Sinai Tapestry (42 page)

But as the gentle Haj Harun had airily noted once, even a Holy City needs the service trades. In fact it needs them more than most places.

O’Sullivan Beare dealt the cards. He and Munk Szondi raised theirs slowly and held them close to the chest, revealing them one at a time. After a few minutes of study they both chose three for discard. Cairo Martyr, as always, had left his cards lying face down on the table, untouched. With some deliberation he now separated the first and the third and the fifth for discard.

Three new cards were dealt to each man. Munk Szondi’s face was grave as he rapidly weighed the comparative values that day of every known Levantine commodity. O’Sullivan Beare seemed a trifle feverish as he calculated patriotic ballistic arcs. Only Cairo Martyr, with his immense self-assurance, seemed completely at ease with what lay before him.

And since he was sitting on the dealer’s left, he had the right to open the betting. Again, as usual, he didn’t look at his new cards.

No openers, said Cairo Martyr, not this time. I have no intention of wasting time tonight trying to inch the stakes up. I’ll start at the top and the two of you can play or not, as you choose. Now I think you’ll both agree that through my various illicit enterprises, I control the Moslem Quarter in this city.

The mummy dust king is about to strike, muttered O’Sullivan Beare. But at the same time he knew the claim was true, just as was his own secret control over the Christian Quarter and Munk Szondi’s over the Jewish Quarter, religious symbols and trading in futures being just as essential to Jerusalem as mummy dust.

Well do I or don’t I? said Cairo Martyr.

You do. Agreed.

Correct. Now then, that’s my bet. Control of the Moslem Quarter. I’m putting the Moslem Quarter on the table. If either of you wins, which you won’t, it belongs to you. But first you have to match my bet. No openers. The real thing.

O’Sullivan Beare whistled softly.

That’s arrogance and then some, he muttered. You mean the
whole
Moslem Quarter?

That’s right. Down to the last sun-baked brick.

People? asked Munk Szondi.

Down to the last unborn babe asleep in its mum’s belly, not knowing what it’s in for when it has to wake up.

Fair enough, said Munk Szondi, gesturing extravagantly. If that’s the way it is I’m betting the Jewish Quarter.

Jaysus all right, shouted O’Sullivan Beare, all right I say. If that’s what you’re up to I’ll put down the Christian Quarter.

He said the last two words in Gaelic but they both understood him. By now they all knew enough of each other’s languages to recognize a bet in any one of them.

So there it was. The three men leaned back to savor the moment, a chance that came once in a lifetime, if ever. They had each bet what they controlled and it went without saying that the fourth section of the Old City, the Armenian Quarter, would automatically go to the player who held the best cards.

The end had come. Jerusalem lay on the table. At last it was a case of winner take all in the eternal city.

But twelve years of unscrupulous poker had to pass before that final showdown could take place in the former antiquities shop of Haj Harun, an ancient defender of Jerusalem who even then was wandering around the room in distraction, just a few years short of his three thousandth birthday.

Going far? asked Cairo.

All the way, whispered the mummy
w
ith a resigned expression.

F
ROM HIS EARLIEST YEARS
Cairo Martyr had picked cotton as a slave in the Nile delta alongside his maternal great-grandmother, a proud indomitable woman whose passions in life dated from 1813.

In that year, as a young woman in a village on the fringe of the Nubian desert, she had taken into her hut a charming wanderer by the name of Sheik Ibrahim ibn Harun. The sprightly young sheik, who said he was an expert in Islamic law, also claimed his blue eyes were the result of Circassian blood.

But as Cairo Martyr was one day to learn, his wandering great-grandfather had actually been a European in disguise, a highly gifted Swiss linguist with a passion for details whose other descendants, known and unknown, were also to play a crucial part in the Great Jerusalem Poker Game over a century later.

Young Sheik Ibrahim, as always, soon grew restless in the village on the fringe of the Nubian desert. With tears he parted from his new wife to resume his wanderings, promising to return in three months. But when he did come back at the end of that time he found the village had been savagely destroyed and its inhabitants carried off by a Mameluke raiding party.

These dwindling remnants of medieval warfare, originally Mongolian and Turkish slaves who later became the rulers of Egypt, had been driven south into the desert by Napoleon some fifteen years earlier. Although the conditions prevailing on the Russian steppes were fully nine centuries behind them, the memories of frosty gales remained deeply embedded in their sluggish brains and they still wore thick woolen underwear in the ferocious Nubian heat. Dressed in gorgeous robes and enormous jeweled turbans, their swords inlaid with precious stones and their saddlebags stuffed with gold, they rode ponderously through the haze into battle carrying all their riches, their catamites running on foot beside them waving the green banners of the Prophet.

Since the Mamelukes were pederasts, they couldn’t reproduce. When they were the rulers of Egypt they had purchased boys in southern Russia and fattened them to be their successors, but with that source no longer open to them they were dying out as a Moslem warrior caste.

Those who survived were aging bloated men, elderly asthmatics tormented by malignant rectal tumors and virulent skin diseases, which flourished particularly in their groins and armpits. In this rampant state of decay, so advanced it could warn local tribesmen of approaching danger when the wind was right, the Mamelukes supported themselves in barbaric luxury by laying waste to the countryside and selling the Africans they captured to Arab slave-traders. After briefly arousing themselves for a sortie they would return to their barges on the Nile and relapse into a deathlike stupor, stretched out under awnings their retainers doused with water day and night in a useless effort to cool their wheezing mountainous bodies.

Since they never took off their underwear, scratching couldn’t help. Even flicking a fly away seemed useless. Instead they lay with their glazed eyes fixed on the wilderness, dully wondering how their once lavish life on the Mediterranean, so rich in soothing breezes and perfumes and other extravagant splendors, had been reduced to the parched oblivion of this lizard’s existence hundreds of miles from nowhere.

On one of these barges in 1813, Martyr’s great-grandmother gave birth to a daughter as black as she but with the light blue eyes of her beloved Sheik Ibrahim. The Mamelukes had no use for a girl, so mother and daughter were sold to an Arab slave-trader who included them in a shipment to the Nile delta, where they were bought to pick cotton. In due time the daughter gave birth to a daughter and that daughter to a son, also deep black with light blue eyes. Both those mothers died of dysentery soon after they bore their children and the boy was therefore raised by his great-grandmother, who finally succumbed to dysentery herself in 1892, after nearly eight decades of servitude.

Upon her death, little Cairo Martyr was freed by his master as an act of Islamic mercy.

Thus thrown alone into the world at the age of twelve, illiterate and without any skills, the boy did what any other black child in Egypt would have done in the latter half of the nineteenth century. He wrapped his kerfiya around his head and walked through the dust to the capital to seek the advice of a former slave named Menelik Ziwar.

Among Egyptian blacks, Menelik Ziwar’s position was unusual in several ways.

Since slaves were brought up in the religion of their masters, the vast majority were Moslem. But Menelik’s branch of the Ziwars happened to be Copts, and Menelik had taken the trouble to teach himself to speak Coptic, the extinct form of Egyptian that had been used in the country during early Christian times.

He shared this distinction with only one other man, the head of the Coptic Church or Patriarch of Alexandria, whose duty it was to appoint the head of the Church in Ethiopia, the only country where this Christian sect was the state religion, and also the only country in Africa not ruled by Europeans.

Since no one else understood the tongue except Menelik and the Patriarch, they took the opportunity to confer in it whenever they met. Of course no one knew what they were saying, but it was widely assumed among Egyptian blacks that Menelik’s influence in independent black Africa, by way of his relationship with the Coptic Patriarch, surpassed that of any other black in the world.

Even his name tended to confirm this special status, the historical Menelik having been the first emperor of Ethiopia.

Nor was it just his political influence that enhanced his standing in the black community. Menelik Ziwar was also the greatest Egyptologist of the nineteenth century.

Menelik’s master long ago, a wealthy cotton broker named Ziwar, had sent his own son at an early age to be educated in England. The Ziwar son had returned to Alexandria with a sound knowledge of archeology, but having been away so long he knew nothing of everyday Egyptian corruption. In order to do fieldwork he needed a competent dragoman, or guide and interpreter, who could oversee his thieving workmen and hand out baksheesh up and down the Nile. The Patriarch of Alexandria immediately pointed out that he had to look no farther than his own household and the sagacious slave Menelik.

The Ziwar son and Menelik joined forces in digs throughout the delta. Menelik quickly learned to read hieroglyphs and was soon offering suggestions about where they should dig. Natural intelligence exerted itself and before long the apparent slave was the teacher, the apparent master the pupil.

Yet Menelik remained the perfect dragoman in every respect, even after he was freed. He stayed modestly in the background, so much so that although his discoveries eventually made his master’s name famous in all the academic centers of Europe, no one outside the black community in Egypt, and no one at all in Europe, had ever heard of the Ziwar who was important—Menelik, secret scholar and revered African folk hero.

When little Cairo went to seek his advice the black Egyptologist was already an old man. After years of stooping in cramped tombs he had developed severe arthritis and now he never went on digs himself. Instead he instructed others where to look and interpreted the findings they brought to him, dictating the monographs they subsequently published under their own names, anonymity having long since become a habit with him.

Between times there was an endless stream of respectful young petitioners arriving from all over Africa, black boys and girls starting out in life who wanted to know what to do and how to do it.

Due to his arthritis Menelik was most comfortable when stretched out flat on his back. And since so much of his life had been spent in tombs, not surprisingly he found a sarcophagus most to his liking as a bedchamber.

The one he had chosen for himself was a particularly massive block of stone originally occupied by the mummy of Cheops’ mother. Upon his retirement in 1880, Menelik Ziwar had the sarcophagus lowered into a sepulcher he had discovered in Cairo under a public garden beside the Nile. And this was where he had held court ever since, on his back in a bed at the bottom of the sarcophagus. Petitioners were ushered into the sepulcher one at a time for consultations that might last a few minutes or most of a day, depending on how often the old scholar dozed off in his soundproof and nearly airless subterranean vault.

Little Cairo stood in line in the public garden for several weeks, waiting for his turn to come. At last it did and an attendant pointed down the steep stairs that led to the vault. He was told to close the door behind him at once, the master’s eyes being no longer accustomed to daylight. He tiptoed down the stairs, took a deep breath and slipped inside the door.

He found himself standing in a small gloomy chamber with the dim outline of a gigantic sarcophagus looming up in front of him, a single taper at its head. He took another deep breath and tiptoed across the floor to peek inside.

He gasped. Far down in the hollow depths of that massive block of stone, amidst piles of books and mysterious inscriptions five thousand years old, lay a withered mummy with a huge magnifying glass on its chest. Little Cairo was terrified. Abruptly the mummy’s withered hand floated up in the air and clasped the magnifying glass, then raised it. Behind the lens the enormous unblinking eye from antiquity was fully two inches wide.

Caught you,
cackled the mummy.

Little Cairo began to shake. His teeth chattered and sweat ran down his face. A dry crinkled smile spread across the mummy’s mouth.

There there, son, stop carrying on like that. I’m only the man you came to see. What’s your name?

Little Cairo whispered his name.

Is that a fact? said the mummy. Well you certainly didn’t get that from your master, so where did you get it?

From my great-grandmother, sir.

Her last name was Martyr?

No sir. She didn’t have a last name, sir. But that’s the one she gave me, sir.

Odd. Why?

I don’t know, sir.

Never gave you a hint?

No sir.

She raised you?

Yes sir.

Everyone else died before their time?

Yes sir.

Dysentery?

Yes sir.

Hm, that’s the paradox isn’t it. The Nile gives us the land but takes its toll in return. Good water is also bad water. Now admit it, son. A moment ago I caught you frightened by the past and that’s not the way to get ahead when you’re black the way we are. And speaking of the past, what do you know about yours?

I know where my great-grandmother came from, sir.

Nubia, I’d say, by the looks of it. Except for those eyes of yours. Where did you get them?