Sinai Tapestry (30 page)

I got caught, said the old man with a chuckle.

Do you tell me that.

Yes, the Assyrian police picked me up for lascivious behavior or indecent exposure or some other indefensible charge. Anyway they locked me up in that jail over there and said I’d have to stay locked up until I promised to change my ways. But my campaign had been largely successful by then and the great evil eye epidemic was nearly over. They freed me before long.

A personal triumph, said Joe.

I thought so but of course I didn’t get any particular credit for it.

Why?

Commerce. As soon as they got their commerce back they forgot about my religious sacrifice. That happens around here.

I see.

They left the fruit juice stand and once more began pushing their way through the din of the bazaar.

You know, shouted Haj Harun, sometimes it seems I was an old man early in life and had little later to unlearn. When I walk here there are memories and more memories on every side. Did you know Caesar used geese as watchdogs?

Quack, I did not, shouted Joe, but the bustling and shoving may be loosening my brains.

Or that when the Egyptians held the city they had a custom of shaving off their eyebrows when a pet cat died? The cats were then embalmed and sent home to be buried in Bubastis.

Cat city you say? Bubbling my brains quite possibly, it must be this infernal heat. I seem to feel the need for some powerful sobering tonic. Or as you said once,
Time is.

Haj Harun laughed.

The memories it brings back, that’s why I like walking here.

But how do you manage to keep up with them? shouted Joe. These changing nonstop smells of time I mean?

By keeping on the move.

That sounds like what I used to do in the mountains of the old country. But County Cork’s a place, or at least it was then. What does it mean in terms of millennia, keeping on the run?

Well take the Roman siege for example, shouted Haj Harun.

Yes let’s do that.

What did you say?

I said what happened during the Roman siege?

Oh. Well the Romans bombarded us for weeks with their catapults and there were monstrous boulders falling everywhere. Most people hid in their cellars and many were killed when their houses came crashing down on them. But not me. I survived.

How?

By staying out in the open. I jogged through the streets. A moving target is always much more difficult to hit than a stationary one.

Right you are, thought Joe, and there you have the answer to it all, right there in that picture of Haj Harun jogging through Jerusalem, jogging around his eternal city. Jaysus yes, Haj Harun the moving target of the Roman Empire and every other empire that ever existed. Cloak flowing, spindly legs churning, bare feet wearing down the cobblestones, around and around for three thousand years outrunning siege machines and conquering armies. Around and around in a circle, defying the arsenals of war that were always being dragged up the mountain to defeat him. Plodding stubbornly up and down the alleys wearing down the cobblestones, puffing and wheezing on the run through the millennia, Haj Harun the ghostly jogger of the Holy City surviving and surviving.

The old man clutched Joe’s arm in excitement. He laughed and shouted happily in his ear.

Do you see that tower?

Yes, shouted Joe, there it stands in its suggestive shape and I’m ready for it. Which century are we in?

The other hour needed for life.

I
N 1933 STERN FOUND
himself walking beside the Bosporus in the rain, and to him the colors of that gray October sky were reminiscent of another afternoon there when an enormously tall gaunt man had entered a deserted olive grove and ceremoniously removed all his elegant clothes, thrown them together into the black passing waters and climbed back through the dark grove, barefoot and wearing only a tattered cloak, a hakïm making his way south to the Holy Land and perhaps beyond.

Over half a century ago and now instead of an olive grove there was a hospital for incurables where he had just gone to see his old friend Sivi for the last time, or rather the body that had once been Sivi’s, tied to a bed and motionless now, staring blindly at the ceiling, the spirit having finally fled its torment.

Stern walked on. By the railing he saw a woman gazing down at the water, a foreigner dressed in a shabby way, and suddenly he realized what she was thinking. He went over and stood beside her.

Not until after dark I suppose. The wind will be high then and no one will see.

She didn’t move.

Do I look that desperate?

No, he lied. But remember there are always other things. Ways to help.

I’ve done that. I just don’t have the strength anymore.

What happened?

A man went mad today after it started to rain.

Who was he?

A man. His name was Sivi.

Stern closed his eyes and saw the smoke and flames of the garden in Smyrna, an afternoon eleven years ago that had brought him and now this woman to a railing beside the Bosporus. He squeezed the iron bar as hard as he could and when he spoke again he had control of his voice.

Well if you’ve made the decision the only thing you have to worry about now is being sure it’s a success. Your friends won’t have it any other way for two reasons.

He spoke so matter-of-factly she turned away from the water and looked at him for the first time. He was a large bulky man with hunched shoulders, his nationality difficult to place. Probably she didn’t see the weariness in his eyes then, just the outline of his shapeless figure beside her in the rain.

Only two? she said bitterly.

It seems so, but they’re enough. The first has to do with the guilt you make them feel. Was there something more they could have done? Of course, so they resent you for reminding them of that by still being alive. Then too you also remind them they’ve wasted their lives and they resent that. When they have to look at you afterward they have an uncomfortable feeling you’re not willing to accept as much moral corruption as they are. They’re not exactly aware of it but you’ll know the minute they sit down with you. A serious face, there’s something they have to say. Welcome you back from the dead? No. It’s cowardice they want to talk about.
It’s too easy.
Those are always their first words.

But it is easy, she whispered.

Of course. Real solutions always are. You just get up and leave. But most people can’t do that and that’s why they talk about your cowardice, because they’ve been trying to ignore their own for so long. It makes them uneasy.
You
make them uneasy.

She laughed harshly.

Is that all they say?

No, often there are special concerns depending on who they are. A mother worrying about how she brought up her children is likely to criticize you for not making it look like an accident. After all, how would your mother have felt?

Touching.

Yes. Then a businessman is likely to point out you didn’t even have your business affairs in order. When you commit suicide, in other words, you should be thinking about everyone but yourself. You’re only losing your life. What about other people?

Dreadful to be that selfish.

Yes. But there are also a few people who never mention it and go right on with you as if nothing had happened. It’s a way of finding out who’s close to you, I admit, but a dangerous one.

You seem to be quite an expert.

No, just one or two experiences. But don’t you want to hear the other reason why you can’t fail? It’s because you’ll have learned a life just doesn’t matter much except as a memory, even a great life. In fact I suspect that explains what Christ did after he was resurrected.

Christ?

Well we know he spent forty days on the Mount of Olives seeing his friends, then disappeared. And during those forty days he must have realized he couldn’t go on doing the same things with the same people anymore. It was over. They had their memories of him and that’s what they needed, not him. In the three years he’d been preaching he’d already changed a good deal and of course he would have gone on changing, everyone always does. But his friends didn’t want that.

So what did he do?

Stern tapped his forehead.

Two theories, one for good days and one for bad. The theory for bad days is set in Jerusalem. Have you been there?

Yes.

Then you’ve seen St Helena’s crypt in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre?

Wait, I know what you’re going to say. It’s the man who paces back and forth at the top of the stairs, isn’t it. Staring at the floor and muttering to himself and he’s been doing it for two thousand years.

You mean you’ve already heard my theory?

No, but I saw that man once and somebody told me about him.

Oh, well according to my theory for bad days that man is Christ. What happened was that after his forty days with his friends he fully intended to go to heaven, but first he decided he might take a last look at that spot where he was crucified, that hilltop where the most momentous event in his life had occurred. So he did and he was so stunned by what he saw he never left, and ever since he’s been there pacing back and forth talking to himself about what he saw.

What did he see?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. They’d taken down the three crosses and it was just an empty hilltop. For all anyone could tell, nothing at all had ever happened there.

She shook her head.

That’s certainly for bad days. What about good days?

On good days I think he did leave. He saw what he saw all right, but then he decided to do something else anyway. So he clipped his hair or tied it up and shaved his beard or grew a longer one, put on some weight and taught himself to speak directly like other men, then went on to acquire a trade so he could pay his way.

What trade?

Cobbler, say, perhaps even carpentry again although I doubt that. After seeing the emptiness of that hilltop he’d probably have preferred to try something new. Yes, cobbler perhaps.

And where did he go?

Oh he didn’t go anywhere. Theories for good and bad days have to be set in the same place. He stayed in Jerusalem and now that he’d changed his appearance he could come and go as he pleased without being recognized, perhaps disguised as an Armenian or an Arab. Which he still does of course, being immortal and having long since forgotten his former troubles, even the man he used to be. And all because a very beautiful thing happened, a strange and glorious transformation. It took more time than going to heaven, had he done that, but it happened.

What?

Jerusalem moved. Over the centuries it slowly moved north. It picked itself up from Mt Zion and inched its way toward what had once been that empty hilltop outside the walls. Foreign conquerors who thought they were desecrating the place helped by razing the city every so often, and each time they did the city was rebuilt a little closer to the desolate hilltop. Until the hilltop was no longer far away but right beneath the walls, then within the walls, then nearer to the center of the city and at last in its very heart, crowded around with bazaars and playing children and swarms of traders and pious pilgrims all shouting and laughing and rubbing together. No longer a sad little empty hilltop at all you see. No just the opposite. Jerusalem had come to him, the Holy City had embraced him and that’s why at last he was able to forget his former sorrows. He no longer had to fear the nothingness of his death.

Well what do you think? said Stern with a smile.

I think it’s certainly a theory for good days.

Yes indeed, a happy ending after two thousand years. And not that impossible either. As a matter of fact my own father did much the same thing in the last century.

Did what? Made Jerusalem move?

No that takes more time. I was thinking about leaving the empty hilltop behind by putting on a disguise. And he was relatively famous too, and rather recognizable you would have thought.

But no one knew who he was?

Only the few he chose to tell.

How can you be sure he told
you
the truth?

Stern smiled. He almost had her now.

I see what you mean but I still have to believe him. What he did is too unreal not to be true. No one could forge a life like his.

All the same, forgeries can be enormous.

I know.

Once a man forged the whole Bible.

I know, repeated Stern.

Why do you say that?

Well you’re talking about Wallenstein, aren’t you? The Albanian hermit who went to the Sinai?

She stared at him.

How did you know that?

Stern’s smile broadened. At last he’d found what he was looking for.

Well isn’t that who you mean? The Trappist who found the original Bible and was so appalled by its chaos he decided to forge his own? Then went back to Albania where he survived to the age of one hundred and four in a dungeon beneath his castle, in a totally black and soundless cell, the only place he could live now that he was God? Cared for all that time by the love of Sophia the Unspoken, later when I met her to become Sophia the Bearer of Secrets? Who was overwhelmed when Wallenstein finally died in 1906?

But that’s not true.

What?

That Wallenstein died in 1906.

Yes it is.

It can’t be. I was there then.

Then you must be Maud, and you escaped to Greece when Catherine had a seizure and all his veins burst, a death willed on him by his own mother Sophia, or so the old woman always believed. She told me the whole fantastic story when I was trapped there during the first Balkan war. Told me everything, it seemed she just couldn’t bear the burden of keeping it all a secret anymore. A strange mixture of brilliance and superstition, that woman. She actually believed Catherine’s madness had come about because Wallenstein himself was an angel, literally, not a saint but a divine angel who couldn’t have a human child because he was superhuman. Well maybe he did have a touch of something considering the scope of his forgery.

Maud stared at him in utter disbelief.