But Joe? I’m proud of what he did, whatever it was. I’m proud he acted for me. On my own I never could have amounted to much in life. I dreamed of giving beauty to others but that was not to be. So I failed in what I wanted to do, and there’s a cave not far away whose dusty contents will testify to the multitude of any man’s lost dreams and lost adventures.
But wait, listen. Even here in the darkness, even here amidst the chaos of an unspeakable war, even now God’s hand may be restlessly moving within me and touching my soul. For just by knowing Stern and being a part of him, haven’t I then also taken part in giving beauty to many many lives through him, through what he is? Might not that also be so? And if perhaps it is, then who can say?…
Slowly, Ahmad nodded. He smiled, his face at peace, and gazed around the little courtyard.
A thumb … and a moment. So small, our world, and yet so vast. From the cave we know all too well to this mysterious sky we dream under. And Stern?… And myself? Well to be completely honest, I have no idea whether Stern feels his life has been justified by what he has done. He alone can decide that. But listen to me now, Joe, and feel the wondrous sweep of our majestic universe with its apparent contradictions.
For in the single moment I’ve spoken of, a single moment in time which is also my life, Stern has justified my existence, for me…. And that, that is truly the gift of gifts. For without it, we recede into dust. But with it, we take our place as dreaming creatures in the grandest of all schemes, and become one with the poetry of the universe.
Later that same night Ahmad turned to study the sky to the east. Not a hint of the grayness of dawn had appeared above the courtyard wall, but they both knew it couldn’t be long in coming now. Then too, Ahmad must have realized that his journey into the past with Joe was nearing its end, probably with that very sunrise.
For me, said Ahmad, this hour always brings Stern to mind, but not for the reasons you may think. I know this is the hour when he turns to morphine … sadly. But that affliction is a burden of only the last decade or so, and I remind myself of all he has suffered, and I also recall the many other sides to Stern and how he has always been there in some obscure corner within me, whispering to me in his soft voice, or simply listening and forgiving me in his kindly way.
I have so many images of the man from over the years. From the boulevards and the cafés, from the riotous nights when he and I and Cohen drank and swaggered and raved away the hours, dreaming our way into eternity. Yet there will always be one image of Stern I cherish above all others. A startling image from long ago that speaks of man in the universe, a vision forever stunning in the simplicity of its mystery.
It’s a memory of Stern as a young man going out into the desert in times of great sadness or joy, and playing his violin in the eye of the Sphinx in the last darkness before dawn, alone and soaring with his strong somber music, those awesome flights of tragedy and yearning that can only come from a human soul.
Stern’s haunting canticle in the wilderness for the lost sunken moon … his only companions the unknowable Sphinx and the fleeing stars.
And there was still a solemn rite Ahmad kept to, in memory of all the fabled dreams of his youth.
Every Saturday toward the end of the afternoon he would excuse himself, going first to take a bath and then emerging toward sundown in a mended shirt and the one old suit he owned, both newly pressed and shiny, a spotted tie around his neck and his one pair of dilapidated shoes newly smudged with polish, his dyed red hair slicked down with water and his battered flat straw hat cocked at some odd angle, his spyglass in one hand and his dented old trombone in the other, a genteel spectacle of quiet dignity, a gentleman without means.
Slowly then, because it was difficult for him, he would labor up the stairs to the roof of the hotel, there to sit for hours in the soft evening breezes, peering at the city through his spyglass and playing his trombone in the darkness. He claimed he could see the little crowded squares where he had passed the evenings of his youth. He even claimed he could make out the cafés where he had once held forth with such success, amusing his friends far into the night with heroic couplets and sudden bursts of song from his favorite arias.
So Ahmad claimed, alone now on the narrow roof of the rotting Hotel Babylon with the melancholy sounds of his trombone, above the twinkling lights of the great restless city.
And of course it made no difference, Joe knew, whether Ahmad could really make out those little cafés in the darkness or whether he only imagined he saw them, alive once more with laughter and surging with music and poetry, no end to the glasses of wine and friendship and above all no end to the wonders of love, the soft air of his great city echoing with those evenings of long ago when the whole world had seemed to stretch before him, as he said, and he was still young and strong and not yet ugly.
12
Beggar
JOE STOOD CLOSE TO a building across the way, studying the little restaurant Liffy had told him about. There was nothing unusual about it but he stood there staring anyway, fascinated.
It was a small quiet neighborhood tucked away behind busier streets. A moment ago he had been pushing through the crowds of shouting men in cloaks and turbans, the honking taxis and the sheep and camels and rickety lorries and Greek merchants and Coptic traders, goats gathered at crossings and Albanian planters and drunken Anzac soldiers, Italian bankers and Indian soldiers and Armenians and Turks and Jews, carts selling juice and carts selling nuts and carts selling fruits, barefoot laborers bent under huge heavy sacks and everywhere the poor wandering aimlessly, chanting the names of gods and saviors and the makings of an imaginary evening meal.
And then all at once he had turned a corner and here he was in a quiet little neighborhood where everyday people lived, the war far away. Seemingly so.
There wasn’t much to see. A woman carrying vegetables home. An old woman shaking her head and muttering, a little group of women talking. Men reading newspapers at the tables of a tiny café. A small square and narrow cobblestone lanes, a water pipe where children filled bottles. Patches of shade and flowers, gray clothing hung up to dry. Little balconies and open stairways and half-open shutters, odd sounds clicking together. A beggar sitting alone in the dust.
Joe passed in front of the small restaurant, the kind of place where most of the customers were probably known by name, men with meager incomes who either lived alone or had no one at home to cook for them.
He peeked in. Some customers for the evening meal had already arrived, shabby dignified men who were lingering over each dish, trying to wait until they had finished their soup before they unfolded their newspapers out of boredom, loneliness. A small man in a gray suit was making a show of greeting a waiter as he removed his red fez and went through an evening ritual of pretending to select a table, probably the same table he had been going to for the last twenty years.
As Joe moved off into the shadows, he found himself wondering whether this was the kind of place where he would have expected Maud and Stern to come at the end of the day, to share a simple dinner and a carafe of wine. Later to move across the square to the little café to have a sweet, because Maud liked sweets after dinner. To sit together at one of those tiny tables and sip coffee and talk, and also just to be alone together under the stars.
And no, he wasn’t surprised. It was the ordinary feeling of the little square that struck him, that and the blessed quiet which seemed so rare in Cairo. He could understand how it would appeal to them.
People coming and going and doing their commonplace things, far from the war. Lentils and barley and cigarettes, a glass of wine, little cups of sugary coffee. A man selling used clothes. Children laughing. Women sprinkling handfuls of water on the cobblestones to lay the dust at the end of the day. A hum of distant cries. A solitary beggar with downcast eyes.
No, it wasn’t much of anywhere really, and none of it surprised him. The peculiar thing about Stern, after all, was that he appeared to be such an ordinary man in so many
ways. The flamboyant figure who lived in Ahmad’s imagination had long since disappeared with the years, and Joe knew that if he were to see Stern here on this street for the first time he would probably not even have noticed him. For Stern would have looked like anyone else in the little restaurant, the same as the man reaching up to take down his small inventory of secondhand suits, the same as the man making change in the little café or the clerk turning down an alley, the same as any of these people who were simply making a life, no more.
Making a life.
Stern’s words, Joe realized. Stern’s words spoken long ago in Jerusalem, in answer to Joe’s eager questions about what Stern was really doing beneath it all. Words from another time and place altogether, spoken when Joe had been newly arrived in Jerusalem and groping to find his way in the world, and Stern had already been a man with years of hard experience behind him.
Of course, that wasn’t all of it. The man who appeared in Bletchley’s files, and in many files under other names, was also vastly different from anyone on this street. With the quiet lives these men and women lived, they couldn’t have conceived of where Stern went and what he did. Yet in another way this quiet street was all of it, for Stern had the same fears and hopes as these people. He wanted things to be better and he tried hard to make them better. He had his small successes and his greater failures and one day when he was gone, nothing would have changed particularly. And in the meantime Stern came to this little restaurant to escape the noise and the crowds at the end of the day, to meet an old friend and talk about everything and nothing and silently share the minutes, at peace for a moment.
And Maudie?
No, it didn’t surprise him to imagine her here either. Her life had also been unusual in so many ways, yet in other ways it wasn’t at all. For surely she’d never wanted anything more than to be herself, to care and to live life fully.
Modest, like these people. Doing the best she could to make some sense out of the terrible mistakes of the past. So often a stranger again in the endless slippage of lives, the conflicting journeys of hope and need where people met and parted. Trying to face the wounding demons of the past, not escape them, because the past never went away. But trying to know herself well enough so those demons could no longer torment her. Struggling to stand alone and yet also to love—in the end, the explanation for all her wanderings. From the coal fields of a little town in Pennsylvania to the mountains of Albania, and Athens and Jerusalem and Smyrna, and Istanbul and Crete, and now here. A lifetime of searching, trying to find her place.
Joe gazed down the narrow little street. He looked up at the fading light and somehow everything seemed right. After all these years this was the kind of place where Maud and Stern would meet for a quiet evening together, here in this ordinary little neighborhood with its modest concerns, its small failures and triumphs. After all these years of struggle and pain and love, of losing and trying again, this was exactly where two people would come to celebrate life in the midst of a terrible war. To talk and sit silently, to smile and laugh and share for a moment those dreams that could never be wholly lost or forgotten, coming together in this simple place as the world raged and died just a little bit more beyond the corner … beyond the solitary beggar who sat at the end of the street in the dust, alone in the twilight, unmoving.
A beggar of no particular era, homeless and stateless and of no use to anyone, a beggar of life from nowhere who would one day return whence he had come. And yet also, strangely, the man for whom the war was being fought, the prize for all the great armies, the solitary man who would survive their terrible victories and their legions of victims.
Anonymous in his rags in the dust at twilight, a beggar surveying his limitless kingdom….
Joe hovered off to the side, out of the way, waiting for her to come as Liffy had said she would. And then all at once she was there down the street, a small woman moving quickly in the way he remembered so well. That hadn’t changed at all.
She stopped to greet a shopkeeper, her face lighting up, and that hadn’t changed either. There was the same eagerness in her smile, the same concern as she tipped her head and made the shopkeeper laugh, some little thing said in passing.
Joe smiled too, he couldn’t help it. When he had known her before, she had made an effort to take clothes seriously, even though somehow it had never seemed to work. But now apparently she had just given up on it. Yet she was beautiful, Joe couldn’t believe how beautiful she had become with the years. Such a strong face and her eyes so expressive, so direct and smiling.
She was going into the restaurant and Joe turned away, excited and confused, frightened. Twenty years, it had been, and where had the time gone since they’d been together? She seemed a stranger now and yet she could never be that, they knew each other too well. They had a son who had been born in Jericho. They had met in Jerusalem and gone to the Sinai, to an oasis on the shores of the Gulf of Aqaba. Two decades ago and less than a year together … but still.
He wanted to walk up behind her and whisper her name, and see her smile and look into his eyes.
Maudie, it’s me…. Maudie.
Instead he turned away, he had to. How could he explain what he was doing here? What could he say about Stern? No, he didn’t know enough about Stern yet. He didn’t know enough about any of it yet.
Joe moved quickly up the street, excited and afraid, confused. She seemed a stranger but she couldn’t be that. He knew her, of course he did, and she knew him.
The beggar on the corner held out his hand as Joe rushed by, a long slender hand, calloused and hard and beautiful, as mysterious as an ancient map of some lost desert. Joe glanced at the beggar’s shadowy face and gave him a coin and kept moving, his thoughts tumbling, racing. He had gone several blocks before he suddenly stopped in the midst of the swirling crowds, stopped dead still, alone and hearing nothing in the warm night air.
The beggar.
It was impossible. The beggar at the end of that quiet street had been Stern.
Stern?…
Joe had no idea how long he stood there in the middle of the crowded sidewalk, oblivious to everything around him. He turned.
No, there was no point in trying to go back, Stern would be gone by now. But what was he doing there? Why was he watching over Maud? And why was he back in Cairo when Bletchley had said he would be away for two weeks?
Bletchley?
No. Joe was sure he couldn’t have been lying about Stern having gone away. Nothing would make any sense if he had been. So Stern must have returned to Cairo without Bletchley’s knowledge, against Bletchley’s orders, and in fact Joe was beginning to think Stern could go almost anywhere without anyone knowing it. He was like Liffy with his disguises, only more so. With Liffy the disguises were always part of a role, but with Stern they were simply another part of him, another face on the turnings of his path.
And now Stern knew Joe was in Cairo, which meant he had to know why someone like Joe had been brought in, and that made everything backward because Joe himself didn’t know why he was here, not really. How could he when he didn’t know what Stern was doing, let alone why he was doing it?… Unless Ahmad had been hinting at something real when he spoke of Stern bartering away his soul to the Nazis. Unless there had been more in that than one of Ahmad’s dramatic turns of speech….
Joe drifted along through the crowds, feeling more lost by the moment. Everything was moving too quickly and he had to break out of these networks of the past which seemed to obscure Stern ever more deeply in the feelings of others….
Talk to Bletchley then? Put it to Bletchley outright?
No, that was too dangerous. He didn’t want to be the one who told Bletchley that Stern was back in Cairo. Not the way things were, the reasons for Stern’s return unknown.
Talk to Liffy?
Yes, and for other reasons as well. Since becoming so deeply involved with Ahmad, Joe had begun to have an uneasy feeling that Liffy might not be telling him everything he knew
about Stern, that he might be holding something back because he cared so much for Stern, an effect Stern often had on people. Instinctively they wanted to protect him, to safeguard that fragile essence Stern carried within him, perhaps for everyone. Joe himself had always felt that way and there was no reason why Liffy shouldn’t, but the sooner he talked to Liffy the better.
Joe stopped at a public telephone, keeping his eye on the young Egyptian across the way who was following him on Bletchley’s orders. It didn’t bother him that Bletchley would know he had gone to the restaurant where Stern and Maud often met, or that he had waited there to catch a glimpse of Maud. Bletchley would have been expecting him to do something like that by now. Nor was he concerned about his behavior since then, for it could only tell Bletchley that seeing Maud had confused him.
He dialed Liffy’s number and let the phone ring once before breaking the connection. He made a show of continuing to dial numbers, reaching Liffy’s phone again and letting it ring twice before hanging up. So there was nothing to do now but wait and see if Liffy turned up in an hour where he was supposed to.
Nothing but one minor matter. Joe spent some time eluding the young Egyptian, and when he was sure he was no longer being followed he headed in the direction of the bar where he hoped Liffy would be waiting. It was down by the river and he hadn’t been there before, but it was supposed to be a safe place where Europeans seldom went.
Strictly a refuge for the lowest of lowlifes, Liffy had said.
One of those downstairs dives, Joe, where the dregs of riverfront society and other serious alcoholics fade away in the shadows a little bit more every night. But also the kind of cave where a spirited actor who never succeeded, and an ex-shaman from an obscure American Indian tribe, could comfortably mutter together in sign language while blowing coded smoke signals in the air, without anyone noticing a thing. Certainly no self-respecting member of any superior race would ever show his face there, so it’s our kind of place, Joe. A club that will have us without examining our forged credentials, a home of sorts for those who haven’t been home since the Babylonians took Jerusalem, say about 586 B.C.?…
Nile Shadows (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 3) Page 25
