The last night in December, 1933. Twelve years to the day since the three of them had met by chance in a cheap Arab coffee shop in the Old City, seemingly by chance then, the three of them escaping the wind on a blustery afternoon that had been cold and heavily overcast with snow definitely in the air. And now they sat around the poker table in Haj Harun's back room, one or the other of them shuffling the cards for a while before passing the pack along.
An ambling affair, said Joe. Just one of those quiet rambling evenings that comes along sometimes. I mean it is the last day of the year so it's only natural a man might want to take a moment to look back a bit, just to see how things went maybe, insofar as they did.
Sure, said Joe, shuffling the cards. And that's some news all right about the end of our little Nubar.
Losing his head like that under the Grand Canal and finding a stone to put in its place. With him out of the way I guess we could go on playing poker forever, if we wanted to. Yes, well I can't say I'm sorry for him. Always was a nasty little piece of goods by any account. But I'll tell you something else. I do feel sorry for Sophia, even though I've never met her. From all you hear she sounds right to me, and I imagine she must be taking it hard.
Yes, said Munk. But she also knows she indulged him too much from the beginning.
Habit both good and bad, murmured Joe. Can run both ways, indulging a man, depends on the man, like most things. Hey there, Munk. Not recalling a breakfast in bed beside the Bosporus, are you? Dashing young officer of dragoons being served steak and eggs and a pot of strong coffee laced with cognac?
Not to mention a mountain of hot rolls straight from the oven and light as light? Ah yes, mere fluffs of ambrosia, no less, in your wicked youth. And your uniform pressed and your boots polished and a bath drawn? Never crossed your mind once, you say, in all these years?
Munk smiled.
I talked to her yesterday, he said.
My God, you what? How's that? You talked to Sophia?
On the telephone, yes. I thought I should call her as one old friend to another. It was over twenty years ago, and only one night at that, but all the same.
Of course all the same. Well quick man, out with it. What'd she say?
She was in Venice. We didn't talk about Nubar, mostly about his baby son. There was one, it seems, and Sophia had just found out about it. She was excited about that and also happy about the baby's mother, who happens to be Armenian. So perhaps the good news has made up for the bad. She plans to take them both back to Albania with her.
And you? What'd she say about you?
She asked me to come pay her a visit at the castle in the spring. I said I would.
Joe hooted. He reached over and slammed down the pack of cards in front of Munk.
Your turn to shuffle, and did you catch that, Cairo? Catch our former dashing young officer of dragoons still in action? The lady in question's over ninety, so what's he going to do about it? Pay a friendly visit for old times' sake, that's what, console the old dear because of the memories. Now is that what ambrosia does for you or isn't it? One taste and you can't ever forget? Just never? Ah but that's fine, truly fine, I love the whole idea of it. And you do a little reminiscing with her, Munk, you do that. A woman her age, she'd like that for sure.
Munk smiled as he shuffled the cards.
Business isn't going well for her, he said. The syndicate's breaking up, not that she cares much about that sort of thing anymore. It was setting it up that was a challenge to her, not making money once it was going. So yes, I'll journey up and see her, and she can straighten me out on the situation in the Balkans, and I'll have another chance to smell those cheroots I remember from my younger days.
Forget the Balkans, said Joe, I never could understand what they were. But the rest of it is marvelous, just marvelous, I love it. You do that and let us know. By God, isn't it true we can get lucky now and then and time doesn't pass at all? Or rather it passes all right, it just doesn't take all the good things with it. Now and then only, but it's comforting to know it can happen at least. And speaking of your younger days, Munk, what news from the Sarahs lately in their various outposts in the New World, mostly Brazil?
They're getting along, back on their feet in business.
Sure, we all knew that would happen. And the all-male Szondi baroque ensembles? Are they getting back on their feet and into their chairs after a decade or two in the discount dry goods trade?
They seem to be.
Well then, Munk, it seems you're just situated here for good and ready to get on with your affairs, building a homeland and so forth, a sober matter certainly after the spew of cards we've had here for the last twelve years. Trading in futures from the beginning, you were, just dealing away like a madman in the market. Hey, where're you going, Cairo?
Cairo had gotten to his feet. He went swaying into the front room in his stately robes and came back with a stone box, which he placed on the table. He smiled and held out his hand. Munk gave him the cards and Cairo began to shuffle.
What's that? asked Joe.
A box, said Cairo.
A man can see that. Why stone?
They made them that way so they'd last. Menelik gave it to me once. He'd found it in a royal tomb he'd excavated.
Well what's in it then?
Ashes.
From what?
From a forty-year conversation beside the Nile. Long Sunday afternoons over wine and spiced lamb in a filthy open-air restaurant on the banks of the Nile, with placid ducks paddling in circles and squawking peacocks getting ready to mate and scurrilous evidence richly woven under the trellises of leafy vines and flowers, and waiters who got so high on their flying carpets over the years they simply didn't move anymore, couldn't move anymore, couldn't imagine why anyone would want to move anymore. Long Sunday afternoons that always ended with drunken plunges into the cooling water.
Sure, said Joe, we know about that. But what are the ashes?
The ashes of two friends who met in an Egyptian bazaar in the nineteenth century, both young then, both just starting out on their separate paths. One a black slave, the other an English lord. Joe whistled softly.
You've got the ashes of old Menelik and Strongbow in there?
I have.
Where did you get them?
I just went and got them. And what are you going to do with them?
Cairo smiled.
Early in the spring when Munk goes to pay his call on Sophia, I'm going to take this box down to Egypt.
I'll choose a Sunday that pleases me and go back to that filthy restaurant beside the Nile where they had their forty-year conversation, or if it's gone, to one like it. Then I'll order wine and spiced lamb and stuff myself, and lean back and while away the afternoon listening to Menelik and Strongbow carry on the way they used to. I'll listen to them tell the story again of the incredible White Monk of the Sahara and his nine hundred children, and the Numa Stone that scandalized Europe after Strongbow planted it in the temple at Karnak, and I'll pound the table and order more wine and roar with laughter with them at all the old tales, all the wonderful tales. Menelik smuggling Strongbow's study into Egypt in the bowels of a giant hollow stone scarab, and Strongbow striding off to the Hindu Kush and returning to stride off to Timbuktu, and Menelik building a spacious retreat for himself in the top of Cheops' pyramid and finding he was afraid of heights, and retiring instead to the sarcophagus of Cheops' mother with Strongbow's magnifying glass in hand. And Strongbow finally finding peace on a hillside in the Yemen, in the simple tent of a Jewish shepherd's daughter. Empires bought and empires sold and an unknown scholar who was the wisest of his century, a former slave so brilliant he spoke a language that's been extinct for eleven hundred years, a young explorer who began his haj by shouting that he had once loved well in Persia.