And so we met, Ebenezer and I. When the pine tree looked green and fresh and the bougainvillea started blooming and the piles of sand disappeared and the new lawn was planted and looked green and soft and mowed and the geranium bushes started blooming I was filled with a kind of pleasure, a plea for far-off days and the tombstone around my house was shattered and my body stood erect, even my face took on color and at night I could sleep from fatigue, and in my mind's eye I saw Menahem running around in the garden I had planted for him, as if life has cycles and there's a return from death, and he pushes a wheelbarrow as if it were a train and goes toot toot and then I saw the walls of my house peeling and I bought paint to paint them and I fixed the roof tiles and a carpenter came and fixed the windows and I stretched new screens and I cleaned the gutters and I made a new gate and I put Menahem's wheelbarrow next to the new faucet and my wife refused to go out to see and peeped out the window, and who knows, maybe she smiled to herself, and I wanted to hug her and she avoided me with an almost virginal laugh of an old woman, and she even said: So what, Menahem will grow up in you to be a gardener. And she tried to wipe away invisible tears and ran to our room and I didn't say a thing, but then I saw my neighbor, he was pruning a rosebush that almost touched a vine that started preening wildly on the trunk of the cypress that looked green again and not dusty.
It was summer then, perhaps late summer, because of the heat I took off my shirt and stayed in my undershirt. A nice smell of a watered garden stood in the air, the cool of evening stood in the dark sky, and he stood also in an undershirt but without the cap I wore and I saw how blasted and white his body was, as if a dangerous malediction lodged in him, and yet in his behavior, the way he pruned, the way he measured and plucked tendrils, there was some authenticity, some solid standing on the ground that was his, surely this is how a person prunes a garden he longs for and is rooted in, this is also how a person hates his garden and this is also how he loves it, I was amazed at those phrases but they echoed in the back of my mind. We stood there, two old men, watering gardens, who just a while ago were tense, maybe we were safeguarding something, getting to know one another through gardens, through our almost naked bodies, each one holding the strong flow of water like mighty gods trying to make the harsh and obstinate earth fertile, I thought about the man's fractures, what holds him together, I could see myself, an old teacher, looking like somebody who stood for many years in front of children, teaching them why they would have to die, and behind me the pictures of Herzl, Ben-Gurion, Berl Katznelson, and Weizmann repeating Zionism that the children later realize on memorial walls that took the place of the pictures of the leaders and here he belongs and yet as if he belongs, to those same echoes that made me send Menahem from his first year to war, so those fractures would have a place in the sun, I thought about Tel Aviv, from here it looks like a city joined together obstinately and innocently, half its name Tel, mound, a place where cities are buried and discovered after thousands of years, and half its name, Aviv, spring, is blossoming, blossoming of what? I thought about a line from the words of the Last Jew, he quoted the Yiddish poet Itzik Manger on one of those tapes, who said: When they buried the last of the Gypsy kings, thirty thousand violins came to play on his grave and I thought of what he said, what he quoted from some person who may have breathed his last right after he said that, and Itzik Manger surely meant that he was the last of the violinists playing on the grave of thirty thousand Jewish kings. And at that moment each one of them turned into two-fifths of a cent.
The sight of my neighbor made me sad, like somebody who's used to investigating a situation woven of words, two separate entities, two different disasters, the disaster of the Last Jew and God and the disaster of the wars my son falls in and surely it's from that junction, I thought, that the great and awful moments of our life are woven, the junction of celebration and the junction of nightmare, an illness of malediction leaving smoke that came here to ask for steps for feet they didn't have anymore, an echo seeking a foothold, and yet a foothold that knew what its echo was…. Maybe Hasha Masha really is right and there's no need to talk and a man can be silent with his fellow man and know things that many words don't know, maybe it was his accent, when we did speak, an accent composed of an ancient phonetic layer of the natives of the Land of Israel, the way farmers talk, which once, when I immigrated here in the early nineteen twenties, I knew as a worker in their yards, and along with that some foreignness, a refugee language, in short here I hold in my hands an enormous sex organ of some ancient god, spraying water, talking with a scarecrow that sprouted in my neighbor's yard, a scarecrow who came from two disasters, and wonders. We talked of the Giladis and he claimed he didn't know them and didn't know where they had disappeared, I was impolite, maybe because of the heat and I asked myself who he was and where he came from, and he peeped at me like an old acquaintance. With some practiced smile at the edge of his mouth that lacked suppleness and yet was quite harsh, and I sensed that his eyes were mocking me, as if he were saying: Old Henkin, surely we're old friends and surely I knew where I knew him from and he said surely my name is Ebenezer and the name of the woman who lives with me and is married to me is Fanya R. He pronounced the words carefully and I sensed that he had a special need to feel the words as if he weren't used to speaking Hebrew, which sounded, as I said, both rooted and foreign. I sensed that he had a need to say "the woman who lives with me" before "is married to me," an amazing phrase in itself, surely I would have said my wife and not the woman who's married to me as if she's married to him and he isn't married to her?
I thought about the Giladis, about his phrases, about the way he bent over and plucked out tiny crabgrass that I may not have noticed, and then he said: Did Boaz Schneerson come visit you yet? And I thought here it comes, like then, when I learned my son died, simple things once again start to take on a twisted meaning, as if everything was planned and he started taking care of the Giladis' garden so two months later I could come out and hear that name, Boaz Schneerson, from him, and suddenly a distant memory flashed in me, the moment when Boaz maybe really was standing here, still a young man who had just returned from the war, raging and furious, he looked at me, and when I asked him who he was and gave him some cold water he took off. I remember how he looked at me then, and I felt a strange envy of him because he was alive and then when I met him, years later, I didn't remember what I remembered now, and now of all times, when the stranger asks me if Boaz Schneerson came again, or perhaps he said "yet," to visit you, what does he have to do with Boaz? What does he have to do with the person who destroyed my life and stirred Hasha Masha's hostility, where does that stranger get a tie with us? I looked at him in amazement and he managed to smile, a smile Boaz would surely call the smile of a hunter of agricultural machines or something, Boaz's diabolical phrases. A pleasant wind now blew from the sea. The air cooled off in a cooling and graying space, a bittersweet smell of geranium, and the blue sea stretching beyond his back, an overloaded ship sails toward the port of Ashdod, smoke rises from the ship's smokestacks, and the man measures me, waits for an answer, or perhaps not, and I water, that's the safest thing. I don't let the hose slip away, I don't let the stream dwindle and then the man says: So? He doesn't come anymore, the bastard?