Today when I reconstruct the things that led me to Ebenezer and the encounter with the German, I recall that that morning, when I went to Demuasz's house, I did see a stranger standing in the door of the Giladi house with his profile to me, I remember a sense of panicky haste I felt at the sight of him, something bothered me and at the same time erased the picture from my mind, like that quality I developed over years to dream that I'm late and then wake up with a start, a minute or two before the big old alarm clock rings. And the man stood there in his shabby but elegant clothes with some old humility, maybe even a spiteful clown but for some reason I didn't think about him, didn't register him in my mind, maybe I thought the man was a guest of the Giladis, maybe he inspired me with some vague dread. I came to Demuasz's house bearing in the depths of my mind a faded picture of Ebenezer, and the man in the Demuasz home was in bed, as if he were waiting for me, I thought, maybe he intends a ceremony of death for me to gore me with his pain. To triumph over me. I looked at the glass of water on the nightstand next to his bed, at his teeth in the glass, his eyes were wide open but hallucinating, his leg twitched under the thin blanket, above him hung an old picture of a butterfly surely left over from the days when Demuasz was a teacher of the nature of our Land and his lips started moving, gaped open and spread and were again covered with a scrim of feeble violence, I took off my hat, my hands were clasped in one another to preserve that measure of fitting courtesy I assume when necessary. A snort like a phony chirp of a bird rose from the man's nose and he said to me: Henkin, I want to say something, Demuasz was stunned and I, my habit for many years, I mechanically thrust my hands in my pockets and pulled out the square paper I always had in my pocket, and the sharpened pencil I never left home without, and when he spoke I of course wrote it down as if I were again Henkin-researcher, Henkin, one of the tough young men who plies his pencil, as my students once used to sing. And the man, still with his eyes shut (he shut them when he started speaking), his leg started twitching, and the false teeth in the glass, because of the tilt of my face and the flash of light, looked monstrous, gigantic, he said: The name of the company there is D. G. S., initials of Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Stadtlingsbekampfung M. B. H., an all-German company of fighters. In nineteen forty-four it paid dividends of two hundred percent to A. G. Farben, one of the three concerns they owned. The cost was nine hundred seventy-five deutsch marks for one hundred fifty kilos of Zyklon B. twenty-seven and a half marks a kilogram for one thousand five hundred human beings. At that time, the mark was worth twenty-five American cents, Mr. Henkin. That is, six dollars and seventy-five cents. In the summer of forty-four, Mr. Henkin, the life of a Jew was worth less than twofifths of a cent. And then they said that was too expensive. They sat in Berlin in armchairs and wrote a report. They wrote that that was too expensive. It's all economics, Mr. Henkin. So, they said, the children have to be thrown straight into the fire. They were frugal, he said, and knew what things cost.
He was silent and I held onto the square of paper in my hand and didn't know what to do with it. It took me a few minutes to understand what he was telling me. For a moment he opened his right eye, which was shrunk in swollen orbits and looked like a bluish-green sore, looked at me defiantly, as if he had beaten me in an exciting but exhausting game of chess and said, You understand? I know a lot of numbers from the Last Jew. Everything is numbered in him. The new Bible, you're a Hebrew teacher, has to be written from numbers. And then he shut his eyes, wheezed, and didn't talk anymore. I thought he had died but he was only slumbering and didn't wake up, then, but, when he spoke I thought about an amusement park where I used to go when I was a kid and where there were terrifying toys and I told Demuasz, who came in now, the smile of an expert on his Jew, he told me shh. And I told him. He said Yes, he quotes him now and then but he won't hold out much longer. I told Demuasz that I had heard the stories about the Last Jew from a bereaved mother whose son had fallen in the Sinai campaign and Demuasz said, Yes, the distress they bring from there, to save two-fifths of a cent, Henkin!
I went back home and my wife was sitting there under the sixty-watt bulb I could never change for a hundred watts because of her stubbornness, her beautiful face was resting on the binding of my son's closed photo album, guessing the photos perfectly, and I went to my study. I sat down at the desk where I hadn't worked for years now, took a smooth sheet of paper out of the drawer, picked up my Parker pen, checked it as a scribe checks his quill, and wrote "The Last Jew" and a few minutes later, I drew a thick line under those words and added in small, even modest letters, I'd say, maybe for camouflage: "A Study by Obadiah Henkin." And then I looked at the page and I knew I had to investigate that Jew and I looked at the window and saw the emptiness of the yard and the Giladi house and I dimly remembered seeing a person there in the morning but I didn't really think about him, his image flashed through my mind and was immediately erased, and some panic attacked me.
And again I found myself investigating, interviewing people, going to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial, to Kibbutz Lohamei HaGetaot, I heard that the man who talked to me in Demuasz's house had been taken to the hospice in Gadera and had been lying there like a vegetable for a few weeks, suddenly he opened his eyes and said: Did Obadiah talk to him? And they asked him who? What? And he smiled, shut his eyes, and died. I thought about his words, about the mission he seemed to assign me, I thought about my wife in the ravines of light, the very solitary house, the empty rooms, the old samovar still heating water for tea and a long time ago I'd become acquainted with the ironic malice of the solitude decreed by pain that has to be acted to live it, and I started investigating the life of a man and all I could know about him were trifles. And at that time we are still living in a certain regularization of organized hostility, my wife and 1. She looks at me with transparent malice, sympathy, I'd say, and refuses to sleep in the same bed with me. At night I try to touch her, to reach out my hand, like a lovestruck boy, the two of us in our beds, tossing and turning, trying to sleep, no tranquilizer or sleeping pill helps, I'm trying to caress her but she doesn't respond to me, even though she's not angry either, she keeps inventing hope for me for other times, or maybe a fabrication for the past, you have to listen carefully to hear the quiet tears flowing on her cheeks, she never sobs aloud, she doesn't weep in the light, and she mocked my daily walks, my activity on the Committee for Bereaved Parents, my searching. After I brought home Boaz Schneerson and Noga was still living with us and what happened happened, her contempt changed to hostility, and her words became as sharp as a razor. She always wears black for herself, she doesn't share her pain with anybody, she doesn't go out of the house, my need to understand the lack of Menahem makes her suspicious, and she apparently has a need incomprehensible to me to be a perfect and unchanging enemy to herself to preserve some trace of closeness, a closeness that's hard to define, as if a shared secret helplessness and a strong hatred unites two people not because of the past but despite the past. I'd say that a canned love prevailed between us, frozen in a deep freeze, a love that has to be assessed with webs of amazement, transparen cies of the window through the heavy shades, furtive looks, stabbing sentences, the way each of us gets into bed apart but always together, at the very same time, and gets up separately but together, prepare without words for another day to live it together, but apart. We had no secrets, I told her everything and she was silent to me about everything. Love of Menahem was shared, but she saw one person and I saw another person. Maybe it was inevitable that like me, she too discovered she was cut off from the bond that bound us and yet she couldn't grant my request, forgive me for my behavior toward Boaz or toward myself or toward the Committee, she didn't forgive me for the life after death I tried in vain to grant Menahem.