The Tel Aviv Dossier

by Lavie Tidhar

  He hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his underpants and slid them off, and stood naked. He felt hungry then, and he began to walk, treading softly as his feet felt every inch of road, every impurity of the surface, so for the first time, it seemed to him, he actually felt the city, touched it — so different from before, when he tramped around it with his heavy shoes, like a soldier who feels nothing for his place of conquest, fulfilling a duty, not —

  Not loving, he thought. To touch, to know, was to love, to understand. He never understood that before. He looked at everything with a new light now, as if a scalpel had been applied to his eyes, removing the eyeballs, polishing them, making them new, then returning them gently to their sockets. He saw a teddy bear lying on the ground with one eye missing, and he saw a tank lying on its side, black smoke still rising from its inside, and a soldier lying nearby with his helmet beside him, and one of his eyes running down his face like a tear. He found a fruit stall capsized on a corner, its produce spilled on the ground, and he bent and picked up an apple, and bit into it, and let the juice run down his mouth and he thought — I am alive. The taste of the thought was sweeter than that of the fruit.

  He walked, and at last he came to the square of the Kings of Israel, which later changed its name to Rabin Square, after the prime minister and former general who was assassinated there. There had been no kings in Israel for many years, Daniel thought, a little dazed. And the king who was said to return, our master, our teacher and our rabbi, King Messiah for ever and ever — where was he, now?

  The square was silent. Nothing moved. The municipality building lay in ruins, a thing like an upside-down pyramid lying in its rubble. Burned tanks littered the square like dead songbirds. He crossed at the traffic light. He felt, suddenly, overwhelmingly, lonely. They are all dead, he thought. All dead. He missed his friends, there in the midst of desolation: Moyshe, and Noam, and the others in the yeshiva, good boys, really, Moyshe already with two kids and a bright future as a rabbi, Noam trying so hard, a bit slow perhaps but with a good heart, he could have become a true tzaddik, and . . . he wondered if, outside Tel Aviv, things were still normal. He wondered if his grandparents —

  Something moved in the distance and Daniel froze. What was it? Ahead of him, across the street and to the left, was a shawarma shop, its shutters closed. Nothing stirred. He took a cautious step, another one —

  There! A flash of light! Coming from a, from a —

  A small window — it was the shawarma shop then. He crossed the road, heading for it. His heart beat fast, the blood rushing through him as if he were running. He came to the place and saw the metal shutter was not closed all the way. Was someone hiding inside? He called out, “Shalom? Shalom?” his own voice sounded thin and insubstantial there in the vast emptiness of the square. “Please, are you there?”

  He bent down to pull the shutters up, and when his fingers found purchase for the pull they found something else, too: for when he grasped the edge of the metal someone else’s hands were already there. He pulled, and the shutters slowly rose. He heaved at them. The other, on the other side, pulled too. He touched fingers: human, warm. The touch was like a drug. He pulled one last time, his muscles unused to physical labour. The sweat ran down his pale, naked body. The shutters rose. Behind them, standing there and looking at him with a bemused expression on her face, was a young woman.

  VIOLENT CHANGES, A DOCUMENTARY (VIDEO RECORDING, PART III — HAGAR)

  For a long time nothing happens. It is quiet, eerily quiet in the square. Tanks are lying lifeless in the street. If there are, as there must be, soldiers trapped inside them, then they must be dead. They must be. Even the sound of the bombings has stopped. From my window I see nothing moving, nothing alive. It is a scene of total devastation, a post-apocalyptic nightmare landscape from a Hollywood movie. But there are no heroes out there. There is no superhuman man with perfect teeth and an indestructible body and a $20-million-a-film salary cheque wandering these streets, the last hopes of a dying humanity pinned on him with the sure knowledge that he would triumph. There is no one here but me, and I am hiding inside a shawarma shop.

  . . .

  Later. I had to pee and went and did it behind the counter. It was embarrassing, squatting there with my pants down, going on the floor of the shop, but I didn’t have much choice. At least it seems safe here. Sitting there in the silence made me think that, almost, life was back to normal. What if I was only confused and somehow ended up in here after my shift at the cinema ended, and fell asleep, and now it was morning and soon someone was going to come by and open the grate and . . . and find me peeing on the floor?

  So I did it quickly and went back to the window and put the camera back on. Nothing moving. There are no birds, no cats or dogs, no women pushing prams, no soldiers running late to base, no orthodox debating the Torah with waving hands, no rockers, no punks, no Thai or Filipino workers on a break from the construction site or the fields, no wannabe models or singers on their way to Café Joe’s morning shift, no retirees with folding chairs and a beach umbrella on their way to the beach, no high-tech executives shouting on flashy high-tech cell phones, no university students heading for a morning matinee at the cinema, no protesters in front of the municipality building, no city council employees sneaking out for a smoke, no joggers, no rubbish collectors, no —

  Wait. There is something moving out there! Moving slowly, coming from the direction of Dizengoff, along Frishman. Something white and pale and . . . and human.

  I can’t believe I’m crying. It just feels so silly, to stand here staring out of a window that looks like a small television screen showing a world in black-and-white, the way it did when I was a kid, when there was only one channel and the same things kept repeating until you knew them almost by heart. Like Marco, the kid who’d lost his mother and then had to voyage to find her — why am I thinking this now? And now the figure outside is coming closer and — it’s definitely a guy and —

  He’s naked.

  I laugh. I can’t help myself. I laugh and the tears drop down my face; I laugh and try to shove my fist in my mouth to stop the sound; I laugh so hard I choke and the tears just won’t stop and my body shakes; my body spasms and I can’t stop it, can’t hold it back.

  . . .

  Hysterical. I mean, I was hysteric. But I’m fine now. And he’s coming closer, I think he must have seen the flash of the camera in the window, and I don’t know what to do but suddenly I need to know.

  I need to know I’m not alone. I need to know someone else, at least, survived. I need — I need — it’s an overwhelming, all-encompassing feeling, a terrible impatience, I have to see it, feel it, know it for myself. I go to the shutter and I have to pull it up and I do and — there’s something else there. Someone else. His fingers, his hands pulling with me, warm and real. We pull the shutters up together. Light comes into the shop and then the guy is there, and I just stand there and stare at him.

  And then he says, “Shalom?”

  . . .

  I don’t want to talk about it. I think the camera was still running when I . . . when we . . . that’s just so embarrassing. The truth is, I think I was a little insane when he came through. I felt like he couldn’t be real. I had to know. He said, “Shalom?” with this kind of quavering sound, he sounded like a little kid, lost, like Marco in that television program, only he wasn’t a little kid, he was a grown-up man and I saw that and I had to —

  I just needed to touch him, needed to know he’s real. I put my hands on his face and felt his skin and his neck and his mouth and I felt his breath against my palms, hot and nervous, and his hair which was kind of greasy and his shoulders, his arms, a little flabby, very pale, like he’d not been in the sun at all. I mean, how do you avoid getting a tan in Tel Aviv? But I wasn’t thinking about that then. He smelled sweaty and I just couldn’t get enough of it; it was a normal smell, a human smell after the burning and the smoke and hot metal, and when I touched his chest I felt his he
art beating fast against my hand, and then I think some of the urgency I felt must have passed on to him and he held me and his hands were in my hair, on my face, on my neck and then we were holding each other and I felt his excitement against me and —

  I just hope the camera wasn’t running. And now there’s this sort of quiet awkwardness, and he says, “My name’s Daniel,” and extends his hand like for a handshake and I say, “Hagar — nice to meet you,” and —

  And suddenly we’re both laughing, not like I did before, a real laugh, warm and gushing and — and shared — and the awkwardness evaporates and when we stop laughing after a long while we just lie back and hold each other. It feels safe in the shawarma shop. And I guess I fall asleep because the next thing I know I wake up and I don’t know where I am, and there’s the most awful sound outside, like a police or fire-truck siren and, above it, and even worse, a jarring, discordant sound and I don’t even understand why or how — somebody’s singing.

  THE FIREMAN’S GOSPEL, PART V (ELI — APOCRYPHAL?

  There was nothing in the cabin with me. And it called my name. “Eli,” the nothing said. “Eli.”

  The voice had a familiar quality to it, despite being barely above a whisper. It took me less than a minute to find out that it was coming out of the radio unit. It took me less than five minutes to find the transceiver under all the junk in the cabin, while driving. The thing kept talking, saying my name and nothing more.

  I grabbed the receiver. “Hello there!” I said, cheerfully. “How’s it going?”

  There was no answer.

  “Hello!” I said, and suddenly I understood how much less fun it was, to go through all this without having someone to share it with, if only for a short while, before said someone got eaten by red turbulence or hit by a flying tank. It’s always good to have someone to talk to. And I thought, maybe on the way to the town centre I can pick up some people. Get myself a bit of stock. Like a puppet show, or the audience in a live-studio sitcom. Who would’ve believed that something good would come out of mere people?

  The radio unit was still quiet, though. Maybe reception was bad. Maybe whoever was calling me had just died, got sucked up into the sky. Maybe I was just imagining things. And then the idea came to me: maybe there are other people, other firemen, listening on this frequency. Maybe there are more survivors, maybe even some like myself — though this, really, was a false hope, since I personally knew all the veteran firemen in the Tel-Aviv-Jaffa area. But hey, what’s stopping me from trying to find them anyway?

  I took the transceiver. I pressed the “transmit” button. I opened my mouth. Inhaled.

  “Goooooood morning, Tel Aviv! This is not a test, this is rock ’n’ roll! Come rock it from the river to the Jaffa border, from the sea to Ayalon! This morning — ” it was already afternoon, though by the looks of it the time could’ve been anything between evening and four AM — “we’ve a wonderful show for you, with storms and monsters, catastrophe and Armageddon, and fun, fun, fun! Guiding you through this crazy time is your favourite DJ, The Incredible Fire-Man, and in the main roles of this action-packed thriller you will find — yourselves!”

  Then I stopped for a breath and I’m pretty sure I heard the receiver say: “Eli.”

  Such a short reply for such a long speech. Shame.

  “What do you want?” I said. “Who is this?”

  Static. A voice too quiet, whispering. Saying . . . “I am the lord your god.”

  Aha.

  “Hey, cool,” I said. Maybe there was some other survivor like me out there, keeping his senses, most notably his sense of humour. “I kneel before you, O Lord, for I have been having too much fun with all this, which is not appropriate. Anyway, what’s your name, dude?”

  “I am thy god.”

  “You bet your skinny ass you are. Funny, we have the same name. Eli.”

  Silence.

  “Don’t you speak Hebrew, God? It’s the holy tongue, you know. Eli, my God. My God, Eli. You got me?”

  Though really it is short for Eliyahu, who the English call Elijah, fuck knows why.

  Fine, I decided. There can’t be two Elis in this truck. “I’ll call you Kishke,” I said. “I had a dog named Kishke once. He was a good dog. I hope you can hold up to his standards.”

  Kishke, from the Yiddish. Meaning kidneys. It’s not that I’d ever enjoyed eating kishke . . .

  Whispering, and static . . .

  “Thou shalt be pure in flesh and spirit . . .”

  “Though he was, in fact, a very tasty dog. With a bit of garlic, you could almost mistake it for pork.”

  There was a short silence after this, not even static. God probably doesn’t like pork. God is Jewish, after all. Then the static returned, slowly, a weak hiss, then an annoyance, like a television tuned to a dead channel, then like a 747 taking off right above your head, right in your head, and over it a voice:

  “And you shall be my emissary in the desert.”

  I turned off the radio unit. What desert? This was Tel Aviv. God, it seemed, was clearly delusional.

  *

  Driving through Ibn-Gvirol Street back north was a lot less fun than going south. It was dreadfully quiet by now: nobody flying, nobody screaming, nobody being chewed by anything. Not any more. No flying yachts either. The real action was to the west, where the Dizengoff Center was still rising, higher and higher. The mountain looked impossibly tall . . . I wondered if, when I climbed it, I could see my house from there. I wanted to turn left and drive towards it, but all the small streets crossing Ibn-Gvirol were blocked by the remains of buildings. They were also becoming notably higher. Ibn Gvirol itself was slowly turning into a part of the mountain’s slope, the right side of the street definitely lower than the left. I was concerned that soon it’d become too steep and I wouldn’t be able to drive along it without the Hawk overturning. So I continued north, hoping that somewhere near the Rabin Square, the municipality building, there would be an unblocked street which would lead me west and up, let me climb the mountain head-on.

  I kept hearing something in my head, like an afterimage of the voice of the so-called God. It kept saying things to me, so weakly that I could understand it only by listening very hard — but I didn’t want to listen. After a while I couldn’t stand it. I started humming to myself, trying to mask the voice, but it wouldn’t go away. I hummed louder, and louder. Nothing. I activated the Hawk’s siren. The sound, through the open window, was horrible, but even then there were remains of talking. My ears were popping, and at some point I noticed I was singing at the top of my voice, no longer Alanis Morissette but a local rock song I’d always hated in particular, but which refused to leave me now. Some band called Ha’Yehudim. The Jews. Dreadful stuff.

  So I kept singing and the siren kept accompanying me in time to the beat, such as it was, and this went on for dozens of blocks more until I got to Rabin Square and saw the naked couple.

  *

  I hit the brakes, killed the siren. My mouth was shut. There was no voice in my head. The two people were getting out of the remains of some food stall or shop, and then they stood on the sidewalk, looking at me. The woman — nice looking, though too pale for my taste — was holding, for some reason, a video camera. The man was even paler. Perverts. They both stared, as if I were something unnatural.

  I got out of the cabin, jumped down to the sidewalk. I wore my best smile.

  “Hello!” I said. “Having a nice day?” They just stared at me. I tried again. “What are you two lovebirds doing here?”

  Both of them looked down, as if in shame. That’s one emotion I never understood. It’s like feeling bad about something you did — which is crazy to me. But I know shame when I see it on other people.

  “Sex, I assume,” I said, and the woman blushed all over, which was kind of nice to see, and the man raised his head and looked at me like I was some kind of a rare newt and he was a collector.

  “Who are you?” he said.

  “My name’s Eli.
I’m a fireman.” The fireman. The Incredible FireMan! Ha! Why was I being so friendly? I could just run him over with the truck . . . “And you, my man?”

  “My name . . .” he looked confused for a moment. “My name’s Daniel,” he said, but he said it more to the woman than to me, and she blushed again. “I’m Hagar,” she said. Clearly I was just getting in the way of true love. Or true sex.