And Jeremiah turned his head to puke but heaved up nothing. He tried in vain to stand up, and he turned around again and signaled to the priest all blurred out of focus in front of him to bend over, and the priest stooped over beside him with the form, and Jeremiah signaled to him to come closer. I can’t stand up, he groaned, you’ve got to come a bit closer, and the priest brought his head up close—A bit more, a bit more—and the priest held the agreement in his hand, the same form that he’d already had numerous prophets sign. Pashhur said, Here, sign here next to the X; I’ve already filled in your details, I only need your signature, only a teeny signature with my pen. And Jeremiah told him, You’re not close enough, just a bit more. And the priest bent his ear until Jeremiah could see the tiny hairs inside it and the wax that had accumulated there, and Jeremiah whispered into this ear, Pashhur … Pashhur … And Pashhur said, Yes, yes, Pashhur is my name, and he looked with satisfaction at his colleagues. And Jeremiah whispered in his ear, Pashhur … Pashhur … And the priest said, Yes, yes. And Jeremiah said: Pashhur, from now on no longer Pashhur, the Lord has named you Terror-All-Around. For thus says the Lord: I am making you a terror to yourself and to all your friends, Jeremiah whispered, and wept. And they shall fall by the sword of their enemies—while you look on. And I will give all Judah into the hand of the King of Babylon, he shall carry them captive to Babylon, and shall kill them with the sword. I will give all the wealth of this city, all its gains, all its prized belongings, Jeremiah wept, and all the treasures of the kings of Judah into the hand of their enemies, who shall plunder them, and seize them, and carry them to Babylon, Jeremiah said into the cavernous ear. And you, Pashhur, he whispered, and all who live in your house, shall go into captivity, and to Babylon you shall go, there you shall die. And there you shall be buried. You and all your friends, to whom you have prophesied falsely. I’m sorry, he added. I’m sorry.
And he got up onto his feet, leaned against the wall, and bent over to vomit; for a split second, he was reminded how, once, after his sister’s death, he decided to go to the freezer and drink her cancerous blood and die. He actually had it all planned, and he got up at night and stole into the kitchen to open the freezer in which his father kept her blood. But his mother was there, facing the stove and staring at the wall in front of her. And he said, from where he was leaning on the wall—and it wasn’t clear whether he was speaking to himself or to those present, who were looking at him with a mixture of bafflement and hostility—Ahhh, I … have been a laughingstock all day long … And again he collapsed. And the doctor said, embarrassed, Wait a minute, we’ll call you a taxi, so that … And Jeremiah took one long look up at the doctor from the floor and said, Thank you, doctor, but I think it’ll be difficult for a taxi to get across town and make the ascent up to the Temple. His fingers jerked in spasms. The doctor was filled with the urge to step on Jeremiah’s fingers in order to make them stop, and he said: Nonsense, it’s five in the morning. The roads are empty—why should it be difficult? Why? And Jeremiah answered, Because of the tanks.
27
SEVERAL HOURS before the grand hummus ceremony, Mattaniah and Tukulti stretched out on mattresses under the sky, on the rooftop of the large house on Yishai Street, as was their custom. Because it was cold, they’d lit a small fire on the roof, to keep warm and grill venison that Tukulti had caught on the slopes of Abu Tor. Mattaniah lay alongside Tukulti and rested his arm on the dog’s compact body. Tukulti wondered, What’s it like over there, in Egypt? And Mattaniah recounted how he’d once flown to Egypt as a child. His father, Josiah, would fly over there on weekly visits: to file his report, Mattaniah said. And once or twice, he brought along his wife and sons. The plane flew low over the pyramids, which were painted green and yellow, and Mattaniah told his brother Jehoahaz that the pyramids’ volume—that is, the volume of each and every pyramid—was the area of the base multiplied by its height divided by three. Jehoahaz stared out the window of the plane and said: That’s maybe true for certain pyramids, but surely it isn’t true for all pyramids. Some are wide, others narrow, some are low—what you’re saying simply doesn’t make any sense, Mattaniah. Later, Mattaniah went up to his father at the head of the plane and whispered, Dad, Jehoahaz is retarded.
Tukulti laughed and told Mattaniah that his ancestors came from Old Babylon, the real Babylon, not the one inhabited by the newfangled Babylonians of our own era. You can see my kind in the ancient wall paintings, large and strong, speaking to the kings, fighting by their sides, and advising them on all matters. The angels that keep reappearing in Genesis and other books are always depicted and drawn as winged human beings, but reality was a lot simpler: they were always dogs. Three dogs announced the birth of Isaac, a dog leaped at Abraham’s hand clasping the slaughtering knife, a dog struggled with Jacob and bit his ankle. Mattaniah asked, And you’re an angel, too? Tukulti was silent, and then replied: Me? I’m just a talking dog.
The morning of the hummus competition, they both went to have their hair cut. Mattaniah said, First we’ll go to the dog groomer, but the dog groomer told Mattaniah: I can also cut your hair; it isn’t all that different. I’ll even give you a discount—I’ll give you a two-for-one discount, in fact. And the barber noticed, under the black dye, the yellow-reddish roots of Mattaniah’s hair, but he didn’t say a word. At the age of twenty-six, at the dog groomer’s, Mattaniah suddenly saw in the mirror that he was beginning to go bald, and in response to his query the barber said, Of course. The process would take a year or two, and then Mattaniah would finally be exempt from all hair-cutting. And that was when Mattaniah started to lie to people who asked and told them he was only twenty-one, as if to put off the draining of his youth down the sewer, but of course that only aggravated the situation and made his balding more obvious. Soon someone told him: You must be kidding—already egg-headed at such an early age? I reckoned you must be thirty-something. Tukulti, who saw Mattaniah anxiously checking his hairline in front of the mirror, told him, Take my pelt and make of it a hairpiece. And so they sat for an hour or two in the shade of the tamarisks, and Mattaniah said, Because you haven’t withheld your pelt from me, whatever is mine I will give to you, and where you go I will go, Tukulti, and half the kingdom will be given to you. Tukulti mused a bit and then said, I have only one request from my master. Mattaniah nodded, and the dog went on: I still have an aged mother, and she’s penned up in Broch’s home. Let us go down to Beit Hakerem and visit her there, and I shall behold her before she passes away. And Mattaniah, who knew perfectly well that it was impossible simply to stop by and knock on Broch’s door and enter, said, Sure, I’ll make an appointment for the summer. No, Tukulti said, for we will now rise and make our way there. And Mattaniah said: He won’t let us in, man. He doesn’t open the door like that for no reason. Tukulti said, God will open it for our sake.
So they caught the light rail at the Ramat Rachel stop and rode up to Kikar Denya, and Mattaniah punched his ticket twice in the ticket machine. The train was packed with large dogs that day, some leashed, others loose, and Tukulti passed beside each one of them and sniffed his or her ears and rear; it seemed as if he was telling them all something. And when they were standing in front of Broch’s home, Mattaniah said, Wait a minute, at least let me give him a call and let him know we’re coming by. He dreaded receiving another drubbing at the critic’s hand, of being trashed again, remembering how Broch had once burned his notebook before his eyes in a Nescafé can. But while Mattaniah was still trying to find his phone number, Tukulti went up to the door and barked once, twice; the handle squeaked and Broch’s door opened, but it wasn’t Broch who appeared then and there, wearing his nightmare-inducing house slippers, but the dog Broch called Sargon, who wasn’t a male dog at all but a bitch, and Tukulti yelped, and the bitch, just about dumb and blind and deaf now, her mouth drooling and with an ugly sore on her foot, lowered her head and took a flying leap, her paws churning air. Mattaniah rushed over in embarrassment and, standing in the doorway, bent over to pet the a
ged dog. All of a sudden, she barked hoarsely, and the master himself dashed out of the house, holding a whip in one hand and a book in the other, hollering: Get in here immediately, Sargon! Who’s that who dared set foot in my home? Who’s that who opened my door? And he raised the whip, and Mattaniah told his dog, Let’s get out of here, but Tukulti stood fast between the bitch and the critic and, without warning, leaped and knocked Broch and the whip flat onto the thick carpet, and shoved his forepaws and his black claws into the old man’s face. Broch screamed, Sargon! Get back into your kennel immediately! But Tukulti closed in and ran his claws over Broch’s lips, etching three thin lines of blood there, and spoke into his face: Nay, Broch, her name isn’t Sargon. Nay, from now on her true name will be reinstated, and it’s Innana, and that’s what you’ll call her, too. And Broch told Mattaniah—whose name he couldn’t remember, though he knew more or less who he was—Hey, young poet, get your talking donkey off me immediately, before I fuck you up for good and sell that stinking bitch to the glue factory.
Mattaniah stooped over the critic, and all at once his fears left him, and he felt all grown up, and he brought his face up close to Broch’s face and whispered in his ear: No longer will you change the names of dogs and people. No longer will you throttle writers and poets. Your fire’s burned out, dragon. And he entered into the house and penetrated into the inner sanctum, the study that no human foot had breached for decades apart from Broch’s own, and began pulling out and flinging books from the shelves, at first two or three at a time, then entire rows. He raked them out and flung them—tens, hundreds, thousands of books—and he ripped at and tore their pages to shreds, and took down from the walls all the photos of Broch with the writers and poets he’d crowned and then inevitably humiliated, with the chairs of departments of Hebrew literature he’d appointed and then demoted. On one of the lower shelves, Mattaniah saw his own book, his book of Assyrian hymns, with his servile inscription, and he yanked the book from its place and opened it, and the pages were all, to the very last page, blotted out with a thick black felt-tipped pen, line after line, and then additionally effaced with large Xs. His inscription, too, was blotted out in rage. And in one of the rooms he saw a small heap of broken and crooked computer keyboards, and he kicked and scattered the heap, and in the bathroom Broch’s urine sat yellow in the toilet bowl, because he’d left it there when he hurried out to see who’d entered his home, and Mattaniah pissed on the critic’s own piss and then flushed away both their yellows. And there was a book there in the bathroom, on a shelf, and it was a copy of Zelda’s Leisure, and he thumbed through its pages, and there, too, the poems were completely crossed out. The Bible was in there as well, and it, too, was erased and corrected and revised. Mattaniah was overcome with joy at the sight of Leisure, and he returned to the study and told his dog, Kill him, Tukulti, bite him in the aorta, eat his gullet. But Tukulti raised his astounded eyes and ignored the command. And they made to leave, the two dogs and Mattaniah in their wake, but before leaving, the aged mother dog stopped and pawed, one last time, and licked the critic’s wounded lips.
28
THE CHOPPERS DIDN’T LAND IN JUDAH but flew in the direction of the Arabian Desert for a different mission. They weren’t really necessary: a hundred tanks, and foot soldiers and mounted troops in iron chariots, were sufficient to conquer not one Judah but ten. From the window of his armored car, the King of Babylon and his attendants watched the King of Judah fall to his knees. To the best of his memory, the King of Judah was old and potbellied, but Nebuchadnezzar couldn’t possibly keep track of all the kings who paid tribute to him, surely not the marginal king of such a negligible kingdom. Nebuchadnezzar signaled to Neriglissar, who was none other than Nergal-Sharezer, to go out to the surrendering king. From his place next to the driver, Nebuchadnezzar kept an eye on what was going on.
Neriglissar didn’t want to deal with this, certainly not first thing in the morning. No, all he wanted to do was sleep. Nonetheless, he went out and approached the King of Judah and, without any ceremonial preliminaries, kicked him gently in the chest. He had to make a great effort to do any shouting first thing in the morning—he hadn’t really tuned up his voice yet—but he knew that his king was watching, and that all of this was being broadcast on a host of channels, so he had no choice. It was necessary to re-establish the balance of power, and to demonstrate Judah’s unequivocal capitulation, so anything less than kicking and shouting would be interpreted as softheartedness. Jehoiachin fell back and shielded his face with his hands. Neriglissar returned to the car, fetched a club from the trunk, and struck—though not too harshly—the ribs of the presumed canceler of the automated payments. He really just wanted to wrap it up and get on with things. He, too, was certain that the local king, Jehoiakim, was supposed to be at least fifty, but he wasn’t going to get stuck on details. He really wanted to get it over with already. The king was always sending him out as muscle, but he hadn’t been trained or brought up for this sort of thing; he was an astrologer by vocation, and in the heavens were the limit of his aspirations, not in landing blows on the King of Judah. He wasn’t a particularly strong person and didn’t look forward to it and didn’t get any pleasure from it, certainly not at five in the morning. But one time Nebuchadnezzar had made him watch two Aramean prophets get grilled over a fire. The king’s intention was more to educate Neriglissar the astrologer than to punish the Aramean prophets. Neriglissar had told his king that he’d rather not beat up the prophets, and so Nebuchadnezzar said curtly, Well, if that’s the case, I’ll take care of them myself. He used a kind of large copper deep-fryer that the Ammonite barbarians used to fry their infants; a blazing fire was lit underneath it, and the prophets—who, needless to say, were false prophets (they’d been mistaken in their forecast concerning Pharaoh Neco’s troops and the crossing of the Sinai Peninsula)—were thrown in shackled and naked.
So Nergal-Sharezer shouted, more for the cameras than for the defeated king, Jehoiakim son of Josiah, come and declare publicly that you broke your covenant and oath. And Jehoiachin shouted back—and his words were immediately translated for the folks at home—Yes, yes, I admit to everything. So why did you cancel those payments? Nergal-Sharezer screamed. What, are you nuts? Did you think we wouldn’t mind, did you think we’d just let you go wild, Jehoiakim? And Jehoiachin said, even though he had no idea what this Babylonian was talking about: Yes, of course, the esteemed gentleman is quite right. I don’t know what possessed me, I canceled the payments, I guess. I couldn’t manage the taxes; the taxes were more than I was earning; I was choking on them. And Nergal-Sharezer said, turning to the cameras: Now, Jehoiakim, you’ll see that you made a mistake. Now you’ll see the surcharge we customarily impose on any business cancelation, a surcharge and a fine and also cumulative interest, but the interest we’ll demand in blood, and the surcharge in heads, and the fine in vessels from your Temple, and the stamp on your bill will be inked with blood from your own head, O Jehoiakim. And he drew a gun and aimed it at this dust rag, this kid, an eighteen-year-old at most, who would now die and be blotted out when it wasn’t even five-thirty in the morning yet. But he noticed then that the king’s hand shielding his head was bandaged, and, oddly enough, something within Nergal-Sharezer stirred a bit, as though trying to awaken; however, he nevertheless flipped off the safety and put it up to the Judean king’s head. And a voice in the assembled cried out, in Aramaic: Hold it, hold it, drop your gun, sir. That’s not the king, that’s his son, it’s only his son. Can’t you see? That isn’t Jehoiakim; Jehoiakim’s already dead. Can’t you see that he’s only a boy, and wounded? And he only arrived in Judah yesterday; he didn’t cancel anything, he didn’t do you any harm. He’s only a pianist—take a look at his fingers.
This voice was enough to halt the execution, and everything came to a stop. Nebuchadnezzar, King of Akkadia and Babylon, got out of his car. Nergal-Sharezer dropped his gun and watched as his king approached. From a carriage parked nearby came Jehoiachin’s mom, Nehush
ta, the queen mother, accompanied by her ladies-in-waiting. Since he arrived yesterday, she hadn’t seen her son close up, but she’d stood all night, eyes glued to the screen, watching him play. Nebuchadnezzar told Nergal-Sharezer: Leave him alone, it really isn’t Jehoiakim. I can see it now. So who are you? he asked in front of the crowd, and the words in Akkadian were understood but seemed odd, for in the ears of the locals it sounded as if the king had asked, What are you?, and someone in the crowd cried out in broken Akkadian, Saklo, muskeno, muskeno—a fool and a beggar—though to the crowd’s ears the words sounded quite different, thanks to an unfortunate resemblance to the Hebrew words for execution by stoning and misery. And Nebuchadnezzar looked at Jehoiachin and asked in basic Aramaic, Sultana? Eh? But the prince didn’t understand, and the king glanced backward, and instantly his aged translator, whose hands had been cut off, popped up by his master’s side. Nebuchadnezzar turned to the amputee and asked him to ask Jehoiachin, You’re the son, yes? The youth nodded. And Nebuchadnezzar asked, So where’s your father? And Jehoiachin said, He died yesterday; he fell. And the amputee asked, You’re the one who played all night? And Jehoiachin said, That’s me. And added, improvising, I’ll reactivate the payments, I’ll add on to them, too—even though he didn’t have the faintest idea how much was in the royal coffers or how much they would need to pay.
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