A new cop arrived and removed the handcuffs and led Jeremiah to the interrogation room at the end of the corridor, one floor down. He sat him on a plastic chair. Opposite him was an enormous vibrating armchair that gave massages; it stood empty, waiting for the interrogator. And Jeremiah stared at it with longing. If only he could lean back there for a while and get a massage. His back had started hurting again as the pill he’d taken that morning gradually wore off, and he imagined himself reclining there, and confessing to everything, to everything they wanted to know, in exchange for the luxury of pressing his back, the painful parts, against that vibrating armchair, which would massage all over, releasing the pressure on the nerve there in his right hip. Then the interrogator entered the room quietly and dropped into the armchair with a sigh. As he raised its footrest and pressed the button that started up the massage, Jeremiah saw that it was Broch.
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MR. BROCH! Jeremiah said in relief, and he stood up and stretched his fists out in front of him, even though they were no longer shackled, as though asking to be set free. But Broch ignored him, rose from the armchair, walked up to the soft-drink machine that stood in the corner of the interrogation room beside a snack machine, and slipped in a coin; a freezing-cold can tumbled down noisily. Jeremiah then saw Broch fishing his money back out of the coin return, and realized that the soda had been, in effect, free. Broch opened the can and threw his head back, to empty his soda in lengthy gulps. He was obviously thirsty. And Jeremiah said, If I have found favor in your eyes, would you mind giving me some water? Broch paid no attention. Jeremiah tried again: Mr. Broch, I’m Jeremiah; yesterday, at twelve o’clock sharp, I was in your home, I’m so glad you’re here … But Broch didn’t respond, just stared at Jeremiah as though he’d never laid eyes on him before and hadn’t even heard what he was saying. He crushed his can with one hand, returned to the armchair, switched on the massage, and without warning flung the crushed can at Jeremiah’s head. The can struck Jeremiah’s forehead and fell onto the table. Shut up, I’ll do the talking, Broch said. I’m the interrogator here, and you haven’t received permission to talk. For this offense alone, interrupting a senior interrogator during an official interrogation, you’re liable to get up to a year and a half. In fact, let’s take it as read that you’ve already been indicted under the interruption clause—and, by the way, I have the civil authority to judge you, and there’s no contesting my verdict. You’ve been accused, he read from the file, of disorderly behavior on public transportation, of assaulting a minor but helpless prophet, of disturbing the peace and vandalizing personal property in a bookstore, and of inciting regicide in the national press, a grievous act of treason in itself and an offense whose sentence is death, of course. Tomorrow you’ll be judged, and presumably you’ll also be executed. Do you confess? If so, it’ll be noted in your file. And Jeremiah said, Mr. Broch, enough with the jokes, this isn’t the book-review section, I … He mustered up what remained of his courage and said: Look, I was given the gift of prophecy, okay? All those things I said were … I was told to say them.
Broch froze, his eyes still on the file, and then he raised his head. No, he said after a prolonged, stunned silence. You haven’t received any sort of prophecy. No. Hold on—he narrowed his eyes—but I know you, you’re Jeremiah. You published the … He gestured gracefully, as if brushing away a mosquito. No, that’s it. That’s the limit. You can fudge a police investigation, you can remain silent, you can lie—after all, I’m only here on reserve duty—but not, not in poetry! You have no right to remain silent in poetry, and no right to cheat the interrogator, and no right to disrupt an interrogation, certainly not. No right at all, and I know this perfectly well, because I’m the one who determines such rights when it comes to poetry and its investigation. He pulled out his phone and browsed briefly before tapping the wrong letters, which ticked him off; he tried again, and cursed the sluggish Internet, because the thick walls of the interrogation room disrupted the wireless network signal. But in the end the poem was uploaded, and Broch read several lines from Jeremiah’s first and only collection: They shall come with weeping and with supplications will I lead them / I will cause them to walk by rivers of waters / in a straight way wherein they shall not stumble / for I am become a father to Israel / and Ephraim. And there was a dead silence. Of course, Jeremiah identified the words immediately, and Broch said: Tell me, please, I’m all ears—what’s the connection between this printed graphomania and the word of God? Explain it to me. No, because, if this is prophecy, then we might as well throw Isaiah right into the trash. It’s either this—or Isaiah. And I won’t allow, he suddenly roared, while the armchair shook his entire body, I won’t allow anyone to throw Isaiah into the trash, even though you and your friends at that literary journal, whether it’s Muscle, or No, or Leave, or Wow, or any of the other literary journals you keep starting up and that last for two issues and then shut down without anyone’s noticing except the founders and the editors, are always endeavoring as best you can to throw Isaiah into the garbage, and Amos, too, and Joel—those are the names of real prophets, in case you don’t recognize them. I won’t allow it, no, I won’t let you. I’ll stand in your way, I’ll block you with my very own body. I’m an old man, it’s true, but I’ve got strength enough left to thwart someone like you from galloping off to the garbage dump with the book of Isaiah in his hand. Indeed, your text is little more than a mishmash of clichés; to compare it to high-school verse would be to praise it to the heavens. Tears, entreaties, the straight-and-narrow path, father, firstborn, water, Ephraim. You’re aware that this is all dreadful, right? Well, maybe you weren’t aware when you published it, you just scribbled it down and sent it right off, but today you’re aware, right? Tell me you’re aware of it; I’ll make a note of that in your file. Broch browsed his phone for a moment, then stopped and said: We’re fortunate to be in a soundproof room; otherwise, I’d be ashamed to read this aloud. Look, look what you’ve written, Mr. Prophet. You’re like the Medusa—all one needs to destroy you is to put a mirror in front of you, you’ll crack under interrogation, your own poems will break you, I won’t need to beat you up at all. Now Broch intoned, like someone reading the Torah on the Sabbath, though in a strong Iraqi accent of sorts, peppered with consonants: Who gives the sun for a light by day / and the ordinances of the moon and of the stars for a light by night / who stirs up the sea that the waves thereof roar / the Lord of hosts is his name; if these ordinances depart from before me / says the Lord / then the seed of Israel also shall cease / from being a nation before me forever … Maybe you can explain to me the connection between the laws of nature, of the moon and the stars, and the laws of the Torah? After all, the connection is entirely fabricated and arbitrary … and what’s this incipit rhyme: Light / By night … Excuse me, but come on, when you get right down to it, your style is simply abysmal. Do you know how to read, or did you skip that stage and proceed straight to writing? Explain it to me, please, because, when it comes to literature, after all, I don’t understand a thing—I flunked all my exams in literature—and of course I’ve never been invited to teach at Harvard; nor was I made an honorary fellow at Oxford; nor was I offered a second sabbatical year at Ann Arbor, Michigan; nor was I offered a seat as professor of Hebrew literature at the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Nineveh. So, please, go on and fill me in, I’m all ears. And Jeremiah replied, It isn’t connected to my literary work, which may well be a failure; the prophecy came much later; there’s no connection. And Broch said, Right, there’s no connection, none. You’re a prophet like I’m Maria Theresa, Her Royal Highness the Archduchess of Austria and Queen of Bohemia and Hungary, who, anyhow, is long since dead. Nowadays, everyone caught red-handed committing a crime, not to mention every lunatic on the street, they all say, I’m a prophet! Every thief, every burglar. You know, we have a rape victim who shows up here every day lately. I interrogated her, and she, too, told me, over and again, that she’s actually prophesying here and that we
’re not listening, that she herself wasn’t violated, the rape is merely an allegory for the anticipated destruction of Jerusalem, so that if we only listened to her and read the signs carefully we’d be able to foresee the future and know what to do about it. Come on, what am I supposed to tell her? That she’s right? That we’ll record her allegorical complaint and publish it in the newspapers? What? Today every child that steals something tells me the Lord of Hosts sent him. So, what, I just release him, let him go on pilfering chewing gum, maybe offer him a job here with the police, or maybe also a post as a senior lecturer in the Hebrew Literature Department? After all, even though I retired a hundred years ago, I’m still hiring and firing at Mount Scopus, as you know perfectly well. You, too, tried your luck; you, too, were rejected; I personally jotted a tiny little x in your file, and now I know I was right—that would’ve been all I needed, having you start prophesying at departmental meetings on Sunday in the Institute of Jewish Studies conference room. So, yes, I can snatch you away from the police and free you, and drive you in my car straight to the dean’s office and arrange to get you tenure, and tomorrow you can start teaching the major introductory course on Hebrew literature, and you can even choose your own curriculum. You’ll set the canon—why not, after all? Indeed, you’re a most deserving appointee, a deserving appointee. And I, too, am a deserving appointee, Broch said modestly, I’m a deserving appointee to the Hebrew Literature Department, and to the police as well. I’ve been volunteering for reserve duty for years; after all, I was an interrogator in the Military Criminal Investigation Division, and then an officer in the CID, and then a deputy officer at CID headquarters. You may be surprised, but I had a life prior to literary criticism, thank God, he said, mainly to himself. And Jeremiah said, Just let me go; I’m so thirsty. He was fed up with Broch’s speech, fed up with the entire day; he only wanted to get away, to be released, to clear out. He hadn’t asked for any of this, and he had no intention of putting up with it, either. Let’s get back to the interrogation, Broch said. You should know, he said, that that’s a two-way mirror over there; we can see ourselves reflected in it, but on the other side are a couple of very senior priests and prophets, and the entire proceedings here are being broadcast live to the Temple, since they expressed interest in your case today. One could even say that they’ve been following you, but everybody is being followed, all the time—it’s okay, it’s only natural. Even when you visited me, you were under surveillance. Broch stood up and leaned over and whispered in Jeremiah’s ear, That vending machine is jam-packed with cameras; after all, the king himself is being monitored twenty-four/seven by Egyptian satellites, and the entire Holyland complex is swarming with thousands of Egyptian mikes. Then he snapped upright again and began pacing. So, he said, you thought you could upset commuters and smash jugs and go home as if nothing had happened. It doesn’t work that way. Too bad I didn’t choke you to death yesterday at my place; we’d be finished with all of this and would have saved ourselves an interrogation. So you claim you’ve been gifted with prophecy. Come on, then, and prophesy something for me right now, for example, Broch said, and signaled at the supposedly two-way glass. Jeremiah noticed a red bulb lighting up and realized he was now being recorded by yet another camera, perhaps of higher quality. He said, Now I’ve got nothing to say. Broch approached at a leisurely pace, grabbed the crushed can, aimed it at Jeremiah like someone threatening to throw a stone, and said, Wrong answer, try again. He smiled his familiar smile, fish-eyed and tight-lipped. And Jeremiah said: It doesn’t work that way. It just comes to me; I can’t decide when I— Broch roared: Now, or else I’ll stick you in the vending machine and you’ll spend the night there with the Coke cans. Jeremiah said, Go ahead and kill me, I’m not saying a word from now on, and Broch got up and shoved Jeremiah’s forehead against the Formica and bore down on it with all his weight, and Jeremiah said, the words escaping his mouth with the speed of a fleeing chariot, Thus says the Lord: if you will not listen to me, to walk in my law which I have set before you, to heed the words of my servants the prophets whom I send to you urgently, though you have not heeded, then will I make this house like Shiloh and will make this city a curse to all the nations of the earth.
Broch released his grip, but Jeremiah kept his head on the table and was still. Broch said, So that’s it? Jeremiah clasped his palms behind his neck and closed his eyes. He didn’t see Broch shrug his shoulders at the coated pane as if to say: What can I do? That’s all I got out of him. The red bulb flashed and went out.
When Jeremiah opened his eyes, Broch had left the room, and the door was propped open by a chair on which a bottle of iced tea had been placed. Jeremiah grabbed the bottle and gulped down its contents. Apparently, they’d decided to release him, he reflected mistakenly. He ascended the stairs and walked back up the corridor and swiftly strode out of the station; the duty officer, exerting himself over a Sudoku puzzle, appeared not to notice him, and someone else was now handcuffed to the upstairs vending machine. Jeremiah strode down Jaffa Road and Shlomtzion Ha-Malka Street in the direction of Customs Square, catching a glimpse of the new residential complexes in the Mamilla neighborhood, and of the mall that had been built opposite the Old City walls and which had crumbled during an earthquake, turning within minutes into islets of ruins, while the Old City and its ramparts had remained in one piece. And he strode on toward King David Street, heading for Liberty Bell Park, where he meant to take cover like a mouse from the shadow of wings.
A crescent moon dragged in its wake an enormous fleecy cloud, like a tugboat sailing into port. I looked and there was no one at all, the birds of the air had fled, Jeremiah thought. Part of the walls of Jerusalem had been destroyed to make room for a new neighborhood half within and half outside of the walls. Land was appropriated—for the public good, of course, though most assuredly for the good of its confiscators, for are they not a deserving public themselves? The earthquake had been disastrous—which is to say, a prime opportunity. Real-estate sharks silently swarmed to the derelict plots of land and promised to remove the rubble and smiled from ear to ear, and in return they received limitless building rights—up, down, and across—and the earth’s lemon was squeezed to the last drop, and jam was made of its peel, and they prepared beads from its seeds for the children of their bondsmen.
The ruins of the YMCA and the King David Hotel stood on either side like twin mounds, and Jeremiah stopped for a moment to gaze at what remained of these two buildings that he remembered so well from his childhood. For a minute, they seemed restored and rebuilt in his memory, the rubble like a movie played in reverse, going from a heap to a solid edifice. And he glanced at the YMCA, which was almost completely destroyed—only its central tower remained standing, leaning slightly to one side—and at the bulldozers that stood there, reluctant to begin shoveling, since they didn’t know where to dump the debris: the city was pretty much covered with shattered Jerusalem stone, and there was no point in starting to build before the earth calmed back down, but they’d been saying this for two years already, ever since the quake. And then the king set out on military expeditions to the East and along the coastal belt at the command of his lord on the Nile. There was inevitably some tribe or other, or some pact between nations, that it was necessary to suppress and eliminate; there was always a rumor of a particularly good crop somewhere, and the King of Judah would sally forth to claim his share, discarding sheaves at the corner of the fields, as ordained. And every new suppression and elimination brought on the next war, fortunately! The oppressed demanded vengeance and equipped themselves with light as well as heavy firearms, and then some Judean soldier was killed, so, after another plentiful yield of crops, it was time for another punitive expedition, to avenge the blood of this selfsame slaughtered soldier. And bulldozer drivers were conscripted to destroy homes in faraway cities and to clear ramparts in order to facilitate a secure entryway for the army, and they abandoned their large vehicles in Jerusalem, instead riding on the king’s own bulldozers in
faraway cities, and some of them would never return—that’s how it is in war—and their bulldozers remained orphaned on construction sites for many more years, like huge yellow headstones, like their children, who wouldn’t remember much about their fathers save the gigantic bulldozers in whose driver’s seats they’d once been allowed to sit.
Someone wearing a kaffiyeh dragged a bum leg while pushing a large coop across the street, with chickens crammed between its bars. From his place on the low stone wall, which alone had survived the earthquake, Jeremiah heard the coop man haggle on his cell phone in elegant Hebrew about the price, one assumed, of his chickens. The chickens were packed so close together that it seemed as if they’d turned into a solid block, like an oblong chest of drawers. Their cackles sounded to Jeremiah like sobs, and he shook his head. Like a cage full of birds, so their homes are full of deceit, therefore they have become great and rich, he muttered. As soon as he stops talking on his phone, I’ve got to ask him about buying his chickens, Jeremiah thought; from what he managed to catch of the heated exchange, the price wouldn’t be too high. He waved at the merchant, but realized that he had no idea what he was going to do with the chickens once he released them from their coop. Where would he leave them, in Independence Park? In the botanical gardens? In his parents’ yard? Would his mother accept them? And what would they eat, and what would they drink in summer? It was cold, and it might snow soon. Surely, by releasing them he was sentencing them to death. And he understood something obscure that flashed through his brain for a moment and vanished. He wanted at least to say something to the chicken merchant, like: Look how you’re bunching them together, they’re providing you with a living and you’re crushing them and making them suffer, but even this he couldn’t quite force through his feeble lips. Anyhow, the merchant was engrossed in the heat of his negotiations. What sort of prophet are you, he reflected, if you can’t even save one chicken? Not even one chick, not even a dog or a flea, never mind a boy or a girl. Jeremiah imagined tearing the cell phone away from the chicken merchant’s hand and smashing it to pieces like the jug. Good for you, you smashed a jug. See how far it’s gotten you. What now? His release from detention had been too easy. It dawned on him—and his low spirits sank even lower—that it wouldn’t be so simple to escape Broch’s iron claws, and that he’d been released for a reason, perhaps so they could catch him red-handed in the act of an even graver offense, and it hit him with no small measure of fear that undoubtedly he was being followed—indeed, this was pretty transparent—and he knew with certainty that the matter wasn’t settled yet. He glanced back, and nobody was there, or so it seemed.
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