What did he see?
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. They’d taken down the three crosses and it was just an empty hilltop. For all anyone could tell, nothing at all had ever happened there.
She shook her head.
That’s certainly for bad days. What about good days?
On good days I think he did leave. He saw what he saw all right, but then he decided to do something else anyway. So he clipped his hair or tied it up and shaved his beard or grew a longer one, put on some weight and taught himself to speak directly like other men, then went on to acquire a trade so he could pay his way.
What trade?
Cobbler, say, perhaps even carpentry again although I doubt that. After seeing the emptiness of that hilltop he’d probably have preferred to try something new. Yes, cobbler perhaps.
And where did he go?
Oh he didn’t go anywhere. Theories for good and bad days have to be set in the same place. He stayed in Jerusalem and now that he’d changed his appearance he could come and go as he pleased without being recognized, perhaps disguised as an Armenian or an Arab. Which he still does of course, being immortal and having long since forgotten his former troubles, even the man he used to be. And all because a very beautiful thing happened, a strange and glorious transformation. It took more time than going to heaven, had he done that, but it happened.
What?
Jerusalem moved. Over the centuries it slowly moved north. It picked itself up from Mt Zion and inched its way toward what had once been that empty hilltop outside the walls. Foreign conquerors who thought they were desecrating the place helped by razing the city every so often, and each time they did the city was rebuilt a little closer to the desolate hilltop. Until the hilltop was no longer far away but right beneath the walls, then within the walls, then nearer to the center of the city and at last in its very heart, crowded around with bazaars and playing children and swarms of traders and pious pilgrims all shouting and laughing and rubbing together. No longer a sad little empty hilltop at all you see. No just the opposite. Jerusalem had come to him, the Holy City had embraced him and that’s why at last he was able to forget his former sorrows. He no longer had to fear the nothingness of his death.
Well what do you think? said Stern with a smile.
I think it’s certainly a theory for good days.
Yes indeed, a happy ending after two thousand years. And not that impossible either. As a matter of fact my own father did much the same thing in the last century.
Did what? Made Jerusalem move?
No that takes more time. I was thinking about leaving the empty hilltop behind by putting on a disguise. And he was relatively famous too, and rather recognizable you would have thought.
But no one knew who he was?
Only the few he chose to tell.
How can you be sure he told you the truth?
Stern smiled. He almost had her now.
I see what you mean but I still have to believe him. What he did is too unreal not to be true. No one could forge a life like his.
All the same, forgeries can be enormous.
I know.
Once a man forged the whole Bible.
I know, repeated Stern.
Why do you say that?
Well you’re talking about Wallenstein, aren’t you? The Albanian hermit who went to the Sinai?
She stared at him.
How did you know that?
Stern’s smile broadened. At last he’d found what he was looking for.
Well isn’t that who you mean? The Trappist who found the original Bible and was so appalled by its chaos he decided to forge his own? Then went back to Albania where he survived to the age of one hundred and four in a dungeon beneath his castle, in a totally black and soundless cell, the only place he could live now that he was God? Cared for all that time by the love of Sophia the Unspoken, later when I met her to become Sophia the Bearer of Secrets? Who was overwhelmed when Wallenstein finally died in 1906?
But that’s not true.
What?
That Wallenstein died in 1906.
Yes it is.
It can’t be. I was there then.
Then you must be Maud, and you escaped to Greece when Catherine had a seizure and all his veins burst, a death willed on him by his own mother Sophia, or so the old woman always believed. She told me the whole fantastic story when I was trapped there during the first Balkan war. Told me everything, it seemed she just couldn’t bear the burden of keeping it all a secret anymore. A strange mixture of brilliance and superstition, that woman. She actually believed Catherine’s madness had come about because Wallenstein himself was an angel, literally, not a saint but a divine angel who couldn’t have a human child because he was superhuman. Well maybe he did have a touch of something considering the scope of his forgery.
Maud stared at him in utter disbelief.
Twenty-seven years ago, she whispered.
Yes.
But can any of it be true?
It’s all true and there’s more, much more. The baby you had for example. Sophia named him Nubar, a family name, it seems she was of Armenian descent originally. She brought him up with as much love as she had had hatred for Catherine and was able to give him a fortune through her early manipulations in the oil market. He’s extremely influential although very few people have ever even heard of him. Now what do you think of that?
Nothing. I can’t think anything about it. It’s all some kind of magic.
Not at all, said Stern, laughing and taking her by the arm, leading her up the street away from the water.
They talked late that night and many others and slowly she pulled away from despair as eventually it all came out, the horror of her first marriage and the loneliness of her second when she felt she had been abandoned again by someone she loved, the hidden fear from her childhood growing malignantly then until a time came when she could bear it no longer and she ran away from Joe, the great love of her life, the one thing she had always wanted in the world, a magical dream come true in Jerusalem and she had left it.”
Every act futile and bitter then. More years when she was terrified at growing old. Trying to find Sivi again, some link with the past, surprised to learn he was also living in Istanbul, tracing him with difficulty and shocked when she found him at last, so vastly different from the elegant and worldly man she had known at the time of the First World War. Pathetically alone now, working as a common laborer in a hospital for incurables.
And the strange muddled story about his former secretary that obsessed him, that he repeated over and over, how Theresa had gone to a place called Ein Karem in Palestine, there to suffer some kind of terrible self-inflicted penance in an Arab leper colony.
It was inexplicable. How could people change so much?
Stern shook his head. It wasn’t time to speak, her memory of standing beside the water was too recent. Sivi? Yes he had known him once, anyone who had ever spent any time in Smyrna had known Sivi. Yes and Theresa too. He nodded for her to go on.
Kind and gentle Sivi, totally broken when she found him, grave and sad and bewildered, living in a small squalid room near the Bosporus, so confused he often forgot to feed himself.
She had decided to devote herself to caring for him, it was the best thing she could do. She cleaned for him and washed and cooked, and for a while she felt stronger. Helping Sivi gave life some meaning again. But then that awful rainy afternoon came when she went to pick him up at the hospital after work as she did every day and found him strapped to a bed, beyond the impenetrable barrier of madness, the same afternoon Stern had found her by the water.