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MATTANIAH BEN JOSIAH leaned over Tukulti-Ninurta, his large brown dog—who lay on his back with his paws bent and his eyes narrowed to slits—and slowly, gently scratched his belly. The mastiff gave himself up to this scratching and stroking, but Mattaniah’s hand was tormented by guilt and regret; and there were moments in which Mattaniah wanted to bite it, his own hand, since his dog clearly wouldn’t. You don’t deserve to be the vessel for such kindness. Everything you do is soaked in lies, every stroke. But the dog, it seemed to him, had shrugged off the past, had forgiven him for everything. Mattaniah glanced at the TV out of the corner of his eye. The camera zoomed up onto a helicopter, and it was obvious from its bold blue color that it was not an Egyptian but a Babylonian chopper. The chopper was blue, but Mattaniah thought that it was most probably some kind of mistake, for why should the Babylonians sack Ashkelon? It all had the tinge of a misremembered dream: wrong from the bottom up. Like a blue crow alighting on the full moon. Babylon? Babylon?! But the camera panned farther up, and more choppers were there, coming into sight, blue choppers bearing the emblem of a roaring lion, and soldiers in pointed helmets that Mattaniah recognized immediately as Assyrian, and after a moment he understood that they were nevertheless Babylonian helmets—these helmets were the spoils of war. They were wearing the headgear of their former enemies.
His manual of ancient Assyrian was on the low stool beside them, and Mattaniah patted his dog with one hand, feeling Tukulti’s ribs through the dog’s thin skin, while the other hand opened the book to the table of basic logograms, which he then went over out loud. Sun. God. Mountain. Man. Bull. He thumbed through the pages for a while, enunciating with some effort, Madatushu amhur. And translated, His tribute I received. And continued, Itishun amdahitz, I fought him. He repeated these phrases, endeavoring to improve his accent: Itishun amdahitz, madatushu amhur, I fought him and received his tribute. He stroked behind the dog’s ear and told him, kiddingly, Tukulti, Itishun amdahitz, madatushu amhur. And he added, Sha la iknushu ana niryah, Who does not surrender to my yoke … And the dog also glanced at the book and, as though reading from its pages, replied, Atama rabbi, and even translated, Only you are the big. And added, standing on all fours, Muhalik za’iri, Destroyer of enemies. Mattaniah froze, and then got up and fled in quick, short strides to the kitchen.
Henceforth, they’d sit together and speak Assyrian and Hebrew. For it turned out that the dog knew how to talk, and his Assyrian was better than Mattaniah’s. Yes, he’d known how to talk even before he was abandoned. Yes, many dogs know how to talk, he said, but they would never admit to it, since it was clear what would happen if they did: they’d be taken to a lab and would spend the rest of their lives under observation—that is, being tortured. We know all about you human beings by now, he said. A dog that knows how to talk knows how to think as well, and has enough brains to realize that a human being is about as likely to let go of a talking dog as a dog is likely to let go of his favorite leather sandal. Doggy not drop sandal! the dog said—that’s a well-known old Assyrian saw. He taught Mattaniah how to pronounce High Assyrian properly, as well as the Babylonian dialect. And Mattaniah asked his dog: If that’s the case, why are you talking to me? When I treated you so poorly, after all the good you’ve done me? And the dog said: Poorly? I can’t say anything especially terrible comes to mind. You were always good to me.
Noa came home, so they shut up. She showed Mattaniah a new jug she’d made that very day, a jug as black as night. Tukulti didn’t say a thing. Mattaniah noticed that it had been six hours since they’d last gone for a walk, so he strapped on the dog’s collar and clipped on his leash and gave Noa a long and fervent kiss, and she rummaged in her pocket till she got out a package of snacks for the dog that she’d bought for him in the market at the Potsherd Gate. Then she went to take a shower, and man and dog glanced at each other and went out for a stroll around the lower slopes, behind the darkened streets between the far end of Abu Tor and the beginning of Wadi Kidron. And they shared the tasty doggy snacks between them, and raised their eyes to the sickle moon and to the new star as they both stood a moment to relieve themselves on either side of a cypress.
PART TWO
JEHOIACHIN
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SEVEN YEARS AGO, he recalled, under this or that headline, there were these outsize photographs of Babylonian soldiers beholding the sea for the very first time, standing there facing the waves on the shoreline of the great Philistine city of Ashkelon, or swimming in those salty waves that so filled them with surprise. Their iron helmets were arranged in rows on the beach. Back at home, so far away, water was sweetness itself. Here they filled their mouths with seawater and spat it back out, laughing in disgust.
Jeremiah folded the sea that was in the paper that was in his memory, and the roaring of the surf ceased. He raised his eyes to the palace. New floors and buildings had been added in recent years, and additional canals branched out from its base, Venice-style, as it were, and at night, it was said, gondoliers had once plied about and sung to amuse the king and his retinue. In recent years, Jeremiah had made it his custom to show up at the palace every couple of days, like a postman, and shout into an intercom, each time to a different intercom at the door of a different building within the palace perimeter. This time, he went up to the tallest building in the compound, even though he didn’t know whether the king lived there, and pressed all the buttons, and again uttered the words he’d written down seven years ago in the margins of a newspaper, for which crime he’d been arrested and sentenced: Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness and his upper rooms by injustice, that makes his neighbor work for nothing, and gives him not his wages. You’re still alive, Jeremiah told himself; in other words, they let you go—after all, you were prepared to die back then, which let you put your mind at ease, thinking death would relieve you of your burden, just like Jonah thought he’d be free inside his big fish. You don’t need to prophesy in the belly of a whale, after all, or curse anybody, or preach. Inside a whale, it’s utterly quiet, among all those doomed sardines and who knows what other sorts of fish that were sucked inside to their death. Who says I will build myself a wide house and spacious chambers, Jeremiah went on into the intercom, and who cuts out windows for it and panels it with cedar and paints it with vermillion? Will you reign because you strive to excel in cedar? Did not your father eat and drink and do justice and righteousness? Then it was well with him. He judged the cause of the poor and needy—then it was well. Is not this to know me? says the Lord. But your eyes and your heart—Jeremiah’s lips almost grazed the plastic mesh—are only on dishonest gain and on shedding innocent blood and oppression and violence, to act swiftly. Therefore, thus says the Lord concerning Jehoiakim the son of Josiah, King of Judah, they shall not lament for him, Ah my brother! or Ah my sister! They shall not lament for him, Ah lord! or Ah his glory! He shall be buried with the burial of an ass, dragged off and cast forth beyond the gates of Jerusalem.
Jeremiah struck the mesh with the heel of his hand and gave up. Pathetic, he thought. Ah my brother … Ah my sister … The words bounced back like an echo. Ah sister. Seven years, seven years spewing out words in vain. Each day and its prophecy, each day and its dreams. A gardener, a man from Cush, watered the flowers below in the compound, along the length of the Venetian canals that were now empty, and Jeremiah saw him bending over and attentively sprinkling drops of water on the palace’s vibrant violet petals. And once again a fire began to burn in him, and he took out one of his scribbled-down prophecies, and he opened his mouth and turned to the blue and red potted flowers next to the intercom, and he told the flowers, Stand at the crossroads, and ask for the old paths: Where is the good way? And walk in it, and find rest for your souls. Rest—for your souls, he told them in all seriousness, and he wondered whether what he was preaching to the king’s flowers wasn’t in fact meant for himself, only himself, whether he wasn’t the one seeking some form of solace for his soul. Only him, nobody else
, all this prophesying nothing more than an interior monologue. Even if he shouted, he wasn’t ever going to be heard, because his words all sounded so different outside his own skull. The flowers nodded their heads in the breeze. Beetles crept in and out of the corollas.
From where he was standing on the hilltop, Jeremiah could see below, in the soccer stadium, troops of workers preparing the largest bowl of hummus in the world, for the upcoming Middle East–wide hummus competition; the newspapers had been reporting on their progress for the past month, and cement mixers were pounding and mashing and pouring enormous quantities of chickpea paste into a bowl that had once been the dome of an observatory, which the king himself had ordered dismantled. Why on earth gaze at the stars? Night after night, it’s just the same old thing up there—and the moon, look, spare us, waxing or waning, enough, we get the idea. The financing of all this astronomy and astrology and who knows what sort of idolatry wasn’t going to come from the king’s treasury … The Lord’s anointed suddenly turned all sanctimonious. I want this dome, and that’s all there is to it. Tomorrow.
The cement mixers backed up a long incline to a ramp that had been placed around the bowl, and steadily poured in thousands of liters of freshly ground hummus, while a representative from The Guinness Book of Records, who’d arrived especially from Hattusa, filled out his report, and every once in a while leaned over the bowl with a spoon whose handle was as long as two broomsticks in order to sample the dip, deep in concentration.
The intercom was sparkling clean. Blank paper slips appeared in the slots reserved for the names of the nonexistent residents, and the board was still entirely covered with a thin sheet of plastic, which Jeremiah had a hard time removing. Behold, I will make my words in your mouth fire, and this nation wood—and it shall devour them. When he first heard those words, he’d thought of a dragon. Now he thought: What fire, what woods, what dragon in your head? A man stands in front of an unconnected intercom and presses this button, that button, and talks to a wall day after day, week after week. Prepares his speech at home and edits and corrects and rehearses and then shows up at the palace to shout into an intercom that isn’t working. Consider your situation. He stepped back several paces and sat on a rock. A beetle landed on his head, but he took no notice. He understood that the king had such extensive vertical security that there was no need for sentinels on the ground, much as a falcon has no need for guards when it raises its nest to the skies. Above him rose huge towers connected by an impressive network of bridges and vertical and horizontal elevators and cable cars, in order to minimize the needs of its residents, members of the royal family and their servants and slaves.
And he remembered Mattaniah, who grew up in the palace, which hadn’t yet relocated to the Holyland but was still back in the Old City, and how once, when they were children, Jeremiah had been invited to visit—that is, visit the palace—but Jeremiah was frightened, he simply got scared, and although they’d arranged to meet, he forgot, as it were, and didn’t show up. They met at the youth science summer day camp in Givat Ram; Mattaniah would arrive every morning, escorted by two Egyptian bodyguards, and one guard would hang around the entire time and watch over the boy and his conduct from a distance. One time, after some kid roughed Mattaniah up—as will happen with boys, nothing too serious—the offending child was caught in a stranglehold within seconds by the Egyptian guard, and no one ever bothered Mattaniah again. Using the smattering of Egyptian that the guards and governesses and cooks had taught him, little Mattaniah had shouted at the guard to relax his grip, since the man had almost choked the attacking boy to death, not to mention the astronomy teacher who’d rushed to the scene holding an inflatable moon. Jeremiah didn’t know what to make of the term puppet king, which his sister had used then, nor did he know that Jehoiakim, who was soon crowned and promoted in the papers as a new David or a new Solomon, was in effect Pharaoh in disguise, a sort of hand puppet behind which wiggled the Pharaoh’s own fingers, which only said what Pharaoh told it to say, and only moved its fingers and its head when Pharaoh moved his own. Now Jeremiah thought how strange it was that Mattaniah had indeed loved hand puppets and assorted marionettes, and how, at the youth science club, he’d sometimes sneaked out to go next door and take part in the youth puppet theater instead—accompanied, needless to say, by that Egyptian man-mountain tattooed in hieroglyphics, his permanent shadow.
But your eyes and your heart are only on dishonest gain and on shedding innocent blood and oppression and violence, to act swiftly. And I, Jeremiah reflected, am I not to act swiftly? Everyone’s in a rush to do something. What better metaphor for the entire human race than a marathon? All and sundry running in their own lanes, the fast and the slow, parallel to each other, but there are so many lanes, and one can’t always see the competition. And then he saw an enormous Olympic stadium of sorts, and its racetracks, and on them he saw kings, kings running around and around: the King of Babylon, Nabu-Kudurri-Usur, whose name was corrupted by the Jews to Nebuchadrezzar or Nebuchadnezzar, and whose appearance Jeremiah knew only from the newspapers; and Pharaoh Neco, who, if the rumor was true, was armless and legless, and consequently had to run along borne on the back of his servant like a royal schoolbag on the back of a child; and Jehoiakim, King of Judah, and his brother the missing Jehoahaz, and also Josiah the dead king, too, dragged along in a coffin, blood sloshing over his chariot. And that wasn’t all—it seemed that more and more kings were running in Jeremiah’s vision: Assyrian kings in an unending column, nearly filling their entire lane; and the kings of Elam and Media, too, in the farther and wider orbits; and Menashe, Mattaniah’s great-grandfather; and Ammon, Mattaniah’s grandfather; and Ahaz and Hezekiah and Ahab and Adonijah and others still, and Jehoiachin, too—Jehoiakim’s eighteen-year-old son, who’d been living for a decade now in Vienna—even he was running there. As Jeremiah watched him running, he suddenly knew, knew for sure, that he’d be seeing him in the flesh soon enough. And he himself, Jeremiah, was there on the track now, too, walking at a rapid pace, not really running, for the poets, young Mattaniah among them, were also in the race, running as one body and at more or less the same speed, one behind another, all sharing the same track, and Broch was jogging alongside them, keeping time. And there were more and more lanes there, for his parents, and his grandfather the priest, who loved to speak over and over again about Evyatar the High Priest, who was perhaps the first in their family line, and about David. And farther back were the tribal heads and the patriarchs and Adam and Eve, who were now there, too, running with a limp after they’d been expelled from Eden, on the farthest-flung lanes of the stadium—like comets circling some solar system—with the serpent hot on their heels.
Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness and his upper rooms by injustice, Jeremiah repeated, unable to keep his mouth shut. Seven years ago, he had been tried on account of these words, but the building that was built by unrighteousness continued to be built both up and across, skyward and sideways, and the king up on who knew which floor marveled at his sliding window, which opened at the touch of his fingertip onto a grand view of the Holy Temple. He could slide open the window and see whatever was going on out there, not to mention the flat screens in his chambers on which he could observe the people worshipping up close. He even had cameras installed in the Holy of Holies for his private use, although he was far from interested in religious matters, a complete bore. As for animal sacrifice, he couldn’t bear the sight or sound or smell of it, though the stench and the screams reached him even here, thanks to his screens. He preferred his meat grilled and silent, thank you, without blessings and Levite hymns, and without any ritual sprinkling of the animal’s blood. When Jeremiah was tried for what he’d written in the newspaper—that is to say, what he’d scribbled in the margins of one particular article—the king was watching the trial on one of his flat screens, even though he wasn’t particularly interested. Such things happened every week—trials of prophets and traitorous army officers and spies—an
d who could keep track of them all?
But now Jehoiakim was standing and listening quizzically to his intercom receiver and the words of prophecy that were erupting from it, which rather resembled the prophecies delivered by one of the people whose trials he hadn’t paid much attention to, several years back—and maybe they were being spoken by that very same prophet. The prophet who had stood trial, all the while repeating his tired and irrelevant mantras, such as: Amend your ways and your doings and hearken to the voice of the Lord your God, blah-blah-blah, and how it was a good thing God had changed His mind about the calamity that He’d said He would bring upon you, blah-blah-blah. And as for me, Jehoiakim remembered, the prophet had said, Behold, I am in your hands, do with me as seems good and right in your eyes. And Jehoiakim had shouted, seven years ago, at the plasma screen: Hey, great, so let’s hang him and that’s that, you said so yourself, smart-ass. And Jeremiah, as if in reply to the king’s bellowing, which of course no one could hear in the courtroom, had said quietly, Only know for certain that if you put me to death, you will bring innocent blood upon yourselves, and upon this city, and its inhabitants. And the courtroom had fallen silent, and Jeremiah had said—his voice suddenly as innocent and thin as the voice of a child, one of the judges thought, a man by the name of Ahikam—For in truth the Lord has sent me to you to speak all these words in your ears. In truth, the king thought. Enough already, really. Come on! Swat the fly, he’s annoying the horse.
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