Rebecca Schneerson went into Mr. Brin's small department store, and Mr. Brin, who had never seen Rebecca life-size, said: It's a great honor for me that you came to me. And she said: No honor, Mr. Brin, I didn't come to you but to the only store in the settlement where you can find a tape recorder. I assume that if there were two stores, the prices would be more reasonable. He tried not to pay attention to the complaint and bitterness in her voice and served her with an exaggerated devotion that disgusted her. Ever since the Captain and Mr. Klomin had died, and all her enemies had been buried in Roots, she had lacked a certain adulation that Ahbed and his friends couldn't grant her since they were too simple to recognize her value.
Mr. Brin showed Rebecca Schneerson about sixteen different tape recorders, and since she didn't trust anybody, she chose the one Mr. Brin claimed was not as good as the others, but she had to have it. She allowed the disappointed Mr. Brin to wrap the tape recorder, picked up the package, and went home. She walked through the fields, saw the new houses, the farms and trees and orchards and gardens, and the new school and the community center and the old water tower, and she thought that in fact this wasn't such a bad place, that there was nice air here and the view was soft and beautiful and everything was painted now and not gnarled, people built and improved, trees grew, flowers bloomed, yards multiplied and were beautiful, the horizon stopped evoking gloomy expectations, the sky became softer and not exactly because of the cataracts in her eyes. She feared those thoughts, as if some long way, maybe the longest she had made since her forefathers' forefathers got her pregnant, a way that had gone on for more than two hundred years, was coming to its end. She wasn't afraid of the end, it wasn't death that scared her, what scared her was some more absolute end, beyond death, an end that torments everybody and only its contamination is felt, an end of what had been dreamed in her veins for two hundred years-Secret Charity, the curse, the river that pierced, Joseph and his poems of yearning, Nehemiah longing for Zion, could all that simply vanish, only because there was never a solid basis for the dream entrenched in some cosmic bitterness of a cruel God against those who betray His command of destruction?
When she came back home, through a row of sprinklers that evoked an amazement in her that she tried to chill, even though they'd water her gardens and she didn't know, she tended to the tape recorder for a while in her closed room, put the microphone to her mouth, and said aloud: One, two, three, and when she turned on the machine, her voice was heard, and even though she didn't recognize it at first, she immediately learned to use it. She said: Recording number one, Rebecca Schneerson, to whom it may concern and to whom it may not concern…
… Nehemiah was a handsome man. Boaz is my son. Ebenezer calls him Samuel. Collectors of charity, who dreamed of Mr. Klomin's kingdom, in vented a state that is a little bit of a dream and a little bit of a ghetto and a little bit of a military camp and a little bit of flowers. My tears for eight years were for nothing. The Captain isn't here. Everybody died on me. Ebenezer was amazed that the Captain ordered flowers placed every week on Dana's grave. I wouldn't have done that. What do they know about the Captain? He was a swindler, cunning, naive, and wise. How many wise Jews are there in this land? It's great wisdom to be a successful farmer, to build a good farm among Jews. Does the fact that I'm alive at least make me dead? I want to say something about Ebenezer. I married Nehemiah, not Joseph, and it's a lie to say I didn't love him. I wanted to save him in America and he didn't want to. Nehemiah taught me a lesson. He left me Ebenezer. Ebenezer went to search for the one he thought was his father, and in the end he married a woman who was both the daughter and the wife of his father. He comes to me and wants to know. What will I tell him? I think that even though Nehemiah was his father, Ebenezer is bound to Joseph and was born to bring Joseph back into the world through Boaz! Is it possible to love somebody, the son of somebody else, who grew in your belly, so that in the next generation your real son will come into the world? Ebenezer, the lost son. Whose son is he? The Last Jew, they call him. And I'll die after him. Lucky thing Boaz has no children. There will be a wilderness here with Ahbeds, as there was before we came here. But to tell Ebenezer I can't. I don't give birth because some man got me into bed. I brought two sons into the world. One was born by mistake from Dana in order to be my son again. Is he my grandson or my son? I lived the end of the story of Rebecca Secret Charity, but they don't believe in the satanic power of blood, in the awful flow of Satan. They believe in progress, they believe all awful things were an imagined curse with no foothold in the reality of progressive people who elect a hundred twenty fools to something they call a Knesset every four years, and they think they're successful and wise and clever because they learned to kill a few Arabs in tanks given them by gentiles, so that then it will be allowed, without any problems, to destroy them one by one… the river was at the end of my life or at the beginning and it's all the same, there was Joseph there, there was Nehemiah there, there were my father and mother. Ebenezer is the curse and he knows wood in its distress. Like an everlasting name he came back. He should be exhibited in a museum…
How much I wanted the love that would replace the dependence, the beauty, the yearning. Did I succeed in being promiscuous? Even that's a hard question. I remember once thinking I should let the Captain hug me, sometimes I did want to, but I thought, Is there somebody who can, with a few drops of water, put out the fire of hell burning in me? And life passed by. That's how it is. Life isn't what we live, but something that flows out of us. And I look around, Nehemiah and Dana died so that Boaz would be, Joseph isn't here, the Captain, I've got an avocado, flowers, fruit, chickens, a nightgown. What the hell don't I have? The flowers bloom, and I look around and ask what to tell Ebenezer, who wants an answer, and he's already past seventy, he wants to know, what will I tell him? That I'm ninety years old and can't say, so here, Ebenezer, with the only love I have left and that isn't aimed at anybody, not even myself, I swear, I'm telling you: Afayg! Up yours! Just up yours! It's not malice, be my son if you think so and want to be, not out of malice, you're quite lovable with all you've suffered with the woman you raised like a dried flower in one of Dana's old books, because I don't have anything else to say, not to you, not to the tape recorder, not to God, not to Satan, not to Rebecca Secret Charity, nothing. Up yours, that's what I've got to say, only that, up yours!