It would seem so. Digging for oil is so simple compared to understanding human beings.
Let me quote something to you, Bubba.
I think it's nonsense. The whole truth can be found only in God, and He surpasses human understanding.
What does the formula refer to, some Fascist or Marxist ideology?
But Nubar was suddenly evasive.
Not exactly, he said, and went on to ask a question about his grandfather, the spiritual presence at the end of the table whose plate of lamb chops was now being replaced by a bowl of fruit, a subject that was guaranteed to make Sophia forget everything else as she lapsed back over the decades.
Two weeks later on a dark stormy evening, Nubar sat hunched over the workbench in his tower room inhaling toxic mercury fumes, brooding, his mood one of rambling speculation. He had been conducting mercury experiments since the middle of the afternoon and by now his workbench was a complex jumble of pelicans and alembics, crucibles and athanors that seethed and gurgled and hissed and bubbled.
Nubar sniffed. He breathed deeply and coughed.
He was well aware that chronic mercury poisoning could produce a delirium akin to madness, but that in no way deterred him. The dangers inherent in his experiments were unavoidable.
Perhaps it must be repeated thousands of times, Paracelsus had written, in order to achieve the unique set of circumstances that produces the philosopher's stone of eternal life.
The philosopher's stone. Immortality. Had he at last found the way to achieve it? And all because of a bizarre report that had been smuggled out of a communal Polish farm in Palestine?
Nubar had come across the report on New Year's Day, after lunch. Normally he took a nap after lunch, and he always carried a handful of UIA reports to bed with him to help him fall asleep. But there had been no nap that day. Instead he had found himself sitting up in bed reading and rereading an unusual report with a thoroughly odd title.
The Greek in question, now lost, was named Odysseus and had been the chief of the UIA station in Ithaca. The previous autumn he had used his annual leave to go to Jerusalem, claiming he wished to make a pilgrimage to the holy sites. But then he had disappeared, simply dropped out of sight. Nothing had been heard from him or about him until this report, in a plain brown wrapper, had suddenly turned up one December morning in the office of the UIA chief of station in Salonika, apparently thrown over the transom by a person of unknown identity. The report was both a confession and a desperate plea for help.
The lost Greek began his report by admitting he hadn't gone to Jerusalem with any intention of visiting holy sites. He couldn't care less, he said, about holy sites there or elsewhere. His sole reason for the trip was to try to make a fortune in the Great Jerusalem Poker Game.
The
The lost Greek had entered the game one afternoon with a substantial amount of money. By the end of the afternoon he was well ahead. However, he had made the mistake of drinking while he was playing, which tended to loosen his tongue even though he was normally a wily man with a reputation for shrewd and clever tactics. Overconfident and perhaps a little drunk, he began to brag about his prowess as a burglar and the easy targets to be found in Palestine. In particular he mentioned burglarizing something called a kibbutz on his way to Jerusalem. It had been a small dusty place, very poor. The farmers had been out in the fields and in a matter of minutes he had made away with all their valuables.
If you can call a suitcase of old cracked Polish clocks valuable, he had added with a laugh. That's all they had so I scooped them up.
Most of the players at the table laughed with him but several did not. The one who seemed least amused was a man named Szondi. What followed was a disaster for the lost Greek.
First he lost all the money he had with him to this man Szondi. That took only two hands. Then he lost the reserve he had hidden in his hotel room, in a single hand, with the best cards he had ever held in a poker game, along with the suitcase of old Polish clocks and his shoes and socks. He wanted to leave for Ithaca then, even though it would have meant going barefoot, but he found he couldn't rise from the table.
As soon as the man named Szondi had started betting against him, it seemed, another player at the table had begun pressing a bottle of very old cognac on him. At least this other player, a carefree Irishman, implied it was cognac and the bottle certainly looked very old. The lost Greek had accepted the offer and drunk freely straight from the bottle, emptying it. The drink had seemed smooth enough when it was going down, but obviously the Irishman had tricked him. It turned out the bottle hadn't contained cognac at all but some kind of Irish home brew called poteen. All at once the lost Greek found he was paralyzed below the waist.
It can have such a temporary effect, noted the Irishman merrily, until you become used to it. Then it generally paralyzes from the neck up, rather than the waist down. Do you follow me?
The lost Greek had shaken his head. He knew now he wasn't following anyone anywhere, he was trapped at the table. The deal passed to a black man dressed in an Arab cloak and Arab headgear, a man who smiled broadly, his skin so black it was almost blue. The beaming black man dealt the cards quickly and the lost Greek went on losing to Szondi, who seemed especially adept at gambling commodity futures. The Greek lost the future olive-oil production of his family farm back in Ithaca over the next twenty years. He then lost the olive oil that would be produced by his brothers and uncles and cousins over the same period.
By now the lost Greek was weeping noisily. His family had no future in Greece, the next two decades had disappeared. He begged for mercy, wanting to do so on his knees but unable to move because of his temporary paralysis below the waist.
Finally Szondi made him an offer. They would play one last hand and if the lost Greek won, all his debts would be cancelled. But if he lost, he would have to do manual labor for an unspecified period of time at a place Szondi would designate.
The lost Greek had no choice, he knew that. He had to chance it. So the hand was played and the lost Greek lost.
The designated place for manual labor turned out to be the dusty poor Polish kibbutz where Odysseus had stolen his load of worthless old cracked Polish clocks. He had been laboring there ever since in the fields, in the hot sun, and it might go on forever unless a ransom were paid.
Despite his exhaustion at the end of the day, he had written the report bit by bit by candlelight over the weeks, under a blanket at night, all the while being eaten alive by mosquitoes. Early in December he had managed to persuade someone to smuggle the report out of the country and throw it over the transom of the UIA chief in Salonika.
The report had been written in pencil, and not a very good pencil at that. Nubar noticed there were water stains around the signature, probably tears.
Odysseus
Beneath that the chief of station in Salonika had typed a few questions asking for guidance.
Nubar had snorted and fired off a cable immediately.
ARE YOU MAD? NO RANSOM OF ANY KIND FOR THE LOST GREEK. WHO NEEDS A LOST GREEK? AND WHERE DID THIS FOOL EVER GET A REPUTATION FOR BEING
WILY, LET ALONE SHREWD WITH HIS TONGUE OR CLEVER WITH HIS TACTICS? HIS
OWN FAULT ENTIRELY, FORGET HIM.
BUT WHAT IS THE GREAT JERUSALEM POKER GAME? SEND PARTICULARS IF
KNOWN. AND WHY SUCH PRETENTIOUS TERMS FOR A SHABBY GAMBLING
OPERATION?
