Sinai Tapestry

his large dark eyes were flat and opaque in the feeble light thrown by the single candle.

A steady wind rattled the windows and swallowed the sounds of the rivers in the darkness. The Arab spoke in whispers, frequently halting to cover his mouth with a rag. Stern looked away when that happened or rummaged in his papers, pretending not to notice how much worse the man's lungs had become. After settling their arrangements they sat silently over coffee, listening to the wind.

You look tired, the Arab said at last.

It's just that I've been traveling and haven't had much sleep. Won't that wind ever stop?

After midnight. For a few hours. It begins again then.

The Arab's lips smiled weakly but there was no expression in his eyes.

I no longer even cough. It's not far away.

You'll have your own government soon and that's not far away either. Fifteen years you've been working for it, just imagine, and now it's really going to happen.

Stiff, thin, wasted, the tiny figure stared at him through dead eyes, the rag clutched near his mouth.

Before you came. Tonight. I wasn't thinking of Amman. It's strange. Concerns change. I was thinking how we've never known each other. Why?

I suppose it's the nature of our work. We hurry back and forth, meet for an hour, hurry on again. There's never any time to talk about other things.

For fifteen years?

It seems so.

You help us. You help the Jews too. I've known that. Who are you really working for?

Stern wasn't surprised by the question. All evening the man had talked in a disconnected dreamlike way, drifting from topic to topic. He supposed it had something to do with the Arab's illness, his awareness of it.

For us. Our people.

In my hills that means your own tribe. With suspicion, a few neighboring tribes. For you?

All of us, all the Arabs and Jews together.

It's not possible.

But it is.

The man didn't have the strength to shake his head. Jerusalem, he whispered and stopped for lack of breath. A boy, he said after a moment. A garden. A football.

Stern gazed at the wall and tried not to hear the wind. Two months before at the end of the summer a boy had accidentally kicked a football into a garden, nothing at all but the boy was a Jew and the garden an Arab's and it happened in the Old City. A mere football, it was grotesque. The Arab saw the foot of Zionism on his soil and the boy was stabbed to death on the spot. In Hebron an Arab mob used axes to butcher sixty Jews, including children. In Safad twenty more, including children. Before the riots were over a hundred and thirty Jews dead and a hundred and fifteen Arabs dead, the Jews killed by Arabs and the Arabs killed by the English police, a boy and a football and a garden.

All the Semites? whispered the man. All together? The Armenians are Christians. What has become of them? Where were their Christian brothers during those massacres?

Stern shifted in his chair. Somehow he couldn't bring himself to find the words. What was the point anyway of arguing with a man who would be dead in a week or a month? He rubbed his eyes and didn't say anything, listening to the wind.

The Arab broke the silence by changing the subject again, not really looking for answers or even hearing them, beyond that now, straying from thought to thought as they occurred to him.

The classics. You often quote from them. Why? Did you start out as a scholar too? I did.

Stern stirred. He felt uneasy. It must have been the incessant noise of the wind pushing on his mind.

No. My father was. I guess I have a habit of repeating things he used to say.

Perhaps I've heard of him. I read a lot once. What was his name?

Lost, murmured Stern. Lost. A man of the desert. Many deserts.

But the accent. You have a trace of one.

The Yemen. I grew up there.

Barren hills. Stony soil. Not like the Jordan valley.

No, not like it. Not at all.

Stern slumped lower in his chair. The overpowering wind outside made it impossible for him to keep his thoughts together. He realized he was beginning to talk in the abrupt manner of the dying man across from him. A wind blowing down the valley to the Dead Sea and Aqaba.

For no reason he saw his father striding into Aqaba eighty years ago after marching the length of the Sinai without food or water, unaware he had walked through three dawns and two sunsets until he found a dog yapping at his heels, smiling then when a shepherd boy told him so and asked him whether he was a good genie or a bad genie, as a reward relating to the boy an obscure tale from the Thousand and One Nights before striding on, Strongbow the genie, many men in many places, truly a vast and changeable spirit as his grandfather had once said.

What? No. I didn't get this from him. Not like us. No. He became a hakim in his latter years. First a scholar, then a hakim.

Better professions, whispered the Arab. Better than ours. Especially the healer. Healer of souls. I would have liked that. But today, you and I. We don't have time. Is that so? Just an excuse we give ourselves?

Stern started to reach for his cigarettes and then remembered. If only the man hadn't mentioned the Armenians. Why did that have to have come up tonight? It always had this effect on him, the memory of the afternoon in a garden in Smyrna, that night on the quay and the Armenian girl soaked in blood whispering please, her thin neck and the knife and the crowds and the screams and the shadows, the fires and the smoke and the knife.

His hands were beginning to shake, it was happening all over again. He tried to bury them in his pockets and squeeze his fists closed but it didn't help, the wind outside wouldn't stop.

The hakim, a huge presence sitting behind a trembling young man at dawn somewhere in the desert half a century ago, telling the frightened man to turn and face the emptiness in all its vastness, to fix his eye on a distant eagle swooping in the first light of day living a thousand years, tracing the journey of the Prophet, the footsteps a man takes from the day of his birth to the day of his death, suggesting the swirls of the Koran shaping and unshaping themselves as waves in the desert and saying Yes, the oasis may be small but yes, we will find it, yes.

The Arab was struggling to get to his feet. Stern jumped up to help him and led him to the door.

It was over. Hurrying back and forth and meeting for an hour, fifteen years gone, leaving again unknown to each other. The man had started as a scholar and would have liked to have ended as a healer but here was his end.

I envy your faith, whispered the man. What you want. I couldn't conceive of it on earth. We won't see each other again. Peace brother.

Peace brother, said Stern as the man limped away in the night toward his river, no more than a hundred yards away but lost now in the blackness, so small and narrow and yet so famous because of events washed by its currents over millennia, and shallow here as well as the earth began to swallow it toward the end of its brief and steeply falling course from the soft green heights of Galilee, rich in gentle fields of grain and kindly memories, a promised stream plunging down and down to the harsh glaring wilderness of the Dead Sea where God's hand had long ago laid lifeless the empty cities of salt.

A few years after that, searching for an explanation of world events, the Arabs in Palestine began to weave the first of their elaborate fantasies around Hitler. One theory was that he was in the pay of the British Secret Service, which was aiding Zionism by having him expel Jews from Europe in order to increase emigration to Palestine.

Or more incredible still, that Hitler himself was a secret Jew whose sole aim in Europe was to undermine the Arabs in Palestine by sending more Jews there.

So Stern's vision of a vast Levantine nation embracing Arabs and Christians and Jews came apart, and the effect of the cascading rumors and swirling events on his dreams might well have been shattering if he hadn't retreated to the memory of a peaceful hillside in the Yemen and begun to take morphine on the eve of his fortieth