Джеймс Миченер - The Source

Cullinane was about to make the kind of extravagant statement that archaeologists should avoid, like, “This is my favorite town in Israel,” when Tabari joined him and, pointing down at the vast walls, said, “When King Richard the Lion Heart camped by that tell, trying to capture St. Jean d’Acre, there were damned few Arabs inside the walls trying to stop him.”

“I’m surprised,” Cullinane said, for although he knew the history of the Holy Land better than most, he had not previously heard this thesis advanced, and he suspected that Tabari was wrong.

“Let’s go down to the café,” the Arab proposed, and he led the way to a spot where drinks had been served for some twenty centuries and asked the waiter to fetch a bottle of arrack. As Tabari poured two glasses of the clear anise-flavored stuff, he said, “The Crusaders held Acre for about two hundred years, but in that time they rarely fought Arabs, because just before the Christians arrived the Turks had moved in and had crushed us pretty badly. So it was always Turks you fought, never Arabs. As a matter of fact, except for that minor matter of religion, we Arabs were always much closer to you than we were to the Turks. The sensible alliance, of course, should have been the humiliated Arabs plus the resurgent Christians against the upstart Turks.” He shook his head mournfully over the lost chances of history, then surprised Cullinane by saying, “I suppose you know that we Arabs tried time and again to effect such an alliance.”

“I never gave much credence to that thesis.”

“We tried. Repeatedly.”

Cullinane poured a few drops of water into his arrack, watching with pleasure as the clear liquor turned a milky white. Tabari summoned the waiter, explaining in the exaggerated simplicity he would have used with a retarded child, “My friend’s an American. And as you know, Americans must have ice. Don’t stand there like a fool. Fetch some ice for the American.”

“We have no ice,” the waiter protested.

“Find some!” Tabari cried. “He’s an American.”

Then he returned to Cullinane. “When your men finally captured Antioch they were surprised to find Arab ambassadors there, proposing an alliance against the Turks.”

“What queered it?”

Tabari strummed his fingers on the ancient table top, then suggested tentatively, “When you once describe a venture as a holy war you surrender all capacity to judge honest alternatives.” He stopped and looked up at the clean and beautiful mosque etched against the palm trees.

At this point there were many avenues into which Cullinane might have taken the conversation: Was Tabari saying that in October, 1097, when the Crusaders reached Antioch they were too imbued with Christian zeal to weigh the actual situation confronting them, just as the Arabs in 1964 in the nations surrounding Israel were so infatuated by the concept of jihad that they could not rationally accept the fact that Israel existed as a sovereign state? Or was he slyly charging the Jews with an error of which they were not yet guilty: constructing a religious state with such enormous blinkers that the world’s reality was prevented from shining through? Or did he perhaps refer to the larger religious war which he had sometimes discussed, in which the United States and Russia were ideologically engaged, each subject to the same infirmity that had struck the Crusaders: an inability to see through the heat waves which they themselves were generating? These were not matters which Cullinane wished to explore at this moment, for he was concerned only with the actual history of Acre during the Crusades and not with what might have been. He was gratified, therefore, when the waiter returned with a piece of ice, but it was very dirty.

“My God!” Tabari cried. “You can’t put a thing like that in the glass of a hygienic American.” He took the filthy ice and started washing it with water, then brushing it with his coat sleeve, but no amount of cleansing would make that ice acceptable, and in frustration he put it in his own glass. Addressing a group of amused Arabs sitting on their haunches outside the mosque he cried, “This will never be a first-class country until a self-respecting American can get ice for his arrack. What kind of people are we?”

Turning to Cullinane he said provocatively, “My point is this. The first nine thousand men your Crusaders killed in Asia were Christians. Your gallant Frenchmen and Germans would kiss their crosses, storm into some town, shouting, ‘Death to the infidel!’ and meet there a bunch of Arabs wearing turbans. When the slaughter was over they found that they had killed perfectly good Nestorians and Byzantines and Egyptian Copts who had wanted to help them. It must have been confusing. When this was finally straightened out your boys did get around to killing real Muslims, but this time unfortunately you killed only the Arabs who wanted to join you as allies. Only very late in your invasion did you kill any Turks, who were always your real enemies.”

“How do you explain it?”

“The fundamental unfairness of life,” he laughed. “How dare a Christian look like an Arab? Or today, how dare so many Jews look like Arabs? Or you could ask it another way. Why does that damned pipe-smoking Eliav look so much like a Christian German while I look so much like an Israeli Jew?”

This lively nonsense Cullinane was willing to explore, but toward the end of the morning Tabari returned to his main theme: “The real tragedy of the Crusades has always been the fact that the Turkish barbarians could have been eliminated … They were nothing but a gang of murderers, you know, surging out of Asia …”

“You sound as if you didn’t like them,” Cullinane suggested.

“I despise them. They ruined our Arab civilization and it may never recover.” For some minutes Tabari reviewed with sadness the eight-hundred-year Turkish domination of the Arabs, concluding, “And the hell, of it is that all the while you Crusaders battled these Turks, we Arabs were waiting on the sidelines, willing to patch up some kind of alliance with you, but your leaders lacked the imagination to achieve it. So the moment passed. And in the end you Christians were defeated. And we Arabs went down the drain with you.”

Mournfully he sipped his arrack, adding a final point that Cullinane had not heard before: “How do you explain, John, that in the final days even the Mongol descendants of Genghis Khan offered to become Christians if the Pope would allow them to enlist in the Crusade and attack the Turks from the rear? That’s right. And no one in Europe even answered the Mongol letters.” He shook his head reflectively, then stooped to pick up three small pebbles which he tossed one by one into the plaza. “So we were all lost together. Christians, Arabs, Mongols. Because when men ignite in their hearts a religious fury, they inflict at the same time a blindness upon their eyes.”

• • •

If Count Volkmar wanted to engage the true enemy, he would not have long to wait, for from the east came Babek, the mighty spearhead of the Turks, driving in from the plains of Central Asia where the horde had gathered strength for its assault some decades ago upon the Arabs and now upon the Christians who had intruded upon the area. He was a violent general, willing to fight on any terrain, but preferring to pick his battleground with the delicate precision of a lady choosing the right thread for an embroidery. He watched with amusement as the Crusaders stupidly assaulted one Christian settlement after another, killing the bearded converts in the mistaken idea that they were infidels.

They’re destroying their own allies, he thought, shaking his head at the folly.

He intended setting the same trap for the Frankish knights that he had used to destroy the little priest on the brown donkey, and from a distance he followed the great army as it stumbled its massive way into the same danger. But then his spies warned him of a significant difference: “This time there are many armed knights,” and he decided not to attack frontally. Instead, he waited until the captains of the force separated their troops and sent a detachment of some ten thousand to ride eastward to protect that flank, and for three days Babek remained hidden from this smaller army until he judged it to be so far removed as to provide an isolated target which the main army would not be able to rescue.