NINE
TYRE 200 miles Ephorus, Greek by birth, and once a sailor had been stranded in Bethlehem for eleven years, and knew that he would die there: yet there never was a morning when, blinking his gritty eyes, licking his dry swollen lips with a dry swollen tongue and throwing back the shutter, he didn’t think—What a place! How did I land here? Why do I stay? The answers to both questions would pour into his momentarily sober mind, smooth as oil, and he’d take a cup, draw some wine, add a few drops of water and drink. The first drink of the day. Then he felt better, able for about an hour to make himself useful about the place. An old sailor—he called himself that, though in years he was far from old—was handy, could turn his hand to almost anything; one hour of his time, every morning, every morning for eleven years had made a great difference in the appearance of this place which, though the smaller of the two inns in Bethlehem, was much the more attractive because of the way in which he had made and mended, plastered, painted and applied his natural Greek talent and his experience to decorating.
But an hour in the morning was as much as he could bear. Then, back to the wine, this time without water; wine, more wine, and soon the real Ephorus was drowned again. Dead for one more deadly day. Sometimes, sheltering behind his own recognisable shape, but never one with it, He was a merry man, ready to quarrel and, if necessary, fight; sometimes he was a sullen man, brooding in silence. None of these men was Ephorus. Ephorus woke, took a drink and worked for an hour because after all he owed Eunice something; and then he took himself off. And what the merry, the aggressive, the sullen men “felt or said concerned him very little.
Once, only once, had he struggled up out of his drunkard’shappy anonymity and tried to talk sense and truth to a fellow being; and that was when a neighbour, a man named Josodad, suffered a bereavement and began to come to the inn in search of comfort. He’d heard himself—to his amazement—speaking in metaphors, like a poet. He’d told Josodad that there was no comfort lying in the bottom of a wine-cup; and that a loss might make you a cripple but drunkenness made you a social leper. It seemed to have worked, Josodad ceased to frequent the inn; and now, after years, still looked as wretched as ever.
There’d been a little trouble with Eunice over Josodad; they hadn’t so many customers that one needed to be driven away, she said. She also said, “I heard you. Talking about that whore! After all this time! After all I’ve done for you!”
He said, “I was only warning Josodad not to try to drown his sorrow or he’d end as I have.”
Eunice gave one of her short, rather cruel snorts of amusement, and said:
“He’d be lucky! What’s wrong with where you ended, you silly drunken clown? What’s wrong with this bed, eh?”
He could have told her—everything! It was a trap, a cage, a baited hook: it was the battlefield upon which he was always defeated; it was the sandbank upon which his barque lay stranded. But Eunice was not to blame for that—or at least only in a small degree—so he’d gone stumbling to the bed. At that time he’d still been able to give Eunice what she wanted, and the carping quarrelsome day often ended in reconciliation. Later on things had grown worse.
On this morning, in the middle of his eleventh winter in Bethlehem, he rose, thick-headed and tremulous, opened the shutter a crack and looked out. The sky was greyish purple and hung just above the roof-tops. Snow, he thought, unless the spiteful, bone-chilling wind succeeded in driving it over. He shivered, and thought, What a barbarous country! How did I land here? Why do I stay? He looked back over his past, boyhood and youth, before he came to Bethlehem, and saw it all in sunshine, with the exception of one spell in the middle of a voyage. Byblos, Tyre and Sidon, Delos, Crete and Rhodes, Alexandria, Carthage, Marsala, dozens and dozens of places, and always in the sun.
He was born in Byblos, born an orphan, one might say. Somebody must have fed and protected him during infancy, but he had no memory of whoever it was; he had come to self-recognition, awareness of his own identity, and to the beginning of his memory, in a hovel, with a lot of other boys, all older than he. The owner of the hovel was an old crone, and when there was anything to cook, she cooked it. It was not a home; his home always seemed to be the quayside. Somebody must have taught him a few professional begging phrases and as a small boy he had haunted the places where sailors, just back from voyages, were paid off. They were always generous. Possibly their seeming wealth and their good-nature had inspired in him the desire to go to sea as soon as he was old enough. Possibly his unknown father had been a sailor. Anyway, to be one himself was his earliest, his lasting ambition. There’d been an interval when he was rather too big to beg; and during that time he’d run with the other boys, stealing if a chance offered, doing odd jobs and errands. The old woman ran things in a simple way; if you went home once with no loot and no coin she’d grumble and give you a bit of whatever there was to eat, but if you were unlucky on the second day then you were unlucky indeed, you got nothing. It was a hard, haphazard life, but he’d known no other, so he never felt sorry for himself. And somehow, he grew up to be big and strong and remarkably good-looking. Whoever his parents had been it seemed that they had both been Greek, of pure blood; there was nothing of the mongrel blur and conflict about his features or his colouring.
When he was twelve he went to sea for the first time in a very menial capacity, a fetch-and-carry boy, even his name lost.
“You’ they called him. Do this, you! Look sharp, you! You, get out of the way! His upbringing had sharpened his wits, and while he fetched and carried, and looked sharp and got out of people’s way, he’d learned a lot. At fifteen he was a sailor. And he, too, was always open-handed with small coins for small beggars.
At twenty he was working on a ship which plied,regularly between Byblos
and Alexandria. From Byblos they carried theEastern goods that had already travelled for months on the overland caravan routes; spices from the far islands, silk from China, from India jewels and a very fine, almost transparent material which women liked for veils and head-dresses. To all these was added a certain amount of the precious Tyrian purple dye. Out from Alexandria they carried papyrus. Byblos and the papyrus trade were so firmly linked that the town had given its name to the books made of the papyrus; Byblos softened down to bible, meaning a book. Also from Egypt the ship brought objects made of glass, and from one of his voyages Ephorus had brought Dorcas a string of glass beads which had cost far more than he could afford, but were beautiful, curiously mottled, pink, purple and rose-coloured. A wonderful present, but of course, unworthy of her.
Unworthy .. . that was the key word; it ran like a song theme with many minor variations, through all his dealings with her. Women like Dorcas weren’t caught young and trained and schooled for the delectation of common sailors. They were the hetaira, designed for the delight of men’s minds as well as their bodies; they could all converse with wit and intelligence; some could sing, some could dance or play musical instruments. They did not ply for hire, like the common prostitutes who flaunted themselves on the quayside and in the streets; they were not compelled to consort with any chance corner like the girls in ordinary brothels. Money was involved, of course, the hetaira were a luxury, but the business side was very discreetly handled; and because the girls were allowed freedom of choice, and were all so beautiful, elegant and clever, an association with one of them was a thing to boast about.
Ephorus knew nothing of this when one evening he saw an open door and heard music, and saw men coming and going, and followed a group of men in. Once inside he knew that he was, as he termed it, off-course; his pay was heavy in his pocket and he’d braced himself defiantly, thinking—My money is as good as the next man’s. In the paved and pillared atrium, prettily arranged with urns of flowers and singing birds in cages, he’d braved some curious, some hard, some almost amused glances, and then all at once he’d found himself in such company, enjoying such happiness, as he had never dreamed existed. He had never talked to anyone, leave alone any woman, as he could talk to Dorcas.