Nile Shadows jq-3

by Edward Whittemore

  Joe looked at him. Too calm, he thought. Too calm by half.

  And that's all? Just like that?

  Stern shrugged.

  Yes, I guess so. Sadly, even good purposes conflict. Good and evil just aren't as simple as we'd like them to be. We try hard to pretend otherwise, but it's never really true.

  Stern smiled again, a peculiar smile that Joe remembered.

  But tell me, Joe, why did you ever allow yourself to get drawn into all of this? So often I used to envy you over there in Arizona. It seemed like such a good life, exactly the kind of thing a man should do with his days, not at all what I've done with the years. And even after you did come here you could have pulled back, given Bletchley something and then. . . . Bletchley probably expected it, in fact. Why didn't you, Joe? You must have sensed where things were heading.

  More or less, I suppose.

  Well?

  Well I didn't pull back, that's all.

  But why?

  I don't know really. How can we ever give a true answer to something like that? Because I wanted to see it through to the end. Because it seemed right to do that.

  I'm afraid it doesn't surprise me, said Stern. From the time I saw you on the street near Maud's, I'm afraid it's what I thought you'd do.

  Why afraid?

  That's obvious, isn't it?

  I guess. But did you know I was in Cairo then? Before you saw me on the street that evening?

  No, I had no idea, it was a shock. But the moment I did see you I knew why you were here and who'd arranged it and what the circumstances had to be. I'd realized all along that eventually someone might find out some facts about that trip of mine to Poland and look into it, as Bletchley did, and then start something like this. I didn't imagine they'd go so far afield as to look you up, but then, it makes sense when you think about it, doesn't it?

  I suppose it does, Stern, at least as much sense as anything else. And then the first time we did come face-to-face, there you were playing the beggar, sitting in the dust in those rags with your hand out, and I took pity and gave you money. And you, you shameless rascal, you even took my money.

  Stern laughed.

  I was hungry. I just don't have much pride anymore.

  Well that's not true but we'll let it pass, the same way I passed you by then. But why didn't you get in touch with me after that?

  I thought about it but I was hoping you'd find out enough to give Bletchley some satisfaction, and then quit before you got in all the way. I didn't expect it to happen, but there was always a chance.

  Joe reached for the bottle.

  So where does that leave us now, Stern? Just a couple of losers having a last glass together on a park bench underground? Just mulling it over and trying to get a grip on before we go topside and get run down by a lorry or take a tumble off a roof?

  Stern opened his hands and looked at them.

  Maybe. Probably. It's the danger in living among people, isn't it? In the desert you can run out of food or water but it's not all that easy to do, really. You can get by on very little and it takes longer to die. Men, civilization, speed things up.

  Stern smiled.

  But I still wouldn't say this is our last drink.

  No? Well I'm glad to hear that, I never did like the idea of closing time. And how many carefree hours might we have ahead of us then?

  Oh I don't know, said Stern. We could probably even manage a day or two if we stayed down here.

  But how could we do that? Isn't this one place Bletchley's bound to look if we don't show up elsewhere?

  I imagine, so I guess we only have hours. But we do have some time, so we might as well relax.

  Well it may sound strange, Stern, but the fact is I am relaxed. I didn't get a nod of sleep last night but I feel as if I've been doing nothing else.

  You stayed up all night with Belle and Alice?

  Almost all night, but how did you know I was there? You haven't been following me too, have you?

  No, but I have friends in the city who keep an eye out for me . . . beggars . . . fellow beggars. It's an occupation that allows a good deal of time for observation.

  Joe nodded. . . . Stern's secret army, he thought. Some people have tanks, some have Monks, he has beggars. Must depend on which dusty byway you choose to sit in at the end of the day.

  Beggars, are they? said Joe. And do you know what happened then on my way back from the houseboat this morning?

  Stern laughed.

  A dreadful commotion. You nearly caused a riot, shouting about Rommel's breakfast.

  There was that as well, said Joe, but it wasn't the important thing. What happened was that I made a fool out of one of Bletchley's young Monks who was following me. Lost my head and humiliated him for no reason at all. I was terribly ashamed.

  Stern looked at him.

  Well you should forget that now, Joe. It's over and done with.

  I know it is, and there's something else I wanted to mention. That letter you wrote to me about Colly's death. That was a beautiful letter, Stern, and I'll never forget it.

  Well I'll never forget Colly. Along with many other people who knew him.

  Joe nodded.

  He was his own man all right, said Joe, and an unusual one. But you know, I did a little quiet asking into his death after I got here, and Bletchley gave me the impression you might have made a special trip to Crete, using an operation as an excuse, just to find out what happened to Colly. Any truth to that?

  Stern moved awkwardly on the bench.

  There could be.

  Could be, yes. Could be, surely. But did you or didn't you? I don't think I caught your answer.

  I did make the trip, said Stern.

  I see. And naturally that was just a little thing. But what about Bletchley himself in all this?

  I like him. He's a decent man.

  Do you trust him?

  To do his job, yes.

  And his job is us, now?

  In answer, Stern reached out and touched Joe's arm.

  And more silence, thought Joe, just more and more of that shadowy shape that won't be. But he's got to start somewhere.

  Well even if that's how it is, said Joe, there's still one thing that's been bothering me this evening in this cozy vault. That sign over the door! I know it's suggestive, but of what? And where'd it come from?

  Stern turned and gazed across the crypt. After a moment he began to speak in a faraway voice.

  The Panorama used to be a restaurant, he said. It was right on the river, a cheap place, mostly a refuge for off-duty dragomen. A dirty open-air restaurant with trellises and vines and banks of flowers, and a pool where ducks paddled and a cage with squawking peacocks, and strong dark wine by the flagon and huge platters of spicy lamb. A century ago three young men got into the habit of spending long Sunday afternoons there, eating and drinking and talking and talking, and they liked it so much they always went back when they could later in life.

  Ah, said Joe, so that's the Panorama being referred to. I've heard of that restaurant all right, but I never knew its proper name. And the three young men in question would have been your father, once called Strongbow, and Menelik and the Cohen of the day, the one who was later known as Crazy, before they all set out on their journeys. And they kept going back to that restaurant for a full four decades, as I understand it, and that was the legendary forty-year conversation on the banks of the Nile that Ahmad used to talk about. That I also heard about years ago in Jerusalem, for that matter.

  Yes, mused Stern, it did last on and off for forty years, right up until my father became an Arab holy man and disappeared into the desert. But then toward the end of his long life he decided he wanted to see Menelik one last time, Cohen being dead by then, and he traveled up from the Yemen to Cairo and he and Menelik returned to their same old restaurant one Sunday afternoon, not long before the First World War.

  And they found that sign waiting for them?

  Yes, said Stern. That sign and an em
pty lot.

  Joe whistled softly.

  So how did they celebrate then? Did they go look for the restaurant?

  Stern shook his head, his voice far away.

  No, they didn't do that, they didn't go anywhere. They were too old to drink by then and too old to have any particular interest in food, and they knew each other so well there wasn't much point in even talking anymore. So what they did was sit down in that empty lot and rest their backs on that sign and spend the afternoon enjoying the view. Now and then one of them would chuckle over some memory that came to mind, first one of them and then the other, and that was how the afternoon passed. Then when the sun began to sink they got up and left the place, Menelik to return here to his sarcophagus, my father to return to his tent in the Yemen. And for them, that was the end of the nineteenth century.

  Joe whistled very softly.

  And there we have it straight out, he said. And after forty years of honest raucous talk beside the Nile, there hangs the sign of a tale in time, deep underground and out of sight. And it is amazing when you think of it, how such an immensity of swirling moments can reside in a legend as brief in the telling as that one.

  And sure the Panorama did move . . . and sure it has and does.

  ***

  Suddenly Stern's manner changed. A dark mood seized him, some violent memory from over the years.

  He lurched heavily to his feet and began pacing around the crypt, oblivious to Joe and everything else, his eyes working feverishly in the gloom, his thoughts fixed on some distant landscape.

  Joe watched him in fascination. It's strange, he thought, how much Stern can look like a beggar when he wants to, how easy it is for him to become the very poorest of the poor or anything else. . . . And it was frightening as well, for there had always been something profoundly disturbing to Joe in Stern's sudden transformations.

  Joe sat quietly watching, waiting, as Stern moved restlessly through the shadows. . . . A gaunt face hollowed to the bone, so lean no more could be dug from it. Hard slender hands and scarred feet and a faded cloak made threadbare by innumerable beatings on stone, weathered by a relentless sun until it was as soft and pale as the sands of the desert. But for Joe, there was more to Stern than just his striking appearance. There had always been a hunger haunting the man that knew no bounds, a fierce and pitiless hunger that could never be satisfied.

  Here, now, Stern was a beggar in a crypt. And he is that beggar, thought Joe. With Stern it's never just a disguise. As he limps there in his rags, he is that wretchedly poor man with nothing.

  Yet, as Joe also knew, Stern was truly many men in many places, truly a vast and changeable spirit who had ventured so deeply into the byways of the human soul that every sound he heard there had long ago become but an echo from his own heart. A strange and mystifying presence who had touched many lives, yet there were so few of them that Joe knew anything about. Years ago in Jerusalem there had been one or two, and again in Smyrna, and now in Cairo there were a few others, friends of Stern whose lives had always been involved with his wanderings, some even for a lifetime.

  And Maud.

  No one had been closer to Stern during these last years than she had, and yet it was only within the last twenty-four hours that Stern had sat down with her and told her about the massacres in Smyrna two decades ago, when Stern had picked up a knife and pulled back a little girl's head and made the sudden awful slash that had cut through his entire life, a terrible and merciful act but also just one among tens of thousands in Stern's turbulent life with its wrenching changes . . . these few people in Cairo and Jerusalem and Smyrna the only ones Joe happened to know about. How many others had there been in other places? How many people helped in some small way by his devotion and love? How many lives marked through the years . . . how many hearts touched by Stern?

  A strange and restless soul, thought Joe, as he watched Stern pacing in the shadowy dimness of the vault.

  Perhaps even a soul lingering on the stormbeaten threshold of sanctity.

  For as the poet said, hadn't that threshold always been terrible? . . . Even crime-haunted?

  ***

  Suddenly Stern whirled.

  I've got to get out of here. I can't stand it down here any longer.

  Joe got to his feet.

  Fine. Where do we go?

  Stern thought for a moment.

  There's a place I used to go to years ago when I was a student, a cheap Arab bar, I've been back there once or twice. It's small and out of the way and as safe as anywhere else. In fact it's not far from the Hotel Babylon, which is good. Bletchley won't be looking for us that close to home.

  Fine. It doesn't have an old cracked mirror behind the counter, does it?

  Yes, don't all bars? How else could we ponder that mysterious stranger who enters our lives whenever we sit alone and brood?

  True. And by any chance, did you ever take Liffy to this bar?

  I may have. Why?

  Because if it's the same place, I was there with him this morning.

  Stern stopped. He gazed at Joe and smiled.

  That's curious.

  You're right, it is, said Joe, also smiling. Well then, is it time to leave old Menelik's mausoleum on a clear Cairo night in 1942? Time, is it, as we used to say?

  Yes. Just give me a minute.

  Sure, said Joe, I'll just wander over and give Ahmad's miraculous printing press a last inspection. Who knows? After you and I leave here no one may ever see that magical machine again. This crypt may just stay locked forever and that may be the end of Greek leks and Albanian drachmas and Balkan reality in general, who can say. Odd money in any case, Ahmad's private tender. . . .

  Joe kept talking as he walked away, talking and scraping his feet and shuffling, making noise. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Stern moving quickly in the other direction, his face to the side, not so much avoiding Joe as making it easier for Joe to avoid him. Joe stopped in front of the printing press and began turning a handle, turning and turning it, making noise.

  He glanced over his shoulder. Stern was crouching by a table near the door, beside a candle, hunched over and intent as he worked on something in his hands. A small black case lay open in front of him.

  God have mercy, thought Joe. . . . Morphine to steady the blood, oh God.

  Joe squeezed his eyes shut and turned the handle of the printing press around and around, methodically making noise and cranking out counterfeit banknotes, spewing out more and more of the ridiculous money onto the floor.

  THE PANORAMA HAS MOVED.

  Oh have mercy, whispered Joe silently. He's tried so hard and he's given and given but he's finished now and he just has no more to give. And when the time comes let a whirlwind descend on the desert at night and let the blessed stillness of dawn be on the sands where he's walked. And let a moment of peace be on him before then, just one small moment of peace before the wind howls an end to him in the darkness

  . . . an end to all he was and wanted. . . .

  ***

  It was the same poor Arab bar where Joe had gone with Liffy that morning. A narrow barren place where laborers slumped along the walls in stony silence, somberly smoking and drinking in the half-light, stirring only to nod at their uselessness within the passing hours.

  The two of them sat at the counter, facing the cracked grainy mirror on the wall. Now I have to get this right the first time, thought Joe. There are opposing points of the compass to be touched and not much time to do it in, so how to get things started with Stern? One way or another we've just got to break through that silence of his, damn it to the end of the world. He's just got to know and believe in what he's done, but how to help him go where he needs to go this one last time?

  The mirror, thought Joe, recalling the visit that morning with Liffy. The mirror will have to tell him . . . the mirror. See all, hear all, speak what?

  Joe laughed and spread his arms, gathering in the room with the gesture.

  So this is your secret
world, Stern? This is where you dreamed away the wee hours of your youth? Well it's a murky place for sure, and certainly a place for dreaming. Certainly there'd be no other direction you'd want your fancy to take in the late hours here, in an alley as sordid as this one, in a rat-infested slum in Cairo or anywhere else.

  And speaking of murkiness, Stern, there's something that's been weighing more and more on me since I arrived in Cairo. It has to do with the tiny glimpses we're given of people, and the fact that everyone seems to be a secret agent in life in a way. With their own private betrayals and their own private loyalties that we don't know anything about, and their own secret code copied down from a private onetime pad, which we both know is all but unbreakable. And with their status in this world not unlike my own in Cairo, in transit, as the good document describes it ever so nicely.

  Ahmad, for example. When you looked at him you saw only a silent melancholy man endlessly playing solitaire and nodding over newspapers that were absurdly out of date, like all newspapers. But when he opened the secret panel to his clandestine little cave, hidden away behind the wall in the shabby corridor that passes for a lobby in the Hotel Babylon, with all the treasures he'd stored up over the years in that private little closet . . . well, a whole world of experiences suddenly came to life right in front of your eyes.

  I was lucky enough to catch a glimpse of that private world, Joe went on, but it would have been just as easy to have missed it altogether, as I'm sure many people did. And to them Ahmad will always be merely what he appeared to be, a taciturn man without any feelings particularly, some kind of large and immobile oddity not worth knowing.

  Even the implements of the clandestine trade are there, continued Joe, cast in their own unique shapes as is only proper. An old dented trombone, say, that served as the unlikely key to Ahmad's secret code, because it provided the notes to the tunes that others had forgotten, but not him. Or an old cardboard suitcase, empty save for a few sheaves of paper with some poems on them, the black bag of Ahmad's particular escape and evasion operation over the years, its very emptiness bulging with voluminous secret memories that only Ahmad could decipher.

  So it strikes me there are no commonplace people in the crowd, said Joe, and no innocents in the game of life really. We all seem to be double and triple agents with unknown sources and unsuspected lines of control, reporting a little here and a little there as we try to manage our secret networks of feeling and doing, our own little complex networks of life. . . .