True.
Right. Then Haj Harun saw what he saw, he learned what he learned, and that’s that. One of God’s secret names is Stern and there we are. Haj Harun heard it spoken to him once, and hearing it once is hearing it forever. You just can’t undo the past and you just can’t argue with the facts in this world and that was a fact for him, therefore is. In all his long life, the old man says, he will always cherish that moment above all others. Stern. One of God’s secret names.
Stern looked up from the table. He opened his hands and shrugged, smiled, this time without any sadness in his face.
Joe nodded and laughed. Even though it was only a small step, he was relieved. But he also knew they still had a long way to go that night, eleven years and three months after that other night in Smyrna.
An evening for reminiscing all right, said Joe, drumming his fingers on the table. What with the alleys outside deserted under the snow and this dreadful Arab excuse for a pub doing no business at all but our meager own, not what you’d call exactly a haven of holiday cheer. Tell me now, what do you know about this formerly talking mummy named Menelik? This Ziwar of antiquity who Cairo’s always going on about. Did you meet him? You must have.
Of course.
Well?
Among other things, Strongbow left him all his correspondence when he went into the desert to become a holy man.
Joe made a face.
Correspondence, you say? Yellowing letters? I don’t know how awakening and arresting that is on a quiet snowy night in Jerusalem near the end of the year. Maybe we should go back to the time when I was smuggling arms for you in Haj Harun’s giant hollow stone scarab. Now that was heavy lifting, I can tell you. And hard on the back with very little assistance from the resident companion sorcerer, I can tell you that too.
But this was an unusual correspondence, continued Stern. About twelve thousand letters and all from one man, the White Monk of Timbuktu.
Joe slapped the table. He whooped.
Hold it. Hold it right there. This may be something I’ve been looking for. The article in question, the said monastic gent in Timbuktu, he didn’t also go by the name of Father Yakouba by any chance?
Yes, the same.
And when his nine hundredth child was born your father sent him a pipe of Calvados in honor of the occasion? Say about seven hundred bottles marching right down to Timbuktu, for which the extraordinary item heretofore mentioned sent your father a thank-you note dated Midsummer night, 1840? Said note thanking your father for this most welcome gift of one hundred and fifty gallons of juice? Timbuktu being as dry as dry with little to relieve the thirst except banana beer?
Stern laughed.
I hadn’t heard of that letter, he said. But there was only one White Monk of the Sahara, and he and Strongbow were great friends.
Joe slapped the table again.
My God man, there we have it. Once a long time ago when I first arrived here, Haj Harun turned up with that thank-you note, the way he does you know, being a former antiquities dealer. Well the numbers involved knocked me over they did, since I was still accustomed to thinking of priests as something quite different from what this White Monk was obviously up to down there in Timbuktu. And ever since, I’ve been eaten with curiosity to know how that White Monk became what he did, where he did. Would you be knowing that?
Stern laughed. He nodded.
You do? Ah and ah, now that’s just the job for a Christmas Eve. Just the thing to brighten up this sorry excuse for a village pub on a cold snowy night. Quickly I’ll alert our host to bring us a whole bottle of his delicious fuel so we can flame at will. Now then, Stern. Who was this great skin down there in Timbuktu? And moreover, why?
He started out as a missionary in Tripoli, said Stern, a member of the White Father order. Originally he was from Normandy, a peasant, and he had a taste for Calvados. Well a cardinal came down to Tripoli from Paris, an art collector who was also epileptic. The cardinal was there to smuggle out some valuable mosaics, but while there he thought he should also deliver a sermon for the sake of appearances. He decided to deliver it in the desert outside of Tripoli, because he’d never seen a desert.
Joe held up his hands to interrupt.
Wait. They chose the Calvados peasant-priest’s congregation for the event? It came to pass in the desert under a palm tree for shade? The cardinal got underway and had a bloody seizure?
Yes. The congregation was black and the peasant-priest was facing them, doing the interpreting, with the cardinal standing behind him. I forgot to mention that the peasant-priest was a dwarf.
Joe interrupted again.
Wait, I think I’m beginning to see it now. It’s bloody hot out there and the cardinal has his fit and begins swinging his arms to keep his balance, and the Calvados peasant-priest’s head is fast becoming a kind of lectern. Down rain the blows, just pounding and pounding away on your man’s head, and before long he’s being battered something terrible. Like this, is it?
Joe stood up and swung his arms, pounding the table.
Do I have it right? Just swinging away at this head beneath him, for Christ’s sake, and then the cardinal goes into the final writhing snatch of his seizure and screams something holy? Maybe that the flesh of the lamb is good to eat? And this last blow of his is so holy and determined, has so much passionate religious conviction behind it, it bangs your man right down into the dust, just lays the dwarf flat out in the dust? True or not?
Have you heard this story, Joe?
I have not, not a word of it, but tales have a way of running true to course and so far this one’s holding together as such things should. Now if I’m not wrong, I’d suspect the cardinal collapses in his sedan chair at this point and is wafted away to a cool palace in Tripoli where he can have a glass of wine and a bath and a relaxing snooze. In other words he’s finished. He’s done what he came to do in the story and now we can forget about him. Yes or no?
Yes.
Still on course then. Still in line and back we go to our hero, our dwarf peasant-priest, who is lying in the dust, flat out and thoroughly dazed, his head singing from the blows of higher authority, trying as best he can to recover from this very holy beating. And his black congregation is staring at him, naturally, and he’s staring back at them, and nobody knows what to make of it all. I mean this appears to be a frightful way to spend a morning. True?
Yes.
And those poor blacks sitting there in the dust are starving. Any one of them would be more than happy to have a bite of lamb if they could, just as the cardinal suggested, but they know there’s no hope of them ever getting their hands on a morsel, not even the tiniest. Right?
Yes.
And now we find this very same scene, utterly static, a tableau if you like, continuing on through an endless hot afternoon in the shimmering heat under that palm tree, no one moving and nothing but mirages on the horizon, not a cloud in the sky, the black congregation staring at the dwarf priest from Normandy and the dwarf peasant-priest staring at this starving congregation, just on and on as the sun slips lower and lower crushing what shade there had been and burning everyone, until there is no shade, just this hopeless heat and blistering dust, suffocating it is, and that continues for about five thousand hours or until the sun bloody well sets. Is that how it went, Stern?
Yes.
Joe sucked in his coffee and poured more cognac.
All right. Sunset. Here we are then. The sun is gone and now that it’s getting dark the people under this palm tree rise like ghosts from the dust, the two sides of them, the dwarf priest on the one side, the starving blacks on the other, nobody having said a thing all day, nobody having moved a muscle all day, and the two sides go their separate ways in the shadows of the night. Correct?
Yes.
Yes, you say? Then I’m beginning to see it clearly now. Well what happens that night is that the peasant dwarf-priest locks himself in his room, lonely as he can be, just lonely as lonely, and breaks out a bottle of
Calvados and says to himself, What’s going on here? What was all that about? Why is an epileptic cardinal from Paris beating me senseless into the dust? Why is my head being used as a lectern by anyone anyway? Why am I spending an endless afternoon flat out in the shimmering heat, nothing but mirages around me and not a single cloud overhead, while my poor black congregation stares at me and I stare at them? Is there anything Christian about that? says the peasant-priest to himself, pouring another healthy slug of Calvados. Be that the case at hand?
Yes.
Still running to course then. So the next morning we find your man, who’s done some thoughtful thinking over his bottle of Calvados in the course of a long lonely night, thinking ahead for sure and ruminating on a more amenable future for himself, we find him respectfully approaching his White Father superiors with a modest proposal. Why don’t you send me to Timbuktu as a one-man missionary team, he says, and I’ll convert the heathens there. Fact?
Yes.
Good, a fact. Although of course it’s also true there’s no French army within a thousand miles of Timbuktu, which means converting anyone there is out of the question. But his superiors decide to grant the request anyway, because losing a dwarf peasant-priest from Normandy doesn’t mean anything to them, and also because a show of missionary effort so far away to the south would certainly be pleasing news to their cardinal back in Paris, who didn’t find their stolen mosaics as valuable as he’d thought they’d be. Still true?
Yes.
All right. Off goes the dwarf peasant-priest, and after adventures that would take hours to recount he finally reaches Timbuktu. There he sets himself up in a dusty courtyard and begins to preach an exceptionally mild message of love that’s all-encompassing. Love thy neighbor, sure, that’s for certain. But don’t stop there. Love strangers and non-neighbors, in fact love everyone you ever meet. Is that it?
Yes.
Do a certain amount of honest labor, but after that and before that and in between times, love anyone you happen to find on the premises?
Yes.
Joe jumped to his feet. He pushed back his chair and climbed up on it. The snow was falling faster outside. The Arab who had been asleep at the front of the shop belched and scratched his groin and belched again, staring in disbelief at Joe standing on his chair, his arms outstretched, dressed in the baking priest’s shabby uniform from the Crimean War.
And it is especially important, intoned Joe, caressing the fetid air with his hands, that no one should ever find himself sitting alone in the dust on a hot afternoon staring at a group of people. Nor should a group of people sit and stare at a poor lonely person, even a dwarf, who happens to find himself alone across the way. Instead both sides should rise at once and mix in the love of God. In short, make love for God’s sake. Don’t just sit and stare, make love, now and quickly and all together. Was that the ultra-Christian message, Stern, that was heard down there in Timbuktu?
Stern nodded, smiling up at Joe.
Well then, said Joe, that must be a true account of how a former peasant-priest from Normandy came to establish a huge polysexual commune on the far side of the Sahara in the nineteenth century. And by this manner of activity one Father Yakouba, a dwarf more generally known as the White Monk of the Sahara, became the father in time of nine hundred children. On which occasion the legendary explorer Strongbow, your said father, sent to his old friend the said dwarf in Timbuktu, by way of most sincere and congratulatory sentiments, a pipe of the priest’s most favored beverage, Calvados, which by a less prodigious man’s measurements would be some seven hundred regular bottles of the stuff. Am I still free from error?
Yes.
Joe dropped his arms. He jumped to the floor, coughing, and sat down. He drank and lit a cigarette.
Wretched drink, this lamp fuel, saints preserve us. But it’s cold tonight and we need it. Cairo told me all that by the way. He had it from Menelik, who of course picked it up in his forty-year conversation with Strongbow. But my God what a giant of a dwarf, the White Monk of the Sahara. You know what I wish sometimes? I wish I’d known just one of those characters from the last century. Old Menelik, the White Monk, Strongbow the genie, just one of them.
Joe tried to laugh but he coughed instead.
I know, he said, when the coughing subsided, why am I always talking about the past? Bad habit, I’ll have to get over it someday. Have to get over all my habits someday. And maybe you’ll be wanting to talk to me about Maudie now that you’ve met her. How she tried to trace Sivi after the massacre in Smyrna and couldn’t, and only found out years later that he was living in Istanbul, if you could call it living after what Smyrna had done to him. Poor old Sivi. Christ she must have been shocked finding him like that, living in a tiny squalid room by the Bosporus and working as a laborer in a hospital for incurables, forgetting even to feed himself half the time. And I can understand why she moved there to take care of him, loving him as she did and trying to have that link with the past at least, until he died and she went back to Athens. Sivi would have been that for her even then, giving her life some meaning. Ah the wreckage in this world, what can you say about it? How can you ever explain it to yourself? And Sivi of all people. From what I’ve heard just about the kindest, gentlest man who ever lived. Always helping everybody and he ended like that. So what’s to say? Nothing, that’s what.
How’d you know all that about Maud?
Munk. She and Munk have been friends since after the war, you know.
I didn’t, but I should have guessed. Through Sivi of course.
Yes. And I’ve tried to help her, Stern. I gave Munk money to give to her, saying it was a gift or a loan or anything from him, not me, but she wouldn’t take it. She must have known it was coming from me and couldn’t bring herself to accept it after the way she left me. Munk’s tried to help her too but she always refuses, still thinking it’s coming from me, I suppose.
But, Joe, why haven’t you ever gone to see her?
I didn’t think it would help. You can’t go back, Stern, you just can’t. I know that. I’ll never love another woman the way I loved her, but still you can’t go back. It’s just too long ago and I’ve put it behind me as best I can. You have to do that, you just have to.
Well what about your son?
Joe smiled.
Bernini. That’s a lovely name she gave the lad. I’m going to be seeing him soon, but I won’t be seeing Maudie and I don’t want her to know, it’s better that way. She’s got some kind of balance worked out in her life and I don’t want to upset it, especially with Sivi just dying. He was her family after all. Brother, father, everything. All she ever had. And I know she must still have some painful memories about me. Time, it takes. So someday maybe. Another time, another place. But listen, I’ve got a favor to ask you. If she ever needs money, I mean if you can see she really needs it, I’d like you to let me know, write to me, so I can send it to you. She’d accept it from you if she didn’t know we knew each other, which she doesn’t. I never told her who I was running guns for back when we had that house in Jericho. So will you not tell her? Will you do that for me? So I can get money to her through you, if she needs it?
Stern nodded.
Of course.
Thanks, I appreciate it. Now let me pass on my stirring local news. Cairo and me, we’re ending the poker game in a few days. Munk doesn’t know it but it’s all over at last.
You’re leaving Jerusalem?
By the stars, Stern, by the stars.
Where to?
Me? The New World, where else. Ever since I met Maudie and she told me about her Cheyenne grandmother, I’ve been fascinated by the American Indians. I want to see them. Maybe even try living with them for a while.
Stern smiled.
And Cairo?
He’ll be heading back to Africa. You haven’t met him, have you?
No.
More’s the loss. A fine article, that, totally fine. Holds in trust what you tell him, then hears what you don’t tel
l him and holds that in trust too. Whoever old Menelik was, he should be canonized, bringing up Cairo the way he did. Who was he, Stern?
Strongbow’s best friend.
That’s a lot.
Yes.
But you shouldn’t go on lingering under that burden, Stern. Shouldn’t do it. No man can.
I suppose.
Wretched stuff, fuel for lamps. Burns your wick but burns it down and out too.
Joe? What about Haj Harun?
I know, I’ve thought about that. Munk’ll just have to watch out for him. If he wants this bloody place he’ll just have to take on the responsibilities.
It’ll be all right?
My God how do I know, I guess it’ll have to be. Nearly three thousand years he survived here before I met him. Why not now without me?
Because things are changing, Joe.
So they are, so they always are. Changing in Jerusalem, changes in the Old City. How about you. You’re going to carry on with what you’re doing?
Yes.
No offense, but you know by now it can’t work.
Maybe.
Not maybe. You know. The point is you’re going to continue doing it anyway?
I have no choice.
Joe leaned forward and placed his hands flat on the table. He gazed at the bulging veins that hadn’t shown a few years ago.
No choice, Stern? No choice?
Stern nodded slowly.
Yes. It seems it’s that way sometimes.
Joe closed his eyes and shook his head. Stern was speaking very quietly.
Joe? That time in Smyrna?
I hear you.
The smoke and the fires, you remember?
We had to get to it, didn’t we. Shared it and had to get to it. Yes, I remember.
And Sivi going mad.
Going all right, going and never coming back. A September Sunday in 1922.
And Theresa beating her head on the floor and screaming Who is that?
I hear it. I’ve heard it more than once since then and I hear it now, poor little one.
And Haj Harun?
Jerusalem Poker (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 2) Page 33