Boaz took a Carmel Duke car and went to the desert to hunt vultures. He parked the car next to a wadi, took the rifle, and walked alone, in a good mood, whistled something, the gigantic desert, yellow and savage. The Carmel Duke car is made of fiberglass. When he came back with a dead vulture and searched for the car he saw a skeleton. Camels passed by there, saw the car, and ate it. They left only the chassis and the motor and the chrome. He walked a whole day until he came to Yotbata. From there he went home. For a week he laughed, even when he saw the vulture stuffed for a school in Jerusalem.
Boaz told Noga about the camels and didn't tell Jordana.
Jordana claims that Boaz doesn't love her because he didn't tell her about the camels. Noga tries to undermine her certainty.
Noga thinks: Jordana tastes like hot peppers and wormwood and cheesecake.
Rebecca Schneerson dreamed she had wept for eight years. When she woke up she didn't know if she had dreamed she wept or wept and had really slept for eight years. She told Ahbed: I don't know what time is now. If now is now or not.
Ahbed asked Boaz what afayg, up yours, means.
The Captain's grave moved at night. Bedouins camping there with the flocks they brought from the south trembled with fear. The son of old Avigdorov, who was considered one of the thirty-one founders and had once loved Rebecca, but didn't have the courage in his heart to tell her, toddled along for six kilometers in the heavy heat to tell Rebecca the Captain's grave moved. She said: Tea you won't get for that, but know that if he moves in the grave it means he's preparing for future wars. The Captain was lazy in his life, and even more so in his death.
Fanya R. was scared, went to the store, and bought two dolls. Then she hid them. The waiter who came to serve drinks at the party that was held someplace else and got the address wrong, buried the dolls in the yard for her, under a tree. She paid him in German marks hidden in a pillow. Ebenezer went to the place where there had once been a village named Marar and picked chrysanthemums. Then he tried to plant them in his garden.
Boaz sat in his house and very slowly burned his hand. He didn't feel a thing. Noga covered her face with a pillow and Jordana went into the street and read obituary announcements. She didn't know the dead people. In the morning she read in the paper that a man had died. She went to his funeral, stood there, asked herself what she was doing, but didn't have a satisfactory answer. Somebody asked her if she was a relative, and she said: Maybe. Then she went to the office. Boaz came with the seared hand bandaged for a memorial book for an artillery regiment. Jordana tried to pretend she didn't know him. They talked with an alienation that suited their mood. But her hand, her hand groped for him. She told him about Mr. Soslovitch, a locomotive salesman. Boaz said: If Henkin had come to Kassit when I sat there three days and waited for him, and Mr. Soslovitch ordered a beer for me and I didn't drink it, I wouldn't have had to write the poem. And I don't think Mrs. Cohen ever slept with Mr. Soslovitch. Then they talked about the fact that their love had to end and maybe was already ended. She wept. All she could say was, I love both of you, Boaz, I love you and I love Noga. He said: Maybe, and left.
Germanwriter finished writing the novella and went over the last proofs. Renate was sick. As mentioned above, they flew Lufthansa Flight 005 to New York.
In New York Sam Lipp said: You act Licinda, Licinda, but you're not Licinda. Nobody can be himself.
A conversation in Tel Aviv: You remember Samuel Lipker from the Sonderkommando? He's my son's commander in the reserves.
I thought he died, said the man.
No, he was on the ship with my brother. The name of the ship was Salvation. He hasn't been seen since. Now, she said, he's called Boaz.
Sam, asked Licinda, were you ever in Jerusalem?
Yes, said Sam.
I dreamed about a house, she said, and I know I got the dream from you, the house wasn't big and there was a bakery in it.
Sam said: That was my grandfather's house on Baron Hirsch Street in Tarnopol.
Rebecca Schneerson's cow barn, said the Minister of Agriculture in the official ceremony, yielded the greatest quantity of milk by three point forty-six percent of all the cow barns in Israel. I am honored to award the family representative the medal for increasing and encouraging production. The great-grandson of Ahbed climbs onto the stage and accepts the award on behalf of Rebecca Schneerson, and shakes the minister's hand. The minister's wife whispers to the minister: He looks like an Arab.
The great-grandson of Ahbed hears that and says: I don't look like an Arab, I am an Arab. And he adds in Arabic, kata hirek, and descends.
Boaz put his mouth to Noga's hand, caught her white hair, and in silence held her hair in his mouth for two hours and twenty minutes. Noga wept, but the tears she wept circumvented Boaz's head, and in an arc, like flying deer, the tears landed on his knee. When dawn broke, he turned his mouth away and said: Anybody who wasn't defending you, Noga, doesn't know what perfection there is in words.
Noga made him tomato soup.
Jordana called and said: I slept in my house and it was sad, but. And hung up.
Boaz thought of Samuel in the camp and didn't know why he thought of Samuel in the camp. He said: My father didn't forgive me for not being there and I didn't forgive either. And Noga said: Look who's coming, it's Kootie-and-a-Half, hello Kootie-and-a-Half, and Kootie-and-a-Half bent over, and said: Who's that beautiful Yemenite woman who's blocking her ears?
A hard land, said Rebecca Schneerson.
A hard land, said Fanya R. She didn't sleep at night. The letters from the newspaper get into my eyes, she said. What dreams there are that I left there and live here. Maybe we'll win the next war? And how alone is it together?
Tape / -
New York, apologies for the delay.
My dear friend,
I meant to write to you on the plane, but I fell asleep. Renate is blessed with what can maybe be called psychosomatic wellness. Two weeks before I was informed of the trip, she was sick, but when they told me I had to fly to New York for the publication of the novella (The Beautiful Life of Christina Herzog), she recovered in a few hours. With my own eyes, I saw a red runny nose dry up. Your letter about Jordana and Noga, and the story you attached, evoked sad thoughts in me about my ability to understand the connections we're searching for: it was an instructive lesson.
Two days before the flight, Renate dreamed she dropped into an ocean and then drove a black hearse. The lights went out and she couldn't see the road, she had to go on driving and started veering toward the steep slope, and when she woke up from the dream, she yelled: Friedrich, Friedrich, but since she hadn't called him in years, and I had meanwhile woken up, I brought her a cup of coffee in bed and she drank and then told me the dream and said that Friedrich had to be here. So she went to the fortuneteller. For years now she hadn't been to her, but back when Friedrich died she had often visited astrologers and fortunetellers. You see, we also seek lost traces in quicksand. Renate thought Friedrich was alive on another plane of time and his death was not absolute. Ever since, an essential change has taken place in her and she doesn't delude herself anymore, doesn't participate in seances to contact our son, has returned to the silent despair of those who submit. That dream before the trip brought her back to the fortuneteller named Ruth, like most of the women in the life of Adam Stein, whom we talked about, and whose old circus Friedrich used to go to, even though he himself no longer appeared in the circus and nothing remains of it except the name-"Adam's Circus." The fortuneteller looked at the cards, made Renate a hasty horoscope, and after she talked with her about her nature and her past, things that need not be repeated here, she talked about the trip coming up in a day or two. There are encounters connected with the past in store for you, she said, and as for the flight, and you're flying soon, and Renate said: The flight's the day after tomorrow! The flight will be comfortable, she said and Renate said: But it's winter now and stormy, and the fortuneteller said, and I quote: "The flight will be smooth as butter."