by Lavie Tidhar

Once, about a year into his habitation of the city, Adam saw in the distance something he thought impossible. There, far on the horizon, between the endless buildings that rose unevenly from the paved streets, there was a flash of green.

He was on a rooftop then, there was a party. The air was warm and scented with potted flowers, and soft music played from hidden speakers. People milled, chatting and laughing, holding drinks. The city rose all about them, its lights twinkling. Behind every window people danced, showered, watched TV, ate their dinner, slept, made love, looked out on the city. In the streets below, cars passed and people walked, café tables spilled onto the pavement, theatre signs were lit and shop windows glowed with advertised wares.

Adam strained again to catch that flash of green. He could almost pinpoint it – almost. There it was, and as he watched the vision resolved itself, and he saw, nestled between the endless buildings, a garden filled with trees. The green of the leaves was so bright that he was dazzled. Then he felt a tap on his shoulder and turned to see Malka, an artist of his acquaintance, offering him a glass of fizzy wine. When Adam turned back to the view he could no longer find the garden, no matter how hard he looked.

• • •

The next day, Adam set out to find the garden. It should have been simple enough in theory. He returned to the building where last night’s party took place. It was a nice, newly built building, with elevators that went to the rooftop, and large sun-drenched apartments only well-off people lived in. Adam tried to draw a line from the angle he must have viewed the garden the night before. Having done so, he began to march, first crossing the road at a striped pedestrian crossing, then down a street where brass and iron statues sprouted out of the pavement in twisted, abstract shapes. The road was lined with florists. He passed through a city square where sleepy pigeons congregated by an elaborate water fountain, crossed the square at a right angle and proceeded down a side street between two tall buildings where the sun didn’t shine. He passed a church with the sign of the Albatross and in mere moments found himself in a tangle of alleyways where washing hung from lines and puddles collected between uneven paving stones and he was lost.

He retraced his steps, followed tram lines this time away from the square and into a wide avenue of expensive shops selling luxury watches, perfumes and hand bags. At the end of the avenue he came to a stadium and again could not find his way. He stopped at a bakery and drank his coffee standing up while chewing on a chocolate pastry. The sun had risen higher in the sky, people milled out in the street, couples strolled arm in arm and women walked their dogs.

Adam felt very alone then. He was far from home, and all the simple comforts he had once enjoyed and taken for granted. He was a stranger here, but he could not find his way back. He kept searching for a way. The garden was the first flash of real green he’d seen in so long. The pastry was too dry and he choked up, covering his eyes.

He searched for the garden all through that day and the next, but try as he might, he couldn’t find it.

• • •

Adam had lived in an ordinary, semi-detached house in the green belt. Each day he left his home, carrying a briefcase and an umbrella, walked the ten minutes or so to the train station, which lay comfortingly in the midst of a small forest, and there he boarded a train into the city. In the city he worked in an office, along with many other office workers. In the early evening he caught the train back, walked the ten minutes or so along the road and the adjoining wetlands in the darkening air and spent the evening at home. He used to have a dog, a shaggy, friendly creature called Rupert, which he often used to walk in the forest out back. But Rupert had gotten old and at last passed away, and so Adam lived alone.

The day that he came to the city was no different from any other day. He had boarded the train. It was much the same as always, or seemed to be. The windows fogged from the humidity, and he could not look outside. Adam dozed in his seat, a paperback book open but unread in his lap. The conductor’s voice on the speakers awoke him with a start.

“Last stop,” the conductor said. “All change, please. All change.”

The train compartment was empty by the time Adam woke. He stepped onto the platform, then out of the gate. Only gradually did he become aware that he must have somehow taken the wrong train, for the station itself felt wrong. It was the same, yet different

It had the same sort of shops. The same sort of concourse. The same sort of large clock hanging from the ceiling and the same clacking board with train times and destinations ever-changing on it. But as he wandered helplessly along the busy concourse, he realized they were not the same shops, not the same large clock, and none of the destinations were ones he was familiar with. He went to the ticket office and tried to ask for directions, but the teller behind the glass merely looked at him blankly.

Not knowing what to do, Adam stepped out of the train station into the sunlight. The city rose all about him, surrounding the train station. A river coursed through it, between the tall buildings, and bridges crossed it filled with traffic and pedestrians. Adam began to walk, not sure where he was going but certain he was going to find a familiar landmark soon. It was all some sort of mistake, a momentary confusion. All through that day he walked, encountering nothing but more city, and as night fell he sagged, defeated, with his back to a wall.

It got dark quickly. City lights came on, casting puddles of yellow illumination on the pavements. Adam wasn’t sure where he was, but this part of town seemed decidedly less friendly, and he saw men in dirty coats exchanging small packages for cash under a graffitied wall. Usually, he was home before this time. He kept walking and came to a road lined with bars and cafés where the lights burned brighter and there was music.

Exhausted, Adam went into one of the bars. A band in the back was playing jazz softly and the place was dimly lit.

“What can I get you?” the bartender said.

“Just a soda, please,” Adam said.

The girl said, “Sure,” and filled up a glass. Adam reached in his pocket for change. He put it on the counter.

The girl picked up a coin and said, “What is this?”

“It’s money,” Adam said.

“No money I’ve ever seen,” the girl said. She looked at him suspiciously. “Is this a joke?” she said.

Adam stared at her in panic. He was tired, thirsty, hungry and lost. The girl’s face softened.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “It’s just a soda.”

“I don’t know where I am,” Adam said. He felt close to crying. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Well,” the girl said, “what do you want to do?”

“What do you mean?” Adam said.

The girl shrugged.

“I mean,” she said, “isn’t that why people come to the city? So they could be anything. What do you do?”

“I work in an office,” Adam said.

The girl laughed, but kindly. “No one is born wanting to work in an office,” she said. “What is it that you really want to be?”

“Did you want to be a bartender?” Adam said.

“Sure,” the girl said. “I love mixing cocktails. It’s a skill. But it’s also just my night job. In the daytime I make art.”

“What sort of art?” Adam said.

“I fold paper,” the girl said. “I fold it smaller and smaller and smaller until I make huge tiny places, as if space itself has been folded around them. Maybe that’s all a city is, when you come down to it. Space that’s been compressed so much it has nowhere else to go, and it contains everything.” She smiled. “You could see it if you like. What would you make?”

“Make?” Adam said. He’d never thought of making anything. Working in an office, all he had to do was to copy things and file things and move things around.

“Yes,” the girl said. “What would you make?”

“I just want to go home,” Adam said.

“And if you can’t?” the girl said.

“Then I don’t know what I’d do,” Adam said.

“Here,” the girl said. She took a slip of paper and wrote something on it. An address. She pushed it toward Adam. “You look like you need help, and I think people should help each other when they can, don’t you?”

“What is it?” Adam said.

“A place to stay. Until you get on your feet. They won’t judge you.”

“I have a home,” Adam said.

The girl looked at him in compassion.

“Until you find it again, then,” she said.

• • •

“Tell me again about the place you are from,” Malka said. They were at yet another gallery opening. This one took place in a fashionable district of large warehouses once used to hold meat for the butchers. The space around them was large and echoey, the walls holding large canvases of urban fauna: foxes slinking by rubbish bins, rats caught with a surprised expression, a spider attempting to escape out of a bath, a blackbird looking morose on a windowsill. Adam knew Malka didn’t believe his story, so he just shrugged.

“It’s outside the city,” he said.

“Outside!” Malka said. “There are no houses? No garbage trucks? No …” She struggled to think. “Streets?” she said.

“There’s houses,” Adam said. “But they’re spaced apart, and then, for a large part of it, there aren’t any houses at all. There’s just, well, countryside.”

“Countryside,” Malka said, the word made strange and new in her mouth. It had an allure to it, a sort of magic. “You lived in this … this Countryside?”

“I suppose I did,” Adam said.

“But there is only the city,” Malka said, with unassailable logic. “The city goes on and on.”

“I know,” Adam said. He had to admit it was true – had found it out for himself. When he first began to look for a way back he took train after train, bus after tram, but far as he went, he never found anything else, anything but the city. Eventually, he had to admit defeat.

But now he’d found something. That vision of the garden was real, it was somewhere in the city. He could find it, he thought.

“I’m going for a smoke,” Malka said. She vanished outside. Adam stood and looked at the photographs. A fox stared back at him from the canvas, as large as a tree.

• • •

Adam did not find the garden the next day or the one after that. Since arriving in the city he had found work, in an office that occupied the whole of the thirty-fourth floor of an office building in a business and commercial district. The work was not too demanding, and he enjoyed it about as much as he enjoyed his last place of employment.

What he liked most about the office were the views. The office was high up, and on a clear day visibility extended for miles around, over squares and railway lines, bridges and canals, over roads and overpasses and avenues and motorways. The city extended in all directions, never ceasing, continuing on beyond the horizon and the line of Adam’s vision. Here he made copies of things and filed them away, and as he ate his sandwich at his desk he looked out of those wide floor-to-ceiling windows, searching for that magical flash of green.

His days had resolved into an ordinary routine. He woke up, he prepared coffee, he caught the train to the office where he worked. He had lunch at his desk most days. In the evenings he often went out – it was one benefit of living in the city, after all. He attended gallery openings and film screenings, public concerts and the theatre, and all in all he felt fulfilled, though he sometimes still missed Rupert, his old dog.

He longed for green, however, and for the sense of a big, open sky. He often still went to that same train station where he had first arrived in the city, and there he’d loiter, endlessly hoping to spot some familiar face, a recognizable destination on the board. He often took the trains at random, a paperback book in his lap as he sat in the carriage and watched people embark and disembark at stations he didn’t recognize. Each time he’d reach the end of the line only to find yet another train station, sending out its locomotives to yet more remote destinations, and he would turn back with a vague sense of loss.

Eventually, while he never entirely gave up his hope of returning home, Adam had mostly settled into his life in the city; and mostly he was content.

• • •

Some years later, Adam found himself in a new and unfamiliar-to-him part of the city. A large museum, of graceful iron and glass, squatted along a large artificial lake. Ice-cream sellers moved along the shore and families wandered around, some flying small kites in the shapes of birds and dragons, others taking to the little paddle boats for hire that lined the lake. It was a pleasant scene and the sun was warm. The museum itself hosted an exhibition of plastic arts that Adam only had a small modicum of interest in, but it was Malka who insisted on going and he was happy enough to accompany her. Malka was somewhere inside the museum still, while Adam had long since retreated to the fresh air outdoors.

It was as he took a gentle stroll around the lake that he saw it again, far in the distance – that flash of green. His heart beat in sudden excitement, and as he looked closer, shading his eyes from the sun, he thought he could just make it out again, that impossible garden, clear as day, its heavy trees raising their heads in the heat, fleshy leaves swaying in a breeze, and birds and bees flying in between them under the canopy.

This time, he thought for sure he could find it. He began to walk, crossing the small bridge that led away from the museum. He walked along the far shore of the artificial lake, then turned from it onto a main road and walked along a bus lane and a parade of shops that sold spices, pots and pans and cheap clothes. He reached an intersection and hesitated. When he raised his head he could still see the garden in the distance, and he waited for the lights to change and crossed, then followed a path through block after block of residential buildings, smelling cooking and catching snatches of music playing on domestic radios. When he finally reached the end of the apartment blocks, he found himself in a dank quarter that sold fish from open carts packed with ice. It was dotted with little restaurants where coals were just being lit for the outdoor grills. He walked through the smoke and the smell of fish and emerged onto a dirty canal where he had to spend some time walking before finding a bridge again to cross.

Still he could see the garden in the distance, between two high-rise buildings. He walked on and came to a rare open plot wrapped in barbed wire and nestled in the midst of derelict buildings. Signs around the perimeter said, “Condemned”. Adam frowned in irritation. He could not go through. The garden winked green at him over the condemned plot.

He turned and went along the derelict row before turning at the next intersection, but when he went round the sight of the garden was lost, and when he returned to try and find his bearings, he couldn’t see it anymore.

• • •

“I never heard of such a thing,” Malka said when he told her later. They were sitting in a bar they sometimes frequented. A jazz trio played soft music that was like dust motes floating in the air. “It’s possible, I suppose. But what use would it be? Don’t you have everything you want right here, in the city?”

“I suppose so,” Adam said.

“I never believed your story, you know,” Malka said, turning her glass round and round. “But it never mattered to me since we are friends.” She looked at him somewhat sadly. “But it’s important to you, isn’t it,” she said. “Perhaps more than I realized. Are you not happy here?”

“I am,” he said, alarmed by the change in her.

“You spend so much of your time looking for it,” she said, gazing away from him and into her drink. She ran her finger lightly on the rim of the glass. “You spend all your time searching for a home when you already have a home. It’s as if it’s not simply … enough.”

He felt heat come to his face then. He’d never heard her talk this way in all the time he’d known her. She said, “What difference does it make where you come from? Everyone has to come from somewhere. What matters is who you are, who you make yourself to be. Isn’t it?”

“I didn’t know you felt so strongly about it,” he said gently. She raised her head and glared at him, then laughed.

“Then you’re a fool,” she said.

He blushed some more. He reached for her hand and took it. She stared levelly into his eyes.

“You’re right,” he said, capitulating quickly. “I have all I need right here.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Malka said. She was smiling now, and she kept her hand in his as they went outside. It was a nice night and so they walked, through a street where a festival was in progress and firecrackers exploded all around them, sending a mist of scented smoke into the air. Adam and Malka emerged out of the smoke, laughing, onto a broad thoroughfare lined with benches, and they walked for a while more. As they came to a traffic circle, Adam thought he saw it again just then, in the distance – a magical flash of green.

“What is it?” Malka said. There was pain in her voice. Her hand tightened on his arm. “What did you see?”

Adam hesitated.

“Nothing,” he said at last. “It was nothing.”

And so, they walked in silence the rest of the way home.