're still
here, she said angrily, but nobody heard.

When they entered the house, Boaz and Ebenezer looked at the Captain's
shattered splendor, his medals, his faded uniforms, the ten tattered visored
hats, the elegant carved sticks. You know, said Boaz to his father, when I was
a child, Rebecca would give birth to me with groans. I'd sit on the chair and
see her give birth to me over and over. You offended me, I'm seeking a connection and don't find it, a rather stupid situation. Aside from the gifts, the
money, the phony maps and stupid war plans, he thought, what else did the
Captain leave? Ahbed, sent by Rebecca, went up to the attic, brought down
suitcases, and said: She said to open these suitcases.

The Captain's papers were there, along with Mr. Klomin's journals, and
hidden in the side of the suitcase was a manila file. On the yellowing oldfashioned manila file was written in a fluent handwriting: "The Torments
of the Life Filled with Modesty and Honor of Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg, as Recorded by Professor Alexander Blum in Nineteen FortySix, according to a Prediction in a Fascinating Performance of a Jew Named
Ebenezer Called the Last Jew in a Nightclub in Paris Called The Gay Kiwi."

So you knew about him, said Boaz.

Maybe I also know about him, too, said Ebenezer. But he didn't know.
He didn't know if he really knew. I didn't know and I don't know ...

No.

... And the handsome poet then left the city and rode in the chariot of
Countess Flendrik. Stunned that she almost succeeded in loving, the
countess stayed in the city and became the dream girl of tired angels.
There was total silence. Birds, stopped in their flight and shaped in books
and pictures, were sold to tourists who burst out of holes in the rickety
ceilings of seventeen kinds of sky hung there like every unexpected disaster. The woman called herself Milat. Milat's father was dead now in the
honor he may have deserved, but his tombstone was defaced by rioters.
She called herself Leila and Alima in turn, and with the fetus in her womb,
she set out with the memory of the awful night stamped so deeply in her
that she forgot it. The poet read her poems in high-flown Hebrew and
listed for her the names of a hundred women who had gotten pregnant in
his honor and she pitied him and let him touch her womb. With a rare
deerskin valise she wandered and her belly swelled. Money she didn't lack.
When she came to America she was adopted by Mr. Luria before his death.
The only condition was that her son would be considered Luria's legitimate
son. And so Avigdor was born, son of the lecherous poet with the eyes of a
demon, adopted by Mr. Luria, who wanted only for her to tell him how bold
and noble he was in his life and in his dying. After she buried Mr. Luria, she
called herself Dona Gracia. She loved the stories of Hebrew maidens who
served their God in secret. Spanish noble aristocrats loved them. Privately,
they bore the tiara of their pride as it was later expressed. Even the boldest
military commander Don Juan Garmiro, who granted Queen Isabella the
greatest cities of the heathens, loved a maiden whose heart was torn between her love for him and her loyalty. When Dona Gracia decided to go to
Lebanon to stay with the Countess, who was still searching in the mountains
for the ancient gold of the Romans, she took her son and went. The Countess welcomed her gladly and anointed the boy Avigdor with goat milk and
golden water, brought her by Arab traders from their long journeys in China and India. Together they lived on an estate in the mountains, and in Aleppo
were Jews who wove wonderful rugs, and an old woman who lived in Sidon
knew the forgotten burial place of Jewish heroes who once ruled here. The
woman's name was Lilith. So in the fusty streets of Sidon they called her a
witch. Roman gold brought by desperate and forsaken Crusaders was found.
The Countess and Alima-Leila-Milat and Avigdor traveled to Italy and were
once again adopted by good people, who were able to grant them the final
and desired bliss. She slaughtered them and then wept, they slandered her
in the city. But backbiters aren't necessarily a valuable historical source.
Even though she was full of death and charm, there was some endless procreation in her, a boundless youth. A pale man who kept wringing his hands
timorously saw her and called himself Goldenberg. When he died he was
buried with a politeness that suited him, because he claimed he was from
the mountains in northern Switzerland. The Countess came to warm her
body in a small hotel near Napaloya, and since they had already stayed in
Pelfonz and the sea was wide, they went to a small and distant island and
there Avigdor grew and became a sharp-witted lad, who could recite the
Divine Comedy in eight languages. He would invent himself in fictions, live
in them as somebody who needs a false biography, and then the Countess
got sick and disappeared, and Milat, Dona Gracia, went back to Lebanon,
married a balding Austrian consul filled with news and named Jospe, and
went from there with her Austrian husband in a coffin. She embellished the
coffin and put it in her cabin and played the mandolin for him, and thus they
came to a small Argentinean city where there were relatives who hadn't yet
come out of the cellars where the parents of their parents had put them, and
were called by Christian names. There she buried the consul, and the old
women who watched her and thought they were relatives began an extreme
forgetting that was much appreciated in those remote places. Then came a
bold American who wanted to move the Jews from Poland to the Land of
Israel in sealed trains, like the trains that would later take Jews to another
place. She learned to love his lined face. He adopted Avigdor, called him
other names, bought him a notebook so he could copy the poems in Hebrew
that were written for him by some father who may once have really begat
him. Together they swam in Buenos Aires, and because of the inventions the
American invented and were recorded in the name of her son, the lad was
given new citizenship and was called Jose after his mother Josefa Dona Gracia, and when Avigdor-Joseph was twenty years old, he volunteered for
the Russo-Japanese War, fought in the Japanese army, joined the routed
Russian army, stirred his soldiers with speeches in fine French, which he
acquired (along with the rest of his inventions) in Lebanon, with the Countess, and when he mistakenly killed a Japanese general who wanted to commit suicide out of boredom about a dubious victory and broke the heart of
the attack regiment he led, he was awarded medals, which, in the market of
Buenos Aires, were worth a title of nobility he had once been denied. So, he
registered as Orthodox since that religion was less accepted, but was surely
not understood as Judaism, and he could be sent on secret missions to the
east, which he knew from his childhood. They told him: Why not Jose de
Lupo, but he insisted and taught methods of warfare he'd invent himself,
and with these methods the capital city was captured in the great revolution
and so he was appointed commander first class.

All that may not have been and so maybe it was. Then Dona Gracia died
and he buried her in a Greek Orthodox funeral ceremony, which he learned
from ancient books he obtained in a long correspondence with the relatives
of the Countess, who remembered him fondly from his youth, and thus he
could get to the east and strike roots in the life of the colonial bureaucracy
without evoking suspicion and that even enabled him to pretend, even
when there was no need, to invent methods of attack and deception. Then
there were wars that didn't have to be invented, and he learned not to fight
in them admirably, and when he lived in Egypt, he came up with the idea
that life is a corridor leading to a world in which his father and mother lived
when there were still gods in the world, and only the great poetry of Dante
Alighieri gave expression to the place where traces of things remained as
they were before history was created which made everything monochrome,
dark, and eager for destruction. And so he was enflamed by the great desire to erect memorials to Dante, which he established or didn't establish
in various places in the world as tombstones people sometimes mistook
and attributed them to somebody else. Giant tombstones where the names
of those buried beneath them were sometimes fake. He felt superior in
knowing that Dante Alighieri's tombstones conquered the world, and as
reward for his happiness he would transport information from place to
place, served so many masters that he had to peep in the small well-hidden booklet, written in code and based on key words from the Divine Comedy, to know who his real master was at the moment, and so he also started
editing a newspaper nobody needed, and a little woman who was caught in
the plot wrote the articles, received the payment of thirty-two subscribers
with fictitious names and Jose, who was meanwhile also called Menkin
and added the A to his name because of his love for mystery, initiated plans
that certain governments paid enormous sums to acquire.

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