Death of a Monk

by Alon Hilu

  Aslan recalls Moussa, his first love, pure and innocent, with whom he made feeble drawings and leaned upon him and discussed sweet destinies with him, and Aslan knows that since their parting there is no person in this world he can trust and rely upon, and he sheds copious tears of pity for these years of his life passing in suffering and persecution, and the hammers pounding at his temples and the churling cough rising to a bark in his throat prove to him that he must find a living soul upon whose ears he may unburden his nightmare; otherwise, his sanity will shatter.

  The barber was sitting, bored, in his shop bereft of customers, and when Aslan entered he did not smile but rather pursed his lips, for anger at himself and the debauched acts they had committed together still stood between them; nevertheless, Aslan fell upon him with embraces and tears and begged the barber to shut the door of his shop and permit him to tell the terrible story that was his lot, and then, while tearing hairs from his head and pacing to and fro, his heels clicking on the drab and filthy floor, he told, breathlessly, the story from beginning to end, how he had not taken the barber’s good counsel and had given in to his evil inclination and visited the Maqha, near the home of the Jew Eliyahu Nehmad, and how he had met an older man there, and what the man had told him about his beloved Umm-Jihan, and what he and the man had planned together and what had transpired, and the barber listened without uttering a word, and Aslan unburdened himself of this heavy yoke, shedding tear after tear, telling of his uniting with the monk Tomaso and what had taken place between them, and in choked terror he described the body strewn across his own and how he had dissected it limb by limb that evening, and lo, that screeching woman in his intenstines had returned to her home in the dried-up, shrivelled womb after depositing her heavy baskets, had locked the door behind her and resumed her confinement somewhere within, allowing Aslan at last to accept the barber’s welcome offer: Sit, calm down, drink a cup of tea.

  The two sat together, Aslan and the barber, and their organs, once erect and pointed one at the other, once thrust into each other’s mouth, were now limp and despairing like a slumped washerwoman whose muscles have gone flaccid, her wrinkled dress spread between her exhausted legs, and Elnahar Alaswad continued to flow beneath them, the silence between them heavy and flooded with worry.

  The barber said nothing, neither good nor bad; he did not condemn Aslan for this vexatious deed in which he had become involved, did not utter a comment about the dissection of the monk’s body and the scattering of his remains outside the city gates, and Aslan was suddenly hard-pressed to understand why he had come to the barber, why he had run to him so breathlessly, why he had forced him to hear every last detail of his crime, for Suleiman alkhalaq was liable, at this very moment, to deliver him to the authorities, and then he would be brought to trial in the presence of the Damascus governor, Sharif Pasha, and the body of Aslan son of Rafael Farhi would be buried outside the cemetery as a mark of disgrace and eternal shame, and in the next moment Aslan showered kisses upon the hands of the barber, swearing him to silence, claiming even that he had merely been jesting, had exaggerated and confabulated, but Suleiman Negrin did not return his laugh, saying instead only that the evil instinct they shared was dragging them to the depths, to an abyss of dung and filth, and Aslan begged him to promise in spite of his anger never to mention a word of this to a single soul, and the barber consented only after considerable pleading on Aslan’s part, acquiescing, too, to Aslan’s request for a hug, that quick, manly embrace Aslan had desired of his father from his earliest childhood but even a hint of which he had never found.

  After these things had come to pass, the barber impressed upon Aslan to understand that if he wished to extricate himself successfully from this distressing situation that had befallen him he would do well to take control of himself and hold his tongue, abstaining from imparting even the tiniest bit of a single word to any living soul, either within the Jewish Quarter or without, to a relative or not, not to any human being or bird or tree, not even to the cockscomb of a slaughtered chicken, for Aslan’s life was in grave danger, and it was not merely Aslan’s life hanging in the balance, but the lives of the entire Jewish community; if the story of the monk’s death were discovered, the Christians, followed by the Muslims, would rise up and riot against every Jewish soul and avenge the pain of his humiliation with acts of rape and pillage and murder and burning, no justice or trial to follow.

  The barber Suleiman Negrin held fast to Aslan’s shoulders and shook him, his brows drawn together, convulsed in anger and resentment, and said to him, Do you understand what I am saying? He took special care to warn him and make him swear not to enter the Christian Quarter of the city, not to set foot near there, and that he refrain from any suspicious action and from any sudden outburst of tears on his way down the street and from fainting at the entrance to Azm Palace or any other act of ill-considered alarm, and he reiterated: Khaliha mastourah, Keep it concealed. And Aslan said, I understand, I do, and he pleaded with the barber never ever to relate a word of this secret to anyone or admit even that they had met one another or of course that this debauched act deserving of the death penalty and the eternal torments of hell had ever taken place, and Aslan asked his advice whether it was best that he escape the city at once without packing a single thing, just take foot and vanish, but he knew the bitter answer himself, that it was incumbent upon him to stay, in the city whose refuse was roiling and bubbling in the Black River beneath the crowded buildings.

  After this conversation Aslan turned with a heavy and contemplative heart to the street and sealed his ears so as not to hear the masses shouting of his guilt, and lo, the passers-by were occupied to a man with their usual daily activities: the yeshiva student fixing voracious eyes on veiled Arab women passing through the quarter with sacks of legumes perched on their heads; the barefoot Jewish children, their bellies swollen with hunger, frolicking in mud puddles; every person going about his own business. No eyes take in Aslan as he passes by, not a single person can spare the time to hear his preoccupations or complaints about the irritating tingle gnawing at his internal organs, and Aslan says to himself, Good is the counsel of the barber: guard your tongue, do not speak a word to anyone, allow this wretched affair to perish on its own, perhaps no one will bother with such a trifling matter as the disappearance of a sinful monk.

  Aslan paused at a stand offering red beetroot and bought one steaming hot root with a piastre from his coin purse. The beet seller said, Shoukran jazilan, Thank you very much, and Aslan asked whether anything new had transpired in the quarter since the previous evening, whether the gossiping women were chattering about any new edict or the proclamation of a fast day or news of any kind, but the beet seller knew nothing, only that the storm had abated and the days of snow were slowly drawing to a close and the beets had harvested nicely and their taste was sweet and beloved, and Aslan nibbled at the dripping vegetable, his clothes filling with stains the washerwomen would toil to remove on washing day, their skin sagging from this coarse work.

  For a brief moment Aslan felt sweet relief pass over him, for his fellow Jews were conducting their lives in peace, with no concern for the monk Tomaso or his manservant Ibrahim or the tiny shed they kept outside the city walls or the orifice of Aslan’s that had been breached in that very shed; rather, they continued their routines without interruption, here a caravan of camels meandering down the narrow streets, pausing to drink from the gurgling mules’ fountain, there stopping by the lemonade seller’s stand to drink from a hammered copper goblet, here selecting a fat carrot from the baskets of peasant women come to town early from the villages, there sucking slowly on a narghile, shutting their eyes to enjoy the blend of smoky vapours.

  At the next intersection, at the corner of the street leading to the chicken market, stood a gendarme of the Tufekji-Bashi patrol, his green uniform adorned with medals and badges, and Aslan, who noticed him only a few steps before reaching him, wondered whether he was holding an arrest warrant or a search war
rant or any such document under his arm, and Aslan was cautious to walk unsuspiciously, but his strides were too long or too short and his toes twisted so that he fell at the gendarme’s feet, quite prepared to answer any question the gendarme might ask him and accompany him to the dungeon of the Saraya fortress in the Muslim Quarter, where prisoners were tortured; and the gendarme, like Aslan, was nibbling a beetroot beneath his thick moustache, fully occupied with chewing the hot, red vegetable on this bright and cloudless day, finally casting an astonished glance at the lean, hairy youth strewn on the wet and muddy ground in precious clothing, and when the gendarme extended a hand Aslan jumped to his feet, startling the donkeys, nearly stepping in their dung, and he raced willy-nilly through the narrow passageways unknown to all but residents of the quarter, but the gendarme was preoccupied with polishing off his beetroot and then picking between his large, wide teeth, capping it off with a sigh of pleasure.

  Aslan’s flight brought him to the far side of the quarter near the ancient cemetery in the south part of Kharet Elyahud, and close by this eternal resting place, with its white worms crawling between pleasant clods of earth, stood the study halls and academies of the Torah scholars, and Aslan listened with half an ear to the prayers of the men crying out as one to the Master of the Universe, pleading for the day in which Our Father in Heaven might forgive them all their sins, that He might embrace His sons, these men standing before Him, a prayer leader at their head, and that He might love their beards, their low, thick voices, their gaunt bodies bent in study of the Torah and accustomed to the weak light of dim rooms, their thin, frail fingers that will never toil like those of gentile men, and Aslan was overcome with great sadness at these lamentations, unanswered for generations, and also that he could not join them, adding his own thin voice to their eternal cries for help.

  My happy friend, thus I stood for nearly an hour on the threshold of the Khush Elpasha, the city’s main synagogue, with no one to talk to, no one to take an interest in me, until that time when fate deemed it so and down the steps towards me came the Khaham-Bashi in the company of two constant companions, Shlomo Harari and Khalfon Attia, and the Khaham-Bashi is all joy and happiness at the sight of Aslan and he embraces and kisses me as his two friends look on, and says aloud, See how beautiful and sweet is this son-in-law! And he asks after Markhaba’s health, and the friends, as always immersed in their prayer books and biblical exegesis and Talmudic debate, are arguing about the weight of a shoe permitted to a Jew on the Day of Atonement, and about the appropriate punishment for a man who exchanges even a single word with one banned from the community, and they turn to me, words of blessing on their lips, and the Khaham-Bashi is proud to show me off to his companions and mentions nothing of our experiences at the Cave of Jobar, and he wonders whether I might not have the time to join them for a cup of morning tea, and they take hold of my garment and enjoin me to accompany them.

  The Khaham-Bashi seats me at a small table with small chairs which precisely suit the diminutive height of his tiny, aged friends, and Aslan cannot help but compare them to his father and uncles, big-bellied and moustachioed, occupied with their epic wars against the Harari family and always ready for some show of strength and enmity, and how they sneer at Aslan and mock him, a chasm of resentment and alienation separating them! The Khaham-Bashi and his cohorts, on the other hand, are sweet-tongued and soft-spoken, feeble and weak, gaunt, taunting one another with riddles about nothing, pulling at one another’s beards, and they offer him a doughnut of honey with a touch of khalvah, sesame paste, and they ask Aslan, in a jesting manner, teasing him, where was the young bridegroom during this night of the great storm, did he know how to comfort the Khaham-Bashi’s daughter in the uproarious thunder, and did he cover her with a blanket of piastres as could be found, they had been told, in the homes of the richest of men? And Aslan wishes to laugh along with them but suddenly his throat seizes with panic, for had not these very hands, now stirring a cup of tea and dangling leaves of mint in it, had not these very hands caressed the ragged old body of the monk Tomaso that night, and this tongue, now drawing near the rim of the hot glass, had it not licked the lips of the uncircumcised dead man, and was not this body, sitting now in repose under a benelovent winter sun, the very same body with the very same arms and hands and head, eyes, ears, nose, the very same organs that had brought the monk’s body to its final resting place, hacking it to pieces and casting each as far as possible in a different direction?

  The memory of the bashed skull causes great weakness to descend upon Aslan; his organs plunge, his fingers grow confused and he jiggles the glass of tea, causing it to churn and froth under the gaze of the Khaham-Bashi, who, astonished, gathers Aslan’s fingers into his own, kisses them, and says, My son, you are terribly pale, and even the wise old men Shlomo Harari and Khalfon Attia desist from tweaking one another’s beards and say to Aslan, Verily, you seem downcast with gloom, and Aslan scolds himself, Daber khalek, Come to your senses; if these old men, whose eyes are weak and dim, can detect your panicky pallor, what will Sharif Pasha’s investigators say? Will it be possible to withhold anything from their eyes?

  Aslan excuses himself from the kind and caring Khaham-Bashi and his two companions and leaves their company, allowing Kharet Elyahud to vomit him out of it, and in spite of the warnings of the barber he exits from the northern gate into the Christian Quarter, and from afar he spies a small gathering and people talking and arguing among themselves, and he recognises the hoods of the Capuchin monks under Tomaso’s tutelage, and they are standing alongside the chapel of the monastery and they are perplexed, and Aslan knows it is incumbent upon him to adhere to the barber’s counsel and distance himself from the Christian Quarter, but his wicked legs lead him there and he cannot restrain them.

  Some twenty Christian men are congregated at the entrance to the chapel of the Capuchin monastery and they are pounding and beating at the heavy wooden door, shouting, Tomaso! Tomaso! Ibrahim! Ibrahim! And Aslan steals a glance at the open window on the second floor of the tiny monastery, where Tomaso’s bedroom stands empty and from where no response is forthcoming, and he feigns innocence, nonchalantly asking one of the men the reason for this assembly, and the man explains that they have been waiting several hours to perform the morning prayers but no one is there, and that now, well nigh midday, they have decided to send for assistance, dispatching one of their members to fetch the French consul, whose patronage all Christian emissaries in the city enjoy. Perhaps he will know something of this matter; after all, they now fear the worst.

  Aslan, his voice shaking, comforts the monk, saying that with the help of God in heaven Tomaso will surely be saved from any misfortune that has befallen him, that he must certainly have been detained by an auction or healing the infirm and will return momentarily to his abode to be greeted by all with relieved laughter; and the Capuchin monk is overcome with tears at Aslan’s words of encouragement and he kisses the palms of Aslan’s hands and wishes him goodness and divine benevolence throughout his days, and Aslan cries along with him, the tears catching in his throat.

  Minutes later the French consul arrives, breathless, a stately, be-suited gentleman with bulging eyes and long, thick sideburns that form a threshold of hair for the lines of his severe jaw, and he is in the company of a big-bellied Arab merchant with the look of a charlatan who serves as his dragoman, his translator from Arabic to French, and without delay the consul, who shows himself to be a man of action and vigour, orders a tall ladder to be brought from the adjacent sweet shop, and the shopkeeper leaves off cracking pistachio nuts and does the consul’s bidding, and then the consul commands that one of the monks ascend the ladder and open the door from within so that they may search for the missing Tomaso and his manservant.

  Aslan does not protest when the gathered crowd of the faithful entreats him to provide his feather-light body for this holy mission, and they kiss his hands and ply him with orchid juleps to strengthen his spirit, and Aslan acquiesces with a frozen,
artificial smile, and he does not oppose their plans for him to enter through the second-storey window and descend to the first floor to open the door to allow the congregants to enter, and he says nothing about what he knows of the whereabouts of Tomaso and his manservant, he merely grasps the lower rungs of the ladder and climbs up to search the locked monastery in order to discover whether some calamity has befallen the two, and a weeping hope steals into Aslan’s heart that the encounter with the monk at the café near the house of the Jew Eliyahu Nehmad and the act of copulation they shared in the shed outside the city walls did not, in fact, take place at all, that they were castles in the air, vanity and a striving after wind, and that Aslan had lain that whole night in his bed, ensconced in his beloved wife’s arms and that now he would climb through the window, pull back the curtain and send a smile of relief to the worried gathering of hooded believers, for the monk and his manservant are lying naked, arms entwined, between silk sheets, fatigue-striken after a night of thunder and lightning that banished sleep from their eyes.

  My happy friend, at the end of my endless journey to the window, when I reached the flapping curtain, I planted one leg and then the other in what appeared to be the monk’s bedroom, and lo, the bed was not dishevelled, the bedclothes clean and pulled taut, and I descended the spiral staircase leading from the living quarters down to the chapel, passing through the aisle between the chairs, highly vexed by the expression on the face of the female icon holding a naked baby in her arms, his gaze condescending, and from inside the chapel I lifted, at the behest of the congregation assembled outside, the bolt from the door and enabled them to stream in, all the while shouting the names of the missing monk and their murdered messiah.