In the evening, Boaz and Noga and Ebenezer and Fanya R. came and took her to the community center. The full community center was decorated. A plaque still hung on the walclass="underline" Ebenezer, who knew wood in its distress. The minister of education came. Rebecca Schneerson had reached her ninetieth birthday. They also came from the television and the radio. There aren't any wastelands now between the settlements, she said, buildings reach to Jaffa and China, and there's no place to weep. She wore a white dress and looked beautiful and svelte. When the committee chairman spoke, she shut her eyes. Everybody looked at her old indifferent beauty. Her long hair slid over her shoulders. Her skin was smooth and swarthy, her eyes flashed and she would have wanted a dead gleam to be muffled in them. They sang "How Beautiful Are the Nights in Canaan" and "Pity Please" and "Do Not Forsake Us" and "In the Fields of Bethlehem." She smoked a cigarette. The committee chairman said: In honor of her birthday, Rebecca Schneerson has started smoking. Then, they aimed the micro phone at her mouth and she got up and pulled the microphone from its stand, as if she were a singer, and started talking with the microphone in her hand, and Boaz said to Noga: Look, Frank Sinatra!
Rebecca said: Now they want Rebecca Schneerson, not Dayan or Kojak. What's happening, maybe I'm an amusing woman. Years ago they were afraid of me. And I wept for eight years, there were problems, the dreamers died and Rebecca remained. Today they hear the Arabs returning to their houses at night from the yards and farms, and the last one to return at night is also the one who will remain here and that doesn't fit what Nehemiah dreamed, who like a Rudolph Valentino of Zionism, died on the shore of Jaffa.
The desert is a memorial to the God my forefathers knew in cellars… A poor Jew who died in the Holocaust tells Ebenezer a number of things that haven't yet been written and he follows the map and finds the Golden Calf. The God of Israel is hiding. The violence is as great as the evasion. In the riots of 'thirty-six, I sat with a rifle in my hand and waited, I didn't wash, three years I waited and they didn't dare come, but the Golden Calf was found for me by the counterfeit son. A first Jew told a last Jew: It's a lost story. Chaos was in the beginning, chaos will be in the end.
And after the uproar died down, she sat and laughed. Boaz and Ebenezer went to the Captain's house. Rebecca sat and looked out the window. Her anger at the bushes Dana had planted hadn't yet faded. They're still here, she said angrily, but nobody heard.
When they entered the house, Boaz and Ebenezer looked at the Captain's shattered splendor, his medals, his faded uniforms, the ten tattered visored hats, the elegant carved sticks. You know, said Boaz to his father, when I was a child, Rebecca would give birth to me with groans. I'd sit on the chair and see her give birth to me over and over. You offended me, I'm seeking a connection and don't find it, a rather stupid situation. Aside from the gifts, the money, the phony maps and stupid war plans, he thought, what else did the Captain leave? Ahbed, sent by Rebecca, went up to the attic, brought down suitcases, and said: She said to open these suitcases.
The Captain's papers were there, along with Mr. Klomin's journals, and hidden in the side of the suitcase was a manila file. On the yellowing oldfashioned manila file was written in a fluent handwriting: "The Torments of the Life Filled with Modesty and Honor of Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg, as Recorded by Professor Alexander Blum in Nineteen FortySix, according to a Prediction in a Fascinating Performance of a Jew Named Ebenezer Called the Last Jew in a Nightclub in Paris Called The Gay Kiwi."
So you knew about him, said Boaz.
Maybe I also know about him, too, said Ebenezer. But he didn't know. He didn't know if he really knew. I didn't know and I don't know…
No.
… And the handsome poet then left the city and rode in the chariot of Countess Flendrik. Stunned that she almost succeeded in loving, the countess stayed in the city and became the dream girl of tired angels. There was total silence. Birds, stopped in their flight and shaped in books and pictures, were sold to tourists who burst out of holes in the rickety ceilings of seventeen kinds of sky hung there like every unexpected disaster. The woman called herself Milat. Milat's father was dead now in the honor he may have deserved, but his tombstone was defaced by rioters. She called herself Leila and Alima in turn, and with the fetus in her womb, she set out with the memory of the awful night stamped so deeply in her that she forgot it. The poet read her poems in high-flown Hebrew and listed for her the names of a hundred women who had gotten pregnant in his honor and she pitied him and let him touch her womb. With a rare deerskin valise she wandered and her belly swelled. Money she didn't lack. When she came to America she was adopted by Mr. Luria before his death. The only condition was that her son would be considered Luria's legitimate son. And so Avigdor was born, son of the lecherous poet with the eyes of a demon, adopted by Mr. Luria, who wanted only for her to tell him how bold and noble he was in his life and in his dying. After she buried Mr. Luria, she called herself Dona Gracia. She loved the stories of Hebrew maidens who served their God in secret. Spanish noble aristocrats loved them. Privately, they bore the tiara of their pride as it was later expressed. Even the boldest military commander Don Juan Garmiro, who granted Queen Isabella the greatest cities of the heathens, loved a maiden whose heart was torn between her love for him and her loyalty. When Dona Gracia decided to go to Lebanon to stay with the Countess, who was still searching in the mountains for the ancient gold of the Romans, she took her son and went. The Countess welcomed her gladly and anointed the boy Avigdor with goat milk and golden water, brought her by Arab traders from their long journeys in China and India. Together they lived on an estate in the mountains, and in Aleppo were Jews who wove wonderful rugs, and an old woman who lived in Sidon knew the forgotten burial place of Jewish heroes who once ruled here. The woman's name was Lilith. So in the fusty streets of Sidon they called her a witch. Roman gold brought by desperate and forsaken Crusaders was found. The Countess and Alima-Leila-Milat and Avigdor traveled to Italy and were once again adopted by good people, who were able to grant them the final and desired bliss. She slaughtered them and then wept, they slandered her in the city. But backbiters aren't necessarily a valuable historical source. Even though she was full of death and charm, there was some endless procreation in her, a boundless youth. A pale man who kept wringing his hands timorously saw her and called himself Goldenberg. When he died he was buried with a politeness that suited him, because he claimed he was from the mountains in northern Switzerland. The Countess came to warm her body in a small hotel near Napaloya, and since they had already stayed in Pelfonz and the sea was wide, they went to a small and distant island and there Avigdor grew and became a sharp-witted lad, who could recite the Divine Comedy in eight languages. He would invent himself in fictions, live in them as somebody who needs a false biography, and then the Countess got sick and disappeared, and Milat, Dona Gracia, went back to Lebanon, married a balding Austrian consul filled with news and named Jospe, and went from there with her Austrian husband in a coffin. She embellished the coffin and put it in her cabin and played the mandolin for him, and thus they came to a small Argentinean city where there were relatives who hadn't yet come out of the cellars where the parents of their parents had put them, and were called by Christian names. There she buried the consul, and the old women who watched her and thought they were relatives began an extreme forgetting that was much appreciated in those remote places. Then came a bold American who wanted to move the Jews from Poland to the Land of Israel in sealed trains, like the trains that would later take Jews to another place. She learned to love his lined face. He adopted Avigdor, called him other names, bought him a notebook so he could copy the poems in Hebrew that were written for him by some father who may once have really begat him. Together they swam in Buenos Aires, and because of the inventions the American invented and were recorded in the name of her son, the lad was given new citizenship and was called Jose after his mother Josefa Dona Gracia, and when Avigdor-Joseph was twenty years old, he volunteered for the Russo-Japanese War, fought in the Japanese army, joined the routed Russian army, stirred his soldiers with speeches in fine French, which he acquired (along with the rest of his inventions) in Lebanon, with the Countess, and when he mistakenly killed a Japanese general who wanted to commit suicide out of boredom about a dubious victory and broke the heart of the attack regiment he led, he was awarded medals, which, in the market of Buenos Aires, were worth a title of nobility he had once been denied. So, he registered as Orthodox since that religion was less accepted, but was surely not understood as Judaism, and he could be sent on secret missions to the east, which he knew from his childhood. They told him: Why not Jose de Lupo, but he insisted and taught methods of warfare he'd invent himself, and with these methods the capital city was captured in the great revolution and so he was appointed commander first class.