Later, Jeremiah and Mattaniah walked in silence, side by side, down the tiny streets of the neighborhood of Baka, Jeremiah pushing the infant’s stroller in front of him while Mattaniah held Tukulti’s leash. Jeremiah had left the hummus joint first, Mattaniah shortly after him; Jeremiah understood that Mattaniah preferred that they not be seen leaving the joint together. But he was already accustomed to such conduct, and in the isolation that was growing deeper inside him every day, even an attenuated sort of contact was more than satisfying. Mattaniah went over what Jeremiah already knew from the newspapers, that only last week he’d married the woman from the jug stall whom Jeremiah had introduced to him, so to speak, several years ago, and that they had an infant boy whom he’d named Eliazar. Jeremiah had read about the wedding in the papers, like everyone else. Jeremiah inquired about Mattaniah’s dog’s health and told him that he thought he’d seen him once, years ago, loping along unattended in the streets. Mattaniah said, That’s impossible—there must have been someone trailing not far behind. And Mattaniah told Jeremiah that his wife, Noa, was about to leave her pottery stall near the Potsherd Gate and open a large factory—not far from Anatot—for artisanal jugs, which she planned to export. And Jeremiah said, They’re crowding the desert with factories and roads; it’s awful. And Mattaniah replied: Urban development is unavoidable. We can’t just keep to the same tiny City of David from six hundred years ago; times have changed. Besides, the desert is a desert—it’s empty. And Jeremiah said: The desert isn’t death, it only looks like death from a distance. The desert is swarming with life, with sounds, and all year round, not only in the fall and winter. I saw the shadow of an eagle on the boulders and crags, he said—or, rather, he wanted to say. My wife, Mattaniah said, when I first met her, was producing five to ten jugs a day. You smashed one of them back then, I remember. Today she gives a sample to her production manager and they put it into production and they then turn out thousands of duplicates a day. And Jeremiah said: Do you remember our astronomy teacher? How he was always watching for shooting stars? And Mattaniah said, I remember that as a child I didn’t understand what that meant—shooting stars—how could a star shoot? And Jeremiah said, He always walked around with a Band-Aid on his finger, that’s what I remember about him.
Above them, in broad daylight on Reuven Street, rose the nocturnal dome, filled with the stars they’d seen at night in Givat Ram, back in the youth science club, with the teacher who was maybe twenty years old but seemed like an old man to them. And Mattaniah, in the growing dark, asked: Are you still doing your … prophesying? Or are you over it? Jeremiah was silent. The new star was above them, and Mattaniah said, He’s probably staring at that thing from dawn to dusk. Jeremiah asked, Who?, and Mattaniah said, Our old teacher. Though I heard he’d been injured. And that his injury was somehow connected to the sun, if you follow me. And Jeremiah said, as though answering a different question: You know what my father told me? He was a doctor at Hadassah on Mount Scopus, I’m sure you remember. He was born into the priestly caste—which means I was, too, I guess—but decided not to work in the Temple. He wanted to study medicine and become a physician. And I asked him how come he gave up the priesthood, which is, after all, a way to be closer to God. He told me: I didn’t give it up; medicine is as close to God as anyone can get. Doctors are priests of the Almighty, and nurses, too, and veterinarians. That’s why we wear white. There’s only one commandment in this religion of mine, and that’s to prevent suffering, to save lives. The alleviation of pain is a prayer; every suture is a form of redemption, not only for the patient and not only for the physician. The world is flesh, and every wound is also a wound in the flesh of the world. Satan dwells in that very body, not only in the flesh of an individual man or animal. From our home in Anatot, my father would walk every day to the hospital, scrambling up Mount Scopus on foot. That’s a good bit of walking, a good bit of strenuous climbing. That was his sport, he told me, climbing was for him also like prayer. In order to take one stride up this hill, he said, you need the entire globe under you, you press the soles of your feet on top of the entirety of the globe, and the globe itself presses on every inch of empty space around it, and in this way you ascend, in this way you slowly advance. Each step forward is a rung, my father said. And I never understood. Everything is a prayer, Jeremiah said, and now it wasn’t clear anymore whether he was quoting Hilkiah, his father, or speaking for himself. I don’t have to slaughter sheep in the Temple and chant songs of praise there. To ascend the hill, to sit in front of a patient, that’s enough for me. The hospital is the true Temple; that’s the only place where you’ll find prayer filling every moment. The prayers of the sick and the prayers of the doctors and the prayers of the women giving birth and of the newborns themselves. My father taught me a prayer, Jeremiah said: Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed, save me and I shall be saved, for you are my praise. For I will restore health unto you and I will heal you of your wounds. He’d say it before every operation and to every patient, countless times a day. Not until years later did I realize that he was asking to be able to heal himself and not the sick—he was asking to be healed in order to be able to heal them in turn. And Mattaniah said, That’s odd. I know it in the plural: Heal us, save us. And he gazed down at his sleeping infant and repeated the prayer tenderly and said: He was circumcised right after his birth. I was sure he’d die from it, but I couldn’t stop the mohel.
They rested for a moment in the shade of a fig tree, and Jeremiah picked some figs, rubbed them against his shirt, and offered a soft, ripe fig to Mattaniah. They savored the taste, and ants converged on the stems they flung to the ground. Mattaniah said, At least admit that you were wrong then: The Babylonians didn’t reach us. Ashkelon isn’t Jerusalem. Jerusalem is something else altogether, you’ve got to admit that. Not some Philistine city on the coast. I’ve never been to Ashkelon, did you know that? And I’ve never seen the sea. I’ve also never been to Babylon. When I was a child, I dreamed of going to Assyria. Now people say that Assyria’s in ruins, that Nineveh is a no-man’s-land, that owls hoot there amid the rubble, and the trees—that the trees there weep, that the stones weep, too. I know, I don’t believe it, either. I don’t believe it. Assyria isn’t going to disappear overnight. A new king will rise, and they’ll sort things out. And Jeremiah said, I suddenly remembered, when we were children in the club and we slept in Givat Ram the night we went stargazing, you told me there was an owl on a tree and it wanted to swoop down and gobble you up. Mattaniah blushed and said: Back then I had all sorts of fears; it isn’t impossible, although I don’t remember that. They’d send me everywhere with those Egyptian bodyguards. They couldn’t protect me from the owl. I think maybe I made it up, because I didn’t want to feel so overprotected. And Jeremiah recalled that he’d told Mattaniah, Yes, you’re right, it’s in the tree, and it’ll fly down and peck open your head. But he held his tongue and didn’t say a thing now, wondering if Mattaniah remembered.
The fig tree provided shade, and the fruit was ripe to eat. Mattaniah bit into his fig and said, Figs are a miracle, how the earth produces sugar, a sort of honey from rock. You know, there are seven hundred and fifty different kinds of fig, and each kind of fig has a specific kind of wasp that pollinates it, Mattaniah said, so it’s the wasp that produces the honey we just ate, the wasp is its foster parent, and the rock is its foster parent, the rock into which the fig tree sends down its roots, and even the bird nested in its branches. Jeremiah, who held his fig between his index finger and thumb, said: But who tells the wasp to come and pollinate the fig? And who tells the roots to grope after the water that’s hidden below? And Mattaniah said: The fig speaks to itself. After all, your fingernails grow without anyone’s asking them to do so. It just happens by itself, and this by itself, that’s the real God. And Jeremiah said, Maybe you’re right, who knows, even though he knew for a certainty that this was quite wrong—but no one takes care not to harm the fig tree, or anything else, because of this by itself. If the tree is
by itself, then everything is by itself—the wasps’ nest, too, and the people who eventually uproot the tree. I saw demonstrators standing around a tree once, Mattaniah said. They told the tree, You are our father. The city wanted to cut it down in order to put up a new traffic light. I remember the hillside palace, Jeremiah said. Once there were foxes and porcupines up there. Now they’ve uprooted everything, everything; they’ve built there on top of everything. They’re uprooting every tree in Jerusalem, drying up every flowering garden, and paving it over to be a parking lot or road. And Jeremiah felt that thing, the whispering ember, flare up within him and form a mouthful of words. Does it seem appropriate to you for the king to take over an entire neighborhood? It’s like Metropolis, but this isn’t fantasy, this isn’t a movie, this is reality—they’ll destroy all of Jerusalem this way, building over it. And Mattaniah said: Look, prehistoric cave-dwellers thought that straw huts were destroying the scenery, okay? After all, the king didn’t build Holyland, he only occupied something that was already there and made some minor additions and repairs and added some nice scenic canals. In fact, no one wanted to live there; people were scared it would collapse after the earthquake. But it didn’t collapse, so he occupied buildings that were already almost completely abandoned, and renewed the whole area. I read the accusations against him. It’s easy to criticize, but even a king needs to live somewhere, too, right? And he can’t live in a three-room apartment without an elevator in Kiryat Yovel. Jeremiah asked, When you’re king, will you live there, too? And Mattaniah said: You know perfectly well that I’ll never be king. He’ll pass on the crown to his son, my nephew, Jehoiachin, and Jehoiachin will pass it to his son, who hasn’t been born yet, and that will be the axis. I’ll end up like my older brother Yochanan, herding sheep in Australia. History is full of brothers of kings who ended up herding sheep. A king’s brother isn’t half a king, you know. It’s like the lottery—almost doesn’t count. I once guessed five numbers out of six, Mattaniah said, but so many other players also guessed as many correctly that the prize was maybe one hundred shekels; I didn’t even bother going down to the kiosk to redeem my ticket. And what’s strange is that the lottery people insisted—they sent me all these notices, they kept pestering me to go over and collect my cash prize. But I stuck to my guns and ignored them.
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THE KING WAS ABOUT TO LEAVE for the Largest Bowl of Hummus Competition ceremony when Minister of Defense Baalgezer entered, accompanied by his flock of armed adjutants. The royal glass of juice on the table was nearly empty, and the straw sticking out of it listed over, as if waiting for a mouth to come put a slurping end to the last drops. The king hoped it was something truly urgent: Because, as you’ll see on my schedule here, Baalgezer, I’ve got to head out and unveil our historic bowl of hummus. I’m sure I don’t have to explain to you the implications, tourism-wise, of winning this competition. Would you like some orange-carrot juice, Baalgezer? You yourself are a kind of juice, he told the minister of defense, who was the terror of the kingdom and its neighbors: A blend made up of two different juices, in fact. On the one hand, defense juice, and on the other, envelopes-stuffed-with-cash juice. Like this healthy concoction here. Here—finish my juice for me, go ahead and slurp it up in good cheer, the king said. And the minister of defense said, Thank you, but I’m not thirsty. He isn’t thirsty, Jehoiakim roared, but he’s plenty thirsty for cash, always. No, Baalgezer, you’ll drink the king’s juice whether you’re thirsty or not. You’ll drink, moreover, with the king’s own straw, mouth to mouse. Otherwise, your head and your neck will part ways by daybreak, I swear on my life, the king said, and with lightning speed drew a switchblade. Call on your Lord Baal from the guillotine; we’ll see if he can save you, if he’ll deliver you.
And there was a eunuch present, a bit of a pedant, and he dared step forward and said, My king, if I have found favor in Your Majesty’s eyes, as I pray I have, may I be allowed to point out that Your Royal Highness has committed a minor error? Silence. And then the king approached the eunuch and said, Error? And the eunuch said: A minor mistake. Half a mistake—no, an eighth. And the king asked, astonished, What sort of mistake, for instance? And the eunuch said, Merely a matter of phonology. Nothing hysterical. Nothing hysterical? the king asked. Sure, nothing hysterical, replied the eunuch. The king said: And so what’s the error? We’re all in suspense here. And the eunuch said, My lord said, with regard to the minister of defense, that he should drink the juice from the king’s own straw, mouth to mouse. So? asked the king, barely able to restrain himself. The eunuch said, You turned the latter, dative mouth into a mouse, a common slip, substituting a sibilant s for the more difficult-to-pronounce palatal th, which requires a lingual retroflex. The king held his peace. The eunuch hastened to clarify: It’s not a serious error, but when it comes from the king’s own mouse—that is, mouth—it grates upon the ear. Thus I felt it incumbent upon myself to offer my most deferential correction, in order to avoid a situation in which we might find the general populace patterning its mode of speech after the king’s, and so spreading the error despite themselves. King Jehoiakim grabbed the eunuch by the neck and said, From mouth to mouse, was it? And the eunuch chuckled and said, No, again you’re making the same error, it’s from mouth to— But he didn’t manage to complete the necessary correction, for the king plunged his switchblade deep into the eunuch’s arm. And he told Baalgezer, Now break a chair over his head. No, not this chair.
The minister of defense did as he was told, and then he picked up the royal juice glass and in one sip on the straw siphoned up the remaining juice, and even went so far as to slurp any remains from the sides of the glass, delighting the King of Judah and his servants. And the king said, How pleasant to see a person who knows his place; how pleasant to see such a resolute head bow and kiss the king’s feet. And the minister of defense said, True, and, still holding the king’s black straw, added, By the way, before my lord leaves for the stadium, he may want to know the reason I’ve come. The king said, Hurry up, spit it out, son of Zeruiah, and the minister of defense reported that some nonentity—oh, nobody too important, some Babylonian factotum, to be more precise, some low-ranking, subordinate factotum, a sort of deputy’s undersecretary, a nobody named Nebuchadnezzar or Nebuchadrezzar—is on his way, is on his way, tut-tut, on his way, and not on his way to just anywhere, mind you, but, rather—to be even more precise!—he’s heading your way, my lord. Yes, he’s already rolling down the autostrada, slowly, slowly, very slowly—which is to say quickly, I mean quite quickly. You can see his black Mercedes advancing; we’ve picked up a signal from it, thanks to our excellent spies, and he’s making excellent time. We calculate he’ll be here within the next couple of days. Hence, if I have found favor in your eyes, it might be best that you keep your royal switchblade open and at the ready. And one of the minister’s adjutants pressed a button, and the highway in question appeared on one of the king’s large flat-screens, down which a small green point could be seen moving slowly toward the city from the northeast. But why let it get to you? the minister of defense said. My lord is undoubtedly in a hurry to get to the soccer stadium and taste some of his hummus, am I right? No, no, there is absolutely no cause for alarm, Your Highness. I’d say that it’s more than possible that the sizable army this wholly unimportant fellow is bringing with him is entirely unarmed—for all we know, it’s just Babylon’s Olympic team, am I right? And the minister of defense set the royal juice glass down on a copy of the book of Deuteronomy that was lying there on top of a napkin. Jehoiakim, in order to shut him up, threw a hardback at the minister’s head. It was a bulky Akkadian dictionary.
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