Esther knew that she should be preparing for a blackout. She should be checking her care gear and the deadbolts. She should place the gun where she could reach it, but she could not pull herself away from the book. She leafed through delicately, lifting each page by its upper right-hand corner as though she were pulling a bandage from a burned face. She exhaled slowly when she found the poem that she had been working on the night before. It was the angriest poem she had ever read. She lingered on the first few lines. The poet’s voice rose from the pages like a bony finger pointing directly at her. Church bells screamed and blood mingled with the black mold edging the pages, something noxious closing in on something beautiful.
She started up where she had left off the day before. Each line of this poem was a puzzle to be solved, right to left. Each word was like a family member in a mood she couldn’t quite gauge, who might crack a joke or hurl an insult at any moment. Esther could only limp through the new lines she yet hadn’t conquered, looking up every other word in her tattered bilingual dictionary and then finally resting back in her chair to contemplate what she had carried over into English.
What does it mean for a translation to do justice to a work? Justice for whom? Her interpretations hit her like oil popping off a pan, pricking and burning.
“In the Kingdom of the Cross” by Uri Zvi.
When her brother’s old truck had still been working and she could make early morning forage runs to the library, she had found this treasure. She teared up remembering how her brother Jamie had initiated her into the mysteries of his truck’s manual transmission.
“That wasn’t you, Estie, that was the truck. Try again,” he said when she stalled out. Then he flashed a wider grin as the truck lurched forward and stopped. “Okay, that time it was you.”
He had fitted his hand over hers on the gear shift, calling out encouragingly when it was time to press her foot down on the clutch. She hadn’t left town with him when he had been targeted. Had he and Gregory made it to a safe settlement? She regretted now that she had not gone with them, not just for her, but because of what her refusal revealed about her own blind self-centeredness. She had seen everything that was happening around her, but had somehow thought it was not happening to her.
The dissolution of States into Kingdoms was traceable even if all the reasons for it were not. Long before their town had been taken over, there had been so many signs. She had witnessed many. That bearded man in his little motor boat, chugging along in the river off the square, who blew a shofar and shouted: “The State has no sovereignty! The governor and the mayor are godless!” According to him, it was God’s will that their town would soon be the Kingdom of Jericho. She’d paused only for a moment to gawk at him and then she kept on walking. He was just a lunatic. Such a thing could never happen.
Then came the boycott of Mr. Ahmed’s store. The graffiti on the synagogue around the corner. The broken glass someone left in her mother’s mailbox because of Jamie. Soon after Jamie and Gregory left, the militia had staged a book burning on the steps of her old high school with the school board’s blessing. She had seen all of this, but recognizing a pattern would have led to hard decisions. She was one for soft decisions.
For a while, Aidan and the nest she had created for the two of them had been reason enough to look away. They had been together since high school, after all. Then Aidan’s prospects had dried up. The web was shut down and the long hours he had spent learning complex programming and cyber security were for nothing.
Shutting down the internet had been the government’s last-gasp attempt to stop the live gathering of the cyber-militias. It had failed. Now these sanctified gangs were gobbling up the national crumbs. Their signs and symbols, their rituals had lured young men like Aidan. He came home drunk, piqued that Esther’s studying got in the way of housekeeping. He launched into tirades against the unseen forces that had ruined his chances in life, forces that included her parents with their damned religion and gay son.
Why had she stopped visiting her parents? Had she really believed she could hide in the library and insulate herself in the apartment? She’d gone with Aidan to the New Jericho church. There were no bibles tucked in the backs of the pews. The pastor read aloud from the stage while images and the occasional line from Scripture flashed behind him on a screen. She had studied the Bible in Hebrew and in Greek. These “instructions” for the people of New Jericho surprised her. What should have surprised her were all the guns. Instead of walking out, she trailed Aidan and all the others to the altar and sipped from the communion cup to avoid drawing attention to herself.
On one scorching weekend, a migrant man with a large red cross tattooed on his inner forearm had stayed with them. He taught both Aidan and Esther how to shoot. Aidan had been keen for Esther to learn and shocked when she finally turned their gun on him. That happened the night, just two months ago, that the New Jericho militia set fire to her parents’ house.
That night she could no longer avoid seeing the pattern. Her parents were gone. Jamie was, she hoped, gone away. She did not know why she had remained and now she did not know if she had the strength to go. The apartment building was deserted except for her. She marked the front entrance door with the red cross, hoping it would keep her safe.
Trapped in indecision, she started going back to where she had always gone: the library. It had loomed up through the cracked windshield each time she drove up the hill, rising like an abandoned space ship before her. Today had been the last time she would be able to sneak inside. The library was slated to become an armory. She probably should have used that day to hunt for canned goods and Advil, but she had felt pulled to that familiar space. Tomorrow they began destroying the books.
The same librarian who had taught her how to handle old books had also taught her how to use the card catalogue, still intact in its oak cases in the basement. Esther had an old brochure map and a headlamp so she could navigate the stacks that were only dimly lit through dirty windows.
This was her university’s library, containing many worlds on each floor. The first time she broke in through a back window she thought, Jamie left. I can’t travel. Probably never will again. Can’t meet with friends or even with enemies. Most of them are gone anyway. What might the dead have to say? Esther culled the stacks for their messages. She brought home all sorts of books, including an encyclopedia of poetry to help her understand this salvaged treasure she was translating.
“Poet Uri Zvi Grinberg (1896- 1981). Conscripted at age nineteen to fight in the Balkans in World War I, he escaped home to the Ukraine and saw his entire community attacked. In 1922, he founded the literary journal, Albatros, in Warsaw. He wanted to create new Yiddish poetry, radical in form and content. Albatros soon caught the ire of the Polish censors and before the year was out Uri Zvi Grinberg was on the run.”
Before her on the table lay an original from the printing that had almost landed Uri Zvi in jail. A cross made out of Hebrew letters dominated the page. She imagined a small room humming with the clack and pull of a hand-powered printing press and pages emblazoned with this scandalous cross dropping from it one-by-one like a chicken laying eggs.
This Jewish cross would have alarmed the authorities, she thought, even if they couldn’t read the poem. She could imagine Uri Zvi with a small suitcase at a bustling train station, slipping from Warsaw to Berlin to keep making his art. There he was, stowed away on a ship bound for a Palestine bristling with British guns. She could see him sweating in the Jerusalem heat as his poetry caught fire and exploded. Poet, prophet, nationalist. His fire died for many years and then flared again in the first poems to mourn the modern slaughter in the ancient tongue.
One scholar in a dusty back-issue called him a fascist. So did one of the most gifted of the Israeli poets, whose very name meant life. After everything, how could she read Uri Zvi’s poems? Why did they call to her? What if a fascist is also a refugee? Where do you go when the plague is hatred? How do you avoid catching it and how did he again find the strength to hold the pen in his hand?
She turned back to “In the Kingdom of the Cross,” stumbling over the cracks in the translation that she was using as her guide. The translation wasn’t so bad. Why did she want to read this in Yiddish?
She found a few familiar Hebrew words too, ancient stones scattered in the grain. Emet. Truth. Ahava. Love. Saying them aloud cracked open the door of a stuffy but sunny classroom years before. She had been a student. She would have been a teacher.
With this poem, translating each word was like trying to crack a walnut in your fist, just as her mother had said Esther’s Yiddish-speaking great-grandfather could do with his right hand and even his left. Her hands felt weak. Why was she scrounging for scraps? Just because something called, did she have to answer?
After an hour’s hobbling over the words, Esther had failed to achieve the escape velocity needed for time travel. She could use a cup of tea, but, of course, there was none. The stove didn’t even work. She walked over to the kitchen and ate her last apple. Then she placed her hand on the drawer with the gun. She pushed on it with her finger tips as if she could somehow seal it closed. She didn’t want to be able to reach it.
She glanced at the electric meter. Enough for tonight. She left her notebook open and laid her pen beneath the last translated line. She twisted off the light, walked over to the bed, and lay on her back, her hair pulled out underneath her as she had done as a girl when her mother or father had tucked her in. She stared into the dark. The double bed was a singular haven, the soft cool sheets salvaged from her mother’s house, the knotted twists of the coverlet a braille for memory, a map for dreams.
Lying in the darkness, she could not see the open window so much as sense it through the almost imperceptibly different feel of air that wasn’t imprisoned inside her room. Outside, the cricket orchestra was still allowed to play.
Where do you go when you have nowhere to go?
In the darkness, she woke to a feeling of heat beside her, as if she had walked by a stove where someone had wastefully left the burner on. Her shoulders tensed. She sucked in her breath. There was a mound beside her. She stayed frozen, willing her eyes to make out more when the mound suddenly shifted. A glimmer of eyes, like a light streaming through the crack in the door. A voice like seeping smoke:
“Du hast gerufn. Ikh bin gekumen.” You called. I came.
“You called me,” she whispered back. A rustle. The mound was gone.
She could only remain rigid, her body shrinking into itself until the sky began to lighten. She turned her head. The bed was empty. She stood, twisted her hair back into a knot, and went back to the table.
Left to right across the blank page of her notebook was an inky scrawl.
בלייַבן לעבן
She sounded out the words: blaybn lebn.
She cracked the dictionary and scanned the entries that, despite all of her efforts, were still unfamiliar. This language was a place she visited, not where she lived. But she could use a visit and she wanted to know: what did the dead have to say?
Blaybn: Stay. Remain. Abide.
Lebn: Life. Live.
Remain alive. Abide in life. Survive.
Esther closed her books and stretched her arms out on the desk, staring straight ahead. The message should comfort, but who was doing the comforting? Had she written those words herself? There was no time to think about this. There was not even time to eat, which worked out since she had no food left. She must be alert if she wanted to collect her dedicated allotment and make it back home safely. As she had so many times in the last weeks, she shifted her focus away from her worries in order to avoid creating more.
As she pulled on her cracked boots and arranged her mask over her mouth and nose, she remembered the idea of the “dedicated” day. Dedicated to study, to family, even to the “mental health” day. This concept brought a half-smile. Today was, of course, dedicated to physical health in an absolute sense. She would have an early start for the allotment.
Just inside the doorway, she moved her hands over her body as a physical checklist. Baseball cap, mask, leather jacket, jeans, boots and her backpack. One of her last bottles of water. She eyed the kitchen drawer then pulled it open and placed her hand on Aidan’s pistol. To take it with her was not only to risk losing it, punishment, or worse: it would admit that she could use it again.
She put the pistol on the table top and then picked it up again, standing frozen with the gun in her hand. Then she turned and placed it in the drawer of the stand by the door. She palmed the pepper spray sitting on the stand with her left hand and grabbed her keys with her right. She stepped out and locked up, but didn’t move down the dark hallway until she had convinced herself that she was alone.
Outside the air was dry but already very warm. She moved quickly down the long avenue. As she looked down the street, she was reminded of a cable news video she had once seen of a tornado strike. On one side of a residential street, the footage showed an increasing path of destruction. The street, filmed by drone, looked like a giant had taken a messy knife swipe across the tops of the houses’ rooftops, finally smashing down the last few with his feet. On the other side, the homes were intact, untouched except for a few boards. The Jericho drone that buzzed over Esther’s head could chart similar jagged paths of destruction, although from the sidewalk she could see that the buildings were marked in ways that showed that this disaster had not been a natural one.
Ahead of her was one older man walking in the same direction, pulling a small wheeled suitcase. As she drew closer to the empty old lot with a few cars still parked in it, never to be claimed, she could see more people coming, including a small family, a couple with a child. A line had formed at the back of the old U-Haul. Esther got into line behind the man with the suitcase and the family stood behind her. Not too bad today. She counted herself tenth. She probably would be fine.
An hour passed and the morning grew warmer, but everyone stayed standing in place, masked and wearing clothes that they would have never chosen to wear in this weather if not out of fear. Esther could feel the sweat beading on her upper lip beneath her mask. The lot was surrounded by trees and the yard in the abandoned house next to it was choked with waist-high grass. Bees buzzed again. Esther thought the air probably smelled fresh, far fresher than in her apartment. The yellow flowers at the yard’s edge would be lovely to bring home, but she wouldn’t dare deviate from her plan: pick up her allotment and get home. Everyone was silent. Even the child. Esther thought she looked around five or so. Born just in time for the big mess, she knew to remain quiet and alert.
Then suddenly the doors of the truck’s cab opened and two men dressed in blue came around to its back. One had a full face that was pocked and greasy. His closely cut hair was topped with a crown fashioned from rifle shells. He held his assault rifle in a way so practiced and agile that he looked like he might begin to dance with it. The other man, also armed, but older, moved as though he were swollen. He rolled up the door at the back of the truck and climbed inside. He began to hand out boxes to each person in line. They took them and then left as hurriedly and as cautiously as they had come. When Esther reached the head of the line, she could see the stock of crowned man’s rifle, painted with the red cross and the words of the psalm praising the god who had trained his hands and fingers for battle.
Those hands kept Esther from staring. She took her allotment with a quiet thank you. The box was heavy, so it was probably mostly canned foods, maybe some beans. She would like to shake it like a wrapped present, but sometimes there were some eggs. She began her cautious scuttle, looking all around as she moved homeward, watching for anyone who hadn’t also been in line.
Beginning to sweat profusely as she moved in the sun, she felt exhausted, nervous. Since she had not eaten since that apple the evening before, she was eager to open her allotment. Her body relaxed as she went into the building. She allowed her mind to return to last night’s strange messages as she pocketed her spray and pulled out her keys. She had just undone the last bolt when she felt two hands shove her inside. She fell into the apartment, smashing the box of provisions beneath her. Her cap flew off her head. Then the hands grabbed her jacket collar, hauling her upwards. She first clung to the box, but then let it go.
“Give it!” a man’s voice said. She felt his hands grab her hair and panic surged through her. She would have to give up this box, but these were her provisions for the month. Scavenging would be punished. Then she heard the slide of a drawer, a click and the fierce pop of a gunshot. She fell backwards.
For a moment she lay stunned, but then she looked over at her attacker, now lying on the floor, and staggered to her feet. She stood staring at him, at his mutilated head, at the gun on the hard wood floor. There was an acrid scent in the air, a sense of vibration moving through it that seemed to shake her as well. Then she heard that smoky voice, this time whispering in her mother tongue: survive. And just for a moment, reflected in the mirror, she saw a thin face, a man with red hair and a piercing green, heavy-lidded gaze.
Survive. Panting and numb, Esther bent to the allotment box, gathered the contents and put them on the kitchen counter. There had been eggs, now smashed. She grabbed a bowl and scooped at them, thinking she could still try to cook them. Fortunately, the provision was mostly canned kidney beans and one large can of peaches. There was one small bag of almonds and of course, the requisite page of bible verses with commentary. These Esther had been using first for scratch paper and then sometimes for kindling. Esther unwrapped her almonds and ate them slowly. After sitting on the floor for a while and staring at the body, she dug out one of her last pairs of latex gloves. Sheathed in gaudy purple, her hands rifled through the clothes on the body. The man had been a successful and ruthless thief. In his pockets she found a pack of cigarettes, matches, a knife soiled with some tacky goo where the handle joined the blade, and a car key.
She laid each of the items on a towel on her kitchen counter. Then she opened her door cautiously and walked over to unlock the door of the abandoned apartment across the hall. Dragging the dead man by his feet she slowly moved him over her threshold and into the empty apartment. She rolled him inside and closed the door. Hurrying back to her place, she bolted herself inside and sagged down to the floor. There was still a sense of something changed in the air, but no trace of the red-haired apparition.
Was this a ghost? Surely after so much had happened her mind was entitled to play tricks on her, but there was also so much in her world that she had been unable to recognize. She sat slumped against her bolted door, unable to move.
It was getting dark when she stood up and peeled off the gloves. She picked the shells out of the rescued eggs and cooked them on her camping stove. She had been a good cook and she worked at them constantly in the pan to cook them just as she had always liked them. She savored making this fresh meal, focusing on its gentle sizzle as a means of procrastinating instead of making a plan. She took the mirror down from the wall and watched herself as she ate, but she was really looking for that mysterious other reflection.
As she waited for it to become truly dark outside, she turned on her precious camping lantern. Her muscles ached and she had no appetite to translate. Instead, she studied the image of Uri Zvi in the encyclopedia volume, a copy of an oil painting made over a century before. That same heavy-lidded, piercing regard from the mirror was the fixed point in a field of curves and shadows that almost seemed to ripple in the fading light. The eyes transfixed her and drew her in.
Then, once again, she felt that shift in the air and the heat of a presence behind her. She turned and there he was, as seemingly real as the attacker had been, but dressed in the type of clothes that she had seen him wear in posed group pictures with his fellow poets from the 1920s. His jacket. His tie. He seemed to shimmer a bit, the outline of him rippling like his portrait. He stared at her and asked in heavily accented English.
“Where is the attacker?”
“Gone,” she said. “Did you shoot him?”
“I can no longer do such things. I can’t even have one of his cigarettes.” His eyes shifted to the pack on the kitchen counter. His lips stretched into a smile. “Although, if you blow smoke in my face, I will be able to smell it.”
Curious, and also wanting to put off any thought that she had fired the gun herself, Esther extracted a cigarette, lit it with a match, and held it before Uri Zvi. He took a long inhale. “You have killed, and not the first time, no? But you don’t smoke?”His smile remained even as he seemed to be taking in the smoke, mingling with it.
“No,” she admitted. The smell reminded her of Aidan.
“Well, you have made that decision. You need to make another. You need to leave here.”
Of course, he was right. She would die if she stayed, either slowly shriveling or sliced open all at once. But instead of having to decide, what Esther wanted to do was ask him about his poems. She wanted to know the stories behind the lines and hear about the rooms in which they had been composed. Have him tell her what it felt like to read the newspaper each morning during the war. What signs had he seen? What had he ignored? She wanted to know about the sky, air, walls, bodies he had seen before distilling them into words. She wanted to ask him how he had dared to leave and how he had found the strength to write.
She also wanted to confront the ugly violence glinting beneath his bright rivers of words. How were his prophecies any different from those of the New Jericho militants? How could the ugliest sentiments produce the most glamourous images, gilding justifications for new dispossessions and new massacres?
She pointed to the book and as if reading her thoughts (perhaps he could read her thoughts) he vanished. She dropped her hand and for a long while she sat as frozen as she had been the night before. Then suddenly all at once she found the strength to stand coiling up through her legs. She began to stuff her allotment of food, her first aid and camping supplies into her oversized backpack. She wrapped up his book of poetry and her dictionary in her quilt and placed them carefully in the pack. She wasn’t sure if she would return or not. She took the gun, the few bullets she had, and, on a last thought, the cigarettes, just to try to keep her poet around. She layered on three shirts and her jacket, masked her face and locked up her flat. In her hand was the attacker’s car key.
The street was lit by a full moon. She stood in front of the entrance of her apartment building, with her fake red cross scrawled across it. She pressed the lock button on her attacker’s car key bob. There was a brief honk and a red flash to her right. She pressed the unlock button and moved swiftly toward the black truck with the little camper top, gun in hand. She shone her light inside to make sure her attacker didn’t have a companion and then climbed in and fired up the engine. There was nearly a full tank of gas. She could see that the entire back seat was also full of food and supplies. The floor of the passenger side was littered with books and spray cans of green paint.
She needed to go, but she couldn’t resist her curiosity about the books. Reaching down she pulled out slim volumes of…of poetry. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Gwendolyn Brook’s The Bean Eaters, Mahmoud Darwish’s The Butterfly’s Burden, and a comic book, Maus. She reached down again and pulled up a beige spiral notebook with the words “Matthew, Son of Heine” printed in bright green ink across the front. On the first page, written in black ink in German and English was a quotation she remembered from her studies: “The place where they burn books is, in the end, where they will burn people.” She had known this. She just hadn’t realized it would be her family that they would burn.
This man, this attacker, was more than mere thief. What can you say when the perpetrator is also the victim? Matthew had seen the marking on her door and attacked when they were actually on the same side. She felt her stomach constrict and drop.
As she sat frozen once again, staring out the windshield, she heard someone blowing a ram’s horn and realized she had to leave. Now. She put her foot on the clutch and on the brake and shifted into first gear. As she eased off the clutch and slowly used the accelerator to move into the street she began to cry.
“Thank you,” she mumbled. “Thank you. Thank you, Jamie. Thank you, Uri Zvi.” Her stomach knotted again as she said a quiet thanks to Matthew, son of Heine.
To her surprise, no one followed her, not for the truck, not for her transgressions or her omissions. She pulled down her mask, shifted the truck into fourth gear and kept going, past the red crosses, past the signs proclaiming the Godly Kingdom of Jericho and into the desert. After several hours she pulled off to a spot hidden from the road by an old gas station. She got out to inspect what her fallen benefactor had packed in the back of his truck. She found two large fuel containers, heavy and full, and more boxes of canned and dried food. And water. She spread her hands against the plastic jugs and thanked Matthew again.
She climbed back into the driver’s seat and had some beef jerky and water. She reached down to pick up the notebook and a marked-up map fell out of the back cover. On it was the town that was now Jericho. A green path cut through the desert to a little mountain town her family had often vacationed in when she was a child. Matthew had circled it in green and written,
Desti-nation.
Esther felt that deep gnaw in her stomach again. Matthew would not reach his destination and here she sat in his truck, with his food, his gas, his poetry, his journal. Would she steal his plan as well? Where could she go except to this green-circled town (could Jaime and Gregory be there?). She could hope whoever was there wasn’t waiting for Matthew or if they were, that they would forgive her. That they would be the types to let her live and to understand that it was not an easy thing, taking a side.
She could try to hide here for a while. Perhaps there was something left in this gas station worth taking. She sat clutching the journal, lost once again in indecision, but she was alert as well. Then she felt that same sudden burning heat behind her. She glanced in the rearview mirror and, just for a moment, those green eyes connected with hers.
Esther placed Matthew’s journal on the seat beside her, atop her carefully wrapped books. She reached down into the floor of the passenger side and pulled out one of the cans of spray paint. Stepping out of the truck, she shook the can hard and sprayed large green letters across one side of Matthew’s black truck. In Yiddish letters, her great-grandfather’s Aleph-Bes, she wrote:
אַלבאַטראָס
On the other side she sprayed the word in her alphabet: Albatros.
She climbed back into the cab, perched between past and future, and put the truck in gear. She headed toward the mountains.
Image: Uri Zvi Greenberg, byy Boris Carmi /Meitar Collection / National Library of Israel / The Pritzker Family National Photography Collection, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=112834328