Unholy Land

by Lavie Tidhar

  “No,” he agreed.

  “The bus bomb, the murder in the Queen of Sheba hotel. Each taken on its own is but a physical act of death. But they add up, you and I both know. A pattern. A key.”

  “Yes.”

  “To destroy the border.”

  “So it would seem.”

  “Why?” I said—demanded. “Why do you do it?”

  “Tell me,” he said. “The man you captured—Joseph. He worked at the Queen of Sheba hotel.”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened to him?”

  He looked at me mildly. He was a mild sort of man. I did not reply.

  “You are a fool, Bloom.”

  Barashi groaned on the floor. We both ignored him.

  I stared at the Orkoiyot.

  “You are the man behind the attacks . . .”

  “You are a fool, Bloom.”

  I had the sense then that I had made a terrible mistake somewhere.

  “The man who died at the hotel, what was his name?”

  “Menhaim,” I said.

  “And why would he be killed? What purpose would he serve?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You are a fool,” he said, a third time. “Menhaim was not the target, it was the other one, the outsider.”

  I said, “Tirosh.” The name stuck in my throat.

  “It was not Menhaim’s death that extended the pattern,” he said. He looked at me almost with kindness. “It was the murder of Joseph.”

  “No,” I said. “No.”

  “He is dead, isn’t he, Bloom? What was it, exactly?” He pretended to consult an imaginary report. “The subject exhibited a fatal response to routine investigation techniques? That is what you call it these days, isn’t it?”

  “No,” I said, “it can’t be.”

  “Everything you do,” the Orkoiyot continued, remorselessly, “seems designed to extend the pattern. Your murder of Joseph. Your savage and unprovoked attack on the camp tonight on the pretext of searching for me, or someone like me.” He went and returned. He was holding a gun. He put it to my forehead and stared at me hard. “Give me a reason not to shoot you, Special Investigator.”

  “I am trying to halt the pattern!” I screamed. “It’s you, it’s always been you, you . . .”

  I subsided under his gaze.

  “Shoot me, then,” I said.

  “We want our land back,” he said. “We want our home. We want our children to grow free, in a world where they can walk proud, a world without soldiers holding guns on them, Bloom. It is a small thing to want, and yet it is a whole world.” He sighed, and seemed to grow smaller then. “But we want this world, we want our world, Bloom. I do not desire to breach the walls of creation. Do you?”

  I shook my head. The fear and the anger all drained out of me then. I felt empty and lost.

  I had made a mistake.

  “The sequence must be stopped,” the Orkoiyot said. “Someone is manipulating our moves, both yours and mine. Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” I said—whispered.

  “Do you agree?”

  “Yes, damn you!”

  He removed the gun from my forehead. The pressure eased and he holstered the weapon.

  “Untie them,” he said.

  Hands grabbed me and in moments I was let loose. Beside me Barashi straightened slowly.

  “I don’t know what you two were talking about,” he said, “but I wouldn’t say no to a drink.”

  The Orkoiyot smiled, without much humour. He turned back to me.

  “The man you seek isn’t here, Special Investigator. Whoever is behind the attacks is back in Palestina. It is to your own people you need to look, not to us. Find him, and stop the sequence. Stop it before it destroys the worlds.”

  He turned away. He was a slight man, and soft-spoken, and he was a terrorist and my enemy. I knew if I tried to come back to find him the camp would be gone, and I would find no trace of it. The men took us back through the undergrowth, through narrow trails that twisted and turned impossibly. In a very short time we found ourselves back by the car. Dawn had broken, and the clearing sky was filled with shards of coloured glass. I loved the skies over Palestina.

  PART SIX

  _______

  DIVERSIONS

  23.

  “People lie,” Tirosh said. Back at the university, the students waited in vain for his appearance. Beside him, in the driver’s seat, Mushon grunted, uninterested. But Tirosh had a lecture to deliver, and deliver it he will.

  “People lie, to each other, to themselves,” Tirosh said. “Which is really just another way of saying, people tell stories.” He stared out of the window of the car, at the dark asphalt and the rolling hills. They were heading down from the plateau, towards the distant water.

  “The detective, like the historian, must go around asking questions, banging on doors, interrogating unwilling witnesses. They must piece together a story from conflicting tales, from clues. There are things that are not in dispute—the bloodstained knife found by the corpse, a battle that took place—but what do they mean? Someone’s fingerprints have been left on the kitchen wall in blood, but whose, and why?”

  “What blood?” Mushon said. He was staring straight out of the windshield, at the open road, his fingers tightened over the steering wheel. “What the fuck are you going on about, Tirosh?”

  But Tirosh wasn’t listening. In his mind the argument fled, nebulous. What was history, he thought, if not a human attempt to impose order on chaos, to give meaning to a series of what were, essentially, just meaningless events? Causality was hidden from him. In detective fiction, as in history, order had to be imposed: clues sifted, witnesses interviewed, conspirators unmasked, murderers brought to justice. The problem was that everyone had a different story. The same place could have multiple names: Jerusalem, Ursalim, Yerushalaim. Each name came with a different and competing history. What happened, he thought, when a different peoples had to share the same land? The same places with different names, the same battles with different outcomes. His mind fled from the implications, and as his head rested against the glass a memory rose instead, of Isaac, reaching out fat little fingers to tug at Tirosh’s ear, squealing with delight; and another, of Tirosh lifting Isaac out from the bath and placing him, gently, on the change table: and his son, unexpectedly, reaching out his arms, urgently, and grabbing hold of Tirosh’s shirt as he pulled him down. Tirosh, overwhelmed, leaned over his son and hugged him, the boy’s face nestled into Tirosh’s throat, so that Tirosh could feel his son’s breath on his skin, and the boy’s comforted sigh. For a long moment he held him like this, the boy unwilling to let go, and Tirosh would have happily stayed that way forever, as though he could forever mask his son from the world and keep him safe.

  “Daddy’s here,” he murmured, his breath fogging the glass. “Hush, Isaac, Daddy’s here.”

  This was how he fell asleep; against the window. Mushon drove on. Tirosh’s lecture was forgotten. He was not much of a writer, of detective tales or otherwise. Outside the dawn lengthened across the sky, but Tirosh missed it. He was fast asleep, escaped into that dark chasm which is like a prelude to what awaits us all.

  When he awoke the world had once again shifted; he forgot all about Berlin, about the boy, all that which came before. Tirosh awoke instead to a deep blue sky, a bright sun that illuminated gentle white clouds in the distance against the lakeshore. He knew then where he was, for one never forgets the sight of Lake Victoria. The car drove smoothly over asphalt, descending from the highlands to the port. Tirosh watched, enraptured, the play of sunlight on the calm blue inland sea. Then the city hovered into view.

  Its official name was and remained Port Florence, since the time it was founded as a modern town by the British. But everyone called it by its original name, Kisumu, which simply means a place of trade.

  It was not a pretty town. The old colonial architecture had not been replaced but added to with ugly, functional buildings. The d
ocks extended into the lake, where heavy cargo ships laid anchor, and warehouses lined up on the shore, and with them came cranes, trucks, forklifts and the workers who operated them. The port was never entirely silent, and the ships came and departed from Kisumu to Mwanza, Entebbe, Port Bell and Jinja. Linked to the port there stood the great railway station of Kisumu, from which the lines rose up and back towards the highlands, crossing Palestina, linking it through Kenya to the seaport in Mombasa.

  It was not a pretty town, but Tirosh liked it all the same. Beyond the city, on the more pristine sand beaches, stood the weekend mansions of the Palestinian rich. In the town itself, beyond the port that gave it the reason for being, there were the usual amenities of hotels and restaurants, heavy with a transient population of travellers, as well as small shops, nightclubs, housing estates, bars and shebeens. It was not a pretty town, just a place to pass through and do business in, unless you were unfortunate enough to have to live there.

  Mushon drove them through the town. They passed the small Arab souk that had stood there for generations, a remnant of the days when Arabs traded ivory and spice here, and other, less palatable merchandise. He stopped outside the Arnold Rothstein, a grungy two-storey hotel in downtown Kisumu, between the British Old Town and the harbour.

  The air was humid when Tirosh climbed out of the car. Storks and herons called in the distance while, on the green trees lining the old English avenues, kingfishers and green parrots chattered to each other.

  “Where will you start?” Mushon said.

  Tirosh stared at him. The thought came to his mind that this was all a game; that he was merely avoiding the inevitable, the visit to his father. “I’ll ask around,” he said. “I’ll see what I can find.”

  “Any idiot can do that,” Mushon said.

  Tirosh just shrugged. He wished he smoked. It seemed appropriate to sneer at the bigger man with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. But Mushon didn’t care one way or the other.

  “Any idiot,” he said again. Then he slammed the door and pressed on the accelerator and was gone from there; back to his master.

  The hotel, when Tirosh entered, was dusty and dark. A brass bell rested on the counter and, seeing no one, Tirosh pressed it.

  “Yes, yes,” an irritated voice said. A large woman emerged from a door marked Office and stared at him accusingly. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’d like a room.”

  “And I’d like a second white wedding,” the woman said. “But we don’t always get what we want.”

  “You don’t have a room?”

  “I didn’t say that. Do you take everything so seriously? Here.” She went to the row of hooks on the wall and took down a key. “Happy?”

  Tirosh looked at her in confusion. “I don’t know,” he said, helplessly.

  She sighed, audibly, and pushed a form across the counter. “Fill this in, will you? And pay is up-front, if you don’t mind.”

  Tirosh filled in the registration and pushed cash across the counter and collected the key. All he really wanted was a shower. He was relieved when he entered the room and failed to find a corpse. He’d had enough of dead men in hotel rooms. He wasn’t sure what he was doing in Kisumu, or what Deborah had got up to, or why his memories were so clogged up, as though he were two incomplete persons. He stripped and stepped into the shower. A stream of cold, rust-coloured water eventually emerged, and he shivered as he scrubbed himself clean.

  He didn’t go to sleep. The cold water had awakened him somewhat, and after he dressed he stepped out of the hotel and onto the street. Cars were already in motion along the road, Susitas and Sabra minis and large trucks all throwing dust into the air. He walked through the Old Town and its neat grid and its tended trees, heading in the direction of the lake, but entered instead into the maze of the old Arab market. Here, amidst the curio stands and the shops selling tat for the tourists, and men feeding imported sugarcane into a crushing machine, the bark stripped, there were other, more specialised shops.

  Here, in this unassuming commercial hub between Palestina and the rest of Africa, there stood the old world shops aimed at the obscure collector. The first shop Tirosh tried specialised in stamps and coins. It was dim inside, the air still. A dark-grained wooden counter was piled high with stamp albums, jars of neatly labelled coins and other, less easily distinguished objets d’art. It was an old town in an old town part of the world, and the lake it sat nestled against had played host to numerous wars and trades. Here there were German army helmets from the Great War, old Arab curios and ancient British maps, hand-carved statues from a dozen tribes and nations, amulets, bao boards, gold pendants, bayonets, old guns: history to some, the unwanted junk of centuries to others.

  Tirosh’s attention wandered. His hand ran along the spines of books. His eyes were drawn to a giant carved Nyami Nyami from the distant Zambezi; to an ivory-inlaid ebony pipe; to a cigarette case engraved with a Prussian eagle; to a First Day Cover bearing the first Palestinian stamp, of a smiling Albert Einstein, apparently signed—

  “Don’t touch that!” a voice said, sharply. Tirosh raised his head to see a tokoloshe-like man stand up from behind the counter, where he must have been dozing. His bulbous eyes stared querulously at Tirosh.

  “I’m just browsing,” Tirosh said, defensively.

  “You don’t need your hands to browse, do you?” the man said. “What do you want? Did you make an appointment? I don’t have time for time-wasters.”

  The man’s hair was mussed from sleep and his eyes blinked myopically at Tirosh before he reached for a pair of glasses held on a string around his neck. Putting them on, he peered more closely at Tirosh.

  “Well?”

  Tirosh wasn’t sure how to progress, exactly. He said, “I’m interested in the first expedition.”

  “Burton and Speke? Livingstone? Shaka Zulu? Ernst Schäfer? Which one, yungerman?”

  “Er, no,” Tirosh said. “I mean, the first Zionist expedition to the Territory. I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name? I’m Tirosh. Lior Tirosh?”

  The man blinked at him. “I’m Fledermaus,” he said. “Mr. Fledermaus.” He looked somewhat mollified. “The first expedition, you say? I have a wonderful set of commemorative stamps issued just post-Independence. It should suit your pocket—” The look he gave Tirosh clearly indicated what he thought of Tirosh’s spending power.

  “Money’s not an object,” Tirosh said, thinking of the cash Gross had given him. Also, he had to admit he had always wanted to say that particular line.

  Mr. Fledermaus stared at him with a little more interest. “Hmmm, well, well, yes,” he said. He cleared his throat. “For the more discerning collector,” he said, “I have here, with me, an almost unique specimen, the Yellow Inverted Wilbusch five-penny stamp from ’34. That will set you back five hundred pounds. That’s Palestinian, not Ugandan, Mr. Tirosh—” And he laughed softly at his own joke.

  Tirosh looked at him coolly. “I am not after stamps,” he said.

  “No?”

  “I’m interested in . . . artefacts.”

  “Ah . . .” the old man said. He rubbed his hands together, as though using a washcloth. His eyes blinked behind the thick lenses, rapidly. “What sort of artefacts, exactly?”

  The note of caution in his voice did not escape Tirosh.

  “You tell me,” he said.

  “Well, well,” Mr. Fledermaus said nervously, “I think maybe you came to the wrong place, yes, yes, thinking about it, I do not deal in artefacts, no, no, curios, yes, stamps, coins, not . . .” He stopped, helpless.

  “Not what?”

  “Those things,” Mr. Fledermaus whispered, distraught. Tirosh smiled, unpleasantly. This new role suited him, he felt. He was playacting a character he had long known and longed to be.

  “Listen to me, old man,” he said, advancing, somewhat threateningly, on the wooden counter and the precariously balanced stamp albums. “If you don’t, then who does?”

  “
No, you listen to me, boychik,” Mr. Fledermaus said, rallying round, and fixing his gaze unnervingly on Tirosh. “I fought in the Ugandan War when you were still a pisher in nappies, so don’t you think you can push me around. I told you I don’t deal in these . . . artefacts,” he spat out the word, “and I want nothing to do with that sort of thing.”

  “What sort of thing?”

  “Muti,” Mr. Fledermaus said, using the southern word, then repeating himself in Yiddish: “Kishef.”

  “Witchcraft? But they’re just old . . . things,” Tirosh said. He tried to laugh, though the old man unnerved him. “You don’t really think they—”

  The old man regarded him sadly. “Listen to me, boychik. I don’t know what you got yourself into, but you clearly don’t know what you’re about. Have you even read the Zohar? The Book of Creation? The Book of Secrets? Illumination?”

  “No,” Tirosh said. “I mostly read crime novels.”

  “Well, then,” Mr. Fledermaus said. “Don’t go sticking your nose where it don’t belong, that’d be my advice.”

  “And if I needed to, anyway?” Tirosh said. “Where would I go?”

  “Away from here,” the old man said.

  Tirosh took out his wallet and peeled off two fifty-pound notes and laid them on the counter. “I just want the information,” he said.

  Mr. Fledermaus looked at the money. Then he looked round his empty shop. He seemed to make up his mind. He leaned forward, and spoke softly.

  “There’s a man,” he said. “A Ugandan. He only comes over now and then. You know how it is with us and the Ugandans. Anyway he’s a trader, a specialist. He calls himself Cohen—he’s a big Judeophile, you see.”

  “Do you know where I can find him?”

  Mr. Fledermaus shook his head. “You could try the casino,” he said.

  “The Pink Pelican?”

  “Why, do you know another one?”

  Tirosh shook his head. He had distant memories of being taken there by his father once. He and Gideon were excited by the illicit atmosphere, the sound of the slot machines, the men smoking cigars and the sound of ice tinkling in glasses. They had played in the hotel pool while their father was ensconced in a series of meetings with the other generals and their counterparts from Uganda. Then, it had seemed a world away from the farm and the everyday, a place where the thick carpet swallowed sound and it was always dusk: it was like something out of a European novel, filled with impossible promise and glamour.