by Joshua Sobol
How long has he got to live?
Two minutes and sixteen seconds, he hears the navigator’s voice in his earphones. The timing is perfect. Down there they are punctual to the minute and up here to the fraction of a second. Punctuality is about to meet punctuality. The black Mercedes stops in front of the stage, and the owner of the little black moustache jumps out and bounds onto the stage. The crowd roars Zieg Heil. The man raises his hand and the roar of the crowd is immediately silenced. Now he roars into the microphone suspended in the center of a metal ring like a spider waiting for its prey. The man’s screams are magnified a thousandfold, they echo from batteries of hundreds of powerful loudspeakers surrounding the square.
We’re on target, Hanina hears the navigator’s voice over the radio. He looks right and left, and against the background of the clear sky he sees the other pilots sitting tensely in their cockpits, their hands on the joysticks into which the firing buttons are set, waiting for a signal from him. He raises his thumb and then turns it down. He sees the other pilots nod in confirmation, and he winks at them before yanking the joystick, veering left, and commencing a dizzying dive towards the stage. The owner of the black moustache has sixty seconds left in which to enflame the souls of his audience with the venomous hatred about to drown nations and countries in blood and fire and columns of smoke, but suddenly words fail him, the crowds standing at the foot of the stage raise their eyes to the sky—a vast field of faces with gaping mouths and staring eyes, of circles with three holes punched in them, one hole for the mouth and two for the eyes, and all those millions of holes turn to the sky, and from the sky a quartet of thundering iron monsters swoops down on them, and the owner of the moustache sees what all that multitude sees: blue stars painted on white circles under the steel wings and on the bodies of the powerful planes, and he turns to the fat man with the swollen face standing at his right, and asks him in confusion: What is that, Hermann?
And Hermann replies, pale with horror: Those are shields of David.
Why shields of David? the terrified man with the moustache asks the no less terrified fat man.
It looks like a Jewish air force!
A Jewish air force? The owner of the moustache demands in horror: Did you say a Jewish air force?
But before the fat man has a chance to reply, Hanina presses the red button on his joystick, and all the people standing on the stage rise into the air in a great ball of fire, break up into arms, legs, heads, guts, livers, gallbladders, kidneys, testicles and backsides, which fall from the sky like a bountiful rain, and in the meantime Giora squeezes the white button on his joystick, and as he pulls on the joystick and raises the nose of his plane and climbs high into the air he catches a glimpse of the bright flash that turns the square beneath him into a field of statues strewn with columns of basalt rock or black clay. And when all thirty-two Phantom jets of the illustrious Squadron 505 reassemble from the corners of the Kingdom of Evil into a single cluster, which rises to the borders of the atmosphere above the European sky, on their way home to the base in the belly of the Mountain of Justice, the pilots see through the canopies of their cockpits the smoke rising from the burning airfields, and the mangled remains of the armored divisions that were about to flood the continent, and then the boy Hanina radios Air Force HQ, to announce that the mission has been accomplished, but to his astonishment there is no answer, and he calls again: Nest, this is Eagle, Nest, this is Eagle, do you read me, over! And nobody answers. Does anyone hear Eagle, he calls, does anyone hear Eagle? But the communications network is silent. And suddenly the realization penetrates his mind. Since he destroyed the Third Reich, the Second World War never broke out, there was no Holocaust, and accordingly there is no State of Israel either, no IDF, no air force, no illustrious Squadron 505. And on the other hand, since there was no Holocaust, there are no Holocaust survivors either. His father never landed up in Sobibor and his mother never found refuge with the partisans in the forests. They never sailed on an illegal immigrant ship to Palestine, they weren’t sent to a detention camp in Cyprus, they never met, and thus there is no Hanina. And if there’s no Hanina, there’s no Phantom attack on the Third Reich either, and the Holocaust does happen, and Hanina does exist.……
Who’s Hanina? asked Melissa, running next to him and breathing heavily, even though she’s as light as a silk scarf.
Hanina, he tells her, was a dreamy child, who destroyed all the evil people in the world. And before he wiped out the Third Reich with Phantom jets, he defeated the Roman army besieging Jerusalem with a medium machine gun, and now he’s hovering in the air in his Phantom, with nowhere to land.…
He does have somewhere, says Melissa, he has a place with me.
She changes to a fast walk, and he walks next to her, and he’s not Hanina, or Shakespeare, or Tyrell the novice scriptwriter: he’s just a man without a name or an identity, stamping his feet in the cold New York night and breathing clouds of vapors from his mouth and nostrils.
I feel so good, she says, waving her thin arms round in circles as she walks, I haven’t felt so good since I was a little girl!
And suddenly she stops and asks:
Do you know where we are?
No, he admits, I haven’t got a clue.
We’re in front of the house, she says.
What house? he asks.
This is where my private Adolph Hitler, Tony Fritshke lives, she says to his astonishment, with a bitter smile. There’s a light on in his window. I can see him lying there on his stomach, on his thick carpet, his feet waving in the air over his ass, his presents scattered around him on the carpet, and he’s tearing off the red and gold wrappings with one of his flick-knives and pulling out the presents as greedily as a spoilt child, the presents he got for Christmas from all his rich clients.…
Should we go up and pay him a visit? he asks.
What for? she asks.
To eliminate him, he proposes.
We don’t have a weapon, she says.
I have my feet, he says.
He’s a dangerous man, she says, with lots of guns and pistols and knives.
Then it will be an interesting fight, he says. Shall we go up?
Some other time, she says, mesmerized by the movement of his fingers writhing of their own accord like the snakes on the head of the Gorgon Medusa.
Don’t you want to kill him? he asks.
Some other time, she repeats. Let’s not spoil this pure night.
Whatever you want, he says.
I want to forget him, she says. To close my eyes and open them and discover that Tony was only a bad dream.
That will happen soon, he says, very soon.
On the day it happens I’ll be a free person, she vows in a whisper opposite the clear cold sky, I’ll never let anyone control me and use me again. For the first time I’ll do as I wish with my life.
I’ll help you get to that day, he says.
You’ve already helped me, she says. Until now I never had the courage to even dream about it, and now I’m standing here and saying it out loud: I want to be a free person.
And what do you want to do now? he asks.
To run with you, she says. To run with you in all the streets of this city. To run with you in Central Park. And on Washington Bridge. When I run with you I’m not afraid of anyone.
Then let’s run, he says.
We’ll run, she says, but first give me a hug.
He wraps his thick arms around her thin body—
26
Why are you sighing? asks Mona.
That’s so good, he says.
What’s so good? She demands suspiciously.
The air. He yawns a jaw-breaking yawn and breathes in a lungful of air, down to the pit of his stomach.
He lies on the deck of the boat rocking on the water, lacing his fingers behind his neck and contemplating the stardust covering the night sky. Snowflakes of stars. A bright snow of stars floats in the black of Melissa’s window as she lies with him in a
hot bath. All relaxed after the long run in the freezing night air. Her long flexible body nestles on his body like a lizard basking on a source of warmth.
How come you weren’t afraid to go into that place? she wonders.
What place? he asks.
The belly of the mountain, she says, the abandoned copper mine.
How do you know it was a copper mine?
By the color of the water, she says, and pushes the foam away with her hands and looks at the blue water fragrant with scented bath oils.
What water? He doesn’t understand.
The water in the underground lake. The color of Bordeaux soup. It has to be a copper mine.
You’re an expert on chemistry too?
No, but I’ve read a few things about copper.
Why copper? he asks in surprise.
I was curious to know why it’s regarded as Aphrodite’s metal.
I didn’t know copper was Aphrodite’s metal, he confesses.
It’s obvious, she says, copper is a soft, malleable metal. It’s a good conductor of energy, of heat and of electricity.
What’s that got to do with Aphrodite? he demands an explanation, and she goes on playing with his fingers, and speaks so softly, in such an inner voice, that he doesn’t know if he’s hearing her voice or her thoughts.
Don’t tell me you didn’t know that Venus was connected to that mine, she says. It was one of the threads that drew you in.
How exactly? He doesn’t understand, and she plays with the roots of his fingers and explains:
There’s a story that Venus hid a small and precious treasure somewhere, in some secret alcove in an abandoned copper mine. And whoever succeeds in laying his hands on the treasure, and also in getting out of the labyrinth of underground tunnels alive, will win the love of everybody he meets.
It’s enough for me if the ones I love return my love, he says.
You already have their love, she says.
So why should I enter that abandoned mine? he asks.
Because Venus caught a certain solitary adventurer red-handed trying to steal the treasure—she goes on brushing her fingertips lightly over the area destined for the slashing of veins, next to his wrist, and her touch sends currents through him that cloud the no-man’s-land between his thoughts and her thoughts, which he isn’t sure if he’s reading or hearing:
This poor guy didn’t know that the minute he crossed the threshold of the tunnel leading to the belly of the mountain, he activated a very delicate, sophisticated system programmed to lock all the entrances after a period of time set in advance. This trap was set by Hephaestus, who as you know was Venus’s cuckolded husband. He was a metalworker, and he created the trap in order to catch his wife’s lovers. In any case, Venus caught our unfortunate thief and imprisoned him somewhere deep down in one of the dark mine pits. The kidnapped prisoner lived on a daily ration of Siren milk which was hardly enough to keep his body and soul together.
I still don’t understand what really prompted me to enter that dangerous place.
And he asks himself if this Sybil will be able to conjure up a vision capable of shedding light on the most obscure affair of his life, an affair in which he went to the rescue of the lover of the only woman he ever loved. The one who is now with a light sure hand steering the sailing boat over the dark sea which is beginning to show signs of turbulence.
One day you get a message, says Melissa, who seems more and more like a strange reincarnation of that prophetess of dubious identity whose prophecies the cunning Josephus Flavius took so seriously.
Who do I get the message from? he asks.
Someone leaves it in your mailbox.
And this message tells me—he begins, and she finishes:
That someone is imprisoned in the depths of an abandoned copper mine, and he’s waiting to be rescued.
He looks at her with growing interest. Is this long-limbed spider a wily CIA agent? Have they put her on his case? Is she trying to weave a web around him in order to trap him and program him to execute the character she calls ‘Tony Fritshke’? Or perhaps she is trying to extract information from him about the methods of the organization to which he belonged in those distant years of the previous century, in the days when his band of ‘Cunning Cooks’ were busy systematically liquidating the gang of ‘Butchers from the City of Hangmen’—which is what they called the murderers they eliminated one by one, to the last but one of them. Impossible, he says to himself. No one could have known that he would walk down precisely that avenue, and go into precisely that Irish pub … unless someone had programmed him to make those moves as well … Interesting, Shakespeare whispers to him. Now you have to find out the truth about this Segestria Perfida. Don’t fall into her net. Don’t be seduced into going to bed with her. Keep a clear head. It looks as if you’re going to need it.
But the country boy with the delicate soul rebels against the wild romanticist from Stratford, who is threatening to drive him insane. This girl isn’t an agent of any espionage agency. She’s simply a poor innocent girl who was the victim of an alcoholic mother, and fell into the claws of vicious pimps, who exploited her to death, but how in the hell did she get onto the story of the pursuit in the copper mine? Did you provide her with the information? Impossible. But she knows the story. This kid knows everything there is to know about you. Everything? Let’s see what she knows.
Who is the man imprisoned in the depths of the mine and waiting to be rescued, he asks.
It doesn’t say specifically, says the Sybil.
It sounds like a poor joke, or a hoax.
But something about the message continues to trouble you and haunt you.
Why? he demands. Why should it trouble me?
Because from the minute this information gets into your system, it begins to grow and echo inside you.
Why? he repeats insistently.
Something in the phrasing makes it special, personal. Only you can get this message and decipher it, it’s so personal—she astonishes him with the accuracy of her words.
And at the same time it’s ostensibly completely impersonal—he tries to lay a mine for her.
There’s something very strange and obscure about it, she bypasses the mine.
Who can he be, this person waiting for me at the bottom of the pit? He scrutinizes her with an eagle eye.
You have to examine the message again, she says.
Yes, I decide to examine the message again, he agrees, careful not to add a crumb of information to what she provides.
But when you examine it, suddenly it seems to you that certain words which appeared in the message on the first examination, have changed into different words.
That’s impossible! He makes an effort not to shout.
Perhaps your memory is playing tricks on you?
Perhaps.
And perhaps the message really has changed, in some mysterious way.
How can I tell?
You repeat the present version to yourself, and then you look at it again.
I don’t believe it! A few of the words have changed again.
How do you explain it?
Maybe it’s a kind of message that changes from reading to reading, he suggests.
Perhaps you have an ambivalent attitude towards this message, she says, and this makes you read it differently each time. In other words: perhaps it’s you who changes from one reading to the next.
Perhaps the message changes without any relation to whether I change or don’t change?
Perhaps it has a kind of built-in inner clock, she suggests carefully, that makes it change whether anybody’s reading it or not?
Perhaps it’s simply growing old? he suggests.
If it’s growing old, is it getting clearer or more blurred? she asks.
Maybe one day it will die and stop troubling me, he says hopefully.
The message, or the man imprisoned in the pit? She takes him by surprise.
You know, when I try to characterize the c
hanges in the message, I realize that from reading to reading it really is becoming more blurred.
But the cry for help that came from it in the first reading is still echoing inside you, without any relation to the blurring of the message, she says.
Letters are missing from the words, whole words are missing …
Suddenly you understand that if you don’t act, if you don’t set out immediately to journey to the belly of the mountain, soon nothing will remain of the original message, only some dim unpleasant memory, that will go on haunting you and never let go of you until the day you die. You understand that the longer you hesitate, the longer you go on trying to understand the message, the more obscure it will become, and something tells you that if you hesitate a little longer, or if you try to read the message one more time—the whole thing will turn into nonsense.
So why should I go on breaking my head over this fucking message?
Because one thing is becoming clearer and clearer: you have received a cry for help.
If it really is a cry for help, then why not an open, direct appeal? Why is the message so strange and indirect?
The man who sent the signal apparently knew that on its way to you the message would have to pass through very unfriendly regions. He apparently assumed that the message would have to get past all kinds of extremely hostile censors.
And perhaps the whole thing’s a setup? Perhaps the message was sent by some hostile force, trying to con me into a trap and lead me to perdition? He confronts her with the sixty million dollar question.
One thing is clear, she states, you will never be able to forgive yourself if you listen to this cowardly voice, inciting you to forget the whole thing and go on living as if the cry never reached you. At the same time as your brain is telling you to keep a cool head and try to discover first of all who sent the call, you sense in the depths of your heart that someone is trapped there in the bowels of the mountain, someone who needs you very much and whose life now depends only on your courage.