Muck Read online

  3

  HIS MOTHER PLUNGED A WOODEN SPOON into a pot when he entered and sat down. She hadn’t expected him. His head was swollen from the blows he’d received from Broch and the old prophet. He went up to the freezer, removed an ice cube, and pressed it against his head. His mother didn’t pay attention, didn’t ask questions. She said, I read that there’s now an organized tour to Nineveh, with attractions; you travel in a red double-decker to the inner city, get to visit the important sites, circle the walls, Nergal Gate, Addad Gate, Shebanbi Gate … He remembered his mother standing in the butcher shop when he was just a child, facing a sheep’s head that stared back at her, its eyes gleaming on the verge of tears, and she told the butcher, That’s enough, I can’t be part of any of this anymore; my daughter died; please understand, I’m sorry. And she paid for the meat she’d intended to buy but left empty-handed—the boy Jeremiah on her heels, clutching their empty wicker basket. The driver plays Assyrian songs, and you also get little flags, she added, and then, all of a sudden, the driver jerks the steering wheel—she gestured sharply with her spoon before sticking it back into the pot—and lands the bus in the Khosr River. The passengers all squeal in terror, but the bus turns into a boat and sails right on. Jeremiah opened a cupboard. And shut it. He always opened his mother’s cupboards, checking around, looking for something. I thought we could go, the three of us together; you could drive us down, but we’d pay for everything. It’s on us. We won’t tell Dad in advance, it’ll be a surprise. We’ll shove him into the river. You know how scared he is of water. We’ll scare his phobia away once and for all. It’ll be a shock for him, but he’ll feel safe with us. Hilkiah, it’s only water, I tell him, it’s been forty-five years now. So what does he tell me?—she stirred with her spoon—I nearly drowned back then, he says. My body is still on that boat. He’ll be turning sixty-three in the fall. This is our chance. Jeremiah looked at her in astonishment. Not only because of the prospect of this scary stunt with the tour bus, but chiefly because of her suggestion that all three of them travel together. He said, Mom, the Babylonians are gearing up to come here soon; who knows, by Dad’s birthday they might have arrived; there will be an awful siege. She lowered the flame and said, as if to herself, The soup looks great, and opened a cupboard and took out pink mineral salt from the Himalayas. Nonsense, she said, what would the Babylonians want with this hole? You think the King of Babylon has nothing better to do than come to Jerusalem? He already has plenty of dough from the rest of the world, you think he needs our money, too? He’s got enough trouble with all those barbarians hanging out up there. They aren’t coming, she declared, sprinkling salt: We’re going to Nineveh, I’ve already ordered our tickets. There will be a siege, Jeremiah repeated. And you won’t be able to go anywhere. All at once he saw it again, as though in miniature: legions trudging slowly across the kitchen table, where the Formica turned into a three-dimensional map, with mountains, boundless plains, dry riverbeds, crumbs advancing like ants toward the edge of the world between boulders of coarse salt. His mother said, I don’t understand you. On the marble counter, next to her, he caught sight of an old guidebook to Assyria. Well, you won’t catch me moving to Babylon, his mother said brusquely, after a long pause. One exile in a lifetime is enough for me. They can do whatever they want.

  His father entered the kitchen silently. Jeremiah slipped a folded newspaper on top of the guidebook. His father said: They announced it on the news. It’s happening. Egypt’s been smote hip and thigh on Babylonian soil. First the Assyrians, now the Chaldeans. Why say Chaldeans? If they’re from Babylon, call them Babylonians. Jeremiah mumbled, They’re an Aramean tribe who gained control over Babylon. They’re the new Babylonians … They’re all the same, his father said. Wave after wave. They’re coming. They all want to ride out into the distance in chariots and on horses. Demolish and destroy. I’m sick and tired of all these invasions. Your great-grandfather saw Assyrian troops take these highlands by storm. They’re fighting over there on the Euphrates, Egypt and Babylon; sometime or other, they’ll fight here, too, face-to-face, there’ll be a bloodbath in our own backyard. You tell me, eh, why should the Egyptians want to wade into the Euphrates? It’s insane! In our own backyard they’ll slaughter the— But Esther, his mother, suddenly burst into a song by Naomi Shemer: In our yard / In the shade of the olive tree / —she sang gleefully in a thin soprano, in order to put a stop to this gloomy lecture—Lots of guests / Regularly drop in … Each in his own tongue / And his own way / to say: Hel-lo. When she lifted the pot lid, steam covered her face and fogged up her glasses. Jeremiah remembered the pot he’d seen in the sky a couple of hours earlier and realized, to his amazement, that this was the very same pot, his mother’s pot, except that in the sky it was as large as the moon, and then as large as the setting sun, but maybe not, maybe as small as a coffeepot, like Broch’s finjan, but all of a sudden he couldn’t recall the exact size of the pot he’d seen earlier, and understood that he needed to jot down what he’d seen or he’d forget everything. His father said, Did you bang your head? And Jeremiah said, I went through a low door.

  His mother stopped singing, because she remembered she had some complaints about the plumbing. She struck her forehead with her spoon. The cold water, she said. I mean the hot water! That is, sometimes it’s too hot, and then, at other times, the boiler’s running for hours and yet the water’s as cold as ice. When’s the plumber coming? The bathroom sink is clogged again, too. Jeremiah’s father had promised he’d get to it himself, but he was scared of tampering with pipes. For your father, she said, a few cheap pipes are more complicated than the digestive or circulatory system. He might know how to fix a heart valve, but a valve in a washing machine terrifies him. A tube in a dishwasher, a tube in a dryer? Forget it. But artery buds—now, there he feels comfortable. I tell him, Hilkiah, it’s all the same thing! Jeremiah got the message and said, Okay, I’ll take a look.

  He stooped under the bathroom sink and gripped the Swedish wrench that had been left there since his last visit, three weeks ago. He dragged a bucket under the siphon and struggled to loosen the threads. His mother brought him an orange melon on a tray. When she had set the melon next to him on the floor, she poked it with her fingertip as if to say, There’s a melon. The melon, which was overripe, ripe to burst, simply popped open at the touch of her finger. The stench from the sink grew worse with each turn of the wrench, and Jeremiah jerked his face to one side and almost puked into the green bucket. His mother paid no attention and didn’t remove the fruit. Their pipes always got clogged, and they were always skimping on a plumber, since they knew their son would come and visit and take care of it for them. Come to think of it, he reflected, and was ashamed to admit as much, from the minute he entered the house, that was all they were thinking about: The free plumber has arrived. When his grandfather was alive, he took care of all the household repairs. A metalworker, he was also an amateur plumber who knew how to detect obstructions and leaks by listening to the sounds coming from the walls. Once, when Jeremiah was a boy, they lifted him so that his ear could reach way up, and he shouted, It’s a mouth, I hear an open mouth in there, and they dropped him in fright. And he also kept a mongoose as a pet, Jeremiah recalled; his grandfather trapped snakes with the help of the mongoose, until his granddaughter was born and he was forced to set the mongoose free in the hills of the land of Benjamin. But it returned with a viper between its teeth.

  His mother knocked at the door. Anything new with my pipes? she asked, or so he fancied. He didn’t answer, but poured a blue liquid into the drain and glanced at his watch. He looked for the burst melon and realized that he hadn’t been served any melon; it must have been some sort of fleeting dream that took hold and let go in a single second. In a quarter of an hour, he’d have to run the hot tap for a good while. On the other side of the bathroom door, he could hear his father shouting to his mother: While we wait for him to get the job done in there, slice me some bread and a mango—I’m all dried up. And his mothe
r was surprised: Again? Jeremiah wasn’t sure he’d heard right. Bread with mango? Why’s he eating that? Something in his father’s request, something in his tone—a mixture of cheerfulness and dread—depressed him as he crouched under the sink. How will they manage in exile? After all, they’re so helpless when it comes to anything practical. They don’t even know how to unstick the float in their toilet tank. Don’t even know how to change a lightbulb. Behold, I will give this city into the hand of the King of Babylon, and he shall take it. And Zedekiah, King of Judah, shall not escape out of the hands of the Chaldeans, but shall be delivered into the hand of the King of Babylon, and shall speak with him mouth to mouth, and his eyes shall behold his eyes. Jeremiah had no idea who Zedekiah might be, since Jehoiakim was the current King of Judah, and he reckoned that Zedekiah was the name of a future king, but he didn’t know anyone called Zedekiah apart from the Zedekiah of Zedekiah Delicacies in the Mahane Yehuda Market, where he’d buy green and black olives, and where his father would taste the cheeses. His wife wouldn’t allow animal products into the house, and Hilkiah was constantly tormented with his cravings for hard, salty cheeses, so he’d lay hold of what he could on the counter, and the vendors, familiar with the situation, showed him all due deference—he’d been a senior physician at Hadassah, so it was worth their while to stay on the best of terms with him. They’d offer him their wares and delight in the keen pleasure he’d evince in savoring, with his eyes closed, the kashkaval and the gouda. And Jeremiah, in a flash, beheld his father being led in fetters from the cheese counter in the Mahane Yehuda Market to endless colossal palaces with hanging gardens and inscribed towers, and a lofty blue wall topped by huge, roaring lions, and he knew it was the city of Babylon, and he saw his father kneeling, in his white cloak, spattered with the blood of his patients, at the feet of a king seated on a great white throne.

  Jeremiah glanced again at his watch and turned the hot-water faucet. Adjacent to the door, on the other side, his father sat on a stool and ate a chunk of dark bread with thin slices of juicy mango. Fibers stuck between his teeth. An hour later, he’d have to floss them out. On the plate beside him on the floor rested the mango’s pit, and it was plain to see that it had been thoroughly chewed. His teeth and his mouth and fingers were stained orange. Jeremiah’s father felt the first signs of decay in one tooth; the sugar bore through, close to the nerve, causing him pain.

  Jeremiah left the Swedish wrench in its place and plodded out of the bathroom. Though the hot water streamed into the sink, he took no notice. His father shot him a quick look, at once nonplussed and annoyed. Once Jeremiah leaves, I’ll get up to turn the faucet off, he mused, but he knew he would forget to do so in the twinkling of an eye, and the water would keep running for hours, and they’d wind up with one hell of a bill. Jeremiah pointed behind him: Pour in a quarter bottle of blue liquid once a week. How about we try sulfuric acid? his father asked. Jeremiah was planning to leave and return to his apartment in Nahlaot with another stack of books. He’d been moving his belongings in stages. But, all at once, he felt exhausted. He glanced again at the mango sandwich that lay, docile and nibbled, on the tray, flung out a word to his mother in the kitchen, who was absorbed in listening to a raucous talk show on the radio, and went to his vacated room. He needed desperately to lie down.

  The angel was lying on his childhood bed, his face turned toward the wall. Jeremiah sat beside him like a father watching over a sick child’s sleep. The angel said, without opening his eyes, You can sit on the edge of the bed. And it began to dawn on Jeremiah that he had indeed been appointed, that the matter was serious and not just a passing daydream; that there were indeed heavenly messengers in the world doing their work and entering without knocking; that there were vast, distant forces banding together around him. Neither the pot, nor the voice, nor the melon, nor the almond branch sufficed in itself—only the angel on his bed truly hammered the point home. Jeremiah wondered whether it was an angel with a long history—for example, the angel who was present at the binding of Isaac, or the angel who fought with Jacob and refused to reveal his name. The angel was stretched out at a slight angle, on his side. There was nothing out of the ordinary about him at a glance, but Jeremiah knew at once that this wasn’t just anybody. The light told him so. His room was plunged into darkness, as if to keep him from seeing anything but the angel, with only the new star outside shedding light from its habitual place. Someone holding a torch passed by the window, and for an instant Jeremiah caught sight of the angel’s countenance, and it was his own childhood face, the boy’s face he’d lost years ago, with bright, shoulder-length hair. He didn’t quite get it—why hadn’t he been terrified by the figure lying on his bed and burying its face in his pillow? To be sure, a Jeremiah deep within him was indeed filled with terror, but this voice of panic seemed very distant: Jeremiah’s heart wasn’t even racing, though all contemporary accounts of such visitations tended to make a big deal out of how thrilling they were. He was pretty surprised by his composure, considering all he’d seen during the course of the day; it was as though he’d been injected with some sort of anesthetic, as though he’d elected for an epidural during a long and difficult birth; even his surprise was muted. And a soft wind swept through the room. And the light in the room was like the light of the setting sun over a wheat field. The wind, too, blew as in an open field, as if the walls were nothing but clouds or even open air, presenting no obstruction to the wind rising and blowing and gliding toward you and beyond.