And Jehoiachin stared at his reflection in the piano’s painted wood and again asked, What now? And whatever he said, his face in the piano said, too. He said, Call the Egyptians for help? And the piano said, Call the Egyptians for help. He said, Flee to Moab? And the piano said, Flee to Moab. And he said, Escape to the sea and charter a ship and disappear? And the piano said, Escape … to the sea … and charter … a ship … and disappear, pausing between words, like someone just learning to speak. Jehoiachin said, Now you say it, and the piano said, Now … you … say it. And Jehoiachin said, Great, you’re learning, and the piano said, Great … you’re … learning. And Jehoiachin said, You’re—speaking—Hebrew, and the piano said: I’m—speaking—Hebrew. I’m speaking Hebrew. And Jehoiachin said, I taught you, and the piano replied, No, no, I taught me, and then it understood its error and corrected itself and said, You taught me. And Jehoiachin noticed that when he stood in front of the piano his face freeze-framed, and only the person in the piano moved his lips and eyes. And he knelt on the carpet and leaned his elbows on the stool as his childhood piano told him: Neither the army, nor Pharaoh, nor Moab, nor your fortifications will help. After all, they have helicopters; they’ll swoop down on the city like wasps come to lay their eggs. There’s only one way out, it said, and that’s me.
And Jehoiachin rushed out of the closed room and turned to the ministers and said: Hear me now, generals of Judah, and hearken, O officers of Jerusalem, there’s only one thing I know how to do. I’ve discovered a way out. I must make him hear me, and my playing will be our voice. I’ll make a supplication, Jehoiachin said, with music, and the music will make the necessary obeisance, the music will drop to its knees before the King of Babylon’s feet, and his eyes will look into its eyes, and, who knows, maybe Babylon will have mercy. And two ministers from the military, one named Yeosh and another who had no name, started pacing nervously in the room, and tried to explain the magnitude of their king’s folly to His Highness: Do you really believe that that mass murderer will listen, that he’ll retreat because of a piano? Maybe we should send a company of flutists or the band of mandolin players from the vocational training school, too. Maybe then he’ll hand over his own country into the bargain. You’ve got to understand that things don’t work that way. Today we buried your father; we’re not going to bury another king so soon. And Jehoiachin listened and said: Thanks for the encouragement, Yeosh. May you be blessed by the Lord, that you have shown this kindness to your former master, to my father, Jehoiakim, and have taken the time to bury him. Now may the Lord show kindness and truth to you, and I, too, will reward you because you have done this thing. Therefore, let your hands be strong, and be valiant, for Jehoiakim, your master, is dead, and the house of Judah has anointed me king over them. Now I’m going to wash up. And he went to the bathroom and stuck his feet into his father’s clogs. Call up the movers, he commanded self-confidently. When I come out clean, I expect the piano to have been loaded onto a truck.
Afterward, the king traveled in an armed convoy to the International Convention Center hall, and the piano stood next to him in a chariot, padded with countless cushions and swaddled like a newborn leaving a maternity ward on the bitterly cold day during which he had the misfortune to be born, and the crown was on the piano’s head. They bore Jehoiachin’s childhood piano to the center of the stage and set it down on the wooden platform, and the blind tuner groped his way toward the piano and rested his brow on its black brow just as Jacob rested on Esau’s brow after all those years in which they’d been apart. And he pressed his finger down on the middle C, and the note resounded in the hall like the echo of a bell at the heart of a silent temple. Everybody out, said the tuner, and he was left alone with the piano while Jehoiachin sat in the wings and thumbed through some sheet music. After a while, he walked onstage, to the muffled sound of tuning, and he bowed low, even though no one had applauded, for the rows were empty in the enormous hall, save for a handful of seats on which court attendants were parked, as well as two security guards.
Jehoiachin sat facing the keys, white breakers crowned with black foam. And he was filled with fear, even though he knew well enough that with the first touch of his fingers the fear would pass. The fear always passed—the first note always completely enveloped him. And he was already feeling the calming effect of the music he was about to play, even though he didn’t know what it would be. Only when he extended his right hand did it come to him, and he was filled with a sense of peace and stillness and immediately started to play. And it seemed to him that the first notes sounded even before he touched the keys.
That entire night, Jehoiachin played through all of Beethoven’s piano sonatas on a piano on which rested a crown—yes, all thirty-two. Now and then, he’d stop between the pieces to have a drink or wipe off the perspiration that streamed in runnels over his eyes and down his cheeks and neck. After the first three sonatas, he already reckoned his execution was at hand, but he regained his composure and told himself—and listened to the piano also saying—that here, here, for the first and maybe the last time, he could actually make a difference with his playing, that he could be of some honest-to-goodness use, playing not only to gratify the rich, playing not only for classical-music critics employed by bourgeois newspapers, but really working with music, as one might work with a hoe, turning music into something that could defy ruination and even save lives. I’ve never saved a life, he thought, while playing in a pained state of reverie, as though disembodied, the slow movement in the seventh sonata. This was just the beginning of the road, to be sure—the late, difficult sonatas were still ahead of him—but he would hack his way into that mountain one inch at a time, even if his childhood piano were to become his grave—for all he cared, his hands could freeze in a spasm as he and his piano were lowered into the pit and the score was flung after him.
The fixed cameras in the International Convention Center broadcast the performance on all possible channels. Judean technicians even succeeded in reviving a poky battery-operated emergency network. The music was aired, but to whom exactly? Was it like those broadcasts aimed at outer space? Jehoiachin mused, as he plunged into the waves of Beethoven’s music. And he no longer knew which sonata he was playing, and whether he was playing the individual pieces and the movements in the correct order; he knew that he was making numerous errors, skipping and repeating himself, shortening, distorting, and in other places stretching the compositions out unnecessarily. And sometimes it seemed to him his fingers weren’t playing and his hands were hanging slack, wasted, void of feeling, while at other times they floated unmoving above the keys as the piano played entire passages on its own until his fingers regained their vigor and he again harnessed himself to the music and made some progress and finally paused. And he imagined the King of Babylon, whose face he knew only from newscasts, and his attendants, too, engrossed in what they were seeing on the screens, or maybe slipping earphones on and becoming immersed in the music, their hearts shuddering, their eyes opening wide, their swords stilled, and their helicopter pilots seated in their choppers, staring at the sea Jehoiachin was creating and deepening and widening and inundating, a sea that was not to be crossed.
* * *
AT DAYBREAK, the king lifted his hands, which had lost all feeling, from the keys. Jehoiachin made to rise from his stool. And it dawned upon him that this was, beyond any doubt, his last recital. He could barely stand up to face the audience that wasn’t there—everyone had left a long time ago—and he made his bow and then collapsed onstage, and the piano collapsed as well. Doctors were summoned and brought the king back to life, and the piano’s corpse they covered with a sheet, and they slipped the crown into the king’s bag. Two hours later, the king struggled to his feet. He needed support, and he was also given an injection before he stepped out of the International Convention Center into the glaring sunlight. And there, under the cable-stayed Chords Bridge, at the entrance into the city, a pair of Mercedes were waiting, their engines idling and their
air-conditioning turned up and blowing frigid air even though it was bitterly cold outside; their windows were tinted and bulletproof, and their headlights were high-beamed and washed and polished and shining from the dew in the emerging light at the onset of the month of Adar.
26
AT THE FAR END OF WEST JERUSALEM, the new king played all night, while in the east, Jeremiah was strapped to a machine known as the rotator. He’d heard of the rotator from reports that had made it into the local newspapers from the Committee Against Torture, and Rabbis for Human Rights, but now here it was, in person, and in such close proximity to the Temple, too, right at the Benjamin Gate. His hands and feet were strapped to a sort of vertical cot, or simply a board, and his forehead was also strapped down. A tube had been carefully inserted into an artery in his arm. He had no idea what was dripping in there.
And the priest said, I’ve got some questions for you, and Jeremiah didn’t answer, and the priest asked, Okay, who sent you? And Jeremiah said, I don’t know, And the priest roared, Who, who? And again Jeremiah replied, I really don’t know. And the priest asked, Who’s funding you? And Jeremiah said, I have no funds. And the priest said, So who are you, in fact, Jeremiah? And Jeremiah only stared back and was unable to speak a word. The priest jotted down some notes to himself, and then he got up and pressed a red button and said, You’ll have plenty of time to think about soiling the cracks of the Wall with venomous notes and scaring the king over an intercom. King Jehoiakim has been murdered, the priest said—that’s what you wanted, eh? Way to go! If you get out of here alive, which is unlikely, we’ll try you for inciting regicide—and let me make it clear to you that there won’t be anybody to get you out of it, like at your other trial. And the priest switched off the light, pressed a green button set into the wall, and left. Jeremiah heard the three locks being bolted one after another, and the priest talking with someone, maybe the warden, and he heard the sound of the priest’s receding footsteps. Pashhur wore wooden-soled priestly clogs, and their hammer strokes resounded from afar.
The board onto which Jeremiah was strapped began to jiggle, and then to rotate steadily on its own axis, and Jeremiah felt himself slowly revolving, counterclockwise, his head like an hour hand, from twelve o’clock to eleven and on to nine, where the apparatus stopped for a second before continuing to six, at which point his head was pointing straight down. The machine stopped. And Jeremiah felt his blood trickling down into his head. Several minutes later, the machine started moving again, and his head moved up toward four o’clock and on and on until it returned to where it had begun. This occurred several times, and Jeremiah thought to himself that he could easily endure such torment, at least for an hour or two. But then, as if responding to his thoughts, the machine gradually started going crazy, as it were, except that this madness wasn’t wild but wholly intentional—it was the machine’s raison d’être, it was precisely programmed, it was an algorithm of madness. After a number of rotations, the machine accelerated, all at once whirling full-circle, or for half a circle, and then braking to a stop before starting to move along other axes altogether, so that the board to which Jeremiah was strapped turned over till his nose was now facing the floor, tilting slantwise at various odd angles while varying its speed and executing sudden, terrifying, jolting stops. The machine had originally been part of the mechanism of a ride in an Assyrian amusement park; it had been upgraded and turned into a torture device. A guard sitting on the other side of the locked door didn’t hear Jeremiah’s screams, didn’t see his face twisted in nausea, didn’t see his quivering jaw. He had a small battery-operated radio, and he listened that night—not counting the hours when he slept—to music. He who’d never heard such music before listened, for the first time in his life, to the king’s piano. It didn’t really do anything for him, but he didn’t switch it off, either.
Jeremiah longed to faint, but he understood that whatever had been inserted into his arm would prevent him from fainting or falling asleep, and as soon as he’d come to the conclusion that this was it, he was going to die, the machine stopped to give him a break—again as if it had read his thoughts, it responded at once and reverted to a slow, regular, indolent turning, like the hands of a clock. Jeremiah muttered, Cursed be the day on which I was born, cursed be the day on which I was born, cursed be the day on which I was born, cursed be the day on which I was born, cursed be the day on which I was born, cursed be the day on which I was born, cursed be the day on which I was born, cursed be the day on which I was born. He tried moving his arms and legs to rip off the straps, and he tried wriggling and jerking his body to stop the machine, all to no avail. Cursed be the day on which I was born. He realized that a good part of torture was not knowing how long you’d be left there. He shouted at the guard, but the guard didn’t hear, and even if he had heard he was forbidden to open the door. Cursed be the man who brought the news to my father, saying: A child is born to you, a son. And Jeremiah told himself that one of the angels was bound to come now and save him—it simply wasn’t possible that he’d be abandoned now, at this awful moment—and he opened his eyes and said boldly, Now, now, come now, and the almond branch and the bulging pot and all the voices that had told him what to say and had filled him with words came to mind. But no angel appeared, nor did an angel knock at the door, nor did one fly in through the wall to pull the machine’s plug out from its socket, or to give Jeremiah water, and not a single word was heard in the room apart from his cursing himself and his parents and his life. And let the man be as the cities that the Lord overthrew, he said, referring to his parents. And to himself. And then a miracle did occur: he fainted. In fact, it was no miracle: the stuff that dripped into his blood had simply emptied out.
His mother rose from within the gloom into which he’d sunk. She told him, Sit down for a bit, Jeremiah. She was looking at the stars, her own particular stars, but they were speeding away through the skies in all directions. She told him the Andromeda galaxy had collided with the Milky Way; they said it would not occur until billions of years from now, but in the end it took only a few weeks. The stars from both galaxies mixed like dust from two adjoining rooms separated by a broken window. She sat in the still courtyard of their home in Anatot and gazed at the dancing stars. She had decided in her heart, so she told him, to devote at least one moment every evening to such luminous beauty. You’d think there was nothing easier, nothing simpler, she told him. And yet I didn’t stand by my pledge. Why? Jeremiah asked her. Her answer faded in the murky darkness. He felt the machine’s rotation still, but as though in the background, like the humming of an air conditioner while you’re dreaming. And he, too, gazed at the skies and saw that the stars were moving very slowly, but all at once they accelerated, turning right and left, and the moon swirled dizzily, as well as the clusters of stars he’d known from the astronomy club; only the new star stood in place and didn’t budge at all. And his mother’s voice was heard, and the skies were obstructed and obscured, and she said, Even so, I believed that if I looked up, this way, night after night, the stars would turn into my neighbors in their own good time. Into my kin. Into my children. If so, why didn’t I keep my pledge? Jeremiah said, Mom, they’ve placed me on the rotator, and tonight I will die with my feet above me, or maybe on some kind of diagonal. His mother said, I see you walking tomorrow in the light. Jeremiah said: I don’t know why I’m doing this. The price is too high, and, besides, there’s no chance—why go on? And his mother stared at the stars and said: The standard for deeds is the standard of the sea and its majesty, and not of the human street, and not of the human byway. The key is not to cling to the byway, she told him. Try to remember this. You know, I, too, she told him, I, too, sobbed because I was confined between the walls of a house, between the walls of a street, between the walls of a city, between the walls of the mountains. Jeremiah said, And it’s impossible to get out? You can’t come and get me out of here? A moment ago, while I was still sitting with you in the quiet courtyard, she went on, I suddenly dis
covered that, although my home is built on the shore, I live on the shoreline of the moon and the constellations and the shoreline of the sunrises and sunsets. Jeremiah told her: I smashed a jug, but now I’m the jug. A jug without a cork, he heard himself say, but this was a voice from a long time ago, from so long ago—a jug without a cork, a jug without a cork, a jug without a cork, a jug without a cork. And his mother raised her hand, and all at once the hundreds of thousands of stars vanished from the heavens, and she vanished with them.
Jeremiah opened his eyes. The machine stood idle. And he had his face pointing the right way, and his entire body shaking uncontrollably. He didn’t know how much time had elapsed. Soon the sound of a key rattling in the three locks was heard, and the priest Pashhur, reeking of aftershave and toothpaste, bent over Jeremiah’s face and grumbled to the doctor who accompanied him, Shit, he’s alive.
Outside, it was still dark; it was four in the morning. The guard and doctors removed the straps and laid Jeremiah on the floor. After the night’s gyrations, the floor seemed to him like a tempestuous sea, and he clutched at it with his hands and his feet, and his body twitched, and a yawning nausea opened within him. The guards stood by and laughed. Like a fish in water, one of them said, and the second corrected him, Out of the water. As they watched him convulsing at their feet, the priest said: I think a bullet in the head right now is all that he’s asking for. Isn’t that what you want, you pitiful prophet? Maybe an injection? You want a shot that’ll fix you up? So, here, come and sign this. I’ll help you hold it in your weak hand. In your wretched hand. In your wicked hand. And you’ll sign this agreement stating that you won’t say another word. Nor will you, nor will you, nor will you stick notes, neither in the Wall nor in your mother’s ass—or anywhere else, for that matter. Are you signing? Sign here or I drag you back to the machine. You’d like a couple more hours in my amusement park?
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