Thank God, murmured Haj Harun as Joe lifted the old man's frail body gently up on his back and staggered away through the masses of pennants and flags and peaked hats, the flickering torches, to limp out the entrance under the northwestern wall of the Old City where the hot July sun was just sinking below the rooftops of the new.
PART TWO
— 5-
Munk Szondi
You eat pure garlic?
Yes.
How much?
A large bulb before each meal and two more afterward.
Some slovenly Mediterranean habit you've picked up,I suppose?
The man with the tri-level watch and the samurai bow hadn't originally acquired his vast knowledge of Levantine commodities through travel, but rather from the unique library of letters that made up the archives of the House of Szondi.
The ancestor who had written those letters, Johann Luigi Szondi, had been born in Basle in 1784, the son of a German-Swiss perfectionist who manufactured very small watches. The smaller the watch the more it pleased his father, and in fact his father's watches were often so small their faces couldn't be read. For that reason few were sold and most ended up strung along the walls of their house like so many tiny beads, ticking inaudibly and keeping precise time uselessly.
But fortunately Johann Luigi's mother was an Italian-Swiss cook who had an unsurpassed talent for baking bread. No better bread could be found in Basle, so while Johann Luigi's father busied himself reducing time to next to nothing, his mother walked around town selling huge loaves of hot bread so the family could live.
Both parents died at the end of the century and it was immediately apparent that Johann Luigi was no ordinary Swiss. To support himself he chopped firewood while beginning his studies in chemistry and medicine and languages. He studied Arabic at Cambridge for a year and decided to make a walking tour of the Levant, a precocious and sprightly young man with light blue eyes, still only eighteen years old.
With his great natural charm, Johann Luigi had no difficulty begging lodgings along the way. In Albania he chanced to knock at the gate of the castle belonging to the head of the powerful Wallenstein clan, where he was duly invited to spend the night. The master of the castle, who bore the Christian name Skanderbeg and was the most recent in a long line of Skanderbegs, was away fighting in some war, as it seemed his predecessors had been doing for the last hundred and fifty years.
Johann Luigi was therefore entertained by the absent master's pleasant young wife. After dinner a wild storm broke over the castle and the young woman invited him to view the lightning from her bedroom.
Torrential rains lashed the castle the rest of the night.
By morning the storm had blown itself out. With bright smiles for the young wife, Johann Luigi shouldered his pack to continue his journey, unaware he had planted in his hostess the seed of a pious future hermit, a man whose stupendous forgery of the original Bible four decades later would be universally accepted as authentic, the renegade Trappist and linguistic genius who would be the last of the Skanderbeg Wallensteins.
Johann Luigi traveled briefly in the Levant and liked what he saw. By the beginning of the following year he had walked back as far as Budapest, where he decided to enter medical school, again chopping firewood to support himself. He received his medical degree and set himself up in private practice, specializing in cases of hysteria. Before long he converted to Judaism in order to marry one of his former patients, a young Jewish woman of Khasarian extraction whose family had been engaged in petty local trade in Budapest since the ninth century.
A son was born to the couple and named Munk, a curious tradition his wife's forebears had brought with them from Transcaucasia before they were converted to Judaism in the eighth century, a custom requiring the first male in every generation to be given the same name. In Sarah's family the traditional name was Munk, although no one could remember its significance. As for Johann Luigi, he was more than pleased with the name since it appealed to his own rather monkish tendencies.
About the same time Johann Luigi began planning another brief trip to the Levant. He would travel overland to Aleppo, he told his wife, and spend a few weeks there improving his Arabic. Then he would journey down the Tigris to the Persian Gulf, find a ship bound for Egypt and so back to Europe. In all he would be gone three months, he said, and he promised to write every day, not explaining how his letters could possibly arrive in Budapest before he did, nor how the distances proposed could be covered so quickly.
But little was known of Middle Eastern geography in those days, and perhaps nothing at all in a Budapest family engaged in petty local trade.
Nevertheless, Sarah and her family must have suspected more was involved when they saw how the young doctor went about preparing himself for his trip. Instead of writing to shipping agents, Johann Luigi disappeared into the Hungarian countryside for a full year, walking barefoot in all kinds of weather and sleeping in the open without a blanket, feeding himself exclusively on grasses and returning to Budapest only once, to be with his wife when their daughter Sarah was born midway through the year.
Yet no one mentioned this odd behavior. The women in Sarah's family had always loved their men well and Sarah wanted Johann Luigi to do whatever would make him happy, even if it meant he would be away from home for a while.
On a brisk autumn day in 1809, then, Johann Luigi lovingly embraced his wife and two children and left on a brief journey to the Levant, to be traced by daily letters sent home to Sarah.
That much was true. Johann Luigi did write letters home every day, often five or six times a day.
And given his passion for details, it wasn't surprising his letters also contained long reports on everything he observed, down to the smallest items. Thus mixed in with the lyrical passages describing his love for Sarah, there was interminable information on crops and trade, lists of cottage industries and analyses of local customs, all strung together in what was in effect an exhaustive diary of his travels.
For two years the heavy packets of letters arrived regularly from Aleppo. By then the inquisitive young Swiss had grown a long beard and learned the one hundred and fifty Arabic words for wine, having become to all appearances an erudite Arab merchant, well dressed in the Turkish manner, who went by the name of Sheik Ibrahim ibn Harun and explained his merry blue eyes by saying he had Circassian blood.
So skillful was his grasp of the Arab imagination that before he left his headquarters in Syria, to amuse himself, he transposed an episode from Gargantua into Arabic and inserted it in a privately published edition of the Thousand and One Nights, the tale so cleverly done it was immediately acclaimed as a lost Baghdad original.
During the next two years Johann Luigi's letters arrived erratically in Budapest. Nothing would be heard from him for months, then hundreds of letters would descend on Sarah in a single day. Now he was in Egypt, having arrived there by way of Petra, probably the first European to have seen that deserted stone city since the Middle Ages.
Pink, my love, he wrote of Petra to Sarah. And half as old as time.
In Cairo he established a reputation as an expert in Islamic law. He was urged to take a high position in the Islamic courts but gently refused, saying he had urgent business up the Nile. He was next heard from in Nubia eating dates, marching ten hours a day, covering nine hundred miles in a month.