Nile Shadows (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 3)

by Edward Whittemore

  So that was Colly’s way and Colly’s path, the way of the Our, and once we talked about it in Jerusalem when I was still playing poker there, just before I left. Colly came to call and we put up our feet and talked about it. And the worst part about being an Our, he said, is living up to what people expect of you. You have to keep giving more and more of yourself, he said, until …

  Not that he didn’t like what he was doing, he did like it. In fact he loved it. But still … and yet … as he said. But still. And yet.

  Sure. You remember all the things they used to say about Our Colly when we were young. I heard them often enough and you must have heard them in whatever hospital you were lying around in then, feeling useless with your dreams of a career in the army as shot up as you were, as shattered as the left side of your own face. And maybe you thought about Colly more than once as those next years came along and you were still lying around in hospital beds, waiting while they performed one useless operation after another and tried to get the rest of those glass and metal fragments out of your eye socket, just waiting and waiting while they reconstructed the bridge of your nose a little and kept breaking your hand and trying things a different way so you might be able to move it a little.

  Waiting, you were. Waiting. Waiting and hoping they could put a glass eye in. But the bones and the muscles weren’t there anymore, and the glass eye looked like a colored bead off in the side of your face somewhere, so you had to settle for an eye patch and wiping around it and being stared at.

  And maybe Our Colly came to mind again when more years went by and you decided to settle for this, because it was the closest you could ever come to being in the regular army, which was all you’d ever wanted in life because you came from an army family and you’d grown up thinking that someday, someday, you might even have your own regiment. Maybe even the regiment your father commanded and his father before him, because it was a career and a calling that was in your blood and just a natural part of fathers and sons, a natural part of the scheme of things…. Nothing to wonder about. Just the way it was.

  Or rather, the way it had been back then in the beginning, before it turned out otherwise. Before you went to the front as a young man and put a spyglass to your eye and a bullet shattered the spyglass and shattered your face, shattering everything in sight, all that was and all that would be, shattering every dream you ever had and leaving you with a face that terrifies children and terrifies just about everybody, if the truth be known.

  The evil eye, Bletchley. Anybody would be secretly frightened by it and you know why that is. We look at you and we see something that could happen to us, that is us, and it terrifies us. So we try not to look at you and we try to ignore you because we’re not like you after all, of course we’re not, we’re nothing like you.

  Just consider it. Now, when there’s a great war going on and every body’s killing everybody for the sake of … just consider the matter rationally for a moment. Children look at you and scream. Children look at you and run away. But don’t the rest of us say nice things to little children? Don’t we smile at them and don’t they smile back? Of course, and we’re not like you, we’re not ugly. That’s not why the whole human race is killing somebody or other. There’s no evil in us….

  And so we like to scorn you a bit because that’s the easier way. Because you’re not really human, because you’re not like the rest of us. Because we’re not ugly, you are, and we don’t want to face that face of yours. Our own face … adjusted a little by circumstances….

  Bletchley was moving around uneasily as he sat there on the end of the little pier beside Joe. He was gripping his bad hand with his good hand and staring out at the river, not sure what to make of Joe’s sudden rush of words, so demanding and insistent, so unlike any side of Joe he had seen before.

  Joe, I think that …

  I know it. We have to be leaving and I’m almost finished, and I will be by the time that felucca comes around into the wind again. It’s working its way up the river all right and it’s due to come around, so just give it another few seconds tacking on its present course.

  Joe smiled. He touched Bletchley’s arm.

  There’s a point to all this. Could you just turn and look at me?

  Slowly, Bletchley did so. Slowly, he turned and looked at Joe, who was smiling.

  Good. It’s just this, said Joe. You’re not very different from Colly. You’re not very different at all.

  A peculiar expression came over Bletchley’s face, disbelief followed by sadness and resignation, and then by a terrible uncertainty. He was about to say something when Joe tightened his grip on Bletchley’s arm.

  Wait, whispered Joe. I’m not making fun here and I’m not taking matters lightly and I’m not saying that spyglass didn’t do its unkind work years ago, because it did. We both know it did. But I knew Colly, you have to remember that. Not only Our Colly but the one behind that. When we were young we worked our days together with fishing nets, and there were also long nights when we lay in bed and talked of what was to come for us, the wind howling and the rain beating down as if it would never stop, back before he became Ours, everybody’s. Just him back then, scrawny and undersized, the way it was, that’s all. And when I see what’s behind that mask of yours, I know the two of you have a lot in common deep down where it counts. The little things on the surface aside.

  I wear a beard so I scratch it sometimes. And you wear an eye patch so you carry on as you do sometimes. But that’s on the surface of things and it’s not important. Founding the Friends of Ahmad, as you did, that’s important. And doing for Anna what I gather you’re doing on the quiet, from what Maud says, that’s important. And as for Liffy, well, it’s not even necessary for us to talk about him. His voice will always be inside us and his sorrowing smile will always be there, and all we have to do with him is just listen, listen, and get to know him a little better as time goes on.

  So those things are important, and maybe the most important thing of all is that worn old key you’re holding in your hand. Just holding and turning it and quietly polishing it with the oils of your skin. That little thing you intend to pass on someday … if it works out that way.

  Meant for sending messages in code. Once upon a time anyway, seemingly so. Meant for tapping out secret messages in all the codes of the race. But not so secret in the end, and not so hard to understand either. Strongbow came across it once in his travels and he took it along with him, and then Stern had it for a time, and now you do. And although its messages may seem complicated in the speaking of them, they’re cryptic only at first glance, only on the face of it, for there’s a flow to all of this as sure as a river flowing away to the sea. Things sensed in the heart and always known, and I’m glad you have that key now. I’m glad it’s in your hand and you’re keeping it and taking it with you … for a time. Until someday, if things work out….

  Joe nodded at Bletchley. He smiled and stretched, raising his hands to the sky.

  So that’s all I wanted to say, and there’s a finish to our moment by the river and an end of sorts. That felucca out there is coming around into the wind now and we can be leaving for the airport if it’s time, a few things resolved but mostly not. The Nile still doing what it’s always been doing and that felucca trying to make its way as we do, and a terrible war upon the world and too many of those we love gone now, not here with us where they should be…. But here with us too in a way. Echoes within us, always to be so…. Like Colly, who came along and turned up in your heart tonight to save my life. He never knew he was going to do that, did he? But he has, and he did it just by being what he was. Because what he was got inside you a long time ago and gave a cast to your mind and your feelings over the years, and not only him but all the others who are here with us as well. Just here in the shadows in the strong quiet sounds of their being…. Nile shadows after all, the shadows of a world raging. But those strong quiet echoes of the river are within us too, thank God, going right on and never to be still�
�.

  They stood. Joe smiled and picked up a pebble.

  Three weeks I’ve been in Cairo, he said, just think of that. It only goes to show there’s no shape to time at all but what we give it….

  He turned and scaled the pebble out over the water and for an instant they saw it glitter, a reflection from the river set free in the moonlight.

  Neither of them spoke more than a few words on the way to the airport. Bletchley was concentrating on the driving and Joe gazed out the window trying to absorb it all, filling himself with the sights and sounds and smells he was leaving, the vastness of the desert and the even greater vastness of the desert sky.

  At the airport Bletchley led Joe through a few quiet offices and then they were standing together on the runway, off by themselves under the stars. A wind had come and was blowing strongly. Bletchley handed Joe an envelope with some documents and money, and Joe put it away.

  That’s your plane over there, said Bletchley, pointing.

  He turned to Joe and reached out, stiffly shaking Joe’s hand. Then he stood with his arms hanging awkwardly by his sides, the wind fluttering his shapeless old khakis, his eye immensely large and round, waiting.

  Joe laughed.

  Here now, that’s not going to make it at all.

  What?

  What, you say? Just a shake of the hand, is it, after what’s gone on here?

  Joe threw back his head and laughed again. He took a step forward and put his hand on Bletchley’s shoulder, smiling.

  Don’t you know it yet, man? Don’t you know we’re on the same side in this world? And I don’t mean just the British side or the Allied side with their Whatleys.

  Joe leaned forward into the wind, his eyes bright, shadows darkening the deep lines in his face.

  Listen to me. I mean the only side there is. And you’ve been in the Mediterranean long enough to know you have to press flesh when the important moments come, because it’s all we have in the end, all we can ever give someone we care for. And anyway, you’re not a regimental commander out in front of your troops on parade. You were never that and now you’re just another anonymous member of that motley crowd known as the Friends of Ahmad, a scarred and tattered little band of irregulars that carries on behind the lines with nothing much in the way of success, and nothing at all in the way of dash. Just passing through, we are, in transit. So open your arms and give me a hug, man. Just give me a hug to help keep out the cold when those nights come, as they surely will. It’s not much and it lasts but a moment, but on the other hand, good hand or bad, it’s everything and it’s all we’ll ever really know.

  Bletchley laughed and they embraced, warmly.

  There that’s better, said Joe. And now it is time, and as a man we both know used to say at moments like this, God bless. Mysterious presence that he always was, so much so I could never even figure out in the end whether he was a Moslem or a Christian or a Jew.

  Curious man, really. Just large and awkward and there and no shape to him particularly, yet reassuring somehow, strangely so. And an odd smile on his face and a certain clumsiness about him sometimes, last seen in these parts as a beggar, a dignified man and poor, surveying his limitless kingdom in the deep of the night…. Stern. I wonder how he ever got a name like that? Because he was always anything but that. Everything else probably, but not that.

  Yes. God bless now….

  Joe turned and waved and began walking across the runway, a slight figure in a collarless shirt and shabby clothes that looked too big for him, his head down as he bent forward against the wind … a small man.

  An Editorial Relationship

  MANY YEARS AGO WHEN I was a young assistant editor at a New York publishing house, a stroke of fortune led me into an editorial relationship that was to last a long time, until after the writer’s death. Our entanglement, like many between writers and editors, was muddied by friendship on the one hand and by the desire to publish on the other.

  The relationship began when the editor-in-chief, Tom Wallace, who was leaving the house for another, handed me the file of an author named Edward P. Whittemore.

  He was called Ted. He had gone to school with Tom in the 1950s, they were old buddies from Yale, and there the resemblance ended. Tom was a classic Yale type—sentimental yet incapable of expressing emotion, good-hearted and highly principled, and completely stuck in his ways. Ted, by contrast, was completely out of the loop. He defied the loop. Ted had lived all around the world, been in the CIA (in fact, nobody knew for sure if he was really out of the CIA), written several crazy novels that were sort of about espionage and sort of about the mammoth course of history, its large brutish atrocities and the small moments of goodness, books that were compared to Fuentes and Pynchon and Nabokov.

  Tom described the books by saying they were really all about poker.

  Ted was famous to about six thousand people who thought he was a genius; nobody else had ever heard of him at all. He had two marriages that hadn’t worked out, and a girlfriend he was breaking up with, and a strong Maine accent. He was a recovering alcoholic who once had been the kind of drinker who wanted to crawl inside the fifth to lick it completely clean, and a chain-smoker, and he lived on the East side of town.

  As it turned out, of all the places he could have lived in the city of New York, he lived on Third Avenue and 24th Street, while I lived on 24th Street and Sixth Avenue. This is the kind of magical coincidence that populates the novels of Edward Whittemore and it seemed strangely appropriate that our domestic routines were performed in locations that were exactly parallel, yet existed a precise and unbreachable distance apart, as though we were two matching magnets with the contrary ends facing one another.

  In 1981, I was handed the manuscript of Nile Shadows, which was third in a projected quartet of Jerusalem novels. This quartet followed his first, and possibly his splashiest novel, Quin’s Shanghai Circus, which we had published seven years earlier.

  Ted had also written several that we did not publish. I was told both that Ted was a genius and that it was possible that the manuscript was not publishable or needed a great deal of cutting. I knew almost nothing about editing fiction; I had never worked on anything remotely this serious, which meant that I was going to have to concentrate very hard. Once I opened it and began there was no question but that this was what they call the real thing. For me, how terrifying and how thrilling.

  The first time I read it slowly, almost without thinking, submitting to it, letting it sink in. The book was both domestic and fantastic, its settings shabby and arcane, and doom was everywhere. Ted understood the big and how it depended on the little. Centuries of conspiracy pivoted on a chance encounter. Friendship was everything, and utterly ephemeral. A shaft of light illuminated horror, then a sweet timeless calm, then slapstick. Words kept it going, words and talk and more talk: chatter, letters writ in stone, a scream in an emergency, a late afternoon’s long slow story, a coded telegram.

  The editor’s job was to be inside it and yet float above it, to see where it wasn’t true to its own internal logic, to love the characters and expect them to be themselves, to applaud every song—but to mark the slightly flat note—to be sure the plot had all its small signals straight. The second time I read it I tried to remember every word, every gesture, every motion.

  My editorial letter advised—but most of all it paid attention. It is not so much the comments made by a careful editor that help a writer revise, I think, but the simpler fact that these comments show the writer that he is being watched. He is being watched intently by someone who tells him, in as many ways as possible, that this matters. And so he thinks harder, he reaches in all directions—plot, character, gesture, sequence, tone, echo—and, so doing, activates the deeper and shadowed part of the brain where music and feeling are stashed. The place where stories begin.

  Ted lived in a tiny apartment very high up above Third Avenue. He had a big window and a dark-floored single room, a small kitchen—the refrigerator contained on
ly a pint container of milk and a plastic tub of tofu—and a bathroom with a towel. In his room were a double bed, a desk, a writing chair, a second chair, a television, and an ashtray. Just the setting for a former spy.

  I went over there on my way home from the office several times, to drop off the edited manuscript, to look at his changes, to explain the copy editing. I gave Ted more personal attention because the novel demanded it, and also, although without saying a word, somehow Ted expected it. The desk was occupied by his typewriter and a few completely neat stacks of typing paper and previous drafts, so instead of interrupting his work space, I laid the box of manuscript on the bed, cracking it open and leafing through the pages, tracing the progress of one detail or another, the intricate traces of his threads. We bent over the manuscript together.

  The revisions took place in the winter, so when I stopped by it was always dark out. I was working long hours, partly to get over a disappointment with a man that had happened at the time; work was a secure place for me in the middle of this unhappiness. One night it snowed and we went to the window to marvel. The snow flew in specks outside the window, tiny furry points of light in the darkness, cold dusty sisters to the lights flickering on Third Avenue below and the many apartments winking on the other side of the canyon. We stood next to the glass and watched the snow swirl, high in the heavens of New York, so far away, it seemed, from the rest of my life.

  As we stood there looking at the snow in that night sky, that winter night in New York, Ted Whittemore, quite unexpectedly, ran his hand lightly down my back. Tentatively. I did not move, and he did not touch me a second time.

  We went back to being an editor and a writer.