Edward Whittemore - Sinai Tapestry

Oh it’s not mysterious, quite mundane as a matter of fact. It’s just that there never seemed any reason to mention it. You see before I left Constantinople I made certain financial arrangements, real estate and so forth. I thought I might have some use for the property someday but then I became a hakïm and then I retired here, so of course as it turned out I’ve never had any use for it whatsoever. And if you don’t think you’ll need the properties, well then I thought I might return them to their former owners. Possessions are a burden and the fewer burdens one has the better when setting out on a haj.

Stern laughed again.

You’re not suggesting I begin naked? Strap a bronze sundial to my hip and leap over a garden wall? But you are being mysterious, Father. Could Ya’qub be telling the truth when he says the two of you own most of this part of the world? Two secret co-emperors with me as your only heir? Why do you smile?

At Ya’qub, at his notion of real estate. To him it’s all in the mind and this hillside is not only this part of the world, it’s the universe as well. You know how fond he is of pointing out he has never been anywhere while it took me sixty years to arrive at the same place. Well he’s right about that of course, about this hillside and what it has always meant to him and what it eventually came to mean to me. Anyway, the Ottoman Empire wouldn’t be much to own these days would it, rather tattered as empires go. Something new will have to replace it soon in this new century you like to talk about.

Stern smiled.

And in any case there was that first lesson the two of you ever taught me the day I couldn’t find the Temple of the Moon. That the only real empire is the empire of the mind.

The old explorer also smiled.

I seem to recall some such conversation when you were a small child. Well what do you think about these properties I mentioned. Are you interested in having them?

No.

Why?

Because I don’t intend to become a real estate dealer.

Just so, fine, that’s taken care of then. One less legacy you’ll have to worry about from my old century.

All the same I don’t think I’ll display myself naked at a diplomatic reception in Cairo the night I sail.

An apocryphal tale, no such thing could ever have happened in the Victorian era. Now come, we’ve arranged your escape from the past and it’s time to join Ya’qub for dinner. He has been laboring all day over his pots preparing a feast and he must be hungry for talk.

He must be?

Hm. Did I ever tell you about the time I assembled certain evidence to deduce the cycle of Strongbow’s Comet?

Stern laughed. He knew his father was really as excited as he was, his leaving bringing back all the memories of that night in Cairo seven decades ago when a laughing young genie had given eyes to a blind beggar and himself set forth on his journey.

I don’t think so, Father. Could it possibly involve incidents from the lives of Moses and Nebuchadnezzar and Christ and Mohammed? A few lesser known passages from the Thousand and One Nights? An obscure reference or two from the Zohar? A frightened Arab in the desert who was alarmed because the sky was unnaturally dark? Who later turned up as an antiquities dealer in Jerusalem? In whose back room you wrote an anthropological study of the Middle East? No, I don’t believe you have ever told me about it.

No? That’s odd, because it was quite a remarkable affair. Do you think Ya’qub would be interested in hearing about it?

I’m sure he would, he can never get enough of hearing anything. But of course he’ll immediately jumble all your facts and rearrange them to his own liking.

Yes he will, an incorrigible habit. Those eternal jokes and riddles and scraps of rhymes he sees everywhere. Well we’ll just have to keep our wits about us and take our chances.

In Europe Stern dreamed deeply of his future. He considered composing symphonies or dramas, painting murals and planning boulevards and writing epic cantos. Unarmed and undefeated, he threw himself fearlessly into these projects.

He haunted museums and concert halls and restlessly paced the streets until dawn, when he fell into a chair in some workingmen’s café to smoke and drink coffee and fortify himself with cognac, totally immersed for a time in this one great achievement.

In Bologna he ignored his medical lectures and covered canvases with masses of colors. But months later when he examined what he had done he found it lifeless.

In Paris he ignored his law courses to study music. Whole scores of Mozart and Bach were memorized but when the time arrived for him to write down his own musical notations, none came.

He turned at once to marble. He pored over drawings and eventually attempted sketches, only to find his own designs for fountains and colonnades resembled Bernini’s.

Poetry and plays came next. Stern provided himself with a stack of paper and a hard straight chair. He boiled coffee and filled the ashtray on the desk with cigarettes. He tore up sheets of paper, boiled more coffee and filled the ashtray again with cigarettes. He went out for a walk and came back to begin again but still there was nothing.

Nothing at all. Nothing was coming from his dreams of creation.

Looking down at the heaped ashtray he was suddenly frightened. What was he going to do in life? What could he do?

He was twenty-one. He had been in Europe three years yet there was no one to talk to now, he had no friends at all, he had been too busy dreaming alone. He had come here with ideals and enthusiasm, what had gone wrong?

He sat up unable to sleep thinking of the hillsides where he had played as a boy, recalling that Ya’qub had said he would never really leave them, remembering his father on their last evening together wondering aloud what it might mean to be born in the desert with its solitude rather than to have sought it as he had done.

He poured cognac and closed his eyes, images tumbling before him.

A blind beggar in Cairo crying out triumphantly, a march the length of the Sinai without food or water, the Arab village at Aqaba, the great divide of the wadis of northern Arabia, an antiquities dealer’s shop in Jerusalem, floating down the Tigris into Baghdad, leeches and opium near Aden, a fever after swimming across the Red Sea, the holy sites of Medina and Mecca in disguise.

Disguises. Strongbow striding back and forth for forty years disguised as a poor camel driver or a rich Damascus merchant, a harmless haggler over pimpernel or a collector of sorrel, an obsessed dervish given to trances and an inscrutable hakïm, a huge immobile presence in the desert speaking with his eyes.

Strongbow the genie changing and changing his size and shape.

Ya’qub the shepherd waiting patiently on his hillside.

And finally, a former hakïm gently led home to rest, brought home to peace.

What was it? What was he trying to find in those three lives?

Stern threw his glass at the wall. He picked up the bottle and crashed around the room knocking over chairs and smashing lamps on the floor. He hated Europe, all at once he knew how much he hated it. He couldn’t breathe here, he couldn’t think, he couldn’t hear with his own ears or see with his own eyes, the noise, the crowds pushing in on him, everything cluttered and unclear, so far from the quiet hillsides of his childhood, the stillness of the shifting sands in the Temple of the Moon.

He’d done nothing here but dream futile dreams and fail, dream hopelessly and fail because this wasn’t his place. He had been born in the desert, he couldn’t live here. The desert was his home and he had to go back to it now, he knew that.

And do what?

Again he saw the three men. Strongbow marching from the Nile to Baghdad. Ya’qub in his tent in the Yemen. The hakïm at dawn deep in the desert sitting with a troubled bedouin, telling him to fix his gaze on the flight of a distant eagle and saying Yes, they would find the oasis.