Zion's Fiction

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

  The garrulous Stefan was reflected with ashy, hopeless eyes; his ingratiating smile, a rictus of pain; his neat tie, a twisted rope. Suicide.

  Elegantly slim Ruth was a gaunt, ravenous creature. In the mirror, her diaphanous dress became a transparent shroud that clung to her protruding ribs and swollen stomach. Famine.

  George, the only man in the room wearing a T-shirt with an Escher print under a sports jacket instead of a suit, incuriously glanced at his own image whose throat was slashed by a gaping wound. The Escher geometry was transformed into a chaos of bloody blobs. Murder.

  Victoria’s shiny blonde hair was a couple of gray tufts on the mottled skull. Old Age.

  Mark was reflected as a walking mass of burns, bleeding tissue, and splintered bones. Accident, she decided.

  Zoe—the others seem to defer to her, and seeing her in the mirror with the black leather harness molding her voluptuous body, her thrusting breasts like missiles, a bracelet of rusty iron splinters around her full arm, and her face covered by a helmet-like mask, Mor understood why. War was undoubtedly high on the deaths’ social ladder.

  There were, however, some visitors whose reflections left her puzzled. Maggie was one of them. When David introduced her, Mor saw a nice British woman, slightly older than the rest. When she walked by the mirror Mor glimpsed a strange scarecrow figure with stick-like arms and legs, her face painted with garish whorls.

  Mor circulated among the guests, making polite remarks, feeling strangely detached (even curiosity was evaporating), when there was a commotion at the entrance. She saw David speaking to somebody whose only visible part was a pair of fluttering hands. She quickly went there as David stepped aside, muttering something about “bad taste.” Mor found herself facing the late guest.

  He was a short, pedantic man with sandy hair and blue eyes magnified by rimless glasses.

  “Let me introduce … Daniel,” David said with a tiny pause before the name. “Daniel is retired. He does not socialize much.”

  “I thought it was my duty to come,” said the short man.

  Mor offered him a drink and steered him toward the mirror. He went willingly, planted his feet wide, and stared at his image. It was exactly the same as the man. And then Mor knew who her last guest was.

  “I’m sorry,” said Daniel. “I know how you must feel. But I had to come.”

  “Do you know me?” she asked and her voice sounded like the squeak of a mouse.

  “I know all of you,” he said.

  She looked around. Should she appeal to Stefan, Death-Suicide, who had helped her mother escape? Or to Plague, Famine, Accident, Cancer, even War? Any other death to keep her company but this.

  “You see, I’m retired now,” continued Daniel, “and looking at the whole business from a historical perspective, I can’t blame myself. I only followed orders.”

  “Can’t you come up with a better line?” she yelled. The sheer banality of it transmuted her dread into anger.

  “But it’s true. Think about it. You call the shots. You, humans. We only do what we are told. A human hand pulls the trigger or signs an order, and we mop up the resulting mess.”

  “How convenient! However, I see the others shy away from you. Could it be even they don’t approve of your methods?”

  “Sheer prejudice,” said Daniel. “Envy too. There is a great deal of jockeying for power going on among us. You’ll find out. You are one of us now, after all.”

  “Fuck you! Do you think I’m doing this to be your sister-in-law? I love David. And anyway, what are you doing here, in this city, attending a Jewish wedding?”

  Daniel only smiled, unperturbed:

  “I have attended a lot of Jewish weddings,” he said. “And of course you love David. I have seen love sacrifices too. Eventually they tend to benefit somebody, though not always the party intended.”

  They moved into a bigger apartment in Tel Aviv which David paid for out of pocket, despite the insane housing bubble going on in the city. Mor kept her mother’s house in Jerusalem. He suggested she stop teaching. There was no need, he said. She refused. She needed those hours on campus when she could pretend that life went on as usual—or better than usual. She was a married woman now. She had a diamond ring, a loving husband, and money in the bank.

  She did not want to know what David was doing when she was away. Every time she came home, she was afraid he would tell her. But he never did. They watched Netflix and ate dinner. He went through the motions of eating conscientiously, even though it was a sheer charade. He did not need ordinary food, of course, and she soon realized that he was incapable of tasting it. Despite that, his cooking was excellent.

  When they made love, David’s body glowed like ice, like frozen steel, the bluish petals of the wound-flower over his heart opening wide to disclose the dark seed of the bullet inside. On the hottest nights when Mor’s side of the bed was sticky with sweat, his body was cool and sleek. He was indefatigable, he was obliging, they would have sex for hours, until Mor would finally doze off and wake up screaming.

  Once she asked him whether deaths dreamed. He said no. Mor was sure he lied. But it was true he never slept, even though he sometimes pretended.

  They were to have a party for her friends (all of whom loved David). She sent him out with a grocery list, having decided to cook herself. The idea of letting other people eat food prepared by a death made her queasy. She was chopping lettuce when the knife slipped and bit deeply into her thumb. Mor watched dark drops of blood pool in the shallow cups of lettuce leaves. And then the bleeding stopped and the cut closed reluctantly like a disappointed mouth, the skin smoothing over, the pain receding—not into well-being but into a strange sort of numbness.

  They had an Indian take-away for her party.

  Once a week she goes shopping, and she always ends up with another colorful package among her drab plastic bags. She comes back home and tears the bright paper to reveal a miniature garment. The clothes are all in delicate colors: cream, lilac, forest green. Pink and blue are vulgar. She intends to give the child a unisex name, like her own, fit for either gender—or none.

  Watching the TV, she takes out an armful of baby clothes and keeps on folding and unfolding them, stroking them with her fingertips, checking the zippers and the buttons, her eyes on the screen. She seldom takes out the same piece on two consecutive nights. The amount of baby clothes one can accumulate in two years is considerable.

  The first time she saw her husband feed was on a bright and clear winter day. She had parked her car and was walking toward a campus gate when she heard a sharp crack, which, from her military training she recognized as a shot. People were running. A crowd was milling on the sidewalk. A man was being sick.

  A boy lay among the parked cars, a gun by his side. The boy had no face.

  The crowd buzzed with senseless words: “suicide,” “accident,” “terror.” Mor stared at the tip of her shoe, dark-stained by the puddle she stepped into. When she lifted her head she saw her husband standing by the body.

  Mor did not call out to him because she knew that he was invisible to everybody else. In the cold sunshine his nude body glistened with metal-colored highlights. His arms and legs looked melted down. But the wound-flower on his left side was alive, its fleshly petals moving hungrily. When he knelt down and dipped his fingers in the boy’s blood, it flashed a deep crimson.

  Mor was sitting in the university cafeteria, poking at her lasagna and wondering whether the cardboard taste was due to the new caterers or to her atrophying taste buds. She had become careless with her diet. Why not, since she was neither gaining nor losing any weight, no matter what she ate? But last night while she was mechanically putting potato chips in her mouth in front of the TV, one chip stuck to her palate. She took it out and discovered it was a piece of cellophane.

  It was hot and muggy; the people in the courtyard were fanning themselves and wiping their foreheads. Her long-sleeved dress was spotless.

  She sipped her coffee a
nd had to look at the black liquid in her cup to make sure it was not water.

  At least she no longer needed to fret about wrinkles and sun damage. Her face creams had been tossed into garbage, together with her tampons. Her gynecologist was concerned about amenorrhea and tried to send her to a round of tests. She did not go, of course. A death cannot die, nor can it procreate. And neither can a death’s wife.

  Somebody plunked a tray bearing a Coke and a sandwich on her table. Irritated, Mor looked up and froze. The man standing in front of her was Daniel.

  “May I?” he inquired, seating himself. This was the second shock. He was speaking Hebrew but with a slight Yiddish accent.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Traveling,” he replied. “I’m retired, you know.”

  “I should hope so!”

  He lifted a conciliatory hand:

  “I’m on your side!”

  “It’ll be a sad day when I need you on my side!”

  “You already do.” He examined his sandwich and bit off a neat semi-circle of bread and hummus. His teeth, Mor noticed, were big and yellow, as if he used to be a smoker. “Look, Hanna….”

  “Don’t you dare call me that!”

  “I gave you that name,” he said.

  She stared at the table.

  “You are like a child in a new school,” said Daniel. “All those secrets whispered behind your back, old alliances, old loves, old hates, and here you are, a newcomer, and nobody to explain the ground rules to you.”

  “And you decided to be my guide out of the goodness of your heart, I suppose.”

  He shrugged: “I do have a different perspective, you know. First, I’m very young. I still remember my mortal days.”

  “Were you human once?” she asked, horrified.

  “All of us were.”

  Seeing her expression, he laughed.

  “See? You didn’t even know that. Your husband is not being very informative, is he?”

  “How do you become…. How do you become what you are?”

  “All kinds of ways. Some of us just grow away from humankind until we discover our true vocation. It’s a gradual process, you see. Kids who play with guns and explosives, this sort of thing. Some hear the call but cannot make the crossover and remain stranded on your side, pathetic failures in their own eyes, never mind how many body bags they send to the morgue. Ted Bundy and such….”

  “Ted Bundy,” she repeated numbly. “Serial killers.”

  He airily waved his hand.

  “Quite a lot of those. They sense the vacancies.”

  “And the others?”

  “Well, sometimes it is a sort of deathbed conversion, ecstatic experience, call it whatever you like. But it’s going out of fashion. Most people on deathbeds nowadays are drugged out of their senses. And then, of course, there are such as you.”

  “Such as me?”

  “Yes. Marrying into the tribe.”

  “Are you suggesting I will become one of you?” Mor managed to keep her voice down only because she recognized a couple of her students at the next table.

  “Your husband promised you immortality, didn’t he? Well, he did not lie, but neither did he speak the truth. Characteristic of him. You can only be truly immortal if you become a death yourself.”

  “Never!” Mor cried and the girls at the next table glanced at her.

  “What else will you do? Plenty of your new relations are in-laws, so to speak. Stefan, for example, and Victoria. You should talk to her, by the way; she is a relatively new bride.”

  “Victoria? How can that be? Isn’t she Old Age?’

  Daniel nodded and finished his Coke in a single gulp.

  “Then how…. I mean, people have died of old age since the beginning of time.”

  “Precisely. That’s the point. Deaths do not procreate, but they die.”

  “How can a death die?”

  “Never heard of John Donne?” asked Daniel smugly. “‘Death, thou shalt die.’ I thought you liked literature. Not Christian literature perhaps. In any case, a death can only be killed by another death, and that under very special conditions. That’s why we have rather mixed feelings about each other. We get together out of solidarity and even affection of sorts. There is a sense of fraternity after centuries of gossiping. But we also need to keep an eye on each other. Not that it always helps. Victoria’s predecessor was assassinated by Hunger and War, Ruth and Zoe, only they called themselves by different names then. We change names pretty often. I’m proud of my current choice. You’re the only one to appreciate its meaning, really. Dani-el: ‘God judged me.’”

  “Oh, cut it out!” Mor sneered. “Cheap theology! Why would Ruth and Zoe do such a thing? What’s the gain?”

  Daniel beamed at her:

  “A very Jewish attitude, if I may say so. Well, since there are so many of us, the only way to gain influence is to enlarge the sphere of one’s activity. To some extent this does not depend on us at all. You humans are our real masters, even though most of us consider you mere cattle. But that’s just the deplorable lack of education. Not many of us read Hegel or understand the master-slave dialectic. Anyway, once a new modality of death is discovered, a new … executive comes into being by a process which, quite frankly, we don’t quite understand ourselves. The twentieth century was a fertile one. Have you met John? In the sixties he was about to crown himself King of Death, but after the demolition of the Berlin Wall he has been semiretired. Tending his garden, I assume, growing mushrooms.”

  “Mushrooms?” repeated Mor blankly. “Oh, I see. Mushroom clouds. And you?”

  “I am a different matter,” said Daniel evasively. “In any case we don’t—quite—control the course of human history, but we can give a nudge now and then. Ruth and Zoe hoped that by eliminating Old Age they would enlarge their own respective domains. The political situation was favorable, too. What they did not count on was that Mark’s demure little bride, whom everybody considered half-witted, good perhaps for crib death but nothing more ambitious, would blossom overnight into the queen of geriatric wards.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Mor’s voice rose again. “Are you grooming me to be your successor? If you think I’m about to take over the gas chambers….”

  “Please!” Daniel shook his head. “A little perspective! The gas chambers have been inactive for seventy years! No, Mor, I’m saying just the opposite. A death’s existence is boring, devoid of pleasure, not fit for a woman like you. I don’t need to tell you what our sex life is like. And no children, of course. Your husband has trapped you on purpose, for his own amusement. He cannot love you, being what he is, but he cannot even appreciate you. You are a fighter; you are resisting being assimilated. But what if the force of your resistance is such that you’ll be forever stuck in that twilight state, neither a death nor a living woman?”

  Mor looked at the wreckage of her lunch. And then she looked at the man in front of her.

  “You have a proposition,” she said. “What is it?”

  The red-eye flight was ruined by a cramped seat and talkative neighbor. But she emerged into the terminal at five a.m. feeling no worse—and no better—than after a night in her own bed.

  Guided by her cellphone, she was in Holborn by eleven. She walked down Great Holborn Street until she came to an arched entrance into a cobbled courtyard. There she had to press the button several times before the gate swung open.

  The flat was cluttered with dusty Victorian junk. The brownish liquid in her cup was either coffee or tea; even with her taste buds intact she may not have known which. Maggie took out the ingredients for the beverage from an old fridge that was not plugged in, its interior choked with bundles of cobwebby herbs.

  “Daniel thinks the world of you,” Maggie declared.

  In contrast to her place, she looked neat and very British in her twinset and pearls. As long as Mor only glanced at her briefly, the illusion held.

  “How nice,” said Mor dryly. “The
feeling is not mutual.”

  Maggie only smiled indulgently.

  “Dear Daniel! He and I have a lot in common.”

  “How so?” Mor asked.

  “We are both retired. Well, no. I’m semiretired. I still do quite a bit of freelancing, but it’s nothing compared to what it was once. I pity Daniel; so much work, and so spectacular, in such a short period, and then he is kicked out. There were certain affinities, you know, between what he did and my own skills.”

  Mor felt her gorge rise as the brownish liquid in her cup suddenly took on the tint of clotting blood. She tried to hold on to her nausea, but it subsided.

  “It is ironic,” continued Maggie chattily. “I’m the oldest one and he is … no, I take it back, he is not the youngest one, even though none of the millennials is as talented as he is.”

  “Are you really the oldest?”

  “Yes. I was the firstborn. Even before your kind was quite sure of its direction. I was there when Neanderthals scattered ochre around the skeletons of the eaten ones. I was there when shamans withered babies in their mothers’ wombs and flayed men alive without even touching them. And I still enjoy the old art. There are people, right now, dear, who are sticking needles in voodoo dolls and calling my name. Some things never change. When all the computer-guided missiles crumble to dust, I will still be there.”

  Maggie was smiling sweetly throughout the speech, but it was not her pink-glossed mouth that spoke the words. It was the other mouth, squirming beneath her skin like a black worm: the slit in the whorl-painted visage of Death-Magic.

  “But why here?” asked Mor. “Why London?”

  Maggie shrugged: “This land is so soaked in history that it’s beginning to rot like a bloated sponge. But this is not about my plans, dear. Daniel has asked me for a favor, and I see no reason to refuse. David and I have never gotten along. His modus operandi is far too mechanical for me. No spirit. So shall we start?”