Tongues of Fire (2 page)

They were naked, bloody, raped, battered, and dead. He could see a streak of semen on Lena's cheek. It was not quite dry.

Rehv began to scream; but all the screaming stayed within his head. His screams pounded from one side to the other of his skull, crashing back and forth in overwhelming waves. He did not utter a sound.

Isaac Rehv was not a religious man; he did not believe in heaven or hell, or any sort of life after death. Prayers for the dead, funerals, burials were meaningless. That was the kind of man he was.

Rehv went into the house, found a large washbasin under the kitchen sink, and turned on the tap. There was no water. He carried the washbasin out into the square and filled it at the fountain. He returned to the backyard with water, soap, towels. Then he knelt in front of Lena and washed her face. He washed her body, and his mother's, and Naomi's. Clutched in Naomi's hand he found a torn scrap of cloth—the black-and-white check of the Palestinian Army keffiyeh.

Gently he dried them with the towels. In the toolshed he found a small garden spade. He began to dig a hole in the middle of the lawn. He wanted to dig a very deep hole. He took off his shirt so he could move more freely. Sweat ran down his arms, soaked the wooden shaft, dripped off the blade. He dug for hours, not conscious of the bombardment or the small-arms fire coming closer. He heard two sounds: the shovel slicing into the earth and the screaming in his head.

When he thought he had dug deeply enough he reentered the house and gathered some clothing—sleeping gowns for Naomi and his mother, flannel pajamas for Lena. He dressed them and lowered them carefully into the hole, side by side. For a long time he stood at the edge, watching them. Down in the shadows they might have been sleeping. Then whiteness flared around him and showed how they really were. He threw in the first shovelful.

Later, when he had filled in the hole and made the ground smooth, he went looking in the garden for flowers. He wanted roses, but his mother was a poor gardener; he could find only morning glories, closed for the night. He plucked a few and scattered them over the grave. There was nothing more to do. He had buried them in Israel.

Isaac Rehv walked into the square. The fountain was gone. Broken stone lay scattered on the ground, and water gushed from the broken pipe. A large dark form was crawling slowly away.

Rehv didn't reach for his rifle; he didn't have it anymore. Or his helmet. Or his shirt. He was content to let the dark form crawl away when something about it made him think.

“Wait,” he called. He felt he had to shout to be heard above the screaming.

The form stopped. Rehv, crossing the square, stumbled. He looked down: a leg, a human leg with an enormous black army boot at one end and horror at the other. He hurried over to the form. It moved, and a scratched and blackened face looked up at him, smiling faintly.

“This time I will,” Sergeant Levy said.

Rehv stripped off his trousers—all the clothing he had—and tore them into strips. He tied a tourniquet around the massive upper thigh and tried to fashion a bandage over the wound. But it was a difficult fit because the femur hung down several inches lower than the rest of the leg.

“I've always like this fountain,” Sergeant Levy said. “Fighting makes me thirsty.”

“Can you sit up?”

“Sure.”

But he couldn't for a while.

Finally Rehv helped him rise up on his one leg.

“Not too much touching of the old stump,” Sergeant Levy said very quietly.

“Sorry.”

“No need to shout. It's all right.”

Rehv tried not to hear the screaming. He lifted Sergeant Levy's arm and braced himself beneath it. “Ready?”

“Where's your weapon?” Sergeant Levy asked.

“I don't know.”

“You're not much of a soldier, are you, Lieutenant?” Sergeant Levy said. He still had a Uzi strapped on his back.

Before Rehv could think of anything to say, the sky turned white and exploded in their faces, knocking them down. He and Sergeant Levy huddled together on the shaking earth. When it stopped shaking, Rehv looked up. There was nothing left of the little white house; only the toolshed remained, its door dangling from broken hinges.

They started walking down the mountain, making their way around the broken buildings, craters, and fires of Haifa toward the beach. They walked very slowly. It gave them time to look at the famous view. On the beach black figures were massed by the edge of the sea. From time to time they moved about frantically like nervous ants. Their long shadows ran after them in the red glow.

“Dunkirk,” Sergeant Levy said.

“No. At Dunkirk the boats came right up to the beach.”

Rehv was right. Beyond the beach stretched the sea, empty and black for a long way out; three miles, Rehv guessed. And beyond that, like a phosphorescent tide, shone the lights of boats and ships, dozens, hundreds, thousands of them. Some were huge—American warships, they could tell that from the shore. They waited out there like the promised land.

“I always thought the Americans would step in if it came to this,” Sergeant Levy said softly. “They say there was a secret agreement.”

“That's the trouble with secret agreements. Who do you complain to if they're broken?” What's the value of a secret agreement, Rehv thought, when regular gasoline was selling for six dollars a gallon at the pumps in Cleveland, Ohio?

They kept walking.

When they came to the beach Rehv felt the cool wind blowing in off the sea. He saw that only a few of the thousands watching the ships offshore realized that they would come no closer. They were the naked, pale figures swimming off in ones and twos. He lowered Sergeant Levy onto the sand while he removed his boots, the only clothing he still wore. Sergeant Levy took off his boot and his shirt.

“I'd better leave the pants on, don't you think, Lieutenant?”

His stump was turning the sand red.

“Yes,” Isaac Rehv replied.

He knelt down to get his shoulders under Sergeant Levy's arm. It occurred to him how much he admired Sergeant Levy for making no false offer to be left behind.

Someone else said it for him. “Surely you don't propose to take this poor man into the water?” Rehv looked up into the angry eyes of a tall, middle-aged woman. She was wrapped in a sable coat against the cold.

Rehv didn't answer.

“It's one thing if you want to drown yourself, quite another to drown this poor man.”

“I'm not a poor man,” Sergeant Levy said.

She ignored him. “I insist that you leave him where he is.” He knew from her tone she had done a lot of succesful insisting in her life. “The landing craft will be here any moment.”

Rehv tried to laugh a bitter laugh, but it was swallowed up by the screaming. He lurched to his feet, bringing Sergeant Levy upright.

“I insist,” the woman began again, but her words were drowned out by noise from above. Everyone on the beach looked up. A helicopter passed overhead.

“You see!” the woman shouted.

But all Rehv saw was a cameraman leaning out of the cabin and the letters CBS on the fuselage.

Isaac Rehv and Sergeant Levy stumbled into the cold sea. “Don't worry,” Rehv told him, “I was on the swimming team at university.”

“Really? I can't swim a stroke.”

Rehv began by swimming on his back, holding Sergeant Levy's head on his chest with one arm and paddling with the other. At first he tried a frog kick, but he kept bumping Sergeant Levy's bad leg, so he gave it up. Above the night sky shone in many unnatural colors. Isaac Rehv never forgot the way the sky looked that night.

After a while he had to stop.

“Can you tread water?”

“Sure.”

But Sergeant Levy couldn't, and Rehv had to bring him up, the two of them sputtering and splashing. He knew he had kicked Sergeant Levy again. The big man didn't say anything, but his face turned to tallow.

Rehv looked at the lights of the waiting ships. They were no closer than before.

They began again. Sergeant Levy was very heavy. Rehv tried a modified sidestroke. They seemed to move faster.

“Now we're doing it,” Sergeant Levy said.

Rehv could hardly hear him. He heard only his own grunting, the screaming, and from time to time odd sounds like a hand smacking the water with force.

They stopped again, and turned to the lights. They were no closer.

“I think we'll do better if I try some swimming on my own,” Sergeant Levy said.

“You told me you can't swim.”

“I was exaggerating.”

“I don't believe you.”

“It's true.” Sergeant Levy pushed himself free. He made some movements in the water. He didn't sink.

“All right,” Rehv said.

He swam beside Sergeant Levy. He felt the cold sucking all the strength out of his body. He felt his heart beating faster to keep him warm. He didn't even know why he was exerting all this effort. Then he remembered: Sergeant Levy.

He heard more of those odd splashes around him. He tried the breaststroke. Something bumped him in the back. What? Something.

“Sergeant Levy,” he called. “Still swimming?”

“Right,” came Levy's voice. It sounded far away. Perhaps it was the screaming.

He swam and screamed, swam and screamed, swam and screamed. “Sergeant Levy. Still swimming?”

“Way ahead of you,” came the big man's reply, from very far away.

So he swam and screamed some more.

He felt a hand touch his shoulder. “Sergeant Levy?” he said.

“Here's a live one for a change.” An American voice.

“Have you got Levy?” Rehv asked in English.

Two sailors in white pulled him into a lifeboat. He glanced around. “You haven't got Levy.”

“Look how blue the bastard is,” one of them said. “Better get some blankets.”

“There's no time. Levy's still out there.”

“Sure, pal.”

Isaac Rehv looked back at the coast. Mount Carmel burned like a funeral pyre. High above its summit tongues of fire blazed in the night. Their reflections licked toward him across the dark sea, touched him, held him, baptized his body in cold fire. In the mirrored glare he could see that Sergeant Levy was gone. Even at that moment he knew that Sergeant Levy was one of the lucky ones.

PART ONE

BABYLON

CHAPTER ONE

Slowly the sleeping pill released its grip. “Try these,” Quentin Katz had said. “You'll sleep like the dead.” And he did every night. No nightmares, no dreams, no renewal. “You look like hell,” Katz told him one day. “Are you taking those pills?”

“Yes.”

“Better double the dosage.”

He lay with his eyes closed, watching green spots jump across the salmon-colored insides of his eyelids. He heard heavy traffic grumbling in the street below. Gasoline was a dollar a gallon.

He didn't want to get up, fold the camp cot, and put it in the storage room. He didn't want to turn on the coffee machine and sweep the polished pine floor. He didn't want to see the latest exhibit: four clapboard cabins the size and shape of telephone booths, standing in a row in the center of the high-ceilinged room.

“You like?” Quentin Katz had asked after they had carried the booths up the stairs.

He hadn't known what to say.

“You go in, sit on the little bench, drop a quarter into the slot, and a projector beams a two-minute film of nothing but close-up violence. Close-up. If that's not a real tour de force I don't know what is.”

“Why?”

“Why? It's obvious why. There are hundreds of booths like these around Times Square, but all they show is porn. The artist is making a statement.”

“What?”

Katz had sighed. “It's hard to put into words, exactly. It's conceptual art.”

“Are they for sale?”

“Not really. I suppose if there was an offer … Why? Do you know someone who might be interested?”

“No.”

“Well, don't worry about it. We've got a grant from the National Arts Council to show them for six weeks.”

Katz and his wife, Sheila Finkle, were his sponsors in America. He slept in The Loft, a gallery they owned in SoHo. To Rehv the word had always meant London.

“They've got one too,” Katz had agreed. “But ours is better.” They had one child, a little boy named Joshua Katz-Finkle.

He didn't want to open his eyes, but after a while his back began to hurt, so he did. The room was just the way he had seen it in his mind—the high tin ceiling, the four booths, the polished floor—everything the same, except for the man in the dark suit standing by the window. He was a slight, small-boned man with white hair, pale skin, and bright blue eyes: a Jesuit scholar with a burn scar on his left cheek the size of a rose in full bloom.

“Good morning,” he said gently. “I envy you such deep sleep.” He spoke English but a faint Hebrew rhythm moved behind the words. “You are Isaac Rehv?”

Rehv sat up quickly. “How did you get in here?”

“The door was open.”

“No it wasn't.”

The little man softly rubbed the raw flower on the side of his face, perhaps making sure it was still there. “Does it matter?” Rehv heard fatigue slip in round the edges of his voice. “I'm in now. I'm sorry if I've startled you.”

“Who are you?”

“You can call me Harry,” he said with a shy smile.

Rehv stood up. He noticed the man who wanted to be called Harry looking at his body in a curious professional way, like a judge at a dog show. He supposed it was recorded under early middle-aged, muscular, slightly heavy. As he rummaged through the small pile of clothing on the floor he said, “Go away, Harry.” He put on a pair of Quentin Katz's trousers, too big around the waist and half an inch too short, a shirt of Calvin Klein's that Quentin Katz could no longer get into, and stuffed a worn and shapeless leather wallet bearing a faded gold Q.K. into the back pocket. He remembered a wallet with I.R. printed on one corner. Inside were a few photographs that he wished he had sometimes when he was alone.