How deep is the chasm underneath you? she wants to know.
Between eighty and a hundred meters.
How do you know?
Ten times four square divided by two equals eighty.
What’s that?
Something I dimly remember from high school, he tells her. But maybe I’m wrong.
You’re talking to me in Chinese, she laughs.
Halfway across I dislodged a stone with my foot and the thud reached me after four or five seconds.
Scary, she says.
Very scary, he hops over a pothole in the pavement.
What gives you the strength to go on?
Luka, he says.
What do you mean? she asks.
We understand the beginning only when we reach the end, he says.
Don’t try to be clever.
I’m not being clever. You’re told that as soon as you arrive at the right place you’ll know it’s the right place, and then you’ll also know what to do next.
You’re arrived at the right place, she whispers.
The only thing that counts here is patience. A lot of patience. Sometimes you have to wait for hours before you take a step. Or make a movement. You have to be able to lie behind a bush for hours without moving a finger. If you don’t have patience—
I do, she reassures him. I could lie with you for hours.
And so could I with you, he says, but we’re running.
It’s good for me, she pants. Running with you is so good for me.
And for me with you too, he says.
You take my pace into consideration, she says.
I’m half a step behind you, he says.
I feel it. You don’t put pressure on me. You’re not in competition with me.
Who needs competition, he says.
Men, she says.
I’m not a man, he says.
Yes, I saw, she laughs.
Seriously, he says. I’m an error of nature. I should have been born a woman.
You’re making fun of me, she says.
Not at all, he says and hears the neighbor women, sitting and drinking tea with his mother at a soft twilight hour. A red sun dips into the narrow strip of sea visible between the mountains, and he tries unsuccessfully to transmit to
the paper with his paintbrush the sense of beauty that overwhelms him, or perhaps it’s the promise of happiness, and then he hears behind his back Ceska saying to his mother, that boy should have been born a girl. He’s so gentle, she adds, and his mother sighs: Yes, sometimes I fear that he’s too gentle for life.
But you’re laughing, she protests.
I remembered something, he says. Once I was in Paris. Before I returned to my country, I went to buy a dress for my mother, and I tried it on to see how it would look on my mother.
Is she as big as you? she asks in surprise.
I’m not big, he says.
You’re big, she says. You don’t know how big you are.
My mother wasn’t big, he says. She was a small woman.
So why did you try on the dress? she asks.
For fun, he says. For a laugh. I came out of the changing booth wearing the dress, and all the sales girls gathered round and started shrieking like a flock of parrots escaped from the zoo.
Go back to that moment, she says.
I’m there, he says. Completely.
Why did you put on the dress you bought for your mother?
Her question casts him back suddenly to that night in Nice, when they impersonated workers in the French Electric Corporation. To the moment when it seemed to him that he saw a shadow slipping out of the room. Someone escaped through the window, he says to the Alsatian. Impossible, says the Alsatian. They told us there were eight people here. But I saw someone, he insists. You’re mistaken, states the Alsatian. In any case, we’re getting into the van and getting out of here as quick as we can. Jonas and Yadanuga back up the Alsatian, and a few years later it costs Jonas his
life, and you too, Shakespeare, almost pay with your life, in the running duel in the desert. The craziest marathon of your life.
A penny for your thoughts, she says.
What? he wakes up.
I asked you why you put on the dress you wanted to buy for your mother.
Because the night before we eliminated a few terrorists, he says.
I’m not surprised, she says.
At what? he wonders.
Suddenly you looked as hard and sharp as a German decapitation axe, she says.
A German decapitation axe? He puzzles over the strange image.
Yes, she says. German executioners in the middle ages had an instrument like that.
The middle ages are now, he says. The old gods are taking their revenge. Barbarity is coming back in a big way.
A combination of barbarity and religion, she says. I experience it every day.
The streets of this city remind me exactly of the tunnels of that abandoned mine in the Austrian alps.
So don’t leave me alone, she requests.
Sorry, he says, I didn’t realize I was putting on speed.
You sure were, she pants. I thought you were about to take off and fly.
Why didn’t you say anything?
I was curious to see how fast you could run, she confesses. You run as if all the devils in hell are after you.
It won’t happen again, he promises.
Do you know where we are? she asks.
Yes, he says. We’re on the way to Executioner’s Square.
Executioner’s Square? she wonders.
Do you want to go there? he asks.
Yes, she says.
OK, he says, you’re my navigator. What’s this?
They enter an area illuminated by thousands of neon lights.
I’m damned if I know where we are.
Look up, he says.
She raises her eyes to the winter night sky studded with billions of stars.
Now look ahead. What do you see?
A big empty parking lot stretches out in front of them, illuminated in a cold neon light.
What am I supposed to see? she asks.
Do you see elongated shapes lined up in a row on the ground?
What are they? she asks.
Fighter planes, he says.
OK, she says in a half question, willing to go along with the story he’s telling.
A full squadron of state of the art Super Phantoms, equipped with extra-large drop tanks to lengthen the flight range, and armed with miniaturized nuclear bombs weighing a quarter ton each. Can you see them?
I see exactly what you see, she encourages him to continue his story.
Each plane carries ten such bombs under each wing.
Exactly, she confirms, ten bombs under each wing.
Can you hear the music? he asks.
Yes, she says. What is it?
He wants to tell her that it’s Beethoven’s Ninth, playing from some window open to the night, but he hears the novice-scriptwriter Tyrell’s voice explaining that it’s the Air Force band conducted by Ziko Graciani playing a selection of marches.
Just a minute, she stops him, who’s Psycho Greatshiani when he’s at home? And he tells her about the great conductor whose band accompanies the best of our aviators on their way to their planes before particularly dramatic missions, like the one in which they are about to take part. He asks her if she doesn’t want to change her mind, and she assures him that she’s with him through fire and water, and they pass together before the reviewing stand, leading behind them the men of the legendary Squadron 505, and opposite the stand he commands his men ‘Mark time’, and they jog a little on the spot, because when your body is so hot you shouldn’t come to a full stop, and the Commander of the Air Force and the Prime Minister and the Defense Minister approach them at a quick march, with the old Prime Minister hurrying ahead, his white mane waving in the wind like two flames on either side of his large head, and the Commander of the Air Force and the Chief-of-Staff can hardly keep up with the brisk strides of the short, resolute man, who when he reaches them asks them hurriedly in his clipped, metallic voice how they feel as they set out on their mission, and Melissa declares:
This is the mission I’ve been dreaming of since I was a child!
Is the mission clear to you? the Prime Minister asks her in the voice of a man of iron.
Yes! answers Melissa. To destroy the forces of evil in the world!
Excellent! The Prime Minister gives her a mighty comradely slap on the shoulder. Go in strength and bring us salvation!
Ziko Graciani gives his band a sign and to the blare of the trumpets playing the ‘Ode to Joy’, the pilots and navigators climb into their cockpits, close the canopies, Hanina presses the ignition button, and the air of the vast
subterranean hall vibrates with the thunder of the engines of the thirty-two Phantoms, which pair off and move slowly along the underground runway carved out of the belly of the mountain. Hanina pulls a lever, and the heavily laden Phantom leaps forward with a terrible roar, accelerates and shoots out of the bowels of the mountain through its gaping maw, which spits into the air one after the other sixteen pairs of mighty steel birds, which climb into the sky and rip it to shreds in a storm of thunder.
And then there’s silence. An ocean of silence. And into this cosmic silence, in the middle of the blue sky thirty-two tiny dots advance in four arrowheads. Below them lies the Mediterranean, a basin of solid glass between the yellow of the African deserts and the green of the forests of Europe. Above the boot of Italy they veer right, and start flying over land. The green of the forests turns to the grayish olive green of the olive groves of Umbria and Tuscany, and it grows darker and darker, turning into a poisonous green with shades of black. Blacker and blacker.
Now they’re above Germany. And here’s Munich. And in the heart of the city a vast square, black with hundreds of thousands of black uniforms and black boots. An open black Mercedes approaches a stage crowned with flagpoles as tall as skyscrapers, flying red flags emblazoned with huge black swastikas. A man dressed in a black uniform with a little black moustache under his nose stands in the black Mercedes and raises his arm in a salute to the crowd that cheers him like one man from a single hoarse throat, and the cheer rises above the city buildings and reaches the ears of the pilot, who smiles a small smile under his helmet and asks his navigator over the radio:
How long has he got to live?
Two minutes and sixteen seconds, he hears the navigator’s voice in his earphones. The timing is perfect. Down
there they are punctual to the minute and up here to the fraction of a second. Punctuality is about to meet punctuality. The black Mercedes stops in front of the stage, and the owner of the little black moustache jumps out and bounds onto the stage. The crowd roars Zieg Heil. The man raises his hand and the roar of the crowd is immediately silenced. Now he roars into the microphone suspended in the center of a metal ring like a spider waiting for its prey. The man’s screams are magnified a thousandfold, they echo from batteries of hundreds of powerful loudspeakers surrounding the square.
We’re on target, Hanina hears the navigator’s voice over the radio. He looks right and left, and against the background of the clear sky he sees the other pilots sitting tensely in their cockpits, their hands on the joysticks into which the firing buttons are set, waiting for a signal from him. He raises his thumb and then turns it down. He sees the other pilots nod in confirmation, and he winks at them before yanking the joystick, veering left, and commencing a dizzying dive towards the stage. The owner of the black moustache has sixty seconds left in which to enflame the souls of his audience with the venomous hatred about to drown nations and countries in blood and fire and columns of smoke, but suddenly words fail him, the crowds standing at the foot of the stage raise their eyes to the sky—a vast field of faces with gaping mouths and staring eyes, of circles with three holes punched in them, one hole for the mouth and two for the eyes, and all those millions of holes turn to the sky, and from the sky a quartet of thundering iron monsters swoops down on them, and the owner of the moustache sees what all that multitude sees: blue stars painted on white circles under the steel wings and on the bodies of the powerful planes, and he turns to the fat man with the swollen face standing at his right, and asks him in confusion: What is that, Hermann?
And Hermann replies, pale with horror: Those are shields of David.
Why shields of David? the terrified man with the moustache asks the no less terrified fat man.
It looks like a Jewish air force!
A Jewish air force? The owner of the moustache demands in horror: Did you say a Jewish air force?
But before the fat man has a chance to reply, Hanina presses the red button on his joystick, and all the people standing on the stage rise into the air in a great ball of fire, break up into arms, legs, heads, guts, livers, gallbladders, kidneys, testicles and backsides, which fall from the sky like a bountiful rain, and in the meantime Giora squeezes the white button on his joystick, and as he pulls on the joystick and raises the nose of his plane and climbs high into the air he catches a glimpse of the bright flash that turns the square beneath him into a field of statues strewn with columns of basalt rock or black clay. And when all thirty-two Phantom jets of the illustrious Squadron 505 reassemble from the corners of the Kingdom of Evil into a single cluster, which rises to the borders of the atmosphere above the European sky, on their way home to the base in the belly of the Mountain of Justice, the pilots see through the canopies of their cockpits the smoke rising from the burning airfields, and the mangled remains of the armored divisions that were about to flood the continent, and then the boy Hanina radios Air Force HQ, to announce that the mission has been accomplished, but to his astonishment there is no answer, and he calls again: Nest, this is Eagle, Nest, this is Eagle, do you read me, over! And nobody answers. Does anyone hear Eagle, he calls, does anyone hear Eagle? But the communications network is silent. And suddenly the realization penetrates his mind. Since he destroyed the Third Reich, the Second World War never broke out, there was no Holocaust, and
accordingly there is no State of Israel either, no IDF, no air force, no illustrious Squadron 505. And on the other hand, since there was no Holocaust, there are no Holocaust survivors either. His father never landed up in Sobibor and his mother never found refuge with the partisans in the forests. They never sailed on an illegal immigrant ship to Palestine, they weren’t sent to a detention camp in Cyprus, they never met, and thus there is no Hanina. And if there’s no Hanina, there’s no Phantom attack on the Third Reich either, and the Holocaust does happen, and Hanina does exist.……