He walked around among the intersection of the looks of the English women who drank cold juice, as Rebecca said later, as beautiful angels walk around at the entrance to Paradise and try to bribe the gods with their beautiful eyes. She took that sentence, although she messed it up a bit, from a description of Joseph Rayna, who she knew sometimes was Boaz's father. Where could such a resemblance between them come from? she asked herself with a pain she didn't reveal to anybody, not even Boaz, how can it be that Joseph Rayna and Boaz Schneerson were one person born at different times?
At least he doesn't fall in love with those women, she said to herself, at least he doesn't get ugly women pregnant. And then she clapped her hands and Ahbed, the grandson of Ahbed, brought her a cup of tea.
After twelve months of war, in 'forty-eight, after he wandered around for a while and didn't know how long, he met somebody who was his double. He took a fake gold ring off the finger of Minna, the building contractor's daughter, and came to the settlement. Autumn made the descending evening silent and dangerous. The threshing floor wasn't there anymore. Instead of the threshing floor was the big house surrounded by a garden. A black DeSoto was parked next to the house. He thought of the chicks of the kindergarten teacher Eve that had died so they could build a new house here with a DeSoto. He recalled the car he had stopped in Tel Aviv, and thought maybe he shouldn't have banged the heads of those two people together. A woman wrapped in a shawl stood in the glow of evening and pruned a rosebush. In that soft, splendid hour she looked like a firefly. The light glowed on her, flitted and returned. Somebody inside the house was playing with a flashlight. She stood out against the background of the summer ground that had drunk the first rains of the season that morning. On the way, in the bus, he saw two Arabs in the field. The sight of them calmed him. They weren't an enemy he had to shoot at.
The Arabs in the field allowed him to think of Rebecca. They were sheikhs; planted in the landscape like scarecrows, cut out of it, without challenge, without the affection or longing of All's Well her husband or Eve whose chicks didn't all return and some were buried in Roots to her husband's florid speeches. The Arabs in the field were domesticated in it. Nor did he resent it, because he thought about his grandfather Nehemiah who couldn't be like them. I'm the wrong man who returned from the war, he thought, and it's her fault! No threshing floor, no Menashe, no Menahem Henkin, no double, no redhead, in the end there's me. On the porches, in the chill evening wind, sit the old women, Grandmother will bury them all and when my turn comes, she'll bury me too. And then she'll go back to Joseph Rayna somewhere in the green moss at the end of the solar system.
He saw children at the bougainvillea bush and thought about a little girl he had once known. They spawn like fish, produce Hebrew soldiers in an assembly line for Eve the kindergarten teacher. I've come back without your chicks, Eve! The soldiers died for you, proudly they carried to their graves the exalted words you instilled in them. Did that help them? So you've got a flag! In the bus, a woman sat next to him and read a magazine. She wore a purple dress and her lips were painted. She didn't know that Marar no longer exists, she didn't even know there ever was a village here named Marar. She read indifferently about the homemade ink flag hoisted in Eilat. The picture shows a person climbing a pole and hanging an improvised flag. The Arabs don't draw flags with ink, Marar was destroyed, they killed Menahem and they go on plowing. The woman in the bus smiled at him. What? Marar? You didn't know, new in the Land, you lived in Beersheba, a new housing project, in the war, it was bad. She talked about another war when Ebenezer died and we built an airfield for the British. A radio is open to the evening, the old women sit listening to music, the wind blows silently, the trees move in restrained splendor, the old women don't recognize Boaz, they don't know that Ebenezer's son brought them the state. Boaz returned intact, not wounded, no woman stood up for him in the bus. All's Well won't make a speech for me, he thought bitterly, no flag will wave, no enemy will be arrested for my dead body. That "togetherness," which started in Eve's kindergarten and continued in the threshing floor when they all sang "there was a young woman at Kinnereth" and I sat on the side, I prepared the next wars with Jose Menkin A. Goldenberg. I helped him woo Rebecca. I told him how she looked without a bra and without panties, and he blushed. He clutched a sword he no longer wore belted at his side, stood gazing, the girls sang about the threshing floor, and I sang and didn't sing. The truth is that what oppressed him most was that he couldn't get killed. I have nothing to come back to, he said to himself, and those who did have where to come back to and what to come back to, didn't return. That's not glory, Eve.
From the day Boaz was mobilized until the war was over, Rebecca Schneerson sat pinned to her chair. My men die too much, she thought. She wasn't really interested whether Boaz wanted to or not, she decided he would return and she recited Psalms. Some nights she shouted the verses and other nights she whispered them. Today she got up from her chair. She knew Boaz was coming back home. And Boaz is walking on the path, evening has fallen now, the no-threshing floor in the distance. One summer when he worked in the Burial Society to understand "what life is woven of," he sat with Tova Kavenhazer on the threshing floor. She was quite beautiful then. They hugged and he pressed against her and she felt his eyes penetrating her body through her dress, and then he told her about Nimitz's body, how they embalmed it, washed and wrapped it in a tallith, and Tova Kavenhazer jumped up in alarm, pushed his hands aside, and yelled: With the hands you embrace dead bodies, you embrace me? And he thought, With the hands I embrace her I embrace dead bodies, and ever since then he often pondered that sentence. She ran away. I was left with the thoughts, embracing dead bodies and embracing Tova Kavenhazer… She yelled: Don't you dare touch me, Boaz Schneerson! Later she married a shopkeeper from Akron who sold bootleg vodka.
When he entered the house, the Captain stood up, saluted, hugged Boaz, shook his hand, and left. Boaz put the kitbag on the ground and looked at Rebecca. She moved her hands a little, almost said something, but didn't. Behind her, through the screened window, the skeletons of almond trees were seen and the moon was starting to light the roof of the cowshed. They looked at one another and her mouth became soft and yet it was firm, and then he took a step toward her, his body rigid, stuck to the center of gravity in a space he didn't know yet, regulated by glory, and hit her hard. The accumulated rage pitched the old woman aside, dropped her to the ground, and Boaz trampled on her and from the window of Ebenezer's house, the stunned Captain peeped out. In the distance music came from a radio, the Captain who was afraid to interfere, tried to move so as not to see anymore. Rebecca lay on the ground, her body heavy and shrunken, her lips rounded, and a strange smile on the opening of her lips. The lips seemed stuck to her mouth. The lamp moved from the blow and then stayed still, murmurs of pain were heard, Boaz kicked her again and she shrank up and growled, but the smile didn't depart from her mouth, a thin slit of abomination popped up and vanished, and then the slit was filled with blood that flowed like a chameleon, and in the pain a groan of laughter was heard. The old woman lay shriveled and laughing; jets of blood burst from her face and her wide-open eyes.