Unholy Land Read online

  “I saw the wall from the airplane,” Tirosh said, searching for a topic of conversation. “It looks almost completed.”

  “Don’t be fooled,” the driver said. “It looks impressive around the city, but it’s not even reached as far as Eldoret yet, and the local tribesmen are refusing to work anywhere near Mount Elgon, and it doesn’t seem to matter how much money you offer them.”

  “Why?” Tirosh said, a little uneasily. They were coming to the outskirts of the city, Tirosh saw. The fields ended and neighbourhoods began, and he saw children playing next to a running water tap by the side of the road.

  The driver shrugged. “They say it’s haunted. But then they always say that, don’t they?”

  The file I had on Tirosh was incomplete, troubling. He had grown up near the mountain, an extinct volcano on Palestina’s border. It was and remained a strangely inhospitable land, where nature was left much as it had been when Wilbusch first came here, on that long ago expedition in 1904. Lions still prowled on the slopes and the farmers went armed, less for the wildlife than against incursions from Ugandan raiders, since the border was drawn through that region. The boy, Tirosh, grew up there, on his father’s farm, and when his mother moved to Ararat City and took him and his brother with her, he still continued to visit regularly.

  There were gaps in the collective knowledge, absences. It was the same way with the maps. Some parts of the plateau had never been accurately charted. Cattle disappeared in the Mau Escarpment, without a trace. Loggers going into the Nandi Forest reported strange sightings, of ice age carnivores the locals had named Ngoloko or Kerit , and which are otherwise called the Nandi bears. Exploring the cave system of the Elgon volcano, one came across strange objects sometimes, things that had no earthly reason to exist.

  Tirosh must have known some of this.

  He had been outside.

  As they came into the city, the world changed again, the neighbourhoods dropping off like leaves. Buildings began to have two and three stories, and Tirosh began to see shop fronts, and pedestrians walking past. Traffic grew heavier and the noise level higher. The sun beat down through a now-clear sky. They passed an open bakery, and the smell came wafting through the open car’s window, of rye bread and rugelach, followed, as they continued onwards along the Alfred Kaiser Highway, with the smell of chickens roasting on open grills, of beef fat spitting and pots of rice and maize sending fragrant wafts of steam into the air, mixing with the car fumes and the smell of the women’s long thin cigarettes and the men’s stubby cigars. Soon they were stuck in traffic, going slow, radios blaring outside: kwasa-kwasa music from the Congo, kwaito from Johannesburg, and Malawi reggae, intermixed with klezmer, orchestral music, and the latest Europop hit. Tirosh took it all in. He was home again, and it felt good. Already details of his life in Berlin were slipping away. He wished Isaac was with him, that he could show him his roots, where he came from. He never spoke Judean to Isaac. The boy heard only his mother’s tongue. Now Tirosh heard it all about him, and the familiar cadences, the mix of Ben-Yehuda’s Hebrew with Yiddish and Swahili lending a sing-song lilt and dance to even the coarsest shout, as different from German as it was possible to be.

  “Here we are,” the taxi driver said. Tirosh had been daydreaming. He shook himself awake with some surprise, and saw the entrance to the Queen of Sheba hotel rise outside the window. He paid the driver, who insisted on walking him inside, no doubt to collect his cut from the reception. Cold air hit him as soon as he crossed the threshold, as though he were leaving one climate for another, foreign one.

  At the reception desk, he paid for a room and collected his key. One of my men followed him in a few minutes later and confirmed where Tirosh was staying. We were not aware of anyone else taking an interest. In that we were wrong.

  Tirosh showered and changed. He felt energised. He left the hotel after half an hour and stepped out into the pedestrian traffic. My man followed him but lost him in the throng. For that he was later reprimanded.

  At that time, too, there was a terrorist attack in Ben Yehuda. Tirosh returned to the hotel sometime at night. Unbeknownst to me and my men, a visitor was waiting for him in his room. Words were exchanged. The first I knew of it was the next morning, when Sergeant Katz called me and woke me from a fitful sleep to tell me they’d arrested Tirosh for the murder of a man.

  4.

  My path had crossed with Tirosh’s own that night, though I did not know it at the time. He had left the hotel as described. At a roadside stall he ordered ugali with beef stew, then perched, uncomfortably, on a low plastic table, painted a chipped blue, as he ate.

  It was perhaps the first time in years that Tirosh had had this kind of food. He watched the foot traffic.

  Black-clad chasidim and children in shorts ran and weaved their way through the traffic laughing, just the way he himself had when he was a kid. He saw a group of Nandi workmen walk past, and he was witness to a road construction site nearby, which caused delays in the traffic. A taxi driver leaned out of his car’s window and screamed abuse at the supervisor, who shrugged resignedly.

  Tirosh paid and strolled away with a glass of cool sugarcane juice. The taste of the juice took him back years, to another Palestina, another life. He was not a man much given to confrontation, had notions of justice and fairness quite at odds with the running of a country. He was most comfortable in his books, his little what if fantasies. The sugarcane, raw and cold with the ice, sweet and yet with that pungent, aromatic aftertaste, revived him. He tried to think of his son but the thoughts slid away like water. The air was cooling down slowly as the sun began to set. It cast long shadows from the aerials on the rooftops, which looked like the masts on a ship, and the nightjars and swifts that stood on their tips cried like lookouts spotting new continents. Somewhere nearby a small neat Yemenite performed the three-card monte on an upturned box in the street, and a small crowd had gathered to watch and to bet. Tirosh had always admired the skill involved in this confidence game, and stopped to watch for a while, though he declined, wisely, to play.

  I myself was on my way back into the city. The Maasai delegation had arrived safely from Mombasa, the latest group to appear for the summit which was about to start. Their security was not my main concern. Borders are more than mere walls; they take other, more insidious forms.

  Night had fallen and the street lights along Zangwill Road came alive, and the air was warm, jasmine-scented, full of promise. Dusk was the time when Ararat City woke to life. Everyone was out on the street. Old men sitting outside the tea stalls played bao with great intensity, the wooden boards between them, the only sound the rhythmic song of the hard seeds constantly lifted and placed into holes across the board, and lifted again and scattered, on and on in an endless sowing. Tirosh’s father had been a bao master in his day, a Bingwa , and when he took Tirosh with him on his trips across the country, his father would sit down anywhere, with an old farmer or a market seller, a child or a grandmother, and play, and take delight in the game. Tirosh had forgotten bao, in Berlin. Now it came back to him and with it an aching understanding that his past was gone, erased, that those moments he remembered existed now only in his memory and would be gone with him. Something niggled at him, another memory, about another kind of loss, but he pushed it away. It was easy to do, now.

  He saw the bus come to a stop directly ahead. It was a red, unremarkable Sharona Co-Op bus, of the sort that ran everywhere across the plateau and beyond. It was just a city bus, and it stopped with a rattling of the brakes, and the pneumatic doors opened to let passengers out. Only a handful of passengers were waiting at the bus stop. As they began to climb into the bus, Tirosh noticed the figure of a chasidic man approach from across the road. The man was heavily clad in a long black wool coat that was wrapped tightly around him, and his head was covered in a shtreimel, a fur hat, which was pulled down low and hid his face from sight. As Tirosh watched, the man stumbled across the road as though drunk. The last of the passengers got on the bus
as he came to the bus stop and made to follow them. As he did, however, his coat flapped open and Tirosh saw, with mute incomprehension, the explosives strapped to the man’s chest and back. The driver began to shout and the man leaped onto the bus as the door was beginning to close. The driver pushed from his seat, neither young nor fit, and attacked the man, whose shtreimel fell down, exposing his frightened but determined face.

  Tirosh heard screams from on board the bus. He saw a terrified passenger look out of the window. Then an explosion ripped through the night air and all the windows on the bus blew out. Metal groaned and tore with a hideous scream, and Tirosh smelled gunpowder and blood. The heat of the explosion seared his face. All around him people were running, screaming, and he saw soldiers with guns running to the scene, past him, and sirens came alive in the distance, screaming mindlessly.

  The bus was on fire and people tried to crawl out of the windows, and all Tirosh could hear was the cries of the dying inside, a sort of broken murmuring punctuated sharply with screams. He ran towards the bus, trying to reach one of the windows, to pull someone to safety, and his hands caught on the broken glass and his blood joined that of the dying. He searched desperately for the face he’d seen. He’d seen it so quickly, and it was just the eyes, the helpless, terrified look in the person’s eyes just before the explosion. He was not aware of his cuts or burns. Someone grabbed him hard and pulled him away and he fought them, but then there were more than one and they were dragging him away, cursing and sobbing, as there was a second boom and the bus shelter and the back end of the bus exploded and sent shards of molten metal and glass everywhere.

  5.

  I was not aware of Tirosh’s presence at the time. I was still in the car when the call came, and I turned it around instantly and headed to the scene of the attack. Tirosh was taken to a first aid station and given a mild sedative. His hands were bandaged. His burns were minor. The medics had more important cases to deal with just then.

  The police had secured the scene by the time I arrived. The fire had been put out and the area swept for further explosives. The bomber’s accomplices would be on the run now, trying to hide.

  They were just beginning to bring out the bodies when I’d parked the car. This was not strictly speaking in my purview, but I stayed. There were several survivors, and the police had cut into the skeleton of the bus and brought them out to the waiting ambulances. Tirosh meanwhile had wandered away, and no one thought to detain him for questioning. Once again he’d slipped through the cracks.

  There were plenty of witnesses. Journalists were also on the scene, and television cameras with reporters speaking in that high urgent tone they use for such occasions.

  “This is why we need the wall!” someone said, and another said, “It was one of them Africans, I saw the whole thing, only he was dressed like a yeshiva boy.”

  It was happening more and more frequently. The wall was needed to stop the bleed, the echoes. But the speakers didn’t know that; they were just angry and frightened, and tonight innocent labourers and naturalised tribespeople would be locking their doors and praying to see the morning undamaged. It was not uncommon for the people seek retaliation, and at such times innocence or guilt counted little but for the colour of one’s skin. I remained on the scene until the last of the survivors and the last of the dead were carried away and the onlookers and the media pushed back. This would delay and perhaps even scupper the talks entirely, and the Congress was assembling tomorrow for the first time in full.

  Tirosh meanwhile had stumbled away until thought cohered again in his mind. He remembered other violences, other atrocities. He’d done his military service in the Disputed Territories and then served during the Second Ugandan War. Something cold and hard returned to him now. He went into a bar and ordered two shots of Waragi and downed them one after the other and then he felt calm. He had not been himself, he thought, until he returned here. He had been playing the part of somebody else.

  Do not misunderstand me. I think he was badly shaken, a man out of place in more ways than one. He did not really realise what was happening. He went back to the hotel, where my men finally spotted him. They saw him go up to his room. They did not realise someone was already waiting there for him.

  By the time I got to my office the next morning, Tirosh was sporting a black eye in addition to his injured hands. One of my men may have gotten carried away earlier. It was not uncommon for suspects to accidentally stumble down stairs or walk into doors. One does not run a security apparatus by being squeamish. Tirosh was pacing the length of my office.

  “What is the meaning of this?” he demanded when I came in.

  “Why don’t I ask the questions, Mr. Tirosh?” I suggested.

  “I didn’t do anything!” He only then seemed to register my face. “You’re that man from the airport,” he said, confused.

  “I am Special Investigator Bloom,” I said. “I apologise for not introducing myself, before. But then, I had not expected that we’d meet again so soon, Mr. Tirosh.”

  “But listen, you have to believe me!” he said. “I didn’t kill him.”

  I looked at him. I did not dislike him. What information we could obtain from the outside about our visitor was that he’d suffered a loss, was divorced, and wrote novels of little worth, and which likewise received an equal amount of attention. How he’d managed the return, I didn’t know. He had slipped once before. It was my job to prevent slippages or, failing that, to contain them. The borders between the worlds are porous.

  Yet Tirosh, I thought, could be useful to me.

  “Why not tell me what happened?” I suggested. There was a knock on the door and Katz came in with the tea. I liked it prepared the Tanzanian way, with the leaves soaked in hot milk rather than water. Katz placed the tray on my desk and departed, silently. He was a good, reliable man.

  “I didn’t do anything,” Tirosh said, sullenly.

  I stirred my tea. Gestured for him to sit down. He stared at me, hard. I waited. The air left him like a deflating balloon, and he sat down.

  “He was waiting for me in my room,” he said.

  “Menhaim?”

  He looked at me dully.

  “Yes,” he said. “We were friends at school.”

  Tirosh had returned to the hotel. He had gone up to his room. The carpeted hallway swallowed the sound of his feet. The hum of unseen air conditioners behind the walls provided a sort of static vibration, cancelling noise. When he got to his room, the door was very slightly ajar. Tirosh pushed the door open. There was a man sitting quite comfortably on the edge of the bed, holding a bottle from the hotel minibar. The top was open and the man had just lowered it from his lips when Tirosh walked in. The man had once been athletic but was now going to fat. His potbelly pressed against his chequered shirt. He had tanned, hairy arms and soft sad eyes that brightened when he saw Tirosh.

  “Lior,” he said. “It’s been a while.”

  Tirosh stood there watching him. He recognised him immediately, though the years had taken their toll on the man. Meeting old friends for the first time in years is always bittersweet: one’s recall instantly coagulates and is transformed as the young turn old in an instant. Tirosh found himself scrutinizing wrinkles, a heaviness to the face that hadn’t been there before, the strands of white woven into the man’s thinning yet once luxurious hair. He said, “Menhaim. What are you doing here?”

  “So you remember.”

  In truth he had not been so much Tirosh’s friend but Gideon’s, his brother. A few years older than Tirosh, he was often at their house, a tall, tanned boy, back then full of mischief. He had given Tirosh his first cigarette, and that sense of illicit complicity had made Tirosh feel all grown up, if but for a moment. They were under the eucalyptus trees, in the shade behind the small synagogue. Tirosh had taken in a mouthful of smoke and then begun to cough, horribly, as Menhaim laughed with delight. Later, Menhaim had been an officer in Tirosh’s platoon. They had been on the Ugandan border fo
r long, wearing days of patrols and ambushes. It was Menhaim who came to tell Tirosh about Gideon’s fall in the failed assault on Entebbe.

  He had not seen the man since Gideon’s funeral, all that time ago. It seemed another lifetime to Tirosh. In the intervening years he’d heard that Menhaim had gradually dropped out, had married a Ugandan woman, became a journalist working for small, left-leaning magazines. The war had wounded the boy he’d once been. His joy had diminished. Once he’d been radiant, the sort of boy you’d follow anywhere, and inevitably into trouble.

  Now, sitting heavily on Tirosh’s neatly made hotel bed, he looked beat-up and weary, a middle-aged man who had never become what his boyhood promised. The wedding ring was missing from his ring finger, but a light band of skin against his tan showed that it had been there until recently. The bottle in his hand was three quarters empty, and he made a futile little gesture and suddenly smiled; for a moment Tirosh saw the Menhaim he remembered.

  “How did you get in?” he said.

  Menhaim shrugged. “These doors,” he said. “There’s not much to them.”

  “I don’t mean to say I’m not glad to see you,” Tirosh said, “but what the hell are you doing in my room, Menhaim? How did you even know I was here?”

  “Famous author returns to his homeland, that’s not big news?” Menhaim said.

  Tirosh, exasperated, said, “I’m not even published here!”

  “Truly, there is no prophet in his own land,” Menhaim said. Tirosh realised the man was not going anywhere. He went to the sink and poured himself a glass of water and downed it. He pulled over one of the two chairs and sat down, facing Menhaim.

  “I’ve just seen a suicide bombing,” Tirosh said.

  “They’re more frequent now. They say they’ll stop after the wall is finished.” He gave a short, bitter laugh. “It’s a travesty, that wall. We were supposed to have a homeland, somewhere safe from oppression. Not to become the oppressors ourselves. By keeping them out we’re merely keeping ourselves in, building a modern-day ghetto. I’d hoped those days were long in the past.”