by Lavie Tidhar
I went back to the door and opened it very slowly. It didn’t make a sound. I didn’t lock it behind me — if the plan didn’t work, I could always run back to the basement and lock myself in, before the invader could do anything. I listened carefully, but heard nothing. It was tempting to think that the apartment was abandoned, but I was sure I had heard only one man leaving. I went up, stood on the stairs with my head just below the floor level, and listened again. Nothing.
I threw one of my paper balls as hard as I could in the direction of the kitchen. I heard it hitting the wall and then fall on the floor. There was a moment of silence, and then — steps. Very quick steps, coming from the living room. I waited for them to get to the kitchen, then raised my head just a bit above the floor level. Indeed there was a man there, bent over to pick up the paper ball. I jumped out, ran towards him and, just as he was turning around towards the noise I made I hit him with the staff. Two-handed, like a baseball player, and smashed it into the back of his head. He went down quietly. My arms went numb. The staff wasn’t even scratched.
I took the paper ball and the staff back to the basement, went out again and locked the door behind me. Then I searched the man. He was young — almost a boy, definitely no older than twenty years old — short and mildly muscular, with brown hair and an unsuccessful attempt at a beard. He had a leather jacket, army shoes, metallic-blue sunglasses and no wallet or identification whatsoever. I took his jacket off him, then decided against taking it with me. It stank. But now that I had, I saw on his arm a tattoo: flames, inked in red, and through the fire, eyes. There was something disturbing about the image, though I didn’t know what. Beneath it, etched into the man’s skin, was something that looked like an over-stylized horseshoe or a magnet, lying on its side.
I took my notebook out of my pocket — I always carry one on me — and copied the symbol. By then the guy was breathing heavily and mumbling. I listened, getting ready to either hit him again or run off.
“Must go back,” he said. His eyes were unfocused. I don’t think he was even aware of me. “The Voice . . . it says it’s time.”
“Time for what?” I said, but I don’t think he heard me. He was in his own private universe, and he looked scared. “I’m coming!” he said. “Wait . . . wait for me.”
“What voice?” I said. I shook him, hard. “What voice?”
“Voice of — ” and then something unclear. Then — “Come back . . . all ready now. Must go.”
“Go where?” I slapped him.
“The station,” he said. He said it as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. And then he opened his eyes, and they were red, a horrible red, so red that they were almost black, and utterly crazy. They were looking right at me.
Then he laughed.
I didn’t hit him again. I ran out through the open door, the sound of his laughter following me, and didn’t stop until my body gave up and I fell down, winded, on the pavement.
*
I came back to myself sitting on some upturned stones in Jabotinsky Street. It was hot, but the light was dim. There was a redness to everything. And above the eerie quietness I heard weird windy sounds, the kind of noise made by putting a seashell to your ear, only a hundred times louder.
The cityscape around me didn’t look any more promising than what I saw the night before. I had to start investigating, and I couldn’t get back home, the natural place for doing so — though it may not have been so now, without electricity, Internet access or my mom. I had to do it the old-fashioned way.
Where was my mom? And why were there two strange men in our apartment? From my brief look around nothing had been disturbed inside. And I knew my mother enough not to worry about her. It was always other people, with my mother, who had to do the worrying.
The Messiah. I shuddered when I thought about the man’s insane laugh. What could it mean? Well, some people would think that the Tel Aviv event may have been caused by the arrival of the Messiah, but this line of thought was amateur hour. The Messiah should appear in Jerusalem, not in Tel Aviv, for one thing. And his appearance would look nothing like this. Not according to my sources, at least.
But then . . . perhaps there was someone claiming to be the Messiah? Or perhaps . . . perhaps this group, if that’s what it was, was waiting for the Messiah to arrive? There were more questions than answers, but at least I had a lead.
The station.
There was only one place as far as Tel Aviv was concerned, only one place to fit the bill, one place that would be big enough, impressive enough (if thoroughly cleaned) and comfortable enough to hold an emissary of God and all his crowd.
The white monster, as it was called by almost everyone in the city since it was opened, several years ago.
The new Tel Aviv Central Station.
Only I bet it didn’t look that new any more.
I N T E R L U D E
There is only one synagogue still open that she knows of, and she makes the trip there whenever she can, once a week if the gangs aren’t out in force, edging her way through areas that, in her mind’s eye, are clearly divided like blocks on a map in different-coloured crayons. If she’s lucky they let her pass through, and there are still good parts, still places where people grow their own vegetables, where people share what they have, small communes, urban kibbutzim, and still neighbourhoods where neighbours look out for each other, band together against the gangs, but for her, she has always lived on her own and she does not intend to change, end of the world or not; she trusts in God, despite everything. And so she makes the pilgrimage to the old synagogue where the last remnants of the faithful gather. There are new faiths in the city now. Firemen, horrid godless people, and Templars, and the others, all the others, looking up to the mount as if God resided there, but she knows that is false; God resides in her heart, God is with her as she walks through the ruined streets, and God is there when they gather in the synagogue, though there is no more ezrat nashim, no area set aside separately for the women, and never enough men for a minyan of ten. But they gather, nevertheless, and they pray, and when she speaks the familiar words she is comforted, and though she is a woman and is forbidden to do so she had nevertheless taken recently to putting on the tefilin, which had belonged to her dead husband may-he-rest-in-peace, and she wraps the leather straps over her hand and head every morning and prays: she prays like a man.
She does not believe in a fireman or a new messiah or any of the rumours that regularly sweep through the city like tropical storms. She believes in God, the one God, our God our Lord creator of this earth, amen, and then she begins the long trek back to her apartment, and prays again as she walks that she is not discovered by His creations.
SAM: THREE
Tel Aviv at first glance was deceptively quiet. There were no more pizza-boys on bikes. There were no more people, period. There was a cat, staring at me from the top of a pile of rubble that might have once been a house. The cat was striped orange and its eyes were a strange, deep blue. It stared at me without blinking. I ignored it.
*
They had grabbed me right after I left the Prime Minister’s office. There were two of them, big, burly, unsmiling, dressed all in black. Orthodox.
“Keep moving,” the one on the left had said. His heavy rekel coat was open, just a little, and I saw the Uzi hanging down his side.
“Chief Rabbi wants to see you.”
“Couldn’t he just phone?” I said. They ignored me.
A black Mercedes was waiting for us at the curb. They pushed me in the back seat and sat on either side of me. The doors closed. The car glided away.
I sat back, let the air-con wash over me, and sighed. It was turning out to be one of those mornings.
The yeshiva boys took me through the narrow streets to the old quarter of Me’a She’arim, the Hundred Gates community of the ultra-Orthodox. There were posters on the walls advising propriety, and women in black with wigs for hair walking in the streets surrounded by toddlers. We passed
a bakery. It smelled good. “Can we stop for a bagel?” I said. They ignored me. “You know, one of the big round ones with sesame seeds and everything?” I said.
The one on my left poked me with the barrel of the Uzi. “Shut up,” he said.
I shut up.
We came to a house, though it was more like a stone palace. We drove through wrought-iron gates. Behind the gates was a wide courtyard. More yeshiva boys stood guard outside the wide doors. I was let out of the car. They led me not to the front doors but through a winding path to the back of the house, where there was a small garden, and a wooden shed. They waited outside the shed. Clearly, I was meant to go inside. “Hey, shorty?” I said to the big one on my left. “Shut up.” He didn’t have much of a vocabulary. I moved fast.
My fingers found his testicles and squeezed. No Uzi can help you there. He dropped to the ground and yelled. I was on the second one before shorty hit the ground, punching him with the palm of my hand, driving the nose bone into his brain, hoping I killed him. They were really pissing me off.
“Enough!” a voice said. I straightened up. There were about ten Uzis pointing at me. Ten yeshiva boys in black, with the wide-brimmed hats that back in the day became the famous cowboy hats of the Wild West. Ten yeshiva boys with guns. Where the hell had they come from?
“Enough,” the voice said again, and when I looked towards the shed a man was standing in the open door.
He was of average height, dressed in the same black Orthodox clothes, and there was nothing very remarkable about him — until you met his eyes, and saw the power in them, and then you took a step back.
“Rabbi,” I said.
“Sam,” he said, and my name on his lips was scarier than anything I’d heard. “Step inside. Please. I merely wish to speak with you.” He made a minute gesture with his head and his henchmen hurried to their fallen comrades. The one whose nose I broke was still breathing, though he was going to choke on his own blood pretty quickly unless he got some medical attention. Shorty was out with the pain, whimpering on the ground like a wounded animal. “All you had to do was use the magic word,” I said, and smiled, and stepped over Shorty on my way to the shed. The rabbi held the door open for me. I went inside.
*
I didn’t know Tel Aviv all that well. I grew up in the industrial suburbs near Haifa, blocks of identical concrete boxes, Soviet-style, where the stench of the Haifa oil refineries filled the air when the wind blew the wrong way. Now Tel Aviv smelled a little like that, and as I walked down the deserted Kibbutz Galuyot road it made me suddenly miss home. My dad moved to Paris a few years after Mom died. We send each other Rosh Hashana cards once a year. I get a call from him every Passover. We talk about the weather. At that moment, with the silence all around me, I wondered if I would ever get out of Tel Aviv again. It felt lonely, and the more I progressed into the city the deeper that feeling got, as if I were the last man on Earth, a Wandering Jew cursed to walk the empty streets forever. At that point the tiger attacked me.
*
“Life,” Y. used to tell me when he was still my trainer at the Service, before he was promoted and I became an active agent in the field, “is a series of attacks and counter-attacks. It is true in war, in love, in marriage — ” he was breaking up with Noga at the time, though I only found that out much later “ — in espionage — ” and he made that movement with his head that said, pay attention “ — in politics and economics and everything else, from your birth to your death. My job is to train you to cope with that. Attack and counter-attack. It’s true in music too,” he added as an afterthought. Then he took me to the shooting range.
When the tiger attacked I brought the Uzi up just the way I was trained and I squeezed out a round of shots. The sound was terribly loud in the quiet street. I hit the tiger in the head and across the body, and it fell. I approached it cautiously, my heart beating. A fucking tiger?
It was dead when I reached it. A pool of blood collected around it. I wondered if I shouldn’t skin it. Meat might be hard to come by in the city. But I still had my emergency supplies, and something in me resisted the thought. It looked pathetic. I skirted the body and continued ahead, Uzi held low. It was then I remembered that ahead, at the intersection with Mount Zion avenue, was the Zoological Garden, and I thought — shit.
That explained the tiger, though.
I didn’t get very far before I heard a noise behind me and, turning, saw the first signs of human life since I left the highway.
A group of children had appeared out of nowhere, scampering across debris, paying me no attention, their eyes focused on the dead tiger. Their hair was long and matted, and none of them seemed to fit inside their clothes properly, the shirts hanging loosely on their bony shoulders. They held knives. When I took a step towards them the nearest one to me, a boy, turned and his eyes met mine. The look in them made me stop. I tried to speak and the boy hissed at me, and at the sound all the other children paused, perfectly still where they were, still crouched like hyenas, and their heads turned to me, their eyes enormous in thin, hungry faces, and they hissed, like one cat warning another from encroaching on their territory. I fell back a step. The children went back to the task at hand. They approached the tiger, in complete silence, and applied their knives to the corpse. In minutes the bloodied pelt was dripping off one of the larger boys’ shoulders like a royal cape, and all that remained on the ground was a skeleton with little bits of red meat still stuck to the bones. I watched them throughout all this, repulsed, and strangely afraid. One of the smaller children had brought plastic shopping bags with him, and was distributing them. Each of the children filled the bags with the meat from the tiger. Then, still not looking at me or acknowledging my presence in any way, they scampered back the way they came, and disappeared between the ruins. At that moment, though I had quit three years before, I really wanted a cigarette.
I N T E R L U D E
The children run back to the kindergarten. There are no more teachers, and the sandbox is covered with half-buried human stools. The children speak their own argot: a Pokemon is a corpse with valuables. A Pooh is one that is decomposing badly. A television is anything too large to carry. They don’t need television. An ice cream is what’s left of a corpse after too much time had passed. Parents are ice creams. A sing-along is any gathering of more than two grownups, and must be avoided. A lullaby is a body that isn’t dead yet but can be hurried along. Bad Place is what they call the mountain. Firemen are firemen. Firewomen are firemen too. Sick-sick is when you’re not feeling too good. Sick-sick is the first stage to half-a-Pooh. They carry the meat as they scuttle and run down the alleyways on the way to the kindergarten. Sometimes grown-ups try to come and see them: groups of scary women who call themselves mothers and want to help them, but they are not mothers, they are cannibals, and if the children find one alone they lullaby it, otherwise they run and hide. Sometimes men come, usually alone, and offer them sweets. Sweets are called choky and are bad for you. Choky-men too. One time a choky-man took Pinky and they never saw him again. After that they mostly hid from the choky-men. They were too dangerous to fight.
They carry the meat and when they get to the kindergarten they sit on the swings and tear into the pieces of bloodied raw tiger, and their bellies are happy and Peretz the Leader, who is the Oldest Kid in the Kindergarten, takes twice as much and is then sick by the petting corner. As night falls they huddle together in the tree house while Simcha Small and Gili Strong keep watch above with catapults. Shiri Sing tells a story and everyone listens. It is always the same story, about the days before time. There were mothers and fathers upon the land in those days. She tells the story of David Smallest, who fought a choky-man called Golgol and killed him with a single stone from his catapult. She sings a song and they all join in and it’s like reeds shivering on a riverbank. After a time they fall asleep.
MORDECHAI: FOUR
On the way south I saw more and more of the city. I was now on the low slopes of what I c
hose to call Mount Dizengoff, which appeared like a wall made of unravelled streets to my right. I saw what remained of the roofs of Ibn Gvirol and Bin Noon streets, as if I was looking at them from high in the air. Higher up, everything was hazy, distorted. My eyes refused to focus on it. And now there were also people.
The first person I encountered was an old woman, sitting on the porch of a ground-floor apartment somewhere in Remez Street, enjoying the light of whatever it was that replaced the sun. I hadn’t noticed her at first, but then she shouted, “Hey, boy!”, and I stopped and realized that what I thought was a heap of unwashed cloth was, in fact, exactly that but not only that.
“Good morning,” I said.
“You new around here, boy? I don’t reckon I seen you before.” I didn’t know what to say to that, but the woman didn’t wait for me to figure out an answer. “You’re not one of them Firemen, are you?” she asked, and made a face.
Firemen? Was the Tel Aviv Fire Department still active? Or . . .
“No, ma’am,” I said, on reflection. “I’m definitely not one of them.”
“I hope for your sake that you’re not,” she said, with a mean look in her eyes. Whoever those Firemen were, they weren’t too popular. I needed to know more.
“So,” I said, as nonchalantly as I could, “when was the last time you saw Firemen here?”
