Sinai Tapestry (25 page)

What could she tell him after all, a boy of four? She was going that’s all, every day the weight was heavier. When she stooped for a blade of grass it pushed her down and when she straightened again she had to press her eyes closed to hold back the pain. The blessing of a child had simply taken more than her body had to give. But he was young and one day he asked her about it when she staggered on the hillside.

What is it, Mother?

The memory of that moment would never leave him. The stiff fingers, the strained face, the tired haunted eyes. She sank to her knees and hid her face. She was crying.

Where does it hurt?

She took his hand and placed it on her heart.

Where? I can’t feel anything.

Here is better, she said, putting one of his tiny fingers on a vein in her wrist.

That’s your blood. Is that where the pain is?

No, in my heart where you couldn’t feel it.

But Father will be able to feel it. Father was a great hakïm. He can cure anyone.

No. The reason you couldn’t feel it is because sometimes we have pains that belong to us and no one else.

Now he began to cry and she leaned forward on her knees and kissed his eyes.

Don’t do that. It’s all right.

But it’s not. And Father can make it better, I know he can.

No my son.

But that’s not fair.

Oh yes it is, new life for old is always fair.

Whose life? What do you mean?

Whose life doesn’t matter. What matters is that if a time ever comes when you have a special pain all your own you must carry it yourself, because other people have theirs too.

Everyone doesn’t.

Yes I’m afraid they do.

Grandfather doesn’t. He’s always laughing.

So it seems. But underneath there’s something else.

What?

Your grandmother. She died long ago and he has never stopped missing her.

Well Father certainly doesn’t hurt.

Yes, even him. Now he has a place to rest but for many years that wasn’t so. And once just before he came to our little corner of the world and your grandfather found him alone in the dust and brought him home to us, there was a terrible time when he was lost.

The little boy shook his head stubbornly.

But that’s not true, Father was never lost. He walked from Timbuktu to the Hindu Kush and floated down the Tigris to Baghdad and marched through three dawns and two sunsets out of the Sinai without even noticing he had no food or water. No one has ever done the things he did.

That may be but I didn’t mean he was lost in the desert. He was lost here, in his heart, where my pain is now.

The little boy looked at the ground. He had always accepted everything his mother said but it seemed impossible that his smiling grandfather could really be sad inside. And it was even more impossible to believe his father had ever been lost.

And so, she said, we mustn’t tell your father about my pain because he has his own burdens from the past. He came here to find peace, he brought us happiness and he deserves it in return.

She put her hands on his shoulders.

Now promise me that.

He was crying again. I promise, he said, but I also want to help. Isn’t there something I can do?

Well perhaps one day you can find our home. Your father found a home with us but your grandfather and I don’t really belong here.

Why?

Because we’re Jews.

Where is our home then?

I don’t know but someday you may find it for us.

I will. I promise.

She smiled.

Come then, we have to pick our grasses for dinner. Those two men of ours talk and talk and never stop and they’ll be hungry after spending another day settling the affairs of heaven.

When he went to Cairo for Islamic studies he used one of his father’s Arabic names. When he went to Safad to study the cabala he used his grandfather’s Jewish name. So when the time came for him to acquire his Western education he asked what name he should use.

A Western name, said his father.

But what? asked his grandfather. The two old men took his coffee cup and studied it. I see many Jewish and Arabic names, said Ya’qub, but I can’t make out a Western one, perhaps because I don’t know what a Western name is. What do you see, o former hakïm?

His father raised the small cup far above their heads and peered over the rim.
Stern,
he announced after a moment. Yes quite clearly.

That sounds too short, said Ya’qub, isn’t there more to it? Doesn’t it have an
ibn
or a
ben
something after it?

No that’s all there is, said his father.

Very odd, very curious. What does it mean?

Resolute, unyielding.

Unyielding?

In the face of what can’t be evaded or escaped.

Ah that’s better, said Ya’qub. Certainly there’s no reason to evade or escape the marvels of life.

All at once he wrapped his arms around himself and rocked back and forth. He winked at his grandson.

But then, o former hakïm, do I hear an echo of your own character in the coffee cup of your son?

Impossible, answered the old explorer with a smile. Coffee grounds are coffee grounds. They speak for themselves.

Ya’qub laughed happily. Yes yes they do, how could it be otherwise. Well my boy, there you have it. And where do you go now?

Bologna. Paris.

What? Unheard-of places. How do they number the year there? What do they call it?

Nineteen hundred and nine.

Ya’qub poked his father.

Is it true what the boy says?

Of course.

Ya’qub snorted, he laughed.

Of course
you say to an old man who’s never been anywhere, but it makes no difference you see. These hills will still be here when the boy returns, only the sand will be different. In fact you’ll never leave them. Is that so or not?

Perhaps, said Stern, smiling.

The two of you, muttered Ya’qub, you think you can fool me but you can’t. I know what year it is, certainly I do. More coffee, o former hakïm? We can thank God your son is halfway between the two of us and has some of my good shepherd blood in him so he won’t have to be a genie for sixty years, like you were, before he becomes a man.

The evening before he left his father took him out walking in the twilight. Too excited at first to realize his father had something he wanted to say, he talked and talked about the new century and the new world it would bring, how eager he was to get to Europe and get started, to begin, so many possibilities and so much ahead, so much to do, on and on until at last he noticed his father’s silence and stopped.

What are you thinking?

About Europe. I was wondering whether you’ll like it as much as you think you will.

Of course I will, why wouldn’t I, it’s all new. Imagine how much there is for me to see.

That’s true yet Ya’qub may be right, it may be that you’ll never leave these hills. That was his way, it wasn’t mine, but then I wasn’t born in the desert with its solitude the way he was, or you. I sought it and perhaps being born to it is different. Surely there’s as much to see in the desert as anywhere else but to some it can also give rise to an abiding loneliness, I have to remind myself of that. Not all men are meant to wander alone for forty years as I did. Father Yakouba for example. He lived quite differently in Timbuktu and was a very wise and happy man with his flocks of little children and their footprints in the sky, his journeys of two thousand miles in an afternoon while sipping Calvados in a dusty courtyard. As he said, a haj isn’t measured in miles.

I know that, Father.

Yes of course you do. You have the example of the other Ya’qub, your own grandfather. Well do you know what it is you seek then?

To create something.

Yes certainly, that’s the only way to begin. And what of money, does it play any part in your plans? What you want?

No none, it means nothing to me, how could it growing up with you and Ya’qub. But that’s a strange question. Why do you ask it when you already know the answer?

Because there’s a certain matter I should discuss with you and I’ve never talked about it with anyone, not even Ya’qub.

Stern laughed.

What could possibly be so mysterious you wouldn’t talk about it with Ya’qub?

Oh it’s not mysterious, quite mundane as a matter of fact. It’s just that there never seemed any reason to mention it. You see before I left Constantinople I made certain financial arrangements, real estate and so forth. I thought I might have some use for the property someday but then I became a hakïm and then I retired here, so of course as it turned out I’ve never had any use for it whatsoever. And if you don’t think you’ll need the properties, well then I thought I might return them to their former owners. Possessions are a burden and the fewer burdens one has the better when setting out on a haj.

Stern laughed again.

You’re not suggesting I begin naked? Strap a bronze sundial to my hip and leap over a garden wall? But you are being mysterious, Father. Could Ya’qub be telling the truth when he says the two of you own most of this part of the world? Two secret co-emperors with me as your only heir? Why do you smile?

At Ya’qub, at his notion of real estate. To him it’s all in the mind and this hillside is not only
this
part of the world, it’s the universe as well. You know how fond he is of pointing out he has never been anywhere while it took me sixty years to arrive at the same place. Well he’s right about that of course, about this hillside and what it has always meant to him and what it eventually came to mean to me. Anyway, the Ottoman Empire wouldn’t be much to own these days would it, rather tattered as empires go. Something new will have to replace it soon in this new century you like to talk about.

Stern smiled.

And in any case there was that first lesson the two of you ever taught me the day I couldn’t find the Temple of the Moon. That the only real empire is the empire of the mind.

The old explorer also smiled.

I seem to recall some such conversation when you were a small child. Well what do you think about these properties I mentioned. Are you interested in having them?

No.

Why?

Because I don’t intend to become a real estate dealer.

Just so, fine, that’s taken care of then. One less legacy you’ll have to worry about from my old century.

All the same I don’t think I’ll display myself naked at a diplomatic reception in Cairo the night I sail.

An apocryphal tale, no such thing could ever have happened in the Victorian era. Now come, we’ve arranged your escape from the past and it’s time to join Ya’qub for dinner. He has been laboring all day over his pots preparing a feast and he must be hungry for talk.

He
must be?

Hm. Did I ever tell you about the time I assembled certain evidence to deduce the cycle of Strongbow’s Comet?

Stern laughed. He knew his father was really as excited as he was, his leaving bringing back all the memories of that night in Cairo seven decades ago when a laughing young genie had given eyes to a blind beggar and himself set forth on his journey.

I don’t think so, Father. Could it possibly involve incidents from the lives of Moses and Nebuchadnezzar and Christ and Mohammed? A few lesser known passages from the
Thousand and One Nights?
An obscure reference or two from the Zohar? A frightened Arab in the desert who was alarmed because the sky was unnaturally dark? Who later turned up as an antiquities dealer in Jerusalem? In whose back room you wrote an anthropological study of the Middle East? No, I don’t believe you have ever told me about it.

No? That’s odd, because it was quite a remarkable affair. Do you think Ya’qub would be interested in hearing about it?

I’m sure he would, he can never get enough of hearing anything. But of course he’ll immediately jumble all your facts and rearrange them to his own liking.

Yes he will, an incorrigible habit. Those eternal jokes and riddles and scraps of rhymes he sees everywhere. Well we’ll just have to keep our wits about us and take our chances.

In Europe Stern dreamed deeply of his future. He considered composing symphonies or dramas, painting murals and planning boulevards and writing epic cantos. Unarmed and undefeated, he threw himself fearlessly into these projects.

He haunted museums and concert halls and restlessly paced the streets until dawn, when he fell into a chair in some workingmen’s café to smoke and drink coffee and fortify himself with cognac, totally immersed for a time in this one great achievement.

In Bologna he ignored his medical lectures and covered canvases with masses of colors. But months later when he examined what he had done he found it lifeless.

In Paris he ignored his law courses to study music. Whole scores of Mozart and Bach were memorized but when the time arrived for him to write down his own musical notations, none came.

He turned at once to marble. He pored over drawings and eventually attempted sketches, only to find his own designs for fountains and colonnades resembled Bernini’s.

Poetry and plays came next. Stern provided himself with a stack of paper and a hard straight chair. He boiled coffee and filled the ashtray on the desk with cigarettes. He tore up sheets of paper, boiled more coffee and filled the ashtray again with cigarettes. He went out for a walk and came back to begin again but still there was nothing.

Nothing at all. Nothing was coming from his dreams of creation.

Looking down at the heaped ashtray he was suddenly frightened. What was he going to do in life? What could he do?

He was twenty-one. He had been in Europe three years yet there was no one to talk to now, he had no friends at all, he had been too busy dreaming alone. He had come here with ideals and enthusiasm, what had gone wrong?

He sat up unable to sleep thinking of the hillsides where he had played as a boy, recalling that Ya’qub had said he would never really leave them, remembering his father on their last evening together wondering aloud what it might mean to be born in the desert with its solitude rather than to have sought it as he had done.