Unholy Land

by Lavie Tidhar

  “Deborah,” Tirosh said. “What did you do to Deborah!”

  “I told you, boy! I don’t know where she is. She’ll probably turn up, the silly girl always does.”

  “The men who tried to kill me—”

  His father snorted. “Tried,” he said. “There is no try in killing, boy. I thought I taught you better than that.”

  “So who—”

  His father nodded. And suddenly there was a gun in the old man’s hand. He fired, the blast a painful detonation in the silent room. The air filled with the acrid smell of gunpowder and blood.

  “Her,” his father said.

  Tirosh turned, dumbly. His ears rang with the blast. Behind him stood Nur, a gun in her own hand, unfired. Her face bore pained confusion.

  Blood bloomed against her shoulder. Her eyes locked onto Tirosh’s, communicating—what? Pain? Bewilderment?

  Slowly she collapsed, until Tirosh sprang forward and caught her just before she hit the floor.

  32.

  Tirosh grabbed the gun from your hand and pointed it, shakily, at his father. Nur groaned softly, trying not to lose consciousness. Something rolled out of her hand and fell under the furniture, but neither man noticed. She’d done it in just such a way.

  “Don’t shoot,” Tirosh said.

  “She has to die, Lior. She has to die to complete the pattern. We could be in Outremer tomorrow, Lior. In Canaan! In Ursalim! We could win where the Jews should have always won. We’d win at Masada and Qargar and Lachish. Join me, Lior. Be a man, for once in your life!”

  Did Tirosh want to shoot his father, at that moment? Could he have, even if he’d wanted to? He wasn’t the kind of man to hold a gun, let alone use it.

  He supported Nur and she stood up, stemming the bleeding as best you could, gaining focus.

  “Lior. Don’t go.”

  “I have to.”

  “You won’t get far,” the old man warned him. Tirosh ignored him. Still pointing the gun at his father, he edged back, step by step, taking Nur with him.

  “Lior—”

  “What!”

  “You should stay here. It is better.”

  “Better how, Father?”

  “How much do you remember? Of the outside?”

  “I remember my life! I remember being happy! I wrote books, I had a wife and I had a child!”

  The word stuck in his throat. Leaning against him, Nur groaned in pain. Tirosh turned his face away. He remembered Isaac. He remembered the boy’s smiling, trusting face. The roar of the truck as it came along the road, seemingly out of nowhere. The boy’s face in the road. Ada’s scream. Tirosh’s . . .

  “Stay. Here it is different, Lior. We can make it so it didn’t happen that way. Here there is still an Isaac, your Isaac, in Berlin. There is a version of you in this world. It doesn’t have to be like this—”

  Tirosh said, “I saw him die.”

  “I know about burying one’s children,” the old general said.

  “Do you?” Tirosh said—screamed. “Do you, Father? You know about sending children to die, about training them up, to be soldiers, to hold guns, to fight, always to fight, to die, always to die. For you, for land. What do you know about innocence, about pain? Isaac did no one any harm. He has no part in this. No part.”

  “Stay.”

  “Enough,” Tirosh said.

  He helped Nur out. The old general did nothing. He watched the two of them go. They went outside. They got into the car and Tirosh turned on the ignition. He was crying, stars smudged across the night skies, a child’s finger painting. He drove as fast away from there as he could. It didn’t matter. The house may have appeared deserted but it wasn’t. Men emerged out of the shadows. They had once been children like Tirosh, like Isaac. Now they had grown into trained killers, old General Tirosh’s real progeny.

  “Get them,” he said.

  “And your son?”

  “He is the last link in the sequence,” the old man said, heavily. “Kill him, too. Kill them both.”

  The men nodded. They slipped into the night and were gone, following their prey.

  33.

  I watched them go. I had parked the car at the turn in the road and made my way to the farmhouse on foot. I watched them drive away, towards Elgon, and I saw the old general and I saw his men and I understood it all. I waited awhile. Then I made my way to the house on foot and opened the gate and let myself in.

  I think he expected me.

  “Bloom,” he said, without surprise.

  “General.”

  “Come inside.”

  He led me to the same room only recently vacated. I saw the fetishes in their display cabinet, these artefacts from a long-ago expedition. I saw the maps on the walls.

  “You came from such a place,” the old general said.

  “Yes.”

  “You seldom speak of it.”

  “General, one puts up walls for a reason.”

  “Oh, Bloom. Don’t be naïve. Walls do not keep the enemy out. They keep you locked in. We must break down the walls and take what is ours.”

  “Sir, with respect—”

  “You’re either with me or against me, Bloom. There is no middle way.”

  There was a gun in his hand. It’d been recently fired.

  “No,” I said, sadly. “There isn’t.”

  I saw the thing Nur had let drop under the furniture. It was nothing remarkable, nothing but a pocket mirror, a vanity. I picked it up and tossed it to him. I don’t think he expected me to.

  He opened it and stared into the mirror.

  I wondered what it showed him.

  I turned my back on him and walked away. I wanted to tell him about mimicry, about how organisms can disguise themselves visually in a foreign environment: like weeds pretending to be useful crops so as to avoid destruction.

  We must have missed it in customs, I thought. But then, things from the outside always had a way of sneaking in.

  The explosion when it came threw me to the ground. When I turned, the farmhouse was on fire.

  I stood there watching the blaze, and I saluted. He was a great man and now he was dead.

  There was nothing to be said.

  I left the place then and followed the car tracks into the darkness.

  . . .

  Sometimes I still think of the sphinx and wonder why it’d never asked me a riddle.

  Perhaps it didn’t think I had anything much to say.

  . . .

  After a time I came on the car abandoned in the foothills of the mountain. It had hit a tree and its chassis was crumpled, but there was no blood and its passengers were no longer inside. I followed on.

  . . .

  I left two men dead at the entrance to the cave and a third dying, his blood soaking into the earth. . . .

  . . .

  Another two in a cave with walls decorated with ancient acts of murder.

  . . .

  My God, that tree! That tree of skulls!

  34.

  “Not . . . far now,” Tirosh said. Nur’s weight pressed down on him. They traversed the cave system slowly, Nur’s blood trickling down onto the ancient rough-hewn stone floor. Tirosh’s eyes stung with sweat. “Not . . . far.”

  The assassins were behind them and I was behind the assassins. They came to that place in the mountain where time stops.

  Black water, a silent pool. Wavelets lapping at the banks. Tirosh sank to his knees. Nur sat there, beside him, holding on to the wound. She was very pale. Her fingers were coated in blood.

  “Would you . . . ?” she said to Tirosh.

  “What?”

  “Would you go? Back?”

  He didn’t answer you.

  The last two men were coming round the tunnel when I killed them with a knife, one each, right through the heart. I helped them down to the ground, gently. I left them there.

  The black pool came into view. I slid down to join them. Tirosh startled, but Nur didn’t look surprised. For just a
moment, she smiled.

  I nodded to her.

  It was done.

  I helped Tirosh ease her into the water.

  The water churned. . . .

  She lowered her head, wearily. She sank into the water.

  There is a place where the lone and level sands stretch far away. . . .

  She was gone.

  You were gone.

  35.

  We had a long talk as we sat there, Tirosh and I, contemplating the black water of the infinite. Nur was gone, and I was hurting more than I realised. I loved this land. I had never thought myself capable of loving another. Person, land: at some point you have to choose one over the other. All history is nothing but a lie we tell ourselves, a story. The land is always there, indifferent to our suffering, our wars, the names we choose to call it. The old general was dead, but Palestina remained, divided by a wall and two different stories.

  Tirosh, by my side, grieved for his son.

  “So you are an outsider, too?” he said, when we had mostly finished talking. He wasn’t that interested, you understand. He was just making noises, it was better than the silence. Perhaps that is all history is, a way for us to ward off the silence of the dead with our fleeting voices.

  “Yes.”

  “What is it like? Your world?” he said.

  The old general had asked me that, too. I had never told him.

  “It is beautiful,” I told Tirosh now. “Altneuland. It sits on the shores of the Mediterranean, with Jerusalem as its eternal capital. Airships glide majestically through the clear blue skies. Children, happy and fat and carefree, run shrieking along the sand beaches of Herzlberg, splashing in the warm water of the sea. The air is scented with the bloom of orange trees. There is no war, no fear. It’s paradise.”

  Tirosh stirred. “And the local people?” he said. A word from his other life, from the outside, came to him then. “The Palestinians?”

  I shrugged. “There was no place for them there,” I told him. “So they had to go.”

  He recoiled from me then; as though I were something rotten and slimy. He didn’t ask; and I didn’t tell him.

  “Will you stay?” I asked him.

  “. . . No,” he said, at last.

  Then, “You?”

  “This is my home, Tirosh.”

  “Then goodbye, Bloom. I’d like to say it’s been a pleasure, but I’d be lying.”

  “Likewise.”

  He tried to grin. It didn’t suit him, much. He dangled his feet into the water and stared down into the black abyss of its depths. It couldn’t have been easy for him, that decision, but I thought I understood it: he’d rejected fantasy, in a way.

  He let himself into the water, ungainly, and floated there, shivering. I don’t know what I was thinking. I was thinking of you. I wanted to see you, one more time at least.

  . . . I wanted to explain.

  He was beginning to sink when I jumped on him.

  “. . . Let go!”

  Then we were drowning.

  36.

  I drowned in a cold, black pool. Stalactites shone, wet with moisture, hanging from the ceiling of the cave. I couldn’t breathe. The water was icy-cold and Tirosh was fighting me, trying to push me off, but he couldn’t. We were sinking deeper into the water. The pool had no bottom, no end.

  I thrashed in the water. I did not want to die. Tirosh fought me off. He was surprisingly strong. Desperation gave him strength. For a moment we were separated and I panicked. Shapes swirled around us in the dark. I reached blindly, caught hold of his wrist, held on tight, fastened myself to him. We were both going to die. We sank. My vision blurred. Why did I follow him? The world was reduced to this one small bubble of air. We were it. Tirosh kicked. I barely felt the pain. The world was agony. My lungs burned. How far had we gone? How much farther could we go? He’d been through once before, I had to believe that. All I had to do was open my mouth and breathe and there would have been an end to it, but still I resisted. A pinprick of light in the distance, impossibly far. I no longer knew which way was up, which way was down. Tirosh had stopped fighting. He dropped like a stone and I held on.

  A roar in my ears.

  The pool was a black night dotted with stars.

  We fell from the edge of the world.

  PART TEN

  _______

  DEPARTURES

  37.

  . . . and into a raging storm of gunfire.

  The night was humid and hot. I was already sweating. They were firing on us from both sides. No, not at us, I realised. At each other. Night, with the stars hanging like cheap decorations overhead. I didn’t know where we were. I heard shouts, Arabic, and what sounded like Judean.

  “. . . Oh, no,” Tirosh said. I grabbed him by the lapels, shook him violently.

  “Where are we?” I demanded. “What is this place!”

  He began to laugh. Infuriated, I pushed him to the ground.

  “Stay down, damn it!” he said.

  I heard a siren in the distance. A dark shape flew overhead, and I heard the whoosh of near-silent missiles, followed a moment later by a huge explosion ahead of us. The shouts in Arabic stopped abruptly. Tirosh grabbed me by the arm.

  “Run, you fool! Run!”

  Tracer bullets lit up the sky. Ahead of us I could see military jeeps, men in olive-green uniforms firing. Behind them was a huge concrete wall. The wall went on and on forever. It divided up the land. The soldiers were firing on us. Tirosh waved his hands frantically and yelled in some sort of archaic Judean, over and over.

  “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! I’m an Israeli!”

  It was the first time I’d heard that loathsome word.

  I thought we were going to die. Suddenly the gunfire stopped, however. Young men surrounded us, guns drawn. We were tackled and thrown facedown on the ground. In seconds we were in some sort of handcuffs, thin strips of plastic cutting into my skin. Expert hands searched us for weapons. They found my revolver, and I thought I’d be shot right there and then, but Tirosh was keeping up a stream of words all this while, a confused babble about having lost our way, about my being a foreign visitor—

  “How did you cross the God damned wall?” one of the soldiers demanded.

  “Where are your papers?” another said. Someone kicked me, hard, in the ribs. “Where are your papers?”

  I closed my eyes.

  I thought, at least we weren’t dead.

  We were taken beyond the wall, and into lockup. Tirosh tried to explain to me, in whispers, where we were. The place was called Israel, or maybe Palestine. We’d been caught somewhere in the Occupied Territories, in the midst of a battle between Palestinian insurgents and an Israeli Defense Force patrol. I let his explanations wash over me. This wasn’t where I’d hoped to end up. It was just another fucked up might-have-been.

  After a while I managed to tune him out, and slept.

  They released Tirosh after a couple of days but kept me in prison for several months while they decided what to do with me.

  It wasn’t too bad. I kept up with the news and learned to speak their version of Judean, a barbaric mix of Hebrew and Slavic tongues all mixed in liberally with the Arabic of this place. It was the Middle East, the same geographical space as my own, long-lost Altneuland, and yet it couldn’t have been further from it.

  Tirosh came to visit me during my incarceration, just the once.

  “It’s my niece,” he said.

  “Your niece?”

  “Deborah. The one who went missing.”

  “I remember looking into it,” I told him. “There was no evidence anything had happened to her, Tirosh.”

  “Well, I found her,” he said, grimly.

  “How?”

  He told me.

  It was on the news, not longer after our . . . arrival. He saw her on the television screen, a youngish woman, a baby strapped to her chest. They were in the midst of a demonstration. A group of left-wing protesters huddled along the Israeli side of the s
eparation wall, carrying placards. Armed police watched them, bored. A short interview, her accent somewhat strange, not quite of this place. Her name was Deborah Glass-Bialik. When he looked, he found her listed in the phone book, and, one autumn day, he drove to see her.

  She lived in a small house in the suburbs. There were leaves on the ground, baby toys scattered outside. He hesitated, then knocked on the door, and she answered, holding the baby. She looked at him without much curiosity.

  “Yes?”

  “Deborah? Deborah Glass?”

  “It’s Glass-Bialik, now,” she said, showing him a wedding ring on her finger. “Do I know you?”

  “I . . .” He didn’t know what to say.

  “Are you a reporter?”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “It’s just, I saw you on the news, demonstrating, and I thought . . .”

  “If this is about the next meeting,” she said, “hold on.” She disappeared inside, returned with a leaflet she thrust into his hand. “All the information’s there. I hope you can make it.”

  She didn’t seem bothered by his appearance there. She seemed used to people showing up at her door, and even as Tirosh dawdled, a large bearded man was ambling along towards them, lifting his hand in greeting. He nodded to Tirosh and began to talk to Deborah about the coming Handto-Hand Outreach Programme, and the next committee meeting, and after a short while Tirosh made his excuses and left, still clutching the leaflet in his hand like a lifeline. The amateur graphic on the cover showed people on two sides of a wall, tearing it down. Tirosh dumped it in the trash a street later.

  “She didn’t have any idea who I was,” he told me. “And she seemed happy, Bloom. I didn’t want to raise old ghosts. I don’t know if she even remembers . . . that other place.”

  “Do you?”

  “It does rather seem like a bad dream,” he admitted. “Do you believe it, Bloom?”

  “I have to,” I said. He nodded, slowly, but I don’t think he was convinced. He left shortly after, and I never saw him again.

  And this is pretty much all of it. After a while I, too, began to fit into that world. My papers were found; I was released with a warning. I often think about you, and wonder where you are.

  Tirosh went back to Berlin, for a time at least. He published only one other novel, a sordid little pulp paperback called Unholy Land. I saw a copy in a discount bin at the local bookshop once, but neglected to buy it. Last I heard he’d remarried.