Edward Whittemore - Jerusalem Poker

Sivi, you do carry on so. You should be back on the stage.

I don't recall ever having left it. Now, a wager of a drachma on the case in hand? I say the passion between the two of them will be greater, if anything. And you say it's already gone?

All right, a drachma.

Sivi suddenly leaned forward, his face serious. He put his hand on hers.

No, Maud, don't do that. Don't you see it's wrong? You must never do that, you can never be happy that way. Not even one drachma. Don't you see you're betting against love?

I suppose I am.

Then the bet is summarily withdrawn?

Yes.

Sivi smiled and squeezed her hand.

Excellent. The least we can do on these beautiful Aegean shores is honor our pagan gods, and there's never been any question they're on the side of love. Heavens, how they did carry on. Swans and bulls were no obstacle whatsoever. In comparison our very best efforts are meager indeed.

Your gods, Sivi. I don't know that they're mine.

Not so, my lady, simply not so. They belong to all who pause in this sunlight, and whether for a day or a lifetime is no matter. We have no control over it, you see. Summoned or not summoned, the gods are there.

Yours?

Heavens no, much too profound for me. The words of a revered counselor of antiquity, the Delphic oracle to be exact. Spoken to the Spartans when they were contemplating war against Athens. Well they made their war and they triumphed, but then the Thebans triumphed over them so where did it get them in the end? Ah yes, in the end. In the end we're all sodomites.

Maud laughed.

Sivi. That's awful.

Indeed it is. An atrocious pose to strike early in the evening. But you do see my meaning? You see how impossible it is for us to escape love? Even when we turn our backs we're not safe.

Sivi, that's enough.

The old man wagged his head happily and got to his feet.

You're right of course. In the cafés of this city, where every sort of depraved creature dizzily nurtures his obsession, such mild remarks would go unnoticed. But here, it's true, we're standing beside a hearth in the presence of motherhood, while upstairs an innocent babe waits to be nursed. As for him, by the way, you've already decided it.

What?

His future, by naming him Bernini. With that name there's simply no chance the pagan gods will overlook him. Whether he likes it or not the sunshine of the Mediterranean will be his home and he is blessed with it, I predict it. Yes and now you're off to your maternal concerns on the second floor, and Munk and Theresa have left to relish the mysteries of the harbor by moonlight, and it's time for me to venture into the shadowy recesses of Smyrna to discover what spiritual nourishment this soothing June evening has in store for me. Shouldn't you be wishing me success? I'm not as young as I used to be.

Maud laughed. Sivi stroked his moustache in the doorway.

Well? Not even a wisp of a wish for success?

You don't need it, you old goat.

I don't? In the end? Hmmm. A felicitous turn of phrase. It suggests philosophical resignation. But naturally I've always been a stoic on top of everything else, although naturally I'm not always on top. Now if you chance to hear whispers in the early morning hours, don't be disturbed. It may well be some thoughtful young rogue in search of the wisdom of Smyrna's Zeno, who is rightly famed for living consistently with his nature in darkness as well as light. And the consistency of that nature? Undeviating. Without the confusion of mixed sexes. Addio then. Yet again Smyrna beckons, and who am I to resist love's caressing whispers? Addio, my lady Maud.

That summer Sivi planned to go to Crete to visit his father's village. He asked Maud to go with him but she refused, Yanni's birth there signifying to her all the pain of loss in life that she couldn't bring herself to accept.

Yanni himself had never told her the story. It was Sivi who did after his half-brother's death, when he was trying to help Maud understand why Yanni had lived the way he had.

Sivi's mother had died giving birth to him. A wealthy sister who lived in Smyrna offered to take the baby and raise Sivi as her own. Sivi's father, in despair over the loss of his wife, agreed to this and also decided to give up politics and return to the isolated village in Crete where he had been born.

He became a goatherd again, as he had been in his youth, spending six months of the year alone in the mountains with his flock, running his goats from dawn to darkness to find the meager feeding, in lonely solitude sleeping in one of the huts made of broad flat stones that had been up in those mountains for centuries withstanding the ferocious winds of the lunar landscape, never able to take off his boots or his coarse woolen garments in the frigid nights of those mountain summers, in darkness before the sun rose and again after it set, hurriedly eating his meals of goats'-milk yogurt and twice-baked bread, rock-hard until soaked in water, brought with him from his village in the spring.

Occasionally his keen eyes spied movement on a far slope and there would be a chance to call from peak to peak to other roaming goatherds. And since the distances were too great for words to carry, they didn't use words, rather a shouted singsong code that passed their messages through tone and cadence. As for talking to another man face to face, that opportunity seldom came until the snow began to block the passes in late October and it was time to descend to the villages and await the ebb of the melting snows in April.

Over a quarter of a century passed before Sivi's father, then eighty-four, took a second wife, a woman of nineteen from his village. She conceived and complications appeared toward the end of her pregnancy. In her eighth month the two of them set out across the mountains for the north coast, to the nearest town where a doctor could be found.

It was early October and snow flurries were already worrying the passes. It took them two days to reach the last northern ridge and see the Cretan sea opening up beneath them. That night she went into premature labor and by dawn the baby was breeched and suffocating.

They exchanged a few words, the old man who had lived a long full life and the young woman who was only beginning hers. The wrong one was being taken but there was nothing to be done.

He held her. They both made the sign of the cross. Then he placed a rock in each of her hands and a twisted root of wild thyme between her teeth and cut open her belly with his hunting knife and removed the baby as she went into shock and died.

That morning he walked into the town on the north coast with the infant Yanni in his arms and the rigid body of Yanni's mother strapped to his back.

Oh I know, Sivi had said as she sat with her head in her arms.

It's cruel and brutal and it sounds barbaric, but you have to remember the life those people have. When you're up in those mountains you might as well be on the surface of the moon. There's only a little wild thyme clinging to the rocks here and there and a man has to run all day to find it, from five in the morning until ten at night, so his goats can eat. And they do that, those men, they run up mountains. It's almost impossible to believe unless you've seen it. The life is hard and violent and although they live to be very old when left alone, often they're not left alone and death can be quick.

Not long ago a child in one of those villages was playing and as a joke took the bell off one of his father's goats and put it on a neighbor's. A goat stolen? By nightfall the boy's father was dead and the neighbor was dead and three other men were dead, and by the next morning the village was deserted, not a soul there. Because if all the families hadn't left at once, the killing of brothers and cousins by brothers and cousins would have to go on until all the men in the village were dead. They knew that and they had no choice but to abandon their homes and go away.