Lion Heart

by Justin Cartwright

  Sex with Noor is gracious and unhurried as if it is a well-understood and ancient ritual. The aureoles on her breasts are dark. Lying next to her, eating pistachio nuts, some shells escaping into the bed, a sheen on our bodies, the fragrance of jasmine and almond coming on the night air through the open window on the same breeze that brings the strains of the flutes and the harsh percussion, I think that Noor believes that her role is to please – not a particularly contemporary attitude. She is what the Bible calls the tender and luxurious woman. Maybe she has a Levantine way of regarding sex, not as a Freudian purging of our demons, but as a sensual, courtly expression of being human. When I asked Noor about her life, she gave me an anodyne history; she told me how much she loved McGill and how she learned French in Montreal and studied international development. Now she kisses me:

  ‘And I love you.’

  Her parents are Christian: they left for Canada thirty years ago just before she was born. She has a brother in Toronto, something to do with electronics, and she has an apartment there and works for the Morning Star and for the CBC. Because she speaks Arabic, she has become a Middle East correspondent. That’s about it.

  We have a large jug of blood orange juice beside the bed. She doesn’t drink alcohol. Her breasts loll slightly to each side. They contain some weighty element, which responds slowly. I pour a few drops of orange juice on her dark nipples and lick them.

  ‘Taste good?’

  ‘The best.’

  ‘My nipples are tightening up.’

  ‘Is that nice?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  I have a swig of beer. It’s brewed in the all-Christian village of Taybeh, on the road to Jericho. Noor tells me she is related to the family that owns the brewery. She says that Muslims in the surrounding villages were hostile when the brewery was first set up.

  Taybeh beer is pretty good.

  ‘Do you know,’ she says, ‘there is a belief here that some of us Palestinian Christians have red hair because of our Crusader blood?’

  ‘It could be true. Richard the Lionheart was a ginger-nut.’

  ‘A ginger-nut?’

  ‘A redhead. Six foot five, a red giant. Your ancestor, definitely.’

  ‘If he was gay, of course, it can’t be true.’

  ‘He wasn’t gay. He’s a gay icon only because he spent no time with his wife and had no children. Not officially. He did have one illegitimate child, a boy, who he recognised.’

  ‘I heard he slept with the King of France.’

  ‘In those days it was a diplomatic move to sleep in the same room as another king to demonstrate your trust. There were lots of servants in the room. And by the way, the first time anyone suggested he was gay was in 1948. In medieval times he had a reputation for being very keen to get his hands on captured women. They were part of the spoils of war.’

  She moves fluently on top of me. Her skin is lubricated by mysterious oils.

  ‘One for the road, old chap?’

  ‘Why not? Noor, just a tip, lay off the accents and stick to what you are good at.’

  ‘I think I can guess what that would be.’

  When she has gone I lie on the bed beneath the open window. Bells in the Old City ring briefly and tunelessly. Somewhere there is a party. I hear music, women’s voices, percussive clapping, reed flutes and the hand drums. In the Palestinian territories the fundamentalists are cracking down on music. The association of public pleasure with ungodliness had died out in the West: gratification is big where I come from, a human right, even a human obligation.

  Noor has gone to her world, as the perfumed night, flooding in, seems to promise ecstasy. I have an invigorating awareness of being alive and somehow connected, although I don’t know exactly to what. Without wishing it, I find myself considering seriously whether the only reality is the self. Up until now I have thought of it as a philosophical idea, with limited use. But there is something in the air – the loaded, tendentious air of Jerusalem – that makes people believe crazy ideas: I am possibly showing the early symptoms. Maybe I am more of my father’s son than I ever wished to acknowledge.

  A little while ago Noor was lying next to me so comfortably and so naturally that I felt we were sharing internal organs, like Siamese twins. It was absurd, but it struck me that our blood, our breath, our sweat had joined forces and were working together.

  Sounds of the party have faded on the breeze. The promise of happiness and limitless possibility is intoxicating. Also, Father Prosper has introduced me to various mysteries and shown me objects from antiquity that have affected me deeply. We went to see the Shrine of the Book and there I saw the Book of Isaiah, all twenty-seven feet of it, beautifully copied, probably a hundred and fifty years before Christ, in the hellish heat of Qumran, and hardly a word of it changed in two thousand five hundred years.

  Father Prosper pointed out the lines that read:

  And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

  He smiled.

  ‘Nothing change.’

  He told me that, as well as the major scrolls, there are thousands of fragments of scrolls, many of them still to be translated. What is it that inspired such devotion? What was it that caused Richard the Lionheart to take the cross and sail for Acre? Why was Robert the Bruce so passionate that his heart should be taken to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem after his death? His last testament read:

  I will that as soone as I am trespassed out of this worlde that ye take my harte out of my body and embawme it and present my hart to the Holy Sepulchre where Our Lorde laye, seying my body can not come there.

  In fact his heart – embalmed – only got as far as Moorish Granada, where Sir James Douglas, the Black Douglas, bearing the heart, was killed. The heart was returned to Scotland.

  All religions may be logically absurd, but they speak of something essentially human and this, I see, lying complacently naked in the warm night air, is itself a reality that will never go away. And Noor’s motile breasts are a reality of another order.

  We are crossing the Allenby Bridge over the Jordan. I am disappointed to see that we are not using the old bridge, so famous from a thousand news reports, but a new bridge alongside. On the Israeli side the border police look at me and Noor with interest as they collect the exit tax. Their heads are close-cropped and topped with sunglasses. They want Noor to know that they aren’t fooled by the Canadian passport. They are particularly suspicious of her journalist’s visa, reading it a number of times to make sure it means what it says. We explain that we are going to Kerak as tourists. The water below the bridge had already died on its journey to the Dead Sea a few miles away.

  Now we come to the Jordanian post. There are fees to pay. We show our visas. One of the three men asks me if I support Arsenal. I say of course, oh yes, I live near the stadium, which is only approximately true. They are impressed by my credentials as a modern and metropolitan man. One of them is a fan of Theo Walcott. These men, after all, are stuck out here in the desert, where no grass grows.

  ‘Football, what you call soccer, is the global currency.’

  ‘I have noticed,’ says Noor. ‘I wonder why.’

  ‘You can talk football with anyone because football is simple; you kick a ball into a net. Sports also have an outcome. Unlike life. I mean they are still waiting in Jerusalem for the Messiah. What’s holding him up?’

  ‘Or holding her up. I dunno.’

  ‘I have never understood why people believe in things that they can’t ever prove.’

  ‘Maybe they need to believe.’

  ‘Why not believe in something that exists?’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Like the Arsenal Football Club of Highbury, London.’

  ‘I was hoping you were going to say “love.” ’

  ‘And that. I believe in it, for the first t
ime.’

  ‘Do you mean that?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Will you marry me?’

  I am startled.

  ‘If you promise your relatives won’t kill me.’

  ‘They won’t.’

  I stop the hire car and, watched by some world-weary goats, we kiss. Her lips seek and caress mine. It is all part of the process of colonising each other. This is the best phase of a relationship, but I know that, buried in it, the inevitable prospect of sadness is already incubating. In Jerusalem I have been struck by the profusion of delusions that waste the human essences; perhaps love is one of these. It’s crazy, it’s delusional, it’s dangerous. All these things rush through my mind in a turbulent stream as we drive through the vast Jordanian landscape. It is parched and antique; it screams its pain via the voices of the cicadas, as the earth bakes. I look around at Noor; she is asleep, her hand on my thigh, and my blood bounds.

  The map shows that at the end of this road is Aqaba; I visited it on a school trip from rainy Scotland. Twelve pink-and-white Scottish adolescents were snatched from the winter to learn to snorkel and to waterski. I was entranced by the fish, which were wearing colourful pyjamas. There was nothing Calvinist about these fish. My aunt paid for me, drawing the money from her post office account and taking it in cash to the school. I kissed Judy McAllister; her lips were blistered by the desert sunshine, but she ignored the pain. When I last heard of her she was a mother of three bairns, and a part-time hairdresser. At Oxford I never once uttered the word ‘bairn’.

  A Bedouin camp not far from the road looks like one of those Victorian watercolours by travellers: two camels graze near the tents as the women crouch around a camel-dung fire which is sending wispy spirals of smoke skywards like prayers.

  We pass a half-built house of breezeblocks. What happens to these houses? You see them all over the Middle East, the work started and then stalled, probably for ever. I turn towards Noor who seems to sense my gaze and wakes. She throws her hair over her face and then she flings it back again and runs her fingers through it. She smiles at me. There is something endearingly natural about her gestures.

  ‘You looked so lovely asleep.’

  ‘Did I snore?’

  ‘Just a little.’

  ‘Do you still love me anyway?’

  ‘More than I dare tell you.’

  ‘Oh, thank goodness.’

  We take great pleasure in speaking this language of love. It is a little sentimental, but it rises naturally from somewhere deep.

  After an hour or so of cruising happily south, with occasional glimpses of the Dead Sea to our right, we come on the turn-off to Kerak City. For the last twenty kilometres we have been able to see the castle, rising improbably from the folded countryside. It looks as if it has grown of its own volition from the rocky landscape. The original name of the castle was Petra Deserti, stone of the desert.

  It was from Kerak that Reynald de Châtillon attacked and plundered a Muslim caravan in 1187, which Saladin took as an unpardonable breach of the truce and besieged Tiberias in revenge. Foolish, impulsive, arrogant, and possibly a drunkard, it was Reynald who persuaded the King of Jerusalem, Guy de Lusignan, to attack Saladin’s army, recklessly exposing the Christian army on some hills above the Sea of Galilee.

  Kerak Castle rests on the spur of a plateau above the ramshackle town. A sign announces improbably that Kerak City is twinned with Birmingham, Alabama in Jefferson County. I have a dream . . . As we come closer we see how huge Kerak is; it is impossible to imagine how this could have been built in the twelfth century; no other building in this landscape rises more than a few storeys.

  Noor has a North American distaste for squalor and disorder; there are battered tourist buses and some dusty and neglected oleanders in the main street, once no doubt planted to welcome visitors. There are plenty of those clapped-out Mercedes, all riding rather low. Noor wonders why this place hasn’t been tidied up; the Middle East, she says with sudden vehemence, is in terminal decline. As we walk hand in hand towards the vast glacis, a stone slope that protected the castle against direct assault and undermining, its walls loom, massive, above us.

  She whispers, ‘Richie, this place is a necropolis.’

  I don’t know what to say.

  ‘It reeks of death. For two thousand years the whole damn Middle East has been a shrine to death and victimhood and resentment and murder. Look at this pile. Can you even begin to guess how many people have died here, attackers, defenders, children, raped women, people who have been tortured to death? Can you?’

  I hold her close to me.

  ‘No I can’t.’

  She buries her face against my chest and all I can see is her magnificent autumnal hair. It spreads beneath me like a wrinkled Red Sea.

  ‘Look, don’t worry, there are tourists in Gap cargo pants.’

  Her body is heaving. After what seems a long time, she looks up from under the hair.

  ‘Let’s go in now.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, yes. No problem. I had a sort of flashback. I’m sorry.’

  Her eyes are moist. I wonder what she was flashing back to. I didn’t tell her that Reynald, the Master of Kerak, was a sadistic torturer. He ordered his men to strip the Patriarch of Antioch, a fellow Christian, naked, to cover him in honey and to leave him staked out in the burning sun. When his skin began to roast and the red fire ants closed in, the Patriarch quickly agreed to Reynald’s excellent business proposition that he finance an expedition to plunder Cyprus. Nor do I tell Noor that Reynald liked to throw his enemies off the battlements.

  The castle can only be approached through one gate. Its base in the desert stone has many arched tunnels where horses and their knights could enter or exit at speed and there are other tunnels and chambers where caravan trains and their camels came in to unload. At any time the Master of Kerak had provision for five years in case of siege. There are remains of Crusader architecture and Norman decoration, though the central church has gone. I knew nothing of the complicated history of the place: Muslims, Christian French, Ottoman Turks, Mamelukes, all fought for this castle. If you were a Frank, why would you leave Poitu or Aquitaine or Gascony or Brittany or Kent to set yourself up here in this desert, two thousand miles away from your verdant home, strung with rivers and thick with orchards?

  ‘It was get rich quick,’ Noor says. ‘It was about land and empire.’

  Deep inside the castle, which is so vast it is impossible to explore fully, there is an ancient chill; the rock slabs of the walls are cold to the touch. We make our way up to the battlements where it is blindingly hot. Noor pulls a peach-coloured shawl over her head. It could just about be mistaken for a hijab, except that she wears it loosely and carelessly and very evidently not in the interests of modesty. Even her smallest actions have a sensuality. I feel guilty when I compare her with Emily and her eyebrows and her white-mouse eyes.

  I am learning the language of love and empathy, which I have sorely lacked in the past. I always saw myself as having plenty of preoccupations of my own to keep me busy.

  ‘How are you feeling? Do you want to go on?’

  ‘Yes, I do. I am so sorry. I was suddenly reminded of something I saw in Homs.’

  ‘Will you tell me one day? When you are ready?’

  ‘I’ll try. One day.’

  ‘Where do you want to be married?’

  ‘Can we get married in Toronto?’

  ‘Sure. I only have my aunt. And you have a huge family, obviously.’

  ‘Yes, I do; we are part of the out-of-control immigration boom. There will be hundreds of us in tasteless brown satiny dresses and the men will be in shiny bamboo blue tuxedos, with clip-on ties.’

  She takes my arm. I can still feel her deep unease. It is like the advance tremor the Underground produces as a train approaches.

  6

  Late October

  Soon after Noor left, I moved to the École Biblique, where I have a perfectly se
rviceable room and my father’s old desk in the library. In bed, I am watched over by a simple wooden cross of olive wood. Father Prosper was very keen to secure the desk for me. I didn’t tell him that my father and I did not speak for the last ten years of his life.

  Noor has left Jerusalem on assignment. She is covering the aftermath of the elections in Egypt. We spent our last night in the American Colony Hotel. I was trying in some way to imprint myself on the map of her body, because I had a dull, throbbing foreboding of this trip. The black Mercedes came in the afternoon to take her to Ben Gurion Airport. The driver did not speak to me as I helped him load her bags and cameras. Noor looked not so much a journalist, as my lover masquerading as a journalist. I was too conscious of the driver and the hovering staff to kiss her. I wish I had.

  In Kerak City we went to an antiquarian shop to buy a ring. I told Noor I had no money but she took that in her stride. We found a ring from Sinai. Noor liked the turquoise inlaid into the copper band. She talked to the owner in Arabic. He said that turquoise was mined in Sinai for thousands of years. It was lucky.

  ‘I want it for luck,’ she said.

  It was hard to be sure that anything in this place was genuine. The owner’s name was Hasad al-Sayid – I have his card. He took me to one side in a conspiratorial way, although there was no one else in the place. He had something very special, he said, an ancient codex, which came from a monastery built by the Crusaders. The codex was rolled and tied with a thin leather thong. He opened it reverently. He was offering it at a special price because the authorities in Amman were cracking down on the export of ancient documents and artefacts. I took a photograph of it with my phone when the proprietor went to answer his. He was angry with the caller; we could hear him shouting furiously. Noor laughed: she said he was calling the other person a pig. My teacher in Scotland said the antipathy to pigs was because of the tapeworms they carried in hot climates.