The crowd thinned out a bit at the bottom of Agron Street. Some people were heading for the center of town, and others were dribbling into Independence Park and resting in the gardens of the Museum of Tolerance, which was built over the remnants of an ancient cemetery that no one—apart from the dead and some jackals—ever visited. Out of the corner of her eye, Esther caught sight of a boy and his large dog, both of them throwing up, seemingly in sync, into an open drain.
* * *
IN THE MEANTIME, Hilkiah took out his phone, used primarily for reading his books, and was about to call Esther, but then had second thoughts and stuck the phone back into his pocket—the same pocket containing the sweet potato and wet earth. Come on, he told himself, nothing bad will happen if we walk apart for a little while. She isn’t a little girl who needs to be kept in sight at all times, and this street is no desert. His feet bore him from Agron Street to King David Street. He saw the tower of the ruined YMCA looming before him, and told himself, I’ll go rest among the ruins. But before he had a chance to sit down, he felt something moving in his pocket. And when he peeked into his pocket, he saw that the sweet potato covered in mud had sprouted a tiny stalk with two or three minuscule folded leaves at the end, curling inward toward the stem. He carefully placed his hand on the outside of his pocket. The earth was warm; he could feel its exhalation through the fabric.
* * *
AT THE BOTTOM OF KING GEORGE STREET, workers dangled down the side of the Bell Tower on ropes, losing no time in switching the huge portrait of the late king, Jehoiakim, for one of their new monarch. There was no decent current portrait available of the new king, however—for obvious reasons, nobody wanted to use any of the numerous publicity photos of him as a concert pianist. That’s all we need, a photo of him striking the keys with his eyes shut—who’d follow someone like that into battle? So they dug up a childhood photograph of him, which they enlarged: a picture of the boy standing with a book in his hands, and two birds hovering in the light just behind him. But they got rid of the birds with Photoshop, and though they left the book, which was a book of musical scores, they changed the writing on the cover. And Esther saw how the workmen slipped hooks through the giant perforations in the poster and slowly unrolled the new portrait, top to bottom. She was riveted by what she was seeing, amazed, though, after all, it was only the supplanting of an old ruler by a new one, and nothing is more common than that, here in Judah as well as everywhere else. The boy with the book was unrolled as though he were being brought into the world, a sort of outsize birth, painless, motherless, gradually finding a place in the heart of the city.
Passersby returning from the stadium stopped in their tracks to see what she was looking at, and they, too, gazed in silence at this second public appearance of their new sovereign. In a couple more years, they said, he’ll get fat and old and he’ll look like his father, and we won’t notice the difference at all. We’ll be the only ones to change for the worse; the kingdom will stay exactly the same forever. And someone said, This isn’t the Hapsburg dynasty. And another said: A pianist king—what next? He’ll play the Rondo alla Turca right on our heads; he’ll press the keys, and the hammers in his piano will hammer-hammer down on us, and the notes of that despicable march will ring right out of our foreheads. Everyone gazed at the portrait of the child king holding a book. Every now and then, a gust of wind passed between the giant poster and the wall of the tower, and the king shuddered and swelled. And Esther cried out, Long live the king! No one joined in.
* * *
HILKIAH SUDDENLY BROKE INTO A RUN, and then he stopped, short of breath, and resumed running, cutting to the right, in the direction of the Old City. Making his way down the lanes, and following the road signs for tourists, he reached the Western Wall and turned right, toward the entrance leading up to the Temple. Policemen sluggishly signaled to him that there was no entry, but he flashed his old priestly card and they let him pass. His cavity ached badly, and he stuck two fingers in his mouth in an effort to press down on the decayed tooth. Here, above, in the Temple courtyard, the atmosphere was completely different from that in the lower town, not because it was excessively holy, but because vague reports on the real political situation in Judah had begun to stream in, unlike in the new city. Numerous priests had decided not to take any risks, and were hastily bundling up their belongings—scrolls rolled up inside jugs, and hats, and a few holy vessels, and some cash and Visa Gold Cards—before removing their priestly robes, clothing themselves in mufti, and vacating the Temple until such time as the situation became clearer. No one had seen the high priest since the early-morning hours, and everyone was too scared to enter into the Holy of Holies, not least because they feared discovering that the high priest had absconded with the Ark. Hilkiah, who hadn’t visited the Temple since childhood, found himself standing in one of the chambers; there were coal pans hanging from the wall, and a small altar at the center of the room, on which embers were burning low, and incense was borne up like a thin line from the end of a paintbrush at the center of the room. He thought that it was undoubtedly here that the priests wrung the necks of their pigeons and turtledoves—he had a vague memory that there was indeed a sacrifice of this nature on the books. And he went up to a coal pan and took some coal and placed it on the small altar, from which a foul odor erupted, bringing to mind blood and screaming. And Hilkiah removed from his pocket the sweet potato soiled with crumbled bits of black earth, his entire body heaving as he pried it out of his pocket, almost throwing his back out in the process. He held the tuber with both hands, making sure it was still covered in earth, and in the hollow formed in the bed of coals he placed this root, from which poked a real stalk, violet-green, with its leaves unfurling, small and large. He saw scores of ants swarming, drawn to the sugar in the tuberous root, and he hunched down and kissed the stem and leaves. He chanced upon some water nearby and cautiously watered the sweet potato, and the ants waited on the stalk and leaves until the end of the deluge. The water exposed part of the tuber, and Hilkiah, using his fingers, covered it back up with earth, as though he were drawing a blanket over it.
He walked out in the direction of the nearby rail stop. His phone had no reception for some reason, and after accosting some passersby, he understood that this was the case for everyone. He boarded the train. The passengers were all in a state. They said that things were happening quickly now, that Babylonian forces were massing on the outskirts of the city, that they’d cut off phone and Internet service into Jerusalem. Nonsense, someone shouted, not every browser glitch is a Babylonian assault. Cut it out with your Jewish paranoia, he screamed, cut it out with your hysterical alarm at the smallest delay! And Hilkiah recalled something his son had once muttered on the subject, and thought about calling up Jeremiah, if only it were possible, but there was no phone service, the whole system was down, every form of telecommunication was on the blink. He told a stranger, a biker who stood there in the railcar with his black helmet still on his head: Never mind—in the end, we’ll all get home. As long as the train is moving, there’s hope. And he remembered how the whole family had once been riding the light rail when a ticket inspector had come up to them, and Hilkiah assumed Esther had taken care of their tickets while she’d thought he’d been the one: What do we have here? An entire family taking a free ride. And he fined them all plenty, each and every one of them, and no amount of pleading helped. When the inspector left, all four of them started laughing, and all four saved the red penalty citation as a sort of memento of the moment in which it became clear, beyond doubt, that they were indeed a family.
* * *
ESTHER, TOO, HAD DECIDED TO GET ON A TRAIN, and she found herself at a stop that she hadn’t known existed, where a blind man was standing all alone. He grabbed her arm, and she offered to help him board the train when it arrived, and he told her, This here is a stop for the blind, then added: I, having a handicapped pass, am exempted from paying. And now you, as an escort for the blind, also needn’t pay. He s
aid this as a way of trying to connect with her, as though explaining to her with a knowing wink that it was possible to dupe the system. Tell them you’re my escort, he said, and we’ll travel free of charge. He had a distinct Dutch accent, and Esther could barely keep herself from asking him where he was from. I’m not even blind, he told her frankly. I once was, but an angel healed me. I wear my glasses and keep my stick and my card, however, so I can ride for free on public transportation. I save thousands of shekels a year. I write poetry—I’m one of the better-known poets, and I can only write on the light rail. All the traveling to and fro dictates my poems’ meter. Sometimes I also meet women this way, and they travel with me. Esther looked at him: he was a handsome young man. And she slowly reached out for his dark glasses; he didn’t react, and she brought her hand closer and closer and thought, He can’t see, and she gingerly took hold of and removed the glasses by their temples. The blind man’s eyes were shut tight, like those of a frightened child in bed when the shadow of a monster approaches from the closet and is about to reach the pillow.
A faint commotion was heard near the train stop. When they jerked their heads around, they saw the first blue tank rolling prudently, leisurely, down Jaffa Road from the west. The incoming westbound light rail stopped and almost immediately headed back the way it had come, and Esther jumped aboard, just barely making it, leaving the blind man behind turning and turning like a spinning top, confused and shouting, but with no one to show him the way. Esther watched him for another moment and to her horror realized she was still holding his dark glasses; she didn’t know what to do with them. To chuck them out the window would be senseless and wrong, but she didn’t want to put them on, either, so she stuck them in her hair, pushed up at an angle on her forehead. The train car, crammed with terrified passengers, picked up speed and hurtled eastward on Jaffa Road, without slowing down at any of its stops. Many people attempted to jump on, but there weren’t any handholds.
That first tank lifted its turret unhurriedly at their receding backs, and then fired one shell high up into the air, above their heads, like a ship whistling to announce its entry into port, welcoming the city and the encroaching night.
25
BUT HOW DID HE FALL? Why wasn’t he fastened to a rope or something? How could you let a king fall like that? Why didn’t you hold on to him? King Jehoiachin screamed. Why didn’t you hold his hand? What sort of place is this? You practically kidnap me, drag me all the way back to this awful place, and then what, you don’t lift a finger, you don’t keep watch, you don’t supervise anything, you don’t strap your king in … No one answered. They all stared at one another. And then someone told him, Sir, your father didn’t fall, I think that he … that he simply jumped. But why should he do such a thing? Jehoiachin screamed. And someone with a scar on his face dared tell him that there were things more frightening than falling into a giant vat of hummus. Fear was relative, explained a certain Pashhur, dispassionately. Like everything, he added. The sun, for example, he expounded, is fairly close, relative to a distant star. What’s more frightening than falling and dying? Jehoiachin screamed, and his voice was thin and worn. What the hell are you talking about?
He entered his new apartment. Only this morning, he had been a resident of Vienna, a pianist whose curly-haired portrait appeared on the covers of albums the world over. His wild reddish hair was his commercial trademark, in fact; women would come to hear his music and admire his hair, unruly and burning like a shampooed torch in the concert halls of Europe. And now he realized that all this was finished. You’re stuck in Jerusalem like a bird in a cage; you’re a prisoner even if you’re not in handcuffs and under guard. You’ll never be able to go home. And he was horrified by the thought that he’d left a cat in his apartment. I’ve got to go back, he said, I left my cat over there. And they all looked at him as though he were a madman.
An old piano stood against the wall in the apartment, and he recognized, with longing, his childhood piano. He sat down on the stool, on which he hadn’t seated himself since he was eight years old. He asked all those present to leave, and when no one moved from his place he roared, Out, out, out of my sight already! They left, but they stood just outside the door, while he stared at the keys that he hadn’t seen for ten years, keys on which he’d learned his first notes and very first melodies. He desperately wanted to play something—in an effort to calm down, and, who knows, perhaps also for his father’s departed soul. But suddenly he saw that two armed gorillas had silently slipped into the room from a side entrance, and he got up without touching the keys.
The accident, the fall, was covered extensively on TV. The king stumbled—this was the phrase the public-relations spokesperson released to the media. THE KING STUMBLED would be tomorrow’s headline in all the big-circulation newspapers. As for the TV news, they lightly edited the video in order to elide the moment when the king went over the railing. Jehoiachin watched the newscasts and listened to the full report of the king’s tragic stumble, and all the commentators spoke of the son’s grief as he sat at the piano and played for the nation while his father the king stumbled and fell, although even this wasn’t exactly true, and he was quoted as saying, as it were, If only I’d been there at the top of the steps I’d have held on to him and prevented him from stumbling. The security guards stood there like statues. And he recalled what that scar-faced priest had said—that there are certain things more frightening than drowning in a vat of hummus—and wondered whether the priest had something specific in mind. Just then, the same priest knocked at the door and said, without any preliminaries, and as though answering his question, Come, come and see for yourself. And Jehoiachin said, I’ve already seen everything, and the priest told him, No, I don’t mean the hummus bowl. There’s more news.
And they drew up close to the flat-screen in the adjoining room and, with the rest of the royal advisers, watched the skies filling up with helicopters like a swarm of blue wasps, while blue tanks treaded up onto flattops along a long road on the outskirts of some city. Jehoiachin asked: What’s that, what’s going on? Is this live or archival footage? Who’s that over there? What do they want, anyway? And someone in the room—it was the minister of finance, or of defense, or maybe both of them—burst into hysterical laughter. The king didn’t understand, and said: Yeah? What? So where is this? And someone replied, My lord, against my will, I will answer your questions. His Highness asked who: it’s the Babylonian army. His Highness asked where: just outside Jerusalem. His Highness asked what they want: well, I think they want, how should I put it … they want to destroy us. And Jehoiachin said: Okay, and we can fight them off, we can oppose them, of course. I’ll give an order to … But whether he was making an assertion or posing a question remained unclear. From the silence that fell in the room he understood the answer. Someone said: Only the Egyptians can save us now. I propose we dispatch envoys to Pharaoh. Pharaoh has never let us down.
And Jehoiachin rose and with a loping stride disappeared into the adjoining room. His bodyguards were taken by surprise and didn’t have time to bolt after him. He locked himself in the room he’d occupied earlier. They pounded at the door, yelling, Open up! But he didn’t. And he also hastened to roll the piano, on its rubber casters, over to the secret passageway, and block its entrance. They didn’t want to break down the door; he was the king, after all.
Jehoiachin lay down on the floor on the wall-to-wall carpet and stared at the light-blue ceiling. And he tried to breathe. He realized with a start that this was his childhood bedroom. The piano stood there as it had a decade ago, and above it the ceiling was painted like the sky; his father had painted it with his very own hands at Jehoiachin’s request after the boy had asked, at the age of seven, Why do the heavens end when we enter the house, why do walls and ceilings shut out the skies and clouds? His father, the king himself, and not a menial worker, climbed a ladder and stood on the ladder like an acrobat on stilts, and dipped a huge brush into a can of paint, and turned the bedroom ceilin
g into the heavens, so that from a certain angle, when lying on his bed—which was no longer present—the ceiling seemed to the boy to merge into the heavens outside his window, particularly in the morning, particularly in the autumn. But the color had faded, and the bed had been removed, and the space was now furnished as a conference room; only the piano remained, up against the wall, and the ceiling, which no one had paid any attention to, so consequently it was never repainted white. And Jehoiachin remembered something, and stood up—ignoring the shouts of the ministers and officials and bodyguards coming from the other room, ignoring the slip of paper that was shoved under the door—and went up to the piano. He saw that, just as he remembered, there were a few drops of bright blue on the black lid, exactly where, when he was seven, he’d ripped the plastic paint tarp his father had thrown over it. He shut his eyes and ran his manicured nails over the stains.
He sat at the piano and stared at the blurry image of his face reflected in its dark lacquer. Now he looked very old, now a mere kid. And he asked his reflected self: Yes? And what now? He spoke in a whisper. It’s like we’re doggy-paddling in the shadow of a cresting wave, and we can either turn our backs or face up to it. Wake up, he told the piano. The wave’s already here. You’ve been brought to the wave. You can jump, you can wave your arms. You can swim into it or try to ride it out. But we don’t actually know how to swim. I don’t know how to swim, he said, and tears welled up in his eyes as he remembered the few swimming lessons he’d taken and how he’d been unable to make sense of the movements or even to float, and how his father had watched as he went under and had to be rescued again and again by the swimming instructress, until King Jehoiakim himself jumped into the water in a rage and grabbed him and raised him up level with the surface of the water and then threw him back in, repeating this procedure again and again, screaming, C’mon, figure it out already, get a grip on yourself, water is just water! You wanna die, or what?
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