“Because you won’t ever be mine anyway, you’re Ilan’s,” Avram’s voice said as soon as Ilan put the headphones back on. “And me, I’ve got this imprint of you, from the first minute I saw you, and every other girl will always be just a substitute. That was clear from the start, so what do I have to look forward to? People make such a big deal out of their lives. What I’m worried about now is just the thermal discomfort, you know, those goddamn flamethrowers. Truth is, I’ve never liked shawarma. I don’t want to die, Ora.”
He laughed, he cried, and he talked to Ora, describing her body and the two of them making love. As usual, he was bolder in his imagination than he’d ever really been with her.
Ilan listened, and that morning, the day Ofer was born, he told Ora what he’d heard, for the first and last time. They never spoke of it again. She lay with her back to him and did not move. He lay close to her and quoted Avram. She heard Avram through his lips. “He was so delirious,” Ilan said. She didn’t say a word. He waited. He said nothing and asked her nothing. She lay silently. Ilan reached out and pulled down her underwear. She did not move, did not resist. At most she said his name with slight hesitation. Then he was inside her with all his force. Had he asked her whether the lovemaking was just Avram’s fantasy, she would have told him the truth. He didn’t ask. He entered her. She did not respond. She took him inside her. Her senses perked up, warning her against what she was doing, but she found that her body was eager to take him. She thought of how she had to protect the fetus inside her, but her body responded wildly, hungry for him. His arms and thighs closed in on her. His mouth burned, he bit the back of her neck, he almost went right through her. Even many years later she found it hard to believe that she’d done it. Her belly swayed, and the boy Avram had planted in her body rocked around inside her, waiting to be born, but for a few moments Ilan and she were only a man and a woman going about their business.
This is so the boy can be born, she sensed at the time, through her fog of self-sedation. And so that Ilan can be his father, and so that Ilan and I can once again be man and woman to each other.
“Hello, hello, this is the Voice of Free Magma. It’s the third night. Or fourth? I’ve lost my sense of time. I got out of the alcove before. There was total silence here for a few minutes, so I crawled out. First time since this started. I could barely move. I thought maybe the battle was over and they’d gone back to the other side of the Canal. I guess that’s not exactly the case. I think it’s still going on, at least in my area, ’cause I peeked out and saw them still crossing the Canal, masses of them, hard to believe, and I didn’t see a single one of our forces.”
He sounded completely lucid again.
“I searched the stronghold, and apart from the radio operator I saw three other bodies, all our men, in Bunker 2, totally scorched. At first I thought they were tree trunks, I swear, but then I got it—why would there be trees here? It’s the reservists from the Jerusalem brigade. When I got here on the eve of Yom Kippur, I went right down to the edge of the Canal with my notebook. It was completely quiet, and I thought everything they’d scared us with at Bavel was bullshit. I found a barrel to lean on, and I sat with my back to the water and wrote a bit, just to acclimate myself faster. And these three guys were on the lookout post above me, and they made a whole production over my writing, and I fought with them, we almost came to blows. Now I feel bad. The way they looked, I think they were executed together. Maybe they tied them to each other and then shot. What was I going to—
“Everything’s falling apart here. Iron rods, rocks, nets, bent and melted Uzis. I think I saw an Egyptian flag above the stronghold. I found three cans of meat loaf, one hummus, and one sweet corn. And most important, two bottles of water. I can’t eat the meat. I’m done with meat for the rest of my life.
“I also filled two helmets with dirt, to cover my latrine. Now that I have food, I’ll probably go back to running my bowels on full speed, ha-ha.
“Bottom line, I’m back in my cage. I crawled in here, lay down again in the dervish-sucking-himself position. If I only knew how to operate this lousy machine, damn it! Anyone there? Hello …
“I just hope it doesn’t hurt. I wish I could lose consciousness. Before, after I saw the guys in there, I tried to strangle myself with my own hands, but I started coughing and I was afraid someone would hear.
“I just hope they don’t torture me first. A guy like me is their bread and butter. I keep seeing pictures flash by. And it’s a shitty movie.
“Good thing they don’t have a lot of time to waste on me.
“But how much? A minute? Three? How long could it take?
“Just do it quickly. A bullet to the head.
“No, not the head.
“Then where?
“Okay, come on already. Come on, you sons of bitches! Fucking Egyptians—sideways-walkers!”
He yelled as loudly as he could. Then Ilan heard two ringing blows and figured Avram had slapped himself.
“Ilan,” Avram said suddenly in a voice so close and tender that it sounded like a casual phone call, “you’ll probably marry Ora in the end. Way to go, you stud. Just promise me you’ll name your son Avram, d’you hear me? But with the ‘h’—Avraham! Father of many nations! And tell him about me. I’m warning you, Ilan, if you don’t, my ghost will haunt you at night in your bed and bruise your reed.”
Then he laughed. “Listen to this! Once, before the army, I went to Ora’s house in Haifa, and her mom made me take my shoes off, you know her, but my socks were so stinky, I hadn’t changed them for maybe a week, you know me, and she sat me down in the living room, on the fauteuil, to find out who I was and what I was plotting to do with her daughter, and I was so nervous about my socks that I started telling her that when I was seventeen I’d decided to be a Stoic, and then I was an Epicurean for a while, and now I’d been a Skeptic for a few months. I gave her a whole speech so she wouldn’t notice the stench. Just a silly story. But tell it to Ora, and to the boy, to Avraham, and you can all laugh about it, why not.
“Enough,” he pleaded. “Come on, come on, whoever you are.”
“Seven notebooks, Ora—d’you get that? It was a fantastic idea. Listen, I was thinking of a series, not just one play. Three at least. One hour each. And no compromises. For once, I was going to do something huge, something like our old friend Orson’s War of the Worlds. The end of the world, I was thinking. That’s the idea, see? But not because of an alien invasion or an atom bomb. I was thinking about a meteor strike, and everyone knows exactly when it’s going to happen. ’Cause the whole idea is that the end date is known, see? Every person in the world knows exactly when—
“It kills me that I can’t tell you this. How am I going to write something without getting your confirmation, without your enthusiasm? Listen, listen, listen to me,” he talked on, but his breath was heavy.
Whenever he described a new idea to Ora or Ilan, Avram was a bundle of excitement. The heat radiated from him. Ilan tried to imagine him in his underground hovel, moving his hands and legs excitedly.
“And all of humanity knows that exactly on such and such date they will be destroyed. Not a single living thing will survive, not even animals or plants. No one gets off the hook, no exception committees, no board decisions. All of life will evaporate.
“Seven notebooks those fuckers burned!” he shouted again with sincere astonishment. “How could they screw me like that?
“Listen, the clocks will only show the time left until the evaporation. And when someone asks what time it is, it’ll only have one meaning: How long left until—
“Get it? Wait, there’s more.”
Ilan ran his tongue over his lips. Avram’s excitement had begun to infect him. He could see Avram’s inner light, which made him almost beautiful.
“For example, the museums will take their pictures and statues out of the galleries and warehouses. All the works of art. Everything will be out on the streets. Just think, Venus de Milo and Guernica
leaning on a fence outside a plain old house in Tel Aviv, or Ashkelon, or Tokyo. All the streets will be full of art and everything people have ever painted or sculpted or created. The great masters, alongside grannies from the art class at the Givatayim community center. Nahum Gutman and Renoir and Zaritsky and Gauguin, next to drawings by kindergarten kids. There’ll be pictures and sculptures everywhere, clay, iron, plasticine, stone. Millions of art works of every kind, from every age, from ancient Egypt and the Incas and India and the Renaissance, all out on the streets. Try to see it, try to see it for me. In the squares, in the tiniest alleys, on the beach, in the zoos, everywhere you look there’ll be some work of art, doesn’t matter what, a kind of massive democracy of beauty—
“And maybe—what do you think?—regular people can take home the Mona Lisa for one night. Or The Kiss. D’you think that’s too much? Wait, wait, o ye of little faith, I’ll convince you …” Avram smiled, and Ilan ached, feeling the burn of a private joke between Avram and Ora.
Ilan could see the look on Avram’s face when he was testing out a new idea. All his force would narrow into a spark of light in the depths of his eyes, one hovering glow, and at the same time his face would take on a remarkably corporeal expression, making him look almost suspicious, as though he were guessing the weight of some dubious goods he’d been handed, and then the eruption: the glow would ignite, a smile would spread, his hands and arms would open wide. “Come on, world!” Avram would bray. “Fuck me hard!”
“Well, there is one big issue I haven’t completely solved yet,” Avram murmured to himself, focused and distracted at once. “Will people dismantle all the frameworks of their lives, like their families, or will they want to leave everything just like it is right up to the last minute? What do you say? I’m also wondering if people will start telling each other nothing but the truth, right to their faces, ’cause time’s running out, you know? There’s no time.”
“In this kind of situation,” he mumbled after a few moments of silence, “even the most trivial thing, like the illustration on a can of corn, or like a pen, or even that tiny spring inside a pen, suddenly looks like a work of art, doesn’t it? The essence of all human wisdom, of all culture.
“Shit, no pen. Now. I’d really start writing it right now. Now I feel like I’m right there.”
Ilan got up and hurried to the bunker. He dug through some drawers and found a few papers the Military Rabbinate had given out for Yom Kippur. They were printed on both sides, but they had wide margins.
“Sweet Queen Elizabeth,” Avram sang over the radio. Ilan wrote.
“My queen, my sweet queen.
“How I wish to protect you from the impending disaster.
“Kings must die slowly, my queen,
“With the heavy toll of bells,
“With flower-strewn carriages,
“With a dozen pairs of black horses.”
He sang and breathed into the mouthpiece. It was hard to follow. The tune was only an awkward hum, a recitation full of pathos and air, and Ilan distractedly began to ponder the musical score that could go with the song.
“But!” Avram croaked, and Ilan could have sworn he was waving his hand up high. “Perhaps we shall kill you slightly before, beloved Queen Elizabeth.
“An expressionless servant will hand you a goblet,
“So that we can see you off appropriately,
“We will lay you down to sleep three days before the rest of us,
“In a coffin of ebony,
“(or mahogany).
“So that you shall not suffer the shame
“Of common, faceless death,
“With crude screams of fear,
“With the stinking farts that we might emit in our final moments.
“And also, my queen, my queen,
“So that the noble thoughts of you
“Do not prevent us from dying cheaply,
“As we deserve to.”
Avram stopped and let the last few words echo, and Ilan unwittingly thought: Not bad for a start, but a little too Brechtian. Kurt Weill was also in the neighborhood, and maybe Nissim Aloni, too.
“These kind of scenes, you see, Ora. I had dozens, maybe hundreds, in the notebooks. Fuck them. How am I going to reconstruct—
“Listen, there’s a line that Ilan and I like. Maybe I should say liked, because one of us, and regrettably that would be me, has to start practicing the past tense: I was, I wanted, um … I fucked, I wrote—”
His voice broke off and he started weeping softly again. It was hard to understand what he was saying.
“It’s a line written by the great Thomas Mann in Death in Venice,” he continued after a few minutes, and his voice was rigid and strained again, a poor imitation of his joking and acting voice. “It’s a great line, you have to hear it. The writer guy, the old one, whatshisface, Aschenbach, he had ‘the artist’s fear,’ you know? ‘Fear of failing to achieve his artistic goals—the concern that his time might run out before he had given fully of himself.’ Something like that. I fear, my darling, that due to the circumstances my memory is limp, and so is everything else. When they hang you, at least you’re promised one good ejaculation, but somehow I don’t think that’s the arrangement with a flamethrower—
“Hang on—
“What should we do about prisoners? Let them go? Let out murderers and thieves and rapists? How can you keep someone in prison in that state? And what do I do with death-row inmates?
“And schools?” he asks after a painful silence. “I mean, there’s no point in teaching anymore, or preparing anyone for the future when it’s obvious they don’t have one, they don’t have anything. Besides, I imagine most kids would leave school. They’d want to live, to be inside life itself. On the other hand, maybe the adults will go back to school? Why not? Yes, that’s not bad.” He giggled in delight. “There’ll probably be loads of people who want to reconstruct that time in their lives.
“This rag stinks to high heaven, but at least it’s stopped bleeding. Hard to move my arm. The excruciating pain has come back in the last few minutes. Fever’s going up, too. I’m dying to take my clothes off, but I don’t want to be naked when they come. Mustn’t give them any ideas.”
He was panting like a dog. Ilan could feel him willing the story to trickle back into him, to revive him with its touch.
“And children will get married at nine or ten, boys and girls, so they’ll have a chance to feel something of life.”
Ilan put down his pen and rubbed his aching eyes. He saw Avram lying on his back, underground, in the little womb he’d built for himself, while the Egyptian army swarmed around him. Invincible Avram, he thought.
“They’ll get little apartments, the kids, and they’ll run their own lives. In the evenings they’ll go walking in the squares, arm in arm. The adults will look at them, sigh, and not be surprised.
“Lots of things are coming to me now.
“It’s all alive in front of my eyes.
“Hey!” Avram suddenly exclaimed with a peal of laughter. “If anyone’s listening, write down this idea with the kids for me! I don’t have a pen, what a bummer.”
“I’m writing,” Ilan mumbled. “Go on, don’t stop.”
“Maybe the governments will start drugging the citizens, in small doses, without their knowledge. Through the water supply? But why? What does that give me?
“To blur the fear?
“Have to think about that.”
Ilan remembered that Avram always joked that if he had a good idea, he was capable of working on it even inside a blender.
“He was right, that Chinese guy,” Avram said wondrously. “There’s nothing like the proximity of a flamethrower to sharpen your mind.
“And people will get rid of their cats and dogs.
“But why? Pets give comfort, don’t they?
“No, think about it. In their state, people can’t give love to anyone. They have no reserves.
“So it’s an age of total egoism
?
“I don’t get it … You mean people become completely wild? Gangs on the streets? Absolute evil? Homo homini lupus est?
“No, that’s too easy. It’s trite. I want to maintain the frameworks. Especially toward the end. That’s the power of it. That will be the power of a story like this, that people still manage to somehow keep the—”
He muttered, intermittently excited and fading, and Ilan struggled to keep up, and knew that no one had ever opened up to him like this before, not even Ora, not even when he slept with her. As he scribbled, something was being written inside him: a new, cool, lucid knowledge that he himself was not a true artist. Not like Avram. Not like him.
“And I forgot to tell you that babies will be abandoned, too.
“Yeah, yeah, parents will abandon their babies.
“Why not—my dad did it when I was five.
“Holy shit, there are so many possibilities. One year, man, one whole year I was stuck with this. It kept not working, it just stuttered and seemed unrealistic and hackneyed, and now, all at once—”
Ilan wrote it all down. And he knew, with total acceptance, that if he got out of there alive he would have to look for a new path. What he had thought of becoming, he would never be. He would not make movies. He would not make music, either. He wasn’t an artist.
“So let’s say the women will give birth in secret, in all kinds of hiding places, right? Out in nature, or in garbage dumps, parking lots, and they’ll just run away from the newborns? Yes, that’s it … Parents simply cannot tolerate the sorrow.
“This whole part is still a little weak.
“I can’t imagine what it’s like, parents. Parents and children, I can’t figure out families.
“That’s the awful thing, that people will have time to understand the exact meaning of everything that’s about to happen to them.
“On the other hand, and the other, and the other”—he was awake again now, alive—“it’s a kind of condition where you can suddenly fulfill all your dreams, all your fantasies. There’s no shame, you see? And maybe there’s no guilt, either.” He gave a quiet but triumphant laugh, as though finally acknowledging some profound, private shame to himself.