by Lavie Tidhar
“I know who you are!” I said, picking a name at random. “You must be . . .”
The thin man smiled. “Aharon Reueli, at your service.”
How lucky for me that he didn’t let me finish the sentence. I was about to say, “Meir Sassoon.”
“I should have known,” I said. “The stupid Indiana Jones hat is a dead giveaway.”
“I wouldn’t mention stupidity if I were you,” Aharon said, and I could have sworn that he turned a little red, though it was hard to be sure under the hat. “Not after that pathetic article of yours, on the findings on Mount Sinai. Stupid indeed!”
“I have proof, you ignoramus! I have unquestionable proof, and I can — ”
“You have a twig and some antique documents that aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. I bet you haven’t even checked them for watermarks.”
Now we could hear shouts, both from inside and outside the huge building we were in.
“Those documents date back from before the invention of watermarks, you buffoon!” I said. The man, unsurprisingly for anyone who’s ever read any of his articles, was completely out of his depth.
“Which is exactly why you should have checked them,” he said, still with that same thin smile. The gun was now trained directly at my head. “Since I estimate your current life expectancy at about, oh, let’s say, a minute, I’ll just tell you.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. The gun didn’t waver. I kept quiet and he smirked. “If you’d have checked,” Reueli said, “you would have found, watermarked in plain sight on all of your precious ‘antique’ documents for everyone to see . . .”
“What?” I said, with more bravery than I felt. “What would I have found? A photograph of you and your grandmother?”
“No,” he said pleasantly. “Just my name and my autograph.”
*
Everything stopped.
There was no fight, no shooting, no smoke, no explosions: There was no sound. Aharon’s face was frozen. His mocking smile was frozen. The world was frozen. I heard my heart pumping, very slowly and deliberately. Other than that — no movement. The world. His face. His mocking smile.
Slowly, gently, everything turned grey again.
*
“How did you know I would be here?” I said.
“You bastard,” he whispered. He was lying on the floor with both his legs broken. Blood streamed out of his nose, and there were teeth on the ground.
“Tell me,” I said. “You like to talk, don’t you? Tell me or I’ll kill you.”
“After the train,” he said, forcing the words out, “I waited. I saw you getting out of there. Nobody else did. I thought of getting rid of you right there, but instead . . . I went away, I knew where I could start my investigation. And I was right!” he coughed. “By the time I was done I knew this would be the focal point. I got here early on, and waited. I figured that you’d come along sometime. All I had to do was kill you too, and then stay for the final act of my book.”
This short speech took its toll, I could see. Aharon’s eyes were closed now, and he was taking quick and shallow breaths.
“Your book?” I said. “My book, you thief!”
He didn’t reply.
“How did you find me when I got in, then?” I said. “That was no coincidence, was it?”
“Not at all,” he breathed. “I used . . . I used the same way to get in myself.”
He coughed.
“You waited for me,” I said. “You wanted to tell me, to my face, how you ruined my life’s work, and then, with me out of the way, you would have gotten all the credit for researching the Tel Aviv Apocalypse . . .” and then something he said finally registered and I said, “All you had to do was kill me too?” and I saw the hint of a smile in his eyes.
“Remember Meir Sassoon?” he said. “The guy who wrote The Secret History of Ein-Harod?”
Of course I did. That idiot. That, as I was being told, dead idiot?
“He stayed here,” Aharon said. “He collected all this crazy stuff, you wouldn’t believe it. Recordings, writings, video, digital, it’s a treasure. It’s all here . . . I had to kill him. I couldn’t let him . . .”
“You would have done it yourself,” he said.
His eyes closed.
I nodded. Then I took his backpack, strapped it over my shoulders, and walked away from the gunfire and explosions, inwards: towards the centre of the station, into the heart of the awaiting darkness.
P A R T F O U R :
W A R
I. In the beginning was the Fire.
II. And when the fire raged upon the deeps He came.
III. The First Fireman.
IV. And He battled the emissaries of God, Creatures of Wind, and bested them.
V. But the world lay in ruins, a desert, and he traversed it to the Mount.
VI. And the Mount rose up to the heavens, and God lived on its summit, and God’s creatures dwelled in the lower slopes.
VII. And God spoke to the Fireman.
VIII. And God sent Him a Sign, and the Sign, too, spoke to the Fireman.
IX. And the Sign was a woman’s Head. And the Head loved Him. And He spoke to the Head, and when He was done He released it, to go amongst His people on this earth, and speak of His return.
X. And seeing that all was as it should be, He rose to the heavens in a Chariot of Flame.
SHE: ONE
In the beginning was the womb, and somehow she knew what it was: it was comfortable and warm and as she grew she became aware of her mother and her mother’s thoughts, and learned much about the world. There were refugees in the world from a place called Darfur, and there were women who sold their bodies in the place of transport called the Old Bus Station. And there were monsters dwelling upon the earth in those days. Creatures of wind who came from the sea and ravaged the city which was called the Place of Spring, Tel Aviv, where white buildings rose up to the skies before the other world came and dwelt in its midst.
Being born was like travelling through a tunnel of light and emerging into sensation. Fingers on her tender body, and wind and air and the smells of campfire smoke and the taste of her mother’s milk and the warmth of her father’s chest as he held her close, and so much to see, mountains and springs and snows and trees and birds.
“She is not meant to grow so quickly,” her father had said, and she knew that he was worried for her. They moved often, camping in caves and in the open savannahs, and she soon learned how to hunt and skin and cook, for the smaller creatures of the mountains had never seen a human being and were not afraid.
“The Garden of Eden,” her father often declared, and her mother snorted but said nothing. And her father told her stories: of Adam and Eve, of a Tree of Knowledge and a snake, and of a flaming sword that turned every way. And her mother told her of the suffering of Women, and of Patriarchal Subjugation, and the Importance of Rebelling Against Orthodox Hierarchy, and her father sang to her, children’s songs about donkeys and goats and birds, and told her the legends of Solomon, who was a wise king, and how he met Asmodeus, the king of the demons, and how he fell in love with the Queen of Sheba, and how she tested his wisdom, and the story of the flowers she presented to him, and challenged him to find the real one amongst all the artificial ones, and how the king followed the path of a lone bee as it traversed the field of flowers, and came to land on the one that was true.
They moved a lot, and when it rained, sought shelter in the nooks and crannies of the great mountains, and watched the passage of the great wind beings, thousands of them at a time passing across the plains, and her parents were awed, while she felt a yearning inside her, to be with them and soar with them into the air.
Always the mountains rose above them, and the higher they climbed always the peaks were farther away. They traversed great chasms, hiked upon glaciers as ancient as any world, and she knew them all, knew their names and their histories and could summon the small, shy creatures of the snow and the veldt. Tim
e had no meaning there, and her parents watched her grow with love but also with concern, and one day her mother said, “You’ll be a woman soon,” and sighed, and her father hugged her mother and she saw the love between them, and felt a momentary emotion she did not at first recognize: jealousy.
Though they disagreed on most things, on the subject of love her mother and father were in agreement. They told her stories of the way they once were: her father pale and studious and unhappy, sitting in a place called a yeshiva, which literally meant a Place of Sitting, and her mother always running, always on the move, a thing called a camera in hand, always documenting other people’s lives. She could not imagine them so: her father, strong and brown from the sun, a silent hunter, her mother the same, and both content, both in love and loving her too, their daughter, and so they lived and much time passed there, on the eternal mountains, with only the wind and the wind’s children and the strange animals of snow and earth for company. And so time passed.
SHE: TWO
One day they had traversed a fold in the mountain and a strange sight was revealed, and she felt uneasy and did not know why. Her parents had gone very still. Her mother came to her father and he held her in his arms and neither looked away, though they looked as though they wanted to do nothing else. In silence they stared at the valley below, and it was like nothing she had ever seen.
Burnt mountains rose up from that valley. Blackened stumps like grasping fingers reaching for the sky. They had no natural shape. Squares, white squares, blackened as if by an immense fire. Her mother cried, silently, and her father said, “Tel Aviv,” but still she could not grasp it. The valley below was man-made, her father said, and her mother said, “man- and woman-made,” and her father said, “Of course, that’s what I meant.”
It was made by people. It was the place they often talked about, the Spring, and she was horrified by it. And though it was terribly ugly, there was, strangely, beauty in it too, and she felt herself restless, and didn’t know why.
The wind picked up then, a cold clean wind that swooped down from the mountain to the valley below, and when it returned it was warm and carried with it strange scents she did not know, and sounds, and the sounds were harsh and alien and she felt herself shiver, and her father said, “They’re shooting at each other!”
And her mother said, “So they are still alive. There were survivors after all,” and her parents held each other closer still. And her father said, “But for how long?” and his face was troubled.
Her parents made to turn away from the sight then, but she did not turn with them. For a long moment she stood and stared out at the miniature world spread out below, and she felt many sensations, like hot and cold currents running through her, and a voice seemed to whisper in her head, the way it sometimes did in the isolated places of the world, and she listened to it, though perhaps it was only her inner self that was speaking to her in her own voice.
Her parents turned back to her, and she saw in their faces that they knew her thoughts, and were troubled by them. “Come with us,” they said. “Come back to the high places, where the air is cold and clear and the silence speaks only truth. Come back with us to the great open spaces where the children of the wind run and play. Come back with us — ”
They fell silent then, for they knew her mind, and knew it could not be changed. And so they approached her and held her close to them, and her mother stroked her hair and her father kissed her brow, and she saw them both cry and felt wonder.
And so, at last, she bid them farewell; and carrying no burden, but that of love, she travelled down into the world of women and men.
THE WAR
1.
At first there’s nothing to be seen, and almost everything to be heard. Small arms fire, an occasional explosion, bullets hitting concrete, glass, tin and flesh, each with its own distinct sound, and the shouts of the attackers, the defenders — though there’s no knowing who’s who — and mostly of the wounded and the dying on both sides. Those are the obvious sounds. But also: the ominous creaking of heated metal; the hiss of water running out of punctured pipes, along with a hint of a louder gushing — someone on the western side has found a hydrant and is using it to repel anyone who’s trying to access level 6, or at least that particular section of level 6; the groans of the support beams, trying to redistribute the weight of the shifting parts of the building; and, somewhere on level 1, which is actually a sub-level — frightened whispers and a child crying.
More than smoke, there’s dust. It hovers in the air, making everything grey and stuffy, and gradually it muffles even the strongest sounds. It is as if the dust has waited there all along, since the station was first erected, to be liberated from the shackles of a closed and ordered space, to get up and around, to be free, and now there’s no getting back from this murky revolution. So for now, everyone inside goes by sound.
Somewhere on the eastern side of level 4, which is in fact the ground floor, a historian of the occult — or so he likes to think of himself — is trying to find his way out of the maze created by a bazooka hit that drove a part of the outer wall inside, right through a considerable number of gift shops. He is entirely focused on his destination, and therefore fails to notice the fact that the floor is wet, and that this wetness stinks. A sewer pipe right below him was cut in a recent explosion, and dirty water has been draining into the rubble for some time now. Soon, when the water level rises a little, it will register with him. Meanwhile he knows only that to get the answers he needs, he must find a way up, to the top levels.
At about this time, in another part of level 4, a steam-powered bus is driving right through the front entrance of the station — which was recently and violently enhanced, and is now big enough to let it through — ignoring the heavy cross-fire. It runs through a series of stalls, and before long it is covered with brightly coloured T-shirts, summer dresses, umbrellas and smoking teddy bears. As it finally stops, hitting a concrete wall, it farts a huge mushroom of steam, which momentarily and unintentionally distracts the snipers on levels 5 and 6, thus saving the passengers — who are now jumping hurriedly out of its windows — from being picked off like the main course in a sitting-duck banquet. The passengers — all of them but one — gather around a thin woman in her forties wearing a tinfoil hat and sunglasses. There is a hurried discussion among them, and then they decisively turn towards one of the escalators leading to level 5. The one passenger who doesn’t join them, an agent of a government service that does not, officially, exist now crawls out and gapes at his surroundings. He’s been through a lot of strange things in his life, but this is definitely on a different scale. A burst of gunfire misses him by sheer luck, and he runs, finding temporary shelter in a nearby men’s room. There he stops to think. He knows now that to get the answers he needs he must find a way up, to the top levels.
Somewhere on level 1, despite the best efforts to make him stop, a small child is crying. He too knows, by instinct, that the answers to many questions lie up on the top levels. However, he isn’t looking for them. He just wants all of this to stop. He wants silence. He wants the grown-ups around him to stop crying.
A tremendous explosion comes from outside. A mine just blew up one of the bridges leading from the bus platform on level 7, and then the whole building seems to jump in the air as one hundred tonnes of concrete falling from the 4th floor hit the street. For a moment, the crying child gets his wish — everything stops. There’s an eerie silence, disrupted only by the sounds of the tortured building. The silence holds for almost ten seconds. Then everything starts again.
Except for the child. He’s quiet. He stares up at the ceiling. Something is happening there. He doesn’t know what it is, but it looks wonderful.
2.
This part of the station was converted, who knows how many years before, into a mall. It consists of several floors running along the outer walls of the building, while in the middle there’s nothing but air. This way, from each floor one can see all t
he others. Thus, when the dust settles a bit, at last, it reveals a view that would have delighted M. C. Escher.
There are stairways and escalators lying on their sides, leading nowhere. In many places, support beams previously hidden inside walls or shops, sometimes covered in various items for sale, are now naked and exposed, and in most cases also alarmingly twisted. Level 6 now sports a surprisingly large waterfall, running uninterrupted right into a former gift shop on the ground floor, which momentarily looks like an aquarium, all sorts of debris swimming inside, until its glass walls — miraculously surviving the fighting so far — can’t take the strain anymore and blow out.
Everywhere there are piles of broken concrete and metal and junk. Some of them are still smouldering. Some seem fused together. Almost each and every one of them has at least one human being trying to climb it. Like ants, or termites. Or like some sort of liquid, an undercurrent, digging its way up, always up, towards the top levels.
*
Mordechai Abir knows a thing or two about undercurrents slowly digging their way up into the foundations of seemingly stable structures, which then seem to suddenly collapse for no obvious reason, creating chaos. He could give, as an example, the eruption of the First World War, which wasn’t really the result of the murder of the Archduke Franz whatshisname, nor of secret agreements between the great powers of Europe, but had more to do with the activities of the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons, and most of all the unnamed cabalistic sect whose members, men and women, held places of power in both secret societies. He could cite many other examples, which he honestly believes are true, of such subterranean rivers undermining the ground above them. It’s just that, until now, this never happened to him personally.
