B002FB6BZK EBOK (58 page)

But the woman was already on her way to him and the man whose son
loved Ratosh's poems met her, but didn't know where she was going, and
Boaz thought: Somebody said we have to find a moral equivalent of war,
what's the equivalent of that nothingness, that dreadful, heartbreaking
lust? Meanwhile, he put on a bathing suit and over the bathing suit he put
on his pants and shirt. Noga looked at the sea. The woman walked past the
hut. He'll search for the poet Ratosh, said Noga, what do I tell Menahem
from Menahem, to Boaz from Boaz? But Boaz didn't go down to the sea.
He sat down on the windowsill and drank the coffee Noga gave him before.
Outside the wind raised leaves and papers and sand in the wind and yellow limestone flowers didn't budge. A ship sailed north and Noga stood up
and facing the small mirror tried to put on a new belt. In the mirror, Noga
saw Boaz's half-shut eyes and also the ship. What began as trying on the
belt turned into being a game. She stretched the belt and released it, and
said: I've got a riddle for you. A bagel distributor walked on Mapu Street
and distributed four bagels to every apartment. When he came to the last
apartment he saw he had only three bagels left. He panicked and thought:
Where did the fourth bagel disappear? He reversed direction and searched
for the bagel. He came back to the bakery and understood that he had lost
the bagel on the way, but didn't know where. You know where the bagel
disappeared? Boaz didn't open his eyes and his face was stuck to the rim
of the cup and she knew he was measuring her with his eyes shut, that he
was expert in looking with eyes shut and she played with the belt again,
her face frozen, the man seeking the poet Ratosh still between her lashes and Boaz was silent and waited for the woman who was now walking in the
street and he was still wearing a bathing suit under his clothes. Noga emitted a brief laugh that shriveled her cheeks and suddenly made her lost,
burned, he wanted to get up and hug her, but he didn't know how much,
sometimes, it was forbidden to touch her. And then Noga whispered: A fat
man and a beautiful woman sat in a train compartment. The fat man was
smoking a big cigar, and the beautiful woman was holding a barking dog on
a leash. The beautiful woman said to the fat man: Sir, your cigar bothers my
dog and so he's barking. The fat man with the cigar said: Your barking dog
bothers my cigar. Finally, the beautiful woman rips the cigar out of the fat
man's mouth and throws it on the platform. The fat man picks up the dog,
removes its leash and throws the dog outside. The dog runs after the
cigar and you know what he found?

Boaz didn't know.

He found the bagel the bagel seller lost, said Noga.

Boaz didn't respond and looked at the ship that had almost disappeared
beyond the Sheraton. A sudden rain fell on the sands that scrunched up as
if they too were ripples of water. A woman in a transparent raincoat approached the hut. That is a war ground and you don't see blood, said Boaz
and looked at the sand. The woman passed by the German who was still
selling suitcases here so that some day he could go back to Europe and he
didn't know how to cross that cruel sea that erected a barrier between him
and the landscape he yearned for. The woman thought: For two weeks now
I've been trying to get here and have been afraid, and Noga heard the knock
on the door even before the woman knocked, and she straightened up, took
off the belt, Boaz didn't budge, and said: That's the woman who wrote to
me. Noga said: You should have known where the bagel was, but Boaz stared
at the door and Noga opened it and the woman came in out of the rain and
sprayed water on the floor. Noga helped her take off her coat. She lit the
stove and the woman stood between the stove and the door and when she
looked at Boaz, she was no longer sure why she had come.

Boaz saw a child running along the sand in the rain. The woman was
blighted, but her breasts were full.

After she spoke with her eyes almost shut, Noga went to a corner, sat and
folded her legs and decided she was a statue. Menahem's poem, she said:
"So charming, Teacher Henkin said to write to you, you have no idea how many times he read the poem to us, and my Yoram is also in that poem, they
were all boys who gave birth to themselves, a poor generation, they tried to
be answers to their parents' dreams which they themselves had to kill. Surely
you'll forgive me. My late husband used to say: Take care of him, I won't
hold out and he really didn't. Didn't I take care enough? Noga didn't budge
and said: He forgives you, and she stared at Boaz hunched up on the windowsill. Boaz performed an experiment he had tried in his childhood after he
read Yotam the Magician by Korczak, he tried to be invisible.

Yoram fell in Iraq-Manshiya. You must have known him! Everybody knew
him in Tel Aviv. He'd walk on his hands on the shore from Frischmann to
the pool in the north and back. Here's his picture, she said, and held out a
hand with a picture suddenly, Yoram Pishinovsky, you're sure you didn't
know him?

Boaz takes the photo and looks. Curly hair, serious eyes, soft thin
cheeks, deathphoto. The serious and saccharine puppets with gigantic
pompadours who left class photos that were too professional, he thought.
Noga offers the woman coffee, but the woman doesn't want to drink. She
can't sit either. Hidden treasures went down the drain, she says. Here, this
is what we have left of him, and she takes a few drawings by Yoram out of
the leather case and gives them to Boaz and wants to know where his Australian hat and Parker fountain pen disappeared. Sorry about such nonsense, but what's left of them? A fountain pen, and even that's lost! The
Negev was cut off, and I searched, she said, and how do you know where
to search for things like that? And something was needed? Then they
showed me a grave, but there was no hat there and no Parker fountain pen,
and I asked, and I'm a member of our club aren't I and every week, I come
to the Shimonis, but nobody knows and then that poem and you ...

We walk and Teacher Henkin explains. He also speaks nicely. But at
least he's got a poem, no, Yoram didn't write poems. Now she said pensively, sadly, hunched up inside herself: I stand here and look at you and
the young lady and the stove and I think: What folly, what am I searching
for, you must think I'm a fool. And in the middle of her words, she stopped,
picked up her coat, and started putting it on too hastily. Her defeat was
total, in the depths of her heart she knew she had come in vain and that
whole two weeks, she muttered, that whole two weeks, a vague hope
lodged in her, now it's not! In her face Boaz saw that mysterious charm of pain when it's disguised as shame, what a patched-up fragility is life itself,
from that human crease life burst forth that terrified him, he couldn't imagine it and thought about himself, about Menahem, and then he got up and
took off the woman's coat, sat her in the chair, the rain stopped, the clouds
sailed quickly and the blue sky appeared and he said: It will be all right,
Yoram's mother, it will be all right. And a few days later, he brought the
woman a Parker fountain pen and an Australian hat. Her house was full of
plants. She grew them as if she wanted to hide in a jungle. Now she was
practical, asked where to put the things, and Boaz built her a corner, hung
the drawings from school, the letter from the Ministry of Defense, the map
of the battle for Iraq-Manshiya that Boaz had brought her, the hat and the
fountain pen he put on the cabinet, with an enlarged picture of Yoram
framed in black. She stuck some money in his pocket, and said: You had
expenses and I don't think you should bear them. He pushed away the
money, but when he saw how she thrust the money into the pocket of his
coat hanging on the hanger, he didn't say a thing. He also bound the compositions for her, and that's how, that's how it all started, said Noga-

Tape / -

For three days she didn't talk. And then she tried to talk and a choked
moan burst out of her mouth and then they went into the other room, and
he said: Noga, they need that and I bring them what they want. I didn't
search for it, it found me. And you too, it happened unintentionally.

Tape / -

Noga sat in bed. She posted her legs like two shapely and tented triangles in the light from the lamp. Wearily her arms hugged her raised legs
and her head rested on her knees. In the room the small electric heater
burned, spreading a reddish light. Boaz was seen walking toward the water.
Only wrinkles of sand and spots of damp remained from the storm. She
smelled death and thought maybe the ceiling really had fallen on her at
night. Her face was red from the light. The room smelled of cigarettes,
rain, and wet sand. Boaz's supple body was seen solitary and gallant at the
empty sea. She thought about the frozen water slowly warming his body,
the light dwarfed distances, the opaque and airy sea, filled with a supple
body of a snake. The crystalline swimming was more ancient than she, a thousand-year-old woman, death in her womb, everything was so unreliable: the woman with the money, those people who come, the trips, the
notebooks he was starting to edit, that foolish man. She didn't move until
she saw him come out of the water, spraying sea jets, in the cold he ran.
She put on an old bathrobe she had brought from the Henkin house long
ago and decided to brush her teeth with her fingers, to rub the gums with
cold water and char a hem of the robe. He ran along the shore, maybe
where Yoram Pishinovsky had walked on his hands and everybody would
admire him. After she brushed her teeth with her fingers and burned the
hem of the robe, she drank four cups of cold water, and gnashing her teeth
as a betrayed woman she could wait for him again with such great lust.

Tape / -

To the Court, Tel Aviv

Re: Income Tax File No. 34/17656T. S.L.A. Company, Ltd.

Dear Sir,

My name is Noga Levin. For six years I have lived with Boaz
Schneerson, director of the S.L.A. Company, Ltd., and I love
him. I mention that detail even though I know the court does
not consider issues of emotion, or even concepts of morality and
justice, but law. Love and law do not necessarily overlap. Maybe
loving means breaking the law? While there is a law of justice,
there is surely no law of love. By the letter of the law, I also
think Mr. Schneerson's acts are not to be faulted, as is clear
from your correct and reasoned judgment. On the other hand,
if I had to judge Boaz Schneerson, and my love would serve as
some measure just as admissible as the testimony you heard
and the papers you read-I may have judged him differently.

And again, I do not mean to cast doubt on your ethical integrity or your judicial talents, Judge. It is not you I'm judging, but
myself.

I don't think I will be able to sleep quietly or look at myself
in the mirror if I do not give vent to strong feelings of shame
that fill me. Love, unlike the law, is relativity seeking cover.

With my own eyes, my dear sir, I saw a marginal issue in Boaz
Schneerson's life turn into a flourishing business. The very fact that the death of strangers turns into a "business" in the usual
sense of the word is not monstrous in my eyes. On the other
hand, I am aware of the objective need, if pain can be called
that, which turned the S.L.A. Company Ltd., into a business.
That is, I am judging the situation of which Boaz Schneerson is
only a symbol. Yet for me, he cannot be a symbol, but a man, a
man I love.

I was not a mute witness, sir, but also a reluctant partner. In
general, I can insist, but in fact, the business flourished and I
helped. I was drawn into Boaz's wild adventure, first as a spectator and then as an advisor. It wasn't possible to stop the cart.
Pain was driving the cart. I mean what people felt, yearnings for
their sons, their husbands, their dear ones. When the cart came
to the bottom of the mountain and I told Boaz Schneerson
what I thought, and asked him to stop, he said he couldn't.
What started as bad luck and then was inexorable, turned into
ambition. And it was all innocent: first Henkin, then a man,
then a woman who wanted an Australian hat and a Parker fountain pen, and then? Then it snowballed. Boaz brought together
a bereaved father with a poet whose poems his son liked to read,
so the poet would explain to the father who his son was. And
Boaz even started getting interested in his acts because they
contained some reply to the burning in him, a challenge, maybe
it was a mercy killing, after death, of the best of the youth, to
lose everything, maybe it was a reply to the fact that his grandmother saved him from death when he didn't want to come
back. And by word of mouth, his name became famous. Anybody who needed a notebook came to him, anybody who
needed a monument came, the personal need of every single
one of those people was human, but the address was now an
office with a telephone and a secretary and jeeps and cars and
such, income tax files, and calculations of losses, and expenses,
and an accountant and a lawyer.

There were real poems and letters, and there were also fakes.
They need that, said Boaz, and I provide them with what they
need. Isn't that a picture of a real situation? Surely, its ethics are definitely dubious, its relative morality-isn't. The death of
others cannot be a source of resurrection. That death, sir, took
his friends, him it didn't touch, what a revenge!

And then we had to move. The hut on the seashore was now
full of portraits, objects, parts of burned tanks, maps, and in the
penthouse apartment on Lilienblum Street, the rooms were
now turned into offices and there was a secretary there and two
typewriters, a Hebrew one and a foreign one, and file cabinets.
The number of temples grew. Hundreds of booklets were written and edited. We became a company of gravediggers.

In the war, Boaz Schneerson lay among the dead and played
dead. Two or three hundred times he was condemned to death
because all the shots aimed at the dead could have killed him.
Maybe that's how the notion of a vulture was stamped in his
mind. It all started in the house of Mr. Henkin of the Committee of Bereaved Parents. He brought a poem there. He brought
hope after death there. Menahem Henkin was the fellow I had
a relationship with and some days I thought I was in love with
him. Maybe that was the most awful thing of all, the sense of
betraying love, revealing it in a true light, too late. Or perhaps
in a late light, too true? We were mobilized then, we'd meet for
a few days and part, I was afraid of him, I pitied him, and maybe
I loved him, because a latent fear lodged in me that Menahem
Henkin was destined to die, but then I also discovered that I
didn't love him. I was alone, I had nobody to talk to, I sat with
Menahem's mother and looked at her, at the locked seal on her
handsome face and I didn't find solace, I couldn't say a thing,
everybody knew that after the war we'd get married. His
mother was worried, she didn't even try to admit the existence
of my allusions, she wrote him letters that didn't get to their
address, and knitted him socks that nobody wore, and I sat and
wrote a letter to Menahem explaining to him why we had to
part, for a moment I forgot the vague lodged fear in me, the fear
that Menahem was destined to die. I sent the letter, and then
we found out that he fell. I didn't know if he got the letter and
I was still his girl. Uncles from Switzerland sent chocolate and gold earrings to the fiancee, the fiancee was me. Suitors were
afraid of me. I sat in the Henkin house. Everybody wanted me to
be the model widow. They didn't want the happiness of those
who come back to their lovers, marry, and disappear into the gray
everydayness of rationing and the new state, they wanted the
little bit of splendor, the pain and bereavement that stuck to me
and I sank into a slumber that lasted years. Menahem's mother
understands now. Later on I understood that all the time she
knew the love affair had ended long ago. She felt more than I
knew, but she also thought I had betrayed her. Henkin was compelled to give concrete expression to his pain, I was his refuge.
I divided myself between them, Henkin and his dead son. I recorded in the album, in a fluent handwriting, the names of the
places where he was photographed. On the day Henkin brought
Boaz Schneerson home, I knew that Boaz came to take me.