The cats who were seen hiding between the fence and the house, where a tree was sprouting, were searching for a bend of the stones in the auto cemetery and suddenly they also fled all at once. The house couldn't be seen now. Who loses, who wins, the pain inside him, he hopped toward the tents on the seashore and wanted to get up and go to the settlement, to Grandmother, to be a live hero returning to the kindergarten teacher Eve and to her husband Teacher All's Well. Here, Eve, is a chick who did come back, your other chicks were left there. To see the gravestones, to forget. But he got up in the morning and went to the officer of the city. The office was humming with soldiers getting new uniforms or returning uniforms or requesting transfers. From the officer of the city he got addresses of those who had been with him. He tried to remember the battle he had left the day before yesterday and everything was mixed up in his mind, the battle, the movies, Laurence Olivier playing Hamlet, Goethe is better than Shakespeare. The girl he loved at night disappeared, maybe I dreamed all those things. He walked with the list in his pocket stood still in the street and saw an apartment on the second floor. On the balcony hung flowerpots and a gigantic awning covered it from the sun. He went up and knocked on the door. A woman opened it. She looked at him and tried to wipe away some tears seen drying in her left eye. Boaz said: I'm Boaz, I fought with Johnny. The woman brought him inside and gave him tea. He drank it and tried to talk, but he couldn't. She said, what are you seeking here, Boaz? He didn't know and so he left. Then he went to the cafe and sat for three days and waited for some parents to find him there. He bought a gigantic Bristol sheet and wrote on it in big letters "I know dead people," and hung the Bristol paper on the tree in front of Kassit Cafe, among the announcements of exhibitions and poetry books that were now starting to come out at dizzying speed. But only one man asked him if he knew Menashe Aharono- vitch and Boaz said he didn't. People who knew him laughed and Minna appeared with the torn finger and said Boaz was out of his mind but she didn't dare approach him. He sat there at the table, alone, full of a new joy that bloomed in him, waiting to give testimony. The waiters served him beer or coffee. The money ran out and he left. The policeman who tried to tear the Bristol sheet off the tree couldn't do it because Boaz fought for his right to give testimony. Three days later he sat with a woman he didn't know and tried to explain to her how the woman he had slept with in the hotel looked. The woman he didn't know thought that was surely love and didn't understand him at all even though he talked about love as if it was a war you died in. He wanted to tell her, That's perfect non-love, but I'm searching for her. And only at the end did he start striding toward Menahem Henkin's house. Here there was already a problem, he knew Menahem well, he defended Menahem, and after he died they said maybe he had been all right. Then the "maybe" was erased. The street was flooded with light but Boaz walked in the shade and when he had to cross the street he leaped across. He believed he'd find the young man who beat and was beaten by him embracing the woman he almost succeeded in loving in the hotel, but he didn't. Courtyards swallowed up the beautiful and the good who tried to seem indifferent. People were already starting to come out and seek a new substance in their new state, which distributed food coupons and declared austerity. When he came to Henkin's house, he saw a dim light, loved the name of the street, Deliverance Street, near the sea, small, pitiful houses, tipping over, and clearly they had once been nicer and more festive. He wanted to tell Henkin that he had sat in Kassit Cafe three days and waited for him and why didn't he come, but he saw a scarecrow of a man drying himself at a dead castor oil tree. Henkin looked suited to the place. His clothes were dark, his hat was from another decade, the music that burst out of him was a waltz of slaughtered ducks. He looked avenged and defeated. With eyes full of sad cunning Teacher Henkin searched for his son at a fence covered with brambles, now wretched and neglected. A small garbage cart stood there, empty, rusted, and the enclosures of the port looked too bright in the sunlight. The intense blue of the sky swallowed up the particle of distance between him and the sea. The houses protected only themselves. Henkin didn't protect anything. Boaz stood there stuck and waited and Henkin looked at him. After about an hour, Henkin went into the house, opened the slats of the shutter a little and peeped outside. Boaz went on standing. A little while later, he came outside and gave Boaz a glass of cold water. Boaz didn't drink it and returned the water to Henkin. He saw Menahem playing in the yard and thought, what could I have told him, Henkin couldn't have recognized Boaz's face because of the strong light and he saw only the stunned silhouette in the afternoon light and then he dared ask, he asked: Who are you?
Just, said Boaz.
Just what?
Just standing here.
Henkin wanted to ask, but some skepticism had already sneaked into him, that sense of loss that, anyway, he wouldn't answer him. He muttered something and said, And doesn't the young man have a name?
I did have, said Boaz and then he started pitying all that life here and he went away. He took the kitbag from the tent, walked to the central bus station and got on a bus. He had soldier's tickets and rode free. The discharge would start tomorrow. Henkin waited a few minutes and went inside. He locked the door and tried to recall the young man's face, but he couldn't.
Tape / -
And then a wind started blowing and Teacher Henkin said to his wife: They won't understand, Hasha Masha, they won't understand, there's an undermined system of fates here, look… but she didn't want to read.
Tape / -
… And once again I recall the young man who stood here years ago. Now I think it really was Boaz Schneerson but maybe I'm wrong. Boaz never confirmed that he stood here and took the glass of cold water and didn't deny it either. The story of the Last Jew was also constructed from the end to the beginning, and only after I invested a few years in my investigation of the Last Jew did I meet Ebenezer completely by chance, even though he was here, near me, all that time. And after the meeting with Ebenezer, doubts about the hundreds of pages I had written stirred in me and I decided to think about writing the book with that German. Maybe that writing itself is an attempt to decipher, to uncover the things whose logical sequence is so strange to me.
My dear son Menahem I lost many years ago. Menahem was killed in two different places: he was killed in battle in the valley near Mount Radar where he lay among thirty-two bodies, and he fell in battle for the Old City of Jerusalem, at dawn on May twentieth, nineteen forty-eight. Maybe she's right, Hasha Masha, who maintains that the glory of mourners in front of a mirror is common in me. I'm trying to reconstruct things: I then felt that life stopped all at once, wasn't in store for me anyplace else, the energy in me was masked by the pain that was too splendid in my wife's eyes, but was all I had left. I sank into endless thinking about my son and my own life was only a setting for the sorrow I shaped in me; like somebody who creates life on the model of death. I looked at my little house on Deliverance Street, near the old port of Tel Aviv, against the background of the sea that sinks there a bit to the north, makes a kind of semi-bow, and at the undrained station is a small airport where small planes land or take off over our house. I looked then at the desolation of the forsaken concrete of the port, the abandoned enclosures, the creased houses, and the dusty trees, eaten by sea salt, and the sand that penetrates everything here, thickens holes, turns everything living into scarred desolation bereft of beauty. It's hard for me to describe the essence of that pain, they're the strongest yearnings for a person whose death is never grasped. That death is in you, lives in you, in the chest, the dream, waking, slumbering grown to somewhere you have no idea of, and then the wakefulness, the emptiness, the waking distress. Memories are nothing but nonstop poundings in softness, maybe a mute shout in a dream and you don't know whether you're dreaming it or it's dreaming you.