Take me away. Your father was anointed king when he was eight years old, Mattaniah was told when he turned eight; prepare yourself for the possibility that this will happen to you, too. He clearly remembered the months between his father’s death and the crowning of his younger brother, Jehoahaz, months during which he imagined that he, Mattaniah, would be the one to rule. And the term child king resonated in his head, perhaps because his mother had told him, Yes, you’ll be the child king; you’ll hold a scepter as tall as you are, and a crown will be placed on your little head, and it’ll slip over your neck and shoulders like a spring-loaded trap on a rat, ha-ha, and I’ll draw a partition and hide behind it and talk, and you’ll sit out front and repeat your mother’s words. But his brother Jehoahaz was crowned instead, and Mattaniah recalled the excitement during the coronation, as well as the affront and then the dread when, only three months later—the festivities alone lasted close to two months—his brother, who’d become king, disappeared, and all they told him, told Mattaniah, was that his brother had been taken to Egypt. He never saw him again, and no letter ever arrived. During the following years, he’d imagine himself boarding a bus to Egypt and looking for his brother in Pharaoh’s palaces, and then in the local jailhouses. He thought of Joseph in the pit and of Joseph in Potiphar’s home, but Mattaniah knew that he’d never go, he’d never search, never meet, and never Joseph … His brother Elyakim was crowned in place of Jehoahaz, who’d disappeared in Egypt—though, to be perfectly honest, Jehoahaz was simply shot down in the outskirts of Ashkelon—and Elyakim’s name was changed to Jehoiakim by Pharaoh, and on no account was it permitted for anyone to call him by his old name. He’d ruled for five years already, which, compared with Jehoahaz’s three months, felt like an eternity. Indeed, it seemed as if the kingdom would last forever and that, at long last, there might be some peace under Pharaoh’s aegis. Elyakim, which is to say Jehoiakim, quickly took over the multi-tower high-rise building project on Jerusalem’s southwestern hills, above the soccer stadium, and shut himself up on one of the top floors, with bodyguards on every floor below and sentinels in the surrounding watchtowers, too, so that it was practically impossible to reach him. He shut down the elevators in all the buildings and lived on the twentieth or thirtieth floor—needless to say, no one knew which one for certain, and he would also change floors from time to time, for security reasons—and in order to pay him a visit it was necessary to use the stairs. Only one elevator was in use, exclusively for the king and his Egyptians, the ones who gave him his orders, and on every even-numbered floor it was obligatory to pass a security check, with X-ray machines, dogs, body frisking, preliminary inquiries, fingerprinting, retinal scans, document verification, personal questionnaires, and who knows what else. It didn’t matter if you were an ambassador from a foreign country or the minister of defense or the king’s younger brother. After Mattaniah attempted to visit his brother the king to ask for his support in setting up a new literary journal and was forced to endure the humiliating ordeal—he was fed up by the time he reached the fourth floor and beat a retreat—he gave up on ever trying to visit his brother, just as his brother had lost any interest in keeping tabs on Mattaniah.
And so, when he was seventeen years old, Mattaniah decided to seek out—this is how he put it to himself—his own path, and to forget his royal origins once and for all, or so he said, and leave behind his brother and his childhood memories, cleansing himself as much as possible of the blood of kings which pumped through his veins, so to speak. He began to fabricate, at first to himself and in due course to his new acquaintances as well, a new life story, including semi-Assyrian origins, with a mother exiled from Assyria to Israel as part of the two-way forced deportations that were at the time customarily agreed upon to the supposed satisfaction of all the nations in the region. And he tattooed his body in some hole-in-the-wall in the Armenian quarter in the Old City with black, archaic, florid Assyrian cuneiform that he didn’t really understand, and whose design the tattoo artist had downloaded from the Internet. And he grew his beard and hair accordingly, and studied beginners’ Akkadian in an Assyrian dialect, and in his room he hung an enormous square poster of the King of Assyria, whom Mattaniah made sure to call by his proper Assyrian name, Tukulti-apil-Eshara, which means My trust in the son of Assur, and not by the Hebrew corruption, Tiglath-Pileser. He worked to build up both mane and body until they resembled those of the figure in his imagination: letting his beard and hair grow long, tinting their reddishness black to match the color of his tattoos; lifting barbells and pulling spring chest-expanders and slurping down protein shakes and energy drinks. Within twelve months, his muscles had bulged and solidified, and he had come to resemble the Assyrian in his poster far more than the boy he’d been several years earlier. He mail-ordered a wristwatch like the one Tiglath wore, and a matching hat. When people saw his profile, they couldn’t help remarking that he’d become the spitting image of the poster in his room.
Except that, against all odds, Assyria’s standing in the region kept deteriorating, pretty much in inverse proportion to the development of Mattaniah’s muscles. One day, a match was struck, so it seemed, in some remote corner of the empire, and Assyria started tottering like a house of cards (made of iron). Envoys and refugees bruited rumors of the empire’s imminent fall, though it took several years to grasp properly and take to heart the fact that Assyria was gasping its last breaths. It was as strange as a dream, like waking in the morning and seeing that the sun had gone out, or that it had turned into a triangle. Mattaniah would still walk around Jerusalem dressed up Assyrian-style even when Assyria no longer existed, when Babylon and Egypt were already fighting over the carcass of an empire everyone had believed would last forever.
And Mattaniah continued, after several meetings with a psychologist, along his journey of self-renewal, of which his Assyrian getup was only the external expression. He began to devote himself to writing and reading, and he began eating, after years of nothing but palace cuisine, a wide variety of déclassé foods, including lots of junky snacks. Above all, he had a constant craving for yellow soup nuts, a packet of which he always kept in his pocket and every once in a while would open and pour into his cupped palm and shove into his mouth and swallow. He didn’t object to saddle-shaped Pringles, either, and candy-coated peanuts were a staple, and the thought of Apropo Corn Snacks made his mouth water, and he’d eat strawberry cobbler on a regular basis, not to mention family-size packages of peanut-butter-flavored Bamba puffs, their scent promising precisely what their taste delivered.
Encouraged by his psychologist, he adopted Broch’s pup, and started to publish pseudo-Assyrian poems under pseudonyms and then under his own name, and he insisted on eating falafel and shawarma and grilled meat—always out. Eat out, the psychologist told him, you’ve already eaten in plenty. You ate at home enough—you were weaned on plenty of cream from the palace’s udders—the time has come to eat street food, the time has come to eat standing up, the time has come to eat cheaply. Junk-food time is here. He’d start, for example, with a cheese bureka in the morning—over at Musa, by City Hall—with some grape juice, which of course didn’t contain even one molecule from the fruit of the vine; at noon, hummus–fava beans or musabaha or hummus with meat, most often at Hummus Abbas, at the pedestrian mall; at four o’clock, after exercising, he’d slurp up a super-large glass of fruit juice through a straw, date-banana-melon with mint, which he’d drink with abandon, especially in summer; in the evening, another bureka—if in the morning his bureka had been cheese, he’d finish the day with spinach, and, conversely, if in the morning he’d had a yen for spinach, he’d settle in the evening for cheese—though sometimes he felt like having a falafel or an eggplant sabich instead, or just any old combination of sushi, and between meals he’d gorge himself on a tube of Pringles or Bamba or Apropo or Time Out white chocolate—chocolate that was, so he was informed, completely chocolate-free—or a tortilla or a Cadbury Flake Bar, or maybe American peanuts or four-fin
gered Kif Kef bars or, again, Apropo, or Till Midnight cookies—half biscuit and half supposedly high-quality chocolate.
His food expenses were huge, and were, naturally, paid from public funds that reached his bank account indirectly—he didn’t know how, nor did he ask why—but this didn’t bother him in the least, which was understandable, considering that he saw his wild street-food habit and his ravenous consumption of snacks as signs of the overall strengthening of his distinct personality and his growing independence. He was no longer at the mercy of his mother or the palace chefs with their healthy, nutritious, and delicious meals! Each time he wiped clean a plate of hummus, its spiciness biting into his tongue, he knew that he was distancing himself from his earlier life and becoming more and more his true self, and he knew, too, that it was only from within his true self that the poet would emerge, not just any poet but a poet in the great Assyrian tradition. A few years hence, he mused, he would board the express train to Assyria and settle there and start a family there and work the land in the shadow of the northern mountains and utterly forget his origins and his cushy, upholstered past. He’d be able at last to eat balanced, nutritious, healthy, tasty, simple food over there—venison you kill and devour like a lion or leopard. With this thought, he used his teeth to rip open a new family-size packet of soup nuts.
When, one time, Mattaniah managed to reach his brother the king on the phone and asked him, How goes it, Elyakim?, his brother would have strangled him over the line if he could have: There is no such name, he said, that name is forbidden, that name is bad. From now on only Jehoiakim is allowed. Jehoiakim—that’s the name Father gave me, repeat after me. Mattaniah was astonished. Father? But Father’s dead. And his older brother said, Pharaoh is now my father, and yours, too; he’s everyone’s father. And Mattaniah realized the line was tapped, and that his brother, in his high tower overlooking the soccer stadium, was caged in Pharaoh’s hand, like a frightened, shuddering bird. Mattaniah wanted to please him and call him by his new name, this name that Pharaoh Neco had imposed on him like another mandatory tribute, but he couldn’t get himself to force it out, and only said, See you, bro, and hung up.
He sat at the southwest corner of the Old City walls, between the Zion and Jaffa Gates, between two arrow slits, and looked down at the circus tent, which, at this time of day, was practically shut down. At night, though, things over there started hopping. And he took out a notepad and started to draft a poem. He would call his next book, or so he told himself, Like a Bird in a Cage. This made him think of his dog, waiting for him at home, maybe hungry, and he quickly scrambled down the walls and hailed a taxi to Abu Tor. His dog licked his face and ears in greeting, as though what had happened yesterday hadn’t happened, as though he hadn’t been abandoned. The treacherous deal treacherously, the treacherous deal very treacherously: Mattaniah called to mind Isaiah’s obscure poem, which he had learned in school. Isaiah was everyone’s downfall during matriculation exams. You go try to understand Hebrew a hundred years or more after it was written—archaic isn’t even the word. And Mattaniah, well, suddenly something snapped inside him at the sight of his all-merciful dog. It seemed as if the creature bore him no resentment whatsoever for having been disgracefully abandoned, wasn’t even asking Mattaniah to make amends, and terrible tears welled up in Mattaniah’s eyes, and he opened a can of tuna and emptied its contents for Tukulti and sprinkled a fistful of the soup nuts left in his pocket on top of the fish, like a shower of gold, and hugged his dog. Tukulti put his paw on Mattaniah’s tattooed arm and ignored the food—they both preferred to wait for Noa to come home so that they could all eat together—and if there had been a witness to this scene, it would have appeared to him or her that the dog was actually trying to read the Akkadian on Mattaniah’s thick, bright limb, or was in the process of copying it down with his claws.
15
THE CHILD MERCHANT SLIPPED AWAY like a lizard behind the small heap of rubble that had once been the flour mill, and Jeremiah, who’d bolted after him, determined to do something—but what exactly?—lost track of him pretty much immediately, and stopped to catch his breath at the corner of Keren Ha-Yesod and King David. It was close to ten o’clock at night, he was sweaty and exhausted and hungry, and on the spur of the moment he decided—a decision that brought him instant relief—to catch the light rail for his parents’ home in Anatot and sleep there that night. He didn’t remember that there was a station at Liberty Bell Park, but a passing train stopped directly in front of him, and the big Liberty Bell replica rang in perfect coordination. As he strode forward, the doors appeared to slide open to the rhythm of his breathing, and before he knew it he was inside. He made his way through the car, which at this late hour was predictably empty. He seemed, in fact, to be the only passenger in the car, at least at first, but when he turned his head he noted one more person at the far end, sitting with his back turned away from Jeremiah, facing opposite the direction of travel. Jeremiah looked for a seat as far as possible from the passenger, worried all of a sudden that this guy might be another one of those light-rail prophets, and dealing with another light-rail prophet—or any prophet, for that matter—was about the least appealing prospect in the world right now. Jeremiah sat down. The light-rail air conditioner, which always blew too cold and too strong, began to freeze his head, and a voice resounded from the rear of the car: Sir, you haven’t validated your ticket; riding with an unvalidated ticket is like riding without paying. And Jeremiah said, Shit, a night inspector! It started to rain, the drops striking hard against the polished windows. Jeremiah raised his head, and it was only his father there in the car, standing and laughing in delight and waving a multi-use electronic fare card, which he swiped in for his son.
He sat down next to Jeremiah in the cold, and they traveled in silence, thigh brushing against thigh. Jeremiah remembered the expression fruit of his loins and shuddered. His father stared straight ahead for a long time. Few passengers ever boarded at such an hour, and fewer still wanted to travel to Anatot or the other stops in northeastern Jerusalem at night. His father pulled out his large-screen smartphone, which also served him as a mobile library now that he’d had his hundreds of books converted and scanned and then nearly vacated his home of all printed matter, and took never-ending pleasure in the thought that everything was on his mobile phone, backed up in the Cloud, so lightweight, so mobile. He was delighted by the notion that his books had become bodiless, that they’d turned into an invisible essence, intangible but nonetheless present, that a Jew could carry his entire library with him wherever he might be going. He would read the thickest possible tomes on his phone, relishing the thought of holding unwieldy encyclopedias, shelves, entire libraries in the palm of his hand. And Jeremiah was under the impression that his father wanted again to show him an interesting passage from this or that volume, but in fact there was an article on the screen from Ha’aretz’s main page in which all the events of the day were recorded in a few lines—of course, without mention of God’s instructions or Jeremiah’s visions or the angel, but his speech in the bookstore was mentioned, as was the broken jug, and his interrogation, and how he had been released only to be placed under house arrest. And his father said, So you’re coming to stay with us for your house arrest? I’m glad. And Jeremiah, who didn’t know that he’d been placed under house arrest, repeated after his father, House arrest, and fell silent. There was something else in the news that Jeremiah didn’t know: that he was to be put on trial, and that his trial was scheduled for tomorrow morning. Broch hadn’t said a word about house arrest or about any trial, let alone set a date for it, but the court reporter knew all, apparently. Jeremiah looked at his father as though for advice. He drummed his fingertips on his knees, as was his wont, playing nonexistent music on his knees’ keyboard, and his father watched and said, out of the blue, She told me: Dad, hold me up and I’ll sit in front of the piano one more time and play that difficult twenty-minute stretch of the Hammerklavier. And I held her up, but she didn’t hav
e the strength by then to lift her hands, she just dropped them on the keys; she couldn’t play the piano any more than a pillow could. And I took the pillow back to bed, and the next day I took her to the hospital. By then, she wasn’t making any sense. She asked that I bring the piano along, that I hire movers—after all, I’m a senior physician, and if only I made the effort they might allow the piano into her room, or at least an electronic keyboard, and what’s all my seniority worth if I can’t even get her a piano? But I didn’t seriously consider carrying out her wish, and I didn’t move the piano into her room, even though I guess that’s the sort of thing you might expect from me. Okay, enough said, enough, it’s not her we’re concerned with at the moment. She’s dead, and none of the angels who occupied our dreams when you were in your mother’s womb visited us when your sister took ill, or after her death. Nothing. They didn’t come to comfort us—it was as though she didn’t exist for them. If only one of them had shown up, a morsel of a dream, half a tiding, three words, a quarter of an explanation. But nothing. Jeremiah, who’d never heard his parents talking about being visited by angels when his mother was pregnant, didn’t respond, and only said, Did you pray for them, did you ask? And his father looked at him and said, No, but neither did we pray or ask for those dreams of your mother’s of an infant prophet when she was pregnant. When they care, they know how to make an appearance without any invitations. Oh yes. In droves.
And silence. At the Yekutiel Adam stop, some twenty villagers boarded. At the next stop, Pisgat Ze’ev Center, the line split, right to Anatot and straight to Sayeret Duchifat and Heil Ha’avir, which was the last stop. Jeremiah and his father knew most of the villagers and nodded their heads as one, in greeting. The flute teacher was there; and the junior-league soccer coach; and the olive-oil merchant; and a prostitute; and the millionaire tutor who gave private lessons in math; and the translator from Akkadian and Persian and Moabite and Elamite and more, who translated the languages of the East one into another and one from another, and published all over the place, and even mixed her languages up, until you couldn’t be sure whether some Persian poet wasn’t actually an Ammonite, or whether this great Sidonite playwright wasn’t after all the national Elamite playwright—she herself was starting to confuse them. My polyglotism is a bitter curse, she said. I never intended to become a translator; my profession was forced on me by circumstance, just because I happen to be familiar with all the languages of the area. Personally, I dreamed of being a bookbinder, but there’s always a demand for translation in this region swarming with nations. Jeremiah looked at the people that he knew, village neighbors and friends of his parents, who for the most part were older than he by twenty years or more. And he said in a gentle, even friendly tone, as his gaze took in his old-time neighbors: A conspiracy is found among the people of Judah, and among the inhabitants of Jerusalem. They have turned back to the iniquities of their forefathers; the house of Israel and the house of Judah have broken my covenant that I made with their fathers. Therefore thus says the Lord, For sure, I am going to bring upon them disaster from which they cannot escape.
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