Cairo nodded. He put his hand on Joe's shoulder.
Say, what's the hand for? Am I in need of support or something? Do I look like the falling-down sickness is on me again?
Joe, why don't you tell me about her?
Who?
The woman you went to Aqaba with once. It was when you first came to Jerusalem, wasn't it?
Yes.
Well?
Well I met her here.
Where?
Here. The Old City.
Where exactly?
In a church.
What church?
A church that's all, what's it matter.
Say it, Joe.
Oh all right, my God, it was the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. I'd been in Jerusalem only a few weeks after spending four years on the run in the mountains of Cork never talking to a soul, and before that nothing but the Dublin post office which we held for a couple of days, and before that just a boy in the Aran Islands. Well that's where we met and she didn't say a word then, she just did this thing in the crypt of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. I mean I'd never done a thing with a woman before, not one thing.
Will you understand?
Yes.
All right, so we met, me just out of four years on the run in the bogs fighting the English, cold and wet all the time and sinking up to my knees with every soggy step, and then this woman and I went off to the desert. Haj Harun suggested that. It was spring and Haj Harun said spring was the time for the desert, the flowers were blooming and they only had a couple of weeks before they all died. Well bless his bones, bless the oul article for telling me that because we did go, we went to Aqaba and down the coast of the gulf and we found a tiny deserted oasis and the two of us were alone there, the Sinai red on one side and the gulf blue on the other and the sand so hot and the water so cooling and arak to drink and fresh figs to eat and other than that just nights and days that had no end or beginning. Do you see, Cairo?
A month we were there and I was just twenty years old and I'd never known there could be sun like that and sky like that and nights and days like that. By God, just never knew it, do you see?
Yes.
Well it turned out I didn't know her. After we came back here it wasn't the same and it got worse, me not understanding any of it, and finally she left our little house in Jericho where we'd gone for the winter, taking our baby son with her, I was away and never even saw the lad, had to go to the midwife to find out it was a boy. So that's all there is and that's enough. Twelve and a half years ago she left me and that's how I got into our bloody poker game, by God that's how. Money and power I wanted after that.
What else is there?
Yet you keep going back to Aqaba.
I do, surely I do, and I also go back to the crypt in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Just go back and back for no reason. Makes me tired, going back. Makes me dreadfully tired, Cairo.
Wasn't there ever another woman after that?
Yes, one only, Theresa's her name. And it's strange because Munk knew her before I did. They were together once.
Who was she? Who is she?
Yes, there's that difference all right. When Munk knew her in Smyrna she was young and carefree, and when I knew her in Smyrna she was still young but she was going mad. And here, well here she's something else, Joe looked down at his feet. He tipped his glass.
Now she lives downstairs, he said softly. She lives with Father Zeno. He takes care of her and protects her and keeps anyone from seeing her because of what she has. Good man that he is, he protects her because of that, so the world won't flock and gape at her and make her miserable.
Because of what?
The stigmata. She has a stigmata. I've seen it, and besides him I'm the only person in the world who has.
The sky was brilliant with stars that autumn night above the roof in the Armenian Quarter where Joe sat with Cairo turning over the years amidst the domes and spires and minarets of the Old City, the shadows of the Judean wastes dropping away into blackness.
Theresa?
There was the one who'd been Munk's lover in Smyrna after the First World War, and there was the other Theresa whom Joe had seen during the massacres at Smyrna in 1922, shrieking and beating her head on the floor in the frenzy of her torment.
Smyrna?
Joe had gone there for a man named Stern. He was running guns for Stern then and there was a man Stern had wanted him to meet in Smyrna, an elderly Greek who provided Stern with guns, so that Joe could deal with him directly. The Greek's name was Sivi, Theresa was his secretary. That was in 1922, September. Joe had taken Haj Harun with him.
But there had never been time to discuss their business in Smyrna, Stern's cause and Sivi's cause and Joe running guns from one to the other. The massacre had begun on a Sunday in September and there was nothing but slaughter and fire as the Turks butchered Armenians and Greeks. Joe and Haj Harun had gone to the address they'd been given, Sivi's villa on the harbor, and there they found Stern and Theresa trying to drag Sivi to safety, the old man bleeding from a head wound and raving incoherently, having been beaten by the Turkish soldiers who were inside his house, looting and setting fires.
Stern and Joe managed to carry the old man away. Theresa was still calm but later she too collapsed and began raving. And the slaughter went on as the city went up in flames, and Joe shot a Turkish soldier who attacked them, and Haj Harun killed a blinded old Armenian who was burning to death, and Stern slit the throat of a little Armenian girl who was dying in unbearable pain. Screams and smoke in the alleys of Smyrna, screams and death everywhere in that nightmare on the waterfront.
They all managed to escape. Joe was finished with Stern after that and told him so. Never another rifle smuggled for anyone, not for any cause, no cause was worth the slaughter.
Sivi?
He'd gone mad during the massacres.
Theresa?
Joe didn't know what had happened to her after Smyrna. Having broken with Stern, he lost touch with all of them except for Haj Harun. But Munk also knew Stern, as it turned out, and later Joe learned from him that Stern was still running guns and Sivi had never recovered his sanity. Of Theresa, however, Munk knew nothing. She'd simply disappeared.
For a year. Until she came to visit Joe on his roof a little over a year after Smyrna, on a clear evening early in November. November 5, to be exact. In Theresa's tortured mind there was a reason for the date, as Joe eventually discovered.
He didn't know why she'd sought him out, nor did he ask her. She'd brought a bottle of cognac with her and they sat here where he and Cairo were sitting now, having a drink and talking and neither one of them mentioning Smyrna. It was as if they'd met once pleasantly somewhere, chance acquaintances together again, who knew? A clear night with cognac and stars and stray sounds drifting up from the alleys.
To Joe it seemed better for them not to have a past that night. Not their past. Not the horrible hours they had known together in Smyrna. Better to have another drink and listen to the murmurs of the Old City, which never quite slept.
Time passed, they made love. It had been Theresa's doing but afterward she sat up in bed crying hysterically.
