The Sacred River (38 page)

Harriet took hold of Louisa’s hand. “No one will look for us here,” she whispered. “If they do, they won’t find us. Don’t be afraid, Mother.”

“If only Yael were with us,” Louisa whispered back.

“She will be all right, Mother. She will remain at the clinic until it passes.”

“I should feel so much easier if she were with us.”

SIXTY

The streets of the old city teemed with people. Not people, Yael corrected herself. Men. Men and boys. Women and small children were nowhere to be seen. The doors of the narrow houses were closed, the windows shuttered, and the latticed, overhanging galleries dark with watchers.

Despite the crowds, their insistent movement in one direction, like a river, there was a stillness and a sense of concentration, of purpose, that was alien here. No laughter. The silence, punctuated by shouts of
Allahu akbar
,
God is great
, didn’t match the volume of people. It was eerie, despite the bright sunshine. God is great, Yael repeated to herself, trying to ignore the prickle of fear in her spine. She had the same disturbed feeling as when she had seen the brown cloud of the dust storm approaching, of something impending, a natural force.

The crowd was moving as one, a shoal of men and boys surging through the narrow alleys. Some had wooden staffs in their hands, or curved, sheathed knives at their waists. Boys stooped to wrench long-anchored stones from the dust; one child of six or seven ran past Yael with a stick in each hand. She recognized him from the clinic. He had come several times with his mother and a line of little sisters. Yael had washed his face herself.

She called to the boy. “Go home,” she said, her voice soft. “You shouldn’t be here.”

The boy turned a pair of lustrous eyes on her. Stared for a moment, then darted off.

“It’s not safe,” she called after him.

Approaching the main path leading to Bab el Bahr, the Gate of the Sea, the mood altered. Shouts and cries rose, joined with more distant sounds of firecrackers and again the rumble that sounded like thunder. The crowd surged onward, moving rapidly through the dust and flattened stalks of straw, over cobbles blunted and polished by the tread of feet, toward the Frank quarter. Yael was forced almost to run to keep pace. Smoke was drifting overhead and the sun beat strongly. The air was still and stifling. Sweat poured down her forehead and made her eyes sting; the inside of her bodice clung damply to her skin.

As they converged on the gate, the tide slowed. Yael wiped her face with her handkerchief. She was almost home. There had been nothing to worry about. She took a deep breath as the people pushed and jostled from behind; the press of bodies grew tighter and then the pressure eased as the men in front of her streamed under the old stone archway; she followed them, past iron-studded doors, down the hill, into the broad streets and tall solidity of the Frank quarter.

Stumbling on, still trying to keep pace, afraid of falling and disappearing under a thousand feet, Yael gasped aloud. The windows of Otto Huber’s apothecary had been smashed and men were crowding inside, grabbing at tins and packets, toppling the stoppered glass jars. She heard shouting, a frightened European voice, and sent up a prayer that the voice was not that of dear Mr. Huber, who had ceased to charge her for the zinc and alum powders, who had advised her so patiently on trachoma.

Many of the shopwindows were shattered. Poor-looking, barefooted men were clutching new leather shoes to their chests; teenage boys ran down the street with bottles of wine and whisky in their hands. The sound of the crowd had altered to something deeper and angrier, more discordant. Some were trying to prevent the looting, others intent on breaking into the shops of the Greek and Turkish merchants.

As the Place des Consuls came into view, Yael’s heart missed a beat.

“Oh, Lord,” she said. “Oh, dear Lord.”

One of the elegant white buildings was ablaze. Dense black clouds billowed from between the charred roof beams; plumes of thinner smoke poured out of broken windows, their lace curtains aflame. The little wooden kiosk in the middle of the square, where the father and son sold coffee and hard biscuits, was reduced to a charred heap, with two smoke-blackened iron chairs still arranged around a wrought-iron table.

The square was empty of its usual inhabitants. No opulent closed carriages rattled through the square with liveried footmen running in front to clear the passage. No fashionable women strolled arm in arm under the jacaranda trees. The Arab quarter had come to the Frank quarter. The fellaheen, in their ragged navy robes, their turbaned heads, were massed in front of a wide building on the south side of the square, which was guarded by spiked iron railings, a pair of stone lions. A white hand waved a white flag from a first-floor window and disappeared.

Yael had felt as if she were experiencing the scene in perfect silence. She was wrong, she realized, coming back to her senses. The noise was increasing. Her ears were ringing, half deafened with chants, shouts, and a roaring whose source she still could not fathom, that sounded now like the sea but was not the sea. It was the sound of rage, she understood. Her legs felt weak. She would have fallen, if it were not for the crush.

“Think,” she said under her breath. “Please, Lord, help me to think.”

She wasn’t far from the villa. She could reach it, if she could get through to the edge of the crowd. Muttering English apologies, praying that Harriet and Louisa were safely on board the ship, she began to inch her way among the people. Her face streamed as she pushed her way through, ignoring muttered words and hostile glances. An elbow in her ribs. A hand that grasped her flesh through her petticoats. As her eyes roved over the heads and faces, searching for the edge of the crowd, Yael tripped. Putting out her hands to save herself, she stumbled into a youth.

“Pardon me,” she said. “I am so terribly sorry.”

He wasn’t more than fifteen. A boy, without a beard. His eyes were bloodshot and his face thin and starved. As he raised his arm in the air, a man stepped in front of her. Yael heard him invoking the Prophet by his title,
Rabir
. The youth looked past the man at Yael and spat on the ground.

Although the burning sun had not dimmed, Yael felt cold, the dampness of her dress chilly and clinging. She stood still, gripping her handbag to her chest. As she did so, another man, dressed in a long white robe that was starched and pressed, prodded her arm. His sharp fingers pierced her flesh painfully through her sleeve. He grabbed at the bag, pulled it open, and the collection coins rained to the ground.

“Thief,” he shouted, opening the bag wide, shaking out the rest of the money.

“No, sir,” she protested. “That is not right—”

The cry was taken up by others. They pressed around her, shouting into her face, their breath hot with fury. “Thief. Thief. Thief.”

Yael turned in a circle, trying to speak, explain. Her mouth was open but no words came. Hands were claiming her, invading her. The bag fell to the ground. Her black umbrella was seized from her hand. As her shawl was dragged from her shoulders, she felt herself falling; she flailed with her hands for help that didn’t come, and hit the ground painfully. Trying to right herself, get back to her feet, she felt a kick in her side and heard a tearing of cloth as a hand ripped open the bodice of her dress. One of her shoes was gone.

On her knees, her arms clutched over her breasts, she looked up and saw a familiar face. A beard stained orange; eyes darkened with kohl. Eyes that looked at her. Relief flooded through her. I am saved, she said to herself. The Lord has saved me.

“Sheikh,” she called, her voice high and feeble. “Sheikh Hamada.”

He waded through the press of bodies toward her, his stick lifted in the air. The youths shrank away, standing back in a circle as he arrived in front of her. The sheikh looked at Yael with an expression that was not what she had anticipated. That was not different from the expression of the men who did not know her.

“Help me, Sheikh,” she whispered. “In the name of your God and mine.”

He looked away, then spoke in Arabic, deliberate and brief, his voice harsh. The youths pressed forward and Sheikh Hamada turned his back as Yael lost her footing for the second time and fell into a sea of hands.

Yael found she was walking naked through the grounds of her childhood home. It was autumn and through the trees she caught a silver glimpse of water, moved toward it on bare feet over a soft, undone jigsaw puzzle of oak leaves. The ground under her feet made it possible to walk, she understood for the first time. It was not the movement of her legs that constituted walking, it was the stillness of the spinning earth rising to meet them.

Broken sunlight lay in shards over the surface of the lake, rising and glinting off the branches of the old trees that abided by the edges of the water, their roots mingled in it, their crowns inclined toward its opaque blackness.

Noise hit her, a tide of sound that she could not read, translate. The wind in the trees, she told herself. Thunder and the cracking of a mighty oak, its trunk rent by lightning end to end. Reaching the edge of the water, she continued, feeling the coldness introduce itself to her feet, her ankles, sensing it and not sensing it, detached, unsure if the water cooled her or if she warmed the water.

This was truth. This cold was truth. Truth was not found in language, in human voices, not in prayer or song. Truth was in the water, its cold embrace. She kept on, the mud soft between her toes, the ducks incurious around her. Oak leaves were here too, floating on their backs, lightly, strangers on the water, bobbing with the borrowed movement of the ripples. She was in deep now, the water beginning to lift and carry her, her feet rising from the mud, floating like the leaves of lilies. She could see her toes, white, above the surface. She rested her head back and a fleeting, partial apprehension of peace made itself known to her, like a promise, a whisper, a glimpse through a veil of fog or smoke.

Smoke. The vision was lost. Something hard and heavy struck her head. And another. The cool water turned to warmth, trickling thick and slow on her face; the roaring filled her ears. Rocks, the rocks. Hitting her skull, her curled back, her fingers. Something slicing, carving. Blood pooling and darkening in the dust where she lay. She cast about for help. Not with her hands, which were useless now, immobile. She cast about within and caught the silver glint again through the heavy-limbed trees.

Yael dipped her face forward into the cold blackness that rose to meet her as the birds, the whole chattering world, fell silent. There was stillness over the earth. It was not the lake of her childhood that was the dream, she understood with a sweet, sharp current of regret. It was the life that followed it, that had patiently and on a circuitous path led her back. The waters had been waiting for her. She was released from the dream. She had woken. Jesus was near, perched on a low, overhanging branch, his black wings spread out to dry, his hungry beak pointing the way to heaven. In the place where he had pierced it for the sake of his young, his feathered breast bled.

She opened her eyes to a mass of faces, the faces of the saints, a shard of brilliant blue sky, and closed them again.

“Hallelujah,” she cried, throwing back her head, opening wide her own beak, flexing the muscles of her gray wings, and feeling herself lift, weightless, soaring toward the heavens. “
Agnus Dei. Resurgam
.”

SIXTY-ONE

Harriet peered through black gauze as the cart moved past the high padlocked gates of the houses and villas in the Frank quarter. The watchmen’s huts were abandoned, the sleeping mats empty. The sun was still below the horizon, the sky streaked with crimson and purple. The voice of a muezzin cut into the air from somewhere close by. Pulling the black muslin folds of Suraya’s veil more closely around her, Harriet looked straight ahead, as Mustapha had instructed.

Louisa sat beside her, her face covered, her white hands hidden from view. Suraya had borrowed a second veil for her. Only their feet, swinging over the ground from the back of the cart, were visible under the hems of the black robes. Fouad had dirtied Harriet’s boots with earth from the garden. Louisa’s light summer shoes, ruined already, needed no disguising.