Dreamers of the Day

by Mary Doria Russel

  Well! Food, books, and a dog to pet—that’s a winning combination for any library. I would sit at my desk, shuffling paper but listening as the children read, slyly giving help when they needed to sound out a hard word.

  In my experience, most children—even backward ones—can do well in school. They just need one person who will cheer them on, one person who can say with serene confidence, “I know that you can do this.” When a child struggles, you can say, “That’s the best you’ve done so far!” Phrasing it that way makes each effort sound like a necessary step along the path to success, you see. “That’s better” can sound more grudging, as though everything that came before was failure and it’s about time they got it right.

  The opportunity to encourage those children was worth more than any salary, no matter how desperately I needed the money. When at last a squiggly jumble of letters began to form words, and sentences, and paragraphs of meaning— Well, it was like witnessing a miracle, and I was amply rewarded with a gap-toothed, face-splitting, ear-to-ear grin.

  As the Depression deepened, parents needed every nickel. Once again, sons and daughters were pulled out of school and sent out to sell newspapers or shine shoes, or even—in America!—to beg. Sometimes children would come to say good-bye to me and Rosie. I would dry their tears, open a desk drawer, and help them fill out a card request for the Cleveland Public Library.

  “The public library is like a giant bookstore where everything is free,” I would say. “Nobody will ever tell you to stop learning at the library. Rosie and I go there every Saturday morning. When it’s nice weather, we read stories out under the big tree. Come and visit us.”

  So you see, in the end, the sorrow borne in my middle years spared me much grief in my old age, for with my own family now long dead, my whole world was little children. To them, I had always been the nice old lady at the library. To me, they would be young forever, full of hope and possibility.

  ROSIE DIED IN fullness of her years, and so eventually did I. Mumma was right about one thing: I did regret smoking. That’s what killed me in the end. And Karl was right about that legend. Remember? He told me that to drink from the Nile was to ensure a return to Egypt.

  Of course, you’ve had some time to get used to the idea that I’ve been speaking to you from beyond the grave, but it took me completely by surprise when Rosie and I were reunited in a place of water and lotuses and palms. This is certainly not the afterlife I anticipated. I thought there’d be … well, nothing. Even now I don’t know if I am closer to heaven or to hell, but Rosie likes it here. There are beautiful ghostly salukis for her to romp with and an extraordinary number of lovely phantom cats to chase, so she is quite content.

  I wandered quite a bit at first, probably because I wasn’t buried with the Book of the Dead, which would have guided me away from the world of men. Then I began to encounter others like me—people who found themselves in this place without the vaguest idea how or why. Drinking from the Nile seems to be the only thing we have in common, so Karl’s explanation is as good as any.

  Most souls are here for a short time and gradually disappear, which is often a pity. Once, a gentleman wearing hardly anything in the way of clothing made friends with me. We didn’t talk much but enjoyed our quiet companionship. Then he stood, knit his brows, and looked out into the fog that surrounds us. “When Pagans strive to rule the world, Yahweh defeats them,” he declared in a firm voice. “When Jews strive to repair the world, Jesus breaks them. When Christians strive to save the world, Allah humiliates them. When Muslims strive to purify the world, Mammon corrupts them. Therefore, the Buddha advises, Cease to strive. Endure the world.”

  I thought about that and said, “I’m not sure I agree with your analysis—” but before I could continue, the gentleman faded away just like the Cheshire Cat.

  There are lots of Egyptians here, but the Nile divides the frangi from the beledi even in the afterlife, and we foreigners still tend to congregate on the west bank. In life, we usually paid attention only to people who could speak our own languages when we visited Egypt. You might say it was as though we were starring in our own private movies. Egyptians became “extras.” They served coffee at the edge of the frame or filled the screen with untranslated rage, while we imagined ourselves the “main characters.” We didn’t even notice we were thinking that way, and now I guess we’re stuck with it, though we don’t seem to have a language problem anymore.

  Some of us here are famous. Did you know Saint Francis visited the Holy Land? I’d never heard that, but it seems he traveled from Assisi to Jerusalem, hoping to make peace with the Muslims of his day. On his way back to catch a boat from Alexandria to Italy, he waded through the Nile and fell in.

  I was less surprised to meet Napoleon Bonaparte because I knew he’d been to Egypt. He introduced me to Ptolemy XIII, who drowned in the Nile during a naval battle with his sister Cleopatra. “We were Greeks, you know,” Ptolemy told me. “I never believed in the Egyptian gods until I arrived here. My body was never found, so I was not properly prepared for the afterworld.”

  General Bonaparte was convinced that the Sphinx held him responsible for letting French artillerymen fire on its nose. Francis refuses to believe in the power of a false god like the Sphinx, but despite his own unwavering faith in Jesus, here he is.

  It is a matter of some debate why some of us fade away so quickly while others linger for centuries. There may be validity to General Bonaparte’s theory. “As long as your name is remembered, you are not truly dead” is what he thinks. Francis and Ptolemy certainly fit that notion, but who’d remember Agnes Shanklin all these years? It’s possible that one of my fifth graders still thinks of me, I suppose, or that someone recalls the Library Lady who used to read to children on Saturday mornings, but maybe it’s Karl Weilbacher’s daughter who remembers me.

  I had a letter from her in 1938. When I first saw her name on the envelope, my stomach lurched at the thought that my sins had been discovered and I was at last to be held to account. Such little fears in such a dangerous time …

  Instead, Fräulein Weilbacher reported that her father had recently been arrested in the middle of the night—roused from bed in his pajamas, dragged into the street, hurled into a car. Despite the open and increasingly shrill denunciations of Jewish influence in Germany, the Weilbachers hadn’t seen this catastrophe coming. Karl had retired from his government position in 1931, his daughter told me, but he had many contacts inside the new regime, old friends who helped him and his family during the Depression. Life was hard, but it was hard for everyone.

  “Papa couldn’t believe that the Germany he had loved so well would fail to value his long service, but you must know how bad things are for people like us these days,” Fräulein Weilbacher wrote. “He sent word to my mother and me that he was lost, but that we must look for help. I am writing to you because your name and address were in his papers. Please, for the love of God and in my father’s memory, is there anything you can do to make it possible for us to emigrate to America? I would not trouble you if there were anyone else to whom we could appeal.”

  That was the moment when I truly regretted the loss of my wealth. If only I had the cash I’d spent on hairdressers during the twenties, or on fashionable shoes, or theater tickets! I might have been able to buy passage out of Germany for Karl’s small family.

  As it was, I could only contact ladies from my stock market days, hoping one of them had made it through the Crash in better shape than I. Could they lend me money for a good cause, one that might actually save lives? Failing that, did they know someone who might have influence at the State Department, or in the visa offices? No, and no, and no …

  So I wrote to our representative in Congress and to Ohio’s senators. I even wrote to Mrs. Roosevelt, who seemed much more alive to the plight of people overseas than her husband was. Nothing came of my pleas. Eventually, one evening, I set myself the awful task. In the morning, I would write to Fräulein Weilbacher to tell her th
at all my efforts on her behalf had failed.

  I went to bed that night and almost wept to think of how Karl’s nation had repaid him. Then it came to me, and I sat bolt upright in bed. Rosie awoke, annoyed by the disturbance. “Palestine!” I told her. “Maybe they could get to Palestine!”

  Of course, by then the British had closed the protectorate’s borders to the desperate German Jewish refugees whose influx had triggered the sort of riots I’d seen in Cairo and Gaza. At the same time, I remembered the hospitality I’d experienced in Jebail. Surely, I thought, such generous people would not turn away a poor widow and her daughter.

  I rose from my bed, pulled on a dressing gown, and picked up my pen to write. The question was, Whom did I know? Who was still in a position to help?

  Gertrude Bell was long gone. She had indeed become a valued adviser to Lawrence’s friend Feisal, who was acclaimed king of Iraq shortly after the British saw to it that there were no other pretenders to the new Iraqi throne. If Feisal was grateful to the British, he was subtle in showing it, and not the puppet they expected him to be. He reigned with some success until his death in 1933, which I suppose was a sort of vindication of the Cairo machinations; on the other hand, he was the only ruler of Iraq to die of natural causes for generations, so there you are.

  Miss Bell herself died in 1926, so she didn’t live to see what happened to the nation enclosed by the boundaries she drew, but she had her triumphs in her last few years. Terms were concluded for a treaty with post-Ottoman Turkey, granting Mosul to Iraq. This denied the Kurds a nation of their own, as Karl had feared, but established Iraq as a reliable source of oil for the British Empire, for a few decades at least.

  The last official function Gertrude Bell attended in Baghdad was the opening of a new archaeological museum—the very one that was looted in your time. When her passing was reported, the newspaper included a photo of her on that gala evening. Her slimness had become fragility and her dress remained resolutely old-fashioned, but it was bedecked with ribbons of honor from two nations. She was found dead a few weeks later—a suicide by sleeping pills, it was rumored, but I don’t believe that. Like so many Britons of her generation, Gertrude Bell was a great letter writer. There are thick volumes of her collected correspondence, still studied in your day, but she left no farewell note. It seems unlikely that she’d have allowed anyone else to write her obituary if she’d known she was going to die that night.

  Given his hopes for Jewish settlement in Palestine and his connection to Karl—whatever it may have been—I think Colonel Lawrence might well have helped the Weilbachers, but he, too, was gone by 1938.

  When I met him in ’21, Lawrence was still running on nerves, but the strain of the war was catching up with him. He worked himself like a sharecropper’s mule, writing that war book of his. Then the original manuscript was lost—lost! just imagine!—but he bore down and wrote it all again. When Seven Pillars of Wisdom was finished, he was out of money and desperately tired—physically, mentally, and emotionally.

  Many were puzzled by his decision in 1924 to leave both academe and diplomacy behind and to live instead as an enlisted man in the ranks of the Royal Air Force, but I was not very much surprised. Like Miss Bell, he was a great letter writer, you see, and to my delight he had found it worth his while to correspond with me. There were hints of his plans in his letters.

  To his misfortune, the predatory paparazzi of your time are really nothing new. The press discovered Lawrence in the R.A.F. and hounded him relentlessly, shouting questions, photographing every move. The situation became impossible, and the R.A.F. asked him to leave. Close to despair, he changed his name and prepared to go more deeply underground in the Royal Tank Corps. Fearing rediscovery, he sent printed postcards to warn his correspondents that he would no longer be writing many letters.

  On the back of mine, I found a handwritten note: “My past is like a tin can tied to my tail.” My reply was itself a few words on a postcard, honoring his own brevity. I quoted Ovid: “Facta fugis; facienda petis. Achievement you flee, pursuing new accomplishment.” I don’t know if he received it, but I like to think he did and that he smiled.

  There were those who insisted that Lawrence must have been working as a secret agent in his later years, fomenting trouble in India or the Middle East, or even spying in Germany. They couldn’t accept at face value his decision to walk away from public life, couldn’t understand that when he finished with something, he simply never looked back.

  He was freakishly competent, you see, a sort of serial genius who thrived on change and challenge. Study crusader castles; run an archaeological dig; make maps. Establish liaisons with Arab tribal leaders; develop tactics for asymmetrical warfare. Represent Sherifian interests with the Big Four at Versailles; find a compromise that would allow for Arab aspirations while serving his empire’s strategic needs. Write a war book; translate The Odyssey from the Greek with a literate warrior’s insight. Master airplane mechanics; test and modify powerboat engines … No matter what he took up, he worked until he achieved a result that he himself could respect. Then he went on to something else.

  Anyway, the publicity eventually died down, and Lawrence was able to transfer back to the R.A.F., an organization he truly loved. He resumed some of his correspondence when it seemed safe to do so, and I was delighted to hear from him again. We rarely wrote of anything historic or political. For the most part, we discussed writers and books, or music and record players. Lawrence had an impressive collection of modern music and firm opinions about the best machinery for playing it. He particularly loved Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, which, he wrote, “holds me in thrall. Its spell does not break until the recording has ended, and I hear the rhythm of the needle.” On his recommendation, I bought a recording he admired and learned to love it as well.

  Apart from the letters, he did me the extraordinary honor of sending a copy of Seven Pillars of Wisdom from the initial hand-printed edition. He inscribed it, “In memory of our camel ride—this is the book I told you about.” Of its contents, he said nothing, noting only that he wished me to see the craftsmanship he’d marshaled in its production. The book was beautifully bound, with a wealth of illustrations, just as he’d envisioned. There were pastel portraits and amusing cartoons by Eric Kennington; oils by Augustus John; Rothenstein’s chalks; a photograph of Meštrović’s bronze of the beautiful, sad-eyed Feisal; pencil and pen-and-wash portraits by Douglass, and Dobson, and Spencer.

  Later Lawrence sent me a proof of his popular abridgment Revolt in the Desert, asking my opinion. Reflexively, I sent a schoolteacher’s quibbling list of typos and misspellings, alerting him to occasions when the ship of metaphor had run aground. I also suggested that he reconsider his enthusiasm for commas, colons, and ellipses, a weakness I admittedly shared. I regretted mailing it the moment the envelope left my hand, but he seemed pleased to receive my advice and thanked me for saving him from public embarrassment.

  That reply was an opening for me to express the one real reservation I had about the shortened story. He’d left out the emotional climax of Seven Pillars: the incident in Deraa. Some people say it never happened as he described it, but something awful did; whatever it was, it scarred him deeply. “I can understand why you would prefer to leave ‘the difficult section’ out of the abridgment,” I wrote, “but that seems to me like skipping the third movement of Mahler’s Ninth. Until you’ve struggled to understand the third movement—with its pileup of polyphony, the crazy complexity that nearly tips into madness—well, I don’t think you can truly appreciate the beauty and consolation of the fourth movement.” I believe he took my point, though nothing came of my suggestion. The abridgment was published with improved punctuation but without reference to Deraa.

  And then one morning in 1935, I read the headline: LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, DEAD AT 46. He had been out on his motorcycle, speeding along a country lane, when he swerved to avoid two boys on bicycles. It was reported that Colonel Lawrence had suffered a compound fracture o
f the skull, a hemorrhage of the brain, a broken leg, and many internal injuries.

  From the first, his doctors were pessimistic, but even in middle age Lawrence was a man of great physical stamina—like a bull, as Karl once described him. He survived the crash for nearly a week, raising hopes for his recovery, but it was not to be.

  You can imagine the shock. You, too, have experienced the sudden and unexpected passing of someone vital and attractive and world famous. Whatever distress their private lives hold, the public lives of such charismatic figures seem charmed, almost magical. Their deaths are all but impossible to comprehend. Many people refuse to believe that something as ordinary as a motoring accident could claim such a luminary.

  For years afterward, sightings of Lawrence were reported and conspiracies were rumored. His death was a hoax, some said, providing cover so that he could sneak into northern India and foment rebellion among the Muslims there. I permitted myself to believe these notions for a while, but they were all nonsense.

  After his death, his brother Arnold published a book of remembrances by those who’d known Lawrence best. I think I told you that earlier, didn’t I? Anyway, Mr. David Garnett was not alone among Lawrence’s friends in finding “something clerical and celibate” about him. Despite, or perhaps because of, the fervent evangelism of his mother, Lawrence was not religious, but the monastic life in the Royal Air Force had suited him, and he was genuinely happy there. As an elderly Miss el-Akle recalled years later, Lawrence “used all his gifts, great or small, in service to others.” Her observation might seem at odds with what some took to be a shameless seeking after fame, but Winston Churchill agreed with her assessment. “Home, money, comfort, fame, and power meant little or nothing to Lawrence,” he wrote.

  In my opinion, Lawrence’s celebrity was as much a tool as his clothing. He used whatever he had to advance causes he believed in, and made himself insignificant otherwise. He was actually quite consistent about that. To work among comrades, doing something useful with his mind and his hands—that was God’s work to him.