In addition to the bizarre curiosities of his own life, Ahmad talked especially about Menelik and the Sisters and the clan known as the Cairo Cohens. In one way or another, all of them had been intimately connected with Stern in the past, and it wasn't long before Joe had begun to sense a network in Stern's life. And not so strangely perhaps, as Joe recalled Liffy's prophecy that the moment had come for him to embark on a journey in time, this network of Stern's spanned more than a century, its members not all among the living, yet their presences still so powerful they echoed restlessly through other lives in a shadowy web of doing and feeling, that most profound of all secret human codes.
And so Ahmad went on conjuring up shapes from the shadows of the firelight, in the darkness, and again the next night they returned to sit up until dawn in their tiny oasis, the two of them once more traveling through long solitary silences as Ahmad searched his memory for turnings along the path, Joe gazing at the fire and trying to decipher the connections with Stern as Ahmad whispered back through the decades.
For there seemed to be clues in everything Ahmad said, quiet footfalls and unsuspected hints that were only to be recognized later, when Joe had traveled further in his attempt to uncover the truth about Stern.
When the day had come to look back and ponder the weaving of Stern's wanderings, the network that would finally reveal what Stern had sought, the unique figure traced by every man on the infinite landscape of time.
***
Alone and exhausted in his room as the great city was awakening, before he fell asleep, Joe drowsily reflected upon these odysseys through the night.
Ahmad? . . . Stern?
Surely a journey in time, as Liffy had said. Not mountains and rivers and deserts to be crossed, but memories to be explored.
From the beginning he had noticed the changes that had come over Ahmad as they had moved from the gloomy corridor of the Hotel Babylon, Ahmad's apparent station in life . . . to Ahmad's secret musty lair tucked away behind a wall . . . and finally to the flowering courtyard outside the hotel, so naked to the immense Egyptian night. . . . Ahmad opening his heart more with each new descent of the darkness, each evening when the last of the sunlight died and the hour returned for them to camp anew beneath the stars.
Buy why, all at once, was Ahmad opening up like this? Joe wondered.
And the more he thought of it, the more it seemed there could be only one explanation . . . Stern. Ahmad knew how much Joe cared for Stern and obviously he felt a need to talk about Stern, to tell Joe something. But why did Ahmad feel that need so strongly now? What had suddenly caused him to abandon the habits of years, his decades of silence?
Memories, thought Joe, the past. . . . Fragments and shards on the journey, as Liffy had said. To be examined in retrospect in an attempt to reconstruct the cup that once had been . . . the vessel that once had held the wine of other lives in other eras.
Yes, in time, thought Joe. In his own erratic way, through glimpses and suggestions and his own peculiar rhythms, Ahmad will find where we have to go.
And meanwhile Joe listened through the nights and slept and pondered Ahmad's fragments during the days, trying to immerse himself in Ahmad's memories in order to grasp the span of Stern's network over the decades.
So elusive . . . time, thought Joe. And Stern's life has been so vast, and now with the war and everything disrupted, dying. . . .
As it turned out, he and Ahmad were to spend no more than a few nights together in the debris-strewn courtyard of the Hotel Babylon, that former brothel crumbling beneath the stars. Yet when Joe looked back on those few nights, they would expand into many worlds so distant and remote it was as if they had been scattered across a universe.
Ahmad's secret universe, as Liffy once had called it.
***
Joe learned that Ahmad had first met Stern, through Menelik, when Stern was a young student of Arabic studies in Cairo, before Stern had gone on to Europe and acquired his lifelong dream of a great new nation in the Middle East, made up of Moslems and Christians and Jews alike. And that Ahmad had been a witness to those early stirrings of conscience in Stern, so boyish and exuberant, that had later made Stern a dedicated revolutionary whose devotion never wavered.
Joe was fascinated. As well as he knew Stern, this early period of Stern's life had always been a mystery to him. And after all these years of knowing Stern in a particular way, he found it strange to try to picture him as a bumbling young man struggling to find himself, bewildered by others and making foolish mistakes. Or the young Stern sulking because his childish vanity had been wounded. Or acting with ludicrous bravado when it was obvious he had failed at some little thing. Joe listened to Ahmad describing these scenes from long ago, and even as he relived them with Ahmad beside the campfire he knew he would never be able to take them to heart, because the Stern he knew was such a different man It's curious, he thought, how the past of someone older, someone we love and respect and admire, so often appears mysterious to us and out of reach. As if they saw life more clearly than we do and weren't as confused and frightened as we are. As if life for them were more than the endless little things, the revolving wheel of little moments, that purs is.
A natural yearning, it seemed to Joe, within the universal mystery sometimes given the name of history.
Man's past. Those little moments of infinite beauty and infinite sadness falsely ordered in retrospect to give life continuity, a recitation of finite moments that in fact had never existed.
And then an even more curious thought struck Joe.
What if it was this very yearning in man that caused his conceptions of God . . . of all the gods in men?
Cruel and profane and vicious, as well as holy?
***
The war? mused Ahmad one evening. Frankly I take no particular notice of it. There's always one going on in this part of the world.
As for the Germans, it's impossible to think of them as anything other than the barbarians of our era, the Mongol hordes at our moment in time. And unfortunately barbarians do seem to serve a purpose in history, for when we have them as enemies at our gates we no longer have to judge ourselves. For a brief moment, anyway, our innate savagery is safely out there beyond the city walls and we can rejoice in our self-righteousness, and be smug in our petty civic virtues.
But refined barbarians? Men and women who listen to Mozart between murders?
We may think that's an innovation of our modern sensibility, but it's not. The beast has always been within each of us, born there a million years ago. Most of us make it as easy as we can for ourselves by ranting about the barbaric monsters at the gates who never stop threatening us, but as for myself, I'm glad I've never been in any position of power. With my fears and compulsions that would be dangerous, and I know it.
Ahmad smiled.
In other words, heaven save us from people who dream, especially failed artists, the worst of the lot. All tyrants seem to be failed artists of one kind or another. . . . But then, so are most of us in our souls.