Yes.
Joe dropped his arms. He jumped to the floor, coughing, and sat down. He drank and lit a cigarette.
Wretched drink, this lamp fuel, saints preserve us. But it's cold tonight and we need it. Cairo told me all that by the way. He had it from Menelik, who of course picked it up in his forty-year conversation with Strongbow. But my God what a giant of a dwarf, the White Monk of the Sahara. You know what I wish sometimes? I wish I'd known just one of those characters from the last century. Old Menelik, the White Monk, Strongbow the genie, just one of them.
Joe tried to laugh but he coughed instead.
I know, he said, when the coughing subsided, why am I always talking about the past? Bad habit, I'll have to get over it someday. Have to get over all my habits someday. And maybe you'll be wanting to talk to me about Maudie now that you've met her. How she tried to trace Sivi after the massacre in Smyrna and couldn't, and only found out years later that he was living in Istanbul, if you could call it living after what Smyrna had done to him. Poor old Sivi. Christ she must have been shocked finding him like that, living in a tiny squalid room by the Bosporus and working as a laborer in a hospital for incurables, forgetting even to feed himself half the time. And I can understand why she moved there to take care of him, loving him as she did and trying to have that link with the past at least, until he died and she went back to Athens. Sivi would have been that for her even then, giving her life some meaning. Ah the wreckage in this world, what can you say about it? How can you ever explain it to yourself? And Sivi of all people. From what I've heard just about the kindest, gentlest man who ever lived. Always helping everybody and he ended like that. So what's to say? Nothing, that's what.
How'd you know all that about Maud?
Munk. She and Munk have been friends since after the war, you know.
I didn't, but I should have guessed. Through Sivi of course.
Yes. And I've tried to help her, Stern. I gave Munk money to give her, saying it was a gift or a loan or anything from him, not me, but she wouldn't take it. She must have known it was coming from me and couldn't bring herself to accept it after the way she left me. Munk's tried to help her too but she always refuses, still thinking it's coming from me, I suppose.
But, Joe, why haven't you ever gone to see her?
I didn't think it would help. You can't go back, Stern, you just can't. I know that. I'll never love another woman the way I loved her, but still you can't go back. It's just too long ago and I've put it behind me as best I can. You have to do that, you just have to.
Well what about your son?
Joe smiled.
Bernini. That's a lovely name she gave the lad. I'm going to be seeing him soon, but I won't be seeing Maudie and I don't want her to know, it's better that way. She's got some kind of balance worked out in her life and I don't want to upset it, especially with Sivi just dying. He was her family after all. Brother, father, everything. All she ever had. And I know she must still have some painful memories about me.
Time, it takes. So someday maybe.
Another time, another place. But listen, I've got a favor to ask you. If she ever needs money, I mean if you can see she really needs it, I'd like you to let me know, write to me, so I can send it to you. She'd accept it from you if she didn't know we knew each other, which she doesn't. I never told her who I was running guns for back when we had that house in Jericho. So will you not tell her? Will you do that for me? So I can get money to her through you, if she needs it?
Stern nodded.
Of course.
Thanks, I appreciate it. Now let me pass on my stirring local news. Cairo and me, we're ending the poker game in a few days. Munk doesn't know it but it's all over at last.
You're leaving Jerusalem?
By the stars, Stern, by the stars.
Where to?
Me? The New World, where else. Ever since I met Maudie and she told me about her Cheyenne grandmother, I've been fascinated by the American Indians. I want to see them. Maybe even try living with them for a while.
Stern smiled.
And Cairo?
He'll be heading back to Africa. You haven't met him, have you?
No.
More's the loss. A fine article, that, totally fine. Holds in trust what you tell him, then hears what you don't tell him and holds that in trust too. Whoever old Menelik was, he should be canonized, bringing up Cairo the way he did. Who was he, Stern?
Strongbow's best friend.
That's a lot.
Yes.
But you shouldn't go on lingering under that burden, Stern. Shouldn't do it. No man can.
I suppose.
Wretched stuff, fuel for lamps. Burns your wick but burns it down and out too.
Joe? What about Haj Harun?
I know, I've thought about that. Munk'll just have to watch out for him. If he wants this bloody place he'll just have to take on the responsibilities.
It'll be all right?
My God how do I know, I guess it'll have to be. Nearly three thousand years he survived here before I met him. Why not now without me?
Because things are changing, Joe.
So they are, so they always are. Changing in Jerusalem, changes in the Old City. How about you. You're going to carry on with what you're doing?
Yes.
No offense, but you know by now it can't work.
Maybe.
Not maybe. You know. The point is you're going to continue doing it anyway?
I have no choice.
Joe leaned forward and placed his hands flat on the table. He gazed at the bulging veins that hadn't shown a few years ago.
No choice, Stern? No choice?
Stern nodded slowly.
Yes. It seems it's that way sometimes.
Joe closed his eyes and shook his bead. Stern was speaking very quietly.
Joe? That time in Smyrna?
I hear you.
The smoke and the fires, you remember?
We had to get to it, didn't we. Shared it and had to get to it. Yes, I remember.
And Sivi going mad.
Going all right, going and never coming back. A September Sunday in 1922.
And Theresa beating her head on the floor and screaming Who is that?
I hear it. I've heard it more than once since then and I hear it now, poor little one.
And Haj Harun?
Yes, trailing his great long bloody sword up there in the garden, weeping and wandering around and around lost in the flowers, lost in the smoke and the flames, just lost, that old blessed sack of bones.
Tears my heart it does, him and his tattered yellow cloak and his rusty Crusader's helmet, standing there in the garden holding up his sword, preparing to charge the Turkish soldier who found us hiding there.
Been dead before he took a step of course, the rifle aimed straight at his middle, but there he was ready to defend the innocent, defending his Holy City of life in terrible Smyrna with an old sword, awful it was, that moment, I died for him a dozen times before I got the pistol up and shot that soldier in the head. And you know what he's been asking me recently? If we shouldn't arm ourselves because of the way the Arabs and the Jews are going at each other here. The two of us I mean, imagine that. The two of us standing up together to defend Jerusalem. What do you say to something like that? It's daft and all too real.
And the other thing, Joe. The other thing up there.
Joe rubbed his eyes. He emptied his glass.
Yes that too. All right, we've got to do that too. The little Armenian girl on the quay that night dressed in her Sunday best, her Sunday black, because it was a Sunday. Maybe eight years old and raped and bloodied within a breath of her life, lying out there all alone in that hell of screams and smoke and dying.