Free B002FB6BZK EBOK by Yoram Kaniuk

old friends and surely I knew where I knew him from and he
said surely my name is Ebenezer and the name of the woman who lives
with me and is married to me is Fanya R. He pronounced the words carefully and I sensed that he had a special need to feel the words as if he
weren't used to speaking Hebrew, which sounded, as I said, both rooted
and foreign. I sensed that he had a need to say "the woman who lives with
me" before "is married to me," an amazing phrase in itself, surely I would have said my wife and not the woman who's married to me as if she's married to him and he isn't married to her?

    I thought about the Giladis, about his phrases, about the way he bent
over and plucked out tiny crabgrass that I may not have noticed, and then
he said: Did Boaz Schneerson come visit you yet? And I thought here it
comes, like then, when I learned my son died, simple things once again
start to take on a twisted meaning, as if everything was planned and he
started taking care of the Giladis' garden so two months later I could
come out and hear that name, Boaz Schneerson, from him, and suddenly
a distant memory flashed in me, the moment when Boaz maybe really
was standing here, still a young man who had just returned from the war,
raging and furious, he looked at me, and when I asked him who he was and
gave him some cold water he took off. I remember how he looked at me
then, and I felt a strange envy of him because he was alive and then when
I met him, years later, I didn't remember what I remembered now, and
now of all times, when the stranger asks me if Boaz Schneerson came again,
or perhaps he said "yet," to visit you, what does he have to do with Boaz?
What does he have to do with the person who destroyed my life and stirred
Hasha Masha's hostility, where does that stranger get a tie with us? I looked
at him in amazement and he managed to smile, a smile Boaz would surely
call the smile of a hunter of agricultural machines or something, Boaz's diabolical phrases. A pleasant wind now blew from the sea. The air cooled off
in a cooling and graying space, a bittersweet smell of geranium, and the blue
sea stretching beyond his back, an overloaded ship sails toward the port of
Ashdod, smoke rises from the ship's smokestacks, and the man measures me,
waits for an answer, or perhaps not, and I water, that's the safest thing. I
don't let the hose slip away, I don't let the stream dwindle and then the man
says: So? He doesn't come anymore, the bastard?
    No! I said, almost reluctantly. His mouth was gaping open a little, a
bird of death I saw, a spasm I saw, invisible blood flows. A blasted cheek,
a bandage on an arm, the bold clear colors before sunset, spots of color on
the back, was he hit hard? The sight of the scars reminded me again of the
sight of Boaz. Back then, when I didn't recognize him, the sight of a captured jackal, and the man talked and straightened up again and I said what
I regretted afterward and after you say it there's no way back, I said: This
garden belonged to my son, Menahem, he fell in battles in Jerusalem, for him I replanted the garden. But he didn't pay attention to the seriousness
I tried to give that moment and he said: Surely you're going to the party
this evening, Mr. Henkin, Menahem's been dead a long time ...

    Before I could digest the words, I said: I'm supposed to go out this
evening, but I'm not yet sure I will and once again I wanted to gain time,
to understand how he knew what he knew, how he knew my son's name,
how he knew I would go out that evening, was he spying on me; his face
was shriveled now, as if he had just been taken out of the grave, his hands
didn't shake, he held the hose with a certain cunning and only his torso
was seen moving a little, as if he were praying and even laughing a laugh
pieced together of tatters of pain and seeking a foothold, assembled, and
stitched together again, he even demonstrated some insolent shyness. His
ear turned