Over the following days, he made more and more proclamations, seeking the counsel of his ministers and advisers and wife and poet friends. Everyone had to tell him what they thought needed fixing, and he wrote it down, and signed decree after decree. He prohibited housecleaning performed by anyone not living in the house in question: It’s unacceptable that someone else should come and scrub the inside of your toilet seat for a few piasters! And he prohibited prostitution, intending to put a stop to the practice entirely, instituting the death penalty for pimps in the process: I don’t understand how anyone can live in peace with this sort of thing going on. Just imagine for a moment that one of these women was your own daughter; would you be so sanguine about it then? After all, they’ve all got fathers, the girls! Or—what?—do you think they don’t? He slapped the table in front of the minister of police, who tried explaining to the king that this had been the way of the world since time immemorial, lending support to his words by citing various texts. And close down all those casinos, the king added. Where do those whores hang around, he shouted, if not in our casinos? It’s one form of immorality encouraging another. People come to gamble, and some whore sits beside them at the table, and then they lose everything and go up to their room with the whore so the night shouldn’t be a total waste, and they fuck the whore, but it’s usually all over within two minutes, and then they go back downstairs to the casino to try and compensate for the shame of having failed in bed, and they pawn a gold watch or a wedding ring in order to get a couple more chips, and again they gamble and again they lose, and again the whore watches them lose, and there’s no end to it. The world’s far too precious to be wasted on casinos and prostitution, and if people can’t grasp this by simply looking around at the world, then they’ll get the message soon enough by virtue of the king’s new laws. There’s no point having a king if a king can’t educate his people, he thought.
Anyone who publishes a book of poetry deserves to receive a monthly allowance, he decreed. And the minister of culture said, alarmed, There aren’t that many poets left; most of them have been relocated to Babylon. All the more reason, Zedekiah said. Every published poet who’s managed to stick around will receive a stipend. Bring me the list of poets, and mark down the ones who’ve remained, he said. And the minister left and later returned with the list in his hand, and it transpired that fewer than ten poets out of ten thousand had somehow evaded deportation. Zedekiah went over each name, and next to some of them he drew an X, because in his eyes these particular poets weren’t worthy of a stipend—one X and then another X and another—and then next to a few names he put a V. He saw his own name there, his old name, and hesitated for a moment as to whether he deserved an X or a V. He finally decided to award himself a V, and then felt ashamed and got out a black felt-tip pen and crossed off the poet that he had been, Mattaniah, before he continued down the list and saw Jeremiah. At this name, his heart stopped for an instant, before his hand unreservedly gave his old acquaintance a V.
He called in all his ministers and advisers, most of whom he knew only from the newspapers—Jehoiakim’s people, the living incarnations of innumerable intrigues and conspiracies. A nest of vipers hisses in the palace, Noa, he told her later. How can anyone deal with people about whom the only thing you can know for certain, and I mean for certain, is that they’re lying to you, telling you only what they think you want to hear? And I, Mattaniah said, a poet who has been crowned king against his will, must speak to them, and answer them, and consult with them. What sort of advice can they give me—the viper, and the adder, and my minister of finance the anaconda?
I should have fired all of you and appointed Jeremiah the prophet as my deputy king, he told his ministers at the opening of their weekly Cabinet meeting—deputy king, or at least a consultant. The serpents raised their heads and nodded, and then one snake laughed and laughed until you could see the venomous glands roiling in his throat. Cut it out, Zedekiah said, and he tried to remind his serpents of the children they’d been, of their humanity, before their arms and legs fell off, before they became covered with scales, before their tongues became so swift, and their eyes and whispers. And he recalled a line from one of Jeremiah’s poems: See, I am letting snakes loose among you, adders that cannot be charmed, and they shall bite you.
Ladies and gentlemen, my distinguished ministers, he said. If anything is clear to me, it is this, and it’s on the basis of this observation that we will conduct all of the kingdom’s affairs: the world, as it stands, is insufferable. It’s unbearable from moment to moment—that’s my axiom. And if we haven’t committed suicide yet, well, the least we can do is take every possible step to remedy the situation. We must live our lives, he said, in a completely different way. Any ideas? And there was a black racer who raised his head and hissed, We’ll give all poets a monthly stipend of thirty shekels. But from the other side of the table an adder rose and said: Friends, you’re draining the royal coffers. Where are we going to get thirty shekels a month for each poet? Thirty? Maybe thirty a year, but monthly? Twenty-five, tops! Not a shekel more! And an anaconda shook her head, and all the other serpents found themselves having the same thought: She’ll swallow us like a whale scooping up a school of sardines. The adder asked, hesitantly: Twenty? Fifteen? And the king said: Friends, what are you talking about? There are fewer than ten poets left in Judah. And a cobra looked at a printout of their CVs and said, Six, to be more precise, and my king is the first among them. Zedekiah wondered where the other poets on his list had disappeared to, but held his tongue and then said, Okay, so I can see there’s no point in passing special legislation for six people … And the cobra replied: Anyway, out of the six, there’s a prophet who’s in hiding—no one knows where he is—and offering him a stipend would be like putting guns into the hands of our enemies. As for the other four, look, we’ll sell them into slavery, so in the end all we’ll have left is one poet in the entire kingdom, only one poet. That simplifies things, and since the literature budget is grosso modo half a million, I propose we vote to allot that half a million a month to our last remaining poet, who’ll serve as a trustee with unlimited right of action to the funds earmarked for the poets of Judah until further notice, and we’ll act as the directorate. Zedekiah said: Are you nuts? I don’t need it and don’t want it. I wasn’t talking about myself at all. Knock it off. I’m removing the proposal from the table. Now I want to prohibit experiments on animals. Just thinking about all those labs drives me nuts—the experiments they perform on cats in order to test some damn perfume or dandruff shampoo or even real medicine, sawing off the heads of monkeys, and other nightmares I can’t even bring myself to speak about out loud. And we’ve got to stop parents from abusing their children; we’ve got to initiate a new parental educational program. I want all prospective parents to sign a contract before the child’s birth, detailing their commitment to the future citizen, what they will and won’t do for and to the kid. After all, everything in this world has a contract attached—you buy a pack of cigarettes and it’s a contract between you and the store—but between you and your child there’s no contract to speak of, no protocol. Anything goes in families; you don’t have to commit yourself to anything; you can ignore your kid, you can raise your voice to your kid in anger. I’m going to put a stop to it, I’ll teach the moms and the dads the basics; I’ll give them a good foundation for parenthood. And while I’m on the subject, I also want to put a complete stop to all forms of pornography. It just makes no sense, no sense at all, that girls who happened to have turned into women … The anaconda wiped a tear from her lidless eye and said: A momentous act of reform! What a reform, praise the Lord! Yes, exactly, Zedekiah said, and rebuked the racer: What’s this business with the poets? It hasn’t been put on the table at all … And the anaconda drew out a black attaché case and placed it on the tabletop without saying a word. Write this down, the king said, and everyone copied down diligently: No trees in Judah will be uprooted, cut down, or otherwise removed; every tree is
the product of tens, hundreds of years’ worth of labor. It’s out of the question that they should be killed just so someone can make a stool or something. And the emptying of waste into our riverbeds will be stopped immediately. Water is sacred, water is the very essence of life; henceforth, we will not pollute what is sacred, Zedekiah dictated. I also want to forbid the tearing of or disposal of cobwebs, he said. Such a marvelous phenomenon, and yet people are always taking out their brooms and pulling down these little wonders from the corners of their rooms. And I don’t want any bad books to be published anymore. Only good books. The bad ones we can pulp. What, I’m being unrealistic? Look, I want there to be a decent selection in the bookstores. It makes no sense for any average Joe to pay to have his nonsense printed and consequently take up a deserving book’s place. Tell me if my logic is faulty!
The discussion went on, with all of Zedekiah’s proposals being passed. There wasn’t a single nay. The ministers ratified everything: the bill that outlawed caging animals; the bill that outlawed child labor; the bill that imposed the Sabbath as a day of rest on man and beast alike; the bill setting up free medical care for man and beast alike; the bill immediately doubling the salary of all physicians while cutting their office hours in half; the bill prohibiting and canceling all literary prizes, of whatever stripe (It’s a bitter disgrace, the king said, to receive a monetary prize for the work of one’s mind!); the bill enforcing tolerance for all the gods of the region and the prohibition of smashing effigies and statues; the bill forbidding child sacrifice to Moloch; the bill banning war—this last ban being the gravest of all bans. And so on and so forth, more and more bills that he thought up at length in his office at the palace and all through the long nights.
Legislation progressed at a fast clip, almost as fast as the shredder they kept running one flight down, into whose maw the Cabinet secretary, a young and promising eel, carefully fed all the proposed bills after the conclusion of this and every meeting. And Zedekiah began to feel that the fabric of the world was finally being repaired, that the world’s bruised skin and broken bones were slowly healing, that a first generation of chicks was being born without the clatter of grinding machines overhead, that all the furnaces of Moloch in the city were being extinguished and growing cold, that all men were laying down their arms, and every woman in bondage was at last free to fix her hair in the good light of day. Give me half a year—he told the serpents, and then the multitudes of his subjects during his rallies, and the media, too—a year at most, and I’ll fix things up! This is where it all begins, he said, and after we set an example to the world, the rest of the nations will see that our way is best and will do as we have done. Give me five years and the world will be cured of most of its terminal diseases! We’ll stop the glaciers from melting, we’ll forbid the maddening use of plastic bags! he confidently told the microphones, and he heard his own voice resounding back to him when he rehearsed his speech from the top of the palace’s highest tower, at whose base half a million people were expected to gather in a few hours.
As he stood there giving his speech to the empty, open expanse, he remembered, for some reason, that he’d taken a book out of the library some time ago that he’d neglected to return, and that undoubtedly he’d have to pay a heavy fine for it, and this vexed him, and he cut short his speech. He returned to his room, having decided to look for the library book, but he was distracted and glanced again at the black attaché case that the anaconda had forgotten, as it were, on the ministerial table. What’s she got in there, he wondered, alarmed, maybe snake eggs? Maybe her black offspring have already emerged, and they’re curled one inside another in the dark, and they’ll lash out and bite me? But all that was in there, of course, was cash. And the king forgot all about his library book.
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A YEAR WENT BY, two years went by, and the proposed bills were slowly but exhaustively processed by the appropriate committees—or so the king was told, at least. In the meantime, a number of rebel cells were uncovered on the margins of the kingdom. And the minister of defense arrived with the official figures, substantiated by reliable data. And there was no choice: the king had to strap on a bandolier, had to wage war. Zedekiah’s battles were no more than local policing sallies, but his minister of defense understood the mentality of kings, so he made sure to let the king kill a few agitators personally. And Zedekiah, who thought he’d be repulsed by it all, was—all of a sudden—no longer repulsed. He mowed down the rebels from inside a hovering chopper, while the minister of defense hollered: Clean them out, Your Majesty, clean them right out. Soon the rot will reach the root—over there, behind those boulders—so shove your toothpick in all the way, let the gums bleed! Baalgezer, who had also served as minister of defense for Zedekiah’s brother Jehoiakim, as well as for his father, Josiah, and was related to the sons of the Zeruiah dynasty, and had his white hair and his beard dyed a blazing red, sat next to him and held the cartridge belt for him, feeding him ammo, while Zedekiah, his eyes shielded by protective glasses and his ears securely plugged, aimed down into the alleyways and polished off the human tartar like dental floss dipped in wax and lead. And he told the minister of defense, I saw some of them dashing into that building over there, and the minister of defense said: You’re an ace strategist, my king—nothing escapes your probing eyes. Even I, with all my defense experience, didn’t notice that. If I have found favor in your eyes, my king, we’ll replace your light arms with something that has a bit more weight. And he gestured toward a red button. Zedekiah asked, What’s that? And the minister said, Let’s have it be a surprise for Your Majesty. Aim here … a bit to the right … no, no, not in that direction … Now lock the sights … yes … Now push … Push hard, don’t be scared … And when Zedekiah raised his eyes, the building was already a cloud of dust billowing up and sinking down again.
And so they’d set out, on the Sabbath, after the public morning-prayer, the minister and deputy minister and the King of Judah, to restore order. After all, a king who doesn’t set his house in order only increases the mess; a king who doesn’t clean only defiles; a king who doesn’t hover above his citizens from time to time with a machine gun is a goner. Your citizens can only see you when you’re high up in the air, no? And these gangs terrorizing the law-abiding Judeans have to be eliminated, yes? It’s tough to see how anybody might think differently. Of course, I’d like nothing better than to ignore them and let them go on organizing and arming themselves, Zedekiah told Noa, but then, by the time they show up at the palace gates to slit Eliazar’s throat, it’ll be too late to do anything about it. It’s easy for you to criticize, but I’m not hearing you give me any other practical solutions. I mean, it’s not as though I’m raiding entire cities like the Egyptians and Assyrians, and I’m hardly impaling children on poles, am I? And I’ve never once burned a village. Come out with me on the chopper, just once, he told her. See for yourself. I’ll even let you gun down a few people, he shouted as the helicopter hatch slammed behind him.
* * *
NOW IT CAME TO PASS, after all these things, in the fourth year of Zedekiah’s reign, that Broch set forth from his home in Beit Hakerem to the old-new palace in the Old City. He had disguised himself as a prophet and given himself the name Hanania ben Azur, and printed himself a calling card. He wished to counsel the king, and bowed down before the king. And he said, Thus says the Lord of Hosts, the God of Israel: I have broken the yoke of the King of Babylon. Within two years I will bring back to this place all the vessels of the Lord’s house, which King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon took away from this place and carried to Babylon. And Jeconiah, your brother’s son, and all the exiles from Judah who went to Babylon I’ll bring back to this place, says the Lord, on the light rail. For I will break the yoke of the King of Babylon.
And Zedekiah didn’t recognize him, because Broch had grown a thick beard and pitched his hair up on his head like a tent, and he was wearing a loud checkered suit, and wraparound shades, like Ray Charles; also like Ray Charles, h
e swayed from side to side as he performed. And Zedekiah said, Look, Ray Charles, I’m not going to say I don’t like what you’re telling me, but it must be clear to you, Mr. Charles, that I’m taking a huge risk even listening to this stuff. Everything’s been going pretty smoothly in my kingdom, or haven’t you noticed? All I need to do is keep my two Babylonians in food and drink, demolish a couple of unnecessary buildings from time to time, and pay taxes. And the prophet said, Allow me, Your Majesty, if I have found favor in your eyes, to remind the king of Pharaoh Psammetichus’s latest conquests … And Zedekiah said, Psammetichus? And the prophet said, Psammetichus, Psammetichus. Two years ago, a new king ascended to the throne in Egypt. He slid on down to Cush and gamboled on up to Sidon; he crept up on her and knocked on her bolted doors. And my noble lord certainly remembers that it wasn’t too long ago that Egypt ruled over the Euphrates, and what was will be again, and there is nothing new under the sun. I have prophesied in your ear, lo, the days are coming when Pharaoh will return to drink from the waters of the Euphrates, and he’ll drink from the waters of the Tigris, too, and therein he will wash away the blood of Babylon. You’ll do as you please, of course, the prophet said, but when Pharaoh goes back home to Egypt, he won’t be happy to hear that some of his protectorates have pledged allegiance to that little Satan Nebuchadnezzar—that some of his vassals have been plying Babylonian officials with the choicest wines and delicacies their lands have to offer. That corpulent captain of the guard has already become a byword for gluttony and a cautionary tale among the rabbinate; he’s been pillaging every refrigerator and oven in Judah, emptying them like a human vacuum cleaner. Or, okay, let’s talk economics, Broch-Hanania said. The king has invested all his money in a single stock, a single company, and its name is Nebuchadnezzar, Inc. Don’t you think it’s time to diversify your portfolio a bit? Wouldn’t that be the wisest course of action? Leaving aside the question of risk, isn’t it true that different investments tend to prosper in different market conditions? It’s not too different from nature—are you following me? Some trees thrive in dry and cold conditions but shrivel up in a tropical climate. Other trees flourish in heat and humidity but wouldn’t last a minute on the summit of a windswept mountain—and then there are trees that are best adapted to living in deserts, the prophet said. Can bananas grow at the North Pole? he asked. And Zedekiah answered, flustered, No, bananas can’t grow there. So has the king understood? asked the prophet. And Zedekiah, who hadn’t the faintest idea what Broch was talking about, said, Sure, at least as much as a person sitting in front of an investment consultant who’s ashamed to show his ignorance regarding his own money, he said. To that extent, it makes complete sense. So what do you suggest? And the prophet said: I’ll put it as simply as possible. The advice of this consultant is that, if someone doesn’t believe in the Babylonian shekel, he isn’t obliged to buy exclusively Babylonian bonds. It wouldn’t be a disaster if he were to open a little sideline and invest in some Egyptian bonds, too, and even trade a few piasters for a bit of solid Egyptian gold … I don’t see any problem there. It isn’t that Your Majesty is rebelling against the King of Babylon; it isn’t written anywhere that it’s forbidden for my king to throw a little capital in Egypt’s direction as well … Ever since your great brother died, the payments to Egypt have ceased, have they not? It’d be a pity if you repeated your brother’s mistake. Let’s try to learn something from history. You don’t want to end up like him, in a bowl of hummus, do you? And Zedekiah shuddered and said, So what you’re telling me here is that this is a free market, that there’s no reason for an investor like me not to back some safe secondary stocks, just as a form of insurance, right? Like shoving a couple of dollars under the carpet—there’s no law against carpets … And the prophet said, Right, exactly, carpets.
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