You're all that's left of Nehemiah. Of all the naive founders, of that nation, of you, of me, up yours!
And then Rebecca turned off the tape recorder and started laughing and the laughter turned into weeping and she locked the door, put her head under the blanket, and wept as she had wept seventy years before, a whole day, nonstop, and then she got up, washed her face, sat at the table, and Ahbed said: What happened, Madame, were you weeping? Were you laughing? And she said: Bring something to eat, Ahbed, and he said: Were you laughing or weeping? And she said: Afayg, up yours, Ahbed, do you know what that is, up yours? So up yours to you, all your sons who will inherit the land Nehemiah sowed with Ebenezers who knew wood in its distress, into me they came, from me they didn't go.
Tape/-
Noga Levin knocked on the door fearfully. More than she was afraid to come, she was afraid of Henkin peeping at her from his house. She thought, What is he thinking, why is he looking? Fanya R. opened the door, invited her in without a word, and went to put on a robe. Noga was bundled up in a scarf, she hoped it made her look older. Last night she told Boaz: I'm going to Ebenezer, I want to look old and wise, and Boaz, who wanted to answer, suffered an attack of yawning she didn't cause and so he couldn't answer her. By the time he finished yawning her footsteps were heard on the stairs.
Ebenezer, who had slept in his clothes ever since the war, put a blue sailor's coat over the clothes he had slept in and went into the room. He said: What is the lovely flower in my house? She laughed because she didn't expect him to behave so gallantly.
Noga said: Sit, Ebenezer. He sat, watched the sun rise through the open bathroom window. I came to apologize for Boaz's behavior, said Noga, he didn't mean it, he had been drinking, he lives in tension, he's sorry for what was-
Ebenezer averted his face and didn't see the sunrise now. In the big living-room window you could see the fences of the port and the demolished buildings, and the abandoned shore. He said: Remind me of what you're talking about, some things I remember and some I don't. She sipped the coffee Fanya R. gave her and stirred while walking, which seemed to Noga like hovering, and after a few sips, when the tasty coffee was inside her, she repeated word for word what had happened at the house when Boaz and Jordana and she came from the cemetery. Ebenezer shut his eyes, stretched out his hands, and said: He meant what he did, and I was a fool!
You weren't, said Noga.
When I was a little girl, said Noga, as if she were talking to herself, I once came home from school and Mother met me on the stairs and told me to go up and wait in the house. I went up and the door was locked. I knocked on the door and Father didn't answer. I thought maybe he wasn't sleeping but listening to the news. I went up to the roof, from the laundry room, I slid on the water pipe straight to our kitchen porch. I loved to slide because it was also a little dangerous. I went into the kitchen and water was boiling on the stove. I turned off the stove, ate a few grapes from the refrigerator, and holding a bunch of them, I went into the living room. My father was lying in bed and the radio was off. His leg was stretched to the side as if he were about to put on house slippers and get up. I think he was smiling, but maybe it was a grimace, I said to him: Father, why didn't you open the door, but my father didn't answer. I went to my room, opened the schoolbag, sharpened a pencil, took out the books and notebooks and started doing my homework. And then I thought, Why didn't he answer me? He always answers me, but at the same moment I also thought there was something wrong with the eraser I had bought and I had to exchange it at Lichtenstein's. I picked up the grapes I had put on a plate where I would once mix sand from the Negev and went back to the other room. He was still lying there, the foot was on the way to the house slipper, he didn't move. Everything was in the middle-middle of a smile, middle of putting on a shoe, like a photo of somebody who is both running and standing still for eternity. I thought he looked like marble. I touched him, his hand dropped and stayed hanging in the air between the bed and the floor. I turned on the radio, after a few seconds, the music started, and then I looked at him and suddenly I understood. I didn't grasp how I understood, because I had never seen a dead person before. But that dead person was my father. I started yelling and stamping my feet until the neighbors came. In the ashtray was a cigarette and then I didn't have a father and I asked myself what exactly I didn't have, what I lacked, Mother would get hysterical and swallow pills and miss him terribly. Once I dreamed that my father came back and didn't want to see me, you can't imagine how that hurt…
Ebenezer got up and stood in the middle of the room. A beam of light penetrated inside and made the small squares of lacquer on the nightstand glisten, his eye was covered with a dark scrim, for a moment he looked both solemn and a scarecrow that birds aren't scared of anymore. Fanya R. gave him a glass of water. He said: I asked him to help me, I don't know who I am and what I am, how can I know who Boaz is or who you are or who Henkin is?
Henkin is writing a book about somebody who doesn't exist, maybe I don't exist, when they shot Bronya the Beautiful, Boaz came, or perhaps it was Samuel, and then somebody came and took him. And fifty years passed. Rebecca's here, and Dana. It's all words, Noga, he says and doesn't feel. Only Fanya R. All the rest is words. Germanwriter too.
Noga said: You scare me when you look at me and say those things, I can't understand.
I'm waiting for Samuel, said Ebenezer. All you say is only words, I've got to see Samuel, Boaz is Samuel, but he isn't either.
Noga got up and went to him. Fanya R. smiled. Noga didn't remember ever seeing a smile like that; as if what was hidden in her or shaped in her, some bitter memory, was disguised to itself and it was itself and at the same time its mask. Fanya R. said: I'm not a talkative woman. You're a beautiful woman, all that is a punishment from God! Boaz looks like Joseph, so how is he the son of Ebenezer? Ebenezer thinks his daughters died, because those are Joseph's daughters. Something for you and for our story. You know how awful it is at night here. Always yearnings and always those dreams he recites. I'm with him, so what, troubles Boaz needs, he's a Sabra, Israel, army buddies, a hero, what, why does he need all that with dead souls and dead bodies and yearnings for the dead, and my little girls who wait in Ebenezer's brain. He's got memories, he doesn't have Ebenezer, he's got Samuel, he doesn't have Boaz, my daughters left, Mengele, twins he loved. He did experiments, and then more, what do we know about Boaz, about Noga that's you or about a Yemenite woman who came here with pain and also apologizing, yesterday, says Boaz isn't to blame and now you come with a story like her, see how much I'm talking, but Ebenezer doesn't have all of you. He's dead, all Jews died, standing with a white flag, with Samuel, hitting gentiles who come, exile, exile, you don't know! Samuel is his son and how will you understand, you!
(Fragments of reels of recording for cataloguing: tapes [6/76 and tape 5/90] were ruined, these are fragments of them that remained-)
Women who look like Jordana and Noga are sitting in row twelve on the aisle in the movie house "Pa'ar" in Tel Aviv. A matinee and cracking sunflower seeds. A Lufthansa plane, a Boeing 747 flight 005 takes off from Cologne. Jordana is weeping and so she can't see the film that Germanwriter doesn't see on the plane because he's sleeping. Noga buys more sunflower seeds, comes back, and sits down next to Jordana.