Lion Heart (10 page)
Now I think that being sent down from Oxford encouraged my father in the belief that he had a spiritual rather than an intellectual destiny. He went out into the world to join what Timothy Leary called
a new species, a young race of laughing freemen
.
7
The day I
arrived back in London, I saw a disturbing sight. Across the road is a small grocer and supply store. It is one of those places that stays open late and sells stuff that is often way past its shelf life. There is always a profusion of fast-drying baklava sinking into a small swamp of honey and there are small packets of mouldering nuts. Outside there are rows of plastic tubs in racks, containing fruit and vegetables, some of them almost at pavement level. As I looked across the road I saw a dog peeing on the lowest rack, which housed the cabbages and carrots. It was a big dog with that malevolent squashed face, bred to fight, a walking advertisement for canine eugenics. Its eyes were vacantly looking for trouble: I thought it was considering the merits of an unprovoked attack.
I went across the road, bypassing the dog carefully: ‘Never show fear,’ my father had said, moments before a dog bit me. ‘I warned you,’ he said.
I told the proprietor what I had seen. He turned out to be the owner of the dog, so I spoke more calmly than I had intended. He went inside and fetched some water in a plastic bottle and poured it over the carrots and cabbages. The dog watched.
‘The kids roun’ ’ere steal everyfink. That’s why I gotta ’ave the dog, and I am Muslim.’ The word ‘Muslim’ is pronounced ‘mooselimb’.
Personally I thought that having a dog that pees on vegetables was worse than a little shoplifting.
I felt a sort of deadening of the spirits. In Jerusalem under the golden clear evening light, I have dined with Haneen, looking down to the Dead Sea. In a pasha’s room, flagged and luxurious, I have made love with Noor and I have walked with her through Crusader castles with all their grandeur and folly and longing. I have seen the old city of Acre, already ancient when Richard the Lionheart captured it from Saladin within a few days of landing. I have looked at the remains of the city’s Templar church; underneath it was the charnel, where the skulls and the bones of Crusaders and pilgrims were piled. I have seen the chapel where early Christians had arrived in Jerusalem from far away, and I have seen their proud and heart-breaking incision in the rock:
Domine ibimus: Lord, we have come
. I have been in the depths of the Holy Sepulchre, and seen the hundreds of small crosses, some still with faint traces of red paint, incised neatly by the pilgrims on the stone columns beside the stairway leading down to the crypts. I have learned from Father Prosper about the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Essenes, the Maccabees, the use of Aramaic, the True Cross, Jewish settlements on the West Bank, which Father Prosper – who understands
realpolitik
, and finds it thrilling – says will never be given back because of the political balance in the Israeli Knesset. I have heard about the irreconcilable claims to the Temple Mount and I have seen Al-Aqsa; I have visited the tomb of Absalom and the Sons of Hegir in the Kidron Valley, and I have crawled into rock tombs and looked at the inscriptions on ossuaries. I have seen the oldest known synagogue in Israel.
I was looking, in fact, at the doomed struggle to make sense of the human chaos. And I felt encouraged, licensed to think expansive thoughts about life and death and love. And now, back in London, I have seen a mastiff with frightful shark’s eyes peeing on vegetables. This same dog, I am sure, reissues onto the pavement, as large, moist piles of shit, the farinaceous dog food that its owner keeps in the back of the shop.
I am very worried about Noor. I have called her number at least ten times. Her phone no longer takes messages. It is dead. In Jerusalem, before I left, I told Haneen that she hadn’t called me for four days. I hoped that Haneen had received a call. Now seven more days have gone by. I have delivered her message to Noor’s father in Toronto. I gave him his sister’s warning as instructed. He was guarded and a little impatient. Perhaps he had reimagined himself as a North American, free of ancient preoccupations and prejudices of the sort I was milling cheerfully. He didn’t ask me what my relationship to his daughter was. But I felt the need to explain that I had been speaking to his sister on academic matters – I cited the École Biblique – and that his sister had asked me to pass on the message that Noor could be in danger and should go home to Canada.
‘Why did she ask you?’
‘I think she was worried about phone tapping. And because I was going home to London. She knew my father.’
‘Who is your father?’
‘He is dead.’
I feel closer to my father these days. Perhaps I have taken on board Haneen’s advice to attempt to make peace with his memory, even if I don’t know precisely how you do that. The least I can do is to share some of his experiences.
I am in Oxford to work in the Bodleian Library. The Keeper of Western Manuscripts himself confirmed, as Father Prosper had told me, that the documents relating to the Crusades and Saladin are being examined and will be scanned. It may be here or in another library somewhere, he said, that there will be something unnoticed that points to a letter from Richard to Saladin, or even to Robin Hood. And there may be clues about the lost art of Jerusalem. He directed me to a book by Jaroslav Folda,
The Art of the Crusaders in the Holy Land, 1098–1187
, which he described as definitive.
Libraries have always eased my mind. Because I loved the libraries in Oxford, it was no hardship for me to work. I wanted desperately to do well, possibly to reproach my father. But also when I arrived in Oxford, I had begun to think that the only reality was the one we create of our own thoughts. This theory had a large element of self-justification because I was lonely and I was not fully socialised when I wandered overcome that first October day into my college. It wasn’t
Brideshead
, but there were a lot of confident and loudly articulate people everywhere. In libraries I made myself, for better or for worse:
I taught myself freestyle
. I had been exiled for four years from interesting people, apart from those in books. At first I tried to be contemptuous of the Etonians and the other self-assured undergraduates who practised what was said to be an Oxford manner, a playful and caressing suavity. Nobody on Deeside had a playful and caressing manner. Instead they went in for a harsh and taciturn manner, a bullying kindness, which was maintained only if you didn’t get too big for your boots. The world in general would always let you down. Burns wrote:
But pleasures are like poppies spread,
You seize the flow’r, its bloom is shed.
I was grateful for my aunt’s instruction when I discovered that, thanks to her, I had read many more books than most of my contemporaries. They had been surrounded all their lives by an awareness of culture; their parents knew people who were musicians and authors and painters and actors. My information came from books. I wasn’t a good conversationalist, and it took me a while to understand the nature of close reading, then required by English tutors.
Now I am back in the Bodleian reading Folda. It’s twelve years on and I am keenly aware that I am not fully part of this: the undergraduates in the streets and in the Upper Reading Room seem to be children. We too must have looked like them. I had read somewhere that in Oxford the scenery stays the same, but the cast moves on, year by year; only the academics remain in place and grow old. The years between twenty and thirty have accelerated out of control, and here I am, almost thirty-three, without ever having had a proper job, sitting down like a student again.
I am staying with my friend Ed who has a small house in Jericho just up the road from Worcester College; after six years in an investment bank, he is working on a doctorate on Adam Smith, which will emphasise the social and moral concerns of his
Theory of Moral Sentiments
, rather than the trickle-down benefits of capitalism of
The Wealth of Nations
. In the bank he was involved with a hedge fund called Lion Fortress, which went disastrously wrong and now he has left banking and gone straight. I see, although I don’t say it, that both of us are taking refuge. Life has given him a few whacks. He has also put on weight, so that he looks as if he is trying on his middle-aged self for size. He has quite a lot of money in severance pay and bonuses and is happy to let me live rent-free until I have found somewhere permanent, here or in London. He’s lonely; his wife left him when he was fired. At times he is jumpy. In truth we are both a little bruised.
In my small bedroom I have a selection of my father’s manuscripts and letters. There is a strangely naive quality to them, a sort of Dalai Lama innocence. He seems to imagine he has access to channels of understanding not granted to many, certainly not to academics. His papers are alarmingly random. I also see that he bought a collection of old silver fish knives at Christie’s in 1969: the handwritten receipt fell out of a folder labelled ‘Healing crystals’.
I have tried to dull my fears about Noor by spending long hours studying Arabic documents of the twelfth century with the help of a graduate student. I had hoped to find some correspondence or something about the art of the Latin Kingdom. But instead I found myself looking at elaborate illustrated manuscripts about siege engines and the trebuchets – the catapults that hurled enormous boulders – lovingly described and beautifully illustrated by Ali al-Tarsusi for Saladin’s better understanding. One of the manuscripts describes Greek fire, which was a naphtha mixture fired in pottery containers over the walls of the enemy castle or town. A Crusader wrote:
In appearance the Greek Fire looked like a large tun of verjuice with a burning tail the length of a longsword. As it comes towards you it makes a thunderous noise like a dragon flying through the air.
I wonder how he knew how a flying dragon sounded.
In the evening Ed and I usually have a pint in a dark pub down on the canal and then we cook. Sometimes we stay to watch rugby there. Ed loves rugby. He is not the blithe boy I remember. His eyes have narrowed against failure and his hair is losing its vitality. As we are sitting down in the kitchen for Ed’s signature dish – chilli crab with linguine (the crab comes from the covered market), my phone rings.
I hear only two words before the phone cuts out:
‘Richie, please . . .’
‘Noor, Noor, where are you?’
I shout, hoping my urgency will somehow reach across the dead space between us. My chest contracts violently. When I try to call her back, the number is apparently unknown. I try her Jerusalem mobile, unsuccessfully. I am beginning to panic. She sounded distraught. I try to call her father in Canada, but that number too is not in service.
‘What’s happened, Rich?’ Ed asks. He is still eating; bits of linguine trail from his mouth as he talks. Perhaps he is trying to maintain a sense of normality.
‘Something terrible but I don’t know what.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know. Something bad. My girlfriend tried to call me. Her father’s number no longer exists. Her phone is dead.’
Suddenly I remember Haneen and call her.
‘Hello?’
‘Oh, thank God. Haneen.’
‘Who is this?’
‘It’s Richard. Richard Cathar, Haneen. Noor . . .’
‘Don’t call this number, whoever you are.’
She puts down the phone.
‘What’s up, Rich?’
I am stunned. Ed reaches across and briefly places his hand on my forearm.
‘Tell me.’
‘I have no idea. In Jerusalem I was going out with this Canadian girl, Noor, who is a journalist. I told you a bit about her. And that call was from her but it was cut off suddenly, and when I called back it was out of service. Her father’s phone number no longer exists and her aunt in Jerusalem won’t take my call.’
Ed says I am hyperventilating. He has had a course in first aid. He puts a Tesco plastic bag over my head and holds it closed around my neck.
‘Breathe deeply. You are taking too much oxygen.’
My breathing calms down and he removes the bag moments before I suffocate.
‘Here, have some pasta.’
I try to eat, but I feel sick. Something terrible has happened to Noor. I explain everything to Ed.
‘The best thing to do would be to call the Canadian Embassy in the morning. Where was she calling from?’
‘When I left Jerusalem she was in Cairo. We are engaged, Ed.’
8
Two years passed
before Richard set out for the Holy Land. Before he left, he reneged on his commitment to Alice, daughter of the King of France, and his fellow Crusader’s sister, who he had been betrothed to for twenty years or more. As a very young girl, she had been taken to England as a sort of marriage hostage by Richard’s father, Henry II, and there were rumours that he had seduced her. Some writers believe that was a reason for Richard to ignore her for all those years, despite pointed enquiries from her father. When in 1190 Richard finally took ship for the Holy Land, he stopped off in Sicily. The Norman King of Sicily, Tancred, had been holding Richard’s widowed sister, Joan, and he had refused to hand over her dower from her late husband, William II of France. He also held some galleys and plate that should have gone to Richard’s father and which Richard now demanded.