Hello everyone,
Before unveiling, as planned, the first pages of my new novel in progress, here are some preliminary clarifications :
I'm not responsible for any errors in translation, and the original French version is the only one for which I claim full responsibility, word for word, in every detail.
This novel is a work in progress, and I reserve the right to modify at any time any part of it as I see fit, to delete or add paragraphs, including changing the ordering, until its final publication as a paper book when I consider it complete.
All or part of these posts are freely reproducible, but only accompanied by a reference with a link to their source (this post) and the mention : © Stéphane Zagdanski 2024
For any remarks or questions, please contact me via the email on this site : lafinroman@substack.com
Finally, as is customary, I specify that all characters and events in this novel, including those whose names are borrowed from real people, are fictional and have no other philosophical or political value than those I will decide to confer upon them in my future interventions regarding them.
The End
For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me, and that which I was afraid of is come unto me.
Job, III, 25
First Part
I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint: my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels.
Psalms, XXII, 14
Blue blood
The convoluted corpse of Benjamin Netanyahu left Professor Muszkat perplexed, gathered urgently with his team around a dissection table at Hadassah Hospital.
Crouched against the concave surface of silvery metal, the ecstatic contortions of the limp bluish gargoyle defied all laws of post-mortem rigidity. The crafty, round visage of the former prime minister had deflated, like a shapeless, defunct balloon. His head, reminiscent of a dealer in American limousines, slumped upon the stainless steel. Mordechai Muszkat couldn't help but think of Edvard Munch's character in "The Scream," who might have suddenly dropped his arms, allowing his terrified, ghostly countenance to liquefy to the ground.
No page in the universal medico-legal annals corresponded to this molluscoid humanoid with limp, entangled limbs, resembling the tentacles of a dying epileptic octopus on the sand, whose tissues still undulated perceptibly under the swell of inexplicable accelerated putrefaction.
Yet, Muszkat and his assistants were only at the beginning of their astonishment. As they began to autopsy the unrecognizable Bibi with his crumpled, twisted carcass, like a love note crumpled and tossed into flames – which quite summarized the fate of this politician, both adored and reviled, this former elite soldier with a steely temperament who had held power for so long and so many times in a country accustomed to an unbelievable sort of constitutional anarchy – they found an unprecedented petrification of all internal organs.
Due to some unknown enchantment, Netanyahu's heart, lungs, stomach, liver, kidneys, and intestines gleamed with stiffness. Muszkat thought of the plastic sushis and sashimis displayed in the showcase of Nini Hachi, the Japanese restaurant on Ben Yehuda Street in Tel Aviv.
Conversely, in a macabre, dismaying chiasmus, all the skeletal structure and cartilaginous tissues had sagged, dripping on the autopsy table like molten wax. This biological paradox had caused Netanyahu's body to collapse, transforming his corpse into a limp, disjointed puppet, curled and twitching, threatening to spill and drain entirely into the siphon at the end of the Mopec table.
Bibi's skin had taken on a bluish hue; the veins showed through the skin, now perfectly crystalline, so that this inexplicable body, this cadaverous wonder in which all anatomical polarities between hardness and softness, rigidity and elasticity, stiffness and suppleness, firmness and tenderness, straightness and sinuosity, friability and viscosity had been reversed; this histological chaos, this physiological aberration by which, with a rigor and meticulousness that surely held a meaning as yet indecipherable – not a soft organ that hadn't ossified, not a bone in the skeleton that hadn't melted; this dreadful, vitrified creature with delicate myosotis moiré, whose only proof of identity – or rather the QR code associated with his passport on his mobile health pass – testified that it was indeed Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu, once the youngest prime minister since David Ben Gurion… was, by an unsettling irony, disfigured monstrously, tinged with the pleasing colors of the flag of the State of Israel.
Blood analysis provided a beginning of explanation for this pathological abomination. On the glass slide under the electron microscope, the antibodies of Bibi boiled with rage and audacity in a few droplets of improbable blue blood. Transitioning from crimson to azure, the life fluid thus revealed its endorsement by Pfizer, whose thirteenth dose of vaccine had been administered just days ago to Netanyahu, like to eight million other Israelis.
And this tiny geyser of white-blue blood cells delivered to the stunned team of doctors a new tragic revelation. The messenger RNA contained in the Pfizer syringe had indeed delivered its salutary message but, immediately after, had betrayed its own camp to defect to the enemy. As if taking their name literally, the antibodies had turned against all internal and external organs of the human into which the genetically modified substance had been inoculated.
It was unprecedented, and it was only just beginning.
(To be continued)
© Stéphane Zagdanski 2024