Or perhaps even meant to destroy the Empire?
Strongbow placed a fourth and last coin on the table, surrounding the fish with gold. He raised his sundial and studied it.
At this moment in your life the Prophet has presented you with a choice.
He has? What is it?
Pocket this money, send my telegrams, order the fish cooked for your lunch and shoot any of your men who are insubordinate. Or conversely, refuse the money and I will shoot you and all your men, send the telegrams myself and cook the fish for my own lunch.
The tall Arab checked his sundial again. In fact this apparition from the desert was so unnaturally tall and self-assured the Turk wondered if he might not be the Prophet himself, in which case it made no difference what he decided. And although he was still afraid to send the telegrams on his military circuit, the eight large breasts of Maria Theresa made a handsome sum of money.
Time, said the apparition, startling the Turk out of his thoughts. Instantly he reached into his night table for pen and paper.
Allah must have willed it, he sighed.
Indeed it seems likely, murmured Strongbow, who had begun printing rapidly in four-letter groups.
Naturally Strongbow’s codes were unbreakable and could only be read by his London solicitor, who had certain sealed envelopes locked in his safe to be used for deciphering when so directed.
The first telegram instructed the solicitor to sell the Strongbow estate in Dorset and the numerous holdings that went with it. He was also to liquidate all the other Strong-bow assets scattered throughout the industrial north and Ireland and Scotland and Wales, using hundreds of intermediaries so the enormity of these financial transactions would remain unsuspected.
The huge sums of money accruing from the sales were then to be forwarded in a devious manner to banks in Prague for eventual deposit in a Turkish consortium. Only when every shilling of the Strongbow fortune was safely out of England was the solicitor to decipher the second telegram that had been sent from Tiberias.
Whereas the first telegram had been long and detailed, the second was brief. And although Strongbow refused to address it properly, this second telegram was directed to Queen Victoria.
In it, citing his own family as an example, Strongbow noted that the quality of sexual life in England had deteriorated disastrously over the last seven hundred years. He admitted the queen was probably incompetent to do anything about it, but at the same time he said his self-respect would no longer allow him to participate in such a dreary decline.
Therefore he was renouncing his citizenship. Never again would he set foot west of the Red Sea. He then concluded with an array of scabrous allegations that surpassed even the obscenities found in Levantine Sex.
MADAME, YOU ARE A SMALL AND SMUG MOTHER RULING A SMALL AND SMUG COUNTRY. CERTAINLY GOD MADE YOU BOTH SMALL, BUT WHOM ARE WE TO BLAME FOR THE SMUGNESS?
IT WOULDN’T SURPRISE ME IF YOUR NAME IN THE FUTURE BECAME SYNONYMOUS WITH UGLY CLUTTER AND DARK PONDEROUS FURNITURE AND HIDDEN EVIL THOUGHTS, WITH ARROGANT POMPOSITY AND CHILD PROSTITUTION AND A WHOLE HOST OF OTHER GROSS PERVERSIONS.
IN SHORT, MADAME, YOUR NAME WILL BE USED TO DESIGNATE THE WORST SORT OF SECRET SEXUAL DISEASE, A PRIM HYPOCRISY INCOMPARABLY RANK BENEATH ITS HEAVY LAVENDER SCENT.
The address on the telegram was Hanover, England. It was signed Plantagenet, Arabia.
Thus the former deaf boy, lance in hand, who had once cleared his family manor of six hundred and fifty years of frivolous history, now felt he had found his vocation at last. The huge magnifying glass and bronze sundial were to be left behind. At the age of sixty he had decided to become a hakïm or healer curing the poor in the desert.
Of course he had no way of knowing that the influx of his immense fortune into Constantinople, nominal ruler of the desert in his day but already corrupt beyond hope, would ineluctably cause repercussions far beyond that city, until by the end of the nineteenth century not only the desert but the entire Middle East would in fact be the property of one man, a lean barefoot giant who spoke humbly as an Arab and was occasionally humiliated as a Jew, who was by then both an Arab and a Jew, an indistinguishable Semite living in a ragged opensided tent tending his sheep.
From Galilee he walked to Constantinople and began to set up the banks and concessions and subsidiaries that would allow his fortune to run without him. One day he was a Persian potentate, the next an Egyptian emir, the third a Baghdad banker.
He obtained a controlling interest in the posts and telegraph system, bought up all government bonds and issued new ones, became the secret paymaster of the Turkish army and navy, bribed the descendants of the Janissaries, consulted with pashas and ministers and laid aside trust funds for their grandsons, acquired rights to the wells in Mecca and all wells on all routes leading to Mecca, bought two hundred of the existing two hundred and forty-four industrial enterprises in the Turkish realm, dismissed and reappointed the Armenian and Greek and Latin Greek and Syrian Greek patriarchs in Jerusalem and the Coptic patriarch in Alexandria, leased four thousand kilometers of railway lines, established dowries for the daughters of the principal landowners between the Persian Gulf and the Anatolian highlands, refurbished the gold mosaics and polychrome marbles of Santa Sophia, so that by the time he was ready to leave the city anyone who could ever be in a position of power in that part of the world was under his control.
Although no one knew it, he had bought the Ottoman Empire.
Nor did anyone know he had already assured the destruction of the British Empire by sending it into a slow decline from which it could never recover. Some might date the decline from the day when his barbaric caravan had disembarked at Venice with its monstrous load of Eastern lore. Or a dozen years earlier when he had first sat down on the giant stone scarab in Jerusalem to expound that ruinous lore. Or even many years before that when he had hinted in a monograph on flowers that Englishwomen were known to sweat in the Levant.
But all these dates were too recent. One hundred years was a more likely span for the disintegration of a great empire, so probably the irrevocable course had been set on that warm Cairo night in 1840 when a laughing naked young Strongbow had turned his back on the reception celebrating Queen Victoria’s twenty-first birthday and leapt over a garden wall to begin his haj.
And now forty years later it was a rainy October afternoon when a tall gaunt man solemnly concluded his business in Constantinople and walked to a deserted stretch of the Bosporus, saw the clouds part and stood in a dripping olive grove watching the sun sink over Europe, then ceremoniously removed the rings and jeweled sandals and filigreed headgear of his last disguise, threw them into the passing waters and climbed back through the gnarled grove to disappear forever, barefoot now and wearing only a torn cloak, without even a bundle to carry, making his way south toward the Holy Land and perhaps beyond.
No one suspected the loss but Strongbow had taken far more than a great fortune away from Europe. He had also taken an irreplaceable vision that saw new worlds and sought them, a spirit that fed itself on the raw salads of mirages.
Never again would the West send out another Strongbow. After him there would be delegations and commissions, engineers and army garrisons, circulating judicial bodies and stray wanderers on camelback. These events were still to come but the greatest of all conquests was over, the expedition that could only be launched by one man from the vast legions he found in his heart.
As a destitute hakïm he no longer carried calomel or quinine or rhubarb grains. Now he cured solely through hypnotism.
His usual practice was to seat himself behind his patients so he couldn’t see their lips and read the words they thought they were saying, thus freeing himself to use his knowledge of the desert to listen to their true feelings. After a time he told the man or woman to turn and face him.
By then the patient was thoroughly accustomed to an empty vista and the sudden confrontation with the hakim’s huge immobile presence, especially his gaze, was overwhe
lming. Powerful, musing, contemplative, the great eyes bore down upon the patient, who was immediately under their control.
The hakïm said nothing in words. With his eyes he reshaped and repeopled the barren desert from the rich landscape of his patient’s mind, detecting distant drifts of sand and adjusting veils, adjusting costumes and revisiting forgotten corners, sampling the sound of the wind and sipping water from tiny wells.
As a botanist might, he planted seeds and nursed the seedlings into flowers. Gently he blew the flowers to and fro until their contours shimmered in the sun. Steadily he gauged the sweep of the horizons.
The eyes spoke a final time and the patient awoke from the trance. The hakïm told him to come again in a day or a week, and if the asthma or astigmatism hadn’t improved by then he would suggest they sit together once more staring at the desert.
At the same time the hakïm took the opportunity to explore a more personal question. Ever since he had left Jerusalem he had pondered deeply that obscure conversation in archaic languages between a mole and a hermit outside a cave on Mt Sinai. And having considered it carefully, he had come to believe that an astounding transformation had indeed occurred in that tiny cave, and that the Bible accepted as the oldest in the world was nothing more than a forgery of stupendous proportions.
Of course he had no way of knowing what was in the real Sinai Bible, he could only guess at its contents. Yet for some reason he was convinced it held the secret to his own life. A strange idea came to him then and he began asking his patients the questions he had been asking himself for so long.
Have you heard of a mysterious lost book in which all things are written? A book that is circular and unchronicled and calmly contradictory, suggesting infinity?
His patients stirred in the depths of their hypnotic trances. Sometimes they were slow to answer but the answers seemed always the same. They thought they had heard of the book. Parts of it might have been read to them when they were children.
The hakïm went on with his cures until the end of the day, when he sat alone and wondered at the sameness of these replies. Since so many people knew of the lost book, could it be they were all secret contributors to it? That the lost original could thus be retrieved only by probing the hypnotic trances of everyone on earth?
The hakïm reeled under the weight of this revelation. The truth was staggering, the task without hope. For the first, time in his life he felt helpless.
Bleakly he recalled his decades of ceaseless wandering through tides of sand in the wake of the moon in search of a holy place once mentioned by Father Yakouba. The memory of that serene and gentle dwarf now filled him with a terrible sadness, for his haj was over and he knew he hadn’t found his holy place. Why had he failed? Where were the footprints in the sky?
Enormous and solitary in the twilight, the greatest explorer of his age sank to his knees and gazed slowly around at the shadows, lost and knowing he was lost, remaining there until a young man approached him at dawn.
O revered hakïm?
Yes, my child.
I am sick and weary.
Yes, my child.
Can you help me, as they say you can?
Yes. Sit now and turn your back and fix your eyes on that distant eagle as he swoops and soars in the first light of day living a thousand years. Are we able to follow such paths? Could it be his flight traces the journey of the Prophet, the actual footsteps a man takes from the day of his birth to the day of his death? The swirls of the Koran shape and unshape themselves as do the waves in the desert and yes the oasis may be small. But yes, we will find it.
One afternoon a shepherd watched the hakïm healing on a hillside in the Yemen and came to him when he was finished. He was a small plump man given to continual smiles who waddled more than walked. The waddle carried him along the hillside where he stood dancing from one leg to the other.
Salaam aleikoum, respected hakïm. And who might you be?
Aleikoum es-salaam, brother. A man astray.
Ah but we’re all astray, yet isn’t it also written that each man has an appointed place?
It is, and also that man knows not in what country he must die. Now what is it that ails you, brother?
So businesslike, hakïm, but you see it’s not me. I only have the usual aches to be cured when that day arrives. It’s you I’ve come to talk about.
Me, brother?
Yes. You’re ailing and no one likes to see a kindly man ail.
As you said, when that day arrives.
No no, hakïm, I didn’t mean that at all. But won’t you come to my tent for coffee? The day’s over and it’s time to leave the dust. Won’t you come along now? Come.
The little man tugged the hakïm’s sleeve and when the hakïm rose the little man laughed loudly.
What is it?
Why the two of us, don’t you see? When you were sitting I was as tall as you but now suddenly I’m only half as tall. What’s to be done? Must a hakïm always sit while a poor shepherd always stands? A marvel, that’s what it is.
What?
His variety, His gifts. But come, brother, as you call me, the day’s over and there’s good coffee to drink. Yes come at once. Ya’qub is my name, come.
He laughed again and they started off, the tall gaunt hakïm dignified despite his rags, the short plump shepherd humming happily as he skipped along trying to match the solemn strides of the man he had come to lead home.
The hakïm arranged his rags, Ya’qub made coffee. And now the little man’s face was serious and his voice urgent.
I’ve watched you curing the sick with your eyes, hakïm, and it’s good work you do. But don’t you know your own eyes can be read as well? They can and today I read them. Would it be wrong to say you’ve traveled so much you’ve seen everything?
It may be so.
And that these things you’ve seen and done no longer interest you?
That’s true.
Yes of course, because you’re growing old like me. But we’re not really that old, hakïm, only sixty and a little more, not much of anything. And isn’t it also true you’re very rich? Not at all the poor man you appear to be?
How’s that, brother?
Here I mean, in your heart, because you’ve seen so much. Isn’t it true you’re one of the richest men in the world? Perhaps the richest of all?
It may be.
No no, sadly for you it isn’t true. You certainly should be but you’re not at all. And when you said before you’d seen everything, that wasn’t true either. You’re a good man and kind but a sickness has come to you in the second half of your life.
I grow old, that’s all.
No no it’s not age, it’s something else. With all your travels and your wisdom don’t you know it? Don’t you see it with those powerful eyes of yours, you who see so much in everyone else? Well if you don’t I’ll have to tell you. It’s loneliness, hakïm, that’s your sickness. You’re all alone. Haven’t you ever loved a woman and had a child?
The first but not the second.
You mean you have loved a woman?
Yes.
But it was long ago in some faraway place?
Yes.
But how long ago, simply years and years? A very long time?
If forty years is a long time, yes.
And this faraway place, would it be strange to a poor shepherd from the Yemen?
It might be strange, yes.
You mean it has palaces and fountains and elephants? These and other wonders without count? All that and more? What could such a place be called?
Persia.
The little man clapped his hands and now all the gravity was gone from his face. He laughed and hugged himself.
Oh I’ve heard of it, hakïm, I’ve certainly heard of Persia with its elephants and fountains and palaces but I’ve never known anyone who’s been there. So won’t you tell me all about it? About the woman too? It’s good for men of our years to recall love, nothing is better save to have that lov
e still. So please tell me everything, hakïm. This is rich news you bring to my hillside.
Yes yes, he whispered, jumping to his feet and scurrying around the tent searching in vain for more coffee to boil, bumping into a lamp in his haste and knocking it over, laughing at the lamp and bumping into the tent poles and laughing at them, finding coffee at last and seating himself with great pleasure, rocking and smiling and wrapping his stubby arms around his body as if to feel the joy that would be his with a story of love and Persia.
The tale Ya’qub heard wasn’t at all what he had expected. The hakïm began slowly, for once unsure what he was going to say, not even sure why he was telling this stranger about the gentle Persian girl he had once known for a few weeks, no more, before she died in an epidemic and he too had fallen ill and been partially blind for a time, memorizing the Koran in his sadness and becoming a Master Sufi before moving on to encompass the rituals of a thousand tribes.
As Ya’qub listened to this tall gaunt man he realized he wasn’t merely a hakïm no matter how good and powerful, but a wanderer who had been many men in many places, a figure disguised in many robes, truly a vast and changeable spirit.
A genie?
Yes a genie, but that was before. Now he was a man with a sickness.
Ya’qub listened to his guest and watched his eyes. He nodded when the hakïm ended.
You’re deaf?
Yes.
No matter. Anyone can be deaf or something else and all men are.
Only one other person has ever guessed that.
And he heard it too, just as I did, and of course his name was also Ya’qub, wasn’t it?
Yes, but why?
But why and why? repeated Ya’qub happily. How could it be otherwise? When things are a certain way that’s the way they have to be. But you’re smiling now, hakïm, and why is that? How can a man who’s done nothing and been nowhere make you smile? And there was more to your wandering than just wandering, wasn’t there? All that time when you were pretending to be on a haj you were really looking for a lost book, isn’t it so? The story of the gentle Persian girl was in it but also other things and that’s why you picked up so many jokes and riddles and scraps of rhymes in so many holy places. Admit it, because you thought they were also part of the book.
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