Zion's Fiction

by Zion's Fiction- A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature (retail) (epub)

  He got up suddenly, grabbed the sack he’d brought with him, spread its contents on the floor, and showed them a priest’s robe, statuettes of Jesus and his mother, bouquets of flowers made of painted clay, boxes of incense, candlesticks—objects he’d found in ruined churches.

  Gila wanted to know the name of the inn and pointed to the sign outside.

  “A Good Place for the Night,” the Pole said. “A very strange name.” He pointed toward the pestilent area and told them that near a distant train station he’d happened upon an inn called Katarina. He’d stayed there until he’d finished the supply of food.

  The man wanted to know the condition of the villages he’d passed through, and the Pole used hand movements in place of the words that did not exist in his vocabulary to describe what he’d seen: one village was sunk in mud up to the roofs of the houses; in other villages, most of the houses, made of wood, had been razed down to their foundations; in three villages, even the church, which was made of stone, had collapsed; in the fields and houses he found only dead people. On the second day after the catastrophe he’d heard a baby crying, but he couldn’t get to it, and then the crying stopped, and once he saw a young girl, who ran away from him and disappeared among the ruins.

  “No more,” he spread his hands to the sides as if to encompass all the horizons, “No more people in the world.”

  “And animals?” the man asked.

  “Animals there are.” The Pole counted on his fingers: horses, dogs, cats, mice. All hungry, all dangerous.

  “Where exactly are we?” the man asked.

  “In Poland, near the Austrian border.”

  “But the people we met don’t speak Polish,” the man said. “Around here, they speak a different language. The people from the village speak …”

  In the middle of the sentence the Pole froze. The nun had come out of her room and walked through the hallway on her way to the sick man’s room.

  “There is a nun here?” He rubbed his eyes.

  “Yes.”

  “How many are you?”

  “Five.”

  “And there are more women?”

  “No. Only a sick man and a baby.”

  “I must go to my family,” the Pole said, as if he were giving up the chance of a better life for the sake of his family.

  They told him they hoped he would find his village still standing and his family alive, supplied him with edible leaves, a bottle of water, a jar of jam from the pantry, and accompanied him to the path. Outside, the Pole tied the sack, his eyes roving constantly from window to window searching for the nun, and then he mounted his bicycle and rode off, waving to them until he disappeared.

  The first few days, which turned into the first few weeks, Gila was still expecting to hear the sound of a car or a motorcycle: a representative of the local authorities come to inform them that the train was running again; a representative of the UN sent to the area of the catastrophe who might perhaps bring some sign that all was well at home. But in the meantime, life began to take on the form of a routine. She stayed at home to watch the baby; washed clothes in the river (a five-minute walk from the inn), whose water was not good for drinking; sifted through the things they’d brought from the train; boiled leaves and roots the man brought; and then checked in a laboratory of sorts he’d set up in the kitchen. The man came back from his wanderings every evening like a man returning to his home in the suburbs to tell his family about his day in the city.

  Despite the family pattern that was taking shape, throughout the first few months Gila and the man kept their previous lives to themselves. She knew he was a chemist, married to a musician, a harpist, and the father of a son who was also planning to be a musician; he knew that she illustrated children’s books, that she was the mother of twelve-year-old twin girls, married to a businessman. She knew he had gone to Odessa to attend an international conference on ecology; he knew she had gone there to copy illustrations from an ancient book of legends kept in a museum.

  The horror outside bound them together; within the cramped togetherness they maintained their independence. He put his shirts and pants on the pile of her clothes, which was separate from the pile of cloth diapers cut from sheets, but his underwear and socks he washed himself, as if he were drawing a boundary line.

  Around the time the boy started to smile, Gila was once again seized by restlessness. For a few days now, she’d seen the funnel lower like a plane in an air force flyover, dipping and raising its nose, then mockingly disappearing in a climb, sending out unclear, anxiety-provoking signals.

  One evening, before the nun and the sick man came down from their rooms, as she was eating a tasty new dish and the child was jabbering to himself in his cradle (which had probably been a gift to celebrate his birth from a relative he would never know), she suddenly asked the man, “Is it possible that the world’s been destroyed? That we’re the last people left?” And she herself was shocked at the question.

  The man raised inquisitive eyes from the calendar he was making on a wooden tablet, as if he were assessing her ability to face the truth. But even before he replied, she understood—for the first time since she came out of the smoking car—that she might never again see her daughters or her husband or her mother or her childhood friends or the other people who had populated her life, from the woman who cleaned the stairwells to the elderly lady with the girlish braid who sold her flowers on the street corner every Friday, and for the first time she was struck with the profound awareness that her girls and her husband and all the other people in her life probably no longer existed, and she burst into tears, immediately smothered them with her hands, and lowered her head to her knees, her hands still covering her eyes. A picture flashed through her mind of her daughters standing shoulder to shoulder, waiting to be photographed, then switched rapidly into a picture of the girls sitting opposite each other at the dining room table, illustrating the invitations to their bat mitzvah party.

  Feeling the man’s warm hand sending currents of calmness along her back, she straightened up, and even though she knew that her eyelids tended to swell and redden when she cried, making her face ugly, she raised her head.

  “It’s because of my daughters.”

  “I can imagine,” he said.

  “I have no idea how this will sound to you,” she dared to say, completely vulnerable, “but I’m so glad you were in the smoking car.”

  “It’s mutual,” he said.

  And she thought that this was probably the new, flexible vocabulary that adapted itself to the time and the place and although what they’d said entailed no commitment, it nonetheless signaled a potential alliance.

  “So what does it mean—the world has been destroyed?”—she repeated the incredible words. “That no one is looking for us, that there is no place to go back to, that we’ll stay here forever without electricity, without water….” Her voice emerged in a childish singsong, an intonation appropriate to the words, “without home, or books, or paintings….”

  He suddenly hugged her tightly, pulling her out of her chair and pressing her to him, burying her head in his chest, shielding her like a parent protecting his child from all the dangers lying in wait for her, dangers she cannot imagine, as if he were trying to compensate her for the things she would not have—the loss of which was only now beginning to seep into her awareness—a list of things that she had only just begun to enumerate and that would grow longer. She sank into the consoling embrace, trying to subdue her renewed sobbing—about the electricity and the water and the terror of the funnel of air and the fact that she would probably never know the fate of her daughters.

  Suddenly she felt his hand resting inquiringly on her stomach, and she understood immediately that this was not the touch of a lover, but the pressure of a doctor’s hand feeling some worrying symptoms in the body of a patient, and like an obedient patient, she let him lift her blouse and run his expert hand, pleasant to the touch, over her belly. The tips of his fingers felt the
edge of the limb slightly above her navel, and in the momentary battle between the lump in her belly and his fingers searching for it from outside, she felt a digging movement as the limb flipped over and slipped away into the depths of her stomach like an agile diver.

  She expected him to recoil from her, from her strange body in which growths were sprouting, but he did not pull his hand away, he simply held it there as if to soothe the troubled spot and said, “I have two of them.”

  Without a word spoken, she went to his bed that night and found him waiting. As she approached in the darkness, he lifted the blanket over the place he had made for her, and when she slipped in next to him, she was immediately trapped in his embrace, her face close to his. She stopped breathing, waiting for the first movement that would dictate the movements to follow, but he remained quiet and tensed, locking her in his embrace and still waiting. She reached up to his face, trying to learn the features she knew by sight but not by touch, which was strange and new, a treasure of surprises, and she ran her fingertips over his chin, stubbly because of the blunted razor; over his jaws, his cheeks, his eyes, which closed under her touch; over the side of his nose, his lips, which opened like a trap in the darkness and caught her thumb in his teeth. She drew back in alarm and he, as if his plan had succeeded, laughed gently and reached down to the backs of her thighs and raised her nightgown over her shoulders, her arms and her hair pouring out of the neck opening. Then he bent over and pulled her under him, and they both stopped for a moment, his stomach lying against hers, before he began to move. The memory of the limbs wandering about in their bodies flickered through her mind, and though she pushed it away immediately, it left behind a faint, persistent fear. Her movements became suffused with despair when, from beneath him, as if she were verifying their existence, she moved her caressing fingers over each part of his body: his nape, his shoulders, the long back, the line of his spine swallowed up by the rise of his buttocks, the muscles of his thigh down to the back of his knee at the farthest reach of her fingertips, all of which swayed together until the movement of their bodies took on a life of its own, absorbing currents from the ground that turned it into a timeless rocking, a reminder of the soothing rocking of an earlier life, until the sweeping, protracted moment of climax that sent ripples to the edges of the body, subduing the storm, also calming the untouched place where the quivering source dwelled, and she wondered as she always did about the mysterious riddle of the body’s ability to forget and its ability to remember. And within that remembering—like everything that had happened from the moment she’d walked out of the smoking car—the echo of distant sensations rose inside her, reminiscent of the maelstrom that had begun in her body when the man entered her, and she fell backward like someone collapsing into an abyss, knowing that his body too had memories of other places that were stirring now and filling him with longing, knowing too that as long as there was the promise of this moment, always surprising in its generosity, it would be possible to bear the horror outside that bed.

  Many days passed, and their life was channeled into a routine somewhat reminiscent of the routine of the life she had left in the previous world, and yet it did not resemble it at all.

  Sometimes she heard distant voices that aroused a faint memory of a house bordered by pitango bushes, a guava tree that bore so much fruit in the spring that its heavy fragrance spread to the inner rooms, and an almond tree at the edge of the garden that dotted the earth with its fallen fruit; of a little girl building a Lego tower in her room, the walls covered with pictures of parents and two little girls, a host of parents and girls, and in another room, another little girl seen from the back, giving milk to a cat, and a man sitting in his room leafing through his papers. Sometimes the images vanished suddenly, as in a magic show, and sometimes the picture became so clear that she could dive inside it and see up close the fabric of the girl’s blouse, the cat’s whiskers twitching in the milk. The reincarnation of her previous life would alternately awaken in her and then become dormant. Sometimes a familiar smell would arouse it, sometimes a touch. Sometimes it was aroused by the light of dusk that would appear at a random moment, a faint, expectant light that even in her former life had stirred in her a mysterious longing for something unclear, a feeling of certainty that she had missed out on something, and she felt burdened by an oppressive helplessness. If only she knew what that feeling referred to, she would rally and act to change it, but her inaction and the knowledge of missed opportunity saddened her so deeply that she cried now, as she had then.

  At the beginning of the second year, turbid water fell from the sky day and night, and Gila was filled with restlessness. Now that they had a roof over their heads, a constant supply of food, a clear picture of the near future, and now that her feelings for the man were growing stronger, nightmares assailed her. She woke at night in a bloodbath. Her two girls had drowned right before her eyes, and she herself, handless, had tried to get them out by pushing and poking at them with her head, then had dived in after them, kicking her feet to raise them up, but they sank into the dark water, and she watched with desperate eyes as their hips, their shoulders, their faces, the ribbons in their long hair vanished. Dripping blood, she went into her bedroom and saw the large light fixture fall from the ceiling onto her husband sleeping in the double bed, the copper prong of the fixture directed at his head like a spear, and to the sound of bones being crushed, she woke with a shriek and found the man leaning over her, brushing her hair away from her face, whispering, “Sshh …” the way she once had whispered to her daughters.

  “Don’t you dream about them?” she dared to ask him one peaceful night.

  “I don’t have to dream; I think about them all the time.”

  “All the time?” she asked, almost insulted.

  “Yes. And I know that I’ll never see them again. I hope that if they survived, they’ll find good people the way I found you.”

  Astonished, she rebelled, refusing to accept his brand of mourning, and she kept having nightmares filled with feelings of rage and helplessness for many more days. But in the end, she surrendered, and a short while before the Pole returned, she could already think of the man as if he were her husband, even though the two were different in appearance and character, in their thoughts and actions, in the way they made love to her, and she taught herself to believe that everything she told him she could have told her husband if he had been beside her. Months later, she’d stopped dreaming about her girls and imagined them part of a large group of children their own age, studying and spending their days as if they were in the camp they used to go to every summer from the time they were eight, and becoming teenagers and young women and finding husbands as much like their father as possible. One day she noted with astonishment that her nightmares had become rare, and all of her strength was invested in worrying about the man’s safe return from his searches and about the child wandering in the garden of wooden monsters, exposed to the ravenous funnel of air. She was amazed at how old forces continued to operate like a well-oiled machine forever and how the senses were now tuned toward new people, remembering their old movements, like ancient springs forging their way along a map of channels that had altered, struggling in the depths of the earth, bearing the memory of that earlier flow, directing it toward a place that had suddenly changed. And how, after a period of paralysis when certain functions of the body had stopped, they awaken like a tree sprouting buds and continue along their path, blind to what is going on outside the shell of the body, assailed by stirrings of desire as often as in the past, causing people to grope their way to each other to find refuge, shelter, and repose; to seek affection and grace in a child, the heart opening to him when he smiled or learned something new; taking pleasure in the warmth that rose at the sight of the nun, in the sweet friendship.

  In the midst of this newly forming serenity, the Pole came back long after he had left, waving his arms in the distance like a voyager returning home, and brought turmoil with him. His wild eyes
in constant search of the nun, his hands flapping every which way, he told them about the destruction he’d found in his village. In the direction of the sunrise, on the ridge, several buildings were still standing, probably a military base, strewn with rifles and equipment and soldiers’ uniforms, but everything else was in ruins. The village was located high on the mountain—he waved his hand upward—chasms and a valley below. In the place where the church used to stand only blackened stones remained. And everything was shrouded in fog. He hadn’t met another living soul on the road, only hungry animals. He’d stopped in other villages on his way back. In one of them he’d found an undamaged house, but he didn’t take anything from it, “Except for this,” he said and pulled an antique ring inlaid with stones from his pocket and put it on the table in front of Gila, then returned his hand to his pocket, took out a plainer ring, and put it down next to the first, “And this is for the other woman.”

  The church—he continued speaking as if he hadn’t noticed that his gifts were not received with thank-yous—the church had collapsed and the wind had blown everything away, leaving only the foundation stones. His house and his brothers’ houses had been swept away, trees had been uprooted, even corpses of people and animals had been carried off. He’d seen some of the dead lying on the mountain slope, unidentifiable. Those, he’d buried. The bodies that had been swept into the chasm, he was unable to reach.

  Silence fell after the Pole stopped speaking, as tired as if he’d just made the journey again. Even the sick man didn’t snigger. Then the Pole asked, his eyes blazing, whether anyone had come to the inn in his absence. The man told him about the old woman who’d been tossed out onto their doorstep and asked if the funnel of air had also reached the distant villages. The light in the Pole’s eyes died when he heard the reply. Several times, he said, he’d seen the funnel. Once, it had almost thrown him into the abyss; another time, it almost snatched him up, but he flattened himself on the ground and held onto rocks; and three times he’d seen it from afar, twice completely empty and once sucking up a pretty, live girl, he said, fixing mesmerized eyes on the nun, who pressed her shoulders closer together, shrinking under his gaze.