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since we don't have any plain on the premises, I think I'll just help myself to another glass of this most
friendly drink that looks like water, yet is far friendlier than that. Care to join me?
No thanks. It's a little raw for me.
Guess it would be. Guess you have to be born to the stuff. But it can help all right when you're feeling like
last winter's turf fire, all cold gray lumps and ashes. Well I'll just be helping myself now.
Cairo squinted at his hands as Joe went inside to fill his glass. Behind him he heard a beating of wings, a
pigeon alighting on a little roof just below them. There were two small wooden shelters on the lower roof.
A short ladder led to it.
You keep pigeons, Joe?
For company don't you know. After he eats he'll sleep, so will the others when they arrive. They'll be
tired certainly.
Where are they coming from?
Joe shrugged. Aqaba, I suppose.
You take them down there with you?
It's company, and then when I'm getting ready to leave I give them a wave and tell them they can go
anywhere they want. Amazing, isn't it, how they can fly all the way back from the Sinai to find a little roof
like this? One tiny roof in Jerusalem when they've got the whole world to choose from? Makes you think
about home and wonder where it is.
Joe went down the ladder and put out some grain for the pigeons. Cairo was standing outside the door of
the shack, gazing at the crucifix, when Joe came back and sat down.
I just knew you'd be going and thinking I was religious when Christ it's just not the truth. Why are you
thinking that anyway?
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. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]