Edward Whittemore - Nile Shadows

I didn't realize I'd taken it out. I seem to have become distracted lately, or maybe relaxed is a better word. There's been little chance for that since the war started.

Joe nodded. Sign both good and bad, he thought. Good, because it means he's leaning back and taking a look at things. Bad, because he feels none of it matters anymore.

Stern studied the key as if listening to something, then put it away.

There are no inanimate objects, murmured Stern. Everything around us whispers continually, it's just that we don't have time to listen. In the desert it's different. In the desert you have the time and you listen long and hard because your life depends on it.

Joe watched him.

Why these thoughts, Stern?

Stern frowned, moving awkwardly around on his stool.

I'm not sure. I guess I was thinking about home, the idea of a home, what it means for all the people who have lost theirs in the war and will never have one again. . I chose my life and I knew what I was doing, but it's still true you never get used to being homeless. You can get used to being away from home, whatever home happens to mean to you, that's easy enough. You can even do it forever, if you have to. But there's a difference between that and not having a home at all.

Well I can see what you're saying, Stern, but I'd never have thought you could consider yourself an alien out here. Not when you can pass yourself off as a native no matter where you go. What's more, as a native of just about any background or standing.

Joe smiled.

After all, you haven't always been a beggar in rags the way you are tonight. As I recall, some other incarnations of yours have been quite grand.

I guess.

Well?

It's what you just said. I can pass myself off as a native. But being one, feeling that you belong in a place, is different.

That it is, and that brings us back to a stranger in the bazaars and deserts, aloneness amidst the clamor and the silence. What's it all about, Stern? Why these thoughts tonight and what was the particular inanimate object you had in mind?

Stern frowned, moved.

A rug. I was thinking about a rug.

Joe watched him.

A rug, you say. Simply that.

Yes. Rugs always remind me of someone's home because that's where I've always seen them, in someone's home. Most of my life has been spent in places like this, bare rooms with bare floors and almost no furniture, not places for living. It's just a little thing, one of those innumerable details we almost never think about. One of those tiny physical details that define us eventually, strangely.

That old faded red wool hat of yours, Joe, that's a physical detail. The one you used to wear in Jerusalem when you were living alone in that odd little room on a roof in the Armenian Quarter. Do you still have that hat?

Yes.

With you here in Cairo?

Yes.

And you wear it?

Well I did all right, back when I was taking my ease in the Hotel Babylon and seeing the world with the help of Liffy's miraculous gift of faces and gift of tongues. Or when I was out back in the courtyard with Ahmad late at night, sitting in our tiny oasis and listening with him to the stars.

Why did you wear it, Joe?

Habit, I suppose. Reminded me of things, I suppose. Must make me feel comfortable wearing it.

And uncomfortable too sometimes?

Oh yes. The incarnations come and go and it's not always easy to recall where those other people in your body have been, and what they did and what seemed so crucial at the time. Of course some of it was crucial, all of it in its way, but is that what you meant about physical details? That my red wool hat is a way of reminding myself that a kid on the run in the hills of southern Ireland, and an obsessed young man playing longterm poker in Jerusalem, and the medicine man of the Hopi Indians, and an Armenian agent known as Gulbenkian in wartime Cairo, that these odd types are all related in some obscure way?

Moreover, that they all grew out of a boy who passed his childhood tossing around in a fishing boat on the tides off the Aran Islands? Tides and more, despite all? Despite even adverse winds and the peculiar sunspots of time? That all these boys and men and notions I've just mentioned, despite the years, still have something in common? Namely me, because they are me? Is that what you meant?

Stern laughed.

You have a way of putting it, Joe. But yes, something like that.

Sure, thought Joe, something like that, but what exactly? Which rug are you thinking of, and why? All of Europe has lost the rug it's standing on, but you've got one specific one in mind. .

Well sure then, said Joe. In that sense nothing would be inanimate and there'd be no such thing as just plain furniture in life. An old wool hat or a shiny Morse-code key, they'd have their changing tales locked inside of them all right. But it was a bare floor you were talking about, a rug and a bare floor and homelessness. And it would seem to me that someone who grew up in the desert the way you did, in a tent made of goats' skins, wouldn't have any serious interest in floors, bare or otherwise. So how did that get into your thinking tonight, and just where was that bare floor? You must have looked at it hard and more than once. Where was it, Stern?

In Smyrna.

Then it must have to do with Eleni, thought Joe. Or with her uncle, Sivi, who got you started in this business.

Where in Smyrna, Stern?

Stern moved.

In Sivi's villa, he said, in the bedroom I always used when I stayed with him. A long room with a high ceiling and tall French doors and a small balcony overlooking the harbor. At one point, after Eleni left me, I used to spend a great deal of time sitting out on that balcony in the early mornings when the harbor was coming to life, and then again late at night after everything had closed and there was only an occasional wanderer poking along the waterfront. I liked the quiet, the peace, the new light of the morning and the old light of the stars. Harbors have always fascinated me with their ships from far and wide and no end to where they might go. Any journey under the sun conceivable, every destination in the world a possibility.

Stern smiled.

It's the ancient Greek in me, he said, that fascination with what lies beyond the horizon. Or what may lie out there, if you dare to look for it.

Greek too, Stern? Being English and Arab and a Yemeni Jew isn't enough of a heritage for you? You want to take on the Greeks too?

Yes, why not, said Stern. And anyway, everybody in this part of the world has a bit of the ancient Greeks in them. The Greeks were the ones who went everywhere after all, who couldn't stop themselves from trying to go everywhere. The light and the sea, but above all that astonishing light that makes you think you can see forever. It just drew them on and on and not just across the surface of the earth. What interested them was what lay beyond things, behind things, beneath things. The soul was their sea and the voyage never ended. Returning home to Ithaca was only an excuse for the Odyssey, the voyage itself was what counted. Homer, with his blind eyes, couldn't help but see that.

Homer, Stern? He's said to have been born in Smyrna. And what of that little balcony in Sivi's villa where you sat in the late and early hours, listening to Homer's seascape and keeping watch in your mind's eye?

Stern frowned.

A peaceful place on the surface, he said, but I wasn't at peace then. Eleni had left me for the last time and I hadn't become used to any of it yet, particularly going back to Smyrna and not having her there. Eleni was Smyrna to me, and the whole excitement of the place and the beautiful way of life people had there then, before the massacres, was inseparable in my mind from Eleni. When I was away, traveling, it wasn't so bad. But whenever I went back to Smyrna to see Sivi, I could only think of her and all the little places where we'd been together. Every little corner held some memory and no matter where I looked it was there waiting for me. . some feeling, some sensation that brought her back to me.