Nile Shadows jq-3

by Edward Whittemore

  Joe smiled. He nodded.

  Off-color hieroglyphs from over the millennia, he thought. Inevitably a trifle coarse now. And keys to the crypt of the past once held by an inner circle, Stern still in possession of one of those keys.

  And the others?

  ***

  Ahmad grew somber, his memory jarred by his recollections of those long-ago Sunday afternoons in Menelik's subterranean home.

  In the crypt, he murmured, back on those lovely afternoons in the tomb. And after an hour or so Stern would unpack his violin and that would be the sign for all of us to get ready. Stern would give us our note and we'd tune our instruments as Menelik sat in his sarcophagus, straightening the folds of the mummy's shroud he affected, a rapturous smile on his ancient face because that was what he'd really been waiting for all along, he so loved music. And then Stern would take out the old Morse-code key he always carried, his good-luck charm, and he'd rap it against the sarcophagus to get everyone's attention, and then he'd draw the first notes and Cohen and the Sisters and myself and the others would all join in, and off we'd go on one of our Sunday musicales . . .

  Beautiful, murmured Ahmad. Harmonious and exquisite back before the war. The last one.

  Ahmad shook himself. He poked the fire.

  But you see how time interferes? How could any of us have imagined then that Stern would go on to do things that would land him in prison? Or that he'd risk his life escaping from prison?

  When was that? asked Joe in a quiet voice.

  In the summer of 1939 just before the war broke out. And that reckless escape was the prelude to what I've always thought of as Stern's Polish story. To me, a tale that sums up not only Stern but the very war itself. Desperate. Incomprehensible. A kind of madness. . . .

  Ahmad began to twist and turn where he sat by the fire, as if he were drawing near to some uncomfortable truth about himself, some irrevocable confession.

  It may be, he said, that I've given you the impression my failures in life have been of the material kind, but that just isn't so. My failures of the spirit have been far more profound and painful. And to what do I refer?

  Ahmad gripped his fists together in a fierce pathetic gesture.

  To Stern, of course. Doesn't everything always come back to him?

  Ahmad's knuckles bulged and there was despair in his voice.

  I committed a crime, he whispered. I've always been a sensitive person and I know there are certain things you don't do, especially to someone you love. When you act as I did with Stern, you shatter something deep inside a person. And when you do that. . . .

  Ahmad faltered, clenching his powerful fists more tightly.

  What I mean is, you can't humiliate someone you're close to, you can't do that, because it's more than we can bear as human beings. We can be defeated forever but we can't be insulted by someone we love, and the failure to give love when it's needed, needed, must always be one of our darkest sins. For in failing that we violate our very essence as human beings and cast ourselves out, and become no longer qualified to be called human. . . .

  Again Ahmad faltered, and this time it seemed he would be unable to go on. He busied himself adding sticks to the fire, then carefully adjusted his flat straw hat to some new angle, then changed the subject.

  Slowly slowly, thought Joe. But at least Ahmad was finally beginning to circle the forbidden subject Liffy had referred to as a betrayal of some kind, the cause of the old poet's irreparable rupture with Stern, now linked in some mysterious way with an adventure that Ahmad, his voice shaking with emotion, insisted on calling Stern's Polish story.

  ***

  I know why they brought you to Cairo, Ahmad whispered one evening. No one has told me anything, but I know.

  Joe looked at him and said nothing. Ahmad's face was troubled as he went on poking the fire, casting new shadows over their flowering oasis in the darkness. A shower of sparks shot into the air, once, twice, a third time. Ahmad watched them go out, then finally whispered again.

  It's obvious, Joe, to me anyway. The Monastery called you in because they're afraid of Stern's secret connection with the nationalists in the Egyptian army, the Free Officers who want the British out of Egypt.

  Ahmad glanced nervously around the debris-strewn courtyard. For several moments he listened intently to the night, then leaned closer to Joe.

  Oh I've known all about that for some time, and I've always assumed the Monastery knew about it too and overlooked it for their own reasons, because Stern's so valuable to them. But now they must have this new fear that Stern has gone too far and joined the nationalists in some Egyptian-German conspiracy, some plot to turn the British codes over to the Germans. Well there's no use denying Stern could probably lay his hands on such information. After all these years of doing the kind of work he does, Stern has contacts at every level of Egyptian society, and given Stern's nature, a good many of those people must be indebted to him. But even if they weren't, Stern's knowledge of people is so great he could easily find a way to get what he wanted.

  Again Ahmad glanced nervously around the little courtyard, and this time his whispers were even softer in the firelight.

  Listen to me, Joe. Once or twice in the last months Stern has mentioned something called the Black Code in front of me. I have no idea what it is but I assume it must be some highly secret British cipher, because Stern also implied that much of Rommel's success comes from the fact that the Germans can read this Black Code. Now none of that means anything to me, but you're a friend of Stern's and you care about him, so I want to warn you it's more complicated than you think, perhaps even more complicated than the Monastery knows. The Zionists also want the British out of the Middle East, and as much as Stern has always done for their cause in Palestine, there are still Jewish extremists who would be glad to see Stern out of the way, because they distrust Stern's kind of cooperation with the Arabs. And as for the Germans . . . and the Monastery. . . .

  Somberly, Ahmad shook his head.

  It's dangerous, Joe, all of it. Monks . . . Rommel . . . Arab fanatics and Jewish fanatics . . . they all have their reasons for wanting to see Stern dead and gone, and he just has nowhere to turn, don't you see? So it may not matter what you do now. I hate to say it, but it's probably too late for anything.

  Ahmad looked sadly at Joe, shuddered, looked away. Joe touched his arm, holding his hand there.

  I know that, Ahmad. I do. But as Stern himself used to say, we have to try anyway. Even if it makes no difference, even when it's to no end, we still have to try. . . . Because what else is there, Ahmad? What else . . . ever?

  ***

  And there were moments of unexpected revelation when Ahmad came out with some remark that suddenly illuminated his entire life.

  Sometimes I try to think of my mother, he once said, as simply the person she was. And I wonder then if this obsessive concern I've always had for her, for what she thought of me, has been enough to justify all these years of loneliness I've known, these decades of eccentric behavior.

  By all accounts she was a plain and simple woman, an uneducated farm girl who chanced to come to Egypt one winter as a servant to a German family, and chanced to become pregnant, and then corrected matters as soon as she could by returning home to lead a regular life. Not a remarkable person in any way, nor was there anything exceptional in what she did. And it certainly would have been a mistake for her to take me with her. A brown baby on a small farm in Germany would have assured a dreadful life for both of us. Yet because this girl was my mother, and because of what happened, my entire life has taken a particular course.

  Deep within us, it seems, we begin life with the false notion that our appearance in the world is of monumental significance, and so we assign universal meanings to the threads and colors of our early lives, assuming them to be a unique tapestry of mysterious import, rather than merely one more shoddy human patchwork in one more tiny corner of the world. There's nothing rational about the way we look at it, and perhaps
because the belief is irrational, it takes much of our lives to unlearn it. But by the time we do unlearn it, that small commonplace irony may have grown into monstrous proportions. For by then we have long since stumbled out into life in such-and-such a manner, and our course may well be irrevocably set.

  Consider.

  If I were to meet a person such as my mother today, or even my mother herself as she was when she abandoned me, the ultimate cause of my obsession, would I suddenly find myself in a human presence so powerful, I could imagine it determining a man's whole life?

  Ahmad's laughter boomed and thundered, then all at once his face was creased with scars.

  No, a ridiculous notion . . . but the joke's on me. All you have to do is to look at me to know that. And seeing what you see before you, would you ever dare claim that some peasant girl from the backwoods of Germany, harboring thoughts no more complex than the blood sausage to be enjoyed next Saturday night, could conceivably fashion this complex brooding creature who now whispers to you deep in these Hanging Gardens of Babylon?

  Ahmad shook his head.

  No. Sheer nonsense. What we have here is simply a case of that grand murky importance we falsely assign to the parent of the opposite sex. . . . Do you realize I've probably spent thousands of hours seething with resentment over my mother, and why? Why have I secretly devoted so much of my life to her? Why have I harbored this absurd notion of her overwhelming significance in the scheme of things?

  It's a terrible irony, that notion, and in my case it's an irony that was discovered too late. For this mother of superhuman proportions, this mythical woman who plotted all manner of things in the world and set loose a host of brooding demons within me, this woman never even existed. And thus have I spent a great part of my life secretly confounding a shadow of my own making. . . . A terrible irony, but at my age one that can't be undone.

  You see I've had no restraint, no restraint. I've been a tree swayed by the wind. Most of us are afraid because someone else is in charge of our lives, and because we're terrified of failing alone. So we wait and wait for something to happen, thinking we can accomplish something by showing patience, but time passes and we grow old, and all we accomplish is ending up alone anyway.

  Ahmad gazed at the campfire.

  Destiny, he murmured, my destiny. What a droll thing life is. This mysterious and merciless arrangement of logic for a futile purpose.

  For a long time now, he added, I've left this place as seldom as possible. Crowds confuse me, so I stay here among my things.

  ***

  And inevitably as the echoes of the past softly gathered in the corners of their little courtyard, as a terrible war raged ever nearer in the nighttide of that desert sky, Ahmad returned again and again to what he had come to call Stern's Polish story.

  . . . the desperate escape from a prison in Damascus . . . the informer in Istanbul who had turned up floating in the Bosporus . . . Stern's headlong trip to Poland on a mysterious mission of great importance . . . and finally, the secret meeting in the house in the woods near Warsaw, only days before Hitler invaded Poland to begin the war. . . .

  Ahmad stared at the fire.

  Later, Stern tried to justify it to me, Joe. We were in the crypt on a Sunday afternoon, and what he was really trying to justify was his life. How he had changed over the years and why he felt it had all been necessary. And I could see how much it meant to him for me to understand, how hard he was struggling to make it sound reasonable to me. After all, I knew him, and I'd been his friend from the beginning.

  But I couldn't bring myself to accept it, do you see? Not there in a place where we had known so much of what is beautiful in life. So I felt I had to tell him to stop because it was too painful for me, the way he had changed and the way I had changed, the way everything had changed. Of course it was wrong for me to do that, terribly wrong. I should have let him go on and explain it as best he could, and then I should have simply accepted it no matter how much pain it caused me, just accepted it as a kind of truth, Stern's truth. And perhaps the truth of the world today, whatever that may be.

  But I didn't do that, Joe. I didn't have the courage. I was thinking only of myself and I was angry because of all I'd lost in the world, and Stern seemed to represent that to me because he'd always been such an important part of the world I'd loved and lost, perhaps even the most important part. . . . Who knows.

  Who can say.

  So I should have heard him out whether I liked it or not, and then I should have taken him in my arms the way we used to do long ago when we were friends who held nothing back, who laughed and cried and held each other.

  Ahmad's voice sank to a whisper.

  But I didn't do that. Instead I told him to stop because I didn't want to hear what he was saying, and still he kept on trying in his halting awkward way, trying so hard to find the words that would let me understand. And then . . .

  Ahmad hung his head. There were tears in his eyes.

  . . . and then I turned on him. Shut up, I yelled. Shut up. And the strength went out of him and his whole body sagged, and there was a wretched yearning sadness in his eyes that no human being should ever have to know, a terrible sadness beyond any hope of redemption.

  So I failed him, Joe, and you have to remember what it meant. For remember. Once there had been three young friends who were inseparable and who shared every feeling and dream, Cohen and myself and Stern. And Cohen had been dead for years and now I'd turned my back on Stern and left him alone. I had done that. I had destroyed a beautiful part of his life by taking away the one thing a poor man has, his memories, and I had cruelly shouted him down by yelling that those memories were dead.

  Gone. And he was nothing and utterly alone. . . .

  Ahmad was quiet for a time.

  No, I didn't realize the enormity of it then, but slowly I began to understand it. Slowly it crept into my heart. And now when we sit here looking into this fire, here with the darkness all around us and the power of the night boundless in its domain, the two of us huddling beside this little speck of light, two tiny insignificant creatures suspended for the briefest of moments in a realm of infinities and blackness, here in these small flames before us I see his face more clearly than ever. A burning human face passing and soon to be gone, and I failed him.

  By not accepting him for what he is. By not having the courage and the grace to do that, but instead, turning away. Fully aware of the haunted sadness in his eyes and yet turning away, turning away and leaving him alone in his torment, alone in his anguish, a friend whom I have always loved. A friend and more, a fellow human being.

  Ahmad shuddered.

  And that's Stern's Polish story, a tale begun one Sunday afternoon in a crypt beside the Nile, begun and never brought to its conclusion. And it's my failure and a failure of the world, and we will both have to live with it.

  Yet I know better than to blame the world, for the world is a metaphor and an abstraction that doesn't exist. We all have our moment to be the world, to do what is right and give love when giving seems impossible and love seems an intolerable mockery. We all have that moment once, and I did, and I failed it.

  Ahmad opened his powerful hands and gazed at them in the shadows.

  It's the briefest moment in our lives. And the simplest. Yet with it, we build our heavens and our hells forever. . . .

  ***

  Who knows what Stern's really doing? muttered Ahmad one night not long before first light, just as they were getting ready to leave the courtyard and go inside.

  What do you mean? asked Joe.

  Ahmad leaned over the embers, glaring down at them, his face working in agitation.

  All I mean is, who really knows? Of course he has contacts everywhere, and of course he has long served many causes in one way or another, to one extent or another, and of course he works for the British. But could there also be something beyond all that, some higher cause for Stern? An even more secret campaign to be waged . . . in his eyes? Somethi
ng so profound, perhaps, as to be unmentionable save before God?

  Well in fact he has alluded to certain things with me since the war started, and now more recently I've sensed a thread to these bits and pieces of his concerns, which he drops in front of me without intending to. For one thing, the Jews in Europe are constantly on his mind. And perhaps . . .

  Suddenly Ahmad became defiant and the words burst out of him.

  Well does he have some sort of traitorous relationship with the Nazis, then? With these Mongolian hordes who are storming the gates of civilization? . . . Stern says there are whole communities of Jews disappearing in Europe, and he alludes to unspeakable atrocities, and he's haunted like Liffy by images of empty railway stations late at night, from which people have been shipped away to oblivion and worse.

  And he says the Allies are doing nothing about it because the evidence isn't conclusive enough for them yet. And he says there's no time to wait anymore for a documentation of death, some kind of doggerel of statistics which will convince our bookkeepers in high places.

  Well I know nothing about statistics, because that's not how I account for human beings. But many kinds of agents have passed through the Hotel Babylon since the war started, and some of them have escaped from Europe and some of them have been Jews. And I've asked them things and looked into their eyes to hear the answers, and I've seen blackness. So if Stern is involved with the Nazis, I know it must have to do with getting Jews out of Europe. There could be no other reason why a man like him would strike this terrible bargain with evil. . . . But as for what he gives the Nazis in return, God only knows. I don't even want to think about it. . . . His soul, probably.

  Ahmad sank to a heap on the ground and covered his face. Great sobs shook him.

  Don't you see, Joe? It's not like Stern to be mentioning these things in front of me, these bits and pieces about Black Codes and Rommel and all the rest of it. He's too clever and experienced for that. And if in front of me, in front of whom else? And how could he help but know the Monastery would have to hear about it sooner or later? . . . And take steps.