by Lavie Tidhar
You remember the bark of the guns. Dark blood on white stone. The smell of an orange.
You barely even knew Anwar.
Yet his needless death marked you: only the first of many.
14.
“We need you to go back there,” Professor Hashimi says. “Back to that place. For a little while, at least.”
You stare at them, at each of them in turn, mute, waiting. La Méduse barks a laugh.
“Not to Jerusalem,” she says. “To Berlin.”
“Why?”
“There is a man there we want you to follow.”
“Who is he?”
“He is a man who fell between the sephirot; now he is going back to his world, though he does not yet know it.”
You are outwardly calm. Yet you think of that other world, how it reeks with hatred. But you have been to other sephirot, and you have seen that men and women are the same wherever in the alternities you go.
“Why would I agree to do that?” you say. They ignore you. Bar-Hillel wets his finger, turns a page, frowns.
“His name’s Tirosh,” Bar-Hillel says. “Lior Tirosh.”
“So?” you say. “It’s just a name.”
“Your dissertation,” Bar-Hillel says. “The one you abandoned. On those science fiction writers.”
“Yes?”
“I asked you if any of them ever predicted the Small Holocaust. You didn’t answer.”
You bark a laugh. “What does it matter? They were just stories. I told you. They envisioned a thousand futures, all of them improbable. They were hacks, who worked for money and always stayed poor. Any sensible person would have quit and got a job. They just kept on dreaming, getting paid per page or per word or perhaps.”
Hashimi chuckles, politely. Bar-Hillel frowns.
“They didn’t predict the future,” you say. “They wrote warnings about what the future could become.”
And you think—were it not for the Small Holocaust, would your world be just like that other place?
“Still,” Bar-Hillel says.
“What?”
“You still haven’t answered my question.”
“Yes,” you say, unwillingly. Knowing you have been pushed into a trap. “One. He wrote a story called ‘Unholy Land.’ It was published in volume thirteen of a Hebrew science fiction magazine called Grotesqa.”
“Published Before?” La Méduse says, sharply.
“Yes.”
They already know all this, you think. They must have known all along.
“What happened to him After?”
“No one knows. He disappeared. So many disappeared, After.”
“What was his name?” La Méduse says. They are all looking at you. Waiting. Judging.
You say, unwillingly: “His name was Tirosh,” into their silence.
“Tirosh?” La Méduse says.
“Lior Tirosh,” Bar-Hillel confirms, and turns a page, all but tutting.
Professor Hashimi turns to the wall, with great intensity; as though still hoping for a window.
And you remember Haifa, the second-hand bookshops, and Mr. Katz’s apartment, on the hill above the ancient harbour. Mr. Katz’s apartment was a temple of books. Old paperbacks hid in glass cabinets, piled on the floor in-between, sat in boxes, winked behind flowerpots, rested on the windowsill. The walls were covered in yellowing posters: of monsters and spaceships, djinns and bronzed Amazonian warriors, weird creatures and the views of strange, other worlds. . . .
You sat there for hours, as the sun chased the shadows across the books until it sank beyond the sea. Until you found it.
The story appeared in volume thirteen of Grotesqa.
In the story, you read of a woman who wanders across the Middle East, restless for a kind of truth. She travels back to Palestine, or Israel, the land of her birth, which she has not seen for many years. A kind of holocaust has taken place in the country’s past; Tirosh avoided describing it in detail, but hinted that Jerusalem no longer existed, and that the nature of its destruction and the amount of pain it had caused brought, after a few years, a peace born of shared victimhood, creating in this way a new Middle East that collectively mourned Jerusalem. In a bookshop in Haifa the woman finds an old pulp magazine. Inside that magazine is a story, called “Unholy Land.” She begins to read the story, but realises that her search was futile, that the tale’s author never existed, that fantasy offers no real escape, and she lets the magazine drop, unread, from her fingers, and she leaves.
“What was the name of the woman in the story?” La Méduse says.
“Which one?” you say. “The first or the second?”
“Either. Both.”
“Nur,” you say. La Méduse smiles, the cat who got the cream. “She’s called Nur.”
“We need you to go to that other place, to Berlin,” Professor Hashimi says, coming back to himself with alacrity. “Only for a short while. He’s a slipper, we think. He is called back to his own world. We believe.”
“We think,” you say, aping him. “We believe. What do you know?”
“The sephirot are under threat,” Hashimi says. “The borders are breaking down. They are becoming porous. We think this is by design. There is a mind at work here. We need you to find it.”
“Where is he from, this Tirosh?” you say. “What is his world?”
Hashimi waves his hand, dismissively. “Some never-been,” he says. “A place where the Jews had built themselves a country in Africa.”
Bar-Hillel raises his head. The look in his eyes is vulnerable, wounded. La Méduse coughs. Hashimi mumbles something. Perhaps an apology.
“Africa?” you say.
“It would be like a holiday,” Hashimi says, encouragingly. “The warm weather, the clean air. It would do you good to be back at it, Nur. You’ve been too long away.”
“What happened in Smyrna was not your fault,” Bar-Hillel says. La Méduse just stares at you, her ancient eyes. They remind you of the Sphinx, in that other place.
“What are they doing?” you say. Whoever they are.
“Death. Blood. They are fashioning a key, to open a gate.”
“Why Tirosh?” you say.
“We don’t know, but he is part of the pattern. Follow Tirosh, find the instigator.”
“He is not the same Tirosh who lived here,” you say. “At most he is a doppelgänger. A shadow.”
“He writes, too.”
You’re not sure who says that. La Méduse stirs. “I read one of his books,” she says. “It was a mystery. A mystery why I read it!”
She laughs, a sound as dry as paint chipping off walls.
“Tirosh is not the issue here,” Hashimi says, self-importantly. He repeats himself: “Follow Tirosh. Find the instigator.”
“And then?” you say. Knowing you’ve lost. Knowing they’ve hooked you, that you would go back into the field, if only to prove what happened in Smyrna didn’t matter, that everyone makes mistakes: even you.
They look at you, the three of them. Judges and jury.
“Find him,” Hashimi says, and, simply: “then kill him.”
“Doesn’t it always come down to that?” La Méduse says. Bar-Hillel says nothing. He jots down a note and tears off the page and hands it to you. You take it without looking.
“For Accounts,” he says, with a slight apologetic air. “Make sure you keep the receipts. You know how they get, up there.”
You pocket the slip. They look at you expectantly. You look for a window, find none.
There must always be a death, you think, now. Sooner or later we are all called to account.
“You better go,” Professor Hashimi says. “Or you’ll miss your flight.”
15.
The world shifts as you sit on the plane. From Damascus to Berlin on a Lufthansa flight with the sky reddening in the west. From above, the world appears unchanged. You slip from one history to another as though changing your pyjamas. The passengers mutate and change, the seats become slightly mo
re uncomfortable, the air hostesses remain more or less the same. It is a curious facet of alternity travel, the interchangeability of airplane staff. You recline in the seat, look out of the window at that world, one of the verboten spheres, where history took a wrong turn, somehow. The in-flight entertainment system is more primitive than that of where you come from. You turn on the news, on RTL a blonde presenter talks animatedly about the ongoing war in Syria, a car bomb in Iraq, American airplanes attacking targets near Mosul. When you land, security forces question you at length, your body and possessions scanned for weapons and contraband, but at last you are allowed to leave. Berlin, which you have seen in many iterations, where you studied, married, loved. Once you slipped, walking Friedrichstrasse, and saw the street in ruins, Russian tanks patrolling through a scene of apocalyptic devastation. Berlin fragments each time you cross its streets: when you pass the Brandenburg Gate a sidestep into a fragment world brings with it visions of the place lit up brightly, red swastika flags hanging from the gate’s entablature, red-faced beefy men cheering at the sides of the road as a motorcade goes past. Mostly you have learned to control the slippage, though it is harder in Berlin, where many of the homeless that you pass, shivering in shop entrances, have the lost, hollow-eyed look of those who fell between the cracks, who woke up one morning in a world as like, yet so unlike, their own, in which everything that was once familiar had become alien and strange.
Your contact in Berlin, in this world, is Ahmed. A young art student, he occupies a crumbling old house in Kreuzberg turned into a sprawling commune. Outside there are coffee shops and bars and galleries, inside the house a permanent party seems to be in motion. In the kitchen a British punk band plays unplugged, the living room has been turned into a modern art installation by a Bulgarian artist, there’s pop art in the toilets and the air’s thick with hash.
You find shelter in a room occupied only by mannequins. Unclothed, they have perfect plastic skins. Their eyes stare at you. You ask Ahmed for a briefing.
“I heard about Smyrna,” he says, sympathetically, and you try not to strangle him. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“Tell me about Tirosh,” you say, and he nods.
“He’s lived in Berlin for a number of years,” he says. “Originally from Israel. He’s well established here. A writer, mostly of detective novels. He won a small award a few years back, for a weird political novel called Osama. You know, after Osama bin Laden.”
“Who?” you say, blankly.
“You know, Al-Qaeda and that?”
“Is that a band?”
“Never mind,” Ahmed says, resigned. “Anyway, I don’t know much else about him. I did get hold of his itinerary, though. That wasn’t hard. He’s flying to Tel Aviv tomorrow, or that’s what my contact at the airport says. And he’s giving a talk tonight at a bookshop just around the corner, as it happens, on Bergmannstrasse. A place called Otherland Bookshop. They specialise in science fiction and fantasy, that sort of thing. I got us a couple of tickets, if you wanted to go. They were free, anyway.”
All you want to do right then is shower, change, lie down for a year or a thousand years. Ahmed’s a sleeper agent; he’s been in this world too long, has begun to accept it as a primary. While the Border Agency has decreed this place verboten, the term may be misleading. It means no unauthorised travel is allowed, but such places bear close attention, and for those purposes a small network of long-term agents—sleepers, moles—has been set up, to witness, report and provide assistance to active agents such as yourself, if and when the need arises. Reluctantly you study it—its September 11s and Gaza bombardments, Afghanistan invasions and Occupy demonstrations, private space flights and banker bonuses, its oil spills and Crimean wars, its doped up cyclists, software billionaires, Christianists and global epidemics and tsunamis and robots on Mars: in short, a world like any other world.
You watch TV. In all the worlds there is TV, and it is always the same, a way in which the world is told to its people. You watch bombings and destruction, but they are far away and on a screen, reduced, distanced; and after a time you do what all people do, and turn it off.
In the evening you stroll to Bergmannstrasse. This is a prosperous world of bright yellows and reds, cafés with their patrons spilling onto the pavement outside, jazz in the air, the smell of hashish—much as you remember your own sojourn in the other Berlin, the one in which the Nazis never came to power. Here they did, for a time. This is the nature of the sephirot, where a careless side-step away into a fragmentalternity would reveal a broken-down desolation where a bustling street, just a moment ago, stood. There are places where dinosaurs still roam the Earth. . . .
There is no queue outside the bookshop. Inside, shelves spill over with bright-coloured paperbacks in German and English, their lurid covers depicting mermaids and exploding suns, spaceships and dragons. A man stands on an alien planet under triple suns, a wide-brimmed hat covering his face, a futuristic ray-gun in his hand. Tirosh’s own books, piled on a table by the entrance, have the dowdy appearance of a vagrant trying too hard to pass for a gentleman, as though the designers themselves could not quite decide if the books they were working on were literature or trash. You suppose the truth might be something in between, not nearly as literary as Tirosh perhaps likes to think, and yet not nearly entertaining enough to merit him the sort of commercial success enjoyed by those who truly embrace escapism.
The talk is sparsely attended. Chairs are arranged in rows at the back of the shop, and on them perch, in ones and twos, such people as could be expected to attend such an event, which is to say the misfits, the in-betweeners, those for whom life, on its own, is not fulfilling enough, who seek completion of a sort in fantasy: in books.
You sit at the back, perched for flight. You watch the people who are here to attend the talk, recognising in some of them, in their lost, bewildered looks, the mark of those who slipped away one day. People who do not belong, who lost their world.
A man in the corner looks vaguely familiar. Black, receding hair. A long face, unsmiling. A crazed, unhinged look in his eyes. But he should have had a moustache, you think, with a sudden shiver. He should have had a funny little moustache, but this man is clean-shaven. Just another lost soul, just another man out of history.
“Years ago,” Tirosh says, “I dreamed I was in my father’s house.” He has a hesitant manner of speaking. His eyes don’t quite meet the audience’s. His fingers move constantly, as though untying imaginary notes. “I woke up and all was just as I remembered. It had been years since I last set foot in the house, and yet I knew each floorboard and windowsill, each creak and every groan in the pipes and in the walls. I woke up in my own bed. The moon shone through the window, casting the room in a silver glow. And I was afraid.”
Tirosh takes a sip of water.
“Everything was the same,” he says. “But everything was entirely different. I knew the house but it was not the same house. I became convinced of that. I got out of my bed though I was afraid. I could not say why I was afraid. I opened my door and stepped into the corridor. The same old floorboard creaked where it had always creaked. As a child I would step over it, carefully, and so I instinctively began to do so again, yet thought better of it. I listened to the house, to the whispering of the pipes, the creaks in the walls. They spoke a language, it seemed to me. It was a language I knew as intimately as my own, yet at the same time, I had never heard it before. The house I knew spoke a foreign tongue. I walked its corridors, opened and closed doors into rooms I knew and that yet were entirely foreign. This was not my house. Its occupants had departed, and the house lay still, waiting, as though it expected them to come back, though many years had passed since their exile. How could this be? I thought. How can there be one house, and yet two houses? How can there be one house, and two sets of memories, two languages, different names for every which thing that stood in that house?”
Tirosh takes another sip. Someone in the third row farts, quietly, and startles
himself awake. Besides you, Ahmed fidgets.
“I searched for my father, but the house was large, and the rooms, though they seemed empty, echoed with the sounds of remembered departures and occupations. I wanted to ask my father, How have you come here? What price did you pay, for this house? But he didn’t answer.”
A blonde woman in the front row raises her hand. She has large bangles on her arm that shake and chime as they slide down. “You are speaking of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, of course,” she says, with authority.
Tirosh glances sideways, as though searching for a door.
“I am not sure if ‘conflict’ is the right word in this context,” he says, but gently, “as it suggests two equal sides, which I am not sure is the case—but to answer your question, I am speaking metaphorically. Or rather, I am trying to explain what it is we do when we construct stories of alternative realities. What we do is literalise the metaphor, so to speak. We construct a world of make-believe in order to consider how our own world is constructed, is told. You see?”
“I think you are a self-hating Jew,” the woman says, and her large earrings jingle in rebuke as she shakes her head in disapproval. Tirosh doesn’t reply: he takes a sip of water, shrugs.
“Any other questions?” he says. There’s a sorrow in his eyes, you think. Something private, nothing to do with literature or politics, but it is there in his every gesture, it is there in his eyes: pain, a loss.
“What motivates you to write?” asks a hedgehog-like man, leaning forward, hands folded neatly in his lap.
Tirosh hesitates.
“It used to be anger,” he says, at last.
“And now?”
“Money,” Tirosh says, with a small dispirited laugh. “That, and it’s been too long since I’ve had a real job.”
The hedgehog leans back, disappointed. Later, you wait in the small line as Tirosh signs his books. You pick up a couple—The Bride Wore a Shroud, and Death Becomes the Executioner—and hold them. They are printed on cheap paper and the lurid covers glare at you, the rotting corpse bride and the skeletal executioner both grinning with a sort of ferocious despair.