What we have here is something like a message from another world: a sampling of the powerful imaginative work that emanates from a small, struggling nation on the shores of Asia, a nation created in the twentieth century on a foundation that dates back into biblical antiquity, a nation of thinkers and fabulators that exists in constant uncertainty and has used that uncertainty as the fuel for deep and often very moving speculative thought. That is to say, an anthology of Israeli science fiction and fantasy.

The Jews have often been called the People of the Book, and the Book meant by that phrase is the Hebrew Bible—known to the non-Jewish world as the Old Testament but to Jews everywhere as, simply, the Bible. To believers of all faiths, the Bible is a sacred scripture, the record of God’s dealings with mankind from the moment of creation (“In the beginning,” the very first sentence tells us, “God created the heaven and the earth.”) through the travails of a wandering desert tribe, the Hebrews, who had renounced pagan idolatry and polytheism in favor of belief in a single deity of austere and remote nature, the migration of that tribe out of Mesopotamia into Egypt, the escape from the tyrannical rule of Egypt’s Pharaoh into the land of Canaan, more generally known later as Palestine, and the foundation in Palestine of the Hebrew Kingdom of Israel, where the Jewish people, as the Hebrews came to be known, attempted with varying degrees of success to live according to the moral and ethical codes of their religion. The later books of the Hebrew Bible provide a chronicle of the division of the Jewish land into two kingdoms, Israel and Judah, the struggles of the two kingdoms against external enemies—the Moabites, the Philistines, the Syrians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and others—and, finally, the loss of Jewish independence as God’s punishment for a relapse into idolatry and other iniquities.

The Hebrew Bible isn’t just an historical chronicle plus a set of law codes, of course. It also contains an anthology of poetry—the Psalms of David—and a collection of proverbs, and what is essentially a short novel, the Book of Job. Nor is the Book of Job the only story that the Bible tells. It is, in fact, full of stories throughout, stories that have held the attention of mankind for three thousand years. It begins with the story of creation, goes on to tell of the life of our first ancestors in the Garden of Eden (“And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from the man, made He a woman, and brought her unto the man.”), continues to the temptation of Eve and the expulsion from the Garden, and on and on: the murder of Abel by Cain, the coming of a great flood from which only Noah and his family escape, the episode of the instructions of God to the patriarch Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac and everything that proceeded from that (and Isaac was not exactly his only son, and a long story descends from that, too) and on and on, a richness of narrative that can stand comparison with any other body of literature ever created. (The adventures of Joseph in Egypt; the career of the shepherd boy David, who became king of Israel; the Exodus from Egypt; the little affair of Samson and Delilah; the visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon—oh, yes, on and on. One doesn’t have to be a believer of any sort to succumb to the storytelling power of the Hebrew Bible.)

A potent fantastic element runs through many of the biblical tales as we have them now. (All of them are fantasy, if you are a nonbeliever and evaluate the whole collection from the premise that God is an imaginary being.) The Deluge of Noah, which has its antecedents in Sumerian and Babylonian legend, is a splendid apocalyptic fantasy. Moses miraculously parts the Red Sea so that the children of Israel can depart from Egypt on dry land. God manifests Himself as a pillar of fire to guide them by night in their journey through the wilderness. Samson is an early version of the superman, and like the twentieth-century comic-book incarnation has a special area of vulnerability. The visions of the prophet Ezekiel involve humanoid creatures with four faces and four wings, who carry him on something much like a voyage through space to bring him before the Lord on His throne. (The postcanonical Book of Enoch, which probably dates from the third or fourth century before Christ and has survived only in an Ethiopian translation, offers a great deal of astronomical lore and describes yet another prophet’s space voyage.) And there is ever so much more, a vast wealth of wondrous imaginative incident that remains alive and vivid in our minds even after nearly three thousand years.

Eventually the kingdoms of Israel and Judah disappeared. Their people were sent into exile by the Babylonians and brought back to Palestine by the next set of conquerors, the Persians, and upon the defeat of the Persians by Alexander of Macedon were swallowed up into his new empire, and then into the one founded by the Romans. Under the Romans, Jews emigrated to every part of the Mediterranean world, but some always remained in Palestine, which now was beginning to be called the Holy Land, the Jews sharing it with non-Jewish tribes that eventually coalesced into a population of Muslim Arabs.

Through those years of exile, diaspora, and shared occupation of Palestine, the hope of a return to the ancient days of the Kingdom of Israel surfaced again and again in Jewish thought and writing, reaching its most explicit form in Theodor Herzl’s utopian novel Altneuland (Old New Land), published in 1902. Herzl had first proposed a self-governing Jewish republic outside of Europe in his 1896 book Der Judenstadt (The Jewish State). He thought Palestine was the preferable location, for historic reasons, but at that point would have found Argentina just as acceptable. But Altneuland explicitly locates the Jewish state in Palestine. Jerusalem would be the capital; Haifa, the center of industrial activity. (Tel Aviv did not yet exist at that time. That was the name, meaning “Mound of Spring,” that the first Hebrew translator of Herzl’s novel gave to the book, and which also was given to the new Jewish settlement on the coast of Palestine that was founded in 1909.) Herzl’s republic was an egalitarian one that verged on socialism, with agricultural cooperatives and public ownership of land and natural resources but also private ownership of industry, and its citizens would converse mainly in German or Yiddish, though some attempt would be made to revive the ancient Hebrew tongue.

Thus a thread of speculative thinking, often mingled with a degree of mysticism, runs through the whole history of the Jewish people, from the visions and wonders of the Bible to Herzl’s prophetic work of utopian fantasy. It should be no surprise to find that elements of speculative fantasy and even science fiction appear in Jewish literature over the many centuries that separate the Book of Genesis from Altneuland. An episode in the Talmud has Moses traveling in time, making a brief visit to the future. The ninth-century Jewish merchant Eldad HaDani imagined an independent Jewish state in East Africa, perhaps Ethiopia. The medieval Jewish legend of the Golem foreshadowed the Frankenstein story and provided one of the first examples of the robot in literature. Medieval lore also gives us dybbuks, wandering ghosts who take possession of living bodies, a theme often used in modern science fiction. For good and proper reasons I hesitate to use any such broad generalizing term as “the Jewish mind,” but there does seem to be some affinity between Jews and speculative thinking, an affinity that has produced not only some great works of philosophy but also many works of fantasy and science fiction.

Science fiction in its specialized modern form, though it had its origins in the nineteenth-century works of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, was largely a product of American creativity—and a significant number of Jews were involved in its development. Jacob Clark Henneberger, the publisher who in 1923 founded Weird Tales, the first all-fantasy magazine, was Jewish. So was Hugo Gernsback, who brought Amazing Stories, the pioneering science-fiction magazine, into being three years later. Such notable magazine and book editors as H. L. Gold, Donald A. Wollheim, David Lasser, Samuel Mines, and Mort Weisinger were Jews. The roster of Jewish-American science-fiction writers includes such illustrious names as Isaac Asimov, Alfred Bester, Avram Davidson (who completed a stint as an army medic during the 1948 Israeli War of Independence), Harlan Ellison, Norman Spinrad, Joanna Russ, Stanley G. Weinbaum, Cyril Kornbluth, Philip Klass, Robert Sheckley, and Barry N. Malzberg. Even the German-speaking novelist Franz Werfel, born in Prague, turned to science fiction for his last work, the magnificent imaginative fantasy Star of the Unborn, when he was living in exile in the United States in 1946. (It takes place a hundred thousand years in the future, but Werfel places a small congregation of Jews in that otherwise utterly transformed distant epoch, presided over by a leader called Saul, whose title is “the Jew of the Era.”)

But modern Israel, too, a country of which it could be said (without stretching things too far) that it owes its origin in part to a work of speculative fiction and which is compelled by external forces to live in a state of perpetual existential crisis, has been a center of the sort of intellectual inquiry that leads to the writing of fantasy and science fiction. The Jewish War II, by Reuven Rupin, sends its protagonist back to Roman times to provide the rebellious Jews of Palestine with sophisticated weapons with which to establish an independent Jewish state. Secrets of the Second World by Yosef Soyka puts the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, living in subterranean tunnels, in contact with alien species who watch over mankind. Yaakov Avisar’s People from a Different Planet shows Israeli spacefarers encountering Hebrew-speaking aliens, with whom they defeat a third species, a warlike one that threatens galactic peace. Other novels portray an Israel jeopardized by neo-Nazi plots or by the seizure of control by Orthodox Jews, strife between Israel and its Arab population, a postapocalyptic Israel that consists of little more than Tel Aviv, and many another possible futures.

Contemporary Israeli writers of speculative fiction have been active as well in the short-story form, which since the time of H. G. Wells has had a central position in science fiction. Such magazines as Fantasia 2000, which was published between 1978 and 1984, provided a venue for original Israeli science fiction as well as stories translated from English and other languages, and there also have been more than a few one-author collections of short science-fiction stories.

But nearly all of this work was written in Hebrew, and Hebrew is not a language widely spoken beyond the borders of Israel; and so this plethora of rich and stimulating Israeli science fiction might just as well have been published on some other planet, for all the impact it has had on science-fiction readers in the rest of the world. Hence this anthology, the first English-language collection of recent Israeli speculative literature. Some of the stories, like those by Lavie Tidhar, Nir Yaniv, and Eyal Teler, were written in English and even published originally in American science-fiction magazines, but the bulk of those included here, those by Gail Hareven, Gur Shomron, Nitay Peretz, Nava Semel, and others, have been translated from the Hebrew and thus brought back to Western readers from beyond the linguistic barrier, and there is one, by Pesakh (Pavel) Amnuel, that is a translation from the Russian.

Messages from another world, indeed. Bulletins about a version of the future different from the one that most of us perceive, sent to us from a far-off place that happens to share this small planet with us.

The State of Israel may be regarded as the quintessential science fiction (SF) nation—the only country on the planet inspired by not one, but two seminal works of wonder: the Hebrew Bible and Zionist ideologue Theodor Herzl’s early-twentieth-century utopian novel Altneuland (Old New Land).

Only seventy years old, the Jewish state cranks out futuristic inventions with boundless aplomb: wondrous science-fictional products such as bio-embeddable Pill-Cams, wearable electronic diving gills, hummingbird spy drones, vat-grown chicken breasts, microcopter radiation detectors, texting fruit trees, billion-dollar computer and smartphone apps like Waze and Viber, and last but not least, those supermarket marvels, the cherry tomato and the seedless watermelon.

What Israel has yet to generate—and in this it stands virtually alone among the world’s developed nations—is an authoritative volume, in any language, of Israeli speculative fiction.[1] Zion’s Fiction: A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature is intended to remedy this oversight. The book will pry open the lid on a tiny, neglected, and seldom-viewed wellspring of Israeli literature, one we hope to be forgiven for referring to as “Zi-fi.”

Zi-fi: We define this term as the speculative literature written by citizens and permanent residents of Israel—Jewish, Arab, or otherwise, whether living in Israel proper or abroad, writing in Hebrew, Arabic, English, Russian, or any other language spoken in the Holy Land.

In the main, however, this volume spotlights a small but growing pool of Israeli writers who have pursued deliberate vocations as purveyors of homegrown Hebrew-, English-, and Russian-language science fiction and fantasy (SF/F), and other brands of speculative fiction, aimed at both the local and international markets.

We showcase here a wide selection of stories whose authors range across the entire gamut of the modern Israeli SF/F scene: men and women, young and not-so-young, Israel-born and immigrants, professional writers as well as amateurs; some continuing to live in Israel and some expatriates. More than a few have already published stories overseas; for others this is their first foray into the international arena. Many are part and parcel of Israel’s SF/F fandom (more about which, see below); others are mainstream writers who at some point in their careers decided to use SF/F tropes as the best vehicles for their message and their whimsy. All of them, however, share one thing in common: by adopting the tropes of speculative fiction, they have all bucked, if not kicked in the teeth, a deeply rooted, widely held, and long-standing cultural aversion, shared by a preponderance of Israeli readers, writers, critics, and scholars, to most manifestations of indigenously produced as well as imported speculative fiction—science fiction, fantasy, and horror.[2] It is the underlying contradiction between the aforementioned science-fictional roots and this primal aversion that, we believe, renders the very publication of this book a wondrous event.

On the roof the solar panels were folded in on themselves, still asleep, yet uneasily stirring, as though they could sense the imminent coming of the sun. Boris stood on the edge of the roof. The roof was flat, and the building’s residents, his father’s neighbors, had, over the years, planted and expanded an assortment of plants, in pots of clay and aluminum and wood, across the roof, turning it into a high-rise tropical garden.

It was quiet up there and, for the moment, still cool. He loved the smell of late-blooming jasmine; it crept along the walls of the building, climbing tenaciously high, spreading out all over the old neighborhood that surrounded Central Station. He took a deep breath of night air and released it slowly, haltingly, watching the lights of the spaceport: it rose out of the sandy ground of Tel Aviv, the shape of an hourglass, and the slow-moving suborbital flights took off and landed like moving stars, tracing jeweled flight paths in the skies.

He loved the smell of this place, this city. The smell of the sea to the west, that wild scent of salt and open water, seaweed and tar, of suntan lotion and people. He loved to watch the solar surfers in the early morning, with spread transparent wings gliding on the winds above the Mediterranean. Loved the smell of cold conditioned air leaking out of windows, of basil when you rubbed it between your fingers; loved the smell of shawarma rising from street level with its heady mix of spices, turmeric and cumin dominating; loved the smell of vanished orange groves from far beyond the urban blocks of Tel Aviv or Jaffa.

Once it had all been orange groves. He stared out at the old neighborhood, the peeling paint, boxlike apartment blocks in old-style Soviet architecture crowded in with magnificent early-twentieth-century Bauhaus constructions, buildings made to look like ships, with long, curving, graceful balconies, small, round windows, flat roofs like decks, like the one he stood on—

Mixed amongst the old buildings were newer constructions, Martian-style co-op buildings with drop chutes for lifts and small rooms divided and subdivided inside, many without any windows—

Laundry hanging as it had for hundreds of years, off wash lines and windows, faded blouses and shorts blowing in the wind, gently. Balls of lights floated in the streets down below, dimming now, and Boris realized the night was receding, saw a blush of pink and red on the edge of the horizon and knew the sun was coming.

He had spent the night keeping vigil with his father, Vlad Chong, son of Weiwei Zhong (Zhong Weiwei in the Chinese manner of putting the family name first), and of Yulia Chong, née Rabinovich. In the tradition of the family, Boris, too, was given a Russian name. In another of the family’s traditions, he was also given a second, Jewish name. He smiled wryly, thinking about it. Boris Aaron Chong; the heritage and weight of three shared and ancient histories pressing down heavily on his slim, no longer young shoulders.

It had not been an easy night.

Once it had all been orange groves…. He took a deep breath, that smell of old asphalt and lingering combustion engine exhaust fumes gone now like the oranges, yet still, somehow, lingering, a memory-scent.

He’d tried to leave it behind. The family’s memory, what he sometimes, privately, called the Curse of the Family Chong, or Weiwei’s Folly.

He could still remember it. Of course he could. A day so long ago, that Boris Aaron Chong himself was not yet an idea, an I-loop that hadn’t yet been formed….It was in Jaffa, in the Old City on top of the hill, above the harbor. The home of the Others.

Zhong Weiwei cycled up the hill, sweating in the heat. He mistrusted these narrow, winding streets, both of the Old City itself and of Ajami, the neighborhood that had at last reclaimed its heritage. Weiwei understood this place’s conflicts very well. There were Arabs and Jews, and they wanted the same land and so they fought. Weiwei understood land and how you were willing to die for it.

But he also knew the concept of land had changed—that land was a concept less of a physicality now, and more of the mind. Recently he had invested some of his money in an entire planetary system in the Guilds of Ashkelon games-universe. Soon he would have children—Yulia was in her third trimester already—and then grandchildren and great-grandchildren and so on down the generations, and they would remember Weiwei, their progenitor. They would thank him for what he’d done, for the real estate both real and virtual, and for what he was hoping to achieve today.

He, Zhong Weiwei, would begin a dynasty here in this divided land. For he had understood the most basic of aspects, he alone saw the relevance of that foreign enclave that was Central Station. Jews to the north (and his children, too, would be Jewish, which was a strange and unsettling thought), Arabs to the south, now they have returned, reclaimed Ajami and Menashiya, and were building New Jaffa, a city towering into the sky in steel and stone and glass. Divided cities, like Akko, and Haifa, in the north, and the new cities sprouting in the desert, in the Negev and the Arava.

Arab or Jew, they needed their immigrants, their foreign workers, their Thai and Filipino and Chinese, Somali and Nigerian. And they needed their buffer, that in-between zone that was Central Station, old South Tel Aviv, a poor place, a vibrant place—most of all, a liminal place.

And he would make it his home. His, and his children’s, and his children’s children’s. The Jews and the Arabs understood family, at least. In that they were like the Chinese—so different from the Anglos with their nuclear families, strained relations, all living separately, alone…. This, Weiwei swore, would not happen to his children.

At the top of the hill he stopped and wiped his brow from the sweat with the cloth handkerchief he kept for that purpose. Cars went past him, and the sound of construction was everywhere. He himself worked on one of the buildings they were erecting here, a diasporic construction crew, small Vietnamese and tall Nigerians and pale, solid Transylvanians, communicating by hand signals and Asteroid Pidgin (though that had not yet been in widespread use at that time) and automatic translators through their nodes. Weiwei himself worked the exoskeleton suits, climbing up the tower blocks with spiderlike grips, watching the city far down below and looking out to sea and distant ships….

But today was his day off. He had saved money—some to send, every month, to his family back in Chengdu, some for his soon to be growing family here. And the rest for this for the favor to be asked of the Others.

Folding the handkerchief neatly away, he pushed the bike along the road and into the maze of alleyways that was the Old City of Jaffa. The remains of an ancient Egyptian fort could still be seen there; the gate had been refashioned a century before, and the hanging orange tree still hung by chains, planted within a heavy, egg-shaped stone basket in the shade of the walls. Weiwei didn’t stop but kept going until he reached, at last, the place of the Oracle.

The news of the decision to close the Preserves was undoubtedly the worst I had ever received. I’d known for months that it was liable to happen, but I’d deluded myself into thinking that I had more time. There had always been controversy about the need for maintaining Preserves (see B. L. Sanders, Z. Goroshovski, and Cohen and Cohen), but from this remote region I was simply unable to keep abreast of all the political ups and downs. Information got through, but to evaluate its importance, to register the emerging trends, without hearing what people were actually saying in the corridors of power was impossible. So I can’t blame myself if the final decision came as a shock.

The axe fell suddenly. At six in the evening, when I got out of the shower, I found the announcement on my computer. It was just four lines long. I stood there, with a towel wrapped around my waist, reading the words that destroyed my future, that tossed away a professional investment of more than fifteen years. I can’t say that I’d never envisioned this possibility when I chose to study the Slows. I can’t say that it hadn’t occurred to me that this might happen. But I believed that I was doing something important for the human race, and, mistakenly, I thought that the authorities felt the same way. After all, they had subsidized my research for years. Eliminating the Preserves at this stage was a loss I could barely conceive of, a loss not only for me and for my future—clearly I couldn’t avoid thinking about myself—but for humanity and its very ability to understand itself. Politicians like to refer to the Slows as being deviant. I won’t argue with that, but as hard as it is, as repulsive and distressing, we have to remember that our forefathers were all deviants of this kind.

I confess that I passed the rest of the evening with a bottle of whiskey. Self-pity is inevitable in situations like this, and there’s no reason to be ashamed of it. The whiskey made it easier for me to get through the first few hours and fall asleep, but it certainly didn’t make it any easier to get up in the morning. As if to spite me, the sky was blue, and the light was too brilliant. As often happens in this season, the revolting smell of yellow flowers went straight to my temples. When I pulled myself out of bed, I discovered that the sugar jar was empty, and I’d have to go to the office for my first cup of coffee. I knew that at some point during the day I would have to start packing up, but first I needed my coffee. I had no choice. With an aching head and a nauseating taste in my mouth, I dragged myself to the office shed. I opened the door and found a Slow woman sitting in my chair.

Despite the security guards’ repeated instructions, I tended to forget to lock doors. Our camp was fenced in, we all knew one another, and the savages entered only during working hours, and then only with permission. How had she sneaked in?

Years of fieldwork had taught me how to cope with all sorts of situations. “Good morning,” I said to her. I didn’t even consider reaching for the button to call the guards. True, there had been occasional attacks in other camps, but for all sorts of reasons there had been none in ours to date. Besides, as I always said, the people most likely to be attacked were the policemen and the missionaries, not me, so I had a logical justification for bending the rules a little.

The savage woman didn’t answer me. She leaned over to pick something up from the other side of the desk, and immediately I became afraid. The fear spread rapidly from my legs to my chest, but my brain kept working. So the rumor was true: they had got their hands on a cache of old weapons. To them, perhaps we were all alike after all—policeman or scientist, it didn’t matter much from their point of view. But then the woman turned back to me: she was holding a human larva strapped into a carrier, which she laid on the table.

“You promised you wouldn’t take our babies from us,” she said in the angry, agitated voice so typical of the Slows. As my adrenaline level fell, it was hard for me to steady my legs. The savage woman fixed me with her black eyes and seemed to see this. “You pledged that you wouldn’t take them. There are treaties, and you signed them,” she spat out impatiently. I was always amazed by how fast news reached the Slows. It was clear to anybody who worked with them that they were hiding computers somewhere, and perhaps they also had collaborators on the political level. The nearest settlement of Slows was a half-hour flight away. They weren’t allowed to keep hoverers, and there were no tracks in the region, so to get to our camp she had to have set out the evening before. It seemed that she had known about the decision to close the Preserves even before I did.

“Those treaties were signed many generations ago. Things change,” I said, though I knew that it was silly to get into an argument with one of them.

“My grandmother signed them.”

“Is it your baby?” I asked, making a point of using their term, as I gestured at the human larva on my desk.

“It’s mine.” Luckily, the larva was asleep. Fifteen years of work had more or less inured me, but at that hour of the morning, and in my condition, I knew that my stomach wouldn’t be able to stand the sight of a squirming pinkish creature.

“Do you have others?”

“Maybe.” The female Slows don’t usually give birth to more than three or four offspring. Given the way they are accustomed to raising offspring, even that many is hard work. This savage woman was young, as far as I could judge. She might have concealed another larva somewhere before coming here. There was no way of knowing.

“You can’t break the agreements,” she said, cutting into my thoughts. “No. Listen to me. You’ve violated almost every clause. Every few years you renege on something. When you forced us into the Preserves, you promised us autonomy, and since then you’ve gradually stolen everything from us. From hard experience we’ve learned not to trust you. Like sheep, we kept quiet and let you push us farther and farther into a corner. But now I’m warning you. Just warning you: don’t you dare touch the children!”

Many people will think this strange, but over the years I’ve learned to see a kind of beauty in the Slow women. If you ignore the swollen protrusions on their chests and the general swelling of their bodies, if you ignore their tendency to twist their faces wildly, with some experience you can distinguish between the ugly ones and the pretty ones, and this one would definitely have been considered pretty. If her grandmother had really signed the treaties, as she said, she might have been one of their aristocrats, the descendant of a ruling dynasty. It was evident that she could express herself.

“Will you agree to have some coffee with me?” Fieldwork often involves long hours of conversation. With time I had got used to the physical proximity of the Slows, and sometimes, when their suspicions subsided—when they accepted that I wasn’t a missionary in disguise—they told me important things. The new decree had put an end to my research, but I might still be able to write something about the reaction of the savages to the development. Attentiveness had become a habit with me, and, besides, I was not yet capable of packing up the office.

“Coffee,” I repeated. “Can I make some for you?” Since she didn’t answer and just stared at me with a blurred face, I said, “You’ve certainly come a long way. It wouldn’t hurt me to have a cup, either. Wait a minute, and I’ll make some for both of us.” The Slows had grown used to harsh treatment, and when they encountered one of us who treated them courteously they tended to get flustered. Indeed, this dark-eyed woman seemed confused, and she kept her mouth shut while I operated the beverage machine.

No doubt the savages were a riddle that science had not yet managed to solve, and, the way things seemed now, it never would be solved. According to the laws of nature, every species should seek to multiply and expand, but for some reason this one appeared to aspire to wipe itself out. Actually, not only itself but also the whole human race. Slowness was an ideology, but not only an ideology. As strange as it sounds, it was a culture, a culture similar to that of our forefathers. People don’t know, or perhaps they forget, that when the technique for Accelerated Offspring Growth (AOG) was developed it wasn’t immediately put to use. Until the first colonies were established on the planets, the UN Charter prohibited AOG. It’s not pleasant to think about it now, but the famous Miller, German, and Yaddo were subjected to quite a bit of condemnation for their early work on the technique, all of it on ethical grounds. In a society that had not yet conquered space, AOG was viewed as a catastrophe that, within ten years, was liable to cause a population explosion on Earth, which would exterminate life through hunger and disease. The morality of the Slows had an undeniably rational basis under those conditions. We may be revolted by the thought, but the fact is that Miller, German, and Yaddo had all spent the first years of their lives as human larvae, not unlike the one that was now lying on my desk; they, too, had been slowly reared by savage females, just like the one who was waiting beside me for her coffee.

“We have to talk,” she said as I placed the cup on the desk and glanced for just a split second at the creature sleeping in the carrier. “There’s no reason for you to use power. There’s no point, because you have all the power anyway. We’re no threat to you.”

I knew something that she didn’t know, because it was a secret that hadn’t been publicized on the networks: in one of the colonies on Gamma, far from the Preserves, there had been an outbreak of Slowness. This was probably why the decision had been made to close all the Preserves at once—to eliminate any possibility of the infection spreading.

“It’s possible to compromise on all sorts of clauses,” the savage woman said, “so why not compromise with us? We’ll die out on our own in a few generations anyway. There are less than ten thousand of us left.”

The problem isn’t one of numbers, I thought, but I didn’t say it to her. The problem is that in many people’s eyes you are not a remnant but a gangrene that could spread and rot the entire body of humankind. Even I, with my interest in your way of life, can’t say for certain that the politicians are wrong about this.

“We’ve thought of all kinds of possibilities,” she said. “Since we have no choice, we’ll agree to let your missionaries into our settlements. We’ll guarantee their safety and give them complete freedom to talk to whomever they wish. We’ll agree that one parent’s consent is enough in order for a baby to be surrendered for accelerated growth, and we’ll make sure that parents obey that rule. What else do you want? What else can you demand? In the end, without wasting any more energy on us, you’ll get everything you want anyway.”

“Not this one,” I interjected, pointing at her larva. A tremor twisted her face and made it ugly. I drank the coffee and noticed that the larva had opened its eyes. The coffee was sour. The machine was apparently not working properly again. But there was no point in calling in a serviceman when I had only a few more days to spend here.

“Don’t take them away from us,” she whispered, and her voice shook. “I need at least a few years. You must allow us that. Why do you hate us so?”

The ardent possessiveness that savage parents—especially the mothers—display toward their offspring is the key to understanding the Slows’ culture. It’s clear that they don’t love their offspring the way we love ours. They make do with so few, and, at the rate they rear them, at best they get to know only their children’s children. Whereas even I—who have spent years away from civilization in barren camps like this one—have managed to produce seventeen sons and daughters and a lineage of at least forty generations. Still, they talk constantly about their love for their offspring, and its glory.

“Hate?” I said to her. “Hate is a strong word.”

The human larva turned its head and gaze toward the savage woman. Her eyes clung to it, and her chin quivered. She had pretty eyes. She had put on black and green makeup in my honor. A week or two of body formation would have made a good-looking woman of her, in anyone’s opinion. She trusted me, apparently, knowing who I was, having heard about me or made inquiries, and perhaps she hoped that, as a researcher, I would agree to represent her side. She had put herself in jeopardy by sneaking into my office in this way. Someone else in my place might have panicked, and an unnecessary accident might have taken place. Through her grimaces you could see a face that wasn’t at all stupid. She had certainly taken my well-known curiosity into account, and my composure. She knew that all I had to do was reach out and press a button, and they would come, chase her away, and take the larva from her. I wasn’t about to do that, but sooner or later, no matter where she hid, it would be taken.

In all my years of work I’d refrained from saying anything that would identify me with the missionaries, but now, seeing the tremble of her chin, I heard their words of consolation coming from my mouth. So be it. In any event, my work had come to an end.

“I know what you think, what they’ve told you. Lots of misunderstandings and rumors circulate in the Preserves. Listen to me, I promise you that no harm will come to the children.”

“Do you mean that you won’t take them?” the savage princess asked in a soft, strange voice. “That the decision has been revoked?”

“Decisions aren’t my field. People like me don’t make policy. What I want to explain to you is another matter. Maybe you think that accelerated growth will shorten this offspring’s life. Believe me, woman, that’s a mistake. Whoever told you that was either wrong or lying. Our life span is no shorter than yours. Actually, the opposite is true: progress gives us a longer life. If your son is ultimately given over to AOG, he won’t lose even a single day. On the contrary, he can enjoy all the years before him as an independent adult. You’ll see your son’s children, and your descendants will inherit the planets.”

The savage woman twisted her jaw to the side. “You think we’re stupid.”

The Slows have manners of their own. You can’t expect them to behave like us. Still, in her present situation I would have expected her to make an effort. But the very fact that she wasn’t making an effort held my interest. Perhaps this was an opportunity for me to hear something new. Usually they were so cautious when speaking to us and behaved evasively, even with me.

But just at that moment the larva started to bleat, and the savage woman instantly lost her impertinence.

“You may do it,” I said to her. “Pick it up. I’ve been in the Preserves for years, and I’ve seen such things.”

Without looking at me, she freed the larva from the carrier and held it to her chest. I observed six of my offspring during the process of accelerated growth, and the distress of the first weeks, before they reached decent maturity, comes back to me every time I’m forced to observe a human larva up close. There are times in a person’s life that are meant to be private, and the state of infancy is certainly the most pronounced of these. The larva was silent for a moment, then it started to bleat again.

“How old is it?”

“Eleven weeks.” The most horrifying human larvae are the big ones, which already look like people but lack the stamp of humanity. At least this one was similar in dimensions to our offspring. Nearly three months old. He could have been a productive adult already. Footsteps could be heard outside, and the sound of two people talking. The savage woman’s eyes widened. She put her hand first to her mouth and then to the larva’s open mouth.

“Don’t worry. They won’t come in here. They know that I hold interviews.” The touch of the woman’s hand on the creature’s lips increased its discomfort, and now it raised its voice, screeching until its wrinkled face turned almost purple. Someone was liable to enter after all. The savage woman stuck a finger into the larva’s mouth, but it turned its head away and looked for something else.

“Don’t you feel sorry for it?” I asked, but she seemed not to hear me, cradling the larva in her arms and also turning her head here and there with an unfocussed look in her eyes.

Human beings as we know them are excited by every development in their offspring, because what purpose is there for the hard labor of parenthood if not to send forth an independent, productive adult who can satisfy his own needs? But the Slows appeared to enjoy the helplessness of their larvae—the lack of humanity, the deplorable fervor of the little creatures, their muteness, their mindless appetites, their selfishness, their ignorance, their inability to act. It seemed that the most disgusting of traits were what inspired the most love in savage parents.

The screeches stunned me. I was so riveted by the sight of that wriggling caterpillar that I almost missed the moment when the woman started talking again. “If we knew how much time was left for us….” So she didn’t know everything: the invasion would start that day; it might already have begun. “If we knew that we had another year or two, if you would only tell us how much time there is, people could prepare themselves.” Had she come as a spy? If they greeted the police with violence, they’d only bring disaster down upon themselves. A few spontaneous uprisings were to be expected. After all, theirs was a volatile culture. But an organized attack would be a kind of stupidity that was hard to fathom.

“I’m asking for so little,” the savage woman said. “Just this—to know how much time remains for us. Listen to me. I know you’re different from them. You’re not a missionary. You know us. You’re merciful, not like them. I feel it. You could have called the guards when you saw me here, but you didn’t do it. Maybe you once also had a baby you loved.”

The larva arched its body backward, and the woman unconsciously fingered the opening of her shirt. Suddenly I knew what she wanted to do, and with that thought the sourness of the coffee rose in my throat. To give it her milk bulges—that’s what she wanted, that’s why she was plucking at her shirt. When I was a student, I was forced to watch a film about ancient nutrition customs. It was for a course restricted to advanced students, but none of us were advanced enough to view that sight without a sharp feeling of nausea. From close up we watched the ravenous face of the larva and the swollen organ thrust into its wet mouth. It was a rather large larva, at least thirteen pounds, and the depraved sucking noises that it emitted mingled with the female’s bestial murmur. White liquid dripped down its chin, and the woman tickled its lips with her gland, holding the organ shamelessly between finger and lustful thumb. I still remember the strong protest voiced by three women students, which was understandable.

“If you’ll just answer me that,” the savage woman said, and her voice shook with feeling. “Just that.”

The emotionality of the Slows had the strange characteristic of clinging to me like a stain. As sometimes happened after a few hours of conversation with one of them, I began to feel polluted. “The good of the children is the only thing that we consider,” I said finally. “Do you want a cup of water? I see that you haven’t touched your coffee.”

When I got up and went back to the machine, the woman bent her body over the larva, almost concealing it under a black curtain of hair. The cold water refreshed my mouth, removed the traces of yesterday’s drink and the bitterness of the coffee, dislodged the clinging feeling. I drank two cups. It is sometimes possible to identify rational thought among the Slows, but their emotional exaggeration dilutes it. Though I had hoped to calm the savage woman, at that moment it was clear that there was no point in trying.

When I returned to the desk with a cup of water for her, I saw that she was rocking slowly on the chair, moving the larva rhythmically back and forth. It was tired from so much screeching, and its voice was growing weaker. She was so deeply immersed in her drugged movement that she didn’t notice me. I watched the two tired bodies moving together, and knew that soon, very soon, there would be an end to their suffering. The larva would become a man in control of his body, and she would accept it and smile. With clarity I saw that image, and, as though to transmit it to her, I reached out and placed my hand on her shoulder. All at once, like an animal, the woman recoiled, raised her head, and bared her teeth. The sudden movement jolted my body backward, and for a long moment we were frozen, twisted in mid-movement, looking into each other’s face.

“Don’t touch me!” she spat out, as though at an enemy. Her face was transparent, and I could read everything in it, all her distorted thoughts. She believed that what I wanted was to hold her soft body, to curl my fingers and grasp her flesh, to press it against mine and rub, blind and hopeless, against her milk glands. Her eyes, like snakes, penetrated my thoughts and fed them her abominable vision, the visions of a lower animal. For nine years I had been in the Preserves, and never had I experienced such a defilement.

“No one’s touching you,” I pronounced with difficulty, turning toward the door and putting my hand out to press the button. By the time the alarm went off, and the sound of the larva’s weeping reached me, I was already in the light—in the bright, bright light outside.

The sound of the bell woke me up.

“Don’t take it,” murmured Yonit out of her slumber.

“I have to take it,” I said, but she was already fast asleep again. I rubbed my eyes and found the switch in the darkened room.

“We have a five-seven-twenty. Still closed. Military’s deployed. Waiting for us,” said Shir at the other end. I coughed. He waited, and when I didn’t reply, he sighed. I know exactly how he looks when he lets out that sigh. “Invasion. You, of all people in the Universe, should remember that—”

“I do remember that everything beginning with a five means invasion, and that this instance does not require urgent intervention,” I interrupted him. “But what’s with the twenty?” Shir had this talent for memorizing protocols in far too many details than our ordinary work required.

Shir sighed again. I knew he sighed again because he kept silent, and when he finally spoke, his voice was half-a-tone lower, and he was distinctly stressing each word. “Seven – twenty. Seven – twenty.”

“Seven – twenty,” I mimicked him.

“Multiple hits. But a single location, so far.”

“Shit.” Now I was fully awake.

“As I was saying.” He hesitated for a moment. “You’re coming, aren’t you? I don’t have to alert… the Others?”

“No, of course not. I mean, yes, I’m coming. You don’t have to alert anyone else.” Neither he nor I wanted to call our Superiors in the middle of the night. We never got any help worth a damn from them, and even just reporting things could have serious consequences.

“Sending you a bubble.” Shir hung up.

When I went out, Yonit opened half an eye and murmured, “Take care,” hogging the entire blanket.

The bus is full, but when it stops at the Indianapolis Academy only I get off.

I’m sweating in my bra, and it’s not even hot. My panties are too tight in one place and too baggy in another. My dress is too conservative. They’re going to know.

I watch until the bus disappears behind a turn and a hill. I wait a couple more seconds, take a deep breath, and turn around.

It’s like there’s a huge gate in the middle of nowhere, with a seven-foot wall stretching in both directions, deep into Indiana country. To one side of the gate is a small booth with an armed guard.

“Hi,” I say, coming closer, being cute.

He steps out of the booth. “You’re new.” All business.

“Yes.” I’ll bet he knows everybody’s faces.

“ID, please.”

I shuffle a bit in my purse and then give him my ID. He puts it in some portable computer thing; it bleeps; he pulls out my ID and hands it back to me. His hand accidentally grazes my finger as he does so, and I get a small sense of him. He’s not a telepath. He’s attracted to me. God, I hate myself.

He goes back to the booth, presses a button, and the gate slides open.

The Academy is inhumanly large, a twentieth-century architectural construct, meant to look like it was built in the seventeenth century somewhere in Europe. I feel as if I’ve shrunk to half my size.

“Good luck,” he shouts after me.

“Thanks,” I call back.

I put on my gloves.

The gate shuts behind me. God, I hate myself.

The night all the stars winked out, I was born. This is why nobody in our family paid any attention to what was going on outside, why none of them witnessed this world-changing event. They were all busy waiting outside the delivery room for my first scream, and Mom claimed I wouldn’t stop screaming, as if I’d already known that the world I was coming into had become completely dark.

Mom and Dad, and Grandpa, and my two spinster aunts, none of them rushed, crazed, into the streets or fields, like all the other people in the world, to see a sky that went completely black all at once; none of them cried out for the stars to come back.

Except for them, there’s not a single person in the world who can’t remember what they were doing at that terrible moment, which is called in history books the Obscuration of the Minor Lights. Until this very day—ten years have passed since—people are holding massive rites; even a special prayer was devised for the return of the lost lights. I remember nothing of that night, of course, ’cause a tiny little baby can’t tell day from night and knows nothing about stars or heaven. All this I was told by Grandpa, who also found out only the next morning that the world had turned upside down just as they were naming me.

Neri, that’s what they named me.

Mom, who breast-fed me with inoculation-enriched milk, said that I wouldn’t stop screaming for days on end.

The old woman in the grocery store stares at the floor and doesn’t look up. She examines the date printed on a chunk of cheese, and her hand shakes. She turns around, and the cheese drops from her hand into one of the two carts nearby.

It’s the wrong cart, and a small child sees the cheese fall, then hit a pack of frozen chicken legs. There’s a terrible tearing noise, and the old woman is split in two. Blood and stomach and intestines spray all over the place, and then there’s a gargling noise, and then silence.

Everyone ignores this, each keeping his or her head down. Except for the little boy, who’s waiting patiently with his mother in the line in front of the cash register.

He still doesn’t understand the need to lower one’s head. His mother covers his ears and eyes with her hands, but it’s too late. It’s oh so late. From somewhere in the air comes the sound of the beating of wings.

The memory will haunt me until my death—not long now. Fifty years could not erase the image of that old man, the feeling of my fists meeting his face. I can still see him standing there, taking my blows without protest, then crumpling to the ground. No cry, no blood, just a helpless body. Funny how this is what I remember—killing myself. The rest is too fantastic to contemplate: the time machine, Ray introducing me to myself, asking me not to become that man, not to go to Korea, to war.

The death—the death is real. Ray might have taken the body back with him, but the memory remains: killing a helpless old man, without reason, in a bout of madness. It is a cancer. Much like the one the doctors diagnosed, it eats me from inside. For many years I had used my writing and my success to block it, but the memory has won—no stories come to me as I’m lying on this hospital bed.

Thoughts that had played in my mind long ago, before I decided there was nothing but madness in them, are now coming back—questions about the reality of it all. How could Ray get a time machine, in that other reality? Just having me go to war couldn’t change reality so much, could it? It would be hubris to think so. And my actions, my words, that killing—they didn’t make sense.

Yet it couldn’t have been a hallucination. The only drug in my life had been my cigarettes, and my mind had always been sound enough—even when I suffered from depression. Besides, that time machine left a mark on the asphalt—I checked for it the next day.

I wish I had had the courage to find out what really happened on that day. I’ve never told anyone about it. Only once, about twenty years ago, did I try, halfheartedly, to find an answer.

“You must be Simon,” she said. It sounded so conclusive that for a moment I was tempted to turn back from her door. After all, if I could only be Simon, a specific, well-defined Simon, what use was there in seeing her?

“And you have no choice but to be Sedef, I guess.” I wondered, though. I hadn’t expected a short, round-faced girl, nor that broad smile in response to my dry joke. But her soft voice, with a hint of foreign accent, was as I remembered it from the phone.

“Come in,” she said, and I followed the path that her hand traced in the air to a brightly lit room with landscapes and a kitten picture on the walls. She motioned me to sit on the beige sofa, but I just stood, feeling as if I had happened to walk onto the set of the wrong movie.

“What did you expect, candlelight and voodoo accessories?”

Was I that transparent? What had I expected? An older woman, perhaps, with an air of mystery—a fraud—not someone my wife’s age, about half my fifty years. It was just a silly cliché, of course, and I wouldn’t have dared using it in a story. Funny how easy it was to use it in real life.

She looked more like a grade-school teacher than a seer, with her open, gentle, not-too-sharp face. Maybe it was fitting, in a way. We were all just gullible kids, those of us who came to her. Sure, Ray said that people swore by her. But then he also said that we should remain kids at heart. He may be my friend and mentor, but that doesn’t mean we have to agree on everything.

How had I managed to convince myself to visit a woman with a power I didn’t believe in? It was probably not too late to fix that mistake. I decided to turn around and leave.

The sofa was comfortable.

“So, Sedef, what can you tell me about that power of yours?”

She smiled. “Is this an interview?”

“No.” I preferred not to think of it that way. Interviews were intrusive and tiring, and my seeds of dislike for them had long ago grown into resentment. “Just curious. I never met anyone who claimed they had a power to see alternate realities.”

She giggled. “Will you stop calling it a power? Any more of this and I’ll have to start wearing spandex outfits. I don’t think I have the body for them.” She didn’t. Not that the flowery dress she wore looked that great on her.

“My talent, or ‘gift,’ if you wish, is the ability to see what might have happened had you made a different decision at some specific point in your life. I can tell you the most likely path that your life would have taken in that case. I don’t really know how I do it, and, no, I can’t really prove it, but people always tell me that it feels right, that they really would have done things that way.” Of course they would, if she was a good enough con.

“So, tell me what would have happened had I gone to war. I mean, to Korea.”

“Sorry,” she said, “I need to get more of a feeling for you first. Like, what do you do for a living?”

I didn’t know whether to feel insulted that she didn’t know me or happy that I didn’t have to deal with yet another mushy encounter.

“I create dreams.” My futuristic dystopias could perhaps be more correctly classified as nightmares, but it was the more lighthearted contemporary fantasy, the kid stuff, that had made me a household name. The wonders of commercialism. Not that I complained—it had been nice to take those vacations in fantasy lands.

She gave me a vacant stare.

I showed her. I liked telling tales. I loved the moment of conception, the minute or two when the idea was born, still ugly and unclean but with its inner beauty already showing. I told her a story set in a world where everyone had her power and knew the results of their choices.

“Wow!” The look she gave me could only be described as awe. My stomach turned.

“You liked my story?”

“What? Oh, it was fine. It’s not that. It’s just that your power of suggestion is so strong! You must be a great author!”

What a good performance; I nearly fell for it. Obviously she had known all along who I was. Still, I decided to play her little game.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, everyone affects the possibilities, you know. Not just choices affect them, but also wishes and dreams and desires. Authors, they don’t just think of ideas—they develop them, research them, let other people share them. Their words are like magic—they can change the world. Even the impossible can become possible this way. I once went with a friend to a writers’ conference. I could feel the possibilities change all around me. Not a lot, but it was still a little frightening.

“But you, you just told a story, without thinking about it a lot, without sharing it with lots of people, and I could feel the world changing. I could feel my power… damn!” She laughed. “Now I’m calling it a ‘power’ myself. I could feel it grow a little stronger, like this world was becoming more like the one you told me about. It’s like you’re changing the possibilities directly. I don’t know any famous writers, but I don’t think it’s normal.”

“I’ll try not to write too many alien invasion stories then.” Yeah, right. Trying to convince me she had a power was one thing. Telling me I had a power was just too much. “So, can you do your reading now?” Better get this charade over with.

“Yeah, I think I have enough feeling for you now. What war was that?”

“Korea.”

“Wow, that’s old! Sorry, didn’t mean it like that. It’s just that most people come to me to validate some recent decision they’ve made, not to ask me about something that happened thirty years ago. Don’t know how easy it’d be. Hell, I was just a little baby in Turkey at the time.” She was older than I had thought. “But I’ll try.”

Her eyes lost focus and looked up, and her forehead creased, as if she were trying hard to remember something. Then her hand went to her chin, her fingers brushing her lips. She reminded me of a female version of Rodin’s Thinker—but with clothes on, which made it somewhat less interesting.

I waited. I thought how to spin the tale I had told her into a publishable story. A better point-of-view character and some plot complications suggested themselves—enough material to pursue back home.

Sedef was still in thought, so I got up, curious to see what titles she had on her bookshelves. She didn’t have anything of mine. Several shelves strained under the weight of reference books—many of them about medicine. The rest were mostly classics and assorted poetry. She seemed to like Frost.

I glanced at my watch, then looked at her and wished she would stop. She could have at least made the show less boring—she could have mumbled or something.

“You know…” Her words startled me. I half imagined that she had fallen asleep in that posture. “There’s something very strange here. Some… barrier. I’ve never felt anything like it. I may be able to see through it, but it will take me some time. Could you tell me perhaps why you didn’t go to war? That might help.”

What could I tell her, that I had murdered myself for no reason, as if I had been possessed? That since that day I’ve kept fearing that I’d kill the people I loved? It had been too much for a boy of nineteen to think about. I was declared unfit for duty, of course, due to my mental state. I shut myself in my room and stopped seeing my friends. I wrapped myself in my writing and hoped that the stories would help me forget. All I wanted was to forget. Why did I come here to stir up these memories?

I made a show of glancing at my watch. “Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot an appointment. I have to go. It’s probably for the best. You’ll be able to look into my other possibility at your leisure, without pressure. Don’t worry, I’ll pay you for your time. Here.” I pushed a hundred into her hand as I picked up my coat and made my way to the door. “I’ll come back another day.”

I went out quickly, but I think I heard her say: “But I don’t take money….”

Lying in this hospital room, where day and night fade into a half-waking sameness, the memory makes me long for those days gone by, for the sound of words forming on a page in my typewriter, for conferences, even for signings—yes, I half miss even the company of people, of fans, and of Carolyn, to whose arms and tall, athletic body I returned that day; Carolyn of the intoxicating smell. I had overlooked her indiscretions, as she had for a while overlooked my mistress and true love: my writing. After our divorce the gossip columns told me that she had decided famous actors were easier to deal with than famous authors.

Those had been busy days—too busy to go back to see Sedef, or so I’d told myself—busy enough to push the memory back into its lair and take the thought of her with it. Once, some ten years ago it was, I think, I saw her on TV, on 60 Minutes. She was a physician. “Miracle doctor” they called her—one whose diagnosis was always on the mark. She had been offered work at ROI, a big research firm. I was tempted to find her again, to have her finish the reading. It didn’t matter if she was a fraud. If she could have come up with some plausible explanation, something to help me close that painful subplot of my life, that would have been enough.

I laugh inwardly and cough outwardly. It hurts—my punishment for being such a skeptic. I’ve seen and done strange things in my years on Earth, not the least of them killing an older version of myself, and still I don’t give her the benefit of the doubt, even though she had told me of a special barrier. She couldn’t have known enough for that to be a trick.

I found out where her lab was, but I didn’t go. She’d be too busy to do a reading for a silly author, I was sure—excuses were always my strong suit. Perhaps she didn’t even do readings anymore, being a famous and busy doctor. My wish to meet her remained just that—a wish. I still wish for it now, but it is too late. Even picking up the phone is too hard for me now.

There’s a knock on the door—a futile gesture. Weak as I am, the mere thought of saying “come in” makes me feel tired. I hear my thought echoed by the gruff voice of an orderly. There’s some argument about nobody being allowed to see me, but it’s settled quickly.

The door opens gently, and the tapping of low heels approaches my bed. I wait until she gets within my view—no use wasting my strength on turning my head. I wonder who she is and what she wants. I don’t get many visitors—Ray is the only one, in fact. I made sure the press was kept out.

“Hello, Simon,” she says. The voice startles me so that for a moment I forget my weakness and turn my head, and I see her sad smile. “I’m Sedef. You once came to me for a reading.”

As if I could forget. Yet the shock adds to my weakness and I can’t even tell her that. I can’t even smile back at her. I think of that old man that I hit—how silently he fell.

She has aged a lot since last I’d seen her. At last her looks seem to have caught up with her age. She looks rounder, and her hair, black touched with gray, is more orderly now. Perhaps she has a daughter named Pearl who is combing it for her, I muse—creating background details is a hard habit to break. Her clothes are more elegant, and I think the suit suits her—I find the pun amusing.

The joke eases the shock, and at last I manage to straighten my fingers—a feeble gesture of hello. She notices it and smiles. I’m glad now that the blanket is not over my hand, even though my arm feels cold.

She sits by my bed on the chair that up till now has been reserved for Ray, on his infrequent visits. She takes my cold hand in her warm one. It’s a good feeling, to have someone warm touch me. Her smile is warm, too, and there is warmth in her eyes. I find that I’m a little uncomfortable with all that warmth, even though I’ve often wished for more warmth, both for my body and for my heart. I don’t complain, though—I let her keep holding my hand.

“You know,” she says, “I was really insulted when you left me, twenty years ago, and even more when you didn’t come back. I decided to put you out of my mind, but I couldn’t. I met no one like you, with your power to alter the possibilities, and that strange barrier in your past. When I found out who you were, I was even more intrigued. You couldn’t have thought that the other path would have made you more successful. So why were you interested in it?

“I tried quite a few tricks to see your other path. I even researched you and read some of your books to get a better feeling for you. You know, some of them are quite disturbing. I liked the Lilian series, though. It’s more humorous and optimistic. It helped me forget the insult and think that perhaps there was some good in you after all.

“Anyway, I finally discovered that to move through the barrier I first had to move a little farther back in time. I didn’t even know I could do that, before. It then became easier than any other reading. It was as if your other path was the natural one, and I had to get back on it and then continue. It still doesn’t make any sense to me. Still…,” she pauses and smiles, “I guess I must thank you for all that practice. It really helped me understand better what I could do. It helped me help people better. Thank you.” It feels bad to get thanked for being selfish, but her gentle “thank you” warms my heart nonetheless.

“You had a very interesting life in that other possibility. Once I saw all I could see, I continued to follow you, day by day, in that other life. I can’t see the future, you see, even in another possibility, so I spent a little time each day finding out what you were doing. Then you died there, and I thought that if you were still alive here….I guess I’d better start from the beginning.

“Let me tell you the story of a young man,” she says. “He left his home, his parents, his sister, and went to war. It wasn’t easy for him to leave, and worse still was the war itself. Many of his friends died, people he cared a lot for. When it ended, he couldn’t face going home. He felt that it wasn’t right for him to live, with his friends dead. He started taking foolish risks, learning sports like cliff diving and bull fighting. Perhaps he was even disappointed that he was good enough at them to escape dying for years and years.

“It was in his days in Spain that he met a young woman from Turkey. He didn’t want to be her friend, but she always came to see him fight. She saw something special in him. Once, after he was injured pretty badly by the bull, she happened to see him being brought to the hospital where she interned. It wasn’t easy for her to get to see him, as he was quite famous, but she managed to pull a few strings and visit him.” She smiles. “I guess it’s the kind of thing she does.

“He talked to her then. He told her that he was sorry the bull hadn’t killed him. He said that he had friends waiting for him in another world, where life was beautiful and there were no wars.

“Then he talked to her about wars. He talked about them for hours and hours. He would only go to sleep when the doctors made the woman leave his side and would continue talking when she returned. ‘Soldiers are dreamers,’ he said, ‘and when a soldier dies, there is a little less dreamt beauty in the world.’”

I understand now what she had told me about how people react to her readings. That really felt like me, when I was younger and naïve.

“He talked about the dreams of his friends and how these dreams came to an end. And he talked about the dead of the enemy. He described the horrors of the ones unfortunate enough to survive, without parts of their body, or without a place to live or things to eat. When he came to the end of what he had seen with his own eyes, he talked of the wars he had heard about, the horrors he could only imagine.

“Eventually he finished talking and slept for an entire day. When he woke up, he said that perhaps it was good that he hadn’t died. He had a gift for stories before he went to war, he said. Perhaps if he could put all those horrors on paper, to show people what war was like, then he could do some good and make his friends in heaven happy.

“But the woman had a special gift. She had heard his war stories, and she had sensed something, and so she told him no. ‘You are special,’ she said. ‘Whatever you tell becomes more real, more possible. Don’t tell stories of war; tell stories of peace.’

“And he did. He told her stories of ending conflicts, of age-old feuds becoming forgotten through acts of love and kindness; of tyrants falling and of religious tolerance. He told of the Koreas healing back into one country, of Turkey and Greece ending their differences, of peace in the Middle East, of Europe joined. She was his only audience. ‘People don’t want stories of peace,’ he used to say. ‘They want conflict, action.’

“They moved in together, into a small apartment on the outskirts of Madrid. She worked at the hospital while he took care of their children and thought of new stories to tell. She would come home exhausted, and he would read stories to her while she slept. Around them the world blossomed. It took years and years, but they could track the change. Those stories that he typed they kept together with the news clippings from the papers when they became true. They could not be any happier, with each other, with their children, and with the world.

“And then he fell ill. The doctors found lung cancer, too advanced to be cured. They tried, the doctors. He tried. He told stories of doctors finding cures for cancer, and I know that they did, but they were too late to help him. He died in hospital, a few days ago. He did so much good for the world, but he couldn’t do himself a favor and quit smoking, the silly man.” Her voice breaks at the end. She squeezes my hand and falls silent.

It couldn’t have been. She must have gotten it wrong. “I…,” I gasp, “killed… me.”

“Huh, what?” Her thoughts return to me from elsewhere.

“Ah…” I start to say, but my voice betrays me. I force my head to my right, to the stand where my laptop sits. I’m not sure if I truly thought I’d write any stories here, or whether I just enjoyed the disapproving looks from Ray, who likes to act as if computers are demons taken form.

When it boots, and the word processor opens, she helps guide my feeble hand over the keys, “i killed me,” I write, “time machine.” Could I have helped create one with my stories, in that other reality? Did I really have that much power to change the world?

She thinks for a while, probably trying to decide if my illness had made me delirious.

“Well,” she finally says, “It sounds rather fantastic, but a time machine could explain why the other path felt more natural. It would take something that could really warp reality to change the natural path of someone’s life. But I still don’t understand what you mean by ‘I killed me.’ You mean literally?”

I don’t answer her. I’m too weary to make a sound or even nod.

“Simon, I’m sorry. I’ve tired you with my story. I guess I’ll come back later, after you’ve rested a little.”

She gets ready to let go of my hand, and I force my fingers to tighten around her. I know that there’s no way I can hold on, so I’m grateful that she stops and sits back down.

“Simon,” she says, and I can hear the humor in her voice, can almost see her smile. “It’s about time you didn’t let go so easily.” She pauses, probably smiling again. I open my eyes, and sure enough, there she is, smiling and looking into my eyes. Her smile grows wider. “Good,” she says.

“I know you’re tired, but I’ll tell you what we’ll do. I’ll ask you questions and you can squeeze my hand for the answers. One time for yes, two for no. No, bad idea—wouldn’t want to tire you. Nothing for no, then. I’ll just wait enough to make sure.” She smiles again. “Okay, let’s see if I get this straight: the older you, from the other reality, came back in a time machine to the time you were about to go to war, and you ended up killing him. Is that what happened?”

I hesitate for a second, then squeeze her hand feebly.

“That’s what I thought. Not that it makes any sense. I’m quite sure now that the possibility I followed was your natural path, and you never got near a time machine there. There probably never was one to be near. So it must have been something else. But what? I wish you could tell me more. Maybe after you’ve rested.”

No way. I’m not letting her go. I have to finish this now. There might not be another day. What was the signal for “no”? Nothing—no, that’s no good. I guess I’ll just have to squeeze “yes.”

“Yes? So you want to rest?”

I guess that saying “no” now would be okay.

“No? Or are you just resting? Not a very smart signal scheme I came up with, is it?” She smiles. I smile back, which probably looks grotesque, with half my face paralyzed.

She smiles a big smile back. “Well, if you can smile a big smile like that, I guess you don’t need to rest. So, you want to continue?”

I squeeze “yes.”

“You want the computer?”

No. I just need to think.

“You need some time to think?”

Hey, she didn’t tell me she has ESP too. I smile in my thoughts and squeeze her hand.

I think back to that day, fifty years ago. My memory is as sharp as ever, but emotions still cloud my view. I push past them, try to see the scene as I saw it then: two men stepping out of a strange contraption that hadn’t been there a moment before. One of them old, feeble, and unfamiliar; the other, Ray, old but recognizable. I remember him telling me the other guy was the old me, and I then saw myself in him. I nearly freaked out then.

There’s some detail here, some buried realization that I must uncover. I stop thinking and let the scene take over, as if it were part of a story, as if these were characters of my own creation that I’m trying to get to understand.

Obviously, Ray was the protagonist. He was the one who talked to me, the one who acted. The old me did little. What did Ray want? He asked me not to become that guy. He wanted me to continue writing. He brought that guy to show me what I would become, and then took his body away. Yet Sedef says that I died in hospital. Perhaps he snatched me from there, then returned me back, dead. Did she miss that moment? She probably couldn’t follow every moment of my life—that would have left her no time for her own.

No, that doesn’t make sense. That old me looked old and muddled, but he didn’t look like he was dying. How did he look? I try to picture that guy—his face like mine, but wrinkled, gaunt; his body thin, shriveled. That’s nothing like me, even after the cancer started taking its toll. I might have imagined this to be me, fifty, even twenty years ago, but not now. Could I have aged differently in that other reality? I find it unlikely.

Ray, the bastard! Did he hire an actor to impersonate me?

“Ray!” I cry. It comes out as a croak. I look to my laptop. When she gets it for me, I type, “Can you check him?”

I wait.

“Ray… Bradbury; the writer, right? I remember now. You knew him before you went to war. You don’t meet him again in the other possibility, but I remember that my research of you mentioned him. I guess you’re friends here. Now that I think of it, I saw him interviewed once. He thanked you for putting science fiction in the limelight. That stuck in my mind.”

It was really Ray who deserved the fame. He was the real artist, with his prose that was poetry. I’ve always thought it unfair that it was my straightforward style that won people’s hearts. Ray never agreed with me, of course. “Simple people need a simple style,” he used to say. It was enough for him that they were reading.

“So Ray had something to do with the time machine? And you want me to check his alternate life?”

I squeeze “yes” to both questions.

“I’m not sure I could follow someone else’s life based on your decision. I do have some feeling for him, from that interview and what I saw in your own life….I guess I’ll just have to try.”

I find it funny that she uses the same Rodin posture that she did twenty years ago. She does have nice lips, I notice when her fingers brush them. I wonder if she has anything of mine on her bookshelves now.

I imagine her mind flying from the east coast to the west, finally settling on Ray’s house, dropping down to the mess he calls a basement to see him sitting among his books, writing his next story on his old typewriter.

A touch on my arm wakes me up. “Simon, are you asleep?” I open my eyes, and I see her smile. “Not a very clever question, is it?

“I’m sorry,” she says, “but I couldn’t really see Ray. I did find something. It jumped into my mind when I tried to look for Ray in that other possibility. I guess I could see it because it had something to do with you. He wrote a story about you, you see. He even got it published very recently, so I guess we’re lucky that I’m just checking for it now. Wouldn’t have been able to see it before.”

“What… was… it… about?”

“I didn’t see the exact details—just a second, I’ll see what I can get. My God! It was about him taking your old you to the past to convince you not to go to war. Would you believe it? Did he really do that? No, of course not. Oh, I see. It makes perfect sense now!

“Ray is a good writer, right?” I know an understatement when I hear one. “He probably waited for you to come back, all these years. He thought about you, he even got a story published about you. He finally did it—he changed the possibilities; he changed your past! That’s some power.”

The time machine, the encounter—they were part of a story? He probably didn’t even realize what he’s he’d done. I certainly hope this doesn’t mean that book burning will become true one day. But I don’t really care. It all makes sense now—my irrational behavior, the killing—it was just a story. I didn’t kill me! I didn’t kill anybody! It’s like the stone has been raised from over my grave, and I can breathe again. I smile, and Sedef smiles back at me, her brilliant smile amplifying mine.

Ray didn’t have to make me kill myself. But I guess that’s just the way he is. I smile again, imagining how I’ll give him a piece of my mind in the next life. There must be one—enough people believe in it. I might have to wait for him a few years, though—he doesn’t seem too willing to let go of this life. I, on the other hand, will soon be looking at new vistas. I hope that heaven isn’t based on the most mundane of human dreams.

I look at Sedef one last time. She takes my hand, and I close my eyes, lose all sensation but her warmth. No more pain, no more queasiness. It seems so right to have her by my side as my consciousness slips slowly away. The warmth becomes sunny, and I’m surrounded by light. A tunnel beckons me. Of the world of my life, I carry only one thing with me; one thing, as if sketched by Lewis Carroll—a smile.

On Thursday, Mika, who was my cat, mine and Liron’s, got killed. One of us, we didn’t know who, left her carrier open on the way to the vet, and in one moment Mika busted loose, bolted out of the cage and onto the street. She was run over immediately.

When we got home, Liron headed straight to the sink to do the dishes. There were no dirty dishes in the sink, so she got all the nice dishes from the top shelf and scrubbed them. After that, she went on, working through the bottom shelf, even though the bottom shelf dishes were sparkling clean. She emptied the saltshaker and washed it. She cleaned all the spice jars and the egg tray in the fridge. She washed the dishes for two and a half hours, crying the whole time.

Mika was originally Liron’s cat, not mine. When we moved in together, I adopted her, and Liron used to say that “now she has two mommies.” Mika liked scaring us to death by sneaking into bed between us and by licking our toes during breakfast. She loved toppling glasses from the edge of the table. She loved playing with Liron’s chains until they got completely tangled. She loved being petted behind the ears and scratched under the chin. She loved attention of any kind.

Liron went to the nearby hardware store and came back with the expensive salad serving bowls I wanted to buy last week before she had said, “Danielle, we don’t have three hundred shekels, and we hardly ever eat salad.” It was only when she unpacked them and started washing them with hands already red and wrinkled from water that I realize that I would have to crack the mirror.

The thought made me feel tired. The last time I cracked the mirror was only two years before, and it took me over a week to get over the terrible fatigue. I lay in bed with red eyes, staring at the ceiling, getting up only to go to the bathroom. Fortunately, Liron didn’t see the cuts on my hand. It took her physically carrying me to the doctor’s—I was too weak to walk—and his not finding anything wrong before she could be persuaded that all I needed was some rest.

When night fell, and Liron’s weeping from the den finally died down, I stood in front of the mirror, trying to delay the inevitable while examining the oh-so-smooth spotless surface, the ancient gilded frame, my own familiar reflection.

Liron hated the mirror. She thought it was ugly and old fashioned. I didn’t like it either, for completely different reasons. At first I loved looking at it, especially after cracking it. The first time I did it I was ten years old, after destroying—in a fit of rage—the doll Nana Chana left me, the only thing she gave me other than the mirror. Now, I wouldn’t crack the mirror for something as silly as that. I did it then, and for months after I would sit in front of the mirror holding the doll, enchanted, looking at the other Danielle who put the fragments in a small jug by her bed and would occasionally take them out and touch them. Once, she cut her finger on one of them. When she grew up and would look in the mirror, I would study her reflection, comparing it to my own. Same red hair, same green eyes, but something in the eyes was different, and it wasn’t just that she couldn’t look right back at me.

I stopped watching that Danielle. I had thought she would grow up to be much like me, and it would be boring to look at her. But things turned out differently. She went to a different high school, studied nursing, and married a doctor. A man. I stopped looking at her because I could no longer see myself in her cold eyes when she put her hair up in a tight bun every morning. It bothered me, seeing how different from me she became over such a small thing. I didn’t look much at the others, either, since I had Liron.

Liron, I reminded myself. I’m doing this so Liron won’t be unhappy. I thought about one more minute, gathering my strength. And then I made a fist. I hit the mirror hard, concentrating on Mika, thinking about her fur, white with gray spots, about her quivering whiskers, a soft purr under the blanket. The mirror cracked. The sudden pain in my hand followed the sharp sound of breakage. But the little crack didn’t stay on my side. It faded into the mirror. And then a different Danielle looked at me from the other side. Yet she wasn’t looking at me, but at the small crack in her mirror. Her hand wasn’t bleeding, and there was a confused expression on her face. She was wondering what had happened, I knew, wondering what she is doing there. And then she heard Liron cry louder again from the other room, confusion turned to sorrow, and she left the mirror and went again to hug and comfort and pack.

On my side, Liron had stopped crying, and a small white cat with grey spots stood for a moment in the door, licking herself before making her way to the bed. I looked at her for a long moment, smiling, until Liron appeared in the doorway. I quickly hid my bleeding hand.

“Whatcha doing?” she asked, coming up behind me. She put her arms around my waist and looked at our reflection in the mirror. She didn’t see what I saw on the smooth surface—the empty room, the sounds of crying and begging from the other room, followed by shouts, a door being slammed shut.

“Looking at my pretty girl,” I answered, and turned into her hug, turning my back on the mirror. Liron smiled against my lips. “Flattery won’t get you anywhere. It’s your turn to do the dishes.”

I would spend more time looking before Liron became mine. I was curious to know if the mistakes I fixed, the errors I erased, were justified for me. I looked at them often, as if to make certain, with evil satisfaction, that they were miserable, so that I could be happy. I would look at the Danielle who made the mistake of choosing biology instead of communications as her major in high school, so she never ended up getting close to Shiri Rosenstein, never kissing her on the lawn. She lived with a man and would often look at the mirror to avoid looking at him. He hugged her at night while he slept and she would lie awake, looking at the mirror, and I knew that she couldn’t understand why she wasn’t satisfied. I would look at the Danielle who decided to study gender instead of literature. She was a little plumper than I and lived with an angry woman who’d shout at her. I would look at the Danielle who had refused the job offer at the new publishing house because she was afraid it would be too big a risk. She, like me, met Liron, but Liron left her six months later after yet another fit of rage. She would edit, mostly at nights, sitting bleary-eyed in front of the computer, drinking a lot. I was certain that she would get fired soon.

The need I hated in myself, to always make sure the other Danielles were unhappy, disappeared when Liron came into my life. It was a month after we moved in together, and right after we hung a sign with our names on it over the door, she wouldn’t stop complaining about it. “Why do we need a mirror in the bedroom?” she complained. “Why this mirror? It’s so ugly.” I told her that it was a family heirloom and that it had sentimental value—which was true, so I felt only slightly guilty.

On the evening when she broke the mirror, Liron waited for me in the kitchen when I got home, and when I saw her face, I immediately knew she did something to the mirror. But she was so pale and frightened that I also knew that it wasn’t on purpose. Liron said that she tried to get some cardboard boxes she realized she would never unpack onto the top shelf, and one of them fell, hit the mirror, and broke it. “The broken remains are there,” she said. “I didn’t know whether to clean… maybe you want, I mean, to patch it up… or maybe keep them in a box and put a new mirror in the frame. I’m sure we can fix the frame….”

My suspicion was confirmed when we entered the bedroom. The mirror was on the floor, next to the cardboard box that had broken it, where it fell. It was intact. There were no shards on the carpet and not a single crack on its smooth face, which reflected Liron’s astonished expression. She looked at me, confusion and fear on her face, and rubbed her eyes. Her hands went, on their own, to wander on the mirror’s smooth, perfect, surface.

“You must have only thought you broke it,” I tried.

“No, no….I’m sure, it was here… and there were shards all over the floor.” She pointed, afraid. “And the frame, it was here, in two pieces….”

“You dreamed it.”

“I did not dream it.”

It took me a long time to calm her down.

At night we lay with Mika snuggled between us, her back to my belly, her soft paws resting on Liron’s chest. Liron claimed that was uncomfortable. “I have scratches on my boob,” she complained, inspecting her body in the mirror in the morning. I smiled when she went to shower and I went to examine myself in the mirror. The weakness was not as bad this time—Liron barely noticed, but I still saw the unnatural pallor of my skin, the fatigue in my motions. Pain still pulled in my hand. Liron bandaged it earlier—I had to break a plate while washing the dishes to explain the cut. Cracking the mirror took so much energy. I hoped I wouldn’t have to do it again soon.

A need I didn’t understand led me back to the other Danielle, the latest one. She was standing in front of the mirror, looking at her expression with eyes red with tears. The bed was made—apparently, Liron had not come back that night. Suddenly, I felt the full weight of the guilt, as I have never felt it after cracking the mirror. I didn’t understand why I felt that way. She was just another Danielle, a mistake. And it was my right to fix my mistakes. It wasn’t my fault Liron wasn’t with her now. “There are so few people who can change their lives, choose their options,” Grandma said when she gave me the mirror. “You should be proud to be one of them.”

I touched the mirror, its perfect smooth surface, looking at a crack that only existed on her side. “Sorry,” I said, even though I knew she couldn’t hear me.

I sorrowfully turned my eyes from the other Danielle, who kept looking at the mirror. Suddenly my back tingled, and I froze, turned around slowly. The other Danielle wasn’t looking at her reflection. She was looking at me. I was sure of it. Her eyes focused on me with pure hatred. I stared at her, frozen, stunned, trying to understand how she could look back at me. Her look was cold and furious, and she balled her hand into a fist. Fear suddenly ran in my veins, and I reached out to stop her, screaming, “No!”

She was smiling at me while she broke the mirror.

I kept on falling even though I had regained consciousness, falling way, way down. I screamed like crazy and opened my eyes to find myself in a hospital bed. But the sensation of falling persisted. Worse than that, I could hear thoughts. Hear, not read—I perceived people’s thoughts through my sense of hearing. For half a day I kept pleading with doctors and visitors to stop the yammering inside their heads. People sitting beside me kept emitting an incessant, enervating babble of noises. I had to shout when I wanted to talk to them; otherwise I couldn’t hear myself. To make things worse still, my visitors shouted back at me, assuming that I was suffering from a loss of hearing.

I finally realized that this mind-hearing thing had a lot to do with distance—inverse-square, or some other exponent. The further the persons who did the thinking were from me, the quieter their thoughts became. My pleadings finally made people sit as far away from me as possible, and then we really had to shout at each other. So all this talk about reading minds and broadcasting thoughts is bullshit. Old wives’ tales.

Old wives? What about my Nana? Yes, they assured me. She’s alright.

The police officer who came to question me asked if I had been injured by the mice. I told him that a sophisticated mouse-made weapon had been used against me. The policeman wanted to know how I could tell it was mouse-made. I said that the weapon was totally mousy, was designed to be operated by a mouse. The disgusting rodent had used its tongue to manipulate it.

“Lucky for you, the Tin Beggar saved you,” said the policeman.

The officer’s thundering thoughts told me how upset he was. First there was all this imbecilic biogenesis thing in the Judean Desert, with an outbreak of evolution so wild it ought to be called a revolution; then there was this American lady who came from outer space down to Jerusalem, after the Thirteenth Shock that had left her lethally disturbed. And now the mice were making their appearance on the troubled and troublesome stage of homeland security.

I could hear how disgusted he was with the forthcoming war. He didn’t think it’s such a glorious deal, fighting mice. His thinking became too noisy, and I had to shout at him to stop it, just stop thinking and let his mind rest, let me rest as well.

The sensation of falling lasted the whole day, even though I was awake, and because of this I was afraid even to move a finger. I lay stretched out like a wounded rubber sheet, pale as death itself, nausea churning inside me. My tongue lolling, I held tight both bedsides so as not to tumble in my nonexistent plummet.

It took the entire day before I calmed down, ceased feeling that I was falling, and stopped hearing thoughts. The side effects of my injury slowly ebbed away. Now I could turn my mind to the war.

The mice had taken over Nana’s street. Preserved in its old style as a Jerusalem heritage site, this street bordered on the religious neighborhoods. I didn’t think it was such a big deal, taking over that street. It had been taken over by roaches a long, long time ago. And the mice held it for just a short while. The Tin Beggar, willing to sacrifice its metallic soul, bravely defended all those unconscious people and, specifically, saved me. The Tin Beggar also evacuated people from the street, for which it won an official citation from City Hall. Lucky beggar!

Then came the police, and later on the military. The military overcame the resistance offered by the mice and drove them away, devastating half the buildings in the street as collateral damage. The way I heard it, not a single house remained entirely intact. The Stern-Gerlach mice suffered seven casualties during the military’s assault, that’s all (I myself killed more than that), because of this ability of theirs to shift to microscopic size and evade direct hits. The military, on the other hand, filled a whole hospital ward with soldiers who kept begging those around them, as I did, to think quietly.

The Stern-Gerlach mice!

How did we get ourselves in such a mess?

In the fourth year, the funnel of air passed frequently over the house, teasing, descending to the garden of wooden monsters where the child used to wander. Every few days, Gila would hear the distant whistle grow shriller, like the siren on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day or on the eve of Memorial Day for the Fallen in War, and she’d run out and pull the boy home. She was almost late once, and at the last minute, as she grabbed him from the sucking flow, she saw the opening of the funnel up close for the first time, damp and quivering, like an elephant’s trunk. And once she was late. The boy’s arm had been sucked in, but he struggled, flapping at the mouth of the funnel, swinging his short legs and his free arm, moving away and rising, and Gila ran under him, screaming, until he was dropped on the other side of the fence into the area of the epidemic over which birds were flying in circles. He was caught in a tree, then fell to the contaminated earth along with some branches, bruised all over. Later, frightened and exhausted, he let her isolate him in his room for three days and smear his body with an ointment she made from the bark of a tree that burned the skin and its fruit, which was shaped like cats’ heads. Sometimes, when he cried and Gila was too tired, the nun would come out of her room and lovingly tend to him. But when he’d recovered from his mysterious illness and grew calm, he insisted on going out again, especially to the garden of monsters, as if he were heeding the call of his parents beckoning him to their burial place.

When the boy was outside, Gila would coax and threaten and plead with him to come in, but he, recalcitrant and rebellious, his body sturdy for a two-year-old, would slip away from the windows to the garden of warped tree trunks, and she became accustomed to straining her ears for the sound of the whistling air that heralded the coming of the funnel.

Not until he was asleep in his bed and she was secure in the refuge of the house did she stop the constant straining to hear. Then she waited for the funnel with forbidden excitement, occasionally seeing objects fly past like lightning and remembering how she had once seen a remarkable spectacle. It was as if the funnel had decided to tease her—like a naked young girl in a dark window, waiting to tease a neighbor across the way. The streams of haze rising from the ground began to move slowly, drawn in a single direction to form a clear diagonal curtain, curled at the edges and with a long, hollow space in the center, and one end of it moving lustfully, seeking prey. A large tree complete with its roots appeared suddenly at one end of the channel of clear air, flew like a shot arrow to the other end, and disappeared instantly. She stood there terrified and enthralled by the haze that was now flattening, returning to its former state, as calm as an animal whose appetite has been satisfied.

But then, the boy had already been a year old.

The first time she saw the funnel, she still hadn’t known the boy existed. As soon as she walked into the house with the man, even before they saw the five dead people, before they found the boy sleeping in his bed, they suddenly heard the noise of a storm, and a tube of bright air cut through the smoke that had already begun to darken outside. Inside the illuminated tube of space, stretched parallel to the horizon and twice the height of a person, numerous objects sailed around slowly, becoming entangled in gentle circles: stools and a bookshelf, babies’ clothes, frying pans, a mattress, a straw lampshade, landscape paintings, a tapestry of harem women, a bouquet of flowers and the vase that had once held them, pillows embroidered with silver and purple birds, a blue enamel kettle, a carpet, a woman’s purse, newspaper pages. Gila looked in horror at the contents of the ghost house hovering in front of her: not too long ago someone had read that newspaper and had drunk tea brewed in that kettle; a dog had lain on that carpet; a woman had worn the straps of that purse on her shoulder; babies had soiled those clothes. Where were they now?

The graying smoke had once again subdued the channel of air, but still she stood at the window, waiting, as if she had been told part of a story and wanted to know the ending. Then the man had come out of one of the rooms and said, “There are five dead adults here and one live baby.”

Two of the dead people had been guests, an elegant couple of Indian descent sitting in the garden on a wrought iron bench, he smoking and she brushing her hair. The three other dead people had been employees of the inn: a very tall, thin young man doing accounts at a desk in the office; an older man with gray sideburns bent over the stove in the kitchen; and a girl wearing a frilled chambermaid’s apron lying like a contortionist at the foot of a half-made bed in one of the rooms on the top floor.

Elated, Gila stood beside the sleeping baby’s bed and recalled a children’s story one of her little girls had liked and the other had loathed: the three bears come home after an evening stroll to find Goldilocks sleeping in the small bed.

The man scrutinized her, pondering, watching this unknown woman glow at the sight of the sleeping child, reach out and cover his exposed shoulder, take pleasure in something familiar amidst the chaos they had been thrown into, holding on to the temporary ordinariness of a child breathing peacefully in his bed.

Then they began a search of the inn together. Stepping noiselessly from room to room, they looked into the gleaming bathrooms, examined the beds, were drawn to the windows that looked out onto a landscape of thin columns of dust that covered the earth.

Once, when the child still obeyed her and didn’t go out into the garden, the funnel of air stopped in front of the house and tossed a cloth-wrapped bundle onto the doorstep. From the window, Gila looked at the package of rags that had been spit out at the door and saw it begin to move. A head emerged from it, the head of a very old woman. The child, who had never seen such an old person, screamed in fright. This wasn’t the first stranger he’d seen. Although he’d known the nun and the sick man from the time he was a baby, occasionally someone would stumble upon the house, speak an incomprehensible language, look pleadingly at Gila, and wolf down the food she offered. Sometimes the stranger would fall asleep in one of the armchairs, and the man would sit beside him holding a stick, and when he woke up, the man would send him on his way. Once, three wild-looking women appeared, their hair and their nails grown long. One of them reached out to touch the child, and he drew back with a cry. Then time passed, and no one came to the house until the funnel spit out the old lady. Gila went out to her and, her hand covered with cloth, looked for the signs but didn’t find even one: the backs of the old lady’s hands were not covered with brown spots, there was no swelling behind her ears and no pus leaking from her eyes. Gila dragged the old lady into the house, sat her down in an armchair, and gave her some water, which she drank slowly. The old lady sat in that armchair for three days, sipping water, taking bites of a biscuit, relieving herself in her clothes. The child stood beside her all his waking hours, studying her from every angle, imitating the sounds of her strange language. On the fourth day she spit up black blood and died. The child cried when they buried her in the yard where—this he did not know—his parents were buried along with the three employees of the inn.

One time, the child had been close to discovering his parents. Driving rain had poured down all night, washing away the dirt that covered the bodies and scattering fragments of skeletons over the yard. From his room the child saw the bones first, and the man hurried outside to rebury them. Gila watched from the window, recalling the beautiful Indian woman they had found dead in the garden, wearing an orange sari edged with gold embroidery. Even if she had been preserved whole in her grave, the child would not have recognized her. Gila would sometimes wonder, and ask the man, whether a four-month-old baby had memories, whether he might know that the people raising him were not the ones who had given birth to him, whether they would tell him one day about the circumstances that had brought the three of them together, whether they should wait until he himself discovered how different his appearance was from theirs.

They agreed that, one day, they would tell him the whole truth, they would show him his parents’ passports and his name and date of birth written in one of them. Meanwhile, the days passed, one following on the heels of the other according to the clock, but never revealing the secret of time. From the first day and through all the years they were never able to unlock the secret of the changing seasons, and only the chart they kept of the days helped them mark off time. The weather seesawed from day to day like a bad-tempered person; the sun blazed not like a ball of fire, but like formless lava spreading like a puddle over half the sky; rain fell not in a downpour, but like an entire cloud being hurled down, exploding on the ground with a crash that made the tree roots quake. Sometimes it would be dark and stormy for days at a time; sometimes the primeval landscape was bathed in a blinding, phosphorous light that flooded the enormous desolation, as flat as a tray, devoid of forests, grooved with fissures that spread in straight lines to the horizon like the furrows of a plowed field, spitting jet-streams of transparent dust from its grooves—a magnificent and menacing stage set. But sometimes Gila would wake and see, as if it were an ad for a tourist site, the kind of pristine, clear, fresh world you see after the rain: bare trees exposed to the pleasant sun; and above them, a sky beautiful with baby blue clouds, as if it had not witnessed the scenes of horror that had raged under it on that cataclysmic day; and in the distance, in a uniform shade of green, pastures as smooth as lake water; and on the horizon, a row of trees with densely tangled foliage, a kind of tree she had never seen before. Her gaze traveled over the clouds, assembled like a mountain ridge, as if they were the repository of memories from other landscapes that had sailed onward over the flat, bright countryside, and she felt suddenly calm: the sky was in its place and the earth was in its place. It was impossible that, beyond the distant trees, there were no roads or cities of living people now planning their day, which had just begun.

“Do you think the train might be working again?” she kept asking those first few months.

The man would look at her, saddened that she had once again been carried away by the deceptive landscape and that she would once again have to travel the path to the knowledge that the world she knew had vanished while she was in the train’s smoking car, and he said, “The train is stuck in exactly the same place.”

On evenings reminiscent of summer, the three of them would go out into the garden, or walk, or ride their bicycles far from the house until they got tired, sometimes heading toward what had been the train station and sometimes toward the corpses of the railroad cars that, before the catastrophe, had crossed Europe. Sometimes they’d pass the charcoal shepherd and his charcoal flock and see the three skeletons in the station and the skeletons of the passengers crumbling inside their tattered clothes. From the day he learned to walk, the child, used to the sight, would go into the ticket seller’s booth, move the skeleton that had once been the ticket seller to the edge of its chair, squeeze in beside it, and play with the equipment and the money, but Gila and the man gazed at the skeletons and remembered how they’d looked on the day of the cataclysm. Then the child, hoisted up to the windows, would look at the skeletons in the train, his glance lingering on the skeleton of the little girl holding the book he would know by heart in another year, Alice in Wonderland, a birthday present from her teacher, who had written in it the false prophecy, “To the talented Mary Jane, who will write books like this herself one day, when she grows up.”

In her dreams she would relive the moment the car shook suddenly, like a ghost train in an amusement park, and she opened the door of the smoking car and saw the sleeping people who, an instant before, had been awake. The brazen young couple who had been making love on the bench across from her (the girl’s panting had embarrassed the other passengers, who shot glances at each other) were embracing, deeply asleep—she arched backward, her hair hanging over the seat, and he bent over her, his face buried in her neck; the frenetic young man’s head was pressed against the window, as if he were kissing the cracked glass goodbye; the older man who had been flashing surreptitious glances of longing at the couple making love was tilted back, his hands crossed on his groin, his gaze fixed on the ceiling; the two strangers who had become friends during the trip, one explaining that he had come from a conference of ecology experts, the other proffering pieces of choice tropical fruit wrapped in cellophane, were sitting mummified, staring at each other; the little girl who had been engrossed in reading Alice in Wonderland was bent forward as if bowing deeply, her forehead touching the open book. Many of the train’s windows were shattered, and splinters of glass glinted on the dark floor; objects and packages that had fallen from the overhead rack were scattered in the aisle; one travel case that had not been completely closed was now open, and meticulously ironed shirts were spread around it as if they’d been arranged for display. A suitcase had fallen, burying a redheaded young man so that only a clump of his hair stuck out over the handle of the suitcase and a pair of new jeans showed at the other end of it.

From where she was standing at the end of the car, Gila’s eyes darted about, taking in the sight with the utmost clarity in incandescent, diamondlike brightness. She felt a momentary stirring of the hopeful suspicion that the passengers had conspired to pretend they were asleep to see how she would respond, and the whole thing—the artificial light, the unnatural positions—had been staged for a television show that tortured people for the enjoyment of other people, and in a minute the famous director would suddenly appear and the sleeping people would open their eyes and delight in her embarrassment. But the astonishing silence in the car, broken by the strange sounds of the earth cracking and the bubbling flow of dust from outside gave her gooseflesh, and the scene visible through the windows completely ruled out the idea of a hidden camera. The flat surface of the earth was now covered with a thick veil that flowed from it and billowed up to the sky, as if the earth’s belly were boiling.

She tried to get a sound out of her throat to wake up the sleeping people, and a low, unintentional croak emerged, like the sound made by a mute trying to scream. Nothing moved in the car, and she stood mesmerized, refusing to acknowledge what she saw, refusing to think about what lay behind what she saw. Her legs began to move of their own volition over the shards of glass and articles of clothing scattered in the aisle, and she pressed her handbag, which held her passport and the pearl rings she’d bought for her daughters in the art museum, against her body. The people in the next car were sleeping too. The headrests, which were not covered with white doilies—she could see through the glass of the door that was stuck halfway open in its track—gave away the fact that it wasn’t a first-class car, but it appeared that the passengers who had bought cheaper tickets had seen a more splendid show: feathered hats, lacy shawls, colored scarves, fur stoles, and bridal veils that had fallen from the trunk of a troupe of actors were scattered over the people, the seats, and the aisle.

“Hello, hello,” Gila shouted into the car, but nothing moved. “Is anyone here? Is there anyone here?” she added in English, in a braver, more desperate voice inflamed by the fear that had begun to creep into her mind, by the knowledge that she could not ignore for long what she was seeing, and that she was not dreaming, but witnessing a dreamlike reality.

Her ears, which had already adjusted to the sounds of the splitting earth and had accepted them as background noises, suddenly seemed to absorb a new sound in the distance, as abrupt as a dog’s bark. She hurried to one of the broken windows, stuck her head out between the sharp peaks of glass protruding from the window frame, listened hard, and screamed to the smoke-filled world outside, “Hey! Hey! Hello! Hello!”

A very faint voice sounded from the depths of the thick whiteness, “Hey, where are you?”

“Here, inside the train!” she shouted toward the human voice and stretched her neck even further, putting it in danger of being slit. “Where are you? Where are you?” Her throat swelled with the effort.

“Here,” a distant voice echoed.

“I’m inside the train,” she shouted excitedly. There was no doubt: a man’s voice. “Don’t go in the wrong direction! Come this way!”

“It’s okay.” The voice crossed the diminishing distance, and now the owner of that voice could hear that hers was a woman’s voice. “Wait for me. I’m coming in your direction.”

“I’m waiting for you, I’m waiting,” she called, her excitement overcoming her embarrassment. She was seized by a strange feeling, as if she were in a movie she’d seen a long time ago and now she herself was the heroine, calling to a man she didn’t know, the hero of the movie, quoting lines from a script that bore some sort of insane similarity to the present situation.

“Where are you?” she asked, frantic with worry.

“I’m getting closer to you,” the voice said. “Keep on talking. I’ll find you through your voice.”

Now she no longer doubted the reality of the voice, and as nervous as a girl about to go on a blind date, she wanted to impress the stranger and to recall a song she’d learned by heart in English class, to assure him that she was worth the effort.

“Hey, are you still there?”

“Yes. I’m waiting for you in the same place.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I’m trying to think of something interesting…”

“That doesn’t matter, the important thing is to keep talking.”

“I don’t know…”

“Maybe you should sing something, that’s easier.”

The words of the Israeli anthem came into her mind automatically and she pulled her head back inside and started to sing, and as she did so, she straightened like the encyclopedia illustrations of the evolution of monkey into man, “Our hope is not lost, the hope of two thousand years….” She sang standing tall, like an instructor in a youth movement standing before his charges and singing with them, her head held high and her heart threatening to overflow. The words of the anthem suffused her with a sense of brotherhood and strength, and she heard her clear, lone voice, separate from the host of sounds around her, “To be a free people in our land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem. To be a free people….”

A man’s head suddenly appeared under the window behind a thin covering that looked like a transparent scarf, his damp hair speckled with white dust, dark crescents under his eyes, and he asked, “What language is that?”

Panting as if she had asthma, she gave silent thanks to whoever had brought her that man, who looked robust and spoke sensibly, and said, “Hebrew.”

He reached up to the window and she reached down through it, and their hands met, crushing the dust between them.

Many times afterward she tried to re-create that moment, the first touch of their fingers, and couldn’t remember anything special that might have made it one of those moments whose fateful nature is perceived only after it has passed. He turned to come onto the train, tugged at the stuck door to open it, and stopped there, stunned by what he saw. Through his eyes—like a child seeing for the first time the amazing sights of his country through the eyes of a tourist—she saw the inside of the car, and before she could ask what had happened to the people in his car, he said, “We have to get out of here right away.”

“Where to?” She didn’t doubt for a minute that she had to go with him.

“We passed a station a few kilometers back. I assume there’s a telephone there. The cell phones are dead.”

On cold nights they’d sit in front of the fire, and the boy, from the day he began to speak, always asked to hear stories. They didn’t tell him about their lives before they’d come there, leaving that for when he grew up and could understand. They spoke as if life had begun the moment the train stopped, and Gila—as if she could look into his mind—understood how the fairy tale was taking shape in his imagination, how it would be magnified as time passed and one day would be told as a creation story: the story of how the train had stopped at an unknown place between Odessa and Frankfurt; the story of reaching the inn, which was surrounded by a network of intertwined, bare branches like a malignant tumor entrapped by blood vessels, an inn whose frightening façade enclosed an amazing interior, as in the fairy tales of wanderers who enter a lost wonderland and find a child asleep in his cradle.

After they found the boy and discovered that the telephone was dead and the electricity cut off, they went to bury the dead. The back garden was burned, and beyond it was a garden of misshapen, severed tree trunks that had screaming, evil-looking faces and grooved tongues, roaring with pain or hunger, and beyond that were gaping, smoking pits and earth that seethed, as if to show that even sand could boil. Every time the man dug a hole to bury the dead in, Gila stood guard, facing the trunks as if she feared that malevolent spirits dwelling in the evil shapes were plotting to leap out and tear the dead and the living to bits.

Later, they sat down to eat in candlelight that illuminated and shadowed their faces. The bread, the cheese, the olives, the homemade jam lent things a deceptive air of normalcy, but she couldn’t identify the sweet liquid in a pitcher whose flavor reminded her of a Columbian spread she had bought in the neighborhood supermarket during its South American Festival.

“Are you American?” she asked, as if now, after they’d been saved from the catastrophe and had walked half a day together and found the baby and buried the dead, the time had come for a personal conversation.

“Yes.”

“I’m Israeli.”

“You live in Israel?”

“Yes. And you?”

“Near New York. A little north.”

“Where exactly?”

“Do you know the area?”

“I have a sister in New Rochelle.”

“So we’re neighbors. I live in Scarsdale.”

“Ah—” She was speechless with surprise.

“Yes,” he replied, as if he knew exactly what she meant.

“What happened today….” Just as she had given the signal to start their personal conversation, she now gave the signal to stop it and realized that she didn’t have a name for what had happened.

“A new kind of catastrophe,” he said. “Probably radiation that decayed immediately.”

“Did you see how it started, how it happened?”

“No. I was in the smoking car….”

“I was in the smoking car, too!” The coincidence excited her, the discovery that within the incomprehensible reality surrounding her so inexplicably, like a nightmare, there was suddenly a certain order, and now she was beginning to catch on to its logic.

“The walls of the smoking car must have been made of a material that stopped the radiation. The window faces upward, and that probably has something to do with it, too. The boy was in a closed room, which is probably what saved him.”

“It’s like what happened in Chernobyl, isn’t it? I once saw a TV program.”

“This seems much worse than Chernobyl. But it might also be some kind of natural disaster.”

“How long do you think it’ll take them to get the trains moving again?” she asked, as if she hadn’t heard the terrifying things he’d said.

He gave her a sideways look of astonishment, as if at that very moment, as she was carefully spreading cheese on her slice of bread, he’d learned something important about her.

“That’ll probably take some time,” he said cautiously.

“They must already know in Frankfurt that something went wrong. After all, the train didn’t arrive on time, and they’re very precise there.”

“Maybe they don’t know. Maybe things went wrong there, too.”

“They’ll send someone to find out what happened,” she promised.

“Who will they send, your army?”

She seemed to be picking up a tone of derision, and she bristled. Over the last week she’d been hearing a lot of teasing about the Israeli army. “And why not the American army?” she shot at him, “We don’t have any weapons that you don’t have too.”

He laughed. For the first time since they met so many hours ago, she saw him laugh. His laughter seemed strange to her, wolfish. “Why are you laughing?”

“Because this sounds like a conversation between generals,” he said. “And besides, I like to hear women talk about the army.”

She fell silent. Something new, a faint hint of courtship, the feeling of tension familiar from other places, infused his voice when he specified what he liked in women.

She was so embarrassed by the subject of the conversation that she changed it. “Do you think the baby is healthy?”

“There are things we’ll be able to see when he wakes up, and there are things that might appear much later on,” he said, the tone of his voice now restrained, as if it were a dangerous animal rounded up to be put back in its cage.

“What will we feed him?”

“I imagine his mother must have had a supply of food for him that would last a while. We’ll find something.” His voice was already as soothing as it had been earlier.

That night, lying on the sofa bed in the baby’s room, wearing her underpants and the Indian woman’s lovely nightgown, hearing the man in his double bed in the adjoining room, Gila was free to think about her home in Israel, which seemed as imaginary as a previous life viewed from the distance of the month she had spent in Odessa and the new reality that had assailed her that morning. Maybe they already knew about the catastrophe. She tried, in her imagination, to bring a picture of the house closer. Maybe, in the early evening, they’d called the hotel in Frankfurt she was supposed to be staying in and found out that she hadn’t arrived. At this very moment her husband was probably making urgent calls to his brother, a brigadier general; his cousin, the ambassador to Switzerland; and her sister in New Rochelle, speaking in a whisper from his study, trying to keep his concern from the girls for the time being. Maybe the evening news had already reported on the train that had disappeared in an area where a mysterious catastrophe had occurred; maybe they’d listed the names of the Israelis who were on the train, her name among them. At a certain point, they would have to tell her parents. Her mother would get into bed like she had when told of the death of her son in Lebanon, pull the blanket over her head, and refuse to eat or drink. How happy they’ll be when they find out she was one of the survivors! What a welcome she’d get, with flowers and a banner the girls would paint, covered with hearts pierced with arrows.

The baby suddenly began crying, and, thrust from the joys of the future to the nightmare of the present, she got up and groped her way to him in the dark. The touch of her hands or her smell, which were new to him, caused him to cry harder when she picked him up carefully, took him into her bed, held him close, and put into his mouth the nipple of the bottle she had prepared earlier according to the instructions on the box. And she said to the man who appeared in the rectangle of the door, “It’s okay. This is how I used to calm my girls,” and she didn’t realize until after he’d gone that she had mentioned her daughters to him for the first time.

Right then, before she felt the movement deep inside her, as if her body alone had recognized it first, she reached down as she had when she was pregnant, and with her fingers spread she would draw circles, soothing the fetus that was moving toward the wall of her womb. She thought she felt a movement in her belly, and suddenly, a small limb bulged from her body like a sharp fin sent to take a quick look around and then withdraw immediately. She continued to move her hand, searching for the limb that was teasing her, scorning her efforts, urging her groping fingers in one direction, disappearing into her body in another. So she lay there in the dark, her heart pounding, and pressed the unknown baby to her body, one hand holding the bottle, the other lying in wait at the bottom of her stomach.

On the day after the catastrophe, when they went back to the train station, about an hour’s walk from the inn, they met the nun who looked like a girl and the sickly, bad-tempered man she was tending to. On the previous day they had been too worn out to look around the station office and storeroom. As soon as they’d discovered that the phone line was dead, they had turned and walked in the direction indicated by the large sign advertising, in pictographs, a place to sleep and eat: a bed and an X formed by a knife and fork. On their way back to the station, they came upon a group of bronze statues: a flock of sheep, some of them pushed up against each other and some of them standing alone, and at the head of the flock, a shepherd with an army backpack slung over his shoulder. They didn’t wonder what a piece of art was doing in that remote place. They knew that ten hours earlier the man and his flock had been living creatures, and now they were frozen in time in the smoky expanse. Gila stood motionless and let her eyes register the incredible sight, and she discovered that the sights she’d seen on the previous day had blunted her sense of amazement. He touched her arm and they continued walking, their eyes growing more accustomed to a new visual language.

They found the cashier sitting in his booth, squashed against the window, his eyes gaping. The woman on the bench was also sitting as she had been the day before, her face sunk into the fur of her coat, clutching her travel case to her chest the way a mother clutches her baby. Standing up, leaning against the wall as if he’d fallen asleep on duty was a railroad employee wearing an elegant uniform covered with buttons and buttonholes. A nun suddenly appeared at the door to the office looking like a child dressed up as a nun. Agitated, she hurried over to them, sentences in Italian pouring out of her mouth. She grabbed Gila’s hand and pulled her inside the office, where an old man sat shrunken in a chair. He looked at them and cursed in German, and to the man’s question, he replied that he spoke English, and promptly began cursing in that language.

At the beginning of the third year, when she’d stopped dreaming about her girls, Gila dreamed that the rusted cars had been removed from the tracks and a sparkling new train was waiting in the station, all its doors open invitingly, its flickering lights signaling that it was about to move. By then she was sleeping in the man’s bed, and she awoke with a start. Once, she’d managed to slip out of the bed without waking him and left the house before dawn. She rode there on her bicycle, a part of her going over and over the news that the world had returned to its former state, a part of her already afraid of the moment she would part from the man. At the station, the woman stroking her tattered bag and the cashier’s skeleton bent over, counting its treasures, were still there. On the train, two skeletons had already begun to disintegrate. The passionate girl was almost completely bald; the nose of the man who had hidden his genitals had fallen off. Gila stood at the door, opposite the skeletons, and was almost relieved: and if she did manage to leave the man, who knows what she would find at home when the trains were back in operation again. Maybe the Arabs, the former owners, had come back to reclaim the house with its turquoise shutters and open balconies where she had lived since her marriage. Seventeen years ago her husband had carried her over the threshold as if she were a baby, and five years after that, he carried their two baby girls into the house in the same way. Maybe the house was deserted and the turquoise shutters had rotted and her beloved family was sitting motionless like the train people. Yet here, in the haze, life was beginning to stabilize: within a ten-minute walk from the inn, they’d discovered a treasure of flints, and two days ago they’d found another well. The tree in front of the door had begun to bear sweet, figlike fruit, and the boy had succeeded in writing another three letters in Hebrew in a handwriting similar to the one that had filled her daughters’ first-grade notebooks. On her way back to the inn, like someone who had been in a coma and had regained consciousness, she scolded herself: the house in Jerusalem was still standing, and her dear ones were alive and healthy and very worried about her.

Several months after the catastrophe, at night, panting into his neck after making love so passionate that it never ceased to surprise her, she would say to herself: this is real life. This is real life with the distinct feeling of a new kind of happiness, lived on the edge, as it sometimes is in childhood, with the intriguing sense of danger and the thrilling pulse of life that had been absent from her former life, the sort that stirs people to climb mountains of ice and race cars across the desert like a storm. But in the morning those trembling moments were forgotten, and she’d again ask him when the trains would start operating.

At the time, she regretted having taken the nun and the sick man to the inn. The nun secluded herself in her chosen room, rarely coming out and rarely eating, but the sick man, aggressive and quick to shout, would seek her out instead, lie in wait for her, taunt her. Later he would taunt the boy, too. He would draw her into conversations in which she found herself helpless, impelled to ask questions she hadn’t intended to ask, giving answers she hadn’t intended to give, as if she’d lost control over what she said; later on, he’d do the same with the boy.

“Will you miss me when they find us?” he asked her on one of the first days.

“I don’t think so.” She took the opportunity for revenge.

“But we’ll never know!” The roaring laugh exposed his dark palate. “You’ll never have the chance not to miss me!” He slapped his knees, “You know why?”

“Why?” Once again, she felt that helplessness of having fallen into an invisible trap.

“Because no one will ever rescue us. We’ll be stuck here together.”

“Till when?” the trap snapped shut around her.

“Till we slaughter each other.” He threw his head back with the shrill laugh of an asthmatic.

“You’ll slaughter each other” was also one of the things the Pole had said too, his eyes riveted on the nun, who had come out of her room for a moment.

One day, on the morning she’d seen orange water spouting from a hidden spring in the pestilent area paint a stripe of wild, orange grass on the scorched earth, Gila decided to tell the man about the limb growing in her belly. But that was the day the Pole came riding to the inn on a new bicycle, clutching a huge sack in his arms. Muscular and energetic, bubbling over with ideas and speaking broken but understandable English, the Pole infused her with sudden hope: here was the man who would put things back the way they had been.

He’d learned English, he said reluctantly, from his dealings with tourists. On the nature of those dealings he refused to elaborate, as if there was still a danger he’d be extradited by the authorities, but she guessed: speculating with foreign currency, maybe pimping prostitutes.

They were happy to see him, gave him food and sat down to listen to him. This was their first encounter with an English speaker who could explain to them where they were and describe what was happening in the surrounding villages. He’d been on the road for months, he said, going from village to village on his way to his own village to see what had become of his family. His home was five hundred kilometers from there. He’d covered most of the way on foot. He’d found the bicycle at the train station and he already knew, to his regret, that he would have to leave it behind because of the poor condition of the roads. Meanwhile, he’d passed through ten villages.

He got up suddenly, grabbed the sack he’d brought with him, spread its contents on the floor, and showed them a priest’s robe, statuettes of Jesus and his mother, bouquets of flowers made of painted clay, boxes of incense, candlesticks—objects he’d found in ruined churches.

Gila wanted to know the name of the inn and pointed to the sign outside.

“A Good Place for the Night,” the Pole said. “A very strange name.” He pointed toward the pestilent area and told them that near a distant train station he’d happened upon an inn called Katarina. He’d stayed there until he’d finished the supply of food.

The man wanted to know the condition of the villages he’d passed through, and the Pole used hand movements in place of the words that did not exist in his vocabulary to describe what he’d seen: one village was sunk in mud up to the roofs of the houses; in other villages, most of the houses, made of wood, had been razed down to their foundations; in three villages, even the church, which was made of stone, had collapsed; in the fields and houses he found only dead people. On the second day after the catastrophe he’d heard a baby crying, but he couldn’t get to it, and then the crying stopped, and once he saw a young girl, who ran away from him and disappeared among the ruins.

“No more,” he spread his hands to the sides as if to encompass all the horizons, “No more people in the world.”

“And animals?” the man asked.

“Animals there are.” The Pole counted on his fingers: horses, dogs, cats, mice. All hungry, all dangerous.

“Where exactly are we?” the man asked.

“In Poland, near the Austrian border.”

“But the people we met don’t speak Polish,” the man said. “Around here, they speak a different language. The people from the village speak…”

In the middle of the sentence the Pole froze. The nun had come out of her room and walked through the hallway on her way to the sick man’s room.

“There is a nun here?” He rubbed his eyes.

“Yes.”

“How many are you?”

“Five.”

“And there are more women?”

“No. Only a sick man and a baby.”

“I must go to my family,” the Pole said, as if he were giving up the chance of a better life for the sake of his family.

They told him they hoped he would find his village still standing and his family alive, supplied him with edible leaves, a bottle of water, a jar of jam from the pantry, and accompanied him to the path. Outside, the Pole tied the sack, his eyes roving constantly from window to window searching for the nun, and then he mounted his bicycle and rode off, waving to them until he disappeared.

The first few days, which turned into the first few weeks, Gila was still expecting to hear the sound of a car or a motorcycle: a representative of the local authorities come to inform them that the train was running again; a representative of the UN sent to the area of the catastrophe who might perhaps bring some sign that all was well at home. But in the meantime, life began to take on the form of a routine. She stayed at home to watch the baby; washed clothes in the river (a five-minute walk from the inn), whose water was not good for drinking; sifted through the things they’d brought from the train; boiled leaves and roots the man brought; and then checked in a laboratory of sorts he’d set up in the kitchen. The man came back from his wanderings every evening like a man returning to his home in the suburbs to tell his family about his day in the city.

Despite the family pattern that was taking shape, throughout the first few months Gila and the man kept their previous lives to themselves. She knew he was a chemist, married to a musician, a harpist, and the father of a son who was also planning to be a musician; he knew that she illustrated children’s books, that she was the mother of twelve-year-old twin girls, married to a businessman. She knew he had gone to Odessa to attend an international conference on ecology; he knew she had gone there to copy illustrations from an ancient book of legends kept in a museum.

The horror outside bound them together; within the cramped togetherness they maintained their independence. He put his shirts and pants on the pile of her clothes, which was separate from the pile of cloth diapers cut from sheets, but his underwear and socks he washed himself, as if he were drawing a boundary line.

Around the time the boy started to smile, Gila was once again seized by restlessness. For a few days now, she’d seen the funnel lower like a plane in an air force flyover, dipping and raising its nose, then mockingly disappearing in a climb, sending out unclear, anxiety-provoking signals.

One evening, before the nun and the sick man came down from their rooms, as she was eating a tasty new dish and the child was jabbering to himself in his cradle (which had probably been a gift to celebrate his birth from a relative he would never know), she suddenly asked the man, “Is it possible that the world’s been destroyed? That we’re the last people left?” And she herself was shocked at the question.

The man raised inquisitive eyes from the calendar he was making on a wooden tablet, as if he were assessing her ability to face the truth. But even before he replied, she understood—for the first time since she came out of the smoking car—that she might never again see her daughters or her husband or her mother or her childhood friends or the other people who had populated her life, from the woman who cleaned the stairwells to the elderly lady with the girlish braid who sold her flowers on the street corner every Friday, and for the first time she was struck with the profound awareness that her girls and her husband and all the other people in her life probably no longer existed, and she burst into tears, immediately smothered them with her hands, and lowered her head to her knees, her hands still covering her eyes. A picture flashed through her mind of her daughters standing shoulder to shoulder, waiting to be photographed, then switched rapidly into a picture of the girls sitting opposite each other at the dining room table, illustrating the invitations to their bat mitzvah party.

Feeling the man’s warm hand sending currents of calmness along her back, she straightened up, and even though she knew that her eyelids tended to swell and redden when she cried, making her face ugly, she raised her head.

“It’s because of my daughters.”

“I can imagine,” he said.

“I have no idea how this will sound to you,” she dared to say, completely vulnerable, “but I’m so glad you were in the smoking car.”

“It’s mutual,” he said.

And she thought that this was probably the new, flexible vocabulary that adapted itself to the time and the place and although what they’d said entailed no commitment, it nonetheless signaled a potential alliance.

“So what does it mean—the world has been destroyed?”—she repeated the incredible words. “That no one is looking for us, that there is no place to go back to, that we’ll stay here forever without electricity, without water….” Her voice emerged in a childish singsong, an intonation appropriate to the words, “without home, or books, or paintings….”

He suddenly hugged her tightly, pulling her out of her chair and pressing her to him, burying her head in his chest, shielding her like a parent protecting his child from all the dangers lying in wait for her, dangers she cannot imagine, as if he were trying to compensate her for the things she would not have—the loss of which was only now beginning to seep into her awareness—a list of things that she had only just begun to enumerate and that would grow longer. She sank into the consoling embrace, trying to subdue her renewed sobbing—about the electricity and the water and the terror of the funnel of air and the fact that she would probably never know the fate of her daughters.

Suddenly she felt his hand resting inquiringly on her stomach, and she understood immediately that this was not the touch of a lover, but the pressure of a doctor’s hand feeling some worrying symptoms in the body of a patient, and like an obedient patient, she let him lift her blouse and run his expert hand, pleasant to the touch, over her belly. The tips of his fingers felt the edge of the limb slightly above her navel, and in the momentary battle between the lump in her belly and his fingers searching for it from outside, she felt a digging movement as the limb flipped over and slipped away into the depths of her stomach like an agile diver.

She expected him to recoil from her, from her strange body in which growths were sprouting, but he did not pull his hand away, he simply held it there as if to soothe the troubled spot and said, “I have two of them.”

Without a word spoken, she went to his bed that night and found him waiting. As she approached in the darkness, he lifted the blanket over the place he had made for her, and when she slipped in next to him, she was immediately trapped in his embrace, her face close to his. She stopped breathing, waiting for the first movement that would dictate the movements to follow, but he remained quiet and tensed, locking her in his embrace and still waiting. She reached up to his face, trying to learn the features she knew by sight but not by touch, which was strange and new, a treasure of surprises, and she ran her fingertips over his chin, stubbly because of the blunted razor; over his jaws, his cheeks, his eyes, which closed under her touch; over the side of his nose, his lips, which opened like a trap in the darkness and caught her thumb in his teeth. She drew back in alarm and he, as if his plan had succeeded, laughed gently and reached down to the backs of her thighs and raised her nightgown over her shoulders, her arms and her hair pouring out of the neck opening. Then he bent over and pulled her under him, and they both stopped for a moment, his stomach lying against hers, before he began to move. The memory of the limbs wandering about in their bodies flickered through her mind, and though she pushed it away immediately, it left behind a faint, persistent fear. Her movements became suffused with despair when, from beneath him, as if she were verifying their existence, she moved her caressing fingers over each part of his body: his nape, his shoulders, the long back, the line of his spine swallowed up by the rise of his buttocks, the muscles of his thigh down to the back of his knee at the farthest reach of her fingertips, all of which swayed together until the movement of their bodies took on a life of its own, absorbing currents from the ground that turned it into a timeless rocking, a reminder of the soothing rocking of an earlier life, until the sweeping, protracted moment of climax that sent ripples to the edges of the body, subduing the storm, also calming the untouched place where the quivering source dwelled, and she wondered as she always did about the mysterious riddle of the body’s ability to forget and its ability to remember. And within that remembering—like everything that had happened from the moment she’d walked out of the smoking car—the echo of distant sensations rose inside her, reminiscent of the maelstrom that had begun in her body when the man entered her, and she fell backward like someone collapsing into an abyss, knowing that his body too had memories of other places that were stirring now and filling him with longing, knowing too that as long as there was the promise of this moment, always surprising in its generosity, it would be possible to bear the horror outside that bed.

Many days passed, and their life was channeled into a routine somewhat reminiscent of the routine of the life she had left in the previous world, and yet it did not resemble it at all.

Sometimes she heard distant voices that aroused a faint memory of a house bordered by pitango bushes, a guava tree that bore so much fruit in the spring that its heavy fragrance spread to the inner rooms, and an almond tree at the edge of the garden that dotted the earth with its fallen fruit; of a little girl building a Lego tower in her room, the walls covered with pictures of parents and two little girls, a host of parents and girls, and in another room, another little girl seen from the back, giving milk to a cat, and a man sitting in his room leafing through his papers. Sometimes the images vanished suddenly, as in a magic show, and sometimes the picture became so clear that she could dive inside it and see up close the fabric of the girl’s blouse, the cat’s whiskers twitching in the milk. The reincarnation of her previous life would alternately awaken in her and then become dormant. Sometimes a familiar smell would arouse it, sometimes a touch. Sometimes it was aroused by the light of dusk that would appear at a random moment, a faint, expectant light that even in her former life had stirred in her a mysterious longing for something unclear, a feeling of certainty that she had missed out on something, and she felt burdened by an oppressive helplessness. If only she knew what that feeling referred to, she would rally and act to change it, but her inaction and the knowledge of missed opportunity saddened her so deeply that she cried now, as she had then.

At the beginning of the second year, turbid water fell from the sky day and night, and Gila was filled with restlessness. Now that they had a roof over their heads, a constant supply of food, a clear picture of the near future, and now that her feelings for the man were growing stronger, nightmares assailed her. She woke at night in a bloodbath. Her two girls had drowned right before her eyes, and she herself, handless, had tried to get them out by pushing and poking at them with her head, then had dived in after them, kicking her feet to raise them up, but they sank into the dark water, and she watched with desperate eyes as their hips, their shoulders, their faces, the ribbons in their long hair vanished. Dripping blood, she went into her bedroom and saw the large light fixture fall from the ceiling onto her husband sleeping in the double bed, the copper prong of the fixture directed at his head like a spear, and to the sound of bones being crushed, she woke with a shriek and found the man leaning over her, brushing her hair away from her face, whispering, “Sshh…” the way she once had whispered to her daughters.

“Don’t you dream about them?” she dared to ask him one peaceful night.

“I don’t have to dream; I think about them all the time.”

“All the time?” she asked, almost insulted.

“Yes. And I know that I’ll never see them again. I hope that if they survived, they’ll find good people the way I found you.”

Astonished, she rebelled, refusing to accept his brand of mourning, and she kept having nightmares filled with feelings of rage and helplessness for many more days. But in the end, she surrendered, and a short while before the Pole returned, she could already think of the man as if he were her husband, even though the two were different in appearance and character, in their thoughts and actions, in the way they made love to her, and she taught herself to believe that everything she told him she could have told her husband if he had been beside her. Months later, she’d stopped dreaming about her girls and imagined them part of a large group of children their own age, studying and spending their days as if they were in the camp they used to go to every summer from the time they were eight, and becoming teenagers and young women and finding husbands as much like their father as possible. One day she noted with astonishment that her nightmares had become rare, and all of her strength was invested in worrying about the man’s safe return from his searches and about the child wandering in the garden of wooden monsters, exposed to the ravenous funnel of air. She was amazed at how old forces continued to operate like a well-oiled machine forever and how the senses were now tuned toward new people, remembering their old movements, like ancient springs forging their way along a map of channels that had altered, struggling in the depths of the earth, bearing the memory of that earlier flow, directing it toward a place that had suddenly changed. And how, after a period of paralysis when certain functions of the body had stopped, they awaken like a tree sprouting buds and continue along their path, blind to what is going on outside the shell of the body, assailed by stirrings of desire as often as in the past, causing people to grope their way to each other to find refuge, shelter, and repose; to seek affection and grace in a child, the heart opening to him when he smiled or learned something new; taking pleasure in the warmth that rose at the sight of the nun, in the sweet friendship.

In the midst of this newly forming serenity, the Pole came back long after he had left, waving his arms in the distance like a voyager returning home, and brought turmoil with him. His wild eyes in constant search of the nun, his hands flapping every which way, he told them about the destruction he’d found in his village. In the direction of the sunrise, on the ridge, several buildings were still standing, probably a military base, strewn with rifles and equipment and soldiers’ uniforms, but everything else was in ruins. The village was located high on the mountain—he waved his hand upward—chasms and a valley below. In the place where the church used to stand only blackened stones remained. And everything was shrouded in fog. He hadn’t met another living soul on the road, only hungry animals. He’d stopped in other villages on his way back. In one of them he’d found an undamaged house, but he didn’t take anything from it, “Except for this,” he said and pulled an antique ring inlaid with stones from his pocket and put it on the table in front of Gila, then returned his hand to his pocket, took out a plainer ring, and put it down next to the first, “And this is for the other woman.”

The church—he continued speaking as if he hadn’t noticed that his gifts were not received with thank-yous—the church had collapsed and the wind had blown everything away, leaving only the foundation stones. His house and his brothers’ houses had been swept away, trees had been uprooted, even corpses of people and animals had been carried off. He’d seen some of the dead lying on the mountain slope, unidentifiable. Those, he’d buried. The bodies that had been swept into the chasm, he was unable to reach.

Silence fell after the Pole stopped speaking, as tired as if he’d just made the journey again. Even the sick man didn’t snigger. Then the Pole asked, his eyes blazing, whether anyone had come to the inn in his absence. The man told him about the old woman who’d been tossed out onto their doorstep and asked if the funnel of air had also reached the distant villages. The light in the Pole’s eyes died when he heard the reply. Several times, he said, he’d seen the funnel. Once, it had almost thrown him into the abyss; another time, it almost snatched him up, but he flattened himself on the ground and held onto rocks; and three times he’d seen it from afar, twice completely empty and once sucking up a pretty, live girl, he said, fixing mesmerized eyes on the nun, who pressed her shoulders closer together, shrinking under his gaze.

The nun refused to touch the ring the Pole had put on the table in front of her. The next day he blocked her way on the stairs and tried to kiss her, but her shouts summoned Gila, who came running and managed to push him down the steps.

Frightened that the Pole might attack her, too, Gila begged the man to send him away, but the man claimed that the Pole had apologized to the nun and that they really needed the help of another man. And in fact, the intrepid Pole, with his highly developed senses and knowledge of the secrets of the place, would sometimes discover treasures, and in the end his presence in the room he chose for himself, next to the child’s room, was accepted as permanent. Again and again he’d offer the ring to the nun, which she refused, and because of that, or perhaps despite it, he would lie in wait for her, trap her in the pantry, where one day he managed to rip her dress, and one night he sneaked into her room and stroked her breast as she slept. The nun was terrified of him. For days after that night, she trailed after Gila like her shadow, barricaded the door to her room with heavy furniture, prayed out loud, murmuring the name Mary over and over again, and sought the nearness of the child, who would soon be three, sitting beside him as he studied Hebrew, writing square words on pieces of flat leaves that were as strong as cloth with a pipe stuffed with the peel of a black fruit, as hard as lead.

On clear mornings the two men would go out together, and whatever they brought back was received with cries of joy: wild chickens, edible fruit, a kitten they gave to the child as a gift that made him glow with happiness. Those days brought with them an awakening of new life, and Gila discovered in herself hidden desires she hadn’t known before. They further helped to delineate the borders of her new world, and just as, in the past, she used to long for new clothes she saw in shop windows, she now longed for a hat she’d seen in the passenger car of the train lying in the aisle among the theatrical clothes strewn there.

One day a golden-tailed bird appeared and built a nest in one of the trees, and a few days later, two more birds arrived, one white with a crown that resembled a bridal veil and the other covered with blue spots. On mornings when there were wind storms, Gila stayed under the covers beside the man, luxuriating in the ordinariness and the tranquility of the birds’ chirping, and she would feel her stomach and find the limb that had sprouted overnight, then shift her hand to the man’s stomach and hear him say, “It’s still there.” Sometimes the child would squeeze in between them, and the three of them would lie together in a tangle of arms and legs. One day the Pole succeeded in igniting a large flame by rubbing two bits of metal together, and they immediately replaced the rare flints, which required expertise to kindle. When the wild wheat ripened, they refrained from touching it because it reminded the man of a poisonous plant, but the Pole explained that it was edible and they went out into the fields the way people did in biblical times, and Gila had a memory from her previous life, the story of Ruth and Naomi and a play in her elementary school in which she played the part of Ruth, for which her cousin had lent her an expensive white nightgown she’d bought in Paris. That memory, like so many others, no longer caused her severe pain or longing, but merely tugged gently at her heart, as if she’d received regards from a distant lover. And there was a joyous day when the man found a bush whose leaves were excellent for making cigarettes. He kept the process a secret but allotted a generous number of cigarettes to the others, and in the evening they sat together and smoked, all except the nun, filling the air with yellowish smoke that smelled as sharp as eucalyptus. And one day Gila and the nun walked as far as the strange trees at the edge of the plain and saw that they had turquoise orbs, like amulets against the evil eye, hanging from the tips of their branches, and they found wild berries. The nun taught Gila a children’s song in Italian about children picking wild berries. The whole way they spoke in the new language they had created, a mixture of English and Italian, and before they reached home the nun had gotten Gila to swear twice that she would protect her from the Pole.

When the boy turned three, the sick man’s condition worsened. Now it was difficult for him to climb the stairs, so they emptied out the office for him, and he slept there. The nun brought a tub of water there every morning and helped him wash and dress, as devoted as a daughter. The sick man spent most days sitting and looking at the back garden. On cold days he looked out at it from inside the house, and during warmer hours he sat in the garden with his eyes closed or else he stared at the mounds of earth that marked the graves of the dead. Gila would occasionally go out and sit down beside him, fearing conversation with him and fascinated by it. And he, aware of this, openly amused himself with her.

“What do you look at all the time?” she asked.

“The question is not what we look at, but what we see. You, for example, look but you don’t see.”

She knew he was talking about the man, whom both of them had once seen staring at the nun.

“What do you see?” She would not allow him to drag her where he wanted.

“The question is not what I see, but whether what I see actually exists.”

“And how can we know?” She was still thinking about those looks.

“We can’t. Kant asked whether our consciousness has the tools to decipher the reality outside of us. And what, in your opinion, did he think?”

“What?”

“That we don’t!” He celebrated his victory over her lack of knowledge. “But Heidegger, yes, Heidegger thought that the question was irrelevant, that we are inside reality, we know it. Oh, Heidegger, I would love to know what he’d say about the reality here.” He closed his eyes and cut himself off from Gila with deliberate cruelty, leaving her determined not to think about the man looking at the nun.

Later on, as if the Pole had infected everyone with his own delirium, came a time that was as feverish and overwrought, as strident and unpredictable, as adolescence. Something in the air signaled calamity, and even the child felt it, never leaving the woman’s side throughout that time. The Pole tried again to attack the nun, and she managed to escape to Gila’s room. The old man, overtaken by rage, destroyed the fence in the back garden before he calmed down. The man, Gila knew without his saying a word about it, thought constantly about the woman who played the harp and about the son who was planning to be a musician. Restlessness permeated the air, as if the era of unexpected disasters had passed and dozens of signs were heralding the arrival of the next disaster.

During one of their nocturnal conversations, her head on his shoulder and her eyes on the moon that linked the worlds of time, the man suggested setting up a place for prayer in one of the empty rooms, because it was now—after they had a place to sleep and bread to eat and they knew of the treasures and traps the world around them held—now that they might begin to ask themselves the questions the ancients had asked after natural disasters had occurred, about good and evil, about crime and punishment, and it seemed right to prepare a place where they could draw strength from God.

“But you don’t believe in God,” she said in astonishment. “And besides, what kind of God could we create that would be good for me and for the nun, too?”

“As a nonbeliever, it’s clear to me what isn’t clear to believers: that they all believe in the same thing. But we won’t make a revolution, we’ll split Him up. We have at least two Catholics and one Jew, and the child’s parents were probably Buddhists.”

She chuckled in the darkness, “Look, you’ve created a new religion.”

The next day, the two women emptied out the small room with tiny windows, took down many of the paintings from the walls of the house, and hung them in the room as crowded together as if they were stamps in an album, next to each other and above each other, wall to wall and floor to ceiling. They put small tables in the corners and assigned a different religion to each. The nun, radiating an aura of light, put a picture of Jesus and the small wooden cross the boy had made for her on one of the tables and decorated it with flowers and leaves. Gila took off the chain and Star of David she had bought for herself on Rosh Hashana and put it on the table across from the Christian corner. The child put on his table one of the cars from his toy train, which had once belonged to a child who himself had been a passenger on a train. The old man, ridiculing the entire idea, put on the fourth table an empty pillbox and a cane that he hadn’t used in months, and the Pole put the ring the nun had refused to accept beside them. Then chairs were brought to the room, and the child dragged them this way and that to form a circle.

After supper, everyone went up to the prayer room. Gila was excited by the smell of the boiled apple leaves and the special tranquility that reminded her of the synagogue on Rosh Hashana eve, permeated with holiness and splendor and the fear of God, who was looking into people’s souls. And that spirit, she imagined, had wandered from the synagogue on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea to the inn whose owners had given it its name in a moment of prophetic inspiration, and the spirit pervaded the room with its two small windows, enveloping the random, everyday objects as if they were holy vessels. Gila looked at the cane and remembered the watercolor that had hung next to the blackboard in her first-grade classroom: a group of people and a flock of sheep led by Abraham, his expression determined, walking toward the Promised Land, and the walking stick in his hand was the cane lying on the table in front of her.

The nun began praying in a hushed voice. They joined her until she whispered “Hallelujah,” to which they responded like a practiced, many-voiced choir, and all the while a splintered, striped light filtered in through the small windows, softening their features. Gila looked at the Pole, wondering if he was sorry for what he’d done to the nun, then shifted her gaze to the man and saw that he was looking at her. A flood of feelings rose in her, and for some reason she recalled the excitement that had made her knees weak on the day of her bat mitzvah, and she reached out to put her hand in his, which she found waiting and welcoming.

The old man watched them from the side, his malicious gaze fixed on their joined hands. For a moment she caught his glance, and he did not hide from her the laughter in his eyes.

“Why did you come to the room yesterday?” she asked him the next day.

“I couldn’t pass up the entertainment.”

“So you came to laugh at us?”

“I like to watch people. I’m interested in their need to look for a reason for something that has no reason.”

“So what is all this,” she waved her hand around at the evidence that stretched as far as the eye could see, “Isn’t there a reason for it?”

“That is the external manifestation, not the reason.”

“What’s the reason?”

“No one knows, not even a scientist who studies it for a million years.”

“But there has to be reason!” She fought for the last remaining bit of logic.

“No.”

“So what is it the result of?” she persisted.

“A whim.”

“Whose whim?”

“That’s the whole point: no one’s whim.”

Once again, she was annoyed after the conversation with him, but she could see clearly that something had changed in the group from the minute they’d begun praying, joining them to each other with the force of destiny as she had been joined to the man in that miraculous moment she’d met him on the train of the dead. The man, like someone with a detailed plan who bases his actions on intelligent logic, said later, “The time has come to start thinking about the future.”

“What do you mean, the future?” she asked, remembering how, in another world, she had been proposed to.

“I mean the next generation.”

She looked at him in surprise. She had mentioned her infertility problems to him many times and had told him about the many years of treatment she had endured before she became pregnant with the twins. “And who will give birth to it?”

“Not you,” he said as if it were a promise.

“But she’s a nun!” she said, horrified.

“She’s the only one who can do it. She’ll have to understand.”

“And who will the father be?”

“Whoever she chooses.”

She needed a long minute to digest this new situation and also to absorb the fact that he had made his plan secretly, without including her, and the seed of suspicion planted in her by the sick man began to sprout.

“And if she chooses you?”

“Then it’ll be me,” he said like a soldier volunteering for a mission.

“Have a good time,” she said, anger rising in her at his plot, his pretense. “And who’s going to tell her about this interesting plan?”

“You, of course.”

“Not me, and not of course,” she said, revealing how offended she was.

But the idea insinuated itself into her until it gained a foothold and would not let go, and the thing she was supposed to be fighting ambushed her, and against her own wishes Gila set out to fight a new war—to convince the nun to have a child—a war that was lost before it began, where her victory would also be her downfall, where she might lose more than she possessed. But she didn’t give in to logic, and in a short time she had thrown herself into her mission as if she were obsessed. Again and again, the image of a baby girl flashed through her mind, the image of her daughters when they were babies, a baby that was crawling on all fours around the furniture in the room, holding on to the back of the armchair and rising up onto her feet, rocking in her cradle, sleeping between her and the man in their bed; sleeping between the nun and the man in the very same bed, and Gila was shocked at the sight.

On one of their fruit-gathering walks, after scrutinizing her constantly from every angle, Gila asked the nun if she liked babies, and the young woman nodded happily. Gila asked if she wanted a baby of her own, and the nun looked at her inquisitively. Gila pointed wildly at the nun’s stomach, and the nun looked at the feverish eyes in front of her, embarrassed and blushing deeply. Gila did not mention the idea again for several days; she let herself calm down, let the possibility sink into the young woman’s awareness. One day, while they were preparing a meal in the kitchen, Gila looked at her and, as if the matter had been settled, asked which man she’d choose to make a baby with. The nun gave her a penetrating look, suspecting that her only ally was about to betray her, and Gila, as if the name Judas Iscariot had not passed through her mind, spoke the name of the man as if it were a question. The nun shook her head firmly, her eyes terrified, perhaps recognizing the signs of an evil spirit that had taken possession of the woman who had sworn to protect her, perhaps frightened by the menacing persistence and by what lay beyond the menacing persistence.

But the thought of the nun’s pregnancy—sometimes separate from the man—gave Gila no rest, and a few weeks after the idea had first been raised, as if she were thinking logically, she convinced herself that there was no choice: the child was already three years old. In another fifteen years he’d be ready to be a father himself. Who could guarantee that he’d find a bride then? Now, now was the time to arrange for a wife for him with whom he could continue the next generation.

She schemed for hours about how to convince the nun how imperative the act was, to describe to her in simple words, in her basic Italian, that there was no choice and she had to choose one of the men because she was the only one who could guarantee that life would continue, and there was no doubt that both Jesus and his mother would understand and permit it, because after all, Jesus too was born in an unusual way. Over and over again, with growing excitement, she told the man of her musings and imagined she saw a look of amazement in his eyes. His look, like a mirror, made it clear to her that he had been a part of her life for only a few years, and that she would never know whether it was his desire for the nun that had spawned the idea. She pursued the relentlessly intractable young woman the whole month, kept the child away from her, punished her with prolonged silences, and did not soften even when she heard the sounds of weeping coming in from the nun’s room at night. Every morning, in a voice that grew colder and colder, she asked again which man she would choose, and the nun again burst into tears that made Gila feel relief and also an unfamiliar wrath.

She would never remember who came up with the idea of giving her to the Pole. During moments of self-awareness or when she was on the verge of sleep and less able to keep secrets, she suspected that the idea had been born in her own brain, imagined that she remembered some hesitation on the part of the man, but she wouldn’t allow the memory to come. She did remember—but perhaps it was only after he brought up the idea and she objected—that the man had suggested waiting until the nun matured and maternal feelings developed naturally in her, and maybe, in the meantime, a man would appear who didn’t frighten her; or maybe another young woman would come in another few years who could be the child’s bride. Gila remembered herself becoming furious, but perhaps that was only after he had planted the idea in her brain; no man the nun might want would suddenly appear, she had said heatedly. The girls who survived after the cataclysm had probably been devoured by animals or sucked up into the funnel of air. Finally, she told him angrily of her suspicion that he hoped the nun would choose him in the end and that he wasn’t trying to protect the young woman, but to keep her from the Pole. Several weeks afterward, he grew tired and surrendered to the madness that had gripped her, and he agreed to her idea, not so he could implement his plan but to put an end to her suspicions. But she took as a good sign the fact that he agreed on that particular day, because that very morning it had occurred to her that the funnel of air hadn’t been seen for quite a while. On the calendar they had marked, she counted forty days. A good rain was falling outside, the sign of a blessing, not a lashing rain and not a rain that uprooted bushes, but one that fell generously and quietly, fertilizing the earth.

Gila also began to prepare the Pole with hints, with movements he was quick to grasp, with a quick, conspiratorial smile he understood well, and inflamed by the fire burning in her, the passion that had already begun to wane in him ignited into a surprising blaze. One night, as if by chance, after she had quieted the child and the sick man with a fruit extract that would keep them asleep for half a day, she and the man went out to the wrought iron bench at the far end of the garden.

The distant slam of a door came first, and they fell silent, stunned, the way it sometimes happens when events are expected. The man withdrew into himself and dropped his chin down to his chest, a sign that she was familiar with. Then they both tried unsuccessfully to shut out the sounds that assailed their ears, sounds that seemed to be shattering bone and penetrating veins and poisoning the body from within; spreading over house, the back garden, the garden of monsters, and the pestilent area to beyond the row of trees in the east and beyond the low mountain ridges in the west; echoing to the edges of the horizon: first the shrill, surprised cries of fear, and then the determined attempts to regain composure, the wild, courageous but futile rebellion; then the horrifying, despairing comprehension and the beginning of the body’s surrender, the shift to a stream of explaining, scolding, pleading words; and suddenly the sobbing, the screaming that shook the blood vessels, the persistent pounding that sought to break through the imprisoning wall, the continual weeping like a siren, the harsh sounds of scraping like iron combs plowing the walls, the animal groans coming not from her throat but from the depths of her loins, the desperate sobs and then the wailing, slashing shrieks, the choking roars that make the throat swell; then the sudden silence of choked breathing and the submissive, sinking whimpering, feeble grunting, the squeaking of the door to the Pole’s room as it opened and closed when he went to his bed.

And then silence prevailed: deep, dark, full of fear and guilt. They did not go up to their room that night. From the moment they heard the sounds blaring from the house and restrained themselves for the sake of the future, they sat in silence, cut off from one another, looking inward, trying to formulate for themselves their individual stories about what had taken place. Even after the long, mournful sobbing subsided, they did not go to their bed but continued to sit silently until the sun, surprising in its splendor, rose over the heavy treetops and so generously illuminated the wide sky and the fields—made them gleam in the first light—and she suddenly remembered a school trip and the breathtaking sunrise that had turned the Judean Hills pink.

In the morning, wrapped in the sweetness of slumber, silent and sleepy, the child slipped between them, and they made room for him. “I dreamed that the nun was screaming,” the child said.

“In dreams, everyone is always screaming,” the man said and wrapped the child’s small, bare feet in the edge of his shirt.

Gila stroked his disheveled hair and said, “Look, sweetie. Look at what a beautiful sunrise we have today.”

The crowd is sprinkled with Arabs in galabieh, Orthodox Jews in dusty black coats, and young girls with navel rings. People jostle and push against each other. But Mor walks freely through the crush of bodies, buoyed by the roundness of her stomach, her gaily colored maternity dress glued to it by perspiration. People respect fertility in Jerusalem.

She is relieved when she reaches the old residential area of Rehavia. The ghostly echo of prewar Europe lingers in the narrow alleyways lined with unkempt gardens. She opens the gate into the small courtyard where a rusted bicycle rests in the meager shadow of an ancient wisteria. The heat is killing her. Leaning against the wall to catch her breath, she closes her eyes and tries to cool off with a memory of blue steel and frozen candlelight.

The evening is almost bearable. This is the blessing of hilly Jerusalem as opposed to humid Tel Aviv, where summer heat lies on the land like a rotting corpse. As the sunset fades to lilac, Mor takes a shower and gingerly lowers herself into the beanbag in front of the TV. Channels flicker in a litany of war, famine, and disease.

She goes to bed early. Stretching on her back, she holds her breath, waiting for the baby’s kick, and falls asleep, still waiting.

I recognized him immediately although we had not seen each other for eleven years, having last met under very different circumstances. There was a change in him: he looked older, yet, somehow, better.

“Hello, Oleg,” I said.

“Hello, Dima,” he answered, as if we had spent the day before as we used to, in years past, drinking and arguing about the cascading splice theory. “I knew you’d come. Sit. No, not on this chair, that’s for visitors. Sit here, on the sofa.”

I sat down, and the sofa squeaked in protest.

“Of course you knew,” I said. “You are the prophet.”

“I’m no prophet,” he said sadly. “Who knows that better than you?” He spoke more slowly than ever before, enunciating each word to the last syllable.

“Yes,” I said, not trying to hide the sarcasm. “Who better?”

“How did you find me?” Oleg asked.

“With difficulty,” I admitted. “But I found you. You were…”

“No matter,” he interrupted, “it does not matter at all, what I used to be. Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did you come? I don’t think you came just to make sure it’s me. You want something from me. Everyone does. Success? Luck?”

If there was irony in his voice, I did not notice it. I did not need luck. Especially not from him.

“Irina died last year,” I said, looking in his eyes. “We had been together for ten years, two months, and sixteen days.”

He turned away from me to look at the curtained window. What did he see in that blank screen, that white expanse where all the colors of his life were mixed together? Himself, young, walking Irina to a discotheque? Or only Irina, on that long-ago day when yet another dazzling presentation he made at that morning’s seminar inspired him to believe himself irresistible to women? The day I watched, from the auditorium door, as he proposed to her with this newfound confidence, as she kissed the corner of his mouth and said that he was a little late because she loved another, and cast an eloquent glance in my direction, and he followed it and understood. The day Irina and I left him behind, defeated and deflated, useless even to himself.

The day I saw him for the last time, until now. On the following morning Oleg Larionov, previously a promising theoretical physicist, submitted his letter of resignation. The dean, though loath to lose him, eventually would have allowed him to leave on good terms (he stamped the letter with “Approved at the end of semester”), but Oleg left without waiting for the response. He left without saying goodbye to anyone. He had been seen boarding the forty-three bus in the direction of the train station; except for that, no one had even an inkling of where he was going.

And that was all.

“Why did she die?” Oleg asked, his gaze still on the white, screenlike curtain. Why did you not save her? was what I heard.

I could not. I could do nothing. My strength was in theoretical work, I excelled at splice calculations, perhaps not all, but up to a very high complexity, up to twelve branches of reality, that’s quite a lot, almost unheard-of for an analytical solution—but in reality there was nothing I could do. Irina fell ill unexpectedly and died soon after. How soon? She was diagnosed in March, and in July she was gone.

“Brain tumor,” I said. “Could not have been predicted. There wasn’t a nexus of branching…”

“Theoretically,” he interrupted, and I could not decide if his words mocked mine, or were a simple statement of fact.

“I’ve been looking for you for an entire year,” I said. “And found you. As you can see. Do you remember Gennady Bortman?”

Oleg turned toward me at last. I had expected something in his gaze, a feeling, anything. But there was nothing. He looked at me as calmly as a doctor at a patient suffering from a cold.

“I do remember him,” said Oleg. “It’s a pity.”

“He stayed on the branch,” I said, “which you predicted for him. Was there anything he could have done?”

So much depended on Oleg’s answer. I did not want to think about my life. But Ira’s….

“Dima,” said Oleg and rubbed his hands together, an old familiar gesture with which he once rubbed chalk dust off his hands after a long presentation, adding it to the floor already littered with chalk crumbs. “Dima, he could have chosen any branch in his reality. The months he had until…. Of hundreds of decisions, you understand, each time a new branch grew, but always in the direction…”

“In our reality,” I interrupted, “only your prophesy could come true. Your branch was stronger, more resilient.”

“Yes,” Oleg nodded, “My branch had higher probability, a million times higher.”

“In other words,” I said, and it was important for me to be clear, so very important that I had searched for Oleg for a year, an excruciating year of living on memories, “in other words, for a million possibilities you choose, there may be one chance for someone else’s choice?”

“Maybe not a million,” he said, still rubbing his fingers, his gesture irritating me so much that I fought the urge to slap his hands. “Maybe ten million. Maybe a hundred billion. There is no way to measure, no statistics.”

“You’ve had years to compile statistics,” I said. “You set yourself up as a prophet to compile statistics, don’t try to tell me you didn’t! For God’s sake, don’t tell me you are disillusioned with pure science and became a practicing prophet only to help people!”

“I do help them…”

“Some of them! Oleg, I’ve hung around here for a week; I listen to people waiting for their turn, some for six months, they come every day, they wait and walk away and come back, and once in a while one of your secretaries will come out and say, “He won’t see you, sorry,” and it’s no use arguing back. And some, people you pick out from the crowd, you’ll see them right away, only them, predict a happy, creative life with luck in business and personal fulfillment.”

“Have I been wrong?”

“Never! You are one hundred percent reliable! This means you choose the necessary branch of the multiverse with an accuracy of at least ten sigmas!”

“Eight sigmas,” he corrected. “I have compiled enough records for eight sigmas, I need another three years…”

“The hell with that,” I said. “I looked for you so that…”

“It is impossible, Dima.” Oleg stopped rubbing nonexistent chalk off his fingers, put his hands on his knees, and looked me in the eyes. “You know it’s impossible. You were the one who proved the theorem, according to which…”

“Yes,” I nodded. “I proved it. If in Branch N of the multiverse the world-line of object A is a segment of length L, this line cannot be extended within its branch by grafting it to other realities.”

“You proved it. And what do you want from me now, Dima? Ira does not exist in this here-and-now. You could not keep her.”

“I could not…”

“You could not hold on to her,” Oleg repeated. “And what is it to us that our Irisha…”

He said “our.” He still lived with the feeling that she had only temporarily left him for another and would come back.

“…our Irisha is still alive in a billion other branches of the multiverse?”

“You could,” I said. “You are a genius at splicing. You can tie branches together and graft them, like Michurin grafted an apple branch to a pear tree.”

“And how did it end?” Oleg chuckled. “Michurin. Burbank. Lysenko.”

“Won’t you even try!” I yelled.

Oleg stood up and walked toward the window as if to put as much distance between us as possible, as if my presence made it hard for him to breathe, to think, to live.

“I tried. All the time, I tried,” he said, his voice as hollow as if he spoke under water.

“You….” I mumbled in confusion. He could not have known about Ira.

“I can do nothing for myself, you see? Think, Dima, you are one hell of a theoretician. If I am in Branch N, then all possible splices that can change my fate…”

“Are bound by the causality of that branch—yes, I proved that in my third year of study,” I said. “But you said that you tried….”

“I couldn’t avoid trying. What if the theory were wrong?”

We sat in silence, each thinking about what had been said.

“How did you know about Ira?”

Oleg turned and looked at me with a silent accusation.

“Well, Dima, if you found me…. You didn’t have to look for me, I checked the university web page every day, I knew about everything that went on. I could not stand not knowing.”

“That never entered my mind,” I muttered. “I would have figured out where you were long ago.”

“I doubt it,” he said. “I took measures. When Ira died, the alumni association ran an obituary the same day. I tried, right there and then. God, Dima, I leaped from branch to branch like a neurotic monkey, spliced more realities than I had ever allowed myself before—and, after that, never again.

“I didn’t…”

“Of course you didn’t feel a thing!”

“Sorry,” I said. “I am not myself today. Stupid; I should have known, I could not feel a break, my reality was contiguous with my past.”

“You had hundreds of realities, and in all of them Ira died, and I was always late, I made it to the funeral in one hundred seventy-six branches.”

“You went to a hundred seventy-six funerals?” I said, horrified.

He didn’t say anything, and I understood why he looked so old to me. I would have gone mad in his place.

“Then,” I said, “there was nothing…”

“You are the one who proved that theorem,” said Oleg roughly, “and I never found experimental evidence to the contrary.”

“So that’s how it is,” I muttered. Something hit me all at once, a year’s worth of fatigue, perhaps, and maybe now I made decisions one after another, each taking me to a different branch, each branch beginning with: “So that’s how it is” parroted over and over.

“Well, that is all,” said Oleg and stood up abruptly. He reached to shake my hand; his fingers were, for some strange reason, dusted with chalk. “Enough already with the histrionics. You lived by hope alone for a year, looking for me, and I lost hope a year ago and had the time I needed to come to terms with it. I can do nothing for you, Dima. Not—a—thing.”

I stood up.

“Leaving?” Oleg asked, his voice flat, without giving me his hand. “You looked for me for such a long time. We could have coffee, dinner, you could tell me about the university. Did Kulikov defend his dissertation?”

“You’ve been on their web site.” I shrugged.

“No, not since….”

“You,” I said, from the doorway, “you splice realities to make lives better.”

“Of course,” he nodded.

“And those you turn away?”

“So that’s the question.” He came closer and with a long-familiar gesture put both his hands on my shoulders. His palms were unpleasantly heavy, and I sagged like Atlas under the weight of the sky.

“You think I turn away those whose fate I cannot channel in a better direction,” he said, looking straight into my eyes. He did not even blink, and I tried not to blink as well. “You are mistaken, Dima. I have rules. Well, not quite rules; I want nothing to do with unpleasant people, or with people whose happiness depends on the suffering of others. I choose, yes. Do you think I have no right?”

“Oh, come on,” I muttered. “It’s just that…”

“You thought of what I could have done for you?”

“No.” I chuckled. “You would not do this, and it’s not what I would want.”

“You do want,” he said roughly. “Don’t lie, your eyes betray you. You want to be happy, everyone does. You want her specter to stop haunting you. You want to forget…”

“No!”

“Fine; to remember, just about enough to light a candle, that is sufficient. And live a happy life. You came to have your life spliced with a branch in which you are happy and prosperous…”

“No,” I said, but blinked and lowered my eyes. I wanted that. So what? This he could do, I knew. I also knew he would not lift a finger to help me.

“Yes,” he sighed and pressed even harder (or did I imagine it?) on my shoulders. “You know, Dima, when you came in and we recognized each other, the first thing I did was run through a list of splices, in my head, that I could have made. For you. Even if you had not asked me, I decided to do it. Because to live without Ira…. I know how it was for me, but I cannot do anything for myself because of your damned theorem. But I could help you, yes, or else what purpose do I have?”

He took his hands from my shoulders at last, and I stood straight, feeling suddenly light. Was it the lifting of that weight that made me feel relieved, or thinking, for a moment: Oleg can, Oleg will?

“There isn’t a single line in all of the multiverse,” he said, “where all is well for you. Not one. What can I do with that?”

“Nonsense!” I exclaimed and stepped back from him. “You know that’s nonsense, why do you even…. We discussed this problem since…”

“Yes, we discussed,” he interrupted.

“The multiverse is infinite!” I exclaimed. “There is an infinite number of branches of reality, and all without exception can be embodied as our reality, any version of any event, phenomenon, process, and that means…”

“That means,” said Oleg regretfully, “that you were right, not I. You proved there’s only a finite number of branches because the wave function for each event has a limited number of solutions.”

“Yes, but since then…”

“But I,” Oleg raised his voice, “I maintained that there is an infinity of branches, and in the multiverse’s infinity there must exist all possibilities of human fate—happy and unhappy. I was sure! But now I know I was wrong. The branching of destinies is limited, Dima. Forgive me. I wanted. Very much. At least in Ira’s memory. It’s no use. There is a huge number of versions of your life, but none where you are happy.”

“Well, then,” I said, feeling an emptiness in my soul which I now knew could never be filled, “we’ve resolved an old scientific debate. For once you have admitted that I’m right.”

“The branching is finite,” he said. “Aren’t you happy to be right?”

Did he intentionally torment me?

“Farewell,” I said and closed the door quietly behind me. Three of the prophet’s secretaries sat at their computers, not even lifting their eyes to me.

“The office hours are over for today,” a ceiling speaker screeched, and dozens of people crowded into the waiting room sighed as one with disappointment.

It was windy outside, and a drizzle soaked my hair. The rented car was parked two blocks away, and by the time I sat behind the wheel my shirt was plastered to my body, and thoughts had deserted me entirely, all thoughts but one: Who needs a life like this?

I drove slowly in the right lane without knowing where I was, in what part of the city, until I saw a Dead End sign. I turned toward the curb and killed the engine.

We had debated once, with Oleg. Not just us; it was a popular question, fifteen years ago, in theoretic everettics: Is there a limited number of events in the world of continuous branchings? I said yes, it is limited, and my arguments…. God, I had no idea I could win the debate and lose my own life!

Rain. It will always be raining now.

The phone rang, its ringtone a Hungarian dance by Brahms. I fumbled in my bag and brought the phone to my ear.

“Dima!”

I did not recognize the voice at first: it was Mikhail Natanovich, the doctor who treated, but could not save, Irina. “Dima, I’ve been calling you all day!”

“My phone was off,” I said.

“No matter! I wanted to tell you: today’s test results are much better than before. Much better! This new drug, it’s really…. Dima, I think it will all turn out for the best, now. Do you hear me, Dima?”

Will turn out for the best. New drug. Ira.

“How is she?” I asked, squeezing the phone as if I wanted to break it.

“Slept well all night.”

“Ira?”

“Irina Yakovlevna had breakfast this morning, for the first time….”

“Yes,” I said. “Thank you for calling. I will be at the hospital no later than nine this evening, as soon as I can get there.”

I dropped the phone on the seat next to me.

Oleg succeeded? How? He said himself—not quite an hour ago—that there’s a limited number of splices, that if she died, then….

Was he mistaken? Or did he accomplish that which he himself considered impossible? Or found an infinity of branches and among them, one in which everything, simply everything, works out?

I lifted the receiver and dialed his number. It was my duty to thank him, at least.

“I need to speak with Oleg Nikolaevich,” I said when one of his secretaries answered.

“Unfortunately…”

“This is Mantsev, his old friend and colleague. I was just with him and want to…”

“Unfortunately,” repeated a voice as gray as the rain beyond my window, “it’s impossible. Oleg Nikolaevich passed away immediately after you left.”

How could that happen? He had appeared healthy and acted perfectly well when….

“I do not understand,” I muttered. “How is this…”

“The police are here now,” the secretary said. “I think they might want to speak with you. You were his last visitor of the day. Ten minutes after you left…”

“Out with it!”

“Oleg Nikolaevich threw himself out the window. And we are…”

“On the sixth floor,” I finished for him.

This is how it ends, I thought. He pushed the white curtain out of the way and stepped through.

Rain ended. I drove to the airport as fast as I could go. At nine I had to be at the hospital. With Irina. My Irina.

I was right after all: there is a limit to the number of splices. Oleg proved it, conclusively this time. He said he could do nothing with his fate. Of course. Except for one thing: he could interrupt it. Only then could my fate where Ira died be spliced with the branch where she survived.

You can extend one branch by cutting off another. The law of conservation. Oleg knew.

Why did he do this? He had every reason to hate me. What would I have done in his place, knowing there was only one possibility? What am I? A theoretician. Oleg worked in practical, experimental everettics. He did what I could only guess at. Or calculate.

I sped up, no longer watching the speedometer.

I knew that Irina and I—that all will be well.

How can I live, knowing that?

“Rina! Rina!” Galia screamed at the top of her lungs, trying in vain to climb out of bed. The man at her side was fast asleep. She already knew there was no point in trying to wake him up. Only Rina ever managed to do that.

“Rina!”

She heard a toilet flush in the bathroom and then the familiar tapping of Rina’s shoes.

“Yair!” Rina screamed. “Wake up, right now! Wake up!”

The man on the bed stirred, and Galia felt that the invisible barrier that had enveloped her had dissolved. She quickly jumped out of bed.

“I was driving!” she said with tears in her eyes. I was driving on Namir Avenue, and there were pedestrians.”

“Oh, poor thing,” said Rina softly and hugged Galia. “Let’s get you into this robe and find out what happened to your car.”

A few minutes later Galia sat at the kitchen table, dressed in a robe and holding a hot cup of tea. Rina sat next to her, talking with the police over the phone. Yair fell asleep again; the two of them preferred to let him sleep as long as Galia was there.

“I understand,” said Rina into the receiver, “so except for the old man who was startled, no one was hurt.”

Galia wrote on a note: Ask him what happened to the stuff in the car.

“I understand. Yes… yes, let her insurance company fight it out with ours—It’s not her fault, poor thing. It’s my husband’s fault.”

She looked at the note while listening to the voice on the other end. “Thank you… yes. She wants to know what happened to all her belongings in the car…. Aha… thank you.”

She put down the receiver. “He said your bag is at the police station, and they don’t think anything was stolen. And he said you should take the police report to the insurance company, showing that it was a Dreaming accident. The insurance has to compensate you for the damages. Worst case, they can talk to our insurance company.”

“Even though you weren’t involved in the accident?” asked Galia.

“But Yair caused it,” said Rina.

“I don’t know what to do,” said Galia. She looked pale and confused. “I’m going crazy. Have you been to your psychiatrist?”

“Yes. And he gave us pills, but they gave Yair an asthma attack. The psychiatrist is consulting now with his colleagues about an alternative medicine.”

“And what about the traditional treatment? Talks? Find out why he keeps dreaming about me in the first place?”

Rina sighed and held her head in her hands. “I asked him,” she said. “He told me that many men dream about women they’ve seen for a moment. It’s natural and usually harmless. Most men who dream about a woman dream about her for one night and usually don’t even remember the dream the next morning. At most, they may create an alternative dream duplicate, and then it disappears when they wake up. Sometimes they don’t even remember it. But Yair? He’s so utterly uncreative. So when he first dreamt about you, instead of creating himself a dream duplicate of you he simply pulled you to him, which created a sort of self-perpetuating effect. Since you appear next to him and he knows you really exist, it makes him go on dreaming about you. It’s an endless cycle.”

“So maybe I should sleep with him once, let him get it out of his system.”

Rina answered in a feeble voice, “I even asked him about it, as long as it would make him calm down. He said ‘no way.’ Bringing you here naked is the top of Yair’s creativity. If you sleep with him it will only give him more stuff to dream about. And it will be even worse. If, when he dreams now, he can confine you to the bed, you don’t want to imagine what will happen if he would actually dream that….” She let her words trail off and sipped her coffee quietly.

Galia drank her tea.

In retrospect, Tommy knew his suspicions should have been aroused from the very beginning. The deliveryman did not have the respectable appearance of an official representative of World Wide Puzzles and Riddles Organization. The hovercraft that conveyed him, despite the display of the well-known logo, was also rickety and dilapidated. But the most glaring of oddities was the fact that the package was delivered two minutes too early—something strictly forbidden by the rules of the competition. In their haste and enthusiasm they never gave this infraction a second thought and just blessed their good fortune in having those two extra, illegal minutes to try to complete the puzzle. And they opened the package, thereby instigating the sequence of events they could never have foreseen.

The very fact that the package had been delivered to the Lintons’ home was no trivial event. It was one of the hundred packages sent to the finalists of the 2137 World Puzzle Championship, and indeed, just qualifying for it evoked high esteem in itself. The entire population of the little township of Cape Cass was proud that three local children had made it to the finals of the most prestigious competition in the world. A lengthy article, including a large picture of the three, appeared on the front page of the Cape Cass Gazette, and the media had at least one item on them every day for the past month.

It was the second occasion that Tommy, David, and Lily Linton had appeared in the press, the first being about a year earlier, when they surprised the world by finishing second in the Youth Open Tournament. This was quite a sensation, as it was the first time ever that the New York, San Francisco, or London teams, the so-called brain tanks, had failed to walk off with the top three prizes. Furthermore, the Lintons missed first prize by a mere thirty seconds. Everyone joined in the wave of adulation for the modern-day Cinderella story, wherein regular kids (albeit very talented) succeeded in outshining teams of certified geniuses of the highest order. The teams in the first three places were eligible for entering the world adult championship, thus placing the children among the elite group of one hundred competitors for the coveted title of World Puzzle Champion.

The contest pitted groups of geniuses, three members to a group, against each other, somewhat akin to the chess championships of a century ago (which lost much of their popularity due to the advent of simple computer programs that could easily beat any grand master). The challenges provided by Professor—the organization’s computer—could be approached only by teams of exceptionally brilliant solvers equipped with advanced accessories and appliances. The sealed boxes, each containing exactly twenty thousand pieces, did not contain a picture or model of what should be constructed out of these fragments. The competitors were expected to derive the method of assembling the pieces and create a three-dimensional replica of an image or scene designed by Professor. This replica could rise to a man’s height, and its base diameter could be twice as long. It could depict any random idea that Professor might have had at the moment of creation; a wild lunar landscape and a bustling city scene were two of the subjects used by Professor in previous contests.

All solvers had forty-eight hours to carry out the building of the representation they had received. However, in order to rank among the first three, thereby acquiring world acclaim and sizable amounts of cash, a team had to complete the task in less than half that time. The world record, established nine years earlier, was twenty hours, fifty-five minutes, and seven seconds.

Tommy assisted Alfred in wheeling the trolley with the package onto the Lintons’ porch. Alfred Collins, the man who lived next door, was a rather timid, frail-looking gentleman in his sixties. He had moved to the neighboring cottage a couple of years earlier and had befriended the Linton children almost immediately. Their love for puzzle solving could be ascribed largely to Alfred’s close companionship—something the youngsters unconsciously craved while their parents were busy with their career activities. Alfred coached and managed the Linton team, contributing enormously to their success in the previous year’s competition.

“Hey, guys, it’s here!” Tommy shouted, opening the front door. “Thanks, Alfred, for helping me roll it in. You really should be more careful with that leg of yours.”

Alfred never stopped grinning. “You’d better get started.”

There was a flurry of activity—not a second was to be lost. Tommy and Alfred lugged the large package into the puzzle room. Dave and Lily hurriedly removed the wrapping, and Alfred hastily made his way out so as not to be caught by the automatic tracker lens. This was an advanced telecamera operated to ensure that the solvers received no outside assistance and that only authorized computing equipment was used. It was triggered by the removal of the top panel of the box.

“Good luck!” yelled Alfred from behind the closed door.

No one bothered to answer him. The game was on!

“Operating the disperser,” called Tommy. “All hands to the assembly deck.”

The disperser was a huge contraption with bellows, trunk, and hose. It, together with the computer, was the only mobile machine permitted in the puzzle room, according to the competition rules. Its job was to suck in all the pieces from the box and arrange them individually on the large apron surrounding the assembly deck. It was a relatively old model, and it took over a minute to finish the job.

“All pieces taken out,” announced Lily, extracting a small, star-shaped piece from the bottom of the box.

Apart from the disperser, the Lintons’ puzzle room was quite highly developed. All the previous year’s winnings, five thousand credits, were invested in innovations and improvements. The three-thousand-credit loan they had taken from Alfred was never returned (in fact, Alfred refused to take it back), and with it they bought an enormous ceiling mirror, allowing all of them to see all the pieces from anywhere. The room itself was very large, with a round deck in the middle that could snugly have accommodated a sumo ring. The deck was fitted on a hydraulic booster that could sink below floor level, and the surrounding apron was equipped with sliding metal plates that could carry a person toward the center of the deck. This machinery, standard to puzzle rooms everywhere, was absolutely vital for providing access to all points of the puzzle without endangering any of the unused pieces or partly erected sections.

The race against the clock had begun.

“First observation: ocean fragment with part of a coral reef. Also an unidentified brown object,” announced Piper, in its typical piping voice.

Piper, the Lintons’ compact computer, hovered lightly over the deck. Its spatial navigation was enabled by the repelling forces acting between the powerful electromagnets installed in its base and beneath the floor of the room. A tiny processor controlled the electromagnetic intensity, thereby allowing Piper motion anywhere within the room. This hovering capability was developed by Alfred and was approved by the Organization. It gave the computer a slight advantage over other puzzle computers, which traveled through a complex mesh of wires and cables.

“Restrict your scrutiny to the ocean and the ocean bed,” instructed Tommy.

The three siblings regarded Piper as their smart younger brother. Eleven-year-old Lily named him, and the brothers constructed him with the necessary computer intelligence for participating in puzzle contests. Tommy and Dave, fifteen and thirteen years of age, respectively, found that endowing the computer with the appropriate competence, while at the same time remaining within contest regulations and installing it into very compact resources, was a challenging effort indeed. Without Alfred to guide and advise them, their task would have taken triple the time.

The construction was necessary; the Organization wished to prevent an unfair advantage to the resource-affluent competitors such as the brain tanks. Therefore, all competing computers had to be confined to a size no larger than a tennis ball and weighing no more than three kilograms. Within these restrictions, the computer needed to cope with vision, speech, hearing, motion, and display—not to mention the actual solution processing itself. Indeed, enhancing one of the functions usually deteriorated one or more of the others. The solution processor needed to be able to scan all twenty thousand pieces and group them in ways that made sense to the solvers. This capability was directly dependent on its size and the quality of its programming.

“Detecting a sandy segment with marine vegetation. Probably extending all the way to the reef. Assembling,” called Lily.

“Okay,” confirmed Piper.

One of the three small lenses on Piper’s surface was focused on Lily. The computer could therefore confirm that the pieces she was handling did, in fact, match. What actually occurred was that any piece could be attached to any other piece by setting their surfaces together, and they would adhere to each other by magnetic force. However, nonfitting matches would fall apart about ten minutes later. It was the computer’s job to verify that such mismatches did not occur.

“I see the base of a large coral,” reported Dave. “I’d say about… umm… four hundred and fifty pieces.”

Tommy eyed his younger brother with unconcealed admiration while deftly putting together a submerged boulder. Dave was rapidly becoming an indispensable factor within the team. The very same Dave, until last year the team’s weakest link, was now revealing an uncanny photographic memory, enabling him to identify hundreds of matching parts at a glance. If he would only improve his coordination, mused Tommy, he could easily become one of the great masters.

The assembly work continued briskly. Portions of ocean bed and occasional corals began to appear on the deck. Dozens of crabs, sea urchins and starfish were strewn on the reef and within the vegetation covering it. The sea urchins were so lifelike that Lily actually pricked her finger while positioning one of them on a coral. The oysters were also very faithful to nature, and Tommy even fit a small pearl into one of them.

“Thirty minutes have elapsed,” announced Piper. “Crab and coral size ratios indicate a scale of one to ten. Unidentified object probably an ancient sea-going vessel. Attempting design of initial overall view; results in approximately five minutes.”

The picture that appeared on the 3-D screen exactly five minutes later was just a rough outline. It displayed a small coral reef surrounded by ocean. On the ocean bed, and adjacent to the reef, was the crude depiction of an antediluvian ship.

“Quite a coincidence,” pondered Tommy. “Just a couple of months ago we assembled a puzzle of a sunken ship named the Titanic.”

He sincerely hoped that the image on the screen closely resembled the solution. He realized that it was just a rough sketch, but Piper would henceforth update it continually with every piece assembled. Tommy knew that the closer the image was to reality, the easier their work would be.

They worked on without a break. An hour later, many more details surfaced; the ship was a sailing ship of some kind, damaged by the reef and half buried in the sand.

“Guessing—cannon on the bow indicates late-seventeenth-century British warship,” chimed in Piper. It had accumulated considerable naval historic data while solving the Titanic puzzle.

“I’m handling the aft section of the craft now,” said Lily. Dave and Tommy smiled at her choice of words. “It’s full of crates and boxes and stuff strewn around. I suppose that the open boxes need to be filled with all kinds of merchandise. Request double monitoring.”

“Okay,” attested Piper, and swiveled a lens from Dave to her.

Tommy marveled at his sister’s expertise. This thin, dark-haired girl had undertaken the hardest part of the puzzle—the ship’s interior. Yet chances were she would make only slight, if any, errors. Her talent for spatial orientation, combined with her extraordinary color perception, made her an invaluable asset to the team.

The first problem arose after seven hours and twenty minutes, about ten minutes after their first meal break. The mainmast that Dave had just completed erecting suddenly broke loose and fell into the watery area below it. To the team’s horror, the mast started sinking through the water pieces as if they really were liquid, and its base landed on the seabed. Tommy, who was assembling the nearby reef, reached out instinctively and grabbed the top of the mast before it, too, slid under.

“This isn’t possible,” yelled Tommy, flailing his free arm to keep himself from falling into the “water.” “The pieces sank through solids!” He lowered himself to a prone position on the floor plate.

“I’ve heard about this,” said Lily. “It’s some special substance that they developed last year. Alfred told me about it and said we could expect it in the competition. If you hadn’t caught the mast in time, we’d have to dismantle all the assembled water pieces.”

“I can’t understand why the mast broke away,” muttered Dave. “It fitted exactly, and Piper confirmed it.”

“That is correct,” said Piper. “Cannot discern anywhere else to place it.”

Lily shook her head, and after a couple of seconds said, “I think I know what went wrong.”

“Yes?” Dave and Tommy chorused together.

“There are two places that could possibly be suitable for a mast. I believe we’ve just encountered the trap of the puzzle, and that we’re very fortunate to have passed it with so little collateral damage. Let’s have a look at it…. Yes, some pieces have shaken loose from the mast, but they shouldn’t take more than a minute to restore.”

Tommy’s heart skipped a beat. In the heat of construction they had quite forgotten that every puzzle had a hidden trap. The temptation to rush ahead and complete the mast had nearly cost them dearly; they would have had to redo the puzzle from almost its starting point.

Piper piped: “Location found!” Tommy thought he detected a hint of embarrassment in Piper’s tone but immediately realized that this was his own wishful thinking. “Tip of mast is on other side of reef, not yet assembled.”

The image on the screen dissolved, and a new, updated image replaced it, the mast relocated now to its new position.

“Great!” exclaimed Tommy. “Now will someone please help me extricate this mast out of here, before my arm falls off?”

The team pulled gingerly on the mast and laid it aside. They had lost only three minutes, and work was renewed with full vigor.

“This looks like a trunk full of old books,” called Lily. She had completed the stern of the boat and was handling the various goods and merchandise that were supposed to fit therein. “The script is so tiny that I can hardly make out the titles. Here’s one called Gulliver’s Travels, and here’s another called Huthering Weights. Anyone heard of them?”

“Wuthering Heights,” Tommy sounded a bit exasperated. “Have you tried to close the trunk lid?”

“Yes. I tried, but it won’t fit. And now it won’t open again”

“Correct,” interjected Piper. “Please remember, we are permitted only one more error of this magnitude. Therefore, it would be a waste of time and effort to attempt to open the trunk.”

“Guys, please—no more individual attempts. If anyone has any doubts or queries, bring them up at once for all of us to consider. We lose three minutes for every error—two more of these, as Piper has pointed out, and we’ll be disqualified.”

“Thirty nine and one-half percent of all pieces are assembled,” intoned Piper, in his reedy voice. “Elapsed time is ten hours and twenty-seven minutes. At this rate you will break the world record.”

It was as if they all had woken up from a refreshing nap. Usually the first third of the puzzle consumed about half the solution time. It began to look as if they could complete the puzzle in less than twenty hours, if no further unforeseen surprises occurred.

Indeed, the replica began to take shape on the assembly deck, and the image projected by Piper became sharper and clearer. At the sixteen-hour mark, the toughest part of the ship’s assembly was nearly completed. The only major task that remained was the bow, jutting above the water’s surface, with its lion-head bowsprit, according to Piper’s projection. Piper had returned his lens to Dave, who appeared to be completely exhausted. Despite the fact that he was allocated the simplest tasks—the final touches to the body of water, with a few fish and eels swimming therein—he needed constant monitoring.

“You didn’t get enough sleep last night,” rebuked Tommy. “Just look how Lily is working like a demon.”

Tommy was about to complete the reef, placing every coral in its proper location and interspersing fish and vegetation expertly in the nooks and crannies. His past experience became more and more evident as the hours progressed. The number of unattached pieces was diminishing rapidly, and many of them could be found strewn around Tommy, whose deft fingers were picking them up and joining them to the others as efficiently as a master bricklayer.

Nineteen hours, thirty minutes, and ten seconds from commencement, and the puzzle was completed. Tommy pressed the red button on the telecamera, and a loud bell rang as the camera took in the assembled puzzle, together with a time stamp, and broadcast the image to the control desk of the contest.

Lily sank to the floor, tuckered out. Dave, who had stretched out exhausted five minutes earlier, held up a limp hand with his fingers extended in a V sign.

It seemed like just a second after the bell that Alfred burst into the room, as if he had been waiting all the while for just that moment. He hugged and kissed the children, clapped his hands in glee, and called up the Organization’s main office.

“Yes, yes, I am their manager. Thank you very much. Yes, we’re all very pleased. Yes, we’ll all make sure to be there tomorrow for the prize awarding ceremony. No, please, no press interviews before then. The children are very tired and very excited. They need to catch up on sleep hours.”

He hung up and danced a little jig.

“It looks good, guys, it looks good. You’re the first to submit the solution, meaning that you’ll take first prize! Tomorrow we’ll appear on SuperVision.”

The three siblings smiled at him, bleary-eyed.

“He has every right to dance and be ecstatic,” mused Tommy, as he leaned with half-closed eyes on a wall. “If it weren’t for him we wouldn’t have gotten anywhere. He financed the building of this room from his uncle’s inheritance money, and it was he who bought the computer’s components. He believed in us from the start, even though we were not certified geniuses—just smart kids. Well, we sure justified his faith in us.”

The doorbell rang. Alfred shooed them into the bedroom, then went to answer the door. As the children slipped out of the assembly room, they heard him arguing loudly with a herd of news-hungry reporters clustering outside.

I knew something was going to happen. Everybody knew something big was coming. I can still remember people walking around with that feeling. But these things, even when you expect them, they still take you by surprise. For me it was a double whammy: first Osher’s rotten stunt, and then Max’s revelation. God really kicked my ass that autumn month, you could say.

Before it all happened we were having a pretty good time. The three of us sat down on the living room couch that evening with a bag of sunflower seeds to snack on. Max was on my left, Osher on my right, and the TV opposite me. Channel 1 was showing a soccer match, Maccabi Haifa v. Beitar Jerusalem, which had the potential to be a twofer: you get to see Haifa win and Beitar lose. Expectations in the living room were high. It was one of those evenings when anything could happen, or, as everybody’s favorite sportscaster Zuhir put it: “Good evening Meir! Good evening viewers! Here in Kiryat Eliezer the tension is colossal! Sky-high!” Haifa was leading 1–0 by halftime—Beitar never saw it coming. Roso was on a roll. Every time they scored, we sang and cheered and waved our green scarves. Max had bet on Beitar, and he realized pretty quickly he was screwed. Haifa trounced them 3–0. We ordered a pizza to celebrate. The loser delivery guy got there super fast, so no free drink, which they give you if they’re ten minutes late. Max paid him, cursed, and swore it was the last time he bet me on anything. And he didn’t tip the pizza guy.

I live on pizza. I’m crazy about pizza. I’ve tried their whole new international menu. My favorite is the Tuna Crème Fraîche. I can easily finish half a large one and down a 50-ounce Coke with it. Life is good.

After the pizza, Max rolled us a joint. We went out to the balcony, passed it around, and talked about life. When we realized how late it was we went inside, emptied out the ashtrays of their cigarette butts and sunflower seed shells, washed the glasses and plates, threw the pizza box in the trash, and went to sleep.

Osher was already in bed. I hadn’t noticed when she’d left the living room. I got into bed carefully, thinking she was asleep. The last thought that went through my head before I fell asleep was: Why is Osher tossing and turning?

I got up in the morning and brushed my teeth. I walked out of the bathroom with my toothbrush in my mouth. Osher was sitting in the living room. There was an empty coffee mug on the table and a lit cigarette in her mouth. Osher doesn’t smoke. Her eyes were puffy and red, like she’d been crying or something. I realized she’d been sitting there for a long time, even though I didn’t remember her getting out of bed.

“Hey, Ido,” she said, and there was something different in her voice, like a quiet, blue sea after the storm passes. “Ido, I’m done,” she said.

“Done with what, babe?” I asked. Then I noticed there was an ashtray full of cigarette butts next to her. When had she taken up smoking?

“I don’t know, all I know is I’m done.” She sniveled, as if something was about to stream out. “It’s not you. Not at all. The opposite—you’re so gentle and sweet and considerate and everything. It’s not you. You need to understand that. It’s me.”

Osher burst out crying, with tears and everything, and couldn’t stop. I sat down next to her, my toothbrush still in my mouth. I stroked her back, at the top, near her neck, where she likes it, just to calm her, but she shifted awkwardly and said, “No, Ido, it’s over.”

“Okay, honey,” I said. “I don’t have time now, we’ll talk about it when I get home this evening.”

“There’s nothing to talk about. I’m done.”

“Okay, babe, I have to run to work,” I said. Even though that wasn’t true and I had loads of time before my shift started. Osher knew I was lying but she didn’t say anything.

I fixed my hair in the bathroom and rinsed out my mouth. I looked in the mirror, just to make sure this was really happening to me. I threw on a sweater and grabbed my bag. I tried to kiss Osher, but she turned away. “Bye, honey,” I said. “We’ll talk this evening.” I left before she could answer and slammed the door behind me.

I took my usual route to Café Gross. The sky was grayish black and the air was still. It started raining, and everyone sped up, or ducked into a corner store until it stopped.

I didn’t give a shit. I walked down the middle of the sidewalk and felt the drops run off my hair into my sweater and inside my sweater down my spine, all the way to my ass crack, then into my pants and my shoes, wetting Osher’s Winnie-the-Pooh socks that she loved so much.

I stood outside Café Gross. It has big windows, and you can see everything going on inside. There was a couple sitting by the window, and not just any couple—they were tall and beautiful, tastefully dressed, as in a European TV commercial. They were drinking steaming hot cocoa in tall glasses, eating croissants, and laughing, snuggled up in their private paradise. Rina went over to ask if everything was all right, and the man must have told a joke or something, because they all started laughing.

The rain was getting harder. There was a pretty scary clap of thunder; lightning lit up the street and little pellets of hail started coming down. I couldn’t feel my feet. Everything suddenly seemed so unfair. There was a lump of burning anger in my stomach, which climbed up and got stuck in my diaphragm. My eyes filled with tears, as at school when the older kids used to beat me up. I wanted to fight back, but there was no one to fight with.

I decided to go back home. Skip out on my shift. No one at the café had seen me anyway.

They had to move. There was no other choice. She did try to keep it together. With all the washing, all the food she had to prepare, all the cleaning up. And she had to learn how to do all these by herself. With no help. With her slowly decaying mother who was looking at them, her and No’am, but saw other persons, times past. No’am was sinking too. When not moping around, he was fighting with kids in the neighborhood, and she had to hide him away and apologize for him. For one month she was able to hold on. Lucky for her it was summer vacation at school, but neighbors would come around occasionally to check up on her, asking questions, and finally Aunt Tehila, whom neither she nor No’am had seen for quite a few years, showed up. Their mother didn’t recognize her at all. Just looked at her with those vacant eyes. No. They weren’t vacant. Transparent, for all those tears, and all the light hitting them, which should have painted reflections and images, was deflected back the way it came, as though they were two little mirrors. And she was examining Tehila, who said, “Aviva, you’ve really grown up,” and then offered her hand to No’am, who was staring at her too. And refused to approach her. “What a mess,” she said, observing their home. Then she went to her sister, who lay folded on the living room’s couch, and kissed her on both cheeks.

A strange one she was, Tehila. All dressed up, perfect makeup, looking ready to go to a party, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, and her makeup—rouge and blue eyeliner. Also what she wore, a simple dress, but nearly an evening gown. Yet, and this was the funny bit, her shoes didn’t fit. That is, they were perfect colorwise, but they were old, cracked, blue lacquer shoes. What’s with all this blue? Aviva asked herself, her hand moving to grasp the locket she wore on a chain around her throat, becoming a fist over that oblate silver egg. She wasn’t quite sure what it was actually, except that her father had given it to her before he was gone.

She almost screamed, now it was just almost a scream. All through that month her pain folded in on itself, becoming a hard shell, so she didn’t cry now when she remembered; it was only the pain banging on the shell from the inside, and she felt the thuds of these bangs, and she almost screamed. There were no stabbing pangs now, like there were when she’d heard from the soldiers who came to speak with her mother, to say things that her mother had already guessed, in the middle of the night, and she woke up and got them out of bed, screaming horribly, and No’am clung to her not understanding anything; fear made him cry, but she’d already realized, though she wasn’t ready to admit it, until the soldiers came. And a couple of weeks later the war in Lebanon was over, but it made no difference to her; she felt the Katyushas that kept falling and the fire that kept burning, breaking pieces off her brain. Then she screamed too, because knives were cutting her inside, every one of her organs was being cut, and seeing her mother give up and start decaying, and No’am uncontrollable and full of rage and looking for pretexts to quarrel, she tried to choke down on her screaming, breathe it in, soften those knife thrusts, and she almost made it, she just almost screamed, and soon she’ll lose her pain completely and will remain empty of her father, his memory, all those moments when he was her father and she was somebody’s daughter, and she’ll get on with her life. She knows this, it wasn’t she who’d set the price, only her locket will remain, sort of an oblate sphere, and she couldn’t figure out why somebody should have made it in the first place, and her father’s words, “Aviva, so that you don’t forget.”

She started crying. Not really crying. She just allowed a few tears to get out. Tehila sensed, how fast she sensed those tears, and came beside her and held her tight. “Well,” she said, “no way you’re staying here. You’re coming to live with me.”

Live with her? In another city? Their mother hardly complained. She said, “The one I lived here for is gone,” and Tehila just took her by the hand after Aviva had packed up for the three of them, but No’am ran out and kept running and running until he got to the royal poinciana tree—she knew its name because her father made her memorize the names of trees and flowers and birds—and No’am started climbing, holding on to its branches. And Tehila went out there, her lacquered shoes going tak, tak, tak on the pavement stones, and Aviva, standing at the window and watching, could hear her shoes even at this distance, but what Tehila whispered to No’am, which made him climb down off the tree and come with her, she couldn’t hear. Even though she saw her lips move.

It was in 1996, during the first annual convention of our newly founded Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy. I proudly strolled, with Emanuel Lottem and other friends, through the corridors of the Tel Aviv Cinematheque, crowded with enthusiastic young fans. One of them stared at me, and I could hear him whispering in a friend’s ear: “I think this is Aharon Hauptman, he was the editor of Fantasia 2000.” And his astonished friend replied: “What? Is he still alive?!”

Well, here I am, twenty years later, alive and kicking (or at least trying to), and what is more important, the Israeli SF scene is alive, kicking more than ever. Yes, there are no regular printed magazines anymore (the time of printed magazines is over anyway). But the online activity is flourishing: three or four sites, rich in contents. Conventions attract thousands of visitors each year (amazingly, sometimes two parallel events competing with each other), an annual collection of original stories is regularly published, several local publishers specialize in SF, Hebrew SF is being translated, Israeli writers win awards, films are produced, academic theses are being written. Who would have dreamed about this back in 1978, when we conceived the late Fantasia 2000, the first Israeli SF magazine that besides translations encouraged submission of original Hebrew stories? (Funny, once upon a time the year 2000 sounded futuristic).

Well, we dreamt. Science fiction is the stuff of dreams, isn’t it? SF dreams (and nightmares) are products of imagination, but they are inspired by reality, and they shape reality by inspiring and enriching human knowledge and actions. I write these words just after attending an academic meeting about artificial intelligence. The chairman reminded the audience that the origins of AI and robotics are rooted deep in SF. They will soon be an integral part of our lives. The same with space travel, of course, as well as with human-machine interface, cyberspace, cyborgs, nanotechnology, you name it. And, as every SF fan knows (or should know), the point is not the technology (real or fictional), not even speculative science, but their interaction with humans, with us. Good SF can help us to better understand how we are (or will be) shaped by science and technology and how science and technology are (or will be) shaped by us. For me, an SF story at its best is a thought experiment about alternative realities, with plausible technoscience ingredients, in a way that makes you think differently and perhaps better understand our world, other worlds.

If humans fail to understand our potential futures, our alternative realities, it is mostly due to the failure of imagination, something that the SF community is not short of. Arthur C. Clarke wrote (in Profiles of the Future) that although only a very small fraction of SF readers would count as “reliable prophets,” “almost a hundred percent of reliable prophets will be SF readers—or writers.” Today, we should better replace the word “prophets” with “futurists” or “foresight practitioners,” as foresight and futures studies are finally (but yet not sufficiently) taking their place in research and policy making.

What’s more, in these fields (which don’t deal with prophecy but with analyzing alternative futures) there is growing interest in the contribution of SF and SF thinking. We constantly face unforeseen surprises in economy, politics, climate, and technology that challenge conventional thinking and methods. In order to enrich the outcomes of foresight studies and to strengthen their effectiveness, it is important to encourage nonconsensual views about potential wild cards: future events with (currently perceived) low likelihood but high impact. And there is no better source of wild ideas for wild cards (including their possible implications) than science fiction. Yes, you may think about teleportation.

Indeed, in recent research activities, such as some projects in the research program of the European Union (in which yours truly was privileged to participate), imagining wild cards played an important role, and the projects’ work plans explicitly encouraged the researchers to explore the SF literature for inspiration. And that’s what they did. In one of those projects many imaginative wild cards were analyzed in order to point at possible new (currently overlooked) research directions for technology-society interaction. Some of them had distinctive “SF flavor”—for example, the one about a society in which people are becoming addicted to dream manipulation enabled by brain-computer interfaces. Another project dealt with wild-card scenarios about potential abuse of new technologies. One of them described future everyday gadgets (enabled by nanotechnology or 4D printing combined with the Internet of Things) that are capable of (remotely activated) self-healing, upgrade, or recycling, thus being vulnerable to a malicious signal that triggers their self-destruction (and thereby making flea markets the most attractive places to buy reliable products). The project even sketched the outlines of so-called narrative scenarios—we may call them SF stories—with the help of an SF writer (my good friend Karlheinz Steinmüller) who also happens to be, not coincidentally, a professional futurist.

With the accelerating pace of advances in science and technology, and of social changes in general, it is becoming a cliché to say that “we witness SF coming true” or that “we live in the future” (although some current societal phenomena should make one wonder if we are not going backwards to live in the past, which in turn has also to do with SF: the alternative history branch of the so rich SF tree). But as the only constant thing is change, and the future will always surprise us, the role of SF is not over. SF is the future; the future is SF, long live SF!

The Tribes of Israel wandered in the Sinai Desert for forty years before they could enter the Promised Land. This book took nearly the same amount of time to gestate. Many people helped us navigate the often treacherous wadis, passes, dry holes, false turns, and dead ends we traversed during this otherwise interminable slog. These included Robert Silverberg, who introduced us to our agent, Eddie Schneider, of the JABberwocky Literary Agency, who ran with this effort long after any other front-ranking agent would have shown it—and us—the door.

Sheldon Teitelbaum would like to offer thanks to our legal Godzilla Guy Mizrachi; Aharon Hauptman, who volunteered for the odious task of translating his words into Hebrew during the heyday of Fantasia 2000; Hanan Sher, who ran his book reviews (he used to refer to them as “Yids in Spaaace!”) in the Jerusalem Post, the first Israeli daily ever to publish a monthly column on SF/F; and Ian Watson, John Clute, and the good folks at Foundation, who at various times offered up much-needed erudition, insight, and other assistance

Emanuel Lottem wishes pay respect to the late Amos Geffen and Aharon Sheer, as well as Dorit Landes and Adi Zemach, the trailblazers, and to add thanks also to Liat Shahar-Kashtan and other members of the Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy who offered help and advice, in particular Nadav Almog and Ehud Maimon; to Danny Manor and Gabi Peleg, who got me involved with Fantasia 2000; to the many readers who gave me feedback on my SF/F translations (good ones or bad, they were always helpful); to Larry Niven, Brian Stableford, and Ian Watson for their encouragement; and finally, to my good friend Aharon Hauptman.

We both thank Avi Katz, our illustrious illustrator and good friend; Alex Epstein, Elana Gomel, Danielle Gurevitch, Gail Hareven, Eli Herstein, and Noah Mannheim, who helped comprise our editorial board; Adam Rovner and Jessica Cohen-Rovner, who provided early and timely counsel regarding research and translation-related issues; Bill Gough, who went over the manuscript and made some cogent remarks; Adam Teitelbaum, Lance Cody, Adam Roth, and Eric Menyuk, the intrepid gang behind our Kickstarter promo, and Lionel Brown, who supported it wholeheartedly; John Robert Colombo, who first showed us how it was done; and Robert Mandel, who made it his business to ensure that Israel, despite the trepidations of every other publisher we encountered, got a fair shake. Other staff at Mandel-Vilar Press, as well as Noel Parsons and Barbara Werden, were ever helpful. Without their stalwart contributions, and those of so many others, Zion’s Fiction would likely never have emerged from the desert. To them, and everyone else who helped light our way, we remain profoundly grateful.

And of course, we owe a debt of gratitude to all the authors featured in this collection and an apology to the many left out for lack of space. We fervently hope to rectify this in future volumes.

Emanuel Lottem, born in Tel Aviv in 1944, has been a central figure in the Israeli SF/F scene since the mid-1970s: translator of some of the best SF/F books published in Hebrew and editor of others; advisor to beginning writers; a moving force in the creation of the Israeli Society for Science Fiction and Fantasy (ISSF&F) and its first chairman; and founder of its annual ICon convention and other activities.

Lottem’s first SF translation was Frank Herbert’s Dune, which has become a classic. According to Israeli literary historian Eli Eshed, “This translation is considered a masterpiece of SF translations.” More SF/F translations followed, and Lottem’s name became familiar to and respected by Hebrew-reading fans.

After a few career changes, Lottem became a freelance translator and editor. In addition to SF/F, he also specializes in popular science and military history. In 1983 Lottem became chairman of the editorial board of the Israeli SF/F magazine Fantasia 2000. A few years later, in 1996, he presided over the inaugural meeting of the ISSF&F, which he founded with a small group of devoted fans. Visiting author Brian Aldiss officially announced the ISSF&F open for business, and Lottem was unanimously elected its first chairman.

To date, Lottem’s SF/F translations include works by Douglas Adams, Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Alfred Bester, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Lois M. Bujold, Jack Chalker, C. J. Cherryh, Arthur C. Clarke, Hal Clement, Michael Crichton, Philip K. Dick, Robert L. Forward, William Gibson, Robert A. Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Ursula Le Guin, Ann Leckie, Anne McCaffrey, Larry Niven, Mervyn Peake, Frederick Pohl, Christopher Priest, Robert Shea and Robert A. Wilson, Robert Silverberg, E. E. “Doc” Smith, James Tiptree Jr., J. R. R. Tolkien, Jack Vance, and Connie Willis, among many others. In 1994 Lottem won one of Israel’s highest translation awards, the Tchernichovsky Prize, for rendering into Hebrew Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene. The ISSF&F gave him in 2016 a Life Achievement award on its twentieth anniversary.

Copyright © 2018 by Mandel Vilar Press

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including electronic storage and retrieval systems, except by prior written permission of the publisher. Brief passages excerpted for review and critical purposes are excepted.

“Foreword” by Robert Silverberg, © 2018 Robert Silverberg; “Introduction” © 2018 Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem; “The Smell of Orange Groves” by Lavie Tidhar, © 2011 Lavie Tidhar; “The Slows” by Gail Hareven, translated by Yaacov Jeffrey Green, © 1999 Gail Hareven; “Burn Alexandria” by Keren Landsman, translated by Emanuel Lottem, © 2015 Keren Landsman; “The Perfect Girl” by Guy Hasson, © 2004 Guy Hasson; “Hunter of Stars” by Nava Semel, translated by Emanuel Lottem, © 2009 Nava Semel’s estate; “The Believers” by Nir Yaniv, © 2007 Nir Yaniv; “Possibilities” by Eyal Teler, © 2003 Eyal Teler; “In the Mirror” by Rotem Baruchin, translated by David Chanoch, © 2007 Rotem Baruchin; “The Stern-Gerlach Mice” by Mordechai Sasson, translated by Emanuel Lottem, © 1984 Mordechai Sasson’s estate; “A Good Place for the Night” by Savyon Liebrecht, from A Good Place for the Night, translated by Sondra Silverston, © 2006 by Savyon Liebrecht, reprinted with the permission of Persea Books, Inc. (New York), www.perseabooks.com, all rights reserved; “Death in Jerusalem” by Elana Gomel, © 2017 Elana Gomel; “White Curtain” by Pesakh (Pavel) Amnuel, translated by Anatoly Belilovsky, © 2007 Pesakh (Pavel) Amnuel; “A Man’s Dream” by Yael Furman, translated by Nadav Almog, © 2006 Yael Furman; “My Crappy Autumn” by Nitay Peretz, translated by Emanuel Lottem, © 2005 Nitay Peretz; “Two Minutes Too Early” by Gur Shomron, © 2003 Gur Shomron; “They Had to Move” by Shimon Adaf, translated by Emanuel Lottem, © 2008 Shimon Adaf; “Afterword” by Aharon Hauptman, © 2018 Aharon Hauptman

This book is typeset in Alegreya. The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39-48-1992 (R1997). 

Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication Data

Names: Teitelbaum, Sheldon, editor. | Lottem, Emanuel, editor. | Katz, Avi, illustrator. | Silverberg, Robert, writer of supplementary textual content. | Hauptman, Aharon, writer of supplementary textual content.

Title: Zion’s fiction: a treasury of Israeli speculative literature / edited by Sheldon Teitelbaum and Emanuel Lottem; foreword by Robert Silverberg; afterword by Aharon Hauptman; illustrations by Avi Katz.

Description: Simsbury, Connecticut: Mandel Vilar Press, [2018] | “The stories come from Hebrew, Russian, and English-language sources.”—Provided by publisher. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: ISBN 9781942134527 | ISBN 9781942134534 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Israeli fiction (English) | Fantasy fiction, Israeli. | Speculative fiction. | Science fiction. | Short stories, Israeli.

Classification: LCC PR9510.8.Z56 2018 (print) | LCC PR9510.8 (ebook) | DDC 823/.010895694—dc23

Printed in the United States of America.

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 / 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Mandel Vilar Press

19 Oxford Court, Simsbury, Connecticut 06070

www.mvpress.org

First coined by M. F. Egan and subsequently espoused by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach and Robert A. Heinlein, the term speculative fiction was generally intended to deemphasize the technological aspects of a great deal of earlier science fiction. Heinlein defined the term as a subset of SF involving extrapolation from known science and technology “to produce a new situation, a new framework for human action.”

Horror, currently referred to as dark or weird fantasy, is a rarity in Israeli speculative fiction, although a few, among them Asaf Ashery and Orly Castel-Bloom, have valiantly tried their hands at it. Many Israelis will argue that they live with enough daily horror to avoid subjecting themselves to additional, imaginary torments.

Quoted in Michael Weingrad, “Riding Leviathan: A New Wave of Israeli Genre Fiction,” Jewish Review of Books, Winter 2014, http://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/602/riding-leviathan-a-new-wave-of-israeli-genre-fiction. Yanai would subsequently set matters aright with the publication of two unabashed fantasy novels, HaLivyatan MiBavel (The leviathan of Babylon, 2006) and HaMayim shebein HaOlamot (The water between the worlds, 2008).

Danielle Gurevitch, “What Is Fantasy?” in With Both Feet on the Clouds: Fantasy in Israeli Literature, edited by Danielle Gurevitch, Elana Gomel, and Rani Graff (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2012), 13.

Adam L. Rovner, In the Shadow of Zion: Promised Lands before Israel (New York: NYU Press, Kindle Edition, 2014), Kindle Location 161 of 8224, retrieved from Amazon.com.

Gail Hareven, “What Is Unimaginable?” in With Both Feet on the Clouds, 45.

Usually, this is rendered in English as “If you will it, it is no dream.” Herzl, however, used the German word Märchen, fairy tale.

Leon Uris’s protagonist, Ari Ben Canaan (Exodus), was a feeble caricature of this idealized image.

See Jeff Vandermeer and Jeremy Zerfoss, Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction (New York: Abrams Image, 2013).

Some cases in point for this kind of bowdlerism include a 1938 translation of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover with no sex scenes and a 1924 translation of Wallace’s Ben Hur from which all references to Jesus and Christianity (including, of course, the subtitle, A Tale of the Christ) were carefully expunged.

Nachman Ben-Yehuda, “Sociological Reflections on the History of Science Fiction in Israel,” Science Fiction Studies 13 (1986): 75.

Quoted in Oren Tokatly, Mediniyut Tikshoret beIsrael [Communications policy in Israel] (Tel Aviv: Open University Publishing House, 2000), 85.

Elana Gomel, “What Is Reality?” in With Both Feet on the Clouds, 33. The term Mizrahi applies to Jews from Middle Eastern countries, many of whom are able to trace their lineage to the Babylonian dispersion, not to be confused or conflated with Sephardic Jews, whose forefathers had lived in Spain and Portugal for centuries prior to their expulsion in 1492 and 1496, respectively, and who generally dispersed southward and eastward. In fact, these are two distinct subcultures.

Ioram Melcer, “Why Doesn’t It Rain Fish Here?” in With Both Feet on the Clouds, 194; Gomel, “What is Reality?” 32.

Robert Scholes, Structural Fabulation: An Essay on the Fiction of the Future (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975).

Baruch Kimmerling, The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: State, Society, and the Military (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 8; Elana Gomel, “What Is Reality,” 33–34; Diana Pinto, Israel Has Moved (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2013), 1.

Dan Horowitz and Moshe Lissak, Trouble in Utopia: The Overburdened Polity of Israel (New York: SUNY Press, 1989).

Very early on, the Zionist movement was almost split by a conflict between two opposing views: the so-called Territorialists held that the Jewish Problem required an immediate solution and were willing to accept any territory that may be offered, notably British Uganda. The Zion’s Zionists faction, on the other hand, insisted on the Land of Israel as the only possible place in which the desired solution could be implemented. Herzl himself initially supported the former view but then yielded to the Zion’s Zionists to prevent the dissolution of his fledgling movement.

Hareven, “What Is Unimaginable?” 46. This, however, has not stopped allohistorical speculation on the matter, as in “What If Frank Had Immigrated to Palestine,” in Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, What Ifs of Jewish History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 187–214. Larry Niven quote from a panel discussion on the Doomsday Asteroid at the Weizmann Institute, Rehovoth, Israel, March 20, 2007, according to editor E. L.’s recollection.

Rachel S. Harris, “Israeli Literature in the 21st Century: The Transcultural Generation: An Introduction,” Shofar 33, no. 4 (Summer 2015): 1–14, 200, quote from p. 1, retrieved from Proquest electronic database. Post-Zionism refers to a sense that by restoring Jewish sovereignty in the State of Israel, the Zionist movement has fulfilled its destiny and may therefore be designated as complete, hence obsolete.

Sheldon Teitelbaum, “Out of Science Fiction, a New View of Contemporary Reality,” Los Angeles Times, January 17, 1988.

Hareven, “What Is Unimaginable?” 45.

“About CyberCozen,” http://www.kulichki.com/antimiry/cybercozen.

Oren Soffer, Mass Communication in Israel: Nationalism, Globalization, and Segmentation (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015), 2.

Gomel, “What Is Reality?” 36.

Quoted in Soffer, Mass Communication, 14.

Shlomo Errel, Undersea Diplomacy (Tel Aviv: Maariv Books–Hed Artzi Publishing, 2000); Amnon Rubinstein, The Sea above Us (Tel Aviv: Schocken Publishing House Ltd., 2007); Yossi Sarid, Accordingly We Are Here Assembled: An Alternate History [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Yedioth Ahronoth Books and Chemed Books, 2008).

Keren Omry, “SF 101,” Science Fiction Research Association Review 306 (Fall 2013), retrieved from author’s website.

Gurevitch, Gomel, and Graff, eds., “Introduction,” With Both Feet on the Clouds, 9.

Omry, “SF 101.”

Kimmerling, Invention and Decline, 16, 23.

Alan L. Mintz, Translating Israel: Contemporary Hebrew Literature and Its Reception in America (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 50.

Gershon Shaked, “Facing the Nightmare: Israeli Literature on the Holocaust,” in The Nazi Concentration Camps (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1984), 690; Gary K. Wolfe, “Introduction: Fantasy as Testimony,” in The Fantastic in Holocaust Literature and Film, edited by Judith B. Kerman and John Edgar Browning (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2015), Kindle edition, loc. 137 of 4490.

Judith B. Kerman, “Uses of the Fantastic in the Literature of the Holocaust,” in Fantastic in Holocaust Literature and Film, loc. 325 of 4490. Felix Frankfurter quote from Stanford University News Service, News Release, March 7, 1995, http://web.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/95/950307Arc5338.html.

Adam Rovner, “Forcing the End: Apocalyptic Israeli Fiction, 1971–2009,” in Narratives of Dissent: War in Contemporary Israeli Arts and Culture [e-book], edited by Rachel S. Harris and Ronen Omer-Sherman (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012), 209.

It is very interesting to note that a similar trend can be discerned now in the Arab world, where “a new wave of dystopian and surrealist fiction [emerges] from Middle Eastern writers who are grappling with the chaotic aftermath and stinging disappointments of the Arab Spring. Five years after the popular uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and elsewhere, a bleak, apocalyptic strain of post-revolutionary literature has taken root in the region. Some writers are using science fiction and fantasy tropes to describe grim current political realities…. ‘There’s a shift away from realism, which has dominated Arabic literature,’ said the Kuwait-born novelist Saleem Haddad…. ‘What’s coming to the surface now is darker and a bit deeper.’” (“Middle Eastern Writers Find Refuge in the Dystopian Novel,” New York Times, Books Section, May 29, 2016.) A notable example is Iraqi writer Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad: A Novel (Arabic, al Kamel, 2013; English translation, Penguin Books, 2018).

Rovner, “Forcing the End,” 206, 209.

Ibid., 99, 206; Arik Einstein, Eretz Yisrael haYeshana vehaTova, Phonodor album 13038, 1973.

Amos Oz, Late Love, in Unto Death, translated by Nicholas de Lange (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975).

Hareven, “What Is Unimaginable?” 30.

Sayed Kashua, Let It Be Morning (New York: Grove Press, Black Cat, 2006).

Compare Robert A. Heinlein’s Revolt in 2100, in which the United States is a theocracy ruled by a self-proclaimed Prophet.

Not that this would stop similarly themed novels from Amit Godenberg, Ir Nidachat [A city withdrawn], 2015; Yishai Sarid, Ha’Shlishi [The third one], also 2015; or Dror Burstein, Teet [Clay], 2016.

Yitshak Ben-Ner, “Aharey haGeshem” [After the rain] (Tel Aviv, 1977).

Gershon Shaked, Gal Ahar Gal baSipporet haIvrit [Wave after wave in Hebrew narrative fiction] (Jerusalem, 1985), 168; Avraham Hagorni, “A Dwarf and a Half” [in Hebrew], Davar, November 20, 1987.

Yali Sobol, Etzba’ot shel Psantran [A pianist’s fingers] (Tel Aviv: Kinneret Zmora Bitan Dvir, 2012); Weingrad, “Riding Leviathan.”

Orly Castel-Bloom, Dolly City (Dalkey Archive Press, 2010), 76–77.

Orly Castel-Bloom, Human Parts (Boston: Verba Mundi Books, 2004).

Zahava Caspi, “Trauma, Apocalypse, and Ethics in Israeli Theatre,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 14, no. 1 (2012): 3.

Nava Semel, And the Rat Laughed [Tzhok Shel Achbarosh] (Proza, 2001; English translation, Melbourne, Australia: Port Campbell Press, 2008).

Savyon Liebrecht, A Good Place for the Night [Makom Tov La’Laila] (New York, Persea Books, 2006); Rovner, In the Shadow of Zion, 215; Etgar Keret, HaKaytana shel Kneller [Kneller’s Happy Campers], from the collection Ga’agu’ay leKissinger [Missing Kissinger] (London: Chatto & Windus, 2007) and adapted for film in 2006 as WristCutters: A Love Story and as the graphic novel Pizzeria Kamikaze in 2005; O. T. Gafla, Olam Basof [The World at the End] (2003; translated in English, New York: Tor, 2013).

Rovner, In the Shadow of Zion, 215.

Lavie Tidhar, A Man Lies Dreaming (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2014); Robert Harris, Fatherland (Billings, MT: BCA, 1992), 372.