My brother groped me

""Yahweh's wife" in a dream turned out to be the goat-footed Queen of Sheba" Alexander Ilichevsky's Christmas story: Books: Culture: Lenta.ru

Alexander Ilichevsky - physicist, lyricist, prose writer, author of the novels "Matisse", "Persus", "Anarchists", "Orphics", a number of poetry collections and a wonderful book of essays "Right to Left". Winner of two of the most prestigious Russian literary awards - "Russian Booker" and "Big Book". An amazing stylist, the owner of a completely unique author's voice. The story of Alexander Ilichevsky "The Lion's Gate" completes the Christmas cycle of "Lenta.ru".

Photo: Sergey Karpov / TASS

My brother is a strange person, he sometimes sees spirits. Usually they gather at his table, dine from empty plates and discuss how to survive from home. He says that he is used to them - they are an elderly man and woman; usually they are peaceful neighbors, they will drink tea in the evening and go to bed. But sometimes the spirits take up arms, and then my brother calls me in despair. nine0003

- I can't take it anymore! he shouts.

— Coma, please stay at home! I mutter, realizing that the next two days of my life can be crossed out.

My brother is five years younger than me, because of him I lost my childhood. The little pet allowed himself anything, turning the whole world around him into a toy box. And only after the death of my parents, I realized that I was helpless to resist this.

My brother works at the post office, mostly sorting receipts and sorting parcels. This is a little that he can be trusted. He never married, and neither did I, but for different reasons. However, I am far from retirement, and this is what really warms me up. I don’t know how to live if I don’t have to throw equipment in the car in the morning and drive somewhere to shoot. nine0003

I am a land surveyor, although I am a history teacher by training. Emigration treats people the same way a cook treats potatoes. She made a man out of me with a theodolite, and my eye turned into an eyepiece cut with risks.

When my brother calls me, it means that he has stopped taking his medicine, and now I have to hunt him down all over Jerusalem to feed him a pill. He usually doesn't fight back, but try to find him first.

The first time he escaped was at the age of six, after reading my book about polar explorers. I decided to go to help Papanin, but I met him by chance after school at the bus stop. He stood in his father's cap, pulled down over his ears, and waited for the bus. nine0003

This was his easiest escape for me - I grabbed him by the collar, he could not see anything from under the visor and did not fly up.

Now my father is dead, the same cap still hangs on a hanger at the threshold of my parents' apartment - in an old house on the outskirts of Jerusalem, where my brother now lives alone. Sometimes, when I'm visiting my brother, I furtively put my cap on the inside to my face and quietly breathe in my father's scent.

I like my job: every day I deal with the earth, which someday will extract at least some meaning from me and plant it in the roots of lush grass that resurrects the desert after the rains. nine0003

With the theodolite at the ready, I studied every fold on the body of the country, every gorge, every ravine, every crack on the slope of the watershed.

I continue to be interested in history, personally, the past of mankind reassures me, because it has already happened. The meaning of life - more precisely, its absence - consists in learning to coexist with oblivion. But that's just easy to say. In reality, over time, though my consciousness clears up, at the same time, helplessness grows with peace. It's like when my brother and I went skiing into the woods as a child, got caught in a snowstorm, and on the way back I decided to cut across the field. Mela blizzard, and after a few steps we were in the milk. Trampling in circles, we began to freeze, so that we barely got back to the trees, where there was calm, and we could find a ski track. Now it seems to me that I am again standing in the middle of a snowstorm, but this time what I was so afraid of happened: I lost my brother. nine0003

Coma - this is because his mother called him Lump as a child, and when he grew up, he remained Coma.

My boss understands my problems with my brother, and when this happens, he gets angry, of course, but not with me, but with whom: among Eastern people, concern is often expressed in anxiety. In addition, I am one of the few in the office who agrees to work in the border zone.

I went out at a gas station in Modiin, called Nissim, listened to his curses and promises to come and attack Koma myself. nine0003

I decided to have coffee and sat down at a table. The pulsation of cicadas and the song of thrushes drowned out the noise of the track. I called my brother again and patiently counted to ten rings before the answering machine went off. Soon I pass Beit Horon, with its ruins and gorges lined with olive orchards on retaining terraces. Somewhere here the Lord, who is not, was throwing pieces of rocks after the inhabitants of Canaan, who were fleeing from the army of Joshua. The road in this highland is one of the most ancient in Israel. Sometimes there is a feeling that you are floundering like a bee in a drop of honey - in condensed time. For the third decade, I still can’t get used to it. At first I was greedy for my happiness. But it has long been unable to carry with it the experience of the simultaneity of the history reigning here - starting from the Copper-Stone Age, antiquity in general, red-hot in Israel, like coals, to blazing transparency. It is hardly possible to find a place on the planet where the wind of change blows the bonfire of the new time that was extinguished twenty centuries ago. nine0003

Photo: Spencer Platt / Getty Images

My brother Koma is one of the landmarks in Jerusalem's Talpiyot quarter. The other is the new building of the American embassy, ​​the approaches to which are guarded by wide-hipped blondes in military uniforms. The parental home stands on the very edge of a ravine, from the slope of which one can see both the embassy, ​​fenced with concrete ditches with lifting ramps, and the edge of a hilly desert the color of bald camel skin. This is the same desert where the founder of Christianity was alone and where on the Day of Judgment the goat carried away the sins of the people on its horns. nine0003

But who is best known in the Old City, where he is like a fish in water. Before I go there, I go to another of my brother's hideouts, the Rockefeller Museum, near the Damascus Gate. Koma loves to wander and take naps on a stone bench in a mansion filled with antiquities. The pantheon of pagan deities, gods, modest and majestic, furious and meek clots of force fields of the universe and suspiciousness is especially noticeable on the shelves and showcases. Probably, Koma feels more comfortable next to idols than with people and spirits. Man, along with his body unchanged for thousands of years, is still small and piercingly weak, despite the path traveled from saber-toothed tigers to cruise missiles. Of course, the childhood of man is partly the childhood of mankind. But there, in the museum, among the figurines of penates and female forms of radiant fertility - there the feeling of pity for a person, ancient and modern, alarmed and hopeful, tormented and praying - is especially piercing, and Coma probably takes it partly at his own expense as a consolation. . nine0003

I wandered through the empty halls of the museum and questioned the caretaker I knew. The old Arab man, who was sitting in the courtyard near the hookah, said that he had not seen his brother for a long time; he will certainly call me if he goes to the museum.

I love Jerusalem, it's a separate world, and if you don't live in it, you won't understand anything about it. On the one hand, it, like all cities, consists of houses. On the other hand, Jerusalem is such an English park, a landscape merged with nature: there is no planting in it, it has layers. This is what makes it somewhat transparent. nine0003

Jerusalem reveals itself at sunset, its true color is tanned-bodily, bronzing, golden. One can speak about the architecture of Jerusalem only in the sense that it, the architecture, is imperceptible - on these mountains, among these gardens.

I read somewhere: "A sleepwalker sees a meadow standing on moles"; likewise, the inhabitants of Jerusalem are like lunatics, because they are mostly turned into the invisible, into a creative sleep.

Sometimes it seems to me that my brother has some special dream of his own, and I cannot completely reject it. nine0003

Photo: East News

The main resident of Jerusalem is a condensed past and future time, thirsting for peace and remorse... And here is the same synagogue, Coma, may be here. Once upon a time, in the first weeks in the country, in the cold autumn darkness on Yom Kippur, my father brought us to it. The people were crowded, the rabbi delivered a sermon, everyone listened with enthusiasm. Next to me stood a middle-aged Chinese man with an expression of terrible reverence and awe on his face. Instead of a kippah, he had a crumpled handkerchief on his head. He, like us, did not understand anything, but he probably thought that this was not a sermon, but a prayer, and he swayed to the beat of the orator's measured rhetorical intonation and whispered something. I glanced at him and remembered his face, wet with reverence. Koma also took out a handkerchief, and both of them and the Chinese stood against the wall and swayed in time with the howls of the chazan. nine0003

No, there is no Coma here either.

Once I was dragging around with a theodolite not just anywhere, but where Alexander the Great was negotiating with the Jerusalem High Priest. Where did I come back from?

Yes, under your feet is time itself. The crystal of heaven peers intently into him. Not a single cloud, not a single thought. Time is a leviathan, for oblivion is the most powerful beast in the world. Who will cope with oblivion?

But soon the New Year. December 31 Coma comes to me with a cake. More precisely, with what was left of him along the way. He eats only sweets, his cerebellar satiety center fails. Damn, I twisted my leg, how painful it is, but it seems nothing, nothing, somehow I hobble, albeit uphill. nine0003

The streets of Jerusalem are mainly arranged according to the principle of a fan and arcs: on a large scale - drawn towards the Old City; in the local - developing the terraces of mountainous terrain. The edges of the fan cover the distance from the Temple Mount or the displacement along the tier; arcs provide communication across the entire surface of the terrace. The relief of Jerusalem and the suburbs is ledge, with many valleys, gorges, ravines, and plateaus. This is a nice and rare topology: today you can go out along one of the arcs, and at some point, passing to one of the edges, reach the Jaffa Gate; and tomorrow go along the arc in the opposite direction and, imperceptibly sliding along a different edge, come all the same to the Citadel of David. You are moving on the surface of a sphere. Whether you go left, right, up or down, you still fall down to the core: to one of the city gates, behind which space disappears altogether due to its special tunnel-like density. nine0003

At the same time, the Old City is not a sphere, but a sphere, you can move up and down in it like a worm in an apple: from the Kotel, through archaeological shafts and arched passages, along the streets, curving and dissecting; there are also continuous routes across the space of roofs, this is a particularly exciting and not very accessible sport - this is how military patrols move.

Where is Coma, where is that damn psycho? For the third hour, I rush through the covered streets, furtively pinching my nose as I pass the spice shops and meat stalls full of the sweet smell of open flesh. I salivate, slowing down at the stalls with hot cakes sprinkled with sesame and hyssop, jostling with tourists, and at the temple of the Sepulcher I look for Abdullah with my eyes - a short, stocky, mule-like, with high cheekbones and slightly protruding teeth, an unusually agile guy - he is from families of “keepers of the keys”, and it is usually arranged by the father to look after the order in general, and he should be asked about Whom . ..

The old city is full of lunatics, some trudge day and night with prayer books through the stations of the Passion of Christ, some drag around with hefty crosses, however, most often wheels are screwed to the butt, like food carts. There are also women among them; hoodie with gold embroidery on the hem: "I am the wife of Yahweh." Coma, in his state, reaches out to these mummers, once I found him on Calvary, bowing to the ground with some peasant in natural onuchs and a sheepskin coat. But no one saw him in the Church of the Sepulcher. I finally waited for Abdullah and left him a phone number. At the exit from the square, he intercepted me: “Did you look in Gethsemane?” - "In Gethsemane? .." - I was confused. Yes, yes, of course, near the Garden of Gethsemane there is either a wasteland, or an unpaved parking lot for buses that brought tourists to the Mount of Olives, these demoniacs sometimes gathered there. Some of them spent the night there, someone pitched a tent, but kept their wandering trash there, someone boiled a kettle - in general, a camp is a camp. nine0003

Photo: Spencer Platt / Getty Images

There was nothing to do, and I moved to the Lion's Gate.

Jerusalem is such a bottomless city, not just a separate universe, but a universe connected and reflecting the whole world, all history and, most importantly, the present and the future. Climbing from the west to Jerusalem along one of the two highways - this path is not at all a routine, but something similar to meditation. It’s hard to explain, but in Jerusalem everyone is a little crazy, and many are tolerant of real madness: for years, passing by, I observed a plump woman on Jaffa Street, opposite the house with a sundial, she stood at an easel with a dried palette and a dry brush corrected that something invisible on a canvas that stopped many years ago with the same house with a sundial, which cast an arrow of shadow from the second underground sun, unfinished. And at sunset it becomes clear where the whirling light madness comes from: at sunset the whole city is transformed in a golden tide over white stone, it becomes precious. And the Judean Desert emerges in waves of hills near the horizon - the feeling arises as if you are on the edge of the earth, because outside of Jerusalem a kilometer-long descent into the deepest depression on the planet immediately begins. That is, I do not yet know a landscape that would leave you so sacredly - albeit only for a quarter of an hour - alone with heaven. nine0003

White limestone - mineralized millions of years of prehistoric ocean - warms at sunset, and the Cezanne peach hue of the stone echoes the roof tiles of the Yemin Moshe quarter and the Cinematheque. Narrow ribbons of curving footbridges open to the observer the "field of the resurrection of the last day" - the Kidron Valley, the rivers where sacrificial blood flowed, used by gardeners as fertilizer. In Jerusalem, one can still find landowners whose soils have inexplicable fatness, all these hanging gardens and gardens outside the monastery fences are manured by the blood of sacrifices that atoned for many mortal sins, manured by life itself. There, to Kidron, now taken into pipes, underground tunnels led from the Temple Mount, through which unclean things and broken idols were carried out - witnesses of the prophets' tireless struggle with paganism. If from this very place where I am now passing, I climb the city wall, to the north the domes of the monastery of the Garden of Gethsemane and a series of tombs cut into the rock, one of which is attributed to Avshalom, will open. It is full of stones that have been thrown into the gaps of its walls for many centuries as a sign of contempt for the recalcitrant king's son...

As I exit the Lion's Gate, a bell chimes from behind the walls. Everything around is covered with melted butter of the sunset. Completely pure, exclusively landscape vision conquers and changes the consciousness of the surveyor, and his eye is unable to tear himself away from this quiet reflection, which transforms everything around with mysterious transparency. Jerusalem seems to rise above itself - even higher into the sky: this is where this feeling comes from, that here you are as if on Laputa, on some kind of floating island.

Coma, Coma, my poor brother. Okay, mother can't worry about you missing anymore. Rolls, rolls frost among the stars in the narrow streets of the old, old city, which has always been full of human hope. Spirits of mercy and consolation - fragile as cobalt dragonflies, small spirits of peace - always inhabited this city more densely than other cities, huddling on attics and roofs, on balconies and abandoned spiral staircases. People always came to Jerusalem, washed with doubt.

Coma doubts all the time, he can hang in front of the washbasin, swapping toothpaste with a brush. Doubt is the younger sister of remorse. I have always imagined the transcendent — otherworldly — existence as a raised doubt, decomposed by him into some air-bearing tiers, bridges, islands, similar to the Jerusalem landscape steps, terraces, platforms, bridges flying over the abysses from one slope of the gorge to the tunnel in another; I imagine the other world like a nesting place, a kind of multi-level happiness of being: here's how, for example, to get somewhere after death to a metaphysical loft, mezzanines - to a dovecote, where souls are birds. From time to time the pigeons are let out there to fly, to rinse in the blue under the flooding whistle, enjoy the sky - and take them back, pour them grain, let them go to the drinking bowl ...

Coma, Coma, where are you, you idiot? Jerusalem is like a sprout of peas that has risen above the sky, like a branched aeroweed - remember the huts on the trees of childhood! - and such a bird's existence is beautiful and comfortable: a magnificent view, everything is all around and far visible, while everything is yours - and there is no crowding, each inhabitant is a separate branch of a heavenly tree.

At the beginning of the descent into the valley of Kidron, the sky was covered with a loose cloud, and twilight came on. It blew cold, and soon wisps of cloud were dragging along the two peaks of the Mount of Olives. The loops of the roads were illuminated by dense headlights, and muezzins screamed one after another from two minarets, their singing sounded with longing and despair in the cold air. But when the columned portico of the Church of All Saints passed on the ascent, a twilight calm set in, and puddles, dried up after the rains, crunched underfoot here and there. Nostrils smelled frost, fingers clenched into a fist. nine0003

Clouds were frowning towards them, the gardens under Mormon University were hidden in the creeping mist, snowflakes streaked cheeks. Somewhere in the distance, a bonfire flickered, and I quickened my pace, wondering where I would go after when I did not find my brother at the Garden of Gethsemane. The day ended so quickly, as if something had happened to nature, belittling itself, stepping aside before the onset of winter. Sometimes I didn’t see anything at all, and then Koma appeared before my eyes with a frightened face and smeared with pastry cream. nine0003

I passed an alley that ran along a fence in front of rows of low ancient olive trees, several girths thick, clumsily folded, like the huge brain of some Druid deity. And then, aside from the glimmering lanterns, a fire opened in a wasteland - it cast long shadows of people standing close to the dancing flame onto the ground. The shadows reached my feet, and I instinctively stepped aside to avoid being stepped on. In the distance, a mountain of fruit boxes was heaped up, and nearby someone was breaking the plank grates of pallets, prying them with a piece of pipe. The rusty nails torn out of the wood creaked piercingly. The haze was suddenly pierced with snow throws. Snow fell, then flew in whirlwinds, then chalked below; the slopes of the Mount of Olives lit up with a vague whiteness before our eyes, as if they had discarded the negative of the relief. The air brightened, the walls of the Old City behind became clearer. I remembered that this year, for the arrival of Coma, I decided to clean up, dumped all the junk from the mezzanine and, leaving the house, stood in front of my simple belongings accumulated over the years. I stood in front of the miserable belongings, and rows of storm breakers crawled in the large balcony window, valleys of light and shadow cast by clouds rapidly changed places across the sea. In recent years, I realized that I could always live only by the sea. I like to experience the feeling of being on the edge of the world; I think that the space after death is a beach, an endless, open strip of wet sand under impregnable rocks, and a blade of an unrealizable horizon, on which you will never meet a sail, a clip of a tanker or a bulk carrier. nine0003

The fire burned furiously, crackling and throwing handfuls of sparks after the tongues of snowy muslin. A tall woman in a white woolen coat, girded crosswise with a gypsy shawl, spoke animatedly in English, dancing now closer to the flame, then away. An Indian with shaved temples and a thin pigtail, like those of Buddhist monks, murmured something quickly in response to her. The glow of the flames licked faces, weathered or swollen. Kulesh, a specialty of the homeless in Jerusalem, was cooked on the hearth, arranged on stones: rice, into which dried fruits and nuts are poured from bags. A bearded man in a Bedouin cloak made of camel hair, looking like a well-groomed Christ from postcards, was digging rice in a crumpled copper cauldron with a spatula. nine0003

Photo: Zuma / Global Look

— Good evening! I said as I approached the fire. — I'm looking for my brother, his name is Koma.

"Yahweh's wife" stepped towards me and turned to the bearded man:

— He is looking for his brother. Have you seen his brother?

The bearded man jumped up and with a courteous smile took out an apple from under his cloak:

— Here, good man, take this fruit instead of what you are looking for.

- Do you know To whom? I didn't understand. - He was here?!

“Hot food will be ready soon,” the bearded man made a grand gesture, inviting me to the cauldron. nine0003

The Indian also came up to me, babbled, asking about Coma, and quickly clicked his tongue in response:

— Yes, yes, he was like that, he was, he came during the day, maybe he is here somewhere now.

“And I took you for a policeman in disguise,” said “Yahweh’s Wife,” pulling tighter on gloves with cut off fingers.

I walked around the wasteland. The snow suddenly stopped falling, the cloud passed and weakened and now stretched to the northwest. I did not want to leave the fire, I asked permission to stay. Little by little we talked. The “wife of Yahweh” turned out to be a kindergarten teacher from Dublin, she comes to Israel once a year, either around Christmas or Easter, lives with a friend in Ein Kerem, works part-time for Ibn Gvirol, filled with tourists, where she plays the harp. Then I turned to look at the crosses folded in a hut and a hefty case leaning against them, really capable of holding a harp. nine0003

I looked around over the nearly extinguished fire. The sky cleared up, the snow now lay endlessly, the stones turned yellow in the light of the moon that appeared. Jerusalem stood out solemnly in the quiet light, gleaming with the dome of Al-Aqsa on the Temple Mount, now silvered by the blizzard.

A uniformed figure appeared out of the darkness. A stocky Mizrahi with a big head immediately went to me and asked to see my documents. I handed him my driver's license and asked about Coma. No, the officer didn't see Coma. I walked him to the car. He said that he was on duty here for the second week, looking after the vagrants. Saying goodbye, he complained: “I can’t wait until the authorities decide to catch them and deport them. And what if they have an aggravation on the holiday, someone will call himself the messiah and lead the people to the Temple Mount?” He twirled a finger at his temple and waved his hand in the direction of Al-Aqsa. nine0003

I went back to the fire to say goodbye and gave the apple back to the bearded man. He, without asking anything, slipped it under the cape.

I passed the patrol car and began to descend back to the Lion's Gate. Jerusalem was waiting for me while I slipped and wandered, wandered, further and further plunging into its whitened streets.

I passed the arch of the emperor Hadrian, and soon, no longer shivering from the cold, but barely feeling the stiffness of my body, I poked my head into another refuge of Koma - the Ethiopian church, attached to the temple of the Sepulcher. I already looked into it during the day, but did not find the familiar monk - a smooth-faced old man, wrapped in colorful cloaks. I never heard a word from him, he used to smile with everyone and lived here as a matter of fact as a watchman, sometimes sitting alone at the threshold for a long time. I don't know if he distinguished me from the others, but he knew exactly who. nine0003

The old man was already sleeping on the bench by the altar, under the unpretentious Ethiopian wall painting: Solomon, the ancestor of all Ethiopians, surrounded by winged archangels, depicted with sidelocks and in shtreimls - exactly the inhabitants of the Mea Shearim quarter. I followed the example of the monk, took out a sleeping bag from my backpack, climbed into it and could not get warm for a long time, looking in the candle twilight at the lamp hanging over the low iron door of the entrance. Eyes began to stick together, and the flame of the lamp was gradually replaced by a fire on the Mount of Olives, where demon-possessed vagabonds warmed themselves.

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