Sinai Tapestry

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.

Twenty-seven years ago, she whispered.

Yes.

But can any of it be true?

It's all true and there's more, much more. The baby you had for example. Sophia named him Nubar, a family name, it seems she was of Armenian descent originally. She brought him up with as much love as she had had hatred for Catherine and was able to give him a fortune through her early manipulations in the oil market. He's extremely influential although very few people have ever even heard of him. Now what do you think of that?

Nothing. I can't think anything about it. It's all some kind of magic.

Not at all, said Stern, laughing and taking her by the arm, leading her up the street away from the water.

They talked late that night and many others and slowly she pulled away from despair as eventually it all came out, the horror of her first marriage and the loneliness of her second when she felt she had been abandoned again by someone she loved, the hidden fear from her childhood growing malignantly then until a time came when she could bear it no longer and she ran away from Joe, the great love of her life, the one thing she had always wanted in the world, a magical dream come true in Jerusalem and she had left it.

Every act futile and bitter then. More years when she was terrified at growing old. Trying to find Sivi again, some link with the past, surprised to learn he was also living in Istanbul, tracing him with difficulty and shocked when she found him at last, so vastly different from the elegant and worldly man she had known at the time of the First World War. Pathetically alone now, working as a common laborer in a hospital for incurables.

And the strange muddled story about his former secretary that obsessed him, that he repeated over and over, how Theresa had gone to a place called Ein Karem in Palestine, there to suffer some kind of terrible self-inflicted penance in an Arab leper colony.

It was inexplicable. How could people change so much?

Stern shook his head. It wasn't time to speak, her memory of standing beside the water was too recent.

Sivi? Yes he had known him once, anyone who had ever spent any time in Smyrna had known Sivi. Yes and Theresa too. He nodded for her to go on.

Kind and gentle Sivi, totally broken when she found him, grave and sad and bewildered, living in a small squalid room near the Bosporus, so confused he often forgot to feed himself.

She had decided to devote herself to caring for him, it was the best thing she could do. She cleaned for him and washed and cooked, and for a while she felt stronger. Helping Sivi gave life some meaning again.

But then that awful rainy afternoon came when she went to pick him up at the hospital after work as she did every day and found him strapped to a bed, beyond the impenetrable barrier of madness, the same afternoon Stern had found her by the water.

And now after forty-three years what did she have?

The memory of one exquisite month long ago on the shores of the Gulf of Aqaba. That and the son she had conceived there.

Would you like to meet him? asked Maud.

Yes very much.

She looked at him shyly.

Please don't laugh. I named him Bernini. The dreams were crumbling but not quite gone. I suppose I hoped someday he would also carve his own beautiful fountains and stairways to somewhere.

Stern smiled.

And why not? It's a good name.

But Maud looked suddenly troubled. She took his hand and said nothing.

In the small apartment above the Bosporus, Stern tried to amuse the boy with stories from his childhood.

He described the first clumsy balloon he had built when he was about Bernini's age.

Did you fly?

For a yard or two, depending on how hard I pushed. After that I just went bumping down the hillside.

Why didn't you put wheels on the basket? Then you could have used it as a sailboat and crossed the desert that way.

I could have I suppose, but I didn't. I kept trying to build better balloons and after a while I made one that would fly.

I wouldn't have done that, said the boy distantly. Sailing would have been good enough for me.

They were sitting on the narrow terrace. Maud came out with tea and the boy lay down on his stomach and gazed at the ships plowing up and down the straits. When Stern left, Maud walked to the corner with him.

He's often like that, I don't know how to explain it. He talks for a minute or two about something and then drops it as if he were afraid to say too much, as if by touching certain thoughts he was afraid they would go away. He wouldn't ask you why you wanted to fly for example, nor would he tell you why he would have preferred to sail. Instead he just lay down and watched the boats. I knew his imagination was working and he was thinking about those things, but he wouldn't talk about it with us.

He's young.

But not that young and sometimes it frightens me. His thoughts don't always follow each other, somehow the sequence is wrong. Again it's as if he were leaving things out on purpose. In school he can't get along at all except for drawing.

Stern smiled.

With his name that's fine.

But Maud didn't smile.

No. He used to draw at home and now he doesn't even do that anymore. He just lies on his elbows and gazes at things, especially the boats. And there's something worse, he can't read. Doctors say there's nothing wrong but he can't seem to learn. I mean he's already twelve years old.

She stopped. Stern put his arm around her. He didn't know how to help.

Listen. He's healthy and good-natured and even though he may be a little too much inside himself right now, that's not necessarily bad or wrong. After all he seems happy enough and isn't that the most important thing?

There were tears in her eyes.

I don't know. I just don't know what to do.

Well at least you could share the burden. Why not get in touch with the boy's father? He's still in Jerusalem, near enough.

She moved her feet uneasily.

I couldn't do that. I'm too ashamed of the way I treated him.

But that was twelve years ago, Maud.

I know but I still couldn't bring myself to do it. I was too cruel to him and none of it was his fault. That would take a kind of strength I don't have yet.

Stern looked at the ground. She took his hands and tried to smile.

Well don't worry about it. It'll be all right

Good, he said in a soft voice. I know it will be.

And now you're going to be away for a while?

He grinned.

It shows that desperately?

A man on his travels, yes.

About a month probably. I'll cable.

Bless you, she whispered, for being who you are.

She went up on her tiptoes and kissed him.

Stern used to tell her how his father had somehow managed to mark his memory as a child with every name and event from his long years of wandering, in the course of time narrating his entire journey much as a blind man might have done in the days when there was no other way for the stages of the past to be passed from generation to generation, in effect rewriting the haj of his life in indelible ink upon his young son's mind, swirling stroke around stroke in the complex etching of a spiritual stylus.

Yet strangely in those myriad experiences, those majestic flowing volumes that together comprised Strongbow's legendary voyage through the desert, never once had the old explorer talked about the gentle Persian girl he had loved so dearly in his youth for a few weeks, no more, before she was carried off in an epidemic. Why?

Why should he have? answered Maud. He had loved her, that's all, what more was there to say?

Besides, when we look back on it there are always mysteries in someone's life and perhaps the gentle Persian girl is his.

You may be right, said Stern vaguely, standing and then sitting down again. But Maud didn't think he was really talking about the Persian girl and Strongbow. There had to be something else on his mind the way he was acting, something much more personal. She waited but he didn't go on.

What else did he never mention? she said after a moment

It's very curious, but the Sinai Bible of all things. Surely he knew about it Why that one secret held back?

Why do you think?

Stern shrugged. He said he couldn't imagine why. He got up again and began roaming around the room.

When did he die? I don't think you've ever told me that.

August 1914, the very month the nineteenth century came to an end. You know I remember that prophecy you said O'Sullivan Beare's father made two months before that, that seventeen of his sons were going to be killed in the Great War. Well Strongbow must have had the gift too. He was ninety-five years old and he'd gone blind by then but his health was good and his mind was certainly as clear as ever.

The main thing seemed to be simply that he felt he'd lived long enough. I was there with him in Ya'qub's old tent during those last days and that's exactly what he said. It's enough.

Ya'qub had already died?

Yes, but only a few months before, the two of them inseparable to the end, always talking and talking over their endless cups of coffee. Anyway, after he said it was enough he did something that couldn't have been a coincidence.

Stern frowned and lapsed into silence. He seemed to drift away.

Well?

I'm sorry, what?

The thing he did, what was it?

Oh. He predicted the hour of his death and went to sleep to await it.

And never woke up.

That's right.

And what wasn't a coincidence?

Dying like that. It was a story he'd heard long ago from some bedouin called the Jebeliyeh. Around 1840

a blind mole did the same thing at the foot of Mt Sinai after talking to a hermit on the mountain. And of course you know who the hermit was.

Wallenstein.

Yes, Wallenstein. A hermit in 1840 and a blind mole in 1914. Strongbow was obviously dreaming Wallenstein's dream when he died. Dreaming of the Sinai Bible.

Once more Stern's voice trailed off and his attention drifted away. Maud waited as he restlessly crossed the room to the window and returned and went back to the window again.

And if it was so important to him, you still can't imagine why he never told you about it?

No, said Stern quickly.

A thunderstorm had broken overhead and lightning suddenly lit the room in a violent burst but Stern seemed unaware of it.

No, he repeated. No.

Maud gazed at the floor. She wanted to believe him but she didn't. She knew it wasn't true, there was no way it could be true. And even though she knew the two old men only through Stern, she could picture exactly what had happened. It was as clear to her as if she had been there and seen Ya'qub and Strongbow marching back and forth between their almond trees in one of their interminable rambling discussions.

Ya'qub saying merrily that this was fine, all the things the boy was learning, but then suddenly serious and tugging Strongbow's sleeve and whispering earnestly that one mystery must be excluded from their teachings, at least that, for the boy's sake, one for him to discover alone by himself.

The former hakim pondering the words and nodding solemnly over this piece of wisdom, the two of them sitting up late that night in their tent trying to decide which mystery it should be among the thousands they shared after all their years of tramping from Timbuktu to Persia, of tracing a hillside in the Yemen and going nowhere.

So Stern was lying to himself. He pretended all his days and nights were taken up with his clandestine cause but it just wasn't so. There was something else more important to him.

Dizzily then she recalled things he had said and all at once it became obvious. For years he too had been secretly in search of the Sinai Bible.

Wallenstein. Strongbow. O'Sullivan Beare and now Stern.

Where would it ever end?

She didn't want to talk about it but she knew she couldn't just ignore it, so finally she asked the question.

Stern, what made you begin looking for the Sinai Bible?

It was late afternoon and he was pouring himself a glass of vodka. His shoulders seemed to twitch and he poured more than he usually did.

Well, when I realized what it meant I had to. What was in it I mean. What's still in it wherever it is.

And what's that, Stern? For you?

Well everything. All my ideas and hopes, what I was really looking for years ago in Paris when I thought of a new nation here, a homeland for Arabs and Christians and Jews alike, you see what I mean don't you? That homeland could have been here in the beginning before people were divided into those names, the Sinai original might show that. And if it does I would have proof, or at least I could prove it to myself even if to no one else.

Prove what? What you've done? What you work for? Your life? What?

Well yes, all those things, everything.

Maud shook her head.

That damned book.

Why say that? Think what it could mean if it were found.

Maybe, I don't know anymore. It just makes me angry.

But why does it make you angry? Because of O'Sullivan Beare? Because he wanted to find it so much?

Yes and no. Perhaps it was just that then, now it's something more.

What?

She shrugged wearily.

I'm not sure. The way it obsesses people. The way it sends lives careening off in all directions.

Wallenstein in his cave for seven years going mad while the ants eat his eyeballs, Strongbow marching through the desert for forty years never able to sleep in the same place twice, Joe and his wild search for treasures that don't exist, you and your impossible nation. Why are there these mirages that pull men and pull them on and on and on? Why does it have to be the same with all of you? You hear about that damn book and you go crazy. You all do.

She stopped. He took her hand.

But it's not the Sinai Bible that does it, is it?

More vodka?

Maud?

No I know it isn't, of course it's not. But all the same I wish that damn fanatic Wallenstein had never had his insane dream. Why couldn't he have left us alone?

But he hasn't got anything to do with it either. It was there and all he did was find it and live it, or relive it and bring it back to us, all the things we've always wanted. Canaan, just imagine it. The happy land of Canaan three thousand years ago.

It wasn't happy.

It might have been. No one can say until the original is found.

Yes they can. You know it wasn't

He didn't answer.

Damn it, say you do. Admit it. Say you know.

All right then, I know.

She sighed and began stroking his hand absent-mindedly. The anger in her face had drained away.

And yet, she whispered.

Yes that's right, that's always it And yet And yet.

She picked up the vodka bottle and looked at it.

Christ, she muttered. Oh Christ.

Yes, said Stern with a thin smile. Among others.

Dizzying and more, for although O'Sullivan Beare had the account of the Bible all mixed up, confusing it with the vague stories Haj Harun told him, Stern actually knew where the Sinai original was. He knew it had been buried in the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem.

Yet he had never looked for it there.

Why?

Stern laughed and filled his glass.

You know that's the only part of Sophia's story I've never believed. It would have been too obvious a hiding place for someone as clever and dedicated as Wallenstein. Look at it. He spent twelve years in a basement hole in the Armenian Quarter before he went to the Sinai to do his forgery. Would he have been likely to come back and bury the original in that same basement hole? Ask questions about him and someone would remember, the spot could be found and all of Wallenstein's efforts would have been for nothing. Would Sophia have allowed that considering how much she loved him? She knew what the forgery had cost him, what it eventually cost her too, so she lied to protect him, to protect herself, to keep their suffering from being meaningless.

Stern went on talking, pacing and puffing cigarettes. He poured himself another drink. Maud looked out the window in embarrassment.

Why was he saying all this? There was no reason for Sophia to lie to protect Wallenstein after he'd already protected himself. When he went to Egypt to find parchment he'd traveled as a wealthy Armenian dealer in antiquities. Who knew what other disguises there had been?

The basement hole could have had a large house over it where he passed himself off as someone else. Or a shop where he actually dealt in antiquities. Or a church where he'd gotten himself ordained as a priest, or a monastery where he was posing as a monk. Anything at all. Obviously the manuscript would never be found by asking questions about Wallenstein and his basement hole.

Stern, a little drunk now, began to describe all the places he had looked for the manuscript. At first he thought it must have been hidden in a large city so he went to Cairo and Damascus and Baghdad, into the back alleys at night.

Did anyone have a very old book to sell? A precious book? He was willing to pay a great deal.

Knowing smiles. Levantine language. He was led through shadowy rooms where every sort of living creature was offered for sale, the body in question guaranteed to be as satisfying as the oldest book in the world.

O venerable scholar, added his guide.

Stern fled to the open air. Perhaps a small cave near the Dead Sea? Wallenstein having chosen this secure place as he was limping home from Mt Sinai?

Stern cranked up his tractor car and sped down wadis and across the dunes chasing stray camels, on the lookout for caves. When he spied a bedouin on the horizon he raced over to him and whipped open the steel hatch. Up popped Stern's dusty face, his tanker's goggles staring blankly down at the frightened man.

A very old book? A cave in the vicinity? Even a small one?

Next he favored the idea of a remote oasis, a dot in the desert so small it supported only one family, surely an ingenious hiding place.

The hydrogen valves hissed and his balloon swelled. On the tip of the Sinai peninsula he hovered over a tiny clump of green. The woman and children ran into the tent and the man raised his knife to defend his family against this floating apparition from the Thousand and One Nights.

Twenty yards above the ground Stern's head appeared.

Any old books down there?

He changed his mind. It wasn't a place he should be looking for but a person. Wallenstein had found a wandering holy man and fixed the dervish with his eyes, whispering that here was the true holy of holies.

The dervish must carry it until he was ready to die and then pass it on to another holy man in a similar way, for this bundle or ark was the manifestation of God on earth carried by secret bearers since the beginning of time and henceforth to the end of time, letting it fall being no less a matter than letting fall the world itself.

Stern went into the deserts and bazaars asking his question.

What sacred object do you carry?

Rags were unwrapped and treasures appeared, slivers of wood and crumpled flowers and thimbles of muddy water, carved matchsticks and cracked glass and smudged slips of paper, a live mouse and an embalmed toad and many other manifestations of God, in fact just about everything except what he sought.

And you? Stern wearily asked once more.

I have no need for graven images, answered a man disdainfully. God is within me. Wait and tomorrow at dawn you will see the one and true God.

Stern spent the night. The next morning the man rose at an early hour, ate a meager breakfast and moved his bowels. He went through the mess and came up with a small smooth stone which he reverently washed and anointed with oil, then swallowed again with a triumphant smile.

Tomorrow at the same time, he said, God will appear again if you wish to return and worship Him.

And so Stern went on telling more stories and pouring more vodka and lighting more cigarettes, laughing at himself and making Maud laugh until long after midnight.

When he left she went around the room picking up ashtrays and sweeping up the ashes that had fallen everywhere as his hands flew and he talked and talked. In the kitchen she stood holding the empty bottles, gazing down at the sink. All at once she was exhausted.

She understood now why he had never made love to her, why he had probably never made love to anyone, why the sexual encounters in his life could never have been more than that.

Removed, anonymous, quickly over, and Stern alone in the end as in the beginning.

Never with someone who could know him. Never. Too fearful of that.

He had already been tossing for several hours, his sleep torn by the grinding of his teeth. The only rest he ever knew was when he first lay down and now, two hours before dawn, even the tossing was over. His jaw aching, he reached for the blankets thrown off at his feet and lay shivering in the dark.

At last a gray light came in the window. Stern slid open a drawer by his bed and took out the needle. The warmth rolled over him and he fell back on the bed.

I'm slipping beautifully, he thought. Every night a dozen new chapters for the secret lost book he dreamed of finding, exquisitely beautiful episodes, nothing would ever come of them.

Once more he was a boy floating high in the night sky above the ruins of Marib among the breezes and stirring stars, above a distant drifting world, far above the Temple of the Moon suddenly seen in the sands. For minutes it lasted, all the minutes of his childhood in the Yemen with his father and his grandfather, wise and gentle men waiting for him to grasp their mysteries.

I'm slipping beautifully, he thought as the gray in the window faded to whiteness and he slept again under the morphine, the other hour needed for life.

He awoke feeling numb and drowsy and threw cold water over himself. No dreams now, only an empty day, but at least he had survived the harsh coming of the light.

-18-

Melchizedek 2200 B.C.-1933

Faith never dies, Prester John.

On a spring evening in 1933 Haj Harun and Beare sat on a hillside east of the Old City watching the sunset, the light shifting slowly over the towers and minarets and changing their colors, softly laying shadows along the invisible alleys. After a time the old man sighed and wiped his eyes.

So beautiful, so very beautiful. But there are going to be riots, I know there are. Do you think we should get guns, Prester John? You and me?

Joe shrugged. You and me, the old man really meant it. He actually believed the two of them could do something.

Ever since Smyrna I've been worrying about it, Haj Harun went on. Does it have to be the way it was up there? They had their lovely city too and all kinds of people living in it and look what happened. I just can't understand why the people of Jerusalem are doing this to each other. And it's not as if we were facing the Romans or the Crusaders, it's the people inside the walls who are doing it. I'm frightened. Will we have to get guns? Will we?

Joe shook his head.

No, no guns, they won't get us anywhere. I tried that when I was young and it's a useless interim game.

Use guns and you're no better than the Black and Tans and that's not good enough.

But what do we do then? What can we do?

Joe picked up a rock and scaled it out over the hillside toward the valley separating them from the city.

Jaysus I don't know. I talked with the baking priest about it and he doesn't know either. Just nods and goes back to baking his loaves in the four shapes. Doesn't dance anymore either, which is a bad sign. But these troubles in the city can't be all that new to you and Jaysus that's what makes me wonder. How have you been putting up with it all these years?

Putting up with what?

What the bloody people have been doing to you. Throwing stones at you and knocking the teeth out of your head and clawing you with their fingernails and stealing what little you have, beating you and insulting you and calling you names, all those things. If that had happened to me someplace I'd have left it long ago.

I can't leave. You don't seem to understand.

No I don't and I wonder if I ever will. Look, Smyrna was bad all right but there's something else that's been on my mind since then, worries me and worries me and just won't go away. All this time I've been looking for the Sinai Bible and now I'm beginning to wonder. It has to do with that, you see, with a promise I made myself then. Jaysus I'm just plain confused. Can I ask you a question?

Haj Harun reached out and took his hand. The lights were going on in the Old City and in the hills. Joe looked up and saw that the old man's eyes were shining.

Prester John?

Yes all right, well it's just this. I loved a woman once and she left me but you see I've learned I'll never love another one. It seems that's it for me and what's a soul to do then? What's a soul to do?

Simply go on loving her.

So I seem to be doing but what's the sense of it? Where does it lead?

The frail hand tightened on his and then was gone. Haj Harun knelt in front of him and held him by the shoulders, his face serious.

You're still young, Prester John. Don't you see it leads nowhere? It's an end in itself.

But that's a hopeless way to do things.

No. As yet you have little faith but a time will come.

Faith are you saying? I was born with faith but it's been going these years not coming, going and going until it's gone now.

No, that can't happen.

But it did all right, she took it.

No, she gives it, she never takes it.

Oh Jaysus man, there you go again talking about Jerusalem. This is a woman I'm referring to, a flesh and blood woman.

I see.

Well then?

Faith never dies, Prester John. If you love a woman you'll find her someday. In my time I've seen many temples built on that mountain across the valley and although they've all fallen to dust one still remains and will always remain, the temple of the first king the city ever had. Yes I'm frightened when I think of Smyrna and what it may mean for tomorrow, but I also know that Melchizedek's City of Peace can never die because when that gentle King of Salem reigned on that mountain so long ago, long before Abraham came to seek him out and receive his blessing and father the sons called Ishmael and Isaac in this land, long before then Melchizedek had already dreamed his gentle dream, my dream, and in so doing given it life forever, without father, without mother, without descent, having neither beginning of days nor end of life.

Who's that you're talking about now? You or Melchizedek?

Haj Harun smiled shyly.

We're the same person.

Go on with you, you're all mixed up.

Haj Harun laughed.

Do you think so? Come let's go back, she's waiting for us.

They started down the hillside, Joe stumbling and falling in the darkness, Haj Harun floating lightly along the rough path that he had followed innumerable times.

Bloody eternal city, thought Joe, looking up at the walls rising above them. Bloody marvel how he keeps it running, lurking up there on the Mount of Olives at sundown disguised as a broken-down Arab.

Keeping watch he is, guarding the approaches, a former antiquities dealer for sure, old Melchizedek the first and last long spinning his city through the ages with no end in sight. Riots and mayhem to come, fearful of Smyrna but still trying to take the long view, as Stern once said.

Madness all right, that's what this place is, daft time spinning out of control, not meant for a sober Christian who just wants to make do with three squares a day and no heavy lifting and maybe a fortune on the side. But all the same who'd have thought a poor boy from the Aran Islands would one day be consulting in the shadows of Salem with the very same king who was handing out blessings here long before these bloody Arabs and Jews even existed with their bloody troubles?

-19-

Athens

Life rich and full in the wine of faraway places.

When Maud returned to live in Athens, Stern often came to visit her in the small house by the sea. A cable would arrive from somewhere and a few mornings later she would be standing on the pier in Piraeus waiting to meet his ship, Stern all at once leaning over the rail above her shouting and waving, rushing out to hug her in the clamor of travelers and banging gangways, his arms overflowing with the presents he had brought, masses of brightly colored paper tied with dozens of ribbons for Bernini to unravel.

Back at the little house by the sea Bernini sat on the floor working his way through the pile of parcels, holding up each new wonder as he uncovered it, amulets and charms and picture books, an Arab cloak and Arab headgear, a model of the Great Pyramid made of building blocks complete with secret tunnels and a treasure chamber.

Bernini clapped his hands, Maud laughed, Stern bounded into the kitchen reeling off the dishes he was going to make for dinner that night, lamb in Arab pastes and fish in French sauces, delicate pastries and vegetables touched by heady spices and aspics of the rainbow. She helped him find the pots and pans and sat in a corner while he chopped and sniffed and tasted, dashing a drop here and a pinch there and frowning judiciously, all the while carrying on a headlong account of scenes and anecdotes from Damascus and Egypt and Baghdad, exhilarating to Maud in the routine of her otherwise quiet life.

Toward the middle of the afternoon he opened the champagne and caviar and later they lit candles in the narrow garden to be near the sound of the waves as they savored his marvelous dishes, Stern still flooding the table with his stories from everywhere, extravagant costumes and ridiculous gossip and imagined conversations beguiling and raucous by turns, Stern leaping up to act the parts, standing on a chair and swinging his arms and smiling and sneaking along the wall, pointing and making a ludicrous face, tapping his glass, laughing and raising a flower.

Bernini came to say good-night and there was stillness for a while in the spring night of the garden, tender and softly relaxed as they lingered in the silence over their cognac, then gradually the talk swirled again reaching out to embrace forgotten moments, slipping back and forth through the decades in brilliant recollections, spinning its net in ever longer shadows until the whole world seemed to crowd around their circle of candlelight, brought there by Stern.

Sometime after midnight he took out his notebooks to show her his plans neatly arranged and outlined in detail, lists of meetings and supplies and schedules.

By the end of the summer, he said. Unquestionably by the end of the summer. It has to be, that's all.

A point here, another on this page. One two three four.

Orderly in black and white, to be ticked off by his finger from one to twelve. From a hundred to infinity.

Foolproof plans. Yes by the end of the summer.

More cigarettes and more bottles uncorked, more sparkling reminiscences and splendid sentiments in the flickering light as they went on to read poems to each other and quote words that spoke of suffering and grandeur, life rich and full in the wine of faraway places, in time returning through the candlelight under the stars by the sea where they wept and laughed and talked away most of the darkness, holding each other tightly when at the end of the night truly at peace with themselves, the hour so late they couldn't remember blowing out the candles and going inside, Stern snoring lightly on the couch and Maud just as quickly lost in sleep in the bedroom.

The next morning Stern had already left when she awoke but the note said he would be back by late afternoon with the makings of another feast. And so there would be another superb evening under the stars and then the following day they were walking down the pier in Piraeus once more, the brief hectic visit over.

In the summer he came several times and again in the clear mild evenings of autumn, piling the brightly colored packages in front of Bernini and conjuring up the banquets and scenes and memories from everywhere, spinning through the schemes in his notebooks. In his cabin they had a last glass of vodka before the ship sailed, Stern appearing confident and enthusiastic as always, his face flushed with the excitement of a new beginning, perhaps drinking a little more than he had the last time they parted, waving and smiling as the ship pulled away.

This time it was going to happen, whatever it was, by the end of the year. And when he came at Christmas he would say it was going to happen by Easter, and at Easter he would say by the end of the summer.

Always the same with Stern. It was always going to happen but it never did.

She went home and found Bernini playing with his new toys. She asked him if he liked them and he said Yes, very much. She wandered out into the garden thinking of Stern and the presents he brought, the expensive food and champagne.

She knew he had no money. She knew he had probably gone away with almost nothing in his pocket but he always insisted on doing it, on paying for it all himself and everything the best, imported, it was foolish, and taking taxis which was also foolish, she never used them herself.

But Stern did when he was with her, spending his money quickly, all at once, what little he had, he just couldn't be bothered with it because he was too busy living for the poetry of his ideas and the grand schemes that never came to anything. So warmly generous, so impractical and foolish, yet it was also sad in a way for she knew the poverty it represented.

She could never have done that even if she hadn't had the responsibility of Bernini. It just wasn't in her to squander enough for a month in two days and then go without the rest of the time as he did.

She also thought of his notebooks, the pages filled with neat handwriting, always new illusions deep at night when hope burned in the flame of a candle against the darkness. But the candlelight vanished at dawn and for him Easter would never come.

He knew that, yet the beautiful dreams, the unreal promises, were always there. Why? Why did he do it?

Suddenly she laughed. She had stopped in front of a mirror and was absentmindedly straightening her hair. The face in the mirror was wrinkled, the hair was gray. Where had it come from? Who was it?

Not her. She was beautiful and young, she had just been chosen for the Olympic skating team and was going to Europe. Imagine it Europe.

She laughed again. Bernini looked up from the floor where he was playing.

What's so funny in the mirror?

We are.

Who's we?

Grown-ups, dear.

Bernini smiled.

I know that. I've always known that. That's why I think I'm not going to be one, he said, and went back to building the Great Pyramid.

When the Second World War broke out in Europe, Stern found her a job in Cairo. He was involved in various clandestine work and frequently away from Cairo, but when he returned they were always together. Now the long nights of talk and wine they had known in Athens before the war seemed far in the past when they drove out to the desert and sat silently beside each other under the stars, accepting the solitude, wondering what each new month might bring.

Stern had aged severely in the time she had known him, or perhaps it was just that she always remembered him the way he had appeared that first afternoon by the Bosporus in the rain, hunched and tall and massive beside the railing, his very bulkiness reassuring. Now the bulky shape had gone and his body was terribly wasted. He moved unsteadily with his mouth set in a thin painful line, his speech hesitant, his face ravaged and deeply marked, his hands often trembling.

In fact when Maud first saw him in Cairo, after a separation of nearly a year, she was so alarmed she went to see his doctor. The younger man listened to her and shrugged.

What can I say. At fifty he has the insides of an eighty-year-old man. And there's his habit, do you know about that?

Of course.

Well then.

Maud looked down at the backs of her hands. She turned them over.

But isn't there something that can be done?

What, go back? No. Change? He could, but it would probably be too late anyway.

Change what, doctor? His name? His face? Where he was born?

Oh I know, said the man wearily. I know.

Maud shook her head. She was angry.

No I don't think you do know. I think you're too young to know about a man like him.

Maybe so. I was young once, I was only fifteen at Smyrna.

She bit her lip and lowered her eyes.

Please forgive me. I didn't know.

No, there's no reason why you should.

Two years passed before their last evening together. They had driven out to the desert near the pyramids.

Stern had his bottles with him and Maud took a sip or two from the metal cup. Often she talked to keep him from depression but not that night She sensed something and waited.

What do you hear from Bernini? he said at last.

He rubbed his forehead.

I mean about him.

He's fine. They say he liked to play baseball.

That's very American.

Yes and the school's just right for him, he'll learn a trade and be able to get along on his own someday.

It's best for him to be over there now doing that and you know I appreciate it. But it still bothers me that you had to send him, when you have next to nothing yourself.

No that's unimportant, don't think about it. You would have done the same for someone, it just happened to be easier for me to get the money together.

He drank again.

Do you think you'll be going home, Maud, after the war?

Yes, to be near Bernini, but it will be strange after all this time. My God, thirty-five years. I can't call it home anymore, I don't have a home. And you?

He said nothing.

Stern?

He fumbled for the bottle, spilling what was left in the cup.

Oh I'll keep on here. It'll be very different after the war. The British and French are finished in the Middle East. There'll be big changes. Anything's possible.

Stern?

Yes.

What is it?

He tried to smile but the smile was lost in the darkness. She took the cup from his shaking hand and filled it for him.

When did it happen? she said quietly.

Twenty years ago. At least that's what I tell myself. Probably it was always there. Beginnings generally are. Probably it goes all the way back to the Yemen.

Stern?

No not probably. Why should I be telling you lies now? Why did I ever? Well you know why. It wasn't you I was lying to.

I know.

Always there, always. I was never a match for any of them. Ya'qub and Strongbow and Wallenstein, myself, fathers and sons and holy ghosts, it's confused but there's a reason why I keep thinking of that.

Anyway, I couldn't do it. I couldn't do any of the things they did. They were too much for me. The Yemen and a balloon, it was hopeless. But that other thing was there too. Twenty years ago was there too. It hasn't all been a lie.

What made you think of it tonight?

I don't know. Or rather of course I do. It's because I've never stopped thinking about it. Not a day has gone by. Do you remember me telling you how Strongbow died? Well it won't be that way with me. Not in my sleep.

Stern, we don't know those things.

Maybe not, but I do this time. Tell me, when did you first find out about the morphine?

That doesn't matter.

Tell me anyway, when?

Early on I suppose.

How?

I saw the black case once when you were sleeping over in Istanbul. I woke up one morning when you were still asleep and it was open on the floor beside you.

But you knew before then, didn't you. You didn't have to see the case to know.

I suppose so but what difference does it make?

None. I just wondered. I always tried hard to make it seem otherwise.

You didn't just try, Stern. You did.

He fell silent, lost somewhere. She waited for him to go on but he didn't.

Stern?

Yes.

You were going to tell me when it happened. What it was.

You mean when I like to think it was. What I've always told myself it was.

Well?

He nodded slowly.

Yes. It was called Smyrna. I'd arranged a meeting there. O'Sullivan Beare was going to meet Sivi for the first time. I haven't told you about Sivi before. He wasn't just what he appeared to be. The two of us worked together for years. From the very beginning in fact. He was a very close friend. The closest I've ever had except for you.

Then that day you saved my life by the Bosporus, the day we met, you had just been to see him?

Yes.

Christ, she whispered, oh what a fool. Christ, why didn't I think of it.

But Stern heard only the first word. Stern was someplace else, hurrying on.

Christ, you say? Yes he was there too. A small dark man younger than you see in the paintings. But the same beard and the same eyes. Carrying a revolver. He shot a man in the head. And the Holy Ghost was there carrying a sword. Weeping, half his body a deep purple. God himself? I didn't see him but he must have been there carrying something. A body or a knife. Everybody was there in that garden.

Stern?

Yes, a garden. Now when was that exactly.

Stern?

There was an animal sound deep in his throat.

Right at the very beginning of the new century, that's when it was. Right after the world of the Strongbows and the Wallensteins had died in the First World War. It couldn't survive the anonymous machine guns, their world, and the faceless tanks and the skies of poison gas that killed brave men and cowards equally, the strong and the weak all the same, the good and the bad together so that it no longer mattered who you were, what you were. Yes their world died and we had to have a new one and we got it, we got our new century in 1918 and Smyrna was its very first act, the prelude to everything.

Stern?

When, you say. Only twenty years ago and forever, and what a garden lay waiting for us then.

-20-

Smyrna 1922

Stern picked up the knife, Joe watched him do it. He watched him take the little girl by her hair and pull back her head. He saw the thin white neck.

An Ionian colony said to have been the birthplace of Homer, one of the richest cities in Asia Minor under both the Romans and the Byzantines, second of the seven churches addressed in the Book of Revelations where John also called it rich and said that one day it would know terrible tribulation, which it did when Tamerlane destroyed it.

But now early in the twentieth century once again prosperous with nearly half a million Greeks and Armenians and Jews, Persians and Egyptians and Turks and Europeans in their various costumes industriously pursuing trade and love, their beautiful seaport surpassing all others in the Levant in the bewildering flow of life's goods.

The Greeks and Jews and Armenians and Turks still given to living in their separate quarters, but the quarters having come to overlap in time and the rich of every race finding their way into the opulent villas of the European Quarter.

A city known for its fine wine and frankincense, its carpets and rhubarb and figs and opium, the banks of the streams thick with oleander and laurel and jasmine, with almond trees and mimosa. Famous for its devotion to music, its incessant musicales, particularly in love with the native orchestras that mixed zithers and mandolins and guitars.

A people renowned for their addiction to cafés and promenades, their fondness for the whispered dramas emanating from backstreets and courtyards, the secret dealings of love and commerce no less than the open acting of the stage.

Renowned as well for their vast consumption of wines and their insatiable desire to join more and more clubs of every description where they could play cards and gamble and eagerly devour the endless dizzying tales of pleasure and intrigue, forever delighted by the gossip that whirled an afternoon into evening and softly spun away the tipsy buzzing hours of night.

On the summit of the mountain the old Byzantine fortress with the Turkish Quarter on its slopes, a maze of alleys roofed by vines where men leisurely sucked their hookahs beside fountains while professional letter writers in the shadows composed rampant visions of love and hate.

From the West chandeliers and crystal, from the East caravans bringing spices and silks and dyes, bells jangling on the packs of the loping camels. The narrow waterfront was two miles long and lined by cafés and theaters and elegant villas with quiet courtyards. Strollers always knew when the train from Bournabat was arriving because the air was suddenly filled with jasmine, brought in great baskets by the passengers for their friends in town.

Here Stern came at the beginning of September for the meeting he had been planning since that spring, the meeting where O'Sullivan Beare would be introduced to Sivi so the two of them could work directly together.

On September 9 a creaking Greek caïque drew into the harbor with several passengers on board, one an elderly wizened Arab and another a small dark young man in a ragged oversized uniform from the Crimean War. The caïque tied up at dawn, a Saturday, and even at that early hour the city seemed strangely subdued. O'Sullivan Beare saw a sign facing him across the quay, its black letters two feet high, a new film that had come to Smyrna.

LE TANGO DE LA MORT.

He nudged Haj Harun and pointed but the old man had already seen it. Without a word he backed away from the railing and pulled up his cloak to look at the great purple birthmark that curved from his face down over his entire body.

O'Sullivan Beare watched him uneasily, never having known the old man to take any notice of his birthmark. Yet now he was gazing at it intensely as if a map could be divined in the contours of its shifting colors.

What is it? whispered Joe. What do you see?

But Haj Harun didn't answer. Instead he straightened his rusting Crusader's helmet and stared sadly at the sky.

Two weeks earlier the Greek army facing the Turks two hundred miles away to the east, fighting for an expanded Greece after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, had been thoroughly defeated. Yet at the end of August life was still going on as usual in the city. The cafes were crowded, the throngs moved slowly along the quays in the evening promenade. Porters bore loads of raisins and figs down to the docks. The opera house was sold out for the performances of an Italian company.

On September 1 the first wounded Greek soldiers began to arrive by train, the cars so packed men lay on the roofs. All morning and afternoon the trains kept coming, the slumped bodies on top outlined by the setting sun.

The next day came soldiers less seriously wounded in trucks and handcarts, on mules and camels and horses, in lumbering chariots unchanged since Assyrian times. And then on succeeding days soldiers on foot, dragging each other, silent dusty figures stumbling toward a headland west of the city where their army was to be evacuated.

Lastly the refugees from the interior, Armenians and Greeks shuffling under their burdens. They camped in cemeteries and churchyards and those who couldn't find space camped in the streets, drawing their furniture around them. By September 5 thirty thousand refugees were arriving every day and now those who came were increasingly weary and humble, the very poor who limped with no possessions at all.

Finally the Greeks and Armenians in Smyrna began to understand. They boarded their shops and barricaded their doors. The crowds disappeared, the cafés closed.

The Greek general in command of the city had gone insane. He thought his legs were made of glass and refused to leave his bed lest they break. In any case he had no troops. The garrison had been evacuated along with the army. Kemal's Turkish forces had triumphed absolutely in the interior.

On September 8 the Greek High Commissioner announced that Greek administration of the city would end at ten o'clock that night. The harbor was filled with British and French and Italian and American warships ready to evacuate their nationals.

The advance Turkish cavalry rode into the city the next morning, well-disciplined and orderly, followed by infantry units marching in formation. All that Saturday, the day O'Sullivan Beare and Haj Harun arrived in the city, the Turkish forces kept pouring into Smyrna in their confusing array of uniforms, some wearing American army uniforms captured from the Russians.

Looting began quietly at dusk. Turkish soldiers entered deserted shops and sorted through the wares.

Turkish civilians carried out the first armed robberies. They came down from their quarter and held up Armenians and Greeks on side streets. But when they saw the Italian and Turkish patrols ignoring them they quickly moved to the larger stores, scooping up rolls of satin and stuffing them with watches.

Soon the Turkish soldiers had joined them and by midnight houses were being broken into with crowbars. There were some rapes and some murders but loot was still the primary concern. Murders were mostly done with knives so the Europeans wouldn't be alarmed by excessive rifle fire.

But by the following morning, Sunday, restraint was gone. Gangs of Turks raced through the streets murdering men and carrying off women and sacking Greek and Armenian houses. The horror was so great the Greek Patriarch of Smyrna went to the government house to plead with the Turkish general in command. The general spoke a few words to him and then appeared on a balcony as the Patriarch left, yelling at the mob to treat him as he deserved.

The mob swept up the Patriarch and carried him down the street to the barbershop of a Jew named Ishmael. He was ordered to shave the Patriarch but when that proved too slow they dragged the Patriarch back into the street and tore out his beard with their hands.

They gouged out his eyes. They cut off his ears. They cut off his nose. They cut off his hands. Across the street French soldiers stood guarding a French business concession.

Stern saw two Armenian children sneak out of their ruined house dressed in their finest clothes. Once in the street they smiled and strolled arm in arm toward the harbor speaking loudly to each other in French.

A refugee woman in black carried her bleeding son on her shoulders, he so large and she bent so low his feet touched the ground.

An elderly Armenian made the mistake of unbarring his steel door to pass a letter to a Turkish officer. He was a wealthy merchant, he said, who had supplied Kemal's armies in the interior. The letter, signed by Kemal himself, guaranteed protection for him and his family.

The officer held the letter upside down. He couldn't read. He tore it up and his men stormed inside.

Stern at last reached Sivi's villa on the harbor. He went to the backdoor and found it hanging on its hinges. In the courtyard the old man lay crumpled on a flower bed, his head covered with blood. His French secretary, Theresa, was kneeling beside him.

It just happened, she said. They broke in, he tried to stop them and they beat him with their rifles. They're still inside, we have to get him out of here.

Stern struggled to pull the old man to his feet and all at once Sivi's eyes flew open. He raised his arm feebly and tried to strike Stern.

Sivi for God's sake, it's me.

I won't have it, he whispered. Get Stern here. We must fight back, call Stern.

His head fell forward onto his chest. The two of them dragged him across the courtyard and out into the alley. Theresa was remarkably calm although rifles were going off all around them. Stern was surprised at her control.

My convent training, she said.

In the alley Stern had to stop for breath. He propped Sivi against a wall and closed his eyes trying to think. A soft Irish voice spoke behind him.

The address checks out but what's this little game here? Taken to robbing and kidnapping old men then?

Having a go yourself now that the Black and Tans have set things up to have some Saturday night fun?

He turned and saw O'Sullivan Beare grinning, a revolver tucked into his belt. With him was an elderly Arab wearing an antique helmet. The Arab's face went white but Stern didn't see that.

Help me carry him, we've got to move him to another house.

But before Joe could move, the elderly Arab jumped forward, his face radiant.

If you will, my lord, allow me to help.

Jaysus, muttered Joe, what next. He can hardly carry himself.

If you will, my lord, repeated Haj Harun ecstatically, his eyes fixed on Stern.

Look, said Joe, I'll do the heavy lifting and you guard us from the rear. We need a reliable warrior back there to make sure some cutthroat of a Crusader doesn't try to sneak up on us.

Indeed we do, said Haj Harun, stepping back and proudly straightening his helmet, his eyes still on Stern.

Between the two of them they managed to carry Sivi up through the alleys away from the harbor. Bodies were everywhere. A girl was hanging from a lemon tree. They went in through the back of a deserted house and laid him out on a couch. A trail of blood ran across the floor to a cupboard. Joe looked inside and quickly closed it. A corpse was stuffed in the cupboard, a naked girl, one of her breasts cut off.

Theresa worked on the gashes in Sivi's head. She seemed to see nothing else. Stern turned to O'Sullivan Beare.

Where did you get the revolver?

The Black and Tans, where else. As usual they've got the goods. An officer he must have been, the troops carry rifles.

What happened to him?

A strange occurrence, I don't deny it. All I did was go up to him and salute and tell him I was reporting in for duty on the Crimean front, and what did he do but take one look at me and do a fast tumble. The medals it must have been, awed by all that brass I guess. Anyway he took such a dive he busted his head on the cobblestones before I could catch him. At least it seemed pretty well busted when I requisitioned his revolver so it wouldn't fall into the hands of some dangerous bloody belligerent.

Stern looked at him in disgust.

Go out front and see if we can reach the harbor. When it gets dark the fires will start.

That they will, general, that they certainly will. Come along, he added to Haj Harun, who stood rigidly in the doorway unable to take his eyes off Stern. At the front of the hall the old man gripped his arm.

What is it? whispered Joe.

But don't you know who he is? Once just before the war I saw him in the desert.

Hold it. Which war would we be talking about? The Mameluke invasion? The Babylonian conquest?

No no, the war that just ended, the one they call the Great War. Of course he doesn't recognize me.

Joe was about to answer that he bloody well knew who he was. He was the bloody fake of an idealist who had been trying to play father confessor to him for the last two years while he was smuggling useless rifles to countries that didn't exist and never would, who had gotten them into this mess in the first place by having them come to Smyrna to meet an ancient Greek queen who was now either deranged or dying.

But he couldn't say any of those things and his face was respectful.

Saw him did you? Just before 1914 in the desert? In person and all?

Yes I truly did. I was on my annual haj and he deigned to manifest himself from the skies at dawn and speak to me.

Speaking you say? From the skies? Manifesting himself? Well that's an event by any account. And who might he have been then?

Haj Harun's lips quivered. Tears trickled down his cheeks.

God, he whispered in a hushed voice.

Joe nodded gravely.

Oh I see, the very article himself. What did he have to say?

Well I mentioned that I knew God has many names and each one we learn brings us closer to him. So I asked him if he would tell me his name that day and he did. Apparently, although it's been a total failure, he must have found some virtue in my attempt to defend Jerusalem over the last three thousand years.

Good, very good. What name did he give then?

Stern, whispered Haj Harun reverently. It was the moment in my life I will always cherish above all others.

O'Sullivan Beare staggered against the door and hung there.

Stern? Out of the sky? Stern?

Haj Harun nodded dreamily.

God, he whispered. Our most gracious Lord descending gently from the heavens.

Joe crossed himself. Jaysus, what's he talking about now and how did he learn his bloody name really?

They moved from house to house making their way toward the harbor. At last they came out in a side street beside it, or rather Joe did. Haj Harun seemed to have fallen behind. He waited and after a while the old man came creeping around the corner carrying a heavy sword.

What's that?

A Crusader's sword.

It looked like it might be. Just turn up did it?

It was on a wall in one of those houses we went through.

And what will you be doing with it then?

Haj Harun sighed.

Bloodshed is wrong, I detest it. But I remember how the Babylonians and the Romans were and I've been assigned to guard our party, so now as then I'll do my best to defend the innocent.

The fires didn't wait for darkness. Long before sunset whole streets were ablaze. When they got back to the house in the Armenian Quarter smoke already hung heavily over the city.

Well? said Stern.

We can get there, general commandant sir, but why we should want to I don't know. The Black and Tans have half the Irish nation down there beating the shit out of them. A bad lot they are, better not to mix with them unless you're standing at the right end of a cannon loaded with rusty nails. Now I grew up on the sea but I cast the vote of the Aran Islands this time for going straight overland.

We can't with him, whispered Stern, nodding at Sivi.

No problem there, said Joe, smiling and patting his revolver. I'll just find a mule and a cart that happen to be going our way.

But he's Greek, you fool.

So we'll cover him with a blanket. Or are you afraid they might take you for an Armenian? They might do that you know and then where'd you be? No place I guess, as bad off as the Irish nation. Ever seen the Black and Tans working themselves up for a session before? No I imagine you haven't, but I'll tell you this is just the beginning. Wait until night comes, that brings out the best in armed men working over an unarmed populace. Night, that's the item, not afraid of it are you? Couldn't be so could it? Not our very own general in charge of building Middle Eastern empires?

O'Sullivan Beare grinned and Stern took a step forward. Boots slapped in the corridor. The door banged open.

Two Turkish soldiers were pointing rifles at them. Their eyes went to Theresa kneeling beside the couch.

One of the soldiers pushed Stern and O'Sullivan Beare against the wall with his bayonet. The other soldier grabbed Theresa by the hair and forced her down over Sivi's unconscious body.

Don't move, she said coolly. They'll leave when they've done what they want.

The soldier by the couch planted a knee in her back and pulled open his trousers. Suddenly there was an angry roar. The soldier with the bayonet slumped, his head nearly severed. The soldier by the couch tried to stand but Haj Harun was upon him just as quickly. The sword sliced through his shoulder into his chest.

Something had happened to Haj Harun's birthmark. In the gloom it had turned a richer and deeper purple, much darker than O'Sullivan Beare had ever seen it Gone were the fainter patches, the varying shades, the nearly invisible hues. His cloak had fallen to the floor and he stood in the middle of the room naked save for his loincloth, the long bloody sword by his side, his head bowed.

For the Lord Himself, he murmured, shall descend from heaven with the voice of His archangel Gabriel.

Stern and O'Sullivan Beare were still pressed against the wall. Sivi lay unconscious on the couch. Theresa was sprawled across him on her stomach, her skirt ripped up the back to her waist. All at once she shuddered and her eyes widened.

What's he talking about?

The two men by the wall came to life.

He thinks he's Gabriel now, whispered Joe. Gabriel revealed the Koran to the Prophet, he added for no reason.

Theresa turned from the Arab to the Irishman and it was as if she were seeing him for the first time, as if she hadn't seen any of them before or the horror around her until that moment. Somewhere inside her a blow shattered the strange calmness Stern had noticed from the beginning. She stared at the Irishman's thin face and long hair and dark searching eyes, especially his beard. The beard from the paintings in the convent of her childhood.

She was on her knees shaking, her arms over her head to protect herself. Her body jerked violently.

Who is that? she screamed and pitched forward on the floor, banging her head up and down on the boards. Stern seized her and she caught sight of Joe standing over her.

Who is that? she screamed again, choking from the blood streaming down her face. Stern slapped her and she fell in a heap, tearing at her chest. He pulled away her hands and held them.

Joe backed away until he was in the far corner. He was trembling and soaked with sweat.

Jaysus, he whispered.

Yes, said Stern quietly, and may it be your first and last time. Now you and the Arab take him, I'll take her. You follow and I'll do the talking.

Most of the alleys were already blocked by collapsed buildings. O'Sullivan Beare slipped on something soft and crashed into the cobblestones. His elbow cracked. He staggered to his feet, the arm hung slack.

He couldn't move it. Change sides, he said to Haj Harun. They gripped Sivi under the arms and started off once more.

Did Stern know where he was going? They seemed to be walking in circles, all the alleys looked the same. Stern tried the gate to a walled garden and pushed his way inside. He put Theresa down. The three men were exhausted.

Five minutes, said Stern.

The Arab went to stand by the gate. O'Sullivan Beare ripped the sleeve off his shirt to make a sling for his useless arm. From beyond the wall came a high-pitched wail.

For the love of God kill me before I burn.

Joe lurched out into the alley, the smoke so thick he could hardly see. The frail cry came again and now he made out the dull yellow of Haj Harun's cloak moving away from him. He followed, stumbling as best he could. The wail was closer. A decrepit old Armenian was feeling his way along a wall, unknowingly walking into the flames. His nose had been cut off, his eyes torn out. Strands of bloody tissue hung from the empty sockets.

Tears of blood. Immovable tears. Joe stopped.

Haj Harun's sword flashed, the old Armenian sank out of sight. Gently Joe took Haj Harun by the arm and led him back to the garden. The Arab was moaning and weeping in despair, his great sword trailing along behind him.

The Romans killed five hundred thousand of us, he whispered, but only the fortunate died right away.

There were others, so many others.

Haj Harun wandered around the garden weeping, lost among the ruins. Flames burst overhead, smoke billowed down on them. Joe remembered his numb dangling arm and felt to see if it was still there.

He lay on his back gazing up at the rolling smoke, at nothing. He couldn't breathe anymore, he was sinking into a nightmare of shadows and hazy fiery timbers. Dimly Haj Harun's faded cloak floated across the sky as screams drifted through the nightmare, Sivi screaming he was a Greek from Smyrna, Theresa screaming Who is that? Stern was forcing some medicine down her throat and she was vomiting on him, he tried again but he'd already done that before with Sivi and what good did it do, they went on screaming anyway.

It didn't matter, nothing mattered, it must be night now because the smoke was darker and heavier, a thick blanket to sleep under. Already they must have been there for hours, Sivi and Theresa raving and Haj Harun wandering lost through the flowers, fires all around them and all of them strangling in the smoke, even Stern the great general. Stern could go to hell with his dreams, he was no better than anybody else, losing hold like the rest of them.

Field Marshal Stern? Generalissimo Stern? What rank was he taking in his make-believe empire? Noble shit and bloody ideals, as dazed as anybody else in the garden, you could see he'd never been starving and on the run from the Black and Tans.

Smuggling arms for what? Why bother? The Black and Tans would only be back again anyway. If you won today they'd be back tomorrow, they always came back and you couldn't hide forever, not in this world. Better to rest and not worry about it, close your eyes and let it come because it came anyway and there was nothing to stop it, nothing to do about it, coming by itself like the Black and Tans and tomorrow.

A savage pain. He'd slipped and fallen sideways on his broken elbow.

And there it was and Stern hadn't even seen it. Only Haj Harun was awake and guarding them, pathetic in his rusting helmet and tattered yellow cloak, his sword in the air, ready to charge the Turkish soldier who had come in through the gate and was aiming a rifle at his middle.

Why? He'd be dead before he took a step. For what? In the name of what?

Jerusalem of course. His beloved myth of a Jerusalem.

There he was again facing the Babylonians and the Romans and all the other innumerable conquering armies, and conquer they would but he'd still be there defending his Holy City in the flames and smoke, an old man weak from hunger in a ridiculous helmet and threadbare cloak, limping on spindly legs, tottering on visions of Prester John and Sinbad, humiliated and insulted and hopelessly confused, ready to charge once more. As he'd said the first time they ever met, When you're defending Jerusalem you're always on the losing side.

The Turkish soldier was laughing. O'Sullivan Beare shot him in the head.

Then Haj Harun was moving meekly among them calling them children, gathering them up and saying this wasn't the garden where they should rest

The harbor, chaos. The waterfront two miles long, one hundred feet deep. On one side the Turks, on the other the water.

Five hundred thousand people there and the city burning.

Turks working the peripheries robbing and killing and taking girls. Horses' halters catching fire, the beasts charging through the crowds trampling bodies. The crowds so dense in places the dead remained standing, held up by the living.

Sivi and Theresa delirious, rising to scream, Haj Harun moving back and forth tying bandages and comforting the dying, holding old women and closing the eyes of rigid children in their arms. Stern leaving and returning, searching for an escape.

Now it was night, Sunday night. Flames in the blackness, shrieks in the blackness, hacked arms and legs in the blackness, baggage and old shoes.

A little girl lay beside Joe and he kept turning away from her. Long dark hair and white skin, a black silk dress, her face ripped open. He could see the small white teeth through the hole in her cheek. Eyes shut and lips shut, a wet stain on her chest where she had been stabbed and another below the waist, a black pool between her legs.

The moan was low but every time he turned away it fell on his back with a dreadful weight. How could he even hear it out here? He couldn't, it wasn't there.

A shoe on the cobblestones a yard away. Cheap, worn, the sole rubbed down to nothing, one stiff twisted shoe. How many hundreds of miles had it walked to get here? How many times had it been patched through the years to get here? How many years was that? How many hundreds of miles?

It was pressing on his back, he turned around. The eyes were still shut, the lips still shut. Small white teeth, stains, a black pool between her legs. Eight or nine years old and no one taking care of her. Alone here next to him. Why?

He looked at her shoes. Smooth black leather and new, not worn at all but caked with mud, especially the heels. Mud caked up the heels to her ankles where she had ground them into the earth when the soldiers were on top of her. How many soldiers? How long had it gone on?

Too many, too long. There was nothing anyone could do for her now. She'd be gone in a moment, gone in her black silk dress for Sunday. Sunday? Yes still Sunday.

Can't you hear what she's saying?

Stern's voice. He looked up. Stern was standing over him with a desperate face, exhausted, streaked with grime and blood. The eyes were hollow, he looked at the shoes. Old and not wearing well, he was surprised. Why a cheap pair like that for the great general? Old and not wearing well, Stern's shoes.

What?

Goddamn it, can't you hear what she's saying?

She wasn't saying anything, he knew that. She was just moaning, a soft heavy moan beside him that wouldn't go away. No, not beside him, around him. All around him and louder than the cries and shrieks.

Stern was yelling at him again and he yelled back.

Answer me goddamn it.

No I can't hear it, I don't speak bloody Armenian.

Please. That's what she's saying. Where's your revolver?

Lost in the garden.

Take this then.

Stern dropped a knife in front of him and leaned over Theresa, over Sivi. He was fixing something under Sivi's head, a coat probably, it looked like a coat. He was forcing Theresa's mouth open and clamping a piece of wood between her jaws so she wouldn't swallow her tongue or bite it off. Always busy, Stern, always thinking of things to do. Busy bastard.

Where was Haj Harun? Had to keep an eye on the old man or he'd get lost. Always forgetting where he was and wandering off.

Over there, the yellow cloak kneeling beside a shadow. Was that where the new scream was coming from? What was the music? It sounded like music. And who was that man dancing up and down? No shoes at all, that one. Why was he dancing and where was his hair? Dancing and laughing up and down just like that, gone, laughing and dead, no shoes.

Where was the other shoe, the one that had walked hundreds of miles? It was right there a minute ago and now it was gone too. A body had fallen on it.

The soft moan, he turned. The fingers were broken, he hadn't seen that before. The hands were smashed and hanging the wrong way, backward. She must have tried to scratch them and they'd beaten her hands with their rifle butts, crushed them on the stones before stabbing her in the chest, stabbing and doing everything else while she was on her back in her black silk dress and her Sunday shoes.

A pain in his shoulder. Stern had kicked him. Stern was down beside him angry and yelling.

Well?

Well bloody what? Do your own work. I'm no bloody butcher.

Stern's eyes were afraid, he could see that too. He just wasn't the bloody terror he wanted you to think.

Tall and strong all right and acting as if he were in charge and giving orders like some great general who'd been through all the wars, Stern the hero who knew what he was doing and had the money to do it and pretended to know all the answers, Stern the visionary who wasn't so much in charge as he wanted you to believe. Staring with those empty eyes, frightened they were too so the bastard might as well hear it again, arrogant and giving orders, a frightened fake of a general without an army, parading his ideals.

Well there were none and the bastard could hear it again right to his face. Who did he think he was? Yell it again why not.

No good, Stern. Do it yourself for a change. I'm no butcher. Take your bloody cause of a kingdom come and shove it up your arse. Chase it, dream about it, do whatever you want with it but I'm not there. I'm not working for you or anybody else ever again and I'm not killing again, ever. Hear that, Stern? From now on you and the other fucking generals can do your own bloody killing. Hear it, Stern?

Flames in the sky, someone staggering out of a building, burning. Not a man or a woman now, just a heap burning after walking hundreds of miles to get here, walking all those years just to get here of all places, but then you couldn't see that far really, not here, you couldn't see more than ten yards but of course you didn't have to, here the universe was ten yards wide and there was nothing more to see after that.

Stern picked up the knife, Joe watched him do it. He watched him take the little girl by her hair and pull back her head. He saw the thin white neck.

The wet knife clattered on the stones beside him and this time he didn't look up. This time he didn't want to see Stern's eyes.

Not all the city was burning. Neither the Turkish Quarter nor the Standard Oil enclave was touched by the fire, which the Turks claimed later had been started by the retreating Christian minorities. But the American government argued that the fire was an accident, since the English insurance policies held by American tobacco merchants in Smyrna didn't cover acts of war.

From the quay overloaded little boats carried Greek and Armenian refugees out to the foreign warships that were there to protect and evacuate their nationals, but not authorized to evacuate anyone else lest the Turks be offended. When they came alongside the English warships and threw ropes over the rails, the ropes were cut. Soon the few boats had swamped and sunk.

People were pushed off the quay and drowned. Others jumped in to commit suicide. Still others swam out to the warships.

The English poured scalding water on the swimmers.

The Italians, anchored much farther out, took on board anyone who could swim that far.

The French launches coming into the quay took on board anyone who could say in French, no matter how badly, I'm French, I lost my papers in the fire. Soon groups of children were huddled around Armenian teachers on the quay learning this magical phrase.

The captain of an American destroyer turned away children at the quay, shouting Only Americans.

A small Armenian girl from the interior heard the first English words of her life while swimming beside the HMS Iron Duke.

NO NO NO.

From the decks of the warships the foreign sailors watched the massacre through binoculars and took pictures. The navy bands played late and phonographs were set up on the ships and aimed at the quay.

Caruso sang from Pagliacci all night across a harbor filled with bloated corpses. An admiral going to dine on another ship was late because a woman's body fouled his propeller.

At night the glow of the fire could be seen fifty miles away. During the day the smoke was a vast mountain range that could be seen two hundred miles away.

While the half-million refugees went on dying on the quay and in the water, American and English freighters went on shipping tobacco out of Smyrna. Other American ships waited to be loaded with figs.

A Japanese freighter arrived in Piraeus packed with refugees, having thrown all its cargo overboard in order to carry more. An American freighter arriving in Piraeus with some refugees was asked to go back for another load, but the captain said his cargo of figs was overdue in New York.

And on the Greek island of Lesbos, the strangest admiral in history was about to launch his fleet.

He had arrived in Smyrna only two weeks before the Turks marched into the city, a Methodist minister from upstate New York who came to work in the YMCA. When the massacre began both his superiors were on vacation so be went to the Italian consul, in the name of the YMCA, and persuaded him to commandeer an Italian freighter in the harbor to carry refugees to Lesbos. He went with the freighter, hoping to bring it back, and in Lesbos found twenty empty transport ships which had been used to evacuate the Greek army from the mainland. He cabled Athens that the ships had to be sent at once to evacuate refugees from Smyrna, signing the cable

ASA JENNINGS, AMERICAN CITIZEN.

The reply came in a few minutes.

WHO OR WHAT IS ASA JENNINGS?

He answered that he was the chairman of the American Relief Committee in Lesbos, not adding that he was the only American on the island and that there was no such thing as a relief committee of any kind.

The next reply was longer in coming. It asked whether American warships would defend the transports if the Turks tried to seize them.

It was now September 23, exactly two weeks after the Turkish army had entered Smyrna. The Turks had said that all refugees had to be out of Smyrna by October 1.

Jennings had been sending in code. On that Saturday afternoon he cabled an ultimatum to Athens. He said, falsely, that the American navy had guaranteed protection. Falsely, that the Turkish authorities were in agreement. Lastly, that if the Greek government didn't release the ships at once he would send the same cable uncoded, so that Athens would stand accused of refusing to save Greek and Armenian refugees who faced death within the week.

He sent the cable at four o'clock in the afternoon and demanded a reply within two hours. A few minutes before six it came.

ALL SHIPS IN AEGEAN PLACED UNDER YOUR COMMAND TO REMOVE REFUGEES

FROM SMYRNA.

An unknown man who was the boys' work secretary of the YMCA in Smyrna had been made the commander of the entire Greek fleet.

Jennings sailed twice and brought back fifty-eight thousand refugees. The English and American fleets also began to evacuate refugees and by October 1 two hundred thousand had been taken away. By the end of the year nearly one million refugees had left Turkey for Greece bringing epidemics of typhus and malaria, trachoma and smallpox.

The estimate of deaths in Smyrna was one hundred thousand.

Or as the American consul in Smyrna said, The one impression I brought away from there was utter shame in belonging to the human race.

Or as an American schoolteacher in Smyrna said, Some people here were guilty of unauthorized acts of humanity.

Or as Hitler said a few days before his panzer divisions stormed into Poland to begin a war, Who after all speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians? The world believes in success alone.

Stern eventually found them a way out. They set sail at night in a small boat, Sivi and Theresa uneasily asleep in the bunks below, fitfully stirred by their own mutterings, Stern and O'Sullivan Beare slumped on deck against the cabin, Haj Harun in the bow where he could keep a steady lookout on the calm sea.

The few waves rose and fell quietly and only one of the travelers was awake that night and still awake at dawn, untroubled by the dreams that haunted his companions. For unlike them he was going home and his home never changed.

They might weave slaughter in the streets but what was that in the end? The other weaving also never ceased, the weaving of life, and when they burned one city another was raised on the ruins. The mountain only grew higher and towered ever more majestically above the plains and the wastes and the deserts.

Haj Harun looked down at his birthmark. It was faded now and indistinct, once more an obscure tracing of darkness and light and shifting patterns, a map without boundaries. He gazed back at the two men sleeping on the deck. He listened to the agonized sounds from below and shook his head sadly.

Why didn't they understand?

It was so clear.

Why couldn't they see it?

In the early gray light he turned to face east, happy and more. He adjusted his helmet, carefully he straightened his cloak. Any moment now it would appear and he wanted to be ready, to be worthy of that glorious sight.

Solemnly he waited. Proudly he searched the horizon for a glimmer of his Holy City, the worn sturdy walls and the massive gates, the domes to be and the towers and minarets softly radiant and indestructible, eternally golden in the first light of day.

-21-

Cairo 1942

A gesture. A photograph. To die.

Thus Stern's voyage finally came to an end in the desert not far from Cairo in the first light of another dawn, sitting with Maud after they had talked all night.

There were a few other things after that, he said. Perhaps you'd like to hear them.

No it's all too much. No more anything now.

But it has to be now and anyway, these are good things. After we met that first time in Turkey I went to see Joe in Jerusalem. I told him the real reason why you'd left him in 1921, because you were afraid of losing him. Because you loved him so much and were afraid of losing that love the way you always had before in life.

Don't Stern. It's too long ago.

No listen, he understood that. He said he couldn't go back but he understood it. Then we talked about the Sinai Bible. He'd been searching for it for the last twelve years, right up until 1933, it had become his whole life. Of course I already knew that, what I told him was where to look. In the Armenian Quarter.

So you always knew it was there.

Yes.

Yet in all that time you never looked for it there yourself.

No, I couldn't I never felt it was mine to find. Anyway after I talked to him he said he was going to give up the search and leave Jerusalem.

Why?

It had to be because of what I'd told him about you. Because time tricks us and he'd never stopped loving you despite what he said. It wasn't really the Sinai Bible he wanted, you know that. And all that talk about money and power and his anger toward me, his hatred even, especially at Smyrna, that wasn't really him. Once years ago we discussed it, I remember it perfectly. It was a Christmas Eve and we were in an Arab coffee shop in the Old City. It was snowing and the streets were deserted, before Smyrna when we were still friends, when he used to come to me for advice. He brought it up and I talked to him about it and it was the first time he ever got angry at me. Of course I didn't have any idea who the woman was who had left him but I did know he was fooling himself, and that's why he broke with me after that, because he knew I knew and it shamed him. So his resentment grew, that's all, precisely because we had been close before. He didn't dare trust anyone then, he went back to being alone in the mountains on the run. Anyway, after I saw him in 1933 he went out and gambled away everything he had. He wanted to lose it. Did you know he'd become very rich?

I'd heard that.

Yes, all those incredible schemes of his. Well he deliberately lost it all in a poker game with two wild characters, over a million pounds, but that's another story. Now listen to this. He went to Ireland to dig up his old U.S. cavalry musketoon in the abandoned churchyard where he'd buried it before he became a Poor Clare. He took it to the vacant lot in Cork where he'd sat in rags before he'd left the first time. He picked another Easter Monday to do that and he sat there all afternoon listening to the sea gulls and looking at the three spires of St Finnbar's, and at the end of the afternoon he decided he'd leave again.

As he put it in his letter, he felt he had finally come to terms with the Trinity, So he shipped out to America, you'll never guess where. The Southwest?

Yes you know him all right, he wanted the desert, he was still thinking of that month you'd spent together in the Sinai. It was New Mexico he went to. To an Indian reservation eventually. He passed himself off as a Pueblo and before long became the chief medicine man on the reservation.

Maud smiled.

Joe? A medicine man?

She gazed shyly at the sand.

I don't think I ever mentioned it but he was always fascinated by the idea that I had an Indian grandmother. He used to ask me about her all the time. What she did, what she was like, that kind of thing. I don't know what he imagined but his face was like a little boy's at those times.

Suddenly she looked away. Go on, she said.

Well that's who he is. He sits in a wigwam with a blanket around him staring at the fire and muttering in Gaelic, which they take to be some language of the spirits. He keeps the old musketoon at his feet and claims it was his cannon in his private wars against the white man. Interprets dreams and divines the future. The revered and greatly respected shaman of the Pueblos.

Maud laughed.

Dear Joe. I was so foolish and he was too young to understand. So long ago.

Wait, there's more. He keeps an old book in his lap which he pretends to consult when the Indians ask him questions, but of course he can't read a word of it. He makes up his stories as he goes along and whether they're prophecy or history no one can say because the book's so old, three thousand years old in fact. The tales of a blind man written down by an imbecile.

Maud stared at him and this time Stern also smiled.

It's true. He has it

But what? How?

Well it seems a few years after he left Jerusalem his Arab friend found it and sent it to him. As to how and why the Arab found it, that must be another story too. But that's where it is now. In 1933 the British Museum bought Wallenstein's forgery from the Soviet government for one hundred thousand pounds, and in 1936 Haj Harun sent the original to a wigwam in New Mexico, where it rests in the lap of the chief medicine man of the Pueblos.

Maud sighed.

Well at last. Dear Joe.

She gazed at the sand lost in the memory of that month on the shores of the Gulf of Aqaba. The most beautiful moments she had known in life and so brief. So long ago.

She looked up. It had been there just on the other side of the Sinai, not so far away really. And the sparkling water and the bursting sunsets, the hot sand beneath their bodies through days without end and the numberless stars over nights without end, love and the all-healing sea, love and the solitude of the desert where the two of them had reached for the fire of the sand, she could feel its heat now when she closed her eyes.

But no, she couldn't feel it, too long ago. Now the sand was cold beneath her fingers. She heard a rattling sound, Stern's bottle against the rim of his cup. She took them from him and filled it for him. She put her arms around him.

It's over, he said simply. Finished. Done.

Don't say that, Stern.

Well not quite, you're right. There are still a couple of things left to do. After the war you'll go to America to be with Bernini and someday you'll see Joe again, of course you will. But as for me I'll never leave that hillside in the Yemen where I was born. Ya'qub was right after all. I'll never leave it.

She hung her head. There was nothing to say. Stern managed to laugh.

Simple in the end, isn't it. After all the struggling and trying to believe, the wanting to believe, two or three things sum it up and say it all. A gesture. A photograph. To die.

Clumsily he lurched to his feet and threw the empty bottle toward the new sun on the horizon, a gesture Joe had once made on the shores of the Gulf of Aqaba long ago against the darkness, this time made against the light. Then he took her camera and framed a picture of her between the Sphinx and the pyramids, clicking the shutter on their love, Maud robust and smiling for him on their final day, their time together ended in the lure of a Holy City, the lure of the desert, a weaving now within the bright somber tapestry of invincible dreams and dying days they had shared over the years with others, a tapestry of lives that had raged through vast secret wars and been struck dumb by equally vast silences, textures harsh and soft in their guise of colors, a cloak of life.

A gesture then, a photograph now, a cloak threadbare and resplendent from century to century. And the unsuspecting weavers of the cloak, spirits despised and triumphant, threads to the tapestry and names to the sands and seas, souls for recollection in the whispers of love that had come to weave the chaos of events into a whole and the decades into an era.

Love, gentle and kind and ferocious, rich and starved and hallucinatory, damned and diseased and saintly. Love, the bewildering varieties of love. That and only that able to recall the lives lost in the spectacle, the hours forgotten in the dream.

Hopes and failures given to time, demons pressed into quietude, spirits released to memory in the chaotic book of life, a repetitious and contradictory Bible suggesting infinity, a Sinai tapestry of many colors.

And so that evening with a quarter of a grain of morphine steadying his blood Stern walked through the sordid alleys of Cairo to his last meeting, entering the bar and sitting on a stool and beginning to whisper to his contact who couldn't decide whether he was an Arab or a Jew, giving instructions for a secret shipment of arms to somewhere in the name of peace.

Tires screeched outside and there were shouts and curses and drunken laughter. The man beside him glanced nervously at the curtain separating them from the street but Stern didn't turn to look, he went on talking.

The young Australians had fought in the disastrous battle of Crete and survived the fall of the island, survived in the Cretan mountains through the winter starving and cold, planning to escape to Egypt in the spring, which they had done by paddling a rowboat across the Libyan Sea. And now out of the hospital with their wounds healed and false arms and legs in place of lost ones, they were out drinking and fighting and victoriously celebrating life.

Shouts. Men scuffling and yelling in the street. Laughter. Bloody wogs. The shabby curtain flying back and something lobbing in through the open door but no one moving in the room. No one knowing what it was except Stern.

Stern hit the man beside him and saw the astonished expression on the man's face as he went crashing backward across the floor, away from the hand grenade slowly sailing through the air.

But to Stern at that moment it wasn't a hand grenade at all but a no longer distant cloud high above the Temple of the Moon, a drifting memory in the desert of dim pillars and fountains and waterways, mysterious places where myrrh grew, the ruins of his youth.

Blinding light then in the mirror behind the bar, sudden death merging the stars and windstorms of his life with darkness in the failure of his seeking, bright blinding light in the night sky at last and Stern's once vast vision of a homeland for all the peoples of his heritage gone as if he had never lived, shattered as if he had never suffered, his futile devotion ended on a clear Cairo night during the uncertain campaigns of 1942 when the eternal disguise he wore to his last clandestine meeting, his face, was ripped away and thrown against a mirror in the half-light of an Arab bar, there to stare at a now immobile landscape fixed to witness his death forever.