Since she didn't leave the house, I'd do the shopping, pay the bills, collect the pension, take care of whatever had to be taken care of, and once a year, we'd go to Kiryat Anavim on Memorial Day. She'd do that reluctantly, with some distress, would get into a cab. Withdrawn into herself, on the path leading to the cemetery she'd walk alone, as if she couldn't bear any contact.
She wouldn't go to her son's grave, but came with me so I'd be sure my son was really buried there, since as far as she was concerned, he was buried there as he was buried everyplace else. The closer I went to the grave, the more exaggerated she became, maybe even magnificent to some extent, the place was so unimportant to her that a few times she missed some Memorial Days and refused to come with me. But when she did come, she'd stand there, enshrouded in herself, looking at me, and then she'd walk toward the road, sit stooped on the bench of the taxi stand, and wait for me.
At that time something else happened that only today I can connect with the Last Jew. I started working and fixing our garden then, cultivating it again. At the time, I thought resurrecting the idea of reviving the garden was accidental. Apparently I saw the buds of the renewed garden in the Giladi house and the sight of the graceful foliage near my window woke me out of my swoon of many years. On a certain day and I can't be precise about the timing, that man I described before as somebody who stood in the doorway of the Giladi house dressed like a clown with his profile turned to me started working the Giladi garden, which, like all the gardens on the street, had stopped blooming when my garden withered after Menahem was killed. Suddenly I began to neglect the mourning Teacher Henkin and to see a red-brown loam, a compost heap. To sense that wonderful, sweet, bitter, sharp smell, the sight of the trunk after years of looking out the window and seeing only gray and sand, and wind, and heat, and something neglected and stinking at the seashore and then, one day, the eyes light up at the sight of a new stem, at a spinning spurt of a sprinkler, at the sight of a rosebush and a bougainvillea starting to ignite, and the evening falling on it smoothes the ground and it doesn't fall anymore, doesn't drop like an estimated nothingness and a blossom that blooms for you evokes completely different longings, longings for life, for morning glories, and then I saw thorns in my garden, crabgrass, destruction, a heap of brown needles that fell from the pine tree, the ground covered with sand and dry leaves, and just like that, I started hoeing a little and then fixing here and there and suddenly I found myself working and hoeing and banging. Every day I'd work for two or three hours, in an undershirt and cap, I sweated, I fixed the faucet, I bought a new hose and sprinkler, and new life ignited, a life that died with the black villas. A lightness and lust filled me, my bones began to recover, not to creak, and how I loved that house I had bought in 'thirty-seven through the Hebrew teachers' organization at the time of the riots the Arabs call the great revolt, the remote neighborhood in north Tel Aviv at the edge of the city, and the new port born then and now dead and left barren and demolished and the street next to mine they called Gate of Zion, and I live on Deliverance, near the sea, nice small houses of teachers, union officials, and the neighborhood blossomed then, its gardens were handsome, the red roof tiles, the houses like little exclamation marks in the desert of sand near the sea, south of us stretched the hills and the Muslim cemetery, north of us forests to what my son called boos, Reading Station that was then small and insubstantial beyond the Yarkon River and then I planted a fine garden and Demuasz helped me choose its plants, and geraniums and climbing roses blossomed in it along with a fragrant jujube and mint and pansies, and in season lilies blossomed and a blaze of fine wildflowers and I planted a pine tree and two cedars and a purple bougainvillea that covered the front of the house after a few years and set fire to it with its sweet light and the castor oil tree that had been standing here for generations I didn't uproot and the soft lawn that needed a lot of watering and the sprinklers spun at night and made a pleasant intoxicating rustle and during the years of the great war, my son would take care of the garden and slowly it turned into his garden. He loved to prune, uproot crabgrass, tend the garden, good hands he had, he loved to work when nobody ordered him, not like in school where he had to work under the triumphant baton of Demuasz who also turned tending the garden into a national operation, here at home he was Menahem, master of himself, he'd frown capriciously and tell me, Henkin (he didn't call me father), go to your books and find me exactly how an Afghanistanian bamboo smells. That was almost our only point of contact, back then, but usually I'd let him work alone while I was locked in my room, investigating, correcting notebooks.
And at night, we'd set up a table in the garden and Menahem hung a lamp outside and we'd have supper on the lawn, yogurt, eggs, herring, salad, black bread and butter, or later margarine, near the bougainvillea with its cruel sweet colors and the breakers of the sea would be heard and the sirens of the ships and the launches sailing toward the ships, not to mention the crickets and the insects that would circle the lamp and Menahem loved to destroy them and I asked him not to kill them and his mother would look at him with some hushed sadness and say: Leave him alone Obadiah, after all he's a little boy. In her voice I could make out a complaint or submission, but back then I was too busy to have it out with her, and she'd say, Menahem is what we were, but I couldn't accept such an unpedagogical assumption that contradicted my craft that still lodged in me back then, imparting values.
A few days after we found out that Menahem had fallen there was a heat wave. We didn't yet know where they buried him and Jerusalem was still cut off from the coastal plain. I went outside, not yet understanding myself; I stood in the customary white shirt and shorts of those days, I picked up the hose by rote, turned on the faucet and aimed a jet of water at the roses dyed by the red and pink colors of sunset. The light was soft and the heat was heavy and the sea to my left was smooth and crystalline and suddenly I saw myself as a scarecrow watering his own grave, a teacher made of crystal, stuck forever in a conspiracy of death against my son, I tried to water for him the garden he wouldn't return to, I thought in terms of the grammar of nothingness, of the grammar of life, or nonlife, and a grammar of nothingness of my son suddenly became definite like the declension of a verb with no future and no past, and so maybe no present either, and the garden the nothingness of all things palpable like the declension of the verb "to die" was proof that Menahem became in this light, the numbing heat that blew as from a bellows, the foliage that in its wickedness wanted to live, that didn't long for Menahem like Yoash's dog that died of longings when he didn't return from the battles, but the garden didn't weep and didn't long, it wanted me to water it as if Menahem its owner weren't dead, the leaves were dropping, they had no grief, I hated that blossoming, the heat blew, the sea stretched to distant lands I could once have lived in, I thought to myself: What do you all want from me, you give birth to dead foliage. I wanted to take vengeance on somebody, the garden was the most convenient target, Menahem wasn't in it, shouldn't I have been mad at somebody, and I laughed at myself, Hebrew teacher, grammar of vengeance, watering gardens where wheelbarrows full of a son's loam won't go anymore, I turned off the faucet, the hose I left where it was (and it stayed like that for years until it rotted and was swallowed up in the heaps of sand that kept piling up), I went into the house and my wife looked at me and said: Did you turn off the water on the flowers, Obadiah? I said yes, and she said: That water, and I said: His garden and she said to me: His? She didn't ask, she said, and at the end of the word she put a hesitant question mark and so I neglected the garden, bushes of weeds began sprouting and I didn't uproot them and the faucet rusted and was blocked, sometimes I'd shut my eyes, I was waiting for him, expecting the evening, the table on the lawn, the herring, the-. "Henkin look up in the dictionary to screw a tomato in ancient Indian," I was expecting his joyous open laughter, humiliating me, the annihilated insects around the lamp, but everything is covered with nettles and yellowness and sand and obstinate callused melancholy shrouded our house and infected the other houses and the gardens ceased one after another, and maybe the Giladis were afraid to appear joyous with the hose next to our house, and slowly their garden was also humiliated and then it was too late to save it and anybody who could took heart and started all over, and then began a plague of dead gardens and it wasn't only Menahem who fell, Kuperman's son also disappeared and they didn't know where he was buried and Yehoshafat Neiya's son was badly wounded and was in the hospital, and slowly the foliage disappeared and only a few dusty stubborn trees remained and the street became dusty, lost its charm, and no longer had even an old-fashioned elegance, only something forlorn, more scorched than parched, and the weeds wove themselves into a new weave, as if death had its own interweaving, which is simply another form of the verb to be, a sprouting in a different direction, and something elite, distorted, miserable, but not without honor, took the place of the charm and the capricious sprinklers and the rounded roof tiles, the walls turned gray and it's true that in the house where your son grew up from the age of seven to the age of nineteen you don't seek aesthetic meaning at his empty shoes and his clothes in mothballs but I had a clear need to seek formal meanings, real formulations as I was accustomed to doing in the analysis of a story by Brenner or Genessin, something musical, maybe a feeling that had lodged in me and now disappeared, that behind every pain is a certain logic and that I had to decipher it for the students and there's understanding behind the complexity of the instincts and a wisdom woven in this or that pattern and grief and love have their own grammar.