Shadrach smiles. “We were slaves in America. More recently.”
“And your owner was a Jew? I don’t believe a Jew would own slaves, not ever.”
Shadrach wants to explain that the slavemaster Mordecai, if ever he existed and gave his name to his blacks, was not necessarily Jewish, but might have been, for even Jews were not beyond owning slaves in the days of the plantation; but the discussion is making Meshach Yakov uncomfortable, apparently, and with such abruptness that the children are left gaping he changes the subject, asking his sister whether dinner will be ready soon.
“Fifteen minutes,” she says, heading for the kitchen. As though heeding an unspoken warning to leave the guest in peace, Joseph and Leah withdraw to a couch and begin a stilted, awkward conversation about events in school — a worldwide holiday has been proclaimed, it seems, for the day of Mangu’s funeral, and Joseph, who is at the university, will be deprived of a field trip to the Dead Sea, which annoys him. Leah cites some remark made by Jerusalem’s PRC chief about the importance of paying respect to the fallen viceroy, bringing a derisive hoot from Rebekah in the kitchen and a brusque comment about the official’s intelligence and sanity, and soon things degenerate into a noisy, incomprehensible discussion of local political matters, involving all four Yakovs in a fierce bilingual shouting match. Meshach, at the outset, attempts to explain to Shadrach something about the cast of characters and the background, but as the dispute goes along he becomes too embroiled in it to keep up his running commentary. Shadrach, baffled but amused, watches these articulate and spirited people wrangle until the arrival of dinner brings a sudden halt to the debate. He has no idea what the battle was about — it has to do with the replacement of a Christian Arab by a Moslem on the city council, he thinks — but it cheers him to see such a display of energy and commitment. In Ulan Bator, bugged and spy-eyed to an ultimate degree, he has never witnessed such furious clashes of opinion; but perhaps the spy-eyes have nothing to do with it, perhaps it is only because he has lived outside the framework of the nuclear family for so long that he has forgotten what real conversation is like.
The advent of dinner is worrisome — should he don the skullcap? What other customs are there that he does not know? — but no problems arise. Neither Meshach nor his grandson wears a skullcap; there is no prayer before eating, only a moment of silent grace observed by the two old people; the food is rich and plentiful, and Shadrach does not notice any special dietary customs in force at the Yakov table. Afterward Joseph and Leah retire to their rooms to study, and Shadrach, warmed by red Israeli wine and strong Israeli brandy, settles down with old Yakov to study maps of the vicinity, for they have agreed at dinner to go on a sightseeing tour in the morning. The old city, certainly, its towers and churches and marketplaces, and the supposed tomb of Absalom in the Kidron Valley nearby, and the tomb of King David on Mount Zion, and the archaeological museum, and the national museum where yhe Dead Sea scrolls are kept, and—
“Wait,” Shadrach says. “All this in one day?”
“We’ll take two, then,” Meshach says.
“Even so. Can we really cover so much ground so fast?”
“Why not? You look healthy enough. I think you can keep up with me.” And the old man laughs.
22
In Istanbul a few days later he has no guide, and he wanders that intricate city of many levels alone, confused, defeated by the complexities of getting from one place to another, wishing that some Meshach Yakov would discover him here, some Bhishma Das. But none does. The map he gets at his hotel is useless, for there are few street signs, and whenever he veers off a main boulevard he immediately gets lost in a maze of anonymous alleyways. There are taxis, but the drivers seem to speak only Turkish, tourism having perished during the Virus War; they can follow self-evident instructions — “Haghia Sophia” — “Topkapi” — but when he wants to go to the ancient Byzantine ram-pan on the outskirts of the city he is unable to make any driver understand, and in the end he has to resort to asking to be taken to the Kariya Mosque on the city’s outskirts, and getting from there to the nearby wall on foot, by guesswork.
Istanbul is gritty, grimy, archaic, alien, and irritating. Shadrach is fascinated by its architectural mix, the opulent Ottoman palaces and the glorious many-minareted mosques and the eighteenth-century wooden houses and the sweeping twentieth-century avenues and the battered fragments of old Constantinople that jut like broken teeth from the earth, bits of aqueducts and cisterns and basilicas and stadiums. But the city is too chaotic for him. It depresses and repels him despite the powerful appeal of its rich-textured history. Even now more than a million people live here, and Shadrach finds it hard to cope with such a density of humanity. There are the usual dismaying organ-rot tragedies on display in the streets, and an extraordinary number of feral children, some only three or four years old, trooping like desperate scavengers everywhere. And there are Citpols moving in wary pairs wherever he turns. Watching him, he is convinced. Is it just paranoia? He doesn’t think so. He thinks that Genghis Mao, unhappy over having given his physician leave to roam the world, is keeping him under surveillance so that he can be brought back to Ulan Bator at the Khan’s whim. Shadrach had not expected to be able to vanish totally — indeed, returning to Ulan Bator is definitely central to his emerging plan of action, though he still does not know when the right moment to go back will arrive — but he does not like the idea of being spied upon. After two days in Istanbul, a perfunctory tour of the standard sights, he flies abruptly to Rome.
He spends a week there, making his headquarters in an ancient hotel, mellow and luxurious, a few blocks from the Baths of Diocletian. Rome too is densely populated, and its urban pace is frenetic, but for some reason there are fewer scars of the Virus War and its nightmare aftermath here, and Shadrach begins to relax, to ease himself into a comfortable Mediterranean rhythm of life: he strolls the splendid streets, he sips aperitifs at sidewalk cafes, he gorges himself on pasta and young white wine at obscure trattorias, and all the traumas of the Trauma Ward become insignificant. Truly this is the Eternal City, capable of absorbing all of time’s heaviest blows and never losing its resilience. He sees, of course, the imperial monuments, the Arch of Titus that commemorates the Roman sacking of Jerusalem, the temples and palaces of the Capitoline and Palatine, the magnificent jumble that is the Forum, the haunted wreck of the Colosseum. He visits St. Peter’s, and, looking up toward the Vatican, muses on Genghis Mao’s mocking, corrosive offer to make him Pope. He does the Sistine Chapel, the Etruscan collection in the Villa Giulia, the Borghese gallery, and a dozen of the best baroque churches. His energies seem to grow rather than flag as he pursues the infinite antiquities of Rome. Oddly, he finds himself responding most intensely not to the celebrated classic monuments but to the ancient gray tenements, steep and gaunt, in Trastevere and the Jewish quarter. Are these the very tenements of Caesar’s time, mansions once, slums now? Is it possible that they are still inhabited after two thousand years? Why not? The old Romans knew how to build six stories high, and even higher, and built of durable stone. And it would not have been hard, despite the sackings and the fires and the revolutions, to keep those buildings intact, to rebuild, replaster, patch the old and make it new, constantly to refurbish and restore. So these gray towers may once have housed the subjects of Tiberius and Caligula, and Shadrach gets a pleasant little shiver from the thought that they have been continuously occupied across the ages. On second thought, it probably is not so; nothing, he decides, endures that long in daily use. These are more likely twelfth-century buildings, fourteenth-, even seventeenth-. Old enough but not truly ancient. Except in the sense that anything that antedates the rise of Genghis Mao, that has survived out of that former world, that prediluvian epoch, is ancient.
He wishes he could stay in Rome forever. A pity, he thinks, that Genghis Mao wasn’t serious about the papacy. But after a week Shadrach resolves to go onward. It is too pleasant here, too comfortable; besides, as he downs a Strega at his favorite cafe one warm humid evening, he notices two Citpols at a table at a cafe on the opposite corner, not drinking, not talking, merely watching him. Are they closing in, tightening their net? Will they pick him up tomorrow or the day after and tell him he must return to his master in Ulan Bator? He buys a ticket to London, cancels it at the last moment, and boards a plane that is about to leap over the pole to California.