B002FB6BZK EBOK (80 page)

I have no idea what Sam did in the next three days. I was
busy with conversations with Henkin, I went to see the Museum
of the Holocaust and Heroism, so I don't know how it happened or who really published the ad in the paper. Henkin thinks that
Jordana, who still kept a key to Boaz's apartment, sneaked into
the apartment, took an old picture of Boaz and printed the ad.
Hasha, or perhaps it was Renate, is sure that Sam himself published the ad in the papers, while Henkin is sure it was Boaz.
At any rate, the ad was published in the Friday papers, and it
showed a photo of Boaz (or Samuel), with black tangled hair,
burning eyes, and under the photo was the caption: Samuel
Lipker, who came to Israel from Cyprus on May 14, 1948, is
requested, for his own good, to come to room 1720 in the
Hilton in Tel Aviv for his reward.

On that Friday, Noga and Renate went to Caesarea to search
for antiquities. They returned happy and flushed from the wind,
and Renate said to me: You walk in those soft sands and suddenly there's a coin that's been waiting for you for two thousand
years. And then Henkin showed them the ad. Noga looked at
the ad and said: That won't end well.

I went outside, it was a nice morning and an early autumn
chill was blowing, I walked along Hayarkon Street, in the distance I thought I saw people I knew: Jordana, Hans Strombe, my
childhood friend, the journalist Joachim Davis, Stephen Goyfer,
the honorary consul of Colombia, and I thought: Why was the
Captain devoted to the idea of the memorial to Dante Alighieri,
what's the meaning of his story-the story of his life that was
found among his belongings that may have been his life and
may not-and I didn't rightly know, I thought maybe it was so
simple it was impossible for me to see things correctly, particularly in light of the fact that this morning, there was in the paper
a picture of one man who is two and I'm a father whose son is
buried in two places and Henkin is father to a lad who was
killed in two places, maybe precisely on that background I'm
trying to see things that in a rearview mirror are perfectly normal. Maybe the Captain really loved Dante's great poetry with
all his might, maybe he wanted to show that Dante's hell was
human and pleasant compared with what the Captain envisioned
for Ebenezer, and he came to the Land of Israel to try to prepare a spiritual awakening there that would combine the poet with
the prophets, the memories, Jeremiah and Jesus, with whom he
belonged in spirit, with those Pioneers who came to bring salvation, with the future victims of the idea of freedom of the vision
of salvation, and Dante looked to him as Spinoza looked to the
manager of the dairy on the settlement-as joining one thing
with another, as a real model for the conjunction of poetry with
its sources, not physical sources but heavenly ones in an Israeli
version. In other words: A memorial to Dante isn't foreign to the
landscape that produced great poets like Isaiah, Amos, or the
author of the Psalms. Byron's Greece should have been the
Captain's Land of Israel, and Goethe and Byron may have sought
an excuse to build spiritual ropes to the real world in the wrong
place. Here, in the place where God revealed Himself, who spoke
from the mouths of Job and Amos, he should have lived the eternal life of a person who sang the lament of the possible world out
of malicious and sublime love, out of dread of what was in store,
dread that came from him and didn't penetrate heaven.

I climbed up to the Hilton and went to the public relations
department. The stormy sea could be seen through the window.
The beauty queen was filing her nails. She knew my name and
suggested I sign the guest book, but I explained to her that I
wasn't staying at the hotel, and she also agreed that it was better if I didn't sign. I asked her about Sam. She put her nail file
in a drawer, locked it, scrunched her beautiful eyebrows, was
silent a moment, and said: He's closed in the room, I can't talk
to him, he's cruel.

I asked her if anybody had been searching for him, and she
said: What do you mean, and anyway, I don't have detectives. I
showed her the newspaper. She looked at the picture a long time
and put her head down on the desk. I saw tears on the Hilton
stationery. I stroked her head and told her how beautiful and wise
she was and I left. The man in me added the word "wise" to
stroke what I couldn't, or didn't dare, stroke. That was one of
those easy moments when I discover how much grief a person
has to have inside him to run away completely from the horny lad in every one of us. A flattery may bear fruit, but her tears
were also tears I should have wept, not because she wasn't wise,
but because I really don't know if she was wise or not, and I say
"wise" to her because she's beautiful.

I found myself a table overlooking the bank of elevators and
ordered coffee. Hours I sat. I ordered more coffee and ate cake.
Women in bathing suits passed by. I was intent. And then I saw
him come in. And when he groped in his pocket I knew he was
holding the newspaper clipping. Hesitantly, he walked toward
the bank of elevators and I saw him, even though he couldn't see
me. The beauty queen passing behind him appeared in the mirror for a moment, so they couldn't even meet; the hotel detective
I had spotted before lit a cigarette. Two laughing girls pass by,
looking tanned and pure. Boaz stands intent, and then comes to
an elevator, he steps inside, the elevator fills with people, the
beauty queen is swallowed up in the opening behind the
counters, a new light is lit above me. The waitress wants to be
paid, because her shift has now ended. Very slowly the door of
the elevator slams shut on Boaz's face, and here the story ends,
from now on even my hypothesis won't have any basis in fact.
What is Henkin doing? What's happening to the actors of the
national theater who are waiting for Sam Lipp, and surely don't
know that at this moment he's waiting in his apartment in the
hotel for Joseph Rayna's last game of vengeance? And I sit-a
person who once shot at low-flying planes, who saluted with upraised hand and yelled Heil-in the Hilton Hotel in Tel Aviv, in
my mind's eye accompanying Boaz Schneerson, victim of a
disaster brought by generations of seekers of deliverance and
stubborn and angry people. And I feel that right here, at the
moment of battle, the story I still have to write or recite like
Ebenezer, is condensing, the story I have to reconstruct from
the tapes, to fake myself in it, and I see the door of the elevator slam shut, and suddenly there is absolutely no certainty that
what was said really was, that my son had to be buried far from
home, that the elevator really is going up, and I see the red
numbers jumping on the control board, trying to see the destruction, the haberdashers now locking their shops in the
emptying streets, the climbers darting at crumbling and mourning chocolate houses, trying to get a foothold in this moment,
I'm writing to you about it, something I started a long time ago,
and to guess, to walk on the carpet, to come to the doorway, to
wait with the creator of the Fourth Reich, and along with him
to open the door, but I can no longer know what will happen
now when those two men meet.

And on the seventeenth floor of the Hilton Hotel in Tel Aviv
the elevator door opens and a person is seen getting off the elevator. He stands still. Waits until the door slams shut behind him.
His face is tanned, a white hair flickers from his mane of hair,
which doesn't seem to have thinned over the years. At the age of
forty-five, he looks younger, but also older, than his age. He gropes
in his pocket, lights a cigarette, walks on the carpet. His eyes are
like the eyes of a hyena at night, thinks a cleaning woman passing
by, carrying a bucket and a broom. He stops at a door. Beyond the
door, as beyond the concrete wall that stood for years in Jerusalem
and bisected the city, Asia, China, India, something distant, unknown, stretching out, beyond the door he stands, so he knocks.

The door opens and he can't see very well because of the
glowing light from the open window. He doesn't say a thing,
looks at somebody he may have to struggle with again. A locked
yard with a tree and a hook and a bird, and distant music rises
in his brain, he enters, and after the door is locked behind him,
in the lobby a well-dressed, tall, heavyset man gets up, pays for
his coffee, looks at the small light bulbs on the control board of
the elevator, and leaves. Far away from there sits Rebecca
Schneerson, facing a grove of almond trees, measuring herself in
the windowpane, cleaned for her by the great-grandson of Ahbed
and she wants in vain to touch the source of her prayers that
could once make such a strong hatred throb in her that she
gaped open a hole in the universe. Now she hurls empty looks
and doesn't even hold the flyswatter anymore and she drinks
wine as she sits for the men who couldn't make her forget the
sweet smell of Joseph, who almost kindled in her her heavy and needless betrayal of love, and she thinks: Who am I waiting for,
as if a pesky fly came and reported to her on the state of the
farm, on crops that grew nicely, on a northwest wind, and she
wants to know what's happening in a place where she doesn't
know that anything is happening. She doesn't know that Boaz
and Samuel are meeting now, she doesn't know that something
that took place years ago, when two young men met and
struggled, a struggle she really didn't pray for, is now reaching
its conclusion. And Jordana, who dusted three thousand books
waiting for her with pictures of eternal youths, returns to
Henkin's house and teaches Noga and Renate how to clean
the bluish rust off ancient coins, how the liquid forces the ancient letters and the ancient images to be exposed, and Renate
looks at the countenance of Emperor Hadrian and sees how his
face grows sad, how those features waited for her on the sands
of Caesarea for two thousand years and nobody touched the
countenance. A wind blew, rain fell, and after all those years
coins emerged that were lost absentmindedly by some Roman
soldier, who hasn't been among the living for ages, for Renate
and Noga of all people, and now Jordana is cleaning them with
a stinking liquid and the countenance of the Emperor Hadrian
grows clear, and Noga, maybe, tries to listen to the voice of
Boaz's ancient blood that has gushed up in her now too, and
she thinks: Where did the blood disappear that poured here,
on the sands, for thousands of years, the blood that went deep
into the center of gravity of the earth, a place where Rebecca
dug toward the sky, with the awful anger that pervaded her
and is now starting to fade, as if after more than ninety years
of life in a place where she didn't want to live, the anger is
starting to be a needless, almost ridiculous embellishment,
and you don't know who to be angry at anymore and you can't
even be angry at yourself anymore, and so, Noga thought of
her lovers, of Jordana who loved Menahem and Boaz, and now
is maybe in love with Friedrich and will soon paste his pictures
in the album and under each picture she'll write in her fluent
handwriting: Place, date, general description, so she'll be able
to look at his volume without opening it again, to guess the dim, grim force of time that doesn't turn hair gray anymore, and
flows without moving, and Jordana goes to Menahem's room,
turns on the television, wants to weep, tears seek her eyes and
don't find them, and then she breaks the screen, but the ice
cream man's ear-piercing music is heard outside and nobody
hears the smashing blow, and Fanya R. yells: Stop it! We don't
want ice cream! And the wrinkled man goes away routed, with
his ice cream, and there aren't any children here anymore to
sell ice cream to, says Hasha, and Jordana sits Henkin down
and talks with him about renewing the activity of the Committee
of Bereaved Parents and tells him that everybody is waiting for
him and he has to do things, travel, search for new sites, the pain
has to be extinguished, she knows, she gave birth to a dead son
and she knows, she also broke the screen and Henkin sits and listens, looking at the beautiful Yemenite woman. What's happening there in the room, thinks Germanwriter standing up in the
lobby of the Hilton, what's happening to them there that I can't
guess, and Henkin thinks of what Jordana said, wants to answer
her, maybe turn everything back, go back to the starting point,
stand before his son a moment, and say to him: Menahem, you
don't have to write poems, if you don't want to. Hasha Masha says
you're a man of the sea. Henkin knew that no lad who came from
Hasha Masha's womb would believe that Henkin who says those
things really means them, and he can despise himself until he
smiles at Jordana who strokes his hand and tries to lead him to
battlefields where others fought for her and for him, and suddenly
he says with a contempt that once was in Hasha but she doesn't
have it now: Why don't you make love with something like a television, but she isn't offended now and moves to the agenda, he's
going to tell me about the locomotive salesman, that sonofabitch,
she said to herself, he thought that because of my love for
Menahem he bought me for life, and I'm free to love whoever I
want, she said and laughed, and Noga saw the laugh caught on her
face like a wounded bird and she tried to get up, but her legs were
heavy and she didn't get up, and Renate went to put on water.

Henkin thinks: That strange Yemenite woman, she endured
everything and remained dry, from all the rain of death she remained dry, and Rebecca sits in her room, Ahbed paces back
and forth, and she thinks: Something's happening, and then a
distant rage passes through her-not her own-one that went
astray and passed through her on the way to her sources, from
her toenails, which once stood at the river and let it pierce the
girl she was, to give up everything so she could be angry at herself, stumble on mastery, live a life that contradicted itself, so
that her life was a betrayal of her desires, to take vengeance on
herself, on the desires she didn't really have, and she said:
Somebody tells me up yours, somebody enters the room, does
to me what Nehemiah did when he committed suicide on the
shore of Jaffa, and when I was born the sun went out and a
rooster didn't die, deaf Joseph went to bring a new sexton to
the city, the rabbi of Lody who caused Napoleon's defeat at the
gates of Moscow, but the house of the Last Jew is still locked
despite the sudden shouts of that prompter Fanya R., the windows are slammed shut, the repainted shutters are closed, the
antenna sways in the wind, and in the hotel the tall beauty
queen sits down, in a purple dress and a white collar, next to
Germanwriter, who's about to leave, and says: So what will be?
Germanwriter, who thinks of avenging that moment when everything takes place, the moment when two men meet and you
don't know what happens to them, looks at the local beauty
queen who was international and came back to her scale, wringing her hands, and he notices that she's removed the red nail
polish and her fingernails are also pale, and he thinks: Did she
really kiss the Ambassador of Peru, did a whore from Hayarkon
Street really sleep in his bed on the seventeenth floor, as that
really was important to what happens to the writer deep in his
heart, where there were once stories that wanted to be written
as he used to tell Renate, and the beauty queen sits and starts
gnawing her nails, looking to the side, stealing a scared look at
the writer, and gnawing. He thinks: Let me have a hand, and he
says: Let me gnaw, and she says: Why not, and he gnaws one
fingernail and wants to laugh in the hotel lobby. He gnaws,
Germanwriter, the queen, a fingernail ...