Zedekiah seemed convinced, but he told Jeremiah, who was buttoning up the royal shirt: You keep this conversation to yourself or I’ll have you killed. And if anyone sees you leaving here and asks you what we were talking about, tell them that you came to beg me not to lower you back into the pit. In the meantime, I’ll think about what you said. It’s not a decision one can make in a hurry, you understand. But, you know, thanks for everything, okay? And Jeremiah looked at the king for a long time, and noticed a missing button. All of a sudden, he was filled with the certainty that nothing would help now, absolutely nothing; he knew that he’d never see his old friend again—Zedekiah, who had once been the boy Mattaniah—and he looked into the king’s eyes and said: Maybe none of it was meant to work. Maybe we’re only actors, and everyone has his role, and your role was to be king, the last king, and my role was to see what was happening and shout about it and be ignored and so be able to tell the whole sad story. And Zedekiah told him, Jeremiah, if the worst happens—and I said if!—you can send Noa to Babylon, to your parents … Eliazar will stay here to fight by my side, and then I’ll anoint him King of Judah in my place.
The book slipped from his fingers and dropped, and Jeremiah looked at it and read the title and shut his eyes tightly. He wanted to bend over and pick up the book of poems, but instead he made to leave, then stopped by the door and turned around, his hand on the mezuzah, and told Zedekiah: Ah … it’s … it’s not that bad, it’s not that bad, Zedekiah. At least you got to be king … and a good king, all in all. With that, Jeremiah ran off and made his way to the wall. And all the dogs were there peering through the arrow slits. And Zedekiah came out of the third entrance to the palace and stood on a high turret above the dogs. Through his binoculars, he spied Nergal-Sharezer, who’d grown a trim little beard, and Nebuzaradan, too, who must have weighed more than three hundred pounds, and the crippled chief eunuch, Nebusarsechim, whose reputation as the torturer of kings had spread far and wide—Zedekiah was well aware of what he’d done to the King of Ashkelon. And at the sight of Chief Eunuch Nebusarsechim, he let go of the royal binoculars, which bumped against his chest as he ran to the Benjamin Gate, and he saw that he was all alone.
He met up with his few remaining valiant warriors at the Benjamin Gate, and Eliazar was among them, grasping a shield and sword. The king was glad to see them but held back from showing his feelings, for he knew that doing so would be interpreted as a sign of weakness. And evening descended. They got themselves into uniform, dressing the king up as a simple soldier, and they fled the city under cover of night through the king’s garden at the gate, between the two walls. Before leaving, Zedekiah told Tukulti, Stay in the city, take care of the dogs; they won’t shoot you because of our sins. And he then noticed that Tukulti was still wearing his old collar, and he bent over and removed the collar and stroked the dog’s back. And Tukulti, flustered, wanted to say something to him, but he didn’t say a word, nor did he howl.
And Zedekiah set forth from Jerusalem in a jeep, turning onto the road leading to the Arabah, their headlights off, with his son, Eliazar, by his side. We’ll get to Moab, he muttered, we’ll find refuge there, and there I’ll anoint you King of Judah. We’ll get a bit of oil and I’ll anoint you, and a fresh shoot will spring up from the House of David. I’ll explain everything about ruling the kingdom to you—it isn’t that hard. They slipped through the southeastern purlieus of the city—drove through a tunnel under the Temple, he, his eleven-year-old son, and a company of his soldiers, all of them from the ordnance corps—mighty warriors to a man. The enemy was in the west, ignorant of his departure, or so he thought, but of course they’d seen him. They were lying in wait for him, or, rather, hovering—they’d called in a chopper rigged with a heavy machine gun to track him down. Chief Eunuch Nebusarsechim sat next to the pilot and said, Hold it, don’t swoop down quite yet; let’s enjoy the show, give him a chance to panic a bit, get a load of his troopers running for cover. And the chopper mowed them down left and right with a businesslike rat-tat-tat.
Zedekiah drove in serpentine zigzags in his Mercedes jeep, covered with dust from the road, strengthened by the presence behind him of his son, who made him feel more focused. I’ll save him, he thought; the bridge to Moab is close, and we’ll find refuge there. He looked at Eliazar and suddenly saw that two of the boy’s right-hand fingers had been pulverized; the boy didn’t cry, however—he didn’t say a word, didn’t complain, actually laughed—and Zedekiah felt nauseated. All of a sudden, he couldn’t remember where the boy had been all these years. He remembered him at age three, but now here he was, big, as though it had happened all at once. There were some strange gaps in his memory; he couldn’t see through the haze in his mind. But never mind that now, he thought, now it’s only me and him, as the chopper dipped down behind them over the plains of Jericho, before it overtook them and nosed around and landed. It took its time landing, and more sand and dust filled Zedekiah’s eyes, even though he had the roof up and all the windows firmly closed and the A/C blowing. Chief Eunuch Nebusarsechim stepped out of the chopper, leaning on a walking stick and holding in his other hand an enormous sword sated with the blood of kings and princes. He limped over to the King of Judah as though to cut off his head and the head of his son, who got out of the car after his father and held on to him without speaking a word. But then another car pulled up, and a large dog leaped out, all skin and bones, and the torturer of kings turned to face the dog, readying his sword, but the dog didn’t attack him, only latched on to him with his two eyes. And, staring all the while, the dog went up to the king and his son, who were crouching together in the dust amid a chaos of tire tracks, and he, too, crouched with them, to protect them with his own body, and he howled, and Eliazar howled, and Zedekiah howled into both of their howling. And the three of them were seized and taken to the King of Babylon in Riblah.
In Riblah, Zedekiah and Tukulti stood on either side of Eliazar. Tukulti licked the boy’s minced hand. And the prince raised his eyes for a moment, looking at his father’s ear, and then collapsed by his side, and Tukulti’s coat was spattered with the boy’s blood. And Nebuchadnezzar entered and saw what was happening and suddenly felt a deep revulsion, as though he were in the middle of a book that he wanted, this very minute, to shut and stop reading. And he nodded his head at Chief Eunuch Nebusarsechim, who approached from behind, and before Zedekiah’s eyes the eunuch shot the unconscious boy in the head, and he shot Tukulti in the head as well, and he hung their corpses on a hook. A moment later, with a thrust of his enormous sword, he sliced out both of the king’s eyes in one stroke, and darkness descended on Mattaniah; the light of his eyes and his soul were snuffed out as though a lightbulb had popped inside him, and all its slivers pierced him in a million places. Since he had no eyes to cry with, the crying filled his insides and overflowed within him, and he died outright at that moment, even though his heart was still beating and his blood was still coursing through his kidneys and through both his legs and arms; even though he was still breathing, he was, literally, the walking dead, the blind walking dead, and they bound him in fetters to take him to Babylon.
* * *
AND IN THE FIFTH MONTH, which is the month of Av, on the seventh of the month, Nebuzaradan, captain of the guard, arrived in Jerusalem, and in his right hand he held a matchbox and in his left a bottle of red wine. Inside the box were one hundred long kitchen matches, and on the box was a picture of the city. He burned down the king’s residence, and then he went from house to house and burned down every building, and soon the wine bottle in his hand was the empty. And in the purlieus of the city, soldiers were tearing and crushing and sweeping suburbs off the map, and mopping up the last fugitive Judeans on every mountaintop and every hilltop, and from the cracks in every boulder. Eventually, they reached the stadium where the upside-down observatory dome still stood, and they clambered up to the rim of the bowl, where weeds and tall thorns had begun to grow and densely covered its perimeter, and they set the whole thi
ng alight.
* * *
IT WAS A HOT SUMMER, as it always is in the month of Av in Jerusalem and environs, and the air was dry, and the winds fanned the flames, and the brush fires ran wild through the city for the entire month, and it was forbidden to put them out. The Babylonians even made sure to line up the city’s remaining firemen in a cistern beforehand and mow them down. Now fire will be king, said Nebuzaradan, and with one last match he lit up the wine bar where he’d been in the habit of drinking, and then filliped the empty matchbox into the fire.
So, when the Babylonian troops at last breached the inner walls of Jerusalem, the city was already destroyed from within. Nebuzaradan motored down the lanes of the Old City in his white Mercedes, with a giant bulldozer as well as the army’s engineering corps and a fleet of tanks clearing the way ahead of him and crushing any cars that had been left parked where the streets were too narrow for him to pass. And the Jews who fell into his hands spoke to Military Intelligence about a prophet who was still in the Old City, locked up with the king’s dogs, and who had implored the nation to surrender and pay obeisance to the Babylonians. And when the captain of the guard entered the court of the guards, he saw that very prophet, he saw all the hungry dogs, and he saw the black man-dog stooped over and drinking from a dripping fire hose, and he saw the prophet standing and looking around at the fire and the debris and the destruction and still talking, talking, talking, and talking. Nebuzaradan went up to him, and in his middling Hebrew, which he’d learned during his earlier years in the city, he told him, So, behold, I loose thee this day from the chains which are upon thy hands; if it seem good unto thee to come with me into Babylon, then come, and I will look well unto thee, but if it seem ill unto thee to come with me to Babylon, forbear. The giant Babylonian’s words were so grandiose and incoherent that Jeremiah, dumbfounded, could only look away. And Nebuzaradan fetched a small tray from his car, which was already hot inside from the fierce summer heat and from the sporadic bursts of fire in the city, and on the tray was a meal and several small gold coins. But Jeremiah threw the coins on the ground. Ebed-Melech came and snatched some food for the ravenous dogs, and he lay hold of the coins, too, while he was at it, and Nebuzaradan took heed and brought out more food from the trunk of the car, and the dogs ate warily, and Ebed-Melech ate with them. Jeremiah’s eyes were glazed over, and he didn’t notice that the captain of the guard was staring at him again, and didn’t notice Nebuzaradan’s departure; for it was at that moment, seeing a Babylonian officer standing in front of him, with thick clouds of smoke rising on all sides, that he knew, really knew, for the first time, that he was truly a prophet—and yet he didn’t care anymore. And he muttered: Arise, cry out in the night, at the beginning of the watches pour out your heart like water, before the presence of the Lord; lift your hands to Him, for the lives of your children who faint for hunger at the head of every street. Look, O Lord, to whom you have done this: women eat their offspring, the children they have borne, priest and prophet are killed in the sanctuary of the Lord. The young and the old are lying on the ground in the streets, my young women and my young men have fallen by the sword; on the day of your anger you have killed them, slaughtering without mercy. And Nebuzaradan looked from his car at what the siege had accomplished over the last months, the children that had been eaten and the scattered remains of their corpses, the beheaded priests, and he saw a shriveled bull that was being dragged to the slaughter as a scapegoat. The bull knew precisely where they were dragging it, and kicked and scraped its hooves against the earth and lowed, but someone took out a bunch of dill, and the hungry beast wasn’t able to resist the strong smell and advanced toward the dill, and then again it stopped in its tracks, and again it was lured, and Nebuzaradan saw this and shook his head in revulsion, and then watched as someone crouched down by the bull as it crossed her path, and she poked at its hooves and drew out bits of barley, which she ate in a mad frenzy of hunger. Someone else was nibbling at the tiny thorns that were growing out of an abandoned camel trough, and a falafel vendor was walking around with a pita filled with salad and what might have been falafel balls in his outstretched hand, but the stench that rose from the pita was so nauseating that no one dared approach him, and soon he tripped over a corpse and fell. And there was a man there dressed in the attire of a high priest, and he stood in the midst of a demolished house and prayed to the new star burning above. And six women ascended the ruined wall, intending to jump, for the unavoidable defilements were by now well under way. Women were being violated in the streets and in their homes and on the roofs of their homes, and they fled to those parts of the city wall that were still largely intact, some having already been raped, others fearing being raped, and there they started to leap silently from the wall. But no one paid any attention, and they leaped and leaped.
And their bodies were shattered on the boulders inside Jeremiah the prophet’s head, together with all the other incidents in the city, and this panorama of destruction was broadcast directly into Jeremiah’s brain there in the court of the guards, as though he’d swallowed all the news channels. The dam of prophecy burst open, and the river was a mighty current, and he saw everything, and he heard everything. But this time his prophecy was of events occurring in the present moment rather than the future, and he was inundated by every ache and pain of the destruction of this city as though he were the ocean and affliction were the rivers feeding into him. Everything streamed into him, every widowed mother, every child devoured by its parents, every elderly person who died for lack of medicine and water, every parched lip, every home blown up with its inhabitants trapped under the rubble, every bird that had been left in its cage when its owners died and hadn’t received its feed and water in the summer heat wave, and all the city cats, to the very last one, who died in the heat of Tammuz and Av and were immediately consumed by crows as well as human beings, and all the pigeons and crows and alley cats that were snatched and whose necks were wrung and who got eaten after the first two weeks of the siege, and all the dogs that were asphyxiated in order to fill the mouths of the hungry, all the vegetation that was burned by the fires begun by the kitchen matches—flowers, seedlings, and trees—all the amputated hands, all the unhinged doors, all the buildings that had turned into heaps of dust. They all seemed to be hollering in Jeremiah’s ears, and they screamed, Stop this, hold it back, rise up and stop it at once! Everything that he’d prophesied had indeed occurred, this catastrophe was second to none, and Jeremiah saw now that it had always been unavoidable. Suddenly he grasped the whole of the Bible, from the beginning of creation to the present moment, as a book whose end could never have been other than utter destruction—from the moment the heavens were separated from the earth, and man from animal, and Adam from Eve, and the drowned from the saved, it was only a question of time until a nation would be set apart and chosen, and only a question of time until that choice would lead to aloofness and arrogance and rebellion, for the demands upon them were too difficult, they never could handle it, beginning with Adam and Eve and ending with Zedekiah. Hence exile and ruin were inevitable. It was already planted in the story of the Garden of Eden for everyone to behold, but no one, no one had beheld. And all of a sudden, Jeremiah understood that his fate, his abandonment were never matters of chance, they were the whole point, so that people would be able to see from then on that a prophet had been sent to warn them but to no avail—he was forced to operate on his own, alone, cast out.
And there was nothing left for him to do now, apart from sitting there in the court of the guards that had been broken into by bulldozers and dynamited to clear the way for the captain of the guard—who kept drinking from his bottle, the wine seemingly never running out—as he pushed on in the direction of the Temple and the palace. Jeremiah didn’t glance back or up in order not to see the flames: He has made my flesh and my skin waste away, and broken my bones. He has besieged and enveloped me with bitterness and anguish. He has made me sit in darkness like the forever dead. He has w
alled me about so that I cannot escape; he has put heavy chains on me. Though I call and cry for help—he shuts out my prayer. Jeremiah didn’t understand what he was saying; he didn’t know if he was speaking about himself or whether the city was speaking through his throat about itself. He merged with the city, and its lament was his own voice, and his mutterings its thoughts, but no one heard him anyhow, only Ebed-Melech the Ethiopian, and the dogs all in a frenzy—Ebed-Melech howling and running in circles there in the court of the guards.
And Jeremiah turned to Ebed-Melech and grabbed him, and from deep within the shambles of his own mind he said, Don’t worry, calm down, calm down—you won’t be delivered to the people that you fear. And he added, Your name will no longer be Ebed-Melech but Baruch ben Neriah, My Candle Is the Lord, for the candle of the Lord has been lit in you. And they held each other tightly until they both stopped shaking, and Ebed-Melech stood upright on his feet and told Jeremiah: Jeremiah, come, let us go to Mizpah. There’s nothing left for us to do here. And Jeremiah looked at him and said, A bear lies in wait for me, a lion in hiding. And Ebed-Melech, which is to say Baruch, didn’t understand, so Jeremiah added: He comes from everywhere. He comes from everywhere. Here, too. There, too. And Baruch asked him: Who? Who? Nebuzaradan? And Jeremiah said, The bear, the bear and the lion.
Nebuzaradan entered the Temple, half of which was already in flames. And he drained the last drops of wine from what turned out not to have been an inexhaustible bottle after all, and broke the empty vessel against the altar, and he took the pillars of bronze and their socles and the brazen sea and smashed them into pieces, and the pots and the shovels and the snuffers and the censers and the ladles, and all the vessels of brass used in the Temple service were taken away by his soldiers, and the fire pans and the basins, that which was of gold, in gold, and that which was of silver, in silver, the captain of the guard took away. And there was also a charity box for the poor, and he pried the lid open with his keychain screwdriver; there was nothing in the box. And a truck arrived, beeping as it pulled up in reverse, and on it they loaded everything, the bronze, the silver, and the gold—whatever remained from last time. The arsonists had to grab whatever they could lay their hands on before they got burned by the fire they’d set. And in one of the rooms whose doors had been forced, and which seemed to Nebuzaradan like a cave, he saw a sort of altar with large green leaves emerging from within that covered nearly the entire hall. As he strode into the thicket in order to find out what was going on in there, he got stuck as in a rain forest. His comrades-in-arms called out to him, Oh, master, where are you? And he drew his sword and tried to blaze a trail to the interior, but he still couldn’t find the center out of which all the greenery was growing. He pulled out a flashlight and peered this way and that, and saw that there were millions of ants on the branches and leaf stalks and on the white-and-violet flowers. On one of the flowers he thought he saw an ant praying and asking for mercy for its nest, and the ant looked him straight in the eye, and this was too much for him. He got scared and retreated back along on the trail he’d blazed, and when he found his comrades waiting there with flamethrowers, Nebuzaradan said, We’ve got to burn it all up, absolutely everything, and left.
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