The Sacred River

by Wendy Wallace

  “Je ne comprends pas,” Yael said, straightening up. “Ave Maria. Mazel tov. God bless you and God bless your daughter.”

  The woman took up the bag, balanced it on her head, the weight of the beans drooping down on each side of her face, and left. Um Fatima had gone already.

  They had run out of oil, sugar, tea, onions, lentils. Soap. She would go to the market in the morning with Suraya. Alone in the room, Yael sat at the table and wrote a shopping list. Retrieving the donations from the congregation, from the back of the drawer, emptying the heavy mass of coins into her Gladstone bag, she raised her nose in the air and sniffed. Something was burning that was not meant for burning. Yael closed the drawer and let herself out. Locking the door behind her, she set off for home.

  • • •

  Louisa sat on one of the two striped couches in the drawing room of the villa, looking out of the open French doors at the garden beyond. The trunks were packed and locked, sitting by the front door. She and Harriet had eaten lunch together, after Harriet returned from church. Harriet had been subdued during the meal, as if preoccupied. She’d been to Yael’s church with her and said goodbye to her aunt there. Louisa assumed she was sorry to leave her. She’d been sorry herself, felt a wrench at parting from her sister-in-law that she would have believed impossible. It felt wrong to be leaving without Yael, but she had been resolute. After their conversation in the garden, Louisa had not tried anymore to persuade her.

  It was four in the afternoon. Mustapha had gone out to get a cab to take them to the harbor; the boat sailed first thing in the morning and the passengers had to embark before nightfall. Sitting on the couch, her handbag on her lap, Louisa felt at peace. There was nothing to do but wait for Mustapha’s return, take the carriage to the harbor, then embark on one of the small boats that would carry them out to the steamer. Her death would come when it came. She prayed that she would be spared to see Blundell once more, to look on his face, feel his arms around her.

  She sighed. Harriet was so quiet.

  “Did you have enough lunch, Harriet?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “Is everything packed?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  Harriet was wearing the peat-brown travel skirt that she had worn for the journey out. She had washed her hair and been sitting in the sun in the garden, allowing it to dry. For once, Harriet had requested Louisa to brush it for her, as she used to when she was a little girl. Louisa had been glad to oblige, had enjoyed standing behind Harriet, drawing the brush through her soft hair, arranging it in a plait that ran down her back and fell on her newly laundered white cotton shirt. Harriet wore the orange scarf over her shoulders and, at her neck, the brooch that Anna had sent from India, the garnet fruits hanging from the branches of the silver tree. Her pocket with her book in it was tied around her waist. Despite her eccentric costume, Harriet looked well, in better health than Louisa had seen her for many years. Louisa took comfort from that. It was what she had wanted. It was what they had come to Egypt for.

  “I can smell burning,” Harriet said.

  Louisa sniffed the air. Laid over the lingering odor of the fried fish they’d eaten at lunchtime was the harsh smell of smoke. “Someone having a bonfire, I expect,” she said.

  Mustapha tapped on the door and entered the room.

  “Is the cab out—”

  Louisa stopped and stared at the housekeeper in astonishment. In the dim golden light that found its way through the curtains, he stood very straight before them. He was dressed in his customary long white robe, his feet were as usual bare, and at his waist was a long curved sword, sheathed in leather. She wondered for a moment if he intended to murder them.

  “What is it, Mustapha? Is the cab outside?”

  “Madame, there is trouble in the town. It is better to stay here.”

  “The steamer leaves tomorrow. I have the tickets.” Louisa reached into her bag, produced an envelope, and held it in the air. “We must go now.”

  “No ships can leave tomorrow. You must hide.”

  Outside, the sound of gunfire ripped through the air, the shots crowding impatiently into the atmosphere, tripping over each other.

  Louisa rose from the sofa. “Whatever can be happening?”

  The air in the room thickened to a haze and Harriet took Louisa’s arm.

  “Don’t be alarmed, Mother. What kind of trouble is it, Mustapha?” she said.

  “Bad trouble.” Mustapha held open the door, instructed them with a movement of his head to pass through it.

  “Come, Mother.”

  Harriet pulled Louisa out of the room. They hurried behind Mustapha through the kitchen, out the back door, and through the mud yard where he and his family lived. Children’s clothes hung from the branches of the tree in the middle and chickens scratched in the dust. Mustapha held open the curtain at the doorway to the apartment.

  “No, Harriet,” Louisa whispered. “I cannot go in there.”

  “Go on, Mother. Quickly.”

  Harriet gave her a push and Louisa stepped over the threshold. In the dimness, Suraya rose from a stool, laid down a new baby. She wiped her right hand on her robe and extended it to Louisa.

  “Ahlan wa sahlan,” she said. “Welcome.”

  Straightening the cover on a low wood-framed bed, smoothing the pillows on it, she gestured for them to be seated. Louisa looked around her at smoke-blackened mud walls, a collection of earthenware jars on an open shelf, a copper kettle on a fire. She turned to Harriet as the commotion beyond the walls grew louder. Mustapha appeared again at the door and said something in Arabic to Suraya, his voice low and urgent. He let the curtain drop again. Underneath it, Louisa could see his feet walking across the yard among the fowls.

  Gunfire sounded again, sharp, so close it might have come from the garden. Suraya gestured urgently and wordlessly that they should hide under the bed.

  Harriet pushed Louisa under the bed, then crawled in behind her. They lay side by side underneath the sagging rope weave, the mud floor hard against Louisa’s hips and shoulders. It was hot in the small room, and airless. Louisa’s body was rigid. She had believed her life would simply expire, like a clock that ceased to tick. She had not imagined she would die like this. By violence. She felt a mortal fear that was new to her and whimpered.

  Harriet took hold of Louisa’s hand. “No one will look for us here,” she whispered. “If they do, they won’t find us. Don’t be afraid, Mother.”

  “If only Yael were with us,” Louisa whispered back.

  “She will be all right, Mother. She will remain at the clinic until it passes.”

  “I should feel so much easier if she were with us.”

  SIXTY

  The streets of the old city teemed with people. Not people, Yael corrected herself. Men. Men and boys. Women and small children were nowhere to be seen. The doors of the narrow houses were closed, the windows shuttered, and the latticed, overhanging galleries dark with watchers.

  Despite the crowds, their insistent movement in one direction, like a river, there was a stillness and a sense of concentration, of purpose, that was alien here. No laughter. The silence, punctuated by shouts of Allahu akbar, God is great, didn’t match the volume of people. It was eerie, despite the bright sunshine. God is great, Yael repeated to herself, trying to ignore the prickle of fear in her spine. She had the same disturbed feeling as when she had seen the brown cloud of the dust storm approaching, of something impending, a natural force.

  The crowd was moving as one, a shoal of men and boys surging through the narrow alleys. Some had wooden staffs in their hands, or curved, sheathed knives at their waists. Boys stooped to wrench long-anchored stones from the dust; one child of six or seven ran past Yael with a stick in each hand. She recognized him from the clinic. He had come several times with his mother and a line of little sisters. Yael had washed his face her
self.

  She called to the boy. “Go home,” she said, her voice soft. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  The boy turned a pair of lustrous eyes on her. Stared for a moment, then darted off.

  “It’s not safe,” she called after him.

  Approaching the main path leading to Bab el Bahr, the Gate of the Sea, the mood altered. Shouts and cries rose, joined with more distant sounds of firecrackers and again the rumble that sounded like thunder. The crowd surged onward, moving rapidly through the dust and flattened stalks of straw, over cobbles blunted and polished by the tread of feet, toward the Frank quarter. Yael was forced almost to run to keep pace. Smoke was drifting overhead and the sun beat strongly. The air was still and stifling. Sweat poured down her forehead and made her eyes sting; the inside of her bodice clung damply to her skin.

  As they converged on the gate, the tide slowed. Yael wiped her face with her handkerchief. She was almost home. There had been nothing to worry about. She took a deep breath as the people pushed and jostled from behind; the press of bodies grew tighter and then the pressure eased as the men in front of her streamed under the old stone archway; she followed them, past iron-studded doors, down the hill, into the broad streets and tall solidity of the Frank quarter.

  Stumbling on, still trying to keep pace, afraid of falling and disappearing under a thousand feet, Yael gasped aloud. The windows of Otto Huber’s apothecary had been smashed and men were crowding inside, grabbing at tins and packets, toppling the stoppered glass jars. She heard shouting, a frightened European voice, and sent up a prayer that the voice was not that of dear Mr. Huber, who had ceased to charge her for the zinc and alum powders, who had advised her so patiently on trachoma.

  Many of the shopwindows were shattered. Poor-looking, barefooted men were clutching new leather shoes to their chests; teenage boys ran down the street with bottles of wine and whisky in their hands. The sound of the crowd had altered to something deeper and angrier, more discordant. Some were trying to prevent the looting, others intent on breaking into the shops of the Greek and Turkish merchants.

  As the Place des Consuls came into view, Yael’s heart missed a beat.

  “Oh, Lord,” she said. “Oh, dear Lord.”

  One of the elegant white buildings was ablaze. Dense black clouds billowed from between the charred roof beams; plumes of thinner smoke poured out of broken windows, their lace curtains aflame. The little wooden kiosk in the middle of the square, where the father and son sold coffee and hard biscuits, was reduced to a charred heap, with two smoke-blackened iron chairs still arranged around a wrought-iron table.

  The square was empty of its usual inhabitants. No opulent closed carriages rattled through the square with liveried footmen running in front to clear the passage. No fashionable women strolled arm in arm under the jacaranda trees. The Arab quarter had come to the Frank quarter. The fellaheen, in their ragged navy robes, their turbaned heads, were massed in front of a wide building on the south side of the square, which was guarded by spiked iron railings, a pair of stone lions. A white hand waved a white flag from a first-floor window and disappeared.

  Yael had felt as if she were experiencing the scene in perfect silence. She was wrong, she realized, coming back to her senses. The noise was increasing. Her ears were ringing, half deafened with chants, shouts, and a roaring whose source she still could not fathom, that sounded now like the sea but was not the sea. It was the sound of rage, she understood. Her legs felt weak. She would have fallen, if it were not for the crush.

  “Think,” she said under her breath. “Please, Lord, help me to think.”

  She wasn’t far from the villa. She could reach it, if she could get through to the edge of the crowd. Muttering English apologies, praying that Harriet and Louisa were safely on board the ship, she began to inch her way among the people. Her face streamed as she pushed her way through, ignoring muttered words and hostile glances. An elbow in her ribs. A hand that grasped her flesh through her petticoats. As her eyes roved over the heads and faces, searching for the edge of the crowd, Yael tripped. Putting out her hands to save herself, she stumbled into a youth.

  “Pardon me,” she said. “I am so terribly sorry.”

  He wasn’t more than fifteen. A boy, without a beard. His eyes were bloodshot and his face thin and starved. As he raised his arm in the air, a man stepped in front of her. Yael heard him invoking the Prophet by his title, Rabir. The youth looked past the man at Yael and spat on the ground.

  Although the burning sun had not dimmed, Yael felt cold, the dampness of her dress chilly and clinging. She stood still, gripping her handbag to her chest. As she did so, another man, dressed in a long white robe that was starched and pressed, prodded her arm. His sharp fingers pierced her flesh painfully through her sleeve. He grabbed at the bag, pulled it open, and the collection coins rained to the ground.

  “Thief,” he shouted, opening the bag wide, shaking out the rest of the money.

  “No, sir,” she protested. “That is not right—”

  The cry was taken up by others. They pressed around her, shouting into her face, their breath hot with fury. “Thief. Thief. Thief.”

  Yael turned in a circle, trying to speak, explain. Her mouth was open but no words came. Hands were claiming her, invading her. The bag fell to the ground. Her black umbrella was seized from her hand. As her shawl was dragged from her shoulders, she felt herself falling; she flailed with her hands for help that didn’t come, and hit the ground painfully. Trying to right herself, get back to her feet, she felt a kick in her side and heard a tearing of cloth as a hand ripped open the bodice of her dress. One of her shoes was gone.

  On her knees, her arms clutched over her breasts, she looked up and saw a familiar face. A beard stained orange; eyes darkened with kohl. Eyes that looked at her. Relief flooded through her. I am saved, she said to herself. The Lord has saved me.

  “Sheikh,” she called, her voice high and feeble. “Sheikh Hamada.”

  He waded through the press of bodies toward her, his stick lifted in the air. The youths shrank away, standing back in a circle as he arrived in front of her. The sheikh looked at Yael with an expression that was not what she had anticipated. That was not different from the expression of the men who did not know her.

  “Help me, Sheikh,” she whispered. “In the name of your God and mine.”

  He looked away, then spoke in Arabic, deliberate and brief, his voice harsh. The youths pressed forward and Sheikh Hamada turned his back as Yael lost her footing for the second time and fell into a sea of hands.

  Yael found she was walking naked through the grounds of her childhood home. It was autumn and through the trees she caught a silver glimpse of water, moved toward it on bare feet over a soft, undone jigsaw puzzle of oak leaves. The ground under her feet made it possible to walk, she understood for the first time. It was not the movement of her legs that constituted walking, it was the stillness of the spinning earth rising to meet them.

  Broken sunlight lay in shards over the surface of the lake, rising and glinting off the branches of the old trees that abided by the edges of the water, their roots mingled in it, their crowns inclined toward its opaque blackness.

  Noise hit her, a tide of sound that she could not read, translate. The wind in the trees, she told herself. Thunder and the cracking of a mighty oak, its trunk rent by lightning end to end. Reaching the edge of the water, she continued, feeling the coldness introduce itself to her feet, her ankles, sensing it and not sensing it, detached, unsure if the water cooled her or if she warmed the water.

  This was truth. This cold was truth. Truth was not found in language, in human voices, not in prayer or song. Truth was in the water, its cold embrace. She kept on, the mud soft between her toes, the ducks incurious around her. Oak leaves were here too, floating on their backs, lightly, strangers on the water, bobbing with the borrowed movement of the ripples. She was in deep
now, the water beginning to lift and carry her, her feet rising from the mud, floating like the leaves of lilies. She could see her toes, white, above the surface. She rested her head back and a fleeting, partial apprehension of peace made itself known to her, like a promise, a whisper, a glimpse through a veil of fog or smoke.

  Smoke. The vision was lost. Something hard and heavy struck her head. And another. The cool water turned to warmth, trickling thick and slow on her face; the roaring filled her ears. Rocks, the rocks. Hitting her skull, her curled back, her fingers. Something slicing, carving. Blood pooling and darkening in the dust where she lay. She cast about for help. Not with her hands, which were useless now, immobile. She cast about within and caught the silver glint again through the heavy-limbed trees.

  Yael dipped her face forward into the cold blackness that rose to meet her as the birds, the whole chattering world, fell silent. There was stillness over the earth. It was not the lake of her childhood that was the dream, she understood with a sweet, sharp current of regret. It was the life that followed it, that had patiently and on a circuitous path led her back. The waters had been waiting for her. She was released from the dream. She had woken. Jesus was near, perched on a low, overhanging branch, his black wings spread out to dry, his hungry beak pointing the way to heaven. In the place where he had pierced it for the sake of his young, his feathered breast bled.

  She opened her eyes to a mass of faces, the faces of the saints, a shard of brilliant blue sky, and closed them again.

  “Hallelujah,” she cried, throwing back her head, opening wide her own beak, flexing the muscles of her gray wings, and feeling herself lift, weightless, soaring toward the heavens. “Agnus Dei. Resurgam.”

  SIXTY-ONE

  Harriet peered through black gauze as the cart moved past the high padlocked gates of the houses and villas in the Frank quarter. The watchmen’s huts were abandoned, the sleeping mats empty. The sun was still below the horizon, the sky streaked with crimson and purple. The voice of a muezzin cut into the air from somewhere close by. Pulling the black muslin folds of Suraya’s veil more closely around her, Harriet looked straight ahead, as Mustapha had instructed.