Edward Whittemore - Jerusalem Poker

So the way life works for them is that everyone has his duty and death can never be feared. Of course Yanni could have come back from the front when your daughter was due to be born, and he could have come back when she was taken ill, but I doubt that he ever even thought of it. To him he was where he belonged as a man, doing what he was supposed to be doing. The mountain people in that corner of Crete were never conquered by the Turks, the only Greeks who never were. For two hundred years the Turks burned down their villages, but they went up into their mountains until they had a new generation of sons to fight, and then they came down and fought, and saw their sons die, and went back up into the mountains again. For two hundred years they did that, and when the resistance was particularly heroic the Turks impaled those they had captured and put mirrors in front of them so they could watch themselves slowly die in the hot sun. The best remembered of all their leaders was a Captain Yanni who died that way when he was a few years younger than your Yanni. So that's where your Yanni came from, and that's what he was.

Maud shuddered. She understood it was a way of life. But she herself never wanted to see those mountains.

When Maud said she hoped to be alone with Bernini that summer, Sivi offered to let her stay in the villa in Smyrna. She quickly accepted, planning now to move back to Athens in the fall and find work as a translator, after Sivi returned in September. As for Theresa, she had already left to spend the summer in the islands, her affair with Munk having abruptly ended in June as Maud had foreseen.

Munk was in Smyrna twice that summer and on his second visit Maud spent a night with him, an evening brought on by wine and loneliness on her part, by wine and uncomplicated need on his. They smiled over it the next day, both aware it wouldn't be repeated, Munk hurrying on with his Zionist concerns and Maud preoccupied as before with beginning a new life in Athens in the fall. But it had been a long, intimate summer night that they both also knew would give rise to friendship.

One of their conversations late that night had turned to Theresa, and they realized all at once that neither of them knew anything about her past. Three years earlier at the age of nineteen, according to Sivi, she had gotten off a boat in Smyrna, alone and friendless and without any money. Another passenger from the boat, whom Sivi knew, had brought Theresa to one of his afternoon teas and Sivi had offered her a job as his secretary, as a way to help. Soon he had become strongly attached to her and now he liked to refer to her, mischievously, as his unnatural daughter.

Another adopted stray, said Munk, like me before the war. And it's been wonderful for him since she moved in. Despite what he says the old sinner has his bouts of gloom and loneliness, and it's made a great difference to him to have her here. She's family to him and he loves her enormously, and I'm sure she loves him in her way. But there's a kind of intensity about Theresa I've never understood. Something hidden. Something that won't allow her to be really close to anyone. I don't know how to describe it.

Is that all Sivi knows about her?

Yes, other than the fact that she was educated in a convent in France, apparently very strictly, although she's not a practicing Catholic now. But about her family or lack of it, or how she happened to turn up in Smyrna, nothing. Of course he never asks people who they are or where they've been. If they want to tell him he's glad to listen, no one could be more sympathetic. But if they don't he just accepts what he sees and plunges ahead without any reserve whatsoever, just assuming you deserve his confidence, his friendship. It's an extraordinary trait, as if he had no guile at all. Of course he must have some or he wouldn't be human. But I've never seen it. And anyway, Maud, surely you already know all this.

She nodded.

Yes. When I came here the first time as Yanni's wife, an American no less with no family, out of nowhere, there wasn't a single question about who or what. And this spring when he found me standing at the door with Bernini, not having heard from me in almost a year and having no idea I'd had a child, well he burst into a smile and threw his arms around me and that was that. Ah, here you are, how lovely. That's all he said, only that. And they weren't just words. I swear there was no question in his eyes, either.

Munk rose from the bed to pour more wine. Maud took a sip and gazed out the open window at the lights in the harbor.

When did it start between you and Theresa?

About a year ago. I've been visiting Sivi since before the war and I suppose it was only natural that Theresa and I should fall in with one another. But I was never in Smyrna for more than a few days at a time, and I didn't think it was a particularly serious matter for anyone. Certainly Theresa didn't act as if it was.

That distance you mentioned?

Yes. Not cold exactly, but as if she didn't really care one way or the other. She never asked me if I could stay another day, for example. In fact she never even asked me when I would be back. When I turned up that was fine, and when I left that was fine too. But when I came here at the beginning of June, she suddenly got all upset and said she didn't want to see me anymore. It was strange though. When she told me that I had the sensation she wasn't there somehow, not with me I mean. She was somewhere else, talking about something else. To be frank I don't think it was me, her interest in me or lack of it, that caused her to become so emotional.

I know, said Maud.

Why? How, I mean.

Well we talked several times too, before she left for the summer. She was terribly guarded but a feeling came through all the same. It's odd, but it almost seemed as if what bothered her were the places you kept talking about. Palestine, I mean. The Holy Land. Particularly Jerusalem. I don't know why I had that impression. Maybe it has to do with the fact that she was religious once and isn't now. Do you think she could be afraid of Jerusalem for some reason?

Maud shook her head. She laughed harshly at herself.

Afraid of Jerusalem, just imagine it. Afraid of something, unlike the rest of us. Aren't you afraid of anything, Munk?

No. What we have to do will take time, but it will happen.

Maud smiled. She put a finger on his nose.

It will? It just has to happen? What's that? The faith of the fathers?

More, my lady, much more. Remember that I became a Zionist because of a former Japanese baron.

And the reason I happened to meet my Rabbi Lotmann was because I once discussed cavalry tactics with his twin brother, Baron Kikuchi, who was a hero of the Russo-Japanese War.

And so?

And so Baron Kikuchi and I chanced to meet in Constantinople while we were both covering the first Balkan war. And then years later he writes to me asking me to check on the well-being of his twin brother, who was converted to Judaism and is supposedly studying medieval Jewish mysticism in Safad.

But the twin isn't there and eventually I trace him to St Catherine's monastery in the Sinai, where he's gone into hiding because of his Zionist activities and is pretending to be a Christian pilgrim, a Nestorian from China. At St Catherine's I listen to the evening concerts on the koto of this man who is now Rabbi Lotmann, and the music is so haunting and strange in that unusual setting that I find I can't sleep at night.

Instead the former Japanese baron and I stay up and talk and talk, and the result is that a Hungarian Jew is converted to Zionism in the Sinai by an aristocratic landowner from northern Japan who was raised as a Buddhist in matters of death, and as a Shintoist in matters of birth.

Maud laughed again.

All true. And so?