We tried to investigate according to known experiments, for example the experiments of Professor Alexander Luria. Following his example, we urged Ebenezer to recall something that happened in his childhood. We told him about something that happened to him that we found out from a source other than him. When we talked to him about that memory, connected with his dead wife, and we measured his pulse, the pulse speeded up and then fell back. When we asked him to recite a forgotten memory also connected with Dana, a memory he dredged up from what he himself had amassed from things he had heard about himself, from others, the pulse rate was much weaker (seventy-two beats as opposed to a hundred twenty). We tried many other experiments enumerated in the full report and this is not the place to go into detail. The process was repeated several times. The memories that were not told to him did not change the pulse rate. They were alien to him, even though they had happened to him and were a considerable part of the web of his life.
Comparisons with people whose memories are as phenomenal as his did not help us either. We questioned A. G., who now appears all over Europe on television screens and defeats sophisticated computers with quick and correct answers. That gave us no help. Those people were conscious of what they knew. They learned when they were in distress and did that to remain alive, so that in the meantime they would not be impaired. They did not erase themselves to fill the empty space of their brain with knowledge. They learned equations or books by heart because they had to triumph over nothingness and fear.
I attach the tapes. I understand from your words that the book you and the Israeli teacher want to write will be composed or woven mainly of our tapes. Keep in mind that the life of Sam Lipp (Samuel Lipker), for example, is known to Ebenezer only when he was in a trance of indexing his memory. In his real life he doesn't know. In his real life Samuel may also be dying. The Jews are still all dying, and always will die. Hence, we in fact did not succeed in deciphering the secret of Ebenezer's memory, but only in documenting the nature of remembrance. Just as Ebenezer builds racks, so he builds a world of knowledge. The conversion and shoe sizes of a group of Warsaw writers. For us at least the mystery remains. Are we witnessing a kind of spiritual suicide? Vengeance? Escape? I said before: Ebenezer doesn't judge. As far as he's concerned, the Germans are neither bad nor good. Not those he meets today, and not those he met before. The shadows in his brain have no concrete reality. The shadows have no judgment, no past and no future. Fanya R. is his wife. Does Ebenezer live with her or does somebody Ebenezer imagines as Ebenezer live with her? We have questions that only a metaphysical and historiological pathology could solve and therefore science, as in many cases, remains helpless. Art may indeed grant legitimacy to the absurd. Existence is absurd. Ebenezer is absurd and there's no possibility of granting him legitimacy, maybe it's possible to tell him, not about him. As for us, we shall send you the full research, but if our research adds to the perplexity or enlightens it, only Ebenezer's God knows.
Yours truly,
Alexander Twiggy Henderson Levy
Tape / -
Got to bring Henkin the poem, thinks Boaz.
Thinking poem.
Menahem poem.
Boaz remembered how they brought Menahem Henkin to the school gym. The commander looked at the three corpses and said: So Henkin got a summons? And he wrote: Menahem Henkin, Palmah, Harel, the fourth brigade, headquarters company, to inform the parents, Deliverance Street, Tel Aviv.
Fuck it, he said, soon I won't have any live soldiers left! From Tel Aviv, a soldier went to inform the Henkin family that their son had fallen. Boaz lay under a tree and smoked. Years later, he would part from Teacher Henkin on Ben-Yehuda Street. The sky is blue and the clouds float quickly. The vendor of German books crossed the street and walked past Hayarkon Street. Boaz started walking to the central bus station, stood in line, boarded the bus and fell asleep. An hour later, he came to the settlement, it was afternoon. Rebecca expected him as always. She didn't measure, she didn't complain, she didn't pressure, she sat at the screened window and waited. For some years now, Captain Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg had been living in Ebenezer's old house. The house is rented to him with a lease renewed every year. If Boaz wants to live here someday, he'll have someplace to live, said the old woman.
A month after Ebenezer disappeared and boarded the ship that took him to Europe, Rebecca Schneerson went to the offices of the National Committee in Jerusalem. She asked to speak with the head of the committee. They told her that the head of the committee was abroad on a mission. She said she wanted to adopt her grandson as her son. She was told that wasn't possible. Rebecca tried the chief rabbinate and the various district offices and deigned to meet with people whose existence she once wouldn't have been willing to admit. The Captain's connections with the British Mandate authorities weren't any help either. A grandmother can adopt her grandson, she was told, but to state explicitly and officially that Boaz is Rebecca's son by birth was not possible. She wrote a long letter explaining her request. According to her, there was no proof that the person called his mother did indeed give birth to him. In another letter, she claimed that Boaz was her son from a marriage she had never disclosed. She quoted a well-known and reliable Russian newspaper that told of a woman who got pregnant in eighteen twenty-one, while her son was born thirtytwo years later. But even this quotation, which, after a visit from the Captain, was authenticated by three old Russians in the Russian Compound in Jerusalem, didn't make the required impact. When serious arguments were raised against a retrospective pregnancy, she deigned with the courtesy of a desperate woman to refrain from hearing the explanations and whispered to the Captain: They always were and still are fools. Later on, she'll tell Boaz: I was impregnated by a river. Don't turn up your aristocratic nose, even a distinguished mother like me sometimes gets pregnant, the river lusted for me and I for him, all your life you've seen streams, what do you know about a river. Do you know that the Americans bought the Dnieper and transported it to America? And Boaz said: You find a way to say America every chance you get. How do you transport a river? He was ten years old then and she was his mother.
I love him, Rebecca said to the Captain with uncharacteristic candor. I love him like the clods of earth love the dead. Like the riverbank loves the river. I love him as you could have been able to love if you were as false and splendid as Joseph Rayna and as innocent and beautiful as Nehemiah. When I fell in love with Boaz I gave birth to what I didn't want to give birth to all the years, and Ebenezer who's wandering around in Europe didn't come from me, Nehemiah brought him to me and I reluctantly nursed him. If your god can make a virgin give birth to a son, Boaz can be born from a grandmother who loved him before he was born. At last, the Captain gave in and with two Arabs from Marar and Mr. Klomin, they went to visit a friend of the Captain who lived in an ancient house with a wooden turret in a tropical garden on a hill crowned by cypresses and palms, near Jaffa.