Песах Амнуэль - Zion's Fiction - A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature

Then I started plummeting, an endless fall into a horrendous awful emptiness.

When I came back to visit Nana after my release from the hospital, the neighborhood was in shambles. Where Hasson’s pear tree had stood I saw just a stump.

I found out that Nana had quarreled with Orit, because Orit tried to seduce Chambalooloo. (True, as I live and breathe!) Nana had made the Tin Beggar her protégé, insisting that Orit would only make trouble for it.

The Tin Beggar, indeed, looked brand new. It told me that City Hall had awarded its efforts with a complete overhaul. It was scrubbed and polished, its nuts and bolts were tightened, and missing parts were replaced—the works. They had even given it a new eye.

Nana had gifted the newly refurbished Tin Beggar a new toaster. You should have seen its robotic delight. What a laugh!

And the mice? Your basic cold war: threats, raids, woe to the lone person who falls into the hands of the Stern-Gerlach mice. And woe to the mouse that falls into human hands. In other words, the usual. Recently, I’ve heard, in certain circles there’s talk of trying to parley with the mice.

Another thing. I’ve become a painter.

How, you ask?

Some arrangement I’ve worked out with the Tin Beggar, since I’ve had the leverage: I’d threaten to tell the authorities it had known in advance of the Stern-Gerlach mice offensive unless it gave me some of its work. Now it gives me paintings, which I sign. What a pleasure, being a painter without actually having to wield a brush. Chambalooloo gets a fair shake, too, because I award it with electronic appliances. Besides, it gets recognition by proxy as a distinguished artist. And I get paid handsomely.

And other than that?

Other than that, all is peaceful and quiet in the new Jerusalem.

In the fourth year, the funnel of air passed frequently over the house, teasing, descending to the garden of wooden monsters where the child used to wander. Every few days, Gila would hear the distant whistle grow shriller, like the siren on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day or on the eve of Memorial Day for the Fallen in War, and she’d run out and pull the boy home. She was almost late once, and at the last minute, as she grabbed him from the sucking flow, she saw the opening of the funnel up close for the first time, damp and quivering, like an elephant’s trunk. And once she was late. The boy’s arm had been sucked in, but he struggled, flapping at the mouth of the funnel, swinging his short legs and his free arm, moving away and rising, and Gila ran under him, screaming, until he was dropped on the other side of the fence into the area of the epidemic over which birds were flying in circles. He was caught in a tree, then fell to the contaminated earth along with some branches, bruised all over. Later, frightened and exhausted, he let her isolate him in his room for three days and smear his body with an ointment she made from the bark of a tree that burned the skin and its fruit, which was shaped like cats’ heads. Sometimes, when he cried and Gila was too tired, the nun would come out of her room and lovingly tend to him. But when he’d recovered from his mysterious illness and grew calm, he insisted on going out again, especially to the garden of monsters, as if he were heeding the call of his parents beckoning him to their burial place.

When the boy was outside, Gila would coax and threaten and plead with him to come in, but he, recalcitrant and rebellious, his body sturdy for a two-year-old, would slip away from the windows to the garden of warped tree trunks, and she became accustomed to straining her ears for the sound of the whistling air that heralded the coming of the funnel.

Not until he was asleep in his bed and she was secure in the refuge of the house did she stop the constant straining to hear. Then she waited for the funnel with forbidden excitement, occasionally seeing objects fly past like lightning and remembering how she had once seen a remarkable spectacle. It was as if the funnel had decided to tease her—like a naked young girl in a dark window, waiting to tease a neighbor across the way. The streams of haze rising from the ground began to move slowly, drawn in a single direction to form a clear diagonal curtain, curled at the edges and with a long, hollow space in the center, and one end of it moving lustfully, seeking prey. A large tree complete with its roots appeared suddenly at one end of the channel of clear air, flew like a shot arrow to the other end, and disappeared instantly. She stood there terrified and enthralled by the haze that was now flattening, returning to its former state, as calm as an animal whose appetite has been satisfied.

But then, the boy had already been a year old.

The first time she saw the funnel, she still hadn’t known the boy existed. As soon as she walked into the house with the man, even before they saw the five dead people, before they found the boy sleeping in his bed, they suddenly heard the noise of a storm, and a tube of bright air cut through the smoke that had already begun to darken outside. Inside the illuminated tube of space, stretched parallel to the horizon and twice the height of a person, numerous objects sailed around slowly, becoming entangled in gentle circles: stools and a bookshelf, babies’ clothes, frying pans, a mattress, a straw lampshade, landscape paintings, a tapestry of harem women, a bouquet of flowers and the vase that had once held them, pillows embroidered with silver and purple birds, a blue enamel kettle, a carpet, a woman’s purse, newspaper pages. Gila looked in horror at the contents of the ghost house hovering in front of her: not too long ago someone had read that newspaper and had drunk tea brewed in that kettle; a dog had lain on that carpet; a woman had worn the straps of that purse on her shoulder; babies had soiled those clothes. Where were they now?

The graying smoke had once again subdued the channel of air, but still she stood at the window, waiting, as if she had been told part of a story and wanted to know the ending. Then the man had come out of one of the rooms and said, “There are five dead adults here and one live baby.”

Two of the dead people had been guests, an elegant couple of Indian descent sitting in the garden on a wrought iron bench, he smoking and she brushing her hair. The three other dead people had been employees of the inn: a very tall, thin young man doing accounts at a desk in the office; an older man with gray sideburns bent over the stove in the kitchen; and a girl wearing a frilled chambermaid’s apron lying like a contortionist at the foot of a half-made bed in one of the rooms on the top floor.

Elated, Gila stood beside the sleeping baby’s bed and recalled a children’s story one of her little girls had liked and the other had loathed: the three bears come home after an evening stroll to find Goldilocks sleeping in the small bed.

The man scrutinized her, pondering, watching this unknown woman glow at the sight of the sleeping child, reach out and cover his exposed shoulder, take pleasure in something familiar amidst the chaos they had been thrown into, holding on to the temporary ordinariness of a child breathing peacefully in his bed.

Then they began a search of the inn together. Stepping noiselessly from room to room, they looked into the gleaming bathrooms, examined the beds, were drawn to the windows that looked out onto a landscape of thin columns of dust that covered the earth.

Once, when the child still obeyed her and didn’t go out into the garden, the funnel of air stopped in front of the house and tossed a cloth-wrapped bundle onto the doorstep. From the window, Gila looked at the package of rags that had been spit out at the door and saw it begin to move. A head emerged from it, the head of a very old woman. The child, who had never seen such an old person, screamed in fright. This wasn’t the first stranger he’d seen. Although he’d known the nun and the sick man from the time he was a baby, occasionally someone would stumble upon the house, speak an incomprehensible language, look pleadingly at Gila, and wolf down the food she offered. Sometimes the stranger would fall asleep in one of the armchairs, and the man would sit beside him holding a stick, and when he woke up, the man would send him on his way. Once, three wild-looking women appeared, their hair and their nails grown long. One of them reached out to touch the child, and he drew back with a cry. Then time passed, and no one came to the house until the funnel spit out the old lady. Gila went out to her and, her hand covered with cloth, looked for the signs but didn’t find even one: the backs of the old lady’s hands were not covered with brown spots, there was no swelling behind her ears and no pus leaking from her eyes. Gila dragged the old lady into the house, sat her down in an armchair, and gave her some water, which she drank slowly. The old lady sat in that armchair for three days, sipping water, taking bites of a biscuit, relieving herself in her clothes. The child stood beside her all his waking hours, studying her from every angle, imitating the sounds of her strange language. On the fourth day she spit up black blood and died. The child cried when they buried her in the yard where—this he did not know—his parents were buried along with the three employees of the inn.