Muck

by Dror Burstein

  Jeremiah, who was registered in the offices of the association as living in Anatot, was staying in his rented apartment the night of the purge, and consequently was saved. One of the soldiers who’d entered his parents’ house stared for a moment at the sunglasses sitting on their kitchen table and asked, Can I have those? Esther didn’t understand the language, and he took her silence for a yes. It was night, and yet the soldier left wearing the sunglasses; he felt more comfortable this way, knocking at doors and waking people up. Several hours later, soldiers arrived from another unit, which was looking not for poets but for doctors. And he sat there, Hilkiah, waiting for them; he sat there in the living room in his white cloak. And Esther wore a doctor’s cloak, too, his, because they were worried the soldiers might take him without her.

  In the news, they reported on the rounding up of the poets and writers and the fellows of the Democracy Institute and the Psychoanalytic Society and the Spinoza Institute and Confucius Institute and Gilgamesh Institute and the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute—the city had a wide array of research-endowed institutes, which greatly facilitated the rounding up of the intelligentsia—and of the medical specialists, and the senior lawyers, and the tenured professors at the university, and so on and so forth, all according to the orderly spreadsheets assembled and distributed by the Babylonian computer tasked with organizing the exile. It took three hours for all the lists to be printed out, and Jehoiachin scanned the names, which didn’t mean anything to him, and nodded.

  Jeremiah quietly entered his parents’ home through the window at three in the morning. They sat there, the two of them, in armchairs in the living room, both in white cloaks, talking softly, and he, who didn’t want to scare them, hung back in the doorway and looked at them glowing there, two halves of a full moon. Yes, it’s dreadful to go into exile, Esther said, but to stay here without any friends and acquaintances is no good, either. Do you remember the days after we buried her? You remember saying that you felt like running away, getting as far away as possible? You said, She sent me into exile, she banished me from life. No? You don’t remember? That’s what you told me. And what did you tell me when I said all that? Jeremiah’s father asked, almost in a whisper. I told you we had another child, that we were like a conquered nation who’d had half of its territory devastated, and that, though it was possible to abandon the half that was left, it was also possible to stay and somehow live on it and hold on to it. Do you think we’ve held on to him long enough? You think he understands what it all meant for us? And Hilkiah said: Sometimes when he spoke I’d see her face in his face, and I’d hear her voice; there were sentences of his that were exactly her sentences, her intonation, the music of her speech. And once I almost told him this, but at the last minute I held back. Maybe I should have said it. I didn’t want to frighten him. Esther said: Everything that happened during the pregnancy, my dreams about the dedication, now it’s actually happening. It’s pretty sad, this prophecy business, it’s like catching a virus. Especially when it doesn’t really work. He barely drags himself along. I saw him once prophesying near the Smadar Cinema, Hilkiah said. Two beggars stood in front of him, and he tried. He really tried. I couldn’t bring myself to watch. I left, I slipped into the movie house in the middle of the feature; I watched the film, something about mountain climbing.

  The silence grew between them, and Jeremiah, who’d been leaning his shoulder and brow against the doorjamb with his eyes shut, deliberated as to whether he should clear his throat and enter or just stay put, maybe stay put there forever. And Esther suddenly said, in the dark, I once saw some lost ducks in a cloud—they lost each other in heavy fog. Tell them that you’re a nurse, Hilkiah said suddenly. That you’re my nurse. That we work together.

  Jeremiah quietly turned around and left his parents’ home without bidding them goodbye. Esther stared after him. He realized, as he left, that those cloaks were the white flags of their surrender. Clothes of surrender, surrendering attire, he muttered. They’re wrapped in their white flags. But it won’t help.

  The next day, Jeremiah sat on the white Chords Bridge in black clothes that he’d taken from his sister’s closet, his head resting on a cable, and gazed at the thousands of deportees standing in long lines in the early days of summer. Train after train left the central station, except that this time, in contrast to the light rail’s customary circular route, the cars didn’t return. Jeremiah saw his parents standing in one of the lines. Each deportee was scrutinized in a quiet, businesslike manner, and his baggage was inspected, and his identity card was examined. They were then all courteously ushered into a car and led to an assigned seat; each passenger was given a cooler for the journey, a kind of serving tray, like those used on airplanes, and also a basic Hebrew-Babylonian conversation manual. Jehoiachin and his mother boarded a car just like everybody else.

  A special car was reserved for prophets. Concerning the prophets, says the Lord—Jeremiah heard the bridge speak to him in the humming of its strings, like a harp in a storm—concerning the prophets, see, I am against those who prophesy lying dreams, says the Lord, and who tell them, and who lead my people astray by their lies and their recklessness, when I did not send them or appoint them, so they do not profit this people at all; who prophesy lies in my name, saying, I have dreamed, I have dreamed. The cables quivered, and Jeremiah’s body quivered with them. I have dreamed, I have dreamed, Jeremiah repeated, like an echo.

  * * *

  HE SAW EZEKIEL STANDING IN LINE, a young prophet whom he’d only heard on the radio once or twice, and whom he’d seen years ago at the Bookworm, sitting there stooped over and writing feverishly. He looked an awful lot like Brenner, the writer. Ezekiel entered one of the cars, and, a moment before being swallowed up with the rest of the deportees, spun around as though looking for someone. Jeremiah thought about what a train full of prophets would be like—the early prophets, such as Samuel and Huldah and Natan, and the prophets that barely anyone remembers, like Gad the Visionary or Hanani the Seer, and Elijah and Elisha, and Amos and Jonah, Isaiah and Hosea and Micah and Zephaniah and Nahum and others he himself had forgotten, and then the prophets of the future, like this same Ezekiel. He imagined them seated with their backs facing the train’s destination, each car provided with its own prophet, one prophet to a car, all staring, frozen, each one of them with the same word in his or her mouth, the identical word that had to be spoken as they waited for the engineer to come and start the train. And in the train on the parallel track Jeremiah envisioned the kings, from Saul right up to Mattaniah, they, too, sitting in their cars, wearing identical crowns on their heads, as though the crowns were really a single crown under which, every now and then, a new head popped up. Meanwhile, the trains slid inaudibly away.

  * * *

  AFTER THE LAST TRAIN LEFT for the north, and a silence fell over the station and city as on the eve of the Day of Atonement, he returned to his parents’ home and went from room to room and shut off the lights they’d left on. They’d left all the lights on, he noted in astonishment, including the small night-light that his sister had called Firefly. He switched off everything. And he stood for a long moment, leaning against his parents’ bedroom doorjamb, and suddenly felt like lying on their bed, felt like simply lying on his back a bit in the dark and looking up at the ceiling with his eyes shut. But he didn’t step into the room, and he didn’t lie down. He strode up to the fuse box closet and switched off the current for the whole house. His back still hurt a lot, but it had stopped preoccupying him a long time ago.

  All at once, thousands of homes in Jerusalem had been vacated, and yet Jeremiah, sitting in his parents’ empty and darkened home that same evening, saw a light go on in one of the neighboring houses in Anatot. As he peered in the dark through the shutters in his sister’s room, he saw that the home of the math teacher, who’d been deported, was being silently looted. The teacher had a rare collection of shells, and someone knew about it and wanted the collection for himself. Jeremiah watched how the thie
f left the place with an enormous fossilized ammonite shell—two meters in diameter—on his back, as though he were a mover lugging a refrigerator. The deportees from Judah, who tended to be affluent, educated professionals, were also for the most part the owners of handsome, spacious homes, and as if by some law of nature, even as they were on their way to Babylon, the plundering and looting began. A cat sniffs out a deserted house in no time, Jeremiah thought. In another hour, no one will remember the cat that ran off. And though no one knew precisely what started it, at the same time as Judah lost its exiles, people began moving out of Edom—entire families, homeless refugees whose cities Nabataean tribes from the desert had raided. The people of Edom fled their homes by the skin of their teeth, seeing their houses confiscated by the Nabataeans, bearing effigies of their god Qos on camels. They crossed the Jordan close to the southern end of the Dead Sea, and then went westward, as a result of their fear of the invading tribes. When they heard of the deportation of the Jews, they hastened to fill the vacuum yawning in the South Hebron Hills, and some of them made their way up to the empty properties in Jerusalem. Though these properties remained fastened shut with locks and nailed shut with planks of wood, the planks that were meant to protect the houses and their windows served only to mark the homes as vacant, and it was as if the wood were bellowing to the new arrivals: Come and break in, O man of Edom, smallest of the nations! They seized upon this abandoned property with heavy hearts, and they broke the locks in shame. They were also academics and doctors and lawyers, and they told their new neighbors: It’s only until the persecution passes. After all, we have no intention of settling here permanently—we’ll return to our native Edom in a week or two, a month max. So their neighbors left them alone—not that there was much they could do during those days of general tumult and exile—and the Babylonians allowed it all to happen, or simply weren’t paying all that much attention. But none of the squatters would ever return to Edom, neither they nor their children, and they sired sons and daughters and they planted vineyards and they opened a small school and a center for Edomite culture, which grew steadily. And a month passed, and two months, and a year, and the deportees didn’t return, and the Edomites tilled the abandoned fields, and they made their pretty ceramic utensils and their copper vessels and their decorated jugs, and they sold them in due course, first as itinerant peddlers and then in a small outdoor market, and in the end they completely took over the pottery business. Now and then there was a case of intermarriage, and the younger generations of both nations began, as is the way of the world, to merge, and there was always someone who wanted to remind everyone: We’re all brothers, no? Esau will not always despise Jacob. And they spoke, too, of the massacre that Joab son of Zeruiah committed, and how he’d eliminated all the males in Edom: Let them settle here in compensation. And people whose names were Qosgever and Qosmelech and Shuvnaqos and Qosbanah and Qosnadav and Qosaneh-lee occupied the region south of Jerusalem and, afterward, even neighborhoods in the center of town; within a year, the first nursery school was opened in which the only language spoken was Edomite.

  A flock of sparrows would alight every morning on a tree in the neighbors’ yard; before her exile, Esther regularly fed them bread, but the day after the deportation they ceased coming. Although most of the residents of Jerusalem were allowed to remain, nearly all of the artists, professionals, professors, writers, poets, artists, prophets, musicians, directors of cultural institutions, delicatessen and wine-store owners, owners of movie theaters as well as their projectionists, and pretty much everyone with an advanced degree were gone. It was clear that there was no point in keeping the university open, so they shut down both campuses in the absence of any senior lecturers. And the Smadar Cinema and the Cinematheque were both shut down, as were the music centers in Mishkenot Sha’ananim and in Ein Kerem, and the writers’ cafés and the Artists House were shut down, and the Israel Museum and the Museum of Biblical Archeology and the Science Museum were all shut down; only the Museum of Contemporary Amelek Art remained open, following orders from on high. Almost nobody thought much about it, since business and agriculture went on as usual. And when Adrabah—the last bookstore in Jerusalem—closed, it was clear that that was that … even though they’d really reached that was that long before.

  Along the light-rail tracks that had been laid down from Babylon to Jerusalem, a steady trickle began—one drop at a time, like a neglected kitchen faucet—of voluntary deportees to Babylon, and on the route that the deportee trains had made during the first year of Zedekiah’s reign hundreds of new travelers were added during the years that followed; they embarked in order to join voluntarily the exiles who’d been forced to leave. The few remaining musicians went first, since they knew they’d be just as easily understood in that distant place as here, and it had been a long time now since they had been able to make a living in Judah from their music (aside from playing at weddings). After them went the aspiring artists, who saw the exile as an opportunity—the ones who hadn’t published anything or had a one-man show yet, and consequently didn’t appear on any lists. Shortly after the deportation, they couldn’t help noticing that there was no one left who would be interested in listening to them or looking at their paintings or reading their poems. So all the artistic dregs of Judah settled in Babylon, along the riverbanks, and played and sang, and poems of weeping and lamentation were printed in the papers, but the songs and melodies they sang and played were of all kinds, and even the dirges were played with a sense of of hope. Some settled in tents close to the site of the new city of Judah in Babylon, whose foundations they started to dig, and they learned Akkadian and Aramaic, and founded clubs for the study of ancient and new sacred books, and also a printing house and a publishing firm, and they married Jewish and Babylonian women. Some emigrated farther, to Persia and Media, the lands of the sons of Japheth, and they scattered farther and farther, not because of swords or tanks but because of the locked gates of the university, and the closed bookstores and the welded-shut doors to the theaters, and the classical-music radio station whose power was shut off in the middle of a concerto.

  Those who remained in Judah didn’t care much: All the better, let them go, let them emigrate; our king’s Zedekiah and our city’s Jerusalem. But in Babylon, when the exiled Jews said the king, they meant Jehoiachin, the young king imprisoned there, who would come out to his exiled people from his place of confinement once a year and bless them in broken Hebrew.

  34

  JEREMIAH’S PARENTS DISEMBARKED at the last stop.

  All the other passengers had alighted at stations along the Euphrates. To Hilkiah and Esther’s surprise, beyond Damascus security measures on the train were nonexistent, and it turned out that the Babylonians didn’t care at all whether their Jewish deportees settled in South Babylon, at its center, or in the north. Only the roads leading back to Judah were well guarded, and the return train was canceled until further notice. They traveled northeast. The journey took many days, during which they slept by day and kept their eyes open at night. There were almost no lights along the way, and no signs to speak of. At first light, they’d hang a sheet on the train car’s window and fall asleep. There were fewer and fewer passengers; the passengers disembarked the moment they realized that there was no one to tell them where they should get out, seizing on encouraging signs, such as a palm tree or a clothing store: Surely if there’s a clothing store it’s possible to make a living here, if not from the peddling of sewing machines, then from tailoring; if not from tailoring, then from selling buttons; if not from selling buttons, then from selling thread. But Esther and Hilkiah went on. And when they arrived at the river, after many days, the last passengers in their car abandoned the train. The water persuaded them, like a great rhetorician, to step outside. So they alighted and drank and walked up to the water and shouted in Hebrew at the Euphrates. The water received the foreign words with sympathy. Esther and Hilkiah saw all of this from the window of the train, which they were about to cover
with their sheet. They were sitting side by side and holding hands—all four hands were clasped. And, without speaking a word, they decided not to get up, and they didn’t even bother to check whether there were any passengers left in the other cars. They simply sat and continued on their way. They didn’t know where the train was taking them. Maybe they thought that, at the end of the line, the last car would become the first, and the train would begin its return journey, as on the Jerusalem light rail. They didn’t know how many days they’d been traveling. Several—that much was certain, judging from the length of Hilkiah’s beard. And then the train gave a sudden lurch, apparently switching to a different track, and the desert scenery that had lately accompanied them was replaced by water. The tracks ran assiduously along the west bank of the Euphrates. They didn’t look out the left-hand window; they covered it with flattened-out boxes. This way they also blocked out the new star, which didn’t give anyone a moment’s rest. Here, too, it doesn’t budge, Esther said of it. Maybe there’s a place somewhere where it can’t be seen, Hilkiah answered. Everything depends on the latitude, he told her. Maybe it can’t be seen at the North Pole. But he didn’t know for certain. In any case, they looked only to the right, at the river. The water, which was moving in the opposite direction to their train, served as a sort of reference point, like a banister on a darkened staircase you ascend in a dream. And they knew that this river wouldn’t go on forever. Maybe there are other trains, she said. Maybe we can cut across and reach the north. What was there, north of Babylon? This they didn’t know. And Hilkiah said abruptly, for no particular reason, Ararat. Esther looked and didn’t see any mountain.