Sinai Tapestry

by Edward Whittemore

  O’Sullivan Beare nodded solemnly as if weighing this information. It might explain the moon and lunacy but not much else.

  I’ve heard that saying, he shouted, but does it apply to a life as long as yours? I mean if you’ve lived three thousand years how can so few people have known you?

  Not quite three thousand, whispered Haj Harun. I’m sixteen years short of that.

  All right, not quite three thousand. Now who are these dozen people? Emirs and patriarchs? Chief rabbis? Princes of the church? People like that?

  Oh no, whispered Haj Harun.

  Well who?

  Do you remember that man who walks back and forth on the top of the steps that lead down to the crypt in the church?

  The Church of the Holy Sepulchre? The one who never stops? The one who’s always muttering to himself? The man you said has been doing that for the last two thousand years?

  Yes that’s him. Well he believes me. Or at least he didn’t beat me when I told him about it.

  Did he stop walking back and forth?

  No.

  Stop muttering to himself?

  No.

  Did he even look at you?

  Haj Harun sighed. No.

  All right, who else then?

  There was a cobbler once. I went into his cubbyhole and told him about it and he didn’t beat me either.

  Where was that?

  Somewhere in the Old City.

  Where?

  I can’t quite recall.

  When?

  I don’t remember.

  Who else?

  I can’t think of anyone else but it may come to me.

  Beautiful, thought the Irishman, just no competition at all. The map’s there for the taking.

  By Jaysus is that the truth? he shouted.

  Oh God the truth, moaned Haj Harun as the boat shot down and down, as a monstrous wave leapt into the sky and he turned his head to receive the vicious blow on his other cheek.

  The day they docked in Constantinople the stomach of the stone scarab was tightly packed with dismantled Czech rifles. The return voyage was just as rough and by the time they arrived Haj Harun had gone without food for three weeks. In Jaffa the heavy scarab was lowered off the boat into a cart. There was little traffic on the pier and the English customs official seemed to want to pass the time.

  Couldn’t make a sale up there?

  Not offered enough this trip but next time we’ll make it.

  The official was staring at Haj Harun, at the rusting helmet that kept crashing down on his nose. The old man was walking in circles, anxious to finish the last stage of the journey.

  Who is he? whispered the official. I mean who does he think he is?

  He doesn’t think, he knows. He’s the last King of Jerusalem.

  The what?

  That’s right.

  And the scarab’s his?

  Yes.

  Where’d he get it?

  From the former king.

  And when was that?

  The twelfth century I think. He’s not too good on dates, uniforms either.

  The official smiled and picked up his pen.

  Name?

  MacMael n mBo, baking priest.

  Permanent place of residence, Mr. Priest?

  The Home for Crimean War Heroes, Jerusalem.

  Nationality?

  Crimean.

  Status of traveler?

  Retired war hero.

  Present occupation?

  Keeper of the royal scarab, second class.

  The customs official smiled but O’Sullivan Beare’s face was serious. He was having difficulty holding Haj Harun, who seemed ready to walk off the side of the pier at any moment.

  Expect you’ll be seeing a promotion soon?

  Within the decade probably.

  Fine. Now just point the old man in this direction so I can ask him a question or two.

  I wouldn’t, not if you want to keep your sanity.

  The official laughed.

  Name? Residence? Profession?

  Haj Harun muttered his name, then repeated Jerusalem three or four times.

  How’s that? Profession?

  Jerusalem, said Haj Harun.

  That’s a profession?

  For him it is.

  Now listen, just have him tell me something he’s done in his life. Anything at all, I don’t care, I just want to fill out this form.

  Go ahead and tell him then, said Joe.

  Indeed I will, answered Haj Harun. Once I wrote the Sinai Bible.

  The what?

  The Bible. I’m sure you’ve heard of it.

  Well that’s just lovely. And what, my friend, is the Sinai Bible?

  The original Bible, whispered Joe. I mean it’s the oldest one that’s ever been found only now it’s lost again. He misplaced it.

  The customs official swore.

  Who misplaced it?

  This Arab here called Aaron. The man who wrote it.

  Get your arses off my pier, shouted the official.

  O’Sullivan Beare nodded pleasantly. He bent and heaved, Haj Harun broke into a wheezing cough. Pushing and pulling they wheeled the heavy cart with its secret load of weapons down the quay, gathered momentum midway and had to run to keep up as the giant stone beetle went hurtling into the Holy Land.

  The next day they were trudging up the heights toward Jerusalem in a cloudbank. They climbed in silence beside the cart, Joe prodding the donkey and Haj Harun struggling along behind. Toward the end of the afternoon Haj Harun spoke for the first time.

  It’s my last trip.

  Why this sentiment?

  No food in three weeks. I’m sick.

  And Sinbad and all the voyages he made? You can’t forget that can you and just give up?

  No I guess I can’t. It’s true there’s much to bear and we have to keep trying.

  His chin fell to his chest, slamming the helmet into his nose. There was little light from the overcast sky and his eyes were watering as usual so he was having trouble finding the path. For several hours he had been straying off into the wastes stumbling over rocks and bushes. His hands were scratched and cut, he limped from a bruised knee on one leg and a sprained ankle on the other. Blood oozed out of a jagged gash in his cheek.

  The cold wind ripped at them. Joe plodded along with his head down. All at once there was a loud crash. The donkey stopped, Joe went back down the path to see what had happened.

  Haj Harun lay stretched on the ground on his face next to a tall narrow boulder. He had walked over it blindly, one foot on each side, or rather he would have walked over it if the boulder hadn’t been waist-high. The rock had smashed into his groin tearing muscles and cracking bones. He had lost his balance and fallen on his head twisting a leg as he went down. Only his helmet, newly dented down the middle, had saved him from crushing his skull.

  Joe rolled him over. One leg looked broken and the entire pelvic region was soaked in blood. He groaned and lay still.

  That’s it, I can’t take any more, you might as well go on without me.

  The leg?

  Numb, it won’t move, I can’t move, my insides are all torn apart. For centuries I’ve been trying to do it, trying to go on, but this time it’s over, I’m finished and I know it. I’m too old and tired, just a miserable sack of pains, nothing but aches and more aches, no I can never move again. Oh I know you thought you could help and you did but I’m beyond helping now, I’ve reached the very end. There’s a limit after all, sadly there is. So take the kingdom, Prester John, it’s yours, and take the scarab and the safe and the sundial, they’re yours too. You know, I used to think I’d have no regrets when the end came but now I know I’m no match for Sinbad and all those other people I dreamed about, no match for anyone at all. Once I thought I could do something but it never worked out. That cobbler and that man on the top of the steps who doesn’t even know I’m there, they’re the only ones who will listen to me, you’re right about that. Other people just beat
me, they always have. They beat me because I’m foolish. They call me a fool and I know I am. Just an old fool who has never done anything, never accomplished one thing, nothing at all.

  Stop this now, said Joe. Stop it right here. The city depends on you, it’s survived because of you. Where would it be without you to defend it? Who would rebuild it? How would it keep growing higher? What would happen to the caverns?

  Haj Harun sobbed quietly.

  No, I wanted to think all those things but they’re not true. You know my wives were probably right after all, I should have been content to live like other people. I was comfortable, there was more than enough to eat and I was never cold, and since then I’ve done nothing but starve and shiver and never sleep, never get any rest at all because my gums hurt so much when I lie down. And they warned me, I don’t deny it. Don’t be a fool, they said. Why give up everything for this hopeless mission? Do you want to be cold all the time? Do you want to starve? You must be mad.

  Haj Harun’s crumpled figure was all but lifeless. He lay on the stony ground gasping painfully for breath, his face smeared with blood. Blood and rust filled his eyes. The circle of blood below his waist was spreading. The broken leg was bent awkwardly to one side.

  Joe knelt holding the old man’s hands, which were so cold it frightened him. His pulse was uneven and growing weaker.

  It couldn’t be. Was the old warrior really dying?

  A sudden warmth fell on his shoulders. He looked up. The sky had opened and a fierce wind was peeling the clouds back over the hills. Directly above them, lit by the sun, was Jerusalem.

  Look, he shouted.

  Haj Harun’s lips moved. There was a gurgle deep in his throat.

  It’s no use, I can’t see. I tried and failed and it’s over.

  No, look.

  He gathered Haj Harun up in his arms and wiped the blood and rust out of his eyes. The old man’s head rolled back. He gasped.

  Jerusalem.

  Yes.

  Right there.

  Yes.

  Haj Harun struggled out of his arms. He crawled to his knees and planted one foot. He grasped the boulder and pulled himself up never taking his eyes off the mirage above him. Wildly he lurched away from the boulder, slipped and nearly fell but somehow kept going, staggering and coughing and spitting, cackling and stumbling, half naked on his spindly crooked legs tottering up the hillside, laughing and trailing blood and no longer caring whether he was on the path or not, waving his arms frantically as he yelled.

  I’m coming, wait I’m coming.

  11 Maud

  Once more a dream and a place to dream.

  THE BLEAK FIRST MEMORIES better to be forgotten as they had been for forty years.

  A farm in Pennsylvania where she was born toward the end of the century, her poker-playing father gone before she knew him, abandoning his wife and child to go west. Her mother managing a few years before she swallowed a dose of Paris green in despair and when that didn’t work went out to the barn and hanged herself.

  Maud hungry and thinking it was time for supper, calling her mother and going to look, stepping through the open barn doorway with a little skip.

  A taut stiff rope. A straight stiff body hanging in the shadows.

  Screaming and running, too young to understand everything could be taken away by a footstep through a doorway. Running and screaming, Why have they left me?

  The desolate mining town where her silent grandmother lived alone, an old Cheyenne woman whose husband had been a murderer, sent away. The old Indian woman not saying a word for days at a time, her face flat and dead behind the counter of the small saloon she ran, a dark filthy place where little Maud poured beer at ten o’clock in the morning and stared at the tense blackened faces of the miners as they whispered about another broken lift cable and mangled bodies three hundred feet below the ground, learning arithmetic by adding up what the exhausted miners drank.

  An ugly world and she was frightened. People left you, why? What had you done? Everyone always went away and there was no one to trust, so she dreamed. At home alone she took off her clothes and danced in front of a mirror, dreaming, because dreams alone were safe and beautiful.

  All else was grime and coal dust and dangling ropes, old women who never spoke and murderers who never came back and haggard worn-out faces, hopeless whispers and the terror of doors and footsteps.

  She worked hard to escape, to become the best skater in the world, it was her whole life as a child. The clean white ice sparkled as she flew across it on the glittering hard surface of her dream, a still silent surface so white and yet so thin above the swirling currents of life that could spin ever deeper into blackness and a blind world of twisting creatures unknown in a young girl’s dreams.

  She won competitions and more competitions and when she was only sixteen she was chosen to join the future American Olympic team that was going on an exhibition tour in Europe. The year was 1906 and the first exhibition was in the resort town of Bled, which was where she met a man with the curious name of Catherine and where it all began.

  A strange name for a strange man, a rich Albanian who was the head of one of the leading Albanian clans, whose native tongues were Tosk and Gheg, who lived in a seventeenth-century castle.

  Tosk and Gheg, a castle in a mysterious land. Within a week she left for Albania with Catherine Wallenstein to become his wife.

  Almost at once she discovered she was pregnant and at the same time Catherine ceased to take any notice of her. Increasingly he was away on what were called his hunting trips. Toward the end of her pregnancy Maud learned the horrible truth about these forays from an elderly woman named Sophia who had a peculiar hold over the castle, a woman referred to by everyone for some reason as Sophia the Unspoken.

  Her mysterious position in the castle was beyond explanation. Sometimes Maud had the impression she might once have had some intimate connection with Catherine’s dead father, yet she also hinted her mother had been no more than a lowly servant in the place, a cleaning woman attached to the stables. In any case she had been born in the castle and passed her whole life there, and now she seemed to be its real master while Catherine was little more than a stranger who came and went. The old woman completely ignored him and he did the same to her, even to the point where they never addressed one another. To both of them it was as if the other didn’t exist.

  Yet she was kind to Maud and often talked to her, especially about Catherine’s father, who had died insane. The old woman was obsessed by his memory and whenever she mentioned him she became a little mad herself. Her voice was hushed and childlike with a peasant’s awe for superstition and she told preposterous tales about the last of the Skanderbeg Wallensteins almost as if he were still alive, although from what the other servants said he must have died at least three decades ago, long before any of them had come to the castle. Of Catherine’s mother, who apparently had died in childbirth, Sophia the Unspoken never said a word.

  And then having mentioned Catherine’s birth, the old woman suddenly went into a rage. She clenched her fists and muttered wildly, spewing out the monstrous visions of a demented mind.

  A vicious child, she hissed. At first he killed only wild animals. He trapped the females in the mountains and ripped them open to roast the embryo. But later he began going into the mountains disguised as a holy man, just as he does today, hunting for stray boys. When he finds one he carries him off and ties him up and uses him, uses him and cuts him until the boy’s nearly dead, then hacks off the head and eats the mouth. Do you understand? The peasants suspect it’s him but they can’t do anything about it because he’s a Wallenstein. All they can do is never let their little boys out of their sight for an instant, but that makes no difference to him because there are always gypsies wandering through the mountains to provide new victims for his ecstasies, more sacrifices for his rites.

  Thus Sophia raved in her boundless hatred for Catherine until finally Maud had to lock her door and refuse to see
her.

  A few weeks before Maud was to give birth, Sophia broke into her room one night. Maud had never seen the old woman so crazed. She screamed at her to leave but Sophia seized her by the arm and pulled her to the door with an unnatural strength.

  Tonight you must see it all, she hissed, dragging her down the hall to Catherine’s room where she worked a concealed lever in a desk. Inside the secret compartment was a thick book in a pale covering.

  His life, she said, bound in human skin. Touch it.

  Maud pulled away in terror but Sophia still held her tightly. She dragged her down a corridor to the back of the castle and lifted a tiny shutter in the darkness. They were looking down on a small windowless courtyard Maud had never seen before and there in the moonlight crouched Catherine, naked and thrusting, the hindquarters of a ram between his legs, his strong hands wrapped around the animal’s neck.

  To break it at exactly the moment, hissed Sophia. Now do you believe me?

  Sophia had a carriage waiting and Maud left at once. By noon the following day she had gone into labor. Catherine, in pursuit with forty horsemen, found the farmhouse where she lay and slaughtered all the inhabitants before ordering some of his party to carry his newborn son back to the castle. His left eyelid was drooping in the familiar Wallenstein manner of past generations and to Maud he said nothing. His only interest now was to return to the castle and murder Sophia before she escaped.

  But as it happened Sophia hadn’t tried to escape. She was waiting for him, standing rigidly in a window of the old tower room where her lover had first learned to play Bach’s Mass in B Minor nearly a hundred years ago. As Catherine neared the castle he caught sight of her. She glared at him, slowly making the sign of the cross and at that moment his furious gallop came to an end. His horse reared, a convulsion seized him and he was thrown to the ground.

  His men propped him against a tree. His arms twitched violently, his mouth frothed, his knees jerked against his chest in successive spasms. Blood trickled over his lips and the veins in his face began to rupture.

  In a few seconds it was over and the once powerful body of Catherine Wallenstein lay dead, not struck down by some primitive paroxysm of rage as it appeared, rather felled by the terminal onslaught of a massive and incurable disorder that had been ravaging him for years with a fever resembling paratyphoid, noncommunicable among humans, a condition visited upon him during the onset of puberty when he had first contracted a rare and largely extinct mountain strain of Albanian hoof and mouth disease.