Making a life.
Stern's words, Joe realized. Stern's words spoken long ago in Jerusalem, in answer to Joe's eager questions about what Stern was really doing beneath it all. Words from another time and place altogether spoken when Joe had been newly arrived in Jerusalem and groping to find his way in the world, and Stern had already been a man with years of hard experience behind him.
Of course, that wasn't all of it. The man who appeared in Bletchley's files, and in many files under other names, was also vastly different from anyone on this street. With the quiet lives these men and women lived, they couldn't have conceived of where Stern went and what he did. Yet in another way this quiet street was all of it, for Stern had the same fears and hopes as these people. He wanted things to be better and he tried hard to make them better. He had his small successes and his greater failures and one day when he was gone, nothing would have changed particularly. And in the meantime Stern came to this little restaurant to escape the noise and the crowds at the end of the day, to meet an old friend and talk about everything and nothing and silently share the minutes, at peace for a moment.
And Maudie?
No, it didn't surprise him to imagine her here either. Her life had also been unusual in so many ways, yet in other ways it wasn't at all. For surely she'd never wanted anything more than to be herself, to care and to live life fully.
Modest, like these people. Doing the best she could to make some sense out of the terrible mistakes of the past. So often a stranger again in the endless slippage of lives, the conflicting journeys of hope and need where people met and parted. Trying to face the wounding demons of the past, not escape them, because the past never went away. But trying to know herself well enough so those demons could no longer torment her. Struggling to stand alone and yet also to love—in the end, the explanation for all her wanderings. From the coal fields of a little town in Pennsylvania to the mountains of Albania, and Athens and Jerusalem and Smyrna, and Istanbul and Crete, and now here. A lifetime of searching, trying to find her place.
Joe gazed down the narrow little street. He looked up at the fading light and somehow everything seemed right. After all these years this was the kind of place where Maud and Stern would meet for a quiet evening together, here in this ordinary little neighborhood with its modest concerns, its small failures and triumphs. After all these years of struggle and pain and love, of losing and trying again, this was exactly where two people would come to celebrate life in the midst of a terrible war. To talk and sit silently, to smile and laugh and share for a moment those dreams that could never be wholly lost or forgotten, coming together in this simple place as the world raged and died just a little bit more beyond the corner .
. . beyond the solitary beggar who sat at the end of the street in the dust, alone in the twilight, unmoving.
A beggar of no particular era, homeless and stateless and of no use to anyone, a beggar of life from nowhere who would one day return whence he had come. And yet also, strangely, the man for whom the war was being fought, the prize for all the great armies, the solitary man who would survive their terrible victories and their legions of victims.
Anonymous in his rags in the dust at twilight, a beggar surveying his limitless kingdom. . . .
***
Joe hovered off to the side, out of the way, waiting for her to come as Liffy had said she would. And then all at once she was there down the street, a small woman moving quickly in the way he remembered so well. That hadn't changed at all.
She stopped to greet a shopkeeper, her face lighting up, and that hadn't changed either. There was the same eagerness in her smile, the same concern as she tipped her head and made the shopkeeper laugh, some little thing said in passing.
Joe smiled too, he couldn't help it. When he had known her before, she had made an effort to take clothes seriously, even though somehow it had never seemed to work. But now apparently she had just given up on it. Yet she was beautiful, Joe couldn't believe how beautiful she had become with the years.
Such a strong face and her eyes so expressive, so direct and smiling.
She was going into the restaurant and Joe turned away, excited and confused, frightened. Twenty years, it had been, and where had the time gone since they'd been together? She seemed a stranger now and yet she could never be that, they knew each other too well. They had a son who had been born in Jericho. They had met in Jerusalem and gone to the Sinai, to an oasis on the shores of the Gulf of Aqaba.
Two decades ago and less than a year together . . . but still.
He wanted to walk up behind her and whisper her name, and see her smile and look into his eyes.
Maudie, it's me. . . . Maudie.
Instead he turned away, he had to. How could he explain what he was doing here? What could he say about Stern? No, he didn't know enough about Stern yet. He didn't know enough about any of it yet.
Joe moved quickly up the street, excited and afraid, confused. She seemed a stranger but she couldn't be that. He knew her, of course he did, and she knew him.
The beggar on the corner held out his hand as Joe rushed by, a long slender hand, calloused and hard and beautiful, as mysterious as an ancient map of some lost desert. Joe glanced at the beggar's shadowy face and gave him a coin and kept moving, his thoughts tumbling, racing. He had gone several blocks before he suddenly stopped in the midst of the swirling crowds, stopped dead still, alone and hearing nothing in the warm night air.
The beggar.
It was impossible. The beggar at the end of that quiet street had been Stern.
Stern? . . .
***
Joe had no idea how long he stood there in the middle of the crowded sidewalk, oblivious to everything around him. He turned.
No, there was no point in trying to go back, Stern would be gone by now. But what was he doing there?
Why was he watching over Maud? And why was he back in Cairo when Bletchley had said he would be away for two weeks?
Bletchley?
No. Joe was sure he couldn't have been lying about Stern having gone away. Nothing would make any sense if he had been. So Stern must have returned to Cairo without Bletchley's knowledge, against Bletchley's orders, and in fact Joe was beginning to think Stern could go almost anywhere without anyone knowing it. He was like Liffy with his disguises, only more so. With Liffy the disguises were always part of a role, but with Stern they were simply another part of him, another face on the turnings of his path.
And now Stern knew Joe was in Cairo, which meant he had to know why someone like Joe had been brought in, and that made everything backward because Joe himself didn't know why he was here, not really. How could he when he didn't know what Stern was doing, let alone why he was doing it? . . .
Unless Ahmad had been hinting at something real when he spoke of Stern bartering away his soul to the Nazis. Unless there had been more in that than one of Ahmad's dramatic turns of speech. . . .
Joe drifted along through the crowds, feeling more lost by the moment. Everything was moving too quickly and he had to break out of these networks of the past which seemed to obscure Stern ever more deeply in the feelings of others. . . .
Talk to Bletchley then? Put it to Bletchley outright?