Muck

by Dror Burstein

  The ceremony under the bridal canopy was lovely. Tukulti held one of the canopy poles, and consequently the whole business slanted backward. The chief rabbi looked at the dog and bristled—Oy, where’s your yarmulke? Show some respect here. But there wasn’t any time to deal with it. The voice of joy and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the chief rabbi trilled. We are gathered here today to rejoice in the joy of the virgin Noa, daughter of Shoshanna and Jacob, with the choice of her heart, Mattaniah son of Hamutal and Josiah, may the memory of the righteous and holy be a blessing. I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine. All of Israel is responsible one for another, not including a third-party guarantee for a mortgage, hey? No one laughed at the joke, and that was a pity, since the silence only encouraged the rabbi to try out another: So why is the glass broken under the canopy? Someone said, In memory of the destruction, but the rabbi said: No, what destruction? We should ruin a wedding because of the destruction of the ten tribes, may the Holy One, blessed is He, revenge their blood? You think they’d ruin a wedding because of us? Still no one laughed, and the rabbi said, One breaks the glass on the principle of You break it, you buy it! He turned to Mattaniah, choking with laughter. And I’ll end with another joke, the rabbi said, turning to Noa: Why is a woman’s period called a period? Someone shouted, Knock it off, hurry up and get them married so we can go eat, and the rabbi said, Because mad-cow disease was already taken! And he couldn’t hold back—ha-ha, he gagged with laughter yet again at his own joke. But this time King Jehoiakim, too, laughed raucously: He’s great, that rabbi, he mixes spiritual authority with a sense of humor, he said to his attendants, who nodded. And the rabbi, convulsing with laughter under the canopy, had to excuse himself for a minute, and ran off to the adjoining room to rinse his face before returning and conducting the rest of the service without a hitch, even though every now and then he was seized by stubborn little bursts of laughter, when he couldn’t help remembering how funny he’d been. Then, seconds before the breaking of the glass, he tried his luck one more time—he really felt that he was in excellent form today—and, playing what he thought would be his trump card, asked the bride’s father: Sir, Pop, maybe you know the number one cause of divorce? Think hard, it’s an important question, under the circumstances. A young couple is standing here and waiting. And Jacob, Noa’s father, turned crimson, and was unable to speak a word. His wife told the rabbi, Let him be, he’s decreepit, he doesn’t know anything. And the rabbi said, I’ll tell you, the number one cause of divorce is marriage.

  A speechless silence fell on the crowd, like a hand grenade into a sniper’s nest, and then someone guffawed, and everybody glared at her. No one seemed to know who she was; it wasn’t clear who could have invited her. Maybe she was a friend of Mattaniah’s—that was probably the most likely answer—one of his erstwhile young female poet cronies. She squeezed her way through the crowd and stepped up to the dais and took the shrill mike from the rabbi and told the crowd—who were shrugging off a few last titters—Good evening to all the guests and to the young couple. The speakers screeched for a moment, as if a dagger had been plunged into the sound system. I would like, with your permission, to file a complaint, I want to complain. And the rabbi, who felt like thwacking her in the face, restrained himself and asked beguilingly, About what would madame like to complain? And she told the crowd, I want to report a rape. And the crowd shouted, Get her out of here, she goes around everywhere in the city with this same story, she doesn’t belong here, this is a wedding. But Mattaniah said: Leave her alone. Please, go ahead, but make it short, and then we’ll eat and celebrate, and you’ll have a good time, too. And the complainant said: I’m a woman who’s been beaten by the lash of misery. I’ve been driven, I’ve been led into the dark, there was no light there. He turned his hand against me, and then he ruined my blood and my flesh, and he crushed my bones. He shut me in the dark like I was dead; he fenced me off and shackled me. I screamed and pleaded, but he shut out my prayer. He shut out my prayer, he shut out my prayer, she said. He built me a brick wall; he screwed up my way. He left me wasted. He strung a bow in front of me and set me as a target for his arrow, he annihilated me with all the arrows of his quiver; everyone laughed at me, composed poems about me. He gave me to drink and … But the honorable rabbi said: Okay, that’s enough, we get the message. Will somebody remove this nice auntie from the stage, and let’s have a round of applause for Auntie, please. Someone did escort her down, to general applause, and Mattaniah, who wasn’t sure whether he and Noa were indeed married yet, asked the rabbi, Your Honor, when are we getting married? And the rabbi replied: We’re already in overtime. You were married even before the nutty woman got onstage to make a fuss. I know her; she also shows up sometimes in my office at the rabbinate. It’s a nightmare; it isn’t funny anymore. There are people who should be locked up for their own good. And the eunuch signaled, and the orchestra began playing Sephardic music, and the rabbi, who had to get to another wedding, began to make I’m-about-to-leave gestures so he would receive his envelope. But there was some sort of misunderstanding regarding who was responsible for the rabbi’s envelope: Mattaniah was under the impression that his brother had taken charge of everything, whereas Jehoiakim—with all due respect—didn’t think that he, of all people, ought to be the one to pay off the honorable rabbi. Consequently, the rabbi lost out on both fronts, and it transpired that the wedding ceremony, in retrospect, and against his will, had been conducted as a good deed for its own sake, to his great regret.

  Afterward, those who were equal to the task pounced on the food as if they’d just been released from a forced-labor camp, piling their plates upward and sideways. A woman screeched, You moron, leave some room, wait for the brain. And her husband replied, What, there’s brain? And the wife said: Yeah, quartered brain in marinated cabbage—didn’t you look at the menu? Why don’t you do a little reading for once? And the husband repeated, in exactly the same tone of voice, What, there’s brain?

  And Noa, who’d gone off to one side during the complainant’s speech, shouted, Mom, I think my water just broke, but no one heard her. She was the bride, but no one was paying any attention to her. She screamed, and her mother came up to her and said, Nonsense, that’s not possible, it’s too early. And Noa leaned on someone from the catering service, and there was a doctor there, and he crawled under her crinoline and stuck his head out and said: She’s giving birth. Make some room, and get rid of this tent of hers—I’m choking. The guests and Mattaniah, who was making the rounds, shaking hands, didn’t take any notice—everybody was famished, and the food was flowing freely. A kitchen knife was brought over, and the doctor covered Noa with a huge sheet.

  And thus Mattaniah and Noa’s child was born in the midst of their wedding festivities. The doctor delivered their son, and Jeremiah’s father, who saw it beamed live on TV, drew closer to the screen to get a better look, because the doctor who delivered the baby had studied with him, at the same medical school. Most of the guests continued to make their way to the buffet so as not to spoil their appetite with the bloody spectacle, or perhaps out of modesty, and King Jehoiakim, who saw the birth from a good ways away—his table laden with both sweet and savory—told Mattaniah, who was sitting there sipping beer from a giant goblet, all dressed in white, with long sleeves to hide his embarrassing tattoos, that there was no point in waiting eight days for the circumcision, having to bring all these guests back from all over the world: The rabbi’s already here; for the same price we’ll get both a wedding and a bris. Mattaniah had no idea what his brother was talking about, so the king told him: Your wife just gave birth. Finish your drink—no need to get excited. She’ll be giving birth plenty more times, your boy isn’t going anywhere, but your beer will definitely get warm. Still, Mattaniah got up and ran toward the bawling, and the king tottered along after him. Later, Mattaniah told his brother: Are you crazy, a bris now? It’s dangerous as hell. And his brother the king said, As though o
n the eighth day it won’t be dangerous.

  So they circumcised the boy two and a half hours after he was born, and they really did save a lot of money, as well as sparing the guests a lot of bother. After all, they’d shut down the entire city for the wedding, and if they’d been forced to close off the streets for the second time in a month, there probably would have been a revolution. After the fact, an official statement about the birth was dispatched to the papers, and people spoke in praise of King Jehoiakim and of his great piety and honesty, and reporters sought out Mattaniah to ask him what he was going to name the little newly circumcised boy. And Mattaniah stared in fright and didn’t know what to answer. He was sweating so profusely that his clothes stuck to his skin and his black tattoos showed through his clothes, leaving him streaked like a white leopard. And King Jehoiakim, from his place behind a heap of meat, decided without further ado, The kid’s name is Eliazar.

  19

  JEHOIAKIM URGED THE COUPLE to come and live with little Eliazar in one of the dozens of empty apartments in the palace compound, but Mattaniah enjoyed his apartment’s proximity to the desert and to the city and cheap restaurants, and for Noa it was near her stall.

  Eight days after the wedding, Mattaniah went out with Tukulti for a hummus in town. From their corner in the hummus joint, they noticed Jeremiah entering and making his way between the close-set chairs to eat. During the last couple of years, they’d barely seen him. And they weren’t the only ones. After the trial, even though he’d been acquitted, albeit tenuously, people chose to keep their distance. The acquittal was baffling, since the conviction appeared certain, and Jeremiah’s lawyer stood there in the courtroom and didn’t say a word—that was his tactic. Perhaps, if he didn’t build a defense of any sort, he thought, the court would show mercy, and who knows, perhaps he was right all along. He did, nonetheless, charge a fee for his silence.

  Needless to say, the verdict was by no means a tacit validation of the prophecies and warnings the defendant had spread. The court made its case on the grounds of freedom of speech, basing its decision on the famous Supreme Court ruling concerning the controversial newspaper Kol Ha’Am. The judge cited this legal precedent extensively—a case that had been cited so many times over the years that it was now worn as thin as a wooden doorknob or the heel of a thousand-year-old sandal—reading from his decision as follows: The test of reasonable doubt, to which we subscribe, does not require that the minister of the interior be convinced, in any case, that the public good is certain to be endangered by the publication of the aforementioned material … The determination of certainty in the sense of probability is not even to be necessarily interpreted as the determination of possible danger from the vantage point of time, that is to say in the sense of proximity. Even though taking into account that, as a result of its proclamation, a danger to the public good has been brought about, which is imminent—the judge read this, realizing that he didn’t understand a word of what he was saying, but pressing on nevertheless—strengthens the estimation that the said danger is indeed undoubtedly proximate, even as taking into account that the proclamation is liable to effect the public good only after considerable time lessens the possibility that such a thing would even occur. And yet, if the minister of the interior will be convinced, under the circumstances, that the proclamation will cause with near certainty serious damage to the public good, assuredly he will have no other recourse but to exercise the authority in his power according to clause 2(19)(a), even if he estimates that this is not a matter of causing said damage immediately, the judge concluded his explication.

  No one, it goes without saying, understood the circumlocutions of his argument, including the high priests and the prophets and the ministers of Judah who were present, and Jeremiah, too, stared blankly at the judge and tried to understand from his tone of voice whether he was to be killed that same day or set free. But the court decided in favor of the freedom of speech, since in any case the public was hardly likely to pay much attention to the words of yet another new prophet, or—truth be told—to any other prophet, either. Consequently, there was no lawful reason—or, alternatively, there was no real use—for putting this loser to death over a few words scribbled in the margins of a newspaper. Jeremiah saw Broch sitting in the courtroom taking notes. To his surprise, Broch didn’t stand as a witness for the prosecution. The judge peered at Jeremiah for a second and asked, with obliging impatience, Why have you prophesied in the name of the Lord, saying, This house shall be like Shiloh, and this city shall be desolate, without inhabitants? And Jeremiah replied, Because that’s what was told to me, and it’s exactly what will happen if a meaningful change doesn’t occur immediately. And the prosecutor reared up, as the saying goes, on his hind legs, and shouted, There you have it, even in the courtroom, Your Honor; I’m shocked! And the judge stared at a fixed point in the air above the prosecutor’s head and told that point: I suggest the counselor calm down. Whether the counselor is shocked or not doesn’t make an iota of difference from a legal point of view.

  Mattaniah read all of this in the paper. How did the children we once were grow up into such creatures? he now muttered to Tukulti, who sat at the foot of his table at the hummus joint and every once in a while ate a chunk of fresh, hot pita dipped in hummus that Mattaniah made sure to cool off by blowing on it. Mattaniah stroked the dog with his heel after removing his sandal, and peered at tiny Eliazar, asleep, all bundled up, in the stroller beside him, partially blocking the way. Jeremiah sat down next to the toilets, and Mattaniah noticed how the atmosphere in the restaurant had become a bit chilly. People continued to eat, but to all appearances without appetite; the waiters, who’d generally shout out orders to the kitchen, turned taciturn and nervous. The diners, one and all, stole glances at this prophet, whose trial had made him far too well known. Once, he’d stopped at the Bookworm on his way to the Cinematheque and was told, in so many words, that they would prefer it if he’d purchase his books from them by phone from now on, since they had some sensitive clients who objected to his presence. Well, what do you expect? No one wants to be told over their morning coffee that their children are about to be torn to pieces and that our bookshelves are to burn. So he stopped dropping in at the Bookworm, and he also stopped attending films at the Cinematheque from that day on, after someone in the audience said volubly—at the screening of a lengthy, melancholic Hungarian film in black and white—Not only is this movie depressing, but that guy sitting in the aisle seat there, you can be sure any moment now he’s going to give us a real mouthful, too!

  And so, little by little, Jeremiah retired into himself, and he asked to have the phone in his rented apartment disconnected. One day, he removed all his books from the apartment and handed them out in the streets of Nahlaot: Just take them. He kept only one book for himself, which he always carried with him in his shoulder bag. This was Leisure, by the poet known as Zelda. He couldn’t give it away. And he read the poems again and again, until the book fell apart, until the signatures separated and the poems got shuffled out of order. He’d walk around half the day with a passage from the book memorized, such as: Sail a craft / across the sea of fire. And he’d lean over to stare at a rose and realize how simple the poem was. Sail a craft. Craft a poem. And then: A chrysanthemum white as death / and quivering like longing— / you sing me plenty, Jeremiah said to the only groundsel on Zephaniah Street. He sat next to the flower and took out the pages and read to himself from Leisure. And when the wind nearly snatched the pages away, he entered a tailor’s shop and asked for needle and thread.

  Then he went to grab a bite to eat, and sat down furious, and was served fava hummus and a small salad and some lemonade, all without ordering, and two pitas were also set in front of him, in a wicker basket. He picked up a fork and paused, sensing that someone was staring at him, and he glanced to the side and his eyes met Mattaniah’s, and also took in the brand-new stroller. He waved meekly with his fork and, without making any sound, mouthed, Congratulations. And Mattan
iah shrugged his shoulders as if to say, Hey, it happens. At a nearby table, backgammon players were playing for money, shooting their dice against the corners of the board.

  Ever since his brother Jehoiakim the king paid obeisance to Babylon, several days after the destruction of Ashkelon, in Kislev seven years ago, and began paying a tax to Nebuchadnezzar—even though the King of Egypt hadn’t released him from his previous commitments—a number of small changes had taken place in the life of the nation. Among other things, Akkadian, which had always been an elective in school, became compulsory, and high-school students were the first to suffer under its burden. Teachers enticed them by claiming the language was similar to Hebrew and a lot easier than Egyptian, which really was a nightmare. They themselves, Jeremiah and Mattaniah, like thousands of their generation, had been obliged to learn hieroglyphics in school: These aren’t mere doodles, the teacher had insisted, these are Egyptian hieroglyphics! Tell me, children, the teacher had said, what is the difference between scribe and inscribe, between scribes and inscribes? Explain the sentence The scribe inscribes the inscription in the scriptorium, she demanded. Students failed Egyptian in droves. Even though they were able, with some difficulty, to identify the basic glyphs, such as hawk, leg, and hand, they were considered perfect morons when it came to the language of the southern empire. But several months after Jehoiakim’s subjection to Babylon seven years ago, schools set out to teach Akkadian-Babylonian alongside Egyptian, and it slowly and steadily ate away at the students’ brains, since they did indeed understand Akkadian better than Egyptian, if only because a number of Akkadian roots were similar to the Hebrew roots—but, then again, to say that our students succeeded in acquiring any degree of fluency or stylistic proficiency in that ancient Semitic language would be as far from the truth as the Nile is from the Euphrates. They could remember a few roots, sure, that was simple enough; but the declensions were a bit more complicated, not to speak of the wretched cases. Jeremiah, who was one of the few who chose to study Babylonian in junior high, recalled perfectly how in seventh and eighth grade he’d labored to decline the verb to ride the same as in Hebrew, and he muttered, over his plate of hummus, riding, as it were, over the wooden chair as he was about to eat, Rakabaku, rakabata, rakabati, rakib, rakabat, rakabanu, rakabatunu … The resemblance to Hebrew made the language a bit easier, but also complicated matters, since, beyond a certain point, the similarity merely led you astray. Failing his exams in Akkadian cuneiform cast a long shadow over its brother failure, his lack of success in Egyptian hieroglyphics. Mattaniah, however, who’d failed roundly in Egyptian, discovered that he had a special gift for Akkadian, and even represented the school in a national competition in the conjugation of Akkadian verbs, though he didn’t win first place. But you don’t study Akkadian, his brother the king reassured him, in order to come first in an idiotic competition like this one or any other.