by Noah Gordon
During the wrapping there were prayers, among them a passage from Hosea 2:21-22: And I will betroth thee unto Me forever … in righteousness and in justice, and in loving kindness and in compassion. And I will betroth thee unto Me in faithfulness, and thou shalt know the Lord.
Repeating them, Rob began to tremble, for he had promised Jesus that despite donning the outer appearance of a Jew he would remain faithful. Then he recalled that Christ had been a Jew and doubtless during his lifetime had laid on the phylacteries thousands of times while saying these same prayers. The heaviness in his heart lifted and so did his fear, and he repeated the words after Lonzano while the straps around his arm empurpled his hand in a way that was most interesting, for it indicated that blood had been trapped in the fingers by the tight binding, and he found himself wondering whence the blood had traveled and where it would go from the hand when the straps were removed.
“Another thing,” Lonzano said as they unwrapped the phylacteries. “You mustn’t neglect to seek divine guidance because you don’t have the Tongue. It is written that if a person cannot say a prescribed supplication, he should at least think of the Almighty. That, too, is prayer.”
They were not a dashing sight, for if a man isn’t short there is a certain lack of proportion when he rides an ass. Rob’s feet barely cleared the ground, but the donkey was easily capable of bearing his weight over long distances and was an agile beast, perfectly suited for going up and down mountains.
He didn’t like Lonzano’s pace, for the leader had a thornbush switch and kept tapping his donkey’s flanks with it, urging it on.
“Why so fast?” he growled finally, but Lonzano didn’t bother to turn.
It was Loeb who answered. “Bad people live near here. They’ll kill any travelers and especially have a hatred for Jews.”
The route was all in their heads; Rob knew nothing of it and if any mishap should occur to the other three, it was doubtful he would survive this bleak and hostile environment. The trail rose and fell precipitously, writhing between the dark and brooding peaks of eastern Turkey. Late in the afternoon of the fifth day they reached a small stream moving moodily between rock-strewn banks.
“The Coruh River,” Aryeh said.
The water in Rob’s flask was almost gone but Aryeh shook his head when he started for the river.
“It runs salty,” he said bitingly, as if Rob should have known, and they rode on.
Rounding a bend at dusk, they came upon a boy tending goats. He sprang away when he saw them.
“Shall we go after him?” Rob said. “Perhaps he runs to tell bandits we are here.”
Now Lonzano looked at him and smiled, and Rob saw that the tension was leaving his face. “That was a Jewish boy. We’re coming to Bayburt.”
The village had less than a hundred people, about one-third of them Jews. They lived behind a stout, high wall built into the mountainside. By the time they reached the gate in the wall it had been opened. It closed behind them at once and was locked, and when they dismounted they had security and hospitality within the walls of the Jewish quarter.
“Shalom,” the Bayburt rabbenu said without surprise. He was a small man who would have looked perfectly natural astride a donkey. He had a full beard and a wistful expression about the mouth.
“Shalom aleikhum,” Lonzano said.
Rob had been told in Tryavna of the Jewish system of travel, but now he saw it as a participant. Boys led their animals away for care, other boys collected their flasks to wash them and fill them with sweet water from the town well. Women brought wet cloths that they might wash, and they were led to fresh bread and soup and wine before gathering in the synagogue with the men of the town for ma ‘ariv. After the prayers they sat with the rabbenu and some of the town leaders.
“Your face is familiar, no?” the rabbenu said to Lonzano.
“I’ve enjoyed your hospitality before. I was here six years ago with my brother Abraham and our father of blessed memory, Jeremiah ben Label. Our father was taken four years ago when a small scratch on his arm mortified and poisoned him. The will of the Most High.”
The rabbenu nodded and sighed. “May he rest.”
A grizzled Jew scratched his chin and broke in eagerly. “Do you recall me, perhaps? Yosel ben Samuel of Bayburt? I stayed with your family in Masqat, ten years ago this spring. I brought copper pyrites on a caravan of forty-three camels and your uncle … Issachar?… helped me sell the pyrites to a smelter and obtain a load of sea sponges to take back with me for a fine profit.”
Lonzano smiled. “My Uncle Jehiel. Jehiel ben Issachar.”
“Jehiel, just so! It was Jehiel. Is he in health?”
“He was in health when I left Masqat,” Lonzano said.
“Well,” the rabbenu said, “the road to Erzurum is controlled by a scourge of Turkish bandits, may the plague take them and all forms of catastrophe dog their steps. They murder, they exact ransom, whatever they please. You must go around them, over a small track through the highest mountains. You won’t lose your way, for one of our youths will guide you.”
So it was that early the next day their animals turned off the traveled track shortly after leaving Bayburt and picked their way over a stony path that in places was only a few feet wide, with sheer drops down the mountainside. The guide stayed with them until they were safely back on the main trail.
The following night they were in Karakose, where there were only a dozen Jewish families, prosperous merchants who were under the protection of a strong warlord, Ali ul Hamid. Hamid’s castle was built in the shape of a heptagon on a high mountain overlooking the town. It had the appearance of a galleon-of-war, dismantled and dismasted. Water was brought to the fortress from the town on asses, and cisterns were kept full in case of siege. In return for Hamid’s protection, the Jews of Karakose were pledged to keep the castle’s magazines full of millet and rice. Rob and the three Jews didn’t glimpse Hamid but left Karakose gladly, not wishing to remain where safety lay at the caprice of a single powerful man.
They were passing through territory that was extremely difficult and dangerous, but the travel network was working. Each night they had a renewed supply of sweet water, good food and shelter, and advice about the countryside ahead. The worry lines in Lonzano’s face all but disappeared.
On a Friday afternoon they reached the tiny mountainside village of Igdir and stayed an extra day in the small stone houses of the Jews there in order that they need not travel on the Sabbath. Fruit was grown in Igdir and they gorged gratefully on black cherries and quince preserves. Now even Aryeh relaxed and Loeb was gracious to Rob, showing him a secret sign language with which Jewish merchants in the East conducted their negotiations without speaking. “It’s done with the hands,” Loeb said. “The straight finger stands for ten, the bent finger for five. The finger grasped so only the tip is showing is one, the whole hand counts for one hundred, the fist for one thousand.”
He and Loeb rode side by side the morning they left Igdir, bargaining silently with their hands, making deals for nonexistent shipments, buying and selling spices and gold and kingdoms to while away the time. The trail was rocky and difficult.
“We’re not far from Mount Ararat,” Aryeh said.
Rob considered the towering, unwelcoming peaks and the sere terrain. “What must Noah have thought on leaving the ark?” he said, and Aryeh shrugged.
At Nazik, the next town, they were delayed. The community was built down the length of a large rocky defile, with eighty-four Jews living there and perhaps thirty times as many Anatolians. “There will be a Turkish wedding in this town,” they were told by the rabbenu, a skinny old man with stooped shoulders and strong eyes. “They have already begun to celebrate and they are excited in a mean way. We do not dare leave our quarter.”
Their hosts kept them locked within the Jewish section for four days. There was plenty of food in the quarter, and a good well. The Jews of Nazik were pleasant and polite, and although the sun was fierce there the
travelers slept in a cool stone barn on clean straw. From the town Rob heard sounds of fighting and drunken revelry and the breaking of furniture, and once a hail of stones came raining down on the Jews from the other side of the wall, but no one was injured.
At the end of four days all was quiet and one of the rabbenu’s sons ventured forth to find that the Turks were exhausted and docile following the wild celebration, and the following morning Rob left Nazik gladly with his three fellow travelers.
There followed a trek through country devoid of Jewish settlement or protection along the way. Three mornings after they left Nazik they came to a plateau containing a great body of water surrounded by a wide perimeter of white cracked mud. They got down from their donkeys.
“This is Urmiya,” Lonzano told Rob, “a shallow salt lake. In the spring, streams carry minerals here from the mountainsides. But no stream empties the lake, and so the summer sun drinks the water and leaves the salt around the edges. Take a pinch of salt and place it on your tongue.”
He did, gingerly, and made a face.
Lonzano grinned. “You are tasting Persia.”
It took him a moment to get the meaning. “We are in Persia?”
“Yes. This is the border.”
He was disappointed. It seemed a long way to travel for … this. Lonzano was perceptive. “Never mind, you will be enamored of Ispahan, I guarantee it. We had best remount, we still have long days to ride.”
But first Rob pissed into Lake Urmiya, adding his English Special Batch to Persia’s saltiness.
36
THE HUNTER
Aryeh made his loathing plain. He was careful to watch his words in front of Lonzano and Loeb, but when the other two were out of earshot his comments to Rob were apt to be cutting. Even when speaking to the other two Jews, he was often less than pleasant.
Rob was larger and stronger. Sometimes it took an act of will to keep from striking Aryeh.
Lonzano was perceptive. “You must ignore him,” he told Rob.
“Aryeh is a …” He didn’t know the Persian word for bastard.
“Even at home Aryeh wasn’t the most pleasant of men, but he does not have the soul to be a traveler. When we departed from Masqat he’d been married less than a year and he had a new son he didn’t want to leave. He has been sullen ever since.” He sighed. “Well, we all have families, and often it is hard to be a traveler far from home, especially on the Sabbath or a holy day.”
“How long have you been gone from Masqat?” Rob asked.
“This time it is twenty-seven months.”
“If this merchant’s life is so hard and lonely, why do you follow it?” Lonzano looked at him. “It is how a Jew survives,” he said.
They circled the northeast corner of Lake Urmiya and soon were in high, bare-earth mountains again. They stayed overnight with Jews in Tabriz and Takestan. Rob could see little difference between most of these places and the villages he had seen in Turkey. They were bleak mountain towns built on stony rubble, with people sleeping in the shade and stray goats near the community well. Kashan was like that too, but Kashan had a lion on its gate.
A real lion, huge.
“This is a famous beast, measuring forty-five spans from nose to tail,” Lonzano said proudly, as if it were his lion. “It was slain twenty years ago by Abdallah Shah, father of the present ruler. It played havoc on the cattle of this countryside for seven years and finally Abdallah tracked and killed it. In Kashan there is a celebration each year on the anniversary of the hunt.”
Now the lion had dried apricots instead of eyes and a piece of red felt for a tongue, and Aryeh scornfully pointed out that it was stuffed with rags and dried weeds. Generations of moths had eaten the sun-hardened pelt down to bare leather in spots, but its legs resembled columns and its teeth were still its own, large and sharp as lance-heads, so that when Rob touched them he felt a chill.
“I wouldn’t like to meet him.”
Aryeh smiled his superior smile. “Most men go through life without seeing a lion.”
The rabbenu of Kashan was a chunky man with sandy hair and beard. His name was David ben Sauli the Teacher, and Lonzano said he already had a reputation as a scholar despite the fact that he was still a young man. He was the first rabbenu Rob had seen wearing a turban instead of a leather Jew’s hat. When he spoke to them the worry lines came back into Lonzano’s face.
“It isn’t safe to follow the route south through the mountains,” the rabbenu told them. “A strong force of Seljuks is in your way.”
“Who are the Seljuks?” Rob said.
“They are a herdsmen nation that lives in tents instead of towns,” Lonzano said. “Killers and fierce fighters. They raid the lands on both sides of the border between Persia and Turkey.”
“You can’t go through the mountains,” the rabbenu said unhappily. “Seljuk soldiers are crazier than bandits.”
Lonzano looked at Rob and Loeb and Aryeh. “Then we have but two choices. We can remain here in Kashan and wait for the trouble with the Seljuks to pass, which may take many months, perhaps a year. Or we can skirt the mountains and the Seljuks, approaching Ispahan through desert and then forest. I haven’t traveled on that desert, the Dasht-i-Kavir, but I have been over other deserts and know them to be terrible.” He turned to the rabbenu. “Can it be crossed?”
“You would not have to cross the entire Dasht-i-Kavir. Heaven forbid,” the rabbenu said slowly. “You need only to cut across a corner, a journey of three days, going east and then south. Yes, it is sometimes done. We can tell you how to go.”
The four regarded one another. Finally Loeb, the inarticulate one, broke the thick silence. “I don’t want to stay here for a year,” he said, speaking for all of them.
Each of them bought a large goatskin waterbag and filled it before leaving Kashan. It was heavy when full. “Do we need this much water for three days?” Rob asked.
“Accidents occur. We could be on the desert a longer time,” Lonzano said. “And you must share your water with your beasts, for we are taking donkeys and mules into the Dasht-i-Kavir, not camels.”
A guide from Kashan rode with them on an old white horse as far as the point where an almost invisible track branched off from the road. The Dasht-i-Kavir began as a clay ridge that was easier to travel over than the mountains. At first they made good time, and for a little while their spirits lifted. The nature of the ground changed so gradually it disarmed them, but by midday, when the sun beat on them like brass, they were struggling through deep sand so fine that the hooves of the animals sank into it. All the riders dismounted, and men and beasts floundered forward in equal misery.
It was dreamlike to Rob, an ocean of sand extending in every direction as far as he could see. Sometimes it formed into hills like the great sea waves he dreaded, elsewhere it was like the flat smooth waters of a still lake, merely rippled by the west wind. There was no life he could detect, no bird in the air, no beetle or worm on the earth, but in the afternoon they passed bleaching bones heaped like a careless pile of kindling behind an English cottage, and Lonzano told Rob the remains of animals and men had been collected by nomadic tribes and piled there as a reference point. This sign of people who could be at home in such a place was unnerving and they tried to keep their animals quiet, knowing how far a donkey’s braying would carry on the still air.
It was a salt desert. At times the sand they walked on wound between morasses of salt mud like the shores of Lake Urmiya. Six hours of such a march thoroughly exhausted them and when they came to a small hill of sand which cast a shadow before the shallow sun, men and beasts crowded together to fit into the well of comparative coolness. After an hour of shade they were able to resume walking until sunset.
“Perhaps we had best travel by night and sleep in the heat of day,” Rob suggested.
“No,” Lonzano said quickly. “When I was young, once I crossed the Dasht-i-Lut with my father and two uncles and four cousins. May the dead rest. Dasht-i-Lut is a salt desert, l
ike this one. We decided to travel by night and soon had trouble. During the hot season, the salt lakes and swamps of the wet season dry quickly, in places leaving a crust on the surface. We found that men and animals broke through the crust. Sometimes beneath it there is brine or quicksand. It is too dangerous to go by night.”
He wouldn’t answer questions about his youthful experience on the Dasht-i-Lut, and Rob didn’t press him, sensing it was a subject best left alone.
As darkness fell they sat or sprawled on the salty sand. The desert that had broiled them by day became cold by night. There was no fuel, nor would they have kindled a fire lest it be seen by unfriendly eyes. Rob was so tired that despite his discomfort he fell into a deep sleep that lasted until first light.
He was struck by the fact that what had seemed like ample water in Kashan had dwindled in the dry wilderness. He limited himself to small sips as he ate his breakfast of bread, giving far more to his two animals. He poured their portions into the leather Jew’s hat and held it while they drank, enjoying the sensation of placing the wet hat on his hot head when they were finished.
It was a day of dogged plodding. When the sun was highest, Lonzano began to sing a phrase from the Scriptures: Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee. One by one the others picked up the refrain, and for a while they praised God with juiceless throats.
Presently there was an interruption. “Horsemen coming!” Loeb shouted.
Far off to the south they saw a cloud such as would be raised by a large host and Rob was afraid that these were the desert people who had left the travel marker of bones. But as the sight swept nearer they saw that it was only a cloud.
By the time the hot desert wind reached them the donkeys and the mules had turned their backs to it with the wisdom of instinct. Rob huddled as best he could behind the beasts and the wind clattered over them. Its first effects were those of fever. The wind carried sand and salt that burned his skin like flakes of hot ash. The air became even heavier and more oppressive than before, and the men and the animals waited doggedly as the storm made them part of the land, coating them with a frosting of sand and salt two fingers thick.
