The Second Saladin

must be made in your natural ways. Do you agree?”

“Yes,” he said. “Teach me. I will make any sacrifice, pay any cost. My life is nothing. It has no meaning other than as the instrument of my vengeance.”

“Excellent,” they complimented him. “Your hate is very pure, and to be nourished. It will sustain you through many difficulties. Some men must be taught to hate. You come to it with a gift. You are holy. You make a holy war.”

“This is not holy,” he had said, glaring, and watched them show their discomfort at the force of his glare. “It is a blasphemy. I must defile myself. But it is no matter.”

He moved northward through the mountains slowly, enjoying his journey. He crossed a dirt road late in the night in a low place. He skirted campsites, places where Americans came to play. The sky was fiercely blue, angrily blue, and in it a sun of almost pure whiteness, a radiance, beat down. The clouds were thin and scattered. At the top of one mountain he could see nothing but other mountains. One spine of crests gave way to another. There was dust everywhere, carried by the wind, and even patches of snow, scaly and weak, that gave when he put his American boots through them. At twilight the mountains were at their richest and in the shadows and the soft air they seemed almost kesk o sheen, a certain blue-green shade close to the Kurdish heart which spoke of spring and, more deeply, of freedom to travel the passes, to move through what they held to be theirs by right of two thousand years of occupation: Kurdistan.

At one point he saw a vehicle. He ducked back, for just a second, terrified. The thing lurched up a gravel track, an ungainly beast. Something in the way it moved: sluggish yet determined. He felt his body tensing, and a feeling of nakedness — the nakedness of the prey — overwhelmed him.

The vehicle pulled to a level stretch. He saw it was almost a bus, gaudily painted, an expensive thing. Bicycles were lashed to its rear and the top was bulky with camping gear. He sat back, watching the thing move. It was obviously some kind of vacation truck for rich or fancy Americans, so that they could tour the wilderness in high style, never far from showers and hot water.

He watched it poke along beneath him, pulling a trail of dust, glinting absurdly, its bright colors flashing in the sunlight. It was almost a comical sight, a preposterous American invention. No other country but America could have produced such a thing. He wanted to smile at the idiocy of it.

America!

Land of wealthy fools!

Yet he continued to breathe heavily as the machine passed from view. Why? What frightens me about this monstrosity? You’ll be among them soon, if things go well. Is this how you’ll perform, frozen with terror at the sight of the outlandish?

You’ll never make it.

I must make it.

But it had been terror in his heart. Why?

Was it the shooting at the border? Would there be a huge manhunt for him? Would his mission be endangered? These things troubled him, but not nearly so much as the killing of the two men.

It put a darkness on his journey, a bad beginning. Damn that fat Mexican! They had told him this Mexican knew the best way, the safest way. The Mexican would get him across.

What would happen to the Mexican now? He was glad he wasn’t the Mexican, because he knew now the Mexican was expendable. They would have to take care of the Mexican, because of the stir the shooting would make.

Death, more death, still more death. It was a chain. Every little thing leading out of the past into the future: heavy with death.

The two policemen, dead, for being in the wrong place. The Mexican, dead. And he himself, ultimately, finally …

“If they catch you, you have failed. They will never free you. They will use you and use you. Do you understand this?”

“I do.”

“It is not that in captivity you no longer can advance your cause; it is that you hurt it. You destroy it. Do you understand?”

“I do.”

“Swear then. We will help and support you, but you must swear. You will not be taken alive. Do you swear?”

“Kurdistan ya naman,” he swore. Kurdistan or death.

He lingered in the mountains a week, for in them he went unhunted. He lived on the flat Mexican bread in his pack and on jojoba nuts and mesquite beans, as he had been instructed. But the land began to flatten beneath him until on the eighth morning there were no mountains except the ones rimming the horizon, crusty brown in the distance, and to get there he had to cross the flatness wavering before him in the sun, sending off a smoky radiance of pure heat. It was the desert valley that led to Tucson, a journey too dangerous for the dark.

“Beware the desert,” he’d been told. “If you have to cross the desert you are an unlucky man.”

But beyond the desert lay Tucson and in Tucson lay a bus route into America and toward the Northeast, where his destiny was ser nivisht, written above.

He set out early. He found it a wilderness of needles, of things that could hurt. It was, in its cruel way, quite beautiful too, an abstract of the textures of death. Over each rise or gentle dip, through the crumbling rocky passes, down the easy glades, up the rock buttes, each shift yielded a new panorama. Yet what impressed him most in this long day’s journey was not the danger or the beauty but something entirely else: the silence.

There is no silence in the mountains, for always there is wind, and always something to blow in its path. Here, on the bright floor of the earth, he could hear nothing. There was no wind, no noise, nothing but the sound of his own boots sloughing through the dust or across the fine rocks.

There was no water either, and the heat was suffocating. He thought only of water. But there was no water and no mercy, only the sense that he had to move ahead. Miles beyond stood a last escarpment of hills, and beyond that had to lie Tucson.

He hurried onward, the dust thick in his throat. The saguaro cactus towered above him, exotic and beckoning. And a hundred other needled monsters, some whose delicate flowers mocked their ugly spikes. Small tough leaves slashed at his boots. He raced ahead, exposed in the great undulating flatness. He knew he had only a day to make the journey, for he’d freeze out here at night, and the next day the sun would come and bake him.

“A day, if it comes to a desert crossing. You’ve got a day. Your body can take no more.” They told him stories of Mexican illegals who’d been led into the desert by unscrupulous smugglers and abandoned and how they’d died in horrible agony in just hours at the hottest time of the day.

He pushed ahead, feeling the blood pulsing in his temples. The shirt off and wrapped about his head in the fashion of a turban gave some relief from the heat; he wore only an undershirt over his body. But at each rise he prayed the mountains had moved closer and at each rise he was disappointed.

Kurdistan ya naman.

The pack had become hugely heavy, yet he clung to it.

He pushed ahead.

In the early afternoon, there was a helicopter, low off the horizon.

Always helicopters, he thought, always helicopters.

He ducked quickly into a ravine, opening his wrist on the knifelike leaves of some grotesque plant. The blood spurted. He listened to the roar of the machine, an almost liquid sloshing, the rising pulse.

He crouched into the side of the ravine as the noise grew. He reached inside the pack and touched the Skorpion.

But the noise died.

He climbed and faced the same bright frozen sea of sand and spiny vegetation. His head now ached and the wrist would not stop stinging. In all directions it was the same — the crests of sand, the cacti, the cruel scrub under a broad sky and a fierce sun. In the distance, the mountains. Ulu Beg rose and headed on, facing death.

By midafternoon he began to get groggy. He fell once and didn’t remember falling, only finding himself on his knees at the bottom of a slope. He stood, his knees buckled, he went down again. He got up slowly, breathing hard, stopping to rest with his hands on his knees. He thought he saw that bus, that crazy bus pulling toward him, full of