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Authors: Yoram Kaniuk
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evening stood in the dark sky, and he stood also
in an undershirt but without the cap I wore and I saw how blasted and
white his body was, as if a dangerous malediction lodged in him, and yet in
his behavior, the way he pruned, the way he measured and plucked tendrils, there was some authenticity, some solid standing on the ground that
was his, surely this is how a person prunes a garden he longs for and is
rooted in, this is also how a person hates his garden and this is also how he
loves it, I was amazed at those phrases but they echoed in the back of my
mind. We stood there, two old men, watering gardens, who just a while ago
were tense, maybe we were safeguarding something, getting to know one
another through gardens, through our almost naked bodies, each one holding the strong flow of water like mighty gods trying to make the harsh and
obstinate earth fertile, I thought about the man's fractures, what holds him
together, I could see myself, an old teacher, looking like somebody who
stood for many years in front of children, teaching them why they would have
to die, and behind me the pictures of Herzl, Ben-Gurion, Berl Katznelson,
and Weizmann repeating Zionism that the children later realize on memorial walls that took the place of the pictures of the leaders and here he
belongs and yet as if he belongs, to those same echoes that made me send
Menahem from his first year to war, so those fractures would have a place
in the sun, I thought about Tel Aviv, from here it looks like a city joined
together obstinately and innocently, half its name Tel, mound, a place
where cities are buried and discovered after thousands of years, and half its
name, Aviv, spring, is blossoming, blossoming of what? I thought about a
line from the words of the Last Jew, he quoted the Yiddish poet Itzik
Manger on one of those tapes, who said: When they buried the last of the Gypsy kings, thirty thousand violins came to play on his grave and I thought
of what he said, what he quoted from some person who may have breathed
his last right after he said that, and Itzik Manger surely meant that he was
the last of the violinists playing on the grave of thirty thousand Jewish
kings. And at that moment each one of them turned into two-fifths of a
cent.
The sight of my neighbor made me sad, like somebody who's used to
investigating a situation woven of words, two separate entities, two different disasters, the disaster of the Last Jew and God and the disaster of the
wars my son falls in and surely it's from that junction, I thought, that the
great and awful moments of our life are woven, the junction of celebration
and the junction of nightmare, an illness of malediction leaving smoke that
came here to ask for steps for feet they didn't have anymore, an echo seeking a foothold, and yet a foothold that knew what its echo was.... Maybe
Hasha Masha really is right and there's no need to talk and a man can be
silent with his fellow man and know things that many words don't know,
maybe it was his accent, when we did speak, an accent composed of an
ancient phonetic layer of the natives of the Land of Israel, the way farmers
talk, which once, when I immigrated here in the early nineteen twenties, I
knew as a worker in their yards, and along with that some foreignness, a refugee language, in short here I hold in my hands an enormous sex organ of
some ancient god, spraying water, talking with a scarecrow that sprouted
in my neighbor's yard, a scarecrow who came from two disasters, and wonders. We talked of the Giladis and he claimed he didn't know them and
didn't know where they had disappeared, I was impolite, maybe because
of the heat and I asked myself who he was and where he came from, and
he peeped at me like an old acquaintance. With some practiced smile at
the edge of his mouth that lacked suppleness and yet was quite harsh, and
I sensed that his eyes were mocking me, as if he were saying: Old Henkin,
surely we're
in an undershirt but without the cap I wore and I saw how blasted and
white his body was, as if a dangerous malediction lodged in him, and yet in
his behavior, the way he pruned, the way he measured and plucked tendrils, there was some authenticity, some solid standing on the ground that
was his, surely this is how a person prunes a garden he longs for and is
rooted in, this is also how a person hates his garden and this is also how he
loves it, I was amazed at those phrases but they echoed in the back of my
mind. We stood there, two old men, watering gardens, who just a while ago
were tense, maybe we were safeguarding something, getting to know one
another through gardens, through our almost naked bodies, each one holding the strong flow of water like mighty gods trying to make the harsh and
obstinate earth fertile, I thought about the man's fractures, what holds him
together, I could see myself, an old teacher, looking like somebody who
stood for many years in front of children, teaching them why they would have
to die, and behind me the pictures of Herzl, Ben-Gurion, Berl Katznelson,
and Weizmann repeating Zionism that the children later realize on memorial walls that took the place of the pictures of the leaders and here he
belongs and yet as if he belongs, to those same echoes that made me send
Menahem from his first year to war, so those fractures would have a place
in the sun, I thought about Tel Aviv, from here it looks like a city joined
together obstinately and innocently, half its name Tel, mound, a place
where cities are buried and discovered after thousands of years, and half its
name, Aviv, spring, is blossoming, blossoming of what? I thought about a
line from the words of the Last Jew, he quoted the Yiddish poet Itzik
Manger on one of those tapes, who said: When they buried the last of the Gypsy kings, thirty thousand violins came to play on his grave and I thought
of what he said, what he quoted from some person who may have breathed
his last right after he said that, and Itzik Manger surely meant that he was
the last of the violinists playing on the grave of thirty thousand Jewish
kings. And at that moment each one of them turned into two-fifths of a
cent.
The sight of my neighbor made me sad, like somebody who's used to
investigating a situation woven of words, two separate entities, two different disasters, the disaster of the Last Jew and God and the disaster of the
wars my son falls in and surely it's from that junction, I thought, that the
great and awful moments of our life are woven, the junction of celebration
and the junction of nightmare, an illness of malediction leaving smoke that
came here to ask for steps for feet they didn't have anymore, an echo seeking a foothold, and yet a foothold that knew what its echo was.... Maybe
Hasha Masha really is right and there's no need to talk and a man can be
silent with his fellow man and know things that many words don't know,
maybe it was his accent, when we did speak, an accent composed of an
ancient phonetic layer of the natives of the Land of Israel, the way farmers
talk, which once, when I immigrated here in the early nineteen twenties, I
knew as a worker in their yards, and along with that some foreignness, a refugee language, in short here I hold in my hands an enormous sex organ of
some ancient god, spraying water, talking with a scarecrow that sprouted
in my neighbor's yard, a scarecrow who came from two disasters, and wonders. We talked of the Giladis and he claimed he didn't know them and
didn't know where they had disappeared, I was impolite, maybe because
of the heat and I asked myself who he was and where he came from, and
he peeped at me like an old acquaintance. With some practiced smile at
the edge of his mouth that lacked suppleness and yet was quite harsh, and
I sensed that his eyes were mocking me, as if he were saying: Old Henkin,
surely we're
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