The Map

by T. S. Learner

  ‘Jimmy asked me. He was in my division with the Lincolns.’

  ‘Jimmy fought with the Lincoln Brigade? He never told me.’

  ‘There were wharfies, intellectuals, teamsters, philosophers and then there was Jimmy. He tended to show his politics in the theatre of war and not bandstanding on some picket fence. I don’t know where but I always had the feeling Jimmy had seen action elsewhere. Out of all of us he was the most professional soldier. He claimed he was a card-holding party member and a simple jazz player who happened to be a believer in the free world of the worker. And boy, could he play the guitar. He was also the best rifleman I knew. And although I was this idealistic stuck-up rookie, wet round the ears, with nothing but a passion for the classical world, we liked each other from the start. He was the first to see something in me that not even I was aware of.’

  ‘Something you’re frightened of?’ she asked, bluntly.

  He glanced up at her, surprised by the acuteness of her observation, then realised she must have been studying him all along. He nodded gravely.

  ‘You’re right. Like him I realised that under all the dedication, all the noble self-sacrifice and fierce belief that we were there to defeat Franco and Hitler and save the world, the only time I felt really alive was on those battlefields. We were both junkies for it – the fear, the excitement, the sheer thrill. Jimmy knew it from the first; it took me all these years to figure that one out.’

  ‘But you know now, is this such a bad thing?’

  ‘It’s not something I’m proud of. In 1938 I got captured in Perpignan. Captured and tortured. Two days later, I was sitting there in that hellhole of a cell, waiting to be shot the following morning, when Jimmy breaks me out. I still don’t know how he did it. But then, at the very end of the war, we lost each other. I thought he was dead.’ August looked back down at the photograph again. ‘Then he appears on my doorstep a month ago with the chronicle in his hand.’

  Izarra reached across her hand and slid it over his. ‘And that’s why you brought it back, because you owe him your life?’

  ‘And so many others.’ Even as he finished the sentence August knew it was the most honest acknowledgement he’d made to himself in years. Perhaps that’s why he was now there, back in Biscay, trying to rescue his younger self. ‘But there’s more, Izarra. Hidden beneath the written text is a whole other story. The man who wrote it, Shimon Ruiz de Luna, your ancestor, was in great danger. Let me show you.’

  He brought the chronicle, along with his notebook of translations, back into the room. Izarra unwrapped it eagerly.

  ‘Thank God it is safe.’

  He watched her tenderly lay the book on the desk as if it were sacred, not to be opened and read but to be preserved and immortalised as a holy relic. Placing his own notebook of the decoded text next to the chronicle, he opened the first page of both and laid them side by side.

  ‘You see how the pages of the chronicle are waxed? I’ve inked some of them and made a pressing and managed to translate some of the pages. Izarra, the whole book is a cipher. Shimon wrote his journal in code in case of discovery. Although it presents as a harmless text on herbs and plants, it is, in fact, a guide to a far earlier and far more contentious ancient journal known as the “map of Elazar ibn Yehuda”. Shimon’s family, who were then wealthy merchants and secret Jews living in Córdoba, had inherited it then passed it down the generations. Yehuda was a well-known philosopher and physician who worked for Caliph Al-Walid, the first ruler of Andalusia. He was meant to have made the map travelling up the peninsula with the conqueror-general Tariq. The map obsessed Shimon. His father had told him it was the greatest treasure the family owned if the map was ever followed and Yehuda’s treasure discovered. So when the family was arrested and executed in an auto de fe, Shimon escaped with only the map, and then began his long odyssey across Spain, living under a false identity. Sometime in the early seventeenth century he married Uxue, a Basque from this region. Her uncle lived in this village, and in exile they came here, for how long I don’t know, but I believe it was Shimon who built the maze following Elazar’s map, and there are others and they are Shimon’s way of safeguarding Elazar’s secret. How, I don’t exactly know, but I’d like your permission to find out. I want to keep deciphering the chronicle and follow Shimon’s own journey.’

  ‘It will be dangerous, very dangerous,’ Izarra said. ‘They will execute you if they catch you.’ Her face was grim and for the first time August had an inkling she wasn’t just talking about Franco’s soldiers. Who are they, Izarra? What are you hiding? Is there something about the people who believe in the chronicle that you aren’t telling me?

  ‘Izarra, you have to understand I’m beginning to believe your sister and her men might have been shot because of the chronicle. Why else would Tyson ransack the house after their murders? Also, Jimmy was convinced he’d been watched all these past years.’

  ‘Danger within and danger without.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I knew that the chronicle was a code, but my mother always taught us that the chronicle’s secrets should stay locked between the pages.’

  ‘But Shimon wrote it so that someone, one day, would follow his words.’

  ‘Someone did once.’ Her voice was ominous and strangely formal. A chill went through August. She stood and indicated he should follow. ‘Come with me, please.’

  The cattle in the barn were restless, stomping and swishing their tails. They swung their heavy necks and gazed at August in a plaintive, almost accusatory manner as if he were directly responsible for the new tension in the house.

  ‘They sense when Gabirel is upset.’ Izarra climbed down from the ladder, followed by August. She walked over to a bale of hay and pushed it away from the floor, revealing a trapdoor.

  ‘This is where I hid when Tyson was searching the house.’ She lifted up the trapdoor revealing a narrow hiding place about six feet deep and ten across. ‘My great-great-grandfather built it during the Carlist wars of the last century. Most houses around here have one – but we kept that fact to ourselves.’ She lowered herself down into it, as August squatted by the opening. He watched as she pulled free a brick, removed a small wooden box from behind it then handed the box up to him.

  ‘Do you read French?’ she asked, hauling herself back up into the barn.

  ‘Well enough.’ He waited until she’d closed the trapdoor and hidden the entry again with the bale of hay. Only then did he open the box. Inside was a piece of old parchment – a letter written in archaic French. He began to read.

  Father Bernard de Montfaucon

  The order of Saint Benedict

  Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés

  Paris, France

  The first of October in the year of our Lord

  Seventeen Hundred and Ten

  To the Ruiz de Luna family,

  I believe your family to be direct descendants of the famous rabbi and scholar Ishmael ibn Ruiz de Luna, pupil of the early Jewish philosopher Elazar ibn Yehuda. Forgive my audacity in writing unintroduced, but I am driven by grave concern. It involves the case of one of the young monks under my care. A brother Dominic Baptise, no longer living, I believe.

  I had employed Brother Baptise, a student of mine, in the task of translating an ancient text I had been given, discovered in Constantinople, written in Hebrew by Elazar ibn Yehuda. However, I never received the translation from him. Before he finished the task, Brother Baptise, inspired by the contents of this mystical treatise, embarked on a curious journey in search of what he insisted would lead to the ultimate union of Soul, Intellect and God. Naturally, the Bishop and myself did our utmost to discourage the young monk, but he was most insistent and left the abbey over a year ago. He was sighted in several towns and countries over the next few months, the last being in the Hanseatic city of Hamburg. But by all accounts he has now mysteriously vanished from an ancient site associated with the philosopher Yehuda.

  I am obliged by Christian conc
ern for my fellow men to write to you, as Brother Baptise often spoke of another chronicle he had seen mentioned that related to Yehuda’s text – by a Shimon Ruiz de Luna, who I believe was of your family.

  Please, if there are any documents written by your ancestor that referred to Elazar ibn Yehuda’s writings, either destroy them or keep them under lock and key to save another poor soul the same fate, for I do not believe them to be of Christian calling but more likely the work of the Devil.

  Yours in Christian faith

  Father Bernard de Montfaucon

  August finished reading, his mouth dry with excitement. He knew exactly who Bernard de Montfaucon was: a Benedictine monk considered the father of palaeography – the study and interpretation of ancient texts, in Montfaucon’s case mainly classical Greek and Ancient Egyptian, but he had also been fluent in Hebrew, Coptic and Syrian. It was entirely likely he would have stumbled upon one of Elazar ibn Yehuda’s manuscripts.

  ‘All this does is make me more resolved. You have to let me finish Shimon’s journey, for his sake, for Leona and all those other dead soldiers. You owe it to her.’

  ‘What do you think happened to that poor monk?’

  ‘I don’t know, but I’d love to find out.’

  But Izarra had already taken the box and the letter out of his hands.

  ‘There have been too many deaths already.’

  August stood in the entrance of the barn staring out into the night, listening to the animals breathing, the scent of hay and manure strangely comforting. It pulled him back to normalcy, a place where the world was divided into endless seasons, where there were no conflicts, the complication of politics, of man killing neighbour. The sound of music floated across from the village. As Izarra had predicted, a spontaneous fiesta had broken out in the village below. The wild swirling sound of the harmonica and drumming, peppered by the occasional stanza of some forbidden folk song, drifted up the valley, tugging at his feet and groin – appealing to some primal core.

  He’d come here to clear his head and bury his disappointment that Izarra had not allowed him to continue researching the chronicle. It was a temporary respite. In the room above him he could hear the muffled arguing of Izarra and Gabirel, as she tried to explain herself to the youth – the timbre of raised voices rattled across the beams like startled mice, then subsided into soft reassurance, followed by the low throb of sobbing.

  The truth is always healing, not matter how painful, isn’t that right? Had I the right to lever open the past? I fear I have shaken the fragile alliance between nephew and aunt. Why does everything I touch break?

  All of a sudden August was aware of a low whistle. Across the barn door fell a shadow – the shadow of a man with a bull’s head. August reached out and grabbed a pitchfork leaning up against the door, then moved soundlessly out into the courtyard. The figure of the Minotaur man stepped out of the shadows, its great bull’s head a leering masquerade of rolling eyes and horns. For a moment August imagined he had slipped into a kind of hell. He jabbed the pitchfork towards the creature. It leaped back, narrowly avoiding the sharpened tips, and pushed up the mask, revealing the face of a young man – a man August had never seen in the village before.

  ‘Please, I am a friend,’ the man whispered, nervously. August lowered the pitchfork. ‘I bring an urgent message from Paris, from your friend Jimmy van Peters.’ His English was good, his accent French. He held out a letter, the white envelope catching the moonlight. August took it.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Now I should go back to the fiesta before I am missed, but I will be out of Irumendi before sunrise.’ Before August had a chance to question him further, he’d slipped his mask back on and stepped out beyond the trees: a mythical figure vanishing back into the mist. August moved into the light of the barn and tore open the letter. The shaky handwriting was almost unrecognisable, as if Jimmy’s health had deteriorated even further.

  ‘Gus, I hope this gets to you in time. I’ve had a visitor, our friend Tyson. If you are there, you must leave Irumendi as soon as you can. If necessary take my diary with you, it is not safe. Also our friend told me both Auntie and Uncle Sam as well as Cousin Patrice are all desperate to see you. I’m well but having a little trouble with my hands, your good friend Dizzy Gillespie.’

  Auntie, Uncle Sam and Cousin Patrice – MI5, the CIA and Interpol, they’re all after me. How long can I run before I stumble? August leaned back against a haystack, the enclosing sense of being cornered rose up around him. I have to leave by daybreak, to Paris with the chronicle. I have no choice. I have to see Jimmy and find out about the fate of the monk Dominic Baptise. Too late to have moral qualms now, he told himself, the need to follow the map to wherever it led now rising up in him as intense as pain. He owed it to La Leona and her men. He owed it to Shimon Ruiz de Luna.

  The dawn had begun to bleed up into the descending night. August stood on the foot guard of the truck’s cabin, looking back over the village and the valley. The top of the church tower was just catching the sunrise, the red shutters of the houses around it pulled closed like eyelids in a white face. Still sleeping after the fiesta, the village looked remarkably benign, but abandoned streamers drifted across the deserted plaza and a lone balloon floated above an oak tree, its string tangled in the branches. A makeshift bandstand of soap boxes still stood beside the café tables and someone had strung the paper mask of a pig’s face over the door of the police station. Now, after all he’d learned in the past weeks, August couldn’t look at the plaza without thinking about the divisions within the community: the townhouse housing the police station, its Spanish flag flying from a pole above the entrance; the way the people broke from Euskara to silence to Spanish when either the priest or an official neared them; the hidden horror he’d found in the forest, compartmentalised into another time, while the people below still had to conduct their lives under the constant surveillance of an enemy; Izarra, the night before, her face torn apart by tragedy; the primal wail Gabirel gave at the sight of his mother’s corpse. Just then a dishevelled-looking Mateo slapped August on the back.

  ‘You must go, my friend, before the Guardias Civiles wake up for their coffee and the rest of the villagers with their hangovers. What a night, eh?’ said Mateo, who had arranged August’s lift to the fishing village of Elantxobe. August reached out and the two men shook hands.

  ‘Remember, when you get to Elantxobe the driver will introduce you to my cousin Emmanuel who runs a small trawler, sometimes as far as Bordeaux. For a contribution to the cause, he will take you.’

  ‘I owe you a great deal, Mateo.’

  ‘And I intend to collect. Next time you visit, you bring me the latest Rolleiflex, agreed?’ Mateo grinned.

  ‘Agreed,’ August replied, surprised at how emotional he suddenly felt.

  The truck driver, already at the steering wheel, shouted a farewell in Euskara. August hauled his rucksack onto his shoulder then pulled himself into the cabin and the truck roared off, as many unanswered questions stretching out behind him as in front.

  It had been a painful process of deduction, one that required a patient and methodical mind, but Olivia had been in no hurry. San Sebastián had proved a frustrating whirlwind of false trails and dead ends, until she was approached by an old man who had watched her scout several of the bars well known for their Basque Nationalist leanings. The old man, a self-declared Carlist, warmed to Olivia when she told him she was a royalist herself, but it had still taken a hefty bribe to be told of a blond goat farmer from Galicia who had arrived a week earlier asking for a lift to a place known only to locals, claiming he had an uncle there. The old man had silently witnessed the exchange but had taken note as he thought the man’s appearance and accent suspicious. Something about the old man’s description of the village – a secluded valley surrounded by three mountains – resonated with Olivia. Then she remembered a mystic reference in one of Copps’s books to three daughters of Mari the pagan mountain goddess who guarded a secre
t heart within their valley. Later that morning she paid a farmer to drive her there.

  13

  By the time August arrived it was already evening. He stood on the corner of the boulevard de Clichy, looking down the bustling promenade. Arriving in the city had been inexplicably unsettling; something about the intact streets and buildings disturbed him, until he realised Paris lacked the gaping scars of the bomb sites, the piles of broken bricks and the makeshift concrete bunkers that still stood in London gardens, paraphernalia of a besieged city. Like a clever whore, Paris had escaped the destruction of war.

  The neon signs of the nightclubs and cabarets lit the sky above in a patchwork of garish colour. After the village of Irumendi he felt as if he’d arrived on another planet altogether. The evening crowds were beginning to congregate on the sidewalk, a combination of servicemen and civilians all intent on seeing a show or some jazz. Some were heading towards the famous Moulin Rouge, others gravitated to the seedier burlesque shows. Statuesque girls in fishnet tights and risqué costumes, legs, bosoms and buttocks shimmering under the neon, stood in the entrances of the clubs, enticing in the men. As August walked past one of the clubs he caught sight of himself in the glass window. Pale and hollow-eyed, he didn’t recognise himself entirely. Something had changed about his demeanour – the experience in Biscay had finally knocked the last vestiges of youth from him. He left Pigalle and made his way over to the Latin Quarter, the bohemian area the students frequented and where the Purple Rose was located, along with dozens of other jazz clubs found in the old buildings’ cellars.