Jerusalem Poker (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 2)

by Edward Whittemore

  Just before dawn he collapsed in a gondola and ordered the gondolier to hurry down the Grand Canal so he could reach his palazzo before daylight came. Gliding over the water then with bits of stale pastry clinging to his face, his evening clothes muddied and his opera cloak ripped and his top hat newly dented, he lay in the bottom of the boat haggard and trembling and dizzy, sinking deeper into a stupor, dangerously weak because he now ate only a single baked chicken wing twice a day, a morbid compulsion toward self-starvation that had come to overwhelm him in the last year. And deliriously drunk as well from the mulberry raki he always carried to the piazza at night in a wooden canteen slung over his shoulder, another compulsion toward self-destruction that had come to overwhelm him in the last year.

  But finally home. Nubar lurched for the landing and nearly missed it, lost a shoe and his top hat in the water, lost his opera cape on the landing, muttered incoherently as he staggered across the wet stones pulling off his clothes and disappeared at last, mostly naked, through the door of his elegant palazzo, there to hide until night came once more to cover his movements.

  Thus lived Nubar in the closing days of 1933, a crazed phantom figure haunting the winter mists of Venice, never farther from the eternal city of his dreams. Yet soon now, very soon, to achieve his goal of immortality after reading the UIA’s last staggering report on the Great Jerusalem Poker Game.

  Part Four

  12. Maud

  Afraid of Jerusalem, just imagine it. Afraid of something, unlike

  the rest of us.

  NOT SURPRISINGLY, MAUD’S LONG friendship with Munk began in Smyrna. Many years later when she looked back on her four decades in the Eastern Mediterranean, it was one of the two cities that meant the most to her, Smyrna in her mind somehow embodying the secrets of profane love just as Jerusalem held the secrets of more sacred dreams.

  In fact Maud lived only briefly in each of them, about half a year in Smyrna and a little more in Jerusalem. Yet so changeable was the flow of time for her in retrospect, reducing whole years to a few experiences dimly recollected, surging elsewhere to transform an afternoon or an evening into months of memories, that the importance of those two cities in her life far surpassed the actual decades spent in Athens and Istanbul and Cairo.

  Jerusalem, because she met Joe there. Smyrna, because of Sivi and Theresa.

  Munk she met in the one, but she always associated him with the other.

  Smyrna, then, in 1921. Maud in flight from the little flowered house in Jericho that Joe had so lovingly found for her so she could escape the wintry blasts sweeping the heights above. The child she was awaiting had been conceived the previous spring in their first days and nights of love in a tiny oasis on the shores of the Gulf of Aqaba. One month of exquisite solitude in that tiny oasis, one boundless month in a world of fiery desert sunsets and star-filled darkness, of sun-soaked hours on the brilliant sands, lacing the Sinai and the blue cooling water in the fingers of their love.

  Winter in another oasis after that, in flowering Jericho awaiting the birth of their child, Joe away most of the time smuggling arms because he could find no other way to make a living for them as a fugitive in Palestine, away because he had to be, yet Maud’s old fears of being abandoned returning from her childhood, asking those terrible questions from childhood.

  Why did everyone leave? Why did they go away?

  As her card-playing father had done when he left the farm in Pennsylvania to go west. As her mother had done when she swallowed Paris green in despair, and when that failed went out to the barn and hanged herself at suppertime. As her Cheyenne grandmother had done behind the counter of the grimy saloon she ran in a Pennsylvania mining town, the old Indian woman hardly saying a word for days on end as little Maud learned arithmetic by adding up what the miners drank, hearing from them that her grandfather was a convicted murderer who had been sent away, never to return.

  And then the dream of her youth, to become the best figure skater in the world, which she still might have become when she escaped to Europe at the age of sixteen as the youngest member of the Olympic skating team. But instead, being totally ignorant of men, she had made the disastrous romantic mistake of marrying a man she knew not at all, a man who lived in a seventeenth-century Albanian castle, the depraved Catherine Wallenstein.

  Catherine raging insanely between the twin curses placed upon him by his father, the last of the Skanderbeg Wallensteins, who had come to think he was God and that his son was therefore Christ, who had named his son after the monastery in the Sinai where he had discovered the original Bible, twin unbearable burdens for Catherine Wallenstein, hopelessly lost as he staggered ever deeper into the symbols attributed to St Catherine, a sword and a crown and a wheel and a book, using a wheel to torture boys in the Albanian forests and a sword to kill them slowly as he bled from a crown of thorns and covered the book of his short violent life with sacrificial human skin, in savage madness reenacting on others the martyrdom of the historical Catherine and her mystical marriage to Christ.

  Fated from the beginning, Catherine Wallenstein. Doomed by an intolerably pious act in the last century, his father’s forgery of the original Bible, a stupendous task meant to bring order out of chaos and give grounds for faith where there were none.

  Maud saved from him by the intercession of a mysterious old woman who had a strange hold over the castle, Sophia the Unspoken, at the time not known to be Catherine’s mother, who helped Maud flee the castle in 1906 when her time was coming to give birth to Catherine’s child, which Maud did prematurely in a peasant farmhouse, Catherine in pursuit with forty horsemen finding the farmhouse where she lay and slaughtering all the inhabitants before ordering some of his party to carry his newborn son back to the castle, Catherine himself galloping on ahead intending to murder Sophia, who instead at last brought an end to the curses on her son by striking him dead on the road in front of the castle. With her eyes, as she thought, and by making the sign of the cross.

  Maud’s Wallenstein son, Nubar, thus lost to her on the day of his birth. And seven years later in Athens an infant daughter dead while her second husband, the Greek patriot Yanni, was away fighting in one of his wars, Yanni himself dead in 1916 on the Macedonian front.

  After four long years of sadness a dream in Jerusalem, where she met her magical Irishman just as he was emerging for the first time from Haj Harun’s mysterious caverns of the past, Joe all whirling words and visions in the shadowy crypt of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Maud in wonder and silence slipping to her knees and performing a first wordless act of Communion there.

  To be followed by beautiful Aqaba in the spring, the worn stones of Jerusalem in the summer and flowering Jericho in the autumn when the evenings were turning cold on the heights. And Joe away although he couldn’t help it, and the terrible fear tormenting Maud as she gazed into the currents of the Jordan flowing near their little house, the muddy river of miracles by then reaching the end of its brief and steeply falling course from the rich slopes of Galilee down to the utter barrenness of the Dead Sea.

  Fear that Joe would leave her. That this love would also go away. At her feet a rushing river and Joe too young to understand the terrified silences that gripped her that winter beside the Jordan, Maud unable to raise her eyes from the water and reach out and touch the man she loved.

  So she had run away from the little house where Bernini was born toward the end of winter. She had left before Joe had even seen his son, not leaving a note behind for him because there was no way then that she could explain her dreaded memories of a barn in Pennsylvania and a castle in Albania, a daughter dying when Yanni was away at the front and Yanni’s death, all those restless demons that had returned to shatter the dream of peace she thought she had found in the stillness of a crypt in Jerusalem.

  Abandoning the little flowered house in desperation and going up to Galilee, where she rested until she could travel with Bernini. And then in April sadly journeying on to the only sanctuary she knew in th
e world, the lovely villa by the sea in Smyrna that was the home of Yanni’s elderly half-brother, the elegant and kindly Sivi.

  Sivi was then nearly seventy. He was unusually tall for a Greek, as Yanni had also been, both of them having inherited their large strong frames and deep blue eyes from their father, a famous leader of the Greek war for independence who had come from an isolated corner of Crete where the people were said to be direct descendants of the Dorians. The fierce old man had married twice late in life, fathering Sivi when he was in his fifties and Yanni when he was well over eighty.

  So nearly thirty years had separated the half-brothers and much else as well, Yanni a warring patriot who had lived by the Cretan war cry against the Turks, freedom or death, Sivi a sophisticated arbiter of art and society at his famous teas in Smyrna, where everyone seemed to turn up sooner or later.

  In the past year Maud had written Sivi only once, soon after returning from Aqaba, a short note saying she had fallen deeply in love in Jerusalem. But later when her fears had begun to paralyze her she hadn’t dared to write. So Sivi had no way of knowing who was at the door on that April afternoon when he answered the bell and found her standing in the rain, thin and wasted with a baby in her arms, one battered suitcase at her feet.

  Maud had memorized what she was going to say but the words left her the moment she saw Sivi suddenly towering above her. She couldn’t speak. She broke into tears.

  She didn’t remember everything that happened after that. Sivi embraced her and swept her inside, delivered the baby into the care of his housekeeper and helped her upstairs, called Theresa, his French secretary, to draw a bath and provide new clothes, talking happily all the while in a warm excited voice as if the visit had been planned for months, as if the only misfortune on that dark April afternoon was that it had been raining when she arrived.

  Later they sat with cognac in front of the fire, Sivi’s deeply lined face all smiles as he wagged his massive head and chatted on about Smyrna and his recent adventures, never once mentioning Bernini or alluding to Maud’s life during the last year, simply accepting her presence in his home and delving into ever more elaborate anecdotes to distract her.

  Constantinople, 1899.

  While Sivi was entertaining a young sailor in his hotel room the sailor’s regular lover, a hulking customs inspector, had arrived and begun chopping down the door with an ax, shouting that he was going to kill Sivi. The only escape was the window and the door was giving way so fast there was no time to dress. With an open umbrella over his head to serve as a parachute, Sivi went sailing out the window in a long red nightshirt and nothing else, the hotel room having been cold enough to warrant a nightshirt no matter what activities were under way.

  The nightshirt billowed up, revealing his nakedness to the pedestrians below. And what was worse, it made it impossible for him to see where he was going.

  To not even know, intoned Sivi, gesturing extravagantly, what manner of grave I was going to fall into? A diabolical trick of fate.

  As it happened he found himself landing on his bottom in a pool of water, raising a great spray, in the back of a madly careening water wagon driven by an Armenian whose horses had gone out of control, attacked by a yapping dog. As the customs inspector shook his ax from the hotel window the wagon thundered away up the street followed by the noisy dog, Sivi sitting up to his waist in the water and still holding his umbrella high, his nightshirt spread around him like a gigantic red water lily, smiling and nodding pleasantly at the astonished spectators on the sidewalks who had seen him come sailing out the window at precisely the right moment to make good his escape.

  Or Salonika, 1879.

  Being given to pranks in his youth, Sivi had not appeared in his box at the opera until just before the end of the first intermission, when he presented himself dressed in an enormous red hat spilling with roses, long red silk gloves and a flowing red gown complete with an impressive bustle, a fake ruby brooch of extraordinary size fitted into the cleavage of his chest.

  Whispers were rampant through the tiers of the opera house but Sivi kept his eyes fixed on the stage, ignoring everyone, slowly stroking his thick moustache with a forefinger.

  The curtain rose. Siegfried marched to the middle of the stage and spread his arms to proclaim a mighty deed, whereupon Sivi swept dramatically to his feet and thundered out the first bars of the solo in a basso profundo that not only shocked Siegfried into silence and stunned the audience but immediately brought the curtain crashing down.

  And Alexandria and Rhodes and Rome, Venice and Cyprus and Florence, Sivi recounting tales from over the years to amuse her until Maud was laughing in spite of herself, whispering as he kissed her goodnight that this was expected to be an especially beautiful spring in Smyrna, his way of saying she was welcome to stay as long as she liked in his villa by the sea.

  And later that night as she lay sleepless in bed, sobbing quietly in the darkness as the rain beat down on the house, she marveled anew at this gentle courtly man who had somehow come to accept everything in life, and everyone, without asking why it should be so.

  At peace. She wondered if such serenity would ever be hers.

  She met Munk for the first time in June and found him to be so close to Sivi as to be almost his adopted son, which surprised her initially because she herself had known Sivi so long and never heard him mention Munk. But then she remembered that had always been Sivi’s way. So flagrant in his own behavior, he was yet extremely discreet when he came to others and never talked about one friend to another. And in the same manner, Munk was surprised to learn that Sivi had a sister-in-law.

  And an American with beautiful green eyes at that, said Munk, taking Sivi’s arm. Why didn’t you ever tell me, you old sinner?

  Sivi wagged his head and smiled wickedly.

  Tell you? Why should I have told you? I didn’t want to complicate your lives. A handsome young widow from the New World? An itinerant bachelor from Budapest? No, I would never take responsibility for initiating such an enterprise. Who knows what might come of it? But the truth is my closets are seething with relatives and friends neither of you have ever heard of. The condition is a common one as you’ll come to understand when you get to be my age and have a long and varied background behind you. It’s just extraordinary how events over the decades can multiply the people in your life. And even when you’re just out for a stroll and strictly minding your own business. Come now, this way for tea. Young Munk is bursting to tell us something. The signs are unmistakable.

  In fact Munk had come to Smyrna to tell Sivi of his recent conversion to Zionism, and he could talk of nothing else as they all sat together in the garden behind the villa that first afternoon, Sivi nodding paternally at Munk’s enthusiasm over what would be done in Palestine, Sivi’s secretary Theresa appearing indifferent. But by then Maud knew the young Frenchwoman well enough to understand her exaggerated calm.

  When did they stop being lovers? she asked Sivi later, when the two of them were alone and he was preparing to go out for the evening. Sivi smiled happily and came back to sit down beside her, more than ready to tarry, as always, when the talk turned to love.

  But my dear, he said, patting his closely cropped white hair, they still are lovers.

  I don’t think so. He may not know it yet, but she does.

  You mean his new interest in politics, a homeland for his people and so forth?

  Yes.

  Sivi waved his hand majestically.

  Nonsense. Passion in one sphere induces passion elsewhere. Our friend Munk has been looking for a cause for years, long before that stately old Empire of his began to crumble in the cold damp mists of central Europe. The blood of the great Johann Luigi Szondi flows in his veins, the indefatigable spirit of exploration, and now that Munk has found his cause on the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean, his flame will burn ever more brightly casting light in all corners. Love, in short. A lifetime to come exploring the landscape of love. The Mediterranean has him at las
t.

  Sivi, you do carry on so. You should be back on the stage.

  I don’t recall ever having left it. Now, a wager of a drachma on the case in hand? I say the passion between the two of them will be greater, if anything. And you say it’s already gone?

  All right, a drachma.

  Sivi suddenly leaned forward, his face serious. He put his hand on hers.

  No, Maud, don’t do that. Don’t you see it’s wrong? You must never do that, you can never be happy that way. Not even one drachma. Don’t you see you’re betting against love?

  I suppose I am.

  Then the bet is summarily withdrawn?

  Yes.

  Sivi smiled and squeezed her hand.

  Excellent. The least we can do on these beautiful Aegean shores is honor our pagan gods, and there’s never been any question they’re on the side of love. Heavens, how they did carry on. Swans and bulls were no obstacle whatsoever. In comparison our very best efforts are meager indeed.

  Your gods, Sivi. I don’t know that they’re mine.

  Not so, my lady, simply not so. They belong to all who pause in this sunlight, and whether for a day or a lifetime is no matter. We have no control over it, you see. Summoned or not summoned, the gods are there.

  Yours?

  Heavens no, much too profound for me. The words of a revered counselor of antiquity, the Delphic oracle to be exact. Spoken to the Spartans when they were contemplating war against Athens. Well they made their war and they triumphed, but then the Thebans triumphed over them so where did it get them in the end? Ah yes, in the end. In the end we’re all sodomites.

  Maud laughed.

  Sivi. That’s awful.

  Indeed it is. An atrocious pose to strike so early in the evening. But you do see my meaning? You see how impossible it is for us to escape love? Even when we turn our backs we’re not safe.

  Sivi, that’s enough.