by Lavie Tidhar
He nodded, meekly enough; but do you know, I do not think he was convinced.
PART FIVE
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BORDERS
20.
The borders of what had been British Judea and is now the Republic of Palestina have been drawn and redrawn several times. You watch it on the view screen of the plane, the dotted lines of borders, the slow, unceasing movement of the aircraft on the flight path.
The transition from one world to the next is subtle when one is in the air. The sky remains the same sky. The clouds continue to reflect back at you your own preoccupations, like a set of Rorschach blots. It is only when you land that the world resolves in its little differences, the arrival on a new and unfamiliar shore magnified by tiny wrongnesses: the worlds are much the same, but the details differ.
You land and the sun beats down on the tarmac. You are glad of the airport’s cool interior. You see Tirosh. Has he noticed you? Already, your mind clouds with new, false memories. It is a disorienting experience, as though you are two people in one, and you find it hard to separate one from the other, know which of you is which.
You go through immigration and customs, and this, at least, is like in any other place. There are always borders, and there are always those who guard them lest they fracture. Outside, you hail a cab. Tirosh is there, he watches. But you have people in this town, and they will keep track of his movements. For you, it is important to first familiarise yourself. You are a good, experienced field agent. You have survived Smyrna. You have seen the mechanical warriors under the banner of the Crimson Emperor in Jund Filastin. You have seen the fish-frog men abominations of Ash-Sham.
You learn to survey. You learn to study the lay of the land. Joshua sent spies to Jericho in Biblical times, and you, that is, your superiors at the Border Agency of Ursalim, have done the same. You hole up in a cheap pension on Adaf Street, near the market, and explore the city. It is a curious place, this Jewish town transplanted into the heart of Africa, and you are caught unawares when you suddenly hear the Arabic words peppering Swahili in the market. You see black-clad Unterlanders walking along pavements beside Nandi workers, Jewish girls in light summer dresses imported from Paris and Rome, soldiers in baobab-grey uniforms and black guns. You taste ugali. Your interest is in the hidden denizens of this city, this world. This is a place where the Jews won.
But you notice, everywhere, too, the signs of their occupation. In a city park you see the Nandi women who care for the elderly: brightly dressed and laughing they congregate under the shade of the wide palm trees, talking softly in their mother tongue, while the elders in their wheelchairs sit dozing in the sun. A street cleaner sweeps away the day’s debris, his bald head shiny in the heat. Black nannies push the prams of curly haired boys adorned with peyes. Drivers in peaked caps wait patiently at the gates.
Yet it is much the same everywhere, you think, even in your world. Always there are the servants, and those who are being served.
You just observe these things. Sometimes they trouble you. You watch all the invisible people and wonder where they go when night descends. Later, in your pension, you fall asleep to the radio, and news of a bus exploding: here, it’s just another terrorist attack.
The next day you see Tirosh, by accident, as you climb off the bus on Herzl Avenue. He goes one way. You go another, at a brisk pace. Down a side street, Der Nister, which means “the hidden” and is named after the Yiddish author, who is buried in the cemetery nearby.
Away from Herzl’s busy sprawl of shops and traffic, Der Nister is a palm tree–lined, shaded avenue of modest, mid-century buildings. There are haberdasheries here, barbershops where the barbers are neat, little old men in white smocks, wielding scissors with an old-world dexterity, side by side with cheap stores blaring out the latest Afropop hit from Nairobi or Cape Town, where one can buy cheap plastic toys, or knock-off fishing rods, or second-hand tyres. You make your way, cautiously, to Abu Ramzi’s Emporium & Grand Bazaar which, despite its name, occupies but a small and unassuming corner unit next to a bicycle shop on the one side, and a small, public square on the other, adorned with wilted grass and centred around the marble statue of Isaac Luria, the renowned Safed Kabbalist.
Balloons, bells, fans, balls, cushions, notebooks, pens, seed packets, pipe tobacco, hats, scarves, sweets, soap, mysterious bottles and a plethora of other, manufactured and imported objects litter every available space. Shelves are crammed into the small, dim interior. A fan overhead turns slowly, stirring the air and pushing the drowsing flies this way and that on the currents. A long counter runs against one wall, shelves of sweets and cigarettes behind it, jars of tea and spices. On the counter are a scale and a cash register, both old but dignified, and behind it is a young, serious-looking man, who is busy reading the Palestina Times. You approach the counter and unwind the scarf from around your neck.
“Yes? Can I help you?” the young man says.
“I am your cousin, Nur. From Al-Quds.”
His eyes widen. He looks out of the window as though checking for a tail. He sees no one, only a man walking his dog.
“I am Ramzi,” he says.
“Yes,” you say.
“My father was expecting your arrival yesterday.”
“Yes,” you say; and only that.
The truth is you need time; time to acclimatise, time to remember who you are.
It would be different for Tirosh, you think. For him it is slipping back into something known if forgotten, pushed into the back of the mind and recalled easily; he fits.
For you it is different. You remember now the time before your arrival, but it is blurred, hazy. Your memories conflict. You had arrived on a flight from Berlin the day before. It was a connecting flight. You had left Jerusalem early in the morning, with the call of the muezzin rising eerily through the fog, and driven to Jaffa for the airport. Your plan was to visit your distant cousins, Abu Ramzi and his family, who had settled first in Tanganyika and then, later, in Ararat City, Palestina. You are a historian. You are interested in—in what, exactly? The words run through your mind—Hebrew pulp writers, alternate worlds—but they make no real sense.
You do not belong. The world is merely trying to squeeze you in, building a protective shell over an irritant embedded it in the host body. You remember your childhood in Jerusalem, then as now a part of Ottoman Syria; your studies first in Istanbul and then at Heidelberg, where you gained your doctorate; your return to Jerusalem, where you taught German to the children of rich parents, while trying and failing to write a great book of literary criticism. At last, the death of an aunt who had unexpectedly left you a modest sum of money, and the decision, equally unexpected, to undertake this voyage to this remote backwater of the world, to see relatives not seen for many years.
These memories are like the pages of a book left too long on the beach, stuck together with salt water and sand. Yet they cohere, they force themselves on you the longer you stay, the longer you live as though they are real. It is a struggle to think. Pain has built behind your eyes all day, and it is only getting worse. You aren’t here at all, this woman you think you are. You are someone else, from a place unimaginably distant.
“Are you all right?” the man, Ramzi, says. Hesitates: “Cousin?”
“It’s just a headache,” you say. “I’ve been travelling a long time.”
“Of course, of course.” He comes round the counter. “Please. My mother is upstairs. She wants to hear all about life in the old country.”
“Do you have the . . . equipment I asked for?”
He raises his hands. “I know nothing,” he says. “You must speak to my father.”
“I will.”
You follow him upstairs meekly enough. There’ll be time for you to regroup and plan. You have a job to do, and you intend to follow it through to the end.
Later, you wait for the arrival of Abu Ramzi. You sit in the spacious living room of the family upstairs. They are watching the television. An anchor
woman in a tailored jacket speaks of the terrible tragedy of the suicide bombing of the night before. Clips show Palestinian Defence Force soldiers going door to door shouting orders, rousing frightened families of what the anchorwoman says are known subversives. Umm Ramzi tutts with disapproval and turns her round eyes on this foreign niece of her husband’s.
“Almond cake?” she says.
“No, thank you,” you say. You drink white coffee, sweet with condensed milk, and the thought of another slice of almond cake fills you with a quiet horror. On the screen, the anchorwoman now cuts to a new segment and a reporter in the field. The man stands against the background of an imposing, roughly circular white building, whose east and west wings spread out like the open pages of a book. Wide stone steps lead up to a raised courtyard where people are milling like chickens before a feed.
“As the Congress assembles here today for its first session,” the reporter says, “delegates from neighbouring Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya, as well as representatives of the Kalenjin oreet, or clans, from the Disputed Territories, have gathered here today for the commencement of the Regional Peace Summit. As you can see behind me, everyone is waiting for the doors to open shortly, and security is heavy.”
The camera pans across the assembled dignitaries, a mix of suits, robes, Orthodox garb and the occasional short-sleeved, chequered shirt. Each has their own security detail, armed discreetly, with wires trailing from behind their ears into the jackets of their suits.
“Also present are delegates from His Majesty’s government, here to facilitate the talks, and observers from the German Reich, the Sultanate of Zanzibar and the Kingdom of Swaziland. Ah, the doors have opened, and everyone is shuffling forward, as you can see. Representatives from all over Palestina are here today, for the assembly of the Congress, first founded by Theodor Herzl in Basel in 1897. We now go back to the studio, where we will be speaking with Chief Kirongo of the Nandi Council of Elders about the forthcoming talks. . . .”
The words wash over you. The television screen flickers, the family sit spellbound in its entrapping light. It is with a sense of profound relief that you spring up as a short, balding man comes in through the door. He has grown a paunch in his time here, where he was younger and leaner when you once saw him. Black hairs bristle on his thick arms. He engulfs you warmly, lifts you off your feet.
“Niece Nur!”
“Abu Ramzi.”
“You have met my son.”
“You must be very proud.”
“I am, Nur. I am.”
He abruptly releases you. When he scans your face you see the shrewdness you expected, that calculating coldness that is the mark of a veteran agent. He wasn’t always called Abu Ramzi, this man. He is of that legendary generation to which La Méduse belongs. They fought in skirmishes that have no name, in the days when the borders were more porous and each slippage and transition could be your last. Abu Ramzi fought in the ill-fated battle of the Mukhraka, against the combined might of the mutant priests of Ba’al and Suleiman’s djinns.
“Let us walk outside,” Abu Ramzi suggests. You follow him, glad to be out of that house, the droning of the television and the sickly sweet cakes. Outside, he turns to you and says, “Sooner or later, a man must have a home.”
He’s a sleeper agent, in semi-retirement, sent here on a sort of extended holiday, really. This backwater place, as the Agency considered it, where nothing much ever happened. A good place to settle down, raise a family, begin to remember how to forget. He sounds apologetic.
“Is it home?” you say. “Here?”
“My son is here. My wife.”
“Abu Ramzi, a shopkeeper.”
He smiles; indulging you. “I have always been a shopkeeper,” he says. “Everyone talks to a merchant.”
“I saw you,” you say. “In Outremer. In Antioch under the stone arches, where the crusaders built their Kingdom of Heaven . . .”
“I was there,” he says. “I was there a long time.”
“How do you manage it?” you say. “How do you remember?”
“You are struggling,” he says. “But you are young. For me, it is like putting on or taking off a suit of clothes, nothing more. Who am I? I am me. Everything else is merely . . .” He hesitates.
“Camouflage?”
“Scenery.” He smiles again. Takes your arm in his. Together you walk down Der Nister, past the statue of Isaac Luria, the Kabbalist.
“They remember him here,” you say, with surprise.
“Here,” he says, “travel between the sephirot is not a science like it is back—”
“Home?”
“Back in Ursalim,” he says. “But that is not to say there are no slippers, and it is not to say that the knowledge is entirely unknown. You must tread carefully, Nur. There are forces at work here which remain hidden from me. The borders are thinning. It was I who raised the alarm.”
“Then tell me what I must look for,” you say. Then, “The man, Tirosh.”
He sighs. “My men followed him but lost him a couple of hours ago.”
“Lost him? Lost him how?”
“They believe he may have been abducted. By who, we don’t yet know.”
“If he dies—”
“The pattern grows. I know. But I cannot discern the pattern here, Nur. I do not know the sequence. Someone is coordinating death as a means of opening a gate between the worlds. Remember the rule: one cures at the source. Do not be distracted by what are mere symptoms.”
“You’re cold,” you say. You look at him again, this pleasant, mild-mannered man. “This is a man’s death we speak of.”
“One man. One death.” He shrugs. “Perhaps he’ll turn up. Or perhaps he’ll be the next link in the chain, and thus reveal to us more of the one fashioning the key. Your path lies elsewhere.”
“Where?”
“Beyond the wall.”
“What is this wall?” you ask.
He merely shrugs again. “Another symptom.”
“It seems wrong,” you say, “to cleave a land.”
“People like walls. They make them feel safe.”
You think of other walls, in Berlin, in Pakistan, in Mexico, in Korea. In this and other worlds than these. Always there are walls to keep people in, or keep people out. You shrug. This is not your fight, and this is not your home. You are merely here to carry out the job at hand.
“What’s beyond the wall?”
“Knowledge. I hope. I have arranged the paperwork for you. There is a woman there, a German from the Reich. She has set up a free health clinic for the refugees. You will visit her. She is not one of us, of course, but she will extend to you the hospitality. To her you are just a tourist from Al-Quds.” He laughs. “The other Palestine. The rest you must find out on your own. There is a man, too. Bloom. He is high up in their internal security apparatus, but he is not of this place. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Outsider calls to outsider. Be careful.”
“The equipment I asked for—”
“You will not be allowed a weapon through the checkpoint.”
“Then what do I do?”
He smiles, thinly.
“Improvise,” he says.
21.
The crossing of Eretz is an exercise in misery. You queue for hours, in single file, shuffling through a corridor of wire mesh and steel, as bored soldiers watch you with their weapons always at the ready. In the centre of this facility is an examination room, a space into which you enter alone, and machines scan you as unseen security officers examine your person. If you are carrying an explosive device, you get no chance to activate it on this route. Concrete slabs surround you. In this room, bombs have gone off before.
You’re told to go through. You’re clean. More of the twisting metal corridors until you emerge, at last, on the other side, allowed to collect your belongings, given back your Ottoman passport. You pass one final gate, out of the perimeter, and there the world changes.
Here markets stalls are set up, on rickety wood tables sit bananas and pineapples, fried chicken, hard-boiled eggs, cooked corn. A teenage boy squats in the dirt beside an open fire, cooking sticks of meat over the flames, frowning in concentration. The soldiers are more relaxed here, they buy some of the food, and the people returning from Palestina are welcomed with their cargo, which is opened and pored over and distributed and resold over the self-same tables.
Children stare at you, this foreigner, neither from here nor from there. You pass a stall selling batiks, and hand-carved masks and statues, voices beseeching you to buy, buy, buy. Your pocket is full of Palestinian pounds. You see carved handguns, a carved double-decker bus, a bowl for washing faces. You buy a stick of meat from the boy and chew on it as you pass. This is a world like any other world. The refugee camp is teeming. Vehicles pass on the main road, army convoys escorting settlers to their lands, local cars passing with asthmatic wheezes, their license plates grey with dust, marked with an N—for Nakuru or Nandi, or something else entirely, you don’t know.
This is not your land. These are not your people. And you think of other marketplaces, other borders—the teeming crusader towns of Antioch and Tripoli, the bark of crazed dogs under the broken moon of Kang Diz Huxt, the whispered bargaining in the green swamp villages of Samaria where the Awful Ones live—and you are not sure where you are anymore, as though you’ve lost your way amidst the sephirot, and become unanchored from reality. Then a voice hails you, saying, “Nur? Nur Al-Hussaini?” and you turn, and the world is whole again.
“Yes?”
She is a youngish, blonde woman, tall and leggy in white, with the discreet swastika flag on the breast pocket of what must be a nurse’s uniform: and you remember that in this world, things turned out differently.
“I’m Astrid. Astrid Bormann.” She smiles, easily. “No relation,” she says.
“No relation to what?”
“I mean to . . . Oh, never mind.” She takes your hand in hers. She has a friendly, outgoing nature; so different from the likes of us. “Abu Ramzi phoned ahead to say you were coming. What a wonderful man. He has been so helpful with our work here.”