Hey, you all right?
What do you mean; Joe?
Nothing.
No, what is it?
The light's not too good in here for Christmas Eve, that's what it is, but what can you expect when they fuel the lamps with the same liquid shit they serve their customers. Bloody Christmas Eves, I never did like them. New Year's Eve either, they're all the same. Bloody expectations and then
What were you going to say before, Joe?
Can't remember. But listen, why don't you tell an old friend how your work's going? It's been a long time and I need some catching up. You've been all over the place and I've just been here, just been doing not much in Jerusalem. Well?
Look, we were there together. What is it?
Nothing.
Nothing. You want me to ask you about Theresa, Joe? She was there too. And tell you about Sivi? He was there too. He finally died two months ago, a blessing. So what was it?
All right then. It was your eyes, Stern.
What about them?
The match. When I lit the match.
Joe stopped and rubbed his head. A match here, a match in Normandy. He saw a match striking in Normandy, in a tool shed with the smell of kerosene and the stink of rotting wood. Wouldn't there ever be an end to Smyrna? Did it always have to lead you back to other things? That afternoon and evening and night in Smyrna with Stern. With Sivi and Theresa and Haj Harun. Couldn't you escape that ever?
Joe sighed.
Listen, Stern. You're not into the heavy stuff are you? I mean, you know there's only one way out of that.
Stern smiled. He pushed back his hair.
There's only one way out anyway, he said.
Joe nodded. He's big, he thought, never realized how big he really is. Bulky and substantial, just large and there and kind of shapeless but there, reassuring in a way, it's strange. And me small and slight, not much to me now or then, now or maybe ever. Just not much there. Just a poor fisherman's son who's learned to play a little poker in the Old City.
Joe?
Well Christ man I know it, know it full well. It's no easy game you're playing what with the fucking Arabs and Jews at each other's throats all the time and you being both of them and trying to make that work, and coming from where you did besides. The Yemen, what a place to grow up. And why didn't you ever tell me Strongbow was your father? I always had him down for a myth.
He was a myth, said Stern quietly.
I know it and you had to live with it. Have to live with it. Too bloody much.
How'd you find out he was my father, Joe?
Cairo Martyr. We play poker together, remember?
Oh yes, the inscrutable mummy dust dealer. But how did he find out?
From the man who adopted him when he was a child, another nineteenth-century myth who went by the name of Menelik Ziwar.
Ziwar? But that was before Strongbow retired to the Yemen. Long before I was born.
Sure, but then they got together again just before they both died. Weren't you aware of that?
No, of course I wasn't. Where was it? In the Yemen?
Not a bit of it. Old Menelik's arthritis was acting up and the best he could do was limp upstream a yard or two. It was in Egypt, in Cairo. At that same filthy, restaurant beside the Nile where the two of them had had their forty-year conversation.
I don't believe it.
All true, all the same.
But I never even knew Strongbow ever left the Yemen. He'd sworn he'd never set foot west of the Red Sea again.
I guess he decided to break his promise in order to see old Menelik. And it wasn't for long, just one Sunday afternoon for lunch. It seems they were catching up on the past.
But that's astounding. When was it?
Maybe 1913? Strongbow wrote that since they were both due to go the other way before long, being in their nineties, they ought to have a last toot in their old haunt and fill up on wine and talk and spiced lamb, and then do a final repeat of their famous jump into the river at the end of the afternoon to clear their heads, so to speak, before they passed on. So that's what the two old gents did, seventy-five years after the first time. Swilled the wine and munched the lamb and raved on in general treating themselves to a scandalous Sunday afternoon, then did their leap into the Nile and went home sober, more or less.
Anyway, Cairo Martyr grew up dreaming about Strongbow and all his exploits because of the things old Menelik had told him. Dreams, don't you see. Dreams. Your father gave them to an orphaned black boy growing up beside the Nile, he gave them to Haj Harun too.
He did?
Sure. What about a genie in the desert in the last century? Haj Harun on his annual haj and suddenly finding the sky strangely dark in northern Arabia, so darkly strange he knew there had to be something unusual going on of a heavenly nature. Could it be so? History making one of its moves with the help of a comet? Sound a chime of time, does it?
Joe winked.
That's right, Stern. A genie in the desert, a genie and his doings and Haj Harun a witness to it And thereafter for Haj Harun, mysteries to dream to.
Stern leaned back and smiled. Strongbow's Comet. It had been one of his father's favorite stories. How he had discovered a comet in northern Arabia, and how a frightened Arab had stumbled upon him while he was taking measurements, and how he had explained the comet to the frightened man.
Yes indeed, said Joe. Haj Harun told me all about the experience and I repeated it to Cairo once and it matched exactly with the account of Strongbow's Comet that he had heard from old Menelik as a boy.
So that's how we identified the genie Haj Harun had met out there in the desert so long ago, the very giant and worker of miracles in question. Dreams for sure, you see. Strongbow the genie just leaving them everywhere.
Stern clasped his hands tightly together on top of the table. He was staring at them, frowning, drifting away. Joe took out a thick envelope and pushed it under Stern's arm. He started for the toilet at the back of the shop.
What's that? asked Stern without looking up.
Nothing. Just put it away and forget about it.
Joe walked away. Of course Stern knew what it was. It was money, a lot of money, much more than Stern would ever have guessed. Everyone knew Stern never had any himself. Always spending what little he had on his hopeless dream of a vast Levantine homeland for Arabs and Christians and Jews together, the peoples of his heritage, Stern's mother a Yemeni Jew and his father an English lord who'd become an Arab.
That kind of homeland? That kind of dream? Hopeless. It could never happen.
But Joe wanted to give him the money all the same. Maybe he'd spend a small part of it on himself. My God it was Christmas Eve after all, at least Stern could treat himself to a new pair of shoes. The ones he was wearing looked like the same pair he'd had on in Smyrna that night on the quay, that awful September night in '22. Joe remembered those shoes, he'd never forget them. He'd been looking at them when the knife came clattering down on the cobblestones beside him, the knife that was covered with blood. Lying on his side on the cobblestones with a broken arm and down came that terrible knife beside those shoes. Worn shoes, cheap shoes, not wearing well even
