by Lavie Tidhar
Their target appeared to be Tirosh.
There had been a short, and mostly silent, battle. The woman fled, taking Tirosh with her. The attackers retreated, melting into the shadows the way they’d come. My men found their car abandoned a short distance away on the lake road. Only a corpse remained on the manicured lawns, and though the man carried no ID it was Barashi, of all people, who identified him. His name was Misha Gomel, and he had served, with distinction, in one of the PDF’s elite units, but had since become a mercenary, as many of our young men did, selling his skills to the highest bidders across Africa.
“Last I heard,” Barashi said, prodding the corpse with his foot, “he was fighting a war over in Equatorial Guinea—some rich British baronet trying to execute a coup d’état with CIA funding. What he was doing back here I really have no idea.”
“Getting himself killed?” I said.
Barashi shrugged. “Well, that is an occupational hazard,” he said.
I didn’t like this very much. I didn’t know where Tirosh had gone to or who was behind this attempt on his life. Someone had executed three other people in Kisumu only earlier that night, and they’d done it as casually as killing a chicken. These were all links in a chain, all a part of the escalating pattern. I had to find Tirosh.
“Who are you?” Tirosh demanded. They had run out of the villa and the woman had hot-wired a Susita roadster with startling efficiency. Before he knew it they were roaring away at top speed back towards Kisumu. Tirosh was breathing heavily from the adrenaline and the running. Really he wasn’t a very fit man at all.
“My name’s Nur. We met before, actually. In Berlin.”
“In Berlin? But . . .”
“How much do you remember?” she said. She said it almost kindly.
Tirosh gripped his knees. He thought of Isaac on the swing, in the park, the boy’s delighted shrieks. “Higher! Higher!” he said. “I like it!”
He was making words, near-sentences, shaping the world to his will as language formed. It was a happy moment, captured in time.
So why did Tirosh feel tears form at the edges of his eyes, why did he feel this overwhelming sadness?
He tried to think of Berlin, but it was hard to get a clear picture of it. It was as though there were two Berlins, one that was still under the German Reich, and one that wasn’t; one in which he was from Palestina as he’d always been, and one in which he was from some other, improbable place. The two images were overlaid one on top of another, and he could get no clear sense of the places where they intersected or diverged. Who was he? he wondered. Was he even real? He missed Isaac then, missed him terribly, and he wanted to go back right there and then, to scoop his boy up in his arms, to hug him as though he’d never let him go, as though he could keep him safe and protected forever.
Perhaps she could see it on his face. She drove fast, skirting the city, heading away; avoiding pursuit. He didn’t know who had tried to kill him, if it was him they were trying to kill at all.
“I remember . . .” he said.
He remembered a cave. Dank air. A tree of skulls. He remembered falling, into icy-cold blackness, falling for so long that he thought he would drown.
He remembered . . .
He remembered not knowing where he was, when he awakened. The fear he felt, and then the search party, and someone shouting “Lior!” and it was—
“We were on holiday in Kenya,” he said. “An after-army trip, with a few of the guys. They said I’d gone off from the others, went missing for a few hours. Everyone was looking for me. They were more relieved than angry when they found me. We spent a few more days in Kenya before flying back home, to, to . . . Israel.” He said the name wonderingly.
“Israel,” he said. “Is that a real place? It feels like a dream I’ve been having for a long time now, but I don’t know which parts of it are real. At first I kept telling them they had it wrong. I didn’t want to go there. This is where I was born, where I belonged. I kept looking for Palestina, but they said there was no such place. Everything was gone, like it never existed. And it was so . . . smudged in my head. Like a picture with all the colours fading. After a while I stopped asking, and after that I didn’t even remember it anymore. I still don’t . . .” He shook his head. “Now it’s the other side that keeps blurring. Do you know what I mean?” He looked at her then.
“Who are you?” he said.
“I told you. My name’s Nur.”
“You’re . . . Are you from there?”
“No,” she said. “I’m from another place.”
In all of Tirosh’s memories there was one black hole, an emptiness from which he shied away in fear. So instead he tried to reassemble what he knew.
Menhaim’s death; Tirosh’s missing niece; the theodolite; the bad place Gross spoke about; Mr. Cohen’s murder. He told it all to Nur.
He didn’t expect her to believe him, but she did, and then she told him another story in return, of where she came from, and what she hoped to prevent.
“We need to get to Elgon,” Nur said, when she was done.
Tirosh said, “I must visit my father. He is ill.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It isn’t your fault.”
She nodded.
“They’ll be looking for me,” Tirosh said. “They might be looking for you, too, after the villa. Poor Melody, I must have ruined her party.”
“I doubt—” Nur began to say, when the glare of floodlights hit them from farther up the road, momentarily blinding Nur. Another driver would have braked. Nur pressed on the accelerator, driving blind, Tirosh ducking under the dashboard as gunfire opened around them. The car hit at least one person on its way. Its windows exploded in shards of glass. Nur drove them through the ambush. Both were cut by exploding glass, but the gunshots missed them.
What happened later it was harder for me to say.
30.
By the time Barashi and myself arrived at this latest scene I had begun to feel things slipping out of my control. Events were moving too fast, the hidden intelligence behind the sequence of attacks manipulating us all.
It had been a hastily mounted ambush. We found one corpse on the ground, abandoned like the one at the Rosenbergs’ villa—this one, too, Barashi identified as a Palestinian mercenary. I suspected at least one other had been hit, but if so his comrades must have dragged him away with them. I saw the signs of the impact, and the blood but no corpse. There were bullet casings on the ground and wheel tracks that peeled off into a dirt road.
“They didn’t try to give chase,” Barashi said. “It must have caught them by surprise she didn’t stop.”
“Tell the uniforms to clean this up, will you?” I told him. At this point I wanted to send up helicopters to look for the two fugitives, to put out a call to all police patrols, but I was no longer sure who I could trust.
I could feel it happening already: a sort of thinning that was in the air, that was in the ground, and it made the moon look hollow and the cars translucent, and the dead man on the road seemed to me to fade in and out of existence: one moment he was there and the next he wasn’t. It was happening, it was working, this spell being woven over my beloved country, over this precious night shelter, my Palestina. And I was afraid. I had felt this happen once before.
From here events took a rapid turn. What I know I reconstructed later, and some details are strangely obscured. For instance, I know that you and Tirosh separated for a while, but I don’t know why. The whole period from this attack to the events that followed it is obscured to me. For instance, I seem to know that you were wounded, perhaps even hallucinating. You walked in and out of shadows; by which I mean, your passage was not entirely in this world but through adjacent ones, shortcuts into might-have-beens and never-weres, places where you could pass freely.
Tirosh, more prosaically, drove. He chose side roads and dirt tracks, pathways used by farmers and the occasional hunter, and only the moon saw him pass. He knew this land, though his mi
nd was divided.
This land was green and plentiful, the moon shone down on the rolling hills, and it was not long before Mount Elgon appeared in the distance and then grew closer as Tirosh passed along the silent roads that led to his childhood home.
Soon he saw the lonely farmhouse. A solitary light burned on the porch. He eased the car into gear before idling, letting it glide the last few feet before it stopped. He braked and sat there, watching the old homestead. He just sat there. The air smelled so sweet and so thick with memories.
After a while he heard the screen door open and bang closed. Footsteps went along the porch and stopped. Eventually Tirosh got out of the car. He could smell the old man’s cigarette. Tirosh felt like a small boy again, coming home.
He opened the gate and stepped in and shut it behind him, like he’d always been told to do.
He heard the old man cough. He took a step, and then another, and the light from the porch fell down on the old man’s proud, weathered face. It made him think, irrationally, of a sphinx.
“Hello, Dad,” Lior Tirosh said.
PART NINE
_______
EXPLICATIONS
31.
Lior Tirosh studied his father, as though he had never seen him before. He remembered a tall, proud man. Not this stooped figure, body wracked with painful coughs, face lined like a tribal mask. Only the eyes remained the same, the eyes of a bird of prey, and the long, gnarly fingers, nicotine stained, which had once taught Tirosh how to hold a gun, how to plough a field, how to tie a knot and how to hold a pen: he had not seen the old man in years, he realised, and half his memories were false.
“Lior. So you are back.”
“Yes.”
They studied each other warily. There had been happier times, when he was young, before they moved to Ararat. Then his mother’s illness, sudden and inexplicable, and the funeral, and he had to return to the farm. He thought then that his life had been a series of escapes, that in a way he had always searched out that place in the mountain, that black water pool.
He had been desperate to disappear.
And somehow it had worked. He got to forget everything and relive his life . . . elsewhere.
He never expected to be back here again. When he thought of his father it was with a combination of anger and embarrassment, mixed in with what he thought must have been love. He didn’t really know. Love wasn’t a word the old man used often, unless it was to talk about land, this land.
Tirosh kicked the porch, the way he’d done when he was a child. This stupid land.
A memory:
At night on the farm the hyenas come out, hesitant under the full moon. The moon over Palestina is a soft round belly, pregnant with possibilities. When the full moon is high in the sky everything is possible, and the boy, Lior, cannot sleep. He steals outside. The farmhouse is a large wood-and-stone structure; solid, strong. It is of this place. It is here to stay. Father built it, with his own hands and with his own workers he built it. It is almost a small village all its own. Father has stables for the horses and a dairy, where they milk the cows and churn butter, make cheese. There is a village nearby, where many of the workers come from. Father speaks their dialect. Father is well respected, a big, broad man; the papers say he carries Palestina on his shoulders.
On a clear night Lior can smell the woodsmoke from the village, see the lights of cooking fires in the distance, hear a baby cry, a woman laugh, men speaking softly. Their voices are murmurs in the night. The hyenas come out, drawn to the light, their long faces tense, questing. Against Elgon the fever trees provide a postcard contrast. The boy Lior sits on the long veranda with his brother, Gideon. The two square off across a bao board. The night is filled with the clicking of seed pods on wood. Their faces are drawn in concentration. Gideon has learned, already, to use a gun. Father takes him to the hills, teaches him how to hold the rifle, how to load it, how to sight and how to fire. Lior is jealous. He too wants to shoot, to know the power of the gun, but more than that: to know his father’s arms protectively around him, the gruff voice instructing him precisely, his father’s unshaved cheek pressed against his as he shows him trigger and stock, bolt and safety. His father smells of Matossian cigarettes, unfiltered, and Old Spice. Gideon sweeps up Lior’s house and scatters the seeds all across his side of the board. His fingers move deftly, stealing Lior’s tokens, until none are left and he slams the final seed into an empty hole with a triumphant cry. Mosquitoes buzz around the lights; the hyenas over the fence grin, lopsided. . . . Then Mum calls them inside.
“So you’re sick.”
“The land is sick, Lior. My sickness is that of the land.”
Tirosh wiped his forehead. The expensive silk shirt stuck to his body. There were glass cuts on his arms. His father’s cigarette smoke made him nauseous.
“I’ve had a long day,” he said.
“Writing.” It was said with such contempt Tirosh recoiled.
“A book never stopped a bullet, Lior,” the old general said.
“That isn’t what books are for,” Tirosh said.
“This land is sick, Lior. I had hoped . . . I had hoped you, and Gideon, would inherit me. Look after this land. It was fashioned for you. But you both left me. Gideon in the war, you with your fantasies. Now there is no one left.”
“Maybe the land is infected with your sickness,” Tirosh said. “Not the other way around. This wall—”
“This wall! Do you think I want this wall?”
“I don’t know what you want.”
The old general stabbed his cigarette angrily into the ashtray.
“No walls,” he said. “No borders. This should all be ours, Lior. It could still be ours! Come inside. I want to show you something.”
He turned to go and Tirosh followed. He always followed his father. Inside, the house was sparsely furnished and utilitarian. There were no family photos. Hanging on the wall was a large map.
The old general indicated the map with a nod. Tirosh approached it. He saw Palestina at its centre, ringed with a marker pen. Africa spread outwards from it in all directions. Uganda and Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi were marked in one circle. Beyond them came the Congo, Ethiopia, Namibia. The final circle engulfed Egypt, Nigeria, South Africa and Mali. A dotted line ran from the Cape of Good Hope, making its way through Palestina, up through the continent until it reached Cairo and finally terminated on the Red Sea coast, in Port Said. The old Trans-African Highway.
“All of this,” his father said. “Don’t you see, Lior? No borders! No walls! A Jewish nation as far as the eye could see, from the Cape to Cairo! And from there . . .” He approached the map and stabbed his finger at the terminus point of the train and ran it along, into the Holy Land.
“All of this, at first,” his father said. “But we could do so much more. . . . We are men who live by the sword and by the gun, Lior. And there are other walls, other borders to cross, to conquer. . . .”
Tirosh’s eyes were drawn away from the map; horrifyingly; he didn’t want to, but it had been there, at the edge of his vision, since he came to the room, a little, old-fashioned trophy cabinet, old stained wood and grimy display glass, a collection of curios sitting forlorn behind the glass; nothing more. And yet . . .
What most of them were he didn’t know. A compass, and a stained pocket book with leather covers, and a spear point, broken; a pair of glasses, the frame wire bent; a watch on a chain; and a portable measuring device, rusted with age. A collection of fetishes; and he recognised the last one with a sort of quiet horror: it was—it must have been—a theodolite.
“Deborah,” he said. He turned his back on the cabinet of curiosities; turned on his father. “Deborah. Your niece. Gideon’s daughter!”
“Lior, please do not take that tone with me,” his father said.
“Where is she?” Tirosh demanded.
His father said, calmly, “I have no idea.”
“It’s you,” Tirosh said. “It was you all this time.”
<
br /> “Lior, please don’t be so melodramatic,” his father said. “Look. Look!”
He pulled down a second map, rolled up on the wall. This one resembled a sort of stunted shrub, or tree, with strange protrusions and excursions, linked spheres each marked in his father’s unsteady hand with annotations and lines.
“Look! All of these places, like the godawful one you seem to have spent all your recent time in. Look! There is a place where the Ndebele defeated Cecil Rhodes in the Matobo Hills. There’s a place where Shaka survived the assassination attempts on his life and defeated the British in the Battle of Port Elizabeth, and took control of the fledgling Cape Colony. There is a place where Moses became Pharaoh and travelled south with his people. There is a place where—”
Tirosh stared at the map, this child’s drawing of impossible worlds, the arrows and diagrams that led from one to another, annotated with numbers of troops, arms shipments, intelligence reports’ code numbers. His father’s bleating of the never-wheres and haven’t-beens washed over him.
He didn’t care.
He wanted back to his rock-solid reality, to his small apartment overlooking the park, to the clear, impersonal European cold of Germany. To Isaac—
“No,” he said. “No. No.”
“Lior, it’s time for you to stop acting like a child and act like a man,” his father said. “Everything is in place, in fact it was thanks to you that I began to understand this destiny, in searching for you, when you disappeared, I learned things. Yes. You have served this land. You will serve it yet, Lior. It is almost ready.”