Edward Whittemore - Jerusalem Poker

What are you doing on the floor?

Gravity pulled me down, I'm feeling grave today. Then too the stones down here are cooler than a chair.

Then too heat rises, so the lower you are the better, which is also in keeping with my lowly mood. Why don't you try it? It's not half bad.

I can't, said Haj Harun. I can't sit still today. I'm much too restless. It's a black day. Black.

I see.

Haj Harun nodded at himself in a nonexistent mirror on the wall and his helmet went awry again, releasing a shower of rust into his eyes. The tears began to flow and be went on muttering to himself as he drifted out the door.

Black, thought Joe, wiping his face with his sleeve. Black and that was half of it for sure.

It had been only a little over two years ago that he'd been fighting the Black and Tans in the hills of southern Ireland, and all because of something his father had said, his father who'd been the seventh son of a seventh son and therefore had the gift of prophecy.

It was too hot to move, too hot to be in Jerusalem.

Joe closed his eyes and went back to the windswept Aran Islands, to a cool June night in 1914.

It had been a party night, one of the few each year. As usual all the poor fishermen had gathered at Joe's house for singing and dancing and drinking, Joe's father being the undisputed king of the little island, both because he had the gift and because he had thirty-three sons, Joe at fourteen being the youngest and last and the only one still at home. What should have been a wondrous evening of prophecies together with tales of pookas and banshees and the little people.

But not so that June night in 1914. On that cool evening his father had stared into his mug without a word, gloomily stared at the floor without a word, until finally toward midnight he began to relate.

All right, said his father, all right now. If you want to know the shape of things I'll tell you what I see. I see a great war coming in two months time. And seventeen of my sons are going to fight in that war and die in that war, one in every army that makes up that bloody war. But that's not what eats at this old heart.

They're men now and can decide for themselves. What eats at this old heart is that not one of them is going to die fighting for Ireland. And that's our people for you, everyone's cause but our own.

Terrible, whispered the neighbors.

Terrible it is, said his father. But wait now, there's more. I also see a rising of the Irish nation in two years time, and then at last I'm going to have one son fighting for his country, a mere lad it's true but he'll be there all the same, that small dark boy you see standing perfectly straight in the corner behind you, his destiny now foretold.

And then, added his father, the lad having done his duty here, he's going to go on and become the King of Jerusalem for some reason.

Don't blaspheme, warned the shocked neighbors.

And none intended, said his father at once in embarrassment. I have no idea why I said that.

Nor did Joe. But in 1916 the Easter Uprising came as predicted and Joe was there helping to hold the Dublin post office before it fell, escaping then to the south and fighting alone in the hills of Cork for four long years before the Black and Tans tracked him down and he had to flee the country in the only way he could, disguised as a Poor Clare nun among a dozen Poor Clares sailing on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

To Jerusalem. Where he lay in a gutter outside the Franciscan enclave in the Old City, penniless and knowing no one, whispering into the dirt in Gaelic the name of the Irish revolutionary party, We ourselves, praying one of the priests who passed would be Irish and take pity on him.

As one did. The former MacMael n mBo, a whimsical man far advanced in years who in the folly of his youth had served as an officer of light cavalry in a British brigade in the Crimea. Who had survived a famous suicidal charge there when his mount fell, and as a result been awarded the first Victoria Cross ever given. Who now for the last six decades had been the priest in charge of the Franciscan bakery in Jerusalem.

Who are you really, lad? the elderly priest had asked Joe as he lay in that Jerusalem gutter, starving and exhausted. And to identify himself with the little breath he had left, Joe had whispered the legend of the O'Sullivan Beare clan.

Love, the forgiving hand to victory.

The baking priest had rescued Joe from that Jerusalem gutter and given him his old army uniform and his army papers so that Joe could move into the Home for Crimean War Heroes, a charity in the Old City.

The baking priest, eighty-five years old at least and dancing and singing in front of his oven as he baked his loaves of bread in four shapes, the four concerns of his life, the Cross for God and Ireland for home, the Crimea where he had given up war and Jerusalem where he had found peace.

Singing and dancing in front of his oven and telling Joe not to worry about the date of birth on his army papers. Not to worry about apparent age here because nothing was as it seemed in the Holy City, everybody's Holy City.

Bread for brains? Joe had wondered. Simply gone the other way after six decades of sweating and dancing and singing in front of an oven in Jerusalem?

But he discovered the baking priest had been right about Jerusalem when he made his second friend there, a wizened old man who wore a faded yellow cloak and a rusty Crusader's helmet tied under his chin with two green ribbons, who appeared half-starved and tottered on spindly legs that seemed too weak to support him, a gentle knight named Haj Harun who roamed through the ages recalling the adventures of Sinbad the Sailor and other heroes of old, who remembered the building of Solomon's temple in his youth, and who for the last three thousand years had been hopelessly defending his Holy City against all enemies, always on the losing side.

On that day when they'd met in front of Haj Harun's shop, the old man had taken one look at Joe's Victoria Cross and decided that he was Prester John, the legendary priest-king of an ancient lost Christian kingdom somewhere in Asia.

Come right in, Haj Harun had said happily. I've been expecting you, Prester John. I knew you'd turn up in Jerusalem sooner or later in search of your lost kingdom. Everyone does.

Then Maud. An American and the first woman he had ever really known. Maud and love in the spring.

They met in Jerusalem in the spring and went down into the desert to be alone together. To a tiny oasis on the shores of the Sinai, and to Joe that month on the Gulf of Aqaba was the happiest he had ever known in his life. But Maud was different after they returned to Jerusalem. And she refused to marry him, even though she was going to have his child.

When the weather on the heights turned cool in the autumn he found a house for them in the warm Jordan valley, a little house with flowers and lemon trees near Jericho, another oasis it seemed to Joe, where their child would be born toward the end of winter.

But no, he hadn't found another oasis as it turned out. In Jericho he couldn't seem to do anything right, anything that pleased her. No matter what he did Maud seemed angry, often even refusing to speak to him.

Joe couldn't understand any of it. It was true he was away much of the time smuggling arms, had to be away, as a fugitive it was the only way he could find to make a living for them. And his absences especially seemed to infuriate Maud. That and his dream of finding the Sinai Bible, the original Bible with its treasure maps of the riches buried beneath the Old City, which he'd heard about soon after coming to Jerusalem.

The original Bible? Discovered in the Sinai in the nineteenth century? Just knowing it existed had been a curse and a hope for Joe, a dream as it had been for so many others before him.