Sinai Tapestry (14 page)

Yet in the closing lines of Volume Thirty-three, Strongbow revealed that in spite of everything he was still willing to live with his findings and even do so with a certain gusto.

It’s true that life is crumpled and mindless and covered with hairs. But for the few years we have its good memories we also have to admit it remains as pleasantly soft to the touch as an old well-used wineskin.

Or for that matter, as an old man’s well-used balls.

Thus Strongbow’s thesis was nothing less than a vicious onslaught on the entire rational world of the nineteenth century, where sensible solutions were considered available to all problems. In his systemless universe no one was safe and there were no solutions, just life itself.

In proof of this he had offered three hundred million words in thirty-three volumes with no deviations from the facts.

So perhaps it was understandable that Strongbowism never acquired a single adherent in the West. In the end nothing could be said of his work except that it was preposterous and true and totally unacceptable.

When the manuscript was ready Strongbow sent it by caravan from Jerusalem to Jaffa, where a large chartered steamship was waiting to carry both camels and manuscript to Venice. There the caravan would be re-formed by its wild bedouin drivers and traverse a stately swaying course across the Alps to Basle, which he had chosen for publication because of traditional Swiss neutrality. Strongbow himself, feeling the need for a vacation after twelve years of uninterrupted work in the back room of the antiquities dealer’s shop, left Jerusalem for the shores of the Dead Sea where the sun was both warm and perpetual.

At the lowest spot on earth Strongbow lolled comfortably in sulphur baths while his volumes duly appeared in a private edition of twelve hundred and fifty copies, the same number used by Darwin for the first run of the
Origin of Species.
But the only other comparison with Darwin’s study was that
Levantine Sex
also sold out on its day of publication.

There was therefore no need for the British consul in Basle to attempt to have the remaining editions confiscated as he had been ordered to do by Her Majesty’s government. Instead the consul went with his staff to the leading local British banker, who added his staff for the joint visit to the leading local Swiss banker, who closed for the day and collected his considerably larger staff for the march across town to Strongbow’s printer.

Thus it was a large and mixed group that gathered at sunset behind the locked doors of a foundry on the outskirts of Basle. The furnaces were fired to maximum temperature and Strongbow’s manuscript was dumped in and consumed. Then they began wheeling in the towering stacks of plates used to print the study and shoveled them into the furnaces, where they were reduced to huge identical ingots of solid dead metal.

The furnace doors clanged, shadows danced on the walls, sudden flashes of sparks shook the air and the printing history of
Levantine Sex
lasted less than twenty-four hours, over before the next sun rose. Having learned patience in the desert, that much Strongbow might have accepted. But not the act that had occurred during the night.

For it seemed that Parliament had secretly met on the night of publication to review his study, and to booming cries of
Shame Shame
had found it despicably un-English without debate, thereupon unanimously enacting emergency legislation stating that his title as the Duke of Dorset was from that moment forever null and void, that all rights not specifically granted him as a private citizen were to be ignored and denied him, and that he was to be deplored in perpetuity throughout the Empire.

So a contest had been joined. But there was never any doubt who would be the victor.

Undoubtedly God passed His time in some other way, but how?

A
ROUND THE MIDDLE OF
the century a ghostly figure became familiar in certain villages in central Albania. Barefoot and hairless and mostly naked, a skeleton with gaping holes in its head, this diseased apparition lurked near water holes muttering insanely in an unknown tongue.

Normally the peasants of the place would have wasted little time beating such a grotesque derelict with their staves, but the appearance of this apparent leper was so unworldly they offered him vegetables instead. Dumbly the ghost accepted their onions and carrots and floated away on an arcane route that always brought him back in a few days.

The language the peasants heard by the water holes was Aramaic and the ghost was none other than the last of the Skanderbeg Wallensteins, who in the course of six or seven lost years had somehow found his way home from the Holy Land. The villages where he now begged had once belonged to him and the mysterious circle he traced lay around the Wallenstein castle, although his eyes were too weak to make out the cliffs above, where it had once stood.

A change came when he chanced to be near a church where Bach’s Mass in B Minor was being played. The music stirred dim memories of a tower conservatory and the Albanian dialects of his youth, allowing him to ask questions that led him to the castle, where he collapsed in delirium. By then only two people were living there, a mother and her young daughter, the mother having once been a cleaning woman attached to the stables. All the other servants had long since died or moved away after Wallenstein had consumed the family fortune in Jerusalem.

The castle itself was in a terrible state of ruin. The roofs were gone and the upper storeys had fallen in. Bushes grew where generations of Skanderbeg Wallensteins had once sneaked down corridors, peering suspiciously down at the surrounding countryside. One room alone remained intact in the foundations, a small kitchen in which the mother and daughter lived.

They too would have left had the mother not been crippled by kidney stones which made it impossible for her to walk. But as it was they had nowhere to go and couldn’t have hired a cart to take them there anyway. So the daughter tended a meager vegetable garden in an upper storey and collected firewood from the debris of former window frames and furniture.

It was the daughter who found Wallenstein unconscious in the empty moat. Although a small girl she easily shouldered the light sack of bones and carried him down through the rubble to the kitchen, where she and her mother ripped their skirts into bandages and applied herbal plasters. That night they lay on the bare stones while Wallenstein slept on their pile of straw.

After being nursed for several months Wallenstein began to recover. His skin ulcers healed, his fingers uncurled and his eyes cleared, he could hear through one ear and control his bowels and spittle. He still lacked the other ear and nothing could be done about the nose eaten away by ants, but the daughter cleverly carved a wooden ear for him and a lifelike wooden nose, which were held in place by a thin leather thong tied at the back of his head.

The herbal remedies had a remarkable effect on Wallenstein’s maladies save for one, a high fever of unknown cause. Wallenstein was running a steady temperature of one hundred and three degrees and would do so as long as he lived, yet for some reason he was capable of sustaining this feverish new condition. What worried mother and daughter alike was the way he talked upon emerging from his coma.

For it seemed that after completing the greatest forgery in history, Wallenstein had inexplicably been converted to the very heresies he had meant to correct. Twice before he had committed himself to extreme religious positions, once to the silence of the Trappists and later to the even more severe silence and solitude of a desert hermitage.

Now came this third upheaval, an absolute belief in the stupefying contradictions of the Sinai Bible he had nearly died rewriting. And since he felt he was living’ at the end of time, he was convinced he had to recite the entire text of the buried original lest its striking confusions be lost forever.

Thus did Wallenstein plunge from utter silence into utter volubility, talking and talking as if he could never stop.

When he awoke on the straw in the morning some of what he said was still comprehensible. As he sat up in bed he had the habit of shouting
I am that I am
over one shoulder, the shoulder below the wooden ear.

And then as if to reinforce this notion, or perhaps simply because he couldn’t hear through that ear, he would turn his wooden nose to the other side and shout with equal conviction over the other shoulder
He is that He is,
these primal announcements often repeated a dozen times before he was satisfied with their authenticity, whereupon he would leap from bed ignoring the breakfast laid out for him and go striding off naked through the barren ruins of his ancestral castle in search of the innumerable shifting characters once imagined by a blind man and an imbecile, inevitably finding a crowd of their faces in a collapsed wall and stopping there to harangue the blocks of stone tirelessly for the rest of the day.

Or he would lecture a tree for weeks, the crumbling castle and its wild grounds having become a mythical land of Canaan whose dusty waysides were thronged with shepherds and priests and cobblers and traders of every description, not to mention the forty thousand prophets rumored to have sprung from the desert since the beginning of time.

Darkness and snow, autumn and winds, spring and rain and the heavy heat of summer, nothing could keep Wallenstein from preaching his inspired message to the rocks and trees and bushes he mistook for the multitudes swirling through his brain, Isaiah and Fatima and Christ listening to him and munching olives, Joshua and Judas and Jeremiah listening and sharing a wineskin, Ishmael and Mary holding hands and listening, Ruth and Abraham sitting on the grass and listening while Mohammed’s flying horse hovered overhead and Elijah and Harun al-Rashid eagerly pushed forward, everyone surging around him intent on not missing a word that fell from the lips of Melchizedek, legendary King of Jerusalem.

For Wallenstein now realized who he was. This secret of antiquity had been well kept, but he knew, so down the open galleries of the castle he marched casting blessings and warnings, raising a hand in hope or instruction, arms spread wide as he assayed meaningless proverbs and retold in an impressively loud voice, to no one, the thousand and one dreams tumbling through his mind.

As his body healed these verbal seizures increased in eloquence and speed, the words coming so fast there was no time to form them anymore. Powerful tirades were delivered as mere noise. Whole sermons were encapsuled in half a breath, where they disappeared before being uttered, the unspoken syllables solidly entangled and indistinguishable.

Until the slightest sound from the outside world, even his own footstep, might cause him to forget where he was. When that happened he thrust his wooden ear forward timidly and for a few seconds it seemed he might be lost, driven back once more to the profound silence of that tiny cave he had known near the summit of Mt. Sinai.

But then just as suddenly he was all smiles. A hundred faces appeared in a rock, a thousand faces lined the trunk of a tree, a new sea of admirers surged around him.

Wallenstein straightened his wooden nose and adjusted his wooden ear. He was ready. Forcefully he launched himself into an even more incoherent monologue.

Sophia, the daughter, was eight years old when Wallenstein returned to the castle. Having always lived as a recluse in its ruins and never really known anyone but her mother, she had no reason to consider Wallenstein insane. Her mother had a bloated body and never spoke, Wallenstein had wooden features and never stopped speaking. Such was the world for Sophia, who was humble and retiring by nature. Gradually she came to love him as a father and he was able to feel her tenderness despite the swarms of hallucinatory events clamoring for his attention.

When she was old enough she tried to teach herself the intricacies of business in hopes of repairing the castle to make his life more comfortable. Money could still be borrowed in his name but the moneylenders were shrewd and she was often humiliated.

Sophia the Unspoken she came to be called in the villages, because she never said more than a few words at a time. People thought this was due to shyness but actually it came from a simple and gentle fear that too many words on her part might somehow reveal the joyful secret of her new love, and in so doing, in some unexplained way, cause it to go away.

At night she cried alone in the castle, the next day she went back to face the moneylenders, in time learning to manage the investments. Painstakingly she paid off the debts on the castle and bought back its farms and villages, so that eventually the Wallenstein holdings were as extensive as ever.

While Sophia was still young her mother’s kidney stones finally burst through the organs and she died, leaving the adopted father and daughter alone in the castle. Almost at once they became lovers and remained so for twenty years. During that time, moved by a physical contact he had never known before, Wallenstein had moments of lucidity when he was able to recall the original Bible he had found and describe its wonders to Sophia, recalling as well the forgery he had made.

I had to do it, he whispered, I had no choice. But someday I’ll go back and find the original again.

His voice cracked when he said those words and he began to cry helplessly in her arms, knowing he would never go back because the moments of lucidity were too rare, too brief, for him ever to do anything important again.

The Armenian Quarter? he said with hope. It’s there where I left it. I can find it again can’t I?

Of course you can, answered Sophia, holding him tightly and wiping away his tears, her simple love no match for the memory of nineteen years in the Holy Land and the terror of a mountain cave, the scars in the dirt floor of a basement hole in Jerusalem.

You can,
she said,
you can you can,
she repeated desperately as she felt his body loosen and he drifted away in her arms, the sorrowful cast of his face already lapsing into an imbecilic grin.