“Surprise is our schtik. The startle effect.”
“You startled. Now that I’m here, now that I’ve had time to think things over, I’m really glad I flew up here. I like it here.”
“Good.”
“Besides, what did I have down there? Did I have respect? Honors? Medals? I had Social Security. I had a pension from the guild. The people who saw my work were dropping like flies. One day before you came I went to three funerals one after the other, bang, bang, bang.”
“Alevai. Rest in peace.”
“Wait. No alevai. Alevai is it should happen.”
“Whoops.”
“Whoops. If one of them said whoops, you would give him such a knock with the ray his kishkas would burn.”
“There’s an advantage to executive status,” Xarix said. “Sam, do you think they’ll be successful?”
“Why not? You send one here, one there, they have papers, they have skills, and they know how to behave. It’s amazing how they look, exactly like people. Who should find out what they’re up to? You got no problem with the spies. Your problem might be that Earth is already taken over by meshuganas. Maybe from another planet. I never met a producer, an agent, a successful man who couldn’t be from Mars.”
“Why Mars?”
“A figure of speech.”
“Ah.”
“I keep asking myself. Xarix, why you want Earth?”
“Because it’s there.”
“So all this trouble, spies, saboteurs, chazzerai, because it’s there?”
“Sufficient reason.”
“Sufficient reason. Be gazoont.”
“Amen.”
“You could say that. In all my years on stage I never would believe such a plot. Never. Too fantastic. So who knew?”
“We knew. Our computers knew. When we asked them the name of the man for the job, Sam, your card came out with two others. Stanislavski and Lee Strasberg. One was dead, and the other is too much with the guttural noises, the schlepping and yutzing. Out of all the actors past or present, your card came out, Sam Derby.”
“It’s nice to know. Nobody on Earth even remembers there was a theater on Second Avenue.”
“Let me say that for an alien you’ve dedicated yourself wonderfully well to our purposes. We had the human forms down pat. We had the technicalities worked out. But nuances of manner, subtleties of speech, are all important. Only you could impart such wisdom.”
“Wisdom. There is a word. Xarix, I’ll tell you, don’t worry yourself. Your people, whatever you call it, will blend like a snowflake on white bread. Down there, anybody will swear they’re just like everybody else. They have the tools.”
“Thanks to you, Sam. Professor.”
“So.”
When the students came, there was much excitement. Take off was only hours away. The combination of youth, travel, and purpose produced a familiar tension. Sam Derby stood on the podium delivering his pep talk and feeling some of the excitement himself.
“Remember, you’re going to take over a planet, not to play pinochle. Do what I told you, be discreet, and the magic word is to blend in the soup. Now, let me hear all together in unison, what you say when you meet a person of rank and power.”
“Oy vay, vots new, hello, howdy doo?”
“Good. Now, in sexual encounter, what is the correct approach?”
“Hey, dollink, let’s schtup, don’t futz, hurry up.”
“Wonderful. And for you in the diplomatic corps, very important, when you run into a prince, a king, a president, let’s hear it.”
“Honorable Ganef, it’s a real Watergate to make the acquaintance of so illustrious a nebbish schlemiel nudnik putz as thyself. May you fornicate with a horse before the night falls.”
“Gorgeous,” Sam Derby said. “I’m proud of you. Go, and give my regards to Broadway.”
“You think they’re ready?” Xarix said.
“Ready for Freddy,” Sam Derby said. “If they learned my lessons and wave the arms you gave them, they’ll be accepted anyplace. Like brothers.”
HUGH NISSENSON
Forcing the End
In A.D. 68 Jerusalem was being besieged by the Roman commander Vespasian. Yochanan ben Zakkai, an eighty-year-old scholar who belonged to a faction that opposed going to war with Rome, believed that a holocaust was imminent. He escaped from Jerusalem with his students and later received permission from a contemptuous Vespasian to open a small school at Yavnah. In A.D. 70 Jerusalem fell, the Temple was sacked, and all Jewish resistance ended two years later at Masada. But although Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed, ben Zakkai trained new teachers in out-of-the-way Yavneh and insured Jewish survival during the Diaspora.
The disturbing story that follows is rooted in the ruins of a past that might also be our future, a future we have built out of plowshares, missiles, and guns.
HAVING REFUSED A CHAIR, Rabbi Jacobi stands in front of my desk, pulling the tuft of white beard that sprouts beneath his underlip.
“All I want,” he says, “is your permission to leave the city, go to Yavneh, open up a school there, and teach.”
“Yes, I understand, Rabbi, but unfortunately, under the circumstances, I must refuse you permission.”
“What circumstances?”
“For one thing, you’ll be safer here.”
“Really?” he asks. “Look out the window and tell me what you see.”
“Jaffa Road.”
“Look again.”
I rise to my feet. The street, the entire city has vanished. We are in a wilderness, where a white haze has effaced the boundary between the earth and the azure sky. Mount Scopus is a barren rock, illuminated on its eastern slope by the morning sun. Huge, yellowish limestone boulders, tinged with red, reflect the glaring light. The ruins of buildings? It’s impossible to tell. They seem to have been strewn indiscriminately on the parched ground shimmering from the rising heat. Only an ancient, twisted oak, with shriveled leaves, grows there, just below my window, and as I watch, a jackal which has been sleeping in the shade rises unsteadily, its pink tongue lolling from its jaws, and pisses against the tree trunk: a short spurt of urine, in which, suddenly dropping from the cloudless sky, a starling immerses itself for an instant, fluttering its wings and catching a few drops in its gaping beak.
And twisting the tuft of hair below his mouth, Jacobi says, “You’re looking at the Holy City through my eyes.”
“The past?”
He shrugs. “The future, too. What’s the difference? They’re one and the same.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Nevertheless, God help us, it’s true,” he says, covering his face with his hands. As he has been speaking, a Sammael, one of our new, self-propelled rocket launchers, roars up Jaffa Road in the direction of the Russian compound. Its two rockets, capable of carrying nuclear warheads, are covered by canvas.
Jacobi twists that tuft of beard between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. Is he a hypnotist, or what? I read over his dossier, open on my desk, once again. He was born in Jerusalem in 1917 and was ordained at the age of nineteen. After that, for twelve years, he was the rabbi of the small town of Arav in the southern Galilee, where he also worked as a clerk in the local post office because he refused any remuneration for teaching Torah. His wife died last year, and he lost his only son at the age of sixteen to nephritis. The boy was also a precociously brilliant scholar, of whom his father said at his death, “I am consoled by the fact that my son, may his memory be blessed, fulfilled the purpose for which man was created—the study of the Holy Law.”
For the last eight years, Jacobi has lived in Jerusalem, teaching a select group of students in a small Talmud Torah on Adani Street. He has been in constant conflict with the rabbinate over its acquisition of extensive property, and with the government over its policy of retaliatory raids for terrorist attacks.