The Crying Machine

3.
Levi

‘Shouldn’t you be working on your masterplan?’

Yusuf turns a chair around the wrong way and sits. The curved wicker frame creaks under the weight of those bear arms folded across the backrest. He leans in too close, like a man who wants to hear a secret.

‘I’m thinking. You should try it sometime.’

He watches me for a few seconds. He doesn’t care that I’m not looking at him.

‘It’s the woman, isn’t it? You thinking maybe you should’ve helped her out?’

‘Sure, like I’ve got time to burn on every ghreeb who wanders in off the street.’

‘Come on! You got to be curious! She comes in here, from Marseille, asking for you by name? And you don’t want to know what her deal is?’

A knot of a hundred tiny metal chains chinks between my fingers. He won’t drop this thing about the girl. He never does. It’s kind of an unwritten agreement between Yusuf and me that I bring excitement into his life in exchange for him letting me run the business from his place. The problem with unwritten contracts is they’re subject to interpretation. ‘Forget her. I’m working on a plan. That’s all you need to know. Right now, I have other work to do.’

‘Yeah, looks important. What is that shit?’

‘Religious souvenirs, for the tourists. I got a variety box of a thousand from China for nothing, but they got tangled in transit, and selling crucifixes to Muslims is a quick way to go out of business.’

‘What business? There’s no tourists.’

‘Because you’re so busy with all these customers you can waste time talking to me.’ That shuts him up for a second. Nobody’s making any money since Europe blew up again and the tourists stopped coming to Jerusalem, but nobody wants to let on they’re hurting; it’s a little bit about pride, and a lot about not letting the sharks see you bleed. Another smoker’s cough from one of the old geezers at the back breaks the silence of the empty bar.

‘You’re an idiot, you know that?’ Yusuf plucks a peanut from the bowl on his bar, leans back and flicks it into the air with his thumbnail. It bounces off his lip and falls onto the floor. He looks at it a second before deciding not to pick it up. ‘You should know better than to mess with Silas Mizrachi.’

‘And that’s your professional assessment as what? A bartender?’ He always does this; he can’t help himself. Telling me I’m wrong is like a nervous tic for him.

‘It’s my professional assessment as someone who knows how to add up – professionally. A job like this takes money. He gives you the change in his back pocket, and suddenly you’re a gangster. You’re not a gangster, Levi. If Silas came to you, it’s because he wants someone he can screw. Take the money and get out of town – Gaza or something. Silas is nothing outside of Jerusalem.’

‘Yeah, that’s a fun idea, but it’s not going to work. The money’s not enough.’

‘Enough for what?’

‘You heard what he said about me owing someone.’

‘Yeah, that was news to me. Who do you owe?’

‘Maurice Safar.’

Yusuf’s face goes tight at the name. In the wider landscape of Jerusalem, Safar doesn’t even figure, he’s a neighbourhood guy, but he’s connected everywhere. Skipping town is not an option. ‘Eesh! How much?’

‘Does it matter? More than Silas just put on the table.’

‘Wallahi, Levi! Did they not teach arithmetic at Jew school? You people are supposed to be all about the money!’

He always panics. That’s why I can’t tell him everything. I’ve got nine days until Maurice Safar breaks the thigh bone of my left leg. Yesterday he showed me a metal bar he got from his father. It’s the one part of the job he always does himself. Violence is only an effective motivator when it’s sincere. People have to know you mean it, and Maurice Safar always means to hurt you.

‘All I need is someone to do the legwork and stay out of sight …’

‘You mean a thief – someone who has actual skills.’

‘I have skills.’

‘All right, skills other than bullshitting and buying cheap tobacco.’ Yusuf counts something imaginary on his fingers like a kid doing maths.

‘OK, OK, you made your point. I need a thief, a cheap one.’

‘So ask your girlfriend. She needed money.’

‘I honestly cannot tell whether that’s a serious suggestion. Seriously, I don’t know.’

He holds his hands out, palms up, and gives me this look like I’m breaking his heart. I know for a fact he doesn’t have one. ‘She did a number on fat Saul outside – swiped one of his oranges faster than you can blink.’

‘I love you, man, but sometimes you can be a schmo. This – this is one of those times. Tell you what, if I need someone to steal fruit, I’ll give her a call.’

Yusuf reaches under the bar and picks up a glass from a shelf I can’t see, stares at some imaginary dirt at the bottom, shakes his head slowly from side to side. This whole Mr Reasonable schtick is bullshit. He only says these things to get a rise out of me. Other people don’t see that.

‘Excuse me for trying to help.’ The snake muscles of his forearm flex as he twists the pint jar around a towel.

‘Don’t be like that …’ If it was actually possible to hurt Yusuf’s feelings, I might put more effort into making nice. Or I might not; it’s kind of hard to imagine how things could be different from how they are. Maybe it is a little messed up.

The sound of leathery laughter from somewhere near the door jerks me around. It’s just the old guys at the shisha pipe laughing at something dumb. Sometimes I still make the mistake of trying to listen to their conversations. I swear they do not speak in actual words; every now and then you might get a sentence, but it is never, ever funny.

The door curtain rattles behind me. Outside, shopkeepers disappear like cockroaches in the fading afternoon light that creeps through the gaps between rooftops. Everything closes for ‘quiet time’ in the Old City. The only people still looking for business at this time are the tech cult preachers offering to solve all your problems by putting a computer in your head. A pair of them stand behind a stall like they’re going to be there all night. Somebody told me they don’t sleep after they get the procedure done, but I’ve watched them: they do shifts; they just all have the same haircut and the same smile, like they’re in on a secret.

In three hours every door and every shutter on this street will be wide open again, covered with racks of carpets and leather stuff and birds in cages – all shit that nobody on the planet actually needs. Like there’s some unwritten law of the souk that says no one’s allowed just to sell you a loaf of bread. I still have to go to the Mahane Yehuda for real food, which always carries a risk of running into family. Right now it’s the wrong time for shopping, but the kind of work I have to do is easier with empty streets. I need to see bad people, and they get busy later.

Leo’s restaurant is in the Armenian Quarter. Depending on who you ask, we’ve got anywhere from three to five quarters – that’s just Jerusalem arithmetic. Any other year I’d detour to avoid the crowds around Temple Mount, but the tourist flow dried up as soon as the insurrection in Europe started again. The one thing you can never avoid is the Haredim doing their business at the Wailing Wall, crying about a building that got knocked down two thousand years ago, and was probably somewhere else. If you think about it, it’s impressive how they keep up the motivation.

It takes fifteen minutes to walk to Ararat Street. You know someone’s going to be watching you from the minute you cross the invisible boundary that runs down the middle of the Cardo archways, so there’s no point trying to be sneaky. When I get there, Leo’s standing outside his joint, smoking a Russian import cigarillo. The old guy clocks me as soon as I turn the corner. Still sharp.

‘Shalom! Well, if it isn’t the Old City’s very own yid prodigy! I’m sorry, kid, I’m all good for plastic replicas of the Dome of the Rock. What can I say? Tourist business isn’t what it used to be. It’s this damn war.’

A couple of years ago I would have laughed at the shitty joke and taken the hit, backed out of the big boys’ game. I can’t afford that now; opportunities to earn real money are too thin on the ground. ‘I need to talk business with Shant.’

The old man’s smile vanishes. ‘What kind of business do you need to talk about with Shant, kid?’

‘With the greatest respect, the answer to that question is Shant’s kind of business, Leo.’

Leo gives me that old gangster stare. He’s not playing. He can still bury me if he thinks I’m jerking his chain. ‘OK, kid, I know you. Shant can listen to what you have to say, but you better not be wasting his time. He’s my nephew. I look after him. I hold you responsible for anything that comes out of this. You get me?’

‘I get you, Leo.’

‘Give me a minute. I think he’s doing his yogilates.’

‘I’m sorry, what?’

‘Yogilates. It’s a mix of … Doesn’t matter. Sit tight. I’ll get him.’

Everything is shiny in Leo’s bar: no cracks in the red leather seats of the booths at the back. It’s obvious these guys don’t need tourists to make money. Shant makes me wait, but I stay casual even though I can feel my ass sweating. This is already wrong. I can’t run a job unless I’m the boss, and he’s letting me know I’m not the boss.

‘Hey.’ The voice is high-pitched. It comes from a pair of spectacles peering over the back of the seats three booths away. The face behind them is a boy, kind of. It’s one of those staring-down-the-barrel-of-puberty faces that’s still making up its mind.

‘Hey.’

The face comes up. It looks at me like I’m a cat that wandered in off the street, not sure whether he’s supposed to pet me or kick me out. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m, uh … waiting for someone.’

‘Oh, you’re here to see my dad.’ Suddenly he sounds bored.

I look again at the eyes. There’s a bony hardness around them that could be Shant. The rest must be his mother. ‘You’re Shant’s son?’

‘Mmm …’

‘Learning the old man’s business, eh?’

‘Yeah.’ The word comes out as a sigh. His head turns so the cheek rests on the top of the booth, like he’s going to sleep. He’s had this conversation before, and he doesn’t want to be here. I don’t blame him. If he was my kid, I for sure would keep him the hell away from all this shit.

‘You should count yourself lucky, kid. You know what my father did?’ The face rises from the seat back, curious. ‘He ran a furniture showroom on the Rehov Hanevi’im.’

‘That doesn’t sound so bad.’

‘Really? What do you think I did all day? Nothing, that’s what. School holidays killed me. To this day, I still get antsy if I smell wood polish.’

‘That does sound boring. I just don’t know what I’m supposed to learn sitting around here. All I see is people come in, start talking, and my dad gets angry.’ His eyes dart around the room; then he leans forward. ‘Some of the kids at school say he hurts people.’

Shit. You can tell by the look on his face: he knows – not the ugly detail, but he can feel what’s not right. Kids are smart like that. I mean, my dad was a fucker, but the worst he ever did was leave a few bruises on us, and Mom if she got loud. He never buried anyone in an underpass. What can I say? He’s looking at me, waiting for an answer, a guy who just walked in off the street, like somehow my opinion matters.

‘Those kids don’t know what they’re talking about. Would I be here if your dad was gonna hurt me?’

‘I guess not.’ He looks happier, but not much. I guess he probably wanted me to tell him his dad was really the greatest guy on the planet, but he’d know I was lying. Sometimes the truth sucks, but it’s what you’ve got. ‘You know, the other guys who come around here don’t say more than two words to me.’

‘Well, they’re idiots. Maybe that’s why your dad has to shout at them.’ The sound of heavy footsteps on the stairs drags me back to reality. ‘Don’t worry about learning the business. All that “follow in your father’s footsteps” stuff is for schmucks with no imagination. You do you, kid.’

He gives me a grin that looks nothing like his father.

Shant Manoukian appears from an arched doorway with no door at the back of the room, big but lean in a loose tracksuit, all smiles and handshakes. A faint sheen of sweat gives his face a movie-star glow. He looks at the kid for a second, seems about to say something, then shrugs and turns to me.

‘I see you met Kyle. Sorry to keep you waiting. I was just finishing up my yogilates.’ I never heard that word before Leo said it. It must be some bullshit workout thing. I’m hoping for the purposes of this conversation it won’t matter. Whatever, he’s not sorry. White teeth flash every time he grins, which is a lot.

‘Yeah, Leo said.’

‘You should try it, man. Your posture could use a little work.’ My spine twitches with the urge to straighten.

‘You sound like my mother.’

‘Ha! I like you, Levi. You’re a funny guy. So, Leo tells me you got a job. What’s the deal?’

‘Ten K for a week of planning, executing next week, half now, half on completion.’

Shant nods in mock approval. ‘You sure you got five K, Levi? That pays for my time but what’s the job?’

I give him the same line Mizrachi gave me – listening to the details constitutes agreement to complete the job. His face tells me exactly how shitty that line is. The movie-star head starts to shake slowly, almost sympathetically. He holds up a hand like a traffic cop.

‘You’re talking about signing up blind. That’s not professional. Maybe Uncle Leo said something to you about risks. He looks out for me, but I run my own business. I can take risks; it just costs is all. One hundred K, fifty up front. You got fifty in your pocket, Levi Peres?’

I start making out that I’m good for the money, but when I get to the part about only ten K up front he looks like he’s sucking something sour. I stop talking and his expression softens.

‘Levi, it’s not for me. You’re a smart kid; I can see that. Leo would tell me to nod and smile and keep pumping you for info, but I respect you for coming here. I respect you for trying to make this work, but it’s no good. Walk away from this. Have you thought about Gaza?’

We shake hands. As I head out the door, Uncle Leo gives me a mock salute with the stub of his cigar. All that respect stuff was bullshit. Shant figured out it’s a job they don’t want to steal, so he found a quick way to end the conversation. In a way it doesn’t matter. They’ll forget about the job they didn’t do, but they’ll remember we had this conversation. After this, Levi Peres can sit down and talk business with anyone in this city, which is great, but it doesn’t get me out of my hole with Safar. Only money’s going to do that, but I have a manpower problem, and not enough money to fix it.

4.
Clementine

From a distance, the Mission is a white hole in the dark of the Old City. As Clementine gets near she can see the cracks the whitewash doesn’t cover. In the gothic-arched doorway the smell hits her: an intense urine tang. The deranged cluster in the shadows, dark piles of shambling rags drawn to this place of succour, but repelled by some ineffable magnetism from the door itself. A pair of yellow eyes, slitted like a cat’s, watches her pass from beneath a concealing hood, the expression impossible to read.

Inside, the Mission is true to its name, an outpost for a dying Europe. The walls are the same whitewash as outside but cleaner, with fewer cracks. Six rows of dark wood benches line up either side of an aisle pointing arrow-straight to a low altar covered with white cloth. For the first time since she left France, homesickness touches Clementine. This room could be in Lyon or Grenoble, but for the faint mist of dust that hovers golden in the yellow light.

A pale-skinned woman, the first she’s seen since she arrived, appears from a doorway in the wall behind the altar. She wears a simple brown robe tied at the waist with a cord. Her short, red hair is cut like a man’s in a style that would mark her as sexually deviant at home, but maybe the rules are different here. The shaven sides show her ears fully, but there is no glint of metal in either of them. For whatever reason, this woman does not embrace the technology the locals favour. She smiles in a manner that grants limited, conditional acceptance of Clementine’s right to be here and waits for her to speak.

The silence is wrongfooting. The conversational gambits she’d been running through on her way here all seem too obviously false now. This woman’s stern simplicity demands repayment in the same currency. Clementine’s concocted stories of a struggle against oppression, of loss and abandonment, evaporate, replaced by a single statement. ‘I want to disappear.’

The woman’s eyes wander over Clementine’s pale skin and inappropriate, form-fitting European clothes. There’s a glimmer of something that might be sympathy. ‘Are you ready to embrace our Saviour?’

A simple, binary question, loaded with two millennia of history, packed with an infinity of agendas. Which one does this unremarkable woman serve? What will it demand? Choice is a luxury reserved for those already possessed of food and shelter. Clementine does not hesitate. ‘With all my heart.’

The woman’s smile warms, but her eyes are still calculating. ‘I am Hilda. You can help in the kitchen for now. I’m afraid you’ll have to stay in the hostel dormitory tonight. You’ll need to change out of those clothes. They’ll bring trouble we don’t need.’ She walks with slow, smooth steps, leading the way to a darkened glass door behind the altar. It opens to reveal a small vestry that looks as if it serves as a bedroom. Despite conspicuous cleanliness, it is a tableau of a life improvised. Piles of things, mostly books and papers, cover every available flat surface, including a narrow, hard-looking bed. Hilda reaches into one of the piles, pulls out a brown robe identical to her own, and passes it over. For a moment Clementine watches dumbly as the reality of what she’s doing settles on her. Holy orders. Will there be a vow? Some sort of ritual? Will they accept someone like her? All she has is this woman’s tacit acceptance. Instead of hopelessness, the thought inspires a wave of calm. This is all she has. Perhaps a freedom from choice is the gift of the Holy City.

There is a pang of loss as she strips off her smart-fabric leggings and vest. Inappropriate they may be, but the temperature-sensitive weave and adjustable wicking properties made them valuable in any climate. The variable colour shift was a useless legacy of her old life – it wouldn’t hide her in the city. Clothes like this were hard to find, even in Europe, since the war on the Ural frontier had started up again. The gossamer network of goods between continents necessary for such sophisticated products had taken years to re-emerge after the first war, and now it was gone again.

She hesitates, wary of nakedness in front of a stranger, until Hilda looks away. The world goes dark as the robe slides over Clementine’s head. It’s heavy, and the coarse fabric scratches her skin where it touches. Her head emerges to see Hilda smiling now, perhaps in amusement at the sight of the slight woman swaddled in fabric, perhaps at something else. The benign opacity of her expression is a mask that could hide anything, or anyone.

The kitchen is spotless but tired. The stainless-steel surfaces are scored with the passage of a decade of cutlery. A small, dark woman stirs two big pots of something surprisingly appetizing. She doesn’t wear robes and she seems surprised to see Clementine, but silently accepts her presence, handing her an apron and a dented ladle. From the other side of a green plastic folding shutter comes the sound of moving bodies and murmuring, the stilted conversations of the hopeless, not listening to each other, hitting dead ends, repeating themselves.

The cook leans across the counter and pulls at the centre of the shutter. It clacks noisily up into a hidden recess. The people on the other side are mostly men, already in a line. They know how this works. A few glance up, noticing the unexpected robed figure, but most are focused on the food. They shuffle past blindly as Clementine ladles bowls full of aromatic stew. There’s a faint waft of sumac and bursts of something else more exotic, a spice that leaves an almost uncomfortable heat on the tongue. Still, it’s good food. The homeless in Europe have been killing rats for more than a decade now. An unwanted memory sends a shudder through her: not just the homeless.

The act of serving becomes automatic and she stops noticing the faces in front of her until one of them hisses thanks. She looks up to see the yellow eyes that watched her in the doorway. They see through the disguise of her robe. The features around them are hidden behind shadows and layers of ragged cloth, the blotched red wrist of the hand that takes the bowl seems almost to strobe out of existence in the flickering yellow ceiling light, but the scars of radiation sickness are unmistakeable.

Clementine suppresses a start of surprise and resumes the mechanistic act of filling the bowls, looking around her to see if anyone else has noticed the stranger. The cook wrestles the dead weight of the second pot, oblivious. The homeless continue their dead-man shuffle.

A few make attempts at conversation when she steps out from behind the counter to gather bowls and spoons, but they’re nonsensical, or perhaps in some dialect of the damned she doesn’t understand. She smiles dumbly; none of her language training prepared her for this. As she clears away, she looks in vain for the yellow-eyed stranger.

The small, dark cook makes empty conversation as they share the duties of washing up and putting away. She answers Clementine’s questions about recipes and ingredients with gentle incredulity at her ignorance, unable to grasp the exoticism of her fare to someone who comes from a place where spices will not grow. The rest of her talk is platitudes and local gossip: political scandals, acts of outrage by a cult she calls ‘the Machine people’. The stories mean nothing to Clementine. There is no threat of meaningful dialogue. She has already disappeared.

She follows the cook’s directions to the dormitory. A windowless corridor floored with colourless, hard lino takes her there. The geography of this place is unsettling, hard to follow even for someone like her. It doesn’t correspond at all to the featureless white box visible from the outside. Walls have been knocked away into nearby buildings and tunnels dug between to link them. It is a warren of the faithful with many entrances. The exteriors are all facades. It makes her wonder who else is hiding here. Or is this just what pragmatism looks like in the ruins of the Holy City?

The hostel dormitory is small and cramped compared to the cavernous dining hall. There are people already here, most dressed in the ragged uniform of the poor. Some chat with cautious familiarity. Hilda had explained the hostel’s twelve beds were allocated on the basis of a benignly rigged lottery. At 5 p.m. every day applicants were invited to draw straws for a place. Recent winners, and known substance abusers, chose from a lot that contained no long straws. Some perhaps suspected their fate was sealed, but it was fairer than chance. Clementine had bypassed the lottery entirely, for reasons as yet unclear.

Fully half her roommates are women: the lottery’s work again. They look genderless in the garb of poverty and the skin of their faces and hands is hard from days spent outside in the streets. The eyes of the men follow her hungrily across the room to an empty bed in one corner. Their scrutiny is relentless, their thoughts obvious, but signs proclaiming the Mission’s code of conduct hang like silent sentinels on the walls. Nobody wants to find themselves losing the lottery.

Nobody undresses. Instead, there are token gestures towards the rituals of preparing for bed: outermost garments are put to one side; one of the men prays in a style Clementine has never seen before, rocking backwards and forwards while murmuring atonally. Another uses a bowl of water to perform lengthy, ritualistic ablutions confined to the limited areas of flesh accessible without removing further layers. They all seem to move to some unspoken timetable. By the time the fluorescent strip light on the ceiling flickers out, they are already lying still.

Clementine stares at the ceiling in the darkness. She can feel the eyes of the men and hear their thoughts. Still, this is the safest she’s been for months, since before leaving France. She thinks of the people she left behind. How many survived? Most would be dead, the bravest. If there were any survivors, they’d likely been sent to join the punishment battalions in the east. Not everybody got the chance to disappear. She was lucky, lying here in a hard bed amongst the hopeless. Still, sleep would not come.

A rustle of cloth and a stifled gasp is the sound of a man masturbating in the dark. Clementine pushes her bedcovers aside and walks to the door, picking her way faultlessly through the pitch black, the path and distance memorized through instinct honed by months of training. In the corridor, she blinks three times rapidly and a film descends over her eyes. Monochrome outlines appear out of what was total blackness and she retraces her steps through the warren until she reaches the smoked glass of Hilda’s door and knocks.

A light blossoms behind the glass and the older woman gestures her inside wordlessly. She doesn’t seem surprised. Even roused from sleep, she still wears the same gentle, slightly calculating expression. Clementine slips out of her robe and crawls into the recently vacated bed, still warm from Hilda’s body. The older woman smiles as she leans down to pull the blanket across to cover her nakedness. The light flicks off, the door clicks closed, and she is gone. Tears of relief and gratitude well in Clementine’s eyes. She has to blink three times before they can fall.