Unholy Land

by Lavie Tidhar

  This came naturally easy for Tirosh, for whom life was one long attempt to escape into other, better, imaginary lands. He pictured himself on a beach in Zanzibar, somewhere on the east coast of the island. The sand was pale, fine-grained like powdered whalebones. A line of coconut trees demarcated beach from land proper. The sea was a calm azure, and on the tideline the sand was covered in brightly coloured shells. There are no seashells as beautiful as those found on the shores of Zanzibar, and Tirosh, in his mind, wandered happily along the beach as the sun set, slowly, over the horizon. He picked each shell and admired it in the light of the setting sun. Sometimes, the shells were empty, and he pocketed them. At other times they were inhabited, still, by their native molluscs, and at such times he watched the little creatures struggle and wriggle in their homes before he tossed them back, gently, into the sea.

  The sun never seemed to set entirely and the beach never seemed to end. When he imagined himself thirsty, Tirosh picked fallen coconuts and tore their green encasing open, cracking the hard nut within against a rock until it broke. Then he drank the water, though it never seemed to truly satisfy him, and he grew more thirsty with every passing hour. His bladder, too, pressed very painfully, and he imagined himself urinating, luxuriously and at great length, against the trees or into the sea, but every time that relief, too, proved illusory, and he was pushed deeper into the horizon, until he looked back and saw Isaac trailing behind him.

  The boy had only recently got his first pair of shoes, and he walked almost crab-like (though Tirosh was vague on exactly how crabs actually moved). That is to say he moved not like a crab at all, but with halting steps, his upper body pulling forward faster than his little legs, so that he was constantly in imminent danger of falling. The boy retained his balance, however, as he followed with a determined purpose, and only his hand, reaching forward and up, towards his father, signalled how desperately he wanted to be picked up. Tirosh walked faster, but the boy kept pace, somehow, until at last Tirosh was forced to turn and reach out his arms for him. The boy clung to Tirosh as though he were drowning, and indeed the water must have been reaching higher up to the sand, for Tirosh could not see the boy’s footsteps in the sand at all. For a moment he held Isaac close to him. His son’s warmth overwhelmed him, and he stroked Isaac’s delicate light hair, gently, feeling the little uneven bumps in the boy’s skull.

  “Dadad,” the boy said. He couldn’t yet speak but had taken to babbling animatedly when the mood took him, jabbing his chubby little finger to point at things, speaking a nonsense language only he understood.

  “Hush, Isaac,” Tirosh said. “We’ll be home soon.”

  The boy felt very light in his arms. He carried him across the warm sand as the sun set and the world grew dark, and the pressure in his head intensified. “Dadad, dadad,” the boy said; then the darkness was abruptly gone and with it the sea and the sand and the boy, and Tirosh blinked back tears as the light hit his eyes. He coughed. He was very thirsty.

  “I need to pee,” he said.

  “Then pee,” someone said, and laughed—it was a cruel sound.

  “We are not animals, Mushon. Help the man up.”

  A grunt. Tirosh blinked, saw shadows standing over him, but he could not make out their faces. Someone cut the ropes that bound him. Pain flared as blood was released. The man helped Tirosh stand, none too gently. Tirosh almost fell. He was like a child, learning to walk. The man led him away to a toilet cubicle and waited with the door open as Tirosh unfastened his pants and urinated. The relief was overwhelming. How long had he been kept here? He was profoundly grateful he had not pissed his pants. Somehow the thought of doing that was mortifying, unbecoming.

  “Finished?”

  “Thank you.”

  When Tirosh turned he could see the man’s face more clearly. It was a lumpy face on top of a lumpy body, which towered over Tirosh. He had the ears of a boxer. Cauliflower ears, Tirosh thought. It was an expression he’d often used in his books.

  “What are you looking at?” the man demanded.

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on.”

  He grabbed Tirosh by the arm and led him away. They were in some sort of warehouse, Tirosh saw. It was a vast hall, filled with sacks of cement, mixing machines, tractors and bulldozers. One other figure, round and small, was merely a shadow ahead. Mushon led Tirosh through the silent machines, to the warehouse’s doors. They stepped outside.

  In the light of the moon, Tirosh saw the land of his youth.

  Mount Elgon rose in the distance, though it was not as large as he recalled it when he was a boy. The land around it was green and pleasant, though of a dark shade in the night, the vibrant green turned almost rusted, like old blood. Somewhere to the southeast would be his father’s farm, the farm on which he grew up, but he could not see it from up here. He was on a hill, and the hill had been taken over entirely by a vast construction site. Warehouses sat hastily built, and with them tractors and bulldozers and cement bags and kilns, and he saw local people milling about, none paying him the slightest attention, all busy at their tasks. There must have been hundreds in that camp. Lights had been strung up on poles everywhere. A road led down from the hill and cut through the greenery and the night, leading to Elgon, yet as it approached the mountain it skirted it, forking into two paths, as though wary of the volcano. Tirosh could see campfires burning in the distance, and hundreds more men on the slopes below, as small as ants.

  A white line cut through the greenery, a neat and orderly form, like a surgical cut in the land.

  The wall.

  Even as he watched he could hear the distant grunt of great earth-moving machines, and the shouted calls of overseers, speaking in the languages of the Nandi and other Kalenjin. Judean was barely heard but for where he stood, with the big man, Mushon, and the other one.

  Now Tirosh turned, and looked at the other with new interest, for this was his first opportunity to examine his captor.

  The man was short and ran to fat. He wore sunglasses pushed over his forehead, and a chequered shirt open at the neck, under which his hairy chest showed proudly. His arms were wide and the watch he wore expensive—it was a European import, from far-off Switzerland. He glared at Tirosh with the irritable look of a busy man confronted with an unwanted obstacle.

  “You have been asking questions,” he said; an accusation Tirosh found hard to deny.

  “I do not believe I have had the pleasure,” he said, “Mr. . . . ?”

  “Gross. It’s Gross, you little ku fartzer,” the man said. He waved his hand, encompassing the building site, and Tirosh could indeed see a sign prominently displayed, which read Gross Construction Co. Ltd.—No Project Too Big!

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t understand.” He touched the back of his head, tenderly. It was sore, still, to the touch. “You had me kidnapped?”

  “I felt we should have a little chat, yes,” Gross said. He looked ill at ease, bristling with a secret sorrow. Tirosh saw how none of the workers dared glance their way; they may as well have been invisible. And he was suddenly afraid of this man.

  “What about?”

  “There he goes again!” Gross said, agitated. “Always with the questions.”

  “You want I should tap him again?” the big man, Mushon, said. “Just a little tap, to give him manners.”

  “Listen,” the man, Gross, said. He jabbed his finger in Tirosh’s chest. “Why are you going around asking questions about Deborah Glass? Did you do something to her?”

  “Did I?” Tirosh was momentarily taken aback. “She’s gone missing,” he said.

  “I know that!” Gross said. Tirosh took a step back; the man’s demeanour, it occurred to him suddenly, looked less intimidating than deeply concerned. Something did not add up.

  “Deborah was looking into the wall’s construction when she disappeared,” Tirosh said. His head was pounding and his mouth was dry; it was hard to swallow. He took a step forward, pleased to realise he could to
wer over Gross. “She was against the building of the wall, she was an activist.”

  He glared down at Gross.

  “You’re the one building it, for God’s sake. It would have been in your interest to make her disappear,” he said. “I swear, if you did anything to my niece I’ll—”

  “Your niece?” A look of confusion filled Gross’s eyes. “Who exactly are you?” he said.

  “Tirosh! Lior Tirosh! I’m a writer. I live in Berlin but I came back, my father—”

  “Tirosh?” The look of confusion in Gross’s eyes intensified. “You’re her uncle?” His shoulders slumped. “Well, this is fakakta,” he said. “I thought you were . . .” He didn’t complete the sentence.

  Tirosh was breathing hard. All around them the workers worked, carrying bags of cement, quarry stones, digging tools. The wall in the distance was white, so white.

  “What is this about?” he said, more quietly. “Why did you kidnap me, and how do you know my niece?”

  Gross waved a hairy arm. “This is not what I expected at all,” he said. “I think we should have a chat. I mean, a proper one, this time. Can I offer you a cup of tea?”

  Tirosh rubbed the tender back of his head, tiredly. “I suppose that you could, at that,” he said.

  He followed Gross to a large tent that was set up, as a sort of command centre, near the edge of the camp. On a portable gas stove Gross boiled water, measured out tea leaves into a strainer, prepared biscuits on a silver tray. Tirosh watched him, this curious, powerful man, and again he thought how little he understood the people of his own land and the things they were capable of.

  Gross wasn’t at all what Tirosh had expected. He looked worried, as though he’d made a mistake but was the kind of a man who never made mistakes, not in his own mind. As Gross prepared the tea service he told Tirosh a little of his life. How he started out as a runner boy, trading in the Nakuru Market. How he’d made friends with the Swahili traders and learned their language. How he’d been accused of smuggling, of having his own routes into the territory—“But they never had anything on me. They never did.” Finally how he’d figured there was more money and less headache in construction.

  “In this land we always build, build, build,” he said.

  Tirosh nodded, politely.

  Gross served the tea. He poured the milk first, Tirosh noticed—the sign of a man who had not grown up wealthy. Mushon stood at the entrance, looking out on the night. Construction never stopped, and Tirosh saw trucks come and go, and men march—it was like a military operation.

  “You’re making them build the walls to their own prison,” Tirosh said.

  Gross looked hurt at the suggestion. “I pay them well,” he said. “These people are my friends.”

  “Friends,” Tirosh said.

  “You!” Gross shouted. “Moses Tanui! Are we not friends?”

  A man, one of the workers, turned his head at the sound. “Yes, boss,” he said, and turned back to his task.

  “See?” Gross said. “I went to his wedding.”

  “Why did you kidnap me?” Tirosh said. “What was your connection to Deborah?”

  “I didn’t know who you were,” Gross said. “All I knew was there was some schmutznik going around poking his nose in my business. I thought you might have had something to do with her disappearance.”

  “She’s gone? How do you know?” Tirosh said. “Her professor said—”

  “Her professor!” Gross snorted, and his large hand slammed the rickety table, upsetting the tea service that was resting there, until Tirosh had to act quickly to rescue his cup. “Listen to me, Tirosh. Deborah Glassner was working for me.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What is there to understand!” His eyes softened. That same curious countenance, that secret sorrow, suffused his face for just a moment. “She’s a beautiful girl. I don’t mean in the conventional sense, maybe. But a beautiful person, inside. People judge me, do you know that, Tirosh? I’m not one of those nogids born into money and power, those whose parents sent them to Paris or London for education, the old families. I’m a self-made man. I’m Nakuru born and bred. These workers know me, Tirosh. But for the colour of my skin I’d be one of them. So don’t you think, too, to judge me. Deborah didn’t.”

  Tirosh took a sip of the tea. He thought of this man, his speech, peppered with too much Yiddish as though he’d picked it up from some cheap romance sold at the kiosks of his youth. He knew what Gross meant. Through his father he, too, had got to know the upper echelons, those from the old banking and trading families, who vacationed in Switzerland or Pemba, spoke French and German with only a hint of Judean accent, who bred horses on private farms away from the plateau. They, too, had respected his father, but only because the old man could not be bought. They’d look down on a man like Gross, with his loud voice and his pulp fiction Yiddish, with his market manners. He would never be welcome in their club.

  “How did you meet Deborah?” he said.

  “She came to me,” Gross said. “At first, of course, I was suspicious. I do not like the activists, Tirosh. Sofa revolutionaries who’ve never spoken to a Kalenjin but are outraged on their behalf. The wall, the wall! Let me tell you something, Tirosh. Walls mean nothing to me. Is this right? Is this wrong? That’s for others to decide. I just build it. This is what I get paid to do. Who’s to say there won’t be peace if we build the wall? My grandparents lived and died behind walls back in Europe. Perhaps the walls protected them from the world outside. At the end of the day, you’ve got to choose who your people are. You can’t be of one place and another, you must be one thing. We are Jews. The Kalenjin are my friends, yes, but they are of themselves, and this is as it should be. They must do what is right for them, and we must do what is right for us. Do you understand?”

  Tirosh nodded. Outside, the electric lights ran in straight lines, illuminating the workers as they trudged to and fro with their cargo.

  Tirosh looked at Gross. He was like a man who’d got everything he’d ever wanted, yet still felt like a fraud. As though he were having to justify himself, to Tirosh, to whoever would listen. And he thought, this was what Deborah must have been to him, in the end. His Western Wall. She was someone who listened.

  “She came to you,” he said to Gross, then. “Why did she come?”

  “She was nosing about near my construction site,” Gross said, and unexpectedly smiled; a tender look which transformed his face. “At first she was with those protester groups, you know how they come near, chanting and waving placards and all that dreck, mostly for the cameras, though the media’s hardly interested in them anymore. My men just told them to keep their distance. I mean, it’s a free country.” He looked at Tirosh defensively. “I won’t say nobody ever got hurt if they got out of line, and the cameras weren’t there . . . but that’s just actions and consequences, isn’t it?”

  “Sure,” Tirosh said. “Sure.”

  “Deborah wasn’t like the others,” Gross said. “She started coming round, on her own. Making friends with the workers. She speaks Kalenjin, did you know that? Not many Palestinians do.”

  “My father does,” Tirosh said, remembering. He thought of his father, marching through a Nandi village as though he were its chief: how the children followed behind him wherever he went.

  He always seemed to have more time for other people’s children than his own, Tirosh thought, and had to push down the bitterness.

  “Your father, of course,” Gross said. “The general. He always respected the land, I’ll give him that. How is the old man?”

  “Dying,” Tirosh said.

  “I’m sorry to hear it.”

  Tirosh shrugged.

  “Do you have any children, yourself?” Gross said.

  “Me?” Tirosh said, in confusion. “No.”

  For a moment, Gross looked at him curiously. Then he said, “Well, I got to know her, gradually. She was just persistent. She wouldn’t take no for an answer. I liked her, Tiros
h. She was smart and she was funny. Ultimately, we disagreed on pretty much everything, but we liked each other all the same. Is that very hard to believe?”

  Tirosh looked at the other man. There was something soft, something vulnerable under Gross’s hard exterior. Tirosh wasn’t sure he entirely believed him, but he did not think it ridiculous that it could be so, that this man and his niece had formed some sort of relationship. It occurred to him he did not know Deborah at all—barely remembered the little girl she had been. His memory had been playing tricks on him recently. He was remembering things out of sequence, and things that never occurred.

  He said, “No, I don’t think it is that hard to believe.”

  Gross, he thought, looked at him with something like gratitude. Gross said, “I figured we could help each other. Do you see?”

  “How so?” Tirosh said. He was discomfited by the view of Mount Elgon always in the background. As a child, it had been a constant, there the whole while until his mother uprooted him from his life and took him to the city. The mountain didn’t care if Tirosh had gone or had returned. The mountain just was. It’d seen humans come and go, with lives as brief as those of elephants or ants. Once it had been a conduit of fire from the earth. Now it lay dormant, its flames extinct, but something of that early power remained in the soil.

  “She was researching folklore. Old stories. Silly stuff, but you know what the natives are like.” Gross scratched his nose. “I mean, sometimes, you know, you do wonder. You grew up around here?”

  “Sure.”

  “You do wonder. An old volcano, and the caves and all that . . . You do sometimes see strange lights at night. Hear sounds you maybe shouldn’t be hearing. I don’t know. Stories sometimes have a kernel of truth in them, don’t you think?”

  “Sure,” Tirosh said, again. It seemed easiest to agree with whatever train of thought Gross was following. “Sure.”