Джеймс Миченер - The Source

And so the turreted town of Acre, so powerful when seen from a distance, was actually eleven separate communities bound together only by their fear of the encroaching enemy: the Venetian, Genoese and Pisan fonduks; the Templar, Hospitaller and Teutonic orders; the Roman, Byzantine, Greek and Monophysite churches, plus the fragile eleventh, the kingdom of Jerusalem, ruled by a handsome, ineffectual young king whose intimates had succeeded in hiding from the public the fact that he was an epileptic.

In this confusion there was only one redeeming feature, the bells of Acre, and now as the time for evening prayers approached, their magic quality drifted across the walled city. First came the deep iron bell of the SS. Peter and Andrew, the Roman church near the waterfront, establishing a stately rhythm which was soon joined by the dancing bronze bell of the Coptic church and then by the tinkling chatter from the Syrian church of St. Mark of Antioch. One by one the other thirty-five bell towers sent forth their messages until the sea-girt peninsula was throbbing with sound. No city in the kingdom of Jerusalem—so great a name now signifying so little—had ever known an assembly of bells like those of Acre, and from his childhood Volkmar had loved them. Now as he looked aloft toward the azure sky from which they sounded, his hope revived for a moment and he listened to their noble symphony, the only thing their churches could agree upon, but then a Pisan merchant tugged at his sleeve and whispered, “Sire, don’t listen to the Venetians if they promise to buy your oil for more than we paid last year. Words, words. You know Venetians.”

Disgusted with the interlocking feuds that surrounded him, and feeling the old sense of doom returning, Volkmar rode to the Venetian fonduk, whose entrance was marked by the statue of a pig placed there to insult the Muslims, and went to the caravanserai, a spacious courtyard whose bottom rooms contained fodder for camels and whose upper floor served as a kind of inn. He looked for Muzaffar, hoping that the old Arab might still be trading with the Venetians—and there the old man was. Volkmar grabbed his hands and led him to the church of SS. Peter and Andrew, which Volkmar preferred because these men had been fishermen of Galilee; and there the Crusader went to one of the Christian chapels to give thanks for his safe arrival, while Muzaffar went to a chapel reserved for Islam, where before a delicately carved screen with a mark indicating the direction of Mecca, he prostrated himself on the pavement to whisper his Muslim prayers.

This was an arrangement guaranteed to startle hot-headed visitors from Europe—this business of sharing a consecrated Christian church with the enemy one had come to slay—but it was justified on the logical basis that outside the town walls stood a Muslim mosque in which a chapel containing a statue of the Virgin Mary was set aside for Christian use. There were other confusions for the stranger: most of the internal trading was in Arab hands, so that trusted Muslims like Muzaffar of Damascus were courted by the Italian merchants; and if one finally did meet a Catholic priest, he was apt to be a bearded Syrian with long oriental-looking garments, and it was this which helped bring about the final catastrophe in Acre.

For the time being the town was delightful. The boy-king, Henry II, and his recent bride were in residence, and in the long afternoons the knights dressed in ancient costume and rode horses caparisoned with ribbons and flowers. Those in men’s clothes pretended that they were Lancelot or Tristram or Parsifal, while the others, dressed as women, were their ladies; and mock-jousts and tournaments were held, men against women, and there was much singing. The sight of real women, dressed handsomely and seated with the young queen, reminded Volkmar of the exciting days he had enjoyed in Acre when he was young and when all the families—the Volkmars were rich then and the Jewish rumor was forgotten—wondered which young girl he would select as his countess; and he had tried many. Those were the good days, before the Mamelukes took Saphet.

He thought of them now as he walked through the narrow streets of the town, and he recalled the girls, the lovely girls of Acre. There was Bohemond’s niece and the Ibelin girl who had crept out of any castle her parents had ever tried to lock her into, and the grandniece of the King of Cyprus, who loved wine. Did anyone ever live as we lived then? Volkmar asked himself, and he turned away from the Venetian fonduk where Muzaffar waited, and went into the Pisan district, where he had been known as a young man, and at the pillared caravanserai he inquired, “Are they upstairs?” and a man with no teeth replied that they were. He hurried up to the second level, two stone steps at a time, and walked along the cloisters to a small door which opened cautiously, throwing a light. “You may come in,” a voice whispered.

Inside were girls from many different lands, but the tall white-skinned one from Circassia was the most expensive, and Volkmar’s eyes lighted as he saw her. She smiled, recognizing him as a man of importance who might leave an extra present, and he by-passed the French girls and the Egyptians and the Ethiopian who had been a slave, and took the tall Circassian by the hand and she led him to a room of manifold delights. In the hour before dawn they were awakened by the bells and he said, “When I come back to Acre I’ll ask for you again,” and in Arabic she replied teasingly, “If you’ve found joy, why risk losing it?” and he had crushed her to him and had not gone, but had stayed with her for three days, saying as he finally left, “At least I remember what it was like.” This time she did not tease him but said, “I would be pleased if you returned tomorrow.”

It would have been difficult for Volkmar to explain why he lingered on in Acre during that hot midsummer. He loved his wife and was proud of his son; not many of the noble families had been able to survive for two hundred years in one line and increase their holdings while doing so, and he had cause for pride. But as a man of forty-five, strong in the arm and courageous, he felt that he ought to be doing something creative with the productive years of his life, yet what he saw in Acre proved that his world was slowly falling apart, gasping to its death without commitment to any ideal; and he could find the vital reassurance he needed only in the primitive relationship of one man and one woman in bed. Night after night he drifted back to the Pisan quarter to spend his hours with the lovely Circassian girl, and when the bells wakened them they talked aimlessly and he discovered that she was a Christian, captured by Muslims on the edge of Kiev and sold by them to a slave dealer in Damascus. There a Pisan trader, seeing no wrong in the transaction, had bought her for the caravanserai of his fonduk, where she entertained men from Europe or Persia. Like the Acre in which she worked she was content with current arrangements and joked, “I’ve been sold four times and each was an improvement.” When she discussed the wars which loomed ahead she was actually gay, for she felt confident that she would survive. “With a good chance of improving my fortune if things go well,” she added, and her optimism encouraged Volkmar. And so these two drifting, laughing people came to bed.

One morning when he was walking idly back to his lodging place he happened to pass through the fonduk of Genoa, now largely empty because of the war between Genoa and Pisa, and he discovered that a group of Jews, newcomers from France, had taken residence in one of the unused caravanserais. He had never really spoken to a Jew, nor had any of his ancestors, since that day in 1099 when Volkmar I had tried vainly to save some of the Jews found in Ma Coeur, but Gunter had slain them and for nearly two hundred years no Jew had lived there.