Nile Shadows jq-3

by Edward Whittemore

  Joe frowned.

  It's sad to say, but it seems we can't have light without darkness. It seems we can't stretch our souls in the sun without first being lost in the night and knowing terrible anguish. And I suppose it may have to do with that circular journey of the sun and with the nature of the sun wheel, which has always been our symbol for life and hope, the most ancient one of all. And a good symbol it is and a true one, but a wheel does go round and it does have spokes, and spokes on a sun wheel make crosses. And what with sun wheels today in their ancient form as swastikas, that cross spinning in the deep becomes as complex and contradictory as man himself. Death and life in the very same symbol, and one no less real than the other.

  Joe rubbed the earth in front of him, feeling it, stroking it.

  Will you do it, then? asked one of the men.

  Do what?

  Go to Cairo. Accept the Stern assignment.

  Joe looked up. He smiled.

  I would prefer not to, as a scribbling man once said.

  Abruptly, then, Joe's smile was gone and his mood changed. A haunting somberness came over him and his voice was suddenly very quiet, very soft in the stillness.

  Ah, but is that all you're asking? Just for a moment sitting up here in the sky as we are, underground as we are, I thought you might have had something difficult in mind. But now I see all you want is the truth about Stern and his strange doings in the bazaars and deserts of that mythical place he calls his home, that sandy stretch of crossroads and history where man has been dreaming and killing himself since ever he was around. . . . Just there in the desert sea is all, the truth about Stern and the tides.

  A shudder passed through Joe's thin shoulders and he wrapped his arms around himself, under the blanket, trying to control it.

  But Stern sits inside the Sphinx, he whispered, didn't you know that? His life is made up of the ancient enigmas of those ancient places, and he peers out from the Sphinx across the nighttide deserts of life, and what he sees is what the rest of us don't want to see. So you have to be careful when you look into Stern's eyes. You have to be careful because there are fearful things to be seen there . . . the world and yourself and a kind of madness, a kind of utterly futile hope without end.

  Joe stared at the earth in front of him.

  Stern, you say. A man as unjustified and lonely as other men, a man who has never known the secret adventures of order. And all you want is for me to look into his eyes and tell you what's there.

  Sadly, Joe smiled.

  Fancy. . . . Only that.

  ***

  Another evening, another sunset, and Joe sat alone at the edge of a cliff on top of the mesa, watching the light die. He had spent the last days visiting each of the homes in the pueblo, and that night there was to be a special ceremony in the underground kiva, a solemn gathering of the elders of the various clans to honor his departure.

  Of course I don't have to go, he thought, and as scared as I am, why should I? The New World's big and I could just go anywhere and nobody would ever have to know.

  And who wants the eternal grief that's over there anyway? Who wants that desert? They dream and they make up our religions and they spin our tales of a Thousand and One Nights, and that's all just fine and lovely so long as you keep your distance from the madness and don't walk in those dreams and live in those tales and get yourself lost forever.

  Oh the three of them were clever all right, passing themselves off as the Three Fates and getting me to go on and on about Stern, trying to get me to persuade myself I ought to go back there. And Maudie even, hinting at that too. The Three Fates just coming to call as clever as could be.

  But I know what I'd run into over there. They've always been at each other's throats and always will be.

  Bloody Greeks and Persians and Jews and Arabs and Turks and Crusaders, there's no end to it. And the odd bloated Mameluke floating down the Nile and the odd mad Mongolian whipping his horse into a frenzy, barbarians on their way in as usual to mix it up with assorted Assyrian charioteers and crazed Babylonians intent on the stars, while all the while the Chaldeans are sweeping in on the flanks and the Medes are sweeping out, and the Phoenicians are counting their money and the Egyptians are counting their gods, maybe the high priests of both of them getting together every millennium or so, to compare notes and see if either of them has come up with more of one than the other.

  Talk about echoes. Talk about confusion and chaos. If there have been forty thousand prophets since the beginning of time, as rumored, surely most of them have spent their lives careening through those very wastes, shaking their fists and screeching their truths and clamoring on to their very last breaths right there.

  Here it is, they shout. The one true God and the one true path at last, and just by chance that one true path happens to be the path where I've always been walking. So just listen to me, for God's sake. Me.

  Listen.

  Oh help. Why bother with it at all? Confusion and chaos raising a Tower of Babel, that's what He spotted over there a long time ago. The tower to me, not to anybody else. The tower everybody's always been trying to raise, everybody who's a man anyway. Dreadfully proud of our erections, we are.

  Mythical spot all right. The birthplace of religions and man's first heavenly erections, and an eternal torment to the rest of us. Must have a lot to do with the desert, I suppose. Nothing like forty days or forty years tramping around in a desert sun to jumble your brains. Water hard to come by and feverish chills shaking you all night, and nothing to eat in the morning but a handful of locusts left over from last night's supper. Do that for a while and how can you help but begin to see things and hear things?

  War again over there, I'm told? Most amazing piece of news since the last report that barbarians were scaling the heights of Jerusalem.

  War in the beautiful wilderness?

  Astonishing news, that's what. Or as Stern used to say, Good morning.

  Joe tugged his faded red wool hat down Over his ears and pulled his new black shawl, a gift from his three visitors, more tightly around his thin shoulders. It was cold with the sun setting, cold with the coming of the night in the desert.

  A small girl was standing some yards away, watching him. Joe made a sign and she came over and stood beside him, so young she had never known another medicine man in the pueblo. He wrapped his shawl around her against the cold and took her tiny hand and held it.

  The little girl said nothing and neither did Joe. When the sun had sunk below the horizon she slipped away, still wearing the shawl, a gift he had made to her. Joe gazed after her as she disappeared in the shadows. He didn't think she had seen them but there were tears in his eyes. He didn't know why.

  Ah well, he thought, we do what we can. It makes little difference but we have to do it anyway.

  Stern's words, he suddenly realized. Stern's very own words spoken to him long ago, whispered now in the shadows in another time and place altogether.

  Strange, he thought. Time is.

  ***

  . . . and just as suddenly he was with Stern and it was a night twenty years ago in a city once called Smyrna, once long ago in the century before the age of genocide, before the monstrous massacres had come swirling out of Asia Minor to descend on Symrna while Stern and Joe were there . . . the massacres ignored then by most of the world but not by everyone, and not by Hitler, who had triumphantly recalled them only days before his armies invaded Poland to begin the Second World War. .

  . . Who after all speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians? The world believes in success alone.

  . . . a night, once, in a hell of smoke and fires and screams, Joe lying wounded on a quay and Stern standing over him and everywhere the dead and the dying huddling together, heaped near the sea while the city burned . . . while beside Joe, moaning softly, an abandoned little Armenian girl lay ripped and torn and dying in unspeakable pain.

  . . . Joe unable to touch the knife by his hand and shrieking at Stern in his anger, his
pain . . . yelling that Stern just wasn't as much in charge as he wanted people to believe, that he could do his own butchering if he wanted to play the great visionary who knew all the answers, the great hero dedicated to a cause of a kingdom come.

  . . . Stern staring down with eyes that burned in blackness, Stern wild with anguish and violently shaking as he clutched the knife and buried his hand in the little girl's hair and pulled back her head, the tiny throat so white and bare.

  . . . the wet knife clattering on the cobblestones and Joe not daring to look up then, not wanting to see Stern's eyes then . . . a night twenty years ago and forever and but a prelude to the century, but a shadow of the far deeper descent into darkness that was yet to come.

  ***

  Joe shuddered. He passed his hand in front of his eyes.

  And who will be Stern's witness now? he asked himself. . . . Who will do that for him, who will look into his eyes? A man with a dream that was just hopeless from the very beginning. A good dream and hopeless, with nothing coming from it ever. . . .

  Joe got to his feet. Of course he already knew how it would end over there, how it would have to end for Stern. And he wasn't going because he felt he owed Stern something, because he didn't feel that way.

  But after all these years of Stern trying and failing, someone somewhere did. And now when Stern was going to die, the gift had to be repaid.

  Silently the greatly revered shaman of the Hopi walked up the path to the pueblo on top of the mesa, to the underground vault where the elders of the tiny nation sat repeating their guttural chants and birdlike whispers, those mysterious sounds of life and death they had heard since the beginning of time, echoing through all things in the universe.

  PART TWO

  -4-

  Vivian

  The sky was cloudless above Cairo airport, unmarred at that early hour by even the softest haze from the sun still low over Sinai. The cargo plane swung around and came to rest, bringing into view a pack of military men marching in twos and threes across the runway toward the plane. The men wore wide starched walking shorts and the different shirts and caps of uniforms from several corners of the British Empire.

  Brisk and crisp and most of the colors of the species, thought Joe, watching the men. You'd have to know what you were up to, or think you knew, to march around the world looking like that every morning.

  The military men advanced rapidly, intent and in step, their right arms swinging high, their left arms cradling clipboards tightly clasped at the ready. Some of them were already pushing on board when Joe reached the door of the plane and started down the stairs. He had only taken a few steps when he caught sight of a bizarre figure in white who seemed to be staring at him. Immediately the man nodded to himself with conviction, barking a silent order as he did so. Then he snapped to attention with parade-drill gusto and marched forward.

  Jesus, thought Joe. What is that?

  And indeed, the man cut an astonishing figure.

  An elegant white shirt, open to the waist and displaying the insignias of a subaltern. White walking shorts and high white socks and snowy white tennis shoes. A regimental leopardskin casually draped over one shoulder, a glittering gold pendant bouncing on the man's chest. And looming above it all an enormous broad-brimmed white hat, one side attached to the crown in the Australian manner.

  Christ, thought Joe, as he reached the bottom of the stairs and found his way blocked. The man in white came to attention no more than a foot away and slammed his foot into the runway, saluting.

  Sah, he bellowed. I say, pleasant flight and all that?

  A blast of early morning fumes struck Joe full in the face. Unable to speak, he nodded instead.

  Right, bawled the subaltern, blasting him anew. Two massive rows of perfect white teeth suddenly flashed in the man's face. Without thinking, Joe ducked.

  Right, shrieked the subaltern. Right? Right. But I say, sir, is it true you Yanks are coming over to win the war for us? Hands across the ocean again?

  Joe swallowed.

  I'm not American, he said.

  What's that, sir? Not American? All the way from that barren wasteland, what do you chaps call the place, Arizona? All the way from a bloody colony like that and you're not even American?

  Heads turned. Eyes stared. The subaltern was still screaming, blocking the stairs.

  Sorry to hear that, sir, rum show actually. Just dropped in out there for a buffalo shoot, did you? Show the flag and let the wogs know who's in charge?

  Joe pushed forward to move around the man, a gesture the subaltern misinterpreted as a sign of friendliness.

  Or something else altogether, sir? A quiet foray among the little maidens in buckskin? New pelts for the library and a well-earned notch or two for the old blunderbuss?

  At last Joe was around the man and heading in the direction of the terminal buildings. The subaltern dropped his salute and fell in briskly beside him.

  No offense, sir, screeched the subaltern. About my taking you for a Yank, I mean. Some of my best friends are Yanks. Be glad to give you the name of my tailor here.

  Joe walked straight ahead. The man had quick-stepped several times when he fell in beside Joe, trying to adjust his stride, but he didn't seem to be able to get it right and was now doing a permanent dance at Joe's elbow, prancing forward and falling behind a pace, quick-stepping again.

  Different drummers, shrieked the subaltern. We're a race of individuals, after all. And please veer to the left, sir, as the Bolshies say. The clandestine war wagon's to the left.

  Joe veered to the left without breaking stride. They were moving away from the groups of milling staring men. Joe spoke in a quiet voice.

  Will you kindly tell me what the meaning of this is?

  The subaltern caught the forceful tone in Joe's voice but apparently without hearing the words. In order to get closer he quick-stepped in, misjudging the distance and crashing into Joe with the power of a body-block. Joe pitched forward and landed on the runway on his hands, the subaltern coming to rest sprawled across his back. The subaltern peered upward, scanning the sky.

  Spot something, sir? Jerry up there for an early morning go, is he? Shows good reflexes, that dive of yours.

  Jesus Christ almighty, muttered Joe.

  Can't spot the blighter, murmured the subaltern into Joe's ear, still scanning the sky intently. Blasted clever, the Hun.

  Get off my back, muttered Joe. The subaltern, his face only inches away, peered sideways at Joe.

  What's that, sir? You only thought you saw a Stuka coming in out of the sun?

  Off my back. Now.

  The subaltern grinned nervously and began to untangle himself.

  Yes, sir. Sorry about that, sir. It's just that you can never be too careful when the Hun's around. War is hell, after all.

  The subaltern climbed off Joe, grinding his knee into Joe's back. Joe struggled to his feet.

  Listen, you bastard, you tell me right now what the meaning of that was supposed to be.

  Meaning, sir? Meaning? Pardon me, sir, but in a world at war you're actually looking for meaning?

  Stop it. That performance you put on back at the plane. And this ridiculous costume you're wearing.

  What the hell?

  Oh, my uniform. Well you see, sir, since secret intelligence work requires a high degree of initiative, we're encouraged to express our individualism in our dress of the day. And as for the manner in which I hailed you when you debarked, we've found that the direct approach is the best one. When matters are secretly at their murkiest, in other words, we try to keep outward appearances as natural as possible. It's by far the most effective cover.

  I wasn't aware, said Joe, that tennis whites and a leopardskin would look natural at Cairo airport in wartime.

  Oh yes, sir, if the whites are modified a bit. You may be a little rusty now, been out of touch and that sort of thing, it could happen to any retiree from Arizona attempting a comeback. But the naked truth of the matter today,
sir, is that we don't carry on the way they did in the old films.

  I see.

  Precisely, sir, that's it in a nutshell. This is definitely espionage in the 1940s that we practice here and the old films are definitely out of date, irrelevant to say the least. And then too, we're in the plain old sandy sunny Middle East, not lounging around in a shadowy parlor car on the Orient Express as it goes weaving into Bulgaria, while you and I lunge at our glasses between hoots. The servant problem, sir. Lackeys just aren't what they used to be, neither as nations nor individuals. Take the Balkans, for example.

  What?

  Exactly, sir, especially the Balkans. They're not at all what they used to be. In fact it would probably be wise to put aside your secret hopes of outwitting some sneaky little Dimitri in the sewers of Sophia, despite his many masks, in order to obtain the truth about the Bulgarian submarine force. This just isn't the place for vague notions about honor and fair play and all that rot. Times change, sir, what?

  Joe groaned.

  . . . can't straighten at all, he muttered.

  No? Well don't be discouraged, sir. People pretty much expect a spy to look like Quasimodo loping around in his belfry with a demented leer on his twisted face. The important thing is to keep abreast of the latest technical developments, that's the name of this game. In intelligence, you're modern or you're nothing. Can you just imagine how it would look if the two of us were to skulk around Cairo airport first thing in the morning in trench coats with a cigarette or two dangling out of the corners of our mouths?

  Looking over our shoulders to see if Peter Lorre has caught up with us yet? Or possibly even the fat man?

  Oh.

  Precisely, sir, the locals. They may be no more dark-skinned than they were in the epics of yesteryear, but they're just not as predictable as extras used to be.

  As he rambled on, the subaltern was keenly observing Joe. After several painful attempts, Joe managed to straighten. The subaltern grinned, nodding.

  Very good, sir. I see we're making a stunning comeback. So the point is, we have this slovenly lot of blithering wogs hanging about with time on their hands, just waiting to catch a glimpse of something they can pass on to Jerry. Such as a suspicious little foreigner arriving at Cairo airport early one morning? A wiry little fellow in some dreadful secondhand suit that's much too big for him? Suspiciously sporting a scruffy growth of whiskers on his face as if he were trying to look like the anonymous spy of tradition?