21 Cairo 1942
A gesture. A photograph. To die.
THUS STERN’S VOYAGE FINALLY came to an end in the desert not far from Cairo in the first light of another dawn, sitting with Maud after they had talked all night.
There were a few other things after that, he said. Perhaps you’d like to hear them.
No it’s all too much. No more anything now.
But it has to be now and anyway, these are good things. After we met that first time in Turkey I went to see Joe in Jerusalem. I told him the real reason why you’d left him in 1921, because you were afraid of losing him. Because you loved him so much and were afraid of losing that love the way you always had before in life.
Don’t Stern. It’s too long ago.
No listen, he understood that. He said he couldn’t go back but he understood it. Then we talked about the Sinai Bible. He’d been searching for it for the last twelve years, right up until 1933, it had become his whole life. Of course I already knew that, what I told him was where to look. In the Armenian Quarter.
So you always knew it was there.
Yes.
Yet in all that time you never looked for it there yourself.
No, I couldn’t. I never felt it was mine to find. Anyway after I talked to him he said he was going to give up the search and leave Jerusalem.
Why?
It had to be because of what I’d told him about you. Because time tricks us and he’d never stopped loving you despite what he said. It wasn’t really the Sinai Bible he wanted, you know that. And all that talk about money and power and his anger toward me, his hatred even, especially at Smyrna, that wasn’t really him. Once years ago we discussed it, I remember it perfectly. It was a Christmas Eve and we were in an Arab coffee shop in the Old City. It was snowing and the streets were deserted, before Smyrna when we were still friends, when he used to come to me for advice. He brought it up and I talked to him about it and it was the first time he ever got angry at me. Of course I didn’t have any idea who the woman was who had left him but I did know he was fooling himself, and that’s why he broke with me after that, because he knew I knew and it shamed him. So his resentment grew, that’s all, precisely because we had been close before. He didn’t dare trust anyone then, he went back to being alone in the mountains on the run. Anyway, after I saw him in 1933 he went out and gambled away everything he had. He wanted to lose it. Did you know he’d become very rich?
I’d heard that.
Yes, all those incredible schemes of his. Well he deliberately lost it all in a poker game with two wild characters, over a million pounds, but that’s another story. Now listen to this. He went to Ireland to dig up his old U.S. cavalry musketoon in the abandoned churchyard where he’d buried it before he became a Poor Clare. He took it to the vacant lot in Cork where he’d sat in rags before he’d left the first time. He picked another Easter Monday to do that and he sat there all afternoon listening to the sea gulls and looking at the three spires of St Finnbar’s, and at the end of the afternoon he decided he’d leave again. As he put it in his letter, he felt he had finally come to terms with the Trinity. So he shipped out to America, you’ll never guess where.
The Southwest?
Yes you know him all right, he wanted the desert, he was still thinking of that month you’d spent together in the Sinai. It was New Mexico he went to. To an Indian reservation eventually. He passed himself off as a Pueblo and before long became the chief medicine man on the reservation.
Maud smiled.
Joe? A medicine man?
She gazed shyly at the sand.
I don’t think I ever mentioned it but he was always fascinated by the idea that I had an Indian grandmother. He used to ask me about her all the time. What she did, what she was like, that kind of thing. I don’t know what he imagined but his face was like a little boy’s at those times.
Suddenly she looked away. Go on, she said.
Well that’s who he is. He sits in a wigwam with a blanket around him staring at the fire and muttering in Gaelic, which they take to be some language of the spirits. He keeps the old musketoon at his feet and claims it was his cannon in his private wars against the white man. Interprets dreams and divines the future. The revered and greatly respected shaman of the Pueblos.
Maud laughed.
Dear Joe. I was so foolish and he was too young to understand. So long ago.
Wait, there’s more. He keeps an old book in his lap which he pretends to consult when the Indians ask him questions, but of course he can’t read a word of it. He makes up his stories as he goes along and whether they’re prophecy or history no one can say because the book’s so old, three thousand years old in fact. The tales of a blind man written down by an imbecile.
Maud stared at him and this time Stern also smiled.
It’s true. He has it.
But what? How?
Well it seems a few years after he left Jerusalem his Arab friend found it and sent it to him. As to how and why the Arab found it, that must be another story too. But that’s where it is now. In 1933 the British Museum bought Wallenstein’s forgery from the Soviet government for one hundred thousand pounds, and in 1936 Haj Harun sent the original to a wigwam in New Mexico, where it rests in the lap of the chief medicine man of the Pueblos.
Maud sighed.
Well at last. Dear Joe.
She gazed at the sand lost in the memory of that month on the shores of the Gulf of Aqaba. The most beautiful moments she had known in life and so brief. So long ago.
She looked up. It had been there just on the other side of the Sinai, not so far away really. And the sparkling water and the bursting sunsets, the hot sand beneath their bodies through days without end and the numberless stars over nights without end, love and the all-healing sea, love and the solitude of the desert where the two of them had reached for the fire of the sand, she could feel its heat now when she closed her eyes.
But no, she couldn’t feel it, too long ago. Now the sand was cold beneath her fingers. She heard a rattling sound, Stern’s bottle against the rim of his cup. She took them from him and filled it for him. She put her arms around him.
It’s over, he said simply. Finished. Done.
Don’t say that, Stern.
Well not quite, you’re right. There are still a couple of things left to do. After the war you’ll go to America to be with Bernini and someday you’ll see Joe again, of course you will. But as for me I’ll never leave that hillside in the Yemen where I was born. Ya’qub was right after all. I’ll never leave it.
She hung her head. There was nothing to say. Stern managed to laugh.
Simple in the end, isn’t it. After all the struggling and trying to believe, the wanting to believe, two or three things sum it up and say it all. A gesture. A photograph. To die.
Clumsily he lurched to his feet and threw the empty bottle toward the new sun on the horizon, a gesture Joe had once made on the shores of the Gulf of Aqaba long ago against the darkness, this time made against the light. Then he took her camera and framed a picture of her between the Sphinx and the pyramids, clicking the shutter on their love, Maud robust and smiling for him on their final day, their time together ended in the lure of a Holy City, the lure of the desert, a weaving now within the bright somber tapestry of invincible dreams and dying days they had shared over the years with others, a tapestry of lives that had raged through vast secret wars and been struck dumb by equally vast silences, textures harsh and soft in their guise of colors, a cloak of life.