Galilee

He started to sob. All the fine thoughts he’d had a few minutes before seemed hollow now. How could he think of leaving her?

“I can’t go,” he said. “I don’t know what put the thought in my head.”

“Yes you will,” she replied. “If you don’t go now, you’ll go sooner or later. So go.”

He wiped his tears away. “No,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

So he stayed. The storms still came, month on month, and he and the widow still coupled fiercely in the little house, while the fire muttered in the hearth and the wind chattered on the roof. But now his happiness was spoiled; and so was hers. He resented her for keeping him under her roof, even though she’d been willing to let him go. And she in her turn grew less loving of him, because he’d not had the courage to go, and by staying he was killing the sweetest thing she’d ever known, which was the love between them.

At last, the sadness of all this killed her. Strange to say, but this brave woman, who had survived the grief of being widowed, could not survive the death of her love for a man who stayed at her side. He buried her, and a week later, went on his way.

He never again settled down. He’d known all he needed to know of domestic life; from now on he would be a nomad. But the stew that had bubbled in him for so long was still good. Perhaps all the more pungent for those last sad months with Passak. Now, when he finally began his life’s work, and started to teach by telling of his experiences, there was the poignancy of their soured love to add to the account: this woman, to whom he had once promised his undying devotion—saying what he felt for her was imperishable—soon came to seem as remote a memory as his youth in Atva. Love—at least the kind of love that men and women share—was not made of eternal stuff. Nor was its opposite. Just as the scars that Nazar and his men had left faded with the years, so had the hatred Zelim had felt for them.

Which is not to say he was a man without feeling; far from it. In the thirty-one years left to him he would become known as a prophet, as a storyteller and as a man of rare passion. But that passion did not resemble the kind that most of us feel. He became, despite his humble origins, a creature of subtle and elevated emotion. The parables he told would not have shamed Christ in their simplicity, but unlike the plain and good lessons taught by Jesus, Zelim imparted through his words a far more ambiguous vision; one in which God and the Devil were constantly engaged in a game of masks.

There may be occasion to tell you some of his parables as this story goes on, but for now, I will tell you only how he died. It happened, of course, in Samarkand.

VI

Let me first say a little about the city, given that its glamour had fueled so many of the stories that Zelim had heard as a child. The teller of those tales. Old Zelim, was not the only man to dote on Samarkand, a city he had never seen. It was a nearly mythical place in those times. A city, it was said, of heartbreaking beauty, where thoughts and forms and deeds that were unimaginable in any other spot on earth were commonplace. Never such women as there; nor boys; nor either so free with their flesh as in Samarkand’s perfumed streets. Never such men of power as there; nor such treasures as men of power accrue, nor such palaces as they build for ambition’s sake, nor mosques they build to save their souls.

Then—if all these glories were not enough—there was the miraculous fact of the city’s very existence, when in all directions from where it stood there was wilderness. The traders who passed through it on the Silk Road to Turkistan and China, or carried spices from India or salt from the steppes, crossed vast, baking deserts, and freezing gray wastelands, before they came in sight of the river Zarafshan, and the fertile lands from which Samarkand’s towers and minarets rose, like flowers that no garden had ever brought forth. Their gratitude at being delivered out of the wastes they’d crossed inspired them to write songs and poems about the city (extolling it perhaps more than it deserved) and the songs and poems in their turn brought more traders, more beautiful women, more builders of petaled towers, so that as the generations passed Samarkand rose to its own legendary reputation, until the adulation in those songs and poems came to seem ungenerous. It was not, let me point out, simply a place of sensual excesses. It was also a site of learning, where philosophers were extolled, and books written and read, and theories about the beginning of the world and its end endlessly debated over glasses of tea. In short, it was altogether a miraculous city.

Three times in his life Zelim joined a caravan on the Silk Road and made his way to Samarkand. The first time was just a couple of years after the death of Passak, and he traveled on foot, having no money to purchase an animal strong enough to survive the trek. It was a journey that tested to its limits his hunger to see the place: by the time the fabled towers came in sight he was so exhausted—his feet bloody, his body trembling, his eyes red-raw from days of walking in clouds of somebody else’s dust—that he simply fell down in the sweet grass beside the river and slept for the rest of the day there outside the walls, oblivious.

He awoke at twilight, washed the sand from his eyes, and looked up. The sky was opulent with color; tiny knitted rows of high cloud, all amber toward the west, blue purple on their eastern flank, and birds in wheeling flocks, circling the glowing minarets as they returned to their roosts. He got to his feet and entered the city as the night fires around the walls were being stoked, their fuel such fragrant woods that the very air smelt holy.

Inside, all the suffering he’d endured to get here was forgotten. Samarkand was all that his father had said it would be, and more. Though Zelim was little more than a beggar here, he soon realized that there was a market for his storytelling. And that he had much to tell. People liked to hear him talk about the baptism at Atva; and the forest; and Nazar and his fate. Whether they believed these were accounts of true events or not didn’t matter: they gave him money and food and friendship (and in the case of several well-bred ladies, nights of love) to hear him tell his tales. He began to extend his repertoire: extemporize, enrich, invent. He created new stories about the family on the shore, and because it seemed people liked to have a touch of philosophy woven into their entertainments, introduced his themes of destiny into the stories, ideas that he’d nurtured in his years with Passak.

By the time he left Samarkand after that first visit, which lasted a year and a half, he had a certain reputation, not simply as a fine storyteller, but as a man of some wisdom. And now, as he traveled, he had a new subject: Samarkand.

There, he would say, the highest aspirations of the human soul, and the lowest appetites of the flesh, are so closely laid, that it’s hard sometimes to tell one from the other. It was a point of view people were hungry to hear, because it was so often true of their own lives, but so seldom admitted to. Zelim’s reputation grew.

The next time he went to Samarkand he traveled on the back of a camel, and had a fifteen-year-old boy to prepare his food and see to his comfort, a lad who’d been apprenticed to him because he too wanted to be a storyteller. When they got to the city, it was inevitably something of a disappointment to Zelim. He felt like a man who’d returned to the bed of a great love only to find his memories sweeter than the reality. But this experience was also the stuff of parable; and he’d only been in the city a week before his disappointment was part of a tale he told.

And there were compensations: reunions with friends he’d made the first time he’d been here; invitations into the palatial homes of men who would have scorned him as an uneducated fisherman a few years before, but now declared themselves honored when he stepped across their thresholds. And the profoundest compensation, his discovery that here in the city there existed a tiny group of young scholars who studied his life and his parables as though he were a man of some significance. Who could fail to be flattered by that? He spent many days and nights talking with them, and answering their questions as honestly as he was able.

One question in particular loitered in his brain when he left the city. “Do you think you’ll ever see again the people you met on the shore?” a young scholar had asked him.

“I don’t suppose so,” he’d said to the youth. “I was nothing to them.”

“But to the child, perhaps…” the scholar had replied.

“To the child?” said Zelim. “I doubt he even knew I existed. He was more interested in his mother’s milk than he was in me.”

The scholar persisted, however. “You teach in your stories,” he said, “how things always come round. You talk in one of them about the Wheel of the Stars. Perhaps it will be the same with these people. They’ll be like the stars. Falling out of sight…”

“…and rising again,” Zelim said.

The scholar offered a luminous smile to hear his thoughts completed by his master. “Yes. Rising again.”

“Perhaps,” Zelim had said. “But I won’t live in expectation of it.”

Nor did he. But, that said, the young scholar’s observation had lingered with him, and had in its turn seeded another parable: a morose tale about a man who lives in anticipation of a meeting with someone who turns out to be his assassin.

And so the years went on, and Zelim’s fame steadily grew. He traveled immense distances—to Europe, to India, to the borders of China, telling his stories, and discovering that the strange poetry of what he invented gave pleasure to every variety of heart.

It was another eighteen years before he came again to Samarkand; this—though he didn’t know it—for the last time.

VII

By now Zelim was getting on in years and though his many journeys had made him wiry and resilient, he was feeling his age that autumn. His joints ached; his morning motions were either water or stone; he slept poorly. And when he did sleep, he dreamed of Atva; or rather of its shore, and of the holy family. His life of wisdom and pain had been caused by that encounter. If he’d not gone down to the water that day then perhaps he’d still be there among the fishermen, living a life of utter spiritual impoverishment; never having known enough to make his soul quake, nor enough to make it soar.

So there he was, that October, in Samarkand, feeling old and sleeping badly. There was little rest for him, however. By now the number of his devotees had swelled, and one of them (the youth who’d asked the question about things coming round) had founded a school. They were all young men who’d found a revolutionary zeal buried in Zelim’s parables, which in turn nourished their hunger to see humanity unchained. Daily, he would meet with them. Sometimes he would let them question him, about his life, about his opinions. On other days—when he was weary of being interrogated—he would tell a story.

This particular day, however, the lesson had become a little of both. One of the students had said: “Master, many of us have had terrible arguments with our fathers, who don’t wish us to study your works.”

“Is that so?” old Zelim replied, raising an eyebrow. “I can’t understand why.” There was a little laughter among the students. “What’s your question?”

“I only wondered if you’d tell us something of your own father.”

“My father…” Zelim said softly.

“Just a little.”

The prophet smiled. “Don’t look so nervous,” he said to the questioner. “Why do you look so nervous?”

The youth blushed. “I was afraid perhaps you’d be angry with me for asking something about your family.”

“In the first place,” Zelim replied gently, “I’m far too old to get angry. It’s a waste of energy and I don’t have much of that left. In the second place, my father sits before you, just as all your fathers sit here in front of me.” His gaze roved the thirty or so students who sat cross-legged before him. “And a very fine bunch of men they are too.” His gaze returned to the youth who’d asked the question. “What does your father do?”

“He’s a wool merchant.”

“So he’s out in the city somewhere right now, selling wool, but his nature’s not satisfied with the selling of wool. He needs something else in his life, so he sends you along to talk philosophy.”

“Oh no…you don’t understand…he didn’t send me.”

“He may not think he sent you. You may not think you were sent. But you were bom your father’s son and whatever you do, you do it for him.” The youth frowned, plainly troubled at the thought of doing anything for his father. “You’re like the fingers of his hand, digging in the dirt while he counts his bales of wool. He doesn’t even notice that the hand’s digging. He doesn’t see it drop seeds into the hole. He’s amazed when he finds a tree’s grown up beside him, filled with sweet fruit and singing birds. But it was his hand did it.”

The youth looked down at the ground. “What do you mean by this?” he said.

“That we do not belong to ourselves. That though we cannot know the full purpose of our creation, we should look to those who came before us to understand it better. Not just our fathers and our mothers, but all who went before. They are the pathway back to God, who may not know, even as He counts stars, that we’re quietly digging a hole, planting a seed…”

Now the youth looked up again, smiling, entertained by the notion of God the Father looking the other way while His human hands grew a garden at His feet.

“Does that answer the question?” Zelim said.

“I was still wondering…” the student said.

“Yes?”

“Your own father—?”

“He was a fisherman from a little village called Atva, which is on the shores of the Caspian Sea.” As Zelim spoke, he felt a little breath of wind against his face, delightfully cool. He paused to appreciate it. Closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, he knew something had changed in the room; he just didn’t know what.

“Where was I?” he said.

“Atva,” somebody at the back of the room said.

“Ah, yes, Atva. My father lived there all his life, but he dreamed of being somewhere quite different. He dreamed of Samarkand. He told his children he’d been here, in his youth. And he wove such stories of this city; such stories…”

Again, Zelim halted. The cool breeze had brushed against his brow a second time, and something about the way it touched him seemed like a sign. As though the breeze was saying look, look…

But at what? He gazed out of the window, thinking perhaps there was something out there he needed to see. The sky was darkening toward night. A chestnut tree, still covetous of its leaves despite the season, was in perfect silhouette. High up in its branches the evening star glimmered. But he’d seen all of this before: a sky, a tree, a star.

He returned his gaze to the room, still puzzled.

“What kind of stories?” somebody was asking him.

“Stories…?”

“You said your father told stories of Samarkand.”

“Oh yes. So he did. Wonderful stories. He wasn’t a very good sailor, my father. In fact he drowned on a perfectly calm day. But he could have told tales of Samarkand for a year and never told the same one twice.”

“But you say he never came here?” the master of the school asked Zelim.

“Never,” Zelim said, smiling. “Which is why he was able to tell such fine stories about it.”

This amused everyone mightily. But Zelim scarcely heard the laughter. Again, that tantalizing breeze had brushed his face; and this time, when he raised his eyes, he saw somebody moving through the shadows at the far end of the room. It was not one of the students. They were all dressed in pale yellow robes. This figure was dressed in ragged black breeches and a dirty shirt. He was also black, his skin possessing a curious radiance, which made Zelim remember a long-ago day.

“Atva…?” he murmured.

Only the students closest to Zelim heard him speak, and even they, when debating the subject later, did not agree on the utterance. Some thought he’d said Allah, others that he’d spoken some magical word, that was intended to keep the stranger at the back of the room at bay. The reason that the word was so hotly debated was simple: it was Zelim’s last, at least in the living world.

He had no sooner spoken than his head drooped, and the glass of tea which he had been sipping fell from his hand. The murmurings around the room ceased on the instant; students rose on all sides, some of them already starting to weep, or pray. The great teacher was dead, his wisdom passed into history. There would be no more stories, no more prophecies. Only centuries of turning over the tales he’d already told, and watching to see if the prophecies came true.

Outside the schoolroom, under that covetous chestnut tree, two men talked in whispers. Nobody saw them there-nobody heard their happy exchange. Nor will I invent those words; better I leave that conversation to you: how the spirit of Zelim and Atva, later called Galilee, talked. I will say only this: that when the conversation was over, Zelim accompanied Galilee out of Samarkand; a ghost and a god, wandering off through the smoky twilight, like two inseparable friends.

Need I say that Zelim’s part in this story is far from finished? He was called away that day into the arms of the Barbarossa family, whose service he has not since left.

In this book, as in life, nothing really passes away. Things change, yes; of course they change; they must. But everything is preserved in the eternal moment—Zelim the fisherman, Zelim the prophet, Zelim the ghost; he’s been recorded in all his forms, these pages a poor but passionate echo of the great record that is holiness itself.

There must still be room for the falling note, of course. Even in an undying world there are times when beauty passes from sight, or love passes from the heart, and we feel the sorrow of partition.

In Samarkand, which was glorious for a time, the lozenge tiles, blue and gold, have fallen from the walls, and the chestnut tree under which Zelim and Galilee talked after the prophet’s passing has been felled. The domes are decaying, and streets that were once filled with noise are given over to silence. It’s not a good silence; it’s not the hush of a hermit’s cell, or the quiet of dawn. It’s simply an absence of life. Regimes have come and gone, parties and potentates, old guards and new, each stealing a portion of Samarkand’s glory when they lose power. Now there’s only dirt and despair. The highest hope of those who remain is that one of these days the Americans will come and find reason to believe in the city again. Then there’ll be hamburgers and soda and cigarettes. A sad ambition for the people of any great city.

And until that happens, there’s just the falling tiles, and a dirty wind.

As for Atva, it no longer exists. I suppose if you dug deep in the sand along the shore you’d find the broken-down walls of a few houses, maybe a threshold or two, a pot or two. But nothing of great interest. The lives that were lived in Atva were unremarkable, and so are the few signs that those lives left behind them. Atva does not appear on any maps (even when it thrived it was never marked down that way), nor is mentioned in any books about the Caspian Sea.

Atva exists now in two places. Here in these pages, of course. And as my brother Galilee’s true name.

I have one additional detail to add before we move on to something more urgent. It’s about that first day, when my father Nicodemus and his wife Cesaria went down to baptize their beloved child in the water.

Apparently what happened was this: no sooner had Cesaria lowered the baby into the water than he squirmed in her hands and escaped her, diving beneath the first wave that came his way and disappearing from view. My father of course waded in after him, but the current was particularly strong that day and before he could catch hold of his son the babe had been caught up and swept away from the shore. I don’t know if Cesaria was crying or yelling or simply keeping her silence. I do know she didn’t go in after the escapee, because she once remarked to Marietta that she had known all along Galilee would go from her side, and though she was surprised to see him leaving at such a tender age she wasn’t about to stop him.

Eventually, maybe a quarter of a mile out from the beach, my father caught sight of a little head bobbing in the water. By all accounts the baby was still swimming, or making his best attempt at it. When Atva felt his father’s hands around him he began to bawl and squirm. But my father caught firm hold of him. He set the baby on his shoulders, and swam back to the shore.

Cesaria told Marietta how the baby had laughed once he was back in her arms, laughed until the tears ran, he was so amused by what he’d done.

But when I think of this episode, especially in the context of what I’m about to tell you, it’s not the child laughing that I picture. No, it’s the image of little Atva, barely a day old, squirming from the hands of those who created him, and then, ignoring their cries and their demands, simply swimming away, swimming away, as though the first thing on his mind was escape.

PART THREE An Expensive Life

I

i

You remember Rachel Pallenberg? I spoke about her briefly several chapters back, when I was figuratively wringing my hands about whose story I was first going to tell. I described her driving around her hometown of Dansky, Ohio—which lies between Marion and Shanck, close to Mount Gilead. Unpretentious would be a kind description of the town; banal perhaps truer. If it once had some particular charm, that charm’s gone, demolished to make room for the great American ubiquities: cheap hamburger places, cheap liquor places, a market for soda that impersonates more expensive soda and cheese that impersonates milk product. By night the gas station’s the brightest spot in town.

Here, Rachel was raised until she was seventeen. The streets should be familiar to her. But she’s lost. Though she recognizes much of what she sees—the school where she passed several miserable years still stands, as does the church, where her father Hank (who was always more devout than her mother) brought her every Sunday, the bank where Hank Pallenberg worked until his sickness and early demise—all of these she sees and recognizes; and still she’s lost. This isn’t home. But then neither is the place she left to drive here; the exquisite apartment overlooking Central Park where she’s lived in the bosom of wealth and luxury, married to the man of countless women’s dreams: Mitchell Geary.

Rachel doesn’t regret leaving Dansky. It was a claustrophobic life she lived here: dull and repetitive. And the future had looked grim. Single women in Dansky didn’t break their hearts trying for very much. Marriage was what they wanted, and if their husbands were reasonably sober two or three nights a week and their children were born with all their limbs, then they counted themselves lucky, and dug in for a long decline.

That was not what Rachel had in mind for herself. She’d left Dansky two days after her seventeenth birthday without giving it so much as a backward glance. There was another life out there, which she’d seen in magazines and on the television screen: a life of possibilities, a movie-star life, a life she was determined to have for herself. She wasn’t the only seventeen-year-old girl in America who nurtures such hopes, of course. Nor am I the first person to be recounting in print how she made that dream a reality. I have here beside me four books and a stack of magazines—the contents of most of which don’t merit the word reportage—all of which talk in often unruly metaphor about the rise and rise of Rachel Pallenberg. I will do my best here to avoid the excess and stick to the facts, but the story—which is so very much like a fairy tale—would tempt a literary ascetic, as you’ll see. The beautiful, dark-eyed girl from Dansky, with nothing to distinguish her from the common herd but her dazzling smile and her easy charm, finds herself, by chance, in the company of the most eligible bachelor in America, and catches his eye. The rest is not yet history; history requires a certain closure, and this story’s still in motion. But it is certainly something remarkable.