He did not know how long he floated. He felt the motion of the river’s current, the clinging of his clothes in the water. He felt like nothing in the water — weightless, directionless, as if with the next gurgle of the river pushing around a snag he would find himself without a body. Above him the sky shifted. Eventually he felt himself bump gently to a stop, beached on a sandbar. He rolled awkwardly and sat up, working his hands loose.
From his path along the irrigation levee, Araz could see the dim, colored glow of the fire leaping and hovering in front of the city’s constellation of lights as he made his way back. The leaves of the old crops left in the fields rustled in the cool dark. The wind stung the deep cuts around Araz’s wrists where he’d worked the plastic zip-tie handcuffs free. The ringing was still there, though it had quieted and moved outside his head so that it was like he was rediscovering it in each stretch of field or huddle of abandoned farm buildings.
The square, when he found it, was lit by the flames, bright as if at midday. There were people everywhere, small knots of religious men cheering, others racing to and from various places carrying water, bandages. Araz looked around. There were people clustered around bodies where they lay on the ground. Araz recognized one of the dancing boys, a huge portion of his thigh missing, the skin and flesh flensed to the bone, a jagged edge of fat glistening yellowish into the wound.
As Araz stepped away from the boy, he felt a light grip on his neck. He turned a little to see Bajh standing beside him. Bajh let go. His face was calm and flat, completely without affect. He did not seem surprised to see Araz, and Araz knew then that Bajh had saved him. Together they turned, watching the figure of the Hotel du Chevalier unmade into its skeleton frame, now only a darkness at the base of the riot of color, the smoke an oily blackness listing in the night, the air above them turned to a sucking, gasping maw. The two stood and watched the towering face of the building, roaring with its burning: huge, almost regal, raging, unconsumed. Suddenly a bolt of brilliant fire bloomed high above the hotel’s roof, and Bajh and Araz hushed with everyone else in awe. And that age was gone forever between them.
The Territory of Grief
As the ship carrying his new wife crests the wavering horizon of the gaseous sea, Gershon again checks the foyer mirror, and rubs his hands vigorously over his face. He is standing in the consular unit, the “penthouse quarters” as Ofer, his supervisor at the diplomatic corps back in Jerusalem, once called the apartment. And while it is true that these rooms do preside at great height over the stone buildings and roadways in the settlement below (as might befit the Government Administrator of the Northern Territories), the effect is not really one of luxury. Instead, the wide glass windows with their panning views and the smooth modern surfaces of the rooms’ décor only emphasize, to Gershon anyway, the solitude of the post — a kind of experiment in bright monasticism. He does not think about it much, usually, but the prospect of the new woman’s arrival has forced him to cast his gaze anew.
Gershon stands at the edge of the foyer, stands in front of the bay doors, which will at any moment slide open to reveal his new wife, the one they’ve sent. He wonders briefly if this woman will look like Yoheved, and, if so, if this will seem more cruel, amusing, or sad. “Well, you know,” Ofer said on the video-link when they told him about the new woman, “they’re starting to use the word rehabilitation a lot in these meetings about the new territory.” Then, after a pause, “It was that or reassignment down here. Which, you know…” And Gershon had nodded, understanding. In the window beside the bay doors, the Earth burns with its color high above the territory, a steady blue moon.
•
“Did you sleep?” Gershon says, the next morning.
He’s found her standing in front of the widest window, the one in the sparsely furnished living room, looking down, or out. She turns to him slowly.
“You should sleep, if you haven’t,” he says. “I know it can be hard. People have trouble, because of the sky.”
The sky: clear, cloudless, a piercing black at night while at day only ripening to a lightless cobalt, insinuated with vaguely amethyst underhues at dawn and dusk. The impression, especially upon new arrivals, is of limitless depth, or height, and sometimes the new settlers experience a kind of vertigo. But he’s talking too much.
She turns to him, is facing him now, silently, her eyes wide, though not with fear. Instead, it is a sharp look, one of alert appraisal, and somehow this in conjunction with her delicate attractiveness feeds Gershon’s anger.
“I’m ready, if we need to do something in the city,” she says softly. “They told me we’d probably need to do something in the city.”
Gershon nods, his jaw tight and aching, and tries to keep from speaking again.
•
Gershon has always been surprised when he’s come across a very attractive Orthodox girl, though they are not so entirely rare. Stepping off a creaking Egged bus back in the real Jerusalem, he’d catch a glimpse of an upturned face in the line waiting to get on: smooth skin, perfectly symmetrical features — a kind of sloe-eyed beauty that passed briefly through his day like a ghost. These fractions of visions became even more disconcerting after he and Yoheved had Shmuli, and moved to the apartment above the hostel just inside Jaffa Gate. Gershon, out walking in the Jewish Quarter with Shmuli in his arms, would see one of these belles filles hurrying along the narrow, cramped Old City market streets, three or four small children wheeling through the crowd before her. It always seemed impossible to Gershon, for a moment anyway, that such an attractive woman — a girl really — could have so many children, though the kids themselves also usually seemed beautiful in that crystalline, epicene way of small children.
“That’s the whole point, though, isn’t it, with those women,” Yoheved once said when Gershon tried to describe it. “All that obscuring: the wrist-length blouses, the wigs and scarves, the denim dresses they’re always tripping over. Men are so predictable. Let them see only your face and they’ll see a fucking Vermeer. Men. It’s because you’re an immigrant, really. It’s because you didn’t grow up here that you can even see it.” And Gershon wonders now, glancing every few minutes at his new wife in the seat beside him as he navigates the terrain vehicle away from the Government Tower, what Yoheved would make of this girl, this woman, this Hava. What did Yoheved see before her when the two women met to sign the rabbinical agreement allowing the new marriage? Though that must have been four years ago, Gershon supposes, just before the beginning of the girl’s long trip. What would he have done if they’d told him in real time, if he would’ve had four years to prepare himself for her, instead of just the six months? Still, the meeting, the document between the two silent women, feels to Gershon tenderly recent, as it must not to Hava herself.
Gershon glances at her in the passenger seat again and forces himself to see her; he can resist it no longer. Her jaw and high, delicate cheekbones make her face angular, Hava benefitting from Ashkenazically emphasized eyes and balance of features while escaping somehow the elongated face. Against such clarity, the head covering she wears seems particularly ugly. The few tendrils of her hair he can make out (real, it looks like) are a deep and rich brown.