I remember an incident like that from years ago. Somebody else told me about it, not him of course, not the woman involved either. It was a dreadful rainy afternoon by the Bosporus and the light was dying and a desperate woman was standing by a railing getting ready to die herself, to throw herself in the water, and along came this big awkward man shuffling out of the rain, a stranger, Stern, and he went up and stood beside the woman at the railing and gazed down at the dark swirling currents with her, and he began to talk in that honest halting way he has, just nothing but the truth, and some time went by and pretty soon he'd talked her right back into life. . . . One little incident a long time ago. Just one that I happen to know about.
Yes. And I know there's no knowledge without memory, and certainly I remember every twist and turn of my times with Stern as clearly now as when they happened. It was right after the First World War when we met, in Jerusalem naturally, Stern's beloved myth of a Jerusalem. And I didn't know much of anything then, and Stern took me in and taught me things and I loved him dearly in the beginning, loved him with all my heart. . . . He can have that effect on you easily enough. His ideals, don't you know.
And then some things happened and I came to hate him with all the passion of a young man who feels betrayed. Because he can have that effect on you too. Those impossible ideals of his again. They can cut you to the heart and shame you maybe.
Stern's ideals. No wonder you're not sure whether he's working for you or not, in the end. Complex, that's what they are. . . . Unravel them and you just might learn a very great deal.
Well, so some more time passed and my feelings for him changed again as feelings can do with time, as the years and the loss of them weather a man's heart in the same way as the wind and the sun weather his face. And I understood it better by then. The trouble I'd always had with Stern was the trouble I'd always had with myself, and it's just awful how we do that. We're a damnably self-centered bunch, the curse of the race, it is. It's just so hard to learn to feel others even a little bit. To let them stand there in front of you and see them as themselves, rather than as some part of you that you happen to be liking or disliking at the moment. . . . It was with Stern and through Stern, you see, that I was first exposed to the truly harsh and pitiless winds of life. With him that I first heard the roaring oblivion of the universe in all its terrifying silence.
Joe poked at the earth.
Yes. So what it comes down to is, I've never been able to get Stern out of my life. I've spent years trying to forget him, and I even came halfway around the world to this little corner of peace and nowhere, thinking I was getting away from Stern and all the rest of it. But no matter, no matter at all. He's still right there in front of me as much as he ever was, a shuffling wreck of humanity who's never done anything but lose, just lose is all, one thing after another year after year. . . . Has none of you ever met him?
No, none of us has.
Makes sense of course, no reason why you should have. You're successful and powerful and it's never been that way for Stern, nor will it be, not like that. But I can tell you your files don't begin to catch the feeling of the man, especially that gentleness of his. I used to think he was out of place in what he was doing, but maybe not and who's to say where people belong. As Stern himself used to put it, our souls are always our own to make of what we will. . . . What's that?
Excuse me? said one of the men.
No, pay no mind. It's someone back in the pueblo, I'll see to it later.
Joe shook his head.
So it's Stern again, is it? Twenty years later and here I am still looking into the mirror and trying to make out the shadows, trying to decipher those whispers in the wind. Trying, something with a little clarity to it, something at least. . . . Stern. Sure.
Once more there was silence in the kiva as Joe gazed at the earth, lost in thought. His three visitors waited. Before he spoke again he reached under his blanket and scattered cornmeal in front of them.
The last time I saw him was just before I left Jerusalem, right at the end of my twelve years of poker.
Winter it was and snowing, and Stern was wearing those dreadful old shoes of his that I've never been able to forget, the ones he had on in Smyrna when we were there during the massacres in '22. How many hundreds of miles had he walked in those shoes to get to that hell of fires and screams and death in Smyrna? How many years and how many stumblings to get to that, God help us?
Well it was more than a decade later when I saw him the last time, and it was in Jerusalem. He got in touch with me and we met in a filthy Arab coffee house where we used to go in the old days, in the Old City it was. A cold and empty place, bare and cheerless, a barren little cave where the two of us used to huddle over a candle late at night, talking and drinking wretched Arab cognac. And it was snowing when he came shuffling in that night', a stumbling ruin of a man even worse off than I'd remembered. And he smiled that mysterious smile of his and said how good it was to see me again, and I took one look at him and I wanted to scream, that's all, just scream those questions that have the sad sad answers. . . . How does it happen, Stern? How does a man get to look like you? What kind of a hell does he live in? And for what? What?
But I didn't scream, not then I didn't. Instead I pulled out a roll of money because I happened to have money then, and I put it down on the table next to his hand. That's always the easiest way to deal with people. I mean there he was in front of me after all those years when I hadn't seen him, since Smyrna really, just there in his shuffling beaten way with all he owned on his back, still wearing those same Godawful shoes, a lifetime of devotion with nothing to show for it but still trying to smile in a way that would break your heart, poor as the night is long and still trying, and with what going for him, I ask you?
What, for God's sake?
The same as always. Dreams is all. He still had those and I suppose we all did once. I know I did.
But the thing about Stern was, you always knew he'd never stop dreaming. No matter how futile it was, no matter how it destroyed him, he'd go right on with his hopeless dreams. Just hopeless, there was no reasoning with him at all.
A great peaceful new nation in the Middle East? Moslems and Christians and Jews all living together in a great new nation with Jerusalem as its capital? All these pathetic specimens of a mad race living in peace in Stern's beloved myth of a Jerusalem? Everybody's Holy City?
No hope in that. No hope ever. No hope in Jerusalem for Stern's dream, no hope there or anywhere under the sun. But Stern went on believing despite what people are, and he knows what they are, more than most of us, he knows. Yet he insists on staggering along, shooting a little morphine into his blood at dawn to get himself through another coming of the light, as he used to call it.
So yes, we had times together, Stern and I did, and they were some of the best and the worst I've ever known. Because when you dream the way Stern does, when you look that high, it also means you have to look the other way, right down into the blackest of the black. And sometimes you slip, it has to happen sometimes. And when you begin to fall it's as deep as forever and there's no end to the darkness at all, by God. . . .
Joe broke off. He pointed to a small shallow pit in the earth beside the altar.
See that? Here in the kiva it represents the exit from the previous world the Hopi lived in. And the ladder-opening up there represents the entrance to the world yet to come. For the Hopi, there's only one entrance and one exit in this sacred chamber they call a kiva, which is to say in life. Or as they put it in one of their sayings, there's light in the world because the sun completes its circular journey at night, traveling from west to east through the underworld.