Gentlemen of the Road (17 page)
Read Gentlemen of the Road Online
Authors: Michael Chabon
Tags: #Fantasy, #Travel, #Modern, #Contemporary, #Adventure, #Historical
“I have never kissed a woman before,” he confessed to her when they parted again.
“A man?”
He shook his head.
“Now you have accomplished both at once,” she said. “Quite a feat.”
“I would invite you to share my bed,” Zelikman said. “But it is a poor one, and I fear that I would acquit myself very poorly in it.”
“My standard of comparison is so low,” she said. “The fact that I’m actually consenting to it may compensate for your absence of technique.”
“I understand,” he said.
They took off their clothes, and climbed under the thin blanket, and warmed their hands in the darkness at the little fire they made. He verified, too quickly at first, that she was indeed female in all her particulars, and both of them were contented, for the moment, with that.
“Will you go to Africa?” she asked him.
“Maybe,” Zelikman said. “Filaq, ride with us. With me. Follow the roads, see the kingdoms.” He took hold of her again, improving somewhat upon his first performance. She stroked his hair and ran her hand along the cheek that he had shaved smooth of its bogus Radanite beard.
“That isn’t my true name, by the way,” she said. “Filaq.”
“Will you tell me your true name?”
“Only if you promise not to ask me to come with you,” she said.
“I promise.”
She paused, as if for effect, and then looked straight into his eyes.
“My name is Alp,” she said. “I am the bek and kagan of Khazaria.”
He was disappointed, but he felt the foolishness of that disappointment, and like a vial of tincture that had lost its volatility he put it aside.
“Oho,” he said. “Bek
and
kagan.”
“The current system has become unwieldy.”
“Swindler!” Zelikman said, knowing as he kissed her that no one would ever touch her as a woman again. “Hustling a kingdom.”
In the morning when Zelikman woke she had gone, taking the knowledge of her true name with her. He went to rouse Amram, but his partner had already removed himself from the warm bed of Flower of Life and stood waiting in the yard, in a wolfskin cloak and a cloud of breath from the horses, stamping his feet, complaining of the chill in bones that were too old for love and for adventure and for dragging his African ass halfway around the world all on account of elephants.
“Do you want to stay?” Zelikman said, looking up at a high small window cut into the stone wall, where Flower of Life now leaned, chin in hand, her face giving nothing away.
Amram swung up onto the back of Porphyrogene, and flicked the reins, and that was all the answer that he gave. And then they took the first road that led out of the city, unmindful of whether it turned east or south, their direction a question of no interest to either of them, their destination already intimately known, each of them wrapped deep in his thick fur robes and in the solitude that they had somehow contrived to share.
AFTERWORD
The original, working—and in my heart the true—title of the short novel you hold in your hands was
Jews with Swords.
When I was writing it, and happened to tell people the name of my work in progress, it made them want to laugh. I guess it seemed clear that I meant the title as a joke. It has been a very long time, after all, since Jews anywhere in the world routinely wore or wielded swords, so long that when paired with “sword,” the word “Jews” (unlike, say, “Englishmen” or “Arabs”) clangs with anachronism, with humorous incongruity like “Samurai Tailor” or
Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.
True, Jewish soldiers fought in the blade-era battles of Austerlitz and Gettysburg; notoriously, Jewish boys were stolen from their families and conscripted into the czarist armies of nineteenth-century Russia. Any of those fighting men, or any of the Jews who served in the armed forces, particularly in the cavalry units, of their homelands prior to the end of WWI might have qualified, I suppose, as Jews with swords.
But hearing the title, nobody seemed to flash on the image of doomed Jewish troopers at Inkerman, Antietam, or the Somme, or of dueling Arabized courtiers at Muslim Granada, or even, say, on the memory of some ancient warrior Jew, like Bar Kochba or Judah Maccabee, famed for his prowess at arms. They saw rather, an unprepossessing little guy, with spectacles and a beard, brandishing a sabre: the pirate Motel Kamzoil. They pictured Woody Allen backing toward the nearest exit behind a barrage of wisecracks and a wavering rapier. They saw their uncle Manny, dirk between his teeth, slacks belted at the armpits, dropping from the chandelier to knock together the heads of a couple of nefarious auditors.
And, okay, so maybe I didn’t look very serious when I told people the title. Yet I meant it sincerely, or half-sincerely or maybe it would be more accurate to say that I could not have entitled this book any more honestly than by means of anachronism and incongruity.
I know it still seems incongruous, first of all, for me or a writer of my literary training, generation, and pretensions to be writing stories featuring
anybody
with swords. As recently as ten years ago I had published two novels, and perhaps as many as twenty short stories, and not one of them featured weaponry more antique than a (lone) Glock 9mm. None was set any earlier than about 1972 or in any locale more far-flung or exotic than a radio studio in Paris, France. Most of those stories appeared in sedate, respectable, and generally sword-free places like
The New Yorker
and
Harper’s
, and featured unarmed Americans undergoing the eternal fates of contemporary short-story characters—disappointment, misfortune, loss, hard enlightenment, moments of bleak grace. Divorce; death; illness; violence, random and domestic; divorce; bad faith; deception and self-deception; love and hate between fathers and sons, men and women, friends and lovers; the transience of beauty and desire; divorce—I guess that about covers it. Story, more or less, of my life. As for the two novels, they didn’t stray in time or space any farther than the stories—or for that matter, any deeper into the realm of Jewishness: both set in Pittsburgh, liberally furnished with Pontiacs and Fords, scented with marijuana, Shalimar and kielbasa, featuring Smokey Robinson hits and
Star Trek
references, and starring gentiles or assimilated Jews, many of whom were self-consciously inspired, instructed and laid low by the teachings of rock and roll and Hollywood, but not, for example, by the lost writings of the
tzaddik
of Regensburg, whose commentaries are so important to one of the heroes of
Gentlemen of the Road.
I’m not saying—let me be clear about this—I am not saying that I disparage or repudiate my early work, or the genre (late-century naturalism) it mostly exemplifies. I am proud of stories like “House Hunting,” “S Angel,” “Werewolves in Their Youth,” and “Son of the Wolfman,” and out of all my novels I may always be most fond of
Wonder Boys
, which saved my life, kind of or saved me, at least, from having to live in a world in which I must forever be held to account for the doomed second novel it supplanted. I’m not turning my back on the stuff I wrote there, late in the twentieth century, and I hope that readers won’t either. It’s just that here, in
Gentleman of the Road
as in some of its recent predecessors, you catch me in the act of trying, as a writer, to do what many of the characters in my earlier stories—Art Bechstein, Grady Tripp, Ira Wiseman—were trying, longing, ready to do: I have gone off in search of a little adventure.
If this impulse seems an incongruous thing in a writer of the (“serious,” “literary”) kind for which I had for a long time hoped to be taken, it might be explained—as I think the enduring popularity of all adventure fiction might be explained—with simple reference to the kind of
person
I am. I have never swung a battle-ax or a sword. I have never, thank God, killed anybody. I have never served as a soldier of empire or fortune, infiltrated a palace or an enemy camp in the dead of night, or ridden an elephant, though I have—barely, and without the least confidence or style—ridden a horse. I do not laugh in the face of death and danger; far from it. I have never survived in the desert on a few swallows of acrid water and a handful of scorched millet. Never escaped from prison, the gallows or the rowing benches of a swift caravel. Never gambled my life and fortune on a single roll of the dice; if I lose $100 at a Las Vegas craps table, it makes me feel like crying.
This is not to say that I have never had adventures: I have had my fill and more of them. Because adventures befall the unadventuresome as readily, if not as frequently, as the bold. Adventures are a logical and reliable result—and have been since at least the time of Odysseus—of the fatal act of leaving one’s home, or trying to return to it again. All adventure happens in that damned and magical space, wherever it may be found or chanced upon, which least resembles one’s home. As soon as you have crossed your doorstep or the county line, into that place where the structures, laws, and conventions of your upbringing no longer apply, where the support and approval (but also the disapproval and repression) of your family and neighbors are not to be had: then you have entered into adventure, a place of sorrow, marvels, and regret. Given a choice, I very much prefer to stay home, where I may safely encounter adventure in the pages of a book, or seek it out, as I have here, at the keyboard, in the friendly wilderness of my computer screen.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that if there is incongruity in the writer of a piece of typical
New Yorker
marital-discord fare like “That Was Me” (a story in my second collection) turning out a swords-and-horses tale like this one, it’s nothing compared to the incongruous bounty to be harvested from the actual sight of me sitting on a horse, for example, or trying to keep from falling out of a whitewater raft, or setting off, as I have done from time to time with sinking heart and in certainty of failure but goaded into wild hopefulness by some treacherous friend or bold stranger, in search of a Springsteenian something in the night.
This incongruity of writer and work suggests, of course, that classic variant of the adventure story (found in works as diverse as
Don Quixote
and
Romancing the Stone)
in which a devoted reader or author of the stuff is granted the opportunity (or obliged) to live out an adventure “in real life.” And it is seen in this light that the association of Jews with swords, of Jews with adventure, may seem paradoxically less incongruous. In the relation of the Jews to the land of their origin, in the ever-extending, ever-thinning cord, braided from the freedom of the wanderer and the bondage of exile, that binds a Jew to his Home, we can make out the unmistakable signature of adventure. The story of the Jews centers around—one might almost say that it
stars
—the hazards and accidents, the misfortunes and disasters, the feats of inspiration, the travail and despair, and intermittent moments of glory and grace, that entail upon journeys from home and back again. For better and worse it has been one long adventure—a five-thousand-year Odyssey—from the moment of the true First Commandment, when God told Abraham
lech lecha:
Thou shalt leave home. Thou shalt get lost. Thou shalt find slander, oppression, opportunity escape, and destruction. Thou shalt, by definition, find adventure. This long, long tradition of Jewish adventure may look a bit light on the Conans or D’Artagnans; our greatest heroes less obviously suited to exploits of derring-do and arms. But maybe that ill-suitedness only makes Jews all the more ripe to feature in (or to write) this kind of tale. Or maybe it is time to take a look backward at that tradition, as I have attempted to do here, and find some shadowy kingdom where a self-respecting Jewish adventurer would not be caught dead without his sword or his battle-ax.
And if you still think there’s something funny in the idea of Jews with swords, look at yourself, right now: sitting in your seat on a jet airplane, let’s say, in your unearthly orange polyester and neoprene shoes, listening to digital music, crawling across the sky from Charlotte to Las Vegas, and hoping to lose yourself—your home, your certainties, the borders and barriers of your life—by means of a bundle of wood pulp, sewn and glued and stained with blobs of pigment and resin.
People with Books.
What, in 2007, could be more incongruous than that? It makes me want to laugh.
—Michael Chabon
A NOTE ON THE KHAZARS
As evidenced by the words of Ibn Shaprut that stand as one of this story’s epigraphs, the mysterious Jewish Kingdom of the Khazars has always enchanted and even haunted Jews living in the Diaspora. Even today we know little about the Khazars, a people of Turkic origin who settled in, and for a while came to dominate, the Caucasus–Black Sea region. It appears that large numbers of them converted to Judaism sometime before 900 c.e. or so, but no one is completely sure to what extent the conversion took place, or for what reasons. No one is very sure of anything about the Khazars, who left few written records. But they seem to have been a dominant force in the region for several hundred years, during which time they were visited by some of the great Arab travelers, whose accounts are our primary sources of information about Khazaria. To write
Gentlemen of the Road
I read everything about the Khazars that I could get my hands on, including the
Travels
of Ibn Battuta. Unfortunately, the extensive research undertaken by Russian archaeologists and scholars lay beyond my abilities. My chief source of information was the excellent
The Jews of Khazaria
, second edition, by Kevin Alan Brook. I also derived a certain sense of atmosphere, and of the historical meaning of the Khazars, from the perhaps unreliable
The Thirteenth Tribe
by Arthur Koestler. For arms and armor, I made happy use of five volumes of the wonderful Osprey Men-At-Arms series (numbers 85, 89, 105, 320, and 333). Readers interested in looking further into the world and time of the Khazars might also consult the relevant entries in the
Encyclopedia Judaica
, as well as the following websites: