Jerusalem Poker (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 2)

by Edward Whittemore

The old man wagged his head happily and got to his feet.

  You’re right of course. In the cafés of this city, where every sort of depraved creature dizzily nurtures his obsession, such mild remarks would go unnoticed. But here, it’s true, we’re standing beside a hearth in the presence of motherhood, while upstairs an innocent babe waits to be nursed. As for him, by the way, you’ve already decided it.

  What?

  His future, by naming him Bernini. With that name there’s simply no chance the pagan gods will overlook him. Whether he likes it or not the sunshine of the Mediterranean will be his home and he is blessed with it, I predict it. Yes and now you’re off to your maternal concerns on the second floor, and Munk and Theresa have left to relish the mysteries of the harbor by moonlight, and it’s time for me to venture into the shadowy recesses of Smyrna to discover what spiritual nourishment this soothing June evening has in store for me. Shouldn’t you be wishing me success? I’m not as young as I used to be.

  Maud laughed. Sivi stroked his moustache in the doorway.

  Well? Not even a wisp of a wish for success?

  You don’t need it, you old goat.

  I don’t? In the end? Hmmm. A felicitous turn of phrase. It suggests philosophical resignation. But naturally I’ve always been a stoic on top of everything else, although naturally I’m not always on top. Now if you chance to hear whispers in the early morning hours, don’t be disturbed. It may well be some thoughtful young rogue in search of the wisdom of Smyrna’s Zeno, who is rightly famed for living consistently with his nature in darkness as well as light. And the consistency of that nature? Undeviating. Without the confusion of mixed sexes. Addio then. Yet again Smyrna beckons, and who am I to resist love’s caressing whispers? Addio, my lady Maud.

  That summer Sivi planned to go to Crete to visit his father’s village. He asked Maud to go with him but she refused, Yanni’s birth there signifying to her all the pain of loss in life that she couldn’t bring herself to accept.

  Yanni himself had never told her the story. It was Sivi who did after his half-brother’s death, when he was trying to help Maud understand why Yanni had lived the way he had.

  Sivi’s mother had died giving birth to him. A wealthy sister who lived in Smyrna offered to take the baby and raise Sivi as her own. Sivi’s father, in despair over the loss of his wife, agreed to this and also decided to give up politics and return to the isolated village in Crete where he had been born.

  He became a goatherd again, as he had been in his youth, spending six months of the year alone in the mountains with his flock, running his goats from dawn to darkness to find the meager feeding, in lonely solitude sleeping in one of the huts made of broad flat stones that had been up in those mountains for centuries withstanding the ferocious winds of the lunar landscape, never able to take off his boots or his coarse woolen garments in the frigid nights of those mountain summers, in darkness before the sun rose and again after it set, hurriedly eating his meals of goats’-milk yogurt and twice-baked bread, rock-hard until soaked in water, brought with him from his village in the spring.

  Occasionally his keen eyes spied movement on a far slope and there would be a chance to call from peak to peak to other roaming goatherds. And since the distances were too great for words to carry, they didn’t use words, rather a shouted singsong code that passed their messages through tone and cadence. As for talking to another man face to face, that opportunity seldom came until the snow began to block the passes in late October and it was time to descend to the villages and await the ebb of the melting snows in April.

  Over a quarter of a century passed before Sivi’s father, then eighty-four, took a second wife, a woman of nineteen from his village. She conceived and complications appeared toward the end of her pregnancy. In her eighth month the two of them set out across the mountains for the north coast, to the nearest town where a doctor could be found.

  It was early October and snow flurries were already worrying the passes. It took them two days to reach the last northern ridge and see the Cretan sea opening up beneath them. That night she went into premature labor and by dawn the baby was breeched and suffocating.

  They exchanged a few words, the old man who had lived a long full life and the young woman who was only beginning hers. The wrong one was being taken but there was nothing to be done.

  He held her. They both made the sign of the cross. Then he placed a rock in each of her hands and a twisted root of wild thyme between her teeth and cut open her belly with his hunting knife and removed the baby as she went into shock and died.

  That morning he walked into the town on the north coast with the infant Yanni in his arms and the rigid body of Yanni’s mother strapped to his back.

  Oh I know, Sivi had said as she sat with her head in her arms.

  It’s cruel and brutal and it sounds barbaric, but you have to remember the life those people have. When you’re up in those mountains you might as well be on the surface of the moon. There’s only a little wild thyme clinging to the rocks here and there and a man has to run all day to find it, from five in the morning until ten at night, so his goats can eat. And they do that, those men, they run up mountains. It’s almost impossible to believe unless you’ve seen it. The life is hard and violent and although they live to be very old when left alone, often they’re not left alone and death can be quick.

  Not long ago a child in one of those villages was playing and as a joke took the bell off one of his father’s goats and put it on a neighbor’s. A goat stolen? By nightfall the boy’s father was dead and the neighbor was dead and three other men were dead, and by the next morning the village was deserted, not a soul there. Because if all the families hadn’t left at once, the killing of brothers and cousins by brothers and cousins would have had to go on until all the men in the village were dead. They knew that and they had no choice but to abandon their homes and go away.

  So the way life works for them is that everyone has his duty and death can never be feared. Of course Yanni could have come back from the front when your daughter was due to be born, and he could have come back when she was taken ill, but I doubt that he ever even thought of it. To him he was where he belonged as a man, doing what he was supposed to be doing. The mountain people in that corner of Crete were never conquered by the Turks, the only Greeks who never were. For two hundred years the Turks burned down their villages, but they went up into their mountains until they had a new generation of sons to fight, and then they came down and fought, and saw their sons die, and went back up into the mountains again. For two hundred years they did that, and when the resistance was particularly heroic the Turks impaled those they had captured and put mirrors in front of them so they could watch themselves slowly die in the hot sun. The best remembered of all their leaders was a Captain Yanni who died that way when he was a few years younger than your Yanni. So that’s where your Yanni came from, and that’s what he was.

  Maud shuddered. She understood it was a way of life. But she herself never wanted to see those mountains.

  When Maud said she hoped to be alone with Bernini that summer, Sivi offered to let her stay in the villa in Smyrna. She quickly accepted, planning now to move back to Athens in the fall and find work as a translator, after Sivi returned in September. As for Theresa, she had already left to spend the summer in the islands, her affair with Munk having abruptly ended in June as Maud had foreseen.

  Munk was in Smyrna twice that summer and on his second visit Maud spent a night with him, an evening brought on by wine and loneliness on her part, by wine and uncomplicated need on his. They smiled over it the next day, both aware it wouldn’t be repeated, Munk hurrying on with his Zionist concerns and Maud preoccupied as before with beginning a new life in Athens in the fall. But it had been a long, intimate summer night that they both also knew would give rise to friendship.

  One of their conversations late that night had turned to Theresa, and they realized all at once that neither of them knew anything about her past. Three
years earlier at the age of nineteen, according to Sivi, she had gotten off a boat in Smyrna, alone and friendless and without any money. Another passenger from the boat, whom Sivi knew, had brought Theresa to one of his afternoon teas and Sivi had offered her a job as his secretary, as a way to help. Soon he had become strongly attached to her and now he liked to refer to her, mischievously, as his unnatural daughter.

  Another adopted stray, said Munk, like me before the war. And it’s been wonderful for him since she moved in. Despite what he says the old sinner has his bouts of gloom and loneliness, and it’s made a great difference to him to have her here. She’s family to him and he loves her enormously, and I’m sure she loves him in her way. But there’s a kind of intensity about Theresa I’ve never understood. Something hidden. Something that won’t allow her to be really close to anyone. I don’t know how to describe it.

  Is that all Sivi knows about her?

  Yes, other than the fact that she was educated in a convent in France, apparently very strictly, although she’s not a practicing Catholic now. But about her family or lack of it, or how she happened to turn up in Smyrna, nothing. Of course he never asks people who they are or where they’ve been. If they want to tell him he’s glad to listen, no one could be more sympathetic. But if they don’t he just accepts what he sees and plunges ahead without any reserve whatsoever, just assuming you deserve his confidence, his friendship. It’s an extraordinary trait, as if he had no guile at all. Of course he must have some or he wouldn’t be human. But I’ve never seen it. And anyway, Maud, surely you already know all this.

  She nodded.

  Yes. When I came here the first time as Yanni’s wife, an American no less with no family, out of nowhere, there wasn’t a single question about who or what. And this spring when he found me standing at the door with Bernini, not having heard from me in almost a year and having no idea I’d had a child, well he burst into a smile and threw his arms around me and that was that. Ah, here you are, how lovely. That’s all he said, only that. And they weren’t just words. I swear there was no question in his eyes, either.

  Munk rose from the bed to pour more wine. Maud took a sip and gazed out the open window at the lights in the harbor.

  When did it start between you and Theresa?

  About a year ago. I’ve been visiting Sivi since before the war and I suppose it was only natural that Theresa and I should fall in with one another. But I was never in Smyrna for more than a few days at a time, and I didn’t think it was a particularly serious matter for anyone. Certainly Theresa didn’t act as if it was.

  That distance you mentioned?

  Yes. Not cold exactly, but as if she didn’t really care one way or the other. She never asked me if I could stay another day, for example. In fact she never even asked me when I would be back. When I turned up that was fine, and when I left that was fine too. But then when I came here at the beginning of June, she suddenly got all upset and said she didn’t want to see me anymore. It was strange though. When she told me that I had the sensation she wasn’t there somehow, not with me I mean. She was somewhere else, talking about something else. To be frank I don’t think it was me, her interest in me or lack of it, that caused her to become so emotional.

  I know, said Maud.

  Why? How, I mean.

  Well we talked several times too, before she left for the summer. She was terribly guarded but a feeling came through all the same. It’s odd, but it almost seemed as if what bothered her were the places you kept talking about. Palestine, I mean. The Holy Land. Particularly Jerusalem. I don’t know why I had that impression. Maybe it has to do with the fact that she was religious once and isn’t now. Do you think she could be afraid of Jerusalem for some reason?

  Maud shook her head. She laughed harshly at herself.

  Afraid of Jerusalem, just imagine it. Afraid of something, unlike the rest of us. Aren’t you afraid of anything, Munk?

  No. What we have to do will take time, but it will happen.

  Maud smiled. She put a finger on his nose.

  It will? It just has to happen? What’s that? The faith of the fathers?

  More, my lady, much more. Remember that I became a Zionist because of a former Japanese baron. And the reason I happened to meet my Rabbi Lotmann was because I once discussed cavalry tactics with his twin brother, Baron Kikuchi, who was a hero of the Russo-Japanese War.

  And so?

  And so Baron Kikuchi and I chanced to meet in Constantinople while we were both covering the first Balkan war. And then years later he writes to me asking me to check on the well-being of his twin brother, who has converted to Judaism and is supposedly studying medieval Jewish mysticism in Safad. But the twin isn’t there and eventually I trace him to St Catherine’s monastery in the Sinai, where he’s gone into hiding because of his Zionist activities and is pretending to be a Christian pilgrim, a Nestorian from China. At St Catherine’s I listen to the evening concerts on the koto of this man who is now Rabbi Lotmann, and the music is so haunting and strange in that unusual setting that I find I can’t sleep at night. Instead the former Japanese baron and I stay up and talk and talk, and the result is that a Hungarian Jew is converted to Zionism in the Sinai by an aristocratic landowner from northern Japan who was raised as a Buddhist in matters of death, and as a Shintoist in matters of birth.

  Maud laughed again.

  All true. And so?

  And so given these vast implausibilities, geographical and racial and religious and esthetic, it immediately becomes apparent that much more than just the faith of my fathers is involved. Quite obviously, someone with an extraordinary overview has taken a hand in the matter and given me faith in this task.

  Maud reached out and tweaked his nose.

  It’s always useful to have that kind of help, she said. The only thing you haven’t explained is why these Japanese twins happen to figure so prominently in God’s plan?

  But that’s easy, said Munk, tapping her nose in turn. The Japanese are a unique people who arrived in their islands more or less as an entity, with a culture of their own, just before and after the time of Christ. But no one has ever been quite sure where they came from. Now it was suggested more than once in the last century, by them of course, when they’d opened up their country and begun to Westernize themselves, that they just might be the survivors of the ten lost tribes of Israel. No one has ever taken that seriously but the time span wouldn’t have to be wrong if you consider a leisurely journey across Asia, with time out to plant crops and care for livestock as a wandering people must, and also with time out to develop their unique culture, so they’ll definitely be an Asian people when they eventually arrive in their Asian islands. And lastly, I don’t think I mentioned that both Baron Kikuchi and his twin, Rabbi Lotmann, are very small men with very short legs. Legs that short, if not in a hurry, would cover distances sparingly and take some centuries to cross the world’s largest continent from its western end to its eastern tip. So in conclusion, God’s plan for the last two and half millennia has been to have His chosen people stationed at both extremities of Asia to see that nothing untoward occurs in the interior, which as we know has been a notorious birthplace for marauding tyrants throughout history. And those are the facts, in brief. Well what do you think?

  Maud smiled and filled both their glasses. She raised hers in a toast.

  Chapeau, Munk.

  Thank you, madame.

  Before she moved to Athens in September, Maud saw the changes in Theresa. She couldn’t believe it was really as bad as it appeared but in fact it was worse, as Sivi told her the next time they met, in Athens late in the spring of the following year.

  She’s coming apart, said the old man sadly. She just doesn’t care about anything. Drugs and alcohol and practically any man who speaks to her on the street. She told me there were thirty-five last month and she didn’t even know the names of most of them. Then she laughed and said they all had beards though.

  Beards?

  Yes, it�
�s crazy. I don’t know what that was supposed to mean, or whether it meant anything at all. But I didn’t like the way she said it and that laugh was more a scream of desperation, just horrible to hear. But she won’t let me help her, she says it’s not my concern and there’s nothing I can do. Well if it’s not my concern, whose can it be? She doesn’t have anyone else. Oh I tell you, Maud, I feel sick about it. It simply can’t go on like this much longer. There has to be an end in sight or it will be all over for her. And she’s so young, just a child.

  Maud took his hand and agreed with him, not knowing the end was indeed in sight because a gunrunner named Stern, the man in Jerusalem who had told Munk where he could find Rabbi Lotmann, had recently arranged for O’Sullivan Beare to meet Sivi in Smyrna in September.

  Sivi providing arms for Stern and Joe smuggling them. Sivi a secret patriot with his dreams of a greater Greece, his clandestine life unknown to Maud then and for many years. And Stern, the sad shabby gunrunner who would save Maud’s life more than a decade later when she stood in despair beside the Bosporus in the rain, ready to give it all up at last, the past too much for her, ready to throw herself into the currents when night came.

  Sivi, Theresa, Stern, Joe. Only a few months from then to be together in Smyrna when a raging massacre would break loose and change all their lives.

  Leaving Stern a tormented man forever. Driving gentle Sivi into madness. Theresa’s tortured visions in the fire and smoke of that terrible slaughter to be revealed so painfully to Joe when their time came, on the small lonely rooftop where he kept watch in the Old City.

  Smyrna and Jerusalem. The profane and sacred cities one day to be inextricably entwined in Maud’s memories.

  13. O’Sullivan Beare

  Signal night, he thought, quiet place for sure. Demanding night up here beneath the murmurs of heaven.

  AND THERE WERE OTHER, quieter moments during the twelve-year poker game when one of the three friends would disappear for days or weeks to pursue his dream. Munk Szondi building a future Jewish homeland, Cairo Martyr on his quest for the black meteorite of Islam, O’Sullivan Beare pondering the enigmas of the lost Sinai Bible and his lost love as well, Maud, the woman who had abandoned him in Jericho in 1921, taking with her their infant son.