First Trip: Get Up and Walk the Land 16
No sounds came from above, but this meant nothing. Eran had never heard Yaniv raise his voice in pain, anger or even during arguments over game rules. Do not go gentle into that good night, but rage—
“Kus em-em-emok!” Dor cradled his hand like Gollum who’d just reclaimed his precious.
“Dor, do the club thing!” Tamar cried as she balanced the lever on the fulcrum. “Quick!”
“No, you do it, it’s better I go outside.” Dor frowned at the scrawny boy and two girls before him. “Do a Turkish pile!” He grabbed Eran and pushed him toward the lever, “Yallah! You start! You have experience.”
Being crushed under a pile of girls seemed like a good death in theory, but when push came to shove, and in this instance, it very much came to shove, it was not different from being crushed under a fat man or a jolly elephant or the 23rd world Zionist congress. Something hard dug into your ribs while something heavy increased the pressure, making it hard to breathe.
Through the blood pounding in his ears and his own labored breathing, Eran heard Dor scrambling outside the basket. An instant later, he heard a shrill cry and a gunshot, followed by the sound of feet scraping back in the direction of the basket.
The girls hopped off Eran and he turned over to see Dor looming over him, smoking gun in hand. Behind him, the girls held Yaniv, who looked shaken but not stirred.
“What was that?!” Eran squawked, pain slowly oozing from his chest.
“An angel,” Yaniv said calmly, pushing away a plastic bottle offered by Tamar.
“Angel…” Waffle echoed in wonderment.
Yaniv went on. “She had six wings and looked like she was on fire even though no heat came from her. She was shaking me as if she wanted me to do something. She was very weak for her size. Then Dor shot her.”
“I totally shot an angel!” Dor cried with a feral grin. “She made a Super Mario sound and flew away.”
“Why the hell did you shoot an angel?” Tamar cried. She was not religious but like most Bukharans, she was superstitious. Then again, shooting an angel would be seen as bad form even to a complete atheist.
“It was hurting Yaniv!” Dor protested. “Only I get to do that.”
“The angel is fine.” Yaniv said. “I think she just got startled by the loud noise. I don’t think she meant to harm me. You know how Georgians always sound angry, but it’s just the way they speak?”
“Hey!” Dor barked. “Racism is my thing. You do you.” He shrugged. “Anyway, it was pretty awesome. All the other angels started flying about like scared pigeons.”
“Oh yes,” Yaniv said. “There were lots. They were chiseling those blue rocks the kids called placeholders.”
Waffle pressed her face to the basket and whispered, “Angels…”
Eran shook his head, too tired to be surprised anymore. “So in one night we meet nephilim, angels and… what? A demon? Mazzikin? If our crap is real, why not the Arabs’? Maybe next we’ll meet a genie.”
“No genie!” Waffle shook her head.
“What’s Mazzikin?” Tamar asked.
“Creatures from the Sitra Achra, the other side, who do harm in this world. Usually they’re invisible, but through kabbalistic stuff you can see them. My dad wrote a paper in Spanish about them once. I’ll talk to him when we get back home.”
Yaniv sighed. “If we get back home…”
“Oh!” Dor smacked his forehead and turned to Tamar. “I have a gift for you.” He reached behind his back and produced a large silvery feather with an elaborate flourish. “Ta-da!”
Eran leaned in to better examine the feather. While at first glance it looked like the feather of a large bird, on closer inspection, it turned out to be metallic and veined, like a sliver from a futuristic motherboard or a postmodernist homage to feathers as a symbol of peace or some crap like that. There was even a little signature near the tip. It looked like one of the giant’s letters, but was somehow more complex and primal at the same time.
“Is that what I think it is?” Tamar eyed the elegant object with greed and trepidation. Her hand darted back and forth, as if deciding whether to accept or reject the trophy. Eran wondered if you were still blessed if you shot the angel that touched you. This was probably something not covered by the Talmud. Maybe the nasty cave rabbi would know…
“It won’t zap me or anything, right?” Tamar asked. Her eyes shone with light reflected from the feather. Or maybe it was just avarice.
Dor smiled. “No… but the tip is really sharp, so be careful.”
Waffle frowned at the feather, “Make you see. Make see you.”
Yaniv tilted his head at the girl. “Is your concern etymological or theological?”
“Oh, what the hell!” Tamar snatched the feather like a street cat accepting a morsel. “This is the coolest thing I’ve seen in my life. Thanks!”
“And it was won in battle.” Dor added.
Tamar placed the feather in her hair, Indian-style, and took a selfie. Then she took it out and carefully tucked it inside her bag.
“I think we had enough adventures for one night,” Yaniv said. “Let’s go before one of the other giant moms decides her children need pets or their rabbi decides to give us a free Talmud lesson or we get some other side quest… They don’t look violent but they do look like giant nudniks.”
“Bored already?” Tamar teased.
Yaniv stared at her with unusual intensity. “No. Not bored. Never bored. I wasn’t bored a single day in my life. Everything is fascinating to me. But I want to look, not gawk. I want to be a scientist, not a tourist.” He swallowed and wet his parched lips.
“Remember when we were little and spent the whole night watching the Iron Dome intercept Qassam rockets? It was awesome at first, like watching Star Wars in real life. Then we accepted that this was just our life now and stopped losing sleep over it. Well, it’s the same now. People in the Lord of the Rings don’t stare every time they see an elf, right? It’s only a miracle the first time around. Then it becomes life. If you don’t accept this, you’ll spend your whole life gawking.”
“Pshhh…” Tamar nodded. “Inspiring. How far do you think we’re from home?”
“Closer than you think.” Dor said. “I know it feels like we’ve traveled a hundred kilometers, but we’re really less than an hour away. Remember that stinky cave with the condoms everywhere or the tree split in two that Eran took like eighty photos of? I saw both on the way here… I more or less know where we are. We will return tomorrow and sell this story for twenty million shekels.”
Yaniv frowned. “We need to ask for permission from the decisor first.”
Eran nodded. “Sure, he looks like a reasonable guy. Okay, and what do we do with Waffle?”
“Exchange her for camels,” Dor said. “I’m tired of walking.”
“A donkey would be better in this kind of terrain.” Yaniv suggested.
“Donkey better.” Waffle nodded.
Tamar squeezed the girl in a hug meant either to reassure her she would not be traded for camels or to squeeze her guts out. “I have an empty house. Waffl— Wafaa can sleep with me! Tomorrow we’ll help her talk to the police.”
The girl shook her head. “No police.”
“Whatever. We’ll figure it out tomorrow,” Eran said, preferring his soft bed to a police station bench as well. “I’ll leave them a message that we’ll be back at the break of afternoon. I hope they’ll be able to read it. I still don’t understand how this whole Keys thing works.”
Yaniv raised his finger.
“Don’t!” Dor barked. “I’ll bite off that finger and eat it.”
Yaniv lowered his finger.
Eran picked up a piece of limestone and scribbled on the wall in big square letters:
WE LEFT FOR A FEW HOURS. WILL BE BACK TOMORROW.
“And one last thing.” Eran wiped his hands on his filthy pants. “What do we do about the junkyard and the, eh, let’s call them mazzikin, there?”
“If we talk to the police, they’ll redirect us to urgent mental help,” Yaniv said. “The junkyard disappeared as soon as we distanced ourselves from it, so we can’t point it out in an aerial photo. If we mention nephilim or mazzikin they’ll laugh at us.”
Tamar’s shoulders slumped. “Eran saw a real woman there. We can’t just ignore her.”
Eran yawned, cumulative exhaustion suddenly dropping on him like an anvil. “Let’s raise this before the decisor tomorrow. Unnatural problems require unnatural solutions. In any case, I don’t think we should reveal the nephilim to the world without asking for permission first. I don’t want to piss them off.”
“Good idea!” Dor clapped his hands and rubbed them eagerly. “Yallah, my sweet crocodiles. Let’s march! To bath and burgers!”