Song of Slaves in the Desert Read online

  “Sir,” I said, “I was born in New York.”

  “Remarkable,” the man said. “Not in the alleys and shadows of Jerusalem or old Napoli or Lisbon but in New York?”

  “I told you the answer, sir, and so I am not sure of your point.”

  “My point, young man,” he said, “is a blunt one. I couldn’t help but think you were foreign-born. The shape of the head, the nose—”

  “Excuse me, sir,” I said, “but I must go below.”

  I turned abruptly and left the man standing on the deck. It took all of my sense of balance to negotiate the way to the hatch and then the stairs below, but I managed this without falling or banging any part of myself against the wood of the deck. The purser had had one of the crew take my bag below so that it was waiting for me on the bed in the small cabin reserved for my passage. I set it on the floor and removed my coat and stretched out on the bed, closing my eyes and giving myself over to the roll and pitch of the ship. As old as I was—or as young—I had never heard anyone speak of me in that way before, and I felt a bit light-headed, confused, as though I might have had too much wine.

  I awoke in the dark to the sound of creaking wood and rushing swells. It took me a moment to recall where I was, and in that moment a spout of terror rose up in me but immediately subsided as I heard the call of one sailor to another over the noise of the slap and drum of the waves.

  I had left New York behind; I was on my way to Charleston.

  I had no sooner figured this out when there came a knock at my cabin door.

  “Señor Pereira?” came the creaky voice of an old sailor.

  “Yes?”

  “The captain requests that you come to his cabin for supper just now, sir.”

  “Why does the captain wish to meet me?”

  “Why, sir, he enjoys knowing the persons who travel under his care and command.”

  I withdrew my new pocket watch and studied it, and then got to my feet and immediately lurched with the roll of the ship so that I clanged my shoulder against one of the timbers in the cabin. When I opened the door the old salt was still standing there, holding a bowl of water in one hand and a candle in the other, as though no balancing act were required despite the roll of the ship.

  “May I, sir?” and at my nod he entered the cabin and set down the water bowl, leaving me to wash before supper. Before too long he was leading me up a set of steps and down another to the entrance of the captain’s cabin at the stern of the ship. This turned out to be more like a real room than a cabin, with candles everywhere, two trim young sailors assisting in the service of several passengers, and the mustachioed cook flitting here and there with pans and pots and spoons at the ready. The scene was not all that different from home, except for the constant roll and slap of the ocean waves—and the cook with the mustache.

  “Mr. Pereira?” The captain, a burly man with thick side-chops and spectacles stuck on the tip of his near-spy-glass length nose, bade me enter and take a seat at the elbow of one of the gentlemen who had boarded with me in New York. The other sat across from me. The one man I didn’t care to see, the white-haired man in black who had boarded at Perth Amboy, was blessedly absent.

  Midway through our meal and accompanying small talk about business and politics—there was a question concerning Carolina, our destination, and its relation to the federal government that came up in conversation, something that I could not quite understand, since politics had not figured large in my tutorials with Halevi—my nemesis, for that is how I thought of him (as you would anyone whose presence immediately chills your blood) appeared in the doorway.

  “Ah,” he said, addressing all of us but keeping his eyes on the captain, “I am, as I have always been in my life, too late.”

  “No, no, sir,” the captain said. “The food is plentiful, and even more so the wine.”

  He directed the stewards to fill the man’s glass, bade him sit at his left hand, and then made introductions.

  “Young Master Pereira I know,” he said, staring me in the eye.

  I nodded, and watched the candle flames dance in their wicks.

  “Because of business?” the captain asked.

  “We met only today,” I said. “I assume we are both traveling on business.”

  “Yes,” said the man in black, “the business of Charleston. Always an interesting business.”

  One of the other men spoke up.

  “It is not my business,” he said. “I trade in cloth and clothing, nothing more.”

  “Nor I,” said the second man. “I have come to study the agriculture.”

  “Methinks you protest too much,” said the man in black. “Agriculture there means rice, and rice means what you know it means. What do you make of this, young Pereira?”

  “It is unclear to me, sir, but then it could just be the light in this room.”

  “This cabin,” the captain corrected me. “Or cabinet. Or, as I sometimes think of it, my womb and my tomb.”

  Fortified by many glasses of wine, he sailed into a disquisition on the life of a captain and the nature of the sea, which pleased me, because it did not give the man in black any room for his own speech.

  Alas, that creature caught up with me on deck after the meal.

  “Well, well, my young fellow,” he said, speaking to my back while I held onto the rail at starboard, watching the dark gap in the low stars in the west where I knew the land must be only a few miles or so across the hissing water. “I never knew, and I watched you, and I listened to you, and I discovered you have manners, you employ utensils with a certain grace, and who taught you this, what keeper? From a parent? Or your owner?”

  Standing this close to him I was forced to breathe in the foul odor that surged past his lips and the last thing I wanted was to stay by. However, instead of moving away, something happened that I never could have supposed I had within me and I turned slowly and giving in to a deep impulse that rose up out of the depths of my feelings surprised myself by taking him by the collar—twisting as I spoke.

  “Have you ever studied physics, sir?” I heard myself say. “This cloak of yours that wraps you all in darkness, do you know that soaked with sea water it would quickly drag you down to the bottom, and your body would not float to the surface for some days? All it would need is for me to take you like this—” and I grabbed him with my other hand—“and hurl you overboard like a sack of ash…”

  “Easy, my beauty,” he said, and I could hear him breathing carefully while still in my grasp. The stench of it I found enormous. “While we are quite different creatures, I am going to make a surmise. And that is that you and I are traveling to Charleston for the same reasons.”

  “And what might those be?” I said, tightening my hold on him.

  “To study nature,” he said.

  “What kind of nature?”

  “The nature of the beast,” he said, twisting out of my hold and coming right back to take me by the wrist.

  “Away with you!” I gave him a shove and he stumbled back along the planking.

  I don’t know what might have happened if a sailor, dressed all in white, had not appeared like a blur out of the shadows and inquired as to our business.

  “Arm wrestling,” the man in black said, “mere arm wrestling.”

  And with that he faded away into the darkness of the deck.

  I stayed there a while, nearly out of breath, wondering what had come over me—and watching the emptiness of the dark, as if in hope some message might flare up that I could read. I saw no lights, and then fatigue and the sea air dragged me below.

  For a short while I read by the light of the flickering candle at my bedside, finding a story of Nathaniel Hawthorne that had, when my teacher Halevi had first introduced me to it, pleased me no end. “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” the tale of a young New England boy who starts out one day in one world, the old time of the Tories who reigned in our country less than a hundred years ago, and by nighttime has his view of life turned ar
ound.

  But I could read no further than the scene where the boy first arrives in town…oh, yes, sleep then pressed me onto my bunk where I lay quietly for a few moments, thinking of tardy Miriam and my father and even crooked-eyed Marzy and darling Aunt Isabelle, before sinking into the place of sea-borne dreams. If I had known it was the last time I would ever find this sort of peaceful slumber, I would have slept even deeper than deep.

  Chapter Five

  ________________________

  Passages

  That stone—the gray face of it, with its three horizontal lines, one vertical—of all the memories of Zainab’s childhood, and of all the shuddering recollections she had of that night on the river plain, when, just as the first light broke, the traders riding huge beasts came thundering down on them—that stone, lying pristine in her father’s hand even as he gave up his last breath telling her to take it—that stone she plucked from his palm and carried with her, hidden on her body.

  “Lie still,” her mother said. And she obeyed, while listening to the stomping and snorting of the camels and the harsh voices of the men.

  “They hurt Papa,” Zainab said.

  “Hush,” said her mother. “They will take us back to the city. They will care for us.”

  “Will they make him better?”

  “Hush…” Her mother reached over to her and touched her on the arm. “They will not harm us. They will take us back to the sheik.”

  “I don’t want to go,” Zainab said in a whisper.

  “We have no choice.”

  The other children made low mewling noises, like hungry animals. Mother crawled toward them.

  “Get up,” said one of the traders, a lean man wrapped in a gray djellabah, his bald head catching the reflection of the early rising light.

  “My children,” her mother said.

  “They are my children now,” the trader said.

  “We belong to the sheik,” mother said. “If you harm us he will be angry.”

  “You belong to us now,” the trader said. “Do you think the sheik will be happy to see you return after you have run from him? You are safer with us than with him. Is that not right, brothers?”

  How many were there? Five, six? Most of them muttered their assent.

  The sun lifted up from the eastern rim of the desert, splashing all of them in glorious red first light. The men sat her on a camel, with her siblings behind her. Her mother rode behind one of the traders, her hands bound, and somewhat off balance as they trotted away from the broad beaming rays of the newly risen sun. They rode west along the river. Zainab could hear her mother weep into her scarf as they moved slowly along.

  “Where is Papa?” asked one of her sisters.

  Zainab herself began to weep.

  “You cannot do this to us,” she heard her mother say in protest to one of the traders. “We belong to—”

  Rough rude sound of flesh meeting flesh.

  “We do what we must do,” the trader said, moving on his beast up in rank, so that he led the little troop further west along the north bank of the river. The air grew thick with dust as the wind sailed down from the north, and the traders turned their faces away from it, one of them motioning for Zainab to cover her nose and mouth in her scarf. The children began weeping again and she tried to quiet them. It was hot. They were frightened. It was difficult to breathe. A coughing spell overtook her, to the point where one of the traders trotted up to her on his beast and handed her a vessel of water.

  “Drink,” he said.

  She refused.

  “Drink, Zainab,” her mother called from where she rode along.

  As she often would over the years, she felt beneath her clothing for the stone, and rubbed her fingers on it, rubbing, rubbing. Rubbing helped pass the minutes, it helped pass the hours.

  One of her siblings coughed, and Zainab looked around and saw that the sun had slid across the southern sky, pointing them now to the west. That much geography she knew—this river ran from west to east, at least up to the near-gates of the city she had just left behind—and the sun rose in the east and set just ahead, in the mountains from whence the river sprang—she had heard the traders talking about the source of the river—and…and…and…Well, she did not know much more than that about the land and water, but she knew that God lived in the sky and watched over those who obeyed his laws.

  Did she obey his laws?

  “She’s just a child,” she remembered her mother saying once, when she and the jar-maker talked about the future of their older daughter. Their voices in her mind seemed so real to her, even though she knew her father lay sprawled on the stones back at that rough encampment they had left behind so many hours ago. Now the sun settled itself toward the western horizon. Fingers of light reached past it toward a few straggling clouds, turning them orange and then pink and then a certain variety of blue for which she had no name. These soon faded into the darkening sky behind them. She appeared to be riding toward the end of the earth, and after the short while it took for the darkness to fall on them like a large curtain from above she felt as though she were descending into her own body.

  That night as the fire crackled and whistled she listened to the traders talking about their work. It quickly became clear to her that they were traveling toward a city some great long distance away. She stared at the black, star-flushed sky, and at dawn she was still gazing up, up, up, as all the stars paled except one bright point near the west, a crescent moon hovering near it.

  Their trail hugged the river, passed over sand and salt-flats, as it turned out, with only low vegetation to break the horizon line, and now and then, after days of travel, they came upon a village and a well. Her mother seemed scarcely able to catch her breath, growing weaker by the day and eventually lying across the saddle like an animal brought down in a hunt, and so Zainab attended to the care of her younger siblings. It became important to her that their hair be neat. And that they stop their quiet weeping.

  “Do you miss Father?” she said. “He will meet us where we’re going. He will, he told me so.”

  After a while her lies calmed them, and she began to believe them herself. Yes, Father would be there. He had returned to their house in order to pack more tools, and he would hire another animal and catch up with them. No, he had traveled without stopping—how much faster men can travel without women or children to slow them down! He had passed them on one of the nights when they had camped and built a fire and passed around a jug of fresh water and roasted a lamb and torn away pieces of meat.

  But why was it that the traders took so long to make this journey?

  She had not wondered, until worried, in her fantasy, that father would pass them by altogether, she dared to ask one of them.

  “What?” he said with a laugh. “What?” And he went lurching away into the night, laughing still, saying the word over and over.

  A few days later she received an answer. They had been following the sun, and at one point it crossed over the river, or so it seemed, as the river meandered slightly to the north, and then back again, and when she again noticed, the sun had returned to the same place in the sky, only farther away, if that made sense. She felt soaked with sweat, which was unusual for a child her age. Everything was bright with the high sun and yet deeply carved with shadows, as if both the inside of her life—the thoughts she thought, the fears she held clenched in her mind like a fist—and the outside had appeared at the same time, one aspect pressed atop the other into a palimpsest of distress.

  As if to ease this, she allowed her heart to take flight!

  A small cloud of dust appeared on the horizon to the north, and the leader of the traders said something to the others, and they slowed down.

  Father? she said to herself. Oh, Father, hurry, hurry to meet us!

  As the animals moved forward along the river she kept peering to the north and watching the small cloud of dust become larger and larger.

  At a certain point the traders began to talk
among themselves.

  It was her father! Yes! It had to be!

  “Mother!” she called out. And then she called to her siblings to watch the horizon.

  One of the traders turned his beast back toward her and came trotting up.

  “Do not make trouble,” he said, baring his teeth at her.

  “My father, my father is coming!” she said.

  He shook his head, and clicked at his mount and turned away.

  “Crazy child,” he said. “Worth nothing.” He rode toward the head of the column as Zainab closed her eyes and prayed to the rhythm of the ambling camel. When next she looked at the horizon to the north the dust cloud had settled, and her heart sank, as she feared all had been an illusion, something even girls her age knew about, at least girls with active minds who sometimes dreamed while awake about things in life they desired.

  It was not until they had stopped to pray and make camp for the night that her hopes rose again. The traders talked rapidly among themselves, and the one who had declared she was crazy kept stepping to the edge of their encampment and staring at the northern sky. There the fading light made way for the advent of a few glistering stars, and more and more of them appeared as she watched that dark part of the world return after a day away on the other side of the desert, or wherever the darkness went.

  Something happened that night, and it wasn’t until a while later that she fully understood. After a series of calm evenings, when only the cool wind that blew after the sun went down gave her any cause for worry, she was awakened by an animal crying, and it took her a few minutes of listening to it before she understood that it was her mother, weeping, as silently as she could but still loud enough to wake her.

  Mother, no, Zainab urged her. Please quiet down or the traders will awake.

  I will not, her mother said in protest, squirming and squealing like a child.

  Mother!

  I will not!

  At which point Zainab picked up a rather large stone—three horizontal lines across it, she noticed, one vertical—and smashed it into her mother’s face.