All right. Off goes the dwarf peasant-priest, and after adventures that would take hours to recount he finally reaches Timbuktu. There he sets himself up in a dusty courtyard and begins to preach an exceptionally mild message of love that's all-encompassing. Love thy neighbor, sure, that's for certain.
But don't stop there. Love strangers and non-neighbors, in fact love everyone you ever meet. Is that it?
Yes.
Do a certain amount of honest labor, but after that and before that and in between times, love anyone you happen to find on the premises?
Yes.
Joe jumped to his feet. He pushed back his chair and climbed up on it. The snow was falling faster outside. The Arab who had been asleep at the front of the shop belched and scratched his groin and belched again, staring in disbelief at Joe standing on his chair, his arms outstretched, dressed in the baking priest's shabby uniform from the Crimean War.
And it is especially important, intoned Joe, caressing the fetid air with his hands, that no one should ever find himself sitting alone in the dust on a hot afternoon staring at a group of people. Nor should a group of people sit and stare at a poor lonely person, even a dwarf, who happens to find himself alone across the way. Instead both sides should rise at once and mix in the love of God. In short, make love for God's sake. Don't just sit and stare, make love, now and quickly and all together. Was that the ultra-Christian message, Stern, that was heard down there in Timbuktu?
Stern nodded, smiling up at Joe.
Well then, said Joe, that must be a true account of how a former peasant-priest from Normandy came to establish a huge polysexual commune on the far side of the Sahara in the nineteenth century. And by this manner of activity one Father Yakouba, a dwarf more generally known as the White Monk of the Sahara, became the father in time of nine hundred children. On which occasion the legendary explorer Strongbow, your said father, sent to his old friend the said dwarf in Timbuktu, by way of most sincere and congratulatory sentiments, a pipe of the priest's most favored beverage, Calvados, which by a less prodigious man's measurements would be some seven hundred regular bottles of the stuff. Am I still free from error?
Yes.
Joe dropped his arms. He jumped to the floor, coughing, and sat down. He drank and lit a cigarette.
Wretched drink, this lamp fuel, saints preserve us. But it's cold tonight and we need it. Cairo told me all that by the way. He had it from Menelik, who of course picked it up in his forty-year conversation with Strongbow. But my God what a giant of a dwarf, the White Monk of the Sahara. You know what I wish sometimes? I wish I'd known just one of those characters from the last century. Old Menelik, the White Monk, Strongbow the genie, just one of them.
Joe tried to laugh but he coughed instead.
I know, he said, when the coughing subsided, why am I always talking about the past? Bad habit, I'll have to get over it someday. Have to get over all my habits someday. And maybe you'll be wanting to talk to me about Maudie now that you've met her. How she tried to trace Sivi after the massacre in Smyrna and couldn't, and only found out years later that he was living in Istanbul, if you could call it living after what Smyrna had done to him. Poor old Sivi. Christ she must have been shocked finding him like that, living in a tiny squalid room by the Bosporus and working as a laborer in a hospital for incurables, forgetting even to feed himself half the time. And I can understand why she moved there to take care of him, loving him as she did and trying to have that link with the past at least, until he died and she went back to Athens. Sivi would have been that for her even then, giving her life some meaning. Ah the wreckage in this world, what can you say about it? How can you ever explain it to yourself? And Sivi of all people. From what I've heard just about the kindest, gentlest man who ever lived. Always helping everybody and he ended like that. So what's to say? Nothing, that's what.
How'd you know all that about Maud?
Munk. She and Munk have been friends since after the war, you know.
I didn't, but I should have guessed. Through Sivi of course.
Yes. And I've tried to help her, Stern. I gave Munk money to give her, saying it was a gift or a loan or anything from him, not me, but she wouldn't take it. She must have known it was coming from me and couldn't bring herself to accept it after the way she left me. Munk's tried to help her too but she always refuses, still thinking it's coming from me, I suppose.
But, Joe, why haven't you ever gone to see her?
I didn't think it would help. You can't go back, Stern, you just can't. I know that. I'll never love another woman the way I loved her, but still you can't go back. It's just too long ago and I've put it behind me as best I can. You have to do that, you just have to.
Well what about your son?
Joe smiled.
Bernini. That's a lovely name she gave the lad. I'm going to be seeing him soon, but I won't be seeing Maudie and I don't want her to know, it's better that way. She's got some kind of balance worked out in her life and I don't want to upset it, especially with Sivi just dying. He was her family after all. Brother, father, everything. All she ever had. And I know she must still have some painful memories about me.
Time, it takes. So someday maybe.
Another time, another place. But listen, I've got a favor to ask you. If she ever needs money, I mean if you can see she really needs it, I'd like you to let me know, write to me, so I can send it to you. She'd accept it from you if she didn't know we knew each other, which she doesn't. I never told her who I was running guns for back when we had that house in Jericho. So will you not tell her? Will you do that for me? So I can get money to her through you, if she needs it?
Stern nodded.
Of course.
Thanks, I appreciate it. Now let me pass on my stirring local news. Cairo and me, we're ending the poker game in a few days. Munk doesn't know it but it's all over at last.
You're leaving Jerusalem?
By the stars, Stern, by the stars.
Where to?
Me? The New World, where else. Ever since I met Maudie and she told me about her Cheyenne grandmother, I've been fascinated by the American Indians. I want to see them. Maybe even try living with them for a while.
Stern smiled.
And Cairo?
He'll be heading back to Africa. You haven't met him, have you?
No.
More's the loss. A fine article, that, totally fine. Holds in trust what you tell him, then hears what you don't tell him and holds that in trust too. Whoever old Menelik was, he should be canonized, bringing up Cairo the way he did. Who was he, Stern?
Strongbow's best friend.
That's a lot.
Yes.
But you shouldn't go on lingering under that burden, Stern. Shouldn't do it. No man can.
I suppose.
Wretched stuff, fuel for lamps. Burns your wick but burns it down and out too.
Joe? What about Haj Harun?
I know, I've thought about that. Munk'll just have to watch out for him. If he wants this bloody place he'll just have to take on the responsibilities.
It'll be all right?
My God how do I know, I guess it'll have to be. Nearly three thousand years he survived here before I met him. Why not now without me?
Because things are changing, Joe.
So they are, so they always are. Changing in Jerusalem, changes in the Old City. How about you. You're going to carry on with what you're doing?
Yes.
No offense, but you know by now it can't work.
Maybe.
Not maybe. You know. The point is you're going to continue doing it anyway?
I have no choice.
Joe leaned forward and placed his hands flat on the table. He gazed at the bulging veins that hadn't shown a few years ago.
No choice, Stern? No choice?