Muck

by Dror Burstein

  The slender Kislev moon rose above Liberty Bell Park. Realizing that the day was drawing to a close, he told himself, I’ve got to get home. Those early-morning hours, with their almond and the pot that had veiled the sun, seemed to Jeremiah as if they hadn’t been so much another day as another year, another century. His detention, too, and the interrogation seemed distant, even though he’d been released barely half an hour ago. The hummus–fava beans weighed on his belly like a cannonball on a feather pillow.

  The chicken merchant moved a short distance from his coop and continued his business transaction. Can we say two hundred ninety-five? Give me two hundred ninety and we’ll call it quits. The merchant was pacing to and fro in the soft rain, and Jeremiah knew that he could, if he so desired, make a run for it, grab the coop, and dash off; the merchant limped badly and wouldn’t be able to catch up. Grab the coop—later on you’ll figure out where to set them free. You couldn’t possibly condemn them to a worse fate. Give them, if nothing more, an hour of freedom. Listen to them crying. Behold the voice of the cry of the daughter of my people from a land far off, is not the Lord in Zion? Is not her king in Zion? One hour of freedom—when did you last have one free hour, an hour of quiet, without any obligations, freedom with no future knocking on the door and no past piling up behind you and making a terrible racket as it falls? He endeavored to visualize the neighborhood, to plan his flight, to retreat back to Agron Street, or maybe he’d keep walking south, toward Liberty Bell Park. But where would he spring the chickens after carrying them off? And he knew that he wouldn’t do a thing; in admitting as much, he was spared having to make the decision, be it in front of the pet store, in front of the cages in the zoo, in front of a butcher shop, in front of a window display of fur coats. The harvest is over, the summer has drawn to an end, and we haven’t been saved. When he turned five, his mother had brought him an aquarium with two goldfish as a birthday present. The following day, his father woke him up at daybreak, and they stole out of the house; in his memory, his sister was with them, too, though all of a sudden he wasn’t sure if she had indeed joined them on the fish expedition. They’d driven to the botanical gardens in Givat Ram and had sneaked in through a gap in the fence and turned the fish loose. Jeremiah remembered the fish and the guard who advanced toward them waving his truncheon, and how they stood there, stock-still, mute in the chill air of a fall dawn, calmly waiting for the guard, who was Ammonite, like most of the guards in Judah, and how they let him approach at a run, how they waited for him to come to halt, and only when he drew up close did the guard notice the small boy standing next to the adult, and the empty aquarium. Jeremiah’s father held the guard back, waving cash in front of him like a paper sword, with a picture of King Solomon under the 100. The guard calmed down at once; he put the “sword” in his pocket and stood beside them, and together they waited for the sun to rise. They gave the empty aquarium to the guard as a present, and he in turn filled it with earth and ants for his son; his son nurtured generation after generation of ants inside it, for years on end, even after his father’s death, even when he, too, grew old.

  Behold, I will make my words in your mouth fire, and this people wood—and it shall devour them, Jeremiah remembered being told, though he couldn’t remember when he had heard it. Was it today, was it years ago, perhaps even before he was born? And he understood that he would never be able to speak softly, like his father, because someone had stuck fire in his mouth this morning; harsh and unyielding fire had burdened his tongue, had placed a glowing coal on his lips, and his mouth was the bulging pot, and he suddenly understood his vision: It was my head and my mouth and my spirit that I saw there. And his speech would have to burn, flame, ignite. It won’t be nice. It won’t give you any pleasure, nor will it bring you any recognition. The days of poetry are over, he admitted sadly to himself. You won’t publish anymore; nothing will get printed. No, from now on, all your words will be words of fire. Blazing and burning up in a flash. Devouring both themselves and the speaker. He beheld the nation at first as firewood placed in front of a hearth, but then he pictured the nation as trees in a forest, an immense forest whose dimensions stretched from horizon to horizon, and he uttered a word, and the crowns of the trees caught fire. Okay, give me two hundred and we’ll close the deal; you’re killing me here, the chicken merchant screamed into his phone. Jeremiah, who suddenly found himself standing close to the man, told him, as he was turning off his phone, An appalling and horrible thing has come to pass in the land, the prophets prophesy in the service of falsehood. The merchant replied: Believe me, every word is true. You can’t open a newspaper without seeing it: here an envelope full of cash, there a few building permits; here a new central bus station, there a sex bribe or a winning lottery ticket. Nobody ever offered me a sex bribe, let me tell you, the merchant said. I think it’s because of my bum leg. But my middle leg isn’t fucked up one bit—in the middle, I’m hung like a donkey, you know? Jeremiah peered at the chicken coop from up close, and only then did he notice how wide he’d been off the mark: there weren’t any chickens in the coop, there were children in the coop, six or seven small children around three or four years old. Some of them were screaming and wailing, and the merchant told him: Look at them; they’ll be fed to the flames in an hour or so, but when it comes to me getting paid—no, I have to wait till the end of the month, if not later. Net sixty EOM. But I have to pay VAT on the fifteenth of every month. And social security—maybe you can explain to me, why a ten percent surcharge—that’s a tax, for all practical purposes. Ten percent, fifteen percent … two hundred a head, that’s practically giving them away, I’m such a sucker. Even when I was a kid, I was just as pathetic, a sucker, a chicken. And Jeremiah said: What? You snatch children? He was astounded, even though he’d heard, like everyone, of such people, like body-organ harvesters and sex traffickers and dog snatchers and child slavers, but he’d never seen one with his very own eyes. You deliver children to idol worshippers? And the man said, Snatch? Snatch?! Purchase—I buy them from their parents, purchase, the parents get a few shekels and perform a good deed in the bargain, instead of just dumping these brats in the garbage. Don’t you start with me like my wife—knock it off! Everyone lays into me from their moral high ground, but there’s an unregulated birthrate here; millions are being born, and sometimes one comes out malformed, okay? Take a look at that one in the corner, for example. The merchant pointed. He’s so sick, he’ll die in a week anyway. And look at this one, yellow as a chick—what can be done with her? You want her? Take her, take her for free, bring her up yourself, Mr. Goody-Goody. D’you know what it means to raise a girl with a shmatte for a liver? D’you know how much her daily medication costs, for one day? So take her! Take her for free! And he went up to the coop and bent over and grabbed the girl, who was clearly sick with yellow fever or cirrhosis. Jeremiah said, Leave her alone, don’t touch me, I mean her—and rage welled up within him, and helplessness. And the seller said: Don’t worry, you couldn’t have taken her anyway, she’s already sold. That’s how I make a living. I buy them from the parents and sell them to the Ammonite workers here in their tenement project. There’s a nice demand from the Tyre and Sidon sailors, too; in such matters they’re of one mind—the Phoenicians and Ammonites—I don’t know who taught whom the ritual, and it doesn’t interest me. They believe in this, not that I understand it, but it’s their religion from time immemorial, so—what?—I should tell them what is and isn’t right? Based on what? We don’t have our own difficult customs? So, granted, they put boys and girls into Moloch’s fire; they let the flames caress them until a faint odor ascends to heaven, as they say … I was once here, in Sultan’s Pool, when they performed the ceremony, and I admit, it’s not a pleasant smell, but who am I to decide what’s right, who am I to decree what’s good or bad based on what’s pleasant or unpleasant to me? So my nose should be the standard? Besides, I mean, the kids don’t exactly smell like roses now, he said, and wrinkled his nose at them and kicked the coop
in an effort to silence their screams. When the kids are Moloched, the worshippers beat on drums so as not to hear all the hollering. All those drum circles aren’t there to soothe the mind, as they say—oh no, they’re a diversion. I bring them the children, they wash them, they treat them nicely, they give them hot goat milk and tetanus shots and antibiotics, and then they’re fed to the flames. I bring my guy a kid, and he sells him to their high-ranking clerks. See, if a high-ranking clerk has a substitute child, then the clerk doesn’t have to put his own kid into the fire, you get it? I’m talking about gold merchants, diamond dealers with mines in Sheba; you can’t expect someone like that to feed his own daughter to the flames! His daughter has to go and study business administration at Harvard, and while she’s out there she’ll get breast implants, before returning to manage the family business. So, naturally, her father procures a child from me, a child who’d have been dumped in any case, and that way everybody’s happy. But when you come right down to it, they’re not actually burned alive. It isn’t true, what’s written in the papers; I’ve seen it with my own eyes. They only pass through the fire—it’s like a shower, it’s like a warm douche. And you should know that if a child survives the fire they turn him into a prince. Did you know that? He becomes a demigod for them. The Ammonites are a real pious nation, not like us, a bunch of hucksters. But, then again, if the child doesn’t come out of the fire in good shape, well, forget it.

  I can see that you’re touchy. I was like that once, too. Why blame them? After all it’s not like we don’t feed our own people into our own fires, in our way, yeah? What about Menashe, our king’s great-grandfather? I mean, he went into the fire, no? He sure as hell did—big-time, like on a conveyor belt he went right in, my grandpa told me stories … And I heard on the radio that King Mesha of Moab passed the son of the King of Edom through fire, but I call that just being neighborly, yeah? As we say here, better a close neighbor than a distant brother. There’s no denying, it’s one powerful spectacle. They’ve got an altar that’s out of this world, coated entirely in copper, with the bull and horns, everything burning hot. They run the child through from one end to the other; if the child comes out alive—I swear, sometimes the child comes out fine, if they run him through at the speed of light, but, well, if they wait an three extra seconds, in order to say the blessing, then that’s that. I’ve got kids of my own, don’t think I’m callous, but if I had to pass my own kids through fire, and I could pay chicken feed to buy your daughter instead, I don’t think I’d count my pennies. Would you? But, what, you got any kids? Be reasonable for a minute. You wouldn’t save a healthy child, with a future ahead of him? You could say these kids here in the coop are already dead, for all practical purposes. I’m giving them a chance to turn into demigods. What’s a bit of Tophet fire? Tophet, that’s the word—they call it Tophet. The tent they put up there in Sultan’s Pool isn’t a circus tent, okay? Anyway, what’s Moloch compared with years of hunger in some hole in the Katamonim or in Gilo? What? Toiling in the Timna mines is any better, or clearing stones in Ezion-Geber? Timna isn’t a Tophet itself? Were you ever there? I worked there for three years, from the age of ten; I’m copper-toxic from head to toe; every so often, late at night, I radiate heat. Mining copper with the temperature up to 122 degrees, drinking filthy warm water from a rusty canteen doesn’t count in your eyes as Tophet? And it’s all within the law! A booming business! I plaster the coop with feathers for people like you, to let them think I’m selling turkeys here. I’ve already had run-ins with inspectors and the police. I don’t want any trouble, I pay my business tax a year ahead of time, he said, and then added: I used to play professional soccer; that’s how I got my bum leg. I used to be right fullback, but I once kicked a victory goal. He pulled out an old clipping, kept between plastic covers for safekeeping, and gave it to Jeremiah to read. The article was indeed all about this miracle, how the right fullback scored a goal from the outfield, and in the photograph someone was bearing him up on his shoulders. The fullback told Jeremiah, That was the King of the Goals that season—the King of the Goals himself lifted me on his shoulders. Jeremiah told him, And they shall bury in Tophet, for want of room to bury, and the houses of Jerusalem and the houses of the kings of Judah shall be as the place of Tophet. And the merchant said: You’re one hundred percent right, but keep this in mind, just between us, there’s a big market in children, not only among the Ammonites—oh no, let’s just say that nothing human is alien to our king, okay? I’ve noticed they’ve fenced in Sultan’s Pool, they’ve put up some sort of tent, sure, like a circus tent, and I saw limos going in, and, believe me, it wasn’t an Ammonite license on the Mercedes, it wasn’t a Canaanite number, it was a Jewish number, glatt kosher, yellow plates. A black Mercedes drove into the tent; I delivered the merchandise and then tried to take a peek inside. There’s a bookstore not far off; it’s closed at night unless there’s a book launch, so I climbed onto its roof and saw the smoke coming out of the tent top. They flew in all the apparatus, as well as an Ammonite priest in his fancy getup, by helicopter from Rabat Bnei Ammon, and the priest taught them the ritual ceremony point by point. You wouldn’t believe what’s going on in this city in that big top. They also use the tent for … And he fell silent, noticing a city inspector approaching on an electric-powered scooter from the other end of the street. I saw them leaving, he said hastily to Jeremiah. They were wearing what looked like hoods in bright colors. I saw the plume of smoke. I also smelled the smell, the merchant said as he got ready to clear out, harnessed to his coop like a horse, his limp suddenly and miraculously cured.

  14

  MATTANIAH RIPPED OPEN A PACKAGE of soup nuts with his teeth and poured the yellow heap into his large hand. Eating junk food was for him a matter of principle. Until the age of eight, he grew up on delicacies prepared in his father the king’s residence—that is to say, until the day he watched a foreign TV channel and was informed that his father the king had been killed in the Battle of Armageddon against the Egyptians. He’d already learned how to read, and still recalled the headline in the paper: And the king said to his servants, take me away, for I am badly wounded. He understood that his father was ill; he thought he’d caught a cold. And when he was told that his father had fallen in a critical battle against Pharaoh, Mattaniah imagined his father swooping down on the pyramids and thrusting his sword between the Sphinx’s eyes. He didn’t understand the words Take me away; he didn’t understand where they took his father. He didn’t really know him, he reflected, but was only familiar with the stories about him: the discovery of the Book of the Law, the smashing of the pagan altars, the roasting of the altars’ high priests upon those same altars. As a child, he didn’t think any of this was especially significant; it even made him laugh. In particular, there was talk of demolishing the Tophet in Gai Ben Hinnom, before they’d channeled in seawater and flooded the entire valley, which then turned into a harbor, and before they’d revived the Tophet in an adjoining valley, not as an improvised primitive bronze altar, but as a mega-altar, covered in galvanized stainless steel.

  But now, as Mattaniah crossed over Gai Ben Hinnom, which had been converted into a lake, and as he passed by the large circuslike tent that had been pitched in Sultan’s Pool for the last couple of years, he realized that his father’s efforts and all his altar smashing were in vain, for the Tophet was restored posthaste and even improved after his father’s heroic death, and all the appeals to the Supreme Court and public demonstrations didn’t help a bit. They said that the matter was outside of the court’s jurisdiction; an expert in international law claimed that the area was in effect extraterritorial Ammonite territory within Jerusalem, and that local law couldn’t be applied within its perimeter, whereas, on the other hand, in order to maintain a balance between Ammonite religious freedom and the fundamental principles of Hebrew law, and weighing in private property rights as well—to be sure, everything was backed up by contracts and affidavits—it just wasn’t possible to issue a restraining ord
er against the big top. (Truth be told, envelopes changed hands, fat and prudently sealed, sent along to the prosecutor and a high-ranking judge—not that it reached him directly, not at all, but by means of a limited-liability company that his adopted daughter founded to handle the matter; she was, in fact, legally adopted in order to set up the LLC, and soon thereafter the judge’s ruling was subtly tweaked, and everything was nicely sewn up: Nope, nothing to be done. Sorry, there are extenuating circumstances, see?)

  His father died twelve years ago; Mattaniah had now lived far longer without a father than he’d lived by his side, though, to be honest, he didn’t see him all that often during those first eight years, either, and even when he did see him it was for the most part from afar. That was how he’d always remember his father, Josiah, from a great distance, not emotionally speaking but in point of fact: on a high throne or on a dais, almost featureless.