Sinai Tapestry (28 page)

He raised his tumbler.

Doesn’t bother you does it, Stern? It shouldn’t, don’t worry about it. Until I find something better to do I’ll run guns to your Arab and Jewish and Christian country that doesn’t exist and be happy doing it, what do I care that it’s never going to exist. And you’ll get good value from me, you know that. Just no more shit about somewhere being someplace because it isn’t, I don’t have a homeland anymore. My last home was in Jericho with a woman who left me.

He grinned.

Cold in Jerusalem wouldn’t you say? It seems to be snowing in the land of milk and honey, do you see it now. So here’s to your kind of power and mine. Here’s to you, Father Stern.

Stern slowly raised his glass.

To you, Joe.

In the spring of 1922 Stern was in Smyrna to meet with his principle contact in Turkey, a wealthy secret Greek activist. The man’s chief interest was in seeing Constantinople returned to the Greeks, for which a Greek army was then fighting Kemal and the Turks in the interior. But he had been working with Stern for ten years helping him smuggle arms to nationalist movements in Syria and Iraq, ever since his and Stern’s aims had come to coincide during the Balkan wars.

In fact it was Sivi who frequently provided Stern with the money he was always so desperately lacking, the same Sivi who had once befriended Maud and helped her with money after the death of her husband Yanni, his much younger half-brother.

In addition the notorious old man, now seventy, was the undisputed queen of sexual excess in Smyrna, where he always appeared at the opera dressed in flowing red gowns and a large red hat spilling with roses to be plucked off and tossed to his friends when he made his entrance into his box, his ruby rings flashing and a long unlit cigar firmly fixed between his teeth. Because of the reputation of his father as one of the founding statesmen of the modern Greek nation, because of his own eccentric manner and wealth and because of Smyrna’s importance as the most international city in the Middle East, he was an extremely effective agent with influential connections in many places, particularly in the numerous Greek communities found everywhere.

He lived alone with his secretary, a young Frenchwoman once educated in a convent but long since seduced by the sensual air of Smyrna society and the salon Sivi ran there. Stern’s meeting with him, as usual, was at three o’clock in the morning since Sivi’s entertainments ran late. Stern left his hotel ten minutes before that and strolled along the harbor to see that he wasn’t being followed. At three he slipped into an alley and walked quickly around to the back door of the villa. He knocked quietly, saw the peephole open and heard the bolt slide. The secretary closed the door gently behind him.

Hello, Theresa.

Hello again. You look tired.

He smiled. Why not, the old sinner will never meet me at a decent hour. How’s he been lately?

In bed. His gums.

What about them?

He says they hurt, he won’t eat.

Oh that, don’t worry about it, it happens every three or four years. He gets it into his head his teeth are falling out and becomes afraid he might have to make a public appearance without his cigar in place. It only lasts a week or two. Have the cook send in soft-boiled eggs.

She laughed. Thank you, doctor. She rapped on the bedroom door and there was a soft thump on the other side. Stern raised his eyebrows.

A rubber ball, she whispered, it means come in. No unnecessary words. It seems opening his mouth to fresh air might hasten the ravaging of his gums. I’ll see you before you leave.

Sivi was sitting in bed propped up by an immense pile of red satin pillows. He wore a thick red dressing gown and a swath of red flannel that entirely covered his head and was tied under his chin. The large olive wood logs crackling in the fireplace gave the only light in the room. Stern pulled aside a drape and found all the windows locked and shuttered against the mild spring night. He stripped off his jacket in the oppressive heat and sat down on the edge of the bed. He felt the old man’s pulse while Sivi sniffed at a pan of steaming water on the night table.

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 you 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.