All through the rains there was no word from Tower Gate. ‘Is he going to make the tiles or not?’ I said to Bembel Rudzuk.
‘I think he’s going to do it,’ said Bembel Rudzuk: ‘he hasn’t said no.’
Passover that year came at the end of March. The day before the Eve of Passover Jews were to be seen selling their leaven to Muslims, and this little act of accommodation touched me. See, I thought, everyone does not wish us dead! and my eyes filled with tears. I remembered the Gentiles buying the leaven of the Jews in my town, the town of my boyhood and my young manhood, the town where I had climbed the ladder to Sophia. So far away it was already in space and time!
On Passover Eve when Jews were reading the Haggadah at the Seder, when the door was left open and a cup of wine was poured for Elijah, I walked in the rain to Bembel Rudzuk’s empty stone square. Freed from the traditional observance of the festival my mind widened into the rain, into the night, widened across the space of time to Pharaoh’s Egypt, to the killing of the lamb without blemish, to the dipping of the hyssop in the blood, to the striking of the lintel and the sideposts with the blood, to the passing of dread wings in the night and the smiting of the first-born of Egypt, both man and beast. Ah, God! I thought, when will you learn! Why must your arm be stretched out against anyone? Why must you choose us to be yours and to be punished for ever by you and by the world? Then I remembered that God was no longer He. Perhaps as It he remembered nothing, perhaps like blind Samson he simply felt for the pillars and put forth his strength against them.
And then, thinking those heavy thoughts in the rainy night I found myself laughing because it suddenly came to me that it was not only Passover for the Jews but Easter for the Christians; Christ having been crucified at Passover the two moon-coupled festivals were for all time chained together. In Antioch that night the Christians would be reciting the eternal crime of the Jews and worshipping their tortured Jew on his cross while that same cross in cloth of scarlet was moving eastwards on the shoulders of the Franks. While the Jewish doors of Antioch stood open for Elijah. When God was He there was nobody like Him for jokes.
Spring came, the Franks arrived in Constantinople and the price of a bale of silk went up by three dinars in Tripoli. ‘As when the leaves of the olive trees show their undersides before the rain comes,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘These Franks inspire uncertainty, everyone is wondering what will happen next. Some think that fewer ships and caravans will be arriving and everything will be in short supply.’
The weather grew fine, the wooden rod at the centre of the square cast a strong young shadow. My original chalk drawing and the drawing made by the speechless boy had both been washed away by the winter rains; the empty stone presented itself to the eye as if for the first time and the sun shone down as if there would never again be cold and wet, there would only be hot and dry. With the passing of days there began to arrive donkey-loads and camel-loads of triangular tiles, as startling in their actuality as Silpius, red and black and tawny as I had seen them in my mind. With the tiles there arrived workmen who unloaded the camels and the donkeys, sorted the tiles according to size and colour, stacked them on the paving stones, and began to mix mortar.
In my hand was the wooden compass with which I had made my first drawing, and now I opened it once more to the radius that would summon to the surface of the stone that same circle I had first drawn in the darkness.
I removed the rod, inserted the plug, placed the compass foot, and then it was as if the chalk line moved the outer compass leg before it as it closed itself into a circle. Again I developed the flower of six petals, and line by line out of it grew the hexagons and triangles of Hidden Lion.
It was then that there appeared a fully armed man walking across the paved square towards us. ‘This man,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘is Firouz. He used to be a Christian, now he is a Muslim. He is an emir and he is close to our governor, Yaghi-Siyan. The Tower of the Two Sisters is under his command and two other towers as well.’
I watched Firouz walking towards us and I found myself not liking the man. He had a way of half-turning as he walked: a half-turn this way, a half-turn that way. ‘He’s a turning sort of man,’ I said to Bembel Rudzuk.
‘He is indeed a turning sort of man,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘and more likely to take a bad turn than a good one. Try not to let yourself be drawn into a quarrel with him.’
Firouz walked to the centre of the paved square; his shadow fell across my circles, triangles, and hexagons. He touched the central six-pointed star with his foot. ‘This is the star of the Jews, is it not?’ he said to Bembel Rudzuk. (By this time I had sufficient Arabic to follow the conversation.)
‘You have seen this star in Islamic patterns without number,’ said Bembel Rudzuk. ‘You have seen it in mosques and palaces and in houses everywhere; even is it stamped by some of our Muslim merchants on the canvas coverings of bales.’
‘That may well be,’ said Firouz, ‘but at the same time it is a device used by the Jews, is it not?’ ‘It is one of many devices used by many people,’ said Bembel Rudzuk.
‘Was it drawn by you?’ said Firouz.
‘Yes,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘it was.’
Firouz’s demeanour was such that I knew it could only be a moment or two until he asked me if I was a Jew. I think that he already knew that I was but did not want to appear to have taken the trouble to inform himself of such a trifling event as my Jewish arrival in Antioch; he preferred rather to go through this play-acting in which he pretended only now to have his curiosity aroused by the six-pointed star.
Such an interesting moment, that moment before someone who is not a Jew asks you if you are a Jew! The world being as it is, any live Jew is a survivor in that there will always be other Jews within living memory who are dead only because they were Jews. So whoever asks, ‘Are you a Jew?’ is saying at the same time, ‘Are you one of those who has not so far been slaughtered?’ To answer yes to this question has at one time and another assured the death of the answerer. At that moment in Antioch Jews were not being slaughtered but nevertheless the question would not be a neutral one, it would not be such a question as: ‘What do you think of our summer weather?’ No, it would be a question with an under-question: ‘Are you a Jew who dies without fighting or a Jew who makes trouble?’
‘As you say,’ said Firouz, still addressing his remarks to Bembel Rudzuk and affecting to take no notice of me, ‘it’s a star one sees everywhere. And yet this particular version of it, with all those triangles appearing at the same time to move inward and outward — there’s something one might almost call one-eyed about it, wouldn’t you say? Wouldn’t you say that the inward tends to be swallowed up by the outward in this design?’
‘One of the virtues of this simple but at the same time complex design,’ said Bembel Rudzuk, ‘this design in which we see the continually reciprocating action of unity and multiplicity, is that it suits its apparent action to the mind of the viewer: those who look outward see the outward preeminent; those who look inward see the inward.’
‘Are you a Jew?’ said Firouz to me suddenly.