-7-
The Tiberias Telegrams
The desire of the stranger is to his people. Speed the stranger home.
News of the triumphant book-burning episode in Basle and Parliament's emergency legislation against him reached Strongbow by way of a Roman newspaper months out of date.
While tarrying in the cabalist center of Safad he had gone down to Galilee one morning to fish. The air was fresh, the land still, the water unruffled. In due time he caught a fish and searched his robes for something to wrap it in, but all he had with him was a worn copy of the Zohar.
A clamor from the hillside above attracted his attention, a noisy band of Italian pilgrims climbing up to have a breakfast picnic on the site where Christ had preached the Sermon on the Mount. As they trudged along one of the men impatiently broke out a large salami and ripped off a mouthful of meat, discarding the wrapping paper, which floated down the hill in Strongbow's direction.
Strongbow was about to wrap up his fish in the newspaper page when he saw his own name looming up in a greasy headline that led into the fish's mouth. The dispatch was slimy but included all the essential facts.
At once Strongbow strapped his heavy bronze sundial to his hip and marched down the shore to Tiberias, where a small Turkish garrison was quartered. Without a word he pushed aside the guards and slammed his way into the private apartment of the Turkish commandant, a young man who was sipping his morning coffee, not yet dressed.
The commandant grabbed his pistol from the night table and wildly fired off all nine rounds at what he took to be an immensely tall old Arab holding a fish and wearing a sundial and carrying a book of Jewish mysticism. When the bullets stopped crashing into the walls the Arab calmly laid the fish on the night table and placed a Maria Theresa crown beside it.
I've just caught a herbivorous fish that thrives on algae and I want to send news of the catch to England.
What?
A St Peter's fish, rather bony but tasty. Are you in contact with Constantinople by telegraph?
Yes, whispered the terrified Turk, staring first at the fish and the book, then at the gold coin, then at the cryptic Arabic aphorisms engraved on the sundial.
Good. Send two telegrams for me to Constantinople, to someone you can bribe or trust, with instructions that they are to be taken to a commercial telegraph office and forwarded to an address in London I will give you.
But I don't even know who you are.
Strongbow placed a second gold coin on the table beside the fish. The Turk's eyes narrowed.
How can I be sure your catch is authentic and your fishing expedition isn't meant to harm the Ottoman Empire?
Strongbow placed another coin on the table and the Turk's eyes widened as he stared at the six glistening gold breasts of the former Austrian empress, largely bare and bulging impressively after having nursed sixteen children.
Or perhaps even meant to destroy the Empire?
Strongbow placed a fourth and last coin on the table, surrounding the fish with gold. He raised his sundial and studied it.
At this moment in your life the Prophet has presented you with a choice.
He has? What is it?
Pocket this money, send my telegrams, order the fish cooked for your lunch and shoot any of your men who are insubordinate. Or conversely, refuse the money and I will shoot you and all your men, send the telegrams myself and cook the fish for my own lunch.
The tall Arab checked his sundial again. In fact this apparition from the desert was so unnaturally tall and self-assured the Turk wondered if he might not be the Prophet himself, in which case it made no difference what he decided. And although he was still afraid to send the telegrams on his military circuit, the eight large breasts of Maria Theresa made a handsome sum of money.
Time, said the apparition, startling the Turk out of his thoughts. Instantly he reached into his night table for pen and paper.
Allah must have willed it, he sighed.
Indeed it seems likely, murmured Strongbow, who had begun printing rapidly in four-letter groups.
Naturally Strongbow's codes were unbreakable and could only be read by his London solicitor, who had certain sealed envelopes locked in his safe to be used for deciphering when so directed.
The first telegram instructed the solicitor to sell the Strongbow estate in Dorset and the numerous holdings that went with it. He was also to liquidate all the other Strongbow assets scattered throughout the industrial north and Ireland and Scotland and Wales, using hundreds of intermediaries so the enormity of these financial transactions would remain unsuspected.
The huge sums of money accruing from the sales were then to be forwarded in a devious manner to banks in Prague for eventual deposit in a Turkish consortium. Only when every shilling of the Strongbow fortune was safely out of England was the solicitor to decipher the second telegram that had been sent from Tiberias.
Whereas the first telegram had been long and detailed, the second was brief. And although Strongbow refused to address it properly, this second telegram was directed to Queen Victoria.
In it, citing his own family as an example, Strongbow noted that the quality of sexual life in England had deteriorated disastrously over the last seven hundred years. He admitted the queen was probably incompetent to do anything about it, but at the same time he said his self-respect would no longer allow him to participate in such a dreary decline.
Therefore he was renouncing his citizenship. Never again would he set foot west of the Red Sea. He then concluded with an array of scabrous allegations that surpassed even the obscenities found in Levantine Sex.
MADAME, YOU ARE A SMALL AND SMUG MOTHER RULING A SMALL AND SMUG
COUNTRY. CERTAINLY GOD MADE YOU BOTH SMALL, BUT WHOM ARE WE TO
BLAME FOR THE SMUGNESS?
IT WOULDN'T SURPRISE ME IF YOUR NAME IN THE FUTURE BECAME SYNONYMOUS
WITH UGLY CLUTTER AND DARK PONDEROUS FURNITURE AND HIDDEN EVIL
THOUGHTS, WITH ARROGANT POMPOSITY AND CHILD PROSTITUTION AND A WHOLE HOST OF OTHER GROSS PERVERSIONS.
IN SHORT, MADAME, YOUR NAME WILL BE USED TO DESIGNATE THE WORST SORT
OF SECRET SEXUAL DISEASE, A PRIM HYPOCRISY INCOMPARABLY RANK BENEATH
ITS HEAVY LAVENDER SCENT.
The address on the telegram was Hanover, England. It was signed Plantagenet, Arabia.
Thus the former deaf boy, lance in hand, who had once cleared his family manor of six hundred and fifty years of frivolous history, now felt he had found his vocation at last. The huge magnifying glass and bronze sundial were to be left behind. At the age of sixty he had decided to become a hakim or healer curing the poor in the desert.
Of course he had no way of knowing that the influx of his immense fortune into Constantinople, nominal ruler of the desert in his day but already corrupt beyond hope, would ineluctably cause repercussions far beyond that city, until by the end of the nineteenth century not only the desert but the entire Middle East would in fact be the property of one man, a lean barefoot giant who spoke humbly as an Arab and was occasionally humiliated as a Jew, who was by then both an Arab and a Jew, an indistinguishable Semite living in a ragged opensided tent tending his sheep.