I'd come to Ebenezer's chamber and sit there. That life I had left was not the life I aspired to. He was afraid, he knew that unlike Weiss, I was a real enemy. But I was captivated by his creation. With thin knives he'd slice strips of veneer, put them together, twine them into one another, carve birds or portraits, spread lacquer whose secret ingredients and composition were known "in his hands." On the first nights I'd flog him but he never mentioned that to me, he made the kind of frames you don't see anymore, built grandfather clocks, more beautiful than anything I've ever seen in my life. A small kerosene stove would burn there and after a while I came every day, I brought a jug of coffee and by necessity we even drank together, he and I, I couldn't not come. Something enchanted me; I hated him but I couldn't take my eyes off his work.
I didn't like only the above-mentioned works, like Weiss, but also and mainly the act itself. That man knew wood in its distress.
I loved his hands, his fingers hypnotized by the big German magnet hanging over the altars of Wotan. I could be only me. The things I said in the courthouse in Nuremberg were only partial. When I was reading my words from the written text the bored Russian officer's snoring was clearly heard. Fortunately, I didn't have to pay attention to what I was saying then. One day, when Ebenezer was mixing lacquer, he turned pale and started talking. His words were a kind of recitation. I heard in them a distant, familiar, Jewish melody. He spoke without excitement. His hands were then shaping an eagle on a frame that looked both very ancient and new. He spoke and I wrote. Why did I write? Today I can no longer understand. Maybe it was an internal compulsion to know what caused the sordid creation to be noble in his hands. He spoke about the contracts won by some Neumark and Berl Shmuel in a contract of leasing salt and delivering it to merchants and Jewish suppliers named Simon Isaac Rosen, Isaac Shonberg, Jacob Lederman, and Michael Ettinger, and they got rich. When the Polish bank borrowed the sum of forty-two million zlotys in eighteen twenty-nine, the loan was financed by the commercial house of S. A. Frankel and the Berlin bankers connected with him in business contracts and even contacts with noble families… in eighteen thirty-five Jacob Epstein and Samuel Frankel were granted a loan of a million rubles…
Germanwriter stopped reading. His hands shook when he put the pages down on the table. Ebenezer looked at him. Renate shuts her eyes and stretches in her chair. My wife looks at the sea starting to turn blue in a pale and distinguished dawn. Fanya R. serves us coffee. We drink without a word.
Ebenezer said: And I recited those things?
The writer was silent, sipped the coffee and smiled.
Apparently yes, said Ebenezer, and also looked to the sea.
You were sleeping among the dying, said the German, you don't remember, you thought even Palestine was already conquered. That the whole world was German, that somebody had to preserve the knowledge. Geniuses were dying next to you, you said. Homer's poetry was Jewish poetry to you. But Kramer loved your boxes. I can understand. That's an astounding table, he said, and pointed to the table. And it was indeed astoundingly beautiful.
Germanwriter is now drinking Israeli Elite instant coffee, stirs in a spoonful of sugar and a little milk and is seeing a Land of Israel sunrise, like the one Ebenezer fled from to the barbed-wire fences, to Kramer. Renate says: I want to hear more and then not to hear any more ever again, and he, Germanwriter, smiles: To sit with Ebenezer, he says, and with Henkin, to read what Kramer wrote…
He was a pig and still is a pig, said Ebenezer shutting his eyes as if he were trying to remember. No anger was heard in his voice.
You mean what my husband wrote, said Renate with a smile, and reached out her hand and embraced my wife's hand, which moved to her. Ebenezer smiled again, tried to understand. Fanya R. gave Ebenezer a few pills, which he swallowed quickly and then drank a glass of water; you don't sound angry, I said with my characteristic foolishness.
My wife peeped at me, was silent a moment, became serious, and said: Anger and hatred are too narrow to include, Henkin. No response is possible. Impossible to investigate hatred or love, that you'll never understand. So your German invented a camp commander for himself.
I think he was! says Ebenezer.
Now he remembers, says Renate.
The German didn't respond. He was waiting for that, acted as if he were expecting all those words. My wife said: Can I hate those who killed Menahem? I'm too small to hate them, or to understand, or to love, or to forgive.
Time moved slowly. The light was already full when the writer put his glasses on again and went on reading. Ebenezer curled up in a corner and looked like a toy bear. On his face an old, refined, unnecessary pain was crushed.
… The amazing thing was that Ebenezer, who carved and recited, knew practically nothing himself. Once I made an interesting experiment. I said to Ebenezer: You told me about Goethe's poem "Peace above All the Mountaintops," and Ebenezer stared at me a moment and went on working. I said to him: You told me that the big beautiful tree where Goethe wrote that wonderful poem is in Hessen and around it you said a concentration camp was built. I said to Ebenezer: You're the one who said that every burgermeister felt a need to have some little camp of his own and the burgermeister of Hessen wanted a camp but didn't give up the tree. People were dying there but the ancient beautiful tree wasn't cut down. He looked at me and muttered something. I looked at him and then he said: Right, I said it. I laughed because he hadn't told me those words, I said. But he didn't remember what he had recited and so he thought those words had also been said by him. I tried to think about that wonderful tree, about that mighty spiritual strength endowed by that race that doesn't cut down an ancient tree where an admired poet sat and wrote the pinnacle of his lyric poems but neither does it give up a small concentration camp, maybe not an especially important one, around it. He was silent, what can I learn about his strange nature?
I wrote what came out of his mouth. Today I'm able to relate to those things as to my great foolishness, because that was how I also turned into a product of Jewish knowledge. A small payment and a debt of no honor. What do I have to do with the tractate on Jewish innkeepers in Polish journalism? He quoted and I wrote down, a famous essay (according to him) by a person named Christof Hilyavski, "Project, or a New Light on Sorrowful Expressions that Accuse the Jews and that Is Found in Seven Paragraphs (Kramer) for Increasing the Income of the State Treasury at the Conclusion of the Days of Freedom Stated in the Articles of Confederation Presented to the Honorable Delegates of the Confederation of the Republic in Warsaw in 1789"!
And here is a part of the libelous document (apparently I was selective):
How to correct that-
That is the remedy,
We have enough trees,
Too few hanging trees.
Hang Jews every year…
And Makolski's writings on Jewish innkeepers who exploit the peasants and enslave them, and testimony on who exploited whom and when. Ebenezer knows names, dates, indictments, and what he calls with characteristic arrogance: "A few gentiles with a conscience" like Bartolomei Djakonski, whose essay he quotes: "Principles of Agriculture, Craft and Commerce" of 1790, which is simply an analysis (expanding the words of one who fed Ebenezer) on the difficult economic situation of that time, and devotes his writing to the Jewish tenants, explains the reasons for their so-called tragic situation, their being surrounded by drunken peasants owning small farms, who are always guilty toward them, and the problem of forced superintendence, flaying the peasants' skin by the Polish nobility (which the Jews, of course, are accused of) by means of their contracts with the tenant Jews and I hear names of those with nailed ears like JaczekYszrszki, representative to the Sejm Mattheusz Tupur-Butorimowicz, spokesmen for the liberal Polish aristocracy… And the growth of the population of Warsaw from eighteen sixteen (see the adjustment) 13,579 Jews and 65,641 non-Jews. Later (eighteen twenty-five) 28,044 Jews and 98,399 non-Jews, and by the end (nineteen fourteen) 73,074 Jews and 547,470 non-Jews-the rate of residency, the rate of books of traitors. The rate of left-handed writings-what wonderful knowledge!