Unholy Land

by Lavie Tidhar

  Tirosh looked at him curiously. “You were never political,” he said.

  “No, Lior, you were never political,” Menhaim said; there was a savage tone to his voice. His hostility startled Tirosh. “You left, so you wouldn’t have to deal with reality on the ground. You ran. You like to think you believe in fairness, in justice, but you’re not willing to do anything about it. Anything but writing your little fantasies like you can change the world with empty words.”

  “Writing is a weapon,” Tirosh said. “Words have power.”

  Menhaim snorted. “I saw what we did in Uganda,” he said. “What we’re doing in Nakuru now. There were people living here before us. We pretend they didn’t; or that they were recent arrivals, so it doesn’t matter if they left; we say they ran, so it’s their fault; we say all kinds of things so we can sleep at night, Lior. But some of us don’t trust words anymore. Some of us believe in action.”

  “So, what, you’ll be a terrorist?” Tirosh said. He was tired; he could still hear the screams of the dying; he didn’t think that Menhaim had the right to break into his room, force his acquaintance on him after so many years and, worse, be so dull about it. Tirosh found revolutionaries tiring, their wild-eyed idealism as implausible as one of the plots of his novels. He did not agree with what was happening in his country, perhaps, but it was a long way from that to, well, this kind of talk. “What do you want , Menhaim? I’ve had a long day.”

  “I’m sorry,” Menhaim said. He shook his head. Where once the gesture would have been like a young lion shaking his mane, this was more the act of an old rhino bull. “How are you, Lior, anyway? I heard you got married.”

  “I did. It didn’t last.”

  “I’m sorry. Any children?”

  “No,” Tirosh said. Then, catching himself—why had he said that?—“I mean, yes, a boy. Isaac.”

  “You must be very happy,” Menhaim said.

  “Yes,” Tirosh said. “Happy.”

  They sat and looked at each other, two men, neither young, neither as successful or as joyous as they had perhaps once thought they would be. Gideon’s death lay between them, the shared Gehenna valley between their respective hills. Menhaim, as though gathering his courage, emptied the last of the remaining small minibar bottles into his mouth and corked it with a practiced turn.

  “You might be wondering why I’m here,” Menhaim began, awkwardly.

  “You still haven’t told me how you found me,” Tirosh said.

  Menhaim shrugged. “We keep an eye on recent arrivals,” he said.

  “We?”

  “A loose alliance,” Menhaim said. “People who care.”

  Tirosh sighed. “So what do you want, Menhaim?” he said. “That I should join your little revolution?”

  “Would you?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so, Tirosh. You’re just a tourist. The rest of us have to live here.”

  Tirosh let it go. He waited. Menhaim looked at his hands, in his lap, considering. Finally he raised his head and looked at Tirosh. “It’s about Gideon’s daughter. Deborah.”

  “What?”

  Tirosh was taken aback. He remembered a serious-faced little girl with black curly hair. She stood holding tight to her mother’s hand, at the funeral. She didn’t cry, not even when the body was lowered into the ground and the earth piled on top, one spadeful at a time. He’d gone over and spoken to the mother, Miri. She had been Gideon’s girlfriend. The pregnancy had surprised everyone. Last he’d heard they had left Ararat, lived somewhere near Port Florence.

  “Deborah?” he said. “But she’s just a little girl.”

  Menhaim snorted. “She’s a grown woman, Tirosh.”

  “Has it really been that long?”

  Menhaim looked at him curiously. “You’ve been outside . . .” he said, softly.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing. I heard . . .” But what he’d heard he seemed reluctant to say.

  “Well, what about Deborah?” Tirosh said. He’d had vague ideas of visiting Miri and the child, though the awkwardness of meeting relatives was one he’d have preferred to avoid.

  “She’s missing,” Menhaim said.

  “Missing?” Tirosh said. The word seemed to have no meaning he could discern. Missing from what? From where? He had all but forgotten his brother even had a child. It had seemed so unlike him. Missing from Tirosh’s life? She would be Isaac’s cousin, he thought with a pang of regret. Palestinians were big on family, but he had always quietly preferred his isolated life in Berlin.

  “Yes, Lior. Missing. Pay attention. It’s important.”

  “She was working with you?” The thought made him angry. He did not want Menhaim dragging his niece into his sordid business. People got hurt that way.

  “She is politically conscious, if that’s what you mean,” Menhaim said, with his own flash of anger. “She was studying at the Nordau Institute. Very bright. A doctoral candidate. Do you know anything about this wall we’re building, Lior?”

  “I know it’s long,” Tirosh said.

  “Do you know how expensive it is?” Menhaim said. “We’re talking billions here, Lior. Billions. The maintenance contract alone is going to make someone rich beyond their dreams.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “Deborah was looking into the wall’s construction, Lior. She was poking her nose into dangerous places. And now she’s gone.” He made a magician’s gesture with his fingers, like releasing a puff of smoke.

  “You think she’s dead?”

  “I don’t know what to think.”

  Money. That was something that made sense to Tirosh. Politics was a mesh of shifting alliances, compromises, deals. But money was always just money. You either had it or you didn’t, and if you didn’t have it, you tried to get it. People died for the sake of ideology, sure; but a lot more died for the sake of a Palestinian pound.

  “What do you want me to do about it?”

  Menhaim shrugged; another helpless little gesture. “I don’t know,” he said. “I thought you should know.”

  “Was she involved in anything else?” Tirosh felt spooked. He went to the door and locked it.

  Menhaim watched him in amusement. “You think those people care about locks?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” Tirosh said. He didn’t know what to think. He felt responsible for Deborah. Maybe that was Menhaim’s whole point. He was going to dump this on Tirosh. Make it his responsibility. Ignoring Menhaim, Tirosh went into the bathroom and shut the door. He ran the tap and splashed cold water on his face. When he stared in the mirror, he barely recognised the man who was looking back at him. Who are you, Lior Tirosh? he asked himself. What is your place in the great scheme of things?

  He didn’t know. Fleetingly he thought of Isaac’s podgy little face in the morning, rising over him, fat little fingers poking his face with delight. “Dahdahdahdad.” Like the verse to a modernist poem. Tirosh blinking back sleep, holding out his arms, marvelling—where did something so small get so much energy?

  He dried his hands and his face. Stepped back into the room.

  “Menhaim?” he said.

  Nothing had been disturbed. The door remained locked and the windows were shut and dark. Menhaim was on the floor, on his side, one arm splayed against the carpet. There were traces of a white, chalky foam on his lips. His eyes stared at the pattern on the carpet. His hair was matted with sweat.

  Tirosh knelt down beside him and took his arm gently and felt for a pulse, but there wasn’t one.

  Menhaim was dead.

  6.

  “But I didn’t kill him, Bloom. Why would I?” Tirosh said. I sipped my tea and regarded him thoughtfully. The sunlight streamed in through the window. Outside, Ararat City gleamed anew after a bout of rain, and low, wispy clouds embraced the top floors of the skyscrapers. It looked solid and durable, yet I knew how quickly things can change. I would not let that happen. I turned my attention back to Tirosh. />
  “Then who did?” I said.

  “How should I know? He shows up with a half-baked story for me, acting paranoid, and ends up dead. Maybe he had a heart attack.”

  “It’s a mystery, isn’t it?” I said. “After all, the room was locked from the inside, and you were the only other person in the room.”

  “I didn’t dislike him enough to kill him,” Tirosh said, and gave a sudden, surprised laugh. “He was just someone I used to know.”

  “And this niece of yours? This Deborah?”

  He gave a helpless shrug. “I don’t know.”

  “The mother’s name was Glassner?”

  “Miriam Glassner, yes.”

  “We don’t have a record of a Deborah Glassner studying at the Nordau Institute,” I said.

  He looked relieved. “Well, that’s that then,” he said.

  “However there is a record for a Deborah Glass.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I see.”

  “No one has reported her missing,” I told him.

  He didn’t like that. I could see it in his face. He didn’t like that at all. He had a coiled sort of quality about him. He kept a lot of who he was deep inside. People like that could unravel, I knew. But they could also be used.

  “I called the Institute,” I said. “They haven’t seen her in a few days. But that’s hardly unusual.”

  “You’ve been thorough,” he said. He regarded me with some suspicion. I nodded.

  “As for your murdered man,” I said. “There isn’t much of a mystery, really. He was poisoned.”

  “Poisoned?” Tirosh looked past me. I couldn’t read his eyes. “How?”

  “The drink,” I said. “From the hotel minibar. It was laced with oleander extract. Frankly, he must have had the constitution of a rhino. He should have been dead before he ever spoke to you.”

  “He drank the whole bottle,” Tirosh said.

  “He must have had the seizure when you were out of the room,” I said. “Nasty stuff, oleander, but pretty flowers. They grow everywhere. It’s the sort of homemade stuff they used to use on war arrows. But anyone could have prepared it, really.”

  “But why would anyone want to kill Menhaim?” he said. I could see he still didn’t get it. “And why in such an elaborate fashion?”

  I waited him out. I could see his mind working, almost the exact moment he realised the truth and the air left him. “Oh.”

  “It would have been a ridiculous way to assassinate Menhaim,” I said, gently. “But a perfectly reasonable one if Menhaim wasn’t the intended target. If the intended target was, in fact, you.”

  “Yes,” he said, dully.

  “Menhaim talked a good talk,” I said. “But he was no threat. I was aware of his activities. You may not credit it, Tirosh, but I usually keep a good lid on things.”

  “I believe you,” he said.

  “Someone must have come in when you were out and put the poison in the bottles,” I said. “Not all the bottles, maybe half. Perhaps they were interrupted. Any idea why anyone would go to so much trouble, Tirosh? Or maybe they just didn’t like your novels.”

  “Everyone’s a critic,” he said. I laughed. I had to hand it to him, he was handling it well. Perhaps it was his return. It changes you, slipping. He was becoming someone else again.

  “So I can go?” he said. “You’re not going to hold me?”

  “You’re free to go,” I said. “Can I give you a bit of advice, though?”

  He was already pushing the chair back to rise. He looked at me. I could see he didn’t trust me. I said, “Tread carefully, Tirosh. In this land you can be one thing or the other, but not both. Sooner or later, you have to pick a side.”

  “Is that it?” He stood up. I could see he had already dismissed me. It was his mistake. I watched him walk to the door. I wondered what he’d do next.

  I had some ideas. He would bear watching.

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s it.”

  “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll be sure to keep that in mind.”

  I watched him go. Katz came in a moment later and I nodded. He withdrew without words. Unlike Tirosh, I remembered more of the outside. I remembered my own home world. I remembered Altneuland.

  Long yellow beaches and grey gulls crying high, and the white buildings rising against the startling blue of the sky. I remembered the silent airships floating, serenely, above the newly built Temple on the Mount. Remembered the serenity of the old new lands, of Judea, Samara and Gaza; hills of cyclamen and poppies in dazzling pinks and reds, as far as the eye could see, and new cities, dazzling with electric light, along the shores of the Mediterranean. My Altneuland. Sometimes it seemed a dream to me, only a dream. It was hard to be sure if it had ever been real.

  PART TWO

  _______

  INVESTIGATIONS

  7.

  Tirosh returned to the hotel. He was given a different room. He showered and changed. His hands felt raw and his eye hurt where one of my men had hit him, but he was otherwise fine. He left the hotel and headed west along Herzl Avenue. He paused outside a hatter’s shop, then went inside and purchased himself a fedora. The hatter was an elderly chasid, and the shop, already at that hour, was busy with the chatter of chasidim young and old who mixed Yiddish freely with modern Judean. It was hot and stuffy inside the shop, and smelled of new leather, warm ironed cloth and sweat. Adorned with the new fedora, an affectation for Tirosh yet common headwear in this land against the sun, he stepped out of doors again and continued on his way. Usually he only wore a hat when he wrote.

  As he passed a bus stop he saw a red bus pull to a stop and involuntarily took a step back. He watched passengers disembark. Amongst them he spotted a figure strangely familiar to him, but it took him a moment to place her: it was the woman from the plane, whom he had last seen at the airport. He had lost sight of her after that.

  She wore dark shades in the hot sun and long, practical clothes. A scarf covered her face, an expensive one, from Paris. She blended into the crowd. She could have been anyone.

  She wasn’t.

  I had been busy elsewhere. The bomber of the previous night had not acted alone. There were many workers from the Disputed Territories in Palestine. Someone had to clean our streets, wash the dirty dishes, look after our elderly and frail. Someone to do the menial jobs on the cheap.

  The security services had rounded up the usual suspects. One of them held my interest and so I had requested to conduct the interview. That is where I was heading at the time.

  Palm Springs had once sat on the site of a pleasant confluence of small brooks where Nahum Wilbusch bathed on his first expedition into the territory. Since then the palms had disappeared and the brooks dried or turned into underground sewers, and concrete slabs of buildings had been erected in their place. Initially this had been a customs station for the British East Africa Police Service Battalion, and was turned into a temporary holding facility for prisoners during that long, regrettable conflict between the British and German empires which ended, in an uneasy truce, on the assassination of Adolf Hitler in 1948. Following the War, Palm Springs was left unused for some time, but on Palestina gaining, at last, independence from its colonial overlords, it was converted into a permanent prison, with new structures erected and the old ones updated and reinforced. After all, did not the poet Natfali Herz Imber once say that until Palestina had its own Jewish thieves, its own Jewish prostitutes, it would not be a nation as all other nations? And he should have known, drunk philanderer that he was.

  The prison lay outside the bounds of Ararat City, on a high elevation on the outskirts of the Nandi Hills. It was quite isolated, yet a road cut clear through the greenery that led into the city, and it was on this road that I travelled with Katz that morning, on our way to interview the suspect. Katz never spoke much, which suited me fine. He drove. The windows were closed and the air conditioning was on. We were inside a world within a world, small and self-contained, with its own climate, its own rules. I
stared out of the closed window at the lush, tropical vegetation outside. I loved this country; I felt an immigrant’s devotion to it that might have shocked or amused a native-born Palestinian. The attack, I was sure, had been part of a pattern. A lock picker would use picks to carefully feel and then press a series of pins inside the lock, all the while applying pressure with a torsion wrench. If the correct pressure was applied at the correct points, the wrench would abruptly spring the mechanism free.

  I could not explain any of this to Katz, but I didn’t need to. My department was a specialist one, and I had made it my own. I hummed to myself as we drove, a klezmer tune without words. Before long the facility came into view. We were stopped at the electric gate. I presented my authorization and we were let in, the gate shutting behind us. Katz accompanied me inside, and I was led to the interrogation chamber.

  The prisoner sat in a low, uncomfortable chair. His hands were cuffed to the arms of the chair and he had been stripped: he sat there only in his underwear. His hair was cut short, his arms lean and muscled for all that he was not a young man. His name was Joseph. He looked up at me with bloodshot eyes when I came in, yet he smiled when he saw me. I made a gesture and the door was shut behind us, locking me in with him. There was another chair behind the interrogator’s desk—a comfortable one. I sat down and regarded him in silence.

  He said nothing. His breath was laboured and it was loud in the room. The room was underground. The walls were strong. It was hot in the room and muggy, and I could smell his sweat. They’d worked him for some time before I got there. There were thin strips of opened skin all along his chest and arms. Bamboo is very versatile.

  “Tell me about the attack on the bus,” I said.

  His nostrils flared. He said nothing.

  “Whatever you say will stay in this room,” I said, and he laughed, deeply and suddenly.

  “I know,” he said.

  I smiled back at him.

  “We don’t have to make this hard,” I said.

  He was still a man; he was still afraid. I knew how much pain he must be in. He had been chained to that chair for hours.