Crematorium for Phoenixes (8 page)

“What? I don’t know what you mean,” said
Tammuz and engaged the rifle.

“NOOOO!!!” the man shook wildly. The skirt
of his garment, which had previously been indistinguishable, now
showed; it was a shiny, matte-red ermine that girded his body.
“Please don’t, you had promised me, you had promised me . . .” his
voice was again that of a child.

“Promised? We haven’t promised anything,”
said Tammuz, but he lowered his gun, apparently intrigued.

“This is a game, right? Another trial? For
you life is just one card from greasy dough that has been thrown
away.”

“Listen . . . .”

“No, you had better listen to me. I am
tired, you know. I’m sick from all of you but mostly by myself. I
was an ordinary shepherd until you told me that my name was Minos,
and then in the mountain of Dicta, I dictated the laws that raised
me like a king on this island.” The man’s voice trembled. He kept
swallowing and swallowing his pain. “You promised me and gave me
much more with your chariots, so we built cities in the wilderness,
created ships that reached and put under obedience overseas lands
that we hadn’t even know existed. From the children of the wild who
didn’t even have their own language, you made us into who we are,
and when my son Everett got sick, I thought that you would help . .
.” the legendary Minos, ruler of the grand Mediterranean, choked on
his tears.

“You made a promise that you would help—that
you would wave and everything would be fine. But that didn’t happen
every time. And here’s your result,” he said and pointed at the
Minotaur who was breathing, snorting steam and saliva as an ox.
Lying on the ground, tears crawled like raindrops that had fallen
over the old man’s cheeks, which reminded one of dough. “You
abandoned and left us in hell, alone with our pain.”

Sharukin bowed his head, as if the accuser
had finished his speech. The bars were closed, leaving only a
sobering silence between the four horizons of the world—the cell
where you only have moments of reflection.

“You are right. Sometimes the biggest
penalty of the divine are not his words, but his silence,” he said,
sliding his gaze across the bas-reliefs on the columns, which were
issued as gargoyles waiting for carrion and flexing their claws.
“But these were not gods, Minos, they were just human beings.”

“Men, huh?” muttered the old man. “So for
those people, the world is just a table, leaned over to create new
horrors.”

“Yes.”

“And all their and our work is the history
on this island. It will be distorted and half-remembered and will
be transmitted to those who will come.”

Tammuz could only shake his head. He sighed
and stared at the mosaic floor upon which kerosene stains looked
like Rorschach images as Minos continued, “That is just part of a
story, lad. That’s the ability of God, to look through our mortal
eyes in every part of the centuries. Do you understand? And the
only thing that He is looking at now is that!” the old man said,
pointing like a ghost at something right by the snorting
monster.

Tammuz and his band, who had approached him,
stared at the grooves on the floor that were folded like shells of
piled junk.

They all blinked several times. Their eyes
were narrowed when the old man pulled out a torch, and the monster
roared at the smoky fire. He shook his chains and his shade, as if
still growing, was cast upon the piles and piles of scattered,
gnawed bones and skulls that grinned speechlessly at this
farce.

“Lord, what is this?” asked the men.

“This is the only food that my son Everett
can take, levied as a tax from all over the Asia Minor coast and
Peloponnese–—human flesh,” Minos spoke. He hauled his cloak about
him, shivering like an old man in a winter storm. “Yeah . . .” he
finished, seeing the realization of the truth on the faces of the
group. “Sometimes the tragedy does not need many words. Reality
itself usually works.”

The men were rubbing the tops of indecision
while staring at their own reflection in the gutter spray; Tammuz
turned his head up and said, “Then I’ll end this.”

“Okay,” Minos said, and he took a few steps
forward until he embraced the Minotaur, which allow him to do so.
“Do it.”

“But why?” interrupted Sharukin, who until
now had been a silent witness to what was happening.

“Because he is my son, boy,” said the old
man, stroking the monster that mooed endearingly, squinting with
pleasure in his animal eyes. And this is one of those things that
even in a weak story has some sense.

Tammuz pulled out the knobs of his rifle,
holding it like a scepter that blesses or curses. It snapped like a
rattlesnake warning. He lifted it to his shoulder and rested his
cheek on the butt, shrinking his eye toward the long barrel.

“Wait, you will kill him?” called
Sharukin.

“I have to,” said Tammuz.

“But why?”

“Life is often a box with a pop-up toy that
is not always popping out good things. And the true monsters in
this story are those who kill them,” said Tammuz. He wiped a few
tears that would pipetted loosely down, dissolving into his slimy
suit.

Then he tried to aim, but his hands dropped,
trembling with weakness.

“You have it right, boy. Life has pretty
moments in which a person is required to live more or die. Fate is
sometimes a cage in which we stand too long chained,” said Minos.
“You do not have to do it. It should have been done a long time
ago. Because ultimately, death is a maze in which there is no way
out. Give me your weapon,” he finished, as if again dictating
divine words that were spoken passionately in the red clouds.

Tammuz listened to him.

Minos took the gun. It looked strange and
was an unknown object to him, like the scepter that the time
travelers had given him to rule over the Aegean. He lifted it and
took a bead on the Minotaur.

His eyes filled with tears that were
accumulating one after another. Seemingly identical, they contained
thousands of shades of sorrow, all rolled up insanely as rain and
tapping on the window of a diseased one.

“Goodbye, Everett,” he said.

There was a shot that echoed like muffled
thunder in summertime corridors.

The monster was dead.

Merging again with the mined darkness, Minos
disappeared.

There was the clatter of footsteps, perhaps
even a muffled shot, and then all was quiet, as if a curtain had
been lowered.

Chapter
Twelve

The boat was elongated and had a tapered
waterline imitating wood. Its fiberglass seemed to glide over the
waves like a swan.

Several men were scrambling and rigging
things as agile as monkeys, walking up and down the ropes,
stretching the winches and pulleys. They shouted to each other in
the morning twilight.

At the end rudder at the bottom part of the
quarter deck, with his hands leaning on it and dressed in a gray
winding robe, stood Takeshi. From time to time, he adjusted the
course.

A hundred feet in front of him, on the keel,
which was cutting through the foamy water, leaned Akuma. He had
braced himself on the railing.

Thus, in the Western Pacific, in the stream
of the warm Kuroshio Current, in the Sea of Japan, as a precious
metal melted among others, these men had started a curious journey
that had something to tell.

How could it be any other way?

If God is a puzzle that leaves bits of
itself on every piece of land and people on the globe, He had put
the most into the Pacific and had left in its heritage His
eyes.

From north to south this ocean drags its
waters, colored as fermented beer in rotten yellow, while the smoky
hues of God’s pupils spread across the canvas like a blue carpet
that has no memory, only infinite love.

And between it, arranged in irregular cilia,
rose and pushed the imagination the islands that were frozen as a
flock of whales splashing the water with their bodies and
tails.

Before them was not only the bracelet land
of Japan, the backbone of Hokkaido to Okinawa, but also the entire
Pacific, which contained a dozen other lands and pieces of
paradise.

It is therefore incomprehensible how in
these lands that stretch to the astronomical dimensions in reality,
or even in dreams, we can have something that is evil.

But, unfortunately, dear reader, we both
know that among the furlongs of gaps, often separated by doors,
pain is hiding. So it would be a lie in this unskilled history to
say that in these dimensions evil didn’t exist.

Because it does.

Often, life’s narrative grinds a barrier
over dreams. Evil is for that.

But behind the disappointment that upon a
few white sheets can be read, “I am terribly sorry,” there is
none.

And after you leave that behind, you will
gradually get to what matters.

Because each story is a ticket through which
we can sneak away from the problems. And no matter whether it will
be told in the red slums of Cairo by a half-blind beggar or in a
stained glass room in the fog of Copenhagen by a poor shoemaker’s
boy, this is the only patented dream machine. Everything good in
this world operates only with a pure heart.

And while listening to such stories beating
in the thick darkness, we are still pacing.

Therefore, allow me like a fixative solution
to be applied on photographic plates to before our eyes again pop
up the view of a ship in full sail in the cigarette-gray water that
hides a coin sliced from heaven with His eternal splendor.

The company piloted the vessel beside the
stretching mountain ranges of Japan that curved like knocking mill
wheels and fused with their mirror images in the water along with
that speed only a sailor could understand.

And the island of Hokkaido, with its touch
of northern chill, came into sight. It materialized like an angel
with open wings, revealing the charm of the southern waters leading
to Okinawa.

This space has been crossed by generations
of traders, fishermen, and pirates, but it will sadly only be
briefly sketched, as sometimes happens on a trip in the
kaleidoscope of an unprecedented land.

Because the course still pointed south, it
strained while lined with felt and decorated with garlands of salt.
The ropes vibrated from the air currents; they were stretched like
the bones around which petrels circled and lifted their melodious
song. The birds accompanied this journey through this piece of the
southern seas.

Every moment the water waves were being
colored differently from the spectrum of light, creating a
uniqueness that fate has combined only in water or in a loved
one.

There was nothing to disturb this
tranquility, which preserved the original slack that created the
world.

And you must forgive us, reader, because
sometimes there are no great songs. There are just simple melodies
sung from a pure heart.

It is because of these songs that what we
love is laying in the elms and emerald-green fields cut into the
land’s gates. Or perhaps it is being held ajar as noses in
chalk-white deserts that carry the haze of the sun. It may even be
found in the outlines and bristling pines of the mountain
slopes.

But this is not always true, as you
know.

Sometimes the pain we bear, hanging in our
souls, becomes too severe. It chases us with the words, “You have
nothing in this world except me.”

Then all hell falls upon us. The dream
castles of sand are crushed by the heavy boot of reality.

Then the densely written pages become
wrinkled, a crossed inability of sheets so that only dreams are
slammed from them.

But at this point in our history,
tribulations are far ahead, covered by the miles, away from the
horizon, emerging as the oil-blue stripes around a ship.

So as twisted fingers pass from one sea to
another, the sleeves and sleeveless water shall be imposed on each
other so that one as a blessed individual could travel to the end
of time and after a few days of the journey being shortened by
copyrighted storytellers, the ship approached the island of
Okinawa, which was rising on the water, smeared from adhered mud
and emerald salt spray.

Chapter
Thirteen

The underwater vessel surfaced like a
drowned man, weightless and submerged in the misty light that
penetrated the waters.

The ice drifted while the snow precipitated
its pieces, tearing them open like crystals of wispy bubbles.

Somebody opened the valves and strong air
hissed in morning freshness as the caterpillar train almost reached
the end of its trip.

After a while, a few chilly people shivered.
The Leviathan’s engine started working with the sound of a fast
moving trolley that was splashing away from the ghost-white water
in a narrow strip. It shone like the trail of a comet.

Iceland seemed again to plunge into the
misty landscape, scratching its limbs without giving up easily. It
was dragged like an animal into the den of a predator.

During this time, Victor Drake, Amos Oz, and
the others emerged from several compartments reinforced by ladders
in the furnace room. They had started the auxiliary machines with
fatigue, like hunched over and limp servants in a dazzling chrome
laboratory.

They were silent, each busy with his routine
and thinking through in his own way what happened thousands of
leagues under the sea.

But as such things are examined, sometimes
an everyday person sees only emptiness and futility. But the worst
part is when he starts feeling those things when looking at
himself. Then he understands that in the face of evil and sorrow he
has lost a part of himself, a piece that will never be found.

This is exactly the way the men were feeling
while looking at the surfaces of stainless steel that reflected
their inflated or oblong forms into soiled, frayed, denim
structures.