by Dara Horn
Oar-driven galleys crowded the port, and it took some time to find the one on which David had booked passage, bound for Qus, the city adjacent to the ruins of Luxor—a three-week journey upstream. As David’s baggage was loaded onboard, Mosheh could hear the rower slaves in the lower decks as they beat drums, singing in a language Mosheh could not understand.
David, fidgeting as he watched the dockworkers hauling his bags onto the ship’s deck, was tapping his feet to the rhythm, beating out time. He had apparently heard the song before. When the last bag had been loaded, he bowed his head before his older brother. Mosheh thought of their father, who had seen David off on his last journey, and placed his hands on his brother’s head, offering him the ancient words: “May God bless you and protect you; may God shine the light of his face on you and be gracious to you; may God lift his face to you and give you peace,” as David responded to each phrase with “Yes, may it be his will.” At the last moment, as Mosheh lowered his hands from David’s head and David recited the verse from Isaiah to begin his journey—“When you pass through water, I shall be with you; through rivers, they shall not overwhelm you”—Mosheh felt his brother’s hand slipping out of his as a dockworker shouted for passengers to board at once.
“Don’t worry about me. Don’t even pray. Please,” David said as his hand fell from his brother’s.
“I’ll worry about you every day,” Mosheh said. He had meant to say something comforting, but the truth was irrepressible.
“Worry about your patients. For them your worry is useful,” David insisted. Dockworkers were coming between them now, pushing Mosheh aside as they began to loosen the ropes that tied the ship to dry land. “As for me, I’ll be in the hands of God.”
“Not literally, of course,” Mosheh said reflexively. He and his brother had had endless conversations on the incorporeality of God. Correction always came to Mosheh unbidden, like breathing.
“Of course not.” His brother smiled, and turned away.
In the instant that David turned his face from his brother and bounded up the plank, Mosheh saw—as if viewing layers of stone in the face of a cleft rock—the briefest glimpse of the many moments that lay below this one in this place, in the port at Fustat. His brother’s face turned, and suddenly Mosheh saw their dead father standing next to him, as he had been when they had seen David off three years ago, his father’s brow already haggard as he shouted some blessing to his son walking up the plank. Beneath that moment, Mosheh saw himself and his brother and father disembarking from another ship when they first arrived in Fustat after fleeing the Crusaders in the Holy Land, their legs unsteady as they stepped slowly onto the solid stone pier for the first time, knowing, from years of studying the divine commandments, that they were sinning against God as they returned to the land of their ancient enslavement. In that layer Mosheh could still feel the pulsating sensations, alternating like the twin drums of a heartbeat in time to the drums of the slaves below deck, of revulsion and relief. Underneath that moment, Mosheh could see, in a flash of unwanted poetic vision, thousands of slaves like the ones he had just spotted on the docks, centuries of tortured people being unloaded in Fustat. And buried beneath centuries, in what could only be imagination or prophecy, he saw the original Mosheh, a baby yet unnamed, as his enslaved mother set him in his little woven basket into the Nile, pushing him away from her. The riverbank sank with the weight of permanent farewells. But nostalgia was the religion of fools.
Mosheh shook off these visions, disturbed by the denseness of their illogic. As he strained to hear something that David was just then shouting to him, he thought, strangely and irrationally, of his father’s hand on his deathbed—of how that old sallow hand had clutched his in the midst of extreme agony and then, despite Mosheh’s fiercest grip, slipped out from between Mosheh’s fingers as his father turned his face to the wall, exhaling his soul. Mosheh fought the memory, mentally drowning it in the Nile as he watched David disappear into the crowds on the ship’s deck. He thought again of the infant prophet’s mother casting him into the waters, could not erase her image from his mind. But Mosheh did not believe in omens.
IN THE MONTHS THAT followed, Mosheh suffered more anxiety than he had ever thought possible for a rational man. He immersed himself in science during the day and in Torah study during the night, but around the edges of this fortress of knowledge, marauders inevitably invaded, stealing his peace. The vizier would ask him a question, and he would see the man’s lips moving without understanding the words. At the market he rode through on his way home each day, the fruits all appeared to rot before his eyes, the customers bargaining for foods that would poison them. A door closing would make him jump.
David had made an almost identical trip three years earlier, Mosheh reminded himself. At that time Mosheh had been nervous too, but also preoccupied with his new position with the vizier—and, he realized, their father had been alive to do the worrying for him. He remembered now how his father had spent the weeks and months between David’s letters in a strange cold daze, writing excessively long legal opinions and seldom speaking to visitors. If Mosheh spoke to him or asked him a question, he would invariably reply with some fatalistic aphorism about the inscrutable will of God. It was maddening, he remembered. David’s own little family had changed as well. During David’s last voyage, his little girl had been no more than a baby. Now Mosheh often overheard her assaulting her mother with questions. “Is Abba going to China? To Jerusalem? To Alexandria? To Fez?” Her questions made Mosheh uneasy. All were treacherous journeys, he knew, the imagined ones no more than the real. Misunderstanding her father’s promise to return in the new year, she became irrational as only a child could be, ridiculous.
“Maybe Abba is going away to visit all the days from last year,” Mosheh overheard her saying to her mother one evening. “Are the years that already happened in a place a person can go?”
“No, my love,” David’s wife had told her.
“Because we don’t have a map?” she asked.
“Because days that have passed belong to God,” her mother answered.
“Where does God keep them?” the girl asked.
Mosheh had wondered, then, if he should interrupt and answer her question. But the answer David’s wife gave surprised him, and silenced him.
“In a genizah,” she said softly. “But only God has the key.”
MANY MONTHS PASSED BEFORE the letter arrived. When it did, it was so worn and filthy that Mosheh could barely read it. But he laid it down on his writing desk, shaking out the sand between its pages, and before long he had memorized its every word.
To my beloved brother Mosheh, the Great Master in Israel, may God bless him, protect him, and carry him from strength to strength:
I write this letter from ‘Aydhab on the Gulf of Aden, hoping to reassure you that I am well, may God be praised, though I am distraught to think of how anxious you must be. I have been wandering the marketplace here aimlessly, without knowing where I am going or even why I went out at all, as I imagine how you must be worrying. I must offer my thanks to the master of the world that I may write you these words and soothe your troubled mind.
I write to tell you that if God wills it, I shall continue on to India. The market here in ‘Aydhab has been disappointing; no new imports have arrived in weeks due to unfavorable winds. Do not misunderstand what ‘Aydhab is. If it weren’t for the port, no one would ever have heard of the place. There isn’t a single structure here that isn’t made of dung. Nothing at all grows here, and the tribesmen who live here survive only on imported food, and by fleecing travelers and merchants like me. After all that I have endured, the sea voyage to India, God willing, should be a blessing.
The journey to this point has been an ordeal. The voyage up the Nile was, may God be praised, without incident, and we arrived at Qus just before Passover. The holy community at Qus welcomed us for the holiday, which we celebrated with great joy. After Passover, my travel companion Ma’ani and I joined
a caravan bound for Bir al-Bayda, where we planned to hire camels and purchase necessities for the trip to ‘Aydhab. It was there that Ma’ani suggested that it would be safer to travel on our own overland to the port of ‘Aydhab rather than with the larger caravan that was then departing from Qus. He had some idea in his mind about a pair of travelers being less appealing to bandits than an entire caravan of traders—that, and of course, some nonsense about what his favorite astrologer had read in the stars. I trusted him, which is the greatest evidence yet that I am nothing more than a fool.
I began to regret our choice to travel on our own at precisely the moment when it was too late. The terrain the camels had to cross was treacherous, and several of the oases where we hoped to rest along the way had dried up and disappeared. At one point Ma’ani fell ill. He was so weak by the time we reached the next oasis that I had to carry him to the well. By that time I was weak myself, and I feared that if we were to perish, God forbid, there would be no way for anyone to know what had become of us. The thought of the agony you would suffer as a result was more distressing than the thought of my own demise. With gratitude to the master of the world, I can report that I am now in the best of health, and that the scars of our journey linger only in my mind.
The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. When we arrived at ‘Aydhab, the caravan that Ma’ani had refused to join arrived at the city gates just behind us—and as Ma’ani had predicted, they had indeed been attacked by marauders during their journey. Not only their valuables but also much of their water was taken, and several of them had died of thirst. Atallah ibn al-Rashidi, whom you will remember as our friend al-Rashidi’s eldest, was among those robbed, though he survived. I hope you have received this letter before receiving any word from him; I was sure that you would recall how I was traveling with his party, and that when you heard of how their caravan was attacked you would panic. Please assure al-Rashidi’s family that he is alive, praise God. He intends to continue on to India despite his immense losses.
Ma’ani regards the attack on the larger caravan as evidence of the truth of astrology—and as a result I cannot abide Ma’ani’s company any longer. He has now attached himself to another party, and he and I will continue on to India on different ships. When I return to Fustat I will indulge myself by telling you all the details of the ordeal I suffered on the trip with him from Qus. I cannot but regard my survival as a miracle of divine providence, of God protecting me not merely from marauders, but from the consequences of my companion’s foolishness. It was nothing less than divine providence that preserved my life as we crossed the desert with no additional travelers to ensure our safety. I have now replaced Ma’ani with Mansur; you know the man and his discourse. Ma’ani has since boarded another ship bound for India. I plan to stay in ‘Aydhab to wait for better winds, because other ships that have left this week have foundered. I have already heard how our dear friend ibn Atiyyah lost all of his baggage with the exception of his money when his ship went down, and ibn al-Maqdisi suffered the same. Please inform their families that they survived.
Do not worry about me as I continue the journey, for he who saved me from the desert and its terrors will surely save me from the sea. Please also calm the heart of the little one, my dear wife, and her sister, without alarming them or making them despair. And most of all, please do not pray for me—because by the time you read this letter, nothing you can say to the master of the world will matter, and if a man cries out over what is past, his prayers are in vain. I embark on this voyage entirely on your behalf. Be steadfast, and God will compensate you and rejoin me with you.
By the time you read this I expect that I will already be in India, but it is God’s plan that will be accomplished. The ship will likely leave in the middle of Ramadan. I am writing this letter now on the 22nd of Iyyar, and the express caravan back to Qus is about to depart, so I must hurry to send it to you in time. Please remember that God is watching us, and knows what our future holds. I pray that God will see fit for us to embrace each other again.
David
Mosheh kept this letter in his pocket during the days that followed, touching its worn leather surface whenever he concealed his hand from the vizier. Feeling it against his fingers was like passing his hand through a flame.
With the vizier, there was nothing to discuss. The sultan had gone off on a campaign in Syria and likely wouldn’t return for another six months. In his absence, al-Qadi al-Fadil seemed to breathe a sigh of relief, and was only puzzled that his trusted physician appeared not to do the same. Ibn Jumay graced the court daily now, offering the vizier endless potions to soothe his ailing back. But the vizier noticed Mosheh’s silence, and at last asked him, on a private walk in the palace gardens, what was troubling him.
“The cure,” Mosheh admitted. “For the sultan. Such a thing does exist, it seems. My brother went to India to fetch it. Please don’t mention it to anyone.”
The vizier could not hide his joy. “His Majesty will be thrilled. You and I shall be protected forever, if God wills it.” He grinned, and stood taller.
Mosheh repeated, “If God wills it.”
The vizier noticed that Mosheh did not smile. “You are like the sultan in the Thousand and One Nights, while you wait for your brother to return,” he said, still grinning.
Mosheh could not hide his puzzlement. He had mastered the Arabic sciences, the anatomies, the words of the great philosophers. But no one had ever taught him stories—or as he thought of them, nonsense.
“The sultan who marries Scheherazade,” the vizier prompted. “The lady whom the sultan keeps alive night after night, to discover the endings of her stories. I think you are like the sultan, waiting for the conclusion, unable to sleep. The first story she tells the sultan is even about a merchant.”
Nonsense tired Mosheh, put his nerves on edge. But he had to indulge the vizier. “What sort of merchant?”
“One like your brother, who travels to faraway lands,” the vizier said. His delight was palpable, like a refreshing breeze. The vizier loved literature, reveled in pointless beauty. Mosheh respected him, and pretended to care. “In Scheherazade’s first story the merchant stops to rest along his journey, and as he eats dates, he throws the pits at the ground,” the vizier explained. “Then a demon pops out of the earth, claiming that one of the date pits killed his son. He demands the merchant’s blood in recompense, like an old heathen before the appearance of the Prophet, peace be upon him. But the merchant is a pious man, and he says”—and here the vizier recited from memory—“‘To God we belong and to God we return. There is no power and strength save in God, the Almighty, the Magnificent. If I killed your son, I did so by mistake. Please forgive me.’ But the demon doesn’t accept the Prophet’s teachings. Instead he insists, ‘By God, I must kill you, as you killed my son.’” The vizier paused.
“Does he kill him?” Mosheh asked, despite himself. To God we belong and to God we return, he thought. It was fatalistic, and in its twisted way, false. For if the man really had killed the demon’s son by accident, Mosheh thought, surely he was still responsible in some way, even if not to the point of a capital crime; at the very least, the man shouldn’t be able to get away with offering a perfunctory apology while actually blaming fate. He thought of the tractate of the Talmud he was condensing at home in Fustat, in which endless arguments raged about the degree of responsibility incurred when a person dug a pit into which another person fell. There was always some degree of responsibility, he understood. If something were to happen to David, he and David were both responsible, he most of all. Otherwise, what was the purpose of being alive?
The vizier laughed. “You’d have to read it, I suppose. It spins into more and more stories, until you feel like you’re being drawn into a kind of vortex. The sensation of reading it resembles drowning. It’s meant to show how the young lady keeps herself alive by repeating these tales, but in the process the sultan really does drown in them. He loses himself completely. Ther
e are limits to what a man’s mind can hold.”
Mosheh frowned, and decided not to reply. If there was a moral to this story, it escaped him.
He was amazed by how often he felt the urge to pray—specifically, to utter precisely the vain prayer that he himself had just identified in his current codex as apostasy. One who supplicates about a past event utters a vain prayer, he had written in his notes, quoting the Mishnah: If a man’s wife is pregnant and he says, “God grant that my wife bear a male child,” this is a vain prayer. If he is coming home from a journey and he hears cries of distress in the town and says, “God grant that this is not from my house,” this is a vain prayer. One did not pray for rain in the summertime; one did not pray for the impossible. David was surely already in India by now, Mosheh reminded himself, day after day. He read his brother’s letter again and again, knowing with perfect faith that there was nothing further to discuss with God.
ONE NIGHT IN FUSTAT, many weeks after David’s letter had arrived, a man appeared at Mosheh’s door, a man Mosheh did not recognize. The man waited silently in the courtyard behind dozens of petitioners, until he was the last visitor of the night.
The moon had already risen, thick and round, illuminating the courtyard in the darkness. Mosheh glanced up at it and noted that four months had passed now since David’s departure. It brought him comfort, each night, to look up at the moon and know that David in India was watching the same glowing celestial face. But now the silver light was shining on the stranger’s face: a man David’s age. When Mosheh invited him in, he seated him on a couch while he laid himself down on the couch opposite, too exhausted to stand or even sit as he waited for the man to describe his ailments.