Muck

by Dror Burstein

  And now, Nebuchadnezzar told Mattaniah, now begins the second and most popular act in the little play we’ve put on before the people. And Nebuchadnezzar raised his eyes and there were masses of people wherever he looked; most of the inhabitants of the city had come out and packed the streets as though for a state funeral. And Nebuchadnezzar said: Now I will change your name, just like Pharaoh Neco renamed your older brother. I know, I know, your father and mother gave you a very nice name, and this stranger comes along and changes it, but from now on I’ll be your father and mother. And you’ll love me as you love them—and maybe even a bit more. And your new name will remind you whom to love. But, as another exceptional example of goodwill and of mercy I will let you chose a new name for yourself. I’ve never done that before, Nebuchadnezzar said, but, then again, I’ve never seen a king so neatly decorated in cuneiform inscriptions before, either. And Mattaniah said: I, uh, would rather stay with the name Mattaniah. Because, you know, I’ve gotten used to … And he giggled as they dressed his head and tightened the bandage. Nebuchadnezzar stared at him for a moment, fish-eyed, and then snorted, and his ministers burst into laughter, and this wave of laughter swept through the crowd, as when the fans of a soccer team rise to their feet and wave their arms and fall back into their seats, and it sped down the length of Jaffa Road, which was jammed with people, and crashed into the Western Wall, and there shattered. And when the laughter subsided, the King of Babylon asked again whether the future King of Judah had come to a decision, and Mattaniah, who hadn’t interpreted the laughter correctly—that is, he thought they were laughing with him—opened his mouth again to say Mattaniah. But something in the Babylonian king’s eyes made him realize that one more wrong word out of his mouth and they’d shoot him then and there, so he said, When I was a child I had a made-up name, and Nebuchadnezzar said, That’s great, what was it? And Mattaniah said, I called myself … I was called Zed … Zedekiah. So the other children wouldn’t know who I really was.

  And so his name was changed to Zedekiah. He was twenty-six years old when he was crowned king, but he lied and said that he was twenty-one, and thus was it registered. And he was given the standard vassal-kingdom forms to fill out. They placed before him the royal desk, and he entered his father’s name, Josiah, and his mother’s name, Hamutal, daughter of Jeremiah. Fleetingly, he remembered his grandfather, whose name was the same as that of Jeremiah the prophet, whom he hadn’t seen since that chance encounter in the restaurant. And Mattaniah recalled that it was him, yes, Jeremiah, who’d given him his name in the youth club—at Mattaniah’s own behest. Then, too, he hadn’t been able to come up with a name for himself. The memory surged up of the full moon they’d seen then, swaddled as though in a pink fabric; it seemed like such a long time ago. Mattaniah placed his hand on Tukulti’s back—his dog, who’d been there all along and had listened to the ceremony with his muzzle lowered, and when they’d smashed the bottle on his master’s head he’d remained silent and hadn’t budged from his place. The dog recognized Broch in the crowd, staring at him in loathing, with flesh-toned Band-Aids plastered on his upper and lower lips, like a terrifying clown.

  Jehoiachin, the newly dismissed king, who was standing nearby and taking all of this in, lowered his gaze and slowly turned around and walked away. No one, so it seemed, paid any attention to him; only Mattaniah looked after him for a moment. He didn’t even have time to say goodbye to his nephew, whom he’d last seen when one of them was a child and the other a teenager. And Jehoiachin boarded the light rail at the Central Bus Station. On the one hand, he was delighted that the whole royal shebang had been forestalled before it even began, but the speed with which it was forgotten and the ease with which he was let go, on the other hand, offended him to the very depth of his soul. No one remembered, it seemed to him, his playing—all of it had already been forgotten.

  He boarded the light rail, confused and drained, and it set out once again on its eastward journey, in its voyage that has no end, to and fro, like a pendulum swinging across the city, in light and darkness, for only on the holy Sabbath does it rest—or, rather, that is, it might rest, depending on the king, whether he doeth evil in the eyes of the Holy One or not. The multitude swarming down Jaffa Road parted to let the light rail through, like a zipper opening, and then closed ranks in its wake. And from the eastern part of the city, the blue tanks crept up Agron Street. They held their fire, as they’d been instructed to their great chagrin, shelling neither the ramparts nor the private residences. The tanks were ramped up onto flattop trucks and then disappeared at the head of the road leading westward, and the Babylonian king and his ministers were swallowed up in their cars and disappeared. Only Nebuzaradan and Nebushazban, who’d been assigned to stay behind and assist in organizing the deportation of the ten thousand—a partial and merciful exile—remained, but now, deprived of all the guards and their companions, they appeared almost like boys, dwarfed by their strange, overly festive getups. And as at a party where you don’t know a soul apart from a single person, and you force yourself on him the entire evening, they both cast questioning looks at Zedekiah, and he said, in pidgin Akkadian, which would improve in the years to come: Okay, so I’ll take you over to the palace in the Holyland complex, to my nephew; surely he’s waiting for you there. Anyway, he, Jehoiachin, is still king for the next three months, and who knows, maybe his reign will be extended. Zedekiah didn’t register that the palace was already his, that he was now obliged to live there, and that the present king would reign only officially, on paper, in the shadow of his dead father, the drowned, the great.

  And Zedekiah stood there, the Chords Bridge behind him, and peered at the legions of the nation, of whom he saw only a small fraction, and he realized that, although he was terrified, there was also something warm making a place for itself between his stomach and his heart, like someone might feel after not failing, as expected, a difficult exam. People looked at him, most of them for the first time, and suddenly someone shouted, Long live the new king, long live our father, Zedekiah, King of Judah, long live! And the multitude roared in answer.

  31

  JEREMIAH WANDERED THE STREETS OF THE CITY like a spinning top in an earthquake. His balance would return momentarily; then the dizziness would start again, and he’d throw out his arms to hold on to trees. The city was like an enormous swing under his feet, and sometimes it seemed to him that he was walking in the sky—until, worn out and shaking, he flagged down a cab and asked to be driven to the palace. The prophecy for Jehoiachin was already set in his mind. And he knew that he had to reach the palace and choose for himself an intercom and say into it: As I live, says the Lord, even if King Coniah son of Jehoiakim of Judah were the signet ring on my right hand, even from there I would tear you off and give you into the hands of those who seek your life, into the hands of those of whom you are afraid, even into the hands of King Nebuchadrezzar of Babylon and into the hands of the Chaldeans. I will hurl you and the mother who bore you into another country, where you were not born, and there you shall die. But they shall not return to the land to which they long to return.

  That was it. But the prophecy was all twisted in his head when he muttered it to himself, peppered with mistakes. He wanted to say cut you off, and what came out was tear you off; he wanted to say to another country, and what came out was into another country. And he realized that they’d scrambled his brain, that they’d swirled him around in the machine not to break his body but to scramble and craze his words and speech.

  But it was impossible to reach the palace, for the multitude was blocking all the roads in the city. When he got out of the cab, it dawned on him that he didn’t have any money to cover his fare. He told this to the driver, and the driver looked at him and said: I know you, you’re Jeremiah. Forget it, don’t pay. I heard you once speaking at the Bookworm. And Jeremiah thanked him and barely made his way to the nearest light-rail stop. He got on and sat there, his head leaning against the window, not even knowing in what direction th
e train was traveling. And he realized that they’d taken his shoulder bag with Zelda’s book in it when they’d led him to the rotator. The amputated beggar cries, he told the window. His weeping covers the sun’s eye, screens the flowers from view.

  * * *

  HIS FINGERS AT REST ON HIS KNEES, Jehoiachin sat, the new-old king, riding the light rail. And the few passengers in the car drew away from him. His ribs were broken—maybe two, three ribs—and he felt a stabbing pain each time he drew breath. He’d never broken anything in his body: always coddled, spared any pain. Now even breathing hurt, and he’d injured his precious hand, and the other one also ached, and he was wheezing and coughing. His fingers were intact, but for the first time in years, dirt had collected under his nails. He felt the dust in his hair. Ten thousand exiles. And he knew perfectly well that the legions of the soon-to-be exiled were weighing down his shoulders, that he was fettered to them by tens of thousands of chains, and, more, that if the ten thousand ever reached Babylon in another three months and he wasn’t there to play for the king, bitter would be their fate. He coughed, and his ribs, like spikes in his chest, tormented him. He thought of Mattaniah, whom he hadn’t recognized at all, even after he’d realized that this was his uncle. He didn’t remember him like that.

  Someone entered at the far end of the car and immediately dropped to his knees, retched, and threw up. And Jehoiachin tried to avoid looking at the man, but then he got up and limped up over to him and jerked him up by the armpits. At this, his ribs shrieked as though they were being harrowed, and he screamed and ceased at once. He fished out of his pocket a moist towelette from some remote restaurant. And the retcher stretched his hand out and wiped his mouth and neck.

  Later, they walked side by side from the Anatot stop to the house at the end of the village. There they found Hilkiah, sitting all alone next to the radio, whose batteries had died during the night; Esther had gone along with the rest of the populace to witness the arrival of the Babylonian king and the crowning of the new King of Judah. And Hilkiah dragged into Jeremiah’s old room a mattress that hadn’t been slept on for many years, and the pair of maimed men lay down there.

  First he examined the guest, whom he immediately recognized as the king who’d been crowned yesterday and who’d played and been dethroned in the morning. Broken ribs, a concussion, and a swollen eye. He brought some ice and disinfectant and sutured the king’s eyebrow. As for the ribs, he said, there’s nothing anyone can do, only rest and patience. The pain will pass within a month or two, and try not to catch a cold, because the sneezing will hurt—and don’t laugh, either, if you can help it. At this point, Jehoiachin began to sob, crying for the first time in years except for any crying he might have done while listening to music; music made him cry a lot. And Hilkiah told him softly: Come, now, it isn’t that bad. You were king for a couple of hours … Isn’t that enough?… I haven’t ever worn a crown in my life. And he gazed for a moment at the photograph of his daughter—or, rather, at its absence, since only now did he notice that it was no longer on the wall, that it was missing, but he gazed anyway at the photo that wasn’t there. Jehoiachin sat up, raised his arm, and with some effort thrust his hand into his bag, where his crown lay, and he told Hilkiah, Here, take it, please, as a gift. And Hilkiah, before returning the crown to its owner, set it on his pate for a moment and felt the weight of gold on his bald head.

  Jeremiah lay there, too, and beheld, from the torment of his wheeling soul, his father crowned for a moment. All of his inner organs, and his brain in particular, felt as though they were seeping together in his body: his heart sliding down, his liver pushed up to his throat, his lungs shoved under his colon. And to his father he said, I’ve been placed on the rotator, Dad. And his father was sorely afraid, but he kept quiet, and then said, Wait a minute. In a panic, he went into his daughter’s room, in which they hadn’t moved a thing for more than a decade; a small painting of a tree fronting the sea still hung on the wall, and her empty desk still stood, with unsharpened pencils and an eraser on which was etched a map of the Old City. And he opened a drawer and found her medications, including her anti-nausea pills; she’d suffered from nausea even before her cancer. All of her medications were still there, like the rest of her stuff. Hilkiah returned to the room with his new patients, ripped open the aluminum seal with his fingernail, cradled his son’s head, had him sip some water and swallow a pill, and placed a second pill on his tongue. And he said, confidently, even though he didn’t know—he didn’t know a thing—that the medication would take effect in half an hour, and the pains would pass, and the dizziness would go away: It’ll soon pass, son, maybe even a little sooner than soon.

  After a few minutes, Jeremiah felt that the effects of the rotator really were easing off, and his balance gradually came back to him. He got up carefully and, looking at the king’s head drowsing beside his crown, tiptoed to the living room and stepped out to the balcony. The moon was shining in the daylight—not so strange a sight—and on the round balcony table his father had set a glass of herbal tea. And Jeremiah told him, It passed. And his father said, Look, the moon is eclipsing the new star; they say that this won’t happen again for another five thousand years.

  They sat at the round wooden table that Hilkiah’s grandfather had sawed freehand, and Jeremiah recounted to his father what had happened until now and what was about to happen, told him about the exile that was being coordinated over the coming months, and the despoiling of the holy vessels in the king’s palace—even though they’d actually looted the old palace, which in effect was a museum for the House of David, and not the Holyland complex. He raised his eyes and told him: Dad, surely they’ll take you to Babylon; they’ll take most of the doctors and the educated, those are the king’s orders. Maybe a few family practitioners will remain to take care of the poor country folk, but every specialist will be sent into exile. Hilkiah, without appearing to get upset, said, I’ve always wanted to see Babylon and the towns along the banks of the big rivers. He kept looking at the door of Jeremiah’s sister’s room, which he had left open, and at the medicine drawer that was still open, and at the blank space where his sister’s name wasn’t written on the yellowing box on the wooden table, which bore a label that merely read: NAME OF PATIENT __________.

  Jeremiah drank the refreshing tea. His father gave him the package of pills but told him: You probably won’t even need these; you’re already recovering from it. Trust me, I understand these things. All that was necessary was to tend to the nerve centers shaken up in your concussed brain. And Jeremiah filled another glass and carefully got up, still a bit dizzy, to set the glass beside the king, asleep in the adjoining room. The king, who was exhausted from lack of sleep and from playing his piano and from the blows he’d received, had dozed off. When Jeremiah returned to the balcony, the door to his sister’s room was shut, and his father said: And so we’ll set out for Babylon. We’ll pack tonight. We won’t let them send us into exile; we’ll uproot ourselves voluntarily; we’ll buy train tickets to Babylon. And Jeremiah looked at him, unable to grasp whether this was stoical serenity or utter idiocy. For a moment, he thought that exile, which would certainly be hard—a long journey, ending in one’s absorption into a neighborhood or city that would need to be more or less built up from its foundations, not to mention learning a new language, a new alphabet, and all that—maybe it would distract them, at least, from his sister’s closed and anguish-filled room, and the unending hope for the miracle of resurrection. Babylon might be, in effect—who knew?—their real revival in old age, or so he tried to convince himself. The change wouldn’t be easy, but at some time or another, there would be a new door and a new apartment, and they’d sit on new chairs and acclimatize. Whatever the case, there was no choice. And he said, against his will: Go on, leave. I’ll come later; I’ll join you when I can, when matters are wound up here. And Hilkiah asked: What, it didn’t end today? I thought that—

  Jeremiah got up and returned inside, and he sat down on
the bed to instruct Jehoiachin in the prophecy that had been laid down for him. But, though he opened his mouth to speak forcefully, he didn’t utter a word; he squelched the prophecy, and only asked the sleeping King Jehoiachin’s suspirations, in a voice that could barely be heard: Is this man Coniah a despised broken pot, a vessel no one wants? Why are he and his offspring hurled out and cast away in a land that they do not know? And he grieved there, in the gloom of the room, grieving not for the city, not for Judah, but for this youth, the son of the king, narrow-hipped and slender-fingered, asleep there on a worn mattress on the floor. Record this man as childless, a man who shall not succeed in his days; for none of his offspring shall succeed in sitting on the throne of David, and ruling again in Judah. And Jeremiah stood up. The dizziness had almost completely vanished, and this bothered him, for he feared that, just as it vanished, so it would return to assault him. He sat beside Jehoiachin, on whom he’d bestowed absentmindedly the pet name Coniah. Jeremiah kept looking at him until Esther returned home and entered the room. The king’s son still hadn’t woken. In her hand was a small bag of sorts, filled with provisions for the trip to Babylon: almonds and dates, two avocado sandwiches, and a thinly sliced radish, for she mistakenly assumed they were setting out in exile that very day, and who knew whether food would be served on the long journey. And Jeremiah saw that this was his sister’s lunch satchel from nursery school, which his mother had kept with all her other belongings. When he saw her name embroidered on the satchel, he remembered that it was his father who’d sewn her name back then; he recognized his handwriting in the seven letters that the purple thread whispered: Shlomit.