The Marsh Angel Read online

  Producer & International Distributor

  eBookPro Publishing

  www.ebook-pro.com

  Marsh Angel

  Hagai Dagan

  Copyright © 2020 Hagai Dagan

  All rights reserved; No parts of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information retrieval system, without the permission, in writing, of the author.

  Translation from the Hebrew by Itamar Toussia Cohen

  Contact: [email protected]

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  a. Early Childhood

  b. Childhood

  c. Adolescence

  1. THE ROYAL FLEUR-DE-LIS

  a. The Holy Anointing Oil

  b. We’re All Palestinian

  c. The Fate of the Russian Nation

  d. Hostile Terrorist Activity

  e. A Distant Star on the Border of Dawn

  2. KIDONIT

  a. Behind the Curtain

  b. Stay Low

  c. Black Material

  d. Tulip

  e. Memory and Forgetfulness

  f. Abandoned House

  g. Intuition

  h. Neta the Intelligence Analyst

  i. The Great Infidel

  j. Pools of Light

  3. THUNDERBIRDS

  a. The Plot Thickens

  b. Sacrifice, Return, Liberation

  c. Bourgeois Intelligence

  d. Illusory Chill

  e. Mainstream, and Slightly to the Right

  f. Blackening Matter

  g. Speculations

  h. Is Something Bothering You, Binder?

  i. Autonomous Sex

  j. Gnats

  k. A Kite Aflame

  l. Where Were You?

  m. Chariot of Fire

  n. The Brains Lottery

  o. What’s Going on in Tripoli?

  p. The Cage is in Motion

  q. Radio Check

  r. Revelation

  4. TWILIGHT

  a. The Wrath of God

  b. The Best Interest of the Matter

  c. No Big Deal

  d. Transparent

  e. New Zealand

  f. Backlog to Be Taken Care Of

  g. Bad Boy

  h. Tediously Familiar

  5. THE LIFE OF ARTS

  a. The Stint Will Die Here

  b. Source Confidentiality

  c. Strive for Clarity

  6. SHIKMA STREAM

  a. Carpenter’s Glue

  b. Skimmed Milk

  c. At the Tail-End of All Things

  d. Rustic Grace

  e. Different, Completely Different

  7. VIENNA

  a. Blocked Number

  b. He Has to Know

  c. Forgotten Frequency

  d. Cautious Joy

  e. Green Mist

  f. Black Rain

  g. Hidden Ground Water

  h. Sorcery and Deception

  i. Distance

  j. Low Priority

  k. Light of Reason

  l. Letters

  m. Who is Flamingo Reed?

  n. Literature Lesson

  o. Anta min Arab al-Ghawarneh?

  p. Austria Vienna

  q. The Banks of the Na‘aman

  r. Cremeschnitte

  s. Direct Order

  t. Zwickel

  u. Saving Polnochi

  EPILOGUE

  Message from the Author

  If darkness still prevails and I am bereft a star,

  and if angry is the sea

  on the bow of my ship, mother,

  light a fire for me to see.

  […]

  Above, a golden canopy,

  beneath, a void lies taciturn.

  Carry me, o wave, do carry me,

  to the land for which I yearn.

  Carry me in wisdom

  why? do not ask of me.

  A little bird, a little bird

  on the horizon waits for me.

  — Raphael Eliaz, “A Love Song for the Sea”

  PROLOGUE

  a. Early Childhood

  Tamir lay close to his mother. Her warm body exuded an aroma of cinnamon rolls. The small bedroom enveloped and embraced her, and she embraced it in return. Far off in the distance was an open window, like a dream, and outside, the night engulfed Kibbutz Sufit: thin rain murmured, frogs croaked in the creek, the scent of water and reed carried in the air, cows lowed in the fields, and jackals howled in the distance. Tamir asked to hear the story of Princess Polnochi again. His mother laughed. Maybe she will come tonight, she said, you never know, you need to wait. She never comes before midnight. Polnochi means ‘midnight’, in Russian.

  Tamir asked where she would be coming from.

  From Siberia, his mother replied, she will fly from Siberia through the night sky. Her voice was pensive and distant. It seemed to Tamir as though she were talking from a dream. She rides rays of light, she said, gentle rays of light, star and moonlight.

  What happens if the sky is clouded and you can’t see the moon? Tamir insisted.

  We can’t see it, but she can, his mother answered. In every darkness there is some light, and Polnochi knows how to find it. She sees all the children lying under the cover of darkness, and if they are very lonely, if they get lost in their dreams, she descends down to them, like a beautiful angel, and strokes them, and they are no longer alone. Close your eyes, Tamirchuk, and wait for her. In the morning, tell me if she came to visit you in your dreams. His mother leaned over and enveloped him in a soft embrace; her large body was heavy and sweet, diametrically opposite of Princess Polnochi’s soft and starry essence. His mother pulled him down and Polnochi pulled him up, and he was beside himself.

  b. Childhood

  One day, the kids went out on a field-trip along Hilazon stream. They sat in a cart harnessed to a blue Ford tractor, which drove through the fields of Sufit, passing by the ruins of Damun village, which was razed to the ground in 1948; they observed the fish ponds and continued along Na’aman stream, until they reached the plain near the estuary and the ramshackle shanty village of the Bedouin al-Ghawarneh tribe. The name of the tribe derives from the Arabic word ghur, meaning ‘valley’, their Arabic language teacher who accompanied the trip explained. Tamir loved Arabic, and loved the Arabic teacher. She had red curls, full cheeks, and slightly bucked teeth which reminded Tamir of a rabbit. He loved hearing the guttural sounds emerging from her throat. He listened to her pronounce those sounds and imagined the patient gnawing of a carrot. The Bedouin of the Arab al-Ghawarneh explained to the schoolchildren that their tribe is dispersed all over the country, especially in valleys and marshlands. One of the kids said that the pioneers that established the kibbutz had dried the marshes, but a tall man with a proud, penetrative gaze said that there was no need to do so, that they had always lived in peace with the marshes. Later, they treated the students to sweet tea and olives whose flavor was intensely bitter, as well as dates, and all sorts of odd, oily sweets. The sweets weren’t to Tamir’s liking, but the olives— which most of the kids found repulsive— evoked thoughts of earth, muddy riverbanks, roots, and humus.

  Two girls served the olives and sweets. They were introduced to the children as a pair of twins: Sa’ira and Dallal. They were slightly older than the schoolchildren. They were dressed in long colorful dresses and wore bracelets on t
heir hands, despite their young age. They told of their lives in a Bedouin village, their quotidian routine, how they help in the kitchen and play in the tamarisk thicket. The Arabic teacher lowered her voice as she told the children that the twins were orphans. Their parents were killed in a terrorist attack when they were younger. As she was saying this, the twins lowered their heads and briefly exchanged glances. It wasn’t clear what was on their minds. An awkward silence fell over the group, and the children also lowered their gazes. The silence was finally broken when Sa’ira resumed telling the group about their daily routine. She spoke in broken Hebrew, laced with Arabic. The Arabic teacher translated some of her words into rabbit-like Hebrew, but Tamir didn’t need translating. He understood.

  He observed Dallal. She barely said a thing. Sa’ira did most of the talking, while Dallal occasionally confirmed her sister’s words by nodding along. She seemed distracted. Perturbed, even. Her eyes wandered over the schoolchildren, as if she were looking for something to hold on to. She paused her gaze over the girls, examining them with curiosity, their short pants and fair thighs, but, finding no respite, she quickly resumed scouring the group. Occasionally, her eyes glazed over and she lowered her gaze, mindlessly toying with one of her copper-colored curls, before looking up again and searching for a foothold. Finally, she locked eyes with Tamir. She immediately lowered her eyes, but then looked up again and fixed her gaze to his. They looked at each other for a prolonged moment, which seemed to Tamir to last an eternity. He felt as if he were plunging into a black lake resting at the bottom of her eyes, a broad black lake, expanding without end, shoreless and bottomless.

  Sa’ira’s voice emerged from a distance. Me and my sister, she said, we love poetry, we talk to each other in poems.

  We have a special language, Dallal confirmed. A language of poems.

  I would like to teach you a song that the children here all know, Sa’ira said. It’s not hard. Listen. Your teacher can translate:

  The hoopoe forgets, the heron takes flight,

  The kingfisher submerges, the pelican sleeps tight,

  The ibis hides in the thicket, the pigeon sits for all to see.

  Only the stint remembers,

  But the stint flies out to sea.

  Sa’ira’s voice was mellifluous and sweet, but even sweeter was the lake in Dallas’s eyes, sweeter and deeper than anything he had dared imagine until that day; how lovely it felt to be immersed in its waters. From a distance, further away than could be fathomed, from the imagined shore he had left behind, Tamir thought he could hear the Arabic teacher thanking the twins. Now everyone will leave, he thought to himself, and he will stay there, forever submerged in the depths of this enchanting lake. It’s fine, he thought, everything’s perfectly fine.

  c. Adolescence

  The kids grew up fast. They wiped the golden mist off their brows and stood upright in the hard summer air. They were into sports now, competitive and physical. The games were rough and violent: they played ‘circles and flags’, wherein a flag was placed in a circle, and the objective was to be reach and obtain it at all costs. The quick and the strong were strikers. The slow were defenders. Tamir was a defender. Always, a defender. But even defenders needed a certain degree of pace and strength. Tamir had neither. Binder, you look like a little Jew out there, one of the older kibbutz members scoffed. So there he was, standing like a little Jew— not in the forest, nor by cabins in the Carpathian Mountains, but in a patch of trampled fallow weeds in the fall heat, between the ruins of the Arab village Damun and the tamarisk thicket bordering the Bedouin village of the Arab al-Ghawarneh— anxiously waiting for someone to suddenly pounce him. And it was always sudden. No matter how prepared he was, it always happened all at once, like a blow, like an insult. Someone would emerge as if from the belly of the earth, erupting like a storm, brushing one defender off, steamrolling another, and running towards him. Tamir was chubby, so he gave off the impression of being a firm child, but everyone knew he was afraid of violence. The kid running at him would yell, move, Tamir, move! At first, he did move. But he would then be yelled at that he had abandoned the flag, that he was a coward, that he was undependable. The girls would laugh, the sound of their laughter resonating in his ears like the sound of the saws in the carpentry workshop on the outskirts of the kibbutz— high-pitched, dissonant, unbearable.

  But this time, he wasn’t going to move. He would prove himself and hold his ground. He stood in his spot and watched the kid running furiously towards him. That kid was named Ronen Schwartz. He was a year older than Tamir, athletic, tall, powerful, quiet, and mean. He ran effortlessly, as if he were gliding on air. Tamir stood rooted to his spot. He was shaking all over. In fact, he should have been running to try and block Ronen’s path, but he couldn’t move. He felt an eerie weakness pervade his body. He had decided that if Ronen reached him, he would hold his ground— but he could do nothing beyond that. That decision alone was enough to sap the energy from his body. He stood still. Ronen could have easily run around him, but that would have been too easy. He ran towards him and stopped directly in front of him, mere inches away, towering above him.

  Well, Binder, aren’t you going to stop me? he said mockingly. His eyes were foxlike, yellow.

  I… Yes… Tamir managed to say, practically in a whisper. He strained to utter the words.

  Yes, what? Ronen Schwartz laughed.

  Yes… Stop you.

  It doesn’t look that way, Ronen said. Why’d they put you out here in the first place? It’s a sad sight, really. If I so much as blow in your direction, you’ll fly like a dandelion seed.

  He didn’t say a thing. Why didn’t Ronen simply pass him by and go for the flag?

  I think you’re like your father, Binder, Ronen said maliciously.

  What about my father? He genuinely didn’t understand.

  Your father’s a pussy, Ronen Schwartz said. He didn’t serve in the army, and he was in the holocaust before that. He’s a zero.

  At that moment, something strange happened. Tamir felt as if the depth of this soul, or the depth of his body, or perhaps the depth of his memory, was filled by nothing but mud. Just mud. But something was stirring in that mud. Materializing. Coalescing. Like peat, like coal. The coal was unearthed, and started heating up. It was as if mysterious streams of heat were jetting up from the belly of the earth and fanning the forgotten, dead coal. He raised his head and looked directly into Ronen Schwartz’s ridiculing eyes. His lips quivered feverishly. He yearned for the comfort of his mother’s presence, her warm body, the protective darkness of her bedroom, but he was standing alone in the fallow field with Ronen Schwartz. In the depths of his inner cellars— suddenly, there were cellars— the coal was burning.

  Why’re you shaking like a girl, Binder?

  You… The words left his mouth laboriously but uncontrollably, as if it wasn’t him who was speaking: You’re a piece of shit, Schwartz.

  The slap must have been powerful, because before he knew what hit him, Tamir found himself on the ground, crumpled in a heap among the trampled weeds. Ronen towered above him menacingly, lingering for a moment, perhaps deliberating whether to pound him some more. Tamir looked up and stared directly into his eyes. Ronen Schwartz kicked a loose rock, sounded some sort of snarl, and carried on running towards the circle and the flag.

  Tamir lay there for a long time. He didn’t know for how long. He noticed it was getting cooler outside. The sun was setting. Herons flew above his head. He knew that the herons patrol the edges of the fish ponds during the day, only to fly back at twilight to sleep in the tamarisk thicket. He got up and started walking aimlessly, paying no attention to where he was going. Dust clouds were whisked up by the evening breeze, and his eyes watered. He coughed. His senses were stirred, as if awakened from a dream. He suddenly realized that he was very thirsty. His face stung, from his cheek up to his ear. He had a bitter taste in his mouth. His legs drag
ged heavily through thorns and stones. He stopped. The tamarisk thicket was spread before him, tangled and dusty, seemingly endless. A sudden, compelling urge to go into the thicket gripped him, to find respite and peace, to be engulfed, to turn his back on the Ronen Schwartzes of the world, never to see any of them ever again. He had never been into the thicket before. He was told that it’s dangerous, especially during the summer, that there were snakes in there.

  Tamir took one step in, and then another. It was difficult. He brushed away branches with his hands. Something scraped his neck. Thorns protruded from the tangled, coiled branches. Tamir listened. He could hear sounds of blowing and chirping in the thicket. Something was moving restlessly. The thicket itself is alive, he thought to himself. He continued moving forward. Suddenly, something flew off from inside, something black and large, and smacked into Tamir with a loud clap. What was that? An ibis? It took him a moment to realize what had just happened and to become frightened. He knew that there was a large colony of black ibises in the thicket. He figured he was walking by their nests and chicks, and disturbing their peace. Something else spread its wings in front of him. The whole thicket awoke. A deafening shriek of birds erupted around him. Tamir protected his face and tried to move forward. More and more thorns scraped his face. A darkness enveloped him; he couldn’t see a thing. He collapsed in the thicket. He crawled over thorns and broken branches. He wept silently.

  The irritated ibises flew angrily above him, creating an impenetrable dark canopy with their black wings. He didn’t know whether they were attacking him or protecting him. He fell asleep there for a while, on the ground beneath the thicket. He dreamt of water, of darkness. His thirst was relentless, and disturbed his slumber. He got up, fumbled around in the dark, and forced his way through a screen of thorns and branches. His shirt was torn, his palms were bloody. Finally, he made it to the end of the thicket. He looked around him and saw lights flashing on the mountains of the Western Galilee. The earthy smell of nighttime pervaded his nostrils.