I have no idea what Sam did in the next three days. I was busy with conversations with Henkin, I went to see the Museum of the Holocaust and Heroism, so I don't know how it happened or who really published the ad in the paper. Henkin thinks that Jordana, who still kept a key to Boaz's apartment, sneaked into the apartment, took an old picture of Boaz and printed the ad. Hasha, or perhaps it was Renate, is sure that Sam himself published the ad in the papers, while Henkin is sure it was Boaz. At any rate, the ad was published in the Friday papers, and it showed a photo of Boaz (or Samuel), with black tangled hair, burning eyes, and under the photo was the caption: Samuel Lipker, who came to Israel from Cyprus on May 14, 1948, is requested, for his own good, to come to room 1720 in the Hilton in Tel Aviv for his reward.
On that Friday, Noga and Renate went to Caesarea to search for antiquities. They returned happy and flushed from the wind, and Renate said to me: You walk in those soft sands and suddenly there's a coin that's been waiting for you for two thousand years. And then Henkin showed them the ad. Noga looked at the ad and said: That won't end well.
I went outside, it was a nice morning and an early autumn chill was blowing, I walked along Hayarkon Street, in the distance I thought I saw people I knew: Jordana, Hans Strombe, my childhood friend, the journalist Joachim Davis, Stephen Goyfer, the honorary consul of Colombia, and I thought: Why was the Captain devoted to the idea of the memorial to Dante Alighieri, what's the meaning of his story-the story of his life that was found among his belongings that may have been his life and may not-and I didn't rightly know, I thought maybe it was so simple it was impossible for me to see things correctly, particularly in light of the fact that this morning, there was in the paper a picture of one man who is two and I'm a father whose son is buried in two places and Henkin is father to a lad who was killed in two places, maybe precisely on that background I'm trying to see things that in a rearview mirror are perfectly normal. Maybe the Captain really loved Dante's great poetry with all his might, maybe he wanted to show that Dante's hell was human and pleasant compared with what the Captain envisioned for Ebenezer, and he came to the Land of Israel to try to prepare a spiritual awakening there that would combine the poet with the prophets, the memories, Jeremiah and Jesus, with whom he belonged in spirit, with those Pioneers who came to bring salvation, with the future victims of the idea of freedom of the vision of salvation, and Dante looked to him as Spinoza looked to the manager of the dairy on the settlement-as joining one thing with another, as a real model for the conjunction of poetry with its sources, not physical sources but heavenly ones in an Israeli version. In other words: A memorial to Dante isn't foreign to the landscape that produced great poets like Isaiah, Amos, or the author of the Psalms. Byron's Greece should have been the Captain's Land of Israel, and Goethe and Byron may have sought an excuse to build spiritual ropes to the real world in the wrong place. Here, in the place where God revealed Himself, who spoke from the mouths of Job and Amos, he should have lived the eternal life of a person who sang the lament of the possible world out of malicious and sublime love, out of dread of what was in store, dread that came from him and didn't penetrate heaven.
I climbed up to the Hilton and went to the public relations department. The stormy sea could be seen through the window. The beauty queen was filing her nails. She knew my name and suggested I sign the guest book, but I explained to her that I wasn't staying at the hotel, and she also agreed that it was better if I didn't sign. I asked her about Sam. She put her nail file in a drawer, locked it, scrunched her beautiful eyebrows, was silent a moment, and said: He's closed in the room, I can't talk to him, he's cruel.
I asked her if anybody had been searching for him, and she said: What do you mean, and anyway, I don't have detectives. I showed her the newspaper. She looked at the picture a long time and put her head down on the desk. I saw tears on the Hilton stationery. I stroked her head and told her how beautiful and wise she was and I left. The man in me added the word "wise" to stroke what I couldn't, or didn't dare, stroke. That was one of those easy moments when I discover how much grief a person has to have inside him to run away completely from the horny lad in every one of us. A flattery may bear fruit, but her tears were also tears I should have wept, not because she wasn't wise, but because I really don't know if she was wise or not, and I say "wise" to her because she's beautiful.
I found myself a table overlooking the bank of elevators and ordered coffee. Hours I sat. I ordered more coffee and ate cake. Women in bathing suits passed by. I was intent. And then I saw him come in. And when he groped in his pocket I knew he was holding the newspaper clipping. Hesitantly, he walked toward the bank of elevators and I saw him, even though he couldn't see me. The beauty queen passing behind him appeared in the mirror for a moment, so they couldn't even meet; the hotel detective I had spotted before lit a cigarette. Two laughing girls pass by, looking tanned and pure. Boaz stands intent, and then comes to an elevator, he steps inside, the elevator fills with people, the beauty queen is swallowed up in the opening behind the counters, a new light is lit above me. The waitress wants to be paid, because her shift has now ended. Very slowly the door of the elevator slams shut on Boaz's face, and here the story ends, from now on even my hypothesis won't have any basis in fact. What is Henkin doing? What's happening to the actors of the national theater who are waiting for Sam Lipp, and surely don't know that at this moment he's waiting in his apartment in the hotel for Joseph Rayna's last game of vengeance? And I sit-a person who once shot at low-flying planes, who saluted with upraised hand and yelled Heil-in the Hilton Hotel in Tel Aviv, in my mind's eye accompanying Boaz Schneerson, victim of a disaster brought by generations of seekers of deliverance and stubborn and angry people. And I feel that right here, at the moment of battle, the story I still have to write or recite like Ebenezer, is condensing, the story I have to reconstruct from the tapes, to fake myself in it, and I see the door of the elevator slam shut, and suddenly there is absolutely no certainty that what was said really was, that my son had to be buried far from home, that the elevator really is going up, and I see the red numbers jumping on the control board, trying to see the destruction, the haberdashers now locking their shops in the emptying streets, the climbers darting at crumbling and mourning chocolate houses, trying to get a foothold in this moment, I'm writing to you about it, something I started a long time ago, and to guess, to walk on the carpet, to come to the doorway, to wait with the creator of the Fourth Reich, and along with him to open the door, but I can no longer know what will happen now when those two men meet.
And on the seventeenth floor of the Hilton Hotel in Tel Aviv the elevator door opens and a person is seen getting off the elevator. He stands still. Waits until the door slams shut behind him. His face is tanned, a white hair flickers from his mane of hair, which doesn't seem to have thinned over the years. At the age of forty-five, he looks younger, but also older, than his age. He gropes in his pocket, lights a cigarette, walks on the carpet. His eyes are like the eyes of a hyena at night, thinks a cleaning woman passing by, carrying a bucket and a broom. He stops at a door. Beyond the door, as beyond the concrete wall that stood for years in Jerusalem and bisected the city, Asia, China, India, something distant, unknown, stretching out, beyond the door he stands, so he knocks.