I asked him who he was so I could tell my father, and he shouted, He’ll know who I am. And surely enough, my father heard the commotion and evidently recognized his voice, and he came out of his room and found the man facing him, and they both froze as if struck by lightning. They looked like waxworks in a profound moment that burst from within them, and they began measuring each other up, and the blank-faced man moved toward my father and halted close to him and then moved away momentarily, as if it were a Rina Nikova ballet I’d once seen with my aunt Esti. Then they fell upon each other and began hitting each other. They really struggled soundlessly, and the shouts could be seen but remained silent, although their mouths were moving and their bodies screamed. Then they shifted into Yiddish, and that was the first time I’d heard my father speak Yiddish and the first time I’d seen him hit someone and the first time I’d seen him hug anyone. He didn’t even hug his wife or us, my sister and me.
My father didn’t even see me. He didn’t glance at me. He looked toward the neighbor’s door and muttered something, and a few moments later they both took a few, almost identical steps back and moved away from each other, and the strange man spat. Then my always well-groomed father, whose clothes were Bohemian, elegant, and handmade by Neumann the tailor, my father who even wore a tie to go to the toilet, that poor dandy, crouched like an animal, took a starched white handkerchief from the pocket of his blue shirt, wiped up the man’s spittle, and afterward carefully refolded the handkerchief and returned it to his pocket. That was my father, who was capable of polishing cakes of soap so they would be cleaner. He drew the man into his room, slamming the door behind them.
They were closeted in my father’s room for a long time. After a while, raised voices were heard and I heard the man shouting in somewhat odd Hebrew, but it was Hebrew intended for my ears. What, Moshe? You don’t vant your uncircumcised son, the shaygetz fon Eretz Yisrael, your not-only-child to hear? Tell me, what about Yoshka? And what about Bomek? And what about Yetka? And that friend, Nathan, of your brother Dov-Ber, who before he disappeared they said he killed some Cossack? And what about Naftuli the poet of “Bo-ee Tzion ve-Sha’alu Shloma”? And my father asked, What, the one who played for the HaKoah Vienna football team? And the man said, And how he played, and wasn’t there a rose of Sharon? And Hassia, and how is it that you haven’t got some heart, a bissel herz? How Mottele ran away when he went looking for your dear brother in Siberia, and where were you? They search for you in heaven. You’re a bastard, and not because of the Torah because it died there with us when you ran away, but a bastard because of your father, Mordechai, whom you abandoned, Moshe.
My mother hurried in and asked if the man would like coffee or tea or something cold, and he shouted at her, I don’t vant anything from you, Missus Moshe, go to the devil, I don’t vant cold, or hot, or water, I don’t vant anything.
My mother stood mesmerized by what she would later describe as an epiphany and didn’t know how to interpret it and say of what. She was not a spoiled girl from a Swiss boardinghouse, she grew up in poverty, and when she was a little girl she came to Palestine on a reeking boat from Odessa, and later was expelled from Tel Aviv to the fields of Ein Ganim near Petach Tikva, and the Turks, who she always referred to as “May their name be erased,” beat her. She saw a lot of wonders. In her Ein Ganim exile she lay in a field of thistles and looked for goats in the nearby Arab village to bring milk to her sick father. When they returned to Tel Aviv, she would sit by the door as he taught young girls Hebrew, which was forbidden by order of the Turks, and barked like a dog when a Turkish policeman approached, and when the girls heard the barking they began singing as if they were attending a singing lesson, which the Turks permitted. They all died: her father, mother, her two brothers, the jackal, her friends, Bograshov the teacher, Brenner the teacher, Nesher the teacher. And in the 1921 riots she tended the charred bodies of Brenner and his friends. My mother knew wars, in 1929 and 1936, and the world war, but facing that man I saw how her mouth pursed, as if she again was her father’s dog, and she left the room, and there were a few moments of silence.
She went into the kitchen and wept and at the same time heated water for nobody, since my father never drank coffee that she had made, only coffee he made himself in a strange machine he’d brought with him from Germany, and he detested tea because it was too Jewish. The sound of the waves could be heard and they sometimes shouted and sometimes spoke in whispers. And the man said, Moshe, kim aherr, come here and bow to me, bastard of an angel’s son, and I realized that my father had fallen to the floor, which today seems to me an impossibility, but I remember, I remember it well. After two hours the door opened, they both stood there crying, my father, whom I’d never seen cry, and the pale man, whose tears flowed like water from a faucet. They came out of the room, and the man moved closer to me. He didn’t have many teeth, and he shouted, Dust, you, you all are dust, and for no purpose, your father is for no purpose, your mother is for no purpose, you are for no purpose, that kind of Hebrew I do know. How does a nation of Jews become dust? Since when have Jews lived in a country of their own? There will not be a state. Jews are not the Jewish National Fund and not Ben-Gurion. Herzl understood that and so he died outside of Eretz Yisrael, what was he looking for in a country of Jews? He despised Jews like us. And your father, where was he born? He was born in Tarnopol in Galicia, an Austrian only because Emperor Franz Josef’s bastards reached there. And he fought for them and became an officer and wanted to join forces with the German army. And you, who are you? A kind of Arab who doesn’t know what a Jewish language is, and you’ll kiss the tuchess of the Germans here, who this time are dressed up as Arabs, and you’ll bring here all the bones of the Jews to be buried, and you’ll be a cemetery for the dust of dead Jews. You know, mein kind, what kind of a man your grandfather was, and your father doesn’t want me. He’s ashamed of a man like me, but he’s good with Germans. Them he likes. He left us to die in Tarnopol. He dressed up as a German and kissed the tuchess of Germans in Nazi bars in Berlin and played there, and not with me. With me he didn’t play. I’m too Jewish. I, as you say, am of the Diaspora. And then he smiled sweetly and kissed my father on the lips, and my father kissed him back, and all at once he drew away from my father and continued weeping quietly, straightened his cap, and before he left he looked toward my father’s room with all his German books, and said, Your son will die young but he looks the way his handsome grandfather did.
The man skipped quickly down the stairs and my father watched him go. I was mesmerized by that man. He was the fallen statue of a dead king. He was a dead man walking. He was a crumbling ancient palace. My father went back into his room right away and I heard him playing the Monteverdi opera he loved on his gramophone. I thought about the man for many days and my father tried to ignore me. I finally asked him who the man was, and my father asked, Who? What do you mean, “who”? I asked. The man who was here, who spoke Yiddish to you, whom you kissed, and my father suddenly seemed confused, as if a cloud had entered his head. Who? There was nobody here, he said repeatedly, and looked embarrassed and went into what was then called the water closet, from where I heard choked sobbing.