Nile Shadows

nights and breezes off the river. . . .

Yes, my Cairo, my life. In the end all grand schemes of order are private, and all the systems which we pretend are universal have but the dimensions of my closet. And thus we never find new places, nor do we find another river, for the city follows us and we grow old in those byways where we wasted our youths.

Ahmad stared into the distance.

Wasted . . . so many things in so many places. And now there is but this body, this worn and tarnished locket hung upon my soul. How many thousands of times have I celebrated the glory of its treasures and the wonder of the gift, the blessing . . . the burden? And lamented them, surely. How many times in these byways where I wasted my youth? . . .

Joe watched him. He shook his head.

Wasted, Ahmad? That's not what I've seen here. That's not what I've heard at all.

Ahmad stirred.

What do you mean? What have you seen, what have you heard?

Joe laughed. He spread his arms wide to take in the small crowded cave where so much of Ahmad's life lay heaped around them in dusty piles.

Ah yes, Ahmad, a world of your own making is what I've seen and heard, and what poet could hope for more than that? And when I look to the heart of that world I see a great wide boulevard with three young men striding down it. And their talk swirled into the night, for they were great companions in those days and they always made their rounds together, elegant and witty and matchless in their joy and laughter, three fearless kinds of the Orient of old. And one of them was a painter, and another a poet, and the third an extravagant dreamer from the desert. And people flocked to hear those three kings' of old, to catch even a glimpse of their outrageous performances. For they were Cohen and Ahmad and Stern and they laughed and wept with the very gods themselves, for the world was an opera then and the sidewalks of life were rich with poetry and color and love, and they were the masters of the boulevards in those days and everyone knew it. Knew it. . . . Everyone who ever set eyes upon them.

And that's what I've seen, said Joe. And that's what I've heard.

Ahmad stared into space, his face solemn behind his great round tortoiseshell glasses, his enormous head swaying defiantly in an imaginary breeze, his battered flat straw hat standing at a slight angle to the universe. Gravely then he nodded to the left and to the right, as if welcoming the companions of his youth, his hand all the while straying down the wall to where an ancient dented trombone rested amidst the shadowy piles of debris. Solemnly Ahmad drew the dusty instrument to him and caressed it, blew a tentative note, rose to his feet.

And sounded a melancholy blast on the trombone, a powerful glissando, his hand sliding slowly downward in a lingering salute to the majesty of a lost world.

-11-

Trombone

When night fell they moved from Ahmad's cave to the courtyard behind the Hotel Babylon, where Ahmad built a small campfire and served a vegetarian supper, expertly mixing grains and spices and vegetables in an array of little dishes that Joe found delicious after his three days and two nights of fever.

As for Ahmad, he was delighted to have an excuse to cook for a guest again, having not really done so, he said, since his tiny cottage on the edge of the desert had been swept away in the windstorms of the last war, along with the rest of his early life.

And so they camped like wandering bedouin in the narrow courtyard where vines and flowers had come to take root beneath the single palm tree, the two of them huddling around the glowing coals of their little campfire in the remote oasis they had found for themselves in the slums of the great city, whispering together under the stars and sipping endless cups of strong sweet coffee as the night deepened and Ahmad gently reminisced, his recollections ranging wide through the silent play of shadows that suggested other lives just beyond their small circle of light, Ahmad quietly conjuring up odd corners of memory in the reassuring darkness, in the vastness of that clear Egyptian night.

In addition to the bizarre curiosities of his own life, Ahmad talked especially about Menelik and the Sisters and the clan known as the Cairo Cohens. In one way or another, all of them had been intimately connected with Stern in the past, and it wasn't long before Joe had begun to sense a network in Stern's life. And not so strangely perhaps, as Joe recalled Liffy's prophecy that the moment had come for him to embark on a journey in time, this network of Stern's spanned more than a century, its members not all among the living, yet their presences still so powerful they echoed restlessly through other lives in a shadowy web of doing and feeling, that most profound of all secret human codes.

And so Ahmad went on conjuring up shapes from the shadows of the firelight, in the darkness, and again the next night they returned to sit up until dawn in their tiny oasis, the two of them once more traveling through long solitary silences as Ahmad searched his memory for turnings along the path, Joe gazing at the fire and trying to decipher the connections with Stern as Ahmad whispered back through the decades.

For there seemed to be clues in everything Ahmad said, quiet footfalls and unsuspected hints that were only to be recognized later, when Joe had traveled further in his attempt to uncover the truth about Stern.

When the day had come to look back and ponder the weaving of Stern's wanderings, the network that would finally reveal what Stern had sought, the unique figure traced by every man on the infinite landscape of time.

***

Alone and exhausted in his room as the great city was awakening, before he fell asleep, Joe drowsily reflected upon these odysseys through the night.

Ahmad? . . . Stern?

Surely a journey in time, as Liffy had said. Not mountains and rivers and deserts to be crossed, but memories to be explored.

From the beginning he had noticed the changes that had come over Ahmad as they had moved from the gloomy corridor of the Hotel Babylon, Ahmad's apparent station in life . . . to Ahmad's secret musty lair tucked away behind a wall . . . and finally to the flowering courtyard outside the hotel, so naked to the immense Egyptian night. . . . Ahmad opening his heart more with each new descent of the darkness, each evening when the last of the sunlight died and the hour returned for them to camp anew beneath the stars.

Buy why, all at once, was Ahmad opening up like this? Joe wondered.

And the more he thought of it, the more it seemed there could be only one explanation . . . Stern. Ahmad knew how much Joe cared for Stern and obviously he felt a need to talk about Stern, to tell Joe something. But why did Ahmad feel that need so strongly now? What had suddenly caused him to abandon the habits of years, his decades of silence?

Memories, thought Joe, the past. . . . Fragments and shards on the journey, as Liffy had said. To be examined in retrospect in an attempt to reconstruct the cup that once had been . . . the vessel that once had held the wine of other lives in other eras.

Yes, in time, thought Joe. In his own erratic way, through glimpses and suggestions and his own peculiar rhythms, Ahmad will find where we have to go.

And meanwhile Joe listened through the nights and slept and pondered Ahmad's fragments during the days, trying to immerse himself in Ahmad's memories in order to grasp the span of Stern's network over the decades.

So elusive . . . time, thought Joe. And Stern's life has been so vast, and now with the war and everything disrupted, dying. . . .

As it turned out, he and Ahmad were to spend no more than a few nights together in the debris-strewn courtyard of the Hotel Babylon, that former brothel crumbling beneath the stars. Yet when Joe looked back on those few nights, they would expand into many worlds so distant and remote it was as if they had been scattered across a universe.

Ahmad's secret universe, as Liffy once had called it.

***

Joe learned that Ahmad had first met Stern, through Menelik, when Stern was a young student of Arabic studies in Cairo, before Stern had gone on to Europe and acquired his lifelong dream of a great new nation in the Middle East, made up of Moslems and Christians and Jews alike. And that Ahmad had been a witness to those early stirrings of conscience in Stern, so boyish and exuberant, that had later made Stern a dedicated revolutionary