Zion's Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature

The Believers ^{Nir Yaniv}

The old woman in the grocery store stares at the floor and doesn’t look up. She examines the date printed on a chunk of cheese, and her hand shakes. She turns around, and the cheese drops from her hand into one of the two carts nearby.

It’s the wrong cart, and a small child sees the cheese fall, then hit a pack of frozen chicken legs. There’s a terrible tearing noise, and the old woman is split in two. Blood and stomach and intestines spray all over the place, and then there’s a gargling noise, and then silence.

Everyone ignores this, each keeping his or her head down. Except for the little boy, who’s waiting patiently with his mother in the line in front of the cash register.

He still doesn’t understand the need to lower one’s head. His mother covers his ears and eyes with her hands, but it’s too late. It’s oh so late. From somewhere in the air comes the sound of the beating of wings.

Next Tuesday I’m going to have a meeting with a machine that will change my life. My head will be put inside a big gray plastic egg, wires and tubes protruding out of its top. I’ll spend an hour like that. When I get out, I won’t be the same person that I am now.

I will not be the only person to be changed like that. There are many others. Or maybe just a few.

I don’t know, I’m not supposed to know, I don’t want to know. I know just this: maybe when we all are changed, we’ll be able, at last, to kill God.

Today, when I think of it, I understand that the incident at the grocery store was the first time that I saw the Hand of God. Until then my life seemed pretty safe, and I had no clue of what could happen to anyone who is careless about anything to do with the divine. Which is, after all, everything.

God took mercy on the children, of course He did. God never punishes the young ones—but only because He needs a steady supply of adults.

God examines kidneys and heart, but not those of everyone at the same time. Not because He can’t, but because He’s bored by it. Or maybe it’s just laziness. Some of us consider this good fortune, and the rest prefer to believe that He knows exactly what they think of Him and does whatever He feels like doing, just let them stop pretending and fulfilling the commandments.

Those people have a problem. All of us have a problem. Because God has a terrible personality.

If I think about this too much He’ll notice me. Let’s change the subject. Here’s a subject that is, paradoxically, rather safe: belief.

This reminds me of my first argument with Gabi, when he told me about his underground movement, the Atheists.

“I fail to understand how you can disbelieve something that exists,” I said. “Especially when it’s something as explicit as God.”

“And we fail to understand how you can believe something that doesn’t exist,” Gabi said. “Like the way God was until a few years ago.”

Several dozen years, but who’s counting.

“And also,” he added, “after we finish with Him, He won’t exist anymore.”

I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to draw attention to myself by thinking about it. I think that I’m thinking too much about this right now.

Change of subject.

Here’s how we met: I sat on a stone bench in the public garden, by the fountain, too close to it. The spray hit me from time to time. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. On other benches, mothers sat with their children, a herd of coifs and hats and children’s toys. No one wanted to sit near me. No one but Gabi, who popped out of somewhere, sat by me, and said, “I know.”

“What?” I said.

“I know exactly how you’re feeling.”

He didn’t smile.

“You have no idea,” I said.

“Look at me,” he said. “Raise your head and look.”

I did that, and I saw. The absence. The emptiness, huge, engulfing, drowning, whining. The soul, perforated, defiled, that will never be the way it was. I saw the vast hole in it, gaping, and I knew that it was just like mine.

“Go away,” I said. I wanted to hold him, to hug him, to merge with him. I added, “Leave me alone.”

“Just like I told you,” he said. “I know how you feel. And I have a solution.”

“Please,” I said. “Please, go away.”

He did, but only in order to return.

The young boy and his mother stand by the table. Two candles for the Sabbath, fresh Sabbath bread, covered. The mother reaches out for the prayer book, the Siddur.

“Mother,” the boy says and points with his finger, “Mother, no, it’s not right, wait a moment,” but it’s too late.

It’s always too late. It has always been too late. And now, just a moment after the sound of sucking and pumping and pulling and absorbing, the dried body of the mother, sans blood and bones and flesh and tendons and cartilages and mucus, drops, very slowly, paper-thin, hovers down dreamily to the floor, then rests.

God’s first appearance occurred before I was born. I have heard old people tell tales of life before it, the way the world was set. Some of them—most of them—remember it fondly. Some say that it was horrible, everyone doing whatever they wanted to, Sodom and Gomorrah, impurity, abomination, sin, chaos. All of them, always, miss it. That was before I was born. I miss it too.

“You want me,” Gabi said.

“You know the punishment for male inter….”

“Don’t say it,” he said.

I didn’t understand what was going on inside me. Yes, I “wanted” him. To be with him. To touch him. The idea had never occurred to me before. On the contrary: the mere thought of… deviants—that’s the safe word at the moment, the word that won’t attract His attention—nauseated me. Undoubtedly God felt that way too. And then Gabi appeared, and….

“I don’t want to make it hard on you,” he said. It took some time for both of us to catch the double meaning. Yes, the punishment for the forbidden intercourse is death. As are most punishments, these days.

But when it comes to this particular sin, the reaction is particularly quick and harsh. And I thought to myself, maybe I’m not really interested in Gabi. Maybe I just want to die. Maybe I’m just aiming for the most horrible possible death. How far from the truth can you be?

I had a girlfriend once. A long time ago. We couldn’t hold ourselves back. We never thought of getting married, or even engaged. We knew, of course we knew, but the urge was too strong. We slept together. We took pleasure in each other. Exhausted, sweating, happy, we fell asleep.

A weird smell woke me up in the morning. Just beside me, in bed, a gray-red-purple sack, moist, dripping, wet. Still twitching. Fluttering about. My girlfriend, turned from the inside out.

A Jew who believes in God doesn’t believe that God exists. Existence is a matter for God’s creation, not for God himself. Attributing existence to God means lowering Him to our level, the level of the stone and the bush and the animal and the man and the rest. Unfortunately, God has never heard of that. And if He has, He has never shown any interest.

A young man bumps into a girl in the library. In his hands there are several forbidden books, which he found on one of the shelves in the back, a place forgotten by the censors. She clutches in her hands a thin booklet, “Dreams of Angels.”

Her face is small, delicate, drawn in thin, sharp lines. They both apologize, smiling shyly. The next day they have dinner together. The next evening they sit in his apartment. He fights the urge, and the guilt—he still remembers his previous girlfriend’s death.

She, without delay, gets out of her clothes. He says, “No!” She smiles, spreads two white wings. She, or he, no gender, no guilt. An angel.

The young man discovers a new form of attraction. He cannot stop looking. The angel is his whole world now, his whole life. Without the angel, his existence is meaningless. And the angel, without gender or guilt, and as the future will show, without any particular meaning, approaches, grows, touches. Penetrates.

It’s impossible to explain what happens to you when an angel penetrates you.

It’s not physical—you wish it was, for then at least you would be left with something of your own. No, your body remains untouched, unfelt, unnoticed, even pure, while the angel penetrates the only place that really matters. You feel it swelling and widening and expanding within you, and then you’re gone.

Superficially, you’re still there, imprisoned in your corporeal body, but it is your mind that has been defiled, and your self isn’t there anymore, and the person you were will never be anymore. And when the angel departs it leaves a hole in you, an empty space, a place that it occupied and that you can never, ever fill again. All of us, all of the people who will visit the machine next week, have such an empty space in the place where we used to have souls.

Know All Tuesday, twice blessed, I walk slowly on my quest, my mind deliberately at rest. Every step gets me closer to the address I was given, an abandoned warehouse in the old industrial zone. I wonder who, of all the people around me, I will meet there, if any, and then silence the thought. The sun shines, it’s a nice day, and those, if I manage it, are going to be my only thoughts till I arrive.

“What are you going to do?” I shouted. “How exactly are you going to fight…?”

Gabi reached out and covered my mouth with his hand, then hugged me. “I fight no one,” he whispered, “but there are more people like us. And, you don’t understand this yet, but there’s something unique about us.”

I pushed him away. “I feel this uniqueness all the time,” I said. “I’m not impressed by it.”

“Oh, it’s not only what you feel. We have other qualities. I… I don’t fully understand it myself, but there’s someone who does. We call him the Know All.”

“And that person, did he explain to you everything about those ‘qualities’ of ours?”

“Not in any words that you or I can understand. But that doesn’t matter. He’s building a machine that will set us free. In several days there’ll be a meeting, and you’ll be able to listen to him for yourself.”

I didn’t answer. It sounded too ludicrous. Some mad scientist builds a silly contraption from springs and coils in his basement laboratory, and a bunch of retards dance around him, hoping for salvation. How pathetic.

I agreed to go anyway. Never underestimate the power of hope, ludicrous as it may be.

We saw from afar the pillar of cloud and pillar of fire. When we arrived at the street, it was already clean. Not much was left of the machine or the Know All, or of the building in which they had once resided. Gabi was desperate to get closer, to look for remains, but I held him back and forcibly dragged him away.

That night we almost committed the deadly sin. We felt suicidal. It was Gabi who saved us, at the last moment.

“No,” he said. “This can’t be the end. The Know All was smart enough to know that this could happen to him.”

I wanted to say that it didn’t sound very smart, losing your life like that, but the sarcasm got stuck in my throat.

“Get up,” Gabi said. “Get dressed. We’re going out.”

We went to a place I didn’t know, a safe house in which, so Gabi said, some of the Atheists’ meetings and some of the Know All’s famous speeches had taken place. One small room, without a bed, without chairs, just one desk, and on it a stack of papers, and on the top one a title: “The Tower of Babylon.”

And under it—diagrams, drawings, descriptions.

“I knew it,” Gabi said. “I knew it.”

“What’s the meaning of this?” I asked. “What’s this about the Tower of Babylon?”

“I don’t know. Let’s take it home and figure it out there.”

And the whole Earth was of one language, and of one speech, in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.

And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.

And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men built. And the LORD said, Behold, the people are one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.

So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off building the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“You didn’t know the Know All,” Gabi said.

“He never said anything directly. Always clues or parts, or both. I think I know what he wanted to say here. Think of it, Raphi. Read it again. To scatter. To scatter!”

“But even if you somehow manage to build the machine, you’ll get just what he got.”

“Not necessarily. The Know All had a problem—he knew. We, on the other hand, don’t know. This may have been his intention from the start.”

“He killed himself deliberately?”

“I think,” Gabi said, “that he died for the sake of the machine.”

Then came the days in which each of the Atheists received a packet of pages, diagrams, drawings, descriptions.

Each of them built or found, or found someone else to build or find, the part, the component, the ingredient that was described and diagrammed in his or her own packet. No one had any idea about the function of any one part, much less the whole, and those who could make an educated guess tried to avoid thinking about it, or asked for someone else to take on the chore.

And I, while they were slowly bringing this enormous task to completion in this or that abandoned warehouse, lay days and nights in bed contemplating a sin that would destroy me without pain. And Gabi wasn’t there to stop me, for he was the one who had the hardest task of all—that of putting all of those parts together.

Who knows what I’d have done to myself if it hadn’t occurred to me that giving in to the machine was a sufficient sin in itself?

And curiosity, of course. Even for someone like me, who has already paid a considerable mental sum for it.

And then there was a note in my mailbox: “Come.”

And on Tuesday, twice blessed, walk slowly on my quest, my mind deliberately at rest, I’m getting closer, closer, closer to the nest.

The door is unlocked, and I step inside. There are no windows in the warehouse, but it’s not dark. The walls glow. I don’t understand how or why.

In one corner, darkness. A big gray plastic egg, wires and tubes protruding out of its top. It hums, or maybe I’m just imagining this. I go there and sit under it, on the floor, and pull the egg over my head.

Darkness. I sit there for quite a long time. No sound is heard, no indication is given, no activity is visible. Maybe there is none, and I’m sitting inside a piece of dead junk, waiting in vain for salvation or a quick death. I don’t move. Maybe I even fall asleep, there in the quiet and darkness.

Minutes pass, or maybe hours, or maybe days. Nothing happens.

I remove the machine from my head and stand up. The light is blinding. The walls are ablaze with light. I see, now, that they are mirrors. And in those mirrors I see my face, and I say to myself, I know that face. Where do I know it from? Small, delicate, drawn in thin, sharp lines. Not the face I was born with, but that which has been mine since… since…

Since that girl, in the library. Since the angel came and took and went away. Went away in my own body, leaving me alone. Only now can I see that.

I spread my wings and fly.

Fly, through the ceiling, through the top floors, through staircases and elevators, through the roof, fly out. And over the roofs around me, dozens of Atheists, glowing, radiating, winged, hovering.

Down on the street there’s no commotion, no notice. No one sees the angels gathering. Gabi flies over and says, “We’ve been waiting for you.”

I try to hug him, but he moves away.

“Later,” he says. “We’re flying.” He raises his hand, points at the sky, and smiles.

“That’s the true meaning of it. The tower of Babel. We go up to the sky.”

I smile back, but something within me is rotten. This is not the way it should be. And the hole in my head, the place where my mind should have been, is still there, still not filled. Nothing has changed.

“After me!” Gabi roars, and everyone takes off, a squadron of angels, the soft murmur of wings, the sun shining upon the beautiful, glowing things.

They rise, higher and higher, further and further from the gray, dirty city under the clear, bright sky, from the filth, from the sin. And from me.

I land on one of the nearby roofs, sit on the dirty whitewash, lie down, look straight at the sun. Waiting in the light, just like I waited before in the dark.

The angels, above me, become smaller and smaller, fade out. I notice anger within me, scorching anger, beneath the intolerable calm of the hole in my head. Anger at God, of course, and at the angels, but mostly at Gabi and at myself.

Why didn’t I join them? Jealousy? Fear? Or maybe I’m just lethargic with the disappointment of still being alive?

The sun moves in the sky, slowly, as usual, then faster and faster. Something is askew. Something is wrong. And if I want to die, why haven’t I flown with them? And maybe my absence is the small factor that has decided the battle against them.

The sun moves in a great arc towards the sea, and I get up, stand erect, hover, fly—up and up, higher and higher, and the sun moves lower and lower and already I can’t see the city below me, and the light diminishes.

Up and up. A glow comes out of the fogginess above me, white lightning, and a great noise rings in my ears, or maybe in my mind, screams over screams, and I think I notice, among them, one particular tormented voice, which may or may not be Gabi’s. I will never know.

Because at that moment there’s the sound of tearing, and the sky above me opens, and I find myself passing like an arrow through a rain of angels.

Burning.

Boiling, bubbling, melting, twisting, shedding skin and innards and bones and feathers.

Dropping. I slow down, change direction, try to fall with them, hurling like a bullet toward the faraway ground, but they fall even faster. Compared to them I feel like a falling leaf, floating gently down, without hurry.

I try harder, push down faster, but in vain. The city appears, grows up with terrible speed, but not as terrible as that of the remains of the angels hitting it like bombs, clouds of some and fire of others marking the places where they smash into the ground and the buildings. I don’t bother slowing down.

I hit a roof and some walls and then the ground, then I realize that I’m going through them all. I feel nothing. I find myself alone on the face of the earth.

The day before yesterday I tried sleeping with someone, a young guy I met at the park. He melted the moment I laid a hand upon him.

Yesterday I went to the supermarket, took some meat and squashed a carton of milk into it. The building burned and went up in a flame, and only I was left, alone.

God has cursed me. I am not alive and I cannot die, and I am not punished for my sins, though others are. And maybe that was, after all, the plan.

Because tomorrow, just after the sun rises, I will go out and fly up, up, and away, over the clouds, through the great fogginess, straight into the citadel of God, and I shall stand in front of Him, and He shall be punished for His sins, and if not for His—then for mine.

I have always believed in God. It’s about time that He started believing in me.