Muck

by Dror Burstein

  The light rail raced on. Now and then it stopped at various stations, and people bearing baskets boarded, and Jeremiah’s parents bought food and tea from them. The tea darkened with each day of their journey north, and the languages that they heard became more and more alien. It wasn’t Babylonian, or Assyrian; they couldn’t identify it; they hadn’t been wherever people spoke such a language, and never imagined they would be.

  Hilkiah’s tooth hurt, and he’d run out of painkillers. He pressed two fingers against his jaw. And she watched and asked, It still hurts? And he said, Nails. She waited for him to fall asleep, then opened his mouth and, with two fingertips, seized hold of the tooth and pulled it out, effortlessly. He didn’t pay any attention, just kept sleeping. She flung the tooth out the window. And when he woke up, he didn’t say a word on the subject.

  One morning, a conductor shook them awake—all of a sudden this old conductor appeared—and he signaled that this was it, they’d arrived, it was the end of the line. The train had come to a standstill, resting on its belly on a beach. The track simply stopped up ahead, and the rails were rusty at their terminus because of the lapping water. The exiles didn’t know where they were. Still, the sun shone pleasantly, and they disembarked after two weeks inside one railroad car. Esther felt dizzy, but Hilkiah held her. They left their suitcases on the train; the conductor brought them out and ran after them to hand them their luggage. A jetty poked warily into the water, and they walked on it like two veteran acrobats treading a tightrope, only for a few paces, but they wouldn’t fall—they acted as each other’s handrails. Suddenly a strong wind rose, and Hilkiah’s yarmulke flew into the water and drifted for a bit. He didn’t bend over. He had a phial filled with blood in his pocket. Later he will empty it into the sea. When it gets dark. When he’s left alone.

  Behind them, the train was being taken apart for salvage; there was nothing else to do with it after its overlong journey: the return trip was canceled. And Hilkiah asked his wife, staring at the water, Esther, what is this place? The conductor who had brought them their suitcases had also taken down the white sheet from the window, and now he spread it out on the shoreline, on the wet seashells—over there, where the jetty extended into the sea.

  35

  ELIAZAR GREW FROM YEAR TO YEAR, and he soon turned four and then five, but Zedekiah was busy from morning to night—touring the city with his pair of industrious Babylonian inspectors, applying himself to the study of the Babylonian language at every available moment, and firming up his muscles as though fortifying a city—so his son’s education he left for the most part to Tukulti and Noa. But sometimes he’d read to the little boy out of various poetry collections, lightly revising the poems. For example, the lines:

  I always always wanted Eliazar

  To tell you many words of love

  And once he went up to Eliazar when the boy was brushing his teeth in front of the mirror and told him, in the mirror,

  You’re a shining mint plant, Eliazar,

  Engrossed with mild thoughts

  But the child didn’t understand the strange language of poetry, not least because Mattaniah would pop up out of nowhere with these poems, waving his arms all of a sudden, without warning, like a magician with a clown’s nose who waylays you in the street and starts yanking scarves from his sleeve. Eliazar felt the anguish in his father’s voice when he stood on a stool in the middle of Eliazar’s fifth-birthday party and, facing his little friends, declaimed,

  I know I’ll die soon, Eliazar,

  Lo every tree beams already and shines,

  Eliazar

  Once, Zedekiah took him to visit the graves of his forefathers Kings David and Solomon. The graves were in a sort of cellar. Zedekiah insisted that they go down there alone, just the two of them, without any security guards, and so it was. They held long, flickering tapers in their hands. The wax melted and scorched the boy’s hand. His father kneeled before David’s tomb, held on to the stone, and shouted, Save us, save us! Eliazar gazed at the shadows on the walls. Their tapers were placed on Solomon’s tomb nearby. And suddenly they were snuffed out.

  That same night, Noa found the boy sitting up in bed and looking into the dark from the high palace window. Eliazar, go to sleep, she told him. There’s nothing there. But he replied, I saw the bat! and stared at his mother, his eyes shut tight.

  And Zedekiah, on his way to bed on the ground floor, went around to see what all the shouting was about. When he found Noa standing there half naked, he said: Why are you walking around like that? You want the boy to have nightmares? And he noticed again how she’d gained weight since giving birth. What had first caught his eye about her, back when they met, was her slimness and her severe, sunburned Moabite look, but now nothing was left of any of that. Above all, he was repulsed by her tattoos, which in the past had been pretty and set firmly on her skin like drawings, but were now flaccid. Several weeks later, he hinted and then said outright that he expected her to do something about it, and she said that, yes, she’d lose weight, but it wasn’t that simple. And she tried an array of diets. First she stopped eating wheat and wheat products, but this only made her ravenous, and she replaced wheat with fruits at best but, at worst and more commonly, with sweets. Looking through Mattaniah’s eyes—she couldn’t bring herself to call him Zedekiah, even though it was the law—she realized that none of it was working. He hadn’t touched her much since she’d given birth, and though at first she was comfortable with that, after two, three months she understood that something had happened. Her close-cropped hair started growing back, and she didn’t have it cut again, though he detested long hair: What, are you a lamb? he felt like telling her, but he stifled his gnawing resentments until he couldn’t bear it anymore, and one day she caught him in one of the compound’s many bedrooms screwing a minor that someone had procured for him.

  He poured out the bitterness of his heart to Nebuzaradan, and the Babylonian listened attentively and then said in Akkadian: Look, it’s a well-known predicament, in all the occupied kingdoms I come across the same problem. One thing is sure beyond all doubt, and this is that the queen needs an overhaul, and the king needs a few more women—no big deal! To make do in life with a single, solitary woman is for insignificant grocers, for postmen, for some puny poet … not for a king. And when Zedekiah wondered what Nebuzaradan meant by overhaul, the Babylonian said, Yeah, have her overhauled, why not? She’ll only thank you. Zedekiah figured that Nebuzaradan maybe just meant that Noa should have her hair styled and said, Yes, why not?

  A month later, a plastic surgeon arrived from Babylon along with a stylist, and men came and took Noa. They waited till she was asleep, then put an etherized mask over her eyes and mouth; still she tried to fight them, and Tukulti barked like crazy, but Zedekiah held the leash tightly and said to Noa’s masked eyes, Relax, it’s only a beauty parlor. The annual ceremony marking his coronation was approaching; he couldn’t ascend to the dais of honor accompanied by all her extra calories and that perm of hers, in which God only knew what was swarming, and those loose Moabite inscriptions etched on her shoulders and arms. And so they took Noa to Hadassah Mount Scopus, and the Babylonian plastic surgeon was already waiting for her there. When she woke from the anesthesia, they brought her a mirror; she looked at her hair, and it was short, as in the old days, and attractively colored with black, and all the surplus kilograms had been removed, to her astonishment and alarm, and they’d also given her breast implants, a gift from Nebuzaradan to the King of Judah. Everything was still bandaged, but in time the bandages would be removed, and she would return home like a bonbonnière. They’d removed all the tattoos from her Moab days when they lightened her skin tone complet, and they’d also injected permanent makeup as well as a monitored electrolysis facial and hair removal: We’ve given her a ten-thousand-mile overhaul! Nebuzaradan cracked. We changed her oil and replaced her carburetor and souped up her engine; she’s like an eighteen-year-old right off the lot; you gave us a housewife and we delivere
d you a bimbo; you gave us a quiche and we’ve given you back a strawberry. Zedekiah gazed with bulging eyes at the amazing beauty who came home on high heels, though with her head lowered. And Eliazar looked at her and started hollering.

  In those days, Zedekiah was still roaming the streets, largely with Nebushazban, who had big plans for the city. The closing of numerous local institutions did not escape the eyes of the Babylonian, and he told Zedekiah that it was high time to set right the monstrous redevelopment of Jerusalem that had taken place during Jehoiakim’s reign and earlier, the product of worse than bad taste. Believe me, Zedekiah, he said, I’ve seen hideous buildings through the length and breadth of the empire—I’ve seen villas painted red and black in the cities on the coastal plain in Elam, and tenement blocks for one thousand families in Shushan, and waterfront high-rise hotels all along the Mediterranean—but the likes of this here I’ve never seen: all these buildings with fake fortifications, the new Bezalel building, and the Clal building, and the Hamashbir department store, and the new Central Bus Station. And that’s not even close to the full list—just think of that horrific palace where you live. This doesn’t do any honor to the king. And Zedekiah said, One can argue over taste in architecture, one can define all this as enlightened brutalism, as popular modernism for the masses, and I actually— Here Nebushazban cut him off and said: No, one can’t argue; there’s nothing to dispute on this point. And since there’s no argument, we’ll raze all these buildings to the ground, and if its brutalism you want, we’ll apply brutalism against brutalism, we’ll undertake a de-brutalization. And Zedekiah agreed and said, as he always did, Come to think of it, why not? And the Babylonian said: We’ll demolish them; we’ll carry out a material deconstruction of the urban architecture in the heart of your metropolis. (Nebushazban liked to talk critical theory.) We’ll bring Jerusalem back to the days when it was a city of human dimensions, he went on, we’ll conduct a reflexive de-territorialization of the local architecture. In other words, a double-recursive ironization of the master plan, a retroactive palimpsestization of the a-grammatological elements in the architectural complex.

  And so began the years of rebuilding the city from scratch. Nebushazban declared that he would knead the city beneath his hands, he would mold her and prepare her for her glorious future. He didn’t intend to waste his time in this city drinking wine, like his friend the glutton; he intended to leave his mark on the city. And the first stage in his plan was this: within two days, he scheduled the demolition of every building in Jerusalem that he considered improper. Until we cut the skyline back so it doesn’t block out the hills, this won’t be a proper city, Nebushazban said, and Zedekiah again agreed. How could he not agree? After all, he was a vassal king, though no one ever mentioned this, and in particular not the Babylonians.

  Bulldozers were ordered to raze and level. Streets were widened, broadened into avenues. In a single day, the entire neighborhood of Nahlaot was removed from the map, and work began to replace it with an overpass in order to divert some traffic from the infuriatingly gridlocked city center. Then they turned Gaza Street into a six-lane thoroughfare, and next on the itinerary was to pave a ruler road, utterly straight and flat, from the Babylonian military encampment in Ramat Rachel straight into the Old City. Nebushazban did actually place a ruler on the map, drawing a line and then another line, telling the local king, whose name he’d forget every now and then, Tomorrow get this tarred for me, Mr. King. And, as an example to the masses, before the ruler road was put in, Nebushazban’s urban-renewal project was officially inaugurated with the demolition of the entire Holyland complex. They dynamited all the buildings at the same time, regardless of size, and they filled in the Venetian canals because of their awful kitschiness, in Nebushazban’s word. Jeremiah, who’d ascended to the roof of his parents’ home in Anatot with his father’s radio, listened to the news reports in a kind of serene despair, calm and devoid of bitterness—at this stage, nothing shocked him anymore. A few days later, he saw the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design on Mount Scopus turned into a heap of white dust in less than an hour. Bezalel, really one for the books, Nebushazban lectured at the festive wrecking ceremony at the Mount Scopus amphitheater: Imagine having erected such an eyesore here, facing the desert. The eye refuses to open on such a sight; its lashes gum up out of sheer disgust. And to think that art was taught there, he said, horrified. What sort of art could one possibly learn inside a space that’s utterly repellent? From a safe distance, his gloved hands lowered the plunger attached to the munitions charge, but maybe there was a faulty connection—nothing seemed to have happened. Then he raised his head and saw the devastation: his headphones were just so good that he hadn’t heard the detonation.

  And so they moved from one neighborhood to another, carefully excising everything expendable, like a copyeditor who’s drained her sweet black morning coffee and, razor-sharp and focused, takes up her red pen with relish to strike out every egregious and excessive word from a text. In this way, however slowly, the city was copyedited and reduced to more humane dimensions: Oh, the laborious polish of the copyedit! Oh, the erasure that lets a little air back into these clumps of text and so shortens the urban novel, which was always a bit too bulky, and in any case unreadable! And many residents were impressed: Yes, he’s finally done what we’ve always hoped for in our hearts. You can call it destruction, but destruction is in the nature of a city, demolition makes room for renewal, and our city really couldn’t bear all those dreadful buildings for much longer, those monstrosities towering higher than two floors, even three—all that weight on the shoulders of such a small city.

  Almost every night, the king would return home, coated in dust and lime wash, to his small child and his young wife; each act of demolition was accompanied by a royal ceremony, and he smashed bottle after bottle on the walls of towers and other doomed architectural atrocities. Even the Chords Bridge was blown up, but it only collapsed in part; its remnants were allowed to stay and become a memorial of sorts to the renewal of the city at the hands of Babylon.

  After the destruction of Bezalel and the Holyland (the historic palace in the Old City reverted to being the only royal palace, and Zedekiah was forced to uproot himself and resettle in the old palace, which had been his childhood home) came the turn of the Clal building and the New Central Bus Station and the Wolfson Towers and the student dorms and the tenement blocks facing the pretty valleys of Kiryat Yovel and Kiryat Menachem; and on and on and on. After several months, it was necessary to stop, because their supply of dynamite had been exhausted and they had to put in an order for a fresh supply from Babylon. There was so much to destroy in Jerusalem—the more food one is served, the greater one’s appetite grows. And on one of those nights when Zedekiah came home covered with dust, Noa stepped into the shower while he was rinsing himself off, and she removed her robe and stood before him naked. And he looked at her and said, You’re amazing, Noa, but it’s … I have to … it’s a bit too much for me. And he pointed at her body. And he realized he was afraid of her. He drew his eyes away, and didn’t turn back around until she was gone.

  36

  THE DAYS OF THE NEW KINGDOM had come. Once again, the currency in Judah was all replaced, banknotes as well as coins, and the king’s vehicles were fueled up, and life returned to normal. And Mattaniah started zealously making a note of everything that needed to be fixed in his kingdom, so he could draw such matters to the attention of his ministers at their meetings. First, it was necessary to cancel parking fees for residents of the city. They pay a municipal property tax—why take an additional bite for parking? It’s scandalous; this is their city, after all. And, in the same flutter of activity, he said: We should close off the city center from all private car traffic and restore the city to its residents, so they can walk about freely. And once a week we’ll ban all vehicles, as on the Day of Atonement. Everyone loves it, so why not? What else? Chicks. He’d heard that thousands of male chicks were ground up every day in machines, and
he immediately wrote an injunction and decreed that, beginning tomorrow, there would be no more grinding! And he also banned battery cages, while he was at it. Fowl that were created to walk upon the earth are cooped up their entire lives in what is essentially solitary confinement—you don’t have to be a vegan in order to be revolted by such cruelty. And he forbade loud parties after ten o’clock at night. Just because she’s celebrating her birthday, does that mean I have to go to work the next day half asleep? And he legalized the lighter drugs. After all, it’s clear to everyone that alcohol is more dangerous than weed—by all means, light up, and take a breather from all your scheming. Let the people rest, let them get high, let them look around—just not straight ahead. What else? The chickens put him in mind of the morning when he’d heard that cattle were being shipped by sea and through the canal to and from Jerusalem, with thousands dying on the way from suffocation and hunger. Not that this bothered anyone, or kept them from eating these wretched refugees, who were slaughtered upon arrival. And so the king said: It stops as of tomorrow. No one in my kingdom will load a cow or a lamb on a boat or ship. After all, there’s a limit even to cruelty. What else? Oh yes, real-estate agencies. What’s all that about? Let the people work it out among themselves; let them advertise on bulletin boards and sell and buy houses and apartments on their own. Why should a third party reap the benefits? It fouls up the market. And he set a fixed price for all books: I mean, you aren’t paying for the number of pages but for the content. It’s ridiculous that a thick book should cost more than a slim one. A book’s a book. And he decreed that no one person or corporation was allowed to own more than one bookstore at a time. Everyone’s sick and tired of all these takeovers and mergers; the book trade should remain small-scale, one small bookstore and then another and another. No big-box bookstores, no huge hangars full of books—it’s a debasement of literature.