Sinai Tapestry

by Edward Whittemore

  Maud meanwhile, dazed and sickly and understanding none of it, crept on toward Greece with her two gifts from Sophia the Unspoken, a purse of Wallenstein gold and the secret of the Sinai Bible.

  In Athens she eventually found work as a governess and came to know a Cretan visitor to the house, a fiery nationalist and soldier whose father had been one of the leaders of the Greek war for independence. Although raised in the wealthy Greek community in Smyrna, Yanni had run away when he was sixteen to join the Cretan insurrection against the Turks in 1896.

  He had the tall powerful frame and deep blue eyes common to the remote mountain area in southwestern Crete where he and his father had been born, an isolated enclave of shepherds who were said to be direct descendants of the Dorians, their harsh region notorious for both the savage bloodshed of its vendettas and the fierce independence of its people, so unyielding the Turks had never fully subdued them in their two-hundred-year occupation.

  Yanni was proud of this heritage and always wore the costume of his native mountains, high black boots and black jodhpurs and a black scarf tied around his head, in his waistband a long pistol with a white grip and a knife with a white handle split at the end in the Minoan symbol of a bull’s horns, a wild and dashing sight on the quiet streets of Athens where he looked like a ferocious corsair from another era, eyes alert and quick in his step, mouth set in such a way men often crossed the street to avoid him.

  Yet there was another, softer side to him when he was with Maud. Then the powerful man who bristled with weapons and honor and courage fell into moods so awkward his direct and tender feelings were almost childlike in their simplicity. Suddenly he would look bewildered and fumble for words, lose them and end up staring at the floor helplessly gripping his huge hands.

  It was flattering but she didn’t prolong it. My eagle, she called him as she asked him to tell her about his mountains in Crete, and then all at once his awkwardness was gone and he was off soaring on the heroic words that had brought his people sweeping out of their mountain retreat again and again to fire yet another revolution in Crete down through the long nineteenth century, every ten years freedom or death, just as soon as a new generation of young men was old enough to fight and be slaughtered.

  After a courtship that lasted a year his friend came to her with Yanni’s formal proposal of marriage in which he stated that since she was an American, where the custom didn’t prevail, he didn’t expect a dowry, Maud smiling when the man gravely emphasized the depths of Yanni’s love by pointing out that for a man of his name and reputation even a dowry of two hundred healthy olive trees would have been modest in Crete.

  After they were married he took her to Smyrna to meet his half-brother, a man then almost sixty, nearly thirty years older than himself.

  Not at all like me, he said with a smile, but family’s important in Greece so that doesn’t matter. And he’s a kind man who means no harm, I think you’ll like him.

  Maud did like him immediately, fascinated by the strangeness of it all as they sat having tea in the garden of his beautiful villa overlooking the Aegean, Yanni nodding respectfully in his fierce costume and trying not to crush the delicate teacup in his hands, his worldly half-brother Sivi immaculate in one of the elegant dressing gowns he always seemed to wear until sundown, languidly passing pastries and discoursing on the opera he was to see that evening or relating the latest gossip of Smyrna’s sophisticated international society.

  When they returned to Athens, Yanni left her almost at once to enlist in the Greek army that was preparing defenses in the north. He came back a few times during her pregnancy but was away in 1912 fighting the Turks in Macedonia when their daughter was born, and away again a year later fighting the Bulgarians when the baby died. Maud tried not to be bitter but the resentment was there deep within her.

  After the Balkan wars came the fighting on the Salonika front and in 1916 she received a telegram saying Yanni had died in a malaria epidemic. Maud cried but it also seemed she had been alone almost from the beginning, a young woman in a foreign land whose childhood dreams had briefly come to life only to slip away again after her first few months with Yanni, still not admitting to herself that once more she felt someone she loved had left her.

  Sivi came to see her and helped her with money. He offered to pay her fare back to America if she wanted to go but she said she wasn’t ready yet, she wanted to be alone and study, languages she thought so she could earn a living doing translations. Over the next few years they wrote to each other and she saw him several times in Athens and Smyrna, always enjoying the visits yet always puzzled how the brothers could have been so unalike.

  He was away so much, she said, sometimes I have the feeling I never really knew him.

  Oh you knew him all right, said Sivi. What you saw was what he was, mountain men like that take their freedom or death in an uncomplicated manner.

  And as for us being so different, he added mischievously, one of us was obviously an anachronism, either Yanni in his guise as an eighteenth-century brigand or me with my tastes that run farther back in history, several thousand years shall we say.

  She met several men who weren’t important to her, summers she went to the islands. When the war had been over two years she turned thirty and then she decided the time had come, she was ready to go but where? It couldn’t be far, she had saved only a little money.

  She looked at a map of the Eastern Mediterranean and put her finger on it. She laughed. Of course. Where else but that unparalleled theater of bazaars and races and faiths above the deserts and wastes, for so long the hope of wandering and lost and searching peoples, once more a dream and a place to dream.

  So Maud made her way to Jerusalem.

  12 Aqaba

  Whispering do it again right now.

  ONE AFTERNOON WHEN SHE was treading slowly up the steep steps from the crypt beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a figure suddenly emerged from the shadows and began whispering to her. He was a small dark man with a thin beard and burning eyes but she hardly noticed that. It was his voice that held her.

  Beneath the city, that’s where I’ve just been and that’s where I’ve just come from, down there exploring places lost for millennia, Solomon’s quarries I’ve seen and Roman circuses and Crusader chapels and the cognac is eight hundred years old and the lances are two thousand years old and the carved stones are three thousand years old will you believe me.

  On down through the past rushed the hushed Irish voice tracing caverns and corridors, spiraling through pageants and spectacles and the innumerable triumphs and devastations of Jerusalem over time, finally after three days and two nights to emerge by chance on this very spot, so astonished by what he had seen he had to describe it all to the first person he met.

  And you’re the first person, whispered the soft Irish voice, and what would your name be then?

  But Maud said nothing, not wanting to break the magic between two strangers suddenly brought together in the holy crypt. Instead she smiled and silently slipped to her knees and took him in her mouth, leaving him afterward leaning dizzily against the stones in the shadows.

  She lingered in the magic a day or two before going back and of course he was there waiting. And on top of the steps that led down to the crypt, as before, was the same muttering man pacing back and forth in the darkness, privately pursuing the secret duties of his unfathomable vocation. As before they took no notice of him, and he of course took no notice of anyone.

  Maud led him from the church to the immense and quiet esplanade beside the Dome of the Rock, and there sitting in the shade of a cedar she touched the collar of his patched and ragged uniform and spoke to him for the first time.

  What in the world is it?

  Officer of light cavalry, Her Majesty’s expeditionary force in the Crimea, 1854. Ragged because old, patched because of a fall suffered in a renowned suicidal charge.

  And how did you survive that charge?

  Two are the reasons. With God’s
blessings and also because my father said I had other things to do in the future. Do you see these medals and especially this cross? They indicate I’m an established hero from the middle of the nineteenth century, when I foolishly aided the cause of the British Empire in a substantial and dangerous manner.

  Maud held the cross and laughed.

  How old does that make you now?

  Twenty, just. Although sometimes I feel older, even as aged as my father. He was a fisherman and a poor man like myself.

  And all those things you told me the other day were true?

  Jaysus and yes they were true, each and every one of them more than the last and as much as the next. True to the end as only the end can be. I know. My father had the gift.

  What gift?

  Seeing the future as the past, seeing it as it is. The seventh son of a seventh son he was and in my land that means you have the gift.

  Maud laughed again.

  And what did your father see about your future that allowed you to survive the suicidal charge?

  Fighting for Ireland he saw, not rowing over to Florida as good St Brendan had the sense to do some thirteen hundred years ago. That’s one of my names too you see. I come from an island of saints and I would have been glad to row to Florida for the sake of the Church from all I hear of the climate there but that wasn’t for me, fighting in the mountains of Cork was for me lugging around a monstrous old weapon, a modified musketoon it was, U.S. cavalry issue 1851 and sixty-nine caliber, me firing it like a howitzer to keep my distance, but after a while they caught onto my faraway game and I had to escape so God allowed me to join an order of nuns known as the Poor Clares, temporarily of course, because some of these Poor Clares were going on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land that had been requested at the end of the eighteenth century, God waiting to grant permission until the moment was opportune, and that’s how I happened to come to Jerusalem as a nun but now I’m not a nun anymore, now I’m a retired veteran living in the Home for Crimean War Heroes because the baking priest decided to award me this Victoria Cross for general valor because the bread was getting to his brains, only natural after sixty years at the oven baking the same four loaves of bread, and if I seem to be rambling and this is confusing it’s just because I’ve been keeping company with a peculiar Arab, a quite elderly sorcerer, an unusual old man who is so unusually old he has that effect on you. Sorry, we’ll start again. Ask me something.

  Maud took his hand and smiled.

  What would your father see if he were here now?

  Surely the desert. We must be away from this babble of Jerusalem with its roving fanatics of every kind. Did you see that item pacing the top of the stairs to the crypt?

  Yes.

  Well he’s been doing that for two thousand years, just pacing and muttering and never stopping. How could we even begin to think clearly in a place where such things go on?

  Who told you that?

  About the man on the top of the stairs? My sorcerer friend. And he knows because he’s been watching him all that time. Around the beginning of every century he drops in to compare notes and see if there’s been any change in the general situation but there never is. But what do you think, will we be going to the desert then? I’ve never been but the old Arab says it’s a wonderful place for filling your soul. He’s been making a haj for the last ten hundred years or so and he says nothing compares to it in the springtime, wild flowers and all that. Shouldn’t we be going?

  Yes my love, it must be a wonderful place and I think we should be going.

  From Aqaba they rode south along the shore of the Sinai until they found a small oasis where they camped. Through the foothills in the moonlight they circled the colors of the desert, swam at noon in the brilliant gulf and lay on the hot sand of the beach, asleep in each other’s arms in early evening and awake again at dawn to slip down to the shore and embrace in the shallows, laughing over their figs and pomegranates and toasting the new sun with arak, whispering Do it again right now and spinning, sinking through the quarters of a moon.

  On their last evening they sat on a rock by the water watching the sunset gather silently, passing the arak back and forth as the Sinai burst into flames behind them and the last of the light settled on the barren hills where darkness was coming to Arabia. The rustle of the waves and the fingertips of the wind, the desert cast to fire and the rush of arak in their blood, the air lapsing into blackness and inevitably on the far side of the gulf another and distant world.

  He stood then and threw the empty bottle far across the water.

  They held their breath and waited and a minute seemed to pass before they heard a tiny splash somewhere out there in the night, perhaps only imagining it.

  13 Jericho

  Home from the sea free as birds.

  JOE WAS OVERJOYED WHEN he found out they were going to have a child. He sang and danced all his father’s songs and dances and insisted they get married that afternoon, as he had been insisting since before they went to Aqaba.

  It’s too hot today, September is soon enough. This heat is frightful.

  Frightful it is and atrocious and terrible and just plain bad. Now just don’t move, you shouldn’t be moving, just sit quiet there and fan yourself while I make a cup of tea. Frightful, yes.

  You know Joe, I’m really beginning to love Jerusalem.

  It’s a madhouse isn’t it, nothing like it, just what the baking priest said. When he gave me his veteran’s papers I looked at him and said, you’re eighty-five and I’m twenty and how about apparent age? Laughed, he did. No problems like that in such a place, he said. Apparent anything doesn’t mean much in our Holy City, everybody’s Holy City, that’s what he said. Just a minute now.

  I remember once I saw a man in Piraeus who looked a lot like you except he was older.

  A sailor?

  Yes.

  How much older?

  Fifteen or twenty years.

  Seventeen to be exact. That was brother Eamon jumping ship on his way to join the Rumanian army. He got himself killed fighting for the bloody Rumanians, can you imagine. The father told me all about it before it happened. You saw him in 1915. April.

  I’m not sure.

  That’s when it was. None of my brothers ever wrote home after they left but the father knew what they were up to anyway. You can’t fool a prophet can you. Here’s a good cup now. Rest quiet and we’ll be home from the sea free as birds.

  Maud laughed, the summer passed in their small apartment in Jerusalem. September came and again she made some excuse for delaying their marriage. Joe continued to make trips to Constantinople and now each time he returned he noticed changes in her mood. She was withdrawn and irritable. But that’s just her state, he thought, surely such things happen, only natural that they would.

  With winter coming he decided their rooms were too drafty and cold for her to be comfortable. The warm sun of the Jordan valley would be better. He found a little house on the outskirts of Jericho and rented it, a lovely house on a small plot of land, surrounded by flowers and arbors and lemon trees. Proudly he took her down there and was astonished when she first saw it. She didn’t even smile.

  But don’t you like it, Maudie?

  No.

  You don’t?

  I hate it. It looks like some child’s idea of a doll’s house.

  Joe couldn’t speak, he was terrified. He rushed inside and pretended to be straightening things, not daring to look at her. What was she doing, what was she saying?

  When he went out again she was sitting on a bench under a tree, staring vacantly at the ground.

  I’m going up to the market, won’t be long. Anything special you want?

  She shook her head slightly but didn’t raise her eyes. Joe hurried out the gate and ran up the path, running faster and faster trying not to think.

  Jaysus Joseph and Mary what’s happening? Blessed mother of God what is it? Tell me what I’ve done please God and I’ll do anything to make it up. Jaysus anything.<
br />
  It became worse and worse in Jericho. Maud spent most of the day away from the house, sitting down by the river. Everything he did now seemed to enrage her, but most of all his trips to Constantinople.

  I know, Maudie, but I have to make them, you see that. It’s our money, there’s no other way for me to make us a living.

  You’re a criminal.

  I know you don’t like the work but I’ve got nothing else right now, it’s all I can make do with.

  Better no money than that kind of money. Guns are for wounding and killing people, nothing else. You’re a murderer.

  What are you saying now?

  In Ireland you shot people. Didn’t you shoot people down?

  That was different, that was the Black and Tans. You can’t imagine the horrible things they were doing. It was a war we were in then only our side was just women and children and poor farmers trying to grow their crops.

  Murderer.

  Jaysus don’t be saying it Maud, it sounds horrible and it’s just not so.

  Would you ever kill again?

  No.

  Liar.

  The other thing that infuriated her was his fascination with the Sinai Bible. When he had told her about it, in Aqaba, she had laughed and laughed. Haj Harun writing his memoirs and then losing them? Three thousand years of secret Jerusalem history lying somewhere waiting to be found. Treasure maps to all the two dozen Old Cities? The old man convinced he had actually written the original Bible?

  It was wonderful, she had loved it. Joe’s fanciful version of the manuscript was marvelous and she had said nothing about the last of the Skanderbeg Wallensteins and his forgery. But that had been in Aqaba. Now she reacted very differently.