The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy

by Ellen Datlow ed.

  They were a mixed assemblage. Many of the poems formed a sort of travel journal, with date-marks from Europe and Africa. Tirosh travelled a lot while writing the poems, and wrote about the places he’d been. There were also some love poems, and some poems in a more surrealist style. The poems of a young poet: He was not a Yehuda Amichai or a Dan Pagis, but he had promise.

  She kept returning to the poem that was, perhaps, the silliest, “Little God,” but that nevertheless successfully combined for her two of the subjects that had preoccupied Tirosh in all of his poems:

  In the skies the weather forecast was written with a spit-wet finger

  On the radio the winds blew from station to station

  Little God sat on a rock, catching yellow fish.

  The weatherman said to expect a heat wave

  Little God took off his clothes

  Jumped in the water, amongst the yellow fish he swam

  His little penis piercing the water layers without resistance.

  The sea danced to the sounds of sunset

  The winds calmed down, gone home to sleep

  Perhaps watch a film

  Little God stayed alone in the water

  Happy among the yellow fish

  Soon he may come out

  Develop lungs grow hands

  Stand erect, maybe even

  Dress.

  The poem showed Tirosh’s continuous engagement with the question of the existence of God, of the struggle between religion and the science he seemed to have believed in. The combination of God and evolutionary theory in a poem that drew on an English Nonsense tradition for its purpose was of little significance, perhaps, but interesting for Nur. In another poem he wrote: “God is a teacher in Malawi / Had hardly finished High School / He doesn’t know what are vibrations / Or who is Neil Armstrong / But knows when to punish and when to reward.”

  The doors closed with an exhalation of air, the suitcase retreated behind Nur’s legs and hid there, and the train was on its way, passing out of the transparent dome of Damascus Station, its face towards the distant sea. Nur put the book on her knees and watched the streets of Damascus wake. Tall office buildings hid the sun. The streets began to fill with people. There was a tension rising inside her, a reluctance to leave her city behind. Nur did not like to travel; she liked to read. And perhaps, she thought, returning to the subject that had occupied her in the last few months, perhaps that was why she liked Tirosh: He travelled, she felt, for her sake.

  More than the other poems, however, it was the obviously political writing that interested Nur. Despite their small number they had a power, a combination of passion and anger, on the one hand the desire to get involved—and on the other, it seemed to her that the poet had wanted to stand with his arms crossed and say, Not playing, an image that never failed to make her smile.

  One of his quieter poems was “I, Jonathan”:

  In Sweden, the Arab–Israeli conflict is reduced to the television screen.

  In Sweden, it is cold, the last of the Vikings emigrated to Valhalla many years ago.

  In Sweden, it is cold and quiet.

  Magdalena rolls on the tongue the foreign words:

  “Shalom,” “Home,” “The Western Wall”

  Outside the snow falls, oblivious.

  The descendants of the Vikings do not want to fight.

  Neither do I.

  From here everything seems blurry,

  Like a dream

  (like a violent video movie,

  Like an original story by the Brothers Grimm)

  It is cold and quiet and peaceful

  And I tire of metaphors,

  Tire of death.

  The Vikings will no longer set out to conquer new lands.

  Not anymore.

  Magdalena is restless

  She wants to go out, drink, dance.

  I, a descendant of Absalom and David,

  Still hear the King’s battle cry

  The crying of his son in the oak.

  And, in the distance, Jonathan

  Looking for love

  Who would go time after time

  To seek his death on the battlefields.

  Nur stretched her legs and settled deeper into the book. From here everything seems blurry, Tirosh had written, and though Nur would have preferred the poem without the lines that immediately followed, the forced similes of movie and story, the clear language, and the final metaphor attracted her in their simplicity. She could have written her entire thesis on these poems without a qualm, but it was the cycle of poems that closed the book, with its cryptic notes and hints of the future, that called her at last from the depths of the past and caused her to sit on the empty train at this hour in the early morning, on her way to distant Al-Khaifa.

  Nur opened the book on page seventy-one and began to read that last, strange poem…

  Tirosh once wrote a cycle of haikus about his trip through Europe. “The Mediterranean waves / in a temper / after two months of parting,” she remembered (Tirosh did not pay much attention to the number of syllables, regrettably, and the poems were not true haiku), and looked through the window: The Mediterranean looked calm and inviting, a distant flash of bright light was probably the enormous golden dome of the Baha’i temple, and the green mountain in the distance was likely the forested Carmel. She put her face to the window and gazed, fascinated, at the approaching city. Haifa, whom some called the Replacement City, was busy with erected mosques and synagogues and churches, but soon the train was past the religious quarter and into the city proper: Nur grew up in a neighbourhood whose residents were mostly descendants of the first aliyah to Syria after the Small Holocaust and now, in the slow journey through the city, the many signs that advertised new books in Hebrew brought her an unexpected pleasure.

  The train slowed and finally stopped underneath a different dome, at a platform that announced itself energetically as the International Terminal. Nur rose and stretched, and the suitcase ran excitedly across the aisle like a rabbit released into freedom. Together they got off the train, and Nur found herself before a crowd of strangers, all but one calling names that weren’t her own.

  “Nur? Nur Husseini?” A woman in a summery dress approached her, hand outstretched. “You’re Nur? From Damascus University?”

  “Shulamit?”

  “Nu, so who would I be, Golda Meir?” The woman winked at her and Nur laughed.

  “Very nice to meet you.”

  “You, too. Are you hungry? Do you want to stop and drink something before we go back to the flat? Don’t worry, I prepared the guest room and a whole pile of poetry books I want your opinion on. How was the journey? Did you bring newspapers?”

  Nur said that no, she wasn’t hungry, that she would be glad to go straight to the flat, that she was grateful for the hospitality and would be happy to read the poetry books, that the journey was fine and that if Shulamit wanted a paper she brought with her a copy of Al-Iktissadiya, which she hadn’t read and was not going to anymore.

  Without noticing, while talking, Nur found herself in the complex network of the Carmelit, Haifa’s ancient subway, made simple under Shulamit’s guidance, and then they were no longer inside the Carmelit but outside, in the cool air of the mountain Nur had seen from the train, and the Mediterranean was spread below them like the map of another world.

  “Welcome to Haifa,” Shulamit said.

  Her flat was on the third floor of an apartment block built, so she said to Nur, in the last years before the Small Holocaust. At this point, upon using the term, she stopped and looked at Nur with an examining gaze. “It is hard for my generations to use those words, at least in public,” she said. “If you talk to people in the street, you’ll see we hardly ever refer to the destruction knowingly. People say ‘Before’ or ‘After,’ without saying what.”

  Nur nodded; it was the habit in the neighbourhood where she grew up, and at the university, which many Palestinians attended. Of course, she thought now, sitting on Shulamit
’s flowery sofa with her face to the small balcony and to the breeze blowing in from the Mediterranean Sea, the problem was with the expression itself: the Small Holocaust, as if it were not important enough, painful enough, as if the event were almost insignificant. People did not know what to call the wound that had erupted in their history, did not know how to define in words what had happened, and instead denied its existence with their silence. There were those among the orthodox Jews who called the event “the Third Destruction,” and the academics still referred to it as “the Small Holocaust,” but to most people there was no name for the event that brought with it such devastation—but also led to the growth of a new and unexpected flower: peace.

  Tirosh, who chased peace without success between the pages of his slim book, refused to identify with one side or another; Tirosh’s criticism, Nur thought, was of human nature itself. “There are words I do not like,” he once wrote, “especially ‘inevitable,’ when coupled with ‘war.’”

  More lines rose in her mind. “What, after all, has happened,” Tirosh wrote in his poem “Shalom, Friend,” whose title itself, so Nur argued in her thesis, ridiculed a collective ritual of mourning, “the prime minister was murdered / It isn’t the first political assassination in history;

  And I, I don’t belong to the children crying in the Square,

  More to those who smoke marijuana on the beach

  In Malawi, perhaps those who

  Wander in an acid trip

  (Hebrew is not a suitable language for writing

  About drugs). People here prefer television,

  News and terror attacks.

  She wondered what it was like, growing up in the world Before. In her world, the world that came After, television and terror attacks were things that belonged to another time, and the news in Al-Iktissadiya tended to the economic and scientific alongside large parts devoted to entertainment and even, here and there, to literature. In fact, the editor of one of the networks, whom she met at some book launch about a month before, had already expressed interest in publishing her thesis. She told this now to Shulamit, who returned from the small kitchen carrying on a tray a carafe of lemonade full of nana—mint—two tall glasses, and a plateful of cookies. “From the shop,” she said and poured Nur a glass of lemonade. “I still remember my grandfather baking us cookies, but I didn’t inherit his cooking ability, or the interest.

  “I’m sure your work will have plenty of readers,” she added. “I read the copy you sent me and it seemed interesting, a little esoteric for my taste maybe, but interesting. What are you going to do first?”

  Nur sipped the cold drink and smiled. She had liked Shulamit almost immediately, and felt much calmer now than she had as she was leaving Damascus. “I thought I’d start in the New National Library, try and find something in the archives that still hadn’t been through sorting and scanning. Then the Book Museum, the Haifa Museum, the National Museum, do the same thing, and then look in the secondhand bookshops—if there is one place where I can find something new by Tirosh, or even information about the man himself, it would be here.”

  Shulamit nodded. “A good plan,” she said. “I’ll arrange a few meetings for you—there’s a collector of poetry books I know who might be able to help, and I thought you could also go out of town, there’s the archive in Akra and some others.” A smile framed her face; Nur thought it was a pleasant face, open and comforting, and the thought raised in her a smile in reply.

  “It will be a lot of work for you to find anything,” Shulamit said.

  “I know,” Nur said. “But the chase is part of the fun.”

  Shulamit nodded in agreement, and they sat comfortably and drank lemonade, and discussed poetry.

  At the end it took Nur less than seven hours to find the start of the thread in the maze, and it happened by chance, not in a dusty archive but at the dinner table.

  “I invited a few people to meet you,” Shulamit said. “I hope that’s all right? I thought you could rest a little, I’ll order dinner from the Indian restaurant on the corner—these are all interesting people, and they all really want to meet you.”

  Nur said that as far as she was concerned it was perfectly fine, and that she’d be happy to meet Shulamit’s friends. After a two-hour rest in the guest room—which was indeed comfortably prepared for her, and was airy and spacious besides—she washed, and admitted to herself that she did not feel bad at all. The morning doubts had passed and in their place an expectation remained, accompanied by an unexpected feeling of confidence. In the coming days, she felt with a certainty that surprised her, she would meet Tirosh: It was as though he waited for her, somewhere in the twisting streets of the city that sprawled below.

  First to appear was Keren Nevoh, about forty, pretty, a lecturer on the Renaissance at Haifa University. She switched between Hebrew and a Lebanese Arabic that Nur found hard to understand. Eduard Abdallah—“But call me Eddie”—was thin and tall and talked enthusiastically about the mining initiatives in the asteroid belt. The last two guests appeared together. Shiri and Michal Livnat, identical rings on their fingers, holding hands. Michal explained with a shy smile that they had just returned from their honeymoon in Turkey. Shiri, it turned out, was a young poetess who worked in a combination of light sculpture and spoken poetry; while Michal, the quieter of the two women, was a project manager for a medium-size wetware company in Tel Aviv.

  Keren volunteered to go with Shulamit to get the food and Nur remained to talk with Eddie, Shiri, and Michal.

  “So what’s your thesis about?” Shiri asked. “Shulamit was pretty mysterious when I asked. She didn’t volunteer too many details.” She looked at Nur expectantly, and Nur felt sudden embarrassment. She didn’t talk much about Tirosh’s work and now, with an audience of listening Israelis, was unsure what to say. She explained about finding the book, about her interest in the years that came Before. About Tirosh’s political poems, and about his other poems also, the few love poems and the travel journal that read like a lyrical diary. She discovered in herself a confidence while she spoke, a passion for the subject that had never left her. She almost didn’t notice the passage of time, and was surprised when Shulamit and Keren returned, laden with food.

  “Did you tell them about ‘Song of Myself’?” Shulamit asked. “Tell them, tell them. It’s fascinating.” As she spoke she prepared the table, laying plates heaped with food on the tablecloth.

  “Isn’t that the title of a poem by Walt Whitman?” Shiri asked.

  Shulamit nodded in agreement. “Yes, yes, this Tirosh liked to quote. The entire poem is some kind of an attempt to rewrite Whitman in Hebrew. In my opinion,” she said, and looked at Nur, who laughed and said that she was right, Tirosh was heavily influenced by Whitman in the poem, but he combined in it a larger number of references to other works than in any of his other poems. “For instance,” she said, “the Haggadah, the Bible, and other Hebrew poets from that period, like Yehuda Amichai and Chana Senesh.”

  “What’s the poem about?” Eddie asked, and his expression seemed bothered, as if he was trying to remember something he had forgotten.

  “That’s it, that in Nur’s opinion Tirosh is talking in the poem about the Small Holocaust,” Shulamit said with an undecipherable look.

  “I don’t understand,” Michal said. “It was written Before, wasn’t it? So, what, you’re saying he predicted the future?”

  “‘And lest I forget you, Jerusalem’?” Nur quoted. She felt a tightness in her throat, and the atmosphere in the room changed, became attentive, almost tense. “‘The city is built on a thousand years of shit and death, a Troy of / holy destruction, a bastard daughter to a multitude of religions / worshipping death.’” The food sat on the plates. “‘I let the dead bury the dead / in large mounds of dust / let the living take care each of himself / All are the same in sleep and in death / each man and his unique oblivion disappear in a final aktzia / into the darkness of memory.’”

  She fell silent, played w
ith a fork nervously.

  “Go on,” Michal said. She held on to Shiri’s hand like a shield. “Please.”

  “I don’t understand,” Keren said. “Just because he writes like this about Jerusalem, it doesn’t mean…” She turned her head to Shulamit, who sat at the head of the table, as if asking for help.

  “He wrote more than that,” Shulamit said. “I don’t remember how it goes, Nur…?”

  Nur made herself put the fork down on the table. “‘Let the sun rise,’” she quoted, feeling sweat now despite the cool breeze blowing in from the sea, “‘Let the atom bombs fall in a splendorous bounty of cataclysmic mushrooms, / let the morning shine on a brave, new world, / let the nuclear fallout spread like a sea of shibboleths.’” She skipped several lines and said, quietly, “‘let us fade like a blessed match, that burned and consumed hearts.’”

  “The Small Holocaust wasn’t nuclear,” Eddie said. “But I see what you mean. He wrote as if one was the product of the other. As if some kind of holocaust had to, even should have, taken place.”

  Nur nodded without words, grateful for his understanding. Shiri smiled. “‘Let the sun rise,’” she said, “that’s Rotblit’s ‘Song of Peace,’ isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Shulamit said. “And that last line is from Senesh. I said he liked to quote.” She stretched in her seat and began to serve food. “Keren, toss the salad, will you? Eat, eat, before it gets cold.”

  Nur and Eddie stood on the balcony and looked at the city’s lights. The sounds of conversations and traffic and competing music emanated from below.

  “The entire meal something’s been bothering me,” Eddie said. “Like I’ve already come across this name once. Lior Tirosh. I have no idea how, it’s not as if I read much poetry, not to say in Hebrew, but I know I came across it somewhere.”

  He fell silent and looked at the view. “It’s different in space,” he said suddenly. “In the halfway point between Earth and Mars there are two days of weightlessness, and then you can float in perfect silence and look out on the entire universe. It can change people’s perspective.” He laughed. “Even though most of us remain the same, whether we’re in space or not.”