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defeated. With eyes full of sad cunning Teacher Henkin searched for
his son at a fence covered with brambles, now wretched and neglected. A
small garbage cart stood there, empty, rusted, and the enclosures of the
port looked too bright in the sunlight. The intense blue of the sky swallowed up the particle of distance between him and the sea. The houses
protected only themselves. Henkin didn't protect anything. Boaz stood
there stuck and waited and Henkin looked at him. After about an hour,
Henkin went into the house, opened the slats of the shutter a little and
peeped outside. Boaz went on standing. A little while later, he came outside and gave Boaz a glass of cold water. Boaz didn't drink it and returned
the water to Henkin. He saw Menahem playing in the yard and thought,
what could I have told him, Henkin couldn't have recognized Boaz's face because of the strong light and he saw only the stunned silhouette in the
afternoon light and then he dared ask, he asked: Who are you?

    Just, said Boaz.
    Just what?
    Just standing here.
    Henkin wanted to ask, but some skepticism had already sneaked into
him, that sense of loss that, anyway, he wouldn't answer him. He muttered
something and said, And doesn't the young man have a name?
    I did have, said Boaz and then he started pitying all that life here and
he went away. He took the kitbag from the tent, walked to the central bus
station and got on a bus. He had soldier's tickets and rode free. The discharge would start tomorrow. Henkin waited a few minutes and went inside. He locked the door and tried to recall the young man's face, but he
couldn't.
    Tape / -
    And then a wind started blowing and Teacher Henkin said to his wife:
They won't understand, Hasha Masha, they won't understand, there's an
undermined system of fates here, look ... but she didn't want to read.
    Tape / -
    ... And once again I recall the young man who stood here years ago.
Now I think it really was Boaz Schneerson but maybe I'm wrong. Boaz
never confirmed that he stood here and took the glass of cold water and
didn't deny it either. The story of the Last Jew was also constructed from
the end to the beginning, and only after I invested a few years in my investigation of the Last Jew did I meet Ebenezer completely by chance, even
though he was here, near me, all that time. And after the meeting with
Ebenezer, doubts about the hundreds of pages I had written stirred in me
and I decided to think about writing the book with that German. Maybe
that writing itself is an attempt to decipher, to uncover the things whose
logical sequence is so strange to me.
    My dear son Menahem I lost many years ago. Menahem was killed in
two different places: he was killed in battle in the valley near Mount Radar
where he lay among thirty-two bodies, and he fell in battle for the Old City
of Jerusalem, at dawn on May twentieth, nineteen forty-eight. Maybe she's right, Hasha Masha, who maintains that the glory of mourners in front of
a mirror is common in me. I'm trying to reconstruct things: I then felt that
life stopped all at once, wasn't in store for me anyplace else, the energy in
me was masked by the pain that was too splendid in my wife's eyes, but
was all I had left. I sank into endless thinking about my son and my own
life was only a setting for the sorrow I shaped in me; like somebody who
creates life on the model of death. I looked at my little house on Deliverance Street, near the old port of Tel Aviv, against the background of the
sea that sinks there a bit to the north, makes a kind of semi-bow, and at
the undrained station is a small airport where small planes land or take off
over our house. I looked then at the desolation of the forsaken concrete of
the port, the abandoned enclosures, the creased houses, and the dusty
trees, eaten by sea salt, and the sand that penetrates everything here,
thickens holes, turns everything living into scarred desolation bereft of
beauty. It's hard