And then the Captain saw the row of Ebenezer's birds coated with black lacquer. The birds stood on the cabinet, and when the Captain looked at them they looked so wonderful he almost forgot why he had come to that house. He stood stooped over, conspicuous by the sudden change in him, and the birds looked as if they were trying to fly. Only later on, when he had sipped the fine wine Rebecca had gotten from the manager of the winepress with every shipment of wine grapes, only then, perhaps as a response to the bliss that flooded him at the sight of the birds and Rebecca's beauty, only then did he start talking about the life and bliss possible for strangers as for relatives, and after all, he said to her: Every husband and wife were once strangers to one another, and she said: And that's how they remain, Captain, and he tried not to hear what she said, expressed his admiration of the birds, and Rebecca said: Those rare birds are carved by my Mongoloid son. And Ebenezer, who was sitting in a corner cracking sunflower seeds, said: She means me, sir, and the Captain said: It's impossible to carve birds wooden and metaphysical at the same time without a Jewish brain! And Rebecca said: But as far as I can tell, you're not a Jew, Captain, and he said: I am what I am, according to a preformed model, made to change with circumstances, and Goldenberg is indeed a Swiss name, but my father, who wasn't Swiss, could also have been called Goldenberg. She didn't understand exactly what he meant, but she didn't think it was important enough to rack her brains over. He said to her: There is no reality, honorable Mrs. Schneerson, there are only distant memories, real hatred, and unrequited love. Rebecca asked: Doesn't unrequited love have to start at some requited point? and he thought she was joking, but for some reason she enjoyed the conversation, and he said: No, unrequited love is the beginning situation of a dream that realizes reality. There's a certain opposition here, he added, but in time everything becomes clear. I'm cursed by everybody, Jews, Arabs, English, Christians, Shiites, Sunnis, Alawis, and that's how I can defend myself. If I had one friend I was fond of, or one nation I could cling to without prior conditions, and respect, maybe I would lose the right of criticism and shorten my honor and my life. Did you notice, dear lady, that I said "honor" before "life"? If I'm not honored, I live in a cloud of fake and unnecessary honor. Only somebody who has his own friend or group is truly in danger, so I'm safer than everybody and tremble with love that is not yet realized as unrequited from the start and so is full of opportunity never to be realized, but that love is very close, and I am more protected than endangered as many thought.
The Captain excitedly felt the birds. He claimed they were wonderful creations, maybe the most wonderful he had seen since the bronze, stone, and wood statues he had seen in the museum in Cairo, and suddenly he spoke with no real connection to the birds, said that Arab children had to be taught how to paint the eyes of a dead fish to look as if it had just been caught. He even tried to learn from Ebenezer the secret of the lacquers and the sort of metaphysical geometry, as he put it, of his works. Ebenezer spoke slowly and Rebecca gazed vacantly at the ceiling. He said: I mix lacquers and carpenters' glue, solutions, I invented a spray, resin, I know how to wound trees without hurting them, know flowers with colorful pollen, and I hear the wood by its weeping and laughing, carve faces and birds, sometimes I recognize the faces and sometimes not. Rebecca said her son wasn't exactly a great scholar and had only gone as far as sixth grade in the settlement school whose level of education was as high as its ethics. And if his father were alive, he would have taught him something. Only after the Captain had gallantly proposed marriage and an impressive dowry and had been turned down with a politeness that really wasn't characteristic of Rebecca did he clutch his sword to his thigh again and hear Rebecca talk about what she wanted to talk with him when she saw him following her in the street. She talked about the complicated network of canals to transport the water of the Jordan from its sources straight to the Negev and the south. That way, she said, we can buy miserable desert land for pennies and then, secretly, transport water and work the land and establish the agriculture my husband dreamed of but I realized, and we'll be rich as the Jews in America. The Captain was excited to hear the words, in his mind's eye he already saw the big canal, the dams, the dike, and the twisting, state-of-the-art pipe. Soon after, he promised Rebecca to convey her ideas to the authorities, who sounded like his cousins when he mentioned them, he recited to her the book of Psalms from beginning to end and from end to beginning and Ebenezer fell asleep in his chair even when two members of the settlement whistled to him in the window to come with them to beat up an Arab who stole Horowitz's mare.
The Captain stood in the middle of the room Rebecca had built in memory of Nehemiah and recited. A murmur that reminded her of Nehemiah's look when he spoke about the Land of Israel now rose in her ears. Ebenezer woke up, listened a moment, and then fixed in himself some memory of reciting words that were the same as a very certain music and he tried to think of the birds flying in his mind and he had to cage them in wood, for he had never invented a bird but caged the birds of his mind in the wood he carved, and he let the wood follow the prepared shapes and Rebecca saw Ebenezer open his eyes wide and shut them again and she pondered the melody sunk deep in her heart and didn't pay any heed to it, and some tune that played with Nehemiah's old excitement and her weeping on his last day, those were yearnings that turned into a melody more ancient than those yearned for and talked about and observed, something ancient that rose in her and overcame her, and she pondered the history of her family, pondered Rebecca Secret Charity, and said: It wasn't in vain that those awful people lived and dreamed and shouted, and she thought about the profound and hidden connection there seemed to be between swindlers like her and the Captain and God. Suddenly she understood that if she uttered aloud the chapters of Psalms, whose mysterious melancholy she always knew, but hadn't dwelt on, the chapters would turn into a force that would reach the farthest place she could imagine, and the touch would turn the impending death into something that could be directed. Her legs grew light her head was suddenly empty, light and flighty. And out of an anger that gnawed at her against Nehemiah she started forgiving him now of all times because he had managed to hurt her so perfectly, and she thought about her relation to herself, that is to the God of her fathers, the God played as a clown by her fellow farmers in the Land where there is no shade or corners, and night falls suddenly black and ruddy. Ebenezer panted. Poor orphan, she said to herself. The Captain's solidity was splendid, she had to admit that he was a noble man with no purpose or homeland and that the strip of light gleaming on him was both his geography and his biography. What worlds woven in the force of the words could start revolutions in the cosmic order, she thought, a thought foreign to her. And deep inside her, she could feel how she once again gathers corpses in the suitcase, writes "Deliverance" on the ceiling, her virginity cut off at the terrorist river, some threatening and frightening force caught in her words about the Land, building and with the word destroying, and she said to herself: There's a connection between circumlocution and circumcision, a Mount Nebo of words, words that bring rain in due season and not in due season. Rebecca knew that those Psalms or the melody heard from them have no connection with belief or nonbelief, just as her life with Nehemiah and her nonlife with Joseph Rayna had no connection with love or nonlove. And so she returned to the room where the Captain was still reciting. Her son dozing in his chair dreams of birds in shining lacquer and in her a barrier was now planted that would later be fixed, between her and her milieu, and a melody of the Book of Psalms that would be the meaning of her life. When the Captain finished reciting he sat down to drink wine and his face was pale from the effort, his nose looked red and his cheeks looked gray, but she applauded him, and at that moment, long before he was born, Boaz Schneerson was saved from the death lurking for him in the war.