by Lavie Tidhar
“You maybe don’t know this, but we’ve been having problems with the workers,” Gross said. “Good people. Hard workers. Usually. But they refuse to work round Elgon. That whole area’s a fucking breach, Tirosh.”
“Why won’t they work there?”
“They say there’s a bad place. I’ve never heard of it. There never used to be. Something us Jews brought with us, in the Settlement, they say. Or something woken up, by the construction. . . . Honestly, I can make no sense of it. I don’t know. My expenses are running high and my workers are mutinous, Tirosh. I can’t afford not to finish this job.”
Their tea was long gone. Tirosh watched the lit road to the mountain, and how it forked, how it skirted the darkness of the old volcano. It was an island of shadow in all that light, something older and more real than those makeshift roads, that ephemeral wall. Gross talked like a man who needed to talk, who wanted to unburden himself. In Tirosh he had found a willing confessor.
His man, Mushon, stood motionless at the tent’s entrance, as immovable and dark as the mountain.
“I don’t see how Deborah could help you?” Tirosh said at last.
Gross stirred in his chair. “I thought she could find someone to convince them,” he said. “I tried money, I tried threats . . . maybe I needed a different approach. It couldn’t hurt, could it? Look at it!” he said, pointing, forcing Tirosh’s eyes to follow again those dark contours to which he was both attracted and from which he was repelled. “Look at the damn thing!”
“Why not just build around it?” Tirosh said, and “It’s not even on the Green Line, that’s Uganda on the other side.”
“It’s not that, it’s spreading everywhere,” Gross said. “The bombings, the destruction. It’s not been on the news, but we’ve had several attacks, sabotage attempts. People died. It’s all over the line, Tirosh. It’s all along the wall, it’s everywhere.” He pointed at the mountain again. “But that’s the source.”
“It’s just a mountain,” Tirosh said.
“I know that!”
“What was Deborah doing?” Tirosh said. It was hard to get a straight answer out of Gross. Tirosh suspected that, for all the man’s protestations, he was not that bothered about the problems with the workers, and his tirade was merely a sort of protective noise that he was raising over himself; that what he wanted to hide was less clear, but may have been his feelings for the girl, which were deep enough to have had Tirosh abducted and brought here. Which meant, too, that Gross was not above breaking the law; that he could and did resort to the use of violence; and that he could therefore be very much a suspect in Deborah’s disappearance, if indeed there had been ill design behind it. Tirosh needed to step cautiously around this man, and yet he felt the need to press, to rattle a truth out of him.
“What did you ask her to do?”
“I needed her to come up with a story,” Gross said, “something to pacify the Kalenjin and the others. I thought she had it, then. She went off to the lake.”
“Her professor said that,” Tirosh said. “She was looking for something, but the professor didn’t know what.”
“An object from the first expedition,” Gross said, and unexpectedly smiled. His moods shifted like the clouds over the plateau, rapidly and without warning. “Wilbusch’s theodolite.”
“What the fuck is a theodolite?” Tirosh said.
“It’s a surveying tool,” Gross said. “They were surveying the land, weren’t they.”
“Why would Deborah go looking for that?”
Gross shrugged. He looked uncomfortable. The night was hot and a mosquito settled on Gross’s wide neck. Gross slapped it without blinking, then flicked the tiny, bloodied corpse away.
“It was like a, what do you call it,” he said. “A totem? No, she told me. A fetish. An object believed to have supernatural power. She’d found scraps of information, I don’t know where. She was always in and out of old libraries. There was this belief that it was connected to the bad place. It was lost, but then it surfaced on the other side of the border. Fucking Uganda, man. She thought if she could bring it back it would be what I needed to convince the workers they were safe. That’s what she thought.”
“What she thought, or what you wanted?” Tirosh said.
“I don’t know,” Gross said. He stood up. “All I know is that she never came back, or if she did, she never came to see me. I’m worried about her. I just want to make sure she’s safe.”
“Sure,” Tirosh said. He, too, stood up.
“You understand, don’t you?”
“Sure.”
“Listen,” Gross said. “You’re looking for her. I can help you. I’ve got money, resources. How much do you charge, a day?”
“Charge? I’m not a detective, I told you, I’m a novelist.”
“Yeah, sure, but that’s not your job, is it,” Gross said. “Arbet iz keyn shand, you know?”
“What?”
“Work is no shame, is what I’m saying, Tirosh.”
“Two hundred,” Tirosh said. It was what his heroes always charged, in his novels.
Gross looked at him blankly.
“Two hundred what?” he said.
“Two hundred Palestinian pounds, a day. Plus expenses.”
“I’ll give you a week up front, is that all right?”
Tirosh shrugged. Gross reached into his pocket and came out with a big dirty wad of cash and peeled off a bunch of notes and handed them to Tirosh. Tirosh didn’t count the money. He wasn’t entirely sure what had just happened.
“And Mushon can take you down to Kisumu,” Gross said. “That’s where Deborah told me she was heading. You can leave right now.”
“But I must deliver my lecture,” Tirosh said.
“Your what?”
“At the university. Elsa—”
The name momentarily stopped him in his tracks. He knew Elsa—didn’t he? His memory of Berlin, of life outside, was fading, somehow. “My agent,” he said, lamely. “She arranged it.”
“Forget your lecture,” Gross said. “This is far more important than any second-hand thoughts you may have about literature, Tirosh. You! Kipngeny!” he bellowed. Down on the slope a man turned and grinned sheepishly, having stopped to roll a cigarette while a bag of cement was balanced over his head. “Watch how you go, you little bugger!”
“Yes, boss, Mr. Gross,” Kipngeny said; but he didn’t look particularly concerned, and he finished rolling and then lit the cigarette with a match before he continued on his way. When Gross turned back to Tirosh, he looked like he had already forgotten Tirosh’s presence. A look of surprise fleetingly suffused his face. Then he put his hand on Tirosh’s shoulder, and leaned close, and he said, “You’ll find her, won’t you? I just want her to be safe.”
“Sure,” Tirosh said. Mushon led him away, to a waiting car parked a little way down the hill.
“I’ll drive you to Kisumu,” Mushon said.
“Sure,” Tirosh said, in a daze. “Sure.” When he looked back he saw Gross in silhouette under the moon, and he thought you never saw the moon so close and so large as you did in Palestina. He had forgotten that, too. He had forgotten a lot of things.
19.
There are few places as beautiful as Lake Nakuru at dusk; the sky is suffused with hues of crimson and amaranth and vermillion, and down below, the pink flamingos gather like a tribe of wise, ancient people, deep in a group discussion. But when we got there it was late at night, and so I missed the view.
When I arrived at the wall I was pleased to see the new Eretz Crossing was up and running. We called it Eretz, land, but in truth it was no land at all but the liminal point between one world and another: between ours and theirs.
Concrete boulders blocked the way to vehicles, preventing the possibility of a car bomb attack. I parked and exited. Barashi snored in the passenger seat. The soldiers knew I was coming. Even at this late hour, Nandi workers and families were queuing up on either side of the barrier, waiting with bowed heads
to enter or leave Palestina. I did not hate them. It was just that they weren’t my people.
I conferred briefly with Captain Blau of the Nakuru Protectorate Civilian Administration Command. Captain Blau was an upstanding Palestinian patriot and a man I had worked with before. He had short cropped hair greying at the sides, keen hazel eyes and a harassed manner.
“It won’t be easy,” he said. “Listen, Bloom. We go in quick, we hit them hard. It’s the only way. What exactly are we looking for?”
“An Orkoiyot,” I said.
“Their spiritual leader? But—”
“Not an official one,” I said, with hatred. “Just round them up, Blau. He’d be an older man, but we can’t take any chances.”
“The Nandi won’t like it, sir.”
“What the Nandi don’t like they can submit in writing to the United Nations,” I said, and he grimaced, a momentary expression of displeasure that disappeared so swiftly I wondered if I’d imagined it.
“Is there a problem, Captain Blau?”
“No, sir. It’s just—”
“Just what, Captain Blau!”
“We’ll have to go hard and fast,” he said, “it’s the only way.”
“Then that’s the way we’ll do it,” I said, smiling at him pleasantly until he got the message and walked away.
I did not like those camps beyond the Green Line. I did not like Nakuru, the slums, the way the streets were all crowded, the broken roads and the concrete blocks, where families huddled ten to a room, where the terrorists lurked, hiding in the civilian population. These people called themselves refugees, but the reality was that they had lived and they would die in those camps, that these were their homes, that the land they claimed was one given to us by covenant. Kenya should have taken them, but wouldn’t. Tanzania balked. And so they remained, forever on the doorstep, growing more desperate with every passing year. And desperate people are dangerous. They may not have meant to become what they’ve become, but historical processes have made them into weapons, an enemy of the state.
I was merely doing my job!
Crossing the wall was like going over into another world. Overhead the stars dominated the sky, the galaxy stretching its arms from one horizon to another. I loved the stars over Palestina, their pure, cold beauty.
The camps pressed against the wall. On our side it remained pristine, untouched. On theirs the wall was filthy, filled with graffiti. Slogans spray painted on the wall. A grotesque illusion: a stencilled man pulling a curtain open, revealing another world, of blue skies, white clouds, innocence. A road cut through the camp, leading from the gate. We drove down it in convoy, five armoured trucks, and turned into the warren of dirt roads that ran like an infection through the camp.
They knew we were coming. They always knew. I saw boys race ahead, to warn their people. Women watched us behind curtains as we drove past. We moved slow, encountering debris, thrown junk, an open fire burning in a disused oil drum. There were so many of them, in the shadows, in the corners, watching. The first stone came out of nowhere, and then another, and another.
“Don’t shoot!” Blau ordered. I remained mute. The stones hit the sides of our vehicles with hollow thuds. There was no justice here, no police, no civil order. There was only us.
We were deep inside the camp when we stopped. Blau shouted, “Go, go, go!”
The soldiers deployed rapidly. They were veterans of this war, in which the enemy moved unseen. It could be a young boy, a kindly grandmother, an old man smoking a pipe. You couldn’t trust anyone because no one was innocent. They hated us and they wanted to do us harm.
My job was to stop it.
I knew more than they did, more than Blau, more than most people do. People think of reality as immutable: solid and reassuring, that it is true merely because it is there.
But I knew better. Even Tirosh, that hack, had a sense of the real truth of it, in all his wild inventions and his torrid fictions. The world is the sum of what it could be, what it might have been and how it could have been.
I knew how fragile the borders are between the worlds, how quickly madness settles, and fiction becomes fact. The world is always stranger, after all, than we imagine. You can call it quantum mechanics, you can call it Kaballah, but either way, it was my job to stop it from happening. People need to believe that the world is solid and real, and here, in this time and place, we had established something true and precious, this night shelter for the Jews.
I did not hate the inmates of the camps; I pitied them. But I had been tasked with protecting this land, and protect it I would.
We streamed, therefore, out of the vehicles. The soldiers moved rapidly, in unison. Their guns were drawn. They were equipped with live ammunition. I myself carried only my side weapon, which was always on me.
“Break down the doors.”
“Sir—”
“And never challenge my orders again, Blau!” I said. I made a mental note at that moment to speak to his commanding officer. I once had high hopes for Blau, but his service here had changed him, had made him weaker, as though even he, a good Palestinian soldier, had become somehow sympathetic to the plight of the people he was forced to operate against.
He was not like me. My intentions were pure, had always been pure. In the place I come from, we had no dissent.
I heard screams, as doors were battered down and my soldiers went into the tenements, dragging the inhabitants out. Several of the soldiers spoke some of the native tongue. They shouted questions, threatened imprisonment, confiscation, destruction.
“Make them understand,” I said, calmly. “Make them understand.”
“Sir.”
I approached one large house. “Secured?”
“Secured, sir.”
I went inside. A family huddled in a corner next to a large television. The soldiers moved methodically, quickly through the house, searching it. They knocked on the walls and tore open drawers, ripped carpets, moving room to room, searching for contraband. It was the house of a relatively wealthy family, I saw. A ten-year-old boy glared at me defiantly from behind his father’s robe. I pointed my finger at him, imitating a gun, like in the movies, and said, “Pow.”
He blanched and hid, as well he should.
“Where is he?” I said to the father.
“Sir?”
“Where is the old man? The Orkoiyot.”
“Sir, we don’t know—”
“Don’t know what?”
“We know nothing!” the woman, his wife, interjected. “We are innocent people, we have done nothing wrong!”
“Keep your mouth shut!” I shouted. I took out my gun and pointed it at the woman’s forehead. “Where is he!”
“I don’t . . . I don’t . . .” She began to cry.
I did not enjoy humiliating her. I was merely carrying out my duties. I was a professional.
“Please. We know nothing, sir,” the husband said.
The soldiers returned, their sergeant shaking his head. “Nothing, sir.”
I motioned at the family. “Take them outside.”
“Sir. Yes, sir.”
I walked out of the house. I paced the street. Everywhere that had electricity, lights were lit. Families were being force-gathered outside, pulled out of doors, confused, frightened, dressed for sleep. The soldiers stood guard, but they looked nervous. In the camps, an attack could come suddenly, out of nowhere.
When the first shot rang out it came from the rooftops.
A soldier collapsed. They wore bulletproof vests but the hidden sniper had aimed for the head, and the soldier fell, a red flower blooming in the centre of her forehead. Then hell erupted all around us as the soldiers began firing, and Blau grabbed me and pulled me down low. “Sir, you need to take shelter!”
“Get your hands off me, Blau!”
I ran in a crouch, hugging the walls, my pistol raised. Frightened people shied away from me.
“I know you’re there, old man,” I said. “I know it, I
can feel it.”
More shots rang out. Another soldier collapsed to the ground, hit in the leg.
“Catch them and bring them back to me!” I screamed. “I want these men alive!”
The soldiers split into smaller units, separated. I stood upright in the middle of the road, breathing heavily. I waved the gun in the air.
“Is this what you want?” I shouted. “Take a shot if you feel you can get it!”
I looked around me. I saw the boy, the one who had glared at me. A dark stain of urine marred his pants. I stalked up to him. I whipped him with the pistol. It caught him on the cheek and he cried out in pain. The mother tried to attack me and I kicked her savagely, and she fell sobbing to the ground. I picked up a handful of dirt and brought it to the boy’s mouth. “Is this what you want? This land? This land!”
“Please . . . please . . .”
“Then tell me. Tell me where he is. The one who wishes harm on my people. The man who can see beyond this world, into the next. Where is he!”
“Not here! Not here! They’re hiding in the Mau Forest!”
I did not even know who said it. The cry came out of one of them; it didn’t matter who. There was always someone who would talk.
I stood there, not saying anything.
Not the forest, I thought. Not that, not again.
But of course it was there. I should have known, I think I must have known all along.
“Bloom? Bloom!”
“Secure the area,” I said. I reached for the boy but he shied from me like a wounded animal. I took his hand, nevertheless. I helped him to his feet. I patted his head.
“Good boy,” I said. “Good boy.”
The mother kept crying, but I no longer heard her. “Secure the area. Bring me the shooters. Do not fail me, Blau.”
I turned to the boy’s father. “Your house,” I said.
“Sir?”
“Set up a command post in this man’s house,” I told Blau. He nodded, tight-lipped.
“Sir,” the father said. “Please, use my home, only, please, do not destroy my property.”
“It will be in the hands of the Palestinian Defence Force,” I told him, stiffly. “There will be no safer house than this in all of Nakuru.”