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for me to describe the essence of that pain, they're the
strongest yearnings for a person whose death is never grasped. That death
is in you, lives in you, in the chest, the dream, waking, slumbering grown
to somewhere you have no idea of, and then the wakefulness, the emptiness, the waking distress. Memories are nothing but nonstop poundings
in softness, maybe a mute shout in a dream and you don't know whether
you're dreaming it or it's dreaming you.

    In the cemeteries for those who fell in World War II, the anonymous
graves say: "Known only to God." On a check you write: "Pay to the bearer,"
so it can't be transferred to somebody else. Pain has no heirs, there is no
imagination that can hold the empty space left behind by some anonymous
person known only to God, if God knew him as I do, he would hold the
whole earth.
    All I had left of Menahem were a few school notebooks, a naive scrapbook from the seventh grade, photos we took here and there of Menahem's
grandfather and grandmother who have died meanwhile, of uncles, friends
we used to meet sometimes. Photos in the drawers of our table or with
Noga, who was still living with us then, before she went to live with Boaz.
His mother hung Menahem's clothes in the closet. Our house is a closet for
Menahem's clothes. A picture album, a few notebooks and that poem,
enveloped by this house. Hasha Masha scoured the buttons, sewed on the
ones that fell off, polished his shoes carefully, scoured the isolated objects we had left and I, who had once worked for a tailor to pay for my schooling, sewed the rips, stitched together, then I ironed everything and we
hung them up in the closet and ever since then he's known only to God.
All we had left was to sit and wait. We had to make up a life to justify what
had ended.

    Boaz Schneerson came and moved me out of my orbit, killed Menahem
in another battle, brought him back to life, and put him to death again, but
about that I'll have to talk later. Noga left us for Boaz and I went on teaching awhile, I was even principal for about two years. But when I figured out
that I was talking to students who had finished school long ago and maybe
were parents of their own children, when I figured out that in my increasingly frequent hallucinations I was talking to Menahem's friends who remained his age, on the day it ended, but in fact they had already graduated
and were filling the world with mischief, or teaching, or running factories,
and I called those kids by other names, when I saw that I was hallucinating, I resigned.
    That was a few years ago, years after our son fell. The photos didn't
help, nor did the endless walks every morning between seven and seven
forty-five from our house in the north of the city to Mugrabi Square that
had been obliterated meanwhile along with the clock that had anyway
never shown the right time, but stood there like a clear sign of some stability that's gone now. Nothing helped, the emptiness was heavy as the
nothingness of Menahem's shoes in the closet. Polished, shining, destined
for nothing. At the end of every journey, thousands of kilometers in the
same orbit, I remained alone.
    Until I met Ebenezer I thought my investigation of the Last Jew resulted from a conversation I once had with somebody who had been the
principal of our school, Demuasz, the teacher who had been there even
longer than I. I have to say that compared to what Demuasz built I didn't
contribute much and our school sank into a gray slumber of routine. What
I did contribute is a wall of memory and every year the graduating students
say with an embarrassed smile that the next reunion will be held on it. And
then they also see Menahem's name carved there, heading the long list.
I put up the wall by myself and there was some pleasure in beginning the
long list with my son's name and adding after the name, as ordered by
Demuasz, the words, May God avenge their blood. I didn't believe in those words, but I