Sinai Tapestry (7 page)

Unable to gauge distances with one eye, he stepped off the tower and landed on his head in a fountain one hundred feet below, instantly dead and never able to reveal that the stars had told him it was his destiny to found a powerful Albanian dynasty, and that a pardon from Germany resulting in his immediate death was the surest way for this to happen.

Thereafter the drooping left eyelid was apparent in all Skanderbegs soon after birth. As with the progenitor of the clan, the eyelid tended to droop more severely under the pressure of alcohol or when death was near.

With it went other unmistakable traits inherited from the original Albanian Wallenstein, who had always suspected his uncle’s Holy Roman enemies were sending spies down from the north to assassinate him.

As a result the Skanderbeg Wallensteins were deeply suspicious men. They moved furtively and never dared look anyone in the eye. When guests were in the castle the master disappeared frequently, being seen now slinking along the far side of the garden, next in the kitchen behind a cupboard sneaking a quick glass of arak, a moment later peeking out of a tower with a spyglass.

What the family malady amounted to, in short, was an unshakable conviction that the entire universe was ordered with the sole purpose of endangering Skanderbeg Wallensteins. The plots they imagined were vague yet pervasive and thereby explained all events on earth.

By tradition they received no education. War was their vocation and they left home at an early age to pursue it, fighting fiercely against either the Turks or the Christians as had their contradictory namesake, the national hero. Yet curiously not one of them was ever killed in battle. Although always campaigning they somehow managed to survive the massacres perpetrated by their enemies and return to their castle to become extremely alert shrunken old men.

Thus in almost every way the Wallenstein men were the exact opposites of the Strongbows, who died young never suspecting anything. In their dark damp castle perched gloomily on a wild Albanian crag, a windy and insecure Balkan outpost, these aging illiterates were forever given to rampant instabilities and extravagant reversals of character.

Then too, the Skanderbeg Wallensteins had never been father and son. Combining love with sensual pleasure was beyond them and they were impotent with their wives. Sexually they could only be aroused by very young girls of eight or nine.

When a new bride was brought to the castle this situation was delicately explained to her by the resident mother-in-law. There was nothing to worry about, however, since the castle had a large staff of loyal retainers. Matters could be easily arranged, as indeed they had been for nearly two hundred years.

The resident matriarchs were always quick to claim that the Wallenstein men loved their women well. Yet the fact was that successive Skanderbegs were never related, perhaps the real reason why these masters of the castle so violently distrusted everyone at home and spent most of their lives away in wars.

Generally their fathers were stolid Albanian butlers or gamekeepers whose interests were limited to the confines of a pantry or a nest of grouse. But in 1802 the new wife of a Skanderbeg happened to take to her bed a young Swiss with a passion for details, a highly gifted linguist who was on a walking tour to the Levant. Later that year a Wallenstein heir was born for the first time in history without a drooping left eyelid.

The boy was unusual in other ways, being both shy and ascetic. At an age when other Skanderbegs would have been glancing lasciviously at girls of four or five, preparing for their adult sex life with girls of eight or nine, he seemed to notice no one at all. Nothing interested him but the Bible, which he read incessantly. In fact this Skanderbeg passed his entire youth without leaving the castle, all his time spent in the private conservatory he had built for himself in its tallest tower.

From the conservatory he had superb views that stretched all the way to the Adriatic. The walls of the room were lined with Bibles and there was an organ at which he sat playing Bach’s Mass in B Minor long into the night. Before he was twenty it was said he had memorized the Bible in all the tongues current in the Holy Land during the Biblical era. So of course no one was surprised when he paused at the gate one morning, there to cross the moat into the outside world for the first time, to announce he was on his way to Rome to enter the Trappist monastic order.

When Wallenstein professed his vows he did so as Brother Anthony, in honor of the fourth-century hermit and founder of monasticism who had died in an Egyptian desert at the age of one hundred and four. As a monk he continued to live much as he always had until he was sent to Jerusalem and ordered to make a religious retreat to St Catherine’s monastery.

This lonely enclosure of gray granite walls at the foot of Mt Sinai, fortified by Justinian in the sixth century, was supported by a curious tribe called the Jebeliyeh, bedouin in appearance, who had been forcibly converted to Islam a thousand years earlier. But actually the Jebeliyeh were descendants of Bosnian and Wallachian serfs, and therefore not very distant neighbors of the Wallenstein castle, whom Justinian had forcibly converted to Christianity three hundred years before that, then sent to the Sinai so the monks could tend to their prayers while others tended their sheep.

When a Trappist first arrived in the Holy Land it was common practice for him to be sent to St Catherine’s to consider these and other wonders concerning time and emperors, prophets and the desert.

As part of his working day at the monastery Brother Anthony was directed to clear away the debris in the dry cellar of a storeroom long in disuse. He uncovered a mound of hard earth, and in keeping with God’s plan for regularity in the universe he began chipping away the mound to level the floor.

His tool struck the edge of a cloth. A few minutes later a large bundle lay in his lap. Carefully he unwound the lengths of stiff swaddling and found a thick stack of parchment. He lifted the cover, read the first line of Aramaic in the first of the four columns on the page, closed his eyes and began to pray.

After some minutes he opened his eyes and gazed at the flowing mixture of Aramaic and Old Hebrew, knowing that no Biblical texts survived in those dead tongues, suspecting, therefore, that here before him was one of the oldest Old Testaments in existence.

The lost original perhaps?

Once more Brother Anthony closed his eyes to pray, this time for deliverance from vanity. Then he opened the manuscript again and it struck him as a blow. The New Testament as well? Centuries before Christ had lived?

His hands trembled as he turned the pages, recalling the various Bibles he had memorized. It was absolutely impossible, but by the end of the afternoon two facts had enveloped his mind in darkness.

First, this Bible was complete and without question the oldest Bible in the world.

Second, it denied every religious truth ever held by anyone.

The stories it told distorted every event that had taken place over three millennia in the Eastern Mediterranean, in the Holy Land and more particularly in Jerusalem, legendary home of Melchizedek, King of Salem which also meant King of Peace, the fabled priest of antiquity who had blessed the future patriarch of all three faiths when first the shepherd Abraham journeyed forth from the dawn of the east with his flock.

Melchizedek’s very existence was in doubt and so was that of Jerusalem, which since Melchizedek’s reign had always been the ultimate destination of all sons and prophets of God toiling up from the desert, stern with their messages of salvation for the eternally queasy souls of that city.

Possibly, the pages implied, Melchizedek had lived elsewhere or been someone else. And just possibly, there had never been a Jerusalem.

To Brother Anthony the words before him were terrifying. What would happen if the world suddenly suspected that Mohammed might well have lived six centuries before Christ rather than six centuries after him?

Or again, that Christ had been a minor prophet in the age of Elijah or a secret messiah in the age of Isaiah, who alone knew his true identity and rigorously followed his instructions?

Or that Mohammed and Isaiah were contemporaries, brethren in a common cause who comforted one another in moments of trial?

Or that idols were indeed God when made in the shape of Hector or David, Alexander or Caesar, if the worshipper was living in the same era as one of these worthies?

Or more or less in the same era.

Or at least thought he was.

Or that the virtues of Mary and Fatima and Ruth had been confused in the minds of later chroniclers and freely interchanged among them? That the virtues ascribed to Fatima more properly were those of Ruth? That the song of Ruth had been sung by Mary? That the virgin birth called Mary’s belonged to Fatima?

Or that it was true from time to time that innumerable Gods held court in all the high and low places? That these legions of Gods were variously sleek and fat or gnarled and lean, as vicious as crazed brigands or as gentle as doting grandfathers?

That they passed whole epochs vaguely preoccupied with the slit necks of bulls, ambrosia, broken pottery, war, peace, gold rings and purple robes and incense, or even gurgling vacantly while sniffing and sucking their forefingers?

Although at other times there were no Gods anywhere? Not even one? The rivers wending their ways and the lambs bleating with mindless inconsistency?

Or that the carpenter who had gone down to the Jordan to be cleansed by his cousin was either the son of Fatima or the father of Ruth? That Joshua had gained his wisdom from the fifth Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad, who might himself have been Judas or Christ if only he had foreseen a painful future as clearly as he recalled a blissful past?

That David and Julius Caesar had been secret cardplaying cronies? That Alexander the Great had challenged them both to a primitive sort of backgammon for nominal stakes, winning easily, yet had gone on to lose his earnings to a chattering barber whose only other distinction in history was that he had cut Mohammed’s hair?

That Abraham had passed on his legacy to the Jews through his first son, Ishmael the wanderer, and his legacy to the Arabs through his sedentary second son, Isaac? And since he had no more sons, that he rejected outright the paternity claims of the Gentiles and refused to take any responsibility whatsoever for them?

Or that the trumpet beneath the walls of Jericho had been blown by Harun al-Rashid, not stridently but sensuously as was his manner, as he seductively circled the oasis seven times and brought his people into a happy land?

In order that Joshua might take a promised bath in the Jordan and Christ might retire to a sumptuous court on the banks of the Tigris to spin forth a cycle of tales encompassing the dreams of a thousand and one nights?

And so on in the windblown footsteps that fled across the pages of this desert manuscript where an entire fabric of history was woven in magical confusion, threaded in unexpected knots and colored in reverse patterns, the sacred shadows of belief now lengthened or shortened by a constantly revolving sun and shifting moon.

For in this oldest of Bibles paradise lay everywhere on the wrong side of the river, sought by the wrong people, preached by a prophet different from the one who had been heard, an impossible history where all events occurred before or after they were said to have occurred, or instead, occurred simultaneously.

Numbing in its disorder and perplexing to the edge of madness. Circular and unchronicled and calmly contradictory, suggesting infinity.

But the worst shock of all came on the final pages, where the compiler of the Bible had added an autobiographical footnote.

He was blind, he said, and had been blind since birth. His early life had been spent sitting beside dusty waysides in Canaan with a bowl in his lap crying out for alms, always close to starvation.

In time he learned a few more coins always came his way if he chanted imaginary histories and the like, for there was nothing poor toilers on the road loved more than a description of wondrous events, their own lives being both dreary and hard. And perhaps not surprisingly after so many years spent gathering gossip, he had no difficulty making up tales.

Before long an old couple had come to him with their son, an imbecile. The boy couldn’t tell night from day or summer from winter, but while he was still young his parents had discovered he drew shapes in the sand very well. An idea had come to them. Why not see if the boy could memorize the alphabet? Very few people could write. If the boy learned to do so he could become a scribe and copy down the documents others dictated to him. The advantage, of course, was that he wouldn’t have to understand what he was writing.

It took many years and all their money but the task was accomplished. Their son could write beautifully, his teachers said so. When a reed was placed in his hand he wrote down exactly what was said, no more and no less.

The problem was that the other difficulties still remained. Now the parents were both ill and wanted to make some provision for their son’s future. They thought of the blind storyteller. What if the boy accompanied the blind man on his travels and wrote down his words, in exchange for which the blind man could show their son when to sleep and eat and wear more or fewer clothes? Wouldn’t it be a fair and useful partnership?

Well it had seemed a good arrangement, said the blind man, and from that day forward they had proceeded from dusty wayside to dusty wayside making a meager living. Affection had grown into love and they had become like father and son. All had worked out for the best in the dusty waysides of Canaan.

But here the blind man had to make a confession. The histories his adopted son had faithfully copied down weren’t histories at all, for several reasons.

For one, because the blind man only knew what he heard, having no eyes to verify anything.

For another, because his position in life was lowly and he knew little about great events, having never heard more than bits and pieces of rumors.