South of the Holy Land, that's all. Nothing more specific than that.
No? Well it was the Yemen where he ended up, and died.
Strongbow's dead?
Yes, four years ago, just before the war broke out. Appropriate, wasn't it. One of the towering figures of the nineteenth century, and the successor to the explorations of Johann Luigi Szondi in this part of the world, dies on the eve of the Great War that will bring an end to his century.
How did you find that out?
How? murmured Sivi. Don't I have a reputation for knowing everyone's secrets? Well so I do, but in this case it was simpler than that. Strongbow's son told me.
His son? I didn't even know he had a son.
He did, but the son's identity is a confidence I can't reveal. He's always gone by a different name.
Munk laughed.
Is there anyone at all in this part of the world who hasn't come to you with their confidences at one time or another?
They had returned to the garden. Sivi uncorked the bottle of ouzo standing on the table and sniffed it. He nodded approvingly and filled two glasses.
Tea won't help us now. Ouzo is definitely wanted, a substantial measure over ice to cloud the clear liquid, the better to clear our minds as evening falls. As for people confiding in me, there must be some who haven't yet, but then I wouldn't be surprised if they were getting ready to do so this very evening, after dark of course. You see the truth is, a juxtaposition of facts in my case tends to reassure people. On the one hand it's known that my father was a leader of the Greek war for independence and a great friend of Byron. Masculine heroics, in other words, the sound of the bugle and the charge against the oppressor, flowing capes and drawn swords and fierce eyebrows, the poet-warrior in a headlong gallop and all that.
Yet on the other hand, it's equally well known that when I attend the opera and take off my evening cape, the gown and jewels I will be wearing will be so elegant no woman could possibly hope to match them. I am, in short, an embodiment of life's bizarre contradictions. Therefore trustworthy.
Munk laughed.
What brought Strongbow to mind, Sivi?
Dreams, of course. The dreams we have when we're young.
Ah yes, mused Sivi. My dream at your age was to become a great scholar, and all because of Strongbow's study.
What? You're not going to tell me you own a set too?
Certainly. Thirty-three volumes on Levantine sex and I shouldn't own them? Is such a thing conceivable?
But why me too?
It turned out the Sarahs had a set. None of the men in our family ever knew it.
Sivi chuckled happily.
Is that so? Well apparently life wasn't as bleak up there as I'd thought. It seems there were certain diversions on rainy evenings by the Danube when the Sarahs had to stay late at the office. But they were probably just being sentimental. The study isn't exactly what people think. Two-thirds of it, in fact, is devoted to describing a love affair Strongbow had with a gentle Persian girl when he was nineteen, the most complete love story ever told and a pastoral idyll that could make any woman swoon. Anyway, what I wanted to do was compose a companion study on Byzantine sex. Levantine is one thing, but Byzantine? It could have been truly arresting.
What happened?
I did a two-page outline and began to have doubts. Strongbow rightly notes that there are nine sexes, and being only several of them, how could I attempt to be accurate overall? No, I realized I couldn't be so I abandoned the project. Such grand designs seem to be no longer possible. Now Alexander the Great would have been much better prepared for such an undertaking. We know he loved several women and a number of boys, his horse, a male companion or two and at least one eunuch. And if we know all that, just imagine what we don't know. Indeed, a person could be more comprehensive in those days.
Sivi laughed. He raised his nearly empty glass of ouzo and tipped it, gazing at the milky liquid left in the bottom. Munk shook his head.
You're not just a shameless romantic, Sivi. You're a shameless aging romantic and that's the very worst sort. To be young and romantic is understandable. But at your age? After all the grief and torment you've seen in the world?
Sivi nodded. He stroked the end of his white moustache.
It's true. I used to try to fight it, to get up each morning prepared to curse and be gloomy. An ache here and a pain there? Neither mind nor body functioning as well as the day before? Evidence, you would think, that the world is indeed a dreadful place to live. Yes, I had my good intentions of a dark nature, but as it happened they never survived the bedroom where I found myself that morning, no matter how sordid the place might appear at first glance. I'd wake up and look around me and think, Oh my God, what have you done now? What have you gotten yourself into this time? How could you possibly have behaved that way last night? Yesterday at this hour you were a total wreck, but to have sunk even lower? It's unimaginable. This is the very end.
And so on. Darkness at dawn, in other words. Terminal despair at dawn. The worst thoughts to be found in the land of the living. But then what did I spy as I lay there beyond hope in that ghastly place? What else, a window. Even the most wretched bedrooms in Smyrna have windows. So over to the window I'd go and raise the shade and stick my head out, what little was left of it, and what do you suppose was waiting for me out there? The Aegean, and the light of the Aegean. And at that moment I knew any attempt at despair that day could only fail. There was too much to see out there, and to feel and hear and smell and taste. So in time I stopped fighting it. I had no choice but to accept my love of life, and of love, as incurable.
Then too I was lazy, which was the real reason I never got on with a massive scholarly study. It would have meant giving up too many things, added Sivi, wagging his head and staring lasciviously at the thin milky dregs in his glass of ouzo.
Munk laughed.
In your hands everything becomes obscene.
Not so, said Sivi. Merely observed in its true light, which is essentially sensual.
I'm afraid the sun with its true light has already set, you old rogue. Put down your suggestive glass.
Almost three years passed before Munk found his dream as Sivi had predicted he would, not by the sea but in the desert. And he did so, curiously, through the unexpected intercession of his old friend from the hectic weeks of the first Balkan war, the diminutive officer who had been the Japanese military attaché in Constantinople.
Then Major, now Colonel, Kikuchi had returned to Japan before the First World War. Toward the end of the winter of 1921 he wrote an urgent letter to Munk from Tokyo saying he had just learned that his older twin brother, the former Baron Kikuchi, an esthete and collector of French Impressionist paintings, had converted to Judaism while visiting Jerusalem on his way home from Europe. He was now residing in the town of Safad in Palestine.
The colonel explained that his brother's health had always been delicate and he was concerned about living conditions in postwar Palestine. Furthermore, in the last months his brother's letters had taken on a new feverish quality that disturbed the colonel, remembering as he did the virulent diseases that had stricken foreigners exposed to Turkish meat during the days of the Ottoman Empire.
Is the situation still as dangerous as before the war? wrote the colonel in his precise hand. Or have the Allies cleaned up the meat in the Middle East? When my brother was a Buddhist he never ate meat, of course, but now that he's a Jew I don't know what he might be eating. Please, dear Munk, could you possibly go to this town of Safad, which looks pitifully small on the maps, and see if my twin brother is well?