Unholy Land

by Lavie Tidhar

  It was then, standing on the manicured lawns, looking out at the lake with the moon overhead, that he saw something impossible.

  A woman materialised in the air above the lake.

  For a moment she seemed to hover there, then she plunged down and fell with a splash into the sea.

  When she emerged she stepped out of the water and stood there on the beach.

  She raised her head and their eyes met. She was slight of frame and her wet dark hair clung to her face.

  He knew her.

  It was the woman from the airplane.

  PART SEVEN

  _______

  VOYAGES

  27.

  When you wake up it is early morning, it must be. You are still held captive by the PDA soldiers, in the house belonging to that Nandi businessman temporarily turfed out of his home. You hear a car, returning. You do not know why you’re being held, or not exactly. These people who have captured you are crude; this world has very little understanding of the fundamental physics that underlie travel between the sephirot, merely a dim glimpse or recollection of it, some obscure Kabbalist texts—mysticism, not science.

  It is different in your world.

  Yet though this world is crude, it is not entirely without knowledge. Moreover—there are slippages. Which is to say: you expect what is coming, you expect the dishevelled man and his shambling assistant as they come in through the door.

  You recognise him, vaguely. You’ve seen him at the airport, an official without a title. He had detained Tirosh. You are trained to notice that kind of thing.

  And hadn’t Abu Ramzi warned you?

  There is a man. Bloom.

  “Barashi, bring us some coffee,” the man says. He is not an exceptional-looking man. He has that sort of anonymity that you and Tirosh also possess. You could pass for natives in half a dozen worlds and be privileged outsiders in a dozen others. The assistant shrugs at you, apologetically it seems, and withdraws. You are left alone with this man.

  He looks at you. He searches your face, for what, you cannot tell. You look back, cautious. He says, “My name is Bloom.”

  You nod. He is important, you think. Willingly or not he is a part of the pattern being made here, the one you have to stop.

  An outsider. And you’re curious, so curious, as to how he got here, and from which improbable history it is that he came.

  “Your name,” he says, this man, this Bloom, “your name is Nur, according to your papers. Nur Al-Hussaini.”

  You nod, yes.

  “With an Ottoman passport, and an address in Jerusalem, in the Holy Land.”

  You nod again.

  “In Palestina to visit relatives.”

  You nod, a third time.

  “Well?” this Bloom says, unexpectedly, and smiles. “What do you think of our little country?”

  “It’s very interesting,” you say.

  “Interesting?” He seems disappointed in your reply.

  “Very beautiful,” you say.

  “That it is.”

  “It feels like a historical accident,” you say, unable to help yourself, perhaps; or perhaps you want to test him, this man, you throw him a line and bait, to see how he reacts.

  “What do you mean?” he says. Still that reasonable voice, that hospitable tone, as though you’re not a prisoner, as though this is not an occupied house in an occupied territory. As though he does not wear a gun.

  “Jews,” you say. “In Africa.”

  “Jews,” he says, “are everywhere.”

  You nod, conceding the truth of it. Your memories of this world—false memories, perhaps, but true just enough—rise to the surface of your mind and you use them.

  “We have Jews under the Ottomans, too,” you say. “In Jerusalem, in Jaffa. Only a minority, but to them, there is no other place to live but the Holy Land. So why do you live here, so far from where you came, in a foreign land?”

  The words, you think, pain this man, a private sorrow, but he replies, nevertheless, with courtesy. “We do not need a holy land,” he says, and you think he must be quoting or misquoting someone else’s words, “but merely a land of our own, in which we can be free.”

  You nod. Do they know, in this world, how lucky they’ve been, that the expedition returned a positive report, that the great Jewish migration to Africa began in the first decades of the twentieth century? In this world there was still a Hitler, but it had escaped a Final Solution.

  And you wonder what Jews are like when they are not defined by the great Holocaust that shaped them, the survivors, that formed of them creatures of power and guilt: more easy in their ways, perhaps, more comfortable in their skins, or perhaps just a nation as all other nations, with the same natural impulses to assert themselves, to be masters in their kingdoms. And you think of the wall they are still building, and of the Displaced, and you know the lesson learned the hard way on your missions for the Border Agency: that no matter what we do, human history always attempts to repeat itself.

  “I am curious,” this man, Bloom, says, “why an innocent tourist such as yourself would be caught by my men, visiting the house of a known terrorist.”

  “Astrid—” you say, and he waves his hand.

  “She’s not been harmed. She is of no concern to us. You, however . . .”

  “I am just a tourist. I was just curious to see the refugee camps, the works being done here. All my papers are in order—”

  “They would be,” he says.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Oh,” he says. “But I think you do.”

  The door opens. His man, Barashi, enters with a tray of coffee. He hands you a mug with a look of sympathy. The coffee’s black, bitter, and you’re grateful for it. You sip as you try to think.

  Which side is this man on? Could he be behind the breaching of the walls, the forming of the pattern? You had expected to be captured, at some point, you think, in a way you are forming your own pattern here, but he doesn’t—yet—know it.

  “There were strange things on the walls of that house,” you say—feeding him a line again.

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t you think?”

  He waves his hand, dismissively. “Black magic. Mumbo jumbo.”

  “Then what’s the harm in them?” you ask.

  You’ve reached a temporary stalemate. Bloom drinks his coffee in one gulp. You sip at yours. Bloom says, “Barashi, leave us.”

  “Sir, yes, sir.”

  He’s done tiptoeing. Without warning, he throws his mug at the wall and it shatters, making you jump despite yourself. The broken china collects on the floor. He leans towards you, aggressively, his veins bulging, and you can see the rage that is always, must always be there just underneath his skin. You think: how tightly wound he is. His bloodshot eyes glare at you.

  “Where do you come from? What is your purpose here? Don’t lie to me!”

  You sip your coffee. It takes control. He’s close. Close now. There is only one quick way to do this, but it will hurt: it always does.

  “I am here to fix a breach,” you say. And before he can react you shoot forward, catching him by surprise. You grab him by the shoulders, you hold on to him tight. His chair topples over and you both

  . . .

  Fall . . .

  . . .

  From high above the world, the great African lakes shine with a thousand thousand lights. What great technological civilization had arisen here, over and over through the millennia, you never get a chance to discover, but their shining artefacts, their elaborate cities and great monuments, their libraries and flying craft are all about you as you and Bloom

  . . .

  Fall . . .

  . . .

  Onto a world that had never known Homo sapiens. Along the shores of the lake stand the camps of Homo erectus, smoke rising into the clear blue sky, and you see a small child drawing stars in the dirt, and looking up at you with a wondering gaze, you and Bloom, these two aliens out of time a
nd place, stepping where there is no road, and

  . . .

  Slip, sidewise, through time—

  . . .

  Into a world at war, where Wehrmacht tanks overrun the villages along the lake and the fires burn, day and night, and humans beyond count are herded by the soldiers into makeshift concentration camps—

  A soldier spots you and shouts, and you and Bloom duck—As a volley of bullets flies overhead and you

  . . .

  Shift

  . . .

  Away from there, away from easily comprehensible worlds, into the realms of could-have-beens and never-beens, into fragment worlds and fraction-possibilities:

  Here the moon has been burst in half, and its two separate halves hang in the night sky as you pass under a plethora of bright stars, in a world where humanity had never even evolved, where the meteorite never landed, where a herd of brontosauruses graze, peacefully, under the twin moons—

  As you shift further, into a world where the gods dominate the Earth, tiny Tokoloshe swish by your feet, startling you, and the Nyami Nyami rises, immense, in the distance, from its kingdom by the Smoke That Thunders, and the young, virile Eshurides rides past, while Mawu gives birth in the sky . . .

  . . .

  To a world in darkness, the sun is absent and you grope your way in the freezing cold, the air barely breathable, what lives in this world, what terrible catastrophe has engulfed it, you never find out as you press on, and on, and I am afraid, Nur, I am afraid. I have fallen off the edge of the world once before and I fear falling again, and yet we press on, through the dark, the ground a black shard of glass against which our feet make no sound, for days or hours I know not now, for time has no meaning in that place, but things do live there, awful, sentient things, cold and hungry they reach grasping tentacles through the eternal night, whispering, Leng . . .

  . . .

  And we shift

  . . .

  There is a little stone hut that stands here, on the edge of a sea of stars. There is no Earth, no land, only the stars all about and, on their shore, this stone hut, which had stood here for eternity and will stand here for an eternity more. There you kneel, you and the man who is Bloom, the man who is me. There, in that tiny sea of reality on the edge of the stars, there is a packed earth floor, and an altar. The altar is devoid of deities. It is bare. To this altar you offer your silence.

  Who built this place, this bubble outside of space and time? I do not know. There are other, older beings than us who have travelled between the sephirot. There are mysteries even you don’t know.

  In that place we take shelter from the night. In that place one realises how small humanity is, how insignificant its wars, its victories and losses. We are but a blink in the eye of a creator.

  It is a terrible place, there on the edge of the stars. And yet there, too, there is life. There is vibrant green moss growing in the cracks in the walls, and in the corner there is a circle of stones in which coals had, until recently, burned. The stones are still warm to the touch. And I think perhaps this is where God lives, and that he had merely stepped out for a time, a fisherman there on the sea of stars, and that soon he would return . . . and I’m afraid, for I do not want to meet him.

  Why did you bring me here, I say. Words do not take shape in that place. Words do not form out of air and vibrations; in all this time we do not make a sound. Why did you bring me here to this waste between the stars?

  But you have been here before, you say, and I say No, no. You take my hand in yours. Your hand is cold, and I am cold, I shudder. And I know you then, I know you and you know me, entire, for in that place there are no borders, and one’s mind is but a part of the whole, and all is known, all is light.

  Gently you take my hand and gently you lead me out of that stone hut which had stood there for eternity, and on the sea of stars I think I glimpse, for just a moment, a fisherman’s canoe, dark against the sea, gliding towards us, and its occupant’s face is shaded. I do not wish to see its face. Gently you take my hand in yours and gently you lead me to the shore of that tiny island of reality, and we look down into the sea, we look down, you and I, we look down into a sky full of stars and we

  . . .

  Jump.

  28.

  It is the feet one notices first. Those colossal lion’s feet of yellow sandstone, towering above you, for the creature—if that is what it is—is vast indeed, and it stands alone in that place, where the lone and level sands stretch far away. Shelley had the measure of it, and he must have caught a glimpse of it, in daymare or night gaunt, and the great Kabbalists knew this place well. The sun beats down, harshly, allowing no shadows, yet this is no earthly sun but something far more alien, an eye, a radiance which is the first light, which is God’s light, the emanations of which beat forth and form the lower worlds of the sephirot. All is known under that light, for this is the penultimate world, the Ein Sof—the ancient Hebrew for infinity.

  It is the feet I notice first, and only then, reluctantly, do I look up and see the rest of it, the creature—if that’s what it is—its lion’s body and its eagle’s wings and its serpent’s tail. And only then, at last, I reach the head, which is human, and regal, and alive: and it looks down on me with a cold and alien amusement in those deep and golden eyes, which hold me in their gaze, until I’m lost forever. . . .

  “Snap out of it, Bloom,” you say. And I blink, and turn from that monstrous gaze.

  The sands stretch far away. There are no other details, nothing but this featureless, endless plane, but for one, so small under the sphinx’s gaze that it is easily missed.

  A door stands in the sands, unsupported, closed.

  A small and featureless door.

  And the eyes move away from it, the mind shies from its glare, for it leads beyond.

  “I know your mind now,” I say.

  “And I know yours.”

  “Then you must realise we share a purpose.”

  You look at me with slight distaste. “But not a methodology.”

  “What I do, I do for a higher purpose!”

  I look at you. I say, “We’re not so different, you and I.”

  “Oh, spare me the rhetoric.”

  “We should work together.”

  At that you shrug. And all the while we stand in the gaze of the sphinx and the door it guards. You look tired, I think. It must take a lot out of you, to make this journey. I have been here, once before.

  That you are able to do so at will impresses me as much as it scares me, though I try not to show it.

  “This Tirosh,” you say, and I almost sigh with relief. We are to be partners after all. “He is the key, yes?”

  “It would certainly seem that way.”

  “But why? What is so special about him?” you say, and you sound confused.

  “Perhaps it is that he casts shadows,” I say. “There are imperfect reflections of him, across the sephirot, I saw it in your mind. There had been a Tirosh in your own reality. Isn’t this why you agreed to take the mission?”

  But you frown. “No, that is not it,” you say. “No, I don’t . . .”

  But what it is you were going to say, I do not know.

  “Ask the sphinx,” I say. You glare at me.

  “That,” you say, “would be very unwise.”

  There is a rumble overhead. The giant human head above the lion’s body moves, and masonry falls down on us so that we must duck and pull back lest we are crushed beneath.

  “Who dares disturb—” it says, in a terrible voice, then the head moves lower still and those impossible eyes blink and the sphinx says, “Oh, Nur, it’s you.”

  “Sphinx.”

  “I’m bored,” the sphinx complains. “How go things in the lower worlds? I feel the threads of light which bind the sephirot shudder, and I grow curious of the affairs of women and men. Who dares meddle with Creation?”

  “Who doesn’t?” you say, and the sphinx laughs.

  “You humans,” i
t says, not unkindly. “You conjure up such wonderful lies, spinning tales of the world, every sentence you speak is a fantasy. You try so hard to believe you are the book of the world, the words that tell its story. And all the while you know in your heart of hearts that you are nought but the ephemera.”

  My eyes are drawn to the door; that door; that terrible door that stands there on the terrible desolate sands.

  It is a door even you dare not open.

  I draw my gaze away and look at you. Under the shadow of the sphinx we square up to each other like gunslingers in an old western. The lonely sands stretch far away. I know your mind and you know mine. We have no secrets from each other.

  “Well?”

  You nod, reluctantly. I smile. The light is very bright. The sphinx’s head lowers.

  His breath, warm and scented with cardamom seeds, blows against us.

  The light is very bright. We grow apart.

  You step into the light and

  . . .

  Fall . . .

  . . .

  While I am thrown violently sideways and hit the wall. I am back in the commandeered house in the tenements of Nakuru. Barashi stands in the room, staring at me with an unreadable expression. The prisoner is gone. You

  . . .

  Fall, through endless worlds, from Keter to Yetzirah, from Crown to Creation . . .

  . . .

  Into the warm waters of Lake Victoria. Overhead, the sky has darkened, and the stars are out. Ahead of you is an unfamiliar house where a party is in progress. You rise out of the water, dripping. You see him then, Tirosh, your quarry. Your eyes meet. He startles, takes a step towards you, and another. You see shadows gathering, the glint of moonlight on a metal object . . .

  You shout, “Get down!”

  A gunshot, prosaically, rings out.

  PART EIGHT

  _______

  ESCAPES

  29.

  It is hard for me to pick up the thread of the story at this point. Things become confused. By the time I arrived at the scene of the attack both targets and perpetrators were long gone. It had taken Barashi and myself over two hours of frantic driving, along badly lit roads, to reach the Rosenbergs’ villa. Witness testimonies were confused. They described men dressed in black, with an obvious military bearing, emerging out of the shadows, guns drawn. There was a woman in the lake—how she got there, or who she was, no one could tell, though I knew, of course. There was Tirosh, in someone else’s clothes and the smell of blood and sex still on him—the smell of pulp, the smell of garish plots—ducking as guns were fired. There was the woman in the lake rising onto land, and somehow, she disarmed one of the attackers.