Unholy Land

by Lavie Tidhar

  “Twenty shillings,” he said at last, reluctantly. Tirosh dug in his pocket. He did not remember changing money but was pleasantly surprised to discover he carried enough of the local currency on his person. He paid and accepted the book back from Waxman, feeling strangely protective of his purchase.

  He stepped out of the shop and back onto the road.

  My man who was following Tirosh was eating a chapati roll at a stall, and was not paying attention.

  Tirosh turned, left or right it didn’t matter.

  Two men converged on him. They bumped into him as though in passing.

  Tirosh began to say, “Excuse me—”

  Something heavy and hard hit him on the back of the head.

  It was a cosh, standard Internal Intelligence service issue, though the men were not working for us.

  One man hit Tirosh on the back of the head. The other caught him as he fell. It looked, if anyone was looking, as though they were merely helping a friend who had suddenly collapsed. Tirosh’s face contorted in pain. He tried to speak but couldn’t. The man, with a frown of irritation, hit him again with the cosh, and Tirosh slumped unconscious. It was all done with quiet efficiency.

  By the time my man—juices running down his chin from the meat inside the chapati wrap—turned round, the two men and Tirosh were gone. Their car, an imported German make, black with tinted windows, had been idling at the curb. The men dragged Tirosh into the car and it took off immediately. My man saw nothing. It was the second time we had lost him.

  Tirosh had that knack: however hard you watched him, he sooner or later just disappeared.

  PART THREE

  ________

  VOYAGES

  11.

  Towards afternoon, the minarets of Damascus cast down elongated shadows, like the masts of ships, across the city. You walk from shade to shade, hopping over hot pavement stones, between cool stone walls and under arches. The city rises from its afternoon sleep and shakes off the heat, slowly, by degrees. In the distance the muezzin call the faithful to prayer, green lights illuminating the rooftops. The air is scented with the bloom of sweet peas, the distant smell of the sea, with the pop and grind of roasted cardamom seeds, black coffee, men’s aftershave, women’s perfume. You walk without hurrying, with a precision of movement, hands swinging by your sides. You’re humming a song, something old by Umm Kulthum. You wear a green summer dress.

  In cool stone courtyards scholars gather to argue obscure theological points from the Quran and Zohar. In souks across the city traders display their wares much as they have done for thousands of years: bags of sun-bright turmeric, volcanic-ash paprika, rare pods of vanilla, saffron strands like delicate hair. You’ve missed Damascus, the mountains, the buzz of a thousand arguments; solar panels spread open like wings on the rooftops. The electric cars move silently through the streets. Under awnings the sheesha pipe cafés are open for business, and the smell of cherry tobacco and the hiss of hot coals send you back to an earlier, simpler time.

  You pass quietly, unnoticed. Your reflections stare back at you from shop windows, cocking their heads, quizzical. Who are you today, Nur?

  I am anyone and no one, you say to them, silently. You smile at your reflections and they smile back at you, but each one is slightly different, each one has a different smile. I can be anyone I want to be.

  Past Hejaz Station, the grand terminus, and you remember when you first arrived in this city, taking the train from Haifa; how it ran through the Galilee, climbed the bridge over the Jordan River, how it led you here, a reserved young girl, stepping off the train with your suitcase in your hand, into the throng of languages and people. How exciting it was, to see Damascus that first time! It is a city one can never forget, no matter how long you’ve been away.

  You think of that girl off the train, that country girl from Hebron, growing in the dark shade of Ursalim. You were her, once. It seems so distant now. You pass the train tracks, skirting the university where you gained your degree (that first one), making your way to the small and unassuming building on Anwar Sadat Street.

  The building, like you, is misleading. It appears so plain. There are no signs outside. It could be anything: the office block of a shipping firm, perhaps.

  Which, in a way, it is.

  You step up to the doors and they open for you. Inside it is cool, the air conditioning is working. The air is dry. The building is filled with the quiet, busy sound of a library. It smells of paper. Here, borders are charted and maintained. A couple of people you recognise. They give you cautious nods as they pass you in the corridors. You follow the meandering path to the interview room.

  “Please, come inside.”

  “Shut the door, will you?”

  Your eyes are green like young mint leaves. They have a coldness that only manifests in rare moments, that is kept hidden from the world. You look at the room, which has no windows. The first speaker you know well: Professor Abdullah Hashimi, the agency’s director. The other is his deputy, Bar-Hillel. Bar-Hillel closes the door after you, gives you an apologetic shrug. Professor Hashimi puffs irritably on an electronic cigarette.

  “Well, sit down, sit down,” he says.

  You watch him. You remain standing. There is someone else in the room, a third person, but it takes you a moment to see her. In the shadows, and with that stillness that you, too, possess.

  An agent.

  She merges with her surroundings so perfectly, it is hard to spot her at all. What did your ex-husband once call you, frustrated and angry? A chameleon. That night he left, he said he never felt he knew you at all.

  You told yourself it was better that way, when he’d gone. You sat up until sunrise, in the apartment—you were living in Berlin at the time. One Berlin, at any rate, one of many. The sun rose sluggishly, hidden behind fog. You had sat up all night watching old movies on TV, nursing a single glass of wine. Gone with the Wind, with Errol Flynn and Paulette Goddard, followed by Jean Harlow in King Kong, the giant ape falling from a great tower to his death, then M, with Lugosi buying a balloon from a blind street vendor, whistling all the while. You hardly saw them. Sometimes you wonder what happened to him, to that man, your husband, who he was, if a version of him were still out there. He had been a doctoral candidate, like you.

  “Well?” Hashimi demands. You look back at him. Your eyes are jade mirrors. He looks away.

  “Who’s she?” you say. You hear a chuckle, dry like old paper. The other woman pushes forward. She is old, older than you, but her face is curiously ageless, unlined, like yellowed paper stretched taut and thin. She could be you, in decades hence. Her eyes are amused, but you sense their coldness.

  “Madame Méduse,” you say, startled, though you cover it quickly. She smiles with teeth like fangs.

  “They speak so highly of you,” she says.

  You say: “I thought you were dead.”

  Bar-Hillel squirms uncomfortably. He is not at home in this room, with people such as yourself. A civilian—though you remind yourself he is Hashimi’s deputy, and that appearances, so often, can be deceiving—you of all people should know this well.

  La Méduse, meanwhile, takes no offence to your bluntness.

  “Perhaps I was,” she says, “yes, perhaps I am. It is so hard to keep track, after a while.”

  Her tone invites your complicity. You resist it. Hashimi takes short angry puffs. “Sit, sit,” he says. “We are already out of time.”

  “That we are, always,” La Méduse says. “We have so little time, and so much . . .”

  “I am not on active duty,” you say, ignoring her. Doddering old fool, you think, but don’t say. “I am on leave of absence.”

  “At the discretion of the service,” Bar-Hillel offers, in that same apologetic tone. “And which has been withdrawn, as you are now aware. After all, you are here.”

  “I was happy,” you say, “right where I was.”

  “In Haifa?”

  “Yes.”

  A city on the
edge of the sea, as old as the mountain it sits on, some say. Mount Carmel, evergreen, and the blue, sparkling sea in the distance . . . and the second-hand bookshops all along Wilbusch Street in the lower city, where you have spent all your time in recent months, continuing your research, for that book on Hebrew pulp writers you are never going to publish. . . .

  Bar-Hillel sits. There’s a thick paper folder on the table before him. Hashimi goes to the wall, as though drawn to a window, to a dream of one. La Méduse fades back into the background. Bar-Hillel wets a finger, turns a page. He looks at it in concentration.

  “Nur Al-Hussaini,” he says. You realise, too late, the trap they’ve laid for you. You thought this a routine visit, hoped to catch the night train back to Haifa, wanted nothing more than to clear up the confusion.

  But there is none.

  You are here to be given a task.

  “Born in Hebron, in the thirty-fifth year after the Small Holocaust,” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “Graduated University of Damascus in ’55, with a degree in Hebrew literature—”

  “Yes.”

  He looks up at you.

  “Why Hebrew?”

  “Why not?”

  He shrugs. “With a special interest in—what is that? science fiction?”

  “It was a way of imagining futures,” you say—a little defensively, perhaps. “Multiple futures.”

  “In my experience,” Professor Hashimi says, “the future happens regardless of what you imagine.”

  “If you say so.”

  You can’t really explain to him. To them. What it was like growing up in Hebron in the shadow of the Absence, long after the world changed. What it was like to read those strange, old stories, those vanished authors from the time Before. How differently they saw the world then.

  “Tell me,” Bar-Hillel says, seemingly at random. “Did any of them ever . . . predict what was to happen?”

  Yes, you think. Yes, one. But they’d just been making up stories; they made up a thousand futures and none of those had come to pass. Sometimes the stories served as warnings. Sometimes as entertainment. Thought experiments. That’s all.

  Yet in you, at the library, distanced from your surroundings—back then it was harder to pretend to belong, harder to blend in—they awoke something you hadn’t even known you were missing.

  A desperate need to ask, What if?

  A question which finally led you here, to this building, this room, this city, or one much like it.

  But Bar-Hillel does not pursue the question. He takes your silence for an answer, of a sort. He licks a finger, turns a page. “Postgraduate studies in Berlin, then Baghdad. You trained as a historian?”

  “Yes.”

  For people in a hurry, you think, they are certainly taking their time.

  “Then what?” he says.

  “You know all this,” you say, unwillingly. You were happy in Haifa. Happy with the hot Mediterranean wind, the hush of bookshops, the spoken mix of Hebrew and Arabic. Haifa is your haven, an oasis away from the greater world of Ursalim, and the worlds beyond it.

  “She was identified as a possible candidate by one of our spotters,” Hashimi says, addressing no one in particular, it seems. “Psych evals, the usual. You have no parents, do you?” he says, suddenly addressing you directly.

  You say, mildly, “Everyone has parents.”

  “I mean, they died, when you were young.”

  “Yes.”

  “You were raised by an aunt.”

  Your aunt Aisha, a woman with the willpower and voice of a bull elephant.

  “Yes,” you say, smiling. Aunt Aisha would eat the director for her tea, you think. Men worshipped her. She used them like sponges. She’d have no time for the director, this officious man with his electronic cigarette and impatient manner. Yet you remember not to trust appearances; remember, too, that the director was a field agent once, just like you. To survive the sephirot one must be more than one thing at a time. We pass them like ants, crawling on the edge of a knife. A line from a film you must have once seen, you think.

  “What happened to your parents?”

  “I was told they died.”

  You see La Méduse lean forward then. Her face is an idolatrous mask.

  “Told?”

  You never really knew your parents. You remember your mother as a warm, all-engulfing presence, your father as a smell, a lift in the air, a squeal of delight. You yourself never had children. What had the poet said? The gate of the dead is open, and we pass?

  “They vanished in the Blighted Zone,” Bar-Hillel says. Licks a finger, turns a page. How you begin to loathe the man. “Is that correct?”

  “So I was told. Later.”

  Ursalim. Jerusalem. Yerushalaim. The City of Peace. Which, in a way, is a name that became appropriate. You think of it then: the black hole of inexplicable devastation on its plateau, nestled between the mountains. A place of utter desolation where once a city stood, where once people lived and fought. A nothing now. A crack between the worlds.

  “They’d lost their family in the Small Holocaust,” you say, to fill in the silence. “They were obsessed with what had happened. Who was responsible. Where the people went. They kept going back, to the edges, the border. Maybe one day they went too far, and fell over the edge.”

  “It’s what attracted us to you,” Bar-Hillel says. “You were already living on the border, you just didn’t know it.”

  You shrug. From the air, Ursalim is a black mirror of faultless volcanic glass. What caused it—who was behind the attack—nobody knows. Flights avoid it. The perimeter is supposed to be guarded, but how, or why? Only the desperate go to the border, and too many of them never come back.

  There is peace now, all across this region: the city’s last gift.

  All its holy places are gone.

  “Who made the initial approach?” Bar-Hillel says; like it doesn’t say so in his file. But you play along, of course. There are protocols. There are always protocols and they must always be observed.

  “It was me, actually,” Hashimi says, startled, perhaps, from some inner reverie. He glares at Bar-Hillel as though to say, Can we speed this along?

  But Bar-Hillel is going nowhere fast. Licks a finger, turns a page. “Ah, yes,” he says. “I see that is indeed so. The director himself?”

  “He wasn’t director then,” you say.

  “Up-and-coming,” Bar-Hillel says, perhaps with a touch of bitterness in his voice. “He was up-and-coming.”

  You seem to remember Bar-Hillel was Hashimi’s superior, for a time. But Hashimi was well connected; he was a Hashemite, after all. Everyone knew he would be appointed, sooner or later.

  And you remember his approach to you. That day at the university library, poring over ancient, crumbling pulp magazines, your fingers gloved in thin vinyl; staring at faded illustrations of spaceships landing on alien worlds, at words in that curious Hebrew block script, written in an obsolete typeface. His soft footsteps, the smell of French aftershave and cigarettes, his cough, until you looked up and he stared down at you, curious.

  “Nur Al-Hussaini?” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “Could you come with me, please?”

  That flash of his ID; a move you learned, later, yourself. It showed nothing, the ID. It was the gesture itself that signified.

  You closed the magazine; carefully. You put it away. You removed your gloves. Finally, you stood. You looked him over, found nothing in him to stand out, to set him apart. He blended. In a strange way, it was like staring into a mirror.

  You followed him out of curiosity. Into a quiet reading room, and he shut the door. “What is this about?” you said. He ignored you. He asked you questions, about yourself. You answered. You sensed that he already knew the answers, though he did not use folders, the way Bar-Hillel does.

  Then he asked you if you thought the world was real.

  12.

  In the time since, you have se
en many impossible things. You have seen the white towers of Kang Diz Huxt rise into the yellow sky under the broken moon, and you have navigated, masked and armed, the green gaseous swamps of Samaria where the Awful Ones live. You have a scar on your arm, from a knife attack: a drunken crusader at an inn in Outremer. You have heard the restless dead call to each other across the night in mist-shrouded Canaan, their voices like those of lost nightingales.

  “What do you mean?” you asked Hashimi. You looked up at him with guileless eyes, though in your stomach ants crawled and gnawed at the delicate lining. You saw or heard in him something unknown yet half-remembered, like a dream you once had, which faded with the morning. How could the world not be real? You were born to it, its light met your eyes the first time you opened them and looked. The world is real, hermetically sealed upon itself. To imagine otherwise is to indulge in fantasy, to want escape.

  And yet you never believed it. Not truly. You’d stare at walls and imagine them transparent, picture yourself crossing them as though they were nothing more than invisible lines. What lay beyond the walls? Anything. Everything.

  And Professor Hashimi said, “I can’t tell you. But I could show you.”

  Was there ever a worse line? Did you believe him? You looked into his eyes and saw nothing there.

  La Méduse stirs. “She did what?” she says.

  “She turned me down,” Professor Hashimi says, by the window, his demeanour sour.

  “Why, child?” La Méduse says. You stare at her with some hostility. Who is she to call you that, you who have been across the sephirot, you who have swum in the warm depths of the Middle Sea and heard the Nephilim cry, imprisoned in the volcanic vents, you who trekked across the Great Salt Marshes of the Egyptian Empire’s province of once-great Retjenu?

  Why? you think. Yet it is not uncommon. You yourself have done your share of recruitment approaches. Come up to a promising candidate, and looked at them with those same clear, guileless eyes, and offered them the question like a sacrifice.

  Do you think the world is real?

  To even ask the question, to acknowledge it, is to accept its possibility. One cannot live easily with the idea. It is better to put up walls. To draw borders. Walls to keep out. Walls to keep in. To contain.