By the Rivers of Babylon (31 page)

Hausner nodded. The bottle was a backup to the hydraulic system. The compressed gas performed hydraulic functions in an emergency, until it ran out. “Can we use it?”

“I think so. It’s a muscle. Energy waiting to do something.”

“Is it full?”

“Kahn says it is. There’s a lot of raw energy here if we can tap it. It has a valve, see?”

Hausner tapped on it with his knuckles. “Put the word out that I want some inspired thinking on this. Another little problem to keep our group of super-achievers busy. Idle minds are the playthings of the Devil. . . . Which reminds me . . .” Hausner held up the winged demon, “What’s this?”

Dobkin took it carefully and held it cradled in his hands. He looked at its face for a long time before he spoke. “It’s Pazuzu.”

“I beg your pardon?” He smiled, but Dobkin did not smile back.

Dobkin scratched some dirt away from the enlarged penis with his thumbnail. “The wind demon. It brings sickness and death.”

Hausner watched Dobkin examining it for a minute. “Is it . . . valuable?”

Dobkin looked up. “Not as such. It’s terra cotta. And it’s not an unusual example, but it’s in good condition. Who found it?”

“Becker. He’s digging a grave for Hess.”

“Appropriate.” He cleaned off the face with a bit of saliva. “I really didn’t expect to find much here. This was the top of the citadel. The battlements and watchtowers. There must be meters
of dust piled on top of them. Strange to find anything in so shallow a hole.” He looked up at Hausner. “Thank you.”

“Thank the rabbi. He overcame an irrational urge to smash it.”

Dobkin nodded. “I wonder if it was irrational.”

The remainder of the afternoon was spent in fatiguing labor. Trenches grew longer and deeper and snaked toward each other. In some places they joined, and, in fact, the object was to join them all—if they were to be there long enough—to make up an integral system, stretching from the Euphrates at the north ridge to the Euphrates at the south ridge. The defenses along the western slope consisted only of individual foxholes.

Before dusk, Hausner ordered a rest period for personal grooming. The men were ordered to shave. Hausner expected an argument, but got none. The shaving water was reused to make mud for face camouflage.

The nitrogen bottle posed a diversionary problem for the mechanically minded. It rose out of the brown earth like a monolith, black and mute. Hausner offered a half-liter of water to anyone who could find a use for it.

The
Sherji
grew stronger and hotter, and dust began to cover everyone and everything. People with respiratory problems had difficulty breathing.

The sun set at 6:16. The truce was over, and their fate was again in their own hands. Hausner watched as the blazing red circle sank into the western mud flats. Overhead, where the night met the day, the first stars showed in the darkness. In the east, the sky was already black as velvet. By the ancient Hebrew conception of measuring time, the day was nearly finished. The Sabbath was ended. The rabbi’s influence would be slightly reduced.

Hausner walked toward the lightly guarded western slope. He found a small depression in the earth, away from anyone else, and lay down in the dust. He stared up at the changing sky. The air rapidly cooled as it does on the desert, and the
Sherji
dropped to a soft breeze. Hausner stared without blinking at the marvelous black sky studded with stars brighter and closer than he had seen them since childhood. Then, the days were all sun-splashed and the nights were all starlight and magic. It had been a long time since he had lain outdoors on his back under the stars.

He stretched sensuously in the warm, yielding dust. The dark half of the sky fell westward and pushed the light half down further into the west. It was all so incredibly beautiful. It was no wonder, he thought, that the desert peoples of the world had always been more fanatical than other groups about their gods. You could almost touch them and see them in the stunning interplay of terrestrial and celestial phenomena.

Out on the mud flats, a pack of jackals howled. Their howling got closer very quickly, and Hausner guessed that they were running toward the Euphrates. They were pursuing some unfortunate small prey that had ventured out to drink under cover of darkness. They howled again, long and malevolently, then came the awful shrieks and sounds of struggle, then quiet. Hausner shuddered.

The strange dusk of the desert lasted only a few minutes after the sun set, followed by what pilots and military people euphemistically called EENT, end of evening nautical twilight—darkness.

The moon would not rise for hours. Would Rish attack, like the jackals, during this period of darkness, or would he wait until much later when the moon set? Brin had not seen the Ashbals moving from the Ishtar Gate area toward their attack during this period of darkness, he would move his men into the attack positions. There was only the thin line of sentries at the base of the hill. But that didn’t mean anything. If Rish were going to attack positions after dark. Any commander would. That gave the Israelis about half an hour before an attack could be launched. Enough time to bury Moses Hess.

Hausner considered not going to the funeral. It was meaningless. He could draw more spiritual strength from staring at the heavens than from looking into a hole in the ground and listening to Rabbi Levin talk about them.

Hausner tried to pick out the constellations, but it had been a long time. Ursa Major was easy and so were Orion and Taurus, but the rest were meaningless groupings. He had more luck with the individual stars. Castor and Pollux. Polaris and Vega.

It was the Babylonians who were the primary astrologers of the ancient world. Like the inhabitants of modern Iraq, they slept on the flat roofs of their houses at night. How could they fail to develop a vast amount of lore concerning the heavenly bodies? Their learning was jealously guarded and at first did not
spread to the other civilizations. But after the downfall of Babylonia, they traveled the ancient world as professional astrologers. Long after Babylon was forgotten by the ancients, the name Chaldean, synonymous with Babylonian, became another name for astrologer, magician, and sorcerer. The fate of Babylon as a state was to be remembered for her haughtiness and corruption. The fate of her people was to wander the world, selling their ancient mysteries for bread, and in the end to be remembered only as magicians. But the world gained a profound knowledge of the stars in the process. It was strange, reflected Hausner, that of all the learned people of the ancient world, only the Jews never took an interest in astrology or astronomy. He could probably develop an entire theory as to why that was so, but he felt too lazy and too tired to bother.

She knelt down next to him and stared at him in his shallow hole. “That’s morbid. Come out of there.”

“It’s a womb.” He couldn’t see her at all. How in the world did she find him, and how did she know it was he? She must have been close by when it was light.

“It’s far from that. It’s dry and dead. Get up. The funeral is beginning.”

“Go on ahead.”

“I’m afraid. It’s totally black. Walk me there.”

“I never go to funerals on a first date. We have about fifteen minutes. Let me make love to you.”

“I can’t.”

“Laskov?”

“Yes. And my husband. I can’t bear another complication.”

“I am a lot of things, Miriam, but a complication is not one of them.” He could hear her breathing. She was very close, probably less than a meter. He could reach out . . .

“It’s wrong. Teddy, I could justify. You, I could not justify to—to anyone. Least of all to myself.”

He laughed, and she laughed and sobbed at the same time. She caught her breath. “Jacob, why me? What do you see in me?” She paused. “What do I see in
you?
I loathe everything about you. I really do. Why do these things happen to people? If I loathe you, why am I here?”

Hausner reached out and found her wrist. “Why
did
you follow me?” She tried to pull away, but he would not let go. “If you follow a dangerous animal,” he said, “you should know
what you are going to do when you track him to his lair. Especially when you turn to leave and you find him standing at the entrance. If he could talk, he would ask you what you had in mind when you followed him. And you should have a good answer.”

She didn’t speak, but Hausner could hear her breathing getting heavier. Some kind of animal reaction subtly passed through her body, and Hausner felt it in those few square centimeters of her skin that were pressed to his. The pitch of her breathing changed, and he could swear that he could smell something that told him she was ready. In the dark, without any visual message, he knew that she had gone from alert and guarded to passive and submissive. He was surprised at his own heightened perceptions—and very confident of their accuracy. He pulled gently on her wrist and she rolled, unresisting, into his dusty resting place.

She lay on top of him and he helped her undress, then they lay on their sides facing each other and he undressed. Her skin was smooth and cool, as he expected it would be. He pressed his lips onto her mouth and felt her respond. She lay back on their crumpled clothes and raised her legs. Hausner lay between them and felt her firm thighs come around and grip his back with surprising strength. He went into her easily and lay still for a second. He wanted to see her face and was sorry he couldn’t. He told her so. She replied that she was smiling. And when he asked her if her eyes were smiling, too, she said that she believed they were.

He moved slowly and she responded immediately. He could feel her nipples harden on his chest, and her breath blew in a rhythmic hot stream on his cheek and neck.

He put his hands under her buttocks and lifted her. She let out a little sound of pain as he thrust too far. He picked up his head and stared at her face, trying to see it. It was an incredibly black night, but the stars were growing stronger and he could finally see her eyes—black as the sky itself—pinpoints of reflected starlight. He thought he could read the expression in them, but he knew that it must be only a trick of the remote starlight.

She began to move spasmodically beneath him. Her buttocks rolled sensuously into the warm dust. Hausner heard his own voice speaking softly to her, saying things he would never have said except in total darkness. And she answered him in kind,
protected also by that invisibility, like a child who covers his face while disclosing his deepest secrets. Her voice became rich and throaty and her breath came in short convulsive gasps. A soft ripple passed through her body, followed by a long spasm. Hausner’s body tensed for a second, then shuddered violently.

They lay still, holding on to each other. The wind passed over them, cooling the sweat on their bodies.

Hausner rolled onto his side. He ran his hand over her breasts, feeling them rise and fall. His thoughts were not clear yet, but they included the knowledge that he had compromised his position. In Tel Aviv, this would have been fine. Here, it was not. But it could only have happened here. Strategicand tactical considerations aside, he was fairly certain that he loved her, or would love her very soon. He wanted to ask her about Laskov and about her husband, but these were things that had to do with the future. Therefore, they were irrelevant now. He tried to think of something to say that he thought she would like to hear, but couldn’t think of anything. So he asked, “What would you like me to say? I don’t know what to say.”

“Say nothing,” she said and held his hand to her breast.

The stars were stronger and there were more of them now. The Euphrates magnified the thin, cold starlight, and Hausner could see the group of about twenty dark shapes standing around the grave and silhouetted against the wide river. He moved closer but stayed behind the group. Miriam stood beside him for a second, then moved among the people to the graveside.

Moses Hess was lowered gently into his grave. The rabbi said the
El Male Rachimim,
the Prayer for the Dead, in a loud, clear voice that rolled down the slope, across the river, and onto the mud flats.

Becker also stood back from the ring of people around the grave, and Hausner could see that he was visibly upset.

How strange, thought Hausner. The bones of thousands of Jews were buried at Babylon. How strange to be burying another today. The rabbi’s voice reached him from the edges of his mind. “. . .
yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We
hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst . .
.” Hausner realized that those famous willows no longer existed. He had not seen one.

Miriam Bernstein spoke quietly with the rabbi. He nodded. She turned and spoke softly, almost inaudibly, to the people gathered in the darkness. “Many of you know what has come to
be called the Ravensbrück Prayer,” she began, “written by an anonymous author on a scrap of wrapping paper and found at the camp after it was liberated. It is proper that we hear it now, at this service, so that we remember, whether we be in Babylon, Jerusalem, or New York, that we are on a mission of peace.” She turned and looked down into the open grave and began.

Peace be to men who are of bad will,

and may an end be put to all vengeance

and to all talk about punishment and chastisement.

The cruelties mock all norms and principles,

they are beyond all limits of human understanding

and there are many martyrs.

Therefore, God

does not weigh their sufferings on the scales of your justice,

so that you would demand a cruel account,

but rather let it be valid in a different way.

Rather, write in favor of all executioners, traitors, and
spies,

and all bad men, and credit to them

all the courage and strength of soul of the others.
. . .

Miriam’s voice wavered as she continued reciting the prayer. Then, as she came to the end, her voice strengthened.