The surprised sergeant took the instrument and held it in his palm while consulting the boy to make sure he had understood. Undaunted by such a challenge in the middle of the night, he seemed pleased to have found a task worthy of him. Without further ado, he stuck the phone and charger into a pocket of his greatcoat and went off.
For a moment, the human resources manager was alarmed. But before he could call the sergeant back, the boy laughingly reassured him in his own language. He smiled back, patting the blond head and returning to the blankets in his corner. The boy, too, appeared to think that it was time to sleep, for he took a mattress and stood debating where to put it. After a while, as if declaring his faith in the man who had approved his mother’s last journey, he set the mattress down beside him, pulled off his shoes, and began removing his overalls. Not only did he not mind the cold, he seemed to enjoy braving it. The resource manager, who had first noticed this at the airport, was not surprised when the boy stripped off his underwear in the heated room and knelt pale-skinned, smelling of stale sweat, to spread a blanket.
The human resources manager had a teenage daughter and had always been careful to avoid seeing her or her friends in the nude. Not since his high school days had he been in the presence of a naked adolescent, let alone one so ambiguous, half child and half adult, so masculine and yet also feminine. The boy had sloping shoulders and delicate feet, and his golden pubic hair had yet to declare itself. Even in the darkness his supple torso, extending from the bare buttocks, could not hide the signs, both recent and old, of scratches and actual bites, fingerprints of the delinquency the consul suspected him of. It was a suspicion confirmed by the look on his face, at once arrogant and desperate. The resource manager wondered if his nakedness was an extortion of payment, not only for his forgotten mother but also for the entire false promise of Jerusalem.
The boy got under the covers slowly, as if reluctant to part from his own naked form. His face was turned towards the man he had chosen to sleep beside. A breath away from him, the resource manager now had a close-up of the eyes that slanted upward from the bridge of a flattened nose. Confident that even the mother’s magic in this boy who so moved him could not shake an inner resolve that had never failed him before, he looked away to avoid misunderstanding and said “goodnight” in Hebrew.
The boy, as if he were determined to expunge from his soul every last word of the language of the country that had killed his mother, merely smiled remotely and languidly shut his eyes. I know you’re just pretending, thought the resource manager. Good night, then, and sweet dreams.
He turned to the wall, over which the flame from the stove cast its shadows until sleep snuffed them out.
For us, though, the flame goes on burning. It entices us, whirls and spins us through space and time, dream-bearers for a man in his late thirties, an ex-army officer, a divorced father of a teenage girl, a personnel manager charged with a unique mission, who now, at the first stop of his journey, in the barracks of a once-secret military base that has become a draw for tourists, lies on a thin mattress, wrapped in a foreign army blanket. Although we feel his urge to dream a dream, is it possible, in all his weariness, with the steady rasping of the sleepers around him, to give him one that willbe meaningful — one that he will remember and even describe to others?
That’s our job. We, the agents of the imagination, brokers of phantasms, are here to produce a dread and marvellous dream. Already we hover above shut eyelids, slip into the rhythms of the breath, stir forgotten childhood wishes into the remnants of yesterday, blend anxieties with fabulous desires, mix jealousies with memories and longings. Microscopic and transparently elusive, we pass, tiny dream nematodes, compactions of dissimulation, through the tough outer membranes of the soul.
And although we are all here for the same purpose, none of us knows any of the others. Incessantly we change our disguises. Two old childhood friends merge into a single youth. A conscript killed by a stray bullet returns as a company sergeant. The former foreign minister, now a next-door neighbour and possibly a cousin, is in attendance, too. And there are others, total strangers with noidentifyingmarks, like a woman our souls go out to as she passes in the street.
It’s twitching into life, this dream of ours. The eyelids flutter as the opening scene appears. A sigh is stifled. A leg shoots nervously out from under the blanket, followed by the other moving more slowly, as if someone were taking a first step, or, better yet, beginning a descent.
Good luck.
4
At first the dream descends broad, smooth steps. He is back home, visiting a new building on a street near his mother’s in which he has rented a small, attractive apartment that will soon be available. Yet it is so easy to skip down the well-lit staircase that he has missed the prominent exit on the ground floor and gone on descending, at first without noticing that the light is growing dimmer. The steps, too, have changed and are narrower. There are no more apartments. He is exploring some sort of basement. Nor is he alone on the staircase. Old men in fur hats and long, heavy winter coats stride beside him, sighing and muttering. Well, then, the dreamer thinks excitedly, I must be in the nuclear shelter and this must be the tour. But where is the tour guide to show me round?
Now, however, the dream takes a more sombre turn. The tourist site has become a frightening reality. The old men in long coats and fur hats are commissars and secret agents who have hastily launched a first strike and are hurrying to take cover from an imminent counterattack.
The steps are now narrow and steep, the walls around them crooked and constricting. In the depths of the new building stands the bell tower of an ancient church. Although he is a stranger who does not belong in this place, the dreamer wishes to be saved like all the others. Awkwardly pretending to be someone else, he is jostled into the shelter, a small, suffocating chamber filled with people casting angry, desperate glances at a transparent partition — behind which, on a small stage, bustle the leaders who have so flippantly given the dreadful order. Seen through the partition they have the silhouettes of grizzly bears oblivious to the idiocy of their actions; even so, the dreamer thinks he knows them and has run afoul of them in the past — particularly one of them, a blubbery man whose broad chest is covered with medals that look like tongues of blood and flame.
Can this be the whole secret shelter? Its entire legendary depth? Can I have agreed to make a detour here instead of proceeding straight to the village, or to take part in a war of annihilation that has nothing to do with me and that I don’t deserve? Who can survive in a pitiful shelter like this? The enemy, gnashing his teeth amid the havoc we have wreaked, is launching his revenge. It will be terrible. The forked glitter of his counterstrike, it is said, can already be seen. Why stay in an indefensible place that will only draw withering fire? My place was always in the West. Why be killed by it now?
But it is already too late. The counterstrike lands on the building in utter silence. A foul, horrid, asphyxiating smell spreads through the shelter, which is also a gymnasium. Wooden ladders hang on its walls. The panicky leaders scale them to reach a high, narrow window, through which the green tip of a cypress tree is visible. The dreamer remembers the tree from his childhood, though he has never before yearned for it as he does now.