Marcel Moring - In Babylon

‘Anachronism,’ I said.

‘Exactly,’ said Magnus. ‘And in a way, we are too, just as Uncle Chaim said.’

‘It all depends on how you look at it,’ said Uncle Chaim.

‘Why are you here?’

Uncle Chaim snapped shut the hand holding the watch. He stretched his face into a broad grimace. ‘Well,’ he said.

‘To help,’ Magnus said.

‘Bah,’ said Uncle Chaim.

‘To tell you how it all began and …’

‘Hm,’ said Uncle Chaim.

‘We were there when Herman was a boy, too,’ said Magnus.

‘Herman,’ said Uncle Chaim. ‘Don’t talk to me about Herman.’

‘But Herman didn’t want us.’

‘Herman,’ said Uncle Chaim, ‘only believes that things exist if you can pinch them.’

Magnus laughed. ‘Your Uncle Herman,’ he said, ‘believes what he thinks, but he doesn’t think what he believes.’

Uncle Chaim shook his head.

‘Isn’t that true?’ said Magnus.

‘What?’

‘That Herman only believes what he thinks but doesn’t think what he believes …’

Uncle Chaim opened his hand and looked at the watch. ‘I’m not so philosophical,’ he said. He turned to me, the ‘me’ that was standing before him, not the little boy on the bed who sat, his hands on the sheets, staring straight ahead. ‘We’re here because we’re here.’

‘Ah. Old Testament!’

Uncle Chaim spread his fingers. The watch leaked out in copper-coloured droplets. ‘What do you mean, Old Testament?’

‘That’s what God calls Himself: I’m here because I’m here.’

‘Magnus. Nephew. God calls Himself something very different – I am that I am. Which can also mean: I’m here because I’m here. Or: I am who I am.’

‘Yes, Magnus.’ He shook his hand. The last few drops of the melted watch splattered about.

‘Talk about anachronisms,’ Magnus said to me, nodding towards Uncle Chaim’s hand.

‘We’d better hurry, Nephew. It’s nearly daylight. Nathan?’

I looked at him with, I would say now, the candour of a child with an overactive imagination. Uncle Chaim smiled and laid his hand on my hair.

Magnus came closer. ‘What did you want to say, Nuncle?’

Uncle Chaim kept looking at me. I saw his eyes grow small, then large and gentle. He shook his head. ‘What a life,’ I heard him mumble, ‘what a world.’ Magnus stood beside him, nodding gravely. Uncle Chaim sighed and stared down at the floor. Just as I was about to follow his gaze to see what he saw there, he straightened up and his face turned into the crumpled wad that it had been before, all grins and wrinkles.

‘You know what we do with firstborn sons, don’t you?’

I frowned.

‘Firstborn sons belong to God, says the Torah. That you know. You’ve read it.’

I nodded.

‘But parents can keep their children by redeeming them. The father pays five shekels, five silver rijksdaalers. His debt is settled, he no longer has to part with his firstborn son.’

‘In our family,’ said Magnus, looking appropriately solemn, ‘that has never happened. In our family, it’s become traditional not to settle the debt to God.’

‘Probably,’ Uncle Chaim took his hand off my head and stared somewhere into the half-light of the room, ‘one of our forefathers was just too stingy, or he forgot, or, even more likely, he was too stubborn. A stubborn family, that’s what we are, Nathan. The sort of Jews that say: Yes, but …’

‘Whatever the case, we don’t do it,’ said Magnus, ‘and that means that we, firstborn sons of the house of Hollander …’

‘Levi, we’re Levites as well, priests …’

‘… that the firstborn sons of the house of Hollander belong neither to themselves nor to their family.’

‘They belong …’ Uncle Chaim hesitated. He shrugged his shoulders and looked at Magnus, then wriggled his eyebrows and leaned towards me. ‘They belong … to God.’

Magnus’s eyes rested on me expectantly. I looked around, at the little boy in bed. He looked like someone who wasn’t there.

‘Okay,’ I said.

Uncle Chaim placed both hands on my shoulders, then kneeled down heavily so his face was on a level with mine. ‘Nathan,’ he said, ‘Nathan. Don’t say “okay”. It’s not “okay”. It’s not nobility. Not a privilege. Highly dubious privilege, at best. You can go back. You can ask your father to redeem you. He won’t know what it means, but if you ask him he’ll do it for you. It’s possible, you’re allowed. Think about it.’ His face was a white-grey-yellow haze. I smelled his breath, a whiff of thyme.

‘It’s okay,’ I said, after a while.

Uncle Chaim shook his head.

Magnus shuffled closer. They were both standing so close now that it was as if I was lying under the blankets and sawheard-smelled nothing but the hollow I had made in the bed. Magnus was hay, fresh hay. ‘We’ll be back, if that’s what you decide,’ said Magnus.

‘We’ll be back,’ said Uncle Chaim.

They stood there all around me and I shut my eyes in the scent of thyme and hay and the heat of their bodies, the feathery touch of their hands on my shoulders and head and …

‘Nuncle,’ I said to Uncle Chaim.

‘Yes, child,’ he said.

‘Can you see the past?’

‘Yes.’

A cloud slid in front of the moon. It grew dark in the room and then light again, lighter than before. It was nearly morning.

‘And the future?’

There was a very long silence.

‘Yes,’ said Magnus, ‘we can see the future. But we don’t know if what we see is right.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Okay.’ The heat from their bodies was so intense that I felt myself gliding away in the paper boat of sleepiness.

‘God,’ said Uncle Chaim, ‘why this child?’

‘Shhh,’ said Magnus. ‘It’s okay. He’s right.’

Just before I reached the land of slumber and my body went limp, I heard Uncle Chaim sigh, ‘Oh, Magnus …’

Not that I had an image of God. Not that I even believed in such a thing as God. I was a child who read the Old Testament with the thirst of a desert traveller and the hunger of a fasting penitent. At night, when the Hill was swathed in velvet darkness, no wind, no voices, now and then the scuffling of a lizard on the roof, the crackling of stones in the desert, at night I lay in bed and looked at the green hands of Mickey Mouse, who kept the time in my alarm clock. And through my bedroom, in the space between Zeno’s bed and mine, the Old Testament caravans trekked from Mamre to Canaan. On the Indian rug that covered the wooden floor, Jacob fought with the angel and lay in his well, staring up at the starry night. I believed in stories. I was a believer of stories. The question of whether or not God existed didn’t interest me. God was the least of my worries.

A family of travellers, yet I never told anyone where I went each night with Uncle Chaim and Magnus. Life was confusing enough as it was. Manny worked day and night on something we knew nothing about and when he came home he fell asleep at the table. Sophie sat during the day with the other wives at Mr Feynman’s calculators, and my sisters, Zoe and Zelda, had reached the age when they were turning from girls into women and were practically unapproachable. And so I kept silent. I kept silent and I listened and as I listened I lost the distinction between then and now, here and there, reality and fantasy. That wasn’t so bad. Later, much later, I would make it my profession to be of another time, and as a child, in an environment where no one paid any attention to me, it wasn’t so bad to be considered a dreamer.

And so I became a fairy tale writer, all because of Great-Great-Grand-Uncle Chaim and Cousin Magnus. Hand-in-hand, we travelled through the forest of stories. ‘The only way to understand the world,’ Magnus once said, ‘is by telling a story. Science,’ said Magnus, ‘only teaches you the way things work. Stories help you understand.’