Sinai Tapestry

by Edward Whittemore

  The soft moan, he turned. The fingers were broken, he hadn’t seen that before. The hands were smashed and hanging the wrong way, backward. She must have tried to scratch them and they’d beaten her hands with their rifle butts, crushed them on the stones before stabbing her in the chest, stabbing and doing everything else while she was on her back in her black silk dress and her Sunday shoes.

  A pain in his shoulder. Stern had kicked him. Stern was down beside him angry and yelling.

  Well?

  Well bloody what? Do your own work. I’m no bloody butcher.

  Stern’s eyes were afraid, he could see that too. He just wasn’t the bloody terror he wanted you to think. Tall and strong all right and acting as if he were in charge and giving orders like some great general who’d been through all the wars, Stern the hero who knew what he was doing and had the money to do it and pretended to know all the answers, Stern the visionary who wasn’t so much in charge as he wanted you to believe. Staring with those empty eyes, frightened they were too so the bastard might as well hear it again, arrogant and giving orders, a frightened fake of a general without an army, parading his ideals. Well there were none and the bastard could hear it again right to his face. Who did he think he was? Yell it again why not.

  No good, Stern. Do it yourself for a change. I’m no butcher. Take your bloody cause of a kingdom come and shove it up your arse. Chase it, dream about it, do whatever you want with it but I’m not there. I’m not working for you or anybody else ever again and I’m not killing again, ever. Hear that, Stern? From now on you and the other fucking generals can do your own bloody killing. Hear it, Stern?

  Flames in the sky, someone staggering out of a building, burning. Not a man or a woman now, just a heap burning after walking hundreds of miles to get here, walking all those years just to get here of all places, but then you couldn’t see that far really, not here, you couldn’t see more than ten yards but of course you didn’t have to, here the universe was ten yards wide and there was nothing more to see after that.

  Stern picked up the knife, Joe watched him do it. He watched him take the little girl by her hair and pull back her head. He saw the thin white neck.

  The wet knife clattered on the stones beside him and this time he didn’t look up. This time he didn’t want to see Stern’s eyes.

  Not all the city was burning. Neither the Turkish Quarter nor the Standard Oil enclave was touched by the fire, which the Turks claimed later had been started by the retreating Christian minorities. But the American government argued that the fire was an accident, since the English insurance policies held by American tobacco merchants in Smyrna didn’t cover acts of war.

  From the quay overloaded little boats carried Greek and Armenian refugees out to the foreign warships that were there to protect and evacuate their nationals, but not authorized to evacuate anyone else lest the Turks be offended. When they came alongside the English warships and threw ropes over the rails, the ropes were cut. Soon the few boats had swamped and sunk.

  People were pushed off the quay and drowned. Others jumped in to commit suicide. Still others swam out to the warships.

  The English poured scalding water on the swimmers.

  The Italians, anchored much farther out, took on board anyone who could swim that far.

  The French launches coming into the quay took on board anyone who could say in French, no matter how badly, I’m French, I lost my papers in the fire. Soon groups of children were huddled around Armenian teachers on the quay learning this magical phrase.

  The captain of an American destroyer turned away children at the quay, shouting Only Americans.

  A small Armenian girl from the interior heard the first English words of her life while swimming beside the HMS Iron Duke.

  NO NO NO.

  From the decks of the warships the foreign sailors watched the massacre through binoculars and took pictures. The navy bands played late and phonographs were set up on the ships and aimed at the quay. Caruso sang from Pagliacci all night across a harbor filled with bloated corpses. An admiral going to dine on another ship was late because a woman’s body fouled his propeller.

  At night the glow of the fire could be seen fifty miles away. During the day the smoke was a vast mountain range that could be seen two hundred miles away.

  While the half-million refugees went on dying on the quay and in the water, American and English freighters went on shipping tobacco out of Smyrna. Other American ships waited to be loaded with figs.

  A Japanese freighter arrived in Piraeus packed with refugees, having thrown all its cargo overboard in order to carry more. An American freighter arriving in Piraeus with some refugees was asked to go back for another load, but the captain said his cargo of figs was overdue in New York.

  And on the Greek island of Lesbos, the strangest admiral in history was about to launch his fleet.

  He had arrived in Smyrna only two weeks before the Turks marched into the city, a Methodist minister from upstate New York who came to work in the YMCA. When the massacre began both his superiors were on vacation so he went to the Italian consul, in the name of the YMCA, and persuaded him to commandeer an Italian freighter in the harbor to carry refugees to Lesbos. He went with the freighter, hoping to bring it back, and in Lesbos found twenty empty transport ships which had been used to evacuate the Greek army from the mainland. He cabled Athens that the ships had to be sent at once to evacuate refugees from Smyrna, signing the cable ASA JENNINGS, AMERICAN CITIZEN.

  The reply came in a few minutes.

  WHO OR WHAT IS ASA JENNINGS?

  He answered that he was the chairman of the American Relief Committee in Lesbos, not adding that he was the only American on the island and that there was no such thing as a relief committee of any kind.

  The next reply was longer in coming. It asked whether American warships would defend the transports if the Turks tried to seize them.

  It was now September 23, exactly two weeks after the Turkish army had entered Smyrna. The Turks had said that all refugees had to be out of Smyrna by October 1.

  Jennings had been sending in code. On that Saturday afternoon he cabled an ultimatum to Athens. He said, falsely, that the American navy had guaranteed protection. Falsely, that the Turkish authorities were in agreement. Lastly, that if the Greek government didn’t release the ships at once he would send the same cable uncoded, so that Athens would stand accused of refusing to save Greek and Armenian refugees who faced death within the week.

  He sent the cable at four o’clock in the afternoon and demanded a reply within two hours. A few minutes before six it came.

  ALL SHIPS IN AEGEAN PLACED UNDER YOUR COMMAND TO REMOVE REFUGEES FROM SMYRNA.

  An unknown man who was the boys’ work secretary of the YMCA in Smyrna had been made the commander of the entire Greek fleet.

  Jennings sailed twice and brought back fifty-eight thousand refugees. The English and American fleets also began to evacuate refugees and by October 1 two hundred thousand had been taken away. By the end of the year nearly one million refugees had left Turkey for Greece bringing epidemics of typhus and malaria, trachoma and smallpox.

  The estimate of deaths in Smyrna was one hundred thousand.

  Or as the American consul in Smyrna said, The one impression I brought away from there was utter shame in belonging to the human race.

  Or as an American schoolteacher in Smyrna said, Some people here were guilty of unauthorized acts of humanity.

  Or as Hitler said a few days before his panzer divisions stormed into Poland to begin a war, Who after all speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians? The world believes in success alone.

  Stern eventually found them a way out. They set sail at night in a small boat, Sivi and Theresa uneasily asleep in the bunks below, fitfully stirred by their own mutterings, Stern and O’Sullivan Beare slumped on deck against the cabin, Haj Harun in the bow where he could keep a steady lookout on the calm sea.

  The few waves rose and fell quiet
ly and only one of the travelers was awake that night and still awake at dawn, untroubled by the dreams that haunted his companions. For unlike them he was going home and his home never changed.

  They might weave slaughter in the streets but what was that in the end? The other weaving also never ceased, the weaving of life, and when they burned one city another was raised on the ruins. The mountain only grew higher and towered ever more majestically above the plains and the wastes and the deserts.

  Haj Harun looked down at his birthmark. It was faded now and indistinct, once more an obscure tracing of darkness and light and shifting patterns, a map without boundaries. He gazed back at the two men sleeping on the deck. He listened to the agonized sounds from below and shook his head sadly.

  Why didn’t they understand?

  It was so clear.

  Why couldn’t they see it?

  In the early gray light he turned to face east, happy and more. He adjusted his helmet, carefully he straightened his cloak. Any moment now it would appear and he wanted to be ready, to be worthy of that glorious sight.

  Solemnly he waited. Proudly he searched the horizon for a glimmer of his Holy City, the worn sturdy walls and the massive gates, the domes to be and the towers and minarets softly radiant and indestructible, eternally golden in the first light of day.

  21 Cairo 1942

  A gesture. A photograph. To die.

  THUS STERN’S VOYAGE FINALLY came to an end in the desert not far from Cairo in the first light of another dawn, sitting with Maud after they had talked all night.

  There were a few other things after that, he said. Perhaps you’d like to hear them.

  No it’s all too much. No more anything now.

  But it has to be now and anyway, these are good things. After we met that first time in Turkey I went to see Joe in Jerusalem. I told him the real reason why you’d left him in 1921, because you were afraid of losing him. Because you loved him so much and were afraid of losing that love the way you always had before in life.

  Don’t Stern. It’s too long ago.

  No listen, he understood that. He said he couldn’t go back but he understood it. Then we talked about the Sinai Bible. He’d been searching for it for the last twelve years, right up until 1933, it had become his whole life. Of course I already knew that, what I told him was where to look. In the Armenian Quarter.

  So you always knew it was there.

  Yes.

  Yet in all that time you never looked for it there yourself.

  No, I couldn’t. I never felt it was mine to find. Anyway after I talked to him he said he was going to give up the search and leave Jerusalem.

  Why?

  It had to be because of what I’d told him about you. Because time tricks us and he’d never stopped loving you despite what he said. It wasn’t really the Sinai Bible he wanted, you know that. And all that talk about money and power and his anger toward me, his hatred even, especially at Smyrna, that wasn’t really him. Once years ago we discussed it, I remember it perfectly. It was a Christmas Eve and we were in an Arab coffee shop in the Old City. It was snowing and the streets were deserted, before Smyrna when we were still friends, when he used to come to me for advice. He brought it up and I talked to him about it and it was the first time he ever got angry at me. Of course I didn’t have any idea who the woman was who had left him but I did know he was fooling himself, and that’s why he broke with me after that, because he knew I knew and it shamed him. So his resentment grew, that’s all, precisely because we had been close before. He didn’t dare trust anyone then, he went back to being alone in the mountains on the run. Anyway, after I saw him in 1933 he went out and gambled away everything he had. He wanted to lose it. Did you know he’d become very rich?

  I’d heard that.

  Yes, all those incredible schemes of his. Well he deliberately lost it all in a poker game with two wild characters, over a million pounds, but that’s another story. Now listen to this. He went to Ireland to dig up his old U.S. cavalry musketoon in the abandoned churchyard where he’d buried it before he became a Poor Clare. He took it to the vacant lot in Cork where he’d sat in rags before he’d left the first time. He picked another Easter Monday to do that and he sat there all afternoon listening to the sea gulls and looking at the three spires of St Finnbar’s, and at the end of the afternoon he decided he’d leave again. As he put it in his letter, he felt he had finally come to terms with the Trinity. So he shipped out to America, you’ll never guess where.

  The Southwest?

  Yes you know him all right, he wanted the desert, he was still thinking of that month you’d spent together in the Sinai. It was New Mexico he went to. To an Indian reservation eventually. He passed himself off as a Pueblo and before long became the chief medicine man on the reservation.

  Maud smiled.

  Joe? A medicine man?

  She gazed shyly at the sand.

  I don’t think I ever mentioned it but he was always fascinated by the idea that I had an Indian grandmother. He used to ask me about her all the time. What she did, what she was like, that kind of thing. I don’t know what he imagined but his face was like a little boy’s at those times.

  Suddenly she looked away. Go on, she said.

  Well that’s who he is. He sits in a wigwam with a blanket around him staring at the fire and muttering in Gaelic, which they take to be some language of the spirits. He keeps the old musketoon at his feet and claims it was his cannon in his private wars against the white man. Interprets dreams and divines the future. The revered and greatly respected shaman of the Pueblos.

  Maud laughed.

  Dear Joe. I was so foolish and he was too young to understand. So long ago.

  Wait, there’s more. He keeps an old book in his lap which he pretends to consult when the Indians ask him questions, but of course he can’t read a word of it. He makes up his stories as he goes along and whether they’re prophecy or history no one can say because the book’s so old, three thousand years old in fact. The tales of a blind man written down by an imbecile.

  Maud stared at him and this time Stern also smiled.

  It’s true. He has it.

  But what? How?

  Well it seems a few years after he left Jerusalem his Arab friend found it and sent it to him. As to how and why the Arab found it, that must be another story too. But that’s where it is now. In 1933 the British Museum bought Wallenstein’s forgery from the Soviet government for one hundred thousand pounds, and in 1936 Haj Harun sent the original to a wigwam in New Mexico, where it rests in the lap of the chief medicine man of the Pueblos.

  Maud sighed.

  Well at last. Dear Joe.

  She gazed at the sand lost in the memory of that month on the shores of the Gulf of Aqaba. The most beautiful moments she had known in life and so brief. So long ago.

  She looked up. It had been there just on the other side of the Sinai, not so far away really. And the sparkling water and the bursting sunsets, the hot sand beneath their bodies through days without end and the numberless stars over nights without end, love and the all-healing sea, love and the solitude of the desert where the two of them had reached for the fire of the sand, she could feel its heat now when she closed her eyes.

  But no, she couldn’t feel it, too long ago. Now the sand was cold beneath her fingers. She heard a rattling sound, Stern’s bottle against the rim of his cup. She took them from him and filled it for him. She put her arms around him.

  It’s over, he said simply. Finished. Done.

  Don’t say that, Stern.

  Well not quite, you’re right. There are still a couple of things left to do. After the war you’ll go to America to be with Bernini and someday you’ll see Joe again, of course you will. But as for me I’ll never leave that hillside in the Yemen where I was born. Ya’qub was right after all. I’ll never leave it.

  She hung her head. There was nothing to say. Stern managed to laugh.

  Simple in the end, isn’t it. After all the str
uggling and trying to believe, the wanting to believe, two or three things sum it up and say it all. A gesture. A photograph. To die.

  Clumsily he lurched to his feet and threw the empty bottle toward the new sun on the horizon, a gesture Joe had once made on the shores of the Gulf of Aqaba long ago against the darkness, this time made against the light. Then he took her camera and framed a picture of her between the Sphinx and the pyramids, clicking the shutter on their love, Maud robust and smiling for him on their final day, their time together ended in the lure of a Holy City, the lure of the desert, a weaving now within the bright somber tapestry of invincible dreams and dying days they had shared over the years with others, a tapestry of lives that had raged through vast secret wars and been struck dumb by equally vast silences, textures harsh and soft in their guise of colors, a cloak of life.

  A gesture then, a photograph now, a cloak threadbare and resplendent from century to century. And the unsuspecting weavers of the cloak, spirits despised and triumphant, threads to the tapestry and names to the sands and seas, souls for recollection in the whispers of love that had come to weave the chaos of events into a whole and the decades into an era.

  Love gentle and kind and ferocious, rich and starved and hallucinatory, damned and diseased and saintly. Love, the bewildering varieties of love. That and only that able to recall the lives lost in the spectacle, the hours forgotten in the dream.

  Hopes and failures given to time, demons pressed into quietude, spirits released to memory in the chaotic book of life, a repetitious and contradictory Bible suggesting infinity, a Sinai tapestry of many colors.

  And so that evening with a quarter of a grain of morphine steadying his blood Stern walked through the sordid alleys of Cairo to his last meeting, entering the bar and sitting on a stool and beginning to whisper to his contact who couldn’t decide whether he was an Arab or a Jew, giving instructions for a secret shipment of arms to somewhere in the name of peace.

  Tires screeched outside and there were shouts and curses and drunken laughter. The man beside him glanced nervously at the curtain separating them from the street but Stern didn’t turn to look, he went on talking.