by Rena Rossner
‘Hang on a minute. Didn’t anyone contact you after she was run over?’
‘They weren’t able to track me down. I got married and changed my name. Now I’m divorced and – anyway, that’s beside the point. I came here to tell you that since, according to the law of the living, one can’t be held guilty for a crime committed against a dead person, you are to be released effective immediately.’
Solvi stared at her in disbelief. ‘But there’s one thing I don’t understand. If your mother had already been dead when she was run over, then how was anyone held responsible for the accident? I mean, there was no body to begin with. She probably got up and went back home, slightly shaken up but still alive. So to speak.’
Now it was Rosa’s turn to stare at him in disbelief. ‘Oh, but she didn’t. She died. And she was buried again, although at a different spot, which means she has two tombstones. Funnily enough, no one bothered to check...’
‘She died?’
‘Yes.’
’For good?’
‘For good.’
Solvi didn’t look back. Upon leaving prison he realized that Marketa had probably been the first among the formerly dead to regain death once again, yet her second demise had been a secret of sorts since no one but her daughter had known about her first death.
He went to the cemetery and looked for Marketa’s stone. He wanted to address it but felt like a fool, contemplating his life ever since he arose. He spent ten minutes in front of the silent grave and wondered about Marketa’s first death. Then he went back home. The following Monday he wandered to the forest and saw Yehoshua pouring gasoline all over himself.
Yehoshua called, ‘Well, if it isn’t…’
Solvi wanted to let him know about the new promise when Yehoshua opened his eyes in shock and pointed behind Solvi, shouting, ‘Watch out!’
Solvi looked around hopefully and heard Yehoshua’s laughter.
‘Just kidding,’ he said.
‘You stupid arsehole!’ Solvi roared at the laughing man. He grabbed the matchbox from his hand, struck a match and threw it at him.
The burning man screamed like there was no tomorrow, and Solvi retorted, ‘Just kidding,’ before leaving the forest.
It was only a week later, during one of his gloomy constitutionals, that he happened upon the human lump of coal that used to be Yehoshua. He bent over the burnt corpse and called, ‘Yehoshua! Yehoshua! Stop playing this silly game!’ but it was evident no life remained in the formerly dead man, who’d resumed his old status courtesy of Solvi’s momentary fit of rage.
Solvi was thinking about the second dead person who managed to prove the theory of eternal temporariness and tried to banish from his mind the other thought, about himself being the culprit, since he’d killed another man, albeit a once dead one. And then it hit him, like nothing before – not even the tree that had changed the course of his lives. Perhaps the only way to help a formerly dead person fulfill their death wish was to have another formerly dead person do the deed.
The excited pounding of his heart reminded him of his not-so-long-ago metal days, and by the time he got back home, he knew he was right. That was the secret. Marketa died because she was run over by a formerly dead driver. Different rules applied to the dead, and one just had to follow them.
Another month went by. Solvi was waiting beside the familiar prison gates for another member of the scapegoat factory to emerge. After talking to Felix and finding out about the next formerly dead person to be released, he contacted the woman in question and told her about his secret plan, assuming she was seeking death as well.
When she stepped out of the gates, he smiled at her. Her name was Diana Bloomberg, and she’d served four years for fraud on a national scale.
At first she said she wouldn’t want to waste another minute, but then she changed her mind and said she wouldn’t mind having one last cup of coffee before they annihilated each other. They had that coffee and forgot themselves a little, talking about this and that, when they noticed the sky was darkening. Then they had a quick bite and headed for the forest.
Solvi, who’d got hold of two pistols, gave her one and asked her to pull the trigger at the exact moment he would.
Diana smiled bashfully. ‘How about one last kiss.’
Solvi sighed and humoured her. Then they made love. Twice – once for each life. Eventually, when all was said and done, they stood facing each other and, on a count of three, fired the pistols.
And this is the end of Solvi’s story.
For now.
LIKE A COIN ENTRUSTED IN FAITH
SHIMON ADAF
1
They wake up Sultana the midwife at the dead of night. Poundings on the door, which she disguises in her sleep. Hides them within the symbolism of the dreams. But her consciousness arises at last. She identifies the knocking, the intervals between knockings. And she is alarmed. The alarm is not shaped yet. She covers herself quickly. Out of habit. Ties her headdress and goes out. In spite of the urgency of the knocks, the man is standing with his back to her hut. Almost indifferent, his small cart, tied to a grey ass, in the starlight of the beginning of autumn in Morocco, is also cut from the landscape.
Afterwards she remembers the light gallop of the ass and the cart on the slope, the rustle of the world she senses whenever she leaves the hamlet, out of the protective imagination of its inhabitants. The wind is warm still, unexpected warmness, and the lucidity of the air. She smells the sea in it, Essaouira’s daily commotion caught in it even at midnight. But they circumvent the city. She already recognised the driver, Shlomo Benbenishti. It’s been years since she’s last seen him. He hurries the ass. He tells it, run like the storm, my beauty, and laughs. She does not understand the laughter. A shred of shyness is apparent in it. Maybe nervousness.
The road becomes steep. The ass brays, even neighs. Shlomo turns to her. He says, do not eat or drink anything in the house at which we are about to arrive. Had dar hadi fiah Jnoon1. The Moroccan is light on his tongue, and his Hebrew heavier, the heritage of the synagogue. He knows that she understands Hebrew, though she’s a woman. She nods. Now she grasps the nature of her alarm. The moon is a thin etch in the thickening darkness, thickening more and more as they near their destination. The moon still breathes his first breaths of the month. That is the alarm. Why was she summoned now? The time is the ten days of repentance.
2
The mother died with a scream. Her face was veiled and the scream was almost silenced. Sometimes they are marked; the demon leaves his marks on their cheeks. A scar of a bite. Every now and then, when Sultana hands them their baby, they remove the veil and she sees. But the woman died while delivering. She twisted and turned with spasms when Sultana came in. Sultana imagined her nails burrowing into the flesh of the hand. A small lamp threw light on her round belly, about to burst. Shlomo stayed outside. Inside, close to one of the dark hut’s clay walls stood a man she couldn’t make out clearly. She said she didn’t want to deliver the baby, that they shouldn’t have called her during the ten days of repentance, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The man insisted. He switched to Hebrew, he said, what is forbidden within the boundaries of the land of Israel, isn’t forbidden in foreign lands. Is he Jewish, she thought to herself, the accent was strange, but his voice, she knew the voice, where from?
The mother shuddered at her touch. Her cries begun. The newborn fought, Sultana could tell. She lifted the woman’s dress. She saw the little egg-shaped skull, through the widened lips of the vagina, smeared with blood and liquids of the womb. She pressed on the belly. He was blue, the baby, his skin, his hair, his eyes when opened shortly. The irises filled the sockets. She couldn’t figure out if he was blind. A spark of intelligence burned in his eyes, curiosity almost. She shook. When she severed the umbilical cord the newborn shook too and went still.
The man told her to put the dead baby alongside his mother’s corpse. I told you, she said. Her voice broke a little. He didn’t react. Shlomo�
��s head peered from the entrance and he called her name delicately. She followed him. Anger grew in her during the journey back. When he stopped near her hut, she said, why are you working for them, why? He asked her, with his former softness, why they sent for you, you tell me.
3
From: Tiberia Assido
To: Doron Aflalo
RE: Rose of Judea
Say, what is this nonsense you’ve been sending me? You promised to report what you’ve been discovering about Rabbi SBRJ. Instead you’re telling me some made-up tale about the days Rabbi Shlomo was young? I realize that stories about demon births were widespread in the villages in Morocco. My mother told Akko and me a similar tale once. Akko couldn’t sleep that night. But what has that to do with the Rose of Judea? If I recall, you claimed that evil spirits are nothing but a story intended to cover up the involvement of Externals in Jewish history. You also claimed that they aren’t born, but are some kind of Jews who’ve been mutated in a distant future, didn’t you?
Akko is advancing with the development of “Solium Salomonis”, at least with parts I’m exposed to. He makes me talk daily with the software. A little scary. When we started the output was confused (look at me, writing as if I had the first clue about computing), without any relevance to the sentences I typed. Now, half of the time she answers my questions.
BTW, it’s beautiful here in Massachusetts. Thanks for asking. And I enjoy being around Akko, even though he kept all his annoying habits from when we were children. He still won’t talk to me about his sexuality. It’s beneath him to show any interest in such an inferior human activity. He also forgets to eat. Anyway, he needs as detailed information as possible, not stories.
What about you? Haven’t gone crazy yet from staying at your parents’ place in Mevoe-Yam?
T.
4
But certain stories are sometimes the only way to give someone a key. The stories of my father were left hidden. My mother forgot. Only Miriam, once, told me a real horror story. The birds’ song, she said, is full of razors. When she’s passing by, they sing about it to her. Not the content of the song, but the song itself, the way it slashes through the air and reaches her ears. That’s the razor. It cuts reality. In the following days I ceased listening. Like I turned towards other voices. The world called my name.
Years went by before I figured out that it’s not what we fear that frightens us. What frightens us lurks at the edges, behind the gates of cognition. The fear we know is nothing but a defense mechanism against this, the thing. How to explain? Maybe that I understood that Tel Aviv fell on New Year’s Eve of the year 5767 to creation. Suddenly I saw only parts of the reality of the city. On the stairs leading to the university, on Jaffa pier, on Allenby. They peered through the shroud of the city. What is reality if not the memory of others leaping from you when you look? Their life, their bodies that created in their movement the space you occupy, gave it meaning. Yet, woven in this weave of remembrance, you are left to your own devices; you have a resting place, a place of becoming. And the city was lost, as Miriam was lost, washed into the abyss from which only a choked, undecipherable sound, is coming back. And the stupid dreams of the Tel Aviv dwellers preserved the city, a dull copy under the sun of Israel.
5
Sultana remembered Shlomo. She remembered him when she lay awake on her bed, and she remembered him afterwards, when she slouched to the cave at the break of dawn. He was a Yeshiva student, who came from a community in Istanbul with a recommendation letter from the community’s rabbi. She was about to get married and didn’t pay him much attention, even though her father, the rabbi of the newly formed community in Essaouira, whose members retired from one of the communities in Fez, took him in.
For a while he was her father’s protégé. He was rumored to be extremely gifted. He knew many tractates from the Babylonian and the Jerusalem Talmud by heart, and was versed in the writings of the Geniuses and Maimonides; he even read the prohibited book. He was exchanging epistles with an Israeli sage, Rabbi Yosef Karo, and her father let his pride be known at Sabbath meals, when she and her husband came to visit, and she was carrying a child in her womb. But something changed. She was only able to get some parts of the story. The young lad Benbenishti and her father were becoming estranged. She couldn’t attend to it; her husband fell ill and she was about to give birth. When she returned to her parents’ home, after her husband’s death, her father wouldn’t hear about Shlomo Benbenishti. He wasn’t welcomed anymore.
6
Her mother told her, when Shlomo appeared one day famished at the kitchen entrance of their house. Her mother fed him somewhat fearfully, as if he were a leper, and made Sultana stand watch at the doorway to the house, to warn her if her father or one of her younger brothers was approaching. Shlomo couldn’t make a living. No member of the community would hire him. Occasionally he would work for Arabs, to drive a cart, to run errands, to sell in the market, to whitewash houses.
Shlomo would pursue issues best left alone. He asked about corpses coming back to life: are they still infused with the profanity of the dead, can they be cleansed by bathing in a mikveh? Is the tent in which a body is vitalized clear of its impurity, the tent and every object within its space? What was the status of the children revived by Elijah and Elisha? Were they still in need of red-cow ashes? What was the meaning of the Jerusalem Talmud argument that the dead live among the dew? And so on, and so forth. Her father, who detested any discussion of the sort, was convinced he was possessed, god forbid, La Yister2.
The memory flooded her – no, slashed her. That day, when the males of the family went to pray mincha, the afternoon prayer, and the soft light anticipated the coming of the evening. Shlomo sat in front of her mother and her in the kitchen, munching leftovers of couscous and meat, and his eyes darkly sleep-deprived, haunted.
7
From: Tiberia Assido
To: Doron Aflalo
RE: Rose of Judea
Doron,
I’m a murderess, murderess. I know the term is a bit melodramatic, but it describes well my shock. I’ve killed Akko’s software. I’ve already named it in my mind: Malka. You know how you’ll ascribe human features to everything that shows a will or imitates life, like pets or toys, when you’re child? When I was eight, one of the girls in the neighborhood got a talking doll. Akko coveted it so much that I helped him steal it. It made me feel sick when he took it apart to see its inner workings. I heard her crying in my head, begging me to stop the torture. Now, thinking back, I think the doll’s owner was Malka. Or maybe I’m rewriting the recollection to make it meaningful.
I wasn’t doing it on purpose. I just held my daily conversation with her. And I couldn’t resist. I quoted, half joking, the dubious exegesismy father taught Akko, about king Solomon’s throne (solium salomonis) and the kings of Edom and the Externals fighting over it, and I asked Malka her thoughts on the matter (I was tired, and bored). She crashed. Akko claims that restarting her won’t do us any good, that the backups won’t help, because she’ll only crash again. He says I need to start training a blank module anew, and that he hasn’t much time to deal with it at the moment.
Poor Malka, I’ve destroyed her. How can I raise another module, to see it grow, develop a consciousness?
And Akko won’t tell me why he’s so adamant about me being the one who raises it. True, it’s crucial to him that the software language be Hebrew. He has this hypothesis that Hebrew is prevalent all over the Worlds, that it’s the Ur-language. No, that in each and every one of the Worlds, a version of Hebrew came to be out of a family of languages similar to it. That’s why Hebrew is the closest to the Ursprechen. But why the hell me? He can hire an Israeli student. They are fucking everywhere nowadays.
So you have time to get serious with your investigation. Yet, why is your story so indirect? Why do you suspend the information? What’s your point, really?
T.
8
Sultana remembered. She stood in the ca
ve, in whose depths her son was kept, and he failed to appear, even when she called out his name. Hosea.
9
When your son shows signs of a mysterious illness, which brought down his father, an illness gnawing his organs while the spirit stays sane, trapped in the cage of flesh, it is easy to prevent his death. All you need is a device to stop time.
But there’s a setback; there’s always a setback. Time-halting objects aren’t as widespread as they used to be. Let’s say Moses’ wand. Or Joshua’s Shofar.
10
And there’s always a price, evidently.
11
She’d been told there was an Arab who lived on a mountain. He was a master of the dying. She walked many miles. Wore out two pairs of shows. Her son was with her, riding a donkey, his life force leaking.
The Arab gave her a ring made of a bone of the upupa epops that was passed down from King Solomon’s hand to the hands of the Kahlif Harun El Rashid, and lastly came to his possession. The ring radiated decay and corruption and gangrene. He commanded her to change her name, to leave her parents’ house without speaking to them. He told her to dwell in a certain hamlet, outside of Essaouira, and study how to serve as a midwife. He said that she would be called for, that he for long has waited for a Jewish woman to come his way.
12
1. All conscious creatures are sentenced to die.
1.1 But not all of them are sentenced to perish.
1.1.1 The consciousness may linger after the death of the body; parts of it may. A knot of memories and sentiments. The ghost is best suited to depict this sort of lingering.
1.1.2 The body, a complex system of appetites and cravings, may survive alone, without the bridles of consciousness. The vampire, one can argue, is the representation of this sort of lingering.
1.1.3 What is the third variation of outliving death that’s illustrated by the zombie? In contrast to the other two, the zombie is devoid of memory, identity, passion. The living entity was erased. Only a blind instinct is left, the will of another that possesses it whole. It has been devoured.
