Lily made tea for the drunken Lionel and then she lay down beside him and was Melissa with little nipples who killed angels of death with her soft eyelashes.
What made you Lily made Himmler Himmler, said Lionel with his eyes shut. And thus he started writing her a farewell letter in his mind. She told him: What's simple about love? You were the first man in my life and you'll be the last. She didn't understand how Lionel knew that Ebenezer had no daughters. She wanted Ebenezer to have daughters. Lionel got angry, but couldn't explain why Ebenezer had no daughters. And so maybe he felt she was immune to him, maybe because of her love, maybe because of her youth as a wunderkind of the Hitler-jugend maybe she had never been a member of, and they talked about the resemblance between Samuel and Lionel. Lionel got angry, as if the heavy blood coursing in him truly had a voice and a shape as the professors and sages in this city had taught for ten years. A scene of a dream she had had arose in Lily's mind. In her dream, she told him, her father, who was now a prisoner of the Russians, was stumbling in a forest and she was a baby bird. Her father picked up the baby bird and decided to cook it. Then he would shoot at birds who came to ask for the baby bird. He put her into a basket, and walked, and that's how I was adopted, she said. Lionel thought of Joseph Rayna. Once, when he had heard about him, he had wanted so much for him to be his father so he could kill him. He thought of how his mother had told him about Rebecca Schneerson who would translate people into an eternal texture of contempt like copy paper that transmits things and serves as a fluent copy but preserves the original. Those thoughts begat in him an almost regal lust that was translated into a tormented and enormous night of love and copulation like some whorehouse of angels, he thought, and when he woke up and saw her sleeping, he noticed how white and clear her eyes were. Don't die on me, he said in a panic. And then he sank into sleep and when he woke up he saw her eyes wide open and looking at him. The responsibility filled him with a bitter taste. She'll look so beautiful on York Avenue, she'll dry the tears of the world, she has no right to wonder about Ebenezer's lost daughters, and he said to her: When Samuel Lipker searched for diamonds in corpses, you sat and drew sunsets with flags at the Baltic shore and a heroic and bold race lusted for you with avid eyes, but she didn't answer him. She tried to remember how beautiful it was to fall asleep in his arms, and she said: But if you decided that I'm Melissa, then let me be Melissa retroactively, too. The vanishing figure of her father didn't grieve her. In her dream, she remembered, she dreamed that somebody pointed an accusing finger at her, but since she never knew what guilt was she didn't know what the finger meant. You know, she said, you're now all the memories I have, I came to you from total darkness.
That night he said he had to go away for a while. He brought a lot of groceries and two pairs of nylon stockings. She was silent and looked at him, and whispered: I'll be here, Lionel. Soon, they'll finish repairing the house across the street, the apartment there belonged to my grandmother, she died in the war. The phone number in her apartment is 46655. If you don't come back and don't call, you'll find me behind Himmelstrasse, in the new cemetery, in the northern part where they're now burying people. Look for the letter S. I'll die secretly even if you don't come back, but if I die, Lionel, all your women will be dead in my eyelashes like the eyelashes that filled Melissa's death. If there's life after death, and if Germans are allowed to enter there, I'll wait for you there, too.
For a whole year they didn't see one another. At night, he called her from distant cities, had long conversations with her and once wept into the phone for two whole hours and didn't say a word and she listened. Once she told him about the house she had moved to, told that she was working in the committee of DPs and people were coming back from Poland and Czechoslovakia and other places and searching for their families and she tried to find the addresses. Lily told that an American officer sent her a package of food every week and he whispered, It's me, you fool, and she laughed, he wasn't sure, and she said, I know my dear, and I'm waiting for you. And he told her: You're naive, Lily, and she said: Maybe, I eat little, don't look bad. I bought two new dresses, also sewed you a coat of thick cloth I found in an excavation under a house they repaired and I made myself a shroud, Jews die in shrouds, don't they? Thinking about your eyes and Samuel's. About your oval ellipses, demons have green-yellow eyes wrapped in oval ellipses!
Lionel, who was interrogating prisoners in various cities, got in touch with Jews who were busy sneaking across borders and ascending to the Land of Israel. He got them cigarettes and food and for a long time he'd hang around in places where roads converged of Jews fleeing from northern Europe and flowing south to get to the Land of Israel. Lily understood who he was seeking and once told him, When you find him come back to me.
Tape / -
That year, the wandering of peoples began, my friend Goebbelheydrich- himmel. People, like little ants, slipped across borders, through mountains, in forests, slowly slowly came to gathering places near Marseilles or Naples, in the forests of Yugoslavia, in many places they gathered. And I searched for Ebenezer.
Tape / -
Lionel travels. People start setting real clocks, no longer covering up sin. My mother was a lampshade, said Samuel, and Ebenezer now performed in a hundred and sixty nightclubs. Now he appeared on a list of professional nightclub entertainers. And one night in Marseilles Lionel Secret sees a long line of Jews. The Jews are waiting to board a small ship named Redemption. A small ship, like a Mississippi riverboat, says an American standing not far from it and goes off. A young man comes to Lionel, too short to be the thug who taught ourselves to be, his arms strong, he clasps Lionel's hands and thanks him for the cigarettes and food, asks Lionel to get weapons too. Emotionally, it's still hard for Lionel to smuggle weapons they'll use to fight the British. The British medals still flutter over his shirt pocket. The line to the ship winds around along a deserted and forgotten quay. The people sit or stand, buy, sell, hold onto their miserable belongings, scared of every stranger, and Lionel notices Ebenezer and Samuel. Ebenezer is sitting on a suitcase. At the sight of Lionel, Samuel takes off and Ebenezer points to an empty place and says, Sit down, take a place in line, we're going.
Samuel told me to go, he added, and I'm going. Samuel says I was born there. One of the Israelis announces on the loudspeaker that the boilers have broken down and there may be a delay of a few hours. Tea will be distributed to you, he added, but nobody got up, they're afraid to lose their place. There's room for four hundred people on the ship, and there are seven hundred people standing here. Sounds of strife are heard in the distance. Behind a destroyed enclosure, a battle rages between Samuel Lipker and another man. The man bought a defective camera from Samuel and is demanding his money back. Lionel leaves Ebenezer gazing at the water of the port striking the concrete wall, and stands not far from the enclosure, Samuel hits the man and then wants to go back to the line and then he looks at Ebenezer's back, Ebenezer is sitting up and dozing with his eyes wide open, Samuel discovers Lionel looking at him, shifts his eyes from Ebenezer to the American officer. The power coming from him annoys him, he says: You think you're an important person because you've got a house and money, I remember how you saved a few pennies! I've got a few francs, maybe you need a little money to buy some ice cream or chewing gum? Lionel, who looks from Samuel to Ebenezer, feels some calm, as if his whole life had been aimed at this moment, some moment when he had to know well how to act, and he said: Looks like I hoped you'd come back.