Zion's Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature

Death in Jerusalem ^{Elana Gomel}

The crowd is sprinkled with Arabs in galabieh, Orthodox Jews in dusty black coats, and young girls with navel rings. People jostle and push against each other. But Mor walks freely through the crush of bodies, buoyed by the roundness of her stomach, her gaily colored maternity dress glued to it by perspiration. People respect fertility in Jerusalem.

She is relieved when she reaches the old residential area of Rehavia. The ghostly echo of prewar Europe lingers in the narrow alleyways lined with unkempt gardens. She opens the gate into the small courtyard where a rusted bicycle rests in the meager shadow of an ancient wisteria. The heat is killing her. Leaning against the wall to catch her breath, she closes her eyes and tries to cool off with a memory of blue steel and frozen candlelight.

The evening is almost bearable. This is the blessing of hilly Jerusalem as opposed to humid Tel Aviv, where summer heat lies on the land like a rotting corpse. As the sunset fades to lilac, Mor takes a shower and gingerly lowers herself into the beanbag in front of the TV. Channels flicker in a litany of war, famine, and disease.

She goes to bed early. Stretching on her back, she holds her breath, waiting for the baby’s kick, and falls asleep, still waiting.

The scrape of a chair and a man’s voice saying: “May I?”

The morning was hot, cloudless and blue, as all mornings would be for the next three months. But the man who sat by her in the campus cafeteria smelled of rain and fog. He smiled: his teeth were white and impossibly even.

They talked until she was close to being late for her class. The language of their conversation was English, as it immediately transpired that “May I?” was the full extent of David’s knowledge of Hebrew. He was from Toledo.

“I’ve been to Toledo,” she said. “They make wonderful swords.”

“Toledo, Ohio,” he corrected. “I don’t like cutting weapons.”

Was he some sort of pacifist? A pilgrim? Just a tourist? Mor did not care. He was the most beautiful man she had ever seen. Just a millisecond before she absolutely had to rush to the classroom, he asked her whether she was free in the evening.

They met at Dizengoff Square, which is not actually a square but the wide pedestrian overpass above a perpetual traffic jam. Its revolving fountain wobbled in the grayish twilight, occasionally coughing up a thin jet of water. Pigeons and pedestrians thronged the overpass, but there seemed to be a magic circle of quietude around David.

After a couple of drinks in a bar, they walked along the beach promenade, the black, oily sea heaving beyond the fluorescent strip of sand. Moonlight dribbled from the tarry sky.

“I like your name,” he said. “Mor. Does it mean something?”

“It’s a kind of spice or incense mentioned in the Bible,” she said, searching for the English word. “Oh, yeah. Myrrh.”

“Really?” he sounded interested. “I thought it had something to do with death. You know, like mortality.”

“Mortality, morbid, moribund.” She shook her head. “You are right; it does sound like it belongs with these. Funny. I never thought about this. But it’s a different word. Mort, death in French. Just a coincidence.”

Her mother wanted to name her Hanna, but Daddy objected. She insisted, and so there were two names listed on Mor’s birth certificate, even though she never used the other one. Another item to add to the list of grudges against her mother; another drop of sweetness to flavor her hazy recollections of the big, burly man who had brought her to the kindergarten one fine morning and was dead of a heart attack in the afternoon.

The silence between them seemed filled with unspoken promises. Mor tried to think what to ask him next and could not. Job, family, politics? What difference did it make? She would be happy to walk with him in this velvety dark for an eternity, just listening to the roll of waves on the bone-white beach. But did he feel the same? He asked for her phone number but made no definite promise to call. When she drove him back to his hotel (which turned out to be the expensive Sea Crest), he politely thanked her for the perfect evening and left without as much as a peck on the cheek. She fought tears on the way back home and counted the crow’s-feet around her eyes as she brushed her teeth. Next day, just as she resigned herself to another dating failure, he called.

When the phone vibrates on the kitchen counter, Mor stares at the flashing display and tries to remember who the caller is. Her memory is holed like cheese, some memories willfully expunged, some unaccountably gone. A school friend? A former colleague? Not a relative, certainly. She has none. An only daughter of an only daughter; and her mother’s entire family buried in unmarked graves.

It does not matter. She needs nobody. She has her son.

Stroking her belly, she watches the phone quiver and jump like a living thing. When it finally calms down, she tosses it into the garbage bin.

They met every day for a week. Mor learned a little more about David—enough for her to decide he was the One. He was so reassuringly normal, untainted by the feverish madness of the Middle East. He was an accountant, he said, and indeed, he was very good with numbers. His parents were dead, his numerous siblings scattered over an amazing geographical range, and there was no mention of an ex-wife or significant other. He read all the right books and had all the right opinions. He liked gadgets. Mor, being an adjunct professor in the Department of Life Sciences, listened to his technobabble with an indulgent smile. The only negative she could find was that he was surprisingly indifferent to good food, despite the plethora of culinary temptations on every street corner. Rice-stuffed vine leaves, couscous, creamy hummus, freshly baked pitas, honey-almond cake—he consumed them as dutifully and apathetically as if they were medicine. Mor told herself that was a necessary counterpoint to her own indulgences that were beginning to show in her curves.

One day he told her his return ticket was for tomorrow. The despair she felt was strong enough to frighten her. Did she really need him so much? She had her life, her friends, her job. She might meet somebody local, get married, have a family.

She was thirty-five. All of her school and army friends were married, most had children. The future stretched before her: blank, lifeless, childless.

They ate at the most expensive restaurant in Tel Aviv. David had a lot of money and spent it freely, though never recklessly. He walked her to her apartment block and pecked her on the cheek as he did every evening. Dully, she waited for him to turn around and walk away as he did every evening.

“Can I come up for coffee?” he asked.

The darkened rooms were bathed in the inflamed glow of city lights. Her neighbor’s cat caterwauled in the yard and fell silent. She tangled with her clothes, but his undressing was quick and tidy. Running her hand over his delightfully smooth chest, she was, again, struck by how cool his flesh was: like a porcelain bowl with sherbet inside. Mor felt embarrassed by the drops of sweat gathering under her armpits and in the hollow of her neck. But David’s body remained immaculate. His kisses were sterile; his mouth tasted of nothing.

His regular breathing did not speed up until it suddenly stopped. David’s perfectly groomed hair tickled her lips and pushed back her rising scream.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I cannot die. Not even a little death. So that’s all for me, but don’t worry, I’m satisfied.”

She could see him clearly. His body was glowing in the dark, a bluish glow like candlelight seen through a thick slab of ice. The translucent flesh molded itself around the geometrical beauty of curving ribs and elegantly strung vertebrae, shining with hard, steely light.

“Little death,” she repeated blankly.

He sat up. Now on the left side of his chest, just above the nipple, she could see a neat hole surrounded by petals of flesh that stirred restlessly, opening and closing like a sea anemone. The wound bled more metallic light.

“Orgasm,” he said. “The French call it la petite mort.”

“And you…”

“I am Death.”

In fact, he was only a death, one of many. Over the next couple of days he explained it again and again: gently, patiently, and reassuringly.

There were, he said, a number of deaths (he talked of them in family terms—brothers, sisters, cousins). New ones appeared from time to time and oldsters retired, though, of course, none died. Each death was responsible for a specific mode of mortality, though in emergencies (he was vague as to what those might be) they could take over each other’s domains. David’s own specialty was death by shooting.

How old was he? He did not know; could not remember. Had he ever been human? He did not know that either. Was there a God? This received a blank stare.

And in between these conversations they went for ice cream or swam in the sea or toured the labyrinthine alleys of Old Jaffa or made love. He brought her flowers every day. After a week he moved in, bringing his natty suitcase from the hotel. After two weeks he asked her to marry him.

This precipitated a crisis. She threw him out, yelling at him to go to hell. She cried for hours afterwards, only stopping when she realized that he might have done just that. Next morning he was at her door with a fresh bunch of flowers.

She could not say no. She was in love. And yet she could not say yes, either. She pleaded with him to give her more time.

“Why can’t we just live together?” she cried.

He explained that it would not be right. He wanted her to see how committed he was. And unless they were legally married, he could not give her his wedding gift. She tried to push the thought of the gift away from her deliberations—she was not to be bought, she told herself and believed it—but the magnitude of it was not so easily overlooked.

One afternoon her cell phone rang. Her mother’s officious neighbor Dvora called to tell her she was worried about Mrs. Shalev’s state of mind. She managed to introduce a not-too-subtle remark about Mor’s dereliction of her filial duties, with the unspoken “and the only child, too!” accompanying every word.

When her mother failed to pick up the phone, Mor drove up to Jerusalem. Just as she was rounding the last bend in the highway, the setting sun shone a peculiar golden-mauve light on the bare hills with their clusters of whitewashed dwellings. In such moments Jerusalem seemed not so much a city as a physical state: a lighting flicker of vertigo or a stab of pain.

Her mother was in the living room, softly crying. The usual half hour of useless recriminations followed, with Mor getting so angry with her mother’s drab misery that she felt like slapping her lined cheek. But eventually Mrs. Shalev rallied sufficiently to make tea. Mother and daughter sat at the kitchen table with a bowl of homemade cookies pushed closer to Mor’s side.

“Ima,” Mor asked. “Ima, did you ever see Death?”

Mrs. Shalev, who was stirring her tea, froze and then glanced at Mor with a sly, conspiratorial smile as if they finally got to share a grown-up secret.

“My mother did,” she said. “Your grandmother, God rest her soul! She told me about it. When they were bringing them in, in the cattle cars, she was just a child. They let her stand close to a window so she would not suffocate. There was snow outside. And there was a man standing on top of a snowdrift: an ordinary man wearing an office suit. In the depth of winter. The people pleaded and screamed, and he was writing something in his notebook. He never raised his eyes as the train passed by.”

Mor reminded herself that David never wore office attire.

“But Granny survived!” she remonstrated.

“Yes,” her mother agreed. “For a while.”

Two days later Dvora called again. When Mor came to Jerusalem, she found her mother dead in her bed. The family physician called it a heart failure but privately admitted that an overdose of tranquilizers might have played a part.

They went to Cyprus to get married. Israel has no provisions for a civil ceremony. In her increasingly sleepless nights, Mor sometimes imagined a council of elderly rabbis solemnly deliberating whether a death may convert to Judaism.

After a brief honeymoon they returned home as a married couple. Now, said David, they should have a reception for his family.

“At home?” Mor asked faintly.

“We will rent a banquet hall,” David reassured her.

A catered dinner, of course, he said casually, say, a hundred and fifty people. No, not including your friends, we can have a separate reception for them; money’s not a problem. No, love, not in Jaffa, the seaside is very pretty, but it has to be in Jerusalem. They all dream of visiting the Holy City, you may count on it.

Will they show up riding pale horses, she wanted to ask, or in clouds of lighting and thunder? But she knew she was being ridiculous. They would stand in line for passport control like everybody else.

Candles burned on the tables. People with champagne flutes and plates of canapés laughed, chatted, embraced, and wandered out onto the jasmine-scented patio.

“Wanda, Zoe, Jerome, Ervin,” David introduced them one by one even when they arrived as couples. “Mark, Yolanda, Ahmed.”

Only the first names. Did it mean that they all had the same family name?

“Maggie, Ruth, Xiaowei.”

How many? God, how many of them?

“Guido, Carl, Donna.”

Good-looking people, all of them: youngish, healthy, smiling, well dressed.

“Liliana, Eric, George.”

And properly diverse too: whites, Asians, blacks, and browns in roughly equal proportions. Mark was African American, and elegant Miranda looked like an Ethiopian model. Ahmed would blend into any Middle Eastern crowd. Susan, arriving on Roger’s arm, belied her nondescript name by sloe eyes and café-au-lait skin.

“Kalia, Roman, Patricia.”

“Nice to meet you!

“Have a drink!”

“What a lovely place!”

They all spoke English, but some with exotic accents: silky French, heavy Eastern European, or guttural Middle Eastern.

“Reginald, Oscar, Victoria.”

Strangely old-fashioned names, but nothing old-fashioned about their bearers. Women in Fendi and Prada dresses, men in Armani suits. Glitter of jewelry and expensive dental work.

“Mikhail, Gloria, Stefan.”

Greeting them at the entrance, Mor tried to guess their identities but was defeated by their impersonal gloss. She found an answer when she started to mingle. One wall of the dining space was composed of mirrors. And in the mirror she could see her new family as they really were.

Liliana was the Plague. Seen face-to-face, she was a slightly plump woman with crinkly brown hair and laughter lines. She was reflected in the mirror wearing a blood-red cloak that dragged on the floor, leaving a dark stain behind. Her pleasant features were disfigured by open sores, lips split and oozing pus. Holding a wineglass in a festering hand, her reflection smiled at Mor with missing teeth.

The garrulous Stefan was reflected with ashy, hopeless eyes; his ingratiating smile, a rictus of pain; his neat tie, a twisted rope. Suicide.

Elegantly slim Ruth was a gaunt, ravenous creature. In the mirror, her diaphanous dress became a transparent shroud that clung to her protruding ribs and swollen stomach. Famine.

George, the only man in the room wearing a T-shirt with an Escher print under a sports jacket instead of a suit, incuriously glanced at his own image whose throat was slashed by a gaping wound. The Escher geometry was transformed into a chaos of bloody blobs. Murder.

Victoria’s shiny blonde hair was a couple of gray tufts on the mottled skull. Old Age.

Mark was reflected as a walking mass of burns, bleeding tissue, and splintered bones. Accident, she decided.

Zoe—the others seem to defer to her, and seeing her in the mirror with the black leather harness molding her voluptuous body, her thrusting breasts like missiles, a bracelet of rusty iron splinters around her full arm, and her face covered by a helmet-like mask, Mor understood why. War was undoubtedly high on the deaths’ social ladder.

There were, however, some visitors whose reflections left her puzzled. Maggie was one of them. When David introduced her, Mor saw a nice British woman, slightly older than the rest. When she walked by the mirror Mor glimpsed a strange scarecrow figure with stick-like arms and legs, her face painted with garish whorls.

Mor circulated among the guests, making polite remarks, feeling strangely detached (even curiosity was evaporating), when there was a commotion at the entrance. She saw David speaking to somebody whose only visible part was a pair of fluttering hands. She quickly went there as David stepped aside, muttering something about “bad taste.” Mor found herself facing the late guest.

He was a short, pedantic man with sandy hair and blue eyes magnified by rimless glasses.

“Let me introduce… Daniel,” David said with a tiny pause before the name. “Daniel is retired. He does not socialize much.”

“I thought it was my duty to come,” said the short man.

Mor offered him a drink and steered him toward the mirror. He went willingly, planted his feet wide, and stared at his image. It was exactly the same as the man. And then Mor knew who her last guest was.

“I’m sorry,” said Daniel. “I know how you must feel. But I had to come.”

“Do you know me?” she asked and her voice sounded like the squeak of a mouse.

“I know all of you,” he said.

She looked around. Should she appeal to Stefan, Death-Suicide, who had helped her mother escape? Or to Plague, Famine, Accident, Cancer, even War? Any other death to keep her company but this.

“You see, I’m retired now,” continued Daniel, “and looking at the whole business from a historical perspective, I can’t blame myself. I only followed orders.”

“Can’t you come up with a better line?” she yelled. The sheer banality of it transmuted her dread into anger.

“But it’s true. Think about it. You call the shots. You, humans. We only do what we are told. A human hand pulls the trigger or signs an order, and we mop up the resulting mess.”

“How convenient! However, I see the others shy away from you. Could it be even they don’t approve of your methods?”

“Sheer prejudice,” said Daniel. “Envy too. There is a great deal of jockeying for power going on among us. You’ll find out. You are one of us now, after all.”

“Fuck you! Do you think I’m doing this to be your sister-in-law? I love David. And anyway, what are you doing here, in this city, attending a Jewish wedding?”

Daniel only smiled, unperturbed:

“I have attended a lot of Jewish weddings,” he said. “And of course you love David. I have seen love sacrifices too. Eventually they tend to benefit somebody, though not always the party intended.”

They moved into a bigger apartment in Tel Aviv which David paid for out of pocket, despite the insane housing bubble going on in the city. Mor kept her mother’s house in Jerusalem. He suggested she stop teaching. There was no need, he said. She refused. She needed those hours on campus when she could pretend that life went on as usual—or better than usual. She was a married woman now. She had a diamond ring, a loving husband, and money in the bank.

She did not want to know what David was doing when she was away. Every time she came home, she was afraid he would tell her. But he never did. They watched Netflix and ate dinner. He went through the motions of eating conscientiously, even though it was a sheer charade. He did not need ordinary food, of course, and she soon realized that he was incapable of tasting it. Despite that, his cooking was excellent.

When they made love, David’s body glowed like ice, like frozen steel, the bluish petals of the wound-flower over his heart opening wide to disclose the dark seed of the bullet inside. On the hottest nights when Mor’s side of the bed was sticky with sweat, his body was cool and sleek. He was indefatigable, he was obliging, they would have sex for hours, until Mor would finally doze off and wake up screaming.

Once she asked him whether deaths dreamed. He said no. Mor was sure he lied. But it was true he never slept, even though he sometimes pretended.

They were to have a party for her friends (all of whom loved David). She sent him out with a grocery list, having decided to cook herself. The idea of letting other people eat food prepared by a death made her queasy. She was chopping lettuce when the knife slipped and bit deeply into her thumb. Mor watched dark drops of blood pool in the shallow cups of lettuce leaves. And then the bleeding stopped and the cut closed reluctantly like a disappointed mouth, the skin smoothing over, the pain receding—not into well-being but into a strange sort of numbness.

They had an Indian take-away for her party.

Once a week she goes shopping, and she always ends up with another colorful package among her drab plastic bags. She comes back home and tears the bright paper to reveal a miniature garment. The clothes are all in delicate colors: cream, lilac, forest green. Pink and blue are vulgar. She intends to give the child a unisex name, like her own, fit for either gender—or none.

Watching the TV, she takes out an armful of baby clothes and keeps on folding and unfolding them, stroking them with her fingertips, checking the zippers and the buttons, her eyes on the screen. She seldom takes out the same piece on two consecutive nights. The amount of baby clothes one can accumulate in two years is considerable.

The first time she saw her husband feed was on a bright and clear winter day. She had parked her car and was walking toward a campus gate when she heard a sharp crack, which, from her military training she recognized as a shot. People were running. A crowd was milling on the sidewalk. A man was being sick.

A boy lay among the parked cars, a gun by his side. The boy had no face.

The crowd buzzed with senseless words: “suicide,” “accident,” “terror.” Mor stared at the tip of her shoe, dark-stained by the puddle she stepped into. When she lifted her head she saw her husband standing by the body.

Mor did not call out to him because she knew that he was invisible to everybody else. In the cold sunshine his nude body glistened with metal-colored highlights. His arms and legs looked melted down. But the wound-flower on his left side was alive, its fleshly petals moving hungrily. When he knelt down and dipped his fingers in the boy’s blood, it flashed a deep crimson.

Mor was sitting in the university cafeteria, poking at her lasagna and wondering whether the cardboard taste was due to the new caterers or to her atrophying taste buds. She had become careless with her diet. Why not, since she was neither gaining nor losing any weight, no matter what she ate? But last night while she was mechanically putting potato chips in her mouth in front of the TV, one chip stuck to her palate. She took it out and discovered it was a piece of cellophane.

It was hot and muggy; the people in the courtyard were fanning themselves and wiping their foreheads. Her long-sleeved dress was spotless.

She sipped her coffee and had to look at the black liquid in her cup to make sure it was not water.

At least she no longer needed to fret about wrinkles and sun damage. Her face creams had been tossed into garbage, together with her tampons. Her gynecologist was concerned about amenorrhea and tried to send her to a round of tests. She did not go, of course. A death cannot die, nor can it procreate. And neither can a death’s wife.

Somebody plunked a tray bearing a Coke and a sandwich on her table. Irritated, Mor looked up and froze. The man standing in front of her was Daniel.

“May I?” he inquired, seating himself. This was the second shock. He was speaking Hebrew but with a slight Yiddish accent.

“What are you doing here?”

“Traveling,” he replied. “I’m retired, you know.”

“I should hope so!”

He lifted a conciliatory hand:

“I’m on your side!”

“It’ll be a sad day when I need you on my side!”

“You already do.” He examined his sandwich and bit off a neat semi-circle of bread and hummus. His teeth, Mor noticed, were big and yellow, as if he used to be a smoker. “Look, Hanna….”

“Don’t you dare call me that!”

“I gave you that name,” he said.

She stared at the table.

“You are like a child in a new school,” said Daniel. “All those secrets whispered behind your back, old alliances, old loves, old hates, and here you are, a newcomer, and nobody to explain the ground rules to you.”

“And you decided to be my guide out of the goodness of your heart, I suppose.”

He shrugged: “I do have a different perspective, you know. First, I’m very young. I still remember my mortal days.”

“Were you human once?” she asked, horrified.

“All of us were.”

Seeing her expression, he laughed.

“See? You didn’t even know that. Your husband is not being very informative, is he?”

“How do you become…. How do you become what you are?”

“All kinds of ways. Some of us just grow away from humankind until we discover our true vocation. It’s a gradual process, you see. Kids who play with guns and explosives, this sort of thing. Some hear the call but cannot make the crossover and remain stranded on your side, pathetic failures in their own eyes, never mind how many body bags they send to the morgue. Ted Bundy and such….”

“Ted Bundy,” she repeated numbly. “Serial killers.”

He airily waved his hand.

“Quite a lot of those. They sense the vacancies.”

“And the others?”

“Well, sometimes it is a sort of deathbed conversion, ecstatic experience, call it whatever you like. But it’s going out of fashion. Most people on deathbeds nowadays are drugged out of their senses. And then, of course, there are such as you.”

“Such as me?”

“Yes. Marrying into the tribe.”

“Are you suggesting I will become one of you?” Mor managed to keep her voice down only because she recognized a couple of her students at the next table.

“Your husband promised you immortality, didn’t he? Well, he did not lie, but neither did he speak the truth. Characteristic of him. You can only be truly immortal if you become a death yourself.”

“Never!” Mor cried and the girls at the next table glanced at her.

“What else will you do? Plenty of your new relations are in-laws, so to speak. Stefan, for example, and Victoria. You should talk to her, by the way; she is a relatively new bride.”

“Victoria? How can that be? Isn’t she Old Age?’

Daniel nodded and finished his Coke in a single gulp.

“Then how…. I mean, people have died of old age since the beginning of time.”

“Precisely. That’s the point. Deaths do not procreate, but they die.”

“How can a death die?”

“Never heard of John Donne?” asked Daniel smugly. “‘Death, thou shalt die.’ I thought you liked literature. Not Christian literature perhaps. In any case, a death can only be killed by another death, and that under very special conditions. That’s why we have rather mixed feelings about each other. We get together out of solidarity and even affection of sorts. There is a sense of fraternity after centuries of gossiping. But we also need to keep an eye on each other. Not that it always helps. Victoria’s predecessor was assassinated by Hunger and War, Ruth and Zoe, only they called themselves by different names then. We change names pretty often. I’m proud of my current choice. You’re the only one to appreciate its meaning, really. Dani-el: ‘God judged me.’”

“Oh, cut it out!” Mor sneered. “Cheap theology! Why would Ruth and Zoe do such a thing? What’s the gain?”

Daniel beamed at her:

“A very Jewish attitude, if I may say so. Well, since there are so many of us, the only way to gain influence is to enlarge the sphere of one’s activity. To some extent this does not depend on us at all. You humans are our real masters, even though most of us consider you mere cattle. But that’s just the deplorable lack of education. Not many of us read Hegel or understand the master-slave dialectic. Anyway, once a new modality of death is discovered, a new… executive comes into being by a process which, quite frankly, we don’t quite understand ourselves. The twentieth century was a fertile one. Have you met John? In the sixties he was about to crown himself King of Death, but after the demolition of the Berlin Wall he has been semiretired. Tending his garden, I assume, growing mushrooms.”

“Mushrooms?” repeated Mor blankly. “Oh, I see. Mushroom clouds. And you?”

“I am a different matter,” said Daniel evasively. “In any case we don’t—quite—control the course of human history, but we can give a nudge now and then. Ruth and Zoe hoped that by eliminating Old Age they would enlarge their own respective domains. The political situation was favorable, too. What they did not count on was that Mark’s demure little bride, whom everybody considered half-witted, good perhaps for crib death but nothing more ambitious, would blossom overnight into the queen of geriatric wards.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Mor’s voice rose again. “Are you grooming me to be your successor? If you think I’m about to take over the gas chambers….”

“Please!” Daniel shook his head. “A little perspective! The gas chambers have been inactive for seventy years! No, Mor, I’m saying just the opposite. A death’s existence is boring, devoid of pleasure, not fit for a woman like you. I don’t need to tell you what our sex life is like. And no children, of course. Your husband has trapped you on purpose, for his own amusement. He cannot love you, being what he is, but he cannot even appreciate you. You are a fighter; you are resisting being assimilated. But what if the force of your resistance is such that you’ll be forever stuck in that twilight state, neither a death nor a living woman?”

Mor looked at the wreckage of her lunch. And then she looked at the man in front of her.

“You have a proposition,” she said. “What is it?”

The red-eye flight was ruined by a cramped seat and talkative neighbor. But she emerged into the terminal at five a.m. feeling no worse—and no better—than after a night in her own bed.

Guided by her cellphone, she was in Holborn by eleven. She walked down Great Holborn Street until she came to an arched entrance into a cobbled courtyard. There she had to press the button several times before the gate swung open.

The flat was cluttered with dusty Victorian junk. The brownish liquid in her cup was either coffee or tea; even with her taste buds intact she may not have known which. Maggie took out the ingredients for the beverage from an old fridge that was not plugged in, its interior choked with bundles of cobwebby herbs.

“Daniel thinks the world of you,” Maggie declared.

In contrast to her place, she looked neat and very British in her twinset and pearls. As long as Mor only glanced at her briefly, the illusion held.

“How nice,” said Mor dryly. “The feeling is not mutual.”

Maggie only smiled indulgently.

“Dear Daniel! He and I have a lot in common.”

“How so?” Mor asked.

“We are both retired. Well, no. I’m semiretired. I still do quite a bit of freelancing, but it’s nothing compared to what it was once. I pity Daniel; so much work, and so spectacular, in such a short period, and then he is kicked out. There were certain affinities, you know, between what he did and my own skills.”

Mor felt her gorge rise as the brownish liquid in her cup suddenly took on the tint of clotting blood. She tried to hold on to her nausea, but it subsided.

“It is ironic,” continued Maggie chattily. “I’m the oldest one and he is… no, I take it back, he is not the youngest one, even though none of the millennials is as talented as he is.”

“Are you really the oldest?”

“Yes. I was the firstborn. Even before your kind was quite sure of its direction. I was there when Neanderthals scattered ochre around the skeletons of the eaten ones. I was there when shamans withered babies in their mothers’ wombs and flayed men alive without even touching them. And I still enjoy the old art. There are people, right now, dear, who are sticking needles in voodoo dolls and calling my name. Some things never change. When all the computer-guided missiles crumble to dust, I will still be there.”

Maggie was smiling sweetly throughout the speech, but it was not her pink-glossed mouth that spoke the words. It was the other mouth, squirming beneath her skin like a black worm: the slit in the whorl-painted visage of Death-Magic.

“But why here?” asked Mor. “Why London?”

Maggie shrugged: “This land is so soaked in history that it’s beginning to rot like a bloated sponge. But this is not about my plans, dear. Daniel has asked me for a favor, and I see no reason to refuse. David and I have never gotten along. His modus operandi is far too mechanical for me. No spirit. So shall we start?”

Mor nodded and braced herself for the ceremony she assumed was about to begin. Instead, Maggie just took a more comfortable position on her sway-backed couch.

“Once upon a time,” she said, “there was a boy who loved guns. His family was dirt-poor, and they could not afford the weapons that he wanted. His father had the only gun in the family, an old Colt Browning. One day the boy came home and saw his father sitting at the table, the top of his head blown off. He looked at his old man for a while. And then he picked up the gun lying in the pool of blood, turned around, and walked away.”

Maggie reached under the torn cushion and pulled out a wreck of an antique gun, rusted and bent.

“Old tales are right,” Maggie went on. “The only power stronger than death is love. When we become deaths, old loves shrivel and fall away. But just as our bodies still bear one mark of our lost mortality, so do our souls. In a dusty corner of each death’s still heart the one true love of his or her life lies sleeping. If it’s woken, the heart will beat once and stop forever. And the death shall die.”

“David does not love anybody,” said Mor.

“This gun is your husband’s one true love.”

Mor’s fingers closed on the coarse metal. The rust stained them red.

They drove up to Jerusalem to spend the Sabbath in the Holy City. It had become a habit by now. Mor bought a bottle of red wine and a couple of fat candles, which she lit in the bedroom. In the candlelight, David’s real face poked through his unconvincing flesh. She caressed the bone and thrust her tongue between the lipless teeth.

Their mock lovemaking died down, as it always did. She sat astride the skeletal thing.

“Don’t you ever miss it?” she asked. “The little death, la petite mort?”

“Why should I?” he said. “I have the real thing.”

“But not with me,” said Mor. “And I’m your wife.”

He laughed.

“I did not marry you for that!”

“You did,” said Mor.

Her hand snaked under the pile of her clothes and whipped out the gun. Quickly she pressed the muzzle to the wound in her husband’s chest and pulled the trigger. For a second, she thought it could not work. But then the body underneath her convulsed, and dark, heavy blood erupted from the wound, splattering her belly and legs. At the same time she felt a hot explosion inside herself. A single groan escaped her husband, the metallic bones of his face corroding and falling apart, the hard sleekness of his flesh growing soft and mushy, her fingers sinking into his arms and encountering only the pliancy of a child’s bones that were snapping like twigs, while she was crying out, dying a thousand little deaths in one infinite moment of time.

When it was over, she found herself lying prone on the bed in darkness. The candles had gone out. She turned on the light. The bed was littered with a pitifully small handful of bone fragments. She was ravenously hungry. She took a shower and spent the rest of the night eating canned tuna and watching movies in Arabic.

At dawn she went out into the clarity of Jerusalem. So early in the day, the city looked empty and innocent, its buildings dissolving into pink shadows on the craggy hills. Mor drove to the mall in Talpiot and stood by the parapet, looking down at the glorious panorama of the Mount of Olives with the golden dome of the great mosque and the dark lines of trees crossing the valley of Gehenna.

She heard steps behind and turned. Daniel, looking fresh and dapper in a white shirt and jeans, smiled at her.

“Well done,” he said.

She stared at him, incredulous.

Over the left nipple, his shirt was stained by fresh blood.

“Thank you, Hanna. You have given me a new lease.”

“You?” she gasped."Coming back?”

“No, no. My old job is done. I have simply taken your late husband’s vacant place. Nature—or whoever our manager is—abhors vacuum. I am too young to retire. I knew that when there was a job opening I would be the first on the list. I’m sure I’ll significantly improve on David’s performance.”

“I should have known,” she said dully.

“Don’t blame yourself. You did not imagine this morning would see all the guns beaten into ploughshares, did you?”

The city was waking up. A car honked, a child cried, a long call drifted up from the mosque in the valley.

“Just tell me one thing,” she said. “What was your real name?”

He shook his head.

“I don’t remember. Perhaps I did until last night, but now, with my new position I remember some things. Piano playing, a woman with dark hair—my mother? Light on linden leaves in spring. But it’s fading, memory disappearing. Like that, see?”

He rolled up his shirtsleeve. On the white skin Mor could see disjointed blue strokes—the remnants of a tattoo—that were being absorbed into the body even as she watched.

“We all have our badges,” he said. “I shan’t be sorry to let this one go.”

Mor looked into his eyes and smiled.

“You have miscalculated, Daniel,” she said. “Or whoever you are. Killing is a spur to breeding. You should have been more careful about murdering your own. And now what will you do, you and your fellow maggots, when death becomes fruitful and multiplies? What will you feed on when life starts feeding on you?”

He stared at her uncomprehendingly.

“I am pregnant,” she said.

“You can’t be! You’re still….”

“Death’s wife. I know. But my husband died in my arms, and I am carrying his seed. I am not a pawn in your game, you smug bastard! I am the mother of the future King who will ride down this very mountain and call up the dead from their graves. He will mold ashes back into bodies and clothe burnt bones with flesh. And he will judge you as you deserve to be judged. My son is King of the living and the dead, and he will make each death beg for oblivion before he slays you all. And you, you will remember your name when you are called to his judgment!”

Daniel’s right hand crept up, the fingers melting together, acquiring a metallic sheen, fusing into a small but deadly looking gun.

Mor laughed. “I thought immunity from the family was part of the bargain! Fool that I was, to trust a death! But I have better protection. Go ahead, shoot me! Do it! Why can’t you? Could it be you are sensing your King? Could it be my baby is already stronger than you?”

Daniel dropped his hand, which resumed its normal appearance. There was fear in his eyes but also something else, something that looked like relief.

“Well,” he said, “this was not planned. But this was bound to happen, sooner or later. And of course, this is the most appropriate place for it. The only place. I wonder what went through David’s dull brain when he decided to take his Middle Eastern vacation. But even if he had a… guidance, this is irrelevant now. You are right, Mor. I cannot touch you. And I can feel the thing in your womb even though it is tinier than a mustard seed. But I wonder what it’ll be like when it’s fully grown. It’s conventional to wish a prospective mother joy, but frankly, I wonder whether you’ll have much joy in your baby. Think of your predecessors: they did not fare well with their kingly sons, who had broken their hearts before future generations bestowed upon the poor women heaps of silly titles. But in any case, Your Future Majesty, though I may be bound to obey your son, I am not going to welcome him with myrrh and frankincense. And though I may be the first one to be hauled before his judgment seat, I will maintain my innocence to the end. I only followed orders.”

He turned and walked away, his back ramrod-straight.

Every Friday Mor goes to the Wailing Wall, slowly wending her way through the narrow, twisting lanes of the market, bright with tourist junk and fragrant with spices, coffee, and sweat. Some shop owners recognize her and offer her bright blue beads against the evil eye, which she willingly buys. At the familiar corner stall she rests her heavy belly, sitting on a scratched aluminum chair and sipping cardamom-flavored coffee from a tiny cup. She hears shots and glimpses a steely blue apparition disappear among the fluttering rugs. She is unmoved, and so is Ali, who continues his rapid monologue in garbled English and shakes his head when she offers to pay for the coffee.

The square in front of the Wailing Wall is beaten into monochrome whiteness by the glare of the noon. A couple of soldiers lazing about in their glass booth throw her an indifferent glance. The women’s section of the wall is less crowded than usual; only some Orthodox heads hidden under untidy wigs are pressed to the eroded stones like a row of bushy little animals. Their men rock on the other side of the partition, their black coats soaking up heat. Mor picks up a modesty shawl from the stand to cover up her bare shoulders, walks to the wall, kisses the warm, powdery rock.

“Soon,” she tells the unmoving weight in her womb. “Soon, honey.”

At home she lights the Sabbath candles, fixes dinner, and sits in front of the TV, absorbing the latest litany of nuclear threats, military casualties, and political crises.

A breaking news banner appears at the bottom of the screen when Mor feels a sickening pang in her lower abdomen. She sits up, breathless, the dinner tray pushed aside. Yes, no doubt of it, the beginning of labor, just as she had been taught in those long-ago birth preparation classes. A wave of exultation sweeps over her, overcoming another brutal spasm that feels as if somebody has grabbed a handful of her entrails and twisted them. The hem of her dress is soaked: her water has broken.

Mor reaches for her phone to call an ambulance. A hand closes on hers.

“No need,” says a familiar voice.

Deftly, Maggie rearranges the cushions on the couch to prop up her back. Dazed, Mor looks around. Familiar faces look back at her. Ruth smiles shyly; Victoria pulls clean sheets out of a large tote bag; Zoe plugs in the kettle in the kitchen. Liliana shoos out the men who crowd at the door. George waves at her; somebody else—Mikhail?—flashes a V sign.

Mor pushes Maggie aside and tries to stand up. But she can’t: the pain is too strong.

“Why?” she cries. “What are you doing here?”

“We want to help you,” says Ruth.

“We want to be here when the King is born,” says Victoria.

She looks at them mutely, and they look back: War, Famine, Plague, Old Age, and Voodoo.

“Do you acknowledge my son, then?” asks Mor.

“He is our King,” says Maggie. “We have been waiting for him since the beginning of time. And you are our Queen. You will intercede for us with your son.”

The labor pains are almost continuous now; she can feel the baby impatiently pushing out of her womb. There are faint screams, booms of explosions, rattle of gunfire; it takes her a moment to realize they are coming from the TV.

“But aren’t you afraid of him?” she cries. “Aren’t you afraid, Death, that you shall die?”

She sees ambiguous smiles on their faces, but another twist of her guts makes her collapse on the couch, unable to push away Maggie’s solicitous hand. Zoe removes her helmet and she sees the old brown bones of a skeleton rotting in some anonymous grave. The empty eyeholes are filled with light, and Mor still has the strength to wonder: Is it the longing for oblivion or the certainty of triumph?