Zion's Fiction
Page 24
The Tin Beggar, indeed, looked brand new. It told me that City Hall had awarded its efforts with a complete overhaul. It was scrubbed and polished, its nuts and bolts were tightened, and missing parts were replaced—the works. They had even given it a new eye.
Nana had gifted the newly refurbished Tin Beggar a new toaster. You should have seen its robotic delight. What a laugh!
And the mice? Your basic cold war: threats, raids, woe to the lone person who falls into the hands of the Stern-Gerlach mice. And woe to the mouse that falls into human hands. In other words, the usual. Recently, I’ve heard, in certain circles there’s talk of trying to parley with the mice.
Another thing. I’ve become a painter.
How, you ask?
Some arrangement I’ve worked out with the Tin Beggar, since I’ve had the leverage: I’d threaten to tell the authorities it had known in advance of the Stern-Gerlach mice offensive unless it gave me some of its work. Now it gives me paintings, which I sign. What a pleasure, being a painter without actually having to wield a brush. Chambalooloo gets a fair shake, too, because I award it with electronic appliances. Besides, it gets recognition by proxy as a distinguished artist. And I get paid handsomely.
And other than that?
Other than that, all is peaceful and quiet in the new Jerusalem.
A Good Place for the Night
Savyon Liebrecht
In the fourth year, the funnel of air passed frequently over the house, teasing, descending to the garden of wooden monsters where the child used to wander. Every few days, Gila would hear the distant whistle grow shriller, like the siren on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day or on the eve of Memorial Day for the Fallen in War, and she’d run out and pull the boy home. She was almost late once, and at the last minute, as she grabbed him from the sucking flow, she saw the opening of the funnel up close for the first time, damp and quivering, like an elephant’s trunk. And once she was late. The boy’s arm had been sucked in, but he struggled, flapping at the mouth of the funnel, swinging his short legs and his free arm, moving away and rising, and Gila ran under him, screaming, until he was dropped on the other side of the fence into the area of the epidemic over which birds were flying in circles. He was caught in a tree, then fell to the contaminated earth along with some branches, bruised all over. Later, frightened and exhausted, he let her isolate him in his room for three days and smear his body with an ointment she made from the bark of a tree that burned the skin and its fruit, which was shaped like cats’ heads. Sometimes, when he cried and Gila was too tired, the nun would come out of her room and lovingly tend to him. But when he’d recovered from his mysterious illness and grew calm, he insisted on going out again, especially to the garden of monsters, as if he were heeding the call of his parents beckoning him to their burial place.
When the boy was outside, Gila would coax and threaten and plead with him to come in, but he, recalcitrant and rebellious, his body sturdy for a two-year-old, would slip away from the windows to the garden of warped tree trunks, and she became accustomed to straining her ears for the sound of the whistling air that heralded the coming of the funnel.
Not until he was asleep in his bed and she was secure in the refuge of the house did she stop the constant straining to hear. Then she waited for the funnel with forbidden excitement, occasionally seeing objects fly past like lightning and remembering how she had once seen a remarkable spectacle. It was as if the funnel had decided to tease her—like a naked young girl in a dark window, waiting to tease a neighbor across the way. The streams of haze rising from the ground began to move slowly, drawn in a single direction to form a clear diagonal curtain, curled at the edges and with a long, hollow space in the center, and one end of it moving lustfully, seeking prey. A large tree complete with its roots appeared suddenly at one end of the channel of clear air, flew like a shot arrow to the other end, and disappeared instantly. She stood there terrified and enthralled by the haze that was now flattening, returning to its former state, as calm as an animal whose appetite has been satisfied.
But then, the boy had already been a year old.
The first time she saw the funnel, she still hadn’t known the boy existed. As soon as she walked into the house with the man, even before they saw the five dead people, before they found the boy sleeping in his bed, they suddenly heard the noise of a storm, and a tube of bright air cut through the smoke that had already begun to darken outside. Inside the illuminated tube of space, stretched parallel to the horizon and twice the height of a person, numerous objects sailed around slowly, becoming entangled in gentle circles: stools and a bookshelf, babies’ clothes, frying pans, a mattress, a straw lampshade, landscape paintings, a tapestry of harem women, a bouquet of flowers and the vase that had once held them, pillows embroidered with silver and purple birds, a blue enamel kettle, a carpet, a woman’s purse, newspaper pages. Gila looked in horror at the contents of the ghost house hovering in front of her: not too long ago someone had read that newspaper and had drunk tea brewed in that kettle; a dog had lain on that carpet; a woman had worn the straps of that purse on her shoulder; babies had soiled those clothes. Where were they now?
The graying smoke had once again subdued the channel of air, but still she stood at the window, waiting, as if she had been told part of a story and wanted to know the ending. Then the man had come out of one of the rooms and said, “There are five dead adults here and one live baby.”
Two of the dead people had been guests, an elegant couple of Indian descent sitting in the garden on a wrought iron bench, he smoking and she brushing her hair. The three other dead people had been employees of the inn: a very tall, thin young man doing accounts at a desk in the office; an older man with gray sideburns bent over the stove in the kitchen; and a girl wearing a frilled chambermaid’s apron lying like a contortionist at the foot of a half-made bed in one of the rooms on the top floor.
Elated, Gila stood beside the sleeping baby’s bed and recalled a children’s story one of her little girls had liked and the other had loathed: the three bears come home after an evening stroll to find Goldilocks sleeping in the small bed.
The man scrutinized her, pondering, watching this unknown woman glow at the sight of the sleeping child, reach out and cover his exposed shoulder, take pleasure in something familiar amidst the chaos they had been thrown into, holding on to the temporary ordinariness of a child breathing peacefully in his bed.
Then they began a search of the inn together. Stepping noiselessly from room to room, they looked into the gleaming bathrooms, examined the beds, were drawn to the windows that looked out onto a landscape of thin columns of dust that covered the earth.
Once, when the child still obeyed her and didn’t go out into the garden, the funnel of air stopped in front of the house and tossed a cloth-wrapped bundle onto the doorstep. From the window, Gila looked at the package of rags that had been spit out at the door and saw it begin to move. A head emerged from it, the head of a very old woman. The child, who had never seen such an old person, screamed in fright. This wasn’t the first stranger he’d seen. Although he’d known the nun and the sick man from the time he was a baby, occasionally someone would stumble upon the house, speak an incomprehensible language, look pleadingly at Gila, and wolf down the food she offered. Sometimes the stranger would fall asleep in one of the armchairs, and the man would sit beside him holding a stick, and when he woke up, the man would send him on his way. Once, three wild-looking women appeared, their hair and their nails grown long. One of them reached out to touch the child, and he drew back with a cry. Then time passed, and no one came to the house until the funnel spit out the old lady. Gila went out to her and, her hand covered with cloth, looked for the signs but didn’t find even one: the backs of the old lady’s hands were not covered with brown spots, there was no swelling behind her ears and no pus leaking from her eyes. Gila dragged the old lady into the house, sat her down in an armchair, and gave her some water, which she drank slowly. The old lady sat in t
hat armchair for three days, sipping water, taking bites of a biscuit, relieving herself in her clothes. The child stood beside her all his waking hours, studying her from every angle, imitating the sounds of her strange language. On the fourth day she spit up black blood and died. The child cried when they buried her in the yard where—this he did not know—his parents were buried along with the three employees of the inn.
One time, the child had been close to discovering his parents. Driving rain had poured down all night, washing away the dirt that covered the bodies and scattering fragments of skeletons over the yard. From his room the child saw the bones first, and the man hurried outside to rebury them. Gila watched from the window, recalling the beautiful Indian woman they had found dead in the garden, wearing an orange sari edged with gold embroidery. Even if she had been preserved whole in her grave, the child would not have recognized her. Gila would sometimes wonder, and ask the man, whether a four-month-old baby had memories, whether he might know that the people raising him were not the ones who had given birth to him, whether they would tell him one day about the circumstances that had brought the three of them together, whether they should wait until he himself discovered how different his appearance was from theirs.
They agreed that, one day, they would tell him the whole truth, they would show him his parents’ passports and his name and date of birth written in one of them. Meanwhile, the days passed, one following on the heels of the other according to the clock, but never revealing the secret of time. From the first day and through all the years they were never able to unlock the secret of the changing seasons, and only the chart they kept of the days helped them mark off time. The weather seesawed from day to day like a bad-tempered person; the sun blazed not like a ball of fire, but like formless lava spreading like a puddle over half the sky; rain fell not in a downpour, but like an entire cloud being hurled down, exploding on the ground with a crash that made the tree roots quake. Sometimes it would be dark and stormy for days at a time; sometimes the primeval landscape was bathed in a blinding, phosphorous light that flooded the enormous desolation, as flat as a tray, devoid of forests, grooved with fissures that spread in straight lines to the horizon like the furrows of a plowed field, spitting jet-streams of transparent dust from its grooves—a magnificent and menacing stage set. But sometimes Gila would wake and see, as if it were an ad for a tourist site, the kind of pristine, clear, fresh world you see after the rain: bare trees exposed to the pleasant sun; and above them, a sky beautiful with baby blue clouds, as if it had not witnessed the scenes of horror that had raged under it on that cataclysmic day; and in the distance, in a uniform shade of green, pastures as smooth as lake water; and on the horizon, a row of trees with densely tangled foliage, a kind of tree she had never seen before. Her gaze traveled over the clouds, assembled like a mountain ridge, as if they were the repository of memories from other landscapes that had sailed onward over the flat, bright countryside, and she felt suddenly calm: the sky was in its place and the earth was in its place. It was impossible that, beyond the distant trees, there were no roads or cities of living people now planning their day, which had just begun.
“Do you think the train might be working again?” she kept asking those first few months.
The man would look at her, saddened that she had once again been carried away by the deceptive landscape and that she would once again have to travel the path to the knowledge that the world she knew had vanished while she was in the train’s smoking car, and he said, “The train is stuck in exactly the same place.”
On evenings reminiscent of summer, the three of them would go out into the garden, or walk, or ride their bicycles far from the house until they got tired, sometimes heading toward what had been the train station and sometimes toward the corpses of the railroad cars that, before the catastrophe, had crossed Europe. Sometimes they’d pass the charcoal shepherd and his charcoal flock and see the three skeletons in the station and the skeletons of the passengers crumbling inside their tattered clothes. From the day he learned to walk, the child, used to the sight, would go into the ticket seller’s booth, move the skeleton that had once been the ticket seller to the edge of its chair, squeeze in beside it, and play with the equipment and the money, but Gila and the man gazed at the skeletons and remembered how they’d looked on the day of the cataclysm. Then the child, hoisted up to the windows, would look at the skeletons in the train, his glance lingering on the skeleton of the little girl holding the book he would know by heart in another year, Alice in Wonderland, a birthday present from her teacher, who had written in it the false prophecy, “To the talented Mary Jane, who will write books like this herself one day, when she grows up.”
In her dreams she would relive the moment the car shook suddenly, like a ghost train in an amusement park, and she opened the door of the smoking car and saw the sleeping people who, an instant before, had been awake. The brazen young couple who had been making love on the bench across from her (the girl’s panting had embarrassed the other passengers, who shot glances at each other) were embracing, deeply asleep—she arched backward, her hair hanging over the seat, and he bent over her, his face buried in her neck; the frenetic young man’s head was pressed against the window, as if he were kissing the cracked glass goodbye; the older man who had been flashing surreptitious glances of longing at the couple making love was tilted back, his hands crossed on his groin, his gaze fixed on the ceiling; the two strangers who had become friends during the trip, one explaining that he had come from a conference of ecology experts, the other proffering pieces of choice tropical fruit wrapped in cellophane, were sitting mummified, staring at each other; the little girl who had been engrossed in reading Alice in Wonderland was bent forward as if bowing deeply, her forehead touching the open book. Many of the train’s windows were shattered, and splinters of glass glinted on the dark floor; objects and packages that had fallen from the overhead rack were scattered in the aisle; one travel case that had not been completely closed was now open, and meticulously ironed shirts were spread around it as if they’d been arranged for display. A suitcase had fallen, burying a redheaded young man so that only a clump of his hair stuck out over the handle of the suitcase and a pair of new jeans showed at the other end of it.
From where she was standing at the end of the car, Gila’s eyes darted about, taking in the sight with the utmost clarity in incandescent, diamondlike brightness. She felt a momentary stirring of the hopeful suspicion that the passengers had conspired to pretend they were asleep to see how she would respond, and the whole thing—the artificial light, the unnatural positions—had been staged for a television show that tortured people for the enjoyment of other people, and in a minute the famous director would suddenly appear and the sleeping people would open their eyes and delight in her embarrassment. But the astonishing silence in the car, broken by the strange sounds of the earth cracking and the bubbling flow of dust from outside gave her gooseflesh, and the scene visible through the windows completely ruled out the idea of a hidden camera. The flat surface of the earth was now covered with a thick veil that flowed from it and billowed up to the sky, as if the earth’s belly were boiling.
She tried to get a sound out of her throat to wake up the sleeping people, and a low, unintentional croak emerged, like the sound made by a mute trying to scream. Nothing moved in the car, and she stood mesmerized, refusing to acknowledge what she saw, refusing to think about what lay behind what she saw. Her legs began to move of their own volition over the shards of glass and articles of clothing scattered in the aisle, and she pressed her handbag, which held her passport and the pearl rings she’d bought for her daughters in the art museum, against her body. The people in the next car were sleeping too. The headrests, which were not covered with white doilies—she could see through the glass of the door that was stuck halfway open in its track—gave away the fact that it wasn’t a first-class car, but it appeared that the passengers who had bought cheaper tickets had seen a more splendid show: fea
thered hats, lacy shawls, colored scarves, fur stoles, and bridal veils that had fallen from the trunk of a troupe of actors were scattered over the people, the seats, and the aisle.
“Hello, hello,” Gila shouted into the car, but nothing moved. “Is anyone here? Is there anyone here?” she added in English, in a braver, more desperate voice inflamed by the fear that had begun to creep into her mind, by the knowledge that she could not ignore for long what she was seeing, and that she was not dreaming, but witnessing a dreamlike reality.
Her ears, which had already adjusted to the sounds of the splitting earth and had accepted them as background noises, suddenly seemed to absorb a new sound in the distance, as abrupt as a dog’s bark. She hurried to one of the broken windows, stuck her head out between the sharp peaks of glass protruding from the window frame, listened hard, and screamed to the smoke-filled world outside, “Hey! Hey! Hello! Hello!”
A very faint voice sounded from the depths of the thick whiteness, “Hey, where are you?”
“Here, inside the train!” she shouted toward the human voice and stretched her neck even further, putting it in danger of being slit. “Where are you? Where are you?” Her throat swelled with the effort.
“Here,” a distant voice echoed.
“I’m inside the train,” she shouted excitedly. There was no doubt: a man’s voice. “Don’t go in the wrong direction! Come this way!”
“It’s okay.” The voice crossed the diminishing distance, and now the owner of that voice could hear that hers was a woman’s voice. “Wait for me. I’m coming in your direction.”
“I’m waiting for you, I’m waiting,” she called, her excitement overcoming her embarrassment. She was seized by a strange feeling, as if she were in a movie she’d seen a long time ago and now she herself was the heroine, calling to a man she didn’t know, the hero of the movie, quoting lines from a script that bore some sort of insane similarity to the present situation.