Sinai Tapestry

by Edward Whittemore

  Terminal?

  Surprisingly, no. In fact the flesh isn’t even cold yet.

  Don’t joke about it. I may well go within the hour.

  How can you breathe in here?

  I can’t, it’s one of my difficulties. The oxygen to my head has been cut off. Who did you say you were?

  A laborer. I load tobacco on the pier in front of your villa.

  The one to the left or the right?

  Left.

  Excellent. Keep up the good work but watch out for your back. Heavy lifting can damage the back. Is it day or night out?

  Day.

  I thought so. I can feel that unhealthy sunshine creeping along the shutters trying to ooze inside. Winter or summer, did you say?

  Winter. It’s snowing.

  Preposterous, I was sure of it, I’ve been feverish for hours.

  You know when your jaw falls off that flannel sling won’t be any help.

  Nonsense, all illusions are helpful.

  You know something else? In your declining years you’re beginning to look more and more like that portrait downstairs of your paternal grandmother.

  The old man wagged his head.

  I wouldn’t mind that particularly, it’s an admirable proposition. She was a pious and honorable and hardworking woman as well as the mother of one of the heroes of Greek independence, who was a good friend of Byron by the way, you probably know that. But what you don’t know is that the last time I was in Malta, I hired as my valet none other than the grandson of Byron’s Venetian gondolier, his favorite pimp and catamite. The grandfather, Tito, led an Albanian regiment in our war and then later was stranded in Malta, destitute, through a series of scandalous misadventures involving his former occupations. What, this intriguing news from a Maltese grandson doesn’t interest you? Well tell me what’s new in the outside world then. I’ve been bedridden since the Mahdi took Khartoum.

  That phallus you’re using as a knocker on the back door is new. It’s awful.

  Sivi laughed happily and sniffed his pan of steaming water.

  It does add a touch, doesn’t it. Well naturally there’s no reason to hide the general state of affairs around here and anyway, I have a certain reputation to maintain. My father had a son at the age of eighty-four and although that’s not my line, virility is in our blood.

  Stern handed him a piece of paper and he fixed his pince-nez to study the figures.

  Ah, my eyesight is deteriorating.

  Degenerating.

  Damascus this time.

  Yes.

  When?

  By the middle of June if you can do it.

  Easily.

  And I’d like to set up a meeting here in September.

  I don’t blame you at all, it’s a lovely place to be in September. Who is going to have the pleasure of visiting here and meeting me?

  A man who works for me in Palestine.

  Fine, guests from the Holy Land are always especially welcome. Is he on your Arab side or your Jewish side?

  Neither.

  Ah, from a more obscure region of your multiple personality. Druse perhaps?

  No.

  Armenian?

  No.

  He can’t be Greek, I’d already know him.

  He isn’t.

  Arab Christian?

  No.

  Not a Turk?

  No.

  Well we’ve accounted for the main non-European elements of Smyrna society so he must be some kind of European.

  Some kind. Irish.

  Sivi reached down beside the bed and brought up a bottle of raki and two glasses.

  Doctor, I thought you might prescribe something like this so I had it ready just in case. You are aware how well the Greek army is doing in the interior?

  I am.

  And precisely when things are going well, along you come introducing a volatile Irish possibility? Do you have any immediate plans for China? Not that it matters, I wouldn’t visit either of those outlandish places. I’m staying right here on the beautiful shores of the Aegean until I’m cured.

  Your granny, said Stern, raising his glass.

  Indeed, intoned Sivi, and quite right too. Not only have I never denied it, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

  In the autumn of 1929 Stern went down to the Jordan, to a small house on the outskirts of Jericho to meet a man he hadn’t seen in several years, an Arab from Amman who was active among the bedouin tribes in the Moabite hills. Although he was a year or two younger than Stern he looked far older. Sitting very still, no bigger than a child, his large dark eyes were flat and opaque in the feeble light thrown by the single candle.

  A steady wind rattled the windows and swallowed the sounds of the river in the darkness. The Arab spoke in whispers, frequently halting to cover his mouth with a rag. Stern looked away when that happened or rummaged in his papers, pretending not to notice how much worse the man’s lungs had become. After settling their arrangements they sat silently over coffee, listening to the wind.

  You look tired, the Arab said at last.

  It’s just that I’ve been traveling and haven’t had much sleep. Won’t that wind ever stop?

  After midnight. For a few hours. It begins again then.

  The Arab’s lips smiled weakly but there was no expression in his eyes.

  I no longer even cough. It’s not far away.

  You’ll have your own government soon and that’s not far away either. Fifteen years you’ve been working for it, just imagine, and now it’s really going to happen.

  Stiff, thin, wasted, the tiny figure stared at him through dead eyes, the rag clutched near his mouth.

  Before you came. Tonight. I wasn’t thinking of Amman. It’s strange. Concerns change. I was thinking how we’ve never known each other. Why?

  I suppose it’s the nature of our work. We hurry back and forth, meet for an hour, hurry on again. There’s never any time to talk about other things.

  For fifteen years?

  It seems so.

  You help us. You help the Jews too. I’ve known that. Who are you really working for?

  Stern wasn’t surprised by the question. All evening the man had talked in a disconnected dreamlike way, drifting from topic to topic. He supposed it had something to do with the Arab’s illness, his awareness of it.

  For us. Our people.

  In my hills that means your own tribe. With suspicion, a few neighboring tribes. For you?

  All of us, all the Arabs and Jews together.

  It’s not possible.

  But it is.

  The man didn’t have the strength to shake his head. Jerusalem, he whispered and stopped for lack of breath. A boy, he said after a moment. A garden. A football.

  Stern gazed at the wall and tried not to hear the wind. Two months before at the end of the summer a boy had accidentally kicked a football into a garden, nothing at all but the boy was a Jew and the garden an Arab’s and it had happened in the Old City. A mere football, it was grotesque. The Arab saw the foot of Zionism on his soil and the boy was stabbed to death on the spot. In Hebron an Arab mob used axes to butcher sixty Jews, including children. In Safad twenty more, including children. Before the riots were over a hundred and thirty Jews dead and a hundred and fifteen Arabs dead, the Jews killed by Arabs and the Arabs killed by the English police, a boy and a football and a garden.

  All the Semites? whispered the man. All together? The Armenians are Christians. What has become of them? Where were their Christian brothers during those massacres?

  Stern shifted in his chair. Somehow he couldn’t bring himself to find the words. What was the point anyway of arguing with a man who would be dead in a week or a month? He rubbed his eyes and didn’t say anything, listening to the wind.

  The Arab broke the silence by changing the subject again, not really looking for answers or even hearing them, beyond that now, straying from thought to thought as they occurred to him.

  The classics. You often quote from them. Why? Did yo
u start out as a scholar too? I did.

  Stern stirred. He felt uneasy. It must have been the incessant noise of the wind pushing on his mind.

  No. My father was. I guess I have a habit of repeating things he used to say.

  Perhaps I’ve heard of him. I read a lot once. What was his name?

  Lost, murmured Stern. Lost. A man of the desert. Many deserts.

  But the accent. You have a trace of one.

  The Yemen. I grew up there.

  Barren hills. Stony soil. Not like the Jordan valley.

  No, not like it. Not at all.

  Stern slumped lower in his chair. The overpowering wind outside made it impossible for him to keep his thoughts together. He realized he was beginning to talk in the abrupt manner of the dying man across from him. A wind blowing down the valley to the Dead Sea and Aqaba.

  For no reason he saw his father striding into Aqaba eighty years ago after marching the length of the Sinai without food or water, unaware he had walked through three dawns and two sunsets until he found a dog yapping at his heels, smiling then when a shepherd boy told him so and asked him whether he was a good genie or a bad genie, as a reward relating to the boy an obscure tale from the Thousand and One Nights before striding on, Strongbow the genie, many men in many places, truly a vast and changeable spirit as his grandfather had once said.

  What? No. I didn’t get this from him. Not like us. No. He became a hakïm in his latter years. First a scholar, then a hakïm.

  Better professions, whispered the Arab. Better than ours. Especially the healer. Healer of souls. I would have liked that. But today, you and I. We don’t have time. Is that so? Just an excuse we give ourselves?

  Stern started to reach for his cigarettes and then remembered. If only the man hadn’t mentioned the Armenians. Why did that have to have come up tonight? It always had this effect on him, the memory of the afternoon in a garden in Smyrna, that night on the quay and the Armenian girl soaked in blood whispering please, her thin neck and the knife and the crowds and the screams and the shadows, the fires and the smoke and the knife.

  His hands were beginning to shake, it was happening all over again. He tried to bury them in his pockets and squeeze his fists closed but it didn’t help, the wind outside wouldn’t stop.

  The hakïm, a huge presence sitting behind a trembling young man at dawn somewhere in the desert half a century ago, telling the frightened man to turn and face the emptiness in all its vastness, to fix his eye on a distant eagle swooping in the first light of day living a thousand years, tracing the journey of the Prophet, the footsteps a man takes from the day of his birth to the day of his death, suggesting the swirls of the Koran shaping and unshaping themselves as waves in the desert and saying Yes, the oasis may be small but yes, we will find it, yes.

  The Arab was struggling to get to his feet. Stern jumped up to help him and led him to the door.

  It was over. Hurrying back and forth and meeting for an hour, fifteen years gone, leaving again unknown to each other. The man had started as a scholar and would have liked to have ended as a healer but here was his end.

  I envy your faith, whispered the man. What you want. I couldn’t conceive of it on earth. We won’t see each other again. Peace brother.

  Peace brother, said Stern as the man limped away in the night toward his river, no more than a hundred yards away but lost now in the blackness, so small and narrow and yet so famous because of events washed by its currents over millennia, and shallow here as well as the earth began to swallow it toward the end of its brief and steeply falling course from the soft green heights of Galilee, rich in gentle fields of grain and kindly memories, a promised stream plunging down and down to the harsh glaring wilderness of the Dead Sea where God’s hand had long ago laid lifeless the empty cities of salt.

  A few years after that, searching for an explanation of world events, the Arabs in Palestine began to weave the first of their elaborate fantasies around Hitler. One theory was that he was in the pay of the British Secret Service, which was aiding Zionism by having him expel Jews from Europe in order to increase emigration to Palestine.

  Or more incredible still, that Hitler himself was a secret Jew whose sole aim in Europe was to undermine the Arabs in Palestine by sending more Jews there.

  So Stern’s vision of a vast Levantine nation embracing Arabs and Christians and Jews came apart, and the effect of the cascading rumors and swirling events on his dreams might well have been shattering if he hadn’t retreated to the memory of a peaceful hillside in the Yemen and begun to take morphine on the eve of his fortieth birthday.

  16 Jerusalem 700 B.C.–1932

  The ghostly jogger of the Holy City surviving and surviving.

  EARLY ONE HOT JULY morning in 1932 O’Sullivan Beare arrived at Haj Harun’s barren shop and found the old man hiding in the back room, cowering deep in the corner behind the antique Turkish safe. The rust from his helmet had fallen into his eyes, streaking his face with tears. He was trembling violently and the look he gave the Irishman was one of total despair.

  Jaysus, said Joe, easy man, get ahold of yourself. What’s going on here?

  Haj Harun cringed pathetically and wrapped his arms around his head as if expecting a blow.

  Keep your voice down, he whispered, or they’ll get you too.

  Joe nodded gravely. He moved in closer and gripped the old man by the shoulders to try to stop the pitiful shaking. He bent over the crouching figure and spoke in a low voice.

  What is it man?

  I’m dizzy. You know how I always feel dizzy first thing in the morning.

  Jaysus I do and no wonder. After what you’ve seen out there in the last three thousand years anybody would expect you to be dizzy when you suddenly had to take another look at it. A new day is always trouble so that’s all right, calm down and give me a whisper of the problem we’re facing.

  Them. They’re still out there.

  Are they now. Where exactly?

  In the front room. How did you manage to get around them?

  Sneaking on my tiptoes along the wall, a mere shadow of myself. How many did you say there were?

  At least a dozen.

  Bad odds. Armed?

  Only daggers. They left their lances back at the barracks.

  Well there’s that at least. What sort of cutthroats?

  Charioteers, the worst kind. They’ll cut a man down without thinking twice about it.

  O’Sullivan Beare whistled softly.

  Bloody bastards all right. Which conquering army are they from then?

  The Babylonian, but I don’t think any of them are regular Babylonian troops except perhaps the sergeant. He may be, he’s arrogant enough.

  Irregulars are they? Working for loot like the Black and Tans? There’s no meaner bunch.

  Yes they’re mercenaries, barbarians, by the looks of them hired horsemen from the Persian steppes. Medes, I’d say from their accents.

  Medes, are they? Now there’s a scruffy lot. When did they break in?

  Last night when I was grinding my teeth and trying to fall asleep. They took me by surprise and I didn’t have a chance to defend myself. They threw me in here and they’ve been out front ever since drinking and gambling over their spoils and bragging about the atrocities they’ve committed. I’m exhausted, I haven’t had any sleep at all. They brought a sack of raw liver with them and they’ve been gorging themselves on it.

  Do you say so. Why this particular article of meat?

  To arouse their lust. The Medes have always believed the liver was the seat of sexual desire. Now they’re talking about loin pie and they say they won’t leave until I hand them over.

  After them are they. Bad, very bad. Hand what over?

  The boy prostitutes.

  Ah.

  They’re terribly confused. They think this is a barbershop.

  Jaysus they are confused.

  Not so loud. It’s true, barbershops in Jerusalem used to be a place to procure boys but wasn
’t that a long time ago?

  More or less I’d say but the important thing now is for me to send them packing.

  You’ll have to be careful. You can’t count on Medes to listen to reason.

  I’m not and I won’t. Just keep under cover here.

  O’Sullivan Beare marched to the door between the two rooms and snapped to attention. He saluted smartly.

  Sergeant, emergency orders from headquarters. All liberty’s canceled, charioteers to return to barracks immediately. Carnage on the southern flank, the Egyptians have just launched a surprise attack. What? That’s right, the squadrons are grouping already. To your lances man. Double-time it.

  Tell them you’re Prester John, whispered Haj Harun urgently from behind the Turkish safe.

  No need to, whispered Joe over his shoulder, they’re going anyway.

  What about the drunken one who passed out in the doorway across the alley?

  The sergeant’s giving him some bloody sound kicks, that’s what. They’re leaving, it’s safe to come out now.

  Haj Harun crept out of the corner and tiptoed timidly over to peek into the front room. He tiptoed to the front door and peered up and down the alley.

  Gone, thank God. Do you think the streets are safe?

  They are. I saw that whole rabble of an army racing out through Jaffa Gate on my way over here.

  Haj Harun sighed and his face brightened.

  Wonderful, what a relief, let’s take a walk. I need some fresh air, last night was a nightmare. I’ve always detested the Babylonians.

  With reason I’d say. Well which route will we be taking today among the many?

  The bazaar perhaps? All at once I’m thirsty.

  The bazaar, you’re right. So am I.

  They passed down several alleys, made a turn and entered the bazaar. Haj Harun’s mood had changed abruptly with his release from captivity. Now he was robust and smiling and talkative, exuberantly waving his arms as he pointed out the sights.

  Hundreds of sweating shoppers jostled each other and squeezed in front of the open shops where hawkers cried out their wares. Haj Harun absentmindedly picked up a handful of juicy fresh figs from a stand and pressed half of them into O’Sullivan Beare’s hand. Peeling and munching, their mouths dripping, they made their way slowly through the dense crowds, edging around loaded donkeys and pushcarts, putting their heads together and shouting to be heard above the noise.