Child of the Journey (7 page)

At once he found himself bothered by the sunlight reflecting off the water. He took off his glasses, closed one eye, and tested his peripheral vision. His eyesight was definitely worsening. Ultimately he would learn to accept that, the way he had learned to accept all of the other inescapable things in his life, even the presence of the dybbuk, the wandering soul that had possessed him since that terrible day when he witnessed Walther Rathenau's assassination.

Eyes closed, Solomon recalled Beadle Cohen's words:
sometimes those souls seek refuge in the bodies of living persons, causing instability, speaking foreign words through their mouths.
Such lost souls, the beadle had maintained, were unable to transmigrate to a higher world because they had sinned against humanity.

But what sin had so absorbed Judith, the nurse whom the grenade had also killed, that her soul had sought a new vessel?

A flash of light exploded out of the water, and then another --cerebral fireworks, come to warn him that he should pay heed. A cobalt-blue glow followed. He shut his eyes and waited, feeling the sun warm his cheeks. Soon, he thought, letting his mind drift, it will be dusk and another day will be over. Meanwhile, in his mind's eye, he decided, he would watch another vision the voices brought. Some, at first, had been fascinating. Then many had turned ugly...because of his losing Miriam?

He watched, waited, like someone fearing an execution but anxious for the finality to begin.
 

He saw a cobalt-blue dusk, and an orange sun setting above the domed keep of a ruined castle. It was the Ethiopian vision again, the one that had sparked his interest in the Falashas----

----A black man, lanky, rawboned, bald but for a bowl of hair at the crown of his skull, leans crouched against a castle wall.
His left shoulder is draped with a white cloak, caked with dust; a brown stallion grazes beside him, amid waist-high daisies. He seems so weary that only his spear shaft holds him up.

At the bottom of a grassy slope, a short distance below, is an elderly woman wearing bifocals and a safari hat wrapped and tied under her chin with a bright blue chiffon sash. She sits crossways in a motorcycle sidecar, her boots up on the main seat. As she watches him with the quick-eyed appreciation women usually reserve for new lovers, she makes quick, easy strokes on the pages of a combination sketch pad and graph-paper notebook balanced awkwardly across her lap. She draws him rapidly, not looking at the paper. Her wrinkled hands are the same hue as her khaki jacket and pants.

"Don't change your mind now, Zaehev Emanuel," she says in English, talking softly to herself. "This old girl's come too far for that."
  

A bee buzzes in front of her face. She swishes it away. When another lands on her lapel, she flicks it off with forefinger and thumb and, frowning, glances back over her shoulder. Thirty meters behind her, a dozen two-meter-high man-made beehives resembling banded sheaves of straw stand as if in formation. Smoke plumes from two of them, mixing with that of a campfire built between two stones. A small black man wrapped from head to ankles in a tattered robe squats beside the fire, pouring batter in a spiral onto a ceramic griddle. On the matted grass beside him sit an ebony jug and two bowls, plus several wicker baskets decorated with chevrons. Set into an hourglass-shaped basket is a metal dish holding bread rounds. They look like enormous uncooked
latkes
...potato pancakes
.

"Can't you just
cook
instead of fiddling with your bees, Malifu?" she asks.

The man beside the griddle lifts a hand in acquiescence. He removes smoking torches from the base of each of the two pluming hives and shoves the sticks, base down, into the ground.

Suddenly it is night. A horse and rider, silhouetted by a full moon, amble down the hill. Stones click beneath the horse's hooves. The rider is carrying a spear perpendicular to the ground, as if he is a standard-bearer.
  

"It just might happen tonight." She sits up straighter, holding the pencil poised above the paper. "Just might happen."

The rider reaches the motorcycle. Slackening the reins, he rises to sniff the air. "Sandalwood incense and
injera
. Bread." He speaks in a strange, musical Hebrew. "Such odors could domesticate a man." He smiles wanly, obviously exhausted. "Hopefully, the smoke will attract a swarm to the hive. They do say it charms the bees." He looks around tentatively, as though seeing the scalloped, verdant valley for the first time.

 
"Malifu indicated that it doesn't look promising," she replies, also in Hebrew. "Getting more bees, I mean." She grunts as, with forearms and elbows, she pushes herself up from the sidecar and extends him a hand.

Leaning down, he clumsily kisses her knuckles. "I am honored you have journeyed so far to see one so lowly as I."

"The honor is all mine, Zaehev Emanuel."

"You know
my
name, while I--"

"Judith Bielman-O'Hearn. Judy." Having extricated herself from the sidecar, she brushes dust from her jacket.

"I trust your travels were pleasant, Miss Judith."

"Malifu guided me. He sat in the sidecar with his head down, gesturing wildly the whole way. I think he had his eyes shut most of the time. The trip was..." She grins, shrugs, opens her hands in supplication.

"Mountainous?"

"Eventful. One I shan't soon forget."

He laughs, swings a leg over the pommel, dismounts. "You were not," he ties the reins to a bush and lifts his eyes toward her, "followed?"

She answers with a shake of her head.

"Not even..." He undulates his hand in the air and makes a motor sound deep in his throat.

"I saw no airplanes, if that's what you mean."

"The beekeeper is a friend of yours?"

"Not exactly. He heard I was looking for someone from your village and offered to guide me here. He seems harmless enough."

"Doesn't everything? Even the airplanes, the first time we saw them." He moves toward the fire, swatting hard at the bees in front of his face, as if to rile them. "I hardly imagine you journeyed to Gojjam, the province of honey, to talk of innocence and insects...or even of airplanes."

Notebook in hand, she follows him to the fire.

"I have questions," she says, "but I also have
injera.
You must be terribly hungry." Her voice is sharp, as if in rebuke. "Honey wine, too. And coffee rich enough to melt the soul."

"You've driven all the way from Addis Ababa to feed me?"

He kneels beside Malifu, who has placed a black lid over the pan. The smaller man appears to stiffen. Shooing away flies, the horseman opens the lid of a vase-shaped wicker, reaches in, and withdraws a slab of honey translucent as amber. He wraps it in one of the breads as though in bunting.

"You want me to take a bite?" the woman asks. "To prove the food is not poisoned?"

He shakes his head and bites off a huge hunk. Strands of honey cling to his lips and chin. His sinewy muscles seem to slacken while he eats. As he devours half the sandwich, he sits on his haunches, arms draped across knees, eyes blank.

She brings a gray woolen blanket from the sidecar and spreads it out before him. He appears to take no notice. When she moves the black jug and one of the bowls onto the blanket, he ceases eating and, holding the honey-and-bread, removes a tiny golden spoon from his broad belt. Eagerly he plunges it into the bowl, scooping up a dollop of dark honey. This he places beneath his tongue. Then he withdraws the spoon, slowly and upside down, cleans it with his lips, and puts it back in his belt.

"I've never seen a man carry around a spoon before, especially one like that." She sets down her sketchpad and pours coffee into two small cups painted with silver leafwork on a blue field. "Does each man in your village carry one?"

His eyes shift to her. His smile holds neither humor nor suspicion.

"I'm sorry," she says. "I shouldn't pry. When I'm excited I sometimes overstep. I meant no harm."

"The spoon
is
very beautiful." He touches it as if to assure himself of its presence. Taking the cup she offers him, he says, "Perhaps it is all right to tell you that I am
not
the only man in my village to wear such a thing."

She curls two fingers into the bowl, scoops out a glob of honey, and places it beneath her tongue. "Would it be something a village boy might wear?"

He lifts his cup in a toast; she responds in kind.
"L'Chaim."

"L'Chaim."
She slurps, sets down the cup and picks up her sketch pad.

"They say the trick is not to swallow--but to
savor
," he tells her in a voice devoid of inflection. "But they are wrong. It is not a trick. It merely mixes the black," he bows slightly, then points his glass at her, "with the sweet." He nods toward her, makes as if to toast again, and drinks half the cup's contents. After several moments, during which she continues her work, he smacks his lips.

"My compliments to your gentle man," he says.

"He likes your coffee," she tells Malifu in English, raising her voice like someone speaking to a deaf person.
 

His back to her, Malifu lifts an index finger in answer and peeks under the griddle lid. He replaces it with a clang of metal against ceramic and blows mightily on his fingertips.

Emanuel chews off another chunk of bread and lays it down on the blanket; the honey--melting from the warmth of the
injera
, spreads among the fibers.

She has resumed sketching. "I understand you've fought the Italians for seven years," she says without looking at him.

"And will seven more, if necessary. And seven thereafter."

"Were you the only person in your village to go off to war?"

"This time." He sounds despondent.

"Malifu tells me you call yourself a
dejasmatch
--one who, in war, camps near the door of the Emperor's tent."

"I prefer to think of it as 'one who will not surrender.'"

"But surely you've no love for Selassie! What did he ever do for any of the Black Jews? Not even allow you to own land! Persecutions at every turn! Not that I don't admire you for fighting the Fascists, you understand."

"Am I to understand that you have come all this way to steal the worth of those seven years?"

"Fighting Mussolini--that makes sense! But vowing devotion to the monarchy that held Black Jews in servitude for fourteen centuries? Even the title--
dejasmatch
--is that not limited only to the Coptic aristocrat...the legendary Christian warrior-prince?"

After a moment he says quietly, "Perhaps when we Ethiopians found ourselves fighting tanks with ancient rifles and machine guns with spears, the slaughter was so great that most of the legendary Christian
dejasmatch
were cut down like Maskal daisies gathered with a scythe. Perhaps when my country capitulated to the Fascists, a list was drawn up of the surviving
dejasmatch,
or at least those willing to go on fighting. Perhaps--"

He pauses, as if gauging her response. When she remains silent he smiles as if to concede her a minor victory and finishes his thought. "Perhaps," he says, "the scarcity of remaining
dejasmatch
left room at the bottom of the list for a
dejasmatch
who imagines he is also a Jew."----

 
"Is there room for an old Jew to sit down?"

The familiar voice came from behind Sol. He withdrew from the vision and turned around. Hoping. "My God--can it be?" He jumped to his feet and took the beadle in his arms. "You still smell like old books, you old Jew," he said. "What are you doing here?"

"Mostly looking for a place to rest my weary bones." The beadle grinned widely. "Your sister told me I would find you here. May I join you?" Groaning slightly, he lowered himself to the concrete. "As Miriam said of the sewer, it's not exactly the Hotel Kempinski, but it is cheap."

Heart pounding, Solomon sat down next to the beadle. What he really wanted was news of Miriam, but he could not bear even to speak her name. "Was your temple destroyed?" he asked.

The beadle shook his head. "Not yet, but I could see no reason to stay." He took a breath, as if he were about to say something more, then shut his mouth.

"Say it, Beadle Cohen. You were never a man to go out of your way for a mere exchange of pleasantries."

"When I arrived in Amsterdam a few hours ago, I went straight to the temple. I asked if anyone had heard of Ella and Recha Freund--"

"Did you not ask after me?"

"I did not, and for very good reason. Until I spoke to your mother and sister, I thought you had been transported--"

Once again Sol jumped to his feet. "To a camp? What made you think that!"
  

"You are shouting, Solomon. Calm down--sit down! I am too old for this much excitement."

Obediently, Sol sat down.

"Erich has convinced Miriam that you are in a camp, Sol. She has no idea you ever reached Amsterdam--"

"But my letters!"

"Did you address them to the estate?"