We walk and Teacher Henkin explains. He also speaks nicely. But at least he's got a poem, no, Yoram didn't write poems. Now she said pensively, sadly, hunched up inside herself: I stand here and look at you and the young lady and the stove and I think: What folly, what am I searching for, you must think I'm a fool. And in the middle of her words, she stopped, picked up her coat, and started putting it on too hastily. Her defeat was total, in the depths of her heart she knew she had come in vain and that whole two weeks, she muttered, that whole two weeks, a vague hope lodged in her, now it's not! In her face Boaz saw that mysterious charm of pain when it's disguised as shame, what a patched-up fragility is life itself, from that human crease life burst forth that terrified him, he couldn't imagine it and thought about himself, about Menahem, and then he got up and took off the woman's coat, sat her in the chair, the rain stopped, the clouds sailed quickly and the blue sky appeared and he said: It will be all right, Yoram's mother, it will be all right. And a few days later, he brought the woman a Parker fountain pen and an Australian hat. Her house was full of plants. She grew them as if she wanted to hide in a jungle. Now she was practical, asked where to put the things, and Boaz built her a corner, hung the drawings from school, the letter from the Ministry of Defense, the map of the battle for Iraq-Manshiya that Boaz had brought her, the hat and the fountain pen he put on the cabinet, with an enlarged picture of Yoram framed in black. She stuck some money in his pocket, and said: You had expenses and I don't think you should bear them. He pushed away the money, but when he saw how she thrust the money into the pocket of his coat hanging on the hanger, he didn't say a thing. He also bound the compositions for her, and that's how, that's how it all started, said Noga-
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For three days she didn't talk. And then she tried to talk and a choked moan burst out of her mouth and then they went into the other room, and he said: Noga, they need that and I bring them what they want. I didn't search for it, it found me. And you too, it happened unintentionally.
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Noga sat in bed. She posted her legs like two shapely and tented triangles in the light from the lamp. Wearily her arms hugged her raised legs and her head rested on her knees. In the room the small electric heater burned, spreading a reddish light. Boaz was seen walking toward the water. Only wrinkles of sand and spots of damp remained from the storm. She smelled death and thought maybe the ceiling really had fallen on her at night. Her face was red from the light. The room smelled of cigarettes, rain, and wet sand. Boaz's supple body was seen solitary and gallant at the empty sea. She thought about the frozen water slowly warming his body, the light dwarfed distances, the opaque and airy sea, filled with a supple body of a snake. The crystalline swimming was more ancient than she, a thousand-year-old woman, death in her womb, everything was so unreliable: the woman with the money, those people who come, the trips, the notebooks he was starting to edit, that foolish man. She didn't move until she saw him come out of the water, spraying sea jets, in the cold he ran. She put on an old bathrobe she had brought from the Henkin house long ago and decided to brush her teeth with her fingers, to rub the gums with cold water and char a hem of the robe. He ran along the shore, maybe where Yoram Pishinovsky had walked on his hands and everybody would admire him. After she brushed her teeth with her fingers and burned the hem of the robe, she drank four cups of cold water, and gnashing her teeth as a betrayed woman she could wait for him again with such great lust.
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To the Court, Tel Aviv
Re: Income Tax File No. 34/17656T. S.L.A. Company, Ltd.
Dear Sir,
My name is Noga Levin. For six years I have lived with Boaz Schneerson, director of the S.L.A. Company, Ltd., and I love him. I mention that detail even though I know the court does not consider issues of emotion, or even concepts of morality and justice, but law. Love and law do not necessarily overlap. Maybe loving means breaking the law? While there is a law of justice, there is surely no law of love. By the letter of the law, I also think Mr. Schneerson's acts are not to be faulted, as is clear from your correct and reasoned judgment. On the other hand, if I had to judge Boaz Schneerson, and my love would serve as some measure just as admissible as the testimony you heard and the papers you read-I may have judged him differently.
And again, I do not mean to cast doubt on your ethical integrity or your judicial talents, Judge. It is not you I'm judging, but myself.
I don't think I will be able to sleep quietly or look at myself in the mirror if I do not give vent to strong feelings of shame that fill me. Love, unlike the law, is relativity seeking cover.
With my own eyes, my dear sir, I saw a marginal issue in Boaz Schneerson's life turn into a flourishing business. The very fact that the death of strangers turns into a "business" in the usual sense of the word is not monstrous in my eyes. On the other hand, I am aware of the objective need, if pain can be called that, which turned the S.L.A. Company Ltd., into a business. That is, I am judging the situation of which Boaz Schneerson is only a symbol. Yet for me, he cannot be a symbol, but a man, a man I love.
I was not a mute witness, sir, but also a reluctant partner. In general, I can insist, but in fact, the business flourished and I helped. I was drawn into Boaz's wild adventure, first as a spectator and then as an advisor. It wasn't possible to stop the cart. Pain was driving the cart. I mean what people felt, yearnings for their sons, their husbands, their dear ones. When the cart came to the bottom of the mountain and I told Boaz Schneerson what I thought, and asked him to stop, he said he couldn't. What started as bad luck and then was inexorable, turned into ambition. And it was all innocent: first Henkin, then a man, then a woman who wanted an Australian hat and a Parker fountain pen, and then? Then it snowballed. Boaz brought together a bereaved father with a poet whose poems his son liked to read, so the poet would explain to the father who his son was. And Boaz even started getting interested in his acts because they contained some reply to the burning in him, a challenge, maybe it was a mercy killing, after death, of the best of the youth, to lose everything, maybe it was a reply to the fact that his grandmother saved him from death when he didn't want to come back. And by word of mouth, his name became famous. Anybody who needed a notebook came to him, anybody who needed a monument came, the personal need of every single one of those people was human, but the address was now an office with a telephone and a secretary and jeeps and cars and such, income tax files, and calculations of losses, and expenses, and an accountant and a lawyer.
There were real poems and letters, and there were also fakes. They need that, said Boaz, and I provide them with what they need. Isn't that a picture of a real situation? Surely, its ethics are definitely dubious, its relative morality-isn't. The death of others cannot be a source of resurrection. That death, sir, took his friends, him it didn't touch, what a revenge!
And then we had to move. The hut on the seashore was now full of portraits, objects, parts of burned tanks, maps, and in the penthouse apartment on Lilienblum Street, the rooms were now turned into offices and there was a secretary there and two typewriters, a Hebrew one and a foreign one, and file cabinets. The number of temples grew. Hundreds of booklets were written and edited. We became a company of gravediggers.
In the war, Boaz Schneerson lay among the dead and played dead. Two or three hundred times he was condemned to death because all the shots aimed at the dead could have killed him. Maybe that's how the notion of a vulture was stamped in his mind. It all started in the house of Mr. Henkin of the Committee of Bereaved Parents. He brought a poem there. He brought hope after death there. Menahem Henkin was the fellow I had a relationship with and some days I thought I was in love with him. Maybe that was the most awful thing of all, the sense of betraying love, revealing it in a true light, too late. Or perhaps in a late light, too true? We were mobilized then, we'd meet for a few days and part, I was afraid of him, I pitied him, and maybe I loved him, because a latent fear lodged in me that Menahem Henkin was destined to die, but then I also discovered that I didn't love him. I was alone, I had nobody to talk to, I sat with Menahem's mother and looked at her, at the locked seal on her handsome face and I didn't find solace, I couldn't say a thing, everybody knew that after the war we'd get married. His mother was worried, she didn't even try to admit the existence of my allusions, she wrote him letters that didn't get to their address, and knitted him socks that nobody wore, and I sat and wrote a letter to Menahem explaining to him why we had to part, for a moment I forgot the vague lodged fear in me, the fear that Menahem was destined to die. I sent the letter, and then we found out that he fell. I didn't know if he got the letter and I was still his girl. Uncles from Switzerland sent chocolate and gold earrings to the fiancee, the fiancee was me. Suitors were afraid of me. I sat in the Henkin house. Everybody wanted me to be the model widow. They didn't want the happiness of those who come back to their lovers, marry, and disappear into the gray everydayness of rationing and the new state, they wanted the little bit of splendor, the pain and bereavement that stuck to me and I sank into a slumber that lasted years. Menahem's mother understands now. Later on I understood that all the time she knew the love affair had ended long ago. She felt more than I knew, but she also thought I had betrayed her. Henkin was compelled to give concrete expression to his pain, I was his refuge. I divided myself between them, Henkin and his dead son. I recorded in the album, in a fluent handwriting, the names of the places where he was photographed. On the day Henkin brought Boaz Schneerson home, I knew that Boaz came to take me.