Ahmad smiled gently.
Later Cohen dropped out of our group to get married and raise a family. Odd, but the men in his line always seemed to be doing that.
Ahmad laughed, rubbing his knees with pleasure.
And what a line it was, those infamous Cairo Cohens…. But see here, what kind of a host am I today? Where is your aperitif and where is our music? Forgive me, I seem to have forgotten myself.
Ahmad jumped to his feet, laughing. He dug behind a stack of newspapers and came up with a dusty bottle of banana liqueur, to all appearances as old as the newspapers. A little digging somewhere else and he found two small glasses, then busied himself over a dusty pile of primitive phonograph records, all of them warped by time. When he found the one he was looking for he placed it on an old-fashioned phonograph with a wind-up crank and a flaring sound trumpet. He vigorously worked the crank and a faint voice screeched from far away. Immediately Ahmad went into a crouch, his straw hat askew, one ear almost inside the gaping mouth of the sound trumpet.
How lovely, he said with profound satisfaction. It’s Gounod’s Faust and the Bulgarian who sings the part of Mephistopheles is superb. What do you suppose ever happened to him?…
On the wall facing Joe, a large heroic poster from the time of the First World War advocated membership in the Young Men’s Moslem Association.
WE WANT YOU, said the authoritative mullah depicted on the poster, as he pointed a bony forefinger out at the viewer. Behind the mullah a group of plumpish Moslem youths lounged beneath a flowering tree in the courtyard of an imaginary Cairo mosque, happily admiring each other’s large gold wristwatches. In the distance rows of sturdy industrial smokestacks puffed thick white smoke into the air, while overhead a small primitive triplane came racing in above the pyramids, bearing the morning mail to Cairo. In all, life was humming and exceptionally clean in the poster.
Ahmad glanced up from his crouching position next to the sound trumpet. For a moment he too contemplated the poster.
What do we get from the art that obsesses us? he shouted.
I firmly believe, he shouted again, that most abstractions are simply our pseudonyms, and that we are therefore time. For surely it is in our fancy, not in reality, that the basis of our lives is to be found …
He laughed.
Which can only mean that in addition to everything else reality is, it’s also unreal.
At last the faint scratchy aria came to an end. Ahmad switched off the phonograph and held up a bottle of lavender liquid he had found somewhere, an atomizer attached to its top. He pumped and great clouds of sweet-smelling mist shot in every direction.
Disinfectant, he said, sitting down again. These old buildings, you know. But to tell you the truth, I’m completely indifferent as to whether the ruler of the world is called Anthony or Octavius. What does interest me, and what I’ve always strived for, is a purity of heart which forgives and justifies and includes everything, because it understands…. Yes, but like all people who ponder life, I often feel frightened and alone.
Ahmad gazed at the floor and lapsed into silence.
Do you still write poetry? asked Joe.
Ahmad sighed.
No, I’m afraid I don’t. For a long time I tried to fool myself, but the words would never come to life no matter how hard I labored over them. Then after that I thought I’d accept second-best, so I started work on a poetical dictionary. But I didn’t even finish the letter A. The last entry I worked on was Alexander the Great. Somehow it was just too painful sitting out front at the counter night after night, contemplating all the things Alexander had done in such a brief lifetime.
Ahmad turned to Joe. He smiled sadly.
I think I recognize my condition. Quite simply, I’m a poet who can’t write poetry. I was given the soul and sensitivity for it, but not the talent. So when all’s said and done my profession remains that solitary one known through the ages as the failed poet. And there must be many people like me who live alone in their little corners, knowing they’ve never been anything but ordinary, and it’s not that we can’t contribute to the world in some minor way, for of course we can. The sadness comes from the fact that we can’t contribute as we’d like to and create even one little moment of beauty that might live on in someone’s heart…. But do you know what the real tragedy of the profession is? It’s that we get used to it. It’s that we go beyond self-pity and beauty and simply endure in our little caves.
Solemnly, Ahmad gazed around the tiny room.
Surrounded as always, he murmured, by a little universe of things we understand….
He lapsed into silence again.
I’ve often wondered, said Joe, what it must be like to have grown up among all these wonders of antiquity, the pyramids and the Sphinx and all the rest of it. How does it affect you?
It affects your taste, said Ahmad.
You mean you tend to take less notice of passing fashions?
Well I don’t know about that, I was being more specific. What I meant was the taste in your mouth.
Oh.
The fact that you never know who or what is going to blow into your mouth next.
Oh.
Yes. There you are walking down a street and suddenly some hot dry dust swirls into your mouth and coats your tongue, but who or what is it? Some deserted corner of the desert being sent to you on the wind so you can taste its desolation? All that’s left of some ancient tomb? Or is this grit on your teeth the final remains of a unicorn of the XVII Dynasty? Or is this new unsavory coating on your tongue the very last memory of the Hyksos, who were always an obscure people?
Ahmad smiled.
Dust to dust, he said. In the desert only a part of the past gets buried and forgotten. Another part always gets eaten, and although we like to pretend we can forget that part too, we don’t really.
Ahmad frowned.
So the past is always with us and never more so than during a war, when so much of the past is seemingly being destroyed. Just look at that old cardboard suitcase in the corner. I bought that suitcase thirty years ago in a hurry one evening when I was on my way to Alexandria for a night of pleasure. Then I was young and strong and not yet ugly, and for me that flimsy suitcase will always bring to mind the memory of a boy in a cinnamon-colored suit, shabby because he was so poor, who then revealed mended underwear and a faultless body.
And do you know what’s in that suitcase now? Two folders of my useless poems, a collection of scribbles once meant to be more, a forgotten footnote to the conscience of the race. My life, in other words….
Ah Cairo, Cairo, this sultry place of half-light where the windows have to be shuttered until sunset for most of the year, where white-tiled terraces violently throw back the heat and the hoofbeats of horses pulling old carriages clatter reassuringly in the darkness. This Cairo with its radiant winters and its glowing springs with their winds from the desert bringing the terrible heat of summer, yet also bringing cool nights and breezes off the river….
Yes, my Cairo, my life. In the end all grand schemes of order are private, and all the systems which we pretend are universal have but the dimensions of my closet. And thus we never find new places, nor do we find another river, for the city follows us and we grow old in those byways where we wasted our youths.
Ahmad stared into the distance.
Wasted … so many things in so many places. And now there is but this body, this worn and tarnished locket hung upon my soul. How many thousands of times have I celebrated the glory of its treasures and the wonder of the gift, the blessing … the burden? And lamented them, surely. How many times in these byways where I wasted my youth?…
Joe watched him. He shook his head.
Wasted, Ahmad? That’s not what I’ve seen here. That’s not what I’ve heard at all.
Ahmad stirred.
What do you mean? What have you seen, what have you heard?
Joe laughed. He spread his arms wide to take in the small crowded cave where so much of Ahm
ad’s life lay heaped around them in dusty piles.
Ah yes, Ahmad, a world of your own making is what I’ve seen and heard, and what poet could hope for more than that? And when I look to the heart of that world I see a great wide boulevard with three young men striding down it. And their talk swirled into the night, for they were great companions in those days and they always made their rounds together, elegant and witty and matchless in their joy and laughter, three fearless kinds of the Orient of old. And one of them was a painter, and another a poet, and the third an extravagant dreamer from the desert. And people flocked to hear those three kings of old, to catch even a glimpse of their outrageous performances. For they were Cohen and Ahmad and Stern and they laughed and wept with the very gods themselves, for the world was an opera then and the sidewalks of life were rich with poetry and color and love, and they were the masters of the boulevards in those days and everyone knew it. Knew it…. Everyone who ever set eyes upon them.
And that’s what I’ve seen, said Joe. And that’s what I’ve heard.
Ahmad stared into space, his face solemn behind his great round tortoiseshell glasses, his enormous head swaying defiantly in an imaginary breeze, his battered flat straw hat standing at a slight angle to the universe. Gravely then he nodded to the left and to the right, as if welcoming the companions of his youth, his hand all the while straying down the wall to where an ancient dented trombone rested amidst the shadowy piles of debris. Solemnly Ahmad drew the dusty instrument to him and caressed it, blew a tentative note, rose to his feet.
And sounded a melancholy blast on the trombone, a powerful glissando, his hand sliding slowly downward in a lingering salute to the majesty of a lost world.
11
Trombone
WHEN NIGHT FELL THEY moved from Ahmad’s cave to the courtyard behind the Hotel Babylon, where Ahmad built a small campfire and served a vegetarian supper, expertly mixing grains and spices and vegetables in an array of little dishes that Joe found delicious after his three days and two nights of fever. As for Ahmad, he was delighted to have an excuse to cook for a guest again, having not really done so, he said, since his tiny cottage on the edge of the desert had been swept away in the windstorms of the last war, along with the rest of his early life.
And so they camped like wandering bedouin in the narrow courtyard where vines and flowers had come to take root beneath the single palm tree, the two of them huddling around the glowing coals of their little campfire in the remote oasis they had found for themselves in the slums of the great city, whispering together under the stars and sipping endless cups of strong sweet coffee as the night deepened and Ahmad gently reminisced, his recollections ranging wide through the silent play of shadows that suggested other lives just beyond their small circle of light, Ahmad quietly conjuring up odd corners of memory in the reassuring darkness, in the vastness of that clear Egyptian night.
In addition to the bizarre curiosities of his own life, Ahmad talked especially about Menelik and the Sisters and the clan known as the Cairo Cohens. In one way or another, all of them had been intimately connected with Stern in the past, and it wasn’t long before Joe had begun to sense a network in Stern’s life. And not so strangely perhaps, as Joe recalled Liffy’s prophecy that the moment had come for him to embark on a journey in time, this network of Stern’s spanned more than a century, its members not all among the living, yet their presences still so powerful they echoed restlessly through other lives in a shadowy web of doing and feeling, that most profound of all secret human codes.
And so Ahmad went on conjuring up shapes from the shadows of the firelight, in the darkness, and again the next night they returned to sit up until dawn in their tiny oasis, the two of them once more traveling through long solitary silences as Ahmad searched his memory for turnings along the path, Joe gazing at the fire and trying to decipher the connections with Stern as Ahmad whispered back through the decades.
For there seemed to be clues in everything Ahmad said, quiet footfalls and unsuspected hints that were only to be recognized later, when Joe had traveled further in his attempt to uncover the truth about Stern. When the day had come to look back and ponder the weaving of Stern’s wanderings, the network that would finally reveal what Stern had sought, the unique figure traced by every man on the infinite landscape of time.
Alone and exhausted in his room as the great city was awakening, before he fell asleep, Joe drowsily reflected upon these odysseys through the night.
Ahmad?… Stern?
Surely a journey in time, as Liffy had said. Not mountains and rivers and deserts to be crossed, but memories to be explored.
From the beginning he had noticed the changes that had come over Ahmad as they had moved from the gloomy corridor of the Hotel Babylon, Ahmad’s apparent station in life … to Ahmad’s secret musty lair tucked away behind a wall … and finally to the flowering courtyard outside the hotel, so naked to the immense Egyptian night…. Ahmad opening his heart more with each new descent of the darkness, each evening when the last of the sunlight died and the hour returned for them to camp anew beneath the stars.
Buy why, all at once, was Ahmad opening up like this? Joe wondered.
And the more he thought of it, the more it seemed there could be only one explanation … Stern. Ahmad knew how much Joe cared for Stern and obviously he felt a need to talk about Stern, to tell Joe something. But why did Ahmad feel that need so strongly now? What had suddenly caused him to abandon the habits of years, his decades of silence?
Memories, thought Joe, the past…. Fragments and shards on the journey, as Liffy had said. To be examined in retrospect in an attempt to reconstruct the cup that once had been … the vessel that once had held the wine of other lives in other eras.
Yes, in time, thought Joe. In his own erratic way, through glimpses and suggestions and his own peculiar rhythms, Ahmad will find where we have to go.
And meanwhile Joe listened through the nights and slept and pondered Ahmad’s fragments during the days, trying to immerse himself in Ahmad’s memories in order to grasp the span of Stern’s network over the decades.
So elusive … time, thought Joe. And Stern’s life has been so vast, and now with the war and everything disrupted, dying….
As it turned out, he and Ahmad were to spend no more than a few nights together in the debris-strewn courtyard of the Hotel Babylon, that former brothel crumbling beneath the stars. Yet when Joe looked back on those few nights, they would expand into many worlds so distant and remote it was as if they had been scattered across a universe.
Ahmad’s secret universe, as Liffy once had called it.
Joe learned that Ahmad had first met Stern, through Menelik, when Stern was a young student of Arabic studies in Cairo, before Stern had gone on to Europe and acquired his lifelong dream of a great new nation in the Middle East, made up of Moslems and Christians and Jews alike. And that Ahmad had been a witness to those early stirrings of conscience in Stern, so boyish and exuberant, that had later made Stern a dedicated revolutionary whose devotion never wavered.
Joe was fascinated. As well as he knew Stern, this early period of Stern’s life had always been a mystery to him. And after all these years of knowing Stern in a particular way, he found it strange to try to picture him as a bumbling young man struggling to find himself, bewildered by others and making foolish mistakes. Or the young Stern sulking because his childish vanity had been wounded. Or acting with ludicrous bravado when it was obvious he had failed at some little thing. Joe listened to Ahmad describing these scenes from long ago, and even as he relived them with Ahmad beside the campfire he knew he would never be able to take them to heart, because the Stern he knew was such a different man.
It’s curious, he thought, how the past of someone older, someone we love and respect and admire, so often appears mysterious to us and out of reach. As if they saw life more clearly than we do and weren’t as confused and frightened as we are. As if life for them were more than the endless little things,
the revolving wheel of little moments, that ours is.
A natural yearning, it seemed to Joe, within the universal mystery sometimes given the name of history. Man’s past. Those little moments of infinite beauty and infinite sadness falsely ordered in retrospect to give life continuity, a recitation of finite moments that in fact had never existed.
And then an even more curious thought struck Joe.
What if it was this very yearning in man that caused his conceptions of God … of all the gods in men? Cruel and profane and vicious, as well as holy?
The war? mused Ahmad one evening. Frankly I take no particular notice of it. There’s always one going on in this part of the world.
As for the Germans, it’s impossible to think of them as anything other than the barbarians of our era, the Mongol hordes at our moment in time. And unfortunately barbarians do seem to serve a purpose in history, for when we have them as enemies at our gates we no longer have to judge ourselves. For a brief moment, anyway, our innate savagery is safely out there beyond the city walls and we can rejoice in our self-righteousness, and be smug in our petty civic virtues.
But refined barbarians? Men and women who listen to Mozart between murders?
We may think that’s an innovation of our modern sensibility, but it’s not. The beast has always been within each of us, born there a million years ago. Most of us make it as easy as we can for ourselves by ranting about the barbaric monsters at the gates who never stop threatening us, but as for myself, I’m glad I’ve never been in any position of power. With my fears and compulsions that would be dangerous, and I know it.
Ahmad smiled.
In other words, heaven save us from people who dream, especially failed artists, the worst of the lot. All tyrants seem to be failed artists of one kind or another…. But then, so are most of us in our souls.
Nile Shadows (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 3) Page 22
