The Tel Aviv Dossier

by Lavie Tidhar

  The wall separating the bay from the rest of the station is relatively intact. Only one hole has been blown in it, quite some time ago. From this hole now emerges a column of people — five, ten, thirty. They all wear red. Bright red T-shirts, shiny red nylon raincoats, red pants, red dresses, and even, in one case, a red bikini. Between them they carry seven big bamboo cages. Inside the cages are seven men, all in various states of unconsciousness, none of whom is wearing any colour worth mentioning.

  The leader of the group, a small figure covered, despite the heat and terrible humidity, in a thick dark red robe, hood included, raises a red-gloved hand. The procession stops, and the cages are lowered down to rest on the floor. By what is, perhaps, a strange coincidence, each cage is located right beside one of the weird leathery contraptions lying on the edge of the bay. The carriers straighten up, salute, then stamp their legs together on the floor.

  This noise, finally, reaches into one of the cages and wakes up Mordechai Abir.

  “In the beginning was the fire,” says a voice. “And when the fire raged upon the deeps He came. The first Fireman.”

  *

  Sam too has awoken. His first emotion is anger. First, his hand. Then his captor, a moving mountain shaped like a woman, carrying him like a baby, paying no attention to his protestations or his cries of pain. Then, when he tried to fight his way free — a slap from her hand, just that and nothing else, but so hard that he flew against the wall, banged his head against it and lost consciousness.

  Now he has regained consciousness. His second emotion is fear.

  He is trapped inside a bamboo cage. Somewhere nearby, someone is making a speech.

  The voice is sharp and precisely articulated. Every syllable is in place, every consonant loud and clear, every comma an absence, every period a void. It is an old voice, but he can’t tell the speaker’s gender.

  His third emotion runs close to despair.

  *

  “And He battled the emissaries of God, Creatures of Wind, and bested them,” says the leader. “But the world lay in ruins, a desert, and he traversed it to the Mount.”

  The red-gloved hand points upwards. This, Mordechai Abir thinks inside his bamboo cage, is really quite fascinating!

  It’s as if he’s found a lost tribe, previously unknown to modern man. This is exactly what he was looking for when he came to Tel Aviv! This, as opposed to all those documents he’s been chasing all these years, this is the real, authentic thing. Fascinating!

  And yet . . . as he huddles inside his cage, he can’t but wonder where it would lead. The anthropology of cannibals is a lot less . . . fascinating . . . when it is you yourself who is inside the pot.

  *

  “And seeing that all was as it should be, He rose to the heavens in a Chariot of Flame!” intones the leader’s voice. “And as He rose, so shall we rise, so shall we rise so that He may return!”

  To which the whole congregation answers, “So shall we rise!”

  “Firemen — to your positions!” shouts the leader.

  Strong hands grab the cages, open them, drag the prisoners out.

  The agent tries to fight, but his whole body is cramped. He can’t even stand, and thus has to be held. He catches the mocking glance of the woman who caught him, towering over the leader like a storm front. Then his hands are shackled and he is dragged and tied to something, some contraption that smells like rotten leather and paint. He knows then that he was right. It’s going to be bad. He just doesn’t know how bad.

  *

  Seven men are tied to seven contraptions. All around them, redclad people operate, fixing, staging, pulling and tying things. Each assembly of leather and plastic and junk slowly gains a more defined shape. The operators scurry around, tightening ropes, setting levers. Then it is all done and the operators return to a safer distance from the bay’s end, on which are now positioned seven red, part-leather, part-human bats.

  “To the fire ye shall soar,” says the leader, “and in your trail the Fireman shall come!”

  A prisoner shouts, and immediately receives a wooden club to the head. The rest of the prisoners, learning fast, settle for quiet moans.

  The leader raises both hands towards the congregation. “Bring — the Lover! Bring the bearer of the prophecy! Bring the receiver of fate, the recorder of the miracle, the speaker of the truth!”

  A small procession now comes out of the station, seven women wearing black robes. The last of them carries a big silvery box in both hands. She stops in front of the leader, gently puts the box on the ground, and opens the cover.

  No-one is talking. Even the prisoners understand, however dimly, that something of importance is happening. Now there’s a sound, the sound of wind, the sound of a storm. The air is charged.

  There’s movement inside the box. Something rises. Something round and brown. It’s furry. No, it’s hairy. It keeps rising. It’s a ball covered with hair. No.

  Rising, higher and higher, like an awful jack-in-the-box, is a severed human head.

  SHE: FOUR

  Shell wandered through the streets and didn’t know where she was, or where she had been, and there was a great pain in her head that wouldn’t go away. Occasionally she whimpered. There was blood on her head, and on her breasts, and her clothes were torn, and she ached. She once had a friend but she could no longer remember her name. She once lived in a house where hot water ran, and had showers, and there was a white magic box that kept food inside it. She once had parents who loved her. There was a lot of noise and she couldn’t think. The very earth trembled. There were explosions, and screams. Where was she? She didn’t know this place. It was a maze she had to walk. Her feet were raw and bleeding. She hugged herself and tears streamed down her face. She didn’t even know she was doing it. She no longer knew how to cry.

  Then she heard a voice, and the voice said, “Shell” and, since it was her name, she stopped and turned. “Shell,” the voice said. “My poor, poor Shell.”

  There was a woman standing there. Shell couldn’t quite see her face. She seemed wreathed in light, but maybe it was just the way the sun came down at an angle. Shell, in a small voice, said, “I want my mommy.”

  “Oh, Shell,” the woman said, and she came to her, and held her, and Shell felt herself letting go against the woman’s body, and she cried, and the woman stroked her hair and said, “There, there,” and patted her on the back until she made Shell burp and then laugh, and then cry again. “Everything will be all right, Shell,” the woman said. “I promise. And your friend’s name is Nicky.”

  “Nicky,” Shell said, and a look of wonder came into her eyes. The woman said, “Why don’t you sit down here, in the shade, and write her a letter, Shell? You’ll be safe here.”

  “I think I’ll write her a letter,” Shell said. “Nicky. How many letters did I — ?”

  The woman seemed to smile through the shimmer of light, and shake her head. “No, Shell,” she said. “You’ve only written the one long, very long letter. But you should be able to finish it soon.”

  “That would be . . . nice,” Shell said. She sat down where the woman suggested. It was comfortable there. Somehow there was paper and a pen, as if they’d been waiting for her. She sighed. It felt good sitting there, writing to her friend.

  “Dear Nicky — ” she started. When she next looked up the woman was gone.

  THE WAR

  5.

  In the bay on the top floor of the station there’s a human head hovering above a crowd of several dozen oddly dressed people. The head, which seems to have once belonged to a brown-haired woman, now sits upon a whirlwind emerging from its severed neck. It looks like a monstrous lollipop. Its mouth is closed. It says nothing.

  Most of the people below — those who aren’t tied to anything at the moment — are chanting and slowly dancing in their places, without moving their feet off the ground. They raise their hands towards the floating head, either praying to it or encouraging it to perform some atrocity.
Without haste, they begin to remove their clothes.

  The floor is now covered with red. Red robes, shirts, coats, pants, underpants. Among the piles of clothes there are also various weapons — hunting rifles, pistols, old army M16s, some bows and arrows. The only person still fully dressed is the leader of the group. Still hooded as well. The chanting and dancing continue. The head is still silent.

  The leader, raising both hands, shouts something incoherent. The singing stops. The dancing stops. Everyone is watching the leader. Even the floating head. Then the leader says, quietly, “Rise.”

  Nobody moves. Several floors below there is the sound of a firefight and an internal wall collapses, but here the noise is merely an echo. Nobody moves.

  “Rise, O Fireman!” says the leader, and the first line of believers takes one step forward, towards the edge of the bay, towards the seven captives held in their fragile contraptions.

  “Rise, O Fireman!” shouts the leader, and suddenly Mordechai knows what these things are, and he screams.

  They are kites.

  “Rise, O Fireman!”

  The kites are grasped by strong hands, lifted into the air.

  “No!” Mordechai shouts. “Wait!” but his voice is drowned, and the other captives are shouting now too. As Mordechai is lifted higher, right above the edge of the bay, he sees the ground several floors below.

  The leader gives one final shout, loud and clear above everything else, and takes the hood off her head. It is a woman, and she is terribly familiar to Mordechai. “Rise now!”

  A gust of wind grabs the kites, lifts them higher, higher still. As he is being thrown over the edge, off the roof, the historian cries, “Mother!”

  *

  At first Sam fails to understand why it is that he is not dead yet. He does not expect these homemade kites, this combination of twigs and leather and old wire, to hold him in the air. He expects the ground to come rushing at him, and is rather surprised when it doesn’t.

  A warm wind blasts from the north, bringing with it the smells of cooked meat and gunpowder, and something else, too. There is the smell of weird, improbable animals and strange trees and wet soil. These smells cannot be coming from Tel Aviv. Sam realizes he is smelling the mountain.

  The wind grabs the sacrificial kite, throwing it up, above the bay, above the watching believers, above their leader who now, without her hood, is revealed as a small, elderly lady. The wind carries the kite above the hovering head. If the head is saying something, Sam cannot hear it. His ears are filled with wind.

  He looks around, seeing some of the other captives flying around, above and below him, each moving in a different direction but covering the same small area. Flying in circles, he thinks, as the ground and the station turn gently below him.

  Then there’s an ominous creaking sound and the kite starts coming apart.

  *

  Seven broken swans hover impossibly in the air, dangerously close to each other. The wind seems to be pushing them together, higher and higher, but one sees the distorted shape of the wings, as various poles and sticks and beams break or fall down. The small human forms at the bottom of each kite now visibly squirm, like earthworms exposed to the light. Higher and higher they go, seven Icaruses ready to fall.

  The head looks up. It opens its mouth. And a turbulence appears in the clouds barring the view to the south, an ochre-red whirlwind of dust.

  Something is moving there.

  Something is coming.

  6.

  Everybody — the believers, their leader, the squirming captives hung in the air under their rapidly disintegrating sacrificial kites, even the hovering head — all of them look towards the wall of clouds. It seems to be sucked into itself, then it expands, stretching forward towards the city. A red bubble appears in it, slightly above the roofs of the remaining buildings, and with it a sound, like a faraway chainsaw in slow motion. Both bubble and noise grow, become more violent. Then there’s a crescendo, and something bursts out of the cloud wall.

  It’s a helicopter.

  It’s flying straight at the station.

  *

  There is a moment in which everything seems to hang in the air, on the verge of falling. This, of course, has been true for the seven captives for some time now.

  The helicopter is a Bell Boeing V-22. This is strange, Sam thinks as he is strapped to the breaking kite. To the best of his knowledge, no such aircraft has ever been purchased by the Israeli Air Force. It’s huge. And it is painted a cheery light blue.

  As the helicopter reaches the station, hovering above the bay, above the kites, Sam feels the wind of its rotors. It blows the kites downwards. Then a door opens in the helicopter’s rear and something falls out of it. Then another one.

  Sam looks up and thinks, Paratroopers. The sky is suddenly filled with opening white parachutes, and on every one of them is painted a large, blue Star of David.

  As they descend, Sam notices the paratroopers are wearing black. They cradle weapons in their arms.

  When they start shooting, Sam recognizes the so-familiar sound of an Uzi.

  He almost sighs with relief, then. He knows where the helicopter came from. He knows who these people are.

  The Chief Rabbi’s army has arrived. Yeshiva boys in parachutes, raining fire from the sky.

  *

  Mordechai Abir is also on the verge of falling. He hugs his kite, hugs his still-dripping backpack filled with documents, holds on for dear life. He can’t focus on his surroundings. All he can think about is his mother. His mother. Impossible. Unbelievable. Mother can’t . . . mother won’t . . .

  But deep in his heart he knows that she always could, and maybe that she always did. She was unstoppable. He just never imagined . . . And he thinks — that’s why there were Firemen in her apartment. His glider is lower now. A great wind comes from above, pushing it down. Tracer bullets also come from above, though it appears he is not their target, at least not yet. There are shouts from below. Many believers are already down, spraying red blood over red clothes and the dirty tiles of the bay. His mother, however, is still standing. He wants to call her. It must be a dreadful mistake, he thinks. She had no idea that he, Mordechai, her son, was one of the captives. As far as she was concerned, he reasons, he’s still in Haifa, and safe. How could she have known?

  But he knows his mother. She knows everything. She always did.

  He watches her take something out of her robe. It’s a long-barrelled gun, at least a .44. She raises it, takes aim.

  She fires seven times.

  From above, seven cries. A red rain begins to fall.

  *

  As the seventh paratrooper dies, something happens. A change of wind, a shift of colour, a new spectrum of sound, as if a huge red piece of cotton was taken out of the world’s ear. The head opens its mouth wider. Its eyes glitter.

  It roars.

  Everything becomes yellow. The station, the clouds, the people, the very air. Everything is hot, on the verge of burning. A wave of heat strikes from above. Flames erupt from the kites, from the clothes on the bay’s floor, from the few parachutes still in the air. Heat beats upon heat.

  The captives fall, one by one, back onto the bay. By now they are not too high above it, so in the event, only three of them die from the impact, neither of which are Mordechai or Sam.

  There is a brightness above the helicopter, a flame, beside which the huge flying war machine looks like a mere toy. Something is happening up there, but the people below cannot discern details. There is a grinding noise, rising and rising. The ground shakes, the whole station serving as the world’s biggest speaker set, amplifying the sound, sending an awful wave of bass towards the skies.

  The helicopter explodes. Parts fly in all directions. One of its rotors slices an already-dead paratrooper in two.

  In the place where the helicopter hovered just a moment before, something else appears.

  The head’s roar gets even stronger. Its gritty treble rivals th
e station’s bass.

  The thing in the middle now acquires a shape. It’s red. It’s big. It shouldn’t be hovering in midair, but it is.

  It’s a fire truck.

  SHE: FIVE

  There are twenty-seven members of the Rooftop Players Commune and they don’t want anything to do with this. With any of it. The bikers are kooky kids, the Professors are idiots, the Firemen nothing but hooligans. The Rooftop Players isolate themselves from all these groups as best as they can. The Rooftop Players believe in peace, and love, and music.

  They have their own rooftop in one of the previously industrial buildings of Hamasger Street. They have built a crude wall around it, so that no one can see them. They built a primitive elevator from ropes and a plank of thick wood. They grow their own food, they raise their own children. They have three guitars — two acoustic, one classic — and at all times there’s music playing. Songs by the Beatles, imagine all the people, and by Jimmy Hendrix, little wing, oh, little wing, and by Led Zeppelin. When someone gets tired of playing, someone else takes over. For some reason they can’t explain they’ve been playing “She’ll Be Coming Down the Mountain” all day today.

  Those who don’t currently play or take care of the children or sleep are busy making love. There are twelve guys and fifteen girls, and of those, seven are already showing signs of advanced pregnancy. There are neither condoms for the Rooftop Players, nor pills. There’s only love, and love is free.