The fact of the beauty queen's beauty, thinks Germanwriter, should have been an advance payment on the account of death. Some reply to life, to expectations, to dread, and isn't really a reply, not her face, not her bittersweet body, not even her measured grief about Sam, whom she spent a night with. It can be guessed how he asks Sam what happened in the room, and Sam tells him: He knocked on the door, we stood still, two mirrors looking at one another, he told me who he was, we talked about the struggle then, I tried to remember, I almost recalled, I told about the Fourth Reich. He was sad to hear about Ebenezer in the wretched nightclubs. We ordered vodka. We drank.
When he asked Boaz, Boaz will answer, Boaz will surely answer in similar language, will say: Somebody published an ad in the paper with my picture. I came. The window was open, the planes that came a few minutes later to Father's house passed by the open window, their lights blinked on and off. We drank vodka. We talked about ourselves. I told about Rebecca, the Captain, the Captain's Dante Alighieri, I said, Maybe a monument has to be erected to Dante, to the fallen ones, to ourselves, to Henkin, to Menahem, to Friedrich, a gigantic monument where you can see the whole land and then die, and he smiled. We fought. We hit one another. He hit hard, but I wasn't weak either. We didn't know who hit whom, then one went out. I'm not sure who. And Sam will say, Right, and there was a beauty queen there. And Boaz will say: All of life, all that suddenly was, balled up for one moment and then silence.
A pianist wearing a toupee started playing old Hollywood songs. The queen got up and Germanwriter went outside and started walking in the street. And then he saw Boaz, and now it was hard to know if that really was Boaz after the meeting in the hotel, the one moment we all focused on, or perhaps it was before, but it can't be denied that Boaz passed by in a jeep and stopped and asked him to get in, and they took Noga who said: What happened to you, were you wounded? And he said: I tried to screw a lioness, and Noga said, Beware of us. And soon after, they came to the settlement, the serene old houses in foliage shrouded in shadows of nightfall, the great-grandson of Ahbed opened the door and Rebecca was seen through the door as if she were trying to classify walls, windows, and objects, not to see the almond groves and the citrus groves, and on her face is an old smile, no longer forced, as if the meeting that was or will be between Samuel and Boaz extinguished in her the last ruse she had brought with her to the Land of Israel on the first day of the twentieth century, and he pondered whether, as Goethe said, miracle is the beloved son of faith, what was seen in Rebecca's eyes was the beginning of a fixed and constant end, or a coefficient of the suicides on the verge of the last compromise a woman like her can make with what she had once decided her fate would be and it turned out otherwise, and then she didn't allow things to take place, but reconstructed what never happened. As if, with her own hands, she knocked down her fate by bringing death and destruction on everything around her, so she could realize in her body and mind what others fought over, while she refused reality; some devotion to something sublime and yet hopeless at the same time. She hugged Boaz, but suddenly her hands flowed off his body, maybe off the bodies of Secret Charity and Joseph and Nehemiah and her son, who is now maybe looking at the sea and the ripples of waves on the shore at the yellowed boards and shells, counting the memories he had lost, so he could at long last remember who he really was and be Ebenezer who maybe doesn't really exist, and start over to mutter and know wood in its distress. Rebecca's face was weary, through the German she looked and saw the walls and the objects she had classified before. On the walls, she said afterward, she counted nine million tears like the number of words Ebenezer knew, tears she had wept for eight years so Nehemiah would avenge her. That poor handsome man of mine, she said softly, and nothing helped; the tears were waiting for her on the walls along with the eyes that once, when she was a girl, she packed in a suitcase with the names of dead people she took down from the walls of the synagogue. The innocent smile of Rachel Brin, who died of danger and didn't tell Lionel, now on his way to the Land of Israel, who his father was, as if he didn't know, as if he really didn't know Joseph and the Captain in his blood, as if his Laments weren't based on the melody Rebecca used to split the heavens with her anger, to protect Boaz who would be saved in the war and so Menahem Henkin would die instead of him. There's no pity, she said then, and she meant the melody Emanuel the Roman taught Dante Alighieri and Joseph taught his offspring, two hundred fifty-two offspring, and thousands of offspring throughout the globe, stumbling, routed, and writing books, selling subscriptions, locomotives, irons, computers, building cities, teaching children, healers, maybe patients and dying people, the whole kit and caboodle is this moment, Germanwriter will think, maybe the whole thing is nothing but one melody, some tune that came from the Temple through the Spanish exiles to various corners of the universe, and that's how those wretched and proud poor people could unite into one fabric, into a game of football with no winners but only losers. Like me, he said, like Friedrich, Jordana's lover.
And Rebecca looked at the tears on the walls, the tears that didn't want to return to her aged eyes, and she was silent and maybe others said for her what she was supposed to say: The end is inherent in the beginning, a pit makes a tree, a tree makes a pit, so Ebenezer invented a book that hasn't yet been written, but he knew it by heart, and by his estimate, she's a hundred years old, and everything is filled with tears for something real. Battlefields of dead children, Henkin and rabbinical responsa, holy walls, holy ground, graves, a holy wall, what does all that have to do with my forefathers for whom God was to gnash your teeth, rage, and glory they sought Him in vain. The messiah will come someday when we don't need him anymore, she said, big dreams bring small ends and Rebecca tried to hold on, for the first time in her life, not to what others dreamed for her, but to what she built with her own hands and didn't pay any attention to-her farm, the fields, the citrus groves, the Ahbeds, the fruit, the horses, the flowers in plastic awnings, the vegetables, winter growths, the transparent air held in the cloths of the fruit trees, the hens that don't stop laying, the prize cows, she didn't seem sure that the farm she built as revenge for Nehemiah's death existed, that everything that happened did indeed happen to her and not to somebody else who was pierced by a river, fell in love for a splendid and despicable moment with a handsome poet under his wedding canopy, killed a husband on the shore of Jaffa in a lion's cage as an endearing reply to the ailments of the inspired soul of Michael Halperin, her vision of the Hebrew army was never necessary, while Klomin wove it into five thousand pages of letters of recommendation to high commissioners, ministers, famous people, rulers, anybody… so Rebecca grew indignant and said: They just go on inventing a past for themselves to console Nehemiah, to understand poor Nathan whom I killed with a kiss when I told him about the Arabs who gave me money, and she looked at Noga and wanted Noga to give her Boaz until the day she died and she wouldn't be with him, Noga who was already seen, or perhaps would still see, Sam and would be confused and would give birth to a son who would be both Sam's son and Boaz's son and nobody would know, and more awful than anythingRebecca wouldn't know, and that would be the real up yours, and Rebecca would ask and Noga would tell her: I'm not telling you, Rebecca, and you'll die years later, a hundred years old she'll be at her death and she won't know who is the father of the heir of Secret Charity, and Ebenezer won't know because of notknowing, she'll say, and Noga will say: That's not right, Rebecca, you knew and you didn't say. And I know too and don't say, and that's the sweet revenge of the soft woman who was Noga who one day, at the age of forty-five, when she'd become pregnant, wouldn't agree to tell who was the father of the child, who would then go on being Joseph with green-yellow eyes and would live into the next millennium, when all of us won't be here and maybe he won't be either, if the destruction does come and the Messiah will come riding on an ass with broken legs, and will tarry, and won't come even after we don't need him, when everything will be or was, in the words of the chief of staff of the solar system, destroyed. And so, from Rebecca Schneerson's yearnings for a son, whom she delivered to herself at the trees and bushes planted by "that Dana," out of yearnings, the settlement could be seen in its splendor along with the rot eating it. Ninety years and the rot now comes to the roots of yearning, the spots of damp, falling walls, trees that came to fill the space of a furious light without corners, already rotten and falling in the rain, and Rebecca looks at them, or through them. What does a beautiful old woman with cataracts see? What can she see, thinks Germanwriter, maybe his architects could put her back together again, fill her interstices and the interstices of the settlement with a renewed antiquity, made of synthetic materials, and then the spider webs could be seen, and Rebecca said: Boaz, maybe we really didn't succeed in not loving. Was that a question or a challenge, thought the writer, and he didn't know, Noga tried to listen to the echo rising from the words, like a biblical old woman, some Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite, who killed her lover. Out of love and loyalty she killed! And I, who will I kill, said Rebecca as if she read her mind, who? Me? Who didn't I kill? My parents and my parents' parents I killed, so that Noga will give birth to a son and nobody will know who his father is and I will die without an heir, and the word "heir" came to her from television, when she'd watch the news and hear H. Herzog talk about our forces which was always Boaz in the desert, striking my enemy, sir, and what difference does it make who wins, she said, what's important is who loses, and I know how losers look, like Joseph's love poems, look at the settlement, they said there, and it's no longer known who said it, and they looked outside, the vineyard of Nathan's and Nehemiah's dreams. Rebecca came to this place to plant shirt trees in America. Plain new houses fill the interstices. Between Marar and the other Arab village they built a passage then and it's now a settlement and then it's "the settlement," and it swallows Nehemiah's old settlement, a settlement where we old women, who buried our buffoons in Roots, sit and knit ninety years, said Rebecca and sees Yemenites, Iraqis, and Poles establishing a small town here and in the river stuffed fish cruise in the Land of Canaan, near a settlement where most of its founders submitted to the need to dig a pit for the first ones next to the synagogue, close to the community center named after Ebenezer who knew wood in its distress, near the tombstone for Dante Alighieri that the Captain didn't manage to erect, but maybe the whole settlement is a tombstone for a poet, every poet, Joseph or Dante, what difference does it make, they all try to phrase a nonexistent and not very important situation, some fictional space that happens because of people, because of the tears still waiting for her on the walls, and in the distance sit the last old women of the settlement knitting sweaters for the grandchildren, who still come see them in their fine cars, and the new houses straggle into one another, lost, fearing the venom, from the dream they never knew, children trying to learn it in the museum or the pit-of-thefirst-ones, the name of the Wondrous One is one of the founding fathers and All's Well is old now and maybe dead, and Eve, a poor old woman, lies in her bed and dreams of her chicks who went to build her a state and came back graves, and one of them-Boazsits in the Hilton and tries to be himself.