Muck Page 10

  On the balcony, facing the Valley of the Cross, Tukulti stood guard. And in his latest dream, Mattaniah drove northeastward, up to Haran, and there was a large well there, in effect a water tower the height of a skyscraper, and he was told that all the Assyrian waters of the Tigris and Euphrates were stored there. And someone he couldn’t identify arrived and told him, There’s a spigot at the bottom, and it’s okay if you drink—the water here is boundless, and after all you’ll only take a sip. But he was scared to drink, thought it was forbidden.

  9

  ESTHER, JEREMIAH’S MOTHER, took a quick look over her shoulder like a burglar, even though no one was home except herself. She opened the kitchen cupboard and took out the old sugar jar. Inside, there was something wrapped in newspaper. She unwrapped it and again looked around, like someone cracking a safe, then removed a little woman made of clay. Though the hands were broken off, it was clear that they had once propped up her small breasts, one of whose tips was chipped, too. Her face smiled and glowed, and her curls, which were partially crumbled and damaged, reminded Esther of hairstyles from long ago. The little woman’s body was a small column of sorts, and Esther set the column’s base on a chair, placed a cushion next to it, lit a candle, and started talking rapidly. An old vendor from Ugarit had sold her the little woman, years ago, in the souk adjacent to the Potsherd Gate. Esther pointed: Asherah? Asherah? The wizened vendor of figurines didn’t speak any Hebrew, and only nodded and said, Ath’rat Sea, Ath’rat Sea. Esther said, I’ll buy it, and the old woman nimbly wrapped the little woman in newspaper, and then pointed repeatedly at Esther’s crotch and at her own crotch. Esther smiled nervously and departed, her heart pounding. She hastened to buy a sugar jar in another stall, and placed the little woman wrapped in newspaper inside that. As soon as she returned home, Esther drew her out of the jar and noticed that now only one of her breasts was still intact and that both of her arms were broken. Esther didn’t know where to find glue, and it seemed to her that she heard the sound of Hilkiah’s footsteps on the path; in fear, she flung the crumbs of clay out the kitchen window into the yard, tucked the broken little woman back into the sugar jar, and quickly hid it behind several rows of glassware.

  10

  AFTER SMASHING THE JUG, Jeremiah walked across the bridge above the Cinematheque. He stopped in his tracks for a moment and looked around to where the separation wall encircled all of Greater Jerusalem, as well as the walls of the Old City, as though immersed in a protracted and serious conversation. And all he wanted was to stumble upon a hummus joint and order in quick succession two helpings of hummus topped with fava beans, to wipe his plate clean with two fat pitas, drink a bottle of cold juice, wolf down five falafel balls soaked in tahini, round it all off with a cup of black coffee, and then find himself a tree or a bench and doze off for a while in the open. He felt like a deflated balloon. The lack of response to the shattering of the jug lowered his spirits; the indifference to the shards and to his words building up to the shattering had been just about unmitigated. A hatchet job was preferable to silence, he recalled Mattaniah once telling him. You write and publish and listen, but no voice comes, no answer, and if you do hear a voice it turns out to be nothing more than an echo of your own insipid mutterings. And who said that, Jeremiah asked himself, you or him? But he couldn’t remember.

  He found himself on Bethlehem Road, walking south. It was past four by now, and the long day was already way too much to process. Maybe peace and quiet would finally win out; maybe he was done with all those divinely inspired visions and the attendant running off at the mouth. After all, just between us, he thought, what’s any of this got to do with me? He caught sight of a dog in the distance, loping along alone, and Jeremiah could easily tell that it was one of Sargon’s brown-coated offspring. His meeting with Broch yesterday came to mind, and he remembered that he had to buy a new keyboard for himself, although he had no intention of writing anything in the near future. He was glad to remember that next to the nearest hummus joint was an office-supply store, and he deliberated for a moment whether to purchase the keyboard before or after eating, but, hunger getting the better of him, he entered the joint on Bethlehem Road, at the corner of Gedaliah, and sat down, waving to the waitress, who was—as he now descried and all but burst out laughing—the twin sister of the waitress at the Bookworm. Apparently, there’s no way to avoid the sisters, he thought, and was suddenly struck by her beauty, the waitress sister; her large eyes were like pools in a poem, he mused. And the hummus–fava beans arrived, and he tore his pita in a frenzy and dug in. Oh, the delight of polishing off your first helping of hummus when you’re already determined to order a second.

  There was another restaurant adjacent to the hummus joint, and, while Jeremiah was absorbed in cleaning his plate, his mother walked into the other place. Jeremiah didn’t notice her. His mother—who did catch sight of her son, hunched over his plate of hummus—seated herself behind a column by the windowed partition separating the two restaurants. She was served, as every day at four o’clock, a cup of red-hibiscus tea and a slice of spelt cake. Immediately after the death of her daughter, Jeremiah’s mother had stopped eating meat and dairy products; she wouldn’t even eat harvested vegetables and fruits. To everyone’s astonishment, she didn’t lose but, rather, gained weight. Jeremiah and his father, too: everyone put on weight after the death of Jeremiah’s sister, even though they’d all cut down on their consumption of food. Jeremiah and his father, Hilkiah, would suddenly break down, jointly or separately, and begin to wolf down cheeses, and then stop, and start again, even sneaking some fish on the sly, and his father would have these sudden cravings for different kinds of foods, such as mango, or kasha, and his mother, too—kasha, yes—and they’d eat lots of kasha, and then they’d stop with the kasha and they’d consume (both of the men, not Jeremiah’s mother) goat cheese and tuna, and then they’d feel sickened by the cheeses and by the suffering of sheep and goats and fish, declaring all at once, Enough! And they’d switch to legumes and crude tahini. Once, on one of the anniversaries of his sister’s death, his father returned home with a large steak in his bag, which they tore into, a steak and fries, and Jeremiah didn’t sleep that night, because his stomach had not digested meat for years; at daybreak, he threw up in bed while asleep. When he woke up early, he took the filthy sheets, and, instead of dumping them into the laundry basket, went out, half asleep, and set fire to them in the open field near his parents’ home. The sheets blazed there, and the smell of the charred steak and fries filled his nostrils for a second time, and he let the fire be and fled and didn’t return home that entire day, but waited until late. At two in the morning, he entered without making a sound, and, crossing the corridor, he caught sight of a dark silhouette sitting in the kitchen; the silhouette was slowly eating a cake.

  They’d decided back then, his parents, that they’d never bring up his sister’s name again, for her name was too difficult for them to bear; and so many years passed and they’d only say to Jeremiah, Your sister, and to each other, She, or Our daughter, and after several years, when someone asked Jeremiah, Come to think of it, what was her name, his sister, he didn’t immediately remember; it took some time to recall.

  His mother sat in the restaurant adjoining the hummus joint and watched her son ravenously polishing off the helping of hummus, and she sipped her tea, the lenses of her glasses steaming up. In a minute, she’d rise and knock on the window between the two restaurants, she thought, but in the meantime, she would look at him a bit longer. The recurring shock stabbed at her once more, how her child had grown up and in effect vanished—a baby, a boy, a teenager, a young man. When did it all happen? She knew it was a banal thought, but it truly astounded her: Twenty-two years, when did you slip by? At home he never ate with such an appetite, not even the hummus she’d prepare for him. She always felt that at home he ate in anger—entering the kitchen and uncovering her pots like a customs inspector looking for stolen goods, or like a kosher-food supervisor grud
gingly tasting some product. As she watched him tearing a pita and cleaning his plate, for a moment she saw his sister sitting opposite him and looking at him, and wanting a taste, just a bit, at the end of a fork—but, no, his plate was empty.

  In recent years, Esther had been in the habit of joining customers wherever she found a vacant seat; she’d sneak a look at their plates, and if she saw something there that hailed from the world of the animate, so to speak, she’d start up a conversation with the other diners, or start talking to herself, and quietly describe the wretched suffering of these creatures, slaughtered merely to please the palate and gratify the gullet. She’d start a conversation and say something like: Where are you from? From Sidon? I have an uncle from Sidon; he got caught in a fishing net, and he was strangled in it, and they left him there, suffocating, for ten minutes, and then they stripped him to his skeleton, and they beheaded him and removed his brain, and they ground his skin to a paste, and what remained of his flesh they crammed into a tin can. Or she’d sit next to an Egyptian tourist who’d ordered coffee with a lot of boiling milk, and say: I visited Egypt once. My mother was with me—I was a baby then—and they took my mother, and they forced her to leave me behind. My mother screamed and wailed, but it didn’t help, because they had to have her milk. She nursed me, and they needed her milk. And the tourist asked, What, to nurse other infants? Esther replied: No, for their cappuccino. I was left behind, and someone came and struck me on the head, and they turned me into the meatballs being enjoyed by that young man sitting over there, across from us. And then she’d get up and walk over to the young man’s table to continue. In this way, she’d spoil the appetite of not a few customers, and she was declared persona non grata in a number of restaurants in Jerusalem; in one place, they stuck her photo up at the entrance above the words NO ENTRY. She didn’t always talk, though; sometimes she’d simply mimic the sound of the animal that was being eaten, clucking like a chicken, or lowing like a cow, or baa-baaing like a sheep. The imitations were uncannily precise. She’d pass by a table clucking, to her own delight, or she’d sit down and glare pleadingly at a boy absorbed eating ribs and snort like a slaughtered pig.

  Jeremiah browsed through the sports section in the paper. The sportswriters explained the symbolic value of Assyria’s crushing defeat, six to nothing, by the Babylonian team. When an empire is collapsing, your soccer team isn’t all that great, either, and after the first ten minutes, Babylon’s ten players began to rout the team that had been, until recently, and for hundreds of years, the terror of all the teams in the world, to the extent that it was customary to define soccer as a ballgame that lasts ninety minutes and ends with Assyria winning. But times had changed, and the Assyrian players, with their curly beards and their bulging muscles, suddenly appeared little more than bulky and cumbersome, and the tall, lithe Babylonians made mincemeat of them with their exacting, mathematical footwork, perhaps because they were playing, for the first time, without having to worry that a goal in the Assyrian net might sooner or later cost them their lives. Jeremiah recalled how the sportscaster Yoram Arbel had once explained, during a live broadcast: They only know how to attack, not to defend. Two or three goals in their net and they come apart, but usually nobody gets that far. Assyria is on the attack so ferociously that, ten minutes in, they’re already three or four to zero, and the game’s over.

  Jeremiah thumbed through the paper. He read in the real-estate section that King Jehoiakim had purchased for himself, if purchased is the appropriate verb in this case, the entire enormous Holyland Park building complex, to turn it into his private, royal residence, since the palace in the Old City wasn’t much more, in his own words, than a nook, and certainly didn’t bring any honor to the royal family or to the people that family represented. The tenants were forcibly evicted at night, with the assistance of Egyptian soldiers. They weren’t happy to go, but, as it is written, Give unto the king what is the king’s—and, anyway, it wasn’t as though anyone was being thrown to the dogs: everyone was relocated to a tenement. In Egypt they’d throw you into the desert without water, so be grateful and say thank you. Of course, the King of Judah, Jehoiakim, was an Egyptian puppet, although he tried to conceal this fact. Even his name, Jehoiakim, was given to him—or, to be more precise, was sprung on him like a net over a butterfly—by Pharaoh Neco, who called him Jehoiakim the way a person might give his little mutt a fearsome name like Rex or Herod. Lots of people didn’t bother to keep track of the kings anymore: they were appointed and then exiled from one day to another, and it wasn’t always clear exactly whom they were serving. But in the case of Jehoiakim—who regularly made his way around Jerusalem accompanied by two Egyptian chariots, and dressed according to the latest Egyptian fashion, including eye makeup—there was no doubt.

  Pharaoh Neco was called Neco the Cripple by some, because he was missing both his hands and his feet, like shattered statuary, thanks to the sharp sword of the King of Babylon, Nabopolassar, or, according to a less reliable source, thanks to the golden lions on King Solomon’s throne, who leaped at him and tore off his hands and feet when he attempted to sit there and worship his native idols. Whether thanks to Solomon’s lions or to Nabopolassar’s sword, Pharaoh Neco II was borne from one place to another in the arms of a servant as large as a boulder, and when he sat on his throne he would sit on this servant’s lap, and they would always wear identical clothing, and the servant would operate his monarch’s hands and feet from behind. Seeing him brandishing a scepter or a sword, one could almost believe the king was in perfect health and possessed four dark-brown brawny limbs. Neco was the one who’d dismissed Jehoahaz, the talented son of Josiah, and replaced him with his brother Elyakim and, as stated, changed his name to Jehoiakim, which caused a certain amount of confusion: people spoke of Elyakim but meant Jehoiakim, though many still thought that the king was Jehoahaz, or even Josiah, although Josiah had met his death in Megiddo some time ago, thanks to the Pharaoh’s arrow, whose accuracy was nothing short of miraculous, and which was fired from a hand that was not his own. It wasn’t as though anyone really knew with any certainty who the king was at this particular moment. Nor did they care. Jehoiakim, Elyakim, Jehoahaz, Jehoshabaz, Jehosabitch? Do me a favor, I’ve had it; in a minute, you’ll expect me to know who the current minister of transportation is, or the minister of the postal system. Consequently, most subjects simply said the king, and in doing so covered all the possibilities from now till further notice.

  Jeremiah perused the report about turning the Holyland complex into the king’s new palace. The city, already more than adequately embellished with hideous architecture, was being turned into a monstrosity of unsightly construction, unheard of from the Euphrates to the Nile, and delegations of architects from the entire region, Persians and Hittites and Elamites and Egyptians, would arrive every year in order to nervously applaud this extreme urban unsightliness, and to write doctoral theses and professional tomes on the subject. Of particular noteworthiness was a book by one of the most recent Assyrian kings, who was also a certified architect, Sin-sar-iskun, Toward a Theory of Urban Unsightliness, a book that summarized all relevant research into his subject up to the present day and concluded with practical recommendations, which included—and here the Assyrian king exchanged his theoretician’s hat for that of a politician—changes to many different cities, not least Jerusalem. This city, which had been one of the most beautiful in the world, was being built up at a monstrous rate and with amazing and grotesque insensitivity. Land was being parceled out piecemeal to foreign investors, who would in turn destroy the ancient buildings that were already on their sites and build pseudo-ancient buildings in their place, in Jerusalem stone, with only one thought in mind—namely, to keep enlarging the already densely built-up area without any consideration for the view, the history, the people, the location—and all the real-estate billboards were in Egyptian, since no resident of Judah could afford to pay such high prices.

  Jeremiah was engrossed in the paper, and in it
s depiction of how Jehoiakim’s real-estate kickbacks found their way into his pocket by means of a branching network of couriers on scooters and envelopes and safes and bank accounts and tax shelters on various islands where it was doubtful anyone had ever set foot. Not that the king had ever agreed to pay his taxes; his refusal had assumed a religious character, as it is written, Should the Lord’s anointed pay taxes? Jeremiah finished his salad and sipped some of his lemonade and tore out the article on the Holyland project’s takeover, and he wrote in the margins of the paper a short sentence that came to mind, with the intention of developing it further later at home: Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness and his upper rooms by injustice, that makes his neighbor work for nothing, and gives him not his wages.

  In the adjoining restaurant, two waiters grabbed the clucking lady under her wings and cast her out, telling her to go to hell, but Jeremiah was absorbed in formulating his sentence and dotting in some of its vowels and didn’t notice what had happened. Someone sat down next to him, ordered a minced salad, and, glancing at the torn page and at the sentence written in blue ink, asked Jeremiah offhand if he’d written it, and if he had by chance written it, whether it might be referring to the King of Judah, or just to some figment of his imagination. Jeremiah replied that it wasn’t any of his business, and the man said that it actually was his business, and he pulled out his policeman’s identity card, took the paper with the sentence as evidence, and slipped it into a sheet protector. Within minutes, a van stopped in front of the restaurant, and Jeremiah, who didn’t have time to pay for his hummus and drink, was handcuffed and led to the van and driven to the police station in the Russian Compound. A small salad came out of the kitchen, and since there was no one to claim it, the waiter sat down and ate, for the first time that day, with a torn newspaper serving as his place mat. He held Jeremiah’s second pita in his hand instead of a knife. The police van’s siren wailed a bit as the van pulled away, but then—once the driver realized there was no reason to use it—ceased.