Outside, maybe the sun set but they couldn't see. Downstairs in the lobby, colored paper strips were surely hung and the music was ear-piercing, but they didn't hear. They played child returning home to mother who's sleeping with the guard. Then they played boy whose father names him after his wife's lovers. Boaz said: I would curse your father if I knew which of his ninety-two women was your mother. And Noga said: You're killing Rebecca's saying, you should have said concubines. He said: It's an Arabic saying and I don't care. The lips burned. The air smelled of old urine, burning cars, and raw flaxseed oil. Noga thought: Is it truly possible to start all over from this moment? They crawled in imaginary battles and she played a girl who writes names on the teleprinter, stood before him only in a bra, he lay on the bed and she was ordered to be a vulture pouncing on a corpse. He didn't shut his eyes, lay without moving, tears flowed onto her cheeks but he didn't give up. When she hovered over him she looked artificial, transparent and airy, but when she landed she was heavy, and when he was filled with dread and yelled, she stopped and he signaled angrily: Go on! Go on! And the tears kept flowing, and Boaz said: Got to know how to celebrate victory before it turns into a bank account. She slapped his face and he played dead again, but his eyes were wide open. The ceiling was filthy and he said: You're a great vulture. Then, he squashed the vulture and kissed it and they lay there, and didn't move, like a couple of elderly lovers whose blood pressure would go up with every movement. They guessed the dark thickening outside and sensed the flow of the hours, the moments, minutes and seconds, and her insides were holding his power, and when a gloomy smile of triumph spread their lips, they fell asleep.
At dawn, Boaz woke up and was still inside her. When it hardened, she groaned in her sleep, but didn't wake up. Her lips were spread. After he got dressed he went down and bought coffee and rolls, butter and jam. And he came back. He opened the window, and when the light beams caressed her she woke up. She drank the coffee and ate two rolls with jam, sat up in bed, gathered the blanket and wrapped her legs in it, straightened her hair, and he said: I sat with the prime minister, and he told me to go see if the circles were really right. I went, but the foreign minister wasn't there anymore. Two young men were making emergency plans, but the Captain's plans were bolder. Then I bought pencils that said Made in China. Talya came and said the pencils belonged to her boyfriend and put them in the James Bond case and went to screw the adjutant. She said: All the foreign ministers went to a parade. I was suspicious, but I didn't say a thing. I bought you coffee and rolls. Two armored troop carriers collided and I photographed their burned skeletons. Then I made them into a memorial to Dante, who invented the armored troop carrier. When children being taken to the Magen David clinic asked me what circles I was asking about, I fled. Then some man I didn't know and maybe looked like me came out of the camp with a barbed wire fence, maybe me, and one of the foreign soldiers standing there said: Now there'll be bread. A man I love and was a father to me said: Now I'm not alive anymore, we remained alive, but this life isn't ours.
Noga said: You dream nice, the coffee's nice, but you've got to go back.
He asked: Where, Noga? He was sad and silent: Where?
She didn't answer and looked at the window as if there really was something there she wanted to see.
Tape / -
Yes…
Yes, I also know when they left the hotel. How many tips? Not counted. Sees an article in a pamphlet "Kingdom of Israel," Number 34B. "Before his premature death (quote from the article), A. N. (Akiva Nimrod) Klomin managed to finish page six hundred of his big final letter. That was on June fourth, nineteen sixty-seven. Then Mr. Klomin heard the news, the weather forecast from the Golan to southern Sinai-one day before the war ended-he stood in his bed, sang Hatikvah to the window, and died. But there is also another version…"
Tape / -
The Hebrew poet Emanuel the Roman lived in Rome between 1270 and 1332. He knew Dante Alighieri, cured him of his illnesses, held conversations with him, sang him the songs of the Temple he knew from his mother's milk, and gave Dante the ancient meters from which Dante spun his rhymes. Maybe he also loved Beatrice. He was a learned man, a bon vivant, and a poet. Aside from philosophy, Bible interpretations, and sonnets in Italian, he wrote the Notebooks of Emanuel on the model of The Wise One by Rabbi Judah al-Harizi. A witty satire, splendid and restrained rhetoric, poems of lust and love, full of wisdom of life and wisdom of the world, his one poem begins…
Tape / -
My dear friend in cold and rainy Germany, here it is light and warm.
Thanks for your last letter.
I asked myself if I am really and truly open to you. Can there be friendship between us? To myself I thought: What is real friendship? Is it possible to understand our encounter at Ebenezer Schneerson's home as an attempt to capture a shadow, when two sides, opposite from one another, you and I, hunt echoes that cannot be captured? You wanted details and I generalize, but I am still horrified and amused by the thought that the Last Jew will be written, or is perhaps already written, by an aging teacher acting-as his wife puts it-his bereaved love and by Germanwriter, a man of the world, an artist who collects literary prizes, whom critics compare with Proust, Joyce, Thomas Mann, and Faulkner, but he's unable to write the story of Ebenezer, Rebecca, Boaz, and Samuel by himself and needs these tidbits, the limping investigations of Teacher Henkin… From the mendacity of the two of us, from our mutual helplessness, will a book come, or perhaps they will be notes for somebody else, for a better violinist than us who will write this book? Maybe a book should be written as books were written in the Middle Ages. First one version of Faust or Hamlet, and then comes somebody else and writes another version, and on the basis of that version, a play is written, or even a book, and then comes somebody else and writes the new version and so on until Goethe or Shakespeare… Jordana managed to weep at the cemetery on the anniversary of Menahem's death. (Details!) She encountered Boaz. They met in the Ministry of Defense because of their common work. I don't know exactly how they met. I resented it, but I didn't say a word. Noga told me: "I love that sad Yemenite woman, I love her lost betrayal of Menahem, her dependence on Boaz."
Yes, and the meeting with Jordana. We planned an outing for the Committee of Bereaved Parents. On the phone, Jordana said: We'll meet in a cafe, because it's hard for me to sit and discuss these things in front of Hasha's mocking eyes. I'm no expert in the new cafes, and I remembered Kassit Cafe, once a meeting place for writers and artists, and I said: What about Kassit, and she said, Fine. I walked there and thought that if I had sat in Kassit after the war I would have met Boaz, who sat there then and waited for me. Unlike me, Jordana took a taxi and so she was late. After all the years when I hadn't set foot in the place, the waiters looked as if they were still expecting those artists. They waited on me nicely, immediately served me what I ordered, and smiled at me as if they were protesting the forsaken youngsters with wild manes sitting there.