And then she said in German: See what a little kitchen like ours can hold, and he wants a new kitchen! They put the cakes and the tea and the coffee on the table and there was silence in the room, not an embarrassed silence, but a silence of something pleasant, as if we had returned from a long journey, we drank, we ate crisp, tasty cookies, suddenly my wife stood up, looked at Renate who had lit a cigarette with the gold lighter her husband handed to her, took the cigarette from Renate's hands, a long brown cigarette that burned with a strange pale light, inhaled and swallowed smoke, gave the cigarette back to Renate, hugged her arm, went to the old radio in the corner of the room, a gigantic radio that looked like an abandoned closet that we had bought thirty-five years before in the teachers' canteen and after a long moment some tune started bursting out of the box and my wife started moving to the rhythm of the music.
I didn't know if Germanwriter and his wife understood how strange it was to see my wife dancing after so many years, but I couldn't tell them again about the Jewish woman in the forest that Germanwriter aimed a gun at her son's temple, the stories of my son standing against his assailants were finished in me, my wife returned to the Tiberias-Tsemakh Road, maybe she danced to win me, to wipe out in me the thought of Teacher Sarakh whom Trotsky had hugged for three desperate nights. My wife set her body free, came alive wildly, held out her hand until Renate got up from the chair, put down her purse where she had been rummaging before, and her hand caught the held-out hand of Hasha Masha who was dancing and together they moved with a kind of rare lightness, with a kind of oblivion, as if the music flowed into their blood and they were stripping off their clothes before a sun god that had vanished and we weren't important to them anymore, they were dancing for themselves alone, not for us, maybe not even for Menahem, the pale light of the lamp created a halo around their dance, we sat, the two of us, Hebrewteacher and Germanwriter, looked at our wives dancing as in some magic ceremony and on their faces a lost light coming from inside them, not the light beaming from the grave that government minister talked about but a white pale light of life that once was and maybe returns, at that moment it returns, and then, in the middle of the dance when Renate and my wife were almost embracing, the writer stood up, glanced through the window at the house next door then sat down and his hand started shaking, he stared at his wife and said as if he were talking to himself: You're a very wise woman, Mrs. Henkin, men like him are hard to know, we don't have a way to know through the body, we get data but the data aren't connected, after all we don't know according to unformulated dimensions. Our son didn't fall in battle, he committed suicide, why does a son commit suicide? He put his head in a gas oven, locked the doors of his apartment, and died.
They stopped dancing and the music coming from the radio was distant, and delicate, Renate looked at my wife, hugged her shoulder, and tried to assess me, to understand something that maybe connected me and Hasha Masha and Renate, and was released like my wife from all abstract thought, said: It wasn't a gas oven, it was an electric oven, maybe he electrocuted himself by mistake, my husband has already written the story. Life is simpler and more awful than stories. No, not electric, Renate, said the writer, gas, and Renate said without a trace of theatricality: There was no gas in his house, there was electricity there, maybe that was necessary because you don't commit suicide in an electric oven! And she went back to dancing, her face opaque with a mute expression. I looked at the expression of silent madness on the faces of our wives, and the sight was so pleasant, everything that happened could not have been different, and for some reason Hasha Masha could pity me now without loathing me, for the first time in a long time, without judging, and the two of us again, adjacent circles, maybe not yet connecting, with Menahem who died twice and Friedrich, their son who died in an electric oven and a gas oven at one and the same time, suddenly it was clear that every son died more than once. And maybe that was submission for the first time, without protest, in a long time, "known only to God," and the check that says: "Pay to the bearer.. The writer suddenly smiled and said: If they weren't our wives we could fall in love with them! And my wife went to Renate, who also stopped dancing, and they sat at the small table where once, a tortoise Menahem brought from the yard slept a whole night (and I then tried to coax him to put out his head and he refused and Menahem said something and suddenly the tortoise put out his head and wagged it) the memory was ignited and went out immediately, the sound of a plane landing not far from our house was heard, and Hasha Masha sat for the first time since my son fell and talked about him with a stranger.
Tape / -
And about ten minutes later when the writer dozed off and I counted the planes fearing some new preparation, the two women got up, Hasha Masha put a black crocheted scarf on her shoulder and gave Renate another scarf, a red one, with smaller, more delicate loops and when we went out into the garden we looked like four bent old people. The sky was illuminated by the light of a full moon, an intoxicating summer night, gardens washed and the sound of sprinklers as then, years ago, the dead castor oil plant was kindled for a moment by a silvery moonbeam and the extinguished streetlamp near our house was lit, the wretched houses of our neighborhood now looked beautiful, almost splendid in their poverty, the enclosures of the port looked connected to one another and enchanted, brightness touching the crests of the trees disappearing in the sky, the dark illuminated and transparent, airy, somebody stole the city, breakers of the sea rustle the silence in the garden, my wife nods, as if desperate to confront me, and the forgiveness was already devoid of substance, unnecessary, that same old love on the back burner during all the hard days of contempt, those long years, was lit once again. And then in that moment, the shutter in my neighbor's house was lifted like a warning and I surely wasn't thinking of how we'd approach him, how we'd get in, what I'd tell him, and now my neighbor said through the window: Come in, I've been waiting for you; he spoke German and Renate, who had previously separated from my wife, hugged Hasha Masha's shoulder again, bent over a bit, something softened in her even more than before, and on her face I saw a flash of a wild laugh like a rare bird that suddenly shrieks.
My neighbor was wearing an old-fashioned, unstylish suit (like a costume), on his head a gangster cap from the 1920s, some splendor devoid of beauty and full of innocence, he had paper lips, maybe cardboard, Hitler did die on the seashore, a Lag b'Omer bonfire of a man, Menahem dancing, dancing, I wanted to burst out laughing if I hadn't recalled how theatrical I looked on memorial days and mourning ceremonies and in contrast I saw how comprehensible that was to the German, how much he expected to see Ebenezer dressed just like that. There was in that drama some contempt only sharpened by Renate's smile, the brazen pauper encountered the desired spectator, in the window he stood, asking us in, the light gleaming there, and Hasha Masha, without my saying anything to her, already knew what to say, what to do, how to go in, how to relate to the moment, how to live it from Renate's smile and Ebenezer's seriousness, and only an experienced teacher like me, who had stood all his life and observed life and thought he was teaching children how to expel the British in diversionary acts, could have watched not only a drama but even his son, seen everything as watching and being watched at the same time. And Germanwriter, like a giant thing bursting out of the dark, held out a hand to the window and said: Yes, yes, and as we approach the door the writer leaps into the room through the window, just like that, as if to lighten the moment, to grant it a certain unimportance-to reinforce its uniqueness. And now we're bisected, facing the reality of the room, Ebenezer declaimed by a jester from the street of the lost dejected and the magic of the enchanted moon in the sky in the window and I see the Last Jew whose sources I had been writing for several months, close to here, on my desk, through the window locked with the old repainted shutter…