Unholy Land

by Lavie Tidhar

  “Kisumu? She went to the lake?”

  “As far as I recall.”

  “Can you remember what exactly she was looking for?”

  “No, I’m sorry. She didn’t go into detail.”

  “Thank you, Professor Falk.”

  The professor stood. She extended her hand for a shake. Her skin was dry and her grip strong. “Good luck, Mr. Tirosh,” she said. “I hope you find what it is you’re looking for.”

  Tirosh nodded. A tree of skulls bloomed in his mind. He thought of Isaac, looking up at him with bright feverish eyes, saying, “Dadad, Dadad!” A bottomless pool of despair, a black mirror in which he could see no reflection, the touch of cold water, the sound of suppressed crying coming from another room. He did not want to confront his memories. He was just a man, neither good nor bad. He hoped Falk was wrong, and that he would not find it: not again.

  9.

  My men watched Tirosh exit the main university building. He was not so much tall as long-legged, with the hesitant gait of a man who never quite felt comfortable in his own skin. He wore faded jeans and a T-shirt advertising a long-disbanded, German rock band. There was on his face a pinched sort of expression, one that I had sometimes seen in my own reflection in the mirror. It is a sort of existential anguish, a tearing of the mind between two incompatible recollections. Imagine that you are one thing and, at the same time, something other entirely, both trying to coexist at once. That is the condition of being a Jew, I sometimes think—to always be one thing and another, to never quite fit. We are the grains of sand that irritate the oyster shell of the world.

  Or perhaps I am, in my quiet moments, merely being fanciful. Tirosh remembered that which wasn’t real. This did not make him insane, for human memory is a highly fallible one, and strongly coloured by the imagination. Indeed, I myself, for a long time, was unsure as to the reality of my own situation. For a time I even believed myself delusional, and yet I could remember Altneuland with an aching clarity of mind: the peal of bells ringing, clearly and swiftly, across the white cities of the coastal plane, the flight of a dove over the David Tower in Jerusalem, the view from on high over the Jordan River snaking through fertile fields, the lazy hum of bees in the clear, pure air. My home had been a paradise, its breadth after the Liberation stretching from Beirut to Baghdad: a land of freed Jews, an old, new land.

  There, I had been a Shomer, or watchman, a member of that illustrious organisation of guards. Here, in my new land, I quickly ascended through the ranks of my chosen profession, until I had carved for myself a high role in the security services. And yet my memory of that other place was vague, and it was easy, too easy perhaps, to slip into a solitary set of recollections, to believe none of the other sephirot real. It was against such slippages that I guarded, against intruders that I remained vigilant. I believed in Palestina. I would not see her hurt.

  As Tirosh departed through the doors, a man came running after him: young, podgy, in shorts—a graduate student, as sure as rain is hot or sky is blue. He was panting as he ran, calling out, “Mr Tirosh! Mr Tirosh?” with the mechanical precision of a rooster at sundown.Tirosh halted. He turned with that bemused expression of a man hearing his name called when he does not expect it—the sense that a mistake, surely, had been made, and one or the other was certain to shortly realise it.

  “Yes?” he said, puzzled.

  The man stopped and wheezed as he caught his breath. The expression he presented to Tirosh was one of a delighted smile. “Mr. Tirosh? Lior Tirosh? The author?”

  “I . . . yes?” Tirosh said. He remained bewildered. He was not, truth be told, a well-known author. He wrote entertainments, cheap escapes. When he was forced to declare his occupation, well-meaning officials always produced sceptical but encouraging words, such as “Well, I hope you get something published one day,” or “Maybe when you become famous I could say I met you.”

  He had not succeeded in becoming famous, but the truth was that fame did not appeal to Tirosh. His father, the general, was famous in Palestina, if by fame we mean a mixture of admiration and fear, even awe. As a boy, his father seemed to him like Mount Elgon: distant and terrible, a landmark seen and known by all on sight, yet never known at all.

  “Do I know you?” he said.

  “Mr. Tirosh, I am Leonid Rozman?”

  “Yes?”

  “From the reading group?”

  “Yes?” Tirosh said. He had no idea what this Leonid was talking about.

  “I’m so sorry,” Leonid said, at last catching the bemused look on Tirosh’s face. His own turned to a cringe of embarrassment. “We arranged . . . but were you not informed . . . I thought you were here because of the lecture.”

  “The lecture?” A vague memory stirred in Tirosh’s mind.

  “You are Lior Tirosh? Author of Death Stalks the Graveyard and The Corpse Had No Face?”

  “Yes,” Tirosh said. “You’ve read them?”

  He felt that mixture of pride and terror that only came on him in those rare moments when he was confronted unexpectedly with someone who had actually read one of his books.

  “I loved them!” Leonid said, with undisguised enthusiasm. “We were hoping you could perhaps give a talk? We have a reading group, you see, here at the Institute. Where do you get your ideas from?”

  “I don’t know,” Tirosh said. He stared at Leonid. He seemed harmless, not much more than a boy. Yet like Tirosh himself at his age, he would have done his military service by now, out there in the Disputed Territories or on the Ugandan border, stopping civilians with the power of the gun, worrying about suicide bombers or an ambush in a side street of some nameless village, of a smiling child running up to you with a grenade hidden in her hand. Tirosh could not clearly remember his life outside Palestina. He knew he lived in Berlin, remembered Isaac, remembered a battered typewriter and a window through which sunlight came spilling in. He remembered sitting at that window typing, the words just forming out of nowhere, a black art of some sort he could never understand or explain, the letters punched with force into the pliable white page, the sound of the keys like the belching pops coming out of a gun.

  In his work he sought to escape himself, the words came unbidden: murder was stylized on the page, brutality as entertainment, an order imposed over life’s random violence. The people who read his books did not seek truth, some nebulous epiphany. Their lives were hard enough, made up of little indignities, personal tragedies, lingering, senseless deaths of relatives and friends, not in battle, yet dead all the same. In Tirosh’s books they sought nothing more than a sort of shelter, a few hours away from their troubles, from the small dingy flat, the crying kids, the drunk husband or the wife one had fallen out of love with, quietly: the way people lived together for years and woke up one morning and were strangers to each other.

  He said, “Sure, I suppose I could. Tell me, Leonid, do you know Deborah Glass?”

  “Deborah?” Leonid said. His frown creased neatly, like pressed trousers. “Sure, why?”

  “She’s my niece,” Tirosh said. “Look, do you know anything about what she’s been doing recently? Any friends I could talk to? Hobbies she had?”

  “Hobbies?” Leonid’s smile was lopsided. “If you call going on demonstrations is a hobby.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She was always marching for something. Anything. For the rights of the Displaced. Against the building of the wall. For peace with the Ugandans. For giving back land to the Nandi. You’d think she was one of them, she loves them so much. If you ask me, such people are traitors, Mr. Tirosh, I mean no offense. But this is our land, given to us in covenant by the British. It is our Nachtasyl, our night shelter. No one will take it from us, no one!”

  “You know her well?”

  Tirosh’s guess hit home. The boy blushed. “Not as well as I’d like to,” he mumbled, sullenly. Tirosh smiled. Here at least was a motivation he could understand.

  “You like her?”

  “I told you,
she is so wrong!” Leonid said. “About everything.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  “Sure, I like her,” Leonid said, and tried to grin. “What’s not to like?”

  Tirosh laughed. They were just two boys talking together about a girl. “Any idea where she went?”

  “She’s always gone someplace,” Leonid said. “You’ll probably find her in some Kalenjin village, learning to sew cow hides.”

  Tirosh’s opinion of Leonid had been plummeting like mercury in a thermometer on a Berlin winter. Yet the truth was that statements such as these were not uncommon; you would hear them at the barber’s or in the supermarket checkout line, over dinner with relatives or friends. They were just something to say, fillers in between more meaningful words. You know what they’re like, or What do you expect from, you know, and then maybe someone would make a joke about cannibals.

  “Is that a thing she would do?” Tirosh said, and Leonid, perhaps sensing the warning tone under Tirosh’s voice, quickly backtracked. “No, of course not, I mean, she is just always so interested in the, you know, native cultures and . . .”

  “You know her quite well, then?”

  “No, I mean, I know her to say hi to, you know, it’s not like we ever—”

  “What I want to know, Leonid, is where I can find her, you see?”

  “Yes, I understand, I just don’t—”

  “So she was against the building of the separation wall?”

  “Deborah?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sure. She was against it. She said it was a travesty, how we lock people into—she called them ghettos, Mr. Tirosh. Ghettos! How she can compare the plight of our forefathers in Europe and elsewhere to the . . . conditions of the natives I just don’t know. They have a good life there. We wouldn’t even need the wall if it weren’t for the attacks. Suicide bombings, Mr. Tirosh! Who but a savage would do such a thing?”

  “Someone desperate,” Tirosh said. “Someone with nothing left to lose.”

  He turned away from Leonid. The boy could tell him nothing. Something nagged at him. He had asked Professor Falk about the wall, yet she denied that Deborah had any interest in it. Leonid was still talking. He just wouldn’t shut up. Tirosh just nodded to agree, only belatedly realising he’d just confirmed giving a lecture at the university later that night.

  “Tell me, Leonid, where can I find some of Deborah’s friends? You know, her demonstrator friends.”

  Leonid shrugged. “Try the Hare & Coconut, on Chamberlain Road.”

  “The Hare & Coconut?”

  “It’s a pub in the old town. The sort where the beer is warm and you can get two-week-old copies of the Guardian.”

  “Have you ever been to London?” Tirosh said.

  “I’ve been to Zimbabwe twice, to see the Victoria Falls,” Leonid said. “And to Zanzibar once, for a youth conference.”

  When he at last left him, Tirosh was struck by how much he envied Leonid, in a strange way. To have convictions; to believe so fully in one set of values, in one point of view—to have no doubt, Tirosh thought, must be a wonderful thing. He wasn’t, couldn’t, be this way. Tirosh doubted constantly. He agonised over every choice; where others were certain, he was always left doubtful, unsure of the right way: unsure, even, if there was one.

  Outside the campus, he caught a bus. He hesitated before he boarded it, but eventually he did. Unbeknown to him, my men were following him still. Unbeknown to us, we were not his only shadows.

  10.

  The bus ambled along without hurrying. It had the patient rhythm of an old beast of burden, a donkey or a mule long years in service, resigned to its lot, as familiar with its route as though it were pushing the same old-fashioned pump wheel round and round, like in old photos of the early settlement. Its passengers were the city’s blood: old women returning from market with their bamboo baskets laden with shopping; a chicken bound, its head bobbing up and down in wounded dignity; students from the Institute, forming one distinct group, their talk and laughter louder than anyone else’s around them; a man sweating inside a dark business suit; a pair of lovers on the back seat, entwined in each other’s arms as the Orthodox man sitting away from the window and the sun’s heat tutted disapprovingly. Tirosh remembered other buses, other days: riding with his mother to the old quarter of the city, where the second-hand bookshops proliferated and he could lose himself among their shelves, the musty smell, the murmur of little old ladies purchasing that day’s quota of romance, while his mother spent her time outside, looking in the shops of almost-new clothes and obscure European knickknacks brought over God only knew why or when.

  Shops of curios, too, proliferated here, amongst the numerous ugali stands and old-world tea rooms, where patient women and men sat all day, some behind stalls, some on the ground, with mats on the floor, offering carvings of game animals, masks and human figurines. Everyone in Ararat had an African curio or two in the home—a mask on the wall, a carved giraffe in a corner—and Shabbat candles on the windowsill.

  And mezuzahs on all the doors, of course. The anonymous carvers in their villages had soon spotted a trend: for a time every second mezuzah was hand-carved out of ebony or soapstone, even ivory, which he had seen once. The parchments inside were made individually, by Jewish men of learning, the Sofrei Stam, whose job it was to inscribe holy texts. As a boy, Tirosh often wondered what was written on these mysterious hides, rolled carefully inside the mezuzot, what secret words, what awful names they contained within.

  The bus stopped and started in fits; at each stop passengers came and went like raindrops. Beyond the window the city calmed, traffic eased, and cresting a hill, Tirosh could see far away, beyond the city, where the white buildings stopped and greenery began, startling against the deep blue of the sky. Then the bus descended, passing anonymous neighbourhoods where, in the fifties, the Congress had built cheap housing for the influx of immigrants departing the Reichsland in faraway Europe.

  Then the city changed again. They were coming to its oldest part, the old town where the original settlers first came. Here Wilbusch had first made camp, which he had named Promised Land. Once it had been a green, pleasant encampment, near flowing water, with good views of the distant Mount Sergoit. Then came the immigrants, by rail from Mombasa to Nakuru and from there on the long march, over the plateau, men, women and children, who had never seen such wilderness, never felt such sun.

  The mosquitoes savaged them. That first year many succumbed to malaria, and in the coming years, until the eucalyptus trees were planted, the swamps dried out; though still one could encounter the disease, and in the long wet season, beyond the city, one might wake up cold and hot at once, shivering uncontrollably. Tirosh had been sick of it once, on his father’s farm, and he remembered it well: for three days he threw up uncontrollably, could eat nothing, drank only the water from coconuts, which is heavy in salts. But he got better. His dreams had been bad all through the nights, and he saw Mount Elgon as it must have once been, volcanic fire erupting from its peak, the flames illuminating the dark sky, blotting out the stars. His mother told him he’d been mumbling all night, in his half sleep, speaking of impossible things: planes crashing into tall buildings, children thrown into ovens, a helmeted man walking on the moon. She held him close when he woke up: the fever had broken and the sun rose outside, and the fever trees glistened with new rain.

  “Don’t you ever do that again!” his mother said.

  But that was long in the past. The past was a place Tirosh did not like, these days, to visit. There were things there better left undisturbed. The past no longer existed, just as the future was not yet formed. All that there was was a single point of reference, an eternal present, and he was borne aloft on it: it was safer that way.

  He looked out of the window, as the buildings became chipped white stone and the roads narrow: they twisted and merged here, built long ago, piecemeal, without design. Back then the settlers had used horse and wagon if they used anything
at all, and these roads barely allowed a car to pass. In the eighties, the city council had undertaken an ambitious regeneration programme for the area, and now Tirosh saw that trendy tea rooms had replaced the old ugali stands, and art galleries stood where the curio sellers used to be. Many of the buildings had been restored, and the clock tower, built there on the occasion of the coronation of the Queen, dominated the old square, looking as good as new.

  Something rang, inside his pocket.

  Tirosh ignored the strange noise. The noise kept coming. He noticed with acute discomfort how the other passengers glanced his way and then looked elsewhere, troubled. He didn’t know what it was, what could be making such a sound. He reached into his pocket and fished out his phone, which, for just a moment, had seemed to him merely a case for holding reading glasses.

  “Hello?”

  “Tirosh, where the hell are you?”

  The voice on the other side of the line had a crackly quality, as though it were coming from somewhere impossibly distant.

  “Elsa?” Tirosh said. “Elsa, is that you?”

  “Who did you think it was? Really, I’ll never understand you. Where are you?”

  “I’m here,” he said, confused. “You knew I was going home.”

  “How is it over there?” she said. “From here, you know, all we ever see is the bombings and the rockets, dead people in the streets.”

  “It’s not like that,” he said, “it’s not like that at all.”

  People were giving him strange looks. It occurred to him that there was something strange about what he was doing: no one else on the bus was speaking on a mobile phone. It was as though they’d never seen one at all.

  The bus came to a halt at last and Tirosh climbed off. He listened to the noise on the line. It had a strange crackling quality, seemingly random, and yet he felt he could discern shapes in the sound, a pattern he once knew.

  “Hello?” he said. “Elsa? Are you still there?”

  “I’m here, but I don’t understand where you are, Tirosh. You’ve not been answering your phone and the university people say they’ve not even heard from you?”