Perhaps, as he said, because such a task is both immense and perpetual. Am I making myself clear?
Not quite, replied Joe dizzily. Could you be just a little more specific?
Haj Harun looked embarrassed.
I doubt it but I'll try. What about?
Oh I don't know. How about that time when you were practicing medicine. That's a good profession, why did you give it up?
Had to. The market for deadly nightshade disappeared overnight.
Why?
Someone started a rumor that wiped out the business. You see most of it was bought by women to enlarge the pupils of their eyes, to make them more beautiful. Well a young man whose wife was a customer of mine came to confide in me. They'd only been married a short time and it seems she wouldn't take him in the mouth. She thought it was unnatural or unsanitary or both. So I advised him.
What advice for such a problem?
I told him to tell her it was perfectly natural and sanitary and furthermore there was no better substance in the world for instantly enlarging the pupils of the eyes. For best results, I said, the dosage should be repeated every few hours. It was only a little lie to help their marriage you see, or maybe it wasn't a lie at all. Maybe it works, who knows. Do you know?
It is true that I do not. What subsequent developments in the matter?
Well he told her all that and she asked me, as her physician, if it was true and I said it was, and after that her husband went around looking so happily exhausted his friends began to wonder what was going on and asked him.
And?
And he told them, and they told their friends, and overnight all the men in Jerusalem were looking happily exhausted and I couldn't sell any more deadly nightshade because the women were getting too much of the other substance.
So the rumor that drove you out of business was started by yourself?
Haj Harun moved his feet uneasily.
It seems so.
Not exactly the way to maintain yourself in a profession is it, would you say?
No I guess not but look at it the other way. Didn't I help to make a lot of marriages happier?
Agreed, that help you must have been. Well what else?
What else what?
What else can you be specific about?
Let's see. Did you know that when the bedouin are starving they cut open the vein of a horse, drink a little and close the vein? I learned that on a haj.
I did not know it. And if they're horseless?
They make the camel vomit and drink that.
I see. I won't ask about camel-less days.
And that bedouin girls wear clusters of cloves in their noses? That they paint the whites of their eyes blue? That the hills around Kheybar are of volcanic origin? I learned all that on different hajes.
I see. Where's that?
A haj? Where does it lead you mean?
No, the place with the surrounding hills and so forth.
Oh that's near the great divide of the wadis of northern Arabia.
Good. What else?
Well once I supplied an Armenian antiquities dealer with some parchment that was fifteen hundred years old.
Had some left over did you?
I did. In the caverns. In a grave down there. I don't know why, do you?
Could you have been thinking of writing your memoirs fifteen hundred years ago and laid in a burial stash just in case?
It's possible, anything is. Anyway he was very desperate to get his hands on it. But you know, he wasn't really an antiquities dealer at all.
No, not at all. He spent all his time practicing penmanship, learning to write with both hands, I used to go and talk with him sometimes. And you know he wasn't really Armenian either. We spoke Aramaic together.
What's that?
The language that was used in Jerusalem two thousand years ago. And now that I think of it, that's probably the only time I've used it since then.
And very sensible too, taking advantage of the opportunity I mean. Probably non-Armenians who write with both hands and speak Aramaic don't turn up that often, not even in Jerusalem.
Haj Harun stirred. He frowned.
That's true. You know I didn't see him for seven years after that, not until he wandered into my shop one morning looking like a ghost. You've never seen a man so dusty. And his nose gone and one ear falling off and a bundle under his arm.
Hard times in the desert, you think?
It would seem so. He said something about having been in the Sinai and talking to a blind mole down there but it wasn't clear at all, I couldn't make any sense out of it. He was lost, poor man, he couldn't even find his way around Jerusalem. He begged me to lead him to the Armenian Quarter, to the basement hole where he used to live there, so I did.
Excellent. What event occurring thereby?
None really. He began digging in the basement and dug down a few feet until he came to an old unused cistern. Then he put the bundle he'd been carrying in the cistern and filled up the hole. Why did he do that? Do you know?
Not at the moment but fresh ideas are always coming to me.
You see he didn't realize I was there, he seemed to have lost hold by then. He was muttering all the time and passing his hand over his eyes as if he were trying to wipe something away.
Muttering, losing hold, do you tell me so. Well that's a good one too. Is there anything else now?
Only those two discoveries I made as a child.
Only two you say?
The first had to do with balls.
Playing kind?
Well, my own.
Oh I see.
Yes. When I was a little fellow I always thought they were for storing piss. Looking at them it seemed reasonable enough, but then when I was a little older it turned out to be not that way at all.
That's true, it didn't. What second and final discovery?
That women and even emperors took shits just like I did. Once a day more or less with the same explosions and gases.
A curious proposition.
Yes. Very. It took me at least a year to get used to the idea and you know how long a year can be when you're a child. Doesn't it often seem like forever?
Forever, true. Often.
You know how I made those two discoveries?
Not precisely I believe.
Well it was from a blind storyteller who was chanting beside the road while an imbecile wrote down what he said. They were adult stories and I shouldn't have been listening but I was. I was very young then.
I see.
Yes, added Haj Harun wanly. But isn't it true we were all young and innocent once?
By far the most striking influence on Haj Harun's early years was his birthmark, an impressive phenomenon that had long been dormant and now appeared only on rare occasions.
This birthmark was an irregular shade of faded purple that began above his left eye, gathered momentum around his nose, cascaded down his neck and swirled intermittently over his entire body in a restless proclamation of stops and starts, tentative here and emphatic there, now lashing out boldly and now retreating, lapsing and flowing by turns as it swung across his loins and drifted down one leg or the other to vanish near an ankle in the manner of a map of some fabulous land of antiquity, Atlantis perhaps or the unknown empire of the Chaldeans, or the known but constantly shifting empire of the Medes.
When the purple pattern had still been largely visible there were those who professed to see in it a general layout of the streets of Ur before that city had been silted over by the primordial flood. To others it offered indistinct clues to the essential military strongpoints throughout the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, while still others claimed it was an accurate diagram of the oases in the Sinai.