Lion Heart (6 page)

A small detail, which Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani does not include, is that the water that was to be Reynald’s last drink was cooled with snow from the summits of distant mountains.

Saladin himself cut off Reynald’s head at Hattin, I think, as a symbolic act. Decapitation has a macabre significance for the executioner. It suggests that mere killing is not the object, but that the deliberate severing of the face and the brain from the rest of the body is the most final death, sending an unmistakable message. When Anne Boleyn was beheaded by Henry VIII, I can only imagine that he intended to snuff out a life in the least equivocal way.

Now Saladin ordered the execution of all the Knights Templars apart from the Grand Master, Gerard de Ridfort.

Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani wrote:

Saladin ordered that they should be beheaded, choosing to have them dead rather than in prison. With him was a band of scholars and sufis and a certain number of devout men and ascetics; each begged to be allowed to kill one of them, and drew his sword and rolled back his sleeve. Saladin, his face joyful, was sitting on his dais; the unbelievers showed black despair.

Many Templars volunteered themselves for execution in solidarity. The bodies were left for the hyenas and jackals. Thousands of ordinary soldiers were sent as slaves to Damascus. The True Cross was attached upside down to a lance and taken with the caravan of captives. There were so many captives for sale in Damascus that their price fell to 3 dinars. One of the inhabitants is said to have bought a prisoner in exchange for a pair of sandals.

Count Raymond of Tripoli’s words – ‘The kingdom is finished’ – were prophetic. Saladin kept Guy in custody for months as an insurance policy while he destroyed as many of the Crusader castles as he could before he took Jerusalem in September and only then did he trade Guy. Guy gave his oath that he would not take up arms. He renounced the oath immediately he was free.

The Holy City was lost, the True Cross was lost. It was a catastrophe which shook the whole of the Christian world profoundly.

Richard the Lionheart took the cross in response. It is reported that when Saladin received word of his intentions, he was afraid: Malik al-Inkitar was coming.

But Richard was delayed, defending his empire in France, and resisting his brother’s ambitions. He was unable to set sail until 1190.

The sun is now striking the water itself. The lake is still, although a few trucks and taxis are passing, from this distance apparently very slowly; with the advent of the light the sound of conflict subsides. I must now accept that perhaps I was dreaming. But this place makes persistent assaults on one’s imagination so that it is difficult to separate the real and the imagined.

I pack up my things. I am stiff after a restless night. There are scorpions in these hills, and many times in the night I imagined they were sharing my sleeping bag. I have arranged to meet an Arab taxi driver down below at a stall on the old road that skirts the lake. On the way back to Jerusalem, he tells me that Mossad orchestrated a recent bombing of a bus in Tel Aviv, which I had read about in
Haaretz
. I feel the urge to reach across the torn seats of the Mercedes. He sees me as a deluded backpacker, lowlife. I want to tell him that right here, thirty thousand people lost their lives for just this kind of persistent ignorance.

We set off for the American Colony. I need a bath – a wallow – in Room 6, but most of all I need to go down to the bar below the hotel, not particularly to drink, but to be among those who go there to escape the tensions and intensity of Jerusalem. Many of the regulars are journalists in search of information; the bar is famous for its meetings and assignations. Down there in the Cellar Bar an ironic good humour prevails; these people are professionally acquainted with delusion. Also, I have been seeing a young woman I met there one night. Her name is Noor, a Canadian-Arab journalist. I call her, and she says she will meet me. The taxi driver turns in his seat.

‘You have sweetheart?’

His gold teeth are winking obscenity.

I don’t answer.

‘She is Jew?’

The obsession that never goes away.

5

The Levant

I have been
here nearly four weeks. Already I feel that I am becoming a Levantine. This world of ambiguity and disillusion and the shadows of past glory and the whispers of endless intrigue are getting to me in ways I hadn’t expected. I have walked the Old City ceaselessly. I have, with Father Prosper’s help, gained access to the closed chapel in the depths of the Holy Sepulchre. This little chapel is said to have been built on the spot where Helena, the mother of Constantine, found the True Cross.

Levantines, I think, don’t make a clear distinction between what is true and what they would like to believe is true. As a way of seeing the world, it has its charms; certainly this crypt is ancient, but it is not clear how Helena would have found the True Cross here in
ad
328. It was said that she was led here by a vision. I emailed a professor in Oxford, an expert on the Holy Sepulchre: he thought it likely that what Helena discovered was some of the scaffolding left over after the destruction of the Temple of Venus, built by Hadrian on the site of the crucifixion. She found, or was sold, the
titulus
, the incised inscription bearing the words:
Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews
, along with some of the beams of the cross itself and part of the crosses of the thieves crucified with Christ. The inscription was in three languages, Hebrew, Latin and Greek. It was in mirror-writing from right to left in the Hebrew fashion. Helena had it sawn in half, and took one piece to Rome. When, in the fifteenth century, this section of the
titulus
was discovered hidden behind plaster in Santa Croce, in Rome, which retains some of the walls of Helena’s palace, Leonardo da Vinci rushed to see it. The Oxford professor told me that he believed the crypt was built in the depths of what had once been a stone quarry, used for building purposes. I didn’t ask him what special interest Leonardo may have had, for fear he would imagine I was a mythomane.

I have grown very close to Noor. She has red hair, the deep russet colour of a gun dog’s coat, which falls around her face and onto her shoulders. Her skin is almost golden. She speaks like a Canadian. (For instance she says ‘aboot’ for ‘about’.) She has the innocence of a Canadian too, although she has seen – she is unwilling to tell me the details – some terrible things in the Middle East. She is also closely related to one of the substantial Palestinian families of Jerusalem. Her glamour makes me feel both uneasy and blessed. Although I know her body intimately now, with all its little uplands and valleys, there is a hinterland to which I am still a stranger. I couldn’t say exactly what it means, but Noor is intensely female. She belongs to an altogether different species of womanhood from Emily. Emily has the gawky vulnerability of a newborn antelope, her limbs rather loosely connected, so that there is something of the marionette in her movements. It’s endearing in its way, but also needy.

I have maxed out my credit card. It has an insubstantial look at the best of times, entry-level. It’s an old student card, never upgraded. I used the last of my credit to book an extra week at the hotel because I can more easily conduct our liaison there, particularly urgent as she is going on assignment soon.

It’s a short walk, sometimes a libidinous scamper, from the bar, our feet clacking goatishly on the slabs. (I am thinking of buying some Ottoman slippers.) She leaves early because she is living with her relatives somewhere not far away and they expect her. She is driven away in a black Mercedes. I don’t like to ask her if the car is armour-plated, but it does have a bulky look. The driver also has a bulky look, as if he is wearing a bullet-proof vest. Sometimes I stand at the front door of the hotel as she drives away. She looks intriguingly mysterious. I know nothing about her life beyond the hotel. But in bed she tells me that she loves me, which calms me.

After her adventures in Sheffield, Emily was awkward in bed and then, alarmingly quickly, she became distracted as if she was having sex with a spirit, who was standing in for me. She was expecting a healing, even spiritual, epiphany, and when it happened her body was racked fiercely and she cried, and then whimpered, her pale eyes swimming into focus, as if she was trying to remember who I was. Her painful realisation that it was not the hairy littérateur – and fraud – Edgar Gaylard, ruined our last sexual encounter. Also, I thought Emily looked increasingly like Virginia Woolf. She rearranged her hair into a bun, primly, without speaking to me. I had the impression she was trying to destroy the evidence.

Sex with Noor is gracious and unhurried as if it is a well-understood and ancient ritual. The aureoles on her breasts are dark. Lying next to her, eating pistachio nuts, some shells escaping into the bed, a sheen on our bodies, the fragrance of jasmine and almond coming on the night air through the open window on the same breeze that brings the strains of the flutes and the harsh percussion, I think that Noor believes that her role is to please – not a particularly contemporary attitude. She is what the Bible calls the tender and luxurious woman. Maybe she has a Levantine way of regarding sex, not as a Freudian purging of our demons, but as a sensual, courtly expression of being human. When I asked Noor about her life, she gave me an anodyne history; she told me how much she loved McGill and how she learned French in Montreal and studied international development. Now she kisses me:

‘And I love you.’

Her parents are Christian: they left for Canada thirty years ago just before she was born. She has a brother in Toronto, something to do with electronics, and she has an apartment there and works for the
Morning Star
and for the CBC. Because she speaks Arabic, she has become a Middle East correspondent. That’s about it.

We have a large jug of blood orange juice beside the bed. She doesn’t drink alcohol. Her breasts loll slightly to each side. They contain some weighty element, which responds slowly. I pour a few drops of orange juice on her dark nipples and lick them.

‘Taste good?’

‘The best.’

‘My nipples are tightening up.’

‘Is that nice?’

‘Oh yes.’

I have a swig of beer. It’s brewed in the all-Christian village of Taybeh, on the road to Jericho. Noor tells me she is related to the family that owns the brewery. She says that Muslims in the surrounding villages were hostile when the brewery was first set up.

Taybeh beer is pretty good.

‘Do you know,’ she says, ‘there is a belief here that some of us Palestinian Christians have red hair because of our Crusader blood?’

‘It could be true. Richard the Lionheart was a ginger-nut.’

‘A ginger-nut?’

‘A redhead. Six foot five, a red giant. Your ancestor, definitely.’

‘If he was gay, of course, it can’t be true.’

‘He wasn’t gay. He’s a gay icon only because he spent no time with his wife and had no children. Not officially. He did have one illegitimate child, a boy, who he recognised.’

‘I heard he slept with the King of France.’

‘In those days it was a diplomatic move to sleep in the same room as another king to demonstrate your trust. There were lots of servants in the room. And by the way, the first time anyone suggested he was gay was in 1948. In medieval times he had a reputation for being very keen to get his hands on captured women. They were part of the spoils of war.’

She moves fluently on top of me. Her skin is lubricated by mysterious oils.

‘One for the road, old chap?’

‘Why not? Noor, just a tip, lay off the accents and stick to what you are good at.’

‘I think I can guess what that would be.’

When she has gone I lie on the bed beneath the open window. Bells in the Old City ring briefly and tunelessly. Somewhere there is a party. I hear music, women’s voices, percussive clapping, reed flutes and the hand drums. In the Palestinian territories the fundamentalists are cracking down on music. The association of public pleasure with ungodliness had died out in the West: gratification is big where I come from, a human right, even a human obligation.

Noor has gone to her world, as the perfumed night, flooding in, seems to promise ecstasy. I have an invigorating awareness of being alive and somehow connected, although I don’t know exactly to what. Without wishing it, I find myself considering seriously whether the only reality is the self. Up until now I have thought of it as a philosophical idea, with limited use. But there is something in the air – the loaded, tendentious air of Jerusalem – that makes people believe crazy ideas: I am possibly showing the early symptoms. Maybe I am more of my father’s son than I ever wished to acknowledge.

A little while ago Noor was lying next to me so comfortably and so naturally that I felt we were sharing internal organs, like Siamese twins. It was absurd, but it struck me that our blood, our breath, our sweat had joined forces and were working together.

Sounds of the party have faded on the breeze. The promise of happiness and limitless possibility is intoxicating. Also, Father Prosper has introduced me to various mysteries and shown me objects from antiquity that have affected me deeply. We went to see the Shrine of the Book and there I saw the Book of Isaiah, all twenty-seven feet of it, beautifully copied, probably a hundred and fifty years before Christ, in the hellish heat of Qumran, and hardly a word of it changed in two thousand five hundred years.