Muck Page 4

  On the piano in the room, which had been covered for nine years now by a summer blanket, a photograph of his sister leaned on an oblique stand. She was photographed playing on this very piano, in this very room. The piano hadn’t been covered back then, when she was still alive; it remained open at all times and didn’t have a photograph on top but, rather, pages of sheet music and a plaster bust of Bach that Jeremiah, when he was ten, had partly painted. Later, it fell from the piano and shattered; his mother had glued the pieces back together, and it was shunted from the piano to the kitchen, where it stood to this day as a paperweight on top of the vegan recipes she diligently cut out of the newspapers. Jeremiah knew exactly what his sister had been playing when the photo was taken, because he was the one who’d photographed her. The angel said, The piano is covered. The silence that followed was so long that it seemed he must have been done speaking, but then he added, Yet you, too, know how to tickle the ivories. And there was another prolonged silence, as though time had no meaning and the conversation might continue in this manner for hours and days and years and centuries.

  Beside the bed stood a small nightstand on which his father’s ring binder rested. For some forty-five years—ever since the Yom Kippur War, in which he had served as a medic and nearly drowned crossing the Suez Canal when he stumbled on the roller bridge—Hilkiah would cut out a selection of newspaper articles on government corruption in Israel. He’d amassed a stack of binders. The binder on the nightstand represented only the last three months. In the margins of his clippings, Hilkiah would jot down his own comments and interpretations, cross-referencing other scraps of news, attempting to reconstruct, as he said, the whole network of corruption. Once a year, he would select the best evidence from his binders and then slip these articles into a large envelope and tuck it into a pillowcase—his Pillow of Corruption, as he liked to say—which he then slept on for the entire year. At the end of each year, he’d replace the pillow; once, Jeremiah peeked inside one of the outgoing pillowcases and saw that the scraps of paper were covered with all sorts of disgusting brown stains from his father’s saliva and night sweats, which had seeped through the newsprint. His mother once burned several such pillowcases, which caused a huge to-do; she’d flung the bulky, foul-smelling pillowcase archives into the fire, a lifetime’s work, and his father had shoved her in his rage, so she claimed, and the police were called in. Jeremiah only heard about it years later, from his sister, during her last days. Now Jeremiah opened the ring binder and thumbed through the pasted scraps of newsprint. Next to the binder lay a yellow glue stick, his father’s plain ballpoint pen, and his large iron scissors, the seamstress scissors he’d inherited from Jeremiah’s grandmother. The sound of cloth as it was diligently cut to measure came back to Jeremiah, the scissors steadily advancing, and he thought about the Chaldeans’ iron chariots and how it was anybody’s guess where they might have deployed their troops by now and what and whom they would slice in two when they arrived, and he imagined the battlement walls butted by battering rams and how they would also be diligently cut in two.

  In the margins of the articles on corruption he read words in his father’s own elegant handwriting, outraged comments like A nice share for the finance minister! or The minister of defense gets two million for giving a lecture?! or else more laconic and less explicable remarks, such as The city is the pot and we are the meat … or Lard for lips to lick, or Power-newspapers-government-security, or Presidential malfeasance, or Deep-pocketed museum, or Safe-deposit box on fire. And there was a photo of the opening of an exhibition in which all the guests were eating veal sweetbreads—that’s what was written at the bottom of the photograph—even the curator, even the artist.

  Jeremiah sat at the foot of the bed. The angel drew up his legs, to clear a bit of space for him. What’s your name? the angel asked him. My name’s Jeremiah, he answered. And you? The angel answered, My name is Jeremiah, too. Do you have any instructions for me? the first Jeremiah asked. The angel said, Earlier, when I was nosing around the apartment, your mother opened the icebox and all the frozen pitas she’d stored dropped like hail on the floor. Jeremiah said, I heard a voice this morning; was it you speaking? And the angel answered, But I don’t have a voice. Things have been shown to me, Jeremiah said—so what now? Yes, one thing must be clear by now, the angel told him instead of answering—and he revealed his face in the dark, in the light of the new star—and that’s that you don’t have a chance, Babylon has already shod its horses and painted its tanks blue, and Babylon will arrive, it’ll show up here, and you’ll suffer, and though you don’t have any choice in the matter, it can’t be allowed to happen without a great lamentation; you’ll be the mouth of that scream.

  Now rise and go by way of the Potsherd Gate. You’ll meet someone there, and he’ll sell you a jug. You’ve got to start as soon as possible—they’re galloping from one desert oasis to another, and their horses are thirsty, and they’re fueling the tanks that will follow close behind the horses, to strike a second and more excruciating blow. Procure for yourself a large and colorful jug. And you will hold on to this empty jug, so that everyone can see you in the streets of the city. Carry it around for days and weeks, and never let go of its neck. Until everyone says, There’s a man in Jerusalem, and his name is Jeremiah, and he walks around with a large jug in hand and won’t relax his grip on the jug. This will be broadcast everywhere, it will become known, and it will astonish and exasperate. And then, when everyone knows this for a fact, you will break the jug in plain sight. And you will tell them: Thus said the Lord of Hosts, Even so will I break this people and this city, as one breaks a potter’s vessel, which cannot be made whole again. That’s all.

  Jeremiah asked, And will this help? I’ll be able to prevent the city’s fall, and— But the angel interrupted and said: I don’t know, but if the city falls they will remember you and the jug. They won’t be able to say it was all due to chance. Jeremiah said, And what if I buy a jug and don’t smash it, what if I fill it with water and say— But the angel cut in again and said: Now play me something on your sister’s piano. Do you know your mother preserved your sister’s dried placenta inside the piano? And it’s still there. Jeremiah got up and glanced at the piano and groped for the string that switched on the lamp, but there was no lamp, and the piano turned into a large pile of dry mud, whose height matched his own. And it had a head of its own, the mud. The angel stretched out on its back and stared silently at the ceiling, and Jeremiah lingered for a moment and then fled the room through the window and re-entered his parents’ home by the front door.

  4

  IN THE KITCHEN, his mother removed the lid from the pot and a column of steam shot up. I didn’t notice you left; I had my head in the pot. The swelling has gone down a bit, she said, and he felt his head gingerly. His father, who’d been a hematologist at Hadassah, saw his wife poking at their son’s head and momentarily ceased removing seeds from his pomegranate. Their daughter, Jeremiah’s older sister, had been stricken with the very disease Hilkiah specialized in. When her first symptoms appeared, after a period of exhaustion and headaches, Hilkiah had started laughing, because he knew, knew beyond a doubt, that he was dreaming. There was no way that what he dealt with daily as a doctor would appear and infect his daughter. After all, it wasn’t contagious. He thought—no, he knew—that she, who’d heard for years about every least detail of the disease, was amusing herself in ticking off for him the symptoms she’d heard from his own mouth during meals and while traveling or in conversation with colleagues. After all, she’d even accompanied him at times to hematology conferences. But then she’d shown him her back, and he saw the blotches and a frightened sound erupted from within him. He was no longer certain whether he was dreaming or not. He screamed in a voice that wasn’t his own, but didn’t wake up. And he realized that it was really happening. Even before she said a word, he knew exactly what she had, he saw death sitting inches away from her. She asked him what she’d come down with, what was wrong
with her, and he realized not only that she wasn’t pulling his leg, but that she herself hadn’t made the connection between what he’d told her all those years and the disease she now had—that she hadn’t yet raised the possibility in her mind that she’d become ill with what he specialized in. He explained to her a number of times, and to Jeremiah, that it’s a liquid cancer, a blood cancer, of the white corpuscles. That the blood goes wild. The white corpuscles. But there’s a new treatment, he’d told her immediately, back then, years ago: You infect the patient with an engineered AIDS virus. The virus can’t cause AIDS, but it attacks the white blood cells going wild and butchering the blood. There’s no guarantee of success. But there were children who’d been treated in a hospital in Egypt and completely recovered. When she asked what it was that she had, he told her; it took her some time to register what was going on, to register that the explanation, which bored her for the most part, and bored her brother—truth be told—had now turned into her life and body. Tomorrow we’ll start with tests and treatment, her father said. And he left her after several hours, just to catch up on some sleep: he needs to sleep, twenty hours he hasn’t closed his eyes. He’ll sleep here, one floor up, in the doctors’ on-call room, and show up the following day at dawn and open the ward and start to do whatever needs to be done, with the assistance of the medical team; he’ll send for the very best. But when he came down to the ward early in the morning, after four hours of sleep, there was no one to treat, for she’d cut her veins two hours after he left her, and when the nurses discovered her she was dead; they hadn’t found him at home, and down in the village his wife slept soundly and hadn’t heard the phone ring, and no one knew that he was sleeping one floor up, in the on-call room. He stood before the bed and again thought, No, no, this can’t be, it’s without doubt a dream. And then he was obliged to wake up.

  In the days that followed, he couldn’t put to rest the unsettling thought that she’d killed herself not in spite of all the information he’d innocently passed on to her in dribs and drabs over the years, but precisely on account of the information he’d fed her. He knew everything there was to know about the disease; after all, he’d written a book on the subject that was about to appear in print—though this, too, he’d been saying for several years. He had intended to start with a battery of tests and treatment early in the morning, but the story had been interrupted even before it began. He didn’t even have time to accustom himself to this new version—the story of a healthy girl, a gifted pianist, who turns all at once into a girl in critical condition—before he had to get used to another narrative entirely, the story of her sudden death. She was nineteen years old. The music had been cut off. That same day, he left the hospital and abandoned the ward in a state of chaos, with patients in the middle of treatment and remission; he simply never returned after the period of mourning, never got back on his feet. As soon as he was told what had happened, he was overwhelmed by a dark, deep self-disgust, though it was accompanied by laughter, too, as if all along he hadn’t been able to help hearing a sort of belly laugh about their fate: A morbid joke is making the rounds, and we’re the laughingstocks. A morbid joke? Esther wondered. Morbid joke, morbid joke, he repeated.

  Efforts were made to speak to him, to explain that of course he wasn’t to blame and so on and so forth, but he wouldn’t listen. The circle was closed and couldn’t be breached. He recalled how he’d instructed her about the disease, how he’d shown her enlarged pictures of diseased blood cells, how he’d explained to her about bone marrow and the awful suffering incurred when the circulatory system breaks down, and he believed—in truth, Esther thought, justifiably—that his detailed elucidations were what caused his daughter’s illness and brought about her death. He had described to her what she should expect without realizing that one day it would be her own fate. Perhaps he’d intended the opposite; perhaps he’d gone into such detail precisely in order to prevent the devil, so to speak, from making her sick with this very illness, in order to find a way to cope from the very beginning with a situation that was so improbable, in which a doctor’s daughter, the head of the department of hematology and a specialist in blood cancer, would fall victim to the selfsame illness in which he specialized? But that’s exactly what happened. Over the years, Esther began believing not only that her daughter committed suicide on account of her fear of the illness she knew all too well, but also that she became sick in the first place because of what her husband had taught her, that the words repeated over and again, and the photographs and the graphs and the accounts of patients, children and adults, that he brought home, were what caused her to fall ill, that he in a sense had infected her with all of this evidence. He washed his face and hands that same morning and descended one floor to start the process of treatment; he hadn’t managed to dry his face since he couldn’t find a hand towel in the staff room, and he almost used his sleeve, and then he saw the head nurse, who was completely red in the face. He’d been certain of his ability to cure his daughter, since he knew she would be receiving the very best help, knew that he himself was the best possible help. But his daughter didn’t let him treat her, she hadn’t given him a chance, and two hours and a quarter after he’d left her that same night and went up one floor to get some sleep, she’d taken a razor blade that she’d noticed lying on an adjoining bed and had sliced the veins on her wrists, and her sick, thin blood had gushed out, and by the time she was found she was already lost. While I was asleep, her father reflected, she’d already reached her death, and he suddenly realized that his room was exactly above her room, and her ceiling was the floor on which his bed stood.

  They lied to Jeremiah, who was nearly thirteen years old, and told him his sister had died from the illness; it wasn’t a complete lie, but neither was it the complete truth, and until he heard the true version by chance from someone or other, he believed his sister had succumbed to blood cancer—an illness that he, too, was thoroughly familiar with, and for the same reasons—within twenty-four hours of the moment it had been detected in her body. After he heard the truth, he quietly approached his mother, without feeling any anger, and sat next to her, and didn’t say a word, and she didn’t speak, either; they briefly exchanged glances, and the matter was seemingly settled. He turned thirteen. They didn’t celebrate his Bar Mitzvah. They buried his sister in an empty, untended field abutting their home, which belonged to Jeremiah’s uncle, his father’s brother, and they didn’t raise a tombstone, they only planted an olive sapling over the grave, not at its feet but directly on top of the mound of earth. And after many years, Esther understood the obvious—namely, that the roots of the olive tree would pierce through and cleave the corpse. It hadn’t occurred to her while she was planting it. At the time, she thought only of the trunk and the branches and the fruit. And the memory.

  Esther looked up and switched off her talk show. The sharp kitchen knife was on the table, its blade stained with the juice of another mango. She cut tiny slices for herself, close to the mango’s head, but left her fruit uneaten, then handed over to Jeremiah a saucer on which she crisscrossed some larger slices with the point of the knife. He ate, making a mess like his father. He still keeps dreaming that he’s drowning, she told Jeremiah under her breath. I don’t know what to do. Because of his constant drowning, I, too, have started dreaming of drowning. His dreams are inundating my own dreams. He keeps a scalpel in his bedside drawer. It’s worse than a loaded gun. The scalpel won’t rust. He also keeps her blood samples in the fridge, she whispered. Everything’s there, in a Styrofoam container, sealed with insulating tape, behind the legumes, deep on the right side. I’ve ordered a new fridge; I told him the fridge broke, even though it’s in perfectly good order. I thought that once we got a new fridge it’d be possible to finally bury the blood. He arrived moments before the movers, removed the blood, put it in a cooler, waited for them to install the new fridge, then stuck the blood inside. He’s been holding on to it for nearly ten years. Jeremiah glanced at his mother and sai
d: I beheld the earth, Mom, and it was waste and void, and the skies, they had no light. I looked at the mountains, and they were quaking, Mom, and all the hills moved to and fro. His mother said, Exactly, moved to and fro. And she thought, His voice has changed. Jeremiah said: Why don’t you leave the house for a bit, go into town? I noticed there’s a dance performance at the Jerusalem Theatre tonight. I’ll come with you, if you’d like, he wanted to add. It’s been close to ten years, Mom, he said. Not seven days, or a month, or a year. His mother said, Yes, I know exactly how many, and she took a Diet Coke out of the fridge and poured herself a drink and gulped it down with revulsion. He remembered in alarm that he was supposed to go purchase a jug. It amazed him that he had nearly forgotten this only minutes after the revelation had been granted him, as if there were, in these revelations, or in the miracles that had taken place throughout the day, something at once highly charged and yet altogether feeble and worthless, so that, if you didn’t want to think about them, it was a simple enough thing to turn the gaze of your memory elsewhere and it all faded away at once.

  Hilkiah entered the kitchen, holding the empty plate in his hand, and took a box of dates out of the freezer. He liked them ice-cold on his teeth. The mango rind he’d thrown by mistake into the toilet, where it would float until his wife noticed and fished it out in disgust with rubber gloves. Lately, he’d been making such mistakes from time to time. His father looked over at the fridge, forgetting for a moment what it was he’d been looking for, and then remembered, yes, the dates, to rinse. And once more there rose in Jeremiah’s ears the words he’d managed to forget. They came to him now as if whispered anew: Even so will I will break this people and this city, as one breaks a potter’s vessel, which cannot be made whole again. The water in the bathroom sink was still running. The three of them heard it but didn’t make any move to go shut it off. They hovered over the dates.