Cock-a-doodle-do, says Maoz Tzur.
Make a sound like a bulbul or a crow, pleads Tyrell. Tell her tra-la-la or cra-cra-cra. Tell her you don’t know if you’re a man or an animal. And if it’s an animal, then what kind of animal. A mole or a monkey-bird. Tell her it’s the bird migration season. The time when all winged creatures are commanded to arise and depart the land of their birth and the graves of their forefathers, to forget their friends both dead and alive, and to fly in the direction indicated by the bird compass implanted in their brains or their DNA.
You know, he hears himself declaim the strange text which the scriptwriter puts in his mouth, once people thought that when autumn came in cold climates, birds took off for warmer climes, but today we know that this isn’t true.
So what is the truth? she asks, without wondering why he has suddenly started talking about bird migrations.
The migratory instinct of birds is apparently connected only to direction, he goes on reciting the novice scriptwriter’s tedious text, without understanding why he’s saying what he says.
But how do they know when the cold days are coming? she asks.
Something changes in the sound of their voice, he declaims the next line.
The birds know that autumn’s coming by the sound of their voices?
They’re very sensitive to sound, he says. You know they can hear ultrasonic frequencies?
And vampires? she asks.
It’s well known that vampires transmit sounds on ultrasonic frequencies, and they pick up echoes returned by various objects on their inner sonar. That’s the only thing that enables them to fly between trees in the dark without bumping into the branches.
And before he can shut him up, the novice scriptwriter involves him in a weird discussion of vampires, which the spidery girl embraces with enthusiasm, and into which she draws him too:
Why do humans suffer so much when they fall in love with vampires? she asks.
Simple, replies the last scion of a vampire dynasty who has just this minute been born. Human beings want to possess the objects of their love. They don’t understand that it’s impossible to possess a vampire.
Because thanks to its sonar system, the vampire will exploit every crack and loophole in order to escape into the dark, she guesses.
Obviously, replies the vampire Sisera, sipping the hot spicy wine offered him by Yael, the wife of a nameless jealous friend, and now imagine what happens when two vampires fall in love with each other, he hears himself repeating the idiotic text, without the faintest idea of what he’s talking about.
Usually it’s a sad story, she muses aloud.
Because if both of them are searching for cracks in the dark, it will all be over very quickly, without any warning signs, he completes her musings.
So why do they start with each other in the first place, she wonders.
Because they get tired of the possessive instincts and emotional blackmail of human beings, he reads the next line of dialogue from the prompter, and thinks that it contains a measure of truth.
And when the female vampire suddenly leaves the male, doesn’t he pursue her? she wants to know.
Never, he states firmly.
‘Never say never’, says her id, quoting the universal id, and now it’s a conversation between id and id, whispers the delighted scriptwriter, and it can go on forever without putting any effort into it at all.
A true vampire never pursues anyone who leaves it, the words slide smoothly out of his mouth. It will never harass anyone who abandons it, or nag it with stupid questions like, what have I done to deserve this.
And he won’t try to look for her in order to find out why she suddenly broke off contact? She isn’t convinced.
Never, he follows the inexperienced scriptwriter. That’s the difference between vampires and human beings: human
beings are sure that they deserve to be loved. When love ends, they look for the logic, because they believe in reasons, circumstances, meaning. In any straw they can grasp at. Vampires, on the other hand, know that they don’t deserve anything. They don’t believe in anything. When somebody loves them, they regard it as a miracle. And miracles, as vampires know, suddenly vanish, for no reason, just as life ends.
That’s true, she agrees, but it doesn’t make them happy.
No, he agrees, vampires aren’t happy creatures, but they have the strength to withstand it.
What’s the source of their sadness? wonders her id, which uses her young voice with whorish charm.
The source of their sadness is not known, says Shakespeare.
In sooth I know not why I am so sad, Melissa unthinkingly quotes Antonia’s opening lines from the first scene of ‘The Merchant-woman of Venice’. It wearies me, she goes on quoting, you say it wearies you.
It won’t weary me, Shakespeare reassures her, I have to write the fifth and last act, even though my inspiration dried up after the fourth act, which is why the last act is going to be lousy, but Melissantonia isn’t reassured:
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it, what stuff ’tis made of, whereof it is born, I am to learn.…
Me too, such a want-wit sadness makes of me, that I have much ado to know myself, admits Shakespeare, without remembering which of his characters he is quoting now, although he is clearly quoting someone, because he himself feels neither sadness nor witlessness at the moment, only emptiness, an abyss of emptiness gaping between them, and all the contradictory statements that he makes, and all the conflicting acts that he performs, circle round the edge of this abyss, and apparently this is the strange force attracting them to each other: a black hole, which is signified by
black-hole bypassing sentences, such as the next sentence that comes out of her mouth:
When a vampire encounters an ordinary human being, who falls in love with it, it doesn’t help it to understand anything about itself.
And Shakespeare supports her:
But when a vampire meets a vampire—
What happens when a vampire meets a vampire? She asks, and her direct gaze bores a long dark tunnel inside him, leading to a vast underground space, hollowed out of the bowels of a mountain in which no one imagines there to be winding passages, opening into dark secret cathedrals, where an eternal silence has reigned since the day the voices of the anonymous miners who quarried these underground galleries were stilled.
When a vampire meets a vampire, Shakespeare embarks on a voyage to an unknown land over the simmering cauldron of wine she has brewed for them, for the night of the vampires—
We’ll continue the meeting tomorrow, Mona cuts sharply into the train of his thoughts, and before he can recover she commands:
And you’re coming with me.
He leaves the conference room behind her and follows her down the corridor. She stops in front of the elevator, and he stands next to her. She presses the button. They wait in silence. The numbers change over the elevator door. The elevator rises from the ground floor, reaches their floor and comes to a halt with a click. The stainless steel jaw gapes. Mona steps inside, and he steps in after her. He looks to see
where she is taking him, to the roof or the ground. She takes him below ground, to the parking level. The elevator stops.
They get out. Only a few cars are scattered here and there in the underground lot, deserted at this late hour. They walk silently to the blue Land Rover. Mona walks with a brisk, resolute step, and he trails behind her, contemplating the tight walnut colored leather pants, the red sweater whose neckline reveals the curves of her breasts, and notes her athletic build, the pomellas of her firm buttocks, her muscular calves and thighs, and the strong tendons of her ankles, twining like roots into her running shoes. As she walks she whistles to herself a kind of improvised cover version of Roberta Flack’s ‘Killing me softly’, which she turns into a kind of jazzy march. Accompanied by the clattering of her keys, which are attached to a steel ring ten centimeters in diameter and look like the keys of a mediaeval prison warder. She’s in a belligerent mood, he says to himself, and as if she has read his thoughts, she turns her head and surveys him with an amused expression. For a moment it seems to him that she is about to open her mouth, but no. She throws her key ring into the air, catches it with one hand, right on the remote of her Land Rover, and presses the button with an imperceptible sleight of hand. The Land Rover whinnies and snorts with the joy of a wild horse that knows its owner, and its eyes flash her two mischievous winks, and already she jumps in and sits behind the wheel, starts the engine and engages the automatic gear with a movement full of dynamism and power, as if she’s operating the lever of the manual gear box of an old Titanic truck, or at least a Mac Diesel from the middle of the previous century. He hardly has time to take his place beside her before the wild beast leaps forward with a powerful thrust that sticks him to the back of his seat. With a savage screech of its tires the monster veers
and tilts sideways, scraping the curb of the sidewalk as it makes a right turn, like a plane changing direction after takeoff. He wants to tell her to be careful, but before he can open his mouth Mona presses the button that transfers the gearbox into sports drive and steps ferociously on the accelerator, humming to herself a tune she picked up from a French commercial many years ago, in the days when she was an Intelligence officer in their liquidation squad and drove a Mini Cooper, whose gear stick was equipped with an overdrive button:
‘La conduite sportive à la portée de tous’
. The engine growls threateningly and the Land Rover cuts across an intersection at a red light, weaving in a slalom like a drunken cruise missile dancing a samba between cars screeching to a stop or getting out of the way in a panic. Mona leaves behind her a cacophony of hysterical hoots and curses, which only egg her on to give the hundred and fifty fire horses imprisoned under the hood their heads. And in this way they burn through another two red lights with traffic swerving right and left in front and behind them the last tenth of a second before or after they enter the intersection, borne on the wings of a terrifying demon chariot. Hanina puts his hand on the handbrake, ready to pull on it with all his might the moment they enter the collision course opposite another vehicle or post or tree at the side of the road. The speedometer needle goes into the red and hovers next to a hundred and eighty. Mona’s eyes are focused on the dense darkness in front of them, through which the headlamps carve a tunnel of light. From time to time the rear lights of other cars flicker in the gloom, rushing towards them with dizzying speed. Mona passes them and leaves them far behind like a vampire, yes! Like a vampire gliding through the darkness and flitting between the branches of the trees without so much as touching a leaf. His hand remains resting on the handbrake.
He’s on the back seat of the Harley Davidson which Yadanuga races at the speed of a plane taking off—swerving acrobatically between giant trucks and private cars, leaving behind Fiats, Alfas, Lancias, and even one Lamborghini, red with shame or anger, which they fly past like a rocket, when suddenly a patrol car leaps out of the lay-by at the side of the Autostrada del Sol, five hundred meters ahead of them, and it is clear that it intends to stop them, or even to open fire on them, and Yadanuga yells into the fierce wind, ‘Hang on with all your strength—we’re taking off!’ and he tightens his grip on Yadanuga’s waist, and the motorcycle veers to the left and leaps over the wide strip of lawn dividing the lanes, and they fly over the traffic hurtling in the opposite direction, and Yadanuga makes a masterly landing on the bicycle lane on the other side of the busy motorway, and they race against the direction of the traffic, and he bursts out laughing at the imagined sight of the flabbergasted faces of the policemen, and ‘What are you laughing at?’ asks Mona, who is now racing the Land Rover towards the parking lot next to the marina, and he says: I remembered a certain liquidation, and he wonders why they had given that terrorist the strange code name of ‘Santa Rosa’, they had always called their targets Abu-something, and only ‘Tino Rossi’ was the exception to the rule, and suddenly they were told that the next one on the list was ‘Santa Rosa’. But in fact they never told them who the man they were required to remove from the world was. They restricted themselves to general information: So-and-so is responsible for the deaths of such-and-such a number of people. Here’s his picture. Here’s his surveillance file. The addresses where he stays. His daily schedule. Habits. People he meets on a regular basis. The address of his mistress. When he goes to her.
When he leaves. Choose your own MO. Access routes. Escape routes. If you’re caught, you haven’t got a father or mother in the world. You’re on your own with God and the devil. That’s it. Any questions? No questions. Get to work.
Come, she says.
They go down to her boat. A white sloop emblazoned with the strange name ‘Cadenabia’. Mona had bought it from a Greek Cypriot skipper who had made her promise not to change its name. He too had acquired it under the same name, from an Italian grain dealer, who told him that the name had brought him a lot of luck. Mona unfurls the beautiful sail, which swells with the wind that at this quiet early-morning hour is blowing from the land to the sea. She seizes the mainsheet with her right hand, and tilts the sail to an angle of thirty degrees to the boat, which slides soundlessly out of the jetty. Now Mona leans over the side of the sloop and increases the windward angle of the sail, and the craft picks up speed and skips lightly over the little breakers which Mona calls ‘ducks’. Or so he understands, because just then she announces that they have a choppy sea ahead of them, and when he asks her how she knows, she replies: ‘Look at those ducks.’ Hanina doesn’t know if this is her own private metaphor, or an accepted term for little waves of this kind, which for some reason break far from the shore.
Ducks are a sign of an approaching storm? he asks anxiously.
A choppy sea isn’t a storm, she replies with a certain contempt and throws him a yellow life belt: Put it on, she
instructs him, and hold the helm in a straight line with the prow, if you can.