Muck

by Dror Burstein

  Jeremiah faxed his letter from the post office in Givat Ram and then walked up the almost completely deserted university campus path and sat at a computer in the National Library—which was also almost completely empty of students and teachers—to take a look at the news sites in Babylon. Truth be told, the King of Babylon had been informed of the plot to rebel against him even before Broch’s fax, because a number of the rebels had taken out a little bilateral insurance, so to speak, reporting to him from the start of their trips to Judah, so that they wouldn’t be suspected of belonging to the underground cell, heaven forbid. Whatever the case, this is what was written in the news: that the king was going to celebrate the eighteenth year of his reign by setting out on a fresh expedition to the Land of the Hatti, and this time, it was promised, there would be no mercy, and he would also strike out against the Egyptian army in a two-pronged attack. You look at those pyramid things and your eyes sting, Nebushazban told Nebuchadnezzar over the phone from Jerusalem. What crime have the skies committed to deserve getting stabbed in the pupils by these big pointy tombs? Hasn’t the time come, Nebushazban said, to file down those arrogant points, and, most important, to smash that big gaudy woman-lion sculpture thing of theirs? We’ve got to go down to Egypt and hack off her nose with a power shovel. And Nebuchadnezzar asked, So it’s female, the Sphinx? And Nebushazban said, Of course. And then: It’s snowing in Jerusalem, Nebushazban said into the black telephone. You can actually see it falling this very minute from the window. Is snow falling in Babylon, too? And Nebuchadnezzar replied, Yes.

  38

  ONCE AGAIN THEY SET OUT to the west and south. It was customary among my ancestors to ride out on military expeditions in iron vehicles and on horses, whereas I can launch a missile without budging from my chair and blot out the enemies of Babylon even before breakfast, the King of Babylon said, but what sort of impression would that make? How will I be remembered? They’ll say, This big king of yours, all he did was sit around and push buttons? No, no, a military expedition must be long and difficult. Conquering a city is like conquering a woman. Imagine every woman you see just throwing herself at you because she knows you’re the king—how dreadful! Or, anyway, that’s what his father, Nabopolassar, had told him: What matters is not only the occupation and destruction, but also how you go about it all. There’s a certain way of going about these things, and each king innovates his own personal variation on this process. It begins with finding a good pretext for the expedition—you can’t simply march out for no reason. You need a revolt, a broken pledge, a personal insult, a lit match, you see? And you also need to take your sweet time in assembling your troops. No need to hurry. Let the match lighter sit and wait and quake in his palace. You’ve got to set out slowly, in good weather, in spring, and enjoy the journey. Sure, you could take a helicopter and arrive in a few hours, but any military expedition undertaken in haste will be as hastily erased from memory. You want, Nebuchadnezzar’s father told him, to prolong the march in order to etch it into the memory. At least into your own memory. And once you’re ready to set out, get the horses going early in the morning, as early as possible, even though the journey will be long, will last a month or two at least. Once you get under way, leave early, don’t waste a minute. Ride out, and make sure to glance back at the infantry treading behind you. And try to think about everything they’re leaving behind. And then fix your gaze on what’s ahead of you, and know—or at least try to believe—that your men will be behind you for the entire journey, and on the way back, too. They might hate you, but it’ll be the enmity of a son toward his father. And remember that the question can creep up on you at any moment—Nebuchadnezzar’s father had once told him, when they were riding north, to the land of Ararat—the question can creep up on you: Why is any of this worthwhile? What’s the point? I’ve got a big enough country already, and I’ve freed it from the yoke of Assyria. Now’s the time to rest, to reap the reward, to taste the fruits of a successful rebellion, to take root, to plant vineyards. The world is far too big to conquer; even the greatest kings of Assyria stopped in eastern Egypt. Even they halted in their tracks once they saw how vast was the land stretching out in front of their noses, how long was the river from which they drank.

  If so, why not stop mid-journey—no, even before the first step is taken—why not set the horses free, and send your troops home, and go back to bed? It’s four in the morning, and you’ve got your iron helmet on, and you’re slumping forward on your horse … The answer’s simple, Nabopolassar told him, placing his hand on his son’s shorn head. The answer is that everyone wants to conquer the world. Everyone wants to lord over a world empire. Every shoemaker in every country town is liable to rise at any moment and assemble an army of shoemakers and attack a neighboring town, and take hostages, and set out to execute, say, all the carpenters, and assemble an even bigger army, and two years later rule over all of Persia, after which he proceeds with his fellow shoemakers to conquer Hattusa, and to turn Suppiluliumas—or whoever might be king there now—into his bond slave. These Hittite names, Nabopolassar suddenly said, in a rare moment of humor, are like a coiled spring that’s been twisted inside itself. And again his father asked him, Tell me, tell me, the names of the Hittite kings, and he shut his eyes as though he were listening to a child playing on a violin, and the fifteen-year-old Nebuchadnezzar said, for the hundredth time: Arnuwanda. Tudhaliya. Lavranash. Tahurwaili. Hattusili. Huzziya … And Nabopolassar couldn’t help laughing: Hee-hee-hee. Huzziya, oh my, Huzziya—what an odd name. What sort of parents would name their child Huzziya? And Nebuchadnezzar said, Maybe in their language the name means something nice; maybe it sounds like a fine name to them. But Nabopolassar said, No, no, Huzziya is, objectively speaking, ridiculous.

  Remember who we were only a few years back. Worse than shoemakers, poorer and weaker than shoemakers, which is why we walked around in our bare feet—we, the Chaldeans! Our entire empire is only a buffer zone, so that at home in Babylon the Babylonians can sleep late, and raise their sheep, and copy out ancient poems. When you get right down to it, wars will always be waged; the only question is where. That’s why it’s best that it take place far from home, and that those fires burn a long way away from where we live, lest anyone hear all that annoying screaming in our city. Because there’ll be plenty of screaming. It’s the way of the world. People scream, okay? Our business is to push back the screams, to keep them out of our house—like when you catch a mouse in your kitchen and bring it outside to a field where you can release it. Nebuchadnezzar said, But we kill the mouse. And his father told him: Yes, you’re right. Maybe that wasn’t the best example. But remember how we turned the trap upside down that one time, and he got away?

  At first, Nebuchadnezzar would set out on the military expeditions, like his father, with horses and iron chariots, doing without most of the technological advances that were available to him. But after one of his enemies ambushed him—pinning down his convoy under heavy machine-gun fire, riddling his antique iron vehicles until they looked like colanders, and mowing down a great many of his men—Nebuchadnezzar understood that it takes two to tango, and that if the enemy wasn’t going to stick to the old chivalrous ways, why, he, too, would have to make a few accommodations to modernity. And this was why the Babylonian army introduced a number of new weapons into its materiel, though for the most part the king’s policy was still to avoid using heavy artillery to blow up the walls of a city but, rather, to insist on raising a good old-fashioned siege by following the standard operating procedure of his forefathers—siege engines and battering ram—after which he’d enter the city mounted on his horse, and with a two-thousand-year-old iron pike he’d dispatch the local king with a single thrust, etc. There were those who ridiculed Nebuchadnezzar for his conservative ways, but his father’s precepts had a strong hold on him (his father, who, in the meantime, had died one day; one day he simply didn’t wake up). But several years later, Nebuchadnezzar’s back pain got so bad that he gave up expeditions o
n horseback and rode instead in a black Mercedes whose back seat could fold out into a sort of bed; it even contained a mini-fridge for water and champagne. And sometimes Nebuchadnezzar fell asleep while his mighty army was setting forth in the morning, and would be woken only by the irritating sound of the hammers of the builders of his siege engines circling this or that doomed town. Later, the rest of the troops would arrive with the horses. And sometimes he’d send his army ahead of him, and they’d make all the necessary preparations, and Nebuchadnezzar would be the last to arrive, together with his ministers. His car would stop next to this or that besieged wall, and he’d step out of his car, and with a tiny hammer—the sort used by doctors to test your reflexes by tapping your knee—he’d test the stones to locate an echo, and would then carefully mark this spot with an X, in pencil, though you had to get really close to make out the mark. And he would signal for a battering ram to be brought forward and aimed at this X.

  39

  AS IN A RECURRING NIGHTMARE, Jerusalem woke up one arid morning in the month of Tevet to find itself under siege. As for the racket of the construction workers building the siege engines around the city, it seemed as if they’d been at it for an eternity … while for Zedekiah it seemed that it was only a matter of minutes between his coronation eleven years ago and this siege. And he told his ministers and scribes: Hey, we got through Pharaoh; we’ll get through this, too, no? Back then, too, they showed up and grabbed what they could and left the next day, right? And one of the scribes wondered, We got through Pharaoh? And Zedekiah said, It’s only an expression.

  Zedekiah ordered Baalgezer to attend to the siege and slammed the door in his face. Jehoiachin’s childhood piano was still in the room, and Zedekiah ran his hands over the keys—as he’d done ever since the second Babylonian incursion had been announced. He recalled the serious music Jehoiachin had played in the stadium and decided that he, too, would learn how to play it. There were plenty of music teachers in the palace, and, one after another, they came and tried to teach Zedekiah the basics: the black keys and the white, middle C, octaves, scales. The king had little patience, however, and told them: No, no, I only want to learn to play this one piece. Don’t go teaching me the entire rule book—I want to know only this one composition. And the teachers looked at the score his nephew Jehoiachin had left behind—Jehoiachin, of whom Zedekiah hadn’t heard a word or even half a word since he’d gone into exile a decade ago—and they played the piece for him. The king would close his eyes and listen to the notes wheeling about and then slowly wheeling about again, and if no one had been there to see him do it, he’d have shed a weighty tear.

  One time, he lost his temper: Did I ask you to play that? I asked you to teach me—if I wanted to go to a recital, I’d buy a ticket. Why do you always have to show me up? Do you think teaching means humiliating your student? He’d have murdered this piano teacher on the spot, eradicating those blissfully shut eyelids and those spindly fingers, if some eunuch hadn’t entered at that moment bearing a telegram. Zedekiah ripped the envelope open between his twin rows of strong teeth, which had been whitened on a weekly basis, ever since he’d ascended to the throne, by the royal dental hygienist—it is of paramount importance for a king to have good, straight white teeth. And the telegram said: Everything’s okay, it’s just two or three Babylonians snooping around, sniffing the place out. We’ll let them have their fun and then we’ll kick ass. No reason to worry. Zedekiah didn’t know who was sending him telegrams—Baalgezer, maybe, or one of the deputies? Up in the palace, it was difficult to measure time; everything seemed to have happened yesterday or the day before. So, even though it had been weeks since Zedekiah went out on one of those happy Saturday-morning peacekeeping jaunts, it hardly seemed possible that anything could have changed in the meantime—after all, if something was going on, he’d know about it … right? Wasn’t the palace a part of the Old City, and the Old City part of the city entire, and the city part of Judah? Surely what happened to one would happen to all. Besides, if they hadn’t gone out to shoot at insurgents lately, well, so what? There must have been a good reason for it. No doubt the last pockets of resistance had been flushed out, no doubt those gangs of troublemakers were off licking their wounds somewhere. There was no point in blowing up neighborhoods that had already been pacified—no point in brushing the brushed, he reflected, as he brushed his teeth.

  And not far from there, the thorn of hunger sprouted in the city, and the thistles of thirst poked out of the cracks in the rocks. After two weeks of siege, because they were deprived of the supplies coming in from the villages in Moab and greater Judah, food started disappearing from the shelves, as though at the command of a cruel wizard’s wand. At first, luxury items like ice cream and chocolate disappeared, and then other products started going, too, one after another, stuff you’d never expect to become scarce, like liquid soap, or moisturizing cream for your feet, or cumin. One day, for example, the city was all out of toothpaste—the last paste had been brushed off the last toothbrush—and that was that; it was no longer possible to brush, and every mouth reeked. The supply in the palace was secure, needless to say, but then the city ran out of toilet paper, and every home where anyone so much as suspected that there might be some stockpiled toothpaste and toilet paper was burglarized; even hospitals were ransacked of their emergency supplies. After several weeks, even the thieves and hoarders were all out.

  And then vegetables became scarce. Everything that was stored was either eaten or had gone bad—how long does a cucumber last, even in the fridge? And the refrigerators of the land became filled with black carrots, and bruised bananas, and things went moldy and were beset by worms. And the emergency-supply granaries were opened, and bread was baked, and also bagels and cakes. There was plenty of flour in the city, but there were also plenty of people living in the city, and they started to hoard flour, and within two weeks the flour monopoly made as much profit as they’d normally make in a decade. But bread and flour also steadily grew scarcer, as month followed month. Since all the vegetables and fruits had already vanished from shelves, people started eating bread and pita around the clock in order to assuage their hunger, bread and pita and beans and other legumes—the hummus joints were among the last to shut down, so the nation was now slathering pitas with hummus morning, noon, and night: people would tear off a hunk of bread and scoop up some hummus and so gain another day, and another. But after a month, the hummus, too, was about gone, so they switched to broad beans, and they ate only broad beans. This was at the end of the month of Tevet, and in Adar they would be celebrating Purim, but instead of disguising themselves as clowns and cowboys and demons and walking mailboxes, the children of Jerusalem dressed up—under duress—as mice and rats, and they chased after every living thing they could get their hands on: cockroaches and cats and every sort of songbird. And the grilled-chicken shops started selling pigeons and ravens, and by then every alley had been cleared of its cats, and people were snatching dogs from their owners, from both homes and kennels, and off the streets as well. Everything changed so rapidly; sugar and running water and detergent and aspirin all turned into luxuries. But up in the palace, the birds still sang as they had for generations, including a parrot whose name was Joseph, and whose forefather had been King David’s parrot. David’s parrot had taught his son, and his son had taught his son, and so on down the generations, a single song from the Psalms—a psalm of David’s from when he fled from his son Absalom—and Joseph, Zedekiah’s parrot, which he’d inherited from his brother, which he’d received from his father, and so on and so forth, turned to the king and told him, as it did every time that he walked by the bird’s big cage: I lie down and sleep, and I wake … But Zedekiah interrupted him: Cut it out, Joseph—enough. One more word and I turn you into a grilled shawarma parrot. Stop fucking with me.

  As Passover drew near, the poor were invited by the rich into their homes, as usual, but whenever poor people accepted this invitation—a tenth of the population was poor
or indigent by then—they’d be knocked unconscious with a wooden plank, or else they’d be shot on the spot, because it was generally assumed that if a pauper was invited in and discovered a supply of matzoth or fruit, within minutes, as though the news were being broadcast telepathically, the household that had been so wise as to amass supplies for a rainy day would be inundated by dozens of the poor scrambling for the sugar bowl. The rats of poverty have been hit hard, the king broadcast on his festive radio program in the month of Nisan. Sometimes a strange delivery would arrive in the city—it was unclear whether these were miracles from the heavens, or from the exiled Jews in Babylon or off in another diaspora—and a helicopter would drop down a crate of bananas or of avocados and the like, leftovers from somewhere else. And the hearts of the citizens would be filled with hope, but every such surprise delivery would result, apart from the few who were sated, in a few people getting trampled, and more than a few getting disappointed, since by the time most of them arrived, all that was left was a mound of pits and dark, tough peels. And so people started to cook their leather belts and sandals, and to scratch off and eat the wallpaper glue from the walls of their homes, because there was a rumor going around that this adhesive had been made from potatoes. And children started disappearing, and soon no pets were left in the city apart from the dogs in the palace.