The Dreamer

By Sidney Freedman

The author presents a challenging dramatic narrative of becoming. It is every thinking person’s life long struggle; that of a longing for self-knowledge.

The major protagonist of the story is a driven man. He has been motivated to be a super achiever in the course of a conflicted upbringing. Because of his insecure early years, deprived of emotional support, a poverty of spirit, money and social acceptance, he has in a short lifetime been strongly motivated to become a self-made entrepreneur of some notoriety applauded and admired within his manufactured social milieu. He is trapped in the imagery of the unreal world he has created to confirm and exhibit his admired and applauded success.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sidney Freedman
• Release date: May 29, 2017
• ISBN: 9781773028118

Book preview

Prelude

It is said that when a person is about to close his eyes for the last time, he realizes he has learned nothing. He is come and gone, and in the span of ages yet to come, it is as though he had never been.

Now in the autumn of the year, the final rush of colour, a defiant reddening of the leaves, sings the golden promise of another season yet removed. Years of gestation, the accumulating years; years of gathering in the fruit of knowledge and, yes, of wisdom, may leave one with the only sure lesson learned: that if permitted to re-engage a life from its very beginning, the end unfolding screening of ensuing life years would picture much the same.

But the soil, the rain and nature’s programmed rebirth seeks no meaning; demands no reason. So why should anyone, the selfsame product of the forces that underlie all living things, need to know the answer to questions best proposed to the silent Sphinx? The Sphinx is not able to speak. Yet it does speak by virtue of its immovable massed presence fixed in its desert cradle. It has been an observer over thousands of years. It has seen much. It must know something that we do not know.

The errant leaves will bloom once again, but any particular person will not. The penalty of not being fixed in rooted soil, of being free to move and earn each day, is that of impermanence.

Some believe that they have been here before—have lived a previous life. Each life in centuries past, imagined or real, played out in different roles; traded pants for dresses, pious and nurturing behaviour with the destructive, demented and cruel. If so, one must hope that he or she had not been a Tamerlane or even the leader of Cossacks who murdered their ancestors.

All things pass, do they not? Trees grow old and die as do all things that live. Mountains wear and shrink, glaciers come and go. The difference is merely in the timeline and in the alteration of that line that accident promotes.

So let’s start over; turn back to the beginning. Enter the start of our drama—page one.

In the beginning, there was more than a void, more than a word. A unique being is born; some would say created. But how created—a term that personifies a being designed; a newborn made to specification in a natural home workshop. But in reality there is only one workshop. It is of the natural mechanical order of life itself.

Yet there must be a difference, a fated but mysterious chemistry, for no two of these creations are exactly alike. They have a personality even in uterus and most certainly from the moment of birth. It is a personality that, emerging from seclusion bravely, willy-nilly engages a pathway into the public realm; a forum in which, ready or not, it must inhabit until the final curtain comes down.

But what is this uniqueness, this personality? How is it set in motion? We hear about chromosomes and DNA—how these are paired between male and female protagonists; but what is the added elixir? While we can examine father or mother characteristics inherited and passed on to offspring, there must inevitably be a separation, a difference from even the closest match of personalities.

There are two perspectives to consider. The first is how others see and experience the newly minted person. The second is how the new person experiences others and by reflection within him or herself. How can one incorporate the sometimes conflicting and regenerating visions, the false starts that contaminate the sense of self that must be accommodated and altered within the passing of years? It would be fair to say that notwithstanding shifts in perception and experience in life years, a basic personality either inherited or earlier fixed remains basically unalterable for all time.

Unless the newborn has come to us from another realm, a Rosemary’s baby or as an unaccounted genius of sorts, having sported a vaguely different persona as though trying on a new set of clothes, a costume for acting itself out in a different set piece, we must acknowledge, in the name of humanity itself, the unique legitimacy of this rare species of one. It is simply rooted in the legitimacy of being!

Having set the scene, let us understand or at least follow how it is that the major protagonist in our story came about when dropped into the place and time of his stage-left entry on an ordinary day labelled Wednesday, September five in the year of the Christian Lord 1928.

How does one experience a place that is not within one’s brain processed memory bank as registered in that part of it that is consciously recallable? At the time, Sasha, an infant should have been aware of sensations of immediate present interest. He most certainly would have been aware of the pain emanating from his penis, but would not have recognized it as having resulted or ensued from a mandated schematic, a religious command handed down from above. Yet in those early hours, he had already been marked as belonging to something outside himself. He had been labelled and claimed, handed a set of values and responses, the purpose of which was to mould him worthy and able to fit into a world not of his making.

Is it permissible to ask whether any person birthing or raising an infant can look upon her charge with passion but tempered by love and curiosity, not in an it’s mine ownership conception but as a blessed separate unique being entitled to fulfilment in a requited demand to confirm its sacred right of passage?

But an infant is not qualified or entitled to recourse in the normal modelling process, because it has not yet established an independent voice. By the time it does, it is no longer independent. Yet there may be a germinating unseen glimmer percolating through the fixed chemistry, a faint something that should attend each birth. It may lie dormant, may not be activated for years.

In some it will not be silenced or subdued. At the very beginning it is but a whisper. But in rare cases, one can tap into a relentless primeval need to turn the glimmer into a mighty roar, and so it was with Sasha.

Let us stop here for a moment. Imagine him—no not just imagine, see him, swaddled in white, wrapped up like a laundry package, unable to move, uncoordinated arms and legs. When at nature’s call he needs to have a diaper changed, his blessed freedom to move is unimpeded. He tastes normative juices, experiencing the responses of the brain to his nascent muscularity. At that moment his personal uniqueness remains but a possibility, a reservation for the future, an invitation to become a wholesome autonomous someone.

It is but a possibility, but one cut short in the reality of a mother’s distress, the reality of a mother’s tired eyes that reflect no joy when mother and infant’s eyes connect—when mother turns her face abruptly away to focus elsewhere; to focus on a role not freely chosen, but handed out as not to be graded or rewarded class assignment.

In the union such as his parents made, or better described as having been cast into by an uncontrollable mandate of the day, you could take a contrary in view of the Hollywood love story, asking what love had to do with it. One did what circumstance dictated, no questions asked. If the stars were in alignment and if one managed to build day on day, slowly accumulating the years toward a long shared life, well what more could anyone hope or ask for?

But what happens to the offspring from a triumvirate arrangement if the father is missing in the mix? What happens when a mother is so obsessed with her own survival mechanisms that she has little empathy or knowledge of how important it might be to release her child from the workings of her own needy processes?

Perhaps we can conjure a picture, something like that in the silent movie era when the harassed heroine dressed in rags has to confront life with no outside help. She survives on what might be seen as the barest of necessities.

During the Great Depression years, it was obligatory to instill some hope, a comfort within the heart of the movie theatre patron. You needed to confirm that hope by portraying the star in a rerun, which would reward the viewer with an additional adrenalin rush derived from a benign conjugation of the stars. It had to be a parallel epic, one that postulated a happy ending. To viewers who could expect no relief to their life misery, there had to be a happy ending!

Chance occurrences or mishaps must, as a matter of form, lead to miraculous relief given at the behest of a total stranger—usually at the very last moment of human endurance. Salvation would be had from the unexpected near miraculous intervention from a messianic figure, one who moved the lovely bereft one and her infant child from a condition of walking the pavement as a beggar, to riding in the back seat of a chauffeur-driven 1920’s Pierce-Arrow.

No such imagery or faint expression, no expectation of a lucky escape from poverty could have taken up even temporary residence in the village in which Sasha first saw the light of day. Yet a half century after the family had left, more than one millionaire in the new lands had risen as a Phoenix from the contaminating degradation stirred in with the mud that was the village’s native soil.

You can see the village streets now, for it is much the same as it was in 1928 except for some rudimentary pavement laid down after the war. Mud lanes and mud corners traverse the town. The mud Main Street has not changed its course for six hundred years since a wandering peasant had walked from fields afar into the area that would become a town.

Since trade had to be established in the centre of the village, a two-acre square is set aside as a focal point for farmers, tradesmen and craftspeople from other villages; a designated place to display and bargain for their wares. The townspeople set up stalls to exhibit their wares as well. Trading is mandated through a long and experienced haggling process. It takes a keen mind and a sharp eye to know precisely what the asking or settled price should be.

Dense wood shacks, housing and commercial stalls surround the square on four sides. A minor arcade straddles the square. It stretches across it, forming a thin line running north to south. More stalls and rooms are established within the arcade.

There is no running water in the village, no electricity or any other amenity. A small stream, a tiny feeding branch of what eventually becomes the mighty Vistula, trickles through the town. The tiny stream reflects the tiny town; the mighty Vistula downstream reflects its power in the grand city of Warsaw where there are electric lights, parks, some cars, immense cathedrals and densely packed proletariat churning away at big-city industry. For the villagers, Warsaw might as well be on the moon.

As you enter the village from the east, you cross the Kopriezinskaia Creek. One cannot dignify its meager width by naming it a river. It is a stream in which villages pound their clothes into submission on a rock rising out of the water, chin up to the only road into the town; just as you can see Indians doing today on the banks of the Ganges.

Past the creek on the height of land to your left is the only possessing structure in the village. It is that of the Catholic Church, its steeple rising up to greet the sky so as to proclaim its dominance and mastery over the village. It fairly shouts its presence; the dominating one in the minds of one half of the villagers. In the minds of those of the Jewish persuasion who number the other half, the church is a necessary counterpoint to be endured if not admired. One has to tread carefully when forced to pass by the iron fencing that encloses its grounds.

At the northwest corner of the square on an extension of the most northerly east-west road leading out of the village stands the church’s and churchgoers’ barely tolerated nemesis, the wood and plaster synagogue and its study hall. It has to look suitably subdued so as not to be accused of putting on airs, or God forbid even seem to be challenging the mighty Christian orthodoxy. The Shul strives to adopt a subservient mien even though the Jewish citizenry in the main are the economic engine of the community.

They are the tradesmen, the importers of goods, the experienced craftsmen who make clothing, boots and hardware. They are the ones who trade in firewood, in horses and cattle. If the Jews are lacking in affluence and the amenities that money can buy, the villagers are certainly no better off, though they being the farming part of the economy are not short of food.

The municipal offices and the police station are sited next to the church, though in more modest digs so as not to assume an authority over the clergy. The police station and the post office have phones. They are the only ones in town.

We walk on for a moment to Ul Kocielna, the street where Sasha was born. Somewhere near the communal well located at the corner of Kocielna and the Stashover road, a gent by the name of Chaim Pepe has built a house for his family. The house has a front and a back door connected to each other by a long hallway along which the successful and optimistic Chaim has built adjoining rooms. He has prepared an abode for his sons, daughters and their spouses, who together with their offspring could hopefully live in peace and harmony side by side under the very same roof.

By the time Sasha had come into the bifurcated dual cultural world of the town, quite a few persons of Chaim’s immediate family have come and gone. His wife has died of who knows what. One of his daughters has died in childbirth, and Sasha’s father’s first wife has died of cancer leaving behind children and grieving relatives to continue their occupation of the rooms off the hall. While the one-time occupants have succeeded each other as victims of catastrophic events, the rooms remain behind and are now full to capacity.

The family room is heated, as all the rooms are, by a wood-burning stove, which is fed day and night during the winter months. Frost coats the cataract-dimmed window light so that one can’t see much of the world beyond its veil. The baby being set down too close to the stove is overly hot and irritated. He hears and responds; contributes to the shared noises that permeate the air.

Subdued cries emanate from the hallway where beggars spend the night sleeping on straw; subdued whispers from siblings sleeping on cots nearby. The intermittent background chorus of sound is conducted by a persistent rhythmic hissing from the stove whenever a snow-encrusted log is added to the fire.

There are now no blacksmithing sounds emanating from the basement were Papa has built his forge because he is no longer in residence. The once-persistent din and smoke thankfully no longer punishes the sleep and health of those persons resident above the blasting drama down below. Mendel Yankel, as he is known, is now not in the goldener land of America but in the lesser land of Canada; in Winnipeg to be precise, the city of cold winter snows and summer mosquito hoards.

Sasha spends months alternatively sucking on his mother’s breast and crying his discomforts, earning the displeasure of his full siblings and the profound jealousy of the half ones who having lost their mother and her loving care, are not inclined to value the newly demanding nobody. His mother and the oldest half-daughter minister to six surviving children out of an original seven. She later ministers to a more manageable four, since the two oldest half-siblings take on adult chores and responsibilities.

In better weather the sun warms the village. The baby is carried in a walk with other families—with other mothers and assorted children who run through forest paths. He hears voices; of children squabbling; shouts, parental warnings, imprecations and threats. He smells the cooler air; is comforted in the cradle of his mama’s arms as she proceeds along the pathways chatting with other mothers.

The sun rises higher in the sky. The days lengthen and grow hot. Before long he is riding, cradled in mama’s lap to the nearby county town where she arranges passport photos and birth certificates for the family’s six kids and for herself. He hears the plop-plop sound of the horses’ hooves as though they were hammers tenderizing the gravel road. A horse shits, the smell of ammonia bringing a stinging sensation to his eyes. The elder siblings are a help and from time to time his older half-sister subs as mother.

In the month of September, a year after his birth, he sees and hears a clamour of many comings and goings. There seems to be a continual commotion, an anxious busyness in all about him, like waves of sand being swept off the streets in gusting eddies driven by a pulsing wind. He is handed from one sibling to another while his mama and the elder siblings pack their few belongings into a trunk. The horse whinnies and stamps its shod feet. Impatient cries of handlers rend the air, and soon with many tears of separation and the importuning of God’s blessings, the wagon moves off.

The rhythmic clop of horse hooves, the click, click, of the reigns and the groaning of the harness, the Balegula’s reassuring commands to the horse all conspire to put Sasha to sleep. They have left the village that he would not see again. In the cataclysm of October 1942 it becomes a village bereft of those who had been the relatives of those who had fortuitously left in earlier years. The stones have a memory. At night when the wind calls, it sends mild drafts of ghostly playback sounds—whispers from the earth recapturing the voices of those that once trod the ground but are no more.

The overloaded wagon carries additional goods that are dropped off at stops along the way. It rumbles on past lane entrances to small tracts of land sporting on assortments of houses, shacks and outbuildings; housing people, cattle and an assortment of canines that bark coarsely as the wagon creakingly passes. Once in a while a dog dashes out to run beside the wagon, barking fiercely at the horse’s hooves. The Balegula berates them with shouts and the flick of his whip. The dog’s owners chase after, calling their hounds home.

Beside each laneway Poles have erected small to large shrines dedicated to the Virgin. The shrines look on in silence as the wagon passes. What are they thinking? They seem cast in shadowy sorrows.

The wagon slows its trek through the main street of a larger town than the one left behind. More people walk the streets in crowded venues. There are stores fronting the streets up ahead. The wagon surges on as though the horse senses that its ordeal will soon be at an end. The wagon wheels creek louder as it slows. It winds its way through the gathering crowd. There is a hush of expectancy, a self-imposed trepidation in the minds of the family perched precariously on the wagon as the first part of the journey comes to an end.

The wagon turns to the left and stops at a station. It is a railway station, once clean and fresh, now showing signs of smoke and peeling paint. The wagon is offloaded by the tall uncle who has come along to minister to his sister and the children. He is helped by the older siblings. The trunk and their worldly goods are set on the ground.

The children sit on the trunk both to guard their possessions and to lounge on the only available seating that is not occupied by those who are older and those who seemingly own the land. The kids have been repeatedly warned to behave, not to make a fuss; to make it easier on mama and the uncle who must navigate the tickets, and obtain kosher food for the long trip yet to come.

The kids have picked up mama’s anxiety. It is revealed in her too-aggressive movements, her louder-than-usual voice signifying bewilderment and vulnerability. The uncle tries to calm her by speaking a low but reassuring voice. They have no experience with ticket handlers, time clocks and railways since no one from their village has travelled except on foot or by wagon to the limits of the nearest town. Papa had written a letter telling mama what to expect. He has been a pathfinder for the family. Many years back he had been conscripted into the Russian army and had ridden the rails for weeks on end to the very far reaches of Chechnya.

The wait seems interminable to the siblings, but they are nevertheless entranced by what is going on in the square fronting the station. Sasha sleeps; cries once in a while when one of the older siblings is commanded to hold and look after him. He never feels quite safe in their arms. He is fast asleep when the family boards the train. He does not feel the transition from being held when in the square, to being put down on a bench of sorts in the railway car. Were he older he might recall differing sensations and smells.

The car sways from side to side, the train wheels squeak angrily on the tracks. An odour of onion and herring, of bread and cheeses wafts through the air as though sprayed from an aerosol.

The uncle has gone. Sasha felt kisses on his cheeks; the brush of a beard on his skin. Now all the passengers can hear are the sounds of the train picking up speed as it traverses the countryside. The clacking of wheels and the swaying of the car grows stronger or subsides, keeping pace with the speed of the train. If you are awake you can hear and remember sounds of alarm, lengthening silences, laughter; someone coughing or snorting.

There are many stops along the way. The train passes slowly and carefully through the big city of Warsaw after which the stops are infrequent. People get off and some others come on the train but the family stays put, afraid to venture out and possibly be left behind. At journey’s end the train comes to its final puffing and huffing halt. It has arrived at the port city of Gdansk. When the shaking and swaying stops, people gather their belongings and organize themselves to detrain. A conductor comes by yelling at someone for not removing garbage that has accumulated on what has been a three-day trip.

Confusion and uncertainty permeate the air. Sasha is passed from one hand to another. Mama scolds the other kids who are puzzled by her outburst because they have been quiet and afraid of the tumult emanating from the large number of people about. None of them has ever seen so many in one place at one time. No one has ever seen anything as huge as the ship.

After what seems like a long wait, some men respond to mama’s plea for help. They steer her to the proper line and help with the trunk. Other kids also stand in line, some of the youngest holding on to their mothers’ skirts; others are gawking at the police who are keeping order. They stare at a band of sailors moving toward and into the maw of the boat, their knapsacks slung over broad muscular shoulders.

After a while, the line the family is in starts moving along toward the gangplank. The other shorter lines have already disappeared into the boat; they are the last. Sasha is carried down many stairs to the bottom of the boat. Some of the people in the line laugh, saying that it’s the safest part. No one in the family understands what they mean.

The family is directed to a small corner of the boat. It has some cots and a few shelves for belongings. They do not have much to put away. The trunk has been stored separately in the hold.

Mama talks to mothers nearby. She is trying to make friends in case she needs help. She seems very nervous. You can tell she is impatient and fearful because when she nurses she keeps moving about. It makes Sasha restless and anxious. The kids are curious about the boat and want to look around but mama yells at them to stay where she can see all of them.

After a while the passengers hear banging and scraping sounds like you would hear if you were suspended inside a bell being rung. Suddenly, they hear three loud blasts of the ship’s horn. It frightens some of the passengers who in steerage can’t avoid hearing and feeling the vibrations; the thrashing sound of the propellers. The vibrations and sounds accompany them across the Atlantic. It is a mantra. We are going, we are going, we are going—and we do not know when the journey will come to its end. Soon the drumming of the engines increases and the boat begins to move. It has left the land and will not find a proper resting place until it gets to wherever it is being directed.

Sasha does not feel secure on the ship. Years later he is told that the family spent three weeks on it. He cries a lot because mama is sick all the time. She cannot eat much and when she does she brings it all up. Other ladies help. Sometimes someone else nurses for her. The other kids run all over the place but because mama is sick she cannot scold them. The older ones take over and look after the younger ones.

Once when mama feels better and is holding Sasha, a strange lady comes by. She stops in front of mama and asks to hold the baby. Mama draws back in confusion and refuses her. Mama thinks that maybe she has been confronted by a malignant apparition. Maybe this woman is captured by a malevolent spirit. But then again maybe she is being sent as a messenger from God! Mama doesn’t know which it might be so she holds the baby close to her chest.

The lady says that she wants to hold him because she knows that someday he will be an important person. She says he will be a world leader! After the initial encounter the apparition shrieks a hideous parting laugh and takes her leave.

Mama, in her fright, can’t remember what the woman looked like except that she was clad in black from her head to her shoes. A black shawl was draped over her sallow bloodless cheeks. She had pointed at Sasha’s face with a bony finger; had reached out to place her stringy finger on the baby’s face. But was there really such a woman on the ship? No one else including the woman who sat right next to her could confirm the apparition!

Whether there was such a woman or whether she was conjured up, merely a figment of a tired mother’s imagination; the image remained fixed in mama’s mind. From his earliest days, Sasha is repeatedly reminded that much will be expected of him because an otherworldly voice had predicted that he would rise above the ordinary, be a world leader, be chosen to command.

The ship rocks and sways. Other people are sick. After many days the ship does not rock so much and people feel better. They start talking to each other and they walk around visiting other families. Some have a father with them. The siblings make friends with others and play a lot and are noisy, but people do not mind when the ship does not rock so much. Many days pass but it is hard to tell because the passengers in steerage never see daylight. The ship’s lights are on all day and are only put out at night when the passengers are supposed to be sleeping.

The older kids never seem to be around except at sleep time. They are always running through the ship. They take the brother next in age to Sasha and his full sister with them. One day he hears a lot of screaming. A brother has had a finger caught in a door and it is squished. Mama goes to get bandages for the finger. There is much yelling and crying.

One day the ship slows to a crawl—almost to a complete stop. It bangs against something. The engines are quiet and after a while they do stop, so that it becomes very quiet. A sailor comes down from somewhere up above and tells the people to get ready to leave the ship. People start to organize their belongings. They are excited and move to begin to cluster in lines. Sailors come down to help with the heavier parcels though the bigger trunks and cases will be unloaded from the hold after the passengers have debarked.

Mama is better now. The kids know that because she starts yelling at them to help her with their things. Sasha is handed from person to person while they ready for their orderly departure. After a while they follow others up the flights of stairs until they come out on deck. The sun is shining. Everybody shields their eyes because they are not used to light. There are a lot of buildings lining the pier. The family has arrived at pier twenty-one. They are in Canada.

ADAGIO

One

Sasha Taylor sat slouched behind the wheel. To an onshore observer he appeared hidden, shrunk to insignificance. The yacht was a two master of some 95 feet in length. Yet he was in clear sight of a number of Egyptian hawkers who, keeping the ship in studied surveillance, hoped to profit from its presence. They had never seen such a boat moored on the Nile. Its presence became known to ever-increasing numbers of gawkers sitting patiently imbedded near the gangplank so as to be first in line to accost whoever might come ashore.

He was dressed in white from the sneakers up; a wide-brimmed hat shielded his speckled grey hair from the sun. His face was lightly lined around the eyes, a brooding dark brown pool hidden behind a wraparound set of dark tinted sunglasses. It was a placid face: his arms relaxed, an open book propped on his muscular thighs and legs. He seemed somnolent, lapsing into sleep. He hadn’t turned the pages of the book for quite some time.

It bothered him that the Nile ran north to the sea. It offended his sense of logic. Nature followed a predictable course. Water ran down, the laws of gravity ensured it. Down on the map ran south not north. Why then should the current run north? Besides, he thought that after thousands of years of following one course, the water of the Nile should do something new to establish its independence. Perhaps it could run East or West for just one day, or perhaps it could wander off to connect with and fill the great Wadis to the northwest in an attempt to make an honest sea out of the Qwattara depression.

But this mighty flow, this changeless alchemist that had sent countless oceans of water north—having inspired war, rebellion, having fed and drowned millions—became mother and father to a people. It did what it had done since time began. It had dumbly drained to the North and would do so for time everlasting.

He gradually became aware of his musing; shifted the book on his lap, stretched a leg and sat up a little straighter to relieve an impending cramp in one of his back muscles.

He thought it rationally ridiculous to personalize a natural phenomenon. The Nile didn’t consciously flow. It didn’t do anything motivated other than by the law of gravity. The Nile didn’t name itself or give itself cohesion or purpose. Water just ran off the high lands at its source, and in having to go somewhere, followed the course of least resistance running downhill to the sea. It was ever-fearful man, ever-imaginative man who called it mother and elevated the river in his mythology to the surreal status of a soulful being.

Man gave the river a soul because man’s life was finite. The river ran on forever.

His mind was wandering between the riverbanks of its making. He was so enjoying his mind’s easy flow that he resented the intrusion when he became aware that someone was calling out to him.

Another nice day—Goddamn it, it’s always a very nice day.

It took him more than a moment to rewind from the reverie of his imagination. Slowly, reluctantly, he focused on white fiberglass, teak decks, aluminum spars. It took him a moment to unwind: to come back to the reality of the boat lying moored against the seawall on the east bank downriver from ancient Thebes and from the massive ruins of Karnak.

He focused on Gary now standing silently waiting in the hatchway. He barely acknowledged the interruption in trying to recover, to recapture the sense of timelessness he had been experiencing. He cast a quick glance across the Nile to its west bank to confirm the rising sun warming the pink-grey hills to the north of the Valley of Kings. He marvelled at the fact that his eyes beheld a timeless vista, one that had not changed since man could first see and remember. He had earlier seen the pink light in the distance beginning to wash the face of the magnificent columns framing the ruins of Karnak.

On a previous visit some years back he had searched the riverbank where in eons past, the grand Promenade had begun as it fed into the incredible ruins. For a moment he longed to tie up exactly at that spot where thousands of years ago the pharaohs of Egypt had come on Royal barges to pay homage to the sun, and to revel in their own reflected glory.

For the moment, he was amused in his thought imagery. Yesterday the boat had moved downstream to take on diesel fuel. Mooring to take on diesel, in his imaginative mind, mirrored a vision of mighty Pharaohs moored before the Promenade, leading a long ceremonial march to the temple of Karnak. The Pharaohs personified the reflected glory of the ceremonial. They bathed in confirmation of their legitimacy to an absolute power, radiating from the endless sun. It was a power that gave them the obligation to rule in the name of the gods. It made them gods!

Hey did I say something to put you off? Gary, the normally calm and quiet New Zealander was not one to tolerate being ignored. He waited patiently for a response. The captain was short, muscular; never wore sunglasses even though his scalp and arms had been mottled and scarred during his many years of sailing the open seas.

He wore sneakers that he called been-to-America shoes. He was a quiet man who did his job well and efficiently. He was not one to silently accept unreasonable orders or commands. One had to work with Gary, consult with him so that the ship’s six crew members would function in an atmosphere that could be comfortably maintained. He was well respected. The crew knew that if he agreed to any plan, it was well thought out. They would never have to face challenges beyond the ordinary.

He hadn’t been in favour of bringing Intrepid to Egypt and couldn’t understand Sasha’s insistence on using it as a base for his business trip. Perhaps it provided a way of writing off the cost of maintaining the boat. Had anyone else been the owner, he would have refused to captain her boat in what he considered uncharted waters. He admired Sasha—admired his achieved success and his way of turning adverse events into positive outcomes.

But Gary could never read his mind. While he liked his boss, experiencing him as a person of sensitivity, he was uncomfortable when at times such as this he seemed withdrawn and distant.

Hey. I was wondering whether we should move out. Do you still want to continue on to Aswan? Gary’s tone argued against the possibility of such an undertaking.

Sasha stood up and came to life. What did you say, Gary? I didn’t hear what you said, he whispered.

Gary, who had been standing on the lower step in the companionway, came up on deck: the captain, short and wiry, soft brown hair billowing at the sides of his head, was not in the best of moods.

He came forward to the wheel having forsaken his made-in-America shoes for sandals, wearing faded jean shorts and a yellow wind-proof jacket over a stained and well-worn t-shirt. Sasha focused on the crown of Gary’s scalp, the skin baked in suns of many latitudes.

Gary frowned. I just asked if we’d be moving on to Aswan. Remember we talked about it? You thought it might be easier for you to fly down while we stayed tied up here.

Look: the radio can’t get any information worth a damn. The charts aren’t worth anything and we just don’t have any decent provisions. I can’t get fresh water you’d be happy to drink or that you’d be happy to use even in the shower. Diesel is suspect and who knows what else I’ll find to bitch about upstream, he growled.

Sasha, seriously, Helga can’t and won’t shop for bread, cheese or anything we need down here. She’s fed up—won’t go into town without me and David as escort—while Jim-boy and Steve, stay with the boat to make sure nobody steals anything of value.

It’s worth your life to run the gauntlet of panhandlers and assorted characters who’ve camped out, never leaving us out of their sight and endlessly waiting for anybody, just anybody, to get off this ship and come ashore.

We try to search upstream: four of us have to go, David to protect the dinghy, and me to protect the women. We just can’t get a Goddamn thing done. Every little job takes ten times as long. Mira has got the runs and all in all we just don’t want to go any further into this godforsaken country. You have to be careful not to slip and fall in the water because if you do, you have to get a tetanus shot right away to prevent some sort of weird infection.

He abruptly hit the brakes, stopped talking. He knew from experience that perhaps he had gone too far. Sasha didn’t need much persuading when presented with unchallengeable facts.

Gary was not the most outgoing of men. Helga, his girlfriend of the moment, was the cook-manager and chef extraordinaire. Mira, the comely maker of bunks, was a hostess deluxe who had never been without a smile until Egypt. Stoical silent David, he with the muscles on his muscles, never complaining, always busy, comprised most of the crew. They had been with the ship for two years, Jim-boy and Steve only six months. But now from the crew’s sullen responses it felt as though this trip would be their last.

They were beginning to grate on each other with increasing frustration since Intrepid had entered the estuary of the Nile. It had been impossible to function normally, and impossible to properly maintain the ship. They were travelling in a land that had just chucked out its Russian advisors. It was a land not yet geared to support a substantial tourist infrastructure. People gathered everywhere, the yacht appeared and they were astonished to encounter a very large, very private and very white ketch framed by its huge masts, its glistening bright work and its mass of chromium winches.

Egyptians were always there, always looking out at the boat, always watching, waiting.

Intrepid was beautiful. She had been tied to the dock for the past three days, her two masts welcoming and giving farewell to the rising and setting of the sun during the course of each day. But she hadn’t bent a sail since entering the estuary of the Nile.

Along this ancient implacable watercourse, she had motored passing barges, feluccas and all manner of traffic. She had motored all the way. Even though the free-spirited feluccas could sail up and down the Nile, tacking and darting like little water bugs, it became increasingly clear that Sasha’s plan to sail all the way to Aswan was turning into a difficult motor trip along a very long highway. Until this very moment he had been determined not to quit. He simply had to sail up the Nile. He had stubbornly insisted that they could do so in comfort and ease, but now he understood he would have to abandon his ambition, or the crew might have to abandon him.

He had not replied or indicated that he had heard anything Gary had said.

Sasha, Gary began, exasperated, silenced in frustration.

Sasha turned his head slowly toward Gary, stifling a sigh. Okay, okay, don’t go on about it. We’ll fly down to Aswan. I’ll take my guests off your hands. Just give us three days and we will be back. See what you can do to get set for our departure. We shall make our exodus from the land of Egypt. We shall, as Moses did, simply flow down—or is it up—the Nile to the Mediterranean.

Gary grumbled something in reply and turned to go below. Sasha stood still for a moment, his eyes caressing the West Bank; awakening his mind from its reverie, he silently spoke to himself.

Sashala, in the name of God, what in the hell are you doing here? What on earth made you want to come down here in splendour when you could have come as a tourist letting someone else worry about permits, customs, passports, bribes.

The trip had become a nightmare. And yet he felt that somehow something significant had been achieved in his life. He simply wasn’t sure how to describe or define it.

Born in a Polish village, the memory of a thousand pogroms soaked into his subconscious; stories that he had absorbed with his mother’s milk; he had sailed up the Nile! He felt that in his lifetime he would redeem—would redeem his people, would redeem its history. His being here would somehow make a difference, would change the pattern of those thousands of years. For some reason he had thought that he would have to return, return to the land of Egypt; return in splendour, return on a yacht, sail up the Nile and down again as the Pharaohs had done. He would moor his boat at the entrance to the great temple of Karnak. He would walk in majesty where once his ancestors had been dragged in desperation and in fear.

Suddenly his mind soured: not only tired of the Nile, he was tired of himself. He had been down to Aswan twelve years back. He had flown first to Abu Simbal; pondered and amazed at the great temple that Ramses the second had built. He pondered the rising of Lake Nasser and peered into its depths as if trying to see where the great temple had had its original location.

Great sums had been raised internationally to pay for the work that had to be done to save it. It was, after all, everyone’s heritage that needed to be ensured. He had tried to imagine how those upper kingdom ancients had superbly calculated its construction. How did they line up the great stones comprising the long tunnel through which the sun god’s original laser would flash, its golden shaft penetrating the shrine precisely twice each year mid-February in mid-October? The sun would be harnessed to penetrate the length of the tunnel reaching and highlighting the statue of Ramses twice yearly to be engulfed in a ball of fire.

The sun god’s power symbolized by the statue of Ramses had come alive, the event orchestrated so precisely by the ancients that the moderns in reassembling the temple could not duplicate, could not realign the tunnel so the sun would hit the exact place where the statue of Ramses stood, on those exact anniversary days.

When he had flown back down the Nile, he had in fascination traced the green line below. It was the life-giving artery along which countless generations of Egyptians had encamped; along which they had lived out eons, building mighty empires, paying homage to the sun that rose every day on the east and went down as a fiery chariot in the west. It did so day after day, generation after generation, as regularly as the heartbeat of the people whose lives evolved under its glare.

Yet now he was tired of it all. He was tired of the history of Egypt that he had so avidly read. He was tired of the Valley of the Kings, tired of the tombs of the pharaohs cut through the soft, oily white stone, tired of the guides intoning their well-rehearsed and well-worn spiel.

The guides flashed their mirrors reflecting the sun to illustrate how the ancients had illuminated the freshly carved hieroglyphics as they worked; as the carvers stood, were born and died. He was tired of the heat of the day, the cold of the night. And now impulsively, he got up once again and stood away from the corner of the cockpit in which he had been slouching behind the big wheel.

He stretched slowly as if testing to see if his body still worked then moved across the cockpit to the gangway, stuck his head below and hollered for Gary.

Mira, usually breezy but now hollow eyed, looked out at him. She seemed quite subdued and morosely quiet.

I think he’s gone down to the bow chain locker, Mr. Taylor. Do you want me to get him for you?

Mira was the only one of the crew who called him Mr. Taylor. He was tempted to tell her not to do so, tempted to ask her to call him Sasha as everyone else did.

No I’ll find him myself.

He climbed past the main cabin deck, carefully treading past the plush cushioning set under the enormous yellow sunshade suspended from the boom to the rails; worked his way past the life rafts curled up in their containers, past the great chrome winches and the mainmast. He worked his way to the forward hatch and called down till Gary stood below.

By the time Gary’s face looked up at him he had reconsidered the issue. "Look; I’m going to leave here and take my party along. We will fly back to Cairo—to hell with Aswan. I will set up my meetings at the Hilton. That would give you lots of time. You can work your way back and we can meet you in Alexandria. What’s the name of the hotel there? I can’t remember. You know the one