SIXTEEN
His heart just stopped, Abu Musa said to Assaf. At some moment very soon before I turned up he took a sip from his glass and put it down on the table, thought of something and smiled and . . . went. Moses is inconsolable, sentimental old monk that he is. He insisted there be a service. Is that proper, I said, with the body already gone and buried? But Moses insisted and you know how he is when he decides something —
immovable. He's so big, a fact of nature like a mountain or a desert. He just sits there and refuses to budge.
Most of the time he's content to let his mind drift along with his chants, mulling over his memories of his little princess and his dreams of a holy river nearby, even if it is inaccessible. But this time he wouldn't be deterred and there was no arguing with him. A service for Bell, he said, and on his front porch, and either you beat the drum or I'll hire a pair of ragamuffins off the street to do it. Well what could I say? I knew it was all decided because when Moses gets it into his head to break out his great African drum, we will have drumming.
The drum Abu Musa was referring to — known to everyone in Jericho as Moses's heartbeat — had been brought to the Holy Land from Ethiopia by the tiny Ethiopian princess who had also brought Moses himself to the Holy Land. It was long and thick and handsome with the shape of a hollowed-out tree trunk, from which such drums must once have been made. Stretched hides were lashed over its ends and the smooth wooden sides were intricately decorated with abstract designs painted in red and green and gold, Ethiopia's national colors. A tall man with long arms could just manage to sit with the drum across his lap, one end of the drum resting on the ground, and thump both drumheads with the open palms of his hands — two thumps with the right hand followed by one with the left hand was the usual beat . . . thump-thump boom. The great drum was primitive in appearance and Moses claimed its shape and design hadn't changed in thousands of years.
No question about that, Abu Musa had once whispered to Bell with a wicked gleam in his eye. Of course its shape hasn't changed in thousands of years, but I don't think primitive is the word to describe it. Basic would be more like it. Moses is much too spiritual to know what he has there, but that drum's not fooling me. Nor, I suspect, did his little princess have any doubts about what it represented. That thing gives a shape to little boys' dreams, little girls' too. Call it the staff or rod of life or call it the tree or drum of life, what does it matter?
In any case, call it life. Without that none of us would be here. Long and thick and handsome and booming?
Ah, how well I know it. The thought of it, the fact of it, the meaning and memory of it, plagues my days and haunts my nights. Moses doesn't realize how fortunate he is to be able to devote his energies to higher realms. He chants to it, but the rest of us? But for that thing, I could have been a saint. . . .
The great drum was used only on the most sacred Ethiopian Christian feast days, and even then few people ever saw it except for Moses and his two or three elderly fellow monks, only heard its dull throb swelling out into the night from the Ethiopian chapel next door to Bell's house. On those special nights all of Jericho would quietly pulsate in the darkness for hours, from sundown until first light, and everyone would sleep especially well because the primeval rhythms of the drum were exactly what sleep required. Clever rogues, these Ethiopians, Abu Musa used to say. Their muffled thump-thump booms in the night take us all back to better times, reminding us of the blissful eternity we once spent dozing away in our mothers' wombs, before all our troubles began.
So Moses's service for Bell was planned and announced and the day came, and a small crowd of Bell's friends and neighbors from Jericho gathered in his orange grove, where they sat scattered around under the trees in the shade. Assaf and Tajar were there, and even Abigail and Anna. Bell's front porch looked the same as it had when Bell was alive. The doors and windows of the little bungalow were all open and deep shadows stirred inside the rooms. Bell's old straw hat lay in his tattered chair on the porch, and it was in front of this chair that Moses had positioned himself in the clearing. There he stood in his bright yellow robes with his congregation spread out behind him, leaning on a tall staff with a mass of flamboyants tucked behind his ears, monotonously chanting above the beat of the drum.
Moses was chanting in Ge'ez, the ancient language of his church's liturgy, and naturally no one could understand him. Before the service Abu Musa had suggested that perhaps, just this once, Moses might chant in Arabic. Otherwise no one will have any idea what you're up to, Abu Musa had said, and Bell didn't know Ge'ez, so wouldn't Arabic make more sense? But Moses, always self-assured in matters of prayer, had replied with a broad smile and a quotation: Religions in general tend to be in foreign and archaic tongues —
who said that? Bell said it, Abu Musa reluctantly had to admit, thereby resigning himself to hours of incomprehensible Ge'ez, which was surely as foreign and archaic a language as anyone in the orange grove was ever likely to hear.
Abu Musa had started out on the drum, sitting near Moses's feet in the clearing in front of the porch, but after a while he caught the eye of a tall young man from the village who came over to relieve him. Beating the drum was hypnotic work, Abu Musa had found. Moses might be used to it, but Moses was a monk and this sort of thing was his business. For Abu Musa the regular beat of the drum was profoundly sleep-inducing. Again and again he had found himself nodding off as he thumped away, slipping back into a dreamy paradise aided by Moses's monotonously soothing chant. Clearly it wouldn't do. No one understood Moses's chants but everyone understood a drum beat. He got the young man to relieve him, lumbered to his feet and staggered back into the shade of the orange grove, sweating heavily. He rested on a tree and wiped his face with the sleeve of his galabieh. Many of the people in the orange grove already seemed fast asleep, lying stretched out facing the porch with their backs propped up against the trees. Did Moses know? wondered Abu Musa.
Would he care? Would Bell?
Next to Abu Musa stood the small man on crutches who had become so friendly with Bell during the last years. Assaf had introduced them that morning but they hadn't yet really had a chance to talk. The small man was about half Abu Musa's size. Now he gestured toward the people asleep under the orange trees and whispered up at Abu Musa.
It seems thoughtful prayer and sleep have much in common, he said.
It's true, Abu Musa whispered back. Bell used to say the same thing. Serenity, prayer, peace of mind, sleep
— they all partake of the same gentle breeze, he used to say. But I hope you don't find this scandalous. Are you Christian?
No, whispered Tajar.
Good. I mean I can't imagine what a Christian would make of this service Moses is putting on. Facing the porch like this as if it were an altar, and specifically facing Bell's old straw hat in that shabby chair as if it were a chalice. Surely it must be sacrilegious. I don't know what's gotten into Moses. Do you think any of this is allowed? Mightn't a flight of Christian saints swoop down and whisk us off to Purgatory? Mightn't the Pope? Oh dear.
It may be an Ethiopian variation, whispered Tajar. A vestige from the African past. Old beliefs live on, don't they? Even in distant lands?
I hope you're right, whispered Abu Musa. I wouldn't like to think that Moses, at his age, could be getting himself into trouble with his superiors. He's too old to be going off on his own and founding a new religion.