On down through the past rushed the hushed Irish voice tracing caverns and corridors, spiraling through pageants and spectacles and the innumerable triumphs and devastations of Jerusalem over time, finally after three days and two nights to emerge by chance on this very spot, so astonished by what he had seen he had to describe it all to the first person he met.
And you’re the first person, whispered the soft Irish voice, and what would your name be then?
But Maud said nothing, not wanting to break the magic between two strangers suddenly brought together in the holy crypt. Instead she smiled and silently slipped to her knees and took him in her mouth, leaving him afterward leaning dizzily against the stones in the shadows.
She lingered in the magic a day or two before going back and of course he was there waiting. And on top of the steps that led down to the crypt, as before, was the same muttering man pacing back and forth in the darkness, privately pursuing the secret duties of his unfathomable vocation. As before they took no notice of him, and he of course took no notice of anyone.
Maud led him from the church to the immense and quiet esplanade beside the Dome of the Rock, and there sitting in the shade of a cedar she touched the collar of his patched and ragged uniform and spoke to him for the first time.
What in the world is it?
Officer of light cavalry, Her Majesty’s expeditionary force in the Crimea, 1854. Ragged because old, patched because of a fall suffered in a renowned suicidal charge.
And how did you survive that charge?
Two are the reasons. With God’s blessings and also because my father said I had other things to do in the future. Do you see these medals and especially this cross? They indicate I’m an established hero from the middle of the nineteenth century, when I foolishly aided the cause of the British Empire in a substantial and dangerous manner.
Maud held the cross and laughed.
How old does that make you now?
Twenty, just. Although sometimes I feel older, even as aged as my father. He was a fisherman and a poor man like myself.
And all those things you told me the other day were true?
Jaysus and yes they were true, each and every one of them more than the last and as much as the next. True to the end as only the end can be. I know. My father had the gift.
What gift?
Seeing the future as the past, seeing it as it is. The seventh son of a seventh son he was and in my land that means you have the gift.
Maud laughed again.
And what did your father see about your future that allowed you to survive the suicidal charge?
Fighting for Ireland he saw, not rowing over to Florida as good St Brendan had the sense to do some thirteen hundred years ago. That’s one of my names too you see. I come from an island of saints and I would have been glad to row to Florida for the sake of the Church from all I hear of the climate there but that wasn’t for me, fighting in the mountains of Cork was for me lugging around a monstrous old weapon, a modified musketoon it was, U.S. cavalry issue 1851 and sixty-nine caliber, me firing it like a howitzer to keep my distance, but after a while they caught onto my faraway game and I had to escape so God allowed me to join an order of nuns known as the Poor Clares, temporarily of course, because some of these Poor Clares were going on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land that had been requested at the end of the eighteenth century, God waiting to grant permission until the moment was opportune, and that’s how I happened to come to Jerusalem as a nun but now I’m not a nun anymore, now I’m a retired veteran living in the Home for Crimean War Heroes because the baking priest decided to award me this Victoria Cross for general valor because the bread was getting to his brains, only natural after sixty years at the oven baking the same four loaves of bread, and if I seem to be rambling and this is confusing it’s just because I’ve been keeping company with a peculiar Arab, a quite elderly sorcerer, an unusual old man who is so unusually old he has that effect on you. Sorry, we’ll start again. Ask me something.
Maud took his hand and smiled.
What would your father see if he were here now?
Surely the desert. We must be away from this babble of Jerusalem with its roving fanatics of every kind. Did you see that item pacing the top of the stairs to the crypt?
Yes.
Well he’s been doing that for two thousand years, just pacing and muttering and never stopping. How could we even begin to think clearly in a place where such things go on?
Who told you that?
About the man on the top of the stairs? My sorcerer friend. And he knows because he’s been watching him all that time. Around the beginning of every century he drops in to compare notes and see if there’s been any change in the general situation but there never is. But what do you think, will we be going to the desert then? I’ve never been but the old Arab says it’s a wonderful place for filling your soul. He’s been making a haj for the last ten hundred years or so and he says nothing compares to it in the springtime, wild flowers and all that. Shouldn’t we be going?
Yes my love, it must be a wonderful place and I think we should be going.
From Aqaba they rode south along the shore of the Sinai until they found a small oasis where they camped. Through the foothills in the moonlight they circled the colors of the desert, swam at noon in the brilliant gulf and lay on the hot sand of the beach, asleep in each other’s arms in early evening and awake again at dawn to slip down to the shore and embrace in the shallows, laughing over their figs and pomegranates and toasting the new sun with arak, whispering Do it again right now and spinning, sinking through the quarters of a moon.
On their last evening they sat on a rock by the water watching the sunset gather silently, passing the arak back and forth as the Sinai burst into flames behind them and the last of the light settled on the barren hills where darkness was coming to Arabia. The rustle of the waves and the fingertips of the wind, the desert cast to fire and the rush of arak in their blood, the air lapsing into blackness and inevitably on the far side of the gulf another and distant world.
He stood then and threw the empty bottle far across the water.
They held their breath and waited and a minute seemed to pass before they heard a tiny splash somewhere out there in the night, perhaps only imagining it.
13 Jericho
Home from the sea free as birds.
JOE WAS OVERJOYED WHEN he found out they were going to have a child. He sang and danced all his father’s songs and dances and insisted they get married that afternoon, as he had been insisting since before they went to Aqaba.
It’s too hot today, September is soon enough. This heat is frightful.
Frightful it is and atrocious and terrible and just plain bad. Now just don’t move, you shouldn’t be moving, just sit quiet there and fan yourself while I make a cup of tea. Frightful, yes.
You know Joe, I’m really beginning to love Jerusalem.
It’s a madhouse isn’t it, nothing like it, just what the baking priest said. When he gave me his veteran’s papers I looked at him and said, you’re eighty-five and I’m twenty and how about apparent age? Laughed, he did. No problems like that in such a place, he said. Apparent anything doesn’t mean much in our Holy City, everybody’s Holy City, that’s what he said. Just a minute now.
I remember once I saw a man in Piraeus who looked a lot like you except he was older.