Having bought himself a moment of silence, the king collapsed on one of his beanbags. What did you say? He’s making his way here? How do you know here? Maybe he’s going somewhere else? There’s no lack of kingdoms around. What does he want from me? Whaaat? Maybe it isn’t me he’s after. And, like a runaway train, the king’s brain pounded on at breakneck speed: It’s happening, it’s finally happening. For years he’d prepared himself for this. And there was also a sense of relief, to be honest, as he felt the prolonged uncertainty of the past seven years coming to an end, though it was relief mixed with a dreadful fear surging within him, like sewage pouring through—like pipes filled with—like a sink blocked by—well, like a cistern collapsing on itself.
* * *
SEVEN YEARS EARLIER, several days after the destruction of Ashkelon, Jehoiakim had surrendered to Nebuchadnezzar by proxy. Babylonian accountants made all the necessary arrangements within a matter of minutes, and money began to be transferred via secure electronic transfer to Nebuchadnezzar’s coffers on a monthly basis, starting on the fifteenth of the month of Tevet of that year. (Ashkelon was destroyed in the month of Kislev, so that people should see and beware, and in the following month, Tevet, the first payments were sent over just as the first rains fell.) It’s far easier, for us as well as for you, the Babylonian accountants told their fellow accountants in Jerusalem, to rely on bank transfers for everything. There was no limit to the generosity of these Chaldean accountants, they were real gentlemen, their local counterparts thought—wolfing down shawarma and hummus at lunch, and more than once managing to dip their ties in tahini or olive oil, to their lasting disgrace. It will also be convenient for us, as well as for you, if we link the sum you owe to what we call a currency basket, so that fluctuations in the market don’t cause us any confusion at a later date. On account of these taxes levied by Babylon, Jehoiakim was obliged to take out a gray-market loan with some disreputable financiers in Sidon. And what assets exactly did he offer as collateral to the Sidonians? Best if you don’t know. Within five years, Jehoiakim knew, the time would come to pay back the secondary debt to the Sidonians, who were always—they, too—friendly and generous, at least until installments started coming in late. At which point they would hire mercenaries from Assyria and proceed to take what was theirs.
Anyway, Jehoiakim started paying taxes to Babylon after the destruction of Ashkelon, which was seven years ago now; and the Babylonians, for their part, maintained a barely felt diplomatic presence in Judah, and shut their eyes to the unfortunate fact that Jehoiakim was also paying taxes to the Egyptians. His was a deep enough purse so he could be taxed doubly, and so what if Jehoiakim passed on the fruits of the labors of his subjects to two instead of one of the kingdoms? What, should the Egyptians suffer because Babylon is greedy for more? shouted Minister of Finance Baalzakar. He knew perfectly well, and said as much in his speeches, that whoever pays taxes should be thankful for the privilege, since in the realpolitik of the region only the dead were exempt from taxation, and thus he who pays taxes—well, there’s no better proof that he’s still alive and kicking.
So, for three years, Jehoiakim had paid both Babylon and Egypt, but after those three years were up, he decided to cancel the automatic monthly transfer to Babylon. One telephone call to his personal banker and the matter was settled. The immediate cause of this interesting strategy was the reliable report the king had received of Babylon’s defeat in its ongoing efforts to conquer Egypt. The Babylonians wished to drink from the waters of the Nile, as had Assyria in its day, but apparently they didn’t properly estimate the difficulty of crossing North Sinai—oh, so much sand, there was no end to it—and then there was a sneak attack upon their west flank. Jehoiakim took a gander at the political map of the region and reasoned that, after such a defeat, the King of Babylon wouldn’t have the patience to attend to one negligible red line in his ledger regarding a kingdom of relatively minimal significance, and so he stopped the payments and used the money to pay off the interest on his loan from the Sidonians, to lower those murderous installments before they came due, and above all in order not to have to cede any Judean property.
And there was at the time a Jew who came to him with a scroll covered in dire warnings, who tried to persuade the king not to take such an audacious step, which would surely be interpreted, said this same Jew—maybe he was a prophet: go figure—as a patent sign of sedition against the King of Babylon, with far-reaching implications. Better that the Sidonians should claim title to Judean assets if the alternative was burning the assets to the ground, the prophet claimed, but Jehoiakim simply grabbed the prophet’s scroll and flung it into the blazing fire in his winter quarters, which were located in the palace compound, and the scroll went up—unsurprisingly—in flames. It was the ninth month, which is to say Kislev, and it was cold in Jerusalem, as was usual for that time of year. No miracle occurred—the scroll could not be recovered from the flames—which only proved, or so the king told the bearded prophet, that the contents of said scroll were not worth their ink and paper. I’m the king, I burn ten scrolls like yours before breakfast, Jehoiakim told the prophet, whose name he forgot as soon as the man had been presented to him: Barely a day goes by without my being sent a new prophecy, siding with me or against me, siding with the gentiles or against them, and let’s not even talk about the doomsday prophecies and the prophecies of consolation. I’m the king; as far as I’m concerned, it all goes right into the fire. I don’t play favorites.
Jehoiakim believed with all his heart, as did many others, that the day was not far distant when a new king, a descendant of the kings of Assyria, would once again take hold of both reins, the Tigris and the Euphrates, and the old order would be re-established, and it would be made clear at last whom the kingdom had to contend with, which is to say: Assyria would reign over the entire world, its boot pressed firmly on the necks of all nations. Difficult, oppressive, costly, sure; but permanent, clear, and predictable. Not like now. Anything was preferable, frankly, to the current bewildering, explosive situation. Babylonians? Who’d ever heard of them until yesterday? Pipe down, Jehoiakim wanted to shout at them, pipe down and let us live. Assyria was the only real empire, he mused. The rest—counterfeits.
Four more years went by. The tension in the days following the cancelation of the monthly transfer was unbearable; the king had no choice but to take half a sleeping pill each night. He was certain that an hour after the next payment was due the phone would ring, the Babylonian number showing up on the king’s caller ID buzzing like the lights in a cell on death row. The next day, he left the palace and looked up at the sky to see whether a blue assault chopper was already making its approach. Every glass of water was as suspect to the king as a goblet full of green poison, and in each and every meatball he imagined he could smell a pellet of cyanide. His only consolation came when he checked his bank account and discovered there the sum that he’d saved, accumulating month by month, thanks to the cancelation of his scheduled transfers to the Bank of Babylonia. And, really, what sort of contribution had the Babylonians ever made to Judah? They didn’t pave a single sidewalk, they didn’t asphalt a single road, construct a single reservoir—nothing, zilch. It was a protection racket, nothing more. We’re talking gangsters here. I couldn’t go on with it anymore—it wasn’t fair, it was simply outrageous. Burning cities down in order to get us scared, then showing up to issue threats—his voice rose to a screech. Robbing me, picking my pockets! he said over a crackling phone line to his son, the musical prodigy who’d left town at the age of eight to study music at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and later settled permanently in Vienna.
And from his apartment in Vienna, this son, Jehoiachin, kept track, of course, of the goings-on back in the kingdom where—he had to admit—he’d been born, although his childhood felt so distant now that that old kingdom seemed to him like little more than a complex if intriguing drawing on display in a museum thousands of kilometers away, whose details even the most powerful telesc
ope would still leave vague. All the nations of the region—Babylonians, Egyptians, Jews, Hittites, Elamites, etc., etc.—seemed to him about as close or relevant to Europe as Martians, and the troubles his father recounted to him, like the destruction of a certain city called Ashtelon or Ashgelon or Ashperon, were about as real to him as the destruction of the capital city of one of Saturn’s cold moons—something he’d read about in one of the books of science fiction he’d so loved as a child. And he turned his head away from his piano and score, and saw the new star shining in the skies of Vienna, and he got up and walked over to the blinds and lowered them. Since he was eight years old, he’d only get to see his father when His Majesty flew in once a year, generally close to the beginning of the month of Nissan, since that was when the Babylonian festival of Akitu took place, a holiday whose observance involved the high priest’s slapping the King of Babylon hard on his cheek in order to demonstrate the throne’s submission to the god Marduk, humiliating the monarch before all of his ministers, and he, that is to say Jehoiakim, was certain, and rightly so, that, with Akitu approaching, chances tended to be low that Nebuchadnezzar would have time to invade Jerusalem. Hence, every spring he’d celebrate the spring festival with his son, making an effort—at times successfully!—to enjoy the private recital that his son would give in his modest twelve-room apartment on Maria-Theresien-Platz, overlooking the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna, the city in which Jehoiachin had chosen to live, far from the clamor of the barren hills between the rivers of Mesopotamia and the Nile, of which he’d read from time to time in newspapers and books.
Jehoiachin was eighteen years old and had changed his name to Joachim to please his admirers in Austria and Germany. In the upcoming season, he was scheduled to give concerts in Tokyo, Moscow, Shushan, Hattusa, London, and Mari. The concert in Ashkelon had been canceled, as might have been expected, after the local cultural institute went up in flames and collapsed onto its own pianos. He opened his itinerary and his tour repertoire, and the pages under his fingertips felt like a soft and reassuring carpet. But his plans were about to change. Also his repertoire.
That same morning, Joachim played the Goldberg Variations in the concert hall at the Vienna Music Academy. After the applause, he played Philip Glass’s Étude No. 5 as his encore—a work that, in spite of its apparent simplicity, always cast its spell over him and left him amazed. While playing this melancholic piece, he noticed two gentlemen standing in the wings, waiting for him to finish. Something in their comportment and looks suggested that they came from his birthplace in the East. He slowed the tempo just a bit so as to prolong by a few seconds the interval before he would have to meet with them. He was certain that a disaster had taken place and that they were here to tell him as much, though he couldn’t quite guess the nature of the catastrophe as yet. Perhaps Father has died, he thought, or perhaps one of the uncles, and they’ve come to tell me that I have to go home and sit shiva. And he was greatly distraught at the thought of it; for years he’d been preoccupied by the thought, the threat of having to hang out with his family for an entire week, to say Kaddish in Aramaic, to sleep in a strange house and wear a yarmulke, and not to shave or bathe—if there was one thing he despised, it was poor grooming, beard stubble or long nails—and, anyway, he couldn’t fall asleep in a house full of strangers, he couldn’t even take a shit in a house where another person was present, though in recent years such a situation had never arisen. He finished the étude and immediately started playing it again. Because of the music’s circular and repetitive nature, he knew it was unlikely that the audience could anticipate when he was supposed to finish. But the two in the wings, they apparently caught on at once that they were being duped; after waiting for a few seconds, they strode onstage and stood beside the piano, like two tardy and heavily armed page turners. Joachim stopped playing, rose, and bowed. Silence from the audience. The two gentlemen led the pianist to his dressing room. Just before they reached the door, and without any apology for interrupting his encore, they told Joachim that he was needed in Jerusalem. Has someone died? he asked (this entire conversation taking place in German), and they said: God forbid. On the contrary, there’s going to be a big celebration. The king your father wants you to come and play on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday, in the concert hall of the International Convention Center in Jerusalem, of course; surely he’d scheduled the event with you some time ago, they said courteously. It’s only a matter of two, three days away from home, they told him, and then, it goes without saying, you’ll return to Vienna. You won’t even have to cancel your next concert, they said.
And Joachim laughed. No way was he about to set out for Judah, and he didn’t remember making any sort of arrangement with his father. He would certainly have remembered such a thing. What’s more, he hadn’t heard from the king in at least half a year—undoubtedly, a mistake had been made. They couldn’t convince him there weren’t plenty of pianists already in Judah. Plenty … even some who weren’t that bad, perhaps?… The gentlemen made no reply. Then: This isn’t easy for us, the second gentleman said. You played the most difficult of all the Goldberg Variations, the fifteenth, so nicely … And Joachim said, Wonderful of you to notice … Heartbreak sweeps over the intervals and silences … And the man went on to reassure him: The handcuffs won’t hurt at all, sir; I made sure to pad the steel with velvet. And Jehoiachin asked, on the verge of screaming: Handcuffs? What the hell are you…? But he didn’t finish his sentence, and in no time he found himself whisked into a car and driven to the airport and seated in a private jet, and in no time they were racing east, exceeding the speed limit in spite of all the traffic signs and speed traps in the sky, and in no time they were landing at Atarot Airport. After some light refreshments, he was driven to the palace in a car identical to the one they’d used in Vienna, still wearing the tuxedo he’d worn at his recital.
And when he entered the royal household, his father didn’t spread his arms wide as he walked toward him, nor did he grin broadly at the prodigal son: he didn’t even greet him, save for a curt nod. He and his retinue left the apartment immediately, and Jehoiachin was dragged behind them. You’re not dressed properly, his father declared. Jehoiachin, take off your tux already; tuxedos and hummus don’t go together. Jehoiachin had no idea what hummus he was talking about—wasn’t there something about a birthday celebration?—and anyway he despised that local dish. Hummus stood in his eyes for everything that was wrong with the Middle East: It has no taste, he used to tell his parents over and over when he was a child. They eat a tasteless paste and it’s their greatest pleasure—it’s pathetic. Look, said the king, it’s not that I’m not really glad to see you, but let’s leave all the catching up for later; we’re already very late. You’re coming with me to the Largest Bowl of Hummus from the Euphrates to the Nile Competition, Jehoiakim said. Have you found something to wear? Very well, he said, but get rid of that smelly tuxedo of yours, he hollered, and promptly leaned down beside his son and cut off his jacket’s tails with the royal switchblade. We can talk later, as long as we don’t miss the ceremonial hummus tasting. We’ll be the first to dip in; our pitas are already being warmed, and they’re huge, his father said anxiously, holding up the shreds of black cloth—as big as tables!
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EASTERLY WINDS WHISTLE in the cracks of the desiccated shower stalls in a distant military base on the border between Babylon and Elam. There are three battlement walls, in concentric circles, and a ziggurat that once rose arrogantly until it was knocked over by the Assyrians some forty years ago is still there, waiting for better days. On the lower floors, however, there are sufficient rooms with ceilings that were spared, and so the place was transformed from the temple it once was—no one remembers anymore whether to a Babylonian or an Elamite God—into a Babylonian military base, which in turn was made over into a royal archive. It is so dreadfully far to the east, so dreadfully far from anything, that one measly old guard is all that’s needed to safeguard the site. He and his d
og have been living there for twenty years now. Evenings, they sit on the battlement walls to breathe in the air after spending long hours below in the archive, and they play chess, or, rather, a kind of chess, a different version of the game, as is customarily played in such far-flung outposts. There’s no king and queen on the board but, rather, a guard and a dog—always a guard and a dog—they’re the center of the world, and they must be protected, and he who strikes at the guard or at the dog wins the game. The chessboard is older than they are. When they arrived and were appointed to guard the site, the chessboard was already there, waiting: it had been waiting since the days of Uru, which is to say Ur, which is to say City—the city whose name was City. The rules of the games were written on the sunbaked board, but since they were written in ancient Sumerian, the guard and his dog could only stare at the signs that they were unable to read, and in the end make up the rules for themselves.
This is where they keep the documents and other plunder the soldiers of the Babylonian king bring back from their campaigns of rape and pillage at the far ends of their expanding kingdom, from the neighboring nations, which are slowly but surely being condemned to servitude. The stuff accumulates here as in the basement of a museum. Soldiers take their booty and transport it to Babylon in order to catalogue and secure it—which is to say, in order to save it from destruction in the now subjugated lands. If it were possible, they’d ship every one of the Egyptian pyramids to Babylon. Here you’ll find an entire wing dedicated to fallen idols and various temple utensils. There are statutes of the Moabite Chemosh, of Anat from Tyre and Sidon, and now of the Assyrian god Ashur, too—thousands of figurines of Ashur, newly deposited in the archives: small ones as well as some pretty gigantic ones, all bearing his terrifying beard, wings, and hooves, hooves that have been trampling over nations and peoples for generations; but in the light of the Assyrians’ crushing defeat, this king of kings has become little more than … an objet d’art. There are altars to Moloch here, too, uprooted from their places in Ammon and carefully transported, intact, eastward, fashioned of burnished brass, as well as thousands of private statuettes catalogued as unidentified gods and wrapped and stored in itemized cartons. Some are large and upright and intact and on full display; others, including the smaller, broken ones, lie all heaped together inside their cartons. Many of the female deities are clasping their breasts and spreading their wings: O mighty fertility, the consolations of which have, sadly, been eradicated. And then sometimes gods that set out for the archive in one piece and in good health wind up being crushed or shattered during the long journey to their new home, and upon reaching the Babylonian archives are no more than pulverized dust—and, indeed, are preserved as dust until the holy day on which they will, some say, rise again from the dust and return to life … Amen. They’re all tightly swaddled in padding and bubble wrap, though even so some will get damaged along the way. Some are as tall as buildings, still wearing their plastic robes, fettered by brown masking tape. The smaller ones, some as small as ancient coins, piled up in their cartons, are labeled not only according to their provenance but also according to their reputed powers. This god walks upon the stars. That god makes purple flowers bloom in winter. This goddess provides for the poor and unloved of a remote village in Ararat. Here’s the god of travel. The god of self-actualization. The god of all donkeys in distress. The god of sick children requiring amusement. The god of poetic inspiration. The very angry goddess of a large Egyptian beetle long since extinct. The god of pyramids. The god of the praying mantis. The god of camels. The goddess of lost youth, the goddess of blessed pencils, the dog god and his friend the monkey god. The goddess of the shortsighted, the goddess of libraries and archives, the god of the carpenters of Assyria, the goddess of the stone quarries from which the statues of the gods must slowly emerge.
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