Tongues of Fire

by Peter Abrahams

  “I’ll bring him by at the end of the week.”

  “Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Rehv.” She turned back to the screen.

  He spent most of the day in the library, reading about Islamic prayer rugs and studying photographs of them. When he had learned about them he telephoned a few dealers from the booth outside and asked about prices. Then he started walking to work.

  The sidewalk was very crowded. He stepped on someone’s heels; someone else stepped on his. He passed a blind man holding a box of orange pencils who had very little money in the upturned hat at his feet, and a man who was playing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony with a saxophone. He wasn’t playing it very well, but his hat was almost full. Two blocks from La Basquaise he slowed down to watch a supple man in whiteface who seemed to be miming the story of Adam and Eve: He was curled around an imaginary tree and flicking his pointed tongue wickedly; then he was a buffoon biting an apple.

  “Mr. Rehv?” A woman’s voice, almost a whisper. He looked around and saw her, pale and thin, her back to a window display. She stepped forward and touched his arm. “It is you?” He heard the soft Israeli accent. He had seen her somewhere before. “You work at a restaurant called La Basquaise?”

  He nodded.

  “Don’t go there.” Her voice rose. She pulled him toward the window, out of the flow of people. “I’ve been waiting here all afternoon to warn you. They’ve got my grandfather.”

  He remembered. Tear gas. “Harry?”

  “That’s not his real name. His real name is Uri Nissim.”

  “Who has him?”

  “The Americans.” Panic circled the edges of her voice, threatening to engulf it. One of her eyelids was twitching uncontrollably.

  “I’m sorry.” He couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  She looked at him for a moment, puzzled. “You don’t understand. He’s had enough pain. He won’t be able to take any more. He’s going to tell them everything.”

  He understood. Quickly he crossed the sidewalk and raised his hand for a taxi. She followed him. “Where are you going?” She pressed her fingers against her eye, but it didn’t stop the twitching. A taxi pulled up in front of him. As he opened the door he felt her hand clinging to his arm. “Where are you going?”

  He looked into her frightened eyes. She wanted to come with him. He looked away. “Don’t worry about your grandfather,” he said, as gently as he could. “They won’t send someone his age to prison.”

  “Prison? They don’t send any of us to prison. They hand us over to the Arabs.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a deal the Americans made. They try to keep it a secret, but everyone knows. If they catch you they send you back to …” The word stuck in her throat. “To Palestine.”

  Someone honked. “In or out, bud,” the taxi driver said.

  Rehv got in and closed the door. Through the window he saw her bury her face in her hands. “Roosevelt Hospital,” he said. He left her standing hunched on the edge of the sidewalk.

  The taxi moved forward, stopping frequently in the heavy traffic. “I’m in a hurry.”

  “Then fly.”

  One block. Two. Rehv looked down the second street. In front of La Basquaise a few workmen in yellow hard hats were standing around an open manhole. The one using the walkie-talkie was Major Kay. Rehv slid down out of sight.

  At the hospital he paid the driver and started running. Inside. Into the elevator. Twentieth floor. Down the hall. The nursery.

  Behind the glass were babies, rows of them, lying in bassinets, the girls wrapped in pink blankets, the boys in blue. Most of them were crying with their mouths wide open, but the glass kept all the sound inside.

  Rehv went to the nearest door and knocked. A nurse opened it. “Yes?”

  “I want to see my baby.”

  She pointed to the clock at the end of the hall. “Forty-five minutes until visiting time.”

  “Please. I have to go to work in half an hour.”

  “Oh, all right, all right. Don’t look so desperate. Boy or girl?”

  “Boy.”

  “Surname?”

  “Rehv.”

  “Go to the window. I’ll wheel him up to the front.”

  “I’d like to hold him. I haven’t held him yet.”

  “For God’s sake.”

  “It’s not against the rules, is it?”

  She sighed. “No, no.” She took a folded white coat from a counter beside her and handed it to him. “You have to wear this.”

  She went inside the nursery. He put on the coat and waited. In a few minutes she returned carrying a baby wrapped in blue. He could have picked him out among a thousand babies. He was not sleeping or fussing or crying. He was just watching, with his big dark eyes. She handed him to Rehv.

  “I’m going to take him for a walk. He likes walks.”

  “Five minutes.”

  He nodded. He started walking down the hall. He went past the nurses’ station and smiled at the nurses. They smiled back. He kept going, around the corner, past the elevators, to the stairs. He walked down twenty flights, through a service entrance, and into the street. The baby did not make a sound.

  “That’s a good boy,” Isaac Rehv said to him quietly. “That’s a good boy.”

  Krebs stood at the foot of the bed, riffling through the green bundles: three bundles of one-hundred-dollar bills, held together by elastic bands; fifty bills in each one.

  “That money belongs to me,” the black woman said, propping herself up on her elbows. Her body seemed to fill the bed. “I haven’t broken any law.”

  “Shut up.” When he had said that to the nurse a little while before she had burst into tears and run from the room. But the black woman just said: “I’m right and you know it.”

  Krebs walked to the window. Outside the sky was changing from black to gray. “It belongs to me.” The old woman had said the same thing, when he went back to the apartment building and finally found her in the corridor on the seventh floor, sitting in her wheelchair, waiting through the night for her granddaughter to come home from the hospital.

  He went to the bed and dropped the green bundles on the thin beige blanket. “You can keep the money. We’re not interested in you. We’re interested in Isaac Rehv.”

  “I’ve told you everything I know.”

  They went through it again. Once. Twice. Once more. The same questions, the same answers; each time a little nastier than the time before. At last he gave up, and turned toward the door. “You’re making a mistake,” she called after him. “He’s not a criminal.”

  He sat in the back seat of the car. Bunting lit cigarettes and breathed them until they were gone. “He kidnapped his own baby. Why would he do that?”

  “He must have known we were coming,” Krebs replied.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know how.”

  Bunting rolled down the window and tossed a cigarette butt into the stream of traffic. “Maybe he’s crazy.”

  “No,” Krebs said. “He’s not crazy.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Slowly, as slow as the weakest calf, the nomads moved south into the Goz. The women and children rode on the backs of oxen, wedged between straw mats, rolled hides, and cooking pots. Rich men rode horses; poor men rode donkeys. The cattle plodded on, heads down, dewlaps hanging limp; some of them switched their tails hopelessly at the mosquitoes and horseflies, most did not bother. Above them hovered a red brown cloud of dust, visible miles away, that followed them from first step to last. The dust found its way into their nostrils, under their eyelids; mixed with sweat it ran in muddy tracks on their faces, light lines against dark skin. Above the red brown cloud were other clouds, the dense gray rain clouds of late autumn, clouds that never rained, or if they did, rained somewhere else, a thousand miles away. What rain there would be had already fallen, the rain the nomads would live on for the year. It had been very little. That was why they were moving south so early, to the feeble river;
to more mosquitoes, more flies, and other cattlemen, black man who had once been their slaves.

  Late in the afternoon the nomads halted on the savannah, near a large shallow pool of rain trapped in a red clay depression. They looked at the level of water and saw how low it was, lower than even the oldest could remember ever seeing it at that time of year. The cattle smelled the water, made restless sounds, and funneled toward it. The children went to gather thorns from the bushes that grew here and there in the midst of the coarse grasses; they piled the thorns into a circular zariba to pen the cattle in for the night. The women began building the tents, straw mats arranged on a frame of branches to form hemispheres. Later they would collect bits of wood and cattle dung for the cooking fires. The men started walking over a small rise toward the men’s tree, an old deep-chested baobab that gave them shade while they waited for their food. As they walked they brushed the dust from their jubbas and talked of the water in the pool, and how it had been the year before, the year before that, ten years before, twenty.

  When they reached the top of the rise they saw that someone was already there, under the tree. It was a man, wearing a white turban and a white robe. He was bent prostrate on a prayer rug, in silent prayer. They saw no horse, no donkey, or any other sign of how he had come. Quietly they drew closer, watching.

  The man prayed for a long time, unaware of their presence. Then he slowly lifted his head and rose to his feet. His skin was very light, much lighter than the skin of the lightest Baggara, lighter even than the skin of an Egyptian. One or two hands moved a little closer to the long knives worn under the jubba.

  “Call the women and children,” he said to them. He spoke Arabic, but Arabic different from theirs, classical and not easy to understand.

  No one moved.

  “I bring you no harm,” the man said. “I want nothing from you. Call the women and the children.”

  They turned to Bokur, the omda. He looked closely at the light-skinned man. He nodded. A man went off. No one spoke. They watched the light-skinned man. His eyes showed nothing. A drum beat. The women and the children came. They crowded around the baobab tree.

  “I bring you no harm,” the man said again. “I want nothing from you. I have come to tell you something. Then I will leave you in peace.” He paused and looked at them. They were very quiet.

  “Once men thought it was the end of the age. A man came to your ancestors, a divinely guided man. They rode with him. He drove the outsiders from Khartoum.”

  “The Mahdi,” some of the nomads murmured.

  The man’s voice rose. “But it was not the end of the age. The end of the age is still to come. It is not far away. And another divinely guided one will come to you. But he will not be from another people, like the man your ancestors knew. He will be one of you. Dark like you. He will show you the way. He will find water when the pools are dry.”

  A man spoke, a rich man. He had eight hundred cattle and four wives. “Why should we believe you?” he asked.

  The light-skinned man looked for him in the crowd, and when he found him his eyes turned hard. “You will believe what you are destined to believe,” he told him.

  He said no more, but prostrated himself again on the prayer rug and began to pray in silence. Later they offered him food to eat and a tent to sleep in, but he refused both, saying that he was fasting and liked to watch the stars.

  In the morning when they awoke he was gone. The prayer rug lay beneath the baobab tree. It was a dark red prayer rug, very old and very fine. Bokur took possession of it in the name of the tribe.

  The sun was already hot enough to bring sweat to their foreheads. The nomads broke camp and moved on. The red brown dust rose above their heads. As they rode on the backs of the oxen, the women began to make up songs about the light-skinned man and what he had said.

  PART TWO

  THE PROMISED LAND

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The boy paddled little whirlpools at him. Kneeling in the stern of the wooden canoe, Isaac Rehv watched them twist by, a chain of holes across the smooth surface of the lake. Each whirlpool looked the same as the one before—just as round, as deep, as swift in its rotation; his eyes went to the whirlpools he himself was making, and he saw they were all slightly different.

  Under the summer sun the boy’s back had grown browner, like coffee with one plastic container of cream instead of two. It was a straight, lean back that rippled in an easy rhythm as he paddled. In those ripples Rehv saw the cores of the man’s muscles that were soon to come. Very soon, he thought, trying to remember his own puberty and remembering only pimples and awkwardness and fatigue, nothing at all of the grace and beauty he saw in that back.

  “Paul,” he said, speaking Arabic. “What is the Kaaba?”

  The boy said nothing. His back went on moving with the same steadiness, but the whirlpools he was pushing back were deeper and wider, and spun much faster, with thick white tails that bored into the green water.

  “Paul, I’m talking to you.”

  “I heard you,” the boy said in English. He had begun to speak English more and more.

  “When we’re alone we speak Arabic. Why do I have to keep telling you?”

  “Because you’re compulsive.”

  “Don’t talk to me that way,” Rehv said, raising his voice. His words echoed around the lake, ringing them in the ugliness of his temper. Was that his voice? When had it become like that? Thinking of it he forgot the lake, the canoe, his paddle. The paddle turned, caught in the water, and tipped the canoe to one side. Instantly the boy stuck out his paddle and made a feathering stroke with the blade on the surface of the water. The canoe regained its balance.

  The boy twisted around and looked at him with an expression in his large dark eyes that he often had and that Rehv had never been able to understand. The boy’s face was thin and spare, like a modern sculpture—clear brown skin stretched over fine, prominent bones; but it was also the face of an aristocrat, the kind of aristocrat who comes from somewhere in the East. “Let’s not spend the night in wet sleeping bags,” the boy said. He kept his eyes on Rehv for a moment more, then reached into the top of one of the packs and took out the canteen. Delicately he held it to the edge of his lips and allowed a very small amount of water to flow into his mouth. The way he drank reminded Rehv of something important.

  “The men can never see the women eating,” he said.

  The boy screwed the top on the canteen and replaced it in the pack. “That makes three,” he said, turning away and lifting his paddle. He plunged it into the water. “Three times you’ve told me that.”

  “I’m sorry, but it’s the kind of thing that will have to be second nature.”

  “When?”

  “When we go.”

  “When’s that?”

  “When we’re ready.”

  The boy’s back began rippling its even ripples. The canoe glided across the lake. Pale green water. Dark green islands. Blue sky that always seemed a little cold, even in the middle of summer. Insects ran in zigzags on the water. Fish darted up from below to catch them. Birds dove down for the fish. Sometimes the water made sucking sounds at the paddles. Otherwise there was nothing to hear. The boy’s back rippled.

  Rehv’s own back started to hurt, as it always did on their canoe trips. If it wasn’t for that he thought he felt as young and strong as ever. But as they paddled he found himself wishing they were back at the cabin, five lakes, almost six now, to the south. There he could lie down with his back to the fire and his knees drawn up in the way that made the pain almost disappear.

  “What’s the next lake?” Rehv asked. “I’ve forgotten.” It had been three years, maybe four, since they had come this way.

  “Crutch.”

  “Any good spots to make camp?”

  “It’s early.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m getting tired.” How often he seemed to be telling the boy he was sorry. What did he have to be sorry about? Nothing. There was something about th
e boy that drew the words from him anyway.

  The boy sighed. “There’s a little V-shaped island with a nice spot, about a third of the way across. Three big spruce trees.”

  “How can you remember all that?”

  Without breaking the motion of his paddling the boy shrugged his broad shoulders. “First there’s a two-mile portage,” he said. Rehv tried to decide whether there was any malice in his words. “The last part’s uphill,” the boy added. And Rehv knew. He thought about adolescents and how they sometimes turned against their parents.

  “I didn’t mean to lose my temper,” Rehv said. “I’m trying to be a perfectionist, that’s all.”

  They paddled. After a while the boy spoke quietly, in Arabic. “The Kaaba,” he said. “A big cube-shaped shrine in the mosque at Mecca, said to have been built by Abraham.”

  “There, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” Rehv said, thinking at the same time that maybe he had given in because he felt sorry for him.

  “Speak Arabic,” the boy said.

  They came to the far shore of the lake. The mosquitoes and the blackflies flew out to greet them. They pulled on sweatshirts, sprayed themselves with insecticide, and smacked at the bugs whenever they landed. None of that stopped the mosquitoes and blackflies from trying to eat them alive. It just made it more sporting.

  The portage was an old dirt track used long ago by lumbermen and now overgrown. The nearest road was two hundred miles to the south. Rehv carried the canoe. The boy carried one of the packs. In the past Rehv had taken the second pack at the same time; this summer he had started making two trips.

  They walked along the path. The insects moved with them, the way an atmosphere clings to a planet. On both sides trees grew thick and tall, shutting out the sun. It was cool and dark and silent, except for the sounds of their feet and the insects whining in their ears. Once or twice Rehv stopped to rest his back. The boy went ahead, out of sight.