Hydromania / Assaf Gavron

/ Photo: Fana Feng

Part I: Eon

She wakes up thirsty, as usual, but this time it’s harder, as if there is sand in her throat. She sits up straight in her bed and strokes her throat, trying to transfer saliva from her palate so that it won’t hurt to swallow. Then she moves the same two fingers to her arm, halfway between her left elbow and shoulder, and touches a tiny nodule under the skin. There’s no money here, is the thought that crosses her mind. I have nothing. This piece of Silicon-Titanium might as well be used as a toothpick. Then she recalls what Dagi told her.

She gets out of bed and climbs up the internal ladder to the roof. It’s cluttered with Ji-Ji containers, receivers and sensors, and a Cloud-Watching Tower, but she’s managed to clear out a corner, and from there she now looks out onto the long sand dunes, the sea and the aqueduct, and Herod’s harbor. Beyond it, the floating neighborhoods and the old Russian destroyers are visible and further north is the metropolis of Caesarea and the communities surrounding it. To the east the sun is already high, its haze hiding the mountains, brownish-grey outlines at this time of day, seeming as far off as they really are, unattainable. The sky is clear, as usual.

She likes her roof, but this morning she hasn’t come up here to enjoy the view. She checks her private storing containers, the Ji-Ji, to see whether they’ve caught some of the morning dew, whether there is anything left. She moves from one container to the next, knows each lock combination by heart, taps them in, turns the lids open, and opens the last fingerprint-reading lid, with her pinkie. She knows what she’s going to find. After all, last night didn’t produce liters of precipitation, so she isn’t going to discover a secret reservoir of fresh water. She’s nearing the end. She will dry up. The next rain is expected in December, and that’s three months away. She won’t hold out until then. She has no money to buy enough water for herself, and not only for herself. She will need – they will need – more water than ever in the near future. 

She sinks a cup into the container. The display on the water line reads 9.3 liters. She feels hot, touches her arm and asks for the temperature: 90,68. She asks for the time: 8:12. Luckily there are still a few services left that are free. With the cup, careful not to spill a drop, she climbs back down the ladder to the apartment. She drinks from the small cup slowly, sip by sip, managing to swallow with less pain each time, holding the liquid in her mouth, wetting all the corners, sucking it through her teeth, finally swallowing the slim trickle. 

She touches her arm and requests a voice conversation with Dagi (luckily there are still a few services left that are free). “Maya,” he says, inside her ear. She fastens the straps of her sandals above and below her ankle. “Dagi. Tell me again about that chip.”

She hears him smiling. She isn’t smiling. “Yesterday you said you weren’t interested.”  

She places her Toyota-31xplorers on the bridge of her nose, sleeks her short hair back and closes the door behind her. “I am now,” she says. He says, “Come for breakfast.” She touches her arm to hang up. 

She loves walking through town, but the densha is free if you don’t want to pay and are willing to watch ads, and she prefers not to sweat. She gets on at South Six and touches the map at North Three, Dagi’s stop. She lets the scanner read the chip in her arm and transmit ads to her Toyota-31s. “Ya Maya, Ohiya – Dive into Life.” The drops in the hologram look so real and cold that she sticks her tongue out and tries to catch them. Come on, she shakes her head. Just what she needs right now, that the biggest water corporation in the world will invite her to dive into her life. Actually, maybe that is what I need to do, she thinks. By the time she arrives at North Three she sees ads for Vizi, promising a once-in-a-lifetime deal for Xgimi’s newest bot, and for Chinese Express chips. Eventually, she’s had enough, lowers the volume, and shuts her eyes. 

Dagi signals ‘one moment’ from a distance. He’s on a call. His big Toyota xplorers are riding on the edge of his nose, and he has white speaker-earrings. She keeps her distance, but can hear his worried tone. His shoulders are a little droopy. She thinks he says, “Yes, today, I will take care of it.” The black clump of hair on top of Dagi’s head looks strange. The last time she saw him, a few days ago, he had long black curls which lay like bells down his back. He touches his arm and walks over. 

“How are you, oba-Maya? You’re pretty today.” 

Part II: Storage

The State of Palestine was established on a rainy January day, Year of the Monkey. Its capital – East Jerusalem, and its land – the region then called the West Bank, east of the line then called Green, and the strip along the Mediterranean shoreline, then called the Gaza Strip. The leaders of the State of Palestine and the State of Israel, the citizens of both countries, and the citizens of the entire world, looked on in hope at the region that was once the focal point of a relentless conflict, fire and death, for many years until that particular winter day. If there can be peace between Israel and Palestine, they thought, there is hope for the world, and a future for humanity. 

The changes in the Middle East were just a small part of more extensive processes that occurred on the planet. China’s expansion and its emergence as the most significant global superpower, along with the concurrent weakening of the United States as a major power, were of critical importance. This was not a conflict, nor a war, but rather a gradual shift of the focal point from Washington eastward, eastward, eastward, until within a few decades, it settled in Beijing. The new generation of Chinese leaders established an alliance with its Asian neighbors and with the Arab countries. On the opposing side, the longstanding alliance between the United States and the European countries gradually weakened. Canada and the Scandinavian countries, which were relatively stable – largely due to water – chose to remain neutral.         

China had no interest in the Middle East and its ongoing conflict, which did not have any impact whatsoever on its strategic and economic state of affairs. On this backdrop, the State of Palestine waged a war on Jerusalem, approximately a decade and a half after that peace agreement, when Maya was three years old and Ido was a baby. Jerusalem was reunified once again, but this time under the Palestinian flag. The city’s Israeli residents migrated to the areas of Tel-Aviv and the Sharon region. The Israeli army, depleted, unmotivated and poor without American money and equipment, was unable to defend them, nor could it help in the following years, when the Palestinians continued to gnaw through Israeli territory, bomb its cities and respond forcefully to attempted Israeli terror. Maya, who was born in Jerusalem, barely remembers the move with her father and brother to Holon, but remembers the two following moves more clearly, first to the Galilee and finally, already on her own, to Caesarea. She remembers smoke, night rides with no lights on, the roaring of bombings and unnerving air suctions of low-flying fighter jets. This may be a second-hand memory, constructed of personal and historical accounts by other people, the media and EitS.           

There were a few failed attempts to salvage the situation, such as the era of the ‘Cloud Wars’: during the last three real winters in the Middle East, with low temperatures, rain, some snow and four months of heavy clouds, Palestine and Israel waged a war over each cloud.

Even beforehand, following the peace accord, Israel was required to forfeit the mountain aquifer, which supplied over one-third of its potable water, becoming fully dependent on Lake Kinneret, aka the Sea of Galilee. At the same time, the water problem became increasingly significant throughout the rest of the world, due to widespread droughts and a disrupted water cycle.     

There were a few failed attempts to salvage the situation, such as the era of the ‘Cloud Wars’: during the last three real winters in the Middle East, with low temperatures, rain, some snow and four months of heavy clouds, Palestine and Israel waged a war over each cloud. Cloud Observation Towers (COTs) emerged like mushrooms after the rain, and helicological helicopters positioned themselves in front of the clouds, shooting mercury bullets, iodide and electrical ionization particles into them, in order to dismantle them and cause rain to fall over their country’s areas – and air-to-air missiles at their enemies’ helicopters.

It’s easy to see, therefore, why Israel turned into a mere and meager memory, flickering like a dying candle, from the country it could have been, and perhaps was, for a few short moments during the twentieth century. It became weak, desperate and unprotected. Its residents abandoned it in droves. Like a cancer patient whose body parts were amputated to prevent the disease from spreading, it shrunk and its protective and immune systems weren’t working anymore. Within a few decades only its heart would remain – Caesarea – and no more. After the fall of Tiberias, the government of Palestine announced the end of the bloody conflict that had lasted over one hundred and fifty years, removed its claim over areas that would remain under Israeli control, and committed to this before China and representatives of the blocs. The Palestinian underground and freedom organizations disarmed after they had achieved what they considered their national goals. These Palestinian declarations hardly received any response from the Israelis: they were too drained, too defeated, to respond. They were thinking of their next sip of water, glancing at the horizon, and waiting for a stray cloud to drift in their direction.         

Part III: Water

The days of his life, the days. The things he’s seen. The journeys he’s taken. This year will be his hundredth. The one-hundred-and-twentieth of his country. When he was a child, the birthday wish was always, “Until one-hundred-and-twenty.” In recent years he hasn’t heard that wish anymore, but it seems that as far as the country was concerned, until one-hundred-and-twenty was an accurate prediction. When he was born, it was at its peak in terms of size and strength. A decade later it started to shrivel up, and over the years, slowly but surely, it continued this trend, until at a certain point he joined it and started shriveling up too, and now both of them, he at ninety-nine, it at one-hundred-and-nineteen, are so shriveled up, they can’t get any smaller, two dry raisins, and the next step – nothingness. He knows they’ll celebrate, his one-hundredth birthday, its one-hundred-twentieth, he can sense it like he’s sensed so many things throughout his life, he can sense it like “the sensitive seismograph of our generation, the poet with his hand on the beating pulse,” as he was once called. Yes, they’ll celebrate their symbolic birthdays, and afterwards, who knows. Even he doesn’t.  

The days of his life, the days: war and peace, journeys, divorces, droughts, his nation, his world, his seven wives, one for each decade of his life (not exactly, but almost), empires that have risen and fallen, languages heard. Everything changes but one thing remains constant: he is surprised every time, even when he expects to be surprised.  

Just like now. He shouldn’t be surprised. They’ve been speaking about the eleventh of December for months, ten days before his ninety-ninth birthday. The whole village has prepared itself. Maya – the wonderful, beautiful, short-haired aunt with the round belly and light eyes like an extinct bird, whom he fell in love with, burning with adoration, but bashful – led everyone to this day and yet, as soon as the rain starts, comes the surprise. Has he ever seen such a thing? Such power, such perfection, such precision. The clouds started accumulating the previous day, as he stood by the edge of the pit watching Maya and Lulu sweep the dark surface. At seven o’clock this morning he went outside, and just like when he was young, raised his head up and let the rain fall upon him, wash over him, his thinning hair, his forehead, down his wrinkles, the crevices on his face, and soak his clothes. The sensations and the smell remind him of himself, of nature, of life. He’s surprised by the strength of excitement arising within him, by the enjoyment from it – despite the misery of his aching back and foot, his plastic knee, his shaky bones, his heavy breathing, that all the treatments and programs, modern medicine and technology, haven’t been able to heal. He inhales the fresh air. He raises his hands, one of them holding his cane, tilts his head back, and smiles.            

Assafgee remembers grass and green fields. Assafgee remembers swimming pools. Assafgee remembers the Dead Sea.

Assafgee remembers a time when nature wasn’t a product bought and sold on the market. Resources such as air and water, genetic codes and seeds were free for all. Nature belonged to everyone. Until: the warming. Disruption of the circle of life. The rise in their value. The rise of the corporations. Their seizing of the water resources. 

Assafgee remembers so many wars that he knows they’ll never stop. Only the reason will change, the reason for people to quarrel, reason to kill, reason to feel alive: spaceships, oil, water, clouds, oxygen, revenge, supremacy, power, money, land. He sees Maya at the pit, and thinks about the new reason for quarreling. His wrinkled smile is bitter, because he knows how it ends.

Excerpts from a Novel by Assaf Gavron. / Translated from Hebrew by Sharon Gesthalter.

Assaf Gavron is an acclaimed Israeli writer who has published six novels: Ice, Moving, Almost Dead, Hydromania, The Hilltop and Eighteen Lashes; a collection of short stories, Sex in the Cemetery; and a non-fiction collection of Jerusalem falafel-joint reviews, Eating Standing Up.  His fiction has been translated into 12 languages, adapted for the stage at Israel’s national theater, and optioned for movies. He is the recipient of awards in Israel, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands.