The Future of Horror

by Jonathan Oliver

  IN SAFED ON top of the mountain under a deep blue sky with blue painted walls and doors to reflect the heavens, secretive black clad kabbalists wandering the stone walled streets with wide brimmed hats like horsemen dismounted. Palestine in the year of the gentiles and their god 1915. That night he sleeps in the yard of a stone house belonging to a man who lived in England, lying on his back on the hard ground looking up at a blue black sky and a myriad of stars. In sleep he sees all that is yet to come: first a burning bush and a great fire and men and women and children with yellow Stars of David on their arms herded like cattle in great metal beasts to a place where the tracks terminate. From there through a great gate into a dark place and ovens and black smoke, gold teeth collected in dirty buckets, skeletal moselmen with bare feet in the snow. Then a great cleansing fire and he sees boats on the sea and refugees docking at secret alcoves and kissing the sand, armed men and women spreading out across the bare land. Then later still the roads cut into the earth and the villages eradicated and the new settlers spreading again and again like locusts. New houses, new roads, great cities until of the wild places nothing remains.

  But all that is yet to come.

  When he wakes it is early and the city wakes around him and he builds a fire and sets to brew his coffee in a tin can. In the distance the call of the mosques to prayer. In the yard a small Jewish boy clad in black, sitting on his haunches by the fire studying the man. His eyes are black. What’s your name, he says, and the man answers, and the boy says, Like the king. The man shakes his head but all around him are the Biblical references woven into the land and the air and smoke from the fire and he studies this small boy and wonders what will become of him in the years to come. He drinks his coffee and the boy stands and goes to the horse and pats him. Is he yours, Yes, the man says. He stands up at last and his coat moves aside revealing his handgun and the boy’s eyes grow round and he says not a word. The man climbs on top of the horse and man and horse both depart this stone house, the boy staring after them. Where are you going, the boy says, and the man says, There is death on the wind.

  He rides for two days out of Safed through the Galilee, camping for a night by the great lake in which reflected are the stars like the eyes of the dead. The air is hot and dry. The crops lie wasted in the fields. He lies alone and is not disturbed. At night he sees the light of fishing boats and hears the fishermen’s cries, though some cry in Arabic and others in Hebrew. In the morning he follows the road that leads down, into the Jezreel Valley. There like a bowl of produce but the produce lies dead in the fields and the crows peck at the ground and at stones as if they were eyes. He rides through wasted wheat the gun at his belt his hat shading his face, watching the Arab villages and the Jewish settlements and the empty fields and the empty roads. At dusk he joins horse drawn carts going to Megiddo and he watches the hill, which the gentiles call Armageddon, and sees the fires burning in the settlement there and hears the hard voices of men.

  He spends the night there with farmers and agents of the Rothschilds, two men from Paris in the light suits made for the Orient discussing the merits of the young women of that place, who should go to study at the Baron’s expense and who should remain. They retire for the night with two of the lasses who are willing or wishing to escape this place for civilized Europe and these men have the power to make it so. He had learned long ago that men have power and he does not intervene for they had gone willingly enough and perhaps he, too, would have gone in their place. In the morning he rides out alone but followed by the carts filled with meagre produce going to the city of Haifa. In the distance he sees a checkpoint and the uniform of the Ottomans and he skirts them and watches from on high as they stop the carts and take away the produce and boot the men away, laughing. He rides on, through temperate hills and gentle forest, the land of Menasseh, until he sees the Carmel mountains rising in the distance, evergreen against blue, and he imagines he can hear the seagulls crying in the distance.

  He enters Zikhron Ya’akov at dusk that next night, the town named for the old Baron, and ties up his horse and enters an establishment such as there must inevitably be, even in a settlement of the Jews. They grow grapes in the Baron’s vineyards on the mountain slopes and make wine from it and he drinks deeply. It is a rough wine and it suits him fine. He has not much coin but he sits there not thinking much and a man comes and stands at the bar and orders wine and though he is an educated man and dressed in a suit, nevertheless there is a strength about him, a power. Not turning his head he says, I am in need of men.

  So, he says.

  I am–

  I know who you are.

  At that the other man does turn his head, and smiles. I’m Aaron Aaronsohn, he says.

  A quiet man. A mild mannered man. A dangerous man, with dangerous ideas. We leave at first light, Aaronsohn says. He drinks his wine.

  At first light they ride out, fifteen of them, ten Jews, three Bedouin guides and two silent Sudanese. At their head rides Aaronsohn, bottles of samples by his side and his rifle strapped to his back. His round glasses flash in the sun. They ride all day and into the night going north and the wind is dry and hot and the men lick their chapped lips and drink sparingly. They travel first along the coast and when they run into a Turkish checkpoint Aaronsohn shows the soldiers a piece of paper and they are let through with curious looks and the soldiers finger their weapons but say nothing.

  The next morning they run into a storm of locusts, the insects come flying out of nowhere in their millions. They grow like a dark cloud on the horizon and the horses shy and the men reach for their guns but they are useless. The insects swarm over them blindly, as if the men and the horses do not exist, are a figment of a locust god’s imagination. They enter their hair and their clothes and their mouths and their noses and the horses rear, frightened, and the men curse and one of them cries out loudly and there is the smell of human piss and a dark trickle on the ground. The insects swarm over them and they bat at them helplessly and Aaron roars, ordering them to turn, but the tide of black insects pushes them this way and that and he can no longer see the others in that sudden darkness, that blotting of the sun.

  At last he finds shelter against a rock face and watches the locusts swarm past until they are gone and a great darkness descends and where there were trees and fruit there is nothing but bare skeletons and they drift along the road towards the fields and forests of the north. He rides on then and the others join him one by one and at night when they camp by the shore of the Mediterranean they are two men short but Aaronsohn makes no comment. They sleep by their horses and rise with the moon and press on and the next day arrive at Jaffa on the shore of the Mediterranean and there the Turks have their fortress. Aaronsohn confers with Jamal Pasha while the men go to the harbour where the ships dock and where the oranges come on the back of camels and Arab men run up and down the docks shirtless carrying boxes, as strong and wiry as circus freaks. They drink by the harbour by the train tracks which link the harbour to Jerusalem and they listen to the French and Egyptian and British traders talk in their pidgin and to the Jewish agents and the Arab traders and they watch the few Jewish passengers who come on shore clutching identity documents to their chests and looking around them in what must be shock, at this Oriental town so dusty and ill-formed, a million miles away from the Europe which is the only thing they know.

  He drinks wine and arak with the others and they laugh at these new arrivals and wait for the girls to come out parading down the main Jaffa road pretty in their dresses and their scarves and saucy dark eyes looking the men up and down frankly. It is dusty and cool in the shade and the smell of tar and salt from the sea and the injuries of oranges litter the quayside roads and their smell bursts forth like the very essence of the country.

  He spends the night with a Greek girl two months now in Palestine but soon to move on, part of a travelling harem of women of all backgrounds all joined together on this mission like fallen goddesses of love. Cairo, she tells him, they wi
ll go to Cairo next where she has a family, and where the men are wealthy and pay generously. She strokes the scars on his chest and asks him how he got them and he answers not, but holds her, her wetness and her warmth, and he tries to lose himself inside her. In the morning they ride out, the Bedouins ahead, the Sudanese men leading three donkeys laden with sealed boxes behind them and barred cages from which protrude the dirty whiteness of live pigeons. You must know, the girl tells him, that night, when he is drunk under the moon, the war is coming, the Turks will not hold on to power forever. Why should I care, he says – demands – and she shrugs, You Jews, she says.

  You Jews. He remembers other days, other lands, but vaguely, as though they had happened to someone else, and long ago. He knows only this wild land, where men must carry guns, and he knows the Turks are fighting a war with the French and the English, and that someone must lose: and it is usually the Jews.

  At night under the stars skirting the hills of Jerusalem Aaronsohn says much the same thing to him, quietly, as though gauging him out. We need men like you, Aaronsohn says, and he says, Like what?

  In the midst of night a great cloud descends upon them from the hills of Jerusalem and the Sudanese cry out in great beats and light a flame. In its light they can see the olive trees stripped of life and the black insects come descending down in a mass in which no individual insect can be discerned. The Sudanese unpack the boxes and the men arm themselves with burning torches dipped into liquid flame, they wave them in the air at the onrushing locusts and the air is filled with the hiss of dry burning carapace and dying insects dropping to the ground until with every step he takes his foot sinks into a crunching necropolis, an insectoid slaughterhouse and the air is full of death. He feels them against his skin and in his hair and on his hands, crawling into his crotch, up his anus, he strips, naked he dances in the moonlight like a crazed person waving torches and the men do likewise, Aaronsohn with his glasses flashing and his pale behind shaking in a dance. None of them make a sound, it takes place in silence, if you had asked him before or after he would have told you it was impossible, yet it was true. It is a circus light show lighting up the dark mountain side and the sweat on the horses’ dark skin and the torches are like the crazy fires of a thousand falling stars.

  They ride onwards with Jerusalem in the distance up on her mountains like a sagging aged queen, her churches and synagogues and mosques the teats of a cow suckling dusty cowled pilgrims snuggling into her bosom, there the Jewish quarter where Eliezer Ben Yehuda dreams in modern Hebrew a language he is still inventing out of old biblical Hebrew and borrowed words and whole cloth and there too the men of the old Yishuv traders and politicos in the shade of the Ottomans huddled within the walls mistrustful of the new Yishuv these interlopers newcomers in the shadow of their money man the Baron in the north: but they skirt the city clean.

  Here they pause, though, while Aaronsohn waits. The Bedouins on their horses scout ahead, the men sit restless, playing cards, he sits apart from the others watching Aaronsohn. At last they see dust rising on the dirt track leading from Jerusalem and an approaching man and horse, riding fast. The rider dismounts and he and Aaronsohn hug. Feinberg, someone says, it’s Avshalom Feinberg.

  And how much like the king’s son he looks, this modern Absalom, how handsome and fetching, born like his namesake on this land, but educated in Paris, a man the girls sigh over, and he and Aaronsohn talk quietly, whispering, and Feinberg delivers onto the expedition leader a small packet of what might be papers, and rides away. In two years he would be dead in the desert, his blood seeping out onto the fine sand, his companion wounded and running, Avshalom like his namesake dead in his prime, it would be fifty years before they found his bones bleaching in that lonely stretch of sand forgotten even by the Bedouins who shot him down.

  Aaronsohn goes to the donkeys and opens one of the bird cages and extracts a pigeon, trembling in his hand. When he releases it the bird takes to the air with a cry and there is a metallic container strapped to its foot. It rises into the air and circles and disappears in the direction of Egypt.

  They ride on. Beyond the hills the land drops steeply, in seeming moments they have ridden deep into the desert sands. Canyon walls rise above them and the air turns dry and hot, a burning, and he thinks of his dreams of all that is yet to come the ovens and the flames, he can see the future but in the future all that is around them is still sand. They ride down and down and down still as if dropping into the bowels of the earth as though descending into a sort of Christian hell and Jerusalem its mountains its olive groves its broken Temple and its Wall its mosques and synagogues and markets all vanish in the hot dry air like a fata morgana like a thing which did not ever exist.

  In the night they are attacked, suddenly and without warning, by men on camels racing through the dunes. He draws his gun and fires, a horse beside him tumbles and falls as its leg breaks with a terrible crunching sound. Its rider drops to the ground, face white in the moonlight, fingers bloodless where they grip the gun. They fire at the marauders men whose faces are obscured by cloth who shoot with old guns but dart close and quick with blades flashing silver and they meet like two primeval armies in the sand, horses and camels clashing, the donkeys braying with a pitiful sound. He fires and kills a man and the corpse rolls still fresh on the sand and blood in bright arcs shoots upwards, collecting within its fading vitality the light of the stars and the moon. The camels run sure footed on the sand but the men riding them perhaps having not expected this opposition drive them away. They disappear as quickly as they’d come, like desert ghosts, leaving behind them the corpse of a camel and three men. On their side one horse dead, one lame, and two men down. He takes his gun and walks to the wounded horse and aims and pulls the trigger. Blood and brain explode on the sand and on his face, wet and salty like tears. They bury the men in makeshift graves. Jerusalem seems to have never existed, the coastal cities are as fabulous and impossible as Ophir.

  They move on, through darkness and sunrise, the light suffuses the horizon like a curse. Downwards and downwards still, Aaronsohn making measurements, scribbling in a book, excited. They keep an eye out for marauders, in the sand he sees the droppings of camels, the signs of a fire half-buried in the sand. They push on and crest at last a dune and look down upon the valley and a sea as flat as a mirror in the distance down below, reflecting the sky perfectly. Mountains behind it, all around it the land is bare and rocky, nothing lives, a dead sea.

  The Jordan Valley lies before them and across it they can see the locusts migrating in great big apocalyptic clouds like black angels of death but they are alive, hungry and alive, and all Palestine lies before them, its wheat and orange trees and olives, mulberries, pines, cypress, St. John’s Bread, figs, phoenix, za’atar and cotton. He watches them move soundlessly along the land away from the Jordan mountains towards Jerusalem and the coast, an unstoppable hand reaching across vast distances to devour and destroy all in its path. How do you fight it, Aaronsohn says, but it is delight not despair in his voice. They travel on, through dunes rising like camel humps and a sky as black as space in which the stars are numinous. At night standing guard pale coal fire behind him he goes around a dune to piss and a leopard passes, so close he can feel its fur on his skin, the animal padding softly on the sand making no sound, for a moment it turns its head and regards him with eyes like gemstones with an alien intelligence behind them. He holds his breath, somehow he is still urinating, the leopard yawns and walks into the darkness and disappears.

  They reach the shores of the dead sea on a day as hot as the ovens which haunt his dreams. Aaronsohn is first to strip off, straight from the horse he slides onto the ground naked, wading towards the water, a stocky man with a dark face and a pale stomach. They run at the water and enter it and float, surprised and laughing, for a moment they are boys again. He too floats in the water of the dead sea on his back, if you attached a sail to him he could be a ship traversing this ancient place. On this sea the Nabateans skimmed
asphalt from the surface to sell to the Egyptians to use for mummies, here David hid from Saul, here lay Sodom and Gomorrah, those cities of sin.

  Aaronsohn releases another bird into the sky, where do they go, those birds, what messages do they carry? They ride on, following the shore, at night the stars fall into the water in trails of flame.

  On the second day the scouts return, the Bedouins confer with Aaronsohn, gesturing to the south. On the third day they reach a temporary settlement of Bedouins, of which tribe he doesn’t know. Aaronsohn sits down with their sheikh by the fire, the men stand outside the camp, the children naked run, a drove of goats, a flock of camels. He watches a falcon sail across the skies. A small Bedouin boy sitting on his haunches studying him, saying, in Arabic, what is your name. David, he says to the boy.

  At night the Bedouins roast a goat its stomach stuffed with rice the women make flatbread on the fire, under the stars flocks of birds travelling, fan-tailed ravens and Dead Sea sparrows, Arabian babblers, blackstarts, pale crag martins, sand partridges, trumpeter finches, desert larks and scrub warblers, at night the sky sometimes is full of migratory birds fleeing Europe as from a great evil, dark clouds against the waning moon.

  Aaronsohn confers with the scouts, again they set off, there is no soul in sight the desert lies silent and vast all about them and the sea as dead, the Jordan at their back. The cliffs rise above them and at night when he sleeps he dreams no dreams.