More Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Outstanding Stories of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction

^{HUGH NISSENSON} Forcing the End

HAVING REFUSED A CHAIR, Rabbi Jacobi stands in front of my desk, pulling the tuft of white beard that sprouts beneath his underlip.

“All I want,” he says, “is your permission to leave the city, go to Yavneh, open up a school there, and teach.”

“Yes, I understand, Rabbi, but unfortunately, under the circumstances, I must refuse you permission.”

“What circumstances?”

“For one thing, you’ll be safer here.”

“Really?” he asks. “Look out the window and tell me what you see.”

“Jaffa Road.”

“Look again.”

I rise to my feet. The street, the entire city has vanished. We are in a wilderness, where a white haze has effaced the boundary between the earth and the azure sky. Mount Scopus is a barren rock, illuminated on its eastern slope by the morning sun. Huge, yellowish limestone boulders, tinged with red, reflect the glaring light. The ruins of buildings? It’s impossible to tell. They seem to have been strewn indiscriminately on the parched ground shimmering from the rising heat. Only an ancient, twisted oak, with shriveled leaves, grows there, just below my window, and as I watch, a jackal which has been sleeping in the shade rises unsteadily, its pink tongue lolling from its jaws, and pisses against the tree trunk: a short spurt of urine, in which, suddenly dropping from the cloudless sky, a starling immerses itself for an instant, fluttering its wings and catching a few drops in its gaping beak.

And twisting the tuft of hair below his mouth, Jacobi says, “You’re looking at the Holy City through my eyes.”

“The past?”

He shrugs. “The future, too. What’s the difference? They’re one and the same.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Nevertheless, God help us, it’s true,” he says, covering his face with his hands. As he has been speaking, a Sammael, one of our new, self-propelled rocket launchers, roars up Jaffa Road in the direction of the Russian compound. Its two rockets, capable of carrying nuclear warheads, are covered by canvas.

Jacobi twists that tuft of beard between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. Is he a hypnotist, or what? I read over his dossier, open on my desk, once again. He was born in Jerusalem in 1917 and was ordained at the age of nineteen. After that, for twelve years, he was the rabbi of the small town of Arav in the southern Galilee, where he also worked as a clerk in the local post office because he refused any remuneration for teaching Torah. His wife died last year, and he lost his only son at the age of sixteen to nephritis. The boy was also a precociously brilliant scholar, of whom his father said at his death, “I am consoled by the fact that my son, may his memory be blessed, fulfilled the purpose for which man was created—the study of the Holy Law.”

For the last eight years, Jacobi has lived in Jerusalem, teaching a select group of students in a small Talmud Torah on Adani Street. He has been in constant conflict with the rabbinate over its acquisition of extensive property, and with the government over its policy of retaliatory raids for terrorist attacks.

My secretary, Dora, whose husband was killed two years ago by an Arab grenade while serving on reserve duty in Gaza, comes into my office and whispers excitedly in my ear, “Sunday, at dawn.”

“How do you know?”

“Yoram’s sister heard it from her husband.”

“Who’s her husband?”

“The pilot.”

“What’s the matter with you? You know how tight security is. It’s just another rumor.”

She adds without conviction, “Yoram’s sister swears it’s the truth,” and sighs. She has aged extraordinarily in the last two years; her lips are as wrinkled as an old woman’s.

“No, there’s still time,” Jacobi says. “Not much, but enough. At least enough for me to go to Yavneh, open my school, and plant a few lemon trees. They’re very delicate, you know, but I love the odor of the blossoms, don’t you? Sweet but spicy. An unusual combination.” He goes to the door and says, “Tell me the truth. Do you honestly believe that this time we’ll achieve a lasting peace?”

“Absolutely.”

“By force of arms?”

“Of course.”

“Really? How I admire your faith. Let me tell you something, my friend. A secret. When I’m in Yavneh, and if one day I’m planting a sapling and I hear that the Messiah himself has arrived, do you know what I’ll do? Finish planting the sapling, and then go to welcome him.” He opens the door. “Did you know that lemons turn yellow only after they’ve been picked? It’s a fact. They remain green and bitter on the tree. You have to store them for months before they turn yellow and ripen.”

“Not anymore,” Dora says. “A specially heated storage plant forces them to ripen in four or five days.”

“Is that so? How hot?”

“I’m not sure.”

“As hot as this?” he asks, and in the sweaty palm of his right hand he holds up a yellow lemon. “From the new storage plant in Yavneh, by the way, and fully ripe, as you can see; juicy too, with a wonderful smell…”

He passes it under Dora’s nose.

“Right?” And closing his eyes and inhaling deeply, he recites the traditional benediction, “‘Blessed art Thou—the Eternal, our God, King of the Universe—who hath given fragrance unto fruit.’” Then he smiles, and says, “This one, for your information, was picked from a tree four and a half days ago and then stored at exactly 22°C.” He twirls it in the air. “Why, one could almost imagine it’s the world: cut off from its source, mercifully ignorant of its state; and just think: some minute malfunction of some machine in that storage plant, for example, or more likely some human error, and the temperature rises only three or four degrees, and look at it now! That marvelous color splotched brown. See? This whole side has changed its color; faintly, but changed, nevertheless, and it’s gotten soft—feel it—rotten…”

“Where is it?” Dora cries out. “I know. Up your sleeve.” But, shaking his head, Jacobi replies, “No, it was only a trick. Well, not exactly that, but…”

“What?” she asks, in a peculiar, strident voice that makes Jacobi stare at her. She looks him straight in the eye.

“It’s true about you and your brother, isn’t it?” he asks, but she says nothing. She and her brother Menachem are reputed to be important members of the Knives, a new, illegal organization allegedly responsible for the murders of a prominent writer who advocated trying to make peace with the Arabs by restoring to them all their territory which we now occupy, and an eighteen-year-old pacifist who, last fall, refused to register for the draft.

Leaving the door open, she goes into the outer office and, with an unlit cigarette dangling from her wrinkled lips, sits down at her desk and pecks away with one finger at some official form, in triplicate, stuffed into her old Remington typewriter. Jacobi follows her. Six of his students from the Talmud Torah on Adani Street crowd around him, speaking Yiddish in hushed, agitated voices. One boy, not more than fifteen, fixes his dark eyes on me and grimaces. He’s deformed in a way I’ve never seen. His right arm is normal, but the left, hanging loose, reaches his knee.

Two days later, at about four, while I’m having my afternoon glass of tea and a butter cookie, I idly glance out of the window again. Four soldiers, in battle dress and armed with submachine guns, are patrolling the street. Each one has inserted a thirty-round magazine into his weapon, behind the trigger guard, and has taped another magazine at right angles to the first, to facilitate rapid reloading. Their footfalls, I notice, are muffled by the sandbags which last night were heaped up, waist high, against the walls of the buildings.

Then, at a command from their sergeant, they break rank, to allow a funeral procession to pass down the center of the street. Four bearded men, dressed in black kaftans, are carrying an unpainted pine coffin on their shoulders. Behind them, three women, with fringed black shawls over their heads, are howling at the top of their lungs. In spite of the sandbags, the din is terrific. About to shut the window, I notice that the boy with the long arm is also following the coffin. With his good hand, he rhythmically pounds his chest, and his narrow face is twisted by the same grimace he gave me—a grimace that bares his yellow upper teeth to the gums.

“Who is it?” I shout down. “Who’s died?” But the howling women, who are now scratching their cheeks with their fingernails, drown me out.

“Answer me,” I yell louder, and the boy with the long arm raises his face.

“Our master,” he yells back. “The Light of the World.”

“Rabbi Jacobi?”

He nods, and Dora, who has been standing behind me, rushes down to the street, where I can see her arguing with one of the pallbearers who has trouble balancing the coffin and rummaging in his pocket for some papers at the same time. When she returns, she says, “They’ve gotten permission to bury him in Arav.”

“Arav?”

“Next to his kid.”

“What about transportation?”

“Two horse-drawn carts, if you can believe it.”

“Who authorized them to leave the city?”

“What’s-his-name. Oh, you know who I mean. That Litvak from the Ministry of Interment who dyes his hair. Kovner.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes,” she says. “I’m sure.” And she glances at her briefcase, on the filing cabinet, in which she keeps the yellowing document, signed by Kovner, which authorized the burial of her husband, with full military honors, on Mount Herzl.

The next morning, Shmelke Kalb, who works in an office across the street, throws open my door, waving a newspaper in my face. As usual, he’s wearing a steel helmet; not because he’s the air-raid warden in charge of the block, but because he suffers from skin cancer, a discolored blotch on his forehead, and puts on the helmet whenever he has to go outside, to protect himself from the sun.

“Have you read about Jacobi?” he asks.

“No, but I’m sorry, in a way.”

“What’re you talking about? Are you crazy? He’s deserted the city. And five or six more of his students have already joined him in Yavneh.”

“But that’s impossible. The man’s dead. I saw his funeral procession.”

“A sealed coffin?”

“Yes.”

“It was a trick to smuggle him out of the city.”

“What’re you saying?”

“Some of his students nailed him into a coffin and smuggled him out of the city two days ago. It’s all here, in this morning’s paper, along with some kind of manifesto for some new kind of school he wants to start.”

“Let me see that,” I tell him, and then read aloud:

We shall be as the disciples of Aaron, loving peace, pursuing peace, and teaching Torah which alone sustains the Jews who, if they faithfully follow its Holy Principles, will be redeemed by them, and then redeem all mankind, in God’s good time…

Dora has come to the door; Kalb lowers his voice: “They say Kovner has disappeared without a trace.”

At one—during critical times like these, we grab a sandwich for lunch at the office—I turn on the radio for the latest news.

“…which will demand from each of us the greatest sacrifice… credence, which, although… New York…”

I can catch only a word now and then because of the noise: columns of Sammaels, rattling the windowpanes, have been roaring up the street for the last two hours. I twist the knob, and unexpectedly, in a perfectly audible voice, the announcer says that Rabbi Jacobi’s body, spattered with dried blood, was discovered in Yavneh early this morning in front of a vegetarian restaurant on the Rishon-Lezion road. A preliminary coroner’s report has established that the distinguished religious leader was stabbed once through the heart with a penknife, and died instantly, between 2 and 3 A.M. The district superintendent of police reports that no fingerprints were found on the weapon, but he has been quoted that he is confident that the criminal or criminals will soon be apprehended because of a peculiar aspect of the case. The distinguished rabbi’s jaws were pried open after his death, and a yellow lemon inserted in his mouth…

Another Sammael, which makes it impossible for me to hear Dora shouting from the outer office, where she’s been pecking away at the Remington.

“What?” I ask.

“Green,” she says. “The idiot. Not yellow, green.”