He recalled a personal connection with India, although Memory couldn’t or wouldn’t tell him what it was. It was connected with occasional dreams of a lovely, oval-faced princess, who dressed in blue ice and smelled of sandalwood and spices. At times he was happy with her, but more often he felt an ominous sorrow, a deep foreboding, like the thundcrheads that warned of rain. As Emily said, next to him in the theater, “It’s like when you hear the spooky music go up just before the murderer pops out with a knife.” She rubbed him furiously, trying to make him come in his pants and mess up his clothes. What a kink she was! As weird as any of the imaginary devils she professed to worship! His mother called her a witch and lectured him fiercely about “bad seed.”
“Khoi,” the driver-lady pointed. “Northeast from there to Nakhichevan, then on to Yerevan in Armenia. That’s where my ancestors came from, you know.”
He didn’t know.
“We’re Armenians… Jews, but Armenians. You are Jewish, aren’t you? I know you’re circumcised.” She gave him what was meant as a roguish grin.
He ought to respond; that would be polite. But he couldn’t. He smiled at her instead. He still had trouble recalling her name, and Memory wasn’t much help.
“Armenian Jews. Not blonde and Germanic-looking like you, you pogging zombie, as glow-in-the-dark white as any ‘Aryan’ ever spawned! As for me, I’m not German, not Polish, not Russian… and so not of our Israeli elite, our ruling class, our gubbing ‘master race!’” She spat white dust out the cab window. “So what if you’re not Jewish? You’ve probably got as much ‘pure Semitic blood’ in your corpse-veins as I do… and more than a lot of our leaders. Most of them are European Jews descended from Slavic tribes converted during the Middle Ages! The rest of us go back to the poor dinkers the Romans scattered all over their pogging empire after they thumbed Jerusalem.” She wrinkled her nose derisively. “We trace our ancestry back to Moses and Abraham and ancient Israel, but that’s propaganda. It unites our people and gives us a claim to a homeland in Palestine that the world can’t deny! But what does it matter now?”
He didn’t know or care. The ship was rolling queasily m the clutches of the storm, steel plates squealing, engines hammering over the din of wind and water.
“So what if you’re not Jewish?” the driver-lady insisted. It seemed to bother her. She rubbed dirty fingers across dust-powdered lips. “Who gives a pog now? Am I so Jewish? I’m neither religious nor a Zionist nationalist. I don’t give a shit about either a kosher kitchen or an empire of miserable Arab slaves! Oh, I’m Jewish by descent and by culture, but I don’t care about the two things our leaders say really make a Jew! All I want is to run my boutique in Haifa, sell fashions, maybe break into the American market, and have things peaceful… the way people ought to live. And now this! Now this!” She waved out the window.
He motioned that it was all right. He was getting good at sign language. Too bad Memory couldn’t find the crewman who knew Morse code or the other sailor with the signal flags. Just wait till he made his report to the admiral!
She said, “I’m glad you can’t talk. That was one thing about my male-chauvinist pogger boy friends! Talk, talk, talk… Mr. Macho Man! Gub them all!” She grinned over at him, then caught her lower lip between her teeth. “I don’t feel well.” “Uh?” he inquired.
She didn’t reply but squeezed her eyes shut. He slid across the seat toward her.
“God…!” She doubled over, forehead down against the steering wheel.
“Uh! Unh!” He grabbed the wheel, kicked her foot away, found the brake pedal, and brought the ponderous APC to a stop. Beverly Rowntree looked annoyed.
“Sick…,” the driver-lady whispered.
What had she told him? What had Memory said about some horrid epidemic sweeping their ship?
She fumbled the door open, rolled down into the road, knelt, and vomited. Before he could reach her she went into a paroxysm of cramps, diarrhea, and retching. The child handed him the canteen, and he held it out to the woman wordlessly.
The driver-lady recovered enough to take it. Her cheeks were sallow, her lips dry and cracked-looking, her forehead flecked with sweat. She husked, “I’m sorry… I’m sorry…”
He wanted to tell her that she needn’t be. He helped her clean up, then scanned the mountainous horizon for some place to take her. All that met his eyes were sullen whitecaps on a silver sea: no land in sight! Didn’t they have a sick bay on this ship? Where was the doctor? He yelled for Memory, but only the child was there. She helped him wrestle the driver-lady back up onto the bridge.
He drove. The driver-lady, whose name he had somehow lost completely, hunched in the passenger seat beside him. She looked awful.
Khoi, when they reached it, was unexpected: a pretty town of broad streets, willow-fringed streamlets, and gardens. The only dirt was what had drifted in from the fertile fields outside. Amidst the rubbish he saw more of the white-boned inhabitants, their mouths agape and choked with dust. He wondered how they ate.
Memory chose the tallest building in sight as a reference point, and he drove around and around until he reached it: a tall minaret on a mosque that faced a brick-built bazaar and a square. There were more skeletons here; they congregated in the side streets, gathered chummily under the arcades, and made friendly, crackling noises beneath the treads of his vehicle. Many of these silent citizens were stacked tidily like cordwood against the mosque’s wall, but they were outnumbered by the unruly ones who lay sprawled everywhere else. No discipline, as the Israelis said of these Eastern peoples.
“Where…?” The voice of the driver-lady reminded him that he ought to do something for her. He wasn’t sure what.
There were Israeli army trucks in the square, a whole row of them. On inspection he discovered that many of the skeletons wore rags and tatters of khaki, and he saw Izzie helmets, guns, and buckles. These skeletons, too, were lying down and lazing about. How unlike the industrious Israelis! So the Jews had gone soft! Major Berger said this was inevitable: live with lazy people in an easy place, and you go all mushy yourself. Next thing you know you’re the same as your conquered subjects. Then some new barbarian comes along and stomps you into history.
Memory sniggeringly interrupted to say that this looked like a real gong-bong, green light party, as much fun as theover-and-under Banger orgies Emily Pietrick popped so much! Look how those white bone-people were intertwined!
“It’s not Pacov,” the woman muttered. “Dysentery, I think. The waterin that last village. You didn’t drink from that well, remember? Nor the girl. Cholera?”
He was puzzled. The water in Sioux City movie-house fountains was pretty good. What was she complaining about? Why didn’t she go get a cola from the stand in the lobby? He could loan her a couple of bucks if she didn’t have the money.
The child whimpered and pointed. One of the Israeli trucks had a big, red cross painted on its flapping, rotting, canvas side. He brought their APC to a stop beside it.
The driver-lady climbed halfway out, then fell the rest of the way down onto the paving. She was sick again, grovelling and retching amongst their hosts’ scattered bones.
The girl seized his hand and drew him away, toward the truck. What was she so urgent about? The ship’s doctor would be here any second. He let her pull him, though, and climbed up inside.