I didn't know what to say, I didn't know what not to say, maybe because of the picture of Amnon, the Shimonis' son, hanging across from me, thoughts were contradictory, so maybe I told him: When I was a child we had a sexton who would wait in the corner until the women got up from the bench and would sit down on the bench quickly so his body would absorb the warmth of their bodies, and I tried to laugh, even though he didn't succeed either, the two of us thought about Jordana who had been sitting here before, he tapped me carefully on the shoulder, his hand was manicured, delicate though very big, I spoke broken English and he looked forward toward the backs that were now wildly hugging the girl of our sons' dreams. Mrs. Shimoni walked around with a tray from one person to another, her cleaning woman served drinks, Mr. Shimoni in an amusing Tyrolean hat was standing at the bar and pouring drinks as if the whole thing were a big joke. The sons are laughing at them, I thought, and the German pulled a cigarette out of a handsome silver case, a pleasant smell of good tobacco wafted from it, he offered me a cigarette, I refused politely, he lit it with a gold lighter that seemed to be swallowed up in his gigantic hand, I was afraid he'd be burned but then he put the lighter back in his pocket, inhaled smoke and I could see how nice his suit was, the vest, once I was an expert in such things, an English suit, not stylish, solid, and yet, maybe because of the beautiful scarlet tie, maybe because of the sky-blue shirt, he didn't look like a prosperous merchant but like an artist who doesn't really want to look like an artist, a man of change but he also had the tranquility of clarity, which unites everything into a pleasant unity. And surely that's what we all aspire to, it suddenly angered me that he was such a good writer, as a gift to my son I wanted him to be a bad writer, but some sympathy was ignited in me, a closeness to the man, the expression of his eyes, when he heard my stupid story about the sexton he was gracious and not evasive, looked straight into my eyes, inhaled smoke, and was with me despite the great tumult around us. A picture of a Lag b'Omer bonfire rose in my mind, a gigantic effigy of Hitler was burned, Menahem and his friends sang, Hitler's dead your mother's sick a German submarine, and a woman who declares on the radio: To punish Hitler he shouldn't be killed, he should be brought to the Land of Israel and shown a kibbutz, and how children plant trees. I wanted to laugh but the innocence in his look was greater than the innocence I was thinking about, and that annoyed me, the smoke curled, we were still feeling each other out, a thigh touched my thigh, I thought about the bomb shelter on Halperin Street where my son used to smoke the first cigarettes he'd hide in the first-aid box back then when we sat in the shelters. I thought: I'm drawn to vengeance, maybe because of Jordana, a vengeance that doesn't suit me. The force that came from him, obstinate and cultivated, his hands clasped his knees and the cigarette burning in his hand next to his left knee, he looked at my hand, silence prevailed, and then he said: Maybe you're perplexed, is it because I'm a German? I tried to say something but the words stammered in my mouth, and he went on almost in a whisper, if so I can understand. I'm perplexed, I affirmed, but that's not the issue…
If you want me to go, I'll go, he said, over there, and he pointed to a group of people that included a tall handsome woman, there's my wife, you know, he added, and I gauged the resonance of his wife's whispers, "the Jews and the Germans, unlike the Latins, didn't seek or find the perfect form, but always some original amazement prevailed, if an abyss gaped at their feet they looked into it and found emptiness and filled it with hewn, new, cruel substance, some new reading of chaos in which is hidden something that wants to be discovered, some imperfection, a divine imperfectness," said the German and the emphasis of the connection restored me, it was precisely the somewhat awkward Gothic style that drew my heart to his fiction, I loved the practicality he wove from the devils that gushed in him, to which pain do I ascribe you, Germanwriter? Which side do you belong to? You're surrounded here with people, some of them came from your area, they listen to you, maybe you express them better than we do even though they've lived here for years, you express them better than we do, that's a certain failure of culture, of education, of vision..
They're incomprehensible, he said, his eye close to my face became watery, melted in the warmth now coming from him, obstinate, but disguised as pallor, I listen to the German of my readers at the Goethe Institute, they speak the German of my grandfather, of the writers I tried to learn from… And, without noticing it, we slipped into speaking German and even though I hadn't spoken German for about fifty years, my German wasn't broken, it flowed with a naturalness that was so fluent at first I didn't notice it, and neither did he. The florid language of my father, my educated teachers in Galicia, my uncles, strict teachers, everything came back to me, sat on my tongue, I thought, Culture! Language! He, Germanwriter, is surely the Bialik and the Alterman of thousands of human beings who live here, he's their real geography from which their longings, their loves, and their nightmares are woven, and they're said to be people who live in the past that never had a future and here is their future, somebody who can someday describe them, he lights another cigarette with the gold lighter, maybe Zyklon B, I tell him that sentence about our Germans, he smiles, Really? I don't think so… It passes…
And then I returned to the anger that had permeated me before. There was no closeness between the two nations, that was a one-sided love, the closeness of Jews and Germans, it's a lie, that's what they want to say today, the Jews lived in Cologne before there were Germans there. Ever since then they burned in desolation for fifteen hundred years. They stood on tiptoe and waited for kisses. That was a one-way struggle, sir, not closeness, the German your readers speak here is a language foreign to them, and they don't know, they're tolerated, no more, excuse me, but-
I know, he said, it's hard to understand… The Prussian state was founded by Teutonic peasants who came back from a Crusade and studied it here, in Palestine. From here they also brought the glass for the windows of their houses and the Bible and what I talked about before. But what was the switch? What was our eternal fortress? I'm seeking, searching, do you think there is really a chance?
He fell silent now. People's loud talking was heard, and more than talking, they were yelling at one another. Laughter was heard, somebody maybe munched on a plastic cucumber by mistake. On the walls, aside from the picture of Amnon Shimoni there was a picture of the Empress Theresa, pictures of snowy European landscapes, a photo of the River Zin in the Negev and an aerial photo of Jerusalem with the edge of the wings of the Mirage birds, a gift from the air force for bereaved families. All that was cut off from some possible answer to Marar, an answer to my neighbor whose request still presses on me, to wondering why he wanted to meet me, of all people, surely not to tell me how many readers he has here and how profound is the closeness between the murderers and the murdered, I tried to calm down, I found myself speaking ardently, in a language I hadn't spoken for fifty years, I tried to find in front of me an empty strip of wall (something rare in the Shimoni house), between china plates, pictures, objects, the Binding of Isaac drawn on glass and a small portrait of Goethe next to a Bedouin ruin that may have belonged to Amnon Shimoni or maybe the Shimonis bought it themselves, I didn't know, an empty strip of wall suddenly glittered, split off from all the objects and grew bright, next to a reddish shade of chiaroscuro colors on the wall whose whiteness had long ago darkened to a kind of pleasant, old patina yellow, a splendid shade of rust, and there I could imagine my face, without a frame, in a light purple, striped tone, without a face, as if the fading graffiti on the wall blended into the wall and doesn't exist except in the vision I created on the wall, a gesture of the existent toward its image, there I was revised in that nauseating light that now started becoming hard inside me, not toward what was in me but for what I could have been if I weren't formulated by ideas instead of trying to formulate them, and there I found myself, my body clinging to the body of the German and I could understand that bear next to me, smoking the cigarette that turns leaves of elusive bright thin smoke violet and telling him: I've got something to tell you, that is, I was asked to tell you, and he then held the smoke in his mouth, exhaled it very slowly, pensively, ardent but restrained. In my body clinging to him I felt him shrivel, grow hard, a car passed in the street and illuminated the pillars of the boardwalk for a moment and the two of us could look at the bored back of the girl of our sons' dreams, so thin, swarthy, in the white dress, hear our laughter mixed up in the tumult, he stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray and asked: What were you asked to tell me?