by Harold Lamb
Jacob had gone up to the altar, moved by curiosity to learn if the single light showed again on the western face of the hills. In the dusk of the evening he saw nothing. Presently he heard footsteps behind him that were not the tread of the Watchman's leather slippers. They were nailed boots that strode with assurance.
The two men climbing the steps had the unmistakable stamp of Europeans, yet were utterly unlike—one, unshaven and massive, enveloped in a worn sheepskin pushteen, looked like a seedy god Pan; the other, slight and stooped, had something of a woman's gentleness and the scar of pain on his pale face. This one wore a stained uniform that might have been English, except for the word "Poland" stitched on the shoulder. He appeared to be about Jacob's age, the heavy man a generation older.
"Warum sind Sie hier?" demanded the pushteen wearer instantly, and, as Jacob did not answer, "Why are you here? Why?"
By all odds, Jacob thought, this must be Vasstan. Aloud he said, "I was looking for a light over there."
The heavy man was not pleased. "There? Perhaps our fire you have seen last night. I asked why you are in Araman?"
His deep voice slurred the English words as if he disliked them, but he knew the language well enough—and the name of Araman.
"I'm here by happenchance," Jacob informed him simply.
"I do not understand!"
"But you're Vasstan, aren't you?" Jacob asked, because he did not feel like giving explanations.
"Vasstan—Rudolf Vasstan, Colonel." Then, with a hint of satisfaction, "Vasstan they call me so in Asia."
This man who had bedeviled the British Empire twice in two generations had conjured up phantoms of resistance to the Raj along the mountain barriers of India, had played upon the superstitions of tribes until the name Vasstan breathed aloud would silence talk at camp fires from Istanbul to the Khyber Pass. Jacob judged him to be unique of his kind, a virtuoso of the past, and—being lonely—he might be vain.
So casually did the German ask his next question that Jacob almost answered before he thought. "You recognized me from a photograph, Mr. Ide?"
"I only guessed. There couldn't be another Vasstan around here."
For an instant the German's close-set eyes stared, irritated. "Allemachtig! Can you not answer in plain English?" Then he seemed to throw off his exasperation. "I thought our mutual friends, the inevitable English, had identified me to you."
On his part the silent Polish officer introduced himself painstakingly as Colonel Jan Matejko, of General Anders's command. Speaking fluent French—apologizing for understanding no English—he invited Jacob to drink a cognac when the cognac arrived. They occupied, it seemed, the house with the curio trove.
At the door Colonel Matejko stopped with an exclamation to point at the glimmer of the lake. Silhouetted against it some children were playing a flute. Michal, carrying her laundry up from the lake, put it down by the children. Dripping as she was, she seized the edge of her skirt and performed a grave little dance step before the young flute player.
"Undine!" muttered Vasstan. "A water spirit!"
When Jan Matejko was introduced to Michal, he kissed her wet hand. His shoulders straightened, and his sickly, handsome face lighted. His eyes, sweeping over her, sought the lines of her body beneath its dress.
Before dark a half-dozen men who looked like soldiers out of uniform appeared from the direction of the gate burdened with valises, crates of canned goods, bottles, and rolls of blankets. These they deposited inside the German's house and departed without a word. At that brief sight of them Jacob could make nothing of it except that they were Asiatics who obeyed the two Europeans without comment. Apparently they had no fear of the descent after dark.
Without wasting a minute, Matejko seized a bottle of Cyprus brandy and uncorked it deftly, filling three cups to the brim. His own cup he emptied in gulps, coughing. Color came into his drawn face. "It is not such a beast of a place, this," he commented almost cheerfully.
The German opened one of the bags where Jacob could not help but see the contents—odds and ends of cheap mirrors, lighters, and rings of the kind made in Cairo for tourists. "My stock in trade," he explained, although Jacob had asked no questions. "Aber, these I trade for those"—pointing out the piled-up curios—"like an honest stock merchant. Yes, I am an honest trader now. Why not? A Kurdish woman makes a rug; but to her the mirror I sell is worth the rug. So we trade. It is in the first place necessary to live."
And, as if in high good humor with Jacob, he explained that neither Colonel Matejko nor himself had a country to return to. They were in the situation of refugees without a country. Their situation required that they keep out of sight. So they intended to hibernate for the winter in Araman, like bears covered up with snow.
At that he stepped out the door and clapped sharply for the villagers to hear. "Sana!" he bellowed.
The newcomers wrought a change in the quiet of the summit for Jacob and Michal. It was not that they did anything to disturb the calm of the days, for they kept to themselves, sleeping much after their hard journey in. Rather it was the cross-current of the outer world that they brought in with them. They carried with them old angers and fears, and Jacob felt that Vasstan at least watched him attentively without appearing to do so.
Under his boyish good nature this scrutiny of Vasstan probed at Jacob, testing his knowledge and background, and exploring for his purpose in staying upon the mountain summit.
"Michal likes it," Jacob assured him once, "and I'm collecting the bronze work to take back with us."
It was not a good answer, and Vasstan muttered something about children with kindergarten toys. Leading Jacob up to the altar height impatiently, he pointed out a peak to the eastward that had been bare rock the day before. Now it showed white. "Gerka," Vasstan named it, "three thousand eight hundred meters. I know Gerka, but you will not find it on your maps. You see the snow?"
Jacob nodded, waiting.
"In one month snow will close the roads of outgoing. Then you and your wife will be here for the winter. Now I tell you something else. Beyond Gerka is a valley and a town. That town is Sanjbulak, a Turkish name. You understand? In Sanjbulak, across the Iranian frontier, tribal begs and aghas sit down to make a new government for themselves. They call it a democracy and an independent Kurdish republic. Out of the debris of war they make themselves a republic in the coffee shops of Sanjbulak, counting the rifles that are given them by those great Western nations. With those rifles they are arming horsemen to make a small war with the Iranian troops who know nothing about democracy but do not desire to see Kurdish tribesmen armed. You understand?"
"A little," admitted Jacob, who understood much more than that.
Swinging about, Vasstan pointed dramatically to the southwest. "Again, there the Iraqi Kurds are in arms under the Mullah Ismail, who preaches religion and freedom. Already he has had to retreat from Riyat closer to those mountains." Vasstan shook his grizzled head ominously. "You see, Mr. Ide, how little space is left in this Oberland to shelter us. You will be wise to ask your wife if she is willing to be snowed in for the winter."
It was news to Jacob that the Mullah had had to give up Riyat, and he wondered briefly whether Daoud or Sir Clement had been caught in the border fighting.
"I think we'll take that chance," he said aloud.
Indifferently, as if he had given a charitable warning and had no further interest in what the Americans might do, Vasstan shrugged his heavy shoulders and said no more. Jacob fancied that the German agent was satisfied. It could not have suited his book to have the two Americans return to Baghdad to reveal his hiding place.
Concerning the two Americans, Vasstan said to Colonel Matejko, "There is every reason why they should not be here. They are visionary-romantics; they are accustomed only to the luxury of American cities; and here they are of the mental age of secondary-school children, who look for gold by rainbows."
"They look for kindness perhaps," objected the Pole.
"That will
not keep them alive."
Until the dinner party, Michal felt a sense of friendship for the German. Jacob had ceased to be surprised at her quick understanding of anyone who came near her. She said simply that that was because she liked them all. "Vasstan has been scarred but not hurt," she assured him. "He's an old elephant, cunning and morose, dragging himself away to the burial ground of the elephants, but not allowing any other animal to touch him."
On the good days the German sat in the sun poring over paper-bound books while Matejko explored the lake and ruined wall, always wearing his pistol at his hip. With the indifference of the sick, he wandered rather than walked, often waiting by the sundial, in the hope that Michal would pass. Or he sat in the plaza over a chess set that he had carved for himself out of two kinds of wood. The board he had fashioned out of an American poster which showed a huge bomber soaring over the letters PEACE.
Although Matejko never asked Michal to play with him, he brightened when she seated herself across the board. Then the Pole would sit erect, concentrating on the two miniature armies, politely pointing out Michal's mistakes. When she left, he rose, kissed her hand, and put away the chessmen reluctantly.
Curiously enough the villagers would stop to watch these chess games which they seemed to understand.
"Colonel Matejko has nothing left to care for," she told Jacob. "He lost his wife. When he was caught in the surrender of Polish troops in the valley of Bzura, he escaped, but he could never reach his home in Lwow. And when he was serving with the Eighth Army he had only one letter from her, by way of Stockholm and the Argentine. It had been written eight months before from a labor camp near Tashkent, so he knew his wife had been transported into Soviet territory. It said only a few things—that she found the kasha gruel of the camp good at all the meals, and she still had one silk slip which she washed in her bucket every week, although she had been offered a great deal of money for it. Jacob, you can see how he must have been reading between those lines and thinking that she had only the gruel for meals and that all her own clothing was gone except the slip. At the end she said she missed most having doctors around to go to." Michal paused, thinking. "It was after V-E Day when he heard that his wife had died of typhus in the camp, before he got the letter. When the British stopped paying Colonel Matejko's regiment, he tried to find work in Cairo. He would not consent to return to his home because he said it was not there. He drifted on to Baghdad, to see . if he could enlist as a private in the Levies, where the pay was still four pounds a month. But that didn't work out. For a while he studied in the library of the museum, and tried to learn Arabic. There was still a Polish colony at Baghdad, mostly young women and children. He could not get work because he didn't speak English or Arabic, and he did not want to stay where the Polish women earned some money as prostitutes and taught their children in kindergarten in the daytime."
Matejko had encountered Vasstan in the bazaar at Khanikin on the frontier, where he was selling a fountain pen.
Owing to his record in the two wars, Vasstan could not find a home in a land where Anglo-American authority made itself felt; because Matejko had served with Anders in wartime, he could not cross a frontier controlled by the Soviet Union.
"He likes to tell me about it, Jacob. His wife had no child; they used to drive to the Cathedral of Mary the Mother in Krakow, to pray for children at Easter, and that was their sorrow then. And he is glad now they had no children."
Instinctively she gripped Jacob's hand. "I know I'm just babbling,, but I feel a thing like that so. I know there's a reason for the treaties and the new frontiers of Poland, for all the Curzon lines that divide up the country. But it's the loss of what made them happy that is so terrible, because it is irreparable. We can't restore a cathedral to a people, can we, or give Jan back his wife?"
Gravely, Michal pondered the Polish officer. His grievance had scarred his spirit deep. He held to the pain of it, because it was his link to the past. He seemed to feel satisfaction in the pain. To take his injury away from him would be to empty him, to make him a shell of a man. In showing him affection, Michal feared that she had nourished his grief, making him more conscious of his pain and of himself. Was this good for him?
And Jacob thought: she is forgetting her own injury, she is growing alive. Her happiness could not be pent up within herself—it had to be shared with the children of the mount and the two fugitive men.
Presently he observed that she wore two rings taken from her toilet box—one merely a curio with a bit of jade in it, the other a slender band of platinum set with square sapphires. At once she was aware that he had noticed the rings. "They were bought with my money," she said casually, "purely for decorative purposes." Then she glanced up at him, startled. "I didn't mean that. It's really a lie, because although I did buy the sapphire one, it was to wear in Cairo when—— Four years ago."
Then her fingers twined into his. "Now that I'm confessing, I'm going to make a good job of it. It's the other me that lies by instinct, and that Michal is dead, isn't she—or only a ghost?"
"In the hotels of Cairo, haunting the corridors."
"And the bars. She was a thirsty ghost, or she is. I'm getting all mixed up. Where were we? Oh yes, now I've put on both rings just for a social whim. That's funny, I suppose. But Colonel Matejko kisses my hand by way of greeting, and sometimes he picks my left hand, so I am faintly embarrassed at wearing neither engagement nor marriage ring." Suddenly she flushed. "Your eyes make me feel very self-conscious, Jacob. It is funny to be putting on a wedding ring here."
"Someday and soon," said Jacob, "I'm going to make you marry me."
Even as he spoke, he thought how absurd it sounded and how little meaning the words had here. But Michal laughed, delighted. "That would be wonderful! But how will you do it?"
"Easily. Father Hyacinth comes up to barter for his wine."
"Jacob!" Michal had fallen serious, her mind going off somewhere. "I have very definite ideas about my marriage to you. We are doing so nicely in every way but the ceremony that that has to be important too. There's an old cathedral in Baghdad where the birds fly in and out and the bishop wears the most marvelous vestments—he's eastern Catholic. My parents were Catholic, and I cherish memories of candles and bells." Her fingers gripped his. "I know I sound frivolous, and I am frivolous, Jacob. I'm sure there are times when you want to throw me off the wall. But those memories mean so much to me, and I want to tie them up firmly to you."
One day Matejko descended the mount and reappeared at sunset with villagers carrying three freshly killed gazelles. In good spirits, he had explained that he had tried hunting with Badr and had brought back trophies. Jacob thought that the gazelles must have been half tame to let the riders come within automatic pistol shot of them.
Vasstan came over to invite Michal and Jacob with ceremony to a hunter's dinner. They would like the gazelle steaks, and he promised them music with the liqueurs.
Obligingly Michal changed her dress and spent a little time over a mirror, doing mysterious things to her hair.
"You haven't had a party since Baghdad," Jacob reminded her.
"I'm not sure I'm going to like this one," she murmured with a comb between her teeth. "But we couldn't refuse, could we? We couldn't possibly have had another engagement."
They found the German's house gay, with the trade carpets spread on the floor and Matejko arranging water lilies on the square of silk that served for a tablecloth. He had prepared drinks out of brandy and vermouth, and Vasstan, who seemed to be at home with music, played the shepherd's song from Tännhauser on one of the village flutes—a simple reed pipe. He looked more like Pan than ever. Matejko proposed toasts to the ghosts of Poland. When the gazelle steaks were served, he poured some good red wine from Carmel, a faint flush coloring his pinched face. His eyes strayed constantly to Michal.
Vasstan kept silent while he gorged on the fresh meat, then snatched up his glass and rose, to drown out the other's talk with his insistent voice. Michal l
istened and laughed. "He's started on Winston Churchill," she whispered to Jacob, "and he's good. He says the British hold nothing so sacred as their scarlet coats and tallyho when they go through the ritual of killing a fox. He says he's been a fox, and Winston is the M.H., the master of the hunt, or hounds."
Vasstan made his oration to the greatest of the fox hunters with academic gravity. Winston had hunted his foxes all over the world. He had made the new nation of Iraq a hunting field for the scarlet coats. At the end of the last war he had promised the Arab prince, Feisal, the friend of Lawrence, a kingdom. So he gave to the good Feisal the kingdom of Syria, carved out of the conquered Turkish Empire. By giving a kingdom to Feisal, Winston could stop paying gold sovereigns to the Arab leaders who had done the fighting for the British Empire in the deserts. But the Tiger, Clemenceau, had wanted Syria for the new French colonial empire.
So the fine hunter Winston had tricked the good Feisal and the fiery Clemenceau at the same time by removing Feisal from the promised land of Syria to the region that was no land at all, Iraq. Iraq was populated mostly by Kurds and by desert tribes who knew nothing of Feisal, who went to London and to the League •of Nations to protest about the broken promise. So Feisal was tricked a third time, because Iraq was not independent, and because, since the Kurds fought with the Arab troops, the British had to keep their soldiery encamped there. For the British had taken a lion's share—the British lion's share—of the oil of Kirkuk and the Kurdish hills. Feisal had died of a broken heart, the Kurds were in rebellion, but the British had the oil. And Lawrence died, •embittered by British perfidy.
Vasstan beamed like a pleased child at the success of his oration.
"I've heard the British tallyho," Jacob admitted. "But they do try to keep most of their promises, and they do publish the facts afterward—long afterward. Iraq will get its independence, and probably Winston Churchill will write down in his last memoirs all that you've just speechified."