Sinai Tapestry (15 page)

After twenty years Sophia became pregnant. She didn’t want to have the baby but Wallenstein pleaded with her and finally she agreed. She also agreed to name the child Catherine in honor of the monastery where he had discovered his new religion.

The child was a boy and Sophia duly named him Catherine, but his birth was the great tragedy of her life. From that day on Wallenstein never again spoke to her, never touched her, never saw her when she was standing in front of him. Unknown to her, behind his grin, he had been pondering for some time the possibility that he might not be merely Melchizedek, no matter how august that primary priest of antiquity.

Secretly, for some time, he had been considering the possibility he might be God.

Now with the birth of a son his own daring overwhelmed him and the already incredible profusion of his brain was pushed into an ultimate or original chaos. In his mind Catherine was Christ and he at once descended into the limitless prophecies of the Bible he had buried in Jerusalem, a vision from which there was no return.

And now that he was God the legions of his creation were so vast, the dimensions of his universe so grand, he could never stop talking, not even for an instant. Yet he also sensed it was beneath him to continue addressing rocks and trees and bushes. Those were the duties of Melchizedek, bringer of the divine message.

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

Wallenstein raised his wooden ear hoping to catch a familiar sound. When he had become God, not surprisingly, he learned that God was also never silent. Not surprisingly, God talked just as incessantly as he had when he had been Wallenstein. But what was so important that only God could say it?

A name? The very name he had been invoking for years in his rapid deliveries? A name spoken so reverently, so quickly, there had never been time to include any vowels in it? A name, therefore, that could only be pronounced by Him? A name that was nothing but noise to anyone else?

Wallenstein tried it. He said it quite loudly.

YHWH.

It sounded right and he repeated it, astounded that he could sum up the entire universe and describe everything in it simply by identifying himself, exactly what he had been looking for during all those years of tirade, one unpronounceable word at the end of time, his own name.

YHWH
.

Yes he had the timbre of it and it was a surpassing method for affirming the truth.

Suddenly he grinned. All at once he had advanced from the blind man’s secret three thousand years ago in the dusty waysides of Canaan to the secret of the imbecile scribe. Now never again would he bother to lecture a stone or a tree or a bush. Never again would he eat or sleep or put on more or less clothing or march down corridors and gardens varying his accounts to verify the truth. Now there would be no more winters and summers for him or days and nights at the foot of the mountain.

He had finished his autobiographical footnote,
saith end ending of endings end,
and now he could stand absolutely still through all eternity repeating his own name.

Sadly Sophia watched him shouting his senseless noise and knew there was only one way to save him, only one way that he could live, so she took him by the hand and led him down through the deepest recesses of the castle to a soundless black dungeon many hundreds of feet below the ground, sat him down on the cot and locked the iron door, thereafter faithfully visiting him three times a day with food and water and lovingly stroking him for an hour or more as he shouted out his incomprehensible name to the entire assembly of worlds he had made, tenderly adjusting his wooden nose and his wooden ear before kissing him good-bye and locking the door once more so moments might come in the black stillness when he could forget his manifold duties as creator of all things and grow silent, finding at last each day the food and sleep necessary for life, which the former hermit and forger did for another three decades, surviving beneath the castle until 1906, through Sophia’s love living to the advanced age of one hundred and four deeply buried in the boundless darkness or light God had found for Himself in the universe of His cave.

The desire of the stranger is to his people. Speed the stranger home.

N
EWS OF THE TRIUMPHANT
book-burning episode in Basle and Parliament’s emergency legislation against him reached Strongbow by way of a Roman newspaper months out of date.

While tarrying in the cabalist center of Safad he had gone down to Galilee one morning to fish. The air was fresh, the land still, the water unruffled. In due time he caught a fish and searched his robes for something to wrap it in, but all he had with him was a worn copy of the Zohar.

A clamor from the hillside above attracted his attention, a noisy band of Italian pilgrims climbing up to have a breakfast picnic on the site where Christ had preached the Sermon on the Mount. As they trudged along one of the men impatiently broke out a large salami and ripped off a mouthful of meat, discarding the wrapping paper, which floated down the hill in Strongbow’s direction.

Strongbow was about to wrap up his fish in the newspaper page when he saw his own name looming up in a greasy headline that led into the fish’s mouth. The dispatch was slimy but included all the essential facts.

At once Strongbow strapped his heavy bronze sundial to his hip and marched down the shore to Tiberias, where a small Turkish garrison was quartered. Without a word he pushed aside the guards and slammed his way into the private apartment of the Turkish commandant, a young man who was sipping his morning coffee, not yet dressed.

The commandant grabbed his pistol from the night table and wildly fired off all nine rounds at what he took to be an immensely tall old Arab holding a fish and wearing a sundial and carrying a book of Jewish mysticism. When the bullets stopped crashing into the walls the Arab calmly laid the fish on the night table and placed a Maria Theresa crown beside it.

I’ve just caught a herbivorous fish that thrives on algae and I want to send news of the catch to England.

What?

A St Peter’s fish, rather bony but tasty. Are you in contact with Constantinople by telegraph?

Yes, whispered the terrified Turk, staring first at the fish and the book, then at the gold coin, then at the cryptic Arabic aphorisms engraved on the sundial.

Good. Send two telegrams for me to Constantinople, to someone you can bribe or trust, with instructions that they are to be taken to a commercial telegraph office and forwarded to an address in London I will give you.

But I don’t even know who you are.

Strongbow placed a second gold coin on the table beside the fish. The Turk’s eyes narrowed.

How can I be sure your catch is authentic and your fishing expedition isn’t meant to harm the Ottoman Empire?

Strongbow placed another coin on the table and the Turk’s eyes widened as he stared at the six glistening gold breasts of the former Austrian empress, largely bare and bulging impressively after having nursed sixteen children.

Or perhaps even meant to destroy the Empire?

Strongbow placed a fourth and last coin on the table, surrounding the fish with gold. He raised his sundial and studied it.

At this moment in your life the Prophet has presented you with a choice.

He has? What is it?

Pocket this money, send my telegrams, order the fish cooked for your lunch and shoot any of your men who are insubordinate. Or conversely, refuse the money and I will shoot you and all your men, send the telegrams myself and cook the fish for my own lunch.

The tall Arab checked his sundial again. In fact this apparition from the desert was so unnaturally tall and self-assured the Turk wondered if he might not be the Prophet himself, in which case it made no difference what he decided. And although he was still afraid to send the telegrams on his military circuit, the eight large breasts of Maria Theresa made a handsome sum of money.

Time, said the apparition, startling the Turk out of his thoughts. Instantly he reached into his night table for pen and paper.

Allah must have willed it, he sighed.

Indeed it seems likely, murmured Strongbow, who had begun printing rapidly in four-letter groups.

Naturally Strongbow’s codes were unbreakable and could only be read by his London solicitor, who had certain sealed envelopes locked in his safe to be used for deciphering when so directed.

The first telegram instructed the solicitor to sell the Strongbow estate in Dorset and the numerous holdings that went with it. He was also to liquidate all the other Strong-bow assets scattered throughout the industrial north and Ireland and Scotland and Wales, using hundreds of intermediaries so the enormity of these financial transactions would remain unsuspected.

The huge sums of money accruing from the sales were then to be forwarded in a devious manner to banks in Prague for eventual deposit in a Turkish consortium. Only when every shilling of the Strongbow fortune was safely out of England was the solicitor to decipher the second telegram that had been sent from Tiberias.

Whereas the first telegram had been long and detailed, the second was brief. And although Strongbow refused to address it properly, this second telegram was directed to Queen Victoria.

In it, citing his own family as an example, Strongbow noted that the quality of sexual life in England had deteriorated disastrously over the last seven hundred years. He admitted the queen was probably incompetent to do anything about it, but at the same time he said his self-respect would no longer allow him to participate in such a dreary decline.

Therefore he was renouncing his citizenship. Never again would he set foot west of the Red Sea. He then concluded with an array of scabrous allegations that surpassed even the obscenities found in
Levantine Sex.

MADAME, YOU ARE A SMALL AND SMUG MOTHER RULING A SMALL AND SMUG COUNTRY. CERTAINLY GOD MADE YOU BOTH SMALL, BUT WHOM ARE WE TO BLAME FOR THE SMUGNESS?

IT WOULDN’T SURPRISE ME IF YOUR NAME IN THE FUTURE BECAME SYNONYMOUS WITH UGLY CLUTTER AND DARK PONDEROUS FURNITURE AND HIDDEN EVIL THOUGHTS, WITH ARROGANT POMPOSITY AND CHILD PROSTITUTION AND A WHOLE HOST OF OTHER GROSS PERVERSIONS.

IN SHORT, MADAME, YOUR NAME WILL BE USED TO DESIGNATE THE WORST SORT OF SECRET SEXUAL DISEASE, A PRIM HYPOCRISY INCOMPARABLY RANK BENEATH ITS HEAVY LAVENDER SCENT.

The address on the telegram was
Hanover, England.
It was signed
Plantagenet, Arabia.

Thus the former deaf boy, lance in hand, who had once cleared his family manor of six hundred and fifty years of frivolous history, now felt he had found his vocation at last. The huge magnifying glass and bronze sundial were to be left behind. At the age of sixty he had decided to become a hakïm or healer curing the poor in the desert.

Of course he had no way of knowing that the influx of his immense fortune into Constantinople, nominal ruler of the desert in his day but already corrupt beyond hope, would ineluctably cause repercussions far beyond that city, until by the end of the nineteenth century not only the desert but the entire Middle East would in fact be the property of one man, a lean barefoot giant who spoke humbly as an Arab and was occasionally humiliated as a Jew, who was by then both an Arab and a Jew, an indistinguishable Semite living in a ragged opensided tent tending his sheep.

From Galilee he walked to Constantinople and began to set up the banks and concessions and subsidiaries that would allow his fortune to run without him. One day he was a Persian potentate, the next an Egyptian emir, the third a Baghdad banker.

He obtained a controlling interest in the posts and telegraph system, bought up all government bonds and issued new ones, became the secret paymaster of the Turkish army and navy, bribed the descendants of the Janissaries, consulted with pashas and ministers and laid aside trust funds for their grandsons, acquired rights to the wells in Mecca and all wells on all routes leading to Mecca, bought two hundred of the existing two hundred and forty-four industrial enterprises in the Turkish realm, dismissed and reappointed the Armenian and Greek and Latin Greek and Syrian Greek patriarchs in Jerusalem and the Coptic patriarch in Alexandria, leased four thousand kilometers of railway lines, established dowries for the daughters of the principal landowners between the Persian Gulf and the Anatolian highlands, refurbished the gold mosaics and polychrome marbles of Santa Sophia, so that by the time he was ready to leave the city anyone who could ever be in a position of power in that part of the world was under his control.

Although no one knew it, he had bought the Ottoman Empire.

Nor did anyone know he had already assured the destruction of the British Empire by sending it into a slow decline from which it could never recover. Some might date the decline from the day when his barbaric caravan had disembarked at Venice with its monstrous load of Eastern lore. Or a dozen years earlier when he had first sat down on the giant stone scarab in Jerusalem to expound that ruinous lore. Or even many years before that when he had hinted in a monograph on flowers that Englishwomen were known to sweat in the Levant.

But all these dates were too recent. One hundred years was a more likely span for the disintegration of a great empire, so probably the irrevocable course had been set on that warm Cairo night in 1840 when a laughing naked young Strongbow had turned his back on the reception celebrating Queen Victoria’s twenty-first birthday and leapt over a garden wall to begin his haj.

And now forty years later it was a rainy October afternoon when a tall gaunt man solemnly concluded his business in Constantinople and walked to a deserted stretch of the Bosporus, saw the clouds part and stood in a dripping olive grove watching the sun sink over Europe, then ceremoniously removed the rings and jeweled sandals and filigreed headgear of his last disguise, threw them into the passing waters and climbed back through the gnarled grove to disappear forever, barefoot now and wearing only a torn cloak, without even a bundle to carry, making his way south toward the Holy Land and perhaps beyond.