by Zion's Fiction- A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature (retail) (epub)
“Where are you?” she asked, frantic with worry.
“I’m getting closer to you,” the voice said. “Keep on talking. I’ll find you through your voice.”
Now she no longer doubted the reality of the voice, and as nervous as a girl about to go on a blind date, she wanted to impress the stranger and to recall a song she’d learned by heart in English class, to assure him that she was worth the effort.
“Hey, are you still there?”
“Yes. I’m waiting for you in the same place.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I’m trying to think of something interesting …”
“That doesn’t matter, the important thing is to keep talking.”
“I don’t know …”
“Maybe you should sing something, that’s easier.”
The words of the Israeli anthem came into her mind automatically and she pulled her head back inside and started to sing, and as she did so, she straightened like the encyclopedia illustrations of the evolution of monkey into man, “Our hope is not lost, the hope of two thousand years….” She sang standing tall, like an instructor in a youth movement standing before his charges and singing with them, her head held high and her heart threatening to overflow. The words of the anthem suffused her with a sense of brotherhood and strength, and she heard her clear, lone voice, separate from the host of sounds around her, “To be a free people in our land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem. To be a free people….”
A man’s head suddenly appeared under the window behind a thin covering that looked like a transparent scarf, his damp hair speckled with white dust, dark crescents under his eyes, and he asked, “What language is that?”
Panting as if she had asthma, she gave silent thanks to whoever had brought her that man, who looked robust and spoke sensibly, and said, “Hebrew.”
He reached up to the window and she reached down through it, and their hands met, crushing the dust between them.
Many times afterward she tried to re-create that moment, the first touch of their fingers, and couldn’t remember anything special that might have made it one of those moments whose fateful nature is perceived only after it has passed. He turned to come onto the train, tugged at the stuck door to open it, and stopped there, stunned by what he saw. Through his eyes—like a child seeing for the first time the amazing sights of his country through the eyes of a tourist—she saw the inside of the car, and before she could ask what had happened to the people in his car, he said, “We have to get out of here right away.”
“Where to?” She didn’t doubt for a minute that she had to go with him.
“We passed a station a few kilometers back. I assume there’s a telephone there. The cell phones are dead.”
On cold nights they’d sit in front of the fire, and the boy, from the day he began to speak, always asked to hear stories. They didn’t tell him about their lives before they’d come there, leaving that for when he grew up and could understand. They spoke as if life had begun the moment the train stopped, and Gila—as if she could look into his mind—understood how the fairy tale was taking shape in his imagination, how it would be magnified as time passed and one day would be told as a creation story: the story of how the train had stopped at an unknown place between Odessa and Frankfurt; the story of reaching the inn, which was surrounded by a network of intertwined, bare branches like a malignant tumor entrapped by blood vessels, an inn whose frightening façade enclosed an amazing interior, as in the fairy tales of wanderers who enter a lost wonderland and find a child asleep in his cradle.
After they found the boy and discovered that the telephone was dead and the electricity cut off, they went to bury the dead. The back garden was burned, and beyond it was a garden of misshapen, severed tree trunks that had screaming, evil-looking faces and grooved tongues, roaring with pain or hunger, and beyond that were gaping, smoking pits and earth that seethed, as if to show that even sand could boil. Every time the man dug a hole to bury the dead in, Gila stood guard, facing the trunks as if she feared that malevolent spirits dwelling in the evil shapes were plotting to leap out and tear the dead and the living to bits.
Later, they sat down to eat in candlelight that illuminated and shadowed their faces. The bread, the cheese, the olives, the homemade jam lent things a deceptive air of normalcy, but she couldn’t identify the sweet liquid in a pitcher whose flavor reminded her of a Columbian spread she had bought in the neighborhood supermarket during its South American Festival.
“Are you American?” she asked, as if now, after they’d been saved from the catastrophe and had walked half a day together and found the baby and buried the dead, the time had come for a personal conversation.
“Yes.”
“I’m Israeli.”
“You live in Israel?”
“Yes. And you?”
“Near New York. A little north.”
“Where exactly?”
“Do you know the area?”
“I have a sister in New Rochelle.”
“So we’re neighbors. I live in Scarsdale.”
“Ah—” She was speechless with surprise.
“Yes,” he replied, as if he knew exactly what she meant.
“What happened today….” Just as she had given the signal to start their personal conversation, she now gave the signal to stop it and realized that she didn’t have a name for what had happened.
“A new kind of catastrophe,” he said. “Probably radiation that decayed immediately.”
“Did you see how it started, how it happened?”
“No. I was in the smoking car….”
“I was in the smoking car, too!” The coincidence excited her, the discovery that within the incomprehensible reality surrounding her so inexplicably, like a nightmare, there was suddenly a certain order, and now she was beginning to catch on to its logic.
“The walls of the smoking car must have been made of a material that stopped the radiation. The window faces upward, and that probably has something to do with it, too. The boy was in a closed room, which is probably what saved him.”
“It’s like what happened in Chernobyl, isn’t it? I once saw a TV program.”
“This seems much worse than Chernobyl. But it might also be some kind of natural disaster.”
“How long do you think it’ll take them to get the trains moving again?” she asked, as if she hadn’t heard the terrifying things he’d said.
He gave her a sideways look of astonishment, as if at that very moment, as she was carefully spreading cheese on her slice of bread, he’d learned something important about her.
“That’ll probably take some time,” he said cautiously.
“They must already know in Frankfurt that something went wrong. After all, the train didn’t arrive on time, and they’re very precise there.”
“Maybe they don’t know. Maybe things went wrong there, too.”
“They’ll send someone to find out what happened,” she promised.
“Who will they send, your army?”
She seemed to be picking up a tone of derision, and she bristled. Over the last week she’d been hearing a lot of teasing about the Israeli army. “And why not the American army?” she shot at him, “We don’t have any weapons that you don’t have too.”
He laughed. For the first time since they met so many hours ago, she saw him laugh. His laughter seemed strange to her, wolfish. “Why are you laughing?”
“Because this sounds like a conversation between generals,” he said. “And besides, I like to hear women talk about the army.”
She fell silent. Something new, a faint hint of courtship, the feeling of tension familiar from other places, infused his voice when he specified what he liked in women.
She was so embarrassed by the subject of the conversation that she changed it. “Do you think the baby is healthy?”
“There are things we’ll be able to see when he wakes up, and there are things that might appear much later on,
” he said, the tone of his voice now restrained, as if it were a dangerous animal rounded up to be put back in its cage.
“What will we feed him?”
“I imagine his mother must have had a supply of food for him that would last a while. We’ll find something.” His voice was already as soothing as it had been earlier.
That night, lying on the sofa bed in the baby’s room, wearing her underpants and the Indian woman’s lovely nightgown, hearing the man in his double bed in the adjoining room, Gila was free to think about her home in Israel, which seemed as imaginary as a previous life viewed from the distance of the month she had spent in Odessa and the new reality that had assailed her that morning. Maybe they already knew about the catastrophe. She tried, in her imagination, to bring a picture of the house closer. Maybe, in the early evening, they’d called the hotel in Frankfurt she was supposed to be staying in and found out that she hadn’t arrived. At this very moment her husband was probably making urgent calls to his brother, a brigadier general; his cousin, the ambassador to Switzerland; and her sister in New Rochelle, speaking in a whisper from his study, trying to keep his concern from the girls for the time being. Maybe the evening news had already reported on the train that had disappeared in an area where a mysterious catastrophe had occurred; maybe they’d listed the names of the Israelis who were on the train, her name among them. At a certain point, they would have to tell her parents. Her mother would get into bed like she had when told of the death of her son in Lebanon, pull the blanket over her head, and refuse to eat or drink. How happy they’ll be when they find out she was one of the survivors! What a welcome she’d get, with flowers and a banner the girls would paint, covered with hearts pierced with arrows.
The baby suddenly began crying, and, thrust from the joys of the future to the nightmare of the present, she got up and groped her way to him in the dark. The touch of her hands or her smell, which were new to him, caused him to cry harder when she picked him up carefully, took him into her bed, held him close, and put into his mouth the nipple of the bottle she had prepared earlier according to the instructions on the box. And she said to the man who appeared in the rectangle of the door, “It’s okay. This is how I used to calm my girls,” and she didn’t realize until after he’d gone that she had mentioned her daughters to him for the first time.
Right then, before she felt the movement deep inside her, as if her body alone had recognized it first, she reached down as she had when she was pregnant, and with her fingers spread she would draw circles, soothing the fetus that was moving toward the wall of her womb. She thought she felt a movement in her belly, and suddenly, a small limb bulged from her body like a sharp fin sent to take a quick look around and then withdraw immediately. She continued to move her hand, searching for the limb that was teasing her, scorning her efforts, urging her groping fingers in one direction, disappearing into her body in another. So she lay there in the dark, her heart pounding, and pressed the unknown baby to her body, one hand holding the bottle, the other lying in wait at the bottom of her stomach.
On the day after the catastrophe, when they went back to the train station, about an hour’s walk from the inn, they met the nun who looked like a girl and the sickly, bad-tempered man she was tending to. On the previous day they had been too worn out to look around the station office and storeroom. As soon as they’d discovered that the phone line was dead, they had turned and walked in the direction indicated by the large sign advertising, in pictographs, a place to sleep and eat: a bed and an X formed by a knife and fork. On their way back to the station, they came upon a group of bronze statues: a flock of sheep, some of them pushed up against each other and some of them standing alone, and at the head of the flock, a shepherd with an army backpack slung over his shoulder. They didn’t wonder what a piece of art was doing in that remote place. They knew that ten hours earlier the man and his flock had been living creatures, and now they were frozen in time in the smoky expanse. Gila stood motionless and let her eyes register the incredible sight, and she discovered that the sights she’d seen on the previous day had blunted her sense of amazement. He touched her arm and they continued walking, their eyes growing more accustomed to a new visual language.
They found the cashier sitting in his booth, squashed against the window, his eyes gaping. The woman on the bench was also sitting as she had been the day before, her face sunk into the fur of her coat, clutching her travel case to her chest the way a mother clutches her baby. Standing up, leaning against the wall as if he’d fallen asleep on duty was a railroad employee wearing an elegant uniform covered with buttons and buttonholes. A nun suddenly appeared at the door to the office looking like a child dressed up as a nun. Agitated, she hurried over to them, sentences in Italian pouring out of her mouth. She grabbed Gila’s hand and pulled her inside the office, where an old man sat shrunken in a chair. He looked at them and cursed in German, and to the man’s question, he replied that he spoke English, and promptly began cursing in that language.
At the beginning of the third year, when she’d stopped dreaming about her girls, Gila dreamed that the rusted cars had been removed from the tracks and a sparkling new train was waiting in the station, all its doors open invitingly, its flickering lights signaling that it was about to move. By then she was sleeping in the man’s bed, and she awoke with a start. Once, she’d managed to slip out of the bed without waking him and left the house before dawn. She rode there on her bicycle, a part of her going over and over the news that the world had returned to its former state, a part of her already afraid of the moment she would part from the man. At the station, the woman stroking her tattered bag and the cashier’s skeleton bent over, counting its treasures, were still there. On the train, two skeletons had already begun to disintegrate. The passionate girl was almost completely bald; the nose of the man who had hidden his genitals had fallen off. Gila stood at the door, opposite the skeletons, and was almost relieved: and if she did manage to leave the man, who knows what she would find at home when the trains were back in operation again. Maybe the Arabs, the former owners, had come back to reclaim the house with its turquoise shutters and open balconies where she had lived since her marriage. Seventeen years ago her husband had carried her over the threshold as if she were a baby, and five years after that, he carried their two baby girls into the house in the same way. Maybe the house was deserted and the turquoise shutters had rotted and her beloved family was sitting motionless like the train people. Yet here, in the haze, life was beginning to stabilize: within a ten-minute walk from the inn, they’d discovered a treasure of flints, and two days ago they’d found another well. The tree in front of the door had begun to bear sweet, figlike fruit, and the boy had succeeded in writing another three letters in Hebrew in a handwriting similar to the one that had filled her daughters’ first-grade notebooks. On her way back to the inn, like someone who had been in a coma and had regained consciousness, she scolded herself: the house in Jerusalem was still standing, and her dear ones were alive and healthy and very worried about her.
Several months after the catastrophe, at night, panting into his neck after making love so passionate that it never ceased to surprise her, she would say to herself: this is real life. This is real life with the distinct feeling of a new kind of happiness, lived on the edge, as it sometimes is in childhood, with the intriguing sense of danger and the thrilling pulse of life that had been absent from her former life, the sort that stirs people to climb mountains of ice and race cars across the desert like a storm. But in the morning those trembling moments were forgotten, and she’d again ask him when the trains would start operating.
At the time, she regretted having taken the nun and the sick man to the inn. The nun secluded herself in her chosen room, rarely coming out and rarely eating, but the sick man, aggressive and quick to shout, would seek her out instead, lie in wait for her, taunt her. Later he would taunt the boy, too. He would draw her into conversations in which she found herself helpless, impelled to ask q
uestions she hadn’t intended to ask, giving answers she hadn’t intended to give, as if she’d lost control over what she said; later on, he’d do the same with the boy.
“Will you miss me when they find us?” he asked her on one of the first days.
“I don’t think so.” She took the opportunity for revenge.
“But we’ll never know!” The roaring laugh exposed his dark palate. “You’ll never have the chance not to miss me!” He slapped his knees, “You know why?”
“Why?” Once again, she felt that helplessness of having fallen into an invisible trap.
“Because no one will ever rescue us. We’ll be stuck here together.”
“Till when?” the trap snapped shut around her.
“Till we slaughter each other.” He threw his head back with the shrill laugh of an asthmatic.
“You’ll slaughter each other” was also one of the things the Pole had said too, his eyes riveted on the nun, who had come out of her room for a moment.
One day, on the morning she’d seen orange water spouting from a hidden spring in the pestilent area paint a stripe of wild, orange grass on the scorched earth, Gila decided to tell the man about the limb growing in her belly. But that was the day the Pole came riding to the inn on a new bicycle, clutching a huge sack in his arms. Muscular and energetic, bubbling over with ideas and speaking broken but understandable English, the Pole infused her with sudden hope: here was the man who would put things back the way they had been.
He’d learned English, he said reluctantly, from his dealings with tourists. On the nature of those dealings he refused to elaborate, as if there was still a danger he’d be extradited by the authorities, but she guessed: speculating with foreign currency, maybe pimping prostitutes.
They were happy to see him, gave him food and sat down to listen to him. This was their first encounter with an English speaker who could explain to them where they were and describe what was happening in the surrounding villages. He’d been on the road for months, he said, going from village to village on his way to his own village to see what had become of his family. His home was five hundred kilometers from there. He’d covered most of the way on foot. He’d found the bicycle at the train station and he already knew, to his regret, that he would have to leave it behind because of the poor condition of the roads. Meanwhile, he’d passed through ten villages.