Private Novelist

by Nell Zink

  The Leviathan was built for the state of Israel in 1968 with the help of a team of conservators from the Institute of Demonology Libraries, New York. Soon afterward, it was stolen. Some say the Leviathan is an all-powerful weapon, capable of spontaneously generating any amount of force conceived by its operators. The basic principle is simple: Any object mentally projected into the Leviathan will there, over a period of weeks, take actual shape until bursting forth spontaneously.

  In the hands of a capable engineer, Leviathan could be an invincible deterrent, but there are indications that the group currently controlling Leviathan has only the vaguest notions of physics, mechanics, and weapons technology, leading the submarine to generate ineffective weapons which upon examination are found to be bereft of interior detail.

  Both were silent for a long time. Yigal read the passage again, committing it to memory. Then he looked up and asked, “The dolphins?”

  The high priestess shook her head. “I don’t know, but I suspect them. A human group would have been controlled by now.”

  “Who wrote the book?”

  “Allow me a question. Who has examined the interior of weapons produced by Leviathan?”

  Yigal looked upset the way he sometimes did in the presence of Dolphin Star mysteries, especially ones that seemed to involve his employers. Then he remembered happily that there was a Leviathan-generated Trident warhead on his own roof in Tel Aviv, sitting waiting for him in a rain barrel.

  “Shall I go, holy one?”

  She nodded. He jumped up and was on his way.

  CHAPTER 16

  HOLDING THE EDGES OF THE RAIN barrel, Yigal and I slowly tipped it over on its side. The water poured through holes in the battlements onto the awning above the café, and the Trident warhead rolled out.

  “Here goes nothing,” Yigal said, hitting it with a hammer.

  A second later we were jumping back, saying things like “Ew!” “Yuck!” “What the hell is that?!” The nose cone of the rocket, which seemed to be made of a compressed calcareous material, had broken open easily to reveal a thick, white, gooey substance that oozed all over the roof. We had no idea what it was, but we both knew what it reminded us of. I ran for the hose, and we washed it down to the awning and into the street. We could see pedestrians running.

  Over coffee we discussed the possibilities.

  I was sure of one thing. “This is definitely controlled by dolphins. They’ve seen Trident missiles go up, obviously, and being dolphins, they assumed they had a sexual function—”

  “Why assume it’s dolphins? It seems to me that any sexually mature, but naive, onlooker might make the same assumption about the Trident program. After all, they only see it go up. They don’t see it come down. The mode of delivery reminds me more of the sperm packets used by mollusks.”

  “You mean cephalopods—octopus—that ninth arm—”

  “Precisely. They’re reputed to be very intelligent. The only thing I can think is that one of your undersea pals down in Eilat is in love with you, and they’ve been aiming at you all along, not me. They overshot you the first time, so then they tried something smaller and lighter.”

  I shuddered with disgust. “Anybody could have seen me in that glass-bottomed boat, and—from below—I was out there in shorts all that time—it could be anyone, coral, or a parrot fish! Or a sea anemone! I feel violated.”

  Yigal put his arm around me. “There’s another possibility.”

  “What?” I sniffled.

  “Twelve-year-old boys. Actually, I can see this up to seventeen, eighteen—”

  “No,” I said. “I refuse to believe that. I don’t know anyone under forty.”

  We sat in silence.

  “Maybe it was something else,” I ventured. “What about the one that blew up in your office?”

  He shook his head. “That was probably the candy and flowers.”

  We spent the afternoon covering the roof with a double layer of plywood and a sheet of PVC.

  The demonology librarian, whose name was Ian, took Mary’s hand across the table. “How would you like dinner at my place?”

  She smiled. “I’m tired, but before I go, there’s one more thing I’d really like to ask you. Do you think, in all that Jewish material you’ve got, that there’s anything to link anyone alive today with the biblical House of David?”

  He laughed. “No way. That’s what you call a loaded issue. Questions like that are fertilizer, if you’ll pardon the expression. When you start to spread something like that around, you get forgeries, destructions, pages ripped out, words cut out, words written in . . .” He lowered his voice. “They also say there are some powerful curses. There’s a story about the first generation of librarians, the people that worked at the institute when it started. They’re gone now. Something made their bodies into a big blob of something like Jell-O. They say it blocked the G line for two days and they had to get it out with a Sikorsky Skycrane . . .”

  Around five o’clock Yigal said, “I need a drink.”

  “That’s so unlike you. Have you really started drinking?”

  He stuck the roll of tape in his pocket and said, “Come along. First we’ll get a bottle of rioja, and then I’ll tell you about how I started drinking.” He began in the elevator. “So, Nell, where did the dolphins get their ordnance survey map of Tel Aviv?”

  “Good point.”

  He told me about his visit to the Dolphin Star Temple and concluded, “I see this as a power struggle between internal and external security. Shin Bet tried to use silkies to control the dolphins, and Mossad tried to win over the dolphins directly through the Dolphin Star program. But the silkies and the Dolphin Star priestesses are wild cards. Plus, neither of them has any actual communication with the dolphins. The silkies feel nothing but contempt for them, and you, well—”

  “It’s true, I wouldn’t know a dolphin if it bit me on the butt.” It was slightly humiliating to learn that I had been the clueless pawn of a global spy network, but I was proud to feel that my ineptitude had played a role in saving the world from the ultimate weapon of terror.

  Yigal added, “I suspect that my mission isn’t exactly what they told me. They had me going after Shin Bet’s silkie contacts.” There was a promotion going on, so we tasted six or seven reds before taking the rioja. “Let’s just go walking and drink straight from the bottle,” he said. “For confidentiality.”

  We strolled to Independence Park through the gray-gold twilight. A hotel blocked our view of the port, but we could see a trio of dolphins leaping through the waves, heading south. “I’d like to see them retain control of it,” I said. “They’re basically harmless, especially now that we’ve reinforced the roof.”

  “I’d rather find and remove the name so we can forget the whole thing.” He finished the bottle and threw it down to the beach. “Now I want to tell you why I started drinking.” The story about Mary took a long time. We sat down on a bench and he kept stopping in the middle of sentences to let people pass by. He stuttered, seeming shy and ashamed, and finally claimed he couldn’t go on.

  “Of course you’re hesitating to tell me this,” I said. “Your behavior is disgraceful.”

  “Really?” He looked up, suddenly cheerful.

  “Of course it is. You’re a loser and a shit.”

  “Then I have to take her back?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Yigal hugged me. “I have no choice!”

  I could see that his typically Israeli need to be as masculine as possible had been wriggling under the heel of a dilemma: It’s very masculine to repudiate the woman you love and suffer alone for the rest of your life for the sake of pride and vanity, but it’s also very masculine to sacrifice your youth and freedom to bring up her children. It was a hard choice for Yigal, but since he was a little shaky on whether the “children” in this case were technically “children” at all, he’d been leaning toward number one. All it took was a little light arm-twisting, and he was firmly back with
option number two, which had the added advantage of confirming his common decency and securing his relationship with Mary, assuming he ever saw her again.

  “She’ll turn up,” I said. “She sent me something to keep for her.”

  “What?”

  “This little medal with a dog—or maybe it’s a koala—and a wheel and some other stuff—she said she got it somewhere. Yigal?” He was crying again. “Be a man for a minute. How about this: What if they’re not after me at all? What if it’s someone after you who’s trying to exploit someone who’s after me, because he can’t control Mr. Pickwick by himself? So they’re working together to defend the Israeli royal family.”

  “Which royal family? The Dayans?”

  “No,” I said. “That can’t be. I suggested it to Zohar, and he said, ‘That’s just too stupid.’”

  Yigal shrugged and looked out to sea. “I’ve spent a month in New York looking for material on the House of David and getting nowhere. There comes a time when a man has to ask himself, ‘What House of David? What are we really talking about here?’ Nell, look at me, and tell me honestly, I’m not talking about nature now: Is there anything in human culture so stupid that it can’t be true?”

  I pondered his question. A woman walked past us, carrying a $300 Italian clutch purse made of patterned vinyl. “No,” I replied.

  CHAPTER 17

  YIGAL SPENT THE NEXT TWO DAYS drunk, writing the following story based on something Kafka began writing in his diary in August 1914, “Memories of the Kalda Railway”:

  MEMORIES OF THE KALDA RAILWAY

  A small railway in the interior of Russia: I was there only a year, long enough to learn two songs from the railway inspector. The songs were “Where Are You Going, Little Child, in the Woods?” and “Merry Comrades, I Belong to You.” Tuneless, meandering songs, each a thousand verses long, sung endlessly to the unvarying southern horizon, which I faced each day, slowly rotating my chair to follow the sun’s progress. The first was a lament—quiet, with deep vibration building up in the chest and occasional sobbing. It was about a lost child, after all. The second usually came after meals and was a high, barking wail of pointless joy. The train came seldom, of course. In the five months I was stationed there, I saw it twice. It came carrying the railway inspector; after two weeks, during which we did little besides drink, repeat the songs, and fall asleep at last in each other’s arms, wrapped in our overcoats against the cold, it returned from Kalda to take him away again. When he arrived the only other passenger was a brown heifer. There was no conductor to close the doors, and when the nine empty cars pulled in, she came to the vestibule and hesitated, considering perhaps a moment on the grass while the engine took on water. I approached slowly, trying not to frighten her. She shivered and her nose seemed dry. My attention was seized by her deep brown eyes’ rectangular pupils. I thought I could make out something inside—a reflected scene, but one that had nothing to do with my shed, the signal, the water tower, or the featureless prairie around us. I saw a tiny boat rocking on a river, with willows hanging over from the banks, and cattails all around. The sun was brilliant and a stone fly skittered over the water. Then the heifer closed her eyes. The locomotive bathed us in steam and pulled away. Then the inspector walked up to greet me. He offered me vodka and began teaching me the songs.

  When after two weeks’ oblivion I honorably left the service of the railway, I asked if I might first ride to Kalda, the end of the line, before returning home. There is little to see in Kalda: a tiny gray town of stucco and daub, a few small plazas, a broken bottle or two, where even the wind arrives tired by the thousand miles from the nearest hills. In Kalda (it was said), though the cirrus clouds race by above, taking just a minute to fly from one horizon to the other, the earthbound air is still. Black-clad women move slowly about, speaking briefly to each other on their daily rounds from the market to the laundry. Then they warm their vegetable diet, wild onions, in huge pots nestled in mounds of smoldering peat. They have nothing to sell and consequently nothing to buy; the population is very old, dying even; all the men are gone, and the railway will soon shut down. This was the common wisdom regarding Kalda, which was held to be the remotest outpost of our civilization.

  Yet someone there would receive a heifer. She stood blankly grinning as I looked into her eyes, and then as the train creaked into motion she listed gently from side to side, still watching me, generously, gently. In her eyes the boat rocked. As I turned to look for it my eyes filled with steam. Then she was gone, into slavery, or to be eaten, who knew. She was right not to seek freedom in the vast upturned bowl of the steppes. In name I was free—nothing held me there but the promise of a salary—still, as everyone says, the plains are a prison. A single shopping street in the city holds more humanity than the entire high plain. The destitute or insane person who might excite our sympathy quickly becomes an unrecognizable tangle of dry bone, immune to charity. The heifer knew this, and she voluntarily chose life in Kalda over confinement to the steppes (I am convinced of this).

  I waited six months for the next train. The winter was uneventful. Snow covered the grass and starving legions of rats swept down from the north. The wind never stopped. Then, in the end, rain fell, the poppies opened their orange mouths, the sky took on a faint glow like dawn, and from an oblique angle, if one lay on the ground, the steppes appeared green. Soon I saw a weasel hunting for mice. Then the train came in a slow smear of colored smoke. After that I waited another week, teetering on the flimsy wooden rails.

  This time there was a passenger, an elderly man with thick glasses and an unseasonable woolen hat. He read the same front page of a newspaper over and over while I listened to the rails, watching the landscape repeat itself as the shadows slowly moved around the car into nightfall. The cars never stopped lurching from side to side, and when I closed my eyes I felt that I was standing on a moored rowboat. Sleep was impossible with the constant motion. The dining car was at the eastern end of the train, due to the prevailing wind. Twice a day I fixed myself a cup of tea and stole a few biscuits from an unmarked, ancient tin under the cash register. I brought tea to the old man. He never left his seat except to piss between the cars. He was shy of doing it standing in the doorway, facing that endless horizon.

  When we reached Kalda it was late afternoon, warm and silent. The old man turned away from the station and fought his way, wheezing with effort, alone into the tall grass.

  I had only one night in Kalda before the train would leave again for six months, and like a sailor with one night’s shore leave I was uncertain how to spend it. I could not stay even two nights without committing myself to walking back to the city, which was impossible. Perhaps with an oxcart to carry water I could have walked, but as far as I knew there was only one animal in Kalda. The station faced a dusty plaza ringed with low gray buildings. There was no glass in the windows, as if no one had used them for a long time.

  I fell asleep. When I awoke the little heifer was nibbling my hand. Its cheek rested on my thigh and its lips curved upward in a smile. It looked up to me with eyes blank as tar. In the pupils nothing was to be seen, but in the glassy surface I could make out my own reflection. My beard was long, both gray and red, and my eyes formed dark circles. My face was sunburned in patches and my nose looked almost purple. I suddenly felt my lips and tongue, and struggled to wet my mouth with saliva. It and my eyes were gummy with dust. I stroked the heifer’s head as she smiled and tried to lick my hands. The sun dropped below the horizon with a start and I realized I was cold.

  There has never been an inn in Kalda. I moved a coin to my shirt pocket and began to think about asking for shelter. Looking around, I saw that someone was approaching us. She was all in black and carrying a heavy walking stick. The heifer’s ears perked upright and she left off licking me for a moment. When the woman was very close to me, close enough to see that under my filth and fatigue I had the features of a young man, she threw back her hood. She had fine, dusty yellow hair that fell thickly
past her shoulders and was tucked into her coat. She looked no more than twenty-five years old.

  I started to my feet and wiped the grime from my mouth. The heifer nuzzled against my hips and drove the two of us back down the black, silent street through the dark to her house.

  In the morning, instead of returning to the station, I went alone to the fields to mow last year’s mustard and turn it under. To do otherwise would have been tantamount to murder. There were no young men in Kalda and no surplus that might have been sold to pay the fares for the old men and women to leave for the cities. No one was strong enough to walk a hundred miles, let alone a thousand. So the empty train made its way back and forth, and the people ate wild onions. With my help there would be potatoes.

  Her name was Mary. Her mother seemed at first very proud and silent, but I learned much later that she had been the victim of a beating by her husband. It had left her unable to speak. Regardless, whenever she saw me she threw her chin into the air.

  The heifer was Mary’s. In mid-June, when the air was thick with black flies and mosquitoes, she gave birth to a calf. She lived at the end of a short grass rope in the courtyard. Mary fought valiantly for the milk, but I think somehow the little starved cow reserved the best for her calf. The milk she gave us was thin and sour. Mary made cheese from it. She said that if she sold enough cheese in the city, she could make enough money to leave Kalda. I encouraged her, but thought she failed to understand urban commerce. Livestock can be sent alone to Kalda, and no one but its rightful owner will think of retrieving it, but cheese cannot sell itself. Still, I did not volunteer to leave her for six months for the sake of selling the cheese. I told her that I would be able to persuade the conductor to grant her a fare on credit against the value of the cheese, and we would leave Kalda together. Of course I would pay her fare myself. What could the cheese possibly be worth, after three months in the summer heat? We devoted long nights of discussion to the fate of the cheese. One night I remarked offhand that we could sell the cheese to whoever had sent her the cow.