Kabydius was in the prime of life, and was sated with wars and excommunications when he met Judith in a small Jewish village not far from the fortress he was building. At night, said Kabydius, Judith would fly off, in the morning she'd come back. Like everybody who desired her, she abused him too. When he wanted to beat her, she slipped away from him. Her family plotted against him and he wanted to burn down their house. At night, bitter people came and beat him until he bled. He wanted to tell Count Montfort about that, but a crow followed him and tried to poke out his eyes. Judith was picking flowers. It was after the rain. When he raped her she laughed and when he swore love to her she spat in his face. When her belly grew, and his son balled up in her, he wanted to marry her, his memory returned to him, he remembered the lass in the Carpathian Mountains, and he said: Maybe she's the same woman or I'm cursed by Jewish witches. Judith refused to marry him. He dimly recalled when he lived in Rome with the monks and loved a little girl. All my life, he thought, I've been caught in ropes with a curse and I can't get away from it, where is the whip that will take Jews out of my insides. He came to Judith, tied her to a post, whipped her, kissed her, and all night long he talked with her. She sneered at him, her hands tied, her eyes flashing, and when he asked again and again to marry her and be a father to his son, she laughed. When he castrated himself before her eyes and felt them taking him on a stretcher as he was bleeding, he recalled seeing a spiteful joy sparkling in her eyes. He came back to Judith with his face burned and emaciated and was a eunuch in her yard.
He was allowed to play with his son. Kabydius was old now. Judith was called mistress of the village where a knight served as her slave. She didn't marry anybody, and he hewed stones and built her another house more beautiful than the houses of the Galilee. There he sat and wrote his history, his shame, his regret, his sorrow, and his love of a woman who was once a little girl in Rome, then a woman in the Carpathian Mountains, and then a mistress in the Galilean Mountains. At night he would carve birds for his son.
… That's only a collection of fragments from the story, and you can peruse it when you receive the material. After I read, I asked myself how and why did this story, fictional or not, get into Ebenezer's hands? Is bird-carving coincidental? Those questions will remain without an answer for the time being. I can assume that bird-carving is Ebenezer's addition, but if it is an addition, why did he add it here and not someplace else? Why is bird-carving not mentioned in the nine million words investigated by the Institute? And the story of the Golden Calf and the place where Moses is buried, for instance… the area of Santa Katerina in the Sinai was barred to Ebenezer.
Now that we can get to it, it's easy to think of his descriptions. But when Ebenezer recited that book (which I listed for you at the beginning of my letter), the area was hard to go to and was in the hands of the Egyptians, when could Ebenezer have been there? In my humble opinion, he never could have been there. I don't know if traces of this ahistorical or even historical myth can truly be found, but the descriptions of the place, the geography, the names of the crystals, the stones, the rocks, the various areas, the climate, the lifestyle of the Bedouins, the monks, all that is precise. It is true that people visited there throughout the years, but it was surely not Ebenezer who invented what they saw or didn't see. The date of writing this ancient book is in another few years. What does that mean? Why did Ebenezer insist that the book be written like that, that the secrets in it are things that happened so long ago? According to various calculations (see appendix) I found in the Book of Salvation, which Ebenezer quotes and copies of it are also found in other places, the year 1984 will be the year of destruction. Also according to the prophecy of Astronomus, the decline before the annihilation begins in that year. The place where Moses is buried isn't clear, according to the book, but when I went with the members of our Committee on a trip to the Sinai last year, I was able to follow Ebenezer's guidelines and I found monasteries that even the Society for the Preservation of Nature didn't know about, I discovered waterfalls, wonderful oases, and sights were revealed described precisely in the book to be published years later, and recited by Ebenezer!
What else can I tell you? I'm sorry I can't respond to your request. When I ascended to the Land of Israel in the early 1920s, I swore I would never leave here. Why did I swear, why do I keep this oath? It's hard for me to answer. Jordana keeps coming. Her love for Menahem touches my heart. Maybe the mean ing of Kabydius's book is that love may really be only between the dead and the living? Maybe that's the meaning of the story of Ebenezer, Boaz, Menahem, Rebecca, Joseph, Nehemiah, and Friedrich? I'm not a literary scholar, I'm a tired old teacher, but there's surely food for thought here. The love people are afflicted with like a disease is a relationship between naught and aught. Maybe later, life began to envy death and imitated impotence.
Maybe everything that was didn't have to be. As I write these confused things to you, Jordana is sitting in the other room and looking at an album of pictures of Menahem. Hasha Masha is drinking coffee. Boaz is wandering around in his jeep and immortalizing the dead. You write me that Samuel Lipker claims that Lionel doesn't know that Samuel is his brother. It always seems to me that Samuel is here and hasn't really gone to America. Something of his spirit sometimes sits on my neck. When Ebenezer called Boaz Samuel, I knew that was more than a mere coincidence.
Yours…
Tape / -
When Yazhik was three years old, I had, said Yazhik, three hens. I fought with Petlura in 'nineteen. Ever since then I learned why hens have a red comb, Ebenezer, the blood was soaked in chewed grass, in berries, the woman my father slaughtered I saw in my dreams night after night for four years and two months, except for one night when I was drunk and couldn't dream. Then I counted the poplar trees in a radius of seventeen kilometers around our house. There were twenty-six thousand, five hundred thirty-two trees. They were cut down at a rate I tried to understand and couldn't. Meanwhile, the farm grew and two hundred eighty hens were added-and three new roosters. The number of trees decreased in the snowstorm of 'twenty-six, I found a woman whose mother was a Jew. She almost loved me, but I was tempted to tell her who my father was and she remembered poor Nakhcha, her uncle whose hand was cut off in that pogrom I couldn't tell you about. Seventy thousand Jews died in that pogrom under cover of the great revolution. Maybe since then my hostility has sprouted for people with squashed noses. What am I doing here? I hid a little Jewish girl, the woman I found dead, I stopped counting poplars, the hens went to Berlin in a freight train, the little girl lay under the stairs, upstairs my mother was dying with a candle at her head, night after night I went down and talked with the little girl and she was scared. And only later was she not so scared. In the dark she sat for three years, until the bent legs were stuck together, shin to thigh, I went to fetch a doctor to separate the shin from the thigh, under the stairs smelled of rotten flesh, I brought her cabbage and potatoes, her eyes were burning and her forehead was blazing. They killed the little girl with one blow, without separating the shin from the thigh, they left my mother to die alone with the crucifix hanging over her bed. The Sturmbahnfuhrer from the General- gouvernement stood and preened in the mirror in my mother's room, he wore oak clusters on his collar, his boots were gleaming, the guards would spit and a slave would rub them, me they tied to a cart and the Ukrainians pointed at me as if they had reasons, and said Yazhik the Jew-lover, I tried to count the reasons and discovered that in the end they were only one reason, and I stopped, I always liked to count, I saw bodies, arms cut off, I wasn't one of you, I didn't have to die but to live on the border of death and starvation, I saw them bring the people, scare them with clubs, blows, undress them and then straight to the showers and lock the door, they were more confused than scared, and then that revolt broke out with one hand grenade that barely killed one soldier, a machine gun from the tower shot and it all ended as it had begun, outside next to the mass graves stood people and searched. Later, years after the war, came the Poles, opened graves and searched for diamonds in corpses and that's how they found out what was under the ground. It once belonged to my grandfather, his name was also Yazhik. You won't die, Ebenezer, and you didn't die. I saw your box when I worked cleaning the home of the General Gouverneur. On the walls they hung pretty pictures, I counted a hundred and thirty-two pictures, two hundred etchings, a hundred tapestries, forty-nine easy chairs, twenty-two carpets! Once I brought champagne and milk to their party and then they discovered the little girl when I went to get a doctor to separate her shin from her thigh, there I saw your box. The box played "Silent Night." Once I counted ships in the river, I wanted to dream of how I'd go to Canada, I had some uncle there who didn't write a word, but was there. The ships sailed without me, I remembered Petlura, my uncle was his soldier, now in Canada, you remember how a ship looks: masts, cables, chimneys, flags, and here I'm drawing you a ship, Ebenezer.