In the awful light of the burning helicopter nobody notices the one remaining living paratrooper landing on the roof. He cuts the ropes and his parachute goes free, a huge prayer shawl flying away to the east. He lies on the floor, on his back, breathing heavily, looking up.
There’s a fire truck in the sky, and it’s coming down.
Sam fails to believe what he’s seeing. At first he doesn’t believe that the Chief Rabbi’s paratroopers were taken down so easily. Then he can’t accept the helicopter’s destruction. And then, then there’s the fire truck. It’s huge, it’s red, and it’s surrounded by tongues of fire. It simply can’t be. He thinks maybe there are hallucinogens in the air. Maybe he’s tripping. Maybe he’s dreaming. Maybe he’s not even in Tel Aviv, but drugged and locked in a cell by some terrorist organization, and his mind is trying to come to terms with the situation by inventing this elaborate story about a city wiped off the face of Israel. Maybe there was no meeting with the PM, no deal with the Chief Rabbi, no mission, nothing. Maybe he’s old, stuck in a home for the terminally ill, passing his days in happy delirium.
But he’s not happy. He’s not happy, and there’s a huge red flame-throwing fire truck in the sky, coming down, coming down, growing larger in the skies above. It isn’t possible, yet it must be true.
That’s one hell of a report I’ll have to write, he thinks.
The fire truck keeps coming down.
Mordechai is struck with awe. As he watches the truck, slowly rotating around its vertical axis and spitting flames in all directions, he thinks of an old film he once watched, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He feels as if he’s starring in the climactic scene of that film, watching an alien spaceship descending, looking for a way of communication. He remembers how it was done in the film — by music — and for a moment regrets his lack of dedication to the piano lessons his mother forced him to take when he was a child. That thought brings him back to the present, and he starts looking for his mother. She stands near the edge of the bay, training her gun on the descending fire truck. Her hand is steady. She doesn’t even blink. He knows better than to try and call her right now. Another film comes, unbidden, into his mind . . .
The Wizard of Oz. Right after Dorothy lands.
The fire truck lands. And Mordechai Abir screams.
Feet sticking out from beneath the great red vehicle . . . for a moment he thinks his mother’s feet are going to curl in on themselves and disappear below the engine, but no: they merely shudder, once, and are still.
For a moment, everything is still. Then there’s a sound, a scream of concrete rising from the very heart of the building. Pressure has been mounting and the building isn’t taking it well. The floor hums like an ungrounded electric bass. Then the supporting beams can hold it no more and it falls.
From above, it looks as if the building is being blown up from the inside. As level 7 becomes level 6, then level 5, the surrounding walls fly outwards in a whirlwind of cement and dust. When it stops, half a floor above level 4, there’s a crash that could be heard several kilometres away, were there anyone there to hear it.
The reason for this becomes clear to the survivors of the former 7th level as they get up from the floor — which has strangely survived the fall in one piece — and try to dust themselves. They look at the fire truck, which is still standing there, still burning, and then they notice the rest.
Around the Central Bus Station is a crowd of forty thousand people. Everyone left in Tel Aviv.
They’re quiet.
They’re waiting.
There’s a hiss from the fire truck. From within the flames, the form of a man appears. At first he seems like a mere shadow, but then he grows, fills up, solidifies. In a voice as loud as a foghorn, as dry as forest fire, he clears his throat.
There is a moment of silence. There is a moment in which time changes, when future becomes present, when present becomes past. There is a moment in which everything halts, fragments, reshapes itself into words, a narrative of human time.
Every human moment is a beginning, and an ending.