What is it? she asked suddenly, looking startled.
Joe smiled.
Nothing.
Did I do something strange?
Joe laughed.
Not that I know of.
Oh the lemonade, she said. I forgot the lemonade. I must have been thinking of something else and had a glass of water and just turned around and come back. How silly of me. It's dreadful how my mind wanders.
Nonsense. What were you thinking about?
Maud's face was serious.
Bernini. What you said about him. I understand that, you know.
Of course you do, Maudie. Sometimes it seems to me that everybody always understands everything. It makes sense, after all, when you think of it, because we do have all of the past and all of the future within us, so what happens is that we just get reminded of things in life we already know, and remind others in turn. Stern taught me that, and you did, and then I learned a little more about it sitting in the desert for seven years. The sounds in a desert are small and you have to listen ever so softly to hear the whispers of the real things, even though they're already inside you.
Joe? I know Bernini's special and it's only sometimes that I feel confused, and right now the confusion has more to do with seeing you.
Yes, there are just so many feelings, aren't there, Maudie. What we had and what we lost, and what we've done since then and haven't done. . It's confusing, I know, and it's sad.
But now there's something else, she said quietly. You don't have to tell me why you're here. No one has said anything but it has to be because of Stern, it can't be anything else. And I suppose you can't talk about it and frankly I don't want to hear about it anyway. I know what Stern has meant to me and I'll always know, and nothing can change that. . But Joe? Just tell me one thing.
She turned away and shook her head. The tears had begun to well up in her eyes.
Oh what does it matter, you don't even have to tell me that. I already know the answer.
No, Maudie, go ahead and ask it anyway. It's better to say some things outright and not just hint at them, even when we know the answers.
She stared at the floor.
All right. . Last night I saw Stern. We went out to the desert and we sat up all night near the pyramids, and he talked as if it were all over and he even said it was the last night of his life. I tried to tell him we don't know things like that, but he said he knew it anyway, and then at dawn he took a photograph of me out there with my camera, so I'd have. . But Joe, is it true? Is it all over for Stern?
Joe nodded. . Yes.
You mean he's finished, just like that, and there's no way to. . no chance at all?
Not with what's happened. No.
Oh, I didn't want to believe him. It's so hard to imagine with someone like Stern who has always been there and always managed to come back. Somehow you just never think. .
Joe took her hands.
But how does he know? she asked. How does he know that?
I guess it's just always been that way with Stern. There's no explanation for it. He just knows things, that's all.
Oh my, I feel lost. .
Maudie, try to hear me, I need your help. I want to see him and there's no time. I came all this way to see him and find out about him and there's almost no time left, so can you help me do that? It may mean trouble with the people you work for, because of the Monks, serious trouble even. But can you do that for me anyway, for Stern's sake, for all of us?
Maud hung her head. Her voice was far away.
. . I can get a message to him.
Where is he now? Do you know?
Maud turned and gazed at the shuttered window. Thin lines of sunlight framed its solid darkness.
Out there, she whispered. Out there dressed as a beggar in some nameless city where he's always been.
He tried so hard to find his holy place and he never did, but he never stopped believing in it, Joe, and something terrible has happened now. He's out there alone and he thinks he's failed. He sees his life as so many ruins around him and he thinks it's come to nothing, and all the pain and suffering were for nothing.
He's wearing a beggar's rags and he's not afraid, but he's lonely and defeated and he shouldn't feel that way. . Oh Joe. Oh my.
Maud pushed away her tears.
Last night he said so many things he'd never said before. Some of them I already knew without him having to tell me, but some of them I didn't. And now he's out there thinking he's failed and there was nothing I could do to convince him it isn't so. I felt completely helpless. Stern, of all people. Stern. He's done so much for others and now he feels nothing means anything to him. .
Oh Joe, make him see. Let him see. Don't let him die feeling this way. .
Maud jumped to her feet.
Wait, I'll get the lemonade. The little things have to go on. . they have to, otherwise it's too much.
***
After he had left, Maud sat looking at the thin gold-colored bracelet on her wrist, turning it around and around and thinking how strange life was, how contradictory. For the thin bracelet reminded her of the trade Bernini was learning, repairing watches, and the time told by watches was something Bernini didn't even believe in, dwelling as he did in another kind of time where the hour of the day was only to be found in one's heart.
And she wondered as well what this gift from her son might mean now, coming when it did. Could it be that this simple little band was to be the final memento of all the many worlds she had known with Stern, with Joe?
Maud alone in the half-light turning the little bracelet and pondering the meaning of love in its long ago beginnings. . A miracle to be cherished above all others. . to be found only to be lost and lost again through the years.
— 18-
Crypt/Mirror
Old Menelik's spacious crypt from antiquity, hidden away beneath a public garden beside the Nile.
A secret and soundless vault unearthed by the great Egyptologist early in the course of his brilliant career of anonymous discovery in the nineteenth century. Later chosen by the former slave and graffiti expert as his retirement home, when he finally decided to forsake sunlight altogether and go underground once and for all, permanently on principle.
In the middle of the crypt the massive stone sarcophagus that had once belonged to Cheops' mother, its roomy cork-lined interior having served for many years as old Menelik's cozy bedroom in retirement, after he had abandoned the elegant pharaonic society he had sought in his youth and had set himself up on a heap of pillows in the evening of life, to sip tea in his sarcophagus and nibble an occasional madeleine in the comforting stillness, to ruminate and recall stray words from over the years. A soothing womb of refuge that had quite naturally evolved into old Menelik's tomb in the end, its enormous stone lid now firmly lowered into place for what might well be eternity.
On the far side of the crypt a small manual printing press, until recently the clandestine work corner of the melancholy Ahmad, former master forger and reigning night clerk of an obscure way station known as the Hotel Babylon, a run-down lodging whose Hanging Gardens had already been in an advanced state of decay at least as far back as the turn of the century, when its sordid rooms had always been available for balmy interludes in the unhurried darkness of Old Cairo, rentable by the half-hour without reservations on anyone's part.
Save for the printing press, the crypt exactly the same as it had been in old Menelik's day. In another corner a handsome harpsichord which had once been played by Little Alice.
Here and there clusters of stately Victorian garden furniture, its paint flaking away, originally Sherwood Forest green. The furniture consisting entirely of sturdy park benches, monstrously heavy and all but immovable due to the solid cast-iron slats binding their undersides in unbending Victorian decorum.