Zion's Fiction

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

  Mor nodded and braced herself for the ceremony she assumed was about to begin. Instead, Maggie just took a more comfortable position on her sway-backed couch.

  “Once upon a time,” she said, “there was a boy who loved guns. His family was dirt-poor, and they could not afford the weapons that he wanted. His father had the only gun in the family, an old Colt Browning. One day the boy came home and saw his father sitting at the table, the top of his head blown off. He looked at his old man for a while. And then he picked up the gun lying in the pool of blood, turned around, and walked away.”

  Maggie reached under the torn cushion and pulled out a wreck of an antique gun, rusted and bent.

  “Old tales are right,” Maggie went on. “The only power stronger than death is love. When we become deaths, old loves shrivel and fall away. But just as our bodies still bear one mark of our lost mortality, so do our souls. In a dusty corner of each death’s still heart the one true love of his or her life lies sleeping. If it’s woken, the heart will beat once and stop forever. And the death shall die.”

  “David does not love anybody,” said Mor.

  “This gun is your husband’s one true love.”

  Mor’s fingers closed on the coarse metal. The rust stained them red.

  They drove up to Jerusalem to spend the Sabbath in the Holy City. It had become a habit by now. Mor bought a bottle of red wine and a couple of fat candles, which she lit in the bedroom. In the candlelight, David’s real face poked through his unconvincing flesh. She caressed the bone and thrust her tongue between the lipless teeth.

  Their mock lovemaking died down, as it always did. She sat astride the skeletal thing.

  “Don’t you ever miss it?” she asked. “The little death, la petite mort?”

  “Why should I?” he said. “I have the real thing.”

  “But not with me,” said Mor. “And I’m your wife.”

  He laughed.

  “I did not marry you for that!”

  “You did,” said Mor.

  Her hand snaked under the pile of her clothes and whipped out the gun. Quickly she pressed the muzzle to the wound in her husband’s chest and pulled the trigger. For a second, she thought it could not work. But then the body underneath her convulsed, and dark, heavy blood erupted from the wound, splattering her belly and legs. At the same time she felt a hot explosion inside herself. A single groan escaped her husband, the metallic bones of his face corroding and falling apart, the hard sleekness of his flesh growing soft and mushy, her fingers sinking into his arms and encountering only the pliancy of a child’s bones that were snapping like twigs, while she was crying out, dying a thousand little deaths in one infinite moment of time.

  When it was over, she found herself lying prone on the bed in darkness. The candles had gone out. She turned on the light. The bed was littered with a pitifully small handful of bone fragments. She was ravenously hungry. She took a shower and spent the rest of the night eating canned tuna and watching movies in Arabic.

  At dawn she went out into the clarity of Jerusalem. So early in the day, the city looked empty and innocent, its buildings dissolving into pink shadows on the craggy hills. Mor drove to the mall in Talpiot and stood by the parapet, looking down at the glorious panorama of the Mount of Olives with the golden dome of the great mosque and the dark lines of trees crossing the valley of Gehenna.

  She heard steps behind and turned. Daniel, looking fresh and dapper in a white shirt and jeans, smiled at her.

  “Well done,” he said.

  She stared at him, incredulous.

  Over the left nipple, his shirt was stained by fresh blood.

  “Thank you, Hanna. You have given me a new lease.”

  “You?” she gasped."Coming back?”

  “No, no. My old job is done. I have simply taken your late husband’s vacant place. Nature—or whoever our manager is—abhors vacuum. I am too young to retire. I knew that when there was a job opening I would be the first on the list. I’m sure I’ll significantly improve on David’s performance.”

  “I should have known,” she said dully.

  “Don’t blame yourself. You did not imagine this morning would see all the guns beaten into ploughshares, did you?”

  The city was waking up. A car honked, a child cried, a long call drifted up from the mosque in the valley.

  “Just tell me one thing,” she said. “What was your real name?”

  He shook his head.

  “I don’t remember. Perhaps I did until last night, but now, with my new position I remember some things. Piano playing, a woman with dark hair—my mother? Light on linden leaves in spring. But it’s fading, memory disappearing. Like that, see?”

  He rolled up his shirtsleeve. On the white skin Mor could see disjointed blue strokes—the remnants of a tattoo—that were being absorbed into the body even as she watched.

  “We all have our badges,” he said. “I shan’t be sorry to let this one go.”

  Mor looked into his eyes and smiled.

  “You have miscalculated, Daniel,” she said. “Or whoever you are. Killing is a spur to breeding. You should have been more careful about murdering your own. And now what will you do, you and your fellow maggots, when death becomes fruitful and multiplies? What will you feed on when life starts feeding on you?”

  He stared at her uncomprehendingly.

  “I am pregnant,” she said.

  “You can’t be! You’re still….”

  “Death’s wife. I know. But my husband died in my arms, and I am carrying his seed. I am not a pawn in your game, you smug bastard! I am the mother of the future King who will ride down this very mountain and call up the dead from their graves. He will mold ashes back into bodies and clothe burnt bones with flesh. And he will judge you as you deserve to be judged. My son is King of the living and the dead, and he will make each death beg for oblivion before he slays you all. And you, you will remember your name when you are called to his judgment!”

  Daniel’s right hand crept up, the fingers melting together, acquiring a metallic sheen, fusing into a small but deadly looking gun.

  Mor laughed. “I thought immunity from the family was part of the bargain! Fool that I was, to trust a death! But I have better protection. Go ahead, shoot me! Do it! Why can’t you? Could it be you are sensing your King? Could it be my baby is already stronger than you?”

  Daniel dropped his hand, which resumed its normal appearance. There was fear in his eyes but also something else, something that looked like relief.

  “Well,” he said, “this was not planned. But this was bound to happen, sooner or later. And of course, this is the most appropriate place for it. The only place. I wonder what went through David’s dull brain when he decided to take his Middle Eastern vacation. But even if he had a … guidance, this is irrelevant now. You are right, Mor. I cannot touch you. And I can feel the thing in your womb even though it is tinier than a mustard seed. But I wonder what it’ll be like when it’s fully grown. It’s conventional to wish a prospective mother joy, but frankly, I wonder whether you’ll have much joy in your baby. Think of your predecessors: they did not fare well with their kingly sons, who had broken their hearts before future generations bestowed upon the poor women heaps of silly titles. But in any case, Your Future Majesty, though I may be bound to obey your son, I am not going to welcome him with myrrh and frankincense. And though I may be the first one to be hauled before his judgment seat, I will maintain my innocence to the end. I only followed orders.”

  He turned and walked away, his back ramrod-straight.

  Every Friday Mor goes to the Wailing Wall, slowly wending her way through the narrow, twisting lanes of the market, bright with tourist junk and fragrant with spices, coffee, and sweat. Some shop owners recognize her and offer her bright blue beads against the evil eye, which she willingly buys. At the familiar corner stall she rests her heavy belly, sitting on a scratched aluminum chair and sipping cardamom-flavored coffee from a tiny cup. She hears shots and gl
impses a steely blue apparition disappear among the fluttering rugs. She is unmoved, and so is Ali, who continues his rapid monologue in garbled English and shakes his head when she offers to pay for the coffee.

  The square in front of the Wailing Wall is beaten into monochrome whiteness by the glare of the noon. A couple of soldiers lazing about in their glass booth throw her an indifferent glance. The women’s section of the wall is less crowded than usual; only some Orthodox heads hidden under untidy wigs are pressed to the eroded stones like a row of bushy little animals. Their men rock on the other side of the partition, their black coats soaking up heat. Mor picks up a modesty shawl from the stand to cover up her bare shoulders, walks to the wall, kisses the warm, powdery rock.

  “Soon,” she tells the unmoving weight in her womb. “Soon, honey.”

  At home she lights the Sabbath candles, fixes dinner, and sits in front of the TV, absorbing the latest litany of nuclear threats, military casualties, and political crises.

  A breaking news banner appears at the bottom of the screen when Mor feels a sickening pang in her lower abdomen. She sits up, breathless, the dinner tray pushed aside. Yes, no doubt of it, the beginning of labor, just as she had been taught in those long-ago birth preparation classes. A wave of exultation sweeps over her, overcoming another brutal spasm that feels as if somebody has grabbed a handful of her entrails and twisted them. The hem of her dress is soaked: her water has broken.

  Mor reaches for her phone to call an ambulance. A hand closes on hers.

  “No need,” says a familiar voice.

  Deftly, Maggie rearranges the cushions on the couch to prop up her back. Dazed, Mor looks around. Familiar faces look back at her. Ruth smiles shyly; Victoria pulls clean sheets out of a large tote bag; Zoe plugs in the kettle in the kitchen. Liliana shoos out the men who crowd at the door. George waves at her; somebody else—Mikhail?—flashes a V sign.

  Mor pushes Maggie aside and tries to stand up. But she can’t: the pain is too strong.

  “Why?” she cries. “What are you doing here?”

  “We want to help you,” says Ruth.

  “We want to be here when the King is born,” says Victoria.

  She looks at them mutely, and they look back: War, Famine, Plague, Old Age, and Voodoo.

  “Do you acknowledge my son, then?” asks Mor.

  “He is our King,” says Maggie. “We have been waiting for him since the beginning of time. And you are our Queen. You will intercede for us with your son.”

  The labor pains are almost continuous now; she can feel the baby impatiently pushing out of her womb. There are faint screams, booms of explosions, rattle of gunfire; it takes her a moment to realize they are coming from the TV.

  “But aren’t you afraid of him?” she cries. “Aren’t you afraid, Death, that you shall die?”

  She sees ambiguous smiles on their faces, but another twist of her guts makes her collapse on the couch, unable to push away Maggie’s solicitous hand. Zoe removes her helmet and she sees the old brown bones of a skeleton rotting in some anonymous grave. The empty eyeholes are filled with light, and Mor still has the strength to wonder: Is it the longing for oblivion or the certainty of triumph?

  White Curtain

  Pesakh (Pavel) Amnuel

  I recognized him immediately although we had not seen each other for eleven years, having last met under very different circumstances. There was a change in him: he looked older, yet, somehow, better.

  “Hello, Oleg,” I said.

  “Hello, Dima,” he answered, as if we had spent the day before as we used to, in years past, drinking and arguing about the cascading splice theory. “I knew you’d come. Sit. No, not on this chair, that’s for visitors. Sit here, on the sofa.”

  I sat down, and the sofa squeaked in protest.

  “Of course you knew,” I said. “You are the prophet.”

  “I’m no prophet,” he said sadly. “Who knows that better than you?” He spoke more slowly than ever before, enunciating each word to the last syllable.

  “Yes,” I said, not trying to hide the sarcasm. “Who better?”

  “How did you find me?” Oleg asked.

  “With difficulty,” I admitted. “But I found you. You were …”

  “No matter,” he interrupted, “it does not matter at all, what I used to be. Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why did you come? I don’t think you came just to make sure it’s me. You want something from me. Everyone does. Success? Luck?”

  If there was irony in his voice, I did not notice it. I did not need luck. Especially not from him.

  “Irina died last year,” I said, looking in his eyes. “We had been together for ten years, two months, and sixteen days.”

  He turned away from me to look at the curtained window. What did he see in that blank screen, that white expanse where all the colors of his life were mixed together? Himself, young, walking Irina to a discotheque? Or only Irina, on that long-ago day when yet another dazzling presentation he made at that morning’s seminar inspired him to believe himself irresistible to women? The day I watched, from the auditorium door, as he proposed to her with this newfound confidence, as she kissed the corner of his mouth and said that he was a little late because she loved another, and cast an eloquent glance in my direction, and he followed it and understood. The day Irina and I left him behind, defeated and deflated, useless even to himself.

  The day I saw him for the last time, until now. On the following morning Oleg Larionov, previously a promising theoretical physicist, submitted his letter of resignation. The dean, though loath to lose him, eventually would have allowed him to leave on good terms (he stamped the letter with “Approved at the end of semester”), but Oleg left without waiting for the response. He left without saying goodbye to anyone. He had been seen boarding the forty-three bus in the direction of the train station; except for that, no one had even an inkling of where he was going.

  And that was all.

  “Why did she die?” Oleg asked, his gaze still on the white, screenlike curtain. Why did you not save her? was what I heard.

  I could not. I could do nothing. My strength was in theoretical work, I excelled at splice calculations, perhaps not all, but up to a very high complexity, up to twelve branches of reality, that’s quite a lot, almost unheard-of for an analytical solution—but in reality there was nothing I could do. Irina fell ill unexpectedly and died soon after. How soon? She was diagnosed in March, and in July she was gone.

  “Brain tumor,” I said. “Could not have been predicted. There wasn’t a nexus of branching …”

  “Theoretically,” he interrupted, and I could not decide if his words mocked mine, or were a simple statement of fact.

  “I’ve been looking for you for an entire year,” I said. “And found you. As you can see. Do you remember Gennady Bortman?”

  Oleg turned toward me at last. I had expected something in his gaze, a feeling, anything. But there was nothing. He looked at me as calmly as a doctor at a patient suffering from a cold.

  “I do remember him,” said Oleg. “It’s a pity.”

  “He stayed on the branch,” I said, “which you predicted for him. Was there anything he could have done?”

  So much depended on Oleg’s answer. I did not want to think about my life. But Ira’s….

  “Dima,” said Oleg and rubbed his hands together, an old familiar gesture with which he once rubbed chalk dust off his hands after a long presentation, adding it to the floor already littered with chalk crumbs. “Dima, he could have chosen any branch in his reality. The months he had until…. Of hundreds of decisions, you understand, each time a new branch grew, but always in the direction …”

  “In our reality,” I interrupted, “only your prophesy could come true. Your branch was stronger, more resilient.”

  “Yes,” Oleg nodded, “My branch had higher probability, a million times higher.”

  “In other words,” I said, and it was important for me
to be clear, so very important that I had searched for Oleg for a year, an excruciating year of living on memories, “in other words, for a million possibilities you choose, there may be one chance for someone else’s choice?”

  “Maybe not a million,” he said, still rubbing his fingers, his gesture irritating me so much that I fought the urge to slap his hands. “Maybe ten million. Maybe a hundred billion. There is no way to measure, no statistics.”

  “You’ve had years to compile statistics,” I said. “You set yourself up as a prophet to compile statistics, don’t try to tell me you didn’t! For God’s sake, don’t tell me you are disillusioned with pure science and became a practicing prophet only to help people!”

  “I do help them …”

  “Some of them! Oleg, I’ve hung around here for a week; I listen to people waiting for their turn, some for six months, they come every day, they wait and walk away and come back, and once in a while one of your secretaries will come out and say, “He won’t see you, sorry,” and it’s no use arguing back. And some, people you pick out from the crowd, you’ll see them right away, only them, predict a happy, creative life with luck in business and personal fulfillment.”

  “Have I been wrong?”

  “Never! You are one hundred percent reliable! This means you choose the necessary branch of the multiverse with an accuracy of at least ten sigmas!”

  “Eight sigmas,” he corrected. “I have compiled enough records for eight sigmas, I need another three years …”

  “The hell with that,” I said. “I looked for you so that …”

  “It is impossible, Dima.” Oleg stopped rubbing nonexistent chalk off his fingers, put his hands on his knees, and looked me in the eyes. “You know it’s impossible. You were the one who proved the theorem, according to which …”

  “Yes,” I nodded. “I proved it. If in Branch N of the multiverse the world-line of object A is a segment of length L, this line cannot be extended within its branch by grafting it to other realities.”

  “You proved it. And what do you want from me now, Dima? Ira does not exist in this here-and-now. You could not keep her.”