B002FB6BZK EBOK (69 page)

For two weeks I was quite busy. Along with my editor and a
few other people from Harper & Row, I flew to six cities in a
row, appeared on television and radio, held press conferences,
was interviewed, lectured, and our young attache, a handsome
woman named Kristina, took Renate and me to a lot of cocktail
parties, endless meetings; I even gave a lecture at the PEN
Club in New York, I'm not complaining, in our day a writer has
to play the clown, the portable philosopher, and I had to do that
for myself and my publishers, my agent and Renate. I know that
Schiller and Goethe didn't fly to public relations tours, but needless to say the times-and the people-have changed. After two
crammed weeks I parted from the editor, the attache, our consul, from some American writers, a few of whom I had met before, we took our bags, and instead of going to the airport, we
went to a small hotel in Greenwich Village, slept quietly one
night, and in the morning, I called Lionel.

Lionel was glad to meet me. I told him how much I liked the
Laments on the Death of the Jews. He told me that he had high regard for me, after all, he said, I wrote the first article about you
in The New York Times. And indeed, I remembered that he had
written and was amazed that I hadn't thought about that, and
after mutual compliments, I on the Laments and he on the novella, and after he expressed amazement that his Laments were
now being published in all the countries of Europe except Germany, I said I was indeed astonished.

On our way to him, we bought white wine (made in Israel)
and Renate bought a bouquet of flowers, and at a temperature
of two below zero, in the cold wind blowing from the river, we
came to Lionel's house. I must tell you that I was more excited
than I had imagined.

Lily opened the door and was exactly what I had expected
her to be, some undefined femininity, something between a
lion and a summer flower. On her face the sadness of polished
matter clean of sediments, was smiling serene, both deep and bright. At the age of forty, she looked rare, feminine, and an
almost Mediterranean olive tone slipped among the northern
tones as if they were bold storms on a marble surface. In her
eyes is a dark touch and they look very bright, and yet the elusive gloom made them mysterious. She held out her hand and
said in English: Welcome, she invited us inside and when we
took off our coats and the warmth spread in our bodies, we offered the wine and the flowers and we saw Lionel. Lionel is tall,
but not too tall, thin, his hair is silver and short and his face is
lit by that light many Jewish intellectuals have, some mischievous flash in the dark eyes, wrapped in dark eyebrows, reflecting an alien, ancient melancholy, and when I looked at him I
thought of the sentence of Spinoza (and Lionel's eyes reminded me of his), that God is celestial harmony and that His
laws of morality are universal and hence are not an imitation of
the laws of nature. Confronting Lionel's eyes, I thought that
only Jews, that stubborn and wise tribe, could have created such
a sublime and unnatural idea. Who if not the Jews had to know
in their flesh how impossible that idea is, but the persistence in
believing that there is a moral law that is not synonymous with
the laws of nature, grants Hebrew tribalism the exciting, but no
less annoying greatness. There was also some savagery etched
on Lionel's face, something that strives for personal freedom,
and I thought about the expression frozen fire, I thought to
myself: Maybe that's how Joseph Rayna looked, or at least
something from Joseph Rayna was looking at me and I couldn't
take my eyes off Lionel, who was wearing a blue cashmere
sweater and thin corduroy trousers and his hands are delicate,
but not unmasculine. Lily persisted in speaking English with
us, even when Lionel, Renate, and I were speaking German. I
loved her for that, and in my heart, maybe I was also angry. The
apartment is beautiful, the garden looked gray under the thin
shroud of ice, I loved the furniture and the pictures on the
walls. Later on, Renate told me that something in the blend (as
she said) of the physical furniture, the pictures, the books and
the atmosphere, reminded her of your apartment, although the apartments are so different. She talked about color and form
that turn into an echo.

I thought about Cervantes's sentence that the pen is the
tongue of the soul. Maybe the apartment is simply the thermometer of those who live in it. The conversation, of course, slid to
the Last Jew. Never for a moment did I believe that Lily didn't
know that Lionel and Sam are sons of the same father, but it was
strange for me to think that Lionel didn't know that and that it
was so important for those concerned that he not know. Later on,
when I met Sam, I understood that he had to preserve lines of
defense for himself and that he never trusted anybody-except
Ebenezer and Lily-fully. After more than twenty years in the
United States, he still felt foreign. As in his relations with
Licinda, he always had to be on guard. Lily came from the same
world of which Ebenezer is the last remnant. Deep in his heart,
Sam Lipp believes that Ebenezer doesn't recite the Last Jew,
but that he is the Last Jew, and everything seen in his eyes, and
felt, is nothing but a delusion he's willing to live in, but whose
logic he doesn't have to accept. That's strategic room for maneuver, a bit mendacious, a kind of pocket pogrom and anti-pogrom
he keeps with him as a guarantee for his life. Thus Sam still sells
his lampshade, hates what he can't forgive himself, takes revenge
on himself for being prevented from taking revenge on the world
that Ebenezer maintained was annihilated.

Sam's dreams are so strong that Lily started dreaming his
dreams and sometimes she wakes up at night in a cold sweat
(she told Renate this as she was drinking), gets up, goes to Sam
and Licinda's room, and he's lying there, his eyes wide open,
shaking, even Licinda started dreaming Sam's dreams.

I said I didn't know where Ebenezer was living today, but Lily
glanced at me offended, since she knew very well that I knew,
and then she said in German: Watch out, Sam does dangerous
things, maybe what you don't know can sometimes be good.

Lionel told me he had found material in the public library that
had been copied by a scholar from Brandeis University. It was a
precise account of an evening in a nightclub in London where Ebenezer performed many years ago. I came on that material,
said Lionel, when I discovered that one of the laments I wrote
was made into an opera and the composer, a German Jew named
Weiss, found the libretto in the library. I found a few laments
whose provenance I didn't know, they weren't exactly my laments, but one of them was very similar to my sixth lament,
about the child who extracted gold teeth. You know the lament,
he said confidently, and I did indeed remember it. The composition is called "Sources for the Burial of Moses, Story of the
Golden Calf and Its Location," and the material Ebenezer recited was that composition-in addition to the other laments,
including my lament-and was composed from Ebenezer's
words, by Yehuda Ber Avram ben Abraham and printed in Leipzig
in 1984. And the year 1984 is still very far from us, said Lionel. I
told him I knew about that composition and was quite amazed by
it, and Lionel said that among the papers and manila files were
annals of a Crusader (I immediately verified the story) and some
meeting between SS Sturmbahnfuhrer Kramer and Nehemiah
Schneerson, husband of Rachel Schneerson, a meeting that was
held, said Lionel, in nineteen nine. I was excited to hear these
things and asked if he didn't mean Boaz, and he said: No,
Nehemiah. Lionel asked if that was so important, since I looked
quite excited and my face was surely beaming and I said Yes, yes.
He told me: I've got a copy of this material and I'll bring it to you.
We sat and drank the wine we had brought and Lily didn't talk
anymore, but chain-smoked, with restrained pensiveness, and
then Lionel came back and gave me a copy of the material, I
glanced at it and then put it in my pocket.

In every person hides an image of a first love that may never
have been. Lily was my first love, a love I didn't know. Dreams of
my youth were embodied not only in the meditations of sin of
Ukrainian guards, as Sam put it, but also in my own meditations.
There was also a moment I still regret, a moment when I envied
Lionel for robbing me of the right to love Lily and in my heart I
expressed that explicitly: Our Lily! And I hated myself for that
thought. Renate, who sensed something, stroked my hand and let me feel that she understood and forgave, but she wasn't willing for
me to continue, and I stopped. That was a moment of wrath, like
a demon that attacked, stayed in me and left immediately.

Lily, who maybe also felt it, laughed and looked at me as if to
say: You're all alike! But there was also some sign of her own guilt
in her smile; if you were forged of this matter, what was I forged
of, she surely thought. But the moment passed. Lionel spoke
excellent German, he told us about Sam's work, about his theater,
and said that Sam had been working for two years on a new play
based on the story of Joseph de la Rayna and that Licinda, Sam's
girlfriend, was acting in that play. The premiere was tomorrow,
and when he asked if we'd like to see the play, we agreed enthusiastically and arranged to meet the next day. Late at night, we
went outside, Lily accompanied us, it was snowing, the wind was
strong, and then the wind stopped, and Lily said: I know your
books, and she linked arms with Renate, who was trembling a
little from the sharp transition from warmth to cold. You're decent
people, said Lily, but I'm really not at all sure it's good that you
came, things aren't yet healed, got to watch out, everybody's conspiring against him, he fights me against Lionel, he's got a broken,
corrupt laugh, he's always expecting the blow to land, that play ...
Sam Lipp isn't producing a play, he's creating the Fourth Reich.
She glanced at me, smiled and didn't continue, changed the subject, and said: But it's better like this, you came, maybe it's important that we met, I have to defend Sam and Lionel, I normally
don't speak German. In my childhood I sang "Spring, fields, how
beautiful are the blue and copper mountains." I sang the
"Niederlandisches Dankgebet, Wacht am Rhine." Yes, sometimes, between Sam's dreams, to protect him, she suddenly said
in broken German, I have to dream or sing in German ... and
then she tore her arm out of Renate's and ran home.

We hailed a cab and went to the hotel. By ten in the morning,
I was sitting in the public library, in a closed room, and poring over
the material. Not until five in the afternoon, when I was so hungry I was dizzy, did I leave. I found very valuable material for our
book, Obadiah, and I'll send you copies of all the material as soon as I can. The story about Kramer's meeting with Nehemiah
Schneerson amazed me early in the morning, when I read part of
the material Lionel gave me. Eating brings an appetite. Even if
Kramer's journal, which I read in Ebenezer's house, was (as
Renate says) my creation, and I don't accept that crazy versionthe meeting between Nehemiah and Kramer absolutely cannot be
the product of my imagination, no matter how fertile it is. In the
report from London, Ebenezer tells about the meeting between
his father and Kramer. (In his relation to the story, Kramer is not
presented at all as a commander in whose camp he stayed. He
tells a story of an encounter between a man-and only we, the
readers, know was his father-and a German whom only we know
was the commander of the camp where he stayed, in other words:
he tells a story that is alien to him, unrelated, and that was enough
to make me shudder.) Kramer, who was then a young man, went
on a journey to the Land of Israel with an old German named
Doctor Kahn, who never was a real physician. The two of them
were residents of the village of Sharona, although Kramer was born
in Willhelma, and only at the age of seven did he move to Sharona.
The doctor, who had worked as a ship's physician for many years,
collected butterflies, lived with an Arab lad, Higer, who was said
to have been wounded once by mistake with his rifle, loved to
swim, spawned children all over the east like some ancient god
and spoke of turning Palestine into a German protectorate. On
one of their journeys they came to a settlement in Judea, and that
settlement was the settlement where Ebenezer was born (even
though he doesn't mention that fact, and when he recited this
story maybe he didn't know he was born there). They were
caught in a storm, sought shelter, came to the house of Nehemiah
and Rebecca Schneerson. Kramer (according to Ebenezer) describes Nehemiah as a handsome man for a Jew, hot-tempered
like most Jews. And Rebecca (in his opinion) was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen even though she was a Jewess.
Kramer told Nehemiah there would never be peace between the
Jewish world and the Christian world, or the Muslim world. There
won't be forgiveness, he said, until the so-called Jew of Jesus is taken out and the reality of the real Jews in the world is separated.
Christianity, said Kramer, had a Greek, pagan tone, sublime and
tragic in its essence. The idea of conscience and guilt feelings are
the Jewish contribution that stuck to original Christianity. The
Jews as a nation that rejects race-Gangbok-invented the
ahistoricism of remorse. Pure chauvinism is foreign to Judaism,
and there's nothing like pure chauvinism to cleanse and create, a
solid element in the health of its nation. Would-be patriotic crusades have to be destroyed, he said, and then the Christian Jesus
will be the natural god in the world where there are no witnesses
to the Jewish betrayal of Him.

I won't weary you with the long speech Kramer delivered
that night. We can be amazed only that he said those things in
nineteen nine, if he really did say them. Kramer was drunk,
drooling, and looked at the enormous expanses stretching to the
Arab vines. He said: Today we no longer remember who was the
first father of the eagle, evolution isn't only in nature, it also
exists as a huge intellectual trap.