I have uncovered and decrypted the secret writings of the Kinneret cult, which was active near the Sea of Galilee since about 300 BC until well after the time of Christ, and had more to do with the latter’s performance than the New Testament would care to admit. I have located the hidden cave in which the actual miracle of the container of oil had occurred, the one celebrated to this day as Hanukkah — and in fact I have the actual container. I know the exact words Moses intoned to open the Red Sea. They were omitted from the Bible, of course. I have studied the reasons for the great earthquake that demolished Safed in the nineteenth century, and that had less to do with the will of God than with the actions of a certain Rabbi whose name it is not yet time to reveal, though I can mention that he is still alive. An article I wrote about my quest for the remains of the Golems of Prague was published in the daily papers. My book on the lost Ark was soon to be published — you’d be amazed if you knew how close Spielberg and Lucas came to the real answer — and how far.
There are several self-styled colleagues of mine, though they are hardly worth mentioning: Aharon Reueli is a crook, with his so-called “discovery” of the “actual” Shimon Bar-Yohai grave; Yehonatan Atzil is a buffoon, researching, if such a word can seriously be applied to him, the clearly non-existent sect of Bethlehem; and of course Meir Sassoon, author of the unjustly famous The Secret History of the Endor Witch, who is clearly insane. Therefore I am, without doubt, the only Israeli historian of the supernatural worthy of serious consideration.
Imagine, then, my feelings when the greatest supernatural event of the last three thousand years hit Tel Aviv, and I was out of town.
Early in the morning that day, I took the train to Haifa. I went there to buy some books for my research, in one of the second-hand bookstores in the Hadar area. I also had to visit Aunt Nehama, my mother’s sister. I don’t like Aunt Nehama much, I must admit, but Mother insisted. I was there, drinking an unwanted cup of tea and trying to avoid a rather unappetizing cake, when the radio started going crazy.
Unfortunately, at that moment I was in no position to describe what exactly happened in Tel Aviv that day, as I was not there. Fortunately, though, I’d survived, and could now begin my research. Even more fortunate: it was quite safe to assume that Reueli, Atzil and Sassoon were all dead, and there would be no interference.
As we sat there and listened, Aunt Nehama became more and more nervous, worrying for Mother’s safety. In the end I had to shut her up, so that I’d be able to concentrate. After some time the radio started repeating itself, as contact with Tel Aviv was lost. This happens every time there’s a bombing or a disaster of some sort: the radio and television people have only a very small amount of information, and they repeat it endlessly, like a badly scratched CD. Having had enough of that, I untied Aunt Nehama, set her nicely on the couch and went out to find transportation back to Tel Aviv.
This proved to be a little more difficult than I thought it would be.
The first weeks after the event were chaotic. Riots, demonstrations, shootings, people running amok. It took some time for everything to settle down again, and even this relative quietness had many undercurrents. I spent all this time at Aunt Nehama’s apartment, only rarely going out to persuade the neighbours upstairs to let me use their shaky Internet connection for research. Only when the mobs were swept off the street, first by the police and then by the army, did I dare to go out.
But then I found that there was no way to get back to Tel Aviv. The police blocked all the roads leading to it and the army guarded its borders, such as they were, and didn’t let anyone in. Aerial transport was out of the question, of course — no one dared fly even a kite in a twenty- kilometre radius around the city. Months went by, and I was becoming desperate.
However, no one considered the train.
All the train lines to and from Tel Aviv were cancelled, of course. It was hard to imagine someone being stupid enough, reckless enough, thoughtless enough to, say, hijack a train.
Which is exactly where Yehuda Rainbow came in.
The first time anyone had heard of him, Yehuda was an assistant in some archaeological dig near Tiberias. He became slightly famous when, after a night probably spent getting drunk on alcoholic relic cleaners, he tied up every member of staff, filled the main dig with water from the Kinneret, and went to swim in it. He claimed to have been influenced by an alien artefact he found at the dig, but which was never seen by anyone else. The book he wrote about this, after the police released him, sold quite well, I’m sorry to report. What a phony.
You can bet all you want that he wasn’t born with that family name, either.
Some of my so-called colleagues weren’t as sceptical as myself, regarding this. Yehonatan Atzil, in particular, published several articles about the significance of what he called “The Rainbow Connection,” in which he claimed that all this was proof of a government conspiracy to withhold information about UFOs. Which just goes to show.
In recent years Yehuda Rainbow tried several more stunts of this sort, but nobody paid him much attention anymore. Which is probably why I found, in one of the numerous Internet forums dedicated to the occult, a message written in a very familiar style — an open invitation, to those ready to face the unknown, to find the truth lying behind the mundane, etc., etc., to take a train trip to Tel Aviv. Nobody in the forum seemed to believe it, which was fine by me. I knew Rainbow was just unhinged enough to try this. And I was coming along for the ride.
The train, which was registered as going to Herzelia, left Haifa just before midnight, the last train of the day. Yehuda Rainbow was driving the engine, but I couldn’t see into it. In fact, I’d never even met him in person. He asked that no one tried to enter the engine, and I couldn’t think of any reason not to obey. I wasn’t interested in him, after all.
During the ride to Haifa, one morning the year before, there was no room to sit anywhere on the train, but now there were only three people in the car except for me, and it was eerily quiet. The train stopped at every station on the way, but nobody came on board and nobody left. There was no talk, no radio playing, no sound but the distant hum and vibrations of the engine far ahead. When we got to Herzelia, the last stop before Tel Aviv, it was past midnight, and very dark. I tried to look ahead but the windows wouldn’t open and all I could see was a sort of dark brown fog. I got up and walked towards the front of the train, thinking that I could find a better position to look out. I got to the door between the cars when one of the other passengers spoke.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” he said.
I turned around, quite slowly, and stared at him. A thin man, wearing a shabby overcoat, which was ridiculous in this weather, and a broad-brimmed hat, which was ludicrous, period.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“We’re going into uncharted territories,” the man said, a little pompously. “There’s a high chance that the train will stop abruptly, or get off the tracks, or do something improbable altogether.”
Like rise in the air, I thought. I’d seen the last footage from Tel Aviv before the cameras died. I suppressed a shudder. “That may be so,” I said with more bravery than I felt. “So what?”
“So whatever’s going to happen, the nearer to the front you are the stronger it’s going to be.”
That did sound reasonable.
“That does sound reasonable,” I said, and — being a reasonable person, after all — I turned and walked back towards my seat.
There was a whining noise, coming from far ahead, a tremendous screech, and then a crash — there was a two-second pause, in which I tried to turn around — then everything flew backwards like a film in reverse as I flew through the door and into the next car, and through that car’s open door to the next, and probably the next, which was tilted up, or maybe it was the next one that was tilted, but after passing through the final door I flew high in the air, as if shot by a catapult, and in a split second I was going down, and then there was darkness.
I woke up lying on my back in a huge puddle, perhaps a crater filled with water. It probably saved my life. My back and neck hurt terribly, but I was alive and was able to — after several failed attempts — walk. I got up and looked around me. I was at the bottom of a makeshift hill, and above me I saw the Tel Aviv University train station. The train was in the station. This expression now had a new meaning, as the station’s reception bay, which is basically a huge piece of concrete parallel to the tracks, was now positioned over them, and the train was stuck in it in quite a literal sense. The engine, which looked rather shorter than I remembered it being, was on fire, and so were the remains of several of the front cars, which were mostly stacked above it at various angles.
I stared at the scene in silence for several moments, then shrugged. Well, I thought, at least that’s the last we’ll hear about The Rainbow Connection.
The rear cars were relatively undamaged, except for being one on top of the other, some of them creating the slope, down which I probably flew. I started to climb up, but about midway there was an unexpected explosion and I was buried in dirt. It took me forever to get out of that, and by the time I got to the train nothing was burning anymore.
I managed to enter the car in which I spent most of the trip from Haifa, which now felt as if it had happened a month ago. The door was broken, the windows were broken, but the seats looked as if nothing had happened, except for two dead people sitting on them. One, I saw immediately, had a broken neck, and the other looked extremely pale, as if all his blood had drained away, though I could see no blood on the seat. I didn’t bother to check elsewhere.
There was no sign of the man in the brimmed hat.
I got off the train on the other side, the right side, and started to walk. I was in Tel Aviv now, and there was plenty of work to do.
The old man watched something amazing, and he sucked on his teeth, which weren’t sitting right in his mouth, somehow. He had seen the train arrive, and for a moment time was rolled backwards, and he remembered that day, when he was waiting at the station, and the announcement came over the PA system that the train would arrive in fifteen minutes. He waited, and didn’t even notice the strange noises and the spreading darkness, he just waited for Tali to come on the train from Haifa, come to visit her old father in Tel Aviv, and in his mind he made a mental list of things to do together — she loved going to the market, and to eat falafel in that one stand they’d gone to ever since she was a little kid — but he was also anxious, because he wanted her to meet Mrs. Pepper, the next-door neighbour who had recently become more than just a good neighbour. After all they were both widowed now, but he worried how Tali would take it, and so he waited.
But the train never arrived. And there were no more announcements on the PA system, and no more trains, and he remembered the things that appeared, out of nowhere, like winds that weren’t winds, that tore and broke and ripped apart, but somehow he lived. But he couldn’t know — was Tali all right? Did she stop outside Tel Aviv? Was she safe? Or did her train come into the city and was . . .
So now he searched for her (there was no more Mrs. Pepper), wandering the streets like a ghost, his special Welcoming-Tali-Home clothes dusty and torn and bloodied now, but he kept them on, walking the city, eating from the rubbish other living people left, looting when he could, but it was hard to loot: every gang had a part of the city and didn’t tolerate freeloaders. He respected that, respected order, so mostly he ate things he found in the street, and if not he went without. It was all right. He was old and didn’t need much food. And for a moment there he thought he had seen something amazing, a train coming into the station, but then he shook his head, trying to clear it. There were no more trains. “When you get here we’ll go eat the best falafel in town,” he said to Tali, and she smiled. “And then I’ll buy you ice cream on the promenade and we can watch the people on the beach, you remember how much you liked that?”
Tali never answered but she smiled and that was enough for him. He shuffled forward and found a pool of not-too-dirty water that had collected in a hole in the road. He bent down on his knees, painfully, and licked the water until he wasn’t thirsty any more, and then he went, looking for her in the maze of quiet streets.