Never did I hear such applause…
We went outside. A cold wind was blowing. We bundled up. In the distance I saw the charming Kristina waving a flaccid goodbye to me and disappearing into a cab. My publisher came, shook my hand, and didn't say a thing, looked at me, for a moment he forgot why he had come to me, and he left. We went to Lionel's house. Later, somebody brought the reviews. We also heard the review on television. Sam closed himself in his room and didn't come out. I went to him. He was sad and quiet. A spark of anger flickered in his eyes. I don't like art, he said, I don't make art, what do they want from me, everything they saw was truth, somebody showed them, what's the big deal. But I couldn't pity him. He created a great work and he was suffering because of that. To create something great is to touch painful nerves, it's to try to create, to challenge, to change a world, and they come and say: Oh, it was awfully beautiful, I understood it.
One General Allenby, said Sam, wanted to scare the Sudanese and told them: I command you with a telegram, I sit here with weapons and supervise the wires. What does it mean to create? I translate dreams into theater. By the same token, I could have been a professional murderer or an undertaker, I've got no compassion, Melissa-Licinda is an open wound, I need her and Lily, that's all. I smiled at him and he looked at me, and then he confessed to me about the letter I had once sent him. Lily smiled the honeyed smile of a jungle queen in a Walt Disney movie, and Sam said: Did you see how my naked parents lay there! You must know, your wife could have been an excellent Jewish shawl, there's no future for that stupid past, trying to teach actors to act "it," not "about," what comes out? A review in the Times: Powder and milkshake. A crooner and a football player understand better. Who am I doing theater for and why? I don't have electricity in my hands and I don't have flames. I have to do theater. What does art do? Except that one man I knew built beautiful boxes to stay alive and then I too, because of him, and the life I have left isn't the life I wanted, you know how many came out of Auschwitz alive? Thirty thousand, another two days of war and not even one would have come out alive to tell.
Henkin my friend, a malicious thought came to me: The next time I'm asked about the heroes of my fiction, I'll tell whoever asks that he really should ask the characters about the author and not the author about the characters. I thought about that as a result of something that happened to me and that I'll tell you now. I'm not a person who acts impulsively. I stayed in New York to meet Sam, Lionel, and Lily. The meeting with Sam was disappointing to some extent. The night after the party, I invited him to a small bar, we sat and drank. He didn't talk about anything but his hatred for the play he had worked on for years. He didn't open up to me. I couldn't really make him talk, even when I gave him some information that should have interested him. When I tried to talk with him about Ebenezer, he shut up, then he said to me: For me Ebenezer is dead! And didn't go on.
When I told him about Boaz he was silent a long time and I saw three things at the same time. He envied Ebenezer, whose existence he didn't admit, he envied Boaz, and he felt a profound fear. He said: That's nonsense! I was the only son of the Last Jew. Licinda is the incarnation of Melissa. Melissa is the love of my stepfather's youth. He said that, since he knew very well that I know they're brothers. But he chose not to relate to that and I didn't press him. I'm afraid of those combinations, he said, those crossroads, of you and of me. The real world doesn't exist anymore and we're its last witnesses. Why embellish them? Melissa is dead so we'll act for her the death of the Jews as she sits at the throne of honor and sells lampshades for ten percent profit. If God were dead, said Sam, we wouldn't have to suffer so much, but He's not dead, He exists as long as Jewish suffering exists. And then I did the irrational act I alluded to earlier, I write you now, and my hand shakes. I did something like Ebenezer's request, when he told you to ask me for his two daughters, something like Renate's desperate attempt with the fortuneteller, I went to Connecticut.