Nebuchadnezzar’s ministers stepped out of the cars to watch this unexpected spectacle: Nebusarsechim, who would be soon appointed chief eunuch, and Nebushazban, and Nebuzaradan, and the remaining ministers of the King of Babylon, though Jehoiachin didn’t know them by name. They were all clad in black suits and sported long beards, save for Nebuchadnezzar himself, who was shaved and bald, a small man who looked more like a clerk, wearing wire-rimmed spectacles and with a head like a thin-shelled egg. He had a slight limp as he paced around. He seemed to be deliberating over Jehoiachin’s proposal, but then he glanced at his watch, and Nebushazban finished talking on his phone, nodding to his king, and Nebuchadnezzar said, No, it’s too late. Jehoiachin didn’t understand why it was too late; after all, nothing had happened yet, and financial matters could always be settled amicably. He’d take out a loan or mortgage some property, or he’d give a concert and use his earnings to repay the debt, he thought. Everything can still be fixed, he told the amputee, who told Nebuchadnezzar, Give us a second chance. But then the sound of an approaching train was heard, the light rail coming back from the Temple, and when it stopped it disgorged not the usual Jerusalemites but two hundred Babylonian soldiers, with the Temple vessels in their possession—all the riches from the House of God and all the riches from the king’s palace. And the King of Babylon told the amputee to tell the King of Judah: I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but while we were having our nice little chat here—and a genuine note of grief could be heard in his voice—we already carried off all the gold vessels we could find, and have confiscated the rest of your accoutrements, so we’ve just about finished collecting our lost revenues. I say almost because we’re still left with the exile clause that your dear father agreed to. It’s a fundamental point of the contract he signed, and I have the right to impose sanctions without having to demonstrate any proof of damage. Hence, within three months, ten thousand Jews will gather here, all your ministers and all your mightiest warriors and every artisan and metalworker, and you, too—he turned to Jehoiachin—will join them. No, no you won’t die. You’re a good pianist; I heard you in my car on the way over. You’ll come and play for me in Babylon. Play? Melulu? To play? You get it? You and your mother and all your eunuchs and all the local elite. You see, your music has lightened your punishment. I won’t do to you what I did to Ashkelon—the city won’t be put to the torch—but I’ll take all your rich people, and your professors, and your artists, and your intellectuals, and your musicians, and you’ll personally prepare the list of exiles for me. That’s it, that’s the lightened sentence, that’s my verdict, and if you go up to the palace and the Temple you’ll see that all is in order, that not even a vase has been broken, the amputated translator bellowed—he had conveyed the entire translation in bellows, because that’s how he believed it was proper to convey the king’s words—nothing is missing apart from what we took as a symbolic fine that won’t even cover our fuel expenses coming over here, sixteen hundred kilometers of travel. The music, he added upon reflection, was a nice move. I’ll listen to it at leisure when I get back.
So it’s agreed: you’ve got three months to get organized, and you’ll rule for three months here, and then you’ll come to my place and you’ll reign from afar. I could demand that it all happen within twenty-four hours, but the King of Babylon’s heart is merciful, and justice still reigns in Babylon, praise be to Marduk. Now I will depart from here, and you’ll quietly get organized and travel northwest at the beginning of summer, and we’ll settle the ten thousand exiles in a new Judah. By then, everything will be ready for you. We’ll give you a ruined city to restore, and there you’ll sit, and all your chronicles will be written down in a book. Prepare yourself; you’ll get the hang of exile. You’ll build yourselves homes; I’ll order a grand piano for you, and you’ll sit and play real nice. Ten thousand good exiles, choose for me the best figs in the basket, and the bad and rotten ones we’ll leave behind. I’m sure you understand that what I’m describing as a sentence is nothing more than a rehab-and-recovery program. When all is said and done, rot has spread deep among you here. Remember: three months from today, you’re out of here. Everything will be done quietly, calmly, the translator bellowed, ten thousand of the choicest figs will go into exile, and the rest of you will stay put.
Now I need to ask you, and this embarrasses me, whether you might have some relative or family member—a son, brother, cousin, niece, someone? I want to crown someone else, quickly, and I want to be certain this time that I won’t have to make the same journey again and repeat what I’ve just said from the beginning. Believe me, Jehoiakim—Nebuchadnezzar had already forgotten the name of the king’s son and so addressed him by his father’s name—I’ve got plenty of other matters on my mind apart from this little tax rebellion.
And Jehoiachin said, No one, no one. The Babylonian whispered, and the translator bellowed, No one? No one? There’s always somebody. And Jehoiachin remembered and replied, Ah yes, you’re right, there should be someone else. And Nebuchadnezzar, whose voice softened till he sounded almost delighted, said, Good, let that one step forward, if you please. He raised his head and peered around, as if he sensed that the person in question was there in close proximity. And he beheld the tens of thousands who had risen from their beds and gathered around, standing in silence, and inundating the open space between the International Convention Center and the Central Bus Station. He didn’t see Jeremiah, who had been standing there all the while, leaning against a TV van in order not to fall over on account of the dizziness, which still hadn’t let up, nor did Nebuchadnezzar see Jeremiah’s mother, who stood at a distance of some dozen meters from her son but hadn’t noticed him among the crowd, nor did Nebuchadnezzar see Noa’s mother, who was hanging around in a dressing gown. For the most part, the crowd hadn’t seen or heard a thing, only rumors about what had been seen and said. Within minutes, there were already plenty of false and empty rumors clouding the true ones: The king is being beaten to death in there! They’re lashing him with a whip! They’re wrestling, and the King of Judah is gaining the upper hand! They’re— And Mattaniah pushed his way through the assembly, flanked by a large dog on a leash, and to Jeremiah it appeared as if the dog was pulling Mattaniah forward. Nebuchadnezzar looked at the dog and said, Marvelous, a big Babylonian dog. He kneeled and scratched Tukulti behind his ears and spoke to him kindly in his native tongue, while the King of Babylon’s astonished eyes struggled to decipher the passages in Akkadian on the young Judean man’s forearms. The King of Babylon gently grasped the tattooee’s wrist, like a nurse checking the pulse of an old man, then turned over the arm in order to continue reading. And suddenly Nebuchadnezzar had the urge to dig his teeth into the flesh of this white, inscribed forearm. And the King of Babylon stood up and ambled over to his car, and he opened the trunk and returned with a bottle of extra-virgin olive oil that was saved for such occasions, and he approached Mattaniah, who looked vacantly at the bottle, and without a moment’s delay the King of Babylon shot back his arm and shattered the bottle of oil on Mattaniah’s head.
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NOA, LEFT BEHIND, watched Mattaniah and Tukulti hurry in the direction of the western entrance to the city, where the King of Babylon stood waiting for the new King Jehoiachin. Eliazar was slung close to her body, less than two months old. The night of the king’s piano recital, they’d slept soundly and hadn’t heard a thing, but something woke them up early in the morning; they heard neighbors leaving their homes in a rush. Noa told him: Don’t worry, Eliazar. You won’t be king. You were born at your mother’s wedding; a sinful stain will always mark you. No prophet will anoint you as king with such a stain on you. It’s impossible to become King of Israel with such sinful origins. She looked at little Eliazar, asleep against her, and said: No, never a king, never a prince. Neither a prophet nor a minister of war, neither the captain of the guard nor the minister of agriculture—not a magician or master sorcerer or eunuch or chief eunuch or satrap, either.
A th
ree-minute stroll from their apartment stood a Babylonian tank that had strayed from its path and was stranded in a park. Horses that had been unharnessed from their iron chariots nibbled at the flowers in the rose garden and lapped the waters from the artificial pond as though it were a trough. But Noa didn’t know any of this, not yet. These were the last minutes of quiet. She sat with Eliazar in the depths of the park, early in the morning, and sang him a song that no one else heard—certainly not the Babylonians, some of whom stood at the city gates while the vast majority were just then finishing up looting the Temple with a quiet, thoroughgoing efficiency, after first locking up the priests who hadn’t managed to flee, as well as whoever else was there hiding in the broom closet so that no one would hurt or bother them. Only Eliazar heard the song, and this while asleep. What was it she sang to him? Would it be remembered in the moments to come? In even a few seconds? Suddenly her heart divined what Mattaniah refused at all costs to grasp, that they would kill Jehoiachin—who it was rumored had flown in yesterday—and that she would be, in no time at all, even today, the queen, and that this baby would be the Prince of Judah and Jerusalem. And she realized that Jehoiakim had summoned the pianist because he didn’t want Mattaniah, under any circumstances, to rule in his place.
He won’t rule, nor will I. Not she, and not the boy. And she told him: Neither I nor you. Neither I nor you. Neither I nor you. Mattaniah may take part in this screwy story, with his own free will or by force, but as for us—no way. Mattaniah can build a new palace for himself, can deploy an army of servants and slaves, can wage war against the people of the region, and sanctify the name of God or, on the contrary, do evil in the eyes of the Lord—he can do whatever he wants. But she won’t budge from the house in Abu Tor, and she’ll raise Eliazar on her own, and teach him only Hebrew, not all the tongues that Mattaniah promised her he’d teach him—not Assyrian and not Babylonian and not Egyptian. He doesn’t need any other language than Hebrew in order to speak to her. When a boy grows up alone with his mother, he has no need for any language other than his mother tongue. She noticed some bread gone stale that someone had left for the birds in the park, and said, The bread’s dry, the broken bread. And she said: You’re such an idiot. You knew all along that this day would come, and Mattaniah would be sucked into this boiling broth. He denied his destiny because he, too, knew in his innermost heart that this day would come. There aren’t that many candidates, and given the brutality of our era they’re growing fewer by the day. Suddenly she understood why Mattaniah had been in such a rush: he’d sped over there in order to reap his reward. They were going to murder his nephew, and he wanted to be there when it happened; God forbid they should crown someone else. And she imagined herself for a moment stretched out on the bed in the palace, her feet bathed and massaged in oil, but then she banished the sight from her eyes as if she were shooing away a mosquito bloated with blood shrilling in her ear. And she remembered the makeshift shacks in Moab, near Dhiban and Aroer; she’d lived there several years earlier, and then in the smaller community near Al-Karak. She told little Eliazar: We’ll hop on a bus today and flee. We’ll cross the Dead Sea in a rowboat, and tomorrow we’ll watch the sun setting from the eastern side of the river; by tomorrow, things will be real quiet. The people of Moab hadn’t ever been sent into exile—they had no tradition of exile there—so a kind of serenity fell on any traveler who had covered a distance of merely two or three hours. She felt the tang and smell of bygone days, of a thousand years ago, wash over her. You’d arrive on the far side of the Dead Sea, and the first thing, which almost begged to be done, would be to shave your hair. All the women there shaved their hair, and adopted simple linen clothes; the silence of Moab begged for a change of attire. From the other side of the Dead Sea, Jerusalem was barely visible, lost and absorbed among the hills in the colorful, blinding light, at times violet and purple—even as you, too, Noa reflected, are slowly absorbed, leaving the big cities and dwelling among the rocks like a dove. It was always possible to stumble over some flint utensils that the local inhabitants had left behind thousands of years ago—blades and awls and graters—and one could collect a handful of sharp blades, and pick vegetables and fruits in the orchards, or trade for them in the small itinerant bazaars, and slice some pears and desert apples. And within a day or two, a sort of waking slumber would descend on you, the dream of a simple and forgotten way of life in an unending summer, far from the thundering tracks of imperial horses, far from the coastal plain and the fortified cities toward which those horses were always galloping, far from all the tumult and the shouting of the Jews dwelling in that place, constantly hoping for Egypt’s ascendency or the fall of Assyria. Years of tense anticipation and anxiety had turned them hard, suspicious, and bitter, suspicious toward everything that wasn’t familiar. Even a woman’s cropped hair was horrifying for them; even a small tattoo on the nape of your neck provoked their ire. In their friendly manner, as it were, they objected to anything deviant. Even her refusal to watch television with her parents every evening was from their point of view a sign of contempt, the first signs of madness and sociopathy. They liked these sorts of phrases: There’s a way to do things, or No, that’s not the way. They told her that Moab was a kind of parched desert, a cultural wasteland, filled with beggars and disease: There’s no orchestra there, they told her, that says everything about the place. She decided to go anyway, and she immediately understood how they’d misled her, and how the land was not lacking in water and green, springs and torrent-beds, and cold and warm pools, as though all the water in the region led there, and she heard the water in the silence, and beheld the green, which wasn’t abundant but was a very bright green, and someone gave her a slice of melon left in the cold, streaming water, and she absorbed its coolness. All this was some ten years ago, and she would go back there tomorrow, tomorrow. After all, Moab is so close, she told herself resolutely. She’d return to those days of her youth, when she was in her twenties. She’d cross that little strip of water with Eliazar, and they’d sit together in a hammock and eat cantaloupe and watermelon; she’d feed him the tasty, cold Moabite fruit; she’d find for herself a stone blade thousands of years old and slice thin slices for him. And, barefoot, she would walk in the cold water, she thought, and she would shade both their faces under a wide-brimmed hat. Tomorrow, she told Eliazar. Tomorrow we leave and cross over. But several minutes later, a black jeep arrived and some eunuchs honked at her to come over. They didn’t know exactly whom they were bringing; they thought she was just some concubine. And she didn’t get up, took no notice. So they honked a second time, persistently. And in due course they took her and Eliazar and brought them to the palace.
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ALL THE ASSEMBLED JUDEANS watched Mattaniah remove his shirt in embarrassed alarm, and he was left with only his pants on, as oil mixed with blood dripped over his cropped hair and over his face. Nebuchadnezzar and his ministers crowded around him and tried hard to read the inscriptions in cuneiform on his body. He stood there with his pants bunched up at his ankles, as though he’d come for a dermatology checkup, his shirt clutched in his hand, sucking in his belly a bit. His skin was bright and speckled everywhere in whitish patches, as is common for redheads.
Assyrian and Babylonian are cognates of the Akkadian tongue, and he who knows one of the languages can make do in the other. This is a king to my liking, Nebuchadnezzar told Nebushazban, who also drew up close to read. The king didn’t succeed in reading most of the inscriptions—they were in High Assyrian, ornate, ancient—but learned Nebushazban clapped his hands excitedly and shouted, Indeed, on his shoulder is the inscription from Shalmaneser III’s black obelisk: Ashur, the exalted Lord / King of all the mighty gods…, he began reading, and then as quickly fell silent, nervously realizing that in reading aloud he was displaying a deplorable arrogance toward his king. Nebuchadnezzar inspected Mattaniah’s muscles and his hat and said slowly in Akkadian, as though speaking to a monkey, Am I to understand that you’re one of us? Even thoug
h Mattaniah more or less understood the question, he couldn’t answer with any fluency, so he told the translator—the fib was by now routine—I’m of Assyrian descent on my mother’s side, Your Highness. In order to prove the point, he switched with some difficulty to his broken Assyrian, and the king replied in Babylonian, and in this way they somehow spoke, to the king’s delight.
And Nebuchadnezzar glanced at his watch and said: What I’ve heard and seen is more than enough. You will reign from the day your nephew comes to play for me, but you can start learning the ropes immediately. Shalashat arhu, three moons. You’ll now make a pledge to me personally; you’ll say it in Akkadian and in Hebrew, here in front of all the Jews and Babylonians, a serious vow. You’ll be my vassal, but not like the vassals of Shalmaneser III—not like him whose words are inscribed on your body, who’d pulverize his many kingdoms to dust with his huge stone pestle just to brew himself some hot herbal tea with their remains—but like your nice dog here is your bond slave. Ah, finally there’s someone to talk to, and he slapped Mattaniah on his tattoos. Again, to his embarrassment—though he kept it all to himself—he felt a strong urge to dig his nails into the future King of Judah, into this flesh, to scratch deep. Oh, you’re cold, the king cried out—get dressed, please. Why doesn’t someone bandage the future King of Judah’s head? he suddenly screamed, and remove the wretched oil from his hair, and the blood. Mattaniah recognized the word igulu, which means good oil, but a picture of a frozen igloo came to mind instead, and he was there, stretched out in the igloo, naked and shivering. I’ll give you whatever you need, Nebuchadnezzar said, and you’ll restore the Temple and fill it up with new vessels. Whatever we’ve already packed away in crates—it’s lost to you now; we’re not about to unpack it all. If you’d only arrived a few hours earlier, maybe I’d have stopped despoiling the gold vessels and riches from the House of your God. But everything is already packed in our cartons, and the forms have been filled out, and everything is already on the way to our archivist. If we unpack the crates now—and it appeared as if Nebuchadnezzar was only waiting for Mattaniah, the future king, to ask this boon, and he’d have it done as Mattaniah wished, but Mattaniah didn’t utter a word—there’ll be a huge commotion here, the masses will turn to looting. Best for us to stick to our plans and not open any cartons that have been sealed. You’ll be my vassal, he said, and that isn’t anything to be ashamed of, but an honor. Everyone has a bond slave; and I am also a slave, of Marduk, and he, too, has lords who are greater than him, who appointed him to rule before the beginning of time.
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