She thanked him, my wife, and smiled at me. That was her first smile at me in years.
I was terrified.
Who was Secret Charity? I asked.
The two of them looked at me and wanted to answer and then Ebenezer said, You'll know everything, Henkin, everything you'll know, what was over long ago is starting over… Look, it's morning now and before it was night. Maybe a new millennium is starting?
We went outside. The sun was already beating down and Renate was supporting my wife. We walked to the car. Ebenezer fell asleep on his feet. His wife dragged him inside and started lowering the shutters. Before he disappeared, his hat slipped off and he picked it up with some tired and clownish acrobatics. Renate sat behind the wheel and the writer fell asleep next to her. I shook the old man's hand. Renate kissed my wife, who bent over to her, she started the car, and drove off.
We went into the house. The heavy curtains preserved the night chill and for the first time in years we got into one bed together, dressed, but hugging, still silent. She kissed me softly and fell asleep. I wept but she didn't see. We woke up in the afternoon. We were hungry; we felt like two kids. We ate something Hasha Masha warmed up and we fell asleep again. This time we took off our clothes. We hugged, if we had been young we would have given birth to a son. The son would die afterward. But we were too old to give birth. It was beautiful to return to my wife's dark and fascinating openings. She hugged me and dug her fingernails into me. I thought to myself, She's become a cat, the mother of my dead son. We opened the windows and Hasha Masha made good coffee. A knock was heard on the door. I opened it and in the door stood Germanwriter and his wife. He was holding a big bouquet of flowers. We drank coffee, we looked at Ebenezer's house. The German said: Now he'll pretend to be sleeping. And indeed the windows were shut.
We got into the car and drove off. The road to Jerusalem was exciting as always. The German looked at the trees and the mountains and after the ardor of talking the night before the words seemed to have died out and were no longer stammered. Renate told how her son once took his sock, wiped his nose, and then put the sock back on. She laughed. Hasha Masha also laughed. The writer was tired and pensive. When we arrived, he said suddenly: What a beautiful place. We parked the car and walked on the path toward the cemetery. The light was savage but the trees soothed it. Their thick crests covered us. The path was full of dry and wet pine needles, the graves were lined up like a military parade. We stopped at Menahem's tombstone. His name was engraved in stone and so was his army number. I wanted to say something. And all I could say was, Here, next to Menahem, Yashka is buried. Yashka fell in one of the two battles in which Menahem was killed. Nothing is known about him except his name, he came to Cyprus in a ship of illegal immigrants, from Cyprus he came to Haifa and from there he went to the last battle he took part in. They weren't even sure of his name.
Meanwhile night fell. We stood there a long time. The moonlight that now beamed tried to save the horrifying sight of the dead lined up under the hewn stones. It all looked like a cheap stage set for something with no name, the pain, for some reason, maybe because of the passing night, was also fuller and more divided, desolate, and so I had nothing to say. I looked at my new friends, they guessed me correctly, I knew that from their faces. On the way back, the writer said: Who remains there, you or him?
I didn't answer, I thought. And then I said: Funny that Ebenezer thinks you wrote the journal. He didn't answer.
We saw each other twice more before they left. We sat a long night in Ebenezer's house and he told us, as in a dream, about Secret Charity and his mother Rebecca. Some things I knew from my investigation of him and some the German knew. We smiled at one another like two conspirators. Then the Germans left and we went to the airport with them. I had never been there before: the noise, the turmoil, the giant planes, all that was new to me.
Hasha Masha and I went back to playing World War II games. I corrected the old map. Jordana came and went, Noga came sometimes. In the game of old battles we came to the Normandy landing. Now I used more perfect flags, with pins with round colored heads. I bought a television set and I started cooking. It's hard for me to understand how a strict and harsh teacher like me turned into a cook. I love the smell of cooking and that activity whose purpose you see immediately. Ebenezer gave me two carved birds. I bought flowerpots and planted cactuses and the garden is growing beautiful. Hasha Masha found some soothing that allows us to go on living, she even started playing the old piano I bought her. She plays Russian and Israeli folk songs and a lot of Chopin, Brahms, Mendelssohn, and Schumann. There's so much romanticism still in those old bones. At night after we hug we dream of Menahem. Each of us with his or her own dream. But we're together now and only the dreams are apart and come together again. A month later, our committee received a big contribution from Germany to plant a forest in the name of the fallen of Brigade G. I was chosen to speak on behalf of the bereaved parents. At night Hasha Masha told me: I hate sacrifices to the dead, but you spoke well, Obadiah. I thought about Boaz, about his father who calls him Samuel, about his grandmother Rebecca in the settlement, near what was once Marar, near the vineyards, near the almond trees. I thought: When will the German and I be able to write together the book about the Last Jew? Or perhaps that will be a book about ourselves?
I didn't know.
Tape / -
Samuel Lipker of the Sonderkommando. What do you mean some gravedigger of the dead. Eitdatius was Bishop in Shaybes. He wrote the continuation of the memoirs of the world from the year three hundred seventy-eight AD to four hundred sixty-eight. He continued the tradition of Jerome and Eusebius of Caesarea. Aaron ben Amos, of the tribe of Levi, Aaron Aurora of Babylon, Aaron head of the court in Pombaditha. Aaron head of the court in Zelikow (the glory of Uziel) Aaron rabbi of the city of Knishin (author of "Jacob's Coat)"..
Aaron Rav ben Rabbi-not the author of "Oil of Myrrh" but the grandson of the author of "Name of the Great"..
Tape / -
With a good bottle of orange soda to be thirsty. Henkin hadn't been seen for a few days now. The sea ranges from turbulent to billowy. When I came to the Land of Israel, Samuel appeared and called me father. I said to him Samuel, and he said, I'm Boaz. And he despised me. Maybe he wanted to cry. Me too, old mother Rebecca laughed a hissing wicked laugh. There was a rage in her because I returned after forty years and didn't explain to her why. Maybe the jackal who raped her in her youth laughed in her. Ever since, my dear Samuel, I've been waiting for you!
Tape / -
Maybe that's the preface to the Last Jew by the director of the solar system who's based in Berlin, thinks that television antennas are arms asking heaven for salvation, sees wonderful people writing letters to one another and finds a small music box in abandoned houses where they listen to innocent melodies and say, Oh, what beautiful work. And the lord of the solar system sits and tries to restore the history for me, I want to get to Boaz who returned from the war at another time, hit a woman on the boulevard, coveted her phony gold ring, then invented Menahem for Henkin and killed him one more time, the director who writes a book like a shoplifter in a piano store; a deep sense of frustration. God had to create the world, but after He created it He changed His mind but by then it was too late. The gods of the solar system can indeed create or perhaps even have to, but they can't participate in running the world they created, since it's their night, in the morning they wake up from it and it's like a shadow. God created the world out of His waking. His point of view is different from the point of view of what are called human beings. He destroyed a world and created a mixture of chaos, storm clouds of gas from explosions in space, all those were the awakening of the world when his moon hit it. But for what are called human beings that was an event that was yet to happen. For God it had already happened.