Firebird

by Michael Asher

  ‘It was the Afrangi,’ the old Bedouin blurted out suddenly, ‘the Afrangi doctored him. You know...Androboff — the water man. He’s not a doctor at all.’ He made the two-fingered sign for protection against the evil eye, and Brother Paul caught his hand, wrenching it down savagely.

  ‘That’s enough!’ he bellowed, ‘I’ll have no paganism in the monastery. You can collect your wages and go back to your hovel!’

  The old Bedouin threw down his hoe. ‘I’ll go!’ he said.

  ‘Curse your father, and a curse on all Afrangis and Christians!’

  Paul went red in the face and took a step towards him, but the old man refused to be intimidated. ‘There’s evil here in the monastery,’ he growled, turning to me, ‘the ghoul was in the boy, that’s why they wouldn’t take him in the Muslim burial place. The ghoul crossed over — and it’s still here.’ He gave Paul a contemptuous glance and spat suddenly and venomously on the ground in front of him. Then he swirled his headcloth across his face, turned sharply, and was gone.

  15

  The car halted by another arch, and we got out and walked through into a wide cloister — a central square full of oleanders, figs, wild olives and brilliant purple bougainvillea. You could hear the constant trickle of water down tiny feeders and here and there were miniature rainbows where the drops of moisture were momentarily penetrated by the light. Monks walked around the covered paths silently, lost in their own thoughts, and there was an almost palpable sense of contemplation to the place — a feeling that here was an unchanging haven of peace in a malevolent world. Brother Paul strode along in silence for a few moments, no doubt brooding over the little altercation with the old Bedouin. After a while, though, he turned round. ‘I’m sorry about that scene,’ he said. ‘It’s just that one gets so tired of local superstition. What with the storms and the drought everyone’s been on edge lately.’

  ‘I understand,’ I said, ‘but is it true that Professor Andropov doctored the boy who died?’

  ‘The Professor has some medical experience, I believe, and if I remember rightly the Patriarch was away when the...accident occurred. Perhaps you had better ask him about it yourself.’

  We walked a little further, looking around. ‘This is the heart of St Samuel’s,’ Paul said, pointing to two very ancient-looking buildings opening off the cloister. ‘Those structures have been here since the beginning. The one on the right is the chapel founded by St Samuel himself. He was a hermit, you know, who lived in a cave in this region, and who was tortured by the Muslims and sold into slavery by the Bedouin. He escaped eventually and made his way back here and built this church with his own hands. It’s no longer used, of course. For centuries it has been a mausoleum containing the remains of all the Brothers who have served the monastery. There are thousands of skulls in there — a memento of the continuity of purpose our church possesses. Men who lived from generation to generation dedicated to the same end. Would you like to see them?’

  ‘Maybe another time,’ I said. ‘What’s the other building?’

  ‘That’s the library,’ the monk said. ‘In medieval times it was one of the best in Egypt. Had manuscripts in Coptic, ancient Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew — even Syriac. European adventurers bought a lot of them, though, in colonial times, when the monks had no choice but to sell. Today it’s only a shadow of what it once was.’

  I swallowed. There was a message here too — outsiders had continued to sack the place right up till modern times, even if it was by filthy lucre rather than the sword.

  He led us through a doorway, up a staircase and along a dark stone corridor supported by massive granite buttresses and lined with antique darkwood chairs and plain carpets. We halted before a heavy, studded door with a curved lintel. He knocked reverently.

  ‘What’s this?’ I enquired.

  ‘The Patriarch’s office,’ he said, ‘Professor Andropov is in there.’

  A reedy voice shouted, ‘Come!’ and we marched in to find ourselves in what was little more than a cell. It was spartan in the extreme, with only a mahogany desk carved in baroque style with angels and cherubs, some straight-backed chairs that looked like they’d been designed for doing penance, and a single beautifully carved crucifix on the wall. The windows were a series of slits, glassed with diamond panels, which allowed light to fall in golden ingots across the bare stone floor. The Patriarch was seated behind the desk, and Andropov sat on a hard chair in front of it as though he was being interviewed for a job. Both of them stood up to greet us. The Patriarch was a small, bent man whose face looked as if it had been scoured by abrasive sands into troughs and channels. He wore a badly stained and patched soutane with a thick leather belt, a velvet pillbox hat and a tiny silver cross around his neck. His beard was thin and moth-eaten, and his eyes beneath his thick-lensed glasses were full of irritation.

  Andropov was an interesting looking figure, I thought — almost oriental. In different clothes he might have been taken for a Mongolian tribesman. But he was dressed mundanely in a loose cream suit, with open-sided shoes, and his silver coloured hair was pulled back from a skull that was pickled red in colour, and tied in a tight ponytail against the nape of his neck. His grey goatee beard formed a dense ovoid shape around the lower section of his face, and his eyes were set in high Slavic cheekbones which gave you the impression that his face was frozen in a permanent condescending smile. His hand felt cold, soft and clammy like a mozzarella cheese, and there was an aloofness to his manner that made me feel he regarded us as ants that ought to be squashed. The Patriarch waved a hand towards some upright chairs and we sat down. There was an odd distribution of power in the room, I sensed. The body language of the two monks was subtly deferential to Andropov, as if he were the real Patriarch.

  ‘I’m sorry, Father..’ I said.

  ‘Father Grigori.’

  ‘Father Grigori. Before I talk to the Professor, I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to give us some privacy. This is a murder enquiry.’

  The little man’s cheeks turned bright red, and he fumbled in the pocket of his robe, and came out with a packet of Cleopatras and a box of matches. He struck match after match, but his hands were trembling so much that each one expired long before the cigarette was lit. Brother Paul rushed to help him but Grigori waved him away impatiently. ‘I’m all right!’ he snapped. Finally he steadied his right hand with the left long enough to light the smoke and took a deep drag. Only then did I notice that his fingers, teeth and beard were stained yellow with nicotine. ‘You are police officers,’ he said heavily, pronouncing each word carefully, ‘you should know the right channels. These things should be set up through the highest authorities — the commander of your division should have approached the High Patriarch. Professor Andropov is a good friend of this monastery and he is a man of the finest moral character and the highest credentials. Without Professor Andropov this monastery would have collapsed years ago for lack of water. I have to say that I object to this bullying from the State, I resent this intrusion into the holy retreat of our honoured guest, and I repudiate implications of dishonourable behaviour against Professor Andropov.’ There were a few moments of silence. Father Grigori drew in more smoke and blew it out.

  ‘I’m sorry you feel that way, Father Grigori,’ I said, ‘but a man has died — a colleague of Professor Andropov. This is an urgent enquiry and we had no time for bureaucracy. I’m sorry we have to intrude, but...’ I strung out the word for emphasis, ‘a quiet word with the Professor here, in private, is surely better than a show of force.’

  Father Grigori looked at me sullenly and his eyes found the pierce mark on my upper right ear. He pursed his lips. Then he took a last, infuriated glance at us and stormed out of the office, followed by Brother Paul. Daisy and I exchanged a silent glance. I wondered why the hell Father Grigori had looked so scared.

  16

  ‘If I may say so, that was most uncalled for, Officer,’ Andropov said. It was the first time he’d spoken and his voice was calm
and steady — almost bored in fact. There was a touch of the pedantic academic there too, as if he was dealing with people who couldn’t possibly be expected to understand the exquisite construction of his mind.

  ‘Lieutenant.’

  ‘Lieutenant. I am a guest here, you understand.’ For a second he looked at Daisy and his eyes focused on her legs, encased in tight jeans. She felt the gaze and crossed them instinctively. I stood up, walked over to the door and turned the key in the lock. He watched me with the same haughty expression.

  ‘So you think it was uncalled for?’ I said. ‘Well, two days ago, a former colleague and friend of yours, a fellow member of the Millennium Committee, was murdered in cold blood in Khan al-Khalili. Saturday — yesterday — you resign from your post and hoof it out here. You don’t think you have any questions to answer?’

  Andropov shrugged fleshy shoulders and looked at me placidly. ‘What has it got to do with me?’ he asked loftily. ‘I wasn’t close to him — haven’t been for years.’ He shook his Mongolian head wearily. ‘Poor Adam,’ he said, ‘his death was a loss to the scientific world, a great loss, but I am not involved, and I can’t tell you anything at all.’ His eyes seemed to beam at us. Maybe it was the high cheekbones, but despite the well-chosen words his whole manner seemed to be saying, Ibram had it coming.

  ‘No?’ Daisy said suddenly. ‘Then why did you leg it down here so soon after Doctor Ibram was murdered? Are you saying there’s no connection?’

  Andropov shrugged again. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I was bored with the Militants and their hit-list, and bored with the millennium celebrations. When it all comes down to it, it’s just petty politics.’

  ‘So you think it was Militants who killed Doctor Ibram?’

  His eyes twinkled slightly and he looked at me as if I was a complete bumpkin. ‘Naturally,’ he said, and I’d have sworn he was about to yawn, ‘they’ve been threatening me ever since I agreed to sit on the committee. I’ve had filthy letters, people spitting at me in the street, rocks through my windows, death threats, obscene phone calls — even a letter bomb. Adam’s death was the last straw. I’m bored with it. I resigned.’

  For a guy who’d suffered all that he seemed amazingly unperturbed, I thought.

  ‘You have proof that you were threatened?’ I asked.

  He looked up, his eyes momentarily hooded with anger. ‘Of course I have proof,’ he said evenly, ‘you think I’m lying?’

  Daisy took the cue and smiled encouragingly. ‘You’re Russian, Professor Andropov?’ she asked.

  ‘Not really — never been near the place in my life. My father was a White Russian civil engineer who worked in Iran during the Shah’s time, but I was born and brought up in Tehran and I studied in London and Vienna.’

  ‘And you specialize in dryland ecology? That’s how you’ve been able to help the monastery.’

  For a moment Andropov looked gratified. ‘My specialization is rainwater harvesting,’ he said. ‘You see, rain falls at some time even in the most arid places, although the showers may be rare and slight. The secret of good irrigation is to make sure you collect every drop of water and conserve it. If that water can be channelled even into a few hectares of fertile ground the product can be incredible. And a few productive plots can keep a community going for months.’

  ‘And you have practised these techniques at the monastery here?’

  ‘Yes, I mean theoretically this place shouldn’t exist — the desert here is as arid as anywhere in the world — two hundred times drier than California’s Death Valley. But even here by carefully husbanding resources you can survive. Under my supervision, the monks have built extensive cisterns all channelling water to a single point — even the roofs of the buildings are cisterns, linked by a complex system of drains to the internal plumbing, the sewers — everything is re-channelled and re-purified and recycled. When it doesn’t rain we use deep bores which are sunk into the water table, where the water is constantly replenished. True, we do often supplement the supply with Nile water, but in a good year the monastery works in pure homeostasis — a closed system.’ He was beaming proudly now. ‘In ecological terms,’ he added, ‘that’s a great achievement.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ I said. I understood enough about moisture conservation to know he wasn’t exaggerating, and I admired what he’d done here, but we had to get down to brass tacks. ‘So did Doctor Ibram share your enthusiasm for rainwater harvesting?’ I enquired.

  Andropov sat back in his chair and sighed, as if the question exasperated him. ‘Adam was always fascinated by the desert,’ he said. ‘He had been obsessed with it since he was a child in Alexandria. We first met when we were doing postgrad work on environmental studies at Harvard. Our fields were very close and we often worked together. I was studying the irrigation methods of the ancient Nabataens — the people who built Petra. They were so advanced that even today their techniques cannot be equalled. The object of my study was to develop an efficient water conservation system which could be used for greening arid lands today. Adam was equally enthusiastic, because it was his dream that the whole of Egypt — even the whole of North Africa in time — could be turned into the vast garden he believed it once was.’

  ‘And you agreed with him?’

  ‘Without reservation. We spent a long time studying ancient rock art — pictures of elephants, giraffes, hippos, rhinos and antelopes apparently living in places where today nothing can survive. We studied lands at images which revealed that there were once rivers and lakes lying under what is now only sand dunes — images confirmed by rock pictures showing people fishing and hunting crocodiles in boats where there is now not a hint of moisture. We collected all the archaeological and geological data and proved quite conclusively that the whole of the Sahara desert had once been green and fertile. That much was indisputable. The next questions were closely linked — why and when? What had created the world’s most extensive desert — nine million square kilometres of arid land — and when had it happened? At that point Adam began to study ancient Egyptian records. He even taught himself to read hieroglyphics and got caught up in the whole ancient Egyptian thing. He started referring to it as his “destiny”. That was when I began to have second thoughts, I suppose. We were both scientists and I felt he was beginning to lose his scientific detachment. After a while Adam came up with the theory that the ancient Egyptian Old Kingdom — the so—called Golden Age, when the pyramids are presumed to have been built — collapsed because of a sudden change in climate, from fertile to arid.’

  ‘And you disagreed on this point?’ I asked, interested now.

  ‘No, I thought his reasoning was fairly sound. It does seem certain now that some time around the middle of the third millennium before Christ — that is about 2500 BC —the climate of North Africa tipped over the fragile balance between desert and fertility. The rainfall belt retreated south, and the land started to become desert. The Nile Valley was badly affected, and for the first time we have records of famine. There is a block from the Unas Causeway at Saqqara, for instance, showing emaciated men, women and children, strikingly similar to the famine scenes from Ethiopia and the Sudan we saw a few years ago on our TVs. It seems also that great dust storms blew up from the south — there are references to the sun being occluded, and of arable land being buried under shifting dunes. The whole social system collapsed — the pharaoh was discredited, the kingdom broke into petty feudal states, bands of armed men wandered up and down the Nile searching for food, plundering less badly hit communities. There are even accounts of cannibalism. In fact, though the civilization recovered, it was never quite the same again, and Adam traced this whole thing back to a climatic upheaval that had taken place some time around 2500 BC .’

  ‘What was his proof?’ I asked.

  Andropov beamed over the high cheekbones. ‘You’re a stickler for proof, aren’t you?’

  ‘Aren’t you?’ I said.

  Andropov’s eyes narrowed even more tightly and his lips forme
d into an outright sneer. ‘Are you acquainted with ancient Egyptian epigraphic literature, Lieutenant?’ he enquired languidly.

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘Ever heard of a piece called The Admonitions of Ipuwer?’

  ‘Sure, it’s famous.’

  He paused, trying to weigh up whether I was serious. ‘Then since you’re such an expert,’ he said, ‘you will know the text is thought to have been written during the reign of the Pharaoh Sesostris I, in the second millennium BC. The author was Ipuwer — a priest of the Ra Brotherhood at Heliopolis — and it indicates that there was total chaos in Egypt about that time. “The districts of Egypt are devastated,” it runs, “every man says, we do not know what has happened to the land.” The evidence seems clear that it was some natural cataclysm that brought about the devastation, which ended in social upheaval. Up till about 2500 BC, pharaonic tombs show the desert as being full of trees and animals. After that date, such images disappear.’

  ‘Are you familiar with the ice core samples taken by Blij and Neuven in Greenland in the nineteen seventies?’

  I asked, remembering the report we’d found in Ibram’s case.

  He glanced at me and smiled condescendingly. ‘So we’ve been doing our homework, have we Lieutenant? Actually, the Blij and Neuven findings confirm that there was some kind of environmental crisis around 2500 BC. If you must know, I never disputed any of Adam’s conclusions on this point — where we diverged was over the question of how and why this crisis had come about. The problem was that Adam felt the environmental change was made by interference in the biosphere. I couldn’t go along with that. I agreed that human activities might affect the environment on a micro-level, but a few nomads with their goats, for instance, couldn’t possibly have created the Sahara Desert. Adam was absolutely convinced. “Look at Chernobyl,” he would say. “Look at the hole in the ozone layer. Human activities can bring about massive environmental change.” I would protest that we were talking four thousand years ago. What could have had the power to change the environment on such a massive scale in that era? Volcanic activity, perhaps. An asteroid collision. But there weren’t any nuclear reactors or C F C gases in those days. “Oh,” he used to say, “How come you’re so sure?” That’s when I decided to part company. I concentrated on water harvesting and irrigation and left him to theorize on his own. We still spoke from time to time and were superficially friendly, but I couldn’t help noticing that over the last few years he’d got more and more political, more and more tied up with his influential friends. He became advisor to the U S president on environmental matters and was very friendly with the president of Egypt. Understandably so, of course. Only eleven per cent of Egypt is cultivable land, and every president since Nasser has been presented with the problem of a burgeoning population increasingly unable to feed itself. The only answer to that is to increase cultivation. Adam became an environmental guru — his ideas of turning the desert green again, however impractical, had huge political appeal.’