The Jews got atom bombs from the Elders of Zion, said the Arabs. You drew clocks and you wrote mysterious numbers on the shells so that if they didn't explode, at least they'd frighten. The explosion worked by smell, said the Arabs, if an Arab soldier got close to it it exploded from the smell. The Jews were vaccinated against it, said the man, for example, in Hiroshima not one Jew was killed. The logic was perfect, Boaz said to him. So you were saved, said the man, I don't remember, said Boaz, but added: Grandmother recited Psalms throughout the war and saved me, even the battle I don't remember.
It bothers you to be rehabilitated, said the man.
But I wasn't there, said Boaz, it's a mistake, and the man said, go home and you'll remember, it'll help you. Boaz said, I still need to know who really came out of those battles, not sure it's me. The man listed names of the dead but Boaz stood up and wanted to pay. He said, I don't remember them, the man said, I'll pay, and Boaz saw the hair stuck to his scalp and thought maybe antitoxin for hair, a future invention, and with a razor blade he always kept in his pocket in a wrinkled old cigarette pack he wanted to cut his circumcision, but also the hair of that man, and the bitter rage evoked in him by that superfluous memory.
In the evening, he went down to the seashore. A man sat there sculpting. Boaz watched him. A couple lay between the darkness and the limestone hill, tossing and turning. The sculptor said: So what, I sculpt eternal statues in water. I sculpt Joshua, Moses, Nimrod the hero, Ben-Gurion. Up above they've already started building the last villas of Saints of the Holocaust Street. A party was going on in one of the houses and music burst out of an open window. A boy was dragging sardines and beer to the party. Near the ledge of the boardwalk were two crows that vanished into the sunset. Invisible walls collapsed on him and Boaz said to the sculptor: That sunset is sweet as fire, and the sculptor said to him, Got to know how to capture yells, and Boaz envied the sand under the lovers. He strode along the ledge of the boardwalk until it stopped. The sea cast a pale light of a city erased of houses, a streetlamp illuminated the sea magic, the iron of the ledge was rusty, and at the ledge stood a young woman and looked at the sea. Boaz stood not far from her and looked at the sea too. He didn't even know that she was standing, at any rate, he surely didn't think of it, he was thinking of Minna, why had he plucked the ring off her. When he discovered the woman he looked at her. She didn't move, as if she were waiting for somebody who hadn't come for some time now. A wild silence was strewn on her face, which she extinguished. She had a pug nose and her cheeks weren't symmetrical. Her eyes turned to him didn't see him. The question conveyed to him in her unseeing look was: How can a young man have eyes that are three thousand years old? Thus they approached one another and then he kissed her with a delicacy he felt she deserved and didn't know was in him. Embracing but each one alone, they ascended the path to the small hotel with the discount for soldiers and a free wash. They got the discount and like everybody else they wrote made-up names. Then she tried to weep and not say anything she'd regret afterward. Too bad I didn't ask her name, he thought several days later, but there was a crib there and they said, That will be our baby, she spoke broken Hebrew and said: There it was bad, and showed him marks on her arms and he tried to tell something and didn't know what, and they laughed because she was the almost imaginary lover of a person whose cruelty Boaz couldn't imagine but warmth flowed from her, that flame that melted her, and at three in the morning she said: I was beautiful and they saw only my back. And he wanted to tell her how beautiful she was now in bed, naked, but he didn't have women he dreamed about years ago and so he was silent. He wanted to understand how they penetrated her, how they didn't ask questions, and his distress became unbearable, he who wanted to be independent in love began pitying her and himself and almost spoke, and then she whispered to him don't say I love, don't you dare, and he got angry that she began teaching him and after they quarreled he brought her water and she drank from his hands, lapped it like a dog, and he got down on all fours and said: Don't love, don't love, and she said see, Hebrew, I don't know but they put into my body that thing to honor Jewish girls and in his mind's eye he saw her standing there alone waiting for somebody else on the beach of Tel Aviv and started wondering whether he had also been there, and the pressure in his chest grew and then he had to hit her, insult her, and before she managed to tell him her name, she got dressed in a hurry and said: I'm going, and he said fine and only afterward, after he lay for an hour and tried to shut his eyes, did he understand what he was losing, but by then it was too late. He thought about the little girl with flaxen hair next to the flowerpots and wanted to understand what was happening to all of them and said I'm Boaz Schneerson and he went down to the pay phone and called his grandmother in the settlement and talked with her for a long time and could sense her wicked laugh.
After he saw the cement in Mugrabi he ate a hot dog in a roll on the square. Behind him flew a distorted picture of Laurence Olivier, and the hot dog vendor tried to prove to him again that Goethe was greater than Shakespeare, less violent, more sophisticated. The clock showed the wrong time and Boaz recalled that in the war they said that after it was all over, they'd hold a brigade reunion in the telephone booth near Mugrabi. He started searching desperately for the young woman he had spent the night with but she wasn't anywhere. Among the things details began to be clear. A man limped toward the movie box office and a woman passed by him, bumped into him, hiccuped, and Boaz laughed. She had cruel small teeth, she dropped a hat, and when she picked it up she opened her purse, took out powder, and smeared it on her cheeks and then in the light of the streetlamp she smeared lipstick on her lips. Since he was stuck to the corner, he could see her gaping mouth, her squinting eyes, her teeth with a little bit of lipstick stuck to them, and then she blotted the lipstick with a handkerchief. Boaz tried to remember the dead, recalled that Menahem Henkin lay next to him, but was dead and his blood stuck to him, so Boaz wanted to break a clothes hanger because Menahem Henkin used to break hangers in his childhood, Menahem Henken told Boaz.
Then he went to see the second show of a film whose name he forgot, and felt as if he had come to the end of the road and where would he escape now, and then the strange event happened to him that I'm telling about in these tapes. Boaz stood at the kiosk and tried to read the head line of the evening paper and very close to the counter, next to a hurricane lamp, stood a young man Boaz was sure came out of the battle the man in the cafe had told him about. His head was wreathed with a halo of light and his face looked like the face of Boaz that the man had told him about. The kiosk owner said to the young man: So from the ship you were sent straight to the war? And the young man said, No, first I was in the port of Haifa. And the young man was so familiar, when Boaz looked at his arm in the light of the hurricane lamp and saw that it moved from his own shoulder. The young man finished drinking and now hid the newspaper headline from Boaz and over his head hung an ad for Nesher beer. Boaz thought, The betrayals will end for a while, so he also understood that no envy would save him but he knew that signals were sent to him from the depths of the war he had fought in, or that that young man had fought in for him. Headlights flashed and there were still many painted streetlamps from the war and the lights seemed to be caressing the gloom. Thoughts that didn't come from a certain place stuck in his mind and a bird built itself a nest on the roof of the kiosk. The man said: That's a honeysucker, so small, every year he comes and makes his nest on the roof. And the young man asked if that tiny sucker could be the same bird and Boaz who knew the answer from childhood, couldn't have spoken, stood on the side, darkened, terrified, the back of the young man's neck filled him with longings for Minna's finger dripping blood and he tried to remember when he had bought her the ring in Hepzibah where Grandmother thought he was stealing pens and erasers, but he couldn't recall. When the young man moved a shadow seemed to shift or a curtain to be pulled. The kiosk was gaping like a wound. A caprice of chiaroscuro made the young man look as if he were going away into a halo of light, but it was only outlines of non-body.