The other hour needed for life.
IN 1933 STERN FOUND himself walking beside the Bosporus in the rain, and to him the colors of that gray October sky were reminiscent of another afternoon there when an enormously tall gaunt man had entered a deserted olive grove and ceremoniously removed all his elegant clothes, thrown them together into the black passing waters and climbed back through the dark grove, barefoot and wearing only a tattered cloak, a hakïm making his way south to the Holy Land and perhaps beyond.
Over half a century ago and now instead of an olive grove there was a hospital for incurables where he had just gone to see his old friend Sivi for the last time, or rather the body that had once been Sivi’s, tied to a bed and motionless now, staring blindly at the ceiling, the spirit having finally fled its torment.
Stern walked on. By the railing he saw a woman gazing down at the water, a foreigner dressed in a shabby way, and suddenly he realized what she was thinking. He went over and stood beside her.
Not until after dark I suppose. The wind will be high then and no one will see.
She didn’t move.
Do I look that desperate?
No, he lied. But remember there are always other things. Ways to help.
I’ve done that. I just don’t have the strength anymore.
What happened?
A man went mad today after it started to rain.
Who was he?
A man. His name was Sivi.
Stern closed his eyes and saw the smoke and flames of the garden in Smyrna, an afternoon eleven years ago that had brought him and now this woman to a railing beside the Bosporus. He squeezed the iron bar as hard as he could and when he spoke again he had control of his voice.
Well if you’ve made the decision the only thing you have to worry about now is being sure it’s a success. Your friends won’t have it any other way for two reasons.
He spoke so matter-of-factly she turned away from the water and looked at him for the first time. He was a large bulky man with hunched shoulders, his nationality difficult to place. Probably she didn’t see the weariness in his eyes then, just the outline of his shapeless figure beside her in the rain.
Only two? she said bitterly.
It seems so, but they’re enough. The first has to do with the guilt you make them feel. Was there something more they could have done? Of course, so they resent you for reminding them of that by still being alive. Then too you also remind them they’ve wasted their lives and they resent that. When they have to look at you afterward they have an uncomfortable feeling you’re not willing to accept as much moral corruption as they are. They’re not exactly aware of it but you’ll know the minute they sit down with you. A serious face, there’s something they have to say. Welcome you back from the dead? No. It’s cowardice they want to talk about. It’s too easy. Those are always their first words.
But it is easy, she whispered.
Of course. Real solutions always are. You just get up and leave. But most people can’t do that and that’s why they talk about your cowardice, because they’ve been trying to ignore their own for so long. It makes them uneasy. You make them uneasy.
She laughed harshly.
Is that all they say?
No, often there are special concerns depending on who they are. A mother worrying about how she brought up her children is likely to criticize you for not making it look like an accident. After all, how would your mother have felt?
Touching.
Yes. Then a businessman is likely to point out you didn’t even have your business affairs in order. When you commit suicide, in other words, you should be thinking about everyone but yourself. You’re only losing your life. What about other people?
Dreadful to be that selfish.
Yes. But there are also a few people who never mention it and go right on with you as if nothing had happened. It’s a way of finding out who’s close to you, I admit, but a dangerous one.
You seem to be quite an expert.
No, just one or two experiences. But don’t you want to hear the other reason why you can’t fail? It’s because you’ll have learned a life just doesn’t matter much except as a memory, even a great life. In fact I suspect that explains what Christ did after he was resurrected.
Christ?
Well we know he spent forty days on the Mount of Olives seeing his friends, then disappeared. And during those forty days he must have realized he couldn’t go on doing the same things with the same people anymore. It was over. They had their memories of him and that’s what they needed, not him. In the three years he’d been preaching he’d already changed a good deal and of course he would have gone on changing, everyone always does. But his friends didn’t want that.
So what did he do?
Stern tapped his forehead.
Two theories, one for good days and one for bad. The theory for bad days is set in Jerusalem. Have you been there?
Yes.
Then you’ve seen St Helena’s crypt in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre?
Wait, I know what you’re going to say. It’s the man who paces back and forth at the top of the stairs, isn’t it. Staring at the floor and muttering to himself and he’s been doing it for two thousand years.
You mean you’ve already heard my theory?
No, but I saw that man once and somebody told me about him.
Oh, well according to my theory for bad days that man is Christ. What happened was that after his forty days with his friends he fully intended to go to heaven, but first he decided he might take a last look at that spot where he was crucified, that hilltop where the most momentous event in his life had occurred. So he did and he was so stunned by what he saw he never left, and ever since he’s been there pacing back and forth talking to himself about what he saw.
What did he see?
Nothing. Absolutely nothing. They’d taken down the three crosses and it was just an empty hilltop. For all anyone could tell, nothing at all had ever happened there.
She shook her head.
That’s certainly for bad days. What about good days?
On good days I think he did leave. He saw what he saw all right, but then he decided to do something else anyway. So he clipped his hair or tied it up and shaved his beard or grew a longer one, put on some weight and taught himself to speak directly like other men, then went on to acquire a trade so he could pay his way.
What trade?
Cobbler, say, perhaps even carpentry again although I doubt that. After seeing the emptiness of that hilltop he’d probably have preferred to try something new. Yes, cobbler perhaps.
And where did he go?
Oh he didn’t go anywhere. Theories for good and bad days have to be set in the same place. He stayed in Jerusalem and now that he’d changed his appearance he could come and go as he pleased without being recognized, perhaps disguised as an Armenian or an Arab. Which he still does of course, being immortal and having long since forgotten his former troubles, even the man he used to be. And all because a very beautiful thing happened, a strange and glorious transformation. It took more time than going to heaven, had he done that, but it happened.
What?
Jerusalem moved. Over the centuries it slowly moved north. It picked itself up from Mt Zion and inched its way toward what had once been that empty hilltop outside the walls. Foreign conquerors who thought they were desecrating the place helped by razing the city every so often, and each time they did the city was rebuilt a little closer to the desolate hilltop. Until the hilltop was no longer far away but right beneath the walls, then within the walls, then nearer to the center of the city and at last in its very heart, crowded around with bazaars and playing children and swarms of traders and pious pilgrims all shouting and laughing and rubbing together. No longer a sad little empty hilltop at all you see. No just the opposite. Jerusalem had come to him, the Holy City had embraced him and that’s why at last he was able to forget his former sorrows. He no longer had to fear the nothingness of his death.
Well what do you think? said Stern with a smile.
I think it’s certainly a theory for good days.
Yes indeed, a happy ending after two thousand years. And not that impossible either. As a matter of fact my own father did much the same thing in the last century.
Did what? Made Jerusalem move?
No that takes more time. I was thinking about leaving the empty hilltop behind by putting on a disguise. And he was relatively famous too, and rather recognizable you would have thought.
But no one knew who he was?
Only the few he chose to tell.
How can you be sure he told you the truth?
Stern smiled. He almost had her now.
I see what you mean but I still have to believe him. What he did is too unreal not to be true. No one could forge a life like his.
All the same, forgeries can be enormous.
I know.
Once a man forged the whole Bible.
I know, repeated Stern.
Why do you say that?
Well you’re talking about Wallenstein, aren’t you? The Albanian hermit who went to the Sinai?
She stared at him.
How did you know that?
Stern’s smile broadened. At last he’d found what he was looking for.
Well isn’t that who you mean? The Trappist who found the original Bible and was so appalled by its chaos he decided to forge his own? Then went back to Albania where he survived to the age of one hundred and four in a dungeon beneath his castle, in a totally black and soundless cell, the only place he could live now that he was God? Cared for all that time by the love of Sophia the Unspoken, later when I met her to become Sophia the Bearer of Secrets? Who was overwhelmed when Wallenstein finally died in 1906?
But that’s not true.
What?
That Wallenstein died in 1906.
Yes it is.
It can’t be. I was there then.
Then you must be Maud, and you escaped to Greece when Catherine had a seizure and all his veins burst, a death willed on him by his own mother Sophia, or so the old woman always believed. She told me the whole fantastic story when I was trapped there during the first Balkan war. Told me everything, it seemed she just couldn’t bear the burden of keeping it all a secret anymore. A strange mixture of brilliance and superstition, that woman. She actually believed Catherine’s madness had come about because Wallenstein himself was an angel, literally, not a saint but a divine angel who couldn’t have a human child because he was superhuman. Well maybe he did have a touch of something considering the scope of his forgery.
Maud stared at him in utter disbelief.
Twenty-seven years ago, she whispered.
Yes.
But can any of it be true?
It’s all true and there’s more, much more. The baby you had for example. Sophia named him Nubar, a family name, it seems she was of Armenian descent originally. She brought him up with as much love as she had had hatred for Catherine and was able to give him a fortune through her early manipulations in the oil market. He’s extremely influential although very few people have ever even heard of him. Now what do you think of that?
Nothing. I can’t think anything about it. It’s all some kind of magic.
Not at all, said Stern, laughing and taking her by the arm, leading her up the street away from the water.
They talked late that night and many others and slowly she pulled away from despair as eventually it all came out, the horror of her first marriage and the loneliness of her second when she felt she had been abandoned again by someone she loved, the hidden fear from her childhood growing malignantly then until a time came when she could bear it no longer and she ran away from Joe, the great love of her life, the one thing she had always wanted in the world, a magical dream come true in Jerusalem and she had left it.”
Every act futile and bitter then. More years when she was terrified at growing old. Trying to find Sivi again, some link with the past, surprised to learn he was also living in Istanbul, tracing him with difficulty and shocked when she found him at last, so vastly different from the elegant and worldly man she had known at the time of the First World War. Pathetically alone now, working as a common laborer in a hospital for incurables.
And the strange muddled story about his former secretary that obsessed him, that he repeated over and over, how Theresa had gone to a place called Ein Karem in Palestine, there to suffer some kind of terrible self-inflicted penance in an Arab leper colony.
It was inexplicable. How could people change so much?
Stern shook his head. It wasn’t time to speak, her memory of standing beside the water was too recent. Sivi? Yes he had known him once, anyone who had ever spent any time in Smyrna had known Sivi. Yes and Theresa too. He nodded for her to go on.
Kind and gentle Sivi, totally broken when she found him, grave and sad and bewildered, living in a small squalid room near the Bosporus, so confused he often forgot to feed himself.
She had decided to devote herself to caring for him, it was the best thing she could do. She cleaned for him and washed and cooked, and for a while she felt stronger. Helping Sivi gave life some meaning again. But then that awful rainy afternoon came when she went to pick him up at the hospital after work as she did every day and found him strapped to a bed, beyond the impenetrable barrier of madness, the same afternoon Stern had found her by the water.
And now after forty-three years what did she have?
The memory of one exquisite month long ago on the shores of the Gulf of Aqaba. That and the son she had conceived there.
Would you like to meet him? asked Maud.
Yes very much.
She looked at him shyly.
Please don’t laugh. I named him Bernini. The dreams were crumbling but not quite gone. I suppose I hoped someday he would also carve his own beautiful fountains and stairways to somewhere.
Stern smiled.
And why not? It’s a good name.
But Maud looked suddenly troubled. She took his hand and said nothing.
In the small apartment above the Bosporus, Stern tried to amuse the boy with stories from his childhood. He described the first clumsy balloon he had built when he was about Bernini’s age.
Did you fly?
For a yard or two, depending on how hard I pushed. After that I just went bumping down the hillside.
Why didn’t you put wheels on the basket? Then you could have used it as a sailboat and crossed the desert that way.
I could have I suppose, but I didn’t. I kept trying to build better balloons and after a while I made one that would fly.
I wouldn’t have done that, said the boy distantly. Sailing would have been good enough for me.
They were sitting on the narrow terrace. Maud came out with tea and the boy lay down on his stomach and gazed at the ships plowing up and down the straits. When Stern left, Maud walked to the corner with him.
He’s often like that, I don’t know how to explain it. He talks for a minute or two about something and then drops it as if he were afraid to say too much, as if by touching certain thoughts he was afraid they would go away. He wouldn’t ask you why you wanted to fly for example, nor would he tell you why he would have preferred to sail. Instead he just lay down and watched the boats. I knew his imagination was working and he was thinking about those things, but he wouldn’t talk about it with us.
He’s young.
But not that young and sometimes it frightens me. His thoughts don’t always follow each other, somehow the sequence is wrong. Again it’s as if he were leaving things out on purpose. In school he can’t get along at all except for drawing.
Stern smiled.
With his name that’s fine.
But Maud didn’t smile.
No. He used to draw at home and now he doesn’t even do that anymore. He just lies on his elbows and gazes at things, especially the boats. And there’s something worse, he can’t read. Doctors say there’s nothing wrong but he can’t seem to learn. I mean he’s already twelve years old.
She stopped. Stern put his arm around her. He didn’t know how to help.
Listen. He’s healthy and good-natured and even though he may be a little too much inside himself right now, that’s not necessarily bad or wrong. After all he seems happy enough and isn’t that the most important thing?
There were tears in her eyes.
I don’t know. I just don’t know what to do.
Well at least you could share the burden. Why not get in touch with the boy’s father? He’s still in Jerusalem, near enough.
She moved her feet uneasily.
I couldn’t do that. I’m too ashamed of the way I treated him.
But that was twelve years ago, Maud.
I know but I still couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was too cruel to him and none of it was his fault. That would take a kind of strength I don’t have yet.
Stern looked at the ground. She took his hands and tried to smile.
Well don’t worry about it. It’ll be all right.
Good, he said in a soft voice. I know it will be.
And now you’re going to be away for a while?
He grinned.
It shows that desperately?
A man on his travels, yes.
About a month probably. I’ll cable.
Bless you, she whispered, for being who you are.
She went up on her tiptoes and kissed him.
Stern used to tell her how his father had somehow managed to mark his memory as a child with every name and event from his long years of wandering, in the course of time narrating his entire journey much as a blind man might have done in the days when there was no other way for the stages of the past to be passed from generation to generation, in effect rewriting the haj of his life in indelible ink upon his young son’s mind, swirling stroke around stroke in the complex etching of a spiritual stylus.
Yet strangely in those myriad experiences, those majestic flowing volumes that together comprised Strongbow’s legendary voyage through the desert, never once had the old explorer talked about the gentle Persian girl he had loved so dearly in his youth for a few weeks, no more, before she was carried off in an epidemic. Why?
Why should he have? answered Maud. He had loved her, that’s all, what more was there to say? Besides, when we look back on it there are always mysteries in someone’s life and perhaps the gentle Persian girl is his.
You may be right, said Stern vaguely, standing and then sitting down again. But Maud didn’t think he was really talking about the Persian girl and Strongbow. There had to be something else on his mind the way he was acting, something much more personal. She waited but he didn’t go on.
What else did he never mention? she said after a moment.
It’s very curious, but the Sinai Bible of all things. Surely he knew about it. Why that one secret held back?
Why do you think?
Stern shrugged. He said he couldn’t imagine why. He got up again and began roaming around the room.
When did he die? I don’t think you’ve ever told me that.
August 1914, the very month the nineteenth century came to an end. You know I remember that prophecy you said O’Sullivan Beare’s father made two months before that, that seventeen of his sons were going to be killed in the Great War. Well Strongbow must have had the gift too. He was ninety-five years old and he’d gone blind by then but his health was good and his mind was certainly as clear as ever. The main thing seemed to be simply that he felt he’d lived long enough. I was there with him in Ya’qub’s old tent during those last days and that’s exactly what he said. It’s enough.
Ya’qub had already died?
Yes, but only a few months before, the two of them inseparable to the end, always talking and talking over their endless cups of coffee. Anyway, after he said it was enough he did something that couldn’t have been a coincidence.
Stern frowned and lapsed into silence. He seemed to drift away.
Well?
I’m sorry, what?
The thing he did, what was it?
Oh. He predicted the hour of his death and went to sleep to await it.
And never woke up.
That’s right.
And what wasn’t a coincidence?
Dying like that. It was a story he’d heard long ago from some bedouin called the Jebeliyeh. Around 1840 a blind mole did the same thing at the foot of Mt Sinai after talking to a hermit on the mountain. And of course you know who the hermit was.
Wallenstein.
Yes, Wallenstein. A hermit in 1840 and a blind mole in 1914. Strongbow was obviously dreaming Wallenstein’s dream when he died. Dreaming of the Sinai Bible.
Once more Stern’s voice trailed off and his attention drifted away. Maud waited as he restlessly crossed the room to the window and returned and went back to the window again.
And if it was so important to him, you still can’t imagine why he never told you about it?
No, said Stern quickly.
A thunderstorm had broken overhead and lightning suddenly lit the room in a violent burst but Stern seemed unaware of it.
No, he repeated. No.
Maud gazed at the floor. She wanted to believe him but she didn’t. She knew it wasn’t true, there was no way it could be true. And even though she knew the two old men only through Stern, she could picture exactly what had happened. It was as clear to her as if she had been there and seen Ya’qub and Strongbow marching back and forth between their almond trees in one of their interminable rambling discussions.
Ya’qub saying merrily that this was fine, all the things the boy was learning, but then suddenly serious and tugging Strongbow’s sleeve and whispering earnestly that one mystery must be excluded from their teachings, at least that, for the boy’s sake, one for him to discover alone by himself.
The former hakïm pondering the words and nodding solemnly over this piece of wisdom, the two of them sitting up late that night in their tent trying to decide which mystery it should be among the thousands they shared after all their years of tramping from Timbuktu to Persia, of tracing a hillside in the Yemen and going nowhere.
So Stern was lying to himself. He pretended all his days and nights were taken up with his clandestine cause but it just wasn’t so. There was something else more important to him.
Dizzily then she recalled things he had said and all at once it became obvious. For years he too had been secretly in search of the Sinai Bible.
Wallenstein. Strongbow. O’Sullivan Beare and now Stern.
Where would it ever end?
She didn’t want to talk about it but she knew she couldn’t just ignore it, so finally she asked the question.
Stern, what made you begin looking for the Sinai Bible?
It was late afternoon and he was pouring himself a glass of vodka. His shoulders seemed to twitch and he poured more than he usually did.
Well, when I realized what it meant I had to. What was in it I mean. What’s still in it wherever it is.
And what’s that, Stern? For you?
Well everything. All my ideas and hopes, what I was really looking for years ago in Paris when I thought of a new nation here, a homeland for Arabs and Christians and Jews alike, you see what I mean don’t you? That homeland could have been here in the beginning before people were divided into those names, the Sinai original might show that. And if it does I would have proof, or at least I could prove it to myself even if to no one else.
Prove what? What you’ve done? What you work for? Your life? What?
Well yes, all those things, everything.
Maud shook her head.
That damned book.
Why say that? Think what it could mean if it were found.
Maybe, I don’t know anymore. It just makes me angry.
But why does it make you angry? Because of O’Sullivan Beare? Because he wanted to find it so much?
Yes and no. Perhaps it was just that then, now it’s something more.
What?
She shrugged wearily.
I’m not sure. The way it obsesses people. The way it sends lives careening off in all directions. Wallenstein in his cave for seven years going mad while the ants eat his eyeballs, Strongbow marching through the desert for forty years never able to sleep in the same place twice, Joe and his wild search for treasures that don’t exist, you and your impossible nation. Why are there these mirages that pull men and pull them on and on and on? Why does it have to be the same with all of you? You hear about that damn book and you go crazy. You all do.
She stopped. He took her hand.
But it’s not the Sinai Bible that does it, is it?
More vodka?
Maud?
No I know it isn’t, of course it’s not. But all the same I wish that damn fanatic Wallenstein had never had his insane dream. Why couldn’t he have left us alone?
But he hasn’t got anything to do with it either. It was there and all he did was find it and live it, or relive it and bring it back to us, all the things we’ve always wanted. Canaan, just imagine it. The happy land of Canaan three thousand years ago.
It wasn’t happy.
It might have been. No one can say until the original is found.
Yes they can. You know it wasn’t.
He didn’t answer.
Damn it, say you do. Admit it. Say you know.
All right then, I know.
She sighed and began stroking his hand absentmindedly. The anger in her face had drained away.
And yet, she whispered.
Yes that’s right, that’s always it. And yet. And yet.
She picked up the vodka bottle and looked at it.
Christ, she muttered. Oh Christ.
Yes, said Stern with a thin smile. Among others.
Dizzying and more, for although O’Sullivan Beare had the account of the Bible all mixed up, confusing it with the vague stories Haj Harun told him, Stern actually knew where the Sinai original was. He knew it had been buried in the Armenian Quarter of Jerusalem.
Yet he had never looked for it there.
Why?
Stern laughed and filled his glass.
You know that’s the only part of Sophia’s story I’ve never believed. It would have been too obvious a hiding place for someone as clever and dedicated as Wallenstein. Look at it. He spent twelve years in a basement hole in the Armenian Quarter before he went to the Sinai to do his forgery. Would he have been likely to come back and bury the original in that same basement hole? Ask questions about him and someone would remember, the spot could be found and all of Wallenstein’s efforts would have been for nothing. Would Sophia have allowed that considering how much she loved him? She knew what the forgery had cost him, what it eventually cost her too, so she lied to protect him, to protect herself, to keep their suffering from being meaningless.
Stern went on talking, pacing and puffing cigarettes. He poured himself another drink. Maud looked out the window in embarrassment.
Why was he saying all this? There was no reason for Sophia to lie to protect Wallenstein after he’d already protected himself. When he went to Egypt to find parchment he’d traveled as a wealthy Armenian dealer in antiquities. Who knew what other disguises there had been?
The basement hole could have had a large house over it where he passed himself off as someone else. Or a shop where he actually dealt in antiquities. Or a church where he’d gotten himself ordained as a priest, or a monastery where he was posing as a monk. Anything at all. Obviously the manuscript would never be found by asking questions about Wallenstein and his basement hole.
Stern, a little drunk now, began to describe all the places he had looked for the manuscript. At first he thought it must have been hidden in a large city so he went to Cairo and Damascus and Baghdad, into the back alleys at night.
Did anyone have a very old book to sell? A precious book? He was willing to pay a great deal.
Knowing smiles. Levantine language. He was led through shadowy rooms where every sort of living creature was offered for sale, the body in question guaranteed to be as satisfying as the oldest book in the world.
O venerable scholar, added his guide.
Stern fled to the open air. Perhaps a small cave near the Dead Sea? Wallenstein having chosen this secure place as he was limping home from Mt Sinai?
Stern cranked up his tractor car and sped down wadis and across the dunes chasing stray camels, on the lookout for caves. When he spied a bedouin on the horizon he raced over to him and whipped open the steel hatch. Up popped Stern’s dusty face, his tanker’s goggles staring blankly down at the frightened man.
A very old book? A cave in the vicinity? Even a small one?
Next he favored the idea of a remote oasis, a dot in the desert so small it supported only one family, surely an ingenious hiding place.
The hydrogen valves hissed and his balloon swelled. On the tip of the Sinai peninsula he hovered over a tiny clump of green. The woman and children ran into the tent and the man raised his knife to defend his family against this floating apparition from the Thousand and One Nights.
Twenty yards above the ground Stern’s head appeared.
Any old books down there?
He changed his mind. It wasn’t a place he should be looking for but a person. Wallenstein had found a wandering holy man and fixed the dervish with his eyes, whispering that here was the true holy of holies. The dervish must carry it until he was ready to die and then pass it on to another holy man in a similar way, for this bundle or ark was the manifestation of God on earth carried by secret bearers since the beginning of time and henceforth to the end of time, letting it fall being no less a matter than letting fall the world itself.
Stern went into the deserts and bazaars asking his question.
What sacred object do you carry?
Rags were unwrapped and treasures appeared, slivers of wood and crumpled flowers and thimbles of muddy water, carved matchsticks and cracked glass and smudged slips of paper, a live mouse and an embalmed toad and many other manifestations of God, in fact just about everything except what he sought.
And you? Stern wearily asked once more.
I have no need for graven images, answered a man disdainfully. God is within me. Wait and tomorrow at dawn you will see the one and true God.
Stern spent the night. The next morning the man rose at an early hour, ate a meager breakfast and moved his bowels. He went through the mess and came up with a small smooth stone which he reverently washed and anointed with oil, then swallowed again with a triumphant smile.
Tomorrow at the same time, he said, God will appear again if you wish to return and worship Him.
And so Stern went on telling more stories and pouring more vodka and lighting more cigarettes, laughing at himself and making Maud laugh until long after midnight.
When he left she went around the room picking up ashtrays and sweeping up the ashes that had fallen everywhere as his hands flew and he talked and talked. In the kitchen she stood holding the empty bottles, gazing down at the sink. All at once she was exhausted.
She understood now why he had never made love to her, why he had probably never made love to anyone, why the sexual encounters in his life could never have been more than that.
Removed, anonymous, quickly over, and Stern alone in the end as in the beginning.
Never with someone who could know him. Never. Too, fearful of that.
He had already been tossing for several hours, his sleep torn by the grinding of his teeth. The only rest he ever knew was when he first lay down and now, two hours before dawn, even the tossing was over. His jaw aching, he reached for the blankets thrown off at his feet and lay shivering in the dark.
At last a gray light came in the window. Stern slid open a drawer by his bed and took out the needle. The warmth rolled over him and he fell back on the bed.
I’m slipping beautifully, he thought. Every night a dozen new chapters for the secret lost book he dreamed of finding, exquisitely beautiful episodes, nothing would ever come of them.
Once more he was a boy floating high in the night sky above the ruins of Marib among the breezes and stirring stars, above a distant drifting world, far above the Temple of the Moon suddenly seen in the sands. For minutes it lasted, all the minutes of his childhood in the Yemen with his father and his grandfather, wise and gentle men waiting for him to grasp their mysteries.
I’m slipping beautifully, he thought as the gray in the window faded to whiteness and he slept again under the morphine, the other hour needed for life.
He awoke feeling numb and drowsy and threw cold water over himself. No dreams now, only an empty day, but at least he had survived the harsh coming of the light.