Edward Whittemore - Sinai Tapestry

What is it, Mother?

The memory of that moment would never leave him. The stiff fingers, the strained face, the tired haunted eyes. She sank to her knees and hid her face. She was crying.

Where does it hurt?

She took his hand and placed it on her heart.

Where? I can’t feel anything.

Here is better, she said, putting one of his tiny fingers on a vein in her wrist.

That’s your blood. Is that where the pain is?

No, in my heart where you couldn’t feel it.

But Father will be able to feel it. Father was a great hakïm. He can cure anyone.

No. The reason you couldn’t feel it is because sometimes we have pains that belong to us and no one else.

Now he began to cry and she leaned forward on her knees and kissed his eyes.

Don’t do that. It’s all right.

But it’s not. And Father can make it better, I know he can.

No my son.

But that’s not fair.

Oh yes it is, new life for old is always fair.

Whose life? What do you mean?

Whose life doesn’t matter. What matters is that if a time ever comes when you have a special pain all your own you must carry it yourself, because other people have theirs too.

Everyone doesn’t.

Yes I’m afraid they do.

Grandfather doesn’t. He’s always laughing.

So it seems. But underneath there’s something else.

What?

Your grandmother. She died long ago and he has never stopped missing her.

Well Father certainly doesn’t hurt.

Yes, even him. Now he has a place to rest but for many years that wasn’t so. And once just before he came to our little corner of the world and your grandfather found him alone in the dust and brought him home to us, there was a terrible time when he was lost.

The little boy shook his head stubbornly.

But that’s not true, Father was never lost. He walked from Timbuktu to the Hindu Kush and floated down the Tigris to Baghdad and marched through three dawns and two sunsets out of the Sinai without even noticing he had no food or water. No one has ever done the things he did.

That may be but I didn’t mean he was lost in the desert. He was lost here, in his heart, where my pain is now.

The little boy looked at the ground. He had always accepted everything his mother said but it seemed impossible that his smiling grandfather could really be sad inside. And it was even more impossible to believe his father had ever been lost.

And so, she said, we mustn’t tell your father about my pain because he has his own burdens from the past. He came here to find peace, he brought us happiness and he deserves it in return.

She put her hands on his shoulders.

Now promise me that.

He was crying again. I promise, he said, but I also want to help. Isn’t there something I can do?

Well perhaps one day you can find our home. Your father found a home with us but your grandfather and I don’t really belong here.

Why?

Because we’re Jews.

Where is our home then?

I don’t know but someday you may find it for us.

I will. I promise.

She smiled.

Come then, we have to pick our grasses for dinner. Those two men of ours talk and talk and never stop and they’ll be hungry after spending another day settling the affairs of heaven.

When he went to Cairo for Islamic studies he used one of his father’s Arabic names. When he went to Safad to study the cabala he used his grandfather’s Jewish name. So when the time came for him to acquire his Western education he asked what name he should use.

A Western name, said his father.

But what? asked his grandfather. The two old men took his coffee cup and studied it. I see many Jewish and Arabic names, said Ya’qub, but I can’t make out a Western one, perhaps because I don’t know what a Western name is. What do you see, o former hakïm?

His father raised the small cup far above their heads and peered over the rim. Stern, he announced after a moment. Yes quite clearly.

That sounds too short, said Ya’qub, isn’t there more to it? Doesn’t it have an ibn or a ben something after it?

No that’s all there is, said his father.

Very odd, very curious. What does it mean?

Resolute, unyielding.

Unyielding?

In the face of what can’t be evaded or escaped.

Ah that’s better, said Ya’qub. Certainly there’s no reason to evade or escape the marvels of life.

All at once he wrapped his arms around himself and rocked back and forth. He winked at his grandson.

But then, o former hakïm, do I hear an echo of your own character in the coffee cup of your son?

Impossible, answered the old explorer with a smile. Coffee grounds are coffee grounds. They speak for themselves.

Ya’qub laughed happily. Yes yes they do, how could it be otherwise. Well my boy, there you have it. And where do you go now?

Bologna. Paris.

What? Unheard-of places. How do they number the year there? What do they call it?

Nineteen hundred and nine.

Ya’qub poked his father.

Is it true what the boy says?

Of course.

Ya’qub snorted, he laughed.

Of course you say to an old man who’s never been anywhere, but it makes no difference you see. These hills will still be here when the boy returns, only the sand will be different. In fact you’ll never leave them. Is that so or not?

Perhaps, said Stern, smiling.

The two of you, muttered Ya’qub, you think you can fool me but you can’t. I know what year it is, certainly I do. More coffee, o former hakïm? We can thank God your son is halfway between the two of us and has some of my good shepherd blood in him so he won’t have to be a genie for sixty years, like you were, before he becomes a man.

The evening before he left his father took him out walking in the twilight. Too excited at first to realize his father had something he wanted to say, he talked and talked about the new century and the new world it would bring, how eager he was to get to Europe and get started, to begin, so many possibilities and so much ahead, so much to do, on and on until at last he noticed his father’s silence and stopped.

What are you thinking?

About Europe. I was wondering whether you’ll like it as much as you think you will.

Of course I will, why wouldn’t I, it’s all new. Imagine how much there is for me to see.

That’s true yet Ya’qub may be right, it may be that you’ll never leave these hills. That was his way, it wasn’t mine, but then I wasn’t born in the desert with its solitude the way he was, or you. I sought it and perhaps being born to it is different. Surely there’s as much to see in the desert as anywhere else but to some it can also give rise to an abiding loneliness, I have to remind myself of that. Not all men are meant to wander alone for forty years as I did. Father Yakouba for example. He lived quite differently in Timbuktu and was a very wise and happy man with his flocks of little children and their footprints in the sky, his journeys of two thousand miles in an afternoon while sipping Calvados in a dusty courtyard. As he said, a haj isn’t measured in miles.

I know that, Father.

Yes of course you do. You have the example of the other Ya’qub, your own grandfather. Well do you know what it is you seek then?

To create something.

Yes certainly, that’s the only way to begin. And what of money, does it play any part in your plans? What you want?

No none, it means nothing to me, how could it growing up with you and Ya’qub. But that’s a strange question. Why do you ask it when you already know the answer?

Because there’s a certain matter I should discuss with you and I’ve never talked about it with anyone, not even Ya’qub.

Stern laughed.

What could possibly be so mysterious you wouldn’t talk about it with Ya’qub?