I don’t think so, Father. Could it possibly involve incidents from the lives of Moses and Nebuchadnezzar and Christ and Mohammed? A few lesser known passages from the Thousand and One Nights? An obscure reference or two from the Zohar? A frightened Arab in the desert who was alarmed because the sky was unnaturally dark? Who later turned up as an antiquities dealer in Jerusalem? In whose back room you wrote an anthropological study of the Middle East? No, I don’t believe you have ever told me about it.
No? That’s odd, because it was quite a remarkable affair. Do you think Ya’qub would be interested in hearing about it?
I’m sure he would, he can never get enough of hearing anything. But of course he’ll immediately jumble all your facts and rearrange them to his own liking.
Yes he will, an incorrigible habit. Those eternal jokes and riddles and scraps of rhymes he sees everywhere. Well we’ll just have to keep our wits about us and take our chances.
In Europe Stern dreamed deeply of his future. He considered composing symphonies or dramas, painting murals and planning boulevards and writing epic cantos. Unarmed and undefeated, he threw himself fearlessly into these projects.
He haunted museums and concert halls and restlessly paced the streets until dawn, when he fell into a chair in some workingmen’s café to smoke and drink coffee and fortify himself with cognac, totally immersed for a time in this one great achievement.
In Bologna he ignored his medical lectures and covered canvases with masses of colors. But months later when he examined what he had done he found it lifeless.
In Paris he ignored his law courses to study music. Whole scores of Mozart and Bach were memorized but when the time arrived for him to write down his own musical notations, none came.
He turned at once to marble. He pored over drawings and eventually attempted sketches, only to find his own designs for fountains and colonnades resembled Bernini’s.
Poetry and plays came next. Stern provided himself with a stack of paper and a hard straight chair. He boiled coffee and filled the ashtray on the desk with cigarettes. He tore up sheets of paper, boiled more coffee and filled the ashtray again with cigarettes. He went out for a walk and came back to begin again but still there was nothing.
Nothing at all. Nothing was coming from his dreams of creation.
Looking down at the heaped ashtray he was suddenly frightened. What was he going to do in life? What could he do?
He was twenty-one. He had been in Europe three years yet there was no one to talk to now, he had no friends at all, he had been too busy dreaming alone. He had come here with ideals and enthusiasm, what had gone wrong?
He sat up unable to sleep thinking of the hillsides where he had played as a boy, recalling that Ya’qub had said he would never really leave them, remembering his father on their last evening together wondering aloud what it might mean to be born in the desert with its solitude rather than to have sought it as he had done.
He poured cognac and closed his eyes, images tumbling before him.
A blind beggar in Cairo crying out triumphantly, a march the length of the Sinai without food or water, the Arab village at Aqaba, the great divide of the wadis of northern Arabia, an antiquities dealer’s shop in Jerusalem, floating down the Tigris into Baghdad, leeches and opium near Aden, a fever after swimming across the Red Sea, the holy sites of Medina and Mecca in disguise.
Disguises. Strongbow striding back and forth for forty years disguised as a poor camel driver or a rich Damascus merchant, a harmless haggler over pimpernel or a collector of sorrel, an obsessed dervish given to trances and an inscrutable hakïm, a huge immobile presence in the desert speaking with his eyes.
Strongbow the genie changing and changing his size and shape.
Ya’qub the shepherd waiting patiently on his hillside.
And finally, a former hakïm gently led home to rest, brought home to peace.
What was it? What was he trying to find in those three lives?
Stern threw his glass at the wall. He picked up the bottle and crashed around the room knocking over chairs and smashing lamps on the floor. He hated Europe, all at once he knew how much he hated it. He couldn’t breathe here, he couldn’t think, he couldn’t hear with his own ears or see with his own eyes, the noise, the crowds pushing in on him, everything cluttered and unclear, so far from the quiet hillsides of his childhood, the stillness of the shifting sands in the Temple of the Moon.
He’d done nothing here but dream futile dreams and fail, dream hopelessly and fail because this wasn’t his place. He had been born in the desert, he couldn’t live here. The desert was his home and he had to go back to it now, he knew that.
And do what?
Again he saw the three men. Strongbow marching from the Nile to Baghdad. Ya’qub in his tent in the Yemen. The hakïm at dawn deep in the desert sitting with a troubled bedouin, telling him to fix his gaze on the flight of a distant eagle and saying Yes, they would find the oasis.
Why did they keep returning to him? To tell him what?
An Englishman, a Jew, an Arab. His father and his grandfather relentlessly striding on, patiently going nowhere, his land and his home and heritage.
The vision burst upon him. A homeland for all the peoples of his heritage. One nation embracing Arabs and Christians and Jews. A new world and the Fertile Crescent of antiquity reborn in the new century, one great nation stretching majestically from the Nile through Arabia and Palestine and Syria to the foothills of Anatolia, watered by the Jordan and the Tigris and the Euphrates as well, by Galilee, a vast nation honoring all of its three and twelve and forty thousand prophets, a splendid nation where the legendary cities would be raised to flourish once more, Memphis of Menes and Ecbatana of Media and Sidon and Alep of the Hittites, Kish and Lagash of Sumer and Zoar of the Edomites, Akkad of Sargon and Tyre of the purple dye and Acre of the Crusaders, Petra of the Nabataeans and Ctesiphon of the Sassanids and Basra of the Abbasids, sublime Jerusalem and the equally sublime Baghdad of the Thousand and One Nights.
Stern was delirious, the vision was overwhelming, far grander than the promise he had made to his mother as a child. He sat down at his desk and began scribbling feverishly, and when he emerged two weeks later he had not only conjured up the memories of a thousand and one ancient tribes and civilizations and fused them together, he had also written the basic laws for the new nation and designed its flag, sketched some of its impressive public buildings and considered its universities and theaters, pondered its national anthem and listed the components of its constitution.
At the age of twenty-one he had arrived at his plan for life.
Quickly then he packed his bags and left Paris. Having decided who he was, nothing remained but to become that man and work toward the common bonds that perhaps had existed in his homeland three thousand years ago, not since.
This new promise was solemn and certain and he knew he would never break it, not even if it turned in time to break him.
15 The Jordan
From the soft green heights of Galilee, rich in gentle fields of grain and kindly memories, a promised stream plunging down and down.
STERN DROVE BACK TO the Middle East in a ten-horsepower French automobile, after being trapped briefly in Albania by the outbreak of the first Balkan war. Once there he converted the automobile into a tractor car to use in the desert. Clattering and backfiring, the tractor roared down wadis and rumbled over mountains covering distances that had taken dozens of painful camel marches in his father’s day.