Nile Shadows

that way for Stern, nor will it be, not like that. But I can tell you your files don't begin to catch the feeling of the man, especially that gentleness of his. I used to think he was out of place in what he was doing, but maybe not and who's to say where people belong. As Stern himself used to put it, our souls are always our own to make of what we will. . . . What's that?

Excuse me? said one of the men.

No, pay no mind. It's someone back in the pueblo, I'll see to it later.

Joe shook his head.

So it's Stern again, is it? Twenty years later and here I am still looking into the mirror and trying to make out the shadows, trying to decipher those whispers in the wind. Trying, something with a little clarity to it, something at least. . . . Stern. Sure.

Once more there was silence in the kiva as Joe gazed at the earth, lost in thought. His three visitors waited. Before he spoke again he reached under his blanket and scattered cornmeal in front of them.

The last time I saw him was just before I left Jerusalem, right at the end of my twelve years of poker.

Winter it was and snowing, and Stern was wearing those dreadful old shoes of his that I've never been able to forget, the ones he had on in Smyrna when we were there during the massacres in '22. How many hundreds of miles had he walked in those shoes to get to that hell of fires and screams and death in Smyrna? How many years and how many stumblings to get to that, God help us?

Well it was more than a decade later when I saw him the last time, and it was in Jerusalem. He got in touch with me and we met in a filthy Arab coffee house where we used to go in the old days, in the Old City it was. A cold and empty place, bare and cheerless, a barren little cave where the two of us used to huddle over a candle late at night, talking and drinking wretched Arab cognac. And it was snowing when he came shuffling in that night', a stumbling ruin of a man even worse off than I'd remembered. And he smiled that mysterious smile of his and said how good it was to see me again, and I took one look at him and I wanted to scream, that's all, just scream those questions that have the sad sad answers. . . . How does it happen, Stern? How does a man get to look like you? What kind of a hell does he live in? And for what? What?

But I didn't scream, not then I didn't. Instead I pulled out a roll of money because I happened to have money then, and I put it down on the table next to his hand. That's always the easiest way to deal with people. I mean there he was in front of me after all those years when I hadn't seen him, since Smyrna really, just there in his shuffling beaten way with all he owned on his back, still wearing those same Godawful shoes, a lifetime of devotion with nothing to show for it but still trying to smile in a way that would break your heart, poor as the night is long and still trying, and with what going for him, I ask you?

What, for God's sake?

The same as always. Dreams is all. He still had those and I suppose we all did once. I know I did.

But the thing about Stern was, you always knew he'd never stop dreaming. No matter how futile it was, no matter how it destroyed him, he'd go right on with his hopeless dreams. Just hopeless, there was no reasoning with him at all.

A great peaceful new nation in the Middle East? Moslems and Christians and Jews all living together in a great new nation with Jerusalem as its capital? All these pathetic specimens of a mad race living in peace in Stern's beloved myth of a Jerusalem? Everybody's Holy City?

No hope in that. No hope ever. No hope in Jerusalem for Stern's dream, no hope there or anywhere under the sun. But Stern went on believing despite what people are, and he knows what they are, more than most of us, he knows. Yet he insists on staggering along, shooting a little morphine into his blood at dawn to get himself through another coming of the light, as he used to call it.

So yes, we had times together, Stern and I did, and they were some of the best and the worst I've ever known. Because when you dream the way Stern does, when you look that high, it also means you have to look the other way, right down into the blackest of the black. And sometimes you slip, it has to happen sometimes. And when you begin to fall it's as deep as forever and there's no end to the darkness at all, by God. . . .

Joe broke off. He pointed to a small shallow pit in the earth beside the altar.

See that? Here in the kiva it represents the exit from the previous world the Hopi lived in. And the ladder- opening up there represents the entrance to the world yet to come. For the Hopi, there's only one entrance and one exit in this sacred chamber they call a kiva, which is to say in life. Or as they put it in one of their sayings, there's light in the world because the sun completes its circular journey at night, traveling from west to east through the underworld.

Joe frowned.

It's sad to say, but it seems we can't have light without darkness. It seems we can't stretch our souls in the sun without first being lost in the night and knowing terrible anguish. And I suppose it may have to do with that circular journey of the sun and with the nature of the sun wheel, which has always been our symbol for life and hope, the most ancient one of all. And a good symbol it is and a true one, but a wheel does go round and it does have spokes, and spokes on a sun wheel make crosses. And what with sun wheels today in their ancient form as swastikas, that cross spinning in the deep becomes as complex and contradictory as man himself. Death and life in the very same symbol, and one no less real than the other.

Joe rubbed the earth in front of him, feeling it, stroking it.

Will you do it, then? asked one of the men.

Do what?

Go to Cairo. Accept the Stern assignment.

Joe looked up. He smiled.

I would prefer not to, as a scribbling man once said.

Abruptly, then, Joe's smile was gone and his mood changed. A haunting somberness came over him and his voice was suddenly very quiet, very soft in the stillness.

Ah, but is that all you're asking? Just for a moment sitting up here in the sky as we are, underground as we are, I thought you might have had something difficult in mind. But now I see all you want is the truth about Stern and his strange doings in the bazaars and deserts of that mythical place he calls his home, that sandy stretch of crossroads and history where man has been dreaming and killing himself since ever he was around. . . . Just there in the desert sea is all, the truth about Stern and the tides.

A shudder passed through Joe's thin shoulders and he wrapped his arms around himself, under the blanket, trying to control it.

But Stern sits inside the Sphinx, he whispered, didn't you know that? His life is made up of the ancient enigmas of those ancient places, and he peers out from the Sphinx across the nighttide deserts of life, and what he sees is what the rest of us don't want to see. So you have to be careful when you look into Stern's eyes. You have to be careful because there are fearful things to be seen there . . . the world and yourself and a kind of madness, a kind of utterly futile hope without end.

Joe stared at the earth in front of him.

Stern, you say. A man as unjustified and lonely as other men, a man who has never known the secret adventures of order. And all you want is for me to look into his eyes and tell you what's there.

Sadly, Joe smiled.

Fancy. . . . Only that.

***

Another evening, another sunset, and Joe sat alone at the edge of a cliff on top of the mesa, watching the light die. He had spent the last days visiting each of the homes in the pueblo, and that night there was to be a special ceremony in the underground kiva, a solemn gathering of the elders of the various clans to honor his departure.

Of course I don't have to go, he thought, and as scared as I am, why should I? The New World's big and I could just go anywhere and nobody would ever have to know.

And who wants the eternal grief that's over there anyway? Who wants that desert? They dream and they make up our religions and they spin our tales of a Thousand and One Nights, and that's all just fine and lovely so long as you keep your distance from the madness and don't walk in those dreams and live in those tales and get yourself lost forever.

Oh the three of them were clever all right, passing themselves off as the Three Fates and getting me to go