Sinai Tapestry (The Jerusalem Quartet Book 1) Page 21

  Yet somehow as he sank deeper and deeper into debt in 1920 and 1921, so deep he knew he would never retrieve himself, he still managed to give the impression he was completely confident in what he was doing, a trait he had learned from observing his father and grandfather perhaps, although with them the confidence had been real.

  In any case Stern was so convincing only a few people ever knew the truth, only the three people who were close to him over time.

  Sivi, then as before the war.

  O’Sullivan Beare a year later in Smyrna when he made his last trip for Stern and broke with him.

  And finally Maud a decade after that when the first victims of Smyrna were beginning to fall in that small chance circle of revolving lovers and friends and relatives, all of whom eventually came to discover their lives had once irreparably crossed on a warm September day in that most beautiful of cities on the shores of the Eastern Mediterranean.

  Late one cold December afternoon in 1921 O’Sullivan Beare sat slumped in a corner of an Arab coffee shop near Damascus Gate, a glass of wretched Arab cognac empty on the table in front of him. Outside a heavy wind groaned on the rooftops and pushed through the alleys, threatening snow. Two Arabs listlessly played backgammon by the window while a third slept under a newspaper. Night was falling in the street.

  Empty as empty out there, thought Joe, not a body stirring and right they are, warm and home with the family where any sane man belongs tonight. Why did the old father back in the Aran Islands have to go seeing a place like this for me? Bloody trouble, that’s what prophecy is, I could have caught fish like him and maybe been content with a decent pint by the lire on bad nights sharing a song and a dance with the neighbors. Mad Arabs and Jews hustling about, a soul doesn’t need the bloody ups and downs of a Jerusalem, Jaysus knows.

  The door opened and a large hunched man came in rubbing his hands against the cold. He stamped his feet and smiled. Joe nodded. Moves softly for a big man, he thought. Moves as if he had some place better to go than this dead Arab excuse for a pub and maybe he has who knows.

  Stern pulled back a chair. He ordered two cognacs and sat down.

  You’re having us take our lives in our hands with that item, said Joe, making his fingers into a pistol and firing once at both their heads. Same business they use to fill the lamps. Saw them doing it, swear I did, just before you showed up. Burns better than anything else, the man said, and is cheaper in the bargain.

  Stern laughed.

  I thought it might help keep the wind out.

  Not likely, be nice if it did. But who’d believe it I want to know. If anybody at home had said the Holy Land could be like this I’d have thought they were waterlogged in the head, been lying out in a bog too long sleeping one off. Sun and sand and milk and honey I thought it was, but this is worse than rowing around my island in a gale. At least then you were fighting the bloody currents all the time and didn’t have time to worry your mind with things but here you just sit and wait, you think and then you sit and wait some more. Bloody wonder how people in this city just sit and wait.

  They take the long view, said Stern with a smile.

  Seems they do, that must be it. True religion I suppose. Jerusalem the city of miracles. The other day an old Arab I know and myself took a wander in to look at the Dome of the Rock and what’s he begin to do but stare and stare at a little chink on one side of the rock. Hello there, I said, is that chink something special? It is, he said, it’s the footprint Mohammed’s horse made when the Prophet climbed on his horse here and rode off to heaven. I was just remembering how the sparks were flying then, he said, and the horns sounding and the cymbals clanging and thunder and lightning shaking the sky.

  Good, I said, that’s the job all right, and then a few minutes later we’d moved on and were padding around in the gloom of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Greek priests were muttering around in their corner waving incense and the Armenian priests were muttering around in their corner waving incense, likewise all the others, everybody’s eyes mostly closed, and then shortly after that we’re out in the open again trying to get some fresh air up on the hill above Jaffa Gate, and who’s there but the same Hassid who was there eight hours earlier when we passed before and he’s still not noticing it because his eyes are mostly closed too, and he’s still facing the Old City more or less oriented in the direction of the Wall but in eight hours he hasn’t gotten any closer to it, just rocking and muttering and hasn’t moved an inch.

  What I’m trying to say is people around here seem to have all the time in the world for that, for waving incense and rocking and muttering and carrying on until twelve hundred years ago or two thousand years ago or whatever it is they’re waiting for comes along again and the cymbals clang and the horns sound and everybody climbs on the horse to heaven at last and again, sparks flying and thunder shaking. Weird, that’s what it is.

  He emptied his glass and choked. Stern ordered two more.

  Miserable stuff, said Joe, but it does clean your teeth. You know, Stern, this old article I was just telling you about, the Arab who thinks he was there watching when Mohammed made his move once upon a time, he’s something like you in a way. I mean not because he was born both an Arab and a Jew, physical fact, but because he’s gotten it into his head he’s been living in Jerusalem since before people had such names, since before they were divided into this and that, know what I mean? So thinking the way he does he can play all kinds of tricks with reality the same as you do, pretend it doesn’t exist or whatever, only his tastes don’t run to politics and that kind of shit.

  Joe drank and made a face.

  I’m rambling too much, it’s this poison seeping into my brain. Anyway there’s also this Franciscan I know, the baking priest I call him because he’s been spending the last sixty years here baking the same four loaves of bread. I ask him if he thinks he’s following in the footsteps of our Savior with all this multiplication and if so shouldn’t he be working with five loaves instead of four, and what does he do but put a twinkle in his eye and say No, nothing so grand for me, I wouldn’t presume as much as that, I just bake four in order to have the parameters of life. Jaysus, know what I mean? Everybody’s daft around here what with holy horses and muttering to themselves and too much incense cutting off the oxygen supply and too much rocking back and forth for sixty years baking heavenly bread. Daft, that’s all. Dreaming up crazy impossible things like you. It’s in the air or lack of it. No bog gas up here to keep a man in touch with the good slippery muck under his feet.

  Stern smiled in a kindly way.

  You seem depressed this evening.

  Me? Go on you say. Jaysus why would I be down just because I’m in a crazy city twelve hundred years or two thousand miles or four loaves of bread away from home on Christmas Eve? Why?

  He gulped the cognac and coughed.

  You got one of those awful cigarettes you carry?

  Stern gave him one. The first wisps of snow were blowing across the windows, the darkness outside was deeper. Stern watched him fidget nervously with the Victoria Cross, then with his beard.

  You know Joe, you’ve changed a lot in the last year.

  Sure I suppose I have, why not, I’m at the changing age. Not so long ago I was a true believer like one of those items you see around here on street corners mumbling over a pile of stones. Sixteen I was at the Dublin post office and then I went into training with an old U.S. cavalry musketoon for three years waiting for the day to come and come it did, calling itself the Black and Tans, so I went on the run in the mountains and it went all right for a while, but do you know what that means being on the run up there?

  Joe’s voice was rising in anger. Stern watched him.

  Being cold and wet every minute of the day and night, that’s what, and being alone and alone. Those mountains aren’t meant for running, there’s nothing but rain and sinking in up to your knee every step you take but I kept running because I had to, ran all night to surprise the bloody Blacks
and Tans. You can’t run up there but I did, just did is all, there was no other way to be doing what I was doing and do you know where it bloody well got me?

  Joe slammed his fist on the table. He was shaking. He grabbed Stern’s sleeve and twisted it.

  To a vacant lot in Cork that’s where, barefoot in rags because the people were starving and some of them were willing to turn a pound by turning informer to keep their children from starving to death. So they informed and the mountains shrank until I had no place to hide and ended up in Cork on the banks of the River Lee listening to shrieking sea gulls, an Easter Monday it was and me exhausted leaning against a ruined tannery wall with nothing to eat in three days, knowing it was all over, the three spires of St Finnbar’s up there against the sky and me not smart enough then to ask myself what that Trinity in front of me really meant.

  But I’ll tell you something else now. While those mountains were shrinking I was growing, I was taking those soggy heaps and putting them inside me and getting bigger, and that abandoned churchyard where I buried the old musketoon in the rain, that mud was consecrated by me and nobody else.

  You talk about your kingdom come to be, Stern. Well I fought for mine, I’ve done that and it threw me out, just kept pushing on me until hope was gone and everything was gone in that vacant lot across from St. Finnbar’s beside the River Lee and I had to escape my Ireland as a Poor Clare, Jaysus, me on the run as a nun do you see it. One frightened nun quiet as a mouse on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, that’s what was left of me at the age of twenty.

  Joe let go of his sleeve and banged the table.

  Bloody motherlands and bloody causes, the hell with them all I say. I never want to see one again.

  Stern sat back and waited. There’s more, he said after a moment.

  What’s more? What are you talking about?

  This resentment and anger, the way you’ve changed. It’s not really Ireland, you know that. That was over before you got here. It’s something that’s happened since then.

  Joe’s eyes softened and all at once his lips began to tremble. He quickly covered his face with his hands but not before Stern saw the tears welling up. Stern reached out and held his arm.

  Joe, you don’t always have to hide things in front of people, nobody’s going to respect you more for that. Sometimes it’s better to let the feelings out. Why don’t you tell me about it?

  He kept his hands up. The quiet sobbing lasted a minute or two and then he spoke in an unsteady voice.

  What’s to tell? There was a woman that’s all and she left me. You see I just never imagined such a thing could happen, not when you loved someone and they loved you. I thought once you were together like that you just went on loving each other and being together, that’s the way it is where I come from. Sure it was dumb of me, sure it was simple minded not to think it could be another way but I just didn’t know. If I wasn’t a man in the Dublin post office I damn well became one during those next four years in the mountains, but women, I didn’t know anything about women. Nothing. I loved her and I thought she loved me but she just fooled me, just tricked me and did me in like the fool I was.

  Stern shook his head sadly.

  Don’t keep telling yourself that, it only makes you bitter and it might not have been that way at all. It could have been something else altogether. Was she older than you?

  Ten years, your age. How’d you know that?

  Just a guess. But look Joe, ten years is a long time. Perhaps something happened to her during those ten years that separated you, something she was afraid of, still afraid of, something that had hurt her so much she didn’t dare face it again. People cut off love for all kinds of reasons but generally it has to do with them, not with somebody else. So it might have had nothing to do with you at all. Some experience from the past, who knows.

  Joe looked up. The anger had returned.

  But I trusted her don’t you see, I loved her and it never even crossed my mind not to trust her, not once, never, I was too simpleminded for that. I just trusted her and loved her and thought it would go on forever and ever because I loved her, as if that were enough reason for anything to last. Well from now on there’s no bloody room in me anymore for believing in things and fooling myself about them lasting forever. The baking priest has been baking the four boundaries of his life for sixty years, laying out his map, and sure you’ve got to do that, sure you’ve got to find the four walls of your own chances and I’ve done that now, they include me and no one else, just me.

  But Joe, where will that lead you?

  To what I want, being in charge of myself. What do you mean?

  Stern spread his hands on the table.

  I mean being in charge, what’s that?

  Nothing going wrong. Nobody throwing me out of my country, because I won’t have a country. Nobody leaving me, because I won’t be there where they can leave me. Not giving anybody a chance to hurt me ever again.

  That can still happen, Joe.

  Not if I have the power it can’t.

  And the glory?

  Never mind the sarcasm. As a matter of fact though I don’t give a damn about glory, being out of sight is fine with me as long as I have power. Tell me, who’s going to be the richest oil merchant in the Middle East when he comes of age?

  Nubar Wallenstein, said Stern wearily.

  That’s him. So what are you doing about it?

  Waiting for him to come of age.

  The hell with the bloody sarcasm, can’t you see I mean what I’m telling you? I’m serious about this. I’m making plans now and before long I’m going to be playing a winning hand in this game they call Jerusalem.

  Stern shook his head. He sighed.

  You haven’t got it right, Joe. You just haven’t.

  Joe smiled and signaled for two more cognacs. He took one of Stern’s cheap cigarettes and rolled it from one side of his mouth to the other.

  Haven’t I now, Father? Is that the judgment today from the confessional? Well all I know is I’ve got it the way it is around here, pretty much the way it is. Maybe not the way the good book says it’s supposed to be but still the way it is. So why don’t we stop being sentimental on Christmas Eve and get down to talking about guns and money?

  He raised his tumbler.

  Doesn’t bother you does it, Stern? It shouldn’t, don’t worry about it. Until I find something better to do I’ll run guns to your Arab and Jewish and Christian country that doesn’t exist and be happy doing it, what do I care that it’s never going to exist. And you’ll get good value from me, you know that. Just no more shit about somewhere being someplace because it isn’t, I don’t have a homeland anymore. My last home was in Jericho with a woman who left me.

  He grinned.

  Cold in Jerusalem wouldn’t you say? It seems to be snowing in the land of milk and honey, do you see it now. So here’s to your kind of power and mine. Here’s to you, Father Stern.

  Stern slowly raised his glass.

  To you, Joe.

  In the spring of 1922 Stern was in Smyrna to meet with his principle contact in Turkey, a wealthy secret Greek activist. The man’s chief interest was in seeing Constantinople returned to the Greeks, for which a Greek army was then fighting Kemal and the Turks in the interior. But he had been working with Stern for ten years helping him smuggle arms to nationalist movements in Syria and Iraq, ever since his and Stern’s aims had come to coincide during the Balkan wars.

  In fact it was Sivi who frequently provided Stern with the money he was always so desperately lacking, the same Sivi who had once befriended Maud and helped her with money after the death of her husband Yanni, his much younger half-brother.

  In addition the notorious old man, now seventy, was the undisputed queen of sexual excess in Smyrna, where he always appeared at the opera dressed in flowing red gowns and a large red hat spilling with roses to be plucked off and tossed to his friends when he made his entrance into his box, his ruby rings flashing and a long unlit cigar firmly
fixed between his teeth. Because of the reputation of his father as one of the founding statesmen of the modern Greek nation, because of his own eccentric manner and wealth and because of Smyrna’s importance as the most international city in the Middle East, he was an extremely effective agent with influential connections in many places, particularly in the numerous Greek communities found everywhere.

  He lived alone with his secretary, a young Frenchwoman once educated in a convent but long since seduced by the sensual air of Smyrna society and the salon Sivi ran there. Stern’s meeting with him, as usual, was at three o’clock in the morning since Sivi’s entertainments ran late. Stern left his hotel ten minutes before that and strolled along the harbor to see that he wasn’t being followed. At three he slipped into an alley and walked quickly around to the back door of the villa. He knocked quietly, saw the peephole open and heard the bolt slide. The secretary closed the door gently behind him.

  Hello, Theresa.

  Hello again. You look tired.

  He smiled. Why not, the old sinner will never meet me at a decent hour. How’s he been lately?

  In bed. His gums.

  What about them?

  He says they hurt, he won’t eat.

  Oh that, don’t worry about it, it happens every three or four years. He gets it into his head his teeth are falling out and becomes afraid he might have to make a public appearance without his cigar in place. It only lasts a week or two. Have the cook send in soft-boiled eggs.

  She laughed. Thank you, doctor. She rapped on the bedroom door and there was a soft thump on the other side. Stern raised his eyebrows.

  A rubber ball, she whispered, it means come in. No unnecessary words. It seems opening his mouth to fresh air might hasten the ravaging of his gums. I’ll see you before you leave.

  Sivi was sitting in bed propped up by an immense pile of red satin pillows. He wore a thick red dressing gown and a swath of red flannel that entirely covered his head and was tied under his chin. The large olive wood logs crackling in the fireplace gave the only light in the room. Stern pulled aside a drape and found all the windows locked and shuttered against the mild spring night. He stripped off his jacket in the oppressive heat and sat down on the edge of the bed. He felt the old man’s pulse while Sivi sniffed at a pan of steaming water on the night table.