Nile Shadows jq-3

by Edward Whittemore

  Stern frowned.

  A peaceful place on the surface, he said, but I wasn't at peace then. Eleni had left me for the last time and I hadn't become used to any of it yet, particularly going back to Smyrna and not having her there. Eleni was Smyrna to me, and the whole excitement of the place and the beautiful way of life people had there then, before the massacres, was inseparable in my mind from Eleni. When I was away, traveling, it wasn't so bad. But whenever I went back to Smyrna to see Sivi, I could only think of her and all the little places where we'd been together. Every little corner held some memory and no matter where I looked it was there waiting for me . . . some feeling, some sensation that brought her back to me.

  I had no control over it, said Stern. It was a mood I couldn't overcome. Her loss was always in front of me in Smyrna, tearing at me and never letting up. All I wanted to do when I was there was hide. Sivi tried to help but he couldn't really. The days terrified me, especially the sunlight on bright days . . . Homer's sunlight. The nights were easier in a way as they always are, less harsh and less brutal, but it was also at night when the most dangerous moments came. The truly black moments when nothing mattered and it began to seem perfectly reasonable to just end it all . . . just end it. End everything. . . .

  Stern fell silent. He touched the ragged sleeve of his cloak and leaned forward, staring intently into the shadowy mirror.

  ***

  The end of December. One of the last nights of that dark year when Eleni had left him for the last time.

  Stern had just arrived back in Smyrna to spend the holidays with Sivi, through Epiphany. Sivi was always careful to arrange some event for the evenings, so Stern wouldn't be left to sit alone in his room and brood. But that evening friends had invited Stern to dinner, so Sivi felt it safe to go off to the theater.

  Stern was able to manage only a few hours at the house of his friends before his courage left him.

  He gave them an excuse and returned early in the evening to Sivi's, to sit on the small balcony of his bedroom looking out at the harbor.

  He was strangely calm that night and the decision came to him in a natural way as he sat there gazing at the lights on the water and listening to the sounds of the sea. There was nothing dramatic about it. On the contrary, it seemed reasonable and commonplace. A new year was coming and there was no point in facing it. No point at all.

  So he went inside and emptied a bottle of pills into his hand and swallowed them one by one, without water, the way he always took pills. Then he poured himself some whiskey and sat down on the side of the bed to savor the drink, lighting a cigarette to go with it.

  Suicide? A desperate act brought on by intolerable despair?

  No, not at all. That wasn't the way he had felt about it then. He was calm and his feelings were commonplace, his mood reasonable. A drink and a cigarette before lying down to sleep was the same as hundreds of other nights. Exactly the same, only this time he wouldn't wake up.

  He sat there on the side of the bed gazing out through the open French doors at the harbor, not particularly sad, relieved more than anything else. Soothed, at peace. The soft lights swayed on the water and the gentle night embraced him, a tranquil murmur of whispers rising from the cafés below in the darkness, anonymous and remote like the world itself.

  It's so easy, he thought, as he sipped and smoked. Real decisions are always so easy, unlike the little things. And death is comforting and death is peace, only life is not. . . .

  ***

  Stern remembered nothing after that until he awoke the following morning. Sivi had stopped by his room when he returned from the theater and had found Stern sitting on the side of the bed, dressed and unconscious. Sivi had immediately guessed what had happened and had made Stern vomit and called his housekeeper, and the two of them had pushed Stern into a cold shower and walked him up and down in his room for more than an hour, until the danger had passed, only then letting Stern lie down to sleep.

  The housekeeper had told Stern about it the following day, when he questioned her. As for Sivi, he had never mentioned the incident and never alluded to it in any way. Instead he was his usual jovial self the next day, laughing and joking and trying to buoy Stern up as he always did, as if nothing at all had happened during the night.

  But whenever Stern had returned to Smyrna and his bedroom in Sivi's villa, he had picked up the corner of the new rug beside the bed and looked at the stain on the floorboards, a permanent stain made by his vomit, by the life going out of him one night in order that he might live.

  ***

  I used to close the door and sit there staring at it, said Stern, trying to find some design in that map of my life on the floorboards. But no matter how hard I looked it was still a shape without a shape, shadings that turned in upon themselves, a swirl of dark tones that was all suggestion, like clouds in the sky. So I tried to see something there but I never could. I could never read anything into it at all.

  At first that stain was so ugly to me I hated to be in the room with it. It shamed me and frightened me and I was always aware it was there, under the rug, and always very careful to step around it. But after a while I forgot about it and I'd actually find myself standing on it, not thinking where I was. . . . In a way that made it better, but it also saddened me because it meant I'd learned to live with the stain. The psyche doing what it had to do in order for me to survive. Forgetting. What it always has to do when something horrible becomes an everyday companion in our lives. . . . But there was also another cause to the sadness. Whenever I found myself standing on that stain, I also found myself thinking of my childhood and how far I had come from a dusty little hillside in the Yemen. By a bed now in a room that wasn't my own, near some open doors overlooking a harbor. . . . But why this harbor and why this room? . . . I used to ask myself that and a whole host of questions would follow. Where is this? Where are you? And the answers were devastating. . . . I was anywhere. I was standing on a map that was me, my life, and it had nothing to tell me. So I wasn't someplace, I was just anywhere. . . .

  Stern drew back. He touched the neck of his ragged cloak and turned away from the mirror, pulling himself away from its peculiar fascination.

  As for that attempt at suicide, he said, the first one, it caused me to think about many things. What I'd really done and what it meant, and what I'd learned about myself and the human condition, and maybe more than anything else, what I'd learned from Sivi.

  There was so much wisdom in the old man I've often wondered whether he was actually aware of it.

  Whether he did what he did out of some intuition, or whether he knew that the way he acted after that night was the only thing making it possible for me to go on. . . . Sivi acting as if. Acting as if nothing had happened. . . . How could he have known to do that unless he himself had once been where I was then?

  But that's a whole other subject, said Stern, and it leads to the massacres and Sivi going mad during the massacres. Wisdom that profound is so tenuous it's often impossible for it to survive the brutality of life, the fears within us. And with Sivi it didn't and he went mad. . . .

  Of course, that night on the balcony happened a long time ago, when I was just beginning to become a man. And looking back on it and what followed, I realized just how hard we try not to grow. How desperately we go on trying to clasp the certainties of childhood to our hearts, bravely trying to face the world with that pathetic armor. I know, we say, I may not be able to explain it but I know what I mean.

  And yet if we can't explain it, said Stern, there is no understanding. Instead there are rigid dead dreams, the sand castles of our childhoods to which we add a turret or two in our youths, and a rampart or two later on before we die, passing on to our children the same outwardly dreamy shape with the same inwardly dense and incomprehensible structure.

  Stern frowned. He stared down at the counter and his voice was tense, hushed.

  Why is it we don't understand how destructive it is to cling to things? Why is it we don't
understand that even revolutionaries do that, and that in fact there is often no one more reactionary than a revolutionary?

  A man who yearns for order, often innocently, and therefore justifies violence and murder and terrible repression through his yearning for the imagined symmetry, the imagined beauty, of a sand castle in a child's mind?

  Images, said Stern . . . things we imagine. These hosts of ethereal wonders and horrible monstrosities born of our unfathomable imaginations. Belief in everything and in nothing is the curse of our age.

  Righteously, arrogantly, we play in our minds with the zeal of pious hermits who have seen nothing of the world and refuse to do so and refuse to hear any echo of what has come before us. So enormous is our arrogance, and so pathetic, we even pretend we can jettison our own past and make ourselves into anything, just by saying it's so.

  But it isn't so and we can't do it because we know so much less than we think we do about man's freedom and responsibility, and his guilt. Yet we go right on pretending in our arrogance, making terrible presumptions that demand hundreds of thousands of victims, even millions of victims. The victims our age seems to want . . . and worse, seems to need.

  Why? Why is our guilt so great today we have to practice human sacrifice on such a monstrous scale?

  What are we sacrificing to? Why do we feel this brutal guilt so implacably it causes us to raise up a Hitler or a Stalin to work our slaughter for us? Is freedom really so terrifying in the twentieth century that we have to have concentration camps and whole political systems that are nothing but prisons? These huge grinding inhuman machines that people willingly flock to, willingly embrace and die for, calling them the future? Are we really so terrified by freedom that we have to make the world into a vast penal colony?

  Are we really that desperate to recapture the order of the animal kingdom . . . our lost innocence and ignorance?

  Revolution, said Stern. We can't even comprehend what it is, not what it means or what it suggests. We pretend it means total change but it's so much more than that, so vastly more complex, and yes, so much simpler too. It's not just the total change from night to day as our earth spins in its revolutions around a minor star. It's also our little star revolving around its own unknowable center and so with all the stars in their billions, and so with the galaxies and the universe itself. Change revolves and truly there is nothing but revolution. All movement is revolution and so is time, and although those laws are impossibly complex and beyond us, their result is simple. For us, very simple.

  We arrive at a new dawn only to see it turn to darkness, or more specifically, in order to see it turn to darkness. And we live in darkness in order to know light. . . . For a moment. As time spins forth opposites, with no end or beginning that we will ever perceive.

  Revolution? Dedication? Belief in humanity and in gods that die and gods that fail?

  Innocence is the origin of our sin, said Stern, and our hope as well as our curse. From that innocence comes all that is evil and all that is good, and living with it is our fate. For the God who is and all the gods who have ever been and will be are within us, seeing with our eyes and hearing with our hearts and speaking with our tongues. . . . Ours. I know. I've been as dedicated as anyone. . . .

  ***

  Stern stopped. Muscles tightened in his face and his eyes moved restlessly.

  He's disturbed all right, thought Joe, we're getting in deeply now. And sirens are going off in his head and flares are exploding and gunfire's rattling everywhere. A man looks like that when he's been under siege too long. Shell shock, a doctor might say. Of the soul, Liffy might say.

  Joe rested his hand on Stern's arm.

  You know, he said, awhile ago when I mentioned Ahmad and David, it surprised me that you passed over them so quickly. But I have to keep reminding myself that you and I have lived very different lives these last years, and you've been close to a lot of that. My times have been quiet and I don't have to tell you how hard that makes it to deal with violence. In matters of feeling, I know, we tend to think everyone's concerns are our own, a way we have of trying to bring people around to our own size and shape. Seems to be human nature to want to make people into a standard issue so we can pretend we understand them, which would be reassuring, naturally. So I have to keep reminding myself of that scorching freezing desert you've been living in, with its death and its dying and its own bloody rules. And I know it's been bad, but what's been the worst part about it for you?

  The sounds people make, whispered Stern. The sounds they make when they're lying there ripped up and dying. It's something you never get used to, and once you hear it it never goes away.

  No, I don't imagine it does, said Joe. At least not out in that no-man's-land where you've been living for all of your life. But you know, most people have never heard that. Most people hear whines and whimpers and excuses in the end, things you can say something about. Not that animal sound from deep down that just sits there worse than death and has nothing to do with words, ever. . . . Do you remember that saying, though, about abstractions being our pseudonyms? The tendency we have to project our own personal cause as the general cause at large? Which is why Marx, say, badly constipated as he was from so much sitting around and thinking, tended to feel a future explosion in the lower regions or classes was a scientific necessity? The historical movement of pent-up bowels objectively determined by the grunts of the dialectical potty, and so forth? Do you recall that saying at all?

  Stern stopped moving around for a moment. He glanced at Joe and looked away.

  It sounds familiar, he murmured.

  Does it? Well I thought it might because you were the one who said it.

  I was?

  Yes. One night when we were sitting up late over lamp fuel in Jerusalem. And wretched drink it was that night, same as now. Also called Arab cognac and I'll never know how those two names got together to ease the pain in the dark hours. Talk about opposites. Arab cognac? Arab cognac? Just hearing that causes a revolution in the head, a real revolution, the kind you were talking about, not to mention ongoing turmoil in the stomach. But yes, you did say that once, and Ahmad after you more recently. As I recall, you were quoting from your father's memoirs.

  Oh.

  Stern moved restlessly back and forth. He made a sign to the owner of the bar, who drifted down the counter to fill their glasses. Joe touched Stern's arm, smiling.

  But I can't let you off too easily, Stern, now can I? I mean this feeling you have that you've failed. It's only to be expected I'd have to worry that one a bit, Marx and the war aside. So tell me something. When you were young, did you ever think of becoming a recluse off in the desert somewhere, the way your father ended up? Something along those lines? It would have been easier, certainly, than dealing with people.

  Stern looked surprised. At least I'm getting his attention again, thought Joe.

  No, said Stern. Never.

  Why not, I wonder.

  Stern gazed down at the pool of water on the counter. And he's beginning to do more than just remember, thought Joe. It's not all sirens and bombs and flares going off.

  Not enough guilt, said Stern. That wasn't my father's reason for doing what he did, but it would have had to have been mine. He sought the desert, after all. I was born there.

  Right. Stands to feeling. So I guess what we're talking about here is regret, isn't it? Things haven't turned out as well as you'd hoped.

  Stern shuddered violently.

  As well? What in God's name do you mean, Joe?

  Right. Things have turned out awful, in fact. The worst. And yet what you've done in the last few years is a hundred times what most men can do in a lifetime. Of course it's also true not many people will ever know about it. Bletchley and Belle and Alice and myself, and Maud and Liffy in a partial way, and some others that I'm not aware of. Not many surely, a handful at best, and even so they're never going to be able to say anything about it except to themselves. Whisper it to themselves maybe, when they're al
one and sad and taking the long view. And doesn't that bother you a little? It'd be only natural if it did.

  Stern moved his finger through a pool of water on the counter, tracing a circle.

  Yes, he said. I suppose it does.

  Well sure, Stern, why not. Anybody would like it known they've left something real behind, something more than just the dust of gold and real estate, something tangible to the heart. Still, another man could be puffing himself up with pride if he'd done what you have, but you don't even see yourself as having accomplished much.

  Joe rested his hand on Stern's arm.

  Tell me, why this talk about Sivi tonight? It's been a long time, ten years since he died, twenty since he went mad. On the face of it, those events would seem more than a little distant to be taking up so much of your thoughts tonight. Or are we looking back to the real beginnings of your Polish story? . . . Ahmad used to call it that, you know, and he wasn't referring just to the actual trip to Poland. For him, your Polish story seemed to suggest a great deal more. Maybe that was because Ahmad always had a long-range way of looking at things, so although the war appeared to start in Poland, he knew its true beginnings had to be much more deeply buried in time. . . . But anyway, Sivi then. What keeps bringing him to mind? Or is it Smyrna we're really talking about?

  ***

  Stern moved his finger through the pool of water, tracing circles, his restless eyes never still.

  Somber and feeling useless all right, thought Joe, just as Maudie said. But telling him it isn't so won't help.

  No sense telling a hungry man he isn't hungry, when did that ever mean anything? The flares and the sirens may have let up a bit in his corner of the desert, but he's still expecting the next barrage and he's weary to the soul, that's certain.

  Stern?

  Yes. Sivi, you said. I was thinking about it.

  And?

  I think it's because I started out with him and learned most of it from him. And then too, that period in Smyrna is all of a piece in my mind. Eleni and Sivi and the wonderful times we used to have before the massacres, before that whole way of life disappeared forever. And the Aegean must have something to do with it, that mysterious light that has always made men want to go farther. And living with the sea in Smyrna and just the sea itself, the closest we ever come to the sound of infinity. And I was young then, so everything was significant, and I was in love. . . .