Abyss (Songs of Megiddo) Read Online Free PDF Page B

back onto the bed. “You don’t care, but you should. Israel is chiaroscuro. Or...chiaroscuro is Israel.”
    “Clearly you’re a little mixed up, there ...” Dio’s hand had slid lower; the sensation of the heel of his palm pressed against the bottom of her taught, gym-worked abdomen making him shiver with lust. “There are very few Blacks in Israel.” Her eyes had shot open to display an exaggerated roll, before rolling up and back into her head in time with the pressure of his fingertips.
    “You’re such an idiot,” She’d groaned. “I can’t believe I’m letting you do this.”
    “That was funny.” He’d protested.
    “No it wasn’t. I’m baring my soul, Dio, and – ”
    “ – I’m not sure that your soul is what you’re baring – ”
    “ – Oh shut up.” she’d laughed, hand grabbing his wrist; not to stop what he was doing so much as to participate in it. “You should come to America. You’d like it there.” She’d paused for a few seconds...panting in tight, shallow little bursts. “Being Jewish in America...it’s not a war. There are people who try to make it one, on both sides...but here? Everything’s so...”
    “Black and white.” He’d finished for her. She’d stared up at him, giving him a rapid nod.
    “Chiaroscuro.” She’d hissed, their eyes fixed into one another’s. There’d been a kind of feral desperation in hers, and, there, he could see his own eyes reflected: a comprehending sadness mixed in with the passion.
    “Blacker and whiter for the intensity of the other side.” She’d nodded again, this time half in agreement and half as a plea.
    “Yes...” Her eyes had flickered shut under his insistent ministrations. In that moment, Dio had been utterly lost to the things she was saying and the way she was moving; enraptured by her body, her mind, and her spirit.
    But that was the way of things. Connection happened, whether you expected it – whether you wanted it – or not.
    Years on, there he was – in that white-walled cell in Tel Aviv – for the first time in a long time, remembering her words. Something about the memory forged a perfect symmetry in his mind. And that was when he knew.
    His people ...his former friends: his Faith was not their Faith. And as for his faith in Human goodness? Faith in a switch, he realised, that could be flipped from ‘on’ to ‘off’, seemingly at will. Or, at least, when Human empathy became too inconvenient. It was a switch that – off – led to carnage. A switch that – off – allowed paranoia, fear, and hate to outpace logic and reason...and a switch that – off – had the capacity to bring paranoia, fear, and hate back a thousandfold. A switch that – when used by Israelis – was named ‘irony’. A switch that, for Dio, didn’t exist.
    And this was the ‘why’ of it. He was one of the rare, defective few who were incapable of putting the ‘Us’ ahead of the ‘Them’. This was ‘why’ he had betrayed his people: because he couldn’t flip a switch that made black and white – chiaroscuro – from shades of grey.
    As dangerous as Hamas were ; as violently opposed to the existence of the State of Israel...Dio fervently believed that killing only made more killing. And while the death of one who brought death to others was, perhaps, just a part of the cycle of it all...the same couldn’t be said of the deaths of the innocent. Dio had once heard his great grandfather – senile and repentant; trapped in the hell of his personal past – speaking in hushed tones of the tragedy of Deir Yassin. Some things could not be borne. For Dio, the situation in which he’d found himself was, yes, one of those things.
    Even so ...the blood on his hands haunted his dreams. But he still dreamt...still slept...still felt, in his chest, the beat of a good man’s heart. The simple truth that flowed through him with every beat of that heart – a truth as unavoidably part of him as the cells in his blood – was that