The Last Jew

The LAST JEW

ALSO BY YORAM KANIUK AND PUBLISHED BY GROVE PRESS

Adam Resurrected

The Commander of the Exodus

The LAST JEW

Yoram Kaniuk

Being the Tale of Teacher Henkin and the Vulture, the Chronicles of the Last Jew, the Awful Tale of Joseph and His Offspring, the Story of Secret Charity, the Annals of the Moshava, All Those Wars, and the End of the Annals of the Jews

Translated from the Hebrew by Barbara Harshav

Copyright © 1982 by Yoram Kaniuk

Translation copyright © 2006 by Barbara Harshav

First published in the Hebrew language

by Hakibutz Hameuchad Publishing House

and Sifriat Hapoalim Publishing House.

Published by arrangement with the Institute

for the Translation of Hebrew Literature.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kaniuk, Yoram.

[Yehudi ha-aharon. English]

The last Jew / Yoram Kaniuk ; translated from the Hebrew

by Barbara Harshav.— 1st ed.

p. cm.

eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-5558-4838-5

I. Harshav, Barbara, 1940– II. Title.

PJ5054.K326Y4413 2006

892.4′36—dc22

2005051396

Grove Press

an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

841 Broadway

New York, NY 10003

The LAST JEW

The young man got off the bus full of soldiers and hoisted his kitbag onto his shoulder. The bus took off, ants returned from a reconnaissance mission bearing pieces of leaves and stubs of wood, he looked here and there and saw a house, went in and on the table were fresh vegetables, cigarettes, and sweet juices. A woman whose hair had changed from shiny black to gray sat him down at the vegetables and wanted to see him eat. He swallowed the fresh vegetables and smoked a few cigarettes and then he put a few packs into the kitbag and drank some sweet-and-sour juice. She asked him if he was hungry and he said no, no. Then a few girls appeared at the window on the way to a tent. He glanced at them and wanted to ask one of them a question but he didn’t find the question and went on sitting. He tried to locate tangible memories in himself but everything was mixed up. Somebody he thought was a commander and wore a ribbon on his shoulder tab asked him a few personal questions and out of his kitbag the young man took papers he himself avoided looking at, and the man studied them, took out a payment chit, and gave it to him. And he said: You’ll surely go home, but the young man didn’t remember anymore if he had really thought of going home and suddenly he really didn’t know where that home was, he only nodded, picked up the kitbag, got into the jeep parked in the yard, and waited. A driver came and asked him what he was doing in the jeep. The young man said he wanted to go, never mind where. The driver looked at him with shrewd amazement and said: All of you came back fucked up, then he bent over the steering wheel and whispered: My brother went, I’m going to Gan Yavneh. The young man said: Take me to Marar. The driver started the jeep and didn’t tell the young man that there was no more Marar. When they came the mountain was empty. The young man stood in the road, put down the kitbag, looked at what was a village, and thought: I live not far from here, but the distance between him and his home was now almost imaginary, he started retreating like somebody who truly dreaded knowing who he was.

Late in the evening he came to Tel Aviv and slept near the sanitation workers in the central bus station. A girl coming back from work stepped on him and he didn’t say a word. In the morning he ate a bagel and drank lukewarm tea, went to the boulevard, and walked all along it. When he came to a bench that suited him he put the kitbag down again and sat down. He sat without moving from nine in the morning until five thirty in the evening. Most of the time he looked at the house opposite. The balconies were empty.

Children paraded by, carrying a blue and white flag, singing. He felt hungry but he didn’t get up. Opposite a window opened and a woman looked at the sky and then closed the window. The cars passed with a frequency that made him try to understand its rules, but he couldn’t. He touched the money in his pocket and thought maybe it was time to get up and go. But he didn’t get up and he didn’t go. A few downcast people walked along the boulevard. They held their hands clasped almost boldly behind their backs and their faces were down. They looked pale but maybe also full of imaginary gaiety; they imagined they were happy. They stopped not far from him; one of them spoke of some great hour that had not been missed and he was glad about the words that sounded familiar to him. Then sights passed before his eyes that he wanted to forget and blood flowed from him and he planned the destruction of the house opposite. He’d place the TNT on the doorsill behind the security wall. Then he’d connect the detonator and then the red wire and the white wire and would retreat to the bench, hide behind the bench, and activate it. The house wouldn’t cave in immediately, but would be opened and then, slowly slowly would sink. When he thought about the anonymous people who would die in the house he felt a distant affection for them, almost a yearning, and in the back of his mind the house was gaping and caving in, gaping and caving in, and he took a pack of cigarettes out of the kitbag and chain-smoked a few. Then, thirsty, he found the hose used to water the boulevard, turned on the faucet, and drank. A sanitation worker tried to stop him, but the young man looked at him with controlled rage and the worker thought: Another one who came back, why do I need troubles. The celebration was in other places.

He thought maybe he should have stayed in camp and eaten fresh vegetables another few days. The gloomy woman with silvery hair could probably have suckled him. Then he could have sung to her how they die in Bab-el-Wad. But he sits here on the bench on the boulevard and the day is nearing its end and he’s not yet aware of anything profound, very important, bothering him. Somebody is sitting here on the bench, he thought, but who is really sitting here? The thick trees intertwined in the sky created a kind of gigantic purple bridal veil above his head. Their trunks were oval. The blossoms were also a bit blue. The kitbag was laid on the mown but almost dead lawn that smelled of mold and dying grass. He felt the wetness penetrate the back of the bench, which was eaten by old wetness that hadn’t dried. The tree facing him was all gnarled, leaves dropped slowly like a gentle rain of dead children. When he opened his eyes after a strained doze, he saw the foliage and the purple blue and could make out the distant sunset hidden by the buildings, and then he could also sense the redness and even see tatters of it. The sky growing dim, that whisper through the purple and blue nimbus. Once again he made out the wall of the house opposite. The wall was yellowish and tending to rust. On the balcony a woman now stood and hung up her little girl to dry. The little girl dropped and then jumped up with a cheer on what might have been a lawn hidden behind a low concrete wall. And the little girl laughed. What should have been terror was a loud rejoicing squashed to depression by a black Ford and the young man on the bench felt a certain regret, something repressed in the back of his mind wanted to see a woman drying a little girl. The woman vanished from the balcony, a door slammed, another car passed, and from Habima Theater appeared a young woman in a golden dress ignited by the twilight with a certain delicate charm, somehow connected with the joy of the little girl on the lawn. She stopped, looked at him, bent over, his legs heavy, his face tilted a little to the side, and said: Boaz, Boaz Schneerson, what are you doing here, and he didn’t grasp that she was talking to him. He got up, picked up the kitbag, and from his angle of vision, when he stood up, a green pin now appeared clasping the young woman’s hair, her lips looked spread in an amazement she was afraid to express properly, the lips were now clamped hard, maybe as an attempt to defend herself, the theater on the right seemed shrouded in concave light, so maybe he burst out laughing. The young woman said: You certainly don’t even remember my name, and he nodded. Then he said: Not your name and not my name, even though you called me Boaz. She said: Boaz, you fell on your head, and he answered: Yes, I fell on my head. Suddenly I’m on the boulevard, what’s on at Habima? She averted her face, looked at the thick-trunked sycamores, the sandy square, the building enveloped in gloom, and tried to recall. Her shoulder holding a purse moved, the purse slipped to the ground, her hand clenched uneasily, she tried to bend down to pick up the purse and yet as if she wanted to stay erect, the little girl opposite started throwing a ball against the wall. The spots above the foliage became dark, on her finger a gold ring was seen shining in the light of the prancing sunbeam, and he approached her, looked at the ring, put the kitbag down on the ground, and started pulling the ring off the finger. She said in pain, Stop, you’re hurting me, but he said, I have to take off the ring. The ring was small and stuck to the finger and the young woman who was supposed to run stood still; a tiny spot of blood appeared flickering on her knuckle. She reached out her other hand, grabbed hold of him, pulled him to her in an attempt to get away from him; her eyes were bloodshot, the sky now grew dark fast and her hair clasped in a green pin dropped onto her face like a wild screen, for a moment she couldn’t even see, in that second he managed to tear the ring off and her finger bled and when she slipped, he grabbed the finger, licked it, and cleaned off the blood. She slapped his face and shouted: You’re really crazy, Boaz Schneerson, you’re a bad animal, but after he licked the blood from his lips, he said: You shouldn’t get married with phony rings, that’s what’s killing me. She pushed aside her hair, pulled it back, picked up the purse, looked at her hand, felt dizzy, something seemed shaky even in her crotch, and she said: I’m not married to anybody, I wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, once when I met you, you went to Hepzibah and bought me a cheap ring. It’s funny you don’t remember. You came from the settlement, maybe that was the same ring.

Things cleared up now and that could be seen on his rounded forehead, his hardened body; he thrust the ring in his pocket and picked up the kitbag. You’re Minna, maybe we really did know each other, who knows. She leaned on a tree and didn’t notice that a dripping resin stuck to her dress and she could see purplish leaves falling into her hair. She said, You said you’d write to me, where were you in the war? And he shook his head and said more to himself than to her, Where the rings were I was too, I’ve got a collection of gold teeth of dead Arabs. And an ear that my friend, who died, would chew like gum. She tried to smile, the dark grew thicker, the change from evening to night was too swift. So my name’s Boaz Schneerson, he said, here, take the ring from me and wait for me, I don’t need phony rings. He held out the ring he took out of his pocket and started going away from her, he didn’t turn around but walked backward, his face stuck to the sight of her, she stood leaning on the tree, her hair covered by a gloom drenched with leaves, and the little girl opposite yelled: Mama mama I’ve got to make peepee, a car sprayed water that may have been left there from the sloppy watering. In the thickening darkness the thick, gnarled, ancient sycamores looked like giant memorials, and she looked amazed at his back illuminated in the light in front of the theater that suddenly came on. The light didn’t touch the kitbag or his hand and it looked like his hand were lopped off. She thought about a hand chewed like gum. The kitbag was the shadow of a dog that wasn’t there. Close to the sand dunes the houses were scattered up to the row of cypresses whose outlines were now erased in the light crushed on their backs; for a moment, a stub of moon was seen above the house under construction and Boaz lit a cigarette, the smoke curled into the street that led nowhere. Maybe he once knew some girl who lived here, maybe it was on another boulevard. Minna’s house with the red roof tiles. Everything was too blurred to be caught in a clear picture. She looked abandoned near the tree, far away, and he thought, maybe the little girl doesn’t have gold teeth anymore. He stood still in the middle of the street and waited. Then the dull feeling of regret that had started filling him earlier was finished, his mouth was still full of the dampness of blood and then he smiled too. But the gloom covered his smile. When he saw the two headlights of the car heading for him, he thought it was the same car he saw before, even though maybe it wasn’t. The lights moved toward him like the limbs of an enemy. And that’s what he also said to Solomon on the way to Tel Aviv: Got to search for the enemy even after the war, to search for a proper defeat, and Solomon said: I’m not searching for any enemy, going to screw until the middle of next year, nonstop, stop only to eat fresh vegetables and halvah. The car came close and the driver, who had already seen Boaz, started honking his horn. The honking was mashed, from one of those broken horns, so Boaz felt generous toward the honking, but couldn’t budge. The car approached and squealed to a stop; in the light of the streetlamp, it looked like a big ladybug. Another person was there who burst out of the kiosk hidden under an awning loaded with a heavy dropping of leaves. The kiosk light was dimmed by the black paint that hadn’t been removed when the war ended; the person who came out of the kiosk held a pencil and a notebook and was writing something. On his lips was a smile he had brought with him from the kiosk and had nothing to do with what was going on outside. Boaz looked from the car to the person and back, wanted to smash the car, but the notebook in that man’s hand excited him to some extent, as if all he wanted to do ever since he had come down from Jerusalem and knew that the battles were over was to see a person with a notebook and pencil. The driver got out of the car and started yelling. His voice was low, thick, and the words came out of his mouth a bit drawled, as if he could think even during anger. The person with the notebook and pencil immediately turned into a witness. You were standing here in the middle of the street, sir, and blocking traffic, he stated with angry politeness. And nobody asked him. Boaz, who was sparing with words and afraid to waste them, let the two men discuss it between themselves. He put down the kitbag and waited. The person with the notebook and pencil said: People like that should be run over, then they wouldn’t stand in the middle of the street and stop traffic, and the driver said: If I hadn’t stopped, he’d be dead, and he looked at Boaz, who didn’t move from where he was standing in front of the car. The word dead inflamed the driver, who said it with a vague fear, and the person with the notebook and pencil now seemed dressed with rather exaggerated elegance, on his nose a scratch was clearly seen that could have come from an illegal chase of municipal tow trucks, thought Boaz and didn’t know if he really had anything to do with those people, if he really spoke their language, if he understood what they were saying, and why the shoes of the person with the notebook and pencil had no laces. They spoke energetically to one another. The notebook in the man’s hand shook and the driver wanted to go and then Boaz approached, with his strong hands that looked so delicate, he grasped the two heads, held them a moment as they were amazed, coupled them, moved one head away from the other, and then knocked the heads together. At the moment the smashing of the two skulls was heard, a car was seen trying to maneuver its way left. From there a wagon with a stooped carter was seen, and the wagon, unlike the car, passed by very slowly, the mare was old and weary and the carter was humming a song in Yiddish: There was a queen whose crown was sparkling, sparkling, there was a queen whose tomb was sparkling, sparkling. The two heads now moved away from one another, the car whose lights were still on blocked the picture of the cart and the other car, and after a silent pause, the cart and the car disappeared, the notebook dropped onto the ground and Boaz, illuminated by the lights, quickly tossed the kitbag into the car and when the driver yelled: What are you doing, sir? in his slow defensive voice, Boaz saw on his face the crushed expression of somebody who managed to stun with illogic but certainly with a certain methodicalness. I’m taking your auto, said Boaz, what I wanted was to lie on the street to ask forgiveness from your shoes. But his hands started hitting in rage, the little girl dropped from the balcony, that tranquility.

Minna wants him to remember her, the rage stunned him, a rage that brought a ring down on Minna, I’m sorry, he said, and when he jumped into the car, he yelled: My name is Boaz, but he should have said: I’m Boaz, he started the car and began driving. The stunned driver stood there next to the person with the notebook and pencil, his face crushed from the blow, and the man with the notebook searched for the pencil that might have fallen and clenched his arm that had been hit and Boaz drove fast down the slope of Dizengoff toward the huts on Nordau. He saw people huddled at the coffee shop where a news announcer’s voice was coming, and he went on, he stopped at a breached bridge with a few bushes still burgeoning between its tatters and an iron skeleton was seen peeping out of what had apparently once been a complete structure. He parked the car, turned off the lights, took the kitbag, and went. He walked along the street and could smell the blood of the sea. The smell was calming and the crash of the waves was pleasant and demonstrated devotion and obstinacy.

When he lay on a cot in a tent on the seashore, in the small camp for soldiers who returned and didn’t know where, or why they stayed there, he thought he didn’t remember who Minna was and in fact he did remember, but it wasn’t important to him. And then he realized that he was protecting somebody.

In the morning, he passed by a small hotel with a sign on its wall saying: For Soldiers, Discount and Free Wash. He didn’t know what was free and what was discounted and he went in. The clerk was snoozing and upstairs in the rooms, people were groaning. Maybe the clerk recorded their made-up names in his notebook. Boaz asked for what was free and found himself in a bathroom whose walls were filthy and whose mirrors were broken. He asked the man for toothpaste; the clerk was too tired to refuse. Boaz spread toothpaste on a fountain pen he took out of the kitbag and brushed his teeth. Then he wet his face and hair and combed his hair back with his fingers, and the broken mirror didn’t give him any idea of how he looked. When he came out, the clerk said something about the war and hope and Boaz asked him if he was interested in buying gold teeth of Arabs. The clerk felt the toothpaste that Boaz returned to him and said: Enough already, everybody’s got those jokes. Boaz didn’t correct him, but went out, pounded his fist, and saw damp crumbling plaster, his hand was white from the blow and he walked along Hayarkon Street where the sea was seen flickering between the houses. A woman was hanging laundry out to dry and he wanted the sun to burn her men’s clothes. When he came to the office, he saw a sign: Office to Direct Soldiers Who Were Cut Off from Their Units. He climbed the stinking stairs and saw soldiers standing in a line. One of them said, There’s a Romanian girl on Third Street, twenty cents a fuck. Boaz waited quietly and chewed imaginary gum. The soldiers wanted gum and he showed them a mouth with no gum. In the office sat a well-groomed officer wearing a handsome uniform, and his eyes were veiled in a panic that became beautiful in a properly functioning smile. Boaz appreciated that national authority. He answered the officer’s questions calmly, pulled out the papers, and showed them to the officer. The officer said to him: Oh, you were there too, you deserve more, where’s the weapon, they spoke a few minutes and a female soldier came in looking furious and wrote something on a small thin pink paper form. After he signed, he wanted to understand how far the female soldier’s gigantic breasts reached, but she turned her back to him and said: Everybody, everybody, and he understood her, maybe in his heart he pitied her, with breasts like those to meet those dark schemes. When he went outside, he remembered dully that he had to go to the settlement, to Grandmother, but he knew the time hadn’t yet come, he’d been moving around for a month now, he’d wait another few days. And he didn’t know where he had been moving around for a month before he came here, the battles had ended before, he didn’t remember what was the last battle, but he did remember saying to somebody, it’s good that it’s over but he didn’t know if he really meant that. Different ants walked in a row toward a hole they had dug and in a nub sat a tree in a big pot. Somebody was watering the tree with a long hose and standing under the awning of a stationery store. From there you could see a big yard behind a house that might once have been a fashionable café. In the yard were pieces of chairs and posts with broken lanterns hanging on them. Boaz loaded the kitbag on his back, spread out his hands, bent down to balance the weight, as if he were walking on a tightrope, and walked toward the courtyard, where cats striped like tame tigers were yowling. He sat down in a broken chair in the courtyard and tried again to think. The ants and the beetles were a sign that his friends really did die and that he really did come back but if he could, he would have asked the officer more questions now, but since it was a waste of effort to go back up, he didn’t. He fingered the money they had given him and didn’t recognize the money. The money was written with Hebrew letters. That money already has a state, he said aloud and the cat jumped with trained wildness toward a broken lantern and planted its claws in it. So he went to the café not far from there and ordered coffee, cake, and a glass of soda. When he wanted to pay, he gave the waiter all the money and the waiter looked at him in shock, counted the necessary coins, and said, returning most of the money to him, You’re funny today sir; but he said finny.

Boaz thought that as a funny, or finny, person, he had to see the car he had taken the day before but he knew that was only an excuse to return to some place, for no good reason, and the car surely wasn’t there. He wanted to know where he should go. When he came, he saw the car parked where he had left it. The man from the grocery store who came outside to bring in the margarine thrown on the sidewalk by the driver of the worn-out and squeaky pickup truck said, You looking for an apartment here? There’s one upstairs, rent control. Boaz said, That car is stolen! The man pondered a bit and bent over to pick up the margarine. Boaz picked up the case of margarine for him and dragged it inside. The man gave Boaz an Eskimo Pie and he nibbled at it. Boaz said, Cars should live in their own houses. The shopkeeper muttered something and said there were people here at night, but they left. And Boaz said they come and go all the time. Over the counter hung an announcement about food rationing and food coupons and Boaz read it carefully; the shopkeeper said, It’ll be hot today. When he came out of the shop, he saw the driver in the distance, he leaped into the yard and climbed the tree. He looked and saw them checking the car and a person who looked like a plainclothes cop searched for fingerprints on the handle. That made him laugh, in the tree, and he slowly came down and started walking. They didn’t even see him. He came to the tents, put down the kitbag, put on a clean but wrinkled shirt, and went out. After he sat for hours and looked at the sea, he went to Café Pilz. The music burst out and the waves of the sea looked silvery. He drank two spitfires and Menashke played songs on the accordion. Then they played a rumba and everybody danced. A girl Boaz later discovered in his arms tried to defend herself against the shock on his face. But she accepted Boaz’s kiss with empty lips cut off from himself. She was offended and tried to look into his eyes but in the middle of the second kiss, with two spitfires in his belly and his head spinning, he left her slack-jawed and went toward London Square. She yelled something that was drowned in the noise of the sea. He expected her to be the daughter of the driver of the car and would sue him. So he groped in the empty pocket where he used to keep the gold teeth. Then he sat on a rock and looked at a bench not far from him. The bench was surely more comfortable to sit on because in the morning, when he went to the office, he saw that it was repainted. The sea spread out before him. The girl was still yelling, or the yelling was before and only the echo was heard now, the sea was locked because of the dark. The moon shed a little light but it was thin and curved and a car that might have broken down, parked with its lights on and illuminated the wrong section of the sea. Boaz leaned over the rock and behind it were white houses gleaming in the curved light, with eyes wide open he saw nonexistent eagles darting, swooping and a bright path, and a man yelling, they died, got to save the black. Boaz sat there terrified, shrouded in dread from some unknown source, thought about the baby that could have been born if the woman who got an indifferent kiss near Café Pilz was yelling something. Maybe Boaz was a bastard who fell on his head, he thought; maybe that’s Minna, did I know her once, or not, Minna, and what does he have to do with all those Minnas, he told the baby kicking inside him: Wait a while, I’ll give birth to you, pretty one, with two mothers, three fathers, and two grandfathers. Then he went down to the boardwalk and bumped into wires not reached by the car’s headlights. Maybe they were laid here recently when the war was close to Tel Aviv, which always expected wars on her border.

Two young men stood at the door of a café that looked locked. They knocked on the door, but nobody opened it. He could imagine the café owner leaving, escaping in a boat, and not yet back. A girl in a short dress was standing in a shaded niche next to the door. For a moment, she rolled up her dress a little and the two young men laughed and approached her as in a slow dance, she raised the dress as if her hands were the hands of a doctor, but the touch was hesitant, wounded, and the lights of a passing car showed some profound contempt flickering deep in her eyes. The lights of the car that might have broken down were extinguished now and the sea was still silvered, calm, sealed in moon shadows. A cop passed by on a bike now and shone a flashlight on the bench Boaz had almost sat on before. Clouds of suspicions in the place were plastered but tangible. An ancient smell of damp and phony chill came from the park. For a moment he felt a secret bliss that he could feel a common fate with those two young men and share the girl’s contempt for their springy steps, but the girl looked scared of the cop, turned around and lowered her dress with perhaps unexpected coarseness, they stood still again in front of the locked door and one of them started weeping. Now Boaz could make out how big they were, like wild bulls he used to see between Marar and the settlement. They were surely searching for a fille de joie with braids and a pinafore, their childhood love, he thought. But there was a war, and if two fools like them didn’t die, they were superfluous like me. The two strode toward Hayarkon Street and from there to the Red House. In the Red House, somebody was playing the Internationale on a mandolin. An unseen woman was singing in a whisper the words that moved toward the sea and were mixed in it. Near the house was a barbed wire fence and two women soldiers with Sten guns were guarding it. The fence was rusty and behind it were only limestone hills and sea. The cannon that may really have stood here once was moved. Inside the Red House a forehead was seen and near it two crests of male hair. The overgrown young men stood facing the women soldiers and spoke coarsely. The women soldiers enveloped themselves in a secret mantle that had long ago been forced on them and tried not to get angry, and, even more, the second one (the first one was fatter) tried not to smile. The girl Boaz had earlier invented with the pinafore and flaxen hair, twelve years old, naïve, now passed by the women soldiers, on her way to a belated piano lesson. The balconies in the house opposite, surely her parents’ house, were wreathed in plants and flowers and a pleasant smell rose from the recently watered flowers. The little girl’s beauty stunned the two young men walking behind her. They wept aloud again and the two female soldiers tried not to pity them. The little girl saved the moment for him and Boaz saw her laugh with the sudden joy of breasts that may have started sprouting. One of the two women soldiers said: Soldiers come and weep all the time, go know. Right, said the second woman soldier, a lot of weepers returned, what was there, and Boaz said: A lake of tears was there and anybody who returned brought the tears with him, but you guarded the secret ship here and you didn’t know. The woman soldier said, The cannon, and Boaz said: But there is no cannon, and she said So what, just because there’s no cannon, there’s no need to guard? He tried to understand her logic, but the crescent moon now cast its full light and they saw how much his look was shrouded in disgust and they were afraid to get mixed up in some emotional adventure that wasn’t yet wanted and they turned their stiff backs on him. The plump one looked better from behind.

At night he slept in his clothes and sweated even though it wasn’t especially hot. In the morning he opened his eyes wide to the voice of a person standing over him and looking from his angle of vision as if he were tearing the tent with his kinky hair. The man read Boaz a new order of the day and Boaz, who was already awake and feeling the wetness of his clothes, said: I’m discharged, dummy. The man tried to be friendly. His yellowed teeth seemed to be searching for a more suitable mouth. The man said: That’s your shock, Boaz, you don’t remember me? Boaz looked at him and didn’t remember. He said, fine, let’s go, and since he didn’t need to get dressed he went outside, took some sand, and rubbed it on his neck and his face. Then they walked among people who seemed for some reason to be rushing like actors in a silent movie. They went into a little café and Boaz was afraid he had lost his hearing. He said to the man: Yell something, and the man yelled, and Boaz said, I heard you, over and out. And then he put a finger in his ear and rummaged around a little while and said, I hear. The man said, He hears, that’ll be fine. The woman who owned the place looked at Boaz. She saw how wrinkled he was and because of that she seemed to know his pain personally and she said: Take off your clothes and I’ll clean them for you. But Boaz said: There’s no point, take some money and bring me new clothes, pick them out yourself. He took off his clothes and remained in a black undershirt and shorts, he also enjoyed her obedience, sat in his shorts and undershirt with a man he surely didn’t know, or else he wouldn’t have sat with him in a café, and people who peeped inside saw a man in an undershirt and shorts and asked what happened and Boaz yelled: The enemy killed my clothes, that man raped my mother, pretends he’s my father. The man laughed and Boaz didn’t. He drank coffee and ate a roll and on it he slowly spread margarine and he didn’t know if it was what he had dragged in from the sidewalk to the shop earlier or a week ago, and suddenly he wanted to know who Minna was. Maybe she really was the daughter of Gilboa the contractor? Boaz licked the jam from the jar and drank more coffee. At first he tried to count the cups of coffee, then he stopped. The woman came back with a bundle of new clothes and took pins out of the shirt, when the sleeves dropped down, he felt some excitement, as if a baby were born, he tried on the new clothes, took the bundle of old clothes outside and put it next to the bundle of clothes forgotten downstairs by new immigrants peeping from their rented room upstairs, or maybe they were waiting for the right time to bring them upstairs. Nor did they know what to do with the new flowerpots that were given them. The man sitting with him said, You have to forget, Boaz, come back home, they’ve started searching for you, they said you’ve been wandering around for a month now, I don’t know why they’re so worried about you, you’ve got a grandmother with citrus groves and vineyards and you’ve got money. What, you need help?

Not me, said Boaz and licked the jar of jam some more.

It says here, said the man, that the battles were hard. Boaz asked where it said and the man showed him a sheet of paper. The paper said Boaz Schneerson, fourth brigade, Har-El. Boaz said: What else does it say? And the man said: It says that you were mobilized in ’forty-seven. That you were trained in boats in Caesarea and then fought in Jerusalem. It says you took part in—and he listed one battle after another until Boaz got bored and stopped listening. The man added, you wound up in an ambush, so what? It says you played dead. That you lay and they shot at the dead, every moment you knew you’d die and you didn’t, there were crows and vultures there, maybe hawks? Maybe falcons? Maybe eagles? I can imagine that it was awful, it says here that afterward you got up and there were another two who got up at the same time and you all ran.

I don’t remember, said Boaz.

The man smiled and said, they didn’t go down to the valley with the dead because the Jews had an atom bomb. And the bomb there was a Davidka shell, which explodes once every seven shots. Fifty percent of the giant shells don’t explode. The shells really were gigantic, said Boaz, and they were shaped like an atom bomb.

The Jews got atom bombs from the Elders of Zion, said the Arabs. You drew clocks and you wrote mysterious numbers on the shells so that if they didn’t explode, at least they’d frighten. The explosion worked by smell, said the Arabs, if an Arab soldier got close to it it exploded from the smell. The Jews were vaccinated against it, said the man, for example, in Hiroshima not one Jew was killed. The logic was perfect, Boaz said to him. So you were saved, said the man, I don’t remember, said Boaz, but added: Grandmother recited Psalms throughout the war and saved me, even the battle I don’t remember.

It bothers you to be rehabilitated, said the man.

But I wasn’t there, said Boaz, it’s a mistake, and the man said, go home and you’ll remember, it’ll help you. Boaz said, I still need to know who really came out of those battles, not sure it’s me. The man listed names of the dead but Boaz stood up and wanted to pay. He said, I don’t remember them, the man said, I’ll pay, and Boaz saw the hair stuck to his scalp and thought maybe antitoxin for hair, a future invention, and with a razor blade he always kept in his pocket in a wrinkled old cigarette pack he wanted to cut his circumcision, but also the hair of that man, and the bitter rage evoked in him by that superfluous memory.

In the evening, he went down to the seashore. A man sat there sculpting. Boaz watched him. A couple lay between the darkness and the limestone hill, tossing and turning. The sculptor said: So what, I sculpt eternal statues in water. I sculpt Joshua, Moses, Nimrod the hero, Ben-Gurion. Up above they’ve already started building the last villas of Saints of the Holocaust Street. A party was going on in one of the houses and music burst out of an open window. A boy was dragging sardines and beer to the party. Near the ledge of the boardwalk were two crows that vanished into the sunset. Invisible walls collapsed on him and Boaz said to the sculptor: That sunset is sweet as fire, and the sculptor said to him, Got to know how to capture yells, and Boaz envied the sand under the lovers. He strode along the ledge of the boardwalk until it stopped. The sea cast a pale light of a city erased of houses, a streetlamp illuminated the sea magic, the iron of the ledge was rusty, and at the ledge stood a young woman and looked at the sea. Boaz stood not far from her and looked at the sea too. He didn’t even know that she was standing, at any rate, he surely didn’t think of it, he was thinking of Minna, why had he plucked the ring off her. When he discovered the woman he looked at her. She didn’t move, as if she were waiting for somebody who hadn’t come for some time now. A wild silence was strewn on her face, which she extinguished. She had a pug nose and her cheeks weren’t symmetrical. Her eyes turned to him didn’t see him. The question conveyed to him in her unseeing look was: How can a young man have eyes that are three thousand years old? Thus they approached one another and then he kissed her with a delicacy he felt she deserved and didn’t know was in him. Embracing but each one alone, they ascended the path to the small hotel with the discount for soldiers and a free wash. They got the discount and like everybody else they wrote made-up names. Then she tried to weep and not say anything she’d regret afterward. Too bad I didn’t ask her name, he thought several days later, but there was a crib there and they said, That will be our baby, she spoke broken Hebrew and said: There it was bad, and showed him marks on her arms and he tried to tell something and didn’t know what, and they laughed because she was the almost imaginary lover of a person whose cruelty Boaz couldn’t imagine but warmth flowed from her, that flame that melted her, and at three in the morning she said: I was beautiful and they saw only my back. And he wanted to tell her how beautiful she was now in bed, naked, but he didn’t have women he dreamed about years ago and so he was silent. He wanted to understand how they penetrated her, how they didn’t ask questions, and his distress became unbearable, he who wanted to be independent in love began pitying her and himself and almost spoke, and then she whispered to him don’t say I love, don’t you dare, and he got angry that she began teaching him and after they quarreled he brought her water and she drank from his hands, lapped it like a dog, and he got down on all fours and said: Don’t love, don’t love, and she said see, Hebrew, I don’t know but they put into my body that thing to honor Jewish girls and in his mind’s eye he saw her standing there alone waiting for somebody else on the beach of Tel Aviv and started wondering whether he had also been there, and the pressure in his chest grew and then he had to hit her, insult her, and before she managed to tell him her name, she got dressed in a hurry and said: I’m going, and he said fine and only afterward, after he lay for an hour and tried to shut his eyes, did he understand what he was losing, but by then it was too late. He thought about the little girl with flaxen hair next to the flowerpots and wanted to understand what was happening to all of them and said I’m Boaz Schneerson and he went down to the pay phone and called his grandmother in the settlement and talked with her for a long time and could sense her wicked laugh.

After he saw the cement in Mugrabi he ate a hot dog in a roll on the square. Behind him flew a distorted picture of Laurence Olivier, and the hot dog vendor tried to prove to him again that Goethe was greater than Shakespeare, less violent, more sophisticated. The clock showed the wrong time and Boaz recalled that in the war they said that after it was all over, they’d hold a brigade reunion in the telephone booth near Mugrabi. He started searching desperately for the young woman he had spent the night with but she wasn’t anywhere. Among the things details began to be clear. A man limped toward the movie box office and a woman passed by him, bumped into him, hiccuped, and Boaz laughed. She had cruel small teeth, she dropped a hat, and when she picked it up she opened her purse, took out powder, and smeared it on her cheeks and then in the light of the streetlamp she smeared lipstick on her lips. Since he was stuck to the corner, he could see her gaping mouth, her squinting eyes, her teeth with a little bit of lipstick stuck to them, and then she blotted the lipstick with a handkerchief. Boaz tried to remember the dead, recalled that Menahem Henkin lay next to him, but was dead and his blood stuck to him, so Boaz wanted to break a clothes hanger because Menahem Henkin used to break hangers in his childhood, Menahem Henken told Boaz.

Then he went to see the second show of a film whose name he forgot, and felt as if he had come to the end of the road and where would he escape now, and then the strange event happened to him that I’m telling about in these tapes. Boaz stood at the kiosk and tried to read the headline of the evening paper and very close to the counter, next to a hurricane lamp, stood a young man Boaz was sure came out of the battle the man in the café had told him about. His head was wreathed with a halo of light and his face looked like the face of Boaz that the man had told him about. The kiosk owner said to the young man: So from the ship you were sent straight to the war? And the young man said, No, first I was in the port of Haifa. And the young man was so familiar, when Boaz looked at his arm in the light of the hurricane lamp and saw that it moved from his own shoulder. The young man finished drinking and now hid the newspaper headline from Boaz and over his head hung an ad for Nesher beer. Boaz thought, The betrayals will end for a while, so he also understood that no envy would save him but he knew that signals were sent to him from the depths of the war he had fought in, or that that young man had fought in for him. Headlights flashed and there were still many painted streetlamps from the war and the lights seemed to be caressing the gloom. Thoughts that didn’t come from a certain place stuck in his mind and a bird built itself a nest on the roof of the kiosk. The man said: That’s a honeysucker, so small, every year he comes and makes his nest on the roof. And the young man asked if that tiny sucker could be the same bird and Boaz who knew the answer from childhood, couldn’t have spoken, stood on the side, darkened, terrified, the back of the young man’s neck filled him with longings for Minna’s finger dripping blood and he tried to remember when he had bought her the ring in Hepzibah where Grandmother thought he was stealing pens and erasers, but he couldn’t recall. When the young man moved a shadow seemed to shift or a curtain to be pulled. The kiosk was gaping like a wound. A caprice of chiaroscuro made the young man look as if he were going away into a halo of light, but it was only outlines of non-body.

A man chewing sesame and drinking soda held a fragrant wormwood leaf between his fingers and the smell was tormenting and sweet. The desert wildness in the city street was sudden and assuaged some pain that gnawed in him. The man paid and the young man started walking and Boaz found himself hopping behind him, he was hopping because now he had a pain in his foot, wanted to stop, settle things, but he followed the young man like a blind man. And then he said: That young man took off Minna’s ring, loves blood, is disguised as a crow. They eat sesame seeds in Tel Aviv with desert wormwood. I’m walking behind a yell that came from inside me, he said to himself, but what’s happening to me, what am I, a car thief, a warmonger, that silence will drive me out of my mind: the young man turned into a dark street and went off toward a house with a thick tree sprouting from it. The tree was dead but the house around the tree wasn’t destroyed. The crest of the tree wasn’t seen in the dark. He searched for a house number on the wall and didn’t find one. The name of the street wasn’t written there either. The fence was low and beyond the house tombstones were seen, the dark obliterated the tops of the tombstones, but one tombstone was seen clearly and even the writing etched on it was seen prominently, maybe because of the light falling from a window where a broken shutter didn’t block it. Then it became clear that aside from the tombstone lying here waiting to be moved to the cemetery, this was a cemetery for dead cars, maybe even the spoils of war. A person was walking in the yards, he had stones in his pocket and was searching for cats to throw the stones at. The cats looked like flashes in the headlights of the passing cars, slithering around tree trunks that looked as if they didn’t have crests. The young man looked as if he were hesitating. I wanted to go back, he’ll say years later, as an end of a story about people searching for themselves, I wanted to go back like a melody played long ago. In the yard the young man entered you could feel rusty nails and shards of bottles and hear the claws of cats leaping toward the hewn trunks. The tree that burst out of the house was seen from the corner where Boaz stood as if pickled in vinegar, maybe the house was merely a box.

The young man searched for a path among the shards of bottles and nails and suddenly felt a stream of water flowing from the next yard. In the window with the shallow light, a radio was heard and in his fantasy, Boaz could imagine the street going on even beyond the house that stood in the middle and cut it off. And farther on there was a building like a Greek temple with the municipal courthouse next to it and then the sea, whose breakers were heard even through the water rustling and the cats purring. On a small balcony latticed with crosses, an iron weave like an army range, maybe against snakes or other afflictions of nature, in a rusty can sprouted a geranium bush and its sharp smell, which surely came to him because of the water that had recently sprinkled it, filled Boaz’s nostrils. Now he followed the young man and turned right toward the front of the house, a bare bulb hung there without a shade and a woman’s robe on a peg that looked like a hook. On the hook stood a bird. The bird kept moving and its beak explored the source of the music coming from the radio and even in the gloom you could make out the gold color of its beak, maybe it was red and Boaz couldn’t make the slim distinction. He thought: we had the barn in the settlement and now there’s destruction there.

Then a scene flickered in his mind and he smiled. Teacher All’s Well stands before the class in the settlement, excited, a dark spot starts showing at his fly, his pocket is puffed up from the cotton he bought at noon for his wife Eve, and put in his pocket, and the girls are giggling and the boys are weeping with laughter and Teacher All’s Well is talking excitedly about Jacob’s ladder … standing on the earth, the whole Land of Israel folded under the stone pillow of Our Father, the ladder facing up … Oh, what a wretched and sublime nation, he said, and Boaz now remembers the blush on the faces of the farmers’ only daughters who had often seen bulls mounting cows and Mrs. Czkhstanovka standing next to the national flags and waiting for a bridegroom who never came, but they weren’t used to seeing a teacher with wet trousers saying: Oh, what a wretched and sublime nation, struggling with God! Israel! An eternal struggle of the nation and its God, Nation and Land, Language and Fate … And the girls are giggling, the spot’s spreading, maybe touching the cotton Margalit saw him buying with her own eyes from old Greenspan whose son committed suicide. And he said: Stiffnecked, struggling fateful struggles, disappointed but not ceasing to believe … maybe in order to lose! And that’s something modern writers don’t understand at all! And he looked at his flock, who had no idea who the modern writers were and what they meant and here, thinks Boaz, stands a young man, maybe I’m standing there, and thinking about spots on the trousers of Hebrew teachers. A garden of nails caught in a pale light and the smell of geraniums intoxicates and the crumbling stone fence and the tree inventing the house and everything here is longing.

And we’re all of us acting in a Jewish Western, somebody will say later on, and then this moment will be remembered. The young man who may be he averts his face, Boaz knows it’s impossible. The geranium, the longings, everything is mixed up here in a restrained essence. He didn’t come to Tel Aviv to seek a new war, especially not against himself. But the enemy, it seemed to him, is shrouded in a smell of mothballs, I and not I, thought Boaz. When the young man turned to him, something forgotten flickered in Boaz’s mind. He recalled that once he was in the battle the man in the café told him about, but he knew he didn’t remember it, he thought then that the Boaz who went into the battle hadn’t come out of it at all. Thirty-two killed. Menahem Henkin was killed there, too. But I didn’t come out of it, somebody else came out of it, disguised as me. Now it was clear to him. The dark was such that as soon as the young man’s face turned aside from the balcony and turned to him, he was blinded for a moment by the harsh light cast from the window when the light now came on. Out of a vague fear, he knew he had to choose, so there was a struggle between Boaz and the very tall mute young man. The light in the window went out and another light came on and a fire engine siren was heard wailing, racing in the next street, the young man was a cruel fighter, nobody could come out a winner in such a battle, thought Boaz. The nails stuck in his feet, the broken glass tore chunks out of his body, the geranium bush was abandoned. Its smell was forgotten in the smell of the cruel battle, blood flowed, and he didn’t know if it was his blood or the young man’s blood, the young man didn’t talk, just groaned and roared, and Boaz tried to talk but no words were heard. Only afterward the young man groaned: You’re all shit, what do you know. But now Boaz wasn’t sure if he had really heard those words, he was just as struck as his enemy, the flight of the two of them was the most ridiculous thing Boaz could think of later on. How the two of us fled at the same time. He tramped on nails and glass shards and fled and saw another back fleeing from there and groaning and he groaned too, but now he couldn’t know who was who, and Boaz imagined that that was all he wanted to know, who he wasn’t, the bird with the gold beak flew off, the robe hanging on a peg before disappeared in a panic, a woman’s hand was seen tugging the robe and maybe tore it, lights went on and off. Voices burst out of apartments where maybe they were trying to listen to a funny program at the end of the war, Hasidic music was heard in the distance, but what was clear to Boaz was that only one of them came from there and again he vaguely recalled that battle and he thought, Only one came out of that too even though maybe two of us were in it, who came out? Me or him, who comes out now: me or him, and he didn’t know. And so, for a moment, when he stood in the street and people started appearing before his eyes, he could take pity on himself. But he was immediately disgusted with himself and stopped. Cleaned his wounds, but he recalled that he had gotten a tetanus shot some time ago and was protected from that harm; he wanted to be sure he wouldn’t get rabies but that only embittered him even more.

The cats who were seen hiding between the fence and the house, where a tree was sprouting, were searching for a bend of the stones in the auto cemetery and