Unholy Land

by Lavie Tidhar

  “The university, Elsa?”

  “The talk!” Elsa said. “I arranged a talk for you, you were supposed to deliver a lecture, about alternate realities or the death of the novel, anyway something riveting like that.”

  “But I did talk to them,” Tirosh said, feeling reassured. “I most definitely did, just now. The lecture, of course. It’s all taken care of, I promise you.”

  There was that noise-filled silence again.

  “Well, if you say so,” Elsa said at last. She did not sound convinced. “I’ll speak to them again. Is everything OK otherwise?”

  “It’s all going fine.”

  “Visited your father yet?”

  “Not yet. I got distracted . . . some family business to attend to first.”

  “Really, Tirosh, you sound very strange.”

  “I’m perfectly fine, Elsa. I’m seeing everything a lot clearer now.”

  He didn’t hear her sigh, but he knew it was there.

  “Speaking of,” she said. “Ada called me the other day.”

  “Ada?”

  “Your ex-wife, Tirosh?”

  “Yes, I know. I mean, what did she want?”

  Elsa hesitated. People were looking at him, passersby on the street. A kid, pulled by his mother’s hand, pointed at Tirosh, and the mother dragged him away, giving Tirosh a wide berth. Did they think he was crazy? Unreasonable anger made him grip the phone. Have they never seen—

  “She asked if you had Isaac’s yellow duck. She said to ask you. She’s better, really, you know. I think she was at work when she called me.”

  “I’m glad. Work is good.”

  “She says it was the first one you bought him. Together. Do you know what she’s asking for?”

  “Of course I do. We bought it for him when he was so small. He didn’t know what to do with it. We used to wash him in this red plastic tub that had a sort of slip he could sit on. The duck would just bob there. Then when he got a little bigger he’d play with it for hours. It was just a yellow duck, Elsa. Can’t you tell her that? It was just a fucking yellow duck!”

  “You’re shouting. Maybe I should call another time.”

  “Tell her that, Elsa!”

  “Lior, you have to take it easy. Please.”

  “I’m fine. I have a case, Elsa.”

  “A case, Tirosh?”

  “A missing girl case.”

  “You’re not a detective, Lior.”

  “What? I can’t hear you. You’re breaking up.”

  “I said, you’re not a fucking det—”

  The noise, like the humming of the air before a rainstorm, ceased abruptly. Tirosh stared at the case of glasses in his hand. After a moment he put it back in his pocket. He felt much better, much more awake.

  He found himself on Chamberlain Road. Back then, in the time of settlement, this had been British Judea, a faraway province of a great empire, and the streets had been named for those long-gone benefactors: Chamberlain Road, Edward VII Avenue, Balfour Boulevard. British-style pubs and tea rooms littered the streets, and Tirosh saw even a fish and chips shop, though the fish must have been flown in from Dar es Salaam or Mombasa. Farther along on Chamberlain, he saw the Hare & Coconut.

  Inside, it was cool dark wood, a long bar with taps for local Bar Kokhba beer and imported ales, and the air smelled of cigar and pipe smoke: yet for all that, the pub was near empty at this hour but for a group of students in a booth by the window, talking in intense yet low voices, and a small, hunched figure on a bar stool, of a man wearing a jazzy little trilby hat, with a feather in its band. Tirosh slid onto a nearby stool with a well-practiced motion. He knew bars the way other men knew stocks, or gardening.

  The bartender was young, a student himself, Tirosh thought. He wore a faded T-shirt and jeans.

  “What can I get you?” he said.

  “Waragi,” Tirosh said.

  “We don’t serve African drinks,” the bartender said, apologetically.

  “Gut-rot,” the man perched on the next stool said. He turned, and the wan light caught his face: aged, with unshaved bristles on his cheeks, and bright piercing eyes. “Don’t serve Africans drink,” he said, and sniggered. “Quite right, quite right.”

  “But I can do you one on the house,” the bartender said, fishing out an unlabeled bottle of clear liquid from under the counter. He grinned at Tirosh and poured him a measure.

  “Made just across the border,” he said, confidentially.

  The old man beside Tirosh glared, but Tirosh knocked back the drink and felt the alcohol hit him: it was like being punched in the face by a drunk.

  “Another one?”

  “Just a beer. Thanks.”

  “No worries.”

  The bartender poured Tirosh a glass. Tirosh looked around. He wondered if any of the students by the window were Deborah’s friends. The old man beside him said, “So what brings you here?” He was drinking a gin and tonic, with a pickled chilli in the bottom of the glass in place of lemon: it was an old twist, favoured by the sort of people who referred to themselves as old Africa hands.

  “What’s it to you?” Tirosh said, and the old man grinned, revealing long, leonine teeth.

  “Got to keep an eye on things, haven’t we?” the old man said.

  “He’s a snoop for Internal Intelligence,” the bartender said. He laughed at Tirosh’s surprised look, then shrugged. “He came sniffing around about six months ago, asking questions. We get a lot of students here. Quiet now, but it picks up in the evening.”

  “You a student, too?”

  “Sure. Got to work.”

  “Not saving up to go travelling?” Tirosh said, setting aside for the moment the curious case of the old man.

  “Where to? Europe? Palestine—the old Palestine, I mean? What’s there, right? Rocks and camels.”

  “Jerusalem,” the old man said. “I’ve been to Jerusalem, once. We went on a Holy Land Tour. Sea of Galilee, Safed, Acre where the Crusaders were. The Dead Sea. You could float on your back and look up and see nothing but skies. The air smelled funny. I remember that.”

  “Potassium bromide,” Tirosh said, and they both looked at him, with a surprised look, and he said, “It’s supposed to have a calming influence.”

  “Anyway we went to Jerusalem,” the old man said, with a finality. “Old stones and nothing but mosques and churches, and half the girls had their faces covered. Me, I prefer them wearing less.”

  “You prefer them wearing nothing,” the bartender said, and the old man grinned again, and took a noisy sip of his drink. The ice cubes had almost melted in the glass.

  Tirosh looked between the two of them. Their relationship seemed friendly, unforced, born of long familiarity. He said, “You’re with Internal Intelligence?” to the old man, who puffed his chest in reply.

  “Was,” he said. “Retired, now. Still helping out. Amos Barashi, ex-sergeant.”

  “He came sniffing around, like I said,” the bartender said. “Asking questions. Listening. He thinks we’re all conspiring against the Congress. That we’re, what, some sort of internal terrorists?” But he said it without malice.

  “Can’t be trusted,” the old man said. “I know, I hear things.”

  “So now there’s a, what do you call it,” the bartender said, “détente? He keeps tabs on us, and at least we know who it is who’s spying. I’m Nir, by the way.”

  “Tirosh.”

  “I know you,” the old man said, pointing a stubby finger accusingly. “You’re the old general’s son. I knew him, you know. Served under him against the Mau Mau. Your brother, he was the hero of Entebbe.”

  The bartender looked at Tirosh with renewed interest. “That Tirosh?” he said.

  Feeling conspicuous, Tirosh shook his head mutely. There was something surreal in sitting here, in this fake British pub in the middle of the African mainland, where once British officers might have sat much as they did now, perched at the dark wood bar, speaking of the faraway places they’d seen.
Jerusalem. Did it even exist? Was it in any way real?

  The old man, this Barashi, said, “You’ve not been here in a long time, have you, Tirosh? You’ve been outside.”

  “Outside, outside,” the bartender, Nir, said. “He always talks about the outside.”

  “I was with the old general in the Mau Forest,” Barashi said. “I know what I saw. You think you know everything, you young people. You want to bring down the wall, for what? The Nandi? They have no claim to this land. It’s ours. Granted and paid for in full.”

  “Paid in blood,” Nir said.

  “Paid in blood!” the old man said, thundering, and the students by the window turned and watched, with amused expressions. They must have been used to Barashi’s outbursts. “Paid in blood, our blood. I saw men die in the mud. Friends. Brothers. I saw Lake Nakuru run red with their blood and the flamingos shot and killed and roasted on a fire. This is our land. This will always be our land.” He turned small, mean, glittering eyes on Tirosh, and Tirosh realised how drunk the old man must already be, even at this hour. “He is showing interest in you,” he said. His voice was a sort of reptilian hiss. Tirosh drew back, only half-aware, his hand trailing down to his side, but of course, he no longer wore a gun there.

  “Who?” he said, uneasily. A name came into his mind and he spoke it, without thinking. “Bloom?”

  “Bloom!” Barashi said. The very act of speaking the name seemed to sober him up. “I watch. I listen. I once killed four men in an ambush. It was in the forest, during the Mau Mau rebellion. They had come out of the trees, like ghosts. Four of them. I didn’t know if they were men or spirits. One minute there was no one there and the next they appeared, out of nowhere. I killed them.” He was breathing heavily. “I fired, in all directions. The bullets tore them in half. They were real enough then. They came out of nowhere. Nowhere.”

  “I’m cutting you off,” Nir said. “I think you’ve had enough to drink, Barashi.”

  “Nowhere,” the old man whispered. The fight had gone out of him. “You know,” he said, to Tirosh. “You’ve been there.”

  “Enough,” Nir said. The old man waved his hand, dismissively. He eased himself off his stool and tottered away, towards a discreet door with a painting of a man in a tuxedo on it.

  “Is he always like this?”

  “He’s harmless enough. He hears what we want him to hear and he files reports no one reads. It’s not perfect, but it works.”

  Tirosh tried to smile but found himself shaken. He reached for his beer and emptied it and set the glass on the countertop. The foam at the bottom of the glass was like distant, dirty clouds. Outside, outside, he thought. He tried to picture Berlin, but all he could see were indistinct streets and indistinct people: it could have been anywhere, or nowhere at all.

  (Isaac crawling on the bed, a relentless, human alarm clock, podgy little hands reaching for Tirosh’s hair, pulling delightedly. “Dadad? Dadad!” and Tirosh burrowing deeper under the blanket. “Hush, Isaac, Daddy is trying to sleep, please—” followed by a groan, then turning and opening his eyes to see Isaac’s smiling face, that quickening in the eyes when he sees him, and he can’t help but smile back at his son, so perfect in every way.)

  Behind him the door to the pub opened and closed, and the party by the window increased in size. Nir poured him a second shot of Waragi, unbidden, and placed on the counter a small bowl of peanuts. “Going to get busy,” he said. Tirosh knocked back the drink.

  “You said you tell him what he wants to hear,” he said. “So what do you really say, when he’s not listening?”

  Nir shook his head. “If we wouldn’t tell him, why would I tell you?” he said. “No offence.”

  “None taken,” Tirosh said. “But someone is always listening. This is Palestina.”

  “We’re not completely without the rule of law,” Nir said. “Not yet.”

  Tirosh shrugged. “I’m looking for my niece,” he said. “Deborah Glass. I was told she often comes here.”

  “Well, she’s not here now.”

  “Do you know where I can find her? I don’t care what you’re involved in, I just want to make sure she’s safe.”

  “I don’t know what you think we do here,” Nir said. “Sure, people talk. Politics. What else? Demonstrations, printing leaflets. That sort of thing. Civil disobedience, man. Old Barashi, I think he just likes the company. His wife died last year, and he has a son who lives in South Africa and never visits.”

  Tirosh, doggedly: “Well, have you seen her, recently?”

  “Deborah? Now that you mention it, no. But she’s always coming and going.”

  Tirosh pushed his chair back and stood. He needed air. He left a handful of change on the bar. He had not touched the peanuts.

  Outside, the noise of the street and the hot, humid air acted to anchor him in reality. He walked away along streets remembered from childhood. He marvelled that they still existed, still smelled the same way. The makes of the cars were newer, and the old cinema had been turned into a fashionable boutique, but it was otherwise the same, as though no time had passed, as though the world had hung suspended, only waiting for him to come back.

  Then he saw it.

  Waxman’s: a dirty and ramshackle hole-in-the-wall filled with old pocket books and magazines produced by the gutter press. Tirosh motionless still at the window. He could not believe it was still there. After their mother left the farm, they had gone with her to Ararat, Gideon and him, and it had not been easy. Tirosh had found solace in the refuge that Waxman’s offered. He spent hours in the dark maze of the shop, reading the latest issue of Yiddish Excitement Quarterly or Thrilling Hebrew Tales. He followed the adventures of Sheriff Zeidelman as he hunted down the notorious bank robber Birnbaum, or squared off against the evil kidnappers Shlemiel and Shleimazal. He held his breath as Abe “Space Ace” Haisikowits found himself trapped inside the Star of Zion, the spaceship’s atomic engines stalled somewhere off the Crab nebula. But most of all he loved the tales of Avrom Tarzan, the Judean Jungle Boy, as he battled Ugandan poachers, dove to the depths of Lake Victoria to find the missing diamonds of the Queen of Sheba, and searched for lost cities of gold in the depths of the Congo, all with the help of his trusted companion, Ephraim the elephant.

  Now he stepped into the shop like an explorer venturing into the dark unknown. The smells of his childhood hit him, the smell of old books, weathered paper, warm musty leather. Waxman sat on a stool as he always did, before the cash register, eating a sandwich. He was slightly older and his hair slightly whiter, but he was much as Tirosh remembered him.

  Waxman glanced up as he noticed Tirosh. He nodded, mouth full of food. “Help you, young man?” he said.

  “Just browsing,” Tirosh said, and almost smiled; back when he was a kid, that was always his reply to Waxman’s inquiry.

  “Always with the browsing,” Waxman said. He dabbed at his lips with a dirty handkerchief. “No one buys books anymore.”

  “Mr. Waxman, do you remember me?” Tirosh said. “Lior Tirosh, I used to come by your shop all the time when I was a boy.”

  “Tirosh, Tirosh,” Waxman said. “Can’t say that I do. Kids today, they don’t go to bookshops, they have better things to do with their time.”

  “I’m a writer now,” Tirosh said. Why he felt the need to explain himself to Waxman, an unkempt and slovenly man whose attitude to his customers was indifferent at best and downright hostile at worst, he didn’t know. Waxman said, “Pffft,” and made that wave of his hand, like the Unterlander on the plane; dismissing Tirosh and his aspirations like banishing an unruly child from his shop.

  “Who isn’t a writer, tell me,” Waxman said. “Only yesterday I had that Amos Klausner fellow in here, asking for documents relating to the Wilbusch Expedition. Says he wants to write a novel about the early years of settlement. Everyone’s writing a novel these days. Not me. All them words. What we need, Tirosh, is not writers. We need soldiers, farmers. Are you going to buy a book or not?”
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  “I told you I was just browsing.”

  “I’m going to close early,” Waxman announced. “So make up your mind one way or the other.”

  It felt vaguely surreal for Tirosh to be inside the store. The books on their dark shelves whispered to him, each one a promise, each one a world. He let his fingers trail along the dusty spines; the dust tickled his nose and he held back a sneeze. He thought about that long-ago expedition: how the three men—the Jew, Wilbusch; the Swiss, Kaiser; and the British explorer, St. Hill Gibbons—met in Mombasa in that long ago January month, and from there set off by train heading to the Uasin Gishu plateau, a remote and unknown region of little interest to anyone but the desperate Jews. . . .

  Their first port of call had been Nakuru, on the edge of the settlement.

  Now Nakuru lay beyond the Green Line, as it was called. There was a heavy army encampment to keep the peace, and new settlements built in the fertile land round Lake Nakuru. Tirosh had memories of going there on school trips, of seeing thousands of pink flamingos dotting the serene waters like festive guests at the seaside, with rhinos standing by with their horns in the air, looking bemused at the cacophony of birds.

  On their journey from Nairobi, the expedition passed through the fertile Kikuyu lands. In Nakuru they were stranded for some time, finding it difficult to hire porters. Eventually they began their journey into the territory. They did not know what to expect or what they’d find. They passed through thick, primeval forest, the land rising rapidly as they marched towards the proposed territory. Several days later, they reached the plateau.

  “So?” Waxman said, startling Tirosh. “Nu? I’m going to close.”

  Tirosh made meaningless noises of appeasement. He cast about him and alighted on a small, slim volume: Baedeker’s 1951 Guide to British Judea and Its Environs. Tirosh waved the book at Waxman, who took it from him with a slight sniff and said, “I guess Klausner missed that one.” He thumbed to the front free endpaper, his lips pressed together in concentration as he studied the pencil-inscribed price and found it wanting.