The passengers stared at Jeremiah in embarrassment, not least his father, who buried his head, so to speak, in the book he was reading on his phone, paying scant attention to what was going on. Okay, enough of all that, go to sleep, dumb kid, the math tutor told him with a mixture of compassion and disdain. Jeremiah’s parents had dished out thousands of shekels to this man, since the boy couldn’t for the life of him understand the language of numbers and sums. What is three—three—what does it actually mean? And the teacher had replied, What do you mean, What is three? Three apples … And he raised three fingers, but Jeremiah said: But what is three without the thing, not three fingers and not three coins but three, what is three plus three, three what plus three what—I don’t get it. And what is a negative number, how does a negative apple look, or three negative fingers? And what does the square root of an apple look like, and what does the root of a negative apple look like? And, come to think of it, what is x? We always talk about x, but each time the answer is different—how can that be? I don’t get it. And the teacher grabbed an apple and brought it up close to Jeremiah’s face, like a loan shark waving his brass knuckles in the face of some deadbeat. Jeremiah got a 100 on his matriculation exam, and the teacher, who met him by chance several days later, said, Three you didn’t understand, but you don’t ask questions about one hundred, eh? And the prostitute said to the translator, Well, since his sister … But she didn’t finish her thought. She remembered seeing the sister walking with a piano score in a downpour once, a downpour like the one outside right now, and her pages were completely wet, and the whore, who’d found shelter under some roof, called out to her to join her there, where it was dry, but Jeremiah’s sister continued marching proudly in the rain, holding her score out as though it were thirsty, as though she were taking a stroll with a flowerpot, letting it slake its thirst in the blessing of the heavens. Next stop: Pisgat Ze’ev Center. Change to: Anatot, final stop. The automated sign announced this in several languages, and the translator smiled to herself like a cat warming itself in front of a heater in winter. My dear friend, Jeremiah’s father suddenly said to the math tutor, whom he’d feared all these years, even though, when they were students together, they’d shared the same bench and desk: after all … But Jeremiah cut in and said to his tutor, What right has my beloved in my house, when she has hatched vile deeds? Suddenly he saw his math tutor’s soul as if via X-ray, and it was like a pit of filth, filled with lust for his confused pupils, who were unable under any circumstances to solve an equation by substitution. As he stared at the forehead of the polyglot, he saw through the fraud. This famous translator wasn’t familiar with even one language, apart from Hebrew and a smidgen of Aramaic; and the whore had once kicked a cat and killed it, just like that, because it was keeping her awake, but since she refused to entertain sweaty clients she’d consequently acquired a name as a high-class operator; and the oil merchant would tell people he was selling them pure olive oil, but always made sure to blend in a third, sometimes two-thirds safflower oil, and his oils won prizes in contests, and with each win he increased the quantity of safflower … etc., etc. All the small lies of the inhabitants of his village were revealed at once to Jeremiah, as if the surveillance dossiers on each of his neighbors had been revealed to him all in one instant: idol worship was as common in his neighborhood as watching TV. In fact, everyone watched the idol-worship game shows on the Idol Worship Channel, and this was the real work of idol worship, not the anointing of some hilltop statues with oil—that belonged to the past, to the era of ancient Israel. Now, for the most part, it took place on the screen. No, there were no murderers or child merchants there—simply normal people with the same run-of-the-mill human contaminations that everyone is familiar with and which everyone calls their complex personality.
And then a Bible teacher approached Jeremiah. He’d taken cover all that time behind taller neighbors at the rear of the car, since he’d had no desire to be seen, to reveal what lurked behind his smug face, but now he said: No. No. You shall not prophesy in the name of the Lord, or you will die by our hand. The fact that you keep saying Thus says the Lord doesn’t make your act any more convincing. I saw in the paper as well—Thus says the Lord this and Thus says the Lord that. Right, the math tutor added, I can say it, too, Thus says the Lord: twenty-five squared is six hundred, not six hundred twenty-five, because six hundred is a number that I find more pleasing, I like big round numbers. It doesn’t work that way. And Jeremiah said, Oh, Reb Birnbaum, I’m awestricken; how can I say another word? And the teacher said: Enough, shut up; aren’t there bigger crooks in Judah for you to pick on than the inhabitants of this quiet village? People who taught you, and brought you up, and fed you in their kitchens … You won’t remember, he said, but the gym teacher here once saved your life. You were in your stroller, and the stroller started rolling downhill, and he broke into a sprint and caught the handle, while your father—who’s reading with such supreme concentration—stood there talking to someone about something of great import. Back then, too, he was engrossed in some idea. Today the gym teacher is a mountain of a man. All gym teachers end up overweight men in track suits—that’s what they call the mockery of fate, but you know that our gym teacher once held the Jerusalem record for the hundred-meter downhill sprint. Jeremiah said, And the whore? And the teacher said: Enough. You’re committing an awful injustice. She isn’t a whore—not every woman who lives alone is a whore, not every woman who decides not to get married is a whore—you can’t go on making such accusations, you’re no longer a boy of six. Pull yourself together: grow up. And, needless to say, Jeremiah, you should be the last person to rage against whores—people who live in glass houses and all that. Jeremiah blushed; the teacher was alluding to the ridiculous rumor about his family being related to Rahab the famous whore. His father had responded to that sort of talk with a snort of contempt, but Jeremiah’s sister had stubbornly insisted that it was true, and there was a touch of pride in her voice when she said as much. You better watch out, I’m a spectacled cobra, the Bible teacher said, and I have a poison tooth—I was born with it—and in any case it won’t be on account of your ridiculous accusations that I’ll bite you, but because you’re trampling all over the Bible. Shame, trampling on the Bible! someone screamed, and Jeremiah recognized Sophia the Bulgarian dental hygienist. How assiduously she’d polish his teeth, digging through mounds of tartar with her steel pick as she leaned against him, scrubbing away layer upon accumulated layer with her electric brush. The things you’re saying today are nicely formulated and well polished, said the Bible teacher, and in today’s world, where everything goes, and there are no literary standards to speak of, some inexperienced editor is bound to come along and publish your prophecies. He’ll copy them down from the papers and list you alongside the true prophets, like Isaiah and Samuel. Sure, such things have already happened. After all, they’ll set the seal on the Bible one of these days, lock the doors, and every scribbler wants to get in while there’s still time! This I won’t allow to happen. Jeremiah stared at his forehead but didn’t detect any blemish; perhaps he was a hidden tzaddik, a saint. And this saintly person told him: Sit down next to your father. If it weren’t for him, and the medical aid he provided to a number of neighbors all these years, and to my wife, too, we’d have thrown you off the train a long time ago.
A motorcyclist in a helmet revved alongside the light-rail car, swooped up close to the window without slowing down, and shouted out to Jeremiah, Thus says the Lord concerning the people of Anatot that seek your life, saying: Behold, I will punish them, the young men shall die by the sword, their sons and their daughters shall die by famine. And not even a vestige shall be left of them. For I will bring disaster upon the people of Anatot. Jeremiah wanted to implore: No, no, it isn’t necessary to bring famine and the sword to every math tutor and dental hygienist. Enough is enough—it’s only a squabble between neighbors. I can manage them fine without any disasters, without any crushing penalties. But the motor
cyclist cut away and vanished, and the light rail stopped at the Pisgat Ze’ev Center stop, and Jeremiah and his father pushed forward to be the first to leave the car and wait on the platform for the connection to Anatot. Jeremiah glanced up toward Mount Scopus, which stood above them to the southwest, and on whose slopes he’d climbed as a child, during his vacations, when his father would take him along to the hospital. He neither remembered nor knew about the incident of the stroller rolling down the street, and his father, as if reading his thoughts, said aloud, Yes. And a chill wind blew, and the night creatures sawed and chirped away in the patches of grass between the tracks and on the leaves of the few trees casting down shadows like parched refugees in the moonlight. And cats fixed their large eyes on the waning, late-Kislev moon. Their neighbors passed by them on their way to the platform to change trains and return home, and the math tutor stopped for a moment and said, I’m sorry, Jeremiah, I got carried away. Who knows, maybe there’s a bit of holiness in you after all. Everyone’s entitled to prophesy a little—who am I to decide? All I know is how to solve binomials and integral equations, and I’ve got to tell you, the tutor said, that I don’t understand everything, either; I know how to rattle off solutions like a parrot, and I know how to teach my pupils, he confessed, but I’ve never grasped what it all really means, what it stands for in reality, and even what that word really means—binomial. So forgive me. And you, too, forgive me, Hilkiah. You saved Orna from certain death, even though we were getting divorced. Why’d she have to go off with that Sidonian? What sort of place is Sidon, anyway? What’s she doing there, what?
The sound of a millstone and the light of a flickering candle rose from one of the homes, and Hilkiah took out a cigarette and offered it to his son, as he was accustomed to do at moments of crystalline nighttime purity. Though Hilkiah objected to smoking and generally refused to smoke, there were moments in which smoking turned into something otherworldly for him—not the beastly wheezing of nicotine addicts walking the streets and dragging on their cigarettes, oblivious to their own habit, as he liked to say. In the last five years, he must have offered a smoke to Jeremiah—who also hated smoking—three or four times at the most, always in moments of well-being and quiet. Hilkiah had a toothache, and he tried to divert the smoke to the tooth, curious whether the nicotine in the smoke would kill the germs. In recent years, the materials needed to fill cavities had gotten so expensive that only the well-heeled could afford the procedure. In fact, getting ill had almost become fashionable among the poor, though a poor sick person made no social sense at all. Being both poor and sick is a tiring affectation, explained Minister of Finance Baalzakar, railing against protesters: You stuffed your mouths with sweets, and now you want me to fill your cavities for you? Sorry, I don’t have any money to spend on your rotting teeth—in the future, be sure to floss.
Jeremiah’s parents lived in the last house in Anatot, which was farthest from the university and faced northeast, overlooking the hills and summits. At times, it seemed, thanks to a strange optical illusion—a fata morgana of sorts—that the Dead Sea extended right up to their doorstep. And the memory of hiking, one winter, from their home to the northern end of the Dead Sea came to mind, how they trekked, he and his sister and father, for some six hours, how light burst out from the clouds, coming and going, streaking the hills with blotches of shadow; they walked in the shadowy blotches, protected for the most part from the sun; by early afternoon, they beheld the sea, and it wasn’t an illusion, but the actual salty waters.
Hilkiah inhaled his smoke and told Jeremiah, I saw from the train window today the son of King Josiah, who was with you in your youth science club. And Jeremiah asked, baffled, What? And Hilkiah said, You know, what’s his name, Mattan, Mattaniah, Josiah’s son. Jehoiakim’s brother. And Jeremiah said: Ah yes, Mattaniah. I saw him today, too. But what’s that you said? He was with me in the youth science club? And his father said: Yeah, for sure, but he signed up with a made-up name to keep other children from teasing him. He was called something else in the club, something like Zahi, Zadok … no, Zedekiah. And the name Zedekiah sounded familiar to Jeremiah, and troubled him, and he said: Sure, the boy Zedekiah I remember … but what are you saying? Zedekiah from summer camp is Mattaniah?! Wow. I’m in shock. I didn’t make the connection; he was, like, a chubby, quiet kid … He had reddish hair—what happened to his hair? And how’d he get so burly, with all those muscles and tattoos…? And his father said: Maybe he’s been hitting the gym all these years to buffer that quiet little boy with a lot of macho racket. Anyway, tomorrow’s your trial. Don’t worry, I’ve already spoken to a lawyer; he’ll meet you in the morning at the entrance to the courthouse. He’s a patient of mine. If your life is going to depend on a lawyer, it’s always best to hire a lawyer who owes you his life … Otherwise things are liable to turn sour. Jeremiah said, What did we study there, at the youth science club? And Hilkiah said, Astronomy, geology … And Jeremiah raised his head for a moment, as though he could see the same stars he’d seen then, lying on his back in a field with the rest of the children.
He didn’t really succeed in calling up Mattaniah’s face as a child, so he imagined him as he appeared today—broad-framed, whether brawny or flabby was open to question; tattooed in cuneiform; sporting an Assyrian beard and an Assyrian hat; his large brown dog beside him—sitting there in the classroom at the youth science club, under the retractable ceiling, under the stars, which drifted in as at a planetarium. All of a sudden, he remembered how they’d walked together after one of the group activities and stopped at the entrance of an apartment building. They’d gone up to the intercom panel, and Mattaniah had pressed all the buttons, and the neighbors started blathering through the intercom speaker: Hello, hello, who’s that? Pincasi, what do you want? First things first: Did you pay your building maintenance fees? So why are you buzzing me on the intercom? I buzzed? You buzzed! What? Your garbage is still sitting there dripping on the first floor. Hold on, who’s that? What? Shulman? Shulman’s dead! Who said Shulman, I said Fichman—you deaf or what? Fichman? Didn’t he move to Sidon with the—? What? Who? Why are you buzzing me between two and four, asshole? I’ve told you a thousand times, I need to sleep. I buzzed? You buzzed! You piece of shit, I’m coming over in a minute with a cleaver to cut up you and your retarded daughters! Seven daughters you bore, and they’re all retarded and hideous, with horse teeth and the brains of a horse to match—how proud you must be! You’re going to cut me up? What daughters are you talking about? I’m a single widower—let me sleep! Let me sleep! A hundred and thirty shekels, don’t you go playing dumb! I’ll cut you up, imbecile, go back to your Ammonite slut and don’t come back. Building maintenance fees are more important than federal taxes, so when are you going to pay, when? That’s right, the fees have gone up, up, and up, don’t you go playing dumb; he always asks if the fee has gone up—enough already! Let me sleep, I need to sleep when I can, I’m a pilot, there’ll be a midair collision tomorrow because of you. Tomorrow? Tomorrow? Again, tomorrow? What about your boy and his ball, that doesn’t count? Might as well be bouncing right on my head! My daughter’s a lawyer, a real barracuda; she’ll gobble you up without salt—you just wait—and I’ll bet you don’t want anyone talking about that hose you’ve got running right into your kitchen, do you? Slut, slut, you called me a slut? Me? What about your wife, ho-ho-ho, does she really have to moan right into our ears every night? All the rent I pay just to listen to a porn soundtrack, and you have the nerve to ask me what the problem is? It stinks, that’s the problem, it stinks. You think you could get away with not paying your taxes for as long as you’ve been ignoring your maintenance fee? Your daughter doesn’t scare me; I’ll send over my Moabite handyman and, believe me, he’ll calm her right down, okay? I’m saying that it isn’t—
Jeremiah and Mattaniah stood there, Jeremiah recalled, and laughed wildly in front of the neighbors’ unending symposium, speaking to one another without knowing exactly to whom they were speaking, and then th
ey left, the two boys, while behind them the conversation continued, shouts and insults and bitter curses. Even when they boarded the bus to the center of town and parted there with their schoolbags, the conversation was probably dragging on, and who knows, Jeremiah reflected, looking at his father for a second, maybe it’s still going on to this day. Jeremiah almost laughed, and quietly entered the house with his father. The door was unlocked. Behind them, it resumed raining. His mother was watching the news on TV with the sound muted, and Jeremiah and his father stood there, dumbfounded at the sight on the screen of the city of Ashkelon in flames.
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