Unholy Land Read online

  “Is that my choice?” he said.

  “I could end this right now. The door is there,” I said.

  “There are other doors,” he said, and that infuriated me.

  “The only way you will leave this room is on a bloody stretcher on your way to a hole in the ground,” I said. In fact there would be no burial. His corpse would be dumped into the old rivers and washed away in the sewers. By the time he emerged into sunlight his bones would be bleached clean of his flesh.

  “Death? Your only threat to me is death?”

  He spoke a good if accented Judean.

  “Death is a given,” I said. “And after all, what is so very wrong in death? Everybody dies. All that remains is to pick the time and the place, and to do it with dignity, Joseph. The place has already been decreed. It is this room. But the time is your decision. We could end this quickly. Or we could . . . postpone. I do not recommend postponement.”

  He tried to smile at me again, but he cried out at the pressure on his back. “Pain is a great motivator,” he said.

  “Tell me about the bombing!”

  “It was not my doing.”

  “That doesn’t matter, though, does it?”

  “No,” he agreed, sadly. “That does not matter.”

  “You work at the Queen of Sheba Hotel? As a cook?”

  “A chef,” he said, with some pride.

  “You send money home?”

  “I have mouths to feed.”

  “Yet who would feed them now that you are gone?”

  I could see his hatred then. Only for a moment, and then it was gone. They keep it buried deep, but it is there all the same.

  “Perhaps your daughters could whore themselves to survive,” I suggested. “Perhaps your wife could find another husband to provide for her and share her bed. Perhaps your sons could find work as houseboys in the settlements, cleaning the dog’s shit from the master’s floor.”

  “Perhaps,” he said. His eyes saw me, and I felt a flash of fear.

  “Perhaps, perhaps,” he said again, mocking me. I thought of Tirosh then. “You would know about ifs and perhapses, outsider. But this is our land. We will survive. We will endure. The people go, the land remains. What do you care what happens to me?”

  “I don’t.”

  He laughed. It came out as a weak gurgle. There was blood on his lips. How long had he been here without water or sleep? How long had they beaten him? He had soiled himself, I saw. But he sat there like he was sitting on a throne.

  “There are other ways out,” he said. “Other doors. You should know this, more than any.”

  “Is that what you are trying to do? Open a gate? The wall—”

  “The wall will not hold us!” He was angry now, too. We were both angry.

  “How does it work?” I said. “What is the pattern?” I was shouting. “What is the pattern!”

  He laughed in my face. I pulled out a gun. I walked around the desk and came to him and put it to his head. There was no sound in the room then, but for the laboured breathing, his and mine. I watched a trail of sweat along his forehead. “Tell me,” I said. Whispered. “And this could all go away.”

  “Do what you must, outsider,” he said, and I said, “Don’t call me that!”

  His eyes were soft and sad. “You have seen it, though,” he said.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert,’” he said. “‘Where the lone and level sands stretch far away . . .’” He was quoting that awful poem by Shelley.

  I flinched and he saw it. My finger stuttered. That was all it took. The sound of the gunshot was enormous in the small room, where so many had died before. Thunder, underground. I didn’t mean to kill him. It was just that he knew too much. It rained. Blood spattered the walls. I breathed in the humid air, microscopic bits of brain and skull.

  He’d escaped me.

  But there would be others.

  I took another deep breath, re-holstered my gun and straightened my clothes. When I stepped out of the room, I told them to clean up the mess inside.

  8.

  Tirosh, meanwhile, had seen the woman get off the bus. There was nothing about this crossing to arouse suspicion. She did not appear to see him, and after a moment, she walked off, at a brisk pace, down a side street, Der Nister. Tirosh looked after her, vaguely troubled, then looked away, his mind elsewhere. He set off again down Herzl, where he saw young soldiers patrolling the street.

  They were so young, he thought. In London or Berlin those same kids would be in college, drinking in bars, working jobs to save for a round-the-world trip, or just hanging out, flirting, falling in love, playing or listening to music—not carrying guns along a hot street in the African sun, watching for invisible threats. He thought of his own son, though the thoughts were like water and kept trying to wash away, like a tide. He had never wanted Isaac to grow up to be a soldier.

  “Long march of about sixteen miles along the Elgeyo boundary,” Wilbusch had reported in his long-ago journal of the first expedition. “The rear of the caravan was attacked by a Nandi tribe, and as the porters had no good guns, the loads were stolen and the head man was wounded. Gibbons, I and some porters pursued the Nandi about five miles, but could not find them in the wood.”

  Could it have all been different? Tirosh wondered. The Zionist Congress knew the land wasn’t truly empty, no more so than Palestine, in the distant Middle East, had been. There had been people living on the land then and now. Their attacks now were merely replications of attacks then, fractals of a larger whole, history repeating. And yet what was the answer? If the Jews had remained in Europe, it would have surely meant a death sentence.

  It was hot but Tirosh walked. He did not want to ride the bus. At last he came to the main campus of the Nordau Institute. It was a large, sprawling, colonial-era building, surrounded by pleasant grounds, with an assortment of newer outer buildings around it in a ring. Trees provided ample shade and students lay on the grass, talking, laughing, passing time. Some even studied their textbooks. Tirosh was stopped at the gate by a bored security guard and given a pass. He made his way to the stone steps and entered the building. Inside it was blessedly cool, and he went up to the second floor, for his appointment.

  He found the door without undue difficulty. The metal sign, affixed to the door with four neat, small metal screws, attested that here resided Professor Falk, of the Anthropology Department. Tirosh had been taken aback by this choice, on his initial query. He had called the Institute, one of the finest universities in Palestina, and inquired as to his niece, assuming—based only on Menhaim’s vague proclamations—that his niece was studying business, or economics: something solid and sound, at any rate, even if it had led her down avenues of dubious politics.

  Instead, he had found that she studied anthropology and folklore, with a concentration on the old legends of settlement and of the Displaced. He had spoken to the departmental secretary, who had agreed to schedule him an appointment with Deborah’s thesis adviser—on whose door Tirosh was now knocking.

  “Come in,” a voice said. Tirosh pushed the door open. Beyond lay a small office crammed with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, framed old maps of the settlement and curious wooden sculptures of ferocious creatures with high front shoulders and a sloping back, like a mixture of hyena and bear. Behind the large, untidy desk sat a stooped old woman with long white hair and fever-bright eyes. She straightened as Tirosh came in and gave him a sharp glance.

  “Tirosh, Tirosh,” she said, as though trying out the name and finding it wanting, “I read one of your books.”

  “What did you think?”

  “Eh.”

  She looked at him in amusement. “Please, sit down.”

  Tirosh cleared a stack of books from a chair and sat facing her. “I was told you’re Deborah’s thesis adviser?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Have you seen her recently?”

&
nbsp; Professor Falk shrugged. “A doctorate takes three years to complete, Mr. Tirosh, at a minimum. Deborah only comes in when she needs to talk something over, or consult one of the books in the library. Sometimes I don’t see her for weeks at a time. Here at the Nordau Institute we encourage our students to conduct their research in the field. Forgive me if I’m blunt, but one doesn’t get to know a culture by sitting on one’s ass reading novels.”

  Tirosh let it go. It occurred to him, too, that Professor Falk hadn’t really answered his question. He said, “So you haven’t seen here recently?”

  “Didn’t I just say?”

  “Not really.”

  She gave him another sharp glance. He got the sense she didn’t like him. She said, “I haven’t seen her since the last time she came in to see me.”

  “Which was when?”

  “Last month, maybe?”

  “And you don’t find this a cause for concern?”

  “Why, do you?”

  Tirosh shrugged. “She’s my niece,” he said.

  “Who you haven’t seen for years. Why the sudden concern, Mr. Tirosh?”

  Because a man died to deliver a warning, Tirosh wanted to say, but didn’t. Was Deborah really at risk? He had only Menhaim’s word for that, and Menheim had seemed unstable, almost delirious, like an old Biblical prophet ranting about the nation’s sins.

  “I feel responsible,” he said. “My brother—”

  “Your brother the hero, who died in the war, yes, yes,” she said. “In our nation’s heroic and never ceasing war against its neighbours. Like I said, I don’t see why the sudden interest.”

  “And I don’t see the need for obfuscation,” Tirosh said, stiffly. “I get the impression you disapprove of my family, Professor Falk.”

  Falk stared at him, then sighed and massaged the bridge of her nose. “I’m sorry,” she said, after a moment. “I didn’t mean—”

  “I am not my father,” Tirosh said.

  “General Tirosh,” she said, and he knew the look in her eyes, had seen it so often before, when people realised who his father was. That fascination. “What is he like?”

  Tirosh shrugged, feeling weary. “I’ve not seen him in years,” he said.

  “Was it difficult, growing up with such a father?”

  “I don’t have anyone to compare with,” Tirosh said. “Anyway, we lived with my mother after a while.”

  “You are not close, you and your father?”

  He had sworn when Isaac was born that he’d be different than his father. That he’d love him wholeheartedly, that he’d be there every moment of the day for his son. When Isaac woke up crying in the night, Tirosh was there to pick him up and comfort him, and when he held his son’s tiny form in his arms, pressing the little crying creature into his chest, he would put his face to the top of the baby’s head and inhale his scent, and he thought of his father, wondering if the man had ever done the same when Tirosh himself was a boy. His father was a distant, towering figure, a powerful man moving with economic grace, always busy, surrounded by acolytes, his lieutenants and adjutants, with visiting politicians trying to press his father into service, with newspapermen and photographers looking for a story, or fundraisers looking for endorsement. Even the foreign press came calling, and in his father’s study were cut images from interviews in Le Monde or Der Spiegel or Time, of his father in uniform, later in civilian clothes, tall, tanned, smiling, posing with a rifle against the shores of Lake Victoria or with Mount Elgon in the background. As a boy Tirosh had loved and admired his father from afar; the way one only looks at a volcano.

  “No,” he said. “We are not close. Professor Falk, about my niece—”

  “Yes, I’m sorry. Do you really think there is cause for concern?”

  “I don’t know. Can you tell me what she is working on? I was only told it was to do with the wall.”

  “The wall?” Professor Falk sounded genuinely surprised. “What on Earth makes you say that?”

  “What?” Tirosh said. Ever since he’d come into this office he felt they had been at cross purposes, he and this Falk. Menhaim had been quite clear, had he not? Had he been lying?

  “Deborah is working on a study of certain legends of settlement,” Professor Falk said.

  “Legends?”

  “Yes, Mr. Tirosh. This is the Anthropology department.”

  “How is that connected to the wall?”

  “It isn’t! The wall, the wall. There was no wall here before settlement, Mr. Tirosh.”

  “But what has that got to do with—”

  “You know about the first expedition, of course,” Professor Falk said.

  “Yes?”

  “The newly formed Zionist Congress, at the time, was bitterly torn between two factions. The majority supported settlement in Palestine, a return to the Holy Land as the only acceptable option for the Jewish people. Others, who called themselves the Territorialists, wanted to seek any available land for Jewish settlement. Theodor Herzl, the Congress’s founder and its president, supported the latter. When the so-called Uganda Offer was made, Herzl supported it, but most of the Congress was opposed to the plan, and the eventual expedition reflected that. Wilbusch himself, though they don’t teach this in the history books, was a Holy Lander. He was opposed to the Uganda Plan.”

  “Wilbusch? Wilbusch was opposed to the plan?”

  Professor Falk smiled grimly. “Wilbusch was the Holy Landers’ secret weapon: their man in Africa. He was guaranteed to deliver a negative verdict. In many ways, the Uganda Plan was effectively over before it had even begun.”

  “Wilbusch was a saboteur?” Tirosh said, bemused.

  Professor Falk smiled. “He was,” she said. “But, of course, he changed his mind in the end. Or we wouldn’t be here now, would we?”

  “What changed his mind?” Tirosh said.

  “You know how the story goes,” Professor Falk said. “The men arrived at the territory. Wilbusch got lost. A hostile tribe attacked them. This is all part of the historical record.”

  “Yes.”

  “In his journal, Wilbusch makes a strange reference. He was lost, alone, on the plateau. He was out of food, perhaps delirious. He saw no living being. You have to understand he had never been to Africa before, to him this place was as remote as the mountains of the moon. On the sixth day Wilbusch found himself in the shadow of an acacia tree. The tree was decorated with dozens of bleached human skulls, hanging from the branches. It marked the presence of a holy place. Years later, in an unguarded moment, he called it a crosshatch.”

  Tirosh stirred uneasily. The chair felt uncomfortable, constricting. “What’s a crosshatch?” he said.

  “A crossing point. A place where worlds meet.”

  Tirosh stared out of the window. It had begun to rain, and the students on the grass ran back inside, textbooks over bare heads, laughing. He forgot Deborah, forgot Menhaim lying dead on the hotel room floor. Professor Falk’s voice had assumed a hypnotic quality. It was the only sound in the room. Tirosh wet his lips. They were dry.

  “Did Wilbusch say where this place was?” he said.

  “He did not. He makes no further reference to it in his report. The legend, however, tells that Wilbusch found something in that place. A mirror. And he was granted a vision, of sorts.”

  He could barely hear her. There was a place where a tree grew, in secret, in the dark, and its fruit were skulls. Wilbusch, dehydrated, lost, had stumbled into an in-between place. He followed the shadowed path into the dark. He came to a place, where a black mirror lay.

  “Wilbusch looked into the black mirror,” Professor Falk said. Her voice was soft and sad. She may have been talking for some time. He wasn’t sure.

  “What did he see?” Tirosh said.

  Shadows crawled along the walls of Professor Falk’s study. They were skeletal humans marching across a great frozen wasteland where a fire burned, day and night. Black ash rose from the fire that was contained in great big ovens, and the people m
arched, near naked and hollow eyed, towards its warmth.

  “It showed him the future,” Professor Falk said. “One future.”

  Pain built behind Tirosh’s eyes and he closed them. The images came unbidden, from somewhere he did not know: from outside. Trains travelling across the frozen plains, spilling out human cargo onto the ice, great gates, barbed wire walls, watchtowers, soldiers. Jews with yellow stars of David on their arms. A great fire, burning, a fire that never stopped.

  “Wilbusch returned a positive report, of course,” Professor Falk said. “The Congress authorised the plan. European Jewry, widely persecuted, were the first to emigrate en masse to the new land. It was said the ships never stopped coming; that if one stood on the rooftops of Mombasa, all one could see were ships like a flying carpet on the ocean, and they were all filled with Jews.”

  The pain behind his eyes ceased. When he blinked, it was the world as it’s always been, will always be. Outside the rain had stopped, and the sky was clear. Droplets of water shone brightly on the big green leaves of all the trees outside. He imagined the refugees arriving, lifting their faces to the sun and feeling the light on their faces. What must it have felt like, to be the first to arrive? A new world, a new future.

  “Like I said, it’s just a legend,” Professor Falk said.

  “A legend Deborah was studying? Is studying?”

  A note of genuine concern entered Professor Falk’s voice for the first time. “You really think she’s missing? I wouldn’t even know how to track her down. She is always off to some remote region or another. I mean, she’s a grown woman, after all. Her life is her own. No, I am sure she is fine. She’ll be in touch, sooner or later. There is no cause for alarm.”

  “I hope so,” Tirosh said.

  “I should have offered you a cup of tea. How rude of me. Would you like some tea, Mr. Tirosh? You look terrible, you know.”

  “I know,” he said. “And no, thank you. That’s kind of you, though.”

  He stood to leave. “Do you know where she last went? Did she give any indication?”

  “Kisumu, I think,” Professor Falk said. “She said something about a relic from the first expedition.”